I Am Not The First To Try This But I Am The Strongest
Hey. There’s something I could have thematically included in yesterday’s post, but
A: I didn’t want it to get overwhelmed in by everything else in the post on account of it deserves room to breathe, and
2: I can give you a more complete report because the thing was incomplete when I was posting yesterday.
Y’all, Shing Yin Khor¹ is a freakin’ genius, and slightly evil. They’ve been doing a distributed mystery for Patreon supporters, with physical artifact clues sent to different people, having them share experience and discoveries to determine what happened out past Portal 12.
Let me back up.
This is The Center For Otherworld Science, a comic about explorers who travel through portals to other universes to document the flora, fauna (often the same), and physical world there. It starts off as an excuse for Khor to draw their absolutely gorgeous unearthly critters, and turns pretty rapidly into a meditation on human worth and ethics.
This is the start of a mystery that Khor constructed, complete with correspondence, newspaper excerpts, and physical artifacts regarding the disappearance of a scientist and an engineer at the CFOS. Alexis was on the survey team that went through Portal 12, out to the safety boundary; Alexis was extremely sassy. Alexis and her fiance Jo seemed to be up to something before Alexis went past the safety boundary and disappeared, presumably dying.
Through official statements and memoranda on CFOS letterhead, the contents of Alexis’s desk, and samples returned from Portal 12, it quickly becomes apparent that this was no ordinary disappearance/death. After Jo also disappeared, their sister began to suspect that something was up. Strange rocks were found and made their way to Alexis’s ex, to researchers at the CFOS, or were found by family and friends.
Khor actually sent these to Patreonistas — field notes with blacklight ink; rocks with USB drives secreted inside; books that were really safes, with clues locked inside. There’s audio and video of the world beyond Portal 12, bits and pieces going to any given supporter, but none of them got all of the artifacts.
To create a fictional world, to create a mystery, and then to create all of the (mostly nonnative to this universe) physical objects to add layers of creepy verisimilitude to that mystery? That’s the work of somebody who is both genius-level creative and in all honesty somewhat more than slightly evil.
Read through the whole thing, and understand: you could be part of one of these at any time, if you decide to support Khor on Patreon. Just sayin’.
Spam of the day:
We get Rid of your Timeshare Contract
Wowsers. How bad do timeshares suck that there’s a population of scammers out there to prey on people desperate to get away from the first set of scammers that sold them the timeshare in the first place?
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¹ Seen yesterday messing with a Deadpool figure; told you I could have mentioned it yesterday.
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