Someone dropped by last Sunday to play around for a couple of hours:
I'm not sure how facetious that sentence was, but I can't think of a better way to explain it.
This is Caffeine as Valerie, who arrives in a somewhat terrifying tidal wave of femininity and sass.
(see what I mean?)
I say "arrives", because she tends to wander around as Darryl nowadays:
(compare and contrast is a game we like to play with our students, so here we go:)
vs
She has other faces too.
There's Sophie:
There's Saph, whom I don't have photographs of, or at least none I care to upload, for... various... reasons.
And Sonya, who's the one I first met.
There's one more, but we don't talk about her. There are reasons.
She sees them as all different. I disagree.
There's a bit in The Tick when Arthur (generally the only sane man in the series) points out that the supervillian Red Scare looked quite a bit like The Tick (both lantern-jawed heroes with masks over their eyes, both large and strong and well-nigh invulnerable. Both extremely comic booky) and The Tick answers with "no, we're not the same. He's red. I'm blue."
And that ends the conversation as far as The Tick is concerned.
But the way I see it...
There's a part of the Belgariad/ Mallorean that bugged Garion for a while: His grandfather married a wolf. And Belgarath is insistent that no, he married a woman. The truth is that Poledra was born a wolf, and started following Belgarath around while he was a wolf (yes, they're shapeshifters, this is a fantasy, deal.) Later, she transformed into an owl after seeing him shift, and then later again, much later, she shapeshifted into a woman permanantly (well, her default form was permanently a woman). Belgarath says that the shape change is complete, and that the shape you take slowly but surely changes you into that shape.
And Garion can't get his head around it until he meets her, and she looks him in the eye, and shifts through her various forms, and asks him am I not the same, whether wolf or owl or woman?^ and Garion realises, yes, she is.
So Caffeine is Caffeine, whether she's Darryl or Valerie or Sonya or Sophie or Saph. It really is that simple. The shape changes. The essence remains the same.
Caffeine is Caffeine. We're together.
I'm a simple man. I don't need to know more than that.
^Almost certainly paraphrased. I don't have the book with me.
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