Rime All The Thyme

Otto, you idiot. Obviously you didn't read the invitation very well. It says right at the bottom, the contest doesn't start until all the inventions are ready! How did you get it into your head that you were out of time?

There's no real punchline here; the strip is sort of like when you're flipping channels and come across a gymnastics competition, then switch the station after a few interested seconds. Mostly I wanted to have fun with rhyming and such. Before I had an entire "tension" themed rhyme script for an Otto monologue about his invention; it'd work only within the range of its attention, you could speak in the language of your intention, et cetera et cetera. But it was as stodgy and boring as Otto himself. So I made a very slightly more interesting version of the script involving several characters, and forged a micro-plot about Puppy's apparent acquirement of the English language.

That is the couch arrangement from No Other Than! Ike and Brock switched places for the sake of convenience, but otherwise it's identical. Well spotted. Originally I wasn't going to include the couch and characters on the close-ups, because I thought that'd be kind of a struggle. And it was a struggle, but it bugged me to no end to see a weird blank spot where some furniture and people should be.

Speaking of which. Not once in the entire strip do we actually see Otto's finished invention. Did he just have it wired through the whole house, or what? I mean I know we saw the boombox-cup arrangement earlier; was that just a prototype? I'm going to imagine that it's somehow now an intrinsic characteristic of the house, that anyone can speak any language they like. It'll give me an excuse to practice my Japanese, someday. We will not have any explanation for these extralingual strips, because we will not need any. This strip is itself the explanation.

What dark and terrible device looms there on the horizon? It's hard to make out, even if you squint. You'll just have to wait until the next installment to find out! Until then, I may or may not fill time with a flash of the Negatopes' contest, because I still need to get to know their characters a little better. This whole "not-quite-opposite" thing makes it less mechanically simple to predict their responses, but also I feel makes for better characters in the long run. Which is good, because I'm not planning on tossing these guys into the cold, lonely multiverse after this arc. I like 'em.