Far Out There Looks At Christmas Lights – page 24
I can’t remember when exactly I first had the idea to make comics out of all the pictures I was taking last year, but I do know for sure that the notion of Mariska glaring at these while shivering was one of the first ideas I had. Also, I was torn on whether or not to add “shivering lines” all around Mariska for added effect. I eventually decided against it, just because none of the other pages ended up having extra details like that and I didn’t want this one to break the stylistic flow. But still, looking at it now, it probably would have helped the humor land better. Oh well…
Honestly, the fact that Mariska hasn’t buggered off to Australia for the season, or directly moved to permanently live at Earth’s Equator, is already impressive.
Or she could just stay the heck indoors, where she can adjust the thermostat all the way up to the top of the dial (and make everyone else miserable instead)! The fact that she bundles up in a dozen layers to trudge through the frigid weather she hates just to glare at other folks yard decorations seems like the sort of thing a professional Nitpicker might do for ‘fun’…or maybe it’s just her.
Nah, she’s been hired to rate Christmas Lights, there’s no way she would be outside in this horrifically cold 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature otherwise.
This place is getting a minus four from her, due to all the snow-themes.
But that’s exactly why Sophia would never assign her to this job – the Guild has to maintain a reputation of being impartially critical of everything, so she’s not going to assign someone a task where she knows the Nitpicker has an irrational bias – and Mariska would certainly never freelance an assignment that involved being exposed to winter in any form. Ichabod probably either dragged her here against her will, or tricked her by showing her this planet’s weather forecast for its Southern Hemisphere, in revenge for her recent string of pranks at his expense.*
So now that she’s here, she might as well have fun glaring at snow related stuff – in the absence of any actual snow. Or something like that.
(*Of course, I realize the Christmas strips never have continuity with the main comic…except when they do.)
Alternate possibility: this happened while she was stuck babysitting the Short Pants Squad, so she got dragged into some Christmas light festival by the boys against her will.
Do I even want to know what sort of ridiculous conspiracy Avi thought the Christmas Light Festival actually was, and how he was going to thwart it by simultaneously overloading every light at a quantum subatomic level..and therefore Mariska has to figure out how to make him think he has done so, while preventing him from actually leaving a 50 mile wide crater…no wonder she looks so annoyed by a few lights!
Nah, Avi knows exactly what it is (we’ve seen him in previous Christmas Comics), and just wanted to start replacing the Jesus’s in the Manger with Baby Avi’s. Or setup a whole bunch of scenes where he’s adored, playing baby Jesus.
Knowing Avi, it’s entirely possible that he could have thought both at different points in the same evening, switching back and forth whenever his mood shifted.
My explanation for that, avoiding Blitz’s alternative possibility, is that everyone else available was either already employed, on holiday, was going to be worse, or was Ichabod & they refused to give him this job simply because he’s been working too much.
Like, they could have given it to Aunt Domino, but her chaotic actions would have resulted in her not completing the assignment, grading only a third of the lights. Potentially in a numerical language that hurts to look at, and thus nobody on the calculation board can understand. So she’s out.
They could have also given it to The Kid, but The Kid is known to compare the lighting to either what their glowing circle can produce in seconds or on the lighting visible in a seventh dimension beyond anyone else’s comprehension. No one’s really sure, but their grading for the decorations tends to seem to come from a random number generator either way.
Mariska, AT LEAST, has a reasonable grading scheme that other’s can follow. Even if she glares at snowmen and gives negative points for signs requesting snow, she also tends to give a report on how she calculated it, so the grading committee can adjust her scores if they care enough to look at the report.
Ichabod would seem to be the reasonable choice since he’s already there, and really would not have to do much more than he’s already doing anyway.
Mariska has been completely banned from assignment to ANY snow or ice or cold related cases ever since one of her very first missions as a young Nitpicker 15 or so years ago (time is very approximate in the FOTverse, as always) to help some politicians on a small backwater planet somewhere called ‘Lowelem’ with some very minor local climate issues, and she advised them that the ‘only reasonable sane course of action’ was to engage on a massive risky thermoterraforming plan costing most of the planet’s GDP to move the entire planet much closer to its sun and warm it up.