The Empress Orange Wednesday sat on her throne while sipping a beverage. "Ah!" she satisfyingly sighed. "This has to be one of the best smoothies I have had in quite some time. Much better than the one from the Strawberry Uprising a few slices back."

She then took another satisfying sip.


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Hum. As their souls got torn away, their drive got smaller too

Frog's anima appears to be an ice cream sundae. Huh.

I still don't trust Frog...

I'm not surprised that Frog got his anima upgraded.

I noticed that as well. With Zoe in the room we're shown the stitching ....

A farm is hard work though. I don't see 'Frog' and 'Work' occupying the same space at the same time ... kind of like fermions.

I can, however, see him with minions.

The former exec of an evil corporation with a large upgraded sundae anima, opening a large farm, far from civilization, where poor outsiders come when they're hungry.

Yeah, I can see about 10 different fun plotlines emerging here!
Exposition kept to a minimum. Lol...

That's one possibility. However, they sold their souls animas because they were outsiders, not the other way around, and it seems very possible that they were outsiders first because they "aren't good at friging lifting a finger to do a thing". So I think you are reversing the cause and effect: their anima's were torn away because their drive is so small.

That logic also says that they are "outsiders" for a reason, and more or less deserve what they get.

After all, remember that Torg and co. are apparently NOT considered "outsiders", even though they are literally outsiders in every other sense of the word. That suggests that all it takes to avoid the designation is a bit of effort. Even Gwynn has managed to be accepted by this society, so clearly it doesn't take much skill or personality.

As a wise man (me) recently pointed out in the comments, this is how the Mayflower colonists failed with agriculture: By sharing all the land as a collective, sharing all the tools and supplies, the food distributed to all equally.

They were a small group closely tied together by religious conviction and their risky journey. It should be ideal conditions for living a communal life. However, the worst twenty percent didn't want to work. This demoralized the second-least motivated people. Food and tools were stolen from the common storage. Only about twenty percent worked hard. (These last twenty percent would be the ones to take pictures of to show how hard people work in communal life.)

So they were starving, and many died.

When the captain returned the next year he divided the land between the families, and production TRIPLED.

It was the same in the other early colonies that tried collective ownership. They found themselves in the same situation and abandoned it, dividing up the land to see production soaring. And that was the end of the communist ... communal experiment in North America.

I can also quote a farmer I used to know: "Collective farming is something city people dream of because they've never worked on a farm."

It would seem the strategy here is to cast out the bottom 20% who don't want to work instead. "You work or you starve" basically. Ultimately the effects are pretty similar I think.

Seems at least extremely insensitive to have done so in the company of outsiders who have to SELL OFF their anima bit by bit to eat. (Frog, insensitive!? Never!!)

He does seem to genuinely want to help the outsiders, though. That doesn't really sound like Frog. But his anima is back to mirroring his body, which I assume means he's being honest.

I'm still a bit unclear exactly what makes someone an outsider. Is it, as Sotanaht and others suggested, the result of being a lazy good-for-nothing who refuses to do anything other than sell off their animas? That, or at least that perception / prejudice, would explain the "outsiders running a farm!? Ha! Can you imagine?" comment.

So, assuming Frog's telling the truth, that explains the visit with Gorf. It does NOT explain what happened to the DFA...

The general definition of outsider is "not us." The label is created by the "insiders." The label may or may not be accurate, the main question then is how to define "insiders" or "us" in this dimension.

Torg and the others, whatever their opinion about this dimension, have been in enough situations in this (and other) dimension to know how to act, and thus they fit the "us" definition, in spite of anatomical differences.

What we know is that having anima indicates sentience, but not "insider" status.

In any case, however they are defined, Frog is quite certainly going to use them for his own benefit.

[deleted -Z] Quick history lesson for everyone else.
*The pilgrims weren't homogeneous. Some were hired servants or merchants and were of different faiths.
*They were chartered under the Virginia Company of London but got lost and settled at a conveniently shaped harbor (spoilers: the Native Americans made it and then got wiped out by the plagues) after the pilgrims ran out of beer (no really, look it up).
*Instead of arriving at an already established city the pilgrims landed in the middle of nowhere. Because people were various shades of religious zealots, or merchants, or servants, nobody knew how to farm. Not that it mattered because they were too busy digging for gold (corn isn't profitable). As you can tell the pilgrims weren't too smart.
*The pilgrims only survived thanks to a literal handout from the Native Americans and Squanto and their communal society (unrelated: ever wonder how Squanto knew English? Dude was enslaved and brought to Europe where he learned English. He then escaped, got back to the Americas, and then decided to not hold a grudge and helped the starving pilgrims.)

A farm you say? And is that a tower in the background? We know the machine travels through time, but how does that relate to relative space in this instance?

The group started this adventure on the East coast of the USA, the first drop had a coast (but it was a tropical climate), I don't remember any coasts from the second drop but it was Ye-Olde cold European climate, and in this drop we see a map that shows Splicer-ville is right on an Eastern Coast.

I think it is a silo?


I think that is a good question, and I'm not sure it has ever been explored. My assumption was they traveled in time but not space, but I can't say that for sure.