Jeanie Bottle 672
Dec28
on December 28, 2021
at 12:00 am
and modified on December 27, 2022. at 1:00 am
Whoa. Mood whiplash. Justified, though.
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Whoa. Mood whiplash. Justified, though.
At least, having been regressed to a teenager, Natalie did not have to burn up part of her life expectancy in returning the slow way—e.g. if Neil were expected to live until around 2075 before dying of old age, then Natalie would have that expectancy as well (inherent differences due to living as female vs. male in 21st Century America notwithstanding). Natalie is biologically the same age that she would be in the “present” if they had not time traveled.
Teen Natalie had no background, no history. So, she couldn’t go to college, couldn’t become an engineer. She has to find a job where the owners weren’t too particular about proof of identity. She’s working shifts.
She’s either a waitress or a stripper at The Hiram Club.
No identity is better than the ‘wrong’ identity. Its not like she could be deported if there is no record at all of her. Where would they send her? An identity would have to be made for her sure… social security number by working a part time job for the start. Hopefully she could get a passport after that and all is well. She would need proof of degrees though and that she would have to re take with a new identity I suspect.
Just guessing here but I think its doable. Its not like she got a record of illegality there’s just .. no record
The fact they were in past for a couple of days before Prom arrived don’t suppose Jean had magic up a identity history record while they were in past.
“Do you ever think of anyone other than yourself?”
That’s a rhetorical question, right? We’ve known the answer for 672 strips.
I think we can rule out an alternate timeline. In strip 620 Neil asks if a new Sartorelli’s diner has opened. Which means the old one closed. Because the owner tried passing “funny money” — though we didn’t know that at the time. And this was before the time trip.
Now, I don’t know how this is all going to be resolved but I think Neil is going to lay down the law. I AM YOUR MASTER!!! The “we’re back in time before you owned the bottle” excuse doesn’t work any more. “Fix this or I will put your bottle where it won’t be found before the Sun burns out!!!”
Incidentally, Neil may be quite well off, having known to buy Amazon and Bitcoin. Or even the lottery ticket mentioned in 617; a Checkov’s Gun if I ever saw one.
The plan to ‘buy stocks’ seems good on the surface, but you can’t really do so without tax information/identity. She’d have to find a partner of sorts, dazzle them with some early predictions and then steer them as a savvy investor. Hopefully this would be a trustworthy person that would split the profits and not keep them. That is, if Natalie remembers anything more than ‘buy amazon’, which is a long term investment and wouldn’t likely pay immediate benefits.
Love the story CD, I kinda hope there is some macguffin that keeps this Natalie around even if we get Neil back, or at least the history of Natalie. Neil: “Jean, I need to be Natalie tonight, I’m going to go hang out with the girls from my old job and we’re going clubbing.”
Robert wrote in the previous thread;
A 10,000 BTC auction was attempted in 2010 with a starter value of $50. It didn’t sell. If you could actually go back in time and invest in BTC when it was new, $100 investment in 2010 would be worth upwards of $100,000,000 today.
True, most investments won’t make you rich overnight, but if you know to buy Apple and Amazon and ditch Sears and Kodak, even a small sum adds up over the years. Natalie might be quite well off “today”; which raises the question why she’s working shifts.
She would however need to get some money to buy bitcoin WITH first …
HKMaly: Yes, but a hundred bucks is peanuts compared to what rent, food, etc. cost in 21st century America (less than two days of minimum wage any time in this century, and any diet better than “ramen and dollar store fare” is going to cost at least fifty bucks per person per week). As soon as she climbs out of the “can’t afford to eat” level, she should be able to save a hundred in less than a month at most.
Neil seems quite in touch with his femine side as Natalie here. I would have thought that as a cis-gendered man stuck as a woman for a decade he would have adopted a more androgenous style, looser clothes, shorter hair, if only for ease of maintenence, but here the hair and the top make Natalie look very much a girly girl.
Interesting point. In this case, though, Natalie is not a male stuck as a woman, she’s been magically transformed into a woman with all the physiological implications that entails. Brain structure, hormones, et al. We’ll have to see where CD takes this.
I would be very interested if she has become a mother or not, that would make things awkward
@mike and Ava_X: Yes. I think the transformation spell went very deep. Natalie is female, to the bone, though she retains some of Neil’s interests and of course, memories.
I do think she will want to return to being Neil.
HA! Ha ha ha ha!
you can;t change back now your friend expecting you to cover her shift at work
I have a few questions here that I would like to have answered and they are:
1. Do we want to leave Neil as Natalie indefinitely?
2. Do we want to change Natalie back into Neil right now if that possible, damage and all?
3. Do we want to see what happen to Teen Neil, Zoey, Danny Natalie and anything else that may have happened at the prom too?
4. Do you want to see the rest of this current back story before the prom to the current time?
5. Do you want Jeanie to try an intercept herself before this happens?
6. Do you want Jeanie to go back into the past to try and undo this mess and return everything back to the way it use to be?
Give us your opinion now.
I pick number 3, would like to know what teenage Natalie did during and after the prom
1. Yes, Natalie is more interesting than Neil
2. No… see above.
3. Yes, did Natalie kick Danny’s butt?
4. Before the prom? No need, but what happened afterwards, yes.
5. No… if Jeanie somehow prevents Jean from opening that bottle the entire webcomic evaporates.
6. No.
I agree with Mike on all counts.
1&2:I want Neil back, having learned from being Natalie. A Neil with backbone would be fascinating. Unpopular opinion follows, avert yer eyes, oh ye faint of heart: I believe the male/female dynamic makes for a more interesting and natural master/genie dyad. They represent complementary strengths and weaknesses. And yes, I believe sex to be an essential, indeed irreplaceable, part of that bonding.
3. Not all that interested in the prom itself.
4. I want very much to know what Natalie has gone through following the prom. I especially want to know what she has like/disliked about being female. It has clearly not been a uniformly negative experience, and yet she still shows many aspects of Neil’s personality, and I suspect on balance she’d rather be Neil again.
5&6. No.
from sound of things at last Jean didn’t return to present to find Natalie as a working mom with a husband.
@Paradox: “No possible world where Jeanie is not at fault.”
Jeanie did not do what Natalie implies–deliberately run off and abandon Natalie for years. Jeanie is completely baffled as to even where she is and when she is, and why.
However, Jeanie’s turning Neil into Natalie and dragging her off to the prom, and all the sequela thereof–definitely Jeanie’s fault, in the same sense that if you drink and drive, and as a result have an accident and kill someone, you are culpable because you chose to drive while impaired.
Finally, though, I’d argue that Neil is at fault because he is Jeanie’s Master. He has been negligent in the care and feeding of his genie, allowing her to get bored by not giving her delicious, interesting wishes to fulfill. And, of course, by not asserting his authority over her to actively prevent her from doing harm. In the same sense, if you do not train your dog properly, and fail to play with her or take her for walkies, and then allow her run free through the neighborhood, it is not the dog’s fault if she digs up someone’s garden, or even injures somebody.
Ironically, this is because Neil simply could not be bothered, opting instead to pursue his career as a rocket engineer. Pure selfishness on his part.
I’m hoping that both of them realize how much they care for each other, and that Neil picks up his responsibilities in his new avocation as Master in the genie/master dyad.
And, wow, Jeanie really does care for Neil. That look of hers as she settles into Natalie’s embrace is pure, contented happiness.
ecause I’ve got extremely unreliable wifi, I downloaded this comic on my phone. But because I suck at thumb typing, I wrote out my comment on my laptop and waited to post it until another magic moment came around when my wifi worked long enough to do it. HOWEVER, I posted it back on Jeanie 671, if anyone is interested.
And now for a not-so-crackpot theory about why Jeanie was suddenly so horrified when she realized she was about to have sex with her younger self: It’s not that having sex with a man. Look back to I Dream of Dream Eyes after Belle told her that “Jean” was a better lover than ever (Jeanie had turned Neil into a lookalike of her male self). Jeanie was Extremely ready to have sex with Neil, I think with much more motivation than finding out how a loser like Neil could be better than a real player like him(formerly)self. And look how bliissful Jean is in the third panel in Natalie’s arms. And Jeanie called Natalie “Neil.”
@Tom Sewell: “look how bliissful Jean is in the third panel in Natalie’s arms” nod-nod. I have indeed noted that. She’s contented and happy. I believe at least part of the reason Jeanie was horrified is that a bottle genie being intimate with anyone other her master is simply not tolerable; it’s part of her genie nature.
One last thing, about Natalie’s emotional whiplash: Ever seen a parent reunited with a lost, wayward child? Ever been that lost, wayward child?
“Jeannie, don’t cast that spell. It’s too dangerous”
Wow 90+ comments on a daily strip! There is a lot of meat to those three panels.
Sorry, four panels .
I once posted in another website the poll, Which was deadlier, the little black rifle or the little black dress. The rifle got one vote. The new banner shows you why. Very nice.
Indeed, it could be argued that little black dresses, and their contents, are what provokes most uses of little black rifles.
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I also like the Jeanie stocking-stuffer. I note she’s bare-shouldered, with a look that suggests she’s bare every thing else, too.
In panel 671 I noticed that a book on the top self fell over and rubbed the bottle. Is that what brought Jeanie back to the present instead of allowing her to stay in the past with Neil?
It’s a fair question, which I hope CD answers in comic. I’m not sure that we see any rubbing. In any case, I doubt accidental rubbing by inanimate objects even counts. How could a book be a genie’s master? What about a cat, slinking along a shelf, as cats do? My guess (as others have said) is that the bottle was not Jean’s in prom-time. She returned to it automatically in her distress, as she does when she sleeps.
Natalie’s reactions in Panel’s 3 and 4 brought to my mind an example from World War II. If you’d like to hear it from a woman who actually had similar reactions, watch Part 2 of “Britain in 1940” on YouTube.
The story is related by an old woman who’s probably dead now, but was alive as a child in 1940 along with her little brother. In that year (the year John Lennon was born, BTW) Britain was having something called the Battle of Britain. This meant that the Germans were bombing it. Since Germany had taken France and come close to capturing the entire British army, an invasion seemed to be coming. So what a great idea it must have been to evacuate at least some of the children across the Atlantic?
So our girl and her little brother were packed off on an ocean liner called the City of Benares. Before she left, her mother told her to grow up to be a good girl and her father told her to “Look after that young man,” meaning her brother.
Once this pair and 88 other children being evacuated by the same organization of do-gooders (CORB, if you want to look it up) were aboard, the boys were separated from the girls and our girl didn’t see her brother aboard that ship again. But she wasn’t too upset; food wasn’t rationed on the City of Benares, not the biggest or fastest ship but built to take well-to-do travelers between Britain and India. It was also pretty new, four years old. And it was in a convoy. What could go wrong?
Answer: U-48.
In a storm, at night, U-48 put a torpedo into the City of Benares. All that were ever going to get off had fifteen minutes. Soon our girl found herself clinging to an upturned lifeboat with another girl, with no one else. They were there all night and through most of the next day.
Some things were not mentioned in the the documentary, and wouldn’t have been known to our girl or any of the children. One of them was that the convoy’s escort had orders NOT to stop to pick up survivors. It’s first job was to keep protecting ships that were not sinking. However, after word reached back to Britain that the Benares had been left sinking, those orders were changed, at least this time. That is why a destroyer did double back to find our girl and the other one still holding on to the keel of the upside-down boat.
Now our girl was remembering what her had said about her brother, what we would tell her parents. A crewman told her that they would be so glad to have her back it wouldn’t matter–and that some Mums and Dads wouldn’t have anyone.
Anyway, here’s were I get back to the reactions I promised to compare to Natalie’s in Panel 3 and in Panel 4. The same destroyer later picked up someone else and brought him to our girl. It was her brother. She was glad beyond words to see him. And then she yelled at him “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!!!” in what had to be her mother’s voice when angry with her nasty little boy.
Only 13 of the 90 evacuees survived. Of 10 other children as normal passengers, four survived.
I’ve known about the sinking of the City of Benares with evacuated children for over fifty years. The library in Richmond, California, where I was living when I was in high school, still had these big bound-together volumes of old Life magazines, and one of them had a short piece on the City of Benares. I don’t think there was much else to it beyond maybe only one photograph and a little text. Certainly nothing that portrayed it as another example of what bastards the Nazis really were–which, of course, they really were. But also nothing about what a crack-brained idea it was to send ship children across the U-boat infested Atlantic, or the standing orders not to pick up survivors, or that this incident raised an uproar in Britain to end the child evacuations, which it did.
Oh look at that. In the characters that appear on the left, it shows Natalie but not Neil. If I’m not mistaken, for the first time ever – until now, when Neil as a female appeared, it didn’t show just the picture of Natalie but both Natalie and Neil, but now it’s only Natalie. I guess because she has been Natalie from being (biological age) a teenager until her early 40s (the comic started in 2009 with them already being adults, and Neil having finished college, so I’m guessing high school prom was in 1998 + or – 3 years), she has eventually accepted her new life as a female.
I hope you don’t just have Jeanie go back in time and erase this Natalie from existence, that would be bad writing and wasting of potential. I guess you made this long ago so there’s no influencing it now, but she should bring Natalie back with her if she’s going to destroy this timeline, and keep the new Natalie on as a character rather than leaving her behind in this future to be erased with the rest of it.
I hope she became an Engineer again.
HOW long have you known this individual?