From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Marbles hands and Oz magic
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 13:46:51 -0600

>Crush responds:
>Whenever is fine. :)
>
>In answer to your question, no, I don't believe Moly had hands like that. I
>don't believe any chem had hands like that. That's what is troubling,
>because as you surely remember, Marble only inherited ONE hand (by my
>reading) from Rose. Remember Marble's conversation with Blood at the end of
>LS3? Talking about the times Rose would come and visit him as a child, he
>notes that (quoting from memory) "One time you came with a hand like that
>one." Then Marble notes "it *was* this one."

Marble did get both her hands from Rose. Rose didn't receive all her
prosthetics at the same time, that's all; she would have scared the hell out
of that boy if she had. Much of her face was prosthetic, both arms and both
legs, her "ears", one eye, and a host of internal organs. Before Marble got
the new hands, her old ones had lost most of their synthetic bio veneer; the
veneer had worn through from constant work over the course of
three-hundred-plus years.

Now that you've acknowledged that you "don't believe any chem had hands like
that", that plays hell with your theory that they originally came from a
dismantled chem. Either Rose had them made to look that way, or that was the
best she could get when she needed them. Echidna had nothing to do with the
hands. They were not an illusion produced during possession. Marble "snapped
her new fingers" when she was deciding how to get the attic door down,
followed by more references to her new fingers (LS3: 5). She couldn't snap
her old ones because they were worn down to the bare metal.

-Roy


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