Poppy O'Possum Tumblr Worldbuilding

Poppy O'Possum Official Tumblr Worldbuilding and Asks Archive.
ARCHIVER'S NOTE: THIS IS A COLLECTION OF WORLDBUILDING AND ASKS THAT THE OFFICIAL POPPY O'POSSUM BLOG HAS RECIEVED. THIS IS NOT THE COMPLETE COLLECTION AND SOME STUFF COULD BE MISSED. THIS COLLECTION WILL START FROM THE VERY FIRST POST OF THE TUMBLR TO THE MOST RECENT ONE AS OF 3/23/2016. I WILL TRY TO INCLUDE THE ASKERS QUESTION FIRST AND THEN MORBI'S RESPONSE. I WILL NOT BE INCLUDING THE USERNAMES OF THE ASKERS BECAUSE I AM A LAZY. POPPY O'POSSUM IS OWNED BY IAN EVERETT (MORBI) AND HE CAN CHANGE WHATEVER HE WANTS ABOUT IT. I HAVE OMMITTED A FEW ASKS FROM THIS COLLECTION DUE TO THEM NOT CONTAINING ANY SUBSTANTIAL WORLDBUILDING OR LORE NOTES.



Could you share a little with us about how the comic started out in your head? If it's not too spoilery, I'd love to know what were the first few ideas/inspirations that got this going.
I wanted to make a silly story that might inspire people to hate opossums a bit less. After that, it just became a story formed from a bunch of the things I liked. Weird fantasy, ambiguous degrees of idealism versus cynicism, gods and spiritualism, single moms, small heroes fighting giant monsters, world trees, the works.
I’ve just been sitting on hundreds of story concepts that never saw the light of day, and I wanted to finally force myself into taking the first step, and see where it takes me. It’s been pretty good so far.

Just how inheritable is magic normally? Is Mary not having much magic talent an especially unusual thing for a descendant of a powerful mage?
Magic potential is mostly governed by the amount and type of magical radiation one is exposed to immediately after birth. Usually it comes from the sun, being the nearest star to Flora, but sometimes other stars will flare up and overpower it for the briefest instant, giving birth to Lucky Stars.
You can’t literally inherit magical power, but sometimes genetics can influence how well you absorb it.

what does poppy sound like ? I'd imagine her accent is southern.
Her accent is the slightest tinge of “Trench” mixed with however neutral English sounds in your head.

What's going on in the lives of Poppy's adoptive family?
Maybe we’ll find out someday.
ARCHIVER'S NOTE: FOLLOW QUESTION WAS ASKED.
was that a non answer on purpose?
Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.
Here’s the real answer.
We WILL find out what’s going on with Poppy’s adoptive family very soon.

doesn't the captain has any magic poisoning from too much magic boost he gets ?
Friedrich isn’t foolish enough to use more magic boosters than he can handle at one time, and their effects always dissipate within a few hours.

Trying not to sound creepy and failing at it, do Opossums go through puberty changes? What sorta changes do they go through?
They become larger and begin estrus cycles? Nothing spectacular.

what the magical potential be of a cross between a short-tail opossum and a common opossum be
Zero.

If you were to translate Poppy's current stage of development to a human's, how old would she be in human years?
Around 45-50.

Will Lily have same super strength as her mother when she grows up?
No, Lily didn’t inherit the very specific combination of conditions that resulted in Poppy’s strength.

did lily not inherit them because Poppy is not her biological parent?
Poppy’s heart condition often skips generations.

Was Lily an 'accident'? And while we haven't seen her biological father (I don't think we ever will) will Lily get some sort of a 'father figure'? Kids need that.
Lily was not a planned child, no.
Poppy kind of straddles the line between traditional mother and father figure at times, to be honest.

How many parts science to magic is alchemy? Can you use magical processes to create non-magical products, or are the results themselves usually magic? Could a possum be an alchemist if they used a long pair of tongs to hold things? How close does a possum need to be to nullify something, anyway? Can a certain thickness of certain substance 'block' the effect?
That’s way too many complicated questions to just throw at me at once, please don’t do that. I’m only going to answer the last two questions, since they’re so close in topic.
The distance an opossum in their neutral state has to be to nullify magic is, on average, close enough to be considered direct bodily contact, but the effect is most powerful in contact of tissue near the heart. It is possible to expand and amplify their nullification field further, through concentration and cardio, but in most cases, the limit is still somewhere within 3 meters, and it puts a lot of strain on the body to “force it”.
Since the effect of nullification is based on attracting and directly absorbing magic into the body, any airtight material capable of blocking the flow of magic through space, preventing it from reaching the opossum, could plausibly minimize magic loss.

So opossums are not liked in the Poppyverse. But is there also a most popular race? One that absolutely everyone likes and that makes kids wish they had been born like that instead?
Canines are king on Flora, literally in the case of Pomeranians, considering Emperor Lord Pom.

do you actually have an a opossum ?
No, I believe it’s unethical to keep a thoroughly wild animal as a pet, and that opossums should only be kept in captivity when they can’t be released for health reasons.
At some point, I would like to become a rehabilitator for injured and orphaned opossums, but I do not currently possess the resources or experience to do so.

Between Mary and Friedrich, who has naturally larger reserves of magic? Does Mary employ booster tablets as well or plain fights without any magical assistance?
Friedrich has a larger natural pool of magic.
Mary doesn’t really get into fights, she is a coward who prefers to hide behind others.

So on a scale from 1 to 10, how big a faux pas is it to stick your face inside an opossum's pouch?
To a stranger? Unacceptable and very disrespectful.
To your wife? Hey, I’m not one to judge.

It's really weird to hear Poppy be referred to as an "Old Lady". Also, whats the current trend in music in the Poppy world? Is it Classical? Metal? Perhaps, something with a bit of refinement and modernism like Hip-Hop and Rap?
The most current musical trend is Klazz. (But what is Klazz you ask)

Did you inspire yourself on cowboy bebop to make the whole 'smuggling drugs while pretending to be pregnant' thing in the recent pages?
I actually forgot about that until someone made the comparison.
It’s just a very logical thing to do, smuggling contraband in a place that can’t set off magical sensors.

You ever worried you might make Poppy a "Mary Sue" of sorts? I mean, right now she seems pretty challenged and lacking but later on, if things change drastically, she may just be hardly challenged at all.
No, I am literally never worried about that. That would be like worrying that I might make Poppy into a tree of sorts.
“Female character not experiencing problems RIGHT NOW” is not what a Mary Sue is.

Talking about pacing, there are two problems with yours: The story itself is actually quite fast-paced, introducing characters, settings and plot-points quickly and efficiently without feeling rushed, problem is every time there is a fight it drags on for too long, completely bogging down the story and even managing to disrupt the scope of the events before it. And the second is the poor planning, either with the story-wise pointless wolf gal chapter, or the current kinda prequel chapter.
The longest fight scene in the entire comic is less than ten pages long. If I wrote them at the same pace that I wrote the plot scenes, they would all likely end up being “Poppy did a thing and won” or “her opponent did a thing and she lost”, and that’s just not fun to write or draw or read.

How the heck do you determine size differences between species in this
Very, very loosely. A universe with a magical foundation makes physics a little wonky, so there’s a bit more room for variance in sizes, even within species. A good rule of thumb is to assume that the species are always at least about 20-40% larger than their Earth counterparts, proportionally. Aside from that, all bets are off.
In some extreme cases, you get things like the short-tailed opossums being roughly the same size as long-tailed ones, despite real STOs being about a fifth the size of a Virginia Opossum.

Hypothetically speaking, if the entirety of Humanity united together to attack Flora or vice versa, who would win?
That is a battle so lopsided in Flora’s favor that it’s not even funny.
Already in-story, we’ve seen Flora has commercially viable automatons, healing to the point of rapid limb regeneration, pocket dimensions and teleporting, and true levitation.
As quaint as the setting might seem, they are at a tech level where stuff we consider bending the laws of physics is how most of their population goes to work each morning.

Does being around Lily ever make Frieeeedy have a pang of "Damn, I miss my brats"?
Homesickness is exactly the reason Friedrich was willing to put up with Lily’s aggressive playfulness during their first meeting.

do the constalation and planet ailignments ever mess with the abilities in the poppy opossum world? even for a split minute?
No. Once the magical radiation of a star has been internally attuned, the body becomes “locked” into producing it naturally without influence from the star itself.
Also, there’s only the one planet with one major satellite anyway.
ARCHIVER'S NOT: PLANET: FLORA SATELLITE: FAUNA

"Gloria"? That giant, buff, masculine croc is called "Gloria"? All of my WAT.
Well, technically, she’s an alligator.

Okay... I did NOT see that one coming. Now I keep imagining Gloria speaking in a high-pitched girl voice. Thanks a lot, pal.
Nah, she’s an alligator, so it’s going to be deep and rumbly no matter what. Really, she doesn’t so much speak as she bellows words.

So is Gloria like... you know. "Happy" for Poppy?
She admires Poppy as a fighter.

Is there anything more to Poppy's initial reaction to Gloria than "oh god a giant alligator just came out of nowhere and stuck her face in my face"? It's a little strange seeing Poppy afraid of a larger animal given her usual propensity, current injuries aside, for punching larger animals into the stratosphere.
She’s not afraid, she’s just surprised.
Sometimes her heart just gives out for a moment or two, you know how it is.

Alligator facts! Did you know that alligators use temperature-dependent sex determination? Eggs incubated at lower temperatures produce females while higher produces males. Alligators continue growing through their whole lives, and we currently have little idea what their life expectancy is! The oldest known is about 77 years old. With magic that probably goes up to much longer! So there are probably some really huge gators on Flora?
There sure are. Male alligators tend to grow larger than females, unlike most reptiles, and Gloria falls a bit into the gray area of being big for a lady, but shimpy if she was a man.
Her friend Cuvier is about Poppy’s size because she’s based on a Cuvier Dwarf Caiman, one of the smallest crocodilian species, of which the females only grow to be about 3-4 feet.

How offended do Alligators/Crocodiles get when you get them mixed up?
Most of the time, not very. They might find it annoying, but then again, they’ll often do it themselves by accident too.

How offended does Gloria get when someone gets her gender wrong?
Not at all. In species where sexual dimorphism relies on much more subtle, unclear indicators, its fairly common practice to just take a gender neutral stance when they’re not actively looking for romantic partners. Even some reptiles have trouble telling the difference within their own species without the help of pheromones, so they don’t even bother.
At worst, she’d just correct you. She might not even notice.

So, any particular reason for deciding Gloria was a female while there was a strong fancanon suggesting otherwise? To avoid shipping maybe?
No particular reason, no. I don’t see how that would avoid shipping anyway.
Also, “strong fancanon” holds no favor in my eyes, so if anyone was thinking widely accepted fan theories or stories were safe, ahahahahahahahaHAHAHA

How do builders in Flora account for the massive size differences between races? I've lived in buildings with door handles so low I had to bend down, I can only imagine how it must be when you've got people the size of, say, the Rough Rodent Rogues living in the same town as those two gang bosses.
Residential areas are usually separated by general size categories, so you often have buildings specially designed for larger, smaller, and “mid” sized folks, although there are also several places designed with overlap in mind. Eggton, for instance, is mostly a community for mid and small-sized folks, so there’s not a lot of spaces that suit larger people well.
Areas that have a lot of traffic of all sizes will have establishments with multiple entrances and other conveniences. It’s funny you ask this today, because the page going up later features a tavern with “unusual-size friendly” seating at the counter.

I want to know if some one has ever told the Cat and Ram to just make out cause sheesh. Also, how about that Alpaca Bartender? Pretty neat character I can't wait to hear about.
Their romantic tension is entirely one-sided on Ms. Rufus’ part. The ram, Claudius, never gets over his species-based superiority complex, and as a result, misses out on what could have been a very healthy and satisfying relationship.
Mr. Baropekay (also known as BARPK in some circles) is merely a background character in this story. Makes a hell of a Muddy Mary though.

For the creepy black market connoisseur: would possum leather have any anti-magic properties?
Only living opossums exert null fields.

What if someone had a fruit child with a possum, would that child be overpowered or screwed?
Feeding opossum blood to a ripening fruit of life is a reliable way to get NOTHING.

Was Cuiver's design inspired by Weekly's design (from the Blacksad series)?
Nah, I just wanted to draw a tiny crocodilian in a flat cap.

So... Poppy is the Sage of the Six Paths now? This latest page has confirmed that she has the Rinnegan eyes, and that is cool beyond measure.
“Ringed eyes” are a trait that flares up in relation to an opossum’s heartbeat, and you’ll notice it’s not exclusive to Poppy. It’s also not a reference to Naruto, for the record, I dropped away from the series long before the Rinnegan came into play. I don’t even know what it does.

are the audible reverberating heart beats a reference to The King Engine from One Punch Man? (love the effect btw, with the electrocardiagram and spheres, great stuff)
Nah, Poppy’s heartbeat being audible at certain points of the story was a thing I decided on around the same point I gave her a heart condition.

Did poppy used to fight in the past ?
Poppy’s gotten into plenty of alleyway scraps, but her technique is very sloppy because she has no genuine experience when it comes to real fighting.
She’s gotten by purely through overwhelming physical strength and reflex and it’s not a stretch to say she’s actually an amateur.

Would the story be terrible different had Poppy entered and won a high profile / high stakes pie baking contest, instead of a fighting tournament?
Yes, instead of breaking her arms, she loses a foot from a surprisingly common kind of baking accident.

If a possum sucks up some magic, but that magic is being used to do something like levitate a bunch of glass shards, will the possum accidentally suck a bunch of glass shards into themselves?
No, the magic becomes inert once it begins being absorbed. So unless, the glass shards happened to be directly above the opossum, they’d just fall to the ground harmlessly.

Will Poppy ever find her 'perfect man'?
No.

Will Poppy ever find her perfect woman?
ARCHIVER'S NOTE: Instead of a reply it appears that Morbi posted a picture of Poppy's face taken from his "Good Luck unlearning that one fuckers" image.

Will Petunia ever find her 'perfect man'? Or will she turn into an old crazy cat lady?
Petunia’s not looking for love. She’s married to her work.

Poppy's orientation? Or is she just full on mom-mode now with no desire for that kind of nonsense?
Poppy wants someone who can look after Lily when she’s gone, she’s not real caught up on anything other than a person’s character.
That being said, she likes her men polite and her ladies perky.

What about Queen Kit Darling, will she ever find her gallant 'knight in shining armor'? Friedrich doesn't count, he already has a wife.
Kit loves everyone.
EVERYONE.

And Ewe Lala? Surely there might be someone her heart belongs to. Gustaff would be a good choice, if we can look past that whole 'I got stabbed in the neck and kinda died' thing.
Gustaff is like, twice her age.
She’s 17.

So what you're saying is Kit would have some sort of harem or rotating set of consorts rather than a monogamous partner.
Platonic love, anon.

Up until now, who do you think are poppy's strongest opponents?
Poppy’s strongest opponent thus far (outside of Poda, who is quite literally god tier), has been Valente.
We just didn’t get to see why because she cheated and sucker-punched him.

Why are you always so anti-fun?
Oh, but I have plenty of fun.

So, Poppy's bi?
Poppy’s simple. She likes what she likes.

Has poppy ever killed someone, or is she a mary sue?
You know, I don’t think these concepts are actually related.

I'm having trouble thinking of what Fazzis voice sounds like. Care to enlighten me?
It’s a bit of an abstract concept because it plays entirely off of the fact that her speech bubbles are sharp and rigid instead of soft.
I personally imagine her sounding like a humming, harshly low-quality sound system.
Maybe her voice is in squarewaves rather than sinewaves as usual? (Also can we get more stan-- Lucky Star names like Kit's and so?)
That’s the general idea, yes.
Kit’s Lucky Star doesn’t have a name yet.

Does Fazzi like her "angular' attire, or has she just gotten tired of bending it back to its proper state and has given up on continuously fixing it?
Fazzi is extremely obsessive-compulsive when it comes to keeping her appearance rounded. She hasn’t yet noticed that she’s become angled.

Do your avian females have 'mammalian traits', or is that maid stuffing her shirt?
She’s just a hen, anon, don’t make fun of her fat chest.

Just curious, what specific species of birds are Arthur and Aria Chicadino?
They’re loosely based on chickadees.

Can Fazzy bend things to any angle or is it just at a 90 degree angle.
Fazzi can only bend in multiples of 90 degrees.

I can't help but imagine Chicadino hopping around like an actual chickadee instead of walking. His bad guy persona has been ruined for me in the best possible way.
That was always kind of the implied humor in making a dangerous professional criminal a cute little songbird species.

90? so,, say she bent someone 9000 degrees or something like that... would they just collapse into a spiral?
No. No amount of right angle bending is going to give you a curve of any kind.
In any case, she has to bend in separate increments of 90 degrees, and she can’t actually make matter overlap past itself, so 180 is usually the realistic limit.

So just how common are Lucky Stars? We are seeing quite a few of em here.
Roughly 8% of the world’s population has them, but some types of them are much more common than others.

Are you sure Petunia's tonsils aren't raw from doing something else for Chicadino?
Yes, I’m pretty sure.

She bent her neck almost completely backwards...
Well, yeah. She’s a cat.

So I take it that the lamb cubed being unboxed was the lamb we saw before? Do they transport her by mail or has she gotten so frustrated that she's gone all cubist on us?
She’s not being unboxed and she’s certainly not a lamb anymore.
That’s Fazzi’s shame cube. She goes in there when she’s done a bad thing she wasn’t supposed to.

Have you considered giving us some maps of the world?
I’d have to design them first!

A question about magic healing. I noticed that a bunch of characters sport scars and one of them is even missing an eye. does that mean that the magic healing like the one petunia received to reattach her foot is actually expensive and not as common? Or that there are limitations to it?
It depends on how clean the wound is and the quality of magical healing you have access to. If you’re not careful, you can actually make an unchecked infection stronger trying to heal an improperly treated wound.

We know Boris is a bit of a nerd/dork, so does he participate in the classic TableTop RPGs? And if so, what class would you imagine him playing? ((And if he invited Poppy and Lily what might they choose?))
The classic tabletop RPGs don’t exist on Flora, they have entirely different forms of role-playing culture that don’t use a standardized class/job system.
Since the format used is based on complex magical orbs instead of pen and paper, the amount of intermediary effort involved to get an opossum to play turns Poppy off altogether.

Is the world racist against all other marsupials too, or are opossum's the exception?
There are no other known marsupials on Flora.

N-no cute kangaroo moms in Flora? ;_;
No cute kangaroo moms on Flora.
ARCHIVER'S NOTE: WHY?!?!?!

Is it possible to fashion a magic resistant coat out of possum fur
Once again, no, dead opossum tissue has no anti-magical traits.

Ok so what if I was to strap opossum babies to myself. Would I be immune to magic then?
Not unless you somehow managed to create an airtight suit of babies, no.

How long has Kit been in rule of the Fenneclands? Was her father last in line before he got his Ebolaids?
Kit had been ruling for about a year and a half when Poppy first moved to the region.
She actually inherited the position from her older sister, who had left to take over their father’s role as head of the Darling family after he became too ill to rule.

so if an opossum only exudes an antimagic field while it's alive, does that mean it's tied to their life energy/soul, and not the body itself?
No. It’s technically tied to their heartbeat.
Hard to have a heartbeat when you’re dead.

ARCHIVER'S NOTE: THIS IS A FOLLOW UP RESPONSE TO THE PREVIOUS QUESTION
I think you guys took that answer a bit too literally. The heart doesn’t actually produce the anti-magic field, it just spreads it outward, in the same way that a magical creature’s heartbeat will spread their magical signature. The field is a signal produced by a core component of the brain (which is tuned to produce magical signals in most other creatures), which is then spread throughout the body and further outward by the beating of the heart.
If the brain dies, then the signal stops being relayed, and there’s simply no bringing someone back after braindeath. At best, you’d get a highly corrupted, functionally useless signal.
An opossum with a fake heart simply wouldn’t extend the field past their skin, but Flora also currently does not have non-magical prosthetic heart technology, so it’s a moot point.
On a related note, short tail opossums have brains that are tuned to produce BOTH signals at varying levels.

I think everyone's missing the most important question: does the Australian opossum have magic or does it count as a regular opossum?
There’s literally no such thing as an Australian Opossum.
The animals you’re thinking of are just called “Possums” and they’re no more related to the Opossum than Kangaroos are. They were named as such because the explorer who named them mistook them for an off-shoot of the species and the mistake was never corrected.
Also like Kangaroos, Possums do not exist on Flora.

can i call the universe you created the possoverse?
I personally refer to it as just the Poppyverse.

Since there's so much magic can the citizens turn into another species? I figure with the gods being for each race that it'd be pretty taboo if it were possible. But it's funny to think of a cult of people hanging out together, having fun, and wanting to be another race
You could probably make yourself superficially look like another species with illusion magic, but if you’re talking outright transformative stuff on sapient species, yeah, that’s banned.
Not because of social reasons, but because using transformative magic on living things is a pretty quick way to potentially make a person literally fall apart or melt open.

In what ways has the redable availability of magic retarded scientific and industrial growth? So far everything seems to be more or less on level with our own contemporary technology base. Which seems odd to me since, with the noted exception of Opossums, most people can simply teleport here to there rather take a cab, and is likely cheaper too.
You should consider taking another look, because Flora’s tech levels are way, way beyond ours in every way aside from monitors and the miniaturization of electronics. They have flying cars, safe spacial warping, life-sized robotic servants, hard light application, true quantum locking/levitation, pocket dimensions, etc.
Harnessing magic has allowed these creatures to accomplish twice as much in 2000 years as we have in over 6000. If there were any other worlds inside of Didelphi’s pouch, you can be sure they likely would have already begun “floraforming” and colonizing them.

I wouldn't have to take another look if you did more showing in your comic, instead of telling in asks.
All of the things I listed are actually things that have been directly displayed in the comic itself, with the exception of pocket dimensions, which will be coming into play later on in the story.

Then how much of the technology is purely mechanical, or rather completely non-magical in nature? I have seen all the things you mentioned, yes, but to me it seems unlikely the thought of making a non-magical analog of anything when any non-opossum can use it. If I can conjur cold to cool my room, why would I desire to build an air conditioner? Is there some kind of limit to how much magic someone can use at once or over time?
The average person can’t do things like conjure cold, though. Even basic spells take a lot of practice and can be dangerous if mishandled, which is why witches have to take decades of education and apprenticeship.
Normal people still use air conditioning units that are powered and controlled by magical temperature charms hard-coded into the machine. Additionally, tricks like Friedrich’s teleportation are the result of activating charm templates he’s had tattooed into his fingers. Think of it as being similar to the relationship we have to digital interfaces, but on a far more advanced, reality-warping level.
And even opossums can use magical machinery so long as they have an analog interface that doesn’t directly interfere with the magical parts (assuming the opossum isn’t exerting an exceptionally powerful null field at the time, of course).

I love how much thought you've put into your universe! In a prior ask, you mentioned that if there were any other worlds within Didelphi's pouch, the residents of Flora would have gone to them. Does this mean that the Possum creation story has some literal truth to it, or are you just speaking figuratively? If that's something that you don't want to reveal yet, that just gives me something else to look forward to in the comic, though!
There is literal truth to it, although how much is still very much unknown.
The space that Flora exists in is, at the very least, undeniably encased in some kind of bubble.

Is there a particular reason why some possums have stronger null fields than others?
Some opossums have stronger hearts than others.

Nooooooo, not Master Mouf, he was such an awesome and chill gecko dude. YOU ARE TEARING ME APART MORBI!
Don’t feel too bad, the guy was over 300 years old and was getting kind of bored of the whole mortal coil thing.

So what happens to ghosts? Can we have some poppyverse ghost facts?
Ghosts are just soul masses disconnected from any physical anchorpoint. They cannot exist by themselves for long and will break down into their base souls (which comprise a person’s personality and memories) in a short period of time after death.
A ghost without a brain to influence will be stuck at the emotional level the person was at when they died. Their level of thinking is severely reduced and reliant exclusively on the memories they still have stored. The lights you see coming off of Master Mouf’s ghost are his souls, and it will become progressively more corrupted and “stupid” as they leave it.
Tying a ghost to a body, while possible, will not bring the person “back to life,” regardless of whether it’s their original brain or not. You would be creating a new stream of consciousness with a copy of that person’s personality and memories (the quality of this copy depends on how many souls survived the trip), but the original consciousness will be permanently gone.
Ghosts, souls, and astral projection are not themselves magic, and will not be affected by an opossum’s null field. Opossums have souls.

So, people have multiple souls? That's cool. In Chinese mythology, the soul has two halves, the kui (demon) half and shen (spirit) half; if all goes well, then when you die the kui returns to the earth and the shen becomes an ancestor spirit. There's also the folk mythology of the yukaghir peoples, in which people have multiple souls associated with aspects of their personalities, and a few other things, which reincarnate separately through family. Were you inspired by any particular mythology?
Flora’s polysoul mechanics were something that evolved naturally as I was writing up the plot.

So does that mean opossums can astral project themselves?
Yes, but not very well.
It’s because of magical charms that the projection is so refined. Usually, the soul is not visible to the naked eye and can’t reliably relay information.
An opossum soul also wouldn’t negate magic like their physical bodies can, so they wouldn’t be able to pass through magical shields like usual.

If an opossum's ghost possesses their heart and keeps it beating (whether because they're bound to their body or because they're just a creepy floating heart) do they still negate magic? If not, could you "make" magic-friendly opposums if you are a very, very bad person?
By the time the Opossum’s null field has faded enough to bond a soul to their body, the brain will be too damaged to work at all.

If magic is used to enhance souls for projection, and allow them to be visible and speak and such, does that mean people with magic can use it "through" their projection?
No. A projection can’t remotely cast magic.
The only person capable of that kind of thing is Silvana, but she’s a bit of a special case.

Can magic cure homosexuality in the poppyverse?
Sorry anon, 1500 years of research, and the witches of the Poppyverse are no closer to curing the horrible affliction we know as “love.”

Is the Power of Love a thing in the poppyverse? Like, in ways we would consider magic but which may or may not be distinct from the specific phenomenon of magic thus far presented in the comic. Or the more distinguished True Love? How about their cousin, the Power of Friendship? Are possums immune to any of these things? Is there any limit to the tyranny of these foul curses, Morbi!?
There is no such thing as True Love, in the comic, or in real life.
Love and friendship is hard, you have to work to maintain it, even in the most compatible of relationships. And they have to be their own reward. If holding love for a person in any of its forms granted you some kind of blessing or deus ex machina, it diminishes the importance of the feeling itself.

"There is no such thing as True Love, in the comic, or in real life." Wow Morbi.
 will always mock the concept of “True Love” because it’s an impossible, irresponsible fictional standard that suggests that love that isn’t wholly selfless or perfect isn’t “true” love.

It has been mentioned that, if it where possible, an opossum with a prosthetic heart would still generate the null field, just not radiate it. Now, much like how a transmitter with no antenna would burn up after a while, would an opossum similarly suffer from deleterious effects if they could not radiate their null field?
At the very worst, they might be somewhat more prone to headaches

With how souls behave after death, does this mean there is essentially no after life in the poppyverse, or is it a bit more complex then that?
There is technically an afterlife, but it doesn’t work the way you might expect.

So, how does dragon blood, and those magical species splicing fruits work?
You just asked me two very different questions at once and I’m not exactly sure what you mean.
Dragon blood is a very magically potent liquid that used to create energy supplies, or crystallized to make batteries. Direct consumption of it can magically burn out the nervous system, which is obviously fatal to most species. It’s not fatal to opossums, but it tastes really bad and has no nutritional value anyway.
Life fruits are fruits that grow on the trees of life and can be “activated” by absorbing genetic material (like blood). There’s actually a big festival for the Sheep’s life tree coming up in the next story, so it gets a thorough explanation then.

I think that last anon as asking what would happen if you put dragon's blood on a life fruit--like, do you end up with dragon/fruit-animal hybrid or does it dissolve or what?
It would probably melt.

Is Kit's playing up the stereotypical 'princess classic' look a case of her not knowing what she looks like? Or is it very much intentional to mess with people? I figure 50-50 either way.
Her mom always dressed her that way and she assumed it was normal.

Sweet goat eyes on the dragon. Are dragons in this world more like Asian styled dragons where have features from multiple animals?
Well, kind of.
They share most of their biology with one particular animal, though, and it’s not the one you would typically expect when you think “dragon”
ARCHIVER'S NOTE: HE MEANS OCTOPI

In Poppy 2, Petunia tells Mary that Shiba's Boys aren't really boys. So does this mean that some of the assistants we see are cross dressing females?
The vast majority of them are women cross-dressing. Some of them are trans men and there’s probably even just a couple of effeminate men here and there.
Shiba started out with nothing himself once, so he’s willing to hire anyone who does good work and wears the suit.

what're this dragon's current thoughts with the rock looming overhead? It's face is just so perplexed, that I'm curious~
“Oh, now I get it.”

Between her sudden egress from Chicadino's estate, and how quickly she gets around that mountain, I think it begs to be asked. Just how quick can Poppy move in a full-tilt sprint?
Poppy’s actually a terrible sprinter. Her legs are extremely short and stubby and she tires out too quickly. She could sprint maybe a quarter of a mile before she would have to stop from straining her heart. And she wouldn’t even cover that distance quickly because her stride is so small.
What she actually does in these situations is hop. Her leg muscles are strong enough to launch her a huge distance in a single bound and it doesn’t raise her heart rate nearly as quickly. This means her speed is dictated mostly by how hard she kicks off the ground, and that turning is very tricky for her.

How long did it take you to get drawing Poppy's head down? I've been trying and it's a little frustrating. :P
A year of redesigning, actually.
Poppy’s head went through a lot of revisions, including an extended period where her snout was almost comically long.

Is poppy getting stronger? she couldn't scratch Boris yet she could heft that whole mountain? Or are lifting and jumping completely different from punches and kicks? Something along the lines of her body's durability? (lifts 10 tons no prob, but 10 tons of forceful impact on her hand shatters her arm up to the shoulder and probably some ribs)
Technically speaking, both. Poppy bones healed to be stronger, and lifting and jumping really are much different actions from punching.
Poppy’s technique when fighting Boris is extremely sloppy. She jumped and threw her body’s weight alone at Boris instead of staying grounded and letting her powerful leg muscles provide more force. She also made an improper fist, which meant a huge amount of strain was put on her wrist and metacarpals.
The funny thing is that if she had just tried tossing him out of the ring to begin with, she’d probably have won with no problems. Pretty much all of Poppy’s failures are caused by her own impulsive nature and pride.

Hold on, does Poppy have that saiyan thing where you heal back stronger every time you get your teeth kicked in?
Everyone does, to some degree. It’s usually much more noticeable for Opossums, though, because they can only heal naturally instead of taking shortcuts with magic.

So, hard-body training and even normal exercise don't work too well if you use healing magic because it somehow heals without accelerating cell division to fill in the breaks?
Kind of.
Most kinds of healing magic are based around reverting injured tissue to the state it was in before the damage, or in the case of missing tissue, copying a new limb/organ from similar tissue (such as replacing a lost right foot by copying and inverting the left one).
In both cases, you end up with tissue that is identical to the healthy tissue that existed before the injury, but injuries that heal naturally by filling gaps in with new tissue has the potential to develop stronger, assuming there isn’t permanent damage to the nervous system.
So yes, if someone were to work out ten hours a day, every single day, but use a healing spell to take away soreness, they’d be unknowingly undoing the microtears/fractures that contribute to natural strengthening, and would end up making no progress, outside of burning calories and fat.

Having attempted work in the healthcare field, I can say that your biology and reasoning re: magical healing seems sound, tho I'm no expert myself. But it also brought up another question. In the human world, we do have techniques and medications that fall out of favor due to being carcinogenic, causing of birth defects, making the problem worse in general. Has there been such issues with magical based medicine, or is that more or less just a problem for those that cannot use it?
I can answer this question and quite a few others by saying that there is such thing as “magical pollution”.
It’s possible for improperly performed or tested medical spells and charms to cause serious, irreversible damage, and magical substances that aren’t cleaned/ refined at all can be extremely unstable (which is why Dragon’s blood is so toxic when consumed).

did the opossum goddess Didelphi realize that by destroying her people's tree she would be making their lives shorter and be turning them into outcasts? also why didn't she take another species tree instead?
She didn’t have much choice.

Do possums get employment in areas where magic immunity is an advantage? Like, we already had the suggested "magic-immune army", but if you have like the equivalent of a magical nuclear reactor or something, it'd be nice to have someone you could send in without having to give them protection. Or, like, for alchemy, you have stuff in bottles and vials and such anyway, so why not employ someone to cart dangerous substances around who doesn't care if it spills on them?
In some regions, opossums are employed for jobs in magically polluted/oversaturated (or otherwise lethally dangerous) areas.
But in most places, they’re simply conscripted without representation, being considered property of the state instead of citizens.

Wait a minute, you said tissue removed from an opossum's body no longer had a magic-nullifying effect, wouldn't Poppy's blood be useless once it left her veins?
The nullifying effect doesn’t fade all at once. It takes roughly 5-10 minutes for saturated, living tissue like muscles and blood to lose its effects entirely after being separated from the anti-magic signal from the opossum’s brain. During that period, its effects are more muted, messing with magic instead of nullifying it outright.
It’s still certainly enough to, say, temporarily disrupt localized healing abilities while you stall for time, for instance.

ok there one thing i do not get about these dragons if there abe to talk and understand the being of this world can't they just talk it our or make a deal with them?
You know how some people see the AI pedestrians in games like GTA?
That’s a little like how most dragons see people in Poppy. There is nothing you can offer a dragon that it cannot simply take from you, and no empathy to be had in that relationship.

I know you're probably getting endless dragon related questions now, but it really fascinates me that you have to qualify the last question about dragon/mortal relations with "most." So are there rare dragons out there that take value in getting to know mortals? Or are they the ones who demand worship to control mortal minions?
Well, no.
It’s just that some rare dragons are kind of docile due to being heavily brain damaged.

What got Poppy fired/quitting from the mining job in the photo album post?
Nothing, it was just a temp job clearing out rocks for a construction site.

What'd she do afterward then, between moving towns? What jobs did she have in previous towns also?
We’ll learn more about Poppy’s time between leaving Trance and the start of the comic eventually.

Okay, so I know Valente's lucky star ability is a double edged sword as that if he comes contact with magic, he ignites it. So healing magic won't work on him, what about other stuff that everyone uses day to day life which he cannot use? Like teleportation? I just want to know how that nerd bird gets around with having such disadvantage in a magic-ridden world.
He can teleport and use magical constructs, but it tends to singe things.
Valente can actually control just how intense his flames are, it’s just that any degree of having fire inside your body for an extended period of time is usually pretty bad.

If he ran into an anti-magic field, would the tendency for his fire to turn magic into more fire turn the anti-magic field into an ice making field? :D
No.

If Kit looks at Valente, does he look like fire? I guess another way of asking that is where does the magic happen in a typical lucky star?
No, Kit’s vision works the same way regardless of the type of magical field she’s observing.
For her purposes, Magic and Anti-magic are akin to black and white, with no gray.

When Poppy emerges from the ground (Page 46), Valente clearly says "Well, hey there, POPS.". Is it just an expression or did he recognize Poppy and played her game with the disguise?
Valente was totally in the dark about everything that was happening.

Could you tell us a little bit about the long-ago-referenced Steel-Heel Ophelia and why the mobsters are so afraid of them? Maybe while we're between chapters, a sort of sketchy-explanation page would be cool?
Oh, you know.
She has steel heels, her name’s Ofelia…
It’s pretty self-explanatory, really.

Can't Poppy's heart condition be treated with good old fashioned medicine? Other than the probable high cost for an operation, what's stopping her from seeking out a good doctor to help her out?
It IS treated with medicine. She’s been taking drugs for it since she was a child.

Does Kit know any form of martial arts? Asking for a friend
No. Kit is almost entirely harmless, physically speaking.

What about emotionally speaking?
She is more a danger to herself than anyone else.

How old is Friedrich, is he younger or older than Poppy?
About 43 or so.

If possums are the only people Kit can see, don't they have her undivided attention by default? I imagine her staring lovingly at them whenever she sees one. Though... that makes me think of a question. If Kit uses her vision to "see" chemical reactions, that implies she can see "through" physical matter, at least to an extent, or else she'd still only be able to see the surface of any substance. If a possum was standing on the other side of a wall from Kit, could she spot them?
She would be able to kind of see them through matter in the same way you could kind of see an LED in murky water.
Which is to say, not very well.

Why can't lily be a Doctor. I still don't see through the whole possum life expectancy.
It takes a very, very long time to become a fully liscensed doctor.

How long would lily live on average if nothing crazy would happen to her?
30 years, tops.

Is the reason it takes so long to become a licensed and educated physician in that world because people know how long possums usually live for, and it's artificially lengthened that way in order to systematically deny possums wealth, status and accomplishment? Or is it REALLY that involved and complicated?
Try taking a look at how many years it takes to become a doctor in real life sometime.
Now consider that Flora is a world where there are a mishmash of hundreds of different sapient species with varying anatomy in modern society.
Even with the head start she has in attending Primary schooling at age 2, by the time Lily could realistically hit her residency period, she would likely be on death’s door.

Wait, isn't coffee poisonous to canids?
In real life, yes.
In real life, canids also do not have opposable thumbs and are not descended from magical trees.

Isn't Kit a magical researcher how can a magic based item affect Poppy and help her heart.
Just because Kit uses magic in her research doesn’t mean the end result is magical itself. She specializes in the creation of pharmaceuticals, not potions.
That would be like assuming Poppy couldn’t eat a loaf of bread because fire magic was used to bake it.

"After 30 years" Wait, Kit is older than Poppy?
Kit is 33.

Yes hi, I'm an angry Anon from Toons and Cartoon drawn on paper from ebaums world and was wondering when you're going to introduce Poppy's husband to the web comic. I'm getting really tired of all this false flagging homosexuals in this comic and was wondering when Poppy will have a health natural and realistic relationship. Lily would just grow up to be even more screwed up if she wasn't in a healthy heter family.
Poppy was not married to Lily’s father and has never had a husband.

Sorry if this is a silly question, but, do opposums usually give birth to a litter in Poppyverse?
Yes.

as i recall poppy was raised by a baker and his family if this is not a spoiler would you mind if i asked how that came to be?
Her parents died and they were the only people in the area who wanted anything to do with a depressed three-year old opossum.

So... what purpose do giant bugs serve other than being giant bugs? Like, you can't get milk from them, their meat probably isn't the best, only the beetles would really be able to help with plowing fields and pulling heavy things, not allot of insects have fur or fleece, and lastly there's the worrisome topic of giant bugs being able to reproduce rapidly like our smaller bugs... which would be bad and scary.
Actually, insects are pretty common food sources in real life. High protein, low fat, solid source of minerals. Chitin also has a lot of industrial and medical purposes.
Mostly, I just wanted to draw some giant bugs, though.

I honestly thought that the aero plane was going to be Flora's interpretation of an airplane! Like, a non magical one! I wanted to see what Floran aerospace engineers thought an airplane should look like and how they achieved aerodynamic flight. I am very disapointed by the flying saucer.
That is their interpretation of an airplane.
On Flora, aerodynamic flight is for the birds, quite literally. Practical quantum levitation and spacial warping made it mostly obsolete as transportation centuries ago. Why would anyone bother with a form of flight that is reliant on lift and thrust when they can literally quantum lock a plane to hover in place and freely move in all three axes?
You simply cannot approach Flora with the assumption that “magic” and “technology” are separate fields. It’s absurd.

aw fudge i also forgot to ask, are there any magic-firearm technological amalgamates in existence? sorry for spewing a huge pile of questions i think i have a worldbuilding fetish even though i can't into worldbuilding at all
Okay, you asked me like a million questions, and I’m only going to respond to this one because it answers most of them anyway.
Almost all Floran firearms use magical detonation and ammunition of some kind. Purely gunpowder-based firearms are niche products, used almost exclusively for conflicts with opossums.
We won’t see a whole lot of firearms get used in the Fenneclands because the magical signatures of their emissions are comically easy to ID by design, moreso than ballistic fingerprinting, and because the nation has very strict gun control laws.

does millie have a lucky star ability? if so what is it? (unless you dont wanna give it away)
Her spit glows in the dark.

Is there any form of discrimination against gay/lesbian relationships in Flora? Or are people usually accepting of it?
Not really, there was never any major cause for a stigma against same-sex relationships to rally behind in most societies, since procreation between magic races is universally adaptable.
But opossum traditionalists get touchy about it, since diminishing reproduction and population rates are a serious issue for them.

I was reading back through the comic a second time to look for any details I might have missed when I noticed in Chapter 2, p. 9 Moonshine says "Uh yeah, 50,000 nibbles, just like every month, why?". Is this to say that the winner is given 50,000 nibbles every month after winning or that they hold the tournament once a month and that the reward is 50,000 nibbles?
Second one.

From where we are in the comic now, how long has it been since Poppy came to Eggton?
She arrived in the middle of Summer and now it is late Autumn.

Is there actually a religious figure in Flora's history named 'Rover'? Is he like dog Jesus or something?
He was just some guy named Rover. Wrote some stuff.
There is no mainstream Jesus analogue on Flora.

If you truly want to make your guns look futuristic, go look at the H&K G11, the closest we've ever been to a new jump in personal weapons development.
A gun that still requires full-sized rounds and mechanical firing mechanisms is hundreds of years obsolete by Floran standards.

what is that gold statue of at the tip of the airplane and what is the tune it appears to be playing
It’s a statue of Renard Darling, and the Darling Family’s anthem.
I’m not a composer, so I leave the melody of said anthem vague and up the reader.

What is the largest species that exists in the Poppy Verse?
Universes.

Considering Possums only live to be around 30 years old, what age is a Possum considered an adult in the Poppyverse?
Too soon.
Physically, they stop growing probably around about age 12-14.

Are the various animal trees (such as the ovis tree) effectively immortal? Have any been destroyed by non-divine means before?
If there’s a way to damage a life tree without being as strong as a god, no one’s figured it out yet. Even the individual leaves are impossible to pull off.

If a sapient species went extinct, what would happen to their tree?
Maybe we’ll find out someday.

Since technology and magic are really tied with each other (or at least it seems to be), would it be possible to artificially give an opossum magic with technological means? Or is their anti-magic 'aura' just that strong?
As long as the opossum’s antimagic aura isn’t directly touching any of the magical/charmed parts, they could use objects that work via magic, assuming they aren’t powered or jump-started by the user’s own magic. An opossum could jerry-rig a firearm to work for them if they replaced the magical triggers with mechanical ones, but it’s complicated and requires re-charming anyway, so they can’t do it without help from someone can use magic.
There are also technically ways to “antimagic-proof” devices altogether by using airtight seals that their aura can’t seep into.

Do all aura's behave like a 'gas', in that hermetic seals can ward off the effects, or is it only a possum's antimagic aura? Or is it more like the 'light as a ray/light as a particle' debate in that it depends on the exact situation?
Magic and Antimagic are forms of radiation.

Antimagic is radiation as well? From the whole Didelphi story, I had assumed that possum blood/hearts were like holes through which she was continuing to drain away any magic they came in contact with, and the capacity for seals to block it was because they blocked magic getting out rather than antimagic getting in. The visual effect seemed to match a drain as well, rather than some sort of counter-radiation pushing outward.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. The trick to antimagic is that it negates magical energy within its field and then pulls it toward the point of origin where the strongest concentration is (i.e. the opossum’s heart and brain).
Some other stuff happens during the process, but it’ll come up.

How does the currency work? Poppy needed to give 9 nibs, she gave a 10 note, but got 4 coins back? I thought, maybe it's just the one coin that's dropping that he's giving her, but there are three more coins in that panel, when there were seven in the previous panel, implying he already extracted those four as a specific amount from what he had. Are those coins like, quarters? Do they use a decimal system or is there some awful three-shillings-and-sixpence arrangement?
Stop overthinking it, those are basically just dimes.


Is the latest page implying that Hallia used to go by the name Milo? Was she AMAB?
Yes. Hallia was still known as “Milo” back when she knew Valente personally.

What kind of music is popular in Flora? Is rock music a thing?
I’m going to say yes, but it’s probably not called Rock.
Fun fact: In the earliest draft of Poppy, when it was more cartoony bonkers than straight fantasy, there was a “boss” character who was a giant six-armed Rock-and-Roll skeleton dragon.
His name was Hellter Skeletor and he’s probably the hardest thing I ever had to cut from the comic.

Can... can we see any rough draft stuff you might have drawn of Helltor Skeletor, if you made any?
I lost most of the old stuff and he was a pain in the ass to draw, so sorry, I don’t have any images right now.
I can, however, tell you that he played a guitar in one pair of arms, a bass in another, and a set of drums with his bottom two.

Also umm, I don't know if this has been answered yet, but since we've talked about Hallia, what happened to her toes?
She lost them to frostbite and stress pecking as a kid, when she was living on the streets.

Do people on Flora have the option to use magic instead of invasive surgery to transition? And are people generally chill about that sort of thing?
Outright biological morphing magic in general is legally banned because it’s extremely dangerous and can have horrible permanent side effects, even in the hands of professionals. But magic does allow for a bit more wiggle room as a supplement during treatment and surgery.
The actual transition process varies wildly from species to species, depending on the biology and social cues regarding sex/gender. For instance, transitioning is a totally alien concept to some reptile cultures, who place almost no value on gender altogether. Gender politics on Flora are extremely lax by necessity, since so many different sapient species co-exist within the same social spheres.
Interestingly, it’s actually the opossum traditionalists who get really uppity about it, being very dogmatic regarding the value of breeding.

I recall reading that the 'dragon bell' is a little more complicated than just... A big church bell. Characters mention someone 'who lives in a tank' that has something to do with how it operates. Will we ever get a closer look at how this thing works?
The Dragon Bell is the machine that drives away dragons, but it also refers in part to the “docile” sea dragon Kit keeps in her lab that acts as a major component to it. The current circumstances surrounding them are more sinister than they might seem.

So, we know that magic allows people to live longer, but how exactly does it do that? Does it just heal any damage caused by getting old, or does it do some weird time-control stuff where it reverses the body's aging or something?
It just prolongs a person’s vitality as a general health supplement. Organs take longer to wear down the more magic a person naturally has.
The only person who can magically mess with time is Mystana. (Well, theoretically, anyone who was born under the same star could, but it flares so rarely that she’s the only one.)

I'd noticed the Queen refer to Poppy as a Mrs. Is this something she mis-assumed?
A mystery for our times.

Oh boy, yet another gay poppy character. I don't have a problem with the differently oriented, but the proportion is getting a bit out of hand. I'm beginning to think it's a side effect of those fruit trees.
It seems somewhat disingenuous to say you don’t have a problem with gay people immediately after saying “oh boy, another gay person.”
I’ve stated in the past that Flora is a setting in which the widespread homosexual stigma our cultures have had does not historically exist, so it’s only natural that there would be more openly gay/bi people. Even then, the proportion is still only around 5-8% of the current cast, which I’m not sure actually qualifies as “out of hand”.

So what's Flora's governmental structure anyways? So far we've just seen a mayor and a queen, and now there's a "high queen," how's that work? And how much democracy gets involved?
A High King/Queen is a king or queen that rules over a group of other monarchs.
Flora has 12 High Kings who serve under the sovereign of the Canine Empire, Emperor Lord Pom. The acting head of the Darling family is one of them.
The actual politics involved depend on the region.

What's the in-universe name of the language that Poppy and co. speak?
Oonglish.

Sooo... How close to the LD50 for caffeine for Flora's fennecs is Kit right now?
Less than you’d think. Kit’s got some detox tricks up her sleeves, being a god-tier medical alchemist.

Question, is Panzer the one who messed up Friedrich's arm?
Panzer and Friedrich have never met.

Are opossum births influenced by the stars too?
Nope.  The magical radiation just gets sucked up and neutralized.
Shoop. Poof. Just like that.

Sorry if you get asked this a lot (i would reccomend a faq) but will we ever get to meet lily's dad? Even for a little bit, or a sort of story/memory that was told/remembered by Poppy?
 answer these questions a lot, so here’s a list of characters who have been mentioned that we will meet at some point in the story, in some way or another, be it directly or via flashbacks:
Henrod (Lily’s dad)
Rose Rani (Petunia’s mom)
Kit’s sisters and father
General Crodilus Panzer
Steel Heeled Ofélia
The entire adoptive Possum family
Professor Lagomo
Madamas Silvana, Mystana, and Laphoda
“Bright Eyes”

"Nope. The magical radiation just gets sucked up and neutralized. Shoop. Poof. Just like that." Um, I thought that the reason Poppy was absurdly strong and could do that "pull in my muscles" thing was because she was a Lucky Star. Was I wrong to assume that that was what the comic was saying?
I can’t imagine where you got that idea, since opossums cannot use magic at all, and she doesn’t have any unusually shaped highlights in her eyes.

Just curious, can someone born under a lucky star have something other than stars for pupils?
It was never said that Lucky Stars only manifest as star highlights to begin with.

Considering how some characters wear rather large accessories for their clothing (or in the high queen's case, enough accessories to build a small car out of), and we have seen that fabrics and the like can be enchanted in order to do things such as resist stains or be wrinkle resistant, are there also magical enhancements for clothing and such that can reduce the weight on the wearer?
Yep! Anti-grav tech is expensive to maintain, but it exists, even in fashion.
Vix’s dress has a weight management device in the gold ring around her waist.

Why are only the Darling family's Lucky Star highlights not traditional star-shaped? Do they use obscenely expensive cosmetic magic to alter the appearance of their highlights?
Nope. Some Lucky Stars are just arbitrarily like that, but usually the more powerful ones have unique indicators.
The Darling children all have very potent Lucky Stars by, essentially, sheer freak coincidence.

So what -is- the deal with the second Boob Window, anyway?
Vix’s mother is very much old fashioned. She comes from a generation where showing off more than one set of cleavage was very chic for canine/feline women, whereas the more “modern” style is all about flattening out the tummy as much as possible.

So wait, if Lucky Stars are determined by when (and where?) a person is born, then what's stopping people from deliberately inducing/delaying labor to ensure their kids have Lucky Star powers?
1: You have to know when a Lucky Star is flaring up, and for how long. Some of them flare often, for long periods, some of them have only ever flared once or twice, for a couple of seconds, following no obvious pattern.
2: You have to know the distance of the star from Flora, so you know how many minutes it’ll take for that radiation to physically reach the planet.
3: You have to actually, you know, have a practical way to time the baby’s first exposure to magic so it happens during the flare, and doesn’t get locked down by the sun’s “default” magic radiation beforehand.
It’s simply not very feasible to attempt to induce it on purpose.

What would happen if one tried to remove or block any and all kinds of radiation during a birth?
Literally nothing. The baby would just sit there without any magic at all.
As soon as you stop shielding it, it’ll get irradiated anyway, though. It’s entirely about what hits them first, there’s no cutoff point.

as it was stated at the beginning of poppy every species had a tree of life. so how are people really able to use canopy's tree to create children if the tree originally bore the children of only one species and why don't they come out as a hybrid? as i recall ewe lala was a pure wolf
Lala technically is a hybrid, because she does have her father’s genes, even if they aren’t visibly manifested in her case. Think of it as each tree taking their default templates (in her case, the canine’s) and manhandling the parent’s genetics in, regardless of species.
Most children of the fruit resulting from cross-species relationships usually come out sterile, so they end up becoming fruit patrons themselves. It’s kind of a messed up cycle.

Friedrich has magic due to some branches of O'Possum tree surviving does mean the tree able to bear some fruit even though it probably just a giant stump and does anyone live on it like how people life in the tree of life that is canopy
Each tree has a sidebranch specifically dedicated to new fruits of life (since the outcome is of variable breed), and the opossum one is missing.
We’ll see the condition of the opossum homeland later.

Unfeasible to ensure lucky star powers, or just prohibitively expensive? If the Darlings have infinity money then that seems like something they'd do with it.
Unfeasible, period. You’d have to be practically omniscient to do it intentionally.

So Canopy is the Tree of Life for canines? Are all Trees of Life capable of making children, and is Canopy only able to make children if at least one participant is a canine?
Canopy is the Tree of Life for sheep. The Ovis Tree. The canine tree would be the Canis Tree, which is very far away.
You can actually use a fruit of life with only one participant, and while they don’t actually have to match species, that’s not recommended, to prevent… personal tragedies.

Any plans to expand on those personal tragedies?
I think it should be very obvious what kind of personal tragedies usually result from bad gene combinations and childbirth.

I'm just curious since I reread poppy: At the end of chapter 4 or close to the end, Why did Sylvana (sorry can't spell) call poppy the "Iron Matron"?
MAYBE….
WE’LL FIND OUT…
SOMEDAY…

I'm just starting to read through and kinda got way into it and then fell in love with Harley's design, she's so cute! Too bad she only showed up for two pages lol Will she ever pop up again?
Harley and Charlie could show up again. Who knows?
(I knows.)

About what proportion of the population have some sort of Lucky Star? Are they the 1%? More, less?
About 5-10% of the population has one or another, even if it’s just a common, low-level one.
You would not believe how many people were born under the “hold your breath for half an hour” Lucky Star, that thing flares constantly.
Posted 3 weeks ago

Why does Kitt's stepmother cover her eyes? Is it because of fashion? Or is there some other reason?
It is a mystery.

So... a faction of peasants are starting a proletariat uprising, (possibly spearheaded by old lady goats?) Considering the numerous societal problems and rampant organized crime you've established in this world. Not to mention how powerful but ineffectual at governing and none meritocratic the royalty at large seems to be (Kit's apparent liberalism aside). Who should we be rooting for here?
Literally nobody has mentioned the proletariat. The Steel Wool have shown up before and their conflict is exclusively about Sheep pride.
I mean, if you want to root for the gang of species/ethnic supremacists, please feel free, but at least know what they are first.

Why does Vix incorporate dirt/plants into her dress?
She likes plants.

So, am I correct in assuming that each leaf on that tree represents a member of the tree's associated species?
es. They grow from a family branch when an individual is born and fall off when they die.
No one fully understands the mechanics of how it works.

Is it a rule that every Lucky Star has to have some sort of drawback, or is that just the way it works out sometimes?
There’s no set universal law saying they have to have a drawback.
Lucky Stars operate purely by the logic of their particular power, any weaknesses that appear are just the result of that logic. Some of them are objectively more useful than others by enormous degrees.

Does that mean someone could kill an entire species or kill an individual by messing with the tree?
Nope. The trees are almost totally invincible and they only control magic, not the life force itself.
Even if you could somehow remove a leaf, the most you’d be doing is destroying that person’s ability to use magic.

Where does the magic go once it's been leached away? Does Vix get it? Does it just disperse back into the universe?
It gets pulled back into the tree.

Could Vix wilt her father's leaf in order to kill his magic related illness?
Yeah, she’s just letting her beloved little sister work herself half to death on a treatment because it’s funny.
Of course not.

is kit's stepmother vix's mother? i know vix is older than kit and you would think the child from the first marriage would get the throne. but i have seen stories were a older step sibling gets the throne
Yes.

Shame on you for missing out on those steel wool related puns. Now that poor sheep will never be able to scrub the world clean of the Darling family's awful regime.
Gang’s already named the steel wool. Naming the lucky star after it’s just redundant.
Also, sheep aren’t the only ones who have it, wouldn’t make sense for other individuals.

Morbi, do you hate sheep? I've been noticing that your sheep characters aren't the luckiest people around. Gustaff got stabbed in the neck, Marche disappeared, and this sheep assassin got pancaked into to the ground to show us how powerful Vix is. Is this all one big coincidence, or do you have something against sheep?
I love sheep and goats. There just happens to be a lot of sheep in the area, since it’s their homeland, so sometimes bad things happen to them.

Is Vix's guard's name "Dynamis" or "Kong"? Or is it something like "Dynamis Kong"? Or have I completely misread something and his name's, like, Steve?
D. K.
Dynamis Kong.
D. K.
Dynamis Kong is here.

I think they forgot that sometimes most sincere showing of affection is to inflict as much misery on them as possible in one's writing. I remember the author of Getter Robo mentioning his favorite pilot was the one he kept killing off. XD
You’ll be able to tell which characters are my favorites by which ones I put through the wringer the worst by the end of the series.

Would a human who enters Flora have a null field like opossums? Or would the primate tree recognize their primate heritage and pump them full of magic? If it's the former then I can imagine Floran scientists being fascinated by some humans living a little over a century without magic. And jelly opossums!
They would just be normal humans.
If they spent too much time around magic, they’d probably just get radiation poisoning.

"If they spent too much time around magic, they’d probably just get radiation poisoning." So Flora is actually just a post-nuclear-apocalypse world of severely-mutated animals?
No. Flora is Flora, and always has been.

Did you get inspiration for your webcomic's setting from World Tree RPG? I have noticed several elements in common, like a physics for magic, active gods, omnipresent magic in everything, anthro animals, and a lot of them living on giant trees.
Never heard of it until now, but those are all pretty common fantasy elements, so I’m not surprised.
A lot of the inspiration for Poppy comes from stuff like FFIX and Little Tail Bronx. Tabletop gaming was never my thing.

Does this mean we'll see a freya cameo?
Floran rats look pretty different from Burmecians.

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