Discordia (webcomic)
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| Discordia | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Aisaku (Abraham Isaac Arroyo) |
| Website | http://www.discordiacomic.com/ |
| Update schedule | On Hiatus |
| Launch date | April 25, 2005 |
| Genre | Fantasy |
Discordia is a twice-weekly webcomic written by Abraham Isaac Arroyo (Aisaku) and Joseph Fanning (Wraith).
[edit] Storyline
Drew Sinclair, a comic artist in his mid-20s, is fired from his job to make room for an attractive woman whom the boss is involved with. When he returns home, he finds out that his girlfriend, Janice, has spent thousands of dollars on 'psychic advisors' and 'magical talismans' using his credit card, including a figurine of the goddess Eris. After Drew's breaks up with her and kicks her out of his apartment Janice goes to her friend Betty to stay. As she complaining about Drew to Betty, the Eris begins to speak to her through the statuette, promising to make Drew's life a 'living hell' as well 'rewarding' Janice shatters the figurine and releases her. Janice does so, and in a flash of light both she and the goddess disappear.
The moment that Janice smashes the figurine, Drew begins to painfully transform, and after passing out, awakes to find that he is now a woman. After realizing that this was actually happening and not a dream, Drew and his close friend Nell conclude that Janice must have been behind the change, at which point Eris manifests before them and threatens Nell before vanishing again. Drew rushes out to Betty's apartment, but finds only an infant girl floating in the center of the room. Betty, who had been passed out on the floor not far away, concludes that the girl is actually Janice, whom Eris 'rewarded' with new youth. Drew leaves the child with Betty.
The next day, Nell forces Drew to try and understand what has happened to her, putting her through what she describes as 'girl boot camp'. Drew resists, hoping that the problem will somehow fade, but eventually concludes that she must do something until a solution is found. She rather reluctantly agrees that she could pass her self off as a MTF transsexual to explain the discrepancies in her records.
Betty discovers that the infant girl is aging at an accelerated rate, and begins repeating the word 'schism'. Betty calls Drew about this, but Nell, who wasn't aware that Drew had been to Betty's the day before, argues with her over priorities. The next morning Drew tries to track down the origin of the figurine, tracing it to an antiques shop, where she learns that the person who sold the statue to the store is now in prison. Confronting him, he tells her that he'd stolen it from the home of a deceased NYU professor. Going to this house, she finds an aging derelict who flees from her,
Meanwhile, the girl has now reached the physical age of five and begins demonstrating various magical powers, including flight and shapeshifting. She claims her name is Schism, and has no memories of Janice's life. Aside from the rapid aging and the magical powers, she acts like a normal child her apparent age, and Betty begins to question whether she really is Janice or not.
After reconciling with Nell, Drew contacts some friends who run an independent comic book company, and after some confusion is able to convince them that she is the same person they knew. At the same time, Nell agrees to watch Schism for a time, but when they go out to the park, Schism turns one of her playmates into a catgirl. After Nell lectures her on responsibility, she changes the other girl back. When Nell mentions Drew, Schism says that her earliest memory is of when Drew caught her after she first appeared. Later still, Drew returns to Betty's apartment only to find Schism and an age-regressed Nell having a pillow fight. Learning about Schism's powers, she asks her to change her back to her male self, but Schism tells her that something is preventing her from doing so. By the next morning, Schism's aging seems to have stopped at around the physical age of twelve. That same day, the derelict who Drew had seen in the professor's home tries to approach Drew and Schism, claiming that Schism is an 'avatar', but he is stopped by the police after he is nearly hit by a car on the street. Schism complains that she feels an odd sensation in his presence, and the two leave the scene immediately.
Over the next few weeks, Drew explains the situation to her family and friends, and Betty legally adopts Schism. However, the derelict later returns and attacks Drew, trapping her in and Nell in miniature glass spheres. When she comes to, Drew recognizes the stranger as the supposedly dead professor, who explains that he faked his death when he realized that Eris could no longer be contained. As he proceeds to explain his actions to the now-freed Drew, Schism begins to sense that something has happened, and insists that they need to go save Drew from the stranger even though they aren't aware of what has happened to her. She convinces Mia and Zach help her look for Drew (after unintentionally changing Mia into an exact duplicate of Drew and then being unable to reverse it), and together she and Zach confront the professor, trapping him in the body of a young girl, and release Drew and Nell; after this, Schism is able to restore Mia to normal.
Once captured, the professor, Sigurd ('Ziggy') Petrel, explains that he had been part of a group who had experimented with magic in the 1970s, under the leadership of his girlfriend, Karen, who unbeknownst to her or them was an avatar of the goddess Eris Discordia. After her brother died in Vietnam, they tried to use their powers to stop the war, but in the midst of attacking a military installation, Eris emerged entirely to possess Karen's body, and attempted to set off World War III with the nuclear weapons on the base, claiming that the human race needed Chaos to renew itself. When Ziggy tried to stop her, Discordia killed him, but this caused Karen to reawaken. He claims that she then used Eris' powers to revive Ziggy and stop the missiles, after which the two of them went into hiding, and lived together for several years before Karen died, after which Ziggy sealed her essence in the figurine to prevent anyone else from abusing the power. He then agrees to help them teach Schism to control her powers, and places a 'tag' spell on her so that they could find her if necessary. However, in his own mind, he contemplates what really had happened that day in 1972: that Karen, unable to hold Eris back, had Ziggy kill her and use the figurine to trap Discordia before she could wreak further havoc.
After returning to their home, Nell declares her love for Drew, and the two become lovers. The professor, still in the body of a twelve year old girl (he explains that Schism will be unable to turn women into men until she has been intimate with a male lover), sets out to attend to unstated tasks. After a meeting with a prospective employer, Drew, Nell and Betty discuss Drew's options, and decide that she should have her records legally altered to reflect her 'sex change'.
