Supernormal Step

I didn't see any thread about Supernormal Step, so I thought I'd start one.

Series Overview for New Readers:
Supernormal Step follows protagonist Fiona Dae, who is pulled by a strange portal from her home in Grand Rapids, Michigan into an alternate world with abundant magic. Part One (chapters 1-14) follow Fiona as she explores the magic world, gets drawn in to a series of conflicts between a range of factions with strange or unclear motives, and ultimately tries to find a way back to her home world. Part Two begins with Fiona and three of her companions from the magic world arriving back in the "real" world...only to discover it is not as Fiona remembers it.


Current Stuff:

Spoiler: Chapter 19

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So in the most recent chapter, we got a bunch of background about the origin of the magic world. We also finally got a confirmation as to how Cavan was originally pulled into the magic world (though the answer was a perfectly plausible guess before).

I'm trying to make sense of this comic. I took the "new reader summary".

Then I went back and read the last chapter of part 1.

So what I think is going on: Fiona Dae is somehow pulled from a normal world, into a world of magic. Good. She gets really good at magic. Good. She has a run-in with the Hendersons, who run the place. Except that it turns out that Mr. Henderson is trying to bring back clones of two long-dead people; he and those two people are in fact from our world; and when Fiona returns to earth with those two clones, and her friend from the magic world, she finds that the earth she has arrived in has magic in it, when it's not supposed to, various magical attacks against her are made, and she finally manages to catch up with an old friend of hers to maybe get some safe time -- but her friend has a very unexpected job/business that Fiona didn't know about.

Right now, it seems that Fiona wants to go back to the magic world and basically topple the repressive government. ... But I'm not really sure why she left, or how she expects to be able to do that.

While the target is the leader so it would involve toppling, the toppling isn't the goal the goal is to prevent someone with unrestricted magic causing a catastrophe again. And how I don't think she has any real concrete plan at the moment she is basically gathering info right now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by keybounce

I'm trying to make sense of this comic. I took the "new reader summary".

Then I went back and read the last chapter of part 1.

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You did miss a lot by skipping part 1. The "Encores" chapter suggested in the new reader summary is really just chapter 1, and it then gives one page which sort-of-kind-of summarizes chapters 2-14. The best way to understand it would be to read all of Part 1. But, let's see if I can help you make at least some sense of what's going on:

--Danny Song pulled Cavan Henderson into the magic world some time in the late 19th century.
--Since people who are originally from the non-magic world don't have any limit on how powerful they can be, Henderson essentially conquered the world and became a dictator.
--Using the alias Danny Kaye, Danny Song creates a rebellion against Henderson, called the Nameless.
--No one in-comic knows that Danny Song and Danny Kaye are the same person!
--After more than a century of Henderson's rule, Kaye pulls another person into the magic world: Jim Black.
--Jim attempts to pull Fiona's dad into the magic world, thinking her dad could help him. What Jim didn't know was that Fiona's dad was dead, so instead he summoned Fiona herself.
--Danny seems to alternate between helping support the Henderson administration and helping the Nameless rebel against Henderson. Danny is a shapeshifter and likes talking to himself in different forms. No one knows his motives, and no one in the Nameless knows that he is playing for "both sides".
--At the end of Part 1, Song engineers a situation in which Jim and Henderson fight. Song then reveals his real motive to the audience (by talking to himself): he wants to see what happens when two "unbeatable" people fight each other to the death. He's hoping it will cause the world to end. No one aside from the audience hears this.
--Henderson turned out not to be unbeatable, since Jim kills him. Jim tries to kill Fiona too, but she escapes back to the non-magic world.
--With Henderson dead and Fiona in the non-magic world, Jim declares himself king of the magic world.

In Part 2, Fiona has just been informed that Song pulled in both Henderson and Jim. Fiona has returned to the magic world with the goal of figuring out what Song's motivations were. She has actually met Song before (when he was using his "Danny Kaye" alias), but she doesn't know it yet. She also has to make sure that she doesn't end up fighting Jim, because the world might end if two extremely powerful people fight.

That does make it a lot clearer, thank you.