Preparations - Prologue Y0 and chapters 1&2

[tehta]

JoB, good find with that extra Hollola! That looks like 'Mau.. Hollola to me. So extra relatives not in the family tree are confirmed! (To me, it seems most likely that Veeti would have had a first wife, since he was so old when he had Taru.)

And I wasn't saying that Lalli was not military, but I am not sure what that means in Keuruu, beyond one's job specialization. The way Lalli and Tuuri could quit their jobs feels not-very-military to me. So maybe some members of the military live in civilian housing? There sure seems to be a lot of it, for such a small civilian population.
But I agree that the southern gate looks like it could be where Lalli turns up. It's also close enough to the docks that he could get there quickly.

The no-children thing is interesting. Were the Hotakainen kids anomalies, then, or were they old enough not to really count as children?

[Jitter]

I think Mau… is most likely either Mauno or Mauri, both male names of about similar feel of age / period as Hilja. I also think Taru is from a second marriage, I wrote about it not very long ago I think.

The Keuruu engineer corps has been discontinued since, but it was still operational in 2013. And BTW Minna mentions the ship being versioned from an existing ship, but that is in the comments so I hadn’t seen it and didn’t know. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this:

[tehta]

I think it would make more sense for Veeti to have not just a first wife, but more children. The way Taru dismisses the Hotakainens as remote relatives makes me think that she has plenty of closer relatives (although those could be on her mother's side, of course).
And I probably became aware of the second marriage idea because of your story!

Also: I forgot to comment earlier, but would love to see the scouting report.

[lwise]

If I remember correctly, even back when it first appeared in SSSS, the military base at Keuruu had already been much reduced and the unused facilities repurposed. There were ... an engineering corps and a training facility still left, I think, but no outright base.

I imagine ... there was by chance a cluster of immunes among the engineering corps and the groups in training.  With heavy equipment belonging to the engineering corps, they were able to set up defenses early on, and survivors from the area fled to their protection.  For years, they stayed where they were, surviving as best they could, not knowing if there even were any other survivors out there.  When they got in touch with the rest of the world, a generation later, well, why would they pull up stakes and move?  Instead, they leveraged their position and experience to continue training soldiers.

By the way ... the first time I saw the page, I thought Keuruu (or at least part of it) was a repurposed rail yard.  Don't those barracks look like train cars?  And doesn't the building at the top of the page look like a train?

[JoB]

And I wasn't saying that Lalli was not military, but I am not sure what that means in Keuruu, beyond one's job specialization. The way Lalli and Tuuri could quit their jobs feels not-very-military to me.

It certainly wouldn't work that way in our current-day militaries, but that's because it takes a lot of training with very modern weapon systems to get a truly battle-ready army (where "battle" means a fight against a similarly-trained army), and replacements for those who quit aren't readily available. The military of the Known World fights not-quite-lucent monsters, with what limited technology they have, and is part of the lives of a substantial percentage of the population already.

The no-children thing is interesting. Were the Hotakainen kids anomalies, then, or were they old enough not to really count as children?

The official wording is that the young Hotakainens weren't "children" but "apprentices".

The Keuruu engineer corps has been discontinued since, but it was still operational in 2013.

But that corps was not what the original "military base" at Keuruu was about, was it ... ?

And BTW Minna mentions the ship being versioned from an existing ship, but that is in the comments so I hadn’t seen it and didn’t know.

AFAIK she never comfirmed, though, that it is indeed the Elias Lönnrot ...

By the way ... the first time I saw the page, I thought Keuruu (or at least part of it) was a repurposed rail yard.  Don't those barracks look like train cars?  And doesn't the building at the top of the page look like a train?

RL Keuruu has a train station, but no yard that I can see offhand.

(The church tower in Lallis flashback supposedly is the one of the real old church of Keuruu, though.)

[Jitter]

She does confirm it, on page 72 in response to a question by Greenwood Goat:

Minna: “Yup. It's not for heavy duty ice breaking, but just enough to not get damaged or stuck some unfortunate trip. They've got a couple of full time ice breakers too to keep the waters open all through winter.

And the boat is actually a slight modification of an existing boat in Keuruu, I didn't just pull it all from my head or anything.. ”

Note also that they do have ice breakers here, but apparently not at Saimaa, or at least enough to spare on keeping the canal open.

[JoB]

She does confirm it, on page 72 in response to a question by Greenwood Goat:
"And the boat is actually a slight modification of an existing boat in Keuruu, I didn't just pull it all from my head or anything.. ”

I said she never confirmed that it is the Elias Lönnrot, though I have to admit that the selection of paddlewheelers in Keuruu in post-2k years certainly didn't amount to a Danish invasion fleet.

[dmeck7755]

On page 70. I LOVE how cats are almost 9% of the population (Grade A at that) I wonder how many others there are...

[lwise]

On page 70. I LOVE how cats are almost 9% of the population (Grade A at that) I wonder how many others there are...

Maybe they breed and train cats in Keuruu.

[Jitter]

Just noticed (because it was pointed out in the comments) that Taru’s character description actually says that she used to be stationed in Keuruu until a few years ago.

Ther is some brilliant stuff in the comments. Load of poetry, ranging from good to really good, Greenwood Goat’s ficlets / scenes, loads of speculation by JoB, and several bouts of hilarity. For example scenes fm the Lalli-centric fanfiction series Scouting for Love in p 73 and freedom for potatoes in 68 🤣

[tehta]

Can't sleeo, so... A few thoughts on the next set of pages:

- Discussion of Emil in-comic: the four-toe thing obviously implies that meeting people from other countries is rare, at least for the ordinary people of Keuruu.
- Discussion of Emil in the comments: people expressing hope that he will be suave, ha.
- Discussion of Lalli focuses on how adorable and cat-like he is, including the question of whether his animal spirit is a cat.
- Speaking of cats... Wow! Seeing so many here makes me sad that they became sparser in Adventure Two. There weren't so many on the boat INTO Finland. (Although maybe it's because, as hypothesized, Keuruu is Finland's top cat-training center, so its boats have the best cats?)
- Tuuri is adorable. Too bad the first thing she sees is logs. (The logging industry is interesting, though: I think in Adv Two we see a Finnish logging ship in Iceland? So Taru was right.)
- "Cities are bad": it sounds like Lalli is referring to all those people who could bug him, but I think he is referring to all those trolls he knows are in old-world cities.
- "The Swedes helped us burn it down": yep, that sounds like Swedes alright. I wonder if a Cleanser visit where Onni's friend met the mythical eight-toed Swede?

[wavewright62]

This again makes me raise the question I have wondered before - why is the army stationed s far from main population? Or do they train here but deploy smaller troops to the populated areas? What is he point?

I assume the base is there to protect the strategic and economic Keuruu-Pori waterway.

In general, Minna kind of generally flubbed the math and biology on the ages when her Prologue characters had their children.  The only ones with a hope of a realistic timeline are Reynir's antecedents, and the amount of 50+ parents having surviving children without our levels of healthcare is fairly amazing.  Minna made a huge rod for her own back with that family tree as it was, so I'm rather sanguine about it. 
Taru is a 'military strategist' so who knows where she's been.  She seems to be the one with half a clue on protocol in dealing with the Nordic Council (but not the dress code oh my goodness no), can read the requisition reports quickly enough to play spot-the-difference in real time, and speaks Icelandic while not being a skald, so I assume she has spent time in Iceland.  (Ditto Trond, a non-skald in a country with little emphasis on education.) 

[tehta]

Regarding Taru's outfit: perhaps she is more used to wearing a uniform to important Icelandic meetings? But she can't wear one to that one as it's her private business?
(Or maybe she has been fired, which is why she is now working on evil schemes.)

[dmeck7755]

She seems to be the one with half a clue on protocol in dealing with the Nordic Council (but not the dress code oh my goodness no), can read the requisition reports quickly enough to play spot-the-difference in real time, and speaks Icelandic while not being a skald, so I assume she has spent time in Iceland.  (Ditto Trond, a non-skald in a country with little emphasis on education.)

Maybe that is how Taru dressed when she was younger?  (it worked then?)

[lwise]

It's interesting that Taru says she would die immediately.  She's immune and she's forty-one, only seven years older than Mikkel.  Granted she's only a military "strategist", Mikkel's only a medic, so it doesn't seem that she'd be at any greater risk than he was.  I suspect she'd have been a lot less useful, but still ... no reason she would have died immediately.