Cassandra's mother is dead.
Bart's reaction
to "Mom would let me" could be interpreted a number of ways, but Cassandra's reaction here seems to imply the situation is more than just a physical separation. It'd also provide an explanation for why she suddenly had to pack up and move in with Bart and Heather. Earth really is a lost ith colony.
See this page. Noh seems to assume the claim is propaganda, but what if there's truth to it? Characters make a big point of how the ith aren't just similar to humans, they're exactly the same aside from the Psychic Powers. The comic notably averts Human Aliens, so there is almost certainly an explanation for this — humans being an offshoot species from ith makes the most sense given what we've seen so far. Why humans do not have psychic powers and fit in with the rest of life on Earth will still have to be explained, however.- This theory is looking more likely as of this page, though it seems the ith may not have been the ones doing the colonizing... Given how incompetent the fiah have been in "rescuing" humanity, it's quite possible they misjudged the danger the ith were in, and the species bounced back...but not before the fiah transplanted a small colony to a habitable planet.
- Amusingly enough, this actually matches up with real-world human biology: humans have a surprising lack of genetic diversity compared to other species, which most biologists attribute to a bottleneck event early in our evolutionary history. The founder effect could conceivably cause similar results.
- Of course that still leaves the question of why human's share a large percentage of their DNA with every other species on Earth if that is the case, not to mention the matter of the fossil record.
The ith are descended from Transplanted Humans
It'd be a neat little reversal of the above theory and what the ith are claiming. At some point in the dim and distant past, someone grabbed a bunch of early humans, messed around with their DNA to give them Psychic Powers (the Black Caste are throwbacks), dropped them off on a planet and then died out or otherwise disappeared. This happened so long ago that the ith have no clue that their planet isn't where they actually evolved. There would be evidence in the form of their planet's fossil record and comparisions between ith DNA and that of everything else on their planet of course, but frankly the ith don't really seem like they'd be inclined to bother with things like that all that much. Earth's moon is the cause of Endi's egg.
Both Endi and Ethma seem bewildered by it. This would imply that fiah cannot consciously control their reproductive cycle, and it is activated by an external stimulus. Ethma seems to believe the stimulus is unique to Haalha, but clearly it isn't.Now, consider this page. Endi's face suddenly and inexplicably displays a strange pattern never seen on any fiah at any point in the rest of the comic, interspersed with a shot of the full moon. Endi notably does not mention this to Ethma, and seems to be dazed by it; it's possible that not even Endi was aware of it. This could be the missing link. Perhaps Earth's moon shares some special trait with Haalha's moon(s), and that trait is what activates fiah parthenogenesis.
This will probably be confirmed/Jossed when the characters make it to Haalha and we see its moon(s). It's one heck of a Chekhov's Gun if this theory is true, though.
