Webcomic / Stand Still, Stay Silent

This adventure requires you to be tough and they most certainly are!^note Left to right, top to bottom: Tuuri Hotakainen, Emil Västerström, Lalli Hotakainen, Reynir Árnason, Sigrun Eide, Mikkel Madsen. Not pictured: Kitty.

"The First Rule for survival outside of the safe areas: If you come across a Beast, a Troll or a Giant, do not run or call for help but stand still and stay silent. It might go away."

— Stand Still, Stay Silent

Ninety years ago, a mysterious illness called the Rash caught humanity by surprise. Those that it didn't kill, it changed into monsters of infinite lifespan capable of infecting the still-healthy. The biggest bastion of survivors is now Iceland, while small and scarce settlements can be found in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. The land separating those few refuges of humanity from each other, and the entire rest of the planet as far as anyone is concerned, has become a Plague Zombie ridden Death World known as the Silent World. Armies of the remaining nations are now entirely dedicated to fighting off the threats from the Silent World and reclaiming it one small piece at a time. In some countries, their ranks include mages. Cats, meanwhile, have turned out to be the only mammals whose entire population is immune to the Rash and able to detect the presence of those that have been transformed by it.

The first initiative to explore the Silent World, an operation that most consider an inherent Suicide Mission, ends up getting funding only because of a misunderstood application that gets its organizers mistaken for asking for much less budget than they actually are. In the process of Cutting Corners to account for the scarcer than planned funds, they give up on hiring a properly qualified crew, and instead build a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits out of a mixed bag of relatives and acquaintances who only technically have the right job titles. The story follows the resulting exploration team as they travel in the territory Denmark lost to the Zombie Apocalypse.

The comic, which can be found here, currently consists of two Adventures (I and II), between which both the chapter and page numbers are reset.

The webcomic is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and is by Minna Sundberg, who previously wrote and drew A Redtail's Dream. It's described as an "adventure story with some humor, some horror and lots of friendship". It used to be updated five days a week at midnight Monday-Friday. Starting November 2016, the time formerly used to prepare the Wednesday update was dedicated to developing a science-fiction video game called City of Hunger in which the Player Party was made of Expies of the comic's cast that ran on the Unity engine and whose development can be found here. The publication pace was also temporarily slowed down in late 2020 and early 2021 for the purpose of producing Lovely People. Announcements made soon after the latter's publication included halting the production of City of Hunger.

Stand Still, Stay Silent was ended in 2022. Sundberg converted to born-again Evangenical Christianity a couple of years prior and wished to move on to new projects, stating that she felt this comic did not reflect her new religious values.

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This webcomic provides examples of:

Tropes #-G

• Abandoned Hospital: The crew visits a long-neglected Odense hospital in Chapter 12.
• Actually, I Am Him: When Reynir goes to check on Onni in the dreamspace in Chapter 14, he sees an owl sitting on a tree branch and pets it, asking if it knows where "his human" is. It turns out to be Onni in his luonto form.
• Ad Hominem: The talk-show program in the prologue discussing the outbreak quickly devolved into an exchange of personal insults.
• Adoption Diss: Invoked and Played for Laughs when the Västerström children get on Tuuri's bad side. Her revenge is to whisper to them that she heard their parents say one of them is adopted and that they don't love the adopted child as much as their two other children.
• Adult Child: Zigzagged in that Tuuri and Reynir keep tossing each other the ball. Tuuri is usually the more mature-acting of the two and Reynir The Baby of the Bunch, but Tuuri's huge blindspot for the Silent World's dangers can make the more cautious Reynir look like the most responsible of the two. This seems to be due to the fact that Tuuri has grown up close to the Silent World without ever actually seeing it, turning it into a Forbidden Fruit, while Reynir grew up further away from it and never had any interest in it.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: When story goes back to a time at which an eight-year old Lalli is the only child in a group otherwise made of elderly adults, it doesn't take long for one of the elders to give him a friendly pat on the head.
• After Action Patch Up: During the battle with "Leaftroll", Sigrun throws her own arm between the attacking troll and the non-immune Reynir, so that she gets bitten instead. After Leaftroll is dead, the next scene we get is of Mikkel stitching up her arm.
• After the End: Ninety years after the end, to be precise. Unlike most examples, the writer spends quite a bit of time showing the end itself, with the modern world's reaction to a scarily virulent but seemingly harmless plague. When the rash sickness turns lethal, the Nordic countries seal off their borders, enforcing their isolation violently.
• Age Cut: Reynir's backstory includes a sequence of three of his siblings telling about their adventures outside the farm. That sequence starts with Reynir as a child and ends with him as an adult.
• Ailment-Induced Cruelty: After a victim is infected with the Rash, they eventually start to become aggressive and are unable to recognize loved ones. On occasion, people close to the patient have attempted to break through to them, though they're always met with failure. Tuuri chooses to commit suicide after her infection is confirmed, knowing she and everyone around her will only suffer otherwise.
• Aliens in Cardiff: Iceland as the largest bastion of suriviors, Scandinavia and Finland as the location of a bunch of smaller bastions, the exploration of a Death World that used to be Denmark.
• The Alleged Car: What the team's transportation initially looks like. Subverted shortly thereafter, thank goodness. The tank is actually pretty robust, for all it looks a little the worse for wear. However, coming at the end of the row of milspec Tank Goodness, it comes off as distinctly Alleged in comparison. The Ratmobile honeywagon notwithstanding, of course.
• Alliterative Family: If the family tree is anything to go by, M-names are a Madsen family tradition.
• Alliterative Title: Stand Still Stay Silent.
• All Myths Are True: The comic takes this approach towards the religions and mythologies it touches on. The Finnish and Christian deities and afterlives, in particular, have taken active roles in the comic, as has Norse Runic Magic.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: In a flash-back dream, Lalli's mother turns out to have been prone to giving childish nicknames to him. Unfortunately for Lalli, the means that let the readers know this are also allowing Reynir and Emil to witness the scene.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Is Rash caused by magic or is it a purely biological illness?
  • How intelligent are trolls? They were shown as intelligent enough to disable traps, but they attack fiercely.
    • Dusklings are capable of understanding human speech and communicating with each other, but still are driven by their hunger.
  • Are The Old Gods real or is it just Scandinavians' rationalization for their newlyfound magic?
  • The reader is frequently shown scenes the way mages perceive them, which can leave unclear just how much of the event the non-mages are aware of unless they specifically comment on the absence of a specific thing and/or another panel shows things in non-mage view. The line is especially blurry for any magic shown to produce light, as the only magic that has so far been shown to be clearly visible to the non-mages included producing actual fire. It's also unclear whether only mages can hear the Black Speech from the radio, or if this has become normal static (at least in the Silent World) to people living in that universe.
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: Grade A cats, that are bred for their Rash victim fighting abilities. One seen in action in Chapter 1 can gesture to a human to keep quiet.
• Amusingly Short List: Sigrun's mutinist risk list is literally a scrap of paper with only Mikkel's name written on it.
• And I Must Scream: The people and animals mutated by the virus are often still conscious, and tend to retain enough memories and personality to wish to die. Unfortunately for them, they're also ageless, and are doomed to spend untold years in their twisted, decaying forms, until put out of their misery by humans, the environment, or a bigger monster.
  Infectee: Hjälp mig...^note Sw. Help me
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: The ghosts stalking the party during the expedition into Danemark threaten to follow them forever and kill everyone they love.
• Anger Born of Worry:
  • Realizing a place he needs to go to is just off the path the crew is following results in Reynir simply running away from the others without any kind of prior explanation. When Mikkel and Sigrun catch up with him, they take turns angrily yelling at him, and claiming his gesture almost gave the other a heart attack. Notably, it's the only time we ever see Mikkel lose his temper.
  • Reynir's mother has a similar reaction when finally reunited with him:
  Sigriður: My perfect, sweet little STUPID IDIOT CHILD!
• Angry Collar Grab: This has happened a couple times:
  • Reynir does this to Lalli during his Cabin Fever moment in Chapter 15.
  • When Reynir runs off to the church on his own in Chapter 19, Sigrun does this to him after catching up to him.
• Animalistic Abomination: Unlike their troll counterparts (who generally are too mutated to even qualify as Humanoid Abomination), beasts tend to go this route. Take a look at this artwork◊ for an example.
• Animal Reaction Shot: Bottom of this page.
• Answer Cut: When Lalli and Onni reunite via the Talking in Your Dreams system in Chapter 7, Onni asks Lalli if he has made any friends on the expedition and Lalli answers that he may have made one. The comic promptly cuts back to Emil and Sigrun's plotline, with visual focus on Emil.
• Apocalypse How: Class 4, death of almost all mammalian (and human) life: except for felines. The knock-on effects of this on other classes of animals is largely unknown.
• Apocalyptic Gag Order: It is implied that the world governments downplayed the severity of the plague to avoid causing mass panics.
• Arcadian Interlude: Aventure II Chapter 2 happens entirely in Reynir's rural hometown, that is more of a village by pre-Rash standards.
• Are You Sure You Can Drive This Thing?: Most people can't actually drive. Which is hardly a surprise when you realise that there are very few places left to drive to, let alone operational machinery for use outside the military. Sigrun, however... really shouldn't be left in charge of a steering wheel again without a few lessons from Tuuri (she may not be the world's best driver herself, but at least she has some clue as to what she's doing).
• Armor-Piercing Question: "Aren't you tired?"
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: At the beginning of Chapter 11, we get to see what Lalli would like to wake up to: Emil waking him up, not needing Tuuri to translate for him, Sigrun praising his work and Mikkel preparing a feast for the hard work he just put in before falling asleep. Reynir's contribution to that scenario? Admitting that his hair is "super dumb" and promising to cut it.
• Artistic License – Physics: The physics of the webcomic aren't that bad, but just in case, the artist has this to say:
  You know those movies where the hero is driving a car and suddenly crashes into a bomb and the car makes a somersault in the air and then lands on a helicopter and the hero chases down the bad guys with the helicopter-car? The physics in this comic are sometimes a little like that, except no somersault (and no bomb, car or helicopter).
  • In the above quote, Minna was referring to the train somehow staying on the tracks during a giant troll attack. To this we can now add the crossing of the Knippelsbro (Knippel Bridge), as there doesn't appear any way the Cat-tank's tracks could get it started on that climb.
• Attack of the Monster Appendage: The only part of the giant of from Chapter 3 that is seen is its arm, which is autonomous thanks to the Body of Bodies nature of giants.
• Author Appeal: No points for guessing what kind of pets Minna has.
• "Avoid This Area" Effect: One of the Iclelandic runes seen discourages wandering Rash creatures from entering the area affected by it, but doesn't work on creatures actively hunting prey that tries using the rune to hide.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The Cat-tank, designed to spend days at a time in the Silent World with a reasonable degree of safety and comfort. It's somewhat less awesome than some of the others in the same garage, but given the state of the bridge those more impressive vehicles would have taken our heroes directly to the bottom of the Øresund strait.
• Badly Battered Babysitter: Implied to constantly happen to people babysitting the Västerström children.
• Bad News, Irrelevant News: Mikkel's idea of cheering everyone up after announcing they are out of food is to tell them about the surplus of candles he just found out about.
  • Later implied to not have been irrelevant. Better hope those candles were made of tallow rather than paraffin or beeswax.
• Barred from the Afterlife: The ghosts following the crew after a certain point of the story are unable to find the afterlife on their own, thanks to the side effect of the experimental Rash cure they were given.
• The Beforetimes: The pre-Rash times are referred to as the Old World.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • In one of the book salvaging spots, Sigrun and Emil find a corpse in a Hazmat Suit holding a gun, with a small hole in his visor. The implications are obvious.
  • Tuuri's reaction to finding out she developed the Rash; she walks into the sea and drowns herself.
• Bilingual Backfire: It turns out that random Finnish guys living in a lost settlement for some reason speak Norwegian perfectly well, to Sigrun's embarrassment.
• Bilingual Bonus: Most of the webcomic is written in English, but occasional snatches of dialogue or sound effects are in Finnish or Swedish.
  • Tuuri and Lalli's conversation in Finnish roughly translates to "I see some mountains... and more mountains... and a funny rock... and mountains".
  • Lalli's plea to the Moon Goddess is written in Finnish so that it'd keep Kalevala's rhythm. Minna wrote in The Rant what it's about, but only Finnish fans can admire the entire version (at least until they translated it for others).
  • Notes under the photos at the end of the prologue give some trivia bits of knowledge to people who know Icelandic, Finnish or Danish.
  • The Black Speech radio in chapter two. Swedish speakers can see phrases "who am (I)", "sorry", "beware" and repeating "no no no".
  • The bit of the giant's arm that attacks the Dalahästen says "help me" in Swedish, which told readers that victims of Rash Illness are still conscious.
  • There is a case of trilingual bonus in Adventure II. The Icelandic and Swedish terms for "best friends" are similar enough to each other for someone only speaking one of the languages to passively recognize both. Hence Emil understanding only the "best friends" part from Reynir's words in pages 34-35 isn't entirely Rule of Funny.
  • A second trilingual bonus shows up in the form of the letter Lalli leaves for Emil, as the words he mixed up make more sense to someone who knows both Finnish and Swedish in addition to English.
• Bizarro Apocalypse: Downplayed. While the Rash pandemic has technically resulted in a Zombie Apocalypse, Trolls, Beasts and Giants are far from your ordinary living dead — they're hideously mutated, ageless abominations which nobody can fully understand. Given that magic has awakened in the world as well, there's possibly an overlap, with many believing the illness to be a punishment from the Gods, and there's nothing to prove them wrong.
• Black Market Produce: Juice is very expensive in the post-Illness world.
  Torbjörn: Although in the spirit of saving money, maybe we should stop celebrating with fruit juice.
  Siv: You SNOBS bought juice when all I got was water?! ...might as well be drinking liquid gold...
• Black Sheep: Most of the adventure party are, if not the blackest sheep in their various nuclear and extended families, then rather disappointingly grubby ones.
• Blessed with Suck: Being mage means that you need to fight attempts from spirits & other undead creatures to invade your mind... while normal people simply cannot be influenced this way.
• The Blind Leading the Blind: Sigrun trusting Emil to choose what to bring back from a book salvaging mission because he's the one with the fancy education results in Mikkel having to take a lot of "trash" out the next day.
• Blood Magic: When Reynir gives out his attempts at a protection rune in Chapter 11, Sigrun suggests that they may work better if drawn in blood. Reynir is grossed out by the idea and it's probably not a good idea for him to try anyway, because he should probably not have an open wound in circumstances that require him to be wearing a breathing mask half the time.
• Bold Explorer: The protagonists are hired to explore what the Silent World is like, as no one has been out there in 90 years and a significant chunk of history has been lost and/or purposefully buried.
• Born After the End: Downplayed. The story takes place after a disease called the rash illness decimated humanity aside from the Scandinavian countries, with those infected either dying painfully or transforming into grotesque abominations. The protagonists are part of the third generation born since the outbreak, with the remaining humans already slowly re-establishing civilization.
• Brick Joke:
  • On page 81, Tuuri asks Taru if it's true that Swedes only have four toes on each foot. On page 106, if one pays attention to what the older adults are doing rather than Tuuri and Emil's conversation, you notice Torbjörn taking his shoes off at Taru's request.
  • On page 187, some poor guy who's labelling packing crates is hit on the head by a mirror flung by Emil, and consequently attaches the wrong label to the wrong crates. On page 280 we discover the consequences when the crates are finally opened.
  • On page 95, the supposedly only useful item that Tuuri packed, her pot, turned out to have a huge hole in it. On page 280, when Mikkel is attempting to cook breakfast the food falls straight through the bottom, revealing a very shoddy patching job.
  • After Mikkel's piece of Loophole Abuse in Chapter 10, Sigrun's idea of a disciplinary measure in pages 468-469 is to put him on a mutiny risk "list", which is really just a scrap of paper with Mikkel's name on it. On page 485, after Tuuri's act of driving away from the campsite against Sigrun's orders, Mikkel remarks that Sigrun put the wrong person on her mutiny risk list.
  • Lalli's Dream Sequence in Chapter 11 has Reynir promising to cut his hair. The City of Hunger version of Reynir has been shown to not have the SSSS version's long braid.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: The official hiring policy for the crew, since the organizers were too short on funds to hire regular people. The assembled crew members certainly have plenty of Bunny Ears, but their competence is yet to be determined.
  • Sigrun gets her Lawyer status twice- when she makes the choice of a lootable building with an escape route, and when she kills a grossling (small troll)
  • Emil gets it, in the process of his first troll kill via Feed It a Bomb. May count as a more if the nest goes up in smoke too.
  • Lalli has proven himself. While he hasn't been in any fight yet, he's pushed back trolls using magic more than once.
  • Mikkel definitely has the skills to make people put up with his trolling, even if they're more of the Boring, but Practical variety. Who would enforce decontamination protocols, cook, bandage and otherwise be stoic and dependable?
• Burying a Substitute: The empty grave variant happens with Adventure I's casualty, as their actual body was buried in Silent Denmark, but their grave marker was put in a place that is much easier to visit.
• Call-Forward: In the Chapter 15 flash-back, Ensi is shown preventing a young Lalli from touching her rifle. One of the few things revealed by All There in the Manual about her before that flash-back is that Lalli's rifle used to belong to her.
• Call to Adventure: The call for everybody in our main group was a misleading job advert put out by a very cash-strapped circle of academics hoping to delve into the Silent World using more action-orientated and expendable surrogates fished from the wider circle of friends and family for not-at-all commercial reasons. At all. Pure research. Honest.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Yes Mikkel, having just woken up after having passed out for no apparent reason, in a tank that is desperately trying to leave the city before dark, is a great time to point out to Sigrun that the driver should be on the mutiny risk list instead of you.
• Cat/Dog Dichotomy: Lalli and Reynir.
  • Lalli acts enough like a cat to elicit fandom jokes about him being a cat in a human body. He also has No Social Skills and is The Quiet One. To add to this, his luonto is a lynx.
  • Reynir is quite energetic, tries to be friendly to everyone he's capable of speaking with and is always trying to help in any way he can. His fylgja happens to be a sheepdog.
• Cats Are Magic: They're immune to the mysterious illness that infects all other living mammals, and can sense monsters.
• Cat Scare: Deer scare, to be exact. Sigrun and Emil are so relieved it was just a deer that they forget to shoot it for a dinner.
• Cat Up a Tree: The plot of be bonus comic from the third printed book involves Kitty getting stuck in a tree.
• Censor Steam: A convenient plume of steam hides the boys' privates from the audience in Adventure II's sauna scene.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: This is the response when the No Indoor Voice Admiral Olsen decides to start Publicly Discussing the Secret.
• Character Tic: Emil ruffles his hair whenever he feels insecure about the situation he's in.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Øresund base having effectively become a trading post. When Trond needs to blackmail a merchant ship into delivering food to the crew, all he needs to do to know where various ships are is go through the papers in the radio room.
  • Tuuri's family portrait. Reynir would have had a much harder time recognizing Onni in the dreamspace if he hadn't gotten a good look at it before being sent back to bed by Mikkel.
  • Reynir's paper-drawn anti-ghost runes. He gives them to everyone right before the visit to the shop in Chapter 11. It's not until Chapter 12 that anyone gets close enough to a ghost to see if they actually work.
  • Emil is shown to have a Never My Fault side to him, which has among other things gotten him convinced he did badly in the public school system because the teachers were actively trying to sabotage him. In Chapter 14, when Sigrun takes her bad mood out on him by telling him he's not scanning for surviving trolls fast enough and that she'll do better at it, he sees right through it and refuses to let her take over the task for which he's actually been trained.
  • In Chapter 2, one of Emil's cousins talks about playing "hairdresser salon" with him. In Chapter 10, Onni's Badly Battered Babysitter package includes getting a haircut along with an ear cut while in an emergency magical trance.
  • In the prologue, Stig Västerström is shown to be quite dedicated to getting the newspaper. In Chapter 2, the research material Torbjörn gives Tuuri includes newspaper clippings from the time of the initial outbreak, some of which were likely collected by Stig himself.
  • The mirror that is shown to have become part of the office's furnishings after it has become an improvised quarantine ward lets Tuuri check for the titular symptoms of the Rash after she gets a couple other signs she may have come down with it while alone in the room.
  • The Luonto info page at the end of chapter 8 first mentions the Kade, an entity which seems to get more focus in the second adventure.
• Child Soldiers: The age standard of armies seems to have greatly dropped in the Known World:
  • The Hotakainens moved to Keuruu and joined the army eleven years before the story started. At the time, Lalli would have been eight, Tuuri ten and Onni sixteen.
  • The Keuruu flashback has Lalli already a night scout at thirteen. "All scouts younger than fifteen" is actually used as part of a sentence during this flash-back. Tuuri is working with the skalds at fifteen.
  • The recruitment poster for the Cleansers has two fine print elements: one saying that one has to be at least thirteen to apply, another saying that joining voids all life insurance.
• Citadel City: Many of the remaining settlements are walled cities due to being surrounded by Plague Zombie territory.
• City in a Bottle: The Nordics have effectively become this, thanks to the Silent World separating them from any potential other bastion of civilization.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Lalli, between his poor education and his nonexistent social skills due to his work as a solo night scout, certainly qualifies.
• Collapsing Lair: A heroic and downplayed version happens with Pastor Anne's church after she passes onto the afterlife. The room in which the crew memebers took refuge happens to not be too badly affected by this, which enables them to stay in it until it's safe for them to leave.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: A subtle one: the characters in the main cast and support crew seem to follow a scheme matching hair colors to religious beliefs. Followers of the Finnish pantheon (the Hotakainens and Taru) have ash-blond hair, followers of the Norse pantheon (Sigrun and Reynir) have red hair, and atheists (the Västerström family and Mikkel) have hair that's blond or light brown. And now there's the spirit of the Christian priest,who has black hair.
• Coming of Age Story: All four of the younger crew members are getting one. Emil gets a New Meat storyline, Reynir a Sheltered Aristocrat one and the Hotakainens joining the expedition at all was their first time going against Onni's wishes concerning them.
• Common Tongue: Icelandic basically replaced English as this in the Known World, and everyone at Mission Control has taken it. The crew actually relies on this much less than on the similarities between Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, as only Mikkel and Tuuri have taken it and the native speaker of the group is a stowaway.
• Composite Character: The Swan of Tuonela combines both elements of its mythological counterpart (as a psychopomp) and Tuoni, the ruler of Tuonela.
• Computer Equals Monitor: During the Abandoned Hospital raid, upon being told by Mikkel that the hospital may have moved to computer-based information storage, Sigrun promptly grabs a monitor on the off-chance that someone back home could read the information in it (it immediately disintegrates). Justified because she has no idea how computers work and Mikkel was pointing in a monitor's general direction during his statement.
• Consummate Professional: The crew of the Dalahästen. They're gruff towards our main cast, but when the train is under attack, they never panic.
• The Constant:
  • Ensi Hotakainen. A baby bump in the Finland segment of the prologue, "grandma" for Onni, Tuuri and Lalli.
  • Several locations in Denmark are mentioned in the prologue and become relevant in the early part of the expedition.
  • Remember that boat on which the Hotakainen-Hollola family took refuge during the Distant Prologue? Tuuri and Onni grew up with it in their yard.
• Contamination Situation:
  • Reynir is the "exposed to the disease" variant as far as the competent authorities are concerned. This is why the crew couldn't simply send him back on the day of his arrival.
  • Tuuri, as of late Chapter 13. Reynir is however the one who has to stay in a single room in practice, as they now need to avoid crossing paths and it's more practical to have Tuuri be the one with liberty to go outside as needed, along with access to the rooms containing the diver's seat and the radio. Reynir seems to be mostly staying in the dormitory (though the decontmaiantion room is technically on "his side" as well), and Mikkel implies he now only goes out during pre-planned walks in Chapter 15.
• Continuity Nod: The newspaper article about the first expedition shown mid-way through Adventure II Chapter 2 includes ads for a couple of businesses and a short paragraph about Mikkel's claim to have seen white clover in the Silent World. When Lalli is in Reykjavik on his own in the following chapter, he walks by the two advertized businesses and ends up staying in a hotel whose name translates to "white clover" to those who know Icelandic.
• Contrived Coincidence: Considering its incubation could have lasted anywhere from several days to two weeks, Tuuri's Rash managed to pick a relatively convenient time to start showing symptoms. Anytime earlier would have made her unable to concentrate on the work that let the Cat-tank last just a little bit longer and drive it. Anytime later would have probably required some complicated logistics to maintain the quarantine while travelling on foot.
• Cool Train: Several, but Dalahästen is especially awesome, complete with front-mounted giant buzzsaw.
• Cosy Catastrophe:
  • The survivors of the plague have had ninety years to recover, but they're still surprisingly healthy, well fed, and optimistic about life.
  • Prologue character Ingrid seems to have that view about the only road in and out of her village being damaged because of an ongoing storm and even hopes for electricity to go off for a few weeks, so they can live like in the old times. Does her country returning to a viking-like lifestyle within her lifetime count?
  • Even the more paranoid members of the prologue Hotakainen-Hollola family seem to have prepared for this rather than a true catastrophe. While they made a good call with the boat trip, their emergency food supplies require a freezer to be viable and they are still assuming it will be okay to take Aino to the hospital by the time Ensi gets around to popping out.
  • Info pages near the start of Adventure II render this Zig-Zagged somewhat. The Nordic countries managed to isolate sections of their population from the Rash, but were far from self-sufficient, resulting in famines which wiped out a significant chunk of the remaining Old World era population before the situation stabilised.
• Creator Provincialism: Choice of the Nordics for the story's setting aside, Minna has lived in Mora, the town that has become Sweden's new capital in the story.
• Creepy Basement: Sigrun discovers one in chapter five. After passing through a hospital full of nothing, she opens the door, goes down and sees... something.
• Crisis Catch And Carry: Once the nearby presence of a troll established in Chapter 9, Sigrun and Mikkel's plan to get Reynir back inside the tank is to escort him back while making as little noise as possible, which entails walking quite slowly. After the troll first attacks Reynir, the plan switches to simply getting him back inside as fast as possible. Mikkel ends up more or less dragging Reynir back to the tank to due to the latter being distracted by the fact that he had been holding Kitty and dropped her during the attack.
• Crisis Point Hospital: The abandonned Rash hospitals seen in the Silent World are full of beds crammed close to each other, usually with their patients still in them. The beds being anything more than a mattress on the floor is optional. In one church that was converted into a hospital, there are sheet-covered skeletons on the pews.
• Crossover Cosmology: The Norse and Finnish pantheons co-exist in the story's universe. Finns are under the protection of the Finnish gods, while the other countries are under the protection of the Norse gods, even though only Icelanders and Norwegians actually worship them while Danes and Swedes don't believe in them. The Christian god seems to be around as well, but not able to do much.
• Culture Clash: There is a fortunately short but telling one between Emil and Lalli concerning the fate of the infected dog from Chapter 7. Emil kills it, but doesn't bury it due to dark and bad weather, promising to it later. When coming back from scouting the next morning, Lalli skins the dog and puts its skull on top of a tree, a process which later turns out to free beast spirits. Emil outright freaked out over the whole thing, quite obviously feeling that Lalli was mistreating the dog's remains in some way.
• Cure for Cancer: Any potential cure for the Rash plays that role in this universe, which is why Sigrun decides that a lead towards one is worth following, despite Taru's protests.
• Curse That Cures: The Year 0 Rash cure basically works like this, stopping the Rash at the price of messing the patient's soul up. Unfortunately, the people who first used it mistook the "curse" for being much milder than it actually was, and hence thought it was worth the "that cures" part.
• Cuteness Proximity: An extremely engaging conversation on what to name the team's new Cute Kitten caused just about everyone to not immediately notice that Lalli had woken up from about two days straight worth of Deep Sleep.
• The Dead Have Names: The gate at the end of the Oresund Bridge tunnel is carved with the names of everyone who died when the area just outside it fell to the monsters.
• Damned by Faint Praise: Sigrun, trying to describe Mikkel's accuracy with a gun as nicely as possible, goes for "not too bad for a blind person".
• Danger — Thin Ice: In Chapter 16, Emil and Lalli's escape from the giant is made more difficult by the fact that the frozen body of water by which they are trying to escape can handle Lalli's weight, but not Emil's.
• Deadpan Snarker: Mikkel.
  Mikkel [explaining to Reynir why he's not in danger of getting infected after his arm was scuffed in a troll attack]: In conclusion: you are safe unless you went ahead and licked your arm. Did you lick your arm?
  Reynir: ... No.
  Mikkel: Well done.
• Death Glare: An impressive one from Lalli here, demonstrating his lack of amusement at having been left behind in an exploding building.
• Death World: Almost entire Earth is this by Year 90, or so it seems. Trolls, beasts and giants roam the lands, hiding in the darkness and attacking everything not turned. Seas are infected by aptly named leviathans, or whales turned beasts. Contact spreads the illness which created the creatures.
  • The story unfolds in Scandanavia, where the cold limits the activities of trolls and beasts. How much worse is it in warmer climes?
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Jukka, Juha, Tuulikki and Anne-Mari Hotakainen show absolutely no negative traits in the handful of panels of characterization they get. Tuulikki is shown to be a loving mother and Jukka a loving son. Juha and Anne-Mari letting Onni take Tuuri and the family's luggage to their private dock before joining the gathering during which we get to see them was a big factor in Onni and Tuuri not getting infected in the village's outbreak.
• Decided by One Vote: The expedition getting funding, apparently.
  The one positive aspect of your silly expedition was its refreshingly low budget. Otherwise, the consensus was that it serves no national good and carries a substantial risk of complete failure. Your application passed with a single vote, and I believe one of my colleagues only voted "yes" because he lost his glasses and didn't know what he was voting for.
• Decontamination Chamber: The characters go through one upon arriving in Mora in Chapter 2.
• Deep Sleep: Lalli and Onni fall into these after losing their luontos due to overextending themselves magically.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The comic uses a limited palette dominated by reds and blues in addition to black and white.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • Having Child Soldiers is completely normal.
  • The main function of the army has has switched from fighting other humans to fighting Plague Zombie monsters, causing a Gender Is No Object situation. However, this also means that not being The Immune bans people from serving on the frontlines.
  • Christianity is effectively a dead religion, with Norse pantheon worshipping being the new majority religion, by virtue of Iceland being one of the countries following it. Minorities can be found in the form of Atheism and Finnish pantheon worshipping, and are apparently left to their own devices. Both religions acknowledge the other's gods to be real, and the only real point of contention with the atheists seems to be over the existence of magic.
  • The Dagrenning program to foster immunity to the Rash in the surviving humans would be an eugenics program by today's standards.
• Depopulation Bomb: The Rash Illness left very few survivors, mostly those who were lucky, paranoid or ruthless enough (and paid attention to their cats). The language diagram halfway through the chapter four illustrates this very well.
  • The Complete Map of the Known World in the Year 90 lists the total Nordic (and possibly world) population as... 249,500. Outside Iceland, the Nordic countries lost well over 99% of their population. And they were comparably well of, compared to the rest of the known world, where no survivors have been discovered.
• Despair Event Horizon: The Battle of Kastrup for the Danish people. A large expeditionary force was kitted up in an attempt to retake Sjælland, but they awoke... something beneath the ruins of Copenhagen which wiped out the entire force in a single night. After that, the Danes just stopped trying, and refused to even send scouts to the old Danish heartland.
• Developing Doomed Characters: The characters from the prologue fall victim to this, not because they die to the disaster, but because the main story happens when all of them, except Aino and Saku's child, can be safely assumed to have died from old age.
• Distant Prologue: The prologue takes place Just Before the End, while most of the story takes place 90 years After the End.
• Ditch the Bodyguards: Inverted, then played with. Mikkel leaving the tank to check out Kastellet fort in Chapter 10 is effectively a case of the bodyguard ditching the Protectorate. Tuuri and Reynir would have been ditching Lalli when they decided to follow Mikkel... if it weren't for the fact that Lalli was effectively in a coma and would have been the one needing protection from them if something had actually happened while Mikkel was away.
• The Ditz: Lalli somehow didn't realize that he was going on a research mission despite submitting his military resignation in alongside Tuuri and talking about it with her for three months. He also doesn't know any languages besides his native Finnish.
• Don't Go in the Woods: Non-cleansed forests are almost certainly full of trolls and beasts, while post-cleansing forests have a high chance of basically working as buffer zones, so going in them is always a risk.
• Doomed Appointment: Waiting for someone to come out of a coma to tell them that you may be dying is outright Tempting Fate.
• Doublethink: A dose of this ends up being needed concerning Tuuri's troll bite. Assuming she'll get the Rash will put a toll on morale that the crew can't afford, but keeping Reynir safe requires to consider the fact that she could be infected and already contagious.
• Do Wrong, Right: When Tuuri and Reynir end up tagging along on an unauthorized stint that Mikkel intended to do alone, Mikkel figures out it was mostly Tuuri's idea and that Reynir would have been perfectly happy staying safely in the tank. When Tuuri tries to put a positive spin on her and Reynir coming along, Mikkel's reply is to tell her to not do something similar again and if she does so anyway, to not force Reynir into coming with her.
• Drama Bomb: Chapter 13 is filled with plenty. While the biggest by far is Tuuri's troll bite, it also includes Onni going into a Power-Strain Blackout-induced Deep Sleep to send the crew a summon at which both Mikkel and Emil get to have a good look. It comes right after Chapter 12, that made the crew's initial mission, including the Rash cure investigations, technically completed.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • An astute reader may figure out the meaning of the possible Rash cure and the ghosts making their first appearance in the exact same place as early as Chapter 9 or 10. The characters, on the other hand, had no idea of what had caused the ghosts to appear until they investigated the place that made the cure in Chapter 12. In Chapter 19, they are shown to have sufficently connected the dots off-panel to expect the ghosts in a cure testing facility.
  • In early Chapter 16, the rest of the crew leaves to find a campsite while leaving Lalli and Emil behind because Lalli is worried about Tuuri's soul getting lost on the way to the afterlife. According to the end of Chapter 15, he shouldn't be worried about this specific issue at all.
• Drawing Straws: This is used by Mikkel to decide who between Emil and Sigrun will do an unwanted task. He riggs the game by holding the straws in a way that makes the shortest straw look much longer than the others.
• Drives Like Crazy: Sigrun, more like "Hasn't learned to drive yet" combining with almost Suicidal Overconfidence.
• Driving Question: What hides in the Silent World?
  • Is magic real? If so, why is it returning after thousands of years of absence?
  • What exactly happened during the last days of the Old World?
  • Why does the Rash Illness turn people and animals into monsters, and how?
  • What was Grandma Ensi Hotakainen's "one mistake"? What exactly are her orphaned grandchildren hiding from? This one starts getting concrete answers in Adventure II.
• *Drool* Hello: How Emil meets his first troll, only here "drool" is lower jawbone, blood and some yellowish bodily fluid. The next page reveal the troll's look and... it's as bad as the introduction made it out to be.
• Duct Tape for Everything: The practice seems to have remained after ninety years. It gets used to keep a door permanently closed (spoiler warning).
• Dysfunction Junction: The crew is not exactly a crack team of explorers and badasses. Everyone has numerous neuroses, after all... Justified, as the expedition is underfunded, not helped by its budget being slashed. Siv Västerström puts it best:
  Our crew is just going to be a bunch of weirdos, isn't it?
• Eat Dirt, Cheap: Gets a couple of mentions:
  • When the crew runs out of food in early Adventure I and Emil complains about the dry rations he has to eat, Sigrun points out that he really shouldn't complain about the food unless he's reduced to eating dirt.
  • When Lalli plan to go looking for Onni with nothing more than his rifle and the clothes on his back, Mikkel has a few questions about what he plans to eat. His plans to scavenge for food turn into plans to eat dirt when Emil badly translates them.
• Emergency Trainee Battle Deployment: Reynir's technical status is Little Stowaway, but he's teaching himself to use runic magic over the course of the story. Within a few hours of him managing to make his first working rune, the crew has to face a massive troll Zerg Rush that is considered bad enough to require maximum resource deployment. During preparations, Lalli, the only of the two crew's mages that is going to actually fight, has Reynir draw his rune on the defense perimeter's floor as an extra measure against the trolls.
• Encyclopedia Exposita: Inbetween and halfway through every chapter Minna puts some in-universe documents, such as writings on various nationalities, Cleansers' recruitment poster, maps or leaflets. As she rarely gives readers any Info Dump, it's rather helpful.
• The Engineer: Cleansers are Combat Engineers, specializing in flamethrowers, explosives and building demolition.
• Ensemble Cast: There isn't a single clearly defined "main" character, and the story is told from the point of view of everyone.
• Epic Fail: In the prologue, Eino Hotakainen and Tuuli Hollola want to keep their son from knowing about the Rash, so they send him out of the room when they are about to discuss it with Eino's sisters. The room to which the kid was sent has a TV, and he knows on which channel the news are.
• Ethnic God: The fairly low number of Finns, alongside the fact that the Flat-Earth Atheist nations are technically under the protection of the Norse pantheon, effectively makes the Finnish pantheon a group of Ethnic Gods for the Finns.
• Evil-Detecting Cat: All cats can sense evil. The ones that have military training are even better at it. The degree, direction and speed of incoming danger is easy to read, if you know feline body language and pay attention. On your own head be it if you pull a Not Now, Kiddo. It's strongly suggested that all the groups of humans who managed to survive outside Iceland in the early stages did so because they were both lucky enough to have cats and actually listen to them.
• Exactly Exty Years Ago: The story is set in Year 90 of the new calendar, that started when Iceland closed its borders because of the Rash.
• Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy: This is implied to be a factor is some of the poor decisions made by Lalli in Chapter 8 of Adventure I, during which he's explicitly doing a morning scouting shift after pulling an all-nighter and performing a magical ritual for the dog beast from the previous chapter.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Tuuri about Emil, though she doesn't say it to his face.
• Eye Scream: The eyes of the infected are not normal. At all. Heck, most sensory organs with nerve clusters seem to acquire what look like tentacles or worms... or worse.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: On the part of Lalli, of all people. After snapping at Emil during a scavenging trip, he decides to leave the store while pushing a wheelbarrow that has been sitting there for ninety years with his almost non-existent muscle mass and turns out to be too weak to move it.
• The Famine: A famine during the first decade of the post-Rash era was the cause of Iceland's own reduction in population.
• Fan of the Past: The "nations of the world" document notes Danes to be obsessed with Old World lore and hints Icelanders do not consider this a good thing. In practice, copying of ancient books happens at least in Sweden as well, as it was Torbjörn's Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job.
• Fatal Family Photo: Tuuri's comes across as this after her death.
• Fate Worse than Death: Becoming a troll, beast, giant or ghost. The victims of the three first are still conscious, and the fourth seem to be unable to find the afterlife on their own.
• Feed It a Bomb: The source of Emil's first confirmed troll kill, on page 264. Proof of the Lawyer in the Bunny-Ears Lawyer.
• Fictional Disability: Lack of immunity to the Rash sometimes gets treated like a disability, thanks to activities involving any risk of encountering grosslings being best left to those who are The Immune:
  • The Dagrenning program in Iceland exists to let non-immune parents have children that are The Immune. The two perks put forward are the child not risking to get sick if another outbreak of the Rash happens and having more jobs to choose from.
  • In Tuuri's flashback to her childhood settlement that wouldn't let the non-immune come and go freely, her combination of wanderlust and lack of immunity play out like a Dream-Crushing Handicap.
  • Tuuri and Reynir need to wear breathing masks when they venture too far from the tank, while immune members of the crew can walk around without them.
  • Tuuri and Reynir can't be left alone without an immune person for protection, and taking that role has been outright referred to as "baby-sitting" on two separate occasions.
• Fine, You Can Just Wait Here Alone: Tuuri does this to Lalli when he refuses to board the train in Chapter 3, pointing out that the alternative is to be stranded in a country where nobody speaks his language.
• Finger-Forced Smile: Tuuri decides to take a sudden bad turn of events in stride, while Lalli is constantly sullen about it. While Lalli gets away with it around other members of the crew, Tuuri won't let it happen on her watch, resulting in her forcing Lalli to smile.
• First-Episode Twist:
  • The Distant Prologue makes it look like that the only catch about the Rash is that it's more lethal than official authorities are willing to admit. The Undead Abomination complications and the fact that magic returned to the Known World in the wake of the initial outbreak are both twists when revealed, but also an essential aspect of the era in which the story proper takes place.
  • The expedition's hidden motive of salvaging Old World books. It ends up being the part of the crew's mission that is shown the most. The research they were officially funded for and have to do in parallel to cover their backs only shows up in the form of the Rash cure investigations and Tuuri taking a camera with her on a couple of outings.
• Fisher King: The mage safe spaces are influenced by their mage's mood or will:
  • Lalli makes a moving tree grow out of nowhere when he kicks Reynir out of his space.
  • A storm starts in Onni's when he spots Reynir in his own space. It calms down when Reynir recognizes him from Tuuri's family photo.
  • The sheep in Reynir's space are seen fleeing in panic when he is protecting himself from the ghosts.
  • While her nature is unclear, Pastor Anne has her church briefly change from its Old World beauty to the impromptu Rash hospital it had become near the end as she tries to remember its physical location.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: The panel right before the one revealing Reynir to be in one of the crates had Lalli staring at the crate and growling a little while Emil was opening the crate.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Emil and Mikkel. Seems to be general for Swedes and Danes.
• Flowers of Romance: Guðrún's boyfriend is seen waiting for her holding a bouquet of flowers.
• Food Chains: Gets an implied passing mention when Reynir asks Onni if it's okay to eat the food offered by Pastor Anne's ghost.
• Forbidden Zone: Silent World, infested with beast, giant and trolls. You'd have to be Too Dumb to Live to wander there on your own. Of course, wandering there is exactly what main characters were hired to do...
• Foreign Cuss Word: The very few times there has been swearing in the comic, the Translation Convention was turned off, creating an effect similar to the trope.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The newscast in the Denmark segment of the prologue implies that many Danes got stuck on the Swedish side of the Øresund bridge when Denmark closed its borders. In the story's main time frame, Øresund base, which is built around the formerly Swedish side of the bridge, is technically part of Denmark.
  • There is only one picture in the prologue Photo Montage that does not depict familiar characters: it simply shows a dead dog covered in snow, with a presumably perfectly healthy cat in the background.
  • The "Many different nationalities" document from the prologue depicts Iceland with a sheep herder, Norway with a troll hunting party, Sweden with a Cleanser unit, Denmark as farmland and Finland with a scout in a forest.
  • The frame of Tuuri's family portrait cracking right over the part of the picture showing Tuuri's left side. She gets a quite big wound on her left shoulder in Chapter 13. Even more ominous given she dies at the end of Chapter 15.
  • In early Chapter 7, Tuuri closes the door between the office and the tank's main entrance to keep Reynir from interrupting her work. In Chapter 14, that very same door gets taped shut and marks the separation between the "Tuuri" and "Reynir" sides of the tank.
  • Right after telling Lalli he's longer allowed leave his protected dream area because it has become dangerous, Onni mentions he's working on another way to contact him and Tuuri. Three chapters later, Mission Control finds Onni sleeping under Torbjörn and Siv's front gate upon returning to Mora.
  • The way the infected dog from Chapter 7 was dealt with by Emil greatly resembles what later turns out to have happened with the Rash victims that were given the cure found in Year 0. The death of the physical body was assumed to be sufficient for the disease to do no more harm to its victims, and the effects on the spirit were ignored. Lalli took care of this part for the dog after Emil killed it but the Year 0 Rash victims weren't so lucky and became hostile ghosts as a result.
    • The letter found in the first Rash cure test facility also gives a hint towards the reveal later made about it: "If any of you wake up...".
  • After several panels' worth of listening to Mikkel dance around his credentials, Sigrun finally gets fed up and point-blank asks whether she can rely on him if anything needs to be amputated. Four pages later, Sigrun gets bitten in the arm by a troll.
  • When Reynir gives out the paper runes, Lalli and Emil are the only ones shown actually putting their copies in their pockets, on the same panel. They end up being the the plot-advancing ones: Lalli later gives the rune a field test when he runs into ghosts, while the activation of Emil's is heavily implied to move his mindset from "there's no magic" to "maybe...".
  • When Lalli gets ordered by Onni to no longer leave his protected area in mage-space, Lalli quickly comes up with the idea of having Reynir serve as a messenger between them, only to have this shot down by Onni before he even finishes fully phrasing his thoughts. Onni relocating to Mora and eventually giving the "do not leave your space" memo to Reynir makes that idea unlikely to happen... until Chapter 13, when they need help from Onni during the night and Reynir sends his fylgja over to speak through it while staying safely in his space himself.
  • In a beautiful Hope Spot moment, a single flower is found growing by Emil and Lalli in the middle of the snow, under a pane of glass. It's accidentally crushed, and soon after the bright optimist of the team, Tuuri, kills herself after discovering she's become infected.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • If Emil hadn't thrown that broken wing mirror away quite so hard, the whole debacle that resulted in the crew getting Reynir on their hands wouldn't have happned.
  • The expedition getting funding was Decided by One Vote, and the lady telling this to the future support crew suspects one of the voters had forgotten his glasses and didn't know what he was voting for. There basically would have never been a story if the guy hadn't forgotten his glasses.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: Emil and Reynir. The lack of common language, religious belief, reason to work together or desire to be friends greatly limits their opportunities for direct interaction.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: Michael Madsen's first instinct when finding out that he won't be able to leave Bornholm once he's there is threatening all the waiters on the ferry with these if they don't solve the problem. The waitress that was sent to deal with him later became his wife.
• Functional Magic: Some time in the past ninety years, magic returned to the world. It's still unclear if it's some odd combination of mutations and forgotten technology, or if the Great Illness was merely the first sign of it all. Even the possibility that there is no Functional Magic and that it's all superstition hasn't been ruled out yet. Except when it is.
• Furniture Blockade: One step of Emil and Lalli's escape from the dusklings at the end of Adventure I involves taking refuge in solid-looking abandonned house and pushing all the furniture of the room in which they're hiding against the door.
• Future Imperfect:
  • Sigrun mistakes a DVD for a plastic book, Emil gets it mixed up with a record.
  • Bornholm is the southernmost point in the Known World, so Reynir expected it to have palm trees and colorful flowers everywhere. It's freaking Denmark. Even worse, he doesn't even know what palm trees are.
• Fuzz Therapy: Shown to work on Lalli (the cast cat hater, despite-or possibly because of — his cat boy traits) of all people.
• Gag Echo: Chapter 11 shows that both Lalli and Emil hate Reynir's hair, but has their respective comments about it in different scenes.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The dominant Icelandic religion explains The Plague as the gods deciding that Ludd Was Right. They might be right.
• Game of Chicken: In the Distant Prologue, a radio newscaster suspects that the Swedish and Finnish governments are engaged in a political version of this, where neither wants to be the first of the two to close borders to stop the spread of the Rash.
• Gender Is No Object: Sexism seems pretty much absent in this world. If Reynir's family is anything to go by, not being The Immune is the big career perspective limiter. This also made evident by the crew's Team Mom being male and the Team Dad being female, and neither getting remarks about their behaviour being more appropriate for the other gender.
• Gender-Restricted Ability: Downplayed in that Icelandic mages are predominantly female, but Reynir is one of the few males. When he finally gets proper magic lessons, he's the only man in the classroom.
• Genre Roulette: The story can easily move from Zombie Apocalypse induced After the End, to comedic character interaction, to horror, to pulling on the reader's heartstrings, to Sadly Mythtaken fantasy, to "here's a page almost entirely dedicated to the Team Pet".
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Emil needs a dose of this from Sigrun after encountering an old Rash hospital still full of skeletons.
• Ghost City: Plenty of them once the expedition starts. The place they are exploring used to be Denmark, after all.
• Global Currency: In a bonus comic exclusive to the first book, Tuuri is shown buying a cupcake in Sweden with money she earned in Finland. The money itself looks like it's Icelandic krónur.
• God Is Good: The Icelanders, Norwegians and Finns at least attribute their survival to divine favor, although they worship the Norse and old Finnish pantheons respectively. Pastor Anne is capable of leading the souls of the dead to the afterlife, and attributes her power to the Lord's miracles, so it seems the Abrahamic God is a decent guy as well.
• Go into the Light: With at least three characters having a Psychopomp duty, this shows up eventually.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: All known attempts to find a cure, vaccine or serum for the Rash have this as the basic outcome. Siv spent her whole research career on failure after nauseating failure. Mind you, the random mutations, aggressive cancers and strange calicifications in lab animals are peanuts compared to the peaceful-death-giving, ghost-creating serum of concentrated And I Must Scream the Y0 Danish researchers managed to come up with and inflict on unknown quantities of their fellow Danes without knowing of the horrifying supernatural side effect... On the plus-side: it does seem to cure the physical side of things. Minus the 100% rate of gradual coma and brain-death issue.
• Good Fortune from God: Post-Rash Iceland seems to have decided that this is what spared the country from the Rash. The prologue shows a little of what really happened.
• Good Is Not Soft: Keeping the plague out of its borders is a major concern for Iceland during the initial outbreak. If its coast guards spot a boat that is unable to provide the proper signal, it will shoot it out of the water even if the boat is full of refugees.
• Good Old Ways: Since the apocalypse, the Norwegian people have been getting their Viking on. Justified since that lifestyle is well suited to defending one's village from monsters.
• Gray Rain of Depression: The Odense hospital flashback, which gives quite bad news about the Year 0 Rash cure and shows its focus characters outright giving up on their battle against the Rash, shows the meeting going on while it's raining outside. For added Rule of Symbolism, the rain hitting the window looks like rashes.
• Grim Up North: Inverted. Frigid Scandinavia is the only known place where humans still survive, because the trolls have a lower cold tolerance than properly equipped humans. The North European winter provides a respite from troll attacks, and allows ground to be retaken by burning down troll nests and leaving the survivors to freeze.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Emil having Recurring Dreams translates into his dreamscape safe area running on one. When Lalli gets stuck in it, he sees the recurring dream "reset" to its beginning when Emil falls asleep.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Averted. The security detail on the Dalahästen are competent, disciplined and dedicated. Our heroes don't save the day, it's almost all the guards and Lalli only assists by telling them where it will come through.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: Humanity versus the trolls. Trolls are driven to attack still-healthy living beings and their Meat Puppet situation actually makes killing them a Mercy Kill.

Tropes H-M

• Harmful Healing:
  • A flash-back implies that this is the only kind of possible cure that the institute in which Siv used to work has been able to produce in fifty years.
  • Ghosts are what happened when Old World scientists found a cure for the Rash whose only side effect was slow brain death as far as they were concerned.
• Heart in the Wrong Place: Played with. Sigrun first places her hand on the right side of her chest while trying to indicate her heart, resulting in Mikkel telling her it's actually "on the other side". "The other side" to the place where Sigrun initially had her hand puts the heart fair and square in the part of the body in which it's usually wrongly depicted to be.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Reynir is disappointed to learn that he cannot be trained to serve as a mage in the military and can only be formally trained as a Farm Mage, on account of not being immune to the Rash. As such on Adventure II the runes he knows how to use are mostly meant to aid in sheep herding. A rune that compels wandering animals (as opposed to focused predators) to walk a certain way might seem completely useless in the Silent World... That is, until that same rune causes a whole herd of (predatory) cow beasts to completely ignore the camp Renir and his friends were sleeping in.
• Hesitation Equals Dishonesty: This is how Onni figures out Reynir is lying when he claims that the whole crew is fine after the battle from Chapter 13.
• Hiding Behind the Language Barrier:
  • Five languages are spoken in this world and each of the main characters speaks a different subset of those five, so this happens all the time. The artist puts little Nordic flags on the word balloons when it's important for us to know who can understand what.
  • Unfortunately for Emil, Danes can understand Swedish.
• Hit So Hard, the Calendar Felt It: Known World counts time starting from the day Iceland decided to close its borders against the plague — this is Year Zero, and New Year is in autumn. Story proper starts in late year 90.
• Hope Sprouts Eternal: Things are looking pretty grim for the heroes by chapter 15 — the cat tank is kaput, Sigrun's injury might be septic, poor Tuuri is still clinging to hope that her troll bite from chapter 13 doesn't turn out to be infected, and a band of vicious trolls is hot on the heels of our explorers. When Lalli and Emil are sent into a long-abandoned store to do a little shopping, Emil spots a flower growing under a pane of fallen glass. He points it out to Lalli, hoping to cheer the other up, but Lalli's fatalistic attitude isn't improving any time soon. The flower gets smushed several pages later when the pane of glass topples over, which puts a damper on Emil's mood too.
  Emil (In Swedish): See that? It's almost spring! Soon we'll be back in the embrace of civilization, and it'll be summer. I know you're worried about... things. But you believe in magic stuff, doesn't that look like a good sign to you? It's tough right now, but I know we'll come out of this happier than we were coming in. Because no matter what, we'll at least be friends. Right? Friends? Come on, I know you understood that last word!
  Lalli (In Finnish): You don't understand anything.
• Horrifying the Horror: Chapter 12 shows that it is not only animals that avoid the ghost-rooms. Trolls that share a building with them do that too.
• Human Architecture Horror: Rash victims that transformed in confined spaces and died at any point between then and the crew finding them, tend to be found in various levels of fusion with their surroundings. At least one giant has been shown to be unable to move without taking part of the house in which it formed with it.
• Hyperlink Story: The Just Before the End part of the prologue jumps between five different groups of people in five different countries, with the progression of the Rash as a Meaningful Background Event. The reason these characters got focus at all only becomes visible at the end up the prologue, when the four people setting up the expedition to the Silent World 90 years later turn out to have familiar last names.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: The infected dog that attacked Emil earlier seeks him out and lies down before him, wordlessly begging him to end its miserable existence. He complies.
• If Only You Knew: A consequence of Reynir's Infraction Distraction to Onni, which boils down to "I'm worried about the comparatively minor thing that happened to Sigrun, totally not about something much worse that happened to one of your family members". Onni falls for the distraction, but it causes him to hope that the situation doesn't make Sigrun a liability and doesn't keep her from protecting the weaker members of the crew. Just that happening was a factor in Tuuri getting her troll bite.
• Ignored Vital News Reports: Happens several times in the prologue.
  • The group cut off from the outside world in Dalsnes ignores the news about the Rash being a pandemic in favour of joking about Aksel's fears and chatting about Iceland closing its borders.
  • Michael Madsen is worried more about his cat and losing his job than about the Rash becoming a serious enough problem for Madagascar, Japan and Denmark to close its borders — though subverted when he realizes that his home country has just locked the door.
  • Among the Hotakainen-Hollolas, young Veeti is the only one watching televsion when the news anchor announces that the Rash has just turned out to be deadly. He does tell his uncle about it. Unfortunately, said uncle's sole personality trait is a bad case of implied Hypochondria, and he was already seasick before being told the news.
• The Immune: Every character's title card notes whether or not they are immune to the Illness. The Known World has an immunity rate of 11%, but that's counting Iceland, which has both the largest population and the lowest immunity rate. Ignoring Iceland, the immunity rate is at 48%.
  • How characters are determined to be immune or not without being exposed to the Rash is not specified; but is implied to be by genetic testing, despite the limited medical resources outside of Iceland.
• Improvised Umbrella: Sigrun is shown using a metal sheet as one in Chapter 15. It happens surprisingly little, considering that only Lalli, Tuuri and Reynir seem to have hoods as part of their outfits, and the two latter are hardly ever seen wearing theirs.
• Incendiary Exponent: Emil, on guard and under orders not to use his rifle (because the noise would attract more trolls), comes face to...well, knee with some strange monsters looking like transparent blobs on very long legs. When one tries to kick him, he responds by firing his flamethrower. Now all the monsters are stomping around madly, and they are also on fire. And setting other things on fire as they stumble around. Ooops. Lampshaded by the writer in the comments to the strip:
  The blobs on legs weren't threatening enough, what with them only being able to try stomping you to death, so Emil decided to light them all on fire to make them more dangerous.
• Inconsistent Coloring: Even taking the change in color palette between chapters into account, the fact that small details with no plot importance can sometimes change from one panel to the next has affected coloring as well. Some cases are more noticeable than others:
  • The collar of Reynir's only shirt was white upon his arrival and has since gone through various darker colors, ranging from blue to various shades of brown.
  • When Lalli is in full gear, his upper arms are always colored white in contrast to his long black gloves and his coat has been shown to be sleveless, thus implying that he's wearing the white-sleeved version of the uniform turtleneck under his outer gear. The two times the comic has shown him get stripped out of his coat and long gloves, he turned out to be wearing the black-sleeved version of the turtleneck under them.
• Inconvenient Summons: As of Chapter 10, Onni can confirm that even only having one's spirit self summoned can become this if the physical body is in the same room as three children who like to "play hairdresser salon".
• Induced Hypochondria: When Emil finds a bruise in his face and asks Mikkel if there's risk of scarring, Mikkel has some fun telling him that face-bruises can turn cancerous if not properly treated. Made even funnier when Emil then tells Admiral Olsen that his face is bandaged to prevent face-cancer, and Olsen recognizes that lie and starts looking around for Mikkel.
• Infection Scene: One of the scenes shown in the story of a village that fell to a Rash outbreak is the Brainwashed and Crazy inhabitant being used as a Plaguemaster huffing into the face of a non-immune friend. It takes a few more pages, and a few more days in-universe, for characters to realize what happened at the time. When the realization happens, there is a flash-back to the infected person simply standing near a large number of people, which is enough since the infection range of the Rash is of about three meters for a carrier in their Typhoid Mary phase.
• Instantly Proven Wrong:
  • Downplayed. While Minna pointed out that nobody should lean on vehicle wing mirrors in the first place, the thing just had to break right after Sigrun said that the vehicle in question was probably sturdier than it looked.
  • The Øresund bridge seems to get a similar impulse later in the same chapter.
  • The older Finnish worker from the travel hub claims he can't tell the rest of the cast whether he saw Onni several weeks ago or not because nobody remembers people they have seen that long ago. On the following panel, a younger worker recognizes Onni from a picture Lalli shows him.
• Invisible to Normals: Spirits, including ghosts. Reynir unfortunately gets his very first experience with the latter while Lalli is in Deep Sleep.
• I See Dead People: All mages can see spirits, which are apparently souls of trollified people and animals. Reynir discovers this when he mistakes a ghost for a living creature. It's implied that he could see ghosts before going to the Silent World, but simply didn't consider it unusual.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Onni uses "it" to refer to the spirit world pursuer he and Lalli are trying to avoid running into, which contributes to the mystery about its nature.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: While the possibility get suggested by Lalli himself, it gets played with in Chapter 20. Emil can't outrun a persistent troll even when he's not burdened by an unconscious body, so he might as well include Lalli's body in his alternate plan to keep himself alive.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Signe from the prologue chapter has no problem chewing out Michael for being rude, but when he starts to cry over being fired, she sits down and comforts him.
  • Emil can be arrogant and full of himself, but has also shielded Lalli with his own body during a giant attack and tried to run into a burning building to save him.
  • When Reynir first showed up Sigrun called him a "useless pet" and threatened to use him as troll bait, but unhesitatingly protected him with her own body the second his life was in actual danger.
  • Mikkel has more than a few authority issues and is bluntly dismissive of other people's beliefs, but will rush to Sigrun's aid whenever she's in trouble and consistently looks out for the younger members of the crew, particularly Reynir.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: After the Distant Prologue taking place Just Before the End, the reader gets dumped into a time period ninety years After the End. Anything about the setting not spelled out in the Encyclopedia Exposita or by characters themselves needs to be pieced together via various hints given in the story itself. On occasion, the narration of events unfolding in the story's present turns into this.
• Jumped at the Call: Most of the team:
  • Tuuri happily signed up for the research mission after being cooped up in a military base with an overly protective older brother her entire life.
  • Emil needed something to prove himself both personally and militarily, as he was being hopeless at trying the usual career progression routes. Once the issue of possible additional *cough*financial incentives*cough* comes up, he gets really invested.
  • Sigrun had had a very hard summer hunting trolls and fought for the chance at the "vacation mission" proposed by Uncle Trond.
  • Speaking of Trond: he'd probably have said yes to worse things to not feel useless and retired.
• Just Before the End: The prologue takes place just as the rash illness begins to break out.
• Kidnapped by the Call: Lalli got dragged in by Tuuri while he was rather hazy about what was going on. Almost literally dragged.
• Kill It with Fire: Cleansers are depicted as wielding flamethrowers and burning down large areas of forest and ruins around railroads and settlements, and probably use them to kill the monsters of the Silent World living in those areas when the Cleansers arrived.
• Kind Hearted Cat Lover: With the importance that cats have taken in this world, this seems to be the default for human characters. The only outright cat-hater encountered so far is Lalli, and it seems to be caused by his own cat-like traits.
• Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy: This is how Tuuri heard that Swedes only have four toes on each foot. She heard it from Onni, who got it from one of his mage friends, who knew someone who had once met a Swedish person.
• Lady Looks Like a Dude: In a classroom otherwise full of women, Reynir mistakes one of his more masculine-looking classmates for the only other man in the room.
• Language Barrier: Since all of the group are from different countries, each of them speaks different languages — which admittedly isn't too bad when it comes to Norwegian and Swedish, as they are quite similar. But it starts breaking down from there. Tuuri is the omniglot of the group, speaking Finnish, Icelandic and Swedish — so she can muddle through with Norwegian, but spoken Danish is just a bit too much (written, however, is fine), Lalli only speaks Finnish, Emil only speaks Swedish and has a tin ear for other languages that deviate over-much, like Danish, Sigrun only speaks Norwegian, Mikkel speaks Danish and Icelandic. When he talks at all, that is. And now there's Reynir, who only speaks Icelandic.
• Language of Love: Emil and Lalli's Odd Friendship runs on a platonic version of this. It gets deconstructed to a degree, as they start learning each other's languages after their first on-panel "fight". However, another one happens a few weeks later due to the fact that the better verbal communication is making the reasons they should in theory not be able to get along surface. Lalli is a mage who Had to Be Sharp and Emil is a Flat-Earth Atheist who's had a comparatively sheltered life. The thing they do share is a lack of social skills.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Illustrations produced for the second story arc give away the identity of the main character who dies during the first one by way of their absence.
• Leaning on the Furniture: Emil does this sometimes, although his choice in furniture is rather poor.
• Left Hanging: While the comic wrapped up with Adventure II's conclusion in 2022, a fair few things are doomed never to be resolved:
  • Emil's parents had sent the team an unspecified job offer, and we never find out exactly how they lost all their money, or gained it in the first place — there's no small chance that the two were related. And what was that fire in Emil's hometown about, too?
  • Mikkel has been unwilling to share much about his past or family, especially his time in the Danish military.
  • Sigrun was also trying to recruit the team into the Norwegian military in the strip's final pages, with this vaguely implied to be their ultimate fate.
  • No one has yet found an actual cure for the Rash.
• Lethal Chef / Cordon Bleugh Chef: Mikkel is the Camp Cook. Everyone else complains about his cooking, despite this being a setting where decade-old canned goods are considered exceptional luxuries. Given what he is willing to add to the stew to pad out their rations, the complaints may be justified.
• Lies to Children:
  • Sigrun occasionally oversimplifies to Emil, both because she needs to because he's a newbie to most combat... and, because she's not got much patience when it comes to complicated explanations.
  • Tuuri often uses lies-to-Lalli (when she even bothers with part of the picture). She also has to do lies-to-Emil when the latter is worried by Lalli's Deep Sleep, because she knows he won't believe it has anything to do with magic.
  • Mikkel, however, is the king of the trope: he deploys lies-to-bosses (because Sigrun doesn't do big paragraphs, and winding Onni up burying stuff in dense metaphors is fun), lies-to-crewmates (because even he can't be too brutal with the Brutal Honesty and getting too convoluted when things aren't good is bad) and the very definite lies-to-Reynir (mostly because dumping very large, hard truths on him about extremely difficult things is pretty much like kicking a confused puppy).
• Lifesaving Misfortune: The Denmark portion of the prologue definitely becomes one such story for its main characters once the ultimate fate of the country's mainland is revealed.
• A Light in the Distance: After Lalli gets forcibly ejected from his dreamscape safe area and "lands" someplace very far from it, Emil's safe area plays that role.
• Lightmare Fuel: Interwoven tightly with Nightmare Fuel by the way of Mood Whiplash.
• Living Shadow: What the ghostly remains of the vaccine research victims seemingly have turned into. Although "living" is probably an optimistic take. Try "undead and very angry about it". Shadows are Very Bad News.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Technically speaking, Sigrun never gave Mikkel any direct orders not to leave the tank... and technically speaking, he isn't leaving two non-immune noncombatants alone without a guard as long as Lalli is with them. Even if the latter is effectively in a coma.
  • Onni forbade both Lalli from leaving his safe mage-space areas to come visit him again, and strongly hinted to Reynir he wanted him to do the same on a separate occasion. He never said anything about Reynir sending his fylgja over, which Reynir makes use of in Chapter 13, when the crew can really use all the help it can get.
  • Reynir's "in-person" visits to Onni's protected area are falling into this as well.
  Onni: Didn't I tell you to not come here?
  Reynir: No, you still haven't specifically done that.
• Lost Common Knowledge: When offered a hot beverage that is either tea of coffee in a dreamspace location in which Old World elements are preserved, Reynir calls it "soup" and says it tastes gross.
• Low Clearance: In Chapter 3, the giant's arm that gets inside the train gets cut off from the giant's main body because of the train going into a tunnel.
• The Maiden Name Debate: Various ways to deal with it have been seen across families:
  • The Västerström name has been mostly male-transmitted and taken by women married into the family, but Mia had to keep it for it to make it to the current generation.
  • Saku Hotakainen took his wife's name.
  • Averted with Ensi Hotakainen. Minna confirmed that her twin sons were conceived on a one-night stand, with a guy whose last name is not even recorded on the family tree that was given to the readers.
  • Tuuli Hollola was technically married into the Hotakainen family, but her keeping her last name and transmitting it to her son is the reason Taru is not a Hotakainen.
• Mage Species: Finns, technically. Most of them can cast spells to some degree, but being considered a mage by Finland standards requires enough innate power to be able to see spirits.
• Making the Choice for You: The Rash cure found by the crew was a massive scale version of this. The people in charge decided that slow brain death from the failed cure was better than dying from the disease due to the small chance of turning into a troll in the latter case.
• Mama Bear: The biggest beast bear among the kade's guards is a literal one to the two others.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: Reynir is the youngest of five, Mikkel has five younger siblings and is a twin.
• Mathematician's Answer: Appears to have been the source of faulty information that led to an attack in a flashback.
  It's the most recent scout report for the site of the attack. It's improperly filled out. And quite vague. The section for area details merely says "Yes".
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • Magic in this world works like a religion that helps the practitioners feel spiritually closer to the gods. Readers are left wondering whether magic can do anything more ... explosive. It's also not clear whether the trolls and beasts are supernatural or just forest animals with some horrible disease.
  • Lalli appears to have altered the weather. He also seems to have some form of premonition or clairvoyance; he can't sleep for visions of trolls, and he knew exactly where the giant was going to breach the train.
  • He also appears to have some form of dream-walking or Astral Projection abilities, as well, starting here.
  • Once we reach Lalli chanting and generating a bright pink glow to clear the Black Speech-laden Sinister Static from the airwaves, though, it's pretty clear that we've got actual magic on our hands.
  • Not to mention that Lalli and Reynir can communicate with Onni, who is, at present, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from them.
  • As of this page, any chance of Mundane is completely disintegrated.
  • The trolls themselves are at least partially sustained by something supernatural — Leaftroll, for example, does not to be inconvenienced in the least by missing major internal organs other than its brain.
• Mean Boss: A couple are mentioned in the prologue:
  • Michael Madsen's boss is furious at him for taking his cat to his sister's place too close to an important meeting because he doesn't trust a cat hotel to take good care of it, and fires him when Denmark closing its borders gets him stuck in Bornholm.
  • Aino Hotakainen has one also, according to her family at least (well, there is the fact she's more than eight months pregnant and still working).
• Meaningful Funeral: Tuuri's, after she drowns herself to keep the Rash from killing her.
• Media Scrum: Averted in that a grand total of three reporters show up to greet the crew after their return from Denmark, but Sigrun still reacts as if a much larger group of them had shown up.
• Mildly Military: After the apocalypse, the armies of the five Nordic nations will have stylin' uniforms and haircuts. The officers are surprisingly friendly, too.
• Military Mage: Unsurprisingly, for a world that has both gotten a The Magic Comes Back episode and a greater need for military than before. Onni and Lalli are both concrete examples, though Lalli is a night scout first and a mage second.
• Missing Mission Control: When the tank's engine breaks down for good, the radio is rendered useless in the process. The mage Talking in Your Dreams system is not a viable solution quite yet when it happens, as Onni is still in Deep Sleep.
• Monochrome Casting: Some of the real-life, present-day Nordics aren't entirely as white as people living outside them perceive them to be. invokedWord of God has justified the lack of visible people of non-Scandinavian heritage by some having survived the initial outbreak, but having done so in so small numbers that they had few alternatives to reproducing with the white population over the past ninety years.
• Monochrome Past: Torbjörn's flashback on getting the Mission Control team together, Emil's flashback on deciding to join the cleansers and the reading of the Odense hospital papers reduce the comic's already limited palette to just one color.
• Mood Whiplash: This is a lighthearted tale set in a world where most people have been killed or turned into globs of animated body parts. The comedy and horror take turns, sometimes within the same comic page.
• Most Definitely Not Accompanying Us: When Mikkel goes to explore Kastellet fort, he orders Tuuri, who wants to go as well, to stay in the tank for her own safety. The title page picture for the chapter in which this happens is of Mikkel, Tuuri and Reynir visiting Kastellet fort.
• Multinational Team: The book-hunters are an odd example. With Finn, Norwegian, Swede, Dane and Icelander members, they're an omninational team by the standards for the Known World, but that still makes them quite homogeneous by today's standards.
• Multiple Reference Pun: The Rash's name. One of the symptoms of the full-blown version is getting a rash in the skin irritation sense. Another meaning of the word is doing something without much thought, which frequently overlaps with doing something too quickly. Between the way the resulting trolls initially seem to act and the disease's fast-spreading nature, both these other definitions apply as well.
• Mundane Solution: The team needs to get on the move fast, but Lalli refuses to go since he wants to make certain Tuuri's spirit isn't lingering after her funeral. While Sigrun and Emil try to work out how to learn what he wants, since neither of them can speak Finnish, Mikkel — who likewise can't speak Finnish — simply shows Lalli a pocket watch, so that the latter can physically measure out how much time he wants.
• Mundanger: Iceland may have managed to remain Rash-free for the last ninety years, but it still lost a lot of its popuplation during the first decade of the new calendar. The main cause was The Famine.
• Mundane Utility: Early on, Icelandic and particularly Finnish mages are described as having a mostly defensive role, serving in their respective militaries to help detect, ward off, and eradicate trolls, beasts and giants. We eventually learn that Iceland also has plenty of Farm Mages, which are specifically trained to use their magic to do things like keep sheep from wandering off. This is useful in troll-free Iceland, specially after the exodus to rural communities post-Rash, but (mostly) ineffective in the battlefield. As Reynir soon learns, Iceland only trains non-immune mages in Farm Magic.
• Mutually Exclusive Magic: According to Word of God, the Norse gods won't choose Finns as mages and Finnish blood is required to have a chance to be a Finnish mage, which means people can't be both.
• My Beloved Smother: Reynir's mother Sigriður. While loving, she went as far as telling Reynir non-immune people are forbidden from travelling internationally to keep him home. Her Anger Born of Worry once the crew returns from the Denmark expedition comes out as telling Reynir that he would never had gone on his trip if he loved her. Her reaction to finding out he has magical powers is to get enthusiastic about how useful they will be back on the family farm. Reynir's father Árni takes part in the treatment as well.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: In Adventure II, Onni calls the crew minus Tuuri "the flock of clowns... and Lalli". Inverted in a way, setting Lalli as the only one not a Zoidberg.
• Mystical Plague: The Rash gives every indication of at least partly being one of these, considering the Undead Abomination creatures it produces which make mockery of the laws of physics, and the fact it seems to affect souls as well — the 'cure' Denmark managed to develop in Year 0 stopped the body's physical degradation from the illness, but didn't stop the victims' souls becoming terrifying Vengeful Ghosts with their bodies suffering brain death as a result. However, it shares several properties with more mundane diseases, such as some individuals having natural immunity to it.

Tropes N-S

• Nature Spirit: Finnish gods, such as the water goddess Vellamo, the moon goddess Kuutar and the forest deities Tapio and Mielikki, tend to be strongly associated with and protectors of nature and its creatures and phenomena.
• Neurodiversity Is Supernatural:
  • Downplayed with Lalli. While some of his mage powers make some of his odd mannerisms easier to understand, they don't explain all of them. In addition, Minna herself has hinted that Lalli could be having some kind of neural issues. It's gradually been hinted that the connection may be more complicated: his quirks partly result from his abilities, but also provide an advantage in maintaining the slightly feral In Harmony with Nature mindset that both Finnish mages and scouts rely on.
  • Many of his mannerisms are just plain absent in Onni and Reynir, the other known mages. Onni is a more experienced mage than him, and his own quirks can be traced back to an overblown Big Brother Instinct that is implied to be present for a good reason. Reynir has been a mage for too little a time for any possible long term effects on behaviour to kick in.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: Lalli never gets to say goodbye to Tuuri before she drowns herself in the sea, since she sneaks off from the camp to do it. Tuuri at least gets to make some kind of farewell to Onni in spirit form, as she travels to the afterlife.
• Next Sunday A.D.: Implied to be the prologue's setting. While the actual dates are concealed by the use of the Known World calendar, a document from the time still using the older one lists the two first numbers of the year as "20". The newest technology seen fits, with Michael Madsen using a smartphone and Mia being shown playing a relatively big handheld game system.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: Rash victims are burned and killed by direct exposure to sunlight and consequently remain within sheltered areas during the daylight hours, but emerge to hunt by night. The right combination of weather and lack of proximity to potential hideouts can be safe enough that even Tuuri and Reynir can walk around outside during the day, but nighttime travel is highly dangerous at best and suicidal at worst.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Onni's spell in Chapter 10, while quite effective at getting the ghosts out of the tank, also combined them and made them into an entity perfectly aware of this property, plus the fact that it can use troll and beast spirits as extra parts as well. The intial being shows up again in Chapter 13, after two weeks of collecting more extra parts and allies among both trolls and ghosts. And is apparently now elaborate enough to verbally taunt Lalli...
  • When an extremely large troll is coming at Mikkel and Sigrun in Chapter 12, Mikkel stops it from attacking Sigrun by... shoving a box full of books into its mouth. And not just any books, but medical notes that might contain valuable information on a vaccine or cure for the Rash, which they'd specifically come there to get in the first place, whereas if he'd just stood back and let Sigrun handle it, there's a good chance she could have taken that troll on her own. Sigrun is understandably not pleased.
• No Bikes in the Apocalypse: Bikes seem strangely absent in this new world. Sure, riding through mountainous, troll-infested Scandinavia comes under a Very Bad Idea, but while horse-drawn carriages and trains are seen (and cars get a mention), people in Rejkyavik and Mora seem to only get around on foot.
• No Indoor Voice: Question not the quality of Danish Ham when it comes with the megaphone that is Admiral Olsen.
  • A flashback shows that when Sigrun wants something, there's nothing like an indoor voice for her.
• No Kill like Overkill: Standard procedure for cleansing an area involves MASSIVE FLAMETHROWERS to clear the forest, destroying anything left standing with high explosives, letting the bitter Scandinavian winter kill anything that can't take shelter, then coming back in the spring with MORE FLAMETHROWERS and high powered rifles in a systematic hunt of anything that might have survived. Repeat as needed. All signs point to this being Properly Paranoid.
• Non-Uniform Uniform: The expedition uniform from Adventure I. Both Tuuri and Lalli have a very different cut from everyone else's and each other. Mikkel, Sigrun and Emil wear a more standard version of it, but the two latter have Too Many Belts for a different reason and Emil has partially white gloves and boots instead of completely black, resulting is absolutely nobody wearing the same outfit.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Despite how often the Västerström family Riches to Rags episode comes up, its cause has just plain never been mentioned. The generation seen in the prologue doesn't seem particularly wealthy (they are driving to their private cabin themselves and the grandfather is described as spending his pension betting on sports), which makes how they got rich in the first place fall into this as well.
  • What exactly did Trond use to blackmail the captain of the boat carrying Reynir into making a detour to the Silent World to deliver some food to the crew? All we have go by is her reaction.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Discussed. The worry about the food supply after Reynir's arrival causes Mikkel to make a joke about eating him if they ever run out of food.
• Not in Front of the Kid: Deconstructed in the Finland segment of the prologue. Veeti's parents are trying to shield him from the Rash issue, including avoiding discussing it in front of him and sending him out of the room when they are about to discuss the issue with his aunts. The first thing he does when left to his own devices? Turn on the TV that is in the room to which he was sent and watch the news.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • The community space scene in chapter 5. Sigrun, Lalli and Emil enter and Sigrun assures the boys that it's not a nest. Nevertheless, it turns out that the place is a makeshift hospital and the ground floor is a maze of curtained beds. You're staring your eyes out trying to spot the trolls in the wide shot... but there's nothing. Then Sigrun discovers the basement and it turns out it is a nest... And then Emil runs into a troll.
  • The Dalahästen scene is one of the most terrifying in the comic so far precisely because of the buildup when nothing happens for four pages straight... Cue the giant.
  • Or when the Dalahästen pulls out of the station, pristine. The next pages are inside the train, with the occasional odd noise outside and the staff assuring people it's normal. The next exterior shot of the train shows that there's now something red on the once-pristine giant saw blade.
  • The Sweden segment of the prologue compared to the three previous, that all showed the named characters being around other people at some point or another. While we got to see a town full of masked people in the first few pages of the Finland segment, we don't get to see what the Västerströms were driving away from at all, leaving the extent to which things have escalated in just four days to the reader's imagination. The only hints given are an abandoned gas station, a newspaper with only two pages of content and a few pieces of dialogue that imply that Stig's parents aren't fully aware of the seriousness of the situation.
  • The nature of 'It' between its brief mention in early Adventure I and the first answers that were given in early Adventure II, between which several real-life years went by. Between the fact that neither cousin seemed surprised upon that first mention and the word 'again' being used, it was pretty clear that this was not the first time Onni and Lalli have been hunted by it. The only confirmed sign of its interference in Adventure I was near the end of that arc's very last chapter; 'It' happens to come close to finding Lalli while the latter is in the spirit sea with no idea where his safe area is, and Lalli gets so focused on not getting noticed by 'It' that he fails to notice that he's swimming towards another danger.
• Not Now, We're Too Busy Crying Over You: When the presumed-dead Emil and Lalli make it to the extraction spot that the rest of the crew has reached the previous day, the following things happen in exactly that order:
  • Mikkel opens the door of the barracks to let them in and is so happy to see them that he gives them a big hug here and there.
  • Emil asks about the possibility of having a bath, well within hearing range of anyone inside the building.
  • Sigrun complains about the cold air getting inside the building because it's distracting her from her mourning over Emil and Lalli.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: The closest thing to a cure the old world had was in Denmark, where early administration stopped the rash from spreading further in patients...and ultimately left them brain-dead. Unbeknownst to anyone, it also tied their souls to this plane so they became ghosts when their bodies died instead of moving on like they should've. Miserable, terrified, angry ghosts. The unwitting government of Denmark issued it as a cure in order to perform an en masse Mercy Kill that neither killed nor was merciful.
• Not So Stoic:
  • In Chapter 4, observe Mikkel's "please don't, I implore you" expression when Sigrun considers going to Copenhagen at night. Doubles as Funny Background Event.
  • Mikkel again in Chapter 10, when Sigrun gets dunked into icy water and doesn't come back up again.
  • Lalli at the end of Chapter 12, when he realizes just how close the mixed horde of trolls and ghost following the crew has gotten. And that the sun is close to setting...
• Not This One, That One: The Cat-Tank happened to be at the end of a long line of better-looking and bigger tanks. Thankfully subverted for the first "that one", however, which involved plywood and bicycle wheels.
• No Zombie Cannibals: Averted. Rash-infected creatures will freely devour each other, as Emil uses to his advantage, waking up a Giant to chomp the pack of Dusklings chasing him and Lalli.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: A couple elements of the plot imply that the species is alive and well in this universe:
  • First, Admiral Olsen could technically have gotten food to the crew the day they ran out, but requesting permission to do it alone would have taken four weeks. Bypassing this is the reason Trond had to blackmail the merchant ship that was carrying Reynir into doing it in the first place.
  • Once Reynir is found in the food crate, Mikkel correctly guesses that the crew will have to keep Reynir before it gets confirmed via official channels, because he knows just arranging for the quarantine ship would take several weeks, and the expedition is intended to last just a few months.
• Ocean Punk: The Known World has taken that direction compared to the present day:
  • The fact that Raising the Steaks only concerns mammals makes travel by boat relatively safe compared to travel by land, while air travel was foregone entirely.
  • The biggest patch of troll-free land is Iceland, Denmark is now a single small island, the surviving Norwegians live on the country's coasts and Finland's survivors are mostly found in the Saimaa lake system.
• Odd-Shaped Panel: Dreamworld panels are drawn with curvy frames instead of the straight lines of the real-world ones.
• Offscreen Romance:
  • In the Norway portion of the prologue, the group of four friends that would go on to become Trond's parents and Sigrun's great-grandparents show no signs of being romantically involved. Before the family tree was made, the only in-story hints there was that they had gotten together were Trond and Sigrun's surnames, Sigrun's first name and a couple of portraits in a flash-back showing Sigrun's home.
  • The Denmark portion of the prologue is Michael and Signe's first meeting. Signe's appearance in a Time Skip photo that otherwise shows Michael's family is the only hint of them eventually becoming an item before Mikkel turns out to exist.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Reynir's reaction when he realises he's been dropped off at the wrong stop. Doubled when he learns that it's going to be nearly impossible for anyone to retrieve him for weeks.
  • Reynir, again, when the ghosts are closing in.
  • Sigrun a bit later, when she learns that Tuuri abandoned their campsite at night while she was unconscious.
  • Emil after completely forgetting Rule #1.
• Oh, My Gods!: Both surviving religions being pantheons causes a lot of this.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: When the mention of "face-cancer" causes a Danish admiral to realize why Mikkel's face was familiar to him, you know Mikkel isn't using that trick for the first time.
• Older Is Better: When the crew stumbles upon a lead towards a possible Rash cure from Just Before the End, Siv sums up what the trope looks like from the perspective of the people working on the newer version of the thing:
  Siv: Are you saying that anything they find would be better than what we currently have, since the last half a century of research has been an utter waste of time and my job has been pointless. [...] Because that would be correct.
• The Old Gods: Most of the Nordic countries have returned to worship of the Norse pantheon. Or in the case of Finns, the Finnish pantheon.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted thanks to some first names running in families. Even before the family tree was published, there were a few visible cases:
  • Sigrun's first name was one of the only things telling the reader which of her great-grandfather's two female friends was her great-grandmother.
  • Reynir's great-grandfather and his father had to share a first name so his ancestry could be hinted at to people not familiar with the Icelandic patronym system. His prologue ancestor is basically named "Árni, Reynir's son", while Reynir himself is "Reynir, Árni's son".
  • Before the family tree was revealed, the only other main character relative to get an actual portrait aside from the mysterious Hotakainen grandmother was Mikkel's twin brother, who shares the name of their prologue ancestor.
  • Ólafur is the name of both one of Reynir's brothers and the cook on the merchant ship that he was riding.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Subverted; Sigrun repeatedly shrugs off the damage to her arm, a few seemingly superficial wounds that should have been nearly healed, even going so far as to hide from the medic that it's still hurting her. Several chapters later she's in so much pain that she loses her grip on her dagger at a critical moment, and ends up getting walloped for her troubles. After the battle, it's revealed she has an infection.
• Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap: Inverted. A spare part for a mechanical vehicle can cost as much as a healthy work horse, resulting in mechanical vehicles being used only by the military while civilians go around in horse-drawn carriages. Supplmentary material has also mentioned sugar to have become quite expensive.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • A mild form happens in Chapter 3. Emil and Lalli sort of bond over their shared hatred of the bed belts. Later in the night, Lalli hands Emil his belt and tangles himself in his own right before sudden movement of the train projects anyone not strapped to their bed (read: Emil) out of it.
  • Sigrun may know when to back down from a fight, but she's also walked into troll nests and killed grosslings, considers a suicide mission to be a relaxing vacation, and through it all has been absolutely fearless. So the first time she's shown to be downright terrified, it's clear that the crew is in serious trouble.
  • The first time we see Lalli look completely terrified. Remember, this is the guy who spends his nights scouting the troll-infested Silent World at night when the monsters are most active without batting an eyelash regressing to a state of panicked flailing.
  • Chapter 14 may very well trump that. After the events of Chapter 13, Lalli is in such need for comfort that, while not directly seeking it out, he picks up Kitty and hugs her when she comes to him. The comic had previously established that he didn't like Kitty that much. He was actually calling her a "stupid useless thing" exactly two panels before deciding to pick her up.
  • Reynir's turn comes in Chapter 15, when a combination of Cabin Fever and a situation that may turn into You Can't Go Home Again if it lasts for too long causes him to snap at Lalli.
  • Discussed when Lalli realizes Onni lied to him about where he was going in early Adventure II. One of the reasons he doesn't like the situation is that Onni sometimes lies by omission, but never lies in the sense of actually telling people something that isn't true.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Emil describes the sound of the Danish language. With a pair of Danish soldiers right behind him.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: They look like trails of darker smoke with glowing white eyes, which gives them sort of "when you see it..." quality.
• Our Monsters Are Different: Giants, trolls and who knows what else haunt the Silent World, but the artist took her time about letting us see them. The names evoke the mythological imagery, but do not appear to have much to do with the actual creatures. They are very similar to Plague Zombies, but they're too weird for the name.
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • When the Rash came, it changed everything in only a few months, thanks to making both the Black Death and the Columbian Exchange look like wimps. No health service or medical emergency procedure was prepared for the scale of what happened. Let alone the very strange nature of the thing which hits straight into Clark's Third Law or its corollaries territory in some way. No attempted preventatives or cures have worked. At worst, they've Gone Horribly Wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
  • Lalli choosing a campsite overrun by hostile ghosts capable of harming and killing living beings had more to do with this than his lack of sleep at the time. Most spirits barely even notice humans, so he just registered them as a type of spirit he hadn't seen before and assumed they were just as harmless as the spirits he knew of.
  • Reynir's mere presence in the Silent World is one, to a lesser extent. He's in a situation in which no non-immune civilian would put himself into on purpose, and because of this there is nothing in place to solve such a situation.
• Paranoia Gambit: Tuuri does a minor one to the Västerström children.
  Tuuri: [smiling] I haven't seen any children in so long, I almost forgot how cute you are!
  Child: You're kinda fat.
  Tuuri: [smile becomes unpleasant] I heard your parents say that one of you is adopted and they don't love that one as much as the other two.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Onni, Tuuri and Lalli's parents all died in a local outbreak of the Rash eleven years prior to the beginning of the story.
  • The entirety of Adventure I went by without giving any clear indication of the present-day status of Emil's parents. The family tree picture is the only proof his mother exists, and his father got a couple mentions in regards to past events of his life.
• Party of Representatives: The original crew has two Finns and a member of every other known nation except for Iceland. The lack of Icelanders gets taken care of once Reynir shows up. Kitty is native to the Silent World. On top of this, the diversity of roles in the crew results in several walks of life from the setting getting represented.
• Patient Zero: From the perspective of the characters in the Distant Prologue, the Rash was brought to Europe by a group of eleven refugees of unknown origin arriving in Spain, and eventually spread to the Nordics.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: Trolls, Beasts and Giants are vulnerable to the elements and UV light, but don't age, making things worse for both the surviving humans, and the tortured minds of the infectees, be they human or animal.
• Perma-Shave: While it's entirely possible that shaving has been happening off-panel, the trope becomes noticeable in later chapters:
  • Onni manages to not grow any facial hair during his several day long Power-Strain Blackout.
  • The crew eventually has to abandon the tank and is separated into two groups travelling on foot. Emil and Lalli end up on their own for a few days instead of a planned few hours and Emil soon gets enough on his plate that he's not even bothering to keep his hair neat anymore, yet remains clean-shaven.
  • Reynir's breathing mask means that any beard he would grow would have to be kept quite short even once the crew starts travelling on foot. Maybe even moreso, since the mask is his only protection between stops.
• Photo Montage: The first Time Skip in the prologue is done via one, via a series of archive photos that feature the characters from the Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland portions of the prologue.
• Pit Trap: In Adventure II, the crew try to trap the beast bears protecting the Kade in a pit with pikes at the bottom. Because of the beast nature of the bears, it only wounds them and makes them a little easier to track.
• Place of Protection: Finland has a few spirit-protected patches of land that are naturally devoid of Rash creatures. They are among the few places in which mosquitoes, which die if they drink the blood of Rash creatures, survive.
• The Plague: "The Great Illness," initially referred to as the rash sickness which affects all mammals except cats. It spread quickly enough to worry world governments, but it was initially seen as merely an economic problem—countries were expected to have up to half their populations bedridden for a couple weeks, which would horrifically affect productivity—until people started dying. The monsters of the Silent World are very strongly implied to be various mammal species (including humans) mutated by the disease. The "economic problem" may have been the official explanation, but there are strong hints the government knew better from the start, they just tried to prevent a panic.
• Plenty of Blondes: The Known World is made of countries that are notorious for this in real life, so this is to be expected.
• Point of No Return: Non-video game example, obviously. A section of the Øresund bridge gives out behind the Cat-Tank just as it's crossing, preventing the crew from returning for likely some time.
• Poor Communication Kills: In Chapter 13, poor phrasing on both Sigrun and Mikkel's part causes both of them to miss the fact that there is still a troll under the tank that should really, really get taken care of.
• Post-Apocalyptic Gas Mask: The breathing mask non-immunes have to wear in high risk areas gives off this vibe.
• Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: Traffic jams like those are sometimes seen while the crew is exploring the abandoned parts of Denmark. As a couple of families from the Distant Prologue are seen escaping The Plague via leaving densely populated areas to take refuge in isolated places, the owners of those cars are implied to have gotten a similar idea.
• Post-Modern Magik:
  • Spirits of Rash victims can cause radios to malfunction. In Chapter 6, Lalli is shown using magic to unjam the crew's radio.
  • The summon Onni sends the crew in Chapter 13 is implied to require a source of fire as an entry point. The hint towards this is the fact that it comes out of Emil's flamethrower.
• Precision Crash: What are the chances that a side-view mirror thrown in panic would fly so far AND manage to hit somebody in the head? Not just anybody, mind you — the person who is labelling the protagonists' food crates, with far-reaching consequences.
• Press Hat: In the panel introducing the three reporters coming to interview the crew after the first expedition, the two male reporters are wearing a hat with a white card sticking out. It helps that hats seem to have come back in fashion in urban areas.
• Private Tutor: Emil was taught by one. Let's just say his parents should ask for their money back.
• Properly Paranoid: Most of the main characters' ancestors escaped the rash illness and the beginning of the Silent World by dint of the fact that they a) had cats and b) retreated to a safe location the instant they got wind of the potential danger of the disease. (Aaaand then there's Michael Madsen, who got stuck on a boat when the ports were closed...)
  • Also, Iceland came through more or less intact by closing and fiercely guarding its borders... demonstrated — rather harshly — by the Icelandic coast guard, who will not hesitate to fire on a boat of refugees if they can't give the correct signal.
• Psychic Nosebleed: And eyebleed. Turns out flashy magic doesn't come free of charge.
• Psychopomp: Helping the spirits of Rash victims to move on is part of the job description for Finnish mages. The Swan of Tuonela also makes an appearance guiding Tuuri to the afterlife.
• Public Bathhouse Scene: Technically a single panel inside a sauna, but the same end result.
• Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: The segment of the prologue focusing on Iceland shows the country resorting to this.
• Quitting to Get Married: Reynir's older sister Guðrún, due to her job requiring travel and the man she wants to marry living in their hometown.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Expecting the contents of a department store to still be usable for camping after 90 years, and said supplies apparently fulfilling the expectation despite the store in question having a partly collapsed roof, means a lot of reliance on this trope.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: What the main characters are shaping up to be. The mission was underfunded from the start, so the group in charge of the expedition purposefully hired people who would be bored, stupid, desperate, or some combination thereof. Most of the team had never even met each other before the expedition. To make matters worse, they're all from different countries and only two members of the party can speak more than one language, meaning all the complications and difficulties of actually understanding each other should make communication in the field... ''interesting.'' Also, the medic has already been fired numerous times and the captain can't actually drive. And then, a few days later, they get an unexpected addition to the crew, in the form of an incredibly sheltered Icelandic sheep herder...
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Mikkel tries to be this, but just keeps on being overridden by Sigrun.
  • Sigrun herself seemed like an inversion in the beginning; right now she seems to be more of a straight example than one would expect from her apparently-reckless behavior.
• Reclaimed by Nature: Plenty of human structures in the Silent World are in this state.
• Recruiters Always Lie: The recruitment poster of the cleansers is the "this is an awesome job" variant. With fine print saying that joining voids any life insurance.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The Encyclopedia Exposita version of the map of the Known World has full-on Silent World areas colored in black and the cleansed areas in red.
• Red Shirt:
  • The research team is viewed as this. After all, their employers refused to do it themselves — they wanted to live.
  • The recruitment poster for Cleansers notes in the fine print that joining automatically voids one's life insurance.
• Refusal of the Call: Onni refused point blank to be the mage when he was approached. It was Tuuri who pointed out they had a mage cousin that could replace him... and who she could incidentally help. It left Onni a message, though, even though she jumped.
• Religion is Magic: Both Icelandic and Finnish traditions of magic involve prayer to the gods. Swedes and Danes don't believe in any Gods and they have no mages. An info page attributes their lack of magic to their lack of belief. Pastor Anne suggests that this trope may apply to Christianity as well.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: The only surefire to kill a Rash creature. However, the head can be tricky to find and some of them qualify for Body of Bodies.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Emil and Lalli to the rest of the crew in Chapter 18. Escaping from an exploding giant and frozen body of water on an ice floe, reaching land quite far away from the others and having nobody go look for them until the next morning will do that.
• Rewatch Bonus: Once the reader knows what will become of each family in Year 90, some events from the Distant Prologue take on a new meaning.
  • For instance, Reynir's ancestor mentions having dreams that are implied to be Past Experience Nightmares in his segment, but the story later reveals that the mage package includes having a very specific type of dream. This leads to an Ambiguous Situation about the actual nature of the dreams.
  • The existence of The Immune is only revealed in the story's main time frame and the info page at the end of Chapter 6 heavily implies that immunity is a recessive trait. Every single cast member who's the child of a prologue character is immune, which means that Gøran, Ingrid, Saku, Aino, Veeti and Mia were either immune themselves or just happened to have a copy of the mutant gene.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: Inverted. When all three of them are on a mission, Sigrun seems to be trying to reassure Emil by asking him if Lalli looks scared. It then turns out that she's really asking because she can't read Lalli as well as Emil can.
• Riches to Rags: Happened to the Västerström family some time during Emil's teens.
• Rich Jerk: Emil sometimes acts like this, especially when he's telling Tuuri about his past and how his teachers from the public system tried to "sabotage and hamper" him. The possibility that the tutors he had as a child were being accomodating to him seems to have never crossed his mind.
• Ridiculously Potent Explosive: Emil's would-be breaching charge, which fits into the palm of his hand, is filled with some sort of liquid explosive. It blows the door off its hinges... And part of the house into the stratosphere. It's worth noting that Emil is typically carrying around enough of the stuff to blow up half a town — so it's no wonder he wasn't allowed to bring his kit inside Mora at the start of the comic. It makes sense in some way for it to be this powerful though, given that the job of the Cleansers is to raze Old World buildings to the ground to clear out any trolls which might be nesting in them.
• Ruins of the Modern Age: Almost all old-world settlements were destroyed or abandoned during the Rash epidemic, and have been largely left to molder since. By the story's time, the ruins of modern cities are crumbling, troll-infested deathtraps only entered occasionally to scavenge for valuable old-world artifacts.
• Rule of Cool: Is a train with pressure-sensitive buzzsaws on top practical? (Given the setting, God, yes.) Would these people have enough of an industrial base to make one? How do you train a cat? It doesn't matter because it's way cool.
• Rule #1: It's given in one of the info pages:
  "The First Rule for survival outside of the safe areas: If you come across a Beast, a Troll or a Giant, do not run or call for help but stand still and stay silent. It might go away."
  • We have yet to see an example of this rule in practice. Emil, for example, does precisely to opposite, probably with good cause. One can however imagine Lalli practicing the rule on his unseen solo excursions.
  • The beginning of Chapter 7 shows a cat successfully following this rule, hiding from an infected dog.
• Runic Magic: Runes are an important part of the Icelandic magic tradition, and usually take the form of complex circular diagrams adorned with a variety of curving and angular shapes. Their powers are usually passive or indirect, and focus on things such as creating mental suggestions or warding away dangerous magical influences. Most runes seen on-page are fairly large, inscribed or painted over vehicles or around campsites, and are intended to do things such as preventing ghosts from entering a site or creating a mental suggestion for wandering monsters to steer around the area where the rune is inscribed.
• Running Gag:
  • Emil's hair spontaneously producing (subtle) Bishie Sparkles.
  • Mikkel just can't suggest anything without Sigrun interrupting him.
  • Onni keeps forgetting to specifically tell Reynir not to come waltzing into his dreamscape. Until he doesn't.
• Sadly Mythtaken: Narrative choices result in this happening to the Norse Mythology, Finnish Mythology and Christianity-inspired elements. To take a Norse Mythology example that is documented in other pages of the wiki, the quasi-Gender-Restricted Ability status of Norse magic is kept, but the cause is changed from Sex Magic to blessing from the Norse Gods.
• Same Surname Means Related: The reveal that that members of the main cast and Mission Control are descended from the characters from the Distant Prologue hinges entirely on the reveal of their identical surnames.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Mikkel and Sigrun's overall dynamic has shades of this. He's the stoic voice of reason, medic and Team Mom who takes care of practical but boring things, while she's the enthusiastic team leader and badass troll-fighter.
• Scenery Porn: The comic really likes showing off the Nordic landscapes that the crew travels through. It turns into Scenery Gorn when they go through abandonned towns and cities.
• Schizo Tech: Not surprisingly for a group of technologically-oriented societies that lost the benefit of global trade. Now the Scandinavians use every technology they can get their hands on, whether it's high or low. They have a high percentage of farmers in the population, horse-drawn carriages, geothermal energy, battery technology that's more advanced than our world's, some sort of genetic engineering, and Viking villages atop re-purposed oil platforms. Technology is unevenly distributed within the world because some areas lost more infrastructure to the Rash than others. The military personnel who fight the monsters get cooler toys than the general population.
• Science at the Speed of Plot: The main cast's investigations eventually make them discover that some kind of cure or vaccine may have been discovered during the initial Rash outbreak, which would have to be unrealistically fast, since that kind of thing usally takes from several months to years in the real world. Meanwhile, Siv's old workplace has been trying to find a cure or vaccine for fifty years and hasn't found anything. The latter may be justified by the technology collapse, and the former by the fact that the vaccine doesn't actually work — or rather, it kills anyone it's used on and turns them into murderghosts.
• Science Fantasy: The Magic Comes Back in an After the End setting.
• Separated by a Common Language: A Danish to Swedish case happens in Chapter 15. Mikkel gives Emil a list of four items to salvage from a nearby commercial area, but two of the items happen to have different words in Danish and Swedish, causing Emil to tell Mikkel he can't understand half the list.
• Serendipitous Survival: Onni and Tuuri survived their hometown's Rash outbreak because they postponed joining the gathering during which everyone else got infected by respectively having a nap and reading. Lalli was able to warn them before they got close to anyone who was infected.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: While not up to par with usual examples of this trope, one line by Mikkel stands out in comparison to comic's usual writing style. Mikkel uses this trope to lampshade the ridiculousness of Emil's request.
  I see. I will dedicate my time and effort to revitalizing this wild and feral animal you found.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: In Chapter 10, when Emil has to deal with a bunch of long-legged trolls and Mikkel and Sigrun are dealing with a water troll, the long-legged trolls get taken care of via being lead right into the water troll's tentacles.
• Shared Family Quirks: In addition to the Strong Family Resemblance below, some characters have inherited behaviours of their ancestors. The most obvious are Lalli getting his great-grandfather's motion sickness and Mikkel being a caring but extremely snarky person, the latter being bad enough to regularly get him fired, much like his great-grandmother (and great-grandfather to a lesser extent).
• She's a Man in Japan: Sigrun Larsen was mistaken for a man in the French translation. The "kind of an ass" from her title card was translated into the masculine version of a gendered term, and there is no actual dialogue referring to her gender in the Distant Prologue segment in which she appears. While she does have a somewhat boyish look and has died of old age by the time the story proper starts, all the hints that she's Sigrun Eide's great-grandmother are left intact.
• Ship Sinking: The end of Chapter 15 puts a torpedo in just about any pairing involving Tuuri.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Västerström children are named after characters from the Sune-series, a collection of children's books with some popularity. If they ever get a younger sibling, expect her to be named Isabelle.
  • Surma, being an unstoppable monster which will home in on its prey from kilometres away, fast, and which in appearance is a pale, emaciated, clawed humanoid that curls up in the foetal position when not trying to kill something, seems to be inspired by SCP-096.
  • The acid-spitting Kalma trolls are directly inspired by the Spitter Necromorphs from Dead Space.
• Silent Scenery Panel: Many panels, and even a large quantity of whole pages, are there just to set the stage and show off the Scenery Porn.
• Silly Prayer: Reynir, who is not the most assertive person, tries praying for good luck and protection. His initial prayer is clumsy, but to the point, but things go downhill after he adds "bless you" at the end:
  Reynir: Oh, I'm not insinuating that I have the power to bless you. You blessing me is what I was getting at. Wait, that sounded way too demanding! I didn't mean to, I just —! Forget I said anything, I'm sorry I bothered you! Please don't smite me because of this, I'm so sorry!
• Sinister Deer Skull: Lalli is nearly killed in the Spirit World by a monstrous Iku-Turso like creature with a moose skull for a head and deer skulls on its appendages.
• Sleep Cute: Emil and Lalli here.
• Shown Their Work: The comic is exceptionally well-referenced to the point that readers could plot the expedition's journey on Google Maps, including landmarks.
• Small Role, Big Impact:
  • A couple of troll-inflicted injuries have a long-term impact on the story, while the trolls that inflicted them were killed within a chapter of getting introduced.
  • Torbjörn's boss, who only appeared in a flash-back. He's the one who informed Torbjörn of just how valuable Old World books were, and made him realize how much money he could make by getting his hands on some and selling them.
  • Ensi Hotakainen, so far. To quote Onni during Lalli's My Greatest Failure flash-back:
  Onni: Grandma made one mistake, and see where that got us.
• Small, Secluded World: The expedition is the mobile variant, with the only contacts with the Known World being with Mission Control via radio and the mage Talking in Your Dreams system. In practice, the latter only enables Reynir-Onni communication.
• The Social Darwinist: Sigrun apparently believes the Norse gods are like this:
  • While she'll protect the weaker members of the crew from danger without thinking twice, the phrase "the gods hate weaklings" is part of her vocabulary.
  • When a fever and low morale take enough of a toll on her that she's unable to keep up with Mikkel and Reynir, she considers it grounds for I Will Only Slow You Down and is persuaded that the Norse gods want to punish her by having her die of illness in the Silent World.
• Speechbubbles Interruption: Sigrun to Mikkel, frequently.
• Story Arc: The webcomic is divided into adventures. Barring the Distant Prologue, which contained five self-contained stories regarding the rise of the Rash and the current characters' ancestors, the first adventure ran from February 2014 until September 2018. The second adventure started in late October 2018 and concluded in 2022.
• Strip Buffer: Frequently mentioned to be one of the things prepared during the breaks between chapters.
• Strong Family Resemblance: The main cast look suspiciously like their great-grandparents from the prologue. This is however deliberately averted with Reynir's brothers and sisters, highlighting that they are not biologically related to the rest of the family due to being Dagrenning program children and thus born from artificial insemination and donor eggs.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: An experienced, but poorly educated female Hunter of Monsters is the Team Dad, an Unskilled, but Strong male Bookworm is the Team Mom.
• Suddenly Significant City:
  • Thanks to the loss of territory that affected all non-Iceland nations, every single one of them has a new capital.
  • Iceland itself has become a suddenly significant country, moving from a country less populated than several European large cities to the most populated place in the world.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Lalli's idea to get rid of the dusklings involves dropping a couple of Emil's explosives in a giant's hideout, then arranging for it to find the dusklings first when it crawls out.
• Super Breeding Program: The Dagrenning Program in Iceland officially exists to increase the number of immune people in the population by the only known reliable means, which is making sure the biological parents of as many new children as possible are immune. However, the poster advertising it strongly hints at sample quality criteria outside of immunity of the donor that fall on the dark side of eugenics by modern day standards; their "unsuitable" candidate example is an unattractive alcoholic with questionable personal hygiene, their "suitable" candidate is a good-looking and hard-working farmer.
• Superhero Speciation: Calling them "superheroes" is obviously pushing it, but mages from different traditions clearly have both similarities and very different methods.
  • Finnish mages cast runos, vocal spells either invoking their gods orfocusing their power through their luonto, a portion of their soul which takes animal form and serves as their connection to the supernatural. Too much spell-casting can cause them to become disconnected from their luonto leaving them powerless (and comatose) until they recover. Finnish mages have strong ties to nature and are able to see nature spirits everywhere. In the dream/spirit/otherworld, they create havens, in which they can set up defenses to protect from spirits wandering the ether. They can travel to other mages' havens, but are unable to enter without permission if the aforementioned defenses are set up. Under extreme circumstances, Lalli was shown to use a spell without casting a runo, but this had negative effects.
  • Icelandic mages such as Reynir primarily work their spells via elaborate runes, and while they have spirit animals in the form of fylgja they don't seem to have the same connection as Finnish mages do to their luonto. That said, Reynir does instinctively cast a protection spell without runes at one point, manifesting his fylgja as he does. Icelandic mages apparently cannot see nature spirits. When it comes to the dream realm, Icelandic mages not only have their own havens, but it seems they can enter other mages' otherworld/dream-havens freely, ignoring defenses so long as they aren't being actively repelled by the proprietary mage. They can also walk upon the etheric "water" that separates locations in the otherworld, a gift they can bestow on whomever they are touching. They themselves, however, appear to be unable to defend their own havens from other mages at all (at least according to Onni).
• Super Window Jump: Lalli dives through a 2nd floor window to escape a burning building.
• Sympathy for the Devil:
  • There may be a monster inside the dog, but there's still a dog inside the monster, and it's not at all happy about what it's become. Emil understands this all along.
  • As scared as Reynir is of the ghosts, he also acknowledges that that they are sad.

Tropes T-Z

• Tactful Translation: Comes up fairly often with this multinational cast. An example here of Taru "translating" for Onni and Siv.
• Take It to the Bridge: The Øresund bridge marks the end of the Known World. Made almost symbolic by how it's shrouded in mist — nobody knows what's behind the borders.
• Taking the Bullet: Sigrun does this for Reynir when Leaftroll first attacks. Justified, as Sigrun's status as The Immune means that she gets off with a torn-up arm and a few stitches, whereas if Reynir had been bitten... well, let's just say that death is the best possible outcome that he could have hoped for.
• Talking in Your Dreams: One of the perks of being a mage, and the first Reynir discovers when he becomes aware of his powers. Much to the chagrin of our Finnish mages, as Icelandic mages can wander into any dream they like.
• Tank Goodness: The Danish military's tanks are not huge by standards of this trope, but definitely bigger than what we have now. Justified, as they are made to fight trolls and giants, who were shown to be able to pierce through a few centimeters of steel.
• Tanks for Nothing:
  • Thanks to Cutting Corners, the crew ends up with something closer to an RV with treads than to the Tank Goodness described above. The story eventually shows that a persistent enough troll can break in.
  • Also, Lali is depicted walking past the rusting wrecks of several of the giant Danish tanks on a scouting mission, no doubt destroyed in the disastrous Battle of Kastrup.
• Tears of Blood: They occur alongside the Psychic Nosebleed when Lalli is seen doing his first Power-Strain Blackout-worthy magic.
• Technically a Smile: Poor Emil's attempt to look positive in the face of an adrenalin crash... wasn't too successful.
• Tempting Fate: Sigrun seems fond of this, not surprising since she usually has a quite positive look on things.
  • Driving: how hard can it be?
  • Curveball, you say?
• Terrible Artist: Emil provides us with a drawing of the infected dog on page 362.
  • A filler page that consists mostly of renditions of Kitty by each of the main characters shows styles ranging from surprisingly good for a member of the military to this trope. Sigrun's actually looks worse than Emil's, who draws rather well, all things considered.
• Terrified of Germs: The Rash still being a threat 90 years later causes the world as a whole to act like this, with Iceland putting the personnel of retuning merchant ships in quarantine and Mora making anyone entering the city undergo a decontamination process. Reynir is this even by the standards of the setting, since his parents exaggerated how easily the Rash spreads, as part of their effort to keep him at home. The comic contains no fewer then three instances of him having to be told 'no you cannot get the Rash from that'. Admittedly one instance was a very near miss.
• Thememobile: Fans nicknamed the team vehicle Catmobile or Cattank and Minna started to use the name too, although so far, not in story proper.
• Theme Naming: There is a lot of theme naming going on in the family tree:
  • Tuuri and Onni. Their names both mean "luck" in Finnish. Their father and Lalli's were named Juha and Jukka. Juha and Jukka's grandmother Aino had a sister called Kaino and a brother called Eino.
  • Sigrun's mother, grandfather and great-grandmother were Solveig, Sigurd and Sigrun respectively.
  • Torbjörn Västerström's brother, Emil's father, is named Torolf.
  • Mikkel's family takes the cake, though. Barring the women who came into the family by marriage (Signe, Anne and Freja), the Madsens are an Alliterative Family down to the cat appearing in the prologue.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Sigrun's face screams this just before a tentacle smacks her back down into the water, and the beastie waiting below the surface.
• Thriller on the Express: Chapter 3 happens on a train, that gets attacked by a giant at some point.
• Time Out: Sigrun gets manhandled into the corner for one of these by Mikkel due to her continued over-sugared reaction in the face of other people's post-action crashes. Which only adds to the Team Mom telling Team Dad to knock it off vibe, of course.
• Time Skip:
  • The Iceland portion of the prologue is separated from the for other portions by a few months.
  • The is a 90 year one later in the prologue.
  • A Travel Montage in Chapter 11 covers two weeks of time, which is a lot for the chronological pace of the comic.
  • An unspecified number of days is skipped between Chapters 14 and 15.
• Title Drop: The last of the first bundle of Encyclopedia Exposita pages, as seen on the page quote.
• Tortured Monster: Many of those infected with The Virus are not happy with their newfound state. Even those who embrace their rage and pain to go full-on Villain with a capital V are still Tragic because of this.
  • One particularly heartbreaking example includes an infected dog, which after being made aware of it's current state,simply lies near the protagonists after they bury the cats and gives an unspoken, but still evident request. They grant it.
  • In Chapter 14, "Sleipnope" (the horse ghost) alternates taunting Lalli and Reynir with cries for help.
• Training the Gift of Magic: Only select individuals are able to use magic at all, and the difference in capabilities depends greatly on their training and practical experience.
• Translation Convention: As one may guess from the setting, nobody is actually speaking English at any point in the comic. The only exceptions are a couple Encyclopedia Exposita vocabulary sheets in which the English words are handwaved as being present for comparison's sake. The convention also gets broken on occasion in the comic itself.
• Translation Punctuation: Due to nobody actually speaking English and several languages sometimes being spoken in the same scene, flags corresponding to the language's country of origin sometimes show up in speechbubbles.
• Translator Microbes: The Talking in Your Dreams system accessible to mages has this property. Reynir talked to Onni for the first time via it, which caused him to be slightly taken aback when hearing Onni's "Some. Enough." real-world Icelandic over the radio.
• Travel Montage: The two-week Time Skip during Chapter 11 is done via one of these.
• True Companions: The crew becomes a quite close-knit group by the time Adventure II starts. This includes Reynir and Kitty, who initially had no say in travelling with the others, and everybody has continued to stick together after returning to the Known World despite having no particular reason to.
• Typhoid Mary: According to the prologue and the "Distances of risk" document, the Rash can be transmitted while it's incubating, and becomes more airborne during that period.
• Undead Abomination: A Rash victim that doesn't get killed by the sickness turns into a horribly mutated Perpetual-Motion Monster that operates like a Plague Zombie and can become part of a Body of Bodies under the right circumstances. The "cure" from shortly before the collapse of civilization actually not only kills its recipients, but turns their souls into horrific, murderous ghost-things.
• Understatement: Mikkel when he tells Reynir he is not in Bornholm, Reynir when he says he may have gotten off the boat at the wrong spot.
• Undisclosed Funds: The reader is never told how much Old World books are worth, only that they are worth enough to be worth illegally looting while officially doing research.
• Unfortunate Item Swap: The crates early on in the story. The boat carrying Reynir would have gone nowhere near the Silent World if it weren't for the need to fix the consequences later on.
• The Unintelligible: When Tuuri meets her first Dane, Emil warns her that their language is utterly incomprehensible. Tuuri doesn't see why, since she's seen some written Danish and it seemed close enough to Swedish for her to get the jist, but Emil tells her that while it's written similarily, the pronunciation sounds like they're talking with a fist in their mouth. True enough, when Mikkel introduces himself, Tuuri is left flabbergasted. Truth in Television, as written Danish is very similar to Norwegian and Swedish, but the pronunciation is completely different, making it a common joke in the latter two countries that Danes are utterly unintelligible.
• Unknown Character: The members of the main and secondary casts are all descendants of characters that were shown in the Distant Prologue, that takes place ninety years earlier. As such, having the main characters exist at all required one or two generations of people simply being born, finding a mate, and having children of their own between the prologue and the main timeframe. With the cast consisting of six different families taken together, this creates plenty of such characters. A family tree published after Chapter 12 fills most of the gaps.
  • Onni, Tuuri and Lalli's grandfather seems to be intentionally this. He's the only person without a last name on the tree and Minna has confirmed it was as literal a one-night stand as one can be, which makes the guy come across as literally existing only to sire a pair of twin boys to Ensi.
  • One of the more noticeable pairs is Emil's parents, due to him being Torbjörn's nephew.
  • Reynir's parents are very likely to have used the same genetical material donor or pair of donors for all four of their older children, considering how similar they look to each other. Whoever that person or pair of people is, Reynir owes them the existence of his siblings.
  • Most adult prologue characters are either already married or have their future spouse appear in the same segment. The only exception to this is Árni Reynisson. Since he's Reynir's great-grandfather, him eventually meeting a woman and starting a family with her is a given.
  • The member of the Nordic Concil who lost his glasses and voted "yes" to the expedition's funding because he didn't know what he was voting for. The funding application was Decided by One Vote.
• Untranslated Title: The French translation sticks with the original title. Due to French having no direct equivalent to "stand still", the Title Drop was translated to the equivalent of "stay immobile and silent". The Alliterative Title would have also been lost if it had been translated.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • Lalli didn't react at all to Reynir showing up in the food crate. Given that he can see spirits and he was growling a little right before Emil opened the crate, chances are that he already knew there was someone in there.
  • Lalli's early Deep Sleep to everyone else, as far as Emil is concerned. Mikkel may have started wondering by the end of Chapter 10 (and sleeping through its second half would indeed count as concerning), as Reynir is sharing a mattress with Lalli out in the open, instead of Lalli sleeping under Tuuri's bunk as usual. The author comments say that Mikkel was the one who insisted on these sleeping arrangements.
• Urban Ruins: Much of the story is spent poking around the ruins of modern cities, which have lain abandoned for a century since the Rash killed most of their inhabitants and turned the others into monsters. By the story's present day, the ancient cities have become overgrown in vegetation and choked with rubble and collapsed buildings, and remain infested with the monstrous victims of the plague.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Inverted. Tuuri is Driven to Suicide after being infected with Rash, while Sigrun, the badass soldier and Hunter of Monsters, lives to tell the tale, although she does wish to have died instead.
• Warrior Heaven: As Iceland and Norway having gone back to worshipping the Norse pantheon, the people there also believe in the Norse warrior heaven. Sigrun, in particular, fully expects to end up there.
• Weakened by the Light:
  • Rash creatures are highly sensitive to sunlight, and direct exposure to it burns and eventually kills them; as a result, they're nocturnal by obligation and can't move in the open during the day unless it's raining or heavily overcast. Some develop natural armor and thickened hides which afford them some protection, but even these can only roam outside during twilight hours. UV radiation seems to be factor in this weakness, since soiled gear can be sanitized by being put under a UV lamp or left in the sun long enough.
  • Ghosts also seem to avoid sunlight, probably because it would dispel them.
• Webcomic Time: Very much so. The first story arc ran from November 2013 to September 2018 and, Distant Prologue aside, covered less than two months^noteMinna has gone on record saying she meant it to be something closer to four months of in-comic time, even having a Time Skip once in a while.
• We Named the Monkey "Jack": According to the family tree, Michael and Signe from the prologue named their son Magnus, after Michael's cat.
• Wham Episode: The second half of Chapter 15. The tank breaks down, meaning that the rest of the trip will need to done on foot and after realizing she definitely has contracted the Rash illness, Tuuri commits suicide by jumping into the sea at the end of the day that was used for preparing.
• Wham Line:
  • Onni's first mention of "It" looking for members of the family, which makes the readers realize that Rash creatures roaming the Silent World and the rogue spirits dwelling in the dreamscape weren't the only reason he wasn't keen on seeing his younger relatives leave Keuruu.
  • A speechbubble of Black Speech, something that only Lalli and Reynir are supposed to be able to hear, appears in a scene in which a previously bitten Tuuri is the only person in the room.
  • Lalli getting more or less stranded in Emil's dreamscape safe area has a few unexpected consequences once Emil wakes up with no idea what to do next:
  Voice in Emil's head: Just start walking. Stupid!
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Invoked by Sigrun on driving.
• What If the Baby Is Like Me: Some non-immune people are reluctant to have children genetically related to them, as illustrated by one couple of Dagrenning program users. In addition, since immunity is implied to be a recessive trait, couples formed by an immune person and a non-immune will have one chance out of two of producing a non-immune child in the best-case scenario.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: One of the few mentions of Emil's father by another character involves him not being able to make it home for dinner because of his work. The phrasing implies this is not the first time this is happening.
• Who Will Bell the Cat?: In Chapter 8, Sigrun at some point got the idea that Lalli had vanished into a tunnel, causing her to turn to Mikkel and Emil who are right behind her and ask them who wants to tell Tuuri her cousin may have been eaten.
• Wimp Fight: The talk-show program guests engage in this after one insult too many. The third one calls for a Tazer to get them under control.
• With This Herring: The first venture into the Silent World in ninety years wasn't given nearly enough money to properly pay or give decent working conditions to a crew of proper size.
• Wizarding School: There is a magic school in Iceland. Reynir is seen attending it in early Adventure II.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: "Sleipnope" (the horse ghost) may have its mind set on killing the whole crew, but is also made of multiple spirits that have been undead for ninety years, no idea how to reach the afterlife and grown well beyond frustrated about it.
• Wrench Wench: The crew's mechanic, Tuuri, is female.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Reynir comes up with a rune that, once painted on the back of the tank, can keep ghosts away from it. Just a few panels later, Sleipnope's reaction to it boils down to: "That thing won't protect you forever, you know. By the way, I'm going to follow you and kill anyone you get close to.".
• You Know the One:
  • Onni's use of this trope is the reason the spririt world entity the Hotakainen mages are wary of is only known as "it".
  • The Odense in Year 0 flashback has a discussion between people who are aware of trolls, but don't have a name for them, resulting in them simply being called "that".
• Zany Scheme: Torbjörn basically channelled Pantalone when he came up with his Get Rich Not That Quick Scheme. Anything that starts with "smarm a pittance out of government" and has more holes in it than a colander even before getting to the "get home from Silent World; ???; profit?!" bit is almost doomed to wind up zanily off-track.
• Zombie Apocalypse: non-standard zombies (tending towards masses of undead corpses stuck together), and they're officially called "Trolls" because the characters are Nordic.
• Zombie Puke Attack: Aside from bites, it's possible for trolls to infect non-immunes via breathing (one-meter range) or spitting (up to ten meters of range). The small chance of both of these happening is one of the reasons non-immunes need to wear masks in some areas.

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