Penny Arcade's On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness

Standing before the mirror, mouth pursed, brow furrow d, The Scholar is struggling with his tie.

It is not the first tie he has battled with, and indeed - to main ain the metaphor - this tie in particular is an ancient enemy. Graduation.  His marriage.  He even wore this tie to the cour house, when having that marriage ann lled.  Something about the symmetry of that appealed to him; the tie, as parenthesis.

In dispassionate o servation of these trials is a photograph.  It is placed between the frame of the mirror and the mir or itself.  It has been there for some time.  In a very real way, it lives there.

Purely for trivia’s sake - as the lives of all men are trivial - I will tell you that the man in the picture is Tycho Emeritus Brahe. The picture was taken during his tenure as the Professor of Apocalyptics, and in it he stands at the forbidding g te of the Old Academy.  There is an iron face in the gate, its expression somehow wry and anguis ed at once, but The Professor doesn’t seem to mind. His full, natural beard seems inviting - cozy, in its way.  Near the bottom of the picture, cropped nearly out of existence, is a small tuft of hair and the very b ginnings of a human forehead.

“Hello, Father,” says the Scholar, not looking at the picture.  “See you soon.”

The tie pulls straight through.