How Old Is Helen, Really?

[Teddy Schnapps]

Hello everyone!
If any of you are like me then you can obsess on the little things. And boy-o-boy is this a biggie for me. So far no one has been the slightest helpful with this. Please, try to stay with me, I'll give you a cookie, if you can at least attempt to help.

So, I was reading through TF comics #3 “A Cold Day in Hell” and found something very interesting. Link to page: panel 11

In the 11th panel Charles Darling mentions how Helen (the Administrator) has been stockpiling the biggest supply of australium in the world, for 150 years. Now this isn’t news to many of us fanatic readers, but two things really stick out to me:

1. Darling specifically says 150 years, no more, no less. This means we can use this as a definite time marker.

• Helen is pretty damn old! So, if we subtract 1972 (now in the series) from 150, we get 1822, the same year all of the Mann brothers were born. Link to page: Storyline

Now the question is, “when did Helen start this Australium quest?” Well, I assume the same time her mother Elizabeth acquired Zepheniah Mann’s "miracle" gravel cache in his will. But here comes some problems. We don’t know how old Helen is still. And we don’t know how old Elizabeth is either.
So this makes it really difficult to figure out when Helen started her mother’s quest. We could assume Elizabeth is anywhere from 50 to70 years of age (at 1850), and so it would put Helen anywhere from 0 to 25 (at 1850). This of course is done by guestimation.

So, pretty please help me solve this problem!
Love Theo~

Also heres the Reddit post I made of it. Wasn't really helpful. Reddit

 

[Yacan1]

I picked the biggest one since I don't have the time or effort currently to make a factual-based opinion

 

[Teddy Schnapps]

It's really quite depressing how this entire post just never picked up. I was wondering. Did I do something wrong? Did I post this in the wrong place? Was this not a worthy enough post to promote intellectual discussion from the community? Really, what is it?

 

[nightwatch]

Personally I'm past the point where I care too much about the story behind tf2.

 

[Teddy Schnapps]

Yeah, I get it. I had a feeling this wouldn't take off. But this does have a purpose to me. I can understand that others may not see it, but to me this is important, if I ever wish to finish my comic. I have my means for doing what I do, even if it isn't clarified. But all well, I tried.

 

[Pocket]

Well, in Loose Canon, the mysterious woman who may or may not be Helen (and definitely isn't Elizabeth, since she looks the exact same age as Elizabeth did forty years earlier) said she'd spent the last decade hunting down australium. So she started in roughly 1880, not even a hundred years before A Cold Day in Hell takes place, let alone a hundred fifty. That complicates things a bit as far as trying to suss out any sort of coherent storyline here.

There's also the question of how long ago Helen's life support machine was made. The earliest possible date was when Radigan made the ones for Redmond and Blutarch, and judging by the fact that it doesn't stop the aging process entirely (compare Blutarch in 1890 to when he hired Dell to service his machine), that lines up with how much she seems to have aged since then if indeed they are the same person. In Blood in the Water, we see that Dell has taken over the duty of regularly upgrading her machine as well, but the most interesting thing to me is that he's still wearing a BLU uniform when the comics so far have focused on the RED team; even the Medic didn't change when he defected to the Team Fortress Classic Blue Team.

So does that make Dell Conagher canonically the BLU team's Engineer while all the other named characters are on RED? The implications of the identical teams have been danced around since they first started writing backstory for this game, and I wonder if we're finally going to get some sort of payoff, since the Engineer is the last member of the RED team left to hunt down.

 

[Teddy Schnapps]

...Blutarch in 1890 to when he hired Dell to service his machine), that lines up with how much she seems to have aged since then if indeed they are the same person. In Blood in the Water, we see that Dell has taken over the duty of regularly upgrading her machine as well, but the most interesting thing to me is that he's still wearing a BLU uniform when the comics so far have focused on the RED team...

Thank you so much Stevethepocket, I didn't take into consideration the impact the blue engineer has in this ongoing lore. He does seem like the missing key to an important event in the near future.

It's all so tricky, all of this lore, and reading into what Valve might be thinking. I was hoping to make this tfcomic based as close as I can to the storyline already in place. So I'm doing as much research as I possibly can, knowing every little detail that's been given to us as is. And hopefully once it’s finished it will be an enjoyable comic for the whole community (especially fanatic tf2 readers).

Some problems I ran into were when setting up the year of my comic, to be somewhere around 1982 or so. I had to use my best judgment to assume what the retired mercs would be doing at this time, where they would be, how they would look act, and be with. It’s become so complicated I fear I won’t be able to finish it without some outside help.