A pivotal moment

I have a few strips that have been parked for quite some time awaiting the beginning of a particular narrative thread. I hope you’ll forgive me if a couple of these are ones you’ve seen before – I’m a little impatient at times and will just throw things out there willy-nilly without thinking about what kind of sense they might make when strung together. But now that particular narrative thread is ready to be spooled out, including those previous hastily thrown out there strips in their proper places. I’ll do my best to make some sense of it.