Kill Six Billion Demons II: “Wielder of Names” (part four)
Picking up where we left our non-angel heroine off, with a successful infiltration!
The shuttle brings the tributes, including the disguised Killy, up onto the upper deck of the SS Mottom, or the "Palace of Radiance" as it is now named. Looks like she built its upper part in the likeness of a vaguely eastern European looking palace complex. Lots of weird critters wandering around much like the Throne population, though everyone looks cleaner and better dressed than what we saw on Throne. There's also a swarm of very Spelljammer-esque flying ships hovering all around.
It looks like some of Mottom's toadies seek to emulate their goddess by wearing giant stupid hats.
We didn't see any of those flying sailboats follow the Palace of Radiance through the void, so it can be assumed that these are either Mykosian vehicles, or landing craft launched from the Palace after it arrived here.
I appreciate how different the architecture here looks from Throne's. I wouldn't have even assumed it was from the same comic, were it not for the familiar costumes and creatures roaming the courtyard. It's a nice reminder that this is a very big setting with a lot of different cultures in it. I wonder if it might also be telling us a little about Mottom. Is this what a palace in her original society on her original homeworld might have looked like? Is it a style she adopted from one of her early conquests? It's distinct enough to mean something, but until we learn more about our current antagonist I can't say what. It definitely gets the mind working, though.
The woman leading the tributes turns them over to another, better tempered, uniformed woman in the courtyard. I'd been thinking that Mottom was going to use these girls she's collecting for something bloody and torturous, but given how big the Palace of Radiance is and that all of its crew we've seen so far seem to be female, maybe it's exactly as advertised. Just conscripting some of the best and the brightest of each world in their prime for indoctrination and training. She presumably has weird psychological reasons for only wanting female crew, then. Hmm. I'm not going to dismiss the possibility of something more fucked up than that just yet, but seeing women who look like they might have once been tributes themselves guarding and guiding the new ones around is a bit reassuring.
Less reassuring is the tour that their new guide narrates. Though nothing about it is exactly surprising, given what we've already seen.
I doubt the actual poor and lowly of Mottom's worlds ever get to set foot aboard the Palace, let alone see her entourage of Bezoses and Bin Salmans lounging around in the hot tubs. Or that they'd be reassured to see that their planetary wealth is being used for luxury bullshit while they live in the barren mud flats left over.
...I still want to know how she ended up deforesting an entire region to get fruit. Was it those mushroom type things that she wanted to grow more of?
Even the guide can't or won't bring herself to whitewash everything.
I guess the alternative would have been spouting some extemporaneous story about how this gentleman's homeworld is famous for the convincing plastic fingers they ritually decorate their swordhilts with. I don't blame her for choosing as she did.
Also, "Mother Nadia Om." One of the other Seven called her "Nadia" back in book one. Mottom is a title, or nickname? Maybe just a contraction of "Mother Om" for ease of common usage? Nadia Om is probably her true name, in any case. Noted.
The guide quickly brings the girls away from the inconveniently decorated mercenary and toward the central tower, where a large crowd of people with wagons are waiting in line. There are apparently tribute-bearers still waiting for their audiences from other worlds, not to mention the various Mykosian leaders who are still arriving. This is supposed to be a special "day of tribute," but I get the impression that it takes much longer than one day. The Mykosian girls and their Terran infiltrator wait for hours before getting inside, and then hours longer while the vast train of tribute-bearers bring their offerings to the mummy in the hat.
At her sides stand a small team of bodyguards Keys in their heads, identifying them as some Mottom's vapras. Inventory is being taken by a golden-masked devil.
Strangely, the vapras appear to be men. Hmmm.
Among the tribute-bearers currently up to bat are some giant hunters from one of Mottom's frontiers bringing teapots made of freshly hunted giants' bones, an emissary from her colleague Solomon David's empire with a gift of six hundred gladiators and a cute little statuette of each of them, and a king from a newly conquered world with a giant chest full of skulls of his own people who died of starvation in the wake of her forces' initial pillaging.
The skulls are less of a tribute and more of a strongly worded complaint to the management, as you could probably gather.
Well, this king has a hell of a lot more integrity than Mottom's other vassals. Presumably because he's part of the preexisting native regime, who has yet to be replaced with a Quisling. I imagine that today's events will be the cause of a regime change back where he comes from.
Also, the panel he says it on isn't a very photogenic one, but this guy gives one of the best short "fuck you" speeches I've ever read.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the differenHad I known heaven was so real, and so choked with evil, I never would have prayed a day in my life.ce.”
In addition to being a sick burn, this is a nice reminder of the nature of K6BD's setting. Throne used to literally be Heaven, but after millennia of mismanagement and corruption it's almost literally Hell. I don't know what King Pryan's native religion was like, or whether its beliefs were closer or further from the truth than most of Earth's, but finally seeing the realm of the divine and seeing what you've been praying to and looking toward for generations...damn. Assuming he was a true believer, that's got to be almost as traumatic as the army of devil mercs that came raining from the sky.
This disturbance prompts Mottom to pull back the drapes of her hat and show herself. Either the woman on the throne is a decoy, or Mottom is employing some powerful illusion magic for the benefit of her public, because she doesn't look the way she did in volume one.
Well, if this Mottom is a fake, she's at least been endowed with quite a lot of her mistress' magic power. She tells King Pryan that since he's so concerned about his people's starvation, she will grant him the ability to feed them. And promptly turns him into a fruit tree.
When I say she "turns him into" a tree, I mean that the tree violently sprouts from his body in a giant spray of blood that throws bits of flesh all over the tiles before her throne.
I wonder if she's going to leave that here in her throne room, transplant it to her arboretum or something, or send it all the way back to his homeworld and instruct his replacement to replant it in front of his palace as a warning. The latter would be most appropriate to the faux-karmic "you can feed them yourself" thing.
From the look of things, its roots are just spread out across the tiles. So yeah, it's not staying here.
The late King Pryan's bodyguards make a desperate, suicidal lunge at Nadia Om. Her bodyguards start to react, but they needn't have bothered. She just blows on the enraged Aiman-Shanites, and they dissolve into a cloud of flower petals.
I think I remember one of Mottom's titles being "the Blood Flower" or something like that. It was mentioned earlier, I think when they were following her palace to Mykos. Looks like she's got a plant motif to go with that name. Sort of Poison Ivy-ish in terms of aesthetics, though she's obviously far from an environmentalist. Actually, with the association with flowers in particular, and the notably circular and colorfully-topped palace ship, I think I kind of get the symbolism. Soaking up the products of death and decay through hidden roots below, and using them to feed this glitzy, colorful, and proportionately very small and flat blossom at the top.
And, yeah, no, this is definitely the real Mottom. On top of the incredible display of power both political and magical, she gets a boss card to make it proper.
Cue music, hit point column, etc.
So, that's illusions then. Or actual, physical transformation.
Also, I thought her wand was just shaped like a tuning fork before, to represent the "catching the voice of god" concept that demiurgic magic runs on, but at this point I'm pretty sure we've seen her actually eat with it too. Speaking of symbolism.
When their goddess rises from her seat in this one-sided combat, everyone in the room falls to their faces in a fearful display of reverence. Nobody else wants to become a plant today. Mottom is calmed by what she sees around her, right up until she isn't.
I heard somewhere that the author deliberately seeded the comic with reaction image fodder. This would probably be his most successful attempt so far:
What got reactionmottom.jpg's displeased attention is a lone figure halfway down the great hall who is not bowing. Either because she's too jittery to get the cue, because she wants to get Nadia's attention and is willing to take the risk she won't just instantly turn her into a cauliflower, or because she noticed that the Masterkey in her head had picked that moment to light up like the fucking sun so there'd be no use in trying to blend in anyway.
On a tangential note, the bug-girl is still right in frame among the others. The shape of her head is sort of reminiscent of some of the Servants' on Throne, but I'm not sure if they inhabit the outer worlds or even breed the way humans do. I still want to know what the story is with the Mykosian insectoids and what category they fall into.
Everything goes black.
There's a tapping sound, from an unseen source.
Then, the lights come back on, the tapping is revealed to be Mottom's finger-blades tapping against her throne's armrests, and I am confused.
Either Mottom hit Killy with some kind of stun spell and kept her unconscious until after the entire tribute train finished, or she teleported them both into this other room with a feast prepared for fifty people and left everyone confused in the middle of tax day, or there's some kind of really weird spacetime fuckery that Mottom is pulling.
It appears that Mottom has also put Killy in an ostentatious robe type thing with yet another variety of silly hat. She comments on how well Killy "cleaned up," which suggests that she had servants of hers change Killy into these clothes. So, yeah, I'm thinking she stunned her and finished accepting the tribute before having her changed into these new clothes and sitting her up in the feast hall for reawakening. Overly elaborate, but LESS so than any of the alternatives I can think of.
Also, now that it's just the two of them Nadia isn't bothering with disguise self.
Well, thanks for warning Killy about the timed escape sequence after your boss fight I guess.
She also, notably, isn't disguising her speech patterns or personality anymore either. No thees or thous or royal we's. More than just making herself look completely different, it seems like Nadia has a whole stage persona she plays while making public or semipublic appearances. No pseudo-godly ironies or twists of speech either, or stereotypically godly demands for constant respect and reverence. She's now acting the way she did in the meeting scene in volume 1; direct, impatient, almost blunt.
When Killy doesn't eat, or say anything, Mottom shows a third, more surprising, side of her personality. Though perhaps it shouldn't be surprising, given that the comic's first mention of the Seven was White Chain warning Killy that they're all batshit insane.
Illustrates White Chain's point pretty well.
Killy refuses to admit she's afraid, when asked, though both of them know she's doing a terrible job of lying here. She tells Mottom that if she's going to kill her to please just get it over with. I doubt Mottom would have bothered dressing her up and sitting her in the feast hall just to do that, though. Her having even bothered to stun Killy rather than kill her and tear the Key out of her head the instant she laid eyes on her indicates that Nadia's got some scheme she wants to use Killy for.
Deciding to ask something about these bizarre surroundings that doesn't run too much of a risk of angering the deranged lich queen dancing on the table in front of her, Killy asks what's up with the feast set out for a small army but not why Nadia is stomping on it. Killy, like myself, seemed to have been under the assumption that this room was about to receive some VIP dinner guests until the tap-dancing-in-the-hors d'oeurves thing started.
That...is an answer, I suppose.
She finally gives up on trying to get Killy to eat, and explains that while she won't pretend she doesn't recognize and lust after the Masterkey in her brow, she's not planning to extract it. At least, not yet. She asks how Killy came by the key of the King of Kings, and Killy answers truthfully that someone just jammed it into her. She also voices her suspicion, for the first time, that the man who gave her the key and subsequently renamed her might have been the King of Kings himself. Or at least his ghost or something.
...
...wow, I can't believe I didn't notice until now. Or what it is about this mention of the guy in particular that made me realize it. Maybe because Mottom refers to him as "the king of heaven" or something of the sort, and that made it click for me. Anyway, Zoss = Zeus. His battle with the Prime Angels was the inspiration behind the Titanomachy, and the demiurgi who took over Throne are the rest of the new pantheon taking over Olympus.
I guess the proto-Myceneans had a genuine prophet or a visitor from Throne sometime in the early Ruling King era, when Zoss's rule was unquestioned and his conquest of Throne relatively recent. Granted, "relatively recent" can mean anything to a community of mostly immortals and near-immortals, but still. Unless time flows at different rates on each world, this might suggest that the defeat of the Prime Angels might have only been three or four thousand years ago. Which is a hell of a long time, of course, easily long enough to accommodate the multiple epochs and declines of the given timeline, but still more recent than I'd been imagining.
...
With some more prompting (and threats) from Mottom, Killy tells her the gist of her story. Boyfriend captured. Key stuck in her head by an entity who may or may not be Zoss. Still trying to rescue boyfriend. Came to the Palace of Radiance because she heard Mottom was like, in charge of her universe or something. Didn't bow when everyone else did because she really didn't want to have to wait still more hours or days for a chance to get Mottom's attention, and is also very reckless and I'm starting to think may have an unacknowledged deathwish. That's all she has to tell Mottom.
She wisely leaves out the part where Zoss appeared to her again since then and named her as his successor; Mottom asks her if she happens to be looking for a young man from the beginning, and when Killy replies that yes, it's her boyfriend, Mottom seems satisfied with the answer. Either she still believes that Zaid is the real successor, or she's been pretending to very consistently.
Anyway, Mottom chuckles at what an inane and stupid plan Killy was following, and then - seemingly apropos of nothing - starts letting Killy in on some cosmopolitics.
She would enjoy being able to use the Masterkey, but isn't going to take it. The reason for this is that if the other six Black Kings learned about this, they'd all attack her, and the Masterkey wouldn't give her enough power or resources to defeat all the others at once. Obviously; if it could do that, Zoss would have never been deposed. So, she doesn't want to upset the balance of power by taking the key, but also doesn't want to risk letting any of the others get it in case they're less cautious. That makes sense.
She follows this thought with some new and very disquieting information. Right now, the Black Kings REALLY can't afford any cracks in their cold alliance, because they already have a potential crisis on their hands. It turns out that the Seven are really more like the Six at this point, because one of them has had a change of heart. The kind that makes everything worse rather than better.
Not too long after the end of the war, THE JAGGANATH BITCH had an "angel of Yisun" appear to him in a dream and give him a sacred mission, along with thirty magical steel feathers. THE JAGGANATH BITCH found that the feathers followed him into the waking world, and that driving them into his own flesh made himself completely impervious to injury.
Well damn, I wonder why the angels didn't use that shit themselves? There's got to be more behind this part of the story.
Anyway, THE JAGGANATH BITCH was already the strongest of the last seven demiurgi. Since his spiritual experience and feather-acupuncture though, his power has increased to an almost impossible degree. He's been militarizing his worlds, constantly increasing not only his personal strength but the might of his armies and underlings as well. At this point, it might just take all of the other six working together to take him out if it comes to that. And it well might come to that, because the divine mission he was given was the destruction of the entire cosmos.
Uh huh. Well, our chief suspect for who that angel might have been is pretty obvious. And, if THE JAGGANATH BITCH is secretly being bankrolled by the Thorn Knights, that might explain where at least some of his new power and resources are coming from.
...if that IS what's going on, then the whole thing about the Thorn Knights fleeing into his territory and getting their avatars wrecked was likely bullshit. They might have been bringing Zaid TOWARD his territory so that he could then keep him on 1 Metatron's orders. When Mottom's agents intercepted them, they fled to SAFETY in Jagganath's part of Throne and informed him of the complication. He then either borrowed their avatars so he could throw them on the floor in front of the other demiurgi and pretend to have caught them, or just let them escape and grabbed a couple of empty spares to use as props.
In fact, given Mottom's emphasis on Jagganath's industrial base and arms development, he could be the one making those damned synths for the Thorn Knights in the first place. He could have literally grabbed those "intruders" off the assembly line of one of his own war factories.
Mottom could be lying or misinformed herself, of course. And it's possible that the angel who empowered Jagganath wasn't actually 1 Metatron or an agent of his. But, that's the most obvious reading based on what I know so far. If so, 1 Metatron might end up being the villain of this story rather than just a villain.
On a less important note, the illustrations for Mottom's speech show Jagganath without his armor and helmet. Turns out he's pretty human looking after all; just big and with a bunch of magitech cybernetics, including those angel feathers of invincibility. Given the previous visuals that suggested he used to be smaller, it's likely that he started out as a totally normal human. Noted.
Killy isn't sure why Mottom is telling her all this, and demands to know where Zaid is already. Mottom replies that, after some haggling and whinging back and forth between the Six (I doubt they included Jagganath in these negotiations lol), they decided to entrust Zaid's containment to Mammon. Being a greedy treasure-hoarder as per folklore, Mammon is the most defense focused of the Black Kings, so his fortified vault of Yre was deemed the most secure place to imprison a potential prophesized destroyer.
Hmm. During the tour sequence, it was mentioned that Mottom's empire also has extensive dealings with Mammon's interdimensional banking system. The phrasing suggested that she makes more use of it than most of the others. Add to that the fact that she was the one who ultimately agreed to hand over Zaid to him, and one starts to get the impression that Nadia and Mammon have better relations than most of the Seven do with each other. Though on the other hand, he didn't bother showing up to her urgent meeting, so maybe I'm reading too much into things.
Mottom muses about what the Masterkey might be doing in Killy's head, given that Zaid is in custody. Upon hearing Killy's clueless response, Nadia gets strangely didactic and philosophical.
Rambling about how once power finds its way into you, it turns you into its slave. Either Killy's situation is reminding Nadia of some aspect of her own past, or she's trying to trick her into thinking as much. One thing I wonder, though, is (assuming she's not lying about this part too) why everyone is so convinced that Zaid is Kill Six Billion Demons, when Allison was the one who got implanted. The prophecy might have used male pronouns, but given the particularities of language that seems like something they should know to account for. I don't know how Zoss could have...
...oh.
...ohhhhhhh.
...
Metatron you sneaky son of a bitch.
You knew that the demiurgi would assume the Thorn Knights had a good reason for capturing a specific human. So you ordered them to grab someone close to the actual successor as a decoy, and they fucking bought it hook line and sinker.
If I'm right about this - and I'm about 90% sure that I am - Metatron has a plan for fulfilling the prophecy in a way that suits him that involves encouraging Killy down a certain path. That's why he's having 2 Michael send White Chain to help protect and steer her.
Well played, big guy. Well played indeed.
...
Killy finally asks Nadia what she wants from her. Nadia replies that she has an offer to make to Killy, but before she does she needs to make her agree to some conditions. The first of those conditions is that, before giving her the pitch, Mottom will have to introduce Killy to Mottom's husband. Huh, I guess she's married. Wouldn't have thought. Second, Killy must be willing to accept eternal life.
Killy tells her she thinks she's just fucking with her again. In response, Mottom grabs some strange looking, fleshy fruit off of a plate a devil brings her just then and messily devours them, and in so doing displays how her glamour trick works.
It's an apple of youth type thing. Nadia doesn't use illusions to hide her true form, she eats those fruit to temporarily de-age herself. So, the form seen in public actually is Nadia Om's, just a younger version. I guess she was quite a looker back before she aged into a multi-millenarian walking corpse.
The other demiurgi we've seen in person didn't look corpselike the way Mottom does without the fruit, though. Maybe they each have different life-extension methods. Though to be fair, we only saw Incubus appear in a dream, so that might be an idealized younger version of himself just like the form Nadia reverts to. In person, he might be another rotting corpse munching on magic fruit to survive just like Nadia.
She makes Killy eat a small piece of one of the distressingly fleshy-looking fruits. That tiny piece is enough to de-age Killy down to what looks like age twelve or so. Mottom, notably, had to stuff four or five of them in her mouth to be reverted to what looks like her mid teens. Either it takes more of them the older you are, or relying on them too often just gives you diminishing returns after a point. In any case, I'm inferring that Nadia's immortality might not be sustainable, and that this is likely another fear that's driving her.
Killy lost her hair dye when she de-aged. Nice touch.
So, teeny Mottom literally drags tweeny Allison to a ball that's about to start. Either Mottom timed Allison's awakening to come right before this, or she's doing more time fuckery. That's the end of another chapter.
That was an eventful one alright! The plot is thickening as we learn about it. Mottom ended up being a much weirder and wackier character than I anticipated, though it remains to be seen how much of that is performative. She's trying to sell *some* kind of act to Killy, but I don't know what or why, or how much of her true self she's displaying alongside the theatrics. She has a persona she puts on for public appearances, so who knows how many other masks she can wear for manipulation purposes.
That husband was never mentioned until now. Like he's a secret from most of the cosmos. I've got kind of a bad feeling about this. The least bad possibility I can think of is that she turned him into a tree hundreds of years ago while letting everyone think he'd died, but Killy already knows Mottom can do that so I don't know what kind of point she could make by showing it to her. Yeah, there's something weirder and probably worse up with Mystery Husband. Until next time!
