Kill Six Billion Demons III: "Seeker of Thrones" (part six)
Killy and the BadMen follow Charon through his tunnel and come up beneath a movable floor tile in the outer labyrinth of Yre. Speaking of Charon, it occurred to me since the last reading that Hades was the god of gold, gems, and wealth as well as the lord of the dead. If Charon has been sneaking people into Yre for a sufficiently long time, I can see how that might have inspired some Greek prophets who then proceeded to mangle him into a psychopomp figure. Granted, the inspiration could still be going the other way, but it seems less likely now. Does he know we named a moon after him? Killy, tell him we named a moon after him, he'll probably like that.
I appreciate that each of the Black Seven seems to have their own architectural style. Mottom's palace ship looked sort of Eastern European up top and pseudo-Egyptian in the lower decks. We only got a brief look at Incubus' lair, but the parts of it that weren't covered in slime and filth looked vaguely Indo-Iranian. The inside of Mammon's fortress of Yre, meanwhile, looks like a Gothic cathedral. And also has his face plastered all over it.
Until this panel I didn't realize Charon was that big.
I might assume that those statues were just Kind People art that Mammon is fond of, but from what we've heard about his contempt for the rest of his species that seems unlikely. So yeah, those are all most likely statues of Mammon himself. Dude likes his own face.
The only sign of life, meanwhile, is the corpse of a Priest of the Count keeled over at a desk, a paper in front of him. He looks to have been elderly, so the implication is that he had a heart attack or something while taking inventory of the stuff laying around in this room. His body is also all withered and half-rotted, so the implication there is that no one missed him and came looking in...several days at the very least, probably longer. The message is pretty clear; Mammon's cult are fanatical about ensuring that every last coin and knick-knack stays exactly where it's supposed to be year after year after year, but they can't spare the time or mental energy to spare for their own people. Presumably, this is just as Mammon wishes.
Killy asks where all the guards are, and Cio irritably tells her that Mammon doesn't bother keeping enough personnel around to man this entire fool-sized labyrinth. The room they're in probably hasn't had any staff coming through besides heart attack guy in centuries. Cio is really, really short tempered, but considering the sequence of events leading up to this mission, and the nature of the mission itself, I can't quite blame her.
Charon isn't as sure about this, though. He came into this room during a recent burglary himself, and he remembered clearing it out. How come all this stuff moved back into it? The Priests of the Count aren't normally incompetent enough to put more treasure in a room that stuff's gone missing in. Well, speak of the devil-that-isn't-Charon-himself, Suuze the acrobat tries to pocket one of the gold coins laying around on a desk only for it to extend its jaws and tentacles and try to rip her fingers off. She tosses the little monster away before it can get her, but doing so prompts the ones posing as chairs, desks, and dead priests to attack as well.
Mimics?
Like, D&D mimics?
Seriously?
I guess it does make sense for Mammon to create a guardian creature like that, and thinking like Mammon could have led the author along those lines just as an inevitability. So, I guess you can call it a case of all pyramids looking the sa...
“Little known fact: Mammon’s interior designer was the infamous warlock Gari Gy’Gax.”
:/
Well, I tried.
On the bright side, the floor tile scorpions are pretty cool. Lucky Felicia's master cat burglar instincts guide her to go stumbling back away from the attacking mimics with all the agility of a cow right onto a patch of floor tile scorpions, and they're pretty cool.
Felicia is "lucky" in this case in that Cio was ready with some origami shurikens. If she hadn't nailed all the scorpions right then, they'd have been down the party...erm...what role is she again? Mascot? Well, they'd have been down a party member.
The other devils are meanwhile fighting back against the mimics, and unsurprisingly winning. If the mimics were dangerous enough combatants to outfight experienced mercenaries, after all, they wouldn't need to bother with the mimicry. Killy fights as well as any of them, and surprisingly she doesn't even use portal-blasts like she did in the last fight she was forced into. Just seemingly mundane swordsmanship.
That said, her halo is flaring, her eyes are going pink, and in the next panel we see Incubus looming over Killy's shoulder as if guiding her. It's not just Key magic that he's teaching her to use then; he's also letting her borrow his other skills. We do know that one of his titles is "the sword king," and it's been implied that he and Meti used to be a thing, so he definitely knows how to use those things.
They manage to deal with all the attackers, seemingly without serious injuries, and resolve to proceed through the fortress without touching anything. That may be difficult to hold everyone to, given the crew of greedy mercenary devils, but it should also be a self-correcting problem.
Also, one minor detail I like is that the devils comment about these shapeshifting beasts being new to them, and the less-cringey supplemental texts for these pages confirm that they're a brand new addition to Mammon's defences. And, that makes sense. After what Yabalchoath did, it would defy belief if Mammon didn't shore up the defences with unconventional new tricks. That also invites one to wonder where he got these creatures from so recently, though. Did he create them himself with his demiurgic magic? Did he commission some brilliant think tank of magicians to gengineer them for him and then kill them all to keep it a secret? Are they natural creatures from some bizarre, monster-filled world within his empire?
It's the mark of good worldbuilding, when such a minor detail inspires that kind of speculation. It's almost enough to make me forgive the author for putting literal D&D mimics in his comic.
Meanwhile, White Chain and Nyave are getting coffee.
On one hand, White Chain would have been a pretty useful person to have along for the raid. She tanked a shot from Mottom in the last volume, and there's a pretty good chance they'll need someone who can tank one from Mammon by the end of this one. On the other hand, White Chain can't even look at most of their recruits without trying to pick a fight with them, and I suspect that at least a few of them would love the chance to backstab a Concordant Knight themselves if one came up. So, I guess it makes sense that she would stay behind and just guard Nyave and the ship.
...where's Princess, though? Hmm. Well. As Vladok, he was using his mighty ebon devil powers to sit around in a diabolical homeless camp and try to poach treasure off of lone humans, I guess he's pretty unambitious and risk-averse, at least by devil standards. So, him not wanting to risk what's left of himself on a mission like this would fit the character.
As they drink, Nyave asks White Chain how she thinks the others are doing. White Chain just murmurs darkly to herself about how she should be there to protect the Key, how Killy is too much of a fool to be trusted with it unsupervised, etc. I'd normally be annoyed at White Chain for that second bit, but given Killy's recent turn for the tweaker I can't really blame her. When Nyave tries to change the subject and tell White Chain that she's always wanted to meet an angel, she's heard so many stories about them, White Chain tells her that the stories are all false, angels actually suck, and she's stupid for believing otherwise. In fact, she shouldn't believe anything at all. Humans believing in things is what ruined the entire multiverse, so she should try and be slightly better than the rest of her kind and just stop it.
...damn. I don't know if Incubus was planning on this interaction specifically, but it couldn't have worked out better if he had.
White Chain doesn't know about Killy's pact with Incubus. So, from her perspective, it looks like Killy just started going hyperactive megalomaniac the instant she got her first taste of victory and started believing in herself. With White Chain's recent conversations with Michael and the thorn knights fresh in her mind, it would be hard for her to not see this as another data point in favor of the "humans are always corrupted by power if they acquire even a tiny bit of it, expect nothing of them and you will still be disappointed" worldview. Killy seemed like an innocent worth taking pity on, and then like a heroine who could perhaps become a force for good, but then - as soon as she had a small victory - she started acting more and more like the Black Kings. I predicted that White Chain would also get a "resisting corruption" arc at some point in the volume, and it seems like it's now being catalyzed by Killy's own.
I like how, just like Killy and Cio's own weaknesses made them vulnerable to the initial temptation that started the downward spirals, White Chain's also resulted from her own biases and blind spots. If she stopped to consider what it's like for a human to get impaled and flung around by a mass of blood-drinking vines, she would probably have thought that Killy's erratic behavior was down to post-trauma rather than power-drunkenness. At the very least, she'd have been concerned rather than contemptuous when Killy's behavior transformed after an experience like that, and that concern could have led to discovering the truth. To an angel though, getting your avatar poked full of holes is just an annoyance, and even if White Chain knows that it's different for humans I don't think she's internalized it.
Anyway, Nyave asks White Chain what the fuck, and White Chain tells her what the fuck. But Nyave also has a pretty solid comeback to her answer.
I'd like to credit this to Nyave's insight and good people sense, but...come the fuck on, just LOOK at White Chain in that panel. It doesn't exactly take a professional diplomat to identify the stone-ash face of depression when it's right in front of you, or to infer that any insults coming from it are probably projection.
Hmm. The under-the-comic excerpt for this page:
““The king Au Vam was known for keeping a peculiar member of his council – a low-born scullion, who would serve tea for his grand war parties. This country maid kept the company of ten of the most powerful generals in the Yellow City, and was privy to their most tenebrous plans, yet was scarcely sixteen summers of age and educated not a whit.
Her purpose was thus: if the grand designs and monolithic schemes of any of these mighty and august men could not pass the base judgement of a girl of sixteen summers, they were immediately discarded.
Thus did Au Vam win nearly all of his battles.””
On one hand, it's literally just paraphrased from the Evil Overlord List. On the other, if you just switch the playing field from war strategy to psychology, it's pretty fitting.
White Chain responds to Nyave by deliberately misunderstanding her and taking the word "dream" literally even though she knows damned well what she meant, and just lectures her about how angels don't dream, because angels don't sleep, because they aren't pathetic useless humans.
...White Chain, you're memeing, right? That's a Juggernaut Star line. You're talking like him ironically, right? Like, you're about to draw a spikey red wojak on Nyave's napkin or something. Right?
Just then, White Chain and Nyave's attentions are both called to a commotion across the cafe. Looks like the proprietor hasn't been paying his protection to whichever gang has laid claim to this neighbourhood. Strangely, there's a fallen angel leading the shakedown. That...seems awfully menial for an entity as powerful as an angel, unless this café owner is some kind of underboss himself. Which, to be fair, he might be; it's a nice looking business in a bad looking neighbourhood, after all.
The fact that this fallen one is not only doing crime, but doing such a bottom-rung thuggery TYPE of crime, just makes it that much worse for White Chain. Which in turn is going to make it worse for the other angel. Seriously, poor shmuck 46 Nice Place You Got Shame If Anything Happened To It over here just had to arrive riiiiiiiight when White Chain was going off about angelic dignity and incorruptibility. This is going to get ugly.
Back to Yre! They've found a way of avoiding the mimics, and avoiding letting anyone get close enough to treasure to succumb to temptation and triggering the mimics. I'm kind of surprised, though, that this crew of powerful devils don't have a more efficient solution than this one:
I guess there just isn't enough room for Cio's origami pterosaur to flap its wings in here? I guess? Still, we've got multiple experienced devils, some of them in the powerful-by-default green and gold castes, and nobody else has a flight power? It just surprises me.
So, Suuze the acrobat is jumping around attaching cables for the others to climb after her on. This continues for some time. I'm going to show you another panel here, not because it's important, but because it's a curiosity:
Those are fountains of gold coins.
...
How is this supposed to work, I wonder? Several possibilities occur to me.
a) the gold is enchanted to act like water, being magically sucked up the pipes back into the statues' hands.
b) the gold isn't enchanted; there's a WOMD-grade vacuum cleaner engine sucking the coins back up so hard that it doesn't matter that they're a mass of wide, rigid, highly dense solids.
c) those fountains are actually portals leading to Mammon's banking hubs, and this is all fresh profit coming into Yre from the multiverse.
d) the coins are all mimics, and they've been trained to extend their little legs and climb back up the pipes and retract them again time after time after time.
Feel free to vote in the comments. I'm pretty sure you all already know which way I'm leaning, myself.
...
They reach an area with more open, column-free space than before, which means it'll be hard to cross by cable. There's no way in hell they can descend and walk this part, though, because:
Mimic recursion effect. At least they aren't very smart.
Well, that, or the actual trapdoor down to the central vault is in that floor, and the Priests of the Count just packed the room above it with chairs to fuck with intruders. That would definitely be true to the spirit of Gy'Gax the warlock.
Suuze manages to climb all the way across the Hall of Infinite Mimics and attach a cable bridge for the others. Killy is bringing up the rear, presumably because no one likes the attitude she's been having. Actually, that turns out to be an understatement: Suuze dislikes Killy's attitude so much that once it's just her left on the cable, Suuze surreptitiously cuts the knot to send her plummeting down into what Killy had best hope are really just psych-out chairs.
Killy starts to fall, but once again Incubus helps her out. Well, maybe. "Falling to her death" was exactly the situation that first got Killy to start using the Masterkey, so I think that probably would have happened again with or without outside assistance. Still, it was worth his involvement just for the second panel here:
Going by his expression and body language, Incubus' reaction appears to be completely genuine. Like, even he was actually blindsided by the sheer, pigheaded pettiness of this, and he's almost as pissed off at Suuze as Killy is.
Anyway, he improves Killy's own teleportation skills by teaching her to think in portals. Which also lets her strike back from an angle that even Suuze the acrobat is too surprised by to evade. She still would have managed to recover from it, though, if her foot hadn't banged against the wall and alerted the mimics that there was an ankle hanging down within reach.
We don't see Suuze getting eaten, but it's apparently gory enough to actually make Killy vomit once she snaps out of her Incubus cocaine fugue. The other devils are eerily nonchalant about what just happened. Their reactions are, essentially, "yep, you sure did kill her." In a moment of semi-clarity after the carnage she caused snapped her awake, Killy asks if the others saw Suuze try to do the same to her. If they did, they don't seem to really care one way or the other. At most, Charon remarks that it's not usually until the end of a heist that they start Pardoner's Tale-ing each other.
Okay, "do as thou wilt," sure. But why didst Suuze wilt to do thus? Killy isn't after the same loot that the rest of them are. Her Key wouldn't have exactly been easy to recover from under a pile of mimics (especially if some of them decided to turn themselves into copies of it ). Was it really just because Killy was being too overbearing? It actually seems pretty likely that someone might have put Suuze up to this.
Well, to be fair, they're robbing one of the dark overlords of the multiverse. The devils probably all just assumed that their party included spies and secret agents from one powerful interest or another. Heck, maybe all of them are. So, from their perspective, it could just be "I guess Suuze's patron wanted Killy dead. Sucks for Suuze's patron." That would make sense.
Killy goes Karen mode again and asks if they're all just going to kill each other before even reaching the goal. Don't they even remember why they're here? This is her mission. She hired them. This just gets her a bunch of dirty looks, and a reminder from Cio that no, she really didn't hire them. Cio did. And, really, it was the name and memory of Yabalchoath more than anything else that got people interested.
Then, Cio says this:
First of all: seriously, what is Oscar's deal? It's like he's compelled to say the most painful thing possible to anyone around him at all times. How does this guy even stay in charge of his little gang if he's constantly antagonizing everyone in sight?
...hmm. The most obvious answer to that question would be "by being just that tough." Red devils are supposed to be the soldier caste, with fewer magic tricks and more brute strength and skill at arms. We haven't really seen Oscar fight yet; he was the last one through the tunnel at the beginning, and so only got to play a bit role in that mimic battle. All things considered...he's probably a hell of a lot more dangerous in battle than his appearance and mannerisms would suggest.
But anyway. If we're talking about devils and their personality disorders, Cio what the fuck.
I was almost ready to say I was wrong in my earlier assessment of devilkind and take Cio at her word now. If only because none of the other devils seem to take offense to her pronouncement here. But then I remembered that Ciocie Cioelle only exists because Yabalchoath's husband cared enough about her to spend time and resources gathering up mask shards and lovingly attaching them back together. And then kept her locked up in the hopes that her original personality would resurface. That second part was hardly a good thing to do, of course, but it was also the exact opposite of "devils are solitary animals and don't have loved ones." Jabba's a monstrously evil fucker, but he obviously loves someone. And tried to bring them back even knowing that in doing so he'd probably be weakening his own political position by having her around to take back control of the Gilded Cage. He was willing to give up money and power to have his wife back.
And then like...devils have traditional songs. Traditional stories. Even if its basis was borrowed from humans (unavoidable for human-created artificial life forms), they've still made it their own. They have a culture. Asocial creatures wouldn't develop that. They'd have no reason to, and no ability to even if it struck some of their fancies.
Even if devils are innately amoral or unempathetic, that's not the same thing as what Cio said.
...there's also an even weirder detail here, come to think of it. In an earlier panel, Cio says that the other devils are here because they want to be, because they want money, and "because their rotten king let them off the leash." Their rotten king. Not our rotten king. As if she doesn't consider herself a part of devilkind, even while allegedly speaking for it.
She's starting to remind me of one of those wannabe-nihilists who can walk through charity auctions and blood drives pointing out the selfish, destructive secret motives that they're sure everyone has behind what they're doing. Sure, the devils she's surrounded with right now actually ARE selfish and destructive, but - as White Chain told us earlier - these types are the lowest of the low even among devilkind; the devils who even the major gangs are reluctant to work with. And, seemingly, these are the types who Yabalchoath always surrounded herself with. Or, perhaps, they're the only ones who were willing to cluster around Yabalchoath.
And...the fact that Cio clearly isn't happy about this, and aspires to something different is ITSELF an important data point. Unless something really weird happened when Jabba was putting her mask back together and she got mixed up with human soulfire or something, this means that there IS more than just greed and lust in the devilish heart. Because if there wasn't, she wouldn't have the ability to feel this way.
I feel like the comic was also being very deliberate in putting this scene right after White Chain's freakout at the café. The insistence that angels are INHERENTLY one thing while evidence to the contrary is literally strolling in the restaurant door behind her. And getting weird and self-hating about both what they're supposed to be, and about what they're not supposed to be. All while dancing around the false equation of "supposed to be" and "are." Cio's version of this is a little more convincing, because she's at least surrounded by other devils who do act like she says, but White Chain's thing is similar enough to encourage the reader to think a little harder about Cio's story and realize that she's only working slightly less hard to deny reality than White Chain is.
And then, right on cue, the answer arrives in a communique from ground control.
Incubus isn't a devil. He's a human. Specifically, he's a member of the same human clique that created the devils and gave them their place in multiversal society.
This isn't what they are. It's what they've been taught that they are. They've just been working to make it a reality from there.
Maybe the angels are the same way, just with the Multiplicity substituted for the Demiurgi. It's not like the old gods weren't flawed in the same ways that humans are, going by literally every single story that we've been told about them.
Anyway, back to the heist. The party reaches a door.
Lucky Felicia walks up to the door and starts busying herself at the mechanical lock on the lower right corner under the giant screaming demon face. Cio, looking tormented, explains that the fractal space of Yre is arranged in the 4D equivalent of concentric rings, with these face-doors marking the end of the "cathedral" ring and marking the beginning of the "MC Escher physics malfunction" ring.
Sounds like even Killy's teleportation won't work in the next zone. On the bright side, Incubus might have a little more trouble reaching into her head through there, hopefully.
Cio continues to explain that unless Felicia has some absolutely insane power that no one knew about, the lock will take her multiple hours to pick. Meanwhile, the giant face will start screaming in five seconds. Starting from when they came close to it. Loud enough to bring Mammon's entire army to this hallway from wherever they're scattered around Yre.
That's why they brought Felicia along to "open the door." And why they deliberately hired someone annoying who they wouldn't get attached to.
...
Hmm. The door IS designed to open if you sacrifice someone to it, though?
Oscar's solution is the obvious one, then. Bring a captive or dupe along who isn't actually part of the gang. This defence wouldn't keep out any of the enemies that Mammon is most worried about. Pretty much all the major players in Throne are ruthless enough to do that, provided they knew ahead of time that they'd need a victim. Maybe that's all it is; you're not expected to know in advance that you'll need a sacrifice, so you're forced to choose a party member on the spot.
...except that even that doesn't work, if there are devil bandits out there who already expect each other's betrayal at the drop of a hat. Feeding the door wouldn't make them any more mistrustful of each other than they already were, would it?
I suspect that what the door really does is make sure that anyone who makes it through is unscrupulous enough to be bought. I'm kind of thinking of the villain from the Conan story "The Tower of the Elephant," who literally uses treasure as ablative armour against assassins. The door ensures that the only enemies that can get to Mammon will be ones like the devil bandits, who he can easily bribe.
...
Killy, as you may recall, has strong feelings about feeding girls to giant stationary mouth-monsters for personal gain. But, unfortunately...
Assuming direct control.
Ground control has her space shuttle on remote control. Just sit tight in that tin can and let Houston execute the manoeuvres.
Cio sort of looks away and tries to distance herself from it as Oscar grapples Felicia. She manages to put a few bullets through his torso with a concealed pistol of hers, but - as I suspected earlier - he's much tougher than he looks. The bullet holes don't even slow him down. He hurls her into the door, and Felicia's luck runs out.
Cio stares at the floor. Killy stares blankly ahead, her eyes Incubus-pink.
I'll call that a post.
