Headscratchers / The Last Halloween

Mona's Monster?

The monster on this page is strongly suggested to be it, but instead of immediately finishing Mona off on the recent page, it's protecting or keeping her safe. It's suggested that it's not seeking imortality (Who Wantsto Live Forever?), so what's its plan?

• While it's intentionally ambiguous at the moment, there's a good chance that it either just wants to live a normal human lifespan on Earth instead of in the Shadow World (since the implications of immortality in this story don't seem to actually be all that great, given Ringley's speech about surviving the death of the Universe), or that it's similar to Robert in having a complicated relationship with its human.
• The monster seems to be going through its own character arc, learning and changing as the story goes on. At first it automatically wants to kill Mona, like most of the other monsters do, but then she escapes. As it follows her, it kills off other monsters that might hurt her (and itself) out of self preservation. However, when Mona proves capable of defeating a monster that her monster can't stop, it begins to respect and admire her... maybe even like her. So it decides to help her instead of killing her... for now at least. It could be that the monster has decided it doesn't want to be immortal after all (after hearing Robert's spiel about how immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be) or the monster could still be planning to kill Mona, but will wait until she has lived out most of her natural life first.
• I have another theory, but since it (and any other answer to this question) is highly speculative, it probably belongs on a WMG page.

• How the heck is humanity so utterly devastated, given that monsters can be killed by good old physical violence (and even through perfectly mundane, non-magical means, as the two women on this page http://www.last-halloween.com/posts/107 illustrate)? At the very least, there should be plenty of armed forces and such who got through things just fine; if you can kill a monster with an axe, you can kill tons of them with a platoon of men armed with assault rifles.
  • Story-telling conventions. It has to come down to The Chosen One to save the world, even if, logically, the world should be capable of saving itself.
  • Monsters are a lot more varied than humans in their size, physiology, and vulnerability. Some are the size of elephants, or bigger. Some are able to kill dozens of humans with little trouble, some are very difficult to kill themselves, and some are both. Monsters can avail themselves of immortality (while humans apparently can't); an unknown number already have done so, and generally the number will only increase as time goes on. Monsters can also retreat to the safety of the Shadow Realm pretty much as they please. It's also been revealed that at least some monsters had some inkling this was happening soon; the humans definitely did not. So overall, the monsters have the advantage. Some military forces would probably make some dent. But since there is approximately one monster (and possibly more) for every single human (including every human in every military force), and since many appeared nearly instantaneously, it's likely that much of the world's military personnel will have been decimated (or worse) before they could even react. And it would only go downhill from there. Being a soldier won't save you if a monster appears next to your bed, or in the mess hall, or in the bathroom, or in pretty much any time or place other than while you are fully alert and have a sufficiently strong weapon in arm's reach. So, initially at least, their death rate was probably not much lower than everyone else's — meaning it's likely that a majority of them were dead by the end of the night — making coordination and logistics more difficult thenceforth. And one must also consider the effects of infrastructural damage.

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