Jotun of Boredom wrote:

Hopefully he gets to say 'Now, I may be blind, but...' before he goes.

V: please get some sleep. Well, trancing anyway. You look like a zombie.

"Contrary to popular opinion, good is not always dumb." I love it.

Good lord, V looks worse than any of the actual zombies.

Guest wrote:

She does, and he's my favorite character! Putting on my oracle hat, I expect an intervention in the future.

I hope we get to see some decent combat again soon. I get the distinct feeling that their current situation is going to involve flight rather than fight, though.

Whoa. V looks like hell. Elf's gonna work himself to death if she's not careful.

So, basically, there's only two fully functional members of the Order left. Roy's. . . yeah, V's gonna burn out here pretty quick, Belkar's suffering from the Mark to the point that he's pretty much an invalid, and Haley's got every thief and assassin in Greysky looking for her, which is probably gonna severely hinder what she's capable of accomplishing. Right now, it looks like Durkon and Elan are the only ones that are both healthy and completely sane.

. . .

Right now, it looks like Durkon is the only one who is both healthy and completely sane.

From the 'demon summoning' moneyshot we can see that they are in the middle of an extremely thick wood, so we can safely scratch 'completely sane' from the list of Durkon's current mental traits.

Which pretty much means it's up to the NP Cs or we're screwed.

(I kinda want Daigo and Kazumi to step up to bat a bit more. It's a quirk of mine - my favourite characters in a given piece of work are usually the secondary ones.)

Ask and you shall receive, man.

Poor Vaarsuvius.

587

That was BRILLIANT. "I'm a goddamn baby-making, life-taking MACHINE!" I'm going to be chuckling all day at that, and I hope no one asks me what I'm laughing about or I'll have to answer with the line "Why should I care how many people I have to kill? I can just make MORE in my TUMMY!" ...and that'll be hard to explain in court. (Also, Daigo's "I just hope I don't miss all the kicking..." heh.)

Well, if you have to keep bringing back pointless characters, might as well flesh their personalities out enough to justify it. Just in time too; I was at the end of my patience for those two no-longer-nameless soldiers.

I wonder if she can revive him by saying his full name?

Everytime I see NP Cs doing awesome things (like these last two strips), I feel happy inside.

588

And Shojo saves the day!

Well, OK, Hinjo helped...

"The jig is up, Kubota!"

Poor Daigo.

Huh. Mr. Burlew seems to take longer updating comics that are more talk-focused than action focused.

Yeah, it's a big day for gender equality all around.

Well, there are a lot of ways this could go... -Therkla betrays Elan, forcing the Order out of the fleet and back to a roving party. Tricky to continue from an island, though, and even harder to contact the rest of the party. Plus it's rather soon for another downer. - Therkla takes Kubota hostage. A big step for her, though. But if she did survive the resulting standoff, she'd gain a lot of supporting character cred. - The others arrive in the nick of time. - Elan turns out to be an illusion, or else generates an illusion, complicating matters fo the villains. - The ninjas roll a one.

Forcing a Sadistic Choice on a minion who's torn but trying to stay loyal? Does he want Therkla to turn against him?

Tangent128 wrote:

My guess is it's probably going to be some variation on this, for reasons Meta4 points out. I'm thinking that after that the tides'll turn on Kubota, and they'll leverage this to force Qarr to send the giant demon back (since I don't think that they have a realistic change of defeating him normally at the moment).

And then we'll switch back to Haley, probably.

Anyone else upset over the recent loss of a character in the latest comic? If you ask me, I felt Therkla's character was complete off-set by her crush on Elan. The amount of change in her over the whole crush was ridiculous and made no sense. All the way to the end - Elan was her only reason for living in life?

edited Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:04:14 PM by Admiral_Kelly

594

Wow, Elan did what we all wish we could do. What a jerk.

Kubota's going to be relying on the lack of evidence connecting him to Qarr. Hopefully the magistrate isn't so corrupt as to ignore the testimonies of two nobles (recently ennobled, which might be a problem), Elan (well, he is a foreigner and, um, Elan), Lien (I really don't see any good reason to ignore her, besides just being corrupt), and Hinjo (...besides just being REALLY corrupt).

I don't know how he's going to spin it regarding all the dead ninja, the Katos' wounds, etc, etc. It would be really satisfying to see him get his comeuppance now. I get the feeling that the arc isn't far along enough for him to be taken out now, and there's still some other things that have to happen, but I also think subverting that would be reall effective.

Personally, I'm hoping that Elan takes this opportunity to remind Kubota that he is NOT a paladin, but a chaotic good independent, and for that matter is currently well out of sight of even his lawful party members, rather less the paladins. With all the testimonies from the battle I doubt that the first words on anyone's mind when this was all over would be "I wonder if Kubota tried to surrender; besides, Elan can just say that the boat was already sinking and he certainly couldn't carry a person in heavy armor in addition to himself while swimming to shore, rather less a person who he suspected might still be armed and waiting to backstab him. Elan should really, really just kill him.

I get the feeling that the non-goodness of killing people after they surrender is more important than whether it's a Lawful or Chaotic thing to do. Plus Elan's not Chaotic Good, he's Chaotic Nice.

And of course there's the fact that Elan looks thoroughly defeated and settled for punching the guy in the face. That ain't the behavior of someone who's about to throw out the rules and dispense some Dirty Harry justice.

Agreed, Rallan. Kubota's Dangerously Genre-Savvy nature is coming into play again - he knows that Elan, capital-H Hero that he is, isn't going to kill someone who's surrendering to him. He didn't do it to Nale, and he's not going to do it to Kubota.

Although I do wonder how Elan plans to stop him from drowning. Can he hop them both back?

In a related story: I am now prepared to say with confidence that Erfworld runs on Rule of Cool, and this is by a wide margin the coolest thing the Tool's gotten to do.

Well, that was wrapped up pretty quickly.

I am utterly in love with V right now. Only I hope s/he turns out to be neither male nor female (maybe something in between?). This is because I want to be trisexual.

edited Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:25:39 by Lull The Conqueror

called it! Kinda.

Anyway...Qarr got away, so we'll probably be seeing him again. Wonder if he'll join the LG? Sabine's presence makes it somewhat unlikely, but who knows.

edited Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:30:43 by Haven