this time: mechanicsburg! coffee! gil’s zappy stick! and a lot of vanamonde, because i love him.
warnings for this one: child death. also, parental abuse – not for the volume itself necessarily, but because i got sidetracked into a rant halfway through about klaus’s parenting methods.
increasingly ludicrous rumors about what happened in sturmhalten. naturally.
a detail i’d previously missed: the von mekkhans have been running a bookshop as cover.
i managed to forget arella von mekkhan’s first name for so long that i ended up mentally referring to her as ‘vanamom’ for a long time.
“They were the worst of the worst - the Heterodyne’s hand-picked warriors. His bloodiest marauders, who rode with him for the sheer joy of the slaughter.They were the ones given the jägerdraught. That’s what all the stories say.”
“They took it freely. That’s in all the stories, too.”
My good good princes!!! (Gil is technically a Prince. I was gonna say “his royal relatives ordered him dead as an infant” bUT THAT PROBABLY APPLIES TO TARVEK AS WELL SO!!!)
We meet him as a very shouty zombie and it’s nothing like what we might have expected from the earlier mentions – or especially the novels where we meet him before. The prologue is set as he prepares to marry Euphrosynia.
He’s been carrying on a correspondence with her, which leads him to believe that she’ll come willingly. He was drawn both to her looks and to her intelligence before knowing who she was. Despite what the opera imposes, there’s no sense of destiny here – he doesn’t think of her as his destined bride in any sense. He just likes her.
He’s very annoyed with the Muses, who’ve been getting more obscure and allusive since the actual fighting ended, but relieved when they do talk to him directly. He also says that he would have taken care even without their warning – he is going to be bedding a Heterodyne!
He doesn’t like fighting, is surprised to find himself nervous before a treaty when he usually only feels that way before battle and is more in his element with diplomacy. He’s turning over the relative benefits of keeping everyone distracted by fashion vs taking half an hour to unbutton his pants – for the sake of peace, he concludes, he’ll wear the damn pants.
…And then we get him furiously melting his way through everything.
Of course, he’s corrupted, but the Jägers seem more familiar with this side of him. Dimo’s memory of “smasher and slasher” is hardly less terrifying. Not liking to fight doesn’t seem to mean he wasn’t good at it. He does say, in the prologue, that the point of war is to make it so unpleasant the enemy wants to stop. Brutality is a way of achieving that.
He takes Prende with him, too, which surprised me. He sees her as having been holding him prisoner, but when she begs he does take her. The Muses annoyed him, but he doesn’t treat Prende like an object – he’s hurt by her betrayal and accepts her plea.
Also, the explanation that Klaus’ overlay is him but not all of him makes me wonder about Andronicus. Especially if his consciousness is in the crown as I theorised before, there’s a possibility it’s only a partial copy of the bits a Heterodyne most wanted to preserve.
Meet Makeshift/Jack. Jack lives with her foster father “Uncle” in a junkyard in the outskirts of Rothaven, a once great automotive city but has since been abandoned and fallen apart. With a lot of the jobs gone, many resident turn to crime, including some of the politicians. Jack makes a combination of gadgets and mechanical battle armor with parts she gets in the junkyard to fight the bad guys as the superhero Makeshift! But with the bad guys becoming more and more high tech, will Makeshift be able to outsmart them?
This is another story I’ve been working on that I want to someday make into a cartoon. I’m still fleshing out the character designs but I’m happy with my progress so far!
Edit: a producer from Cartoon Network’s Steven’s Universe suggested I send it to them once I’m finished polishing the story, this could be good!
Hey, how many of y’all are caught up with Girl Genius? Because now having seen him, I think X is just Y having been exposed to extradimensional energy and spent years in another dimension only to atemporally arrive here recently, but I don’t have anyone to share the theory with. (X and Y under cut for spoils, + images for further explanation)
X = Kjarl Thotep, Y = Dimitri Vapnoople
I mean, it feels almost too obvious so I’m not sure. Their builds are even extremely similar, Kjarl’s is just an inflated version.
(And I think he IS legitimately good now, not pretending for subversion purposes, but I’d understand if not. Him having been the one to heal his own mind after not recognizing himself, so he’d hop in the portal and become himself, is just delicious Homestucky time shenanigans.)
I don’t expect to keep having Girl Genius theories or start classpecting it so don’t bug me to make more Xo
EDIT: Added a Kjarl Thotep/Mad page to the wiki for this I guess. I can’t believe he didn’t have one before.
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Based on the hour I would say the situation escalated rather quickly. One hour and 5 minutes after Agatha arrived Mr. Tock and (very soon) Dr. Beetle are dead. And this wasn’t her fault.
They were surrounded from all of the sides possible, I’m pretty sure Baron had some clanks even under the floor.
I love this little “Don’t Touch” right under the lever Merlot pulled, it such a nice way to keep things a secret in the lab.
Dolokhov is already writing a report, Gil is protecting the goldfish and Beetle looks like he is considering simply running away as the best method of dealing with this crisis.
The Other have a lot of teeth… Hive Engine, even if in dormant state, is a pretty impressive piece of machinery. Definitely not to be brought to the heart of university - but I guess since they have some corpses on display in the main courtyard nobody should be too shocked by this.
I wonder what was Baron expecting, but certainly not to find a secret part of the lab. Treat your employees good or they will expose your machinations and secrets!
Gil is still holding the fish tank, what a kind guy.
Quite a mess:Gil caught the goldfish, locals are terrified (Agatha already know who will be responsible for this accident), Dolokhov tries to reach Gil (with his four arms!), Baron seems to be unimpressed and not surprised at all.
There’s a cannister of phlogysten (a fire-like substance - you can read about it’s theory here) and a book titled “How I Do It?”. Indeed, it’s a good question.
The filing system is really easy - it’s all in one, icluding one terrified goldfish, a cactus (it’s always nice to have green plants in the workplace), louse notes, books and black paint right above Gil’s head.
Agatha starts Heterodyning - she’s humming a strange melody while thinking about science. It helps her with her concentration but Merlot clearly isn’t a fan.
