Annotated 11-19
Panel 2 originally had some last words for Best, “I don’t want to die,” but they seemed redundant with the last page and his expression here.
Even in our world, something feels supernatural about sinkholes. And there’s something… else beneath this one that Best is falling toward, the nature of which wouldn’t be revealed until much later. But even then, Phil and I knew it was tied to the series’ “multidimensional” premise. He hit me with the idea for an amnesiac Best a few pages before this.
Kudos to John for, well, so many things, including the fantastic work on the chess pieces and giant golems and the challenge of drawing reflections. But here I’m impressed by the way he was able to believably collapse the entire structure.
Seeing how this is probably the last chance to ask this: Why did the whole structure collapse? Was a self destruct initiated? Was it a consequence of destroying the basin? Or just a coincidence?
Yes, yes, no. A tremendous amount of magical power was flowing through that artifact– had to be, to reveal people’s futures– and destroying it left that power with nowhere to go but toward more destruction.
And nobody noticed the collapsed sinkhole looks like a basin – a basin of destiny?
You know, at this point of the original run I pretty much expected a Sky Elf to enter through a portal and ask “Dudes, where’s our temple?” It didn’t (and still doesn’t) make any sense to me that they would just leave behind all the stuff that was inside the temple and never pay the least bit of attention to it afterwards.
I concede that we never explained it, but I think our implication was that impressive as all this is on a human scale, it’s still a discarded rough draft compared to what the sky elves are capable of now. And if there’s one thing all three elf tribes have in common (shit elves aside), it’s isolationism. The sky elves kept to their sky island home for a long, LONG time, with only the wake-up call they got in Chapter 4 and a nascent political movement among their young starting to change that policy a little. Tourism, even to landmarks of their past, has not really been their thing.
I could also theorize that since it housed an object capable of telling the future, a winter elf specialty, it might have been the result of some ancient collaboration. The current state of elven isolationism might imply racial tensions even among each other, with no more than what amounts to a stiff professional courtesy. It might not even be at that level, I’ll admit I’ve forgotten the reception Syr’Nj got and don’t feel particularly inclined to look it up.
Hey Best! Do your impersonation of Hans Gruber!
So, I hate to be “that guy”, but there’s this ancient temple, and a maze inside leading to an amazing artifact.
But there’s also a hole in the ground just outside the temple, leading to that same room :D :P
Sure, but was that hole human-sized before the implosion began? ;-)
It might be a feature, not a bug. If the temple was to train the young, then the Sky Elves might have used the hole to drop down and surprise the initiates who had to puzzle their way there. They can teleport, sure, but the room may have been warded against it to keep the whippersnappers from skipping ahead.
What I want to know is how they got the god rays from the hole to hit the artifact correctly regardless of time of day or season….
Amnesiac Best was much cooler than normal Best. I liked him, and when I realized who he was my first thought was: “Crap. Well, maybe he won’t regain his memory.” I guess that’s kind of a nasty thing to think, but I thought it. When he did regain his memory, I thought: “Well, maybe he will have learnt something from this and won’t be as much of an entitled jerk.” Again, I was disappointed. Maybe he was a little less entitled, but it was barely noticeable.
OH! I just assumed that the “anonymous grave under a dead tree” was left unexplained as a “well that happens much later” thing, but… well, there’s the dead tree, and with the assumption that he’s dead and lack of resources, the best Our Heroes can do at this point is a barely-marked grave. so… Best didn’t *end* in that grave. XD WELL PLAYED!
Well, I went back and checked, and the hole seems to have been the source of the “Epic Lighting” in [ENDROOM] from when they first saw it, and nothing seems to have fallen from the ceiling at the point Frigg nominates it as [EskaypExMachina]. So my guess would be that yes, it probably was :D
I was going to add that I’ve played that D&D scenario a number of times, so it’s a trope in its own right.
Now, the real question is, what is the official name of that trope?
Pretty close to “Collapsing Lair” + “No Ontological Inertia.” Not textbook though – there is a decent reason for the collapse after all. I like the explanation quite well – I like it when magic has logical consequences.
“Gate? What gate?”