Annotated 27-25
“No one will probably see anything like this again, either. I mean, I don’t think this solution is going to scale well enough for us to release it as an add-on.”
So part of HR thinks of what happened to Ferris as a “terrible, unfortunate accident,” but another part thinks, “gee, sometimes dumb luck just drops a burst of inspiration into your lap! When life gives you arms, make arm-ade.”
A discarded draft of Chapter 25 implied that HR briefly considered sacrificing Carol for this if Ferris hadn’t become available. Even in that version, he rejected the idea, out of either humanity or practicality. But if you don’t think he’d ever be capable of doing such a thing to his only important human relationship, you probably haven’t read the climax of the story lately.
Nice use of Mrs. Nesbitt for the commentary pic!
I admit, I find it somewhat hard to believe that even a part of him thinks it was a terrible accident/one of those things that just needs to be done.
I also wonder if he couldn’t have just, say, had a big blood drive at the company and swiped a pint or two of the bags from the people in order to get what he needed for this.
Probably needed some of the fleshy parts too, so harder to ask for that in a drive. XD
In this job market? Not really
Just pay them in Honor Points.
I am thinking more along the lines of: He’s using Death magic. A pound of flesh is just trappings. Killing the guy who loved his creation? That was the real component.
Yeah, HR was justifying his actions. ‘I had no choice’ is the default for most murderers
Sorry if you’ve answered this before, but do the arcane words said here have any meaning or internal logic, or did you just use random letters to make nonsense words?
‘No one has ever seen this before,’ adds a lot of gravity to this already cool and disturbing page. Shows just how much power GR has, both in the arcane and really, over Carol. I was really looking forward to learning how HR gained these abilities but that was left a mystery.
I love that it was left ambiguous! Not because I wasn’t also very interested in knowing, but because it leaves HR ambiguous and I think that serves to make him a much more interesting character.
For all that both characters and readers can, have, and will judge him they’re forced to judge him based on a set of assumptions that the story calls into question. And the character most qualified to know whether those assumptions are true is HR.
I get the sense that the authors didn’t really intend for that to be how it worked out, though. In that sense it might have been a mistake, but I think the story benefits from it.
Someone must have posted this joke the first time around, but: “I shall call him, ‘Mini Me’.”