My impression is that it’s meant to be somewhat obvious by now. Cultist comes in, gives Byron The Madness. Byron kills brothers and the cultist (and the rest of the village?); cut to now.
But yeah, horrific as it may be, it’d be….interesting…to actually get to see all that happening.
Actually we had a flashback a while ago showing us Bayen and Brayen both being berserk. So I’m thinking the cultist gave the madness to a few random people including them and Byron and then let them kill each others until there was only one left. It’s also possible Byron wasn’t originally affected by the madness but got contaminated by it while killing the brothers (it has been said to be contagious after all, between Harky freaking out in the arena and the cultist doing rituals so as to not be affected).
Yeah, if Baby Byron had been patient zero, it’s hard to see how he could have been the sole survivor, and why the madness would have subsided in him. My guess is he was on the fringes of the whole shebang, like in that Crossed comic where the kid hides in a barrel and watches the chaos engulf everything, including his dad and his brother.
Maybe my memory is faulty but I don’t know if they ever established that the Madness is contagious or that’s just a heavily believed myth that even Harky believed.
In the shattered panel, there are three sets of glowing eyes, and two murders in silhouette. Several different weapons appear to be involved, so it’s reasonable to conclude that this is more than one, and as many as five, individual berserkers being shown. It’s hard to say for sure about all of them, but several of the shards can clearly be attached to those next to them; if this holds true for each of the mouths next to glowing eyes, then at least one of the infected has a mustache, making it definitely not Bayen, Brayen or Byron.
I note a wavy-bladed dagger on the ground in the first panel. It is being not grasped by a dead hand. I don’t think that the carnage was started by the villagers or by Byron.
1. It IS being grasped by a dead hand (or a sleeping hand, but that’s a little less likely).
2. We already knew this was started by cultists, to be honest.
Obviously cultists involved by that dagger/corpse.
The real question becomes…
Does Byron remember killing any of them?
Did he kill any of them? He may have killed few, if any of them. But the rage can make remembering hard. And being a kid, even watching someone die in front of you can make the mind do funny things. Add in cultist shennanigans, and who knows what REALLY happened.
Could be that he holds guilt for slaying his brothers while enraged, when he never touched them. And the cult’s curse uses that to twist him into a mindless beserker.
He has at least one clear memory of Bayen and Brayen being berserk. He may killed them before going berserk, and contracted the madness as a result. Also last panel seems to point to him having vivid flashes of memory from when he was berserk.
So, we know Byron at least remembers Bayen and Brayen going berserk – but it seems his other memories may be confused at best.
Easy to imagine Baby Byron coming round from the madness in the grove full of bodies and his mind putting 2 and 2 together and making five – “They’re all dead, and I’m alive – Oh Gods I killed them all!”
For now we’re left to wonder how what he THINKS he did stacks up against what he ACTUALLY did.
I don’t think he think he killed them all. Me think how many he killed is “too many” even knowing he wasn’t the only one affected by the madness. Also he IS sure he personally killed the two who were the closest to him, and they were the ones responsible for killing the others dead people. Trauma is already big without adding killing part of the villagers himself.
whoah. Okay, brotherly tussling straight into full-blown and permanent PTSD.
You know, I don’t think I really need to see the whole “everyone i know and love getting dismembered all around me, and possibly BY me” in-between bit. This is…enough.
But here’s the really maddening part;
Byron was NEVER A BOY IN A VILLAGE (*)
Byron is the creation(*) of a man put into a Tank in Sepia World, who selected some stats for an adult human warrior, and then has been RPing a background.
Is this whole PTSD flashbacks thing a way for Byron to RP his character’s flavor text?
(*)SepiaWorld Sorcery and the Death of Rachel have made this fuzzy. Do players possess existing characters? Do new characters get backgrounds auto-generated by code that trawls a database of “World Lore” for details?
Long ago (it seems), after we learned about Sepia World, I “wondered aloud” in the comments whether Byron was, IRL, a veteran with PTSD…still patiently waiting to find out. :-)
Bear in mind that another member of The Five is literally the princess of an entire nation, not just in character, but in universe. Another member, by merit of his race, should be hostile-on-sight to all Gastonians, yet not even the hardcore RP group wonders why they’re friendly with a Savasi. To them, Gravedust’s friendship is as natural as their own. The Five simply do not follow the same rules of charactership as the others do.
By this, we can guess three possibilities:
(a) when The Five created their characters, the world reshaped itself to suit them. The Five were in long before Arkerra was opened to the public, so nobody would be the wiser. Just a bit of rewriting history and HR’s first great act of Arcanometry, of Godhood, whether he realizes it or not.
(b) The characters already existed and, by what can only be described as an act of fate, The Five were “assigned” to take over the lives of characters who coincidentally fit their personalities very well. A bit contrived, but it would raise some interesting questions about the exact nature of the relationship between Sepiaworld and Arkerra.
(c) HR’s original belief – that he created Arkerra – was in fact correct. It would have been easy for HR to generate a self-serving history and backstory for these characters if they were created at the same “time” as the world itself. What HR doesn’t realize, in this scenario, is not that a preexisting world is resistant to his attempts to shape it, but that Arkerra has taken on a life of its own and doesn’t particularly care to follow HR’s designs anymore.
Yeah, it’s a concept I’ve come across before. Essentially, a creative effort in one universe – that the creator thinks of as being, essentially, a work of fiction – may, if enough investment is put into it (by the original creator or fans of the creation) pick up enough of a life of its own to spawn a new universe. A good example of the concept is http://www.crfh.net/fanart/displayimage.php?album=46&pos=23
Of course, in most of these cases, people from the parent universe cannot transfer to the subject universe or vice versa. The comic I linked to above involved someone’s character in a roleplaying community being sent by magic “upladder” into that world’s equivalent of SepiaWorld – here, we have HR using magic in order to send himself and others “downladder” from SepiaWorld into the worlds he (apparently) created.
The series “The Gaming Magi” proposes that reality is nothing but a series of nested sub realities and that gaming is the key to understanding and interacting with the system. Just remember, you may be a gm here, but on the next level up, your a pawn.
Or, it could just as easily be that the Five in Arkerra and the Five in Sepia aren’t the same people at all. Perhaps the Tube Five are simply comatose and the Arkerra Five are living their lives as normal, unaffected by their counterparts while HR believes otherwise.
… well that escalated quickly.
Indeed.
Is it morbid that I want to see a clearer picture of how this all began?
My impression is that it’s meant to be somewhat obvious by now. Cultist comes in, gives Byron The Madness. Byron kills brothers and the cultist (and the rest of the village?); cut to now.
But yeah, horrific as it may be, it’d be….interesting…to actually get to see all that happening.
Actually we had a flashback a while ago showing us Bayen and Brayen both being berserk. So I’m thinking the cultist gave the madness to a few random people including them and Byron and then let them kill each others until there was only one left. It’s also possible Byron wasn’t originally affected by the madness but got contaminated by it while killing the brothers (it has been said to be contagious after all, between Harky freaking out in the arena and the cultist doing rituals so as to not be affected).
Yeah, if Baby Byron had been patient zero, it’s hard to see how he could have been the sole survivor, and why the madness would have subsided in him. My guess is he was on the fringes of the whole shebang, like in that Crossed comic where the kid hides in a barrel and watches the chaos engulf everything, including his dad and his brother.
Where was that?
Maybe my memory is faulty but I don’t know if they ever established that the Madness is contagious or that’s just a heavily believed myth that even Harky believed.
The cultists had a ritual to gain immunity to the Madness too.
In the shattered panel, there are three sets of glowing eyes, and two murders in silhouette. Several different weapons appear to be involved, so it’s reasonable to conclude that this is more than one, and as many as five, individual berserkers being shown. It’s hard to say for sure about all of them, but several of the shards can clearly be attached to those next to them; if this holds true for each of the mouths next to glowing eyes, then at least one of the infected has a mustache, making it definitely not Bayen, Brayen or Byron.
No. No its not.
See what happens when you start rough housin’?
It’s all fun and games until someone loses their temper.
Then it’s bloody fun and games.
It’s all fun and games until someone ends up in a cone.
#sayingsofthefuzzypeople
Then it’s a game of Escape the Cone!
So that’s why everybody wants to know where the point is.
(rolls eyes) yeeeaaaahh, ma. (sidekicks brother when she looks away)
Stop screwin’ around. Y’all kids screw around too much.
Yeah, show some digi beast battle for half an eternity, but skip the fun part why won’t you… Ah well.
Looks like someone had an axe-ident…
At least he salive -a
That cultist on the right mustard been the one who caused it all, he should’ve known it’d ketchup to him!
Wood you believe they are just pretending?
I don’t have a pun :(
I guess the joking around cut deeper that they thought..
bloody cultists…
I would also accept axe-indent. Being picky would just be splitting hairs.
I can hardly tear (as in the tears he is crying) myself away
Better not to axe.
Even berserk, its hard to believe a child could have killed a village full of warriors.
He wasn’t the only one goin nuts, just the last one standing. Still, I wanted to see…
Or worse, he went berserk to survive the others going nuts, rather than alongside them.
I note a wavy-bladed dagger on the ground in the first panel. It is being not grasped by a dead hand. I don’t think that the carnage was started by the villagers or by Byron.
Cultists ?
1. It IS being grasped by a dead hand (or a sleeping hand, but that’s a little less likely).
2. We already knew this was started by cultists, to be honest.
Definitely sleeping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1byycwl8qgc
Obviously cultists involved by that dagger/corpse.
The real question becomes…
Does Byron remember killing any of them?
Did he kill any of them? He may have killed few, if any of them. But the rage can make remembering hard. And being a kid, even watching someone die in front of you can make the mind do funny things. Add in cultist shennanigans, and who knows what REALLY happened.
Could be that he holds guilt for slaying his brothers while enraged, when he never touched them. And the cult’s curse uses that to twist him into a mindless beserker.
He has at least one clear memory of Bayen and Brayen being berserk. He may killed them before going berserk, and contracted the madness as a result. Also last panel seems to point to him having vivid flashes of memory from when he was berserk.
That’s some stark contrast there.
Got some whiplash there, but I like it. Hang in there, baby Byron.
So, we know Byron at least remembers Bayen and Brayen going berserk – but it seems his other memories may be confused at best.
Easy to imagine Baby Byron coming round from the madness in the grove full of bodies and his mind putting 2 and 2 together and making five – “They’re all dead, and I’m alive – Oh Gods I killed them all!”
For now we’re left to wonder how what he THINKS he did stacks up against what he ACTUALLY did.
I don’t think he think he killed them all. Me think how many he killed is “too many” even knowing he wasn’t the only one affected by the madness. Also he IS sure he personally killed the two who were the closest to him, and they were the ones responsible for killing the others dead people. Trauma is already big without adding killing part of the villagers himself.
whoah. Okay, brotherly tussling straight into full-blown and permanent PTSD.
You know, I don’t think I really need to see the whole “everyone i know and love getting dismembered all around me, and possibly BY me” in-between bit. This is…enough.
But here’s the really maddening part;
Byron was NEVER A BOY IN A VILLAGE (*)
Byron is the creation(*) of a man put into a Tank in Sepia World, who selected some stats for an adult human warrior, and then has been RPing a background.
Is this whole PTSD flashbacks thing a way for Byron to RP his character’s flavor text?
(*)SepiaWorld Sorcery and the Death of Rachel have made this fuzzy. Do players possess existing characters? Do new characters get backgrounds auto-generated by code that trawls a database of “World Lore” for details?
Long ago (it seems), after we learned about Sepia World, I “wondered aloud” in the comments whether Byron was, IRL, a veteran with PTSD…still patiently waiting to find out. :-)
Bear in mind that another member of The Five is literally the princess of an entire nation, not just in character, but in universe. Another member, by merit of his race, should be hostile-on-sight to all Gastonians, yet not even the hardcore RP group wonders why they’re friendly with a Savasi. To them, Gravedust’s friendship is as natural as their own. The Five simply do not follow the same rules of charactership as the others do.
By this, we can guess three possibilities:
(a) when The Five created their characters, the world reshaped itself to suit them. The Five were in long before Arkerra was opened to the public, so nobody would be the wiser. Just a bit of rewriting history and HR’s first great act of Arcanometry, of Godhood, whether he realizes it or not.
(b) The characters already existed and, by what can only be described as an act of fate, The Five were “assigned” to take over the lives of characters who coincidentally fit their personalities very well. A bit contrived, but it would raise some interesting questions about the exact nature of the relationship between Sepiaworld and Arkerra.
(c) HR’s original belief – that he created Arkerra – was in fact correct. It would have been easy for HR to generate a self-serving history and backstory for these characters if they were created at the same “time” as the world itself. What HR doesn’t realize, in this scenario, is not that a preexisting world is resistant to his attempts to shape it, but that Arkerra has taken on a life of its own and doesn’t particularly care to follow HR’s designs anymore.
Yeah, it’s a concept I’ve come across before. Essentially, a creative effort in one universe – that the creator thinks of as being, essentially, a work of fiction – may, if enough investment is put into it (by the original creator or fans of the creation) pick up enough of a life of its own to spawn a new universe. A good example of the concept is http://www.crfh.net/fanart/displayimage.php?album=46&pos=23
Of course, in most of these cases, people from the parent universe cannot transfer to the subject universe or vice versa. The comic I linked to above involved someone’s character in a roleplaying community being sent by magic “upladder” into that world’s equivalent of SepiaWorld – here, we have HR using magic in order to send himself and others “downladder” from SepiaWorld into the worlds he (apparently) created.
The series “The Gaming Magi” proposes that reality is nothing but a series of nested sub realities and that gaming is the key to understanding and interacting with the system. Just remember, you may be a gm here, but on the next level up, your a pawn.
Or, it could just as easily be that the Five in Arkerra and the Five in Sepia aren’t the same people at all. Perhaps the Tube Five are simply comatose and the Arkerra Five are living their lives as normal, unaffected by their counterparts while HR believes otherwise.
Can you hear their laughter from last page still echoing in the first panel?
I like the little trail of vomit trickling from his mouth.
But in the end, I was the only one left alive. And I… I ate the custard that started this whole bloody mess.
I can taste key lime pie.
Looks like someone is feeling a little blue. (RED)
What? I said, feeling a little blu(RED)
Look, he’s clearly feeling bl(RED RED RED RED)
Oh, just forget it(RED RED RED RED RED RED RED RED)
Da Fuq?!