Annotated 37-9
“And now his curse is my curse” is…an interesting line, in light of the secrecy about Byron’s condition. Did Braggadocio know? Seems like he might’ve. They were close, once, before Byron ever met the Peacemakers. The “warning” Bragga mentions, though, is a more traceable reference to this.
Weird timing for a name pun, but it adds to the macabre grotesquerie, so I’ll allow it.
I strongly doubt that Isidro’s voice carries over to Bandit’s cell, which looks at least three stories’ elevation away from it. We’re just using a little poetic license for the scene transition’s sake. (We’re using a little more to assume that those cells, and indeed most of Asallah En-Qu’Lara, are not constantly being buffeted by winds too strong for anyone to hear anyone else. Sky elf magick FTW!)
The first time through, I thought he was talking about Bert.
Nah. Bert, strangely enough, tastes just like Ernie.
And by user testimonies, a trained person tastes like beef, while untrained person tastes like pork. So now you know and preferably don’t need to go test it for yourself. XD
Granted, those were both separate testimonies from people from highly different areas and cultures, but… At least I’m happy enough to take just the word of it without really experiencing it first hand myself.
Trained in *what*?
In a nice marinade, I’d guess.
“Trained”…?
As in “hit with a train”, obv.
Trained to be delicious! You’re not just delicious naturally, you have to work hard for it!
Chess. Makes your meat take a whole new texture, it does. :D
Sports. XD
What really sells the despair to me is the thousand yard stare of ol’ Braggadocio in panel one. Only the broken men that have seen things they will never forget lapse into that unfocused, reminscing, absent gaze… young men with the eyes of elderly people.
Two pages after the one referred to by this: http://guildedage.net/comic/annotated-21-13/ , Bragga calls Byron “bererker boy”. So he knew of Byron’s rep, at least.
He calls himself Byron the Berserker, so of course some people will call him that — but that doesn’t mean they all know about his curse. On the other hand: If Bragga has adventured with Byron long enough to form the kind of bond they seem to have there, it stands to reason he witnessed the berserking at some point, in which case he probably got some kind of explanation from Byron afterwards, or else he wouldn’t be talking to him anymore.
I think we can also just assume Braggadocio isn’t particularly dumb.
He sees Not-Byron-Anymore show up zerked to hell, knows whatever caused it is cultist related, probbaly knows something cultisty happened at battleshire and that it was really messed up, understands that the anti-zerk is Syr’nj’s creation, can probbaly reason out that she was extremely prepared for something that really ought to have been unthinkable without having seen it, that she seems to have done so without having had a test subject, knows that her and Byron were very close and certainly knows Byron’s epithet.
Even if he wasn’t aware before hand, it wouldn’t take a genius for to put things together now. And Braggadocio has had little else to do except think about what happened.
Bragga doesn’t need to have known about Byron’s curse beforehand – he could have been filled in by now, or even pieced it together from the, uh, recent experience of his.