Hey, don’t feel too overwhelmed by these marching orders, panel 1 Ulak. As long as you conceal your Cultist loyalties, you’ve got a shot with Frigg.  It ain’t happening with E-Merl, but you could probably give WAV a helmet-noogie and convince him that was sex. I wouldn’t rule out Sundar… If you get to Syr’Nj before she finds out Byron’s alive, she may be stressed enough… I’m mostly joking with those last two, although this all gets more plausible if you’ve got access to some kind of glamour spell.  I’m sure your new boss could hook a brother up with one of those. Just don’t use it to mimic Rachel to E-Merl, or he will literally kill you.

HR’s attitude here makes me wonder. Is there a viable alternate reality where he became a benevolent sort of god? We obviously never considered this option, because it would mean that our biggest villain just sort of took care of himself as a threat, without our heroes having to lift a finger. Even if we consider the story as HR’s story, such a transformation would feel unearned after his sins. But all this talk of letting go of himself and his old grudges makes me think, what was stopping him? Was his personal growth limited only by the constraints of the kind of story we were telling?

Fun to think about, but I’m gonna say “no.” Pride and greed are so fundamental to who HR is that I think his attempts to get away from them are ironic and doomed. It’s like certain tragic soliloquies where characters speak as if they have more options than their personalities will give them. “To be or not to be?” SPOILER: IT’S GONNA BE “NOT TO BE.”