Annotated 50-27
Deep cut here: Best’s “less than successful recruitment” is Peter the Blest, last seen… hang on… last seen at the end of Best’s very first appearance. Remember, Peter’s primary exposure to Best was coming in to see the town Best sucked dry. He met the pregnant groupies and dying prophetess who regretted ever putting faith in Best. That’s the kind of impression that tends to stick, and if anything, hearing later reports of Best’s heroism would only increase Peter’s rage at how this Best scuzzball has made everyone think he’s so great.
Amorna the Avian is a new creation to round out this adventuring team Sundar and Best are putting together. (Beckitt is one more Guilditization.) The usefulness of an avian scout on this mission of exploration needs little explanation.
The return of Braggadocio’s appetite was the running-gag callback we didn’t know we needed.
FB: Part of personal growth is accepting that some people are always going to see you as you were, no matter how many different glamours you have.
Yes, but imagine how long you’ll have to pound that squid to tenderize it for consumption.
Squid is uniquely self-tenderizing…because they use ammonia to maintain buoyancy, after death a squid will just…kinda turn into mush, in a way that other molluscs (and even other cephalopods like octopuses) don’t.
It’s not instantaneous, but maybe if he gives it a day or so…
That is fascinating. Thank you.
That is indeed fascinating.
Sea animal thingies are *so weird*.
I read about Portuguese men o’ war the other day, and the name is one of the less weird thing about them (although I have no idea why anyone would think they looked like a galleon…). I’m not even sure how many animals one of them should be counted as.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war
How come Braggadocio didn’t lose any weight? I remember he had a bad case of PTSD for a while. It got to a point where Braggadocio’s friends actually had to beg him to eat something. Now, I see he’s ready to reassume his culinary adventures, but how long did Braggadocio spent fasting in that birdcage? Even if he didn’t actually fast, and all that time in the cage he fed on things that didn’t trigger him, like, say, veggies and noodles, that relatively limited diet had to have an impact of his waistline, doesn’t it?
That’s a fair question for which I do not have a great answer. We know that Bragga’s appetite has not notably returned before this conversation, because Byron is still worried about it. I could say there were issues of recognizability and visual shorthand that meant we had to keep to his character model, and I could look carefully at his waistline and say “He may indeed have lost a few hundred.”
My best attempt at justifying it is to say that at the same time he lost his lust for eating, he lost his zest for life and could no longer be an adventurer until he began to recover both. (I’m pretty sure he was a nonparticipant in the war: he wasn’t in the right spot for Byron to recruit him, and he was pretty much done with the Gastonian army even before Taro made it an instrument of tyranny.) The sudden drop in calorie burn, combined with a simple diet, an occasional eat-your-feelings binge, and some medication side effects, could conceivably justify his stable weight.
The real answer, though, is that I don’t think any of us thought of this one.
Maybe he’s lost 50 lbs, leaving him at 550?
I find it hard to blame Peter the Blest.
We know Best is a changed man now. But he still hurt a lot of people before he changed, and a lot of that hurt has probably not yet gone away either.
And he still ain’t payin alimony…
But I suspect he’s about to, and when he does, everyone will agree he … did it really well.
Literally next page : Dude skips town. :p :D
We did think about bringing Carla and Darla back at some point, and the issue of some kind of child support would’ve come up in that case. (Not alimony per se: that’s for spouses and divorcees, and Carla and Darla were neither.)
Still, the way Best’s intro sequence ends with “There is no more town” implies that they wouldn’t have their old address for Best to look them up, and they’re as likely as not to want nothing further to do with him at this point. Especially if, like Peter, they think he’s the same guy he was from back then.
Well, it is to be hoped that Bragga has permanently learned a lesson about stuffing sapients into a pie, anyway.
I’m not sure this needs addressing, but Syr’Nj’s point about lack of contact fostering racism applies here. When Braggadocio said “Who counts avians unless you’re stuffing a pie?”, he had never met an avian except perhaps as an enemy on the battlefield, and the same applied to the rest of Fightopia. Sundar ranted about the “Savage Races” as much as anybody, and he’s the one who recruited Amorna here. Getting past such prejudice is sometimes a journey. But the journey they’re about to take, in which all six of them will be relying on each other for their very survival, is likely to speed them on their way.
I hope they remember a big part of exploring is going back home to tell folks what you’ve seen. Though we know eventually Payet won’t.
I’d trust Rendar and Sundar for that. One is a meticulous note-taker who wants to change the world for the better; the other is a gregarious storyteller who probably can’t wait to amaze the people of Newlight with tales of the Stonehead Levitators of Gilgam Island. Even the humbler Best hasn’t lost his love of performing, so he’ll be glad to relate those stories too, often in the form of song.