Issue 30, Page 5
Transcript
1: The Smiling Man smiles angrily over his shoulder.
The Smiling Man: Tazim-Talash… have you lost all sense of decency and tact? Get out of that thing.
2: Melissa/Tazim’s head is tilted to one side as she smiles wickedly.
Tazim: Zalef, what’s wrong? Lost track of your pet?
3: The two now face each other. Zalef/The Smiling Man stands sternly with fists clenched; Melissa/Tazim stands looking sassy with one hand on her hip.
Zalef: Someone filled that mortal’s head with the idea of using my… temperamental guardian… to clean up their mess…
Tazim: Well, someone had to get involved. I needed something to prevent our crops from succumbing to blight, and it’s not like you or I could help directly.
Our pact of non-interference was your idea. Remember?
4: Zalef’s smile falters as he looks to the side in failed recollection.
5: Tazim smiles wider.
Tazim: …You don’t, do you? Zalef-Labev, The God of Knowledge, The Eternal Archivist…
You’re slipping.
6: Zalef scowls.
Zalef: I will not accept mockery from a trickster and aspirant.
So, not [i]actually[/i] Melissa, then? =o.0;=
Does this mean the “bud” version IS actually Melissa?
My guess is that Tazim or Zalef (or someone/something else) shunted Melissa’s soul into the Black Mass embryo-thing so she could be reborn, as a favor for her unwitting sacrifice.
This also raises the uncomfortable question of, well. We *know* everyone is actually the Black Mass. Everybody is, in fact, just the God That Crawls.
Just, we’ve only ever seen it work *one* way before: individuality collapsing into uniformity (or Instrumentality, hah). Melissa seems to have been it working in *reverse*, where a piece of the larger whole reproduced an individual.
SOMETHING had to cause it. But whatever it did was ostensibly causing a similar process to what made individual sapient life in the *first* place, and that’s….that’s a hell of a thing to wonder about.
Individual sapient life of *ONE* *PARTICULAR* species. I have to remind that there are at least three other sapient species which are NOT related to the Black Mass.
Uh, no? The only species we know much about that isn’t related to the Black Mass is the Martians.
The bug people and the dinosaur people are both also from the Black Mass. We know this from these pages:
http://orderoftheblackdog.com/comic/issue-13-page-21/
http://orderoftheblackdog.com/comic/issue-20-page-2/
In the latter page, the Black Mass – as Sedjet and Julia – decided to just ignore Xijo because he was an ‘outsider’. The Black Mass isn’t a ‘force of death and ruin’ for the Martians, but it is for the bugs and dinos. This is also hinted at from how the bug people were hoping the Black Mass would help them with their evolution; they probably had myths about it; especially about evolving from it.
When immortals are bitchy…
Damn, Tazim is sassy as Mel…
Welp. That explains a few things.
Not-Melissa in that bottom panel is the most ‘catlike’ I think Rebecca’s ever drawn a character. It also feels like one of her best pieces of expression work ever.
Not sure what it says that it’s also so unsettling.
Yeeaahh, he hasn’t been behaving very god-like. I am curious what Tazim-Talash’s theory is though, as they seem to have predicted he would be ‘slipping’, and tested their hypothesis with that line, which provided the evidence needed to promote it to the level of a theory.
Nicely subtly scientific! Though I also suspect that there’s more evidence of this ‘slipping’ that they previously saw, like maybe the fact that he let Mel use Kenazil without seeming to consider how Mel got the container crystal thing for holding Kenazil in (I forget what they called it). Given that they also used the crop analogy, perhaps they were covertly holding themself in that crystal too, and listened in on that meeting in which Kenazil was obtained. Would also explain how they snuck into Mel’s body after her death.
At any rate, maybe this is a normal thing for all the ‘gods’, that when they’re a certain age they just.. Get prone to something akin to dementia? Kinda like the ‘Immortals’ in El Goonish Shive, which reset themselves every 200 years or so (or at least, they should) to prevent themselves from becoming a dangerous combination of super powerful and super unstable/insane?
I disagree with Tynachs’s interpretation; the pages they quote don’t seem to me to support it, just that the bug aliens knew of it, and that it is hostile to them, but not why, and that the BM wasn’t interested in Xijo, but not why. My understanding is that the bug aliens and the Kae-Kariin are not of the Black Mass, only the earthlings are. If I am correct, that would by part of / one of the reasons why the Kae-Kariin have such a low opinion of the earthlings (going so far as to enslave them).
Correction/clarification: just that the bug aliens knew of the *Black Mass*.
Further clarification: I am commenting on Tynachs’s first comment; the one that starts with “Uh, no? The only species we know much about that isn’t related to the Black Mass is the Martians.”
(Hopefully I’ve not forgotten anything else. I seem to have caught whatever is afflicting Zalef.)