Issue 19, Page 32
we can hear ourselves again
and we
are beautiful
Transcript
1: Sedjet hunches down, clutching his stomach, the dark tendril of his arm whipping in the air.
2: His clothes rip and strain, bulging as his body seems to ripple from beneath the skin, his ear parting, his shoulder bulging.
3: His hand, contorted into thicker claws, rips at his back, tugging back fabric and strained, furry skin, leaving dark black flesh.
4: We see from the floor that he’s fallen to his knees, copious black and purple fluids pouring out and splashing to the floor.
5: The fully mutated and unleashed Sedjet busts forth, ripped clothing still clinging to his body. There’s no fennec left: his torso open at the top in a large, screaming, toothy maw. His arms have split into many horned, lashing tentacles. It’s a symmetrical form: four limbs, controlled tentacles, its mouth designed with purpose. No longer scrambled by the confusing radiation, the Black Mass takes on a more purposeful form.
Oh man!
Like they say in the [Green Hornet] radio shows: “Things look badly for our hero.”
Sorry to hear about your ailment, Sedjet! ^^;;
Oh hell.
This all begs the question of how much control over his form Sedjet still has. Can he go back to being a fox? Is Shankar radiation needed for that? If you go riiiight back to the beginning, there was an experiment where a sample of the Idol was bombarded with Shankar radiation and suffered rapid uncontrollable mutations. But that was just a sample, a piece taken from a larger entity. Would a complete Idol react the same way?
I think that Sedjet is over.
He accepted this. He did this on purpose. And he was right to believe that this was the end for him.
I’m not so sure. In the past, people who’ve been partially absorbed into the Idol have clearly retained their own distinct personalities. We can’t really tell what happens to them after that point, so we can’t decide between a total loss of identity or whether the person they used to be still exists, albeit as an Idol.
Oh, come on! Sedj is on the cast list, he’s basically invincible.
This does add an amusing bit of irony to one of the ‘ask the cast’ Q&As in the extras. You know. The one to… I think it was Nicole?… about who the hottest character was.
Makes me wonder how far ahead Immelmann plans things, now that I think about it.
… holy shit.
This is so not good. Sedjet and Julia may NEVER be able to return to normal now! And what about an actual scientific method? He basically risked it all on untested theory and LOST!!
ok, this is amazing and intriguing, there is a question there as well though… How much did the remaining piece of black idol in him affected this. It is enteirly possible that it might have worked differently, maybe slower, if that piece hav e been cleaned out by that weird dog demon, and the entitity that “tamed” it and guided…
Actually… Maybe that entity is another person who learned about how they are all made of the dormant black idol mass… *He* WAS looking like he was partially transformed… did he actually tame that demon to “reset” the “shell” that makes them individuals. maybe he didn’t as much as “cleaned” the residuo out of out kitty heroine, but actually “reset” it to the dormant state.
So many possibilities.
Flicking back through the past issues, it’s implied that Sedjet *did* get freed from the Idol by the Black Dog. Issue 6 ends with the Black Dog perched behind him, looking down at him.
I don’t think he was. I think the dog was just staring at him but didn’t do anything because he wasn’t ordered to.
It (she?) had been observing Mel for a while too, before pouncing much later
wE Are eTErNity
by the ticking of the clocks
hUNgry in the CHaos thAt In betweeN Eons unDying
in glorious silence
Worth observing; That’s not a blob.
A tentacled, semi-fluid form, yes, but not a shifting and boiling ooze, like we’ve seen it be before.
That looks more like the form of it that confronted Julia on the moon. More like, maybe, what the God That Crawls is *supposed* to be.
Assuming you can apply coherent physiology to a thing that, by its nature, seems meant to be incoherent. To us.
… for now.
We’ve seen forms with symmetry and distinct features before – they’re useful for specific purposes like running.
Also, assuming the old infection had been cleared out of him, that’s only Sedjet in there.
I see this as Sedj “stretching” – exercising ‘muscles” he never knew he had before, but not yet letting go of some ideas.
He seems overwhelmed, but for his sake I hope he gets it under control, at least rebuilding the ability to speak, while the dampening is in effect.
I give Sedjet a D- for this line of testing. Did he provide evidence for a connection between sapient earthlings and the Idol? Obviously. But from an outside perspective, it looks like this could all have just been due to his earlier infection. So he’s actually one of the worst subjects to pick for this, scientifically speaking. Far better to use this test on someone who has no known connection to the idol.
Furthermore, his earlier ethical objection (“I can’t do this to anyone else.”) doesn’t make much sense. This experiment could have been tried on dead anthropoid flesh, cultured anthropoid cells (like HeLa cells), or brain-dead anthropoid subjects. Furthermore, he (or his organization) has experimented on live sapient subjects before. It is unclear what bioethical system would approve of that experimentation as a “necessary evil”, and yet not approve sapient experimentation in this case, especially considering that the (anticipated!) result is a large Black Idol mass being loosed in the facility without prior notice, at precisely the moment when one of the major scientists with expertise regarding the creature is incapacitated.
In the unlikely event that Sedjet can be recovered, I recommend that he be put through a remedial bioethics course, transferred to a different project, and be subject to long-term monitoring for psychological conditions, especially suicidal and paranoid tendencies.
I am in strong agreement about everything except the last part. There’s no shrink qualified for this.
I think you misunderstood. I’m not saying he should be put through therapy, I’m saying he’s a security risk and should be *monitored*.
And I stand by my previous statement. “remedial course” and “monitoring” can only be performed by a guide who *understands* what’s happening.
Imagine you’ve magically gained a very intuitive understanding of quantum physics, and were given a technical supervisor with an average grasp of Newton.
And Sedj has already been shown lying on psych evals.
This has proven one line potentially true, he went into a nearly filter free place, and the idol broke free from within him.
With them finding ways to increase the presence of such, they could keep it harshly suppressed if not turn it to break and decay.
That is a thought…
I wonder- if 1]all people [in this universe] have some amount of black idol in them, and 2] if removing all of the shankar radiation/noise turns a guy into a full black idol-monster, then 3] maybe if they put Julia in a room, + FLOOD her with lots of shankar radiation, then- maybe giving her all of those rads can shrink Julia’s monster-stuff down to a manageable size, and Julia can have a normal life again.
I hope so. There’s ever so much hope, “Hey Arnold”, there’s ever so much hope. 😀