BREAKER OF INFINITIES 4-148 to 4-149
Prim went by a brightly lit merchant city, where the free living inhabitants held nightly sojourns, seances, and threw wild celebrations. They sampled poetry, sipped on liquor, and inhaled smoke. There were among their number many great, wise, and virile arithmeticians and philosophers, and many well furnished and splendid parlors and cafes.
It was a very pleasant and energetic place, and a Prim stayed there a while, eventually owning a used book shop, but after a while Prim began to realize that nobody stayed there for very long. It was not a place to settle. The hours were too late, there were few children, and the people talked in circles. So it was after two or three years Prim moved on and returned, wearily, to the road again.
– Prim Masters the Road
I guess this is the new standard of rock bottom: sleeping in what looks very much like a lab or clinical examination room, complete with a spooky stone monolith, which reminds me of the last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001. It’s clear that Jadis gets no visitors.
You’ve gotta eat, Allison! You’ve lost most of your muscle mass, you’re in no condition to fight anything.
“I’m nobody. I’m nothing.”
There are several ways you can look at fact, Allison. You’re nothing but *so is everyone else*! The absurdities of life and circumstance aside, death makes us all equal. There is liberation to be found in that understanding.
If nothing else, don’t you have any curiosity left? There are so many questions. Why didn’t Jadis take the Key out of your skull? Why did she restore your broken body to health? What’s her game, what’s she not telling you?
I don’t know how it works in the rulebook.
And I haven’t seen anyone discuss this before.
It just occured to me that there is a way you can resurrect the Two.
They fused into a singular being, there must be traces of them still in Allison
That is a possibility. Or maybe that’s Allison figures out how to do for herself: resurrect her lost friends. That would certainly show she’s finally getting the hang of godlike power.
To speculate, one way she might do it is go look, again, assuming it doesn’t completely cook her brain, at the totality of space-time and make copies of all her friends from “earlier” instances. She could pick an instance just before they all got utterly ruined and destroyed.
That would be a very scary and godlike power.
Jadis would say that she didn’t take the Key and did restore Allison’s body because “That’s what she does here, in this moment.” The question, then, is “Very well, what circumstances powering the Wheel caused all this to align to cause those to be the actions that you take, in this moment? What circumstances have yet to come to pass that require you to NOT tell me the answers?”
Not that this is directly a reply to the issue you raised but–
Your point reminds me of how Dr. Manhattan replied to Juspeczyk on Mars after her pleading for Earth. He, eventually seems convinced, and says that human lives are miraculous surprises and therefore something worth preserving.
Which I always thought was a cop out on Moore’s part.
Manhattan could have said something very similar to what you just suggested Jadis could say: You did not convince me, Laurie, but, I must go to save Earth because I see myself going into the source of the tachyon interference.”
He’s just a puppet who sees the strings, right?
It’s not as heartwarming as Moore had it, but it is in some ways even more mysterious and spooky. Laurie would just stand there saying, “Uh, what? What do you mean?” [ZAP] Straight to NYC. And the story eventually ends with that question never being answered.
Incidentally, in the Watchmen TV show, isn’t that the tack he takes, in a way that’s deeply tragic? Or am I misremembering?
(If you haven’t seen the show, it’s actually quite good; if nothing else, Jeremy Irons just DEVOURS the scenery as Ozymandias, in a way the film certainly didn’t manage!)
AL-YISUN misses one crucial detail: whether or not she’d have stayed home, Universal War would have come all the same. Recall the tale of the men in the desert. In the face of inevitable doom, is it not magnificent to rise up and meet it?
Her lowest point. I feel so bad for her! There is so much to struggle against.
Does anyone still remember that this isn’t real life, that she was lying in the “hospital” without an eye and both right limbs before she “woke up”?
I wonder which invisible cities Prim shall visit next.
Well Allison didn’t mention not saving Nyave so I guess that means she made it out alright!
that meal looks delicious
It really does doesn’t it? I don’t know how but, Abbadon always makes his illustrated food look delicious!
Allison is right. But what she does not understand is that because she is precisely nobody she is the chosen one, even more so because she wasn’t supposed to be in the first place.
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there’s a small mark in the middle of her left forearm, in the panel where she’s laying down.
Nefas. Ex nihilo creatus es. Ad nihilum redibis. Sed in hoc tempore potens es.