To be fair, are we not all? We all know what we Want and often confuse it as a Need. And even more are presumptuous as to tell people what we believe it is they Need.
I’ll bet that her physique right now is how her body really looks like here in the physical plane. In the Void we see how her soul looks like. She is beautiful only outside, in reality her soul her being is really ugly. At least that’s what I am thinking. She may as well use illusion but it doesn’t change the fact that her “old hag” look matches her actions better then a beautiful young woman.
I doubt this, because as we’ve seen, even the first consort of Incubus was not a shade at the seven’s meeting. My money is that all the demiurges were NOT casting shades at the void council for whatever reason. Mottom must be concealing her form another way.
We can very clearly see that they ARE in the void, though, in that meeting. There is a panel on 3-40-creation, which shows how the void site under the universe, and you can see in the center of the void, directly under Throne, what looks like the giant statues in chairs that the meeting between the seven was being held on top of. Onthe page where Jadis says “Kill Six Billion Demons” and the page that follows, we can see a red light over the head of the main statue that the actual meeting is happening on.
It may be that the particular location of the meeting allows people to cast their regular bodies rather than just shades.
We could also see that when Allison conversed with king Zoss, he too had a body. It may be that the 7 are strong enough to cast regular bodies in the void, and their power also lets their servants cast regular bodies.
No matter what though, it doesn’t explain why Mottom looks unlike a shade at all in the pages about the meeting. It could be that they don’t cast a shade like Allison, but they also can’t stop their soul from manifesting a body their reflects their true nature.
Or perhaps it’s like everyone says and Mottoms real body is the shriveled fat hag, and this beautiful form is an illusion, or some sort of Elizabeth Bathory type shit.
I think you may be conflating beauty and kindness. Realistically, those who can afford to look good, often do so at the expense of others — knowingly or otherwise.
I still think Mottom’s using most of the tribute girls for some kind of weird magical crap that keeps her perpetually young and beautiful, but that comes at their expenses. So it could be herself as she actually looks.
Or she could just be very nice-looking. Evil isn’t automatically ugly.
She has the powers of a God. Surely, appearance is just a facet of her clothing for her. She appears as she wants to her subjects and as she wants to other Gods. A face is like a dress to her. When she looked like an undead witch, it was because she wanted to.
Consider that dropping fruit/tempting other animals to eat their fruit is how trees spread their offspring presumably his fruit being eaten wouldn’t be the agonizing part.
Being a man frozen in agony at the instant of violently being transformed into a tree and kept suspended that way for all eternity is almost certainly the painful part.
Of course if we want to get really Poetic, since Mottom is liable to be the first Demiurge offed, he could ‘survive’ to witness her downfall and then end up planted in the wastelands of this denuded world.
Suffering for eternity but feeding the people and rejuvenating their world would be a relatively badass fate for a good king.
I agree. Her art to reign and rule is as well as shriveled and brittle as her former appearance, even if she cloaks it in an apparition of taste and irony. There can be only one way how a ruler like her shall fall. (Honestly, countless, but all with the same red thread.)
If I may ask, what would you have done in her position, with her power? I admit to my ignorance in matters of magic, but I am always fascinated by the methods of its practitioners.
A proper Keraunomancer always carries the tools of their trade, the Elektron (what the uneducated, as none of us are, would call Amber), the Leyden Jar, the Coil. These can, as Preem Atomicthumbs has said, be smuggled in a sleeve of sufficient size, or, as I often do, in a hat and cane.
She could grow such trees from debris(?) or the bit which she leaves on her devastated worlds. While I am not an altruist, I would neither bring the destruction she does – I am a skull, not a glutton after all – but always leave enough that change is quick and possible. The arts, the might? I could use them against my actual defiers, and would not have to watch my back at the same time. (Which I do not have to, since I am a skull. I carry already a hole in the back of it.) While Mottom amuses only herself, I see more benefit as well as personal pleasure brought by the arts if I use them to the amusement of the many too.
I think that now, after some pondering (it takes some time when there is neither brain nor caffeinated hot beverage in my hollow interior) I would, in Mottom’s Place, grant him the chance to feed his people as a sentient tree, forever, planted in his own world, growing food enough to end the famine. It will be his place to either back out of it or accept this grisly fate.
It is easy to face death from another’s hand and place the decision when and how to kill on them; it takes a thousand times more altruism and bravery to take a fate worse than death upon oneself.
Either way, she would have won. But she is Mottom, too mighty, too shriveled, too self-content, and settled far too comfortably in her 7th part of the Wheel.
I like Worm in the Wood’s idea … it would make a fine additional statement on this being actual punishment.
Enchant the skulls thrown about his feet. They hungered in life, they continue to do so in death. Viscerality is a far more potent learning tool than simple irony. And honestly, do we expect dear, sweet Mottom to bother having that tree picked over to make her point? No! She is a busy Demiurge, and will have forgotten this by morning, the deed unfinished. Better have his former people devour his wretched hide all at once.
Strictly speaking, avoiding this situation entirely would make more sense, given both the power and command of supernal forces. Lady Hunger here is at the point of their godhood when they simply Do Not Care. This is a desperate and rather petty, maneuver of one who is bored, and seeks a cure for ennui, nothing more.
Were I in this position (which, again, I would take care not to be), and if I felt that some curse was warranted (also unlikely. I do so loath yes men – having someone tell me my faults may be unpleasant, but so much better than the alternative)…were that all the case, I’d animate those several hundred thousand skeletons, to farm and labor and produce food, without rest or imperfection.
and then, a year past, they’d find out the price of these servants, and the power needed to sustain them – the life of the next person each skeleton meets, man woman or child. And allow the king the devil’s choice – accept my bounty in return for my cost, or pay me my tithe on the backs of his of his starving people.
Assuming there is a single person left after that first year of eating. I’d think so, since the King clearly had the manpower remaining to bring this gift into my court, but, c’est la mort.
Whelp children of the wheel this why you don’t shit talk Devine level beings. They always give out bizarre and karmatic punishments based on either your offense or turn you into a symbol for one of your causes. The king for example was turned into a fruit giving tree to feed his people who were constantly starving. The second mercy she will give will be not to tell them what happened to their king.
But this fool will be the most likely to at least make it to the climax most of you inheritors will burn out your flames to early in the opening sequence to make a difference or even be anything but cannon fodder for the seven Devine beasts. I will see weather al-ys-ion has what it takes as true royalty and how she develops into godhood.
While the experience of being a sentient tree might not be particularly pleasant, for his people I think it would be rather comforting to have a former king around as a nurturing tree spirit who performed such a sacrifice to serve the public. Over a few generations that would probably get spun into him being hailed as some kind of nature deity.
But, wise or fool, neither man has much say when the divine crooks a finger and beckons them approach. And Gluttony wants to have everyone over for dinner.
What was that Honored Assistant fellow just saying about Mottom ruling in a fair and just manner? I fear this is amongst the least of the tyrant’s punishments for defiance.
I… I fear I may have spoken too soon. My apologies for doubting your prediction, Lady of Owls. In the future I’ll attempt to cultivate a more healthily jaded attitude towards the sovereigns. And while I’m at it, a newfound fear of trees.
AH, but this is fair! She could have easily transformed him into an animal such as a cow and fed his people off his milk and eventually his flesh once he’s given birth a time or two. Not only that we have yet to hear screams of agony or sobs of despair from the divine punishment yet.
Wow! Despite the rather gruesome subject matter, this page is friggin’ gorgeous. I love the panel composition and the way it’s used to show the transformation, and the facial expressions are fantastic.
I suspect that not only can he still think and feel, but that each fruit and each see carries his thoughts and feelings, that over the ages many trees will grow and he will be inside each and everyone one of them, screaming. Forever screaming.
342 Annoying Voice Returns to Proclaim the Obvious
Huh? Actually, I wouldn’t mind becoming an eternally providing, thinking, feeling tree in death… well… uh… non-death… I really look up to trees, you know? They’re great.
The man who is willing to throw away his life in defiance should not be wary of the manner of his death, but beware the being who refuses to accept his sacrifice.
Ah, would’ja look at that, now she’s completely ballsed up the Feng-Shui of the entire palace. Gonna need to get people in to remove the tree, fix the floor, such a mess.
Who. Would eat. Those Fruits.
Mottom.
The Queen, we presume.
They who sit among the highest branches.
There are plenty of hungry people back in his home world, apparently.
A Queen who knows the meaning of Want.
But seems a little fuzzy on the definition of Need
To be fair, are we not all? We all know what we Want and often confuse it as a Need. And even more are presumptuous as to tell people what we believe it is they Need.
I would.
A name thief would.
]=O
Whoa. Harsh, Dude. harsh.
What kind of fruit would be bear?
in this southern climate? Strange fruit.
The fruit of a king would fetch a mighty price, whether sweet or bitter.
The truly desperate and starving, as this man’s people seem to be.
Well’p.
Mottom is a huge fan of Fruit of the Loom. 😀
That is one hell of a pot plant. I wonder if the Queen has a garden full of such strangely humanoid trees.
Well, there’s the halo, crazy powers, and connections with Gluttony… this is quite likely really her, then.
The question remains if this is how she ‘naturally’ looks outside of the Void, though, or merely an illusion.
I’ll bet that her physique right now is how her body really looks like here in the physical plane. In the Void we see how her soul looks like. She is beautiful only outside, in reality her soul her being is really ugly. At least that’s what I am thinking. She may as well use illusion but it doesn’t change the fact that her “old hag” look matches her actions better then a beautiful young woman.
I doubt this, because as we’ve seen, even the first consort of Incubus was not a shade at the seven’s meeting. My money is that all the demiurges were NOT casting shades at the void council for whatever reason. Mottom must be concealing her form another way.
We can very clearly see that they ARE in the void, though, in that meeting. There is a panel on 3-40-creation, which shows how the void site under the universe, and you can see in the center of the void, directly under Throne, what looks like the giant statues in chairs that the meeting between the seven was being held on top of. Onthe page where Jadis says “Kill Six Billion Demons” and the page that follows, we can see a red light over the head of the main statue that the actual meeting is happening on.
It may be that the particular location of the meeting allows people to cast their regular bodies rather than just shades.
We could also see that when Allison conversed with king Zoss, he too had a body. It may be that the 7 are strong enough to cast regular bodies in the void, and their power also lets their servants cast regular bodies.
No matter what though, it doesn’t explain why Mottom looks unlike a shade at all in the pages about the meeting. It could be that they don’t cast a shade like Allison, but they also can’t stop their soul from manifesting a body their reflects their true nature.
Or perhaps it’s like everyone says and Mottoms real body is the shriveled fat hag, and this beautiful form is an illusion, or some sort of Elizabeth Bathory type shit.
Yes you misunderstand me. I am aware that the seven were in the void, this is why I am perplexed that the first consort was not casting a shade.
I think you may be conflating beauty and kindness. Realistically, those who can afford to look good, often do so at the expense of others — knowingly or otherwise.
Are you really trying to argue that only ugly people can be good people? That’s stupid.
More that people with means rarely present themselves in their ‘natural’ states and go to great lengths to make themselves look more appealing.
Considering what she just did, eternal youth to go with her immortality is probably the deal. That or flesh warping.
I still think Mottom’s using most of the tribute girls for some kind of weird magical crap that keeps her perpetually young and beautiful, but that comes at their expenses. So it could be herself as she actually looks.
Or she could just be very nice-looking. Evil isn’t automatically ugly.
She has the powers of a God. Surely, appearance is just a facet of her clothing for her. She appears as she wants to her subjects and as she wants to other Gods. A face is like a dress to her. When she looked like an undead witch, it was because she wanted to.
Less gruesome than I expected, but more poetic.
Quite gruesome if his senses are still intact. Feeling people pick off and eat parts of you forever seems pretty horrific.
It might be no worse than clipping nails or cutting hair, though.
Consider that dropping fruit/tempting other animals to eat their fruit is how trees spread their offspring presumably his fruit being eaten wouldn’t be the agonizing part.
Being a man frozen in agony at the instant of violently being transformed into a tree and kept suspended that way for all eternity is almost certainly the painful part.
Of course if we want to get really Poetic, since Mottom is liable to be the first Demiurge offed, he could ‘survive’ to witness her downfall and then end up planted in the wastelands of this denuded world.
Suffering for eternity but feeding the people and rejuvenating their world would be a relatively badass fate for a good king.
I feel the poetry of the universal song, nay, the voice of YISUN itself coming hence oh brothers and sisters, may I speak naught but lies
Enamel and blood
The fruit of her voice made will
May Alice-UN learn thus
The Art does so broaden one’s options for dealing with the insolent.
Still. Such ironic punishments are something of an amateur move.
I agree. Her art to reign and rule is as well as shriveled and brittle as her former appearance, even if she cloaks it in an apparition of taste and irony. There can be only one way how a ruler like her shall fall. (Honestly, countless, but all with the same red thread.)
If I may ask, what would you have done in her position, with her power? I admit to my ignorance in matters of magic, but I am always fascinated by the methods of its practitioners.
Lightning. But then, my answer is always lightning.
If I may, how do you intend for the lightning to get into that grand hall? Invitations are terribly difficult to obtain.
smuggle it in up a coatsleeve
A proper Keraunomancer always carries the tools of their trade, the Elektron (what the uneducated, as none of us are, would call Amber), the Leyden Jar, the Coil. These can, as Preem Atomicthumbs has said, be smuggled in a sleeve of sufficient size, or, as I often do, in a hat and cane.
She could grow such trees from debris(?) or the bit which she leaves on her devastated worlds. While I am not an altruist, I would neither bring the destruction she does – I am a skull, not a glutton after all – but always leave enough that change is quick and possible. The arts, the might? I could use them against my actual defiers, and would not have to watch my back at the same time. (Which I do not have to, since I am a skull. I carry already a hole in the back of it.) While Mottom amuses only herself, I see more benefit as well as personal pleasure brought by the arts if I use them to the amusement of the many too.
I think that now, after some pondering (it takes some time when there is neither brain nor caffeinated hot beverage in my hollow interior) I would, in Mottom’s Place, grant him the chance to feed his people as a sentient tree, forever, planted in his own world, growing food enough to end the famine. It will be his place to either back out of it or accept this grisly fate.
It is easy to face death from another’s hand and place the decision when and how to kill on them; it takes a thousand times more altruism and bravery to take a fate worse than death upon oneself.
Either way, she would have won. But she is Mottom, too mighty, too shriveled, too self-content, and settled far too comfortably in her 7th part of the Wheel.
I like Worm in the Wood’s idea … it would make a fine additional statement on this being actual punishment.
Enchant the skulls thrown about his feet. They hungered in life, they continue to do so in death. Viscerality is a far more potent learning tool than simple irony. And honestly, do we expect dear, sweet Mottom to bother having that tree picked over to make her point? No! She is a busy Demiurge, and will have forgotten this by morning, the deed unfinished. Better have his former people devour his wretched hide all at once.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Strictly speaking, avoiding this situation entirely would make more sense, given both the power and command of supernal forces. Lady Hunger here is at the point of their godhood when they simply Do Not Care. This is a desperate and rather petty, maneuver of one who is bored, and seeks a cure for ennui, nothing more.
Were I in this position (which, again, I would take care not to be), and if I felt that some curse was warranted (also unlikely. I do so loath yes men – having someone tell me my faults may be unpleasant, but so much better than the alternative)…were that all the case, I’d animate those several hundred thousand skeletons, to farm and labor and produce food, without rest or imperfection.
and then, a year past, they’d find out the price of these servants, and the power needed to sustain them – the life of the next person each skeleton meets, man woman or child. And allow the king the devil’s choice – accept my bounty in return for my cost, or pay me my tithe on the backs of his of his starving people.
Assuming there is a single person left after that first year of eating. I’d think so, since the King clearly had the manpower remaining to bring this gift into my court, but, c’est la mort.
It’s nice to see that Nadia hasn’t lost her creativity.
Creative? Did you not see the urban flora on the way in?
The blueish leaves all through the palace seems tis standard procedure.
It seems that said trees have a new companion, either way.
…This is probably where she gets them all, really.
Is that the Whispering Forest that I see beginning?
A strange mercy indeed. Perhaps it is not misleading, however; I know of many fates still worse.
Whelp children of the wheel this why you don’t shit talk Devine level beings. They always give out bizarre and karmatic punishments based on either your offense or turn you into a symbol for one of your causes. The king for example was turned into a fruit giving tree to feed his people who were constantly starving. The second mercy she will give will be not to tell them what happened to their king.
You are indeed a fool. He lived a life of honour and died free.
who’s being a fool ?
he’s not quite dead.
maybe you heard
about this trick:
“i have no mouth
and i must scream”
With her powers, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he was still sentient.
But this fool will be the most likely to at least make it to the climax most of you inheritors will burn out your flames to early in the opening sequence to make a difference or even be anything but cannon fodder for the seven Devine beasts. I will see weather al-ys-ion has what it takes as true royalty and how she develops into godhood.
While the experience of being a sentient tree might not be particularly pleasant, for his people I think it would be rather comforting to have a former king around as a nurturing tree spirit who performed such a sacrifice to serve the public. Over a few generations that would probably get spun into him being hailed as some kind of nature deity.
The holy man attempts to get closer to God.
Perhaps it is the wiser man who stays far away indeed.
But, wise or fool, neither man has much say when the divine crooks a finger and beckons them approach. And Gluttony wants to have everyone over for dinner.
What was that Honored Assistant fellow just saying about Mottom ruling in a fair and just manner? I fear this is amongst the least of the tyrant’s punishments for defiance.
I… I fear I may have spoken too soon. My apologies for doubting your prediction, Lady of Owls. In the future I’ll attempt to cultivate a more healthily jaded attitude towards the sovereigns. And while I’m at it, a newfound fear of trees.
AH, but this is fair! She could have easily transformed him into an animal such as a cow and fed his people off his milk and eventually his flesh once he’s given birth a time or two. Not only that we have yet to hear screams of agony or sobs of despair from the divine punishment yet.
Wow! Despite the rather gruesome subject matter, this page is friggin’ gorgeous. I love the panel composition and the way it’s used to show the transformation, and the facial expressions are fantastic.
I really hope he can’t still feel and think in there.
I hope this tree doesnt do anything double creepy. Like wail or seep blood or something.
Repugnantly naive.
Yes. That is, indeed, the important question here.
No question was posed…
Hope is a question asked, the future is those questions answered.
I suspect that not only can he still think and feel, but that each fruit and each see carries his thoughts and feelings, that over the ages many trees will grow and he will be inside each and everyone one of them, screaming. Forever screaming.
Plants as humans on Alice’s earth think of them indeed feel pain sometimes, along with other things, but only in a fractal sort of way.
Huh? Actually, I wouldn’t mind becoming an eternally providing, thinking, feeling tree in death… well… uh… non-death… I really look up to trees, you know? They’re great.
And lo, yet another person who has stood before the gods realizes that they are a plum tree.
But in truth are we all not all plum trees before the gods? And are not they all plum trees before YSUN?
And is not YISUN not the discarded plum, being devoured by worms? There’s a fearful symmetry here. A wheel-shaped recursion. What a beautiful lie.
I love how the handmaidens are all like ‘Oh snap shes doing magic again :[ *backs away* ‘
Hmm maybe I was wrong i guess he didnt die…technically.
The man who is willing to throw away his life in defiance should not be wary of the manner of his death, but beware the being who refuses to accept his sacrifice.
Thus Ends The Lesson
But does he intend to plant him on his own world for what remains of his kingdom or keep him in her palace?
It’s an irresponsible and short-sighted farmer, who does not resow her fields after a harvest.
That would be the ultimate insult now, wouldn’t it? Keeping his fruits for her hunger alone.
Welp. I wonder if Allison has realized how badly in over her head she has gotten herself now…
If this be mercy, I shudder to contemplate what she must be like when in the mood for cruelty.
To his credit, he lasted one page longer than originally predicted.
Ah, would’ja look at that, now she’s completely ballsed up the Feng-Shui of the entire palace. Gonna need to get people in to remove the tree, fix the floor, such a mess.
W A S T E F U L
skin turned to bark is a waste? he’ll last much longer than his skin would have.
=//=
AT LEAST THE LUMBERMAN WILL BE PLEASED.