I would like to claim my prize now.
There was a prize right?
Our respect for your sagacity and good taste? Best I can do.
Great guess by you. I couldn’t figure out how Burlew would allow those two to be discovered in a manner than wouldn’t likely lead to their immediate, albeit hilarious—it is Xykon we’re talking about here—demise. Didn’t think Burlew would introduce yet another set of characters to the plot.
I am quite certain that we have not seen either of those speech bubbles before. But what we know:
They’re not nice.
They have access to some very impressive poisons, and invisibility that doesn’t break when they attack.
They have peculiar-colored speech balloons.
They’re capable of communicating coherently.
They have an interest in the paladins, alive.
They think that the outcome they got was in some way suboptimal.
They’re capable, between them, of carrying two humans and their equipment straight up a cliff.
They expect to cease existing, once their plan is carried out.
The Snarl and the Psion.
Well, no, not really.
Flumph ghosts.
Actually, yes really. Sort of. My money’s on them being minions of the Snarl.
The line about “existing”? They weren’t just referring to themselves; the meant the world.
I knew it’d be a cliffhanger. I just didn’t know it’d be literal.
I figured Burlew would want to remind us of the events going on in the north as a lead-in to the next story arc. Lien and O-Chul have been established as being at the scene but not doing anything immediate. So I figured Burlew was putting them there to be hostages to raise the stakes for the main group. And in that case, having them getting captured in the final strip of this story would be an obvious cliffhanger.
I will admit I wasn’t sure who would be discovering them; Xykon? Red Cloak? The MITD? Some third part arriving on the scene like the Sabine or Tarquin or Loki? It doesn’t surprise me that Burlew left it a mystery.
I tend to think they’re with the Directors. I think introducing yet another group that we’d not know about that has been secretly trying to deal with all this stuff would be a bit much. The others all worked because they linked to the personal journeys of the main characters, and were set up before. Plus the Director faction hasn’t really done much.
That doesn’t mean I think they must work for them directly–they could be those the Directors are influencing. Vaarsuvius was their first contract, yet they mentioned having a lot more to do.
Didn’t someone way earlier in the strip make a comment about how many factions were vying for control? I seem to recall the number 9 or 11 being bandied about, with several of the slots left undetermined.
I think one of those has just been heard from.
I appreciated the fact that V’s message could have probably been sent in 12-15 words if not for the verbose nature of the sender…
Crisis averted; Durkon resurrected. On our way; two days. Where are you? How’s Xykon?
…or similar leaving more space for whatever. Instead, we got the previous strip with V and Blackwing working it into exactly twenty-five words, probably from an initial count of 40+.
That’s why I think it’s the Snarl. The Snarl isn’t a new factor, but it’s one we know virtually nothing about. Now is exactly the right time to start getting to know it and its motives.
It was a pair of demon roaches. And the number was “at least nine”.
I can see that, but only as “these are people who have been studying the snarl,” and not in a “the Snarl directly is telling them to do things.” The Snarl works because it isn’t really a knowable entity. Sure, you could look at it and try to figure things out about it, but I don’t think it would work as a personal entity that could tell people what to do.
That said, I’ve kinda suspected the Directors were linked with the Snarl in this way already.
I disagree.
For the story to conclude properly, it can’t just end with the Snark being caged in a four-quiddity prison. That wouldn’t be satisfying, from a storytelling point of view. There needs to be some sort of true resolution. The Snarl is the series’ primary antagonist, and it needs to be confronted and perhaps defeated, if it actually is evil. It can’t just be a mindless force. It has to have its own personality and agenda.
I agree with this. The Snarl was depicted in the two Crayons of Time sequences as a primal force of Chaos and that’s how people are thinking of it. And that’s probably what it was like in the beginning. But there was also a line in there about how it was growing more intelligent.
There’s been millions or billions of worlds created and destroyed since then, with an interval after each when the gods are in hiding, waiting for the Snarl to calm down. So we’re talking tens of billions of years minimum, more likely hundreds of billions, perhaps even over a trillion years. Even if the rate of increase of the Snarl’s intelligence is very small, by now it must be at least as smart as a god. So it’s no longer a primal force, but rather a rational (or maybe irrational) actor.
So I think there’s a definite possibility that the two new guys are minions of the Snarl.
People have been counting factions ever since the Demon Roaches said that. Depending on how finely you want to slice the factions, it’s been possible to come up with more than 9 for a very long time. And this really is too late in the story to introduce an entirely new one.
Agents of the IFCC are a possibility, but one I doubt. The Fiends said that Sabine was finding “an appropriate vessel”, not two of them. And if this were the vessel and someone else, that someone else would probably be either Sabine or Quarr, and the speech bubbles don’t match.
Agents of the Snarl seem more likely. Have we seen any speech bubbles from Laurin since her possession?
Particularly since we’ve repeatedly seen a big hint (the world inside the Snarl) that something important and yet to be revealed is going on there.
Which I think is a mistake. Specifically, taking that number as literal is a mistake. I just interpret it as saying there’s a goodly number of factions and 9 is a rough count of them. There could be more or less and trying to get exactly 9 is a waste of time.
But that’s what you get when you trail a specific number in front of the nerds that make up this strip’s core fans. The same kind of thing happened when Hel said there were 10 million dwarves.