I would speculate that all the Gods are co-operating on this long-term, eliminate-the-Snarl-by-restoring-balance-and-order plan, so Gods are aware of it. I’d further speculate that they got buy-in from everyone by agreeing to leave to chance *which *PCs, exactly, get ascended, which means in effect all the Gods are maneuvering to get their followers into the right position. Non-Gods know what their Gods tell them, although Xyklon in particular may have stumbled onto this plan by accident.
I like the way the six OOTS members are the correct number to match the six dead Gods shown (assuming Zeus = MITD); that’s a nice symmetry. But if instead the Eastern Pantheon *really *consisted of all 12 Olympians + Hades, V could be Athena (who has an owl), Haley could be Artemis the Huntress, MITD could be Hera or Hestia, and Roy could then be Zeus, all of which seems more appropriate. (BTW, I’d further speculate that V’s oracle prophecy is as yet unfullfilled.) That leaves six more slots, so maybe the Linear Guild gets restarted to fill them.
ETA:
Yeah, I did think of that independently, but I was focusing on only the seven Gods shown in the crayon drawing. If all 12 Olympians were actually in the Pantheon, that opens a lot more possibilities, including the identity of the MITD (as I mentioned above).
Come to think of it, wouldn’t Durkon be a better Zeus (bearded guy obsessed with thunder and lightning) and Roy a better Hades (because, okay, Durkon’s been vamped, but Roy was actually, y’know, dead, hanging out with dead people and returning from the afterlife because there’s a walking corpse that needs to be put in the ground)?
I expect Durkon to be raised and un-vamped before the story ends. So I wouldn’t take “he’s a vampire” as indicative if how anything will end. But, he does have to die to be raised.
It’s not absolutely certain the previous eastern deities are gone. There does seem to be a nice little world inside the rifts, and there is nothing certain in stickverse about where gods go when they die. Maybe they got reformed in there.
Even before they became an item. In an early bonus strip, they encounter a unicorn, and Roy suggests that Haley try to talk with it, because unicorns have an affinity for maidens. Haley tries to weasel out of it, but Roy insists it’s worth a shot, which leads to the unicorn to paroxysms of laughter.
