Girl Genius XXI: Cancel the Jugglers

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

I'm hoping the next page or two is REALLY impressive. For the Master of Paris to give that "Oh AM I? Observe!" line and then just drop a clank or two is terribly anticlimactic.

With regards to the entities, I'm pretty sure the "huge, entwined, omnipresent" entity is the Master of Paris himself, given that he starts focusing on Colette the moment she mentions the entity's focus is moving.

The other may indeed be Drusus Beausoleil, who I'm starting to suspect may actually BE the city at this point. Firstly, his name ("Beautiful Sun") matches nicely with Paris's nickname of the "City of Lights." Secondly, he's clearly connected to the city: this comic has the Paris-linked Castle seize control of Beausoleil's clank body, and we haven't seen anything have the ability to remotely control a clank that it isn't networked to in some fashion. He's also obsessed with mechanical life, which seems to indicate that he isn't (or wasn't?) human in any fashion. Finally, he claims to be linked to a bunch of parts of the city, which the "spread out across vast areas of unimportant subsystems" the first entity has matches perfectly.

So I have to wonder...is he a work of Van Rijn? Because if he is the "parasitic intelligence" and the "mathematical chimera without physical constraints" we've heard about, he's operating at a level which clearly boggles Tarvek, and which seems to surpass even powerful artificial intelligence like the Castle and the Beast. And Lucrezia was not, I believe, noted for her work with artificial thought, but Van Rijn seems to have been rather talented in that regard (see the Muses).

Also, side note...thoughts on Beausoleil being a Spark? We've seen from Agatha's little clanks that a machine CAN have a sort of Spark, and Beausoleil did mention making improvements on his clank bodies. That sounds very Sparky, but more and more I'm starting to think he's entirely artificial, which raises all sorts of questions...