Girl Genius XX: Endothermic Life Forms Are Inherently Heretical

[Shadowcaller]

It looks like he might have a case of Hogfarb's resplendent immolation from the infamous castle arch. Perhaps that disease might actually be relevant in the bigger story.

[HandofShadows]

SK does not seem to be changing colors though.

[Shining Wrath]

I have to admit it will be beyond epic if Agatha and Andy get their Spark on together in order to save his life - breaking into nearby vaults for raw materials, snuffing monsters who get in their way, Hoffman spotting traps with X-ray vision ...

Good times.

[Kantaki]

OK, looks like it's confirmed this *is* the Storm King, and it sounds like he believes van Rijn betrayed him. Doesn't mean van Rijn actually did so, of course--it would surely have been far easier to just kill the guy than to imprison him in some sort of time stop field for hundreds of years, after all.

Easier to kill him? I seriously doubt that. We are talking about Andronicus Valois there. The Storm King. If he was easy to kill he would never have managed to conquer most of Europe. Seriously, this guy was dangerous enough to attract a Heterodyne- and to make her betray him for her family's sake.
Putting him into stasis sounds like the easier way to deal with him.

[Calemyr]

Easier to kill him? I seriously doubt that. We are talking about Andronicus Valois there. The Storm King. If he was easy to kill he would never have managed to conquer most of Europe. Seriously, this guy was dangerous enough to attract a Heterodyne- and to make her betray him for her family's sake.
Putting him into stasis sounds like the easier way to deal with him.

Suddenly I'm having flashbacks to Captain SNES.

Spoiler: Captain SNES Spoilers

Show

In Final Fantasy IV, Prince Edward snaps and tries to kill Cecil. Cecil is afflicted with a superpowered version of the Hold spell, and completely unable to do anything but speak, warning the prince that he doesn't believe Edward can kill him.

Edward: You mean you don't think I have the resolve? Let's find out!
*Edward attacks like fifty times, the ones that don't miss do 0 damage.*
Cecil: No, I mean you physically won't be able to do it.
Edward: *Wheeze* *Pant* Stupid game mechanics...

[Giggling Ghast]

This strip and the one before it reminds me that Phil is bad at drawing people holding things. The Storm King is clutching that mace in the first panel of both strips like one holds a spoon. (The second-last panel is good, though.)

[Rogar Demonblud]

If we learned anything from Civil War, it's that the easiest way to kill a supersoldier is to put them in stasis, then shoot them.

[geoduck]

I have to admit it will be beyond epic if Agatha and Andy get their Spark on together in order to save his life - breaking into nearby vaults for raw materials, snuffing monsters who get in their way, Hoffman spotting traps with X-ray vision ...

Good times.

I'd bet a fair amount of money that the Storm King is not a Spark, although it's pretty much a given that some Spark or other inflicted his current status on him.

[Calemyr]

I'd bet a fair amount of money that the Storm King is not a Spark, although it's pretty much a given that some Spark or other inflicted his current status on him.

It'd be very interesting to see a major player not be a spark. We've got some tough non-sparks like Zeetha and Dupree, but they're the exception.

The idea that the Storm King is just a guy who is so implacable that even Sparks follow him... I kinda feel we need that.

[SZbNAhL]

It'd be very interesting to see a major player not be a spark. We've got some tough non-sparks like Zeetha and Dupree, but they're the exception.

The idea that the Storm King is just a guy who is so implacable that even Sparks follow him... I kinda feel we need that.

Do we count Zola and Anveka as major players? Because neither of them are sparks. I don't think Seffie or Grandma are either.

[Calemyr]

Do we count Zola and Anveka as major players? Because neither of them are sparks. I don't think Seffie or Grandma are either.

Pretty sure Anevka is Lucy, so spark.
Zola, kinda/sorta. She killed someone with a marshmallow gun. And is part Lucy. Probably counts.
Seffie and Grandma? Dunno. All four of these cases come from powerful Spark bloodlines, and we know heredity plays a part.

That said...
Zola wasn't a major player without Lucy. She's scary, yes, but she was working under another group's (led by a Spark) orders until she pulled a fast one on Lucy.
Anevka was nothing but stand-in before Lucy. She was part of Tarvek's posse.
Seffie and Grandma are of uncertain provenance at this point.

They have influence, clearly, but does the world bend to their whim the way it does for Sparks like Klaus, Voltaire, The Other, or the Heterodynes?

We've got levels of influence here. Major sparks, major non-sparks and moderate sparks, and moderate non-sparks.

Andronicus Valois is a player on a whole other level. None of the big four can claim that level of domination. They dominate their little slices, but Valois basically stole the pie. If you tell me Andy is a spark, I'll believe it and then yawn a little because that's just status quo. You tell me that the biggest badass in the history of Europa was not a spark, however, and you've got my interest. We're getting to Axel Higgs levels of awesome, here.

[eschmenk]

Pretty sure Anevka is Lucy, so spark.
Zola, kinda/sorta. She killed someone with a marshmallow gun. And is part Lucy. Probably counts.
Seffie and Grandma? Dunno. All four of these cases come from powerful Spark bloodlines, and we know heredity plays a part.

I think he may have meant the original Anevka, who wasn't a spark. Even if not, Gil mentioned that Clank Lucrezia hasn't come up with anything new, so evidently she lacks the spark. (The mini hive machines were invented by someone else.) Zola never did anything that indicated that she has the spark. Yes, as you said, Zola killed someone. She did it by bashing them in the head with a hard object. That's not nearly enough to demonstrate that she is a spark. Neither Seffie nor Grandma have ever demonstrated that they have the spark.

[eee]

Wow, close up, he's got complexion problems. O_O

Could he be turning (or already turned) into something like a Jager???

How do we know that van Rijn sided with Euphrosynthia over Valois?

Might have been a misreading of the Baron's fairy tale. Van Rijn didn't appear there, but the King's son did disguise himself and offer a sword to Euphy he SAID would solve her problems...

As I understand it, the whole Storm King / Euphrosynthia thing went like this.

1) Clemethious Heterodyne decided to try to conquer Europa.
2) Valois said "No" and put together a coalition of forces that Clem couldn't defeat or break apart through conventional means.
3) Deciding to be unconventional, during negotiations he let the Storm King see Euphrosynthia, apparently by accident, in the hopes Valois' passions would overcome his brains.
4) It worked, Andy saw her and said "Woo" and started thinking of dynasties, and diplomatic courtship happened and a marriage were set up by which peace would descend on the land.
5) (from the novel) The morning of the wedding the Muses, who had been subtly trying to make the Storm King see was being played for a sucker, just told him straight that Euphy didn't love him (according to Tweedle, who read her journals, they were wrong about that) and she was her father's daughter and was going to be the catspaw by which the coalition would be destroyed and the Heterodynes take over Europa. They couldn't tell him before because van Rijn had built them to teach, not dictate; and if the King was too love besotted to understand the tales, parables, hypothetical situations, and everything else they'd been trying to use to make him see the situation for what it was, they could do nothing until it was too late. Which it was.
6) Shortly after this, things hit the fan at supersonic speed, and it appears NOTHING went as anyone had planned.

Now, assume Andy here is still rational and they can calm him down to the point he will talk, we may be about to find out what DID happen after that.

[geoduck]

I think he may have meant the original Anevka, who wasn't a spark. Even if not, Gil mentioned that Clank Lucrezia hasn't come up with anything new, so evidently she lacks the spark. (The mini hive machines were invented by someone else.) Zola never did anything that indicated that she has the spark. Yes, as you said, Zola killed someone. She did it by bashing them in the head with a hard object. That's not nearly enough to demonstrate that she is a spark. Neither Seffie nor Grandma have ever demonstrated that they have the spark.

In the print novel Zola explicitly says at one point that she's not a Spark, though of course she's far from the most trustworthy source of information.

And we have no idea which version of Lucrezia is going around as The Queen of the Dawn. It could be the clank-copy, it could be Zola, or some body we haven't met yet. But yeah, I agree that whoever it is, she's not a Spark, which is why the Lucrezia-copy inhabiting her can't come up with new stuff.

If it is Zola, it would be a neat twist if she's just pretending to be Lucrezia, and Zola's actually the one in charge..

[factotum]

Easier to kill him? I seriously doubt that. We are talking about Andronicus Valois there. The Storm King. If he was easy to kill he would never have managed to conquer most of Europe.

Yeah, but he clearly trusted van Rijn enough to stand next to one of his machines while he did some work on it. Which would be easier in that situation: have the machine be a bomb that blows AV into chunky kibbles, or have it perform a very complicated stasis field effect on him? Anyway, my major point was simply that van Rijn almost certainly didn't put AV into stasis just to get rid of him, because there would be easier ways to do that.

[Rodin]

Given the time travel shenanigans we already know are at play, I'm really wondering if this was a sort of "King in the Mountain" style ploy by van Rijn. He trapped the Muse of Time (who may be Lucrezia/Agatha/The Other/a Time creature/etc), and then got loads of information about the future. He learned from it that Europa would collapse into a roiling mess of warring factions right as an existential threat to the planet in the form of the time creatures loomed, and decided to sort things by punting the Storm King forward in time via stasis. He got the Muses to sign off on it but knew Andronicus himself would never agree - hence he zapped him unawares.

Voila, instant King Arthur, ready to aid Europa in its darkest hour.

[eschmenk]

If it is Zola, it would be a neat twist if she's just pretending to be Lucrezia, and Zola's actually the one in charge..

...especially since Zola's voice probably doesn't have the right command harmonics. She's Lucrezia's niece, not her daughter, so she probably doesn't sound as much like her. OTOH, she might have learned something from the copy of Lucrezia in her head. I don't think she would be enough of a spark to be able to use the voice box Tarvek built for the clank. She might have convinced a spark to help her, though.

I think it's quite a long shot. OTOH, Zola is incredibly scrappy and it probably wouldn't be wise to underestimate her. I think she's more likely to be Madame Velix, the Geister in the Paris Opera House. I think she would be wearing makup, rather than having been turned into a Geister, though.

[geoduck]

Given the time travel shenanigans we already know are at play, I'm really wondering if this was a sort of "King in the Mountain" style ploy by van Rijn. He trapped the Muse of Time (who may be Lucrezia/Agatha/The Other/a Time creature/etc), and then got loads of information about the future. He learned from it that Europa would collapse into a roiling mess of warring factions right as an existential threat to the planet in the form of the time creatures loomed, and decided to sort things by punting the Storm King forward in time via stasis. He got the Muses to sign off on it but knew Andronicus himself would never agree - hence he zapped him unawares.

Voila, instant King Arthur, ready to aid Europa in its darkest hour.

No, Prende said that Van Rijn "failed" in whatever he was attempting to do. I still think he was trying to trap the Muse of Time in order to somehow force from her a cure for whatever's afflicting the Storm King, and VR placed the SK in stasis so he wouldn't die/blow up/finish mutating in the meantime.

[factotum]

Voila, instant King Arthur, ready to aid Europa in its darkest hour.

Interesting theory. The main problem with it is, if van Rijn had done that, he would presumably have had some sort of mechanism to decant AV at the correct time--rather than relying on a fight between a pair of Smoke Knights accidentally (or possibly deliberately, still not sure about that) breaking Prende's Lantern and releasing him.

[eschmenk]

No, Prende said that Van Rijn "failed" in whatever he was attempting to do. I still think he was trying to trap the Muse of Time in order to somehow force from her a cure for whatever's afflicting the Storm King, and VR placed the SK in stasis so he wouldn't die/blow up/finish mutating in the meantime.

I'm going with what Van Rijn said he was trying to do: Get the "trick of endless life." It's kind of obvious why Prende would conclude that he failed to do that as soon as she found out he was dead.

Assuming he was doing that for the Storm King's benefit, that's basically what you are suggesting, except that he may have been trying to cure the Storm King's old age as well as his own. I'm not ruling out the possibility that the Storm King had some fatal injury or disease or was poisoned, but we don't have enough information to start analyzing that. I agree that it looks as if Van Rijn needed to put him in stasis for some reason, though.

[Ellen]

Does someone with a better memory/better information sources know what the deal is with the sword? The only thing I've got it the story the Baron told our favorite, wandering teller-of-tales--the story that didn't fit with any known history or the other tales of the Storm King (I should have realized that gave it good odds of being based on the truth).

So, right now, we know Von Rijn was once the Storm King's friend and made the muses to serve him, implying that the Storm King wasn't always a complete nutter.

We know that there is a zappy style sword (electro-zappy or other-zappy being unknown) kept by his family. It sounds like it is a bad thing for the Storm King to have this.

We know that something has made the Storm King green, glowy, and possibly megalomaniacal (or maybe he always was [megalomaniacal, I mean. I assume green and glowy would have caused comment]).

So, can he be reset to sanity? How sane was he? How much trouble are we in? Will Paris still be standing when Agatha leaves? Will the Master of Paris ever let her back? Does this increase the odds that her dad or her uncle will be found in an insane and glowy state when Agatha tracks them down?

[geoduck]

In the print-novel prologue-scene where the reader gets to see things from his perspective, he seems calm and rational enough. It's set right before his planned marriage, so presumably whatever caused his current condition happened after that point. And there's been no mention at all before this of his having a special sword, although he's wielding one in the mural in the Immortal Library.

And I still think the Baron wasn't intentionally basing his story on any historical facts, but like Theo's Dragon-from-Mars tale, it may end up being more true than the teller realizes.

[Kislath]

Well, now...didn't this just suddenly get all kinds of interesting?

[factotum]

So, right now, we know Von Rijn was once the Storm King's friend and made the muses to serve him, implying that the Storm King wasn't always a complete nutter.

We don't know that he's a "complete nutter" now. Look at it from his point of view--last thing he remembers is watching van Rijn doing something on a machine during some sort of big battle, then suddenly he's elsewhere with a bunch of strangers in front of him. I imagine you'd be a bit disoriented and probably angry if the same thing happened to you.

[HandofShadows]

Well I don't see van Rijn and Muse so eager to keep him contained unless there was something VERY wrong with him.

On another note Andy there does seem to like to use electricity. Now who else do we know that is VERY good with it? And better yet we know he is heading to Paris very quickly.

[eee]

We don't know that he's a "complete nutter" now. Look at it from his point of view--last thing he remembers is watching van Rijn doing something on a machine during some sort of big battle, then suddenly he's elsewhere with a bunch of strangers in front of him. I imagine you'd be a bit disoriented and probably angry if the same thing happened to you.

Agatha (or somebody, but Agatha would be best) needs to step forward and start talking to the guy. He doesn't trust Prende (and she's not really telling him what he needs to hear) and is rushing forward on emotion; that needs to be stopped, fast. Agatha should tell him it's been 200 years, he's not well, things have changed (well, sort of), and he needs to sit down and listen or hilarity will ensue.

[Calemyr]

Agatha (or somebody, but Agatha would be best) needs to step forward and start talking to the guy. He doesn't trust Prende (and she's not really telling him what he needs to hear) and is rushing forward on emotion; that needs to be stopped, fast. Agatha should tell him it's been 200 years, he's not well, things have changed (well, sort of), and he needs to sit down and listen or hilarity will ensue.

Not sure a Heterodyne girl is the best choice for that. Honestly, the two best prospects to my mind would be Hoffman and Violetta. Hoffman is a somewhat dim heroic type, the kind of adventurer a guy like the Storm King would be more likely to trust, while Violetta knows more about the Storm King than the rest of the assembled party due to Tarvek's determined prattling. I would have rather had Voltaire's daughter, representing what seems to have been a friendly relationship, but she didn't seem to be along for this particular ride.

Now, I will be very interested in how Andy responds to Agatha. I imagine that (unless it's a plot point) Agatha and Euphy aren't eerily similar, just familiar. But there's an awful lot of Agatha that her ancestor also had, between her charm, danger, and loyalty first to her town and people. How Andy reacts to her will be very telling.

[eschmenk]

And I still think the Baron wasn't intentionally basing his story on any historical facts, but like Theo's Dragon-from-Mars tale, it may end up being more true than the teller realizes.

I think Klaus was trying to keep his story consistent enough with with what was known and the other legends to be able to pass it off as a Storm King story. Remember that Clank Lucrezia was present, so Klaus had to be sneaky. That said, he changed things enough to hide his message in the story. We know there were large differences as a result. Basically, he changed things enough to embed his message, but not more than that.

[Kantaki]

Whatever he is doing with that sword, he can do it over a pretty big distance. I just hope he isn't going to pull it to his hand or teleport it. Or himself for that matter.
On the other hand he would meet Martellus. That could be a interesting interaction. Especially with that beard.

[Shining Wrath]

So his sword is hung on the wall as a family heirloom, and now Martellus knows something is up with the heirloom.

And unless I miss my guess, alarm bells just went off in the Master's bedroom and office, because he seems like the sort of guy who'd be on top of the Storm King's sword being in his town.