Friday's comic!

[murgatroyd666]

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20181214

It would seem that Albia learned her tricks from someone else ...

Comments

[occams_pyramid]

Lozz sort of reminds me of the way Lucrezia rules the Geisterdamen.
Could the Other be one of the queens, who survived by serial mind transfer?

[madfilkentist]

It makes sense to me that individuals such as Lucrezia might just be receptacles for the Other, and that there could have been many over the centuries.

The "land of the devils" which Lozz came from could be another dimension or the future, or perhaps a hidden advanced civilization. I don't know what to hope for, but I hate time-loop plots. They always degenerate into incoherence or throw out causality.

[occams_pyramid]

Come to think of it, could Lucrezia be Lozz?
It says 'overthrew', not 'killed'.

[katzedecimal]

"When I was a novice [our goddess] visited us frequently, always in the same lovely aspect. But then she [Lucrezia] came to us in high distress..."

When I read "and the people went in terror of the strange other worldly servants the witch queen showed them", I straight up expected to see Geisterdamen. (A little disappointed actually...).

Either way, it seems to hint that even if Lucrezia is not herself a vessel of the Other, it seems she may have known one of the god-queens and either studied with her or tried to reverse engineer her work.

(And I still think Neolithic!Albia looks like a jacked Wilma Flintstone.)

[bunsen_h]

Wilma Flintstone... now that you point it out, yeah.

[*bzzzownt*]
<Marvin_the_Martin>"Oh, dear, I've got the silly thing in reverse. She's a Neanderthal Wilma!"</Marvin_the_Martin>

[turbobeholder]

So the question is…
Is this yet another interactive apparition ("meet the hypervisor"), or does Albia Prime remotely monitor these requests in person to decide when to stop the answers?

[spectrum_09]

Remember Zola called Lucrezia a fraud.

My thought is that Lucrezia was attempting to become a God-Queen. Perhaps THE God-Queen. I think Lucrezia is the Other as the story states. Nothing inhabits her beyond her own blind ambition.

She had to have known about the mirror in Mechanicsburg, which is why it was tapped into from the Refuge of Storms.

[jbwoodford]

The latter, I think. It sure sounded like the attendant was asking Albia for access.

[cmdr_zoom]

A friend of mine notes that Agatha has already come close to breaking through a second time, and it almost killed her ("forty-five point three seconds from exploding"). So apparently part of the difficulty in going Super-Saiyan becoming a Queen is surviving the process.

They also note that when taking down Lucrezia-in-Agatha, Otila sneered at her as a coward.

Put together, their theory is that Lucrezia wants to become an immortal God-Queen, but doesn't want to risk her own precious hide. So she's looking for alternatives...

[murgatroyd666]

Come to think of it, could Lucrezia be Lozz?

I do believe you may have discovered a Clue.

[jhameia]

This implies that there's only just one (or a few) Big Evil in the world who just lie in wait for the perfect receptacle to continue their mischief.

People get to make their own decisions and become evil on their own without being involved in a larger cosmic evil, so this theory doesn't make sense to me.

[spectrum_09]

I know I'm going against the grain here.

"The Other" is called that because the attacks on Spark Houses were anonymous, no one claimed responsibility or reason. Just attacks, no demands, no anything. People need to name things.

Lucrezia wanted this anonymity. She did not want to be known as the leader of this. The whole Storm king Conspiracy, as originally conceived, seems to have involved Lucrezia occupying her daughter and marrying the Storm King (most likely, Tarvek who was viewed as manageable). She would also be a Heterodyne with access to the Castle and it's secrets. Things didn't work out the way she wanted. After whatever happened the night of the attack on the Castle, she shifted gears and became the Other.

Lucrezia, in my opinion, IS the Other. She has always been extremely ambitious, always wanting to control everyone.

[turbobeholder]

This looked like a ritual, as in she was not expecting any actual answer. Thus ambiguous.

[murgatroyd666]

I know there are people here who are resistant to the idea, but I strongly suspect that the Professors are going to set up a time loop that ties causality in knots.

Lucrezia IS the Other -- and she's also other characters, due to her mind transfer ability. And I think that via time travel the Other will CAUSE Lucrezia to become the Other and to set the whole scenario in motion.

(But what happened to Lucrezia's original body? Is thee still hope thatshe -- that paticular "she" -- might be a Good Guy?)

The whole issue of cause and effect will become meaningless -- there'll only be "what happened/is happening/will happen" as a single ball of spaghetti.

As an example, a prediction: The Heterodyne Device, which provides an invisibility shield, is also a power source. I think it's the essentially infinite power source needed by the Time Window, which is more likely a Time Gate. And who made it? Nobody! At the end of the story, Agatha will decide that time travel technology is too dangerous to keep around. So she'll make sure that nobody can use it for other shenanigans, by sending the Heterodyne Device back to a curio shop in Paris, where university student Gilgamesh Wulfenbach will notice it and buy it.