Unsounded

The whole Unsounded world is pretty fucking metal, isn't it?

I mean we already know Duane is a war hero who was known for keeping his charges alive.
I don't think child death is in the cards right now.

[spoilers]Besides, they are all almost certainly dead by present time in the story

None of DUANE's plats die

Nobody said Lemuel's silver friend or any other number of kiddos are completely safe

Nice reference to the snake dude there

It's a whole race of snake dudes, until humanity finally purges them forever

Although it appears even other sniggers think Ruck is a faggot

>It's a whole race of snake dudes
And snake ladies.
with tentacle nipples.

What happened was humanity hunted down and killed all the snakes who would actively interact with humanity, for better or worse. The only ones left are the one's who know enough to stay out of everyone's way. Except Ruck, who survived by being more conniving and cunning than all the others, apparently.

It's alright, Darkseid, even if the Word of God has decreed these children to be safe there will be plenty of time for the murdering of children we have yet to meet.

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Duane still has a temple full of children to eat, provided Bell or Hetr don't blow them all up first

That's pretty hardcore, I definitely stealing for my game.

It kind of looks like the old world got too out of control, so they just killed everything and put down a new layer.

The scary part is that there are actual real world fossils like that. Hundreds upon hundreds of prehistoric monsters trying to claw their way through the mass of death.

Ever since the audience has come to expect child murder, Ashley has to work extra hard to keep it shocking. I think she is going to keep teasing and foreboding in the flashback, but we will cut back to reality just in time for Ruffles or one of the twins to get caught up in shit getting real

What's with all the ogres

You can always see their sanity murdered

>survived by being more conniving and cunning than all the others
He slept through it all.

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Sleeping is cunning

He has slept intermittently throughout the age of man and has at times woken up and acted. We see on this page he has known at least one previous Queen of Cresce at some point so he gets up and does shit.

>ogre tunnels
They're going to go inside a butthole, aren't they?

Ruck wakes up every seventy years to take a piss and genocide some bitches, then goes back to bed.

Calling it, Lemuel goes looking in the tunnels/is nabbed and taken so Duane has to venture beneath to look for him, where he meets the salt lizard

Will Duane ever get a new waifu?

Tittybird is his new waifu. He just hasn't realized it yet. Probably will after their promised ice skating date.

Minnow seems like a strong contender. She's gonna appear in later books and she had relations with Duane in Ashley RP before Unsounded. While not everything maps perfectly over of course it does seem personalities are pretty similar.

Tittybird has too many villainous vibes going on for our good boy Duane. Though I guess we can root for him dicking her back to the side of good.

He married once would be a sin for him to marry again

>New

He is HAPPILY married

Even if he is currently on extended sabbatical

i'm pretty sure in ashley's previous rps literally everyone fucked everyone at some point so that's not saying much

I wouldn't go that far, but you have a point. It does sound like Minnow and Duane had a more substantial relationship though.

>Ssael appears in some fashion to warn Duane that Ilganyag is a megathot and he should steer clear

He heard His voice before, why not again

You and I both know he would not give his wife the burden of seeing him again

His body has no desire or ability to feel, and it's clear that emotionally he's still dedicated to his wife.

Too bad that shit is absolutely gonna fucking happen.

He did kinda fuck the bird tho

Unusual circumstances aside

No matter what her reaction is it won't be good for Duane

I'm reading through some of her Q&A posts and this once is scary
> Crescians will kill the shit out of Plat children too, they are lethal little turds and fair game. In return, Alds love specifically targeting Crescian female soldiers and killing them in horrible ways.

Not really, she ran a memory of him fucking his wife through his mind, and not having felt...anything for years, it apparently hit him pretty hard.

why is everyone in kasslyne a fucking psychopath

Sette already warned him away but he ignored her. I fear Tittybird's sex powers over him are too stronk.

Cause the gods made the world wrong

Most war veterans are fucking psychopaths. It comes with the territory.

Thinking about it, just having that memory ready to nonconsensually spring on Duane is pretty unusual unless somebody's feeding us some lies about how memories and the khert work. Wouldn't it have taken ages to find that shit?

"War is fuck" - Sun Tzu

I don't think that's how it worked there. Duane still has all his memories. That's his problem, he didn't die properly. Tittybird doesn't need to find his memories in the khert, just inside him. I think that's her power or her skill or something. Finding your memories and coaxing them into your brain so powerfully that it's like you're living them again.

Tittybird has enormous control over the Blacktongues, so perhaps part of her Senet Bestialness is some kind of mind control over men? The Blacktongues are a No Girls Allowed club, which I feel has to be a detail of worth (you don't care what gender your sub-human servants are unless it matters). She was physically toying with Bastion's choker at one point, but she also apparently can just spontaneously induce orgasm or something in men, and got Rahm to just turn around and try and fucking murder three children and two men he'd literal minutes ago been feeding, housing, and helping.

Perhaps it's not so much that she went around and found it, but that she can just trace back any memory if she's got access to a soul? Alternatively, perhaps she just followed Duane around during the nights and found his memories that way. Ashley said that before Duane "Woke up" to the Khert, he was actually moving around it at night and Tittybird had been actively following him and plucking him out of anemone-assholes and keeping his soul from falling off of cliffs. Perhaps while Duane had been stumbling through his memories, he was leading her to them?

Shut up ya Ssaelit

The khert has all memories in it, past and future. Don't forget Duane saw the silver rampaging in Alderode.

Someone asked Ashley to say all the words so we know how they're pronounced.

I say we go further. Ashley, do a dramatic reading of the comic up to date! And don't forget to do the voices!

I do believe RP!Duane didn't have the equipment to actually fool around with Minnow either. I think Ashley has mentioned on her tumblr Minnow's interest in him while being unable to actually lewd him.

Duane is a dunce for thinking Gods can be killed

Yes... but why go looking in the khert for Duane's memories when Duane is right there in front of you with his memories intact.

Gods are pretty fragile. Our world is full of gods so dead we don't even remember their name anymore.

I wonder what it would be like being Isekai'd to Kasslyne, assuming you don't fall through the world first because you have no Khert

I feel like you'd just immediately die if you have no khert. Like, you wouldn't be able to breathe. And you'd be invisible since the light wouldn't know to hit you. You just would glitch out.

But assuming the gods grant you a khert or some shit and you can survive, it could be rad. I think it would be good to apprentice with the Black Tongues so you have someone to watch your back and teach you pymary. Then you bounce out of there before they take your balls.

Then maybe you travel to Tain and join the rebellion there and see what kind of hippie Tainish secrets they have. Help free Alderode. Or you go meet Minnow and fuck a fish, she seems easy. Hang out with senet beasts, free Tiddybird from the khert and earn her eternal devotion.

I'm not sure if I'd want a giant dog mount or one of the giant flying snakegoats. The mechs are cool too but they seem impractical and uber expensive.

I'm not so sure about exploring the underground. It sounds like it's full of monsters and death.

Well since you lack Khert noting could cast on you but a sword would still work and when you die your soul wouldn't reincarnate. And considering the stuff that would come with you they would be interesting since they lack a word for plastic or polyester your clothes would also be safe

Safe from spells lol but someone could just fucking set you on fire.

I love pymary but its uses are exceptionally narrow.

>I love pymary but its uses are exceptionally narrow.
And even then it would be better than most tech that would possibly come with you

I really do love the clunky way they utilize it though. They have a way to do incredibly powerful things to their environment but they don't understand that since they don't understand the sciences. Like how they can sterilize shit instantly but they don't understand what they're doing - they just think they're exorcising sickness ghosts.

Or like the flawless and incredible holograms that they call glamours like they're fucking witchcraft, or how they call this thing the Alderode khert does a "curse" when it's probably some kind of sophisticated command that rewrites your metadata.

>they just think they're exorcising sickness ghosts.
I mean once they learned the "word" for germs they could and that's crazy

But my phone has angry birds and a calculator app on it I bet that would impress them

Kassylane has fairly advanced math, I'm sure pymaric calculators are a thing.

Duane, I love ya, but your country fucking sucks. Seriously, even accounting for Cresce’s ritual twin sacrifices it seems like Alderode still has a higher child murder count than Cresce could ever hope to achieve.

The world being terrible is proof that the gods were unfit bastards. I doubt Duane would argue with your assessment.

Don't worry, they do the twins thing in Alderode too.

Yeah but at least they are free instead of commies

Too true my man.

Interestingly, she has confirmed that the membership criterion is a physical, biological guy thing. I had previously assumed it was just that the Black Tongues had to be male so she could seduce and manipulate them, but she said that isn't it. A gay male black tongue would be accepted, but a lesbian would not. I wonder what it is about men specifically that she wants/needs?

>free
Nigga the Aldish government can literally snuff your life out from anywhere in the region whenever they want. And that’s not to mention the caste system; it’s not really a meritocracy at all and it’s certainly not “free”. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.

Gods dying is not so unusual in religions, though a dude achieving some kind of apotheosis to do so is. God as a literal, lovecraftian beyond all bounds of human existence is something that showed up fairly recently, human history-wise.

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Free to do whatever you want... As long as you're the right gender, caste, and either come from money or catch a rich guy's eye. And as long as you don't oppose the government, though to find Alderode its due, treason is strongly discouraged in just about all countries.

Just don't be a traitor

Just don't be a traitor, woman, soud, gay person, or want to ever move to a different country.

YEAH sounds perfect

I basically look like a stereotypical Soud so I'd be pretty down there on the social pecking order.

Their testicles, obviously.

Duane and Lemuel seemed to have been working their way up. Yeah, you'd have to eat some shit, but maybe you could eat shit in a nice office if you worked hard.

where do you think the raw potential titty bird uses to make lion kids comes from?

Starting to like Claggart, him getting into scaring kids is great

>>That's right, Jay.

Normal physics exists in the world, you can go high enough up that the Khert doesn't apply, but physics still does, so the Khert is more like an overlay. Which is weird.

I mean...

Surely they make pymarics for this kind of thing, right?

Also doesn't touching Duane hurt her?

Hm, I'm not super sure

First Silver loaded with agonized memories certainly does, but I don't recall if a fish lady would have the same effect. I don't think it would, since many of his parts are pymaric in nature now

She recoiled from touching him, though maybe that was more just the shock of the feeling of him rather than actual pain.

Yes. Waterwomen are super sensitive to dryness and Duane is a desiccated corpse by necessity (moisture rots his joints and remaining soft tissues).

They can't even snuggle.

You can imagine all the stupid drama this produced back in RP. It's still important in the comic. Minnow has water powers and she needs the explicit weakness to drying out to serve as a Kryptonite so she's not too OP.

Maybe the collar sort of taps in to its host's endocrine and nervous system in addition to whatever pymaric fuckery it does? It would explain how she can control bodily functions (make Bastion sleep), moods (whatever she did to make Rahm do a sudden shift in temperament), and memories (khert woo).

Maybe it sort of plugs into where the testicles were, and interfaces from there. It's a lot harder to safely remove a woman's ovaries than it is to castrate a guy and have him live.

She seems cool but I don't want them to get together anyway. I expect she's gonna go her own way after this arc anyhow.

She will, and then she feels bad about the awful shit she's gonna cause, and pops up again in the story later to try and make up for it.

Unbelievable. So not only do I have to write in why his dick didn't fall off, and why it's working, AND how it would even be practical to get with a zombie in the first place, I have to figure out how it'd even be possible for the two of them to be adjacent. If I didn't know any better I'd say you were TRYING to make the smut difficult.

Whatever, forget it, I'll just pretend like he never died.

Okay but what about non-water based lubricants in copious, if not ridiculous, quantities

Silly user, Duane loves Leysa. You need to do what Lady Ilganyag's gonna do, and that's to coax out young!Duane in the khert, and seduce him instead. That's kosher, since it's before he got married. That's part of the reason we're doing this prequel chapter - to introduce the version of Duane that Lady Ilganyag is gonna pursue.

You just gotta be creative. Think like a tittybird.

>think like a tittybird

I have significantly fewer than the requisite assemblage of titties for that

That was just because he's super dry.

Which is his natural state these days

She probably eats them. The whole Black Tongue order was started because she can't get enough of that lip-smacking taste.
On a more serious note
Isn't Bastion's the only torc that actually plugs into his skin? On the rest of them, it's just an incredibly useful spell-storing pymaric.

>moisture rots his joints and remaining soft tissues).

Honestly, if Pymary can sterilize a given cubic area of all microbes, it's a ridiculously powerful sterilization method. If Duane was cleaning himself up every few hours, and his body was still animated preventing oedema I'm not sure he shouldn't be able to keep his flesh going an arbitrarily long time. Obviously damage would set in and not be repaired, but he'd be more of a leper than a zombie for a long time.

Dunno perhaps after 6 years the results wouldn't be that different but as I've said before, pymaric disinfection is ridiculously powerful.

What would Leysa think about her dead husband shacking up with a tittybird

and people still claim Shartshane is a shithole...

It is a shithole literally they shit on the streets

Well, yeah, senpai. He's a six year old corpse that's still walking around well enough to dodge and fight and stick-spar. That's a remarkable thing and probably due to all his pymary-fueled maintenance.

It's probably been brought up before, but how much does Duane even depend on his physical bits?
Obviously he needs hands if he wants to hold things, but does he need tendons in his fingers to make them work or is there some sort of animating force and the tendons just hold everything together and would be very inconvenient to lose? What about muscles? He's apparently got super zombie strength so if they're still doing anything they aren't doing it naturally. Nerves? Iirc his brain is mush now so there's no real signals to carry anyway, but does there still need to be a good enough connection between the "command center" whatever that is and the body part he's trying to control or does he not have to worry about getting his spinal cord severed as long as the damage isn't too severe physically?

All that matters is the bones. He doesn't have muscles or anything, they just rot away. There's some force that is somehow applied to his bones and that's how he can move them which gives him his zombie strength because he's only limited by what his bones can withstand. His brain his beyond mush, it's rotted out of his skull by now. There seems to be some metaphysical template of the human body, the "soul", that needs to be met. He can swap out his old human parts for other human parts but he couldn't put a stick in his arm and move it around. Likewise if his parts became sufficiently far removed from this template then he would lose control of them.

Thanks
That sounds familiar, it was probably explained directly in the comic and I just forgot.
Time to reread everything I guess.
I wonder if he could modify himself, how malleable is that human pattern? Would an extra arm be too much? Would replacing a couple bones with metal recreations disrupt it? Could he ship of theseus himself completely with borrowed bits? Could he bend his elbows backwards just as well as forwards if he decided to? I'm starting to see why all the weird dudes in the setting are so interested in him.
Although I'd guess it's at least partly related to your image of self, so Duane probably couldn't even if the mechanisms by which he operates would make it possible, good Ssaelish boy that he is wouldn't be interested in a few extra joints no matter how convenient they would be.

He's pretty much made of borrowed bits by this point, though his skull is still the same since you can see the eyebrow piercing he had in life. The human pattern is pretty set, you can see a brief glance of it when he pops off his hand to escape the cuffs that Stockyard had him in after he comes back from the khert. The way he looks in the Khert is a good indicator of his "soul" in all likelihood. He can replace his bodies with prosthetic he just hasn't because he felt he was damned and though he should suffer through the rot. Pymaric replacements seem pretty great, but the more he has the more his pymary will be disrupted. If he had pymaric hands they would likely block his ports and prevent him from casting.

Could a wright absorb ambient light and feed it into khert lines to help them be visible? Could he take a color from something and color the khert lines as well? What happens when you take color from something, does it just turn a milky white as it now has no color?

>What happens when you take color from something, does it just turn a milky white as it now has no color?

It basically vanishes, like with Rahm, the accident with his son blasted away the visible aspects of his lower half

Interesting to note how he doesn’t actually need a physical hand to cast pymary since it comes directly out of the soul-template. Taking that premise to its logical extreme, would it be foolish to theorize that Duane could potentially exist as just a floating head or completely disembodied ghost? Given his tacit status he wouldn’t need vocal chords or even a mouth to cast.

Either way I have a gut feeling that we have yet to see Duane at anywhere near his most powerful. I could see him achieving full lich status in the future.

Depends on just what exactly was done to keep him stuck to the mortal world

Milky white would be a color, still, wouldn't it? I think if you took the color from something you may not be able to see it at all.

Well there’s definitely a reason why Bastion chose a particularly powerful tacit caster for his zombie experiment. It seems pretty clear he wanted to turn Duane into some kind of WMD, and I doubt he’s gonna let him escape without finishing the job.

Reminder that one could totally make a pymaric that collects atmospheric moisture.
Actually, Senet beasts are first X themselves, could one use a live Senet beast as a base for pymarics?

My point is, his body could still be mostly intact, rot doesn't just happen, bacterial processes carry it out, if he can just sudo remove bacteria arbitrarily 2 or 3 times a day he'd just... not rot.

He probably would've needed to do it decisively through all his body from day one to get rid of the gut bacteria, but after that he should be more or less ok as long as he kept sterilizing himself assiduously. The heart isn't pumping and he's not breathing so there's not much activity helping any bacteria that land on him to spread. I suppose the lungs would be the largest surface for new infection... if the pymary cleaning doesn't cover fungi he might just end up rotting in a different way.

Hmm.

Quigley has glasses that make pymary lines visible, so something like that must be possible

>Duane, potentially, in a weird chaste relationship with some sapient water
>his memories being seduced by a bird that vomits itself inside out into a woman in the equivalent of the setting's afterlife
You continue to come up with the craziest shit.

Just gonna also mention that the fact you shipped Hojo/Vincent is hilarious both because it was unexpected information and yet completely unsurprising.

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I always just assumed he wanted a tacit caster since being stuck in a decaying body would require a lot of self-sufficiency.

probably something like the farcytes used to scoop memories from the Khert

Bastion wants to find a way to prevent death. Him not liking death is like his main thing. I doubt Duane was meant to be a WMD, Duane was chosen for his tacit casting (confirmed in story) and because him being a Soud has some as of yet unelaborated on impact on what happened (confirmed by Ashley congratulating some user in a thread on getting close to what happened by theorizing along those lines). I don't know, however, if him being a Soud causing complications or benefiting the experiment was something Bastion expected though. Much of exactly what Bastion did and how it works remains a mystery.

Duane just also happened to be a good martial combatant AND brilliant at pymary. Even without his tacit casting, Duane was a genius when it came to pymary and learned to combine that with active combat. Though being a tacit caster helped him do that. Duane is so powerful as a zombie mage mostly by accident, not by design. Of course, general immortality, even if it requires some upkeep and a lot of downsides related to being a zombo, would give most people a leg up. Duane has just especially benefited from it, in this specific way. He doesn't much like it.

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this was the scene and specifically the page that made me start caring about bastion
he's probably one of my favorite characters now

Bastion's interesting. Like with most of the characters he's presented as a trope (pretty boy edgelord villain) and then that's completely subverted (inept and ridiculous failure who's actually trying to save the world). I long for the day Duane realizes who's responsible for his current state, and he and his maker fight it out.

I've been following Ash for like 15 years and she's famous for the Vincent shit.

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> actually trying to save the world
That's a funny way to spell "greedy little cowardly bitch."

I can't wait to see him get his reckoning