Unsounded

Watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and never, ever, cut a deal with a dragon.

He’s probably about to go full gremlin in Roger’s direction and lose an arm in the process.

But Ash never seems to go with the most obvious option, so who knows how it’s really going to get lost.

So I'm really increasingly unconvinced Alderode is going to be bad enough to make me dislike them more than Cresce unless they're literally eating the kussen or something.

Then he should be used to getting fucked in the ass like this by now.

>wow, salt lizard who hates all of humanity with a impotent genocidal fury, I can't believe your plan to help me actually hurts me instead

The skulls falling might be a sign that the Khert fire is dissipating, right? The Curse may be on the verge of taking full effect. Wouldn't that be a bit earlier than was intended?

uh yes hence op's commentary. Everything is about to happen

Can't wait for Vampire and all the Non-Soud aldish to go apeshit on Roger.

dwayne's plat brigade probably fixed it.

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If this bitch cuts Will's arm off, I swear to fucking god.

What was he expecting? That the genocidal and utterly hateful ancient horror was actually going to help him out?

Sure, Cresce seems like a place with a pretty straightforward authoritarian power structure with a strong side of cultural hypocrisy (anti-greed monarchy, two-toe ethnicide, Gefendur religion in general) and the militaristic fervor that comes with said religion. But Alderode has a hardline racial caste system enforced by a reality field that overwrites the nature of genetics and minds, and the government has dev console access to at least a couple of its features.

There’s all sorts of nasty surprises that could be pulled out of that system, both behind the scenes and in their open culture itself. Remember that we’ve only ever seen the place in any detail from the perspective of a Soud, and they generally aren’t invited to the party in Aldish society. Shit, they don’t even have the local telepathy patch everyone else is running on.

Roger seems to have believed he was the exception to the rule.

What an asshole this salt lizard is.

Even Duane seems to find this pretty appalling.

I mean, Roger did intentionally lead his entire family to their deaths, so I feel that this is a pretty good example of karmic justice.

Well, I believe he thought he was the leader of all this, so that at least made him useful enough to protect. After all how will the revolution continue if he has to die? Who will lead it?

The answer, of course, is the Queen of Cresce. Salty doesn't give a fuck about nationalities, just a bodycount.

Rewarded as a traitor deserves.

Yeah, I have a really hard time feeling bad for him after hearing about that.

Not that it justifies getting them killed, but his family sound like greedy, grasping scum of the earth.

I'm expecting both places to go to shit.

Evil gods don't make exceptions. They just leave you around for as long as you continue to be useful to them. And Roger's usefulness has clearly been exhausted.

I liked his answer about it though. Revolutions are usually only successful if someone in a place of privilege gets fed up and does something. If he sacrifices his peers. It's kind of shitty but if your family is shitty, fuck 'em. “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

I suspect this won't be a story where all society collapses.

I could see Alderode being completely reformed while Cresce stays about the same with maybe some reforms. It's less (LESS) aggressively terrible

We'll see. There are too many factors. Bell's coup. The two-toe's situation. the silver. This. It's all going to hell.

Shartshane coming out on top after Cresce and Alderode BTFO of each other then Litchking Duane leads an army of plods out of the north White Walker style.

>Duane “Ssael’s Homeboy” Adelier ever associating with plods or the production or the commanding thereof

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They hate tomgirls

The thing is Roger's not really reacting to being a matyr, though he does say he didn't want to become one. What's really horrifying about his situation is the specifics: being torn apart by an Efheby. It's like if you expected to be able to endure being hated by everyone you ever knew in order to take down your country, then informed you also needed to be drugged and raped and over time all the drugs and rape would tear apart your soul until you had ceased to exist. Remember, it's not just that the venom is a drug, but it siphons who you are away and eventually, in order for this to work, all of Roger needs to be torn apart. He won't even get to become part of the Khert, because his memories will have been sucked out by Ruck and analyzed by mad sorcerers.

It's a pretty fucking nasty fate, regardless of what he's done.

That is pretty fucked

>The spooky skulls have gone out
And here's the best part, since Roger and Vampire are so distracted, on top of coppers having such a shit feel for the Khert, they probably won't even notice until Will starts trying to skewer Roger on his mother's knitting needles. I imagine Mallory might at least TRY to resist, but Will is certainly going to FEEEL IT MR. KRABS

Oh I totally forgot about the rest of Duane and Lem's squaddies

I don't have a good feeling about our Jet comrades coming out of this in one piece

Vampire will hold out a while. He's a Copper, and therefore the curse will take longer to affect him than the other Aldishmen. He may be able to recognize when it starts to affect him and withdraw peacably. Probably not, though, cause that wouldn't be properly tragic.
The Plats would go first, if there were any left alive in this group. As it is, the Silvers will start attacking him soon.

>the tied up jets and silver (I think that's what evans is?) deglove their skin trying to get out of their bonds and fuck roger's shit up

Fuck, that sounds painful. I still can't watch gerald's game knowing how it ends

They aren't the only aldishmen in the room, don't forget. Roger's men are there too, they'd be just as affected as the tied up aldishmen

So I guess that lends to the idea that what we've been seeing in the alt texts is the actual wording of the curse as it's being cast?

He specifically sent Eustace and the other rebels away for that exact reason a number of pages back
casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch14/ch14_91.html

It's not beyond possibility that once the curse hits they'll turn back around though

The suspense is terrible. I hope it'll last.

>I'm a genius
>Oh, no!

I wonder what will cause Roger's change of heart at his fate or will it just be weariness and resignation.

Nice to see the readers turning on Rodger as someone who was /antirodger/ from the start

ITS SHOWTIME

Probably seeing/having to kill Mallory after the curse takes effect.
The Khert is whole again, and Roger Foi-Hellick is out of time

Or maybe he never changed his mind, but the Queen kidnapped him

You're just very susceptible to the Etalarche curse, you bootlicking Statist dog. I stan Lord Foi-Hellick forever.

God I love this comic so much, and I'm so happy Cope let the chapter billow so out of control and become as fuckheug as it is
The alt text was simple but such a nice way to show the curse seeping in, and so satisfying when combined with the visual cue of the khert fire stopping to make you know shit is about to go very very badly
Nah he's clearly come around to it by the present, if he REALLY wanted out of the plan he could have probably just killed himself

>Next up is the one hundredth page of the chapter
COME ON COOOPE, DON'T LET US DOWN. MAKE IT BIG

Prisoners irl are often prevented from killing themselves in captivity
You'll not still want to instead lick Roger's boot come wensday

>Unsounded's rendition of the hundredth page of It Hurts
Such horrors were never meant to be seen by mortal eyes.

>mind break

>Mind Break
>Male: Monster
>Male Penetrating Male
>Size Difference
>Interspecies
>Snuff

That fat dude who looked so frightful will become jerky.

I still think the curse also affects its target, making him hate/dislike himself.

But that only works if the curse doesn't turn men into ravenous beasts but only resentful cunts.

I'm not sure how this will turn out where the lizards will be happy to have heard the story.

Salty-Rex will fuck off and survive and lots of Spiderpaws will die. Win/win for Granny.

Where can I find that Bastion/snake porn?

Like user said, granny is just gonna be happy that salt lizard lives and two-toes are (maybe) still with her

Patreon I think. Purged from Tumblr.

>First you need to get the Etalarche curse cast upon you so that every man woman and child in alderode will kill you on sight
>Then you need get fed on by an Efheby which will kill you in both body and mind
>Dude trust me it's a solid plan

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>pissy bitch is a literal salt elemental
Top kek, bravo Cope

What was the endgame for all of this again? Freedom? Ruling the kingdom?

Crashing this country - with no survivors!

For Roger, the latter, though there’s rather the feeling he still probably imagines himself in top in the “New Alderode”
Clearly that determination is being tested

We've never gotten the sense that Roger imagines he'll be the new power in Alderode. After all, he might be the face of the current conflict but he's not actually a head guy in the rebellion itself. We haven't gotten really any idea what Roger, or the rebellion, imagines their new Alderode will be like. Out of comic, this is apparently because the rebellion is much like real world rebellions where the rebels are united not so much by a shared vision of what will be as a shared hatred of what is. And we'll learn more when the story moves to Alderode proper.

>Duane gets his memories altered by tittybird to make him Ssael's righteous avenger
>Learns how to mass produce his own litching
>Duane leads an army of perfect immortal Ssaelit Zombies on an undead crusade to sunder the kerht and end the god's tyranny
Tell me that's not endgame

>Duane in the last panel
This must be fascinating to Duane. Also, horrifying, since Duane is a Good, Patriotic Aldishman and these people are casually talking about how they intend to completely invade his country's collective minds. He's like the only one here who might be able to understand the full implications of what they're talking about.

Throws into some interesting perspective Duane's entire screen time before this. He must have seriously thought this shit was ended after this adventure or else he would've been worried about this for years. Cope saying this was originally intended to come earlier, before everything else we've seen of Roger, also casts a certain tone over Duane's previous scenes. Duane has basically known the entirety of the Queen's secret plot. He just had no reason to mention it.

I disagreed with an user before about this being why Duane was got, but I'm more amenable to that theory now. It's still problematic, because of course Duane would've had ample time to relate all of this to the Aldish authorities. But still, it's another wrinkle on Duane's incredibly fucking life. Sette was right: it's entirely unfair a man should get so many interesting deaths.

The timing is suspect too. Duane was killed almost right after he might have been put forth as a composer. He ended up not, but an operation like that clearly required much prior planning. It's not like Bastion, even with his "off setting" just showed up to kill the dude one night. And when was Ruck first found again? It does kind of seem like Duane might have been offed as the plan began to go into motion and they realized someone who knew of it personally was about to be in a privileged position to stop it. I'm still not entirely onboard, but it's worth keeping in mind. It's hard to imagine there was another fucking crazy thing Duane was involved in that got him killed.

Oh, and Cope said we were coming up on the thing that marked Duane for death. So yeah. Probably this.

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Oh my god this makes sense.
>curse is shitty coding so bad it burns itself into the khert, so roger's soul is technically made visible through the khert when dissected
>rapesnake melts and drinks your memory and since every memory is dumped to the khert, and the curse is related to his soul it should technically come out as an outline in the khert or something?

Ah fuck I'm losing it here
Someone smarter than me explain it, still this is a damn cool premise years in the making, I really admire Ash's storytelling.

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poor little silver handbag

Its a tale of two cities

Cresce (france) seems nicer on the outside but a revolution is brewing from the disenfranchised plebs.

Alderlode (england) has more outward signs of trouble but is actually capable of change via the VITS council (parliament)

From what I understand, it wasn't burned into the khert because it's shittily coded, that was just another mistake. You don't need to burn spells into the local khert, that's just what you do to have it be easily recast. We don't really know why burning it into the dammakhert was a thing the king wanted to do, even in haste. Perhaps in case it didn't catch. Or something like that. The curse seems to permanently alter the victim once it's been cast, and not need to constantly be running to work, so why it would need to stick around after being cast the first time is somewhat vague right now. In any case, a bad spell on its own wouldn't be a problem. It would only be cast once and then you could make sure its vulnerabilities would never be exploited. Being a permanent, accessible feature of the dammakhert wouldn't be a problem either, as long as the spell was properly made and didn't have the vulnerabilities it has. It's that a spell with a serious flaw was also made a permanent feature of the dammakhert that's made it such a double edged sword. Presumably because there's always a temptation to use it, but there's always going to be the risk someone might figure out how to get at those vulnerabilities.

The shitty coding part is the "true" threat here. From the description, it was sloppily made to do what it does. And as such, the spell reveals too much of the dammakhert's workings or access to it than it really needed to have. As such, if you can properly analyze the spell and the effects, you essentially have a back door into the dammakhert's fundamental workings. It's like that Fallout 76 thing that happened: the support ticket coding was so shit, everyone who made one was also given access to every other support ticket including all of the personal information tied to those tickets. It's a security breach where there just shouldn't be any. The Etalarche Curse figuratively gives its victims administrator level access to the dammakhert, it seems.

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See, this is why I always check out unsounded threads. Always full of helpful dudes, info out of the ass, not to mention the author passes by every now and then to answer specific questions.
Yea Forums might be shit but you guys are still alright

Probably didn't expect being unmade slowly enough that he would get to feel his mind dissolve, knowing the whole time that abandoning this course would mean it was all for nothing.

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Knowing that he wasn't fully aware of what was going to happen, casts this scene even further in a different light. After it had already gotten deeper from learning about the Etalarche Curse.

"YOU will be loved... and YOU will triumph..." It's not exactly a illogical assumption that Roger once believed these things might have been his. Only to learn, when it was too late, there would be no true happiness or achievement for him on the path he was set on. Given how Vampire described his deception of Roger over staying with him after the curse hits him, he seems to not even have really known that absolutely no one he knew, even Vampire himself, would escape the curse's effects.

That entire page was so cool.

Given just how much cope works with the webcomic medium (animation, alt text,alt pages, backgrounds, secrets etc) does anyone who has actually bought the books think the paper copy holds up to the webcomic version? Or is it like lamezone where she gives an extra file where she bundles the comic into a downloadable webpage format?

Got my volumes out just for you, user. Cope has mentioned the volumes are redesigned to work exclusively on the printed page. They never come with "lamezone" stuff you need to refer to. Since the volumes come with their own extras, like little pre-chapter inserts (we get an image of Quigley, Matty, Jivi, and Uaid being found by Iori right at her house looking for shelter with Rahm) and things like the Senet Beast dictionary or Duane's time as a duelist, they each have their own upsides. The printed volumes have more material, but the webcomic is also free and has the whole "infinite canvas" to work with.

I'm sure there are more, but for example Sette falling into the Khert and the musical number at the Deadly Nevergreen are all condensed into proper pages. Sette's fall still lacks proper paneling and the images that were once on their own pages online are intentionally positioned on two pages to make it like we're seeing a bunch of moments all at once. With Sette wandering across an open page like she's wandering through the Khert. The musical has paneling and is set up to read properly as a normal page despite being reworked from a bunch of moving parts. Simpler things like the skeletal serpent used to represent Duane's zombie hunger earlier on and Knock being kicked off the page (oh also Jivi and Uaid bursting on to the scene right before that) are simply cropped to a proper page.

If there's anything from chapters 1-9 you remember being interestingly rendered on the web page and want know how she changed it for the page, just ask. I can't believe the first thing Trump's done that's directly affected me is the tariff's making it impossible for Cope to afford printing more volumes.

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>If there's anything from chapters 1-9 you remember being interestingly rendered on the web page and want know how she changed it for the page, just ask.

I feel like it's a good time to re-read the entirety of the webcomic yet again, this time I'll throw ash a fiver for the HD version.

>Even Duane seems to find this pretty appalling.
That seems like Duane's "wait what is she saying about the khert exactly" look

may have been assassinated by the ruling class for knowing about the exploit after telling them about it

Is there an archive that contains all the pages to the comic? I want to go back to past sections without having to click through each page or navigate the site.

Alright, let me see if I get this straight.

The etalarche is a punishment that exists in Alderode for the absolute worst offenders - worse than death. Because it makes literally all your countrymen, the people of Alderode, hate you to the point where murdering you is their only practical treatment of you. Nobody is allowed to leave that country but when the etalarche curse is inflicted on someone they must leave the country.

Roger, has evaded the curse by not being within the borders of Alderode when it was cast, which means that interactions with his countrymen outside Alderode are fine. However, he's now returned and the curse, which is etched in the khert, is going to find him. And when it does, all his countrymen, Golds excluded, are going to irresistibly attempt to murder him.

The people of Crece in the room won't go murder-crazy on him as they are not citizens of Alderode.

I've been meaning to do it myself. I also want to keep track of what's actually come up in the comic versus being mentioned in Q&As, since it'll help with arguments about what might be going on.

Flipping through the printed volumes, it's amazing how different those first few chapters are. Aside from the cruder art, Sette is much more moe. It's also funny to see what Cope did for the opening inset images that prolog the first chapter in each volume. In volume 2, it's the two peaceguard on Duane's ass from attacking Toma's crew at the Red Berry Boys' hideout. In volume 3, as mentioned, it's Quigley and co. arriving at the Ripas. But in volume 1 it's just Duane and Sette's feet on the road. On its own, it's a good way to prolog the very first chapter, before we've seen either main character. But also, it must have been drawn sometime after chapter 1, and indeed I recall we were around Chapter 7 before anything got printed, and thus she had to avoid drawing anything that would look too obviously out of place next to her early art for the story.

On that note, I'd forgotten the first volume has a bunch of old art of Sette. Some real old deviant art kinds of drawings in there. As the lady herself said, it's a good thing Cope moved Sette beyond a winged half demon child that wore dresses. Also, a side story about them briefly palling around with a smoking Ulestrian assassin lady.

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>Roger, has evaded the curse by not being within the borders of Alderode when it was cast, which means that interactions with his countrymen outside Alderode are fine. However, he's now returned and the curse, which is etched in the khert, is going to find him. And when it does, all his countrymen, Golds excluded, are going to irresistibly attempt to murder him.
You've got it mostly right. Except he returned before it was cast, as shown by Lem seeing him earlier in the chapter. What they've done is intentionally break the khert. That attack earlier in the night was both an attack on the camp and intentionally used inefficient spells in order to put too much strain on the khert. They also helped it along by intentionally using a kind of artificial break designed black tongues, I think they designed it, that not only made the resulting "khert fire," the way the khert's breaking physically manifests beyond all laws of physics breaking down, cover a huge area and be absolutely impenetrable. The khert not only broke, it broke around Roger's location in such a way as to completely cut off all pathways on the khert inside and outside the fire.

Because the khert lines are completely cut off, once the spell is cast, it won't actually hit him until the khert can repair itself and the curse has pathways to travel on to Roger. Roger needed to be in country when it was cast to be targeted, but the khert fire is a way to delay the spell actually hitting him until he can get far enough away from his own forces for safety.

Forgot, not the image on this page: the hands representing the curse are cut off from roger by the khert fire.

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Man, I can't believe the silver monster fight in the brothel was literally 4 years ago. I'm re-reading it right now and the level of detail and writing is absolutely stunning.

So he purposely returned to get nailed by the curse under the premise that the Salt Lizard would deliver the means to destroy Alderode.

Couldn't the Salt Lizard like, I dunno, meet him outside Alderode and he could avoid the curse altogether after he's heard what inflicting the curse upon himself would accomplish?

I might be missing a point here; I may be misunderstanding that Roger cannot avoid the curse no matter where he is in the world and that all this is, as you've said, is just buying him time to get away from his countrymen.

The curse is cast through the Dhammakert, since it effects people connected to it (the Aldish), so presumably Roger has to be within the range of the Dhammakert for it to take effect.

To be honest, it seems possible that he could have met Shaensigin somewhere else, but she wanted to make sure he was cursed so that he couldn't back out of her plan to fuck over everybody after learning the details. She's got his balls in a vice where even if he doesn't go get soul-eaten he's a permanent exile from everything he loves.

The curse might hit him anywhere in the world, we don't know. I highly doubt it, though, since that sort of long range pymary doesn't seem possible in the setting. Or else countries would constantly be fucking each other up that way. He seems to have to be in Alderode to be hit by it. It may be that once cast, it'll be waiting for him if he ever returns, but I don't think he'll actually get cursed properly unless he's in Alderode. Then its effects are permanent and will affect other Aldishmen wherever he goes.

Since he was only going to learn more about how the Etalarche Curse would unmake Alderode once the Salt Lizard got her followers and he got cursed, it makes sense he would set things up to immediately talk to her after he got hit. Thus he returns on the eve of being cursed with her followers, makes sure it won't fuck him right away, and goes to find her to complete the deal. The fire to make it so the curse can be out and about but he won't actually be hit by it for awhile, so he has time to meet with his followers and get to the Lizard with some wiggle room.

Going back through the pages I get the feeling that the curse is only brought to bear because the rebellion was going well for the rebels and the curse is being used as a spiteful "fuck you" by the government in the hopes it nails Roger. It seems like the whole plan from the beginning was to hope Roger gets cursed.

- Ally with Cresce to destroy Alderode
- Get word the Salt Lizard has a means of doing it
- Start winning the rebellion so hard that the country's leaders curse Roger
- Use Salt Lizard's advice along with the curse to destroy Alderode

It seems like a fine plan. Up until this page.

Lol what a pussy

>It seems like the whole plan from the beginning was to hope Roger gets cursed.
That's almost explicitly confirmed recently. They don't come right out and say it, but Roger talks as if it were true. He met Shaensigin when he was the foreman for the minds, well before he had any real reason for rebellion. She may have mentioned it to him as far back as then. Roger also talks about things like inciting a rebellion with his family while knowing Cresce wasn't actually going to lend military aid. Something that doesn't make sense unless the plan was a thing back in the very beginning.

Which is actually why your first supposition isn't true. In fact, the rebellion has been broken for awhile now. It started off fairly well, even when Cresce's help failed to materialize. Roger is noted to have almost single handedly kept his side going. But then he was "seduced" by Queen Sonorie and fled the country. This severely undercut the rebellion and eventually the loyalists rebuilt the khert hubs and struck down all of their notable leaders. Now it's just cleaning up the rabble too afraid, or too truly invested in a rebellion, to surrender. Which is why Roger returning seemed so odd: there's really nothing left for him to do. The Etalarche Curse seems to be more of a final fuck you to Roger, making sure he could truly never return. In fact, it may not have been possible without the kherthubs rebuilt. After all, they couldn't Sting the other leaders without those rebuilt. Roger could've just snuck in somewhere else in Alderode, one supposes, but still.

The plan actually seems to have been something like: incite enough rebellion and cause enough trouble to be worth being cursed, then allow Alderode to "win" in order to allow them to be able to reach Avelpit with the curse. These two things in succession made Roger a worthwhile target and then made sure Alderode would see it as practical enough to do so now that they spell was likely to hit him if he was still around.

I’d throw a fit too if somebody told me AFTER throwing away my entire life that the only way forward was to let an effectively-psychopathic snakeman dissolve my mind and soul and leave me a drooling P-zombie.

Since Duane at al survived to tell the tale, does this mean Alderode is aware of Roger and Sonorie's plan?

>How is that solid for me?
>Oh, you wanted one that... well, you should have said that upfront.

Not necessarily; the Curse could have messed up their brains enough that they couldn't remember it clearly. Well, while they were still alive anyway.

lol what a pussy

if the curse is so bad and the VITS council knows it, why don't they just compose a better version

We are in for a page dump of god-like quality

Any ideas on whatever the hell the red cost is? from what roger said a few pages back it seems to heavily restrict some type of freedom and that affected him to the point of making him suicidal.

Could it be being copper heavily influences thought patterns as a result of dhammakhert influence, being part of the copper caste means you're forced into the upper echelons of political society and you learn all the fucked up things the dhammakhert does in the background to keep citizens compliant? I'm spitballing absolute bullshit here, anyone got anything?

Alderode's had a bloody history, could be that when they tore down the old monarchy they lost the knowledge on how to code another Etalarche-like spell as important spellwrights got slaughtered. Dont know, you'd be better off heading to the tumblr and hope Cope answers your ask

Salty says it' really hard to do and the government doesn't even know how it actually works, just that it does. It's also presented as being so last resort that they really don't want to use it.

For some reason I thought duane doesn’t know roger is still alive

I think kussen are "slaves that live separated from the rest of society so energy can be extracted from their minds to power all manner of things."

Cresce is racist, against the Inak and Sharteshanians at least. Racism between Crescian humans doesn't come up much since the population is so homogenous and immigration is tightly controlled.

Sucks that the Bronze and the Soud get treated like shit, still, but better being born one of those than a lizard. Thank God for good ol' Jeb.

But his family did do something. They gave way more to the revolution than Roger had done up until he threw himself at Ruck. What did they do that was so shitty? A war that killed thousands, maybe millions? So did Roger and all those rebels.

Ashley said that Vits is well aware, and that the information was relayed to them. Perhaps they figured Queen and Co would never find Ruck? Perhaps they know exactly what's going on and are preparing their own nefarious scheme in turn? Perhaps Ruck is not only working both the Queen and Bell, but also with Vits?

Pymary apparently works by telling the Khert to take aspects and move them around, and then the Khert moves them back where they go. But such Pymary needs to be said precisely right, or else it just doesn't work (you have to make specific fuckups to get punished), so calling a rock "a thingy" won't make anything happen. Really, really cool stuff requires you to say increasingly longer spells which gets exponentially harder as the spell becomes increasingly abstract. Think moving bits around by hand on paper to simulate how a computer works.

At some point humans came up with "Khert Hubs", areas where you can essentially override the Khert and input "functions" in the computer science sense. When Teeth blew up, Duane didn't think "Heed me O' Great Khert, take the solidity from that rock and this rock and that boulder and place it in a sphere projected from my palm x distance and..." he just thought "Shield, 3 meters radius". The "Shield" spell was burnt into the Khert hub he was in. Alderode has the world's most complicated Khert Hub, the Dhammakert (Every country except Rachschane has their own Khert Hubs). The word "burnt" is taken literally, as you can't remove a spell from a khert hub; presumably you can knock it down and start over new, but that obviously can't be done with the Dhammakert.

Dhammakert theory is something you can just learn about at universities and in publicly available books, so I doubt it's necessarily a matter of "no one knows know how it works", but rather that fucking everything about the Dhammakert is so complex and so many layers of bullshit.

Not being a part of the khert isn't so bad imo. It's what every non-Kasslynian human gets. And is getting it even so good, considering all your bad days also get stuck repeating on a loop forever?

He is gonna get dementia, then die, basically.

The rape part is Ruck's own personal touch. Don't profile efheby like dad, dude, not cool.

I ran out of characters, Khert Hubs are actual physical structures (hugeass towers), and an individual hub only covers a limited area, but the point still stands.

I'm guessing it Duane told the authorities and every politician and government worker that matters knows about it but they are keeping it on the downlow to prevent mass panic. Also, it's probably not a good look for Vits to seem like they got tricked into handing the whole country to the Sonories.

god, the unsounded lore is just so cool. I know SSSS has been getting a pen and paper RPG and that cope DMs, has she ever said anything about laying the foundations for a game?

The government probably have their own informants in the Queen's court and the Blacktongues to keep tabs on their progress. And we know they haven't made much progress in the years since Roger's been exiled. I wonder what the first meeting with Ruk was like?

She's tied to the comic for now. And a lot of the material came from years of D&D sessions, altered into the story we're reading now. I think by her reckoning we've only covered about a third of the full story she wants to tell, I remember half a decade ago she started talking about Minnow.

We already passed the page she said would seal his fate. Based on how big her buffer was when she said it, and how it's the end of a seemingly innocuous conversation. Just look at Lem's eyes there.

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Duane is a soud, he won't be affected by the curse.

The Dammakhert can in fact be knocked out/rebuilt. The exact thing has happened in the course of the rebellion and Fachlyne is still without it because nobody dares enter to fix it because of the weeping plague

Ooooh... Oh dear.

If he knew what had to be done after the curse hit, he would never have gone along with it. And salt lizard ensured a tribe of two toes were safely brought to her so she can fuck off to the depths again never to be seen, and protect said two toes

> I can't believe the first thing Trump's done that's directly affected me is the tariff's making it impossible for Cope to afford printing more volumes.
I was going to ask how much volumes would cost but I guess the answer is that it's not possible yet.

Somehow the fact that the Adeliers were witness to all this has to tie into what happened to Duane later on. Maybe Bastion and co. were some kind of Vits-backed counter operation and Duane's soul-tether/memories being housed outside his physical body are an Efheby insurance policy?

Also, Duane seeing the skull drop is counting the seconds and waiting for tacit casting surprise fun.

You can still get 1 & 3 but she can't reprint 2 or make 4 until the tariff bullshit is gone.

casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic_shop.html

>Maybe Bastion and co. were some kind of Vits-backed counter operation and Duane's soul-tether/memories being housed outside his physical body are an Efheby insurance policy?
Somebody in Alderode has a counter-kiekaku but everything we've seen says Bastions experimenting was his (and tittybirds) own plan. I'm still thinking Duane is the wildcard that will eventually ruin everything.

If I remember correctly, it was actually years of freeform (or at least very rules-light) roleplay. I think she's said she doesn't really do D&D.

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"No bowing in our Alderode," so probably (still) a republic without castes or even legacy titles, but I've not doubt that like most revolutionaires Roggy and his bear pictured themselves "coincidentally" being at the top.

Pretty much, everything is about to hit the fan at high rotational speeds.
Roger just had the true breadth of the plan revealed to him, and is going through various stages of grief. The Khert fire ended, which means two things. One, the curse is going to get through, which if has the right idea, means that Will is just about to go feral and rush Roger in cold blood. Likely getting his arm cut off by the bitch . Which will tip the hat to Vampire that the curse is through and likely cause him to do a heroic sacrifice so that he can at least die protecting the one he loves, rather than be the one that tears him limb from limb.
Second, it means that our boy wonder over there can start tacit casting again and absolutely ruin everyone's day.

What I am curious about is if he'll actually get a chance to talk with based, lore-dump salt lizard anymore. I'm not sure if the salt lizard would rather stay and watch the spiderpaws slaughter each other, or choose to exit stage left and disappear into the north.

>I have no intention of becoming a martyr
>Good job forcing those plat kids to kill themselves to forward my plan though, sacrifices are necessary

Man FUCK this asshole

Salty is apparently addicted to delicious human flesh (despite only needing to eat to add mass, and not because she actually needs to eat), she might just hang around and watch to dine on the leftovers.

Vits must know something. Delicious Lizard claimed he wanted ALDERODE to win this war that's coming.

It's hypocritical yes, but there is a major difference between dying and having your soul dragged into the Khert and get it recycled & reborn, and being turned into a juice box having your very soul eaten by a rape snake. The second option ensures your soul will never be reborn again. Roger's unwillingness is understandable

Huh, I was rereading an earlier chapter, and I realized Murk can teleport the same way that Bastion does.

Illgyang gave Bastion that power, it only makes sense she’d give it to her boyfriend too

Is it actually going to kill him or is it just going to leave him a mindless/soultorn babbling husk?

Well we don't actually know if a body can survive without a soul. Maybe he'll basically be a non-rotting plod if Duane is anything to go by.

Either way it's not gonna be good for him, though they may have to euthanize him to even get at his soul

Pretty hot, not gonna lie. It's a shame that Ruck is a fag because mindbreak/hypnosis is one of my favorite kinks.

His soul is literally being destroyed user

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CHRISTIAN IMAGEBOARD, user

The tiniest boop on panel 2

I want to live dangerously.

Someone make this but with Roger kay thanks

Ashley probably will if you clamor for it enough.

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How do you pronounce Cresce? I was pronouncing it Cresh, but while I was rereading, I saw that they seemed to rhyme it with grace in the brothel music number. Is it really pronounced craysh?

>>Mysterious to my knowing how she has so completely enthralled you. Ilganyag has no venom! How?
>>She's a great cook.
>>Perhaps her sadness? Do you pity her?
>>I'm telling you she can crack an egg one-handed.

Fuck anyone who doesn't like Bastion, he's hysterical.

That just makes it hotter

I'm with you, I'd love to see what Roger and Ruck's "sessions" are like. I'm sure Roger is terrified before and after but Ash has described what the venom does to you and it's apparently so blissful that some humans seek it out. Roger is probably constantly cumming while the snake's in his brain and up his ass.

In fact he probably hates himself even more because he's enjoying his own slow murder and can't even be faithful to Vampire.

He's such catty trash, it's great.

The most horrifying thing about this, in my opinion, is that Ruck's "hair" is a prehensile apparatus to hold people in place while he SUQQs them.

HNGGGGGGHH

Oh jesus I didn't really see it until you mentioned it because I was focussed on the little arms

oh that is dark

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Based user. See you in three.

>Tags: NTR

On the topic of Ashley-drawn stuff, there's also that one that has Quigley topping living Duane. Pretty sure there's barbed wire restraints involved? Too bad I lost it.

Argh that sucks. I've got 1-3 but I got them with the intention to own all of it when it gets printed.

>Duane on the bottom

unacceptable

Like almost everything in the comic, there’s probably a right way but you can use whatever you want
I pronounce it kress

>Mathis Twinkley
>topping

Just like kindergarden in Portuguese. Spelt the same way. But then it doesn't rhyme with grace...

I have it I think, will post it later if you want.

>doesn't even remotely care about what happened to Roger
I like this girl's laser focus.

That’s Cresce for you

>She is a bit of a mad scientist and pretty wedded to a conviction that Alds are Not Human.

Fair point of view desu.

Where can I find more info about the other countries in unsounded? So far the comic has only shown 3-4 but you guys mention shit from other places as well.

See the outfit Murkoph dreams? Man's a rat through and through.

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Most will not factor into the story enough to go into very much. It's going to be basically all about Alderode, Cresce, and to a somewhat smaller extent, Sharteshane
For the smaller places and large countries alike most of the non-comic details are stuff Ashley tells us on the comic's Q&A tumblr
unsoundedcomic.tumblr.com/

thinking emoji

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I only recently heard of that "gods were based off of the senet beasts" theory, but one interesting parallel that goes along with a lot of the other theories on Ssael and murkoph is the comparison between lions and rats.

Sette and Duane had a back and forth a while ago of if her tail was a rat or lion's, and murkoph also refers to his teeth as those of a rat's. Then just recently, salt lizard was calling the spiderpaws rats, and iirc refered to one specific eat in particular.

Splurgaaaah doesn't really roll off the tongue.

>the risk was calculated, but man
>I am bad at math

As if an aspirant like him would take control.

As if Duane "The Pain" Adelier would ever be a faggot. If you want that ass you're gonna have to tie him up and rape him.

I dunno man, if he was a silver twink maybe. There's something about those silvers.

>As if Duane "The Pain" Adelier would ever be a faggot
I mean he did fuck a legal man once

You saw her. Who wouldn't?

A lot of legally blind people can see, too, just because the government thinks you're a gay doesn't mean you are one

I'm torn. Obviously, the comic is great.
But I also want her to just take a break for commissions so I can maybe get smut of best girl and her dream man.

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I have it but I'm not gonna take a 3 day vacation for bullshit bottom Duane

user, no. That's like imagining my grandparents fucking. The Ripas are not for lewds.

coward

i'm really bummed out they'll never appear again
unironically one of the best couples i've seen in fiction

No way Duane is not a bottom and especially not for Twigley

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>Lori: Whatev.

Now Rahm finally has given up on his pipedream, he can focus what really matters: Rahmming his beautiful wife. COPE, get on with it please

Rahm swooned her out of being a sacrificial twin, I'd be interested to see them younger.

My crackship is Duane and Lemuel, personally. I can't decide who tops though.

It's comforting to know that their part in the story is done and they're pretty much in the clear though. There's reams more of uncertain fates to watch for the future

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that was probably because of his personality before he got traumatized and turned into an angsty grump and not because of his owl looking ass.

Honestly that's how you're supposed to write characters. Finish their arc and then retire them, leaving the audience wanting more. Don't write them into the ground until everyone hates them.

By the six rings and the aldish kings behave yourself or you will get a taste of my shoe

Hottest if the bigger one bottoms.

Agreed. Ride 'im, Pissmop!

He used to look less silly. Not super handsome, though I'm no good judge of such things, but less crazy in the face.

Also, I wonder how they got away with Iori running away from being ate. I guess I always figured it was super illegal, since Cresce and Gefendur are all fucked up about blasphemy, but perhaps it's not actually illegal. Just really frowned upon. I had thought they hid that she used to be a twin, but it's somewhat hard to do when the temple is just down the river and Cresce can track you with its magical bureaucracy.

whoops

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So when she says soul, does she mean his soul or just his memories? Since they’re sometimes used interchangeably. Will his soul still reincarnate?

Young Rahm is just black Willem Dafoe.

No. It'll be the end of him for all time.

Yeah the Kept Twins aren't FORCED to play their roles, but they're basically raised from birth for it and the social pressure is pretty strong

Sounds like the town was considered pretty backwater. The government probably has better things to do than hunting down a single woman who just didn't want to be sacrificed

Definitely seems like it, but there's always mysteries to the Khert, and the full measure of the soul still eluded even Delicieu by the time he died

Wait, if Rham has no balls, how did they have a child?
His actual soul. This is his final life because of the venom.

Lemuel is prettier, so the law says he bottoms.

He joined the Black Tongues because he, like many others, wanted to try to find a way to bring his son back
So long after he'd actually conceived his children

Rahm became a black tongue after Dani died. Iori implies, though oddly avoids outright saying, he joined because he wanted to try and bring him back. A common thing among black tongues.

>all this “soul” talk
Reminder that the reincarnating immortal soul Geffies and Ssaelit go on about so much is a doctrinal assumption and not anything that has concrete evidence.

As a complete set of memories intact without a living body I’d say Duane is the closest thing we have to a conceptual “soul” operating in this setting.

That's bunk
Kasslynian humans can literally hear even if their ears have been completely obliterated because they can perceive certain sensations through their souls
Ghosts are another thing.
Also the Black Tongues are literally mapping out Roger's soul in the present day

The soul definitely exists in this world, but Kasslynians DO make up a bunch of stuff about it. There's no proof of reincarnation at all. For all they know their soul is just a copy of their brain that goes and sits in the khert when they die. One day the gods will come home, wipe the drive so they can install Minecraft on it, and that'll be the end of them.

the reincarnation we don't know for sure, but we did see the soul of the guy Duane ate disintegrate in the khert. And I think it was kept together for longer than usual because of Duane's soul-thread.

You say that in jest but from what Ilganyag has implied for all we know Ssael has become a Divine Neet after ascending

The thing is, we don't actually have proof of a "soul" that is a distinct thing from the structure of connected memories that makes a person. Humans can hear because of their connection to the khert, but is the connection something independent from how their memories are cobbled together into a person? Delicieu 1.0's research seems to show that it's how human memories are put together, since he's able to get a Two-Toe to have the same connection merely through grafting memories to him. If there was something truly independent of memories, some actual independently existing "soul" that they congeal on to, he would've needed something more. But just human memory structure seems to be it.

From what Cope has said out of comic, no wright has ever proven the existence of a soul. It's accepted because the doctrines seem to fit and they can't explain the sorts of things you've brought up. But they haven't isolated the "soul particle," so to speak.

Worked for Jesus. He hasn't been seen on earth since. I think he's up there beating it to /d/

Sette seems the best proof so far, if we're willing to take Minnow's word for it, how she apparently keeps coming back through the years
If she's still Sette every time but her memories are taken by the Khert each iteration, that's quite the anomaly. But what makes "a Sette" a Sette. Very many things to ponder

>you die
>as you walk the kerht your memories are stripped from you
>you end up a baby again waiting to be reborn into the world
I thought the whole thing was pretty straight forward, especially once we saw Tittybird making a nest in the forest of yet-to-be-born. Whether or not having your memories cut from you early will prevent your essence from turning into a proto-baby when you die is unknown but that's the assumption.

Who the fuck knows what's actually going on in the Fetus Forest

Oh, yeah, I forgot Sette exists.

I was prepared to be miserable this chapter because I knew it was a flashback and that Sette and the rest weren't in it but I'm so on board at this point I'll be miserable when it's over. Sneaky fucking Ashley. I'm going to miss Clag-chan, Lem, murder-children, Salty, and the red gays.

>user doesn't know there are thousands of Jesus sightings a year
>hundreds of which the Catholic church investigates
>on average three dozen a year remain unsolved
Poor euphoric basterds.

Thousands of people claim to see Muhammad, Buddha, and the Hindu gods too. And aliens and Bigfoot and Nessie. They can't all be right, so I'm pretty sure they're all just wack.

We saw the soul of the red berry boy that Duane ate in the khert

I suppose the question is, as others have mentioned, whether there's an enduring constant soul that is actually cycled through lives after being scrubbed of memories
Was that thing we saw just an imprression of Turas' thoughts melting into the Khert, or was there a soul as well waiting to be squirted into a new babby somewhere in the world

I remember once Ash said that Duane, being a man of science, uses certain traits in senet beasts to support the idea of reincarnation being a real thing so he doesn't just rely on scripture. That's evidence, at least.

I always wished I could sit down and have a conversation with Duane. I think it would be fascinating.

Actually true. Almost every cut away in this comics history has yielded characters that make me go "wait, no, what happens next?!". Especially General Belle and Ruck.

I'll miss young Duane. He was so happy and kind of a cunt. Ah, youth.

From what I recall, Prakhuta's spellery is half him actually doing things, and half the Pain Eels inside him sort of just doing things for him. He catches Duane's shot and slices Deliceu wordlessly, but then Ashley also says he has to literally speak like a human wright and learned Old Tainish and studied Pymary. It makes me think that Prakhuta has something approximating a human soul in that he has a collection of memories jammed in him with some kind of connection to the Khert, but they aren't actually his (or rather, aren't from his perspective, to avoid the philosophical debate about what a person "is" and if you can "own" a memory).

In that sense, I'd almost say that what Deliceu managed to do with Prakhuta was turn him into a living plod mask and then intentionally haunt it.

Well one thing that should be a factor in observable fashion
Both the Geffies and Ssaelit believe there are certain conditions whereby a soul can end the loop and ascend to paradise with the gods/join Ssael in the GU
Considering that Ssael supposedly intends for ALL of humanity to eventually join him, and for there to eventually be an end of times when the souls receive all of their lost memories again in the gefendur worldview, that should indicate that the number of souls going through reincarnation cycles is finite
If x number of souls depart the loop every so often, doesn't this mean that gradually less and less humans will be born as the souls ascend? What happens when there's only a single living human soul left and they die with no other humans to birth them again, do they get a freebie and pass on to the end-state?

Only an issue if you assume the khert is temporal. But we know it's not. It's reincarnating souls all throughout "history." Just because you die in 2019 doesn't mean your next life will be in the future. You could shoot back to the Stone Age.

I suppose that goes into what a soul is, though. Is a soul just a special housing for memories? A means by which the Khert can interact with humanity on a deeper level? If so, given that there's theoretically infinite memories, why would the Gods evolve humans, who are by all Gefendur scripture supposed to be dynamic, growing, and non-static unlike their Senet Beast Predecessors, in such a way that there could only be a finite amount of them?

Obviously one could ditch the religion and just simplify this to "why does there have to be a finite number of souls?". I suppose that would raise the question of if memories are being sent to the Khert, what actually reincarnates then? Perhaps the soul is made up of re-purposed memories, ground up and granted to humans at conception (or birth, I forget when Gefendo-Ssaelit doctrine says a human "Gets" a soul; it's an irrelevant distinction here). The soul and memories are made of the same thing, in the end. But then, that still doesn't explain where memories go, unless a soul takes a whole hell of a lot of memories to make.

This is kind of my thought about souls in all religions. What is the point of them? What about them is so special that they need to exist at all and, additionally, need to exist forever and ever?

If a soul is just code for "I want a reason to believe I don't actually die when my heart stops," they're obvious fakey wish fulfilment and boring, both in reality and fiction.

So if the soul truly exists in Unsounded's lore I want to know the purpose of it. Even if it's some dark shit like as fuel to power Yerta's vibrator.

No-one seems to have an answer as to why, but the Khert seems to simply hold onto memories and the religions seem to have a distinction between soul a memory
Like the Soul is a bucket that is repeatedly filled with experiences in life and then emptied upon death and repeated
Both faiths seem to agree that the cycle is meant to have some kind of bettering affect, in that each life is cumulative in the soul's growth. But it also seems to be demonstrated that all of those layers of lives result in scattered, chaotic bundles of untethered memories
It's all quite a mystery

>Both faiths
It's worth nothing Ssaelism is just sort of like the unofficial sequel to Gefendur. There were other, unrelated religions that got knocked off awhile ago. All that's left, I think, is the Tain paganism. Once we know how they operate, we'll probably get a better idea of what is "universal" to humans in Kasslyne.

>They can't all be right
Says who?

>tfw your husband cut his balls off for a literal bird he was seeing on the side

The whole thing with the Black Tongues adds another layer to how much shit Iori put up with. It's basically like your husband getting a mistress who lives in his head. Also, she put a collar on him.

Do you think Tiddybird was around when Iori and Rahm were uh having relations? Like, was that a threesome? If you want to get really kinky it's fun to imagine Tiddybird trying to apologize to Iori for her presence by gifting her extra pleasure or something.

I like how both kids are fully invested in the story.

Thankfully Iori should be incapable of seeing anything like that

Etalarche does though.

Man, this unsounded thread lasted for a lot longer than the typical ones.
I'm glad, you anons are a fun bunch to talk with.

shit's happening recently, so recent threads have been more lively
now if only these fucking mods would let us have a fucking dark crystal thread

Makes me wonder if Ashley has ever read Spirit Circle. It has a very similar system of reincarnation.

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This is an old, old idea. It's not from any one story.

It also helps that this one didn't pop up in the middle of the night and die before the sunrise.

COOOOOOPE

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Shame the modern day story was so weak, I didn't care about their current incarnations much at all, but the alternate lives were great

>We don't really know why burning it into the dammakhert was a thing the king wanted to do, even in haste.
It could be that the king faced a coup by an incredibly charismatic guy whom he underestimated until it was clear they were succeeding by a wide margin. The curse basically code with kernel access that achieved a half-continent wide effect without much thought or care needed to make.
>The curse seems to permanently alter the victim once it's been cast, and not need to constantly be running to work, so why it would need to stick around after being cast the first time is somewhat vague right now.
The curse may not just permanently alter the victim's soul, but also everyone in Alderode to react hostility toward that one soul. By memory-dumping the curse's victim, you're basically seeing how the dammakhert could do such a thing in the first place, potentially exposing the patterns and affects of the dammakhert that is reflected in every souls in Alderode. By keeping this crude mass-mind control, Alderode is unwittingly also keeping active a way to quick direct root access to all these souls. If Cresce finally gets their hands on Roger's soul map, not only may they be able to cast the curse themselves, they could hack any Alderodian soul.

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...

Umm No i'm pretty sure prakhuta has to talk to cast.

Chapter 10 page 137, he's definatly speaking old tainish

You are a man of good taste user.