Oh, I think I just got what’s happening lol
Alinua meant to ask what happened to Dainix because she wasn’t awake to see it, and the last panel is her getting her answer.
Took longer than it probably should have…
The hull was stated to be constructed of “transmuted argent.” Argent is an archaic term for silver, so I presume that’s what they’re dealing with here. A brief bit of online research indicates sterling silver may be most likely – while pure silver is less prone to corrosion in saltwater, it’s relatively soft, and sterling silver is still fairly resistant to saltwater. Pure elemental silver has a melting point of 1763F, or 961.8C, while sterling silver melts at a bit lower temperature – 1640F or 893C. Nowhere near what would be necessary to melt something made of iron or steel (iron melts at 2800F or 1538C; alloys of it like steel will be comparable, albeit lower), but still quite toasty.
Of course, being something like a supernatural avatar of fire means Dainax probably doesn’t need to burn quite that hot. Fire melts things, so some flavor of Essential Flame will be particularly good at melting things without necessarily having to be quite so hot.
Is that… is that the sail? I can’t tell what that is due to Dainix trashing it
Alinua and Kendal both have their “we’re so screwed” magic visions to tell the others now
I love Falst’s face in panel 6 it’s “Oh no”
What für a plan could they possibly come up with to make their situation slightly less… (I’m struggling to think of an appropriate adjective so I’ll just leave it at that)
You remember the story of the flute player’s apprentice who never felt he learned to play as amazing as the master did until he came back to the village he was from years later and got the same compliment out the crowd his master did that inspired him to follow the master in the first place? It’s like that.
Alinua awakes from herdiadem, screaming.
Falst gets her to hush,
And hide behind half-melted hull,
Against it flames did brush.
Erin won’t wake, they must work without him
To cease the crucible’s churning.
Like a pillar of light, ignoring the rain,
The mast is snapped and burning.
Now would be a really good time to invent life boats. I feel like the patch notes for Boat 2.0 would be hilarious.
“Insulated handrails to avoid inadvertent paralysis and lightning damage.”
“Wooden portion lacquered and insulated to withstand the heat of the godsdamned sun.”
“Fire containment lacrima x 14 added.”
“Mast reinforced.”
Amongst everything else going on, I can’t help but love Alinua’s eyebrow raise in panel 3.
The only other time Alinua awoke screaming from a dream/life vision was her first meeting with Life back in 1-3-29. Just how terrible is the thing below them to illicit a similar response? Is Alinua going to be revealed to be the thalassophobic member of the gang? In any case, like Kendal’s “She’s coming” warning, there’s more immediate problems at hand.
Great to see Falst is (reasonably) Ok and working on saving them; he can remain pretty cool in a crisis, so long as the crisis doesn’t trigger his own issues. It’s better to stay silent and work around the fight; Falst knows there’s a good chance the Champion can use that diadem again, so, at least for now, don’t give him a reason to do so.
Unfortunately, the go-to guy for solving problems, or at least informing them how to solve a problem, is out cold. And from Tess’s stern expression and unwillingness to wake him up, I reckon it’s serious.
Oh no, Dainix looks terrible. During his other crucible transformations there was at least a shape of something humanoid in them; I see what may be a clawed hand on the top-right of the blaze and that’s it. None of Dainix’s transformations have been exactly alike, understandable as all were fuelled by different emotional states, circumstances, and pain (physical or mental) Dainix was feeling.
I see the mast in that blaze, so that’s both the sail and the lacrima array gone, and potentially the deck if they can’t stop Dainix. Erin out cold means no water or wind magic to manually move the ship, nor do I see Falst’s bubble having the oomph as a propeller. I also don’t recall the ship having lifeboats, probably because Tarren wasn’t expecting to take it on such a long journey, and was too busy with the lacrima array updates.
No way of moving the ship against the storm, no safe way to abandon ship, and no help for miles around.
I’m wondering if Alinua just woke up from an out-of-body experience; the shape of her eyes in the first panel look suspiciously like the eyes from the previous page.
Those eyes from the last page were Alinua’s; you can also tell from the hair. Those bubbles around her face were just an artistic choice to further hammer in that she was sensing that creature below them.
The mast is on fire, the ship is melting, the kraken is waiting, the storm is raging, and Erin is down. Boy, it sure is going to be hard to get out of this situation.
Looking back at the previous pages with VD coming out to break the diadems, what if he’s right and the corruption magic Dainix used was genuinely not his doing? We’ve seen how Dainix can basically break down his body into fire and reconstruct it, and supposedly that form is immune to VD’s corruption. But what if he’s incorporating that corruption into his form? It doesn’t make cave corruption, at least not like the cases we’ve seen, but I got to think that it’s not exactly pleasant.
Or maybe Dainix is like a blue dragon nudibranch and incorporating dangerous powers into his form is just… par for the course LOL
I’m worried that the transmuted Void might’ve corrupted Dainix and made his flames hungrier, wilder, and even less coherent than he would normally be under duress. I think (okay, am hoping, crossing my fingers) that Dainix himself will be okay… ish… and not corrupted once he changes back, since the Crucible can stand up to the Void Dragon’s attacks and is able to transmute Light and Void into each other to begin with. But oh boy.
Luckily Falst is okay and trying to think of a plan, and everyone is free of the diadem, but Erin’s out of commission and badly hurt and there’s a danger noodle in the depths…
I really like that take: Void energy making the flames more wild, more uncontrollable. In any case, I think trying to talk him down is probably out. At this point, “Dainix” is no longer home, so to speak — with the Soulfire burning like that, I’m betting he can’t really form coherent thought or focus on human speech. He’s just “directionless rage”, as he said. They may have to wait for him to burn himself out again.
…I’m not sure the boat will last that long, though :/
Oh, yes, poor Dainix is a mess right now, and I don’t expect him to transform back soon either, just eventually. I’m not confident the boat will last that long, either. I think we’re going to see soulfire burn at the bottom of the ocean soon…
Interesting thought… if we spin it a bit further, it might explain why he was so, let’s say for lack of a better word, calm during and after the Tynan fight. He got hit by a huge void blast and transmuted some of it into light, which might have been temporarily incorporated into the demon form. If transmuting light to void and incorporating it into his demon form makes him more ravenous and uncontrollable, transmuting void to light and incorporating that may well have had the opposite effect.
He was waiting until the dragon stopped talking to attack before the blast and only attacked the obsidian ghouls while avoiding people the first time he transformed. He doesn’t know that much about his power and anything he says about it should be subject to some skeptism for now
I don’t get what you mean.
He did not wait at all, Dainix started cracking on the final panel of 1.17.30, then just 3 panels later on 1.17.31 he already tackled Erin in full demon form. I guess you’re right that after the initial tackle, before the blast, he just stood there while VD monologued about creating humans for a page.
He still destroyed his people’s village, unlike the Tynan fight, where literally the only damage he caused was to Erin. All that really means is that the demon isn’t usually a mindless monster (just like LD said a few pages ago), unlike what appears to be happening right now. Same for above, he may have waited for a better opportunity when Erin couldn’t just block him with wind magic.
None of this is really based on anything Dainix said, just observations Squirrel, I, and a couple others made on the last few pages.
And for your other comment: there’s two instances when he’s blasted with void, and in neither case do we see all of the light fly off him, and we can’t properly see Dainix in the following panels of both instances. Similar to the current case where loads of void flew off him as well, which VD then made his bullet out of.
That’s a cool additional spin on the thought! I do think the intention and protective emotion behind his transformation was a key factor in the Tynan fight, but Light’s potential calming or clarifying effects hadn’t occurred to me. I’m intrigued by that idea.
I was wondering a similar thing. Could it be that instead of transmuting anything he touches, he transmutes himself into a version that can beat whatever he’s fighting? So when he fought the void before, he became part-light bc only light can destroy void, and that made him more calm like you said. I bet it would be easy to miss some streaks of light amidst his normal glowiness. Now to fight light he became part void (while not being able to think straight, so not realizing the consequences this could have) and now he’s hungry and destructive.
I feel like Falst is the solution one way or another here.
I’m at this point, deeply concerned on what’s happening with Dainix because 1. He isn’t in any kind of humanoid form signaling… something, I can only guess as to what (lack of any control perhaps) 2. He has a dark coloring that hasn’t been there before indicating it’s from him interacting with void which, makes one wonder why Dainix hasn’t already gotten rid of it 3. Either last page took several seconds and something happened during that time period or the diadem getting broken made 1 happen and I think we can all agree that 1 probably isn’t good so if it happened from the diadem getting broken then that being a bad thing is rather concerning.
hey… Hey alinua… there’s some kind of malignant life magic thing below the boat… it kinda feels like you detected its presence?
you remember that, right? cus i would hate for everyone to be attacked by a sea plesiosaur chimera with no warning…
yeahhhh they’re definitely getting surprised attacked by a sea monster with no warning…
Good news is they already know that! They said right before the floof squad left that they knew Erin wasn’t going to return the boat but he should give them all of his notes on it
Alinua, it’s good to have you back! On the other hand, 1/3 of the floof gang now has unshared premonitions of immediate danger… that will never bite anyone in the butt, ever, I am sure. The fact that Alinua sensed it, meaning it probably has abnormal amounts of life energy in it (collector collector collector collector)? Nothing to worry about! Surely the collector and gigant sea serpent are actually pet and pet-owner and she was just visiting her little chimeric abomination <3. Or they’re pals meeting up for overseas tea! I think we should feel ashamed of ourselves for making such prejudiced assumptions about their motives. They could have any business going towards the singular boat traveling the northern passage!
Falst! Glad to see you’re all right, dude. From his and Tess’s positions, it looks like they went straight to Alinua and Erin respectively to check on them. Alinua seems okay, if mildly traumatized, but Erin is very much…not. Not sure if it was the overchannel, the blood loss or the pain from the diadem that did him in, but he’s down for the count for now.
The way Tess responded to Falst sounded almost…defensive to me. “He can’t”, not only as in “He’s tapped out” but also “Don’t ask him to do any more so he stops hurting himself“.
With their book-smart guy taking a nap, it may be up to street-smarts guy to try and piece together a plan. He’s already got the good sense to try and stay under Michael’s radar — perhaps Falst can use Erin’s lacrimas to do what Erin can’t at the moment?
So much for sailing, huh?
Oh, I think I just got what’s happening lol
Alinua meant to ask what happened to Dainix because she wasn’t awake to see it, and the last panel is her getting her answer.
Took longer than it probably should have…
fellas i think the boat is on fire
You sure? I could’ve sworn it was melting.
secret third option, ✨ both ✨
Oh my god the boat is actually fucking melting. Geez Dainix that is some SERIOUS heat.
The hull was stated to be constructed of “transmuted argent.” Argent is an archaic term for silver, so I presume that’s what they’re dealing with here. A brief bit of online research indicates sterling silver may be most likely – while pure silver is less prone to corrosion in saltwater, it’s relatively soft, and sterling silver is still fairly resistant to saltwater. Pure elemental silver has a melting point of 1763F, or 961.8C, while sterling silver melts at a bit lower temperature – 1640F or 893C. Nowhere near what would be necessary to melt something made of iron or steel (iron melts at 2800F or 1538C; alloys of it like steel will be comparable, albeit lower), but still quite toasty.
Of course, being something like a supernatural avatar of fire means Dainax probably doesn’t need to burn quite that hot. Fire melts things, so some flavor of Essential Flame will be particularly good at melting things without necessarily having to be quite so hot.
Ya think?!
Fire is on the boat.
Typical monday for sure
Is that… is that the sail? I can’t tell what that is due to Dainix trashing it
Alinua and Kendal both have their “we’re so screwed” magic visions to tell the others now
I love Falst’s face in panel 6 it’s “Oh no”
What für a plan could they possibly come up with to make their situation slightly less… (I’m struggling to think of an appropriate adjective so I’ll just leave it at that)
I think the word you’re looking for is “catastrophic”.
That sounds about right.
“But you just pointed to all of me”
For the mobile folk:
Alt text: yup, that’s me. you’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation-
Image source: plan
tumblr text: the situation appears to have escalated somewhat
Twitter/Bluesky text: this is your morning wake up call!
“You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. Well, so am I.”
I find the last two panels strangely comical
She wakes with a scream
As the ship goes up in flames
Think of a new plan
You remember the story of the flute player’s apprentice who never felt he learned to play as amazing as the master did until he came back to the village he was from years later and got the same compliment out the crowd his master did that inspired him to follow the master in the first place? It’s like that.
… Is this a non-english thing?
Oh- Oh, no. Oh, no no no
Yeah that sums it up pretty well
Alinua wakes to chaos and pain
Only a fistful of sails remain
This is fine.
Alinua awakes from herdiadem, screaming.
Falst gets her to hush,
And hide behind half-melted hull,
Against it flames did brush.
Erin won’t wake, they must work without him
To cease the crucible’s churning.
Like a pillar of light, ignoring the rain,
The mast is snapped and burning.
Welp that’s bad, glad those three are back in the action though.
Now I’m very curious about that sea monster if it made Alinua scream that much.
Well, looks like Erin is going to have to give some explanations to Tarren later…
Now would be a really good time to invent life boats. I feel like the patch notes for Boat 2.0 would be hilarious.
“Insulated handrails to avoid inadvertent paralysis and lightning damage.”
“Wooden portion lacquered and insulated to withstand the heat of the godsdamned sun.”
“Fire containment lacrima x 14 added.”
“Mast reinforced.”
XD
I love how straight to the point Tess is here, no wasted words just what she knows to be true it’s great.
I know you really find glowie effects a true pain to work on Red, but panel seven is a magnificent play of light and shadow. Master class work indeed!
Good thing they brought a metal boat
not for long
We didn’t start the fire,
It was always burning, since the world’s been turning
SECOND?!
SECOND!
I think they need to think of a lot of new plans, not just a single new plan.
Amongst everything else going on, I can’t help but love Alinua’s eyebrow raise in panel 3.
The only other time Alinua awoke screaming from a dream/life vision was her first meeting with Life back in 1-3-29. Just how terrible is the thing below them to illicit a similar response? Is Alinua going to be revealed to be the thalassophobic member of the gang? In any case, like Kendal’s “She’s coming” warning, there’s more immediate problems at hand.
Great to see Falst is (reasonably) Ok and working on saving them; he can remain pretty cool in a crisis, so long as the crisis doesn’t trigger his own issues. It’s better to stay silent and work around the fight; Falst knows there’s a good chance the Champion can use that diadem again, so, at least for now, don’t give him a reason to do so.
Unfortunately, the go-to guy for solving problems, or at least informing them how to solve a problem, is out cold. And from Tess’s stern expression and unwillingness to wake him up, I reckon it’s serious.
Oh no, Dainix looks terrible. During his other crucible transformations there was at least a shape of something humanoid in them; I see what may be a clawed hand on the top-right of the blaze and that’s it. None of Dainix’s transformations have been exactly alike, understandable as all were fuelled by different emotional states, circumstances, and pain (physical or mental) Dainix was feeling.
I see the mast in that blaze, so that’s both the sail and the lacrima array gone, and potentially the deck if they can’t stop Dainix. Erin out cold means no water or wind magic to manually move the ship, nor do I see Falst’s bubble having the oomph as a propeller. I also don’t recall the ship having lifeboats, probably because Tarren wasn’t expecting to take it on such a long journey, and was too busy with the lacrima array updates.
No way of moving the ship against the storm, no safe way to abandon ship, and no help for miles around.
I’m wondering if Alinua just woke up from an out-of-body experience; the shape of her eyes in the first panel look suspiciously like the eyes from the previous page.
Those eyes from the last page were Alinua’s; you can also tell from the hair. Those bubbles around her face were just an artistic choice to further hammer in that she was sensing that creature below them.
Honestly dainix is so real cause like. that’s how i feel when i’m having an anxiety attack too
It has somehow only now occurred to me the raw, horrific destructive potential of a BEING MADE OF FIRE is capable of.
The mast is on fire, the ship is melting, the kraken is waiting, the storm is raging, and Erin is down. Boy, it sure is going to be hard to get out of this situation.
Nah, it’s gonna be super easy, barely an inconvenience
Pitch Meeting reference in the wild?
tight
I love this arc already, the sheer amount of chaos already beats the tynan fight haha.
Flying guy.
Forget Michael, the champion’s real name has been revealed: Flying Guy.
Looking back at the previous pages with VD coming out to break the diadems, what if he’s right and the corruption magic Dainix used was genuinely not his doing? We’ve seen how Dainix can basically break down his body into fire and reconstruct it, and supposedly that form is immune to VD’s corruption. But what if he’s incorporating that corruption into his form? It doesn’t make cave corruption, at least not like the cases we’ve seen, but I got to think that it’s not exactly pleasant.
Or maybe Dainix is like a blue dragon nudibranch and incorporating dangerous powers into his form is just… par for the course LOL
Oh dear.
I’m worried that the transmuted Void might’ve corrupted Dainix and made his flames hungrier, wilder, and even less coherent than he would normally be under duress. I think (okay, am hoping, crossing my fingers) that Dainix himself will be okay… ish… and not corrupted once he changes back, since the Crucible can stand up to the Void Dragon’s attacks and is able to transmute Light and Void into each other to begin with. But oh boy.
Luckily Falst is okay and trying to think of a plan, and everyone is free of the diadem, but Erin’s out of commission and badly hurt and there’s a danger noodle in the depths…
I really like that take: Void energy making the flames more wild, more uncontrollable. In any case, I think trying to talk him down is probably out. At this point, “Dainix” is no longer home, so to speak — with the Soulfire burning like that, I’m betting he can’t really form coherent thought or focus on human speech. He’s just “directionless rage”, as he said. They may have to wait for him to burn himself out again.
…I’m not sure the boat will last that long, though :/
Oh, yes, poor Dainix is a mess right now, and I don’t expect him to transform back soon either, just eventually. I’m not confident the boat will last that long, either. I think we’re going to see soulfire burn at the bottom of the ocean soon…
Interesting thought… if we spin it a bit further, it might explain why he was so, let’s say for lack of a better word, calm during and after the Tynan fight. He got hit by a huge void blast and transmuted some of it into light, which might have been temporarily incorporated into the demon form. If transmuting light to void and incorporating it into his demon form makes him more ravenous and uncontrollable, transmuting void to light and incorporating that may well have had the opposite effect.
He was waiting until the dragon stopped talking to attack before the blast and only attacked the obsidian ghouls while avoiding people the first time he transformed. He doesn’t know that much about his power and anything he says about it should be subject to some skeptism for now
I don’t get what you mean.
He did not wait at all, Dainix started cracking on the final panel of 1.17.30, then just 3 panels later on 1.17.31 he already tackled Erin in full demon form. I guess you’re right that after the initial tackle, before the blast, he just stood there while VD monologued about creating humans for a page.
He still destroyed his people’s village, unlike the Tynan fight, where literally the only damage he caused was to Erin. All that really means is that the demon isn’t usually a mindless monster (just like LD said a few pages ago), unlike what appears to be happening right now. Same for above, he may have waited for a better opportunity when Erin couldn’t just block him with wind magic.
None of this is really based on anything Dainix said, just observations Squirrel, I, and a couple others made on the last few pages.
And for your other comment: there’s two instances when he’s blasted with void, and in neither case do we see all of the light fly off him, and we can’t properly see Dainix in the following panels of both instances. Similar to the current case where loads of void flew off him as well, which VD then made his bullet out of.
That’s a cool additional spin on the thought! I do think the intention and protective emotion behind his transformation was a key factor in the Tynan fight, but Light’s potential calming or clarifying effects hadn’t occurred to me. I’m intrigued by that idea.
The light flew off him and faded instead of sticking to him like the void is doing now, so I doubt it was the reason
I was wondering a similar thing. Could it be that instead of transmuting anything he touches, he transmutes himself into a version that can beat whatever he’s fighting? So when he fought the void before, he became part-light bc only light can destroy void, and that made him more calm like you said. I bet it would be easy to miss some streaks of light amidst his normal glowiness. Now to fight light he became part void (while not being able to think straight, so not realizing the consequences this could have) and now he’s hungry and destructive.
I feel like Falst is the solution one way or another here.
I’m at this point, deeply concerned on what’s happening with Dainix because 1. He isn’t in any kind of humanoid form signaling… something, I can only guess as to what (lack of any control perhaps) 2. He has a dark coloring that hasn’t been there before indicating it’s from him interacting with void which, makes one wonder why Dainix hasn’t already gotten rid of it 3. Either last page took several seconds and something happened during that time period or the diadem getting broken made 1 happen and I think we can all agree that 1 probably isn’t good so if it happened from the diadem getting broken then that being a bad thing is rather concerning.
hey… Hey alinua… there’s some kind of malignant life magic thing below the boat… it kinda feels like you detected its presence?
you remember that, right? cus i would hate for everyone to be attacked by a sea plesiosaur chimera with no warning…
yeahhhh they’re definitely getting surprised attacked by a sea monster with no warning…
(also love tess this panel)
…
I don’t think Tarren is getting their boat back.
Good news is they already know that! They said right before the floof squad left that they knew Erin wasn’t going to return the boat but he should give them all of his notes on it
I don’t think Tarren thought they were getting their boat back.
I don’t think Tarren knew exactly how much stress their boat was gonna be tested under.
Interesting that Dain bears a passing resemblance to Glort with the formlessness, the hands, etc. Something to do with void transmutation?
Is it time for the Falst and Dainix “I know you’re in there somewhere” talk?
Alinua, it’s good to have you back! On the other hand, 1/3 of the floof gang now has unshared premonitions of immediate danger… that will never bite anyone in the butt, ever, I am sure. The fact that Alinua sensed it, meaning it probably has abnormal amounts of life energy in it (collector collector collector collector)? Nothing to worry about! Surely the collector and gigant sea serpent are actually pet and pet-owner and she was just visiting her little chimeric abomination <3. Or they’re pals meeting up for overseas tea! I think we should feel ashamed of ourselves for making such prejudiced assumptions about their motives. They could have any business going towards the singular boat traveling the northern passage!
Falst!! He’s reappeared! I was getting worried after a couple pages with no sign of him
Falst! Glad to see you’re all right, dude. From his and Tess’s positions, it looks like they went straight to Alinua and Erin respectively to check on them. Alinua seems okay, if mildly traumatized, but Erin is very much…not. Not sure if it was the overchannel, the blood loss or the pain from the diadem that did him in, but he’s down for the count for now.
The way Tess responded to Falst sounded almost…defensive to me. “He can’t”, not only as in “He’s tapped out” but also “Don’t ask him to do any more so he stops hurting himself“.
With their book-smart guy taking a nap, it may be up to street-smarts guy to try and piece together a plan. He’s already got the good sense to try and stay under Michael’s radar — perhaps Falst can use Erin’s lacrimas to do what Erin can’t at the moment?
Protective sister Tess
skick 🙁
Well there’s Falst, being tactical.
The melted boat is looking quite edible.
it’s the molten metal instinct it looks like it might be a good texture yk
You are right Red. Something always get set on fire on Mondays
TL;DR: New plan? There is no plan! Only fire!
RIP Kendal’s new shirt, we hardly knew you.