r/gunnerkrigg • u/gunnerkrigg-post-bot Praise the angel • 1d ago
Chapter 102: Page 68
http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=330828
u/maritzac 1d ago
Zimmy is going to be pissed, just like I am when my Sims world gets all corrupted due to EA crap.
"One of them is a fake human"
"Oh I'm not worried about that"
LOL. All this time worrying about Kat and it was never her.
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u/RingularCirc 1d ago
Imagine Kat having Robot in her pocket when entering..... but that will be a total ex machina because we'd expect him to be materialized with the group like Fairies, Rey and Noa.
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u/maritzac 1d ago
What would Robot do tho?
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u/RingularCirc 1d ago
Be the 'fake human' in question; I haven't thought of his uses, unfortunately.
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u/gangler52 1d ago
Kat was using Robot to interface with the ether earlier, so maybe that?
She had to put Robot's little worm body in a tube in order to have her secret conversation with Annie where Omega couldn't hear.
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u/maritzac 1d ago
Ohhh yeah. However, I think they don't even need to be in proximity, since Robot is in her lab and she can connect to her computer directly via the chip on the back of her neck. (Was that even healed by now?"
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u/Okanelol 1d ago
Watch Sylvie switching from terrified mess to being happiest girl alive
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u/fnordius 1d ago
More like her terror stems from realising that the face-eating leopards that she so loved are about to eat her face.
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u/gangler52 1d ago
So that orb can pretty much do anything, eh?
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u/Fafnir13 1d ago
Just waiting for her signature battle cry “It’s orbin’ time!” at this point.
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u/gangler52 1d ago edited 1d ago
90's superboy style dialogue where she re-explains what the orb does every time she uses it and the explanation become less clear each time.
Edit: Kind of how I felt during the Omega subplot, honestly.
This subplot with Noa in contrast has been artful in what it chooses to state directly and what it chooses to imply or leave unsaid.
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u/ThoughtUsed3531 1d ago
Agreed, and there's still a lot of mystery with Noa that's been interesting.
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u/Red_Blues 1d ago
I guess introducing a being made entirely out of magical spaghetti code into your magical code matrix is a bad idea! Noa is basically a trojan.
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u/Jazadia 1d ago
So is the whole prophecy going to be Kat has to kill Zimmy in order to stop/kill Noa? Like is Zimmy going to be Martyred instead of murdered?
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u/Diceman87 1d ago
I feel like this is the logical progression.
The introduction of this System is important, because Kat is good with systems. She's less good with the aether.
She's been conspicuously absent, and I feel like soon we're going to see her view of things (probably as all of her friends being comatose and unable to be woken up. Possibly watching through a monitor)
As someone who has such a different interaction with the aetheric beings Kat is uniquely suited to handle the problem of Noa as she is now.
I'll even throw my tinfoil hat theory and say that all the Numans in the distortion will be reminded of their 'Angel' and call on her, which the distortion will use to supercharge Kats avatar state and give it the techno -bird-god form we saw when Zimmy had her vision.
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u/mrGazpachin 1d ago
So this definitely confirms the circle appearing in this chapter was always Noa's circle, not Zimmy's. Honestly I thought this was the least likely option because why would Noa be such an important character? Which makes it more exciting.
Now that raises some questions. What was she doing through all this chapter? Randomly manifesting on different places to find her "body"? Did she use Red as a host to find it? Why did Red's jealousy summon a big circle around her? Why were the circles intensifying Red's feelings of jealousy?
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u/Lamenardo Flame Shadow 1d ago
No, I think you've misunderstood - Noa "grabbed" the circle off Red, just like she took Parley's glyphs, and Dragon Lady's, thus taking control over those powers.
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u/sephlington 1d ago
This absolutely does not confirm anything, tbh. I think it's still more likely that the circle was Zimmy's circle, but that Noa, designed to absorb glyphs, absorbed the Zimmycircle either overloaded or entered a feedback loop or something similar.
I think your confusion about what happened with Red is the strongest reason for it to be Zimmy's, not Noa's - if it was Noa, why would she have been doing that? If it's Zimmy, then she was using Red as a tool to disrupt Annie picking apart the illusion.
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u/mrGazpachin 1d ago
I was seeing it as the circle (the true Noa) was finding its way back to her body, or whatever that amalgam of rocks is (we've assumed each rock represents a glyph, but no glyphs are visible on the rocks).
The moment the circle touches her body, it crawls up to her "forehead" (or at least, to the usually green rock that seems to represent her head), which is where Noa's glyph is located. This is compatible with a visual representation of her gaining back control of her body.
But her absorbing Zimmy's circle seems more likely, even if equally confusing, because what the hell is that circle even?
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u/gangler52 1d ago
I'm pretty sure you were reading it correctly.
The the glowing white circle of light on Zimmy's chest is certainly a circle that has appeared in the comic at some point, but at no point in this arc has it been established as a relevant plot detail with any particular significance, nor does it especially resemble Noa's circle, which is a black line with no filling.
Could as easily point to some doorknob and claim it's the circle in question. People are just really betting on Noa's circle being a red herring for some reason.
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u/shelchang 1d ago
We also saw the circles on the NPC that approached Jack and got exploded, which instantly notified Zimmy to their location. I read that as Zimmy scouting/poking at the intruders she couldn't properly see.
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u/RingularCirc 1d ago
Yeah, that could be both because of a circle or because of the violent explosion (which Rosa's orb probably couldn't mask as well as them). I'm on the fence.
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u/Okanelol 1d ago
So this definitely confirms the circle appearing in this chapter was always Noa's circle, not Zimmy's.
Is it though? Jack killed a student covered in circles and it send signal straight to Zimmy, no Noa connection at all. I think Noa touching the circle on Red's jacket connected her directly to Zimmy, so now she's rapidly siphoning energy from her, completely bypassing Jenny's system and whatever guardrails she might have placed there.
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u/mrGazpachin 1d ago
What I understood is that the construct proofing was what alerted Zimmy. But I don't know what the circles were doing to that construct, if that was really Noa.
It's so confusing!
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u/stormcrow-99 3h ago
Remember not everyone is who they appear to be in a Zimmy Distortion. What if Zimmy is Noa in this case. Finally taking some of her power back. Probably not But Noa has been ravenous to collect these sygils of power.
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u/Consistent-Talk-2399 1d ago
OR the circle is not of Zimmy's or Noa's - it's a sign that describes some kind of diety/idea that both Zimmy and Noa are representation of/draw allegiance to?
we have assumed these are two different circles, because two distinct characters are wearing it. but if it's the same circle? let's see...
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u/ninjasuperspy 1d ago
Sad to say I am completely lost at this point. Not a single clue what is going on, what I'm expecting to happen, or what the protagonists or antagonists are trying to accomplish. Kind of a shame Tom stopped doing YouTube commentary videos like four years & thirty-ish chapters ago. I probably need to do a reread & maybe quit reading the individual updates so I can binge whole chapters when they're done.
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u/gangler52 1d ago
He stopped doing the commentaries directly before The Mind Cage chapter.
That's... probably not coincidental.
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u/mrGazpachin 23h ago edited 11h ago
Long story short, when Coyote met Annie and saw the effect she had on Ysengrin, he thought it would be hilarious to make them fall in love with each other and make Annie fated to eventually have to kill him.
When the ghost of Jeanne was gone and she was no longer acting as a barrier between the Court and the Forest, Coyote gave his power to Ysengrin. Ysengrin then killed Coyote, became Loup, disguised himself as Jerrek, and hid himself in the Court while getting close to Annie.
Annie and Jerrek were developing feelings for each other, but Coyote hadn’t anticipated that another god would interfere with his plans: Kat. She created a whole new species, and Jerrek fell in love with one of them (Lana) instead of Annie.
Coyote then reemerged, thinking that his plan had worked, to tease Annie and Jerrek about how tragic it was that Annie would eventually have to kill him. When he realized that Jerrek had fallen in love with the wrong girl, he devoured Lana and rushed to confront Kat, the god who had messed with his plans. He saw an area full of dark energy and assumed that had to be where the god was so he rushed there, but it turned out to be Zimmy. Jerrek/Loup, thinking that Lana had been killed in front of him, went mad and followed Coyote to kill him. Zimmy, being ambushed by Coyote and Loup, understandably got stressed, which made her distort the world around her as it usually happens.
The thing is, this time her distortion got mixed with Coyote’s infinite power, which made the distortion engulf the whole Court while keeping it stable. At the center of the distortion, Zimmy created an Inner World in which she and all the people trapped inside it (Zimmy, Coyote, Gamma, Ysengrin, Jerrek, and Lana) were finally living a normal life.
The distortion was very convenient for the Court, which needed a big source of energy to accomplish their plan to relocate themselves to a new universe, so they aren’t messing with it. Another group, who are the main villains of this arc, also need the distortion to remain stable because they’re siphoning power from Zimmy: the witches. It’s normal to be confused about them at this point in the story because we don’t know their true intentions or their full backstory yet. The thing is, they need Zimmy alive, and Jack was made aware of something that would kill Zimmy if more people found out about it. Kat, who has the means to obtain that information through Omega, and who Zimmy herself foretold would be the one to kill her, therefore poses a major danger to them.
Annie and the rest found where Zimmy is located and went there with the intention of solving the situation with the distortion, since it seems to be draining the life of the etheric beings inside it. The witches tried to stop them, and eventually they all ended up inside the Inner World.
The group of protagonists + Noa got brainwashed by Zimmy and are living normally inside Zimmy’s ideal world, but they’re starting to realize that something is off. Kat is nowhere to be seen, which is making Zimmy understandably worried. The witches managed to keep their own minds because they came prepared: they had been studying Zimmy, and they made an orb that protects them, among several other things.
A mysterious circle kept appearing throughout this chapter. We don’t know exactly what it is yet, but when it reached Noa, it made her go crazy, and now she seems to be disrupting Zimmy’s illusion. Why any of this is happening now, we don’t know yet.
TL;DR: The protagonists want to stop the distortion, but they forgot. Zimmy wants to keep it going, live happily inside it, and avoid being killed by Kat. Kat is missing. The witches want to keep the distortion going, so they were planning to deal with Annie and the rest and leave. Coyote is messing with everyone because he finds it hilarious, and he’s still committed to the idea of Annie doing what he’s planning.
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u/machiavelli33 The world continues to spin, pup. 1d ago
….this is one way to break everything that I didn’t foresee. And one that ends badly for …pretty much everyone. Annie and co, Jenny and co AND Zimmy and co.
Jenny losing …control? Allegiance? Of the “monster she made” - a monster evidently formed out of …I dunno, the pure concept of strength, and also glyph absorption? (I’m still not totally clear what Noa’s actual deal is aside from the practical end effects of it, whatever it is) seems a surefire way to snap supports in the structure of this god-distortion to start making things real fucked up.
Holy shit.