Salkafar

Gregole's data file doesn't say his power is fifteen times greater than in his human form, it says he has fifteen times the strength of a normal human. And these other examples are, of course, a Libertus and Aptom, neither of which are representative for Zoanoids. Aptom is not even a Zoanoid, in fact.

That is elegant and neat, Alkanfel, but I don't know... Gregore has been stated to have 15 times the strength of a normal human... and Derzerb, 60 times. So he's four times as powerful as Gregole, not ten times. And we don't actually know how powerful Guyot is in terms of raw physical strength. All his feats have to do with energy attacks and gravity manipulation. Same with Archanfel.

I don't think you can say Waferdanos had a real battle form. After all, he wasn't a human, so he wasn't really a Zoaform. He hadn't undergone processing the way humans do. That does make me wonder about just what a Zoa-Crystal is. It seems to amplify and focus psychic potential.

Wow. That's pretty amazing.

Comic Sans...?

Maybe. Before the Dinosaurs they'd still have to contend with our ancestors, the theracephalians.

The snake people? Like the folks from 'the Lost City'? I don't know if the Elder Things actually used Ubbo-Sathla. I mean they arrived, what, two billion years ago? I think he was pretty much played out by then. And humans being scary, well, we are germs to the Great Old Ones... but germs can be pretty scary. SARS, MERS, MRSA, AIDS...

If Clumegnig and Jabir target Griselda and disable or kill her, they can turn the Libertus against Agito.

Thing is, Cthulhu isn't even that important in the greater scheme of Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. Earth is choking with beings like that and they are somehow all dormant right now. Imagine what would happen if they all awoke at once rather than every now and then when someone accidentally pokes them in their sleep. Ubbo-Sathla: he really shouldn't be an Outer God. He's basically the Primordial Soup, a mindless organic goop which constantly produced life forms, way back at the dawn of the Proterozoic. I also think Abhoth is the degenerated remnant of Ubbo-Sathla. Another bit of headcanon: the two most powerful Outer Gods are Azathoth, who is generally thought of as more powerful than all the rest put together, and responsible for the creation of the entire universe... and is completely insane, pretty much catatonic and just sort of squatting at the heart of existence; and Yog-Sothoth, who is ethereal, intelligent and destructive, known as the Keeper of the Gate. The headcanon part is this: they're not two entities. It's not Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, it's Azatot and Yogzatot - Body and Mind. When the original, unknown entity created the universe - accidentally or not - he trapped part of himself inside. The mind is still outside, and every 'incursion' of "Yog-Sothoth" is him attempting to fix it. Nyarlathotep is the nascent consciousness of the universe trying to prevent this, because he likes existing. Compared to Azathot he is practically powerless, but by human standards he is very much a god. The Outer Gods are like parasites of Azatot, rampant because his mind can't manage 'pest control' now; the fleas, intestinal worms and lice equivalents on a divine scale. Everything else in the Mythos - including the Great Old Ones - is native to the universe which was created by Azatot/Yogzatot, and they seem monstrous only because they are so different from us. Some of them are offspring or descendants of Outer Gods, though, so I guess that makes them hybrids. Humanity - and incidentally, also the shoggoth race and the great race of Yith - is descended from Ubbo-Sathla, which was created by Azathoth/Yog-Sothoth. Therefore, humans (and, I guess, shoggoths and Yithans as well) subconsciously strive to re-unite the two. That is why humanity and shoggoths and possibly all other natural alien races are being targeted by Great Old Ones and Outer Gods and their servants such as Deep Ones and the Tcho-Tcho people - they realize that if we succeed, it's the end of the universe and of them. Some of the more ancient alien races - Elder Things, Mi-Go - might also realize that humanity's propensity for invoking alien entities might lead to disaster one day, so they try to keep us stupid and destroy us if they can; of if we actually succeed, intercept the call and appear themselves instead to destroy the unfortunate conjurer. Humans also do degenerate things, such as using magic or technology to raise the dead, or create monstrous hybrids. Aliens and other entities are forever trying to lure humanity away from its intended purpose (and the purpose of all natural life in the universe, so perhaps every inhabited planet has its own version of the Mythos). But humanity is tough, much more so than Lovecraft makes out. For all the myriad attacks on humankind by the seemingly endless array of aliens and gods, we survive... and become more dangerous by the day. Maybe humanity is the really scary entity in the Mythos - the final story will be humanity finally fulfilling its destiny and with some kind of magic or technology or both finally open the Gate, and as all of creation, al the gods and monsters, howl in despair, all the walls everywhere will come down and creation will collapse as God is finally whole again. Perhaps he will decide we're worth preserving.

Yeah! This is better than 10 pages of Sho catching a collapsing construction scaffold.

Oh dear. Mesa fall down, go boom.

Ah, lovely. ...I guess those must be Clumegnig and Jabir's reserve troops... either that, or Chronos is finally taking the battle to Apollyon.

I had never heard of the man before you mentioned him. Personally I think Elaine Morgan's 'Aquatic Ape' theory seems more plausible than this. It's sensationalism.

That seems about getting to learn about the beauty and wisdom of God. Lovecraft is more about the opposite.

The chick will probably be called 'Brandy'.

I have read quite a bit of Lovecraft's Mythos stuff (and a lot of Mythos stories by other authors, as well) and I can tell you that he made it up. Except perhaps some of the names, like Dagon. But his cosmology and teratology were entirely him. Maybe he borrowed a little from Lord Dunsany and Robert Chambers.

Yeah... Vendramini... http://sciblogs.co.nz/bioblog/2010/10/31/killer-neandertals-does-this-one-really-stack-up/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/06/19/neandertals-were-monsters/ https://outwardbounder.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/why-bug-eyed-furry-neanderthals-are-stupid/

I used to drink Coke like a hard rock drummer, but I don't anymore on account of my teeth. Still: Coca Cola, every time. "Is Pepsi all right?" "Is it all right if I pay with Monopoly money?"

Aww, poor Doctor Druid. Talk about characters getting shafted! If you ever want to see a comic book character really get p!$$ed on in his own magazine, you should try to get the 1995 mini-series Druid. And it's not fair. He is even older than the Fantastic Four. And a lot older than Doctor Strange.

It's a matter of tradition. The original Avengers were the Hulk, Iron Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp and Thor. The Hulk left after issue #2, and in number 4 they found Captain America. For a while it was like that, but eventually the Wasp, Ant-Man, Thor and Iron Man left, and Captain America was left with new recruits Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Now, Hawkeye had been introduced in an Iron Man story a while before, followed shortly by the Black Widow (or was it the other way around?); a few issues after that, they were paired up, and they were a couple for a while afterwards. But while Hawkeye joined the Avengers in #16, the Widow only became one of them in #111. So while Hawkeye's only 'power' is incredible marksmanship with the bow, he is a traditional Avenger. And, really, so is the Black Widow. They both led the Avengers at one point, and they both also led their own team - the Thunderbolts in Hawkeye's case, and Force Works in the Widow's. Hawkeye was frustrated, being relatively 'powerless' as an Avenger; so after ingesting an experimental drug created by Hank Pym (Ant-Man) he had the ability to grow to giant size for a while, using the name Goliath. So far as I remember he unfortunately never used his bow while at giant size. Hmmm. In a few weeks, Ant-Man the movie will come out. That opens possibilities.

If only you knew how badly Tony Stark has been shafted over the last ten years, often by the writers of his own magazine. ...I guess it all started with Mike Grell. He had had rough patches before, most infamously with Terry Kavanagh, around the Crossing, but that was long ago and squarely in the Nineties, which, as everybody knows, don't really count. But Mike Grell... in retrospect, he wasn't even that bad. But at the time, it seemed like the frickin' apocalypse. If only we'd known. Anyway... after Grell left, we got a fill-in guy, and then John Jackson Miller who wrote quite entertainingly... until he would leave again. His run was followed by a truly abysmal story by Mark Ricketts. We were sad... until we heard who was going to be the new writer... Warren frickin' Ellis!! Well... he wrote six issues... the famous, game-changing story 'Extremis'... and then he was gone again. But it took... eighteen months. And after that... 'Civil War'. That was when it really was going to go downhill, that was the blow from which Iron Man would never recover (He didn't). He was set up to play the designated villain role in the event, which involved the heroic community being divided over legislation. Oh, nominally either side was as right, or as wrong, as the other, but Iron Man was universally derided as a fascist. Thanks in no part to a highly tendentious depiction in the comic itself. And at the end, Captain America was killed, conveniently martyring him, making Iron Man look even worse. And he just never really came back from that. From that time on, Tony Stark was this snarky, stuck-up shifty guy who thought he was smarter than everybody else and who always was planning stuff in secret, probably planning to take your rights and freedom away in the name of some abstract cause. Except in his own book, of course. After a laudable effort by the Knaufs, and some fairly solid fill-in work by Gage and Moore, volume 5 was written entirely by one writer, the longest consecutive run any writer has ever had on 'Iron Man'... his name: Matt Fraction. Matt Fraction is Satan. Imagine your favorite book and superhero being in the hands of a man who hates every character in it and wants them to suffer. That was my life. For four-and-a-half years and sixty-one issues. I literally opened a bottle of champagne over his final issue. Almost everything he wrote for Marvel was subsequently ignored by everybody. A great example of this is the major crossover 'Fear Itself'. The only writer at Marvel who ratified his stuff even a little bit was Kieron Gillen, and that's because he is a gentleman. He got to write Iron Man after Fraction left; and when Gillen is good, he is really good. But even he petered out, leaving early to go write 'Ãœber' and 'The wicked and the divine'. Despair. So then Marvel made the final logical step: they simply turned Tony Stark into a villain, for real. That is the premise of the comic 'the Superior Iron Man'. Tony was inverted by a mystical spell during 'Axis', meaning his alignment was basically switched, and he never de-inverted. Iron Man is a supervillain, and he was never restored - because the Marvel Universe was destroyed, less than an hour after Iron Man and Captain America fought to the death in the streets, until a Helicarrier crashed on top of them. As of this writing, Iron Man is missing, presumed dead. So you can understand I am a little bummed-out on the Iron Man front.

I think Agito can definitely take them. Compared to the Arizona situation, he has the advantage: he has more Libertus with him, he has destroyed the exits of the base (unless there is a secret emergency exit) and he doesn't have to worry that Sho might suddenly pull the Gigantic away from him. In Arizona he was facing three Zoalords - even if one of them never entered the battle - and he knew as little about them as he did about these two. And even so, he managed to kill two of them and as-good-as-kill the third, and get away in one piece (more or less) himself. Unless Kurumegnik and Jabir pull a gigantic rabbit out of their hat now, they're well and truly screwed.

Awesome. So... this should be a hell of a battle. Would Kurumegnik have sent out all of their personnel, or are there still some Unus' left to oppose the Libertus? And has Heckaring come up with a response to the Unus' yet? What if Libertus' now can combine, as well?

Thanks, Alkanfel! I have to say: what the heck? How did Agito locate the rebels? This should be a nice battle... and we finally get to see the combat capabilities of Jabir and Kurumegnik (I still prefer 'Kurumegnik').

...Is that a train crash?! Ah, wait: is that Guyot crashing down into the subway to escape?