Episode 83 of the Letters Page - OblivAeon Part 1 (spoiler discussion)

It’s the end of Multiverse as we know it and I feel fine 

http://theletterspage.libsyn.com/episode-83-oblivaeon-part-1

Will take some time for me to process everything, but I can already tell my interpretation of events was way off. Egyptian gods vs Oblivaeon happened in the middle of the story and caused significantly more damage to big-O, when I always thought it was the very beginning of the event and only took out a single shard. 

“This is the last thing Nightmist does... in the Multiverse.”

suspicion intensifies

You know what this episode needs....

More Nixious!

So, my pod bean app decided that this was the best time to go completely pear shaped and stop downloading episodes.

FML.

I really enjoyed the fact that in the canon version of the game, the heroes really drew out the first phase of the battle to get a bunch of rewards and take out a couple of scions, which is...exactly the strategy I’m seeing some people recommend.

@GWNN - that did not escape my notice, either.

Managed to listen to this episode again last night. I still want to read the written summary to get a clearer picture (my brain works better with text than sound), but I got some impressions:

-Seems like all singular aspects have problems with tunnel vision, being so limited by their nature that they can’t use their phenomenal cosmic powers to their full. Wage Master can only see things in terms of games and bets, while OblivAeon is so focused on his reality-destroying plan (being the messed-up aspect of entropy) that he fails to understand that, by taking the proper time to deal with the heroes for sure, he would have the opportunity to finish it in peace. 

Well, that’s my interpretation at least.

-I can’t decide who had the funniest lines, Luminary or Lifeline.

-I loved the line delivery on Oblivaeons “oh you have a shard… fantastic”. He sounded so frustrated and disdainful. 

-So many cool moments, but my favorite is definitely Commmodora’s “having problems amigo?”, where she didn’t just save existence, but also beat OblivAeon in his own game (multiverse manipulation) and then got to troll him about it.

-The Haka subplot feels like playing a Fighter in a party full of high-level magic users, where everybody else is throwing around meteors and summoning giant constructs while the GM has to make a sidequest to make you feel useful. 

-Now that I mention tabletop rpgs, I happen to be playing a raven-controlling witch in a current City of Mist game, and I’m definitely going to steal the hermetic-circle-made-of-birds idea. 

Something I forgot, why

…Huh, now that you mention it C&A did refer to OblivAeon’s death as the end of the multiverse (with timelines being separated and all), didn’t they?

In regards to Nightmist we know her fate in Mist Storm as she literally is the Mist Storm taking over the world and leading to its destruction.   In the RPG there could be a Plan down the line that reconstitutes Nightmist.  Though I imagine anything that does so will leave her in a much different state.  

I downloaded a completely different podcasting app in order to listen to this episode, because podbean's "help" wasn't.

This was a fun episode, but I really hope the guys got some sleep before recording the followup.

They did it all at once.  So no sleep for them. 

“There is no future for Grand Warlord Voss!”

I have to say I was a bit disappointed that Tempest wasn't the other person making sound effects in the Mecha-Knight.

That episode was a lot of fun!

I loved the little pre-music intro that Trevor put together, It did a fantastic job of showcasing the fact that everything leads to this one point, and it just sounded good.

This episode is definitely pushing Luminary further into "favorite hero" territory.

And roughly half of the OblivAeon story seems to revolve around the rule of cool.  "You know what would be totally awesome here?  A giant non-corporeal robot attacking Oblivian / Dropping a moon on him / [insert awesoneness here]".  (The other half of the story is sad character deaths and thinking everyone's going to die),

As for OblivAeon's "tunnel vision", I think that might be a relatively accurate description of what's happening.  But I also think that it's simply the case that the heroes should be beneath his notice (at least from his perspective). Yes, they're annoying, but so are mosquitos.  I'll swat at one if it lands near me, but even at their worst they're simply really annoying... never due they represent an actual threat.

I'm not sure why OblivAeon didn't look at all the trouble these heroes were giving him and just send himself back in time 100 years to when the only heroes around were Haka and Paul Parsons VI, or earlier.  For a 5th-dimensional being he sure handles time in a largely linear way.

Oh.

Oh boy.

The second episode is goint to get LOOPY.

In my headcanon, Trevor comes into the office at a normal time, and he is surprised to find Adam and Christopher still in the recording booth after an all-night session that he did not expect them to do.

You know, all this Entropy and Preservation singular entity stuff is really giving the Multiverse a Brandon Sanderson vibe.

I haven't listened to this yet because I wanted to get OblivAeon first.  Is it full of spoilers?  I thought they weren't going to do it until everybody had OblivAeon?

Yes it will be full of spoilers for those who don’t have OblivAeon.  Now whether you care about spoilers or not is your choice.  

Okay so what was that opening music?!  Is that something Jean-Marc made for the Digital version of OblivAeon?!

The opening song was Progeny’s theme.  Typically they’ve used it as the outtro music.  

The show notes do say this…

We jump right into the story, not wasting too much time messing around as we often do. And! You get to hear hints of some new music! What could this music be? Only time will tell.

The new music is much later on.  The music at the start was not new as that’s Progeny’s theme. 

No, I know Progeny’s music, I mean the stuff they used as the intro to the main discussion, not the show opening.  Sorry I wasn’t being clear.  I mean the real dark music with the creepy woodwinds and brass stabs.

I just assumed it was a teaser of Oblivaeon’s theme from the video game.

Something interested me in this episode: during the battle with Borr at Saint-Tropez, A and C evocate « several other europeans heroes »

We don’t know them, right ? Who can they be ?

You know, out of all the amazing information revealed in this episode, my brain would go and fixate on one incredibly trivial nitpick. When Chrono-Ranger is trapped in the past, they specifically say that he’s in Pompeii while the lava flows all around him. If A&C were history nerds, which I thought they were (or Christopher at least), they should realize that when Mount Vesuvius erupted, the lava flowed away from Pompeii and toward its sister city of Herculaneum. Pompeii is the more famous city because it wasn’t engulfed in lava (which would have destroyed all remains and left most of the ruins entombed in solid igneous rock, making an archaeological dig far more difficult); it was instead suffocated in thick layers of ash. Since being in Pompeii would have likely resulted in CR suffocating (and would definitely have looked different in the art, as he’d be buried in snow-like ash and be barely visible), he must in fact have been trapped in Herculaneum instead.

Odds are good that the comic writer in the metaverse didn’t know that, either.

There are a lot of similar things in real comics, in addition to those in Sentinels Comics.

It must be convenient for C&A to be able to blame their mistakes on an entire fictional universe full of nameless, faceless comic-industry goons.

Of course, this might not have been a mistake, but an intentional “artistic” choice. Still bugs me either way though.

So this episode gives us a canonical order for the Scions coming out.

1. Empyreon (though not yet acknowledged as a Scio).
2. Nixious the Chosen
3. Faultless
4. Voidsoul
5. Sanction
6. Dark Mind
7. Progeny
8. Borr the Unstable
9. Aeon Master
   X. Rainek Kel’Voss (disregarding earlier appearances as Tim Cosing or OblivAeon’s shadowy lieutenant).

Harpy’s spell against OblivAeon is cool because it should be based on actual swarming behavior, the movement patterns that a flock of birds use to evade predators, but drawing the flight paths of all those birds to create a crazy fractal pattern.

Found another possible sequence for the scions, though it’s incomplete. The series Scion Strike appears to have been a six-issue book, and issue 1 is quoted only with regard to Empyreon as far as I can tell. But then issue 2 features Aeon Master, issue 3 is about Dark Mind, issue 4 features both Nixious and Borr, issue 5 has Faultless, and issue 6 is mostly about Sanction. I’ve been unable to find where Voidsoul, Progeny and Rainek fit within that series as yet; I may have missed a card or two from the Scion deck and the ten Scion character cards, especially one or two of their backsides, but I went through most of the 30 quotes involved and came up with this pattern pretty consistently. If we assume that nothing preceded Empyreon and nothing other than Rainek follows Sanction, then we only have two scions to insert somewhere into this sequence, plus needing to figure out whether Borr comes before or after Nixious in the events of issue 4.