LNH: Hungry Hungry Sabertooths #6pi.VI.6: "Tragedy and Trenchcoats" [2/3]

[Drew Perron]

On Tuesday, November 3, 2020 at 9:23:50 AM UTC-5, Jeanne Morningstar wrote:
> II. RECRIMINATION 
> 
> Occultism Kid's astral form sank back into his body like an overcrowded 
> garbage bag into a dumpster.

Oof, what a metaphor.

> He'd overexerted himself and now he 
> wouldn't be able to go astral for a while. He was stuck in this room 
> with himself (and technically the Door Warden, but the Door Warden had 
> been in a depressive mood and hadn't felt like talking for a while), the 
> worst place to be. 

awwwwwwh.

> In theory, it should have been easy for Occultism Kid to deal with 
> quarantine. He already spent most of his time sitting in his room 
> astrally projecting.

Turns out it's not that easy. @-@

> He saw a 
> message from Mashup Laq, who'd also been trying to keep in touch with 
> him, and ignored it. Mashup Laq was one of the easiest people in the 
> world to make friends with, but Occultism Kid still found himself 
> resisting it a little. 

Awwwwwwww. Yeah that makes sense.

> What he had was a small number of friendships he cultivated and invested 
> himself in, of which Obscure Trivia Lad and wReamhack were the most 
> stable. Forming new ones was hard; he tended to stick to the small 
> number of relationships he was sure of, which made it all the harder 
> when one of them crumbled because a character died or was taken off the 
> board. 

Hmmmmmmm yeah that scans. ``;

> He did feel an instinctive strong connection to Nina, but guilt over 
> what happened to Ultimate Ninja and putting her in this situation got in 
> his way, even though he knew that he probably blamed himself more for 
> that than she did. 

Oh dear. Also familiar.

> The fact that the problem might be Neme.sys affecting his thinking was, 
> in a way, the more comforting option. The problem could have gone back 
> long, long ago in his life, beginning with his visit to the dead 
> Looniverse, not long after he joined the Legion. [Legion of Occult 
> Heroes #4] Ever since then, death, failure and tragedy had never been 
> far away. Had the horrors he'd seen impressed themself on him so much 
> they'd become a central part of his magic? 

oooooooooh. Nice deep angst.

>  His victories were all pyrrhic. 
> 
> There was part of him that was afraid of that and part of him that 
> wanted to embrace that.

Niiiiiiice character beat.

> In his jewelry box of artifacts he held a 
> particularly powerful one called the Wings of Endless Angst, which drew 
> on the power of Darkening. It was obviously (well, obvious for the 
> people who had read a lot of Doctor Strange comics) inspired by the 
> Peter Gillis run of Doctor Strange, one of the better examples of that 
> kind of story. The problem was that after a certain point this became 
> the only story anyone ever told with Doctor Strange,

YEP. >:/

> (He wasn't really able to follow the Hickman Avengers run and 
> the death of the universe so forth because that was too similar to what 
> he'd been through recently.) 

Well yeah. @-@

> The Darkening of the Sorcerer Supreme was one of the two stories that 
> creators who didn't really know what to do with magic as a narrative 
> element kept going back to--the other was "the Death of Magic" which 
> thankfully the LNH writers, for all their boundless silliness, had 
> enough sense to avoid.

Mmmmmmmhm >:/ Slash "The New Age of Magic", which we *have* played around with but in a different and smarter way.

> Maybe switch to wearing white 
> trenchcoats and call himself Occultism Kid the White--no, that had bad 
> connotations, but he could certainly grow a long beard.

X3

> But no, he wasn't ready to move on just yet. Because his apprentice was 
> absolutely not ready to be Occultism Kid. They were still stabilizing, 
> still figuring themself out. They had a good bit of arrogance--extremely 
> justified arrogance, which was as bad in its own way as the other kind. 

That's so well-put.

> They were as loud, assertive and flashy as Occultism Kid was quiet, 
> retiring and sometimes nonentity-ish. They had to learn to listen and 
> reflect in the same way Occultism Kid had had to learn to be confident 
> and assert himself. The problem is, maybe he'd never actually figured 
> that out. 

Oh oof, *oof*. <3

> He saw the telltale rainbow flash of the Trenchcoat of Many Colors worn 
> by Kid Occultism Kid, his apprentice.

:D

Drew "this is such good character stuff" Nilium