The Young Protectors: Double-Cross Chapter One—Page 61

September 3, 2019 Alex Woolfson 39 Comments

The Platinum Priestess sure knows how to make an exit…

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39 Comments

The New Page is up:
https://webcomics.yaoi911.com/typ3/doublecross-ch1-page-62/

Patreon Rumbles

Hello Campers,
What does Spooky see?

Does he have a choice? It could be: Portal #1, Portal #2 or a Box.

Or he could just take the magic and run.

Run Away was my first thought but that’s Not Spooky.

I’m assuming he’s looking in disappointment at the spot where the now-vanished Priestess was, wondering if he’ll ever get the opportunity to kill her again. (Hint: Drop a house on her, Spooky. That trick has a proven track record of success.)

And it’s only at this moment that I realise that the closing/vanishing portal indicates that the Priestess must have gained some measure of control of the portals, since we haven’t seen any of the others close so far. So much for my idea that she may have cast some other spell, like the death curse on Spooky. On the up side, it indicates that even with the Sphere Celestiale broken, it is possible for the portals to be closed, so Spooky just has to get to work to get the situation under control. Let’s just hope that there isn’t some sort of conservation of portals at work, otherwise it might be that when he closes one another one will open.

Maybe something passing through the portal closes it?
Maybe the Sphere Celestiale requires another blood sacrifice to control it?

Hmm.. I don’t think that portal closed when it chopped the middle out of the tree a few pages back, but it may have done so on the next panel and we simply didn’t see it.

And, yeah, given the three factors that we’ve seen so far – the preparation for mass sacrifice, the way the Sphere activated when the cultists’ blood got spilt on it, and the way the Priestess seemed to get a bit of control over the portals after she released her own blood – I think it’s strongly implied that the Sphere Celestiale requires blood to at least activate, if not fully control. The exact details will be important, of course, if Spooky wants to control/shut down/keep the effect from expanding/fill-in-some-other-non-horrible-outcome-here.

Her words in Panel 3 make me think that she’s done something to create harm or death or unleashed something terrible to make the situation worse.

Okay, so the whole issue of what the Platinum Priestess is ‘up to’ is a kinda complicated mix of what we can see the Priestess physically doing as opposed to what she’s actually doing, how and why.

I’ll stand by my previous assessment that if the Priestess had gained enough control of the portals to kill Spooky with slicing’n’dicing then she would have done so immediately. This isn’t even a matter of heat-of-the-moment anger, it’s simply practicality. Spooky has been tracking her for years (as we know from the text stories) and in rapid succession he’s recently turned up with superpowered teammates to wreck two of her schemes. From the Priestess’ point of view this sort of thing is possibly/probably going to continue, so it’s in her tactical interest to simply remove the problem at the first convenient opportunity. I therefore think the fact that she didn’t kill him in the few seconds that he was distracted by the appearance of the portals is extremely telling.

Next comes the question of how powerful the Priestess is with and without her staff, and why. We really don’t know. I’ve wondered before about whether it’s something that acts like a magical Swiss army knife (and simply makes actions easier) as opposed to an artefact that she’s imbued a lot of her personal power into). Another option that occurs to me as I type this is that there are certain types of spells/magical operations that need specific types of tool or tools that have been enchanted in advance in particular ways .

Clearly the Priestess retains some level of power without her staff. But without knowing the rules of blood magic for this setting, or even what specifically the spell last page was for, we can only speculate on what’s happening on this page. Was it some sort of spell of protection and/or control so that she could cross over one of the portals without getting chopped up? That would be a sensible option for someone who’s been stripped of her useful magical staff, is on the ropes from an opponent who has been clear that he intends to kill her, and needs to make a getaway. Although I still like the idea that she may have laid a death curse on Spooky, since that would tie back into her medium-to-long term tactical needs.

(As a side note, the choice of portal to walk through into a suburban setting has two advantages. One, the Priestess’ power base of cults etc in on Earth, and if she’s low on resources then traveling to another place on what’s probably Earth has the advantage of meaning she only has to use mundane transport to get home. Two, she’s already tried to guilt trip Spooky with her ‘You’ve wrecked my plan and now it’s your fault that the world is going to be destroyed’ speech, so she if she can unsettle him a bit more with the subtext implication that she’s going to start killing children again then she may well try to do so. Heck, she may even kill some people simply to try and ad on some guilt – although I doubt if Spooky would fall for that sort of trickery. However, I personally doubt that the Priestess would actually need to kill anyone right at this second – all her big save-the-world-and-also-regain-personal-power schemes seem to require time and a large number of people to setup. I’m guessing that even if she has to recreate her staff with blood magic it would still take some time to acquire the materials and prepare the ritual.)

Okay, that’s all that I can think of just at the moment. I’ll leave the rest of you alone now to enjoy your camping.

All very well thought out, Saxon. Fun for me to read. 🙂

Okay, that’s all that I can think of just at the moment. I’ll leave the rest of you alone now to enjoy your camping.

That world that PP just stepped into looks very mundane, but then again, she had only seen a tiny bit of it. How certain can she be that it is anything like Earth?

I like the way you think, Klaus. 🙂

Voting links for The Young Protectors and Artifice!

Thank you, b3nc0!

Ugh! Sircea is such a bitch. Overall, the mission was a success. Yay!

Witch. I’m sure you must have meant witch…! 😎

It’s not over yet. We haven’t seen what that spell did. I’m guessing things are only just getting started.

Good point.

Just one kid left to save. 🙂

Are u serious! I thought they were all safe! *huge sigh.

Flyboy’s on it on the very next page. 🙂

The value of those homes is about to drop.

“Mommy, who’s that scary lady who appeared out of nowhere and said something like “I hope your friends die, Spookysomething?”

Ha!

What do you think she did next?

I’ve got a lot of complicated thoughts running around in my head about the Priestess using portals to get away, and I’ll probably take time to process and analyse before doing a longer post on the subject.

But for now I’ll just make the speculation that we can’t be sure what the spell she cast on the last page by biting her wrist and spilling blood was about. It seems to have given her a measure of control on the portals – but that might be correlation rather than causality. For all we know she may have laid a death curse on Spooky and the other YPs – which would tie the use of the word ‘Nekros’ from last page with the Parthian shot on this page about him and his friends dying screaming. OTOH, if the spell did give her a measure of control over the portals, I’m thinking it was a bare minimum of control, so that she could escape. If she had any greater level of control I’m guessing that she would have used the portals to try and slice Spooky into emphatically dead kibble.

Those pesky Parthians — always taking the last shot!

I think you’re correct, she’d have zapped him some way if she could have.

She was very angry…

Really interesting speculation, Saxon. Nice.

Always was and always will be a “SORE LOSER”

Why is your avatar a picture of Mitch McConnell?

Let’s not venture into politics for two reasons:
One, not all the readers are from the USA, and
Two, politics tends to turn readers off which isn’t the aim of TYP.

If it’s crap, you need to find the toilet paper portal

I don’t like which portal she’s going through. I’m hoping it was just the closest/most convenient and not her regathering sacrifices.

Yeah, sheer coincidence for sure…!

She had many options. 🙂

Sircea and two young children in the same place.

What could possibly go wrong…! 😖

Those pesky Young Protectors might show up and ruin everything.

That has certainly proven to be a risk, hasn’t it, Klaus? 🙂

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