Level 9: #6
Chapter: Comic, Level 9 — Hotel Califormian
Rusty & Co.
Monstrous Misadventures! Updated every Wednesday at noon, EST.
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Well… this bodes ill.
Also, finally got my Rusty Plush today. He’s adorable! Larger than I expected, too.
Ill? But it seems like such a lovely place. Such a LOVELY place.
Got my plush a couple days ago, was planning to gift it to my niece, she got something else instead, because this one is mine
So… are the ants incapable of speaking, or is it just impolite to be too chatty towards guests who just arrived?
Also, I don’t think stairs are very convenient when you’re a snake.
Only second highest ranking formian caste (Myrmarch) could speak common, lesser castes communicated telepathically.
Look again at those stairs and the carpet: the guests are not close enough to hear them yet, unless they would be yelling, and that’s definitely impolite.
cool!
I’m calling it right now, this entire arc will follow the song, up to and including, “This could be heaven, or this could be hell.” Look at their reactions, this is gonna more or less follow the song lyric by lyric.
Maddie’s ” eyes grew heavy and her sight grew dim, she had to stop for the night.”
Well-spotted! Her eyes do indeed look heavy in that first panel.
Desert highway, check
Hair blowing in the wind, check
Shimmering light in the distance, check
Bell ringing, check
Woman in doorway with candle, check
Corridor, check (stay tuned for voices next week?)
I do believe you’re onto something!
Cool wind in Madeline’s head, check
Warm smell of colitas, check
Ayup, seems 100% spot on. So… Are they going to be saved by eagles?
Rusty’s thinking to himself “This could be heaven or this could be hell”
She’s lit up the candle to show them the way.
Next week will probably open with the voices down the corridor saying “Welcome to the Hotel Califormian”
One of the lyrics is “Her mind is Tiffany-twisted” so something will happen to Yuan-Tiffany I guess.
I just realized the drink on the last page is a colita…
The girl with colita goes by?
I thought a colita was the bud of the cannabis plant. Perhaps you’re thinking of a colada?
Well as long as there’s a warm smell of them, rising up thru the air.
Y.T. manages to fit every possible interpretation of ‘colita’: she’s got the drink, she’s smoking something which could be weed – she even has the ‘little tail’ which is the literal interpretation.
“Hey! It’ssss not that little!”
The colita from the song is referring to sage, “wild buckwheat”, according to the Eagles.
Hmmm… this does seem to follow the lyrics of the song. I am a bot worried though by the lines “In the masters chambers, they’ve gathered for the feast. Stab it with their steel and knives but they just can’t kill the beast”…
So “the Beast” will be Rusty?
No wonder they can’t kill the beast… “eat knives?”
I’m getting strong Hellen Gravely vibes from the hotel owner. Keep an eye out for suspicious picture frames, gang.
I was going to say that the Formians need two more legs; then I realized that their front legs have probably evolved into arms, so they do indeed have the requisite 6 limbs.
What’s most ominous to me are the two closing lines:
“You can check out any time you like,
but you can never leave.”
Here’s a picture of what canon formians look like, and here’s the SRD game data on them.
That’s assuming these actually are formians, and not some other ant-folk. Canon formians are also supposed to live on another plane and be living embodiments of the Lawful Neutral alignment (like how archons are Lawful Good, devils are Lawful Evil, etc.), not be running a hotel on the material plane. However, the ants in the comic do look basically like cuter versions of the canon artwork, so they’re probably proper formians, with some houserules / setting-specific spin justifying their presence here.
And yeah. The centaur-like body form makes far more sense for insects than it does for vertebrates like actual centaurs. In fact, some real-life insects come remarkably close to such a stance – not actual ants, generally, but praying mantises often look like this.
There is a species of mayfly that has the same set up. (Aristotle mentioned it, and frequently gets a lot of chaff from people who insist that the forelimbs must be legs.)
Hmm, really? I can’t find that one.
Of course, as the Wikipedia article on mayflies reminded me, most insects in general are already noteworthy for having wings that are completely separate from their legs, rather than having evolved from their forelimbs (leaving them with only two legs) like all three groups of vertebrate fliers. So an insect has enough limbs to be a centaur and a pegasus at the same time. Not ants, though…
Ants have wings.
Well, males and young queens have wings (and are hence called alates). Except for those species of ants that are all-female, and reproduce by parthenogenesis.
If my memory (assisted by a quick search) is correct, they (often?) swarm, and (might?) fly some distance to increase genetic diversity, then mate in flight.
The males die upon mating, but are so numerous, a queen usually mates with several males, before she goes to ground and (typically) sheds her wings.
So yeah, ants typically have wings – but typically for just one flight.
Well, it depends on if this is the Hotel Canon Formian or not.
Formian Spirou, now I’ve seen everything.
Maddie looks like she’s feeling a little… Antsy.
YT, on the other hand, seems to think it’s ex-chitin.
Mike, I’m not going to lie, I feel like I’m going to get mad at you very quickly when the rest of the arc isn’t anywhere near as adorable as just about everything on this page.
All I could think after seeing the bellhops was “Ant Twinks? Really?”
Incidentally, we’d been wondering a couple of weeks ago if ant-folk make much use of metals. Well, that bell sure looks like brass to me, and the candle-holder is likely metallic too. The fact that they’re wearing clothes also suggests they’re more on the “folk” side of ant-folk.
No metal weapons yet, but then these are bellhops, not warriors. Given their civilized appearance, it would be hard to imagine them fighting without weapons, unless one of them happens to have monk class levels (perfectly viable – they’re Lawful!).
Plot hole: That’s a ship. A land-ship, granted, but still a ship. You can usually sleep, eat, live on those for months so you don’t strictly need to stop for the night.
Well, you can sleep in a CAR just fine, but people still stop for the night at motels…
That’s not really a fair comparison for the size of ship depicted. An RV would be closer.
I’m guessing the welcome party is workers and probably a princess or other high ranking hive member. I somehow doubt the queen is interested in walking about or using warriors to greet guests
So Hotel California with a Necromantic artifact hidden somewhere in the hive and maybe a “Beast” possibly somewhere protecting it
How about a homebrewed antfolk supersoldier? At least twice the size of a normal warrior and she probably wouldn’t notice a sword bouncing off her head even if you explained it with diagrams and an action replay.
Plus it would be pantswettingly terrifying
Take a look at the canon writeup. Formian elites twice the size of a normal warrior already exist. They’re called myrmarchs and supposedly also wear a bronze helmet as a sign of their rank (unless a rust monster ate it), so I suppose swords bouncing off their heads is plausible. Judging by the official picture, that helmet is also the only clothing any formians wear – so that’s one way these homebrew antfolk are different from the standard model.
Also warriors are already twice the size of the workers. If these ants are sticking relatively close to canon, then the bellhops are almost certainly Small-sized workers, and since the candleholder looks one size category larger (twice as tall, twice as long, and twice as wide – size categories in D&D are pretty coarse), meaning Medium, she would have to be either a warrior or a taskmaster… again assuming we can use the canon stats. Which it looks like we can’t: she doesn’t look particularly dangerous (so unlikely to be a warrior) and doesn’t have a mind-controlled slave with her (which canon taskmasters are supposed to have), but then it would be easy enough to homebrew taskmasters into something less… unsavory. Or maybe the slave is just hiding around the corner.
Then again, the canon sizes don’t even make sense.
The warrior is described as: “A warrior is about is about 5 feet long and about 4½ feet high at the front. It weighs about 180 pounds.”
The myrmarch is described as: “A myrmarch is about is about 7 feet long and about 5½ feet high at the front. It weighs about 1,500 pounds.”
It’s mathematically absurd for these relatively small differences in length and height to make such a huge difference in weight.
We’ll get a better sense of scale once we see Maddie standing next to the ants.
Has anybody heard of RL rail sailships? They do exist: https://youtu.be/PTqtythamJs?t=194