Well, you probably knew that this was coming…and your reaction to that might be similar to the Professor’s. But there just isn’t any way around it. With our heroes showing back up again after a longish absence from the plot, in a different location and obviously much more powerful than before, a flashback laying out what they were up to in the meantime is pretty much inevitable.
I’ll try to keep it short. ^_^; And, who knows, perhaps there’ll even be something relevant or interesting in there. >_>
The flashback is off to a mixed start, I’d say. It gets points for speed, since it’s covering many, many months of traveling and growing in only four panels. The contents, however, are unsurprising: to summarize, our friends fought countless monsters. We could have guessed. At least Mopey doesn’t insist on actually showing countless different monsters, but restricts herself to four representative samples.
The first sample is a bog-standard swamp ogre. Here I probably should add that the fight wasn’t about the fact that he was ugly. Our adventuring heroes are adventuring heroes, so they couldn’t have laid a bloody track through the swamp on such a superficial reason. Instead, they only slaughtered their way through a marginalized community of sentient swamp creatures because they were kinda there, and our heroes needed to get to the other side of the swamp. Clearly justified ogrecide, by the standard applicable to RPGs.
Next they had to cross a body of water (commonly found close to swamps), so they naturally encountered scores of sea monsters. Probably some of them were of the Nessie type, which K’ip encountered as well, but Mopey chose to highlight a more enigmatic, if slightly less dangerous creature. Likely simply because there’s much clearer footage of it than there is of Nessie.
Then, the mood turned very dark, if pastel colored. This probably was the most traumatizing encounter for our heroes, so the less is said about it, the better. Suffice to say that our heroes did not form the offered contract. The Professor, Gregory and Snuka aren’t girls, Biff is too new and insecure in being one, and Mopey hates pastel colors. She’s already been a magical girl for a short time during chapter two, and she didn’t enjoy the experience.
The final encounter Mopey chose to highlight was against countless basilisks. Unfortunately, I couldn’t supply a picture here. They don’t seem to be very photogenic, for some reason. But Mopey is right in pointing out that it was a bit unlucky to actually run into basilisks in the Basilik’s Back Mountains. Usually, such names are only for flavor – you won’t encounter actual dragons in the Dragon’s Teeth Mountains or actual giants in the Giant’s Spine Range. Too bad for our friends that the Basilisk’s Back Mountains were actually named for the fact that the basiliks were back (after having been on vacation for a while). ._.
More on Mon…uh, Thursday.
Well, I did NOT expect Kyubey to make an appearance, but I’ll agree he was probably the worst of the lot by far…
No joking! Kyubey’s one of the worst villains in all of fiction…committing horrible atrocities against vulnerable little girls on an industrial scale, without even the slightest hint of remorse. And the cuteness and cat-like behavior only make it worse somehow. Makes one really wonder if Darth Vader would have been a better villain if he had looked like Yoda… Which is also how Kyubey came by this little cameo here. I had mentioned the “deceptively pleasant route to Schicken” at the beginning of the chapter, so I needed a “deceptively pleasant” monster to go with that. And which monster would fill that description better? XD