Let Nale die, or spare him? Elan's inner voices conflict on both alignment axes.
Cast
- Elan ◀ ▶
- Nale ◀ ▶
- An Angel
- A Devil
- A Modron (Quadrone)
- A Red Slaad
- The horde of 1st edition monsters
Transcript
- Panel 1
Nale dangles from the edge of the bridge by his fingertips.
Nale: Help!
- Panel 2
Elan: I don't know what to do now!
- Panel 3
A red devil appears at Elan's shoulder, "POOF!"
Devil: Oh yeah, this kicks nine kinds of ass. That loser is right where he belongs.
- Panel 4
Devil: You don't even have to lift a finger, just hang out and let sweet, sweet gravity do its job.
- Panel 5
A blue angel appears at Elan's other shoulder, "POOF!"
Angel: No, Elan, you have to help Nale. He is still your brother, and to kill him, even through inaction, would be wrong.
- Panel 6
Devil: Um, hello, am I the only one who remembers the SWORD sticking out of my man Elan's CHEST? C'mon! He totally stabbed you!
- Panel 7
Devil: It's like you said: karma, dude. He brought this on himself.
- Panel 8
Angel: But his evil is the direct result of the environment in which he was raised. Had it been you that had been raised by your father, wouldn't you have ended up evil?
- Panel 9
Devil: Oh, that's a load of crap! Evil is objective, I should know!
Angel: Elan, if Nale dies, Mommy will cry.
Devil: Ugh, what a cheap shot!
Angel: Hey, guilt is one of the primary weapons in Good's arsenal.
- Panel 10
Elan: Now I'm all confused!
Elan: I woulder if there might be another philosophical perspective to consider...
The Good and Evil manifestations disappear, "POOF! POOF!"
- Panel 11
Manifestations of Law and Chaos appear in their place, a purple Quadrone and a crazy-eyed Red Slaad. "POOF! POOF!"
Modron: 10010101 01000101 01101011!
Slaad: Turquoise bicycle shoe fins actualize radishes greenly!
Elan: So much for Law and Chaos...
D&D Context
- The purple square appears to be a Modron, a creature which represents the physical manifestation of law, from the plane of Nirvana, while the red frog is probably a Red Slaad, a chaotic neutral creature from the plane of Limbo.
- The devil is Lawful Evil, and comes from the 9 Hells (Baator), which he references by saying "this kicks nine kinds of ass."
Trivia
- If you convert the binary that the Modron says to ASCII, the Modron says, "•ek!".
- The Red Slaad's line, "Turquoise bicycle shoe fins actualize radishes greenly!" may be a reference to Noam Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously", an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical.