I agree. He hasn't "reformed." You can pretty much tell that he still has a warped sense of justice. Being kept prisoner of Farahn in the book is a better fate than Edda deserves because she broke his rules? Pretty warped. He does seem to have gotten smarter about his plans though. That said, I don't think this plan is going to go as well for him as he imagines. I suspect he's going to end up a prisoner of the book himself or in some way face Dunoloa's wrath (those aren't mutually exclusive specs and indeed I can even imagine Dunuloa trading him for Farahn so that she can more directly get the revenge she desires on Farahn).

I don't think it's that simple. I am of the opinion that protecting Edda was taxing to him and it had come to a point when he had to reassert what he considered to be his priority. It's not like he had banned her himself (this was, after all, mostly the consequence of her own carelessness), but simply stopped protecting her from Farhan.


All in all, it seems to me he was truly saddened that Edda had to suffer such fate, but he considered it was no longer his responsibility to care for.

Oh dang, a very good catch! I fished through the archives through Niftysearch, and lo and behold:
https://archives.sluggy.com/book.php?chapter=65#2014-02-05

For me that makes it pretty clear that whatever Yffi is up to is part of the plan set up by Symachus (Y-machus?) in the past and executed by Wilcott in the present.

At this point I can no longer see how Yffi cannot be Symachus. Wonder if there's a twist there.

I'm pretty sure that somewhere or other the glyph of the cult of the release was shown in more detail, and it was basically identical to the Y shape that appears in the bug's recent "phone calls".

There's also a Y-shaped glyph that appears as part of the spells that Dunuloa developed for capturing people/demons in books, and releasing them again.

https://archives.sluggy.com/book.php?ch ... 2014-03-12

I've always assumed it was representing something like a very-abstracted hand -- in the release spell you can see something like a bird taking flight above it, and in the capture you can see something caught in the upper part of the Y.

Can't believe I never made the connection between the symbol of the Release cult and Mister Yffi.

The Cult of the Release's symbol is identical to Dunaloa's symbol. See here: https://archives.sluggy.com/book.php?ch ... 2014-04-18

But Yffi's "Y" is a bit different. More like a capital Y, with prongs representing each of his familiars. Or perhaps a dowsing rod. But not quite the Release glyph. Also it's missing the entity being released/bound, so even as a representation of a spell it would be doing something different.

"Reformed" was the wrong word for the (potentially) Yffi version of Symachus. What I wanted to get at, is that his personality just seems really different.

This part of the story has all been following specific individuals over long periods of time and seeing how they change, so we certainly could see how Symachus becomes Mister Y, but my main mental push-back on the theory had been that distinction. Mister Y is playing some sort of long game that (likely) leads to the Sluggyverse vampires, and seemed to genuinely feel remorse for Edda's fate. Just doesn't seem like the same god of justice whose plan was "blow up the spark since I got power last time it happened".

But I'm on board as of Tuesday with the bug's assumption that Yffi would free him right away.

Well, the version on the shirt in that comic has the released thing above the Y/hand, which does make it match the glyph in Dunuloa's release spell, yeah... I could swear somewhere there was an instance where it had more articulation on the three tips of the Y, though.

So I've been trying to track down exactly what the deal is with the "Revenge of the Broken-Hearted" spell. K'z'k expects Siphy2 to cast it, and that it will free him; we know it was one of the 4 spells in the Book of Uhglee which has its true nature disguised. Allie names their true uses as 1) Put a demon into the book, 2) Take a demon out of the book, 3) Put a demon from the book into a person, or 4) Take a demon from a person and put it into the book. Riff used the "Find Lost Keys" spell, which turned out to be #2 (and the spell text he pronounces matches Allie's when describing #2). So which is "Revenge of the Broken-Hearted"?

I originally thought of #4, since K'z'k is trapped in a person, and if he was put in the book he'd have access to its magic directly. But looking at the actual spell-texts and tracing back - I now think Allie is describing #3 and #4 incorrectly (or at least, that she's describing four things she can do rather than four explicitly distinct spells). I think #3 is "forced possession" and #4 "forced expulsion". She can put a demon from the book into a person by combining #2 and #3, and she can take a demon from a person and put it into the book by combining #1 and #4. (This redescription of #3 and #4 also matches up with Quint's abilities with Ozzid quite naturally.)

Look at the spell characters that Quinn uses to free K'z'k the very first time. It's the same spell as the first uttered by Dunuloa to capture K'z'k (in Farahn). She follows it with a spell to put a man in a scroll/book. (The same two come out of the egg combined when Zoe "storm-breaks" K'z'k the second time.)

So this first spell that Gwynn uses is "Revenge of the Broken-Hearted", which she thought she was casting as her revenge against Riff, and its effect is forced possession (no matter where the demon currently is, in a person vs. in a book). Dunuloa uses it to force K'z'k to possess Farahn, and Gwynn (inadvertently) uses it to force K'z'k to possess herself. It's also why K'z'k can't free itself from Gwynn until Torg casts its reverse, forced expulsion. (The characters are slightly out of order there, but it mostly matches Allie's use on the cult leader.)

Early in Roomies Part Two, the bug tries to get Mr. Y and then Farahn to cast "that one little spell"; Farahn calls it "The one that frees you to destroy everything and leaves me trapped", but later seems to expect to be freed when he captures Edda and high-fives the bug, so he may have been convinced otherwise in the interim. If I'm understanding things correctly, Mister Y could have used the spell to force K'z'k out of Farahn/the book and into anyone else, which he certainly didn't choose to do.

Did anyboy catch who carried the book to it's location in the tomb?

Ozzid.

Nice analysis, Mike. I'll add that Siphy L. moved that very spell from the Book of Uhglëë to the Book of E-Ville, where Gwynn found it. And if Torg said the words out of order, that may explain why his use of the spell freed K'z'k instead of putting him back into the book like when Alligia used it on the cult leader.

The hand-and-bird glyph is how the people of Mokhadun wrote the word "ropuik". It occurs in release spells because it means "release", and presumably that's also why the Release cult used it. I see no reason to believe that Yffi's symbol has any relation to the "ropuik" glyph.

Now that Ozzid has brought the Book of E-Ville back to Alligia's home, it seems rather clear how the last two pages were removed from the book. Tombsy Sr "died in an accident" at the excavation site where Gwynn found the Page of Binding, and Ernest "committed suicide" in the Wildenburg mansion where Gwynn found the dominance page. That is: Wilcott murdered Tombsy for death magic to remove the Page of Binding, and later murdered Ernest to remove the domination page.

Well, my interpretation is ignoring the slight difference in Torg's casting and saying the spell "forced expulsion" in both cases - forced K'z'k out of Gwynn, effectively freeing him (likely because Torg didn't realize he could direct him into someone else), and forced the demon out of the cult leader. It's the mirror of how I'm interpreting Gwynn's original summoning and Dunoloa's first spell matching - both are "forced possession", Gwynn forcing K'z'k into herself, Dunoloa forcing K'z'k into Farahn. It requires some spec to understand how the two matching sets combine.



Ernest for sure. I'd guess maybe Tombsy did fall or something accidentally and Wilcott uses his death opportunistically, based on the little we know of Wilcott/Qaboos/original Tombsy being a close group. But that seems to be where we're heading.

So with all this discussion on release, I find myself confused on one point. Quint specifically told Allie not to put the scroll of binding in the Book of E-ville. I get the impression that she put it there out of convenience (next comic). But what difference does it make where the spell resides from Allie's point of view? That is, I do not understand what possessed her to put the spell in the Book for all to see? What am I missing?

I think once you have the spell of binding, reversing its direction is fairly trivial. Scroll back up a few days from where you linked, Quint is fairly clear about this. "In the right hand, that spell could 'Unbind!'"

Since Farahn and the bug are _in_ the book of E-ville, having that spell _right there_, along with them, makes it more likely they'll manage to manipulate somebody into using it.

Ah but exactly. It doesn't make a difference from her perspective, and that's why she did it. Quint's main concern was giving the bug tools he could use to manipulate wielders of the book, but since Allie was effectively impervious to the bug and Farahn's feeble attempts at manipulation, and because she was actually competent at magic, it didn't matter how many tools the bug had access to: he couldn't use any of them anyway. But putting them all in one place was extremely useful to her as a demon-cult killer. However, what she failed to think of is future owners of the book - mainly because she was too egotistical to imagine anyone else would have to take over her job.

Speaking of ownership. Given that Yffi never touched the book of E-Ville (er...figuratively speaking. I'm pretty sure he literally touches it at some point) I have a suspicion. That suspicion is that you cannot become an owner of the book of E-Ville if you are undead. If Symachus's immortal state counts as undead (and he's Yffi), then this is justifiable, since Khronus definitely wouldn't have allowed him to use the scroll. That would explain why he needed his doomed wife to do the chanting during the very first attempt to release KZK

This fact is mostly irrelevant except in one situation: if Allie approached Yffi in order to learn how to live forever for the purpose of being the owner of the book of E-Ville for all time, then her success in becoming a vampire would have the ironic knock-on effect of preventing her from doing just that. Hence why she disappears from the story. If she couldn't use the book to cast spells, it would be useless to her - and anyway, she'd now have badass vampire powers to fight demon cults with.