This comic continues the arc's use of animals as metaphors, introducing a rat has been eating, attacking, and stealing things in a company. Two hapless workers are tasked with stopping it. This task continues through the end of the arc. In this issue, he steal food, and they send in cats, which it kills. It builds a nest with its trophies in a tunnel underground. It sees itself in a mirror and runs up the tunnel, finally surfacing in triumph. The rat seems to symbolize Grendel.
Eppy Thatcher fills us in, via narration, on his problems with the Church. He believes he's a servant of the Devil, and that the Devil is, in a sense, good--less hypocritical, more active, more at home in the reality of humanity. God, meanwhile, is hypocritical and overly pure, unable to accept the nature of real people. He was once a very hard core Christian, but turned against it as he was abused by his mother. Eppy starts making videos and broadcasting them on TV, overriding normal shows. He works in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich factory, and hates everyone. He even openly smokes crack on the job, which gets him demoted. He gets prayer balloons and lets them go, then shoots them down. He also goes to an arena where people take the drug Arcana Prime, also known as the Grendel drug, then fight to the death. Eppy takes the drug at home, constantly, and hallucinates about the devil talking to him, giving him orders to attack the Church.
Pellon Cross and his top assistants, Zebra and Kierch, continue looking for Eppy. Cross starts looking for sellers of the kind of blades he uses, but gets nowhere, and actually walks right past Eppy without knowing it. Zebra hypothesizes that Eppy might be taking Grendel, since its known to increase strength. Cross finds Eppy's seller and gets a list of all his recent buyers.
Log in to comment