Posted January 19, 2016 at 5:28 pm
The klik species are a genderless symbiotic race that have spread through multiple dimensions. They have a large amount of magical power but as a result, can at times, be dangerously volatile.
There are five basic klik types, all with the ability to become various mutations of themselves. Some of those mutations are a healthy form of evolution, while others are twisted and dangerous.
Positives And Negatives
Each klik has its own 'positive' and 'negative'.
The positive is what that klik is required to "eat". It's what provides the massive amount of food energy needed to not only stay alive, but to allow it to heal, hover and perform other abilities. The negative is that klik's main weakness. Contact with the negative rapidly breaks the klik down and ultimately kills it.
While each klik's type may tend toward certain positives/negatives (a klik made of fire will commonly have water as a negative), there is no hard rule about this. With the exception of the temporal kliks (see below), any type can have any positive or negative.
The Five Types Of Klik
1. Metallic
Metallic kliks are the most common of the five types. They can appear as any sort of naturally occurring metal and even some types of stone. Along with the ability to hover that all kliks have, metallic kliks can polymorph at will, into basic shapes. When they are in any shape other than their natural form (usually a sphere), metallic kliks are unable to hover.
2. Energy
Energy kliks can be made of fire, electricity or certain types of magical or mechanical energy. They don't really have a solid form and as a result, are much faster than other types. Energy kliks can have their own unique sets of advantages and handicaps that are separate from the issues they have with positives and negatives. For instance, a klik made up of electricity (or "lightning" as most folks in Thuntonia would call it) can travel through a conducting surface like steel or water. A klik made of sunlight would have no problem killing off a group of vampires, but would be vulnerable to a Darkness spell.
3. Organic
Organic kliks are the most diverse. They can be made of skin, claws, plant matter (wood, leaves), insect legs, spider webbing, hair, teeth... this means that they can sometimes be kind of gross or terrifying to look at. Organic kliks aren't as strongly affected by their positives/negatives. While their positive can take hours instead of seconds, to heal their wounds, their negative will not be as damaging to them as it is with other forms.
4. Temporal
Temporal kliks are partially made of "time" and exist in 3 to 6 consecutive moments of time at once, thus the echoed imagery. While these kliks follow the same rules as other types regarding negatives, their positives are oddly unique. A temporal klik might know what you're going to do a few seconds before you do it, because it's partly existing a few seconds in the future and is already experiencing it. Naturally, this tends to lead toward the standard paradoxes that come with time travel and it's these paradoxes that the temporal klik "eats" as a positive. I'll give an example...
Imagine that you are about to step on a banana peel, causing you to slip and fall. A temporal klik is hovering next to you and since it exists a few seconds in the past and future as well as the present, it is watching you slip and fall just before you actually do it. Since it also exists in the time frame in which you haven't fallen yet, the temporal klik grabs you by the shoulder and points to the banana peel, thereby stopping you from ever slipping on it. This creates a pretty standard paradox. The klik sees you fall, allowing it to stop you from falling, which stops the klik from seeing the event, which makes it impossible for it to have stopped you from falling. This of course, causes you to fall, which restarts the cycle of impossibility.
These paradoxes create a kind of logical feedback that temporal kliks can absorb as energy. Once the paradox has been eaten as the klik's positive, it no longer exists. This cleanly sorts out the timeline in ways that beings who exist in only one moment at a time can't hope to understand.
Different temporal kliks eat different types of paradoxes. Sometimes the paradoxes require conscious decisions made by other beings. Sometimes they need to involve the destruction of matter. Some temporal kliks can only absorb paradoxes that spread into tiny pockets of time, disturbing very little in a universal sense, while others need paradoxes that ripple outward, affecting events on a cosmic scale.
Existing in multiple moments at a time, makes it nearly impossible to physically harm a temporal klik. Much like the banana peel scenario, these kliks will usually know that they're going to be attacked before it happens.
About Kliks Part Two
Aside from the five basic types of klik, there are also kloks (the larger, more complex looking guys) and tics (the tiny guys). I'll cover these in part two.
The AD&D Monster Manual lists demons and devils as two separate species. Some people have been a bit confused when they see me referring to 'devils' as 'demons'. In Thuntonia, they're all simply referred to as demons.
Thuntonian demons live in hell and are animated by a form of magic that is more powerful, but more chaotic than the magic found on the prime material plane (that's where regular folks live). Thuntonian magic is actually a form of energy. On the prime material plane, spells and magic items tap into that energy and use it to power whatever that spell or item is designed to do. In hell, that magic is a massive amount of excess energy that constantly and violently generates various types of heat and radiation into the atmosphere it permeates. This is what gives hell its fiery state. It's also why demons have no problem with heat and fire. In the same way that sunlight would kill a vampire but feel quite comfortable to a human, fire would kill a human but feel comfortable to a demon.
Since hell magic produces so much energy, demons don't require food energy to live. They get all the "calories" they need just by existing. But demons don't have souls and this means they need sustenance that mortals don't. To understand this, I need to explain how Thuntonian souls work.
How Souls Work
Souls are indirectly responsible for mortals dying of old age, instead of living indefinitely. Imagine the prime material plane as a dark room. In order for life to exist, it needs to shine through that darkness with light. Now think of a soul as electricity and a mortal body as a light bulb. The bulb emits light and we have a living creature. However, while the electricity (soul) can exist forever in one form or another, the light bulb (body) will eventually burn out.
Hell is like a brightly lit room and demons are like bulbs that are not generating any light. They don't need to, since the room itself is already lit up. Without electricity (a soul) running through them, the bulbs (demons) never burn out and can exist pretty much forever. But just like breaking a light bulb, demons can still be killed.
Souls are what make certain emotions possible. While souls have little to do with whether someone is good or evil, they're what generate love, empathy, passion, and other feelings. While a demon can experience hate, anger and lust, only a creature with a soul can passionately experience those emotions. It takes a soul to create and appreciate all forms of art. Being moved by a story, painting, song... this is only possible with a soul.
It's this passion that sustains us. Without ever experiencing any of these feelings in one form or another, we're really not alive. But demons are living creatures, so how do they manage to exist without being able to generate any kind of extreme, passionate emotions? Well, they are forced to absorb the experiences of others.
Why Demons Love To Make Others Suffer
Demons are able to 'capture' the passionate experiences of other souls and use that as a sort of emotional food. While a number of passionate feelings can be absorbed by demons, suffering is by far, the easiest and most energy efficient state to take. This is why hell is known for capturing the souls of mortals and forcing them to suffer in various horrible ways. Souls are like never ending generators of sustenance for demons.
Because of this, demons will often use souls as a form of currency in hell. And since some souls are more capable of suffering than others, some souls are worth more. This is where the whole concept of 'sacrificing a virgin' came from. In the rare times that a demon could reach the prime material plane, they might sometimes demand souls. The more innocent, goodly souls tended to be capable of experiencing horrible suffering to a greater extent. The demons honestly didn't care if the sacrificed person had ever had sex or not. But if the person being sacrificed to the demon was a virgin, there was a greater chance that they were innocent and "pure". For countless ages, mortals have misunderstood this concept and it has become fairly common practice to sacrifice virgins to Gods, the weather, volcanoes... I mean, if it worked to get the huge, fiery demon to leave the village alone, maybe sacrificing a virgin to improve the crops will work. Yeah... mortals can be dumb.
Demons Have Shaped Our Nightmares
Some of our instinctual fears are there for natural reasons. We fear the dark because there might be a hungry predator hiding in the shadows. We fear snakes and spiders because they might be poisonous and kill us with a single bite. But why do we fear monstrous things that don't exist on our plane? Well, we can thank demons for that. As a species, demons are much older than any mortal life that's around today and they've been pestering humanoids since the beginning. Demons and demonic imagery doesn't look the way it does because it's what mortals fear. Mortals fear those images because that's what demons look like.
Demons Invented Swearing
Why are some words forbidden? Why do certain words cause noble souls to gasp at hearing them or mothers to cover their child's ears?
Demons have their own language and of course, this language is older than any mortal species that exists today. This language is so old, so drenched in nightmarish horror, that simply hearing a demon speak it, can cause mortals to go insane or become evil. Many ages ago, mortals would on rare occasion, witness a demon speaking in its hellish language. While telling the tales of their rare encounter to others, those mortals would try to replicate the words they heard. Of course, no mortal can properly speak the demonic tongue. However, just making the sounds to the best of their abilities, carried a fraction of the dark power that the language held. These mispronounced demonic words felt... wrong to hear and even worse to say. Over time a few of these bastardized, pseudo demonic words have become part of the common tongue. They're easily said by those who don't shy away from darker thoughts and sometimes, even uttered by the innocent in times of anger, shock or pain.
Are Demons Evil
Yes and no. Not having a soul means that demons are incapable of feeling empathy or friendship toward other demons or those they torture in their realm of fire and brimstone. It's this lack of empathy that has them betraying each other and conveying no sense of honour or compassion. Yet their cruelty always has a purpose. Demons by their nature, cause suffering in others because it's how they survive. A human who rips the wings off of a fly, simply to watch it flail about, does so without a purpose. A demon would never do something like this, simply because... well, why bother? Whether or not you think they're evil, they're undoubtedly horrible and scary.
Angels
Angels also have no souls of their own and are a lot like demons. Though instead of feeding off of mortal suffering, they feed off of mortal joy. This is why they tend to help out mortals in need and produce "miracles". Angels don't really capture and collect souls, like demons do. This is merely because a captured soul is harder to keep happy. It's better to visit the prime material plane, create some kind of joy and move on. And just as a demon can't care one way or another about the mortals themselves, neither can an angel. They simply want to feed.
Comic Notes
Let's answer some questions I can imagine popping up from readers after reading this...
1. Complains of Names still has his soul. His soul was... erm... 'dented' a bit when he became part demon, but he's still got one. The full extent of his transformation will crop up in the comic at some point.
2. Yes, Big Ears saying "shit", was him saying one of those words that sound like demonic but isn't. Swear words aren't actually evil, they just 'feel' kind of evil. So while a paladin can technically swear all they want, they tend to not want to do it much at all.
3. Yes, Not-Walter feeds off of suffering, too. I know. I try not to think about that, either.
As always, thank you for everything.
-Tarol
Some people have condemned me or praised me for making some strong statement about homosexuality when really, I haven't.
The guy is gay. That's it. Really.
Goblins isn't a story about Ears' sexual orientation, just like it's not a story about Fumbles being asexual or Chief being a virgin. These are all just details about the characters that have shown up. I'm not trying to make any statements about my own beliefs and nobody has strong-armed me into wedging these points into the comic.
Then there's the recent discussion about Salt's gender.
This has nothing to do with gender issues or feminism or anything like that. Salt is a girl. Kind of. I mean, Kliks are genderless, but Salt is just... well she's just a girl. This was just the moment in which this detail was introduced. I wrote it this way because if I just had everyone calling Salt a "her" without covering it, I'd have readers scratching their heads, thinking "wait, it's been established that Kliks have no gender. What's the deal with Salt?". But again, I'm being both praised and scolded for making some daring statement about gender issues that isn't there.
I can understand people reacting strongly, though. These sorts of issues are very important to a lot of folks and I get that. It's just that these issues aren't here in these pages of the comic.
Thanks for reading!
-Tarol
