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Re: The Deceiver and Alric
Posted By: David Wellington (dialup-209.245.9.102.Denver1.Level3.net)
Date: 1/7/2000 at 1:05 p.m.
In Response To: Re: The Deceiver and Alric (William Wallace)
Could someone restate the evidence (or lack thereof) for the theory that it isn't Balor who interrogates Alric? Personally, I think it works better for the plot if it really is the big B, that Alric is just so clever that he ends up learning more from his interrogation than Balor does.
Now, after that call for reason, here's my wild theory.
Balor still thinks he's Connacht. The powers of destiny have made him the Leveller and twisted his mind so that he sees light as dark and vice versa. He rides up to Muirthemne expecting to be hailed as a returning hero and, whoops, the city is occupied by what look to him like evil folks, so he decimates them--sacrificing his own empire for what he BELIEVES is right. Ceiscoran (or whoever the Emp at the time is) doesn't get a chance to argue with him. Then Connacht/Balor sits on his heels for nearly fifty years, skirmishing with whatever force stumbles across him but not really fighting all that hard. It's only when the Nine get up an army to oppose him that he starts pushing back--because he thinks They are the bad guys, so he's pulling the old Connacht trick of being ten times tougher than anybody else.
The problems creep in when the Deceiver captures Alric. The D, an old general of Connacht's, is under the same spell but not to the same degree. He thinks about how he could undo some of the damage that is done, and decides the best way is to have Alric talk to Balor, try to reason with him. Balor goes to the interview expecting to meet with a serious baddy--and Alric just confuses him. I mean, this guy LOOKs evil, if you're twisted like B, but he sounds like a good old-fashioned Avatara. Balor is so confused he blurts out a bunch of useful information and then decides not to kill Alric but to imprison him until he (Balor) can work out all the complicated repercussions here. This is when the war starts turning and you start making some real progress--I think because Balor is in the midst of a moral crisis. Alric uses this to his best advantage but eventually it becomes a liability, not an asset--Balor is sulking in his fortress, trying to find himself, and Alric needs to draw him out, so he resolves the moral quandary by making himself look like an ally of the Myrkridia--which in Balor's eye is most definitely a sign of infinite badness. Well, okay then, Balor thinks, I was right all along. Might as well make it rain dwarf heads and kick some ass. The rest is history...
The D doesn't help Alric escape. It would have been very easy for him to let Alric go in the middle of the night and say, "whoops, sorry. Don't know what happened, the guy was just too tricky for me." If he wanted to make it look good he could have turned his own shade (the way he does in Myth 2--twice!) and then blamed the idiot for Alric's release. He can't do these things because the link to Balor is keeping him relatively loyal and relatively evil. Letting Alric and Balor talk it out is the best he can achieve.
It's just a theory, of course, and people are free to shoot it down. It does explain one other thing, though: the Head. The Head is under the same distorted perception problem as Balor et al. It still thinks Balor is Connacht and a good guy. So it helps the Nine fight the ancient evils--Shiver was never a nice person, right?--but foils them when they try to go against Balor, Soulblighter, the Deceiver (Connacht, Damas, Myrdred) and so on because it believes them to be Heroes. When they ask it one too many times how to kill Balor, it gets suspicious of their motives (the way Balor gets when he sees the Myrk standard) and so he starts the civil war as a way of messing with Connacht's (not Balor's) enemies.
The theory essentially boils down to this: the Leveller and his Baddies are heroes of the light reborn. Destiny demands of them that they be evil but it forgets to let them in on the plot twist--they're still fighting the same old war, they're just confused about which side they're on.
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