Duke #3: Ah, the Baroness.
Before this issue, we were essentially watching boys playing with their toys. It was fun, but it was also sort of ridiculous, the idea that Duke was going to play spy on Burkhart's behalf. I mean, he isn't exactly the spy sort of guy, as Hawk mentions in issue #1.
The Baroness, on the other hand — well, she's an entirely different kettle of fish. Duke reviews her history here, which interestingly enough seems to surprise her. It isn't really a shock that she was a rich kid who got bored and started engaging in black ops for an Eastern European intelligence agency to keep herself amused. But Duke alludes to something made her go from spy to terrorist and exposits that they still don't what it was.
The Baroness doesn't reveal her cards, though. Instead, she notes that she left the situation and observes, not incorrectly, that Duke remains committed to his system, even though it's locked him in the same prison as her. Duke insists that he let himself be captured so he could make his case to the Powers That Be, but he doesn't seem so confident about it when he repeats it for the Baroness.
Before they can continue the discussion, Major Bludd and his Blood Hounds arrive. Working for Destro, he's been tasked with killing Duke and finding Burkhart's device. (Destro used Burkhart's tracker to reverse engineer where Duke was, leading Bludd to the Pit.) Before Bludd can kill a defiant Duke, the Baroness shoots him between the eyes. Looking at a stunned Duke, she notes the bounty on his head that Bludd mentioned.
All in all, the Baronness injects some much needed energy into this title, distracting me from the nagging questions about how this story and "Transformers" fit in the Energon Universe timeline.
Dungeons & Dragons: Saturday Morning Adventures II #2: This issue is interesting because Booher really addresses for the first time that the kids, notably Bobby, are aging.
Jarlaxle learns that Bobby didn't run from the party; a pirate named Captain Wrathun captured him, for reasons that Booher doesn't reveal. Jarlaxle hires Minsc and Boo (!) as mercenaries, and the party sets sail across the Trackless Sea for the island of Gundarlun, where Wrathun and the Hanged Man Crew have their hideout. Sheila confides in Diana that she's struggling with the fact that Bobby is getting older, and Diana tells her that they need to assure Bobby that they'll be here for him as he does.
A dragon turtle takes out their boat, and the party (minus Jarlaxle) find themselves on Gundarlun just in time to find Bobby swearing fealty to the Hanged Man Crew, after Wrathun correctly surmised he wanted to be the warrior Sheila didn't want him to become. Dun-dun-DUN!
Undiscovered Country #28: Holy shit, I didn't see that coming.
In a flashback, Dr. Kellogg, Bounty's founder, tells his son, one of the Nephilim, that the other Zones have become dangerous, some of them evil. He's at the end of his life, so he boards the train to destroy the bridge to Aurora and begs his son to keep up the lie that Bounty is feeding the other Zones so the Nephilim have something in which they believe. But he also warns him that outsiders will come one day and he'll need to keep his family safe.
In the present, Chang gets Janet to shake off her grief, asserting that Aurora created and cured Sky to build up tension and then grant release, hopefully creating the scenario for the AEA and PAPZ to channel their newly excess energy into war with each other. Janet realizes he's right, that the United States would then ride into the situation on a white horse, given the goodwill it created in curing Sky, which is why her and Chang's analogues in Zone History ordered the invasion of the United States. She and Chang recommit to taking out Aurora.
As Ace and Valentina have sex for the first time, the locusts attack, and the team heads off the bridge. Snyder and Soule are clever here: I was wondering how the team was going to survive, and then we then see a naked Ace (whose hog is huge, per Chang) flying Buzz, with the rest of the crew hanging off Buzz. Pavel uses his flaming arm to kill some of the locusts, and, for reasons that aren't totally clear, the locusts decide now to attack the Nephilim. The crew makes its way back to Bounty only for the Nephilim's leader to blame the team for the locusts' attack and rip Chang in half to save his family!
I'm assuming Chang survives here but, man, that had to hurt.
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