The Monster Under the Bed by Brandon Shane is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
The Monster Under the Bed
“Embrace your fear.”
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
The greatest problem of the Noxians: Terminus’s ego and power tripping dreams.
Oh shit this is bad this is very bad
Cue evil laugh
Awesome fresh off the printer so to speak. Too hot to handle. I can tell things are about to get interesting in the tunnels of Nox.
So Terminus’s plan is basically world domination?
It’s to reclaim their rightful place at the top of the totem pole, so to speak. We’ll be diving into it deeper a little later.
Yeah, he still hasn’t really gone into what the problem is. They’re able to get through the doors, whether it’s through the cracks or not. I don’t really see the transportation problem being what’s stopping them from taking over the world.
Hopefully the explanation later clears it up!
They are stuck in beds and closets… he plans to gain access to every door there is. Also, to claim what he perceives to be their rightful place, which the rest of his kind has forgotten and become lazy and stuck in their ways.
I get the vibe that Terminus is making the same mistake as Harry Potter’s dark wizards: Failing to account that the humans/muggles they disdain outnumber them by a ridiculous ratio… and that they have guns.
Though I can’t blame him for COMPLETELY underestimating humanity’s likely reaction to finding a new threat literally under their noses.
I don’t think he’s stopped to ponder why if they already have access they’re still hiding regardless.
@Brandon – know what would be a great plot twist? Terminus opening a door in a toxic waste dump or the like, and dying horribly 60 seconds after he boldly goes where no Nox has gone before.
This reminds me the Temple of a Thousand Doors of the Neverending Story novel.
Well… A lot of fiction has used the same idea. Just the first time I see it in my live (I was a child then)
Ooooh. So does that mean the Noxians were once the dominant species on Earth? Did the humans drive them off?
Hmmmmmm… maaaybe!
The same way my ancestors beat the neanderthal. We out-competed them for resources (we had dogs and other domesticated animals when my ancestors invaded Europe, but the neanderthal did not), we got crafty at war and we genetically merged with them (Make love, not war!). That’s right;about 4% of Europeans have neanderthal DNA.
The Noxians show no signs of animal domestication, and other technology is also quite a bit more primitive than humans in the same time-frame. Tim is an example of genetic merging; is that the future? Terminus clearly wants to choose the war option, without realizing that we have gotten really good at war since they last invaded the human world as a military operation. Even a small militia should be able to hold them off until the police (let alone the military) show up.
The only technical advantage they have is the ability to show up under beds. Mind you, find the door to a bunk in a U.S. nuclear submarine and they won’t be able to open it because of the able sailors’ foot lockers are under the bottom bunk.
I wonder if Tim is actually fertile. Hybrid males tend to be infertile while the females often are fertile with the mother’s species. This applies to mules, ligers, tigons, among others, but that is what comes to mind.
Noxians have magic. We can’t be sure what limits it has. However, we have nuclear weapons. I wonder how big their whole underground is … in terms of weapon yield.
“Instant sunrises” are actually nowhere near the worst of their worries. Chemical warfare is far easier to make and deploy in combat. So is *biological* warfare, God forbid THAT gets authorized.
Noxians MIGHT be immune to biological threats. NOONE is immune to hard gamma.
… although there is plenty of chemicals which are guaranteed to affect anything capable of having sex with humans, and they don’t seem to have that much airflow in Nox, so …
(Actually, the way Nox was shown, I wonder if it could be simply flooded by opening portal in ocean. There ARE beds in submarines …)
If Tim’s mother had Tim with a human dad, it’s a pretty safe bet that Tim is fertile too.
In the early days of the comic I was sure that he and his extraterrestrial GF were going to end up on their own episode of “Teen Mom”.
Wow, terminus deserves his name, it is the terminus of all things, isn’t it? I do not know what will happen with his baby with Anna if he will do that. I feel his ambition is boundless but with him, I am not surprise at all. And when you are thinking that Anna and Nightmare just are like a pom-pom team in his plot… I feel clealy sad for those girls…
While Anna did say that she was pregnant, she then turned it around by going, “Psych! Just kidding…” That retraction did not make the Termite happy, and by his musings several strips later, it seemed like Anna was not the first human he had tried to get pregnant… deliberately.
Hmm… I wonder if the only way for a pregnancy between Human and Noxian is for both of them to [REDACTED]
Oopsie… Spoilers… :p
Pfeh… [color] tags don’t work. (And no, I did not use square brackets…)
Congrats, Brandon! That’s two Sundays in a row!
Now, to the comic. It figures that Termite’s objective would be something megalomaniacal like world domination, but I’m particularly interested in the implications:
1) That the Noxians aren’t living underground by choice, they were forced or trapped there at some point.
2) That someone forced this one them. This further implies that either there’s another species inhabiting the surface of Nox (or possibly just another faction of Noxians) or “Nox” is actually Earth and the Axis is just underground somewhere instead of another dimension.
3) That the Axis isn’t just a system of tunnels and caverns, it’s a single building or machine. A fortress? A war machine? A starship?
4) Furthermore, Terminus’ talk of opening “all the doorways” suggests either that the portals that the Noxians use to enter our world are currently operating in a limited capacity or that there are other “doorways” we haven’t seen yet that they currently can’t use.
I’ll expand on these later, but yeah. You are sort of catching on to some historical things.
Ahh… speculation. That which allows the reader to try and scry the mind of the author, allowing the author the opportunity to sit back, rub his fingers together in extreme pleasure, and cackle maniacally whilst grinning like a lunatic.
Brandon is so thing big is going happen. Is this the end of Chapter 4 or not yet.
Maybe just past half way through Chapter 4. You’ll know it when you see it! 😉
Not really related to the plot here, but just once, I want someone in the hidden underworld to have a plan like this, only to realize “Oh, wait, there are tens of thousands of us but literally *billions* of humans, and we have some magic but they have machine guns and tanks and stuff. Suddenly I realize why nobody was hot to start an invasion.
Harry Turtledove wrote a story called The Road Not Taken where there’s actually an incredibly simple means of creating anti-gravity and, by extension, FTL space travel. It’s so simple that most species discover it before gunpowder, but with this technology in hand they tend to stagnate. Humans just never happened to chance across this discovery, so we continued to advance in other areas. This results in an alien race trying to invade 21st-century Earth with the equivalent of pikes and blackpowder cannons and the attitude of Spanish conquistadors. It goes about as well as you would expect.
that sounds hilarious
He didn’t even give him a chance to recognize that’s the problem he meant! Come on, man.
Hello I’m a time traveler from the year 2014
…….. me: goes farther forward year 2025
X-x are you fucking kidding me…..
Slap the shit out of this boy!!
I second this motion,
Nah! You’ll just get shit on the carpet.
There’s gotta be a better way that doesn’t involve so much cleaning afterwards.
poison?
I wonder if he planned any further than not getting any information on how the upper world would most likely decimate them.
Huh, unlimited acssess could be quite potent.
Until the severl billion humans realize this modify potential ingress point into death funnels
So basically, orcs must die or any other tower defense style game. And if they come through, they gotta have an aegis. Which means humans would very shortly be picking them off noxian corpses and counterinvading.
Humans are very, very good at turning confined tunnels into deathtraps.
The sole Noxian advantage is their extradimensional (?) hidey-hole. The MINUTE that is lost they will be routed if not outright slaughtered. One engagement going bad means risking extinction.
Terminus doesn’t get that because he’s a hotblooded glory hound. Mr. Old Nox does. And this is probably not the first time some naive kid has thought he could Rule The World Again(tm).
Is he plotting an all out invasion?