YES.
Alternatively, Spirit-Volcano.
The name âVoid Volcanoâ is very classy-sounding, almost musical, and I would call it superior to any of the alternatives they floated in this episode. I rather wish theyâd dropped the subject and stopped trying to force some ridiculous portmanteau. It makes them seem like overpaid buzz-marketing executives when they go off on these rabbit-trails.
The velociraptor pack creatures being described makes me think of the Slivers from Magic the Gathering (which were rebranded into humanoid Zerg things in 2014, but they appeared first in 1997 and were revisited twice during the 2000s, so for well over a decade they were in their original iconic form, and I prefer to pretend the 2014 version never existed). Itâs a sufficiently close parallel that it makes me want there to be a Raptor Queen that commands the entire swarm.
And I was just complaining about bad portmanteaus, but if they had gone with the swarm being physically merged into a single centipede-like body, the name âVelocipedeâ would be too obvious not to use. IMO this isnât an awkward mashing-together of things that donât belong together, but an actual recombination of the original Greek root words, sounding just as scientific and valid as the original words.
The thought-eater plant thing is a great concept, similar to a monster from D&D called an Udoroot, and also reminiscent of a character/creature named Lyekka from the rather NSFW sci-fi shlock TV program âLexxâ. (We could call the Nexus Primalus version âNexxâ as an homage.) I feel like the theming of an adversary like this needs to be different from the dominant feeling of peril that you get across the rest of this Environment; it feels like an oasis of safety, if not a slice of paradise and perfection, which is creepily âoffâ but doesnât inherently feel bad. Iâve often thought that an entity like Lyekka can validly claim âlook, Iâm offering you the chance to experience the most happiness you can ever possibly hope to achieve in life, and then you die, rather than going on and living a life that will be disappointing by comparisonâŚisnât that a very fair bargain, compared to all the dangers and sorrows of the life youâre looking forward to now?â While a naturally-occurring plant couldnât be remotely this sophisticated, the addition of some sort of psychic Void spirit which merges with this giant pitcher-plant could create a lovely Alraune-type being, which borders on being a âGood-Alignedâ monster. Such concepts are extremely interesting to me.
The obvious answer to the Sliver of Creation being singular is that, in the beginning, there was one âCosmic crystalâ for the entire multiverse; it was then shattered into a multitude of Shards or Slivers, each of which then created a single universe. It would make a lot of sense if these Slivers came from the body of Archaeon after Oblivaeon absorbed him; rather than her fully consuming him, she effectively ripped out his heart and ate it, leaving the rest of his body to fall apart into the Slivers which created the alternate timelines. Or perhaps only a portion of Archaeonâs body was shattered; OblivAeonâs appearance is a strange mixture of crystal and flesh, so perhaps Oblivion was entirely made of gray flesh, and filled in the head and torso of Archaeon with herself (in the process becoming nominally-male instead of nominally-female in appearanceâŚas a reminder, this is pure headcanon on my part), leaving the new entity with crystalline arms and legs but a mostly-flesh center mass. All this is just a theory of course, and probably doesnât line up with whatever C&A have come up with since then, but to me it seems like the only correct answer to these questions.
La Commodora being the only La Capitan who turned good makes perfect sense to me; sheâs a statistical outlier, the only one of a legion of Chaotic Neutral time pirate women who was convinced to become a responsible True Neutral heroine. Basically, every time she made a decision throughout her life, she mentally flipped a coin to decide whether sheâd do the selfish, impulsive, disruptive thing, and Commodora is the one case of every single one of those flips coming up ânoâ, out of thousands upon thousands of Maria Helenas who flipped âyesâ at least once in their lives. The odds of rolling snake eyes on 2d6 are 1 in 36, and the odds of double snake eyes on 4d6 are 1 in 36-squared (I believe this is 1296, but I might have screwed my math up, I donât care enough to bother using a calculator)âŚLa Capitan has definitely made more than 4 or 24 or even 1296 significant moral choices in her life, and not all of them were obviously binary ones, so frankly she was beating the odds to even turn out heroic once.