40 hours of work- just around 200 peoples ocs in the twst community (as such there may be some small mistakes on my end and sometimes i couldnt find refs with all the colors so i did my best!! Honestly im sorry if i missed you too even if its impossible for me to get every single person HFNDJXDHV)
Nothing can quite describe how welcomed ive felt in this community. I find myself always wanting to give back to my moots, followers, or even just other members in the community in general.
SOOO ive been slowly chipping away at this for the past few months. Consider this a gift! And uh, have fun finding your ocs/yuus-
Hello! I wanted to ask, but do we have any visual descriptions of the blot monster that killed Ortho? Like even just if it was big or if it had claws anything like that lol
Also this is a bit of a darker question do feel free to not answer this part but is the it ever implied or said how exactly Ortho was killed? Like did the blot monster like.. bite or maybe squash him? (Ngl I'd normally ask it in a more graphic way but I don't wanna make you uncomfortable)
Anyways I hope you have a good night/day whenever you read this <3
Hello hello! ^^ Thank you for this question!
I do not believe we have any detailed description of exactly what it is that happened to human-Ortho and, interestingly, we do not really know what happened to Idia, either!
There is a loud sound of something striking against something else and Idia says, "Everything after that is a blank for me. By the time I woke up, Ortho was gone."
What was that sound we hear after the monster lunges for Ortho? Metal against metal? Someone or something hitting a wall, or floor? How did Idia fall unconscious, and what happened in between Ortho being attacked and Idia being knocked out?
"Everything after that is a blank" may be insinuating that something happened during that "everything after," but he either can't or does not want to remember what it was. Very curious!
And there may be more to this scene than meets the eye 👀
When Ortho reacts to the creature coming down the hall, he doesn't call it a phantom: he calls it a monster.
"Monster" is one of the various ways that the cast refer to Grim (re: Animal vs. Monster vs. Cat vs. Dire Beast vs. Tanuki (pt1) / Animal vs. Monster vs. Cat vs. Dire Beast vs. Tanuki (pt2) ).
STYX labels him a dire beast in Book 6, but at the same time we learn that Grim is under a powerful spell that STYX's supercomputer can't actually analyze!
Grim might not be a direbeast at all, and we have already heard of creatures that will blend in with direbeasts in order to hide: phantoms 👀
I first came across this theory via Vtuber Toro-san (shared with permission) who points out some interesting things we know about the creature:
1. It was subject ROS-3367A, which possibly means that the phantom originally came from the Queendom of Roses, and Grim is theorized to have been at least partially based on Dinah from Alice in Wonderland.
(In Book 6 we also hear about a SUS-332OB, theorized to be from Sunset Savanna.)
2. While the weaker phantoms frozen on the higher levels of Tartarus in Book 6 mostly growl, the stronger phantoms frozen deeper inside would sometimes speak, saying, "I'm hungry, feed me flesh," "Don't go, stay with me" and "I want to be friends, too."
This is not impossible to tie back to Grim, who recalls waking up "hungry and alone," saying "it was real cold."
He follows with, "What happened after that again? It's all so foggy..."
Grim is mysterious enough on his own, not knowing where NRC is located (which begs the question: how did he get there?) and having significant gaps in his memory, in addition to being so unfamiliar with basic information of what is (presumably?) his own world that other characters often express surprise. (re: Grim's Memory / Grim's Experiences)
3. The chimera in the prologue has long been theorized to be some form of overblotted Grim. Is that his true form as a potentially flesh-eating, unfrozen phantom under a curse and/or blessing that no one understands?
We do not know! :> To the original question: it is difficult to pinpoint how exactly it was that Ortho died, as we do not know exactly what it was that killed him. (If it was the chimera in the opening, though, we have an idea of what it is he may have looked like at the time!)
We know Ortho was killed by a monster who had just escaped from a place built expressly for the purpose of housing lonely, violent, and hungry creatures--but that is all!
Perhaps a mystery to be solved as the plot thickens 👀