Nugas
She is Our favorite character in anything ever, so We figure it's high time We make a little essay extolling her greatness and depth. This will contain spoilers for some of Vigor Mortis's most important plot beats. Also, Nugas is a very horny character and We will be engaging with that aspect of her, tho it's not the focus of this essay. You've been warned.
Creation
Vigor Mortis is all about how much what we are made to be defines us, so what was Nugas made to be? She is a punishment for the man she was made out of, a test subject for the most thorough animancy we see in the entire series, and the most loyal servant you could make out of a living being, or in Vita's own words, "a living fuckdoll of me."
Penelope says to her in our first proper scene with Nugas that, "You don't think anything I didn't make you to think!", which Nugas takes offense to. This is because Penelope is dead fucking wrong, as the rest of the series is intent on proving. Penelope, in this scene and Nugas's first, is so caught up in the mistake that Nugas is that she attributes all of that failure to her impulsive side, the bubbles half of her soul. She fails to see the enormous part her control complex played in creating an unwaveringly servile personal slave maid, which seems shortsighted and hopelessly unselfaware because that's exactly what it is.
Both Nugas and Penelope identify a turning point that I believe to be the very same for both of them. Where Nugas became herself and, as she puts it, "ripped him apart." Where Penelope made Nugas love her and lost her enthusiasm because it wasn't torture anymore. And yet she still finished making Nugas, up to the penultimate step, removing the memories of the man.
Growth
A few chapters later, we get a bit of a glimpse at what Nugas does outside of being a maid to Penelope, and it happens with Nugas off screen. Nugas is assisting Margarette with setting up a teleportation circle, which proves she is a very competent learned mage in spite of how infrequently she shows it, and an active participant in our favorite counsel of blasphemy's research in more than just her capacity as a test subject. All of this is later reaffirmed. This is also where Vitamin raises the idea of Nugas being, in a parallel to herself and Vita's relationship, Penelope's "daughter".
I'm going to give a brief aside on Vitamin, because the parallel is relevant. Throughout Vigor Mortis we see parents who fail to understand their children and children who are much better at understanding their parents in turn. This holds true even for the fucked up psuedo-parentage role that animancy occupies on occasion. Vita holds Vitamin's life in her hands for years, treating Vitamin as more of a pet than the daughter that she calls her. Vitamin gets Vita, gets the macabres of her life, the tension between effort and ease that drives her, but Vita doesn't give Vitamin a smidge of the same in return. Vitamin's attempts to follow up on her memories from Remus are stampted down, and when the compulsions to love and follow Vita are removed, she drops the pretense of mother and daughter that Vita built up.
Complex
Where Vitamin was temporarily warped to such a state of servitude, Nugas bodily accepts it. We see throughout her perspective chapter (which We are very pleased she got :) how deeply Penelope's idiosyncrasies impact Nugas and her growth. Nugas learns and adapts to every part of Penelope, from her abnormal emotional range to her need for someone to let her slip off her mask. (Where Vita gives Penelope the space to remove the mask, Nugas forces it aside.)
Nugas's growth is all in service of becoming the kind of person Penelope can rely on and love. However, she insists on doing so by becoming more herself. She revels in her body and soul in a way we don't see much of in Vigor until the end of the series, cherishing the femininity she's been given in defiance of the dead man she was molded out of. She embraces her sexuality, I would argue, specifically in contrast to Vita, who she was made to look like, which is the one thing we know she does entirely in opposition to Penelope's interests. Nugas insists on being herself and no one else. She says, and Jessica Almasy fucking kills this line read in the audiobook, "I'm not just a thing. I'm real."
That is her core complex. She loves herself not in spite of the torture that made her but because of it! And every time the beauty of her transformation is criticized, she is furious. This is why she gets along so well with Capita, both share this reverie in the way they were created.
Calamity Protocol
When Penelope is taken by Galdra's cognimancy, Nugas is the one who is prepared, not Penelope. Lin informs her of the event, and Nugas arrives at the scene to continue serving her lady. It is Nugas's own personal philosophy that lets her ultimately free Penelope from Galdra's control, because she knows the difference between creation and tampering, and she knows Penelope Vesuvius.
Penelope has always had two sides, spines and bubbles if you go by her soul. Control and impulse. Ethics and the destruction they hold back. Logic and emotion. When Galdra's rough treatment only takes advantage of Penelope's emotional side, Nugas knows to push her buttons so that the logical side can take over, and does so in just such a way that, if she fails, she can at least indulge in some masochism. Like an inversion of Lin and Rowan succeeding as parents by accepting Vita regardless of how well they understand her, Nugas succeeds as Penelope's servant by understanding more than she accepts.
Nugas is maybe the only character in the series for which clarity of purpose and drive to fulfill that purpose are not in conflict in the slightest. It makes her uniquely capable of masterminding the most devilish schemes we see in Vigor Mortis, where cognimancy and kinemancy and good ol' fucking politics are all on the table, she dethrones Galdra and Nara both just by knowing the pieces in play and keeping a straight face. Now I'm just gonna show you an excerpt of the chapter this section is named for, cause hot damn, Nugas and Penelope's back and forth is so worth pointing out!
I Always Get Off
We don't see much at all of Nugas throughout the majority of volume 4. We can infer from her insistance on being Penelope's right hand that she was spending much of her time helping with the forest town's administration during Vita's time away, but not much else. Even more than in volume 3, her appearances favor quality over quantity. She pops in to make great sex jokes, then pops out.
Then we get to Crumbling Away. Penelope's hackjob of a soul is breaking, and Nugas appears out of nowhere, perfectly prepared once again. Penelope tries to isolate herself, but Nugas insists on going and she literally can't bring herself to deny Nugas. She is so vulnerable at this point, her self-flagellating principles make her unable to set a reasonable boundary simply because it's Nugas, her victim, the person she's wronged.
Nugas once again pokes at Penelope's emotional state, as she did during the Calamity Protocol, planting a seed for the later part of Penelope's breakdown. The dragon lady ruminates, then gets poked again, much harder. Nugas reveals that she has been learning animancy to use on herself. She says its to kill the man she was made of once and for all, but with the double entendre of getting gruesomely murdered by her lady, cause she really is down for fuckin' anything. This riles up Penelope more, bringing attention to another painful gray area in her principles, one she sees herself as responsible for.
Once again, Nugas sees the bigger picture for what it is, the difference between self-mutilation and self-becoming. Penelope, too traumatized to know what liking herself is even supposed to look like, says something stupid again and pisses off Nugas in the process. That is the difference between them, Nugas loves herself and Penelope does not know how. Nugas can identify love and Penelope does not know how.
Nugas, very intentionally, because every single bit we see of Nugas is filled with intention, turns the subject to servitude. She is making her point at the same time as she is giving Penelope fuel to get furious. It makes her think of Galdra. And Penelope is no idiot, she knows Nugas manipulated her into killing Galdra. And Nugas is no idiot, she knows this is the conclusion her lady will come to, and the lingering attachment she no doubt has. While Penelope is boiling over into a violent outburst, Nugas pokes the bear extra hard, stating her fucking raison d'ĂŞtre like a Bond villain.
And in one brilliant move, by the standards of a world-class masochist like Nugas, she plows through Penelope's mental troubles again and takes all the disease-laden backlash on herself. And though she is in a state of emotional upheaval, even just after Nugas cracks her we can tell Penelope is on the road to recovery for one reason: she can set a boundary.
Not Anyone in the World Better for the Job
While Taal and Zoi give Penelope proper aftercare, they commiserate on the subject of Nugas. It's clear, even through Penelope's incredibly biased view of her, that Nugas is terrifyingly capable. She's the one who runs the city whenever Penelope isn't doing it, who manages the people working for the city even when Penelope is there, and lemme tell ya, Braum's got nuthin' on her.
And at last we come to the finale. Nugas has one final trick up her sleeve, and her sleeves are nice and well-padded, unlike usual. We finally get to see what it looks like when the scheming potential of both Penelope and Nugas is put the same task. In anticipation of Nawra's bullshit, Penelope is made to be positively inclined and deferential to Nawra to act as a double agent, however what I want to focus in on is what she isn't compelled to do.
Throughout the chapter where we follow Penelope, we see her reason herself through the possibility that she was tampered with animantically, and purely by the fact Nawra wouldn't have been able to do it, she dismisses the idea. We also see her come up with counter-plans to the very plan she is genuinely working to make happen in that moment. None of that is the animancy, and I can tell you why the animancy wasn't done anyway just to ensure success: Nugas. No manipulation was required to make Penelope act like that, she just does and Nugas predicts it weeks in advance without even knowing what kind of state her mood disorder will leave her in when the time comes.
This is the brilliant part, because Penelope is not the central figure being manipulated in this plan, Nawra is. The two needed a piece on the board that could be in the right places at the right times and adapt to whatever threat Nawra ended up posing, and with Nugas's flawless understanding of her lady, they set Penelope up in just the right position for that to work. Nawra, being so similar to Penelope in so many ways, and yet simultaneously centuries out of touch with the ways of interpersonal manipulation, is all too easy a target for Nugas and Penelope working together.
Nugas, on the other hand, stays behind to coordinate their party, who are all conveniently under Vita's aegis. And finally, when Penelope needs to turn coat, Nugas is there to play on her insecurities and set everything straight again. As she says, Penelope gets stupid around her. And with that one bit of stupidity, they save the world.
Also, We skipped over it earlier, but she rips out a dude's intestines and finally wins Penelope over just a little bit in the finale with how attractive that one action is. (Big agree, Penelope, big agree.) This is more speculation, but Penelope definitely takes up Nugas on Zoi's old offer from just after the breakdown of her principles, which is to say they fuck crazy style while Taal and Zoi are away.
Conclusion
This is what We love some much about Nugas, she's a bit of power fantasy, but in a way that is so classically Thundamoo in it's dark twists. She is a richly complex, self-confident and self-loving woman hypercompetent in every plan she puts into motion and every joke she plays. She is also wholeheartedly servile, the product of a process most would consider abominable, and a sex pervert the likes of which the world only sees once a century; All traits that society would tell you make her an idiot and/or a predator, of which she is neither.
She is a delight to have hit the page with every single appearance, an invaluable piece of the puzzle in analyzing Vigor Mortis's themes, and a fascinating transfeminist message all bundled together. That last bit is an essay for another time tho, thanks for reading Our ramblings and, Thundamoo? Your works are an endless inspiration to Us, so I'm going to be a bit selfish and ask that you never stop.
