Dreen

Dreen
The Dreen help defend Castle Wulfenbach.

NOW—YOU WILL EXPERIENCE AN IMPORTANT REVELATION.

—Unfamilar Dreen ✣

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The Dreen are powerful entities of extra-dimensional origin existing, according to Baron Wulfenbach, "tangential to time" ✣ as humans experience it. These strange beings first appear (unnamed) in volume 3 and are identified (in comic) for the first time in volume 12. They play a relatively small role in the story until volume 24, ✣ , but become major players (in more than one sense of the word) at that point.

Physical Description

Dreen are originally shown as about average human height or a little taller and seem to be built along roughly humanoid lines, though their obscuring clothing makes this very uncertain. Over their bodies is worn a golden or brass-colored conical hat, from which descends a translucent veil, about half the length of the robes. Only their very slender arms are exposed outside of the black drapery, and whether that's black-and-green-striped skin terminating in cyan hands or suit sleeves with gloves, they still have unnaturally long, spidery, claw-like fingers (arachnodactyls) which seem sharp and strong enough to easily penetrate a slaver warrior's carapace. (see below under Novels.) They possess a single eye or visor built into their structure.

But later, when Agatha returns to undertake the unfreezing of Mechanicsburg, we see a rather different picture of them. (See below.)

History

The Dreen were accidentally brought into ✣ Europan humanity's plane of existence by Agatha's ancestor Robur Heterodyne, thanks to his experiments with the nature of time. In a typically sketchy conversation ✣ with Gil and Higgs, Castle Heterodyne at least implies that it was a witness to this event, without ever mentioning the Dreen by name, and says there were "dozens" of the entities. Believing the creatures to be angels sent to punish him, the terrified Robur smashed his machinery in an attempt to banish them, but evidently this didn't work, or at least not completely.

At Robur's desperate request, the Dreen and the device which summoned them were taken from their arrival spot by the Corbettite Monks. The device itself made its way to the Corbetite fortress which eventually became the Incorruptible Library under Paris, while most of the Dreen went to another Corbettite fortress ✣ . The story of their arrival is evidently not common knowledge; even Gil appears to be unaware of it.

Quite some time later, two of the Dreen chose ✣ to start working for (or at least with) Klaus Wulfenbach as he returned from his Lucrezia-imposed banishment, as repayment for some "future" favor on Klaus's part.

In the Comic

In the comic proper, the Dreen are first mentioned when the elder Wulfenbach chooses ✣ them to serve as guards for Adam and Lilith, because the Jägers, who would otherwise be logical guards, are likely to be on Adam and Lilith's side, because their loyalty is to Agatha. (Though said guarding never takes place.) Before we were properly "introduced" to them, Word of God told us that the shrouded, conical-hatted things in the background of this page ✣ (the image above) are them.

Along with fighting the slaver-wasp infestation on Castle Wulfenbach, at least one of the Dreen takes part ✣ in Klaus's attack on Mechanicsburg, where their reputation is so fearsome that even the normally stalwart Jagermonsters opt to flee from them ✣ . This attitude is promptly shown to be well-founded when Knight of Jove pilot Martellus von Blitzengaard attempts to squash it; the targeted Dreen shrugs off the attack and obliterates the Knight with an energy blast, with Tweedle just barely leaping to safety. The humans all flee, and despite just announcing that Agatha was to come with it, the Dreen immediately disappears from the narrative.

Lurking in St. Szpac

Two and a half years later, Gil and Higgs retrieve Vole from the time-frozen Mechanicsburg, but not without the aforementioned conversation with the Castle, which insists on their looking at of the center of the time stop. They see ✣ a enormous being that doesn't look like the Dreen, or at least isn't dressed like one, but evidently shares a similar origin point. The Castle estimates that it will arrive in Mechanicsburg in two years, with likely Something Unpleasant then happening to the inhabitants of this three-dimensional world. So that's the deadline for rescuing Mechanicsburg from Klaus's time freeze.

Shortly thereafter, a different lone Dreen appears ✣ in the bowels of the Corbettite Depot Fortress following the Beast's escape-rampage through the fortress's treasure-vaults. (Although as noted above, there are evidently many more of them present.) Agatha's Wasp eater seems to notice and react adversely to the Dreen which, as seen in the included picture, lurks in some shadows as Agatha and Co. go running past. It is unknown at the current time if this is a legitimate triggering of the Wasp-eater's intended function (i.e., identifying wasp-infected Revenants), or if a Dreen is just that scary. (The whole "tangential to normal time" thing would seem to suggest the latter.) Either way, the Dreen is then shown either watching, trailing or pursuing Agatha's group, but Agatha and friends eventually defeat the Beast, finish construction on the Corbettites' new Sparky super-train, deal with the arrival of Gil and his forces, and depart the fortress for Paris, all without further interaction with the Dreen.

It is Gil himself and Bangladesh DuPree who are finally confronted ✣ by presumably the same creature, which enigmatically announces Agatha's intended destination to Gil, adding that Gil will be journeying there himself. This prompts Gil to recall Castle Heterodyne's comments, specifically that the newcomers "wore hats" ✣ . Agatha later learns about the summoning from a notebook in the Immortal Library, but not that Robur's "angels" were the Dreen.

Much further along, during their return from England to fend off the incursion of the Polar Lords, Gil and Kjarl discuss possible consequences of the Mechanicsburg time blockage, and Kjarl unknowingly remarks ✣ that if the situation were very bad, it would have attracted the Dreen. He is not happy when brought up to speed on current events. Gil comments that the Paris prediction at least never came true.. whereupon he is immediately informed that he is about to meet with that city's new Master.

When Agatha finally returns ✣ to Mechanicsburg, she is abruptly confronted by three of the entities, and attempts to zap them with her time-stopping Star. Instead of freezing the trio, the Star's power makes them appear as blue, short-legged long-armed humanoids ✣ wearing an assortment of uniforms, tech-gear and ornate veiled hats. They also have conjoined eyes. Displaying at most mild offhand irritation, they casually walk out of the Star's field of power and make themselves at home. As they do so, their appearance immediately reverts to "eldritch abomination" mode. It is then revealed they are some sort of dedicated monster-hunters who have only come to Agatha's dimension to battle the aforementioned giant entity; they recruit a fairly unwilling Kjarl as an official witness to this fight. (He is somewhat relieved to see there are only the three of them, and not dozens.) The fact that he is a Vozzler is mentioned, but it is not clear if that occupation actually affects said witnessing. When the three are conversing quietly amongst themselves, they appear to be using some unknown language ✣ , though in fact the text consists of the word "WHISPER" repeated five times in the "Ancient Astronaut Alien" font, with random line breaks added. (Here is a graphic image of the word as it appears in the comic, on a single line: .)

And so.. using the Star, Agatha goes into the time-frozen city with the Dreen ✣ , and gets them into the positions they claim they want to use to attack the entity, leaving them frozen as she moves on. In the process of this, Agatha learns that Castle Heterodyne has made a deal with the Dreen ✣ , agreeing to lift one of the trio higher into the air using the Torchmen when the attack commences. After the usual delays and complications, Agatha and Co. finally reach the Take-Five Bomb and deactivate it ✣ , dropping the time-freeze. The one Dreen is lifted as promised, ✣ and all three shoot the Entity in the eye with their beam-weapons ✣ , which causes three eldritch-looking circles to start forming in the air around the target. As this happens, the Dreen make a cryptic comment about "amplifying the Grand Pattern"...

As the battle progresses, it appears that Kjarl's role as vozzler is not merely to be a passive witness to events, but to analyze the possible future outcomes ✣ of all the attacks the Dreen might make against the entity and guide the conflict to maximal awesomeness! ✣

Upon receiving their upgraded weapons from the Great Sages ✣ , and beginning some time before ✣ , the Dreen begin to be characterized in a way that recalls tropes of video game players — becoming excited about gear upgrades, discussing 'possible wipes', wanting to save their most powerful abilities for future use, and one commenting 'I should have done this solo, but nooo—'.

The Dreen They Are A-Changin'

During their first few, rare appearances in the comic, the Dreen are indistinguishable from one another, so there seems to be no reason to bother trying to treat them as individuals. But that changes when Agatha is confronted by three Dreen (seemingly the whole crew) in Mechanicsburg and she uses her Star on them, as noted above. Since the Dreen each have a distinct appearance under the Star's influence, it suddenly becomes desirable to be able to refer to individual Dreen, at least for the purposes of the Chronology pages. Somewhat later, the Dreen's appearance changes yet again, necessitating yet another set of names for these new forms. Therefore, the following naming scheme has been adopted in this wiki.

Original Dreen

When the Dreen have the cloaked and veiled appearance we first see and only one appears in a scene, that being may be referred to simply as "Dreen". In scenes with more than one Dreen present, making it necessary to keep track of who is who, a dash followed by a number is appended to Dreen; for example, Dreen-1, Dreen-3.

New Dreen, now with comic relief!

Once the Dreen take on their less veiled, more humanoid appearance, they are assigned names based on the memorable scene shown on the page dated Monday, April 8, 2024, ✣ where the Dreen first change and each utters a word or two. The one who says "Rude" will be called Dreen-R; the one who says "Weird", Dreen-W; and the one who says "'Bout time", Dreen-BT. However, when the Dreen revert to their original appearance, it becomes very difficult to determine who is who. In those cases, any Dreen who can't be identified will be numbered, as noted above. Occasionally, even when the Dreen have returned to their original appearance (and they appear in original form most of time), it is still possible to identify them as individuals because they were shown in their unique forms in a previous scene and continue to occupy the same position or perform the same actions.

New Improved Dreen, now with more eldritch horror!

After the Dreen receive their upgraded weapons ✣ from the Great Sages, they shift in appearance yet again, transforming in truly ominous fashion. ✣ Initially, they seem to have left the Girl Genius universe entirely, inhabiting a space that suggests starry space, strange forces, and cosmic vastness. They now have no resemblance to their previous forms or to each other, having taken on surreal, almost Cubist shapes, with vivid, otherworldly colors, ✣ resembling a scene in a blacklight poster from the real-world 1970s.

As the Dreen reappear in the (to them) limited dimensions of Girl Genius space, they briefly take on fully abstract shapes, accompanied by simple, almost musical tones: plink, plank, plunk ✣ . They finally stabilize into relatively solid-looking beings, much larger than they were before. They no longer have hats, clothing, or coverings of any kind, nor any equipment aside from their weapons. They look very alien and monstrous and again bear no resemblance to one another. ✣ In these new forms, the Dreen will be identified with names based on their appearance: Dreen-Rings (pointed "head", multiple "halos", and wings), Dreen-Torus (shaped like a very irregular doughnut), and Dreen-Column (shaped like a pillar).

True Names?

As the conflict between the extradimensional monster and the Dreen starts heating up, Kjarl shouts out instructions to individual Dreen, ✣ apparently addressing each of them by name. Their names are rendered in the "Ancient Astronaut Alien" font, and so initially appear as gibberish, but fans quickly "decoded" the names by referring to the font web page (see above). The Dreen's names are:

• Zulfar ()
• Taza ()
• Nelth ()

Alas, it is not currently possible to match up these "extradimensional names" to any of the Dreen's forms with much certainty, but we are eventually given a clue that Zulfar may be the name of the Dreen with wings, ✣ although the wings we see may belong to the Hideous Extradimensional Being: Type 1 instead.

The Novels

In the print novel Agatha H and the Airship City, the Dreen are described as 'killing with a touch' and as being the only thing that the slaver wasps seem to honestly fear: "Deep within the midst of the enemies moved the Dreen, two unearthly terrifying creatures garbed in dark wide brimmed conical hats and long, obscuring veils. They killed with a touch, and they alone seemed to scare the Slaver Wasps. Everywhere they drifted a circle of emptiness opened around them as wasps desperately tried to escape."

In Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg, after the Dreen briefly menaces Agatha and Co. on the walls of the eponymous city as described above, the reader is given a glimpse into its thought processes; the creature performed this act because it felt the need to drive historical events in a certain direction, namely, getting Agatha and Tweedle (AKA The Heterodyne Girl and The Storm King) together. Having done this, it makes no effort to pursue them further.

Possibly relevant outside information

From a discussion archived on NNTPnews.net:

• The Dreen are the bad guys in a series of novels by John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor.
• Also, another race called the Dreen feature in Star Rider by Doris Piserchia.
• And a race by that name appears in "Man of Two Worlds" by Frank Herbert and Brian Herbert.
• Dreen is also a dialect variant of the word drain.
• The Dreen appear in the 1993 trilogy written by J. Calvin Pierce about a place called Ambermere. The female Dreen is first mentioned in The Sorceress of Ambermere.

In the Myth Adventures by Robert Aspirin, the first which was adapted into a graphic novel by the Professor, the word “demon” turns out to be a shortening of “dimension traveler”. Robur Heterodyne’s term “angel” (unfallen demon), which the characters find puzzling, may be a reference to this.