Ahab
“ | When I perish, this world shall perish as well. So my very life, my very existence itself, is then the world! And I have deemed it so! | ” |
–Ahab, Canto V: The Evil Defining |
Ahab (Hangul: 에이해브, Eihaebeu) was the captain of the Whaling ship The Pequod, before becoming the leader of the town constructed from its wreckage. She is a major antagonist in Canto V: The Evil Defining.
Obsessed with hunting down the Pallid Whale, she gathered an entire crew of sailors onto her whaling ship, including Ishmael, as they sailed through the Great Lake and the Outskirts. A ruthless woman who led Ishmael's crewmates to their doom, she is the "bastard" Ishmael swore revenge on and became the reason she joined Limbus Company.
Appearance
Ahab is a tall elderly woman with curly, mid-thigh length greying hair. Like her namesake, she has a black-and-gold peg leg starting from her left knee. She wears a green captain's jacket over an untucked button shirt and darker green pants, one leg of which is tucked into the prosthetic, a crooked captain's hat, white gloves and a thin belt around her midsection. On her back is a harpoon around her height with a narrow, transparent cylinder behind the tip and a loop at the other end. This cylinder contains a small flame, the intensity of which varies.
After being trapped in the Pallid Whale, Ahab gains Pallidification membranes across her entire body. Her peg leg is also modified to have a harpoon-like tip.
When using GasHarpoon, Ahab's left eye and arm are completely consumed by Pallidification, producing an oversized, white biomechanical arm with blue and red veins terminating in a harpoon. Additionally, she loses her captain's hat.
Within the shoulder is the flame-bearing cylinder on her harpoon, whereas on her shoulder are seemingly three crooked gas pistons, each bearing a monochrome face and ending in a lantern-like element with a luminous gas. Ahab uses these in battle to change the end of her mutated arm; doing so causes the corresponding piston to retract and the gas to transfer into her shoulder. Following her defeat, these pistons are snapped off and her shoulder displays its original orange flame.
- Topmost: Bears Queequeg's face and a purple light. The last to be used, it gave Ahab a massive harpoon that she can fire.
- Middle: Bears Starbuck's face and a green light. Changes Ahab's arm into tuft of rhomboid blades.
- Bottom: Bears Pip's face and a blue light. The first to be used, it granted Ahab a floor-length bludgeon.
Personality
Ahab's most defining feature is her extreme and single-minded desire to hunt the Pallid Whale, with little regard for anything else. Initially, she appears to be highly charismatic, bringing in and unifying individuals from all walks of life for the goal of hunting the Calamity. However, she is highly manipulative, egocentric and selfish, seeing her crew as nothing but a means to an end. Even pre-Pallidifcation, she kept an extremely tight hold on her crew, and later admitted that she cared not about their reasons or desires, believing that they should've devoted themselves to her cause the instant they set foot on The Pequod.
Her end-justifies-the-mean mindset leads her to make extreme sacrifices, decimating her crew on their voyage to the Whale's heart without a second thought, seeing her leading the crew to their deaths as sending them to greatness. Her viewing her crew as tools is reflected in her GasHarpoon E.G.O, where she uses her most loyal crewmates as fuel for her weapon.
Ahab believes herself responsible for giving the crew conviction and meaning in their lives, and their sacrifices are merely recompense for her actions while blaming them for their fate, calling them "flimsy" and their hearts "shallow". Ahab's egocentrism is further shown when she outright rejects distortion and instantly gains an E.G.O, declaring herself as the only being that matters, and her existence itself as the world.
When her life's purpose, killing the Pallid Whale, was stolen from her by Ishmael, Ahab suffers a mental breakdown and roars for her crew to set sail for the Pallid Whale, despite the Calamity already being dead and her crew gone.
Background
Before the events of the game, Ahab had a ravenous obsession with the Pallid Whale, believing it to be "the source of all evils". The reason for this is completely unknown. Ahab's charisma allowed her to gather a devoutly loyal crew, including Ishmael who had just quit her job at U Corp.'s Nest. Together, she would lead the crew of The Pequod into the Great Lakes, to join in her mad search for the Calamity. However, the beast would soon prove too much for the crew and destroy The Pequod, swallowing Ahab together with most of the crew. She and the survivors, alive in the belly of the Whale, soon began undergoing a slow process of pallidification, only kept at bay thanks to Ahab's sheer determination. Eventually, she would form a community named after her ship, the Pequod Town, with as many other survivors as she could find, with the goal of locating the Pallid Whale's weak point, its heart, and slaying the Calamity.
Main Story
When Ishmael's plan to enter the Pallid Whale to locate the Golden Bough works, members of Pequod Town bring them to their community, where she welcomes the Sinners with open arms. When Ishmael tries to attack her, only to cause a riot with the Sinners against the town, Ahab calls them off and convinces them into her office, where she convinces the Sinners that following her plan is the best course of action, much to Ishmael's agitation. When Ishmael again tries to kill her, she promises that so long as the Sinners help her reach the heart, she'll offer herself up to Ishmael. She then states to reach the heart, she divides the whole group in two; Her group would traverse the pancreases, a labyrinth full of mermaids and acid, while the other travels a blood vessel with had become infested with Abnormalities that the Whale had swallowed beforehand to the heart.
As revealed by Dante's new power, she would then sacrifice all of Pequod Town in her odyssey to reach the heart. Once the remains of her group meets with the Sinners again, she reveals those infected by pallidification are unable to attack the whale, and only the Golden Bough can reverse the effects. She then demands Dante gives her their head so she can slay the beast, but the manager refuses, and the two groups fight. However, once beaten, she begins to hear the Voice trying to temp her into distorting, only for Ahab to manifest her personal EGO; "GasHarpoon", based on how she sees her crew as extensions of herself and takes control of the pallidification. Using Pip, Starbuck, and finally Queequeg as ammunition for her battle, she continues to lambast Ishmael for falling the crew. Once GasHarpoon is broken by Ishmael's Snagharpoon and is left vulnerable, she then takes delight in Ishmael's bloodlust. However, she soon falls apart when Dante is able to convince Ishmael into killing the Pallid Whale instead. Left without purpose, she collapses into sputtering nonsense about finding the Whale again as the Sinners leave her within the dying beast.
Ahab miraculously survived the whale’s destruction; drifting on the remains of the foe she was robbed of slaying. Muttering her hopeless delusions as she aimlessly floated on The Great Lake, Ahab was eventually rescued by Hermann and her fleet of battleships.
When Ahab questioned if Hermann was here just to mock her, the N Corp. Director gave her a proposition: if Ahab joined her, she would allow the captain to kill any and every Pallid Whale across the countless mirror worlds. Reasoning that it was simply just a ‘single’ Pallid Whale out of potentially countless others, Hermann would give Ahab her purpose again.
All Hermann asked of Ahab was her “staunch determination and conviction”.
Gallery
Trivia
- Ahab is based off of the character of the same name from the 1851 novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale written by Herman Melville. Much like Ahab as seen in Limbus Company, her literary counterpart is an aging whaler single-mindedly absorbed into the hunt for the White Whale that has devoured his leg.
- While the narrator of Moby-Dick is the sailor Ishmael, Captain Ahab is considered the protagonist, being the character upon which the most important events of the story focus on. Ahab, as seen through Ishmael's eyes, appears to be a grand, "tragically great" man, whose presence and words invoke a feeling of awe in Ishmael, who feels compelled to follow along in his hunt.
- Ahab's E.G.O, GasHarpoon, as well as Ishmael's Uptie Story in the world in which she mirrors Ahab, reference a scene in Moby-Dick in which the Pequod is caught in a typhoon. During the storm, lightning strikes Ahab's harpoon, setting it on fire, an event which the First Mate Starbuck sees as a warning that God is against Ahab and his hunt, but which Ahab takes as a sign that the whale is near.
- Ahab appears to have a slight connection to the Sleeping Bag of Olden Days Abnormality, with the fusion gift associated with her in the Mirror Dungeon, the Guiding Gas Lamp, being made up of an E.G.O Gift obtained from the Sleeping Bag, the Nebulizer. The Abnormality is made up of two parts, a large skeleton and a shadow trapped inside its ribcage, unable to breathe, which appears visually similar to the final fight to Canto V, in which Ahab is defeated inside the heart of the Pallid Whale.
External Links
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Mechanics | Battles - Battle Announcers - E.G.O - Identities - Items - Luxcavation - Mirror Dungeon - Story Dungeon - Theater |
Seasonal Event | Seasons - Limbus Pass - Refraction Railway - Dante's Notes - Walpurgis Night |
Characters | Dante - Vergilius - Charon |
Sinners |
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Terminology | |
Locations | The City (Districts (Nests • Backstreets)) - Outskirts - The Great Lake - Mephistopheles |
Lore | Abnormalities - E.G.O - Distortion - The Sign - Smoke War - Singularity - Golden Bough |
Factions | Limbus Company - Fixers (Offices • Associations) - Syndicates (Five Fingers) - Wings |
Other | |
Songs | "In Hell We Live, Lament" - "Between Two Worlds" - "Fly, My Wings" - "Compass" - "Through Patches of Violet" - "Pass On" |
Media | Lobotomy Corporation - WonderLab - Library Of Ruina - The Distortion Detective - Leviathan - Limbus Company (Game) |
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