Grrl Power #1048 – Limitful cosmic power
This will definitely end well, I’m sure of it.
It’s weird to think, but Thothogoth doesn’t actually have a massive need for bars of gold. Since demons/devils/fiends are starfaring species in the Grrl-verse, then it stands to reason that basic element/mineral acquisition isn’t difficult. It seems most planets that aren’t mostly gas or ice have roughly similar compositions. Tons of silicates (if there is or was oxygen in the planet’s history), aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, etc. And even though gold comprises only 0.000004% of Earth’s total composition, that’s still 1.6 quadrillion tons worth. (Don’t worry, I didn’t do any math this time, I just looked up percentages and stuff.) A spacefaring race that discovers a dead planet like Mars that’s even further from the goldilocks zone (demons have considerable heat tolerance, so their goldilocks zone is a little different than humans) like out in Neptune’s orbit, could crack that thing open and mine the hell out of it. Even if you’re not into planet cracking, I think once you’re in the position to mine asteroids and comets and whatnot, resource gathering becomes nearly trivial, at least once you mine enough to create a massive mining fleet. The thing is, once you have access to even a few trillion tons of a resource, I don’t really see how it maintains any market value. That’s why the majority of the technologically advanced universe uses information, entertainment and energy as the primary units of currency. For magical races, energy can mean anything from straight up electrical power to mana.
That doesn’t mean that some of the “lower” tiers of demons aren’t still into gold, virgins, or suffering. It is considerably more difficult to write a check that covers the latter two, so gold (and other traditionally precious resources) is still useful to someone like Tom, but he can just order a pallet jack full of the stuff from Astrozon. He can even justify treating it as a valuable commodity, because the shipping cost of 2 cubic meters of gold is pretty steep.
Tom just wished for a bar of gold to give Parfait something to practice on. Too bad about that audit, buddy.
Two books for you guys. Or, well, three, I guess.
Aether’s Revival 5
is out. This is the only cultivation series I’ve stuck with… not that I’ve tried too many others. The genre seems very slow paced and generally steeped in a lot of asian culture that I have trouble identifying with, like just… so much bowing. I don’t know why it bothers me, but the few cultivation books I’ve tried are like 40% people being super polite to each other? Anyway, I like AR.
That said, I did try Trojan Nightmare by Blaise Corvin, which is cultivation, but in an apocalypse setting, no tea ceremonies or yukatas in sight. It’s… alright. I mean, it’s good – I’ll get the next book, but I’m not bursting at the seams for it.
Speaking of Blaise Corvin and also bursting at the seams and also the 5th book in a series, Delvers LLC 5 is out tomorrow! (The May 13th, if you’re reading this in the future) Delvers is one of my favorite series of all time, and is seminal isekai. At least it is to me, because it’s one of the first isekai series I read. Maybe seminal isn’t the right word, but it is one of the series I judge all other isekais against, and I’ve been waiting for this one for a while.
The May Vote Incentive is up! This month it’s Warsyl, from Tamer: Enhancer 2! I’d say spoilers, but the book has been available for 5 months now. Anyway, this pic doesn’t have a zillion outfit variations, partially because her armor took longer to draw than I thought it would, but mostly because she just has an armored form, and an unarmored form. The latter being available over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Is Sydney’s famed genre savviness having a fail? She should know better than to make wishes with genies of any flavor but especially with efreeti and djinni.
I think she’s thinking Genie and Eden from the animated Disney Aladdin and Genie from the live-action one, rather than the Fisherman and the Genie or the tropes Literal or Jackass Genie.
Note both those trope pages are longer than Benevolent Genie.
So yep, I think her genre savviness is failing.
the jerkass wish granter is intentional on the part of the one granting the wish, the novice wish granter is another thing entirely where they try to grant the wish but a lack of power, experience, or their own understanding/imagination causes the wish to come out funny.
Traditional genies weren’t bad wish granters if they owed you a favor and you didn’t get greedy. Per 1001 Arabian Nights.
Solomon captured *bad* genies, whose approach to granting wishes was very devilish, while the good ones were into teaching Monkey Paw type lessons if they didn’t owe you a solid.
true, though in my readings the wish granting is actually very rare among Djinn and seems to be a social rule among them when given a favor such as being released.
hence them doing three favors on good terms, while others are spiteful and will use this as an excuse to torment the human while apparently somehow fulfilling their grant three favors tradition because not orange/blue morality as they knowingly are doing something they know won’t benefit the human; but under their traditions somehow still counts…the humans can suck it clause I guess.
Since D&D has come up before, I know that in at least one edition, some Genies while quite magical don’t actually have wish granting powers. However, many do come from some powerful noble families in their societies and so if one is for some reason in your debt, it’s not uncommon for them to use their influence and wealth to essentially grant you a couple wishes.
“Magic sword of unimaginable power? Yeah, I think my Dad has one in his museum he’d be glad to give to you for getting me out of that bottle so I can go back home.”
“Massive fortune? Well, I can manage your weight in diamonds, that’s basically my allowance for three months but it’s yours since I’d been saving up.”
“Locate your sworn enemy so you may take vengenace on him? Sure, I can do some location magic and heck I’ll even throw in a free teleport to get you there. That should square us buddy. Thanks again and stay safe!”
that would be closer to the Djinn.
they were mortal *albeit with long life spans* and magic powers. More like Dark Elves for a cultural comparison…beings of black smokeless fire that lived in the shadows…so think Shadow People more so than anything.
they could use their shadowy ways and magic to grant boons for helping them but…they could not warp reality like so many specifically wish granting entities *although one could imagine a modern ethereal being playing a Genie game and adopting the name for a quick reference*, but the actual name sake not so much.
its not too different from that Summoning for beginners horror story youtube video where a guy is asking for a really specific wish and the demon is like, “One question, what do any of those words mean?”
you try to give some really specific, well thought out, prevent any slam back wish to a Djinn and its just going to be “what by great Iblis’ left nut are you talking about human?”
Sydney should come out of this mostly okay. Its being approached as an experiment that the wish granter is willing to try.
Technically speaking, Sydney is an astronaut. And from my intense research on Nick at Night, astronauts have a better history of getting good genies than evil ones, who just occasionally mess up but are not malicious about it.
I’m pretty sure my logic is flawless here.
Astronauts in comics have some really interesting experiences with the supernatural, such as the NASAghasts (story arc starts here).
Also in 60s TV sitcoms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND1MXF-svtQ
I’d seen the animated section of that intro plenty of times, but never the live-action opening. Never registered that he was an astronaut watching the few episodes I’ve seen, just military of some kind.
I figured given the succubus part, the intro that has the kissing and the ‘the girl in the bottle played spin the astronaut’ fit better. :)
It totally does. I am just really amused by the Nasaghasts and felt they needed more recognition.
I’m realllllly hoping Dabbler or Tom stops them fast.
If Tom’s in a post-gold-scarcity economy, I don’t know why’d he get an audit over an additional piece of gold -it’s not income.
Hmmm…. maybe items from wishes are counted as income?
Wherever the gold is going to, it’s presumably got to come from somewhere, especially for a highly processed format such as a doubloon (mined, refined, cast, struck…). Having an audit trail means being able to track who you’ve just ‘stolen’ from, so that it’s harder for a treacherous employee to steal for themselves and blame it on a juvenile genie.
I took the audit to be an unfortunate side effect.
Wish Bureaucracy man…..
The arch-nemesis of Chaotic Freestyle Man…
“We’re interstellar mercenaries killing people at the orders of a demon for profit, anyway Ms superhero, do you want my number?”
I mean…yikes.
devil’s advocate, they never explicitly said they were conquering in those campaigns. Perhaps they are guarding caravans of trade goods from space pirates. Fending of assassination attempts, guarding the demon orphanages from the zealot followers of “celestials” who think they earn divine brownie points by killing demons regardless of being children or not. etc…
conquering and such still circles back to what part does Infernum play in the Xevoarchy, do they also have people in the space police. Which given this has come up before seems to be the main exchange between worlds. Personel. Either for labor, warfare, mercenaries, or space police.
Mreruope never said anything about conquering.
They said killing people for profit, nothing at all to do with the involved situations, just their actions.
Killing people for profit.
its implied given Thothogoth had mentioned his campaigns and they would be acting as soldiers for him.
anything else is splitting hairs.
Hey! Leave the bunnies out of it. The penthouse and cop ones have enough split hair ends as it is.
Implied, you can imply anything, doesn’t mean squat.
they also never said they are explicitly killing people for this demon, you and this other person are seeing that implied.
Why does no one bother looking at the PowerPoint presentation before making these scurrilous accusations?
THE TRANSITIONS ARE TRANSCENDENT!
I’m gonna need to see some spreadsheets no matter how good the transitions are.
engineer or accountant?
Engineer, although I’ve actually dabbled in accounting and have migrated to an overlapping space in fintech.
Both fields get boring day to day, but figuring out how to do the projects is fun and challenging. Like math, spreadsheets are a boring tool that lets you do exciting things in an organized and repeatable way.
I mean, while they are superheroes, their official job is American military, so unlike the justice league, their approach to anything outside America’s jurisdiction can be “eh, have fun. Bring me back some souvenirs for the museum.”
when dealing with interstellar and interspecies monetary its unlikely any physical object is going to be regarded as having the same value. Humans like shiny objects due to certain elements in evolutionary psychology. and X-amount of some shiny rock doesn’t inherently mean any absolute law of the universe way that is has ANY value what so ever. Being rare does not equal valuable no matter how much this concept is beaten into the norms part of human experience. (even taking into account the concept of availability not relying on absolute abundance but industrial production working within a society).
something has value because the society has agreed and conditioned its self to the belief that it has value, even when it has no physical use.
for this reason you can have, especially when working with multiple sapient species the concept of faith based currency. A currency that is not backed by anything physical *no rocks, metals, mana crystals*, except where the specific planet may tell the planet side citizens it does just to ease their tensions, but interspecies it really isn’t.
the currency representing some *exchange and service value* within the broader multi-species empire and so long as the means to reproduce the currency its self can be regulated and controlled by the society’s higher ups then there is a system of control/cooperation via this exchange.
In fact in real life much of the money in circulation has no real physical backing and has exceeded the monetary value of gold banks and what not and is based more on various internal conditions regarding trade value between nations.
How much and what the society has to offer impacting their currency’s value to other currency systems; and create a galactic standard good across any world within that empire that has what value it has as an agreement within the empire, federation, trade collective, etc…
Now of course those goods and services will have their value in that they can be exchanged for said currency, local craft, local entertainment, exotic energy sources, labor, etc… but that is something exchanged for the currency. So the backers of the empire could claim that the currency is backed by any number of things used to exchange for it like some reward system. It all comes down to what the different civilizations are willing to accept.
This can get *interesting* if planets retain their local autonomy and have their own local currencies based on local resources, beliefs, and psychologies. Like Planet B has natural mana crystals that take ages to grow and their currency locally is said to be backed by its value, they exchange this currency for federation collective currency; even though these are not backed by the same thing. Same when working with other planets via trade directly. Like Planet C is still diamond based, but they still exchange currency with the third party to deal with each other as they agreed on the shared value of the collective currency over their own local currencies.
go far enough up and you end up with some ascended or above species that is just handing out points like a game as their form of currency as any monetary exchange for goods and services only has value as a game system to them or because its a way to interact with less advanced civilizations and obtain new ideas and goods they hadn’t thought of before…and even then just be “playing along”…
and in the end it trickles down to the less advanced who obsess over material things so insist the encrypted augmented darkmatter super quantum bits or whatever used to denote their bank accounts has to equal some physical value rather than acknowledging it only has value because everyone has agreed to exchange goods and services at specific relative rates with the currency in question.
Also convenient that nobody has to remember to draw the wisps consistently.
Just like with Terre’s hair, and Dabbles’ ticker-tape corset :D
The naughty weather storn dress dabbler hacked for Cora at syds return home party.
Forgot that one :(
In my wasted (or not, depending on point of view) youth I knew several girls who would have thought that outfit was the BEST. THING. EVER. The boys around them would not have disagreed.
On that note surprised he didn’t make the curving stripes on her body be like the shifting stripes on Ferril from Bloodrayne 2
I wonder if they get “the banana spilts”
Yeah, I cant see any way that this could pausibly go wrong.
Oops, sorry that never happened before, “possibly”
Gold could be useful for trading with less advanced cultures that still highly value it.
Also, with the whole emotional spectrum access that some races can do, such as a succubus and lust/sex as one example, if a “client” that values gold is required to pay in gold, it’s bound to cause some level of emotional distress, especially if they are greedy, and either feed on that, or gather and store it for trade with a race that has need/desire for it.
Kind of losing interest, I like to see Sydney learn some new stuff. Like more action.
That’s the downside of a webcomic. Sometimes it feels like it’s taking much longer when you’re reading it in the present, vs binge-reading it. It’s a necessary evil of the format. Fortunately we have a fun forum to discuss the comic each page to distract from that. :)
that’s true I remember how the fight at the former steakhouse (did they reopen? would they let ARCanything back?) seems to drag on and on and on when it came out. now it reads very well.
a voice whispers ‘Siege of Mechanicsburg’ several loud thumps later voice is not heard again.
Yes EXACTLY! :)
The restaurant fight was EXCRUCIATINGLY slow for me, if you included the Vehemence fight. It was over a year just at that that one fight and it was long the most annoying part of the webcomic for me.
Then I later reread it as part of binging the comic…. and it read a LOT smoother. Webcomics are funny that way. They can be excruciatingly slow when you’re reading ‘in the moment’ but they flow very well when you’re binging it, and I’ve learned that it’s just the way most webcomics are, especially if the comics are not every day (which is quite difficult for ANY webcomic creator to do – it’s impressive that DaveB manages the level of detail he does twice a week, and he does space it out well by making the updates on Mondays and Thursdays)
Holy cow, Siege of Mechanicsburg has been going on for-freaking-ever. It’s one of those comics that is getting to the point where I, the reader, has almost lost track of what’s actually going on. I really hope it picks up the pace eventually. I quit reading LFG because of that – literally forgot what the hell they were doing and just gave up.
You talking about “Girl Genius”? They have moved on from that Siege and doing other things
I quit reading both GG and LFG years ago because nothing. ever. happens. I’ve checked back on each a couple times since, and seemed like there were no new characters or significant developments.
LFG they have entered Richard’s purse, which turned out to be another world, and then that world and their world kinda collided
Agatha may or may not be headed towards becoming a Queen (and they found a portal to that lost Amazonian queendom)
Thanks for catching me up, see you in 2026 for the next equivalent summary. :D
When she says “unpeeled banana,” does she mean one that doesn’t have any peel, or one that still has it?
Unpeeled is still pretty much like they come from the large woody fern-like plant. We used to have a banana “tree” in our back yard in Hawaii, they only superficially resemble a tree, as in bigger than 5YO me, I think it might have been taller than my mother or father but that was over 50 years ago, and I’ve died once since then (4 times if you believe my customer loyalty card for Charon’s Ferry), so memory might be a little suspect on that.
My general guess would be ‘banana that still has the peel on it, and has not yet been peeled to get to the soft insides of the fruit.
Maybe the banana has been peeled and then the skin has been put back on the banana, thus unpeeled. Best of both worlds.
English, gotta love it’s ambiguity.
That would be repeeled
Or depeeled, dispeeled, expeeled, antipeeled, contrapeeled, , counterpeeled etc.
English, a bucket of ways to say the same thing.
A very political language with its ability to say one thing and mean the opposite.
isn’t that the appeal of it?
### Will Wight
I like the Cradle series by Will Wight
It is my favorite western interpretation of cultivation and mystical martial arts
On his blog Will Wight mentions action and plot development are more important than dragging out the story ( filler or info dumps ) so when in doubt Will Wight cuts non action scenes and can explain in more details on his active social media
10 novels out of the planned 12 are currently out ( Unsouled to Reaper, next up Dreadgod )
A lot of light novels/ manga/ anime seem to be mostly filler, taking until chapter 200 before a couple even kisses
I like the cradle series because very little filler
(https://www.amazon.com/Unsouled-Cradle-Book-Will-Wight-ebook/dp/B01H1CYBS6/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2U84FSYPNY9IM&keywords=will+wight+cradle+series&qid=1652386729&sprefix=wil+wi%2Caps%2C67&sr=8-1)
### My Dress Up Darling
I also like slice of life manga/ anime like My Dress Up Darling. If you are going to give me 1000 chapters of filler, I find I like a genre that is 100% filler
### Bruce Sentar
Some Grrl Power readers may not like Cradle due to a lack of harem elements
An interesting take on harem is Bruce Sentar Mana Master ( a Mage’s Cultivation Book 1 )
Mage’s power come from their bonded beasts with some beasts being monster girls
Due to luck super power, the protagonist has only sexy, maximum level, monster girls
Due to dual cultivation, power amplification, secondary super power, the protagonist collects a harem of wifes in addition to the monster girls
Currently two trilogies in the series
I did not like the 6th book ( felt rushed ) and I skipped lots of the 1st book ( I like TTRPG campaigns were players start out at level 5-15 ) but books 2 to 5 were interesting for a mega harem title
(https://www.amazon.com/Mana-Master-Mages-Cultivation-Book-ebook/dp/B08MDHLY6V/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3R33VJGSY956U&keywords=bruce+sentar+mana+master&qid=1652387629&sprefix=+Bruce+Se%2Caps%2C68&sr=8-1)
I should point out that Efreets are supposed to be a type of Djinn, so saying it like that is a bit weird.
I should point out that Efreets are supposed to be a type of Djinn, so saying it like that is a bit weird.
Also, the three wishes were a promise to do three things for the person who freed them, not the common portrayal of reality warping.
Just to be clear, that’s IRL, and just how I understand it, presumably the comic is going by other interpretations.
This is true and why I loved this comic I saw once and have a hard time finding again where a guy frees a djinn and tries to get clever with the wishing to get lots of wishes…only to be informed the djinn is under no obligation to actually grant wishes and is doing so as a thank you for freeing it.
What you’re really selling with these book recommendations is Kindle Unlimited subs. Between a few purchases and browsing the others, Amazon is now suggesting a dozen series for me to read.
Parfait is just so damned adorable….I can see why dabbler is so protective
She really is, isnt she?
Also when you have total matter= energy=magic conversion you can pretty much create any element you want in huge volumes. no one thing is more or less valuable then any another thing except in how much energy it used to create it. unless of course its only to available to the elite.
That’s only if magically created substances have the same metaphysical properties as their naturally occuring counterparts. Further, since most post Iron elements have to be forged in the explosive deaths of super-massive stars, it’s a good bet that the energy needed to create even a reasonably small amount of said elements is going to be prohibitive on anything like an industrial scale.
Creating a single Kilogram of gold ex nihilo would take on the order of the energy released by a 22 megaton bomb exploding… assuming the bomb exploded with ~98% efficiency… which they don’t. It would also require overcoming Uncertainty, which (as a fundamental law) can’t really be overcome without actual magic. Even if you’re only fusing protons and neutrons, you’re looking at the energy of a 200 kiloton bomb for 1kg. Mining is always going to be more cost effective. Always.
Astatine (sp?) and Francium are probably still difficult because they have such small half lives (8 hours 1 minute and 20 minutes respectively) plus they are just SO unstable. I think they’re the rarest naturally-occuring elements in the universe. Not just Earth. The entire known universe. I read somewhere that if you mined the entirety of Earth, you might find one ounce of astanine before it annihilates itself.
But it’s just something I read. Anyone else know for sure? I know that the atomic numbers of 85 and 87 are just… incredibly unstable for some reason.
Not to sound rude but the question comes down to “so what?” on those elements.
Are they theorized to be useful in some way? If not, it doesn’t matter how rare they are. At least not to me and one imagines many things that don’t think like *average* humans.
One aspect of the human thought process I never fully grasped, especially in relation to *no physical use* items is assigning value simply because they are rare.
Now there are certain things I get why humans assign value to them, certain metals, stones, gems, and crystals. Due to the primate part of the brain associating them with ripe fruit, fresh meat, and clean water. Apparently add that its something that can’t be consumed and the brain goes to “its magical and special” territory. and yes, even societies that had/have these materials in abundance still used them for decoration and jewelry so even without assigning value based on rarity they still held them to some higher status than other materials…otherwise why throw gold into a sink hole for your gods.
but to assume something has any value simply because it is rare is…weird.
Just…sorry…its really fricken WEIRD, like watching a dolphin being sexually aroused by fire levels of what am I looking at and why?
If something has use (technological, medical, consumption…psychedelics, entertainment, etc…), is aesthetically pleasing (for whatever psychological or social reason a given species has to think so), or something along those lines I get it…but sometimes I see things like this where its assumed because something is rare that if you can get it and keep it then it just naturally has some incredible value simply for being rare.
I mean I could see an element, say some ugly crystal, that can’t be used for anything (not even as a weapon, fuel, or altered to make something “pretty”_ but if it is rare, say you find out only like a ton of it is formed throughout the entire aalaxy. Humans would covet it, seek it out, and even kill each other just to proclaim that they among all other humans personally own the thing there is little of.
On some level I know where this comes from…its the hoarding ape, its the resources are limited and the one that can hold and control those resources curries favor from the other apes in the troop and may even cause members of other troops, such as females, to sneak over to the troop with the resource.
but this really should stop, when its not really a “resource”. Yet it still seems to be there; the “I only want that ball because someone else has it, and there was only so many on the field, even if I don’t want to play with it*…which again that at least is a toy and once can concieve a future use for.
but if something has NO USE AT ALL, even from an aesthetic side…then why covet it ever regardless of how little of it there is. and no basing currency as backed by it isn’t a real use its an excuse, you could base your money on anything money is a social agreement of value so you don’t have give away stuff just to get stuff and services in exchange. Saying its back by this pile of rocks is just internal justification so you feel better and the people less likely to question things will go along with what society says.
It is never about hoarding ressources, but asserting dominance. monopolizing this really rare yet useless thing , means you have the power( to monopolize (useless) ressources). fear of missing out erase whatever was in those parenthesis.
for the sake of fairness I have looked up both elements,
humans can have value for Astatine as it can be used to fight cancer.
Francium however has no use.
the point of the discussion however was assigning value based solely on rarity however.
there is no way that can go right, but YES Let’s do it! my chaotic side really wants to see what happens
its just Ice Cream. they make 1.5 billion pounds of it every year. most of it is even listeria free.
Mostly asbestos-free too.
This is going to end horribly.
Let’s do it!
No. It’s going to end funnily!
its going to end up sticky.
Reminds me of that one SCP that could only always fail to meet expectation. All expectations. Tell her to fly and she could only hover, tell her to make 682 200% dead and she can make it 100% dead (then 50% when 682 told her to finish it).
Lady; she’s a succubus. She can make ALL your wishes come true.
Once she turns 18
So has anyone ever seen the animated film “The Magic Pudding”? Nothing can go wrong magically wishing for second helpings
No, but have heard of the Magic Porridge Pot (believe it was Pease Porridge, or at least the nursery rhyme mentions peas… )
“Could you “fail” back to one whole b-split?”
THIS! THIS IS THE KIND OF IN-STORY NERD-CRAFTING I ENJOY IMMENSELY!
For value tot spacefaring species:
I think gold would still be valuable tot them, because scarcity is a relatieve effect(read if we use a lot of gold and generate less gold it becomes more valuable)
Even if there’re just as much demons as humans they obviously have more expensive machinery reliant on gold and thus a more hopefull goldarket than it looks to many of us.
As in materials I expect tot be really valuable to spacefaring civilisations:
Low background radiation lead, deuterium andere tritium poort water(like most water on earth) and carbon-12. For these materials would be really usefull fort building spaceships and are really scarce in space, because they require a lot of time and/or energy to form and special circumstance onder which are some very rare and life supporting. Things like a planet or a neutron star collission.
Gold actually has some pretty good uses, if it weren’t so darned expensive. It’s even better than lead for roofing and plumbing, for instance.
Huh, neat. So while a gold toilet may be a gross display of wealth, actually using gold for the piping that supports a toilet could be a worthwhile investment.
I’m fairly sure that I’ve heard that it’s also a fantastic conductor like copper and silver are. Again, just too expensive in our economy to be commonly used for that.
Gold is expensive to use for the main wiring, but it is used as a plating on contact surfaces between components. As you say, it has a very good conductivity, and being malleable means it easily deforms to match any non-flat-ness in the opposing contact
Sydney no teaching potential enemy minions rule lawyering!!!
I accidentally read it as “one bar of gold (aka drunken location) and an idiot”
Okay, no one else noticed how Sydney just insulted Parf by implying she never went to College?
You are not smartest one around Sydney, you are barely the smartest one in a single-occupancy lift (being a smart-arse doesn’t count!)
Parfait is 18
Sidney knows this.
this is not an insult but a *maybe this gets covered in college* kind of joke comment. She doesn’t even know if there is a college course specifically for wish granting.
you can put away your hate boner for Sidney before you rub that poor thing raw.
Not an intentional insult, but Sydney has a habit of believing herself to be the smartest person around and tries to teach experts their job or creatures and other supers how to use their innate abilities better
she is a hyper active (to the point of needing medication for it) nerd who has spent her entire life surrounded by this exact same subject matters; only as hypotheticals, fiction, and fantasy. Her brain has likely burned her reactions to these subjects tracks long ago into these specific think it out and what ifs pick at the corners reactions…that its now very real, and how much of it is real and how much fiction has not been well defined for her; especially as she keeps turning around and finding out all these other things are real.
she was just told Efreet/Djinn are real, her wish question was met not with (that’s just stories) and instead, yes that’s real too.
and she just came from a conversation where 4th tier or above entities were being discussed who can manipulate the firmament of reality.
So the line between what in her overly active imagination head between what is real and what is fiction is likely all sorts of fuzzy right now and like a child sticking things in the electric socket she wants to test the limits of her environment by pure impulse with little to no control over those impulses.
really given this is playing with a neuralogical condition inhibiting her processing skills and this is the sort of thing that could cause mental breakdowns in people who claim to have a firm grasp on reality. She should be pitied and applauded for not constantly asking,
“is this real? is this real? is this real? is this real?” over and over again listing off every spell, monster, magic rule, super power, super power rule, devised across fiction and fantasy going back to the epic of Gilgamesh though last month’s issue of Captain Marvel.
You are saying she should be applauded for not acting like a child who asks “Why?” fifty dozen times in a row or asks “Are we there yet?” every five minutes?
as someone with ADHD, but not at the level where medication is needed (anymore), yes. Not rewarded, but at least recognized she is making an effort. It isn’t easy wrangling your own brain, especially when you are surrounded by your subject of interest, sensory overload. Which DaveB has been showing she has developed some control, at first she was more into asking everyone random questions, she has taken a more laid back on that; but when presented with something new being confirmed to exist and not just in her fiction interests; it is amazing she has learned to not hop around like she did before and go right into their faces squeeing out a hundred questions in a row.
the child analogy is offensive but not entirely wrong, it comes down to impulse control combating your natural curiosity. A child is still learning about the world, and have very little to no impulse control, so will be asking constant questions about everything around them. I actually hate when I see parents at the store shutting down their child’s questions about something new rather than at least giving a quick answer….also some flash back issues there.
Sidney has the impulse control issue with the curiosity and has been emerged into what is effectivly a new world for her. She could dismiss most things as not existing, but instead this is a mixed genre setting so a lot of her interests keep being confirmed to be real and her strongest impulse/instinct will be to set the boundaries. What in her experience was real and what was entirely fiction. With the impulse control issue this becomes constant questions, joking around when she puts her own foot in her mouth because her curiosity annoys or offends the supers, supernaturals, and aliens as she asks too personal of questions sometimes or fails to read to the room (see both of those at the Twilight Council chambers in regards to vampires).
She was the expert when it came to the fiction versions, so a bit of ego she needs to work on as well of course, in regards to relating her fiction based experiences with the real world equivalent…not that I still don’t have on the bingo chart she is a Haruhi Suzamiya scenario and some higher form of her is reacting to her desires and wants to alter the timeline to fit those. A far out theory, but the 1-1 similarities pile up enough to keep it on the board at least.
why haul it out of a gravity well? Asteroid mining…
Probably because most truly large deposits of stuff are going to be found on planets with gravity wells, and places with atmospheres are safer to mine than places surrounded by hard vacuum.
Given their inertial dampeners and stardrives, they don’t have any problem with gravity wells.
to every ‘rule’
https://futurism.com/meet-asteroid-thats-made-5-trillion-worth-platinum
Kinda makes you wonder of djinn grant wishes because they are bound to, because they do it for laughs or because they feed off the wish energy like succubi feed of tantric energy.
Also, does hair made of smoke even *need* to be washed? Heck, I imagine throwing water on that hair might not be good.
Probably because most truly large deposits of stuff are going to be found on planets with gravity wells, and places with atmospheres are safer to mine than places surrounded by hard vacuum.
Given their inertial dampeners and stardrives, they don’t have any problem with gravity wells.
eeeh, this is going to turn into banan-kakke isnt it.
No post technic society is going to value gold purely for its decorative or monetary value. What they are going to value are rare metals that have useful properties. Iridium, Osmium, Vanadium, Chromium, Platinum, Gold, Tantillum… perhaps other rare substances. H3 in high quantities. Noble gases, expecially the higher tier ones. Thanks that can be used for many important purposes.
If we want to go all in the sci-fi we can say Dark Matter is highly valuable…and not as star ship fuel.
so speculative physics here: Dark Matter has mass, it has gravity, and while it makes up the majority of the mass of the universe it could be very dangerous for beings from the…shall we call it electromagnetically reactive regions of space to explore and bring back samples from the *umbra attractive* regions of space.
the logic here being that Dark Matter could have many variations, not unlike elements, soils, compounds, metals, complex biological like structures, etc… the big difference is Dark matter is only called this because it doesn’t produce or interact with the electromagnetic spectrum *does not produce, reflect, or absorb things like light, radiowaves, gamma rays, etc…and we only knows its there thanks to gravity lensing and influence on other stellar objects via its gravity.
so not the safest thing to explore, imaginging shining a flashlight and it not reflecting off anything or being absorbed, just you see the glow in the end but no beam appears through the DM Atmospheres etc..it wouldn’t be like a world of shadows (that requires absorbing light(, but an invisible world, you see the stars beyond even when walking on a planet or asteroid…now try to imagine expeditions to try and sample or interact with such a world…and you could be just as invisible to anything there, invisible solid objects…perhaps using DM samples to produce some sort of equipment just to see these worlds.
It has also been speculated that Dark Matter is not produced by supernovas, so it would have NONE of the familiar elements.
(there is some speculation that some electromagnetic waves and particles do react with Dark Matter such as neutrinos, which don’t really react with the matter we all know and interact with).
So it can be reasoned that due to the vastly different origin of the matter *unknown forces produce Dark Matter and change it, maybe dark stars or space/time fountains etc…*, so molecular assemblers, even the atomic and energy converters can’t make Dark Matter due to the exotic difference is mass origin.
thus, dangerous to explore, dangerous to sample, thus rare despite being so common at the universe scale. and perhaps may have some properties that can be used, such as building a neutrino receiver and transmitter.
My wish is that Sydney not be granted any wishes… I also wish I had got this joke in earlier.
Well, time didn’t rewind, I obviously have no genies granting me anything.
Check out Tao Wongs Thousand Li series. Like the Aether’s series it is compelling and will most likely hold your interest.
Dibs on Sydney in a large banana peel filled with whipped cream!
Parfait: I GRANT-
Dabbler: Uh, maybe you-
P: YOUR WISH!!
*bright flash of light consumes the three women*
Parfait *licking whipped cream off her body*: Mmm!
Daabbler *pulls chocolate-coated cherry out of her cleavage, eats it*: Okay, I’m not complaining…
Sydney: Uh fnk- *pauses, pulls unpeeled banana out of her mouth* I think it needs work.
Asteroid mining for gold is being investigated mostly because a lot of the gold on Earth is buried inaccessibly deeply. While a 100 foot asteroid might only have a few micrograms, it would probably be practical to crush the entire thing and centrifuge it. And then you’d have all the other materials nicely separated too.
Getting there and getting it back to Earth unfortunately more than wipes out any cost savings in mining techniques (hilariously understating things there). So far anyway.