Grrl Power #1121 – Phenomenal Cosmic Roll of the Dice
Will they unleash a superpowered supernova? Merge into a Tyrant type creature? Or will Varia just attain the ability to come up with dumb pun supranyms? That one would be less useful than Bird Radar, cause I can think of quite a few uses for that power. Nemesis and Omni-Gestalt are really pretty similar powers, or power sets really, since both potentially contain “all” powers. Nemesis likely has a smaller catalog because it’s purely a defensive ability. It’s hard to imagine Bird Radar as a counter to some specific bird attack power. Although… maybe if someone could control birds and also make them invisible? Eh, sure, I can see it. And if someone could take the form of a giant burrito and the only way to defeat him was to make him boiling hot on the outside and still have a chunk of bean-ice on the inside, then Nemesis could generate a microwave laser power, so while the power is activated defensively, it can still create offensive abilities.
The January Vote Incentive is up! The new on is being worked on. Time for the quarterly fashion show that Anvil puts Maxima through. Can you detect the theme?
Variant outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon.
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Of course, he could be lying, and actually have death touch as a superpower.
We have seen death toll’s power before so. Not likely.
He could have several abilities. We never saw him touch someone directly, unless we count both time he nemesissed Jiggawatt, did we?
If he had another power he could have used it against Archon, but he didn’t attack when they provoked him, or when they prepared to defeat him.
He also touched Anvil and Stalwart, and Hiro if you include stomping Hiro’s face.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-242-well-that-sucked/
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-243-taking-all-comers/
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-244-recruitus-interruptus/
He wasn’t touching them, he was wearing gloves.
Right now he’s taking off his glove.
My shipping senses are tingling
I still think it would be cool if this resulted in a Fusion. Imagine Varia shouting “Power Overwhelming!” in the voice of a Protoss Archon.
I’m sorry, but all I get from “Power Overwhelming” anymore is “I’m The Boss,” by Big Bad Bosses.
Thinking of the most obvious outcomes, one of two things happens.
Either these abilities simply cancel each other out, and as a result absolutely nothing happens at all.
Or… even just barely grazing each other creates a phenomenon similar to a matter/antimatter explosion, as these two powers violently react to each other.
There is a chance that Death Toll’s power won’t activate at all. If his power only reacts to attack, then there is no reason to assume that his power will activate by just touching someone.
If that is the case, then there is a third option that only Varia’s power will activate.
Given what happened with Portal Eyes, there’s no reason to assume PBS won’t have a power activate. (PBS referring to the name Sidney gave him, i.e. Periwinkle Butt Sniffer)
Oh lawdy I forgot that nickname!!!
I kinda hope Varia flips the script on him somehow, like a surprise judo flip or a very non aggressive restraint. Can his power work to bust free of handcuffs? They aren’t attacking him, and even if he struggles all he’ll do is chafe his wrist, so what he gains strong skin?
Most likely, forcibly holding him will count as an attack, or at least forcing him into the position will.
We do know that chokehold counts as an attack.
Sure, but we’ve yet to see any evidence that his power can counter mundane attacks…
Now that I said that… I’m getting some SERIOUS Bink from Xanth vibes from his power.
Xanth is a novel series about a magical fantasy kingdom with a very convoluted location.
In Xanth, all humans born there are born with a power unique to them. Magical powers, called talents, never repeat themselves, though there can be similar talents.
Bink is possibly the most powerful being to ever be born in Xanth. His talent is… well, it’s kind of hard to say… Basically magic can’t hurt him… his talent activates automatically, and only when there is danger in what happens. So if someone with the talent of transforming living things into other living things were to do it to help him, it’d work. But if that same person decided to try to turn him into a bug to squash him, it wouldn’t work… Except it would work…
Ok, see… the problem is that his talent defends itself against being discovered. So most of his life he thought he was talentless. But there was a long string of really weird coincidences that followed him his entire life. Like someone tried to use their talent to summon flying swords to kill him, he slipped on a serendipitous banana peel and they missed.
Someone tried to use seriously powerful magic to suss out what his talent was and an earthquake would occur, or suddenly a potion of silence would fall off a shelf and prevent the spell from being cast, things like that.
The talent VICIOUSLY defended its own secrecy to the point that the ONLY person who managed to figure it out was only allowed to figure it out because it was the only way to get him to stop trying to find some way to kill Bink.
Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that the reason for the talent’s secret nature is that while it has very very limited abilities to defend against non-magical attacks. For example, he lost a finger to an unenchanted dagger brought in from outside of the kingdom of Xanth once.
When you consider that he was unable to counter Sydney and Harem’s shenanigans regarding placing googly eyes on his mask, it’s clear he can’t counter non-aggressive super power use, and he can’t counter non-aggressive mundane activities. So he might not be able to counter handcuffs, and maybe not even the Full Nelson.
No, we’e seen him no-sell mundane flashbangs.
Yes, he can’t counter non-attacks – but forcibly moving him against his will would absolutely count as an attack.
Except he countered Anvil’s attempt to choke him out by shocking her, and then countered her attempting to punch him by sapping her kinetic energy.
Technically, a punch is an attack, and even grapple-holds can be countered
‘Convoluted location’? It’s Florida!! The Centaur Isles are the Keys
There was a book where someone from Earth entered, and they entered from Florida
It is frequently Florida because that was where the author lived and was comfortable writing about, but was lampshaded as a magical peninsula that attached itself to Earth at various points. Xanth had been invaded multiple times in the Waves, and I think at least one of them was hinted at being Attila’s army invading through the Korean peninsula.
I’m guessing they cancel each other out?
I’m fairly certain I already know the outcome of Varia holding For Whom The Death Tolls’s hand. Nothing SEEMS to happen, mostly because Varia gains the powers of For Whom The Death Tolls, which only really activate defensively. For Whom The Death Tolls doesn’t get any benefits, because he’s not being attacked, so his powers don’t activate.
So it’s a potentially useful bit of information that has no practical application unless Varia manages to work out a way to utilise her contact abilities at a range. For which I suspect that Sydney’s previous suggestion didn’t work, or else Varia would currently have a power-belt allowing her access to a variety of useful abilities at a moment’s notice.
Varia doesn’t gain the powers of the person she’s touching, she gains a new power (that is often related to the other power.) So she won’t gain the exact same power as FWTDT.
My wild guess: She gains a power that gives her any power to protect someone, and uses it to bail out Jiggawatt.
Technically, all we know is that it hasn’t happened *yet* (on-screen at least). And I’d say that a power as versatile as FWTDT has the highest chance of having that as the outcome if it’s possible at all lol
True, but Varia’s Powers have regularly been seen to be related to an Individual’s Powers if she’s in contact with a Super. The specifics of what her powers go off of is only known to have a genetic component, and we don’t know if it takes a person’s powers into consideration, if her powers take inspiration from what a person’s powers could/should be, if there’s a sliding-scale of importance, or it’s “entirely random” based on what the author considers important.
It’s been strongly hinted that a person’s powers are linked to their genetics. Thus Varia’s power working via a genetic component already takes a person’s (potential) power into consideration.
Some evidence of this is how Varia gets similar powers from people within the same family, and Jiggawatt having a brother who also has electric based powers.
“Related to” doesn’t mean “exact same”, which was my point. Varia could gain any number of conditional powers where the conditions are fulfilled.
No, Vahriah doesn’t gain the powah of whomever she touches, because she gets a powah from even non-supers
umm hasn’t death tool i mean toll already been tested since he was already arrested once
My guess is simple: He’s been treated with whatever the prisoner who got powers is. So her touching him will unlock some powers for him… for a short time.
They also probably recruited him to study multiple super-powers. His manifesting defenses means they could have people attack him and study the powers he gets to add to their database. He’s probably a paid guinea pig as much as a bodyguard type.
Every time I look at For Whom’s skull mask I can’t help but think of Bill Engvall’s dorkfish.
Anyone else note that Varia’s lips keep changing from painted to not?
If you look carefully she always has most of her lips sucked into her mouth when her lipstick disappears. The most logical conclusion is that PBS has an allergy to an obscure chemical that is created by an interaction between her lipstick and her saliva, so whenever her lips touch her saliva his powers activate and her lipstick disappears.
Wasn’t this goon taken into custody at the end of the restaurant fight? How did he get out, and shouldn’t Arclight have done some tests on him while he was in custody to find out the answers to questions like ‘what would happen if Varia touched him?’
There were mitigating circumstances in that fight-everyone could reasonably argue they’d been aggro aura’d into fighting, so the only one arrested was Vehemence. (Aside from those with outstanding warrants, like Jabberwocky.)
you know… now I’m also curious…
we’ve seen a weird interaction between powers here before, and if we don’t get a super powered singularity i think we are fine.
DE-molecularization of bowties.
hey, bowties are cool!
shadow proclamation says so.
Prediction: Every superhuman within three miles loses their powers. Every NORMAL human within three miles GAINS superpowers.
Bear in mind, that right now, both Varia and Jigawatt are effectively trapped at the bottom of a deep dark hole, until Harem gets back to them, or Maxima liberates then. FWTDT might know this.
This is true, but he can’t really stop her either. He doesn’t know what Varia’s gestalt power is with Jiggawatt. (Magnetic powers, for those who’ve forgotten). Varia could probably wrap those bars around him without a direct attack. His defense would be “resist damage from iron bar hitting me”, not “counter the power moving the bars”
That’s why he had to dodge when Ad-visor threw the bars at him…
Perhaps he got a power that helped him dodge, or perhaps it didn’t count as an attack (because it wasn’t really, AdVisor just wasn’t paying attention to where he threw it.) Or perhaps he decided to dodge because using his power would have made more of a mess or harmed Void.
That’s pure conjecture. His defense could be any number of things, including superstrength to break the bars, heat aura to melt them, something to mess with her magnetism …
There’s no reason his power should not count forcible restraint as an attack, and it doesn’t just choose the minimum passive defense. Against Jiggawatt’s lightning attack he gets the ability to trap her, not just immunity to electricity.
Love Varia’s expression in panel 11. “So, instead of giving me a fight, you’re flipping me the bird?”
@ Voting Incentive: Are you sure you’re not supposed to be wearing a Mimic instead of the skin colouration joke, Maxima? A top only you could wear… because it would eat practically anyone else who tried it on. I mean, sure, it could easily be both, but where’s the fun comments from that.
Oooo, just figured out Peri’s power: accountability! if something can be countered, he can counter it!! that’s why he was able to shrug off ‘mundane’ attacks
Quick, deploy Ari and see if he can counter her lawyer-fu!!
I’m thinking you should be worried about summoning another lawyer with that pun. ;)
Then we’d have two lawyers involved, quite the pair-a-legal minds. I’m sure they’d have a suit-able response.
Some people say puns are the law-est form of humor. These people have bad judgment.
I will tell you this law secret but just keep it between you, me, and everyone who ever reads this comic on the internet since it is a very closely guarded bit of info among my brethren of jurispudence…
Nothing can counter good lawyer fu except another lawyer with equal or better lawyer fu.
Its like how in the Ninja 1, 2, and 3 movies only a ninja can kill a ninja. Same with lawyers.
Again shhh dont tell anyone.
Actually: the invotive is quite clever, and punny, Pander will hate it :P
Oooo, just noticed the padlock isn’t closed…
DaveB grudgingly gets a pass for pun crimes because his art and story work is just too good to allow ninja evisceration.
This Smacks me of a Phenominally Stupid Idea, especially since Death Toll could like the results and not let go.
Of course Varia’s totally going to do it right?
it’s technically any peninsula on earth as they have also been invaded by people heading to rome. eventually the portals from earth get even wilder things like sentient computers or video games as doors
I’d say Maxima hardly needs to padlock her bra.
I have to wonder why there are people that think FHTDT’s has been experimented on. He’s not a prisoner he’s an employee obviously he’s not been experimented on that’s only for the people that they’ve taken prisoner. He’s far too useful an asset to try experimenting on and most likely it’d be impossible to experiment on him.
This is an evil business venture. Do you really think the bosses wouldn’t sample their own merchandise, so to speak?
They don’t have “merchandise”. They can’t actually give superpowers, they are only conducting experiments to figure out how to do it. All they have is ideas that so far aren’t doing what they want.
Taking them yourself would be reckless for no visible benefit, especially if you already have superpowers.
My guess?
Varia’s been shown to know what she’s doing, so she doesn’t take the bait. His powers are reactive. The best ways to fight this guy are to ignore him like the pretentious fartsniffing dork he is, and to let him worry about flying debris from other combatants instead of worrying about it for him.
If I remember correctly his power doesnt just react to super powers but to anything that might be a threat to him. I seem to recall in his initial fight a large chunk of debris came flying his way and he swatted it down with obvious super strength and durability.
Varia’s power specifically defends the person she’s touching from the power she gets, so Nemesis likely won’t activate at all
Part of me indulges in the idea of this as the start of AU BNHA.
She causes people to be immune to her power acquired. He would counter that making himself vulnerable.
Or he could counter the ability she gains.
Or counter the gestalt sampling of his genetics.
1 in 3 odds of failing badly if her gained power is dangerous to humans.
Not the worse pickup line we have ever heard.
Personally, I would think them touching would either have no effect because DT’s power canceled it, or he’d be able to swap her power to whatever he wants.
Though if I was writing this, she would turn into a glowing human figure surrounded by rings of eyes and feathers like a biblically accurate angel.