Grrl Power #1323 – Plans within plans
Sciona is poor at feigning ignorance, (or non-superiority) so imagine her first few lines coming across a little bored sounding, like she’s just reading lines with her college roommate who is suuuuper into her drama classes, and Sciona just… can’t. But not so much so that she’s immediately suspicious sounding. Ellie was kind of distracted penciling in runes, so Sciona got away with it. If she keeps drooling over those spell sigil blueprints, she might finally trigger Ellie’s situational awareness.
Sciona is there as… actually I never came up with her cover name. Sangre Mago? No, that’s just “blood mage” in Spanish. She’s not that stupid. Valeria? No, sorry to anyone out there named Valeria, but that’s straight up a bad guy’s name. I think the first time I ever heard it, it was attached to some cartoon henchwoman. I can’t remember what cartoon. It was some sort of G.I. Joe-level cartoon as I recall. Also it sounds too much like venereal. She wouldn’t use Escorpia’s name either. You can believe that any foreign supers involved in crime are tracked if there’s any evidence of their activity. Actually foreign supers not involved in crime are kept tabs on as well. Officially, this isn’t acknowledged, and the practice is defended with academic reasons, like “We want to know what all possible superpowers are so we can extrapolate future possibilities and also it’d be nice to know if someone has the ability specifically to teleport people out of a caved-in mine or see anything happening within twenty feet of a bowl of borscht.” But obviously the intelligence agencies want to know if anyone has borscht-voyance and make adjustments to the cafeteria offerings the Joint Chiefs have access to.
Georgina Constanza? No, wait… Isabella Mary Elizabeth Jesusina Concepcion Ferreira Marroquín. No one calls her Iza. Six Times Guy might, might earn use of her full first name at some point. If she hooks back up with Deus at some point… Well, he would call her Sciona. He might actually call her Sci-Sci (pronounced Cici) if he wants to get stabbed.
Anyway, Sciona/Isabella is ostensibly there to audit budget… stuff for the Senator’s office. Basically just getting an update on the exciting new secret project. It’s probably being written into the budget as one of those underground neutron studying bunkers. Which honestly would probably be a pretty hard sell these days. Oh, I know, an underground apocalypse seed bunker.
The new vote incentive is up! (Finally.)
I’m revisiting a panel from a recent page, but I included some comic reactions and a few outfit swaps, so hopefully you all enjoy it. I also plussed up the art from the comic version a bit, though I suspect that despite the time I spent on that, not a whole lot of people would immediately notice that, so I’m gratuitously pointing it out here.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Acting like Dabbler as a hick girl with Cooter.
“I am so ignorant about this magic stuff. Look at you with the funny squiggly lines and reciting the fancy words, pouring liquids and adding ingredients like some children making a mud pie”
If you want a job well done get a nerd to do it, just don’t expect them to keep it a secret.
Neutron observatory? I am pretty sure the Department of Energy has one at Fermilab, outside Chicago. Neutrino observatories are underground, but this one may not be deep enough for that purpose.
Noooo, don’t spoil it for the author.
A forest theme for the dungeon? Just how many trees are the going to need to plant in that desert?
Catalina de Erauso y Pérez de Galarraga , aka la Monja Alférez is more appropriate due to the body count …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_de_Erauso
But she is more sexy like Julie d’Aubigny aka Mademoiselle Maupin or La Maupin…
Panel 4 – Sigil on the far left: Nice reference to Black Mesa
Also Diehard with the Nakotomi Plaza and that Stargate Chevron (looks like one) for the Taurus constellation. With those, might summon some bearer bonds and who knows with that (potential) stargate chevron.
One of the symbols is Elder Scrolls writing I think? Whatever its name. Reverse Alternian, if you’re hip.
Looks like a prime opportunity to make a few ‘minor adjustments’ to some of those runes and make the dungeon far more hazardous – or even slave it to Sciona’s will.
A bit more likely, she’ll get her own private island somewhere. And a metric fuckton or so of Palladium for the reasons mentioned in the comic. Maybe get her sugar-Senator to fund it all.
“one of those underground neutron studying bunkers” Given the rather spectacular unexplained light shows and the pagan pagents that crop up over the site now and then, it might be plausibly argued that CERN might be a secret dungeon project… ;3
Alright, If I take the book to be using the 6 x 9 standard size and use the 4th panel but account for the spine then each plate appears to be roughly 12 inches wide, slightly smaller to the inside and slighly larger to the outside. I will guesstimate that they are 24 inches long and 6 inches high, sloping at 45 degrees in the last 6 inches.
I think that gives me 1512 cubic inches per plate. Presuming exactly 2,000 plaes we have 3,024,000 cubic inches of Palladium.
Palladium is notes as 197g per cubic inch so 595,728kg at $30k per kilo for:
US$17,871,840,000
Seventeen billion, eight hundred and seventy one million, eight hundred and forty million dollars, U.S.
…I have this image of Deus acting like Montgomery Burns on hearing that value and simply pulling his wallet from his right-front pocket.
HOWEVER, Elle notes they could use a lot LESS Palladium, so maybe we could presume half for $8,935,920,000
My best estimate on Hepatizon price per kilogram is $8,800 for a cost of US$5,242,406,400
So its either a saving just under US$4b presuming half the amount in Palladium or saving of US$14.5b for the full weight.
…If Sciona is about to indicate she’s keen to make it Palladium, she could probably wrangle $4b with effort. More likely she might know a better source or a technological method of aquiring it… Heck, I guess the Geo super from page 638 who siphoned an olympic swimming pool worth of gold from the Earth’s core might be able to easily supply.
*Page 368
Maybe not so fast.
First, the book in panel five appears larger than 6×9 – more like 8×10.
The rune segments in comic panel four to the left of the book look to be at least as wide as the open book and the top areas are more or less squarish – so about 250 square inches per rune.
Second, there is no need for the segments to be solid Palladium. As Elsbeth says in panel three and four: the final installation will be done on “plates”, not solid segments. The plates could be 1/4 inch thick or even thinner since they are to be acid etched, not milled or stamped.
At 1/4 inch that is about 125,000 in^3 for the 2000 plates or about $750M for the project – much more “reasonable” for a government project.
However, the thickness required is dictated by the amount of Palladium or Hepatizon needed for the “mana reaction” for which we have no clue – only that they differ by a factor of 800.
Couldn’t Max and Sydney go grab some palladium heavy asteroids or something? I don’t know how hard it is to find mineral rich asteroids but still
Probably relatively easy for supers. But I anticipate cries of “Won’t someone think of the world economy?!”
It doesn’t affect the economy if it’s not in circulation. Viz the Super with the vault full of bars of gold he’s extracted from the Earth’s core…
They need to go talk to *him*, he could probably extract that from the core without too much trouble.
Max and Sydney are quick, but not that quick on an interplanetary scale, and space (including the Solar System) is a big place. To travel to the asteroid belt by flight would likely make them unavailable for too long. Sydney can’t use the gateway option for various reasons: it would further alarm aliens about humans using Nth tech, and she likely hasn’t the right coordinates recorded in the orb.
OTOH, this is a service Cora could do with ease. Or otherwise wait until the USA builds its first spaceship.
Those are on hold right now because the last one they launched went boom!
Or just ask Cora who in the galaxy can sell it for a reasonable price.
The main problem is how do you tell a palladium heavy asteroid from the trillions of other identical asteroids floating in a volume of 16.384 septillion cubic km of space.
– finding the particular asteroids might be a problem. We’ve speculated about content, but it’s not certain.
– visiting them is likely to take a while. As Sydney found out, Mach 16 isn’t all that fast in interplanetary terms. She can gate, but it’s unlikely there’s a destination in the asteroid belt, she doesn’t know how to set new ones, and even if there is one there’s no guarantee an appropriate asteroid is nearby.
– extracting the palladium may also be a problem. It looks like most of the terrestrial palladium is mined as part of a mine for other metals. Our processing is set up for that. We also have no experience with space mining. I suppose Cora could help with that, but that depends on the specific laws/customs involved.
For those that also had that question Hepatizon is a alloy of copper with some gold and silver and is somewhat purple.
Hepatizon (aka Black Corinthian Bronze) is also a contemporary of Orichalcum (hopefully all three types of Orichalcum).
It was the second most valued type of Bronze of ancient antiquity.
I am surprised that someone even knows of it, let alone had the idea of using it in a magical setting as @DaveB has.
In my nerd experience, Valeria is far from being an especially villainous name, and I like it more than the options you chose (although I am biased for SO reasons). However Isabella works in a pinch and fits her Latina cover.
Sciona still has work to do about perfecting her social skills, but given her starting point, she made an amazing improvement already.
Funny that Elspeth and Sciona look like hairstyle sisters, and damn they are gorgeous. Six Times Guy is a lucky man if you don’t mind a dangerous lifestyle (hints are he doesn’t). Hopefully we are going to learn his name at some point, since STG is a mouthful. I think there are good chances for that, since Sciona feels increasingly fond of the guy. For all his impressive proficiency, however, I bet she would jump at the chance of another hook-up with Deus, tsundere as she may act. Hilariously enough, Harem and Sciona now are eskimo sisters.
Good to see she puts her Chief of Staff cover to good use to be the hands-on kind of supervillainess. I wonder how much effort she had to put up to hide Escorpia’s criminal past at background checks, although I bet it was far from impossible with her current combo of blood magic and superpowers.
I mean, Valeria is the name of Reed & Sue Richards’ daughter, so that’s a positive reference. Then again, she’s only called that because Doctor Doom got to choose the name…
And a fling (rival pirate) of Conan the Barbarian. She stars in the excellent “Red Nails” short story.
Given the usual penchant for nicknames, I fully expect STG to be called “Sixgun” or just “Six” soon.
I wonder what this is leading up to…?!?
Isn’t Valeria a place name in the “Lensman” books?
…On earth Palladium is 30k per g. Wonder what it is in the wider ‘verse? Can magicked-up palladium work? Wonder how many alchemists are needed to make 2k plates of it?
Is Maxima’s skin or hair an equivalent to Palladium in this instance? Is our favorite sociopathic business tyrant (who’s currently trying to figure out how to seduce Maxima) going to pull out all the stops to make this dungeon the best version of one in the known galaxy?
Stay tuned, Halo-friends!
To anybody with the hi res version, does it seem like anybody else is there, or is it just the two of them? The comic gives the impression that they are the only two people there, which should just not happen. A top secret dungeon site with no big group of guards, management staff, or other techs involved? Do you want your dungeon plan compromised, because this is how you get your dungeon plan compromised!!
The guards are all around the perimeter fencing, which is at a 5 mile radius to the site we’re seeing in the comic. Likewise, the technicians are in their control building a mile from this point.
Global production of palladium is about 210,000 kg/year. World supply is maintained near the annual production.
I am guessing Sciona is going to make some…subtle modifications of the runes?
Nothing to easily spotted, but enough to give her some nice beasty down the line?
Now then, Just a drop of blood here, and this rune changes from “Tree” to “Treant”….And change this one over here from “Fruit” to “Imp”….
Oh, I guess Elsbeth’s organization wouldn’t have any reason to think that is Sciona.
The term “Blood Mage” would be “Mago de sangre” if you want to use it.
Heh, “Valeria” made me think of Devil May Care.