Grrl Power #1327 – Booty duty peeper creeper
You can tell an alien likes you when she installs advanced space encryption on your phone for the purpose of secure sexting. Even if she thinks of you as a himbo nitwit. Of course, her general opinion is that humans and most other races are lame, so her thinking of you as a nitwit is less a targeted insult, and more of a general racial narcissism. Which is just racism, really. It’s not like there are a lot of racists that think some race other than their own is the superior one. >cough<
I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d already shown that Sydney’s space glasses had a zoom function, but there’s no way that wouldn’t be a function of super advanced space glasses. I only question if I’ve shown it before because I vaguely remember linking this video before, showing a modern smartphone zooming way out from a windmill from a plane. I think it’s a Galaxy S22 maybe? That’s not important. What’s important is that the phone has a 10x optical zoom, and a 10x digital zoom on top of that which makes for 100x overall. The digital zoom is heavily cleaned up by some sort of algorithm, preventing it from turning into a pixely mess. My point is that space optics and space algorithms would be like 100 times better, probably.
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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Sciona’s going to need the patience of at least dozen saints to not do something… rash.
Sciona pulling Sid’s head off would then become Max pulling Sciona’s head off. And finding female super bodies with mind control can’t be easy, she got very lucky.
So, this is where Sciona learns about the wonders of “paradoxical drug response”, like the way opiates give me insomnia?
By any change you have ADHD? Seems more than common among us that smaller opiate doses work more like a stimulant and for the intended effect the dosage needs to be rather heavy.
Asperger’s. Which, yes, is also associated with paradoxical drug responses.
Wow! Super rude to be reading phone texts over someone’s shoulder. Nice phone caddy, though.
Is it over the shoulder when you’re about a football field away?
I think its super rude to interrupt the lady while she reveals her evil plans to me, frankly.
“My point is that space optics and space algorithms would be like 100 times better, probably.”
There are some pretty fundamental limits on how far you can zoom and still get an image with a given sized optical system, and, without running the calculations, I think this is pushing them. But maybe theoretically possible.
They used (back in the 80’s I think) to have Spy Satellites so good they could read somebody’s newspaper from orbit.
I think advanced alien technology can beat that.
They often CLAIMED that. In truth, because of diffraction limiting the resolution, the best any past or current spy satellite has been able to manage is being able to read the reg plates of a parked car.
In theory you could just make ’em bigger to overcome the limit, but then you’ve got to find a rocket with a wide eough fairing and enough fuel to actually put the thing into orbit. Spy satellites are bloody heavy!
And they couldn’t even do that most of the time, because license plates are usually vertical.
Las Vegas casino ceiling security cameras are about three stories up. They claim they can read the serial numbers on the money put on the table.
Satellites are four orders of magnitude further away, and moving at about five miles per second.
I wonder if the glasses ‘cheats’ with enchancing the zoom with any available image it can aquire access too, nearby security cameras, spy satalites, anything earth tech pretty much would likely be open to them if they are advanced enough
Somehow I doubt there is any available recording device near that construction site that’s advanced enough to get that sort of zoom effect off.
Sydney’s zooming in on Sciona, the AI in the glasses detects her interest and highlights the phone, then the counter-encryption software intercepts the texts.
CSI ‘infinite enhance’ isn’t needed.
The only reason Sydney even cares about it is her glasses gave an ‘Alari Data Encryption in use’ pop-up alert.
space algorithms is like sampling, even low res capture systems can make out text at a distance after doing tens of thousands of samples per second while movement is happening.
-aka it’s the deltas of the distortions not the picos of the pixel.
Unless the optics are bigger than the glasses. With Grrl Power tech you could imagine something like hard light mirrors or gravitational lensing.
The optical limits are only fundamental if you’re unwilling to increase your effective surface area and/or observation time, the second one seems to be sufficiently available(problem for speeding satellites not for a stationary Sydney staring at a bright screen), the other can be done hypothetically with either refactory anlysis(they’re in an atmosphere) or gravitational lensing(requires some batshit crazy tech, but is less crazy than FTL comms)
I can see where this is going.
Sciona is falling for this guy already :P
This is going to be hilarious later on.
Hilarious, sexy, and/or heartwarming, depending on circumstances.
Sciona in love was something I didn’t expect.
It fits with her current arc of becoming a more humanlike and nuanced character.
Probably a gradual side effect of having her soul installed in a human brain. She’s never had to deal with that before.
What if Sciona starts to become more human, developing emotions, feelings, and other human traits since she now has a human body? It has been done before but not with a villain, I think.
Having a human body is a factor, but so is being able to live openly among humans as a seeming human. Sciona is becoming more humanlike, but in all likelihood she is going to stay a supervillainess. Her current circumstances can likely do little to sway her mindset and tone down her Alari Dark Triad traits. However, she might well develop more unspoken respect for humans.
It’s not just the body. Before she could end humanity if it meant she could go back home but she’s stuck here now.
Her perceived value of humanity has gone way up, she has to live with us now. Similarly her home organization is also gone so no point trying to impress them.
Done with the alien villains of the week on Star Trek, they created human bodies to inhabit while looking to take everyone back to the Andromeda galaxy. Kirk figures out how to defeat them by exploiting that with human bodies comes human emotions and feelings.
There’s a saying somewhere that water takes the shape of the container it’s poured into.
I’ve seen it mostly used in arguments about isekai characters gradually taking on behaviour of their new bodies over time
Ho boy. I do hope this doesn’t turn into another case of Sydney almost getting raped…
Another case? I remember her almost getting killed, but not raped. I think you are letting your imagination running wild with this one.
Remember when she summoned Parfait into Archon HQ and Parfait’s lust aura went berserk?
I wonder if Sciona has only a specific drug her body secretes or if she’s able to adjust it somewhat. When she drugged that girl the young lady was completely tripping, much like the politician. But it feels like Mr. 6xGuy got some sort of a different dose that had him firing away.
I guess Sciona could deny Sydney’s claim but alternatively she could try claiming a mild power like blood kenesis rather than give away that she has drug powers which could connect her with much more. I doubt Sydney would necessarily know the difference between moving blood around magically or by some power and provided she doesn’t do anything else it likely wouldn’t be seen as a big deal.
On the other hand, Sydney is just the kind of crazy thinker to come up with a random conspiracy that due to blood manipulation and the silver hair that this is Sciona while others think she’s crazily jumped to conclusions and needs her meds.
We already saw she is able to adjust the effect of the drugs she secretes considerably, in addition to having learned how to toggle it. With the Senator, it worked like super-cocaine, but with 6xguy, it was more like super-viagra.
We don’t have complete confirmation on the drug she produces, but cocaine is believed to increase libido and “performance” so it could have both effects. She could likely adjust the dosage down to just enough rather than enough to make him completely trip out. Whatever the case, none of the Author pages suggest she can adjust anything other than the amount she puts out (yet). But there was one page that suggested it would be a new drug, so it might not have a drug we could compare it against to understand all the properties between tripping out and making a guy go for 6 bouts.
She could claim something totally lame, if she wanted, like being able to generate talcum powder. All supers get “super bods” regardless of how lame their powers are, apparently, and that would be an easy power to fake: Just generate a placebo instead of an active drug.
Not all of them. Sidney, for example. Though, of course, the admitted counterargument possibility/subtext that supers without the bod get their powers from other sources and, thus are technically not “Supers.”
Irrelevant example. Sydney only has superhuman abilities because she bonded with Nth artifacts. Without them, she is a Muggle.
All the people with inherent superpowers we know of in this setting have them because 1) they tap in the Superion field (and then they get the ‘ideal bod’ package, so far w/o exception) 2) they are wizards and/or supernaturals (and hence they tap in the mana field) 3) they have personal or racial enhancements thanks to superscience or alien biology. These categories are not mutually exclusive. Cfr. Peggy, or the current version of Sciona.
BTW, I wonder about the in-setting justification for the Nth creators of the Superion field giving that kind of side benefit to its users. My current best guess is they wished to optimize the supers’ chances at sexual selection.
I work tech support, and I always get angry people asking why stuff like passwords are blanked out. This is why. You never know when people are looking over your shoulder. Not that facts make them any less angry.
Haven’t they met before?
The planet that Sydney was stranded on?
The alien ghosts as the portal closed?
Also…
Duh! Well, maybe not exactly Duh. The Halo-verse’s female Supers look like swimsuit models but I suppose there are also swimsuit models.
She should keep her actual powers a secret and claim to be 6 times stronger than a normal and that cuts heal quickly.
Yes, they have met before.
No, not in that body; Sydney and the rest of the team thought Sciona was dead.
Check 743
Sciona took over the body.
True. To be accurate, Max and Dabbler met her in her current identity, but failed to recognize her. Deus was also present and recognized her, or at least acknowledged she was an Alari soul in a human body.
He has a lot larger database on her reactions and mannerisms, due to being in contact with her much longer, and in both negotiating and relaxing circumstances.
He’s hinted at being a super with “intelligence” as a power.
Which could just mean able to work larger problems, but can also mean deducing things with only a few clues. E.g. “Have I laid enough of a breadcrumb trail that this opponent can figure out where his best interest lies?”
“Super Body”? So the girl the gang killed that Sciona possessed post-mortem was a super? Or did she trade up off-screen at some point?
I have to admit that it took me a while to figure out that the pinkish-red slashes on Sciona’s shirt were vibrations, and not the result of her latest blood magics.
She discovered the body’s super-powers within a few hours after taking it over, here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-746-youve-got-the-touch/
When she’s using it against the senator, you can still see her head tattoos:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1247-soul-x-sole/
Yes, Escorpia, the Mexican hitwoman whose body Sciona possessed, was a super with the power of drug-like biomanipulation. She won the super lottery with that body.
‘Always Expect Sydney!’ Needs to be a shirt!
Two things:
1 – Sydney isn’t really suited to covert ops. Entertaining as it is…
2 – Have I missed something between this and the last page? Are we in the same place and time, or was Sciona elsewhere?
2 – Same place, yes. They’re all at the construction site for the dungeon. But at a minimum it’s several hours later or the next day. I was assuming the previous panels were showing them working late at night (stars in sky), but it’s possible they just started really early in the morning.
Everyone is at the same place where the next new big thing is happening, down at the proto-dungeon.
Security lesson of the day: It doesn’t matter how good Alice’s encryption is if Eve can see her typing. I’d invoke the cliche about the weakest point in any security system being the human element, but I don’t think this counts.
The other option for cheap decryption is called “rubber-hose cryptanalysis”.
See https://xkcd.com/538/
Will Sydney end up using the Truesight orb? Begin your wild speculation now.
I don’t think Sydney’s Truesight would see anything different. Scorpiona isn’t using using a glamour. Scorpia’s soul moved out and Sciona moved in before things totally fell apart. Sciona has done a few repairs but the body should look like any other super. Unless the Truesight has an Soulgaze option that Sydney has unlocked but hasn’t told about yet.
Sciona (Thinking) What. The. Fuck. Am I cursed to have this little girl interfering in my nefarious plans in Every. Single. Incarnation?
A vilain standard curse , after all she is the monster of the week …
And Sidney it’s irritating but for the moment not fatal, don’t do anything drastic , Sydney is nosy but she has an attention trouble , refraining her for noticing something odd:
ArcSWAT if they aren’t the keystone cops , must have a file about her if she was a super and work for a senator … Maxima is no-nonsense and make her homework … A super undocumented on a US senator staff is fishy as tuna sandwich…
Ah, yes, critical weakness of all information technology security: the human element.
Or, I guess, the Sapient/Sentient-capable-of-imperfect-infosec element in this case.
The only part of this I am struggling with is the Alari ranker seemingly suddenly having a concept of work-life balance.
With our admittedly very limited exposure to the culture, this doesn’t much seem like a thing. Of course, being a refugee/ghost possessing a human on Earth, with her home world having reduced to ashes probably does a lot to alter Sciona’s perspective…but this one specific thing still feels out of character.
My read of her tone in that panel isn’t that she has truly adopted the concept (and really, our culture is no shining example either), but that she’s attempting to mimic it for the sake of blending in, and reminding herself of the need to “act human” to keep her identity secret.
I feel like there was a panel of Sciona coming around to the idea of gaining power through politics and manipulation, rather than overt force, but I can’t find it, so maybe it was just in the author’s notes, or maybe I just imagined it. But it does seem like she’s a lot more comfortable being human now that she’s got a super body. Reminiscent of “Maybe this planet does have something the universe will want.” Sciona may not think much of the average human being or human culture, but she seems to be revising that general opinion and making some exceptions.
You have a point. Moreover, we know that Sciona in the sum of her incarnations actually had ample opportunity to study our culture.
Last but not least, even in her previous incarnation Sciona was no stranger to the notion of seeking a balance between ambition and pleasure. As soon as she got back her Alari body and she was offered an opportunity to have a transactional one-night stand with Deus the sex god, it took very little persuasion for her to eagerly indulge, even if she was hunted by her enemies and at a key stage of her master plan. Whether this is a feature of her personality, a trait of her culture, or a mix of both, hard to say.
She needs to learn the tropes, saying that was just begging for her nemesis Sidney to appear.
I hadn’t thought about it in several decades but Sciona’s newly acquired seductive ability reminds me of the female operative in Helstrom’s Hive by Frank Herbert. That book was rather unsettling to my 13 year old self.
“You’re body is super”
Aha! Captain Grammar at your service!!
*Flies away
Sconia is making a typical non-technical people mistake.
AES and RSA with preshared keys is more than enough to keep the secret service from reading your texts, while in transit.
The challenge is the fact that they got to install software on her endpoint(phone).
She can’t secure Deus’s system enough to keep the NSA from reading her texts on her phone, while she can read them.
Maybe her “encryption software” also acts as a data spoofer inside her system, but in that case she’s technically mistaken what’s keeping her secure.
Not that I find it unrealistic she would think so, but she would be technically mistaken.
This probably also means she can read anything Deus does at that phone he’s using to communicate with her.
She got this software from the Alari homeworld and it’s clearly security focused and aimed at military infiltration, it must have not only a data defense, but also a spyware mode.
Shoulder surfing works on the general principle that the best way to open a lock is the key made for it. The only way around it is putting the encryption in an implant. (Or being able to decrypt in your own brain)
Or using a privacy screen to make certain you’re the only one the light reaches.
consider yourself intercepted lmao
Dave you’re supremely underestimating racists.
People can certainly be convinced other races are superior or equal to theirs and still have racist convictions.
Check the class system in India.
They believe that by living better people get reincarnated as children in the superior races.
Also ever watched a Chinese propaganda film?
I did.
Like half of the film I watched was spent describing how the “west” is superior and that they should risk their lives to limit this superiority taking shape.
I’ve seen black children associate themselves with white dolls out of a feeling of inferiority.
Also based on “La Fasicm” of El Castro’s, no race is superior, they’re all just owed a certain part of earth and should kick out all others.
Racism doesn’t have to come with a feeling of superiority.
It’s just often more externally damaging when it does.
To support this, my late mother-in-law was a Hispanic that was super racist against… Hispanic people.
Correction not El Castro was the writer, but Benito Mussolini.
MY current theory is that people don’t necessarily subscribe to a system that places themselves on top — obviously, many people act against their own best interests — but will accept a hierarchy that reflects their values. They’ll accept a lower position in the hierarchy as long as they agree with the metric used to sort people. If they value physical strength, they’ll recognize that they’re not the strongest, and that they don’t deserve to be on top. It places the blame for their position on them, rather than the system, and motivates them to try to rise according to the rules that they’ve accepted.
What upsets people is when someone appears to be violating the hierarchy, is placed higher or lower than they believe that person deserves. That’s fundamentally what’s behind most of culture wars: anger at people imposing different metrics for the hierarchy that they don’t agree with. The fight isn’t to be on top, but to get your own values imposed as the organizing principle of society, whether that be race, sex, intelligence, power, empathy, beauty, etc.
Most people understand that they personally aren’t going to be on top, except in the manner of being a big fish in a small pond. They’re not going to be the best in the world. They’re content to have people above them to admire and aspire to, and people below them who grovel and recognize their superiority.
Tabletop RPG are invented in US… and ther was Dungeons and Dragons…
Imagine alternatives universe
Invented by a Greek : Mazes and Minotaurs – a pastiche of Dungeon &Dragon had this name –
It’s free
http://mazesandminotaurs.free.fr/revised.html
By a French Gaulish Legends – Légendes and Légendes Celtiques about the celts dates back to 1983 –
By a Brit the answer is obvious Warhammer RPG 1st edition is definitively British more deep to earth vision of a renaissance fantasy – published in 1986 – …
German simple and generic – The dark eye “Das Schwarze Auge” dates back 1984 –
A nosy Sydney appears! Do you a) throw a mega-ball or b) challenge with a “sexy man-thing” LOL
I think this is so wrong. Sidney is being creepy and so invasive.
Uncle Ruckus from Boondocks feels like a similar pull, talking about white superiority, to the consternation of the main Freeman trio.
Did anyone else get confused and think that was white-haired Harem for a moment? Just me? Okay.
My current best guess is that Sciona can plug the leak effectively by some combo of:
a) pretending she was using hyperbole in sexting with her b.f. and she is just a very fit and sexy Muggle. Maybe joke something on the tune of “I wish. You have no idea how much effort it takes to keep this body in shape”;
b) Make Sydney feel guilty by (legitimately) act offended about Sydney being intrusive, nosy, and a creep for no good reason; Sydney is vulnerable to emotional manipulation;
c) distract her with something seemingly more interesting.
This ofc provided Sydney failed to notice or remember the bit about encryption.
The Curse of Sydney strikes again. (Or just Sydney.)
The big irony here is for all the dungeon project seems to be an important part of her master plan, Siona in this scene is not doing anything villainous we know of so far. To inspect the construction site is a legitimate part of the Congressional-oversight duties of her cover identity, and she took a break from work at a non-critical moment to take a personal message from her love interest and sext a bit with him. Sydney has no business doing what she’s doing, and she is acting at her worst, even if she means no harm.
So what happens if the healing sword is used on Sciona’s current body? I think it will fuse enscorpia and sciona by bringing the villainess back to life while Sciona is “hooked in” to the brain via her soul/blood magic. I don’t think it would reproduce Sciona’s body.
But. Sciona will likely learn that the sword is being recharged eventually. And she might try to use her superpower on her previous lover, everyone’s favorite egomaniac.
Does Sydney have space glasses? I thought she had magic glasses that had been hacked by Krona.
Cora fabbed up some glasses for Sydney on page 712, and it was revealed on page 818 that they’ve got some extra features.
You can have all the encryption you want but unless you modify the screen it doesn’t stop anyone from looking over your shoulder.
So Sciona gets outed as former cartel boss with drug powers after her fingerprints get run and gets dragged into being a part of Arc-Dark with X and Chimyriad then awkwardly avoids Dabbler indefinitely.