Grrl Power #223 – Unlike a dead parrot, Heavenly Sword does go VOOM
My wife cautioned me to research whether or not ice conducts electricity before putting up this page, which is good advice since I just assumed it did. Water conducts electricity so ice should too, right? Well, it turns out, water doesn’t conduct electricity. Not pure water. It’s all the impurities in the water that conduct the electricity, or rather all the ions swirling around that are provided by the impurities. Same thing goes for ice, only since ice is cold, the ions aren’t so much with the swirling. A chunk of frozen sea water will conduct electricity if you put enough volts through it, but it is a better insulator than melted sea water. Therefore we can posit a few things about Dabbler’s attack. One, the ice she whips out of the sword is loaded with rock salt or something. I guess the diamonds or magicite or lightning phoenix eggs or whatever you what to think they are that she has in the hilt are intentionally impure for that reason. Look, it’s magic ok? Two, she puts a shitload of volts in that electricity attack. Four million at least. :)
Originally I had planned for Dabbler to cast some sort of Magic Missile pinwheel attack to keep Heavenly busy while she reconfigured Soulreaver, but it didn’t fit. I also wanted Sydney to grill Dabbler about where the second handle came from, which is a reasonable question. I originally tried to conceive of a way that would work, the best options I came up with had flaws. One was that each handle was shaped like a U if you looked down the length of it. Maybe a better way to describe it is like an stick of celery. Take a second stick, flip it over, then they kind of fit into each other, only Soulreaver’s handles would fit together with machined precision, and never get floppy if not refrigerated. That would physically work, but could make the grip awkward in both configurations. The other idea had the handles corkscrew shaped. That could potentially make them the right circumference in either configuration, but then separating them would be a pain in the ass. In the end I decided that one handle is phased inside the other, which is a huge cheat, but again, magic. I mean it’s a sword that shoots out elemental attacks based on what magicite has been stuffed in the guard so I figured it wouldn’t upset anyone too much.
Anyway, all that extra stuff would have made for one if not two more pages, and I wanted to wrap up this fight and move on. Sydney can give Dabble the third degree about the sword later.
Heavenly Sword is fun. Her name is a little cumbersome, granted. Same number of syllables as Wonder Woman, but anything over three syllables is in need of a nickname IMO. The more thought I give Heavenly the more I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ve seen of her, but she’s done for now. When she comes too she’ll feel like she had a hard night of drinking and woke up next to the Energizer Bunny, only all his fur is missing and it’s just a bunny shaped mass of exposed wiring.
I am on vacation this week, puttering around Florida, so contact may be intermittent, but expect a comic as usual on Thursday.
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That is the cardinal rule of real life special forces. Shoot them in the head and chest.
Yuffie was looking for her materia lol mabe you could pull out a buster sword from advent children (she could make it super light)
Strontium titanate crystal is nicely conductive when exposed to light, which could lead to holographic computers. I’m sure Dabbler views holographic computing as old school tech.
https://www.designntrend.com/articles/9127/20131115/accidental-discovery-electrical-conductivity-crystal-discovered-washington-state-university-researchers.htm
I didn’t realize that was ice until I read the commentary. I thought it was some type of crystal.
Ice IS a crystal though. gotta remember a lot of things when they’re in solid form are crystals, it’s just at the temperatures Humans can survive at, that’s mostly just minerals.
BTW, Panel # 5 = Bad+Ass.
Hmmm, always figured Dabbles had a great ass, but each to their own :P
where electrocution induced Afro
A hair-raising experience?
(Not to be confused with working on a rabbit farm)
Trust me, that doesn’t always happen. I have the scars to prove it.
The future of crowd control. I bet Leon has one of the prototypes ‘on loan’.
Leon probably has a better design. He would need one. That model is totally vulnerable to any form of ground attack. Looks like the customers being targeted (stet) are Third World dictators who have already successfully oppressed the masses and just need to deal with the occasional intellectual or student protest. As long as it stays above the signs, it’s immune to damage. Multi-barrels for indiscriminate shooting. And semi-lethal hard rubber balls aimed at the head. Lots of fun if you’re into human rights violation as a hobby.
This is from a country which legally allows civilians to install flame throwers on their cars. I do not think they are too concerned about the morality of it. But it is the fist step on where things are going.
Whilst we have the right to die, we can commit the ultimate act of protest. Once non-lethal pacification is perfected, we will loose that.
Societies will be able to fool themselves that they are acting in a just manner, when suppressing dissent. Simply because they will be able to do so in a humane fashion. Tyranny without bloodshed.
For those who might Possibly be interested (DAVE! >_o). GOG.Com is selling the entire Legacy of Kain Series for $6.00 today.
Correction. They don’t have the original Blood Omen included. =(
That attack simply wouldn’t work.
Electrons always go to the ground (or the lowest electrical potential) through the lowest resistance path, so even if the ice is conductive, all the electricity would have no reason to go through HS. It would go from the sword to the ice and straight to the ground.
If somehow the ice is isolated from the ground (you know, magic), then HS is dead.
Electricity is a bad choice if you are taking the non-lethal path. Tazers work because the distance between the start and the end of the electrons path is short (the two pointy things), so they simply take a walk through the skin/muscles, since they are so close. If the distance is long, they take the subway through all major organs, frying everything on their path, and fibrillating the muscles along the way, and you don’t want to heart or lungs fibrillating, causing cardio-respiratory failure.
So either her organs became charcoal or her heart/lungs stopped working properly.
Just to know, since you are worried about veracity.
Depends on the amperage and the type of current. AC is actually more dangerous in a lot ways. DC has more of just stopping your heart but AC is more likely to damage tissue. An actual lightning bolt is more than simple electricity, it contains plasma and is 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun which puts it right around the surface temperature of low end O-type and high end B-type stars.
Oh and asphalt & concrete are piss poor conductors. How bad in comparison to ice I can’t say but they are rather decent insulators.
You need to read the comments. There are already plenty of ret-cons on offer.
Frequency of the electricity would have an impact as well. High frequency electricity would tend to ride across the surface of the body instead of having deep penetration. Ask Tesla about that… :)
It’s called the skin effect in case you were wondering. Plus, with enough amperage and voltage, it could very well travel to HS. That’s why they tell people not to approach downed power lines. Dangerous/deadly levels of current can travel through the ground and kill you.
Asphalt acts as an insulator unless other aggregates are added to it. So a third reason why HS could get zapped since the only available conductive path would be through the ice/HS.
SO…. If Dabbler controlled the amperage, voltage, and frequency of the electrical discharge, she could easily zap HS unconscious without much trouble.
Isn’t Dabbler a Genius? Surely she could just calculate the needed volts to get through the ice and deal with Heavenly without killing her.
Where was it said that Dabbles was a Genius?
Repeatedly, if you’d actually paid attention previous to this, but then, you’re, you know, you.
Really I don’t get why people want to try and explain away magic with by bringing science into the picture. Once you do you take all the mystics away, like telling a person how a magicians magic trick is done. It takes away all the wonder and joy that people associate with magic. But no, people want to be the dick in the audience that shouts out, “He’s using wires!” And ruin it for everybody else.
Ahh, but that only happens if the premise is that magic can only be conducted via tricks. The way to really get folks, who make such comments, wound up is to make a good case for the possibility that it is real.
There was at least one really tempting comment that would have made it very easy to do so. Trouble is that I was not in the mood. It is the kind of thing that scientists get all worked up about, so the debate can go on for ages.
Plus DaveB has been doing good work on attracting in scientists recently. So I would not want to scare any of them off. We need to let them get comfortable in the environment, before we open up the hunting season.
Tricks, spells, deals with Eldridge gods, or avatars between the balance of good, evil, order, and chaos. My point is no one cares how Thor’s hammer can fly, how Dr. strange can port between reality, how Santa can go around the world and billions of chimneys in one night, or how Dr. Fate or any of the others can do the voodoo they do so well. Just so that they can. People don’t need a science breakdown with magic.
Well, putting aside my bad habit of teasing scientists, I fully sympathise with your point of view. I know DaveB himself can have a similar view about super powers, at times, too.
But, in this instance, folks are not being unreasonable in doing so. Dabbler has just done an attack which combines a magical attack with a scientific/technological one. That absolutely begs analysis. And we have a lot of folks here, who like doing that.
The trouble is that humans are eternally curious. It is no more fruitful asking people to stop wondering why things work, than it would be to ask a glacier to stop being cold, or the sun to stop shining. It is part of what makes them what they are.
It reminds me of an interview I saw with a famous scientist. He said that one day his son asked him an apparently simple question. Something like “how does pushing the ground make a skateboard go forward?”
The scientist decided not to give a platitude or approximate answer. This was his field of expertise, and he felt that he should be able to give a genuine, true answer. All he had to do was find a way of saying it in such a simple fashion that a six year old would understand it.
Which turned out to be incredibly hard. As the physics used to describe it is very complicated stuff. So he kept trying to trim out any unnecessary parts, and just find the simple core, which he could use to frame his answer. And as a result had a realisation about something profoundly simple, yet which he knew had never been described in scientific literature.
Something so important that developing the idea earnt him his Nobel prize.
And he is not alone. Many of the prizes have been awarded to people who approached a problem from a different angle. Typical examples being scientists who come in from another discipline. They do not have the disadvantage of being taught ‘this field works this way’. So can look at it from an outsider’s perspective and see something really simple that the specialists fail to. They are too busy looking at the trees to see the forest.
In this case, those with a scientific mind, have their curiosity piqued. Here are problems that deal with things that they are familiar with, but which would apply them in unique and interesting ways. Most of the time such analysis is just a trivial, if fun, waste of time. But, you never know, one of our readers might have an epiphany, and gain a fundamental new understanding, applicable to the real world.
So, if you give them a little slack, and even encourage them with such lines of thought, you might find yourself being mentioned honourably, in their Nobel prize winning acceptance speech.
Of course, if one were a lifeform from a planet further from the sun, then a glacier might seem hot.
And if one were living on a planet or satellite which has a side always facing the sun (and the people there didn’t have space-faring technology), they wouldn’t know that the sun existed… Unless study of the shifting stars/other sky bodies made them realize there’s a source for the light. (But would they know that was the sun?)
+1
I look forward to observing scientists, from the watery depths of Saturn’s icy moons, and finding out if they can cope with such revaluations. And whether we can cope with some of the realisations about the universe, that they have, which we have no inkling of either.
What I want to know is, what is our purple friends reason for giving two craps about earth or ARC-SWAT? I mean, she’s killed GODS so what is her reason for being a cop? In D&D terms everyone else, even Maxima, seems like they would be in a normal setting fighting baddies that you would normally find, where Dabbler is more spelljammer speed, where plannets can be bards.
* planets
There are many reasons our purple gal might be hanging around this uninteresting seeming dirtball of a planet:
1) It isn’t uninteresting after all, which can involve plenty of classic plot lines
a) Dabbler needs to “learn humility” or “learn humanity” or “learn [whatever]” that those puny mortals called human can do which no one else in the universe seems to have gotten the hang of, because aliens are alien and don’t work like humans and/or any other race;
b) Dabbler needs to recharge her batteries/fix her Tardis/find a McGuffin she needs before she can leave Earth;
c) She is hot for the Major and hangs around for the chance at scoring some golden skinned ‘tang. Or she just loves teasing her. Or someone else. But that’s why she isn’t off killing gods;
d) “I’ve killed gods” is all in the perspective of their power compared to the average human. Which Heavenly Sword isn’t. Or Dabbs is just boasting after beating an opponent who gave her a hard time because she insisted on doing things the hard way. So it’s not as bad as it sounds;
e) She finally found a restaurant which makes a decent kimchi/gak/Romulan ale/french fries/glass of water, and can’t bear to leave.
Add other reasons as they occur to you, but don’t expect/require them to necessarily make sense, because aliens are alien.
+1
Gonna have to call foul on this. Not only with Dabbler badgering a unconscious person with a irrelevant act(I mean really, what superhero in this day in age hasn’t killed a god or two?), but the fact that I still don’t buy her four armed sword stile. There is no way that Heavenly Sword couldn’t doge that attack when four arms would make that sword stile too slow, clunky, and cumbersome. Especially when she is using two sword stile with two arms for each sword.
The sword did not go anywhere near her. Dabbler was just using it like waving a magic wand. There was nothing for Heavenly Sword to dodge.
Besides which is is darned hard dodging when you are encased in ice. Heavenly is good at fending off missile-like magical attacks. But clearly is not used to area of effect entrapment spells. And who would be? Up until today most people did not even know that super powers were real. They still have not even had a hint that magic is too.
Plus, if you look at HS’s hand position, her blade was positioned for a low line block, so the ice projection caught her off-guard.
maybe its too late or somone else had point this out but if she pulled the 3 stones off her tounge pirceings what do the other three do???
She was pulling a Bruce Lee… If you look close, she was putting some of her blood on her tongue, not taking crystals off her piercings. She was taking the matching crystals off the right side of the cross guard to allow the swords to unlock.
Dabbler, have you considered embedding those three stones on the other side of the sword? Not all opponents will politely stand around, whilst you perform modifications. Speed change from one weapon to two weapon style is a distinct combat advanta…
Ahh, of course, but it is not as sexy and stylish. My mistake. I must bear in mind your priorities are not the same as mine.
I have read the first page of comments and
THANK YOU, AUTHOR, SO MUCH FOR NOT PLAYING FEMALE CHARACTERS AS SEXUALIZED FANSERVICE FROM YOUR FEMALE FANBASE
(you have annoyingly little competition in the niche of “badass superhero webcomics with female protagonists”)
Thanks! And you’re welcome. I enjoy the occasional piece of gratuitous fanservice myself, but you’re right, there’s a dearth of non-gratuitous stuff out there.
You have to bring Kratos into this somehow. Like making him Dabbler’s mentor or something.
Wait, what? What did Sydney know? O.o
I believe she was referring to the sword splitting in two.
Yeah, I’m not sure how I didn’t get that on my first reading; it seems so clear now. What I still don’t know is how Sydney knew!
Dabbler is a four-armed character. A human fighting with melee weapons has the choice of a single-handed weapon, or a two-handed weapon. For a four-armed swordfighter to restrict themselves to just those options is a waste of their additional capabilities, when compared to human fighters.
You will note that Dabbler is holding the weapons with two hands, meaning that they are either both two-handed weapons (thus requiring four hands) or they are ‘bastard swords’ which can be used either one-handed or two-handed.
The one-handed option being useful in freeing up hands for spellcasting, or other combat purposes.
These are things that hardcore tabletop gamers, such as Sydney, would consider just on seeing a four armed person drawing weapons (of pretty much any sort).
I personally thought it was crystal.
Of course… It doesn’t have to be “lightning”. (It said “magic”. XD )
I like Dabbler. Maybe it’s misguided to try and think of this in D&D-like terms, but to me she’s like a whole adventuring party in one purple package. A ludicrously high level character with a fairly cheesy racial template and probably at least a couple of levels in every class in the book, a lot of Wizard levels and I’m thinking primarily Rogue levels with Int through the roof, for a wide and deep spread of skill points.
Which to my mind is probably how she planned her life from the start, if not in those words.
The author has described her previous adventures as having video-game type kill counts. So you may be summing it up right, even if the mechanics vary.
I can’t believe that in six years nobody else has connection “Dabbler” with “intentionally impure”. It’s the sort of thing that would be right up her alley.
Did you go scuba diving around the … keys?
So did Dabbler happen to find the Aetheon Throne in a Vault of Glass?