Grrl Power #344 – A few things may have been skipped when she was hired
It’s probably obvious what the knowing glances are about, but I won’t spell it out here since it comes up on the next page. Also I reserve the right to change the title of this page, but I sat around for well over an hour trying to think of something clever and my brain was like “nope.”
I don’t know why the locker room has that many lockers. Arc-SWAT doesn’t have that many women in it… well I guess including the non SWAT Archon personnel there are plenty of both gender at the base. I’m not sure how often the Arc-Light personnel use the showers though. They don’t have the same rigorous physical routine as the SWAT folks. The SWAT branch is generally assumed to be on call most of the time unless they’re doing a press event somewhere, and they have rooms on the upper level, like we saw part of Peggy’s a while back. In truth a lot of the personnel from all the branches spend most of their time at the base, it’s just the nature of the job.
How sweet does Harem have it? Being able to stand behind herself to fix up her own hair? The only other way to do that is with a portal gun. Looking at the way Harem is dressed, she’s less Goth and more Harley Quinn fan club today. That’s fine by me, it’s a lot easier to draw than gothic lolita with all the lace and ruffles. How that became a popular thing I don’t quite understand. Not that the style doesn’t have a certain appeal, but there are genuinely few things more tedious to draw than ruffles and lace. Fortunately “goth” in the context of fashion is vague enough that it really means whatever you want. Gothic lolita, evil clown, vampire assassin, or just lots of black clothes and a large eyeliner budget. Also looking at her here it’s obvious I need to make her freckles bigger. They all but disappear when I shrink the page down to web size.
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Well, the last time I lived on base, I was in the US Navy, stationed on a submarine. Obviously, when we were out at sea we ate for “free”. Free as in you got the food in lieu of a food allowance.
When we were in port, you could eat for free at the sub, or go to one of the food joints on base and pay for food. During the day time, we were on the sub “working” so usually breakfast and lunch onboard, and if you didn’t have the duty go to the barracks and/or eat out for dinner.
Then later, when I was in the National Guard in the State HQ unit, there weren’t enough people to support a mess section, so on drill weekends we’d got out somewhere to eat and everybody got a set amount of money to spend, at the Sizzler, or the local pizza joint, or where ever else we went.
When I was still a civilian employee on a Navy base, the mess opened up to us since the sailor population got so low. We subsidized the sailor meals with our paid admissions. I didn’t mind, food was better than the only other options – McD and the bowling alley and I also didn’t mind covering part of the lunch of a sailor since I literally made 4 times more.
We treat our military, especially enlisted, like dirt most of the time. I’ll chip in where I can.
Thank you both for your service.
It wasn’t much different on my ship. I was on an amphib in Japan, so underway we’d eat on the mess deck (which with Marine’s on board meant the line could take an hour to get through) and whenever we were in port everyone would go out in town to eat, usually right before copious amounts of drinking.
We also tended to do trades with Marines for their MREs. Several people on the ship had one or two types of MREs they actually enjoyed, so we’d trade things that the Marines wanted for them. My personal favorite was ChiliMac, and my going rate was 3 packs of smokes or a 6-pack of ramen (not the cheap kind, the good kind since we were based in Japan). At one point I had nearly 2 dozen ChiliMac MRE’s, which was great when the mess deck was cooking something that looked like it would make you sicker than going through a typhoon at sea.
Oooh, I love chili-mac, it’s one of my favorites.
Ooooo! It’s good to see Waldo’s back.
…His front ain’t half-bad either…
Oh lawd, the Chili Mac MREs! The only edible ones!
Hooah brother!
-97E A Company 1st Battalion 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment 82nd Airborne US ARMY 1998-2005 WIA Afghanistan
My bet they start at an E8 or E9 paygrade
Someone is going to have to explain what that means to Sidney… and all the rest of us non-career military folk. :P
Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if the food allowance is both very generous, and customizable. I really don’t think you can feed Anvil on regular portions; Harem has five stomachs, and you figure the rest of the super-types all expend way more energy than a typical soldier; you gotta feed those furnaces a forest!
E8, maybe. or maybe O2/O3. And I agree, with Hinoron, that it is boosted.
If military pay at all. Which means technically Sidney bought someone else’s meal.
I would hope that supers have their own pay grades that are 10X the normal grade. ie: Sydney is a ES-1 so she makes $180,000. Maxima would be OS-5? making $500,000 or so. That’s cheap compared to the costs of the aircraft it would cost to replace her. Maxima kinda makes the Stealth Bomber obsolete.
Except I think she would show up really well on radar.
Radar operator: Captain, I think I have a flock of geese following an airplane.
Captain: Yes, I have seen that before on a documentary. You think someone is doing that here?
Radar operator: Maybe, but can geese fly at 250 knots?
Captain: Red Alert!
Depends on how her shield orb works. Is it radar reflective, radar opaque, or radar transparent. And does her flight have a stealth mode…..
Maxima does not have a shield. I guess if she is flying behind Halo’s shield …
Realistically they would just use standard military pay in grade, with bonuses based on Job, tif, and special duty.
For example… current in 2015
https://militarybenefits.info/2015-military-allowance-incentive-bonus-special-pay/
More on this soon.
You guys are thinking too small. These aren’t difficult to replace people, they’re irreplaceable “must have” assets. And the gub’ment is competing against the entirety of private industry for their retention. If the pentagon can spring for five hundred dollar hammers, you can bet supers are being paid in seven digit plus ranges.
Those $500 hammers are either money going into a black ops fund that congress/taxpayers would be upset at , like supporting the muslims that fought US troops before just because they are going against Assad or actual $500 hammers from someone earning money like Warren Buffet.
Actually, Mikey, it’s just greed, plain and simple. The government is wasteful because if they took the time to analyze every single expense, down to the last nut and bolt, nothing would ever get done in a timely manner. The companies that win government contracts are aware of this, and count on the fact that they almost never get caught. (Though part of the reason for *that* is undoubtedly corrupt politicians whose campaigns are funded largely by corporate donations, and/or they own stock in the company, so they stonewall any investigation.)
Other waste is due to senators tacking on “pet projects” to bills that the President wants to pass. Because they refuse to let the president have a line-item veto, if the President really wants something passed into law, he has to sign off on the whole thing. And other waste is just plain mismanagement (such as the IRS software mentioned below).
Here’s some examples. In Alaska, there is an outhouse that was installed in Denali National Park. (It really IS just an outhouse; it has no internal plumbing.) It actually cost $10,000 but because the Interior Department contracted with a local business that ordered it from an Oregon manufacturer, “shipping and other costs” added $89,000 to the fee. That had better be one deluxe outhouse.
The IRS bought $239 million worth of software – and then forgot (yes, forgot) to use $11.6 million of it. Forget “who watches the watchers”… who the hell audits the auditors?
Remember last year’s sequestration, when billions of dollars were pruned from the federal budget? Something that wasn’t pruned was a $704,000 five-year contract on gardening and landscaping for the home of the American ambassador to NATO. In Belgium.
For the last five years, the National Guard has spent $136 million sponsoring NASCAR driver Dale Earnhart, Jr. So far, they’ve drawn in almost 25,000 recruiting prospects… out of which only 20 met National Guard requirements, and none of them joined. (It’s demographics, btw. The National Guard wants people in the 18-to-24 range, but NASCAR fans are mostly in the 35-to-54 range. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have already figured this out and stopped sponsoring NASCAR a long time ago, but for some reason, the National Guard just… doesn’t… get it!)
The NEH spent just over $900,000 for an ongoing study of romance literature and art, and another $825,000 on a documentary marking the 75th anniversary of Superman. The NIH spent over $325,000 on a research project that proved what any husband would’ve gladly told the government for free: The happiest marriages are ones in which the wives calm down quickly during fights.
P.S., in regard to the research: That money is of the “use it or lose it forever” type. If the government gives you $1 million for research, and you only spend HALF of it, then next year the government is gonna say “well, obviously you don’t need that much money” and only gives you $500,000. So I understand why researchers sometimes spend money on unnecessary projects.
Still, do we really need research to tell us that most accidents happen at home? (“Gee, wait, so the place where I spend TWO-THIRDS OF MY LIFE is where most accidents happen? Who’d have thought?”) But WAIT! There’s MORE! The majority of THOSE accidents happen IN THE BATHROOM! (“You mean the small room with the tile floors that always get slippery when I take a bath, and lots of sharp corners for me to bang my head into?”)
So no… it’s not black ops. There’s a separate section of the budget just for that.
Actually, there might be a very good reason for those $500 hammers. Most equipment that gets taken into battle routinely has very different requirements than stuff that sees use in civilian settings. A very old story about this has to do with $300 ashtrays that were being put in submarines. A lot of people started crying foul, insisting that the government was being wasteful, funneling the money somewhere else, etc.
The sailors, however, knew better. The ash trays were that expensive because they were designed so that in the event of them being caught up in the kind of shockwave that a torpedo strike or collision tends to produce, they didn’t shatter. Instead they’d break into 3 blunt pieces that were incapable of ending up in someone’s eyes. And before you ask, no, the ash trays were not the only pieces of glass built like that.
I don’t know why the hammer is that expensive – but I also know that I don’t know nearly enough about what standard it has to meet to say that it shouldn’t be either.
That story never rang true to me. It sounded like someone getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar and quickly making up a story that was just good enough for people to go “ok, that makes sense”
$300 glass ashtray that doesn’t shatter when it gets knocked around? Great. – OR – Just use a metal ashtray. The Navy could probably get them bulk for like a quarter. Those don’t shatter, and they only cost a quarter.
Hmmm. Let me share with you a little story — one you’ve almost certainly heard before.
“Once upon a time, NASA spent $70,000,000 dollars to develop a pen that could write in zero g, underwater, upside-down, etc., to take on space flights.
The Russians used a pencil.”
There’s only one problem with that story: it’s completely false.
The development of the “Space Pen” wasn’t funded by NASA. It was entirely a private-sector product.
And while it’s true that both the Russians and the Americans used pencils, they switched to the Space Pen because pencils are hazardous in multiple ways in zero g (broken tips, graphite dust, flammable materials, sharpening debris) and tend to produce easily smeared, illegible documentation.
When NASA bought their Space Pens, they paid $6 each for 400 of them, for a total expenditure of $2,400. But that’s not nearly as entertaining a story as “NASA spent $70,000,000 to develop a Space Pen. The Russians used pencils.”, so it’s the urban legend that gets told.
I’m not saying that every government expenditure is justified. I’m just saying that buying an off-the-shelf hammer for $20 is a false economy if you’re flying that hammer to orbit. I’d much rather have a $500 hammer made of some high-tech and incredibly expensive alloy, forged in the fires of Mount Doom and quenched in the blood of virgins, so that I can be *absolutely certain* that it won’t break when I’m 20,000 miles from home.
Not to mention that a $500 hammer that weighs half a pound less than a $20 hammer pays for itself in the first approximately 1/20th of its first launch (figuring a $10,000/lb cost-to-orbit).
When you take into account hostile environments (radiation hardening for space and military applications, EMP hardening for military applications, shock tolerance, etc.), redundancy, stringent weight requirements, no economics of scale, very limited amortizing of research costs over the production run, and the steadily steepening price-per-value curve as you move toward the upper end of any performance scale…it’s honestly surprising to me that military and aerospace hardware doesn’t cost more than it already does.
This
Sometimes the “free” food isn’t worth it. On active duty in the Corps, I had food poisoning 3 times and once actually had to have my stomach pumped. Leaving the old adage “Nothing is Free”.
yeah i know how that is, on my first ship we had the inspectors for the annual Ney Awards (a food service excellence award) onboard, and out of three HUNDRED points available we got exactly 3!!! and that was only because i was in the galley fixing a steam table heater at the exact time the inspectors came thru and saw me working on it… if i hadn’t been there we would have gotten a ZERO!… to be truthful i have no clue as to why nobody came down with food poisoning while i was there, but man you get REAL tired of rice and pork adobo for BREAKFAST…
Hell yeah, wooden lockers!
Seriously they got a crazy design budget for that building. I’m having a hard time believing it’s a government group.
Hahahaha… Oh wait, were you being serious?
That is a facility used to house, train and supply government run supers. It’s probably got the same budget as the Pentagon.
I think we’ve discovered the one random fat that it’s impossible to Google. It’s buried in a sea of results about the defense budget, so many that even adding phrases like “actual pentagon”, “facility”, “building”, etc, don’t help.
Found something related. Went pentagon+architecture. Interesting stuff.
https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-pentagon
US embassies had millions to spend on artwork, but no money to protect Gay ambassador Stevens from the religion that beheads gays. A month before he was killed he asked for real security
Mikey, they didn’t behead him because he was gay. They beheaded him because he was American, and he wasn’t a Muslim. (Though being gay probably didn’t help his case.)
Who says it’s real wood? You can get wood-panelling paper to give something the appearance of being made from wood
Clearly cheep ikia paneling, so that “accidental” breakage is a low cost.
Forget accidents. If the government department responsible for building ARC-SWAT’s headquarters is at all genre savvy, they will have built everything as cheaply as possible, to minimize the cost of rebuilding when it inevitably gets destroyed. :)
None of them seem to have ventilation slots, so far as I can see. I hope Leon’s okay . . .
:-D
Haha, nice.
Well, everything except the structure of the building itself. You don’t want the Big Bad Wolf to be able to huff and puff and blow the thing down. (There’s also the safety of the non-supers inside the building as well as state and federal building codes that have to be adhered to.)
ikea paneling over steel containers like some actual army units use for foot lockers and storage tubs
Yup, and a non-strength enhanced super decides to punch one out of frustration :D
Specially cool if there are some actual non-steel reinforced lockers, and they keep getting moved around, like Russian Roulette :D
How much time has actually passed, in comic, from the first page to now?
About a day, I think. It started “yesterday” around lunch time and it’s just after lunch “today.”
Well, she was going to the bank on lunch, and its lunchtime, so… roughly 24 hours?
Negative 2 months and 29 days. :p The comic started with a three month flashback to now. Its a scary thought isnt it? I wonder if we will see her live out the entire three months like this, just to catch up to “current” times. If so my great grand children will likely enjoy seeing what takes place when the flashback ends, going by the amount of time spent per day so far.
Personally don’t have a problem with that, but DaveB mentioned that he will (or may) speed things up a little after the introductions have gotten out of the way, and this still counts as ‘introductions’
Honestly, I’m perfectly fine with the comic taking as long as it needs to get where it’s gonna go, because I am enjoying the ride immensely.
same here, Its just fun to poke at the fact that its been roughly 24 hours since the story started in world yet its been what, 5 years rl?
If you really want to get technical, the time taken during the course of this story so far only covers about an hour or less, perhaps…The first few pages of Sydney gaming at the store, then driving to Archon, but the rest of it since then has been all “flashback,” which occurs at the speed of thought.
I think Alexander and Ignoble are close (maybe more like 3-4 days). Back on page 3 & 4 when the flashback started, Sydney had been at Archon for a few months. Currently she just got her uniform and is in the beginners class for firearms training and physical training.
No, she had lunch twice yesterday. If you remember, the first one… didn’t quite take.
We should all do this https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:SmithsonianX+POPX1.2x+2015_T2/courseware/372a806b0894443ea7e15f06694826ef/7f94a873e3864f1b9ddbba605f5200ea/
If for no other reason then I would love to see what this following would do to the discussions on that course.
I think this is the link you meant: https://www.edx.org/course/rise-superheroes-impact-pop-culture-smithsonianx-popx1-1x-0
And it looks fun!
Well, Make it happen, Captain! and yea, So far Its looking like a fun course, I’m going to rock (fail) my way though both tracks, See you on the edu side.
Best part might be getting the verified certificate and then hanging it up like it was a diploma. :OP
I work in a fancy-ish restaurant. Not, like, Jamie Oliver fancy, but fancy enough that when I told people in my city where I was working most people had heard of it. Fancy enough they have a full time pastry chef like me.
I’m going to say right here that $40, at a fancy place, would certainly get you a meat lunch and probably a glass of wine, so I’m with Sydney here, it’s a lot for a lunch.
Also, like many restaurant people, I’m extremely cheap when I eat out and tend towards falafel places and other spots where I can get home-made food at a low price. But I would certainly pay $40 for a good meal for myself, hell, at the right place, I’d drop a hundred. Just maybe not on a regular lunch. But when I can get a bento at the local sushi joint with a pop, soup and salad for under $15, I’m rarely going to want to drop the big bills.
P.S. Lobster roll is a thing here, you can totally get a lobster sandwich for cheapish for lunch, Sydney’s setting her sights low ;)
I’ve spent $60.00 for a meal. But that was at a Benihana, and I ordered the steak and lobster tail dinner.
Benihana? In Chicago?
If it’s the same place you’re talking about, I ate there once quite a few years ago. Excellent food AND service. It was worth every penny I paid.
Mine was here in Dearborn Mi. My first trip to Benihana was in Memphis Tenn.
Have you started saying what the French say “Pardon our muslims”?
Mikey… exactly WHAT does France have to do with Benihana?
The answer is NOTHING.
Benihana was founded by a Japanese guy named Hiroaki Aoki.
Good job trying to throw the discussion off topic with anti-Muslim nonsense.
Hey, Mikey? The last four comments I’ve read by you have seemed to me to be variously angry, insulting, homophobic, or racist. Do you think you could cool down a little bit, and work on enjoying the excellent company we have here in the comment threads on these excellent comics?
I’d really appreciate it.
Ive had a … client… spend about $300 on one dinner plate on me. The wine was a lot more insane :D
I believe the fancy place is the case here. We’ve seen the Archon food court before and it looked expensive. Penny was really happy to get free meal out of Maxy.
I think you got hit by the attack of the auto-correct. It was ‘Peggy’ at the food court.
And now you made my brain think of the following scenario. At some future late evening at Archon headquarters Sydney is bored and looking for something to talk to. She approaches Lt. Kessler’s quarter and we hear:
Knock knock knock. “Peggy”.
Knock knock knock. “Peggy”.
Knock knock knock. “Peggy”.
Daniel the Human usually ends up going into Perth at least twice a month, meets some friends for a while then usually goes to a burger place nearby called Grill’d. Pays about $25 for his meal, but that gets him a bottle of ginger beer (he can’t drink, tho they are licensed), decent serve of thick chips with a dip & a quality burger even he has trouble shoving in his gob.
That’s the most he usually pays for a meal. Places that charge around the $40 mark don’t interest him, despite me trying to get him to take me to a few. I just recon he’s being stingy. Just cause I made him pay for me too last time…
I don’t go to high priced restaurants but can still spend upto £50 on 3 courses, sides and drinks and sometimes a second main course. Even when trying to keep the bill down a good meal costs.
I once hit £80 on pizza for 3.
Yeah, but we are talking about lunch
Ever eaten at a Disney Park? Standing food can run you $20 per person. Sitting with a waiter involved doubles that. Arc doesn’t have a cafeteria, they have public food venues in the building down where civilians can join in. The obscene prices are there to ensure the tourists are hardcore and polite, while being a pittance to combat pay. Now I don’t think they get rockstar level pay every day, but every mission is treated like combat triple overtime hazard rate –especially when you consider the value of endorsements good airtime during the “event” generates.
Disney is only that way because it is a monopoly. It would be like every gas station within a 3 hour drive of you getting together to set prices. You are making the taxes are the price we pay for civilization, ignoring that before income taxes Asians & whites built roads, hospitals, schools, & libraries.
No… it’s not because Disney is a monopoly. It’s because of what I call “hostage pricing”. What are you gonna do, leave the park to eat, then come back and TRY to find a parking space (and have to go through security again) and waste time that you could be spending waiting in line to go on the rides?
Disney knows that you’re not gonna leave, and they raise their prices appropriately, because they know you’ll pay it.
Its one thing to go out to eat for $40, but for the employee café to be a $40 daily thing is another. A place like ARC needs an employee café for security reasons to cut down on info leaked out.
If I had to guess, looking at all the supers, not even taking their powers into account, they burn though a LOT of calories in a day, more if you factor in strengths, so paying for lots of food isn’t that big a thing.
That, or I bet that they have a hell of a paycheck given they are in a rather unique profession. Though most jobs for the government don’t pay too well, government funding is another thing entirely ^_^
Yeah if you could convince a government budgeted to think of them in the same category as aircraft or ships instead of infantry they could be convinced to pay a lot and still think of it as a deal. And since Arc SWAT could take down a carrier group or two that’s not a bad way of thinking of them.
Yeah, Max’s salary is definitely a (high) number in principal, but in practices its “whatever it needs to be” up to and including the entire budget. Her allegiance is currently the force which describes what nation is militarily supreme on earth. If she asks for a raise you give.
Thought her allegiance was to the country where she was bred born and raised in
Not everyone is super patriotic.
If Arc-SWAT is paying, say, 500k, and Russia wants you and will pay you 2m, which are you gonna go for?
May be, but we were talking about Maxi
And not everyone is a money-grubbing mercenary
You underestimate the power of dosh.
There is a competition in play here between two tropes.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScrewTheMoneyIHaveRules
The question isn’t ‘how powerful money is’, but whether or not Maxima is a person of principles, and what those principles may be. I would anticipate that she is probably very well compensated, but so long as she does not feel undervalued, I don’t believe she is so mercenary as to go chasing whomever can throw more money at her. She has sufficient power to take what she wants from society for free; if she’s taking a paycheck for her work, it’s because she respects the validity of society. Money only has value to her because she lets it, out of regard for the other people on the planet.
Yeah, but sometimes the job ain’t worth the pay. That’s why I’m freelancing…
Patriotism ain’t the half of it, Shaded Exalt, nor is money. Russia can’t afford to pay me enough to work for people who think it’s a good idea to beat up and kill my friends and family members for who they love. America ain’t perfect, by any means — but we’re slowly but steadily dragging ourselves out of the dark ages. And, lately, Russia seems hell-bent on dragging itself back into them.
A bigger factor, I think, is that most super-powers simply aren’t very useful to people outside the government. For most reasonable power levels, sure, you can do things bare-handed that other people need power equipment for. But that’s why people have power equipment. And the power equipment has safety standards and trained operators and is designed to integrate smoothly into the job site. Our hypothetical super…doesn’t and isn’t.
I’ve been watching a new building go up right next to the one I work in. They had these two enormous construction cranes, and they would pick up these huge bundles of rebar and slabs of preformed concrete and put them down with pinpoint precision across the entire two-block-long building. And they never dropped or so much as chipped one of them.
If I were one of those construction workers, I’d a heck of a lot rather have a crane like that, than have Superman flying the rebar all around my work-site. Because I know how cranes work, and I know how to avoid getting hurt by them, and everyone knows how to use cranes to make sure that the materials get where they’re needed, when they’re needed, safely.
Admittedly, at Superman’s power level, we get absurdities (at least in the Golden Age) like “Superman uses his super-speed, his super-intellect, and his mighty super-breath, to *blow* the construction materials into the shape of a building. The orphanage is completed on time and under budget! Thank you, Superman!” But, as I said, for reasonable power levels, it’s actually fairly hard to think of how your typical super could earn any impressive amount in private industry.
US soldiers in warzones have families on food stamps. US paid mercenaries earn 6 figures for a few months work
Yep, sad but true, regardless of all the yelling and speeches politicians make about “we support our troops” they have no problem cutting their throats to save a few bucks so they can build more bullets in the factory in their state >_>
Well, it is almost certainly not the *universal* case that supers’ powers are fueled from the food they eat. Max, for example, probably is not capable of eating that much unless she’s got a random-fuel fusion reactor in place of her digestive system. Which would be dangerous for people around her unless her skin is really good radiation shielding.
However, it could be that *some* powers are fueled from food in *some* cases.
And Anvil’s power doesn’t need to be fueled. She doesn’t really have a power, she just has a really unusual storage capacity. And the catch that you can never tell what she has stored.
But anvil being the size and strength and physical condition she is, would burn around 5X the calories of most people. I’m using Micheal Phelps’s 12,000 calories a day during training as my reasoning for this.
Well now, 5x the calories of most normal people – how would she compare to someone who happens to be five people? Not sure if this has been discussed or not, but do all five Harems need to eat? Or if one of them eats are they all satisfied? And in that case, does she need to eat enough food for just one person or enough for all five? Or maybe one Harem can automatically teleport excess food (or maybe just the processed energy from food) out of her own stomach into the stomachs of the other four?
And what about mind-altering substances? If one Harem gets drunk or high on something, does it affect them all? Or does she need to intake 5x as much of said substance to feel the effects? If you sprayed her with mace/pepper spray/chloroform/nerve gas/etc., before she could teleport away, would they all feel the effects? So many questions…
I would guess that any Harem that is not Vorped out needs to eat every 6 to 8 hours. Her brains are entangled, not her stomaches. But Any Harem that is teleported out of existance at the moment doesn’t have time passing for her so would not be burning calories and needing to eat.
Why do I get the feeling that we are going to get a hypersonic squeel from Sydney when she learns her salery?
Supply and demand…..guess a super would be worth 6 or 7 figures a year.
Charles
At the very least.
I have a friend who is an Apache pilot (or was 15 years ago I’ve lost track of him), he told me that the missiles he fires are nicknamed “Lexus’s” by his ground crew because they cost about the same as a new Lexus.
Keeping that in mind, the PPO alone provides the military with similar fire power worth several hundred thousand dollars a year. That it is attached to a radar stealth flying platform that can put up and invulnerable shield, is easily worth millions a year.
Take her rank into account and we are looking at 5 figures in my opinion.
Halo could make 5 figures a day working as a skycrane replacement. With the lighthook and flight she would have unlimited height and could work over any surface or in remote locations.
ARC supers are not like normal enlisted. They are not interchangeable, replaceable, or common. The supers pay scale would be at least 10X the regular enlisted pay scale. So at S-1 Sydney would be making $180K.
Military pay for a recruit is currently $1,430.00 a month before taxes. When I left the Navy after 4 years I was getting $780.00 a month before taxes ( this was back in 1985 ). Maxima’s pay would probably be at least $7,261.00 a month.
*Maxima* has firepower that surpasses a Warthog. And is even more indestructible than an A-10. And doesn’t guzzle expensive fuel and depleted uranium bullets. Or need a team to keep her in the air. $150K /year would be cheap.
And unlike the Warthog pilot, she did not cost millions to train to fly and shoot, nor require a continuing flow of “tail” support (read hundreds of mechanics, engineers, radar crew) to keep available to go –let alone be “in” the air. Just float a 10 year training budget, ammunition and fuel comparisons and paying them 2 million a year would be peanuts. Does the military get paid back for a Warthog + pilot to go visit a country fair? Product placement can mitigate lots of budgetary issues…
…and now we know why every country in superhero universes tries to develop a national superteam. It makes your neighbors thoughtful, and you don’t have to suck up to the first tier nations quite so much.
Imagine the costs for an aircraft that was stealth, VTOL, super sonic, and capable of any thing from nuclear bombing to close air support. That is only part of what Maxima can do. $15 million a year would be cheap. The B-2 stealth bomber costs $550 million just to make, not counting maintenance or payload.
Sydney is going to get a surprise when she goes to the payroll department and meets one of the non-fieldable supers on the team.
Sydney: “They said to come here for my pay.”
Clerk: “Yes. Let’s see. At the starting pay rate of 10 grams per day, here is you first week’s wages.”
*he slides a small block of lead about the size of a sugar cube across the desk with a gloved hand.*
Sydney: “Hold on. This is supposed to be my pay?”
Clerk: “Oh, wait. Let me get that for you.”
*he removes his glove, touches the cube with one finger, and it turns a shiny yellow color*
“Nice to meet you recruit. It’s Halo, isn’t it? My Arc code name is Midas. Excuse me if I don’t shake your hand.”
Problem with a power like that: they can make the value of gold worthless
Yup. Supply and demand… introduce too much gold into the economy and the value of gold will drop.
Of course, I just had to work that out… *twitch*
10g of gold -> 0.32oz -> 358 dollars per day -> approx. $86k per year.
Nice ‘starting pay’!
Yeah, but not nearly enough to make a $40 lunch inexpensive.
Don’t care if you’re Donald “The Mouth” Trump, a $40 lunch is never “inexpensive”.
Are you kidding? for guys like Trump, they make so much a minute that if they were to see a 20 dollar bill in the street, it’d literally not be worth their time to stop and pick it up.
Meeting him would carry more consequences than shaking Varia’s hand…
and if Varia shook his hand, which ability would activate first?
She’d probably end up doing the same trick she seems to do with many supers – get the same powers, along with most strengths & weaknesses. With Harem she can tag along in a teleport, with Sydney she seems to share the orbs, maybe with “Midas” she would also get his immunity (I’m guessing he wouldn’t have patches of gold skin from scratching itches or gold tackle from peeing) & turn-to-gold power, or perhaps the ability to reverse it? That would be useful…
“Ah Hell, Midas?! You turned my computer gold again…”
“Sorry about that, I tripped. SOMEONE CALL VARIA FOR US…”
“gold tackle from peeing”
now I’m picturing that Austin Powers villain with the detachable metal weener…
You underestimate the power of dosh.
LMAO, ahahahahahahaha <3 <3 <3
From Dave’s comments: “How sweet does Harem have it? Being able to stand behind herself to fix up her own hair? The only other way to do that is with a portal gun.”
I think Dave reads Go Get a Roomie.
You should probably mention when your links are NSFW, btw.
i wouldnt call getting a back rub nsfw with especially when fully clothed.
WANT!
No, but the rest of that webcomic *is* NSFW. I mean, one of the main characters sleeps with *everyone* she spends the night with.
Roomie hasn’t done that in years, and it was only special people (no guys)
True. I read the entire thing today. It’s still (borderline) NSFW, especially the early strips. Only barely though, and the later strips make a lot of very good points (bordering on the philosophical, even).
Have been reading it for some time now, it’s nice to see Roomie (and Elle Tea) evolving as characters (and the rest of the cast)
Really wish I had LT’s lucid dreaming ability. It’d make my dreams so much more enjoyable. I don’t have nightmares, but some of my dreams are really strange… and sometimes other people pick up on them too.
Case in point, back when I was in college, I was really stressed out due to one of my upcoming finals. When I woke up the next morning, my roommate asked me, “Hey, are you stressed out or something? I had a dream last night where you were coming after me with a shotgun, and I tried to run but I couldn’t get down the stairs fast enough, and you shot me in the ass!”
And yes… In that dream, I was shooting something with a shotgun. I don’t remember what it was, and I don’t think it was human. But the fact that he actually had a very similar dream (with him as the target) is kinda creepy…
Had a friend who was trying to teach me to better control lucid dreaming: didn’t work as each time enter dreams it’s with basically a clean slate (they had actually ‘shared’ a few dreams with me, or at least was able to enter the same dream)
try this. write on a sheet of paper (small to medium sized) ‘it’s just a dream’, and crumple it into a ball in your hand as you go to sleep
if your mind recalls it during the dream, and you feel it in your hand, you can cause your dream self to open the paper to read the words, and allow the dream to become lucid.
I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that they all probably get paid a obscene amount of money, to wearer $40 for lunch is a drop in the bucket. True hero career need a good amount of funding. But I often wonder how the non rich superheros managed to get by. I mean how does a newspaper reporter have enough funding to build his little “fortress of solitude?”
Even if you are a Bill Gates, $40 for lunch is a lot simply for lunch for one person
Kent didn’t need much funding to build his Fortress: it was made from alien crystals, furniture and stuff he could just ‘borrow’ from some factory that builds crap for Ikea
Superman can travel anywhere he wants at the drop of a hat, so he could have just nipped over to a nearby star system and taken some stuff from a desolate planet.
Any planet that’s that empty isn’t going to likely have things like furniture and the like.
Obviously he can travel to the Planet of Furniture.
https://furniplanet.com/
His fortress kinda built itself from a crystal didnt it? And dude could literally strip mine all of alaska for gold inside a day, he could crush coal into diamonds at will. I dont think money is a real issue for him. As for affording 40 bucks a day, its still wasteful in the extreme. If they are getting gouged by the local cafeteria just because they are well paid, thats total bullpuckey. Mcdonalds doesnt charge doctors and lawyers extra for a combo does it?
Guess it would depend on the combo.
And aside from superman there are other non wealthy heroes out there. Spiderman, Savage dragon, the Tenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hell even Wolverine lives line one of those Alaskan bush people.
i guess that all depends… i know that in Hawaii, if you go into a McD’s and show a Hawaii ID, the food IS cheaper for the locals than it is for the tourists, ie everyone ELSE…
Actually, that fortress built itself and is semi alive if memory serves me, so it has no upkeep budget, lol
I am so sorry that I am saying this, but it’s been bothering me since I found the comic:
It’s spelled “lech,” not “letch.” It’s a shortening of “lecher,” which is the noun version of “lecherous,” which is how most people come across the word. I’m not angry at you for not knowing, but it’s been since comic like thirty or something that I’ve been following, and so after Math joined the scene it nagged at me till I posted this.
That is the origin yes. But like many things, it has been borrowed into another culture (Japanese Anime to be exact) where a misspelling becomes canon through long use. The “letch” of anime nature describes the type of person who always thinks about it to the point of distraction. DaveB is merely saluting the “flavor” that Math exudes since he is an eastern style (well actually this is assumed) fighter.
“Letcha can be considered like “Leet” or”pwn” or “Skillz” to have a specific variant meaning…
Spellcheck strikes again!
The one thing I worry about here, is that this is basically foam-padding the walls and floors. I mean, if ARC is also making major dollars, then doesn’t that cancel out a lot of the hazard? Plus they’ve got cutting edge armor and weapons, and all the rest of the upswings, it’s getting to be something where there aren’t any rough edges to anyone’s lives.
And if ARC is paying so well, why are there any mercenary villains? I mean, seriously, the benefits package and such alone makes it almost better than merc work. Combine that with high pay, and being a mercenary is just stupid in this world. A moral super would choose ARC in order to be doing good in the world, and an amoral/immoral super would be in ARC cause of the bucks. ARC is just hitting the point of “too good” a bit hard at this point.
Four man job, 60 minutes, $100 million in precious gemstones.
OR you could worm for Arc, where pay is considerably less, the work is much harder and longer, and there’s greater personal risk in the form of death and dismemberment.
Yeah, no, most aren’t doing that. The vast, overwhelming majority are doing heists, many of which end up poured back into their own gear, gear that would be covered by ARC, were you working for them. Yeah, a rare few MIGHT get more out of villainy, but for the vast majority, they’re basically just choosing to get their asses kicked thoroughly and repeatedly for nothing, since their heist gets broken up anyway.
Please remember that Archon has only been official for LESS THAN A DAY!!!!!
How do we know there aren’t Mercs who are supers, but keeping their super-ness a secret (even more so now that they know there are well-paid Super heroes who will be coming after them if they reveal their villainy evilness)
Actually, three months. The original flashback was a three month flashback, and we’ve more than caught up to it by this point.
But again, why? If they’re so well hidden, they could just join ARC under their assumed identities, and makes an absurdly good paycheck, without all the “getting my ass-kicked” by superheroes schtick.
Was actually going by the time-line in the flashback, and this is only Day Two (the first few pages was Real Time, pretty much everything after meeting Maxi and Anvil has been the flashback)
Fairly sure that there is not a secret identity that could get past Leon’s checking (not to mention Arc-DARK)
If all of the supers seen so far (good and bad) in the comic joined ARC at a starting $250,000 dollars a year, The cost would still be at least two orders of magnitude less than a carrier group, but with at least as much military utility.
Since you brought up the subject of Harley Quin I thought I should ask, have any of your guys been looking at the commercials for the new movie coming out called, “Suicide Squad” One of the members of the Squad in it is Harley Quin. Their also bringing in Joker, but I’m not sure if he is on the squad or not. Another member of the squad is played by Will Smith. I don’t know what roll he’s playing but he uses a whole lot of guns in the trailer.
“Suicide Squats” is going to be as big of a flop as the recent “Fantastic 4” reboot
Joker is, quite frankly, a joke, with gold grills and tattoos all over his body, he is Gangster Joker (and everyone hates him)
Will Smith is playing Deadshot (a crappy version of the one seen in the “Arrow” TV series)
And boy, the Fantastic Four reboot was a flop. 10% fresh on “Rotten Tomatoes”, 3.9 (out of 10) on IMDB, “C-” on CinemaScore…
Part of it can be laid on the director (Josh Trank) … he was literally telling cast members when to blink and when to breathe. He kept pushing them to make the performance as flat as possible. (This might have to do with Fox’s initial idea of “a grounded, David Cronenburg-esque Fantastic Four“, and not a lack of talent on Trank’s part.)
But not ALL of it can be laid at Trank’s feet… Fox was desperate to get the movie out before the rights reverted back to Marvel, so even when they noticed problems with the production, they buried their heads in the sand and didn’t provide help for Trank or fire him. It wasn’t until principle photography was already completed that they decided it was a disaster and set out to salvage it by bringing in a “dream team” (including Drew Goddard) to rewrite and reshoot the ending.
However, by THAT time, most of the actors weren’t available, having already moved on to their next project, so most of the new ending was filmed with doubles, with Miles Teller performing in front of a green screen…
IIRC wasn’t the “Suicide Squad” sent to kill Joker at one point?
As to the specific price of a meal, yes it s high, but think more like amusement park prices instead of conventional restaurant – you wanna see the cool super heros & costumes & toys & goodies, you almost gotta pay the “park” rates to be in there – add to the fact a super might just come in while your eating, out of costume, and it becomes a “cool” place to hang out for a meal too
Why should they have to pay extra to hang out with their own colleagues? o_O
May just be me, but the way that Anvil and Peggy were looking at each, and that Harem is the one doing all the talking, seems like it is just a prank: if it was anything ‘official’, Peggy, being her immediate Superior Officer, should be the one doing most of the talking (or at least telling Daphne to follow up on it)
Sydney hasn’t been there long enough to get her first paycheck
I think of $40 as an expensive week’s worth of food.
Did Anvils waist shrink a few sizes for panel 3?
I swear she was thicker around the middle.
Considering how much these guys could get paid fulfilling multi-hundred-million-dollar demolition contracts, without the expense involved with insuring hundreds of worker lives or meeting massive payroll requirements for equipment operators, or massive expenses for equipment …. The military darn well better be paying them at least twenty percent of what they could make as civilians, which is A LOT of money.
Meals are probably part of a voucher system. You swipe a card or something and get comp’ed so many meals a day/week or something. If the government is paying via vouchers the price can be anything, look at the prices on prescription meds, insurance pays for “most” of the cost so the prices are astronomical. I’m thinking it is a similar system but with only feeding a small group of supers it would be a minimal portion of the budget.
She could carry conversations between two people and they wouldn’t realise they weren’t having a unique conversation with her. She could be a go-between for two people if they didn’t want to talk to each other or whatever.
She could play against two chess Grandmasters simultaneously and be certain to beat one of them (or draw), as long as nobody smells a rat.
Admittedly, it might be difficult to shoehorn that scheme into future missions…
It was brought up previously that if she has to pass any written exams for things like college courses or Arc certification tests it would be impossible to prove she is not cheating unless all copies of her are there in the same room.
…Or at least accounted for…
After reading the comments about lunch costs, I checked the US army pay grades (monthly salary) and compared them to character descriptions:
E-1 (recruit, cadet) $1547 (Jiggawatt, Halo)
E-4 (Corporal) $2020-$2451 (Achilles, Harem, Heatwave, Stalwart)
O-1 (2nd LT) $2935-$3693 (Mr Amorphous)
O-2 (1st LT) $3381-$4679 (Anvil, Peggy)
O-4 (Major) $4450-$7431 (Hiro)
O-5 (LTC), $5158-$8763 (Maxima is getting about $7020)
Civilian Specialist (Dabbler, Math) pay grade is E-4.
I would assume that the Supers will get some kind of “hazard pay” -type extra salary, or have some pressing reason to remain with Archon. Otherwise the “Specialist” characters would be much better off in civilian jobs or as super criminals. With her magic/technology abilities, Dabbler might have so much wealth and other assets, that she would consider the army E-4 salary as “pocket money”.
I’m seriously assuming the contract they signed involves a LOT more money than standard pay grades. Remember what Arianna said – by the end of the day, she’d be more famous than any celebrity, by the end of the week she’d be one of the most famous people on the planet.
like celebs they get endorsement options and a cut of merchandising, and there would be standard military signing bonus plus special skills pay that can run insanely (thousands of dollars a week) high based on how important the skill is deemed at the time (note the same skill can be worth nothing but a note on their file a week later)
What’s the pay grade for a platoon, since some of these supers could easily replace one? Q: How much would you pay a super NOT to work for the other guys? A: However much they wanted.
Speaking of freckles, I had this absurd image pop unto my head of Harem during a very bored moment with too much time on her hands, deciding to play ‘connect the dots’.
As someone with a few freckles and having too much time on my hands thanks to waiting rooms, I can understand the appeal. As an on-again-off-again newblette artist, I tend to never be without a pen. Add to this the boredom center previously mentioned, and I can be found with little freckle constellation scribblings on my arms. Yay for long sleeves!
Depending how long Harem had her powers she probably had to re-learn how to do her hair due to shifting from hands inverted and reaching over her head to how she is doing it in Panel 1
Believe he first ‘split’ happened when she was around 9 or 10 (or maybe it was 8)
why? all she has to do is “pretend” that the one DOING the braiding is actually doing it to someone ELSE that is standing in front of her, and for the one GETTING her hair done is “pretending” that someone else is doing the work. it might feel a bit weird at first, but no relearning of skill-sets needed.
Back when I used to have long hair (back when I used to have hair), I braided it myself. It was a completely different skill set from braiding someone else’s hair. It’s entirely possible that Harem had not learned how to braid someone else’s hair by the time she first “split”, and had to learn the other-person-hair-braiding pretty much from scratch.
I like the little quip at the bottom of the page referencing the last panel. (so funny. HAHAHA) But I’m with Sydney on this one cuz i don’t military.
Harems stockings switched colors from the last strip to this one. I only noticed because I have her outfit. And yes, it is Goth Enough. A+
She has also managed to control that wayward lock of hair
Good catch, Hanners. I went back and checked, and you’re right.
“GUIRL”
How do you suppose that’s even pronounced? Gooey-Earl?
buoy is pronounced boo-oh-oy, but guirl is pronounced sydney
:P
Always understood ‘buoy’ to be pronounced as ‘boo-ee’ /shrug
Tomayto, Tomahto…
“No, I didn’t say tomato, I said terrorist!” (Sorry… couldn’t resist. Flashback to the Glimmer Man movie, with Steven Seagal and Keenan Ivory Wayans.)
Clearly the government realized the smart thing is to provide high paying legal jobs to supers so they don’t feel the need to commit crimes.
Non-mil guy here, but I am good at google-fu. A quick google search shows a O3 in the US Army gets almost 50k a year. An E6 gets around 30k a year. In addition to suitable benefits. In the first section of the comic, Sydney is called a Corporal. They get 23k per year, again, if scaled to a US Army Corporal. All this is starting pay, which goes up as you gain experience. That does not sound like much, but if Sydney gets subsidized living space and health care, which seems implied, that amount is suddenly much higher in value.
All this assumes, of course, that their pay scale matched the US Army, which seems unlikely, considering the rarity of supers in this setting.
How much weight can the flight orb carry? We know at least two people, which is 250 pounds or so.
Could she put the forcefield around the entire team and carry them all? That would be convenient.
What would happen if the forcefield came on in the middle of a person? Would they be sliced in half? No effect? Is there a fail-safe to prevent it?
Anyone have a link to the orb manual? :D
word of dave we learn when the story needs to determine the carry limit, yes she could enbiggen the shield enough to carry the whole team, nothing would happen because the fail safe wont let the shield occupy the same space as a person re-sizing to either contain them or exclude them.
In the U.S. Mil Pay works something like this (not going to get into deployed pay outside of the U.S.):
Base Pay = based off grade (rank) AND TIS (time in service)
BAH/BAQ (Basic Allowance for Housing/Quarters) = If you don’t live in barracks you get an amount based on your rank, dependents, and your zip code (lodging costs more in California than Alabama)
BAS (Basic Allowance for Subsistence) = (Enlisted status and meals are NOT provide by the Government) Based on your zip code and dependents
Bonus Pay = Typically an enlistment bonus based on how badly your skills (official job MOS/AFSC) are needed–care to guess what it might be for Supers?
Special/Incentive Pay = Any kind of amount for any kind of reason; some types used at the moment include: Language Proficiency (Russian, Farsi, Chinese), Hazardous Duty (HALO jumps), high demand career Incentive Pay (Aircrew, Dentistry, Nuclear Officer, etc), Hostile Fire/Imminent Danger.
In short their Base Pay/BAH/BAS is the same as all of the other military branches, but their Bonus and Incentive Pay is probably impressive.
DaveB, I really want to watch these folks take their annual SAPR (Sexual Assault Prevention and Response) training. Not mention their Profession of Arms cultural training. Even if you don’t plan to push the military culture very hard, you should be aware that your in-world sister services will frown heavily on an unprofessional branch of the military. And while, in most cases, we cannot give orders to those outside of our chain of command; we are required to correct the behavior of ANY military member who is acting unprofessionally. Just imagine Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermey getting up in Harem’s face and reading her the riot act.
Plus I can’t wait to learn their Core Values, Creed, and Song.
After the Maxima Wedgie, Harem would enjoy the nice change of pace :p
And the imagine Maxi taking Gunny Ermey outside for a ‘quiet chat’ about how she appreciates him abusing one of her people (do you really think anyone would allow someone from another branch to pull his brand of crap outside of Marine Bootcamp? regardless of how much that individual messed around)
I could well imagine R. Lee Ermey trying. If Harem is honestly being that unprofessional, I have a hard time imagining her letting him.
ARC has an inset culture dating back to 1941, it is only because if its recent reorganization into the department of defense that it falls under military practices at all. Ironically, this is less recent than the National Military Establishment, which was created in 1947 under the National Security Act (Reorganizing a desperately wasteful war department). Given that they’ve had nearly five decades of ‘out of public eye’ operation (bordering on covert, really), chances are good that their entrenched culture and code of conduct (indeed, their organization’s very definition of ‘professional’) are going to be quite divergent from those of run of the mill branches. Quite frankly ARC had quite a lot in common with the CIA (which it also predates) on those grounds, and may well have explicit exemptions in the UCMJ’s conduct code that allow it those internal guidelines. This would be natural for an organization that would have fallen into Homeland Security in its reorganization were it not for the issue of transferring Supers (and other atypical assets) out of military service and into civilian life…. especially given that going forward, they don’t know who their prospective recruits may but, but there’s a good chance that many of them would not have made the choice to serve in the military, but feel a responsibility to use their abilities for the good of the country. Maintaining hard military codes of conduct in such a situation rather than treating the prospective recruit like an individual who can be worked with could cost ARCHON opportunities (possibly creating enemies)… and would probably run contrary to the internal culture they’d built up during their covert years.
Long story short, there’s plenty of reason to believe that what’s standard for other branches of the DoD would not work for ARCHON, and ARCHON has five decades of field experience to testify as to their Best Practices.
My kingdom for an edit-and/or-delete function….
Nevertheless a well thought out post.
Oh god… that turned into a grammatical mess, and now I desperately wish for an edit button.
>> How sweet does Harem have it? Being able to stand behind herself to fix up her own hair? The only other way to do that is with a portal gun.
NOT TRUE! I can think of several other super powers that could accomplish this: Time traveler, Mind control, having a monkey for a familiar, etc.
Flexibility.
PS – Can I get the NSFW versions of the last 7 pages? :D
In all seriousness — if you’re ever inclined to offer the NSFW version of these pages as a Patreon incentive, you could basically write your own check. I’d pay. I’d pay a *lot*.
Aw man, the setup was so good, then you deflated it with the whole thing about Harem having another conversation about it. >< That bit doesn't even make that much sense! At least, not right now. It might on the next page. Maybe enough sense for me to forgive ruining the setup on this one. We shall see.
It became proper precisely BECAUSE all of the ruffles and laces. It looks really ‘busy’ and intricate.
That’s right! She’s not a Bouy! She’s a Girul!
Sydney should at least have an idle animation where she can spin in circles on her imaginary sky chair.
(Psst, I think Peggy is a telepath)