Grrl Power #502 – Checkpoint checkup
I had this page totally written and was laying out the panels before I started thinking about how the checkpoint would affect Harem and realized I needed to rewrite a bunch of stuff suddenly since… well, you’ll see. So this page became two, which wasn’t too bad because I think the original version of this page likely had too many panels anyway.
Harem and Pixel both understand the term “checkpoint.” Pixel isn’t asking what happened, she’s asking literally what Krona did to cause this effect, and by the way, is there a chance the universe might explode?
I like that Krona conflated fingernails (and by extension, claws) with the kind of nail that you hit with a hammer. Although I guess people hit their fingernails with hammers all the time too.
Edit: Whoops! I screwed something big up. The original version of this page had Krona in the second panel saying “Which is probably why Pixel getting, uh, as you put it, shanked and capri’d, didn’t activate it.” This contradicts Krona in the 4th panel where she says that Sydney is the only one who remembers the first loop. I forgot who knew what since as the author I know it all, and somehow during the jillions of hours it takes me to draw one of these pages I never caught that. As Krona mentions toward the end of this page Krona says she has a log of the events, so the best fix was to just have her pull it up a bit sooner. The log has an outline version, a detailed account, but also a deep debug console version which is what she’s looking at at the end of the page.
This page colored by Keith.
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Ooo~ Put Sydney on that webshow “Hot Ones”. See her laugh at the 550K Scoville sauce~
Honestly, Blair’s make some damn good sauce. Of all the extract based ones I’ve tried, Ultra Death was definitely the tastiest and yet it still had the crazy heat I’d come to expect. I’ve not tried Mega Death (the one below Ultra that they use as the 550k sauce) but I’d expect she’d enjoy it.
Blair, which?
*groan*
Who turned all the bread sticks into puppets?
No, Yorp. Stay out of the corner. Better not to go camping at all.
For reference, Blair’s Hot Sauce is a brand that advertises its accurate scoville rating on every bottle. They carry a range of hot sauces up and down the band from the low hundreds to about a thousand, last I looked… and if you had $200 to spare and signed a waiver, you could buy a bottle of Blair’s 16 million reserve, which is a chemically pure vial of crystallized capsaicin sealed in wax. I imagine it’s what Sydney had in mind when she asked about ‘a drop of pure cap’.
Ahh, thanks. Nice to know.
Quite an appropriate purdy avatar, Codyray1.
Just a warning to Dave-
I’m starting to realize how dangerous it is for Krona to have the Key of the Twilight. Be careful she doesn’t take control of herself despite your best efforts!
An observation based on the last couple of panels –
When the person with the reality-altering power seems to be having an “Uh-Oh” moment, THAT is the time to start worrying.
Yes, Pixelicious is worried, that’s why she’s asking Kronachrome what she gone and done did
My guess is that everwhere that harem is has had a localized temporal disruption. Annoying and panic inducing, but nothing major.
My guess is that it’s only a localised save (somehow). It affected harem’s local body because she was close by but not her other bodies. Because it didn’t affect the other bodies she can still remember what happened to the reset body. Possibly instead of the ‘checkpoint’ actually sending them back in time it just resets the local area to the exact condition it was in previously. They’d be able to test this if any of them has a watch. Their watches would be reset and thus several minutes behind the actual time
technically, Harem’s abilities have their own type of ‘save function’ as we’ve seen before with her ‘unteleported’ self being in stasis until she could get looked at (earlier in the comic) so I’m guessing that some form of memory point as well as a checkpoint may be in effect here (some games DO allow for you to return to a memory save rather than a checkpoint if you wish)
That would suck if you have a bad memory though. Although I guess it could have its advantages. “Did I fire five shots, or six? Oh make it one…”
Indeed lol
Found this comic yesterday and crushed the entire archive since. This is fantastic work and I loved every minute of it. I’ll be keeping up from now on.
Welcome to the community.
*offers a tray of Yorpie Snax™*
Hee Haw! (That’s how Donkeys say hello!)
Feel free to share wisdom and silliness. Conspiracy theories are currently restricted to 3 per poster, so choose carefully. :D
I think this one exceeded the limit! It was probably a Russian plot to install a sleeper agent in a position of power.
I’m happy that you discovered this great comic but if you read all the pages in a day that means you didn’t stop to enjoy the comments section of any of the pages. I didn’t stop to read all the pages’ comment sections when I first discovered this either, but I did stop to read some of the comments for the pages that I had comments to say myself.
Maybe this is just me but some of the pages of this web comic have the most entertaining comments section in all of the internet. Ranked up there with a certain /tg/ thread from years ago (I haven’t gone there recently) and certain Reddit threads.
This. Good UI design > clumsy manual workarounds, especially if you’re the one who wrote your own goddamned reality-hacking tool.
A hacker would think “Sure, I *could* move it so something less distracting’s in the background. OR, I could spend five minutes tweaking the visuals and never have to move it again if I don’t want to.”
A hacker of *reality* would then “tweak the visuals” by making her eyes more acute until they could effortlessly tell the difference between physical glowy orange and interface glowy orange. (And speaking of biology-hacking, “lost minutes” can’t be the limiting factor. Just look at her. Girl has control over her stem cells, whether from being undead or just plain rooting them.)
Son of a fucklord, why does “reply” randomly not work half the time!?
I think Krona is just messin’ with ya.
If you have a script blocker it can cause that.
Test.
Okay I think I got it fixed.
Caution, your test has failed, we are rewinding time to just before you began to conduct your test.
i wonder what the limits of Krona’s powers are? reprogramming people? life creation? changing the fundamental forces of the universe on a universal scale? the mind boggles.
We get pretty strong indicators of her limits, from the author’s blog underneath the previous comic. In a nutshell ‘the checkpoint is her biggest trick’. So anything which seems more powerful than that is probably beyond her capability.
On top of which Krona herself indicates that the power is too limited to keep trying until they succeed (the Groundhog day reference).
So presently she is fairly limited. But I think she does have considerable scope indeed.
In Skyrim, I distinctly remember getting frustrated with NPCs and slaughtering entire towns, then reloading afterward. Now, I wonder what kinds of things Krona’s done with her “checkpoint” ability. Great way to test the limits of your power with no consequences.
Unless your local checkpointing interferes with the programming of the rest of reality and causes a universal BSOD. Or even the collapse of the local instance known as “Earth”.
I think the universe is a little better at programming than Microsoft.
“Is that a bug or a feature?” “Yes”
What happens when the black holes (a.k.a. ‘recycle bins’) get full, and need emptying?
Are we talking fantastically or realistically in the case of your black holes?
My black holes are fully armed and operational thank you. For us portal users they make very handy weapons. And they do not require knowing the trick of how to have super novas always available, when needed.
Mind you you do have to pick your targets carefully. You would not want to get affected by the attack too, after all!
SInce Harem’s peculiar state prevented her memory from being altered it implies it’s also very difficult to mindcontrol her. Always a useful resistance to have.
Problem is, if you can mind control her, that gives you at least five taken bodies each with a special set of skills you don’t want coming looking for you
I don’t think the above comic implies a direct correlation to mind-control, unless it happens to be via Krona, and she again fails to take into account Harem’s distributed personality.
That said though I do agree that many types of mind control would have difficulties with Harem. For instance telepathic domination, where the attacker suppresses the victim’s consciousness and takes control of their body.
No normal human, or most single bodied species for that matter, would be able to even cope with the conflicting sensory input coming in from five different bodies. Let alone the fact that the attacker may have only suppressed the mental ativity in one body, meaning the others are still awake and pissed off.
Further Harem is used to loosing contact with one or more minds, from putting them into storage or even just sleeping. So will easily be able to cope with the issue. Whereas the attacker will unlikely have come across anything similar before.
Maybe Harem was born the regular way with a regular mind but because of practicing with her power she gradually became used to having two bodies, then three, and so on until she became how she is today. If this is the case then she once had a main (or at least original) body but after reaching the ability to create four additional real bodies (as opposed to clones or illusions) which body was the original became irrelevant.
Yea, she did start off with just the one, so until her teleporting power manifested (in her early teens if I recall correctly) Harem would have been just like a normal kid. Exactly as you say, once she first created an extra body, using her teleporting, there would be no way to distinguish one from the other. Nor any need.
They are both her, with the same memories. Most significantly of all though, if this were a normal cloning type effect (albeit one using teleportation) then each would start to develop different memories, from being in different places. Over time they would have different experiences and gradually develop divergent personalities. Essentially becoming different people.
However that process can never start with Harem, due to her mind-link, and sharing of all of her senses. As all her bodies share all of her senses and thoughts there is no way to differentiate one as being different, or ‘original’ compared to the others.
Although Harem has kept one without tattoos, dyed hair or other body alterations. I do not believe she thinks of this as ‘the original’ though. It is purely a practical matter so that, whenever she creates another body,* that body does not have any alterations. So is a blank canvas for whatever body art she may wish to use next.
Likewise it gives her the opportunity to try out a new hairstyle and colour. It is my guess that we will not see her change any of the others (significantly) at any point. People will have difficulty enough dealing with a multi-body person. Without her confusing them by changing styling.
Even though they intellectually know that each body is just one aspect of her, they will be used to recognising each through their own distinctive looks. Changing them will just draw attention back to Harem’s weird nature, at a point where they may have otherwise gotten used to it. Something I imagine she will have found out, through trial-and-error, in her latter teen years.
* Harem may be due one sometime soon, according to the latest comic dealing with such. This is at odds with old comments by Dave, but such is perfectly within his remit. He wisely reserves the right to change something when he needs to commit it to the comic. In the intervening time he may change his mind, or there might be plot developments which would suit something different.
Either I’ve read a lot of fiction or I just think differently from most other people (or both) because I took in the idea of one mind between five bodies without batting an eye. From the beginning I knew DaveB meant one decentralized mind and not five minds that were linked together. Harem once mentioned disliking having one or more of her bodies non-existent/unteleported because it made her feel blind. One of the other reasons I think she doesn’t get sensory overload from experiencing five bodies is because she has five brains to process that info. I’m referring to the hardware of the brains not the software of the mind. Since each body’s brain can handle any muscle memory easily and only one brain is truly needed for conscious thought and critical thinking that means it would be very rare that her “CPU” is ever maxed out.
…Or at least that’s how I would write her. I’m pretty sure that’s how Dave wrote Harem but I can’t verify the part about only one brain is needed of the five for critical thinking (as opposed to simple stuff like reflexes and muscle memory).
Stuff like telepathy (which is notably absent in the comic as of yet) typically has a range limit and/or a target limit, and there’s a good chance that Harem is mentally “bigger” than her attacker to begin with, giving her a better chance of just driving them out. Magic, though? Well, that varies. A lot.
“What did you do?”…”I need to check my log”…”never mind that now, WHAT DID YOU DO?”…”you don’t understand–I’m a hacker, checking the log is how I found out what I did–until then, I only know what I thought I was doing”
It’s been how many days since this comic and not a single person has referenced, “What did you DO, Ray?”
I haz a sad.
Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say “YES”!
Why is she yelling at the time wizard who hacks reality for hypothetically saving her ass.
This is why you don’t have reality warping wizards in your super hero association.
You are mean to them and they take their wheel of hacking home.
Probably because there’s still like a 40% chance that failing to factor in harem will have resulted in Cascading Temporal Failure where 10 minutes from now the universe ends because the harems all suddenly have conflicting reality based timelines meeting at the reset point.
Saving your ass is only good if it didn’t Doom Everyone.
Am I the only one who shouted “Now kiss!” at the end of panel 5?
Yes. Or at least I did not. However I love your way of thinking, and happily endorse it.
I knew I couldn’t be alone thinking they’d e the cutest ever. I know Sydney’s officially not gay but…
Meh, we can put it down to ‘being in denial’. Or the Mississippi, as that is nearer than the Nile.
Missus Shippy.
Re-reading this page (like you do), now hearing Pixelicious asking the question in the last panel in a sing-song’y way: “Kro-na, what did you do?”, with the voice rising slightly on the last word, but otherwise calm, which is probably freaking Kronachrome out more than if Pixelicious had yelled at her :)
I’m guessing Time-cops are involved if it is over abused
insert Dr.Who. (Rowan Atkinson) , but add the scarf and the fez.
and a red nose
In which case I am surprised that Pixel is not more enthusiastic? After all she enjoys a good time spanking.
Anyone know what happened to the VDSD comic? This site is listed as a participant but I can’t seem to locate it.
Clicking on a few of the links, at random, whilst some clearly have Valentines Day content, most seem to presently just link to the participating comic. I guess as the relevant art is completed the links will be updated to point at the entry?
It seems not everyone did do what would be considered a ‘Singles Awareness Day’ invotive
Most comics put it as a vote incentive… so I usually don’t bother nowadays.
Oh how annoying, having to actually show support by voting to get the naked pictures
I love the save point. My only regret is that Pixel will not be rescued and have to run around en flagrante for a few pages.
Well the villain clearly chooses to strip victims, before hanging them up to drain them, regardless. So you may get to see one or more of our heroines getting the same treatment yet.
*ears drooping, and whining*
Pixelicious wasn’t running around in anything (or nothing), because she was strung out (and up)
Too bad they didn’t have her at the restaurant for that first battle. She could have restored the whole place without anybody ever knowing. Maybe in the future she can overwrite property damage.