Grrl Power #566 – Surprise billionaire
Sciona is obviously good at long term planning, but there are simply some scenarios no one is going to predict, like an obtrusive billionaire and his squad of femme fatales showing up in the middle of your heist.
Even if you could actually predict all possible outcomes, there are still limitations on preparation time, like the actual time it takes to prepare for those outcomes and the material resources required to overcome, for instance, the leviathan making the vault its nest, or being met by your future self here to wave you off this course of action, or the shapeshifter pretending to be your future self, or the neutron star that gained sentience and wants to take you for its wife. In a universe full of superhumans and supernaturals and cryptids and aliens, “all eventualities” is an absurdly large possibility space.
It really comes down to managing probability. The neutron star thing? Well below a 1% chance of happening. Like… 0.000000000001%. Actually something which has never happened before is probably impossible to predict, so it would go in the “probably don’t need to worry about it” column. The Leviathan taking up residence in or near the vault? Maybe worth considering, but only to the degree that you prepare in a way that would allow you to deal with any number of large obstacles. Like, I don’t know, a grenade launcher. That’s the only practical way for someone like Batman to operate. He may not have a specific solution for dealing with Solomon Grundy in his belt, but as long as he has a batarang that can pump 50,000,000 volts through someone, he’s probably covered.
I found a great webcomic to share with you guys. It is totally NSFW, but despite being quite explicit on some of the pages, it doesn’t feel sleazy. All the sex is pretty casual and friendly. It also has fantastic art, and is well written and there’s like, a plot and characters and everything. It has the slightly odd name of “I Roved Out in Search of Truth & Love”
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Small details check.
And a whole host of them that nobody has commented on, given the big reveals drawing everyone’s attention.
Panel 1: The pillar above the Epimorph is hollow. Strongly implying that it can slide down and seal it off.
Panel 2: Sciona has beautiful eyes (I already mentioned that before though). The detail being the dark ‘whites’ of the eye contrasting with the lighter brilliant blue iris. Don’t look in too much detail and make the mistake of looking further down. That scar is all too gory.
Same panel, we do have a golden chalice in the background. Previously I speculated that holy relics would not be in ‘The Dark Reliquary’. But might vampires consider something that can turn regular water into holy water to be a dangerous item, needing to be locked away? Could that be the Holy Grail?
Then there is the inscription inside the ring, visible between Wyrmil and Sciona.
Panel 3
Probably a precursor to the portal opening in the next panel, but the alternative is that the one ring and it’s unidentified green neighbour are humming at each other and maybe zapping too!
[Translation from alien-speak:] Lantern ring: “mmm… ayup, that looks like an incoming portal”
[Translation from Black Speech:]The One Ring: “Aha, my chance to bind you!”
And nobody has even tried to identify the tetris crown in between Opal and Vale in the penultimate panel. Plus only one of the artefacts in the final panel has been narrowed down. Still the ruby and vague oblong one to go!
Note how Worm-boy heard the ‘Hmm’ and repeats it just before the *POIT*
I never noticed it was tetris like crown…. I believe it is the Crown of Winter-een-mas, the crown only the “True King” of the holiday can wear.
(If it is that crown, its from a web comic called Ctrl-Alt-Del if anyone doesn’t know the reference)
Plausible.
It’s smaller than I had planned it to be way in the background, but I was watching Hellboy 2 while I did the backgrounds of this page, if that helps. :)
in the final panel you can see The Mask from The Mask, a Unicorn Horn, a Chaos emerald (red one) and The Weighted Companion Cube.
*leaps on to the weighted companion cube, hugging it*
*falls asleep*
[Dreaming of squirrel girls]
Sydney Scoville, Jr or Slappy Squirrel?
Neither. Moist squirrel girls, don’t question it.
I don’t think thats the weighted companion cube, looks more like the Lament Configuration to me.
it isn’t the companion cube I zoomed in on it ( I don’t have the full page high definition page to look at so I -ctrl + – till it was big enough to make out. it is a box and 6 of the 8 corners are covered with an oval in the center so if it is from portal it is simply a weighted cube… now please excuse me as I ctrl- so i am not typing a letter at a time on this page.
Like this.
In the 2x view the red thing in the last panel looks like a solved Rubik’s Cube and the far right cube definitely is the Lament Configuration cube.
I wonder which one. There is more than one puzzlebox in the Hellraiser universe.
I must admit that a Hellraiser cube does belong here. Mind you, so does a Buddy Brick, being part of a diabolical apocalyptic scheme.
Can’t be the Holy Grail, that cup is wooden, not gold
Well deduced.
Mind you Indiana Jones forgot one thing. Wealthy churches had the habit of adorning every artefact and relic in their possession with gold and jewelry. So that could be a humble carpenter’s cup. Underneath a lot of subsequently-added bling.
except that wood and molten gold does not mix very well since the melting point of gold are WAAAAAY above the combustion temperature for most wood used for eating utensils
Gold is a malleable metal, there is no need to turn it molten in order to shape it. Quite often the outer gold will just be created separately, as a container. But others actually inlay gold, cover it in gold leaf and so on. This is a genuine facet of history, not speculation.
Not to mention that the holy grail is described in a lot of different ways depending on which Arthurian legend you read. Some of them really are jewel encrusted bling bling cups, some are bowls.
Oh yeah, and it’s a major divine artifact. I don’t think molten gold is much of a problem to something that gets saving throws against Mordekainen’s Disjunction…
If you are only going by Arthurian ‘legend’ (which, most times, can’t even get the name of the castle correct…) then you need to do more research
Saw a programme that tried to explain the truth about the Grail and claimed that it was in Spain, very plausible explanations, butt, like the Spear of Longinus, legend built upon lies (there really is a wooden bowl-cup under all that gold and jewels, just doubtful it’s the wooden bowl-cup used at the Last Supper as the servants at the time would have cleared it away)
That sounds like a flaw to me. Given the prominence given to Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. In other words he was choosing to take the servants’ role, rather than place himself above them.
So I doubt that they would have been making use of servants at all at the last supper. Plus I could envisage Jesus doing the tidying up, as he was making his various farewells that were recorded. Either that or the disciples will have taken the example Jesus set at the outset and took that upon themselves.
What I can’t see is leaving it for servants to do. Not with the tone that Jesus set at the outset.
It was still a public eating facility, either way, after the meal, he would have left the cup, unless he was a thief, or his disciples were
This does not speak to me of a public eating facility. Moreover the man meeting them was probably a follower of Jesus. Likewise the owner of the property in question (likely one and the same person, if he had readied such a large meal and was waiting to meet them).
Most likely the crockery and cutlery would be his own, and even if some was borrowed from neighbours, he would have provided Jesus with his best. So the cup would doubtless have been kept.
Further, once the significance of it being the last thing he drank from, before his death, sank in, it would become even more a treasured possession.
So I find the possibility of it surviving, and being identifiable, for several generations, to be highly credible. We see such within present day society often enough, and I do not see any reason why such behaviour would not have occurred in antiquity too
Whether it would make its way across the Middle East to the far side of Europe is another matter. But the crusades certainly do provide a feasible route, if that did happen.
Black speech for the “One ring” inscription.
I assume you used the patron’s double -res version for this analysis? I can’t see anything CLOSE to those details in this image
Oh you would not be able to read the inscription, even with that, as it needs to be heated before it becomes visible. Just hold it in your paw until it warms up. Don’t put it on though, that has… consequences. It also makes reading the inscription very tricky.
The rest is all plainly visible at muggle resolution, which being as poor as a church mouse is all I have access to.
Welll, if we’re talking about small details, did anyone mention the Epimorph has 11 points? And it takes 99 lives to recharge, which works out to exactly nine lives per point.
I thought that was interesting as it implies the design was not really random, but serves some kind of magical function.
Interesting observation and deduction.
Worth mentioning that the 11 excludes the main point though. Likewise the two which extend either side of the handle. But valid if just considering the ones grouped together on either side.
I think it might be Portal-Lady making sure it’s safe to open a portal there, so you don’t walk face 1st into a wall or emerge embedded in half a wall…
Learned that lesson the hard way, no embeded-in-objects yet but a few “emerge face 1st into wall/rock/long drop” type events. Ground Bridge targeting can be tricky…
Oh look, Deus is still alive. ¬_¬
Why wouldn’t he be? We saw him alive just a day or two ago (in comic time), when Maxi brought Sydney around to get that ‘special’ rebreather
I know, just voicing my displeasure at his return.
So Opal, Heavenly, and Vale were later added to the Who’s who, despite them not talking, but Cthillia is still not added to the previous page’s Who’s who.
Opal and Lee were added because there was too much confusion about who they were (well, at least with some people regarding Opal)
Whoops, I messed up her tag when I posted the previous page. She’s added properly now.
Alright, Deus! My favorite character is back!
He can’t be your favorite! He’s My Favorite! – My 4yo nephew’s logic
My favourite non-super is Suzy News.
And here I thought it was Sydney :p.
Technically, Sydney is a Super
Yea. She was not born a super, nor has she developed any mutations, but she certainly does have super-powers, which does make her a super.
Ain’t that super? :P
She’s still working on that
Spicy supper?
I can’t fault your logic, but he’s still may favorite!
Ok Im really starting to think Deus has some form of mental power like Precognition or Psychometry.
Oh sudden thought. We know personal mental time travel is possible in a GP universe. Maybe he can save scum. It would explain a hell of a lot.
or could be he was constantly checking wards strength and noted it weakened
he is coil
I think the most he could do is scrape him off and mop him up with a sponge. But doubt he would want to ruin a good suit doing that.
I see what you did there.
Deus is starting to remind me more and more of The Chairman from Sentinels of the Multiverse
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Dues outstrips poor Mr. Pike by miles.
Pike was outwitted and outgunned by Zhu Long and isn’t a major power outside of Rook City.
Dues is pulling so many strings I would only be slightly surprised if he supplied Sciona with the tech necessary to build her robot while simultaneously keeping a chat server with Krona.
The Chairman wishes he were Deus, in short
You… want to see… Deus, in shorts? o_O
I could be mistaken, but the crown looks to be from Hellboy 2, the one that controls the golden army.
I think we have a winner. The looks match and, more importantly, it is an apocalyptic artefact.
*awards a gold star*
And confirmed by DaveB above (confirmation posted after Mr. Reaper)
Now, I seem to recall Deus telling Maxima that Opal couldn’t make portals that went very far. Seems he may have been fibbing on that bit of info. Shocker. I suppose she may have, like, a twenty mile range just fine, though.
Also, ‘Epimorph’… Let’s see… latin root ‘epi’ means before, over, covering, on top of, while ‘morph’ mean change of shape.. I’m guessing this thing lets someone physically change their appearance. Not just illusionary or temporary, but a full-on body alteration? I can see why Sciona would want that.
But I wonder what look she would intend to go for?
Restore her original orcish good looks?
Take advantage of the pretty dark-elf eyes and convert her orcish parts to match the top of the head?
Replicate the most beautiful person she has ever encountered?
How will Sydney cope with having an evil twin?
lol – you’re a mess, man.
You mean he’s a sick little puppy? :P
Well, Deus did say he needed Opal to provide transport for his countries’ goods to and from the coast, which means it needs to be at least one country away
An epimorph is a crystal left behind when another crystal it grew over has dissolved. It’s like a cast without an arm in it.
I learned something today!
So, either related to that or something else.
Vs the Platinum Kings
Vs the Private Jets
Vs Vice.
Sure. Any gathering that gets big enough, popular enough, and sooner or later a suit shows up to make it profitable enough.
I just love the inversion of the usual trope. The heroes go to all the hard work of solving all of the puzzles, overcoming the deadly traps and locate the McGuffin. Only to have the villain turn up and steal it away from them, once all the hard work has been done.
We see it in Indiana Jones, Lara Croft and countless other films.
Yet here it is the arch-villain who finds herself in the role of the hard-done by adventurer, finding someone else muscling in on her spoils.
Excuse me, just a question, when did Opal get out of the cell our supers put her in after the fight in the parking lot? I last remember her here https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1881
And if it’s one of those “it’s happened but not yet been revealed to the audience” typ of things, I’m very sorry for bringing it up.
Deus told Maxima he would be taking her, i think it was around the time he had the discussion with Maxima about the geode
Yups, he explained why she was needed: he needed a way to get his goods to and from the coast without having to go through hostile neighbours
Aaah, thank you!
Yea, U.N. sanctions can be pesky. ;-)
No, it wasn’t U.N. sanctions, it was simply his new neighbours were hostile (why do you think he chose that country? because he knew the region was in turmoil and the wasn’t oil or other resources to attract the attention of the U.S.)
Is like a mystery shopper? Is Deus actually carrying quality control checking, on the Dark Reliquary?
Mmm, tasty new invotive!
*blindly groping for the keyboard, and touch-typing*
Wow, somebody has been working out on a buffing machine!
*dials emergency services*
Can I have some anti-dazzle treatment please, I can’t see a thing!
Ask Sydney if she will share
The Bloody Cryptids vs. the Jetsetting Business Sharks?
*awards your choice of stars*