Grrl Power #1036 – The unseen… tentacle?
Well, I’m glad everyone enjoyed my math screw up on the previous page. I’ll have to come up with something a little more sensible since what I actually came up with was a number large enough to include every protein molecule from every single strand of DNA on Earth combined. Not just every human. Everything currently alive. Possibly everything that has ever been alive.
Crypto8536 commented “Out of curiosity, I found a big number calculator online and ran 4^(64^3). I put the result into a Word document with font size 11 and, because of the calculator, every 3 digits has a space behind it. It’s 65 pages long.”
It’s not googleplex, but it’s a pretty big number. Well, I have to own it. I borked that one hard.
I kind of feel like this page should have ended with Dabbler being shocked at Sydney’s statement there at the end (not quantum field encryption shocked, but still) and called for a mandatory lady orgasm class when they get back to base, but… sometimes the space constraints on a single comic page are the only editor I get, and it’s not always a terrible thing.
Book recommendation time! I just finished one I found fairly amusing, called Skyclad (Fate’s Anvil Book 1). It’s your basic isekai novel, except the (primary) main character is a young woman, and through no fault of her own, upon arriving at the new world, gets stuck with a class with powers that only work when she’s nude.
Now, I know this sounds like a setup for a salacious sex romp, but the book doesn’t remotely go in that direction. I’d say it’s almost a missed opportunity, but it’s not like the author didn’t realize what the premise was. I think it was more of an excuse for him to heap some pretty reasonable bonuses on the MC for surviving “naked and unequipped,” but even that stuff falls by the wayside as the story progresses. Anyway, I thought it was quite a bit better than the average isekai book, so I’m telling you about it.
The other series I want to recommend is probably something you’ve heard about if you’re into the sorts of books I tend to pimp. Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s pretty popular, but it’s still easy to miss books if Amazon’s recommendations are screwy because you share an account with someone buying outside of your usual genres or if you don’t hang out in LitRPG Facebook groups or whatever.
Anyway, I actually didn’t like this book at first, because I didn’t feel that the setup didn’t really match the fairly casual attitude of the characters. The setup is, Carl is out chasing his ex-girlfriend’s cat, when every structure with a roof on the entire planet, buildings and cars, etc, is instantly flattened into the ground. So like, what, 85% of humanity just dies in that instant. Then the announcement comes out of nowhere welcoming all survivors to “The Game” which is your basic every-level-is-different/Smash TV dungeon dive. Basically alien youtube meets gladiator games.
Now, I don’t want to read a book about someone suffering from crippling emotional trauma/survivor’s guilt/whatever, but I also can’t deal with books where something horrific has or will happen, and the characters don’t seem to care about it. Characters need to react appropriately to their situations, IMO. Call me crazy. Carl has a few moments early on where he’s like “OMG, everyone I know is probably dead.” But otherwise he doesn’t seem terribly broken up about the near total genocide of his species and the functional erasure of the entirety of human history and accomplishment.
At least, at first. I quit about 2 hours in on my first try, but after finishing up several other books I had a brief dry spell and gave Carl another shot. The books are well written, faintly humorous, (which I found to be at odds with the premise initially) BUT, after pushing through, I was more entertained than annoyed, and Carl does eventually start fighting back against the genocidal producers. I won’t spoil anything, but by the end of the 4th book, he does fuck them pretty hard. It’s fantastically satisfying, and I’m hoping for more to come. I’m awaiting the audiobook (all of which have been excellent) for #5, but I think it shouldn’t be too long. I think it’s just getting edited/approved but I can’t say for sure.
Huh, two non-harem non-sexytime books in a row. Weird. Now go support the Tamer 8 Kickstarter, hah hah.
The kickstarter for Tamer 8 is up! It has already comfortably made its goal, I think it did that in the first few hours, but I’m letting you know so you can get the book and extra goodies if’n you want as soon as everything is available.
New incentive is up! Dabbler decided to get out of the pool, in slow motion (see the bonus comic at Patreon), possibly with added “physics.”
Cue Mele Kalikimaka.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Carmen Sandiego stole the Superion field for the sake of an orgasm. Robbery is her fetish after all.
“Robber no robber! Orgasm no… makes Carmen sad,” sad Dora the Sexplora. (Yeah, Don’t Google that- it’s Rule 34 at the worst)
You realize of course, that saying “don’t google that” instantly sends a certain kind of person straight to a google search. Not me, of course. Of course.
MUST… RESIST… GOOGLE SEARCH!
a wise man once said, yeild to temptation, it might not come your way again.
hmm. on a scale of 1 to 10 10 being (REALLY CENSORED) this was a 3
no I’m not handing out any search terms. the lawyer is already trying to sue me for corruption of language.
rule 34 _has_ to be in the porn sense manual, or the internet purity test
having played Where in the Universe is Carmen Sandiego, she could. She puts Rick Sanchez to shame with her tech.
omg, could you imagine if Carmen Sandiego teamed up with Waldo?
Rule #34 It already exists
Nobody ever asks “How’s Waldo?”
Poor guy.
I seem to remember Waldo also had some reality jumping device or magic as well.
Or imagine their offspring…
I’ve seen a comic about that. The baby vanishes from the obstetrician’s arms.
with his wallet
Can’t be a brute force attack, you can’t brute force a code that long. It has to have been intentional.
If each human counts as an attempt, that’s a solid ~8 billion attempts. Which doesn’t count all those who lived and died in the past several thousand years that the superion field is hypothesized to have existed.
That doesn’t go very far towards cracking even AES 256. But if we, say, assume that each gene and position in each human’s DNA is a chance to access then our numbers go up dramatically.
I believe about 90% of people ever born have been born since 1 C.E. and that number is estimated at about 100 billion. FYI :-)
rule 34 _has_ to be in the porn sense manual, or the internet purity test
maybe the code is not a password but a uder id.
some just got lucky because previous user did not reset the default password
You can, if you have infinite time and resources.
That would be almost impossible. I feel like a cuppa.
Mmm… You can if you get partial information with some or all of the attempts, e.g. side-channel attacks. That’s what a lot of cryptographic weaknesses are. RSA padding oracles, that sort of thing.
So the orbs bonded to Sydney. Sydney is the DNA decryption key?
I’m sure it is entirely unrelated to the fact that whoever previously owned those orbs seemingly crashed into earth so hard that it wiped out the dinosaurs.
The problem here is three layers of timing.
The crater is millions of years old. But Deus thinks the code is only thousands.
And scientists and the like have been over that section of ocean floor for a good while.
Now if I had a theory. Those Lovecraftian horrors recognized the orbs and looked recognizable to humans. The last landing for the orbs was distorted. I think the previous user was redirected into a crash. And the crater was the destination.
On another note. Deus knows the presumed creators of the orbs now?
This is making Sydney’s paranoia about revealing any secret more on the nose.
Not necessarily a conflict of timing.
The orbs might have *nothing* to do with the crater beyond landing in it well after it had been made.
The code might be thousands, might be more, might be less, hard to tell – he’s guessing; but how long the field has been around is has nothing to do with the orbs. Sydney is a super via artefact, rather than through native powers nor alteration (curse or corruption or blessing etc would all classify as alteration), so we can fairly say that Sydney, herself, is not, strictly speaking, a super.
Further, let’s assume the orbs are responsible for the crater. The orbs don’t necessarily need the superion field to function, and in fact, might be to the creators what an atlatl is to us now; it could even be a precursor to the field. And this is assuming they’re even related.
And finally, Deus knows the creators the same way we know the Indus Valley civilization. Which is to say, he doesn’t, only that he knows *of* them through observing what is left behind and nothing else. It’s not that he knows them, it’s that, if his theory is correct, *someone* must have made it. And this is also assuming whoever made the Superion field might not be the same people who are trying to brute force attack it with Earth’s genetics.
The brute force attack might also not be deliberate on the part of ANYONE, it could also be sheer coincidence. There are only so many models genetic code can form, so given a long enough period of time and large enough number of planets that develop intelligent, complex life, it becomes basically a given that eventually you will have totally unrelated species that are genetically compatible due to the law of large numbers.
I don’t know just how many genetic models are actually possible, but I know it’s finite and I’d wager it’s not especially large, and how long with how many planets it would take for that coincidence to arise is obviously dependent on how many possible models there are.
You say Sydney is not a super. Who is to say the way her mind works, as odd as everyone else finds it, is not the super power allowing her and only her access and use of the orbs. Not every supper power has to be spectacularly obvious. Who is to say she doesn’t retain everything she experiences down to the last detail and that is why she seems to go into sensory overload. It could be that super powers are the result of improper attempts to direct the energy and development of the mind and so enhances the body as failure. This would mean supers are a super screw up because development didn’t target the brain properly.
Human definition of super and alien definition of super or rather acceptable minimum standards to be considered more than animals that mimic intelligence is not likely the same thing. All of this is also based on Dues and the assumption that he is not only being honest, but is also not leading the nosy cops to a wild goose chase by giving hints about a dead end line of investigation so he can later laugh about time and resources wasted.
Until the desired result is known, no one can say for positive that super power is the goal and not an accident that looks pretty and amuses the livestock in the planetary lab.
That’s when the Superion Field got activated. The mechanisms for it could have been placed there long before.
We don’t know nothing about the creators of the Field.
Someone could have brought down the asteroid because the dinosaurs were a failure and this was the fastest way to get back on track to get a sentient species. Maybe someone sent the asteroids because the dinosaurs were on the way of becoming sentient and someone wanted that stopped. Maybe the asteroid was necessary to start the Field up and it took millions of years of buildup to become active
We just know too little about everything.
The fact is, the Superion Field is here. It was probably artificially created. The Chicxulub crater and the place were the orbs were found is the same, which is a strange coincidence. The creators of the orbs could have been advanced enough to create the Superion Field.
Or they put the orbs there for Sidney to find (the Q thought it would be funny to put them right in front of her to find and see what happens) and location is just a coincidence.
or the timing is unrelated, not saying some aliens didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs and most life on Earth so they could run mutation experiments on the shorter lived and higher mutation rate mammals on a planetary scale; just that it might not be directly related to the orbs being in the impact zone later. We all did cover on that page how they were just sitting on the surface when Sidney found them and the all the permutations as to why that could be.
That’s a pretty elusive concept right there. Wonder if Waldo could help locate it.
“As elusive as the offspring of Carmen Sandiego and Waldo” works.
“As elusive as the offspring of Carmen Sandiego and Waldo hiding in the Mall of America.”
“As elusive as Carmen Sandiego’s orgasm during coitus with Waldo while riding the Loch Ness monster”
As English isn’t my first language I had to look up what “bespoke” means as I didn’t see that word before.
After that 5th panel started to make sense. :)
“Bespoke” seems to be more commonly used in Great Britain. People from North America, or the United States at least, are more likely to say “custom made”. I was probably in my 30’s before I saw the word in a British hobby magazine. So, is this a word that Deus picked up some where as an affectation or is he from somewhere other than the U.S.
Since no one’s mentioned him being naturalized, even though they’ve mentioned him having duel citizenship with the country he runs and the US, I’m going with he reads/listens to a lot of stuff that contains words like “bespoke”. All it needs is to be in recent enough memory to easily retrieve.
when i was studying computer programming back in 80’s, on mainframes, i had “borrowed” an extra login in one of my classes as extra tool because they only allowed us so much time for logged in work. when they started to teach us random number generators i got the bright idea to compile a machine code program (all programs had to be turned into machine hexadecimal code to run). well after i figured out what size program to create, i had program create a specific block of memory and filled it with random hexadecimal numbers.
i always wished i had saved it somehow, because i had it create it then execute it right away. right after that entire mainframe for college campus froze up, even the admin terminal that was supposed to be immune to any other errors. mainframe was down for whole campus for a whole week. i always thought i had accidentally created a virus, or put it into eternal loop
Thing is at register level if you create a Hex code at random, the next iteration will move it to another register. And try to parse or act on it. If it’s code in the call library it will be run (this is the old overflow 256 vulnerability that plagued windows and internet programs forever. If you don’t specify read only it will process anything when shifted. When you have low active memory this can happen even when block size is specified. Fortran and Cobol both did this automatically unless programmers prevented it.
You… weren’t told about “undocumented instructions” were you? They’re SOOOOOO much FUUUUUUUUUUUN!
Professor Vega found out I knew about call tables and undocumented instructions when my first program came in at 2 pages – 3/4 of which was comments and documentation. I found out reading Asimov’s stuff in a science magazine. And a Niven booklet on programming in sci-fi writing. He made me do the rest long ways. I cheated even then recoding backwards from call function tables.
oh yeah lots of fun. if you ever follow Ben Eater’s channel In making a computer with breadboards. you could see that invalid bit combinations can also happen, because certain bits for the instructions are directly attached to the IO pins that sets up how instructions setup the computer. EG that bit flip does this, that bit tuns on decimal. that bit causes register x to be seen on the bus. etc. so what you end up is certain hex codes may not do or mean anything because they were not specifically accounted for.
Look up the “J1 Forth CPU core for FPGAs”. They do something similar, but it’s much more closely tied to how the intended upper layer uses the CPU, so perhaps fewer nonsensical instructions. There are at least a few encodings that turn into fused instructions you’d normally use separately, so you could build an optimising compiler to make use of them. One intended explicit one is the “return” bit, that can turn any ALU instruction into the same with a return tacked on.
The term of art for feeding random garbage to a system is “fuzzing”, but you’d ideally want to do it in such a way that you learn something useful from it. Robust systems would do little more than cause the process to dump core. Then again, a certain OS that strutted its multi-level hardware-based protection use by a certain well-known software vendor could still be taken down in an eyeblink from the lowest of the low-privileged states. Only took a single and well-documented debugging instruction.
Unlikely that a simple infinite loop would seize up a mainframe. Then again, I surmise that your mainframe was more of a mini, with much less in the way of multi-user protection. Viruses are pretty tricky, so unlikely to emerge from random garbage.
What might have happened is that the random instruction stream trashed the system somehow, and that this caused an unscheduled shutdown, losing writes and disk file system consistency in the process. Restoring that would easily have cost a week.
Then again, there have been cases of actual “halt and catch fire” instructions.
Did Deus just do “I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was Aliens”?
That’s a dangerous remark to make, Sydney.
“An undisputed winner in a zero-sum game.”
You can win, for a time, but since the loser has nowhere to go he now has a strong incentive to make you lose. Zero-sum games are usually best avoided, averted, or amended to no longer be zero-sum.
“An undisputed winner in a zero-sum game.”
I seem to have missed something.
How bad is Dabbler at drinking water? Even in a aggrigated state she should be able to drink and not splash half her face.
Maybe she has a drinking problem
The thought occurred to me that her natural skin may be prone to beading water in a distinct way, then combined with the light from the projector / hologram, it really makes their appearance pronounced. Normally she has a method to “wipe” it off (or maybe relocate it to other places on her body) and ensure she remains attractive, whether that’s wiping with her hand or a tech gadget or a spell or something, but she’s a bit preoccupied and hasn’t activated it yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4plPGRG8o
Had to post this.
yes, that was the clip I wanted, thank you
When I saw that, I wondered if her biology has her lapping at the water like a dog (or cat if you prefer) rather than the Human ‘get a mouthful and swallow’ method. Dabbler saves that method for other things.
As a cat, it wold be flowing down her cleavage. Cats curl their tongues, under not over!
I thought she did a spit take into the glass.
She might be blowing bubbles.
Where is Carmen Sandiego?
(Who is Carmen Sandiego?
Why is Carmen Sandiego?)
Good times, good times. Anyone know if the reboot is any good?
Everyone always asks “WHERE is Carmen Sandiego? “, but nobody ever asks “HOW is Carmen Sandiego?”
Whereunto and whence is Carmen Sandiego?
Patently, elusion is her end/purpose, so to speak. Thereupon as to the issue of whence, her surname might suggest a Hispanic origin, but perhaps it’s a pseudonym. Perhaps… that’s what she wants you to think…
Reboot is good… if you either don’t think of it as even remotely connected to the older stuff, or as an origin story to the origin story to a modernized version of it. Carmen is the heroine, not the villain.
Seriously, it’s a good show (but I’ve only seen a bit into season 2, and there are four seasons), but not only does it break with tradition, it basically kills the possibility of the series being attached to a classic-style game.
Why do they even have to change her to a hero? It is possible to have a main character who is a villain, with no tragic backstory, just look at Hannibal Lector
Not to forget, The Joker.
I played the original, and won on my first attempt.
You always have Dabbler do a call back to to “Carmen Sandiego’s Orgasm” later when she is recovered from her “quantum field encryption shock”.
Preferably when Arianna is present. :-)
I’m just imagining her suggesting the need to offer a continuing education course in “the female orgasm”.
Max would say she’s just looking for a free buffet.
Exactly this. She is way too mind blown to deal with it right now, but later she’ll be back with a vengeance.
Arianna would just remind dabbler that pornhub exists and she should start her own channel pretending to be a cosplay of herself. Leon can handle the security of the hookup. (channel should be seen to be posting from somewhere in Austin, TX. )
Dabbler’s Only Fans page….
Absolutely going to use “Carmen Sandiego’s Orgasm” in the future.
Would be kind of funny if humanity was some kind of hack by one group of aliens on the other’s creation of the field.
possible. I am about to suggest one species different individuals, possible cultures or organizations within, made different things; supernatural beings, the Maxima symbiote, the orbs, all for a common idea but different take, maybe even different *products*, like going from NES to Switch…and the geode symbiote was a game genie/game shark cheat device set to some optimized codes.
Oh peachy, now I have to change my passwords…how did you guess over half of them and string it all together as a page? Argghh!
Called it! lol It would explain a lot to be sure…
And no I didn’t write it here too often I get trolled so I keep things like this to myself…
mostly… I have said that the reason only humans have supers is because of the orb creators and that it’s what gives the supers their powers and it’s why Sydney could very well be after time and training be the single most powerful being in the galaxy! I didn’t say universe because the creators of the orbs may still be watching and waiting on the new user etc…
a. I have that exact kind of glass
b. How exactly is Dabbler drinking water? It seems both her lips are inside the glass rim, not how terrans usually go about drinking liquid from a cup- or glass-like container
I think she wanted to take a regular sip, and then Deus dropped the second bomb (the field is artificial), and then it just went all over.
I think she’s trying to lap it up?
You wrote six other novels already?? Wow. Are they different from the original and second one? I’ve not started the second book yet.
Tamer 8 name through me off as being rebooted of the original novel.
So Time traveling Sydney created the field, got it.
Yeah, I know it’s likely ‘whoever created the orbs’, but still. She totally would create something to make superheros. And then grumble that she forgot to/wasn’t able to give herself the ‘most common superpower’, or at least some of the benefits there. Outside of the possibility of her making peace with those grumblings she had earlier on in the comic.
A code Haruhi Suzumiya.
Or “Cosmic avatar”. Created/altered this region of space to be a cool playground, suppress your own memories and power to play in it; but after reincarnating as a human the subconscious still linked to the primary body realizes you totally forgot to turn on the decryption key in yourself so your assistants have scramble and toss one of the older super powe models, the baubles with the super powers skill tree in front of the avatar to compensate for this mistake.
or its intentional and they are testing one of the older or different super power products within the new one to see how they work together. Maxima could be a case of the same thing.
-which could get a tad darker, “our company thought of a way to increase the numbers of super powered pets/toys from this region; however we don’t know what impact this will have on our sales and relations with the older custom builds so we will put two test cases into the area as well.”
Deus gonna point at brown orb and aim code at it? Just to see what happens? New interface pops up asking for user ID?
Beyond the size of the key, there’s also a different math error:
If I understand it correctly, the rings were made up of the DNA base pairs that have their index be in the Fibonacci sequence. The problem with that is that the human genome only consists of 3 billion base pairs, and there are only 47 Fibonacci numbers that are smaller than 3 billion. 4^47 is 19 807 040 628 566 084 398 385 987 584, which to be fair is quite big when you look at it like just a number (it’s still 2.5 quintillion options per human), but nowhere near what’s needed for a proper encryption key. And also nowhere near what’s needed for 64 rings of 64 rings of 64.
That being said, the challenge is finding a way to make whichever number you choose fit with the proportion of humans you want to have superpowers. If that’s 1 in every million as you originally said, then you could say that only 10 of those genes determine whether you get superpowers, and the remaining 37 determine which ones you get.
Elusive as an Honest politician.
Dabbler: How’d this thing come to be?
Deus: I don’t know… God did it?
LOL that last panel, and thats why Dabler likes Sid so much, well that and the Porno sense tingling thing :P
Good to know that Galytn already has a healthy agricultural trade and can get bananas, grapes, AND apples for their conference rooms (or at least Deus’s conference room)
Let’s be honest, the most common password is “Password1!”
My personal favorite (from a friend’s wifi) is “lowercasealloneword”.
Or “incorrect”, as in the “That password is incorrect” popup. Not one I’ve used myself, but…
I’m reminded of a webcomic where several of the main characters visited another galaxy that was suspiciously like the Star Trek setting (although the Federation knock-off was far more on the evil side) in particularly the laws of physics allowed for warp travel when the rest of the universe didn’t. Turned out that bored, omnipotent and immortal beings had come across Star Trek on Earth and decided to turn an entire galaxy into a knock-off as a game for them to amuse themselves with.
Ah talking about Vibe, right? Yeah that was weird at best lol
Based on things like that and anime where magic doesn’t work right in other worlds I came up with the idea of the Architects of Magic creating mutlidimensional “machinery” that alters the laws of physics around specific planets or the systems they are in so magic exists there and obeys various sets of rules depending on the planet and system *seven sisters, seven types of magic*, but these people on these planets assume magic is a natural universal thing, until they travel to the other planets or another timeline etc… and find their spells either don’t work or work differently.
to add, its actually about the same motive.
I may have seen that webcomic and was inspired, remember what it was called?
in my own series the beings called the Architects of Magic had come across one timeline where they had inhabited the bodies of advanced androids collecting all the information from the civilaztion *which was a highly advanced to the point of having dimension tech version of Earth*, some of this data was folklore, fantasy, RPG videogames, inspiring seven of these beings to try and recreate this in reality after they were done there. Making several pocket dimensions and experimenting with various planets with different magic systems and set ups ranging from more folklore like clear to ones that even have random monsters and magical items that appear in chests and pots that appear around the world.
(same situation also caused two of them to create a real Heaven and Hell based on that Earth’s fictional mythologies and from then on they were real for countless other Earths).
Where does the title
” unseen tentacle “refer to?
The concept of an unidentified guiding force behind something is often referred to as “the unseen hand”. Except this time, the architect doesn’t necessarily have HANDS specifically.
I half-remember reading some attempts at ‘pitching science to the religious’ that described the established laws of physics using the metaphor of ‘the unseen Hand of God’. Maybe DaveB is referring to something like that, but for the unknown physiology of the Makers?
Mkay… That’s less terrifying.
Basically some civilization tampered with the fundamental forces of their universe, within the past couple millennia’s. At least is wasn’t built that way from scratch, as far as they can tell. It just means the minimum class of civilization that could do this is a type IV, but likely a type V. After all, nobody would want to fiddle with the fundamental forces of their own universe without testing it somewhere else.
That’s still a terrifying prospect though. Just not as bad as, “Welp! We now have evidence that the entire universe is someone’s lab experiment from the get go. Let’s hope they’re friendly!” or something to that sort.
If anything, I think the recent timescale may even be more impressive. It’s one thing to set up a whole experimental run and include a hidden ‘Easter Egg’ field. It’s quite another to get under the hood of a running Universe, from inside that same Universe, and add an entirely new field – let alone to do it so smoothly that the vast majority never even notice the addition.
It’s impressive in it’s own way. Just as it’s easier to mod a car than it is to build one from scratch, the same could be said about a universe. It’s a leap towards making your own bespoke universe though.
My thoughts exactly,
at the very least we know the field isn’t restricted to Earth thanks to the jump to Alari homeworld not affecting the powers of the supers that went there (Harem being the key evidence, and no one else reported a loss of strength or anything), so the field is at least we can assume galactic in scale; how far beyond that is anyone’s guess, if it was designed to be self expansive like regular quantum fields no telling how far it has expanded (I mean someone could do the math if it is expanding at the same rate as the regular quantum field *AKA the universe*, but we don’t know.
Bespoke:
made for a particular customer or user.
“a bespoke suit”
making or selling bespoke goods, especially clothing.
“bespoke tailors”
It’s a fancy way of saying “custom made” that will confuse the plebes and impress the rich.
We’re just completely glossing over dabbler drinking water like a dog/cat lol huh?
Her tongue is over a foot long and forked of course she’s going to lap at it… in public… especially in front of Max! Heck I’d watch that LOL
I would suspect she can also curl it up and suck like a straw, maybe even have undulating muscle controls to even swallow, meatier portions, with it.
Reminded me of this ad on the exact subject.
Kind of surprised Sydney didn’t go with as elusive as the infamous queen vampiric bee/fish succubus.
Oh so many needs…
So little time…
Sydney imagined that thing during one of Dabs explanations and kept it internalized so she probably forgot about it since then.
Magrathean ioun stones?
I feel like both Deus and Dabbler would answer Sydney’s last statement with “Not when I’m around” in stereo.
Was that too much for Dabbler to take in???
I think part of Dabbler’s problem is “this primitive-ish world (tech/magicwise) has THAT!?” and “this guy figured it out without access to an interstellar education?” Her reaction seems similar to when Sidney suggested putting a tracking spell on a rock and kicking it through the blood portal.
Most supers seem to be born that way the few who aren’t (like Sydney) are much rarer.
Sydney should start humming “Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego” theme.
The Rockapella version, of course.
Sydney to the rescue.
I feel like this point in the story is unusually relevant, considering that some physicists are currently proposing (and testing!) the theory that Information is another state of physical matter.
https://www.soulask.com/the-fifth-element-exists-a-new-experiment-will-confirm-that-information-is-material/
Missed my favorite party about the Crawler Carl series his partner in crime Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk. An uplifted former show cat turned magical murder machine with all the impulsiveness,vanity, self absorbtion and hubris of a pedigree Persian cat. She’s such a great character DAMMIT DONUT!
You know, with any other bad guy (except maybe Xanatos), I’d question the wisdom of accepting a drink from them without checking it first. But Deus thinks longer term than a temporary advantage from drugging his enemies.
Part of the elusiveness of the subject of Sydney’s comment has to do with a relative lack of study, in modern medical history, of the female reproductive system and the area around it. Dabbler will likely be shocked if she ever learns of the level of ignorance on the topic until the very late 20th/early 21th centuries.
You know what’s unnerving? I read mythology and religious histories for fun. While every system claims to date back to when everything started, recording the stories of gods and heroes in writing started with The Epic of Gilgamesh, which tale is believed to date back to 2900 BC/BCE. Even giving verbal tradition a thousand years or two before that, that’s still within Deus’ estimate, especially considering he’s dating a functioning relic based on collected data.
pre written history is a strange thing to study,
humans presumably spent 300,000 years just wandering around to every corner of the globe, having a few local innovations but nothing really lasting then all of a sudden around 10,000 years seemingly everyone all at once jumped into horticulture and agriculture and permanent settlements; without communication with one another this just cropped about every where.
I would say we saw writing crop up everywhere at once, but we can at least trace where these started, spread, intermingled, and how sadly so much of the world never got on that band wagon till it was too late and a good chunk of their cultures were lost because the guys who were writing stuff down were the conquerors; and they liked to change the stories to fit their preferences.
But Deus likely does not regard the members of Archon to be “enemies”. Customers, certainly. Potential allies. Employees of a potential competitor, which he hopes to eventually recruit.
But not enemies.
Yeah, I think people forget his company has contracts with Archon, this is more a sales pitch meeting than anything
(College college college…)
Lex Luthor had government contracts, tried to make a deal with Wayne Corp in at least one version of the DC-verse (and Bruce Wayne’s public persona is such a goody-two-shoes), and tried to cut deals with Braniac and Darkseid -all because it would benefit him.
Deus is smarter in several important ways, much less arrogant, and way, way, waaaaaaayyyyyyy more patient. Just starting his takeover from a small, politically unimportant, and impoverished country was a stroke of brilliance. If some nitwit tried to use his affection for Max against him, they’d probably be shining his shoes and cleaning his toilet before the day was out. If Deus was in a good mood. (We’d also probably learn how many words for idiot Max has in her vocabulary.)