Grrl Power #1061 – Late night intelligence and chill
Getting cornered by a succubus at a party is like “Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, Orgasms?” They might not phrase it quite like that, but you can bet the conversation will eventually veer toward the topic of how every medically capable adult should maximize their orgasm potential.
In my head, the comic all plays out like a movie, and breaking it all down into a succinct and clearly illustrated comic page is still a skill I’m working on. I mostly blame my struggles on the amount I put on each page. Maybe one day I’ll just make every page a double page, but limit myself to 10 panels across both pages, as most comic pages average around 5 panels to each page? Anyway, I point this out because there’s a lot going on in panel 7 and I just wanted to break it down a little. Obviously Dabbler is proselytizing physical hedonism into Krona’s ear, but what’s hard to see is that Krona is using her hack panel to tweak her own personal arousal stats, and more importantly, setting up a sympathetic arousal link to Leon, so basically if one of them is in the mood, then they both are, in an attempt to limit “headaches” and “tiredness” and “but video games!” etc. Ideally I would have had a close up panel of her hack screen making her tweaks clearer.
Edit: To clarify, this link is one way for now. I should have made that clearer. If nothing else, she’s concerned about a feedback loop if it was two way. Not impossible to deal with, it’d just take more work that a few tweaks at a party while she’s lightly buzzed.
Mozambique/Galytn is seven hours ahead of the U.S. Central Standard timezone, so… I guess Sydney and Co left Archon HQ in the mid to late but not quite getting dark PM, and flew through the night, and arrived over there in the early AM? I’m not sure what time it is here now, but let’s say… 3 am? Honestly, 3 am doesn’t seem all that late to me. I don’t stay up that late very often these days but it’s still known to happen if I’ve got a good book or the rare engaging video game. I guess I think of 4 am as properly late. To me, 4 am is a late as it can be before it starts to get ‘early,’ if that makes sense.
Archon HQ is a 24 hour establishment, but they do turn off half the lights in most places after… I dunno. 12 am?
The June Vote Incentive is up! What’s that dripping down Sydney’s face? Uh… well, actually, clicking on the link won’t actually give it away necessarily, cause the thumbnail is from one of the, er, advanced pictures in the series, if you take my meaning. Yes, I mean there is a nude version of Sydney (and guest) over at the Patreon version.
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.
SCIENCE CORNER QUESTIONS
1- basic thermodynamics vs thermo-orgasmic : can you get more out of a process or system than you put in it? If so where does it come from?
2 (prob from Sydney) Can you harness twerk power? All that wasted energy. Heat loss etc… what are the energy units called, officially? If you add pistons for energy transfer, do you still measure output in horsepower?
For #1, the answer is usually no. At least some energy is usually lost in the process (even if it’s just in the form of light/sound). Usually the answer is to create so much energy that you have more than enough for your needs or to steal energy from elsewhere (vacuum, another universe, another dimension).
For #2, you might be thinking of orgone energy. And the official measure of energy is a joule.
1. Probably. Vehemence can use Vehemic Energy to create an aggression aura which leads people to violence which gives him more vehemic energy back. It stands to reason succubi work similar.
Also, his magic is inefficient, but the loss isn’t released as heat or anything noticeable, so in practical terms vehemic energy isn’t conserved like regular energy. Whether it is created from nothing or exchanged with some sort of vehemic field is unclear.
But in Vehemence’s case I would say thats more like how you have to provide the initial heat to gas, to release the inherent chemical energy as heat energy. It isn’t a small amount creating more, so much as a small amount helping to trigger the change of potential to current
…….kiiiida feel like doing that sympathetic arousal thing without asking him is edging into some very bad Consent concerns
Dave has clarified in the comments that the link is from him to her, not the other way around… Her sexual interest is mirroring his… his isn’t mirroring hers.
It’s a sympathetic mirror… Mirrors are one way. You aren’t a reflection of what you see in the mirror.
So, unless she is unable to consent to hacking her own libido, then there’s no problem.
The way I’m reading his explanation is that it’s only one way in that it won’t induce a feedback loop until they’re both so horny they’ll be doing it in public.
So if Leon’s ready to go, Krona is, and if Krona’s ready to go, Leon is.
DaveB explained a little more and it seems that it’s more like what Tokumei said, which means no consent/violation problems.
He said “if it was two way” not “it is two way”. Also Dave has clarified further in the comments. So it’s if Leon is ready to go, Krona is, but not vice versa. Furthermore, it’s more than just that. It’s interests… If Leon wants to play [insert gawd awful online game here] then Krona wants to play [that same gawd awful online game].
Dabbler is already that problem incarnate. She’s constantly using magical mind altering powers.
Dabbler gets into everything. Eventually.
I believe the reverse of that is also true.
her pants are low security.
Krona has taste. she’s eating the twist. I like the twists. the chocolate covered one from Shipley’s Do-Nots are some of the best. the devils food one is super rich.
now she just needs to have pineapple on her pizza.
what? you think I’m trying to start something? when there’s Mac and cheese on a pizza, there’s still a controversy over pineapple?!?! really.
Like pineapple, mac and cheese on pizza is not a thing in my universe.
Pineapple belongs on pizza, as long as its not whole pineapples.
I am surrounded by supervillains.
I might need to take the ninjas off pun duty because this is an even greater threat.
All you anti-pineapple pizza lovers are going to hate this creation. Even as a fan, I’m conflicted.
I have seen a recipe for a low carb snack. it is pizza stuffed pepper. The sweet idea above does not surprise me, the donut hamburger exists in this country somewhere and I will bravely refuse to look for it. I have eaten the 1 pound hamburger, large fry, and a Diet Coke, I have retired from weapons of gastronomic destruction.
I just realised the pretzel is symbolic
If krona puts pineapple on her pizza then it foreshadows that she is secretly the big bad of the entire comic.
If she puts peas and mayo on her pizza then she is the big bad’s boss.
Yes, I agree the controversy over pineapple and pizza is best left as a silly joke arguement. I have had actual strong disagreements with people for giving me guff over being okay with pineapple and ham on pizza… in my country its marketed as “hawaiian” as thats whoever made it popular called it.
That’s, uh, that’s some serious dubious consent. Honestly uncomfortable rapey vibes.
read dave’s exposition again. it’s one way towards her meaning if he gets horny then she will too but not the other way around.
it’s kinda like if i get horny and i feed my horniness by watching porn. did i forget to consent to myself watching more porn and ultimaterly nutting?
Okay, reading the comments so far
increasing arousal is not mind control and he still has a choice. While doing it directly is iffy, increasing arousal is big business, clothing, color theory, make up, perfumes, all with entire departments whose goal is, can we make people horny just by looking at or smelling our product. Again doing it directly is iffy but these others are something of a subliminal affect at times. It’s when she crosses or enthralling him that she will have gone too far.
All that said, there are two ways to look at this one.
1: the fear she may push her control to the point he is a mindless sex zombie (AKA sex doll with a pulse),
or
2: She won’t go any further than a subtle push, and accusing her of rape for that is the same as accusing her of not asking his consent because she wore some lingerie, perfume, or make up “preying” on his male libido to push him from a placid state to an aroused one.
But yes I can see the *Love potion” level if ick on directly affecting him, while at the same time looking at it like the psionic version of perfume, psionic perfume.
so long as he still has the option to say no, all she has done is made him horny.
granted it would be nice to ask first with anything that direct, but again its not mind control levels so.
*so its complicated and can go back and forth all day till it clearly tilts one way or the other*
Uh yes increasing arousal is on the mind control side, the entire industry you talk about can’t force arousal onto someone. The entire point of aphrodisiacs is to force arousal onto someone so that it reduces or removes their ability to control themselves. I still remember an artist who got a LOT of flack when he revealed backstory for one of his female characters having her ex-boyfriend feed her an aphrodisiac so she’d service him and his friends but it was okay because ‘she consented.’ Except she didn’t consent, a drug took away her ability to consent and it was explicitly used for that purpose.
And correction, rereading comic an DaveBs comment last page this is a thing she is doing to herself to become aroused when he is…a bad idea given the young male libido can be set off by some random BS sometimes.
If a young male can cope with that, so can a young female.
I think its more the surprise. I think Kobayashi’s dragon maid wasn’t too far off when she was cursed with a penis being confused and annoyed that it seemed to be aroused by any amount of pressure or warmth.
it of course can vary from guy to guy, but it may even react when you aren’t really aroused…which wander how that works in this hack, like his mind or his body.
this has even come up in court cases to point out that a man can get an erection without them being sexually aroused mentally; the body just reacts on its own.
Of course 24 hours operations run by Days, Mids and Swing tricks. The supes should have some kind of similar schedule for immediate emergency response. Harem is the no brainer immediate responder but there should be at least a couple others sprinkled around the clock.
Ummm… How is potentially unzipping his pants getting construed as rape?
It’s the “whammy him into getting horny when she gets horny” (panel 7) that’s being treated as the equivalent of dropping him some Date-Rape drugs, not the zip-state toggle in panels 5 and 6.
Doesn’t matter if someone would have probably have gone along with the sexy-times without the drugs, they no longer have the option to make that choice for themselves.
You’ve got it backwards. She set her arousal to mirror his, not vice versa. It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t start this scene as aroused as she is.
She can also be aroused by other stimulus as normal though, such as a conversation with Dabbler.
So she’s basically setting herself up for rape. Even in a relationship there can be cases when you don’t want to get aroused, and getting hard/wet doesn’t also want you want it.
By that standard, a man making the conscious sober choice to pop a viagra is setting himself up for rape. She is an adult who made an informed decision to do that, she consented to applying the mirror to herself, knowing it’s effects, for the explicit purpose of having sexy times with her boyfriend. By no means is that rape.
Furthermore, in the event that she did want to end it, there’s literally no reason she couldn’t undo the mirror. Unlike Viagra, this isn’t a chemical effect, it’s a program she is running with the use of her power, one she is perfectly capable of turning off if she stops enjoying it.
Your standards are whack.
Quite the opposite ? That man popping a viagra chooses to at that moment, but doesn’t set up something for later. Like, there is a difference between libido and lust.
As long as she knows what the affect will be before taking it, I don’t see the problem.
Read it again:
“so basically if one of them is in the mood, then they both are…”
Not ‘If Leon is in the mood, so is Krona’
Or ‘If Krona is in the mood, so is Leon’
It’s ‘If EITHER of them are in the mood, then the other is as well’
His only clarification is that it’s set up so it isn’t a feedback loop that drives them to ultra-horny levels.
‘I meant that she set that link up so that if he’s interested, then it will boost her interest. She’s aware of when it happens, as she set up the link, and it’s not two way as that could cause a feedback loop if she wasn’t careful, but I didn’t make that clear in my initial comments there. Also, she can turn it off whenever she wants, if she legit has a headache or a deadline or whatever.’
this is DaveB clarifying. its a one way connection. Leon gets none of her arousal over the link. normal arousal transfer (touching, talking, kissing, double entendres, sexy puns, and sexy pictures) will still work. hopefully She’s mature enough to handle the ‘incidental’ shoulderboobs that Leon will get. or Sydney might get another go at Leon’s affection after he is dumped.
“If Krona is in the mood, Leon is as well” might already be tautologically true, given he’s a young man. :P
Krona’s got more than one type of hacking going on. Way back when people were welcoming Sydney back to Earth, at some point during the party Dabbler talked Krona into setting up a “Sympathetic Mirror: Arousal” program. DaveB explained this a bit too vaguely in the Author’s notes, creating the false impression that this could force Leon to be horny whenever Krona felt like it. THAT’s more than a little bit rapey. DaveB eventually clarified that A) the current version Krona has set up can only make HER horny in response to HIM being horny, not the other way around and B) since she’s the one being affected and it’s her power, she can easily turn it off if she doesn’t approve of it happening in any given instance.
Finally more Krona time, i started to miss my 2nd favorite character (after syd) of this comic
After seeing the explanation, yeah, I see what you mean. More confused about the big ‘And Sydney (Also Glen)’ sign behind Dabbler there to be honest. Although given the timing of things I’m sure the Ping is very Sydney-related …
I think that’s supposed to be saying that during the birthday party for Sydney (and Glen), Dabbler had a talk with Krona, and I guess gave Krona the idea (and maybe mechanics) to setup an arousal link macro for extra zazz during fun times.
well this was the vote incentive that finally got me to sign up for the patreon
hang on… if your girlfriend is a reality hacker, could that mean that you’re packing?
Or basically the Bad Dragon storefront. Whatever size or shape you want.
More importantly, whatever size or shape SHE wants.
Given what we know about Krona, we can ascertain that should her powers evolve that this would be a reasonable simulation of what may happen if she has to defend Earth from alien invaders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzqv0ZrxMtU&t=1s
I am looking at Krona in the 4th panel with the twisty cruller in her mouth and I had a “FAST TIMES” moment,
(The cafeteria and the girls with the carrots “Practicing”) and I am thinking, Okay. Krona’s Horny. Leon, Dude see to your Girlfriend’s needs. she will make you guys invisible, just a few seconds out of Phase from reality. Hey it worked for The Doctor when he hid The TARDIS.
and when The invisible Woman and Mr Fantastic had sex…in the fantasticar, while The Thing was driving and The Human Torch was in the front seat not two feet away from them…
I must have missed that issue…
issue *I don’t remember if they did it in the comics, Malice was a thing in the comics as well but, they did this in the cartoon…in the 90s (AKA the era of censors so afraid of women’s bodies they kept giving women uniboobs)…guess the advantage of having a 6am or so timeslot, the censors don’t care.
couldn’t find just the clip, but on youtube I found the whole episode *with a slight speed up or voice change to avoid copyright bots, but
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv4g_uMlXSE
scene is at about 16:50 (rewind a bit if you want to see what she was wearing in her villain costume)
Took a while to realize that last symbol was gagged, not a pokeball-head.
Oh of course, doh. Thank you for that, I couldn’t figure it out.
My guess, that is Krona’s phone pinging. Sydney wants her help to temporarily change the terrain into a lake or something.
there you go making sense. there is precedent for the inconvenient Sydney call.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-294-sydneys-mighty-need/
I think it’s actually an alarm ping from the screen he was watching.
Either something has completed, a download, decrypt, compile, whatever.
Or something has gone wrong with whatever he was monitoring, space traffic, comms, satellite surveillance of Galtyn, energy spike from a gateway opening in the troposphere to close orbit around a black hole, you know, the usual stuff.
Soo….does everyone not realize that the second to last panel is a flashback? It’s Sydney’s coming home party. Krona set up a mirror on Dabbler to herself and my guess is it’s still going. Krona is type to leave processes running in the background.
Dave’s said it’s a mirror so she matches Leon’s libido. I wouldn’t want her to be stuck with Dabbler’s arousal levels.
Any one else concerned about what is happening in the background of the fourth panel? That smile Xochital is giving Arianna is deeply disterbing
Totally understand that people don’t read comments before making their own, so will understand when no one reads this reply either
Vahriah has seen what is going on in Leon’s little nerd-den, she has also seen that Ari roaming the hall right outside the giant window and she is warning Leon
And possibly distracting Arianna.
Yeah… one of these days Dabbler is going to do the sex thing and the reaction may not be funny ha-ha so much. Something tells me Max and the powers that be reeeaally don’t understand how much of an influence she can have/is having. the mess with Jabberwocky is just one indicator.
Yes, consenting sex between adults is bad and should be stopped and never discussed
Well no, but a super natural being by which nature of just being around it mentally effects people perhaps would be a bad thing to some extend.
Of course it can.
It’s just that the benefits of her super technology and expertise outweigh them.
Sadly, there are times when consenting sex between two (or more) adults can be bad. Say, in a chain of command. While Dabbler herself may have a questionable place in it, Maxima is well within her rights (and a little something called the UCMJ) in squelching hanky-panky in inappropriate situations. (Heatwave and Achilles may have been a thing pre-Archon, and I think there’s an exception for that sort of thing.)
But if Peggy and Harem hook up? Then things go bad. Quickly. Even if they really want to and are able to avoid any appearance of impropriety, that’s an officer having a relationship with an enlisted person. That way lies ruined military careers.
Who exactly would be ruining their careers?
Dabbler is such a good influence. :)
I was trying to interpret the stick figures picture, and then I realized something…
Two male symbols and a female symbol.
The only threesome available currently in Krona’s near future as a possibility is her, Leon, and Sydney.
And then I realizing… turning Sydney from girl to boy, for Krona, is probably as easy as turning a dial.
That will be… an interesting experience for Sydney.
oh dear…. if the whole arousal thing was confusing… introducing a sex change spell is going to be exciting. please bury this idea in a footnote somewhere. I’m sure it will never come up.
Kind of BOTH an “Oops” and an “Uh-oh” moment combined.
So not related to this comic but an older conversation
a brain burner bit of information passed my way yesterday.
So remember the mercenary fight and the stasis gun slowing down Maxima. How the stasis gun slowed down time without affecting gravity (Maxima was in place on the street and stayed in that spot relative to everything else so time was slowed down but no crushing gravitational force involved).
so one of the concerns given in the comments at the time was why could everyone see Maxima in the field and could Maxima see outside the field. The majority were saying the photons should be slowed down by the stasis field so form a blurry image on both ends.
However the odd bit of quantum mechanics I came across last night says photons are subject to gravity (bending and distorting and so on)…but not time. As in photons carry information, have movement and force, but due to having no mass exist without time.
So theoretically if you could make a device that slows or stops time around say an individual, or even a whole planet, then the external sources of light would still pass normally through this field as time has no affect on photons.
So if something or someone was slowed down or frozen in time but still subject to local gravity we would just see a near or completely motionless object/person.
What Maxima would see would depend on how fast her perception/ability to process visual information increases with her speed.
I don’t understand, why is Dabbler there in panel 7, I thought she was in Galytn with Max and Sydney and Tom?