Grrl Power #1079 – Guess who played Deity difficulty level in Civ?
This page is not especially visually exciting, but I needed to speed up the production of the page a bit to make up for my weekend trip last week. Normally that middle panel would have cut to a very sooty Sydney, but we’ll catch up with her soon.
Deus’s idea of adding to the disk, presumably with the use of geokinetics, is a slippery fucking slope in a world with superpowers. Can you imagine some American Secretary of… I don’t know, Parks and Rec deciding that he wants America to have the world’s tallest mountain, so he hires a geokinetic to add 1,700 meters to Mount McKinley? Over the course of a decade, I mean. All at once would be just silly. Or someone decides to widen/heighten the worlds second widest/tallest waterfall, or any number of things? The 7 natural wonders of the world would turn into 12 then 35 then suddenly Rhode Island has the world’s tallest-to-circumference-ratio plateau with a rotating restaurant on top, and the Grand Canyon is so deep they needed to install a quarter mile of glass in the bottom so you can see the magma and then aliens come to Earth and they’re like “Uh, what is happening here?”
And all that is ignoring the kind of mischief that hydro/geokinetics could get up to by changing the course of rivers and fucking with borders. If particular treaties define borders by the path of a river… there may or may not be provisions in there for the rivers naturally changing course, which seems like something you’d want to audit every, I dunno, 40 years or so? What I don’t imagine is in most border treaties is provisions for someone artificially changing the course of a river. Shit, actually that may well be Deus’s next land acquisition ploy.
Sydney’s idea of smothering a fire while keeping a bubble of oxygen around herself would work, I think, if the bubble was quite large and she could keep the oxygen well away from the actual ignition point. Normally this would be crazy to try, but since the Atmo-Orb allows her to create a pocket of air that won’t disperse, I think it would work out. I’d still recommend one of those foil fire retardant suits and a self contained breathing apparatus the first few times she tried it though. And by judging by the size of the fires in the background there, this is not an ideal test bed.
Turning sand into glass takes just north of 3,000F. The melting point of obsidian is only around 1,000F, so I guess the edges of Sydney’s little work of art there should look pretty interesting. In the meantime, all the grassland and anything else that isn’t straight up dirt that’s caught on the edge is going to burn for a while. Though with the disk only being ~4 inches plus or minus 1 inch thick, it’s going to cool off pretty quickly, (they’re all standing near the middle, which is where Sydney started) and I imagine will result in a shitload of cracks with very few large slabs. Honestly it’ll probably be a pretty dangerous tourist attraction if people are allowed to just hike over it.
The August Vote Incentive is up!
I’m a big fan of John Byrne’s run on “The Sensational She Hulk” and the imminent show looks very Sensational influenced. Therefore, I was inspired to draw some buff (pun intended) She Hulk, and threw in Red She Hulk for fun. Also, a wild Sydney for scale. Enjoy them posing in various outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Uh, golden girl here looks nothing like Maxima
Art style changed various times since the first comic. I, for one, like it.
I agree. She looks like a high school girl headed to the prom, not a battle-hardened military super soldier.
At first I thought that was one of the other characters.
its that sandy windswept look isn’t it … it makes every one look like they were on their way to the prom ……
I kind of prefer Maxima with the hard angles she had in her first appearance. It gave her a unique look.
She just got sandblasted, in the face, two pages back
I’m going to vote for this, too. The shape of her face seems to have gone “off model” since the previous page, she looks a lot younger?
I don’t think any of the characters have a “model”… or rather, DaveB makes copious use of reference material, so they look like whatever reference he’s using for a particular panel, which is likely not the same person he used for any previous reference. It’s a tradeoff between quality, consistency, and speed.
Yeah, there are a couple ‘shiny spots’ tacked on, but she isn’t made of metal anymore.
She never was made of metal. Her skin is just gold colored and very reflective/shiny.
“You’re warm,” said Sydney, long ago, when she first had skin-to-skin contact with Max.
That… doesn’t really provide any evidence for or against Max being made of metal. If she had commented on her softness, that would support one theory or the other, but metal can be warm as well as flesh.
It looks too smooth.
Lake Malawi is not too far away, as the Sidney flies. Helicopters dump water on fires. Zoom to the lake, scoop up water with her bubble, zoom to the fire, dump the water. Her knowing it was there to scoop, this would of course rely on her actually paying attention to the pre-mission brief…
That would require Malawi being cool with them taking their water. Which… could be fine, could be a major diplomatic incident. Definitely the sort of thing to run past the diplomats first.
She has to be inside her bubble. Not sure she can even partially fill it, maybe, but no precedence yet on doing that without it pushing water away like in the pool
It was partially filled with sand with her in it after the tank incident.
True, I am just remembering her bouyancy with it in the training pool.
She didn’t try and summon Mr Buble while in the water
Yes, she did. The orb moved to her hand, she then used it, to evoke the bubble while underwater, at which time Max tested the atmosphere.Then Sydney rose up with water in the bubble.
No, that was the air bubble, not Mr Buble, which is how she figured out what that Mystery Ball did
She had been in side Mr Buble, and held down by chains, but when he left she panicked and got caught in the chains
She was well trained, in how to recover her air and mask
I feel that her aether-gate-thingy could be made into a veritable fire hose if she could get to the lake, bubble to the bottom of it, and warp back.
Forget the lake, use the ocean. Doesn’t matter that it’s salt water, since this area is never going to grow crops again. Much better than wasting potable water in a place that is constantly in a drought.
Why use water? There’s plenty of sand around that she could dump on it. Sand is pretty good at smothering fires. Considering that she’d have to travel a significantly shorter distance to get sand, and that water is a fairly precious resource in a desert, using the sand would be better.
Not sure if anyone has said this already. Maxima looks surprisingly young in this strip. Or maybe less stressed. More like she did the day she was first exposed to the geode. Normally her facial expressions are more hardened. It’s the difference between looking 19-21 vs looking 26-28.
Facial sandblasting will do that to someone (if they survive the facial of course… )
So… Just worked out, Max has been sand blasted to a shine.
The guy literally buffed her.
you missed the value here, check this site: https://howtofindrocks.com/obsidian-value/#:~:text=Rough%20pieces%20of%20typical%20black,obsidian%20usually%20become%20museum%20pieces.
The price for obsidian strongly depends on the texture of the stone. Beginning from just $20 per kilo, it can occasionally reach up to $150 for a 5 cm rainbow tumbled stone. Obsidian is usually sold by kilos, rarely per grams or carats. The calculated price per gram rarely exceeds a couple of dollars.
Here is the table of obsidian prices in different units for your convenience.
Units Obsidian price
per carat $3 – 5 *for faceted stones
per gram $0.02 – 0.08
per ounce $0.56 – 2.24
per pound $9.06 – 36.2
per kilo $20 – 80
Obsidian Value per Pound, Ounce & Gram
Obsidian Value per Color / Type
The most valuable obsidians are stones with snowflakes, Mahogany textures, and rainbow and fire effects.
The price for them can reach $100 for a few centimeters stone. Rainbow and fire samples heat the top. Common black opaque obsidian is usually sold for $20 – 30 per kilo of tumbled stones or big boulder.
Color of obsidian Price
Green $6 -10 per 5 x 5cm rough
Snowflake $15 – 20 per 100 gram rough
Red $10 – 30 per 5 -10 cm tumbled stones
Raw $20 – 40 per kilo
Black $20 – 80 per kilo
Rainbow $20 – 150 per 5 x 5 cm tumbled stone
Fire $30 – 170 per small tumbled stone
Mahogany $10 – 40 per 10 grams (50 ct)
So average of 2.5 kg per m^2 per mm of thickness density, 4 inches (100~ mm), and “few miles” (7km) radius… My calcs are showing 12 and a 1/4 billion kg of obsidian. That is somewhere between a quarter and a whole trillion dollars assuming it is black obsidian.
Exactly. She just gave them much more than tourism dollars. Yes Obsidian is incredibly sharp, so who knows what else it could be used for and given this “stockpile” I am sure Deus could figure out a way to market it.
and assuming the vaule doesn’t drop through the floor because there’s so much of it, the market would quickly be saturated and it becomes worthless
Naw. If De Beers could keep diamond prices hugely inflated for nearly a century with only 40-75% of the market and some marketing, Deus can easily keep Haloite expensive with 100% market control.
He’ll probably have her agree “not to ever do that again” on tape, then use that to a) prevent the creation of more deposits elsewhere and b) hype up the rarity and exclusiveness as a single-run collectors item.
Too bad Sydney cant create water (or simply creating ‘cold’) with her life support orb… yet.
Sydney! Drop sand on it!
isn’t obsidian also really REALLY sharp?
Obsidian can be made into something extremely sharp, but it’s not normally all that sharp. Usually it’s pretty much just a hardened blob, since it hardened into its shape from a syrupy molten-liquid form. To make it sharp you generally have to “flake” it, meaning you strike pieces off of it at a sharp angle until you get a fine edge to it.
There are details of how Sidney’s shield works that as far as I know you haven’t dealt with. Is it always spherical? Or can she make it have a large flat floor? If so using that floor to smother the fire would be easier than the light hook.
It seems like it’s always spherical and always centered on her so if she was 10m above the ground, made a sphere 20m in radius and then flew up, she ought to carry a hell of a lot of dirt with her, which could use to smother the fire.. Alternately if the shield just stops at the surface of the earth, that’s a problem for anything that can come up through the ground to attack her.
We have seen it many times have a flat floor, this happens when she forms it while standing on the ground or forming it over herself and others who are on the ground.
The time Sydney was demonstrating her PPO for the press she had been too close without the bubble when the tank blew up, out of instinct she grabbed the orb and trapped quite a bit of sand/dirt in with her. Plus she can bubble around people and fly up with them in it. Either it follows the ground under her or in lets the ground pass through when she flies up.
In America, Canada, EU, Shengen, Australia, NZ, and maybe Japan, I wouldn’t really worry about park officials running amok with supers. Uplift of McKinley would never make it past the mandatory public comment period.
There are some dictatorships where really weird and dangerous stuff could happen. Okay, so you have geokinetic or hydrokinetic powers on a grand scale, but how many Ph.D.s do you have in Geology, Vulcanology, Hydrology, Physics, Fluid Dynamics, etc. Worth considering because even if the “lift a mountain a few miles” plan works, and you did enough seismic refitting to avoid leveling every human built structure there, you have to consider the possibility that what that did to the fault line running into the neighboring country may mean that as soon as they can rebuild their runways, and import some new warplanes, they’ll be paying a visit to turn anything in your country that wasn’t flattened by the quakes into a crater. Given how much of geology consists of, “we sure wish we knew how that worked,” there would be rich opportunities for unintended consequences.
Also, I haven’t done the envelope/napkin math yet, but based on the relative heat energy of large bonfires and wildfires, what the comic is missing about Sydney’s landscaping job is the mega convection cell that got created. The hurricane plus force winds developing as (relatively) cool air comes blasting in to replace the hot air going up at high speed. Also the creation of the mother of all thunderstorms once the hot air gets to maybe 50 to 75 thousand feet and starts getting cooled off in a major way. Even if there’s not much moisture in the low level air, it’s going to be a “Wow, look at that!” level event from the international space station, in the don’t even need binoculars sort of way. The dust alone in the convection column would make a pretty epic level electrical storm even if you didn’t have enough water to create severe precipitation.
Realistically, a lot, maybe most of the people, animals, and plants in there would end up thoroughly cooked. A layer of molten glass a few inches thick doesn’t seem like a lot, because for most people if they encounter molten glass it’s in very small amounts. Even industrial scale production where you need serious PPE for the radiant heat is a tiny speck compared to what Sydney did. It’ll cool faster than a similarly sized lava flow to be sure, but for the first several hours to day or so there’s not going to be that much difference, and in terms of surviving temperatures of several hundred degrees at ground level, being cooked for a couple of hours isn’t any less fatal than being cooked for a few days or weeks.
I’ll forgive physics lapses though, because for storytelling purposes I can see aiming for unintended consequences that are at a scary, but less than guilt driven PTSD level for Sydney.
my takeaway from all that is it’s magical heat, just like D&D fireballs and stuff, and the amount of residual heat it leaves behind returns to wherever it came from far more quickly than natural heat, conservation of extraplanar energy dynamics and all that.
IN other words, it’ll set stuff on fire if combustible, but everything melted and fused cools down unnaturally fast once targeted, and none of that heat/convection stuff even applies because it ‘radiates’ right back to where it came from, cooling unnaturally fast.
Takes care of all the problems. Ya stand one inch outside the blast radius of a fireball, and take no damage at all.
Sydney Scoville, Jr., Redefining the meaning of “scored earth” in our life time ;)
Since the area was largely desert it would of required serious irrigation and soil “transplants” to make it usable for much else to begin with. Since volcanic glass it pretty common there’s no real value in it other than a tourist trap.
Maxima’s face looks really smooth compared to her usual angular one.
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