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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“Pretty dangerous tourist attraction.”
There is a reason aa type lava is called that.
But silly things like ‘overwhelming dangerous situations’ never stopped people from being idiot tourists.
Can anything?
They could guard it with bears. That works so well at Yellowstone… uh, maybe guardrails like at Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon…
Never mind. Then tourists are doomed!
The Jurassic Park franchise agrees with you
Free roaming dinosars would stop most people from not going where they shouldnt. Much better deterant than handrails.
Forget the bears, Yellowstone is an active volcanic caldera. Humans will make anything a tourist attraction.
No it’s not a volcanic caldera. Don’t be ridiculous.
…
It’s a supervolcanic caldera. :)
the posibilities of yellowstone erupting are astronomically low, the media tends to exagerate them because of course they do but there are even chances that yellowstone is cooling down not heating up
`It explodes randomly into fireballs of doom? ooooOOOOOooooo I so wanna flood it with liquid nitrogen, see if it still explodes. Sam!’
‘You want me to helicopter in a truckload of LIquid nitrogen?’
‘eventually. Let’s start small, hand me a mug of it.’
Deus could make it a two-for-one attraction. In addition to the central tower he could build another one on the edge overlooking the native savanna and wildlife. He could put up a sign saying “this way to see the Grass Menagerie”.
(boards up windows in defense of the oncoming ninja attack)
When pundits go out drinking it turns into a Crass Menage e Troi.
Obsidisk?
… Did you not read the rest of that panel?
ObDObOb – Obsidian Disk Observation Obelisk. Or shorter version could be Ob3 if you’re hip.
Do we even know what Sydney was using to do all this? I can only imagine that she’s discovered the cutting beam has a setting to widen it’s effect at the expense of making it weaker overall, so she’d just widen it until it’s still strong enough to melt sand with only a brief, high-speed passing.
I recall DaveB mentioning that He’d include some additional power or aspect Sydney hadn’t figured out for the PPO since there was an accidental extra chevron/point in it’s tree, so maybe this is it.
I’m pretty sure PPO is a heat beam, not a cutting beam.
Had this conversation when she was using it, linked to the tank demonstration where it was a thin beam cutting through the target ,yes there was a great deal of heat, and tbe beam was followed up with explosions , like the beam seeded explosive energy along it’s path in the ground , same with other times we saw it. Only other setting previously shown and explained was a scatter shot.
She discovered a control to modify the aperture when she got her machine gun option and started experimenting with it.
I guess she might have found out the aperture applied to the beam as well. But I don’t see much of a reason for ever selecting the machine gun/blaster over the beam since the beam would completely saturate a kill zone of her choosing with instant beam death while the machine/gun blaster puts intermittent blasts that could be dodged.
I mean, you might want to occupy an area after you’ve finished clearing it, and NOT have it be melted into slag?
That option wouldn’t exist if that weren’t the case. So, you can probably guess that the machine-gun shots are ‘back-up’ pulses, thicker and more explosive than the main beam, and a more efficient allocation of killing power among multiple targets. Also, they probably scattershot to cover a wider area, and so kill more things quicker.
From what I’ve seen it’s not a cutting beam or a heat beam per-say it’s more of a plasma beam, several thousands of degrees in a focused area would almost instantly melt anything we “norms” know. Sydney did describe it like “touching a star” pretty much covers it.
It could be that the Energy Blast Orb (I’m not cool enough to say Pew-Pew Orb … Oh, bugger)
acts by siphoning plasma from a nearby stars Chromosphere-Coronal boundary
(Temperature approx 35000 Kelvin for Sol), possibly through the use of an aetherium portal or whatever it is called and then emits the plasma as a C-PAW (Charged Particle Accelerator Weapon).
Multiple variant applications of the portal technology.
that is one way, it could simply be using a conversion field in front it to hyper excite nearby particles that it draws in and fires though, super heating them; of course then it wouldn’t have worked in space.
-which granted is Tier 1 or 2 tech,
the portal option to a star is a Tier 2 civilization way of doing things, and even some tier 3, although a tier 3 may also be drawing in, super heating, or simply drawing in extra dimensional energy.
now tier 4 tech we could be looking at a layered quantum field forced expression matrix that manifests on, around, and focuses in the desired direction before the orb that alters the expression harmonics of quantum field “string theory quantum field expressions make particles and energy from the “nothing” of the base field (or fields as we now have the quintessence field hypothesis going around for the expansion of the universe, the Higgs field expression matter and the quintessence field possibly expressing dark matter or something)
-either way the idea here is perhaps it is using a forced expression matrix to manipulate reality to express energy and/or highly charged particles from NOTHING.
of course you get to Tier 4.3 or heavens forbid as high as tier 5 and that fancy energy and matter from nothing device is nothing but a laser pointer to them. a toy.
*granted at a lower power setting and depending on the “physical nature” of the tier 4 civilization in relation to those power levels, the PPO could still be a toy, just as you can have toy lasers but also weaponized lasers at a much higher intensity.
I suspect it’s just a straightforward plasma beam. No need to get fancy with portal tech, as the energy to create the portals has to come from somewhere in the first place, and probably requires a vastly greater amount of power than just shooting plasma.
I still think the whole thing’s a federation starship, just taken to the Nth degree.
Which makes the red ball weapons systems, so along with the photon torpedo and the plasma beam there’s probably a phaser setting someplace.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a battery in it somewhere, and it is hooked up to a generator made from an ethergate strung between a star and a blackhole.
I disagree with Deus, “obbedisk” sounds weird and definitely not catchy. But maybe that’s because I’m read-hearing it with Dutch pronunciation.
Most made-up words sound ‘weird’ and certainly not catchy at first, no matter what language they are in (even morseo when used in a not ‘native’ language: ie made-up English in… some other language)
Agreed. And it is always smart to check if a ‘made up’ word doesn’t have meaning in other languages
And having said that just previous…
-Obbedisk – I obey was the motto of Italian military hero Guiseppe Garibaldi.
[from 6parknews april 14 2022]
or
-Obbedisco! – I Obey! A famous response of Garibaldi in a telegram.
[Wiki Battle of Bezzecca]
While Garibaldi was preparing to continue the invasion toward Garda to take the forts of Lardaro, on 9 August he received the message of the armistice between Italy and Austria and the order of general La Marmora, commander-in-chief of the Piedmontese army, to abandon Trentino. On that occasion, in the square of Bezzecca, Giuseppe Garibaldi replied with the famous telegram, with only one word: “Obbedisco!” (“I obey!”).
How about obbobbedisk?
It sounds like someone has a cold!
I did have a stuck sneeze once that came out like that LOL!
Speaking of pormeanteau, when are we going to see Death Toll again, his powers were interesting and I’d like to know what he does for a living when he’s not a villain, like that zebra haired stylist.
I wonder if his powers protect him from anything or just from powers.
Hey, remember that guy Bell the Who, ya know what happened to him?
Yeah. What?
Shark bite. Then drowned.
Wait, what?
Yeah, plain old shark, plain old ocean water.
Bummer.
Total dork.
just heard an update
an update?
Yeah, turns out he bit the shark
that’s crazy!
Yeah, he definitely shouldn’t have swallowed that bite while underwater.
I think you may find that treaties already cover watercourses. You don’t need superpowers to operate diggers and dozers.
That’s something you could observe someone doing. A geokinetic may be able to change the landscape in a way that is indiscernible from natural events.
Amazing, the reflection of Sydney’s obbedisk on Maxima’s skin is incredibly good.
I have to imagine that Deus has accounted for the cracking in the obbedisk in his calculations – there’s a knife making industry to be found there, after all! “Super Knives”, made from materials made by a super, during defense of the nationstate.. that’s got some serious tourism dollars attached right off, even if they’re terrible quality. He’ll have to fight off the scalpers and knockoff attempts.
Forget tourism, what you just said has serious patriotism dollar attached to it.
Well there have been instances of making Surgical Scalpels out of flakes of Obsidian, and possibly flint, as they are naturally so sharp.
Not sure if they still do though.
Now, how do they stop Sydney calling it “Dragon Glass”?
By asking Sydney if she has scales or a natural tail
Drakonite.
They are still used where scarring may be a concern, eye and cosmetic surgeries being the most common usage.
As for Sydney getting her Daenarys on, Deus might actually suggest it, only to instantly regret mentioning it due to Sydney’s ultrasonic SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
…And from that day forth, nothing could stop Halo from shouting “DRACARYS!!!” every time she used the PPO orb……..
I wonder if superion-created material has any thaumaturgical properties. Plain obsidian is plentiful, but super-magical obsidian could make some pretty interesting new tools / weapons.
the look of her head & face are going to buuuuuuuuug yew until you fix it… looks like a guest artist :)
Her face got sand-blasted, which for her skin type is what makes it very smooth.
It took years off of her appearance.
New art change, Mr. Barrack ? Maxima’s face looks strange to her previous appearance. I’d say more manga-like.
She needs to create her largest possible force field, make it pancake shaped, and just fly around stomping on the fires. That way she can continue breathing…
Sydney can’t control the shape of the bubble only it’s size, maybe after a few upgrades she will.
If Syd knew how to make the green orb create water then she could use it with the flight orb and be a water bomber.
If there was a sufficiently sized body of water nearby. Fighting forest fires is another cool thing Sydney could train to do for the general civic assistance Archon is supposed to render, although I still think NASA would have the strongest need for her.
If the green orb could generate water (which is theoretically possible, if the “oxygen” Sydney cites in the comic was generated as O2, and not just as monatomic O) she wouldn’t need to pilfer it from a nearby body of water.
So, what is the market value of bulk obsidian?
Not much. It’s just glass.
Not even good quality glass, it’s very brittle and has lots of impurities / variety in its makeup.
But very sharp, there are a few applications…….. not many though.
78.5 square kilometres of blades for the business ends of inumerable macuahuitl and tepoztopilli.
The Aztec Empire shall rise again.
Is it just me or does Maxima’s face look different?
Hey! At least Sydney is trying to mitigate what she did rather than stand back and let the locals deal with the burning shit
Oh sure she’s not stupid just ummm… distractable? She’s just not equipped to handle things to the level she’s created.
While shes distractable, she has proven herself to keep her eye on the ball in moments of dire need (The whole dropping the shield & throw it ahead of the party on the Alari homeworld) & reacting here.
As much as love her switching mental….ohhh shiney……what was I saying….oh yes gears, I think you do her a disservice.
Hmmm… Sydney should set her beam to… Maximum would be too much, I guess; maybe medium intensity? And blast a fire lane around the burning area and let the fire burn itself out. Without knowing the details, that strikes me as the most practical option.
Wouldn’t the outside edge of the new fire lane start new fires? That might work upwind of the fire, but not on all sides.
Firelanes alone are not enough.
Though now that I mentioned wind, she can create enough heat to modify airflow, so she could just superheat the centre and create a strong inward wind towards the centre of the obbedisk, which would contain the fire if the wind is strong enough. Of course, the ecological consequences of adding even more heat to the atmosphere are atrocious, not to mention the modification of the local weather pattern. I predict lots of droughts and floods in the surrounding area for the future.
To be fair,most of her fires will be surrounded by glass to a lessor or greater degree.
Granted that still leaves things on fire – just don’t expect most of those fires to spread far.
Please don’t tell her but Max looks sooo cute when she’s not angry *_*
Apropos “scalpers”, I’ve read that it’s possible (and was done) to make scalpels from obsidian.
Because of how obsidian shards when it breaks, a weapon from obsidian won’t last long since it will begin to lose pieces really fast, but it will NEVER grow dull, and can put razors to shame.
Can the orb make halon gas?
… Maybe, if Sydney knows what that is (do NOT let her discover how to make helium!!!!!!)
Why not? I mean, I’m sure there are some dangerous uses for helium, but we’re running out of helium in this world and it’s crucial for cooling a lot of important medical equipment, so Sydney being able to synthesise it would be massive.
You think she would be producing it to help people?
NononoNOOO! She’ll be using it prank people
All you have to do is take some hydrogen atoms and smack them together real hard. Of course, there is that part about a somewhat energetic release of radiation in the process. If she survived the process she would have another patch (or small country) of glassified terrain to practice on.
Even if Sydney knew how to switch the life support orb to produce something that’s very much NOT life-supporting, it still has the issue of not cooling down the area after smothering the fire from lack of oxygen.
In that case, CO2 seems a reasonable thing to synthesise
It’s Denali, not McKinley. Ohio’s 40-year filibuster (seriously, rules prevented a name change for any place with pending legislation so the senators would mention it in a proposal and leave that “pending” constantly) was ended in 2015.
Also Uluru rather than Ayers Rock since 2002 while we’re on the topic of “name changes I didn’t find out about until last year and thought they referred to different places”.
How disappointing. Ohio is fired.
I love how it was resolved. “The rules also say that if the US Board of Geographic Names doesn’t make a decision in a timely manner, the Secretary of the Interior decides. 40 years is far from timely, and the Secretary isn’t bound by the same limit on legislation. It’s Denali now.”
You are all missing the best thing here. Free solar plant. We have a field of highly reflective heat absorbing material in the middle of a dessert. Both the salt tower and and solar cell methods are tee’d up. On top of that with supers in play a few dozen tons of obsidian has a lot of practical use in less clandestine fields. I see specialty exports and unique research opportunities for years to come.
You are preaching human technology to the dude that has access to advance alien technology. He probably has already planned how his power source are gonna be “developed” for the next few decades.
If its (by and large) flat it will just collect some more heat than the desert sand because it’s black or dark violet.
What you’d want would be at least several times that heat (to heat water) or several 100 times that heat (to melt metals or obsidian). You’d get that by reflecting the (small amount of) heat from a lot of places into one point. Which would require lots of mirrors that follow the sun and reflect its heat to one point all the time.
Tl;dr: It’s not a free solar plant as it is now.
You are looking for Secretary of the interior, who deals with everything outdoors.
Wouldn’t that make them the Secretary of the EXTERIOR?
Presumably “interior” refers to “things inside the country”, not “things inside a building”.
that would the secretary of foreign affairs, some countries do call them secretaries of the exterior if you translate the title. America doesn’t it seems.
When I first read it, it came out as “orbdisk”, which made sense, but Deus is in the business of SELF aggrandizement…
Wouldn’t the product of Sydney’s, um, “effort” be more like Trinitite than obsidian? If so, I doubt it would make good knife blades.
Thanks for that radioactive rabbit hole.
I doubt the PPO is radioactive or there would be serious constraints on the use, so not trinitite. The results of flash melting of sand would depend on the nature of the sand/dirt/water and I suspect without knowing the particulars, that it would be like a glassed rhyolite
I meant Trinitite in the chemical and structural sense (and even actual Trinitite is harmless in a radiological sense unless ingested). Trinitite was formed by a sudden application of high heat, and was a thin layer over the sand it was made from (it is a little more complicated than that, but not in a sense that it would affect this discussion), while obsidian is silicon-based lava that cools in a particular way. And you may recall I said “be more like Trinitite than obsidian”, not that it BE Trinitite. Other than chemically and structurally.
Instead of bubbling herself with the burning material, she’d be better off making Mister Bubble really large, and then using the flight orb to smash her self and her bubble down onto whatever is burning like a giant blanket.
Actually, probably no more dangerous to hike over than the lava (pumice!) fields I hiked in Utah. (Didn’t even know they were there, ran across them by accident during a lunch break!) Don’t expect to finish that hike with your skin intact, or much life left in your boots.
I wish I hadn’t been busy with so many other things that the whole discussion I started about She-Hulk completely slipped my mind. XD But it was interesting to read through the spectrum of viewpoints.
I hope someone remembers that Sydney will need to visit their doctor after all this to alleviate any damage smoke from all this might have done to her lungs.
she needs to find max’s gas mask.
Pretty sure that’s part of the post-deployment process.
Yeah it’s not good maybe very bad depending on what was burning I was a fireman for 10 years had my share of smoke inhalation but not just myself but other’s as well, building fires aren’t just wood smoke. There’s a lot of plastic, glass, roofing, and sealant products that go into making a house that are all very toxic. Smells a lot like a trash fire but with a lot of black smoke. Chief used to say “If it’s black, get back!” The air tanks only had 30 to 45 mins of air so we rarely wore them outside.
flash melting of sand/dirt/water and organic material like this…. I think you would wind up with something similar to opal that forms in the edges between a lava flow and the ground below.
If he was honest he’d call it the Obsidian Field of a Thousand Cuts If You Look Too Hard.
To make it safe he’d probably need to concrete it ALL in or something similar that geokinetics could do.
… Given how fine some of it would be solidifying EVERYONE THERE should get a healer or hospital out there for uh… what happens to old insulation installers handling fine fiberglass wool, and folks making themselves go out into even slight volcanic ashfall. Came from Washington state to start with. I know the stories from as far as Spokane from Mt. St. Helens, it is NOT good for ANYTHING that takes air in, least of all organic things. They had to ship in all sorts of automobile air intake systems over. Some people exposed and untreated still have a constant low wheeze. A species of shrubland lizard might have become extinct from that, if I faintly recall right. Something about their respiratory system not being all too robust to vegin with, mighta been a local bird….
About borders based on rivers when the rivers were artificially altered, that exact circumstance was included in the treaty defining the Rio Grande as the US-Mexican border. Artificial changes to the rivers’ flow wouldn’t trigger the national border change, which did lead to some bits of country on the wrong side of the river.
One such case was Rio Rico, which is on the Mexican side of the river, but in 1906, before its founding, the American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company redirected the river and didn’t put up the border markers they were supposed to place after they were brought to court, and the old riverbed simply dried up, so when the town developed everyone thought it was Mexican until decades later someone noticed that part of it was actually in the US. Eventually, in 1970, a treaty was signed that ceded it to Mexico in 1972, and that was formally done in 1977. Also, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that everyone born there between 1906 and 1972 could claim American citizenship by birthright, which a lot of them did, and used that to move elsewhere in the US.
A more extreme case is the Mexican-Americans in Texas and other parts of the American Southwest whose families have been in the region well back into the 1800’s when all those lands had still been part of Mexico until 1836-1847. When someone presumes they or their ancestors must have been immigrants to America at some point they retort, “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”
Dave, didn’t Sydney use the stmo orb to provide air for an entire group of people inside her shield when they traveled to the bottom of the ocean? Current evidence seems to suggest that air from the orb expands to fill the shield, rather than just remaining in a bubble around her, which would mean that she would indeed be feeding the fires rather than putting them out.
Ooh, yeah, good point on glass eroding. Glass dust can’t be good for your lungs. Or skin.
You can tell Max is stressed about what Sydney had done but it did end Max’s battle a lot faster than otherwise. Last time she fought with Darude she basically did the same thing. With the heat Sydney’s plasma beam can create she could possibly create or seal volcanoes with it but I don’t want to take the time to get into that kind of geological mechanics lol. That much pressure has to go somewhere!
Has Sydney tried creating two force bubbles at once, one enclosing her (and the oxygen maker orb), a larger one covering that one and some of the fire (to be smothered)?
Maybe she can, maybe she will unlock those abilities in the future, but as far as she knows, she can only make one bubble, and it has to be centered on her.
Not obsidian.
can’t sydney pick up sand with the bubble and dump it on the fires? sort of like a water bomber except with dirt because there’s no water around.
alternatively, what would happen if sydney just flew really fast next to the fires. we already know the bubble displaces water, shouldn’t displace air as well and leave a vortex in her wake?
“Buried under a foot of sand” is not all that much better than “on fire” for a lot of civilian things. Neither is “blasted by a massive vortex shockwave”.
I am surprised that Max isn’t chastising Sydney for not asking for help with something she clearly doesn’t have the right powers to deal with. I guess it’s good that she’s taking responsibility for the fallout from her actions, but she’s putting herself in danger unnecessarily when there’s got to be somebody better suited for the task.
They have a portal maker there, seems like organizing a transport of Heatwave would be a good reason to intersect the two simultaneous events, here and back at HQ
Could easily call it the Obsidian Observation Obelisk Disk. Bam, alliteration preserved.
Sydney just saved your ass, Max. Your condescending sigh in panel two is totally inappropriate and unappreciative.
It’s not really condescending. Maxima cares about sydney a LOT. She just wanted Sydney to get to the point because sydney gets easily sidelined with tangents.
Max’s face feels…off?.
She looks young. Like, teenager young. Sure, she’s always had a hot look, but you could tell she was an older woman. mid-20s to early 30s look (I think she’s a little older than that canonically, but she definitely doesn’t look it). Here… she looks like her parents should be chastising her for skipping school.
Remember the birthday present Max received?
I just love Dues more and more.
When life gives him lemons, he thinks about ways to turn them into multi-million dollar profit.
He is just having so much fun thinking about it.
You know that obsidian disk is so large that you’d probably be seen from space. That would mean there’d be two roundish disks in Africa that’d be able to be seen from space. The first one is known as the Richat Structure AKA the Eye of Africa. And now there’s another one but purple/black/blue-ish.
So… I can see the tourist attraction slogan already.
“Come to the Obsidian Obelisk! Where The Mighty Halo gave Africa a black eye.”