Grrl Power #1108 – Whatever’s the opposite of greased lightning
When Jiggawatt teleports through wiring, it’s often really bad for the wires, unless she’s traveling through industrial grade power lines. 12-14 gauge residential wiring is not rated for 1 Jiggawatt, much less 1.21, and it’s a good idea to replace it if she has to hop through something that weedy.
Jiggawatt’s power stunt is to basically just put a steady current through the wire there so the signal has a path to piggyback on. Like firing a laser a millisecond before your railgun slug exits the barrel. She can alter her amps and volts and hertzes so she was able to find a combo that gently cradled the 5G signal up to Harem.
The main problem with having an inconspicuous evil lair is that you can’t post expendable guards all over the place or surround it with fortifications and trenches and dogs that shoot barbed wire when they bark. Really the best you can do is put up a non-suspicious amount of security cameras and maybe have people on your payroll who loiter around outside looking like they’re not keeping watch.
Well, the ascender base is under a parking garage which is attached to a building in a business park somewhere. Arc-SWAT didn’t exactly buzz the place with the Osprey, they flew in low, landed like 5 miles away and hoofed it to the back side of the parking garage through sparse forest. Luckily the team brought their wire-chewing trained squirrel… okay not really, but flying above a camera and turning it to alter the area it covers probably won’t be noticed right away unless someone’s looking at the monitor right when it happens. Well, or if they’re using an old CRT for the monitor and the coverage image is burned into the screen. It’s safe to assume that’s not likely the case these days for most systems, though I have no doubt there are still some CRTs out there with so much burn-in that you could turn the monitor off and no one would notice.
The November Vote Incentive is still up!
I was down at my parents last week which meant I didn’t have an opportunity to work on the new incentive. I’m working on one that’s… fine? I guess I’m a little lukewarm on how it’s turning out. It’ll be better if I can do a few more pieces to accompany it, so I have to weigh trying to do that or attempting to start and finish a separate piece this weekend.
I went a little simpler with the art this time, which is to say I didn’t add like 9 passes of lighting and detail work. I wasn’t trying to chintz out on the time input or anything, I’d been browsing around ArtStation since I like torturing myself with all the amazing art there, and found a few people who do nice clean styles that are more Arcane (the League of Legends Netflix show) than Love, Death and Robots, and by LD&R I mean the ones that are like “Look at how realistic our skin textures are!” and not the ones that are more Pixar-y or just like 2D cell art or whatever.
Enjoy variant 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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Well, the bad guys are about to have they’re HQ rung like Big Ben.
Harem did mention back at the Mars factory that her power won’t fire if there’s not a good spot to <b.VORP into.
The real secret to an inconspicuous evil lair is to rent space in a perfectly normal office building. There’s plenty of legitimate secured facilities out there, doing stuff that requires having a few guards and some heavy doors with nice locks. Just have to make it look like you’re a backbone internet company, or doing work for DARPA, or even something boring but very proprietary like plant genetics. “Yeah, we’re developing tomatoes that can grow in deserts.”
They’re less secure against brute-force attacks, but nobody’s going to be blasting open the side of a building with loads of noncombatants unless they’re real jerks. You just have to make sure that the super villians have a dress code that is either suit and tie or labcoats.
Example from Heroes-
Primatech Paper Co. is a paper production/distribution company located in Odessa, Texas. Unknown to the local populace, Primatech is actually a front for The Company.
Not only that, they ACTUALLY sell paper. When Claire needed since banner paper for a project, Noah’s like “sure honey coffee down to the showroom and pick some out.”
The best fronts actually do some honest business.
Doing real business makes you less suspicious, but it also increases your surface area for attacks.
I think the best example of this was a mom & pop style pizza place that the mafia supposedly had started for ‘washing’ some money, from what I read (I can’t recall the actual info) the place became so lucrative that they ended up making a legitimate business out of it and stepped away from organized crime in that area.
Godfather’s Pizza.
They started is a money-launderer, for Gotta, I believe, though the details escape me.
Ray’s Pizza in NYC. https://nypost.com/2013/09/22/secret-mob-history-of-rays-pizza/
Well…I stand corrected. ^_^’
…and saddened by the loss of one of favorite stories.
Heh. I recall on a road trip, my mom stopped with three hungry kids at a small diner. Seemed to mostly be doing carry out. Lousy menu, but she ordered us the spaghetti, it seemed safe enough.
Took a ridiculous amount of time to get cold Spaghetti-O’s on a paper plate. Why, it was almost like they’d sent somebody to the grocery store to buy some!
I still recall Dad explaining to her that she’d stumbled across a bookie joint.
In Tom Krartmans books, in the Carrearverse, his protagonist who was the de facto military junta ruler of Panama…eh sorry Balboa, had his super secret skunkworks sub base with a front as a high-end yacht builder. He actually built boats, but only Q boats for his Intelligence service, and anyone else that came in got an irate owner who was way too busy to take their order.
No such company exists. (I live in Odessa…of course maybe I’m just saying that.)
My favorite was the original COBRA HQ from the G.I. Joe comics. It was the town of Springfield, a “quiet little town.” COBRA literally owned the entire place so there wasn’t any worry about pesky locals or law enforcement seeing something they weren’t supposed to since everyone in the town was COBRA.
So… a scam call center
Redundant terms, sadly.
Not really, I worked a real call center at the turn of the century, doing Windows Support for Unnamed Computer Company, our biggest support line was the Pavlov computer, and laptop (they didn’t call them desktops yet back then). joke: The biggest support problem we had was if someone rang a bell near our computers they would start to drool./joke
Just don’t toss the CD like a frisbee, a Pavlov computer might jump off the desktop to chase it
They would be immune to brute attacks if the neighboring offices were actually full on civilians. Take the fight outside or lose the battle with public opinion
Many CIA and NSA branch offices are just that, a floor or two of a nondescript office tower in a big city. They don’t advertise that this is a NSA data analysis office; they just have some regular name on the door/directory, right next to various private-sector companies. The person you are riding the elevator with could be a spy.
“So what does Eddington and Smith do anyway?” “Oh, were a data analytics company. We investigate people’s shopping habits on the internet for our clients.”
A proud tradition that goes back to Untied Fruit.
And that explanation is literally true.
Their clients being the three letter agencies, domestic and foreign,
“people” being everyone,
“the internet” being all devices reachable by the internet, and
“shopping habits” being literally everything you do on those devices, or say within within hearing of those devices.
The NSA and CIA “clients” are strictly within the federal government of the United States of America. What those agencies choose to do with that information is up to them (and some international treaties, like NATO). According US law (and earlier scandals), the NSA and CIA are supposed to gather information only on foreign targets. There have been some court cases that have been decided on these guys digging up dirt on American nationals.
The ‘clients’ would include agencies in the rest of the “Five Eyes”, so can include things like CSIS in Canada, DIO in Australia and MI5 in the UK.
Dio? Rock on, Holy Diver!
nice power combo. wonder what the charge is for this combo. bet it will shock the defenders.
…After all’s been said & done, there’s also the charges under indictments coming later for the crooks…
Okay, since no one else is wearing them, I guess Seneca’s goggles from the previous page are NOT the new combat HUD.
You’re telling us that Harem’s seriously never tried the teleport via video feed of where she’s going trick before now?
You know how this will end right. Someone will fake a Vid feed from a VR totally artificial digital environment and Harem ends up teleporting into a game server.
The Faketrix is real. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1013/
Sqqueeeeeeer!!!! ><
It's low key level up time!
Nice touch dave! It shows the other's power are able to grow even without sid's level table.
That would be an advantage to working for Archon. Not only do you have an opportunity to expand your abilities you are actively encouraged to do so.
Indeed, it would be a fantastic playground for experimenting and getting feedback from other supers. I’m really happy to see both of them learning new things.
or of course Harem has been there before. She does have form as a double agent after all…
No, she was assigned to keep an eye on that SmugD
But… she has, though… Like, the very first time we saw her use her powers.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-60-operation-cover-our-asses/
Not a proper example was. She had been to the bank and knew where it was, and by video knew where the ambulance was. This is going to someplace she has never seen before.
I always assumed she vorped to the edge of the parking lot, and zeroed in on the ambulance from there, rather than pop directly from HQ into the ambulance based on the TV footage.
Is it a public parking garage? Could they fill an inconspicuous “Thing-Doers, Inc: Doing things since 1951” work-van with surveillance/stake-out toys and just park it there?
New ways to use the same old powers
Creativity was never their strong suit. These aren’t new uses to old powers. These are “what would Sydney try” power uses. I assume blowing up the electrical wire has happened a few times in training and tripping breakers ends the current which also ends the entry.
Jigga’s phone traveling with her is probably new.
Harem can literally port in gear/support once she has the first body in.
Varia is probably #4 in the room as she becomes adaptive anti-target.
Once those 4 are in you have direct contact non-electric coms so long as the Harems are up. Their first task will probably be to connect to the internet via items inside this place. Then Leon does his thing. All of Harem is probably on deck here. One next to Maxima, two on infiltration, one by Leon, and the last known one on standby so she can scout two routes at once.
Goals:
1. Find an exfiltration route. Inversely this makes an entry for the heavy hitters without breaking anything.
2. Find Chimy and attach a Harem to increase search radius.
3. Recover or if necessary destroy database device.
4. Find Goon Squad’s zero.
Jiggs always brings her clothes, can’t see why her phone travelling would be new. The signal tunneling is brand new though, and possibly too degraded for Leon to do much with it. Although it might be enough for him to establish an outside connection – though I wonder how long she could maintain a channel like this.
And no reason to keep a Harem in reserve, or more than one with leadership, as she can instantly vorp to any other copy or back to base. Just need one on the outside (probably with Max) while the 4 others do a mapping speed-run with video cameras. Preferably ones with an independent GPS-style triangulation WAN on board to speed up the model processing.
All Leon needs is a single port. Plug in a USB device and he’s in. This isn’t superhero tech either. It’s merely current.
> This isn’t superhero tech either. It’s merely current.
IIRC, the in-universe year is 2011.
they are on windows 7 about to go windows 8. my condolences. usb drives exist. I’m not looking up to see if blue USB out yet.
BlUSB!
Wiring teleportation… that is an interesting thing to munchkin.
Do ARC have a secret network of extra thicc wiring especially made and rated for Jiggawat, interspersed throughout the country? Seriously, the ability to rapidly deploy anywhere in the states is nothing to sneeze at. Sure, ARC has Maxima with her supersonic flight and Harem with her teleport clones, but more QRF supers wouldn’t hurt from a military perspective.
Back during the first big fight she was shown to be able to fly through the clouds as lightning
Huh… I wonder if there’s a range limit or the like. Because, what if you daisy chain powered buoys or something between Earth and the Moon. Jam her into a space suit and have her transport items within her weight limit into orbit or onto the Moon.
I think she was going through the high-voltage lines and then just jumped down through the air when she arrived at the parking lot.
She’d have to change systems periodically, but she could cover a lot of the US via existing transmission power grids. Ironically, Texas has one of the messier / least coherent systems for her to be based in.
Texas’ power grid is not connected to the other 47 CONUS states, because that would mean having to meet socialist government standards. That’s what they told us when hundreds of people died in 2021 when the grid went down.
they also told us that our grid was down because of the green new deal which is confusing…
its almost as if they were trying to keep Texas distracted long enough to get reelected. but no, dear leader would never do that…
please note- this post contains sarcasm. if you are using a sarcasm detector from starfleet… I am sorry. I accept no liability.
I really just came here to codos the substation sketch!
However, as a quick note, the Texas power grid IS in fact connected to the rest of the US power grid at multiple points, and we import/export power all the time. The difference between Texas and the rest of the country is the Texas ties are DC only, which limits the amount of power we can import, and slightly increased losses due to conversion from DC to AC before it goes it the grid. It also means in times of great instability like during Snowpocalypse we can’t rely on the larger grid to help stabilize things. The advantage of the DC only ties is if there are grid failures on either side, it doesn’t propagate to the other side, which sort of contains the problem, like in Snowpocalypse. In fact the US consists of three different ‘grids’ tied together this way, so it’s not like Texas is just arbitrarily doing it’s own thing here, as the news media liked to assert.
The big issue was not a lack of grid tie, but insufficient winterization. The operators were told it was going to be a cold one and to plan accordingly, but they underestimated the degree of cold as winters here are typically mild, not arctic like it was then. Wind and solar was unavailable, which is about 20-25% of the supply typically, then a few critical producers had unexpected cooling pipe freezes and had to shut down, and as it got super cold, natural gas was being consumed at massive rates by consumers, leaving too little pressure to run NG plants and they also had to shut down. Shutting these big producers down is a really big deal and takes a while to start them back up depending on what happened.
That, in a nutshell, is why it played out the way it did. Being tied to one of the larger grids likely would not have helped anything, and could have risked destabilizing half the country, rather than just the state. Sorry for going on so long on this.
Source: I’m a Texas resident that works in the power industry.
And here I thought SpaceX was just doing a cryogenic rocket test for their entire facility; it just spread a bit from there. ;)
As the “Defender against the Socialists” hightailed his ass to Cancun.
And this is why every superhero group need at least 3 or 4 people that might or might not be powerhouses just to do stealth missions like infiltrating the bad guys’ fortress.
Just have Max knock on the, well, former door. While everybody in the evil lair is distracted, the rest of the team can find any entrance they want.
When Max knocks through the door, they’re gonna be in contingency mode. Doors locked, auto-turrets armed, laser sharks released, documents and technology destroyed or evacuated, non-combat-personnel evacuated, captives killed or taken hostage.
Better to infiltrate while they’re unsuspecting, then send the heavy guns in after the vital stuff is secured.
Parking garages dont have doors, do they?
depends on the ramp.
Maybe it’s just New York. I’ve never seen a parking garage that had a door that you’d knock on, instead of a gate or one of those toll bars. Not even sure how a door on a garage would work.
…and this is why you do not mess with military trained special forces people that also happen to have superpowers, kids.
The reason household worrying isn’t rated for 1.21 jiggawatts is because it’s rated in amps, not watts. The question is what are the volts? Because if it’s 12.1 million votes, household worrying can definitely take 1.21 jiggawatts.
That matter the 120 volts wer in are a scam because it takes fewer watts to boil water at 240v than at 120v. This is also why electric kettles are less popular in America than stovetop… Stoves run on 240 and this it’s more efficient
Your first paragraph is correct, your second isn’t.
Watts = Volts X Amps
As both North American (120 Volts) and Europe (240 Volts) use the same gauge of wire (capable of carry the same Amps), that means that the 240 Volt kettle boils twice as fast. It is not more ‘efficient’ (except in terms of time): both systems use the same amount of Watts to bring the water to the boiling point.
Not quite, total energy is the same, which is Joules. Watts are power, which is indeed lower on the 120V, all else being equal, but of course it takes more time, which results in the same energy.
You have so many things wrong there. Household wiring absolutely would have trouble with 1 million+ volts – it would burn through the insulation (possibly starting a fire) and arc across to the return wire.
In short – amps determines the wire thickness, volts the insulation thickness.
As for voltages and kettles – the problem is that both the US and the UK have a very similar maximum current, so the voltage being halved in the US means an electric kettle is half as powerful. Due to kettles generally not being perfectly insulated, that means you lose more heat when heating something more slowly than if you heat it quickly, reducing the efficiency of the US kettle a little on top of it already being half the power.
Stovetop kettles are usually gas powered I believe, but electric stoves with a kettle on are less efficient than an all-electric kettle would be, again due to heat loss. Probably less efficient even than the 120V kettle – but overcoming the difference in efficiency with 240V power. So it would be faster than the 120V kettle – but still significantly slower than a 240V kettle would be.
I said it before, I’ll say it again, and I will die on this hill. Amps are what burn out wires, not volts. A million volts can be passed through hair thin wires if the amps are low enough. You’d need ridiculously low amps for that though.
“it takes fewer watts to boil water at 240v” Not unless the laws of thermodynamics were recently amended by Congress. Specific heat of water does not care how you are heating it, if the heat source is the same.
Fewer amps, yes.
I misspoke, it takes fewer watts on a 240v electric kettle than with a conventional kettle on an electric stove due to the less direct heating.
I’d say it’s more the fact that after the American Revolution the US decided to throw off anything seen as “too British” to distance themselves and this greatly reduced the popularity of hot tea and the elimination of tea time. Without the same number of people consuming tea as Britain, it naturally goes that fewer people would need tea kettles, electric or not. There’s many kitchen appliances that use way more power that are extremely popular (e.g. Instant Pots.)
Incidentally this “British purge” is the reason why American English and British English differ. Intentional changes to spellings (including infamously dropping the ‘U’ in many words) to distance themselves further.
If that’s the case then we’d be on metric because it was being promoted back around the same time the UK was creating the imperial system (US uses customary, not imperial, there is a difference). US inherited the Customary system from the UK and it was around the 1820s the Imperial system was created. While it’s true the US didn’t adopt Imperial because “too British”, Metric was also very NOT British.
As for 240 vs 120 volts, it has nothing to do with that. In fact, the US actually does use 240volts (and in 3 phase as well for that matter), it just doesn’t pass that much to all of the sockets in a house. Technology Connections did a good video on that.
how much resistance do you think your average household wire has? O_o
1GW to 10MV (i just scaled your values by 1.21) means you are running at 100A (which might already be a bit much for your average wiring)
that also means your wire has a resistance of 100000 ohms
looking at a chart of wire specifications – 2gauge wires can just about do 100A (95 but ill be generous) … they come with a wire diameter of 6.5mm (they are also essentially industrial wiring for high voltage applications – for reference the smaller gauge 4 is rated for 60 amps and is used for electrical furnaces… your stovetop uses even less than that)
feeding that into a wire calculator and giving it the resistance of 100000 ohms based on the wattage and voltage… the cable would have to be 194000km long
so no – the reason household wiring isnt rated for gigawatt levels…is because they cant be… you need really really massive wires to conduct that much power safely…
You missed the point. I’ll say it again.
Wires aren’t rated in watts. They’re rated in amps.
If you have a 10 amp wire and you run 20 amps through it, your wire is going to melt. It doesn’t matter if it’s 1 volt (1 volt at 20 amps is 20 watts) or 120 volts (120 volts at 20 amps is 2400 watts). It’s the amps that fry a wire, not the volts, and not the watts.
And resistance is a property of the wire that determines how many amps are drawn to provide the required watts at the available voltage.
Sharien seems to imply that resistance depends on volts and amps when it actually depends on conductivity and cross-sectional area (and length, to a certain degree).
Tokumei is completely right, but is skirting around the full picture.
My point being, for a certain piece of equipment (lightbulb, kettle, stove, …), at a fixed power level:
— The Watts and resistance are fixed.
— The Volts are determined by power source (110(ish)V for mains US, 240(ish)V for mains UK).
— The Amps are determined by combining the Volts and Watts in the equation Amps = Watts / Volts.
Then, as Tokumei points out, if the drawn Amps are more than the wire can handle, it melts (which can start a fire if other conditions are right).
Therefore, 1.21GW is perfectly safe for any wire if the voltage supply is large enough that the current draw doesn’t exceed the wire’s capacity.
For several years, I sat in an armoured room inside a high security federal institution watching a dozen monitors that could call up almost 200 cameras, up to four on each screen at a time with some you could set to continually pan over a selected area until you used the joystick to move them yourself.
There was still one ancient CRT monitor with a 4-split display of four fixed cameras covering the stairwells in one building that as mentioned in the author’s notes, you could turn off and the picture just darkened a little :)
You could switch the view to one camera at a time but when it filled the whole screen the image burnt into the aquadag over the 25 or so years it had been working made it impossible to see anything clearly.
It did show anyone moving into and out of the field of view clearly but you couldn’t ‘zoom’ in without making the picture unuseable.
The rest were all upgraded to low-light pan/tilt/zoom ones over the years and were very useful, except that if you spotted suspicious activity on one and reported it as was your job, access to that camera was removed if management thought catching an employee committing a criminal act was a ‘privacy issue’ then the next time something happened they tried to say it was your fault.
(BAMF!) Aieeee! My feet are in the floor! My Feeeet….are in the Flooooooor!
(Yeah, I know she has an “Empty space sense” that would prevent this, but it would still be funny. And Painful.
A shocking turn of current events that will hertz a lot.
You already got christmas, hannukah, saturnalia, kwanzaa and festivus cancelled. Are you also trying to cancel new years eve?
Ohm my god, luckily you’re not in charge of holidays.
Note to self. Look into cancelling Voyager’s next birthday for his stealth puns.
Is this just your current fixation, or will you complete the arc?
well, first the arc has to be struck. then cooled.
then because its a multipole, we gotta do it again.
Today was National Have a Bagel Day. Now it’s been cancelled as well in exchange of ‘Have a Ninja Hit Squad Day!’
Sounds Kosher to me.
The font in the second panel is really hard to read.
It’s meant to imply spoken electricity, basically static
“This really sucks, like pulling off a band-aid as slowly as possible. I want to leap through the wires all at once!”
The opposite of Greased Lightning? Electric Molasses!
This feels like a Blues Rock bank…
Or Electric Bluegrass (it’s a real thing, Google it)
When in doubt, call on The Electric Mayhem…
Animal!!!
“The Devil Went Down to Georgia!”
Man first rule of evil lair. pressure sensors in the floor and for air displacement. You know like the armory at Arch headquarters.
You’re assuming the Ascenders haven’t already detected Archon – possibly via monitoring the airspace, 5 miles is nothing to radar. A good alarm doesn’t alert the intruder unless you just want them to run, preferable to catch them before they realize you’ve been alerted.
I live in a small city. Within five miles of me are four airplanes and a helicopter, all flying at low altitude. Sure, if they’re running radar, the Ascenders will have detected Archon, but they’ll have detected a whole lot of other traffic as well.
True, lots of air traffic everywhere. And I’m sure Archon craft wouldn’t have a public transponder.
But surely there’s a constant watch on Archon headquarters, and the Osprey taking off and heading in the general direction of their base should have at least raised their alert level.
I used to to live in a long-term stay hotel in White Settlement. there’s a JSF airport nearby. (ok the hotel is in the flight line for the airport) the number of military planes flying by is significant. so the osprey is probably uncommon, but not unheard of. it would be stupid for archon to be the only military branch operating the Osprey domestically. training and maintaining certification will make the flights uncommon but not so uncommon that an Archon flight will be easily told. now, if the ascenders paid someone to monitor the tail numbers assigned to archon, then yes they’d know the gig is up. but then really, they took a hard drive whose contents are slit-your-throat before reading level. they have got to realize that its only a matter of time before archon comes with a personal delivery of whoop___, seriously. there are places in the world where one can maintain a base outside the US jurisdiction. that would be the place to be with that hard drive, as long as the host is not sure what they have there…
Radar is not passive and has distinct signatures, congrats you just put the evil base on the FAA map of known emitters subject to a visit from the FCC.
As for some osprey taking off in some direction, it’s the reason you put ops bases next to training bases (lots of useless flights to track). Or you built the Skunkworks at a public airport in Palmdale
One invisibility spell…or cloak
If you know their radar freq you can borrow that and passively collateral returns from actual legal sources and map out a pretty good visual.
civilian radar, sure. supposedly, military uses a range of radar frequencies (trying to understand how sounds like a migraine) in some kind of classified pattern. also, civilian radar is fairly rare. you’d probably have better luck using weather radar (another migraine). because of how crowded US airspace is, figuring out which ATCs control the relevant airspace and monitor them for ‘interesting’ aircraft. and no, the ATC absolutely has to know where the planes are they are responsible for near misses. just don’t expect obvious call signs.
This comment doesn’t make any sense. You seem to have a variety of misconceptions about how radar works and it would take quite a bit of time to break it down, but suffice to say you should find a youtube tutorial.
As we’ve assumed evil, here’s an evil way to make sure there’s guards at a door that seem natural.
Put an improvised looking ash tray outside the door, make it look like a low security door, and intentionally hire up a LOT of smokers. Tell them they they will get paid DOUBLE when they are on a smoke break as long as they are also on guard at that spot.
Then give them as many smokes and breaks as they want.
Just inside the door they have propped open the hallway makes a turn, and THERE is the real security door, 5 cameras, biometric scanners… yes your making it annoying to come back in, to encourage them to lurk outside longer.
It is by will alone I put my watts in motion.
It is by the juice of Faraday that my thoughts acquire speed.
The contacts acquire weld spots, the weld spots become a warning.
It is by will alone I put my watts in motion.
Maybe Jiggawatt’s real name should’ve been Emma L.Brown?!?
No, Emma T. Brown
a sentient (highly intelligent) silicon-based earth golem with mouth-based powers…
TerraBite
Barbed wire shooting dogs and squirrels with indestructible teeth…are super animals possible in the Grrlverse?
Hey, were they using the term “power stunt” before they met Sydney?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they lifted lingo right out of Superhero RPG’s as most applicable and first to come to mind when they started measuring stuff. Power Stunts is the normal name for tricks with super powers.
It also is a phrase used in electrical circles
If it’s not used in electrical circuits or squares that is not relevant.
civilian garb private security is oddly common for unmarked facilities *in real life these would be buildings being used for offsite storage, or are covering up power grids and transmitter towers *which yes some cities actually build stuff around because they are either viewed as eyesores or locals get jittery thinking they are something else. Also easier to guard a walled structure than a fence to keep people out.
but yeah, some people dressed as workers, loitering, or having a few windows made up to look like something else is there like an apartment or small office and have someone staffed to live there.
Granted this is much easier way out in the desert where its the *how does that tiny ranch make any money* kind of spots you may drive past, or the “maybe they are squatters” tiny house out in the middle of no where.
If you have two identical rooms not far from each other and you have a video of the inside of one of them, how do you teleport to that one and not the other one?
Seems like a good edge case, and well worth testing if Harem does this again. Duplicate rooms as a trap / red herring are a common trope that could be exploited by the enemy, although that’s a lot of work when Archon has lots of options for an approach.
I’d guess, based on her prior statements that she can “feel” the destination and abort, she’d have a sense of whether she was landing next to Jiggs or not.
I wonder if she can feel direction, like which direction each of her bodies is relative to each other, or how much distance there is between them. I’m guessing that she can’t teleport to a location based on just a picture. She has to know where it is. I think that’s why she normally can’t teleport anywhere she hasn’t been without being able to see it directly.
Perception to location quantum locking for the space bridge she subconsciously produces to teleport.
Getting jiggy.
Hurray for power stunts! One of my favorite old FASERIP/MSH things.
I get the feeling this teleport will go incredibly right or horribly wrong.
Please stop explaining the ‘science’ in your text after. You just make it sound less intelligent every time you do. You don’t need to ionize metal the way a laser ionizes air to create a free electron path – also you don’t need to ionize air before you fire a rail guard n. All of what you wrote is patently stupid. If jiggawatt was doing anything at all, she was resonating the metal withh the cell signal – acting as a contact point or even amplifier.
You can carry a signal on another. Piggybacking.
If she ionized the sheath and transferred signal, it’d indeed act as a guide. Even could amplify it and still prevent signal leakage.
But laser ionization is useful to plasma discharge or electrical discharge. Creates a path of lesser resistance so to speak.
For a laser to prep path for something ballistic the laser already would be weapon enough for the job though.
You don’t sound too smart yourself.
On one hand, if he doesn’t supply his reasoning, then the audience is left to come up with their own explanation, for better or worse. But when he does, the audience also has an opportunity to educate him, and he can do better in the future. You don’t have to read it if you don’t like it.
I for one always appreciate the explanations, even if the exact mechanism may be off. I was ready to complain about the idea that Jiggs could encode an even remotely coherent digital video signal complete with encoding and carrier packet info. Dave’s general idea that she’s just energizing the conduit to act as a boosting antenna for her phone is far more believable.
Dave’s explanation is complete gibberish. Other explanations he has given have either been based on actual physics or explanations of how the alternate physics works in his universe. This is simply nonsense though. As you said her directly encoding the signal would also be nonsense. Her using her body to pick up and amplify the signal is what I assumed, and a reasonable extension of her known powers. What Dave said is so painfully wrong that it is hard to even explain why, like the statement about colorless green dreams. Anyone who thinks what he said is even slightly reasonable literally does not know the definitions of most of the words used.
A side note is that the noisy video picture is also wrong, I get that it is probably easier for him to draw, but anyone who has ever been on a bad video call knows that isn’t what a corrupt digital video looks like, chunks and frames get distorted. What he drew is a degraded VHS recording or a bad broadcast TV signal before broadcast TV went digital.
You are showing lack of comic-fu. He is directly referencing How To Kill A Kryptonian.
There was a SUperman series where Kandor was enlarged, and one of the things they and aliens had were weapons to kill Kryptonians. What were they?
Red Sun lasers pulse-firing to shut down their invulnerability in a small area an instant before the rail gun rounds hit them. He’s talking about Making a Hole for something to follow, which is what Jigawatt is doing.
How do you do it in your comic?
Why so mean?
the opposite of greased lightning is in fact Bureaucratic lightning. DMV lighting if you will.
Greased lightning- the speed at which you “try” to reach toilet when gas and internal fluid pressure exceed pinch potential of the biological valving yer born with. Nominally always partially unsuccessful as any venting is considered a failure. See “Street curry shuffle,” and “Baile de Burrito “
‘Delhi Belly’ for those not American :P
Ah yes, the Taco Bell Two-Step.
As in, you try to get to the bathroom in two steps or less.
Tortoise on Tranquillizers.
Sometime in the future…
Varia, Harem, and Jiggs are in a room staring at an old fashioned landlines.
Varia “my Nana says they won’t stop calling her. All hours day and night. Scammers phasing for info.”
Harem. “And we’re here why and not hacking them back?”
Jiggly. “Remember the parking lot base? Well with Varia I learned new tricks and refined it a bit more.”
Varia ” I kin touch two people now and augment both. Can get weird though. Like shared thoughts and a bit of power leakage…”
Harem “Like how secret? Side effects?”
Jiggly “electrically charged hair. Emotional leakage between parties, like if you’re horns we all get a bit of that too. No faces or Train of thoughts, but you might try to use a skill or power you don’t have unless touching me.”
Harem “sounds like something Dabbler would love.”
Varia and Jiggs blush, “she did help help a bit…with the science. Funny this works with magic too…”
Jiggs,”can’t use magic after. But you got the feeling for it. So if you have the talent…it’s easier to learn it.”
Harem thinks for a second. Okay I’m in. But I have a feeling that we should never triple Halo with anyone with mind control or magic. If she learned those too…”
Jiggs “A magic using, jedi with alien amaze-balls and hyperactive like a squirrel on expresso and sugar rush? What could possibly go wrong?”
PHONE RINGS.
Nana off screen. “It’s them bahstards agin. I knows it.”
Jiggs “varia synch us up. I’ll track and scan location. , then massport us. You two grab the bosses and I’ll frag their systems .then we have a nice sit down talk with them.”
“One way talk I hope.”
Nana off screen as the girls disappear in confusing cloud of sparks a port effects into the phone.
“I’m making cookies…”
lol, maybe we could get the folks that can afford to Patron to do so to get this made as a vote incentive side-comic
Genuine question….
What happens if Varia does touch two or more people at the same time
Does she get multiple powers?
Does she get some new power that is an amalgam of the other powers she would have gotten individually?
Does she only get one of the powers? And if so, which one?
What if she gets two powers which would cancel each other out?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Argh why did you have to describe the sensation in such detail at the bottom of the page? You’ve hit all of my “Noooo!” triggers at once!
Keep in mind that wire ratings are intended for full load over indefinite periods of time to keep the conductor from overheating.
For example a 14 ga copper THHN wire is rated to handle 15A of 120V because it will never rise above acceptable temperatures while under that load. But for a few minutes or seconds it can take a lot more than that. That said, if you way overload it than it will just pop like a fuse. Also, anything on a circuit breaker is gonna have that artificial limit.
Also, any facility that’s running large amounts of equipment, as this one appears to be, will have a lot of cables running around that can handle a lot more than any grade of romex ever manufactured.
The fun thing about electricity is, if you use enough of it? Anything can be a conductor – once.
Harem once teleported into the ambulance by seeing it on TV, in the aftermath of the staged bank robbery. So I would think she can do this too, even without direct line of sight.
That’s because she knew the layout of an ecnalubma, she just needed to know where it is
She knows the layout here too. They showed the blueprints in the previous page, and she can see a panning video right now, as well as how deep Jiggawat is underground.
NOt the same. She knew where the bank was, having been by it and laid eyes on it. By the video, she thus knew exactly where the amubulance was. In other words, she satisfied line of sight to the area. Blueprints are not line of sight, even if they are representative, so this is indeed a totally new trick.
She knows where the parking garage is, as she is standing right by it. She was not in the ambulance. She had never been in that ambulance before in her life. She saw the ambulance on the TV though. Same principle here.
She sees where Jiggawatt is through the video, just like she saw where the ambulance as through the TV. It doesnt seem like a new trick at all.
Blueprints (even isometric ones) don’t tend to show important things like scale and if the builder made alterations
Daphne has, presumably, been in an ecnalubma before, so she is familiar with the layout, she just needed to know which one to *VORP* into
Blueprints definitely do show scale.
Oh, also she’d never been in Sydney’s old comic book store either. She said ‘Nice shop!’ when she teleported in, looking around. Which one does not do if they’ve been there before. But it was also on TV and social media. Plus she knew WHERE it was, even though she hadnt been in it.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-304-a-wild-harem-appears/
I have always presumed that Harem’s visits to the ambulance, comic store, etc were done it stages, e.g. pop to the block next to the bank, peek around the corner to get eyes on the ambulance, then make a line-of-sight jump into it. No reason to show that on-screen.
Here though, even if she had blueprints (including scale) she still has to feel her way into the space without line of sight.
If you want to have lots of camera coverage for your secret base, make sure to also have things nearby that have an excuse. Such as a self-storage facility.
Then you use dome housings on the cameras to hide exactly what way they are pointing. You justify that by admitting that’s what the domes are for, with the dishonest bit being about how often they point at the storage units.
I’m going with the opposite of greased lightning is molasses lightning…
Harem’s look is awesome. Perspective, proportions, shading, top notch sir.
Ajaxed thunder
When I read the content of this chapter, I found it very interesting and interesting. I hope that someone can tell me the name of this story.