Grrl Power #1111 – Costume quest
Harem should use the map to find the Info Desk, where she can ask about the secret backdoor used to sneak the rest of the team in.
It makes sense that if you’re designing the Death Star, it’s a reasonable bet that you won’t get a lot of interlopers running around in the halls, so some maps on the walls making it easy to find things probably isn’t going to compromise security. Well, as long as you don’t advertise the location of the secret self destruct button or anything like that. But even marking out where the Emperor’s personal restroom is located, or the main reactor chamber won’t really compromise security because even in a “secure” base, there’s going to be people guarding important areas.
That’s probably a pretty cushy job, guarding a thing in a secret and/or impermeable base, because there’s really nothing to do… right up until there is something to do, when the base does get infiltrated, and that’s when you get strangled by an extension cord from behind and your corpse is used to jam up the gears on the thing that keeps the base from exploding.
Of course, if you’re the guy guarding the Emperor’s private bathroom, then you know that the Leftenant in charge of your squad is going to be a real hard-ass because he thinks keeping anyone else from ever using that restroom is his ticket to a promotion and failing that simple task means he’s gonna get force choked.
The November Vote Incentive is still up!
The new one will be up later today. I wanted to post it with the comic, but I got ambitious with the bonus comic and the outfit variants and was up till 1 am working on them, so there’s a few finishing touches yet.
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.
Lets hope Harem waited until the woman finished her “business”. Otherwise I imagine she’s walking around in a soiled uniform.
If we go by head height of the bathroom sign then it certainly looks like she’s a few inches shorter than Harem. Most supers seem to be taller with a larger bust and its been noted that Harem is on the shorter and less busty side of super women, but probably safer to drug and zap together just in case. Wouldn’t want to face the same problem with the tazer that the poor handyman did with Jigga.
No, she hit her as soon as she went through the door
Cora be looking hot, and sexily-freckled :D
“because he thinks keeping anyone else from ever using that restroom is his ticket to a promotion and failing that simple task means he’s gonna get force choked.” That’s at most half true. :P
OMG, the vote incentive! I totally want to put her beside Jellifer of Dance Monsters!
All they would need to make it secure is have the “you are here” be inaccurate.
hm no choker on Harem?
I’m assuming she took it off before vorping in order to blend in. she had a choker on in the last panel on both Harems.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1110-telescout/
(panels 2 and 6)
I mean, she could take it off at the same time as swapping clothes to that of a masked woman. It’s not really revealing her while she’s sitting on the tree
When I was in the USAF, I worked in the bomb dump.
Obviously we had guards on the gates, but that’s not all, we were also instructed to use “personal recognition”.
If we saw someone we didn’t know, they got questioned.
The new people got to know everyone really fast because of that.
Of course, this only applied to our areas as it’s just not possible to use personal recognition over an entire base.
Though we didn’t wear masks either…
I guess the organization the heroes are infiltrating has never read the Evil Overlords Rules.
Funny how few of the evil wanna be overlords know of that list… Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I guess that depends on which side you are on. Good or evil.
It is also funny how few REAL LIFE wanna-be evil overlords have read that list so commit the same mistakes. I am waiting for one of them to turn into a snake, honestly. Even that cannot be weirder than some of what I see on TV daily.
The issue is that most people smart enough to actually become evil overlords realize a few things.
Ruling by fear means you can never rest easy again.
paperwork is eternal. its possible the Chinese invented bureaucracy to punish the people who conquered them.
the higher in management you go the less you control or the sooner you die.
that time with friends and caring family beats drinking a mixed drink staring out a window with a great view alone.
in reality it takes so long to accumulate power that the ruler is then too old to enjoy it.
it could also be that its simply not fun to write overlords who are not stupid, and the real life overlords grow up reading the same stories and mistake them for a manual.
also, the evil overlord list is a forgotten treasure. I didn’t learn about it until I was *censored* years old. (son was already born by then)
so what villains in media seem to have read the list? only one I can think of that’s close is Dominic from Person of Interest. Sarmatian from the same show may also qualify, but its not human or biological.
David Xanatos has been raised previously as a list-saavy example. Lex Luthor makes occasional but inconsistent nods to it.
Ozymandias from Watchmen.
It could be a good thing, even if you’re not on the evil side. Much of the list consists of discouraging gratuitous cruelty in favor of a more pragmatic approach to seizing power. It kinda boils down to, focus more on the “Overlord” and less on the “Evil”.
I used to be a faithfull reader of this comic. Nowadays I come from time to time to see what’s going on (old habits die hard) and the current events made me remember a fanfic, set on the GrrlPower universe, that I wrote back around 2015 :)
In it there is this super villian who kidnapped some Archon’s members, and to rescue them Max and company have to go into his underground lair, which have an autodestruction device they need to take care of :D
Lots of differences, though. The lair was not near as fancy. Harem plays a core role as scout, but only to find an entrance. Jigga is central to the plot too, but as one of the kidnaped. Also Max opts to storm heads on (because the hostage are in imminent danger) with a team that of course includes Sydney inside her bubble :) paired with Dabbler. Before that Leon and Dabbler do hacks the security system, but they can only deactivate the external defenses, and elongate the self-destruct trigger time a bit.
A detail that became outdated however, is that at a point Sydney and the other persons inside her bubble were running out of air, something the green orb would now turn a lot less dramatic.
Also Max get buried in a tunnel collapse due the destruction device going off, so it made me laugh when I saw that happening during the Council attack :)
Man, this made me want to revisit this universe, it’s a fun one to write about.
Wait…. why can’t Harem pop out to a shoe store for long enough to buy some better-fitting shoes that still match that outfit?
I mean the odds of the villains using custom-tailored, visibly unique SHOES are basically zero, right?
They have to just be purchasing generic black dress shoes and then reminding everyone always to switch shoes before changing back into their civilian identity….
Honestly that’s a very valid point. She has at least 2-3 minutes buffer for bathroom time, more than enough for a copy to vorp to a store with similar (if not identical) shoes in her size and bring them to this instance. She’s got to know a lot of shopping options by heart, with that many bodies to clothe.
Heck, I’d bet she has a shoe collection that would make Imelda Marcos jealous already. Not to mention literally tons of mix-and-match clothes.
You never know when dressing like Carmen Santiago could come in handy.
Somebody has a very different experience with shoe stores than what I’ve had. Trying on *a* pair of shoes in 2-3 minutes seems pretty unbelievable to me. OK, sure, she can afford to shop in really high end stores that keep enough salespeople waiting around so that any new customer is served right away.
But there’s also the detail of, assuming she even finds shoes of the right style in the five stores she decided to look at (given that time frame, there’s basically no way she could look at more than one each), finding one in her size.
“But that’s easy,” you say, “they always have a variety of shoe sizes out front, which invariably includes the size I want.”
1. Most of the stores I’ve gone to *don’t* have a variety of shoe sizes out front, and the higher end one goes, the less likely that seems. So either she’s shopping in places that virtually don’t have sales staff and won’t ever have shoes that high end, or she’s shopping in places where she’ll have to wait on a sales clerk to go to the back to get the right size of shoes.
2. You may be a common size. Harem isn’t. Supers are bigger than average. If the shoe stores she’s going to cater specifically to supers, they might feel her size is common. But the shoes they sell are likely to be distinctive, and thus probably not match the shoes she needs to match. So to get the right shoes, she’s probably going to be going around to a variety of stores that don’t particularly find women’s feet her size to be particularly standard.
Now, does that mean her foot situation is hopeless? No, she has a few extra bodies to do that shopping for her. She probably can’t devote all of them to that task. For this mission, she probably has to keep at least one other on hand to communicate with the team. Possibly another for HQ. So maybe she just has two of her looking for shoes.
Once she finds the right shoes, she needs a moment unobserved to VORP in, trade out the shoes, and VORP out. But it’s a tall base, so unless she magically happens to be right by DETENTION, she has a ways to go before she needs to be active.
Oh, wait, they’re at the bottom and DETENTION’s just one floor up. Oh, the pain of de feet. Hopefully, it won’t cause the pain of defeat.
no, no, you don’t try to make the match by starting at the shoe store… you make the match by starting at the SHOE.
Harem A:
1. Disable Villainess.
2. Take off Villainess’s shoes.
3. Read the label. “Woman’s Belice Ballet Shoe Size 7”
Harem B, at arc-swat HQ:
1. Type name of shoe into google.
2. Find store anywhere in the world that sells this shoe in Harem’s size and has a good inventory system.
3. Find live video feed near that store.
4. keep searching for a backup store, just in case.
Harem C:
1. Vorp outside the shoe store.
2. Vorp inside the shoe store.
3. Vorp into the shoe store’s back stock area.
4. Flash a badge and ask for the stock clerk’s help finding a shoe you already know they have.
Harem D:
1. Vorp in, Try on same shoe in harem’s size.
2. Vorp out wearing the shoes, leaving Harem C to pay for it.
Back to
Harem A:
1. has just finished tying up the villainess in the bathroom and putting on her OTHER clothes
2. Harem D vorps in with the correct sized shoes
3. Harem D vorps out with the wrong-sized shoes.
4. Harem A puts on the correct-sized shoes.
It’s even easier to do if, say, Harem has a good working knowledge of how Amazon’s warehouse inventory system works, and has enough access to Amazon’s internal inventory database to just look up the shelf location of the shoes she needs.
I think my favorite part of this comic is panel 9’s unique onomatopoeias.
Yes :)
I mean the maps don’t have to be truthful. Do you all remember Dining Hall B in the first Resident Evil movie? Rather it is some common pattern that all your goons will have to memorize, such as all “weapons labs” on the map are actually traps and every second “janitor’s closet” is an armory. Or maybe just a few key locations that are obfuscated or hidden and only revealed to the top ranked goons.
Seriously guys, wait for them to use the toilet. Please?
love the metaonomatopoeia