Grrl Power #1172 – Super(natural)PAC
Oh sheeeeit, haven’t seen her in a while!
Okay, some (most) of you are probably all, “Um… who is that?” It’s Sciona, who is possessing Escorpia‘s murdered body. (She got better.) Of course, no one in the room knows this. She’s obviously been busy since she, I don’t know, took over some nowhere town in Mexico? Or just stuck all her disembodied pals in a bindle and marched across the border. Woe to the ICE unit that tried to detain her.
I bet you guys thought this page would be Maxima, Dabbler and Halo on an alien magic heavy planet kicking the shit out of a dracolich or something, but no! Get ready for some hot and heavy budget meeting action!
See, Maxima wants her own private dungeon. Like having a garden in your own backyard. Why buy groceries like a sucker when you can have fresh tomatoes four months out of the year assuming the rabbits don’t get ’em first?
Can you imagine the dungeon farming industry in an industrialized, capitalist society? You could go into the grocery store and just pick up a bag of dragon scales, and of course there’d be “imitation dragon scales” which are really salamander scales but they work the same in about 15% of alchemical solutions so the FD&DA allows it. Then there’d be a call for “free range” alchemical ingredients, but of course no one wants rust monsters in their neighborhood so all the dungeon farms have to be out in the middle of nowhere in case some of them escape. And then there’d be stuff like “organic eye of newt” that costs 2.5 times as much even though it’s the same thing because how could you have inorganic eye of newt, but some people will pay extra to feel good about themselves by getting shafted by “Ma and Pa Farms” which are owned by Colosso Corpo Farm.
Oh, and feel free to ignore any inconsistencies in Ingsol’s accent. My initial strategy with him was to transpose all his “V’s” and “W’s” but that doesn’t always make for super legible dialog. Plus, neither of those are the most common letters, so when reading his lines, remember that his actual accent is Chekov looking for nuclear wessels meets The Count from Sesame Street. Aah-ah-ah!
The June vote incentive is finally up! Maxima is prepping for her night out.
And in the Patreon variants, she gets (un)dressed and takes a look through all the makeup options.
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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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…um, if I may ask, why has Ingsol’s speech been garbled up so much compared to the previous encounters with him? It doesn’t even read natural, much less sound natural. I tried reading it aloud… oh boy.
Author note explains that Dave is trying to transcribe the accent differently
Author’s note quote: “Chekov looking for nuclear wessels meets The Count from Sesame Street. Aah-ah-ah!”
Which is now stuck in my head.
He sounds like Count Notfaroutoe from Discworld
I totally confused Esporpia with some other woman I forgot the name of and who isn’t on the cast page, but she has the same hairstyle and is part of ARC.
Varia? Except Varia doesn’t have a scorpion tattoo.
Sciona in her new body.
I don’t quite think you follow the thread of conversation here.
Are you thinking of Varia?
I’m guessing you’re thinking of Varia?
Thanks everyone, Varia is indeed whom I thought about. :-)
You’re not alone. I was wondering why Varia would be the one summoning them in to see a senator…then I read Dave’s author’s note.
Organic newt parts would come from newts that have only been fed with insects, that have only been fed vegetation treated with only all natural pesticides. A practice that would be equal parts overly complicated, and humorously nonsensical.
Unless there’s some magical effects such a thing grants or eliminates. “Yeah, 99.99% of the time, organic eye of newt is a waste. But this is really needed for interstellar communication spells, as otherwise it results in minute impurities that means the spell fails to reach the intended recipient.”
That would be lab-quality eye of newt, where the newt is raised in a perfectly clean enclosure and fed only entirely processed food with the highest purity possible. Organic eye of newt would have, at best, slightly different impurities.
Chemical impurities, maybe, but I could see magical reagents requiring certain types of emotional or aetheric influence that you can’t get in a lab or a factory.
Yeah, because in a world of magic there isn’t any artifact or empathic magic that can easily emotional influence the newt or some other method. When there’s a will there’s a path.
The question is how valuable such product its and if this investment would give any margin.
You guys do realize that “eye of newt” is not actually meant to be the eye of a newt, right? Witches often obscured the ingredients of their recipes so people couldn’t copy them. “Eye of newt” is code for mustard seed!
and also were grown inside a music-producing device somewhat like a piano
If it’s a classic dungeon, then it can also act as a training facility, getting XP for newbies under controlled conditions.
Maxima [ Typing ]: Dear Mr. John & Mrs. Amanda Jones. I regret to inform you that your son, Peter Simon Jones, a recruit in Archon, was killed in a training accident on June 17 of this year. The incident involves currently classified information so I can not discuss the details of the accident at this time. An investigation into the accident has been started and we will be seriously considering the recommendations to improve safety in the future. Yours truly, Lt. Colonel Maxima Leander.
Maxima [ Thought bubble ] How the hell did that displacer beast get loose and why did it attack only him?
My party’s first adventure was protecting Druids while they gathered herbs with their golden scythe during the High Sun festival (summer soltice) because that’s when the herbs are the most powerful. They thought they were protecting them from thieves who would steal the scythe. It was also the only day of the year when both moons were full and drew out ALL the lycanthropes. :D
So, you “construct” dungeons? Been decades since I played D&D, but the dungeons there were generally abandoned ruins that monsters moved into due to the convenience, with an admixture of “abandoned because a magical experiment went horribly wrong creating a portal into a nether dimension” and “natural consequence of unimaginably powerful artifact left there leaking reality distorting magic”.
You didn’t ‘construct’ them, you found them.
Mind, in some recent isekai “dungeons” are just something that springs up naturally if you accidentally got too much manna of the wrong sort released in a place, or a species of monster that actually lived off eating slaughtered adventurers. Or, stupidest, (But entertaining in a stupid way!) “Gee, beats me where they come from, but that’s where we get our carrots.” But that seemed to be just a rationalization for their being all over the place, rather than incredibly rare and hard to find.
So, how do you “construct” a dungeon? You take the abandoned subways in NYC, and sign them up for some kind of arcane VRBO? And monsters just start showing up?
More like an AirDnD.
These days, “dungeon” is shorthand for “magical ecosytem in a contained environment.” Sometimes they have a dungeon core at their heart which controls everything inside, sometimes they just arise spontaneously because there’s so much magic in the air, but the point is that monsters (and possibly other valuables) grow there and can be harvested.
While the word “farm” is clearly being used in a video game context here, it applies even more than usual. A dungeon is basically a magical farm with especially dangerous animals.
The interesting thing is since our pop culture and theirs is the same. If it is a dungeon core style of regenerating dungeon and they have been trying for decades to be allowed to build one they might be responsible for the rise in the concept in pop culture just so they have something to help explain it to confused politicians wondering if these guys are sadists or perverts.
I discovered that genre a little more than a year ago.
About 10 months ago I started writing a serial in the genre, it’s rather fun. :)
Based on your description I can expect to find perfectly ordinary Emus in a dungeon.
Nothing ordinary about an Emu
Australians would be too scared to go into that dungeon.
Unless they were equipped with DropBears
All I’m sayin’ is they already lost one war against them. :)
To be fair emus are fairly benign, they didn’t demand surrender and left the aussies to their business once superiority has been established
Well, *somebody* constructed them, even if the murderhoboes didn’t. Usually it’s an underground complex that has been abandoned, and monsters have moved in, but since monsters have an affinity for underground complexes you could just build one and wait for them to move in (think birdhouses).
Dungeons can certainly be constructed.
I currently fail at convincing my group to try out “Wicked Ones”. A RPG, where you play as chief monster in a dungeon.
Anyone here interested, at European friendly times?
Interesting, sounds like a game called “dungeon keeper” where you got to play as a well dungeon keeper. you got to possess creatures. motivate imps. feed chickens to your favorites. and above all keep those pesky heroes from stealing your gold.
It was an old DOS game. you can still get it if I remember right on ‘good old games’
Yeah, Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper 2 are on GOG. There’s also War for the Overworld on Steam, which is one of the wave of Kickstarter-funded spiritual successors to classic games from mid to late last decade – even getting the same voice for the narrator. There are also a number of other games in the same general area, but the ones I’ve tried have been rubbish.
There was also an official Dungeon Keeper free-to-play mobile game that had issues with microtransactions, controversies over review censorship, and generally was poorly received, and has since been pulled.
War for the Overworld is worth checking out if you enjoyed the original Dungeon Keeper and/or Dungeon Keeper 2
Yes, Dungeon Keeper was a great inspiration for Wicked Ones.
I used to play that a lot back in the day. Lots of fun.
Carrots you say? You must be a high level adventurer, we had to live off of bean sprouts (with Gochujang sauce that dropped as an Add)
-yeah weirdest isekai anime in the nippon food/cooks/diners in a fantasy world genre.
Somebody had to build the dungeons, then they either abandoned it for some reason or else they brought in dangerous creatures/situations that got out of control. Open the wrong door and suddenly you are facing a very hungry critter that got locked away when things went wrong; its instincts are making it seriously consider your party its next meal.
Max: Yes, Senator. We recently arrested a criminal enterprise that called themselves the Ascenders. They had an extensive facility under a parking garage that we would like to repurpose for this project. The application to expropriate the illegally built facility to Archon is before the courts right now.
They’re using dungeon as shorthand for a “monster” farm. Just make a space and filling it with beings and plants you harvest for alchemical materials. Any traps would be to keep the monsters in and there wouldn’t be random magic items or story clues. It’s just more fun than saying farm.
“the dungeons there were generally abandoned ruins that monsters moved into due to the convenience”
Ruining a building and then abandoning it isn’t hard, so the only tough parts about constructing a dungeon are:
1. Getting the monsters to move in, which can be solved by a controlled capture + breeding program.
2. Keeping the monsters in, which can be solved by an extra ring of fences and a thorough capture / harvesting program between the inner and outer fence.
The more “fantasy” expand the more you can put in the definition of dungeon. But an easy to find dungeon constructor are Liches in D&D. They construct the dungeon with soul harvesting purpose given that the ritual of Lichdom has a minor setback that erodes the Lich’s soul over millenia and powerful souls helps to slow down the erosion.
It’s all an excuse for why would a powerful undead wizard built a death trap for adventures and why would adventurers explore such places (loot, the answer is always loot).
Someone had to build the original building to be abandoned, so why not deliberately build one?
yeah looks like I got beat to it, there are lots of dungeons that do the regenerating dungeons bit with a power core at the center. Sometimes is like a self contained ecosystem, a sort of “hunting preserve” where you can bag some materials and “have fun” while the over all project is maintaining a viable ecosystem *with the difference of humans or whatever is in charge *elves, orcs, “not” humans but technically still humans, etc..* acting as the apex predator controlling the population of some of the species *the valuable ones basically like dragon-worms or elemental deer or whatever*
there are others. some less ethical like a magi-core dungeon that regenerates the monsters in it after a set amount of time. These in a “quasi realism” setting tend to be necromantic creatures, golems, artificer constructs, or fleshy magic creatures the special life ooze/field will restore (think a self contained version of/probably inspired the Blood Moon from Legend of Zelda BoW/ToTK, when the cycle comes around new Bokoblins to farm basically.
there is also the mana creatures version, which is basically magical holodeck, but farming that is a stretch as its really more just a training ground kind of scenario, the golem version usually is too when its not a dungeon guarding some treasure.
“No one wants rust monsters in their neighborhood…”
About that…you just know there’d be a (wooden-)gated community of hardcore druids, martial artists and exceptionally woodsy elves that keeps them as guard animals/pets. If they aren’t using metal, neither are any unwelcome guests.
reading the commentary… can you imagine if they were detained by the ICE?
I’d almost feel sorry for them indeed.
Can you just imagine waking up one morning and meeting a bunch of supernaturally genocidal fascists, and then they get replaced by space aliens?
Yeah, it’d take a lot more than that to get me feeling sorry for the ICE.
Oh-HO, and this *would* be the kind of endeavor that Sciona would have a vested interest in. A little bit of parts embezzling, perhaps? A little manipulation of dungeon design?
Ten bucks Sydney gives Maxima the stink-eye for not bringing her in for design consultation from the get-go, btw. :)
So, if Halo looks at Sciona with her true sight, is she going to see the body, or is she going to see the Alari blood mage possessing the body? The latter, I’d guess.
I would argue for just seeing the body. Sciona, IIRC was a disembodied soul when she got back through portal and found Escorpia’s freshly dead body. There may be some magical residue from the healing process but there is only one consciousness in the body. Sydney didn’t really get a chance to get to know Sciona and since Escorpia’s body is some flavor of super it would be easy enough to assume that was what she was perceiving.
I would like to see what you get if Sciona/Escorpia touched Varia. That might tell more than Sydney’s truesight.
We need a portmanteau for Sciona/Escorpia until Dave gives us her new alias.
The suffixes for both of the names are clunky as heck. I reccomend EscoSci, escorpisci or something
Soul/body mismatches are the sort of thing Truesight is good for. It doesn’t count as magical transformation, but the ability to perceive the ethereal form is a dead giveaway.
Esciona?
Sci-orpia?
Use to have a name for her back when she first appeared, but it’s been so long have forgotten it (would have to go back to her pages to look, but… lazy)
Calling her Sciopia for now
Dave actually provided one shortly after Sciona possessed Escorpia’s body: Sciorpia. Check the who’s who on page 745.
I am trying to think how well Maxima would stack up against various types of D&D/Pathfinder dragons.
Your typical physically focused dragons she’d be great against, but I think the older members of species like Umbral dragons and Dream dragons would give her issues, mostly because they can make it hard for her to lay her hands on them.
This makes me think not so much
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-768-late-to-the-party/
She DESTROYED Dabbler’s boyfriend who is at least as powerful as a Balor is given everything we’ve seen, and those can take on most sizes of standard dragons pretty effectively. I don’t think even Great Wyrms would do much if you also consider the spaceship she one shotted that was powerful enough that most spacefaring races shit their pants at the mere thought of them.
I must admit I like the discussion on dungeons, particularly in relation to various LitRPG mechanics. Two series that interested me on it are Path of Ascension and Apocalypse Redux.
So, Path of Ascension has a lot of cultivator influence, but the fact that the average cultivator world/society is a shithole is like saying Gotham has a crime problem is actually fucking acknowledged. The Emperor is fully aware that letting powerful people shit all over everyone who hasn’t leveled up yet is fantastic way to mass produce rebels and terrorists, so while power is still abused, if somebody higher up finds out the abuser frequently gets their shit wrecked (assuming the abusee can escape, dramatic tension and all that).
But, I’m drifting. It follows most dungeon break scenarios, but it’s also the preferred mechanism for tier/leveling up (it leans a lot more toward progression than actual ‘levels’ as progressing through a tier usually doubles your power, and then actually getting over the hump will double it again, IIRC). One of the interesting aspects is that the dungeons are instanced, so people will roll into one, slaughter the monsters, and then set up a bunch of automatic farmbots and have the roll on out afterward. And they’ll send in a batch every thirty minutes or so because of the instancing. The bulk of mineral extraction also was performed in dungeons, since why bother digging a fucking hole and such when you can just murderhobo your way through a goblin camp and take all their pig iron weapons.
Apocalypse Redux (as the name implies) is a regressor where the MC goes back in time. When the system showed up, all it did was unlock stats and stat growth and then give out a summoning database; all humanity had to do was not fuck about with something they didn’t understand and we’d have been fine, which led to the end of humanity within a few decades. Anyway, the third book, they go visit South Korea which has a heavy dungeon oriented magical society (as opposed to summoning individual monsters), and it was fun looking at the way different mechanisms could be used to farm resources.
Ah, another Royal Road enjoyer I see. :)
Yeah, admittedly, most of them are spat out by the kindle unlimited algorithm. I have found that I prefer a lot of the Western takes on cultivation tropes/mechanics. A lot of the more classical type trend toward ‘if you cultivate hard enough, you too can be part of Lord Freiza’s army!’ sects; which isn’t really my jam. Really, it gives me a ‘cyberpunk, but the MC dreams of being a corp enforcer’ vibe. I suppose the thing that appeals is a mix of the magic/weapon ratio and that leveling up isn’t intrinsically tied to how aggressively you murder hobo.
“Eye of Newt” is going to be contentious because people will be buying bags of actual Newt eyes until someone points out the Shakespearean line is referencing a plant that’s nicknamed called “Eye of Newt”, at which point you’re going to have multiples of different versions of it because you won’t be sure which version your potion actually needs.
And the grocers will be happy as it means more money for them.
And amateur witches are going to brew some EXTREMELY disgusting potions.
Hate to tell you this, but amateur witches already brew some extremely disgusting potions.
I had been wondering what Sciona was up to after all this (comic) time. From gunshot victim to Senator’s aid, eh? I wonder what kind of blood magic was involved in getting through her security clearances.
It depends on which party the Senator belongs to doesn’t it? Can you look at todays political news and honestly say a bunch of them haven’t sold their souls? Some of them are high level scumbags in their own right who should not have their own security clearances so putting someone like Sciona on their staff would be a non-issue.
There’s strong suggestion from the last page she was in that she’s actually managed to possess a “Super” with some kind of power that produces psychedelic effects.
It might have opened up her repertoire for manipulation considerably. She also had plenty more Alari “ghosts” who were seeking “vessels” which seem to require little more than killing the host, so it possible she killed key members with clearances and had the “ghosts” take them over. Even the Senator could very well be a vessel, although I also note that they don’t seem to gain any memories of the host so its not a perfect system… Unless she has a way to harvest memories/knowledge like Dabbler then kill the “vessel” and insert the memories back once a “ghost” is hosting it.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-746-youve-got-the-touch/
I’m assuming this dungeon is going here in NM given the secretive nature of the thing? Seems like it would be par for course with the rest of the weird crap we have here.
Why not Area 51 in NV? Already a secret base with a huge runway complex that supports jumbo jets for transporting people/supplies in/out with outlying hangars that can be secured separately from the rest of the base. And already mostly abandoned from its previous use as a test facility due to constant surveillance from the UFO/conspiracy nuts.
Meanwhile,did Seneca recover from Dabbler’s little healing potion?!?!?
I was wondering when Sciona was going to show up, worming her way into the government no less! Let’s open the borders they said, won’t hurt anyone and this country has always welcomed new people they said, sigh…
Maybe Sydney’s true sight can detect her before she can do too much damage. I’m sure Sciona will want in on the “potion farm”! I can’t help but worry about the long-term effect of a medication used by troops in the field of a “super soldier” concoction.
It’s been tried before, with several of the men to become addicted to it. Other side-effects of one I heard of that dates back to the Vietnam war were very bad. It became a street drug that I believe is still out there, or was until crack and meth was invented.
Oh its way older than Vietnam. Drugged soldiers were common in WW1.
Oh I know, that is just one example that was told to me by a retired black-ops man from then. They were experimenting with drugs like cocaine, LSD, and so on SO many times. The one I mentioned was nick-named “black beauties” when it hit the streets. It was intended to keep a soldier functioning behind enemy lines for days without food, water, or sleep. But it was very addicting and had serious side effects, including causing paranoia and uncontrollable muscle movement. You would feel fine, but to everyone else you were twitchy and would act like a rabbit crossing a busy road, but being heavily armed and quick to suspect everyone! Plus if you ran out you would crash, almost like someone turned you off, NOT good in a battlefield.
I’d imagine if the potion has negative effects from overuse Dabbler would have warned Maxima about that when they were discussing the possibility of setting up a dungeon farming operation. Then again, with how difficult and dangerous the reagents are to source, it’s possible nobody has ever really had a large enough supply of such for those effects to manifest – and even if the potions aren’t physically addictive, there’s the risk of basically becoming mentally addicted to the sensation of having such power. But I don’t think Maxima intends to just have her people quaff potions before every fight – rather, my guess is that the intent is to keep the potion on hand in case you are seriously injured, and then you can drink it (or have an ally shove it down your throat if you’re indisposed… or maybe they can modify it to be injected) and get a solid boost to keep fighting against whatever managed to seriously injure you. You know, basically the same way an adventurer who gets their hands on one (and doesn’t immediately sell it to buy a better sword or whatever) would use it.
And if your base is infiltrated by enemy supers, the zero levels have a chance to fight back.
Just don’t give it to Sydney in that situation.
We know how dangerous she is without superpowers, or her Orbs, just think what she’d be like on that stuff!
In fact I’d go as far to say that Maxima will probably end up using it as a threat against enemies and obnoxious superiors.
Methamphetamine was extensively use by German military in WWII. After experimentation on Jews at death camps to gauge the severity of its long-term effects. Your basic nazi supersoldier was often tripping balls.
1. I only transpose my v’s and w’s when they’re in words that are close together. This happens much more often than you’d think.
2. Just because Americans can’t do organic properly doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t and with that actually bring about the promised benefits of organic farming – reduced chemical use, increased biodiversity and improved animal and worker welfare. So there XP
Maxime wants her own private dungeon. Bowchickabowow. Bring out the leather lingery and silk whips.
Nah, I know what kind of dungeon is meant, and I would love to have one as well, as long as the first stage/floor/level is suitable for adventurers at level 0 without Isekai Cheat Skills.
I’m sure Deus would be happy to let her use his dungeon.
Didn’t Dabbler already buy her an outfit and smuggle it into Anvil’s purchases? 3:)
Cage free , free roaming, ethically sourced dragon scales for sale here! -said no adventurer ever. [who was not a shape changed dragonkin ;) ]
Sounds clawsome in theory but large scale projects like these can drag-on.
You stop that right this instant!
Nice of you to give Ro a wyverning.
You have to use real Newt eye to turn someone into a newt.
other wise they get better.
Sciona? Seriously an aide to a Senator? Do you realize the kind of background checks she’d have to go through to get that position? I have to say that it would nearly impossible for that to happen for an illegal sneaking across the border. Even if you managed to get really good fake documentation, there’s the background checks for a security clearance. That involves FBI agents going out to interview your immediate family and friends. Then they ask them for any other people they know who knew you to interview. Then they ask that second tier of people for and additional third tier of references. I know this because I’ve had a Special Background Investigation four times.
Four times? Wouldn’t once have been sufficient?
Considering there was recently, in RL, a chinese spy who was an aide or driver or something to a senator (possibly more than once), I think that an alien from an advanced race that also apparently has the ability to brainwash people with a touch probably can achieve this feat as well.
She wasn’t brain washing, her touch got people high! And I expect it was easy to get someone addicted, making them easy to control. Which I suppose it is a form of brain washing…
:)
I’m mildly vexed his name is spelled Ingsol and not Yngsol, but maybe he’s a young guy, post Christian invasion.
Whoa! Two callbacks on one page?
Also, “dungeons” ? Has Dave been reading Royal Road?
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54476/dungeon-life
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/15935/there-is-no-epic-loot-here-only-puns
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/51893/the-heart-grows
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/58768/dungeon-tour-guide-a-dungeon-core-litrpg
And so many others…
Um… getting slight Makima vibes from Maxima’s looks, and the mental image of a fusion of Maxima and Makima is giving me a confused fear boner.
Oooh, Sciona coming out of a senator’s office? This tells me she’s trying to sneak her way into the government. Between her own powers and her host’s pleasure-inducing touch, she’s probably well on her way towards making things miserable for Max without direct confrontation…
Yeah, Secret Invasion vibes/body snatchers.
Kill someone important, Alari skully soul takes over body, continues to live their life.
If that is the plan, then Sciona must have convinced enough or all the skully souls in that soul battery to join her, despite there also being an Alari ship in another country that they have to know about by now.
why are dragons inheritly ‘evil’?
personally I’d love to have a dragon to replace a rustable piece of transportation technology. One that could feed and take care of itself. avoid traffic altogether. get you to the front doors of places you need to get and park itself. people stealing one could be thought of as crunchy natural organic foods that are good with ketchup.
Literature is full of “good” Dragons.
So is Mythology.
And songs as well, “Puff, the Magic Dragon”.
Pete will be upset as well.
(this is different than my first post about PETA. This is about Pete being upset. Yknow, Pete’s Dragon? See… the joke is funnier because I’m explaining it ad nauseum. :) )
But Puff live by the sea so you should have explained it ‘ad nautisme’.
Okay you and palmvos are just baiting me to send more ninjas by these awful puns after you so you got your wish! NINJAS FOR EVERYONE!
Rebutts by sending Ninja Emus armed with Balistic Dropbears (certified chlamydia positive) with an army of Annoying Steve Irwin Impersonators in reserve.
Have you ever heard of the ancient (1970’s) British martial art called ‘Ecky Thump’?
(He asks as a load of Peaky Blinder lookalikes armed with Black Puddings mysteriously appear.)
Oh, I like black pudding. It’s got a nice texture. But if these folks are here to beat the poop outta me just keep in mind that I had two entire haggis’ for lunch.
Wing clippings doesn’t sound painless. Might need medical treatment afterwards. Shed scales typically don’t need the creature to be caught first either.
As much as she might preffer keeping everything alive for potentially more harvesting later it seems less humane than typical farming of animals.
I’m sorry farmable prisons, are we looking at the slippery moral slope. Once you have an economic incentive for prisoners parking violations become a imprisonment offense. Robbing sentient creatures of body parts. “I’m taking all your fingernails but I’m giving you a real good price. ”
Thies aren’t dangerously sourced components, they are moraly questionable.
While I’m sure Sciona and her ilk will applaud our choices. I’m reminded of the Babylon 5 Death walker quote.
Have you never heard of the Prison Industrial Complex before?
https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/the-pic-and-mass-incarceration/
One of my nieces worked for a GEO Corp. run private prison in Oklahoma. She was not impressed. She could list a real life example of almost every gag from the Burt Reynolds version of “The longest Yard”. Including the prisoner under the secretary’s desk bit.
Considering she’s conversing with the dragon, and it’s able to choose, that means it’s intelligent.
Congrats, Maxima, you’ve brought back slavery.
I think the scenario is that this is the kind of dragon that tends to ravage the countryside and prey on its inhabitants, and is usually exterminated (with difficulty) once the populace is able to deal with the problem.
In that case, giving it the option to play nice, not die, and still benefit to some extent, seems a moral enough offer when the alternative is, “or we’ll leave you to the usual extermination squads, which by the way have more firepower now.”
To summarize, “we’re already at war, we now have personified WMDs, would you prefer to lose, or shall we work on a generous peace treaty where everyone benefits?”
It seems like tricky business to apply this logic to an individual. If your country has been fighting another and you get a decisive advantage and negotiate like this, it is pretty acceptable, and definitely an improvement over waging war. But for a sapient, intelligent individual which has been bred in captivity and (I would assume) has never ravaged a countryside, isn’t this just punishment for actions committed by others?
Well, I don’t really know much about dragons. Is it absolutely unavoidable that they are going to ravage countrysides, even when they know very well that they will be killed as a result? If so, I might want to retract the “intelligent” label.
Also, I know *humans* who would happily “ravage countrysides” if they were powerful enough to get away with it freely, and some who might try even knowing that there is some small risk of getting caught and punished. Does that justify exploiting humans like this?
I guess I am suggesting that being near-invincible allows horrible behavior, but should not necessarily incriminate all members of the same species, especially in situations where they are clearly nowhere near invincible.
I do believe the count’s proper title is The Count of Count. Just calling him the Count from Sesame street is like saying the King from Europe. Even if there were only one. It’s just disrespectful of his dignities as a member of the nobility.
His actual name is Count Count von Count. :)
And he is a noble from Moldova, who shares a large home with his many pet bats, whom he frequently counts.
He has also been in several romantic relationships with the Countess von Backwards, the Countess Dahling von Dahling, and Lady Two. It had be more than one romantic relationship or he wouldn’t be able to count them.
PETA is going to be very upset with this if they ever find out.
PETA tends to be upset about everything in general.
YES! Send PETA (and lawyers) to have a talk with the dragons
What do you have against the dragons? The poor dragons wil get upset tummies from eating all of those empty calories!
Pssh, they’d start an ad campaign instead. :)
Sarah MacLachlan, sad looking dragons on TV, all that stuff.
it means those naked or semi-naked ladies will have to use different body paint.
SCIONA HAS DIFFERENT EYES!
Last time we saw her in Escorpia’s body she (and the two other Alari she helped possess humans) had Alari eyes (which are very blatantly different from human eyes). That was in spite of wanting to keep a low profile (and actually specifically stealing some sunglasses to hide her eyes.).
Why do they look human now? Alari have black sclera, so it can’t just be colored contacts. Sciona’s never shown any shapeshifting or illusion capability. Presumably it has to be one of those, though, since Escorpia’s human eyes turned Alari when Sciona’s soul entered, so I assume that Sciona can’t just rip a pair of eyes off somebody, insert them, and actually use them.
Well, maybe the Veil is covering them, and Sciona just forgot about that when she stole the sunglasses? Except Ingsol is in the room, and he at least surely isn’t affected by the veil.
I suppose she could have a shapeshifter or illusion super locked up in her basement, whom Sciona routinely drains blood from and uses to get the super power? She said the side effects of that really suck the last time she did so, but maybe she improved the process?? Still…if that’s what she’s doing, I’d have expected her to hide the distinctive and “unprofessional” scorpion tattoo.
Hmm. Whether Sciona is shapeshifting, graft, or illusion matters, because if it’s the latter Sydney could see through it with the com ball. Not that Sydney appears to be present for this meeting.
Sciona is a blood mage, I’m sure she could use her magic to disguise her eyes easily enough, if not change them outright. No doubt Sydney’s true-sight would see through the spell, or at least detect it.
That’s a gang tattoo, it’s not uncommon to hide them on the scalp, Escorpia was a member up until she was killed and Sciona moved in.
Sciona possessed Escorpia’s deceased body and it clearly healed up (remember it had patches of Alari skin where the body was injured?), Sydney ain’t gonna detect shit!
Sciona’s blue patch was on a portion of her chest covered by her current clothing, so I don’t think we can be sure of that. Of course, she could well be using a method that Sydney can’t detect.
Wasn’t it also on part of her arms and slash or hands?
And it’s still not an illusion (remember when Peggy scrunched up a piece of paper and used it as a mask?) which is the only thing Sydney can detect
Sydney can also detect magical auras, and just plain magical things</a. So it's quite possible that she may be able to detect something magical about Sciona in Escorpia's body, though it probably wouldn't be anything that would indicate to Sydney that it is Sciona.
Pretty sure all it would do is detect that Sciopia is a super, and being a super in itself is not illegal
Sci isn’t possessing Escorpia, she is the new tenant after the previous one died and left the premises vacant (basically: original spirit left, new one moved in and renovated a little)
For years I was sad because Russians don’t have the same accent as Chekov. The W/V thing especially. About 500 days ago I started hearing Chekov’s accent from Ukranians on TV.
There is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet (looks like capital B) which is pronounced “V” in Russian, but in Ukrainian it is sometimes a “V” and sometimes a “W”. IIRC, it’s V before a vowel (which you might think would be easy to remember)?
This is a very, VERY bad idea!!
Hello hello. Nice to see you again Sciona, the literal Drug Cartel.
You know, “Society industrialized on the backs of tamed dungeons” is basically an entire sub-genre of fiction online.
Dave, of course we can imagine what dungeon farming would look like in a capitalist society. Japan has been endlessly expounding upon the idea in it’s manga for decades.
China and Korea too… I kinda wanna see Sydney meet Beru from Solo Leveling XD
Honestly, the most questionable thing about this page is why they don’t already have dungeons for farming. The supers and supernaturals have an established history with each other and the government. Exceptional operators at Max’s level are rare among both groups, but any super is a massive force multiplier. If the Council has been trying for decades, there is no way they haven’t proposed adding pre-public ARC supers to the dungeon teams. And there’s no way a secret agency turns down outside, no-approval-needed income.
I’d say, consider Jurassic Park. Imagine that Jurassic Park was in fact meant to be used as a farm, using components from the dinosaurs for whatever people wanted. But the thing is that costs money. Producing and/relocating the dinos to a contained ecosystem where they can be mostly self sustaining, but with a facility to watch for them and hopefully correct if there is an error. That takes both huge amounts of time and money, and that is assuming that everyone is in agreement (the people who are going to run the project, supply the funds, build the infrastructure, secure the specimens, man the food trucks for the workers, etc). If any part of that stalls, it can all stall, possibly for years at a time. And with that in mind the people holding the purse strings are even more unlikely to jump on board since until they see a return on investment, the project is basically a colossal hole they are dumping money into, which means they are also prime targets to be replaced for ‘their lack of judgement and fiscal responsibility ‘.
Same reason we don’t have more nuclear power plants. Sure, they’re almost always perfectly safe and have almost no chance of destroying everyone and everything for miles around, but they’ve had enough really bad, highly publicized incidents that nobody wants one in their state.
Love the Tattoo in the hair in last panel