Grrl Power #1181 – Measure twice summon once
Arc-LIGHT’s dress code is pretty relaxed, as you can tell. Granted this is after hours, and in the office, not the field, but Maxima doesn’t even let Dabbler walk around with exposed side-panty most of the time. It doesn’t hurt that Zeph is off in DC with Max doing dungeon budget stuff. Maybe Gwen has plans later this evening.
Gwen’s office is more spartan than expected because this was my first time using the fisheye perspective ruler, which is a new tool with the latest version of CSP, and man did I mess it up a few times. I actually couldn’t figure out how to do a top down view, so I wound up combining a 2 point fisheye ruler with a 1 point vanishing perspective ruler and eventually it more or less worked out. Also, besides not being the kind of artist that particularly likes drawing a room full of cluttered knick-knacks, I thought it’d be sort of amusing to play against type and have Gwen be a bit of a neatnick. She definitely seems like she’d be the type to have a cluttered alchemy shop with dreamcatchers and wind chimes hanging from the rafters and piles of maps and 40 different half started knitting projects and vials of stuff all over the place.
The Tamer: King of Dinosaurs book 9 kickstarter is almost over. The campaign has long since funded, but you might be interested to know that it’s reached a bunch of milestones that now includes short stories covering the arrivals of five of the ladies, and their adventures surviving after getting dumped in Dinoland. It’s an add-on to the book kickstarter, but if you get it then you get all the short stories that have unlocked.
The July vote incentive is finally up! There was a disagreement about digitigrade and plantigrade leg configurations. What better way to resolve it than a race?
And in the Patreon variant, what better way to resolve it than a nude race? You know, to eliminate uh… wind drag I guess?
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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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SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Oh! This looks dangerous! ^_^
there needs to be a can of beer for someone to hold. no good idea is complete without someone holding the beer.
I think you have that backwards. It should be: No -bad- idea is complete without someone holding the beer.
I have several bad habits. sarcasm is one of them. clearly I needed to add this:
my above post may contain sarcasm, please read responsibly.
You forgot the sarcasm tag : /s
I’m assuming this is something that was taught to her by her half-efreet/half-djinn friend, the lovable Parfait.
Or she’s been studying with Krona and Leon, who are both into Arcanum++. I would’ve guessed Dabbler, but as much as she loves mischief I think she’d know better than to turn Sydney loose to practice enchantments unsupervised.
It really doesn’t surprise me too much that Sydney would dabble a bit, now that she knows it’s possible. She is, after all, a D-n-D type player, this might be something she seen in one of the game tomes and is trying to see if it’s real or not.
I kinda doubt magic will be something she could do anyway, since the orbs seem to block magic entirely to her. Neither Gwen, Specs or Dabbler could “look” into them, and Mr. Bubble blocks everything, and the true-sight orb even sees right through Dab’s glamor. So their power is something much greater than magic and can effect it in ways no one has seen or heard of before.
Krona is the only one that can see anything of the orbs, and even then only when the upgrade menu is displayed. So maybe the orbs defenses are down then? Might be the only time Dabs or anyone else could take a hard look?
The orbs shield her from magical attack/influence, just like anything else that could harm her, but I don’t see why they would prevent her from acting via magic. Indeed, she should have options no else else does, especially paired with Krona and Dabbler as assistants.
Interesting point re: visibility with the skill tree open. Dabbler has seen the skill tree open, but I just realized we haven’t seen her specifically try to scan at those moments, only the first time she saw them in the ball room interview. The tree was open again in front of Zephan too, but we also didn’t see him try anything.
But Krona did without trying, my thought is that maybe if the tree is open Dabbler might be able with far less effort. Krona doesn’t know what she was looking at, and they didn’t have time with that living android attacking, to take the time to figure anything out.
I was thinking that testing might trigger the defenses, causing the “test” to fail. Magic defense seems to be a passive side-effect of the orbs, so even if she was to call magic to her, they might see it as aggressive action and shut her off from it.
I’m thinking a deal like this: a guy spends hours setting up X-mas lights all over the house, when, after many hours of work, he plugs it in and it’s glorious! but when he calls everyone to come see, someone unplugs the cord from the wall to plug in the vacuum cleaner… Yes, I’m talking about National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation”.
Yes, not the same, but everything points to the orbs to have some form of AI. Who knows, she gets far enough in the skill tree, they might start talking to her…
NOW that would be very creepy, more so if no one else can hear them.
bwwwwuuuhhh? I’m not sure I like where this is going. Suddenly Halo knows ritual magic? Surely it cannot be.
Probably something Parfait taught her?
Sorta? Look back at page 1093. At a glance, the circle Sydney drew looks rather like Parfait’s ‘card’.
So, to be overdramatic in my phrasing, it looks like Sydney’s making her first foray into infernal magics to summon a demonic temptress…for a chill girls’ night in, I guess.
That makes perfect sense. Not even Sydney sense, just sense.
Everyone knows first edition DnD had actual magical rituals
Isn’t that the one they had to recall because too many people were trying them and succeeding?
At least, according to Bureau 13 lore, anyway.
No, in real life that’s the Arduin Grimoire… pre D&D by a few years. D&D had the spells successfully nerfed.
The Arduin Grimoire came out in 1977. D&D came out, the First Edition, the Three Holy Books and the Sacred Plywood Box, came out in 1974. I bought both of them when they came out. Still have them, too.
I would think that Katrina would be jump-running like a kangaroo. It is biomechanically the most efficient method of bipedal high speed land movement. Human walking/running isn’t as fast, but because it’s gravity assisted (we move by essentially falling forward and catching ourselves) it gives us better endurance.
I was focused on how Kat’s pencil neck looks like it’s about to snap off, but now that you point it out I’d like to see her trying out a 4-legged stride. However since her animal form is still bipedal humanoid, I don’t know if the rest of her leg structure would be suited for it.
Yeah, it’s how I had to learn to walk, rather than pushing back I lock my knee and lean forward until my good leg is free so I can catch myself, sounds easy but it took a lot of concentration at first. I suffered severe nerve damage when I broke my back, so I had to learn how to walk at the ripe old age of 24.
Anyway, when a rabbit runs, they reach a point where it’s almost entirely their back legs, only touching the ground with their front paws when they start to drift down. I watched a nature show that had taken a slow-mo clip of a rabbit running full out. I can’t believe they would let Didget to use a cheat like that, granted she does look good, but where is the exercise in that?
Yeah, I mostly walk with gravity assist too, although not due to relearning via injury, I just have always had really, really poor balance (I was born with terrible vestibular sense, if I stand still too long I *will* lose my balance and start listing over), so I got really, REALLY good at catching myself (really good proprioception, basically, so I’m like a weeble, I wobble but I don’t fall down). At some point I adapted this to move more fluidly/efficiently, shifting my center of gravity in the direction I want to go and moving my feet to catch myself rather than pushing off with my back foot or pulling forward with my front foot like most people do (although I do make use of both of those things when I need move with a sudden burst of speed or power). I’ve found this allows for much better maneuverability, allowing for easier pivots and turns, and lends itself quite well to footwork for martial arts. I also make use of my uncanny ability to catch myself to perform very unusual maneuvers by deliberately throwing myself WAY off balance for greater reach or sudden speed or to make sudden turns while moving quickly and then catch myself before it becomes a real problem, really freaks people out when they think I’m gonna fall, so sometimes I do it just to mess with people, like open a push door by just leaning backward and *right* when it looks like I’m gonna fully fall on my back or my head due to the door being out of the way, I step back and bleed off the momentum with a pivot to turn around, I get lots of distance that way and it really doesn’t take much effort.
Most people don’t pay attention to things like gait, whether their own or others around them, but when I have had some people comment that the way I move seems weird, especially for a really big dude like myself, even when they can’t place why, and the people who don’t notice on their own sometimes get upset when I point it out because then they start noticing it and can’t unsee it. I’ve been told sometimes I look almost like some alien “thing” wearing a human skin. Good times!
I was a fair sprinter in high school, and people would complain that I was walking too fast, so when I returned to a “normal” life those same people complained I was “too slow” now. Make up your minds people! I was just happy I wasn’t in a wheelchair. The funniest thing? On my first day back to work, one of those busy-body types that I had worked with before the accident, walked up to me and ask “Didn’t you die?!?” I replied “Why yes I did, and I’m here to haunt you for the rest of your days.” The look on her face!!! Gads, I wished I had a camera! heheheh….
Yeah, walking with gravity assist I find I move a lot slower than most people overall, but it’s really good for sudden acceleration and maneuverability. It’s especially great for conserving energy, though. I’m a LARPer, but I’m also pretty fat and out of shape, if you ask me to run I’ll be fully out of stamina in a couple seconds, but put me in a long, drawn out sword fight? And I can outlast people that are actually in decent shape purely because I work maybe half as hard for twice as much effect. My proprioception isn’t just great for catching myself when I fall or moving with gravity assist, it’s fantastic for putting my weapon *exactly* where I need it to be to just barely block or to slip in the smallest gaps in my opponent’s guard, combine that with being able to suddenly double or triple my speed for a few seconds with no warning, suddenly change direction or angle, suddenly overextend in a way that would cause most people to fall flat on their face to double my reach, etc. and I become a nightmare to fight. The best compliment I ever got was I was sparring with a co-worker during a slow day at work and some other co-workers were watching, and I pulled a maneuver like I described above where I threw myself into a fall just so I could catch myself for some added acceleration and reach and apparently one of the spectators blinked at just the right moment for me to go from standing upright to standing on one leg with my back and other leg parallel to the ground a full 5 feet ahead of where I had been and he was like “Did he just teleport?” I didn’t think I had moved that fast so maybe he blinked for an extra long time or something, but there’s few things more flattering than being told you’re so good at something people wonder if you have superhuman powers, lol
As a teen, I was a body-builder, afterwards I started training in martial arts. The doctor told me it was most likely why I recovered as fast as I did. It was sad though, I lost almost 10″ off my chest, the body brace I had to wear almost fell off of me after the first month. I had hit some black ice, the car flipped, then rolled off the embankment catapulting me straight up in the air long enough to know it. when I landed back on the pavement, my entire right side was damaged, dislocated my hip, shoulder, and collar bone. Shattered a bone in my foot, and crushed 2 vertebra. some how my left hand was mangled as well. It almost felt like a straight jacket after they were done patching me up. I had to give up my motorcycle and my workouts after that. My right leg after all these years is still partly numb. Nothing is more humbling than going from someone you didn’t want to mess with, to a helpless baby that couldn’t even feed myself. I was 24, and was single at the time, I had to move back in with my parents!
I wish I had thought of that when I got killed in 2001. I just decided being dead was boring and scared the EMT helping put me in the body bag half to death when I told him to be careful, I had broken the upper end of my femur. I almost hit the road again because he almost dropped me.
Maybe Gwen’s the kind of person who’s neat and tidy at the office, but a slob at home. Like me! I keep my desk clean and impersonal, bare minimum knick-knacks, but at my house you can’t go three feet without tripping over a dragon statue and falling into a shelf if fairy ornaments
Being a neat freak and a Goth? Well, they do seem to have a certain need to have things in a way they like, that doesn’t mean they are trashy or anything. Just when you work with arcane objects, it tends to be a bit cluttering. Could be this is just her office, and her real lab is more like you would expect from a “witch.”
Her comment on dusty old tomes being flammable and requiring fireproof safes is an indication that the need for such has been demonstrated in the past. The cluttered alchemy shop aesthetic is not really conducive to fire safety, nor is it conducive to finding dropped items or small creatures that like to hide.
She’s not wrong, cardboard is really bad about that. I worked at a warehouse for a while, and a spark set off some old record cases just from a bad extension cord some fool tossed over them. Old+dust+spark = fire alarm! Pity too, there were some rare albums on those pallets… For example: A case (20 record albums) of the first Van Halen album! I had one from when it was released and in the 90s it was worth $70 USD. (both the case and the store plastic was still on it :) )
Oh gods, she’s trying to learn magic! Run you fools, all hope is lost!
Do you mean there was hope in the first place? We are talking about Sydney she tried to get her arm cut off so she can get a ‘hammer space’ Honestly I am surprised it took this long for her to attempt magic.
Given that Dabbler has a cybernetic hand with full articulation and sensory feedback, plus hammerspace access and alternate attachments, I’m kinda with Sydney on ‘sacrificing’ an arm for the upgrades since the only real downside appears to be psychological.
That said, there should be an immediate ban on Sydney attempting magic without qualified supervision, massive shielding provisions, and proof she’s taken her meds.
An additional potential downside that was pointed out, is the possibility that the orbs can’t be wielded by a cybernetic hand.
Ah yes, forgot about that rebuttal. Although, we’ve seen now that Cora could make a milk run for a vat-grown replacement so if it didn’t work she should be able to restore an organic hand.
And if a vat grown hand would work, Sydney could just go for two more of those…
Or, SmugD could make his own and then steal Sydney’s balls for himself
I’d expect a limb attachment from another person to be rejected… although… organs work and those are far more finicky, so maybe that would work. And again, way less risk if you can go back to an OEM part after the experiment. Which wouldn’t take very long with magical healing potions – which reminds me that the dungeon has massive implications for medical advancement.
No, there have been limb-transplants, or at least hand-transplants
Didn’t clarify well, I meant rejected by the orbs rather than the host body, I was assuming the orbs would not activate for the DNA someone other than the user they bonded to. Although no one else has ever tried holding them, so even that limit is just theoretical. Now wondering if the transplanted limb’s cells are replaced over the years with host DNA or if they keep working from their original blueprints…
But given that organs and transfusions work fine, I’d guess the orbs may be fine with just the main soul/aura/whatever matching. But if not, would be really interesting to try some (possibly unethical) workaround experiments with say bone marrow transplants.
I’m with Gwen. What the hell are you up to, Sydney? I’m almost positive you shouldn’t be doing whatever you’re doing.
I’m absolutely certain she shouldn’t be trying this! If she wanted to try magic summoning circles, she should start with a diagram in a book and ask where the mistakes are. Painting an actual summoning circle on the floor–complete with LIT candles–is a recipe for disaster.
I wanna see a bunch of poorly-planned experiment outtakes from Sydney’s careless (and probably forbidden) experimentation while she learns magic.
thank you, as I suffer through more crunch for the protection of executive bonuses I needed to ‘not hear’ such rampant profanity and see someone else fail so routinely. I was disappointed that he managed to keep from setting his cheap ugly Christmas sweater thing from catching fire. I al also sure that isn’t how an electric guitar works.
Prediction: Sydney is trying to summon Parfait because she liked hanging out with her. Only problem is that P is still tied to Tom, so if S tries to summon Parfait in the US, T will come along because it counts as an invitation.
I would welcome more of Tom. One of the funnier characters.
Yeah, he’s a riot! the fact that a 5′ 10″ tall Dabbler can kick his titanic butt says he’s a glass cannon, or he really does care for her and won’t risk hurting her! (insert ladies going “D’aaaaw” here).
I’m pretty sure it IS the latter, since he’s already admitted to having had a crush on her in school.
Gonna guess, though, that his “grow to giant size” spell is probably mostly for intimidation purposes, and likely actually reduced his combat potential.
Very true, I just can’t see someone like Dabs having any feelings for THAT pug-ugly, but love is blind…
I can’t say too much, my wife is 58, overweight, missing all her teeth, on oxygen 24/7, and shakes like a leaf in the wind, but I still see that very lovely gal I married 38 years ago….
Yes, I have no room to talk, I’m 63, lost my teeth AND hair, and I’m covered in scars on my back and belly, but she still loves me :D.
Well Dabbler is a demon so she should be able to appreciate those with demonic looks and personalities. And since he could go five rounds with her I assume she got a whole lot of tantric energy from him too.
Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder or in this case the succubus.
And how you and your wife see each other, that’s how the human mind works.
In truth, death is in the eyes of a beholder.
This may get us in trouble with Hasbro and WotC though…
I think they both care much for eachother and their ”fights” is more like foreplay. If I was a girl I would go ”daaaw”.
Not a girl.
D’awwww!!
Is… is that a Good Place reference? Double d’awww!
Now I’m getting the feeling that she’s intentionally playing against type.
Perhaps she’s trying to make sure that people who come to her office don’t know her, they know a character the office describes.
Or maybe she IS that neat at heart, and she’s got lessons about the time that a cat figurine fell off a shelf, rolled across a room and broke a protective circle.
She’s trying to summon Dabbler’s little sister, isn’t she?
That or she’s just trying too hard to “fit in” with people, which in her case, always ends in disaster. Another “hold my beer” or “Guys, check this out” type of deal.
Why not consult Dabbler first?
Oh; right – she might be the cause of that.
#sexualfittingpotion
Knowing Dabs, she go all motherly on her and insist she not try it. Think mom finding her hyper 12 y/o wanting to shoot daddy’s .45 1911 in the backyard. Plus she’s busy with the funding talks about the dungeons.
Sydney doing spell work…
somehow I do not think this will fix the comment section at all.
Oh is she going to try to summon Parfait? That’d be cool and definitely couldn’t go horribly wrong.
Which orb is projecting that? There is no way that Gwen just stood around while Sydney lit a bunch of candles and drew the symbols on her office floor.
Looks like a different room.
That doesn’t appear to be Gwen’s office floor (note there is no low cabinet in any of the corners in the third panel). They probably walked to another room between panels.
I was wondering when she’d get around to anime night. Can’t wait to see a certain character again. Favorite minor character so far.
Honestly, Gwen is keeping remarkably calm, given the horrific idea of Sydney dabbling in the arcane arts…
Whos the bunny?
That’s probably Kat, the were hare from the council meetings, she’s the one asking more information about the dungeon core stuff from a few pages ago.
I was about to mention (complain) that we haven’t been seeing The Mighty Halo recently.
Maybe this is a demonstration of her ability to SEE THE PAST ?
That’s Gwen’s summoning paraphernalia.
OK… Looks like a Monster Rancher Circle!
Hey! We see the entire room in the establishing shot and that cabinet wasn’t there!
What orb is Sydney holding? The one that saw through Dabler’s glamour months (years) ago?
I see 7 orbs circling in the last panel…
Yep, no orbs in use. The yellow comm-ball lets her see spell structures, not project them. Although that would be an extremely useful upgrade, with proper training (or even a scan and replay ability) she’d be an insanely OP combat mage, even without her other powers.
At first I was confused what just happened. It’s clearly NOT Gwen’s office anymore. Smash cut, I guess.
Halo has an office of her own, and it’s basically empty because she doesn’t use it? I guess that makes sense; Each of the team probably gets a suite of their own.
Anyway, yeah, having truesight would probably be a huge advantage in picking up ritual magic, since you could actually SEE what was going on when other people did it. And she HAS been around people doing it.
Nice to see the artwork is back to normal….!
Is it just me, or can all of you sense the “Bounce” in the incentive image?
Poor Math’s eyes are gonna get sprained.
His eyes are usually like that. Especially under certain circumstances.
Shouldn’t the Rabbit be more Jacked?
I can only assume that Digit’s rig is fueled by Anhydrous hydrazine and FOOF. I’d say an unshielded nuclear reactor, but that’d probably be safer to be around.
FOOF would be a terrible choice without magical containment, but in this universe where that’s possible… yeah. A small quantity of those compounds would indeed make an extremely compact rocket fuel, if you could fabricate pistons and a drivetrain that would hold up. Even then, I’d insist on Digit participating via timed trial in separate location, like the abandoned quarry.
Digit have a history of inventing things that shouldn’t work. My theory is that her superpower is that her inventions work as long as she think they do kind of like the technology of 40K orks.
She’s been compared to the Verne type supers from Wearing the Cape, which has a canon crossover.
Yes, what the hell is Sydney up to, perhaps literally.
Sydney’s proclivity for causing chaos can no longer be satisfied by just her curiosity and the orbs. Additional autonomous agents required.
I did not see this coming.
The only two explanations for this narrative whiplash that I can think of are:
When Gwen tries to decipher the infernal in the summoning circle it will produce light and sound effects ‘surprise’ and half a dozen strippers of her prefered gender(s) are summoned. (Dabbler created the circle, obviously but Sydney was selected to spring the surprise because it would be such a … Sydney thing to do)
Or …
When the circle activates Gwen and Sydney are mysteriously reverse summoned (punted?) to a strange planet where dinosaur’s roam. For some reason their clothes are mostly shredded and they end up in the company of a Woof with superpowers.
I think we can all agree that the second option makes the most narrative sense.
The Wereworld comic ended over a decade ago, but this could be the perfect time for a cameo.
Why not both?
Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan, and I unreservedly endorse it.
Syds! This is NOT how to increase cup size!
{squint} Dabblers sister gave Sydney her calling card didn’t she.
That outfit is (chef’s kiss)
Dabbler’s not allowed to go exposed side-panty because she’d lose the panties the moment Max looked the other way.
Or looked the right way ;)
I’m going to guess Sydney’s glasses have a magic circle overlay and tutorial function, which isn’t surprising but not something I’ve considered.
I like this idea.
Definitely Dabbler would have added a spell checker
True, but I suspect her autocorrect would lean toward the…puritanically incorrect.
autocorrupt
Well that depends on if she’s a member of the witches’ union. We have Spell Checkers. I was a Union Witch for a couple of years before the turn of the century, check out the title of my blog…
I’m going to need full art of this fishnetted lady stat.
Heh, I loved seeing my wife wear fishnet, but she complained it was “uncomfortable” so yeah… Stocking! jeez…
Maybe she’s trying to recreate something from one of her orbs?
I read the epilogue too fast and thought Dave wrote “dungeon buffet”. Sounds like a cool character in a novel.
“He’s a level 50 craftsman with cooking at +100.”
You know I don’t actually care what Sydney is up to. Any day with Gwen in it is a good day for me.
AD/HD superheroine playing at black magic….
What could POSSIBLY go wrong???????????
Bold of you to assume that Gwen is wearing panties under that…
Technically Dabbler isn’t plantigrade or digitigrade, since she has hooves. She’d be unguligrade.
“Just summoning an incubus in the form of Wolverine, my comic husband.”
That could be VERY dangerous, since they don’t exist in the Grrlpower universe! If he ran amuck, every woman in any form in power would fall for him and he could easily control the world at some point. We seen how easily Dabbler can effect both sexes with her lust spell, just picture that in an aggressive male!
Not with Logans personality I think. He is a antisocial asshole so he would probably screw it up.
Maybe, but think of all the assholes out there that DON’T have those powers and they still manage to screw up women’s lives…
We haven’t seen an incubus, but doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I mean there’s demons, succubi, and polyamorous male aliens. I wouldn’t doubt there being incubi as well. I went for a shape-shift rather than just straight up summoning a comic book character to life lol.
Dabbles said there are no incubus, nor male succubae
Ahh, missed that I guess.
Now I truly lament not being able to support you on Patreon…right now, trying to dry out after the combo of drenching rain, and the shaking of a mild earthquake. California has been interesting as of late…
What makes you think Dabbler wears panties
(unless explicitely ordered by Maxima and even then)
She does when making cookies. :)
Dabbler would wear panties, but they would be engineered to draw your attention to what’s underneath. Like properly worn jewelry, they would draw your attention to a feature, not distract from it.
You mean like the thong that was 2 pieces of string and a small patch of shear black cloth? Yeah…