Grrl Power #1183 – Smng
I guess Parfait has her “Auto Reply to Summoning Requests” set to “Automatically Accept.” In her defense, she’s just getting her career as a professional Succubus started, and her Summoning Rolodex has like 4 names at the moment?
All those sigils that cause the candles to blow out and the wind to pick up and black smoke to pour from the edges of the circle and cackling before the flame wreathed hand breaks through the dimensional bulwark are just designed to promote theatrics. Gotta maintain the mystery and make sure the mortals continue to fear and revere the unknown and all that.
I’ve long liked the idea that most magic that happens in popular media is the result of people cobbling together ancient texts in order to cast a single spell or summon an entity and everything inevitably goes wrong – aren’t caused by malicious intent of the magic itself or the things being summoned… well, okay, sometimes it’s the fault of the things being summoned – but most of that stuff is because the people in those movies don’t really know anything about magic despite their 40 year quest to unlock its secrets. It’s like someone trying to code a computer program but all they have is snippets of code that were written in ancient Sumerian. They don’t know what each snippet is supposed to do, but if you string enough of them together, maybe you can get something to happen, even if that thing is a OS crash or it makes the USB port that connects the keyboard to the computer to stop working. But the magical script kiddies are pretty sure someone 5000 years ago used “Sumerian++” to create solid gold out of thin air and also made them irresistible to women, (ignoring the fact that having a mountain of gold is not, in and of itself, a huge turn off) so it’s worth trying, even if the last guy who tried it lost the blue channel on his monitor and also his bones were replaced with fire ants.
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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“Never fails You get in the bath and there’s a rub at the lamp” – Genie
(For those missing the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdGmK3P4hXk )
*rubber duckie squeak SFX*
Now I know I’m old, because I immediately thought of the old Bugs’ Bunny episode. A lad and his lamp. https://youtu.be/ZRxPjbnqROw?si=ofI_RHyjhvosS-Jo
Wow, it ends with a hare-m.
“Three Cheers and a tiger for me! I have WON!” – The Genie
That was my first thought too.
Beat me to it. Nice to see someone else who appreciates the classics.
Gwen’s face in the last panel.
Also, this is sort of an August incentive?
Well, if DaveB now considers it as a request…
Let me hereby second that!
It has my vote, as long as she is her species’ equivalent of 18.
Sound effects courtesy of Wapsi Square.
POIT!
Thanks I’ve been trying to remember the name of that comic for years.
It’s now “Wapsi Square: The Next Generation” (which is not a bad thing, should really check it out if you liked it before)
Pinky and The Brain, more likely. I totally wanna see Parfait ‘Narf’ Sydney
Nah, *POIT* is used in “Wapsi Square”, has been for over ten years
Hmph, I looked it up on Urban Dictionary. It lists about a dozen definitions, two related to sex and two mentioning PatB. And a Dexter’s Lab one where it was used for teleportation like in Wapsi.
I like to imagine the flickering of candles and billowing of drapes and smoke ARE the indicators that the request has been sent and is pending. Gives the summonee time to prepare their own dramatics and avoid comedic shenanigans like this for the more serious types!
…Of course, if the curtains freeze for a moment and the candles lock in place for an instant, that’s the indicator that someone has just put down a quicksave. Results may vary.
considering she is a succubus this is one of the better options to randomly summon her during.
Except for the two of them having their brains lock up on account of sudden exposure to too much wet, naked succubus.
Ah, she’s in her formal best
It also apparently isn’t adapted for “Bring a travel bag.”
That’s gonna leave a bruise on the ole’ bum…
I’m guessing succubus butts are extra durable for reasons.
“Poit” is officially Best Summon Sound Effect
In this case also works.
Be glad it wasn’t “NARF!”
First, great comic. Freakin’ funny. <3 Anyhow, in the InCryptid books by Seanan McGuire a lot of magic is like that. A spell book is likely to be a copy of a copy of a copy of an original or at least a copy that was proofread and repaired by an actual sorcerer who knew what he was doing. Mistakes creep in. Mistranslations. People who only partially understand the original work trying to fill in the blanks. Sorcerers in that series have actual magic themselves and can try things and learn how the fundamentals work and extrapolate. Non-sorcerers who want to use magic need to use sacrifices and rituals to get magic effects but they can never really learn the underlying mechanics which means errors creep in pretty fast; especially since a failed ritual might leave half of a scorched spell book behind instead of a whole volume.
A failed ritual might also leave half a scorched summoner behind, thereby making it clear to everyone that although there is a whole book, the book contains at least one major error.
A young monk arrives at the monastery. He is assigned to helping the other monks in copying the old laws of the church by hand.
He notices, however, that all of the monks are copying from copies, not from the original manuscript. So, the new monk goes to the head monk to question this, pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up! In fact, that error would be continued in all of the subsequent copies.
The head monk, says, “We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.”
He goes down into the dark caves underneath the monastery where the original manuscripts are held as archives in a locked vault that hasn’t been opened for hundreds of years. Hours go by and nobody sees the head monk.
So, the young monk gets worried and goes down to look for him. He sees him banging his head against the wall and wailing.
The young monk asks the head monk, “What’s wrong, father?”
The head monk with tears in his eyes replies, “The word is celebrate not celibate!”
+1
Have read that many a time :)
Reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon, ” A lad and his lamp “
I love teleport sound effects. They show character. This type of summoning does show the need for communication. Unless the other party is in to that.
The funniest (or not so) form of accidental magic that I know of is found in ‘The Laundry Files’ series. Written by Charles Stross (who can succesfully argue that H.P.Lovecraft wrote thrillers while Crichton wrote existential horror stories).
In that universe ‘and sufficiently advanced math is indistinguishable from magic’ but you will not enjoy what you
accidentally summon. At least you will not enjoy it for a span of time measured in miliseconds.
I highly recommend both this series and the writer (his book Halting State (a different series from the Laundry Files) opens with a hilarious take on gaming gone wrong and ends with some pretty serious questions we have to ask ourselves regarding our ever digitising world)
Seems somewhat similar to L. Sprague deCamp’s “Accidental Enchanter” series. Turns out that magic is just a series of logic loops that let you convince yourself something is real when it ‘isn’t’.
Read a few installments of Laundry Files and quite enjoyed them as comic detective stories, even though I don’t like Lovecraftian settings in general.
Any sufficiently well written thriller is indistinguishable from a horror story.
And vice versa.
To be fair, Crichton was writing hard Sci-Fi under mostly the same premise as Hebert did: The scientific method has a place for checking your assumptions for a reason, too many people skip this step to their detriment.
He wasn’t writing action/adventure stories, he was writing sci-fi with a side of horror. What happens when you screw up by the numbers. For example, Jurassic Park. The math nerd predicted everything because the park’s ‘controls’ were sloppy at best, and made dangerous assumptions. For example, the reason their tracking program didn’t pick up extras was it was given a hard upper limit on how many of each species existed. In fact, that was where they got proven that the dinos *were* breeding, when they went in and increased the limits of the tracking program algorithm.
That Jurassic Park fell was inevitable, and because of the hubris and cut corners that existed all along the way, and was supposed to be an example of what happens when you let corporate thinking interfere with scientific study. Given how corporate thinking has… adversely affected the modern day, it is not unreasonable to consider it existential horror.
Lovecraft was a mentally unstable person who tried his hardest to convey his mental instabilities to others through his writing. If it is existential horror, it is only because that is what Lovecraft lived every day of his life. His stories are probably closer to Slice-Of-Life from his perspective, which is perhaps the truly most horrifying thing about them.
Glad to see other Stross readers here!
It should be noted that Charles Stross also follows the “Badly copy-pasted Sumerian++” model., @DaveB
There’s a scene in (I believe) the Atrocity Archives where the main character even comments on this, complaining that the ancient mass-sacrifice ritual the bad guy is using to open the portal, is “wildly unoptimised”, and if they had used a proper algorithm, a few drops of blood would have done the trick..It offends this “computational demonologist” on an aesthetic as well as moral level.
The same character also uses an Aeduino, a 9V battery and some conductive ink to trap a minor demon on a pizza box.
So, Thursday we find out that, if she’d just dumped a much tinier amount of manna into the ‘card’, Parfait could have shown up very slightly more dressed, and dry.
Isn’t there a blue moon this week?
A super blue moon
Downright perky.
Magical progress goes “poit”?
Given Parfait’s nature, the classic ‘boink’ was also a distinct possibility, albeit with very different connotations.
Magical progress goes “poit”?
I’m wondering if DaveB has read Charles Stross’s The Laundry Files. I’d like to see if they can do magic similar to that.
Also appropriate magical form for the Bureau 13 novels, and by extension the Stalking the Night Fantastic TTRPG.
… no ring-tone or call waiting… hmmmmm
Nudity for silly reasons. My kind of humor.
A “Nude-le” Incident as it were.
Naked 16 year old. Grrl Power is now officially child pornography.
Hey dum dum, how about you do some research before you try and slander someone’s work with accusations like that?
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1045-return-of-the-attack-of-the-boobs/
“Parfait is about three weeks past her 18th birthday, FYI. Young and inexperienced, but not so young that it’s icky.”
This also a little while back, so now she is probably a few months past that.
She’s 16 in Succubus years..that’s like metric ;)
When(if) I turn 68, I’m going to tell everyone I’m 20…Celcius
Hey dum dum, maybe do some looking back and research/fact checking before you slander someone’s work with accusations like that. That’s not something to be slinging lightly.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1045-return-of-the-attack-of-the-boobs/
“Parfait is about three weeks past her 18th birthday, FYI. Young and inexperienced, but not so young that it’s icky.”
That was also a little while back, so she’s probably months past it now.
Ah, an Olsen Twins Timer supporter. PANDER WHERE ARE YOU!?!
I…wha?
I presume your lawyer skills are being requisitioned, it’s a reference to some dark internet / pop culture history around being too eager to draw the line of “it’s not pedophilia once they come of age” as sharply as possible.
Nope. In her culture he’s totally of age of consent, AND she’s not a human, AND you need to study the definition of pornography. What you see here could be called erotic, and even that would be a stretch.
Succubi take things like ‘Age of Consent’ extremely seriously.
Remember Dabbler’s reaction about Lavender going missing?
There is no such thing as “child exploitation” among succubi and woe be unto those who would dare try force themselves upon one.
She’s covered in bubbles, but, if that doesn’t count to you, then basically every anime is in the same situation.
Also, things get weird when you consider drawings of fictional characters. If there is a 900 year old deity, whose body is indistinguishable from a 12yo count as okay or not?
P.S. are you mistakenly remembering the young girl from the club instead of Dabblers younger sister?
On the one hand, you’re not wrong about the 900-year-old-in-the-body-of-a-12-year-old. OTOH, it’s still weird, and I immediately thought of this: https://youtu.be/pU2VY4vCDug
Because I can’t post images here I will quote half of the relevant Magritte painting:
“Ceci n’est pas un pipe”
Parfait is not a person, not even a depiction of a person as she does not exist independently of this particular comic (unlike Magritte’s pipe). This is what makes declaring any fantastic fiction pornography (of any variety) problematic.
And I am not claiming that any depiction or description of underage nudity or more explicit interaction is never problematic. The issue is that there is no clear border that can be drawn in a legal sense as too much ends up being “it depends how the observer experiences or interprets this”. It creates a real risk that in a legal sense the author of a work or art becomes responsible for how a viewer chooses to interpret said work.
“I know it when I see it” as a rule has the advantage of being the only practical “definition” that can be applied in a court of law, but it has the potential of creating gross miscarriages of justice (not to mention can mess up the life of many people, and in fact has in the past. From children who found themselves in the sex offenders register for sharing naughty pictures with each other, to photographers who put pictures of their young children in art galeries. And it could very easily lead in a ultra conservative community to, say, a 15 year old girl being convicted for wearing too revealing clothes, even if those match the current fashion).
I do not pretend to know a way around this legal quagmire, and neither have supreme court justices anywhere in the world (unless you are unlucky enough to live in, say, Iran or certain african countries these days, who approach this with a “burn them all” mentality).
But … “Ceci n’est pas une jeune fille”
(and nobody was forcefully abducted either, even though in the story that was exactly what happened. That is the point, it is a fantasy story, not reality).
It’s not child porn for many, many reasons.
1) Not real – cartoon image.
2) Parfait is 18, not 16.
3) Parfait is succubus and not human. It’s like saying Superboy from Young Justice would be child porn because he’s technically 1 year old or Miss Martian would not because, while Martian age-wise, she’s 16, Earth age-wise she’s in her 40s.
4) There was no nudity shown.
#2 is pretty much the most important one here btw, since it’s a defense even if it was a real and human person, which it is not, but there’s no definition by which this would be child pornography.
Some jurisdictions obviously don’t care much for arguments 1 and 3. I am baffled by your definition of nudity, since Parfait is quite visibly nude.
@Viirin And you’re now officially an ignorant a-hole.
They should send her back(so she can get dressed)and then re-summon her?!?!
Did you forget that she dressed herself in magical smoke? I doubt that’s an object. I’d bet it’s just part of her magic.
Don’t forget that she and Dabbler use boob-space to store objects. She could contain a couture closet in her cleavage.
Yeah, I’d been thinking that an impromptu summoning is hella rude, for just the reasons shown in the comic. You def want to call ahead and arrange the time so they can be prepared.
Also, it seems like opening a magic portal within ARC HQ could be a massive security risk
Explains why summoned demons are usually in bad moods.
All true, but how was Sydney supposed to call ahead when all she had been given by Parfar was a design for asummoning circle, not an interplanar telephone?
Thought it was an interplanar caller, not a summoning device (specially seeing how she didn’t check to see if Sydney even could charge a summoning circle)
Didn’t Parf tell Sydney to call her if she wanted to hang out, and not summon her?
I’m sure some sort of “dog years” consideration applies.
She’s a summonable succubus. You can’t tell me she’s never been summoned in similar situations before.
Like powering a text message with a lightning bolt.
Call ahead next time, in case they are giving a head
Smoke girl turns into soap bubble girl after hours?
Hmm… Me thinks they need to work on communication first.
We need a desktop-background sized version of the sudsy succubus floating above the sigil
And here I was thinking they’d summon her sister (or something worse) by accident.
The theatrics didn’t just blow out the candles, but took Gwen’s fishnets with them!
Hmm, maybe they’re actually a wearable mana-battery? Or does summoning a succubus automatically disintegrate underwear within a certain radius of the summoning circle, for reasons?
You know, I’m pretty okay with that.
I know they are part of the goth aesthetic, but I’ve never found fishnets particularly attractive. Tights, stockings, and bare legs are all superior IMO.
The candles and stuff are definitely for theatrics, but magic users are all about the theatrics! In the words of Sir Terry Pratchett:
“The Rite of AshkEnte, quite simply, summons and binds Death. Students of the occult will be aware that it can be performed with a simple incantation, three small bits of wood and 4cc of mouse blood, but no wizard worth his pointy hat would dream of doing anything so unimpressive; the knew in their hearts that if a spell didn’t involve big yellow candles, lots of rare incense, circles drawn on the floor eight different colors of chalk and a few cauldrons around the place then it simply wasn’t worth contemplating.”
I have always loved the diskworld wizards, they can do magic they aren’t charlatans they just know its much smarter NOT to do magic because magic is kind of a sneaky bastard.
Losing the blue channel on my monitor is a price I’d be willing to pay; the fire ants is not.
What if it’s the blue channel on every monitor you ever own, from now on?
I have always liked “poit” as a teleport sound effect for comedic effect over “bamf”
I agree, for reasons… See https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/worm-nine-lives-of-the-calico-complete.30603/
I want to know how Gwen tests for mana using ability.
She could do the boring thing and ask Specs if she can see mana inside Sydney?
Though traditionally in stories this is done with a simple artifact (usually a crystal) that will produce a visible effect if it can draw mana from the person holding it (who has not yet learned how to shield).
Or in magic systems where magic is distinctly elemental in nature testing typically involves medidating for (many) hours in front of an altar with sources for the different magical domains to see which visible reacts.
Being a mage herself Gwen can probably plunk Sydney in a circle and use whatever magic of the circle to do the testing. That has the humorous advantage of having Sydney sit still and quiet for a long time and not being distracted by anything shiny, or any stray thought popping in her head. This may well be the reason why Gwen said she did not have time for the test just yet. (and she probably considers it extremely unlikely that Sydney actually has any magical abilities given her utter lack of self control).
Cue Syd asking “Hey, can you GameShark my MaxMP?”
“Though traditionally in stories this is done with a simple artifact (usually a crystal) that will produce a visible effect if it can draw mana from the person holding it (who has not yet learned how to shield).”
And explode if you’re the protagonist in an Isekai.
…this is why you cast Contact before Summon to avoid these kind of issues
I was just thinking that Sydney should invite her to go out with her and Parfait for fun and games.
Not that sort of fun and games you perverts.
Receive Nudes.