Grrl Power #1226 – Whippet good
Sydney has been wanting to try this since she figured out how to do the nitrogen trick in Galytn. She just didn’t think it through all the way. She figured, change Oxygen to Nitrogen, everyone passes out, then change it back. They wake up a little dizzy, maybe have a headache, but it’s all good. What she hasn’t figured out is if she can change the air already in someone’s lungs to and fro. Probably should have tried this in the Arc-SPARQ lab.
Still. It’s not the worst tactic against, you know, really bad people. Sydney was just lucky (or possibly unlucky as the case may be) that these particular demons actually need oxygen. It’s pretty easy to imagine certain breeds of demons not really needing a lot of O2. If you’re standing knee deep in lava… honestly I have no guess as to how that would affect the atmospheric composition – besides probably a shitload of ash and little crystalized bits of rock that would fuck up a normal human’s lungs. Well, a normal human that’s immune to insane temperatures, but not immune to inhaling powdered obsidian. I would guess that 5 feet above a lake of lava, there would be… slightly less oxygen? It’s not like the heat would fuck up the O2. I think other gasses would just be added to the mix and the percentage of O2 would drop proportionally. Molten limestone would give off a shitload of Co2 for example, and that would make it harder for Heat Ignoring Man to breathe.
Of course, I write and draw this page, then 3 days later as I’m posting it, I see on the news that Alabama JUST approved Nitrogen Narcosis as a form of execution.
You know, I’m against state sponsored death penalty, not because some people don’t really deserve to die – I just really don’t trust that the state will handle prosecution and evidence correctly. The number of wrongfully convicted people over the years should make any reasonable person hesitant to grant the government that power. (Also, some non-extradition-to-the-US countries are non-extradition because we have capital punishment) – BUT, all that aside, I know a lot of people object to it because the lethal injection method has never been proven to be humane, and that’s why part of the cocktail is a paralytic, blah blah blah. Well, I’ve always wondered, if you want to kill someone painlessly, honestly, how hard would it be to just rig up like 100 double barreled sawed-off shotguns and rig them all to go off at the same time? Kind of going all in on the Firing Squad concept. Call it the Red Mist method. Or just a small room with 45 claymores all facing inward? That’d be even more sure-fire. Even if they didn’t all go off at the exactly same time, I imagine once one of them went off… the rest of them would probably go off. Granted, as close to painless as those methods might be, I’m not sure that anything where the cleanup involves opening a sluice gate and turning a hose on an area is strictly humane.
Of course, this is all happening in the comic long before Alabama decided to out whippicide, so Sydney will likely avoid some new team nickname like The Alabama Strangler, though this move might eventually get named The Dixie Chokehold.
Oh, and FYI, since it’s not windy today, Sydney just turned a dome of air into Nitrogen, and since it’s the same temperature as it was, it’s not blowing around and mixing any faster than air normally would, so Harem’s fine where she is for a few more minutes.
The new vote incentive is up! Crimson and Scarlett have a present for Ingsol!
It’s them, they’re the present. They’ve decided that “Sire-versaries” are a thing and Ingsol has to be convinced this is a good idea each time. Everyone thinks his pair of names-that-are-synonyms-with-red sirelings who are both women and who were both turned in that age range that ensure peak hotness means he’s a dirty old man, but he actually isn’t. It just worked out that way. And don’t forget that while it looks like there’s a 25 year age gap between the girls and him, it’s actually much worse, as he is 700 years old, while Scarlett is something like 180 and Crimson is only 40. But at the same time it’s meaningless as they were both fully adults when they got turned, so it’s all copacetic.
As usual, Patreon has the pair of them in various states of undress.
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Fine, fine, you’ve finally dragged me out of my hole to actually comment on this, and of COURSE it’s nitpicky scientific inaccuracies that have done it. To preface: I love the comic, it’s very fun, I just normally don’t comment on webcomics. Now.
1) As I understand it, the main problem with an overabundance of nitrogen (at STP, high pressure is different) the main problem is in fact still the lack of oxygen. It’s potentially deadly for the same reason choking someone out is potentially deadly- depriving the body (and especially brain) of oxygen long enough to get someone to pass out is also long enough to be rolling the dice on permanent brain damage and death. Except you can *stop* mechanically choking someone quickly, but if the air got turned to nitrogen there’s no such quick on/off.
2) I know where you’re coming from with your “it’s just a dome and there’s no wind” thing, but I’m a physicist and I’m here to rain on your parade and tell you your quick-and-dirty excuse does not hold up. Maybe. Rates of diffusion (which, if we’re playing pretend here that the entire body of air is preternaturally still with no currents at all, would be the only thing causing change) depends strongly on the relative concentration of gasses on either side of the barrier (where here the “dome” Sydney initially created the gas in counts as a barrier for math purposes, even though it’s 100% permeable due to not existing), and so oxygen (and the other components of normal air) would be mixing into the dome very quickly, so almost immediately the boys would not be in pure nitrogen. Now the question becomes: what percent oxygen can their bodies tolerate? Since everyone but Cthulhu seems to be running off the human baseline for convenience, that works out to needing 10% or higher (and wanting 12% or higher), where normal concentration of oxygen in air is ~20%. So, the halfway point, and that’s where halfassedly waving my hands around can no longer work, because I’d actually have to do some math to figure out whether or not the air would sufficiently reoxygenate through diffusion alone before they fell unconscious, and I draw the line at doing webcomic math (this is a lie; diffusion in particular is just a pain in the ass)
Your body doesn’t notice if you’re not breathing oxygen in — your breathing is regulated to get the carbon dioxide out. So victims won’t notice until they fall flat from lack of oxygen. The Air Force has to train pilots to notice anoxia in time to do something about it. Some fighters are even programmed to notice the pilot going AWOL and drop down to levels where the air is breathable. And once they get air back into them, the pilots recover rapidly – if it hasn’t been too long.
Now that Halo has seen the problem, all she has to do is create 20% oxygen in the lungs of the passed-out.
CAN she precisely target the air in someone’s lungs though? As stated above, Halo hasn’t worked that out yet. Next page could be an inciting incident where she accidentally kills someone AND invites a demon revenge war to Earth. We’ve been getting a lot of succubus and demon lore lately, wouldn’t be surprised if the next big bad fight was from them…
1. How would she make it only 20%? More likely she’ll just make it all oxygen and BOOM! now it’s hyperoxia.
and 2. If she’s affecting what’s in their lungs, Dave goofed. Swolethulu “holding his breath” wouldn’t save him.
Look up partial pressure, hyperbaric oxygen therapy. The main hazard with increased oxygen levels is fire hazard.
See apollo fire accident
She has already used it to make human-breathable air, which presumably has about the same mixture of gases as air at sea level.
Swolethulu most likely has an enlarged spleen (like a seal, or like a human of Bajau ethnicity) that stores several minutes worth of highly-oxygenated blood.
Knowing Sidney, she’s going to make 100% oxygen and then a spark turns on the forest back and up to 11. Also, lungs on fire
ALSO knowing the COMIC, they will happen to have high burn resistance and just get a sore throat and a cough.
the gas buble Sydneys orb can make also can mantain a certain shape, not to the point of the Force Field, but she has maintained a air buble inside a pool more or less stable.
Now I need to go back and re-read; I remember syd making the air bubble inside her shield in the pool
That was this page.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-541-bubble-untrouble/
I think we can almost guarantee that you don’t have to take diffusion into account, because convention will have it beat by several orders of magnitude, even if there’s absolutely no wind.
Still not fast enough to save any lives, unless somebody is standing right by the edge of the bubble, though.
Ok, obviously I have missed or forgotten something important. How did Sydney change the air into nitrogen?
When Halo was talking about being a space ship a while back, she talked about how one of her orbs can do life support, make air, etc. In Galtyn she used it to make non flammable/non oxygen air to put out the fires she created when she burned that huge chunk of desert to cut down on the amount of sand available during Maxima’s fight. She hasn’t been playing with those powers very long. It seems like if she can make air, there’s a lot of possibility for that to be hugely OP with some clever power feats, and that assumes it can’t be powered up to be a general transform power to turn pretty much anything into anything.
I’m starting to think the orbs are meant as a terraforming tool.
While it is very cool as “weapon systems” there’s something that would be extremely cool in a totally different way if the PPO wasn’t intended as a weapon, but rather a mining laser and zone-clearing burst tool.
Could be a survival kit, could be a toy set for the species’ young. Maybe the unknown orb is for nutrition.
She figured out how to do that here.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1080-nitrogenerator/
You may have missed this one.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-541-bubble-untrouble/
The following page is the one Dar was referencing where they are debriefing what happened. I apparently missed that one as well, or at least I don’t recall reading that.
> I just really don’t trust that the state will handle prosecution and evidence correctly.
That’s only because of repeated prior incidents showing that they can’t.
The immediately important point isn’t the technical accuracy of the dangers involved, it’s whether Sydney would think ‘that’s a cool idea’ and Parfait would think ‘somebody gunna die!’.
Dave, remember the submarine implosion? All the people on board has died quicker than any nerve could’ve reacted to anything that has happened. So, sending someone 3-4km down the ocean in a carbon egg with a pressurizer, then forcing an implosion would definitely be a Humane execution. Kind of expensive though!
Search “Can you feel pain when submarine implodes” — there are many videos. I liked that one: https://youtu.be/Mri2T2_R8tw?si=oiuFvTTonMpWqdmi
The diver doesn’t know about nitrogen narcosis
I think she needs to resit the course.
Nitrogen *narcosis* only dangerous (to humans) at high partial pressures of nitrogen, well over 1 atmosphere. It’s hypoxia/aphyxiation that’s the worry here.
Nitrogen narcosis only happens at about 3 & 1/2 atmosphere pressure or more
Here it’s going to be at about 1 atmosphere
So what does Baby Cthulu get as a beat down?
Magic Tubee until too much Hentai? Or Will he scream, “No! Daddy,No!” Making the fight even more awkward?
I don’t know enough about chemistry to dispute this but something seems strange about her use of the atmosphere orb this time.
“She just didn’t think it through all the way.”
What else is new?
Oddly topical, since someone is about to be executed by Nitrogen gas
A few disconnected thoughts:
While it’s a popular fictional trope, in reality, the idea of a “harmless knockout” doesn’t hold up. Bodies work hard to stay alive and conscious, and rendering someone unconscious without other harm means threading the needle between not doing enough to incapacitate them, and doing enough to cause lasting damage.
My understanding is that it’s not actually the percentage of oxygen that matters, but the partial pressure – even at the peak of Everest, you’re still around 20% oxygen, but the partial pressure is down to about 7% of an atmosphere – a third of what it is at sea level – and it’s that lowered partial pressure that causes problems. If you have a sealed room (with a CO2/O2 gas exchanger to keep quantities of those constant) and dump in a bunch of some inert gas, increasing the pressure in the room, so long as the new gas doesn’t cause problems, people will continue to be fine despite the percentage of oxygen dropping.
I learned that apparently suffocation is the “least dangerous” way to knock someone out quickly, mostly because it doesn’t cause physical damage. The neurons lack energy to function but don’t start dying immediately, like when your arm falls asleep. Sydney has a minute here before any significant brain damage from hypoxia is likely, possibly longer depending on how durable the demons actually are.
And yes, the partial pressure, or absolute amount of oxygen your lungs have access to is what is pertinent, not percentages or overall pressure.
That said, it’s unlikely that “nitrogen poisoning” is as literal as it sounds considering that the atmosphere is already 80% nitrogen so a number of different things are possible, from Parfait overreacting to the standard hypoxia to them secretly having respirators that lower the oxygen amount (unlikely) to some peculiarity of demon physiology that makes them particularly susceptible to pure nitrogen and/or lack of oxygen.
Parfait’s choker is missing
It may just be an art mistake.
Or it may be that by being inside Sydney’s bubble she is cut off from her connection to Thom.
The later would be very bad indeed for Parfait.
Definitely an art mistake, previous page shows her with her choker while bubbled.
OMG i want Halo to quickly turn too much Nitrogen to Oxygen and have the entire area burst into flames
Without a spark that isn’t happening, they will just jump from nitrogen narcosis to oxygen toxicity though.
Go back a couple of pages to the “I didn’t start this forest fire”
At the very least there should still be really hot embers
Don’t know if anybody else has pointed it out yet but Whippits are nitrous oxide, the NO in NOS performance enhancers for cars and only slightly toxic in high concentrations like would happen with pure N2 excluding the O2, only NO will make you stoned long before you get enough to exclude the O2.
Thought Whippets were dogs, kinda like greyhounds…
Whippet good…
The story takes place in ‘comic book world,’ so the people there are more durable than on earth. That means they will revive once the oxygen returns.
On earth, those people would be dead from their exertions on zero oxygen. She’d also have the ability to turn the atmosphere around them into fluorine. She could turn the air inside their lungs to iron.
We’re assuming everybody in today’s episode has a good understanding of chemistry. I can see the demons having classes in magic, but if you got magic why study chemistry. I don’t remember Sidney’s education being mentioned but I bet it was from comic books…
So on the whole “what would breathing in a volcano be?” question. Like you figured, a lot depends on the type of volcano. But…instead of oxygen, there would be a whole lot of Hydrogen Sulfide (combines with water vapor in lungs to make sulfuric acid), water vapor (to make Sulfuric acid on the outside), Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Monoxide, varying amounts of Clorine, Bromine, Argon, and (oh yah) some oxygen.
Spent four years studying volcanic rocks.
Speaking of things Sydney should know a fair amount about: as a SCUBA diver Sydney would be more aware of nitrogen narcosis, it’s effects before passing out and the relevant dangers- scuba divers need to know as much as pilots because they have to use the same concepts with the dive tank and oxygen mix. Since she and her Dad have also dove together without a local dive master she should also be very well trained in how to handle all potential dangers of scuba diving, especially since the euphoria + ADHD makes the risk of not recognizing the danger a little more likely than a normal person when it comes to nitrogen narcosis. You may want to address that gaping plot hole Dave.
Sydney is easily distracted and prefers to montage her way through the boring parts of life.
Geeze, talk about timing.
Oof. Resonates a bit too hard with the execution via nitrogen in Alabama today.
Whippits are nitrous oxide, not pure nitrogen (whippets are micro greyhounds). Too much of it will also kill you but it’s mostly for getting you high, pure nitrogen won’t do that.
I also am against the death penalty except in the most extreme cases (i.e. recorded mass shootings with no possible question of guilt), and agree that with our current legal system it probably shouldn’t be on the table. However, I have also felt that /if/ we’re going to keep doing it, we should have switched to nitrogen execution decades ago. Survivors of nitrogen accidents say they felt and remembered nothing. Every method we’ve had up until now has had a chance of painful failure (heck, guillotine is probably more humane than a badly aimed firing squad or expired injection meds) while nitrogen is pretty much instant painless blackout. Heck, if you want to appeal to the more sociopathic people in charge of making the rules, it’s also a lot cheaper.
I also kind of wonder about Parfait being so worried about them (granted, she’s known them a lot longer than she’s known Sydney) after they tried to use lethal force on Sydney, but, different values, etc. I also think it would be hilarious if she kersploded the area with too much oxygen, but I think she’s also overdue for not being at fault for a fire for once. Also: very curious as to what a demon ambulance would look like. Or supernatural ambulance? Liquid mana IVs, blood for vampires, uh… chelation is not effective for silver poisoning so I’m not sure what you’d do for a poor werewolf who accidentally stepped on someone’s silver earrings.
it didn’t go well in alabama the other day. i doubt they will do this type again.
Considering speed may be desireable for executions, a bit of c4 at the atlas-skull joint may be better. A shaped charge may also suffice.
If Swolethulu’s lungs are full of nitrogen, “holding his breath” won’t help him.
On a side note, if Sydney suddenly changes the nitrogen to oxygen they’re just going to go from nitrogen narcosis to oxygen toxicity.
That’s going to depend on how long they’re in 100% oxygen
Treatment for the bends and carbon monoxide poisoning has people breath 100% oxygen under very close monitoring so a quick burst of 100% oxygen probably wouldn’t kill them
I gotta say it, Sydney and parfait should be a thing
They’re more a besties thing than a shipping thing. Sydney made that very very very clear to Parfait.
This does seem like the people who wanted Halo to be “humbled for her hubris” are getting what they said, just not via losing the fight. Curious where Lulu went. Is she considered a noncombatant for this kind of fighting? Was she permitted a break because she already had to do round 1? Has she been sent somewhere to prep a sneak attack?
Presumably she’s still bound up by Parfait’s spell.
She is probably still bound and only fought because she was ordered to. Brelx is currently unconscious so jo orders are in place now, even if she gets free.
Shoulda increased the carbon dioxide by 1%. Still wouldn’t affect the guy who can hold his breath for days. At least he’s not an olm.
Max has Dabbler, and Sydney has Parfait, or am I imagining an echo.
Told ya Asta would join the fight
There’s a scene in the James Bond novels where Bond almost outs himself as a spy because in an airport, he tries a shot of 100% oxygen and feels giddy.
Why would demons need air?
I can’t lie. This would be a good point for Sydney to kill those demons and see the fallout from it. I recall her blowing some stuff up, but may not have directly killed any one individual.
Also, could turn Parfait into an arch-enemy for Halo killing her friends?
DaveB: ” I would guess that 5 feet above a lake of lava, there would be… slightly less oxygen? It’s not like the heat would fuck up the O2. I think other gasses would just be added to the mix and the percentage of O2 would drop proportionally”
Question – in the case of a demon who breathes an atmosphere that has very little or no O2, but a bunch of other gases instead, wouldnt they already have problems breathing in Earth’s atmosphere before Sydney did anything? So any demon that comes to Earth without some sort of breathing apparatus or magical ability or who simply doesn’t breathe at all would already need to have O2 in the atmosphere to breathe, so it’s generally a good bet that if they’re on Earth, they need O2?
“Sydney has been wanting to try this since she figured out how to do the nitrogen trick in Galytn. She just didn’t think it through all the way.”
Seems like pretty standard behaviour for Sydney. Thinking ahead? What’s that?
Ok, no one is addressing the most glaring issue here, so I will.
It seems that the aliens are mainly having an issue with nitrogen being toxic to them, not so much the lack of oxygen. The problem is that Earth’s atmosphere is already 70% nitrogen, so Sydney didn’t really change all that much in terms of how much nitrogen they were exposed to.
It’s possible for divers to get nitrogen narcosis, but that is caused by inhaling nitrogen under much higher pressures than atmospheric.
It seems unlikely that the demons would be unfazed by breathing mostly poison, and then suddenly die when breathing slightly more poison.
I like Muscles McSquidward over there. He’s a happy brawler. I’d love to buy him lunch sometimes. Just…no sushi or seafood
Unless he’s into that.
He is the fun, yes. Is good for happy brawl and ze speaking broken.
Not entirely sure, but doesn’t nitrogen need to be compressed to cause poisoning? Nitrogen is roughly 70% of the air we normally breathe. So breathing exclusively nitrogen is less than double the intake. Recreational scuba diving with normal air goes to 130 feet. At that depth, air is five time denser than at the surface. Meaning hat even if your tank has 70% nitrogen, you are still breathing 5 times the amount of nitrogen particle that you would at the surface. Then divers go on about their day without needing medical help.
Nitrogen narcosis is kinda funny. When you dive with a normal air tank, you will get sorta drunk when you go deep. Lesser reflexes, dexterity and wits and mood change. Unlike alcohool, it stops when you go back up. Reaction change with people, some being euphorious and others anxious. Personnally I became extremely aware that I’m human and have no deal swimming a hundred feet from the surface. I loved that feeling.
I’d like to note that one of the main arguments in favor of the death penalty is that, if the worst offenders are limited to life in prison, then they can escape and go on repeated killing sprees, like the Joker in DC comics…
…Which is completely unrealistic. Arkham Asylum only gets a pass (and only within a fictional setting) because it’s run by deliberate incompetents, in a corrupt city that needs the villains running around to keep Batman from focusing all his attention on the corporate raiders and politicians who are responsible for things being so bad.
(Seriously. There’s a group called “the Court of Owls,” which is made up of the majority of wealthy families in Gotham. They always hated the Waynes for not joining the “fun”)
In real life, prisons don’t get escaped that easily. Every fictional escape attempt you’ve ever seen? The people who run the prisons are ALSO familiar with those methods, and have made certain those methods won’t work in real life.
One of the other arguments I’ve heard, particularly for violent offenders, is that they aren’t going to stop being violent on the inside. Admittedly, it’s just fellow prisoners that they can target, but… well, part of humane jailing involves not putting people in an area where they’ll have to fight for their lives. And yes, I’m aware that prisons are also not quite as bad on the “get shanked / ravaged” setup as the films make it… but it’s definitely more common than escapes.
And, of course, the general reaction to that is that people want to make prisons *worse* by reducing the things the prisoners can do (libraries got replaced by tablets, which require time to be purchased, and a lot of the exercise has been cut out for fear of criminals coming out athletic criminals), which leads to more acting out.
Maybe actually working on the rehabilitation part of prisons might help with that?
If you’re talking about the US, the end of lots of services in prisons (general reduction in gyms, common areas, training, therapy, activities, etc) has more to do with the increasing number of convicts in the care of for-profit prison management companies that are striving to keep their expenses low.
I maintain that it is probably a bad idea to create a class of businesses whose ordinary business model of quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year growth requires more crimes to be committed, crimes to be punished by more jail time, more currently-legal things to be made criminal, and on the whole more people to be imprisoned. Because businesses spend money to try to influence politicians and all of that stuff that’s good for their business model is bad for society at large.
To be fair, if she’d had to shoot them with lasers or bludgeon them with a super-strong tentacle, that would also probably require calling the hospital.
What will happen after getting the Veil fixed???
Will Sydney’s Archon career be short lived?!?
If anything, this may earn Sydney respect among demons. She lept right to lethal force and didn’t even react to counterattacks.
lol, guess she doesn’t know about them suicide booths/pods/whatevs? — Think it might be prevalent in Japan, though not sure, since I only encountered one media that actually has it. [That I remember of.]
One of them uses nitrogen so the peeps falls asleep & never wakes again, so something similar.