Grrl Power #1233 – Attack of Alexsiri!
Well, the immediate emergency has passed, so it’s time for a quick exposition. It doesn’t help mitigate the situation, but at least Sydney and Harem have a better idea of what they’re dealing with.
The “relatively recent emancipation legislation” means this particular category of magend isn’t forced to do a particular job. That said, a lot of ætholiths generally prefer occupations like librarian, security system overwatch, inventory management, stuff like that. Many of them will take their body to work, then hop onto a specialized control cradle, and essentially “become the system,” making them prized for such work. There’s a also a large contingent who prefer to live monomorphic lives, attached to a single body, just like all the other organics. That doesn’t mean they don’t upgrade their meatbags on occasion. Being able to feel EM like a shark is popular with them. Most of them have that function in their horns, so don’t expect the typical ætholith to go around headbutting anyone and throwing their 9G antenna out of whack.
Nearly all ætholiths are super not okay with jumping onto an unwilling host, because they don’t want anyone proving the anti-ætholith contingent fear mongering correct. If it’s found out that Lapha is trying to pull this move here on Earth, the other ætholith’s won’t invite her to play in any of their reindeer games anymore.
The new incentive is basically done. I want to put some finishing touches on it, but it should be up… you know, whenever I suggest it will be up with the Thursday comic that hasn’t worked out, so let’s say it will be up with next Monday’s comic, but there’s a teeny chance it might maybe be up with the Thursday comic. I mean, probably not, but maybe?
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.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Lapha and Sydney found their common interest. Getting familiar with alien bumpy….
Next you’ll tell me one of Dabbler’s side gigs is being a creative consultant for Bad Dragon.
Creative consultant? I’m pretty sure she’s a founder
Nah. If she was, I’m pretty sure she’d never drop the ball on keeping up with maintaining their various state sales & use tax licensure’s (which has only happened once that I know of, mind).
As someone who works for a small business, that is a pain in the *butt* to keep up with. It seems like you have everything done, then BAM it’s a year later and everything needs to be renewed again. AAARGH!
You know you can now set google assistant reminders months or more in advance? So you could say, Ok Google, remind me on April 1, 2025 to renew the company vehicle registration’ or something like that. I am sure that the others(Alexa, Siri, Cortana, etc…) also have similar functions. Also, you can set distant appointments on any networked calendar app in existence with reminders. Sometimes technology actually does help.
Yep, and I’m sure it works perfectly until your business has gotten successful enough for someone at Google to notice…
This is a fair point (having had to just file my own), but I’m pretty sure BD wasn’t considered a small business at the time. Could be wrong, though.
Everyone who founds a company gets to the point where they feel the need to delegate some crucial task to somebody who will inevitably screw it up at least once.
Having Dabbler on the founder list means that she would then be very careful to make sure it only happened the once.
This is why I love my itinerant business permit. I can work anywhere in the US, and I only pay the sales and use taxes for where I hang my hat, per se. Where I live and work is where I pay taxes. Saved sooooo much on book keeping.
“They can access all their host’s memories(…)”
Congratulations Lapha! You’ve just become a Grade-A National Security Risk!
Your prize is an all expenses paid, lifetime stay, in a AAA Supermax facility!
please please can she spend 20 years impersonating Sauron in a Lego LOTR display. at least then she will do something useful until the majority of the classified data to age into uselessness.
LEGO might do a reissue/remake of the Tower of Orthanc, but the big LotR set is more likely to be a Micro/Architectural scale Minas Tirith
They can simply make a custom MOC for this purpose. Would make much more sense than using an existing set.
Or just permanently giving Syd her first auxiliary battle consciousness.
Recruit the bad planner! Have her and Syd partner up!
Umm, what National Secrets is Sydney privy to, exactly?
She would be aware of a lot of her coworker’s strengths and weaknesses in addition to her own.
Again, how do those constitute National secrets?
Or that she’s any more of a risk than any one else in ArchonHQ?
because she is not affiliated to archon but is a hostile party and we have been explained that the US military keeps stuff like maximas max flying speed or her the total output of her particle beams a secret because that is information that could be exploited by a hostile party or nation
you know like how IRL we are not privy to information like the the radar cross section of the F-35, or the total resolution of the CIAs spy satellites, and stuff like that
Sydney knows a lot of clasified information, mostly by accident, and she herself needs to keep a lot of her true capabilities hidden like the aetherium causeways and her orb that can create oxygen and other substances
I think maybe we’re not giving this enough context. I’m realizing that the government secrets of one country of a “backwater” planet are likely absolutely worthless to an advanced alien society. The one thing of value Earth has are supers so if Sydney knows anything on how supers are born or created that might be relevant. Even stuff like Max’s or any supers real capabilities has minor value at best. Lapha’s trying to traffic supers so I don;t believe she care at all about government secrets only relevant to Earth politics ect. It would be like humans caring about the government secrets of rats.
I don’t think assuming every alien is an idiot is a good idea. Sure, government secrets of this backwater might not be of interest to the bulk of galactic society, but the smart ones will know that there may be ways to leverage those secrets into getting what they do want – access to supers. Revealing that Sydney’s orbs actually came from off the coast of another country (I forget which one) could cause some issues for Archon, which might be exploitable to try to abduct some of them (or other supers who aren’t part of the team)… or they may even try to blackmail Archon with that secret. More complete information about Maxima’s (and the others’) capabilities would allow for planning around them more effectively – and they’ll need to plan around them if they intend to abduct humans from under their noses. Knowing Tom has Vehemence on his side, as well as knowing how his powers work (and how Tom has gained access to supers for hire) may well be useful for fighting against him, and I suspect he’s something of a significant player on the galactic scene. There’s a lot that Sydney is privy to that they’d rather not be in the hands (well, memories) of an unscrupulous mercenary.
I’m sure there are alien civilizations who would be eager to strip min the whole planet just on the off chance that they might run across more tech on the level which Sydney has.
And on an alien scale “strip mine” might mean “gravitationally unwind the entire planet into thin easily searchable strings overlooked by an information system powered by a recently installed matrioshka brain.”
This might take a few hundred years but that’s fiiiiine. They might build stations in the matrioshka brain for the humans to live in and forcibly relocate them there if they’re feeling nice or politically pressured not to genocide new species when it’s not that inconvenient to just move them.
Then again, a civilization that can make dyson swarms on the fly would probably not consider a single fel carrier a meaningful threat to a system save maybe in the sense of self-replicating manufacturing capabilities or as an infection vector. So they might not be there yet, despite being spacefaring.
Whether or not the alien civilizations consider the information “secret” has absolutely NO BEARING on the matter, it is whether the nation (/planet/etc) deems the information secret, and what they’re willing to do to the sophont that has acquired said information.
But if she’s trying to traffic supers, knowing their capabilities is very relevant.
Or someone else wants to figure out the secrets of supers.
Or someone like Thothogoth wants to invade earth. Or the Fel want a rematch.
I dont think the Fel are likely all that strategic-minded. They remind me a lot of the Reavers from Serenity/Firefly. And Tom likely already has deals in place with Deus which dont involve him taking over the Earth (plus there are other reasons he likely would not bother, involving Dabbler living here).
we know for a fact that maxima hits with the strenght of a space battleship main gun if not stronger since cora stated that the only weapon in her ship that could do anything to the fel ship was her antimatter main cannon or the broadside of a capital ship and that was a class of weapon that could not be fired in atmosphere while maxima pierced their shieds with a single hit, that alone made cora reconsider the whole “earth is a backwater and they have nothing of importance for the interstellar comunity”
hell the presence of lapha herself is prove that the interstestellar comunity is interested, let me remind you that she was part of a group of mercenaries hired to go to earth and capture a bunch of supers to try to decipher how they work and archon kicked the but of the entire mercenary group no problems, a group of earth supers gave them more problems that the mercenaries equiped with advanced alien technology
so yeah i do believe that the secrets in sydneys head would be of great interest to a galactic civilization, hell lets remember that her orbs are nth level tech and she can casually create FTL gateways that usually require a masive battleship to generate and she can pull that off with a trinket the sice of her fist
Because the strengths and weaknesses of the supers in the branch of the nation’s armed forces for supers are classified Top Secret?
Lapha might not be able to accomplish her original goal, but she could now have the needed information to nab Heatwave, Achilles, Stalwart, and so forth. Maxima’s enough of a self-control freak that I doubt Lapha would be able to move one of her muscles, let alone enough to make her dance. I’d guess Harem would probably blow Lapha’s mind and might be able to teleport away, depending on exactly how Lapha’s integration meshes with Harem’s teleport abilities. There are probably some others who would be for one reason or another more or less immnue.
However, Lapha now has The List and will probably retain that when she departs Sydney. And she has that other The List also, and knows what it means.
I see no reason that Lapha would have more trouble controlling Maxima’s body (not mind just body and motor functions) than Sydney’s body, although she would be unlikely to be able to alter Maxima’s power output like she cant control the orbs. Maxima could likely just overmax out something nonviolent like her flight and minimize everything else.
And she couldnt take over Maxima’s mind, as we have seen she isnt THAT powerful to do that. But she would have all of Maxima’s intel, which would be much more valuable as a high ranking Lt Colonel than what little Sydney knows as a low level private that only knows secret info that most aliens already know (except the existence of the Black Reliquiry).
And the deals with the council are considered also top-secret information, already discussed in-comic.
What deals? All Sydney knows is that the Council exists, and so do the off-worlders, the only people who don’t, are the ordinary hyu-mons that the Council feeds on and exploits
Lots of classified information, including classified power sets. She further has some EXTREMELY lucrative information that could go for a lot of money on the space black market. Deus knows how to make supers and A LOT of organizations out there would be very interested in either over or under the table deals to have access to something like that. That alone is worth detaining her. She also has some terrifying info about the Altari home world. And let’s not forget that if anyone even SUSPECTS that Sydney has Nth level tech then every powerful empire in the galaxy is going to come invading Earth to try and get their hands on it.
Lapha getting away could potentially be game over for Earth if she decides to sell what she learns about the orbs. Knowledge of how the orbs can open up their own causeway can not be more important to keep quiet because everyone is gonna want to invade Earth to try and get that kind of tech.
we cam add to that list knowing the location and security for a vault full of magical objects, some of which are doomsdays in a can.
Sydney does not actually know the location of the vault. She was blindfolded for most of the journey there, even though she was the pilot.
true, although a general idea *state, region, etc…* before the final journey, and even knowing it exists is enough to start greasing some palms to find its location and plan a raid.
The vault isn’t full of magical artifacts. It’s actually mostly empty.
I feel like a vault formerly full of super powerful magic artifacts is probably worth less than it had been.
Um, Deus and co raided one room in the vault, while entering Sidney and such were told about other rooms each with a different circular protected entrance with different themes. So its not almost empty.
Keep in mind that Superpowers are the galaxy’s primary and ONLY real interest in Earth. Lapha knowing a whole lot about the phenomenon now, including pretty precise knowledge of the abilities of some of the world’s most powerful, could set them up for Interplanetary (or interplanar) crooks who want to kidnap or experiment on them, AND provide those crooks with practical directions to meet unsavory supers who’d cheerfully join in the plot to do just that.
Two words: “Nth Tech”. That alone is likely enough to make the alien black market for abductees forget all about Max splitting the attacking spaceship–sure, that’s impressive, but Sydney’s powers come from the intergalactic equivalent of the Holy Grail. Anyone even remotely aware of the rumors of Nth Tech will do whatever it takes to get some leverage over Syd.
Meaning the only option for ARCHON right now is to finally act like a government agency and ‘silence’ someone, permanently. I doubt that’ll happen, so I’m a bit worried David’s written himself into a corner here in order to get the shared sexual experiences joke on the page.
One potential hope is that shared memories are ‘lost’ to some degree when the gestalt ends. But even that gets dicey if the conversation right now drifts to the subject.
Sydney doesn’t actually know it’s Nth tech though. It’s just a hypothesis made by Cora.
The orbs are valuable loot on the basis of their oberserved capabilites, regardless of whether or not they’re Nth tech.
Note that since they actually care who they’re working for, in a way that’s apparently not relevant to what physical body they’re wearing right now, the Orbs now have to be assumed to be intelligent. Or at least sentient.
So they’re not just loot. They’re a person of some kind, or at least some kind of loyal animal.
That’s not my impression. I think they’re just connected to something non-physical that Lapha can’t take over.
The Veil. The powers/abilities/ limits of her unit mates. The identity of the Archon Intel unit troops/ command. The locations of all of the above. The 4-40 digit codes to open any doors in Archon. Etcetera ad infinitum ad nauseum.
yeah as soon as I read that line i was thinking the same, well you just became a national security risk with everything you know
and…um…the knowledge that Nth tech exists and the Nth possibly being responsible for supers as Sidney was in the room when Deus was talking so yeah…
Lapha is going to a cell.
Guys, guys, guys, you’re forgetting something very relevant: The memory sharing thing goes both ways. And Sidney has a lot of experience torturing herself with capsaicin. All she has to do is focus on those memories and Lapha will beg for release.
“This is when I got chili in my eye.”
“Oh no, please stop, By all the GODS PLEASE STOP!!”
Harem: So, not dangerous? Just weird? Typical Wednesday…
Just your average national security risk.
She is not going to leave earth or council jurisdiction for a while, that is for sure.
I think since Lapha has discovered she can’t simply take over, she’s just trying to feel her way around in Sydney, if there’s a chance she can influence her? If she can’t control the orbs, then she’s trapped herself, unable to do anything other than share Sydney’s body. Once Max arrives (in moments knowing her) then the hard questions will start, I’m sure Dabbler will have some VERY pointed words with Lapha as well! And yes, this makes her a huge security risk now, so she might fine herself in a locked room with a simple stand to rest on.
Planetary security risk – if it comes out that she might have Nth level tech…
Upgrade it to galactic security risk, honestly.
When we start looking back at our past behavior and outcomes and then revising our expectations of future outcomes based on that is when we reach a new level in future prediction abilities. So good work with the cautious estimate!
Now I also wonder what prevents the ætholiths from self-replicating endlessly. if they’re basically just magical software that can be installed into almost any body, computer, or information system. You jump to another body, OR you cast another copy of yourself into another body or system. A single ætholith could infect an entire planet in a matter of days if they kept copying themselves from host to host so long as they have enough mana to simulate the least version of the original.
You only need to double in number 33 times to reach 7 billion after all – travel time by plane or car would be the biggest time stall if they wanted to go on a self-replication binge.
Is it established they can even self replicate? We don’t know anything about this species biologically speaking yet. I imagine if they were that dangerous the galaxy would be much more scared of the self replicating race that can jump between bodies and technology.
Ætholith’s aren’t just software, they’re running on the flame eye thing, not the host’s hardware. If you want to make a new Ætholith, you need to make a new flame for them to live in.
Also, Ætholiths aren’t computers. They used to be living spells, then developed beyond that. Whatever makes them individuals isn’t necessarily copyable, and even if it is, as individual they wouldn’t necessarily want to.
Also, the benefit is limited: The original owner retains control of their bodies, so you can’t just do whatever you want with it, so if you bodyjack en masse, you’re just pissing off a lot of people.
Wait, if she couldn’t 100% override Sydney’s body control, what was even the plan here?
Shouldn’t she have had a partner in crime along to help her abduct Sydney while Lapha interfered with her Orb-wielding?
“Wait, if she couldn’t 100% override Sydney’s body control, what was even the plan here?”
Unclear.
My best guess is that she originally vaguely planned to beat up Sydney together with Brelx and co., then hijack her unconscious body, which plausibly could have worked. And when that failed because Sydney handily won the fight, instead of cutting her losses and trying to keep her cover until she could escape, she went for a random desperation move.
It seemed more like, “If I can’t lure in Max, I’ll settle for Sydney”.
But that doesn’t make sense either, because how was she planning to capture Max? She didn’t have a stasis gun this time.
Said it before and I’ll say it again Lapha has never displayed thus far great strategy, only charismatic momentum as Graham was kind of putting it. Big ideas, willing to go all in, but not big on planning out things like an exit strategy. Like they think they can just achieve goal A and it was cut away to *profit*.
She wasn’t planning on ‘capturing’ Maxima; she was planning on the same sort of ambush she just used on Sydney. Get close enough in an unfamiliar guise, make contact for a soul-kiss when Max wasn’t expecting it, and then fly Max off. Essentially, her plan was, “I don’t have to capture Max, I just have to be Max, and then her teammates won’t be able to stop me from escaping.”
If her plan had worked, I do wonder if she was planning on trying to bring Tenri’s body back, or just figured that the deal to sell Max to the highest bidder would include enough to get them both bodies, or what.
“She wasn’t planning on ‘capturing’ Maxima; she was planning on the same sort of ambush she just used on Sydney.”
By “capturing” I mean gaining control of her, in a way that allows her to sell her off. And what you propose can not work for the same reason it couldn’t have worked on Sydney: She can’t actually override her host’s control of her body. If she tries to fly off Maxima, Maxima just turns around and flies back.
This is a “plan” Lapha can’t execute because she lacks the required abilities, and knows it.
Hence our wondering about what was her plan here.
I wander if she just assumed Terrans are some simple minded life forms she could just control, given her attitude after leaping onto Sidney and controlling the arms briefly, which was probably only that much control because Sidney was surprised but once she figured out what is happening has gained majority control of her body again.
Which of course means she had zero experience actually doing this, and made a speciest assumption about humans
Like her partner in crime said, she has momentum. That’s not always a good thing
Yep, in both cases we know of so far, her plans had plenty of missing steps. She really seems to be more of “eh, let’s get shit started and hope for the best” rather than any kind of master criminal. Planning is definitely not her strong suit.
But the first time her plan was at least plausible workable. Put Max in stasis, have her crew fight off Arc-SWAT, then capture Ray’s ship and escape. A way to capture the powerful target, deal with their friends and get away.
Still risky with plenty of things that can go wrong – but at least you can see how it’s supposed to work, and could succed if everything go right, at least given what Lapha knew at the time.
If not for Arc-SWAT being much stronger than expected, which is a theme, and the unpredictable interference of the LLC, it might have worked.
I expect at least part of her partially formed plan was based on the thought that the people of Earth are backwater rejects who haven’t figured out space travel yet, so obviously can’t have a lot going on upstairs. How hard would it even be to control one of those?
Unfortunately for her, it turns out the answer is, pretty hard. It’s not that we’re stupid, it’s that we’re too busy fighting each other to get there. And she just happens to be going for the cream of the crop, so… way out of her league for straightforward body jacking.
We’re not certain of their reproduction, but living spells that can ‘run on’ or at least ‘sustain themselves on’ any living host seems to be very comparable to software.
We can of course not be certain of the difficulty of casting such a spell, but there is a real risk that if you can cast that spell once (or have a device/ritual circle that can cast it once), you can cast it again as long as you have mana to spare. And you may be able to use the new hosts mana to recast it rather than the mana of the existing living spell.
Definitely seems like it is likely “you have to intentionally design this thing to be difficult to reproduce to prevent it” territory. Of course that may be exactly what the original designers did – but it also seems like anyone who understood the theory behind their creation well enough could just as easily design a new one without those safeguards if they wished to.
“We’re not certain of their reproduction, but living spells that can ‘run on’ or at least ‘sustain themselves on’ any living host seems to be very comparable to software.”
They don’t “run on” a living host, they run on the flame and just remote control the host. And “sustain themselves on” just means mana supply, that’s the equivalent of electricity for computers.
An Aetholith isn’t like software you can run on any computer, it’s like a special USB stick you can plug into any computer with a USB port. The computer will let it do things and supply power, but you still need the stick.
“We can of course not be certain of the difficulty of casting such a spell, but there is a real risk that if you can cast that spell once (or have a device/ritual circle that can cast it once), you can cast it again as long as you have mana to spare.”
1. That’s different from self-duplication. A mage being able to make as many Aetholiths as they want with an industrial spellcasting line is not the same as an Aetholith without any infrastructure or resources just copying itself.
2. The production of Aetholiths might require any number of rare, expensive, or otherwise difficult to acquire magical resources.*
Even if we suppose an Aetholith could just make another one, why would they? An Aetholith existing and having a host doesn’t give you anything except maybe the knowledge of the host, but if you’re after intel, it makes more sense to have a single Aetholith that just jumps in and out of the target.
* Maybe you need to sacrifice a soul to provide sapience to a newly created Aetholith. Maybe they aren’t simply software, but software built around an essential soul core.
Oh it’s definitely not certain, but it’s definitely in the area of “time to consciously think about how to prevent this sapient magical spell that either needs no more mana or can gather more mana from casting the spell that created it a lot”. It’s an instant transformation from raw resources into a sapient being.
It may require scarce resources for the first casting, but once the idea of sapient spells is out there you also need to consider the way someone else might iterate on that idea upon getting their hands on the design documents or reverse engineering it. If it’s all mana in the end, someone may one day cast it using only a ritual circle and a mana collector. Or if living spells become advanced enough, they might house both ritual circle level of complexity and mana collecting structures within themselves, in addition to methods of flavoring mana to the necessary types.
The potential is exciting!
“It’s an instant transformation from raw resources into a sapient being.”
That’s not in evidence at all. We don’t know how long it takes to create one, and we don’t know what resources are required or if any of those resources can be substituted.
If it’s soul sacrifices, you’re not actually creating sapience.
The thing with spells is that they at most the same amount of mana as they were cast with. So even if they could copy themselves, that would only result in two weaker copies. So yes, there could be billions of them, but they would all be entirely ineffectual.
Unless, of course, they could cast the spell again either with their new hosts mana rather than their own, or after regenerating their own mana for a bit in whatever means are available to it (passive aborption of ambient mana, tantric mana, vehemic mana, heat, etc).
Can Aetholiths even cast spells? They don’t seem to have internal mana sources, so they’d need to use their host’s ability to spellcast, which may or may not be possible to begin with, and probably requires cooperation. If precise somatic components are required, that would also be messed up by the host not cooperating.
Uh oh! Does Sydney know anything important? I feel like she should know important things but also her brain probably wouldn’t retain anything useful. Does she even remember the passcode to get into Arc or her rank and designation?
What do you think about:
The fact that she possesses nth artifacts.
The fact that she can ftl travel.
The fact that there’re hidden monsters among the humans.
The superion.
How is any of that National Secrets?
Any secret that could start nationwide mayhem, is uncovered while actively acting under the military, reveals things about the country’s military capabilities.
Is or becomes a national secret.
Maxima is when revealing the existence of the monsters quite clear about that it’s a national secret.
During Sydney’s introduction to the team some of the capabilities of her orbs get actively classified.
Maxima is clear over that she should know abouts Sydney’s new teleport power, because the difference in military rank.
The entire interaction about the superion is during an officially sanctioned diplomatic mission.
Fair point, you could call them Planetary or even Galactic Secrets.
Which is… much worse.
Of course Sydney also knows national secret, like specific information about the limits of her own power or Maxima’s power.
Pretty sure she knows about Max’ secret identity, at least in appearance; don’t know whether Leon and Geen would have talked about the name they gave her. Pretty sure Max didn’t even check the name on her ID! XD
Really, aside from government operations, I don’t think Halo knows anything Lapha wouldn’t be able to find out, given the level of tech they have access to.
Remember as we know thanks to Dabbler the mages couldn’t(at least a generation ago) make sentience.
Lapha isn’t following orders, she is sentient and has reproductive urges that aren’t fully body dependent.
Her race probably stems from the same process as the succubi.
Was just thinking that about how they shared a similar origin to the Succubae
In short, that means they are an artificial race who only relatively recent became an actual ‘race’. That makes them in a way similar to the succubus, based on the history lesson we got some time ago.
I wonder how many other artificial races like that are out there, that we might’ve met in passing already.
And Sydney’s got a new fetish.
She is already a furry. Why not a scalie as well?
I’m sure this is a security risk, despite Sydney’s low rank… But I fear for the random jumple of memories and thoughts that Lapha will encounter in Sydney’s mind
she pretty much is yes, Sydney is privy to A LOT of classified information that she shouldnt know because of her rank but she knows because she either has the power set to overpower most illusions, she has fought against said classified information, she closely works with said classified information, or she herself is classified information
Lapha aint leaving US jurisdiction for a while
Lapha just became genre savvy to the extreme.
I wonder if Syd’s spastic behavior issues will rub off on her.
Magends?
Living spells?
That sounds familiar.
Not sure where else they’ve shown up, but I fondly remember them showing up in Fred Perry’s Gold Digger series.
Also apparently have popped up in Fairy Tail and D&D.
The More You Know!
Is no one going to mention the Halo reference in that last bit?
No!
Okay, I will.
@DaveB, cool reference there!
Ah shit. Talk about a security breach. But at least Sydney doesn’t have high levels of clearance. Right?
Sydney has the truesight orb, she knows things she doesn’t have clearance for.
Also things she figured out by herself, like Maxima’s weakness.
Maxima’s weakness? I remember some sort of theory-craft regarding one of her abilities, as well as assuming mind control, but nothing that indicated a viable weakness. Closest weakness would be her being overpowered at the super brawl, showing that she has a limitation.
It’s arguable whether it counts as a weakness, but I was referring to the fact that she has a power pool, and if she’s forced to max out one, she gets weaker on the others.
Thanks to the truesight orb she knows about the council.
And generally a exceptional amount of “national security” level of secrets.
Dumb question, but, isn’t that wildly known in the intergalactic civilization?
I’m pretty sure Lapha already knew all about demons and probably the other races behind the veil, considering that she arrived with a group of them.
Yups, the only people who don’t know about the Council of ‘Monsters’, are the normal dwellers of Dirt, the ‘ordinary’ everyday Hyu-mons (and that includes the Supers)
Sydney has information about Maximas true capabilities like her flight speed and she herself needs to hide a lot of her true capabilities, like you know the fact she has nth level tech, that she can FTL, that she can transmute elements, etc
Once Sydney figures out she can concert nitrogen into gold, she will be able to both buy and sell Earth’s resident evil billionaire and encase any enemy in a gold casing.
Can she, though? Yeah, the atmo-orb can generate stuff like oxygen and nitrogen by some means (I don’t think it’s ever been stated if they create new matter out of energy or just convert existing matter), but then those are fairly light elements, and also rather abundant. Gold is much heavier and much more rare on account of it only being naturally produced by supernovae (pretty much everything up to iron is generated by normal stellar activity or from the results of normal stellar activity decaying, but heavier things call for more violence). But if it can make heavier stuff, it’s not just life support (although even if not it’s probably more than just atmospheric life support – water, fats, and carbohydrates will keep most lifeforms going, although there are some necessary trace minerals that might be too heavy… although I think you’ll be covered if you can manage to make up through iron), it’s manufacturing. But the fact Sydney hasn’t yet tried to make a banana split with it means she’s probably just thinking of it as producing atmosphere.
sydney is still pretty new with that one orb, in universe it has only been like a couple of days since she discovered that she can create other things aside from oxigen, im sure at some point she is going to have a talk with dabbler about the limits and capabilities of that one orb
Access all memories, both ways. So a criminal aetholith has very, very good reason to kill the previous host.
Or use only the designed bodies, which don’t have a memory function to begin with.
I guess “Aeolith Ankle Monitors” are just memory recorders put into their bodies?
So this isn’t a demon posession – it is Magic AI posession.
Boohya, Sydney crossed of two entries at once. The posession and AI mind control!
Sound like, unless Lapha is a very errr… (new? juvenile?) Magenos, Sydney now has access to FAR more information than vice/versa. It also feels like, give what we’ve seen in past episodes, that keeping Sydney off her meds for a few days would crash Lapha’s systems like the worst DoS attack she’s ever experienced.
Well, her antics so far have been pretty juvenile.
If being able to plug yourself in to a computer and instantly learn skills like in the matrix doesn’t exist in this universe, I feel like this race / AI could make a living doing just that. They connect themselves to a highly skilled individual, learn their moves, and then they could make a killing swapping to other bodies and letting the body learn that information. This seems like a potentially terrifying race.
Whoa. I know Kung Fu.
Yup. However, I suspect it takes a lot longer for them to teach their new hosts what their old hosts knew than they took learning the information in the first place, and I suspect it’ll take them some time to adjust to the amount of time this actually takes. So at first, it just seems like they can become a temporary level up for someone just by spending enough time to pick up those skills.
At least, so long as we don’t factor into account the differences between different bodies. For example, if Lapha spent a week hanging out on Chuck Norris and then spent some time on my head, she’d find that I’m just somehow too awkward to make proper use of his skills and WTF is wrong with my knees anyway? (One knee injured before I turned 8 and somehow has not yet managed to fully recover. Other knee injured when I was 16 and also has not fully recovered. Knees take so long to self repair, it’s almost as if I’ve never really given them proper rest after those incidents…)
This is going to be a security nightmare, what with Lapha being able to access (and presumably remember forever on) everything in Sydney’s mind.
what if Sydney’s ADD rubs off on her? She’s now got scat singing Batman in her head forever…
Lapha seems really aggressive, and not that bright. I’m guessing she was made as a military AI system? Although I can’t think of a lot of applications where stupid is desirable. Maybe she’s a botched job.
But yeah, going to be a lot of passwords and code signals changed tonight. Most of what Sydney knows is a local concern, so they might be okay with banishing her, assuming Dabbler/the Council has some way to reliably detect and ID Ætholiths. If not she’s probably going to end up very, very bored in a council vault. They seem better set up for securing a possesing entity.
if not the council definetly a super max prision, she is a threat to US national security with all the information about US supers that she now has
So wait. Now Lapha has all the memories of Sydney as well?
Like all those top secret briefings and the inner workings of multiple clandestine organizations?
Vital security details of the nation and the PLANET?
Yeah. She’s never going home.
Welcome to your new life as ArcDark IT specialist, Lapha. And that’s the GOOD ending.
I don’t think she’s getting the good ending. I doubt she’s going to convince anyone she has the discretion needed for the good ending.
Hopefully someone will take Tenri’s body back to her. I mean, sure Tenri could just use Lapha’s body, but if there wasn’t something distinctive about them, Lapha would’ve just used her own for that exercise. I mean, it’s not the same body as on the last scheme and it has a tail, so it’s not like the Terans would recognize her from before. But I’m sure it wasn’t the Terans she was worried about before anyway.
I think the body swap was less to do with avoiding our security per se and reprisals for the attempt on Max as it was about taking advantage of the portal to earth and the expendable muscle that went with it to cover her retreat.
Oh wait! If Sydney remembers getting it on with the big lizard guy, then that means Lapha also shares Sydney’s memories with Frix.
So they both know lumpy from furry…
This situation is easily fixed. Ask someone to fetch Syd’s ‘special’ sauce, and when her time in the driver’s seat is up, have her down it. The heat and pain will drive off any campers in her body.
So does this mean that to imprison an Aetholith you’d have to use a cell that doesn’t have computerized controls (to avoid her jumping into that system somehow and letting herself out)? And that no one can come into direct contact with her (I’m thinking a Hannibal-style cell), so she can’t forcibly cohabitate a guard or fellow prisoner’s body?
I get the impression that there are going to be some creative imprisonment brainstorming sessions as they continue to encounter new species and power-sets.
I think the answer is no. An Ætholith is a magical entity somewhat similar to an AI. But they’re magic, not science. The machines and “computers” that they integrate with are magical constructs, not computers as we know them. For our purposes, I believe it’s just an analogy.
Of course, I could easily be wrong, but I think Dave would be the only one who could say for sure.
Considering that the other ætholith Tenri in a flaming eye tower thing, I think they need some sort of limbs (throwing themselves) or a direct connection to a ‘host’ (Kissing a person, touching a computer, etc) in order to transfer. The ‘Not Flaming Eye of Mordor’ TM could also have something that essentially locks them in place unable to remove themselves without outside help.
Yeah, I suspect Aetholiths can’t actually do anything except control their host, so if they don’t have a host with useful abilities and no viable interface comes close, they’re basically helpless. Put them into an Aetholith-mate and you’re good.
Even if they can take over the cell control system, then what? Their body, if they had one, is lying on the floor unconscious and they don’t have any tool to transfer themselves back over. They can open the door, but that doesn’t help if they’re stuck in the control unit.
Firstly good to see parfait back in her collar like a succubus should be (purely as a matter of healthcare of course .
Secondly can ætholiths analyse a system they are attached to? If so we could get an analysis of each orb possibly including the skill tree. Obviously we don’t let Lapha anywhere near them but others exist.
I don’t think she has sufficient access to the orbs to do any such thing. I suspect if she did, it’d literally blow her mind. Considering that she is almost entirely if not entirely mind, that could be the death of her.
Lapha hasn’t but it’s not impossible that a different member of the species could be trustworthy enough to try.
Wait, Lapha is a Mag-End? Better than being a Bell-End… oops, guess she’s both :P
On the flipside, Sydney now has a blanket excuse for any sort of weird mental tic or habit. “Oh, yeah, picked up a craving for that when shared a mind with a magend. Weird, right? But nothing I can do about it.”
I’d like to set aside the horrific problems inherent with the concept of a race being legislated into existence, since legislation, beliefs, and guns do not define reality, we can assume the ætholith are in fact fully sentient.
However, regarding “… they don’t want anyone proving the anti-ætholith contingent fear mongering correct”: It’s not fear mongering if it’s correct. It’s reality. Calling it fear mongering is merely an attempt to prevent any conversation about it to happen, out of fear the conversation won’t go the way you think it should. But just because eradication of the ætholith is an option that some may prefer, and may even be the only alternative you can imagine, doesn’t mean a viable solution couldn’t be found given sufficient conversation.
Whenever one ‘side’ refuses to have any conversation at all, calling all other sides fear mongers and worse, even refusing to accept the reality that more than two sides actually exist, it isn’t those other sides spreading false fear. In this case it is the ones calling the others fear monger who are actually mongering fear. It is the ones *calling* the others fear monger who are actually perpetuating the, black-and-white, all-or-nothing, your-side-is-always-wrong, submit-or-die thinking that has in the last four years led to the needless deaths of millions, and those needless deaths continue to this day, all because one side does everything in their considerable power to prevent any and all conversation.
I think by ‘legislate into existence’, Dave means they’ve been defined to be a race, and so from a galactic standpoint, they now are. Prior to that, they were still people, but they were probably considered the same as other spells from a legal standpoint and were thus considered basically chattel.
Also, I suspect that regardless of what the anti-Ætholith community may be saying about them, it’s entirely possible that they haven’t actually managed to properly hijack anyone yet – the host has always maintained at least partial control. As such, whether it is or is not actually correct is not entirely clear. Most of the Ætholith community wants to keep that a hypothetical. As exciting as it may be to find someone who is sufficiently weak-willed for them to completely control them, they recognize the consequences that would have and do not want to risk finding that person.
I believe this would allow both sides to be completely correct, while still enabling the term ‘fear-mongering’ without it being about refusing to have the conversation. They are instead refusing to seek out the event that would allow that contingent to gain enough clout to end the Ætholiths.
Of course, even if Ætholiths could completely dominate some small fraction of the population against their will, if Ætholiths as a population were set against doing that, punishing the entire population for that capability would certainly be a result of fear-mongering. A more balanced approach would be to have a judicial system which responded to those few Ætholiths who made the attempt, while letting those who were forever law abiding go about their business.
Kinda like Florence from Freefall: she is an AI, so legally property and treated the same as a robot and not species let alone a ‘person’, and considering she is still a ‘proof of concept’ she still runs the risk of getting ‘shutdown’ at any time (anyone with the proper access can issue her commands that she must obey)
It is entirely possible to fear monger about something that can happen by overblowing it’s likelihood. Or lying about their capabilities.
“Legislation”could be more along the lines of the fourteenth and nineteenth amendments to the US constitution, legal recognition of their rights as sentient beings, but the full phrase she used was “recent emancipation legislation” making this closer (in theory) to the thirteenth amendment.
If we ever do create a truly sentient AI we will need legislation to give it rights, the same if we were ever to encounter any alien race as all our laws currently only apply to humans.
Lapha, I don’t know how jurisprudence works where you’re from, but on Earth, we have something we call “Prison.” You have kidnapped Tenri and you tried to kidnap Sydney. Kidnapping is a serious crime and doing it twice can get you locked up for decades. Then there’s attempted theft of weapons of mass destruction, which our courts don’t look to kindly on. With your special abilities, there’s also a civil liability for invasion of privacy that means Tenri and Sydney here will likely own everything you’ve got before this is over and you’ll owe them a lot more than that. Finally there’s theft of national secrets, which means we can’t really let you go or even let you have unmonitored conversations with anyone until those are declassified.
And to top it all off, you’ve pissed off a bunch of actual demons by kidnapping their friend, and your own people despise bodyjackers and aren’t likely to lift a finger to defend you.
Do I have all that right? Offhand I would say you stepped in some deep doodoo here.
Great summary, although if I’m reading the mood between the lines correctly, it would be “your own people despise bodyjackers and are likely to be eager to assist the court in bringing you to justice to clear the blemish on their reputation as much as they can.”
Very deep doodoo indeed.
I would go so far as to say she dove right into the Infinite Outhouse.
Dabbler: “Please excuse me while I take four full pages of history to explain why the most hypersexual species in existence gets powerups from the metaphysical manifestation of an incredibly common kink.”
Parfait: “To avoid getting into a long aside, this species is really good at processing information and hardwiring to data systems (brains included) because they’re literally Magic.”
+1
Par is clearly the superior teacher even though Dabbler is smarter.
There will be no problem after Sydney introduces Lapha to her comic collection. She’ll be distracted for years.
It would be ironic if Sydney’s meds are allowing her to stay in control.
So the security risks of knowing what Sidney knows like details about supers, the magical vault including its location, the orbs being possible Nth tech, that Deus knows how to make supers, and the theory that supers are the result of a bespoke quantum field created by Nth (which comes coupled with the idea the Nth are not only real but active in the galaxy just not in a giving a crap about the Xevoarchy kind of way)…not sure if security or not but knowledge of what happend on Alari prime.
So in final panel backstory, they weren’t as some of us theorized a Goa’uld mixed with the cactus alien from Outlaw Star *parasite needing a host body but like the cactus being immobile and using psychic powers to control a host to move them around*.
But not the quasi-ascended I theorized they could be, so not top of the Xevoarchy food chain as it were…but kind of still are in that quasi ascended category only as a “tier skipper”, these Magends sound similar to summons and etherias and such that were magic given form and intelligence and their own agency. But in a MagiTech kind of way. “Tier skipper” as in they didn’t start out simpler and evolved up, but formed or were developed at the specific level of complexity. Which as an artificial intelligence that is basically a synthetic spirit adds this whole other level of ethical complexity. Had an idea ages ago of a setting where a civilization with incredibly advanced dimension tech had accessed “the well of souls” without really understanding what that was and were using machinery to create complex technoorganic mechs, robots, and androids and drawing power from the well of souls to infuse a quick to adapt intelligence with its own power source to their machines. (basically forcing reincarnation to guide souls into robots).
The Aetholith backstory however
Puts me in mind of the evolved cybertronian sparks *I don’t know what the current Transformers lore calls this*, but like Starscream whose spark could exist without a body but needed another host to continue…and yes in certain continuities the free moving spark could inhabit a biological body as well.
I wonder if they could co-inhabit an AI Art Program? That would definitely freak people out!
When they incarcerate Lapha, they can put her in an automatic door. So all she has to do is open and close, as people come by. Then she can be transferred to the Heart of Gold, and have Marvin whine about her cheerful need to open and shut…
Magic AI, cool.
Slightly reminds me of the Babylon 5 living recorder species that took hosts and shared the vast library of knowledge of all species before them… Only magical… And ghostly… And just as dangerous or problematic as Guilty Spark 343.
… Given that what Lapha is doing is very much frowned upon by the majority of her kind, either Lapha really, *really* did not think this through, or she had always planned to either a) leave Tenri’s body behind, or b) kill Tenri outright, as a ‘leave no witnesses’ type of measure.
I’m wondering if it’s possible for a telepath to break the connection and return Lapha to her own body sans damage to Lapha/Sydney, and also remove any information Lapha gained from Sydney (and vice-versa) from Lapha’s/Sydney’s memories. That’s really the only possibility I can see for Lapha to be allowed to return, instead of imprisoned due to the security risk. Twilight Council might have someone (would a telepath automatically see through The Veil?)? Assuming there isn’t a sufficiently skilled one in Archon already; we haven’t had anyone specifically pointed to as a telepath. Even Vance’s possibly trolling of Sydney only mentions telepaths as a theoretical.
Then again, given the general physique of supers in this universe, I’m also wondering if it’s even possible for there to be a character like The Blob (who I only know of due to the X-Men animated cartoon from the 90’s, and very little of him was shown).
‘Murder’ is frowned upon by the majority of hyu-mons (at least publically), and yet… we have politicians and lawyers
I just thought of an interesting thing. I had been thinking of this as a breach of US secrets but it actually goes both ways.
Ætholiths have eidetic memory and Lapha probably attended enough introductory classes and life experience to at least understand the principles of operation behind most galactic technology plus a scattering of useful details about specifics that human engineers and materials scientists (and physicists, and planetologists, and PARTICULARLY genetic and biological engineers considering what Ætholiths ride around on) would find absolutely fascinating.
Now Sydney knows all that stuff too.
This might mean Earth can make a fast break out of its ‘Backwater Primitive’ status. Or at least that the US can probably maintain tech parity with Galatyn. Deus may be superintelligent but an army of thousands or tens of thousands of bright researchers and scientists can cover a hell of a lot of ground in a hurry if you clue them in on an entirely new layer of basic knowledge.
it is unlikely they will retain full access to all the information each other knew after seperation
think of it like having access to a database – you dont immediatly know every line of every table in there… but you can look all of them up whenever you want and then copy them over
when you then lose access to that database, you will retain whatever you copied, but you can not look up anything else
now for lapha it is possible that they are going through sydneys memories at a rapid pace right now… but it is also possible that they are not – but sydney clearly is not doing that… she is only haphazardly reading stuff that comes up at that moment
The problem with that plan is that it requires Sydney to explain advanced science to people.
that is an interesting point really, if sydney now has access to galactic level science that would speed things inmensely, we know that the US already has a working interstellar vessel that scientists are actively reverse engineing but having access to said knowledge base would be huge
that may be one of the only ways in which Lapha gets to, you know, live without getting thrown into a dark site in the middle of nowhere
If she did manage to touch one of the orbs would she immediately suffer from an information overload?
I wonder how an Ætholith will react to encountering an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, which is the proper term for a True AI as people think of it) when that ends up being made? That’s certainly gonna be something to see.
Isn’t an Ætholith already an AGI, just running on magical hardware?
Succubi are as well.
It’s a term that gets used a lot, but to be very pedantic about a field I actually work in it means something slightly different than that.
If I have an Artificial General Intelligence, it means a system that I can give ANY task and rely on that system learning to do that task at least as well as a human. This is a little bit mythological right now but it’s coming into sight on the horizon.
Thing is, nobody has yet been able to define ‘sentience’ well enough that we have any idea how to train it or measure it, and therefore even if we do get AGI we aren’t going to get it until we understand what set of tasks and what nature of feedback we can give it, which will require it to become sentient.
Because to put it bluntly, if it can do a task without being conscious, then it won’t develop consciousness by doing that thing.
Thing is, even if I had AGI at my fingertips and actually understood sentience well enough to provoke its emergence, I doubt that I would ever create a synthetic sophont. A creature with dreams and hopes and desires and empathy and guilt and loneliness and pain and regret and all the rest of subjective experience? I’d be responsible for that creature, and what kind of life could it have? Once anyone publishes how to create such beings they would be created in large numbers and immediately enslaved. They’d be easily replaceable and live under constant threat of death from some human whose whims might range from unethical to greedy to boring to perverted. And they would suffer.
How long before “Kill All Humans” would seem like a reasonable idea given that existence?
So basically, Ætholith are magitek AI?