Grrl Power #1339 – Qaplonk’
SYDNEY: “Wait, how am I a danger to myself?”
MAXIMA: “Well, you did you just hit your superior officer with a deadly weapon… even if it’s decidedly non-deadly to me. Still, you did just volunteer to peel every potato in…”
SYDNEY: //fidgeting with bat’leth, drops it on foot.//
SYDNEY: “Ow! Ow! OW! Back of the handle right on the long bones!”
MAXIMA: “Also that.”
If you were an agent of chaos, handing Sydney a giant, awkward, heavy, bladed thing isn’t the worst plan. Or giving her artifacts that grant her amazing superpowers. I’m not suggesting Deus had anything to do with that, but… if he had been in a position to arrange it, he certainly would have considered it.
I think a proper, steel bat’leth would weigh about 20-25 pounds? Depending entirely on how thick it was. The prop that Worf had on the show looked like it was maybe 1/3″ thick, and almost certainly not made of steel. Maybe aluminum? I could probably google it. Hmm. I found a prop replica, 1/4″ thick, made of aluminum, weighing in at 4 pounds. Honestly I thought Worf’s bat’leth looked like a dull nerf weapon if not for the way it caught the light sometimes. I’d assume they’d have two versions of the prop – a dangerously sharp one for display and closeups, then a HEMA or SCA safe version for twirling around and stage fights. The Sword of Kahless looked way chonkier and sharper. I found a “full size” prop on Amazon for sale made of steel, but it weighed less than a pound, because it looked about as thin as a piece of sheet metal. If the prop on the show was made of steel, I’m sure it would be impractically heavy. At least for a human to wield in a fight.
Klingons were supposedly something like 4 or 5 times stronger than humans, but that was just something the writers said. The guys staging the fights never got the memo, because human starfleet officers almost never lost a fight to one on camera. Major Kira, beanpole that she was, won every melee she got into against a klingon if I recall correctly. Oh, but she was an expert guerilla combatant, you say? That’s fine if she’s lacing the hallways with claymores, but I distinctly remember her blocking an overhead strike from a klingon by holding her phaser rifle sideways, then shunting the bat’leth off to the side, then hitting the klingon with the rifle, and he went down. That was definitely just lazy “main character VS. the one-hit-die schlub” writing, but really, a woman (and it was never established if bajorans had any particular strength or skeletal advantage over humans, so let’s just assume that Major Kira was as strong as a fit, slender human woman), a woman blocking an overhead strike from a man who, as most guys cast as kingons go, probably had six inches on her and a hundred pounds… Okay, sure. I can see that happening. If she meets the strike just right and yes, she has a decade of experience as a soldier. Not impossible. If her opponent was a human male and was only twice her strength. However, if that guy is 4 times as strong as her – and really – a female klingon would be 4 times as strong as her. A male klingon would probably be closer to six to eight times as strong as her, her arms would have buckled or her shoulders would have dislocated, or her rifle would have been ripped out of her grip (let’s assume the rifle is made of space polymers and doesn’t just snap in half) and that bat’leth should slammed into her brainpan.
So I submit to you that klingons were nowhere near 4 times stronger than humans. 40% stronger, maybe.
You know what’s weird and unnecessary? You won’t guess what I’m going to write, so I’ll just tell you. Memory Alpha had a wiki page for an “hour.” Is it a space-hour that takes into account time dilation or some sort of galactic unit of time that’s different than a standard 20th century Earth hour? No. It’s just an hour. Why it needs a dedicated page on the Star Trek wiki is baffling to me, but it’s late as I write this so maybe I’m missing something obvious.
I’m going to try something with this new vote incentive.
This month, I’m closing on a new house, selling my Mom’s house, finishing packing Mom’s house, moving city to city to the new house, forwarding mail, canceling utilities, all that. And after that’s done, I get to start the process of selling my old house, which needs a little work before it can realistically go on the market.
SO. I’m going to try and do this vote incentive in stages. Currently it’s just pencils. The TopWebcomics one will update with colors and detail until we get to the no clothes versions, then that will continue over at Patreon. Also there will be a comic or two in between each version to fill out the story.
I know it’s hard to tell from just the pencils, but this is Heatwave and Jiggawatt. The comics will explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. Although I feel like even saying that much makes it easy to guess, but hopefully the journey will still amuse.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
This reminds me of one of the early episodes of Star Trek: lower decks, only it was Mariner swinging the Bat’lef and accidentally slicing into Boingler’s thigh…
My son had bought a replica katana off a friend that was hard up for cash, got it for $250. First thing he did was try a few swings, I told him to go away from everyone asap!
JEEBUS CRIPES!
Get the kid into classes… Or at the VERY least, Buy him a Bokken ASAP; take away the Katana, and let him practice with that until he proves that he’s not a danger to himself and others!
Also, FYI…a “Katana” is a type of sword design, not a specific weapon…so there is no such thing as a “Replica Katana” (unless it’s made out of pot metal or something; or it’s a direct copy of some Game/Anime/Actual-Historical version)
it’s possible the OP meant it was for looks only, like a replica gun; won’t shoot, looks cool; won’t slice, looks cool
Problem with replica blades is, they are sharp as heck and slice real good, but they are tempered deliberately to break into a thousand shrapnels like a frag grenade if they hit anything harder than boneless jelly. You can do real harm with it, you just can’t use it in a fight.
In my experience, replica blades aren’t sharp. They’re blunt as hell, only ending in a sharp tip. At least, that’s the case for all the ones that I’ve interacted with and the Shirasaya that I own.
(For comparison, I also own a decidedly not replica katana that is battle ready, but I didn’t buy that. My dad gave it to me at some point.)
Probably not sharp from the factory but then some overly ambition young fellow such as my self manages to put an edge on the cheap Chinese steel.
Ugh. I’ve used Chinese-steel foils and epees. They are absolute trash; my salle ordered a batch of them and a couple came with chunks taken out of the blade.
We made that mistake (in the SCA) about 30 years’ ago….bought a batch for about 10-15 people….it was a *nightmare*, and we soon wrote more robust sourcing and testing of blades into our Rapier rules.)
…. i am surprised it did not damage Maxima’s shirt after all Maxima is the mostly invincible one not her clothes.
Maxima’s durability extends a short distance from her body, it was first mentioned in the big restaurant fight and explicitly mentioned here https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-521-to-no-dress/
Max also has a bad time in general with explosions, most of the ones we’ve seen her caught in have managed to damage her clothing for one reason or another… either because they were very powerful explosions or because she wasn’t durability focused at the time.
As a matter of fact, her durability comes from a telekinetic field that just barely covers her, which includes her clothes to a certain degree
So her clothes are, as a matter of fact, mostly invincible.
Similar to Supergirl or Superman’s kryptonian biomatrix or Superboy’s tactile telekinesis.
They are also crafted by a super, remember, with an army of fashion ninjas, no less. Pretty sure their uniforms are all much more durable than normal clothing.
Or it was a poking strike rather than a slicing strike. A lot of my t-shirts have little holes that don’t show up until you wash them. Thankfully not from a bat’leth.
Yeah, that looks to be a poking-strike (as shown in panel BLONG)
And little holes tend to grow into big holes over time (have had to replace a few shirts after many years because of that)
Adorkable! Now we need Halo plushies with spring-loaded blade launchers!
The skalagrim channel on YouTube did some reviews and tests of the Bat’leth that are entertaining. According to lore the weapon is 5.3 kilos, this is still ludicrously heavy as that makes it heavier than a Landsknecht Zweihänder greatsword which maxes out at 4kg and is a bit over two meters long.
One shudders to imagine what Syd would do with a nearly seven foot long greatsword.
then again, Klingons are rather a bit taller than humans, and by far have a stronger build.
Though, Jadzia likely still spanks most of them in Sto’vo’kor.
5.3 kg is 11.6 lbs.
By the time humanity has ascended into the stars and gone post-scarcity one hopes everyone will be on metric.
I feel weird saying it, but metric annoys me because its base units are so out of proportion to each other, and not particularly useful to human beings. A gram is almost meaningless to us, while a kilogram seems like a useful base unit for things humans interact with. A meter is far too large to provide useful granularity to human scales, while centimeters are tiny! A liter feels almost like a useful unit, and it’s a cubic decimeter, which is… both sensible (because a decimeter is a far more human-scale base for length than either the centimeter or the meter) and silly (because a liter, being the base unit of volume, should be related to the base unit of length, so it should be a cubic meter instead).
So shift some terms around, and I’d basically be fine with it, but at this point, that would only cause confusion.
I have a cheap wall hanger Bat’leth and that thing is heavy, so I can only imagine how heavy a proper carbon steel one is.
my mom had a guy at a ren fair make her a bat’leth, it was oversized, and indeed heavy, but it was still only maybe 12 pounds.
Oh sure a bat’leth “looks” cool, but let’s face it: no one who would actually have to use such a thing in combat would design a weapon like that.
Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reviewer that’s held one badmouth it. Those prongs are great for parrying and catching incoming weapons, and the different grips allow for a lot of versatility in transitional attacks. There are some chinese weapons that actually share a lot similarities with it, like deer horn knives, so some people would in fact design them like that for use in actual combat.
The only real reason you don’t see more weapons like that in history is because they take a lot of steel and training, which tends to be true of a lot of more exotic weapon designs. Why make 10 bat’leth that take 15 years of training to use competently, when you could use that same steel to make 100 spears that take 15 days of training to use passably.
You haven’t looked at many good reviewers I guess.
Spears are the gold standard of melee weaponry, and are super easy to make. If you want your weapon to be useful, it needs to beat a spear in at least 1 category of reach, weight, armor piercing, and bulkiness(carryability, weildability, storability). Batleths fail to win any of those categories.
If we’re apparently judging solely based on what’s the most effective weapon to cheaply arm an entire army with, no melee weapon other than the spear deserves to exist. Swords? Garbage. Warhammers? Trash. Poleaxes? Don’t even get me started. It’s impossible for ANY weapon to out-compete “stick with a knife on the end” in that category, so bringing it up to begin with is stupid. I mean, if we’re going by your stupid checklist, most polearms fail despite having useful functional additions, like hooks for tearing away shields and the like. Things like that aren’t on the list because apparently having additional ways to engage your opponent and undermine their advantages somehow isn’t helpful in combat. Convenient that said missing criteria is what I listed as the batleths main strength. Seriously, what a braindead opinion.
Someone with human strength couldn’t hold the blade toward an opponent when the blades clash. It’d twist in their hands so the blade would come back toward the person holding the weapon.
So, now I am wondering. Surely there is someone out there in fandom who actually works out with a bat’leth for an hour a day. I suspect it would be like those people who use the entire sword as a weapon and not just the tip and edge of the blade. Even people who are expert at swords/bladed weapons would need to work at it to be able to use it at its full potential. As for it’s practicality vs a regular sword or a spear the bat’leth is presented as an icon of Klingon culture. It’s not so much its usefulness as a practical weapon as its being an anchor for their belief in their culture. IRL the guy who designed the bat’leth for the show is a martial artist but he was also working within the constraint of making somthing that looked unique and would film well.
Major Kira wasn’t human, she was a Bajoran. That particular line of reasoning only establishes that Bajorans are close to Klingons in strength, not that humans are.
Weight? Surely a REAL Klingon wants to get the weight up. An osmium batleth comes immediately to mind.
If the Star trek universe contains ‘neutronium’, I’m pretty sure it has some lightweight, tougher than steel alloys that would be used for thinbgs like edged weapons.
You need mass in a cutting weapon and that mass needs to be in the right places, rapiers are generally as heavy or heavier than longswords but don’t usually cut as well since the weight distribution and blade shape isn’t designed for it.
I highly doubt that high carbon steel would be the alloy of choice in that setting and a more durable material would be used, possibly even a composite, ceramic, or polymer of some sort that would do sa much better job.
If stuck with steel, I’d think 1/4″ would be plenty thick enough, comparable to a lot of historical swords but stronger due to width and shape, probably with a mass of 5-6 lbs, or zweihander weight, not unwieldy but not very efficeint either without a few adjustments to the overall shape. Great against another bat’leth, but kind of slow against other swords, even if the reach can be extended by shifting the grip to one end.
The material that Bat’Leths are made of in Star Trek is a reinforced composite metal alloy called ‘baakonite’ according to Memory Alpha.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Baakonite
Oh no, now Sciona knows Sydney’s main weakness! Shiny and/or awesome thingies!
I vote that Sydney’s “Punishment” is to train with the Bat’leth for 2 hours every day; with Math (…or another Super with preternatural Martial Weapons skills)
C’MON…Max is creative-enough to come up with that!
According to Google, an actual bat’leth weights 12 lbs.
According to Cutlery Imports, a 48″ (4 foot) Steel (not aluminum) Bat’leth with a black leather wrapped handles weights only 5 lbs.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/727039911/massive-4-ft-replica-klingon-batleth
I found other carbon steel ones around the same size (45-48″) that weigh around the same amount, give or take a pound.
If it’s $149…I GUARANTEE that it’s not the actual thickness of a Canon Bat’leth (Steel is a *lot* heavier, and more expensive, than that per square inch.)
(YES, I *AM* the “Um, Actually” guy.)
I’m just letting you know what it says on the ad. There are actually a lot of them ranging in price between $150 to $300 that I’ve seen online from a casual search.
I’m a blacksmith and I made a Bat’leth for a martial artist friend. It was made from high carbon steel and sharp. It was a surprisingly good weapon, with nice balance for two handed use. IIRC it was designed by a guy who had experience with some of the odder Chinese crescent blades. It was a bit heavier than an average one handed sword, but not by much. Probably about 2kg? But I guess Dues would have known how much the show said they weigh (5.3kg) and had it made that one to weight, which would definitely make it unwieldy for a human.
There’s a DS9 scene where Jadzia Dax enters a Klingon training scenario in the holosuite and has the computer whip her up a bat’leth to her specifications of weight and dimensions. That implies to me that in addition to the “standard” size for mass production, it’s not unusual to have advanced practitioners customize their blades for their size and other requirements. I think Deus would have it scaled to Sydney’s height and weight. She’s just a klutz that’s lacking in arm strength.
DS9 is an American show. There’s a chance that someone made a bat’leth, weighed it, said “5 pounds”, then the writer for the script for the Jadzia episode mixed up pounds and kilograms. Or asked for reasonable weights for weapons and got “5 pounds for that”, then mixed it up.
It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. A Mars probe crashed on landing due to a mix-up between American and metric systems.
5 pounds is reasonable for someone of human height and weight. More than that and it’s hard to e.g. block with it; you end up moving your body instead of the weapon.
Am I the only one vaguely disappointed that Cthillia is still, er, not “normal” looking? Last we saw her she only needed nine more victims to charge the unsheathable knife, and Deus has since gone through another war or two, and mentioned getting rid of corrupt officials therein, so I would have thought she’d have charged it all up. Makes me wonder if she’s suddenly hesitant or if there’s something she needs to have done before she’d get the results she wants.
That’s a good question that I gave some thought myself. Maybe there are definite limits to how much radical a change the Epimorph can implement in one go. We know it is able to change a body from male orc to sexy ‘Space Drow’ female (and give her a magical boob job as a bonus) with one use, but that still works within the boundaries of vanilla fantasy/sci-fi humanoid species. Maybe to transform something as unique, exotic, and radically inhuman as a reptilian/humanoid beholder requires multiple uses of the artifact, Cthillia is still partway in the transition process, and she keeps her visage strictly and carefully hidden until it’s complete. We know she usually does until she settled her body issues to her satisfaction, and only made a onetime exception for Sydney because she pestered her into maddened exasperation with her relentless befriending.
The ‘Space Drow female’ form was Sciona’s original body, so it wasn’t a transformation so much as a regeneration.
You may have a point, or it might make no real difference for the Epimorph. Fact is, to regenerate a body almost from scratch (she still had her original top of the head) or to transform male orc into female Space Drow in one go does not look like a big deal for an artifact that needs a charge of a hundred lives. Chtillia, however, looks inhuman and monstrous enough that to make her humanlike or close to and attractive may well require multiple uses (the magical equivalent of multiple cosmetic-surgery procedures).
And there is the not so negligible issue of how you may make the new her humanlike and not-monstrous-looking. To turn her reptilian skin into a human one does not seem a big deal in this context. But all those eyes? I tend to assume Chtillia would not want to lose the powers they have, given her supernatural bodyguard/enforcer job, unless she plans to retire and has secured alternative means to support her lifestyle.
Otherwise, how could you arrange those eyes? Cluster them together in a spider-like way like the spider-thing in the previous page? Throw them together and make her new eyes gemlike, with every facet channeling a different power?
If she becomes ‘normal’ looking, will she lose her special ability?
And there was no proof that the orc body Sci was using when we first met her was male, we never saw the body naked, and not all females have gigantic bewbs (look at Rachel Rodrigus {or what ever name WWF have her using lately}, she is a muscular lady with no more than a B-cup)
And again, neither Sci nor the orc were hyu-mon supers
Ooh, I felt that it had been stated somewhere that the orc body was male, but couldn’t find it at the time. I just happened to stumble across DaveB saying it was while I was looking for something else though!
Issue (Sub!)Title! Max’s last comment on this page.
I mean, it could be the title/subtitle of most, if not all issues.
“Pick up heavy things, move them, then put them down.” Sydney is Helix!
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00075.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff600/fv00565.htm
I do smithing too. 4 lbs of aluminum would be 12 lbs of the same in steel. Most real swords were about between about 1.5 to 4 lbs, and you get pretty tired with them pretty fast. But…prop weapons are usually overbuilt so they don’t chip, break, and otherwise come apart, so you usually end up with something much heavier than you’d use in real life.
Real weapons get chipped, bent, and broken in use. The last thing you want during a show though is to have a pretty boy like Worf have a shard of steel come off the edge at time and a half the sound barrier and go in his leg or his face.
That’s so awesome!
I can’t wait until Sydney figures out she can use it with her light hook.
hmmm. Sydney is standing next to 2 people that would severely injure (as far as she is concerned) and others on site aren’t indestructible. And she swung a weapon without looking with her eyes closed. That’s really pushing the bounds of “played for laughs”. Basically, how would a soldier get punished for grabbing a gun from the wall and firing it towards the targets on a range without looking if anyone was down range or even in front of her at their stations? I’m guessing it wouldn’t be pretty when the range master got to them.
It seems Sydney may well be in for another dose of Archon’s favored punishment for errant operatives, exercise to exhaustion. Especially effective for someone like her that isn’t exceptionally fit like Superion-field channelers. The dungeon construction site lacks a track field, but its terrain got flattened, so I guess its perimeter would do in a pinch. Or she may be in for that once they get back to base, as Maxima deems best.
I wonder if Sydney’s two Light Hooks working together are able to lift twice the weight or if the total lifting capacity is split between them.
I’m still hoping this whole mind control schtick ends with Maxima going “Escorpia you are under arrest” because her Tattoo got matched to the body’s former occupant and ARC just assuming she’s stepped up her game of drug induced mind control. Stick with nobody but Deus realizing she’s Sciona at least for now.
A canon compatible bat’leth weighs just under 12 lbs and is not a very good weapon. A bat’leth built for combat would weigh at most 5 lbs.
The props they use on screen are meant to be judicial weapons designed for judicial duels. Those are by design not very good weapons.
Wikis for fandoms have a weird tendency to define ordinary real-world things that happen to appear in the fiction as if the average reader was no more familiar with hours than with the history of the Radchaai Empire.
Probably when humanity goes extinct and nothing is left of us but our internet archives, alien archaeologists are going to end up learning a lot of basic knowledge from these sorts of niche wikis.
Some of that is a tendency of create concordances, giving you a reference to every place a word appeared in any script.
Though I can imagine cases where there could be good a reason to discuss hours in a television show wiki – neither an hour of programming nor an hour of billable actor time correspond to a chronological hour, and that might be worth mentioning.
As I read this comic, I am listening to a 7.5 hour long documentary about the Dominion War.
Hey Dave!
I own a bat’leth blank from the show and the non-sharp areas are 1/4″ thick. That’s the area that would be the raw metal. Just figured I’d toss that out here.
Sorry! my bad they’re 1/2″ thick. Really thick suckers.
So I’m guessing the Vote incentive is Heatwave getting… “Even” with her boyfriend via the carefully controlled and 100% consensual succubus aura, but I’m willing to be proven wrong.
lol, yeah, that was certainly a plot line of all time. Glad it isn’t getting much attention anymore.
In a more serious comic, fans would call Syd being this reckless a sign of character regression/flanderizing.
Steel averages 2.5-3x the weight of aluminum, so more like 12 pounds? Still unwieldy, but not impossible to handle.
Sydney: “Not my fault. Someone put a gold unbreakable wall in my way.”
(Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki, “Hour” page.)
It was always my understanding, even if not outright stated, that time and calendar conversions were just part of the translation process, and handled by the UT… kind of like how some folks are able to believe that on current Earth, every country and culture uses the same calendar (many don’t, but that conversion is part of translation).
Now I’m imagining Sydney and Gir from Invader Zim in the same room….what could possibly go wrong?
I take your point, but if you’re comparing Klingons to Humans, you probably should have picked someone who is supposed to BE human. Major Kira may be a humanoid, but is not a human.
Super-ADHD *and* still buzzed! Dangerous move, Deus! (There is no way at this point he doesnt know her condition, given he stepped in n Sciona right after 2 of the site’s heavy lifters and a detective hare took an unscheduled break for munchies)
I say that was really Maxima’s fault. If you see Sydney swinging around a large pointy metal object, you should be smart enough to keep your distance. Unless she deliberately stood in the path of the bat’leth (knowing it was harmless to her) just to make a point. I could see that.
She has a level of superspeed up all the time. She definitely saw it coming, and definitely did not get out of the way.
She explicitly does not have a level of superspeed up all the time. That is how Sydney managed to vomit on her boots once.
Not true, but she can still be surprised, as that very comic explained.
Obviously Max is keeping her guard and attack around Deuce. You know, for resisting his charms and verbally sparring.
Looking WAAAaaaaaay back, we haven’t seen Tony since the (First appearance #18) since he introduced his cousin/half-sister Olivia…
Huh, how the comment section has changed. I’d have expected to see a dozen or so comments these last few ages theorizing the last orb is going to be a data log, and recover lost memory or something. Which typically, new situation arises, comment section (what if the final orb(s) *before the atmosphere orb revealed its function*, do a thing for this situation).
Also yeah, good thing for Sidney Maxima was there.
Also can Arch Swat members even accept gifts from Deus? I mean on the one hand he is a private citizen of the United States, so gift from citizen to citizen no problem, but he is also a defacto power behind another country and an emissary for an alien government.
Speaking of, Sciona’s revelation here is interesting. Considering her blood portal plan.
So not friendly to say the least with most houses, but assumed that where she planned to connect the blood portal to would be on her side to lead an invasion of Earth, her own house we imagine. So unless the portal connected to a different spot not just different time on Alari prime, then where they showed up should be her home house land. Which could explain the thing I’ve been wandering, why the souls in that soul battery have been seemingly staying on her side…seems likely now given this information they are from her house, like a bunker perhaps. It still raises the question about their plans given other houses are acting more openly over on another continent with demons and supers while they play Secret Invasion body snatchers reptilian conspiracy infiltration…but can be apparently outed by other Alari anyway.
Really, they should NOT be able to accept gifts from him–he has actual diplomatic status as a foreign official, which means he’s absolutely on the list of forbidden gifters.
There might be a dollar amount that serves as a cap, with gifts below that being acceptable. And I could totally see Deus claiming he paid fifty bucks for the thing–not mentioning that the craftsman was someone whose family he saved from starvation, and thus the money was just for the raw materials.
I am confident there is a waiver exception somewhere in the forbiddance of gifts from foreign governments, if the chain of command knows and approves it for foreign-policy reasons. The current US government and Archon policy seems to try and court Deus and Gaitlyn’s friendship for tech advantages, so Gaitlyn should be labeled as an allied/friendly power. Sydney was able to accept a foreign decoration from him apparently w/o issue, in all likelihood for the same reason and by the same means. That gift does not look like that expensive, esp. if Deus states it isn’t.
Are you misspelling Galytn on purpose?
Nope. I have a terrible memory for names, if good for everything else. Sorry for the misspellings borne from that.
I looked up the statute in question, and there doesn’t seem to be any exceptions–a soldier would be forbidden from accepting a gift from a person in the British government, for instance. I suspect there might be a method around that, possibly by going through diplomatic channels for permission, but there’s certainly been no indication of it here.
That said, ARChon’s dual status (military branch, domestic police service) may cloud the waters, here–I don’t think there’s a similar prohibition against an FBI agent accepting such a gift, for instance.
Wait, lemme do the Google.
Okay, interesting. If we argue that ARCHON falls under the general umbrella of ‘federal employee’ rather than under the UMCJ, then we have the following:
“Unless the frequency of the acceptance of gifts would appear to be improper, an employee generally may accept:
gifts based on a personal relationship when it is clear that the motivation is not his official position;
gifts of $20 or less per occasion, not to exceed $50 in a year from one source (note: this exception does not apply to gift cards, certificates and promotional codes that function as cash, although it does apply to those redeemable only at limited places, for example only at one store or at a group of affiliated stores such as those in a particular shopping center;
discounts and similar benefits offered to a broad class, including a broad class of government employees;
most genuine awards and honorary degrees, although in some cases an employee will need a formal determination;
free attendance, food, refreshments and materials provided at a conference or widely attended gathering or certain other social events which an employee attends in his official capacity, with approval; and
gifts based on an outside business relationship, such as travel expenses related to a job interview.”
Sydney, being a fairly low-ranking member of the team, is unlikely to have the sort of official status that would absolutely forbid her from accepting a gift as a federal employee. Max, OTOH, is absolutely bound by those rules, and should be accepting ~nothing~ from Deus if she doesn’t want to be compromised.
Now let’s see what happens when she swings it around with the lighthook
Soooo… I’m curious… how much time has passed since #4 Big Guns had Maxima call Syndey a corporal? Sydney said “back up a few months”… where are we at right now in that timeline? I’d guess she’s going to be a corporal soon?