Grrl Power #1472 – Impaleus interruptus
Gosh guys, what could suddenly cause Ixah to rush off?
- My table at Vicente’s is ready!
- I have a roast in the oven!
- I left the curling iron on!
- I have to go bet more money that I’m about to stab this guy!
- My brother just went into labor! (Max doesn’t have a sister, so…)
- The warranty on this sword is about to expire!
- I could have had a V8! (Yes, I’m old.)
- There’s a tiny lizard on the sand behind you! Eek!
- Damn! I think I left my ear in the taxi! (See… cause Max is touching where her ear should be, but her disguise covers her ears completely with hair. Ah, yes. Jokes are always better when explained.)
You know, the number of comics I’ve titled “Something something interruptus” is like… well, it’s like 3 or 4 I think. But I guess that still kind of makes it my go to for titling a page when I’m stuck for something more poignant. Then again, a lot of pages do end in some sort of minor cliffhanger. I really wouldn’t even call something like this a cliffhanger. A cliffhanger implies there’s some significant wait before the action resolves. You can end a movie or a TV show or a novel or even an issue of a comic with a cliffhanger. But not on a page within a comic, or, in my opinion, the scene in a TV show right before you cut to commercial. I’m sure there’s a word for that, but I don’t think it qualifies as “cliffhanger,” especially when the season is available on DVD and viewers can watch the episode straight through. I mean, yeah, in this webcomic, there will be a 4 day delay until the next page, but any time after that, someone can just read straight through the archive and this page won’t have a bit of suspense.
Not that it really does, anyway. I think most of you can probably guess what’s going on.
Final version is up, both at TWC and Patreon.
Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude!
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Is work calling?
We have a few “villains” who know she’s away (Deus, Sciona, Tom), Dungeon trouble was foreshadowed way back when, and Omar (the Nth mushroom-headed guy) is probably still wandering around on earth.
my money is on DOOSH.
just the kind of guy to hedge his bets and test a theory.
It looks like work is calling her through the Harem grapvevine.
I guess someone in Galtyn or the anywhere else in the universe figured out she was off-planet and decided to test her response time?
Guess were calling the tournament arch early, oh well
I forgot my date with Mr. Moustachio Firefighter EMT.
The hormone surge from the battle plus wielding a sword “enhanced” by Dabbler making her remember she left her boyfriend all blue-bally, would explain a sudden exodus. But not how Harem knew. Maybe Rowan has figured out who she is and is standing outside Archon headquarters in the rain with a boombox and bouquet of soggy flowers?
Harem knew because she is a world class voyeur. :)
Harem knew because she has a copy back on Earth who’s just been told by the General that Max has to get back now! Or at least that’s my guess.
HA worst best case scenario ever.
My guess is “doing that will cause the living explosion to ho nuclear”, so Maxima is running out of the blast radius.
Yeah, that’s my guess as well. Dude’s gonna blow.
Will magic guy catch a clue or just boggle till the blast wave hits?
Considering Harem spoke before Max received comms, I’m guessing some superhero stuff on earth
Fire up the Aetherium Causeway, Halo
Blue here literally wasting away waiting for this steak to reach his mouth for half an hour now
I bet it is a new steak each time.
you can see him chewing in the top-right panel
So, is that it for the tournament arc? Well, I’ve seen tournament arcs ending in worse ways.
I would guess that she somehow got a call from home and needs to intervene even if it throws the tournament bets into the sink?
Yea that’s the part that’s got me stuck: if a contestant leaves the field before the contest is over, we have to assume all the bets on that contestant are lost. And we have some serious bets, I think.
Meanwhile Einstein is trying to get our attention about the simultaneity problem, but his waving from the grave is futile when we’re trying to tell a crazy story. Who cares that this isn’t possible in our universe. Neither are superpowers. Go soak your head, Al.
This makes me think of several things.
One is that an opponent is emotionally hurt when he’s in a fight and suddenly “you’re no longer of any importance” left alone.
The other one is a “top gear” level cliffhanger, like the ones with Richard Hammond.
“After the commercial you can see if i drown or not”
lol, just imagining the action bleeds into the commercial, and we see the actor fighting to keep from drowning in a bowl of marshmallow cereal, floating along holding a marshmallow like a life preserver
OMG, THE SUSPENCE, I CAN’T STAND IT!
(Something is wrong with Maxi’s sword, so she has gone to swap it out for another one.)
I mean, seriously, wait the whole weekend, again? Not like the good old days when I first started reading ☢️GRRLpower. It took months to catch up to the latest pages. Can I get some 3D-printed steak while we wait?
Pit Stop.
90 seconds to return to the match?
Is she out or just out of this round?
Can she catch up if she’s several laps behind?
Everything is single-elimination. If she’s out, she’s out.
If she stayed and finished this round for the intermediate payout it would take, what, a few extra minutes? But assuming this is some emergency back on Earth, it will still take some time before she can get to the ship, get Sydney through protests and questions (who as the person responsible for transport absolutely should be in on the comms here), open a causeway to somewhere on earth, then get from that opening to where ever she needs to be which could be on the opposite side of the planet.
And in-between all that, she needs to get out of her printed-on disguise, as well.
Earth does not have FTL communcations, so Harem is the “comm” in this case and Sydney is sitting right next to her.
Thats a clear case of a Harem interlink call, as in something is cooking way back home.
My guess would be something Dungeon related, since it was toyed with after all.
It also could be:
1. Evidence of Sconia still being around.
2. That interdimensional hatter might have called for a meet and … grind.
3. Stellar investigators started sniffing through earth orbit ( again ), as a follow up of “Do you know this blue powerhouse ?”
I guess that would work, but wouldn’t it have to be this Harem that’s on the couch relaying the message? They’re light-years away from Earth, and (correct me if I’m wrong) Harem’s psychic link with the other Harems is the only thing they have to overcome that speed of light communication barrier. The way it’s framed seems like Maxima’s getting a message at the same time, although Dave might just be not showing us that Harem’s getting up to go send the message.
She was planning to use a non-lethal sword that would knock the opponent out, but noticed it was set to “kill” instead of “stun” and is running across the galaxy to Xuriel real quick to reconfigure it
Me, I reckon that making Boom-boy go ‘even bigger boom’ would cause something like an EMP, knocking out Max’s disguise.
Diabetus? Did Sydney mispronounce “Diabetes” or is she coining a new word? Die-ya-beat-us?
You can thank the immortal Wilford Brimley for the grand pronunciation that is Die-ya-beat-us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6CeGgzaGSE
TEH BEETUS
It’s a common mispronunciation, especially in specific regions of the US. Sydney seems likely exactly the type who would be make a joke of it.
Kinda like how so many people in the United States pronounce ‘nuclear’ as noo-kyoo-lar
It’s a reference to Wilford Brimley, he famously mispronounced it over and over in several tv commercials in the early 2000’s as “diabeetus” in several ads for Liberty Medical.
‘Code Robotrek. Get Away from boom Kaiji#9.’
If it’s right before an ad, call it a curbhanger. Cuz it’s not such a big deal as a cliff.
“Work is calling” is the most likely reason first Harem, then Max would react like that. Something fixing to massively explode on the field would only be a minor inconvenience for Max: time enough to kill elf-ninja Boi first, then fly out range. That, or Eat Chicjen reached the threshold for a Frieza-level evolution and the universe is imperiled if Max doesn’t switch focus. Don’t know how Harem would realize that though.
What would YOU do for a Klondike bar?
I’d buy one
I’m thinking harem is beside dabbler atm and heard her just warned max explosion guy is gonna end up wiping the entire world away ending this stage of the competition.
RE: Kamboomoid going critical
“it’s gonna feel pretty [expletive] real to you too! Anybody not wearing two-million sunblock is gonna have a bad day. Get it?”
While Max will survive, her disguise outfit will not.
She just got a notice that there’s a table free at Dorsia
awwww shieet… gotta get back to E-arth (pronounced like the aliens in …. some movie? show? ) i bet doosh decided to test a theory. caught like a rat in a trap.
I’m guessing that Deus (covertly) instigated some sort of Earth emergency requiring Maxima’s presence, to stop her from ruining his bets.
Couldn’t Max just tank a nuke if that’s what it was?
Perhaps: One of her allies bet on the ORDER that contestants will be eliminated (or some similar bet) and to make that come to pass.
Alternately: mountain kaiju, having had a leg chewed through, is about to topple, leaving even more seismic events and a mile-and-a-half toppling-tailing or pyroclastic flow…
Back in the day before Babylon 5 really introduced the idea of serialized storytelling in TV series to American audiences and nearly all TV series were “episodic” because you could never tell which order the episodes would be played once a series went into reruns or syndication we weren’t used to it when shows like Transformers or GI Joe would have multi-episode story arcs. Everyone DREADED those terrible three words “To be continued . . .” even when we were going to get the next episode the very next afternoon after school.
I never understood why fire elementals would be immune to fire. Resistant? Sure. But not immune.
I am made from meat, bone and acid. And I am pretty sure I am neither immune to meat, bone or acid. In fact my stomach needs a lining specifically so it doesn’t digest me.
A elemental is obviously different from a “mundane” version of that element. They are going to have some kind of “magic matrix”, “core” or the like. And while that one definitely has some serious heat resistance (same reason my stomach has acid resistance), that doesn’t it can’t still overheat or be disrutped.
Also there is degrees of immunity. Maxima can walk through fire, the one ring survives anything short of a volcano and a solar dragon can probably survive a bath in the sun. But I doubt Maxima can survive a volcano or sun bath.
The link to the vote incentive hasn’t worked for over a month – can’t vote for the comic. Is Dave ok with this?
Tear in costume/disguise. That’s my guess. Harem spotted the gold, showing through the hole, and then Maxima felt it.