Grrl Power #1485 – Zenithectomy
When Mt. Atrocitous was just a little butte going to Elementalry School, he got called “bismuth brain.” Also “pepto,” because apparently Pepto Bismol has bismuth subsalicylate in it? That’s why it’s called Pepto Bismol, I guess? In fact most generic Pepto is just called Bismuth Subsalicylate, or Pink Bismuth. I never thought about what’s actually in the stuff.
Anyway, they were all, “Hah, hah! Your brain is an antacid,” or “Meatsacks lick your brain when their poop isn’t viscous enough!” Or possibly, “Your brain is colorful!” Geomorphs can be cruel, and not always terribly creative when it comes to insults. Presumably their brains were formed from something else. Possibly Hoppered Galena or Fenster Quartz.
Maxima has destroyed a significant portion of a mountain once before, in her first fight with Darude. That does depend on how you define “mountain.” I’m sure cartographers and geologist might argue that point, but Max insists it was a (very small) mountain, and not a rather tall hill. It turned out to be a poor decision, tactically, because she would up freeing a bunch of granulated rock for Darude to add to his storm of sand. Or as one might say, his Sandstorm.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Gotta wonder how Ryzyl is feeling about his chances of victory right now…
My guess is he will try a sneak attack while she’s busy with Mt. Atrocious. Then she will beat him (again), or appear to beat him, and offer a chance to yield. He will take advantage of her “weakness” for another sneak attack and end up fully dead. This will generate lots of discussion here in the comments and on the page.
I guess Mt. Atrocitus just got Bismuth-slapped.
Mountain puns are hill-arious.
we have not yet reached the peak of humor.
Who’s fault is that?
No need to start pointing finger we are all just talking schist.
I’m an avalanche of laughter, though I must say I have seen boulder puns than that.
Actually the distinction between mountains and hills isn’t for cartographers or geologists to argue but for linguists.
In the UK it’s down to Bureacrats whether a feature is a hill or a mountain.
If it’s above 1,000 feet high, it’s a mountain.
Anything smaller is a hill, which explains the main plot point of the 1995 British film ‘The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain’.
How do you determine where to start measuring the height? The lowest point you can reach from the peak without going up? If so I would imagine there can be a hill on a mountain.
It’s measured as height above sea level. It’s 2000ft/600m, not 1000ft.
So a ~50m tall bump on an expansive flat plain at just under 600m above sea level would count as a mountain, but a ~500m tall peak right next to the coast is just a hill?
Well, the highest mountain in the Netherlands is 322,4 m (or 1057,7 ft).
That’s the highest point of elevation in the dutch mainland.
The highest and only real mountain in the Netherlands is 870m.
Saba is part of the Netherlands(not just the kingdom), since 10 October 2010.
In the UK, sea level is a pretty good baseline. It’s not the U.S. where a huge chunk of the country is thousands of feet anove sea level before you get to the mountains.
Most countries, including the U.S., don’t have a set height or even a definition for what makes something a hill or a mountain. The UK seems to be exceptional in that, probably because it’s a fairly small island so it doesn’t have to deal with huge differences in terrain and elevation.
Fun fact, there’s a hill in Oklahoma that’s over 600 meters tall which is claimed to be the world’s tallest hill.
Aww, she made the mountain sad.
More seriously, at what point do people start reviewing the footage of a certain supercarrier destruction and compare dimensions?
If the ruse remains successful enough it might actually spawn Maxima vs. Ixah debates, which in turn will give rise to at least one Maxima/Ixah slashfics.
I vote MaximIxah for their ship name!
Didn’t even notice the magma-teardrop til I saw your comment.
Max didn’t use super strength/speed/durability against the supercarrier. She hid behind a forcefield and used a pencil thick beam of destruction. Ixah has been way more impressive.
That footage is holoshopped!
I would like to put forth a suggestion: Panel five of this page, cleared of dust; wind movement lines, and and other visual distractions, would make a bitchin’ vote incentive! With Ixah, Max, and perhaps Harper variants for Patreon? Just saying…
Ok, could someone explain me how she managed to mountain-punch juuust right amount of mountain top away and not just blow the “brain” into smithereens?
Who says she didn’t?
Im sure the merch for Mt.Atrocitus is top quality. Metal band looking tshirts, Mountain shaped Mugs, giant foam mountain hats, polished rocks and crystals he’s cast off of his body, grow your own mountain crystal kits, and for the kids a Mt. Atrocious plush (id love that for me.).
I presume Mt. Atrocitus’ brain is more resilient than their body, so when Maxima shattered its brain-case, the brain stayed intact. That would likely call for magic, but that would track with her using her anti-magic sword to do the tapping and cause Atrocitus’ leg to involuntarily kick.
Maxima also has an incredible degree of control, which likely contributed to her being able to break only the zenith.
Atrocitus appears to be more or less a solid state entity. At least where its brain is concerned. The face and torso may have some gooey bits. The top of the head could be basically a protective cap. If the brain isn’t supported and cushioned in a fluid bath as with us puny organics, Atrocitus might survive having the top of his head popped off. It might even be a maintenance feature if it is a construct.
Please don’t ask, or the author will take you seriously and waste an entire page on having the characters sitting in Master Roshi’s house explaining something pointless like this.
I was expecting her to just throw him into space.
Pepto-Bismol is a little too powerful. First try Alka-Seltzer, or Tums if you’re aspirin intolerant.
“…, that’s what it’s all a-bout!”
Note the difference between a cracked rib from getting stomped into a rock, and no injury from supersonically splitting a rock. Maxima is at her most dangerous when she has optimized her power set. Of course only new readers wouldn’t know that. But we won’t know for sure if Max is injury-free until she returns to the ship.
Thursday we should find out if Mt. Atrocitous fears having its’ brain “Lectered” or not. I’m looking for a yield, possibly two yields. Will Ryzyll really try a sucker punch after having seen 4 such powerful opponents taken out in such quick succession?
Speculation: Mt. Atrocitous or its’ designer was expecting to fight opponents like megaballbat Barney and that mecha from round one in the finals. Yesterday’s news, I’ve already forgotten their names!
Max is doing brain surgery on a mountian, using a sword.
Uh oh, she means BISMUTH!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARSeFXukwGM
It has probably been discussed someplace but from a strength of materials perspective, what would be the upper size limit on a kaiju type creature/ construct? One can always call on magic, superion fields or other forces to hold the thing together but I’m wondering about normal physics and materials that can be found on the periodic table. How big could it get before the stresses start to shear the bonds in the molecules that make up the things structure?
There is a skyscraper that is >800 m tall. The proposed Rise Tower would be two kilometers tall. With the most modern material known to man, it is perhaps possible to build an elevator/skyscraper that would take you to geostationary orbit and a bit beyond, but it would not support its own weight at ground level.
A critical piece of information for calculating that upper limit would be the gravity it has to operate within. In zero-G it could give serious competition to some moons, but if it has to withstand the 1G of Earth, or similar, I’d be surprised if it could be even twice the size of the largest dinosaurs with any materials that we know about today. At least, while retaining mobility. We have of course built much larger immobile structures, but those are designed to deal with very precisely defined stresses and would not withstand being moved around.
she made a friggin volcano cry
I would rather have this bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy!
Did she just threaten to torture someone?
We have to remember Maxima’s not expected to be evenly matched here. She’s a ringer.
According to Cora’s own assessment, she’s likely to win this contest easily. Max is here specifically because Cora believes she is in a class by herself with power well in excess of the contestants this tournament attracts. And Cora is familiar with this tournament and has lots of experience evaluating weapons and defenses, so we should be trusting her assessment at least a bit.
This contest doesn’t get interesting until one of two things happens. Either there’s another “ringer” and Max might not win, or there’s follow-on consequences from Max having won.
Kevin could be another ringer, possibly fielded by Tom or Deus. If he meets Max in the final round, things could get dicey. And Cora believed that if Max made it look too easy (which she IS DEFINITELY DOING here) she could scare the Xevoarchy.
Or she might run into some more portal shenanigans from a specialized or generalist opponent who watched previous fights and noticed that Ixah almost lost against teleportation – only saved by the portal being set to reopen when she smashed the castle (rather than the portal collapsing for the foreseeable future upon supporting infrastructure being smashed).
A all powerfull entity doing this super powered MMA is rather dubious , Dr Manhattan could transmute any atomic mass into gold or rare metals ensuring an extravagant lifestile if he wishes.
She is at her superman level of power and at the pinacle of contestant in this type of event.
10 on the power scale is ressreved for Dr Manhattan like entities, bored an tired gods.
Does Max just get more max the more she fights?
You saiyan Maxi is hiding a tail? o_O
Maximum is a personal best, not a limit.
So what happens if Cora is right and Max wins here so easily that it scares the Xevoarchy?
Wait, what actually is the Xevoarchy? Seriously, it’s occupying a very gray space in institutional terms.
The Xevoarchy is a galaxy-spanning entity with broad enforcement powers regarding piracy, trafficking, trade treaty enforcement, shipping, and extradition of interstellar criminals. It enforces sanctions on states whose actions are seen as bad for trade or promoting piracy, and in extreme cases undertakes military actions up to and including destroying populated worlds. It is the closest thing the Milky Way Galaxy at large seems to have, to being a functioning unified government.
But what kind of government? Its “laws” take the form of business policy, known to member states but not particularly influenced by the member states. There are no representatives, no public debates, no answering to the whims of member states.
It charges route tolls where it provides security, insurance premiums where it doesn’t, service fees for adjudication and negotiation and ship registry, gets seized ships and cargoes from pirates and smugglers, and a few other things. They aren’t a universal taxation authority but they add up. The Xevoarchy winds up in control of an enormous amount of wealth, and presumably makes some profit after providing what services they provide.
They have to be very careful to avoid upsetting member governments too much. They have to restrict military actions to those that have near-universal support. They have to avoid being visibly unfair or changing policies rapidly or controversially. They have to avoid inspiring resentment by costing the member states too much money or too much immediate short-term power. So they can’t be very heavy-handed.
But a light touch, applied consistently over centuries and millennia, could allow the Xevoarchy, not subject to any formal kind of public control, to set the conditions that all smaller-scale governments survive in and the terms under which all smaller-scale governments interact with each other.
So what scares an organization whose center of power and wealth is the maintenance of a very carefully constructed status quo in which it’s always just a little bit cheaper to pay them and just a little bit more expensive to do something that isn’t their policy?
What scares them is the emergence of a potential class of unpredictable and disruptive influences.
And that describes Earth’s supers, with Max as exemplar, to a tee.
I interpret the Xevoarchy as being effectively the interstellar U.N.
And we know how much the Terran U.N. is taken seriously…
What about the spacetime-striding T-head in the sweater? Do you expect his/her race is part of the xevoarchy or beyond it? (Did T-head even get a name yet?) I suppose that in this story they are AN Nth-tech race, but they could be THE Nth-tech race. The difference being, are they running the galaxy themselves, or just monitoring it?
Given that scene of a control room full of assorted aliens that detected one of Halo’s causeways, I suspect that the Nth race is beyond the xevoarchy. To me that implies a bureaucracy sponsored by a number of mature, very high-tech (but < Nth) races. They've all been around the block enough times to know the futility of war, and so agreed to form the xevoarchy. Less advanced species are encouraged to fall in line, and individuals can find employment in the xevoarchy. I could make a "Babylon 5" analogy but it wouldn't be entirely parallel.
So the xevoarchy I have described would definately see supers as a potential threat, because of their military potential concentrated in the hands of individuals. Technology can be manufactured, but superpowers? The xevoarchy knows so little about them so far. It will be dealing with fear of the unknown.
Contrast that with the Nth, who were able to begin investigating the unknown as soon as it was detected. The story is developing!
So, was that a knee-jerk or tap-out? Need to be clear.
And i assume the exposed crystal is it’s brains, right? Yeah, time to tap out.
BTW, i nice touch on the inverted 3d squares for brains. I can see that being the equivalent of ‘Brain Folds’ in a silicate based life form.
Hint: Search for “bismuth crystals”.
Grand mal sword = Big bad sword. (As opposed to petit mal sword.)
A play on “grand mal seizure”, which will happen if she start slamming her sword into whatever caused the leg to jerk with a little tap.
seizure: tachiwaze sounds close, but that’s for a katana
Health professionals now call it “generalized tonic-clonic seizure”, or GTCS for short.
In this case it’s more of a localized tectonic-cyclonic seizure.
Generally, the reason why health ‘professionals’ change names of medical conditions, is because someone was offended by the term (note, ‘Manic Depressive’ got changed to ‘Bi-Polar’, as though we have a white bear in our brains)
Sometime soon, Sydney will start freaking out in a BAD way as she realizes that the “Greater but Opposite” trope is coming due for Maxima…
Maxi made mountain mope (had to make it alliterative)
Bismuth for brain ridges is brilliant. Truly, you are a man of science.