Grrl Power #271 – How do you disarm someone with super powers?
This is really Vehemence’s fault. Gentleman brawler or not, he made it clear their options were limited. If anything he’s lucky that Maxima didn’t start with his head. It would seem he forgot that Max is a solder first, and this would definitely be an ignominious end for Vehemence after such a promising start. On the other hand (sorry, V) that was also fantastically violent, so hopefully Max was right about there being a tipping point.
TV Tropes is running a kickstarter to spruce up their site, front and back end. They’re a good resource and drive a lot of traffic to a lot of webcomics so at least give it a look. Just be careful with your time if you go to TV Tropes proper, as the site is actually a time vampire.
I just want to casually remind everyone about the Amazon affiliate link since it’s cyber-Monday, something that e-tailers just made up a few years ago and now we all just accept is a thing. Evidently Saturday was “Small Business Saturday” in an attempt to win back some customers from the Amazons and Wal-Marts. I imagine within a few years nearly every day between Thanksgiving and Xmas will have its own name, from “Knick Nacks Thursday” to “Oh shit it’s nearly Xmas and I still need to do all my shopping Wednesday.”
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome which I can’t live without anymore, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.
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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.
Hentorb for the win!
She’s a “solder”, first?
Must be a pun about her shiny metallic skin :P
Even then, she’s doing all wrong. :p
Yeah…Solder is shiny-silver in color…
You’re thinking of Tin-Lead solder, which is the more commonly used solder, but solder is any kind of alloy that is used to fuse metals together. This includes gold solder.
True, but tin/lead solder is the most common. Using gold solder & circuit boards with gold leads/runs really jack up the price.
Of course, we are also talking about Maxima. :-)
And because we’re talking about Maxima, she needs a dictionary. ;p
I was meaning about the gold. :-)
She need to be careful, Tin/Lead solder sticks to gold
Actually their are four types of solder with different tints or colors to them, they are also used for slightly different soldering jobs. In either case their are four types that I know of and each has a slightly different color and temperature tolerance. The regular tin, which is silver, a gold type solder, a blue solder and a sort of pinkish red.
The primary choice between solders is balancing the differences of cost & the properties of conducting electricity. Tin/lead is very cheap & still conducts well. Silver is a better conductor than copper, but more expensive…Gold is like silver on steroids in both cost & conductivity. I’ve never seen or used the blue solder before; I don’t remember what the comparative properties are.
If you’re in North America, be thankful you aren’t forced to use lead-free solder all the time, like us in Europe.
I have to use SAC (tin/silver/copper) solder – and it’s a real pain to work with compared with the ‘proper’ stuff. It needs a higher temperature, so rework often leads to broken pads (which I have to stop and fix).
And it’s a dull grey, rather than nice and silvery 8-(
Sounds better than breathing lead. I chose lead free solder for my hobbiest projects, it work fine, my iron does go up to like 850f or something silly though
I’m expecting the fight to end here. Vehemence went into this fight fully expecting maxima to never unleash the energy blasts because of the collateral damage it would cause. Now that he lost an arm and possibly his life, he will surrender and we’ll see about eight comics to wrap all of this up. Then it’s onto chapter three!
Or he starts to chuckle, Max stops dead in her tracks with a look of “oh shit” on her face, and V regrows his arm and eye as his chuckle turns into maniacal laughter. Oh and now V is ten times as powerful as he just was. Game… set… match… or so V thinks.
If that happens, V gets his head blown off. Max is serious.
Somehow I begin to want V to win now. Or at least not die :-(
Maybe he needed Max to use her blast against him so he could get an immunity against it, like he got against “getting poked in the eye”. Somehow I hope so. He has been kind of a gentleman brawler so far…
Max is ready to blow his head off if he even suggest that he’s thinking off anything other than surrender
It won’t stop, it’ll escalate!
It’s already established during the first few pages of this comic that this *won’t* escalate to the point that ARCSwat can’t end it.
She gave him the five-finger discount…
Wow. You can really tell who the serious anime junkies are from reading this. Why, oh why, do so many people want Vehemence to have another big reversal this late in the game? What is the objection to letting the fight die and getting on with (gasp!) the story?
We’ve spent all this time wading through the trash villains and finally got to the main course, and thus far it has been a really short and uneventful fight. I get that that’s more realistic, but frankly I’d rather watch a 20 minute WWE fight than a 2 minute UFC fight.
Not to mention, considering that Max has actually been struggling for awhile this sudden super powerful attack seems really out of nowhere and effortless. It would make sense that she’d have to dump stats from her other attributes to do that kind of damage, but what’s the point of her taking that kind of risk if she never pays for it? And on top of that, Max i telling Vehemence he has to have limits, limits which she clearly doesn’t have herself, which once again is painting Max as this perfect goddess who is just really, really boring to read about. It’s the same reason why I hate Dabbler.
I’m not even close to being the first one to point this out, but… this is the first battle the team has fought. Claiming that Max has no limits or is a Mary Sue is clearly a vast oversimplification- not to mention a claim with barely a shred of evidence to support it. Desiring to prolong the fight just so Max takes a whupping seems petty.
Frankly, the endless trash baddies and overly simple defeats of all of them has left me with a profound sense of boredom reaching this late into the fight. I want it over so that we can get into things that actually say something about the characters in question.
Its not a claim, its a bluff. She has limits and having limits she recognizes someone who believes that they have no limits. If he has any power at all left after that attack and hits her she will go down because she just had to dump all of her power into that attack meaning she is in turn totally vulnerable right now. Again at this point she is bluffing and has nothing left. However with the massive damage V just took he may not be in a mood to counter attack. Flip a coin, he doesn’t seem to be showing any powers of regeneration, however being what he is he could have a healing spell. Again however being what he is most of his spells would be power focused into doing damage and destruction. now keeping all of this in mind if another villain shows up at this point and hits her from behind she will go down, Max is fully versed in her limits and since she knows her limits she can pull stunts like this one. But to be honest this is really pushing the border on reality. Yeah she can do this but let’s be honest their will be fall out on her pushing her powers to this point. For every action their is a counter reaction. All things have a balance and that being said their will be hell to pay for using up so much energy in an attack. She may be able to bluff it for a while until they take the enemy away, and maybe even until she is alone. But when she comes down from the power shift its going to be ugly.
Maxima already has a broken nose, and had an opportunity to put everything into blast. Rather than out of no-where, I’m reminded of her demonstration, blasting is her ultimate attack.
How is this an out of nowhere attack? She already demonstrated she can do this, and she was only able to charge up this blast because Sydney was distracting him.
And she clearly has limits, demonstrated by her broken nose, and that she needed something distracting Vehemence in order to actually put him down. That blast took time to charge, time she would never have had if Vehemence had been focussing on her (she had to focus fully on dodging his attacks)
Maxima was only struggling because she was trying really hard not to just kill this guy outright. This required guessing his limits based on performance and then thumping him accordingly. Made difficult by his ever increasing power levels which she didn’t realize immediately.
He finally pushed her far enough she is edging closer to just killing him for safety sake (which I would have done right now or some time back actually. Personally… ) So what you are seeing is her taking the gloves off and jumping her attacks up a couple of levels of destruction with intent to maim/kill instead of arrest before he powers all the way up to where she is forced to Max out just to hurt him. She needed Sydney’s distraction to get the time to do this focused attack so I’m guessing Vehemence was getting close to the point where Maxima was going to have to tell everybody to evacuate so she could seriously blow the area. (which might have been dangerous to a Maxima who just maxed [or come closer to maxing] her blast)
Maxima takes risks in her strategy. First to train her team and now to arrest rather than kill a hard to predict perp.
Personally, I’d rather watch paint thin than spend five minutes on WWE, but that is another story altogether. ;p To the topic at hand, how does her stating to V he has limits equal Max not having limits? She is talking about him, not her. Makes no sense.
Also, thematically, letting the battle end with this represents something of a broken aesop. As V noted, it was the heroe’s cliched “let’s solve everything with our fists” response which allowed him to gain his power. From a story stand point, this would seem to imply that an “out of the box” response was required. If it ends with this, Max literally solves everything with her fist. Put another way, violence isn’t always the answer … oh wait, yeah it is.
I understand your argument, but it has a couple flaws.
1) There have been a number of “out-of-the-box” things tried; none of them have worked or, really, even slowed him down.
2) Unless you can suggest a method of defeating V that is both consistent with the characters and utterly forgoes the use of any further violence, a nonviolent solution just isn’t in the cards.
3) While many people don’t like to admit it, sometimes violence is the answer. I know that goes against some established tropes that say heroes must come up with clever and peaceful ways to reign in the big bad, but sometimes the big bad is both big enough and bad enough that the only solution is crushing him flat. V reached that point when he informed the heroes that not fighting was not an option.
1) Under the assumption that something out of the box will eventually work, I would say that this is well within the bounds of conventional narrative. Typically, things are tried which don’t work out in an attempt to build tension. The author may end it here, it’s his story. However, if he does, it will be a bit sloppy (in my opinion) given some of the other things he’s written.
2) I’m not certain that you’d accept any solution I might suggest. It’s one of the downfalls of an internet discussion of a fictional work. Still here’s one that’s been implied as possible and seems nonviolent: Dabbler has displayed that she has a working teleport system (recall her demo during the press conference) that doesn’t seem to suffer the same limitations as Harem, can be placed on objects, and activates quickly. It’s a horribly broken piece of tech for the setting (again, my opinion). She changes the teleport destination from her lab to a point well outside the earth’s atmosphere, and activates it. V finds himself floating in the void, and has to burn his violence juice to keep himself from decompressing. Lethal in most cases, but it’s not violent.
Alternatively, they wake up the teleporter V had previously knocked up, and have her do the porting. She’d have plenty of motivation given his betrayal.
3) I’m not arguing that violence doesn’t solve problems. I’m arguing that it presents a thematic problem for this particular narrative. There’s been too many story elements introduced arguing against the further use of violence for it to be elegant to just use a heck of a lot more violence. The author is of course free to do it, but it seems like poor craft. There are ways to subvert the trope of course. The classic one is that V would get so much violence energy he couldn’t handle it.
Knocked out, not up.
Have a Harem grab a gallon of chloroform and dump it on him.
That’s not how chloroform works
While it’s true that chloroform works in a vapor state, if you doused Big V with a gallon or so of it in liquid form, he couldn’t very well escape the fumes released as it evaporated, now could he?
Knocked up Opal? Man, apparently making ka-pants is not his only power. :D
1) You are correct- we are well within the bounds of traditional narrative. Ending it here, however, breaks traditional narrative, especially as the assumption is that now V will have to get his second (and later third, fourth, fifth, and umpteenth) wind. Granted, we are not talking about real life, but even so… reality doesn’t work that way. People may get a second wind; more likely, though, they start getting beaten into paste, and they end up as jam.
2) I think we’ve established that we’re going to disagree on this one. I would say that, from a narrative standpoint, any use of powers against V could be considered as violent. Granted, it’s not the same as punching him, but it’s still the imposition of will through force. As to the specifics, I believe it’s been suggested already and countered that Dabbler’s teleport cannot be used on living creatures (I grant you, that makes me question the nom-nom radiation eater). Regardless, that just transfers the mantle of broken and overpowered from one character to another. It does not eliminate it. Waking the other teleporter is better, but has the problem that her ‘porting is, essentially, passive- V has to actively engage the portal to be affected by it.
3) At what point is it no longer sloppy narrative, in your opinion, and therefor acceptable to go from “V can absorb violence and it just makes him stronger” to “V has absorbed enough and now additional violence is more than he can handle”? I would argue that Maxima has already passed that limit- I hope.
Regardless, none of this addresses the simple fact that the fight has left me bored and simply wishing that it was over so that the narrative could start to move again. It feels like it has stalled.
Dabbler’s teleport gadget is not only *imbedded* in her cybernetic arm, but it’s linked specifically between itself & her lab/workshop (location & size not specified yet). So far, only relatively small items have been ‘ported through it, the largest things being the sword she used in this battle & her portable railgun demonstrated at the press conference.
In short, even if that device *could* ‘port something as big as V at all, Dabbs would just be setting this guy loose in a virtual warehouse of high-tech gear & possibly magical artifacts. It wouldn’t be wise to let Hitler into the armory, ‘ya know…
As for waking up Opal to do the teleporting…Good luck. She’s got a probable concussion when V smacked her AND she’s already been sedated to keep her unconscious. Even if you give her a stimulant to counter the sedative, she’s still going to be groggy & probably not capable of focusing her power…this doesn’t even include the effects that being whacked on the head would have.
And Maxima’s guess that V has a “diminishing return” on violence is just that…A guess. It may be a good guess, it might be a bad guess. Dave hasn’t shown us what V’s going to do next…It’s just too soon after having his arm removed to tell from this side of the comic page.
Before someone comes around to criticize “the narrative,” perhaps they should wait to see how that narrative plays out first.
From your comments, I get the impression that you might have intended to respond to me, rather than WhisakedJak. If I am incorrect, I apologize.
While I certainly understand your viewpoint regarding waiting for the narrative to end before criticizing, I fear that I have been unclear. It was my intention to make a comment of the probable future of this story arc based on the conditional case of what the story would like if it ended now. I await with baited breath the coming pages.
The sword wasn’t teleported. It was Magically Summoned.
2) I’ve not read the limitations on Dabbler’s teleport. Perhaps, I simply overlooked it, or perhaps it was made in one of the comment threads. I would disagree with you on your definition of violence, but it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that that would happen. I fear we must simply agree to disagree.
3) Generally to make the overloaded with power bit work you have to show the person doing the absorption having some indigestion first. V would have a thought bubble or two expressing his concern or distress at the thought of absorbing more power. Or a worried look on his face, or an Akira esque grotesque body transformation or…
“…but sometimes the big bad is both big enough and bad enough that the only solution is crushing him flat.”
As emphasis on that, please refer to superman’s “World of Cardboard” speech…As he literally stomps Darkseid flat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl_5UwS57X8
No. No. Not the “World of Cardboard” speech again, please, i beg you, anything but that!
Nooooooooo!!!!!!!!!
What? Perhaps you might prefer https://leekspin.com/ ?
If I remember correctly more violence didn’t solve that fight though infact it was Lex Luthors ‘non-violent’ approach that solved that fight and he literally saved Superman’s life.
Not going to try to get armpits deep in this. Just a little food for thought for #2.
What about Halo’s force field? It’s an already established power, it can easily be placed on V without any desire to do him any form of harm, and it’s already been proven to handle even Max-sized blasts. Granted, she probably didn’t go all out for the demonstration, but it didn’t even faulter under those conditions. They could just let him wear himself down within it while they work on helping those who might be injured and moving the prisoners. Maybe just let Max, Harem, and Halo babysit it just in case he manages to crack it (Halo to sustain the forcefield, Harem to get her out of there in case it fails as well as to alert the others, and Max to lay the smack-down.).
Also, if he just so happens to run out of air while going bonkers in there, then he’ll eventually pass out and they can handle him from there. If nothing else though, it’s at least a way to contain him until they can come up with a better plan, no?
Halo has to be in the shield, so she would be killed. Harem can’t teleport living things. This has been brought up many times before. You will soon have a ninja appearing to give you a sign. Atlantis will rise soon. And, alcoholics are now in danger of alcohol poisoning. :-)
The ninjas are here…
You have been gifted with the signs of Captain Obvious and Captain Oblivious, first for pointing out a strategy that has been proven as non-functional, and second for not noticing everything has been suggested the same thing for several pages now to the same lack of effect.
We are now gone…do not follow us…
Oh my gods… did you just? Yes, yes you did… Have you even bothered following the comments in previous pages? It’s been suggested dozens of times. Each time it’s pointed out that the shield centers on Halo. If he were trapped in there with her, he could simply pound her into paste. Furthermore, given his powered up state, she’d likely pass out before he would, and passing out means letting go of the shield orb, which means Halo passes out, he doesn’t, and in the end all it does is give him some alone time with Halo.
It’s too much of a risk.
Clearly the moral of this story is “If violence isn’t working, you aren’t using enough of it”. Or, “Moar dakka!”
With this group of heroes, there *is* another alternative. Let Dabbler cut loose on him: Death by Snu-Snu!
Don’t care the number of times people have said it. I still approve of this plan.
Just who has ArcSwat beaten with something other than violence?
This is ArcSwat’s first fight, so that question isn’t entirely fair…
As for who they beat with something other than violence, oh, I don’t know, For Whom The Death Tolls?
Having a big trash group battle with its own boss this early in the comic plus Dave still working out his pacing has caused some issues with how people view the importance of this fight. Even for those just reading the archives it is starting to get some size to it which is granting it a feel of importance that I think Dave never meant it to have.
I think originally Dave just wanted to throw his characters into something that would allow him to introduce some of their nature/traits to the viewer early on by showing not just telling. Like the press conference display allowed him to show their powers.
Up to this point we’ve been told tons about how much more powerful and experienced Maxima is vs. most other supers but only shown a little vs. normal bank robbers (or those that were operating as such). Her reputation being well established as story “fact” instead of author forced hype (see the Worf Effect trope) is apparently important enough to Dave to get out of the way early on.
And that is all this is for. V was made just powerful enough so that we could get a better idea of what Maxima could really do instead of just hearing about it. This whole multipart fight was just character establishing fodder. The length of it got away from Dave, as he has said himself, and is now being viewed as an important story itself instead of just a larger version of the bank scene.
Now it has become so important that I keep seeing replies saying everything from, “If Maxima doesn’t to well against this guy it is a betrayal of the expectations Dave created with all of his descriptions of this characters abilities and experience. It will make her a Worf from the Worf Effect!” to “If Vehemence doesn’t do well it will be a betrayal of all the hype and dramatic tension that was built up around him up to this point. (especially after all the easy wins)” and of course the famous, “If Maxima doesn’t get the shit pounded out of her by Vehemence and have to be saved like a damsel in distress by her team (not just helped like saved) with the ultimate win going to Sydney (or something like that) then Maxima is a Mary Sue!!” So Maxima is either a Worf or a Mary Sue depending on whether she wins or looses. But either way Maxima looses in the eyes of a good chunk of the fans. In her first fight on the first day of the comic (not counting the flash forward or whatever at the beginning). This seems to be some kind of combination of a pacing issue (fights too long for a Slice of Life comic?) and having a lot of people out there who have been burned by badly written very powerful characters so often in the past they are primed to hate Maxima the instant she was described as one…
It will read better in the archives and Dave has learned a lot about pacing and what this has done to our expectations so lets just chalk it up to a learning experience. We got a lot more on the characters abilities and reaction types and Dave learned a lot about how hard it is to shrink something like this down. Now that most of the characters nature when fighting has been shown maybe more fight scenes will be way short from now on just showing the highlights.
This answers more than what the original poster said but the OP spawned so many replies I decided one big post would take less time, space, and be less annoyingly repetitive.
I like what you’re saying. The ridiculous fight fan in me wants this to go on for ten more rounds, but really it shouldn’t. Taking in mind that this is just the team’s intro, V should get one faux second wind that is immediately, and finally shut down by Maxima. Something like an arm regrow or whatever that Maxima instantly vaporizes then breaks both his legs. A clear show that the kid gloves are off and that any narrative attempts will simply be shot down. The end of this fight would be a good Christmas present.
Nice move on Sydney’s part and big double thumbs up to Max for finally letting him a serving of come uppance!
Bah, tis but an enhanced-flesh wound. That being said we’ll see if he has enough energy to grow one back.
Yeah, this looks like a tipping point for Vehemence to decide if he’s got enough Kajones (well, he hasn’t *lost* them yet) to keep it “up.”
Maybe since his tattoos on his (now disintegrated) arm are gone then any possible regeneration abilities/powers/magic won’t bring back his tattoos as well. Maybe his missing tattoo arm will act as a power leak and gradually drain him if power. It’s late and I’m tired so I apologize if this makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense! :P
Yes, it does actually. Good thinking. I never thought of that. Maybe Maxima did?
Some others have mentioned conjecturing on the significance of those tatts for the past couple of pages or so. Earlier in the comments for *this* page, I’ve conjectured on the possible significance on the patterns being broken now. While I’ve considered V might have either reduced ability to absorb more V-Energy or not able to absorb any more at all, you’re the first to point out that it would actually be draining his power…Like poking a hole in the bottom of a water bucket.
Well, the side in this case. But still, a hole
Well, there might also be a completly uncontroled release of all his energy. *Boooom!*
What about a power reduction based on body mass? Perhaps it could be some calculation of body size that defines his maximum power storage/output, and therefore by removing parts of him you gradually reduce the amount he’s capable of using along with the ability to utilise the power he has.
you know whats gonna happen? the fights gonna wrap up than everyone’s gonna be like “oh where’d all the OTHER villains go?” Queue teleport lady woke up during the commotion and got them all out.
Nope the are being watched over by Peggy & Harem per Maxima’s orders in
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1547
At least one of Harem has been treating villain injuries & slapping sedation cuffs on them since the bodies started falling.
“Max is a solder first”
Hmm … I know that Max had iron abs and body … by I’m sure that supposed to be Soldier.
Sorry Dave … =(
Oh, congratulations on hitting your 3,000 goal on Patreon at last!
The point has been made.
The team will think twice now before going blindly into the fray believing that they can handle anything.
I like V, I really do, but a super fight were someone ACTUALLY gets hurt and doesn’t have a mage colleague, cybernetic implant, clone or whatever Deus Ex Machina solution for a couple of days/hours/minutes latter being completely unscathed, would be refreshing…
I have no problem with violence as long as a price is paid… because it always is.
Since there is no “Thumbs up” option, I’ll simply say, “Thank you.”
Well, to be fair to ARCSwat, this is their first battle against supers since the team actually formed & trained together; indeed, they probably never even *had* any kind of plan to work against such a mob of “grouped enemies.”
Their training may give them some material to work with for tactics & teamwork, but there’s also the ‘ol “no battle plan survives intact against a real enemy” maxim. Yeah, they have to re-work some already-existing methods & work out some new methods, but this is still an exercise in “trial & error” for the most part.
I can just see the report writing after this. “At his point in the fight I had disarmed the subject and directed him to surrender…”
As long as V still has one arm, he’s not disarmed! Falsified report! You got KP duty for a month!
Even if he could only head-butt, with that torso … that wouldn’t be a nice…
Sooo…After he’s been disarmed, he’ll have to be-head them?…
Works with:
Humans; Werewolves; Vampires; Zombies; Ghouls; most critters and even slows down Leviathans…
Why not, pray tell!
It’s a good catchall!
…and if “something” survives beheading, you know you got problems, and will not fool around…
No, then comes defeeting him
He could bit yer legs off.
I hope he wasn’t left handed. Because that would suck.
Not that losing an arm doesn’t suck but its the principle of the thing.
If he was left-handed before, he certainly isn’t now.
He seems to know a lot of people. I’m sure his cyber prosthesis will work fine and come with cool attachments.
Well, not sure if he’s left handed but he has one hand left.
HO! LY! SHIT! SHETOOKHISARMOFF!
I guess you could do it that way too. . .
Also, I like the “Not touching you” move. Imagine the lawsuits if she did touch anyone with her tentacles. . .
And once again, because there was no reaction…would be nice to know what other people think about it:
If V was not a Malumi, but dies a VIOLENT Death, he will born/transform in a full Malumi? He has seen what Maxima can do…and in some way it would bne a real ironic twist…
V is intelligent..and YEAH Maxima is a Soldier, but he has set up a big plan..in a few hours work…there is always a plan..
HOLY SHIT This is awesome.
Well as someone pointed out the fight has been dragging on for sometime, and the number of pages I think are close to filling its own comic issue. That is a tad long without something in between to break it up.
Now my thought about V was about his power. His limit, as I can see, would be the ability to only absorb violence ‘energy’ from the localized area. Because if he could absorb it from any part of the world, his power would literally be nigh limitless.
I feel sorry for the big guy :/
If this wa mentione before than sorry for putting it but I don’t have time to check every comment and have this urge to post this before a new page uploads :P
For theory that V could heal his wounds with his power well I don’t think he can do that and my reason for this is not ‘because healing is opposite of violence so he can’t use it or it would make him weaker’ My reason has a more concrete proof behind it ‘Dabbler’
As far as we know vehemic energy works pretty much same way as tantric energy other than the source is violence instead of lust. We know Dabbler lost an eye and an arm and put cybernetic replacements in place of them. Although it can be said that Dabbler repalced them rather healing them because she is a tech savvy she confirmed that she lost them in a swordfight which means not healing wounds on the spot was not actually a good idea so it is not that she didn’t heal her wounds to get cybernetic replacements (if she was that much of a tech savvy she would accept Sydney’s offer to replace her arm :P ) it is that she can’t regenerate lost limbs or impairments and it should be same for V as well.
He forms an arm of energy then? That would be awesome…
KA-ARM! Now he has pants for an arm.
maximas hand looks off when shes grabbing vehemence by the arm. looks like a balloon, or sausage links or something ( i think its the lack of the knuckles being shown due to glowiness
I really kind of want that ninja guy from ARCDark to suddenly appear and end things with a single action, just as Vehemence regrows his arm while he laughs maniacally. He just poofs in and steals every last drop of Vehemance’s energy, the way Death Toll stole Anvil’s kinetic energy. Not likely to happen, but it would certainly be a way to wrap up the fight without any more destruction. Just an unconscious perp.
I think we will see an unconscious perp. I don’t care how tough V might be, that kind of trauma can kill normals just from shock even before they bleed to death in a minute or two. Max’s energy blast might be hot enough to cauterize but that’s even more trauma.
Naw. At this point the *REAL* villain decides V isn’t going to win this one and teleports him away. Maybe over V’s very definite will to the contrary, or even while V is in the middle of a full (er, right-handed but still full) roundhouse swing. Maybe he even manages to take V away without even being seen except via Sidney’s True-sight orb.
If one thing doesn’t work… NUKE IT! (Ideally from orbit, but you don’t need to be that far away if you can withstand said nukes.)
So this is a thinger that comes up periodically in discussions: healing. Dabbler’s down a few parts, and it occurs to me that traditional external “Healing Magic” is incredibly rare in most comic book settings.
Sure Healing Factors (or at least overall superior conventional recovery times) abounds in Marvel, but actual “I can Lay on Hands”-ish stuff almost never happens.
I remember back when City of Heroes was alive it’s healing focused heroes were either kind of weak secondary “energy” healers (beneficial radiation bursts^, kinetic energy for a pick-me-up, tech and devices, etc) but oddly enough the real big guns were Empathy Heroes. Not flesh-knitters, not damage-blockers, but “pain sponges” -at least conceptually.
I wonder if ARC-SWAT has one.
I wonder if that Healer would be easy to _deal_ with?
In terms of stuff to make the world’s Faithful sit and pay attention superheroes being Infernal in origin is one thing (Dabbler’s existence makes for a certain endorsement of their being an Afterlife and/or Hells), but actual “I told the cancer to leave and asked the bone marrow to stay” acts of miraculous healing are a sure-fire way to cause total religious insanity.
A super capable of doing the same could be utterly uncontrollable. They’re one podcast away from having a billion followers rioting across the globe. Or they could demand anything -“I have come to speak for Zeus, build me temples and I will heal your warriors.” Or they could be a incredible security risk with desperate billionaires across the globe willing to bet their fortunes on kidnapping an immortality-pet.
Yeah, the real potential crazy’s not Max’s particle beams or Achille’s invincibility or even Hiro’s gorgeous smile -because In Real Life destroying, surviving, and being dashing are all things we can encounter in various mundane ways -for all the terrifying potency nuclear weapons are entirely conventional (no pun intended) outcomes just scaled up quite a bit.
But instantaneous healing? That’s some “Act of God” crap. That’s the kind of thing that could truly alter the destiny of Humanity and in any way possible.
I’m real big on soft power, but if I had to figure out how to negotiate services with some Joan-of-Arc-alike who was pretty sure the infidels were overdue to be judged for their heresies I might consider getting Cruel And Unusual out of fear of what that person could do if they had the chance.
^yeah, yeah -don’t ask me, I didn’t program the damn game. =P
Gosh darn it. I wanted to see the new comic before I needed to leave for school.oh well. I can wait ten hours for a comic page I guess.
Almost 1k comments…
O.O
You said that just to add one more, didn’t you?
I know I just did. ^o^
Sydney, I have to give you a hug, for saying that you were unhappy to be part of that.
*hug*
You look like you could do with some smelling salts too.
Comment 1000!
Yep, I have no shame.
And a big HI to all those coming from Page #346…
I’m glad I’m not the only one who (from reading through the comments) enjoyed the puns most of all :D.
i love that last panel