Grrl Power #487 – Semi-Angelic messenger
Well, I almost forgot to post this page since holiday travel has me all turned around, but here it is. Obviously Ravven should have a Who’s Who entry but I’m not in front of my regular machine, so I’ll get that up when I get back home.
Sydney has a talent for asking people just the right thing to move the conversation right direction. She didn’t ask Krona what her name meant (it’s the feminine of Kronos, BTW. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know if there really is a feminine version of Kronos, maybe it’s Kronosia, or Kronisia. I just made up Krona, but that’s the answer Sydney would have gotten had she asked her.)
Sydney only asked Gunnhildr what her name meant cause it’s a cool name with a cool meaning. It’s like a kind of precognition called “being the agent of the author.”
That name and the way she dresses (and the fact that she carries a sword around) should give you an idea of Gunn’s origin, though dressing in a manner which connects a vampire to their place of origin is an affectation some of them take on in certain social situations, usually when doing so shows of how old they are. Most of the time though, they dress in modern comfortable clothes. Well, modern clothes, maybe not entirely comfortable, as they also tend to dress somewhat eccentrically and certainly fancier than the average couch potato. Some vampires might have started off as peasants, but it’s tough to live several hundred years and not amass some small savings, so they’re not going to show up to a vampire munch wearing their original potato sack.
Check out Wearing the Cape: Team-Ups & Crossovers. Sydney’s first Crossover! I’ve made a dedicated blog post for it, please comment there.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
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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.
Yeah, I guess it would…..
Thier approach blew up in thier face. Quite literally.
Commentary seems to have ignored the most important thing!
Krona with rainbow hair.
Meh, that’s easy to alter.
Commentary? You were the second one to post mate, give them time to ignore her (although, how could you possibly ignore that adorable cheeky grin?)
I think what was meant by that was ‘author commentary’.
Smugness, thy name is Krona. But when you’ve basically just proven you can photoshop reality – which she has – I suppose you have the right to be smug. Wonder what would happen if she tried to apply a Gaussian blur to something/someone….
That’s not a smug grin
It isn’t?!?
No, it isn’t, as someone below said, it’s pride and joy and, well, happiness, but not ‘smug’
Self-entertainment at its finest…..
As grins go that is about as smug as it is possible to smug a grin.
I’d say it’s more of a shit-eating grin, personally. Usually those are a bit more toothy, but I’ll make an exception on this one.
A toothy grin that’s a chunky brown in color is not something I’d like to see…
I LOVE Krona with Rainbow hair!
“Oh, that’s an easy perameter to edit.” *Ding* “See!”
But does the collar match the cuffs? Enquiring minds want to know…
^_^
Remember the 80’s cartoon Rainbow Brite? I once saw where someone had photoshopped a porn movie DVD cover so the blonde on it looked like her… and her downstairs was suitably multicolored.
The more you know!
I didn’t watch many cartoons in the ’80s. Being already in my twenties by then, and adjusting to the worlds of unemployment & subsequently work, I had other priorities…
It’s a polite version of a middle-finger salute to Elspeth’s comment about having a “complete set”.
Personally, I’m a much bigger fan of the Konami Code casually sitting on the flag above her
I’m really glad someone else caught that. Ahh memories.
You know it’s “caught” almost every time it shows up in the comic, right?
Just shows how many new readers we are getting :D
It probably just jumps to the nearest flag/banner to her person on its own. Because she finds it funny.
It’s her own personal banner.
Twitch. Don’t me get /me’s list.
Just for the record /me is my evil twin…
That is “Don’t make me get out /me’s list”
Hmmm, are we sure her name shouldn’t be Chroma? ;p
Paul Simon understands… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpaNJqF4po
I was thinking more along the lines of Roy G Biv. It’s an awkward name for a girl, but it fits right now.
But ‘Vib G. Yor’ would work
Krona is now 20% cooler
But what can she do in ten seconds flat?
She’s a reality hacker, use your imagination.
Oh, look. My bank account has an extra ‘0’ on it, right before the decimal place. How strange!
…and mine has one just after…
. . . and mine is nothing but 0s.
You have a bank account? o_O
Lucky
And now there’s a big smoking hole in the Veil. Joy.
Yep, I was wondering if this would happen. Somebody has a big hate-on for the council, and I’d be making a list of suspects right about now…
Really you have to make a list? Come on folks if this wasn’t done by Mr.X face [previously known as Deus] I mean come on the guy is practically Lex Luther and Magneto all rolled into one.
A bit too crude for him…..
Said it before, and I’ll say it again. My guess is Mr “The cleansing is at hand” from the villains reaction page. Someone who maybe wants to cleanse humanity of the vampires, weres, fairie, and others and all their kin so only the “pure humans” survive. Maybe he thinks the supers are the next stage of humanity and therefore will assist in cleansing the impure? Alternatively it could be the two members of the council that also appear on the villains page (pointed out to me by Yorp). Possibly part of a “if humanity can accept Super’s, they can accept us as well” end the secrecy thing.
Well if it’s anything like the seals on the Veil of Junipher Lee or the Seal in Doctor Strange, you need to destroy all 3 to actually dispell the veil, but since he says it’s operating at low power, it might be that they are 3 overlapping veils covering 3 halves of the globe.
Past comic said that with ONE sigil down, a few incidents might be reported – this suggests that one was already enough to weaken the Veil a bit. With two down, you’re likely to have more incidents, and maybe even a full breakdown in some locations – hopefully remote!
Someone is attacking it, ether to force them out or to make them think someone else was doing it.
Either way, same effect. I don’t think they was anticipating Archon involvement though….
Or they could be trying to get the council to implode in on itself and return to an age where old conflicts can continue unimpeded.
“I mean, I don’t want to be that guy, but the fey have always been careless. If they hadn’t been entrusted with a task that was clearly too much responsibility for them, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Actually, come to think about it. It’s unreasonable to think that the puppetmaster behind the Mannekillers would commit themselves to an attack blind to which groups guarded which sigils, and assuming the mannekillers at each of the other sites had relatively similar weapons and tactics, attacking the constructs was doomed to fail. I mean, what’s the best projection for that scenario?
Custom-pellet grenades: negligible to moderate depending on the size of “boom”
Blades/Spikes: Negligible
Mana-siphoning Counterspell: negligible
Poison: ineffective
Blood-siphoning sword shards: ineffective
Any other race would be devastated by those grenades. Even barring that, mages/demons/celestials/etc would fall for the same pitfall as the fey, and pretty much anything else would be fighting crippled by poison, except maybe vampires, which I imagine 1) that’s what the spike that almost got Dabbler is meant to be for and 2) they have a stronger reaction to having their blood drained.
So why attack the place where you have the lowest chance of success? The only reason I can think of is to make someone look bad, or someone look good, or both.
Some one needs to make an avatar of Kronachrome :D
She gives us those nice bright colors
Then gives us the greens of summer
Makes us think all the world’s a sunny day..
She comes in colors everywhere
She hacks her hair
She’s like a rainbow….
I see coloured hair and I want it painted black
No colors anymore, I want them to turn black. :-)
Momma don’t take my Kronachrome away!
Momma don’t take my Kronachrome
momma don’t take my Kronachrome
momma don’t take my Kronachrome awa-a-a-ay!
GAH I WANT KRONOA’S POWERS
not only for the jokes you can do on people, aka the thong wedgie for example, but also to CHANGE HAIR COLOR AS I WANT hehe
I guess we can call her Chroma now :P
Krona Dash!
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one that though that on seeing her.
Have been calling her Kronachrome from the first time we got her name
And I’m sure she’d get a better card then a certain false god…
Why is the qualifier ‘false’ necessary when speaking of any god? Mankind invented them all.
Yeah, but the “false” qualifier usually refers to someone who’s named him/herself a god, whereas non-qualifier gods are group constructs.
I’m not familiar with any deities who don’t name themselves as such, and that applies in full measure to the majority of gods being worshiped today.
Of course, it’s really just men making these claims in the name of the god(s|trinity|pantheon) they invented, but it applies all the same.
Wait, didn’t the “One True God” also name Himself? So, that makes him a ‘false’ god by your statement
Can she make them fade between colors?
She won’t have to hack reality to do that. As a person grows older, hair color tend to fade anyway…
;)
That is a sign of who Sydney is in panel three: showing concern for a rilly rilly old vampire (or should that be ‘long unlived’?)
Sydney lives in a caring place, notice how it confused Gunn….
She might have been less confused if she didn’t answer ‘what does your name mean?’ with ‘This is what half of my name means’. Especially when the combined meaning is different than the two parts on their own.
Though it might be more ‘why are you getting so close to me’ confusion.
Looking down her nose at Sydney, refusing to shake her hand, responding with curt replies . . .
Gee, Gunnhildr, I cannot imagine why vampires like you should need a little good PR. Perhaps you might try to be a little friendlier?
Maybe it is just her reaction to the unexpected thong wedgie she’s currently experiencing and probably trying to hide.
It’s a problem that she wasn’t expecting, she’s in open view of quite a few others…Yeah, some people don’t mind it if they adjust their underwear in public view, but being a bit old-fashioned, Gunnhildr’s more the type to just “ride it out” for now.
One does not tend to have conversations with your food source.
My lunch begs to differ.
At Milliway’s, you can talk with the cattle before they serve it to you…
Some fen nicknamed author Larry Niven ‘Speaker to Seafood’.
“Looking down her nose at Sydney”
Of course she has to look down her nose at Sydney. She is like a foot taller than her.
“Sellsword”? Never heard that used before.
Seen it used in some other fiction, along with ‘blankshield’.
I’ve seen the term used here’n’there, mainly in historic or fantasy contexts. Very basically, “mercenary”..
She’s basically calling Ravven a mercenary. One who fights not for lord or country but merely for whoever pays the most. I get the feeling these two have a bit of a history, and it’s not particularly amicable.
THE LANDLESS
by Corwyn the Dirge
We’re landless sons and gutter-scum
Good men and viscious brutes
A band of sellsword brothers
Outcast, torn up by the roots
Chorus:
We march, we fight, on land o’er which we roam
Unwanted hired soldiers with no land to call our own
We bleed, we die, reviled where we roam
Unwanted hired soldiers with no land to call our own
The threatened Kings and rebel Counts
Greet fair before the fray
And when we’ve done their dying
Quick to send us on our way
Chorus
The battle-lords give orders
That the gods could not obey
And use their loss as cause enough
To cheat us of our pay
Chorus
The shining courts and noble folk
Can treat us with disdain
No landless mercenary scum
Their famous names to stain
Chorus
We’re sellsword thugs and cunning knives
Who murder for a price
But no Brother’s ever cheated me
On worse than throw of dice
I’ve used it as part of a cosplay many years ago. The picture was taken back in 1978. I was a ‘Sellsword’ I even had cards that read “Have Sword-Will Travel” .
https://pre02.deviantart.net/d540/th/pre/i/2011/141/b/3/sellsword_by_kaeto1-d3gwm15.jpg
Sell Sword? Looks more like “Sell Bow.” Hmm, high school library?
College Student Union.
If you notice there is a blade sheathed on each side of the boots. A Kukri on the right side, and a Sabre on the left side of the belt. Unseen at the rear of the belt there is a hand axe. Plus among the arrows is a cane knife. I still have most of those weapons to this day. The costume was my first attempt at cosplay which explains it’s crudity.
I created & played a GURPS character in one campaign, a half-Orc who usually worked as a bounty hunter when not employed as an army scout instead, whose character image (drawn by me to show the GM & other players what he looked like) took the form of a poster advertising his services which included the message: “have crossbow, will travel”.
My favorite character along those line was a holy warrior of Arvoreen the Defender. His cards read, “Halfling, Will Travel.”
It is someone who, literally, sells their sword to the highest bidder, as 7thsealord and Stormtalon said, a ‘fancy’ (or would that be archaic?) term for a ‘mercenary’
‘Blankshield’ on the other arm is new to me, but understand the meaning (your shield does not bear the heraldry of a lord or country)
Similar to how the old Cowboys-n-Indian movies might feature a corrupt banker as a main villain & hire “gunslingers” as an enforcement arm to their schemes.
I’d always heard gunslinger as any extremely competent gunman, but there very much is an element of mercernary in the phrase, isn’t there? The thugs retained by the villain in Westerns also commonly went by “hired gun”, which still resonates as the outsider brought in by the employer to do a task that is in some way onerous or difficult.
That proud grin on Krona’s face makes the first panel the best panel on this one imho.. Decided to complete the full spectrum (see previous comic) on her own. I love it. Seconding the previous request to avatarise rainbow!Krona. Meanwhile the plot moves onward… I wonder if the rainbow gradient on Krona stays for the rest of the meeting…
That was it, ‘pride’, not ‘smugness’
The rainbow ‘do will probably stay until she changes it (or DaveB forgets :P)
Skittles: be the Rainbow
Pride you say?
Heh. She gives DaveB a good excuse for forgetting details like that. She’s got to be one of the easiest characters for an author to work with if a lapse of continuity slips in occasionally.
:D
Maybe that’s where DaveB got the idea from :D
If not, it is now because Kronchrome just ‘adjusted’ reality to say it was :P
Does Gunnhildr still hold the same religious views she had throughout the centuries or did she go mainstream?
Depends on what beliefs she had prior to getting Fanged
If her religious beliefs included “There is no such thing as vampires,” then her religious beliefs would have changed since her conversion.
That’s usually what conversion is all about, after all. :P
The Super Mansion ad is messing with the site and turning into a popup.
Yep the add and something else is screwing with this page.
Pop up blocked easily, but the other problem is add refresh sends code to browser to goto bottom of the page. About every 30-45 sec.
what I’m curious of: are the groups Guarding the Veil Sigils indicative of who they protect from being noticed? because if so they just removed the Fey from the Skirmish completely, and Crippled the Constructs at least.
also, calling it now Raven is going to betray them later on.
I think it’s a shared responsibility, which is good for unity, but causes a weakness with people like the Fey who rely on magic….
Really? And Gunnhildr and the guy she was sitting with behind Azilus (ah, Zova as I look back)? The guy who was surprised that Gun Hildreth suggested helping until she pointed out the council was going to win anyway? The guy who still hasn’t been put in a who’s who even though he’s had a speaking role in at least two pages (one of them prominent, the other more of a peanut side gallery comment). I even find the snark comment page suspicious because he seemed to be sitting with Azul us but not really on board, ie ready to play any side.
of course, this could all be an early set up to later make him the person we should have suspected sooner, only turn it around to show he was on the good guys’ side along. But then if we kept going we could twist the trope into Eschesque proportions.
The “Ancient Wealthy Immortal” cliche never really sat well with me. How would they amass this wealth? They would still have expenses, while thier job opportunities would dry up due to the hazards of thier “gift.”
I’d like to read a story of a dead broke vamp have can’t keep a dime in his pocket.
well look at it this way, how much of your yearly salary is spent on food and drink? now imagine you could cut those expenses and survive. now you have an idea of why it would be easy for a vampire to become rich.
Two words: Compound interest.
Start with a lump sum of five thousand dollars.
Saving 500 dollars a month(6,000 annually) at 5% interest compounded annually for 50 years gives you 1.3 million dollars. Double your monthly contribution to 1000 dollars a month(12,000 annually) and you hit 2.5 million in 50 years.
Barring taxes of course.
And unlike normal humans, you don’t need to worry about healthcare, your earning potential doesn’t drop with age, and you have superior means of screening your financial advisors; Bernie Madoff is unlikely to have pulled off his scam on an adult vampire, for example.
When you are a vampire/immortal of any age, you have to either be a blithering idiot or making active effort not to end up with a significant nestegg by the time you’ve been around for a couple decades.
At least in the modern world.
Way to not take in to account inflation.
Inflation like we see today is an artifact of going off of the gold standard. An ounce of gold is alway worth an ounce of gold, and in the good old a single country could debase their currency like Rome, or go to paper promises lie pre-revolutionary France when they went to paper promises. Now the entire world economy floats on magic paper promises, and we wind up with entire region’s taking a crap….
Indeed. You can normally expect – over the long haul – that the gold supply will be one of the slower-growing forms of wealth. So if you’re using it as money, and don’t debase it, you have a slow DEflation.
(Of course, if you happen upon a humongous supply of readily-accessible gold, like the Spanish did in the late 1400s and early 1500s, it can really eff things up. It basically destroyed Spanish industry, because top-quality imports from countries that weren’t awash in gold cost less gold than even mediocre Spanish products. Spain is still way behind where it likely would be had the conquest of the Incas and Aztecs not occurred.)
…And then again, there’s this guy…
O.o
Which is actually worse than inflation. Tends to lead to a viceous cycle of failing businesses and unemployment and is very hard to fight.
You still would have devaluation of your currency.
Bismarck supposedly ordered Germany off the silver standard when he got wind of the Comstock Lode. (Heard it on a series of documentaries talking about the gold/silver rush in America) A sudden influx of the metal your currency is based off of can really trash your economy.
Inflation like we see today is an artifact of going off of the gold standard. An ounce of gold is alway worth an ounce of gold
Oh my ,there’s so much you are misinformed about. Starting with history, if you think inflation if you think inflation over the last half century is a “today” thing, adding in when the gold standard was dropped, going to what the gold standard is and represents beyond the simplistic dictionary definitions, and diving in to why it is inadequate for a modern global economy.
Expanding on what I just said: going by your scenario of 2.5 million in 50 years, 50 years ago the dollar was worth roughly on-tenth its current value. If one had wanted to save 2.5 million in 50 years without compound interest, it’d only cost $400 a month.
So yeah, inflation counts.
I think you have that backwards. 50 years ago, the dollar was worth more. The depreciation of the dollar and inflation of prices have made the dollar worth less than it used to be.
Indeed…Since the Federal Reserve first started issuing the US Dollar back in the 1930’s, and since the Nixon Administration succeeded in severing the Gold Standard from the currency, the USD has lost a bit more than 95% of the value it had when it was first put into circulation.
since the Nixon Administration succeeded in severing the Gold Standard from the currency, the USD has lost a bit more than 95% of the value it had when it was first put into circulation.
You really think that started only then and because of that? Oh, my.
Yes, I worded that backwards, but the math remains – next to inflation, 5% is effectively nothing.
5% interest? I want an account at YOUR bank :) That’s the thing about that old time traveler’s trick. Even “High yield” accounts only offer around 1% at best. Take a lot longer to be a millionaire if you cant only just outpace inflation.
Replace “interest” with “return. ”
Many investments average way more than 5% annuall return over time. Even ignoring stocks (average annual return of 11-12% over the last 80 years), land was dirt cheap at various times in the past. It’s not so cheap now. Presumably immortals are (at least historically) large real estate holders.
Keep a job, keep several jobs, the best jobs, because you have centuries to hone skills that a normal person can only master one of in a lifetime – if that. So you don’t eat food or need a fancy abode, or really need to spend money much at all, especially if some of your skills are in crafting – and back in those days you would generally make stuff with what’s nearby to begin with. Anyway, you have crazy powers, and the people you kill don’t need THEIR stuff anymore so you just relieve them of their valuables and add it to some vampiric horde.
Gold, jewels, priceless artifacts. Spend fifty years as a pirate. Come to the modern age, keeping this kind of junk up and you’ll have enough ancient currency and treasures to destroy a national economy. Or fund one.
There was an episode of Amazing Stories (I think) starring Mark Hamill (again, I think) where Mr. Hamill played a fellow who loved his toys. He was advised by a Mysterious Fellow to treasure the things he loved. So Mark’s character saved all his toys and kept them pristine, kept buying more of them, and always lived on the edge of poverty. He needed money for some reason later in life, was falling into despair on how to get it, and a passerby noticed one of the toys in his vehicle.
The auction of his near-mint vintage toys brought a tidy sum.
It was a teapot at a gas station I think. The lady said “I’ll give you twenty for it.” He agrees, figuring it’s enough for gas money. She whips out a check for twenty thousand.
Pirate could be a bit difficult for vampires if the “running water” limitation applies to them…
For the record, the old story of a time traveler or immortal person leaving a few bucks in a bank account and then coming back for it in a couple of centuries when the interest has turned it into a few million bucks is also a lie.
Well, yeah. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as time travelers. :P
Yeah, I remember a guy mentioning that tomorrow.
Everybody’s a time traveler. We just happened to be struck at moving only forward in time at a rate of 60 seconds per minute…
;)
you can travel back in time, but only mentally. it’s the cause of deja-vu.
No, that’s due to dreaming about events that happen to your counterparts in alternative realities where the ‘current’ date is slightly different…
Probably the easy way for a vampire to amass wealth woukd be real estate. Buying large amounts of land long ago, and renting it for living and business. Not to mention long term investments, and business holdings. As someone who can take the reallllly long view, there are lots of options. And that’s not even taking into account their possible ability to supernaturally influence mortals thoughts and actions. Force people to make business deals that grotesquely favor you, or turn a ceo of a major corporation or several prominent politicians into your thrall. When you don’t have a time induced endgame like mortals do, aka retirement, you can setup investments that will pay off decades down the road.
It’s been done. So if you’d like to read about this, I’ll suggest Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice. In it the protagonist is turned into a vampire primarily because he is a wealthy plantation owner and the vampire who turned him wanted to live the wealthy lifestyle.
I’d have said “spoiler alert,” but the novel was published in 1976 and there is a statute of limitations on such things. Also, this occurs fairly early on in the novel and knowing it in advance isn’t really a spoiler.
Rosebud was his sled.
But as it turned out, the siring vampire (LeStat de Lioncourt, by name) was already wealthy anyway. LeStat’s sire fronted him with, literally, a chest full of treasures, which he did invest for the long term. Louis (the newer vampire) didn’t know & guessed wrongly when he was interviewed by that mortal. This was revealed in the second book of the Vampire Chronicles series, Tale of the Body Thief.
Did Krona’s hair just change color???
You saw her starting to ‘tweak’ reality last page, that is the result (what, you thought she was still wedgie-ing Gunnie?)
It’s always been like that. :D
+1
Konamii code!!!!!!!
Welcome to the comic, hope you enjoy it enough to come back on Thorsday
Because you are the second person to say that you are going into /me’s list of people to be dealt with.
Krona-Me code
That’s actually funny. Plus one internet to you
…am I the only one that is seeing that first panel as “Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you… Gunnhildr’s breasts! Aren’t they spectacular?”
They cant stand up to Max’s.
…I don’t think even a tank-cannon could stand up to Max’s breasts…
I mean, really, she could twist that thing around as if she were making pretzels.
Yeah, I just had to figure a way to sneak that particular visual in here for the guys…
;)
… … I shall NOT be going to mu bunk for that image.*limps away holding himself*
Ok, I’ve been searching all over, but I can’t seem to figure out what ‘mu bunk’ is. I figured it might be an image archive from the context, but I just can’t find anything.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I%27ll%20be%20in%20my%20bunk
Hey, an urban dictionary definition I completely understand and agree with. A genuine first.
You can’t take the sky from me
I’m not sure just what possible context would be required for Max to give a tit-wank to a tank’s main cannon…
But you’d like to find out?
^_^
But you’d like to find out?
^_^
blasted echoes!
A drunken night out with Dabbles? o_O
Let’s give them a hand!
I mean a warm welcome!
Get your mind out of the gutter, you’re blocking our skylight.
They are the Most Common Super Power after all.
So the Fey’s approach blew up in their face?
…more like sucked?
“It’s Mega Maid, sir. She’s gone from suck to blow.”
No amount of children clapping is going to heal those fairies. “It was horrible, pixie dust EVERYWHERE! Pookas perforated…. I just can’t go on….”
I really do wish this comments-page had a “like” button…
just say ‘+1’
Or +100… :)
Personally prefer the systems where you have to reply, because usually they say why they like (or not like) what was typed
A possible problem with that approach is that, even if only rarely, someone says something so profound, so clever that there just isn’t anything more than can be added. It’s those occasions when a +1 is confirming “‘Nuff said.”
Yup, tend to say that (or similar), specially if it’s a huge long post
Hohnestly there is no “right” approach to magic draining battle manequins
Max would disagree…
I suspect that the PPO might work as well. Assuming you have a target area that would let you use it. The one time we have seen her use it, the area of effect was “only” the size of a M1 tank, so if she fired down at the target most open areas would be OK. Now firing a horizontal blast might be a problem. Plus the possibility of a forest fire, of course.
Yeah, and her targeting isn’t that great either. maybe one of these days she’ll actually get some training….
From whom?
From herself: time spent out in a desert or mountains, with careful supervision from Maxi or Les, will be the training she needs
With Achilles on hand to provide a moving target….
Why all at once am I seeing a weird game of ping-pong where Max and Halo bounce Achilles back and forth over a wall with their power blasts? Or with the lighthook and light slapping by Max.
That actually sounds like a good training thing. And that scares me.
Sounds like a fun scene :D
But was thinking having Les there as he is nigh-indestructible, so being a moving target would allow Sydney to practice her aim
Yes there is: don’t use magic
When all you have is a hammer…
Then don’t blame the bolt when it explodes in your face
Or simply get a better toolbelt
So other sigils are being attacked? Damn I thought I was right about the sigil being damaged just to ambush the council during an emergency meeting. Or maybe they ambushed the council during the meeting because it aligned with what they were doing anyway.
“This was no accident …”
Wait, ‘Sydney’ means ‘Meadow’? Always thought it meant “Here be criminal scum!” :P
That’s in the Australian dialect of the English language.
;)
You Realize it wasn’t hardened criminals that got Shipped out? it was mostly the street urchins that stole things lie a loaf of bread?
Didn’t say anything about being hardened or not, typically the ‘hardened’ ended up in either the army or navy or politics
or dancing the Tyburn Jig…
(Fun fact: the location of Tyburn’s gallows a couple of miles west from the City of London was the origin of the colloquial term “Gone west” meaning “dead”.)
it was just the bread that’d been hardened
Somebody whom I used to know mentioned having an Australian friend who complained that an ancestor had been transported for stealing a piece of rope… without mentioning the horse that had been on the rope’s other end…
Well, if the horse didn’t choose to detach itself from the rope, that the horse’s problem, not the rope stealer’s!
Well, he’s lucky he was in Britain and not the American West. Horse stealing out there would’ve had him hanging from a tree pretty quick. That there’s serious business out on the frontier.
‘Course being sent to the Deathworld Down Under might not be a whole lot better…
horse? what horse? omg! there’s a horse on this rope I borrowed!
Err why does she have exoskeleton on her wings? And why did the exoskeleton disappear after she landed?
Doubt it was an exoskeleton per se. They look like constellations almost, and there are what appear to be stars among her feathers. Could just be an effect.
Those “constellations” look an awful lot like wing bones
I think that shows she’s putting magic into the wings so they can support her weight?
My thought is that this is the leftover effect of her teleporting in, or some such.
Not so much an exo-skeleton, as more her wing bones glow when she flies
And those wings look way cooler folded than the ones in DCUO do (at least, the Small Bird Wings, haven’t found the bigger feathered wings yet :()
The skeleton is on the inside of the wings, but the wings themselves are transparent, but not the bones. Hmm, birds and bats do not have 3 major joins in their wings, just 2, like our arms. What is with the extra pair of bones going from her shoulder to the next major joint? After that it looks like a normal wing. Is she related to Baby with her extra upper arm bone?
Shoulder joint, elbow joint, wrist joint, are you missing one of those? o_O
The bone count between the joints is all wrong.
Again I see terrible anatomy in arm analogs. Humerus from shoulder to elbow , Radius and Ulna between shoulder and wrist, carpals in wrist and hand analogs (like bones in wing tips). Single, double, multiple.
Magically enhanced wings for flight. I’ve read many people reference how human-sized creatures can’t actually fly using wings. The difficulties are compounded by a human body shape, weight and bone density. Also probably reinforcement of (possible) brittleness and numerous other effects.
Yeah, and bees can’t fly either . . . ☺
Which has been debunked. An engineer sometime early last century did a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation using a simplified mathematical model, and drew the wrong conclusion.
No one “proved” that a bumblebee can’t fly. What was shown was that a certain simple mathematical model wasn’t adequate or appropriate for describing the flight of a bumblebee.
Insect flight and wing movements can be quite complicated. Wings aren’t rigid. They bend and twist. Stroke angles change. New, improved models take that into account. Only problem is, the engineer doing the math wasn’t USING one of those models…
In regards to “human-sized creatures not being able to fly using wings”… actually, they can, but the wingspan would be relatively huge, courtesy of the square-cube law. As a creature gets larger, his muscle mass increases by the square of the scaling factor while its mass increases by the cube of the scaling factor.
In other words, if the average adult human were 6 feet tall, a giant who was twice as tall (12 feet) would weigh four times as much. A giant three times as tall (18 feet) would weigh NINE times as much, and so on. This means that compared to birds, a human with wings would have to fly *much* faster, or have a significantly larger wing span (which means more mass that has to be accounted for; not just the wings but the muscle mass necessary to flap those wings with enough speed to generate enough lift.)
Anyway, my calculations (which could be wrong; I’m no engineer) indicate that the average adult human would need a wingspan (tip to tip) of 6.7 meters, or just a hair under 22 feet!
Actually, because the mass increases by the cube, your 12-foot giant would actually weight 8 times the as much as the 6-foot person, but with only 4 times the strength. This in effect makes the giant half as strong as the giant has such a harder time just standing up. This also why elephants don’t jump.
The most massive flying bird (other than an ostrich in a 747) is a Trumpeter Swan, with a wingspan of about 3 metres (10 feet) and a mass of up to 12.5 kg (27.5 lbs). The California Condor is a very close second, with pretty much the same wingspan but a little lighter. The emu gets up to about 100 lbs, but is way too heavy to fly. The Indian Flying Fox is the heaviest self-flying mammal, at up to 1.6 kg (3.5 lbs) and a wingspan of 1.2 m.
To get a mammal the size of a human in the air on bat wings would require absolutely (and self-defeating) incredibly sized wings. The added mass of the wings themselves would then make it impossible to fly.
Quick thought:
Sydney’s two inactive orbs, while having had magic used on them, haven’t been held while in the presence of active magic. She out to give them a whirl while someone there is casting a minor cantrip on her and see if it does anything, like negating the magic or reflecting it or something…
Just a thought.
The problem is somebody around Sydney has to think about it, but they are all busy, and Syd’s mind is going in many directions all at once….
With all this magic/supernatural stuff DaveB is introducing in the story, it would be logical to have one of the null orbs have something to do with magic.
Looks like I’m the first to correct Dave re: the fifth horseman.
It’s actually Ronnie Soak, dairyman extraordinaire.
he’s not a horseman, he’s a cow boy (mooo)
Because who doesn’t fear Kaos right?
Would you believe… the agents of CONTROL?
missed it by ][ that much
“She’s the 5th Horseman, the Angel of showing up late to the party.”
She’s also going to be late to the battle of Armageddon too. She arrives on the Day After Doomsday. Also, the last Sinner to reach Hell…When she gets there, they’re already opening up the ski slopes & ice-skating rinks.
” It’s like a kind of precognition called “being the agent of the author.””
It works well in conjunction with her P(ersonal) L(ightweight) O(mnidirectional) T(actical) Armor. Between the two, an author can make certain that Sydney will live long enough to deliver the exposition speech.
Sooooo…just what IS wrong with Gunnhildr’s underwear? Or did I miss something?
NM read back and ‘got’ it.
My condolences.. We’ll give you a moment
Has anyone warned Gunnhildr about a guy named Siegfried? Or maybe that already happened?
I guess you are thinking about Brynhildr.
The names have been changed to protect… well whoever. Pretty darn close though. And if she’s as old as I figure it’s probable Wagner got the name wrong. He didn’t make it up out of thin air it’s based on Norse Mythology.
If Siegfried turns up, can Shtarker be far behind?
Ignoble! Ziz iz KAOS! Ve do not “can someone be far behind” here!
On the Fourth Panel, Sydney said “Tight” instead of right… or was it intentional?
Saying that something is ‘tight’ is an ‘odd’ expression, but an acceptable one
As long as Gunnhildr doesn’t take it as a reference to the wedgie, and blame Sydney for that…
‘Tight’ is kind of a synonym for ‘cool’
Or it could be the exact opposite of cool. Not in meaning, but in delivery.
I’m having a weird problem with the page loading. For some reason the comic is getting shoved to the far right of the page and the Who’s Who is pushed down below it. Anyone know what the problem might be?
Try setting Adobe Flash to only run when you allow it, and not auto run whenever a page uses it.
ChromaKrona reminds me of OmniGal: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/55
Except that OmniGal’s hair is one colour: lime green, the other four colours are part of her mask
So what is the controller symbol pattern in the first pattern supposed to mean, and is for a hack already done, one she’s doing now, or something else?
That’s the Konami Code, one of the first game hacks. Always nice to teach the young’uns.
Actually it wasn’t what most would consider a “hack”. Supposedly one of the programmers for Konami put it into Gradius as a Playtesting tool (it gave your ship all the powerups) and it wasn’t removed before publishing.
I thought the newcomer’s name was Rawen at first. Somebody needs to tell Ravven that she’s got an extra V in her name. It’s also taken me this long to realize that she flew in and landed on the table!
“Everyone respects me so much! Notice how they all look up to me!” ☺
Yeah, thought it was ‘Rawen’ as well, typically, if someone adds a letter to ‘raven’ it’s a ‘y’ ‘Rayven’
Ingsol pronounces V as W and wice wersa, so you’d think if he said “Ravven” her name would actually be Rawwen.
I was planning on doing a mini-comic where Sydney interrogates Ravven about her name looking like Rawen, even though obviously she’s only heard it spoken and not seen it, but the Xmas break threw me off and I almost forgot to post the page at all. :/
I should add, I like the idea of an angel with black hair and wings named Raven, (probably not a terribly original idea, though I can’t think of an example of another one) but I wanted her name to be somewhat unique, only there’s really only one way to spell “raven” Ravven is a bit of a stretch, but Raiven looks weird, as does Rayven or Ravenne. As it is, Ravven looks like it’s pronounced RAH-ven
mmmmmm, ramen.
Karmic cost for colouring her hair that way: all the rest of her hair is also rainbow coloured, even her pubic hair. Although she shaves her underarms, you can still see the rainbow pattern when she lifts her arms.
1) She has sleeves for that. 2) So?
New headcanon accepted.
That actual sounds like fun. Hmm… finding the spectrum lines would have a whole new meaning.
Awesome lil Krona there haha. I would have to ask her to make my hair purple….
Is Krona wearing like a black undersuit? or just a sports bra I wonder.
That newbie should be careful with flying as it apparently glows her bones which likely means a bit weakness there….
One thing about that vamp Gunnhildr, tho… That way of writing the scandinavian name Gunnhild is either a millenia old, or it’s Icelandic. So, is she a 1000 year old vamp? That makes her several centuries older than Vlad the Wallachian, the man with the pointy sticks and terrible social skills…
I like that Nordic look women with a sword is a vampire, not a Valkyrie. Playing against type is always fun. Actually most of the women in this fight, other than maybe Max are playing against type.
You are aware that Wlad was not the first, aren’t you?
And faces continue to look weird.
If Sydney were the type of person to go for maximum snarky, her comments to Gunnhildr would be “That’s a very interesting top you are wearing. Does it come in your size?
And now that she has heard Sydney’s comment, Krona has already hacked Gunnhildr’s name in the Council registry to “Essenporträt”
“Some vampires might have started off as peasants, but it’s tough to live several hundred years and not amass some small savings” … not having to pay for either food or medical care would certainly help too.
They can also save big on housing. Sure, some vampires have their own castles, but all they actually need is a coffin.
or an abandoned structure with a root cellar
Sleeping in direct sunlight isn’t much good for humans either, especially if wearing only a bathing suit.
What if you’re NOT wearing a bathing suit.
Krona is my new favorite.
And him that sat on her didn’t get any chips, because they’d all been eaten.