Grrl Power #501 – 1-Down
I telegraphed the checkpoint a little bit, so some of you saw this coming. I had considered obfuscating what Krona was doing a bit more, but decided against trying to be intentionally misleading. So for anyone who guessed it, collect your no-prizes on the table in the corner next to the nacho cheese fountain. I mean, it’s gouda cheese. We do fancy nachos here. It will definitely ruin the fountain though.
And importantly, for anyone worried that this breaks causality/ continuity/ everything and nothing has consequence anymore, dogs and cats etc, don’t worry, I got you boo. Not to give anything away, but… hm, actually I can’t really say anything without giving stuff away. Just hang out, I have taken that into consideration.
I wanted this page to be a little more explicit as to what was happening but I just didn’t have the space. I wanted a few more panels to show the exact sequence – it’s tough cause I picture all this as a movie or cartoon or whatever and I have to decide which freeze frames to actually draw on the page.
Anyway this is by far Krona’s biggest trick. At the low difficulty end is stuff like we’ve seen already like flipping bits. Armed to disarmed, locked to unlocked, etc. Hitting snooze on a bladder is the next level up. Making more of an extant thing is harder than that, for instance resetting the ammo counter on a teammate’s gun. She’s pretty handy to have around but she’s not a fighter herself. That’s not to say she can’t tie your shoelaces together without going anywhere for near your shoelaces. About 8 levels above that is the checkpoint.
If you haven’t checked out the fan art I got for page 500, or checked it first thing when the comic went up last week, look again, there’s a few more pieces now.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like. Share the comic with your friends, then compete with them to see who can contribute the most!
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Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
That’s sort of cheating…
Mate i got some news for you….
Cheating death is a super type requirement…
FUTURE VISION!
*sparkly eyes*
Is it cheating to the trope of “Hero’s death is extremely rare?” Or is it in accordance with a “Rule of Thumb” specific to the superhero genre?
;)
It is a running joke in the Marvel universe that you aren’t fully a member of the X-men until you have died at least once.
Also that in both DC and Marvel, there’s almost always a comic with ‘This episode, X dies!’ usually with a picture of the person dying or a grave or a tombstone or a statue, and when you read the actual comic, the person didn’t actually die, or comes back within the same issue. The cover shot was a fakeout.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/82/06/8a/82068a03e4d8a0fba96115493041c21e.jpg
https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/8/84205/3539753-tn.jpg
https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/0/2/0/35020.jpg?v=1
https://www.heroesassemble.com/ekmps/shops/markashley/images/nightwing-148-r.i.p.-2008-death-of-batman-dc-comic-book-7381-p.jpg
https://static4.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/0/4/18838-3092-21057-1-uncanny-x-men-the.jpg
https://www.sellmycomicbooks.com/images/daredevil-81.jpg
‘Sales bait’ predating ‘click bait’, even if having the same underlying immorality. Fake information, or ‘stretched truth’ deliberately designed to mislead, in order to increase profits.
Let us hope that panel does not make the cover of the book! Keep Halo honest.
OH MY! :-D
I was wondering about this. I’d been looking back at the previous updates and wondering what exactly Krona did. I even wondered if it was something sinister.
Sydney’s right. Krona may well be the most powerful character around. :-)
Checkpoints are a REALLY awesome power. They’re also horrifically abusable, just ask Thomas Calvert.
or Doctor Strange
Doctor Who…
I HAVE COME TO BARGAIN!
HAHAH, GREAT reference ther ArtyD :D
Err, meant one that said the BARGAIN line, Doctor Strange reference. When he kept saying that, flying up in Doorman’s face (yeah, I know it’s not spelled that way) I was like WOOOOO every time and face hurt from grinning so much :P
This reminds me of a few time-travel shows, that set right what once went wrong, like Quantum Leap and Seven Days. So Krona triggered the checkpoint, and everything resets to the time of the checkpoint. Now, how much do Sydney and Pixel remember of the first time around? Is it just the emotions of the reset time or do they remember more details? Maybe it just fades like a dream when you wake up. We shall see.
Sydney remembers all of it. (Since it was her personal checkpoint that Korona set up). It was Korona that didn’t know anything of the checkpoint. Since she tied the Checkpoint to Sydney dying (since Halo’s a newbie hero).
Although I’m guessing that checkpoints while spamable, are also limited to number of people it can affect (since Korona only used it on Sydney here, and mentioned that before that she only used it on herself) at one time; and the situations that cause a reset are finicky.
actually I’m betting that the checkpoint ONLY applies to Korona and those two in the sense of returning them (and her) to the physical location and status at the time of the checkpoint, but keeping their memories of what happened. The rest of the world doesnt wind back with them though… so odds are the big bad Sciona still knows the kitty and Halo came in and she caught them, and may or may not be taking steps to get away now that her hideout has been compromised (and the people who did the compromising have, apparently, escaped).
Repeat the rescue a few times and there may be a pile of dead Halos on the ground.
Nah, I bet Krona is really good at stable time jumps, now the question is, how skilled is she about stairs?
The Checkpoint power may not necessarily require mucking about with the flow of time for anybody. Di Sciona actually cut Sydney & drain her? We don’t know that for certain since DaveB didn’t actually show that. Also, Sydney still has her memory of the incident.
Krona may not be exactly sure what happened, but she wasn’t there to see what happened…All Krona knows for sure is that the Checkpoint was triggered according the the parameters that she set. What were those parameters? We don’t know that either…Krona could have set the parameter that “Sydney is in real fear that she will die very soon,”
The Checkpoint power may be nothing more than (in D&D terms) a Teleport or Dimension Door spell linked with Contingency to trigger it once certain circumstances have been met. Spellusers in D&D can really be damn-near unkillable…
DaveB’s explanation should be interesting…
It can’t be a simple Teleport since time has been reset
It’s not clear that time has been reset.
Pixel and Sydney are back where they once were, but that doesn’t have to mean time travel. There could be a very frustrated blood mage making stabbing motions at the air right now who is going to be very aware that her base of operations has been discovered.
Any Sydney was completely correct: Krona is the most powerful person on the planet.
“Not clear”? Krona has repeated a line from before Pixel left (incidently, Pixel is back on the roof), and demonstrates no awareness of anything in the intervening comic time those lines were spoken. Seems pretty clear to me.
It sounds to me the trigger was a bit less dangerous, maybe:
IF Sydney IS Hurt (major pain) THAN Rewind time AND Copy memories
That begins to sound like the novel “All You Need is Kill”
What you just said reminded me of The Gamers 2.
To paraphrase what happened in that movie:
Bard dies a few dozen times and keeps coming back with duplicate RPG sheets.
Warrior: “What do we do now? We need time to cast the spell to stop the zombies!”
Bard: “I know! Hide behind the pile of dead bards there!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ohk5Swy-04&spfreload=10
That was a hilarious spoof. And accurate, as Bards in D&D 3.5 were quite lame unless the DM allowed the few PrCs that added some decent power to the class.
Bards in 3.5 were amusingly breakable. In fact, I built several CharOp level Bards over my stint.
There was the Joker Bard, which gained some notoriety. Basically, Changeling Bard, mastermind who was difficult to find and would attack the party laterally by getting them in trouble with the major power players, and effectively takes the party’s plans and twists them upon themselves. Basically stupidly high Bluff and Diplomacy checks, complete with Glibness when necessary for +30 to both checks, and scrying doesn’t really work all that well on him. He was designed as the counterpart to the Batman Wizard.
Then there was the Heavy Metal Bard, which did use a PrC (but honestly, who didn’t use PrC’s?) Warchanter, and had Dragonfire Inspiration feat. Basically, ‘the whole party has the same BAB and iterative attacks as the dude with the highest BAB, and everyone gets +14 to attack, damage, and +14d6 Sonic damage per attack’. Including summoned minions, by the way. So yes, your Summon Nature’s Ally spell to summon a horde of stupidly weak creatures? Those creatures ALSO had the same high BAB and bonuses on attack and damage, which basically turned them into cruise missiles.
Oh, then there was Pedro de la Cuba ala Costa. AKA ‘Cuban Pete’. You can guess what he did. A combination of Facinate and Mass Suggestion completely Old Man Henderson’d the GM’s plot. Easily a 1.0 on the Henderson Scale, possibly as far as a 1.5.
But seriously, Bard wasn’t bad. It was a 3/4 BAB arcane using skillmonkey gish right out of the box. Additional splatbooks only made them stronger. But then, additional splatbooks made every class stronger. Well, technically, it didn’t make Monk stronger, that was completely hopeless, so it got remade as Swordsage (unarmed variant). And it didn’t make Fighter stronger, because Fighter is a two-level dip for bonus feats.
And, hilariously, the monk in that very same movie was actually effective, which was ludicrous. He had the same BAB as the Bard, with more penalties on attacking stacking up (flurry of
blowsmisses), and the DC to save vs stunning palm is ridiculously low. The chick, who had never before played in a D&D game before, actually created the most optimized character, breaking action economy through Great Cleave and a reach weapon.But then you have a fighter who is not a dip, who goes for Great Cleave, and who has the maxed out strength to make use of it. A spiked chain gives a considerable reach. Not to mention the entangling option, which is opposed by the wielder’s strength. Did I mention that was maxed out?
A single weapon that gives both mob clearing and single-target incapacitation. Back that up with something like a two-handed scimitar (for style and maximum damage resistance penetration) and you have quite an optimised character.
Mind you, I must confess that mine was a barbarian, with a fighter dip. But only because I was trying out the class. It would have been more effective as a fighter.
That said though, the berserking was useful to the maxed out strength concept. Absolutely essential to ‘kill them before they kill you’ however. Play it at less than full-tilt aggression and things could go pear-shaped very fast!
Yorp,
What you have described could be done by any full BAB class. In fact, there’s even an entire category devoted to this melee archetype: the Ubercharger. You forgot, however, Power Attack, Shock Trooper, and Leap Attack to deal enough damage to make things actually be injured. Remember: Doing less than all of an opponent’s hit points ends up doing absolutely nothing at all.
Spiked Chain was a nice melee weapon, but it wasn’t the end-all-be-all and you had to spend a feat to get it. It works best, however, with things like Expansion or other ways to be considered Large for purposes of reach.
Great Cleave is typically a trap, first off because it’s at the end of a feat chain that has a lot of fail behind it, second off because it is rare that you are one-hit killing anything consistently which renders the feat completely worthless, and three: for every charging Barbarian there is an equal and opposite Dominate Person spell to turn him back around on the party long enough to make good your escape.
Almost my entire group. I did, but only for non-casters and then only by permission. Any blanket “this or that sourcebook” inclusion was bound to include things that were broken.
Non-casters needed PrCs and sourcebook option just to keep up, and casters didn’t. Occasionally I’d get a player who would complain that their cleric or druid or wizard or sorcerer wasn’t allowed the PrC and sourcebook things that I allowed to the players who were running non-casters. I invited them to run a non-caster if they wanted to use some oddball PrC. And oddly enough, none of them ever took me up on that offer. Because straight out of the box all full casting classes are quite powerful and don’t need any help at all. And they knew it.
The bard, while a 3/4 casting class, didn’t have access to completely overpowered spells “stock” and had to be played by a fairly savvy player just to be much other than a party buffer with mediocre combat skills until mid-high levels.
I hardly forgot power attack, it is a prerequisite to get great cleave. The various feat requirements, to optimise such a build is why I indicated that a fighter is better for that. I.e. they are good for something other than just a dip, which was my point.
And yes it is a specialised type of character, which does have ways and means of countering it. If it did not, it would be boring. It is all too easy to build a character who is invulnerable to any threat of around their challenge rating. The character described was optimised for his role, which was not that of a tank.
Conversely it is nice to play a character who needs to have some gaps filled. Be that by rings of protection or of spell turning, for example. Or, even better, good teamwork with the party.
Wrong sort of quantum distortion.
Reminds me more of Groundhog Day than Quantum Leap… Or 12:01 (really good movie).
Or Edge of Tomorrow.
Never heard of 12:01 before. But given the company you list it in, your recommendation and your reputation…
Buffy, get the popcorn.
Wow, over three hours long!
Moar snax needed!
Thomas Calvert doesn’t have checkpoints, he has… something spoilery, and eye sockets that attract dull, rusty knives.
That’s a seriously heavy duty ability to have.
Everyone who called it, give yourself a cookie.
Now we know why our little reality warper is with the council rather than Archon, it is to prevent Halo from using her as a infinite life bar. Also, kudos for it not waiting for the death to happen.
Chocolate cookies for everyone!
Except Yorp. Chocolate is bad for doggies.
A doggie treat for Yorp, then.
Some of those Dog biscuits aren’t bad. But peanut butter cookies are probably okay for dogs. Hell my dog used to love peanut butter sandwiches a healthier snack than cookies.
Baking Soda (calcium carbonate) is toxic to doggies.
I have relevant information! :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7p9QiaRLFM
my dog prefers (addicted to) bacon…
Merely substitute the chocolate chips for Yorpie-Snax™ & he’s good to go.
:D
Chocolate is a poison to all mammals. The dosage just scales with body mass in such a way as to make it almost impossible for humans to eat a detrimental amount.
Not impossible. Just very hard. 85 chocolate bars, in one sitting, will do the trick.
Personally I love chocolate, so am mindful to stay within my carefully-measured safe dose.
And the dark stuff is especially bad to our four legged friends. A few ounces of 85% could finish off a small dog.
The main source of dogs getting chocolate is small children who, thankfully, prefer the milky stuff and can usually be caught before they do too much damage.
Darker doesn’t necessarily mean more cocoa, it just tends to. I’ve had some pretty low quality dark chocolate and some milk in excess of 60%. Honestly though, I prefer my milk low cocoa and my cooking chocolate 100% “Absolute Black”.
So now they know Scion is there. Pixel is unharmed and prepared. So is Sydney. Time to call in a report and get the others to converge on their location while Sydney’s team begins a more cautious and active watch.
> So now they know Scion is there. Pixel is unharmed and prepared.
Er… I have the impression that the checkpoint affected nobody but Sydney. So Pixel is still harmed and Sydney… idk, but would she know what happened in that dungeon after she got resetted?
You can see her in the background in the second to last panel – she was there at the time that the checkpoint was initiated, so if time’s been rolled back, it makes sense she’d still be there.
Odd that her predicament didn’t trigger it, but I suppose she was still alive and probably would be for some time…
I’m not sure if the check point was set to trigger on pixel. I think it only sets on one person, who is then the only person to remember what happened, but ti resets everything to that point.
The reset effects everyone. But Sydney’s the only one who remembers what happened.
Depends if Sciona has consumed any Halo blood before the reset kicked in and now has similar memories of what went down.
The checkpoint reset brings all things back to the time that Krona cast it. So Pixel is unharmed and in fact still with them and Sciona has neither captured Pixel nor taken anything from Sydney.
Also, ONLY Sydney has any memory of what happened. We know this because even Krona herself was surprised at Sydney’s reaction.
I get that part of it.
I am referencing line about drinking Halo’s blood might allow Sciona to control the balls. Sometimes the ingestion of blood allows transfer of memory of the victim, brief access to their powers, etc. Consumption mid reset might have cause Sciona’s memory to have jumped back to the same point. She may also remember what happens next.
I’m sure the blood is now un-consumed. I’m guessing only Sydney retains anything from the rewind.
What about the contents of her bladder? o_O
Sydney still has the half hour Krona bought her. Only everything after the checkpoint spell has been reset.
Only Sydney would be overjoyed by “dying & getting away with it.”
I’m fairly sure a lot of people would be … just for slightly less fannish reasons.
For some people, unscratched near death experience is very revitalising. I can relate to that. Plus for Sidney, living a trope is one of her guilty pleasures.
Except she’s not guilty about it, in the slightest :)
“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” – Winston S Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, London 1898.
She got a cheevo.
I love the ‘Grim Reaper sucker punch’ logo on the cheevo.
Thought that was someone poking TollhouseCookie in the eye
If DaveB ever makes a GrrlPower video game (btw, DaveB, make a GrrlPower video game), this needs to be one of the achievements you can get.
But using a checkpoint continually must have some consequences or it becomes too OP.
Also did Krona reloaded in that precise moment or did Sciona actually stabbed Sydney and it wasn’t shown for graphical reasons?
Probably the latter. Showing Sciona drinking her fill out of Sydney via a sucking chest wound is a TAD graphic. Implying that that’s what happened is perfectly acceptable.
neither nor.
Krona said it “would trigger on certain…” after saying that Halo didn’t necessary died.
-> most logical conclusion? Trigger on specified “extrem” emotional stats. Like Syds lifethreatening fear/horror.
And I suppose Pixel was surprised, so neither dead enough to trigger the checkpoint, nor afraid/stressed enough.
She wasn’t surprised enough to get in a couple of claws across Sciona’s face first.
I mean, to NOT get….
Sydney seems pretty sure she died, and the fact the comic is named 1-DOWN (instead of 1-UP) is pretty telling.
In the third panel we can see Sciona grabbing a knife of sorts and in the forth Sydney is clutching her chest. So she was most likely stabbed in the chest, which sounds pretty deadly to me.
I wonder though why Pixel’s checkpoint wasn’t activated when she was captured and bound up.
Second and third panel I mean.
I assume she set the checkpoint only on Sydney, because she’s hohnestly the most accident prone and has the leas field experience
That doesn’t make much sense since it was initially Pixel that was going to do recon, Sydney was supposed to stay on the roof with them.
Probably Krona changed the checkpoint trigger to Sydney when she teleported.
Or, more likely, she set the checkpoint up for all current party members instead of just one of them, with each of them able to trigger the reset..
Just a point of reminder. Pixel was unconscious for much of this, so the last thing she presumably remembers is whatever knocked her out, (and possibly not the last second or so of that.)
It’s possible that the whole team now remembers, but Krona, (nice name, by the way, so long as she doesn’t go and eat her own children, by the way, what type of car does she drive? A Saturn, perchance?,) was already in the act of saying those words when the reset hit, so didn’t react to not speak quickly enough to not repeat herself, (but more so the two scenes would be tied together.)
DaveB said not to worry about consequence for he says he got them covered.
There also already are some known limits:
1. Only those whose mind were brought back remember. Since Krona doesn’t, it’s probably also only the person who triggered the safe-point – Sydney, in this case.
2. Returning a mind means only knowing what said mind knew. If he / she doesn’t know about the reason for being returned, to prevent it from happening again should prove difficult.
3. Even if Krona were able to apply multiple safe-points to multiple people at the start of every day, the more the day progressed to more difficult it becomes to change an outcome for the better due to the dynamics of the people now alarmed that something should happen.
There also is a hint that there might be limitations since Krona stated only having done it for herself before. There is little reason to limit herself, except for there being consequences or limitations if applied.
Let’s see what DaveB lets us know next thursday. ;-)
To explain the ‘save’ in a less world-breaking way I would propose the following. The action of setting up the restore function works by doing a deep scan of the surroundings and building potential worst-case scenarios of the target person interacting with the elements found in the environment. If no fatal danger is detected, nothing happens. If any of those scenarios results in the death of the subject, that scenario is downloaded into the consciousness of the target person and replayed. This gives the person the ability to avoid that particular situation. Of course Sydney is capable on getting herself into any number of other predicaments on her own from this point forward.
The orbs are pretty resistant to magical scanning, and the predicament here came from their function that nobody knew of. So, passively collecting all the present variables and going through all permutations won’t be enough, you still need ability to explore alternate timelines, which doesn’t seem any less OP than actually letting it happen and then rewind time. I’d say we wait what Word of God on the limitations will be.
Well the checkpoint could have just effected Sydney’s mind & not the orbs at all.
Well, Sydney’s ability to bounce back from major mental trauma has to be at near-superhuman levels on its own. “I died, but I didn’t! WOOHOO!!!” is not what Krona was expecting.
I think Sydney’s gonna have another “vegan moment” like when she was first introduced to Peggy….
I’m sure it will get to her later. Dont forget her fear-vomit reaction after her first battle.
“Thank god I’m alive” a different emotion, and it will definitely occur to her later…
Seriously, the more we learn about Krona the more I wonder why she isn’t on ARCSWAT. Seriously bravery doesn’t enter it, because you don’t even need to leave the base! Just put checkpoints on everyone!
Pretty darn certain she has …. limits.
Also, the BIG problem with having multiple checkpoits for different people is, as I see it, what happens when specific outcomes are “bad” for some users but the opposite for others?
I see potential for seriously scary tangles and cosmic-level FUBARs in the local timeline. Imagine multiple versions of ‘Groundhog Day’ AND ‘Edge Of Tomorrow’ AND ‘Back To The Future’ all running across each other.
This. Set it on two characters who secretly oppose eachother or are made to by a third party and you have major paradox potential. Would not recommend.
But paradox is fun!
*blinks eyes on each writhing spiked tentacle*
My guess is that checkpoints have a time and/or range and/or number limit.
She can work with them just fine through the Council, and maintain her privacy to boot. Why would she go out of her way to join ARC?
Maybe this ability can’t be used again for a long time?
Her other attributes are temporarily off-line?
I’m having difficulty imagine the penalty for doing this.
It has to be severe or it would be overused.
Since Krona and Pixel don’t seem to be reacting, Sydney’s the only one who remembers the last 20 minutes.
Prob only the one that triggers the reload, will remember. Pixel most likely thought she is winning, not triggering it, until she was knocked out without a chance to process whats happening
-> no emotional trigger, while she is still alive and therefor no death-trigger.
The real question is how much/long will Sydney remember?
“It has to be severe or it would be overused.”
Obviously that’s true – so why did Krona use it here? This was supposed to be a routine “confirm the place is empty” mission, which ought to be the last kind of situation in which she would expend such a power.
Well perhaps she is genre savvy enough to know that most Super Hero routine checks end badly
Because her experiences made it clear that you NEVER act as if nothing will go wrong and assume the worst case scenario, so for the potentially most vulnerable she made sure ‘better safe than sorry’ was in effect.
Which makes sense if it is cheap and easy. If it is cheap and easy, she ought to be doing ti routinely, which removes all tension from the strip.
But if you loose tension in garments, they fall off. Instant stripping!
It makes sense if it’s difficult and expensive as well, and remember it clearly cost her setting a reset for herself. She sacrificed covering for herself to cover for Sydney instead.
Could still be a group thing. Pixel might only remember being in the building, getting startled, taking a blind swipe at SOMEthing, and blacking out.
Also, in ten years when Krona gets t-boned on a highway intersection by a half-asleep 18-wheeler, turning her Saturn(R) into a piece of grisly modern art, all four of them are going to land back on this roof, at this time, and, jointly, reply with profanity at having to redo the last decade.
Unless Krona resets for just herself, tomorrow morning.
Speculation, of course.
Can someone explain what happened? To me Checkpoint implies a gate in the old Berlin Wall, with Soviet spies gathered round it to shoot defectors. Don’t see how that applies here….?
Save point. Sydney died in a gruesome manner, so she resumed the game from the last checkpoint..
Checkpoint as in a video game. You hit the checkpoint mid level or so, die later on, and get returned to the checkpoint instead of the start of the level.
A checkpoint in a video game is a key location usually before or after a difficult part. Where the game saves so that if you die, you respawn back at that location again.
Don’t play video games much I take it?
In a lot of games there will be automatic save points as you progress. If you die, or otherwise fail to meet the objectives of the level, you will start there instead of the very beginning of the level.
Sydney failed her objective of “Don’t get killed,” and her consciousness got zipped back in time to the point Krona set.
Thanks everyone. I think I understand now.
You sure? We can get twelve more people to say the same exact thing.
Are you positive. because I suspect at least a dozen other people can provide you with the same information.
Not everyone has the same points of reference. We are in a geek-heavy community, but even here there are exceptions to the stereotypes. I don’t watch TV, for instance, unless visiting folks who do. So I miss a lot of TV-related pop-culture references. Anyone who is not a gaming addict would naturally miss game references, such as this.
My response was a joke.
*ducks*
What, where…
I thought there might be something, but did not get it. Which left it feeling like reiteration of the teasing. Either way though I felt that P. I. deserved a bit of positive support. Especially given how polite the reply was.
No biggie mind, it was all quite light.
Now, where is the receipt for my ‘joke detector’? I suspect Machina Industries sold me a dud!
At the risk of ruining the joke by explaining it, after four different people gave variations on the same explanation, and after DomineSatanas gave his statement, referring to the repetition, I decided to have fun by paraphrasing DomineSatanas, in mimicry of the four variations of the original explanation.
Hence why I worked “a dozen” into my reply. My reply was so close to DomineSatanas’s, that it’d probably trip a plagiarism filter.
No need to worry Sydney, if you do die, the author will write a story ARC for your inevitable return.
Also, judging by Sydney’s reaction on the third panel, She was stabbed in the heart or somewhere in the upper chest region
She is patting right part of the chest, heart is slightly to the left, so she was not stabbed directly to the heart (or it is an art error). Being stabbed in the general chest area is of course possible (so she could stay alive longer and “enjoy” the draining process, courtesy of Sciona). And I’m not even 100% sure she holds her chest at all, third dimension is lacking in third and fourth frames, even on patreon 2x res image. She could just as well be massaging her wrists which probably hurt from the way she was held. Or checking her pulse, whatever she experienced must have driven her heart rate WAY up.
Looks suspiciously like her right hand is clutching the left, partially obscured by her left hand clutching the right. That suggests a rather fatal gash to me.
Sydney’s left hand appears to be passive. Compare it to the previous frame, and it is in the same position. I don’t thin there is pulse feeling, or the like, going on, as we have the onomatopea ‘pat pat’. So either Halo is patting the hand (which I agree is plausible as Sydney stated that it hurt), or her chest. If she is using the full palm, then she is patting her sternum.
Whereas if she is using her finger-tips, then she is indeed patting her heart. Whilst one would normally do that with the whole hand, she does have her other hand blocking her, so it is entirely credible that she has been restricted to just using the finger-tips.
All that said though I think we saw what Sydney saw. Halo got recalled just prior to the nastiness happening.
No one going to mention the Flash Gordon joke on the tombstone? Thank you for saving every one of us!
Technically it’s true.
I liked the Flash Gordon reference, I just figured someone else would get it first…and…voila!
Odd. It didn’t trigger for Pixel despite her severe danger. So the question is why did Krona put it on Sydney and no one else?
She put it on the whole party. Pixel might have been severely beat up, but Sydney died (and triggered the save point) first.
It depends on what the reset trigger was. Pixel was merely knocked unconscious after a battle and regenerated from any damage she may have sustained while being milked for blood. Which is not life threatening, per se. Sydney however was threatened with extreme blood drainage while conscious.
Possibly more than threatened. In the second panel Sciona is pulling a knife out her pocket and in the third panel Sydney is clutching her chest. We might have been spared some gory details between those events.
To me, that “knife” looks like the molasses taps that are in the others.
Sydney was right, Krona really is the most powerful.
Krona is either a Writer a la “Namesake” or she basically got the root password to the Universe.
More like a Unix ‘superuser’…
I’m getting a timeline feeling about this :I
Yes, in another timeline, the reset didn’t happen, and Sydney still got drained, Sci-fright is now in control of Sydney’s balls and owns the world and the surrounding star systems
I call BS on this, I’m afraid. If Krona can do this at will, and now knows that Pixel is in an untenable position, why doesn’t she just call Pixel back to the rooftop at some stage before being overcome?
At which point, there is no plot…. or is it a one-way-time thing, a grandfather paradox; not having don’t it at the time, it can’t be done now?
Pixel IS back on the rooftop, just look at the 2nd to last frame.
It is a time loop reset thing. Think of it as a triggered precognition. Sydney just received forewarning of events which would lead to Pixel’s capture and her own imminent death; which they can hopefully now avoid.
Basically we’ve wound time back to https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2385 and everything since hasn’t happened yet, except in Sydney’s memory.
Now, it seems Krona “cannot do it at will” but must preset the trigger conditions; so if a trigger event does not happen to someone, they don’t loop-back. Thus Krona herself was unaware that it worked, Pixel (though safe and sound) did not trigger a reset, and so only Sydney is privy to the forewarning.
Krona hasn’t progressed forward in time, so it’s a surprise, and we haven’t heard fro Pixel yet…
Still BS, I’m afraid. Sydney, with Pixel has apparently now reset back to a point before the card game on the rooftop? Why isn’t she looking over her own shoulder at her cards?
This is developing a case of Heinlein Syndrome, always a problem when trying to logically resolve situations with too many undefined variables.
“Manly Guys Doing Manly Things” lampshades all this perfectly with the joke about “a watched cheetah never bevels” – i.e., it makes no sense, the less you think about it, the better it works..
Krona sets up a checkpoint, Sydney triggers it.
Load screen, please wait…
Back at the exact moment the checkpoint was set up.
The art is literally copied and pasted from 2385, except for Sydney.
If you hit F5 (or whatever your quicksave button is) you don’t expect a reload to bring you back 10 minutes before you saved, right? So why should Krona’s checkpoint bring Sydney back to any point in time other than when she hit F5?
Unrelated: does Krona summon her reality-hacking powers by making a tilde sign with her hand? :P
Think of it as her consciousness travelling back, not her body.
Why would Sydney be looking over her own shoulder at her cards? The card game happened after the Checkpoint was made, a good ten minutes after in fact
To bevel something is to create curvature in it and big cats will arch their backs as they prepare to pounce. Add to that that Cheetahs rely on stealth to get within sprinting range and I think you’ll find the idiom makes a good deal more sense than the kettle version.
I imagine there is a limit to this power.
Greater Power “Checkpoint Save”: Loops player consciousness back in time to point of save. All memories of events up to death are retained. Effect fades after one death or 24hrs. Can only be cast once per 72hrs.
IMHO, “loops player back in time” and “All memories of events up to death are retained” contradict each other, unless the “back in time” point is right before the player’s death which would be totally useless. Oh wait. Normally it’s not the player who dies, it’s the played character.
I was thinking that. If you keep looping back then, eventually, all the different time lines are going to get confused in your head and / or you go crazy. Also, your mind would be the same age as your consciousness so, if you do it a lot and / or have long leaps, you may end up with dementia early.
We have evidence, from “implanted memories”, or “false memories”, that a person can “remember” two different timelines, and not lose their wits about it.
Even if they are telling the psychiatrist where the “bad man touched them” on a doll.
Human memory isn’t a linear record. Not even close.
Groundhog Day showed the perils you mention, very graphically. However it takes a lot of repeats before the problems begin to kick in. And Bill Murray showed how even such problems can be worked through. You do not need to keep track of what you did in every timeline. You only need remember the things which are useful to you, when you loop.
Granted if you physically age as you loop, then you would get more than dementia early, you would also die of old age, if you kept it up long enough. However the nature of these ‘returning to checkpoints’ do not permit that to happen. You get restored to the state you were in before. So there would be no physical degradation. Other than the memories you gain (which do have a physical aspect, admittedly) your brain would not have degenerated.
Think of it like re-reading a favourite book or re-watching a favourite movie. The media is the same each time, although your appreciation and understanding of it may evolve over time. Such that you may spot nuances or details you did not appreciate before. Sadly you may also tire of it. Which is where Bill Murray hit his problem. The boredom of knowing everything that is going to happen.
Combine this with the futility, of not being able to change the outcome, or alter his own day-to-day life, is what drove him to try to commit suicide. But, of course, if you keep getting restored to a safe point, you cannot even do this!
Then it just becomes a matter of ‘living within the moment’ and ‘making the most of the life that you are living’. Appreciating the moments of enjoyment you can draw out of your repetitive life. And making the most of those accumulated memories. Learning new skills (such as piano playing, dancing and emergency medical treatment) is what got Bill Murray through and, ultimately, made him a better person.
Tartarus? Surely even with her foul mouth and the potential checked off entries in “The List” Sydney wouldn’t be involved with Tartarus?
Thanatos, or Hades maybe, but Tartarus?
Primer for those to lazy to look up Wiki..
Tartarus is both a place and a deity, Much like Hades is the underworld and the deity that rules it, Tartarus is beneath Hades and is where monsters/The Titans/ and the most heinous evil of people go..
Thanatos is minor Deity, that being death, a job he shares with Atropos(The Crone aspect of the three)
Her geeking out is gamer related, and Valhalla doesn’t occur to her…
She probably meant that the deity as death was denied her soul due to rewinding time.
yes. that.
I wonder if fish that come back from the dead get to deny Tartarus sauce
Actually, Hades is just the name of the realm. The god is not the underworld.And Thanatos is simply the god of death so he HAS no realm.
It’s actually the other way around: Hades is the name of the God, not the realm (Hades is Zeus and Poseidon’s brother)
The creep kidnapped the girl he was interested in, but at least he didn’t dine on his own children to prevent his own usurpation.
Now, tell me who was responsible for that heinous act.
I’ll give you time to figure it out.
SeanR? Ooh, wait, was ‘time’ a clue? Chronos? Father Time, with his favourite motto, ‘a baby is not just for Christmas, eat it slowly and it will last you until Easter!
Yes. I noticed that our young mage, KRONA, does seem to have a large percentage of time spells.
Sorry – but you have to start making pins out of Sydneys thought bubbles … apologies but I’ve already clipped the “Tartarus Denied” bit and am very tempted to have that as my life goal on social media …
I’ll bet there are limits like the checkpoint only being able to cover a certain amount of time, etcetera.
The obvious limitation I can think of is Krona can’t use that checkpoint ability again until after the moment it was triggered.
Pray that Sydney makes it through this mess.
Which mess in particular? We know Sydney, Maxi, Kenya and Wart are still around in four months’ time (in-comic time)
Someone who looks like Sydney is, yes. In a world with super powers and supernatural there is still a whole host of ways that our Sydney did not make it!
And in the original timeline, she did not.
*cries*
Sooo what happens if you face an entity so powerful they kill you in the past? does the checkpoint still trigger?
I would argue that it does but is entirely useless as the you at the checkpoint is still dead, meaning that no-one is even aware of the trigger.
Okay, gonna say it. Sydney NEEDED (needs?) a good stabbing.
There’s a difference between being ditzy or whatnot and being a completely airheaded buffoon and Syd has been falling into the latter category QUITE often as of late. Attach some paper-thin ideology to her babbling and she could start a side-job as a Spinnerette-character.
Possibly, but bear in mind it has been a rather intense three days for her.
Also important. It’s only been 3 days. 3 Days do not character growth make.
Don’t need character growth to not act like a complete spazoid under danger. And since she actually already showed the capacity to identify such situations, this is actually a regress in her character.
Show me when she previous was actively in real danger of dying before this page
Shadowboxer could’ve killed her easy enough if he’d actually kept the pressure on, and that was entirely Sydney’s fault for complaining about her wrist com, when she should’ve been putting her shield up. Shrapnel from the tank she blew up could’ve killed her if she was unlucky, and that was only a risk because her shield wasn’t already up. Vehemence could’ve killed her if he had thought to try, but at least that was a calculated risk.
Yeah but those were all there and gone moments of danger not something she was able to see coming and worry about in the moment and it’s not like she’s had time to reflect on her close calls.
Did we see Sydney panic and be in fear for her life? No, we did not
You go on about things that ‘could have killed her’, if we are going down that rabbit hole: Sydney could have died when Mr Tubey got caught on the shop door, or when she left Him in her jeep, or got mauled by Yorp when she startled him
YORP!
Me? Never! I would not harm one hair on her head!
I don’t think I fully understand your previous question if the things I mentioned don’t count. I apologize, but could you explain what you mean by actively in danger of dying, please? I thought things that could have killed her was what you were asking for.
“Old habits are hard to break”.
Might seem a cliche, but it is also truer than many of us care to give credit for. It takes a heckuva lot more than three days of varied experience and purely incidental training, however intensive either might be, to change a lifetime of ingrained habit.
Krona’s skill is quite interesting, and may also explain the perpetual tired look that she has.
This is reminiscent of another story I’ve read(Manga actually) where one of the characters had this exact skill, and while only 19 years old in the story had already lived several centuries of repeated life.
She lived with a cyanide pill in one of her molars, if something didn’t go right, she’d bite the pill, trigger the save and try again.
Morbidly,(In white) she had the skill as an infant(instinctively) and it is suggested(the char doesn’t actually know for sure) that lived a few hundred years as an infant trying to survive with parents that neglected her..
What is the name of this manga? I need it.
Apparently it’s called UQ Holder. The character name is Kirie Sakurame.
Yup, that’s the one, a bulk of the Manga is not about her…
There’s a series of short stories with a guy who basically created a reset button that let him rewind time when he felt like it (even shared it with a friend at one point, which left the friend resetting too anytime he was too close when the reset guy triggered it). He ended up having an implant put in that let him reset back around 24 hrs anytime he died and kept cyanide in his shirt collars. He also MASSIVELY manipulated time and the history of the world (he didn’t like the smog in LA and somehow REVERSED THE EARTH’S ROTATION to have it blow out to see and made sure the South won the war for separation). The friend (who was the protagonist) would occasionally find things that were ‘missed’ during the editing, like newspaper articles to events that were made to never happen or be confused about something his friend said because it referenced a previous version of history (his friend is confused why the Chocolate Importers Of America i.e. the CIA had been trying to find and capture the time resetter, because the resetter had erased the guy and the Central Intelligence Agency from existence).
On first look, before reading the author’s comment, I thought Krona made Sydney teleport back just in time.
Yep, but Krona will be explaining, and if the explanation is “you died Sydney, for real”, we may yet see fear vomit…
Well, there are several ways this quirk of Krona’s ability can be interpreted. There’s the obvious: Time Manipulation, which is next to godliness. Or perhaps the “checkpoint” starts some sort of precognitive vision. Unlikely. But what this ability most reminds me of is the ability Kitty Pride had in the movie X-Men Days of Future Past. But instead of having to be there when the consciousness is sent back in time to the body of the previous time, it can be set to trigger automatically.
My thoughts exatly.
Krona didn’t really change time or throw everybody back in time, but tweaked Sydney’s personal time regarding her mind / memory only.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were not so much a “Tartarus Denied” as a “Timeline Denied” feature, just dialing for another which does not include serious injury or worse, and we simply just saw what would have been if nor for Krona’s intervention.
Now I’m wondering if one of Sydney’s orbs has something to do with timelines.
FUTURE VISON!
Just from what we have seen Krona was already next to godliness. Adding time travel is just icing on the cake now.
Sure. but do YOU want to repeat Every Single Hour until you get it just right?
Eventually you get to the point where you go “meh. Good enough.” and go on.
Especially if the last save point was more than an hour ago. Like, this morning, or last week.
Or last year.
And do you DARE go through life with ONLY a SINGLE hour saved up?
The moment someone figures that out, they know that they only have to keep your undoing a secret from you for an hour, before you can’t undo it.
For safety, you want LONG save times, to give you time to catch on to the problem, and reverse it
But for convenience, you want SHORT save times, so you can have do-overs of generally non life threatening occurrences.
Long save times means not hitting reset because you sprained your ankle.
Short save times means not getting the chance to hit undo because you’re now in a situation with no way to survive. Say a Polonium pellet in your breakfast, or cancer, or you boarded the wrong ship or plane. All things that take longer than an hour to go from “oh $#!+”, to oh, dead.
Mh-hmm! Like accidentally saving during a lethal fall, when you’re already on the way down. (Which I have done before, in video games. Thankfully, it was just a quicksave, so I was able to go back to an older save slot, which was about an hour’s work gone.)
Yea, it would be like Sydney teleporting off and Pixel going ‘uh oh, this could end badly, I better do a checkpoint quickly’. Whilst the arch-villain is looming over Halo!
That would be a bad groundhog minute!
There are a slew of possible limitations that keep the Checkpoint power from being OP, going to trust DaveB on this one.
Besides, if what he has come up with isn’t sufficient, well I get the impression he reads his feedback…
Okay. NOW can Krona play with the transparency slider on the building? :D
The real twist is that Sidney did in fact die and that this is an alternate reality that Krona hacked into where Sidney was given a premonition of her other self’s demise. The downside is that I don’t even think Krona can disprove the theory unless she has some way of measuring and differentiating time, space and dimensions and how they all interact. Which I suppose she might with her cheat console.
When will Sidneys Cast be updated? The Teleportation Power is a Major thing and totaly worth it to be mentioned. Also will the Teleportation Picture which describes her Powers get an additional Point and bumping her Power Lvl up to 7 Paragon ?
Well, we have been assuming that the one-star teleport icon referred to her telepresence ability, rather than foreshadowing this development.
Yeah, cast page is wildly out of date now, but low enough on the priority list behind getting the comic done that it may be a while yet.
When you have reality-defying OP abilities whose implications totally freak out the baselines, it’s got to be nice when you meet Sydney and she just… rolls with it, even after a practical demonstration, and treats you just the same as always.
I still think an awkward hug is in order, just to confuddle Krona
I expect that to be more done out of relief when all the danger is over.
“Kidnapped by a supervillain that wants to have you for dinner.” UNLOCKED!
Twist. You’re the dinner.
Achievement is “WELCOME TO MY PARLOUR”
Still sounds like the villain is going to make the hero the actual dinner entree.
Better than “A NICE CHIANTI”
“Unhand me!” – lose the use of your hands for remainder of scene.
What part of her display gave away that it was a checkpoint. Is it visible on this page?
It is more the “I died but I didn’t” part that gave it away to Sydney.
If Dave really wanted to troll the readers he would have shown a disoriented Sydney appearing back at the comic shop and Joel saying “If you’re headed out to lunch you might at well take the deposit to the bank.”
Maybe if this was April First :D
And then just wait for the hundreds of angry trolls posting about how the last several years are going to repeat :D
Ultimate Troll:
“Mr. and Mrs. Scoville, it’s a girl.”
“A girl? But we already picked out the name Sydney.”
We’ll save this part of her history for the prequel movie after DaveB goes from web comic to graphic novel to animated series to motion picture.
Ain’t nothin’ free, especially the kind of ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card Krona’s holding? I get it. Curious to see if Krona really knows how hooking someone besides her into something like that will go. Not that *I* know how it will go either, but I’m buckled in and ready to see!
Personally, I would have been fine if you used this page to kind of showcase the process, like you mentioned, and then used the next for the explicit reveal. But this way works too, and you certainly know your audience better than I do. I’ve just been loving the whole sequence since everyone was on the roof even more than I love everything else.
And I just finished watching re:zero last night.
Good timing ;)
Been meaning to look at that, though I already know the base premise and was thinking of it myself.
He he he. I love the emotional rollercoaster that is our heroine. But boy is Sydney building up her ‘frequent trauma points’. She is going to be able to upgrade to the executive couch for her next one hundred hours of therapy!
I wonder if Frequent Trauma Points works something like how airlines treat Frequent Flyer Miles? Once Sydney builds up enough points, does she get a free Trauma Incident that resets her trauma stress level to zero, so she can start out relaxed & refreshed again?
… whatever applies, I sure hope the Trauma levels do not accumulate, or the world might run short on psychotherapist who are not in dire need of therapie themselves.
And our next class… Superhero Therapy 101: Explaining why Stan Lee wrote everything down before it happened.
he didn’t. it all just happened and Stan Lee was the best reporter ever.
You just know Stan Lee was a witness to it all…He’s got the cameo appearances to prove it.
Trauma points has me in the mind to ask the question,
When does Sydney melt into an eldritch horror?
Okay , I love the fact that, unlike some webcomic artists, DaveB doesn’t change the outcome of a story arc just because some people might have figured it out in advance, because the outcome was COOOL!
:) DaveB. Friend to the fans.
Also, Krona’s becoming my favorite person in the comic.
Not just some webcomic artists…
*(mutters grumpily about the identity of the main villain in DC’s ‘Armageddon 2001’ being switched when people figured out that plan…)*
Yeah, just because you know the score to The Big Game does not tell you how the game went: was it a close game? did one team get all their points in the first half and the other team claw their way back in the second? was it a neck and neck, point-for-point contest right up to the final whistle?
And if fans are able to figure out how things will go, just means the author is doing a great job on setting everything up, unlike nearly all of those mystery cop shows where the writers deliberately withhold information from the fans, or, worse, feed false information only to have the detective slash snoopy busybody turn, at the last minute, to someone completely unexpected and only seen two or three times the entire show
Congrats to whoever it was, under the previous comic page, who queried about other people using Halo’s orbs. Mind you Scionia really is fixated on the blood side of things. For all we know anybody who holds them can use them.
Of course they do have other safety features, so that seems unlikely. Mind you draining Sydney would also stop that pesky issue of ‘bones being broken’ whilst you try to grab the orbs.
I think the only one we know of for sure who can use them is Varia and only so long as she’s touching Sydney.
We don’t really know that for sure, though. I’m pretty sure she didn’t try using the orbs (that I remember, anyway),
No, she didn’t, but the orbs did expand their orbit to include Varia, which is a pretty key sign that she’d be able to use them. Only reason they didn’t notice is they both had their eyes closed — Varia in concentration, Sydney in “Don’t suck, don’t suck, don’t suck!”
Or, they simply expanded their orbit so as not to whack Varia in the head, like what happened when Sydney clung to Maxi’s toight butt-ox after learning the flight orb also removes debilitating vertigo
Trouble is, on that occasion, they did not go around Maxima, despite Sydney being wrapped around Maxima’s leg, thus being even closer than she was with Varia. What actually happened was the orbs formed a closer circle, than they normally have, so they were precisely around just Sydney’s head and no part of Maxima.
I have no doubt that Varia will be able to control the orbs, when in a gestalt with Halo. And, from a writing point of view, that only makes sense if others normally cannot. But from the point of view of the people in the comic, nobody there has any indication that the orbs can only be used by Halo.
Even Sydney! That is one thing that she will not have been able to test, whilst keeping the orbs secret from everybody else, even including her own friends and family.
Or Varia can control the movement of the orbs, if not activate one (or two, assuming skin to skin contact without hands being used). Although I do think her being able to use the orbs’ powers is probably the most likely from what we saw happen. I think it’s just really hilarious that no one realized it :)
That’s ridiculously powerful – I really hope Dave it limiting this heavily. Next up: Sydney teaches Krona about save-scumming and other save point abuse.
That “Konami Cheat Code Banner” hanging under Krona’s seat back at the Twilight Council Chamber makes perfect sense now, doesn’t it?
;)
It is ridiculously powerful, and yet Krona cast it during what she understood to be a completely routine and safe mission, which makes no sense if there are heavy limits on it.
Not in combat or under stress, reloads upon the first kill, MAY NOT ACTUALLY BE RELOADING TIMELINE… Was more likely Pixel died…
I think one good limitation would be if Sydney’s Forcefield, other orb-based powers, and the orbs themselves were unable to be affected by even Krona’s reality hacking powers, because the orbs are not actually from this reality and therefore it’s like knowing how to program in C but the orbs are from a computer that uses Prolog.
PS – if Prolog and C are simlar, just assume I said a different language like Pascal or Lisp or Fortran or Basic or something. I am not a programming person and I’m relying on what I remember from my older brother’s computer programming books.:)
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Darmok ate Gelato at Tanagra
*snrk* Reminds me of a mondegreen (misheard lyric) that I saw the other day. The German band Eisenfunk (which broke up a few years ago) had a song called “Pong”. The only lyrics (if you can call them that) are “Let us play pong”.
Unfortunately, someone suggested it sounded more like “Lettuce, plate, bun” and now I can’t unhear it. Anyway, if you like industrial music, check it out… it’s got a pretty catchy beat.
https://youtu.be/cNAdtkSjSps
my fave’s always been ‘Thirty Thieves and the Thunder Chief’ (extra points if you figure out what song that really is)
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. My bonus points swimming pool needs expanding to Olympic pool size!
Now all I need to do is figure out how to convert the points into gold…
Heh. I’m not sure which one is my favorite; there’s just too many of them. No song is immune, though on the website “amiright.com”, it doesn’t surprise me that Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers are in the top 10 groups with the most misheard lyrics. (The leader is The Beatles, with Michael Jackson in a close 2nd place.)
Personally I like Queen’s “fried chicken” instead of “one vision”. Apart from the fact that it does not fall under the category of ‘misheard lyrics’, that is what they actually sneaked into the song, at the end!