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.
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Well Sydney is certainty seems to be coping with her little “return by death experience,” well. And while I wouldn’t call “Mary Sue.” on this since I don’t think it necessarily fits. I will say this seems like a cheap trick in that as ushual Sydney escapes Scot free and both escapes any realism, and character building.
It’s hard to build character when you are dead, though. Or so I hear… Never tried it myself :P
I didn’t mean she should stay dead, but people are usually more freaked out, and somber instead of spazing out and being excited about it. just seems that everything is over convenient for her and always comes up scotsvill.
Sydney’s survival should be a foregone conclusion for you, seeing as how all this is still a flashback. Remember?
To be fair, I totally forgot it myself.
For some reasons near-death experiences tend to cause more character growth the Death experiences. Well, unless you are Jesus…
When I thought of this page Sydney’s reaction was considerably less enthusiastic, but as I started actually writing it, this version presented itself, and I thought it was totally in character for her to be excited to have checked one trope off the superhero checklist. Hence the page title 1-Down being a play on “1-Up” but also as in “one down, X to go.”
Once the adrenaline wears off, the nature of what actually happened might dawn on her with a little more weight.
I can excuse Sydney’s looseness in her phrasing due to her emotional state, but technically she is talking about the death of her father, not herself. I don’t know if it would provide clarity to add a ‘Jr.’ into her last statement or just sound forced. (You did put it on the tombstone)
That adrenaline crash is going to be….very…..interesting
I’m guessing that Sydney didn’t die, but Pixel did. Krona probably set the ‘reset point’ or ‘checkpoint’ to the moment any of them died.
If she hadn’t, then I would have expected the ‘checkpoint’ to activate as soon as Pixel got into trouble. So that Sydney didn’t even need to go find her.
Still, we can let Halo think it was specifically it was tied to her.
Pixelicious was not in any risk of dying, Sydney was
Plus, in panel 7 Krona was saying death was not necessarily the trigger. For all we know the trigger could have been Sydney’s panic.
I mean, it looked like Pixel was being drained of blood, to me. Could be that she just bled out.
But prrrrobably not.
She wasn’t being drained of blood, or she would have had her throat slit with a huge bucket underneath, was being harvested, which means the last thing they would want would be her dying on them
More likely K has stress level as a trigger. Pixel was knocked cold and most likely never got into full battle furry before she was knocked out and string up.. Syds is far from battle hardened and just the thought of having her blood drained took her stress level to 12 (on a scale of 1 to 10) triggering the checkpoint..
“battle furry” hurr hurr
I think Sydney may have actually died, or received a mortal wound. Look at her actions after she reverts – her hands are clutching desperately at her chest – not above her head, as when she was held prisoner, but not in the same pose she was at this point before, either. In the next panel she is patting her chest, as though looking for something (like a stab wound), while looking shocked that she is whole.
Final point? When she asks about a checkpoint, she also asks herself ” did I… die?”, very quietly. Not “Holy crap FrankenTroll was totally about to kill me to steal my previous life-giving Chilli-sauce blood substitutes!”, but a very quiet, shocked “…die?”.
If you give your hero a lightsaber, you need to give his enemies the Death Star.
Giving a hero reality-hacking powers means you need godlike enemies.
Either we are off to interesting times, or the comic just jumped an entire line of sharks. With laser weapons..
Stay tuned, I guess :P
Yeah, that line about lightsabers and the Death Star was exactly what came to mind when we first got an inkling that this might be a save point. Now that we’ve seen it wasn’t just a throwaway gag or kept ambiguous it really does massively up the protagonist power level. It will be interesting to see what the antagonists have that balances it at all.
Let’s just hope that Archon headquarters isn’t located on Alderaan Blvd.
You didn’t notice the receptionists name tag was ‘Beth Ann’?
I was hoping the checkpoint wasnt the case because death would have no meaning, like Dragonball Z. I hope there are specific limits to the checkpoint, like only being able to lose once a battle or something
I’m guessing that it works like the Contingency spell in D&D: it lingers until triggered, but you need to recast it in order to get it again and from Dave’s description it’s a pretty tough ability to use so Krona’s probably limited in how regularly she can do it.
Well as long as there is a limit, but I did hear that if you die for a third time you get a free Ice cream Sundae.
*Shrug* At this point, I think you’d know if the comic has jumped the shark or not. Given that we were introduced to the council and we know that every supernatural/alien/robotic entity that has ever been written about does exist along with a lot of others that we don’t know about, we’re way past the point where a checkpoint system is going to phase me.
If anything, at this point, I suspect that Ravven (Comic 487-488) understands the truth of the matter better than Ingsol does. Even if the veil did fail and humanity had a collective freak-out, what are they going to do about it?
I can’t agree with this. This kind of thinking leads to formulaic, predictable, boring encounters, and can put stress on the writer to keep his/her heroes weak without proper growth or diversity in levels of ability or overall strength just so that their villains don’t get to be massively over-the-top.
Not every villain fight will be ‘cinematic climactic clash!’ mode, and never should be. Nor should they be the ‘and now we join our heroes who just finished smacking around some villains, all off-screen because it wasn’t a huge cinematic climactic clash!’ which both plague this sort of genre to cancerous levels.
There should be times when the fight is TOO hard and you have to leave, regroup, do something to stymie the opponent so that they at least stop what they’re doing or won’t chase you. There should be times when the opponent is able to put up a fight without being a white-knuckle threat <– and that should be the majority of them, otherwise the tension and thrill dies after the second time in a row, and unless you go all out for the final battle, it'll never recover from that horribly jaded feeling.
"Oh no, Batman's going up against another evil villain. I WONDER if he'll win. Woooo." And you only get surprised a couple of times and eventually the formula becomes apparent so it's not even fun to watch.
So having powerful heroes now is great. Villains never seem to 'balance' the heroes so much as they're always leagues better than the heroes and the good guys somehow win anyway. It's asinine, there's no reason that being 'bad' just suddenly makes you that much stronger, or that people with powers this great would never sign up with the good guys.
sharks with lasers, dolphin disguise kits, and mime outfits…just because
So if whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger what does something that actually kills you do when you come back?
Makes you a Super Saiyan? o_O
^ THIS! ^ (please oh please make the next vote incentive a Super Saiyan Sydney) [say that 3 times fast with marbles in your mouth, and you’ll never need dental work]
Wait, didn’t Krona casted this spell on Pixel first?
Its weird it didn’t trigger.
neverming, just read the comments.
Pixelicious didn’t actually die, so the Save Point wouldn’t activate
Alternately, Pixel was never in fear of an imminent & certain death; she was still fighting when she went down & being unconscious, wasn’t in fear of dying from being blood-drained. Sydney, however, was in fear of an imminent & certain death; How do we know that wasn’t the parameters that Pixel set when she activated the Checkpoint power?
I guess we can rule out healing as an ability of Sydney’s orbs. At least no totally overpowered instantaneous healing factor.
We can’t rule it out yet. Sydney’s orbs only work when she holds on to them. She was holding no orb at all at the moment of (near) death.
I totally forgot about that. But as perfect as these orbs are designed I wonder if a healing function would set in automatically while unconscious or under similar conditions.
Well, “flight” is only active when she’s holding it. So I suspect that “healing” would work the same way.
Krona is incredibly powerful! Archon’s sign up or you get a 10×10 room policy doesn’t really work on her (then she turns your heart off, womp womp), but they definitely need her on board for every battle, all the time, forever.
They can’t, she’s an SV. She will be available on a case-bu-acse basis courtesy of the Council, but trying to swipe that powerful an asset out of the Council’s control would start a war.
She’s an SI, but yeah, she chose to join The Council but is allowed to work with ARCHON on occasion (like how FBI can work with other agencies if a case is of interest to both)
Her bio says “One of the Twilight Council’s Semper Vigilantis”, so… She’s still horribly broken in too many ways to count, but then, every chaarcter with the power to hack reality is broken pretty much by definition.
Except, Inngie didn’t say they were Svee’s
Krona isn’t a vigilante. She’s an official operative of a secret organisation that is allied with Archon. Her actions are constrained to policing only those of the secret group. She’s not catching bank robbers (unless it’s a blood bank… *cough*).
I agree with Sydney, Maxima has NOTHING on Krona’s potential power levels.
Archon does not have a “sign up or you get a 10×10 room” policy. It has a “sign up if you want to be a superhero because there’s a no-vigilantism law” policy. That is all.
Sure, but you bend that for demigods.
Krona is Cosmic Cube levels of almighty. If she isn’t on your team, then you get to lose to the team smart enough to sign up the lady who can rewrite reality.
then again, you REALLY don’t want to uter ultimatums to reality hackers.
Suddenly, your great granddad was gay and your great grandmother died in a freak landshark accident when she was born.
Much better to let them live however they want unless they actually turn evil, but with a “If you need a job or any help, here is out number” policy
Yup. This is why we have Maxima in charge of recruitment and ‘wisking away to be studied in a laboratory’ policies. If people have variable morality, where ‘ok at this level we can forget the morals, because it is too valuable to us’, then you have a corrupt system. An honest system sets the rules and sticks to them, even when it is not convenient.
Slavery is not acceptable in any guise. Not to mention the stupidity of trying to enslave a being who has godlike power!
The way I see it, Krona didn’t actually havew to muck around with the flow of time in any way to use that “checkpoint.” What is would need to do otherwise would be the same as a Teleport or Dimension Door spell (in D&D terms) linked with a Contingency spell to trigger it upon a specific condition.
Except Pixel is back too, and she’s dressed. Krona’s words are also word for word what was said when she “set” the checkpoint.
The Checkpoint power was set for the whole team, back when Pixel was still on the rooftop (in range of the power). Pixel still would have been affected by the power, even if it it was Sydney who triggered it.
When Pixel was talking about the the parameter she set, all she said was “in case anything happens.” She didn’t give any specifics of what had to happen at that time.
Sorry, my point was that instead of initiating a teleport that time HAD to jump back because A: Pixel is clothed now, and B: everyone is in the exact same spot in time (as evidenced by Krona having just said what she just said, and Pixel, being in the exact same pose)
Yes, but Pixelicious was simply incapacitated and alive
And tapped like a Maple Tree.
But, a Were superheroine, so all that healing factor goodness was probably still keeping her alive. A constant source of blood is better than draining it all at once. However, to see if she could take control of the orbs, big bad wanted to drain Sydney dry.
Yes, hence the ‘tapped like a Maple Tree’ bit
So. Krona OP, pls. don’t nerf, devs?
She can hack the, what, time stream? or set a temporal anchor at the point that she applies her hack? What happens if Archon and the Council end up at odds, can she de-power Maxima by hacking what happened in the past, or can she just do that directly? Hacking physics to immediately apply in advance Newton’s 3rd Law to any aggressive action Max tries to undertake would have that effect, since Max would be fighting her own strength.
..how close does she even have to be for the initial hack? If in visual range, would cameras/remote scrying spells work?
This girl is scarier than just about anyone we’ve met so far, in any case.
That depends on how well magic works on Maxima. Thus far, we’ve only seen superficial stuff used on her, like Dabbler’s cleaning spell, and we weren’t shown at all if Vehemence’s aura worked against her.
She might be resistant or even immune to any magic that attempts to alter her beyond the superficial level, but wouldn’t know because magic is rather rare outside of the Council, who are clearly on her side (for now).
She’s apparently immune to Dabbler’s lust aura, and with V she was in actual close combat. Dave needs to fill us in a little more…
Wouldn’t say she was immune, just has built up a tolerance to it
And she was affected by Kevin’s Rage Aura
Max is semi-pissed most of the time, so it’s hard telling…
This is why I was thinking of what Krona did to Brunhilde. She didn’t affect her directly, but instead her clothing. What happens if Krona can hack things like physics, so that for every action Max takes, there is an immediate equal action counteracting it? So if she tries to fly (expending kinetic energy into movement), then equal kinetic force is immediately applied to her in the opposite direction, cancelling out her movement (an object in motion will remain in movement, unless acted upon by another external force). Or just hacking the air in her lungs so that it contains carbon monoxide, or seals into a solid barrier in her windpipe.
Point being, you would be hacking her environment, and not Max herself.
Simply hacking Max’s clothes wouldn’t cut it, unless she could massively increase their durability as well, and I don’t think you would want to deal with an angry Max who you have just forced to strip naked on the battlefield. That would likely be painful.
That’s probably why she wasn’t in as blind a rage as the others
Better NERF Greninja instead.
There is one important thing that everyone is forgetting. DaveB no longer has 500 comics. We are now back at 496-a.
No, those events still happened, in another time line
He did miss a golden opportunity to do this 11 days ago…
I’m not sure how to feel about this development. I like Krona but being able to set up save points like this might just be too much even for this comic. I hope we’ll learn about some limits and drawbacks for her abilities pretty soon.
At least one limitation is obvious: She’s a VI, not a member of ARC-Swat. So they won’t have access to her most of the time, only when the Council is willing to lend her to ARC. (And they’re probably only going to do that in a case like this, where the outcome directly affects the Council.)
Hard Reset is one of the Best powers to have even if it’s only temporary
can’t beat a temporal reset, as a fail safe.
especially when you get to keep the memories
on another note
why are evil vampires always obsessed
with drinking blood and gaining the power of others?
Sciona probably isn’t a vampire. She’s been described only as a Blood Mage. Don’t need to be one without also being the other; conversely speaking, you don’t need to be the other in order to be the one (Unless you’re either Neo, who was The One or Conner MacLeod, who became the only One remaining).
Sigh.
So, which kind of “sending information backwards in time” are we looking at, here? Underused or quickly removed by author fiat?
It’s always one or the other. Characters with this ability NEVER EVER EVER use it like they should. EVER! Because then we wouldn’t have a story.
Go to fanfiction.net and look up: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Less Wrong (or just go to its index: 5782108).
Feel free to get back to me when you are done readnig all 122 chapters :P
Read it a year or so ago. I wonder if it’s gotten longer now. I’ll have to revisit it.
Personally, I liked Sluggy Freelance’s version. Dumbledore tells him never to turn it more than three times, and Torg immediately just spins it, and he watches the scenery fly by until it’s the first day of school, at which point he grabs Not-Ron’s pet rat, snaps its neck, throws it on the ground, and curb-stomps it until it turns back into a human and everyone goes “oh hey it’s that guy!” Entire plot: Averted.
Also, the Steven Universe pilot. There, they destroyed an artifact rather than a character, but it was the same “Oh hey the most powerful thing in the Universe no wait the writers have to kill it to preserve the status quo.”
Oh god that episode. I enjoy some of SU but that one pissed me the hell off. Horribly constructed time travel continuity aside, casual destruction of godly magic item aside. . . it has Steven destroying the one thing that could allow him and Rose to exist simultaneously without ANY of the crystal gems being the least bit pissed?
Depends on the manna used / stamina impact and the length of time it’s effective for.
If you wear yourself out before you actually need to do anything on repeated just in case actions, you won’t be effective when you need to be.
She seemed extremely willing to use it on Sydney, rather than just using more mundane means to keep Sydney from doing anything reckless. She also didn’t react to it being used other than “Oh hey I guess it happened.” If it were hard to do or cost something precious, she would have been like “Guess it was worth it after all” if it’s consumed upon initial casting or “Sssssssss. Dang, that’s one extra life down the tube. Well, at least you’re okay Sydney. What happened?” if it’s consumed upon trigger.
I can say that I’ll be extremely fucking disappointed if they kill this character off, because then that means the ONLY reason she existed in the first place was to do this scene. The one power that, if used appropriately, could utterly decimate Maxima, and she lived and died to remove the consequences of Sydeny being a disposable camera drone ONE TIME and then immediately died because the author said so and for no other good reason to keep it from becoming unbalanced in favor of the good guys.
I’ve seen this a million times, it’s hack writing, and I don’t look forward to seeing it play out again in a series I actually CARE about.
Hopefully she just won’t think of exploiting it in the most obvious ways and Sydney won’t suggest any such shenanigans ever. (Because that’s plausible.) At least then she gets to live.
I wonder when Pixel is going to realize that Krona was okay with her being strung up like a side of beef but when Sydney got in over her head…
Probably triggered by immanent death (say, next 12 seconds).
She really can’t die. Not in any plausible manner, except perhaps extreme old age. She is like the main character in the movie Next except with many, many powers beyond just being able to set “reload” points (which the character in Next didn’t technically do, but did for all intents and purposes as far as the movie continuity goes).
Undertale.
That’s the exception that proves the rule. Undertale was the STORY of a saved game file and a deconstruction of its meaning and repercussions.
This is more like if a random NPC in a Zelda game had control of the timeline. You can’t shift gears mid-stream to turn it into Groundhog’s Day Meets The Man Who Folded Himself without losing the thread of the original story, so they won’t.
I just regret, on a fundamental level, that fictional characters have to be born, get incredible powers, and then suddenly die young just because The Plot Demands It. Authors who do that aren’t just monsters, they’re telling less interesting stories than they could have been.
Where’s the comic about Pixel: Master of Time and Destiny? No that’s okay, we’ll just create her and then kill her for the sake of name-checking a trope. I hope it says “murdered by god” on her tombstone, because when an author kills a character off for continuity reasons, that’s what happened. Game of Thrones is nothing more and nothing less than the rap sheet of a malevolent interventionist deity.
[/rant]
Umm, Pixelicious didn’t die, she’s still there pulling a peeved-Dabble look in the background of panel seven
Personally believe some people are simply born to be at a certain place and time, most times to die at that place and time (but then again, also believe that life is simply a test for the dead: you are born, live, then get tested on what you learnt, and, depending on your answers, you either stay dead or you get reborn and do it all over again)
Another story featuring information being sent back in time was the 1980 novel by James P. Hogan; Thrice Upon A Time.
Everyone is assuming Pixel doesn’t know what happened to herself, but maybe she also remembers but is quite a bit more reserved in her reaction. We should find out Thursday, same Dave-time, same Dave-webpage.
Pixelicious? Reserved? Have you not seen her Dabble’s Pout in the background of panel seven?
I’m not a Patron yet, so I only saw the webpage resolution on my iPhone. I could make out that she was there, but no real details.
Not a patreon either, a lot of readers seemed to have missed Pixelicious even being back on the roof
This is the funniest comic so far. You had me almost rolling on the ground. I love this trope and I love your use of it here. Thank you for the amazing comic!
DaveB said the title is a comment on the ‘1 trope down, X to go’ theme. Aside from ‘not really dead’ What other superhero tropes does Sydney need to check off?
We may have just seen the “He’s/She’s standing right behind me isn’t he?”
I can so far tick off:
– alliterative name
– hero’s initial on the costume
– Utility belts are cool
– most common superpower (not Sydney)
– hammerspace (often combined with above)
– Magic pants (subverted with Vehemence)
– battle bikini (also not Sydney)
– Superhero formerly in military
– registration of supers
– new powers added as needed
– power nullifier (nullified in this universe)
– combination of ‘fastball special’ and ‘dropping an Anvil’
– murder mannequins (so heroes aren’t seen killing real people)
– Story must be set in/visit New York.
– Evil billionaire industrialist villain (points off for not being bald, extra points for facial scar, so it’s a wash)
Wait, does Sydney not remember what happened? That means she can’t warn Pixelicious!! :(
Where would the fun be in that?
She may also no longer remember she can teleport.
The function of one of the ‘mystery orbs’ may be the power of inducing short term amnesia.
“Ooh, look. There’s a button lit up on this orb. I wonder what it does?”
“Ooh, look. There’s a button lit up on this orb. I wonder what it does?”
“Ooh, look. There’s a button lit up on this orb. I wonder what it does?”
She obviously remembers or there would be no reason for her to react like that. I’m assuming she set up some kind of groundhogs day reset thing on the team for the area surrounding the warehouse. Hopefully it doesn’t allot for the enemy to remember things as well. But based on Pixels face and that she’s not pissed off or freaked out, she either doesn’t remember or she is just handling it very well.
Depends on just how much she remembers
And Pixelicious is totally pissed off, about something: take a closer look at her face, it’s similar to Dabbles’ when Maxi assigned Sydney to Pixelicious’ team
Wash, rinse, try not to repeat.
Ahh the save point immortal which has recently found it’s way into Anime and manga RE: From Zero is basically just this every time the guy dies he resets to a certain point he doesn’t get to pick it though and he can make things worse as he goes. In UQ Holder there is one character with this ability as well it is written by Akamatsu Ken who also did Mahou Sensei Negima! and is about his grandson.
It is a really fun power when used right which Dave did perfectly. Oh no now we get a Sydney recap within a Sydney recap cruse you Dave how many more decades will it be before we actually catch up the the start of this. ;P keep it up I need my Monday and Thursday read.
Now as Sydney was the trigger, does she remember everything between then and now or just the very last situation?
As to the other question, not likely, might get results with a skin graft copying her hand print though.
So, what I hope is that the limit on the save point is one of two things.
A: It only effects the individual who triggers it and so only they retain their memories.
Or
B: It’s code lyoko style where if someone dies, they don’t come back to life. (Issue is that this breaks down on the macro level)
Or some combination. (Also there would have to be a period after it no longer works, or we will be back here in another 200 or so pages.)
Yay! Pink kitty is back. Not nakers, but I can live with that.
Cat-astrophe averted!
Things are now absolutely purr-fect!
Don’t worry, Sydney will be stroking her pink pussy in no time. Just look at the vote incentive, for proof!
Ohno, scary girl wants to play with the tomboys balls!
What, there was no loading screen gag? I feel like an opportunity has gone to waste. :P
And that’s where I get off this particular train! Thanks for the years of entertainment. It started out strong, but each strip being an exercise in how to top the over-the-topness of the previous strip is just too much for me. Good luck in the future!
Yeah, I hear you. I teetered on the edge of that when we first found out about the “reality-hacking”. Still teetering.
“The power to reshape the world…
Purely by your own determination.
The ability to play God!
The ability to ‘SAVE’.”
~~Flowey, 20XX
So does the big bad remember what happened too? If so, they better get ready for some friction.
Alternative non-time-travel version: everyone/thing who was in a certain fairly-small radius around Krona at the time the save point was set, and was still there when the restore was triggered, got the intervening period wiped from experience and memory – resulting in them re-finishing sentences, etc. Everyone who was in the circle when it was set but since moved elsewhere, gets brought back and restored to their prior physical condition. The person triggering it retains memories; other people (Pixel), not yet known.
If any of them is wearing a non-communications-network-based watch, it’s now about 11 minutes behind.
It would be messy if people were reconstructed rather than brought back – this would mean that Pixel is now on the roof AND in Sciona’s blood bank…
Way more than 11 minutes: the card game went for at least ten minutes before Sydney got bored, and we don’t know how long it took before she got bored in the first place and pulled out the cards, plus how ever long it took for her to scout with Lightbee
Everyone jumps to conclusions in this comments section more than Sydney, it’s kind of amazing. I expect we’ll run into some limitations or explanations before too long, for now it’s all speculation
Comments exists so everybody can put forth their wild guess. It’s entertainment between episodes…
And more often than not we help our friendly neighborhood author/artist with new ideas or alternative plans for future story arcs.
People have been jumping to conclusions regarding Krona’s (as well as others) abilities since the moment of her introduction. ‘Reality hacking’ is just too vague a term that doesn’t imply any clear boundaries.
Except that it is refereed to as hacking, so it is probably limited to computer language to set the commands in place. So Krona wouldn’t be able to be vague about the set up and would need to plan ahead to avoid any holes in her programming.
Live, Die, Repeat: The Scoville Episode.
I’m surprised that Pixel’s still standing there.
… Uh, question. Sydney can clearly swipe her orbs around hard enough to pulverize bones with them, and it looked like whats-her-face took a few seconds to regen that damage. During that entire scene, I was continuously thinking “just keep smashing until she drops you or loses the arm”. It seems like the exceedingly obvious answer to Sydney’s situation. And yet, like in every other superhero setting ever, Sydney completely ignores that exceedingly obvious solution.
What exactly is it in superhero settings that makes people see something almost works, and instead of thinking “just do it again” to themselves, decide it means it doesn’t work? Heck, some cartoons and anime also have that problem.
And this is just that much worse because Sydney, of all people, should know better. She’s a nerd of many media, and should have recognized the “almost works == doesn’t work” fallacy. Damaged target has regen? Hit it harder and faster than the regen can keep up. Simple. And yet… this happened.
I can sort of accept that she’s untrained and didn’t know what to do in her situation. But she was doing well for a moment and then just stopped and it’s really frustrating.
I can understand your frustration, and at this point, I am wandering why, when faced with getting stabbed for all of her blood, she didn’t use the orbs to try doing more damage to the arm or bashing Sciona’s head in. But, Sydney is only several days in to her training, and from the previous fight expressed regret in being part of Max’s disintegration of Kevin’s arm, and also believes in heroes doing right. To save her own life, it might be justifiable, but I think she would have trouble taking the next step, and unfortunately, in that kind of fight, you have to react quickly. She didn’t, she died. I guarantee, this is something that will come back to her later, maybe traumatically.
The orbs are stronger than Maxima, so she could’ve just crushed Sciona’s skull. BAM! Arc over. But that wouldn’t be a very good story.
Panic? She was not holding her orbs, smashing the attacker’s arm didn’t even cause them to wobble, it would only take a second of Halo hyperventilating before she’s stabbed & dead, and well before she can work through the sudden realisation that she is really and truly about to die, and that she has to fight lethally to have a chance.
The question becomes, just what ARE the parameters?
It DIDN”T trigger on Pixel being captured, knocked out, and blead.
It did trigger for Sid ….
Was her trigger “absolute panic” ?
Thats good, Pixel is fine back there. Dressed too, oh well I’d theroughly enjoyed the were jaguar big form all bare even if its from the back. Anyway good show on Krona’s part, that girl has got a lot of useful tricks up her sleeves. Thank goodness for that. :)
Is the last panel Sydney giving her tombstone The Finger ?
“F____ You Death! Better luck next time!”
No, she’s giving a “thumb’s up” to the camera with her right hand and pointing towards her tombstone with her left hand
We know Krona can use predictive text to anticipate the speech of what someone is about to say. It’s possible that the “check point” works as an immersive VR prediction of the near future. If it triggers on the subject confronting mortal peril, and Pixel didn’t see what hit her, it may not have triggered for her. Sydney did see something and was presumably the first one of the remaining crew to do so. This is pure conjecture, but given that whatever this power actually is explicitly does not break continuity, I think it’s plausible.
Man, I wonder what the cost on that little cantrip is. Because if it were me, I’d be casting that fucker every time I walked through a doorway. Or got in the car. Or checked my phone. QUICKSAVE FO LYFE
Now THERE’S a useful power!
Did anyone else notice that Krona did NOT alert the council to the attack? If she had a save point set up, she could have deliberately set off the trigger and saved Maxima getting exploded (at the very least), and possibly saved the Fey guarded sigil getting destroyed.
I’m thinking there definitely is a hard limit on when/where she can set up these checkpoints, and so she saves them for situations where she sees a likelihood of them averting a major catastrophe (someone dying/imminent peril) but doesn’t spam them for routine things like a meeting.
Note that she set it for just before her companions blindly went into an unknown situation with the very real possibility of a major problem.
They’re likely fairly short in duration, and as we’ve seen, only limited to individual prescience about the events.
Krona may not have have thought that function necessary for a Council meeting. Even if she did, the re-spawn is set to occur at the demise of the designated die-er. She did not die in the meeting, so did not go back to tell her past self about the attack. No council member died in the battle, so it would not be worth committing seppuku to warn the Council “Hey guys, we are going to need a new door.”
This might be an option under some circumstances. The effect may only last a certain period, an hour for example. She could find herself locked in a dungeon or bank vault where she would slowly die from lack of air or water over days. Then she may consider an intentional reset, because the time limit would expire before she did.
All well argued.
Then, of course, consider the Cassandra effect. If you can see the future, but nobody else can, then they are going to have a hard time believing you. Especially if you give a warning that ‘a squad of constructs is just about to attack the council chamber!’ and, in due course, nothing happens.
Now whilst this may give Krona insight into the fact that someone in the chamber (or who is monitoring it) called off the attack, it makes her loose considerable face in front of her assembled peers. Not to mention loosing credibility for the future.
Even if they do believe her, the Twilight Council is a bureaucratic institution, which probably takes days or weeks to decide things. Unless there is an emergency. Letting them see the attack, for themselves, is politically the most sensible thing Krona could do, even assuming that she did have some kind of contingency in place, that would allow her the option to warn her earlier self (such as a checkpoint).
Not to mention that the attack is what let Halo redeem herself, in the eyes of the Council, along with Maxima and the rest of the team showing they were willing to go to the line, to protect their allies. Yet another thing that is far better for the members to see, in person, rather than being given a second-hand unverifiable report.
…The most obvious potential weakness?
It only works once.
That can have its drawbacks. Just ask Daffy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRxohDs2-UM
Hey at least he was able to say that. No one without cartoon invulnerability or Achiles’s real deal could do the same.
CALLED IT!
And my thoughts surrounding this idea caused me to spend a couple days developing a cool short super-powered woman. Her hero name is The Retro-Specter. She is a weak point in the past.
Past Senses: She is constantly seeing, hearing, and feeling things around her from the past, which gets very distracting. She wears colored contacts to color the present differently so she can at least ground herself to seeing ‘now’ by focusing on the tinted sight. Sifting through the layers of past events can be quite difficult and gets murkier and murkier the further back she tries to look. And I just realized she could also use something like a pink noise generator with headphones to help identify the sounds of ‘now’ if she mentally trained herself for it.
Specter Mode: By meditating she can ‘astral project’ herself to go look at things without being there. In this mode, she is constantly fighting against the currents of time which gets harder and harder the deeper into the past she tries to delve and the farther away from her body she tries to travel. The present appears to flow around her in slow motion, like molasses, gradually becoming like swift flood waters as she delves into decades past or miles away.
Retcon: In specter mode, she can make minor alterations to the past, but the bigger the impact the harder it is for her to pull it off. For best effect, she must study the entire path of the alteration before performing it. She could, for instance, slip her business card into someone’s pocket 3 hours before she met them so that she can ask them to check their pocket to find out who she is, but she would need to know that they hadn’t checked their pocket since the point she placed it because finding her card early would significantly alter their initial meeting which would produce a torrent in the flow of the past that she would be unable to navigate. I don’t yet have an idea on the limits of what she can do in this state other than placing small items from now into the past, but perhaps she can also paint messages on a blocked up section of wall, or under wallpaper… I don’t know, something ghosty.
Groundhog’s Day Flashback: The ability to wake up back at the start of your day after dying…. Every time she finishes with her REM sleep cycle she is open to her future, what she calls a Flashback Point. When she dies she enters specter mode and must swim back to her body at the most resent Flashback Point, it calls out to her like a bright and shiny beacon in the storm of time. With focus and meditation she can set a Flashback point that she could find even up to a few days later, allowing her to go farther back than just that mornings point.
Writting it all up like this is making me think of a cool story I could write about her. Thank’s DaveB for such an inspirational comic.
I do think this “Happy Red Reset Button” power needs a significant limit either in how far back it can go in time (any events more than x minutes from the point the reset kicked in are set in stone) or frequency (Why yes, I can do this like once a week with relative safety – more than that causes… problems).
Using the limit backwards in time, Sydney goes in and pops back out – but poor Pixel is still in there, as it was longer than x minutes ago (example, people, not canon, obviously). I would say that boat is likely making a beeline for the horizon, but…
The other option, limits on frequency of use, is a lot easier to fit into what we just saw.
One wonders if Sydney remembers because she was the crux-point of the reset; this could imply Pixel, not being the crux-point, remembers nothing.
Specularium No Baseum!
Krona confirmed for the most broken character yet, beating “Magic!” Vehemence.
I predict that limitations to her powers are going to be tortuous and leave holes. Reality warpers are on par with time travelers and Magic! users in their ability to induce plot holes.
‘plot holes’ is a weird term for a superhero comic. Like, the entire genre pretty much exists on the spectrum of ‘don’t think too hard about it.’
Grrl Power’s intro arc made a case of being a cut above the genre, one that WOULD withstand some thinking. And that’s why it’s been one of the very few I’ve been arsed to follow.
Uh, well, ok, but before you beat yourself up about Krona, why not wonder why Peggy is affiliated with the team?
Either:
A: humans with guns can be helpful in superfights, in which case there should be a thousand or so of them. (Humans who can fire guns are not in short supply)
B: humans with guns cannot be helpful in superfights, in which case why does Arc have one?
And so on. Superhero comics don’t make sense if you think about them. Just go with it. Krona’s powers are no more ill defined than Dabblers.
I mean, I’m cool with what is basically meta-power of save scumming on principle, but damn does it raise the bar for expectations.