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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I’m kinda hoping it’s a form of Divination/Future-sight rather than groundhogs day time travel. Having the magic to spin a simulated reality forward in the minds of those affected, scanning for a prescribed sub-set of events (like someone in the spell dying). It would still make it a powerful ability, but the further out you go the less accurate. Also possibly detectable and counterable as the magic *flashes* to pickup and copy the current state of reality, to run forward at Magically ludicrous speed.
Even the ‘simulation’ model is incredibly powerful. It becomes like the movie Next, where the majority of the film was just him mapping out every damn possible future before deciding what to do. Even just a few minutes into the future is still pretty damn powerful when you are talking about life and death decisions.
No, don’t compare it to Next. Next was a horrible, awful, terrible, atrocious, other adjectives to describe the word bad movie.
Well I liked it.
It was really good… until the end.
That would kinda suck. Imagine that you set a checkpoint but forgot about it, go on your life with all sort of trials and tribulations, become a mature high-ranking 60-year-old, then suddenly kick the bucket and are back to being 18 and derpy again.
Ehhh… but you’d still be alive. And you have all your memories. And all your friends are still alive too. I’d say this is great :)
Your friends are still alive, yes. But what if you suddenly find yourself too mature to become their friend again? what if THEY find you too “different” to become your friend? What if you can’t seem to connect with them like you KNOW you used to, can’t help them out of a bad spot because they just don’t let you help? And you’re stuck knowing your friends “from another life” might be miserable and you can’t do a thing about it. That would kind of be torture if you ask me.
Yeah, who would want to rule the world by knowing when the tech bubble popped. Or Apple climbed and crashed. Or that Microsoft would split so many times.
Nobody wants that, oh NOOOOOO.
Yep… “If I knew then, what I know now” is the battle cry of us old farts, and my medical file would sure as hell be a lot shorter…
I hear that.
It does not matter if you convert the text into an audio signal, you are still breaching patient confidentiality by listening to it!
You’re forgetting the Butterfly Effect. Changing the past, changes the future.
Depending on how the universe works. If the Norns ensure the future is predetermined, then any butterflies that try to change the course of history will get their wings torn off and eaten!
Heck, I wouldn’t mind being a derpy 18 year old again, with all my current knowledge!
Imagine all the advances that we have today, coming some 35 years early!
Yeah, I’m not just a technophile, but I actually understand how most of this stuff works!
You just described the video game ‘Roy.’
As played by Morty in Rick and Morty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as
Since Dave is not known, thus far, for handwavium, can’t wait to see how he explains THIS, because it will likely make or break the future of this comic for the audience >_>
And if Krona turns out to be as absent minded or ADD at explanations as Sydney, little powers like this, could get Krona a LOT of ugly glares later, lmao! And I just noticed Krona is a female version of Kronus. Hmmm… *eyes Dave* How did I miss this <_<
Yes, this one character could undo this entire comic. Dave had better have a pretty good explanation for how this works and doesn’t undo anything bad – and when she doesn’t use it doesn’t leave us all asking “why didn’t Krona reset that?”.
Hell even if it’s just a reset point it still plays holy hell with the story. People about to go on mission, create a reset point for all of them, oops, mission went sideways, well, we all popped back without the smell and the mess of actual death, and we gained important intel.
As Feng said, it would completely eliminate tension or suspense.
Even a short term reset of only a minute or two would be too damn handy. It would be like save scumming in a game. ‘Save’ before doing anything, try it, oops, that didn’t go well, go back to the save.
I see it as effectively a form of precognition that will apply to one person’s immediate future. They “live through” the vision, rather than just glimpsing a snapshot displaced by time. better than precog, scarier in cases like this, and if the trigger doesn’t occur, neither does the “precog”. It might be that Krono is just sending one person’s mind ahead thru time, to give them a chance to change what is most likely to occur by being forewarned.
remember, forewarned is forearmed, and four-armed is half an octopus.
Also I’m wondering if she can do the checkpoint more than once at any given time period, and if it tries to do it more than once you start piling up code on the 4th dimension and corrupt stuff.
If she can’t use nested loops, this’ll be a one shot for awhile, and I think that causality might start whimpering…
*sits down to a yummy bowl of nested loops™*
Think of it like this. The more you loop a simple program, the more memory gets used up. I know that on the old Timex Sinclair 1K computer, you can write a 3 line BASIC program which will crash the computer eventually.
Might be the same with the universe and universal code.
That loop would work in actually any version of basic on any computer at the time:
10 Gosub 10
even on CPUs running at single digit Megahertz speeds, it was over fast.
This method can and has been used to shut down a call center.
Not by me, of course.
Not on purpose, either, or so I was told.
If the Feds try to pin it on you, just say ‘neigh’!
I said essentially the same thing a few days ago in this comment thread.https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2430/comment-page-1#comment-502252.
I have seen a lot people make comments that go down the same logic path since then. It is almost like I am reliving the same event over and over again.
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.
I’m somehow betting that she can’t do this over and over again, or that it might take a significant amount of time between ‘checkpoints’ so no save-scumming.
Why is it that everyone… everyone… except for me misses the obvious? Krona is not going to be a regular part of the team. Krona is not an ARC-SWAT member, and never will be. They’re only going to have her when the Council decides to allow her to moonlight with Arc-swat, and THAT is likely to only happen when there is a situation like this where the outcome directly affects the Council.
So “People about to go on mission, create a reset point for all of them” is not going to happen very often (and probably only this once), by simple virtue of the fact that Krona is not a member of ARC-Swat.
This was said on page one and fails to fix the problem of “Oh look, Krona is in the party, guess someone’s not-dying again.”
Her presence could have been a big help on the original Trek series.
“Krona, Kirk Spock McCoy and ensign Jenkins are going down to the unexplored planet. Could you put a tag on Jenkins please?”
That’s ensign C. Fodder, and squad leader is Lt. Snuftkwik.
In the red team?
Jenkins, Nooo!
(sorry, someone had to say it)
You people really need to cool it with the doom and gloom “this character is going to ruin everything”. Maxima is literally Superman-Lite. Give her some time and she could raze the whole planet, and with her resources she could get the drop on practically anyone who could stop her from doing so, before they had a chance to prepare any crazy powers to defend themselves. A hyper-utility character is, at most, just fun to have around now and then and imagine what they could do with their powers that they haven’t been shown to use already.
Chill, guys. Dave knows what he’s doing. Seeing streams of comments like this, like YOU own the story, tends to kick a writer’s enthusiasm in the gut or get under their skin. Because with every “Krona’s going to ruin the comic” you’re saying “Dave you need to nerf or remove her right now or all your hard work means nothing to me”.
There are ways and means of defeating even Maxima. But that only goes to prove your over-riding message that Dave does know what he is doing, in balancing these characters. Each has a nemesis, and the characters have used the analogy of playing ‘rock, paper, scissors’ in order to match the right hero to the villain they can defeat.
This is the whole point of a super setting. It is not meant to have a bunch of equally moderately powerful individuals, so that no one character dominates it. Rather it has a number of mind-numbingly powerful individuals, who need to either be countered by a peer, or by a lesser being who can exploit a weakness.
But the very fact that people fear the power is too overwhelming to beat is a good sign for Dave’s writing. He is inspiring awe and despair in readers. This time it is a hero. Other times it has been villains. Remember Concretia, the Periwinkle-Butt-Sniffer and Vehemence? Each, in their turn, seemed too powerful to fall.
Yet Concretia was removed from play by Peggy. Who is not even a super! And For-Whom-The-Bell-Tolls was beaten by googly eyes!
I like the suggestion that this power triggers on /fear/ of imminent death, making it a near-perfect counter to a monologuing villain but utterly useless against random ninja stabbings or enemies who knock you unconscious first.
Entirely true, Yorp. Though this is less Dave’s ability to inspire and more the whining of babes. I know you’ve read most, if not all of these comments. It’s really disheartening to see this number of people who don’t understand how to be a good audience. … Makes me feel old.
I would assume that she needs to set in very specific commands for it to work. Such as, Sydney=dead_silverknife, or Sydney=Imminent+death_Stabbing. Or something like that. I could see the power being limited in the way that it can’t just be vague or random circumstances and needs to just plainly spell it out within a certain phrasing or something. There might even be a limitation on time, such as, Sydney=dead<5min, or along those lines.
Anyone here that does any kind of coding knows that you need to be specific about how things operate or you get glitches or just a bunch of code that doesn't actually do anything.
Exactly.
Said that just the other day, “it’s a good thing this is a test system, because if this is wrong it could make a HUGE mess.” And in that case it ended up just not doing anything.
And bad coding on reality?
“Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to turn you into a rutabaga. Um… let me just.. damn, what the hell is causing that?”
Or simply nothing?
“I’ve got your back, don’t worry.”
“GAH!!! It should have pulled her out! But it did nothing! What… oh crap, the conditional…”
Ruin the comic/story? Please. Look up Coil (Thomas Calvert) of Worm:Parahumans. Now he was the first evil mastermind in the story, but his entire stick was this simulation/alternate timeline power. And his version was a lot more versiatle than a tricky spawn point. I have heard this debate about how it ‘actually’ works OVER AND OVER. THAT ruins the story more than the actual power!
He did not ruin the story, though he did become the first person the protagonist deliberately killed.
As someone who was a DM/GM for 17yrs and who has coded some, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head as to how hard a power like this can be to implement effectively. If it was a power with just “point click” done, Krona would be near unstoppable. But with the requirement of “now exactly how did you word that if then statement?”… *hand waves* But only time will tell. As we get more from Dave, we will know more. Like I said, thus far he has not been prone to handwavium.
Hacking the time/space fabric to make a closed timelike curve? The short version, according to google, is “the line of a material particle in spacetime that is “closed”, returning to its starting point”. If not a CTC i would guess something similar that still ties in to reality/time hacking.
I’m afraid that did break my interest in this comic. Now that we know bad things can always be reset there’s really no tension or suspense. Take care, all.
it can’t. Definitely needs pre setup, probably limited in time it can rewind, and evidently limited in scope, since sidney triggered the checkpoint load but pixel did not.
The difference is that Pixel was alive and being milked, where Sydney was going to be a lab experiment of a very terminal kind. Besides, unless we know the exact parameters, (which I think Dave will tell us soon) we don’t know the limits…
Being blood drained, rather than milked. But I can guess where you were fixated.
it may be that krono doesn’t fully understand what it does. Instead of being a video-game style checkpoint, it may just be that when she did it to herself, she was actually sending her mind forward thru her own timeline, then snapping back if the trigger happened. her only mod to reality in this case would be her foreknowledge in her own head, but it would seem just like a video game checkpoint. So maybe it isn’t the end-all plot device it seems. Still powerful, but not plot killing.
Essentially, it appears that Krona is simply projekcted Halo forwards in time along the most probable timeline. Should an ‘imminent death’ scenerio play out, the personality and memory matrix in that timeline automatically snapped back to the time that Krona set up prior to Halo’s going into the warehouse. I would not be surprised if she did that to Pixilated too.
Where did anyone, within the comic or without, say that bad things can always be reset? Holy conclusion-jumping, Batman.
They’re saying that because it’s not an unreasonable conclusion if this IS like a video game check point. Dave needs to be REALLY careful how he uses and explains this power of Krono. Like. It could not be an actual check point, but rather future sight that get’s more and more deluded as it goes on. It could be that after a certain point, he stops working. It could be that it can only be done a certain amount of times per random number of time.
This can either be too powerful, or just powerful.
that’s kind of like saying ‘I’m not going to get your newspaper anymore because Garfield is no longer in it’
WRONG! I said it before, I’ll say it again: Bad things can NOT always be reset, even if it’s only for this one reason: Krona is not, Not, NOT, and never will be, a member of ARC-SWAT. They simply do not have her around all the time, only when the Council is willing to lend her to them.
(of course, having said that, watch her suddenly decide to switch to ARC-SWAT and thus invalidate my entire rant. That would be the kind of bad luck I’ve been having lately.)
My guess would be that in case of likely death, immediately reverse how she got into that situation. So it’s not like the world backed up, just that Syd was about to die. Krona’s hacked reality could see that Sydney was about to die (creature holding Sydney has both ability and intent to kill Sydney) and reversed how she ended up in that position, essentially reversing the teleport. So Fugly decides to bite and drain Sydney, suddenly the light bee zips away in the reverse of her teleport, and poof, Fugly’s left holding air.
Anything else – such as reversing time, resurrecting a person after death at a safe location – would essentially be “there are no consequences any more”, which would be very bad for the story.
Even my interpretation is pretty damn powerful. Personally if this was a superhero game where I was the GM, and a player came up with Krona as a character, I would respond with “no chance”. She seems ridiculously OP, even compared to Maxima, and Sydney (both of whom are pretty damn powerful, but have obvious limitations).
I really hope there are some pretty damn big anchors on this character, or you just created a demi-god, if not an actual god. In D&D terms, she is throwing around wish level magics at a whim, with no apparent drawbacks.
Incidentally, as a coder, that kind of predictive model would be a real pain in the ass to write. Short of being able to see the future – as opposed to mapping probabilities – it would require so many conditionals and weighting, it would be nasty – and an iron plated bitch to test and debug.
So honestly, at best I’m detecting a high level of hand waving here. For Krona to ‘hack’ something like that blind – not knowing what was going on inside the building – even using a representative symbol language for reality and being able to insert a lot of parameters and conditionals simply by thinking them (and that would require extremely high level mental focus to avoid random nonsense getting in there), should have taken a lot of time.
Except that the pink puma is back outside as well, and by the look on her face isn’t panicking about the fact that she was bound and gagged upside down in that warehouse and just fighting a Frankenstein-Vampire monster.
Crap. Missed her being there.
Wonder how the religions of the world will react to finding out that god is a small woman with blue hair?
Unless she wants it to be rainbow!
I, for one, welcome our new random hair-colored goddess overlord!
And she has the power to MAKE you think that. She better be careful letting other people know about her abilities. Some unscrupulous foreign power could blackmail her into changing public opinion to make a totally unlikable and unqualified person win an election.
How can they blackmail her? She can simply re-code reality so that never happened
And just think, that almost happened, fortunately they were stopped before it did happen
+1
Wouldn’t be too surprised if it happened to her before. Most people would find such a close death encounter very traumatic.
Sydney looks on it as a superhero achievement.
My suspicion, however, is that there IS a significant cost for this ability. We just haven’t seen what it is yet…
Btw; on a previous post, I suggested that Halo was projected forwards in time, on the most probable timeline, but when she snapped back to the “here and now”, only a copy of Sydney’s personality and memories came back.
The Sydney of that timeline was killed.
Well, yeah, but I doubt the blood mage was planning to kill her. Her healing factor would take care of that pesky “running out of blood” problem… Sciona could drain Pixel for a long, long time, and take advantage of it. Keeping her unconscious and bound might be the difficult part.
Pixel’s a were-creature. That comes with certain advantages that she may have gotten used to, such as the “much harder to kill” bit. Which in turn probably plays into her lack of panicking.
you can see a fully clothed pixel in panel 7 in the background. also kronas reaktion on sydney clearly shows she is at the moment krona did the checkpoint. that is a game breaker power if there ever was one.
Ugh, missed Pixel. Damn, this is not good.
the only reality she needs to hack here is how tast her awareness moves forward thru time. if her awareness is synced so time seems to be passing at normal speed. the trigger brings her awareness back with information she can use. it would appear the same, but not require godlike hacking.
Noooo. Please tell me this is an early April Fools…I really don’t like this power and I really don’t like Krona anymore. The moment reality hacking was introduced I had my doubts and while an explanation might be able to explain away the power, I don’t think an explanation will be able to make Krona enjoyable (for me at least).
She’s OP. Explanation or no, reality hacking is just too powerful. Makes every other character and everything they do kinda irrelevant in light of that kind of power. Even if she doesn’t do anything, you know she could, and left wondering why she didn’t. And the pointlessness of everything in the story because of it.
I think Dave fell afoul of the old “this is kewl!” trap that many a writer has fallen into.
Although he had already fallen into the ‘introducing too many characters’ trap, so it’s not too surprising.
Kinda rookie mistakes, but understandable. This is what you need editors for, to read over your stuff and say “okay, dude, walk it back.”
heh heh heh. I think DaveB spent lotsa time on character design and is clever enuf to avoid StarTrekking himself.
no Star Trekking, but maybe perhaps Galaxy Questing?
I was referring to the problem Star Trek writers had, when halfway through the first season of the original series, it became apparent that Replicators + Transporter + time travel on demand was a solution to every single problem ever. Galaxy Quest may have covered this, I don’t recall. maybe it’s time to see it again (the best Star Dreck parody ever).
You’re jumping to conclusions and not giving Dave enough credit. We’ve learned almost nothing at all about the nature of this power, and you’re already declaring that it’s OP and is going to kill the story? Have some patience and let Dave at least *finish* introducing it.
Jumping to conclusions seems to be sport around here.
I remember there was a lot of fuss about Vehemence and his “make up powers on the go because energy to burn” too. How he totally breaks the comic, “there is no way to end that fight in satisfying manner”, “that’s it, I’m out”, etc. Some of the people from back then are still commenting here now, in much calmer and rational way – it turned out Dave has pretty good idea where he is going.
The comic was feeling little stale lately, this is bringing something fresh.
I have always wanted a No Prize
you can’t have a No Prize, but by not getting one, you have it.
Who said anything about resetting everything? If I don’t get it wrong, she has to set it up in advance without knowing what will happen.
I like Krona a lot. But I also liked “Edge of tomorrow” (up to the point where the powers are gone) and I like “Paradox Girl”. To hell with causality. Boring concept. No one needs it.
The thing that gets me is that Sydney is an accident waiting to happen. And if not even near death has a learning effect on her, oh boy. Hm, could the orbs behead somebody if need be? How do you measure how sturdy they are without accidentally breaking them?
Here’s the question for the next page: if Sydney doesn’t remember whether she died or not, does she know what awaits them or is everything up to the checkpoint erased? Not so OP then. Krona ftw.
Idiot Ball is not the answer.
It’s not lack of memory, it’s lack of comprehension. Sydney has not yet come to terms with what happened to her and, while she is enjoying the comic book trope now, it is highly likely that the full implications of her potential death will catch up with her later.
On one hand, Krona and Sydney together are really reinforcing the whole “Reality is basically and RPG” narrative. So I can kind of accept that this is possible. But it also really, REALLY creates a narrative problem. There needs to be a serious drawback to this kind of power or else all tension in this series just vanished. If we’re still going off RPG-style systems, I could see there being limited “save slots” or something, like she can only store one save file at a time so she can’t cover an entire team. Of course, if that one person dies then they can come back and prevent everyone’s deaths, but that’s kind of an extreme case. Or for all we know Sydney only remembers that she died, but not how or what she was doing (since she lost the “EXP”).
Actually wait, I think I just got it. Sydney didn’t even die, the trigger was set to BEFORE she died. So it’s possible that Krona can’t bring someone back from the dead. Seems like more of a triggered time travel power, which is still kinda OP as fuck but not quite god-mode.
What i get from this is that she has control over which universe they are in inside the multiverse. Basically the whole Quantum Immortality theory. Her checkpoint she made was essentially a branch in the multiverse, and she’s able to draw those in her immediate vicinity into the universe where stuff did or did not happen. It may be a temporary thing though, where the timeline will stabilize itself back to the “main” timeline.
The whole idea of ‘Red Wizard’ taking the Red Pill in 8 Bit Theater just went through my mind.
My favourite of the fan theories thus far is that it’s a fear of imminent death trigger but that would imply that we’re going to have to see an unexpected major character death that she fails to prevent soon.
Are you sure, Maxima is the most powerful Super? From the looks of it I’d say it’s Krona.
But we don’t know Krona’s limits are, but I think they are localized. So somebody like Peggy with a rifle at a 1000 yards could rain on her parade…
Sydney agrees with Senjiu, as do I.* Peggy is a force to be reckoned with, when you live in a squishy shell like Krona and Sydney. But Krona can just Groundhog Day Peggy, until she wins.
* Set Maxima forcefield = 0
Set Maxima energy blast = 0
Beat Maxima to death with a stick.
If any flaw in plan, loop back to checkpoint until kink ironed out.
…recover in ICU after Max punches you over local horizon (no Eb+no Def = maximum Strength ; Max runs on balancing between the three )…
Nope all three of those are actually specific manipulations of Maxima’s force fields. Every cell in her body is surrounded by them, and they can be used to protect it (naturally enough) or make it work faster (increased speed/reflexes) or harder (increased strength). Likewise just pushing the body in a particular direction (speed, if on the ground or flight otherwise). This is why the power is also called zero-range telekinesis.
Which is why she can only be maxed out in one at any one time. Maxima is having to choose what aspect the force fields need to be supplementing. Underneath it all, they are all the same power. Which Krona can take away by changing a single option!
Maxima would still have her energy attack though, as that is a separate power. Hence wny Krona needs to change the toggle on that one too. After which Maxima is just a big golden-skinned target, with no super powers. And she may not even be golden, as there is a high probability that her force fields are what makes her shiny!
To cap it all off she is used to being a woman of steel in a world of cardboard. She is not used to being hurt if someone hits her over the head with a stick. All of her training makes use of her extraordinary speed, durability and strength (even at a minimum she is super-fast, tough and strong). But that too is gone. So even her combat training will be worse than useless, as it will make her overconfident and misjudge every action.
A well-trained little girl with a stick would be more than a match for her!
… Max has a modicum of resistant defence beside her forcefield/touch TK (check the geode flashback pages vis the docs talking+the steakhouse fight- the two hits V tagged her in the face only broke her nose each time; they would have pulped her skull if the ff was all she had).She is also a trained hand to hand combatant – Krona would have to hack Max into a paraplegic for the scenario you laid out to work(and it also means that the fight that caused Max and Peggy to meet in the hospital must’ve made the steakhouse fight look like a couple of kindergarteners squabbling in a sandbox )…
How much of Maxi’s hand-to-hand combat training relies on her golden aura?
Take Superman: remove his Kryptonian abilities, and he can’t even land a punch, because he’s never actually learnt how to fight
… during the steakhouse fight, it was revealed that Max spars with Hiro on a regular basis – nevermind that she has to also spared / trained / picked up a few tricks from Math. Max is both combat trained and battle hardened ; powered or not ,she knows how to fight…
That sparring though requires her use of super powers. And she is so powerful, even at her minimum, that she had to pull her punches to avoid harming him. Despite the fact that he is known as ‘Super Man Lite’!
However you miss the point Maxima would not have those super powers. That “modicum of resistant defence” you refer to still derives from her force field. She cannot remove it from surrounding each cell, no matter how hard she tries. Check out Dabbler’s science corner number 1 for the basics.
Yes Maxima is a trained soldier. But all the military training and experience she has EVER had she always had her super powers making her fast, strong and tough. I stand by my point that, until she has learnt to compensate for that, her judgement will be totally out.
Where Maxima thinks she can easily dodge the stick, she will find she cannot. Where she thinks she needs to pull her punch, to avoid ripping Krona’s head off, she just turns her punch into a tap. And the stick won’t bounce off Maxima’s head, it will knock her out or kill her.
Maxima would not get the time to re-adjust.
Plus do not forget that despite me teasing about her being a ‘little girl’ Krona is actually a highly trained individual herself. Not only will she have the full training of a federal officer, of some sort, she has also experience at taking down supernatural enemies.
And will likely be practiced in exploiting stripping beings of their powers, and then beating the crap out of them.
Should that technique prove to actually be something Dave wants in her arsenal.
You make one scary scenario there. Thankfully Krona seems to be a buffer character class with about as much offensive ability as strong language will take her. But with one or two friends in tow…
Thankfully she thus far seems inexperienced and non-malicious, and possessing no narcissistic traits. But damn would she make one hell of a “power behind the throne” villain that doesn’t want “bogged down with day to day affairs.” lol
Yup. Mind you she is not unused to politics. Remember that she is an entire Twilight Council faction on her own. No power sharing or in-fighting with the other members of her faction, to distract her. Whatever she wants goes. And, when her faction’s turn comes around, she will take her seat on the ruling table.
But, yea, the rest of the time she does seem to be content to watch quietly from the peanut gallery.
I love how people are complaining about this being OP and killing the story when Dave explicitly said in the commentary that that’s not going to be the case.
Gee its almost like the options are either that it is incredibly OP, or that it is so limited it could only be used in such a specific set of circumstances that it being the sole reason the main character is still ALIVE becomes incredibly contrived.
Look I’m all for calling out a webcomic when they do something BAD but I think you’re jumping the gun. There are MANY ways that the checkpoint, while incredibly powerful for one time, can be limited so as to not be game-breakingly OP, WITHOUT it being contrived. I’ve listed a few in another post, in fact.
Give DaveB a chance to sort if out a bit in the story. I’m pretty sure there will be questions asked later by Sydney about this. She’s very genre-savvy and probably thinking the same things you are thinking.
Your lack of ability to imagine a way in which this power could be cool without it being OP or contrived is…well, irrelevant. You should be judging the comic on what DaveB actually does, not what you assume he’s able to do.
El Goonish Shive, Sarah’s power. = Krona’s, but only along the edges
What’s funny is I’m an EGS fan, and Sarah’s power was just showcased again a few pages ago, and yet I didn’t even think of her at all when this happened. I guess because this one appears to be real, or at least a shared simulation that behaves like reality, rather than a slowed simulation that occurs solely in the caster’s head and can be manipulated at will.
We haven’t seen what, if anything, they actually remember yet. Other than a sense of WTFBBQ!?
Hmm, potential limitations:
– Is only a mental projection: Still allows for risk-free scouting, and on a narrative level exhausts suspension of disbelief when anything that happens might actually just be a projection.
– Requires a specific event to trigger: Just carry a cyanide tooth and the only danger is unexpected instant death.
– Can only rewind a short time: A minute or two is plenty of time when you have teleprompters and/or speedsters on your side.
– Other people in the immediate area (including enemies) also remember: If it is a time rewind, negating a loss at the cost of having your opponent find out about it is still an incredibly strong power
– Can only use the power with a long cool-down: Still an immensely strong power; just with more hiding behind team members while waiting involved.
– Can only rewind once ever: This one could actually be really interesting, but that is something that an entire story would revolve around the use of. Also, it is implied Krona has used this power before.
– Can only rewind once ever per person who triggers it: This version would be kind of neat actually. Extra lives for everyone, but only one apiece.
I’m thinking #5 is probably the most likely. Sort of like ‘it takes a long time for the code to sort out’ – if you try hacking reality on such a large scale repeatedly in a short period of time, code gets jumbled up.
could also be instead of once per person, once per event, so it cant be used again this mission, so we know from now on what is happening is permanent. also means we/Dave dont have to keep track of who has used their ‘life’.
That’s what I’m thinking. Multiple loops could be a self-crashing disaster…
I’m thinking/hoping for some combination of #3 and #5, where it can only rewind a relative short amount of time (and expires once they have gone past that mark without rewinding) and it takes a long time before she can set up another checkpoint. Combined with what Silverwolf said where now that Sydney triggered the rewind the checkpoint is exhausted.
You surprised me at least. Wow, that was cool. :D
And it isn’t even broken, since it is basically impossible to play with much due to the consequences of an unsuccessful event.
Ruin the comic/story? Please. Look up Coil (Thomas Calvert) of Worm:Parahumans. Now he was the first evil mastermind in the story, but his entire stick was this simulation/alternate timeline power. And his version was a lot more versiatle than a tricky spawn point. I have heard this debate about how it ‘actually’ works OVER AND OVER. THAT ruins the story more than the actual power!
He did not ruin the story, though he did become the first person the protagonist deliberately killed.
So I was playing Skyrim the other day, and I got into a pickle: I saved over my autosave right after I accidentally ticked off a whole guild of people. The only way out was through going back to an earlier save.
Krona can’t do that. Her power relies on having a reliably safe moment, and knowing when to save before going into battle. And this is a team we’re talking about, and it takes a lot of work to checkpoint one person. So having her around for one mulligan doesn’t add up to much in this crazy universe, IMHO.
Called it!
Oh no…Sydney, of all people, cannot be trusted with knowledge of the future.
I think she can be. She’s a good strategist remember.
Thinking that Krona’s power has a great deal in common with Galaxy Quest’s ‘Omega-13 Device’. This device gave the user a 13-second timejump into the past – which might not seem, like much, but was enough time to undo a bad decision or wreck a surprise.
I would infer that both have definite limits on usage. The Omega-13 was a complex alien device supposedly powerful enough to “blow up the Universe” – making it something you don’t want to trust unless you really had to. Seems to me that Krona’s “Checkpoint” power might have something of the same quality
Omega-13… does nothing, but you now have your daily requirement of Calcium and non trans-fats
I’m betting the BAD point of that checkpoint dearie-bob…is that the villain ALSO just experienced it, and knows full well that Sydney and friends are out and about. Now, probably not knowing where, but stilll, knowing there are more supers about. And as a result, alarm raised.
Seeing how Pixel isn’t freaking out in the background (that we can see) and Krona is surprised at Sydney suddenly looking like she has seen a ghost I think it is save to say only the one that triggered the reset has any knowledge about the near future.
Good news: Sydney got the information they needed, primarily the location of the Blood Mage presumed to be the only one capable of sending the Killabots and assumed to be well dead so they don’t need to go into the building, they can contact Maxi and they can send in a tactical assault and rescue team
Oh no, now the Wolverine principle will kick and she will keep dying all the time.
Suddenly, the ‘don’t camp my spawn’ comment to the media has a whole new level of meaning. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1640
+1
I don’t know if this has been brought up, but this is not just a superhero milestone for Sydney but also a Trek one as it is first temporal anomaly.
Sydney already has her own deflector shields, and if she still remembers how to do it, a transporter.
We are still waiting for the evil twin. Technically possible if Sciona managed to get a blood sample.
And hey, there’s an alternatively-color-skinned alien practically right there!
I like this Trek track and where it could conceivably lead…
With me winning the evil twin back to the side of good, and being able to take them both out on a date?
I for one can’t wait to see what happens next.
All those people bitching and moaning and claiming this is now “the end!” for the webic, piss off and leave already
Krona: the second most awesome character to date. First is Halo, of course.
Not my type :P.
Woo hoo, one less competitor.
This thought occurs to me; Pixel goes off to check things out, and just in case anything happens, Krona makes a checkpoint that triggers when something bad happens to Sydney? Since it didn’t trigger when Pixel was knocked out and strung up to bleed out, but did when Sydney was about to get stabbed with a syringe, that implies that the trigger was put only on Sydney, who was staying where it was safe. This confuses me.
That’s because what happened to Pixelicious wasn’t life-ending (Sydney was there, and the Harem would have been on her way after reporting in, unless Harem is a traitor as sooooooo are hoping for, in which she simply bugged out and waited for the raid wipe and then report the disaster), Sydney’s was about to end (or possibly even did)
I’m puzzled at the “now the tension is lost” folks. The comic is a slice of life comic and has taken ten years to go like one week. This is not tension. This comic is fun because we are going along for the ride.
Not even a week. Three days. This is just about the only webcomic that has made negative progress since it started (since we still aren’t caught up to the beginning of the flashback yet).
Guys .. has no one noticed the big fat hint thrown around ?
Krona has already used her Savepoint . As seen by the fact that she new what Sidney was going to ask.
( https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2384 )
Ha predictive texts , nice try Krona but your not fooling me . :-)
I’m getting the feeling that some are overthinking this. Sydney’s personal theme is games and comics, that is how she sees the world. Not always necessarily how the world works. Her Skill Tree was very much game inspired, there were other times when Sydney used her knowledge of games and comics to understand and deal with what she experienced.
Krona’s trick can be thought of as a ‘reset’ or it can be thought of as a ‘safety rope’. She attaches this rope to everyone in the group and programs it to activate under set conditions. Once activated, all ropes begin to drag the persons back to that starting point.
I expect that there are limits to Krona’s powers, for example the goggles she wears, or the fact that it takes time to program an outcome. She’s powerful, but not all powerful. Match her up against a Marvel Comics style Reality Warper, and she’d get creamed.
Agreed. She could be a game breaker with infinite time to set-up, but in a time squeeze her wording of conditions and if the reset point was set too late to stop later bad outcomes (how times have one of us discovered later our last save was past the point where meaningful change was possible?), would limit her greatly and her power drops off quickly.
And personally, I love how well Dave has stuck to Sydney seeing the world through gamer eyes, since I’ve fallen into that “trap” on more than a few occasions IRL personally, lmao.
Finally, someone who isn’t petulantly whining. You have a good grasp of this. To be frank, almost any character could pull off absolutely anything with the Batman-vs-theory “infinite amount of time to prepare/unlimited resources”, and Krona is no different. But in a combat situation she’s definitely back-row, because all it takes is for someone to dart over to her and pummel her normal, frail, human girl body, and they’ve taken her completely out of the picture before she can start tikkity-tappin’ at her console.
Or, y’know. A gun. That thing that shoots stuff only Maxima has been shown to be faster than. Don’t even need to be a super, just pop a cap in Krona and it’s over with.
Yet there’s all these folks complaining that she’s too OP and ruining the comic. It’s so sad to see that this many people who can’t use their brains.
Regarding the vote incentive, Pixel’s claws must be hell on the upholstery!
Being a lightsaber in a world of cardboard tends to do that, I’m sure.
Was going to comment about maybe she can turn off the light-claws, but then remembered: she would still have claws
They’re most likely semi-retractable, so.
You have never had a cat then…
Yeah, they do not retract their claws when they’re happy and stretched out.
Zack Tilly! :D
A happy relaxing cat shreds what (or whom) ever they are relaxing on :P
most cats can retract, only cheetahs can’t, naturally speaking that is
Ladies and gentlemen, please be ready for your first aircar taxi rides, in July. All you need do is catch a flight to Dubai first, unless you happen to be situated there normally.
Do be sure to diet though, if you are over 100kg (220lb). Oh, and take out plenty of life insurance first. The expert in that link feels that they have failed to conduct adequate safety testing.
*lays a single red rose on Sydney’s tombstone*
*sniffle*
Anyone else find this EXTREMELY disturbing? I dying to know how this works.
Did Sydney die? Is this the real Sydney, or only a copy? Or did Sydney only get a glimpse of a possible future.
In any sort of scenario I imagine, Sydney still died. Follow me on this. SPOILER ALERT FOR MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN.
So in the movie Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, Miss Peregrine has the ability to turn back time. She does this daily so her and her kids can live forever. However, there’s one point where she says a line that can easily be thrown away, but has extreme consequences. She makes mention that she’s had to murder the same police officer and a barkeep multiple times in one month.
Well, one way of interpreting this is through multiverse theory. Every time she turns back the clock, she creates another universe. Doing so, however, doesn’t mean what happened before didn’t happen. Rather, what that means is that Miss Peregrine did murder a cop and a barkeep, and in that timeline they stay dead.
If I were Sydney, I’d be having one hell of an existential crisis. Mind you, I would also be having the same existential crisis having just teleported.
I guess what I’m saying is that if I were Sydney, I’d be having a very, very bad day D-:
You are a ‘the cup is half full’ kind of guy. Whereas Sydney is a ‘I am alive, whee!’ kind of gal.
Yes, she, or an alternate reality version of her died. But the one who is thinking the thoughts is alive. Bear in mind that, under the multiple alternate Earth’s way of thinking every decision creates two (or more) separate universes. Make this choice and you go down the first path, make the other one and you go the other way.
Folks who spend their lives second-guessing the choices that they made, and ‘what if’ I had chosen a different route?’ are loosing their own precious lifetime imagining what is happening to the alternate time-line versions of themselves. Which is meaningless, as there is someone else living that life. Same face, but a subtly different person in the driving seat. The only life you have influence over (without Krona’s ability) is your own. So you have to focus on that.
Sydney need not reflect on the millions of universes in which she died, maybe crossing a street or having a sign post fall on her head. She should just be thankful of the second chance she has gotten. And save her angst for when Archon are paying a top-level shrink to help her through such issues!
Whilst there are disadvantages to Sydney always ‘living in the moment’, her behaviour in this comic shows one of the advantages.
Oh believe me, I’m quite pragmatic, and live in the moment. It’s why I quit my job and moved to Vegas. But in the context of the story, I find this stuff to be really, really heavy.
Lucky for the rest of the world, we see Krona being a rational self-controlled person in this comic. If she had turned out petty and vindictive the results could have been similar to this Twilight Zone episode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilight_Zone)
I feel like a lot of people around here don’t spend enough time in the superhero genre if they honestly think Krona is going to overbalance the universe. Put her down in the DC universe and see how far she gets. This is well within the scope of power for classic super heroes, and gives us a lot of cool story potential with the ability to explore what-if scenarios that would be cool but bad for the overall plot.
Just found this comic a few days ago. Sorry if this has been discussed before, but question:
Halo has earned 1 pip …so is “level 2” Grrl Power was started in 2010…assuming she gets another tomorrow, that’s like 1 every 3 years…assuming the comic is still being drawn in 60 years, that’s still low 20s in level. Is it too much to hope she gets pips as fast as she learns how to use the last one? Like a step by step tutorial rather than actual combat?
I so like the idea of a Halo style perk point matrix for a 1st person game. Someone has 2/3 of his points in Lighthook, someone else 1/2 in shield, 1/4 in flight, 1/4 in PPO.
One thing to keep in mind is that this story is being told in a flashback. So who knows if we’ll skip ahead… to the present ^_^;
Actually.. in the DC universe she would be tugged of join the JLA so swiftly you could still see her afterimage when she had arrived at the moon base.
Being able to push back the clock like that makes her the biggest force multiplier i can imagine unless said power has some sort of limitations.
I mean.. imagine how much it would suck to have to fight superman without being able to surprise him? You reveal you got Lois Lane as your hostage.. turns out its martian manhunter in disguise.
You got a secret kryptonite stash? No.. Batman replaced it 15 min ago with green plastic.
Pixel getting strung up didn’t trigger the checkpoint, so it does seem to imply that Sydney was in fact tapped of all blood and died… but I think it just qualified as an immediately life-threatening situation, alternatively author self-censorship since we don’t actually get to see said heroine die.
It’s safe to say that this didn’t help Sciona control the orbs, as they’re controlled by Sydney’s consciousness. But they remain tied to her, which has several possibilities but I bet it was a one-time event of being chosen. If Sydney dies, presumably someone else could become chosen, but not just anyone. There’s too many safeties on those things to be left up to chance.
Krona’s checkpoint save is an interesting ability, but it looks like it comes with a multitude of limitations, the most obvious one being that it was only set for their little group. It also seems likely that only one can be set at any given time, and quite possibly being a one-use commodity.
It’s also interesting that Syd’s orbs can strike with enough force to break bones, because it could make the most awesome martial art ever. If Syd was coordinated enough to be a rave queen, that is.
This may be presumptive and a little late to ask, but do you have a submission for VDSD 2017? I only ask because they have you listed as on of the participants.
Oh and Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!
I was going to ask the same thing. Maybe February’s vote incentive this year’s VDSD submission?
It’s oddly SFW for VDSD.
The question is what does Sydney remember about what happened in the warehouse? Also does Pixel remember anything? If they do then it is a big cheat if not well then nothing has changed. It seems that they know something happened.
If she died, wouldn’t that make her Sydney Scoville the Third?
No. Scoville the Third comes with a crown.