Grrl Power #503 – Manic loop
This page doesn’t actually explain a whole lot. It was supposed to initially, but Sydney kind of got away from me here. She’s a menace to both sides of the 4th wall.
I’m not sure Sydney has considered what’s involved in actually implementing her checkpoint ‘sploit. It would involve either dying a lot or at least hitting those acute stress levels Krona mentioned over and over. I enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow enough as it was basically the military version of Groundhog Day. I can’t say I’m interested in Before I Fall, which looks to be the high school girl version of Groundhog Day. Anyway, one thing I thought Day of Tomorrow might have done a little differently would have been if they showed the toll of dying over and over and over took on Cruises character. He didn’t need to descend into a quivering mass of overlapping PTSDs, just a line here or there about “I hope we figure this out sooner rather than later. Dying is not… most people don’t have to remember it.” Maybe one or two more traumatic events would make Sydney realize her plan has some significant drawbacks.
Given Pixel’s knowledge of artifacts, telling her your time loop is limited might sound a bit like “it’s just a tiny atomic bomb.” Presumably she’s not a fan.
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A good example of “time grief” is The Liberians and the Point of Salvation. His friends keep dying and he explains the pain of seeing that over and over while he fails.
GM rolls dice and says to players: “Your party gets attacked by a wandering spell checker. Your librarians are now Liberians.”
Haven’t seen that episode. Sounds a lot like Steins;Gate.
Loved Steins;Gate but would also recommend Puella Magi Madoka Magica if you haven’t seen it.
And then he ends up being the one who doesn’t remember the loop, putting him back to square one.
Since we have little other development to comment on, my attention turned to the layout of Sydney’s utility belt. The rebreather is on Sydney’s back cleverly disguised as a VCR tape. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2393
The craft supplies, and the med-kit appear to be in her left side waist pouches https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2260 https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2406
Have we found out what she is carrying in the right side leg pouches?
I liked Edge of Tomorrow BECAUSE we get to see Tom Cruise get killed a lot. Best Tom Cruise movie ever, just because of that. Gonna be hard to top… technically, that one where he’s a clone who’s brainwashed to be helping that alien tetrahedron things in the sky probably killed more Tom Cruises, but nearly all of them happen off-screen, so that doesn’t really count. There is that scene of Cruise beating up Cruise, though, so that’s a mark in it’s favor…
Not a fan, huh?
This is true, until there’s a Youtube video of Tom Cruise being murdered.
there was. you missed it. the Tom Cruise you hate is really a time-travelling clone…
I bet Arnie will be assassinated by a time-travelling terminator!
Hey it is just like Wayland, of Wayland Industries, ended up being the model for the ‘Bishop’ series of robots that like hanging around Aliens.
Hmmm… the next twist is older Krona showing up in a Time Patrol uniform, smacking younger Krona on the back of the head and saying “don’t do that again!”
Heeeyyy… the comm ball does projection and teleportation. Can it project and teleport to the past? I suspect not – Sydney with built-in time travel sounds like a way to knot a storyline irrevocably. But wait – most of the comic has been essentially a super-long flashback so far. Are we sure she doesn’t have time communication powers and that’s what is showing the flashback?
Sydney with that ability would cause a universal causal loop… ;-)
At least it’s controllable a time loop, not an uncontrollable time bounce*!
*As seen in 12:01 (short 1990 film with Kurtwood Smith, not long 1993 film with Jonathan Silverman).
The problem being that Krona is fallible. As demonstrated by having an unexpected result from Harem’s presence. If this is a full-on manipulation of time (as opposed to a local phenomenon) it risks sticking the universe in an eternal loop, if the exit conditions are not met, or another unexpected error occurs.
Likewise even a local loop would be disastrous for themselves. Barring that eventually some external help might find a way to break the cycle. But that might not be for a very long time, from the outside world’s point of view. Even if they are blissfully unaware of it inside the loop.
Who knows, they may have already been through millions of iterations of this loop, if Halo/Harem only remember the most recent attempt? When they get out (assuming the local version, with the possibility of getting help) they might find all their friends and family long dead!
Only if the memories persist, from cycle to cycle, will they be able to Groundhog day and try to find a means of breaking the bounce-back themselves.
The risk is there, unless, as other fiction continuities have it, the universe has a sort of… resistance to harmful manipulation that’d gum up the works. In Doctor Who, for example, a paradox tends to cause a huge explosion centered around the person creating the paradox.
Something of that nature.
It could be just a simple… just because you got to remember the re-do it does not mean that the enemy does not remember it. After all this is a world of magic is it’s possible they could also remember due to ‘magic’… That or the whole ‘it works till I die and I don’t want to make the enemy focus on killing me instead of you’ type of deal.
No theory or plan can account for hitherto unknown superpowers.
That said, the general rule has been established– Krona knows from experience that usually, in the general case, people don’t remember unless she tells the holo-thingy to make them remember.
So “Edge of Tomorrow” was based off a rather interesting manga titled “All You Need Is Kill” which has the story more well fleshed out (and more believable ending loops).
As for a character showing the effects of dying multiple times to get to the point where Sydney is babbling about, the anime/light novel “Starting Over in a New World From Zero,” or “Re: Zero” for short, does a very nice job of showing the mental stress on a character that has to die to reset often and the various ways their “futures” play out.
I read the original version online where they looked like they where wearing armor from halo then i saw a printed version where they changed it i liked the original best
If anyone wants to read a surprisingly good time loop story I suggest the mlp fanfic Hard Reset
Depending how your concept of time is… A time loop could be anything from the best thing ever to universe destroying, to a non-event. This is a place where theoretical physics just breaks down.
…As do theoretical physicists!
I’ve never met a theoretical physicist, so i have a theory they don’t exist
(implodes)
)>voit<(
Physics is theoretical.
Even the most basic physics theory is predicated upon an act of faith.
Even a tiny atomic bomb is absurdly powerful. The W9 was only 11 inches around but had the explosive power of 15,000 pounds of tnt.
Though suitcase nuke is a misnomer, as it still weighed 800 pounds.
I suppose one of the most obvious limitations of Krona’s ‘checkpoint’ time loop would be the creation of another checkpoint prior to her current one being triggered. If only the most recent checkpoint is active, then this would make it a most dangerous situation.
For instance, imagine the scenario: Sciona has a minion who can create checkpoints, and on Sydney’s second venture, she lets slip that Krona made a checkpoint. Then Sciona gets her minion to make a new checkpoint and Sydney’s screwed.
No wonder Krona didn’t want to be very explicit about it.
There is no such thing as a limited time loop. You either just “looped” a certain area, which would mean you undid about half an hour of the Earth’s rotation for that specific area, so…that factory just got violently relocated (OR you’re currently busy halting the laws of space).
Or you reversed the rotation and movement of the Earth (or rather every planetary object in the Solar system) and every object (living or inanimate) within it for that same time frame.
And that’s why it’s better to employ time travel only when we follow Bill&Ted-rules – which is no rules.
No, the Bill & Ted rule was that time still moves in the present, so if you travel to the past and spend an hour there, you’ll return to the present an hour after you left it. It’s better just to use a flux capacitor.
Except when it didn’t (ending of 2).
That is something that bugged me, they really did not have to follow that rule when they could just dial anywhen they wanted.
The Delorian had an upgrade, in the meanwhile. If I am remembering the sequences right,* at that point it could fly, for instance. Let alone being powered by garbage, rather than lightning.
Wooden ships were restricted to coastal voyages until they were upgraded to include sophisticated sea navigation, by one means or another. Or take a blind chance, but then they certainly could not guarantee arriving a a specific desired destination.
* No guarantees on that.
“There is no such thing as a limited time loop.”
You are not the one in control of this world. There’s no such thing as magic and bombshell beauties with superpowers either, so who are we to say what there is and isn’t of?
True, but his point is still sound. The notion of a ‘limited’ time loop is that it is limited in time, not space. If you only loop the local block or so around you while the rest of the world continues on you’d be flying off into space.
Krona either looped the universe, or did a lot of moving rocks around to make stuff line up. Or rather, the library that she called did, if we are using her coding metaphor.
Well, there is of course the option I only slightly hinted it that she avoids the physical dilemma by either moving the manipulated space in some form of pocket dimension or that she cancels the spell and therefore the “local time” snaps back into place but either way, none of that is “limited”. Especially since those options would imply this is an actively sutained effect.
These are god-like feats, usually reserved for insanely powerful entities or primal forces themself. For a single schoolgirl to just casually bend the rules of space that casually is just insane.
People have debating whether Krona gives Maxima a run for her money. With this, it’s done. Maxima is a bunny-fart in comparison. Because there is no world in which suspending cosmic powers is in any way, shape or form less demanding than, let’s say, dissolving the connection between atoms.
And that is exactly why people who create detailed and explained settings really, REALLY shouldn’t touch alterations of reality and/or time manipulation until they REALLY know what they’re doing. Intentional or not, Dave just created something on the level of a deity.
Has it not occurred to you, that maybe that’s what Kronachrome is? A minor god manifesting on Earth to see how things play out? It wouldn’t be the first story to do so with some cosmic level reason why they don’t just erase humanity and start all over again with dragonflies
It’s called consistency. You learn it around the same time you stop making vapid arguments.
It’s the reason why Aragon didn’t just fart out an army of anthropomorphic tiger sharks to pummel the orcs into the ground using Kamehamehas, despite LotR being fantasy. It’s why magic, while it doesn’t exist in reality, is clearly defined and has rules and limitations in every work of fiction that isn’t either shit or a comedy, parody, anything else that makes clear that it doesn’t care about the machinations of the setting.
This webcomic, in case you missed it, DOES try to set limitations, establishes a semi-realistic framework and in fact revels in how it explains how things work. So yeah, I’m not in control of this world but I can apply the rules that were presented to me by the creator.
And “who are we”? What, you need a tittle now to apply logical/critical thinking? If you like to think of yourself as some form of inept subhuman, kindly do it on your own time.
Yeah, and if you pull your head in instead of biting it, you will find out what those limitations are instead of crying foul! and trying to inject your own ideas as absolutes in a world of flying magic balls and golden elves
Unfortunately for you, I didn’t “cry foul” nor did I “inject my own ideas” as absolutes. Again, two phrases that are as hollow as they seem practiced.
I pointed out how the feat of casually altering/suspending the laws of physics at will (possibly manipulating the cosmos) is in no way, shape or form “limited”, explaining – in great detail – how in every scenario this is an utterly breathtaking action.
If you think that there is a possibility to make the alteration/suspension of the laws of physics and possibly the manipulation of the entire cosmos a trivial act, I’d like to hear that.
If you can’t you might want to try not employing indignation for its own sake. It just might make you look less foolish.
You are still making an ass out yourself and attempting to make one out of me, by deciding what does and does not work in the Grrlverse, if you believe you know how everything works then you must already know what the two mystery orbs are and what they do
The laws of physics gets altered and suspended every time Daphne *VORP*s, or Maxi breathes, or Sydney fondles one of her seven flying balls
Okay, guess I have to do this the kindergarden-way.
You say that I try to “decide what does and does not work in the Grrlverse”.
I would now ask you to quote me on where I attempted to do so.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Come on now, give me a hard one.
Headbiter
February 20, 2017 at 9:42 am | # | Reply
There is no such thing as a limited time loop. You either just “looped” a certain area, which would mean you undid about half an hour of the Earth’s rotation for that specific area, so…that factory just got violently relocated (OR you’re currently busy halting the laws of space).
Or you reversed the rotation and movement of the Earth (or rather every planetary object in the Solar system) and every object (living or inanimate) within it for that same time frame.
Hopefully I didn’t screw up the citation, but you did state, as an absolute, what Dave can and cannot do in his universe.
The format that I find works best to display a citation is as follows:
<blockquote>Text you want to quote.</blockquote>
Or if you want to include quotation marks, you need to add those manually, as follows:
<blockquote>”Text you want to quote.”</blockquote>
Giving a result like this:
Oops. I must have chopped off the “/” in closing my example tag, when I was editing it. The code displayed above would work correctly, and did when I tested it. But subsequently added more text and effed up the demonstration tag in the process.
Again, I’d ask you where I said what Dave could or could not do in his universe.
What you quoted there literally just listed a number of options how Krona – and pay attention now – COULD (<- important word here) HAVE ACHIEVED WHAT SHE JUST DID in order to demonstrate how big of a deal it is and could in no way be considered "limited".
Less wishful thinking and more actual reading comprehension please.
Addendum: I even elaborated on that fact in a following post, something you might have come across if you managed to scroll down an inch or two instead of stroking your ego.
To be precise you listed two options, an exclusion (which is what I take your “or” statement in parenthesis to be, given its tone) and your conclusion gave advice.
As this this comment page is in response to Dave’s comic, the default assumption that readers are likely to make is that such is directed towards him. Unless of course some hint is given to the contrary, of which none was forthcoming.
Reading on to your next comment, as you advise, I note that the concluding paragraph yet again offers advice in a similar manner. Yet this time the concluding sentence is:
At this point it becomes hard for any reader not to conclude that your remarks are indeed directed more at Dave than some unstipulated authors (or wannabe authors) amongst the readership.
Rather than trying to defend the ambiguity of your comments it would be better to graciously consed the point, and aim to avoid such in future. If it genuinely was your intent to direct the comment generally, rather than as a criticism.
Not that there is anything wrong with constructive criticism mind. Where such concludes that the author was wrong to handle an issue a particular way though, do be prepared for those of a contrary point of view to speak up in his defence.
Incidentally I think it is clear that Dave does know what he is doing, given that Sydney explicitly said that Krona is more powerful than Maxima. Who is currently the unbeaten champion amongst the world’s super heroes.
Further the ‘little school girl with incredible cosmic powers’ is actually a nice spin to play. It is reminiscent of the scene in MiB. The big difference being that Dave is following the mantra of “show don’t tell”.
We are getting to see, first paw, that the supernaturals do number at least one individual of godlike power amongst their ranks. Which very much underscores why Archon are striving to co-operate with them, rather than be antagonistic.
Likewise as regards being cautious about lowering the Veil until the world is ready for it. Spooking somone with god-like powers, because they feel threatened (for good reason) is not wise.
In the spirit of my own comments, the latter points are general comments, rather than directed at yourself. However it does lead to a pertinent point in that Krona is an embodiment of the political dynamics under which our heroes operate. They might be big fish, but there is always a bigger fish out there! Which means they cannot rely on brute force solutions. They have to deploy diplomacy and compromise, where necessary.
*waggles tail to cast ‘summon bigger fish’*
So don’t send a person.
You’re doing it wrong.
(This is what I’m talking about when I say no author ever uses Time Travel correctly because it would ruin the story.)
Spend a day maybe with Dabbler helping cobbling together a tiny flying robot. Then send that back in time to now, whereupon Kronastarts a new Time Loop for the robot. All it needs is good maneuverability, a basic general learning AI, a network connection, and if you’re feeling particularly enterprising, maybe a modest weapons payload.
Every time the robot is destroyed, it sends itself back in time and does a data dump. It doesn’t even need to be particularly intelligent. If the robot is not destroyed, it can fly back to Krona, who can record remarks and give its algorithm some feedback before sending it back to the Now.
Then the robot just keeps looping, millions of times, in the Now. Within seconds or minutes after the time loop was initiated (assuming SOME nanoseconds are lost with each iteration due to scheduling to arrive slightly before the last robot was sent into the warehouse) they have a 4D map of the entire building, how every opponent within the building will react to the robot taking a certain path and performing a certain action, actual Outcomes for every route taken so far (which Krona can basically pick from and repeat if they’re a satisfactory result) and if they don’t want to just Brute Force it like this using an algorithm, they can make the robot remotely controlled from outside the warehouse. That way, every flight path is a Groundhog’s Day, controlled by a Bill Murray, but only the Robot experiences the PTSD preconditions AND only the robot ages when it sends information back in time. You’d get millions of loops out of it before you started to spend loops replacing worn-out components that, according to the log, are ABOUT to fail.
Now, then. Let’s talk combat. You’re probably thinking “oh, there must be Supers in there, so the robot can’t really do all the fighting. Once you know the optimal schedule, you’d have to start sending in our PCs to do the heavy lifting, and you can only loop them so many times, so you’ve just shifted the problem forward in time a few minutes. (Which the victims may or may not have!) Risk and action can totally still happen! You haven’t ruined the story yet.”
And you only think that because you’re still doing it wrong.
I’m sure Dabbler has all sorts of powerful energy pistols and micro-emitters she could theoretically incorporate into our bot’s payload. But she probably doesn’t need to. All she needs is any weapon that can theoretically damage all of the opponents. Our troll friend can be wounded with a simple bayonet strapped to the flying robot. Therefore, our troll friend can be assassinated by the flying robot doing a particularly impressive Speed Run. Or if you just want to capture, not kill, it’s a little trickier. You’d want to use a heated blade (if that’s how Troll healing is countered in this campaign setting) to each of the major tendons. If that’s still too cruel for our heroines, I dunno. Dump a few cycles into trying various glues, weights, and other immobilizing traps until you find one that works on this guy.
If you wanted to, you could try psychological warfare. Flying robot just gets punched every time. But a flying robot that looks like the Troll’s lover’s crying, decapitated, bleeding head begging for mercy? Turns out that buys you 30 seconds of decision paralysis, every time, at the cost of 10-12 minutes of sustained berzerker rage afterwards. So if you employ this gambit, you’d better also nail the crit. Oh. You missed and the robot got destroyed? Functionally infinite do-overs!
What about the victims strung up to the soda fountain in there? Medical research might be able to save their lives. Oh, that’s right, we can recover the bodies, even if half the team dies in the process, perform a loop within a loop, do ALL of the medical research, all of it, by sending robots with logs (NOT RESEARCHERS) back in time and using the logs to bring the researchers up to speed on what the “other team” did (secretly them.) Then once we know how to save all the victims’ lives, Krona packs the researchers’ whitepapers and a condensed metalog that she thinks Past Her needed to know into the original bot and sends it back to prevent this metaloop by just HANDING Now-Krona the results of thousands of years’ worth of medical research if that’s what it takes. (And that won’t be what it takes, we have some goddamned medical geniuses in Arc-Swat, obviously.)
So! That’s all enemies killed or captured, and by that I mean you get to decide whether you prefer to kill them or capture them, all victims saved, the blood-extraction procedure definitively reversed (even if it is some weird maguffiny thing and not just, you know, “Let’s drink supers’ blood and see what happens.” And don’t say “what if it’s a magical maguffin, not technological, how would you do the research?” Sufficiently documented Magic is indistinguishable from Technology.
But what would that epic War On This Moment look like, in the Now?
Well, it would look like a tiny flying robot suddenly appearing that Has All The Answers. Krona reads a log for a couple of seconds, then presses a button choosing an Outcome. Robot implements, all the baddies get dealt with, rescue teams are called in and told EXACTLY how to save the victims, and Pixel again screams “What did you DO!?”
If you sufficiently miniaturized the final robot that delivers the log, nobody would probably even SEE it. Only Krona would have even a vague inkling that this massively engineered War On This Moment had happened. It would look like all Krona did was squint at her screen and fiddle with the controls and then decide what to do, and then when they went inside the building there’s evidence of a fight and lots of captured bad guys but no hero to have caused it. Even the bad guys don’t know what happened to them, because if they’d seen the attack coming, it would have been a less than optimal Run.
So, “Okay,” you’re thinking, “that’s still not ruining the story. You still get to see the massive, epic War on This Moment. Sure, all that infrastructure and planning and scheming gets deleted when the time loop is broken, but the viewer still got to see it, right?”
Yes. Astute observation. The problem is, these techniques are TOTALLY generalizable to solve basically any problem, even problems that require Maxima or someone else to Go Do A Thing. And once you’ve seen it once, watching it play out again will become boring.
That’s why characters can’t use time travel Correctly, or if they do, some kind of Time Lords or Self-Correcting History or Krona has a Mental Block Preventing Her From Using It or other clumsy implement of authorial fiat is required. Exploiting this principle makes all future problems irrelevant, unless the problem was literally never solvable in the first place according to all possibly discoverable laws of physics and metaphysics. (Assuming the mechanics of the universe are deterministic, of course.)
In the great RPG of Life, Time is the one stat that every character has, and which can be converted into any other stat. Strength. Skill points. Money. Literally anything. That’s why it’s so confusing to me that so many players tend to use their Time for target practice. Unlimited Time means Unlimited Everything, and Time Travel, sufficiently exploited, means the very best of all physically possible outcomes in any given moment.
If time travel were possible, it would be direct and incontrovertible evidence that the laws of the universe are not deterministic.
You’d also have so many lottery winners that the lottery itself and all high stakes gambling in general have ended.
The act of traveling through time to a point prior to the determination of the number on the lottery ticket affects the randomization of that selection. In other words, If you travel back a week to buy the winning lottery ticket from yesterday, the new number will not be the winning number from your prior future past.
Don’t ask me how I know this.
An interesting thought… On one hand, even a chaotic system should still produce identical results given an identical input, it’s only chaotic because those inputs are too minute to be be measured. So as long as you did nothing that altered the handling of the balls, the result should be the same.
However, that could be easier said than done, thanks to the butterfly effect. It may not be possible to avoid altering the starting condition of balls.
Also depends whether the universe is deterministic or not. And now that I think of it, even if the universe IS deterministic, the robots would need to time the replays down to a single quantum frame in order to reliably get the same Outcome. That’s probably easier to do by just going back in time a few nanoseconds until you nail the landing than by actually being that fast and precise, but I don’t know what kinds of bizarre alien tech they have to work with at the lowest level. Presumably, when you ask Krono what time it is, she knows the most accurate answer out of all currently available technological methods of telling the time. If anyone can count quantum frames, it’s her.
I do think that there are parts of the universe that are strictly deterministic, like what happens when a cue ball strikes a set of billiards balls, and things that are not strictly deterministic, like what happens when quantum states collapse. If traveling through time were possible, I’d expect neither to be directly affected. However, I’d also expect the quantum side of things to step up and keep the peace if paradox became involved. I’d also expect the quantum side of things to use minimal effort to do its job. You want to kill your grandfather while he’s an infant? The quantum side of things might just arrange for a different chromosome for him when you try, making him someone else, and making sure you are never born and so can never make the attempt at paradox. Arising out of normal quantum states, paradox is avoided. Extend the logic far enough, and time traveling lottery cheats will also destroy themselves in the same way.
lottery winners
you’d walk into the convenience store, the guy or girl or other defined would look at you, roll their eyes, and point to the ‘leave a penny take a penny’ jar and say “take the penny, that’s your winnings”
How do you spend a day, then send a robot back in time? I’m scratching my head over that, or are you thinking that Krona has a more general time control ability than just save points?
Ahh, sorry, my wiring got sloppy there and there’s no edit functionality. I guess I forgot to spell out that she’d have to create a third save state before doing that.
Remember, this whole thing assumes the “limitation” is a function of human biology and psychology. If there’s an actual other limit such as power source, Time Police, or Krona knowing from past experience that if she consistently solves All The Problems this way it’ll make her superheroine friends lazy and eventually doom the human race, the whole post is moot. If there is no other such limit, you can pretty much just assume that if the description needs another nested loop, she can do that.
Oh wait. I guess I was further assuming Krona could take an object, not just an idea, back in time with her.
Or that Krnoa built the flying robot in the past and has been using it for years, and that’s why people think of her as a “reality hacker.”
Or, like you said, that she could just “send an object back in time.”
Silly me.
Okay so they can’t do it right now if information is the only thing that can go back in time. They could probably, however, try this with whatever existing robots somebody in Arc-Swat has lying around right now. But after this event, they could always start doing it right.
Really, REALLY hope I didn’t just get Krona killed by author fiat.
Naa, she is too cute to die.
There is the problem of wear and tear on reality. Like walking over a section of grass will, over time, create a muddy path.
Rolling time backwards and forwards repeatedly could cause something else to wear out. Could be a maximum number of times before you can’t rewind any more, or it could crack reality and distort other dimensions.
The one thing nobody has said is ” We better call Max”. Chain of command exists for a reason, especially for people like Sydney…
Someone, and I think it was DaveB, said that this was supposed to be an innocuous check on a low probability site since it is a known old base of operations. What kind of supervillain hangs out in places they are known to have hung out before?
Now that they have a positive ID on the target they will probably, and should probably already have, call in the intel they have gathered and await orders.
Scouts aren’t supposed to be raiding parties, after all.
What you have, is Sydney got the only meaningful intel, triggered the time loop, and hasn’t yet reported what she saw. She’s still spazzing about having died and time travel and etc. Harem knows _something_ is up, and knows Sydney, for better or worse, can teleport, and something there took down one super before sending Sydney to spaz-land. But perhaps all they ran into was a troll… or a long abandoned security system. Recruit, report!
Krona has the intel. She even has the hexdump. It was all in the log.
A diarrhea curse is nasty. But even nastier if you have to squeeze off your daily log and examine it for your information!
Actually, the only people who could possibly know that Sydney can now BeePort (have we come up with a name for her new ability yet, like Harem’s *VORP*?) are Sydney herself (once she stops spazzing), Kronachrome (once she gets to that part of the log and possibly Sci-fright (but only if she remembers what happens, and if she can, she’s either already sending out troops to find Sydney and Pixelicious or bugging out): Pixelicious was unconscious and Bodie had already started searching for Holo-Halo and the strung up Pixelicious
If they HAVEN’T called Max yet, it must mean that Syd is too busy spazzing-out to report that “detail”. In all fairness, we’ve not yet seen any sign that Sciona has named herself to Syd. Unless Syd gives a good-enough description (&/or reports having heard a name), they might still fail to ‘connect the dots’ here. Their best chance is if Krona knows enough about Sciona to recognize her from Syd’s report, so that the search can then be re-focused onto this warehouse.
A possible reason for Sydney’s spazzy behavior:
Even if the ‘checkpoint’-app transmits no more than data into the past, there is still a physical consequence, because memory is stored physically in the brain as an electro-chemical encoding-process. By transmitting these memories into the past, the time-loop is therefore physically altering Syd’s brain. My point is, if Krona’s app hasn’t allowed for the existence of Syd’s meds then it might’ve reset her brain to a ‘100%_drug_free’ state by ‘editing-out’ the presence of any ‘foreign’ chemicals.
“Why might Krona overlook this?”
When foreign chemicals are found in a Super’s body, it usually means poison, knockout-cocktail or some other form of chemical attack that should be removed. Most Supers (&/or Super-naturals) don’t use/need chemical assistance to stabilize their brain’s behavior.
We do not know where Dabbler’s other bodies are.
I would not be surprised if one is with Maxima.
Daphne, not Dabbles
I think it’s fair to assume that Sydney has said at least a little bit about her encounter to the gang. If she hasn’t, then her constant references to “this bitch” (last comic) and “she” (this comic) should have at least elicited a “who are you talking about?” from one of the others by this point.
Context suggests strongly that they all know that it is Sciona in the
WMars factory.Or maybe they have learnt to tune most of Sydney out
After seeing Sydney’s performance I realized I have no comment. No really, I’ve got nothing to say to that.
I’m quite impressed that Sydney managed to pull off her little choreography without the flight ball in her hand to lend her gracefulness. She must have practiced this many times before, given that awkwardness and clumsiness are a part of her character.
I’m sure she’s spent many hours practicing the fight sequence from Daffy Duck’s brief attempt to become Robin Hood.
And yet, there are no bent duckbills.
check again, she’s got her lips bent up like a duck bill in one of the panels (panel 5, subsection…um..)
Yes, but that was to simulate Sci-fright’s head exploding
*thpoilthport*
the thing everyone forgets about is that even though for you time loops back to the checkpoint
for the rest of reality things carry on as normal, minus you.
yes they’ll win in this reality
but in the previous reality Pixel and Halo are essentially dead
and one of the Harems might very well be joining that club.
which begs the question what effect does having a pocket time loop
overlapping in reality cause to the local time-stream ?
It’s either a pocket time loop or an actual looping of time itself. The latter is more likely and raises the least amount of complex questions.
If it was the latter harem wouldn’t remember anything
Her hive mind remembering tells us at least one of her is out side the radius of the time loop
This is evidence that it is a localized temporal pocket of time that has been looped
Which to be frank is the worst way to do a time loop.
Agreed. Also, if you were trying to use localized time travel to undo someone finding out something that you don’t want people to know, it would be a quick fix that is doomed to long-term failure, as eventually someone would notice that ALL the internet connected devices within the radius of effect are suddenly all *exactly* the same amount of time off. And even if they updated their clocks on returning, there would be enough digital evidence to be able to say that *something* has messed with the standard progression of time in this area. The way to fix something like that, so that no-one notices, is to instead use reality warping to remove all record and memory of the Thing You Don’t Want People To Know, and then Stasis the knowledge in some physical form so you have a way to recover it should you need to.
Evidence is the least of the worries involved when discussing local time loops
the smallest local area that a pocket time loop can be used
is the size of the Solar system, and by solar system I mean the solar Heliosphere
The sun orbits the Galaxy at 220 km/s
the Galaxy is moving away from the estimated center of the Universe at a speed of about 600 km/s
just going back in time for 1 second would cover a large amount of distance.
Are Pixel’s laser claws retractable or should Krona be worried about holes in the collar of her shirts?
retractable. she’s a cat.
Correct. All the great cats can retract their claws except cheetahs.
Pixel, the voice of sanity.
I am finally getting used to Sydney’s new look. Just so long as I do not focus too much on how narrow her neck is, all her facial expressions and emotions convey the same old Sydney, just fine.
I have to know; Is panel 5 (with the multiple sydneys, which could also be panels 5 through 11) a reference to Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu? I just saw the first season of that, which was amazing, and Sydney’s in the same sort of sitting position.
Pretty sure it’s an homage to an old Daffy Duck cartoon. “Dodge, parry, thrust, Boing! (broken beak)
Not that part. The part right after it. Where she has her fingers up to represent the tusks and stuff.
Don’t know what show you are talking about, but Sydney is imitating Sci-fright, complete with the voice
Lets hope she has a better time of pannel 4 than Daffy did here…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cuihrjLNAo
I love the Daffy Duck Reference Halo does. Well Played.
Panel five is conformation that Sydney remembers her meeting with Sci-fright (or it’s Author error :P), because how else would she know what she looks, or sounds, like, The Council would not have been able to tell her either because The Council believe her beheaded and deaded and even if they did describe how she use to look, they would not have told her what she sounded like
Panel 6 looks totally bizarre with Pixel’s wrist being just out of the field of view. Looks like part of her went invisible for a second but was still grabbing Krona.
This is actually the third loping as the second had more shouting and attracted the attention of the villain in the building with good hearing and the long-range weaponry.
Talking about stories where time loops are a significant plot element, aside from “All you need is kill”, which is where EoT took its inspiration, you might want to look into Re:Zero. It places a lot of emphasis on how stressful time-looping is for those who experience it, not only for the actual stress of living (painful) deaths over and over, but also for the actual psychological elements of growing attached to people whose knowledge of you resets every time. (Plus bonus butterfly effect —if you don’t behave exactly the same, what happens may be wildly different.)
Seems like if the trigger is stress, then eventually you’d get unimpressed enough by any surrounding danger that it would fail to trigger and then you would be dead.
I suspect that as a result, it only reliably works if you don’t know about it.
Is this the cutest Sydney has ever been? I think this is the cutest Sydney has ever been.
…annoying, certainly. But cute, regardless.
Cute yes. Very cute, ayup. Cutest ever? You are trying to make me re-read the whole comic and assemble a collage of “Sydney at her cutest moments” aren’t you?
Sounds like a good way to spend a rainy after noon.
sounds like a better way to go insane
stark raving bonkers
do it! do it!
Too late
I’m voting for “Cutest ever.” The Donald Duck choreography, that is. I’m not including the faux conversation about time travel with Sciona. That was just standard levels of cute.
Wrong Duck
Is Sydney supposed to be having a mental breakdown? Because this is going beyond some mild eccentricity and into truly disturbing behavior. It’s not even funny. It’s creepy.
Give her a break. She just died. This is her way of coping.
This. It’s not a full on breakdown but it’s part way. It’s letting fantasy take hold to avoid the immediate reality of an otherwise terrible situation that could well lead to such a breakdown.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/wiki/series/creature_88
An alternate take on the ‘dying and coming back with knowledge’ trope.
Everytime he dies he wakes up in a clone body, and can then upload (relive) memories from the previous body (after they find the black box implant). So yeah, he’s died hundreds of times. And he remembers dying, because that’s part of the memory upload.
My favorite time travel movie is ‘Primer’.
xkcd puts it well here: https://xkcd.com/657/
The movie is basically a time war between the two co-inventors of a time travel machine (that can only travel backwards at a 1:1 speed, and to a maximum ‘distance’ of when it was first activated). Both of our time warriors are pretty genre savvy, but they are after all only human.
Thanks for reminding me about that movie.
I had to check out the trailer to refresh my memory of it. Which basically amounted to ‘enjoyable, but boy was that a complicated film!’
If anyone wants a summary of it, there is one on YouTube. I got 9 minutes into it before deciding that the XKCD summary was much better.
Still not a fan of being so abruptly broken out of a pretty enticing action sequence. Following it up with filler-esque pages like these… also not a fan. It’s not terrible, just a bit…meh, I guess.
Dealing with the abuse of power is hardly ‘filler’. Discussing the morality of ‘should we abuse our powers this way?’ is actually a far better use of space than showing ‘ooh this is a cool way to use a power’.
I wish we would apply it to more things in life. For instance ‘ooh, we can clean clothes better if we put “micro-particles” in the washing powder’ has been implemented without conducting investigation as to whether they will cause long-term harm to our bodies. Given that they are too small for our bodies filters to keep them from entering and circulating through our blood stream, it seems very likely to me.
Sadly the question of ‘should we’ seems to have been replaced with ‘is there a law against it?’. Given that the law makers never considered such a prospect, it is again not surprising that there are no regulations prohibiting such. So the makers can proudly claim they are ‘complying with all existing legislation’, as they gradually kill us.
Filler, no. Interesting reflection of society, yes.
Besides which the author indicates, in his blog, that Sydney got out of control. She needs someone to hug her and tell her to calm down.
There is no abuse of power going on here, unless you include Sciona. There are people with power here, and they are using it for lawful purposes.
A certain section of the readership are already claiming that everything that Kronachrome is doing is ordering on godlike powers, and just using them such a way as ‘doing a mulligan’ is abusing that power
Your position is similar to how ‘legal highs’ were abused in the UK. Because each drug had to retroactively be added to a list of prescribed drugs, in order for the makers to be prosecuted. Fortunately that loophole has been closed by having legislation that (paraphrasing) prohibits the manufacture of drugs which cause hallucinogenic or psychotropic effects etc.
That way even a previously unknown drug is illegal to manufacture and/or distribute, if it causes one of the prescribed effects.
Something similar can be done with super powers. Prohibiting the use of powers which might ‘endanger the Earth or the entire universe’, until their effects have been properly considered and authorised, by an appropriate authority.
Of course, at the moment, Archon have been delegated the responsibility to police the use of super powers. And Pixel is the senior Archon representative present. She is actually acting within her remit, by challenging Krona’s irresponsible tinkering with time.
Should it become necessary to arrest her or charge her, then some suitable piece of pre-existing legislation would be required. As there is reason to believe that Krona was risking permanently putting the world into a time loop, there are a large number of laws which could be examined, to find something suitable.
One that springs to mind would be the ‘prevention of a police officer from conducting their duties’. This is a crime in most countries, and looping time would stop all police from completing whatever duties they were attempting at the time.
OK it does not specify time loops as a mechanism, but it does not preclude them either. And prosecutors and juries would be favourably disposed to any charge which punished putting the world into a loop that would prevent everybody from progressing with their normal lives!
Hmm, seems like the local time loop broke the comments, my bad
It’s edge of tomorrow not day of tomorrow.
Aka Live, Die, Repeat
Why is no one mentioning the buck-and-a-quarter quarterstaff?
Personally speaking it is because I have never heard of that.
It’s part of the whole “Daffy Hood” skit
She’s playing on hard so she has a limited number of saves.
what. the heck. happened. to krona’s shirt?
its all sticking out, but nothing visible is pulling it??
You are looking at panel 6, but it is answered in panel 2. Pixel has grasped the shirt. She still has hold of it, in panel 6 (as you can see from the outline of her fingers) it is just that her arm is out of sight due to the framing.
Wait, who’s the “she” that Sydney is talking about? Sciona’s a dude, right?
Nope she is a lady. A bit hard to tell with orcs and ogres, because they have not sexually selected for curves and enlarged secondary sexual characteristics, but definitely a female.
All you see of the actual Sciona is the blue-ish head part. Everything below that isn’t her body.
So in summary, Sciona is a female…something, crafted onto a male (presumably) troll’s body.
Not quite, the top of Sci-fright’s head was grafted onto either an orc’s or ogre’s body (of yet-to-be-determined gender), she used an infusion of troll blood to recover from her capture of Pixelicious
Well, until we hear from the author, any “brutish humanoid” wannabe can be an orc, an ogre, a troll, or any number of other fantasy creatures.
Tolkien need not apply, nor need any other work of fiction. As a person who has played a lot of D&D I would have called the “troll” in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone an ogre. Trolls in D&D are green skinned, gangling, and rubbery looking, not flesh colored, hulking, lummoxes. But Rowling differed and went with a more Tolkien-like version, and it is her world to create free from any preconceptions.
If the body of Sci-fright was a troll, then she wouldn’t have had to go get an infusion of troll blood, she would have staid in that room instead of sneaking up on Sydney
Please…please…let Krona get struck by lightning and die the next time she uses this ability! Protest checkpoint powers! The Pcp movement… >.>
Sidney’s leg strap for her utility belt seems to disappear and reappear in the 4th panel. Missing in the middle version of her.
Is that any relation to “kinda pregnant”?
Am i the only one who are starting to think Sydney’s behavior is a little grating on the nerves?
She has gone from cute to more or less constantly spassing out, and not even almost dying is enough to connect her to reality.
Its almost reverse character growth.
In this particular instance, I view it as her subconsciously overhamming the fangirl reaction to avoid facing the more logical and disturbing side of this revelation. If I’m right, it can’t be put off forever and we will see the actual growth in the post-mission regroup.
Yeah, I’m with you. A little too Mary Sue, everyone around her seems to adore her and put up with her antics despite all reason, and it reached the point where I check this one once a month to see if it is still sliding down this road or if it has reconnected with any sort of logic. For crying out loud she gets a triggered timeloop that indicates that she likely died and she’s unfazed three seconds later.
There’s no rein on the character, period. No one even tells her to be quiet, apparently because no one is capable of forming the thought in her presence. One of the orbs apparently gives her mind dominance over everyone in her presence because it’s the only explanation I can fathom.
Its the nature of the comic, clearly it is popular and hey, whatta I know. But putting it out there because it really finally jumped that shark for me.
we’re at the point it’s not jumping the shark, it’s eating the shark and jumping the dolphin. but still, it’s funny, it’s adorable, it’s Sydney. The artwork here is top-notch, the characters are human enough to recognize them as if they’re real people, and if anything seems bent or warped that’s only your perception of it. Enjoy the surreality of the situation.Go. Come back. Enjoy more.
‘Unfazed’? Un-fucking-fazed? She’s fucking freaking out and you are saying she’s ‘unfazed’?
DaveB warned you, and everyone else, what would happen if they miss-use the term “Mary Sue”
There are quite a few people who get fed up with Sydney behaving so erratically. That is just the way she is though. Asking her to change is like saying ‘have you tried being not gay?’ to a lesbian or homosexual. It is in their nature. Plus they have the right to live their lives the way they want.
In Sydney’s case it is reasonable to ask her to tone it down. But that has been done. You may have forgotten that Maxima did tell Sydney off. But she went straight off the rails again. Hence why Maxima ejected her from the conference room.
Hence you are being rather unfair in saying that everyone around her ignores the behaviour. Given that both a warning and action have been taken. And it was not the first time.
Clearly just telling her off is not adequate. But it may simply not be possible to contain her, without brutal or repressive techniques, such as doping her up with drugs or wiring her jaw. However these may not be sensible things to force onto a powerful super hero, against her will. Likewise overdoing military punishments could alienate her from Archon.
Which means that Archon simply have to consider whether the package of advantages she offers (such as True Sight, good tactical planning, keen insight, flight, force field and various offensive options) outweighs the continual mucking around.
Presently their bosses (Maxima and General Faulk) have set policy that it is. So the rest are just keeping their heads down and putting up with her. It is the only practical way to handle an eccentric, but valuable, colleague. Especially one who has saved their lives a couple of times recently.* That does tend to make people a lot more forgiving than you are allowing for!
Then of course there are those of us who love her for who she is and how she behaves (most of the time). Not to everyone’s tastes, I agree. And you have my sincere sympathies that her antics wind you up the wrong way.
It may console you that Dave was not intending to take the page this way, but Sydney got out of control. As you can confirm from his blog above. This is the fairest indication that the author is portraying the character as being true to herself. Whilst simultaneously dismissing your accusations of her being a Mary Sue, as it was not what he wanted. And my above comments counter it from the point of view of the other protagonists.
* Maxima would have been killed by Vehemence. And the rest of Arc-SWAT would have lost the battle, as a result. Whilst they may well have lived, they would be subjugated by Vehemence. Along with the rest of the USA.
Likewise everybody squishy, near to the central table, at the convention, would have been killed by the grenade blast (and likely follow up ones, in that confusion) had it not been for Sydney’s warning. Including Pixel, due to those silver fragments.