Grrl Power #621 – Egocentrap detector
There is no I in team, but there is a ME if you rearrange the letters.
Maxima and Sydney are talking about both sides of the same coin. Sydney’s just forgetting that teams can do stuff like split up and apply their specializations while not standing right next to each other. She may be getting a little too used to being the center of attention ever since joining up.
For those of you who don’t know who Achilles is (because he’s only been in a handful of pages since the start of the comic) well, you can probably guess what his power is. And it’s not coming up with a creative name. And it’s not that mealy invulnerability that a lot of so-called invulnerable heroes have. Achilles could take a bunker buster to the noggin and not notice if it weren’t for all the noise and collateral damage. He’d be the worlds best tank if the enemy strong man couldn’t just pick him up and throw him into the next zip code.
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“If you want to win you’ve got to work together as a team. Remember, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘win’!”
….waitaminnit…
“There is no I in team”
You’re absolutely right, boss! There’s no you in team. There is a ME though!
I’ve been using that “ME is in team” comment for decades. Really ticked off my junior high coach when said it.
Accidentally posted this down there, but meant to put it here.
Ahctually… there is an “i” in “team”.
….
Mind… blown….
+1
Wow, yea.
+2
+3d.
Harumph!
+ 1d100!
d20
+system overflow
+ ; DROP TABLE username;-
HAR!
Yup, the I in team is in the A-hole.
And theres always at least one A-hole in every team right?
Your honesty is refreshing!
Beat me to it. I used to draw that on whiteboards in team building or other such events.
I’m pretty sure that Achilles loves being used in weird ways. He’s embraced his role as an impervious brick.
It wouldn’t suprise me if this isn’t the first time he was used as a mop.
Looks like Achilles is going to need some new duds from Ashley.
How could anyone forget who Achilles is? He stopped a sword strike with his eyeball!!!!
Oh, god, that one was awful. Why did you have to bring that up? >.<
To make you cringe, of course :)
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EyeScream
At least he didn’t grow permanent horns out through his eyeballs.
The content here is rather tame for gore.
Hold on Dave. I think you got Achilles’ uniform color wrong.
For this assignment shouldn’t he be wearing a red shirt?
Nah, if he had a red shirt, he’d have to die, and that goes against his skill set ;)
+1
Then again, would it hurt any if he did wear a red shirt? After all, any trope-savvy enemy that doesn’t know about his power might be inclined to hit Achilles first, thus ruining any chance of surprise.
Only a moron believes that crap
so superhero webcomics don’t involve suspension of disbelief for you?
Heh.
It wouldn’t actually even require genre knowledge. Red does catch the eye. Whilst Maxima is wearing black, and the rest of the team are in camouflage patterns. So, especially with him on point, he would stand out nicely in red. Thus being the most likely one to draw fire (all other things being equal).
Be fair, Maxima. He doesn’t seem to mind.
He is used to stuff like that.
I hope though that Sydney repents and turns her creative juices to helping Achilles fulfil his own potential, rather than just being used as a tool.
Mind you that would require her not viewing him just as a tool, and their run-in in the canteen will not be helping her current mind-set.
In fairness, he’s kind of a tool.
…He can do anything a human being can do. He’s a tool that can use human-made tools. The best thing is, he’s got a lifetime warranty…Lifetime of the whole flippin’ universe, no less.
I don’t recall him being a tool? Even on the page where Sydney puts him on the floor for his use of the word mouth-feel, he agreed with her that he didn’t care and made a joke about how he could now check out the ceiling and everyone wins. If anything, that tells me he’s a good humored and affable guy. Then again… if I knew nothing could kill me, I’d likely be in a pretty good mood most of the time, too.
Also, using the Lighthook helps keep him from just dropping away when the inevitable pit/slide trap is triggered.
Nice point. And a serious problem for him, not having any super transportation abilities, like flight.
The irony here is if sydney was playing with her Achilles toy while he was standing up, she could probably get away with doing this using the above mentioned completely reasonable reasoning
That is going to really play havoc with his uniform!.
As usual for Achilles.
I wonder if they make Achilles’ uniform out of cheap fabric rather than the high-tech stuff everyone else gets. It has to get replaced after every engagement, and it offers no additional protection considering his powers.
Heh.
Sounds cost effective. Just so long as it is strong enough for normal wear and tear, and scrambling through brambles. Would not want to shock the vicar, after all.
Has it ever been answered how Achilles reacts to “indirect” threats, like radiation, poison, disease, or lack of food or oxygen? Or to a complete vacuum? (Magically accelerated) Ageing?
Does he have an Achilles’ Heel?
I assume, at least, that even if he does, it’s classified – or he might be genuinely invulnerable. Or not know what his metaphorical heel is.
The cast page used to say that they literally couldn’t find anything that harmed him in any way.
Also he said he ate a vial of super Ebola once. Saved the world. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1797
Which demonstrates that he CAN interact with the world on a chemical level – enough to destroy the “Super-Ebola” by digesting it – even if it couldn’t harm him. This sort of “exception” to the general rule of “100% Invulnerable” leads me to suspect that the basis of his ability is magical, rather than scientific, otherwise he’d currently be a horrific “Typhoid Mary”, walking about with a constant case of “Super-Ebola Death-Breath”.
hmm ebola has a prettty short half life if not in an incubation period.
So if he ate the vial, the time it took for it to reach poo stage it would have died out I imagine.
I mean there are factual instances of people uh. eating. aids, and never being infected and its dead by the time it gets through the body.
I do wonder what happens to achillies if he eats something not edible? does he gain nutrtion from it?
can you starve him?
can you drown him?
It may or may not count, but in the ‘mouth feel’ page the author said that chips and glass have similar mouth feel to Achilles, so it probably wouldn’t do anything to eat non-edible materials.
“Interact with” is distinct from “be harmed by” mind. But we can already tell that he interacts chemically with his environment, as he eats and breathes.
As he does eat you can starve him. Unlike other people that would not actually harm him. However, unless his super power also provides him energy independently of him consuming food, it will gradually make him less and less capable of acting, and eventually cause him to become inert. But not dead. It would be akin to other mammals in a state of hibernation.
Feed him a cheese sandwich and he will be good to go again, as if nothing had happened!
Likewise drowning. Air is an essential part of the metabolising process. However, unlike the pretty immediate and deadly results for other humans, at worst it might make him unconscious. And even then he would remain functional for a lot longer than drowning humans normally can. Because we die from toxins building up in our blood long before the lack of oxygen would cause us to expire.
As the toxins do not harm him, Achilles could make use of every bit of remaining oxygen, before becoming torpid. Again bring him into an environment with air and he would be as right as rain. Giving him CPR would make it fairly instantaneous. Otherwise he would have to wait until osmosis or similar effects managed to get enough oxygen to key parts.
Toxins might not directly harm him but can still have the effect of blocking oxygen. What we die from is lack of oxygen in brain cells … however it’s true that carbon dioxide can prevent oxygen getting into brain cells long before all oxygen in lungs is consumed. So, it’s possible that Achilles would get unconscious just as quickly as ordinary humans, only difference will be it would be reversible in his case.
Touche.
He’s on record as having been in outer space without a helmet. Pretty sure breathing is optional for him.
[Yorp]:
My point about him “chemically interacting” with the world around him was based on the page in the restaurant where he demonstrates his ability to TASTE his food — because taste is defined as creating chemical changes in the taste-receptors in your tongue, which then fire-off a message to the brain when the change occurs.
I’ve always pictured “100% Invulnerability” as a 100% inability to physically alter the body.
This meant (to me, at-least) that such a person would be able to UNDERSTAND his sensory input, but he’d still be completely unable to LEARN-or-REMEMBER anything from it, because the act of learning requires storing new memories electro-chemically in the physical structures of the brain.
Obviously, however, my viewpoint is too narrow a definition to service the needs of this story.
Oh, yeah — BTW:
I assume that his hair has long-since stopped growing, because:
1)__He wasn’t rendered bald in MAX’s fire-bomb blast, so his hair must be as tough as the rest of him.
2)__If it still grew, it would be down PAST HIS ANKLES after 50+ years of growth!
Still, while his hair can’t be plucked from its invulnerable follicles, his mullet should provide some strands that are long-enough to use (in a “dental-floss” kind of way) as ultra-thin, unbreakable line that can slice thru anything (assuming that your fingers are strong-enough to pull it thru without themselves getting sliced).
Only it is spelled magickal with an additional “k” as per Alistair Crowley. Not stage magic.
Magick is the manipulation of the exocosm by word, symbols coordinated thought and your soul. Yeah that is what it is good for. Most humans talk about it but know zip about it. And since science has fallen down on the job and not discovered it yet, again. It is essentially a useless organ. Far less so than the appendix.(Yes, it has been discovered before several times during the first industrial revolution about 100,000 to 75,000 years ago or so.Wiped out by the Toba Caldera explosion around 72,000 years ago. And even earlier times by non-human intelligent races that have lived on the planet going back to the Permian. (Not counting the Fairies from the Carboniferous.)
But I digress. In population evolution traits are distributed with the most common are the most numerous and densest while the least common are few and far between. Use of one’s soul without training is a rare trait now. Not so important to survival as it was many centuries ago. But that may change in the future. All depends on what the future has in store for us, doesn’t it?
To be fair, his body needed to be capable of normal biological functions, all the way up to the time in his life that the Power manifested. He can still breathe, eat, drink, etc. but it’s just that he no longer needs to do any of those things. His digestive system worked normally then, and now it works super-normally.
Indeed, I’d bet that Achilles’ digestive system processed it normally, just like any other biological material…But it couldn’t harm him. His stomach acids probably killed the virus, even though it couldn’t kill him. So he probably defecated or urinated it out later as an inert & harmless substance.
mistletoe
OK, I am not going to scroll up and see what inspired that reply. It is just cool enough to stand on its own merit.
+1
The pure and good Norse god Baldr and his mother had a dream of his impending death, and to prevent it his mother Frigg made all things on earth swear to never harm him. This rendered him invulnerable to all things on earth except the one thing his mother didn’t consider significant enough to make it swear not to harm him….mistletoe. The gods would amuse themselves by throwing weapons and other things at him and watching him survive. Loki created a weapon (various accounts say spear or arrow) of mistletoe and tricked the blind deity Hoor, Baldr’s brother, into firing it at Baldr, killing him. This was considered one of the first harbingers of the end times, Ragnarok.
This is why a lot of people think shadow moon is Baldur.
If right get cookie.
Think he’s physically immune to the point that I figure he is actually in a timeless (sort of) pocket dimension being used as a template for a magical avatar functioning in our reality, interacting with it, and updating memories back to the protected original body. So the clone is made immune to just about anything you can think of and if somehow anything did “harm” the avatar it would reformat itself based on the original body “template” so fast that the right super with the right power set would have to be right no hand paying attention to notice it.
Mind control of the avatar might work though as long as you didn’t upset it enough to make it reflexively “reset” before uploading the changes to the template?
We haven’t had anybody who plays with spirits/souls themselves yet so maybe that could get through to?
Well its nice to know that Syds opinion of Elves is as low as mine but someone really needs to give her a b***hsmack once in a while to stop her from becoming a smug super jerk before its too late.
You are too late on that one. Sydney levelled-up and gained +1 smugness over her vegetarian-like diet, at the steak house. You can see the image occasionally in the banner rotation.
*points paw to the top of the comic*
She also lost that +1 due to eating fish because ‘they’re ugly’.
In my mind, she regained the right to have that +1 for lighthook-smacking Achilles for using the word mouth feel instead of texture.
*applies paw print of approval to headcanon*
And Achilles did get butt-naked in back of Sydney…
…And Sydney even managed to get a free “cop a feel” too!
I find it amusing that Dave has made sure that Achille’s heel is NOT caught by either of the triggered traps he’s drawn here….
Lol. I missed the significance of that, be it intentional or co-incidental.
Except, Les has two heels…
Note that it stipulates “heel” rather than “heels”. Further it is invariably phrased this way. Achilles was only vulnerable on the one spot, on a single heel.
The River Styx is one of the rivers in the Underworld. I wonder if, whilst down there, Achilles also got splashed by some water from the River Lethe.
Ooh ooh!
Or Achilles did die, exactly as per the historical record. Thus finding himself in the Underworld. From which a few heroes have escaped, but normal mortals are trapped forever. The most formidable guardian being Cerberus, the giant three-headed dog. Who, of course would not pose any credible threat to Achilles (unless it happened to nick his heel).
Then there is the river Lethe. Which Charon, the Boatman, would not be willing to transport him out of the Underworld (not without payment anyhow, which he would not have on him). So Achilles would have to swim that, in order to escape. Thus loosing all his memories.
If, despite that loss, he carried on in the direction he had been heading, he would find his way out. But would likely have to swim across some other rivers of the underworld, on the way. Which may have included the Styx. Thus curing his one weakness!
I mean.. he seems to be quite alright with this though.
also..
couldn’t sydney actually use her LightHook to coil in a perfect square and push agasint all 4 walls and”detect” traps far fare better than Achilis’ spot tapping?
there would be no spot untouched by her light hook
But could it get trapped? For instance when those blocks slammed together the tentacle might have become trapped. Whereas with Achilles blocking it …
*double checks image*
… sorta … it may have been able to wiggle free easier.
Even if the LH did get trapped, I’d expect she could just dismiss it and summon again in a different location.
Wouldn’t necessarily work out well for Achilles, mind…
Possibly. Probably.
However there are hints that the things the orbs generate are not forces, but things contained in the orbs. Look closely and you can see the red lightning crackling in the PPO. The lightbee is obvious when napping inside the Truesight orb. Meanwhile the tentacle can be found curled up in the Hentai Orb.
Huh. I’ve never looked that closely at deciphering all the characters on the orbs, but I had been assuming that everything was energy-based and the glyphs were simply button labels. The idea that the orbs may contain actual …devices? of some kind is intriguing.
Check any scene where they get used. The little thing inside the orb is no longer there, whilst it is being deployed.
Couldn’t that be because her finger is covering the icon? Or that the display for the active function is disabled while it’s in use, since the user doesn’t need to see it anymore? I will have to look closer, this is an intriguing possibility.
Sometimes, like above. Other times though we get an unobstructed view of the orb and it is always clear under such circumstances.
Your other point is a reasonable alternate conclusion, which could be drawn from its absence.
But…. teamwork!!!
“He’d be the worlds best tank if the enemy strong man couldn’t just pick him up and throw him into the next zip code.”
True – his extra “skill points” in taunting would get him Aggro, but his aerodynamics would have him ejected from Aggro Range pretty quick.
OMG! If they outfitted Achilles with a “flying squirrel” suit, he could just boomerang back on the kinetic energy of the throw!!!
Achilles is LITERALLY the mobile cover ever swat team in the world would want….
Just need to put a proper handle his back and change his name to Aegis.
Fairly sure Achilles is having fun
“Well this is different from my usual anti trap duties. I haven’t been used as a mop in years.”
YOU DO NOT SPLIT THE PARTY!
To be avoided where possible, agreed. However it is a vital tactical option if attempting to flank enemies. Similarly if it is decided that a diversion is necessary. There may not always be an option available to do that without someone separating from the main group.
Likewise other time-critical objectives might require that more than one be completed simultaneously. The party might, for example, need to lead an invasion force. Yet the rogue/scout/technician may have to infiltrate the enemy fort’s gatehouse, to let them in.
__________________________________________________________________________________
As a complete aside I just found out today that Cordelia, one of my (almost fully grown) kittens, lives in my gatehouse, part time, when not in the house with me! I had always wondered how she managed to ninja up on me so easily in the garden.
Turns out she sits on a plank, in the roof of the gatehouse (originally put there to stand on when rebuilding it), and can see most of the front garden by peering under the eves.
Aww, even as I typed that she climbed up onto my lap and curled up.
Yorp, I think you might be biased on the benefit of splitting the party because of how Scooby Doo’s gang always splits the party. But remember, Shaggy and Scooby’s lives would be far less stressful if Fred didn’t keep splitting up the party. Besides, his traps never work anyway. They might as well not split up in the end. :)
Yorpie Yorpie Doooo!
BAH! A careful rogue can get first pick of the loot if the party is stupid enough to split up.
{Thinks “surely someone already linked…” and checks comment threads on all pages, but finds only actual tactical analysis.}
It has already been said (and sung) far more eloquently than I can – Never Split the Party
Lol. New one on me.
I look at this page over & over again & I still can’t see it…Where is the party splitting up here? Sure, there’s some distance between Achilles & the rest of the group, but he’s still within line-of-sight & Sydney even has a grip on him anyway.
No split yet, but any decent Evil Lair™ surely has a maze of tunnels, and it is inevitable that someone will say “let’s split up and cover more ground”. Which is always a terrible idea – staying alive and defeating the villain should always be higher priority than running in blindly out of impatience or setting a speed run record.*
*Unless of course you are trying to set a speed record, but that’s generally frowned upon in real life.
TWb is referring to part of Dave’s blog:
When I was in high school I got roped into playing a DnD game, and I chose Rogue because it was the simplest to understand when I had no books and was not going to memorize a bunch of rules for a game I wasn’t going to play regularly.
At one point, they said I was supposed to scout ahead for traps, and I found a lockbox with a few hundred gold pieces, a bag of holding (which is sort of like a Tardis type of bag I guess), and bracers that give +2 to archery. When I came back to the group, the DM asked if I was going to split up the treasure. I said ‘No, I’m a rogue, I’m going to say that I disarmed a couple of traps and not mention the treasure at all’
Which I thought was very in character for me to do. The other players were not happy at all about it and kept acting like my character was a lying liar that lies. Which she was. But they werent supposed to know that in game. Didn’t really play again after that. :)
“Hey, you guys made the rules, I’m absolutely playing by them. My character type says I’m supposed to be a lying liar who lies to your face. Not my fault you forgot to close some of the loopholes when you sent me ahead to scout. Really it’s your fault for not being as committed to this as I am.”
I feel obligated to say at this point that your career choice is making more sense now. ;D
LOL
LOL².
Shame you did not play with a group of true roleplayers. They would maintain the necessary separation.
But, better still, the dungeon master should have conducted your side adventure out of earshot, or (if there was not somewhere convenient to do that) quietly enough that the other players could not hear what was happening.
The latter is better because then the players would genuinely not know what you had done, but would not feel that they were cheating if they checked up on you. Or if, if the next time you were bleeding to death, they indicated that there was a charge for healing services.
Which could be waived for any rogue who freely shared any loot they found when exploring solo.
Well, someone really needs to tell that to Harem…
Please tell me that Achilles is not Polish. “I carefully advance through the hallway tapping the ground ahead of me with a pole…”
he is polishing the floor with his hair tho
The tactic is a standard concept. Tapping with a pole works in most applications, so we could say that Achilles is a pole is head-canon.
Really hoping the next page shows them walking by all the discovered traps, so we can see an Achilles-shaped hole in the wall panels.
Would tie in nicely with past Looney-Tunes references and use of negative character space.
At least one of the wall panels should be scorch-blackened, with a suspiciously Achilles-shaped area that’s not scorched.
Important cultural news. The BBC has made a serious news error! Regarding the iconic term “embiggen”.
Here is their article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-43298229
And my objection just sent to them:
My faith in the BBC has been shaken!
And that’s even in the Oxford dictionary! You’d think that the BBC, of all people, would at least be able to connect it through the Oxford University, also in England!
Now poor Yorp is double-shaken as well as stirred (into action)!
Even James Bond wouldn’t stand for double-shaken and stirred either.
Thought you were going to link to here (it was the earliest could find with Mega Mr Buble, butt there is probably an earlier one)
Well it was the reason why I raised the point in this comic. :-)
So perfectly reasonable to assume I would link to that. But I was counting on astute readers like yourself remembering that.
Thus freeing me up to link to something else.
There are a few sayings that I’m reminded of:
“If you don’t find the trap with your Skill Points, you’ll eventually find it with your Hit Points.”
“You can’t spell ‘team’ without ‘M’ ‘E’.”
“There’s no I in ‘Team’, but there’s an M and an E, so calm your T’s and kiss my A!”
And let’s never forget: “There is an ‘i’ in ‘TEAM’. It’s the A-hole.”
https://imgur.com/gallery/Y3kp02W
The “I” in the team is the a-hole.
…… checks out.
He he. Twisty twiny.
That seems rather stupid and reckless given there could very well be something in the base that could kill Achilles…
You miss the point of Achilles’s power. They have tested it thoroughly and he cannot be killed or even harmed. Even attacks that should damage things at a subatomic level cannot hurt him.
That is why he was completely unconcerned at standing in a nuke-like blast.
For info the star ratings system caps at five stars. Which roughly equates as “the most powerful known” (for whatever category, be that strength or flying speed, for example). Hence why Maxima is rated as five stars in her various categories. Likewise with Sydney’s shield and a few other extremely powerful (best in the world) abilities on the team.
With one exception. Achilles has six star defence. As the author reiterates above, in his blog, Achilles invulnerability is not hyperbole. He has the real deal.
Now i want him thrown into a black hole just to see what happens.
Good point and an interesting thought experiment! If he’s truly unaffected at the subatomic level, he shouldn’t be hurt by sailing into a black hole, although his super strength may not be enough to move any more.
Getting the actual results is where it breaks down though. If they had a deployment and retrieval system, this would open some amazing research opportunities. We know he’s affected by gravity, so he can get to the middle a black hole intact, but whether he ends up in another universe or sitting on the core of a singularity, there’s no way for anyone else to know about it.
Is a good plan…however years ago when we used a particularly annoying paladin who had gotten a bit mind-wiped as a trap detector… didn’t last too terribly long. It was a VERY long set of stairs we didn’t see in the dark.
Especially as falling through the event horizon takes an infinitely long time.
Which is really odd, as we know black holes are there. So it is not like they do not form until the end of time. So if the matter falling in (say to turn a bunch of teeny black holes into a super massive black hole), will not get into the black hole until after the heat death of the universe (well not even then), how does it get bigger and have the galaxy forming effects that a super massive black hole has?
Physics is weird.
Anyhow, the Grrlverse can bypass all such problems. A dimension traveller could pop through to whatever location the mathematicians predict a hypothetical white hole might emerge (being what comes out of the things that go into a black hole, if they are correct) and have a chat with Achilles.
If that whole ‘infinite time’ issue is complicating that, then she needs to team up with a time-travelling super. And a future historian (as in a present day historian who specialises in future history), to interview Achilles and find out if he learnt anything useful.
Other than what the mouthfeel of a black hole is.
The question I have, is Achilles immune to aging? Is he gonna be floating around when the universe collapses? I would hate to be him and live for eternity.
You assume there will always be just ONE Achilles. He only needs to find the group of other invulnerable beings before the heat death of universe and then they can spend the eternity together.
… actually, it’s likely that while he can survive vacuum of space he wouldn’t remain conscious there.
Nice thought for the former. As for the latter 50/50. Many other supers have energy sources, for their power. It may well be that Achilles can remain active without needing food or air. Without that though, the alternative is as you say.
As regards the ageing point, he has not visibly aged in at least 30 years. So there are pointers that he will be dining at the restaurant at the end of the universe. Hopefully in enjoyable company with fellow immortals.
Maybe Thor will invite him back, to his place, afterwards.
Although, possibly not him. Thor is destined to be defeated along with the other Norse gods, at Ragnorok.
So maybe some tougher god.
The Hulk maybe?
There is The Occupant from The Lost Room Mini-series who is invulnerable and immortal
It is not uncommon to find the two traits paired.
You’re mistaking the frame of references. In your external (hopefully) frame of reference, it takes forever, because crossing the event horizon will require the mass to accelerate past the speed of light. In the MASS’S frame of reference, it happens nearly instantly.
Oh, well, that’s classical Einsteinian mechanics. It’s actually weirder than that (example, there’s not one event horizon, there’s more than one, mass actually does escape despite the speed of light, the smaller the hole the faster the evaporation, so a black hole the mass of say, Mount Everest will evaporate in a fraction of a second, turning all that mass to energy – enough energy to blow apart a solar system, and on and on) but that’s close enough for a reasonable approximation.
But if it is taking forever to do that (from our point of view out here in our spiral arm of the galaxy), what happens if I grab the black hole and yank it away from the falling object?
It thought it had instantly gone into the black hole. Yet I moved the black hole away (before the end of time), so it never gets to finish that fall.
I think that you forgot something there: In deep space, black hole yanks you.
;)
…
“Especially as falling through the event horizon takes an infinitely long time.”
Not only that, but once he gets past the event horizon, no one can see what happens to him, if anything.
They were able to test it using things ARC has access too.
It’s completely possible and even likely however that whoever built that base has access to things ARC doesn’t.
Which means using Achillies to test for traps instead of just having Sydney prod the the floor from a couple rooms away with her light hook is stupid.
It is possible.
However they do have access to a lot more than just mundane human technology. They also have supernatural allies who we know happily conduct testing on supers. Given their confidence it is likely that everything from magic,* to petrification and ray guns have been used on him.
Whilst you are right to have qualms, as there is always the possibility that something undiscovered is dangerous to him, I would not agree that it is stupid. If there is something dangerous out there he is by far the one most likely to survive contact with it, unless it totally negates his power. So better him bumping into it than some other team member.
Then we must consider the time constraints. They are pursuing a maniac believed to be armed with mulitiple WMD. Anything that speeds their progress, and minimises the risk to the team, is working towards saving the entire world from destruction.
So, no, it is not stupid. It is calculated and brutally effective. If having some slight element of risk.
* I exclude mental, mind control, curses and other non-damaging things from this list, as they cannot directly harm him, so are not pertinent to that side. Although him getting mind controlled would be problematic, and is a risk in this particular complex.
Except his powers also mean they have no idea what will happen if he does get hurt.
As an example what if his Invulnerability means his body can’t heal from damage?
Good point.
Bear in mind though that Achilles drops out of planes, without a parachute, for fun. Although that thrill has faded and become dull. Plus he has no qualms eating genetic warfare material. Or standing in a nuke-like effect. And doubtless had a bunch of super powers used against him in his vigilante days (he is at least 50 years old).
Yet nothing has ever affected him. As we can see he is completely unfazed and unafraid. So the slight possibility that something might affect him is only likely to stimulate Achilles. Anything which can drag him out of his apathy is good.
Plus if he sees something that he knows he has never been tested for, he can tell Sydney to stop. So that a controlled test can be conducted.
But if he misses it, and it does turn out to be dangerous, then you are right.
Consider though that this is a fear about the fear of the unknown, and the possibility that it may contain something harmful.
Whereas real life soldiers have to risk their lives against things which are unequivocally deadly. Their odds of being hit by a bullet or shrapnel is far higher than those for Achilles stumbling across something exotic which may pose him a threat. Yet they accept the risk, because it is part of their duty.
Having Achilles test for traps is the smartest idea within the time constraints, against who ARC is trying to find and what they might have on them.
Now, Sydney using the lighthook to hold onto Achilles is also a very, very good idea – the only genuine issue here is Sydney playing with Achilles instead of just holding onto him.
I will also say that Sydney using the lighthook to basically tap a tiny section at a time LOOKS like a silly idea, but if you consider the fact this is an enemy base, of someone who had a long, LONG time to setup traps, and she is magical in nature all means that Sydneys approach is actually correct, if odd for the teams safety.
Achilles powers reminds me of a Wonder Woman ep. “The man that couldn’t die”. A man and a chimpanzee cannot be killed. They also don’t need sleep, food, water and have stopped aging. The process that changed them is lost. A conventional explosion just damages the clothes, electricity does nothing to him. Sounds like something I would want.
Here you go. Enjoy!
By the way, he likes short walks, in the park, and bananas.
You know what? I can actually grok it.
How many times have we seen Achilles trapped in something? He was out for a lot of that mass melee because a building collapsed on him. Instead, they’re using the invulnerability AND giving him a pull-chain to get him back out. This is good. It is good that they are doing this. I’m okay with what is happening in this page.
Heh. A good way to put it.
Now we need that mentioned to Maxima, and nobody just suggest Sydney that it’d work just as well just holding his waist and still letting him walk under his own power…
I didn’t say they had perfect execution… Just that the plan itself was logical. :D
+1
Achille’s face looks like all of his muscles are tightened if you tilt your head to look at him…
… like he’s trying to force a straight face…
What I suspect is going through Achillle’s mind….
“There’s currently an aggressive woman who has me tied up in front of others and is using me as an object… normally this is something people have to pay for…. must keep a straight face in front of C.O., must keep a straight face in front of C.O…. must keep a straight face in front of C.O…..”
Heh. Mind you gravity is also playing tricks with him, whilst he is upside down.
*cough*
“That’s just gravity Maxima…. just gravity.”
Thanks for my new cannon on this strip.
Ahctually…
Why do the comments keep saying he’s being used as a mop? With the ‘taps’ in the pictures of his head, it looks to me like she’s using him like a blind man’s cane, tapping him along the hall.
Agreed.
But he is indeed sweeping up dust, with his hair, so I can see why folks are making such comments, despite the primary use he is being put to.
so maybe this has been answered before, but does Achilles still have startle reflexes (ie: swatting at or dodging a bee, jumping when someone tries to jump scare him? ..or is he so used to his invulnerability that he only reacts if he cares to?
He certainly is not demonstrating such above, yet anybody else would. So I think he has long since become blase about such things. And we know from him getting bored, at jumping out of planes without a parachute, that it is getting harder for him to get thrills, let alone scares.
Two traps in what looks to be less than a hundred feet.
So either this is Sciona’s lair, another supervillain’s lair, or an immortal’s obstacle course.
Also, thought, both traps have been set off by Achilles hitting their triggers on the floor.
Sciona is a flyer, many of the creatures she faces are flyers, or can transform into smaller flying creatures. Seems they should also consider mid-air trip lines *sensors* and top to bottom vertical sensors as well. After all this is a modern opponent not a D&D dungeon.
Good thinking.
As I expect of you.
You may haz a Yorpie Snax.
*ties it up just a wee bit below ceiling height*
There is limited space for traps around the corridor. The mid-air trip lines “sensors” might be activating the same traps as the floor triggers.
To be fair, it’s been explicitly stated that a problem Achilles faces is literally getting stuck because he’s tough enough to endure some kind of damage but not strong enough to free himself, so having a tether that can lift two tons attatched actually seems kinda useful to me.
Sydney’s Lighthook can lift about 16 tons (as Maxima has estimated), but otherwise, you are correct.
She lifts sixteen tons and what does she get?
Enough money to become the Queen of Salt!
Whereas poor old Mr. T.E.Ford just got another day older, & deeper in debt.
I’m reminded of my friend’s proposed prestige class for D&D: the Dwarven Trap-Stomper.
:-D
I bet it has shed loads of damage resistance, on top of oodles of hit points and decent armour.
My dwarf received a potion of frost giant strength, and ended up wishing it permanent. So, all I need now is the defense…
Cunning.
*discreetly slides over a potion of dragon skin, and a ring with a wish on it*
thanks Yorp, I wish I could actually use it for the game, gaining permanency with it .
My pleasure.
Something you can use in the game though is a tip. Avoid doing any potion testing duties from now on. Some can negate other potions. Being permanent would probably not stop that effect.
There are Girdles of Giant Strength of varying strength levels too. Presumably, it already has an effective “permanency” on it. The only difference is you could take the Girdle off if you needed to handle something fragile & delicate.
“Er, who wants a 20-egg omelette?”
“How about over-easy?”
“(sigh) I haven’t had an over-easy egg for 20 years.”
I prefer my eggs unfertilised.
Technically, this is the best use of Achilles anyway. Sydney probably doesn’t have to do what she’s currently doing, but keeping the lighthook on him at all times is important to make sure he doesn’t just disappear on them. What if one of the traps is a portal, or some kind of ejector that launched the victim into orbit? Then they’d have to go retrieve him, which would be a hassle for all involved.
Yeppers.
Although I would say ‘a good use of’, rather than ‘best’. I am sure that he can be elevated to a far more useful role, with some effort to maximise his potential.
Training in explosive ordinance disposal and demolitions would be a start. His ability to take shortcuts, on the former, and being able to safely deliver and detonate the latter (without leaving it unattended) would make him excel in either role.
But, in the here and now, he is doing a good job.
Oddly, given how fast the lighthook can be moved, and as precisely Achilles can be moved with it, tap-tapping with Achilles head is probably a pretty damn fast way to clear the hall and be almost sure you got all the traps (cant count the magic ones)
There is an I in team. It’s right there in the A hole.
55. Before facing the dragon, not allowed to glaze the elf.
345. I don’t have weapon proficiency in elf, either.
https://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html
:-D
Awesome list.
*marches off* [to an authorised variant of 20.]
For this page, I’d apply #48 to Sydney.
“Officers may not use the parking spaces, without a permit issued by the space corps directorate.”
Are you sure this directive is applicable sir?
Thanks for the link…
…it shall remain a treasured bookmark.
:)
You know, Achilles really needs to invest in some Akido lessons. Granted, there comes a point where that becomes ineffective, and inevitably you’d reach that point in a super fight against the big bruisers with super strength, but it would at least help him not be tossed around quite so much, simply through evasive maneuvering, and be able to toss a surprisingly heavy load by shifting center of gravity.
Agreed.
Then arm him with weaponry salvaged from the damaged turrets in the Dark Reliquary. He would become quite formidable wielding a disintegrator gun!
But it’s more funny when he is just used as a tool, shield or weapon.
Indeed.
However I do feel sorry for him. That is a sad life and military career. And he does not look too enthused above. Flying through the air, he does his Goofy battle-cry, and clearly gets kicks.
Getting his hair dirty though, whilst being held upside down? Real funny for us. Not quite so much fun for him.
Are you absolutely certain there’s no i in team? https://www.liatraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/iinteam.png
This feels like the perfect way to find out what Achilles’s heel is.
Lets hope they don’t find out.
It would be one thing if she had it wrapped around him like a safety harness to prevent him from falling off-screen such as a pitfall trap would be one thing but the way she’s doing her trap detection is more demeaning than helpful.
But that’s funnier…
OMG I laughed so hard on this one
My eyes are LITERALLY watering!
Love this keep up the good work
I mention this a few times reading thru the comments…. but as weird as its being done, Sydney using Achilles as an invincible mine sweeper is actually a good idea.
Now, if Sydney wasn’t enjoying this, then this could actually be considered a good way to clear the traps.
Points to consider –
1) By using Achilles head & tap-tapping super small areas at a time, she is actual clearing the physical traps in both the safest manner for the team, and in the fastest way.
2) Holding onto Achilles prevents any trap door / pitfalls, or spring type traps to throw Achilles out of the hall = Remember, Sydneys Lighthook can hold something like 15 tons, more then enough to negate any trap force in that hallway.
3) While Achilles could walk or run down the hall, his speed is just that of a person, but as the token on the end of the Lighthook, he can check every spot as fast as Sydney can think it. Even moving super carefully, the combo of the 2 of them is faster then solo.
4) Ok, while technically Sydney could use the Lighthook to check pretty much every wall, and even faster, the lighthook isn’t a real person, so Achilles on the end of Sydneys rope is probably triggering more traps faster then either person would find normally.
Point 4 is the best one, as there may be magical or high tech traps (such as pop up turrets) which only activate when a person is detected (say using a thermal imaging camera).
Point 3 is good because it is astute, and I do not recall anyone mentioning it before.
1 to 3 though do all suffer from the fact that the tentacle could do the job just as well, if not better.* As you pointed out. So it is 4 which saves the day.
* On the bridge we saw Sydney forming a flat platform, strong and stable enough to hold Dabbler up. That same configuration could make a giant fly swatter which could check for pressure traps, mines and triggers even faster, by virtue of covering more ground with each swat.
All well and good until you trigger a trap that floods the corridor your standing in with hydrogen sulfide or something even nastier. Achilles would make it out, but many of the others wouldn’t.
That is why Sydney is on the team. Her orb’s powers react at the speed of thought. So it would be simple to scoop everyone up, in the force field, and fly above the acid.
Hydrogen sulfide is a gas. Almost instant loss of consciousness followed by death. Syd not having her shield up is already an enormous mistake.
The only issue with your comment is a gas trap wouldn’t be used in a cavernous hallway like we have seen, its too open – now later, in the “central” area, then that would make sense
.
Not because its not dangerous, but because of 2 reasons. Its supposed to be a secret base, while every trap is dangerous, the owner doesnt want to have a trap that could screw THEM up if that trap gets tripped. Secondly, if you cant make the room airtight, gas is a very unreliable choice given the advent of a radio for backup
The room is below surface level, which is plenty to keep in a heavier than air gas. Also the owner can teleport. Of course, given Sydney’s eating habits she might actually have built up a tolerance to mustard gas by now.
Heh, yea that she might.
And it is true that Sydney should keep her shield up pretty much all the time, when on a mission. It would not interfere with her use of the tentacle, for instance.
One point that I have not mentioned before though is do consider that holding an object the size of the orbs, for an extended period, is uncomfortable and becomes painful. Note that in the test linked Adam was able to swap the grenade from hand to hand, whenever it became too bad.
Holding two orbs though Sydney would not have that option (other than at moments when the action eased off). But do consider that when flying the team across country Halo HAS to use two orbs, and for a protracted period. Getting no chance for any break, because the only time she swaps orbs she has to do that very fast.*
So give the girl a break, her hands must be cramped enough! Yet she is fighting through that, and still holding one orb.
The other thing though is that this is a super hero comic and it simply is not very heroic to always be hunkered down behind a shield. We should allow some artistic and dramatic licence, appropriate to the genre.
You made a good point about it being a gas. But I have used smoke grenades and know that it takes a few seconds for an area to become filled with smoke. Let alone a big volume such as we see here. So, with Sydney’s top-notch reaction times, and the shield likewise responding near instantly, I honestly feel that she could cope with such an attack.
There are others that she cannot mind. Such as a sniper’s bullet (unless she saw her taking aim). However she is standing next to Maxima, so risks like that are reduced (you can bet that Maxima has a good balance between her personal defence and reflexes in this kind of situation).
* Keeping up the force field, whilst swapping the flyball for the air orb. Quickly refreshing the air, then swapping back, before too much altitude is lost.
I’m amused to see Maxima ready to lecture Sydney about using Achilles as a probe when Max seems to be comfortable using him as a projectile:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1311
Another lecture from Lt Col Maximum Hypocrite
It is a matter of human dignity. Being held upside down and tapping his head on the ground is undignified. Not to mention getting dirt and bugs in his hair.
Plus, as others have pointed out elsewhere, Sydney could just as easily have used the tentacle directly.
Whereas Maxima did not want to use a ranged area attack in a mass melee, and was drawing the bulk of the enemy fire, so needed to remain in an optimal position to do that. Let alone risking dragging enemy fire across allies, had she flown up to punch directly.
So Maxima had a need, but acted in a way that Achilles enjoyed. Importantly it made him look cool, rather than a tool.
I don’t think she’s complaining about using Achilles as a trap finding probe. I think she’s complaining about how Sydney is doing so.
The last panel makes it look like the spikes are actually piercing his leg.
Leg of his pants, not his actual leg