Grrl Power #639 – My empire of dirt
So, no real surprise here. Sometimes the reveal is a big “duh” because of how the pages break down. I maybe could have squeezed a slice of this onto the previous page, but the dedicated splash page is more dramatic, even if it’s fairly telegraphed at the twice a week page rate.
Still, fun to see the results. I have to say, drawing blown up cities is a lot easier than drawing intact ones. If a building is looking wonky while I draw it, then I’m like “Nope! You get an explosion, and you get an explosion! Everybody gets an explosion! Except you. You get a CRATER!”
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So…
Essentially the entire Alari civilization is destroyed…
Because you can´t draw buildings?
Harsh…
Hah hah. By that logic, all civilization in the Grrlverse should be like Mad Max levels a best.
Deserts are easy to draw.
There was ONE mosque! One! ~ Max
(I think that was right, can’t find the archive page at the moment)
Hmm, how would that work? Should have no effect on photoelectric based smoke detectors. And… OK, ionization-based detectors are a little more complicated than I thought: Two ionized chambers, one is a sealed reference chamber and the other is an open detection chamber; particles blocking current in the detection chamber cause a current differential between the chambers and set off the alarm. Is it possible that additional ionizing radiation in the detection chamber could change the current and set off the alarm? Maybe…
How would what work? Did you reply to the wrong thing? either way I’m interested in those kinds of mechanisms.
Please let this be a civil war! Sick and tired of “evil empires” being potraid as stable and functional rather then petty and fucked up.
If you extrapolate Sciona’s behaviour up, on the assumption that she is a typical member of her species, this would seem to be a logical event.
The only problem would be how they actually co-operated long enough to build all that stuff?
Sciona is (was) a duchess of the Alari. Maybe while she was gone her successors warred with each orher to fill the vacuum of power snd this was the result :)
Maybe they have a few evil overlords and a lot of nice obedient stupid minions, like USA, China or Russia.
Heh… wry political commentary.
har har
Sick and tired of Empires being portrayed as ‘Evil and corrupt’, except for the Great and Benevolent ‘You Ess of Aye’, the Saviour of Society and The World!!
Every Empire that has ever existed potras itself as the Good Guys. No one thinks they’re the villain.Except maybe Palpatine, because he owned that s**t and was having a blast the whole time.
I honestly feel stupid for not considering that. I just assumed the Alari had gone and pissed off someone way outside their weight class. To be fair, the only example of Alari behavior I have is Sciona is is a arrogant manipulative psychopath who belives in her own absolute superiority despite practical evidence to the contrary.This is how it played out in my head.
*Alari fleet bumbles across research outpost of heretofore undiscovered species.
*”Surrender to the might of the Alari Empire! Bow before us!”
*”Sod off, or we’ll call for reinforcements.”
*Alari fleet destroys research outpost
*Expiditionary fleet of heretofore undiscovered species shows up and ROFLSTOMPS Alari fleet.
*Predictably, Alari prisoners throw shade at heretofore undiscovered species fleet commanders
*Having the example of an unprovoked attack on a peaceful research outpost and and the unrepentant arrogant attitude of Alari captives, heretofore undiscovered species fleet commanders decide to remove the nuisance before it becomes a problem.
*See current comic for result
Yea I had the same thought flows. Sciona has been repeatedly surprised at having found bigger fish than her. So if we make the assumption that she is typical (she may well not be) and that they have the same attitudes as her (she seemed confident they would invade and enslave Earth, so that is reasonable) then your scenario plays realistically.
Although I agree with Aldarad‘s sentiments, and it would be nice if that alternative was the way it had played out here.
Historically though you find that dramatic collapses of empires (evil or not) usually require multiple factors. In order to have become a successful society, in the first place, they would need to have robust enough systems to survive the occasional bad winter or crop failure. Likewise they would need to be strong enough that they did not get raided by rivals. Or have a good enough diplomatic network to ensure that a common front could be put to enemies.
So for it all to come crashing down requires multiple failures, or something catastrophic which they had never encountered before. Even Civil Wars get called to a halt if it looks like everybody, on both sides, will die. Up until the nuclear age, of course.
If we look at the simplest example, namely Easter Island, they did have a lot of fighting between factions. They had limited resources, and an expanding population. But, in order to prevent the feuds killing all the workforce, they turned some of their rivalry into competing in less deadly ways. Building their big stone heads.
So that alleviated pressure from one side, but increased pressure on another, in that head building was expending resources. Lots of wood was being expended in moving and erecting them. And their craze was causing trees to be chopped down faster than they could regrow.
Which then created a further pressure, in that most of their food was from fishing. Which, for their population levels, required boats. And reduced timber supplies meant that less food could be harvested.
Then throw in some lean seasons (all means of farming and fishing can have times when the weather, or other factors like disease, which can cause drastic shortfalls, at times) and suddenly the political problems are back, as various armed groups try to ensure that their families are fed.
Which then requires calling on the gods/ancestor spirits etc for aid. Which, unfortunately, requires more head building.
Even those who could see that this downward spiral was coming, and who must have been calling for drastic reductions in lumbering, could not stand against these social pressures. And, even worse, there are tipping points beyond which, even if you do implement such measures, it is too late.
Not to mention that the reduction in genetic diversity, amongst the trees, through previous uncontrolled harvesting, would make the remaining populations highly vulnerable to disease or even recovering from losses due to a particularly bad typhoon. The latter being something that island trees, and their ecosystem, will have long built up redundancies to ensure their ongoing survival.
Worst of all is that trees actively encourage rainfall. Little organic particles get wafted upwards, and do a similar job to our seeding of clouds, using aircraft. As the tree population falls, so does this effect. Eventually reaching the point that a poorly-forested island has no significant difference, in rainfall, to one without trees.
And we have seen this effect, very dramatically, in the present day. With tropical rain-forest islands being stripped, and loosing their rainfall. With the land which was thought to be good for (substance) farming, turning out to be useless, due to insufficient rainfall. Not to mention the previously good food producing lands likewise suffering.
So the Easter Islanders were brought down by civil wars, drought, inability to fish offshore, inflexibility in religious and cultural practices, ignoring the doomsayers and the vagaries of nature.
With their remoteness cutting them off from the options that other societies have, such as trading for anything in short supply (i.e. wood), or moving elsewhere. The latter often being enough to reduce the pressures on those remaining.
In our simplification, we say it is because they cut down all their trees. But the entirety of the situation was much more complex than that. Likewise likely here, unless it was a hostile invasion. And even then it suggests a breakdown in diplomatic options, lack of mutual defence treaties and a bunch of other factors.
Good post. Most of the Precolombinan Civilizations in the Americas collapsed for similar reasons to Easter Island even with the option of outside trade. Then there’s the Roman Empire, which technically fell to the Visigoths but was more or less in the process of imploding when they showed up. And then it took another forty years or so for most of the far flung reaches of the Empire to get the memo that their civilization was over. It may be that the Alari were actually in decline as an Empire and whoever bombed them back to the Stone age took advantage of their weakness.
News just in. Some eco engineer Easter Islander managed to accessorise the heads without expending precious trees. Likewise raising them on top of the heads, in this case by building a ramp.
That’s a REALLY big mess..! Who’s gonna clean it up?!?
Who you gonna call?
Probably The janitors from Veridian Dynamics R&D
DustBuster!
Ghostbusters!
God, that phrase is never gonna be usable again, is it?
Doubt it.
Sadly not anymore, there is no longer team of ghostbusters people love …there is just wimpy group people hate left
What are you talking about? There has only been two Ghostbusters movies, still waiting on the third one
*sniff sniff*
Ahh, Brain Bleach™.
*nods head understandingly*
A similar thing happened for me, explaining why there is only Highlander, the movie, and the TV series.
Eh. In ten years no one will remember the last movie even existed. Maybe we’ll get past the current era of remaking old movies badly.
I have not seen it yet. The abysmal trailer put me right off. But I have been assured that it has its merits, so do intend to check it out, should the opportunity arise. I had high hopes for what could be done with gender-swapping the roles. So, if nothing else, I want to see any specific issues which may have been done poorly. Although I would still hope for some entertainment out of it.
I shall be taking in a bottle of Brain Bleach™ with me though, just in case. Due to the polarised opinions I have come across.
One point that I know will have been extremely hard for the new production team though, is the fact that the original script was tailor customised to each actor. To maximise what they could bring to the role. So the characters were heavily influenced by that.
Meaning that any attempt to replace them would either have to diverge from those roles, significantly, or suffer from trying to shoehorn different personalities into impersonating those gender-swapped characters.
Personally, if I had been tasked with writing the script I would have produced a generic story, but indicated that, once casting had been confirmed, that each role would need to be customised according to the skills and characters of the actors involved. Whilst drawing in only those elements of the original characters which overlapped with their sets.
Which, needless to say, may be considered anathema to actors, who would feel that they should be able to step into any part. But when that part is a well-known and much beloved personality, and that individual is a powerful extrovert and dynamic character, in their own part, it is a very very high bar to try and reach.
*rant online*Gender swapping roles can be a great story telling device if done well. Starbuck from the 2003 Battlestar Galactica reboot is a great example. The producers took took Dirk Benedict’s hard drinking, hard gambling, sex crazed ace fighter jock character, applied it to Katee Sackhoff, and used the juxtaposition to examine what would drive someone like that. The biggest problem for the new Ghostbusters was all four women were basically playing Peter Venkman. There was no Egon or Ray to balance out the wacky antics and while Winston Zedmore was the down to Earth Everyman, Leslie Jones’s character was a wacky “Streetwise” character thrown into the mix with three other wacky characters. There was no straight man, when in the original three out of four Ghostbusters were basically straight men. And that’s not the fault of the actors. All four have serious comedy and acting chops. The fault lies squarely with writing and direction. *rant offline*
*nods*
Yea, that doesn’t sound appealing. You need a contrast between normalcy and the weird, for comedy to work, at its best. Mork in Mork and Mindy, Lisa and Marge Simpson in the Simpsons, Morecambe in Morecambe and Wise. Or the really clever trick of having most of the cast normal, but with comedic turns. M*A*S*H* being one of the best examples.
But even then Klinger inverted that, being crazy more often than he passed as normal. To good effect. Along with the Korean War providing a very serious background, you get the roller-coaster of emotions going from comedic highs, through intense drama, down to heart-breaking tragedy.
Soap, another show employing the latter, to great effect, had more emphasis on the crazy (alien abductions spring to mind) but was very well ground with several straight characters, most notable of whom was the butler, Benson (who went on to have his own spin-off show).
It can work if all the principles are wacky, but the rest of the cast are not (the Three Stooges) although they never appealed to me personally, and I suspect for that reason. Single odd characters can work well, but I find that they can wear thin over time (Mork being one who did not).
For example Ace Ventura, pet detective worked. Courtney Cox played a great ‘straight guy’ to contrast Jim Carry. And, for those of us who had not seen him before, his oddball style was funny. But the sequel lost Courtney and her replacement was not as capable.
The focus is often on the funny actor, but Courtney had huge comedy experience in Friends, so knew how to play off the antics of the Joey and Pheobe characters. Jim Carry is so extreme though you need a strong talent like that to give balance. Loose it and he becomes overwhelming. Coming across as just ‘more of the same’, but without a rapport to balance it.
The big clunker for me regarding FemBusters, was they made Murray the villain, and Hemsworth as a dumb himbo (the original secretary wasn’t dumb)
The real surprise reveal thingy will be when we find out what ‘s done this, why it has done this and what relation it has to earth. If we find out any of this. The team could decide that getting the heck out of dodge is their top priority. Don’t want to interfere with alien cultures, etc.
War. War never changes.
Well it does once someone perfects killing. Then war stops.
Maxim tried it, Oppenheimer got it.
…but there is always someone to thick to learn.
As well as all life…
No, then you get a Cold War standoff and a ton of proxy wars while the major powers with the ability to annihilate one another circle warily looking for any sign of weakness.
Incorrect. We have not perfected killing. Perfect killing allows you to wipe out everybody you choose, in an instant. There would be no retaliation, because there would not be anybody left to launch a counter-attack.
Provided such capability remained with a single faction only then any ‘war’ would be over in the blink of an eye. So, whilst there may still be a desire to wage war, there would be no means.
Unless, of course another faction gained that capability. In which case they could, in that moment, become the sole faction, by eliminating all their rivals.
And this would be the most likely option to be taken. Because, if several factions had such a capability, they would know that it only took one aggrieved leader, having a temper-tantrum, to push his button and wipe out everybody else.
So, once perfected, there would be no cold war. There would just be instantaneous genocide.
Drakeye clued on to the other take on my play. Namely that non-selective perfect killing would leave no survivors, on either side. Something which, once developed, is always a risk that the wrong person will get to push the button. And there are no take-backs on that.
“Some groups just don’t get along” 1998 – KKND2
“I told you I smelled gas. But nooo, you didn’t want me to call a plumber ….”
Somebody got ticked off at the Alari and rewired their DNA with a nasty virus that made each Alari a walking high explosive. Then, somebody tripped, or sneezed, or lit a cigarette, etc…
So…Taco Bell Tuesday?
You don’t need rewiring of DNA for that just some nasty Nanotech. Need an exploding person get them the right nanotech and watch the fireworks. Faster and easier if they haven’t though t of a defense against it.
Nanotech. Biotech. Same results. Everybody goes “BOOM!”
Oh, I get it now. That big broken metal ring? It is the crown that fell off the giant half-buried statue that we were all expecting, just off screen to the right.
Yup.
Yeah, wasn’t Earth at all, some alien race thought the statue was pretty, so they too it home. Got a bit banged up in transit tho, so they just dumped it on the nearest planet & left it there…
“BUT… THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE”
Oh noes! They failed to kill lavos!
Poor Kenny though!
How long ago did this happen? I ask because some of those fires are still burning and Dabbler had to do her wind spell to clear the air of dust/smoke which should have settled fairly quickly.
The latter Sydney attributed to being kicked up by the portal. Which makes sense, when you see how big the effect is, next to them, in the above shot. So that has only just happened.
Advanced building materials I would expect to be fire-retardant, rather than fire-prolonging. So it seems unlikely that a building fire would continue longer than ones we have. Putting an upper limit of a few hours (or a day or two if there is nobody there to put the fires out).
The lower limit of the two events are at the same time. When the portal opened.
Fire retardant only works for a given value of “fire”. Even brick will burn, given enough energy.
Like THIS horrifyingly dangerous substance!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride
To paraphrase, Burns through glass, steel, concrete, sand and industrial chemists
If they have the equivalent of gas lines some of the fires could go for longer but it would require most people to be dead.
Fires or the cracked mantle of the planet, revealing the bleeding magma of the core below?
Black Blood of the Earth.
Don’t you mean oil?
No, I mean black blood of the Earth!
Yeah… that’s something I noticed as well. Methinks they should maybe secure the portal and get the hell outta dodge. Possibly after a quick search for any survivors. After all, they are heroes and no way ALL of the Alari are like Sciona.
So… if there is still fire and smoke, this must have just happened recently?
Yup.
Time to look really inconspicuous, stabilise the portal, step through it, and shut it down. Fast!
Ah, yes. The dreaded…”You know, if you last leave your world when it’s stuck in an endless war…and then wait a few millenia…It won’t have stayed the same.”
The unending war was probably was started by one faction that have black backgrounds (sclera) in their eyes (Sciona’s side) and another faction that look the same but have white sclera in their eyes.
In case that sounds familiar, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_Battlefield
Kirk: What are you picking up?
Spock: Several very large cities, uninhabited. Extensive traffic systems, barren of traffic. Lower animals and vegetation encroaching on the cities. No sapient lifeforms registering at all, Captain. There is no evidence of natural disaster. yet there are vast numbers of unburied corpses in all cities.
Kirk: You mean…all the people are dead?
Spock: All dead, Captain. They have annihilated each other. Totally.
“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. Nice quotation, very apt.
And one day… Earth.
Now, are we going to have to add a refugee operation ontop of the stopping sciona one ? :)
Looking at the destruction, it looks like it’s radiated from the Portal/rip in in space… almost as something horrible, destructive, and pink-haired came through with them and did a number on the Alari… and the civilisation and a good deal of the surrounding environment…
And I have a suspicion about that certain pink-haired individual.
In this comic “… that certain pink-haired individual” really does not narrow things down much. :)
Although the blue-haired (or rainbow-haired, on a whim) Krona could probably pull this off. In the area we can see, but not planet-wide.
Or she could turn it into an idyllic countryside scene, out of a John Constable painting.
That certain pink-haired individual I mean was Vale. And sorry for the double post, I thought the first one was eaten so reposted.
The penny was very late dropping for me. I realised much later who you meant.
No problems about the double post, it is a problem we are all suffering from, at the moment. Although, I must say, it is much improved for me, I still suffer from it periodically too.
The problem being that F5 or ctrl F5 will not work, if done too soon after the post is submitted. The server is still fiddling round with it, or something like that. So the trick is to go to the previous page, and back. This forces the server to finish off whatever was causing the delay and actually make the post.
I have only had that fail to work once or twice in the last couple of weeks, so that is a tiny proportion of the volume of posts I make. Meaning it is a very workable solution. If a pain in the butt to have to do it every time a post does not appear. Although, for shorter ones (especially in the middle of a comments page, making it harder to get to the navigation buttons and back), I just cross my claws, and hope that it made it OK.
My suspicion for Vale is… she’s an Old One, in particular Yidhra, as she usually appears as a youthful, attractive, earthly female. And what does Vale look like…
Would also explain how (if it was Vale) she could devastate the Alari homeworld so fast.
Though… might be assuming a lot.
There are always loads of options. And Dave is well known for throwing a curve-ball that nobody has predicted. But that is certainly a viable one. Especially as it ties back nicely, into various elements in the story.
Better plan: work on fixing your Own world, Then we’ll talk about Earth.
Unstable wormhole could have thrown them forward in time maybe. Either way if Sciona could survive as only the top part of her head I doubt there are too many actual casualties even from that.
As for the cause of said destruction, am going to say fireworks factory explosion = P
Looking at the destruction, it seems to have radiated out from the portal/rip in space. Wonder if a certain pink-haired individual came through with them and did a number on the Alari, the civilisation and a good chunk of the surrounding environment.
And I have a suspicion about that certain pink-haired individual’s identity.
Peggy?
Turns out Peggy is also immortal and just slowly did it over the course of years.
And she could have nukes, if she came through on a gunship, rather than her usual Osprey.
Go girl go!
Sooo…. Dabbler, when you say unbounded wormholes are bad, do you mean “Accidentally destroying the place I meant to go” bad?
That would probably not make Sciona happy.
which would essentially actually make this more Sciona’s fault in the first place… of course, knowing her, she’ll try to blame Archon for it.
Tell me, and the rest of the readers, who was it who fucked up the carefully prepared summoning? o_O
There is no I in Team. There is plenty of
XPblame to go around.:-D
YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS
Oh wait, just checked previous page, Cesret beat me to it. Oh well, you can never enough additional pylons.
Her wormhole caused the destruction, created on that end an enormous magnetic pulse causing all the satellites and nearby asteroids to crash down.
Foreign planet, burning craters, possible giant helmet, and after all the predictions no has pointed at this guy yet?
*RRRgghh, crash, looom* “Excuse me, just looking for this purple 4-armed adventurer, I think she may have come through here? …Hello, why is everyone just running around screaming about being on fire? Ok never mind, I’ll just check the next planet over.”
I can see him pulling up on a motorcycle, hellrider style.
Ummmm… Too soon to say civilization is destroyed, but THIS CITY looks a lot like immediate post-war Berlin. Given the pattern of damage and the locations of all the fires, I’d be looking hard left and up high from the given image.
The entire thing looks like a large scale orbital strike from that direction, complete with thing falling from orbit. The groundshear along the right and the straight down deep impacts sort of suggest a big gravity cannon fired through the orbital infrastructure; followed by a sharply tangential crash by the gold and crystal vessel.
On the other hand, that sharply a tangential crash indicates general hell raising elsewhere too. So the could be screwed. Or that Galactus has decided that THIS is the location of his new 1,800 hole golf course with natural disaster level course hazards…
Am I the only one that noticed that the arch with crystal looks like a pylon from Starcraft
You require more vespine gas.
Yeah, totally called that one.
Looks like her people seriously pissed somebody off!
Vale.
Ooh ooh, she has pink hair. I think that solves a riddle posed in an earlier thread!
Let me know when someone gets a chasm, Dave.
Actually, Sciona was the youngest of her siblings and the runt of the litter, with the weakest powers and an inferiority complex to rival the military industrial complex. She was hoping this would be her “I’ll show them – I’ll show them all!” moment. Of course, an older sib had warned, “Don’t play with unbounded portals; you’ll put eyes out with those things.” Well, she sure showed them!
Is it wrong that when I read the bottom script, instead of Alari I read Atari? Why would video games collect craters?
Well, the reverse is true. Craters collect Atari video games.
lol – that comment reminded me of Boyfriend fairy:D you get a boyfriend and you get a boyfriend, everybody get boyfriend
Even Mark Twain believed that until the US invaded and annexed the Philippine Republic, although IIRC the annexation of Hawaii caused him to start questioning it.
Oops, that was meant to be a reply to Guesticus’s comment’s about empires.
And let the hate celebrations begin!
*dances on the rubble*
Too soon?
*nods to self*
Too soon.
Mind you Sciona was confident that they would invade the Earth and enslave humanity.
*raises leg and pees on rubble*
Looks like somebody destroyed their moon, causing massive meteor bombardment. But the open magma pits indicate volcanism. So, massive gravitic disruption that tore apart their moon and caused huge tectonic shifts/fracturing? Between the quakes, the volcanoes, and the meteors, we’re talking about a civilizational mega-death event. The fact a breathable atmosphere remains suggests there are probably survivors somewhere, most likely along coasts that weren’t swept clear by tidal waves.
Johny Cho was here?
Only if it’s Hell.
I’m now envisioning a side story with the Alari version of Red Dawn.
Hey! The craters are still smouldering! That means the damage is fresh, right? Right?
Seems likely.
so why is there protoss shit everywhere? or is that just a coincidence.
Opening interstellar/interuniversal portals probably takes a shedload of power, even if that may only be at the receiving end. And they kept on finding that they needed more and more pylons.
Hey what if the wormhole caused all this destruction in the first place?
Did Sconia wipe out her entire race trying to get home? She was trying to get here, was the power of the spell directed here when it went wrong?
inquiring minds want to know…
And the shocker will be that they are getting blown up just so somebody could build a bypass though their empire..
That’s basically the plot of the last three episodes of the Justice League cartoon.
Looks like an invasion of mine turtles to me.
You can keep them.
There is one fridge logic check to the “This must have just happened” supposition. Where is everyone? Even if we assume Sciona has a large number of levels, the Alari are tough, fast, and fly on glowing wings. If everything just got knocked over there should lots of survivors checking the rubble/fighting the attackers. If this is the end result of a long war of attrition that wore down the Alari numbers and reduced everything to rubble, then we’re back to the “But why is it on fire?”
Of course, it could be something else, like, the Alari were fond of gaslights instead of electric, so of course everything is still on fire. Or this is what happens when “mana” is one of the things hardwired into the walls along with electricity and water.
Hey Dave blew up the city because drawing buildings is hard. You try drawing a million Alari!