Grrl Power #649 – The long way back
Whoops. That reflexive grab of the shield orb is 99% of the time going to be a good thing, but this time, not so much probably.
Now if Sydney had completed her Apex Superheroine in Training training, she’d know exactly what to do. Okay, no, Arc-SWAT doesn’t take into account exo-planetary shenanigans. At least not yet. There will probably be a bumper course developed in the near future.
I’m not really sure what that course would entail actually. Probably just advice on what to do if you get super lost, and a little booklet with major galactic landmarks, plus $100 in astro-bucks and a homing beacon supplied by Dabbler. Only she wouldn’t do that because that’d require tech that humans don’t have yet, and she’s not about to hand over a FTL communicator and a generator capable of powering it.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Oh, SNAP!
Well… that sucks.
“In entertainment news, the Grrl Power Comic has been discontinued. The author Dave Barrack had these words to say: ‘So long and thanks for all the fish’.
And in other news, the entire world was rocked with an explosive exclamation of ‘FUUUUUUUUUUUUU-‘ from 7 billion readers.”
I’m not too worried. Remember, as of the very beginning of the story, there’s Sydney back on Earth within just a few months from this point, even in time to make Corporal Rank too.
However, there’s still the question as to exactly how the fuck does she get back from here?
Sydney is still on Earth. Hopefully she and Pixel will have survived the explosion destroying most of Sciona’s base. Halo’s force field would be up to the job. There will be much confusion as Pixel and Pixel meet. But once they reveal that they were captured by Sciona, at the Mars warehouse, it will be easy for them to figured out that Krona copied them, when doing the checkpoint.
Sadly that means that this Sydney can die, and the story will not be affected. So things look dicey!
Well shit.
… just got real.
Interesting
I find it interesting that the weapon used on Sydney’s shield appears to be different than what was used to bombard the planet. Different looking crater & and no fracturing pattern around it.
That wasn’t a weapon, that was the Alari souls abandoning ship and heading for Earth. The crater Sydney is in is the same one from before.
Er – I don’t follow you. I’m speaking of the view in the very last panel (bottom righty). Do you also mean that one?
Er, I’m a little confused. I mean the very last panel – bottom righty. Is that also the one you mean?
They weren’t talking about the Alari souls. They were comparing the crater around Sydney to the craters seen in the establishing shot of the destroyed landscape. (Page #639)
How interesting – I’ve tried to post this comment twice before now, and it doesn’t show up. Is there a depth of reply limit?
Anyways – @David K. Storrs, I’m a little confused. I was talking about the last panel (bottom righty). Is that also the one you mean?
Oh, you mean the FFFFFUUUU… Well, that’s from Sydney herself. While her Atomic F Bombs are probably weapons-grade, it’s mostly her perfectly valid reaction to being stranded on an exoplanet containing nothing and no one except the first…entity…that’s ever inflicted noticable damage to her shield.
Speaking of which, I would be Very Surprised Indeed© if the first panel of the next page does not begin with “….ck !!!”
Spoken by Maxi, with the rest of the sentence being something like “Send us back!!!” :D
There’s a glitch with the comment section that makes it so posts don’t always show up right away. You’ll come back later and have a double post.
Good point. Perhaps it’s the difference between a wide-area anti-personnel attack and a (relatively) focused armour-piercing one. Or maybe, as others have suggested, the ARC team were fired on by scavengers stripping someone else’s leavings.
For those confused by the comparison, it doesn’t need reference back to the establishing shot. We can see within the last panel of this page the one focused crater (follow the speech bubble), and compare it to the neighbouring diffuse fracture fields.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if a group of them were stranded (having the comic just be Max, Dabbler, and Syd for a while would still work and would reign in the scope a bit) but having her stuck all alone is completely out of left field for me.
I’m surprised Max didn’t insist on Sydney going through first, or at the very least have herself go last. Isn’t the leader supposed to be the last one back through the interdimensional portal? I thought that was the rule.
It looks like the souls have some kind of ability to affect the physical world and probably pushed Maxima through, also sydney brought up the shield and that probably also didn’t help in getting her through the portal.
Looks like she was pushed by the souls without intension of going before Sydney.
No, Maxi was carrying Dabbles in front of Sydney, they believed the threat behind them was less compared to what may be waiting for them on Earth
Yes, if you look closely, Max was pushed by those souls hard enough to drop Dabbler before actually getting through the portal.
Speaking of those souls, panels 2 & 3 forced me to have a flashback to playing Doom 3. Swarms & swarms of Lost Souls !
(shudders) (presses 3, clicks mouse) (clicks mouse — Damn! Outta ammo!)
You are in your 40’s, right? Maybe early 50’s?
I was using computers back since the Commodore 64 was top-of-the-line in home computing. Windows wasn’t even a sparkle in Bill Gates’ eye. Getting online meant that the only platforms available were Compuserve & Prodigy. I had to cradle my landline telephone to connect to my IP.
(close your ears at this point if it starts to sound too ugly)
Vinyl records & 8-track tapes. Betamax tapes for recording video. The original GI Joe by Hasbro–before life-like hair. Mighty Mouse before DC Comics made him change to a yellow & red costume. I watched the original run of Star Trek on TV. I saw Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon…During the live broadcast. I saw JFK get shot, but I was a bit too young to understand what it meant.
You’re pretty close with the upper number…
I broke my teeth on the original Apple. I have used a tele-tank and rejoiced at 30 cps. A monitor capable of 4 colors gave me teenage wood. I remember watching the Moon Landing from my sleeping bag on the living room floor. I remember watching Tricky Dick wave the double-peace sign as he left office. I had baby-sitters that smoked pot and walked around naked.
C=64, and pet computers having ot use a cassette tape drive ($40) to save and load programs since the 5-1/4″ drive was $200, just like the C-64 and Apple ][ were still over $2000
You think floppy’s were slow tapes sucked even more, but they worked.
I had the (patience is a )1541 floppy drive for most programs, but I had cassette tape loading for others. Heh! I even taught some CBasic to my nephew before they even started teaching grade school students on Apple.
Back then, IBM hadn’t yet broken into the PC market, but they were at least beginning to see how they were missing out though. It only took them a few years to get caught up.
;)
I used a real nice machine, back in the day. Lost it at sea though, near Antikythera.
@Yorp It was good for it’s day but all it could do was calculate your birthday stars.
Naa, it did way more than just that. It also gave me plenty of advance warning when the next four-yearly games were coming up. Allowing me to catch a boat to somewhere without so many naked human makes running around, with their jiggly bits flopping all over the place!
That is very distracting, at eye height.
Plus I had a particular need to track exactly when the full moon was due.
Although I am alright nooooooooooooooOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
The problem was less grabbing the shield orb and more ‘not also continuing to fly through the portal’
Sydney turtled up and lost her op.
Sydney has her own “spaceship”…
… but not enough arms to fly it all the way home. O_O
She can shield, then every so often swap the fly for the air orb to replenish her supply
Logistics: Food, water, sleep.
Remember, her orbs usually go to sleep shortly after she does…Let that sink in.
Duct Tape. Never leave home without it.
Why is there no Duct tape n Mars? – nephew – after playing a newer version of DOOM and you could have a flashlight or your weapon ready but not both at the same time
It was pretty easy to find a Flashlight Mod somewhere on the internet. It would effectively attach a light to all of your weapons (except your knife, but you’d still have a light in the other hand). Some weapons didn’t really need a flashlight though…Plasma Rifle lit up the area pretty good all by itself.
:)
Even with duct tape, Sydney would still have to sleep sooner or later…It would still be bad to test whether or not taping orbs to her hands would still keep the orbs active when she’s sleeping out in space, yes?
Unless the green orb supplies food too, Sydney would need to locate, test and store a lot of food and water. Which would take more than one day.
Although quite what direction she may choose to go in, once she gets into space, is another matter. She had difficulty in finding her location within walking distance of her house, after all!
Plus at a top speed of Mach 4, it is fortunate that she has a whole planet to loot, for food and water. Let us hope that the embiggener does not have an upper size limit!
I think the biggest issue is knowing where home is, and that she’ll probably dehydrate/starve before getting there unless the remaining orb can make food :P
No, the bigger problem is the alien that proved to her, that her shield is definitely NOT indestructible….
Or #32 – Oh Snap!
A very important question we don’t yet know the answer to – is her shield tougher when it is only big enough for her, versus when she has it expanded to protect multiple people at once?
So now we figure out theblast orb is either a fab or an intergalactic GPS?
Well it could also be a function of her ‘Trusight’ – eg handy dandy scanner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSwaGgAjQZk
That has to be one of the most terrifying situations you could be in. Stranded on an to you unknown planet with an powerfull also unknown giant enemy with unknown numbers that has attacked you before and destroyed an advanced civilisation and you are alone without support and no known way home.
Yea, looking at it that way, her reaction seems completely reasonable.
I think, for Sydney, her reaction is fairly subdued…. fetal position rocking and crying is slightly more appropriate
Or #32 – Oh Snap!
Imagine how Max must feel
Sry but i think Sydney has it much worse situation wise. Max is military – She should know every mission is a risk and you can loose someone. There was nothing she could have done except maybe call it off sooner. But to me it doesn´t look like it was very long to make that decision. Her first priority was to get everyone back and asked for Dabblers (expert here) advice for crossing and shutting down the unstable portal. It was interrupted by important information in the area and the discovery of hostile looking life and followed by an immediate fallback. They rushed back as fast as they could and were attacked. At least she got almost everyone back.
I don’t think Max is immune to the primacy of feelings over logic (maybe Achilles is, because we don’t know how far into the metaphorical his invincibility extends :p). Many a military leader has made the best possible decision and still managed to feel bad about leaving someone to die.
I have no idea how her powerlessness in the face of this is supposed to make her feel any better.
If she has any heart at all, Max probably feels about as bad as she can.
(Yes, Sydney is still in the worst situation, but assuming she’s not about to collapse into a heap of pathetic, she has the numbing effect of (at least) seemingly effective action to soothe her pain. Max has approximately bumpkiss, and depending on how this story goes, may have enough time to eliminate every possiblity of hope before Sydney finally makes it back (I’m honestly hoping for a bit of an adventure))
No sequitur reply to myself! (rock music intensifies)
I think it actually might be really fun to spend a few (dozen) pages with just Sydney here. This is an excellent opportunity to give her some character development, some opportunities for real growth. So far we’ve mostly only seen Sydney excelling with what she’s already got (character wise), or learning more about her powers, but we could definitely use this chance to see her struggle with her weaknessess and stuff (you know, get some more of that sweet cross genre stuff and throw “literature” into the mix)
I mean, does “you tried your best” ever make anyone feel better about anything ever?
Don´t get me wrong I am sure Max feels guilty as hell and thinks about everything she should have done different but as a comperison who is worse of at the moment I would still vote for Sydney.
Was it ever actually supposed to be a comparison? I’d say all of ARCHON is now in a pretty sh*tty situation.
Oh, I’m not saying Maxima is in a worse *situation*, I’m saying she’s likely doing worse *emotionally* than Sydney right now, or will at least be shortly.
Good thing she is a freaking space ship
That’s… a very good point, actually. Time for her to discover where in her skill tree are navigation and warping
Even if she could fly at Mach 10 (which she can’t)
And even if she was as close as on the surface of the moon (which she’s not)
It would take over 31 hours of bubbled flight.
I eagerly await the introduction of new powers/allies/Sydney tactics.
Her speed could be based on acceleration HP, limiting her speed in the atmosphere but not in space. This is partially true of rockets which is how the ISS is currently going mach 22. Still , without FTL travel she is in trouble.
Longer if she has no deep space navigation skills/calculations, as even with something as close by as the moon you’d have to constantly readjust your direction if you tried to go straight at it, possibly even ending up playing a game of *catch up* as you follow it through space.
Landing on planets and other stellar bodies is less *look and go to* as unlike places on a planet they don’t stay in relative fixed location, but move, so NASA has to calculate where they will be and basically try to get ahead of that spot so more or less the probes and stellar bodies run into each other.
Yup. She’s a freaking space ship…. NOT a star ship. And she’s not on any planet in the Solar System. So if we assume she’s in the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, instead… and if we assume that she can tape her orbs to her hand so that they remain active even while she sleeps… and if we assume that she doesn’t die of thirst, starvation, easily-treatable medical problems, lack of sanitation in her hermetically sealed bubble, old age, insanity, or
plain-oldSydney-style insanity… and if we plug in her top flight speed of Mach 4….… we get a flight time of almost exactly 3,816,000 years.
…. oh, and she’s almost certainly much further away than Alpha Centauri.
…. AND she doesn’t know which star to fly towards.
…. let’s just call that Plan B, shall we?
It’ll help her survive for awhile, but won’t get her home.
First, she doesn’t know where she is, thus she doesn’t know where to go to get home.
Second, she doesn’t have enough arms with which to activate enough of her orbs’ powers to get her through space. She activates the Flight and Forcefield orbs to travel, but eventually she’ll run out of oxygen in her bubble. She can keep the shield up and switch to life support to refresh her atmosphere, but then what about food and sleep? She lets go of her Forcefield for any reason and she’s dead. We don’t even know if she has Faster-than-Light capabilities (or at least knows how to activate them).
If she can make orbit with the flight orb she can let go of it and after a quick refreshing of the air grab the so-far Unknown orb to see if it has activated some form of FTL function by some sort of Hyperspace or Spacefolding abilities. She’d be home in time for a smoked kipper.
Yay, Red Dwarf! I just binged through the entire thing. What a great show.
Well Syd probably has a better change sticking close to the portal (planet wise) and wait for help from Max/dabs setc. You start wandering around the (current) universe and you truly will be lost
Why? I don’t think dabbler ever said the Alari home world was in the same dimension.
If any of her orbs have TFL then it’s likely a flight orb upgrade. She may not have bought it yet and we still don’t know how she gains EXP.
Yup, called it. Ok, I called for all of them to be stranded, but getting it right down to just 1 person isn’t all that bad.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the last unknown orb would turn out to be a teleportation orb, but that would be too much of a Deus Ex Machina, IMO.
Teleportation is included in the telepresence orb – but she needs to send her vision in first. So, unless she gets just the right grid upgrade right now, she is stranded. (until Dabbler figures out how to reopen the portal.)
Hrm… Actually, how fast IS the Lightbee’s, uh, bee? And how is it ‘navigated’? Could she just think, like, “Next to Maxima” and it would zip out and shortest-route there through quantum wormholes or something?
I was just thinking something similar. She’s never really been in a hurry to get that thing far away from her, so we don’t know it’s top speed. For all we know, the telepresence orb could achieve FTL movement and it just takes about an hour for her to get back. Unfortunately, it would also give her pursuer a direction to search.
Good points.
The biggest problem is that it is clearly not instantaneous. So Halo’s body would be standing around vulnerable. Right now one minute like that would likely be fatal (or maybe even one second), let alone an hour.
However it is a good line of thought, should she find a secure spot to hide.
Well, hopefully Dabbler has an FTL/timetravel device, (or one of the orbs beheaves that way). In any other case, I don’t see it going well for Sydney…
I am sure that Sydney will be Deus Ex Machina’d out of this mess somehow by someone. Perhaps Dabbler calling in a favor to get Sydney picked up and brought back to Earth (assuming the Alari homeworld is a known location).
A swirling blue vortex appears beside Sydney, from the portal emerges a tall woman dressed in an alluring sorceress costume complete with a black corset with red strings, black high heel boots, a black cape with a red inner lining, and blood red hair. Her blue starlight eyes survey the much shorter Sydney and the chthonic creature beyond the portal.
“Uh wuh?” stammers Sydney, “Who are you? What is going on? and third…are you a villain or a hero?”
The stranger twists her blood red lips into a smile and raises her hand in the direction of the creature, “Chaos Blast!” a wide beam of dark red energy destroys the creature, and everything around it.
“I am the Deus Ex Machina…or Deus Ex Fuck this planet, depending on my mood; lucky for you kid I like you.”
She stretches out her arms and brings her hands together as Sydney is surrounded by a cyclone of blue and white starlight waves, “Oblivion Summance!” shouts the woman, not the nicest sounding spell name as it occurs to Sydney to brace herself…only to open them to the startled *gasps* of her teammates as she appears from the cyclone of light in the Archon base.
What has come of the Alari world you ask? Upon being contacted by Dabbler the Xevoarchy has sent an exploration team, but the planet…is missing, where it should be is instead a different world with lush vegetation, and numerous life forms. A strange new species is to be found there, a utopian culture of humanoid dragons with Alari like light wings. As for the unknown enemy, they are no where to be found, and a deeper scan shows that time and space have been altered around the planet as though this world and not the Alari homeworld had been there for decades.
Greetings from Dec 1, 2018.
You were correct.
Dun dun dun…
Now, Sydney is in the infinitely deep waste puddle. I wonder what is going to happen: Captured by the people in the ship? Goes on the run from the people on the ship? Bums a ride home with the people on the ship who are not as ‘bad’ as hey are made out to be?
Plenty of ways this can go.
I like the idea that they bring her on board and introduce themselves with a hand (tentacle?) shake and “Respect.”
Yeah, I can see it now – “sorry for scaring you, inferior species, but we saw life on a planet we just annihilated and wanted to make sure the Alari hadn’t resurrected from their own ligaments or something.”
“… What? No, we’re not space-cops at all. Why do you ask? By the way, you’re coming in for dinner, right?”
Syd’s really… REALLY Lost In Space at the moment. With something that thinks ‘Nuke Her From Orbit’ is the correct strategy. Oh, and her teammates back on Earth? They might have just gotten possessed.
Oops… I did not even think about that… yeah, Maxima’s body might be a ‘pretty sturdy bottle’ but against a spirit which in popular culture can phase through most matter nor properly warded and take over bodies? Yeah, Maxima might be “Scionima” at the moment!
Counterpoint.
Maxima’s power is more than skin-deep. The Gold showed on her skin first, but it was bonding with her skeleton. (( Look at the Ribs )) I’m willing to bet Maxima’s bones could be some sort of reverse-neutron substance. Reverse as in ‘not even neutrons could pass through this, that is.
I think you mean Neutrinos. Neutrons are fairly big and hefty (for a particle), weighing in at just slightly more than a proton. Neutrinos are the super-light, super-fast, pass through matter easily particles.
I think that, more than the gold skin, the spirits would be stopped by her internal force field if she has any defense against them at all. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/376
R.e. look at the ribs
No, it’s the skin being impermeable to xrays.
We don’t know what’s happening under the skin there.
Present day we do though, in that every cell of Maxima’s body is surrounded by a force field.
If we infer that it is the force fields responsible for the X-ray immunity, then this transitional partial blocking makes sense, as it had not completed integrating itself around all of her body’s cells yet, in the scene above.
Although Maxima DOES have “screwy skin” according to Varia.
Which she concludes due to the fact that she cannot touch Maxima (which we know being due to her force fields) and the fact that makeup does not stick to her. Probably not a classified secret (at least around Archon water-coolers). However again down to the force fields, rather than the skin.
Clarifying that though is likely to breach the classified aspects of Maxima’s nature (what her skin is ‘made of’ is classified). So letting those without high security clearance (such as Varia and most of the other rookies) think it is just ‘screwy skin’ will be fine by Maxima. It reduces the chances that a leak, about how her powers work, can get out.
I didn’t tell you that right?
*puts paw to side of nose*
“(what her skin is ‘made of’ is classified)”
Also, they don’t know what her skin is made of.
“I didn’t tell you that right?
*puts paw to side of nose*”
Ohhhh *looks around suspiciously* Yeaaaah I didnt hear nothin’.
I’m assuming that Dabbler has standing defenses against arcane intrusion, and would be able to recognize the signs if Maxima got whammied. I think she could probably deploy countermeasures to keep at least the immediate team members safe. Now, the folks in the chopper who are right nearby…
Goodness gracious that is some loud profanity. Though I won’t say it is unwarranted.
Loud enough for Mr Barkley back on Earth to have heard it :P
Time for verbal diplomacy with Mecha Death God for a trip home.
Calling it: last ball is a universal translator.
Yes, but how will it fit in her ear?
Trek-verse, it is an external utility (TOS, a handheld device, TNG the communicator badge) – but yes, a babel fish would be awesome.
it’ll turn into a fish, of course!
The yellow orb already has a teleport ability. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2409
Yeah, butt LightBee has to physically travel to its destination first
Well if the portal just shrunk in size to about 1in, the light
bee can still fit
That is some Nuklear Power Black Mage “FUUUUU-” there.
Tlepresence/teleportation hop can work, but to where and what range does she have?
On a side note cthulu-light-craterpuncer might get introduced to mr pew-pew orb out of frustration.
I take it that the purple skull up front is Sciona….
Good catch, was about to mention that as well :D
A good question would be: would not turtling up be a good thing? These souls seem to have momentum AND mass. If they managed to knock Maxima over, that could be dangerous to a human.
As WoD said: under normal circumstances, yes, butt not when it results in you being stranded on an almost-dead alien planet with a big nasty RAOOOOOO-ing on the other side of the crater it had just created!!!
Notice the size of the big honkin’ crater Sydney is in compared to the other blast sites nearby. Looks like they didn’t even use their biggest gun…
If they can possess only normal unenhanced/experienced humans then it wasn’t the worst thing she could have done but maybe going through the portal might have worked out better.
If the souls of the war minded alien race can take over, even temporarily, anybody of any power level who doesn’t know the right magic/advanced science to block them then even being stranded might be better long term than being on the other side with Evil Max’s new ARC of Evil. (assuming Dabbler could manage something to protect herself)
I want to bet that of the two unknown orbs one is a healing orb, and will keep her alive past starvation and dehydration. perhaps it’ll just sustain her body, perhaps it will start trek synthesize sustenance for her.
Bit low on the list of priorities. First tackle the shield-straining dust-beast. Then work out how to get home. The most optimistic route is to find a Translate function on the com-ball and diplomat the s*** out of the situation. Because unless Sydney can learn blood magic in short order, looks like the only route out is to hitch a lift with the genocidal aliens.
Continuously starving isn’t all that pleasant even if you aren’t dying from it.
(In)Appropriate to leave this here: https://www.superstupor.com/sust12292008.shtml
I was thinking of the Magic 2.0 one, I had forgotten about Super Stupor.
Eh, Jemma Simmons got through the same situation on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Not before going half-crazy on an empty planet
Sydney is already half-crazy and on a planet that is most definitely not empty
I only see one potential ride home nearby and only one place that the destroying aliens are less likely to deploy their most powerful Badabooms for fear of the collateral damage. Its time for the “Aquapirate” to evolve into a Space Pirate.
When I saw Sydney’s portal/shield error: “Well, there’s no use crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.” :D
And the science gets done. And you make a neat gun for the people who are still alive.
And while you’re dying I’ll be still alive.
Bad enough that Sydney has to deal with the space squidbillies. The last thing she needs is for GlaDOS to show up.
Besides it was a portal that got her into this mess in the first place.
Looks like Sydney is gonna be stuck there for a while….!
Okay, I’m seeing basically two or three options for Sydney’s survival.
Option 1: Hope for rescue. Best chance is that Dabbler and the Arc-Light crew figure out Sciona’s interestellar wormhole bill and open a gateway. Main problems with this strategy: We don’t know if they can do it; if they can it may take hours or days or weeks; Sydney isn’t that patient; a spaceship drone-thingy capable of overwhelming her shield wants her dead; the spaceship/drone/thingie probably isn’t patient either.
Option’s 2 and 3 can both fall under the same category of using that ship which just warped in, and so might be called the same option. The ship appears to have both FTL travel (because warped in) and communication (because it was called in). However, the two approaches are very different. So…
Option 2: Have fun storming the castle! Take the ship by force. Sydney’s got the cutting beam to breach the hull, a nigh-impervious shield that they won’t dare nuke when she’s INSIDE the ship, and absolutely nothing to lose. They shot first and if Sydney’s a spaceship I think that’s legally attempted piracy. (The law is absolutely airtight on this, I’m not stretching, not in the slightest.) Once she controls the ship, fly it back to Earth. The real challenge will be retaining ownership rights. Problem with this strategy: we’re dealing with an interstellar civilization here versus a single person. To put that in perspective, if the resources of the Solar System (a single star) were fully exploited it could likely support something on the order of tens of sextillions of human beings, give or take an order of magnitude… that’s 1 followed by 20 zeroes. And presumably they all live in an industrialized society that makes first-world per-capita productivity look like that of stone-age Mongolia’s. And THAT is if we don’t figure out fusion power, or, you know, some more hypothetical physics… like, you know, FTL. Very short version: You do NOT want to pick a fight with a multi-star-system enemy, even one that has only the sort of tech we can model and design today and implement in 20 years. Throw in FTL (which is a huge game-changer) and you DEFINITELY DO NOT pick a fight with them. … of course, we’re in a genre (space opera, apparently) where this sort of math doesn’t usually get thought all the way through, so MAYBE it won’t be that bad. Still, Sydney would at the very least be up against something tall enough to reach into space, so a bit of trepidation is definitely called for. Oh, and
Option 3: Diplomacy. Make peaceful contact with the people on the ship and hitch a ride home. Problems with this strategy: They’re trying to kill her; Sydney neither speaks the eighteen dialects of Grrblax nor knows which one she’s supposed to use today in order to avoid causing mortal offense; and she left her towel at home. Shame on her.
Correction: That population figure I quoted is actually 1 followed by 23 zeroes. But it’s probably closer to 22 or zeroes because of no perfect efficiency. …. and that’s assuming you aren’t uploading billions of people into computers the size of a small house.
Option 4: Sydney turns lightbee, wishes she was home, and, lo and behold, the lightbee can materialize anywhere she’s been before.
I like the idea of Sydney conquering the ship, though I question the feasibility of her learning to fly it. Mostly I like the idea of Max and Dabbler frantically mounting a rescue mission and arriving back in system, only to find Sydney commanding the ship with the mecha strapped to the prow.
…although if we do get that, I will demand more details during the retelling of the action, rather than just a panel showing Sydney in a bar with the rest of the team saying “…and that’s how I became the Space Pirate Queen of Alari.”
Dat face tho, she really does look horrifyingly horrifically horrified.
The last orb might be navigation, or might be medical.
I wonder how fast Dabbler can figure out the Brane-ripper to open a new portal?
Haha, you beat me by a minute on navigation *high 5*
I wonder how how fast dabbler can dig the brane ripper out of that mountain…
I wonder how fast Dabbler can repair the crushed remains of the bran ripper.
If the mountain collapsed due to the explosion there may be some damage.
Would a “bran ripper” be some kind of cereal you really don’t want to eat?
Neural bran?
bran ripper. sounds like bran and beans
maybe with prune juice
Dabbles would have to know the ZIP-code for the Alari homeworld (and that’s even if that was the homeworld)
I wonder if the remaining orb will come into play now. Navigation?
Sooooooooooooooooooo…… Time-Skip?
Oh man, if this is the last page before we jump forward to the “present”, I may rage-quit. The current arc has way too much setup and character-/world-building potential to just drop and start a new storyline.
Although, a single flash-forward or side story page right now would be quite the dramatic cliffhanger. No matter what the next couple pages bring, we’re going to be really curious about what’s happening on the other side of the portal.
This looks like an opportunity for new orb powers.
Well, flight is right out as is any science fiction transport method.
But did they not get there using an arcane mode of transportation?
Is this, slightly toasted, world the [former] home of galactic bullies with knowledge of the arcane?
So it stands to reason that there is the possibility of a way home laying around somewhere if all such escape methods were not destroyed by the SciFri-Squidwards
Cthulhu-dude is about to have a surprisingly bad day.
Well, that isn’t good.
OK, OK, OK, don’t panic! Right, this is me NOT panicking.
OK, assuming the idea that ‘the orbs make Sydney into a spaceship’ is correct: Let us hope the unknown orb opens wormholes for interstellar travel.
Im betting that her last orb is warp or something. It would be in line with her other spaceship based abilities.
Honestly, I’m hoping the last orb remains a mystery (or possibly its revelation is off-screen and stays classified, becoming a noodle incident) for a long time. The team has other resources to draw on here, and the mystery of the final orb has a lot of life left in it.
Problem with that. To survive in Space, she has to have her Shield up to hold air and pressure in (and avoid cosmic radiation). To maneuver in space, she needs to have the Fly Ball going.
She doesn’t have a third hand to activate Warp with.
She doesnt need her fly ball once in space and moving. An object in motion stays in motion. At the same speed. Theres no gravity to make her fall once out of the planet’s gravitational force. Thats how deep space probes work as well. Voyager wasnt using continuous fuel for decades.
Once in space, the only orb she must continually hold is the shield orb. She can hold the atmosphere orb when she needs that and the fly orb when needing to correct course/maneuver. But most of the time just hold the shield orb if she was able to go fast enough. Which she cant since she tops out at mach 4 or so unless she gets another pip which greatly expands her speed or opens wormholes or stargates or something.
She is bound to have earn’t another skill point (assuming her guess that it is an XP based reward system is right). In which case this would be a very good time for her to carefully study her skill tree and pick something which may give her such a capability.
The flyball seems the best bet. And she can avoid the one at the end of the mostly filled line. That is most likely her mundane flight speed/acceleration. Another good one to eliminate is the singleton with double lines around it. That is common to all of the orbs, so is unlikely to be something as unique as FTL travel.
Which narrows it down to a 50/50 choice between another singleton and a line of three skills, with a ghosted line extending from that. Which could be either.
FTL seems like something that might have various upgrade options though. So that is the one I would advise Sydney to go for.
Although it may turn out that one of the Truesight orb’s skills will allow Halo to teleport the lightbee, to any location familiar enough for her to give it a mental picture, of where she wants it to go. So similar to Harem’s teleport power. Albeit then involving a second step, in activating the teleport, which takes Sydney to the lightbee’s location.
Her next pip on the Fly tree that they wanted her to pick was something where they thought it might unlock a new attached line of pips. See how the 4 that are lit and the on that is not YET lit all attach directly to another line, staritng with a new pip line of 4 pips (and a fifth pip that is a double attached pip? So….. it could be the difference between ‘mach’ speed and FTL/warp speeds or hyperspace bypass speeds.
Like…
Pip #1 – Mach 1.
Pip #2 – Mach 2
Pip #3 – Mach 3
Pip #4 – Mach 4
Pip #5 – either Mach 5 or Mach 5 + Warp 1.
Second line
Pip #1 – Warp 1
Pip #2 – Warp 2
Pip #3 – Warp 3
Pip #4 – Warp 4
Pip #5 attached by two lines – Warp 10/Improbability Drive/Stargate Tunnel Formation/Hyperspace Jump-Point?
Then there are those two other lines of 5 and 4 pips, and the last line which is just one lone pip. No idea what any of those could be – especially the two that are already lit, although I’m assuming they MIGHT have something to do with localized gravity or gravity control or something along those lines, although it could also be something dealing with her immunity against vertigo.
What I’m REALLY curious is about what the pip in the center does once 7 pips around it are filled in, since each of those pips seem to fill in 1/7th of the center pip.
That is the game objective, of course. If Halo fills that in, she becomes the Empress of the Galactic Empire of the Orbs! Seven Orbs to Rule Them All. That salvo was from a rival orb-wielder, who is lagging behind in completing their skill tree.
God help us all…
Give her the goku pose as she is screaming. From when namek blew up!!!!
Well… If I had to guess the brown orb is a zoomable star map with waypoints and the flight orb has switches to FTL after escaping a planet’s gravity well. FTL in atmosphere would overwhelm her shield way faster than the skreenboom did. Think fusing of the various atoms and molecules in the air.
Hey when does sidney become a corporal.
She is already corporeal. Sciona was also corporeal, but now she is incorporeal ba dum tss . (I’ll see my self out.)
Well look at that, Maxima almost found out whether her invulnerability rates for portal cuts!
Seems she wasn’t that ivnested in finding that out, though.
Meanwhile…. On the planet of the Psylicans… A mere 80 lightyears away…
“Did you hear something?”
Don’t you know that ‘In space, no one can hear you swear’.
There are no space-sailors around, neither are space-nuns, but Syndey might make the aliens in that screwlike spaceship blush if they can translate her rant.
Sydney’s balls obviously have some sort of affinity towards her, so hopefully there is some sort of “Save my User’s Ass” protocol built into them. If there is an AI hiding in the unknown orb, this would be the time for it to introduce itself.
And how did that “SMUA” work out for the last User? o_O
May not have been any protection against growing old…
“hitchhikers thumb” – tiny print – ‘Avoid Vogons’
So, I’ve seen some solutions that go the route of “Maybe Dabbler can make a portal.” And I couldn’t help but think… Doesn’t Dabbler have a bloody spaceship?! You know, as long as space/time/dimensional travel isn’t super long relative to everything else, she could just fly there. >.>
There’s no evidence that Dabbler has a spaceship of her own. She probably has access to interstellar travel but that might take a long time.
have you noticed you and Dr.Cynic have the same avatar just at different resolutions?
I think the base version of mine is supposed to be a corgi not a fox.
Whooboy, ok, did some delving and what Dabbler said here
My bad there is evidence :D
When I read that I didn’t think ship I thought just an area she blocked off for herself.
Well, looks like the local genocide beings will be getting to probe Sydney for information after all.
Fortunately they won’t be able to probe the information about where she’s from because Sydney doesn’t know. Astro navigation was not something that she’s probably learned so far. If one of the orbs is a translator then maybe her best bet is to convince these aliens that she is an average person on her planet. And that they should not attack them because they all have those orbs.
Or she was attacked because she does have those orbs *the sentry squid seemed to be reacting to her* and not anyone else it was scanning, and the orbs were made by a species they know or have run into before and aren’t on the best of terms with.