Grrl Power #658 – Round 1 Fight!
Sydney should have known better. There’s no way that dude has just the one attack. If nothing else he could swat at her. She just doesn’t appreciate what she’s up against yet, even though it’s the only thing she’s ever encountered (in the week she’s been a superhero, lol) that’s strained her shield.
Yes when Sydney shoots her beam she starts falling. She complained about that on the previous page, but she can deal with that when she’s really high up. The quickswap wouldn’t work if she was chasing someone in between buildings at relatively low altitude. At best she could angle up before swapping and try and take the shot before her arc starts dropping her to low, but she doesn’t need that stress.
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.
Ouch.
Is it really ouch though? Sydney is always in the middle of her sphere no matter what the situation, and shes also proven that no matter how many Gs she is affected by her flight orb + shield seems to negate them (her first time flying with Maxima she was flying faster and faster with no feeling of it) so as long as the shield doesnt pop, she shouldnt be feeling that at all-hence her ability to fling curses faster than an automatic rifle.
How does the ping pong ball really feel about being served?
That is so Zen!
how would it feel about being served lobster?
so much difference one word makes. *giggles*
how would it feel about being served as lobster?
so much difference one word makes. *giggles maniacally*
“It’s a cookbook!”
Heh! Y’all have just been served…
Is it really ouch though? Sydney is always in the middle of her sphere no matter what the situation, and shes also proven that no matter how many Gs she is affected by her flight orb + shield seems to negate them (her first time flying with Maxima she was flying faster and faster with no feeling of it) so as long as the shield doesnt pop, she shouldnt be feeling that at all-hence her ability to fling curses faster than an automatic rifle.
It’s not the Gs the shield was protecting her against, the flight orb does that. The shield just protects her flesh from cooking or sheering off. Long before Sydney’s top speed, the SR-71 Blackbird, which is far better streamlined than Sydney’s meat body, gets hot enough that its pilots would flip the plane upside down and crack some eggs and bacon on the windshield to have fresh breakfast.
Quick, shoot the ground it’s standing on! Or she could try to destroy the engines of the ship overhead and drop it on him.
Given the size of the ship, it’s engines are probably a bit out of her damage range, and probably are well shielded
Maybe she could try and get it to hit its own ship with the eye beams?
Thinking about it, if she stays between it and the ship it will either have to hold fire or hit its own side.
The fighters might also be on her tail still. Enough of them falling down in bits and Mr Big might not be able to see what’s the other side of the metal rain.
But it would also pin her down in a specific location/range. When facing an overwhelming force, staying mobile is the thing to do.
She’s not trying to destroy the enemy by any means possible; she’s specifically trying to level up her orbs.
She needs to be able to stop and relax at some point too.
*sigh* I really really dislike those bosses that you have to circle around the back side, on the 5th of June in the dark of the moon. When the dew flies migrate, and you’ve just Cast an Oblivion spell which eats all your mana, so you only have 10 measly points out of 9999 to hit em with before they mega-regen.
And they have insane rotation abilities to keep you directly ahead of them. :P)
The score would be….
Sydney zero, squid monster one.
One point? What kinda shabby 1950s pinball game is this?
This is alien soccer, so one point. What Squidward needs to do now is fall down and grab a lower appendage in the hope of getting Sydney sent to the penalty box.
Does he get extra points if he manages to bounce Sydney off all 5 beams?
He’s playing Pinball.
Ever since I was a young squid
I played the Sydney ball
What a coincidence…That’s the song that Squidward happens to have queued up on his MP3 player right now…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3sKIV6KugA
You won the win.
+10 deflection bonus to AC
Quick Sydney, Target his saves. He’s taking crazy size penalties to Dex
Whoops, sorry for the double post, site was lagging and I thought the comment just didn’t work.
What’s that, like a +10 deflection modifier to AC?
Quick Syd, Target his saves! He has to be taking crazy size penalties to Dex…
Actually made use of that recently in the campaign I’m part of. Fighting an ancient dragon, and the thing has a crapload of CON, but no DEX to speak of, so I’ve just been dumping Evocation spells that require DEX saves on it, and watching it burn.
Holy crap ! That was unexpected. Said no one. Of course Syd’s first go to attack had to fail. Otherwise there would be no suspense. On the other hand I did not expect her to take it so calmly.
Sooooo how many pages til she one shots it?……
If you don’t down it in one page, it’s not a one-shot.
It’s always a one-shot if you only count the last one 8-)
If it takes a hundred tries to land a hit it’s still a one shot. Just a very unimpressive one.
welp its at this point in most rpgs that running is an option
It’s like fighting a dragon at lvl 5
You know he’s out of your league, yet you still take some pot shots from a safe range just to see how far you have to go
Fus-Ro-DAH!
Time for the TruSight Orb to reveal if Squidward is cheating and using the ship to power it’s shields/weaponry
If I start a fight with a dragon, you can be damn sure that I’m going to finish it. Or get cursed with good looks and critically seduce it but that only happened once.
Yeah, a critical success on your Saving Throw is still a critical success, even if Charisma is your dump-stat…
It’s a boss fight. Running is only an option if it’s scripted.
in the case of a boss fight running is still an option (its called load your last save and hope you didnt lose to much progress so syd might be appearing at the mars factory ;))
Quick! Press R2 and L2!
Not sure what is happening with Halo’s attack. Does Squidward have a crazy shield? Or something else?
not 100% but i think hes redirecting the ppos cutter beam
Something like a distortion field – the beam is redirected around him.
Which means that she can circumvent it by teleporting right next to him.
It will probably take her five panels to figure that out.
The issue of the teleport ball needing a time to work is not beneficial for her in this case.
Getting directly next to that baddy could be pretty bad, too. Best move would be to flee,
communicate – or in the worst case: attack the mothership. There MUST be some random exhaust port which can only take a single hit.
Moon-sized battlestation with only a 2-meter wide exhaust port that could only be breached by an impossible missile trajectory after running a trench full of turrets and tie fighters….
You’d think they could have added a simple blastdoor but the guy upstairs wanted a deluxe suite for his lightsaber trophy collection…
Or being space they could have literally flown straight down at the exhaust port and fired at it. Heck the trench run scene and the trench its self were last minute ideas to justify the fact the model for the Death Star had a visible seam around its equator, so rather than be something people could point at as a model design flaw they worked it into the script.
Yeah sure, it’s possible this ship has a small thermal exhaust port with a shaft that leads directly to the reactor system – but Sydney would need to practice by shooting some womp rats first.
Maybe it’s Guild master and the membership expires real soon now for the sector….
Plus, Lightbee still needs a path- it doesn’t go through barriers (even ones made of wood), so the forcefield around it would make teleportation inside impossible.
That could be a good tactic. Com ball might show a weakness too. Aim for an energy conduit (assuming its a piloted device and not a being with that size and power).
Though he may already have a note of what the balls can do so expecting the move.
…or she teleports right into the distortion. If it can affect her PPO, either the teleport won’t put her where she expects, or she teleports right into distortion, which doesn’t sound fun, shield or no.
Yeah, teleporting right up on something like that only works in games. Aura Burst, Distortion Field, Radiation, short range tentacles that come out through parts of the skin, detaching parasite/symbiote organic drones.
Heck I’ve written scene were a gung-ho fighter tries to punch someone with a Chaos Aura up around them, only to of course be instantly destroyed by the chaos energy.
also things like Fire Aura, Chill Aura, Acid Shell, ect…
General rule, if it has some crazy special defense shield around it, best not to go in for melee.
carfull sidney. words of curse have power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoBPe1LIvA8
Sydney’s only cursing at base Black Belt level now…Evidently, she’ll need crank it up a notch or two against Squidward. Not to worry yet because, according to Math, she already holds 7th Dan.
Amazing. Somebody else who is not afraid to use the word feltching in polite conversation! (The rest of you can look it up.)
“polite conversation”
I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean.
That’s a term that can easily snowball out of control…
…
…..
…….
GOLD STAR! *sticks it to MidnightDStroyer’s forehead*
And now to wait for Monday.
It feels like the Vehemence parking lot brawl all over again. Ahh how time flies. Waiting to see how the parking lot brawl unfolds is a fond memory to me now.
I’d try shooting if from directly above, if it just distorts around it, it would redirect it to the ground it’s standing on, making it take aoe damage
Nothing beats AOE and DOT. Eventually, everything dies.
Was bored last night so I hit Wayrest Sewer solo. Bosses were all “my adds” and “eat lightning” and “watch me port” and I just laid down the dots and let the pets attack and kept the shields up. Takes a while, but they died and I didn’t.
I think you’ll find that regenerative powers counter DOT at least reasonably effectively.
Attack the weapon site/face…. because that’ll be total unexpected, and wont have all the armour and shielding at all…
Now she knows how a pinball feels.
New strategy: Enter the mothership and KABLAM that sucker from the inside out, Deathstar run style.
She can do that with the Mastersquid first. Considering the creatures size, it surely eats a lot of galaxypizzas… that have to be pooed afterwards. It´s a matter of finding aliens big anus and use it to her advantage.
And then, she will be justified to make lots of jokes about this politically incorrect subject without being scolded by Arianna and Max again. A win-win for sure.
Just perpetually feeding off of the entropic gradient there is no such thing as waste products. Only primitive type zero life-forms like us have to do that. If the Dark Boss Squid is alive or a machine or something else it just may not need to be fed. You can never be sure which came first the Dark Boss Squid or its minions. Not that it matters if you are just several parsecs away from it. Sydney hasn’t reached minimum safe distance for a medium yield colour charged anti-matter bomb to feed to it. Are there any Vorlons or other advanced species nearby?
They colour as in from “The Colour out of Space” very dangerous radiations and is a life-form that sucks out all life and chance of life after mutating whatever it infects. The optimum vampire and tetrogenic generator.
And sailors across the universe blush.
Dave, any chance you could give us a clearer view of that thing’s whole body? I’ve caught that that squiddy part is just its head, and it has a huge slenderman-esque body, but it’s always squeezed into such a tiny panel that I can’t really see what it looks like.
So far the only full body shot we’ve had of it is through the smoke in 652: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2916
Everything else has been just shoulder up.
There’s a full body shot right on this page, panel six. It’s just too far back and too small to properly reveal anything.
Oh whoops, I meant before this page. Yeah even on the patreon 2x version it’s pretty small.
Meanwhile on Earth:
“Maxima!! Sydney’s alive!” says…
(Who should be able to sense Sydney’s distinctive profanity halfway across the galaxy? A character we met when the strip was in double digits?)
Hopefully she can set him on fire with her foul language.
I didn’t see any B***** S******** in that mix.
At this point Sydney’s best option might be just to go back to killing drones and then fly in through their hanger.
… also, I wonder how Squidward would react to (illusion) Sydney right at its feet. Is it dumb enough to go for the shimmer beam under those circumstances?
They have clothes drying? She’s not that small anyway.
She could create a white hot pool of magma beneath it for the squid to sink into.
I like that! It might start flying, but you never know. you can only pump so much stuff into a villain before you end up with a magic box with infinite stats, there must be weaknesses somewhere.
and that is why otherwise unstoppable villains who got built up to be these end game bosses ended up with some pretty dumb weaknesses.
Galactus: Gets hungry, and power goes down when hungry.
Thanos: He subconsciously believes he doesn’t deserve to win so leaves openings, loop holes, and clues for the heroes to exploit…or trips on his own feet and drops the magic cosmic McGuffin…seriously that actually happened.
Squirrel Girl defeated him via conversation…or at least redirected him.
A lot of heroes do, that was her point in that issue about Galactus ordering take out, he figured out even without a herald the heroes of Earth have a knack for finding planets for him to feed on.
No, what I was referring to are those times when Thor can hit him, or some other entity kill him in some alternate timeline or whatever, its usually excused that his power was low from not feeding for too long; heck the writers had to retcon him to feed more often *originally only once every few centuries* just to reuse him more often as he was originally meant to be a one and done character *A Big-G that no one could ever top or be equal to only encountered once by the F4, an end-game level opponent*. But he got popular so as these things go have to figure out some way to get him involved and then figure out someway the heroes can win even though they as Stan lee put it, should be like fleas against a freight train.
Wow, I didn’t realize how friggin’ HUGE that thing is! Love Sydney’s reaction in the last panel, it’s been a while since we saw her cut loose like that! “A black belt in swearing… 5th, no 7th dan” wasn’t it? LOL!
For some, when the stars are aligned just so, they get to rise up and destroy the world; for others, they get to rise up and have their world destroyed; and for others, they get to rise up and bounced around like the ball in a pinball game and have a glorious swear fest.
Which one are you?
Assuming that scene in the restaurant where Sydney describes using the PPO as “like touching a star” actually means that she’s channeling fusion plasma in a coherent beam, then Mega Nega Squidward’s defenses look like a seriously strong, localized magnetic field with a complicated geometry to it. If that’s the case then Maxima’s particle beams would also be deflected, and even Dabbler’s rail gun rounds might be depending on what its ammunition is made of.
Take it down like an AT-AT. It doesn’t seem to be able to fly, so needs good footing.
Something tells me she’d need more than 16 tons to tangle it’s legs.
She wouldn’t be trying to lift it, she just needs to restrict it’s movement. Wrap that sucker around a few times and pull.
Kaiju physics, consider how much force it must be exerting just to move around, something that big will be using many tons of force just to go forward. Also why Godzilla should be causing massive destruction just to lift its legs and push its body forward not just when the weight comes down.
Why not actually touching a star? Open a teeny wormhole to the core of the nearest star, and you’ll get one godawful fusion plasma beam out of it.
Reminds me of a sci-fi weapon I once thought of: open up a small wormhole to the core of the sun, and fusing plasma tens of millions degrees hot will shoot out at a million atmoshperes of pressure – pretty deadly. I don’t think Sydney’s PPO works like that though since she doesn’t incinerate everything in the vicinity everytime she uses it.
Have you ever watched Farscape? The ability to make wormhole weapons was the McGuffin that drove the series. Everybody wants a piece of that action.
If you didn’t mention that, I would have.
When it was finally used in Peacekeeper Wars, it was a tiny firey hole. Then it grew.
Crichton: “The power of 2 x 2”.
Its gravity quickly overpowered all the ships on every side of the war, even the dreadnaught capital ships, and ate a nearby planet, and showed no signs of stopping its growth. The galaxy itself would be eaten if left alone.
Everyone wanted a wormhole weapon. No one knew what a wormhole weapon was or what it would do.
A guy had a pocket version of that in Glasshouse (by Charles Stross). It opened for just a millisecond (or less?) but the guy firing it still got a bad sunburn from the reflected radiation.
@PD: I didn’t see your reply when I wrote mine. Great minds think alike, huh? ;)
I didn’t quite get the size of the enemy from previous screens. The sucker is *big*.
Now that is just unfair.
Sydney’s laser if it is composed of just light should be impossible to deflect by anything short of a large gravity well. Which would imply that the squid alien has some sort of gravity based shield. But if that’s the case there should be some major optical distortion. But a gravity field that powerful would use a lot of energy, and would be very strong, such that it would be extremely dangerous to have on continuously, like having multiple blackholes kissing your face dangerous, it would rip yourself and the planet apart.
Also the fact that you can’t see a laser till it has hit you, that shot should have hit if it was a lazer.
Which might imply that it isn’t a laser, but is instead a plasma or ionic beam, which would make sense since Sydney says that it feels like touching a star. A plasma or ionic beam would move a little slower than light and would emit light allowing the beam to be seen. As well a plasma or ionic beam could be deflected by a magnetic field. Mind you with the angles it’s being deflected along and how quickly it’s being deflected, it’s clearly a very powerful magnetic field being used as a shield.
The only option at this point is for sydney to get into it’s blind spot and shot it point blank.
Or use her shield as a mach4 battering ram.
The question is why don’t the drones have this type of shielding?
If i was a commander over an alien fleet I’m pretty sure I would put such shielding on drones as well as my giant tentacled foot soldiers or tentacled gundam mechs.
An alternate attack Sydney could use. Could Sydney use her shield to cut chuncks out of something?
Get in close behind it flicker her shield off than back on and rip away part of it’s body or armor?
What about lifting a large mass of rock inside the shield, and dropping it from high enough onto the squid?
That would depend on how responsive the shield is to Sydney intentions. It doesn’t cut into floors when she is standing, so likely conforms to nearby surfaces rather than forcing the sphere shape.
Can’t mirrors deflect light as well?
yes and no mirrors can deflect light but im fairly certain if the beam is focused enough the mirror might melt under the stress
i always wonder, is there a point at which water could cut through a mirror by reverting a portion of it to sand/mud?
(not really, but it’s a fun thought)
Well we use extreme high pressure water cutters now to slice thru steel like butta. The water has a bit of ‘grit/diamond dust/etc’ in it.
Pretty much anything will cut through anything else when the speed of impact is faster than the speed of sound in either material. The speed of sound in glass and in water is about about 1500 m/s. So if your waterjet is faster than that, then it will cut glass.
At an atomic level mirrors don’t deflect or reflect. They absorb the light then emit light with identical wavelength but different vector.
So they still have to absorb all the energy of the laser which would cause them to melt if it was strong enough.
Hmm… so one of Niven’s stasis fields would be better…. of course, inside one of those you are invulnerable anyway…
Well of the shield as you presume takes a lot of power to generate it is conceivable that the drones just don’t have enough energy to generate a shield that can deflect Sidney’s PPO.
The drones don’t have that shielding for the same reasons that jet fighters dont have tank shielding.
Well the drones are probably disposable scrubs for providing cheap area coverage – vital if you want to fight a planet, you can’t spend your budget everywhere. Like the difference between an oliver hazard perry class destroyer and a Ticonderoga class cruiser, one was designed to be cheap, mass produced with minimal capability and the other an all up multi-role warship to face the soviet main battle fleet head-on.
It could also have been a ruse to keep her away from the ship. Sacrifice as many disposable mechs as possible to get her to come and face the ‘Boss’
I’ve missed her curses, it’s been a long time since we last heard them.
I guess she can try her lighthook next?
That thing clearly weighs more than 16 tons, the light isn’t going to be useful.
She wouldn’t be trying to lift it, she just needs to restrict it’s movement.
Take it down AT-AT style!
Finally! Sydney’s swear streak is back! I’ve missed it :D
“Souffle”? :-)
Sydney you’re lapsing back to your match against math well your second match the first one he threw to boost your confidence and try to get a kiss out of you.
Well, that ain’t good!!!
Sidney, it’s time to truesight the thing and hope it could show you a weak point. If that fail, target the legs or the ground bellow
Yeah, that’s the smart play. Frontal assault has clearly failed, time to go looking for exhaust ports.
Not sure if this is something that Sydney would think of in the heat of battle, but perhaps she should forgo the PPO for a second and grab the true sight orb instead. The idea being to search for a weakness that she can then exploit. Maybe locate that two meter wide thermal exhaust port that leads straight to the main reactor.
Holy flying ferret balls! That is going to be one tough nut to crack. That’s for sure.
This has me thinking of the old “why don’t lasers pass through her shield” conundrum.
Real lasers are very comic unfriendly. They are too fast for a character to have a heroic Dodge moment, they have no physical force so they don’t blow people back when they hit, and they are invisible till they touch something so they’re boring to draw. So most of this stuff is likely charged particle beams of some sort.
I bet if someone aimed a laser pointer are Sydney’s shield it would go through just fine like normal light. Maybe leaving a little dot as it passed through like they do on windows.
I think Sydney’s shield prevent harmful levels of electromagnetic radiation wavelengths from passing through while allowing non-harmful to pass through. Otherwise the nuke blast several pages ago would have blinded and toasted everyone inside the shield. So while a laser would likely pass through the shield, the harmful levels of heat would be blocked, so Sydney would experience it kinda like a low-power laser pointer.
Something to keep in mind is that lasers don’t have mass, but they do have momentum. In other words, lasers do have recoil, and can push a target if the target is super light or the laser is super powerful.
None of the man-portable lasers we currently have are powerful enough for us to notice. Laser pointers are limited to 5 milliwatts (1 milliwatt in Europe), and even a surgical laser is only 40 watts. The military is experimenting with lasers in the 50 to 100 kilowatt range, but those are not man-portable; they’re mounted on a HMMWV or similar vehicle. Even if you could carry it, the recoil would be a couple milli-newtons at best. You wouldn’t even feel it.
On the other hand… someone did the math: In order to destroy Alderaan so completely that gravity would not eventually cause it to re-coalesce, the Death Star’s super laser would have to generate more than 200 million trillion trillion joules (2.24 * 10^32J). That’s more energy than the sun puts out in an entire week. We know that the Death Star is ~160 kilometers in diameter. If it were a solid mass of steel (which it isn’t), then unless it had some sort of handwavium to deal with the recoil, when it fired the super-laser, everyone on board would be liquefied by ~2100 G’s of acceleration.
Note that I am not saying that NetHobo is wrong. I’m just saying that a laser that is powerful enough would have recoil and could blow people back when they hit. Okay, let’s be fair, it would blow Achilles back when it hit. Anyone else would be vaporized. Having said that, though, I agree: Those are probably particle beams of some sort.
Whew, been so long since Sydney cursed that I’d forgotten just what a filthy mouth she has on her!
She should probably find a safe spot to upgrade the orbs.
She destroyed many fighters, flew to space and resisted an attack that put her shield to the test: if this doesn’t grant a lot of exp, I really don’t know what does…
Mastersquid: “Want to play a game?”
Sydney: “…yes.”
*pum* *pang* *byoing* *BINGBINGBINGBINGBING* *tilt*
I’d definitely agree Sydney has ’tilted’
“Ever heard of paint ball? Just remove the T.”
(Did I get the reference right One-Eye?)
I wonder when Halo will become woman enough to try out her brown orb. Obviously, what she’s doing now has been proven to be ineffective.
She had tested them all out when she acquired them, it just didn’t seem to have any noticeable effect.
I’m not sure she’s used it in tandem with the shield in order to see if it reflects attacks
It’s the return of the Sydney epic swear rant! YAY!
Sydney gets +2 to initiative next round.
The previous ones had better structure and flow, IMO. This feels less unnecessarily descriptive and more like swearing for the sake of it.
It’s one thing to have structure and flow when you’ve been taken captive by a “bank robber”. It’s another thing entirely to have structure and flow when you’re doing your impersonation of a human pinball.