Grrl Power #727 – A timely prank
There’s been a lot of speculation, and this finally confirms it. Time travel! This is why when the team arrived on Alari Prime, Harem got discombobulated, because suddenly there were twice as many of her, and half of her knew the date was different. This helped the team immensely though, as they knew exactly when in time Sydney was. Past Harem also instantly knew everything that had happened in the intervening time. Since she only has one mind between all her bodies, the two versions of her integrated into a new single mind with the added memories. Her ability to recall those memories, however, is somewhat limited. They’re all there, but they don’t just burst forth unbidden. Most memories need some context. She sat down and tried to sort of remember everything in order, but a lot of the samey daily minutia got lost in the kaleidoscope of monotony that is modern life. The big events, however, were a lot easier to pull up. In the last 2 months, the team has gained a bit of a reputation for being exactly where they needed to be to prevent major crimes and disasters. If anyone is speculating that Archon has a psychic, they’re okay with people believing it.
So they were thrown 51 days into the future, and it took Sydney 2 days to make it home, most of which was spent on Cora’s ship. That’s not too bad considering she had no idea where she was. It’s lucky Cora got a lock on her when she jumped from the Alari homeworld to Fracture Station.
If most of Sydney’s friends are around her age, most of them would probably still be alive after 57 years. So, typical overreaction from her really. The reason Harem went with 57 years instead of 53 years, is 57 is the length of time Ripley was lost in space between Alien & Aliens. As for why I chose 53 days instead of 57… I don’t know, probably I thought it’d be too on the nose to homage Aliens that hard.
Moving update: Jeeze, I though preparing a house for sale was took a lot of time, but showing a house… geeze. All weekend it was every other hour, pack up and go for a walk or do some errands while a realtor walks strangers though the place. Not conducive to working on a comic. :/ You’re supposed to let the realtor do the selling, which is probably a good idea. I tend to overshare. “That’s where the cat threw up last week. I stepped right in it. That’s the problem with having cat-barf colored carpet. I guess it depends on what you’re feeding the cat really. Oh, and also there’s a hellmouth under the porch.”
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I’m trying to sell my house right now. It’s an f-ing pain in the ass to keep it spotless all the time in case a showing pops up.
It is, but I’m hoping it instills some better habits in me, like putting my dirty dishes in the dishwasher and not letting them pile 16 deep on the counter first.
If you’re anything like us it will. For about a month…
What?? Aren’t you simply supposed to wash dishes when you run out of clean ones???
https://imgur.com/rnZQpEz
I hope this works, I had a little fun piecing together some items (and an avatar) in Second Life to make up a Maxima for you, Dave :) Hope you get a kick out of it
Not too shabby :)
Great Reveal for Harem! Well done, DaveB!
Does this put significantly closer timewise to the prologue of the comic, or was that purely a few months from Sydney’s…retrospective?
I really was expecting it to jump up to 2019.
But for the flashforward at the beginning she was done being a recruit so that’s a ways off yet and time travel wouldn’t get Syd there any faster.
She’s already a corporal in the prologue, so she’s actually gone up more than one rank from recruit, not 100% on this but I believe that there are at least 2 stages of “private” before corporal(e4 which oddly is senior ariman in the air force. So i’m guessing ARCHON’s rank system is based of army, not air force.). i think Sydney’s couple months is more like 20+. Though a quick promotion(AFTER she completes ALL of her training) after all she’s done wouldn’t be too far fetched.
But considering basic training for the military runs anywhere from 8-16 weeks depending on the branch and occupation within that branch(air force used to be 6 but is 8 now) and that’s with basically round the clock training, which Sydney is not doing since she’s allowed to work while doing basic(can’t do that till after basic in the military (you are a FULL TIME++ student) iirc)
and a typical police acadamy is 6 months i’d put archon basic training at 6 months or more. though she might graduate from recruit to private after 2 while still in “school” since basic training is just that, there’s more training after basic before deployment usually.
Of course this time shift thing isn’t something that comes up normally but if there’s a break in training for some reason i’d imagine they have to pick up where they left off. Meaning 2 weeks off, means 8 weeks becomes 10. and since Sydney basically lost 2 months that means she’s added 2 months to her “recruit” phase. Not to mention she’s prematurely deployed several times which also cuts into her training time. 8 weeks at 12 hours a day(i think it’s more like 16, (couldn’t serve myself so only know 2nd hand,) but i’m pretty sure that there’s almost no downtime in basic) 7 days a week is 672 hours (which at 9-5 m-f with 1 hour for lunch that’s about 5 months) of training that like school i’m sure is counted by the hour not the days. (each course takes at least x hours to complete, and each course must be completed before you can graduate) So every time her training is paused for whatever reason that adds on to the time it’ll take her to complete basic.
It’s been said before but I’ll say it again, ARHCON basic training will have alot of coursework that would not be there for a normal soldier. Since normal soldiers are to just do what they’re told, they don’t need to know more than the “super-uber don’ts” they don’t need to know every little law like a cop should. they also don’t enforce laws domestically so there’s a whole slew of stuff only MPs are trained in. They(MPs) actually do some civilian coursework I believe.(Knew someone who was sweet on an MP once and she (the MP)was talking about having to go to the civilian PD for a test.)
In my 3 years in the army during my first enlistment, I went from an E1 to an E4 (Private, Private, Private First Class, Specialist)
Though Corporal is an Officers rank, which is a different tree.
Course Arhcon could be using its own unique system which borrows rank names form other services.
Corporal isn’t an officer’s rank. It’s just line for NCO track rank. Before specialists E4’s went for corporal. But retention meant that skilled individuals who weren’t being tagged for Corporal and eventually NCO track were being cut and sent home. Army was losing skilled men faster than they could be replaced.
Solution Specialist branch– think of E4 Mafia who are skilled and tied to specialty and not command track. Kinda like Warrants. (if you can find one.) :D
I’m thinking that her pay-grade and advancement cycle will probably work out something like how the Navy does for it’s Nuclear Power program personnel.
Rather than starting everyone out at the very bottom (E-1) and having the Nuke program recruits get whiny about the pay vs effort input for them versus the Regular navy recruits (non-rates), and give up and fail out to join the fleet and have an easy life… thus losing time and effort of the whole training system and STILL have to find MORE people to fill the ranks, they’ll probably have her on a “In Boot Camp you’re a NOBODY!!!… BUT when you graduate, to show that YOU are better than the scrubs in the REST of the Armed Forces, you will be advanced to E-4… WITHOUT having to go thru the time in grade and testing B.S. the non-Supers do, you’ve already been beat up enough in training, this is your reward for passing it!”
SO… Long story short… I’ll bet that one of the ways the government is trying to sweeten the pot in order to even be able to GET Supers to enlist rather than Private Sector work, would be to run something similar; you come in right off the street at an already elevated rank and bypass a lot of the grunt and grind daily b.s. stuff… and that would make Maxima’s greeting of: “Corporal” and Anvil’s “Big Guns” comment when Sydney came in to work a pretty easy thing to hear with out too much suspension-of-disbelief…
Yeah, I agree the jump to corporal for fieldable personnel sounds reasonable. Given that there’s a good chance they might be fighting something that’s above their clearance level.(“corporal and above” are cleared to know about aliens and the twilight council races)
But, Sydney is still a recruit till she graduates. Which considering all I’ve mentioned before is realistically 6 months or more. (+2 due to her time skip)
And lets face it. Anything less than a year could be stated as “a few months”, and not be completely false.
At least the prologue says “a few” and not “a couple”. So yeah, while 6-10 is techinicaly “several”, you wouldn’t exactly be charged with “lying under oath” to say that it’s a few in court… I think. (iirc, the technical definition of a few is 3, but in actual practice, it’s used to represent any number between 2 and 12 regularly.)
and i don’t care if she’s a recruit, the “big guns” comment still holds water. she did after all just recently pull off a “robotech”, and slice a kaiju to pieces. Not to mention anvil was used as the “anvil” in her first roadrunner maneuver.
I’m happy Sydney isn’t in 2019. We still get to have Barack Obama as president, in Grrl Power at least.
She will still have to deal with Obamacare…
You can tell that Dante never had to prepare a house for sale/show a house/sell a house at action/buy a new house (and possibly arrange interim accommodation)/move all the stuff you’ve packed from the old house to the new house and unpack it, because if he did it’d be prominently listed as a feature of one of the deeper circles of hell. Been there. done that, never again! Sympathies to you DaveB!
In Dante’s day, people could literally knock their walls into sections and carry them off (knock the dried daub (mud, clay, sand, straw, etc) off the wattle (woven panels of sticks and posts, pick them up, and literally move their homes (after removing the thatching, of course–hard work, and usually easier to just build fresh, but there were legal cases of someone literally dismantling another peasant’s home and moving it).
The tough part was getting permission to move, because a lot of people were legally tied to a certain region or plot of land to work it as serfs, which was a few steps up from slave, but only by a few. That’s why the whole “run away and live un-caught in a town for a year and a day” thing was so important, because it changed that person from serf to free. (Towns didn’t like vagrants, though, so you’d have to get a job of some sort…and to get a job you often had to apprentice, which was right back into serfdom in many ways.)
Actually, slaves had value. Just check the Old Testamente, or old Norse rules. Slaves were property, and therefore had VALUE.
Serfs and Husmenn(Norwegian version of ‘crofters’) only ‘value’ was as free labor. Often they had to work all day for the landowner, and only had the evenings to tend to their own meager fields. If they were lucky, they had a landowner that gave them a meal every day they worked. The rest of the time they usually had to make do with what they could grow themselves.
There’s a reason why there’s more people descended from Norwegians in the USA than there are Norwegianss living in Norway today. The emigration of all those workers was probably a big factor in how the Husmann system ended.
I have been through the moving process on a number of occasions. Packing, loading the truck, moving, unloading the truck, unpacking and rearanging everything again. Until recently though we were always renting, and my parents handled he arrangements. This time, we are packedup and ready to move, just waiting to close and get the keys. My parents first ‘owned’ home.
Look on the bright side Sydney: You’re 53 days YOUNGER than you’re suppose to be.
Well that’s not 100% accurate. She wasn’t frozen in time while she was out and about. So it would be 53 minus all the time from her perspective.
51 days
nope, she’s exactly the same age as they all are … you take Today’s Date, and subtract your Birth-date… you get a certain value… say, for EXAMPLE that Sydney and Heatwave were Both born on the SAME day 22 years ago say 15 April… ok, so in this example you take Halo’s and Heatwaves BD’s and subtract from Today’s date, and you get exactly 22 years old for BOTH of them. therefore they are STILL the EXACT SAME AGE… it’s simple math people! :D
NOW, that being said i agree that her Chronological Age vs Calendar Age ARE 53 days out of sync with the rest of us due to the time Dilation effect specifically from the wonky wormhole that all the others on that trip passed thru TWICE (once going and once coming back) thus cancelling out the dilation effect for them… BUT because Sydney did NOT pass thru the same portal the SECOND time, she only got HALF the effect… that of 53 days forward and NONE backwards in time travel…
Time dilation only comes into play if one is traveling near the speed of light. Also, contrary to popular opinion, it does not take you backwards through time if one is going faster than the speed of light. (Don’t waste my time citing “Star Trek” or any other such science fiction.) Special relativity is not defined for velocities in excess of light and, if the equation were applied in such a situation, it would yield the square root of a negative number, i.e. an imaginary number which has no physical meaning. A “worm hole”, or what ever it was, BYPASSES physical space, and time, creating a direct path form the point of origin to the destination. In this case, the destination was 51 days in the future thus bypassing the 51 days as well. They, literally, took one step to cross some number of light years and 51 days of time. Coming back, they too one step to cross the same number of light years and the same 51 days backwards.
The look on dabblers face is just to damn adorable. As for Sydney her reaction to proximity in dabbler’s case is a major change from normal though being among friends after an adventure like she just had would make for a major dollop of tolerance in light of getting home safe.
Dabbler looks like a doting grandma. I doubt that she would like the comparison but I guess she could be.
Well, she *IS* 160+ years older than Syd, so “Doting Grandma” could fit…
I can confirm the resemblance to a grandma, specifically an Asian grandmother. I’m Japanese and my baa-chan makes that exact face. It’s actually quite uncanny.
Well, Sydney is kinda the only other member of the team that’s now technically an intragalactic jetsetter, so maybe feels kinda maternal about it in that “my baby’s ftl cherry has been popped” way, with baby being protege and the cherry popping in question being what makes Sydney anything like a protege in the first place.
Wouldn’t Dabbler also be an intragalatic jet setter?
Hence “only OTHER member”.
Missed that.
And then she finds out what Sydney did with Frix… :D
Oh man, that also means she has two months worth of pay accumulated that she hasn’t touched.
That would depend on whether Archon treats her as Off Duty or On Vacation for those two months. Since they probably wouldn’t mess with her like that (since she also has 2 months of expenses to pay, rent and stuff) they’ll probably count it as part time or something. Are they on hourly rates like workers in a business, or salary like the military? I’m betting Salary.
Military is more like salary pay, and they get paid on the 1st and the 15th. Could never be hourly, because you are literally on duty 24/7/365, even when on leave, even when ‘retired’.
Assuming that Archon is still considered a branch of the military, the same rules should apply to them regarding getting paid while MIA.
https://www.quora.com/Do-United-States-MIA-soldiers-still-get-paid-Are-POWs-paid-during-the-time-they-are-imprisoned
Archon is “military” as opposed to military, which allows for significant differences [see pay scale for an example], which could mean she gets charged with being AWOL fir 53 days, and fined 53 days pay.
which she wouldn’t be, citing extraordinary circumstances. she was MIA.
and any beauracrat claiming otherwise likely would have to deal with Maxima and the rest of the team, who were there for her going MIA.
“Lost on a mission after saving the team’s collective posterior” is rarely considered grounds for being AWOL.
The military can be a bit strange, but they’re not bat$%@ loco.
Good point… Saving the team’s bacon and not making it through the portal in time very much is the definition of being absent WITH leave
If we go back to Sydney’s first pay check, for one week, “that’s more than I made all of last year”, it is apparent she is being paid WAY more than anyone in the military. ARCHON’s pay scale is unrelated to the military pay scale.
If you are stranded on another planet, you are not on vacation.
If you aren’t anywhere for days due to temporal shenanigans then pay considerations may need new guidelines. MIA for 2 days and compensation for time displacement by 51 days. She wasn’t AWOL but she wasn’t working for that time.
But since those guidelines haven’t been written yet,(as they probably thought time travel was highly unlikely given the energy requirements(Kora, who can hack reality, can’t do it)) then she gets her pay regardless, and probably hazard pay, (Which you get when deployed to a war zone iirc) since she was technically “lost behind enemy lines”. (I’d consider being on a hostile planet “behind enemy lines”. Wouldn’t you?)
Also going AWOL is pretty much a matter of intent, I think. If you didn’t chose to leave(like you were kidnapped stateside(barring certain reason for being kidnapped i’n sure), or captured in combat) you weren’t AWOL. iirc
If Archon wants to maintain the “Halo is busy training” cover story then they have to pay her for all 53 days. Docking her the 51 days where she didn’t actually exist means their accounting records would not agree with the cover story. If Archon has any sense (and I suspect they do), they would have been doing direct deposits of Sydney’s regularly scheduled paychecks into her bank account during the intervening time. They likely were even forging checks against Sydney’s checking account to pay her rent and utilities on time. They would have been doing whatever it would take to maintain the illusion that Sydney was still on Earth, just busy training.
Now the only problem is getting Sydney to behave in public as if she has had the training she never actually had.
In actuality they wouldn’t have had to forge a check to pay utilities, as these can be done via bank draft, or credit card even. They can even be set up to be automatic.
The rent is the wild card, depending on how big her rental agency/landlord is they may or may not take electronic payment. Even then, some banks,(mine at least, well it’s a credit union actually) also offer a bill pay service that pays a bill for you. i’m not 100% sure on this, but i think this sometimes even involves my CU mailing a check to whoever.
And if Ariana has Sydney’s power of attorney,(Which seems to be the case from the contract signing scene) it wouln’t even be illegal for her access Sydney’s accounts for the purpose of paying her(Sydney’s) bills.
Although, i can see a Sydney storm coming when she finds out that Ariana can legally mess with her(Syd’s) money.
Also considering they wer ein the middle of combat ‘action’ when she went ‘missing’, prime example for missing in action right there.
And get rent and bills came with her did they?
Noooo no-no, not time travel, time dilation! I was really impressed reading the comic because time dilation is something most sci-fi authors forget about, the trip to Alari Prime wouldn’t have taken long (due to it being a wormhole therefore they didn’t travel far they just took a shortcut) but Sydney’s trip back aboard an FTL starship was a long distance trip even if the time it took wasn’t really that long for her so it makes sense that her subjective timeline would be out of sync with everyone else’s.
One implication of this is that Sydney hasn’t missed her birthday rather she’s going to have to adjust the date 53 days forward.
That’s what I was just thinking! Even with wormholes, there’s still some significant change-ups going on. In fact, technically the wormhole would have had them going BACK in time, because instantaneous space-travel without ftl time-dilation would screw up the wibbly-wobbly. Though then Harem should have known before they went in the portal… And then if Cora’s ship uses more conventional Lightspeed systems, or their own FTL… Bah.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-633-the-universes-buttholes-x1/
I remind you of the last panel here.
I thought the same thing – that the initial trip there was instantaneous, but the trip back caused time dilation.
DaveB explained in the summary below that the portal traveled through space and time, about 53 days into the future. The rest of the team returned to the ‘present’ through the portal while Sydney stayed in the ‘future’. They experienced the 53 days, she jumped over ’em. At least that’s what I got from it.
FTL bypasses time dilation. It has to otherwise you’d go backwards in time every time you went faster than the speed of light.
No, it would just be impossible to go faster than the speed of ight.
In Normal space, with conventional travel we get hit by Einsteins theory of relativity, and suffer time dilation. The faster we travel, the worse the effect, until at the speed of lighr, time would stand still on the ship. That, combined with the increasong power requirements makes it impossible to travel faster than light in normal space.
Travel outside of normal space(wormhole, parallell dimension or whatever) or bypass it somehow(stretching/compressing space in front and aft the ship and keeping the ship itself in a ‘bubble’ of normal space) and Einstein can stop rotating in his grave.
Remember: light is very happy to go through the wormhole faster than you.
In addition, if one were to travel through physical space at a velocity greater than the speed of light, the special relativity equation for time dilation would produce the square root of a negative number, which is an imaginary number. An imaginary number would have no physucal meaning or, at least, we have no way to interpret it.
I have something that covers this; https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4754be03eb3bc
Just because the ship carrying one end is exposed to time dilation doesn’t mean that the ends of it will end up at different times.
I wouldn’t push anything through the wormhole while it’s travelling, though, but that’s just because you’d probably end up adding the transporting ship’s speed to your own.
It wasn’t a wormhole, it was a portal made with blood magic… Try to keep up
po-tay-tah, pa-tah-toe… science/magic, wormhole/portal… whatever you call it, it does the same thing once opened…
By definition, magic need not conform in any way with known physics.
So it’s a valid distinction in the conversation at hand.
The link that ai_vin posted is about wormholes and time dilation. Therefore I mentioned wormholes, not Aetherium Causeways or unstable magical portals crafted with blood magic.
You please try to keep up.
Ok? And that makes the link relevant… How? It wasn’t a wormhole, get over it.
Muhahahaa.
Expected something like that, still,e xcellent double delivery!
Harem had future knowledge to respond to certain ‘crimes and disasters’.
I don’t suppose she happened to remember the outcomes of certain sporting events, or lottery drawings?
Perhaps a new shell corporation was doing well at day trading for a month and a half,
given that she also hangs out with Deus who is surely plugged into manipu…trading stocks.
Among the various things the US armed forces manged to do in the summer of 2011 was to take out some guy named bin Laden. Coincidence?
I can guarantee that Archon probably has rules against stuff like that.
I can see Harem saying she was “Fuzzy” on the lottery, and Dabbler saying something about affecting outcomes. Meanwhile, the two (six?) of them are raking in extra cash on discrete lottery and side-betting.
Well, Harem would because it was fun to be devious and try to not get caught.
Dabbler probably sees the things which constitute wealth on twenty-first century earth the way Warren Buffett would desire the wealth of a sixteenth century African trader.
Dabbler is just here to have an adventure and get laid.
Well one whould home the team had to forsight to send someone (most likely Harrem) to Syds place and clean out all the perishables and take out any trash or shes in for a world of hunt when she get home.. also The hopfulley paid her rent /bills.
Well, that’s one way to do a time skip.
It beats being frozen in carbonite.
…When you mentioned the 57 years or 53 days I assumed “Ah, so Dave was giving us an answer on the FTL method. Clearly they can just go up to like 90% of lightspeed or something, hence the massive time dilation” but then I read the post note and I’m just laughing and grumbling to myself at the time travel shenanigans xD Still, I can’t complain, since it’s genuinely interesting, and I just hope he finds a way to incorporate that notice into the story itself because I find that fascinating and would love it made canon.
If that’s the case, wouldn’t it be an ABNQFTL Drive? (Almost But Not Quite Faster Than Light) LOL
Others talked about time dilation thing, so I wont. others also mentioned the infinite loop of Harem’s memory thing (which is totally debunkable), so I wont go into that either… I want to mention something else…
Going with with the explanation, I seem to be missing something key… Harem gaining those 51 days of future memory due to having popped thru a jumpgate that bumped them forward in time 51 days, and her having shared herself, with… herself… Is totally fine by me.
What I’m not really getting tho is how (on the day of the jumpgate/portal thing and the blending of her mind) Harem would know how long it takes Sydney to get back?
At the time of the blending, the future-most Harem was still 2 days too young to know that information.
I mean sure… After Cora was able to let Dab know that she had located Sydney and they were on their way back, THEN a return time could be known, but that was still after the past-Harem had already gone back to re-merge with her normal timeline. So how would she know that Sydney would be home in 2 days?
Unless I just read it wrong and it wasn’t meant to imply that Harem knew that Sydney was even alive, or ever returning until after they got confirmation, but at least knew when and where to have Cora look for her…
If that’s the case (which makes all The Sense™) then carry on!
I shall return to my desk now and apply more eye glue so as to re-stick them to my screen.
Cheers!
Doesn’t the likelihood of communication between Cora and Dabbler explain that?
After Cora rescued Sydney from the clutches of the Grakz stand she probably contacted Dabbler and gave her an ETA.
As long as the implication isn’t that Harem knew when Sydney would return due to her future-knowledge blending, then it’s all good. Of course with FTL drives and time dilation being what they are, IF Sydney was headed back toward Earth with Cora a day after the rest of the team went back thru the portal, and that trip took 2 days, then back on Earth, the time dilation effect from that FTL would’ve added an additional 51 days to the perceived time passing on Earth.
Or have I missed something?
No, Harem wouldn’t have known when Sydney was arriving on Earth.
At the point in time when the team (here referred to as ArcSWAT) exited the portal on Alari Prime (and Harem experienced the curious effect of syncing between six-to-ten bodies), Cora was maybe a couple hours away from arriving at Alari Prime, having been told 51 – 52 days ago where and when to be to find Sydney. ArcSWAT then left roughly 5 – 10 minutes later, leaving Sydney behind.
So at the point in time where Harem synced with her future selves, Sydney leaving the planet and travelling to Fracture Station (and therefore Cora following her there, delaying Sydney’s return to Earth) hadn’t happened yet even from Future Harem’s perspective.
The only information Harem could’ve gained from her future selves is all the events that happened between entering the portal on Earth, and exiting the portal on Alari Prime. Anything after that (ie. When Sydney was arriving on Earth due to the detour to Fracture Station) would’ve had to come from communication with Cora.
Okay, so…One Harem goes through the gate. One harem stays behind.
One harem, on the other side of the gate, quantum connects with the ‘hers’ that stayed behind in the future. Since she only has one mind. But, retains quantum connection with the past harems.
Harem gets one hell of a headache. When she heads back through the gate, everything snaps back..but she retains 51 days of extra memory? (And since there was at least one of her on EARTH…)
It’s been a very interesting 6 weeks for Harem – even without perfect recall, she’d have a pretty good recollection of major events. I can’t see her not making use of that info. Even without going full Biff Tannen, she’d have some great tips on sporting events. And she’s passed info to Deus in the past, so I’m really curious to hear things went down from her viewpoint.
Aww, Dabbler hugging Sydney and nuzzling her head is adorable.
Ooh! I LOVE time paradoxes! In this case with Harem we have a version of the Bootstrap Paradox. Present Harem traveled through the portal and linked up with Future Harem, which gave her the “memories” of the past 53 days so the team could be “exactly where they needed to be to prevent major crimes and disasters.” However, those memories from Future Harem would have been of the team stopping those crimes and disasters because Present Harem already knew about them from Future Harem. Unless time travel in this comic (or at least this one specific instance) functions on the Multiverse Theory, then there was never a time when the team DIDN’T respond to those incidents due to Harem not knowing about them, and Harem’s initial knowledge has no origin since she always had it from herself.
I’m not entirely sure if I articulated that clearly, so if anyone who is better at articulating thought into written word wants to clean it up, have at it. And by all means correct anything I may have gotten wrong.
If Harem said that the team thwarted a break in at Ft. Knox on a certain date, then they would have sent people out to guard it on the previous day or so. The neighborhood legion of doom would think “Wow. There must have been something REALLY valuable put there recently. We need to steal it!” So they then go on to attempt the robbery and suffer their inevitable thwarting.
On the multi-verse thing, there is a sub-theory; the fractal time line; that postulates that smaller events aren’t that important so time doesn’t create another universe for every single decision; instead both decisions occur; and the stronger of the two locally takes root so the other partial path is merged. *It also requires that time is not a universal constant (which we have real world evidence that it isn’t).
In short; you have two ways you could drive home, right here your local reality temporarily splits so you got both directions; however in a few seconds or handful of minutes the choice with the larger local impact is accepted in the timeline; so the other path is fused in. You could experience an odd second of deja vue, or “I could have sworn I took the other street”, that is shrugged off as the stronger set of memories takes full hold.
There is also the merger version where the events are so short lived and so unimportant that time just merges them; so you end up trying to figure out how you managed to clean the entire counter top in less than three minutes because time decided in the empty after hours lobby that you started on both ends at the same time as you had to choose which end to start on.
In Harem’s case it looks like the slow boil version. One of her jumped a small amount of time (cosmic scale) into the future; there due to quantum entanglement she linked to the minds of the other hers back on Earth; however she can’t have so many bodies and the temporal shift between them caused a lag effect. So when she went back, the lag brought forth a few memories as her mind tries to untangle the sudden influx of memories. But as Dave pointed out, daily routine memories could muddle the when and what *the mind is more like a series of photographs not video so much; and people use imagination to fill in the gaps*. So a few big events; and they just happen to show up a little sooner. Fracture time could handle that; if they were going to respond; only a little later; then there are two very similar series of events and the one with the most impact *arriving sooner* on the most people and the area takes root.
Fractal Time is a good go-between when Paradox and Anti-Paradox both seem a tad too extreme a solution. We don’t need a whole other infinite universe just because Chad chose no cream in his coffee today instead of cream.
I used to love time paradoxes, but that was before I started loving them.
Not necessarily… You don’t have to remember yourself stopping a crime to remember that the crime happened and where… It’s a bit more like a week and a half ago I got into a motorcycle accident. If I could send a message to my self telling me to leave the house only after 2:15 in the afternoon, the accident wouldn’t have happened. I don’t have to have a memory of leaving a few minutes later to tell myself to do so.
So are we almost caught up to the time of the initial flashback, or flash-forward, or however we count it?
Page 4: “Let me back up a few months”.
(from back seat): Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Except that one has Max referring to her as ‘Corporal’*. Is she getting a field promotion?
* This may be Max commenting that she is seeing Sydney’s material body, and not her holographic projection.
That would be corporeal, not corporal.
–Pedants Disunited
Probably not, THIS bit of Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey STUFF, AS OF RIGHT NOW (as far as we the readers know), is only involved in getting Halo back to Earth and Archon… anything involved in the Origin Story Flashback is still in the future for us.
Wee need panel 4 without the dialog balloons. Sidney’s and Harem’s facial expressions are just perfect.
Nah… panel SEVEN… ’nuff said…
So is Wolfie going to get the 3rd degree from Maxima and Dabbler?
consenting adults, its not Maxima’s job to dictate her recruit’s personal life.
Dabbler on the other hand, I’d say less 3rd degree and more, do you want a threesome next time; unless Dabbler has fallen into the motherly/sisterly mindset with Sydney…being a succubus though that might not be enough of a mental hindrance to at least suggest it.
I do recall on Voyager once one of the characters getting the 3rd degree from the captain and then the doctor about becoming intimatly involved with an unknown species. The issue wasn’t the relationship itself specifically, it was that being an unknown species, there could have been unknown physical effects which could then interfear with the officers ability to do his job.
“We” Also, panels 1, 5 and 6 are awesome as well.
Awww…..
I decided, quite a while back, that I would wait patiently for the explanation of what was going on with Harem having ‘too many of her’.
I guess I was hoping for some unique explanation, some quirk of her powers caused by the vast distance she travelled, something that hadn’t been done before….
Don’t get me wrong, you are a fantastic writer & artist, & I am neither, & I love your work….I guess I was just hoping for something unique. I do love time travel stories, but they are pretty common in sci fi & comics & such.
Without *TRYING* to sound insulting or unappreciative, I love how unique Harem is, & I guess I was expecting a new twist on the explanation of her powers, or maybe even a new application of her powers, or maybe even an extra body due to some unique mechanic of her powers exploited by the portal she travelled through.
A time-displacement caused by an unstable portal certainly does explain everything & allow it to be wrapped up neatly, but it just feels like time trav….
….on second thought I’m not going to say that….as I said, I don’t want to accidentally offend you, I do love your comic, I’m a lousy artist & a strictly amateur writer, & I have no real sense of how much work has to go into this comic on a regular basis to get it done on your schedule.
I look forward to reading your comic every day, & I hope you do understand that comic nerds do take our comic fandom quite seriously, so sometimes we can pick things apart even if we love it.
well technicly she traveled distance aka X,Y,Z cords and then T time like dragging a connected dot way out there then up the Z cord in the grand scheme so it was stretched in like 3 to 4 possibly 5 ways thus the fuzziness and OMGWTF reaction
As a professional writer & editor (I can’t draw stick figures very well though), I find the time difference between the two locations to be entirely plausible. Sciona and Dabbler both did indicate that an unstable portal could be not just dangerous, but potentially catastrophic, because it’d be highly unstable.
They are, in fact, super-duper lucky that the end on Earth was still anchored in their own time, and that the end on the Alari homeworld was anchored in that time, even if it wandered in location a bit on both ends. If not, they all would have been stranded with Sydney when it shifted not only location, but moment. If the Alari end had been completely unstable, it would’ve vanished from their view.
…And YES, the location of the unstable wormhole back on Earth did actually wander! Otherwise they should’ve splatted against all that fallen mountain rubble, just like the “bug on a windshield” effect whenever Stargate: SG1 closed the iris on their Stargate. I suspect at first it didn’t wander on the Earth end because of all those runes, but once they asploded, the portal also started traveling.
I also suspect that, for stability purposes, they need to be created in fairly debris-free zones so that matter (excessively dusty areas, solid rock faces, etc) doesn’t infringe on the edges of the portal, threatening to cause destabilization strain & collapse…so it would make sense for the portal magic/tech/whatever to make the portal ends move away from such impediments. The air around them on Alari was very dusty/foggy when they arrived and the area on Earth after the ka-BOOM was super-dusty.
They came out of there on a cleared spot, but there’s no guaranteeing it was a cleared spot that was the original floor of the portal room…and gauging from the slope of the mountainside and its missing chunk (https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-650-when-god-closes-a-wormhole/), it looks like there wouldn’t have been enough ceiling clearance (a big open space like Sciona’s portal room needs a pretty sturdy thick ceiling of rock, plus all the dirt and trees on top of it)…so they’re standing on an explosion-leveled playing field on top of a whole lotta rubble, with Achilles buried somewhere beneath their feet. (He was at floor level when the blast hit.)
For them to have come through a portal above all that asploded rock & dirt, the portal on their end had to have wandered. I suspect it only did so mid-explosion onward, which is why it may have only wandered a little bit, but it clearly did. In doing so, it proved that the wormhole portal obeys specific laws, and that the laws are the same on both ends, and that’s a wonderful piece of writing.
It collapsed because the explosion destroyed the last of the runes tethering it in place, and it was tethered in the starting location because every idiot using Arcane++ knows that you always describe and anchor the end you’re at before describing and anchoring the end you want to connect to, because if you mess things up, how would you even know that the portal ever opened at all if you can’t see the opening on your end?? (Plus, if you’re using it to visit Grandma and accidentally connect Grandma’s living room to the planet of the Woof people, boy will your riding hood be red!)
It’s internally consistent, it’s internally logical, and though it’s been done before (what trope hasn’t?), it was used appropriately. Plus it gave us all those outstanding training /grinding /squid-butt-kicking fight sequences that followed. (Also, the glory of the boredom of Mach 4 orbital flight. That scene was beautifully well done!)
It may not feel completely satisfying, but that’s alright. Individual tastes will vary, and it is a commonly used trope. But common or not, it was executed quite well…which not all time-travel tropes have managed.
You are both right of course, & I never once said that the time travel idea was wrong or bad….I was just hoping for something different.
& I did actually rather like hte analysis of time travel from a corporate/logistical viewpoint…something that I’ve never thought of before, & I’m sure few other writers have ever thought of before (at least to put into the final product that I have seen).
Also, I do need to apologize for what I said & how I said it. I have been having a bad month & I got a bit grumpy at the world in general. I’m not trying to excuse my comments, just explaining my reason for what I said.
As I said, I am an amateur at best & am in no position to be critiquing.
Is the 53 day difference due to time dilation due to travel at relativistic speeds? I know DaveB said time *travel*, but I thought I’d ask just to be sure.
unstable wormhole.
The blood portal was destabilized as it wasn’t finished; it connected to the right point in space but not the right time.
No, it’s not relativity, it’s a portal between two points in space-time.
Now we wander what Dabbler’s expression will be learning the orbs might be Nth tech….doubly so that the factor making Cora come to that conclusion that is so far above most tech that it takes a massive amount of power and/or sacrifice to achieve is only blip one of the portal chain.
I’ll hazard a guess that Dabbler is well aware about the probability that the Orbs are Nth Tech already… remember that she’s already done an intensive scan of them during Sydney’s recruitment interview…
Folks…that portal trip was NOT time dilation.
If it really was time dilation, then going back through the wormhole would NOT have “unsquished” time, but rather, doubled the time spent missing. If Sydney was displayed by 51 days going through it once, then Harem, Max, Dabbler, & Hiro would’ve experienced a loss of 102 days.
Instead it was definitely time-travel, because Max & crew arrived back at pretty much the same time that they left, synched to however many minutes they spent confronting Sciona, eyeballing the wreckage, and fleeing expeditiously. (If there had been much in the way of noticeable time distortion/dilation, then Peggy definitely would’ve remarked on that!)
So.
Time Travel.
Not time dilation.
*displaced, not displayed, yeesh…!
It was a wormhole between two places… Time is a dimension of space. It’s one time on one side, another time on the other side of. You’re right that it’s not time dilation, it’s simple a door between two points in space-time
It’s obvious that the wormhole was a point-to-point connection between two points in space time– one on earth “Then” and one on Alari “51 days later”. Kinda makes you wonder how the refugees got to earth so quick, but we don’t know when “Operation Obiterate” was launched against the Alari. Since fires were still burning, you kinda think “recently”.
But isn’t messing with time travel / foreknowledge the sorta thing they yelled at Krona for?
Fires still burning doesn’t necessarily mean they recently started burning.
It can also mean they have just kept burning.
I have been around fires that blackened the sky for months.
Also its not like the hero team tried to initiate a time-displacement event. It wasn’t even thier portal. And lets see alien villian who has already violated a number of laws…. ya I don’t think she would have cared about time-displacement rulles if she were trying to do something like that on purpose.
But what we get is, magic gone haywire. Important note, some spells just fizzle and die when the caster is interupted, others on the other hand, go wild and do thier own thing if not aborted properly.
The portal was damaged, before they went through it.
And they didn’t so much go through it in the normal sense, the gate expanded and enveloped all of them.
Last panel is SO a sister-hug…
Hah! nice “ALIENS” movie ref to spring on Sidney! Nice bit of playing with the fact one end of a wormhole doesnt have to come out in the same timeframe as the starting end. Good thing the runes werent so screwed up they popped out in an alternate universe. Getting home might have been problematic for all of them.
WHEN I WAS ON ACTIVE DUTY, one of the many tropes was, “What are they gonna do, take away my birthday?” The meaning was that there was only so much the PTB could do to punish you for trivial discipline problems. “They can take away my pay, they can take away my liberty, but they can’t take away my birthday.”
There was a Readers’ Digest joke (Humor in Uniform) about a sailor being disciplined for Unauthorized Absence (AWOL for Army types). The above was his mantra. He was on a ship approaching the International Date Line. They reached it at midnight of the day before his birthday. When they sailed beyond, it was two days later – they skipped his birthday completely.
At any rate, Sydney’s birthday occurred, she just wasn’t “present” for it. Let the hilarity of all the wordplay commence.
I think my punny bone just had an annual-ism. I do love that story though. :)
I brought this up when Sydney got stranded.
At some point (30 days?) her parents should have been notified
that she was MIA but believed to be alive and that
a rescue mission was in progress.
They should have been notified when Cora phoned Dabbler
that they were on their way back to Earth.
Maybe Harem knew sometime after the cookie baking that Sydney
would be back eventually?
Nobody would have known for certain until Cora located Sydney at the Fracture.
Come in, cut to the part where Sydnet debriefs the higher ups on killing alien Kaiju like they cockroaches. And her level ups.
I don’t know… I am still kind of disappointed that sydney didn’t spend more time grinding levels… When is she EVER going to get that kind of opportunity again?
Always.
Sydney is a disaster magnet.
Perhaps that aspect drew the orbs.
Sydney thought about it but was worried that the aliens might learn her attack patterns, adapt and kill her
Sydney did think about staying and grinding but was worried that the aliens would learn her attack patterns, adapt and kill her
So with this 53 days jump plus the week’s time (my estimate) that had already passed since the start of the comic we’re almost at the two months mark.
So I’m really excited I may actually get to see the end of the current flashback!
Okay, I’m now amazed that the reporters weren’t being more aggressive about Sydney’s whereabouts. Surely her parents must be raising almighty heck given that she hasn’t been contacting them during her “training”?
Her parents would have been told.
They would be crappy parents if they raised hell while rescue operations are underway.
They might have been at the beginning, but after 53 days of being fed the same line, how much excitement can you generate about it? Maybe a perfunctory question, that’s it.
won’t the team be surprised to learn that she is a near fully functional starship (no replicator for food/water yet), with warpdrive (well aetherium causeway) and can quite literally fly to the moon (given enough time)
Dabbler looks like she gives the best hugs.
Yeah, but if you don’t want it to turn out to be much more than a hug you may need to slug her in the old gazorpazovum.
I’ll admit to being a bit bummed because my favorite theory on the “too many of me” comment wasn’t the correct one. I still think there would have been some serious paradox issues with time travel, but it’s Dave’s world so if Dave says there are no paradoxes then there are no paradoxes.
An interesting possibility has occured to me that would put new meaning to the “too many of me” comment. If Daphne suddenly found herself connected to her future self you might think that her future self would have been prepared for that and she would have better control over the Harem body that was with the team on the Alari homeworld. This would have allowed her to provide the team with an intel advantage, such as warning about the Squidward aliens before they popped up. With that sort of heads up, the team could have headed to the portal earlier and thus avoided leaving Sydney behind.
This scenario obviously didn’t happen. So why wasn’t future Harem better prepared to deal with suddenly having 6 bodies, or possibly 10 if the link to her past self was total? Simply put, there were an infinite number of future Harems to deal with. Present Harem receives information from future Harem. Present Harem acts on that information, creating a new timeline. This new timeline future Harem imparts new information onto present Harem. Present Harem acts on this changed information, again creating another alternative timeline. This process repeats ad infinitum, meaning present Harem is connected to an infinite number of future Harems.
I guess an infinite number of selves would be “too many of me”.
Hey, depending on the buyer a Hellmouth under the porch could be a good selling point!
Depending on the buying, you may not want them to have access to a Hellmouth…
Now we know Dabbler’s real name is Xuri.
Her full name is Xuriel Shahara Tantalis, and we’ve known it for years.
Oops, did not remember that.
For everyone who is hung up on special relativity and time dilation, the relevant equation is 1/((1 – (v^2)/(c^2)) ^ 0.5) where v is one’s velocity and c is a constant equal to the speed of light, 186,000 mps or 300,000 kps depending on which system one uses. Now, plug that into your calculator with a value of v greater than c and watch you calculator croak.