Grrl Power #728 – She spent two months not existing for tax purposes
I spent some time thinking about this, and really, Archon would probably wind up paying anyone the least amount possible for time travel incidents. Not because they’re cheap, but when it comes down to it, it’s logical. From Sydney’s point of view, she only “worked” two days, and for some of that time she was asleep on Cora’s ship anyway. From Archon’s point of view, Sydney was technically on the clock for 53 days, but also absent from work. She is salaried and not hourly, so there’s no O.T. to consider in either frame of reference.
If she had traveled to the past, that could be trickier. Assuming she didn’t show up back on Archon’s doorstep before they ever hired her, that’s a whole other discussion. But if she went a month in to the past, then showed up five minutes after going back, and could prove she’d spent the time saving the world from whatever… would they pay her for a month or 5 minutes? It seems like the easy answer would be that they pay her for the month. She was doing her job the whole time after all. But what happens if someone got sent a year in the past, or ten? Their salaries are not inconsiderable. Sydney is a recruit, but Major Hiro went ten years in the past, that kind of back pay could cause a budgetary crisis.
Not that Hiro would show up and demand a huge paycheck necessarily, but it’s something that the bean counters might need to consider at some point, now that they know time travel is possible.
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.
Nice HG reference, lol. Better than spending it dead, after all.
My grandfather was HG. Can’t remember him saying anything mentioned in this page though?
*scratches chin with paw throughtfully*
HG is what the wannabe fans call it. The true FEN who are fen without ruling/ruining their lives call the 5 book trilogy. HHGTTG, I swear. Kids these days…the movie was okay. I guess, if you pressure me. Not as good as the original BBC mini-series (which I have on VHS) in all it’s 70’s kitchie BBC real effects. le sigh. (tosses yorp a trefoils) here ya go, getting senile, but I like these also. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, I spent a decade dead once for tax purposes.
HHGTTG, I’ve heard. H2G2, I’ve heard. HG is not a way I had heard the trilogy of four referenced before.
First, there are 5 books in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, not four. 6 if you count Eoin Colfer’s contribution (I don’t, as talented though he may be he’s not Douglass Adams). And yes, that’s how I normally refer to it. It’s rare that I’m in a big enough hurry/lazy enough to abbreviate it because that line – from the preface of book 5 I think – continues to make me smile to this day.
Second, HG is not one I’ve seen before either.
I count Colfer’s only because Adams hated that he ended the trilogy on a downer note and always wanted there to be a sixth book to make things better. Was Colfer’s what Adams would have wanted? Probably not in the details, but Adams would have wanted a happy ending. That’s the kind of guy he was.
I felt like Eoin was channelling the Spirit of Adamsthe whole book through. Plus, I have felt that there had to have always been another book intended, as ZB made no appearance whatsoever in “Mostly Harmless.”
“And Another Thing” was based on a plot outline that Adams wrote. Originally, it started life as a Dirk Gentley book (The Salmon of Doubt), but he realised while writing it that the tone didn’t fit and he’d “actually been writing another Hitchhiker’s book all along”
Could be worse, could be Piers Anthony’s first Xanth Trilogy (with 13 books). But to quote Mr Anthony himself, “It has a 3 in it! It counts!!”
Plus after the first three they got really really bad,
So when you reread them you only read three.
Still, back in the eighties I always wanted Piers Anthony and Douglas Adams to write a collaborative work.
Personally found them good, up until that one with the Zombie King chasing after a teenager (started it, couldn’t even finish the first chapter)
zombie king and millie the maid was like book 3. And its quasi-medieval, so different mores (marriage was much earlier at that time), and he was a shunned shut-in because of his powers and she was not just the first woman, but one of the first people to ever really give him a chance and see him for himself… The story pretty much writes itself, and they live happily ever after.
I think the mathematically correct abbreviation would be (HTG)^2.
I still love that Marvin from the BBC made it into the movie as an extra
Likewise here, on Fracture.
“She spent two months not existing for tax purposes”
I bet Hotblack Desoto understands what DaveB is talking about. He probably wasn’t looking too healthy during his one year of death.
But even during that whole time, Sydney would have been listed as MIA, not Killed On Duty. They couldn’t know for sure without any evidence.
I figure that Sydney should be getting paid for the whole time, including hazard pay because she was seperated from the team while literally under enemy fire. The documentation of her paygrade would also help to substantiate the “cover story” that Arianna was telling the press.
Granted, if Sydney had been missing years instead of months then it could get pretty tricky especially considering that Supers are getting paid substantially on their checks. However, until Sydney actually graduates from “boot camp,” she’s only getting pay for Recruit Rank. Of course, military pay for a Super in an Elite Force is already scaled up from the normal “mundane” payscale, but it would still be considered “Recruit Rank” for a Super. Any combat/hazard/conditionary promotion/etc bonuses & raises still should not actually be seen on her paycheck until after boot camp…The balance would be retroactively added to her paychecks at that point. IE – Sort of like having the extra pay “in escrow” & dependant upon graduating. That’s the way the military normally does it (in the normal, mundane world).
Sydney could argue that the loss of time was a work related injury and seek compensation for any inconsistencies suffered but she’s probably better off with the half pay she’s getting.
Sydney can also argue (probably successfully) that she did exist during the entire time.
Just in a pocket dimension created by the magic gate. During that entire time she was working directly with her commanding officer and an Arc-Swat team.
Bring in a Council Mage and one of the Fae to speak to the review board.
Technicaly the entire team who went to the future might have been eligible for 50 days pay…so the split the diference could just be maxima putting her foot down and saying Sydney gets 50 days, the rest of the time travelers get normal pay.
i think if it were me i would make an agreement to maintain their essential personal assets and store any less essential assets with a fixed paycheck on their return.
Or, to save taxpayers’ money, a couple of winning lottery tickets.
Or first six months pay that’s uncollected being invested on their behalf.
Even if they are gone 100 years then that would eventually add up a lot.
Even a lottery win would depreciate if uninvested and in a normal x% interest cash form bank account.
Given the possibility of traveling back in time, setting aside enough finance and putting six months wage for each team member in a trust for them to receive if the eventuality occurs seems reasonable and doing it now as they are aware time travel is a possibility seems legally correct. Delaying could lead to them seeming negligent in preparing for issuing pay to further instances of time travel with potentially legitimate orders to do so meaning pay due.
Sydney needs to show how much time she spent actually working, and not getting Frix work-out :P
Yeah, but fighting giant Kaiju earns triple-double-secret overtime, which makes up for it.
That’s still only one day, and she is on a salary, not commission
She was working for no more than two days, butt missing for two months
You misspelled “was abandoned on a hostile alien planet two months ago.”
She wasn’t ‘abandoned’, that implies intent
She was missing because they had no way of knowing if she was still okay, and unless she had her own way of getting back, all they could do was wait
No, abandoned does not imply intent in any way.
a·ban·doned
[əˈband(ə)nd]
ADJECTIVE
having been deserted or cast off.
“an abandoned car” · [more]
synonyms:
deserted · forsaken · cast aside/off · jilted · stranded · rejected
Addressing the linguistic point, “… or cast off” is showing intent. The act of “casting off” is a conscious one, distinct from “accidentally dropping” or “mislaying”. However one can become “deserted” by either being consciously dropped (for instance mutineers marooning the former captain of a ship), through fleeing a military unit (not applicable in this situation) or simply by misadventure (say surviving an aircraft crash or shipwreck). So the latter allows both conscious abandonment and by misadventure.
Regarding the specific situation, Halo was abandoned by misadventure, rather than intent
And in the military, no one is to be left behind period.
It’s not okay if it was unintentional and the command must rectify it.
This is a basic principle.
That does bring up an interesting point. How does the real world military handle POW/MIAs who escape and make their way back? I know it’s not exactly the same situation, but it’s close enough that the precedent could apply.
During WWII this happened a lot with downed pilots.
They simply reported to the first friendly unit they found when they got back to allied lines and the command structure would direct them from there.
The pay system was pretty screwed up in general at the time, but I don’t recall reading about it being more interrupted than normal.
@Reality check. In the early days of WWII when there was still plenty of money to spend, they got the money for the time they missed plus some based on any information they brought back with them, if I recall correctly.
Later on, when those situations became way too common, and the war was driving most countries into debt, the allies started handing out metals and gave out promotions that didn’t actually come with a pay raise.
In WW2, in countries that followed the Geneva convention, POWs whose captivity had been officially reported could actually draw a part of their pay to spend on little extras to make their captivity more comfortable (or, if their captors weren’t very careful, to make escape easier): it was delivered through a neutral nation, and converted into special currency that could only be used in the POW camp’s stores. Also, at least for the British, I’m fairly sure that if they’d already arranged for part [or even “most”] of their pay to be sent to their families while they were away on active service then those arrangements were automatically continued.
You don’t ‘accidentally’ abandon a car
If your old car is swept away in a flood, you don’t retrieve it.
In Global Warming, Car abandons You.
Cars have always abandoned you.
In my day the engine and drive trains generally fell apart at around a hundred thousand miles.
Unloyal wretches, cars are.
well, at least she didnt need to fight against tsi-hu
She was forging inter-species relationships. She should get a bonus for her diplomatic work.
You could even say she was hammering out a base for meaningful relations. Sowing the seeds of future diplomatic engagement. Possibly even discussing the possibility of exploring diplomatic back channels on a future date.
Conducting first (official) contact is working. And should earn hazard pay in its own right, for various reasons.
Cora performed a “relay” of first official contact from her ship. Of course, Sydney had been already “MIA” for most of that time.
From Sydney’s perspective, the actual return trip only took a few hours, but time factors during “wormhole travel” might have meant days or weeks from Archon’s perspective. During that time, Sydney “wormhole traveled” on her own once, plus one other trip on Cora’s ship. From Sydney’s perspective, that was only a couple of days she was missing.
From Archon’s perspective, Sydney was “MIA” for perhaps half of the 53 days she was gone because Cora would have sent message somewhen around the halfway point.
This is all just a rough “guestimate” considering that we don’t know how far Sydney traveled under her own power & we don’t know how far Cora’s ship had to bring her either…We were never told what relatives distances were, only the relative time factors.
I was an Army Pay Master in my past life. I think they would keep her on the books but put her into a “non-pay or inactive” status until she returned and then adjust her pay for actual accrued days “lived/served” vs. time passed at the point of administration (Earth). There would probably be some special status and pay rates for hyper-sleep and other planned hibernation/inactive states of suspended animation; a literal state in the case of web comic characters. Per Army traditions the compensations rates would be particularly unfavorable as well as unavoidable for the service member, including loss of benefits like no accrued vacation days or retirement points during “inactive’ status. So, all in all, I think Max gave her a great deal.
My wife and I were in the Navy. Since Archon is part of the DoD, wouldn’t Sydney be classified as MIA right up until the last 2 days? I’m not sure if that would help or hurt her situation but I agree that Max is giving her a great deal!
MIA is a casualty designation, in the full sense of the word casualty which includes injured/illness, captured or deserted persons as well as deceased. None of those applies/applied to Sydney.
Sydney was last seen alive, and although I did a stint in the US Army I have no idea what the time period is before you are declared MIA (or if it even happens) if you were last seen alive but no one from your military has been back to the place you were last seen alive in order to verify your actual status.
I mean, there might be some expectation that an abandoned soldier make their best effort to contact their unit or other forces from their nation, but “Last seen as a space/time portal closed before they could enter it” kind of makes that expectation a bit moot, wouldn’t you think? There was no expectation that Sydney had the personal capacity to leave the wrecked planet she was last seen on, Sydney developed that after she was left behind. They can’t just assume that she is either alive or dead despite the fact that the team was under fire when she was abandoned, since Sydney has significant offensive and defensive capabilities.
Sydney was also not missing. They knew exactly where and when she was … at least until she left the solar system before the rescue mission arrived.
Of course, unlike the regular troops there is a legion of paparazzi hanging on every word Sydney might say. And there are an unknown number of undiscovered supers who would surely hear of pay shenanigans.
Arc-Swat are (for all intents and purposes) both celebrities and prototypes of what relations between the U.S. Government will look like going forward.
There’s no real good reason that the press would obtain the documentation for Sydney’s payrate. Since Arianna used a “cover story” describing “sequestered training” then Sydney’s pay info could easily been designated as Classified & kept sealed from public knowledge. Getting a FOIA through court action would take several months, in which Sydney wasn’t missing long enough for the press to get it.
nah, keeping the pay charts classified isn’t going to work. they are part of the income tax process, and REQUIRED to be public if i recall correctly. heck the Navy Times publishes it every year for the US Navy personnel and their families, etc. to read in a newspaper, i’m assuming the rest of the branches news feeds do as well.
The thing is, even though the pay CHART is a public document it WON’T tell the public how much time she’s going to get credited for in this instance (two days vs, 53 days, hazard pay, etc…) THAT is the stuff that the Admin/HR Dept. will be working out and putting into her personnel file that will NOT be let out into the public due to Privacy Laws, etc…
The public doesn’t have any fucking rights to anyone’s pay chart, that is a private matter between the employer and the employee (and sometimes the Income Department)
Actually, military pay charts are and have been public since long before the Viet Nam Conflict.
https://www.militaryrates.com/military-pay-charts
If you know an individual’s rank, you can make a fairly accurate guess what their paycheck is. On the linked page, you can find things like hazardous duty pay rates, sea pay rates, flight pay rates, allowances for quarters.
What is NOT public is an individual’s pay record. His or her (still a binary set in the military) pay record is the documentation of actual payments and allowances to that individual, and while it may be subpoenaed or otherwise requested legally, it is a private document, “For Official Use Only.”
Yes, that’s what meant: the individual’s pay record :(
Words are still difficult for me at times
The public is the employer for Government employees.
To make a private income work a private job.
You can go right now and Google my niece’s annual pay. She works for the San Francisco District Attorney’s office. Or, rather, you could if you had her name.
For public employees and civil servants this information is PUBLIC knowledge.
It’s not like she just randomly wandered through a portal, it happened during a mission because she was busy saving her squad’s asses. For all practical purposes she was rendered MIA in enemy territory during a sanctioned operation. There’s already a process for handling that, no need to try to come up with something new.
True. Although the initial comment was interesting in its own right.
Sydney should take the 50% pay plus applicable bonus and be glad Cora’s Taxi Fee isn’t being deducted.
It could be anywhere between free and what it would cost to rent Disneyland for 48 hours.
Government pays for troop movements.
Not if they have to use civilian transport, then it’s out of their own pocket (unless… can’t remember the proper terminology, something to do with it being needed to carry out their duty :()
The civilian transport thing is if they choose another option other than the one provided.
The “if” qualification wasn’t met.
They left her behind in combat.
No twisting and dodging by REMF pogues removes the responsibility of retrieving her.
This wasn’t shore leave.
*nods*
So, tell me Captain, how was Archon suppose to retrieve her when they have zero means of even getting to the planet she was left on?
They can’t even get to their own fucking moon!!
There was no other viable option!!
It was mentioned at the beginning of the series that Dabbler has access to a starship.
Do learn to keep up.
Then why didn’t she use it?
Oh right, because Dabbles refuses to share her toys, even to rescue Sydney
Like said: no viable option
All this talk about time travel and pay rates is missing the most important question of all. Did Sidney miss out on any Marvel movie premieres while she was off-planet?
Regardless of whether fifty-three days or fifty-seven years have passed, Thanos will STILL demand your silence.
She was only gone for fifty-two days. There would have been, at most, three MCU movies premiered during that period.
If she’d been sent back two months, would they be like “Oh, we’re only employing ONE Sydney. Archon couldn’t survive two Sydneys. Come back in a couple of months when you’re the only one again.”
That would probably take her back before there was even one Sydney employed. So she could have joined Arc-Light or Arc-Dark. In fact she could be “X”!
This is my new favorite theory on X.
Have some snax!
As it is in the mundane world, the military has all of those factors pretty well worked out. Adding Supers to the mix probably caused a bit of a shakeup but they already have a basic framework to work with to cover many of the non-mudane situations.
But I’ll bet that Sydney is well on the way to making the bureaucratic bean-counters a whole new layer of ulcers on top of their ulcers…
They might just count it as an exigent circumstance and issue one paycheck. Harem doesn’t get five paychecks, I’m assuming, even though there’s five of her present most of the time. Different mechanism, but I’d guess they could cite it as a precedent.
Then again, erring in favor of not being dicks probably pays dividends when trying to recruit talent from an incredibly small pool of supers (even smaller when you count out ones not psychologically fit for service (and early days Sydney kind of pushes the limit there), those with powers of little utility, etc.). Jabberwocky, for instance, could go a huge distance toward increasing their potential ranks just by showing that the grass is greener on the Archon side of the fence . . . but it has to actually be greener. Giving Sydney more pay than she might technically rate when she got left behind in the process of saving half her team from becoming crispy fried supers may not be the correct move, but it’s definitely the *right* move.
i just googled the current GDP of Morocco, 109.1 billion USD, i never thought of Morocco the country as being that rich so i googled the US and it was in the trillions but still 100 billion is a lot for 1 individual
They do that with 38400 people, not ~328 million. They got over double the GDP per person.
oh no… i just did the math and based on that number sydney is making 109.1 million dollars a year. i don’t trust her with that kind of money. this is also just under 9.1 million per month, no wonder she was drooling.
That’s why she had the financial guy to help her.
I like that you called it “doing the maths” when you just replaced a “b” with an “m” to go from “1000 years” to “a year”. You can make any aspect of your daily life epic like that tbh, good call.
Isn’t metric wonderful?
Each year should be divided into 1000 days.
100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 10 hours in a day. As long as a “metric second” were actually about 1.15 “Standard” seconds in length.
No matter how you slice it, you’ll still end up doing ridiculous math eventually.
i was being stupid and used a calculator when i could have just cut off a few zeros.
I’m pretty sure that Arianna didn’t do the math and was just throwing out a random ridiculously large metric. It was probably not an accurate reflection of Sydney’s salary, so working it backwards to figure out how much she makes is pretty fruitless.
And let’s be fair here: SYDNEY doesn’t trust Sydney with the kind of money she’s making now.
Check my math:
GDP Morocco = 109.1B
Amount of time being paid for = 500 years (1000/2) [Splitting the diference]
109.1B/500 = 218.2M per Year = 18.183M(Rounded down) per Month = 9.092M(Rounded up) per paycheck (Bi monthly).
This is a thought exercise only, for giggles.
There have been many a discussion about Captain Steve Rogers waking up to 70 years of backpay
Worked for the troops in The Forever War. They were tossed through black holes (don’t think about it too much, also maybe it was neutron stars it’s been a while and it’s irrelevant to the discussion) and made relativistic journeys to another system orbiting another black hole/neutron star along their line of entry (aiming must have been very carefully done!). The trip was instantaneous to the ship/crew, but took however long it would take light to make the trip to the rest of the universe. This meant that Our Hero and those of his companions who survived the multiple tours he had survived were hundreds or thousands of years older by the normal time reference point, and their pack pay had been accumulating throughout.
Of course that pay was almost worthless in the human culture which existed after they mustered out, but that’s beside the point.
Arianna is being quite optimistic, expecting not only current civilisation, but also the U.S. Army and even her current organisation to last a thousand years. I know she’sbeing hyperbolic on both counts of Morocco’s GDP and the time, but the statement has to be formed from natural thought in the first place.
Not to mention assuming that humanity will still exist then. But without optimism we only have despair, so Arianna is not making a bad call in her assumptions. Especially as the unspoken “but if the organisation/ country/ race does not exist anymore then you will get nothing” would be true of any salary expectations, not to mention being both quite depressing and demotivational and thereby counterproductive.
I have heard that there are plans for the IRS to collect taxes after a nuclear war. Since barter (cashless) transactions are taxable (one of the reasons why working for room and board is frowned on) there will actually be transactions to tax.
ummm, speaking of time travel, does anyone know when/if we have gotten up to Page 1 in the timeline? Are we still in a 9 year long flashback?
We are getting close to it. Sydney said something like “let me back up a few months”. If that was just 3 months then we are very close, as this one event accounts for a couple of months. In addition to that though the comic did at least one jump forwards of an unspecified lapsed time. So even if it was 9 months the two could be matching up. Or there may be several months to go. The author has cunningly allowed himself the slack to play with any topics of interest.
What we do know though is that the book we are currently in is only meant to cover Sydney’s basic training. So if her stint of solo combat experience signals the end of that, then we could catch up next week. Alternatively there is a lot of basic training which could yet be explored.
So your guess is as good as mine.
I’m secretly hoping for more basic training, although there have been cases of basic being waived when critical skills needed to be deployed in a hazardous area.
Sink or swim isn’t the most thorough training plan.
… unless Sydney is counting the days in “Sydney Time”… :P
The unknown center node activated the training montage power.
Although Sydney essentially only experienced two days, I’d think she should still get the 2 months of pay. Her bills on Earth do not only experience two days, after all.
There’s also some precedent for something like this in other fiction. When, in sci fi movies involving cryosleep or FTL speeds (when the writers actually acknowledge the time differential), the characters often talk about how they are getting paid a huge amount to put a chunk of their life on hold or miss the passing of time back on earth, even if they are not conscious for most of it and are biologically only experiencing a much shorter period of time).
The first Aliens movie, I think, mentioned this, as did Avatar.
They probably should add something to the contracts though about time travel, like a time travel pay rate. :)
Oh, or they can set up an variable (to increase with inflation) high interest-bearing account for each person with a certain amount of money, which can only be accessed in the event of temporal shenanigans happening, and that would take care of the payment (ie, someone gets thrown 10 years into the future, they ask about their money for the past 10 years, Arianna says ‘look at your time travel savings account’)
Add to that the fact that Archon have concealed the fact that Sydney (et al) time travelled. Therefore they will doubtless be giving her orders to keep that secret herself. So they will risk compromising their own cover-up, in the event that public scrutiny of hero salaries (a very likely aspect) will reveal this weird anomaly in Halo’s salary.
The official (publicly announced) cover story is that Sydney was getting training. So they should have been paying her salary in as normal. Additional hazard pay for her extraordinary dangers should be paid in addition to that, albeit that secrecy might require it to be given a more vague description.
Although, given that Sydney turned up on an alien space ship, the underwear might already be off the genitals.
They could just say that Cora was contracted to train Sydney in celestial navigation and space operations in general.
I still don’t quite get why everyone keeps saying that not paying Sydney regularly will expose her absence. Her banking details are private, and Archon payroll accounting is private – aside from some annual summaries, but since this is year 1 there is nothing to compare it to. She’d have to be gone several years running before anyone could form meaningful conclusions, and by then they’d have had plenty of time to form good official explanations.
But since Harem was able to give them a date and even reasonably accurate time, I doubt they’ve spent too much time worrying about it. A 2 month absence from the public isn’t hard to explain as “sequestering”, and Arianna probably has some more good spin up her sleeve now that Sydney’s back.
This is a new and doubtless highly controversial unit. And they are being paid well above the maximum normal cap for public servants. Not to mention super-star celebrity status, along with all the media intrusion that goes with it. So there will be intense scrutiny of how much money Arc-SWAT members are paid.
Even if it is limited to the total budget for the unit’s salaries, that will be a part of the public record. And one way or another the monthly figures may be exposed. So if there is a dip during the period that Sydney was failing to make public appearances, culminating in her arriving back on an alien spaceship, and that amount approximated the average salary of one SWAT member, then it will not take much for the press to join the dots and start asking informed questions.
There will be people working at Sydney’s bank who can view her account balances. While these people aren’t supposed to reveal such information to the press according to banking and privacy laws, they are also not people who have been vetted the same as the people in Archon who have clearance to know the truth about Sydney’s little trip. The professionals who come up with cover stories try to cover any and all possible discrepancies that could possibly expose the lie. Far better to keep Sydney’s direct deposits going as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening.
That’s what the term “on assignment” means.
This is true. I’m pretty sure the accountants are probably not high enough security level to know the truth, so paying for 2 months instead of 2 days would make sense as a cover story anyway :).
50% pay is not actually unreasonable in this context as she was functionally disabled for the period in which she didn’t exist… and it was due to work-related temporal injury. This could be a workman’s comp claim. She might be entitled to 60%, and hazard pay and/or overtime should be considered.
Actually if it is handled as a workmans comp claim then Sydney is definitely going to get 100% of her pay. The laws on workmans comp don’t let an employer short pay an employee just because the employer managed to break them.
And don’t forget the purple heart. Sydney should qualify just for the grakz.
Although she did have a combat wound</a to genuinely qualify.
That…. actually is true. Sydney is essentially a police officer now And police officers, by law, are entitled to file for workman’s compensation, and Archon is required to provide workman’s compensation insurance coverage. Which they already do, and Arianna already mentioned that they will be providing insurance for her in an earlier part of the comic.
Actually, it is entirely unreasonable, absolutely unworkable for anyone with ongoing bills and certain to be a violation of her contract.
Military contracts specify a rate to be paid each month.
Period.
That pay can be made forfeit by disciplinary procedures, but that would entitle Sydney to demand a court martial which would expose the particulars of the case.
She will be paid.
That reasoning as an absolute rule doesn’t scale beyond a few individuals though. Say a space wizard managed to fling the entire Earth forward 10 years – ignoring the issues caused for off-world aliens, since Earth is isolated from the rest of the Galaxy, for the whole of humanity it’s as if nothing happened at all. You can’t just immediately pay everyone with a salary 10 years wages, and I can’t see any reasoning that you should.
No services were rendered, no utilities or products made or consumed, no expenses incurred – effectively, no additional time passed at all. Wikipedia would get a highly-debated article on The Shift, a lot of academic papers would be written on physics and philosophy, and everyone would tire of talking about “that weird thing that apparently happened without anybody noticing” and move on.
It only matters if a portion of the population jumps, whether that’s a single person or half the population; how that’s handled depends on how many. If only a single person didn’t jump* and had to live the intervening 10 years alone, would everyone else get 10 years pay or would that person just be considered really unlucky and maybe get a book deal? What if that person is the Archon paymaster? How about 100 people? 10,000? A long as it’s a tiny fraction of the overall population**, the rules are going to be set up to deal with the standard case, and exceptions will either be ignored or handled as special cases.
Since this is the first time it’s been dealt with, they’re apparently going to bunt, but you can bet if it happens again it will no longer be considered a special case. There will be an official policy created, and it definitely won’t be “we’ll just pretend nothing happened and pay them for doing nothing for 2 months.”
*Poor Marvin
** If it’s around 50%, the holy wars between the Nows and Thens will undoubtedly destroy the planet anyways.
I would agree that she should be paid based on elapsed time on earth. The they should deduct for the non-military things like rent and so forth that they took care of, unless she set up a direct deposit payment plan on her own, which her comments imply she didn’t. Since paying her rent and utilities and so on requires service beyond military, they tack on “shipping and handling” fees and voila! Half pay, equivalently.
What about “performance pay” ? Surely fighting planet killers should count for something.
The military doesn’t give performance pay.
They give something better.
Basket leave.
Sydney should get 2 months of pay. She was gone for 2 months from the perspective of everyone on Earth including the Archon paymaster software which should be just making her direct deposits automatically.
And if there is any argument, I’d like to see them prove that she was only ‘on duty’ for 2 days instead of 2 months.
Just one more reason why time travel is a bullshit thing to introduce into any story.
It is interesting in a super hero setting though, as it then allows for the appearance of characters from all the breadth and depth of history. Something that various of the mainstream publishers in the genre have long done. Plus, in this story, it does allow Dave to explore the mundane aspects, like missing birthdays and paydays, which other sources gloss over or ignore.
Not to mention providing points of interest (e.g. the mystery and eventual benefits of Harem’s “precognition”) and humour.
Ya know,
If I don’t want to read about “throbbing manhood” doing it’s thing with “steaming femininity” then it behooves me not to read bodice rippers.
Time travel is pretty much one of the core tropes of the super hero genre.
Are you at all familiar with Sailor Jim Johnston?!? I’d swear you’re quoting from “On the Subject of Penises…”
https://sailorjim.livejournal.com/191340.html
Time travel is only a core trope to hacks. A very few authors have not produced crap while delving into the morass which is time travel. And for those few time travel is a side project that they have explored very carefully, not a hackneyed plot resolver and/or shredder used because they have run out of other ideas.
Not to mention the fact that the time travel is likely classified anyway.
Ah! Don’t worry, Sydney, I think about the birthday conundrum too. And you’ve managed to, mostly, come up with the same solution. Your birthday is fixed, and is not going anywhere. You just need to advance the date that your odometer turns over. So, yeah, you got two days to celebrate now. Frequent time travelers will need to keep careful track and use math to keep things sorted.
Is there a trope that deals with this problem? If not, I vote we call it the Birthday Conundrum.
I suppose Sydney could ask Math when her birthday was, but did she ever tell him in the first place?
I was born on the third Sunday of August. I was also born on August 18. These are different “dates”, but I was only born once. When I was quite young (5?) My mother gave me a choice between them. She asked me which of those two alternatives I’d like to have as my birthday every year. Either can be used to mark off one year, and both things were true.
I probably should have picked “Third Sunday.” At least then I’d usually have the day off to celebrate it.
I miss a scene like:
Sydney: What? 53 days? … … Yuhu! Comic marathons are coming! … Ehem… May I request a week off? I… eh… need to recover… eh… from the trauma I´m suffering. Fighting Cthulhus and all that. Yes, that´s it. Yeah.
Maxima: Denied.
Hold the phone… Sydney had her first month of pay in advance, unless the story was far enough along before she went MIA to cover that month, she still has that first month to go through before she starts earning a paycheck again. So… with just shy of two months payperiods splitting the difference ((53+2)/2=28) she still hasn’t been working long enough to even get another paycheck, as she’s only just gotten through her first month of training for her advance and would only be part way through month 2…
Edit: 28 ish… 27.5 technically, but giving the benefit of the doubt. presuming the amount of time she worked before going MIA was less than 32 days to have her reach her full second check of approximately 60 days (2 months, rounding down in her favor).
Military pay is paid monthly, except that for the convenience of the government, half is paid on the 1st, and half is paid on the 16th. If her first day was the 28th of the month, her first payday would still have been the 1st of the next month. Most of the ways I can look at 53 days encompasses THREE paydays, of about 1.5 months pay. Not two months. Not one month.
Could have sworn ARC got paid monthly. Double checked, it was every 2 weeks in this comic. My bad. Logic fail on my part. not as significant an impact as I thought.
I wonder if we’ll get to see Sydney’s parents now. After a couple of months incommunicado, I would think she’d want to visit. I’m sure Max has stopped by in the meantime. “Your daughter is missing” is a message that a CO would always deliver in person if possible.
Yeah, but the standard “Your daughter got launched two months into the future because that’s just what happens with superheros sometimes, so we’re just going to pick her up then” message might not be.
In this universe, that hasn’t become a standard.
The existence of supers has just had the big reveal.
And time travel was in the realm of the technically possible, but requires a phenomenal amount of energy (say barrels and barrels of blood drained from supernatural beings) to achieve.
That’s doing it accidently.
Doing it deliberately just involves a not particularly power, though certainly very complex, spell and not understanding how time travel works.
Though that will get you yelled at by quite a lot of people for almost accidentallying local causality.
Oh no.
Magically speaking, that particular ingredient in that quantity represented about the same effort to gather as producing the energy to accomplish the task through physics.
Basically Sciona captured a large number of powerful supernatural entities and used them as a sort of horror show blood fairy for a long period of time. Revisit the Team Lilliput arc.
Blood dairy.
Stupid spellcorrupt
I demand a fanfic story about the bumbling horror show blood fairy that was working with Sciona.
I’ll write it after Dave B. Promises to draw Dabbler and Gwen performing it with puppets.
She traveled forward in time. That’s easy. Any civilization with access to propulsion systems that allow them to go a significant percentage of C would have to take active measures to prevent it (or just deal with losing a decade or two whenever they do interstellar travel).
Doing it through a portal might be a bit more difficult, but honestly if you’re ripping a hole in spacetime going to different temporal coordinates wouldn’t be any more difficult than going to different spacial coordinates.
Sydney only traveled forward in time.
However, Maxima, Sciona, Hiro, and Harem Traveled forward in time, interacted with the aliens destroying the Alari homeworld, and then traveled backwards in time to the point from which they left.
An unknown number of Alari souls traveled backwards through time as well.
Her father would be proud that his daughter is already doing all the strange and weird superhero things that they read about together in comics.
He is going to be the proudest father telling everyone about his daughter’s exploits (non-classified, because I would never tell him the classified stuff either).
She’s already making people rewrite laws and regulations to account for the insanity that is now REALITY!!
It would be interesting to see if her father also lives up to the family name.
Perhaps there could be a bowl of Grakz in his future next April first
Mrs Schoville I am very pleased to let you know that your daughter has safely returned to Earth… I mean the Archon HQ building. You may wish to sit down though, before I tell you about her new boyfriend …
Sotto voce
… and your grand-puppies.
Honestly, the simplest way of doing this would be to have a set, capped “bonus” for time spent time traveling (either forward or backwards.) For each month of difference of observed time vs. “real time” the employee is subjected to in the line of duty, ARCHON will pay the bonus amount rather than the salary. This continues up until a set number of years, like 5 or 10.
So, you got whisked to the past and had to support yourself while living under an assumed name so as not to wreck the timeline? When you get back to the “present” you get your hardship bonus but not a second salary.
So you got whisked to the future and missed out on your pay for that time? You get your hardship bonus in lieu of your salary for that period (because you didn’t “work” it) and Archon covers any financial obligations you had in your absence (rent, minimum payments, auto loans, etc.) in the meantime.
There’d be a little more to it for paperwork on how long they’d pay your bills for you, probably something along the lines of an “insurance plan” you could opt into to extend your “maybe they’re not dead” period, or perhaps a trust fund kind of thing set up from a portion of your earnings that got set aside for that purpose.
The simplest way is to handle each instance on a case by case basis unless it becomes so routine that it is necessary to codify it.
Every stupid, insane, or just plain weird regulation has a story behind it.
R – “Why is there a regulation on pay related to time travel? That would never come up.”
CO – *sigh* “That is Classified recruit.”
R – *shocked Pikacu face recruit* “I can’t wait till I get the clearance to read it”
CO – “It was 3 months of the most boring meetings with high ranking people to figure out how it works. F*** time travel.”
Yeah, I would hate those meetings too.
She is payed a salary, so untill they employ her, they should pay her: the fact she perceived those two month differently has nothing to do with her employment. Otherwise this would set a bad precedent: when one of the heroes will be kept prisoner in a chronostatic cell, they would cut their pay too. And a super able to accelerate his relative time should be able to claim years of salary in a couple of days
Absolutely good point.
Speedsters who slow the time Dimension they are in age faster and must be paid more.
Unless the pay is per calendar month, then their salary is the same as everyone else.
Generally I agree with you. But just to play devil’s advocate, what about an employee who got put into suspended animation (and thereby was doing no work)? Would they eternally remain on the payroll as a working member of staff?
I can’t wait to she tells them about fighting and defeating some of the alien Kaiju, and the level ups she got.
I’m hoping that the choker actually records. And from multiple camera angles yet. And and that they actually watch that before talking about it.
The Pipboy makes more sense as a digital camera.
Maybe it has a 360° lens.
She was too busy to use her smartphone until she reached Fracture.
All this discussion about Sydney’s pay during the 51 days that she didn’t exist got me to wondering if Archon has any rules in place yet for dealing with deceased team members who some day become no longer deceased. Technically this may have already happened once to Sydney, but since her “death” was undone immediately it really didn’t come up as an issue. However since this is a comic book world sooner or later there may be real instances of Comic Book Death to deal with.
Whether a character was really dead and came back, or was simply thought to be dead and then turned up later, there are serious legal consequences to being declared dead then later on not being dead. These YouTube videos cover a lot of the issues that a no longer dead person would have to deal with.
How Exactly Do You Prove You’re Alive if You’re Accidentally Declared Dead?
Skip the first 1:15 to get past the sales pitch
Do You Get Your Stuff Back if You’re Declared Dead, Then Turn Up Alive?
The sales pitch is short at the beginning of this one, only about 15 seconds
I can imagine how annoying it would be to keep getting arrested for stealing your own identity. Also, given the large salaries that supers employed by Archon receive it is likely that their estate will be large enough to attract all sorts of “long lost relatives” wanting to get their hands on a big chunk of it. Imagine having millions in the bank when you die, only to find out that you are broke when you come back.
Dildo Shagginess had to buy back his own crap, which always felt like bullshit to me: his money-grubbing cousins should have had to pay back the buyers
On a slightly different topic than three pages of comments about pay structure, I wander what them Alari refugees on the ship are up to. Anyone told them they landed on Earth, told them there is an Alari colony ship on the planet they just landed on. Does Cora intend to contact the Alari colony ship and ask them if they want some refugees.
Also….
Does THE VEIL give them human appearance or are the aliens already here using HoloEmitters?
(Cora’s team isn’t Veiled…yet. It takes time to kick in?)
It was said earlier that each individual race has to be entered into the veil separately. Sciona was visibly an Alari, so her race may not have been entered in.
At this point, the revelation of a whole colony ship would surely have overpowered the glamour of the veil for Alari anyway.
Will Suzy News notice that a lot of secrets are being revealed in rapid succession?
Supers actually exist.
Aliens actually exist.
Vampires actually… No wait. no one said anything about Vampires.
Just so long as she can keep her own origin story and secret identity quiet, I think she will not rock the boat too much.
You know, we’ve never seen Suzie Wen and Marble Maiden at the same time. Do ya think…?
:-O
Suggestion: Look into military pay for hypothetical situations like this. Although your theory of minimum is close to accurate, there are other factors that come into play for pay as well. Hazzardous, Deployment, Hardship Duty Pay, Flight Pay, BAH, Combat Related Special Compensation, Ect. Maybe that’ll give Arianna some more spotlight, too. (She is one of my favorite characters)
What is the G.D.P. of Morocco!?!?!?
Hang on, I know this one. Is the GP followed into the bar, by a guy in a fez and a camel?
Which episode had Sydney check her inventory?
I`m trying to remember if she was wearing the Pipboy.
She wasn’t wearing it when she bandaged her face after getting hit by debris, or when sh checked for money after arriving at the Fracture.
I believe the Arc spectacles were supposed to replace the pipboys, but then they all got destroyed at the restaurant fight.
I think the phone they gave her has the same functions, but the pipboy makes more sense for a flyer who needs both hands.
Did anyone else notice that Arianna is missing her headset in the bottom left panel?
Well spotted.
You may haz Easter Egg.
DaveB put her earring back in by mistake :P
I actually prefer this interpretation of Max over her over-rendered version. You still get the golden surfer vibe with athletic physique; but now her beauty comes through. No offense but she came across as angry lesbian “I am stronger and better than men” before your open house situation. Please keep the simpler highlight/shading technique, it feels more natural to the eye, especially with expressions.
Dave’s skill is to skate the razor’s edge between Fitness Model, Female Bodybuilder and this:
https://www.deviantart.com/atariboy2600/art/Marge-All-Pumped-Up-22199780
DaveB is facing stiff competition, comedy wise, from real life:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-47952295
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48007487
this is a well known trope. it almost seems like no matter how insane things get, real life gets crazier. this could be used as evidence that this is all a fever dream. I mean this one rich guy says to some friend- ‘hold my beer’ and now. . .
You know…..
If they ruled that Sydney was entitled to her BASE pay rate while she technically did not exist, but was NOT entitled to Combat Pay, Media Presence Pay, Hazardous Duty Pay, Flight Pay, or other related bonuses….
That probably would work out as roughly 1/2 pay.
Personally, I’d add the provisio that anybody missing for more than 7 years is legally dead, with their estate placed in a holding trust if we have reason to believe that they will show up as not-dead at a later date. Pay would be capped at half rate for the first 7 years, and none after that.
‘Media Presence Pay? is that really a thing?!?
Knowing Arianna, it almost certainly is now. she even arranged licensing fees for action dolls.
Just FYI missing soldiers are entitled to the entirety of their pay, plus missed promotions.
Looks like the relevant document is here….
https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/documents/fmr/archive/07aarch/07a_34_Jun08.pdf
looks like the Branch Secretary does have SOME discretion on starting or ending certain types of allowances, and the “presumed dead” review period is set at one year after missing…
but oddly enough, housing allowance pay is specifically continued, even though the missing wasn’t using a house…..
Art-based question, and it’s possible it was answered before, so pardon me if it’s a repeat.
Does Sydney have a lip ring? In some pages, it looks like she has one, and in other pages she doesn’t.
Personally, I prefer her without it but it *IS* the artist’s prerogative…
She’s a salaried employee, so why are we hairsplitting her hours? If she wants any of the pay she would be entitled to for doing the job she was hired to do, then she better log the hours.
How many hours has she spent in physical training? How many hours has she spent in courses? Get the fuck moving, recruit!
I should really know the precise jargon for specialized training courses.
My frame of reference is mainly the comic Powers, but it’s a generally very well researched police procedural and here’s how they do this: If a cop gets abducted in the line of duty and disappears for a year, and goes through several traumas and ends up doing serious crimes in what can be construed as a psychosis, it just gets retroactively written down as undercover work and she gets paid with interest for the whole time. Soo much overtime. Plus damages.
The department really wants to be seen to be responsible when their officers go missing, you see. Nice of them to pay Sydney’s bills for her, right? If there was any obligations she had been missing out on that they couldn’t cover with money they’d be in a lot of trouble. As was mentioned on another page, life on Earth goes on even if from her perspective she’s only been gone two days. Trying to spin it to pay her for less than the time she has been on Archon’s payroll for, not to mention the hypothetical case of “What if someone goes 1000 years in the future and Archon still exists by then”, is really very cheap of them.
Arianna’s earpiece goes missing in panel 5.