Grrl Power #745 – Como llego al banco de sangre?
It may seem a little weird that Sciona is bothering to try to talk to the clerk, but 1) She’s low on power, 2) She’s well aware of the existence of supers, and knows enough to know that they can potentially be a threat to her, 3) She’s unprepared and doesn’t even know where she is. She’s been on Earth a while, at least she had been in her previous incarnation, to guess she’s somewhere in a Latin American country. She know what Spanish is, but never bothered to learn it. (She should be able to tell that she’s in Mexico, however, because the clerk of the corner shop is for some reason dressed like a waitress at a themed TexMex joint.)
BTW: The clerk is supposed to be saying “Escorpia! I don’t want any trouble please!” So I may need to tweak that google translated output there on the page.
This does tell us one thing, at least. When she (or another disembodied Alari) possess a recently deceased body, they don’t learn everything that person knew. The possession process sort of formats the brain to make room for the new consciousness.
It should be noted, since I don’t know when it will come up in the comic, that not all Alari are capable of this. They’re a highly hierarchical society, and one of a surprisingly small number of high tech races that continues to use magic. Only some of the mages can do this, and the soul battery Sciona found on her homeworld was one particular coven trying to get offworld. They might have been crazy survivalist mages, which is why they had their own private escape pod.
That’s a scary thought. Crazy survivalist mages. They’re all prepared for the zombie apocalypse… that they’re going to start!
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survivalist mages. this can’t be good
well… I guess she took the speed-reading course
Well she specialized in blood magic, not Divination. Comprehend Languages is your friend, Sciona!
Shouldn’t she be able to take a drop of blood from the counter person and use that to link to her knowledge of spanish?
Well, it depends. A lot of spells with blood magic tend to be centered around the source of the blood, yes, but the willingness of involved parties is also a very important aspect. Generally, unless willingly given, one needs both more blood and more power for a given sympathetic spell than if the provider consents to the provision of blood. It’s even more efficient if the provider understands the purpose. As the cashier likely wouldn’t allow a bloodied trio to cut her, and would be very unwilling, it would take significant power to create a link, Power that she stated she doesn’t currently have.
Although, she could use being a member of a crime organization to her advantage.
If she could get the cashier to understand what she wanted at all.
Damnit! comments refusing to show up for me again
It is probably the spam-catcher being a little slow say “Yes, you can show this one.” The AI model might be a little complicated and slow. If your comment is valid, it should show up in a minute or two. Hopefully not too many get forwarded to DaveB to validate.
So now she will be mentally translating from Alar to English to Spanish?
She was long enough speaking English to just know the language.
technically, no. learning a language after late childhood (8-9 for you humans) uses a different part of your brain; no matter how fluent you become in it, you’re still translating mentally rather than “thinking in” that additional tongue.
True for humans. To assume that is true for all alien races is, simply, assumption.
I dont know. I started learning english past age 10, didnt really get it until I got interested in a book in collage… I find myself often thinking in english now and sometimes find it hard to translate back to my native tongue.
Smae with me, because at that time nearly all RPGs were in English.
Though I was older (16 or so).
And now they are Japanese
Nope. It can happen naturally at older ages if the person is used and exposed to the other language to enough of a degree. Speaking from my personal experience with english, to boot, when i was in the late teens/early 20s and living out of my native country.
I only started learning English seriously around the age of 10/11 and definitely don’t always translate in my head. Hell, I even use words I know the meaning of, but can’t actually translate to my native language.
That’s not true.
This is not true – I know a lot of English words that I don’t know in Hungarian because I learned them in the UK. I don’t translate in my head – it happens sometimes when I try to explain something specific what I only learned in Hungarian, but most of the time I actually think in English.
Not true, polysanity. It’s a matter of immersion for some of us.
I learned Spanish from 12 to 16, and about my third year in high school, stopped translating. It took almost a year of watching telenovelas, but one night I started dreaming in Spanish, and the adjustment was made. I had an older friend who had the same cutover with Hawaiian.
I can’t help but wonder how good / how quick she will be at picking up this language that she’s heard of it but never try to learn before. Too bad her blood magic can’t let her simply absorb some of the knowledge of her host the way it lets her absorb and replicate Powers at least on a temporary level
Those dictionaries include pronounciation. I assume she can read those.
And well, it is blood magic, not brain magic.
Do they include syntax tips? For me the fact that English uses different sentence construction and/or conjugation than almost any other language is the hardest part about learning foreign languages.
Though, there are brain mages, and her blood magic could possibly steal that power, at least temporarily.
You know that is a workaround I did not consider.
I wonder if she knows about the refugees? I am not entirely sure where that stands on the timeline.
the refugees came a couple months later, when sidney arrived
Not those refugees, the ones on the colony ship in Douchevillia, Africa
There was another group in Africa already when Sydney arrived, in Deus’s private kingdom. So there are three groups of refugees: Deus’s group on their own spaceship, Sydney’s group in Cora’s spaceship and Sciona’s group of body snatchers.
Well, we don’t know if Cora dropped off the Fracture-tourists somewhere before taking Sydney home
We don’t, but getting Sydney back to Earth was a priority.
The refugee issue will be addressed as soon as this sequence concludes.
Dropping off the refugees could have happened along the way, could by dozens (or more) likely planets (or stations or what-have-yous) between Dirt and Fracture
Have to remember one very important piece of information, and something Cora probably knows better than you: Sydney doesn’t have the authority to offer refugee status to aliens!!!!
Specially when the knowledge that they exist was still, at the time, not made public!
Well so long as the Alari groups don’t get their luggage swapped* or completely mixed up*, it should be pretty easy keeping them sorted out.
(Both excellent movies)
The ship is probably going to be invited there based on future communication we are about to see between Deus and Sciona… since the Alari planet hasn’t been hit yet.
Right now we are between the time Maxima came back from the Alari homeworld via runaway portal – where Sciona followed them – and before Sydney came back via Ship.
I know it will be misformatted and I forgot how to use the code brackets… so I’ll just do both versions in hopes that one will get thru..
[code]
,---Maxima's group returns ---- ARC SWAT calls out to Cora-------------------------------------------------Refugees Arrive-------.
Portal incident `-- Sciona finds a body---- +----- Heroes united
`-------------------------------------------------------Sydneys Battle - levels up to gate away - goes to Fraction Station - comes back to Earth
I think line returns would be easiest to avoid formatting issues:
-Maxima’s group returns & sciona’s group returns
-ARC SWAT calls out to Cora
-Sciona finds a body
-Refugee ship arrives
-Syd goes to Fracture
-Dues goes shopping
-Cora picks up Syd
-Cora & Syd arrive at Earth with second set of refugees
Well that answers some of the questions from the previous week.
Still wondering if anybody in the Soul Battery was actually a rival of Sciona?
“and one of a surprisingly small number of high tech races that continues to use magic.”
… They stop using magic? Why?! I know the old ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ line and technology is probably a lot easier and reliable than magic in everyday use, but magic allows you to reshape reality and give a big middle finger to physics at the same time. I’d think most would try and use some mixture of both, not abandon magic altogether.
Downsides like people wandering around draining people of blood to power their spells?
I’m guessing, though, that on some level messing with the fundamental rules of physics doesn’t mix well with technology that depends on that physics; “Nature, to be commanded must be obeyed.” vs, “Nature is going to do what I want, or it’s getting ugly in here!”
Draining people (killing them for mana) wouldn’t be a bad thing, depending on exactly what’s going on with society to begin with. If they have exponential growth and lack of resources or lack of work due to increased tech (which is natural) then wiping out a portion of your population is totally super fine and a good idea for the world as a whole.
Maybe not for individuals personally affected, but you gotta keep your population at manageable levels somehow.
“It’s people! Essence Green is people!”
*wink and thumbs up*
Well we know who will be tossed onto the guillotine after the third anti-mage rebellion…
One reason may be that magic requires a lot of talent and personal sacrifices to learn and use. Technology – just push the right button.
Like the way in which the introduction of guns generally led to them replacing bows, in most cases (with Japan, where special circumstances existed, being an admitted exception), although bows remained technically superior to guns in many respects, until some point in the 19th century…
Guns first replaced crossbows. Bows are still superior to them, without the fact that you need years of training to use a bow effectively.
Guns became superior when you could shoot more than one bullet at a time, so, until some idiot invents a repeating bow that can fire up to 9 arrows a second, guns will remain superior in most cases (only being surpassed in regards to stealth and not having access to a silencer or sniper rifle)
A bow does have the advantage of being easily produced in the case of societal collapse
No.
Guns became superior because round (or even shaped) metal slugs were simpler and faster to create as opposed to fletching arrows and a bullet and gunpowder is a far smaller package to haul in a supply train. Guns started out being superior in terms of the logistics of a foreign campaign. Bacon, band aid and bullets all have to be manufactured and transported to the battle front.
While a firearm is heavier and more expensive to produce than a bow, bullets are smaller and quicker to manufacture than arrows.
My first thought was John Rambo… of course, there’s also Hawkeye and Green Arrow, as far as establishing the point I’m making. A bow has the advantage of utility – you can deliver a LOT with a bow (there’s a novelization of “First Blood: Part II” where the author emphasizes that the weapons Rambo uses are all very real. The explosive arrows were just regular hunting arrows made of hollow alluminum tubes. Rambo kneaded a little C4 into worms and slipped them in, then replaced the serrated arrowheads with detonators. Which was then fired from a compound bow with a 100 lb draw).
(It should be noted that the book differs from the film in a number of respects: https://rambo.fandom.com/wiki/Rambo:_First_Blood_Part_II_novelization )
But as for bows… they have exceptional utility. The ammunition is larger, and that allows you to do things with it. Explosives are just the tip of the iceberg – grappling hooks, signal arrows (there were historical “whistling” arrowheads made to scream loudly when fired), message arrows (With the message written on paper wrapped around the shaft), and those are just the examples I know to be historically true. The only firearm I know of that can compare to that is a 12 gauge shotgun, with its own dizzying assortment of specialty ammunition.(rubber slugs, “dragon’s breath,” napalm, flechette rounds, etc)
Tell me Doc, how do you produce bullets without power or specialised machinery?
Bows (and arrows) can be manufactured at the battle front
With a mold, a small fire, and some spent rounds. Granted you can’t do it well at scale, but prior to widespread adoption of cartridges and repeating rifles, it was common for troops to make (and recycle) their own ammo in the field.
Bullets are a little piece of shaped lead.
As recently as the post civil war frontier days a hinged mold allowed led balls and slugs to be cast by traveling marksmen over a fire hot enough to melt lead. Attend any civil war reenactment. That is a whole lot simpler and faster than making an arrowhead.
Powder was shipped in kegs and carried in various horns and bags.
And I was ninja’d.
Always. Expect. Ninjas.
Who said anything about arrowheads? o_O
Where is your precious gunpowder going to come from?
Presumably the same place the rawhide, stone, feathers, and wood are coming from to replace strings and arrows. Gunpowder’s a pretty simple mix really, and even the rudimentary (and impure) mixes developed starting in the 9th century are pretty effective. Yes, it’s harder to make than a simple arrow*, but far from impossible and the payoff scales well enough to be worthwhile.
But really, beyond individual use (say for a militia or any larger band of post-apocalypse warriors), it quickly becomes important to start rebuilding manufacturing and establish supply chains to take on any hostile force, and gunpowder would be high on the list of reachable priorities. Followed by things like refined fuels for vehicles, and other consumables needed to wage battle. It’s just not practical to replace anything en masse in the field; it’s cheaper and more reliable to run manufacturing and shipping. Given the need to ship materiel, weapons with the best efficacy for their weight are typically the best option, and 10K rounds of rifle ammo and a couple tiny replacement parts for a rifle are lighter and far more compact than 10K complete arrows and a pile of bowstring and string wax.
*And actually, a good reliable arrow is tricky and time-consuming business. Assuming you even live somewhere with trees that have acceptable straightness and strength.
Rawhide and stone are not requirements for making a bow and arrows (the rubber for the suction caps on the other flipper… :P)
There is also the possibility that magic and technology clash, when used together, mostly in the form that machines don’t work properly when someone nearby randomly changes the laws of physics with magic.
That was a big plot point in the game Arcanum – for example a station building was destroyed in the capital, because a train’s brakes failed thanks to a careless mage.
We have seen via Dabbler that they don’t in this universe.
And I nailed it on the Soul Battery being a mage device.
She did say that.
Like, casting fireball doesn’t change the laws of the universe anywhere except where the fireball is (the ignition point in the palm of your hand, where the fireball’s flame is while flying, and when it hits it creates force in addition to fire).
Like fire itself is heat + dehydration element
bomb is metal + heat + dehydration + shockwave
But magical fire includes shockwave and time elements.
“Time?” yep. A normal temperature flame that only touches you for one second does no damage. For it to do damage it would have to be over a longer period of time. Fireballs do damage and knock people around, so that’s why the other elements added.
Where was I going with this? Something about magic not interfering with muggle physics, I think.
Casting a fireball doesn’t change the laws of physics in D&D — it just imports a tiny bit of a different set of physics very temporarily, in a deliberately unstable way.
The usual premise behind a D&D fireball spell was that the little pea-sized missile it originates from is essentially an unstable portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire. That’s why the thing goes off when and where you don’t want it to if it hits an obstacle (never blind-fire a fireball). When it goes off, the portal collapses, ‘burping’ out a sphere of Elemental Fire that then fades near-instantly in a realm that doesn’t support self-sustaining fuel-less fire. But while you’re in the radius of the fireball, the Elemental Plane of Fire rules apply, and you get burned (but various items on your person may or may not catch fire, in a fairly random manner).
Similarly, a Wall of Fire is only hot as you approach it from one side. Regular fire: not that picky.
This premise doesn’t hold up in relatively recent editions. There are places, and situations, where access to other planes is impossible, preventing all teleportation and plane-shifting magic, but evocation spells like fireball are still perfectly usable. That wouldn’t be the case if a portal to an Inner Plane were a key ingredient.
True. I guess I should’ve been more clear that I was talking about old-school (AD&D era or earlier) versions.
I got into it in the old TSR days (I remember Chainmail, and I owned the original D&D Basic Set . . . I do mean old TSR days). I liked the layered lore and often retcon-laden explanations. The newer editions seem more centered on the game mechanics, with lore an afterthought if it’s even a concern. I have a lot more time to read the material and fiction than to play, so I sort of let everything after version 3.5 pass me by.
Yeah, the later editions seem to be more stream-lined for a quick fast-paced game played in a single lunchbreak
Stopped playing after AD&D 2nd Edition (about 20+ years ago)
Long time since I’ve seen the brown paper bag color of the Arduin Grimoire…
Arduine?
There’s also ‘Any sufficiently analysed magic is indistinguishable from technology’ line from Girl Genius.
^ Source.
That was the line that got me hooked on Girl Genius – may have to go check it out again and see if the plot has progressed in a meaningful way yet.
Prefer the line from “Freefall”, can’t remember the line, butt it was the third in the series (first line is Azimov, or Arthur C. Clark, second was Agatha)
“All technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who do not understand it.” Florence rules.
Then there’s also “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”
That’s the one :D
Beautiful.
Blacksmithery was considered magic at one time due to precisely this.
The Book of Magic DC Comics series had a line from the Phantom Stranger (who is according to his multiple-choice origin either a survivor of a previous reality, the Wandering Jew, or an angel that refused to pick a side during Lucifer’s rebellion). He was explaining to the protagonist, Timothy Hunter, the difference between magic and science: “Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.”
The scientific method assumes that observations and experiments are repeatable, that the rules that cause those results to be repeatable can be discovered, and that this will continue to be the case. Skyscraper designs don’t account for any potential Tower of Babel issues in the architectural plans, for instance. Gremlins may be an exception to the rule, depending on who you ask.
Magic assumes that through Will, divine (or other) intervention, connections between disparate things (symbolism, sympathy, etc.) and/or other means, change can be created. That the rules can be bent, sometimes even broken, or a special rule set used to override the usual one. In such a system, science would have to either account for all the bending of rules that may have taken place that may have influenced any given observation (Applied Metaphysics? Eschatological Engineering?) or just put an notation by any theory or rule that says “void where affected by magic”.
It sounds like the Alari are being posited as a species that developed mystic arts in a way that let them participate in FTL civilization in a non-standard way. Blood-driven interstellar portals? Makes me wonder what their ship that’s parked in Deus’ pet country uses for fuel. Possibly lower-tier Alari?
Both magic and technology are clearly inferior to COMBINATION of magic and technology. That’s why it’s surprising there are so few civilization getting that. I suspect Halo’s balls are prime example.
Bear in mind that your statement is only true in realities where combining them is possible. There are realities where the presence of a magic field interferes with the motion of subatomic particles in a way that effectively acts as a constant omnipresent electromagnetic pulse, preventing electronic devices from functioning.
In Adventure Time, the world (Earth, continent of North America / Ooo) has a stable/unstable rate that changes. If physics is constant, then magic is weak. If physics becomes erratic, then magic becomes powerful and versatile. One or the other. However, Evergreen’s crown is an exception created when the two switched, which is part of why it’s so ridiculously powerful.
I find those realities boring in the highest extreme.
It’s like having to choose between a meal with exquisite food but only water to drink, or a meal of gruel but fantastic cocktails, fruit drinks, shakes, or alcoholic offerings.
I will take both.
Well, we know where the other Alari souls are…….and that’s about it. We may know as much about where she is right now as she does……….which we don’t. Actually. It isn’t Brazil. They speak Portuguese, not Spanish.
Of course, the two girls could be – say – Mexicans living in Brazil, and talking Spanish to each other. Obviously, they know each other. OK, knew.
Or, it’s simply Escorpia, being part of a cartel, was simply a badass bitch and everyone knew of her
This girl seems scared of her, not relieved to see a friend
DaveB literally just said they are in Mexico.
Well this is damn omnious, her not slaughtering the whole town for new bodies means she needs to slaughter it for some other, likely more nefarious, purpouse.
I’m guessing her interest is something else altogether, as slaughtering the locals to power some other nefarious purpose should not exactly make the bodies unusable to relocate her associates.
Or, it’s simply slaughtering the town would serve no purpose other than to provide bodies for her skull-compatriots
Slaughtering the town would also probably be noticed by someone who would want to come dispose of her. It’s too risky to do that right now.
When she’s on her own, she was a force to reckon with, add in a dozen or so Alarin-filled meat-bags and they might be able to hold off even Archon
She had a lot of resources and preparation previously. Right now she’s low on power, in a body that she just randomly found, and she doesn’t even know where she is, let alone where her stuff is (most of which is either buried under that mountain or confiscated by Archon/the Council after being dug up from that mountain)
She is also, not the only Alari on the planet anymore, she may currently be on the back foot, butt she won’t remain there for long
She may be the greatest thing since sliced bread to the disembodied cabal of Alari, but the refugee Alari may have a very different opinion. Especially if whatever shenanigans mages like Sciona got up to are connected to the Cthulhu/Celestials (Cthulestials?) mangling the Alari homeworld.
So it may be a one step forward, one step back situation, depending on how much help the refugees might be able to provide in terms of talents, abilities or intel.
Because this is a superhero comic, I’d say that you’re wrong:
More characters means slower draw time, so it’s better to make “usually super” villains get slaughtered en masse easily so the comic can stay on schedule. One Sciona, dangerous. A hundred? Effortless.
Ah yes, Conservation of Ninjitsu.
Halo is already aware of this law as well, as she brought it up when Vehemence was the only one left at the restaurant.
Reverse ninja!
Lol. If you look at her left hand, she’s got blue skin, meaning she got hurt there. If you look at the last page, she’s holding the back of the head of the dude.
She shot herself through the hand, from the bullet going through the guy’s head. SHE SHOT HERSELF IN THE HAND.
good spot.
Yeah, noticed that about her hand as well, well, the blue patch anyway and wondered how that happened
It’s possible, that after shooting Rico, the little guy tried to shoot Scicorpia butt hit her hand instead
:)
But she’s holding the guys neck in the pervious page and his exit wound is at the upper part of his head
Ah Duct tape. The universal hole coverall, be it a leaky boat or leaky body. At least I assume that is tape?
My guess would be alari skin. No idea where they got it, but the color is right, and small print below the comic says “patches of blue skin”.
Blood magic regeneration?
Truth be told, it looks far more like a silver tape or putty patch than different-colored skin growing in the place. SPECIALLY in the back of the bald guy’s heaad
It reminds me very strongly of young Maxima’s skin, the flesh peeling away to the gold skin underneath. Give them a few days or weeks, their bodies will convert to Alari color and texture, but stay the same shape.
Probably.
Yes, this
And it might lead more into Maxi’s origin (well, the Gold-plated Maxi anyway)
So Alari blood magic focused on healing = magical duct tape/second skin? Yeah, sounds good to me.
She’s afraid of trouble from Escorpia?
She’s the dangerous one?
(Well obviously, NOW she is.)
The guys with her shouldn’t be with her?
the souls of the mages sitting inside the guys with her wouldn’t scare the clerk less. she still has blood
Three wired looking thugs with guns and blood all over walk in your store. Of cause she is afraid.
Escorpia is a big enough badass to piss-off some drug dealers (probably by stealing from them), then spit at them while they’re beating her. She’s at least a sociopath, if not a worse.
Hey, even some of the really old summoning rituals, the stuff in PGM, include “Okay, you got yourself a servitor who will tell you stuff – here’s how to get rid of it if it isn’t working out”. They even have phylacteries to protect if a curse rebounds on you.
What I’m saying is, crazy survivalist mages seem to be the default.
Well, after an actual genocide (say, by planetary bombardment, swarms of small spacecraft performing strafing runs, and giant kaiju) then if there are to be any survivors at all they would of necessity have to have prepared in advance…
Wait a minute!
Those ghost skulls are visible?
(Probably not too very in daylight, but still.)
Well, yeah, Sydney saw them coming at her on Alari Prime
Maybe Sciorpia (yeah, that’s better than Scicorpia) could have them hold some string in their mouths and pretend they are ugly balloons
Through sheer luck, this happens on The Day Of The Dead….
Sciona is slightly confused as to why, instead of people looking at her blood stained clothing, screaming and running away, instead small children are asking her for candy…. :-)
¡Joli!
Okay, the possession part I get, including the soul battery type escape pot.
Even animating a body with three bullets to the heart probably is no biggie for a blood mage.
But possessing a dead body with “dysfunctional” essential organs ?
And how exactly does one format and reuse blown out brains ? So how come those two headshot-cases are walking around, and talking logically sound on top of it ?!
I would guess that Sciona killed the thugs and then rebuild the brains with blood magic before inviting the souls in.
What part of the term “blood magic” is confusing you?
Step 1 kill body
Step 2A attach soul
Step 2B regenerate body as needed with available blood
Reverse steps 2A and 2B if that’s your preference.
True, but if she could insta-heal something as entrinsic and complex as a brain, then what does she need the “duct tape” style patch-up jobs for ?
Also, this far we only knew she could heal herself while harming others, not healing them. This would be a new side.
The Alari skin is likely a byproduct of the regeneration.
It might even be easier to heal the tissue as Alari tissue than as human tissue. Say, for instance, she has the equivalent of a Regenerate Alari spell. She could, if she wanted, tinker with it to make the healed tissue match another species. But that would take more power and produce, in her opinion, an inferior product. So she just didn’t bother to alter the default settings.
Because that’s the first step in turning the bodies into Alari bodies
Maybe she simply didn’t have a need or reason to heal others before, and she only healed herself via the use of troll blood when she was in the ogre body
Blood is one thing; neural tissue another.
Get the book on birds! She could use a bunch of birds to do her bidding!
Interesting enough that book is on English.
Must be eco-tourists through there occasionally. Also note how pretty and new the counter girl’s *costume* is. Even with the barred windows, this is the touristy side of town. We may be right near the US border.
International travel for bird-watching is a thing. I know someone who is fairly obsessed with “completing my book” (personally observing every species in his reference book), which is apparently not unusual. Kind of an obsessive collecting hobby, except collecting sightings (sometimes also photos) instead of objects.
I too was hoping to see her grab the bird book. Possibly as language homework for her sidekicks?
They want the expurgated version.
Or simply to keep them occupied and not-bored, plus they can learn about local birds :D
“Birds Of The West Indies by James Bond…”
“Niiiice!”
Comes with free Walther PPK
Humph! I can not believe that at least one Spanish phrase hasn’t made it out into deep space…
“Yo quiero taco bell.”
Which as we all know, means “Eat me, I’m delicious.”
“To Serve Man . . . it’s a cookbook!”
Preparing for the zombie apocalypse…? They ARE the zombie apocalypse…
How would Sciona look in a pair of Joe Cool sunglasses?
Any idea what that clerk is saying in the third panel?
Basically: Sciona! Please, I don’t want any trouble!
What you would expect someone to say when a local mobster walks into their shop.
OOps, Escorpia, not Sciona. She doesn’t know Escorpia’s body is under new management.
DaveB went to the trouble of providing a translation of what he intended her to say in his Blurb, why you not read his Blurb?
Just a head’s up: Looks like you made a typo on “translated from Alar” in the comic. It currently reads as “tranlated”.
D’oh!
Maple leaf in the fourth panel: alari are space canadians confirmed
Not polite enough, eh?
Québécois?
(Sorry :-) )
Blame Alar.
Have to admit, I do like the fact that you made Sciona not omniscient (aka knowing everything, like languages) even though she has been on earth for what, at least 500 years?
I’m not sure when Sciona was identified as an ancient evil.
She was clearly on Earth long enough to get established and clearly knew English, but that just means probably years.
Nah, this store clerk is probably not related to the new employee at Event Horizon Comics. Okay, she has been on the job for a couple of months now. Actually, I think this is happening shortly after the Earth side of the wormhole collapsed, she was probably only on the job for a week or so at this point.
Hmm, I wonder if Sydney got in touch with people outside of Archon when she got back.
Joel: [Picks up phone] Good evening. Event Horizon Comics, your source for comics and gaming. How can I help you?
Sydney: Hey, Joel! I guess it has been a while since we talked.
Joel: Sydney? Is that you? What the hell happened to you? I couldn’t get a straight word out of Archon and your mom’s been calling every week trying to find out what happened to you. It’s like you just disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Sydney: Funny, you should word it that way. Yeah, I should call Mom and Dad next.
Yeah….I was actually expecting Sydney’s parents to be at the party.
What was the posting date of the comic she got stranded in?
Try this nice little link to find the page where she got left behind on war-world.
The clerk’s dialogue is perfectly valid, and grammatically correct. Especially for someone terrified of of a well-known street gang. No adjustment is really needed, aside from the punctuation requiring the inverted exclamation points at the start of a sentence, but we can write that off as practical limit of Dave B’s keyboard lacking the matching symbol.
I was just about to point this out. If any of you want to know, in Spain, and spanish speaking countries, we insert “¡” and “¿” before exclamations and questions respectevely. … ñdsoifjao butchering english again.
O. And we have “ñ” XD.
That’s weird. Is that like… opening and closing html tags, to frame a word, like to help emphasize that it’s a question or exclamation?
That actually makes a lot of sense now that I think about it.
– ¡Me cago en la puta! ¡¿Qué cojones crees que estás haciendo?!
Would literaly translate as: [And i use a bit of “bad language” so you can use it if you like]
– I shit on the whore! What ballshacks do you think you are doing?!
I think you may have meant “ballsacks,” as in the sacks the balls are in. “Ballshacks” would be little buildings to protect the balls from the weather, I guess. Which would either be a codpiece, maybe? Or, judging by how balls react to danger and/or cold, the ballshack might be the lower abdomen.
One imagines that the cartels, still wanting their money, are going to be another “something”. Should be no shortage of corpses to sleeve the disembodied Alari in relatively soon.
Yup: why kill innocents when scum bags will be volunteering themselves as Alarin body bags :D
I suspect Sciona isn’t nearly as interested in ‘not innocent’ as she is in ‘location, resources, and physical training’. Starting a zombie apocalypse with cartel members from inside the local compound armory is going to be far, far easier than with you average pedestrian in the local cantina.
And get fewer complaints (read less notice) from super heroes.
Of course, if Sciona had never been to a TexMex restaurant (and there’s no reason why she should have), she’d have no idea what the staff wear, themed or otherwise. Nor, even if she had, would she necessarily draw the conclusion that they were in Mexico, based on how one individual is dressed.
Knowing that the clerk was speaking Spanish and not Portuguese might be a bigger clue as to their location, but again, there’s no evidence that Sciona necessarily knew the clerk was speaking Spanish either.
Regarding swearing (no point going back a page so will post this here)
Just like how real people in the real world don’t speak proper grammar, when people swear they are not going to do so grammatically either
Just like when Sydney swears, she strings together a lot of nonsense words, it’s the intent that matters (“cream-filled piss-finger” makes no sense, butt shout it and the intent is evident)
Curses on the other hand, do need to make sense: a curse is a command for ill-will to befall the recipient
Klinger from M*A*S*H said some good’uns (“May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits!”), and was able to get away with it on Primetime TV because most idiots didn’t understand and thought he was just being ‘crazy Klinger’
Came up with a curse that was a paragraph long (really need to find that piece of paper as it was a doozy)
My father was a circuit board designer, and my mother was a CPA turned middle management department head.
I didn’t learn to speak with slang regularly until I joined the Marine Corps.
While growing up, if I or my sister or one of our friends began saying “you know” repeatedly one of my parents would interrupt the young offender. Once our attention was focused, said parent would say “why no, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
It was embarrassing at the time, but all the grammar lessons stuck. It took me years to sound normal when I want to.
Then I went through PTSD and I spoke like LOLcats for several years.
That’s because, like, ending a sentence with, like, ‘you know’ is, like, fucking annoying and nothing to do with fucking grammar, you know?
Blue? Looks silver to me.
Probably the white balance against the page background, which is a very similar shade of blue. A color picker will confirm that their skin patches have 15-20% more blue than an even silver/gray.
Both Scorpiona and ThugB’s tops are also gray but with a slight blue tint as well though, so without some pure white close by it all sort of washes to gray against the flesh tones and blood stains.
Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I feel like panel 2 is worthy of a “Deal with it” meme.
It seems the “sleeving” has left them with Alari eyes. Are the bits they’re regenerating are also coming in with Alari skin? One posits that over a significantly long period there would be a total conversion to Alari? Except maybe the nervous system? Could lead to interesting results if the Alari get kicked out of the body later and random cartel goons find themselves suddenly alive again and in an alien body with light wings.
Yeaaahhh….those blue patches on the men’s faces & especially the back of that one dude’s head (we have yet to see the other)…nice touches. Creepy af but nice touches regarding Alari body-possessing regeneration abilities.
It’s interesting that the new skin patches on the sidekicks are blood-free, while the original surrounding tissue on Sciona isn’t. I would’ve expected blood magic to slurp up the extra fuel – perhaps it took some time to get a proper regeneration ritual set up, and the surface spatter was already dried and no longer viable? We’ve seen her utilize her own blood for spells before…
My guess is they are Powder burns from three feet away. The kill shots for the goons were from contact, so those charcoaly bits are mostly inside the body.
How can Sciona not know where she is, when she came back through the same portal as the Archon team, at her own lair somewhere on the northeastern seaboard of the USA? Assuming any awareness at all in soul-form, I doubt that after flying directly through the portal she somehow wandered aimlessly for several hundred/thousand miles without noticing her surroundings before picking a place to set up shop.
The only explanation I can think of is that the portal threw the Alari souls out in a different location, but that’s some serious plot ex machina when everyone else returned with pinpoint accuracy, and DaveB hasn’t resorted to those kinds of hand-wavy coincidences in the past.
The Alari reached Earth by the same portal as Archon, but they paused to get organized and the explosion caught them and since souls seem to have a mass of maybe a gram, a mountain-destroying explosion is able to send them quite a distance, with air currents adding even more distance. Add in some stun and they have no problem waking in Mexico. [And it is Mexico. The cartels are much more careful about things like shooting people North of the border{not sure why-maybe less bribed cops-but the crime rare is way lower on this side. Nor are there many other place where a store would carry several Spanish-English dictionaries.} Now there isn’t much in the way of NW US-Mexico air currents, but once we allow soul stun, we can allow enough time for them to take some indirect routes.
An alternate idea is that Sciona set up a or several hidey-holes before she got trolled. Now she is quite weak and Archon is on her tail. so she opts to use a refuge that nobody can know about.
I actually like the mental image of fire-propelled souls, and I’ll even concede that the blood-magic fire could push souls without their resulting flight path being subject to such mundane things as wind resistance.
But Word of Dave is that she doesn’t know where she is, and even if this happened mere minutes ago that rules out a backup base. Plus an explosion would result in widely-scattered Alari ghosts (hundreds of miles at this distance), and the floating crew shown doesn’t bear it out.
Maybe once turned to souls they run on a sort of auto-pilot that draws them to the closest acceptable body but they don’t have full awareness?
Kinda like Syd’s light bee she can tell if there’s something blocking her but not really be aware more than that?
Maybe they have full awareness but not normal sight. Not speaking about map. It’s quite hard to be sure where you are without seeing good orientation point you know, and if you only see auras or something?
(Actually, even if she saw where she was flying: she wouldn’t know exactly what direction nor exactly distance. She would know she’s not in Africa, but knowing which city she’s in?)
One major problem with this theory: the explosion happened before the Alari souls passed through the portal. (And before anyone from Archon went back through it, for that matter.)
Ops, that pretty much blows up the explosion idea, unless we want to add in something about as unsatisfactory as a hand-wave. Still, we’d like an explanation of why Mexico, and why this particular body… So an alternative… Sciona-Escorpia… There is magic in names. The two names are not as similar as we would like, but it could be enough to link the two girls, and the link is made dominate by Escorpia being killed. So Sciona is drawn to Escorpia’s dead body and can make use of it’s blood.
> That’s a scary thought. Crazy survivalist mages. They’re all prepared for the zombie apocalypse… that they’re going to start!
Look up Word of Blake for scifi equivalent. Their goal is to lead remnants of humanity from apocalypse to new prosperity, AFTER they have made apocalypse happen. And they’ve got nukes, androids, and mecha to make it happen.
Slight correction in DaveB’s Spanish for the title: Any question in Spanish should start its interrogating clause with an upside-down question mark. Also, putting the title into Google Translate renders it as “How did I get to the blood bank?” Reversing the translation gives “¿Cómo llegué al banco de sangre?”
Caveat: I’m not speaking from any more expertise than having taken several courses and using the language on a regular basis with friends for whom it’s a first language.
Dammit Dave, now I have another thing to worry about. Crazy survivalist mages, with their nuclear weapons grade magic items stored in the flimsy bunker they built with their meager practical skills, and what they were able to learn over a couple of months of weekend Home Depot/Lowes carpentry classes.
Where is the blood bank?!
Just thought of this joke.
“Dam those illegal alien’s, coming to our planet and stealing our bodies and jobs!”
“We’re going to build a wall around Earth!!!
And make the Aliens pay for it!!!”
I’m envisioning that working out something like this:
1. Earth builds Dyson (cordless) sphere around the planet.
a. Outside is covered with photovoltaic converters and laser cannons to keep aliens off our lawn, inside covered with power transmitters and high-resolution displays to simulate day and night skies.
2. Earth loses tech level (Plastic eating microbes? Idiocracy?) and forgets past achievements over many generations.
3. Future humans rediscover telescope.
4. Future astronomer: “LOL wut?!?”
woodrobin –
4. Future astronomers don’t notice, because it’s all they’ve ever seen, and it’s a half light year across.
5. Voyager runs into the crystal sphere…. turns out we are living in a pocket universe.
6. We figure out how it was done, and make a new copy.
7. This is background in Phillip Jose Farmer, “the World of Tiers” series
Not to nit-pick, but the most expansive measure of the entire Solar System (from heliopause, where the solar wind peters out and the Sun’s gravity is not noticeably stronger than that of other stars, through the solar system, to heliopause on the opposite side) is 180 astronomical units. That’s 0.00284625 light years, or about 28 hundredths of one percent of a light year. The distance to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, is over 1,510 times that far.
I was just talking about making a sphere big enough to wrap around the Earth and make a planetary solar panel. And that was mostly as a goof — it would be a ridiculously dangerous way to beam power to Earth. Maybe if you had to send the power down via wires? Space elevators with power cables built into them? Otherwise it would make way more sense to cover Mercury with solar panels and beam the power back to Earth.
Either way, nothing close to half a light year across would be involved, or even feasible — most of something that big would be too far away from the Sun to get any ‘juice’ out of it.
To quote a great mind: “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Sounds familiar.
Is it from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
@Dave , Besides asking a reader who speaks the desired language (I.e. Spanish with me), there is a trick with Google Translate that has not failed me yet. Open 2 tabs, set one English -> X and the other for X-> English. If your message can make the round trip you are mostly safe, it’s great for Chinese and non-latin languages.
And if it doesn’t make the round trip, translation fails can still be hilarious.
And when it doesn’t, turning that phrase into a babelfish translation game is worth a few minutes of entertainment.
Romance languages seem easy, but I’m surprised that works with Chinese.