Grrl Power #749 – Autopilot
Peggy once mentioned to Sydney that after a while, one can zone out while exercising. This isn’t exactly what she meant. Sydney’s barely upright at this point. You know how some racetracks are in a loop, but they have that little “Q” tail on one end? Every time Sydney got to that she just kept running straight until she realized she was running on grass.
At the last minute, I decided to put those <> brackets on Cora and Dabbler’s conversation, and make it so they’re having a private conversation in an alien language. I don’t think it would matter how tired she is, Sydney would be annoyed by having to listen in on that sort of thing. Not that it would matter too much. She’s going to be plodding along super slow there, and Dabbler has a lot of endurance normally, and is also jogging on those digitigrade legs, which gives her a greater stride and a little more spring, so she’s blow past Sydney pretty quickly. Of course, Cora is straight up cheating. She can hit around 45 MPH on those treads. A light jog is practically her idle speed.
Call on meeeeeee | Grrl Power #749 – Autopilot https://t.co/s7C7MLSYoU #webcomic #superheroes pic.twitter.com/bNsTcG6sKj
— Dave Barrack (@grrlpowercomic) July 1, 2019
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. 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.
at bottom of comic, it says jogging may not do cora any good, but keep in mind, she has to mentally control the cybernetic controls, and doing stuff like jogging may make her focu on one form or one action for long periods. think of it as being like learning multiplication table in school when young, but doing it for hours.
or she might just be doing it just to be social, or to have a chat with an old friend she has not been with for a long time
It depends on how much actively controlling her implants requires pumping blood to the “stubs”
She has to have some kind of physical exercise to keep that body (unless her species simply doesn’t gain weight beyond 5-8% bodyfat)
Or she does core exercises regularly, she doesn’t actually need a leg day. Hell, acrobatic sex with a reverse harem of sexy alien boys on the daily is probably fantastic core exercise, and I’m sure the ships shef can make both delicious and calorie friendly meals. Jogging with cybernetic limbs that are controlled directly from thought would have zero physical benefit but gossiping about super sex would have great mental benefits I’m sure… after all she’s the one who just had sex with 2 “aliens”
She never had any legs, there ARE NO STUBS.
if the implants are made correctly and programmed right, they could theoretically stimulate all the major biological parts to make them in the best physical condition her species is capable of. kinda like the electical stimulation some physical thereapissts use on bed ridden patients who can not move on their own.
What will happen to Sydney if Maxima learns about this!?!? Unless she already has!?
Learn about what? Sydney is running, Sydney is washing, Sydney is attending a meeting with a shrink
What is it that Maxi should know?
I think Black Rose means if Maxima learns that Sydney’s suffering from sort of equivalent of PTSD. Maxima’s actually pretty protective of Sydney from what we’ve seen.
she is also sleep deprived, sore, the Adrenalin has worn off, and shes back on her right meds. (it was said earlier that she carries generics which because of how they were mentioned i take as being not her normal ADD meds.) i suspect the counselor will take one look at her and suggest she take a nap while he fills out paperwork including an indication that further discussions are needed. (paperwork is eternal)
Remember: the amount of meds she currently has, increasing the dosage would basically be giving her meth (no, not Math :P)
Oh yes, good point: Maxi will be torn between being Big Sister and wanting to comfort Sydney, and being Commanding Officer and wanting to comfort Sydney (the tear will actually be in how each would offer comfort)
Yes, and remember how angry Maxima gets at the idea of putting Sydney in any sort of danger in the past, like with Sydney at the Mars factory, or when the vampire guy suggested that Sydney be involved in the search in the first place (despite the vampire making a lot of sense in why she’d be very useful in the search). Or taking Sydney to the Black Reliquiry (which she only allowed because Sydney’s shield would allow them there relatively safely and Maxima did not want to ask the Council for help getting there). Maxima definitely has a very ‘big sister’ mentality to Sydney, but she still tries really hard to comfort her when she thought she was traumatized (and tried the ‘hashtag’ thing to try to comfort her).
What sort of mad person shoots the shower directly at their face? Especially since at that angle a good bit is going straight up her nose.
The thirsty kind. Depends on the nose, to a degree.
Umm, from that angle, it ain’t going ‘straight up’ her nose
Depending on what she got up to last night (or with whom ;) ), she may be using the shower to wash her mouth out
Having been in Sydney’s current position many times, your head and body really do wake up for the jog. Then you crash like an RC plane that flew too far after you shower. It’s really the rest of the day that sucks, not the PT.
That would be Post-Hole-Excavation mode for the RC plane if I recall correctly ….. Buhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
There are people who use the shower spray to take a drink, and/or swish and gargle to get rid of that morning-breath mouth-funk feel. Also, the shower spray probably isn’t super-strong. They’re military with a ridiculous budget for paygrades, but they still have to save money somewhere, and that means low-flow showerheads. But still, even if not…that’s a lot of showerheads operating at once, so the water pressure isn’t gonna be all that strong, either way.
As regards the pressure at each shower head, that depends on a lot of engineering factors, starting with main header pressure and pipe size, water source, and so forth. Where I work, our water comes from a million gallon tank atop a water tower and goes through a reducer to lower pressure to about 50 psi. It’s delivered everywhere in 2.5″ pipes. Individual services are provided through 3/8″ lines, and you could use all the showers, all the sinks, and flush the toilets and never notice a difference in any of them.
Exactly. Sometimes when I get up in the morning and shower first thing, I will gargle with the hot water, or swish it around in my mouth a few times because I have that nasty AM mouth feeling.
i do that from time to time good way to use water pressure to rinse out mouth and sinuses if you know what you doing. also used it wheh had sore throat and white spots on tonsils, rinse back of throat out and throat feels better.
also we dealing with supers, so person doing it may have trouble getting water to wash skin, she may have thin field stopping stuff getting thru, or may be heat generator and they trying to cool off
Seems to me Sydney is showing the beginning signs of PTSD little to no sleep, nightmares, bad enough she has ADHD but add PTSD and the balls to the mix she’s about to become a major danger to herself and others even if unintentionally.
Yes. For that and other reasons, I think that while making her do things like PT and drills at this point may be accurate to how the actual military would do things, it’s still dangerous, irresponsible, and ineffective. What a shitty system.
She needs a routine and to talk.
After Significant advances in the understanding of various stress related problems made during the eighties and nineties, the Military enacted protocols to improve troop welfare.
5 year combat medic here, actually disrupting your established routine is catastrophically damaging to a vulnerable psyche, believe it or not good exercise and breakfast is still a cornerstone of starting anyday right, and her obvious exhaustion and displayed symptoms are qualitative observable data required for behavioral health specialists to log and measure the exact extent of the damage to her faculties.
PTSD is an absolute **bitch** to live with (I know firsthand, my girlfriend is very, very patient with me) but cramming someone in a hideyhole has to come later, not first. trying to enforce the “Normal” workday is important so we can see just how bad the problem is, establish the amount of additional stress an individual can take, how much permanent damage has been done, and where the “New” hard limits are. it’s an excruciatingly emotionally painful experience, but I’m sure ARC knows all of this and will get her the help she needs.
it’s stated outright that they’re not “True” military, they go by firstname basis and generally outside of work are far more relaxed and casual, I’m sure that asking for a day off is a lot easier, or getting an extended week or even just saying “fuck it, I need a week vacation to play wow, run my comic shop, call me if there’s an emergency.”
Check me on this though, @Logan. As a 5 year combat medic who knows a bit about PTSD from the inside, would you recommend wrapping the pew-pew orb in duct tape or something that would take at least a second or two to get off? Sort of like how if somebody can’t stop carrying a weapon they should at least turn on the safety?
BTW, thanks for your service, and you have my sympathy for any PTSD symptoms you still have. (You are blessed to have a very, very patient GF who works with you – that’s something all too many sufferers do not have).
The PPO has a built in safety switch. Sydney noted that it was much “harder” to activate than the others. Denying her access to her own powers also seems like a terrible idea to me. She needs more autonomy, not to feel like she’s being controlled even more than she is now.
grean is air and purpel is shield ppo is hovering above head so air and shield are taped to hands.
How much of an established routine would Sydney have after basically one week of training?
Sydney has a hygienic portable bathtub in that shield ball if it can form around the pipe without severing it / the water flow.
or if/when the air ball is also a water ball somehow
No, the shield would do it – if it could form with the showerhead inside and not chopped off. But I think it would defeat the purpose of the shield if water could flow thru it when in a pipe.
She has an atmosphere ball, I am expecting water at any temp she wants as a definite possibility, the chance for some kind of hamster feeder of god strength mana and a very uncomfortable direct waste removal.
A good therapist will not assume they can quickly deduce the true causes of a patient’s distress. In Sydney’s case, it could be that the shocks of several days of near-death experiences have finally caught up with her. Or perhaps it is her fears of what could happen next, be it further encounters with her recent foes, or whatever other horrors her new-found super status might bring her way. Then again, like in the early restaurant scene, she may be feeling overwhelmed by how powerful she has become, and by the immense responsibilities that inevitably come with such power. Or maybe, just maybe, her empowering victory and her recent alien romance have somehow cross-fertilized in her deep unconscious with her well known hentai tentacle fascination (and possibly some lingering daddy issues), resulting in a newly emergent kink that her conscious mind is simply not yet prepared to contemplate.
Or maybe it’s just the grakz.
That’s why the shrink is letting Sydney do the talking, well, sort of
Sorry, Sydney, I am severely distracted from your suffering by the built, buff, strong women around you.
there’s a support group for that… come join us.
I think there’s something wrong with the perspective of the tiger vs the body it’s on. Not an artist and can’t quite figure out what it is.
Her back is curved, which at this angel makes the tattoo curve weirdly.
Personally, would have gone with “Buhh” “Guhh” & “Duhh” for the three panels :P
Dang, those are some serious baggage Sydney is carrying
Sydney is like “I can’t even.”
Literally.
Can’t blame her for it though.
What? Symptoms of psychological distress related to combat-originating trauma? That’s not actually a thing, is it? /s
Seriously though, yup Dave. Just yup. It always bugged me how glossing over how traumatic combat is has become the norm in fiction. Sydney is basically untrained. The few days, maybe a week at most, of training she’s had is woefully inadequate to prepare one for the horrors of life and death combat. I would expect her to be having some SERIOUS psychological problems right now. I’m glad you’re having her react realistically. Heck, her rather bold approach to Leon – and that “let’s share him” suggestion to Krona – could even be a symptom.
I took the unspoken part of that to be, “Because, hey, I might die next week, so I’d better get my fun in while I can, and not be too picky about the details.”
The late John Steakley‘s book Armor is largely a book about the effects of trauma. It’s a good story too, but impossible stress is the primary conflict.
I think it is the book that Starship Troopers should have been.
Must read Armor again (sorry, can’t do italics, my computer does weird things instead.) I’ve been avoiding it for years because the last page depressed me. Still a pretty good story.
My thoughts are more mixed I feel like she could definitely have some form of PTSD but also she was running on fumes with little to no sleep for the entirety of it. I recently did a 3000 Mile road trip and it took a week to fully recover from it after. So far Sydney got back had a massive party was up late and is now attempting everyday life with no break for recovery. Add in the PTSD of serious com at and that’s an emotional/physical implosion of almost all faculties.
I think I may have found a Douglas Adams quote that sums up Dabbler’s philosophy of life quite nicely:
“Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
Or, to phrase it another way, her continuing mission is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new partners and new combinations, to boldy eff like no one has effed before.
Think the unthinkable, do the undoable, eff the ineffable…
…row row, fight the power?
I really hope to see how this whole idiotic “force sleep deprived Sydney to exercise” thing spectacularly backfires on them.
Oh yes, soldiers should not be forced to do daily exercise and established routine after having a rough night, they should be allowed to sleep in until noon and be issued extra fluffy pillows and kept away from loud noises
she just got back. in her framework shes only been gone a couple days. everyone else has been back for months.
she is fatigued and trying to process things trying to actually kill her and her killing those things. i have seen PTSD start real fast but not that real fast it usually takes a bit of time to come on. and you can tell especially if you arent next to the person every day. the thousand yard stare the odd walks or twitches ect, ect, ect. folks just seem to assume that if you are in a life and death fight your gonna come down with PTSD and thats simply not true. Syd is more than likley NOT going to have any problems because she wasn’t helpless. she could control part of the conflict she chose to attack and had the power to change the outcome.
she wasn’t ordered into the breech like cannon fodder with inadiquite equipment and a sense that if she disobeys she will be killed by the machine. oh and not everyone gets PTSD any how or even suffers from a bad dream over killing in battle. training has no effect on it either folks with years of training get PTSD.
the point is that its all a toss up as to what effect a fight is going to have on her and yet folks seem to think she’s just gonna crater when the pressure comes off.
Interesting facts there, and well argued.
However you are only looking at the obvious fight, rather than Sydney’s recent life before that. PTSD does not just derive from combat, as the “traumatic stress” part of the disorder’s name indicates. However Sydney has been involved in several combats, as well as other stressful events and situations sufficient to be traumatic to her. Some of them are individually enough to potentially trigger PTSD, whilst others (in the rapid succession Sydney faced, with no cool-down period, holiday or way to de-stress) would compound to create a cumulative stress, despite being less serious individually.
Here are a few examples, off the top of my head:
1) Being involved in a bank robbery, where Sydney saw ‘the bullet that was about to kill her’ being stopped by Maxima. *
2) The backstabbing at the beginning of the battle at the Steak House car park. Whilst Halo did fight back with vicious glee and devastating effectiveness, her initial survival was down to the pure luck of glimpsing the attack, by pure chance. This has a double impact on her psyche. Firstly another near death experience. Secondly I am sure she will have been troubled, in her sleep, or repressed and bottled up, at the realisation of how easily and readily she was able to cause grievous har. Worse still that she revelled in it.
is this me projecting onto Sydney? No. Sydney is quite squeamish (I cite the example of her looking like she was going to puke at the thought of aiding Maxima in ripping off Vehemence’s arm).
3) Aiding Maxima in ripping off Vehemence’s arm. Sydney pixelated her own mental imagery of Maxima warning her to check what is behind her primary target. She did not even want to clearly imagine shooting someone’s arm off!
4) Putting her life in Vehemence’s hands, by trapping herself in the shield with Vehemence on the inside (in order that her shield would protect everybody outside from his aggro aura). She was clearly petrified that she had made a poor judgement call (in trusting the raport she had established with Vehemence would protect her).
5) Finding out that vampires, werewolves and other supernatural monsters are real (note that this occurred at a time when Sydney was extremely sleep deprived, with her meds having run out and already having a very tough day). Specifically I am pointing out that Sydney collapsed during this process. Much of it caused her glee, yet we saw her body/brain reacting adversely to the stresses being put upon her at that time.
6) Dying. Sydney was astute enough to immediately realise that she may have been killed by Sciona and have been reconstructed by Krona. Whilst she covered this with humour (giving herself an ‘achievement unlocked’ award), we have seen Halo using comedy to shield herself.
7) Having a massive breakdown and nose bleed at the pool-side, when she took Harem’s teasing about Sydney having to take her turn exposing her body to teammates. At the time she was still finding it necessary to cover herself up even in the showers, due to personal embarrassment, and a feeling of inadequacy compared to the amazonian good looks of the other female supers.
* Note that although we, the readers, know that this was a staged robbery Sydney did not and still is unaware of that, so the trauma is that of being involved in a near fatal robbery, from her point of view.
“1) Being involved in a bank robbery, where Sydney saw ‘the bullet that was about to kill her’ being stopped by Maxima. *”
False assertion, she didn’t see the bullet, until after Maxima stopped it.
From a psychological impact point of view your hair splitting is irrelevant.
Sydney saw the gun being pointed at her face, the trigger being pulled and the gun firing, then she saw Maxima holding the bullet, thus confirming (from Sydney’s perspective) that this experience was very real and that she had almost died.
Plus, from a linguistics point of view, please note that I placed the disputed phrase in inverted commas, in order to indicate that this was how Sydney would recall the incident (i.e. that some aspect of the sentence should not be taken literally, or may be subject to dispute by pedants). This is often used in factual news reporting.
I had considered using ‘the bullet with her name on it’, but decided that the value of an artistic turn of phrase was not worth the inevitable subsequent quibbling.
The bullet was about to kill her, until Maxima stopped it, in front of Sydney’s eyes.
Cora and Dabbler (simultaneously, many, many times): “On your left…”
Hey, completely unrelated to any discussion happening, but does anyone remember when Sydney took that orphaned node on the Comm-ball? That mystery’s never been resolved so far as I know. I mean, I don’t think that that was the thing that let her switch places with her illusory duplicate or anything. If I’m wrong, let me know, but if I’m right, I think Dave might have a new mini-plot to explore! :)
Unless she put two points into the Comm-ball, then yes, it is the Holo-port
After she took that node, she noticed a new “Ghosted out” option on the Com Ball. It only lit up when she used the Lightbee to do recon in Sciona’s base in the candy bar factory, and thats when she found out it was the teleport. It was never explicitly stated (as in, Sydney never explicitly stated it to anyone) because Sydney thought it might be nice to have a power that was completely “off the books” in case she had to deal with “Dark Maxima” some day. But she wound out telling maxima about it anyway when she got back from her space adventure, just not “on camera”
That red chair looks amazingly comfortable. And that room… I envy a library like that!
Envy not the tombs that whisper to you, in the night and the chains and wards that bind the terrors within them!
“I’m far to terrified of the thought of the force of primal chaos that Halo might become after talking to the Simurgh, though. Eek.” Being the daughter, of chaos, that describes me. :)
I thoughts I made a comment yesterday.
*cries*
It is not there. Mind you I am as tired now (and was then) as Sydney is above, so unsurprising.
Comments making it onto the board seem to be more hit and miss since the site changed software. Duplicate posts have slowed down though.
Honestly if i was Syndey’s NCPO I would have sent her to her rack. There’s nothing to be gained from her going through her day like this
No, nothing except a sense of normalcy and routine, and she doesn’t need either of those
She’s only been in the military a week. That’s not long enough for this to feel routine at all.
I would probably discharge her back to civilian life for a week or two, go work at her comic shop, which is what will feel routine and comforting to her.
I agree. I think either Dave or Peggy dropped the ball proceeding this way.
Nightmares about PE. How many nerds have them?
Sydney must do sports with top athletes and supermodels.
Even if no one is bullying her, that can lead to an inferior complex and nightmares.
I already have a bad feeling about this counsellor. I’ve seen many, many counsellors in my life, and none of them have called me “Miss [Surname]”. (In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been called “Miss [Surname]” by anyone in my life, in any context.) Nor have any of them had such a fancy office with a fancy chair. To be fair, I’ve never seen a private counsellor, and I’m not American (I’m Canadian), so maybe this is just how private counsellors are in the US (you’d certainly think so, the way they’re portrayed in pretty much all American media). But I’d say that kind of formality is intimidating at the best of times, let alone for someone whose job it is to get a complete stranger feeling comfortable enough to open up to them. I know this is the military, and therefore it’s more formal (and they can afford a nice office), but this still seems like the mark of an out-of-touch counsellor to me.
Unless they have another dark-skinned redhead on the team, Anvil is far too short.
She’s in the background.