Grrl Power #773 – Pentamory
Harem might have polyamory down to a science, but that doesn’t mean all of her advice will be applicable to anyone but herself.
The masculine of ‘mistress’ is actually ‘master.’ I mean, it’s obvious if you think about it, but of course no one uses that term to mean that because of gender biases in English, (and probably most languages, come to think of it). According to a quick internet search, Sydney’s last guess ‘manstress’ seems to be the most widely accepted alternate, but even so, no one really says that either. Instead it’s boy-toy or sugar daddy or something a little more descriptive depending on the role the man is filling.
See now, if I was Harem, I think it would be pretty amazing to “date” someone while doing certain other activities. Skydiving for instance. Riding a roller coaster. Something where you can make a shitload of noise anyway and no one would give it a second thought. The only problem with doing something that makes your stomach do flip flops while other parts of you do flip flops is that it could set the bar for future encounters really high. Like, beyond the capabilities of even a high end shower head with the really nice massage setting.
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Ok, more explanation…
That’s one of the cool things about this comic…
Only concern on the sky diving or really any dangerous activity while she is “Dating” is distraction. Pull the cord a bit late and injuries or death. . . Not fun thoughts either.
If anything goes wrong, she can just teleport out of danger. Or even “unteleport” and store that body for later, if there’s nowhere safe in range.
Daniel here. Don’t forget, she could be quite distracted at the time, plus if she does Vorp in time she keeps all her momentum, meaning she would also have to aim her exit in a direction where she can safely loose that momentum without splattering into something else instead. All while either in the middle of the act or at least still riding the afterglow…
I’m imagining too much excitement running the risk of switching out SuicideGirl for Strawberry, but Strawberry was jumping out of a plane while Suicide was getting it on.
That’s one very very powerful…
Someone dies if she was on top.
“… nowhere safe in range.”
Uhh, I didn’t know she had a range, other than same planet, type of range, for teleporting…
Harem’s rules are line of sight or if she’s very familiar with the place, like her childhood home or something.
I have always had an issue with the ‘line of sight’ rule. Technically the Moon is line of sight.
The same ‘memory or line of sight’ rule applied in the ‘Dragonriders of Pern’ series. The rider telepathically told the dragon where to teleport to. It worked fine for centuries until they uncovered artifacts from a previous civilization, including telescopes. Soon after that they discovered their solar system had other planets.
Yes, technically, the Moon is “line-of-sight”, but I think in this case, it’s more about depth perception and being able to judge distances. Yes, you could know that the moon is 238,855 miles from the Earth, but that’s really just an average distance, since the moon’s orbit isn’t perfectly circular. To teleport there, you would need to know the EXACT distance to the surface at that time, or you could end up either inside the moon, or 25,000 miles away (the difference between how close it can be and how far it can be).
It should have nothing to do with depth perception, simply the ability to tell if there is something where she is about to land, which is why her ‘rules’ involves ‘line-of-sight’ and being very familiar with the location
She does not calculate the distance, she simply sees the destination, and goes there, it’s the reason why she doesn’t ‘time-travel’ every time she goes more than two time zones away (or, as you pointed out, end up inside ground or not even on the planet anymore)
The problem there wouldn’t be misjudging the range since she could still do the jump in 10 steps, with shorter and shorter jumps if she can jump far and often. It’s all vacuum anyway. The problem with the moon is that it’s very very fast relative to earth. So if she doesn’t have some way of adjusting relative velocity…SPLAT
Teleportation fun fact. 1640mph is Earth rotational speed….. Teleport to far side of planet…. 3280 mph for road rash from hell…. Plus at mach 4 wind impact most of that body would be jelliefied… One time zone 750 miles in North America would put her exit speed at 165mph…. Terminal for a normal but survivable for combined Harem….. Or if she aimed up in air would give time to do a vertical velocity bleed and landing bamf…. An instinctive panic jump to family farm homestead bedroom could be very very fatal.
Not to mention, where we see the moon at in the sky is no longer in that postion by the time the light reaches our eyes. It’s further than you think about 1300 meters… if she could teleport to the moon because she can see it, she’d miss her target by 1300 meters…
Not to mention, where we see the moon at in the sky is no longer in that postion by the time the light reaches our eyes. It’s further than you think about 1300 meters… if she could teleport to the moon because she can see it, she’d miss her target by 1300 meters
So if one harem gets an STD do they all get them? Just the symptoms? Or can each of them have a different one?
Hrm. I wonder if each one of the bodies has to eat. Or sleep. Do supers even get sick in this universe, though?
It seems as though all of the expected physical requirements are present for each of her bodies. Having just one mind doesn’t keep a body or several bodies from needing to eat food for energy. Sleep is a tricky one because that is a mental rest more than a physical rest…
Taxes should already be fairly complicated. We don’t know how Archon is paying her, but prior to Archon when she was busy picking up multiple skills by having five bodies out experiencing life all at the same time Harem would have had five paychecks and therefore five W2s. So five full time jobs all attached to a single SSN, which might raise an eyebrow at the IRS.
And sadly she can only claim herself once as a dependent, despite needing to house and feed and clothe every body that is out and about.
I believe the multiple people using one SSN but only one can get a refund is why the IRS is a bit lax on that form of identity theft. Since it is tax money that just stays.
Hours are not actually reported… or they weren’t, before the Affordable Care Act. Even afterward, I don’t imagine there’s any reason for the IRS to cross-reference the ACA paperwork with the W-2, since the ACA forms are only used to verify that the proper health insurance was offered aand accepted or rejected by the recipient.
Well someone posted that Maxima ordered Harem to always have one of her bodies in uniform at all times, so apparently Dave has decided that her superpower includes no need to sleep, since having one body awake and on duty at all times obviously precludes her one mind ever getting any sleep. So now I’m wondering if any of her bodies ever sleeps, because why would they?
Either that, or her Power treats sleep as an exhaustion of the body rather than the mind. (The science of our world can’t prove that it isn’t, because all of our potential test subjects have only one of each.) That way, each individual body sleeps as and when it needs to do so, but the mind can stay awake in the others. Similar to the way some fish and (especially migratory) birds can sleep on one half of their brain at a time, while the other takes care of keeping the animal cruising along. Whether the sleeping body dreams, and whether that bleeds over to affect the waking bodies, is currently unknown – I’d guess it does, based purely on the potential comedy value of such bleed-over.
I certainly wouldn’t read “one of her bodies in uniform at all times” as requiring that it always be the same body. If she can sleep in shifts, she can stand watch in shifts; the only difference in having Harem stand shifts compared to a team of Baseline Humans, from an operational point of view, is the perfect understanding between shifts with no need for handover meetings.
They would all feel any symptoms of an STD, but only the actual body would have the STD. When she broke her wrist, they all felt it, but only one of them actually had broken bones.
I’m thinking Super Immunity.
Line of sight here is used in the sense of her being able to see her destination in detail. She did mention that binoculars help, but only to a point. A telescope that could give you good detail on a human scale of the lunar surface through Earth’s atmosphere would be really hard to find.
Dabbler’s Science Corner 2 specifically mentions that she can’t use a telescope to teleport to the Moon, as using magnification to give her a detailed image of her destination has diminishing returns as distance/magnification increases. In fact, it’s even stated that she can’t use vision-enhancing tech to teleport 17 miles to the horizon via line-of-sight.
Also, even if she could, if she retained her direction of travel and momentum relative to the surface of the Moon . . . ouch.
She also used live television broadcast to teleport.
So she could use Curiosity.
She said “I know where the bank is,” and she then used the live footage from the bank’s security cameras to determine where the ambulance was in the parking lot. So it seems like it was a combo of location familiarity (which increases her range, with the longest mentioned being returning to her childhood home from “hundreds of miles away”) and vision-supplementing tech (live video).
Given that she also specifically says her momentum is conserved. Even if the fact that there is an average delay of about 12 minutes while light and/or radio waves travel from Mars to Earth wouldn’t stretch the definition of “live video” too far, there’s going to be a huge difference in her speed as a person on Earth and the speed of the surface of Mars near the Curiosity rover.
I’m not saying she couldn’t do it at all. Maybe her powers will increase with practice, like building endurance or musculature. I’m just not sure how she’d survive doing it.
Actually, having said that, Dabbler could probably come up with some sort of inertial shunt . . . but solo Harem . . . whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiizzsplat.
Yes, she had no problem with getting to the bank, she just had to know where the ecnalubma was so she could safely *VORP* inside without being seen
As for travelling to another planet (ignoring the hostile environment: would the life-support suit and equipment exceed her *VORP* limit?), she could simply *VORP* a couple (hundred?) feet above the surface and then freefall until she got a good view of the ground and spot a safe-spot to touchdown (using that technique she demonstrated to Sydney coming back from the comic shop to land as softly as a lamb’s fart)
She might survive that, if she correctly oriented her direction of momentum to send her away from Mars. That said, the relative velocity of Earth and Mars varies between 6 and 54 kilometers per second (leaving out rotation of either planet — at these speeds the rotational velocities are trivial additions or subtractions). That’s between 13,421 and 120,795 miles per hour, or between Mach 17 and Mach 157. Even in Mars’ thin atmosphere, Harem’s going to need one heck of a heat shield. Oh, and the escape velocity for Mars is 34 km/s, so if she doesn’t pick the right time to make the port, she may need to repeat the trip out of Mars’ atmosphere a few times to bleed off enough speed, or she’d just keep heading out.
She’d be much better off hitching a ride in Cora’s ship or riding along with Sydney (assuming that Aether Causeways in-system aren’t some kind of hazard — the original owner of the orbs crash-landed on Earth, after all).
And shortly after that, discovered explosive decompression…
I do not think it means what you think it means.
We get the bends if we experience sudden changes in pressure, but that doesn’t occur in 25m of water (additional 2.5 atmospheres pressure). Losing a single atmosphere of pressure, even within seconds shouldn’t present a problem. It appears our bodies can take the shock. Unprotected cosmic and solar radiation however… The sunny side of the moon’s surface is up to 125°C (the boiling point of water is 100°C). Then there is the whole breathing thing.
I can see that there is a moon, but I do not have anything close to human scale resolution.
The same way I can see there is a city on the Horizon, but not have any real resolution for it.
Without that resolution, a thing is not in my “line of sight” any more then the other side of the planet.
Dave ruled teleporting to the Moon out in by having Dabbler mention it in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-dabblers-science-corner-2/
Unteleporting strengthens the other bodies out so what happens to the momentum?
Can she add a kinetic boost to one or all others by removing one that’s moving very fast?
Alternatively does she need to rememberer for when she brings out the body the next time.
Don’t believe she can share the momentum between the bodies: the one who started with the momentum keeps the momentum until they lose it
“Alright, gotta pull the ripcord in 3….2….1…”
“OH GOD, OOOOOOOOHHHHHHH! AAAAAHHHHH…”
“Ripcord girl, pull the ripcord! Damn IT PULL THE RIPCORD!!!”
*Harem found out that day what happens when 1 of her bodies dies…*
Yeah, that would be a problem…
Not as much as you’d think. Remember, she can reorient herself while teleporting to cause her momentum to be counteracted by gravity. So technically she can fall from any height and land safely.
But then, where does that leave her “partner?”
0.0
Still in the same spot he/she was having sex with another Harem?
The second half of your comment got me wondering whether Harem has ever screwed herself.
Most people masturbate. No matter how many bodies she has, sex with one’s self is by definition masturbation.
Her masturbation videos would probably make more money though.
That’s just masturbation, from a certain point of view, so probably. Especially if she’s bi- or pan-sexual, there wouldn’t really be anything that weird about it.
She is clearly at least bisexual. In this very comic she corrected Sydney’s “Dating multiple guys” to “dating multiple people.”
In a prior comic she also seemed to be very interested in sex with Dabbler.
It has been heavily implied that she has. Pretty early on, if I remember correctly.
Yes – she’s said as much (below the main comic) – https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-197-feminist-v-feminist/
Not to forget the Playboy layout interview
Not if she gets ‘distracted’ at the wrong moment
Just in case somebody does deploy their main parachute late, there is an alternate parachute on the front, which will deploy manually or by an adjustable altimeter, if the main chute has not been deployed by the time you get to the preset limit. Being distracted by other-body orgasm is not the usual reason for the altimeter to deploy the alternate, but it would do that too.
when Harry met Daphne?
I find myself wishing this comments section had a thumbs up button I could smash repeatedly for you.
I’ll have what she is having!
The gender-neutral term I’d reach for there (given Harem swings both ways, wildly, and with abandon) might be “consorts.”
Which, you know, she certainly would be.
Ahem. I’ll show myself out.
and considering her activities with Dus. that brings new meaning to consorting with the enemy
I’m pretty sure that that is the original meaning.
Insert ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ joke here.
…Be careful what you wish for, since you don’t know exactly what (or who) she’s having…
Yeah we do, Nachos!
Trent.
That’s the swarm of tentacles wearing a trenchcoat, right?
That is indeed him.
I’d like to see him visit Arc Swat again.
To watch anime and cooking shows with Sydney, of course.
If it’ll get me the reaction she’s having, I’m willing to experiment.
I wonder, what would happen if Harem one day decides to merge all her current personalities into one.
Also, in case of STI or pregnancy (regardless of having practised safe sex): do all copies get it? are all copies pregnant? is only one effected?
No, the copies are distinct physical entities. When 1 broke her hand, only that one had a broken hand.
BUT all copies could feel the pain.
And there is only one personality, because there is only one Daphne (she just gets to experience life spread in six bodies)
Actually, she currently has five bodies. As for pregnancy, diseases or other physical issues, only the body that go the sperm, bacteria or injury would be physically affected, but all the mental and sensory information would be shared. “You’re not the one whose pregnant! Why are you puking?”
Yeah, it was a joke, many people in the past have speculated that she has a sixth (or even a seventh) in storage or living another life unknown to Archon
Deliberately left off the shifty-eyes or wink or poked-tongue as a trap :D
well if this strip is any indication
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-422-out-patience/
When she (in her own words) “un-de-teleports” she still has the pain and other physical symptoms of her duplicates.
A pregnant or infected duplicate could go into a sort of stasis until “respawned” or she could end up absorbing all of their physical conditions (including being pregnant).
From a pure safety standpoint, I imagine she’d probably keep a pregnant copy separated until the baby actually shows up. However, since they all share a psychical/emotional link to one another (since when one gets their boots knocked they all apparently feel and enjoy it), they would all get the joys of dealing with the not-so-fun parts of being pregnant (morning sickness, constant need to pee in later stages, back pain, sensitivity in various body parts, etc).
Though that does also beg the question as to what would happen if the Daphne-Prime became pregnant while she didn’t have any dupes out (for whatever reason), and then decided to split again. Would all of them be pregnant?
We’d probably need Dave to clarify just how this would work. But as long as he didn’t decide to pull the same dumb crap with that situation that Marvel did with Multiple Man’s kid with Siryn (they apparently forgot babies are a combination of their parents DNA/genes and not just a copy of one or the other), guess it wouldn’t matter beyond the entertainment value for us.
There is no ‘Daphne-Prime’, not even Daphne Herself remembers who was first, and any one of them can be the ‘Last Girl Standing’ with the others ‘stored away’
Citation needed.
I assumed one day her power manifested and she woke up on both sides of the bed.
Then, every 12 to 18 months thereafter she respawned as a non-identical twin.
Don’t have a citation, and could be wrong, butt fairly sure DaveB Himself said that: Strawberry is the least ‘modified’ butt that doesn’t mean that she is the ‘original’
Remember: there is only one Daphne, who just happens to inhabit more than one body
Fairly sure, she had the *VORP* power first, and then one day, there were two of her when she left herself behind
I would assume that as long as a Harem is physically connected to the parasite, so until birth, it’ll stay with that body just like a broken arm. Teleporting around with it might have some typical superhero comic effects on the kid but I don’t think it’d have any immediate effects.
“Undie teleports” is how Deus removes her bra.
She has ONLY ONE personality
The trouble with “dating” someone while skydiving… is definitely timing. No, wait, she can teleport. She just needs the parachute.
Technically, she doesn’t even need the parachute.
Technically she doesn’t even need a plane to jump out of.
Thinking about it I’d say she’s technically the fastest member. They only need a camera feed somewhere they want the team to be and she can be there. Even if there’s only one nearby she can probably hop by how far she can see very fast from that point.
An important question: if a person dates 1 copy of Harem, do they always get the same copy (say the Blonde one), or does she mix it up?
She doesn’t even need a parachute. She can just reverse her momentum to slow down and land safely.
Going by what’s shown (always the white haired one with Deus) I think she keeps her forms monogamous
i would guess people would prefer the same copy every time. what with sti’s being a thing
It has been Abby (with the white hair), not Blondini (with the blonde hair) who has been the one to associate with SmugD
That is going to be one interesting marriage to say the least.
Would that even qualify as an open marriage?
That said, whoever she decides to settle down with is going to be in for some serious fun times in the bedroom.
Her code name is indeed, truth in advertising.
Ok, here’s a real question. If Daphne only has one social security number, does that mean she only gets one paycheck? Seeing as her living expenses are 5 times greater that seems a little unfair. But if she gets 5 paychecks, she’s still only doing one tax return so her taxable income would be marked as 5 times greater than her colleagues. Whichever way you spin it, Daphne is getting royally screwed over moneywise.
They get paid biweekly whatSidney made in a year.
And Sidney is a recruit, Harem a corporal
I think she can manage
Plus we know one of her is boning Deus on the regular. And who knows who else she’s having play the role of Sugar Daddy.
Between her paycheck and other activities, pretty sure she’s doing just fine financially.
DaveB has said they get paid like NFL pros, so I suspect Harem can manage.
When you remember how much the team is paid, she is doing just fine money wise.
its probably one check but its bigger. remember max ordered her to have one copy in uniform at all times, so harem is on duty 24 hours a day. there has to be compensation for that
8 hours normal pay, 16 hours overtime? At time-and-a-half, that’s 4 times pay. If overtime is double-pay, that’s 5 times pay – one for each body.
What overtime? She can rotate who is on duty, so one can be resting for her next shift
If she is one person and gets one paycheck, it’s overtime. You don’t get to pick and choose which definition applies where.
How is it overtime? o_O
Because normally anything over 8 hours of work is overtime.
If Daphne is employed as one person, then any time spend working past those 8 hours is overtime, it doesn’t matter if her powers allow her to be awake 24/7 in some way, if she is working those hours she should be paid for them.
Though while she probably can make long hours by shuffling through which body rests, I wouldn’t be surprised if Max telling she wanted one body in uniform at all times included the asterisk ‘when you are on the clock’. Just because she has 5 bodies doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve some days off.
A wonderful thing about the military is that they own your ass 24/7/365.25. There is no overtime in the military. There are no “eight hour days.” Heinlein said it in Starship Troopers: “Six days shalt though work, all thou art able; the seventh the same, and clean out the stable.”
Yeah, she does get time off, just like everyone else
Can someone link to that page where Maxi ordered one of Daphne to be in uniform? Have a feeling (may be wrong, hence the requested link to the page) that it was simply one of her in uniform at all times that she is on duty, not that she has to be in uniform 24 hours a day
Order to have an instance in uniform at all times was given when she appeared in the ambulance after the the bank heist. Hijinks related to non-uniform dress ensued.
Thank you, like said, wasn’t entirely sure what the exact wording of the command was
Overtime isn’t usually relative to a flat eight hours, but to whatever is in the worker’s contract. For instance, some areas of the factory where I work run shifts of twelve hours on and twelve off, four days on that rotation and four days off (i.e. A B A B A B A B C D C D C D C D and repeat). On that system, ‘overtime’ doesn’t cut in until the thirteenth hour or the fifth ‘on’ day.
If Harem’s contract says ‘eight hours times five bodies times six days’, than it’s between her and Archon whether or not the bodies do their eight hours at the same time. I suspect it would be instead be worded as ‘240 body-hours’, thus allowing for any preferences about which body does which hours in which roles and for how long at a time.
The EU Working Time Directive (as implemented in each country’s own legal system) does provide protections against being obliged to work more than 48 hours in a week on average, but it specifically allows individuals to opt out of the limit and work longer if they want to. Note that the calculation period for that ‘average’ is quite long, so it’s perfectly feasible to have long shifts balanced by long breaks (as in the offshore oil and gas industry, for an extreme example).
Either she is one person with one paycheck and gets paid for all hours worked by any and all her bodies – including overtime for anything over 40 hours a week – or she’s 5 people and gets 5 paychecks.
We know that she’s supposed to have at least one of her on duty at all times, so that’s 168 hours a week, 128 of which is overtime and thus comes out to a total pay of 232 hours. The alternative is to pay all 5 of her at least 40 hours a week for a total of 200 hours pay, slightly less expensive for good ol’ Uncle Sam, but still quite a big chunk of change even before you consider that they’re paid like rock stars. Whichever approach Archon takes I think Harem is probably fine.
She is one person, with one social security card and one salary. There is no such thing in the military as “overtime,” except in the sense, “Over time, you’ll get pretty tired.” Sydney does not collect seven salaries for having seven orbs. Aztec doesn’t collect extra for having billions of potential power gestalts. Multiple bodies is just part of Harem’s superpower. If you think you need to pay more to Harem because her superpower manifests as five bodies, imagine what you’d have to pay Max for the ability to wipe out alien invasions.
What would concern me, if she is indeed keeping one body awake and in uniform 24 hours a day, is how her mind gets any sleep. There are psychological as well as physiological reasons why humans need sleep. Staying awake 24/7, even if her physiology permits it, is likely to drive her insane within a few weeks.
All military are “on duty” 24 hours a day. They are not always awake. They are usually divided into “duty sections” with more regimented responsibilities, and even these sections usually have time to sleep.
If that is correct (her being in uniform 24 hours a day), nothing was said that it had to be the same body for 24 hours
Remember after the bank blunder, and the Maxima Wedgie? We saw one of her (Berry) in the common room wearing her “Thing 1” shirt, one of her (Gothamer) having lunch, one of her (Abby) opening a cupboard (with her face) and one of her (Bodie) actually getting the wedgie (we never saw Blondini, so it’s possible she was in storage)
And it was Bodie who was in uniform so either she is the designated uniformed body when on-shift (in the same way that it seems it is Abby who is the primary SmugD liaison) or it was simply her turn (although, so far, Bodie is the one seen most often in uniform…)
The number of bodies Harem has is irrelevant to my point. She only has one mind and that one mind cannot stay awake for weeks on end without psychological damage. Daphne’s mind, as far as we know, needs sleep just like everybody else’s mind.
But sleep is a requirement of the physical brain, of which Harem has 5. Just like any of her other physical needs, I expect sleep is required by each individual body, same as food, etc.
Yes, which means, as long as that body gets some sleep, she should be okay, because cereally doubt she has had all five sleeping at the same time (at least, not voluntarily or willingly)
The point of non-synchronous sleep is interesting as well actually. She discussed in-comic how ordering meals with clashing favors was a processing issue; what happens when 2 of her are asleep and having 2 distinct, bizarre dreams mixing with the activities of the other 3?
Even being used to processing 5 input streams, that would be hard to deal with. Seems far easier to sync up on sleep than try to focus on important tasks while also flying a unicorn through the Deathstar with Aragorn. Or even worse, having PowerPoint presentations pushed into your dream worlds.
The human need to sleep is mostly due to sleep hormones, a brain chemistry thing. There’s a guy in Vietnam whose brain stopped producing those hormones after a head injury during the Vietnam war. He hasn’t needed – or been able to – sleep ever since. You’d never know the difference. (Note, however, that I first learned about that guy 20 years ago. It’s likely he’s died of old age by now).
Anyway, mental rest doesn’t require sleep, just relaxation. And as long as each of her bodies sleep often enough to clear out the adenosine and melatonin she’s probably fine.
In the military, the paycheck is a salary, not wages. There is no “overtime” on salary.
Well, not necessarily, I was “salary non-exempt” for a while at one job. It’s a nice deal if you can get it, the advantages of salary, but you still get overtime.
But, yeah, the military probably doesn’t do salary non-exempt, it’s a civilian employment law thing.
not quite true. there’s technically no overtime, but you get compensated, if you do make overtime, such as being in the field for training, or standing guard, or being on patrol. you either get more free time or it is financially compensated. there’s also compensation, when you get deployed. since you can’t spend all of it, it’s quite a sum, you amount during deployment.
Military pay can be weird, but it is all spelled out online, so the civilian masters can see.
To start with, there is base pay, the salary that each soldier/sailor/airman receives. Then, because nobody could live on that pittance without drawing food stamps, there are allowances. The military tries to provide every member with “three hots and a cot.” Nearly all of the bases have chow halls and barracks, but often their salary may be augmented with Basic Allowance for Subsistence aka lunch money and/or Basic Allowance for Quarters. Married troops get BAQ unless they live in government owned housing. When order require the troop to subsist on a local economy away from home base, there is Per Diem, an allowance to pay for hotels, food, transport, yada yada. When the army sets up a camp/laager/station in a foreign country, there is no Per Diem. They live in the camp or whatever. There is a one-time Clothing Allowance which isn’t money, but initial issue of something like six sets of skivvies, six pairs each of dress socks and undress socks, a dress uniforms, a number of undress uniforms, shoes, boots, belts, buckles, hats… Sailors refer to it as their sea bag. Ground pounders have a different name. I assume airheads have a name of their own as well. Then there’s an annual Clothing Maintenance Allowance for partial replacement of uniforms. It isn’t much. There are also Specialty Pays and Hazardous Duty Pays that someone called deployment pays. I was Nuclear Trained and drew Proficiency Pay for that. I was a submarine sailor and drew Sub Pay, a category of Hazardous Duty Pay plus Sea Pay when the ship was at sea. When deployed to a War Zone, none of the pay during that time is taxable.
https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/Pay-Tables.html
There was never any financial compensation for overtime when I was in, nor were there any records kept to keep track either.
Ah, I forgot that that was one of the many ways in which the labour laws in the USA are messed up.
I work in the UK. I am salaried. I get paid overtime. That’s standard practice
Are you in the service? That’s what people are getting at: while in the military you get paid differently than if you are a civilian, and, in the military, there is no overtime as you don’t get to ‘clock out’ at the end of the day, you are on duty 24 hours a day, butt you only have to work in shifts
Please, someone correct me about the logistics slash details
Though their payscale is high, Archon is military and their facilities show a branch seal just like Army, Navy, Airforce, Marine Corps, and Coastguard facilities.
They’re all salaried, so there is no overtime.
Besides all of the above, when it comes to Uniform Allowance (which is added to her paycheck) she’ll have no problem with the costs of maintenance to keep up her uniforms, at least. Pretty much the same for ComRats (Commuted Rations), which means everything she eats at a military facility is free, but she gets a bit of extra on her paycheck for when she’s not in one. There’s also BAQ (Bachelor’s Allotment for Quarters.
Let’s just say that, even if it weren’t for Harem having up to 5 bodies, just being in the military keeps her covered (mostly).
but they pay for their food at achon. remember how syd found out about her pay
Sydney found out about her pay after grousing about the cost of the meal, which she had to pay, not Archon. She just had a lot more to pay it with than she thought.
Sydney didn’t eat at Archon, she ate at one of the on-site civilian restaurants
At any normal job, I would assume she got paid for hours worked, she could just work 5 different jobs simultaneously. She would get screwed on taxes, since all of the income would be credited to a single individual while in practice that individual has five mouths to feed who wouldn’t get counted as dependents. Although I suppose she could probably save a lot on housing due to lack of necessary privacy (not a lot of bed space required) and/or using the housing in shifts or something, so it’s not quite as unfair as, say, a married couple who both work filing jointly but only getting deductions as a single person.
As far as her current job, we know they get paid a ton because they’re superheroes, and I would assume that since one of her powers *is* having multiples they just pay her (well) as a single individual.
We don’t know whether their pay scales by power (probably not since they’re military) but if it did she would probably get one pay grade for teleportation and a second bump up for the ability to be in multiple places at once. Flipped around, if her *only* power were being in multiple places at once they might not even hire her because it’s not that useful, but if they did she’d be being hired explicitly as a single person with ability to be in multiple places at once.
It would be no different than hiring, say, a really strong lady who had to eat five times as much as a normal person to support her strength—it is assumed that the high pay covers unusual expenses resulting from being a super. Or hiring a really huge guy—you need to give him an extra-large room and bed, and he uses more water to shower and food at the caffeteria, but otherwise you figure that you’re paying extra so he can get a specialized car or whatever.
Can she claim her duplicates as dependants?
Dependents are listed by name and SSN. Daphne just said she only has one SSN, so that’s a no.
But if I were her I’d probably have gone though the legal hassle of picking up an additional 4 SSNs. There’s no way to prove that she is the same person, after all. It would have a lot of advantages and very little disadvantage.
To get a new SSN, they’ll want to see her separate birth certificate. She has publicly admitted to being a single person with fifty fingers and fifty toes (She can count to 100!), so any attempt to claim otherwise is fraud. They probably still have that pressurized anti-teleport cell.
When she spun off the first duplicate at age ~8 she hadn’t made that admission. And *bam* there was a minor child with no known home or parents, if she had been smart enough to go that route. Anyway my point remains that she probably could have managed to pick up 4 additional SSNs if she had really tried.
Eyes up about another foot there Leon :P
His eyes are at eye level. He’s not used to looking up at someone.
at least thats his line and he is sticking with it
His eyes are looking down, with one raised eyebrow
And there I thought I was the only one that noticed this…
Leon is a mere mortal. To not look would be a superpower in and of itself.
As Hiro has demonstrated already…
For some reason, the link I included just above didn’t actually get included.
Argh! Again!
Let’s try to be a bit more direct…
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-521-to-no-dress/
…And of course through out the conversation Leon is watching Harem’s chest… Typical male.
Typical person with a working libido (not just males look)
Being a bisexual woman, I notice other women’s breasts, and have a hard time looking away from them!!
The reason why the opposite of ‘mistress’ is not ‘master’, is because while ‘mistress’ is typically viewed ‘the other woman you are having an affair with on the side’, ‘master’ typically means ‘owner’ (it use to mean the male heir of the household, where the daddy was the ‘mister’ the son was the ‘master’)
Yeah, it’s complicated, butt not sure if there ever was a male version of ‘the woman having an affair with’ as it was usually the husband having a ‘bit on the side’, the wife either staid at home unawares (or pretended to not know, as good chattel were bred to be) or had simple ‘dalliances’ and then returned to the husband for the daily beating with a rod
Definition that I read somewhere: “A mistress is somebody between a mister and a mattress.”
Another option would be “paramour,” which I think applies to both male and female versions of the person you’re having an affair with — but since “mistress” is in wide use for the female version, I’ve mostly seen “paramour” used instead of “master” in that situation.
Paramour is just a word that refers to someone you’re involved with romantically. That’s a word you use for someone who’s seeing someone even if they’re not married.
The word everyone is looking for is “side-piece.” Unisex term.
“Mistress” started out as just the feminine of “master”, any woman in a command position.
Then it evolved to the wife of the master of the household, because she’d generally be able to issue orders in his absence.
Then it became a euphemism for whoever you were boinking on the side on a regular basis.
That’s why said ‘typically’
And when the father was absent, the ability to issue orders was passed to the son, even if they were only 15, hence becoming the ‘man of the house’ when Father was away ‘on business’ and being able to order around the mother and older female siblings
Had forgotten that ‘mistress’ is also now connected with Dominatrices (the plural of a Dominatrix)
That depends very heavily on what time period you’re talking about. For a long time, the wife was very much in charge of the household. The husband would not have been the one issuing orders to the staff beyond his own manservant/valet and maybe the head butler (not counting the type of orders anyone in the house would be issuing, i.e. ‘bring me some tea’ ‘take this to the kitchen’ and so on).
The wife would be the one working with the housekeeper, cook, etc. to manage the household and they in turn would be ordering the lower level staff to carry out the basic tasks. The wife was also often in charge of household finances, with the husband in charge of actually making the money and various non-household expenses. Wages for the staff, money for groceries, new clothes, repairs, and so on were the purview of the mistress since they were considered domestic.
A variation on that division continued well into the twentieth century, at least in the U.S. In the 50s and 60s, both of my sets of grandparents had a household management system based around the husband handing over his paycheck, the wife working out the budget, then handing him back the extra.
Did no one notice the ‘Rugby Team’ reference?
As Sydney is American, shouldn’t that be ‘Football Team’?
Just seems weird for her to use a British phrase, instead of its US counterpart.
As has been stated before, Sydney watches a lot of English TV
And just one Rugby (Union or League) has more endurance than an entire American ‘Football’ team (both the Offense and Defense) :P
Yes, rugby players are pretty tough. Unlike a certain game for kids, they don’t wear armour. They’re not afraid of getting a nasty bwuise – they just brush off the blood and keep going.
A really tough game.
Go the AB’S!! Threepeat!! Threepeat!!! THREE-PETE!!!! :P
Okay, now we begin the game of finding out which Harem is the chaste one. Let your bets begin!
In another note, Leon is definitely checking out Harem’s boobs in the 5th panel.
The blonde is the one with undyed hair.
My guess is it would be the one with her natural appearance.
Could be, although every Harem is emulating someone on the team and the blonde one is based on Arianna (although blonde Harem has usually her hair loose, unlike Arianna). Of course, that leaves white-haired, glasses wearing Harem.
My theory is that Harem Prime (the original, if she even exists) is someplace away from all this.
I think Harem Prime is back on Cybertron.
We know the white haired one is banging Dues, so it’s not that one.
My guess is that it’s the strawberry blond one, since that’s her natural hair color and if one of you is old fashioned it might as well be the on that doesn’t go in for the sorts of things old fashioned people tend to not approve of.
I too would guess that it is Thing #1 that is being kept in a virginal state. That’s the one that is the least modified from Daphne’s baseline, so she probably wants to keep everything in “Mint” condition on that body.
I think it is the pinkish one that is undyed? Her natural hair color is listed as ‘strawberry blonde’ which is more reddish in color than the yellow blonde.
The undyed body being it would be my guess as well though. She keeps one body close to original, which means no piercings, tattoos, dyes, etc. Adding ‘keeping her virginity’ to that list doesn’t sound far off.
There is an early image of five Daphnes, and Berry was not one of them
They all have tattoos, including Berry
I will say this Sydney is not shy about asking those questions.
Well yeah. After the thing with the bald merkin…
What thing with the bald merkin?
And, isn’t ‘bald merkin’ a contradiction in terms?
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-343-shear-pressure/
Contradictions are Scoville’s stock in trade.
As George W. Bush always liked to say, “I’m proud to be a merkin!”
Jimmuh Cahtah said that too.
It’s a fading accent from the southern states.
No more a contradiction than a ‘bald wig‘, for when someone with hair wants to (reversibly) play a character without. Less common, granted, but not contradictory.
She is polymonogamous. That is more restraint than I would have expected. She has the possibility of being multiple attendants in an orgy. Getting fucked while she is getting fucked.
No reason she couldn’t have tried that with the two bodies who are more loosely dating, or when she was not currently ‘monogamously’ dating people and had three or four bodies at the ready to attend.
I have been curious about something. Which Harem is Harem Prime?
No one knows, not even Daphne (and no, don’t have a citation, just something DaveB said long time ago)
There is an older group image of the Five, and Berry is not one of them (which means she changed her appearance to the strawberry blonde, which means that she is not the original un-modded Daphne)
Do you remember on which page the older group image was shown, or have a link? Because the cast page lists strawberry blonde as her natural hair color.
Believe it was a pre-comic image, check DaveB‘s dA account
The older group image on the cast page shows all current Harems except for the Platinum that is banging Deus.
Oh, that’s the image was referring to, and was wrong about Berry, it is Gothamer who has changed her hair (you can see Berry in the back, Blondini getting kissed by Abby without glasses and pink tips, with Bodie with long hair hugging a brown haired girl, who may or may not be Gothamer)
Nobody knows, and even Harem herself has forgotten.
This seems like bullshit to me. Or possibly a fiction Daphne is maintaining for some reason of her own. If she can keep her bodies straight well enough to maintain one as a virgin, she can’t also be mixed up enough about them to have forgotten which one is the original.
I think that different hair colors are actually helping her keeping track of who’s who ; back when she only had two identical copies and little experience, she might get them confused. I would still assume she will know which TWO are the most original … because she probably knew better when she got third copy.
Judging by the chart on Page #491 it looks like she spawned her extra bodies at the ages of 8, 9, 11, and 14½.
Even so, it still raises the question: Is Harem faking it or not?>
So which one is the virgin?
I say the blonde one.
Leon is totally staring at Harems tits in panel 5, lol.
In the last panel I see the typical restaurant beverage tactic. A glass full of ice with about 4 ounces of fluid in it.
(and of course no free refills)
Leon looks kinda distracted in panel 5, I certainly would.
I was about to say the same thing. He’s quite focused, but not on the discussion.
The last panel reminded me of that one strip a while back where Harem got surprised by someone and hurt herself..and that caused a chain reaction across all the rest of her bodies so they all ended up pratfalling.
You managed to forget Maxima’s atomic wedgie?
I think the closest real-world analog of dating Harem would be dating someone with an identical twin whom they share absolutely everything with. I think if I were dating one of her (and make no mistake, I’d want to date one of her rather than play “which Harem am I having dinner with tonight”) I’d think of it in those terms or something similar. I’d expect her to be loyal with the “her” I was dating, but beyond that it’d be unreasonable to expect her to not see other people with her other bodies. And it’s not like one person could keep up with 5 libidos anyway (even a single overactive libido is tough to deal with, as any guy who’s ever dated a legit nymphomaniac can tell you).
Also, this whole line of thought led somewhere unexpected in my head: There’d be something to be said for having a girlfriend who could fulfill your threesome fantasy – assuming you have one – by bringing in herself.
Ha … or dating co-joined twins. lol
Yeah, she seems to be doing that at the moment, each body is assigned a primary role slash task: Bodie is the army brat, with Abby being the SmugD spy (triple agent?), not sure about the rest
I believe the gender neutral (although more often applied to males) equivalent of mistress is, “paramour.”
Of course it’s rather archaic, but then, so am I.
I’d rather be a paradactyl.
That’s a paranormal pterodactyl. I think I only wrote this because I’ve been listening to SCP videos for the last two days, and am thinking about seagulls.
Second panel – “Multiple” is misspelled.
I am reminded of the meeting Harem was in while having sex, and meeting-harem what making little sex sounds while trying not to, and Dabbler leaned over and said “I’m going to like it here. You’re neat.” or something close to that.I think even if she was super deadpan (hey! Alternate hero name for Stalwart!) that she would never be able to fool Dabbler.
Anybody remember which strip this was?
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-606-boring-meeting-try-orgasms-why-not/
606.
Right after Maxima finds out Harem is seeing Deus.
Thanks! I was going to look it up but couldn’t recall where to start looking.
“Side piece” is a good, gender-neutral descriptor.
Mistress used to be the wife of the Mister. Misses used to be the illegitime affair of the Mister…sometime in the Elisabethan Era, the two terms got swapped for some whatever reason I have not found out yet.
As for logistics of her five-fold attendance, I believe she gets only a single salary, but potentially five times the merchandise payout since there are five action figures for her on the shelves (Collectibles – Gotta Have Them All).
Also, while I believe even in Military one is entitled to regular vacations and there certainly is going to be a max number of hours one is allowed to be on duty per month, it doesn’t matter if she is handled as one or five people in terms of working hours. Remember, she can have her vacation AND shift at the same time. The only restriction is medical, she can’t run a thousand hour shift with the same body, but she can rotate 8 hour shifts with three bodies and have two others on vacation. If she rotates who is on the clock and who is on vacation every week, each body would get 10-20 weeks of vacation a year, at 3 weeks length per vacation, without loosing out on pay.
On Polymonogamy, it is pretty much a matter of personal viewpoint…some people believe just watching porn or reading erotica or fantasising about somebody else while in a relationship is cheating. Others say it is only cheating if lies to keep it secret are involved. Most are somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, with the most common being if it is physical in any way in the ‘nilla scene or if it is kept secret (lies or no lies) in the poly scene.
Theword ‘Paramour’ works well as a gender neutral, as does ‘Consort’ or ‘Side Dish’. As far as I am aware, the ploy scene has adopted Paramour for themselves to refer to the lvoer of one’s significant other.
I do not recall any maximum hours per month in all my years in. Duty for seventy two hours straight happened any number of times, and we went extended periods with four hours of sleep fairly often.
Do Harem’s bodies age while in “storage”? I mean, she de-teleported the version of herself with the broken wrist for a while, and when she re-spawned it, it still had a broken wrist, so I assume for that body, no time passed.
Could she un-teleport one of herselves for, say, 50 years and then bring it back and have a young body to continue living in?
Thinking about it further… If she keeps generating new duplicates, she could conceivably extend her lifespan by several centuries by careful use of this technique.
It would appear that they go into full stasis, including shutting down their input to the whole – https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-422-out-patience/
I don’t remember this being proposed before, but I am intrigued. The initial trade-offs, of course, are those of any (semi-)immortal – watching everyone she knows grow old and die. She would have some unique concerns though, with multiple mortal bodies instead of a single immortal(ish) one.
First, constantly operating below full capacity for those 50 years; it’d be hard to resist having #5 pop in at least occasionally to lend a hand in a pinch, but keeping it brief would still expand that body’s timeline dramatically.
The bigger issue though is that if the ‘eternal youth’ instance retains its state while de-popped, so do all the others that aren’t in storage. Someday she’d have 4 bodies in a retirement home with arthritic joints, feeling every bounce of the one 20-something out clubbing. And as jarring as that would be, someday those old bodies would start dying, and we still don’t know what happens then. No way that huge disparity wouldn’t seriously mess with her mental health.
Maximum longevity strategy would be to de-pop her older bodies in semi-permanent storage, and start rotating through them all to 5x her golden years. If she’s going to do that at all though, she should start young and get the maximum years, plus have more time while she’s young enough to have a healthy body. Really though, she’s kinda doing that now anyways by living 5 lives at once…
Maybe there’s an optimum, middle-aged tradeoff where she starts keeping one on the shelf for public appearances and fancy evenings out, and rotates the rest (maybe 2-3 at a time) to age at half speed, or even picks one to really run down the clock on.
No matter what she decides, at some point she’s going to need to thoroughly weigh the pros and cons, and figure out how she wants to age her bodies. I would love for DaveB to discuss it in-comic, or even in a note.
Actually, it was proposed, or at least mentioned in the comments, some years back, leading to some to speculate that there is a sixth Daphne already that she has kept secret from Archon, either in storage or just somewhere living a ‘normal’ life (well, as normal a life as it would possibly be while still connected to the others, so one being in storage would make more sense… if it was true, and Daphne’s lips are sealed :P )
Third panel, it should be “it’s old fashioned”.
I believe that Paramour would be the word that Sidney is looking for.
Uhh…even with her teleport ability, I would NOT advise skydiving while making love, because climaxes are VERY distracting, and either she’d forget to pull her chute cord, or be too distracted to teleport-correct her velocity at the right moments in the right ways. No bueno!
I still wanna know how many Harem there are at this point.
There were 5, but then the ‘not exist also spacetime’ thing.
Isn’t there 6 now, with 2 being identical until she customizes one of them?
No. There are still only five, but one of her is a few minutes (hours?) older than the others, the duration of their stay on the Alari home world. Due to the quantum entanglement of their mind, at the instant of that body’s return, they all had memories of the next 53 days.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-727-a-timely-prank/
Oh, so 5 – 1 + 1 = 5 or something.
So one of her was unteleported and that was the same her that she spawned as?
I’ll have what she’s having!!!
Random granny two tables to the side: “waitress? i’ll take whatever Nachos she’s having!”
Can’t wait to see what else Harem tells Sydney…!
Daphne’s five bodies controlled by one mind are like five fingers controlled by one hand. If you steal something using your thumb and index finger, you can’t say that you are not entirely a thief because your pinky was not involved.
Butt, if you insert your four fingers into a butt, your thumb can still be untainted (unless it actually touched the taint :P)
That’s why she said one of her would still be a chaste (physically) if broadly experienced virgin (unless she was also stored during sex-times)
so if they share the same social security number does that mean there was an original born and the others manifested later?
like its either that or her mother had 5 children at once and gave them all the same SSN which is incredibly unlikely
Yes, the others manifested later. One at a time.
The duplicates emerge when she teleports and finds herself in two places with another copy of herself left where she started. Earlier in the story I got the impression that she has built up how many of her there can be over time, so maybe there is some sort of inherent leveling up as she refines her control over her teleportation.
Maybe she will eventually have a platoon of her. Think of it as Manifest Daphne.
Yeah, the first time it happened, she *VORP*ed and left herself behind, it’s possible that she wouldn’t have had the Quantum Entangled Mind thing going right away, so maybe the one who remained thought it didn’t work, until herself that successfully *VORP*ed returned and she had her first out-of-body experience :D
The answer to which one ended up naked is something she has not revealed :P