Grrl Power #816 – Horrifying demon monsters are only skin deep
Poor Olivia. All that quality drinking, down the drain. That adrenaline shot sobered her right up. Now she has to start over.
Varia’s gestalt power is usually not a problem for those around her. But occasionally… she does emit a horrific smell, set nearby vinyl on fire, spontaneously drained or overloaded all nearby batteries, stuff like that. Luckily she’s never liquified everyone’s skin in a 50′ radius or blasted out a few megasieverts of gamma radiation.
Yet.
There have been concerns that one of Varia’s eight billion potential gestalts will be to create a black hole or a portal to somewhere nasty, and a horrible buggaboo leaps through and starts wet willying people’s souls or something. If this was an X-Men style title, there would probably be people wanting to jail or kill her to prevent a possible darkest timeline.
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That can’t be the first time THAT’S happened?
She has Rougue-like problems.
Rouge. Sorry.
Also Mudge Wilson from Magellan…
Rogue, actually. Rouge is a type of make-up… and also a cartoon bat who is ironically a rogue as well. Go figure.
It’s a french word that mean red. All other meaning of the word are derived from that one.
I mean, sure but a lot of those other meanings are their own words in their own right these days. Especially if you’re speaking English.
The word “rogue” is not from the French “rouge”, it’s a different word entirely.
Rogue = rogare [latin] or roger [English] which means begger/vagrant.
Rouge = French for red and one of many variants of an ancient European word that means Red
Roger that!
I helps to remember the logic behind the spelling.
Romance languages, such as French, have the same rule English does about the vowels e or i softening a preceding g into a j sound. But sometimes they want to have a hard g followed by one of those vowels. To do this, they insert a silent u (which wouldn’t be silent, normally) between the two to protect the g from being softened. Hence, we’ve got rogue instead of roge, baguette instead of bagette, and guillotine instead of gillotine.
In other words, they’ve got a rule that’s inconvenient, and rather than just break it (as we do with words like get and gills), they instead mutilate their words in a manner that breaks a different rule.
… did I say logic behind the spelling? I meant madness.
Spelling has hard rules
Like egroll
I remember it ‘only rogues stick out their tongues’. And ‘Rouge the luge, Louis’ (but pronounce it Looie)
“Rouge Angles of Satin”, anybody?
its probably not the first time but its probably very high up in the “What the Fuck” category of transformations.
Trent.
It’s usually been in ‘private’, so no unaware normies don’t go, well, like poor Olive did
I know what you mean, but a I Cant help thinking no save points randomly generated ..
I only have Rogue-like problems when trying to find the Amulet of Yendor…..
That looks like a semi-permanent change for Olivia.
Also, wasn’t Varia wearing her ARC choker earlier tonight?
It might have gotten in the way of collecting hickeys.
DaveB is known to forget the chokers at times
Just checked. No one was wearing a communication collar.
correct, no check in chokers are present.
Oh. My. God! That was hilarious! Poor Varia, she is probably going to have to go all Rogue protocol to avoid these embarrassing {but funny as hell] gestalt incidents.
Yeah, I would have thought she’d have been wearing a full body stocking from, roughly, a week after her power first manifested. The first time you go Human Torch bumping into somebody on a subway, it gets real.
It’s only the person she gets the power from who’s protected, after all.
you know it is rather interesting that the Gestalt seems to recognize the fact that Scarlett is a vampire, does this mean that all Vampires cause the same Gestalt Power or do they only cause powers within the same category (all cause transformations but with different parts of the normal power set) or is it possible that each Vampire Bloodline cause a different Power?
I mean, it’s also possible that vampires still give whatever gestalt they would have given when still alive, and this is just hella coincidental.
Makes me wonder if Varia would get a different gestalt from Pixel depending on which form Pixel was in…
Given Pixel has different powers in each form.
Probably yes.
Also, it’ll possibly be years in comic time before she has any clue about this. I mean, to even have a chance of having a clue, she’d need to know about the existence of lycanthropes and other multi-form beings.
But thinking about this, and the apparent lack of a reaction touching Sydney… would she get different powers if Sydney has one or two orbs in hand? I could imagine each combination of orbs could have a different effect, assuming that the in universe impression was accurate, rather than it being the orbs seeing her as part of as Sydney like many seemed to think looking at the comic (including me. Though I’ve since thought more about it and realized it’s likely that was likely an intentional orbit deviation directed by Sydney, so that the orbs didn’t bean Varia.)
So close on the self correction! :) it’s Rogue, rouge is red, generally makeup on cheeks…
https://twitter.com/FillTheSpacez/status/930336751620624385?s=20
Don’t worry, people misspell her name all the time. It’s especially funny when you can’t edit your mistakes like in this forum. I hope we never get a edit option here.
Varia is wearing a mesh top. Something tells me her hands aren’t the only issue here.
Those mesh tops would stop skin contact. So no issue there.
Well, that answers if her powers work on someone paranormal as well, though maybe a vampire isn’t the best to test that with as they have a human base already. Also, unless Scarlett had something batty about her already in her past, this might proof that the power Varia gets from a person can change if there is a big enough change within that person.
So what happens when she touches Dabbler?
Or any non-human, really. Like could she keep a pet chameleon that gives her x-ray vision.
In some versions of vampirism, the vampire isn’t actually the person who was turned; That person’s dead. They’re just a demon of sorts that possesses the dead body and inherits the dead person’s memories.
Of course, it hasn’t yet been established whether Grrlverse vampires go through that whole dying and then coming back as a vampire thing, or if it’s more like lycanthropy, where you change without dying.
Well we could already tell that since she got orb related powers from Sydney.
Allegedly got orb related powers (which is not really likely since the orbs are not a manifestation of Sydney, Sydney is still just a normal gerd girl who just happens to have dragon balls floating around her head)
We know something happened, seems like no one in world noticed anything happening (not Vahriah nor Sydney), and what actually happened is something DaveB is keeping secret (along with the final ball, whether those two secrets are connected… we will just have to wait)
Its already been shown that Varia’s powers have the secondary power of being Plot Convenient. Granted that was in a Crossover Short Story.
Never read it
So to “Does Varia power works on vampire?” question the answer is a definite “yes”.
Next check, aliens.
Varia had said the only person her power didn’t work with was Maxima (and she thought Sydney, but the metagaming audience knows better), so I assume it works with Dabbler.
And to be honest, Max is immune mostly because her flesh has been transmuted into golden metal, and Varia’s powers *probably* only work on organic beings.
My theory is that the orbs suppressed the effect on Sydney, and they circled Varia as a side effect of the suppression, or maybe that’s necessary for the suppression to happen.
my thought is that for whatever reason the orbs are linked to Sydney’s unique gene sequence.
Varia’s gestalt power takes an external gene sequence and makes a power out of it.
As a side effect Varia is also immune to whatever happens to the target. Most likely from sharing/mimicing that gene sequence temporarily.
This bypasses the Orbs standard user authority. (which in and of itself is a very rare “exploit” in an operating system that is been around for geological timescales made by beings that should know better presumably)
So in theory … if Syd and Varia are duct taped together (it is not a kludge unless duct tape is involved) to maintain skin to skin contact (triggering the gestalt-link) then each of them can operate 2 orbs a piece (shell+ppo or hentacle and telepresence+flight are the obvious examples. What once was a one woman space exploration suit is now a pilot/gunner combo straight out of the last starfighter ) while the other 3 orbit the pair in whatever pathway their minds desire.
Considering that the original makers are spacefaring Cephalopods; users with multiple brains is not an issue.
What becomes an issue is when doing a task that needs two balls (shooting ppo through the shell)
things could get weird/bad if Synd has shell/tentacle active and varia sees something with telepresense worth using the PPO on all of a sudden.
Also it would make it unlikely that Dabbler installing 2 cyber arms (“hardlight” or mechanical) in Syd would not give syd more orbs to use at the same time.
Unless Syd’s skin was encouraged to grow over those arms to her finger tips and those limbs have a place for Syds nervous system to grow the appropriate organic nerve cells to govern their function.
And most likely; Syd would have to spend about many thousands of hours learning the four armed equivalent of Ambi-dexterity
My theory is that the orbs analyze pretty much everything about beings in range, and that the orbs keyed to Sydney based on her thought patterns. I believe something about the way she thinks caused them to attract her attention. Maybe it’s the genre savy, maybe something else, I just don’t believe it was something about her body but rather something about her mind.
It is force fields. Max’s skin appears metallic because it is sheathed in a skin-tight force-field.
“so I assume it works with Dabbler”
You know what happen when one assume.
Dabbler is very much on board with Ass u me
So how long until Varia gets forced into one of Dabbler’s ‘closer than skintight’ wetsuits?
Varia have endless monstergirl potential.
I’m actually kinda curious what happens if she touched Aranea now.
Read the crossover book and find out!
*Is* there a crossover book?
Yes. See thr right sidebar for details.
Where on it?
In a white box containing:
Miscellaneous Goodies
Sydney’s First Crossover!
PICTURE OF BOOK COVER
Wearing the Cape: Team-Ups & Crossovers is Sydney’s first Crossover adventure. (Also her first appearance in prose!) I’ve made a dedicated blog post for it, please comment there.
Check out the rest of the excellent Wearing the Cape series!
Actually kinda curious what her Gestalt with Aranea or Vehemence is now. Or Clover for that matter.
She needs to go touch Crimson now, see if that ^^ is vampire-specific or Scar-specific
400 hours is a bit longer then 16 days.
That’s plausible.
672 for a lunar (28-day) month. But hey, what does the Vampire transform do to body chemistry?
I would guess a lot of it just isn’t necessary any more.
Based on what Scarlett nearly said, it apparently puts a permanent end to biological cycles like menstruation.
And apparently it happened before she learnt normal hyu-mon female biological cycles
Not necessarily. That’s easily enough time to forget how things worked, especially since she was apparently young enough at the time she still looks young. So maybe it was just something she went through for a handful of years, and then didn’t for the next 200.
I mean, thinking back to 200 years ago, there’s *so* much that I no longer remember like it was a first hand experience.
190 to 200 years ago, there was so much people didn’t know about what we today take as basic body knowledge
*nod* Look at the myths of how cockatrices and basalisks are born.
There are still a lot of people around the world who don’t know many obvious, basic facts about human biology. Unfortunately, many of them are in positions of power.
What if Varia touches two people at once?
Also: Olivia’s Halloween costume problem is likely solved as well.
“Olivia’s Halloween costume problem is likely solved as well.”
《- eyeroll -》
Only if she can somehow replicate the way she reacted to th’way Varia’s power interacted with Scarlet!
This really isn’t an issue until they started making it an issue. Varia’s ability allows her to manifest into anything and could just be easily explained that it was an unusual, though scary, transformation. Them acting like idiots is what would tip most people off.
Also amusing that the veil didn’t cover it up, as I guess the veil didn’t decide that was anything that should be hidden.
Well… we do know that supers kind of have a weird interaction with the veil in the first place. Since no one was explicitly transformed like that we know of to show any kind of coverage, it may be that the reveal was basically considered as part of her powers alone and not covered by the veil. Have we even seen any of the vampires even transform like that as of yet? I know we’ve seen the bat thing already, but I’m not really sure what extent and/or rules we’re playing by in this particular universe at this point.
Varia isn’t covered by the veil, so any transformation she gets with vampires, fey, lycanthropes etc will still be visible.
They are in a noisy nightclub. No one else is hearing them, and the reaction to Varia’s transform would be natural from any distance.
Varia’s general powers are known, since shes been doing that stuff while dancing, so there’s not really anything to explain.
So wait… can vampires transform like that in this universe or was that simply an over dramatic change thanks to her power? Will she do that with other vampires as well? Lots of questions with that one…
Good question. Whose standards are baseline in this univers? I’ve pretty well settled on Anne Rice, but OTOH…
Scarlet’s turned into a swarm of bats a couple times before, but Varia can’t (???) so that’s why she looked like that I guess?
I thought that was the purple bat-like things around Varia when she broke the touch?
I figured that was just Dave having fun with the art, but it isn’t actually there- just going “and then this effect ended”.
We haven’t seen Scar transform yet, that was Crimson who snuck into Archon to deliver the messge
gonna theorize that comazotz thing is a kind of progenitor of the vampire blood line form.
Hand up who wants to see Varia bump into Dabbler?
Repeatedly?
“Eggroll”, not “egroll”…
Eggo’s anyone?
@DaveB – correction for EGROLL?
Is that supposed to represent her accent? I don’t think it works that way.
After tonight,it looks like that Olivia and Sydney’s friendship might be a thing of the past.
We know their friendship lasts at least as long as the flash forward gaming session we saw at the very beginning of the comic.
Why? Because she kept the knowledge that ‘monsters’ are real a secret? o_O
Olivia was startled, which is fairly understandable considering the transformation, she didn’t run screaming from the nightclub, she simply ordered a round of six shots
For that matter, Varia’s transformation doesn’t necessarily reveal that Sydney hid the truth about the existence of vampires (and even if it did, Olivia might be fairly understanding about a need for secrecy to avoid persecution or panic).
For the transformation to give away that the touched person is a vampire, Olivia would need to know that Varia’s power often reacts to someone who is superhuman in a way that relates to their powers/nature, as opposed to touching a non-super, which gives similar powers from relatives, but nothing that obviously relates to their nature. I’d assume that the super/non-super difference is classified, if only to avoid accidentally outing Daily Planet reporters, Daily Bugle photographers, and the like.
That said, turning white as a sheet and ordering extra drinks is a fairly laid-back reaction to that unexpected bat-transformation, regardless of whether it lets any cats out of any bags.
Will Olivia infer the existence of vampires from Varia’s transformation? Will Sydney be pissed that all the eggrolls are gone? Tune in next time to find out: same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!
Maybe ARCLight might have a device similar to the neuralyzer from Men In Black and wipe Olivia’s memory of what she saw!?
Or Scarlett could do that with Vampiric mesmerism.
I hope not. Such device is cheap storytelling and unlikely to work without lot of negative sideefects, not speaking about ethic of it’s use.
… wait. Dabbler already edited someone’s memory.
Various forms of helplessness are central to many horror plots, and the council is how the horror genre is married to the superhero genre in the Grrlverse. A lot of traditional supernatural horror creatures feature various forms of mind control which effect mortals like the waters of the River Lethe. Bondage, imprisonment, buried alive, indestructible superstong monsters. The whole points is for doomed humans to be helpless.
And then Superheroes change that.
It’s cliche, but it’s a much loved cliche.
Dabbler’s ‘edit’ on the Barberian was a case of blurring the memory’s details, rather than wipe-and-rewrite. That might work for Olivia’s case if they were that way inclined – letting her remember that Varia had a beastly transformation with Scarlett, but not the details of what she looked like. Although to be honest, there’s nothing to say that Varia can’t get a beastly transformation from a baseline Human (especially when the likely limits of Olivia’s knowledge relative to the sum total of canon knowledge are taken into account).
At the moment we don’t know that Varia is aware of vampires.
Poor Olivia, she got way more information than she bargained for.
At least we know (from the first pages of the comic) that Olivia will not be so frightened that she won’t associate with Sydney any more
Doesn’t everyone (get way more information) after spending more than five seconds around Sydney? :P
Do we take Olivia’s appearance – post reveal – as literal or as artistic license? I’ve never seen anyone in a comic drawn as being so scared they turned ghost white and stayed that way.
She really needs to read more comic books.
I’ve seen it in an anime or two.
Nyarko-san! Another Crawling Chaos! (A comedy based loosely on H.P. Lovecraft, believe it or not) actually had a character turn white (and stay that way for a while) with shock, and then weaponize it to get her love interest to go on a date. And keep the date from ending.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-797-bust-a-gestalt/
Interesting what gestalt varieties her clothes can and can’t survive from.
Makes sense so far. Those didn’t change her SHAPE much. The clothing just failed to make its saving throw against spikey shoulder pads.
DaveB, the 2X version has not loaded.
AN INCONVENIENT GESTALT is now my favorite unsound effect.
She’s lucky she only ripped her top around her shoulders.
Why does Scarlet feel the need to try and cover that up? Varia’s been transforming in many things that are (hopefully for them) unrelated to the regular humans she touched (see here https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-797-bust-a-gestalt/ ).
Because Olivia is a civilian who doesn’t know that Scar is a vamp, and she probably just panicked when she saw Olive’s reaction
It looks as though she’s not really trying to cover up Varia’s transformation, but her own near-blunder in joking about how long since she had a period. A beastly transformation gestalt could be triggered by a baseline Human, but not many of those are in a position to joke about centuries of experience.
“Hair standing on end,” check. “Turning white as a sheet,” check. “You’re turning my hair white,” check. But poor Olivia was scared so much that her clothes lost all color. That’s a whole new idiom. It’s a cool look, though. Hopefully Olivia will recover and isn’t a ghost girl now.
Maybe, Olive is also a Super and that is her power: the Human Snowcone :D
Just don’t lick her if she turns yellow :P
We’ve just witnessed the origin story for The Incredible Monochromatic Woman.
Her special power is invisibility but it only works in a snow storm.
《- snerk -》
Or she can only turn invisible when no one’s watching. *
* poor quality link, but even though that atypical superhero movie is really cheesy it has some fantastic moments that make it worth watching. I think most readers here would get a kick out if it.
if you’re gonna watch that one, you should watch ZOOM as well :)
just for the giggles
So that’s what is happening in the last 3 panels. I thought that Dave just forgot to colourize her or didn’t have time to do so.
“So great was his fright,
His waistcoat turned white”
The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carrol
Wow, NICE! So it’s not a new idiom after all, just new to me.
Wait.. Why was a vampire reaching for an egg roll? Or lumpia, whichever it was..
Because it’s an eggroll and Scar hasn’t lost her sense of
mouth feeltaste?Just because she doesn’t need to eat, doesn’t mean she lost the ability, or urge
Just because you receive no nutritional value from something doesn’t mean you won’t eat it anyway for the flavor. Otherwise a few food industries wouldn’t be so successful LoL.
But yeah, there is probably a trope name for it, but its not that uncommon to see post-human entities like vampires eating human food from time to time for the flavor…how they dispose of it later is a question as a liquid based diet physiology change begs a few questions to how altered their digestive system is. that Wraith (space vampire) from Star Gate Atlantis who liked human food mentioned he doesn’t really digest any of it, but still likes to eat it on occasion.
Heck I could add completely non-human entities…that have taste buds for some reason…like the Gems from Steven Universe for whom eating serves no purpose beyond enjoyment as their bodies are solid light and derive nothing from eating.
Still hot, though……. what?
Huh. At the upper right, Scarlett is described as “century old.” Not centuries. Was she about to say 200 months?
hat s suposed t0o bee cenuries od Dve eeds o fi tat…
Ok Ok Bad Pun you can stop throwing bricks at me
Its possible that Xochitl’s transformations (while mostly random) could skew towards having a lot of minotaur forms. Because with a gestalt power there can be too many VariaBulls.
I’ll show myself out.
Cow-‘erd
Only if you ignore the fact that there’re ^other^ kinds of bulls ~ like pachyderms₁.
〰️〰️
¹Then again, I wonder if a minotaur could be part ^elephant^.
Wow I guess she has to be careful of what Supernatural people she touches if she’s going to be getting gestalt like that from a vampire girl
imagining a queen of krakens from a Scylla, eldritch shark goddess from a mermaid, echidna-dragon from a lamia (and most reptilian humanoids),
she looked like she took on a progenitor form when she touched her here.
I like how the sound effect “words” of Varia’s sleeves ripping are actually drawings of cloth ripping.
And that went wondering; do the powers that Varia gains from touching someone change when they became a vampire?
Whatever the powers are, the side-effects really suck.
…
SOMEONE WAS GOING TO SAY IT!
Speculated further up the page
Is it Canon that part of her powers are clothing regeneration? The rips in her mesh top from the shoulder spikes were repairing themselves from panel to panel.
Perhaps it’s a secondary part of the “returns to normal when not touching anyone” part of her main power. Or maybe she gets her clothes enchanted by one of the magic-users in the setting. Lord knows there’d be a market for such garments among the changelings and werewolves.
So…Olivia doesn’t have any color-changing powers, does she? It’s just an artistic indicator of shock. She’s not stuck like that…right?
That was ^my^ impression.
Well… X-men has the habit of creating its own villains by doing that “Let’s lock up the person who MIGHT create the apocalypse!” and that ends up being what creates the apocalypse.
So anyone who even suggests that nonsense in my opinion should get the old steel-toed boot to the glute.
So did Varia get promoted from recruit to Corporal while Sydney was gone for a couple months? The comment about “Do you feel like that all the time?” kind of implies she knows she is talking to a vampire, but only Corporals and above (comic #491) should know about the veil, and (non-alien) supernaturals/council races.
If I was to explain away why Varia would know this and not be a Corporal, I would guess for a similar reason to Halo. Varia turning into that form might be something that happens when she touches any Vampire, so she could technically identify that vampires have something different; it was mentioned that family members give out similar powers when she was introduced.
Another theory would be that, once in contact with someone/something that could see through the veil, she might also gain that temporary ability to see through the veil as well. This means that she would need to have this knowledge in the likelihood that she does encounter a supernatural being.
Or, final theory, all ARCSWAT members are told after Halo’s disappearance.
that’s a really coll visual, i really liked… poor Olivia…
It looks like Varia became an ink-pire there for a moment. They have the power to remotely suck all the color out of graphically rendered characters. Their weaknesses are abominable snowmen, ghosts, beluga whales, polar bears.
That’s gotta be hard on the wardrobe.
Wait, does Varia see through/know about the Veil? Anything revealed through her powers could pretty easily be written off as, “Wow, touching this random person makes me grow fur, neat! That’s probably not related to their species or anything, though; normal humans can make me turn into metal, that doesn’t make them robots.”