Grrl Power #897 – Hide and go document
Sydney has lost enough things to realize that when she comes back looking for the stasis pod, that “all those skyscrapers kind of look alike.” Sure, the tarps and the scaffolding make it more memorable than the other skyscrapers in the area, but I’m sure at any given time, 5-10% of buildings in NYC are having some work done on them. Of course, you’d think she would at least write down the nearest cross street, but she could be recalled to the fight at any moment.
Cora probably thought Sydney was going to just fly to the top of a skyscraper and dump it there, which Sydney considered, but also figured any villain flier could find and make off with it easily if she did that. So she flew around circuitously for a while before finding a place she could duck into, which is another reason she needs to document where she’s leaving the stasis pod.
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Company Sydney?
Let’s hear it for our next contestant.
Also, no Mr. Bubble right now… :-(
I just happen to have some vintage (and they still fit, very comfy 100% cotton) Mr. Bubble boxers. Almost as good as flannel.
I had flannel pjs once. They were heaven. Can’t find them these days.
So, is the suspicious ‘CRRK’ the scaffolding about to collapse, one of Brut’s team lurking about, one of Firehead’s team lurking about, or something completely unexpected?
Last panel zoom in behind her, a rather suspicious semi humanoid shape there. Not sure if alien or a spookum of some kind
it could be Jesse of team rocket’s head, or it could be the foot and leg of a high stepping genie, or someone else wearing a curly-toed shoe
I’d go with one of Team Brut. I can’t figure out what Dave drew right above the CRRK. Thoughts anyone?
My first thought is: an ugly umbrella grip.
Was the ‘crrk’ breaking off FROM the column? In which case Guesticus is probably right about it being concretia. Or is it her like …. eerily craning out her neck, and she’s a shadow, in which case it wouldnt be.
Going by the ‘shadow’, seems like they are emerging from the column, rather than peeking around it
I’m betting Marble maiden. She makes a CRRK sound when she emerges from pavement.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-216-50-caliber-headache/
Marble maiden isn’t Concretia, who youre actually referring to
Concretia, not Marble Maiden. But the silhouette sorta matches and excellent link.
Correct. Here’s the link to MM
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-366-successfully-unwarranted/
damn I went down the rabbit hole on that link and replied to a handful of 6 year old comments.
Candlejack.
Astral will be missed.
It does kinda look like Concretia’s hairdoo/silhouette from #216. Also note the crrrk in that same comic. I’m not sure if she was taken in after that fight…
As I recall, if they didn’t have a criminal record, than all they got was a “debriefing” after the fight. You do make a good call with Concretia.
Nope, after Cree tried to take out Peggy (and failed), she wasn’t seen again
It’s entirely possible that Concreta’s powers are a form of Geomancy, which would explain Hench Wench’s geo powers.
in the brawl Concretia displayed petramorphic possession (possess earthy materials and form them into a body), but didn’t show any signs of geokinesis (power to manipulate without direct contact earthy materials via levitation and/or deformation)
Concretia was my thought as well. I dug through the archive to find her: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-216-50-caliber-headache/
Emerging from the concrete column would seem to be in line with her abilities.
inb4 the “which idiot took this picture ……… oh right me”
She could record the GPS location from her phone, no?
I bet she has GPS tracking in the neck-tie comm thingy!
Her wrist comm thingy had it (does she still have that?) so I don’t see why the choker comm wouldn’t.
I am under the impression that most phones by default record where the photo was taken into the photo’s metadata. if she has a company phone then I would be deeply shocked if it didn’t do that. too easy a way to make things easier.
Oh noes! Bubble up Sydney!
You can just imagine the poor construction worker if she forgets it.
“All right, who just left this THING just sitting on the scaffold. Jees, Health and safety’s going to have a field day. what even is that thing?”
Site super: Okay, I’ve checked. It’s not a concrete form or part of ventilation or anything like that. Nobody’s claiming it so chuck in the garbage.
Or they call the bomb squad.
Couldn’t she have brought it somewhere, you know….secure?
This seems remarkably short-sighted even for Sydney when her meds run out.
Secure is good, but takes time. Placing it where nobody will really think to look is faster and almost as good, especially if someone isn’t actually looking for that specific widget.
Except that it’s alien tech. And they were treating Maxima as a weapon/commodity. So they obviously have ways of tracking the device, meaning NOWHERE would be a place they don’t think to look.
They were idiots, sure. But even idiots would put a tracker on their payday.
unless the tracker is powered by the powersource that Dabbler removed
She can go really far. Her Fly Ball lets her make Aetherium Gateways to pretty much anywhere. She could drop it off at the space station where she got Neil Tyson some grakz in a matter of moments, and it would be far more secure and have a less catastrophic failure state than the current plan.
I think there’s probably a thought to “Earth could probably get some tech advancements by studying this thing.”
Otherwise, I’d guess the Alari homeworld would be the most secure place she knows.
Heck, it *still* could be the most secure place. Except her phone’s automatic GPS metadata won’t help locate it there. As such, it could be the sort of “low accessibility” issue you get with a computer secured by pouring liquid (is that the right term?) cement over it, then placing that in a mold and giving it a nice coat of steel, and then dropping it in an ocean trench: unlikely anybody’s going to break into it or make off with it, but it’s not very easy to make use of it.
No it wouldn’t be more secure.
Now there’s confirmed alien presence and only one of these aliens has to have a general idea about theoretical magics to make such an endeavor potentially catastrophic.
Because nth-tech
It’s not enough that no one who knows about it would think to look there – she’s almost guaranteeing that someone will stumble across it the next morning. She needs someplace no one will be going at all, then pick from that category one that’s unlikely to be thought of.
What she really needs is for ARC-Light to come up with a plan for extracting dangerous tech and individuals from the field in a hurry. Actually, calling Harem and having her transport it to a secure location would be the smart thing to do.
Depends on how heavy it is
Also – one must wonder if Varia’s tag-along ability taxes Harem’s carry-limit or perhaps could instead enhance that limit…. so if both are vorp-ing, maybe Harem can carry up to the weight limit of a single copy, or else 25% of EACH the Harem and Varia that are moving, so roughly twice her previous limit…
who knows?
@DaveB knows!
Until next morning is long enough. This is just a stopgap for while the fight is going on. After the battle is over, she or another super will pick it up again and bring to Archon HQ or another secure government facility.
Well she’s learning.
O Sydney, “No one will find it here” guarantees that someone is going to see you hide it, or stumble across it! Tcch, Sydney you’re usually more genre aware than that!
Also, is it just me or does our stage right lurker’s profile look kinda familiar?
Doubt it’s Marble Maiden, and she’s a good guy anyway, well, vigilante
That’s where I’ve seen that curled hairstyle before.
It would also explain both the sound AND the fact that she’s coming out of a pillar.
The opponents are a mercenary group, as far as I can tell. And I’m betting they probably hired a few of the patsies Vehemence drew into his fight battery. Let’s just hope no one frees Vehemence.
Though he wasn’t techinically evil, was he? He was just a fight seeker who had incredibly high requirements? He could have killed several people if he hadn’t been focused on the one person he was there to fight.
I think you’re confusing Marble Maiden white Concretia
Name-wise, probably. I’m terrible with names.
But the lady in my head is the one who fuses with inanimate objects and has a yellow ‘ghost form’. Not sure why she’s called ‘Concretia’, though. We watched her fuse with asphalt, which isn’t concrete.
Because her first body was concrete and Leon is lazy.
To be fair to him, he was also rather rushed at the time to get lots of names on lots of people, and to make them obvious enough not to need explanation in the middle of a fight. A bit lazy, yes, but excusable. Plus, it wasn’t until later that ARC discovered that Concretia could transfer between materials, by which time the name was established and changing it could have caused more confusion than the inaccurate implication.
Well, the two women are probably related anyway, what with their similar power sets. Sisters? Cousins?
Petramorphic Possession and Petramorph Armor aren’t all that related of power sets. Heck we saw another Pyrokinetic in the parkinglot brawl and no indication they are related to Heatwave.
The only comment in the series about genetics being related to superpowers I can remember was Varia explaining her powers. But that was specifically HER power.
I can’t think of any siblings with superpowers in the series yet. So no way to know if they would have powers that are related. It also wouldn’t take into account how they got their powers. Look at Maxima. A space rock peed on her. What a backstory, lol. Sydney found hers on a dive.
A very popular book series on Amazon (Immortal Supers) has a setup where genetics has no bearing on your power set aside from the ability to survive the power manifestation (which killed more than 80% of the planet, I believe).
It’s also a bad idea to talk out loud to yourself when doing something that calls for stealth.
But obviously she only says no one would find it here to force whoever she might have suspected to be following her into the open it’s a Bluff clearly!
Sydney is currently operating with awareness of the meme “‘No one will find it here’ means YOU won’t be able to find it later”. She can only hold awareness of one or two memes in her head at a time, cut her some slack.
Unless she concentrates, like in the fight with Kevin
Noo! Sydney! Behind you!! I hope she does not get captured.
Ha, she just came back from a space adventure. Now it’s time for another.
You think its he aliens again? Might be the enemy supers. Either way, I hope Sydney actually fights. “Im not saying its aliens, but its aliens” immediately popped into my mind
Getting captured by aliens could actually trigger Sydney’s trauma from her isolation on her last space adventure. So anyway, she started panic blasting the PPO and we don’t have a new york anymore
Well someone’s about to have a Sydney moment, the question is who?
Meanwhile… Three minutes ago…
Concrete/Tarmac woman from the diner fight, right?
Was wondering where Concretia had gotten to…
I don’t think concretia can become shadows…. from what I remember she was able to ‘possess’ different types of stone/concrete/etc.
Then again we didnt see her for all that long.
I just realized you might be right and the ‘crrk’ could be her breaking out a piece of the column. I thought it was like an eerie craning of the neck sound instead.
So yeah might be Concretia after all. I’m siding iwht you and Barney on the guess now. :)
Nah, not sure it is either Cree or Marble Maiden: Cree makes a mannequin out of whatever substance she is going to use, leaving a ‘Cree-shaped’ hole behind, and Maiden simply changes her form into marble
She also had that nifty, mobile ghost form that was intangible (judging by the .50 going through and doing no damage).
And she made the same noises when she created a body from the asphalt.
And she had that goofy ‘hair curl’ that you can see in the shadow.
Yeah, forgot about her ghost-form :(
I definitely doubt it’s Marble Maiden. Marble Maiden turns into marble – she doesn’t emerge from marble. Plus the hair’s all wrong. :) I just checked with the parking lot battle and yeah – this looks similar to Concretia. :) You were probably right the first time.
You know, that ghost-form would be awesome for espionage. She probably followed her in.
We don’t have confirmation that the ghost form can defy gravity, do we? like, does it need to “cling” to something it can possess? or maybe stay intact without clinging, but otherwise will become ballistic until it CAN?
Even if it’s disarmed Sydney it is probably still lojacked.
Plot twist: that is a Machina Inc building under going renovations
Nah, being prepared for demolition! All those tarps will catch the little (and not so little) bits of building debris when the explosive go off. When Sydney gets to go back in a couple of days, she finds a 30 foot tall rubble pile where the 16 story office tower used to be.
I don’t understand. Why didn’t she just put it on ground. Bubble up and fly with slow over city than mach++ to headquoters?
Cora clearly intends for this bit of tech to NOT end up at ARC HQ. Sydney seems to be going with the flow on this one. Plus, going over mach 1 over the US requires special permission. (Sonic booms disturb civilians and/or their toys–to include the milk- & egg-producing kinds.) She needs to stash it & get back.
It’s a long way to HQ and back, even at Sydney’s speeds – especially since there will be many other settlements in between that she would have to avoid booming. If it’s likely that there’s a closer option, she can take a bit of time finding it and still return to the fight faster than if she’d gone half across the country and back. (Of course, this doesn’t rule out the ‘closer option’ being an official location, such as the local police HQ, where the Pod could be kept under guard until collected…)
I see that DaveB mentions Cora in his blurb, but did Cora tell Sydney what to do with it? I’m quite sure it was Dabbler that took the power core for safe keeping, and told Sydney to find a safe place for the larger part of the machine… six limbs, furry ears, and all.
Sydney, for the love of Master Chief. Why is your phone INSIDE your uniform? You are opening your armour in the field!
I was wondering what Sydney was up to…..
That outline kinda looks like Candlem-
Nah, Nurgle from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.
clearly it’s Jesse of team rocket from Pokemon
I’m pretty sure that the only person in any reality who could make the Jetsons car noise with their mouth is Micheal Leslie Winslow.
Don’t feel bad tho, Syd, it was a good attempt. Hey, wasn’t she supposed to bring that thing all the way back to base?
Nope, simply secure it (after Dabbles swiped the power core)
She could have also just put it in space. :)
It is a long way to space. Remember when she tried to reach a moon of that planet?
All she could do is a low orbit. And stuff in a low orbit is easy to detect even with terran technology.
Akshually… Space is pretty easy, certainly for Sidney. But if you want it to stay in space you need to bring it to orbital speed, which is quite a bit harder. Given that her speed is limited to Mach 16 (Her orbs seem to behave in a ‘boats in space’ fashion), she’d need to take it some 6900km out before she can achieve a stable orbit.
And then you’d need to find it again..
Remember that “Mach 16” is in an atmosphere. Once you leave the atmosphere, acceleration is cumulative, unless this is an Anime universe where constant thrust = Constant velocity.
Mach 16 at ground level in the atmosphere implies an available thrust that would have her pulling multiple tens of gravities acceleration. She could be in orbit in minutes.
But she can’t fly, use the shield, AND use her tentacle orb. She can’t get above maybe 100mph without the shield, safely, and if she carries the mcguffin inside her shield, she can’t drop it off in orbit.
So a nearby rooftop or construction site makes sense.
She COULD drop her shield to release the thing in orbit – I’d think the hardest part would be calculating the correct trajectory and speed… maybe her glasses would be able to understand what she’s doing and assist her with that.
Simply put, for a human in a vacuum, death is far from instantaneous.
She would need to exhale, drop the shield, move away just a bit or tighten the shield radius to get the item out of said radius, then deploy the shield again – something she could accomplish in two to three seconds of shieldless time, or maybe less. So that she could breathe again, she would let go of the flight orb, create/release atmosphere with the air-orb, and then breathe in before again grabbing the flight orb and going back down to earth (depending on her acceleration rate and the chosen orbit, she may be back where she started, relative to New York, or she might be on the other side of the planet, but regardless…)
So, unless it’s more along the lines of her lacking the intestinal fortitude to attempt it without practice, or her not having seen enough hard sci-fi or documentaries about what would actually happen to a person outside a spacesuit or spaceship, or that maybe she has a debilitating phobia of walnuts and brake pads, it’s definitely possible for her to drop it off in orbit. She has the tools – the question is, can she use them effectively (and to a lesser extent, is it necessary to use them)?
Sydney is dive certified, and knows about decompression. An instant 1atm drop would blow her eardrums, even if she re-bubbled in 0.5 seconds. The airb made an atmosphere bubble around her underwater in the pool though, so perhaps it would manage / prevent the pressure change just around her…?
Also, as noted, “space” is only 100km away. Near-Earth space flight is about speed, not altitude; Halo could fly something there, but probably not keep it there.
I forgot about the needing to use her shield AND the lighthook part. You’re right, Brett.
actually she could. Humans can survive a minute or two in space, contrary to what most sci fi teaches. get into space, release fly orb, grab “makes air”, shield down, shield up, make air, drop “makes air”, grab flight orb again. I assume if ‘makes air” is life support, then it also generates survivable warmth too.
Acceleration is cumulative when your thrust is achieved via Newtonian mass-throwing (so like in the Star Wars chase… act (? — it was much more than a scene, so…) that really shouldn’t have happened)
In general, supers and mutants rarely use such a method (at least obviously) for their flight abilities inside a gravity well (Heatwave, I think, is a canon exception), so I’m incredulous that anyone in this comic uses it unless otherwise indicated. Maybe my incredulity is unfounded.
Flight is rarely explained, but more often hand-waved as “they just… fly, duh”, but when it is, it’s usually something a little more like autotelekinesis, possibly with some mass-reduction, there’s no way to know if telekinesis-based propulsion is cumulative
Momentum is momentum, and motion is relative. Once you leave atmospheric friction behind, there is no reason to believe that you couldn’t continue accelerating. She doesn’t fly by pushing against the atmosphere like a propeller or jet engine OR by mass throwing (It appears to be some variant of the skyhook reactionless thruster)
There is no privileged frame of reference from which your “Actual Velocity” is measured. If you can accelerate at all, with no reliance on being inside an atmosphere like you would have with propellers or jets, then so long as your flight power is still active, there isn’t any reason to believe that you would suddenly stop accelerating.
Perhaps Nth technology flight orb uses accelerationless motion, comparable to how photons change locations.
An argument against this is that we don’t know of photons moving at anything less than the speed of light (within the particle’s medium), but perhaps the orb gradually alters Sydney’s baryonic matter only a little bit toward being photons, while maintaining the relationships between her constituent particles so she can maintain her experience of self, look like herself still, chat up her friends and so forth. I appreciate that this is, to a large extent, technobabble but that’s Nth tech for ya.
It’s not that long a distance into space. It IS a long distance to the moon.
Distance from surface of Earth to orbit of Earth= 400 kilometers (a little less than 250 miles). Sydney can do that REALLY quickly.
Distance from surface of Earth to surface of moon = 382,500 kilometers (about 237,675 miles). That will take Sydney a while.
Orbit is a LOT closer than you think. Especially when you don’t have to deal with G-forces, like Sydney does not have to.
Sydney needs to make sure that all of her equipment is easily reachable with one hand, so that she can keep her other hand on her shield orb.
Also start getting in the habit of sweeping areas with the yellow orb before letting her guard down.
Here comes another space adventure!
We already had one of those. How about something different this time? Underwater adventure, jungle adventure, time travel adventure etc…
Underwater adventure and time travel adventure already happened, but Jungle adventure still has to come.
The item is a pipe cutter. They are usually in that shape to make the cut as smooth and flat as possible. So could be a random worker for the sky scraper too. It is a construction zone and there are some companies that work even at night when the job is time sensitive.
Big ups to Sydney for acknowledging that she will probably (more like ‘certainly’) forget it’s location if she doesn’t record it, at least the general, if not the exact, location
Is that Candlejack behind you, Sydney? Don’t say his name or else he can-
OH SHI
Who’s Candleja-
Aaaand here goes the next super-napping attempt. :(
Is it bad that I am expecting Halo to eventually unlock multiball and she will lose the need to touch the balls to get them to work
Probably an ability of the middle orb. She said that it made her more in-tune with the orbs after spending a point there. As such, that should be her primary level focus to see how much of the technology she will just know. Imagine if a full investment means she can calculate space travel? Understand each orb functions? Utilize all orbs without the need to touch them?
That being said, we still haven’t seen any testing on others attempting to use the Orb. We assume that they can’t, but we don’t know for certain.
Thing is, she’s not grinding now, so new points to invest are few and far between.
I suspect that the linked with 2 lines that every orb had is toggle so she could actually leave the shield on if she selected it but maybe I’m just being optimistic on Sydney’s behalf.
I hope not. Restricting the use to two powers at a time makes it more interesting.
I think I generally agree that the limit of two makes it a bit more interesting and less overpowered, but a slightly less breaking enhancement than “using any number of orbs” would be an autopilot sort of thing, where she can’t exert conscious modification of an orb’s function without actually grabbing it, but it could simply not turn off when she lets it go for a moment…
So the shield wouldn’t necessarily immediately drop when she let it go – it might gradually reduce power over ten seconds or a minute. Or the lighthook would become rigid until she again grabbed the orb to make it release whatever was being grabbed. The effect could fade or it could continue until she grabs it again, but that is a possible path of enhancement that has some drawbacks, but still being a noticeable enhancement — like leaving the PPO shooting, while grabbing the flight and shield, but then the PPO destroys its target suddenly and then punctures a hole where she didn’t want to…
She should pin it on ”Archon Maps”.
Well, this is going to end very poorly for somebody.
Sydney going “Loo-loo-loo” while flying made me think of how Arale, the little robot girl from DR. SLUMP, used to pretend to be a jet plane by sticking out her arms when she ran and shouting “Ki-i-i-i-i-i-i-n-n-n!!!”
I just want to point out that I think Sydney just forgot she can teleport via Aether Gate. So… Grab thingy and gate to the moon drop it on the Doorstep of an Alien Ship (possibly the alien merch ship) and then you can have the fight scene as she blows it up…
Her Aetherium Causeway has the old limitation of (only places she has been too before), while she can clearly thanks to the comic shop incident clearly be really specific not just the planet but a spot on it; she still has to have been there before…or at least the balls have to have been there given other planets on the address list. So unless one world on that backlog is the Earth’s moon she can’t go there.
Also the alien mercs as far as we know came down in the tour bus. Which is dumb, and why so many in the comments for those pages were discussing what their escape plan was supposed to be after grabbing some one.
She doesnt have a limitation of only places to which she’s been before – that’s just the past search feature. Remember, there’s also the stellar cartography map that she couldnt figure out how to use until one of Cora’s crew explained it to her (the red guy with the horns).
Syd can only go to places she has been, or to places she can map and she doesn’t have the gift of interstellar mapping math yet, unless she has taken a lot of classes that we missed. in game terms “you can only fast travel to known locations”
to clarify, Cora’s crewman understood it, but he has years of interstellar navigation under his belt, just because he understood it doesn’t mean he had the time to teach Sydney.
hummm. that may be a problem… wait a second, that silhouette looks suspiciously like concretia….
Wasn’t it Dabbler that told Sydney to take the stasis pod to a safe place?
Yup.
Cameras with built in GPS are a godsend.
Question for everyone. Do you think this super merc team was hired by Sciona to gather alien tech and kill Max? Im starting to feel like that is the case.
this entire scenario was too out of the blue. No one knew this tour bus was landing and Archon was acting on little notice. There are aliens already out of the immediate area (I do wander what our friends in the van are up to right now; I was actually interested in seeing their fish out water New York adventure),
Why we feel the alien mercs were smash and grab and not planned.
and these supers are “local talent” taking advantage of the chaos. Some local crime syndicate types who saw the aliens, saw the fight, and decided to make a play at some alien tech and while they’re there might as well make a play at the new super cops as a “don’t mess with us” tactic like old timey mobsters….which is of course now back firing on them.
but no, this all feels too off the cuff for Sciona’s schemes which were trying to be secretive.
Her collar or belt should definitely have some kind of ‘push here to drop pin’ button for any scenario where the user might need to come back after this, preferably backed up to a cloud of some sort. Also, can serve as an emergency mayday system.
As an aside, considering her ability to make Aetherium Causeways, she could have created a portal near Fracture Station and thrown/cucked/yeeted (whatever you kids are calling it these days) it through and gone for a ‘well, I had to keep it away from an underdeveloped species!’ as an excuse. Wait, was she trying to keep the causeway’s secret? Scratch that.
Well, we don’t really know what happens if you chuck something lacking a guidance system through one of those causeways. Maybe they miss a curve and fall out of the causeway, or are destroyed, or something of that nature.
nothing should happen as she had to lock onto coordinates as it were to make the portal in the first place so the portal once made is already bridged between two points in space it shouldn’t require any additional guidance while inside. Think more (Star Gate) rules and not Ether dive from Outlaw Star or hyper space in Babylon Five. The two gates are open so you could chuck a golf ball through and make it to its destination no problem.
side note, driving golfballs through an active stargate was one of my favorite scenes in the series.
Which I’m sure was very popular with whoever was downrange on the other side…
It’s really too bad Sydney doesn’t have a bag of holding… OR DOES SHE? There’s still one orb we don’t know what it does…
It could always be a cargo bay.
Or a brig. :)
I believe Maxima and her already discussed this, shortly after the pool incident where Sydney found out what the life support orb is for.
am i the only one that stares at the panel of where she is hiding it. that looks so real to me my brain is thinking thats a real photo that the artist has drawn on top of.
if so is it a clue for the readers?
It wouldn’t be the first time that DaveB has used a photo to guide his art. But if any reader can identify the location based on such a generic image, I will be seriously impressed.