Grrl Power #910 – Jabber blabber
When I sit down to write a page, I know basically what I want to happen on it, and have a general idea of what the dialog will be. It takes some time to actually compose it and sort it into comic panel friendly chunks, but for this page – I knew what was going to happen on it, but had no idea what I was going to do for the dialog.
Sitting down to write it though, I wasn’t really worried. One of the secret powers of ADHD (for me anyway) is kind of never having to worry about writer’s block. It pours out like goo from a massive lanced boil. Doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good, or that I won’t just sit in my chair spinning and daydreaming twenty different scenarios instead of actually typing something out. The point is, quantity is not the issue. I stared at the screen for about 15 seconds and was like, “Hmm, what is Sydney going to verbal diarrhea about… ah! Jabberwokky’s kiss cure.”
Actually I had that story banked for another page or three, but I think it’s at least as amusing in this form.
Fun fact, Jabberwokky was supposed to be obnoxiously chatty, which is where she got her nickname. But I forgot to do that every time she showed up. Maybe she switched her meds right before her first appearance.
By the way, for those of you wondering, Clip Studio Paint does not handle large blocks of anti-aliased text well. The program is embarrassingly single-threaded. It’s actually amazing it’s as fast as it is, but I would really like to see some GPU support.
Check the vote incentive to see Sydney not naked. Check Patreon to see her… well, you can guess.
Boobs.
(. )( .)
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
That’s brilliant, Dave, and SO what would have happened!
Also, I’ve run into people like this in Con Suites….
“Also, I’ve run into people like this in Con Suites….”
And in a similar vein I once had a guy come up to me and ask if I knew the best way to kill Hill Giants. When I said “No” he proceeded to tell me!
Ray, when someone asks if you’re a god, er, if you know how to best kill hill giants, you say “yes!”
Perfect reference
Motormouth under blabberjuice….
The ADHDefence
Yeah, what have they been thinking?
So….. when did Sydney last take her meds? I think that serum might’ve stopped them from working.
Nope, that serum is having a BAD INTERACTION with them. Cora didn’t get a secret text from Sydney’s glasses, she got an IMMINENT CORONARY FAILURE medical alert from them.
Maybe next time also research what mental issues the person has if you’re liable to jab em with drugs.
I actually think she’s doing this (partially) on purpose. It’s the correct defence against Truth Serum; just say things that are technically true, but not relevant.
And, if you don’t give them a chance to ask a question, then she can’t give them what they want. However, it is useful intel if you pay attention.
Good to know that Jasmine and Dabbler’s relationship is working out well. How about that barber guy?
You know what they call a monogamous succubus?
Anorexic.
Hah hah.
Well, unless she’s dating a guy with supernatural virility and no day job.
Which is essentially the premise of Jim Butcher’s third Bigfoot short story.
Ooooh, thanks for reminding me to catch up on Jim!
Definitely do that. And if you want to read the two books that came out last year, order them together – you want to read them in one go.
They are really good – although, fair warning, you might get emotional as a fan of the series.
I was yelling at my computer in anger halfway through “Battle Ground” (Kindle app).
No spoilers, but when you get close to halfway through the book… clear the rest of your day.
The thing is, non-fictional “truth serums” don’t actually force you to tell the truth. They deprive you of enough capacity to think that you can’t formulate or stick to a lie.
So they ask you a question and you blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. It doesn’t technically need to be true, but you’re not thinking straight enough to remember that you should lie.
With enough training the first thing that comes to mind CAN be a lie, I gather. That’s when they break out the cigar cutters.
Which is why you make passwords a common phrase that you change the characters and letters around in. Makes it nearly impossible for someone to figure out. But that fact Sydney is reacting in such a way should worry the hell out of the bad guys means they have no way of easily getting the info they want.
The problem with truth serums is you will talk, but you say what YOU know as the truth so using a truth serum on someone who knows nothing but myths from the internet, that’s all you’ll get. The myths they think are truths.
I’ve read various interviews/articles of people who have undergone tests with sodium thiopental, and yes, it does make you incapable of lying, mainly because it doesn’t occur to you to lie. But truth serums aren’t as reliable as the movies make out.
I’ve long thought it funny that we assume someone knows what the truth is when we question whether they’re telling a truth or a lie. Is someone lying if they’re mistaken? What if they intend to tell a lie, but actually tell the truth because they have it backwards in their head?
>The thing is, non-fictional “truth serums” don’t actually force you to tell the truth.
The hell is a non-fictional truth serum?
The ones in use on this particular planet Earth, as opposed to the ones that show up in movies and TV.
For example, sodium thiopental has fun truth serum like effects.
If I’m not entirely mistaken, ADHD and related conditions can make it easier to go off on tangents without really thinking about it, because it all seems relevant and important at the time (the Malcolm in the Middle bit about Hal changing a lightbulb is often used an example for a similar thing when it comes to doing stuff). This – to me – seems like it’s that, but dialed up to 11 by the truth serum.
Zah, the Miles Vorkosigan method of defeating truth serums. Yeah, that fits Sydney perfectly.
Except that Sydney doesn’t divert off into poetry and/or Shakespearian plays. “If he keeps this up we’ll be here all winter!” “Now is the winter of our discontent…”
She hasn’t gone off into poetry and Shakespeare (or in Sydney’s case, probably quoting pop culture) YET. Miles only figured out the poetry thing after a while into the interrogation. I think Galen even said “It’s working, he’s just giving us _too much_ information.”
I’ve never heard of Miles Vorkosigan, but scanning through the comments, apparently a ton of you have.
Worth reading still?
Huh, the first audiobook is free.
Oh, dear gods, yes.
That series has won a truly terrifying number of awards over the years, Hugos, Nebulas, Mystery awards, Romance…
Including the first ever Hugo for Best Series.
Yes, absolutely. Everything Lois writes is amazing. Read it all.
One of my favorite series. The series is now officially finished as well, so there’s no waiting for the next one.
Shards of Honor doesn’t directly reference Miles Vorkosigan so much as his parents and how they met. It and the sequel Barrayar can be found as an omnibus titled Cordelia’s Honor, which is worth a read, and sets up background for the events that unfold in the life of one Miles Vorkosigan in future books.
If you just want to start with the hyperactive little git who not only kissed the blarney stone, but bloody well swallowed it, his story starts with The Warrior’s Apprentice, later published in the omnibus Young Miles.
Just to let you know the first two books which is what Shards of Honor is aren’t Miles. They are about his parents, which helps set the back story for Miles and explains why he is they way he is. I have one of the books sitting on my night stand still need to finish it. But yeah Miles is worth reading.
heck yes read it !!!
It’s a shame you’re late into it – there was a time that Baen Publishing didn’t think that ebooks were going to be profitable, so instead they used them as marketing. They bundled CDs containing the ebooks of an entire series, with the latest hardcover in that series – they wanted people to share them, hoping they’d buy the series for themselves. Worked with me, I bought the Vorkosigan Saga three times – twice as gifts.
Unfortunately, now ebooks are much more mainstream, many of the CDs have been pulled for distribution by the authors, but the ones that are still legal to share are archived at https://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/
There’s several series, including Weber’s Honorverse still available, so If you’re interested in a new sci-fi read, and don’t know whether to buy them yet, have a look.
There are more than a few Baen Authors lurking around these halls.
Neat, but how do I tell what books are which if I’m pretty sure I’ve never read any of these? ^^’ Am I looking at series titles, here, or~?
slight correction, but I talked to Jim Bain many a time
( not a personal friend, just Conversations at conventions)
and it wasn’t that he didn’t think e-books would be popular but rather
a great distaste for all the security and encryption protocols people were pushing.
He contacted all of the authors in his stable Asking for donations of security free books
and established the bane free library to prove you didn’t have to lock everything up in DRM
to make a profit.
And he was right, the authors that contributed to the library found Sales of their other books
and even the books that were free jump.
I haven’t been there for a while but the last time I checked the library was still running
and still occasionally adding books. Just type in the bane free library
Myself, I can’t handle those books. Too many V names make them completely unreadable for me. Decoding the MIDDLE of a name as what distinguishes a character’s id? Nope.
You just have to mentally snip the ‘Vor-‘ prefix from the names. Memory is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read, but meaningless if you haven’t read at least 4 other novels before it.
They’re pretty good, though I faded out on the series midway.
The thing most people are referring to here is that Miles, whose mother was exposed to a dangerous posion when he was in her womb, suffers from numerous significant birth defects, including having bad reactions to most common drugs. At one point in the series he is captured by bad people who give him the basic truth serum for that universe, but instead of working like normal it turns him into a hyperactive blabbermouth: pretty much exactly what is happening to Sydney here. He took advantage of that by directing his babble in all sorts of directions other than the ones his captors wanted: he couldn’t stop talking, but so long as he forced his thoughts down a different chain than the ones they wanted he could keep them from getting the info they were after.
Somebody rolled a 1 on their interrogate check.
Sydney uses a heavily weighted table for her sanity checks.
“It’s supposed to be a truth serum…”
Although based on Sydney’s EYES it looks more like that needle was full of theophylline. (think crystal meth on crack) Her heart’s probably making a hummingbird look calm.
I wonder how the crystal meth on crack is interacting with her normal meds.
Oh, wait, she’s having trouble breathing. This might be a problem.
I think the breathing problem is just that she’s forgetting to inhale.
Yeah … I was wondering about the eyes.
just try not to imagine a meth-head hummingbird
That humming bird just stole my car battery!
The problem for these goons is that it’s a heck of a lot of truth, just not the truths they wanted.
I hope somebody remembers to hit “record”, there’s a lot of juicy stuff in that wall of words.
Sydney uses Truth… Its Real Effective… There’s a lot of it and she has a lot to tell! XD
This is on par with the famous Truth-Serum battle in Tintin Flight 347 to Sydney! XD
Flight 714 to Sydney, but yes. I wanted to comment on it, but I see that you have beaten me to it. Odd coincidence that the Tintin story with a similar reaction to a truth serum, also has “Sydney” in its title. Did DaveB give her that name all those years ago just in anticipation of this scene?
Omg who had the bright idea of giving SYDNEY something that encourages her to speak.
That *is* the correct defence against any form of Truth compelling method. Like DnD’s Zone of Truth, which Sydney 100% knows about.
Just keep talking about things that are true, but not relevant.
Just try to avoid calling yourself Barrel-Rider.
The truth, and nothing but the truth, but not ALL of it! And not those things that are true, we want the other true things.
Why doesn’t anyone think this through?
As someone with ADHD and mood swings I can attest this is accurate.
I used to call it the data stream, where for some reason either because I was nervous or anxious or for reasons I can’t explain I’d just start to express a ton of information on any topic very quickly in as short a time as possible, even switching between topics while talking and coming back around to ideas.
I still sometimes do this to co-workers if I am tired or am trying to overcome an earlier annoyance with a customer as just going over random data points quickly somehow calms me down.
I am dyslexic and mildly ADHD and I Have done Something
mildly similar many a time particularly when I’m tired.
and given that I estimate I’ve read something on the order of 10 to 15,000 books
on Hundreds of subjects over the last 60 so years,
I’ve had people run away to get away from the pedantic babbling. :)
Heh. Reminds me of when they gave Miles Vorkosigan fast-penta.
Among other things he wound up reciting all of one of Shakespeare’s plays on fast-forward.
my brotha i was thinking the same thing …. that was a maaad mad i forget if it was terrorist or mercenary …. i think it was terrorist was that brother in arms or the vor game?
It was a Komarran terrorist in Brothers in Arms.
Poor sods got the entirety of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Unfortunately for his cell-mate, most of it was after he was back in his cell.
Ah yes, the Miles Vorkosigan / Admiral Naismith syndrome. Incredible. You love to see it: a beautiful.mind meets a mind-releasing drug. May the gods have mercy on her captors’ souls. And blessed be the words by Lois McMasters Bujold, for she is mighty with pen and character.
“like how Kahn tried to do to Kirk” That’s Khan.
And Khan is a title, which could refer to a great many people. The context of Kirk makes it (far) more clear, but really the guy’s name is Noonien Singh.
Some writer probably just thought that Kirk calling him Noonian, or Singh wouldn’t play as well to audiences. But then you have the reality that Kirk is literally calling this guy a King every time he addresses him. And Kirk is too savvy of a poker player to do that unless he’s doing it to fluff the guy’s ego before some trick or subterfuge.
Khan also just happens to be a common surname in the Indian region
And it’s not like people with one name aren’t widely known by another, you know, like a certain medical professional who goes by ‘Ducky’
Ah! That gives me a hint to the heritage and faint accent of a couple of the customers for the store I work at (their last name is Khan, and while curious about the accent, I haven’t asked–can be kind of rude, you know? ^_^’)! :D
Well not all of us can be as fortunate to be called Dr. Mallard :P
Actually, when he first awakened on the Enterprise in Space Seed, he said to Kirk “Khan is my name.”
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f9b04dcc-e9a1-4cb5-9e38-3cb2197438d5
Unfortunately, it sounds like Mr Roarke is saying “My name is cun.” :P
“My name is Khan, and welcome to Fantasy Island.”
Looks at today’s guests to the island, Don Knots and Phyllis Diller.
In the case of Wrath of Khan, Khan wasn’t his title. It was his actual name, according to Gene Roddenberry, and it was based on a pilot Roddenberry knew called Kim Nonnien Singh. Khan Noonian Singh was a sikh, not a khan, according to the TOS episode, “Space Seed.”
Reference:
Marla McGivers: “From the northern India area, I’d guess. Probably a Sikh. They were the most fantastic warriors.” —”Space Seed”. Star Trek: The Original Series. Season 1. Episode 22. February 16, 1967. NBC.
“A Sikh, not a Khan” – not mutually exclusive categories, albeit unlikely to be combined. One is a religion (and by context, extended to refer to the people of the region where it originated), the other is a leadership position (at varying level) in several central-Asian hierarchies. Some of the states whose organisation included khans overlapped with India-Pakistan Sikhs in either time or geography, but I’m not sure that they overlapped in geography at the same time.
Understood. Just saying according to Gene Roddenberry his actual name was Khan :). Not a title. Also in the remake where benedict cumberbatch or however his name is spelled, he says “My name is Khan.”
Could be worse, it could have made her start telling all THEIR secrets (like has happened in a few stories, including one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy novels).
I was also thinking about the HHGTTG incident when I saw what was happening.
But what sort of frakking idiot does this sort of thing in the field when the Goddess of Ash is a couple of blocks away and likely to start looking for you at any moment?
They probably decided that it was too dangerous to try to move her. She’s tethered to her orbs, which means they would have had to break open the concrete and free them in order to move her. And if Sydney manages to touch either her shield, the Lighthook or the PPO, the situation would go downhill even faster than it is…
I don’t think so. Given Concretes powers, they could still be entombed and moved.
Secondly as far as they know (and based on the night noise) the rest of them are still busy with the other supers. This doesn’t seem like a capture gambit more than an intel mission. Otherwise they could just inject her/knock her out/and do this else where.
Also this is what you thought would stop her wit?!?
Sydney can’t move away from the orbs, and the orbs can’t be moved away from her. They’d have to move her and the orbs together, which would be a challenge.
A challenge, yes, but not an insuperable one. A bit of precision concrete-forming from Concretia could be used to give the Orbs a relatively thin coat, enough to prevent contact without being too heavy to carry (adjust that balance depending on the load capacity of your henchers). If they can then be separated into groups to be carried by different henchers each at the limit of the Tether in a different direction, then Sydney can be pinned in the middle. Does work better in a more open environment, though – manoeuvring around walls and stairwells may make it difficult to maintain that separation.
Heck, just put them into Concretia and have the two of the cultist hold/drag Sydney while Concretia walks beside her. There’s a lot of options.
Form a concrete backpack on one the goons so he can just walk with sydney.
The kind of idiot who responds to a demonstration of her power with “The cleansing is at hand.”
Or at least the lead dude seems like he might be that guy.
He doesn’t look anything like him
More memorable for me was a comic story in one of those weird comic titles. Three corrupt military officers decide to use an untested truth serum on a black soldier accused of theft. He then starts telling secrets he couldn’t possibly know because of it giving him effectively omniscience in response to questions, then one of them stupidly asks if he knows how helpful he can be to them. So he starts mentioning some of their many crimes and at the end points out he’s a liability and they’ll have to kill him to which they agree. He then manages to escape and flee into the streets where they murder him only for his blood leaking from his body to spell out ‘The Army Murdered Me.’
Wow, the truth serum even made his blood truthful!
Although “the army” is a bit vague, it’s not like anyone is going to try to indict “the army.” The names of all of the conspirators would have been far more useful, and there’s a lot of blood in a human body.
Whew. Glad someone else remembered Prak. I was starting to feel old.
:-) The “tell all the truth” from Hitchhiker’s Guide was the first thing to occur to me as I read this. They should just be happy THAT didn’t happen.
lol it’s weird I never noticed sydneys barrage of hair clips until now. Amazing. Even more so that they are actually managing to hold back her giant anime bangs.
I was going to say that you hadn’t noticed them because Dave hadn’t been drawing them, but I went back and he HAS, since the beginning of this NY sequence. I just had never noticed them too. WOW!
A barrage of barrettes?
oh no, i missed your post, someone later put in an armada of adornments, and I took the letter B and used baubles. you totally deserved my spot!
holee f of that wall of text in each speech bubble
If Concretia doesn’t breathe, how does she talk?
That’s either comic book physics, or something similar to low frequence electrical discharges that woek like a piezoelectric speaker. Concrete contains some quartz, by deforming that it will generate some electricity, salts contain metals and are with some encouraging capable of conducting said electricity. She would sound a bit screetchy i think.
Her astral projection can talk. It does not need to make the animated rock talk. It just needs to stay able to talk while animating rock.
Possibly Concretia’s astral projection is able to vibrate in a way that causes sound, like the larynx vibrates when air passes through it.
You opened the floodgates. Ya shouldnt’a did that.
I am laughing so hard right now.
You go, Sydney. :D
Having a Miles Vorkosigan moment here, watching that wall of text….
Sydney’s eyes in panels 3 and 4 are cause for concern.
Yeah, your pupils dilating that differently, outside of radically different illumination, is a classic sign of something really bad going on, like a stroke or seizure.
Sydney uses logorrhea, it’s super effective!
Between Grrlpower’s and El Goonish Shive’s author commentary, I REALLY consider getting myself diagnosed for ADHD…
Nice to see another EGS fan. (Digital fist bump.)
/me pulls out TF-gun.
*hand on the gun, shaking head Susan-ly*
*volunteers for all testing of every device/wand/watch from EGS*
Volunteers to observe.
*nods at volunteerism*
If you’re on Twitter, you might want to check out Dani Donovan and ADHD_Alien–they make comics related to ADHD and are what made me laugh and say “haha! That’s me!”–too many times, until I paused and went “Oh. Uh-oh…” :)
Miles Vorkosigan on fast penta. (Brothers in Arms, Lois McMaster Bujold)
You guys put in the quarter, you gotta hear the whole song.
One thing that must NEVER HAPPEN: Sydney must NEVER meet Luis. It would be CATASTROPHIC!
My immediate thought
Is she multi-tasking right now or are her retinas doing the dilation mambo and changing color on their own?
It’s called a stroke.
Oh, yeah.
Like a Harvard boat race.
Miles Vorkosigan did it better.
Miles does everything better. how else do you think he got laid so often. the man even managed to die and come part of the way back. (there were side effects)
Yeah, boy howdy are there side effects, of course there are side effects from getting hit with the truck so it is slightly hard to tell where the side effects from dying and coming back stop and the side effects from getting hit with a truck begin, and oh Gawds it’s starting…
Oh my god, I can’t find a single punctuation mark!
That’s because she hasn’t taken a pause or a breath, other than when she started hiccupping
Yup, it’s runaway run-on rumjnation
What do you suppose “GPU support” means, hm? The only thing they were really good at is munge texttures until “GPGPU”, and that really only added support for processing “embarrasingly parallel” stuff, once you’ve written the support. So your program would need lots of cookie-cutter “kernels” to load onto a GPU, and that only helps you if it has a “kernel” for just the thing that you want done.
You’re probably better off if the program could split the work to be done, say stick text on a picture, into multiple “work-units” and divide them across available CPUs. Same thing, less tinkering with exotic hardware. But sticking text on a picture in large quantities is already a degenerate case for making comics, so I’d say there’s no real upside in putting in any work speeding it up.
Technically yes, “multi-threading” is probably what’s needed; GPUs are one way to do that, and they are especially with visual data and handling dedicated image processing outside the main UI thread(s). “Sticking text on a picture” is both a perfectly normal use case for comics, and something GPUs ought to do quite well.
It’s more complex than that. The nugget is text fonts are vector curves, GPUs aren’t built to calculate curves in real time. It’s a costly operation to have them do. Currently to get the most benefit, the “easy” way to feed fonts to a GPU is to first render them out (on CPU) as image/sprite-maps, then run that through the GPU.
Proper CPU multi-threading would be the answer. Although even with that, a large amount of text would likely need to be broken into multiple textboxes to allow for better tasking.
https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harder-than-3d-graphics/
And with the coming rise of the massively multi-cored ARM CPUs, all developers of rather meaty programs need to start getting onboard with CPU multi-threading.
So she’s pulling a Vorkosigan on the enemy? Great tactic! :D
How much time is passing?
I thought they were time constrained.
Mad Magazine once made fun of Spiderman’s ‘Banter Time’ where he’s
speaking in mid jump.
Was that a thing once?
Sydney told them they were time restrained.
They apparently don’t believe her.
Sydney doesn’t need the Amazeballs to have superpowers.
This is her using her Mega-Distraction.
“Apparently banter is a free action” taken to the extreme.
Tl;dr
Out of curiosity, why is it that some days I can see my comments appear right away when I post, and other days they’re invisible forever? Anyone else have this experience?
Happens to me too. Can’t tell if it’s wordpress or if the author has to approve comments or if it’s just a random glitch, but it happens more often if I post more than once.
It appears to be mostly random, or dependent on how busy your computer and/or the hosting server is at the time. Posts with more than three links get held for moderation, as an anti-spam measure, but text-only posts should go straight through. Others have recommended forcing a no-cache reload of the page, to make sure that you’re getting a cached version from before your comment was received. How to do that will depend on your browser; I can’t give advice because I don’t give it that much urgency.
I appreciate your non-urgency. Not a big deal for me either. I just don’t understand computers at all most of the time.
I did include one link to TV Tropes in my first comment today, maybe it was held up for that why. (Please note, I deliberately used poor grammar there. I normally write English very goodly.)
A single link shouldn’t have caused any problems. (Not with the posting at least – can’t say the same about anyone who follows it to TVTropes and gets lost there!) Sounds like you just hit a slow patch of internet that time. It happens.
It seems to mostly be on the server end, as well as current activity on the page. I’ve had comments on the latest page take a long time to submit and not show up immediately, but I’ve never had even a lag on older pages that aren’t being actively discussed.
The cacheless reload only works sometimes. Which seems to indicate other or possible multiple issues.
Another thing that seems to “kick a post free” (besides time, posts never seem to just get lost permanently) is to make another post. Often the prior one that got held up will then magically appear.
Was Sydney targeted? It looked like merely an opportunistic grab.
Sydney doesn’t know any ‘need to know’ stuff.
What are today’s villains looking for?
Where she got her balls from, maybe?
She doesn’t know any ‘need to know stuff’ – that she’s aware of. If we discount the Council, or any off-Earth technologies/capabilities she may have seen on Alar or the Fracture or Cora’s ship, or the true capabilities of some of her Orbs… Depending on what her captors are looking to find out, even casual observation from ordinary-team-member levels of clearance may suffice.
She does know need to know stuff, but they’re all linked to all the capabilities of her orbs.
– The Sconia fight(Twilight council is already need to know, a fight with an alien would only be more need to know)
– The details of her deep space adventures
– x
Barring some kind of superpower involvement, it seems like she was targeted, in that they probably saw her fly away and rushed to get to where she was going. Ahead of her, before she herself hadn’t decided where she was going…
It’s all just so very improbable… Halo can fly very fast, and probably didn’t go very far as there was active fighting still going on and even accepting that she undertook the really foolish task of “hiding” a piece of alien tech in a city of 8 million people, she probably wouldn’t have wanted to be gone very long.
So Concretia would have had to be able to move very fast indeed to be ready to ambush Sydney almost immediately after she landed. The apparently normal humans involved took a while to hoof it there, so now we have to assume that Conretia had access to some means of fast travel that the other three did not.
I’m pretty sure we’ll never learn the details, because trying to answer all of the huge logical holes seems unlikely to result in anything even remotely plausible.
Sydney was probably targeted because she suffers from the same basic weakness of all gadget heroes — take away her gadgets and she’s just a human norm and a petite woman at that. She’s demonstrably far more capable than most women her size if only because she’s so unpredictable but size and strength do matter in a fight and these guys are prepared for her where the last two weren’t. Don’t forget that was a false flag operation and they were supposed to take a dive, just not to Sydney. These guys probably thought she’d be easy to defeat without her orbs. And she was – but only physically. Mentally she’s still very much in the game. Concretia doesn’t have to travel, she projects, and may have been stalking Sydney in ghost form all along waiting for her opportunity. And since when has plausibility been a reasonable expectation for a superhero comic?
HOLY WALL OF TEXT! batman
a) reducing Sydney’s already minimal inhibitions to get her to talk more was a terrible idea
b) I hope they’re smart enough to be recording this for future review, because she’s actually dropping a decent amount of (potentially) valuable knowledge about Archon’s abilities and team dynamics, as well as some classified stuff like her space trip.
c) I hope she passes out soon to improve her chances of surviving the imminent heart failure / asphyxiation
Yeah, part of the idea with truth serum is that you are disinhibited, ADHD meds on the other hand boost the persons ability to exercise a little more focus and inhibit themselves. I have known a few folks that sedatives really did make their disinhibition worse right up to the moment that they passed out. (B.) is quite likely true but would take a lot of listening to sort the wheat from the chaff. I’ve seen people use the wall of sound in a psychiatric setting but if you want to see an example of a live person doing it just watch an episode or three of the Dr. Phil show. (C.) I’ve seem people pass out out from both holding their breath and from hyperventilating. Luckily you pass out before you do yourself any particularly harm. The real risk is hurting yourself when you fall down.
It turns out Sydney DID have a mental filter, and the point of truth serums is to get rid of things like that…but now she literally can’t stop talking to save her life.
A little concerned over Sydney’s health here! Also later when she remembers what she said about a bobsled team!
it’d be even funnier if all the members of the team were named Bob
Someday, all the universe will be Bob.
be fun if the one orb we thought as medical orb just straight up smashes through at max force going into CPR mode basicly purifying the body instead of air type thing