Grrl Power #980 – Destination beatdown
Sydney probably could have just hunkered down in her shield and let Kevin just blast away at it, then maybe juggle him around with the lighthook, but she felt this would be a whole lot more demoralizing.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update:
I really need to finish the book so I can close the tab I’ve had open for three weeks on google results for “sintered.” (Spoilers? Not really, no.)
So Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was on sale and I’ve never played one of those so I decided to check it out. It’s… fine? The hide, stab, climb a thing loop is okay I guess. It’s basically the same game as Far Cry, but you hide, shoot and climb a thing in those. That basically describes all of Ubisoft’s catalog I think. The world is huge and there’s a lot of nothing. Like I remember Skyrim, you couldn’t walk for 90 seconds in any direction before finding a carin stone or dungeon entrance or a giant herding sheep or something. AC:V has you running for 5 minutes from place to place to a pre-marked treasure which is usually an ingot for upgrading your weapons marginally, or a “mystery” which is usually just some minor scripted side quest that gets you some XP. There are also towns you can raid, because you’re a viking, but instead of calling in your homies, I can usually take down an entire town by myself because I’m playing on normal difficulty.
Like I said, it’s fine.
All this is to say, I haven’t made any progress on T:E2 since Monday because I haven’t played any video games in quite a while and thought it would be fun to hit some digital Saxons with an axe. I do hope to make some more progress by the next update though. I’ve played a lot of video games and the gameplay loops tend to wear out their welcome with me fairly quickly. I actually can’t think of the last game I actually beat. Playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, I maxed out Enchanting and Stealth, then enchanted a full set of glass armor with stealth buffs, then crouch stealthed all the way through an Oblivion portal and stole the gem thing and I was basically invisible even in bright light, and after I did that I kind of figured I had basically won the game in all but time expended, so I stopped playing there. I tend to either do stuff like that, or just play long enough to get about half the upgrades then exhaust the gameplay loop and lose interest.
September’s vote incentive is up! It’s been over a year since Max was featured in one of these, so I figured it was time to revisit.
If you just popped by to see it right when it went up, you might have missed the update. Her nipples were a touch high in the first version, and if you poke through the comments there, you can see the reference I used, only that model’s boobs were about 3 cup sizes smaller. Anyway, I flew her nipples south for the winter and updated the relevant pics.
Nude version is up at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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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.
Wasn’t expecting that! So many questions
But I did say, if V was thinking about being bad he would have been smarter to make a run for it while fully charged.
I’m thinking that Kevin would be thinking that he’s better off in his cell while being spaced out.
#1: Kevin was just suddenly & unexpectedly exposed to the conditions of a wormhole (whatever those conditions might actually be) so he’s, at the very least, disoriented enough that I’m surprised he had sufficient cognizance to hold his breath. There’s also likely to be so other kinds of physical shock in addition to the mental shock.
#2: In microgravity conditions, he has no leverage so his strength is useless…Unless he figures out how to fly with no conventional means of propulsion. Without it, he won’t even be able to make it to Fracture Station.
#3: Surrounded by about as pure of a vacuum as you’re going to find anywhere & all of the problems associated with being exposed to it suddenly. He can’t get to Fracture Station to catch his breath without flight, so Sydney is his only hope to survive more than a few minutes or so.
#4: Kevin will have to burn a lot of energy to compensate for all of the above. He’d definitely last longer than a normal human but the end result will still be the same.
Yes, called it! “Or she could just teleport him to space. His powers don’t seem like they could handle space-based suffocation without using up a ton of energy.”
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-979-final-boss/comment-page-1/#comment-907971
Suffocation is the LEAST of his issues right now.
The lack of pressure is currently causing his BLOOD TO BOIL, causing INSANE internal damage.
The radiation is probably ripping his atoms to shreds as we speak.
Not to mention, he is currently experiencing near Absolute Zero in terms of temperatures.
Sure, space is effectively near Absolute Zero, but there’s basically zero wind. Vacuums are good insulators, which is more significant than the effective temperature in the short term.
The nearest star provides the vast majority of radiation in any ‘in a mono-solar system’ situation. Fracture station is built around the nearest star, so provides shielding. He’s probably experiencing less overall radiation than if he was on Earth right now. True, the ratios of the types of radiation that he’s experiencing are probably quite different from on Earth, and there may be one of those that’s therefore at problematic levels. But he’s a big boy who can regenerate.
Yeah, you got a good point about the vacuum being an immediate problem even before suffocation is a problem. But also, there was far too much air in his lungs to pass out through his nose and mouth in a pain-free manner a moment ago. On the other hand, that issue’s been mostly fixed now. :D
Contrary to popular fiction, blood won’t boil in space. Your body is effectively a pressure vessel providing enough pressure to keep the liquids in your body from boiling. In a vacuum a normal human has about 15-20 seconds of useful consciousness, after which you would start to lose consciousness. Kevin can burn manna to compensate but eventually he will run out, especially considering he is pretty far from any violence (Fracture station is huge and for it to be that small in the background, they are most likely thousands of miles away). His options are surrender, or wait till he burns through most of his manna, loses consciousness, and Sydney drags his ass back to Earth in triumph and he goes back in a cell where he has no access to violence at all.
The internal pressure is the exact problem, you have pressure inside you and NO PRESSURE on the outside, it’s like taking a deep-sea fish up to the surface rapidly. It ruptures when you do that, by the way, which is one of the reasons why we have a hard time doing research on em.
Basically, Kevin was just plopped Surface pressure caused by our atmosphere to deep space, which has no pressure at all. That’s gonna cause a serious case of the bends (Decompression sickness) AT BEST. At worst, the resulting blood boil will have him burst like an overfilled balloon.
Either way, best case result, he’s going to take severe internal damage. Super constitution or no, an air bubble in your heart will cause a heart attack.
Bends yes (but not as bad as you probably assume), blood boiling, not till he is long dead. bends happens when nitrogen dissolved in the blood comes back out and forms bubbles in the blood, but it isn’t as severe a problem in this case as the usual cause is ascent from a high pressure environment where more nitrogen dissolves in the blood, though it is still a problem going from 1 atm to vacuum, it takes time before you start to see the effects. The immediate problem will be oxygen deprivation, the water in your eyes will start to evaporate drying the eyes and causing capillaries to burst. Burst eardrums are also possible. Kevin is tough and this damage is minor, though eventually can become catastrophic, so for him it would be an inconvenience easily healed. The lack of actual violence means that the longer he stays, the more energy he needs to burn to stay alive in healing and using in place of oxygen. It might take a couple of hours before he runs out of energy, but eventually he will run out, and he will die, and then his body will begin to outgas and eventually his blood will boil. but he will be dead at that point and not care anymore. Sydney won’t let that happen, so she will wait til he either surrenders or passes out and then bring him back.
People have been exposed to vacuum, generally by accident. The damage is usually fairly mild: earaches, mild bruising, and the like.
Not really. The blood boiling can do damage, but Kevin is tougher than normal humans. The radiation is more of a longterm concern, and vacuum is an insulator so he won’t freeze.
He is strong and tough enough that one atmosphere of internal pressure isn’t really a big deal. Radiation isn’t that high if it’s just for the length of time he can last without air, and considering his healing is magical, it might even heal DNA damage without mutations. With no air, he won’t freeze anytime soon. Who knows how much heat he is producing in that form, but he probably won’t cook himself before running out of air. She just needs to bring him back before he runs out of energy to make up for not breathing. She can’t let him in the shield unless she learned some new trick to let him in without letting the air out.
The boiling of blood is not caused by internal heat, when liquids are exposed to lower pressure their ability to keep themselves in liquid form lessens, you can have room temperature water boil by simply putting it in a pressure chamber then slowly lower the pressure towards 0.
It’s the same thing here, with no external pressure working against the body, the internal pressure has free rain to push outward allowing the blood vessels and the blood in it to expand freely causing a loss of pressure while slowly but surely tearing you apart internally and allowing the gases inside the blood to escape, not just nitrogen, but oxygen as well, a severe case of the bends is the best case scenario.
Not breathing is very much the issue here.
The rest of the vacuum effects are dramatically slower, and frankly probably wouldn’t do much to someone with V’s pure physical toughness. If your outer skin can handle a punch from Max, the pressure differential isn’t going to mean anything to you – you are already far tougher than any current spacesuit.
Radiation and temperature issues will depend mostly on how close you are to a nearby star and what its relative luminescence is. You could potentially overheat, or very gradually freeze, but in V’s case he’d probably have to be quite a bit closer to a star than relative Earth orbit around the sun before he would worry about overheating or radiation burns.
Not sure what kinds of radiation Fracture Station is giving off back there, but given that it is inhabited it must not be as bad as it looks (it looks bad, to be honest…)
so time till she gets the you cant just space people lecture
Without permission? Pretty sure this was a given outcome.
Pretty sure the only reason she was even at that fight was because Maxima wanted/ordered her to do this
Pretty sure the only reason Sydney was even at that fight, was Maxima wanted/ordered her to do this if he refused to follow the rules
My girl real just said ‘Seatbelts everyone, we going on a roadtrip’
Magic School Busted.
Note how she doesn’t have her pen out with her. She had this written out in The List already, and probably not just for Kevin.
that’s what i was asking myself, she wouldn’t sacrifice two pages of her sacred “THE LIST” just for a training exercice, meaning she had those words already in there, and she remembered them well enough to use them here, meaning she might be reading THE LIST from time to time, to remind herself who is in it.
Syd decided that this will be a recurring issue for her, so she added it
/Glad I picked vacuum when this fight started.
Pretty sure Sydney has had those two pages printed up years ago. She probably first used it in The Mugging.
This is not “THE LIST” in any shape.
1: Too big. The list is pocket sized. See https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-82-whos-interviewing-who/
2: This is two pages used. There’s zero chance she’d do that kind of disrespect to “The List” at all.
3: Too many pages to be “The List” here.
According to “Teamups & Crossovers” there have been many volumes of “The List” over the years. This is probably just a later volume of it.
She did say “that’s my cue” last page so this was definitely planned in advance.
It’s a good way to remind him “Even if you get fully powered up, we can isolate you and make you burn power”
I am giggling way, way, waaaay too much. ♥.♥
Me too. Friggin love this.
He’s in trouble. His eyes are open and he has lungs full of air…the exact opposite you want to have in a decompression situation.
That would be a bad combo for a squishy human, but he’s probably strong enough to keep his mouth shut and not explode from the internal pressure. The way you or I would. And his eyes can shrug off a shot from a Barrett, a bit of frost isn’t going to hurt them.
So he really just needs to worry about burning through his mana compensating for not being able to breath. Already a demonstrated power. He has time to think it over.
Simply being in a vacuum is causing constant damage to every part of his body, so it’ll cost a lot of power to compensate for that, beyond just the need for oxygen. This will drain him a lot faster than simply being submerged.
Yeah, 1 atmosphere of pressure isn’t actually that much – only around 14.7 psi, it’s just that humans can’t deal with it very well.
Dangers of being exposed to space include:
Increased heat loss due to lack of insulating air
rapid decompression
– bodily fluids degassing
– expansion of gasses in the body
lack of oxygen
radiation exposure
Betting he can power through those, for a while. We know he can use his power to replace breathing, the radiation damage he can heal through, surely he can burn power for heat, and his body is likely just tough enough to tank the decompression.
The question is, can he figure a way to get himself to the station before he runs out of juice without Sydney stopping him.
> burn power for heat
A vacuum isn’t cold. Without atmosphere to conduct temperature, you would overheat in space, not freeze.
Not quite accurate a sphere of water will drop from 310K to freezing in about 18 hours, so there is heat transfer just very slow. My PhD text book on space mission analysis and design talks about lack of heat loss alot in planning a mission
Don’t forget the effect of vacuum boiling of water as the most energetic molecules depart in an attempt to equalize vapor pressure. It’s easy to observe, just put an open container of warm or hot water into a vacuum chamber and remove the air; as the pressure goes down, water will vigorously evaporate, until it suddenly freezes. Supporting evidence on Youtube is easy to find, just search for “Water in vacuum chamber”
This isn’t right.
He is emitting about 2000 W/m2 black body radiation (assuming twice the surface area of a typical human).
He is producing about 360 w/m2 (assuming 4 times the volume of a normal human).
So he is emitting about as much as a top end hair dryer on high (the kind that needs a diffuser).
He will cool – rapidly.
Sweating would probably work – the swear immediately vaporizes, cooling you until you dehydrate.
With what propulsion?
The only actual external energy we’ve seen him able to create/manipulate has been electricity, which wouldn’t help much for personal movement in space.
If I recall right, he has demonstrated the ability to just BS new powers as needed.
For instance, creating pants when he hulked out too far, even admitting he’d never grown that large.
So, in all technicality, he ‘could’ develop a means of propulsion. The question is, will he have enough time to do so, and enough power to use it afterwards?
He had beans for lunch. His secret identity is Booger Man.
I’m confused. “He had beans for lunch” implies he can rocket himself around with his farts, but “Hs secret identity is Booger Man” implies he’ll sneeze his way about?
Where are you from that “booger” means “fart” and not “dried nasal mucus”?
It’s a reference to an old game – 1994 old.
Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure.
I was expecting Animal House… Or The Spleen.
Or … POWDERED TOAST MAAAAAAN!
Oh god… NOT THE SPLEEN!!!
ANYTHING but that!
RUUUUUUUN AWAY!!!!!
A cartridge game on Sega Genesis.
Ah. That makes sense.
Don’t remember the game, but I have fond memories of one of its contemporaries, ClayFighter, which appears to have had several sequels including at least one with Boogerman as an unlockable.
Actually, heat loss isn’t a massive problem.
Space is, nominally a vacuum.
The problem is actually the opposite.
You have nothing to radiate your internal body heat TO.
So, in short order, your temperature begins rising. Alarmingly so considering the difference between “average” body temperature and “go unconscious” is about 10 degrees.
Again, Kev can probably handle higher temps. But at some point, he slips into a coma, relaxes, and Madame Universe kills him with little fanfare.
Heat loss is not a problem in vacuum, but decreasing pressure gets cold very fast. So a air filled lung for example my still feel cold effects.
Well, his internal pressure is still the same as long as he can keeps the air in his lungs and his skin stays intact. He is his own pressure vessel (for now).
That’s good, but you’re still not quite right — you have plenty to *radiate* heat to (and unless you’re in sunlight, nothing to radiate back at you), but nothing to *conduct* heat to. Radiation of heat is slow. You usually conduct a good deal of heat to the air (and evaporative cooling on top of that).
You can still radiate heat (infrared light), but we tend to conduct and convect a lot more heat. The last two options are not available for Kevin right now. He is also getting excess energy from Fracture as well. How close is he to one of those white dwarf access ports?
This is assuming they’re actually in vacuum right now, which might not be the case. Based on the background art, there’s a belt that goes around this base, and they appear to be in some sort of thin nebula. So there could be gasses and particles that he could be conducting heat too, just nothing that would be particularly useful to him. The station itself also appears to be venting some particles into the space around it as well.
Nebular densities may be higher than true-deep-space densities, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually high density. Even in the densest part of a nebula, the pressure is far below what can be produced in high-vacuum chambers on Earth.
As Sydney herself is demonstrating, a lot of those things can be overcome by putting up a magic barrier and filling it with air, and we know Kevin can throw his magic around on non-punchy things if he doesn’t panic. In contrast, the consequence of being a bajillion miles from home is significantly worse–assuming that home is where you want to be. Vehy would probably do well as a roaming space hitman or at least pro wrestler, assuming he wasn’t immediately (and successfully, which might be a problem) jailed or killed.
If Sydney plans to repeat this trick, she ought to have Cora fly her around so she can bookmark a neutral, non-survivable location in the Earth planetary system, like say Jupiter, instead of going somewhere that (1) has people with alien cameras watching the pretty Nth-tech or whatever girl; we already saw Cora can get the destination coordinates while the portal is open from a ways away, (2) might allow supervillains to escape into galactic society, (3) might be right in front of an oncoming freight train–I mean starship, (4) is populated enough that if you left the corpse of a baddy there, they might be discovered in time to be revived with alien supertech, or they might self-revive by Earth superpower bullcrap, or if they’re alien in the first place, they might have a transponder with coordinates…
In general, I think Maxima and the Fridge Logic Brigade will disapprove of this specific version of the tactic
No chance of getting hit by a starship, at least. They’re in space and a good distance from the Fracture, you’d have an exponentially easier time getting hit by a freighter while floating in the middle of the Pacific. At least in the ocean, you only have to match 2 dimensions at once.
Yeah, I listed the heat loss one in a very bad way, as yes vacuum is actually a better insulator than air, it’s more the moisture to vapor due to low pressure that directly drains heat and being in open space means there’s nowhere externally to gain any from without a nearby star.
So if he was able to control moisture loss he can prevent most of his heat loss.
the frost part is a misconception, we use the surrounding air to evacuate our excess body heat, in space there is no such a thing as “air”
after the initial cooling effect of.. every bit of moisture on your skin evaporating at once, you’ll get pretty toasty, since your body will start overheating
Well, there would be a bit of frost, since part of the moisture is above and part of it is below the sublimation temperature. So some of it would evaporate and the rest would turn into ice (until your body heats it and it also evaporates).
You only get toasty if you’re in sunlight from a sufficiently close star. Fracture Station is built around the nearest star, preventing that issue, unless it’s part of a multi-stellar system, and the other star(s) in that system are sufficiently close and not eclipsed by something.
For diving it’s only like going from 33 ft to the surface. Painful but not immediately crippling, especially if he releases some of the air in his lungs. (That continuous exhale on ascent is weird as hell.)
Dude gets hit with cliff faces for fun, he can handle it with minimal power burn.
one shot… that was a really good move, good one Sydney. extra points for performance
The vacuum of space is *extremely* deadly to humans, far beyond simply the lack of oxygen. This is one hell of an opener.
I wonder if there’s some tiny quantity of atmosphere around the station – of course, if so, it’d probably be made mostly of ship exhaust, so still worse than worthless for breathing, but at least it could provide better-than-full-vacuum pressure levels and possibly some tiny modicum of heat regulation.
They are as high up as satellites are for earth. There will still be particles that can be detected, so by that definition there is “an atmosphere”. However, when talking about anything relevant for biological needs, there is effectively no atmosphere. He’s in a vacuum for all things that matter.
If you are going by that no human has ever left earth atmosphere. There are earthbound gas particles measured farther out than the moon. The interaction between those is, of course, minimal, but higher than nonexistant.
It’s actually called an exosphere. It’s a very tenuous gassy zone where the gravitational pull is to weak to maintain an outer gassy layer (the atmosphere). All major and some minor bodies in the solar system have exospheres, including the Earth and the Moon. Beyond the exosphere, the particles are part of the interplanetary/interstellar/intergalactic medium.
That’s not a planet in the background
It’s a Dyson’s Sphere
Aka, something the size of an entire solar system
They’d basically have to be further from that thing than Pluto is form the Sun in order for it to show up that small
A little bit outside ‘orbiting satellite’ range
It’s around a Magnetar, or some other kind of neutron star, according to Sydney. Those have a radius of tens of kilometers
And the size of the sphere is such that surface gravity on the sphere is earth-like.
So yes, the total thing is probably rather close to the size of a planet.
Fracture Station is a moon-sized city, per author comments.
That’s still big enough for it to be really, really far away, in terms of the speed that V can get up to simply by letting gravity do the work while he burns through his mana.
Where on Earth did you get the idea that a Dyson sphere has to encompass an entire solar system? That is most definitely *not* what a Dyson sphere is. Here, just FYI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Origin_of_concept
It says so right in the article you linked.
“In fictional accounts, the Dyson-sphere concept is often interpreted as an artificial, hollow sphere of matter around a star.”
“The variant of the Dyson sphere most often depicted in fiction is the “Dyson shell”: a uniform solid shell of matter around the star.”
Since this is a fictional universe…
There is a small difference between the size of a Star, and the size of a Solar System.
I think of it s being he size of the Goldilocks zone aroud a star.
Big difference between “around a star” and “around a solar system”, in case you hadn’t noticed.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/11676dd4c753726c06eb1402fb6e24c7.jpg
also a Dyson sphere
technically
Dyson sphere, yes, but not as big as you think. It’s around a neutron star, which are quite compact – a typical radius on the order of about 10 kilometres. Definitely not the size of a solar system (and even the completely unscientific solid-shell Dyson sphere around a normal star shouldn’t be big enough to describe as “the size of an entire solar system” – 1 AU radius at most, more probably significantly less).
Aaaaannnd don’t forget, to make a Dyson Sphere (or a Ringworld) you’ll need 90-odd% of your solar system anyway, but it seems the Oort cloud will probably not be useful.
90%? Nowhere near that, really. Mass-wise, one could construct a 1-centimeter thick shell around our sun with a radius of 0.1 AU using just the mass of Mercury.
A Dyson sphere just has to be about power collection, not inhabitable space. Most of the surface area of space-based solar collectors can be very thin structures.
Well, we can actually do many things. Some I’ve heard tell of have tried to drive hyper-cars at ridiculous speeds on some really underdeveloped roads, for example.
We note the solar coronal temperature is around 1,799,945K according to https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/sounding-rockets/strong-evidence-for-coronal-heating-theory-presented-at-2015-tess-meeting (after some arithmetic to scientific units). So why would anyone bother with a Dyson sphere/shell at 14,960,000Km distance from the “surface” of the Sun? And we have yet to look at CMEs…
However, we can economise on building materials if we follow the F’sherl-Ganni buuthandi concept, though I think we might possibly need (in addition to Mercury) Venus and part of Mars. If we don’t incorporate solar wind windows in the design, we could also sacrifice Earth, and use a 3 or 4 AU radius.
Why build at 0.1 AU away? Why not? As I already said – a Dyson sphere is about about power collection, not living space.
As for “sacrificing” Earth, none of the planets need be “sacrificed”. A “window”, as you allude to, consisting of no collectors running the whole equator of the Dyson sphere 9 degrees above and below the solar equator will provide no change in solar energy to the rest of the solar system. IOW, from the vantage point of any of the planets, none of which have more than 7 degrees of orbital inclination, everything will look exactly the same as it ever did.
A full, interrupted equatorial window would cut the sphere into 2 bowls, which would then be pushed away by the solar wind (if not the coronal ejections, etc). You’d have to connect both sides and have sliding partitions to keep the window slots pointed at each planet.
And even then, radiation doesn’t come only from the small section ‘aimed’ directly at the planets, but from the entire solar disc visible from those planets – some quick drafting shows that a solar stripe of 9° to each side of the ecliptic (18° total) would have a projected area of just under 20% of the full disc. So you’d need to have some lensing on the windows to direct the emissions and make up the difference anyways, and at that point you might as well have small windows and stronger focus.
A) The “bowls” are not solid strictures in of themselves, but collections of numerous smaller structures.
B) The force of light pressure & solar wind pushing said smaller structures away from the sun is balanced by the force of gravity pulling the structures towards the sun. It’s a “simple” solar sail problem with variations being addressed by an active system of sail management.
C) The solar radiation received by the planets comes in a straight line from the sun. Owing to both the size of the sun and planetary distances, any radiation coming from the sun is considered to be coming in parallel at all points on a planet, be it pole or equator. Your calculations are erroneous because they fail to take in to account that the sun is 1.4 million km diameter while the opening around the proposed sphere is over three times that at 4.7 million km while also being over ten times the sun’s own diameter away from the sun at roughly 15 million km. In short, at any distance past the sphere, one would be able to see the the sun in its entirety as though the sphere were not there. There will be no change in either the solar flux or how the sun looks from the vantage of any planet.
You’re right – I completely missed the 0.1AU radius proposed in the prior posts, and was treating it as a sphere of basically equal radius with the sun itself.
Fracture Station is pretty solid and looks like it’s not much bigger than the star it encloses; I would think a star-sized radius to be more practical to live on if it could be achieved. Something with a 0.1AU radius would have enormous travel times, but that would probably be solved by the time we advanced enough to actually construct it.
He should be durable enough he can handle everything except the lack of oxygen.
He can heal through it all, but he’ll drain fast.
No, he will simply not take significant damage. He his more durable than a human and won’t get hurt by barotraume because he can handle the pressure difference.
He showed he could handle lack of oxygen back at the restaurant fight. He just had to burn through power to do so.
That will just buy him time.
He who controls the airlock, controls the world
Maxim #8: Mockery and derision have their place. Usually, it’s on the far side of the airlock.
Ah! Another diciple of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, I see!
Classics like that never go out of style.
Even when the lawyers get involved.
Especially when the lawyers get involved!
“Outside those doors is space, so he who controls the doors controls space” is the version I heard. Either way it works
Of course, he threw himself towards her, as she backed through her gate. Kind of awkward to replicate that for the return trip, nothing for him to kick off of. And she can’t grab him with the light hook, AND stay bubbled, AND gate back to Earth.
Nothing she can’t solve by setting up the correct relative velocities before gating, of course.
I guess this is where we find out if he can fly by burning mana, and how long he can hold his breath. But he doesn’t exactly look in a mood to test things.
Actually she can get back to Earth one way or the other. V still has initial velocity. So she just has to make a gate in front of Kevin’s current flight path. Or not. Basic portal physics (speedy thing in, speedy thing out)
Still leaving V anywhere near fracture probably still be a dangerous move
She actually can use the lighthook. Remember, an object in motion stays in motion. Grab the lighthook, give him a few inches per second of velocity, and he’ll keep going straight without any more usage of the lighthook. Right into a gate.
she could just use the bubble to push him
Ah yes, the good old “You still need to breathe” gambit
That’s how she beat him last time. But it took every brick in the big melee to help do it. Halo has gone from dangerous to scary.
Ah, you realize that Vehemence has two left hands?
I think the fact that one is half draw is to visualize him trying to swim in an unexpected environment. Humans tend to not know what to do when suddenly weightless
Literally, we’re looking at the back of both hands, and the thumb is on the same side. He’s been drawn with two left hands.
It could be a visualization of super-fast movement like RobK’s suggesting. It’s confusing, so if that’s what’s being expressed by the image the expression has some flaws, but that is a valid theory for why we’re seeing this.
One of those arms is drawn transparent. That usually signifies movement, and not an extra limb. His right arm is just out of panel.
That’s the same hand moving very fast.
That’s an afterimage used to show motion in a single panel.
And there’s another below his actual arm so it would be 3 anyway, unless you wanna argue Dave not only mistook left for right but forgot how many arms humans have too.
Could be you’re right about that being an after-image.
I believe he’s ‘signing’ a tap-out, like for wrestling, so is using his left hand for that, the second arm/hand is a motion after-image
Those are his left hand and the after image of said left arm moving quickly, hence being see through
Three left hands. Two are see through after images.
He’s flailing in space.
What you’re seeing is an after-image or motion blur.
He’s waving his hands around, that’s while the extras are translucent.
Kevin’s two left arms in the last panel is a bit of a weird look. If it’s some kind of refraction from the space travel stuff or an effect from super-fast movement it’s unclear what’s going on. If it’s supposed to be his right arm the silhouette works okay but we’re seeing too much of the detail of the interior.
Super fast movement: He’s panicking because “OH JESUS THERE’S NO ATMOSPHERE AND NOTHING I CAN PUSH OFF”
I don’t know if it’s necessarily “super fast”. I took it as just [*futile swimming motion*]
Now would be the moment when Kevin really hates his regeneration. Lungs collapse, grow new lungs which then collapse, REALLY dragging out how much this hurts. Nicely done Halo!
Remember, his bits regenerate are back stronger than they were.
Assuming he doesn’t burn power so fast that he dies in a couple minutes, he might actually be able to become structurally capable of enduring this for quite a while. The lack of atmosphere is what will really kill him, and the like of gravity/anything to push off seems like it pretty much locks him down.
Although, who knows? Maybe he can burn power to create some sort of blast, that he can use for propulsion? *shrugs*
…he did mention something about “force waves” back on page 972.
Can still dump him on alari p rime.
Just open a gate and toss him through with light hook.
That way if kevin still decides to get frisky you can just leave them there
Sydney can’t shield AND portal AND light hook all at the same time
Not without taking off a shoe
still couldn’t she has to use her hands. She’s tried her feet before.
I think she’ll take him to see the sites (effectively recruiting him) and get him some lunch …. (you know what I mean).
There will also be a fight or bar brawl of some sort.
They would probably have a lot of fun but unfortunately he can’t be trusted.
Maybe not “as is”.
But then again, that’s one of those “ordinary superpowers” we humans have.
We change.
Also it’s a superhero comic. In this genre it’s common to quickly switch from heel to face.
With, perhaps, some sort of on-point rotational – or “turning,” in layman’s terms – action?
I feel like this fight sequence was his opportunity to show that he can change and he didn’t.
Maybe he’ll get another chance, but it probably won’t be for quite some time.
Entrapment.
Yes, they agreed to stop, but when he asked “what if I don’t want to,” Maxima explicitly gave him a shot at Halo.
He was still operating within parameters that he was explicitly given by the HMFIC.
Kevin on a Vehemic High is pretty much an overly wound up puppy. It is absolutely obvious that he’s just having fun. He’s been in the Cooler for fucking ages, and they took him too the proverbial dog park.
Sydney just jerked his leash.
And he’s a Smart Boy, so I very much expect he’ll have already figured this out after less than 10 secs in hard vacuum. He got a little too rowdy, but they still love him, even though play time is now over, and it’s time to Go Home.
I fully expect he’s going to take a while, yet, but eventually, he _will_ sign up. He doesn’t really really have a lot of other options, if he wants to feed his habit.
Now…that said, he maybe doesn’t necessarily sign up with Archon. Lotta foreign powers would find him extraordinarily attractive, as an asset.
You do remember how Keven’s powers work right?
You let him near unshielded civilians, at what is essentially an intergalactic airport, and you will have a reality-ending war on your hands
Especially when he’s super-charged the way he is now
No, this is just Sydney pulling a “The fights over. Get over it” move before hyper-jumping them both right back to earth
“Getting Put In Space? My One Weakness!”
It’s even one of the things the team suggested as a countermeasure early on; hence his using V-energy to root himself.
If there’s one lesson every villain should take away from this encounter:
When Sydney smiles at you, you are no longer in control of the rules of engagement.
I think we’ll be saying that for a long time. Heck, let’s make it a meme.
When Sydney smiles at you, you are no longer in control of the rules of engagement.
If you’re bored of AC:V game, why not go where everyone knows your name…
The old indie MMO Minions of Mirth is back online.
Links to the current install and the Discord can be found on Reddit.
It’s also worth noting that Valhalla mirrors exactly none of the rest of the- Ok, I’ve only played Black Flag, Brotherhood, and III (American Revolution) aside from Valhalla, but as far as I know Valhalla doesn’t match the rest of the series for playstyle. While you can stealth in Valhalla, you’re probably just going to smash things.
It is pretty similar to Origins and Odyssey actually. There was a bit of a gameplay shift that makes those three feel like pretty different games from what you played, for better and worse.
I’ve never played MMOs. There’s just not enough time, and honestly, killing the boss of the haunted forest or whatever just to have him respawn for the next group 30 seconds after you turn your back really seems to draw attention to the… I hate to say “pointlessness” of video games, because obviously the point of games is entertainment, but… maybe a better way to put it would be that it really calls out the inconsequentialness of any given player’s time and contribution.
It gets harder to maintain the illusion the more people you involve. Particularly when they’re still trying to tell the same sort of single-player stories. Most MMOs are effectively just a bunch of people playing the same single-player game at the same time. The usual term is “theme park MMO”, to contrast with something that’s designed to have a persistent, shared world that the players can actually make lasting changes to.
Is she holding the shield orb behind “the list”? That looks like the “fly ball” in her left hand. And from the spacing of the orbs in the halo it ALMOST looks like there might be 6 up there.
Flyball and shield are similar colours, and both sorta glow blue when being actively used. You can also tell that she’s not using Flyball because it gives her a personal gravity, and her hair is going everywhere right now.
Yes, i guess space makes bright kinda wash out to similar(but it the last page the aura was clearly purple). And in the last page she had the shield in her left hand and florb in her right. one confusing bit is over the last couple pages, is that the unknown has shifted color from red/brown to more purple., making it look more like the shield in the last panel. and no, that’s not lighthook, the order of the halo has been the same for the last several years. the one behind the com ball is either lighthook, or the florb(in which case lighthook would be behind her head)
It also looks like the shield orb is still behind her in the first panels.
Sneaky mirror spaceship in panel 7, wonder if it’s relevant.
Good spot.
I had to look closer myself.
I spy with my little eye something that comes out of 2001 a space Odyssey
Huh, i didn’t realize until you pointed it out. (bottom right corner, right?) MIGHT be some smugglers or otherwise illegal aliens (pun intended). I mean, it would be a HUGE coincidence if they stumbled upon people trafficers like the ones who tried to kidnap Maxima, but it would also make for a fun mini arc of Halo and Vehemence against space crime :).
Speaking of heel-face-turns…
I’m actually all fit this. I would absolutely love to find out that Kevin has serious mahagony for sentient-trafficking.
I can just picture standing there with space cop, gently holding her back.
“Shhh….let this happen.”
Whoops, that’s actually a leftover from the first time Sydney arrived at the station. That was another panel I didn’t blend in well.
Shhh, just play with the 2001 a Space Odyssey reference
1. I am SO happy that this is how those waypoints Cora helped her set up came back!
2. She can take someone with her who isn’t in, or even touching the shield? Maybe this has to do with him occupying the space she had just previously been in?
I think the gate is just a gate. Anyone that goes through when it’s open goes through
hmm. That is one way to end a fight. pretty similar to banishment in dnd 5e. The difference here is that Sidney had a sub arc about getting home because she believed the orbs had some correlation with transporting back to earth and their previous owners demise. we shall see how these events unfold yes?(im putting on airs here. thats a really bad ass way to end a fight all things considered.)
After Cora brought her back home, she popped off to Fracture and back again for fun during the interview with Niel DeGrasse Tyson. Successfully gating FROM Earth gave her a safe bookmark for it.
As something of a brute myself, I’m not super impressed with Vehemence saying things like “hey, no flying”. If you’re willing to disregard someone else’s rules of engagement ( which I do think is legit sometimes), then you don’t really get to complain when they disregard yours.
Frankly speaking, in a real fight there are no rules outside of winning.
So much for the “no fancy powers” rule.
Kev better hope he’s got enough juice left to make up his own handwave like space armor and a rebreather. Although it wouldn’t be in character for Sidney to just let him die out there.
Well, the “no fancy powers” rule was part of the agreement that also included that they stop at the red zone. He continued past the red zone, so the gloves are off.
That was implied the moment they sent they send the “powers do the fighting” squishy wizard
And she flew backwards so the shield bubble masked the created portal. Nice little touches.
Yup! Interesting.
From her last visit, Fracture Station traffic control should already have her on its hazard list.
Given how large the station is, they could be an AU out. Or more.
Everyone heard the “bwi-i-i-i-i-ip” sound when he got light-tunneled, right? Not just me? ^_^’
I sort of called it on the Patron page. I guessed Halo might toss him into hyperspace if he got too aggressive. But Sydney didn’t even wait.
Him getting too aggressive was the entire reason Maxima tagged Sydney into the fight
To put an insta-end to the fight, in a way Kevin couldn’t counter or receive a charge from
If they really wanted to get rid of him, Sydney could just drop him on the planet the Asari (I think that was their name?) are from. she seems to have killed all the kaiju, so he would be stranded on an empty planet with no violence.
On another note, how was Enhancer? I read Tamer back when there were 5 books on Kindle Unlimited and after an hour or two tracked down a save file with the ebooks up to book 6 (still couldn’t find 7 anywhere other than the scammer sites).
My biggest issue is that the guy on the cover looks human, and there are supposed to be literally no duplicate sentient species on the dino planet.
They probably prefer to keep a eye on him. And the space chtulus might return and offer him a feast of violence.
There’s no rule about duplicate species. It hasn’t come up one way or the other yet in the canon books, leaving the option wide open for fanfic. Besides, even if there was a rule about it, maybe it’s one race per continent, or my book takes place six years before Victor’s or something.
Also, you can just buy the books from MSE’s site in far less than two hours.
Not paying $10 for less than two hours of reading.
KU has spoiled me.
Sydney has not killed all of them. After killing the first one, 3 more showed up. She burst through the eye of a second one, then ran away. The giant ship was also still fully unharmed
“she seems to have killed all the kaiju” 3 at the most,if the missiles were not sentiently driven.
She did not kill all the Big Bads on that world; she was considering “farming” them for more powers.
It’s impressive, but it’s also risky. Does anyone know if Vehemence can even survive in space? Is it a good idea to remove him from his ‘Jail Cell’?
If Sydney kills him of loses him, wouldn’t Max be irate? Wouldn’t that be illegal?
She can always just open a portal in front of him if it looks like he will die. He is still moving with his initial velocity. Also, it was shown before that he can burn power to keep himself alive against both injury (like decompression) and lack of oxygen.
Prior to the training session:
Sydney: “Kevin is going to be involved? Didn’t it take like, everyone, to bring him down the first time?”
Max: “We’re going to be careful and not let him get too out of hand. His glowy lines do help us there.”
“Uh-huh. And when he gets up into the red and decides to try and beat you to a pulp?”
“That’s when you tag in.”
“And… I’M supposed to stop him?”
“He’ll be overconfident, eager and that’ll make him stupid and predictable. Just portal into deep space with him.”
“Won’t that KILL him?”
“At that power level he’ll survive for a little bit. Certainly long enough to make a point.”
“Fair enough, it’s not like he’s Batman or anything.”
That’s a joke, right? Except for his intelligence, Batman doesn’t HAVE any superpowers. He’s just a filthy rich guy with a lot of technology.
Yep, just like Iron Man; both are really just versions of ‘White Privilege Man’.*
* just referencing a funny quote, not an endorsement of any political theory
https://batmantobe.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/breatheinspace.jpg
Huh, this is…..
actually pretty clever. Minimal input, maximized output.
Honestly, a pretty Sidney way of thinking, if I took time to think about it.
I like Valhalla okay, but liked Odyssey a fair bit more. It’s really similar in a lot of ways, I guess I just find the setting of ancient Greece more interesting than England.
Also, the female protagonist was noticeably more buff than Eivor is. Just saying.
Always nice with big and buff female protagonists like Kassandra.
So.
The orbs ARE a spaceship arn’t they?
Maxima is the one who can launch a DeathStar/PlanetKiller beam from her fingertips
Pretty sure the orbs can’t do that
But other than that, yes
The Orbs essentially give the host the powers of a humanoid-sized spaceship
PPO
There are still some upgrades missing :-)
Would putting someone in vacuum count as violence? I guess so. It’s magic so anything goes.
FORCING someone into outer space might. But stepping back into a space-portal while they foolishly throw themselves after you? Probably not.
She lured him into a trap that is inflicting great amounts of pain and damage to him. I don’t know. This is complicated. Pander is better at this than I am. Pander, if you help me with this I won’t do any puns for a week or two.
Pander, if you help Ro with this I’ll step up my punning game in every response.
Comet me bro. There is always space enough for more punsters here.
As I have said, “Puns are the highest form, of intellectual humor!”
True stars of comedy gravitate towards puns.
I’ll either bet Pander takes you up on it, orbit that she just links you to her extensive theories from several pages ago. Which she did a stellar job on.
Don’t even test me, or you’ll be writing your own orbituary.
I’m pretty sure Pander has planet ahead to deal with that threat.
Dude I’m actively trying to LOWER my budget on ninja hit squads, what the heck man…. not cool man. Not cool!
*calls Ninja hit squad* Yeah I got a coupon…
It’s actually a brilliant strategy specifically because it’s NOT violence. Sydney didn’t actually do anything to him. He went into a place where there’s a hard vacuum.
That’s not something that meets the definition of violence. :)
Remember, Violence = “behavior using physical force intended to hurt (cause physical pain), damage, kill, or injure someone or something.”
Right off, we see that what Sydney did isn’t violence, but it is EFFECTIVE against Vehemence. Why? Because she’s not using physical force, and isnt even the person causing the injury or damage, even one place removed as the cause (it’s two places removed instead). She just made an aetherium causeway when Vehemence was charging AT her. What she did was about as violent as opening a door. There was nothing remotely destructive or damaging about that. Less violent than even grappling.
Reltzik:
“But stepping back into a space-portal while they foolishly throw themselves after you? Probably not.”
Exactly why it’s not only not directly violence, it’s not even violence once removed. It’s violence twice removed. If she pushed Vehemence INTO a portal, then there’s at LEAST the violence of pushing him into a deadly scenario. She didnt even do THAT. It’s pretty much what Maxima WANTED to do, but didnt actually do because Maxima’s solution to everything seems to be punch it or blast it harder :). What Sydney did, however, is literally maximum deterrent, minimum violence.
Ro Jaws:
“She lured him into a trap that is inflicting great amounts of pain and damage to him. ”
That’s not the definition of violence though. There was no physical force used. If I tell someone to take a pill, but tell them it’s aspirin but it’s actually cyanide, then it’s evil, and murder (the unlawful kliling of one human being by another) … but it’s not violence as per the definition of violence.
So since there’s no physical force involved, it wouldnt be violence for Vehemence’s purposes. It’s less violent than even grappling because she didnt even touch him. Or even do anything directly to cause him injury – he went through a door with something bad on the other side. Not even a thing that’s bad – an environment that’s bad.
ie, when a person dies in the desert from thirst when their car runs out of gas or they somehow otherwise get stranded in the desert, that’s not ‘violence.’
Now Ro… I expect a week of pun-free bliss for me.
PS –
I can’t even argue it’s as violent as ‘spacing someone in the Expanse TV show’ (a common method of execution in that show) because she isnt even forcing someone in an airlock then pushing a button. Which would still be less painful and violent than, say, choking them until they can’t breathe. Which is still less violent than punching them repeatedly until they pass out from the pain. Which would at least have the physical action of pushing someone into an airlock. So that would be SOME violence. She just opened a door and Vehemence did all the rest. He wasn’t even forced. Like a bullfighter except you havent starved and injured the bull beforehand and arent stabbing the poor creature afterwards. Just the ‘ole!’ part :)
You got a way with words Pander. It will be hard to hold back the puns for a week but I will uphold my end of the bargain. I expect Brichins and the other punsters to keep the puns flowing.
It’ll still save me money on one ninja hit squad I won’t have to send out for a week to at least one person.
I’m fairly shuriken you could get your Ninjas to give you a bulk discount by now.
And they’d be sure to honor the contract. Especially since they know that the penalty for breaking a contract would be tort-uruous.
They know trying to defraud a lawyer would be court-ing disaster.
Besides, ninjas are known for their honor and lawyerty.
Reltzik:
… that was just awful. You’re bad and you should feel bad. Shame on you. Shame
Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.
Okay now you’re just trying too hard man!
Let’s leave that judgment to the people who actually appreciate puns to begin with.
No. If they appreciate puns then they’ve clearly gone insane.
Ninja hit squads! Ninja hit squads for everyone!
So I guess Sydney now has a direct route to Earth on her Navigation Menu?
Yes. After she went to Fracture Station to pick up some Grakz for Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-784-how-to-lose-friends-with-alien-cuisine/
Either she has bookmarked Earth or she’s just clicking ‘Undo’.
Could she bookmark PLACES on Earth?
ARCSWAT HQ….NYC….Disneyland?
My observation is that the Flight Orb has a number of “Bookmarks” and/or at least a history of previous places visited for quick travel. Frix and the rest of Cora’s harem probably helped her set Earth as one of those. They seemed to think the FTL interface was pretty intuitive.
In the next panel we discover V can manifest message placards like Wile E Coyote does.
Nah
The next panel will show them both right back in the quarry, with V having agreed to end the fight
Likely only after expending all his stored energy just staying alive in a vacuum
While it is a clever gambit to deal with V, isn’t it dangerous in a different manner? If Fracture Station Control picks that up, there will start to be questions. Some very powerful groups could start looking for answers to those questions. Especially since the technology to open an Aetherium Causeway that fits in the palm of your hand shouldn’t exist.
Until she becomes a nuicence STC will just chalk it up to ‘Space Wizard Crap’.
Fracture already knows there’s human-sized thing that can open those sorts of portals. that has a fondness for earth
As this is at least Sydney’s second time returning to the station’s region of space since she first got home from there
And the universe at large already knows Earth has beings able to 1-hit-KO Entire Space Armadas
After the 10 second Fell invasion
Do they know she has a fondness for Terra, or just that she has a fondness of one of the various planets named Dirt out there?
OK, they probably know she speaks English, unless their surveillance is significantly worse than the surveillance in any major US city or their AI reviewing their surveillance data isn’t far better than that of the US. Depending on stuff, that could pinpoint the particular planet – or it might not. It’s known that there’s a significant number of people of Terran descent who have lived in space all of their lives. How many of them speak English natively? How about the first generation space humans who have been in space most of their lives? What about the linguistically talented who’ve spent significant time around them? People with translator chips that include an ‘English’ option?
Suddenly, that whole “speaks English” bit doesn’t mean as much.
In order to know she’s fond of Earth, they’d need to either know that’s where Cora went after Fracture Station – and she seems like the sort to make it hard to follow her like that – or they’d need to trace Halo’s collapsing causeways. If she’s as clever as she thinks she is, she didn’t jump straight between the two places, so they’d also need to go through and trace the other collapsing causeway in time.
As far as her having been involved in the first Fel Invasion… she really wasn’t. That was Max.
Now, that said, they *could* theorize that the person who 1-hit cored the Fel super battle carrier was the same person who flew up from the surface of Fracture Station and then carelessly into traffic, resulting in a quick demonstration of them being more durable than the space ships that they ran into. But it wouldn’t be the same thing as knowing.
Oh, that’s just playing DIRTY.
lololololols
I’m also a space-time wizard. I’m getting nowhere fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Oe7Q8OCm5I