Grrl Power – Dabbler’s Science Corner #6
It’s been decided to keep Deus’s supposed revelations about the nature of Superpowers mum at the moment, mostly due to the assumed “gold rush” of scientists playing god with live human specimens. Since human DNA is the only known way to interact with the Superion field, there’s no animal testing possible, or, really any other laboratory experiments, other than seeing if anything that’s extremely close to human DNA might also work, and also what the limitations are when it comes to the field’s interaction with “living” specimens. Like, could a vial of a Super’s blood also somehow summon lightning the same way the Super it came from can?
No, if the information got out, everyone who has a working knowledge of human history or human nature or just a functional brain realizes that a bunch of low-level Supers are going to wind up in dungeons, hoosegows, gulags, and centre pour peines aménagées. Okay, maybe not the last one. That’s French for “Center for reduced sentences” but the first time I read that my brain saw “Center for penis ménages” as in ménage à trois, but exclusively for penises. And the image my brain conjured wasn’t a gay ménage, either, but like, literally just for penises, so it’d be a room full of guys walking around with sandwich boards, only the board extends up over their faces, and the phalluses stick out of a hole in the board like each guy is an ambulatory glory hole. That’s all totally irrelevant to my comment, just thought I would inflict upon you how my brain works.
Anyway… Oh, right, dungeons full of low-level supers being experimented on, probably forcibly bred, you know, all the usual tropes.
The new vote incentive is up!
Dabbler went somewhere tropical, in a very small bikini. As you might guess, it doesn’t stay on for long, which of course, you can see over at Patreon. Also she has an incident with “lotion,” and there’s a bonus comic page as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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‘forcibly bread’? How rye.
Sounds like a real pain.
I will bake all the bread puns I can baguette away with.
The yeast popular torture. Loafing around before being sliced, topped and grilled for information.
That oat to get you some info. But really, some of these puns can be pretty corny. I must say they go against the grain. They barley measure up.
some seem rye enough
banana seed more of ’em
Pander probably wants all of you to be toast.
She really loaf puns.
Better start buttering her up then
if she cuts us… we will rise again.
New Rule: All Daffy’s comms now go on a delay & get routed through ARC-Light and/or Command Staff for approval.
I swear, that girl is a walking, talking, vorping security breach…
Actually, she needs to be under orders to reveal absolutely nothing she ever learns without explicit prior approval. Remember, she outed Sydney’s vegetarian diet before Sydney finished telling her or had a chance to say “don’t tell anyone.” She propagates gossip at five times the speed of thought.
She’s 19, same age my wife was when we moved in together. The whole thing about technically 50 is BS, she’s just the same 19 y/o times 5. I caught my wife many times either complaining or bragging to her friends about us. “No sweetheart, you can’t have a picture of it” (face palm) of course, that was before smartphones, or she would have anyway. All teen girls love to gossip, the juicier the topic, the better. The “Orgasm Gods” would be a hot topic on Tik Tok!
Well, yes, but most teenagers can’t spread gossip in person in four other rooms [i]at the same time they’re learning it![/i]
this might be part of why she did basic again.
That’s true, but that begs the question: who was she texting then?
Wasn’t Sciona already kind of doing this with her blood magic? I thought she had Super blood.
Yeah, the horses have already bolted on this. In addition to Sciona’s blood magic, I’m sure I remember some villain essentially remote piloting a super to commit crimes
Not really remote piloting inasmuch as using a ‘shock’ collar on their real body. Concretia I think it was.
Yeah, was just about the mention the Hooded Maroons: weren’t they kidnapping supers and holding them in that underground missile silo base of theirs?
They were kidnapping normals and experimenting on them trying to turn them into supers.
Actually they were trying to copy minor supers’ powers to make uber supers, or enhance them. The Superion field is hardly common knowledge. Remember the eye portal guy? Vari’s power activated his. They were trying to find people that could best Archon’s supers.
Supermassive explicitly attributed eye portal guy’s ability to their experiments: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1116-boston-express/
They kidnapped guys who were normal (at least as far as they knew), then experimented on them. We never saw them experimenting on the supers they had.
I don’t think it has ever been spelled out whether they knew about the superion field / had a similar hypothesis. Secret supervillain organizations doing unethical experiments in hidden bases are hardly restricted to common knowledge.
They were experimenting on them but without knowledge (we think) of the Superion Field. I’m sure people know that superpowers have something to do with DNA, but the knowledge that human DNA is actually a kind of decryption key for access to a source of magic (for lack of a better term) power is currently unknown by anyone other than Deus and now ARCHON, as far as we know.
Yeah, and commented that the after-effects were going to suck. I think it’s a blood magic enhancement that gave her “super powers” very temporarily, 5-10 mins maybe, and be badly weakened afterwards.
She might have just been brute-forcing a result without any understanding of WHY it worked, and thus doing it in one of the least efficient ways possible. And remember that her security golem was able to copy powers outright from a blood sample. We have no idea what (if any) limitations it has while doing so, though given it’s heading up the “protection” racket the team is currently investigating we might have more details soon™.
And… cue someone (maybe Deus?) doing this a bit later in the Grrl-verse continuity. Guessing it’s not coincidence we’ve also got or had storylines lately about the likes of Sciona’s species, and Lapha’s species, puppeteering supers. Maybe the latter is what made Sydney think of it, even if they don’t know about Sciona doing it yet.
Yes, she did. That’s how she found out just how useless having eyes that shoot energy beams can be.
Deus has probably already thought of it and is likely doing it.
But ensuring that, when it goes bad and the wrong people find out (people with morals and ethics, like Maxi), someone else gets the blame
Deus HAS thought of it, and IS doing it. Galytn has a much-higher-than-the-average percentage of super population.
I could see Sciona perhaps doing it; I don’t think she sees other people as real.
Probably not Deus though. If found out, I could see it as turning pretty much every super against him. He strikes me as being able to work out the consequences, even if it did not personally repel him.
Don’t forget he’s already claimed (in a deniable way) to be a super.
Sydney the in universe Avatar of trope dictionary and genre savvy
Clones having at least parts of their brains scooped out for control technology is very 40K.
Glad to hear Sydney knows about even that.
Probably plays Orks.
Orks woud prolly replaze yer brain wif a squigs.
‘okay, Gnome, get inside that skull and make with the driving”
Brain Squigs were an upgrade for Weirdboyz in Rogue Trader (1st edition) and Second Edition, giving them access to even more random psyker powers, back when the were an unit of 5-25 that had to roll each turn on a table to see what mayhem they would do (or not, the “1” result was “they sit around and applaude the nearest enemy”.
Hair Squigs were also an upgraded for Nobz, giving them a +1 Ld and Will, still in Rogue Trader, because “lookin’ dashin’ when bashin’ ” was a thing …
Orks were weirder than the most bizarre, convoluted wet dreams of Dabbler back then, but they’ve gone very very grimdark along with further editions (there’s still a Warlord having the time of his chaos-extended life in Khorne’s Realm though, trapped in endless battle and enjoying every second of it).
And don’t forget the origin of Ghazkull Mag Uruk Thraka, a basic Boy that got his head split open by a battle cannon round, was patched-up by Mad Doc Grotsnik with a “bionik bonce” (a plate of scrap metal with wires to what was left of his brain) and became the most feared, dangerous and powerful Warlord ever, bringing the Imperial planet of Armageddon to its knees not once but TWICE, and escaping to wreak even more destruction in the galaxy at large.
“Squig for brainz” is a compliment for Orks !
I did a Dr Who story where a company was researching super soldier genetics by creating braindead clone bodies with the appropriate genetic expression that were piloted by AIs and generally tested to destruction
So we can assume that your reaction to misunderstood French is going to be a NSFW Patreon cartoon?
That’s actually where Dabbler got her “sunscreen” in the current one.
I would go with Jabber here. But there are too many cults claiming to be for stuff like that. You are lured in with free sex and later you don’t realize any more that every body is just free for the cult leader.
Cults seem to go to one extreme or the other as far as sex goes. It’s either “free love”, or “chop your bits off”.
I guess it’s a way to gatekeep membership that doesn’t require a lot of thought to come up with. And cults really need a way to gatekeep, or they tend to die off.
If the DNA requirements are 98 percent or less it could result in SUPER PIG!
If we’re truly dealing with cryptography here.
I assure you it’s not.
We see from the multitude of supers, that many different decryptions/decodings are possible. So it is not a strict one field with one key produces one result. We have at least a one field, with slightly different valid keys produces a multitude of good results.
A more interesting question is whether it works on other sapient beings? Are vampires and weres close enough to human to get super powers on top of their own powers?
What about aliens? Cora is a part-human-hybrid.
Pixel is literally a lycanthrope with superpowers.
But *not in all her forms*. Which should probably be some sort of clue to decoding it.
That’s why they said ‘lycanthrope with superpowers’
Her base ‘normal’ self has no powers, only her ‘part-human-hybrid’ part
I’m reasonably sure that ‘bread’ in the last line shouldn’t have an a in it, unless you mean the bad guys are responding to a hunger strike with forced bread rather than hooking up an IV.
Alternate approach embraced by outlier Mad Scientist:
Step 1 – Obtain data on which part of brain activates and regulates superpowers (it’s always some organ in the brain that’s overdeveloped compared to “normies” such as the hippocampus or pineal gland). This will likely require hacking into a government bio research base with the data on file from testing with EEGs, MRIs, and so on.
Step 2 – Capture select female supers by knocking them out and harvesting eggs from said super before releasing them back into the wild. (Potentially with an ear tag and tracking collar?)
Step 3 – Perform same with select male supers and… *looks at notes*… “corresponding genetic material”… before releasing them back into the wild. (Potentially with similar tag and collar?)
Step 4 – Fertilize egg and begin growth while closely monitoring development.
Step 5 – Obtain healthy and active stem cells, preferably from part of developing brain linked to superpowers.
Step 6 -Inject said stem cells into relevant area of brain on volunteer subject fitted with control collar to see what superpowers develop. (Boy… seems a little like the mutant factory in the Deadpool movie…)
“Optional” Step 7 (let’s face it, we know this would happen) – Mix and match collected stem cells from multiple sources before the Mad Scientist uses a machine developed to inject said “Superhero Stem Cell Cocktail” (tm… just so someone doesn’t try to give that name to an alcoholic beverage or alternative punk band) into the relevant part of his/her brain in order to become the human superpower equivalent of… *tries to look up the highest powered form of a Super Saiyan and just gives up because there’s so many supposed ultimate forms*… whatever the hell that would be…
Virtually Inevitable Step 8 – Said Mad Scientist becomes so powerful they head off to find an isolated planet to terraform into their own fortress of isolation because they have surpassed mere human concerns and vanities… or they scream “I… AM… A… GOD!!!” (or something similar) shortly before all their conflicting superpowers turn against them and revert them quickly and explosively into a pile of protoplasmic goo. (The second happening while his/her equally adept assistant looks on, furiously scribbling down notes to that they can “get it right the next time”.)
Step 1 is already a horror show. A lot of what we know about the functions of the parts of the brain is due to injuries to those parts, either accidental or deliberate.
I guess this is a “mad scientist” we’re talking about here.
There has been a huge advance in understanding the brain structures since MRI was developed. We are by far no longer restricted to intrusive methods.
I worked in that field for some time and none of our subjects was harmed in any way.
Step 8 will always result in an explosion ’cause it is not proper mad science if nothing explodes.
wouln’d ‘I am invincible!’ count. cuz at least one instance karma did not use an explosion. Karma is cool like that.
Ohhhhh. That would explain why the supered women have a distinctive look.
Except for Sydney.
Because Sydney isn’t a Super, she’s a Tech-enhanced (she, herself, has no powers, only access to her floating balls which give her the abilities)
That’s like saying a sniper can kill at 2 miles away: they can’t, it’s the rifle that does it, the sniper just tells the rifle where and what to hit
That comment has me wondering if at some point in time Sydney might wake up with either Harem’s or Max’s body shape because she just HAD to tinker with some “mad” scientist’s do-hicky in the corner… Only temporary of course, I can picture her disappointment as her boobs and butt shrink to to return to cute rather HO MAMA!
A ‘Mad” scientist is a comic-book trope, a mad scientist is one that stubbed his toe, knocking over a beaker, flooding the room with a green/purple gas that makes him talk like Donald Duck for a week. They call them mad because they are only focused on the science, not caring if anything or anyone got hurt in the process. Any scientist worth anything would know that taking control of the world would take time away from the important things, like making the first warp drive, or making a drink that makes women stick to him by the vagoo’s LOL!
Actually it only assumes any connection between the body and super powers and since its semi-public knowledge that having a family member with super powers increases the chance that somebody has super powers(Varia, Jiggawatt, etc.).
Considering the ratio of powered vs. nonpowered humans is apparently literally about one in a million, it’s likely an assumption that there’s a genetic connection.
If it’s entirely random, then the chance of two members of a family with powers would naively be a trillion to one, i.e. we shouldn’t expect *any* with the entire world population to draw from. So the existence of multiple families with such means there’s probably some connection.
It could be genetic, or it could be that families tend to be in similar circumstances.
It’s like rare diseases in the real world, e.g. ALS (Lou Gehrig’s). Is there a genetic component, or is it environment? Or both?
I’m still giggling about the sandwich board thing, but I’m also now curios on how Deus knows what power to activate. Or is it just that a), every human has this DNA sequence, it’s just a matter of turning it on, or b), there’s a test to see if the person has it, and it gets turned on from there? Does he know what power someone has before it’s activated, or is this like the Sparks storyline from DC in the 90s, where everyone was getting superpowers and one teenage girl turned into a purple humanoid goop thing–no telling what the power set is until it’s activated? Also, if the latter’s the case, how much could that come round to bite him in the arse?
Just noticed, but Harem must be wearing colored contacts–in her who’s who, her eyes are blue.
In some of her bodies she has freckles, other’s she had them removed somehow. It’s like she designed her bodies to cater to different men’s tastes?
It’s been specifically mentioned that she’s deliberately kept “Goth” Harem out of the sun as much as possible, to keep freckle production to a minimum; that’s why she had the umbrella when talking to Max shortly after Sciona tried to attack Dues. Pretty sure she’s designed her bodies to cater to her own tastes.
Nah, the umbrella is just part of the whole Goth thing (also… industrial-grade make-up to keep her pale :P ), it’s why Abbey wears glasses (sometimes)
As for the freckles thing, believe that’s more due to painting tiny little dots all the time can be difficult so sometimes they are either not there or minimal
The problem isn’t if someone has already done it, but simply preventing more people from doing it.
We already have aliens trying to kidnap supers, a group of rich jerks that tried to bag and experiment on people to make supers, and one who had a Frankenstein body thought might be super related.
We do not need incentives to have them all share notes and make Super, Super death squad and have an Omni-man situation happen!
And the result even without .gov the Endeavor family from my hero academia
“Like, could a vial of a Super’s blood also somehow summon lightning the same way the Super it came from can?”
Did Varia every try out peoples if people’s blood works?
Sydney did suggest it way back in #324.
But she didn’t use it when attacking the Ascenders base, so I guess it doesn’t work?
“probably forcibly bread”
“Bread” is the stuff you eat.
I think you meant “bred”, as in “breeding”.
Unless he actually meant “bread” as in “forced to ingest carbs”.
Shades of pate de foie gras…
“seeing if anything that’s extremely close to human DNA might also work”
Ook?
*hands you a rare book*
Minor nitpick, but Dabbler’s second set of arms seems to have vanished in panel 4.
My brain with the input from Dave’s brain added the idea that all the penises would be very long and erect and they would be trying to (blindly) fence with them.
Would Deus lose his super intellect in that case?
At least while “piloting” the meat suit?
You’re still connected to your original body when piloting the meat suit, so I wouldn’t think so. Also, what Sydney seems to be suggesting here isn’t so much “The body has access to super powers” as it is “Because you’ve been linked to a body with superpowers, and because said body had those powers due to being a cryptographic key to unlock the Superion Field, you’ve unlocked it for your own body as well.” Or maybe it’s something where you have to maintain the link to keep the powers.
Interestingly, the orbs – which Deus implied may be related to the Superion Field (at the very least, he seems to think the field and the orbs have the same creators) – actually migrated to Sydney’s temporary body when she was (or I guess will be, given she hasn’t suffered the relevant injuries yet) piloting a meat puppet in an older vote incentive. Well, technically the orbs migrating to the temporary body was in the Patreon-only minicomic to go along with the incentive. So I think while the body is the encryption key, the Superion Field appears to interact with/bind to the mind/soul. Assuming the orbs work by tapping into that same field, anyway.
Classified? Classified by who or what agency? Independent civilian think tanks and corporations occasionally come up with or duplicate what the USA government considers classified. Here we have an excellent artist and writer airing a concept via a comic book/SciFi nerd and declared classified. Tom Clancy gave our Submarine service, the NSA and other Intel agencies collective apoplexy when he came out with The Hunt for Red October. Likewise when civilian imagery satellites began to get as good as our highly classified military sats’ there was a great deal of heartburn in the National Reconnaissance Office NRO. For an interesting OSINT read do a search on Talent Keyhole under Secret compartmented Information. Wiki has a good write up which I will neither confirm or deny.
That said, if it’s an Alien agency that considers such information to be classified then they can just FOAD. If it’s ARC that has classified it then Dave is in trouble.
You wouldn’t need to know anything about the Superion field to think that cloning a superhuman of immense power could have give a useful host. There is a chance that there are unknown environmental factors involved or some other reason that a clone body wouldn’t give the same results, but the possibility of godlike power would be pretty attractive to those lacking a moral compass.
Literally the first thing anyone is going to do to duplicate super powers is try cloning. They don’t need to have any concept of a special field to get to “hey, maybe it’s genetic.”
You would certainly have to have the tech to create and support de-cerebrated clones, bodies that never had a brain (or at least cerebrum).
Otherwise you run into the problem of keeping a super under lock and key, until you can scoop out the brain. What are the chances of a jailbreak? I guess less if you have a good handle on the powers, but there’s generally wrinkles there.
And then you have a super on the loose who has a real hate on for you. This generally doesn’t end well.
I am assuming that if you grow just a part, it wouldn’t necessarily be super. E.g. I think they’ve successfully grown an ear or something. If the ear is from “The Bat”, it doesn’t necessarily hear in the ultrasonic.
If parts do end up with superpowers, this might (assuming you can lick the rejection problem) become a transplant industry…
I simply assume Deus has people working on this exaqct thing at this very moment.
He implied, he can make supers.
He’s sooooo beyond that.
Why take over a body when you can give yourself super powers.
The next step would be making super weapons.
“Since human DNA is the only known way to interact with the Superion field, there’s no animal testing possible, or, really any other laboratory experiments”
Uhh… it is not particularly difficult to get human DNA outside of the human body. And we already have a standard practice for experimenting with human DNA without a human test subject – we splice it into a bacterium or lab animal.
could the next vote incentive be Dabbler’s TEACHER OUTFIT.
can the next vote incentive be Dabbler’s TEACHER OUTFIT.
I wouldn’t think you’d need prisons full of minor supers, just a solid hacker and backdoor to the Grrlverse version of 23 and me.
This is all leading to the inevitable attempt by aliens to ‘gather more human DNA’ to hopefully create superpowered alien-human hybrids, by abducting (via the usual alien abduction tropes) hot co-eds and having a sexy space romp. This Saturday night at 11pm on Skinimax!
That cat is sooo out of the bag.
The bodynapping Aeolith already made all conclusions needed for this plan when she took control of Sydney(although Maxima was her target).
She didn’t have the budget for a full avatar cloning rig, but she already tried.
Okay, she publicly failed, because she controlled the one super basically immune to this trick, but she gave the reason why too: “the orb are NTH tech!!!!!!!!!!!”
Sydney is not a Super, and Laph didn’t gain control of Sydney’s balls (they didn’t like Laph)
Didn’t Sciona already kind of figure this out, in two ways. Using the blood from Supers to grant herself, and presumably anyone else those powers. And the Alari soul possession of a dead super comes with those powers intact. So not a far leap to clone a bio frame variant without consciousness or just the body and clip out the brain forming sections…or a Frankenstein bio android blade runner method of making body parts from the DNA to bond together and implant a control module where a brain should be…or as far as anything more complex than the autonomic nervous system.
Does it work with other species of Homidae? Bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans? Science demands an answer! (Not that that doesn’t raise its own big ethical questions.)
Besides, species boundaries are just an artifact of a convenient human-made system of classification. Biology doesn’t care about things being so clear-cut, so…
…well, I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but if I were a mad scientist, I’d probably be coming up with some new projects right about now.
cross-breeding lemmings with flying squirrels so they’ll survive cliff-diving and ultimately overpopulate the planet? (food shortage hack with self-delivery system)
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work with anything else. Otherwise the world would be too much different from our own.
If you’re willing to be completely cold-blooded about this, Harem is Earth’s secret weapon. While anybody with access to the right equipment and DNA could clone and avatarize Maxima, Trying to cope with the sensory input of 5 bodies at once would not likely be easy, making Harem a hard sell.
“So what?”, you ask. Harem’t not that powerful. Sure she is if you hook each Harem duplicate up to a Maxima clone.
For extra fun we can ask if Harem can connect each of her duplicates to a Harem clone body, giving her 25 bodies to avatarize in different shells. How far can she chain that out? The powers of 5 are 25, 125, 625, 3125…
I imagine if we have cloning tech we might be able to skip the brain scoop step, as with a little encouragement Harem can just add the new bodies to the gestalt. once she gets to 11 bodies she gets 10 partners and the 11th sits with Dabbler for a meal that’s twice as nice. how many Harems does Dabbler need to get supercharged?
…The Church of Ahegao?
Bwahahaha. Dave, you need to be unleashed in Montreal in an uninhibited state. I would pay to see where that discussion goes. Actually I think there’s a festival or two there you’d enjoy…
Syd: We’re having movie night
Dab: Goody. I have so many to choose from
Syd: We are not watching “those” movies and we are not watching “your” movies!
Isn’t that kinda what Deus is already doing? Not the cloning, but he is producing supers isn’t he?
He might be looking to make them, and he’s certainly researching it all, but he’s more gathering them then making them.
I think Dues is trying it the hard way as his wisdom is to high to do it the easy way. he’s going to stick to passive measures and reasonably willing subjects. *old reference incoming* maybe he’ll try something like the Howard Foundation. Something like that could be workable, and people are mercenary enough to try it. hopefully I got the name right.
Dabbler is straight wrong in panel 7. You don’t need to know about the superion field or how superpowers work. Cloning people and seeing if they still have the same powers is a straightforward avenue of research.
Just checked Kickstarter, and Tamer 10 is listed (funded in 38 minutes with 12 days to go)