Grrl Power #1390 – Space Street Fight
Some of the stuff pulling Max’s attention there in panel 2 might be explained… eh, no, probably not. I mean, maybe way down the line, but I’m not going to detour this encounter into a Stygan culture crash course. I feel most of what Max is looking at probably isn’t self explanatory, but should be enough for you guys to guess at reasonably well. None of it is critical to the scene, I wanted to show that Max isn’t jumping into a fight without having some idea of what she’s doing.
The “shimmering crystal shield” on Max’s arms is just an effect Cora programmed into her Glowbod in case there was a need for Max to explain away her ability to take a hit. Max didn’t rove out looking to get into a duel, but she understands serendipitous comic book tropes well enough to not have put some preparation into her disguise.
The glowbods the team is wearing are solid projections, for reasons previously explained, but they’re not like Cora’s hard light rig. Cora’s is properly battle ready and requires quite a bit more power and computer cycles to run. The glowbods do offer some actual protection, but it’s about like motorcycle “armor.” It’s not going to stop a bullet or blade with any real skill behind it, but the illusion won’t shatter if someone trips on a curb or bumps into a lot of people in a crowd. Maxima’s personal fortitude field actually protects the parts of the glowbod that are nearly skintight, so probably not the pauldrons, horns or the leather vest she has over the cuirass. Or the hair. All the girls are wearing their hair pinned up, because trying to track and cover the movement of hair with the hologram is just asking a little too much of the glowbods. It’s fine if the hair is mostly just hanging there, but if someone gets caught in a windstorm or starts headbanging, it’s just not going to be able to keep up.
But for Max, if she’s deflecting hits on her arms, then her disguise should be able to weather almost anything she’s likely to encounter on the station.
BTW, I don’t know what happened to Max’s funnel cake in panel 7. I guess she dropped it into her left hand so she could pinch the bridge of her nose, or rather, of her glowbod’s mask’s nose, which would probably be odd looking behavior among always-wearing-masks-Stygans, but then she transferred it back to her right had to toss to Sydney. Look, if I’d drawn her doing the nose pinch with her other hand, it would have covered up too much of her face, making her expression harder to convey. Don’t think about it too hard.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Just for fun, a mockup where Max’s funnel cake doesn’t magically vanish
https://imgur.com/a/X2gC2ZK
Max to Syd: “Here—hold my … uh, funnel cake. Whatever.”
Watch out, Max! It looks like he’s got the power of god AND anime on his side!
Everyone’s assuming he’s an brash young idiot who will get what he deserved. But for all we know he’s got Luke Skywalker levels of plot protection running, and some ridiculously powerful mentor in the background…
Possible, but everything we’ve seen of him so far suggests that he has too little of whatever his species uses for brains and too much of whatever his species uses for testosterone.
His plot protection armor is countered by Max’s plot protection armor. In trying not to hurt the young heir, Max’s deflection of his blows ends up with everyone in his party getting stabbed and then, out of exhaustion, he trips and falls on his own blade.
Well I just visited the start of the comic and I must say, the time it takes for each page to load is a lot longer than you’d expect. Also, this has got to be the longest “few months” I’ve ever seen.
I’ve noticed that for some reason the site loads a lot slower when using a VPN; could that be it?
That’s just a feature of VPNd in general rather than something to do with this site specifically. The signal has to bounce to a whole other server first then go to the destination then back to the server then finally back to you. Physically your 1s and 0s are taking a longer path with what is essentially a toll gate in the middle. It’s going to slow down your internet response times just from the increased Ping alone.
I like how the guards is giving the universal shrug of “Don’t look at us we are just paid to keep him out of too much trouble.”
I don’t know much about swords but that looks like a bad way to hold one.
just imagining Maxima taking the sword ‘This is a nice sword, you should treat it better’, handing it back, and letting him humiliate himself further
We have a cocky young kid, of noble rank, showing off for his ‘date’ – an older woman ( longer horns), but of lower rank than him. (Also possibly a spellcaster? Weirdly-shaped staffs usually mean magic, but alien culture, so who knows?). He desperately wants to impress her, so he challenges some poor ronin to a duel.
If Maxima is smart, she will find a way to honorably lose to this jerk. Problem is, she’s so much more powerful than him, she might win without meaning to. Humiliating him would garner a lot of attention they don’t want, while a loss would be quickly forgotten.
Samkin should really know better.
Losing would mean she belongs to him
I mean it seems fairly self explanatory to me after all, tbh.
That’s a clan marking p2. Might be his auntie in law, might be his clan appointed uh, girlfriend? Courtship target. Idk. Doesn’t seem likely to be his direct mother given skin tone but I obviously dunno how stygian color genetics function, could be that’s some sort of females only coloring like tabby cats. But it seems to me pretty obviously the kid (also p2, he is the only short horned stygian in this sequence) is trying to impress HER, probably, if anyone specific and not just assin around in general.
The guards are not threatened by this turn of events so they trust her to either be a little novice he can crush OR controlled enough in her (Maxima-disguise) not to utterly destroy him.
They also don’t seem impressed by the attitude. Maybe they are hoping someone that isn’t them can humble him up some, honestly.
None of this is extreme Sherlock Holmes type nonsense deductions from thin air. She immediately mentions the age, then unenthusiastically accepts the duel. Between the glances, what she actually says and the faces of the guards, it all seems basic situational awareness type stuff.
I don’t know why, but I feel that this will be extremely relevant soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atxYe-nOa9w
Still getting 403’d, seems to trigger after a few posts and then keeps me out for a week or two