Grrl Power #1473 – Feed the meter
In a comic book, this is one of those pages you register, but basically flip right past. It’s transition, but I didn’t have time to make the previous page and this one a double, so here we are.
You know, Maxima could claim that she can fly at 1,250 light years a second. (I think I said the UCBA was around 5,000 light years from Earth, but I can’t find the comic where I put a number to it.) It wouldn’t be… wrong. Depending on how you actually measure her path. From point A to point B is indeed 5,000 light years and she traveled that distance in 4 seconds. But she didn’t, because the Aetherium Causeway does bridge 4,999.9999999999999999999999999999 of those light years. It’s one of those fun statistics lies. You know, a pregnant woman has a 50% chance of having a boy. She gets pregnant again and has a 50% chance of having a boy, but also a 25% chance of having a second boy. It’s all in the wording. Max wouldn’t be lying if she said she flew 5,000 light years in 4 seconds. If someone wants to use that information to extrapolate her top speed, that’s on them.
Now, the fact that Maxima is wearing a hologram of herself over her bespoke space-latex holo-emitter-embedded catsuit does mean that Cora and crew have a very detailed scan of Maxima in order to project the Max-o-gram. During this scan, Max insisted the holo.hpg image be destroyed after the tournament, not wanting to tempt Cora to disguise herself as Max and, you know, rob a bank or intimidate a corrupt politician or anything of the sort. Of course Cora laughed it off, saying she’d never even consider such a thing. Then Max said, “And naturally you wouldn’t be tempted to cosplay as me during a MMFMM fivesome.”
And there was the tiniest delay before Cora waved her hand and said, “That… of course… never even crossed my mind.”
I’m not sure if Max can narrow her eyes and raise one eyebrow at the same time, that seems like the sort of thing you have to practice a bit so you don’t look like you’re at the start of some kind of weird facial tic, so instead Max just stared until Cora’s hard light elbows started sweating.
Granted, it wasn’t a nude scan, since there’s no chance Max would need a hologram of that. But it’s not like no one has ever holoshopped an .hpg file.
Now assuming access to holodecks is as common as smartphones and also aren’t regulated by a buttoned-up Starfleet, let’s discuss the ethics of holo-disguising yourself as your friends and acquaintances and then having sex with other friends and acquaintances. Obviously if the other party doesn’t know you’re disguised, that’s bad. If the person you’re disguising yourself as doesn’t know and hasn’t given consent, that’s also bad. Maybe a little less bad than the first example, but it’s sort of a lateral difference. But if you’re at an orgy and the holodeck changes everyone’s appearance at random and everyone knows what’s up and consent is in abundance, then… well, congratulations, you probably have a bunch of fairly attractive friends. Huh. I guess that was a pretty straightforward ethics discussion. But then, and ethics conundrum that starts with “everyone is on-board and is okay with it” isn’t the sort of hypothetical that keeps philosophers arguing into the wee hours at their salons.
But that does lead me to the most unrealistic episode across all of Star Trek. The TNG episode where Westley finds out the girl he’s dating is a shapeshifter, and he’s all “Ew, no.” Now, Star Trek isn’t hard Sci-Fi. It’s kind of a medium-soft sci-fi, and in its defense, anything set more than a few hundred years in the future kind of can’t be super hard sci-fi, because we just don’t know where the possibilities of science and technology can really take us. If anything, something set 1,000 years in the future with technology that more or less resembles what we have today is probably less realistic.
But a teenage boy finding out that his girlfriend is a shapeshifter and getting squicked out by it is FUCKING FANTASY. It’d be more like, “Can you turn into Starfire from Teen Titans? Can you turn into Ariel in both her mermaid and landmaid forms? Can you turn into Counselor Troi? Can you turn into…” etc.
Of course, those floodgates probably only opens up after the shapeshifter gets past the conversation that goes, “I appreciate the “you’re all I want,” sentiment, but honestly, it’s okay to ask me to turn into other girls from our class. Or the volleyball coach. Or that one singer we both like.”
“Really?”
“Sure. In fact, as a shapeshifter, it would actually be racist of you to not ask me to turn into other girls while we make out.”
Final version is up, both at TWC and Patreon.
Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude!
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Now I’m wondering what Max can get done in 26 seconds that nobody else in Archon can handle.
Pee.
Maxima takes 4 seconds to move one picometer?
She might genuinely be one of the slowest moving objects in the universe!
Assuming I haven’t made some huge mistake applying the Maxwell-Boltzman distribution, a hydrogen atom of that speed would be a temperature of about 3.76 * 10^-30 K. The lowest temperature we’ve achieved experimentally is 3.8 * 10^-11 K.
Granted, a hydrogen atom at room temperature is quite fast (it’s on the km/s scale). A more apt point of reference would be continental drift (which is 1000 times faster), the growth rate of limestone stalactites (which is 10 times faster) or the erosion rate of bedrock (which is about on par with 0.25 pm/s or about 10 µm/yr). There are some crystals that grow 10 times slower still, then it’s only things like “relative speed of two immobile points in free space 1 m apart due to Hubble expansion” (100 000 times slower, 2.2×10⁻¹⁸ m/s).
Those growth & erosion rates are rate of change rather than speeds (or velocities), I think that’s a different category.
I wouldn’t say at all this is a page you flip right past. It may be a transition page but it’s a very impactful transition page. It’s establishing a major time constraint, rough source of the problem, and that Sydney also had to react quickly and is now holding the gate open.
Also it’s cool as hell.
Oh are they actually going to try to have Maxima win a fight in less than 26 seconds? Clock is ticking!
22. She has to go back.
More likely 10 seconds to get there, 10 seconds to get it done, and 10 seconds to get back.
Does it matter WHERE on the playing field she returns to as long as she doesn’t run out the clock?
Far less than that. Starting with 30 seconds for a time-out (assumed), it took 4 seconds from edge or arena to earth, so assume the same time in the other direction. Down to 22 seconds. I don’t recall ever seeing Max’s max speed, other than “classified” and faster than Sydney at Mach 4 (before Syd upgraded her travel ball). Assume a blistering Mach 10 with all “points” allocated to speed.
The speed of sound at 20°C / 68°F is ~0.343 km/s (~0.213 miles/s). Going with 10 seconds to travel to the flight and ignoring acceleration/deceleration time allows travel of up to 34 km (21 miles) from the quarry. This leaves only 2 seconds to assess the situation then blast or fly through something/someone and return. Obviously if she can fly faster than Mach 10 or the conflict is closer to the quarry she’ll have more time to fight.
I believe Archon headquarters is in/near Dallas, TX, USA, and there are a few rock quarries on the outskirts. Probably too far out for to get to headquarters, plus they wouldn’t be willingly fighting Kevin on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area, so probably a quarry much farther away.
So the theory of her boyfriend standing outside Archon headquarters with a bouquet of roses is out. My guess is the quarry is a long way from Archon and somewhat near the Dungeon, probably right next to it. Maybe even the building material source for it.
There was a bit in *Young Justice* where Miss Martian shapeshifts into Black Canary while making out with Superboy. The real Black Canary was not pleased when she saw a security video of this. The real Black Canary’s boyfriend Green Arrow was also not pleased until he found out what was actually going on, at which point he thought it was hilarious.
Last time Syd opened a causeway, the guys at Fracture Station nearly pinpointed her and were about to inform the Xevoarchy. Wonder what will happen if they catch a whiff of caushenanigans near the tournament site.
That causeway was in open space right in front of their sci-fi space cameras.
This one is in Cora’s hold. They don’t know it’s there.
No you can’t raise an eyebrow and narrow both eyes at the same time, as both use some of the same muscles.
The best you can do is raise one eyebrow and narrow the other eye.
It’s not really effective as all it generally does is make you look like Sir Patrick Moore.
Not to be that guy, but thats simply not true. I just did it in a mirror.
Narrowing of ones eyes does not require eyebrows to move even a little bit. You can just use whatever those muscles are under your eyes. Hell, I do that part all the time. Then you just have to move one eyebrow up and there you go.
It took a few tries, but it definitely can be done.
Any video game that uses her as a character after this is going to have the debuff of randomly leaving that arena for twenty five seconds or so.
is that a pair of citadel’s keepers i spot!
didnt realize this was happening in mass effect universe :)
DaveB-“But a teenage boy finding out that his girlfriend is a shapeshifter and getting squicked out by it is FUCKING FANTASY.”
it’s 1987 and most shape-shifters in the movies are ambush predators.
The Howling
American Werewolf in London
John Carpenter’s The Thing
Ok, I blew that one, figured she was running from a nuke.
Somebody is going to notice an Aetherium Causeway opening.
Quarries never get filled in.
> let’s discuss the ethics of holo-disguising yourself as your friends and acquaintances and then having sex with other friends and acquaintances.
Go read #horny_on_main over on Ao3. And canon EGS: “Summer Pranking.”
Have fun ;)
I could think that Harem would put on the holo suit, reset the clock, and pop out
You definitely added a few 9s too many in the description… according to napkin math, she’s traveled fractions of an ångström.
Well, whatever has forced her to return to Earth is in for a bad time, as it now has a probably very mad and impatient Max heading right for it.