Grrl Power #1486 – And pause for the not-surprise attack…
Maybe she went to go eat some spinach, or took a Proton Energy Pills which gives her the power of 10,000 atomic bombs for ten seconds? Look, all things being equal, I’d rather have the power of 1,000 atom bombs for 100 seconds, or maybe even 100 a-bombs for 1,000 seconds. What I wouldn’t want is the power of 1 a-bomb for 10,000 seconds, because it seems like you’d wrap up most adventures pretty quickly with that kind of chutzpah, and you’d be standing around for 7,000 seconds waiting for the pill to wear off so you can go get lunch without accidentally blowing up the diner.
The tournament is supposed to be no-holds barred, but they’ve slowly introduced rules over the years to keep things moving along. Did you guys ever see the earliest UFC matches? They hadn’t refined the rules, and so a lot of matches turned into “grappler takes a few hits while diving in to grab at someone’s midsection, they go down, and the grappler spends the next 25 minutes trying to force the other guy to tap out. I only ever watched a few matches in the early days, and after that, I’ve seen the occasional highlight on reddit or wherever, but I’m pretty sure if you get grappled, you’ve got less than 25 minutes to get out of it these days. Or maybe not. Maybe all the grapplers have had to learn that almost-hyperextend-your-elbow hold to force people to tap out.
I’ve peppered in the rules for the UCBA, and I’ll try and remember and list them all here. It is a deathmatch, meaning you can kill, but if someone yields, it’s pretty bad form to keep pounding on them. Fighting at this level means someone can launch an ICBM, causing the target to yield, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the guy who launched it can abort it in the two seconds before it hits. It comes down to a call by judges, though it’s rare that anyone gets removed from the tournament for ignoring yields.
Only a single entity can enter the tournament. In the case of something like a space ship or a gunship, the ship itself is considered the entrant. Crew can man exosuits and fly around outside of the ship and attack other competitors, because a mage could just as easily summon a phantom army or the like, but if the mage goes down, the phantom army would probably disperse, and even if they don’t, they can’t win that round of the tournament in the mage’s place. Similarly, when the space ship goes down, the round is lost for the crew as well. Someone could pilot a mecha-godzilla while wearing Iron Man armor, and when the mega-mech gets destroyed, the guy in the suit can eject and keep fighting, but only if he is the registered entrant and not the mega-mech.
You can’t endanger non-combatants. There’s almost never a case where that can happen, since the matches take place 100 kilometers from any other sapient life form (and there’s reasonable effort taken to not hold matches in or near national parks or endangered wetlands or nature preserves and the like) but if you have an ability to open a portal to redirect that meteor swarm attack, and the exit portal opens over Times Square, you will be disqualified at best.
You can leave the combat area for up to 30 seconds. That’s generally a bad idea though, because if you step out of the ring for ten seconds to catch your breath, another competitor might try and pin you for 20 seconds, then jump back in bounds once you’re ringed out. Also, when you leave the arena, you “spend” those 30 seconds. You can earn more out-of-bounds time at the rate of 1 second for every ten spent in-bounds. This is to keep competitors from jumping in and out of bounds and skirting the edge of the arena. The matches are much more interesting when everyone is battle-royaling in the middle.
No off-table support. You can bring a bag of holding or your very own mass-fabricator, but you can’t bring a laser designator and call down tungsten rods from geostationary orbit or artillery from a land-battleship parked just out of bounds.
You can possess other competitors. It is advised that all competitors have reasonable mental defenses. If you win the match with someone else’s body, you can’t ride them into the next match. If possessing someone destroys your original body, or at least the body you entered with, you and your host are out of the tournament.
Hmm. I think that’s it. I’ve probably mentioned a few things in the comments that I’ve left out, but I think that’s the bulk of it.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Gail does wear that outfit well, doesn’t she?
Just noticed: that outfit is from The Fifth Element.
Yup, it sure is. Watching Leeloo wear it was … disconcerting, though. It’s better suited to Gail.
It certainly does sit differently on a character with Dave’s typical proportions it did on Mila, who is more like Sydney in body shape.
(blinks) huh? whu? What outfit? Who watches the commontaters? Sheesh, I got the last of the EXO-beer and the last bowl of chicken wings. (looks at screen) oh, who are the sci-fi convention escapees? Because dude is rockin’ that outfit but giving away his age with the matching mustache.
And Bluce is wearing an Earth Defense Directorate uniform.
Got to love those thermal bandages! 5th Element is one of my favorites!
What are the chances of a racy sci-fi cosplay contest for a vote incentive?
Huh, I really thought the arena would be large enough and expansive enough to include a column of geostationary orbit above it specifically for the purposes of allowing exclusively non-atmospheric spacefaring ships to compete. Maybe even that the arena would be the entire (otherwise already mined out) planet up to the distance of the furthest moon.
If someone’s defensive strategy is “be in orbit” and the other entrants can’t defeat someone in orbit, that really is on them in this scale – if you can only defeat planetbound threats you’re not very unlimited in a science fiction setting, you’re a glorified Planetary Defence Force that can potentially be dispatched by orbital bombardment at the enemy fleet’s leisure.
Or maybe it does include a column of geostationary orbit but you can’t call in help from other ships that aren’t entered into the arena?
Also how would the entry count for things like “Distributed Artificial Intelligence running on a swarm of 5 quadrillion nano- to milli-bots”? Would they only count as defeated once an opponent had destroyed every last nanobot? Maybe once the General AI can no longer operate at a sentient level, even though their subsentient body’s automatic functions are still in the process of rebuilding them to sentient and then sapient? Maybe a 30 second time limit to become sapient? Then again, given that remote-controlled opponents are a thing, maybe the AGI is just remotely controlling their swarm and their primary server clusters are out of bounds and thus there is no smallest number of nanobots needed to stay sentient.
Would they need to make themselves known?
Would “currently infesting opponents bodies and disintegrating their bone marrow” count as “making themselves known”, or would that still be considered ‘in hiding’ if the other opponents can’t find them and forgot to search their own bonemarrow for nanoscale infection?
See, these are proper thoughts.
What if I’m a mathematical equation like that one Green Lantern, Dkrtzy Rrr? I’m still true in bounds and sentient, but if an opponent can’t regulate logic itself that’s on them – right? If it’s unlimited, can I win by agelessness in ten thousand years?
What happens if I’m bigger than the battlefield, like Ego the Living Planet or that other Green Lantern Mogo? Am I automatically ‘out of bounds’? What happens when there is no battlefield because my mere presence consumed it? Or something else that would destroy the battlefield with my presence – there was a living explosion but not on the order of a blue giant solar flare or blackhole gamma ray burst.
Another Green Lantern is a virus, Leezle Pon. Sure, I can’t infect anyone and ‘win’ because I’m destroyed in the process of co-opting their cells to replicate me. But am I ‘hidden’ enough to be automatically out of bounds? What if I’m a poltregheist that can’t be perceived by an opponent anyway? Or a chaos construct like some versions of a gremlin or computer bug? Or the afore mentioned mathematical equation? Or a weather pattern or something else that another remaining competitor can’t recognize as me cognitively?
Countdown clock yay.
Was hoping I wasn’t the only one that noticed!
If someone wins eight rounds of UCBA, do they get invited to an underground octo-winners club and the opportunity to compete in “Street UCBA”?
This needs more crosshatching, maybe some dramatic glute-grimacing. (that’s like dramatic face grimaces but with the glutes and hamstrings) And yeah, this finish move will rock.
> Only a single entity can enter the tournament. In the case of something like a space ship or a gunship, the ship itself is considered the entrant. Crew can man exosuits and fly around outside of the ship and attack other competitors, because a mage could just as easily summon a phantom army or the like, but if the mage goes down, the phantom army would
Didn’t you say before that if a ship entered, it could only have a single crew member?
*checks*
Yeah, in the #1427 commentary:
> Can you enter a starship? Like a Galactic Dreadnought? Sure, but with only a single crew member. Or a single A.I. (A proper A.I., not the shit we have now.) However, in a relatively close-range fight against 7 other Unlimited Class opponents, it’s a pretty good way to get boarded and lose your ship. There have been a few instances in the past where people tried to cheat by entering a powerful ship or mecha and another powerful entrant shanghaied it to double up their fighting power, but it’s a stupid tactic, because you can just enter Goku wearing Iron Man’s armor piloting a Warhammer 40K Titan in the first place. The only thing “cheating” like that would do is it would let you “beat” an otherwise difficult opponent because they’re really on your side to begin with.
Backstabbing seems like a dumb move after seeing someone take out Eat Chicken. Not Mt. Atrocitus who was obviously a scrub anyone could defeat. Eat Chicken was the beyond omega level threat. I’d forfeit if I were Ryzlyl.
Depends on whether there’s a prize purse for the runner-up of this round. If so, then definitely. If not … Well, then he might open up his bag of tricks.
Man, the early UFC stuff could be super boring. Hoyce Gracie, Ken Shamrock, Oleg Taktarof. Bunch of skilled fighters, but so many matches would end up just a grapple.
Early UFC fights were great. Hour and a half long chess matches testing the limits of endurance.
The original marketing of it as a blood sport was what ruined a great era, where regulation banned it until it was bought by the current guy and marketed as a sport. But calling something a sport when it’s a blood/combat sport is just taking out more and more of the combat.
Original UFC was no biting, no eye gouging, no kicks to the throat…and I think no groin blows (you could still try to break someone’s tail bone/coccyx). There were some other implied rules like male-ness/isity and a towel being thrown in / cutman calling it. But now there’s stuff like ‘no position change’ so you can’t try to python someone by compressing their rib cage until the lack of motion in their lungs doesn’t allow enough oxygen exchange for them to stay conscious.
In an unlimited class, there’s got to be a system for attacks like that. “I’m Asgardian. Since they can’t defeat me and I can’t defeat them, I’m going to wait a few millenia until I grow into my true power as the God of Staredowns from staring them down for thousands of years and then I’ll be able to smite them.” Is “I snatched the aura off of them and now they’re a philosophical zombie, so they aren’t sentient they’re only acting sentient.” actually a defeat because their sentient behavior is still in the ring and is that what they registered as themselves risking mind control as a defeat?
Panel 3 text: Off-site supercharge IS permitted. How could anyone be sure that that’s the same contestant?
Now we know that there are referees somewhere.
I wonder if taking down Babezilla would count as endangering non-combatants.
If anyone is familiar with those “space operas” of the 1950s, how would certain characters look in the uniforms of those shows?
Remind me, who is Ryzel?