Grrl Power #1239 – Sydula rasa
Well, it looks like Lapha has one card left to play. Imagine having to start over with Sydney. You’d have to show her SO MUCH sci-fi and cartoons in order to try and reboot her memories – assuming that’s even a viable solution with whatever brain-wipe method Lapha’s race employs.
Imagine being the lobby guard when Maxima shows up with an unconscious Sydney under one arm and gray blue-ish kind-of-purple alien girl under the other. I guess at some point you’d be like, “Oh, it must be Tuesday.” Working at Archon would probably be more interesting than manning the gate at most military installations. When Tenri gets her body back, she’s might have a jacked up neck from Maxima scruffing her like that. At least, I assume that’s how she’s holding her up, as her tank top isn’t being pulled taut across her torso. Not that the average Space-WalMart tank top would even hold a person’s body weight for long.
The new vote incentive is up! This is a bit of a weird one as it’s a character that hasn’t appeared in the comic.
It’s my Ifrit Pathfinder 1e monk, Fray! Ifrits don’t really make great monks in Pathfinder, as player characters they get a +2 to Dex and Cha, but -2 to Wis. For monks, Dex is good, Cha is largely irrelevant, but Wis is important as it can add to your AC and also has something to do with Ki points I think. But I didn’t care. I wanted a character with dark blue/gray skin and glowing orange hair, so that’s what I picked. (I don’t think Ifrit even really have dark skin, so maybe she’s 1/4 Drow? Don’t care. I think she looks cool.) Will she show up in the comic? I mean… maybe? Probably in a Dabbler flashback, but who knows?
As usual, Patreon has her in delicto flagrante.
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Killing somebody and rapidly freezing them will extend death time before trying to resuscitate them. I wonder how a sentient AI flame would fare with that treatment.
How is that a threat? It would be a shame to lose Sydney, but even an average therapist could have The Mighty Halo back up and running in six months.
I think she means turning Sydney into a vegetable, no memories, no mind, no nothing.
No memories doesn’t turn you into a vegetable. Also, there are different types of memories and we can deduce that only personal memories, not operational memories, will be removed. She’ll still maintain her ability to speak and move, she’ll just don’t remember what skills she has until she needs to use them and won’t remember where, when or how she learned those skills. She won’t have any memory of who she is, but she will still mostly have the same personality (disorder). There are several cases of people loosing their entire personal memory and they are not reduced to a brainless shell of a chemistry meat sack.
I think you’re massively overestimating the effectiveness of therapy, people who undergo personality changes due to trauma don’t recover and I can’t see that losing all the memories would leave somebody in a better state than that
I mean if she did do that to Sydney then she would also be guilty of murder(?) so she would just get an even long jail sentience, if allowed to ever leave. So she really doesn’t have any leverage. The most she could do is ask for a good lawyer and then negotiate a plea bargain. Which by the way is a terrible thing we do in this country and we really need to end it.
As I understand it, plea bargaining exists mostly to save time for the already-overcrowded courts. If someone has half a dozen charges against them and they are absolutely going to go to prison it’s easier to simply say “you plea out for half the charges, you get X% of the time you would otherwise have gotten, and we can take the time to run a trial that is actually in doubt.” Granted, this could be solved by expanding the bench, but there are political concerns around that, among them the fact that 2/3 of all sitting federal judges were appointed by one party (not naming them because I don’t want to make this *too* political) and that party would prefer not to have their advantage diluted.
Fairly commonly prosecutors bump up the charges massively and threaten people with huge penalties, then drop them down to something reasonable if people agree to plead guilty
Of course this works better for poor people who can’t afford a big defense (and the richer people tend to get better offers) – a lot of public defenders are very good but they’re massively overworked and under-resourced
https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/coercive-plea-bargaining-has-poisoned-the-criminal-justice-system-its-time-to-suck-the-venom-out
has some details on how plea bargaining is broken.
Interesting. Thank you!
Legally speaking, I don’t think mindwiping Sydney would count as murder, but rather as maiming/mayhem. I’m not sure what the maximum punishment for that would be in this case (or if it would be tried in Texas state or US Federal courts, considering I believe Archon is a Federal agency). I suspect it’s a death sentence offense in the rest of the galaxy, but then outright possessing another’s body might already be such.
I believe leaving somebody in a permanent vegetative state is normally prosecuted as assault initially but if the victim dies afterwards it’s often boosted to murder
Quick, take Lapha’s memories of wanting to take Sydney’s memories first!
Here is a thought from beyond the 4th wall.
Is this “Tabula rasa” a way to kill a storyline that has gone on for far too long?
Mind you the whole start of this comic was “I dont just play a superhero in (insert your tabletop gaming system of choice) … I AM a superhero.” Page 4. At which point the question is put out “how did I get here?”
The answer of that question was “let me back things up a few months”.
It has taken (so far) 1239 pages (made twice a week FOR FOURTEEN YEARS) to cover “a few months set in or around 2010” and it is STILL not even close to done in 2024.
Hell the MCU managed to go through 4 phases in a similar time frame.
This is a real problem.
I dont speak for the rest of the audience but this particular reader has buried multiple family members in the intervening time (two of whom were also following the story).
And because the entire comic is one long ass recap told from Sydney’s first person perspective …
memory wiping Sydney ends the story from our perspective.
Or at the very least thanks to Dabbler and Krona busting out some time skipping deus ex machina on some soul bound Nth tech … rolls it back to Corporal Scoville Jr wondering how she got there.
So effectively Sydney has been reliving the same “few months” (what is time anyway to a person with ADD so bad they need meds to be not even “high functioning”) over and over. Even as everyone else around her continues on with an uninterupted time line.
It would not surprise me to learn that Archon’s current and ongoing primary mission was specifically to create a weird variant of the Truman show funded specifically to make sure that Sydney AND her Soul bound Nth-tech tool belt comes out of her recurring time loop WITHOUT the sort of mental issues that bring about “a dark past and a deep seated need to avenge herself upon an uncaring Universe” GirlPower#692 murderous villain arc that destroys the planet. Or turns a large chunk of it into purple glass
Which is getting harder and harder to do the further into time this goes. After all Sydney still thinks she is living during the Obama administration a few years before the world ends (according to the Mayans) in 2012.
How would you react to a speedy recap of what has happened in your own timeline if the last thing you rememeber was 2012? Who the fuck is Harambe and what does he have to do with a world wide pandemic? Also how in the fuck do you expect me to believe that hotel Mogul and B-list reality tv star Donald Trump is not only a former president of the united states of america but is running for RE-ELECTION a Second time (its to avoid jail time you say. To which i respond ok. at least that tracks …)
Post Scriptum:
for extra credit on my Speculation No-Prize we can count the number of times this recursive time loop has happened based on how many times the art style of the comic changed (off the top of my head that’s what, 3~ish times so far? )
> I dont speak for the rest of the audience but this particular reader has buried multiple family members in the intervening time (two of whom were also following the story).
I’m very sorry for your loss. Losing close family hurts.
Thanks, man. Your thoughtfulness is appreciated.
There WAS a bit of a time skip, from Sydney’s perspective… I just can’t remember how long it was offhand. The bit where she upgraded her flight speed, and put a point into the long-distance warping/teleportation. (Aetherium causeway I think?) Which… wow, that’s six years ago give or take.
728 says it was two months, so still pretty slow. She… might have actually caught up to the beginning of the comic/pre-flashback. I think she might have also had a few ‘training timeskips’. But it’s been long enough, and slow enough, that it could have just been a few days for those.
Although the ‘memory reset’ idea does provide a few possible explanations for some of the orbs already being powered; some of them are leftovers from prior loops… provided that it doesn’t reset all progress. Archon might even have a growing chart of all the orbs! (Maybe that’s how they knew to test the atmosphere generation power, but in a way that made it seem like they didn’t).
It’s a bit farfetched, given that there’s no reason for others to play along. At least, for a ‘keep everything secret’, now if the ‘Superpowered people exist’ reveal was something new for THIS loop, that makes a bit more sense on that front; the bank stunt was intentionally done when Sydney was there. If nothing else, it’s an interesting AU idea.
(Although the idea of a prior Sydney ‘wasting’ points on the pie option, unlocking a new orb, and no one knows what it does yet even despite the loops is kind of funny too. But given the rate of the comic going, we might not find out what it does until a decade down the line.)
It seems like if ætholiths have only recently been accepted/given rights by galactic society- they’d be really horrified by what Lapha is doing & be eager to render any assistance to mitigate her action. I’d think an older more complex ætholith might be able to overwhelm L (or at least put her in check while other actions are taken). Seems like Dabbler would have some galactic contacts that could make things happen.
Give her a bowl of chili with Sydney level spices a host body means a host sense she will hop ship if it is on fire
Force feed her chili with Sydney level spice a host body means host senses the hitchhiker will hop ship within 20 minutes
Oh wow yeah that’s clever.
I really can’t imagine Syd taking that “The adults are talking” line well. There’s gonna be a lot of writing in her list soon.
“Lapha? Sydney’s brain contains a weapon. She has a condition called ADHD. Check her memories for confirmation, if you want. It’s not life-threatening for her but it’s not what you call a “stable substrate” either. So if you stay there for more than a day you’ll probably be glitching, and if you stay there for two days your matrix will decay. So, I’m willing to stand here and wait, with this handling device, until you start glitching and whatever’s left of you begs to be extracted. Unless you actually hurt Syd or take her memories, in which case I will release her after you’re dead. You have just two choices here: live, or die.”
Is it a bluff? Neither Lapha nor Syd has any way of knowing, but Syd’s memories will bear inspection and confirmation of the first part anyway. And for all we know it could be true, even if Dabbler thinks she’s bluffing when she says it.
Edward, I think you’re right. It will be like a PC with a failing CPU cooler.
Not a safe place for a living program to be.
What movie had the poisoned wristwatch time bomb?
Sydney knows.
I don’t see anybody else mentioning this. But Lapha has no real understanding of the American military. Erase her memories? So we can build her back up into a perfect soldier? We don’t even have to feel guilty about it, the filthy xeno forced our hand! Now that obviously isn’t the tone of this comic. But that really isn’t the threat Lapha thinks it is. They are making Sydney go through all this useless army training to try to erase her civilian identity so she’ll follow orders and die for her country. Erasing all the pop culture swimming around in her head just makes her easier to train. It’s not like she will lose her powers. She will still presumably understand English or they could fix it with magic. Syndney is lucky that Max is such a softy
So she’s saying that they lose Sydney until they capitulate, at which point they lose her forever? What kind of bargaining tactic is that?
Wait a moment…
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-689-customs-conundrum/
A device that can create Aetherium causeways and fits in a Pocket is something no one is supposed to have.
So what are those recall devices, exactly?
Not something that creates Aetherium causeways, obviously.
Probably some sort of magical teleportation effect with extremely limited mass/size/distance abilities.
DaveB would have to define the precise differences.
It’s be really cool if DaveB came to the comments to explain these lore queries in person, but it’s understandable that there’s a lot to go through, and he probably doesn’t want to lock himself into a particular explanation before he’s thought out everything it might affect.
Well, I’m sure DaveB will clarify this, but the most important thing we need to know is whether Parfait’s friends were able to get away from the earth. If yes — well, that’s a huge issue.
Those guys who were there for Parfait may think they’re beyond Archon jurisdiction.
But Syd can open Aethereum Causeways. Obv doesn’t want to deploy with her current “passenger,” but once rid of Lapha?
If they want to push it (like for example if the hottest secret in the galaxy is on the line) nobody is beyond Archon jurisdiction.
There’s a difference between ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘reach’. Just because Archon may be able to follow them doesn’t mean any other government will recognize Archon as having any right to apprehend them.