Grrl Power #1369 – Battle Arena Omega Super Explosion
By “side-missions,” Cora obviously means bulletstorm fueled escalations that leave yawning power vacuums in the criminal underworld. Cause, you know, you take out some sub-boss who’s looking to carve out some corner of his organization, and his crime-sempais are glad to see him go, but the “insult to the family” can’t go unanswered, and before you know it, 600 crime-bois are dead and the “condemned” space station the group headquartered out of is rapidly deorbiting its moon to a catastrophic but satisfying conclusion.
Like you do.
Basically there are a lot of parts of the galaxy that are necessarily okay with frontier/vigilante justice. For what it’s worth, Cora and Co. are licensed bounty hunters and are deputized in several jurisdictions. By the same token, they are disinvited from or even wanted in some places because the local authorities are a lot more strict about who gets to do the law enforcement – whether or not they were actually doing a good job of it or were even wildly apathetic or corrupt in some cases doesn’t matter, as anyone “doing their job for them” erodes their power/ego/income base.
The vote incentive is finally done!
The update to the TWC image is pretty minor, but the Patreon version has the bonus comic as well as nude versions. I will strive to make the next one more timely.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
This isn’t related to this comic specifically, it’s something I’ve been thinking about the Grrl Power universe in general.
What happens when a super gets old? Does the strength of their superpower diminish with age? If they don’t, what’s stopping a super with dementia and a similar power level to Maxima from causing a “Westchester Incident” (i.e. having a fit, losing control of their powers, and killing a bunch of people entirely by accident)? What’s ARCDark’s plan in case Maxima herself starts coming down with dementia as she gets older? They can’t exactly leave somebody with the power to level cities to go senile, but if they have her whacked then somebody’s going to find out and start screaming it all over the internet.
You just made me think of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.
Seeing Maxima, or Heatwave, or Anvil or Harem that confused would NOT be pretty or remotely safe.
Even worse if Sidney’s compass lost sight of true north…
Fairly sure Sydney’s compass doesn’t even have a North (it has a handwritten note saying “It went that way -> ” :P )
Heh! Nice.
The needle was probably made of weapons-grade bonkercite, too.
Since Superion channelers get optimized bodies by default, chances are they are ageless.
Achilles definitely is, but if that applied to all of them, we’d be seeing several-hundred-year-old supers knocking around the place – remember that supers have been a thing for a long time, just in small numbers up until recently.
On top of that, Maxima got her powers when she was a teenager, and she’s definitely gotten older since then.
Small numbers in premodern ages make it relatively easy to hide one’s immortality or fall through the cracks. Moreover, any supers back then were still covered by the Veil. They would have escaped notice just like vampires and other supernaturals with the same gift.
Agelessness is far from incompatible from growing up to your prime normally, quite the contrary. Immortality Begins at Twenty.
Obligatory reminder that growing up (physical development) and becoming old (physical decay) are entirely different and unrelated phenomena. She still had some maturing to do, but for all we know maybe once well done she has looked the same as she does now ever since.
That said, maybe supers just age into healthy Badass Grandpas, getting somewhat weaker but never getting any big problems like dementia or cancer until one day, maybe in their 120s, one morning they just don’t wake up.
Ageless doesn’t mean invincible, and while Achilles and Maxima are certainly tough we know that most supers aren’t shrugging off serious injuries. Take into account medical and food options pre-1900s, most probably died from infections and other misc. hazards
“we’d be seeing several-hundred-year-old supers knocking around the place”
Are we sure we aren’t? After all, if they remain ageless, we can’t tell from their appearance*. Maybe it’s simply never called out. They wouldn’t be the only characters that are older than they look.
And on the other hand, have we seen any visibly middle-aged or elderly supers? We should if they do age. Where are the grey-haired supers from Achilles’ age group?
*Except for Achilles, who is stuck with his out-of-fashion haircut, but that’s specifically his power.
And as others said, growing up and aging isn’t the same.
We know of at least one, if Deus is to be believed, so there are probably others
Bodies, no one said anything about their minds
It is enough to rule out anything like dementia or senility, which are caused by physical degeneration of the brain.
I’d have to dig back through the archives but wasn’t one of the African supers “The Lionesses” I think they were called sporting some gray hair.
If you’re thinking of https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1098-operant-education/, that doesn’t look like hair grayed from age to me. More like some sort of sand blonde – lots of heroes have unusual haid colors. Her face and body don’t look old.
Naah, check #1098-1100. Not a grey hair in sight.
Answered in the case of Achiles “stuck in the 80’s”
Achiles seems untouched by time – the mulet being an homage to the bad taste of the period – he is unaging since he got his powers.
Maxima with a stressfull life don’t had any wrinkle at 34 , aging seem to be on another scale for her.
Botox is not an explaination for her.
Dabbler seem to have an extensive lifespan , or perhaps an infinite one.
Peggy and Math are mudanes , a “super-normal” in the case of Math .
Halo is a mundane with an evolutive unknow artefact , and guess is quasi imposible about her lifespan.
Just a fyi, it’s a mullet. A mulet is a small mule.
This seems like a lot of unnecessary complication to me.
The dungeon is a growth project. Sign a deal with Cora that she and her crew can go on dives when they’re in the neighbourhood, and nobody gets to tax them on the resources they extract – within a reasonable limit, to be determined by the mages and Semper vigilantis.
It motivates her to keep coming back, it gives the dungeon a regular workout that helps it grow… Seems like a win-win from my point of view.
…
So naturally it isn’t going to happen, because politics and economy et cetera.
> So naturally it isn’t going to happen, because politics and economy et cetera.
If this were reality and not a comic you would be correct. No way this effort would be allowed to proceed if it went up the official chain with superiors having to put their signature down approving it. Dungeon-diving would be much more reasonable of a way to reimburse Cora and crew… if that were even needed after all the “exposure” she’s had recently that clearly allowed her to up her prices. Or just lend/subcontract a few supers from time to time provide extra firepower on a few carefully-selected missions.
But really it’s because Dave wants to draw, and fans want to see, Max (or Sydney, or whoever) fighting in a super-death-match. Actually, both will probably happen. A dungeon-dive, con or sin Cora’s crew, has got to be somewhere in Dave’s future comic plans.
Back to reality, while “official” channels would never happen to allow Max to participate in a betting scheme, “unofficial” black-money channels would be a possibility. You’ll never convince me that the CIA (or whatever letter-organization you prefer) hasn’t sponsored and made money off of ‘roided-up US military members in underground fight clubs. So schedule a few weeks PTO, coordinate with ARC-DARK, and go do some beat-downs.
I think this is actually kind of reasonable.
Cora is a small business owner and can probably not wait for slow payout(, because she has bills to pay).
What you’re proposing works for a billion dollar mega cooperation who can eat the upfront costs until it gets them back.
Cora isn’t necessary in that position.
Also she really seems to like the prospect and keeping trade partners with such giant offerings happy is worth a lot.
There are also the potential intelligence, logistical, financial and deterrence benefits.
Kinda wanna see Sydney face her nightmares for therapy reasons and have a match with a planet wrecker…
This not-so-safe death match is guaranteed to launch Maxima at this Hoss-unicorn-guy.
Because of course it is.
They recently found out that the human genome was fiddled with some 28,000 years ago to limit our age limit to 120 years, aparently we didn’t have a limeter before that. Means that there could be that there could be some that wern’t killed off after the meter hit off the east coast of Africa 1500 years ago.
“They”? Is this something in-universe that I forgot about, or did you fish that off some conspiracy theory webpage?
“They say that there’s a secret gene
that Adam had and it made him clean,
but you don’t plan to get to Heaven, do ya?
It goes like this:
you die, you wait
for genecheck at the Pearly Gate
with angles poised to cue the
Hallelujah!”
(from Genocide Man, to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”)
Probably from some sort of conspiracy theory page. A brief bit of looking indicates 28,000 years ago roughly matches up both with the disappearance of H. sapiens neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) and the incorporation of some of their genes into our own genome via interbreeding, so I’d assume that’s the “tampering” being referenced. The 120 year limit is almost certainly a Biblical reference, as after the death of Methuselah (age 969), God said humans would no longer live beyond the age of 120.
Is it no beams at all or just no mega-death beams? If no beams at all, she can go into strength, invulnerability, speed, and ??? (I can’t remember her 4th aspect) and be a flying brick.
Flight is the last one.
Or, the first one, really. The FISS power set, like 84 (Julie Finster) in PS238
Why does Maxi assume that that hologram is specifically for her?
Why can’t it just have been an example of Cora’s last undercover mission?
Because, thanks to Dabbler’s lack of regard for personal boundaries, Maxima is now aware of the General’s fetish for green skinned space amazons. And this is Dabbler’s friend, so she most likely knows what she’s doing with her sales pitch.
“As far as Maxima’s exposure goes – there’s going to be a lot of it!”
Since it has been mentioned that boot-legging Earth videos is a thing, would some Underlord possibly get their jollies by fixing Battlebot fights or other events before the Galaxy at large gets the interstellar pay-per-view? How soon before Arc-Swat twigs onto such a thing if its not as obvious as Tombstone or Minotaur turning into 2 story tall Transformers?
The main issue I see is that it would involve Maxima being completely unavailable, as their most powerful super, for missions. If they take Sydney along so she can return Maxima at a moments notice with the orbs, then that takes two of them away and if Dabbler goes along as the most knowledgable for alien relations then they have the same situation as when the Ascenders hit while those three were half a world away from the headquarters.
Sydney could travel there and back rather quickly if they needed to call her back, plus they’ll have an easier time getting through to Sydney to make the request if she’s still on Earth. They don’t technically need Dabbler to handle alien relations, as Cora could handle that part quite readily. So, as long as they are willing to trust Cora in this regard, they’d only be losing access to Maxima.
I read the tagline as “Dabbler and Cora just need to F- an alien green girlfriend”. Thank you, dyslexia. But I’m pretty sure they already have…
If General Faulk has concerns about Maximas weaknesses getting exposed, he could always just send Sidney instead.
It is exactly her weight class and she can always use more EXP.
—————–
Either way, he should definitively send Dabbler along.
Magic or telepathy circumventing the physical defences of either Max or Sidney is the actual risk in this kind of situation.
I had not considered the xp angle.
If they can hide that from the greater Galaxy this could actually work.
New threath.
All limitations discovered will be worthless after the upgrades earned.
The challenge would be hiding the high tech angle, but that was sort of destroyed by the Aeolith anyway.
Sydney would be in as much if not more risk than Max if her ID was known, they want her orbs…
I don’t trust Cora’s assessment of the galaxy’s ability to penetrate her cloak.
I don’t think she could or does know the limits of the detection capabilities of their militaries.
If there is anything easy to hide it is the ability to see what is hidden.
Doesn’t Maxima want to fight in the unlimited class arena for the specific purpose of unleashing herself completely? Meaning “so long as she doesn’t use that same energy beam that took down the Fel supercarrier” is entirely contrary to why she’d join the arena. That hologram disguise is going to hit its disguise limit, by definition of Maxima unleashing completely.
Time for someone to build a widget that takes in Maxima’s energy output and turns it into hardlight rainbows radiating the Power of Friendship with appropriate background music, instead of, you know, highly concentrated plasma bursts. Be really funny when a cheerful rainbow arch cuts through the planet-wrecker with exciting little side explosions, and everybody wonders what is going on.
Captain Pony, she’s our hero.. (to the tune of Captain Planet)
Because they would know who she is and be spotted as a ringer and if nothing else, be disqualified. Or arrested “for questioning” and detailed exams. Max is know as to be the most powerful being in the known universe by this time.
I think this is one of the worst ideas that Cora has come up with, both Max and Sydney are desired by MANY of the peoples of the galaxy. The entire New York plot was about this, both of them were targets of 2 different groups during that. So the risk of exposure makes this a Very Bad Idea.
I’d expressed a great deal of reservation last time. But this holographic disguise angle mitigates almost all of the risk, assuming the disguise technology can’t be physically broken during combat.