Grrl Power #1378 – Commence Operation StealthySpaceGambleBloodSport
I didn’t draw Maxima flying besides Sylv because she’s insecure about being shorter than him. If you could fly with zero effort, wouldn’t you do it sometimes?
I call out “with zero effort” because I have had more than one dream where I could fly, but it was the shittiest, worst flying possible. I could only get about waist high off the ground, and moving required basically swimming through the air, so I could move barely as fast as a brisk walk, if I put a ton of effort into scooping my hands just right to catch as much air as I could and shoving it behind me. Brains are the worst.
I looked back at the pages that introduced Cora’s crew, and I noticed that Sylv’s name was originally written as Slyv. It would be much easier to retcon that first page than all the others with him on it, but instead, I’ve decided that his full name is Sylv Slyv. Possibly his middle name is Yvsl.
And now I’ve decided that his whole race’s given names are anagrams of their family names. Because why not? They’re aliens, and aliens do alien stuff.
Why isn’t he wearing a shirt? Because I started drawing his muscles to make sure I had the proportions right, then decided I didn’t want to make up a spacey male-cut shirt. I would be the absolute worst costume designer for a sci-fi movie. Everyone would be wearing Han Solo adjacent outfits probably. Unless the project I was working on was Deja Thoris chic. Then I’d have fun with it. Or at least designing the women’s costumage. I probably wouldn’t enjoy designing men’s bejeweled banana hammocks or whatever. Leave that to a female costume designer, or a gay one. That’d be fair, right? Although, that might result in some competitive minimalism that’d have to be scrapped when it came time for fittings.
Maxima tried to hide her ascent into space by flying out into international water, then over the horizon, then up out of the atmosphere, since they figured the spy satellite was going to be positioned within a few hundred clicks of being directly over Archon HQ. But a quick google suggests there are roughly 100K ships at sea at any given moment, and that’s just large merchant ships, excluding small fishing boats and military vessels, so it’s probably hard to pick a spot where Max could get into orbit without being seen at all. Maybe somewhere closer to the poles? Lots of research stations out that way, but fewer eyes in total, I’d wager. Wearing a black stealth suit and doing it at night would help a lot, no matter where she was.
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.
you know… i think Sydney is about to level up quite a bit
I’ve been unable to comment lately.
Is Sydney finally going to have to wear one of those skin-tight spacesuits?
I’m guessing not, since I think it would be funny trying to get her into one and would totally be something that Cora might try to pull off, but Max probably wouldn’t go for it.
It makes sense for the plot.
They need to disguise her powers in some way. I’m thinking “Utility belt.” It’s not a perfect disguise, but if she kept the important orbs in pouches she could reach easily, she could fly and raise her force field without needing to actually show off the orbs.
Although if they’re going to be really smart about it, they’ll give her a small spacecraft – something about the size of a Chevy Sprint – that she could drive with her flight orb. Then everyone would just think “Neat little spaceship” and not even realize it’s powered by The Mighty Halo.
Trying to disguise Halo would feel more like a futility belt…
I agree! It’s time for Syd to level up again!
I’m dying, stage four cancer. I blame the puns. My death will not be mourned, it might be celebrated, but no one will notice until the electric bill is overdue. This shall be my final post.
GO and pack a weeks worth of… your meds plus a bit for safety.
Kinda funny to think about needing a costume designer for Dejah Thoris chic, but I guess jewelry counts as part of costume design.
Honestly, it’s unlikely someone can even see a Human sized figure more than a few hundred feet away, and they certainly would notice someone wearing a stealth suit – even a poorly made one.
All she really needed to do was wait until night, and nobody’s going to see a thing.
Just so you know, orbital mechanics don’t allow for something to remain in place over a fixed earth location unless that location is on the equator and the thing is in a very crowded Geostationary orbit.
Only if you are orbiting. If you have a limitless delta-v to apply, you can can stay anywhere you want. Not having to carry around reaction mass makes everything easier.
Cora mentioned reaction mass as an expense, so these spaceships expend *something* when they accelerate.
Hehe, my own recurring shitty flying dream required me to mentally pull myself up to fly. In many instances I struggle just to get off the ground, and staying there typically took a lot of effort and careful balance somehow. Dreams being dreams, difficulty and flight speed were variable, but it was rarely very useful. I’ve had entire dreams consist of repeatedly trying to use my new neato supernatural magic flight powah and… failing to get off the ground for more than a few seconds no matter what I try.
Of course, there was also the time I dreamt a zombie apocalypse and as the zeds broke into the room I was hiding in my brain Nope’d and suddenly I had super powers, and then the dream was like Nope and the zombies had super powers, and that rapidly spiralled into some DBZ-ish flying super-fight over the middle of the atlantic as two parts of my brain went at it like kids arguing about whose favourite characters would win in a fight – from what I could remember it felt, on a meta-level, like there was a presence in the dream that was resisting and actively fighting back when my brain broke out the cheat codes, very strange. Not the only time my brain’s broken out the cheat codes in the face of certain death and the dream has fought back, but that kind of thing’s never happened very often; usually I’d just die messily and then there’s this weird sensory-deprivation disembodied ness that’s hard to describe. But it’s been a few years since I’ve had either of those.
Sydny picked that up with remarkably few clues.
Kevlar can be silky.
My flying dreams are both better and worse than yours. My height is not an issue and all I do is chose a direction of travel. The problem is as I swim up into consciousness and become aware in/of the dream my speed… is inversely proportional. I slow to a crawl in the air, not a baby’s swift crawl either, slow slow… frustration sets in just as I wake from it.