Grrl Power #1442 – Something, something, chicken dinner
Under normal circumstances, blowing up the thing that’s obviously the power source is a terrible idea. Under a severe time limit? Blowing it up may be the best option. It still might be a terrible idea, I’m just saying a time limit might eliminate other paths all together. Blowing it up might be the only option.
Maxima’s blue word bubble and slightly squareish text represents that her voice is disguised. I’m thinking Sovereign, but somehow feminine. Like, 1 octave higher, and her “I’s” have little hearts instead of dots. You can totally hear it in her voice!
If Bluce and Gail didn’t know Ixah can talk, I have to wonder what the sign up process for the tournament is. Like, presumably, the competitor or a representative has to fill out some kind of form, even if you don’t necessarily need to put your real information on it. They don’t care who’s competing, whether you’re the heir to a powerful dynasty or a secret science project or a member of an unknown species, but they still need to know what name to call you. I guess Cora taught Max to write “Ixah” in galactic standard, then she just stared menacingly while they tried to ask her questions, and eventually, they were like, “Fine, you’re entering late, so you’ll need to show you can hang in the Elimination Battle Royales, so go qualify for that by fighting a bunch of battle mechs with laser halberds and oh, you’ve already broken all of them. Okay, you’re good to go! Be at the transit pad at this time.”
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently. The new one is underway.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
So it does appear it was not super speed or some time manipulation deal it was just find the building and essplode it, not really surprised but he hopefully we can move the focus back onto Sydney and the team.
I mean she might also have used super speed to avoid potential baleful fey time manipulation causing time to pass faster on the other side.
I’d take the battle arena over the college dorm humor, so I guess we disagree.
I’d take the battle arena with anyone other than Max.
The “Megumin Gambit”.
Dave’s been hyping up this fight for over a year, every page should have been about only the fight until it was over.
Not quite a year, but if he’d focused only on the fight, that would bore the portion of the readership that’s here for everything else for a considerable period of time. Which might also include the author and artist himself.
“Trap the other combatant in my realm, I said… What can go wrong? I said…”
Don’t throw them out of the ring if you don’t want them to pick up a chair….
Also don’t throw them next to your vault of trophies
“…to shreds, you say…. and the wife?”
“to sheds you say. Tut tut tut tut….. GOOD NEWS, everyone!!!
I would think blowing up the power source risks shutting down the gate before you can get back through it.
It WAS a risk, but a lower risk than blowing up the gate. And there wasn’t really an option to get out without any risk.
That would’ve been my thought. The idea that the gate will automatically open once it loses power seems… counterintuitive.
Then again, maybe she just flew back to the gate, and the wide-eyed gate guide just said, “Oh! Oh heavens, you’re finally ready to leave?! Thank you, thank you! Here, just right through here, sir!”
I thing it was less the gate itself opening as it was whatever seals on the gate that were part of whatever shenanigans the ‘Gate Guide’ was trying to put Ma-…. I mean, Ixah through coming down.
Maybe it was even the gate guardian panicking and throwing the door wide open, rather than risk Ixah completely crashing the realm and everything in it into the Void.
(We know she normally wouldn’t; they don’t.)
It might even have been the gate-guide panicking and unsealing the portal, rather than risk Maxima/Ixah tearing the whole realm asunder.
She did do that though, based on Nightwing’s statements.
Yeah, it is counterintuitive. And also seems callous. While I could see other more callous participants casually destroying a castle potentially full of people and destabalising and entire realm… I wonder if she even considered she may’ve racked up a body count of innocent creatures by doing so.
Eh. Max has been in contact with the Council for some time now. Who knows what tips she’s gotten about dealing with the Fey?
Particularly if she treats it as if she were a lore nerd. With a much larger payoff for doing it right than getting to own your game ref.
lmao that little pixie trick was very expensive
You win some, you loose some.
I’m thinking a voice like the Dredge Queen from Titan A.E.
Yeah, [that works pretty well](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xA2hqXhcdE).
When in doubt, blow something up.
Actually, I imagine Max dotting her “I”s with fists.
Good thing it was Maxima.
Dabbler or Sydney would have dotted their T’s and crossed their I’s
One out of boredom and the other out of ‘ooh shiny’
Both ladies can be susceptible to Ohh Shiny!
And those are some icy tits..
Where do you think the brass monkies learned how to do it?
Yep kids, that’s how some of my boss’s did it. It ain’t just the good guys that figure “Eh, this security system is too hard to figure out. I guess it’s MAND time.” (that’s Make A New Door) Some days, skip the door, the security because. The never reinforce the wall, the ceiling. Etc.
There’s even a trope for it, it’s “Myopic Architecture”.
My favourite example is from the movie RED, with Bruce Willis and John Malkovich; they’re breaking into the CIA and they have to get through a door with a passcode that changes regularly and can’t be hacked, it’s described as “unbreakable” while Bruce is punching through the cheap-ass drywall right next to it to reach around the door and unlock it from the other side.
In Elder Scrolls Daggerfalls I opened all chests with my sword.
Apparently US Firefighters say something similar about being in a hotel fire.
It’s easier and safer to get to the exit from your room by going through the Drywall between each room than going through what could be a smoke-filled hall and having to bust down doors.
It was mentioned in an episode of Supernatural.
That’s absolutely not true. Without proper tools (which few, if any, travelers have with them in hotel rooms), getting through gypsum board walls is not easy. Yes, the average adult male could brute force an opening in one, as long as their first hit isn’t directly against a supporting stud so they break their wrist or foot. But the time it would take is much longer than what most people would think from the movies. And far longer than what it would take to open your bedroom door from the inside and walk down the hallway. Why would any hotel guest ever need to bust down a door?
Maybe you’re thinking of firefighters responding to a fire where they need to get into a hotel room. In that case, yes, they’d have appropriate tools for the job and with certain hotel room layouts it might be easier to go through the wall than a solid door. They would have to be careful of electrical wires running through the wall, and the fact that in most hotels the bathroom is directly opposite the hall wall. But maybe if they have to clear multiple rooms they break down the first door then go through the interior walls.
Yeah, tool user here. And everything in a hotel room is a tool. That’s not just a movie trope. :) Chair legs make okay improvised wrecking bars, also. ALWAYS save the coffee pot if your room has one, trust me you’ll need it. Or just use the whole chair to make that new door in the gypsum. Mind not everyone on earth has walls like that.
As a former construction.. or in this case de-construction guy, I stripped the lathe and plaster and drywall out of a 3500sq foot house purely with fists, a good set of gloves and some bangin tunes.. punch a hole and rip. You can tell where the studs are just by knocking on the wall, or looking for key features like doors, wall plugs, light fixtures.
That said, yes, look through the peep hole to the hallway and feel the door is a lot quicker/easier plus worst case you still have a door to close if fire/threat is closer than expected. And for firefighters they can pop doors faster with the halligan than they can cut walls, a fully kitted fire fighter isn’t squeezing between studs so there would need to be a specific reason to go through a wall, IE, the fire is right outside the room door and they know there are kids inside.
I have done it, on a bet. My boss took a contract to wreck a building, and a bunch of us got “creative” in ways to have fun and play with it while the guys with the crane were setting up.
One of the bets was “go through ten walls in a row.” I used heavy leather gloves, a construction worker’s helmet, and sheer momentum. Going through one of those walls reduced my momentum by a lot, but didn’t stop me. More like slowed me from a dead run to fast walking speed. I’m naturally tall and heavyset; at the time I also had construction-worker muscles and was overweight, so my momentum at a dead run was nothing to sneeze at. And I picked a route where the rooms were wide enough to build my speed back up before I hit the next one. The studs were all perfectly aligned, so I didn’t have to think about studs on the run; the spot to hit on the next wall was always the same as the spot to hit on the last wall.
And then my boss told us to quit playing before some insurance guy saw us and raised his premiums. Spoilsport. I’m convinced insurance companies are responsible for at least half of the having-no-fun-at-all that affects today’s world.
That reminds me of something similar my father once told me. One time, he visited a place where they manufactured a certain type of rocket fuel. Some sort of oxygenated rubber that CANNOT be extinguished once it’s set on fire. The walls of the place, aside from the structural supports, were all made of styrofoam. So if a fire did break out, if anyone was trapped inside they could easily break through a wall to escape.
Solid rocket fuel, by any chance? Usually it’s a mix of aluminium and a perchlorate, with a few percent of rubber or polymer to bind it together into a solid instead of a powder. Easy to use and produces a lot of thrust, but it’s not very efficient compared to liquid rocket fuels and you can’t put it out once you’ve ignited it because all the stuff it needs to burn is in the mixture, it doesn’t need any external fuel or oxygen and it generates its own heat to keep it going once ignited.
hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB), according to google. Basically a safer version of hydrazine. I feel like making the walls out of styrofoam is just an easy way to turn the place into napalm during a fire, though.
As a Frenchman, I would be curious to see the tactic of going through the wall in a French hotel in particular the Château de Bagnol (this hotel is in a 13th-century fortified castle even if the openings were remodeled in the 15th and 18th centuries).
When you said, “MAND” I was immediately reminded of Giles and his chainsaw.
And yes, if you insufficiently shield your power source, don’t be surprised when someone torpedoes it. A 2 meter womp rat is a ROUS, last I checked.
MAND sounds a lot like mouse-holing
It does feel quite… extreme to blow up someone’s entire base and everything they collected over centuries of adventuring. I think Ixah made an arch enemy here…
One who’s a mite more clever than some of the other candidates for that title, too.
Using your home as a weapon is a choice, so is holding a lit M-80 tightly in your hand.
If you destroyed your potential enemies’ war-marking ability in the same stroke, idk how much of one was created.
I’d actually be pretty amused if Max or “Ixah” made a new enemy here. I think the fairy makes an interesting potential adversary since her powers pose a non traditional threat to Max in a way outside the typical enemy dynamics would. Max is actually vulnerable to magic and tricks. Also this was kind of a dick move by Max in my opinion. She should earn a new enemy with this.
“Also this was kind of a dick move by Max in my opinion.”
I… disagree. The pixie went and literally tried to trap Max in the same “room” where she kept all of her valuables, just to try to win money in a competition. And then when Max blows open the door (and in the process, the valuables) to get out and continue competing, Ms. Magic gets to whine about how Max shouldn’t have touched her stuff? Seems a tad… short-sighted, at the very minimum.
You don’t have to agree. Putting aside the rules or lack of rules here, sure the fairy is responsible for putting her items, property and potentially whatever else at risk with her trap. Yes. But I don’t think Max is above criticism here. She’s entered this fight for the same profit motivation as everyone else, and she made this decision not with safety of herself or anything else in mind, but just specifically to win in what is kind of low key a scam on her end since she’s entered as a ringer. And considering basically anything else can still happen here, pissing off powerful entities also seems a tad shortsighted. I also feel like character wise Max would be the first person to criticize a move like this if someone else did it.
How can there be a ringer in an open-entry Unlimited Class tournament? Isn’t it literally “we don’t care where you’re from or what powers you have”?
“Ringer” seems like a bit of an ambiguous term; the definitions I’ve found range from “someone highly proficient” to “someone who enters a competition, lying about their experience”, Cora seems to mean it simply as “someone who outclasses the competition”, and some readers are interpreting it as some form of cheating. The rules DaveB provided for the competition were pretty limited. Basically: single entrants, no outside support. Hammerspace/bags of holding are allowed, but that does seem tricky to distinguish from a portal to another realm, and it sounds like if Saraviah had pulled anything out of the portal, rather than sent her opponent into it, that might have been against the rules.
Well, this is an everything goes kind of fight, unlimited power, where Max can go all out. The Fairy already knew Max was powerful. It was rather foolish not to consider that an opponent of Max’s calibre might not try to use some of the power on the Castle itself. Especially when they are under a time constraint.
Maybe, but I dunno that it’s likely. First Saraviah has to find out that Ixah is Max, and then she has to weigh the risks of pissing off someone with THAT level of firepower and backup. She might decide that her time is better-spent trying to replace those trophies and artifacts, rather than picking a fight with the sort of folks who shred a Fel invasion in minutes, and can solo gut her entire realm.
Rather than new enemy, I think it’d be interesting if she inadvertently created a new quest. She just destabilised and entire realm which may have many innocent creatures living in it. I’m sure she, or at least Sydney could be somewhat guilt-tripped over the prospect of innocent lives at risk to help obtain some kind of stabalising relic or something.
Sometimes blowing up the base is the most effective thing you can do. See the 1977 documentary “Star Wars” for this particular bit of strategy.
In retrospect, it makes sense she’d have sent opponents to her own realm. I don’t know that she’d want to deal with the consequences of sending an unlimited-class opponent to someone *else*’s realm (with *or* without permission).
If uninhabited pocket dimensions aren’t an option with this power, it’s apparently best just not to use it.
also means Maxima just overpowered a fae lord
I mean… If you’re going to trap an “unlimited class” opponent in a fae realm… you probably don’t want to trap them in YOUR realm.
You also don’t want to send them to the realm of someone who bet in favor of your opponent.
On the other hand, dropping an unlimited class-level combatant in another fae lord’s realm – unless you’re doing so by arrangement – is a good way to make an enemy on your own level. Or possibly well above that level.
And such an angry fae lord might have sent Ixah back with a substantial power boost as an opener for centuries of tricks and assault.
What if they already were an enemy, and, so far, you were at a stalemate?
Dark Lord musing: “The enemy of my enemy shows up on my front porch? How… serendipitous.”
Then you’d be a fool to risk said enemy being clever and diplomatic enough to not just attack the person you were trying to inconvenience, and instead make a deal with them. Together, they would be stronger than apart.
“her “I’s” have little hearts instead of dots. You can totally hear it in her voice!”
–> Well, we readers would like to see that in the font !
Teleporting an opponent into a prepared area for a more predictable and controlled ring out? Smart.
Making said area your actual home that is also filled with your most expensive things? Not so smart.
Yeah, there’s a reason these battles are held on a barren rock with nothing important anywhere near it. Putting any single one of the combatants we’ve seen in the realm where you keep your own important stuff would constitute an extreme lack of planning on your part.
The possibility occurs to me that the Castle, being a Castle, may not have been unoccupied and that she just killed hundreds of innocent people not covered by the rules of the tournament.
After all, if you get ringed out in a more traditional way it isn’t really permitted to go ham on whoever is around, even if you land in your opponents house or spaceship full of people.
I’d still consider that the responsibility of the sender… you choose to teleport a hostile into your home, which you’ve specifically arranged to trap them, blowing it up doesn’t seem unreasonable.
I’d fully agree with you if was just teleporting them into a place where they can just leave or a random spaceship of uninvolved people but sounds like the place and people were actively preventing re-entering the gate.
I didn’t even consider that possibility and I doubt Max did either. I guess John’s argument that it’s still the fairy’s fault for sending Max to her home still makes it her responsibility to but I’m legit surprised Max so quickly went to such an extreme option. It’s funny in the moment but I won’t be surprised if she later expresses some regret at entering this battle. I also doubt there were people there. I feel like that would be irresponsible of the fairy lady and messed up to give Max an increase in body count over a prize fight.
It is possible that Max did do some cursory recon to check out the Castle first before blowing it up. We still do not know exactly how much time passed within the realm between when Max entered and when she left.
With super speed it’s even possible that she manually moved everyone inside outside the castle before she blew it up, even if there were hundreds inside.
But imagine that say the bioform or giant robot got teleported to a prison or something like that. Yes the guards would try to stop you from leaving within the time limit, but you wouldn’t necessarily have a blank card to blow up the entire prison just because you got thrown out of an unlimited class battle arena.
Weapons that can’t be trusted to not do damage outside the arena when ringed out would presumably be dealt with by the authorities of wherever she goes, and if it brings legal trouble to the arena it seems likely that the arena would try to pass those costs on to the contestant who actually chose to do the damage knowing they had left the boundaries of the unlimited class arena.
I would think the responsibility would fall on the contestant who did the teleporting, not the one that got teleported, who may not be able to determine that they have been teleported, or where. They think they’re in a place where they can use their full power, and may need to in order to survive, and suddenly they’re not by no action of their own. It could be an illusion, for all they know.
If you teleport someone else’s live ammunition somewhere, and someone gets hurt as a result, that seems more like the fault of the teleporter than the one who fired the ammunition.
Tom is going to kick himself for not flipping that bet.
Now I’m curious as to how much speculation there is going on Galnet about Ixah – and just who was speculating whether she could talk or not. And why.
Remember that slavers are a thing in this wider universe. A voiceless powerhouse might make an appealing target…
These elimination rounds can end very quickly, depends on the match-ups. Saraviah probably just didn’t have time to think it all the way through. She had to have a spell ready to cast if Ixah successfully took out that pesky Gray eejit. She didn’t have time to reflect on how the G.A. would be taken out. Que sera, sera, Seraviah.
Round 26, about halfway through the elimination rounds. I thought it unlikely this was round one. Once 7/8ths of the entries have been eliminated, do you suppose they will go to 1 on 1 matches? Will there be seeding based on the elimination results? Handicapping?
Per commentary over the last few pages, it will (as of now) always be 8-on-8 battles. One final (8 contestants), one set of eight semi-finals (64 contestants), and one set of 64 elimination rounds (512 contestants). So this is elimination round 26 of 64. Assuming the elimination rounds are either run sequentially or maybe a few happening at the same time, then needing to re-set the arenas between rounds, it’ll now be a substantial wait for the rest of the elimination rounds to finish up before the semi-finals. Which makes sense assuming quite a few of the winners could be seriously injured. All that said, Dave said he’s still working through the details so it may change.
Considering it is a huge media event, I’m thinking it extends over a period of weeks, like the Olympics.
For some reason, I imagined Maxima’s voice going through some variant of Google Translate to make the words come out stilted and oddly grammared. You know, like “I am able to excavate the topic of which you are currently conversing about.”
It would be funny if the translator broke or was sabotaged sometime. My hovercraft is full of eels.
Kind of her to leave exactly One turret on the bottom right and that the henge in the back is still standing.
When brains fail brawn prevail.
Oh, I thought you meant The Sovereign, David Bowie on Venture Brothers.
I’m gonna say this one seems super mean of Max. I know this was a no rules fight, but that trap seemed pretty non lethal in design and Max decided to blow up her house. To win a fight, she entered for profit. She didn’t seem in danger, she just got outplayed and destroyed a person’s home for it. Maybe it was the fairy’s mistake to send her there, but still a very harsh punishment for that decision.
Destroying a home: The fairy FAFO’d. Maybe harsh, but suitable for what she did.
The real issue is whether or not that very large castle was full of innocent staff, servants, and maybe a watch party of local lords and ladies. I’m kinda hoping Dave addresses that, at least in his commentary, because mass killing of civilians would be totally out of character for Max.
Disagree. Once it was used in the arena as playable, it was as eligible for destruction as any mountain used for bludgeoning or volcano used as a spritzer.
I don’t understand the rules here. It seems the main conceit of this class of fight is that there are no rules so you’re probably right. It still seems to me that based on this logic participants have no liability for their decisions and that seems wrong. Also her castle was never in the arena, which is probably just a technicality, but if the situation were reversed or the area the opponent was sent were inhabited this would this be okay?
If she had kept her power source somewhere other than her castle, then that other thing would have been blown up. Even more than sending Max to her realm, her storage of her power source within her castle is what made it a viable target.
If Max was somehow aware that this kind of trap has a reputation for potentially taking years to escape from, it wouldn’t matter if she herself was in danger. She needs to be able to return to her duties on Earth at a moment’s notice…or at least a week’s notice.
There are faerietales on Earth of people who spent a brief time in the fae realm, only to find lifetimes had passed when they returned home. And Maximilia “used to be” a nerd. I’d bet she knows about those old tales and took them into account.
The point of bringing Sydney along is to enable her to get back immediately via aetherium causeway if necessary (p1370).
Yes, but Sidney has no idea how to aim an aethereum causeway into the fae realms. Yet.
While I don’t disagree with your logic entirely, I’m not as concerned about her crossing lines just yet. That could be because I also feel like “building that obviously is or contains the source of power for this realm that I need to escape, not only to continue in this competition, but also to be able to return to my home planet” could reasonably have a few degrees of separation from “building that obviously is someone’s home.”
Does that absolve her of any liability for not considering it? Nope. She’s shown a great deal of capacity for such things in battle before (though iirc, she also has shown that she’s not perfect about it). It’s just another perspective.
So… she just left the gate open this entire time? I woulda’ sent her through then sealed it behind her: NO way back until I deigned to release her.
Max mentioned a gate guide, so there was a way back, just through the usual fae indirectional way. Also, I’m sure the gate was set for one way only, but destroying the power source cut off the block.
The problem with trapping Maxima in your magic realm is that it means trapping MAXIMA in your magic realm, and she’s likely to get pissy about it.
Space bacon? That implies space pigs. That means…”PIGS IN SPACE”! Oh, poor Miss Piggy.
Oh my. I just had another thought. That fairy is liable to hold a grudge over losing her home. It’s her fault of course, but I can foresee where that little whippet shows up in a future storyline in an attempt to extract revenge.
Don’t enroll in Unlimited Class Battle Arena if you’re not prepared for Unlimited Violence.
Ms. Nightwing didn’t consider that someone she’d send into her labyrinth would respond by an action which might destroy the entire realm holding the labyrinth, because to a fae the idea of taking out a realm is just inconceivable. She had a rule in her head which she didn’t realize was ONLY in her head and not part of the actual rules of the tournament.
That said, this entire bout suggests that possibly Max will have to contend with similar issues. She was challenged a bit by Grey Anatomy’s time/space manipulation, and nearly taken out by the labyrinth, but easily dominated in fights which came to strength, speed, and other direct forms of violence. The unconventional threats are the most dangerous to her.
Hah! Yeah, a Ixah’s response to being trapped was valid. I was wondering if it would be her own realm Seraviah tossed Ixah into. Given she’s upset about her artifacts and treasures, I’m going to assume anyone “living” in the castle with her were simulacra and similar. She just needed a big place to hold all her stuff. Silly fae; why didn’t you just make a maze in a separate pocket dimension and leave it at that? Using your own home was idiotic; especially since you hadn’t even considered this possible outcome; Ixah had to point it out to you. Probably wanted to trap the GA there, but he yielded to Ixah, so Seraviah just switched the target without thinking it through. SMH
Being able to withstand the fallout of your own nuke-level energy blast changes the equation “should I blow up this power source or try to find another way?” considerably, too.
I am surprised by the following:
¤ Ixah is talking, despite the obvious lack of mouth. Based on the font, the talking is being filtered through an intentionally-robotic translator. Presumably this requires Maxima to subvocalize.
¤ Saraviah has her own realm (which apparently means she is considered a fey lord), and was dumb enough to toss an opponent into it unsupervised.
¤ There does not appear to be any time dilation of note. The actions described could very plausibly have taken Maxima/Ixah exactly 28 seconds.
¤ Saraviah is still alive.
¤ Saraviah decided to talk, and then listen, rather than using magic to liberate herself. (I would expect an escape spell to be reflexive.)
You know people can talk while wearing a mask, right?
Sara is able to enter an Unlimited Class Galactic Battle Royal, and survive, so she would have to be very powerful (she figured who ever she tossed in would be kept trapped long enough for the match to end, and then she would release them, she didn’t think that someone, or thing, tossed in there would be powerful enough, or motivated enough, not to wait)
Why wouldn’t Sara be alive? Maxi doesn’t kill unless she has to (despite what many would like to believe… )
While all of US know that Ixah’s lack of mouth is due to Maxima wearing a mask, it also seemed like a gimmick specifically implemented to prevent Maxima from needing to talk. Therefore, having Ixah not only talk, but be verbose, is rather surprising… as Gail so conveniently points out.
Saraviah’s eyes were bulging like a gel stress ball, in conjunction with a very obvious CRUNCH of a hand around her torso, which happened to lack any visible armor. It’s the sort of thing that, at the very least, implies a crippling injury. Maxima’s voice font changed from a broken NOSE. Saraviah’s voice font is unchanged despite a crunched TORSO. I suppose it’s possible the crunch was her arms and wings, and that her torso is somehow miraculously uncrunched (despite the aforementioned gel squish eyeballs), but I certainly do find that surprising.
I think the eyeballs in Panel 4 of last comic were more cartoony than literal.
Of course, Sava could have some sort of regeneration spell running constantly or another way to autorecover from gross body damage, but considering that Max chose on this page to converse rather than annihilate, plus Dave’s past practice of using different art style to suit the story, I feel that what’s going on was The Rule Of Funny
Probably so. I recall that Joel’s eyeballs looked a bit bulgy when Sydney finally showed him what was in the poster tube (p298), and that was clearly Rule Of Funny.
Unsure about how fae magic works here, but such a get free spell would likely take inspiration from the spell “Freedom of Movement”, which in D&D 3e and forward (can’t confirm 2e and earlier) and in both editions of Pathfinder, has a Somatic component in addition to a material component (and a divine focus component for divine casters in Pathfinder), so she’d need to have pre-cast the spell in order to escape Max’s grip, due to not having the freedom of movement to perform the somatics nor to retrieve the material components.
Alternatively, it’s just very hard to focus on casting a spell when you’re being crushed AND even so, Saraviah was *probably* more concerned about making sure her realm didn’t collapse – something apparently preventable, but not necessarily reversible once done, so likely she didn’t have the luxury of winning the fight and getting to it later.
Misty Step in 5 / 5.5, simple reaction short range teleport. Dimension door for a action based, farther distance thing.
Next time Bug, don’t send them to your own home!!
Had a thought regarding places where Maxima could hide something in her Ixah disguise. While she would probably not go for the cleavage of holding idea, her protective aura very obviously extends to her hair. If she has something concealed there, it would explain why, despite being whipped about, Ixah’s hair has yet to be shown hanging (or pressing) down against her back.
I apologize for being late to the party if someone else already made this suggestion.
Hopefully the castle was staffed by golems or illusions and not hired servants…
If the castle was staffed by servants, they certainly weren’t HIRED servants. At most, they might have been INDENTURED servants. More likely they would have been ENSLAVED servants. But yes, one who values sentient lives might hope that Saraviah used magically-animated automata or other non-sentient servants.
The bigger worry is if Saraviah was hosting GUESTS (for a tournament viewing party). It’s the sort of thing a fey lord might do to show off their prowess, and the sort of thing that could cause a diplomatic incident if they happen to now be DEAD guests.
It would be very bad form and strategy to hold a watch party for the tournament, then drop one of the contenders’ mid-fight into the same area as said party, under a serious time limit for them to figure out how to break the energies holding them in said realm.
This is the problem with running the defenses for a pocket dimension off the same power source that stabilizes the pocket dimension.
Sure, it reduces the maintenance cost, but if somebody wants to level the defenses…
The phrase I was always fond of for those kinds of scenarios is “The best worst option”. When “good option” isn’t even on the table, you have to figure out the least bad one.
She talked on camera? In English and people with translators can hear what she said in their own language?
She basically outed what planet she is from. Unless she was using translation tech that made her think and talk in another language…
If Nanoha has thought me anything it’s that the shortest path through a maze is a straight line. There is a reason she was the image on dungeon bypass on tvtropes. When time is critical shenanigans get exploded.
Something tells me that Maxima’s actions may come back to bite her in the future.
So Max has made two of her opponents yield now. I wonder if this will become a trend.
Tiny little question – how was Maxima able to tell where the lines of power were emanating from? I know that Halo can do stuff like that (from what I saw with the Vehemence fight) but how did Maxima do it? Some sort of thing that Cora gave her? Is there some sort of way to detect that that Dabbler told her about? I’m sort of lost on how she knew where to attack or why she knew to attack it. Anyone able to explain that please. THanks in advance.
She couldn’t tell for sure, but a castle surrounded by an empty field was a good guess (hence she described it as “obvious”).
IIRC Maxima has Advanced Knowledge (Nerdery). So far, it’s mostly been useful for dealing with Sydney, but when the battlespace is a Magic Realm, it’s a +5 to her professional training in analyzing opponents.
My guess is she used the “magic eating” sword to locate the lines of power, but it could also be implemented in the disguise, or be something else.