Grrl Power #1449 – The Danbury Oreo Shake
I know what we’re all thinking. If we could eat metal, we’d all like to try Gallium. For the few of you who weren’t thinking that, and wondering why the rest of us were, it’s because Gallium’s melting point is 85.5°F (29.7°C). So you could keep it in the fridge, probably in the cheese drawer, then pop some in your mouth, and it starts to warm up, then it gets all melty and you could suck on it like a hard candy. Yes, I know Cesium melts at 83.2°F (28.5°C), but Gallium just sounds like it would taste better than Cesium, am I right? Although… I do hope Cesium has its place in the spice rack of metal eating species, because I want Cesium Salads to be a thing.
I thought drinking Mercury would be odd because metals conduct heat really well, so it would feel like a cold drink even if it was heated up quite a bit, but I looked it up, and it’s a terrible conductor of heat. So good news, I guess you could make Mercury coffee and it would stay hot, though I suspect very few foods are Mercury soluble. So you’d probably wind up with a bunch of coffee grit floating on top of a mug full of hot Mercury.
So Max does have some odd nutritional requirements, but it’s perhaps even odder than 98% of her diet is still just normal human food. Her sense of taste is basically the same as it used to be as well, although it is slightly expanded so the odd elements she craves taste good to her. The fact that she can have an omelet florentine for breakfast, and then shoot out a petajoule of energy before lunch seems like a pretty solid indication that it’s not proteins and complex carbohydrates that powers her power. Though maybe it is, and her body is able to fizz regular food. (By fizz, I mean fission, but it doesn’t sound right to me to say “her body is able to fission regular food.” Like, if you’re talking about fusion, you can fuse two things together, but you have to fission them apart? No, there should be a “fuse” equivalent. So, fizz.) Of course, I have no idea how much nuclear energy is in the average omelet, even one with spinach in it, and non-fissile material is, by my understanding, not easy to chain-react, meaning it would be absurdly energy inefficient to extract all of the fission energy from it, so again, the theory is that Maxima’s, and indeed probably no Super’s power source is regular food.
Okay, the new one will be up today. In a mostly complete form. Or maybe finished. I thought I’d have finished it over the weekend but I stupidly put 5 characters in it, so it slowed down the rendering a lot.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
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.
Soooo there is the potential for her to poison her firefighter beau with some heavy kissing. I reckon going all the way would kill him.
The phrase that comes to mind is “Woman of Gold, Man of Tissue Paper”, paraphrasing a Larry Niven work. If he inspires her to contract, he will need massive reconstructive surgery of his ribs, pelvis, other bone systems and several soft organs. The surgery will most likely have to be performed by Archon’s metahuman surgeon to ensure the patient’s mere survival.
She can dial down her strength to the minimum. I assume that because she *can* dial it, that she has extensive experience with dealing with the rest of the world in a non-destructive manner.
She can also dial up her speed a bit. Both to prolong the experience and also maybe get a handle on those reflexive movements before they move far enough to cause problems.
It would require a fair bit of deliberation to get through. I guess taking it slow is a good idea, and not just for story reasons.
I “Spiderman:Reign”, Mary Jane Watson-Parker had died due to exposure to Peters radioactive Sperm.
And Dr Manhattan and his first girlfriend in Watchmen.
Except that in the Watchmen, Janey Slater was given lung cancer because of smoking and the intentional intervention of evil people seeking to discredit Dr. Manhattan, he isn’t radioactive.
(This explanation is intentionally vague on who the ‘evil people’ are for spoiler reasons, it’s a much better first read for anyone if they have no idea.)
Yeah, I didn’t mention that part cause I didn’t want to spoil it.
Wait, if Parker’s sperm is radioactive… where did Mayday come from?
In some interpretations it is.
It most it isn’t.
Did you just expect rules consistency across the multiverse?
Looks like Sydney is eating meat!!!
Surprised Harem hasn’t twigged on that or checked betting board yet.
What disaster awaits our heroes once Sydbey learns she can program Arti-meats like bacon jerky
to include her favored spice levels?
She’ll insist on her own portable food station. She won’t read the instructions.
Her BF might indicate which supplements are safe and can slowly increase both her size and breasts too.
Math will snatch a snack. Suffer the heat. And, surprisingly, be okay with his new breasts.
That or he’ll learn fire-breathing and infuse it with Qi.
So many possibilities of shenanigans.
Harem was there when they were talking about the art-meats…
Butt it was a thermometer…
So one day Maxima feels ill. She goes to take her temperature, and accidentally cracks open the thermometer. She isn’t hurt, but the mercury leaks onto her hand. Without thinking, and perhaps a little delirious from fatigue, she licks the shiny liquid from her fingers. After a few minutes she starts to feel better. What follows is a mental back-and-forth as she comes to terms with having (1) swallowed a toxic substance, and (2) started to feel better after doing so.
Or maybe skip a few steps and she accidentally crushed the thermometer under her tongue, then swallowed it reflexively before she realized what happened.
It easily could have happened while she was transforming into her current bedazzled appearance.
No my friend, she denied it being a RECTAL thermometer. Not thar she gave a thermometer coy, furtive glances… Meaning she was eyeing up Thermometer and anything containing mercury, like a carnivore smelling cooking meat.
Which implies she one day threw caution to the wind, busted open a thermometer and drank that down.
Likely leading to tests and such because of her transformation.
Honestly, I’m kinda picturing her doing the Lolita lollypop suck on a thermometer as a vote incentive now
Also, I feel as if Sydney and Harem just both crossed off a square on their Maxima bingo card.
Now I wonder if she eats the glass, too.
Before consuming cesium, may I recommend reacting it with chlorine or iodine first? CsCl and CsI are non-toxic in moderate amounts, and your kidneys will kick out the large atoms during their process.
In the superhero RPG I was in, most supers need to eat huge amounts of food, to the point that some of the most powerful supers can’t keep their identities from the government, when the FBI tracks food orders of unusual size.
[“…this guy ordered *how much* in groceries this week? And he lives *alone*? He’s got to be a class IV at least.”]
Plus the need for some to get unusual materials – like Maxima does – to maintain their metabolisms. On the other hand, Stonebreaker (The Silicone Smasher) can pretty much go to the beach at night and down a couple of pounds of sand, and he’s fine with no one the wiser.
And then you had one of my characters, who was mostly normal except for having hyperintelligence and massive inventing skills. Totally normal diet for a Japanese expat in the US, and a talent for turning junk into weaponry, and was arrested five times for trespassing when dumpster-diving at tech places, until the FBI’s Supers division finally noticed.
It’s a game setting, so you only need to put enough chemistry in for plausibility.
But actually fueling superpowers with the energy you can extract from food pretty quickly becomes infeasible. At least if you want to spend any time at all not getting rid of food you’ve extracted the energy from.
There’s a reason we use diesel fuel to power heavy machinery – it’s much more energy-dense. Have you ever stood close to a tractor while it’s running and noticed just how hot it is?
Electrically-driven items work in some areas because the energy generation can be done somewhere else and we can transmit it to where it’s needed very efficiently.
Battery-driven stuff hasn’t been more popular for large applications because that’s storing it as chemical energy and then converting it again, and you run into the same problem with waste, both heat and chemicals.
In other news, Sydney is having orb affinity due to her capsaicin tolerance, which is a trait Nth tech nailheads thought was limited to themselves.
It would be funny if it’s not exactly her affinity for capsaicin, but how much of it she contains at any one time. Like maybe the Nth naturally produce capsaicin at levels that shouldn’t be possible for normal organic lifeforms, but Sydney eats so much spicy stuff that she resembles an Nth.
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”
Humans as a species are hopelessly addicted to oxygen. In its pure form, it causes euphoria, becomes toxic when consumed in excess, and is also known to be highly flammable. Most humans have easy access to a diluted solution of roughly 1/5 concentration oxygen, which their bodies can handle for extended periods without significant ill effects. If deprived of access to this intoxicant, withdrawal symptoms begin almost immediately, and death occurs within a matter of minutes.
“Oxygen gets you high!” – Tyler Durden
Yeah. I love oxygen. You might say I’m even a connoisseur of it.
Also reminds me of this video from Ryan George:
Ryan George: “I personally love air. I’m like constantly breathing the stuff. Let me just paint a picture of how much I love air okay? I’m breathing that stuff in SUBCONSCIOUSLY, like when I’m not even thinking about it, okay? I guess, y’know, maybe I’m special. I know I just can’t get enough of the stuff.”
Nevermind the dangers of di-hydrogen monoxide which has been in contact with every single human who has ever lived.
Well something that dangerous should definitely be made illegal! gasp.
“Love is like oxygen
You get too much you get too high
Not enough and you’re gonna die
Love gets you high”
Hate to be pedantic, but oxygen is NOT flammable. It’s the—wait for it!—oxidizer for stuff that IS flammable.
So, does that make rust the same as a “slow burn”?
Yes. They’ve shown pictures that if you pump oxygen under high pressure into a chamber with iron, it will literally start to flame as it oxidizes and rusts. Rusting is iron burning so slowly you’re only seeing the ash.
Shouldn’t that be ‘burning so fast you only see the cold ash’?
Teeeeeeechnically oxygen itself isn’t flammable. It’s just VERY VERY good at…I’mStrugglingToRememberTheScientificWord…accelerating(?)…the combustion of *other* flammable substances.
Oxidising…
I was trying to think of “accelerant” or “catalyst,” as my understanding of “catalyst” was incorrect. I was thinking that a catalyst was just simply something that accelerates a reaction, regardless whether or not it’s consumed in the process.
A catalyst, by definition, is not consumed as part of the chemical reaction it is facilitating. It works by dropping the necessary energy threshold to be overcome by the reactants to perform their reaction. This is done by either:
– forming a temporary, intermediate compound with one of the reactants. That compound then interacts more readily with the other reactant, releasing the catalyst back as a by-product of that second reaction, or
– providing a substrate upon which one reactant connects, resulting in a temporary change (e.g. in shape, charge distribution, etc,) to the reactant that makes interacting with the other reactants easier.
Conceivably, if the reaction is just a decomposition, a catalyst can also be used to allow that single reactant to break apart into new compounds by either of the above. Ex: Platinum plates are used to catalyze the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen. The platinum is not consumed by this process.
That said, a catalyst could conceivably be worn away or used up by other reactions occurring in the medium, just not by the one it’s catalyzing.
In response to the remark about fizzing food: Because most atoms in regular food have an atomic number below iron, you would have to fuse them to get energy. Everything below iron releases energy when fused, everything above releases energy when fizzed.
Curve of Binding Energy in Da’ House!!
You wouldn’t be able to extract energy from carbohydrates and protein via fission. Attempting to fission anything with that low of mass would consume more energy than it would produce. Fusion, on the other had, would produce energy (see what Doc Brown’s does at the end of “Back to the Future”). Max’s body is probably tough enough to contain the necessary plasma, and her body can generate the required energy to force fusion. Only question is what does she do with all of the heat that would generate? And how would Max’s body use the energy produced?
I believe it was previously mentioned that Max feels “warm” to the touch. However, heat is just a form of energy transfer; leakage if you will. There wouldn’t necessarily be heat produced if the energy were stored efficiently. What we really don’t know is by what mechanism Max stores the energy her powers use, similar to how we don’t know where the orbs’ energy comes from.
I thought that it was already determined that Supers get their energy from the Superian Field.
Her food isn’t being disintegrated.
Yeah, anything Iron or lighter consumes energy to fuse instead of releasing it… which is one of the reasons stars go supernova!
(Core collapse supernova, basic edition:
When the core is finished fusing hydrogen the reduction in energy output makes it contract, increasing the pressure until it can fuse helium… Repeat a few times as it rapidly cycles through everything lighter than iron, faster and faster, until suddenly, instead of the increased pressure causing it to gain thermal energy, the opposite happens. The more it contracts, the more energy is consumed, making it contract even faster! This runaway contraction forges a lot of the elements heavier than iron, and starts compressing the electrons and protons deep in the core into neutrons. Eventually the neutrons reach a point where they can’t pack any closer together, causing the infalling mass above them to rebound in a shock wave that, depending on details of the star’s size and makeup, can blow off the outer layers, scattering a bunch of those heavier elements around the vicinity. The dense inner core left behind is a neutron star or, if the star was massive enough, becomes a black hole.)
I saw on a youtube science video once that gallium is one of few metals you can chew on without dying. It’s low toxicity, but would most likely melt in your mouth once it’s in there and might lead to kidney issues if you actually ingest it. But you won’t die from it, unlike mercury. You could also POSSIBLY inhale it into your lungs accidentally (it’s called aspiration) and that can lead to stuff like chemical pneumonia or permanent lung damage.
Drinking mercury, meanwhile, attacks the central nervous system and can lead to tremors, memory loss, neuropathy, and hallucinations. Then it can lead to SEVERE damage to your kidneys with even a small amount (unlike gallium which requires a lot more to be ingested) and renal failure.
So the difference between gallium and mercury is the former is, at most, a mild irritant (and no risk at all from the vapors) while the latter has a SEVERE risk from the vampors and it’s a neurotoxin that will shut down your kidneys and attack your brain.
Soooo now I’m wondering if this means that Maxima is also invulnerable on her insides (ie, her organs and blood) or if it’s LIMITED to mercury.
Actually, if you drink mercury, once, it’s pretty much going to 99.999% pass through you, because while the organic compounds are super nasty, they don’t form terribly easily. What little gets into your blood will evaporate out through your lungs and skin, the rest will exit by the usual way.
The problem is that a tiny bit of it does convert to organic mercury compounds, that stick around and accumulate with every exposure.
Just hope that you don’t have any gold dental work. Mercury and gold play way too well together. I don’t know about cesium or gallium but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they are problematic as well.
oh no, my burgeoning 80’s rap career and gold teeth is going to prevent my ability to guzzle gallium! Once again I am being foiled by chemistry and the man!
:)
and Cesium Salads. Me say you full of Beryllium Balogna. (excuse me, its either that or Cesium Salami)
i’ll show myself to the door.
Question: If one of Harem’s clones gets extremely ill from something like exposure to neurotoxins, acute radiation poisoning, breathing in mustard gas, etc – does that affect all the other Harems?
Also, Max should NOT have that container open outside of a fume hood.
And why is it classified that she drinks mercury?
No, each body is separate physically from each other, so while the other bodies might mimic the symptoms they won’t die (well, depends on what happens if any one of her dies)
Remember when one of her broke her arm or when Maxi Maximum-Wedgied one of her: there was a painful chain reaction
_”And why is it classified that she drinks mercury?”_
Because it is kind of gross and they don’t want to encourage others to do it.
Mercury doesn’t smell like anything. Although in Maxima’s case it might be a good idea to add some nasty oderent to keep everyone else away from her stash.
What’s it say on that bucket or whatever it is in the second-last panel? I can’t read it in this resolution.
“Horse Rectum Specific Lube”
Oh dear.
Thanks for the help lol
Shouldn’t Harem go see Frix given she just huffed mercury?
Given that cesium is an alkali metal and thus reacts vigorously with water, pure cesium would be a hell of a pop rock. Maxima might enjoy it, though, and I’m sure she’d at least survive it.
And by the way, if Maxima is nuclear-powered then she is surely fusing her food; food is made almost entirely of small atoms like carbon that are energy-negative to break apart.
Presuming she’s a “typical” super and that Deus is correct in his speculations about unlocking a super energy field that nothing else can touch, her power source would presumably be the same as Sydney’s orbs.
IOW, I think Dave’s just messing around.
Not to be that guy (this is totally being that guy), but the thermometer in the comic has a RED liquid inside. That isn’t mercury. Red-liquid thermometers use some sort of spirit (like isopropanol) with a red dye. Mercury thermometers are silver coloured inside.
So anyone else notice the reason Sydney is grinning and Harem is laughing?
Cause Maxima only denied it was a rectal thermometer, not that their were coy furtive glances…
Well, somebody had to be that guy. And it probably would’ve been me if you hadn’t beat me to it…
So the ancient Chinese royal, Qin Shi Huang, thought that by consuming mercury he could have eternal youth and immortality. Incidentally, he died from acute mercury poisoning.
HOWEVER, there was a reason he may have believed this. Early stages of mercury poisoning (before cognitive decline and madness sets in) can include euphoria, making you *feel* better while you’re killing yourself
Additional fun fact in regards to the ‘madness’ part: The term ‘mad as a hatter’ and the character The Mad Hatter in Alice in wonderland was due to hat makers (hatters) in the 18th-19th centuries using mercury nitrate to turn fur into felt and developing erethism, or Mad Hatter’s Disease
Well there’s how to beat Maxima in one easy move. Aluminium down the throat. youtube(dot)com/watch?v=IrdYueB9pY4
If Maxima is drinking toxic substances then I hope she has a toilet attacked to a hazardous waste collection system. None of that needs to be going into the sewer system.
Oh, there’s far better reasons for her toilet to be attached to a hazardous waste collection system than a little Mercury.
If you read my mini-lecture on Symbiotes/Parasites under comic #1444, one of the reasons that I used the phrase “Incubation Chamber” in the second phrase is that we don’t know WHAT “comes out” of Maxima. After all, in many parasitic infections, urine/feces is a vector for spreading or even maturation.
For all we know about the Symbiote/Parasite that is part of her, her excretions could have alien material inside them. Maybe the alien material is inert/benign or maybe it has a maturation phase that could flow undetected through our sewer systems. From there, it could possibly infect other plant/animal life forms. Hell, for all we know, Max could be a carrier for a symbiote/parasite that could be an insidious (The gradual/stealthy definition) terraformer.
All this is to say that:
1) Compared to what could be in her waste products (presuming she has any), a little mercury is not even a blip on the potential danger scale
2) If Arc-Light hasn’t got her plumbing hooked to every monitoring/containment system available and made her aware of the potential dangers of off-base bathroom breaks, then they’re idiots.
Did you know that drinking mercury was once considered a treatment for syphilis? Archaeologists tracked the Lewis & Clark expedition by the traces of mercury in the latrine pits.
Drinking? Or topical application? I’ve heard both.
I mean at this point it’s academic, I doubt it would even relieve symptoms. But curiosity has nothing to do with applicability, or four-element theory would be completely unknown today.
Hmmm probably not drinking. According to “Discover” magazine Jan 29, 2022 – Lewis & Clark carried calomel “Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills” or “thunderclappers,” pills – the idea being that if you’re sick it’s something in your system that needs to be flushed out with a laxative. Indeed it left so much mercury in their latrines that archaeologists can still trace their campsites today.
Is that… Beth Smith?
Sure looks like her!
Earth Beth, not Space Beth…..probably
Mercury is dense enough that I can imagine her superheroine metabolism simply converts some of its mass to energy. Since it’s not fissile, it has to be some crazy nuclear reaction, maybe using charmed matter – in fact I’m thinking it makes sense that human super powers in universe have something to do with charmed matter reactions. Charm quarks are very massive and very unstable, but the theory is that if enough of them are combined into a polyquark particle, the particle is stable and has some crazy properties.
There’s a process under investigation for using common isotopes of mercury as a neutron multiplier in fusion reactors, converting it (after a few decay steps) into commercially significant quantities of gold as a side benefit. https://www.marathonfusion.com/alchemy.pdf And what does Maxima’s skin appear to be made of?
E=mc². We are chemical furnaces. We eat food, it gets broken down by stomach acids right to basic chemicals and we absorb those with the help of symbiotic bacteria in our intestines. Maxima, with the amount of power she can generate, does not “digest” food; her system now breaks it down to atoms and as Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, this makes a enormous amount of power which she can use for her feats of strength, energy projection, armor/surface force field and etc. An omelet is matter. Broken down that way generates enormous power. Her physiology being now vastly different from base line humans or even baseline superhumans, for her, mercury is a refreshing drink.
Yes indeed. The amount of potential energy in an omelette (or anything really) goes E=mc². Because matter is just condensed light. The most efficient way of liberating this energy is just combine the matter with an equal mass of antimatter. To quote Leeloo from 5th Element: “Big BadaBoom”.
I know it might be overused, but dangit, I SO WANT the Thursday update to include Harem’s other bodies doing spontaneous laughter again! It’s one of my FAVORITE running gags in this series!
Mercury is a heavy metal, not a neuro toxin.
though it will burn holes in your brain over time.
dude that made hats at one point in time would use boiled mercury to cure/shape the brim, and it would have -SEVERE- long term effects on them, hence the saying ‘mad as a hatter’.
Should be noted quite a number of the lighthouse mysteries can be attributed to the lamps using mercury which would leak. Below the lamps were usually the wells where they would get their water or other places that could lead to poisoning the workers. The isolation didn’t help.
The process that made plate glass cheap enough to use like we do involved floating the molten glass on a bed of mercury. The mercury, being liquid and extremely dense, was absolutely flat. The glass would conform, so you didn’t have to grind and polish it down.
The bed was switched to molten tin, probably due to the toxicity. And the expense (tin is a lot cheaper than mercury).
You do have to cool the glass down more afterwards, though it’s definitely solid.
Aurora Borealis? At this time of year? At this time of day? On this type of planet? Localized entirely within your milkshake?
Yes!
Can I have a taste?
No.
Came here looking for this exact comment XD
zinc can be fine powdered and turned into a nice shake… ;p
I assume she shouted it out due to the effects of mercury vapors on the brain messing her up?
I read somewhere that just 7 liters of mater combined with 7 liters of mater could make enough energy to destroy the planet. So maybe she just turns a couple tea spoons of what would be poo into energy.
ROFL, weird coincidence, I just bought a mess of zinc scrap to cast for a project I have in mind. PS – NEVER melt zinc in a building occupied by anything, unless it’s under a really good hood. Don’t even heat up a galvanized anything. Fair warning.
Welders have a thing called zinc fume fever. It makes you feel like you have the flu.
There is plenty of Hydrogen in food, in the form of H2O. So pluck those atoms out and fuse them into helium, and there is your superpowered energy source. What would the Mercury be for? Who knows? Someone above suggested radiation shielding.
I’d also say that Maxima is being unsafe by having mercury in a food container near other people’s food. She should treat that like medication.
So, going with the idea that Max is not only unharmed by mercury but actually craves/requires it, how does this impact her ability to carry a baby to term. In this universe supers don’t normally come into their abilities until adolescence. What would protect the baby from the mercury in Max’s system? Max is somewhat atypical, even for a super in that her powers were at least partly granted by contact with the geode water but what about her baby? Would the symbiote power transfer to the baby giving her a literal “Golden Child”?
Whether or not Max should or would even want to have a baby is a separate question. I’m just asking about biology.
You do know that we already have food that’s solid at room temp but melts at body temp, right? I have a couple bars right here in my pantry. It’s called chocolate.
I just finished inhaling that Mother of Learning series you recommended a couple weeks ago. Didn’t accomplish anything for a week. Thanks!
Is math ending up in a relationship and we are only seeing and hearing about it on the fringes?
Harem, I’m the ultiamate spy
actual Harem worst spy ever
Nah, the worst spy would be Johnny English (or maybe Maxwell Smart)
Harem is the ultimate spy in the fact she can get into (almost) anywhere (as long as she has a good line-of-sight or real-time video feed)
Just because she ‘forgets’ which one is talking doesn’t make her the worst
As I understand it, taking one sniff of room-temperature mercury wouldn’t be particularly risky. Mercury boils at over 350 ºC, so there should be very little evaporating from the bottle unless Frix really heated up Max’s drink. English hatters were only going mad because they were constantly breathing in boiling mercury, as well as handling it regularly. I’d not recommend it, but the exposure should be minimal, in this case.
One of those power aspects that leaves one asking how you figured it out was safe or needed. I don’t remember the exact series or show but I do remember someone who had to eat uranium or something to power up and I was like, “how did you discover this?”
That would be more a case of writers think something is cool without thinking “how?”