Grrl Power #1451 – She drinks a mercury drink, she drinks a quicksilver drink…
…She drinks a cinnabar drink, she drinks a hydrargyrum drink… And oh, look, even in the rare cases where she gets knocked down, she does get up again.
I should note that inducing vomiting if someone swallows mercury is not necessarily the recommended procedure. I googled it to see what the proper medical response should be, and most results just said “call poison control.” But basically, getting it out of the body is a good thing, only in the process of vomiting, it could cause vapors to get in the lungs, which is where the real danger happens. And also, since mercury is probably heavier than most anything else that’s likely to be in someone’s stomach, vomiting may not actually expel all of it. I suspect either a stomach pump or a “ass higher than your head” vomiting position is required, and I imagine Downward Dog vomiting could lead to a lot of stomach acid in the sinuses, which would probably suuuuuck.
So when the doctor here panic-ly says “We need to induce vomiting immediately!” He’s probably going to go run into the next room and grab his “Big Book of Medical” and double check the proper procedure. That is, after he watches Max crack open that blood pressure thingy (sphygmomanometer) and hold him at bay with one arm while she glugs down another slug of quicksilver.
Max doesn’t actually have a whole weird shopping list of exotic nutritional requirements, but she also hasn’t gone around trying a sampler platter from the Periodic Table, either. Mercury is the only one she ever felt the urge to eat. She and quite a few others suspect that she could probably eat a whole lot of stuff that would be bad for humans, but she also isn’t in a hurry to do so. For all she knows, swallowing Antimony or Tantalum could cause her to have a bad case of “organs on the outside” or whatever the opposite of Scurvy is. Which… I guess would be Vitamin C poisoning.
Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.
Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Crushed glass. it’s tastier than Himalayan pink salt.
Pretty much everything is….
We use that salt all the time, only other salt we use is iodised and chicken
Her expression in those panels is definitely manic looking. Which makes her description of euphoria check out I guess.
I wonder how much of that is how rarely we’ve seen her smile.
They were meaning MaxTeen
Now I wonder if she uses red cinnibar on foods like we use salt…
“a lot of stomach acid in the sinuses, which would probably suuuuuck.”
Thanks to chemo induced vomiting, I can confirm that: Stomach acid in the sinuses does indeed suck. Blowing your nose to expel food you really should have chewed more thoroughly just adds to the experience.
Man, teen Max must have been a terror…
So, Max got super-speed by eating Quicksilver?
She tried, but his boyfriend got angry
You’re thinking of Sped, Quicksilver’s nephew, and even then I don’t think his sexuality has been explored like his brother, Wiccan’s has been.
Quicksilver is strait, and was married to Crystal of the Inhumans, Johny (Human Torch 2) Storm’s old flame.
Look above you, that is a joke flying past :P
BA-DUM-TSS!
Please explain, cause it seems like it should be girlfriend to me too.
Since the symbiote apparently can communicate to her what she should be eating, so long as it’s at least right in front of her, I’d be absolutely shocked if at some point her superiors hadn’t had her sit down and have a sample of every element in the periodic table, (And maybe every isotope of every element.) waved in front of her, to see what she gets an urge to eat.
After all, maybe she’s at a fraction of her true potential thanks to that severe rhenium deficiency.
She has a Mass Spectrometry Sense?
Maybe? It’s got to be something, since she was able to detect mercury through glass and suddenly be compelled to ingest it.
She’s surprisingly loose with classified information.
Unless… it’s false information
We know Harem is sitting on SmugD relaying this information right now!
Harem’s an even worse accidental security risk than Sydney, on top of whatever level of intentional security risk she is!
Yes
What’s the best way to catch out SmugD than ‘feeding’ him false information that can only come from one source? If he acts on it, then Maxi knows how he found out, plus, she knows he will fail like the fraud he truly is
He already knows she’s double agent and is using her as a triple agent without her knowing it.
I think that was more of an oops “put the tongue over the glass too hard and broke it” situation, buuuuut I could be wrong. Although, being in environments with explosions- she’s probably tasted lots different minerals through the line of duty by accident.
That seems likely to me as well, and mentioned last page: it looks like she was simply attempting to read the thermometer and then started to get a sneeze, and suppressing the sneeze accidentally caused her to crack the glass and she swallowed automatically before she realized what happened
Why does it have to be a symbiote? DaveB has said (or implied) that she was a late bloomer, maybe the geode-juice simply triggered what was already there
That is more likely than something that has never even hinted at (she has not had any additional voices in her head, nor has her ‘skin’ tried to eat someone… or get in a huff and leave)
DaveB literally said “symbiote” in the blog post for page 415. Which he states as a fact, but then says it’s just “guesswork by both of them”. So “word of god”, but also kind of not. But it’s the best we’ve got to go on for the time being.
He says something, and then counters it… and everyone just focuses on half of what he said
And again, this is just what Maxi believes, without actually knowing if it is true or not
EDIT: just checked that page, and it wasn’t “WOG”, it was DaveB stating that in the original draft that that is what they would have both said… with what was a single page extending to two or three pages as they go back and forth speculating on the origins of her powers, and just how much was attributed to the Geode Juice (which was completely gone by the time SmugD tracked it down)
Yeah that’s one of those things where your body literally builds itself or rebuilds itself out of specific elements that you’re supposed to get from your food. In this case it was probably taking Mercury from traces found in seafood and other stuff that max was eating.
Can attest to that had a gastric bypass back in December, I cannot get enough calcium between the 1500mg a day plus milk which I drink on my own a gallon of a week easily. Went from not drinking it to downing it two or three times a day. Should talk with my dietician about increasing my dosage.
Huh. I have a friend who has a similar issue, only with potassium. He can’t get enough of it, but curiously, having nearly (or even actually?) zero in his system doesn’t seem to slow him down any, so he only begrudgingly takes his supplements.
Talk to them about calcium citrate. It’s not as cheap as ground chalk, but the bioabsorption is much higher, and it doesn’t need stomach acid to be absorbed. There are some other options that don’t need stomach acid, too.
On another nutrition related note, the various forms of citrates can also help with things like gout.
Just beware, some of them also have uses like laxatives. Granted, if you’ve also had your gallbladder taken out, that doesn’t really matter for reasons that anyone in that situation already knows.
Craving for seaweed wrapped tuna? Seriously, people have come down with mercury poisoning from a constant diet of tuna.
Looks like a flashback to Maxima age 16…!?
She’s 13 in these flashbacks.
She seems a bit older that that in these flashbacks.
One way to read the commentary on the linked comic is that she was 13 when she got doused.
Another way is that almost all capes (at least that they know about) show powers by the age of 13, and she hadn’t, so it was assumed that she wasn’t naturally a cape. And then she got doused, and this not only woke up her latent powers, but also supercharged them.
There have been a couple of other one panel flashbacks, and in at least one, showing her in a running outfit presumably after a race, seems to be at age 16 or 17. She still has brown hair in that panel. Can’t find it at the moment though.
I have to agree with that. When you look at the picture when she peering into the mirror she clearly looks like 16-18 year old verse the Halo like younger appearance in page.
She’s 6’1″ and perhaps an early blommer , size is not a clue , I’m 6’2″ since my 16th birthday , I’m male and puberty tends to strike later on the male half of population.
She don’t look like a lolita because she’s tall , but the smaller cup size could be a point about her age 13-14.
I’m guessing it’s a little bit after those initial tests since her nails have turned red in the new flashback here, where they hadn’t changed yet in the original flashback.
Also, a near-full head of purple with just traces of the original
Check your source material. DaveB said that Max did not have powers at 13, and then we see the fateful museum trip without a statement of her age. She still looks 16-17 years old, then as well.
Then again, in the paragraph after that, there’s this text: “I’d love to do the extended version of Max’s origin, which deals with stuff like a 13 year old girl dealing with what seems like pretty frightening disfigurement at first”…
So is there a term for that hankering/nutrition euphoria when you have that sudden want to have chocolate etc and have that nutrition euphoria. I know craving, but I’m assuming your body wants something specific had a more sensitive term available?
Pretty sure the medical term for this would be pica. In horses, it’s what they believe one of triggers for cribbing in horses.
Everybody check your sources: Even “solid” glass is considered a liquid.
Just an extremely viscous liquid!
Oh for the love of…
No. No it’s not.
“Regular” glass is considered solid. Only the molecules aren’t in some neat lattice like a crystal, but arranged more as if they are a frozen liquid.
And before you bring up the whole “old church windows are thicker at the bottom”, that’s because of limitations of glass making techniques and setters using this both for balance and to hide these imperfections.
The lead used in stained glass windows is actually less viscous than the glass. While the glass would slowly deform due to gravity, the lead would puddle on the floor before the glass noticeably deformed.
Note that before the widespread use of float glass in the Fifties, most glass was irregular in thickness.
Also, see the Pitch Drop Experiment: https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
Engineer with a focus on materials.
Glass is NOT a liquid. It’s classified as an ‘amorphous solid’ – ie, its structure is disordered like a liquid (does not have a set, ordered, repeating structure), but its molecules are locked in place (so it’s a solid). In other words, it’s a solid but not crystalline, so it’s capable of changing forms. Glass doesnt act like a fluid at room temperature, so the whole viscosity argument is wrong as well.
I think the whole ‘glass is a liquid’ myth came from something with windows that were made with older glass-making techniques where the heavier end was placed at the bottom. Some people then thought ‘hey, glass is a liquid because the glass flowed downwards over centuries! Nope. It was always thicker at the bottom because the glass makers SET UP THE windows and glass so the heavier end was on the bottom for stability reasons and because they were not as accurate at making it the same thickness throughout..
Yes, pre-float process, “flat” glass would have been ground and polished to be that way. Which would be very difficult to make flat.
you can technically make arbitrarily flat surfaces (well, down to a tolerance of a few atoms, which is where flatness doesn’t really mean anything anyway) with primitive tools. it’s called the whitworth three plate method for lapping. the only real problem with it is that you need to use the same material for lapping as you are lapping, and it’s probably pretty easy to break the glass pane if you are using it to grind another.
and you really don’t need an arbitrary level of flatness with glass.
Maybe you can. I don’t know your limitations. Personally, I cannot do what you say I can here. Most specifically, I can’t tell when I got there. My ability to detect flatness is many orders of magnitude too crude for me to do as you suggest I can. The tools might be able to, but this tool user is not up to that challenge.
Careful. lare290 might be Rick and he might know the secrets of true level as well.
Sure you do. That’s how you hand make optical glass flats to a fraction of a wavelength. Quite useful in the optical sciences.
okay, you don’t need arbitrary flatness for medieval church windows. sorry for not being precise enough.
What the frog-stepping ferret does room temperature have to do with anything?
That’s like saying ice isn’t a liquid because it’s not a fluid at room temperature!
Does that mean it stops being water just because it’s frozen?
Water does not stop being water when frozen. Water stops being liquid when frozen. When water is frozen into ice, it’s a solid.
Um… no. Water does not stop being water when frozen. Water stops being LIQUID when frozen. When water is frozen into ice, it’s a solid.
You… being a smart lawyer type person, do know those were two, separate, statements, right?
‘Course you did
Error on the whole comment making. It didnt look like it went through, so I tried again, and then it went through. Then the first one went through.
Not your comment, the one you replied to
Comments not displaying (without an actual error message) has been a problem for months, it’s now a ‘feature’ of the page :P
Thank you all for your contributions. It’s interesting finding out that experts on various subjects are Dave B. readers.
Now if only I could remember where I originally read that thing about old window glass, but it was a long time ago. Unlikely to have been written by a glazier.
FYI, I always have to check back here hours or days later to see my posted comments, but they always show up. I suppose the server just needs time.
Chumbawumba! This Thrull approves! *nods in Sarpadian*
Man, Sydney and Max have got some real interesting dietary preferences…
… And now my brain has switched to M*A*S*H, where Hawkeye and Radar end up tasting each other’s drinks. I’m sure Max could likely handle Sydney’s Scoville Rating Aleph-Nought a lot easier than Sydney having potato skins with crushed quartz. Do we know if anyone else on ARC who has interesting tastes in the culinary department? I’m NOT counting Cora and her crew or any of the supernaturals we’ve encountered, but I mean, what about HR?
Achilles ate a vial of super Ebola, but I don’t know that he got a taste for it. He may have enjoyed the mouth feel of the vial though.
NGL- awkward teenage transforming Maxima is oddly adorable.
Oh Davy Boy, I got that reference even without your elaboration in the comments.
From what i remember the main problem with drinking mercury is inhaling the fumes, that can rise up from the stomach as Mercury doesn’t easily pass the intestine blood barier and is heavy enough to just move through you. It used to be used as a strong laxative for this reason.
In fact, that was one of the ways they found the campsites and so on from the Lewis and Clarke expedition – The lads were taking pills called “Thunderclappers”(Quite vivid a name, considering) to relieve constipation, and a number of sites were found due to finding random spots with insanely high levels of mercury in the soil, but no observable reason in the surrounding environment as to why that would be. Turns out, those spots were where they’d dug a latrine when they were setting up camp.
So, they sent her to the army to stop (or control) her mercury rush?
That poor doctor…
Who sends an incipient Super to a General Practitioner?
Someone who doesn’t know she is an incipient Super?
And who said he was just a GP? He could just as easily be part of The Council
That was literally decades before supers were revealed to the public in the comic timeline.
she should go after the old style top hats then.
We all know what a badass Max is. Now imagine if she had a proper diet of metals and other elements that she doesn’t know she needs.
Can’t really give yourself Vitamin C poisoning through diet. Take too much of it and you just give yourself diarrhea, as your intestines flush to avoid absorbing any more of it. You’d have to inject or IV it.
Technically speaking, what you just described IS Vitamin C poisoning (vitamin c toxicity) – it’s just not life threatening.
That’s because vitamin-C is water-soluble. Some other vitamins which are fat-soluble can absolutely make you very ill, if not actually fatal.
However, if you take too much vitamin C over a long period, then suddenly stop, you can actually get scurvy (because your body has upregulated the enzymes for removing the excess).
Arrrrrrr, Matey.
Good to see Punder is still around :)
Is it just me, or has Max suddenly lightened up?
Maybe all the fighting has made her less tense…
That and she’s not in her usual position of military authority out here in space. Lot less pressure to lead everyone and follow protocol and discipline
Also post-adrenaline crash, mercury-shake endorphins, healing potion side effects, etc. She’s basically intoxicated. The most surprising thing is that she’s still conscious.
Yeah, most likely.
I just wasn’t prepared for her being an silly-billy when nobody’s watching.
She used to be a D&D nerd.
Pretty sure she knows how to relax when she’s actually able to.
The Haluter, an alien species in Perry Rhodan, have a so-called converter stomach that can convert nearly everything into nutrients. Though even among aliens, the Haluter were pretty alien (https://www.perrypedia.de/mediawiki/images/e/e1/PR2518.jpg).
The “nutrition euphoria” Max is referring to is probably a dopamine rush. Dopamine plays a large role in guiding eating/drinking behavior by triggering feelings of happiness or euphoria when consuming (or even looking at/smelling) a craved consumable.
In its simplest form–have you ever felt a sort of shock, followed by a feeling of relaxation, after the first gulp of water when slightly dehydrated? That’s a dopamine release (and a few other factors), encouraging you to drink more water.
can it manifest as a weird tingling in the jaw? or is that just me?
Qualified no, if I’m not mistaken. Other things can trigger that symptom, but it’s not (directly) the dopamine.
When I’m somewhat dehydrated, I find immediately after I drink water, I am inclined to breathe more, which will cause me to have tingling various places because the way our blood manages carbon dioxide is annoyingly complex and not particularly great at handling a sudden decrease in carbon dioxide levels. That could be what you’re experiencing. Or you might be experiencing something else. I’m not a doctor and I’m not you, so it’s tough to say.
Could be salivary glands kicking up production, maybe–either as a result of rehydration or in preparation to eat something? I’m not an expert, I just happen to have read stuff about dopamine response. Like Some Ed says, there’s complicated stuff going on at that point.
I still think that her hair would have blonde ends and purple roots. Her skin is not changing to gold directly; it is changing inside, and her normal skin is peeling off. There would have been an unique research opportunity to examine the transition in the hair; the molecular makeup of the place where one changed to another was probably very interesting, but they probably didn’t think of it at the time.
Not all her hair has converted to purple
OMG Pre-Max Max is just as adorable unhinged as Syd
Actually, pure, liquid mercury has such a high surface tension that it passes through the digestive tract with very little absorption. There are parts of the world where a gulp of mercury is routinely used to relieve constipation. (*Not* recommenced, BTW.) Oh, and how many here saw the episode of the original Addams Family TV show where Fester gets a house call? Or the comic book with Ben Grimm vs. the Nurse? (“According to this, you’ve been dead for three days.”)
It is mercury compounds and – as mentioned – mercury vapor which are so very, very dangerous. Some compounds are absorbed through the skin. Latex gloves will not protect you against dimethyl mercury.
Hmmm… Max could have started with bismuth, a heavy metal so safe it is used to relieve stomach acid. (This is where Pepto Bismol gets part of its name.) Much cheaper than gold, or even mercury.
Can’t recall: has she tried to get a medical exam from Frix, or is she resistant to his multi-species “alien” tech as well?
b(kinda)
When she arrived from the battle she admitted she needed dr. Frost, because his equipment wouldn’t do anything, which he conceded, but handed her a custom healing potion instead, which worked.
Also a few times she mentions, she had Dabbler scan her with her equipment and nothing useful came up(this is always said to foreign citizens, so this could also be a way of covering up the truth).
Dr. Chevy. Dr. Frost is the psych therapist.
Ummm, so, is kissing Maxima unhealthy for you long-term because her body fluids contain small amounts of mercury?
Or is it, like, locked tight into her skeleton or force-field organ or something?
It’s probably okay to kiss Max. When all this changes started to kick in she probably got an enormous battery of diagnostic testing. It was mentioned that she spent most of a summer break in a hospital gown. Once she stated consuming mercury somebody is going to start to wonder where it is going. I would bet that every available bodily fluid was sampled and analyzed. Max would know which, if any, of her bodily fluids were toxic. She doesn’t have to observe any particular precautions with her bodily fluids so she is probably safe. As to what happens to the mercury in her body, we cant know at this point. It would be interesting to know how much she has actually consumed over her lifetime. It could only be a hundred grams or it could be on the order of kilograms.
Just the swig she took two pages ago is definitely more than 100g. And considering she needs it often enough to warrant bringing a bottle of it on to a spaceship, it’s safe to say that it’s more than a micronutrient for her. How many kilograms of carbohydrates have you eaten over your lifetime? Hundreds? Thousands?
To be fair, she did take a pretty big hit in battle. She could have higher mercury requirements when recovering from injuries, and took a thermos of the stuff knowing she was risking getting hurt.
My impression from her reaction was that she was not regularly able to drink that much of it, and thus that Altus had prepared it for her, rather than her having brought it on board. But the container does look rather non-spacey.
The more I look at the red alien, sorry but I am horrible at names, the more I see the rich jerk that keeps wanting to get Maxima in bed…like a twin in face beside skin color and horns.
IIRC at least one cChinese emperor died of mercury poisoning because the immortality elixir he got from his alchemist contained cinnabar (a mercury compound) as the main ingredient.
I guess in the Grrl-power-verse that might work for real if you ingested first some “geode water”, as long as you get the right geoid.
mercury is weird. Most people could drink liquid mercury. It isn’t readily adsorbed, and other than the density issues in your intestine, probably not that bad for you. Mercury oxidizes to Hg+ and Hg2+, both of which are adsorbed and are very toxic, however, not much oxygen in the digestive tract. (otherwise you would fart CO2 not CH4)
Thomas Edison made quite a few people sick with mercury poisoning during his time making true vacuum light bulbs. Mercury vapor pumps are dangerous if not properly sealed and the emitted air cleaned.
We use hot oil diffusion pumps now, much safer.
That’s because Edison was a fraud and a patent thief
“Unearthly” strength, hm? Did teen Max play the Marvel Classic tabletop game?
IE The same strength as the Hulk. pretty much all the other really strong guys had to settle for Monstrous, “The Hulk is the Strongest of All!”
I predict a thermometer shortage on the short term
She’s the real reason they stopped using it in thermometers.
maybe mercury is what keeps her alive at all?
and somehow is used as fuel for her power?
kinda like, anti-matter generator but only works with mercury for some reason?
We really need to introduce Maxima to the “Things I refuse to work with” list …
The more-or-less complete archive: https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-work-with
My favorite is the write-up for thioacetone.
Her list will be much shorter than mine. She might even be a fan of fissile metals.
Is her human eye basically dead in this flashback, waiting to be replaced by a new purple one? It seems cloudy and doesn’t track with the other one.
I love Teen Maxima. Hope we see more of her.
So did one of her eyes go grey before transforming, or did she always have grey eyes?
Which isn’t all that strange… I have grey eyes (used to be blue). And no, that’s not some skit. They faded with age. *shrug*
No, she had dark blue eyes originally
I hope her finally getting a date will let us see more of “teen maximillia, but grown up a little.”
Because if there’s one place she lets her hair down, it’s with her beau.
Her transforming from the inside out does lend credence to a symbiote fortifying itself… maybe
Is it just me or do all the Arc people look to be wearing cotton? Even Maxima.
“It’s the fabric of our lives.”™
This has made me desperate for more sequences of Maxima’s transformation process.