Grrl Power #1454 – The three ages of Maxima
See, page title comes from Maxima being shown at three different ages there across the bottom of the page. Granted, the older version is a bit speculative. And sure, there’s more than just the three ages. Maybe 9 year old Maximillia got up to some interesting adventures. Like she was some sort of neighborhood pre-teen Nancy Drew, solving the mystery of the missing cookies, the missing homework, the dog that had a lot of paper in its poop, stuff like that. I’m not saying that’s the case, just that Maxima probably had some “ages” before she got gilded.
I vaguely remember in D&D… I think 3rd edition, possibly others, haste potions were supposed to age your character a year every time you used one. Which is a terrible trade off considering they only lasted 10 rounds. So for 60 seconds, you get one extra attack and can run twice as fast. And in exchange you lose a year of life? Granted, a speed potion could definitely be the deciding factor in a life or death fight, but unless you’re an elf or a dragon (or possibly a vampire, not sure about that one) that’s definitely a tactic of last resort. (Dragons become more powerful with age, so it actually benefits them. Vampires probably have to be feeding regularly to benefit from age, but since humans don’t starve to death after using a haste potion, I assume it has no detrimental effect on a vampire.)
I think they changed the after-effect to losing a round to exhaustion, because otherwise, that’s a little terrifying. A few year-sucking potions could cut decades from a human adventurer’s career, and I think halflings and half-orcs have shorter average lifespans than humans. In “realistic” superhero novels and some of the more grim comics, super speed is one of those powers with such terrible drawbacks that as soon as you realize you’re aging faster, you’d basically stop using it. Granted, judicious use of super speed wouldn’t really add up to all that much. You get into a fight, use super speed for 10 seconds of your local time, and win the day, easy peasy. The problem comes from when the super speed character runs across the country, or reads every book in the library to find the clue. Running east to west coast across the US took one ultramarathon runner 42 days. Reading every book in a library could potentially take months, or possibly centuries, if they have a comprehensive copy of the Tax Code, or any book they asked us to read in high school. Seriously, Bleak House, go fuck yourself. I mean, it’s called Bleak House. I could barely get through the cliff notes.
Anyway, if the super speedster experiences time in real time local to him no matter what speed he’s going, and Batman says I have to run across the country to get the disarming key to a Joker bomb in time, I would quit the team. Okay, I’d probably go and disarm the bomb, but I’d steal a bicycle, and that’s assuming my powers can’t be extended to cover the Batmobile, cause if they could, I’d fucking steal that. But then I’d quit.
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.
weirdly i kinda liked Bleak House, the whole ‘british legal system is bullshit’ satire was clever, and Inspector Bucket is a boss.
Re: Bleak House, it’s some of the most revoltingly gorgeous writing in English. And part of it strongly reminds of the moment we’re in and a certain tendency to turn one’s back: “even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go right.”
Jesus Christ that Old Maxima in the last panel is CURSED!
Well Betty White was already 63 during the filming of Golden Girls, 70 at the end and she almost hit the triple digits. Instead she pulled the ultimate pregnant pause as all her 100th birthday celebration effects were fully set up. Master and legend that she is I don’t think she would have been able to pull of the hair.
That said thank you for the reminder Dave. Also yes I’m derailing the plot here. Please forgive me. Betty White was a lover of animals. Donate on her birthday to your local no kill shelters. Adopt instead of shop. January 17th. #BettyWhiteChallenge
Also donate to and adopt from so-called “kill shelters”.
“No-kill shelters”: are allowed to refuse more entries when they’re full, and thus can control food budget and maintenance.
“Kill shelters”: are forbidden by law to refuse entries, and thus when they get to overcapacity, either on food budget or just plain space, are forced to euthanize some animals so their entire charge doesn’t suffer. If you donate or adopt from these, *you are helping them not have to kill animals*.
So donate to no-kill shelters, and adopt from kill shelters?
Seems obvious to me…
Hrrm. Interesting question. Long-term, if the goal is to avoid killing animals, we would presumably prefer more no-kill shelters, and for them to have more resources. But short-term, donating to the kill shelters more directly avoids animal death. If the no-kill shelter doesn’t have sufficient resources, it just refuses taking on more animals.
Assuming they are both operating at maximum capacity, it’s a zero sum game regardless to which you donate to and which you adopt from:
If you adopt from a no-kill shelter they can take in one more animal which would have either had to go to a kill shelter or straight up euthanized on the spot, and therefore save one animal’s life. If you adopt from a kill shelter they will be able to take in one more animal they do not need to compensate for by killing some other animal. Same goes for donating money: they will be both able to support more animals that do not end up getting killed.
If they are not operating at maximum capacity then it doesn’t make a difference at all: they will both be able to support more animals already, and donating money or adopting from either will result in one or more animals being kept alive in the future before capacity issues arise.
Only thing where there is a notable difference is when sending a pet to one: if it’s a no-kill shelter it will be able to live until it’s end of days, whereas sending a pet to a kill shelter has a change of it getting euthanized if the shelter runs out of capacity.
Obviously the right thing to do would to never to take a pet you cannot take care of, and if getting one, adopting one from a shelter instead of “buying new”.
If she’s a Golden Girl, does she want to be the stupid one, the “ugly” one, the perverted one (likely not) or the ancient one?
I think the ancient one would be best because Maxima gets trolled so much that I wouldn’t put it past her to start becoming more mischievous as well once she gets old, but I don’t think that Shady Pines would want her so those jokes wouldn’t work.
I actually LOL at the “Golden Girl” comment. And Betty White played Rose Nylund, who was commonly considered the “stupid one”, but with above average wisdom. Using the trope GG D&D template, Rose would be the kind hearted Bard/Cleric providing support and comic relief. And while no, the GG were not the original template for the classic 4-member D&D party, they can at least provide inspiration on how completely different character types can work together.
Oh, and Max would play Dorothy Zbornak (who you referred to as the “ugly one”) who is seen as a Fighter or Paladin and considered to be the Leader of the group.
Blanche Devereaux (you said “perverted”) is seen as a Rogue or Bard. A cunning charmer, skilled with social interactions.
Sophia Petrillo (“ancient”) is the high-intelligence Wizard. Witty and sarcastic, much older than the rest of the party.
Fairly sure the actress playing Sophia was not, actually, the oldest in real life (believe that was her ‘daughter’, or maybe it was their ages were much closer, like only a couple years)
Oh, and ‘Dorothy’ wasn’t the ‘ugly’ one, she was just the ‘grumpy’ one
Blanche repeatedly made fun of her looks, regardless of whether they were accurate descriptions
Blanche was the hot horny one
She was doing it in real life as well, Estelle (Sophia) began showing her real life dementia and had to use que cards for her lines. Betty often helped cover for her by distracting the audience and ab libbing.
I didn’t know that!
It’s always nice to hear a story of kindness or friendship in real life. Let’s hope we all have such a pal when we need one.
Apparently the developers for D&D (2nd edition) used the Golden Girls as a template for the ideal adventuring party. Rose was a Paladin.
https://i.redd.it/n22dtw3zitb71.jpg
I asked ChatGPT about it and it said that this is a funny internet joke but it isn’t true. When I asked it for evidence it said that while proving a negative is not doable, during development the devs kept consistently referencing other things like wargaming or Tolkien, but never the GGs, and that the ideal party was created based on what makes sense logically.
Also – while the idea is a good joke [possibly from Mike Mearls in 2018] – the four‑role adventuring party (fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard) was already fully established in Original D&D (1974). Golden Girls premiered in 1985 (while AD+D 2.0 was in development but I don’t think that it grossly changed party structure concepts)
“I vaguely remember in D&D… I think 3rd edition, possibly others, haste potions were supposed to age your character a year every time you used one.”
I don’t recall this in D&D 3. It seems more like the kind of weird jank there was in AD&D2 and older. D&D 3 tried to make things more consistent and regular, in it potions have exactly the same effects as the spells they replicate, and nothing about the description of the haste spell implies accelerated aging.
It’s AD&D 1 and AD&D 2 side effect for a speed potion ad the haste spell…
If speed potions exist and have this drawback in Grrlpower universe , provide tham to Achilles, he is unaging since the 80’s and probably anoyingly immortal.
I remember casting that spell as often as possible on one player’s character as it was very annoying.
More to the point though, the year of aging wasn’t a big deal.
Because there are also Potions of Youth which would make you 3d4 years younger or some such number.
If you had the good fortune to have a steady supply of Haste potions or scrolls or a Transmutation Wizard, you could probably afford the occasional Potion of Youth to counteract the worst effects.
The point was that powerful spells and abilities SHOULD have drawbacks or limitations specifically to keep you from abusing them.
Actually, the key part was that the spell was far more powerful, too. (The AD&D/2e reference is the correct one, here, not 3e).
It doubled your time. So your speed doubled, your number of attacks, doubled… and the number of spells you could cast per round doubled.
Yeah.
It was a VERY powerful effect, a buff that could instantly win a fight, and as noted, Potions of Longevity and Elixirs of Youth existed, or you could play elves and dwarves, who didn’t care about losing a few years out of their centuries.
While the potion of longevity existed, it wasn’t very good at countering aging effects. It would reduce your character’s age by 1d12 years, but each time you took one there was a 1% chance _per potion of longevity your character had ever drank_ that they would all stop working and all the reductions would be undone. Note that this did not reset the chance of it happening. (The elixir of youth didn’t have these problems, but were rarer and only gave you 1d4 years.)
To make things worse, the aging effect of both haste/potions of speed and potion of longevity failures would trigger system shock checks. A character with an 11 Con would have a 25% chance of simply dying, even an 18 Con meant a 1% chance of just keeling over dead.
Part of the fun of the original D&D(the three beige booklets that may or may not have come in a box, depending on how you got them) was abusing the rules!
My fondest memory of rules abuse was stacking hastes. Nothing in the rules we had said you couldn’t, so of course we did. At first our dungeon master went along with it, grudgingly, as we cast two and three hastes and started taking turns eight times as fast as the monsters. But when we reached for the fourth haste, he simply declared it didn’t work. Why? No idea. It just didn’t. Honestly, getting that far felt like a moral victory.
Later dungeon mastering got more creative. One DM invented a mysterious Ordo Rapacium, an order that raided any adventuring party causing too much disturbance(because such parties were obviously carrying loot). Another DM allowed the exploit the first time, but ruled that the gods took note, and at the next moonset a wave of divine power swept across the world and quietly removed the loophole from reality.
Good times!
As for a super, no. They won’t age unless it is a condition of their ‘gift’ (seriously most of those gifts from gods, yeah they aren’t they are punishment because it always has a catch) If anything the more time a superspeedster spends at speeds where time dilation can factor it. Yeah, they don’t age we do. I am not a physics teacher, so don’t ask me to explain it. I’m still trying to grok what a long term investment would be with someone like a vampire or a demigod. Or that one guy I know who ended up accidentally eating a glowing peach, hasn’t aged a day. Still looks 18, gets carded everywhere.
Sydney could play Sophia.
Super-speed is one of those powers I’ve never really been a fan of. Or at least I tend to prefer the Marvel version where the speedsters are (usually?) slower; they might run at hundreds of miles an hour but they still tend to be limited to things you can kind of imagine a really-quick person actually doing, as compared to the “whatever BS that we need at the moment because SPEED FORCE!” crap that the DC characters tend to get up to.
For the latter, I assumed that the time they experienced was kind of a split. You do have to be able to have your brain (and hands, etc) keep up but when activating your powers a required secondary power was some kind of mental protection from all the potential negative impacts of, basically, living in a world that’s stopped for however long you needed it to.
It’s like, imagine a scenario with Batman and The Flash, as played by Wally West. Funny, jokey, lets-not-get-all-grimdark Wally West.
Batman: Flash! Some villian has hidden 5 bombs around the city- I need you search everywhere and find them.
Flash: You got it Bats! Back in a flash! *he zooms off*
*5 seconds later The Flash returns, holding 5 crudely rigged dynamite-and-alarm-clock bombs…but he just stands there, silenty, a 1000-yard stare plastered across his face*
Batman: Good work Flash! Now lets-
The Flash: Do you know…do you know how long it takes to search EVERYWHERE in a city this size?
Batman: Well, uh, I would estimate that a normal human jog down every street in Gotham in a few months of dedicated effort, but-
The Flash: But to search every room. Every closet. Every hallway and basement and spare space…. it takes years. DECADES…. The things I’ve seen… the crushing lonlieness…. *The Flash closes his eyes as tears slowly stream down his cheeks*
Batman: Well, uh… my idea of therapy is putting more black in your costume, so…
Yeah, that’s not exactly the kind of story most people want to read I think.
Quicksilver explained that he’s such a duck cos every second is like being stuck behind that old person in the checkout line, who is trying to count out exact change, or something like that
Writing a check.
That actually makes a lot of sense… or at least more sense than comic-books usually make, lol.
SolidJJ did a funny skit about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ9C-pao0lw
That was very funny, thank you.
But yeah, I kinda think it hits on some of the same points that I was hitting on.
So it seems like the required secondary-power to “super speed” include some form of psuedo-immortality, impecable mental fortitude, and a whole host of weird biological requirements.
Almost nobody talks about something simpler, more fundamental.
Breathing.
Ok, so I get that super speed somehow applies to the air around the super. When they’re running around the world to deliver an around the world punch, fine, they’re moving through the air and they’re picking up fresh air all the time. However, when they’re just sitting there reading a book at super speed, how does that work?
Ok, so I’m not remembering the Flash doing that, so maybe it was just Superman not needing to breathe, just like he doesn’t need to breathe in outer space.
That said, I *have* seen the Flash sit through eating a giant stack of pizzas. That may not take as long, and it may be more enjoyable, but it’s my understanding he still needs to breathe. And also poop. Drinking is also a thing, and he just had one “large” fountain drink. Which, by today’s standard is a small, because virtually all of the media I consumed that I can talk about with anyone was from 20+ years ago. Actually, thinking about it more, I don’t even know what sizes are like now, it’s probably been a decade since I’ve been to a movie theater. When he moved at super-speed in that movie, it took a couple of frames for him to get off screen, which we could see, and he didn’t. So he just sat there and ate something like 20+ pizzas with just 20 oz of soda to wash it down. How does that work? Was that pizza just so greasy he mostly didn’t need any extra liquid? Is that even possible and have the pizza still be edible? Does his colon super-compact everything?
I actually have an answer to the breathing part!
A canon answer, in fact.
The Flash breathes at superspeed by using the ‘speed force aura’ – it’s basically a protective energy field that surrounds his body – it’s ‘similar’ to the Kryptonian biomatrix, in that it also shields him from friction, prevents him from incinerating the air, protects him from any sort of high pressure waves, and lets him breathe normally despite being able to move faster than light. It’s also why people that he relocates at superspeed do not have their bodies destroyed from the speed they’r going at, far beyond what a normal human is capable of surviving. Same for objects. In the same way that Superman and Supergirl unconsciously extend their ‘kryptonian biomatrix’ around the things they hit carry or catch or lift (and sometimes things they punch) so that the massive objects don’t break under their own mass, and why people who they catch from the air dont have their necks snap like Gwen Stacy.
No idea how Flash does the massive eating though. I know he burns calories at a very accelerated rate, but that doesnt explain the waste or how the volume of the food can fit in his stomach. I’m guessing that’s speed force aura reasoning as well, unless you want a deep dive into Flash’s bathroom bowel movement schedule.
Wait, are pizzas so bad in the US people who consume them have to drink something to wash them down?
Ultimately, no, but there is a wide variety of regional styles (even beyond the Chicago vs NY debate). So you end up with a lot of instances where someone goes to a part of the country that they’re not familiar with and because they are tired and stressed they order a slice of a simple comfort-food, and when they DON’T get what they are expecting there’s often wailing and gnashing of teeth and “everywhere has bad pizza but my hometown!”, etc etc etc.
Well, yeah, it makes sense that different regions have different flavours, heck, different brands in the same city have different flavours (even of they are the same name, they might have different ingredients: like, one would use aged cheddar {took me decades to learn that “Tasty” cheese is actually a cheddar… } whole another would use dairy-free Edam)
Honestly, not sure if have ever had something to drink with a pizza, even back in the day when could eat two large pizzas in one sitting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzXIpp59eoU
Jon Stewart speaks for me and all noble patriots everywhere on this most important of issues.
As a resident of New York City, I have to protest your disparagement of the finest food ever created, New York pizza. If you take back your libellous heresy, all shall be forgiven. Otherwise this might very well mean the start of a feud upon you and all your descendants. Honor demands it.
Never said anything about New York Pizza (not even pineapple pizza, the Prince of all Pizza’s :P ), simply asked if it’s a requirement to drink anything to wash it down, in response to the comment about The Flush only drinking 20 oz with 20+ pizza (not even sure how much 20 oz is, we use mls down here, with the smallest can being 250mls)
I wonder if Maxima can also use her speed to get 8 hours sleep in 5-10 minutes or if she experiences accelerated healing when using her speed. I guess its a question of if she needs to be awake and/or moving with her super speed or if its enough that she just dumps her power supply into full speed.
If she can do all that then they really only need to make sure there’s food available and she can speed through training, eating and sleeping. I’m guessing it wouldn’t be possible to speed through a shower, but a bath might work provided there were several that were taking turns to empty dirty water and refill… May also be some problems with using speed in other ablutionary actions…
Isn’t that the way it works in Wearing the Cape? Super speedsters have short careers because they age according to subjective time? So, yeah, they do get a normal subjective lifespan, but as far as everybody else is concerned they’re aging several times faster than everybody else, depending on how much they use their powers.
And they have to buy more food, and replace their clothing frequently, get weekly dental cleanings… An expensive power in many ways.
Wearing the Cape speedsters can accelerate their personal time up to a maximum of 10x. Beyond that, an A Class speedster can “jump the wall” into hypertime, where time actually stops. That’s where it gets really weird and gives scientists fits because _it doesn’t make sense_. Nothing moves in hypertime, including light… but they can see just fine. A speedster can’t affect any real-time object because it is locked in place by no-time… but they can breathe, so can their motorcycles (NO, they don’t run everywhere!), and the air somehow ISN’T solid to them. When breakthrough powers come on the scene, normal reality and physics acquires a host of _exceptions_.
Dragons get more powerful with age because they collect experience. You don’t really do much of that under the influence of the Haste potion.
If you want to age a dragon faster in AD&D, just have a ghost whale on them for a few rounds. 10-40 years per blow.
In Ruins of Castle Greyhawk, Zagyg aged a gold dragon by feeding him gemstones dipped in Potions of Speed, yep.
Betty White Reference for the win!
Behold The Queen!
Oh gods, I actually forgot that Syd and Max actually share the same sense of humor.
Some of the same sense of humor. However, most of the time, Max feels she’s duty-bound to keep it under wraps, so we don’t see her sense of humor most of the time. They’re away from Maxima’s chain of command and she’s letting her hair down here.
In the 2025 superhero video game Dispatch, the former super-speedster Chase, AKA Track Star is in his early 30s, but is physically in his 70s due to accelerated aging.
Was looking to see if someone else had mentioned this.
Speeding Bullet in the comic Common Grounds also ages faster. And is somewhat of a Death Seeker due to the fact he’s literally doing EVERYTHING all the time at superspeed. He can’t have any personal relationships because it feels like an eternity to him to slow down to talk to people, and, well… He *once* managed to actually have a love life… and ended up breaking up incredibly depressed because he gave his girlfriend… friction burns. When explaining that in an interview with a guy in the comic, and asked why he couldn’t just slow down, he says “Sure, you love making love… But how would you feel after doing it for a week straight? That’s what five minutes feels like to me.”
Guy’s life honestly kinda sucks, and he expresses RELIEF that he’ll probably end up dying faster due to his powers.
Can Maxima speed sleep? THERE’S a superpower!
Also…. Could a speedster get their time back by super slowing?
It would be like fast forwarding the world. No more waiting!
Fast-forwarding through 1/3 of your life seems like it would DEFINITELY lead to accelerated aging.
That’s actually part of the magic system in Mistborn (Brandon Sanderson). Ferruchemists can “store” attributes by suppressing them for a while … move slowly now to bank speed for later, weaken yourself now to store strength, dull your senses now to sharpen them later, and so on. It’s basically the fantasy‑physics version of your “super‑slowing to get time back” idea.
And of course the Big Boss of the setting figures out an exploit that lets him run the whole system at a completely different scale, because of course he does.
I don’t recall a haste potion, but the haste spell in 1Ed did take a year off your life. Not that adventurers expected to die in bed ;)
1st and 2nd Edition D&D for the Haste thing, being affected by the spell aged you 1 year (you did get extra AC and double mouvement speed and attack rate so it was not THAT bad of a trade off). And if your DM was really intense in reading all the side material and read the one that said “in case of magical aging you have to do a System Shock roll and on a failure you just die” then you never used it
I’ve been reading so many cultivation novels that the idea of Max just being completely ageless is actually kind of appealing to me, lowkey hope that’s the case
Situational Immortality. Ageless?
She’d live until she got killed.
Since she’s unique, there’s really no way to know (though the fact that she seems to have aged normally from thirteen to thirty-something suggests that she’ll get old like everybody else… though some immortal or near-immortal characters in fiction age to thirtysomething and stay there, so maybe not).
No doubt that was one of the things that made the initial transformation scarier — for all she knew, she had days or hours it live…
I mean, people reach their physical peak around their mid to late 20s, so that’s usually when immortal characters stop aging, and she doesn’t look older than late 20s despite being in her mid 30s, especially in the more recent panels.
Aging faster when you are moving at superspeed sounds a lot like Dispatch’s Chase. :)
It’s actually a really good counter to what is normally an extremely OP superpower in comics, like in DC’s Flash or te MCU’s Quicksilver, without resorting to dumbing down the power for a moment to give any sort of ‘stakes’ to the story with everything not getting wrapped up in 2 seconds. With one second to spare.
I wonder how many super powers translate to decreased aging oe extended lifespans. Is that a perk of being super in general. I’d imagine it is with other general perks supers seem to get like being in peak physical condition for free and having more durability just as a function of having powers. Seems like it might be a nightmare though. It makes me kinda sad thinking Max might greatly outlive most of her friends and family.
It seem like it would depend to the power set. Any kind of durability is probably going to extend one’s lifespan. If a super doesn’t have that or some similar trait, iIt seems likely that they will age at a rate similar to normal people. We have seen several injuries among the team, including Max and it was noted that Heatwave had some permanent damage to her foot from the first big melee. The wear and tear will eventually add up. So while Max may not age at the same rate as others, she probably will eventually age. The only Super who has so far been described as “ageless” is Achilles.
My Father-in-law once said that one of the worse things about being in his 90’s was that he had outlived all of his friends.
Is it just me or is that right hand in panel 1 backwards? If the thumb is on the outside, the fingers curl up, not down.
They are curling up at the first full knuckle, but bending downward in a stretch where the fingers meet the hand itself.
Never mind, it is oriented correctly. The thumb appears to be too thin at the tip; don’t know how that threw my perception of the rest of the hand off.
Much of visible aging is due to UV damage to the skin, which is not a factor in Maxima’s case.
Whatever she’s using for a DNA substitute these days probably isn’t getting slowly degraded by environmental radiation either, unless maybe she spends a lot of objective time loafing around in stellar photospheres or something. Questionable whether she’s aging inside or out, at least as baseline humans understand aging.
” And in exchange you lose a year of life?”
And the average lifespan of an adventurer is what again?
In our World, countless enlisted take years off their life doing similar things for an edge when they are in an a active theater of conflict.
Golden Girl? LOL…
Reminds me of that one Dispatch character who ages super fast while moving super fast.
Shirley Eaton. Heheh.
“a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues” – alan moore, describing barry allen
Huh.
“if the super speedster experiences time in real time local to him no matter what speed he’s going, and Batman says I have to run across the country to get the disarming key to a Joker bomb in time, I would quit the team. Okay, I’d probably go and disarm the bomb, but I’d steal a bicycle, and that’s assuming my powers can’t be extended to cover the Batmobile, cause if they could, I’d fucking steal that. But then I’d quit.”
As a supers nerd, I’m kinda suprised that I never thought of it quite in that way. I mean, I KNEW for super speed to work most supers needed to have a super-fast mind to keep up, but… framed like this, it’s almost disturbing.
I mean, just this one example. “Go get the key!” “Sure!” Then 42 days of running across the continent, stopping to eat and use the restroom as needed, finally getting there, grabbing the key (the entire world still bright and sunny yet still and silent all around you,) then 42 days of running back. Then you finally jog up to your frozen companions, deactivate your power, and then just… jump right back into the fight? Would you even still remember the team’s game plan they had going in?
And that’s just the more obvious stuff, now that I’m thinking this through more. Didn’t Asimov have a short murder mystery where it turned out the killer had used, effectively, super-speed to commit his crime… and one of his methods was that he simply used a simple flashlight, which when emitting it’s light at 1000x speed or whatever, was enough to flash-fry his victim? Combine that with the knowledge that you need to have a pretty bright environment to get good high-speed video footage, and another chilling thought emerges… the faster you move, the darker it gets. At 2x speed, you’re only receiving 1/2 the photons you would in a second, so it’s only half as bright. At 100x speed, would you even be able to see your hand in front of your face? Probably not when indoors and away from windows; definitely not outside away from city centers at night. So even if it were a bright and sunny day, there’s a good chance Flash would spend his 84 days of cross-country non-stop jogging mostly in the dark.
Dang. As a kid, Flash and speedsters in general were my favorite supers, and later I kinda came to think they were basically OP. Now…… I’m not sure I’d ever want that kind of a curse.
*Flash brings back the key, the heroes win the fight.*
“By the way guys, just so you know… I quit.”
*Batman thinks through the situation a moment.*
“That’s fair.”
I don’t think that was Asimov. I think that was Larry Niven’s Gil the Arm series.
Yup, the inertia reduction device that altered the passage of time incidentally, because everything moves faster if all the forces are the same but inertia is reduced. The lights looked dim while you were under its influence because you were getting fewer photons per subjective second.
I notice the nicks in Max’s clothing, presumably from the blade. Are those scratches on her skin or residue from the blade?
Maxima is capable of moving at super speed without damaging herself. Not her clothing. Also please someone make sure post-menopausal Maxima doesn’t meet Deadpool: Blood is a pain to clean.
This training holodeck kinda makes me wonder about general education in the universe. Magic is commonplace, can kids in space-school learn some cantrips by taking an elective?
Maxi’s not wrong about The Betty
You know how you can tell Maxima is a science fiction character? She drinks deeply of the Hg Wells.
Oh dear gods above and below that is both terrible and awesome! :D
I’d call it mercurially deep!
HG Wells along the path of MC Escher, alongside the garden of Salvador Dali
Problem. Hair growth wouldn’t necessarily indicate aging in her case. She may be more elf like in this sense in that things like hair growth may continue at a relatively normal pace but aging happens in an almost impossibly slow manner to the point that she could live centuries. It does pose some questions about her retirement financial plans though.
Well, scaling up from Sydney’s recruit pay, a lieutenant colonel in ARCHON presumably makes enough that she’d reach the point of having a pile of money big enough to keep making more money unless she does something really stupid.
Putting some more speculation detail on that:
In #345 we find that Sydney gets paid twice per month and that her first paycheck is more money than she made all last year. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-345-ka-pow-ka-blam-ka-ching/
Sydney co-operates a comic book shop that was on the edge of going out of business, so she definitely wasn’t pulling in the big bucks. Let’s say she and Joel were paying themselves $30k / year; that’s a reasonable lower bound.
Based on her reaction, that check was not slightly more than her annual take-home, it was significantly more. Let’s say $50k and withholding has already been applied (as is standard for W2 salary pay). With 26 pay periods per year, $50k after withholding is $1.3M disposable. She was getting by on that $30k per year but would undoubtedly like to think less about money. Let’s be super generous and say that she raises her lifestyle costs to $100,000/year. That leaves $1.2M/year, which conveniently works out to about $100k/month.
Average return on the stock market over the last 100 years, adjusted for inflation, is about 7%.
How long before she is financially independent regardless of how long she lives? Let’s arbitrarily say that this is $10M dollars. That’s a lot higher than it likely needs to be as a hedge against all the uncertainty in the world right now.
Let’s assume that:
– she never gets a promotion or payraise or bonuses or income from any other source.
– we simplify her pay to $100k/month after taxes and lifestyle instead of dealing with the 26 pay periods
– she starts banking the $100k/month in January so we don’t have to do partial-year calculations
– she gets a consistent annual 7% return
This is obviously heavily oversimplified, but it’s enough for a gut check.
The answer is: 7 years. She is so useful that Archon is not going to fire her basically unless she commits active and highly visible treason. If she can manage to not commit treason for 7 years, she can spend the rest of her life eating bon-bons.
This was an unnecessary and wildly inaccurate exercise that no one asked for, but it was fun.
Medical scanners on the ship are way better than on Earth. Can they read anything?
oh god, now i’m imagining a betty white maxima in a fantasy bikini on top of a dragon hoard
Thank you for the Betty White commentary.
May she RIP.
Golden Betty is seriously creepy.
Maxima is *fast*.
She should still be wary of ancient, wrinkled, vaguely oriental sweepers/concierges. Especially the ones who smile politely all the time and have “just always been there”.
My sister is nearly 80. I show people pictures I took of her at my brothers funeral a couple years ago. They swear I’m lying and she’s got to be younger than me.
– Doesn’t Maxima have a healing factor? That could heal the effects of age as well, depending on how it works.
– With her body being metallic, all bets are off anyway on how her biology works. We know she still needs to breathe, but she also eats mercury. So it’s possible she’s unaging to begin with.
Yeah, her biology is weird. I mean blue blood, but red lips? No, it’s not lipstick.
But then it’s already been remarked that superpowers don’t follow physics. Except when they do.
“Where does the energy come from, and where does it go to” is the starting point. Buckle up, it only gets odder from there.
Golden Girls Reboot!
Shirley Eaton (89) is an interesting choice.
I will toss out:
Dolly Parton (80) as our Lovable Bumpkin.
Whoopi Goldberg (71) as our Spicy Single.
Allison Janney (66) as our put upon Daughter.
> Allison Janney (66) as our put upon Daughter.
I’m down to see Ms Cregg in anything!