Grrl Power #1457 – Portal (to her) panties
References: Sciona used a cut-out-the-distance-between-things artifact stolen from the Twilight Council’s black vault to create the Skybreaker, which Deus, by way of Vale, stole and turned in into the backbone of his not-a-Stargate program.
Full disclosure, everything I know about antagonistic sexual relationships I learned from TV. Personally, I don’t get hate-fucking. It feels made up. Like, I’m sure it happens, IRL, but it’s probably over-represented in media. Though I’m fairly sure it would be difficult to compile statistics on comparative rates of IRL vs. media instances.
That said, I think Deus and Sciona’s relationship is fairly asymmetrical. There’s some respect there, but she mostly hates him. He digs the bad girl vibe, but doesn’t approve of her… more sociopathic tendencies. You know… I think he might have an idea about reforming her? He already has a bit of a collection of bad-girls. I mean, Vale… inhabits a shell that definitely looks female. Which isn’t to say she isn’t actually female. Or possibly was, depending on how she came to be what she is. Or maybe eldritch hungering void beasts are all female. If that’s what she is. I’m not confirming either way. Cthillia… well, she uses female pronouns. I have a full body model sketch of her somewhere, and I’ll just say she’s not a candidate for a vote incentive. Not a sexy one. Hmm. Although, maybe that would be an amusing change of pace every once in a while. Lorlara is the most normal female of his entourage, and “normal” is not an adjective I usually associate with her.
I realize that a “hydro-magneto” power generator could very well just describe entirely mundane generators powered by gravity or steam motivated water, but what I was picturing when I started writing Deus’s explanation before letting it veer into facetiousness, was something akin to some sort of metallic hydrogen convection dynamo. Metallic hydrogen is one of those theoretical things that seems to have been more or less confirmed, though it’s hard to keep a sample of it in a jar, since it requires something like 4 million atmospheres of pressure, or 400 Giga Pascals, at which point it would become (or at least exhibit the properties of) a conductive liquid metal. Why using something like that would be better than regular hydropower is not immediately clear, but it’s weird and exotic, and a power source based on it is (at this point) entirely made up, so no one can tell me it wouldn’t work.
Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude! Well, eventually. The nude part of the interview, as well as the version that includes shading will be coming soon. Of course, you can view the interview in the nude now if you take your own clothes off. You know. Technically. Just put a towel on your chair first.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
… I am a perv and I DO NOT deny it. I’d pay for their (p)corn comic *waves a 20*
I would too, and largely because interesting girls and guys are the best to look at. More Cthilia, Frix, and kobold Sydney
Oh please. Considering what gets the Rule34 treatment around the internet, I dare say Cthillia is fair game.
Knowing the Internet, I’d say even Cooter is fair game.
It’s absolutely terrifying how accurate this statement is.
Please, in the name of all benevolent deitites, don’t put that picture in our minds! Brain bleach, now!
What about Wyrm-Cooter hybrid… with themselves?
Before or after Sciona sliced him into ribbons?
‘Tis but a scratch, he got better :P
Uhhhh out of curiosity. I know Sciona has that “create addicting drugs” ability in her new body. Do we ever see if Deus has some immunity to it? Or is her “wheels within wheels” brain hoping to ALSO maybe enslave him while shes ‘interacting’ with him?
One of the fun interweb bons mots is:
You are one in a million. That means there are 8,000 of you out there. Form an Army, take over the planet.
Never doubt that if you get enough people together, two of them will have the same kink. And the other 99.999% of us want nothing to do with it.
Damn, she was so pissed in panel 5 she caused his tie to change color.
It’s one of those special color changing ties. Deus has access to the most cutting edge fashion.
Mood tie. And it’s not Sciona’s anger, but Deus’ smugness that caused the color change.
I don’t think “smugness” is the emotional response to blame at the moment ;)
Also, P8 suggests that Deus smirks smugly so often, his face is starting to develop “smirk lines”, much like some people might develop “frown lines”?
Hah hah, whoops!
I can’t help but notice that Deus is being SO diabolical in panel 6 that his tie has changed color.
Well, I fixed it now, but a “mood tie” is a fun thought, and come to think of it, something Deus might invest in.
Sounds like a Veridian Dynamics product. Which is handy for him!
Well he DID invest in clicker thunder after all…
Dang, she was so mad in panel 5 she made his tie change color
It’s a Mood Tie
Regarding Golden Girls – most recent Last Week Tonight with John Oliver at 5:28
I’d like to apologize for my double comment, it didn’t look like it posted the first time
You just got hung up on the anti-spam filtering. Eventually your comment was recognized as legitimate and allowed through.
Nah, it’s a common problem: posts take time to go through, even if you have been posting for years
Unless there is an error message, it has gone through and proceed to your next comment
Hatefucks are probably done because of the huge sexual tension but complete lack of personal compatibility.
Like lusting for each other, but can’t stand each other. It happens. Can’t say I’ve been there, but there has been some women in my life where I’d think “Too bad I really dislike her personality, but if they offered… I would”
As a younger fellow I got into a relationship that was hatefuck adjacent. It started as a one night stand and evolved into mass quantities of sex. As a person in my early twenties that was hard to pass up. She was attractive and the sex was fun but she was kind of a sociopath of not a full blown personality disorder. Toward the end I started resenting the sex because it was just another manipulation. There was just not enough sex in the universe to be worth being around her. So, probably not truly a hatefuck, just inertia. I guess the moral is, if you don’t really like them but there is a sexual attraction, get in, get out and move on.
Get in, get out, (repeat), then move on? Eh? Eh? Oh, swines before pearls.
I lowkey forgot that Deus is doing stuff. He kinda fell by the wayside, imo, despite being the most consistent antagonist-shaded character in the story.
Deus is definitely a slow burn, planning in the background kind of guy. A very interesting antagonist if you can even really call him that yet. It kind of seems like whatever his end goals are he’s still setting up the board. Definitely less proactive than the other villains have been even Sciona here has done more than he has as a villain.
He is just a less alarming villain. He is the type of person that you think is not threatening enough to deal with right away, only to wake up one day and find yourself completely reliant on what he is selling. Kind of like Putin.
I guess. I’m not too familiar with Putin but he doesn’t exactly strike me as someone without active enemies.
Cept Deus isn’t a moron. Worth remember Putin literally constantly invaded his neighbors and specifically went out of his way to do war crimes. And even sprung the invasion of Ukraine ON HIS OWN MILITARY.
The war in Ukraine has no shortage of foreign volunteers that showed up due to all the enemies he made too, MH17 (Netherlands), Salisbury Poisonings (the UK), Several Belarussian battalions, several Chechen ones, even several RUSSIAN ones.
… Isn’t that what SmugD is doing right now under guise of forming a ‘land bridge’ to the coast?
He even admitted to not be concerned about the UN (or The Hague) because they would be tied up in moronic bureaucratic bullshit for the next multiple decades
My money is still on “loves feeling like he is The Villain, will never even be a villain.” He’s got Designs and he has Means, but there’s no malice behind it.
He just saw the world and decided it was inefficient.
Or maybe he saw the writing on the wall that we were going to be splattered by some unknown force, and started rolling up his sleeves. Then he rolled them back down and smoothed them over meticulously. After all, that’s an expensive suit and ironing out the creases takes ages.
The “hedging on the tech talk” technobabble is for OUR sake, Sciona. Jeez, it’s not all bout you.
And… SERIOUSLY?? What’s with the engraving on the ring? It’s a track to guide the Skybreaker, it doesn’t need runic carvings – hack, Sciona just said it’s a non-magic solution! The only reason you’d cover it with runes is if you wanted your not-a-Stargate Stargate to LOOK like a Stargate! C’mon, Deus, be classier.
My guess is that those are actually circuit channels for the energy that keeps the portal open and swings the Skybreaker around.
There’s nothing wrong with a little artistic flair on the paneling as long as it doesn’t interfere with the operation of the gate. Cities would be better with more gargoyles I say, but of course “needless” decorations are expensive and that’s why basically no one does it.
But this is Deus’s very first not-a-stargate, so he wanted it fancy.
And, unlike most cities, Deus has PLENTY of money.
I do miss decorative flourishes in architecture. One disadvantage of our modern hyper-efficiency and cost-saving world. Even those little things that started out as architectural necessities and later became optional decorations were nice. Added character to buildings.
I bet if we could actually go back we’d find that the artistic flourishes started because somebody’s ND 2nd cousin needed to be kept busy so they assigned him to the finishing, where he couldn’t actually screw it up, and they found he’d spend days on end carving shite into the walls. Then some Edison level BS-artist sold a rich guy on how much cooler he was than the other rich guy for having such carvings, and One-Upsman-ship took over.
Wealthy patrons is actually how most artists survived, and being able to support them was one of the hallmarks of being wealthy.
“starving artists’ is a trope because that’s exactly what happened to those artists without patrons. They didn’t get paid for their work and lived in poverty if they wouldn’t ‘sell out’. It was a very rare artist back then who could get to the point of being self-supporting and possessing a livable income without such patronage.
Easy access to people with the internet changes a LOT of things for modern artists.
“I am actually from the galaxy-spanning civilization…”
Whose home world just got ganked by unknown invaders. So their tech base is “what we can crib from our ancestors,” meaning she is basically on his level now.
Does it count as “ancestors” when some of them are still alive and the generation gap is nill?
Depends on if you attended the same counting class as SmugD
Isn’t her superpower something like a touch-based, mood altering chemical that can be highly addictive? Can’t she turn him into an addicted thrall like she has most of Congress?
Knowing Deus’ superpower (knowing things he shouldn’t, not the super intelligent crap he claims it is), I would expect that he has identified at least one antidote for her super power and has made appropriate use of it.
Both of those ‘powers’ are crap,and you all know, specially Pander
Knowing Deus, he probably is well aware of that and has a solution at hand for when she tries that.
And I doubt that it is most of congress. Partly because it would attract the wrong kind of attention such as ArcDark, partly because Sciona would then be stuck feeding all her thralls all day without any time for her evil plots.
Wait a minute, “manna-less solution”? Isn’t the skybreaker a magic artifact? How is that manna-less?
Probably meant that the rest of the array uses no magic and the skybreaker itself doesn’t need to be powered by mana, as it is permanently magic.
There isn’t enough ambient mana to just keep doing stuff with it. Since other places have more mana just present and ready to be tapped, I assume the Alari homeworld had the equivalent of free batteries and wall sockets everywhere out of thin air, but it required millennia of magiscientific research to tap into them. A low-tech place like Earth wouldn’t know what to do with it AND doesn’t have it in the first place. Sucks to be us!
Won’t her abilities make touching her a bit risk-ay for such an occasion?
He will have to put on one of Rogue’s full-body condoms.
(manNa should probably be mana?)
Indeed. Manna is what the Hebrews ate in the the desert. Mana is, IIRC, a SouthAmerican idea originally, that has been used in modern speculative fiction as the magic energy or fuel that magic runs on.
Yeah, probably.
I can confirm, eldritch hungering void beasts are all female.
Some have suggested it kis the opposite, namely that all females are eldritch hungering void beasts.
Personal experience has to take over, but I would think that everyone has a mother and I can see that maybe that might confirm it for some folks the majority of us would not classify our mothers in that category.
Deus, you home wrecker! You’ve fired a shot across the bow of Sciona’s situation with her way out of his depth lobbyist bro. Which also seemed like it was having a somewhat reforming effect on her.
Hate sex and angry sex are very similar, you’re just throwing all of those feelings into the act, and if you’re into rough sex, it’s bound to be better. Not my “cup of tea” but different strokes, etc… I’d be careful Deus, she might try to use her drug-addiction skill on you. I doubt as intelligent as he is it’ll effect him, but it won’t stop her from trying. Sorry Sciona, you abandoned Skybreaker to escape so finders-keepers. Just because you stole it before doesn’t give you permanent ownership and you know it.
Technically she didn’t “abandon it to escape”… the portal opened before she was ready, it was unstable and moving, and she got sucked through along with Max, Sydney, and team.
I love how he low-key slipped in oversight of the murderous wannabe conquerer’s plans and activities for the foreseeable future, under the guise of “antagonizing” her. Deus is amazing, the way he behaves like a villain despite his actual activities being heroic in their planned consequences.
No, he is a villain, just because they have beneficial superficial side effects doesn’t change the fact he is smug evil hole who is only interested in himself
If an evil person’s selfish acts benefit everyone, are they really evil?
For a while in the 2000s, Dr. Doom was an evil hero who saved the universe twice, and tried to save Earth from all future attacks, but was foiled by the “heroes.” Even the Panther God that gives Black Panther his powers and can read minds and hearts was like “yeah, your intentions are pure, you want to save humanity” and gave him access to the vibranium vault. Deus reminds me a lot of that Doom.
Meanwhile, Mr. Fantastic was creating extradimensional prisons and singlehandedly caused the Secret Invasion. But he’s the hero.
Using that logic, Thanos’ intentions were also pure so he should have been the hero.
Thanos’ intentions were selfish and vile. In the comics his motives started out as “be a creepy stalker towards Death, who cannot seem to make him understand that she’s just not into him,” and then segued into “being cruel and petty for funsies.”
In the MCU his motives were “wants to be right about everything and expects people to thank him for his murderous ways.” Not only did he have a meltdown after finding out people had undone the Snap, but even prior to that his favorite response to criticism was to sigh heavily, “you just don’t understand, but people will thank me for this,” and then murder anyone who argued with him.
… Yes, they are still evil (and a smugly douche)
Doom would also have used the vibranium to conquer the world if allowed to take enough of it, noq uestion. he’s done some horribly evil things (turning the love of his life into magical armor after sacrificing her to hell for more power!!!) and is clearly unrepentant of them.
As for the Secret Invasion, the Skrulls were infiltrating Earth for YEARS before then, he actually delayed their invasion because they had to reassess how dangerous Earth was (and in one What If, the FF popped the Skrull Homeworld like a grape) and how to foil him specifically. He bought us TIME, and focused their attention on him.
And when the full invasion finally came, they still underestimated him and the rest of the heroes. Certainly it wasn’t the villains that foiled them…
The reason for the Skrull invasion was because the FF turned a bunch of them into cows, which were then eaten by humans. That’s what made them choose to target Earth despite its extreme danger when they needed a new homeworld. They could have used their powers to conquer almost any planet, they didn’t need to go after the one that every sane alien feared because of all the supers.
And yes, Doom planned to use the vibranium to conquer the world. He told the Panther God that, in no uncertain terms. He had used Morgana’s magic to see the future and decided Earth needed to be united to face the coming attacks. The Panther God agreed.
It was, in fact, the villains who foiled the Secret Invasion in the end. The Thunderbolts, and specifically Harry Osbourne, aka the Green Goblin, killed the Skrull Queen and defeated their main force. That led to Osbourne being given control of SHIELD and the Avengers, leading to the Dark Reign event, and the Thunderbolts becoming the (Dark) Avengers. The heroes and other villains helped, but of any single contribution, that was the biggest. In fact, if you only read the main Secret Invasion comics, and none of the other titles, it would seem like the Thunderbolts did 90% of the work.
I’m surprised he didn’t smugly point out all probes we’ve sent to the other planets in our solar system. Then again I’m pretty sure this comic is still set in like the late 2010s/early 2020s so I don’t remember which specific ones he’d pull from… unless she means actual people, which fair.
Probes don’t mean diddly-squirt
Butt then again, this is the hole who believes having his minions illegally set foot on another country’s soil automagically makes it part of his country…
Don’t care how much you disagree, cheerfully or otherwise, you are still, cheerfully, WRONG!!!
Regarding the invotive: they are canonically a couple, yes?
Maybe not before the tournament…
I mean, if it’s supposed to be some kind of ferro-fluid, it’d be okay, I think Gundam 00 used one for their orbital ring (different from a ringworld or Elysium).
Anyway, speaking of pseudo stargates, have you seen Manifest Fantasy yet? https://www.amazon.com/Manifest-Fantasy-Military-Isekai-Adventure-ebook/dp/B0GRV5F7R7
Last I heard it was five more souls and Cthillia can look like whatever she wants to look like.
You go girl! Take charge of your life! Though the cost seems a bit excessive.
Is there a reason it’s being spelt “manna” here? Double-n is reminiscent of the Bible rather than the Polynesian roots of “Mana”.
Is Deus not worried about Sciona’s mind altering drug powers?
Since the comments already went to their post-talk activities, I can’t resist saying – that first, upper-left-corner panel is looking hella sus. Like it was cropped on purpose to look a bit risqué. Either the internet ruined my brain, or Dave’s being a bit cheeky.