Grrl Power #524 – Importinent questions
Sydney, don’t forget that Super women are like 8-12 inches taller than you on average. Of course, she’s not entirely sure how professional porn starlets… you know, work with the equipment they do. Accommodation wise. It’s the same way you get to Broadway, Sydney. Practice.
I’m not really sure how it works for vampires that can turn into a fleet of bats. (Technically a Colony or a Camp of bats. I like Fleet. I’d also accept a Coven of Bats.) I joke here that they all argue and have seemingly independent minds, but that would suck for the vampire. Getting them to form back up would be like wrangling flying cats. Really they’re probably all guided by a hive mind or just a single consciousness. But it’s funnier to imagine them arguing as they flap around.
But here’s a serious question, do the bats have the same immunities as vampires? I mean, they probably would burst into flame if they got caught in daylight, so I guess they’d be resistant to conventional damage as well. That’d be pretty confusing for an owl that got a hold of one. Or what if a farmer blasted one with a shotgun? Unless the heart was decimated or the bat was decapitated (both actually pretty likely in that scenario) it’d just flop around on the ground while it healed.
Also, what would happen if like 10% of the bats were killed? Would the vampire form back up without an arm, or would little scattered chunks be missing from him all over? If the bats represent discreet parts of the vampire, is one bat the heart? Do all the other bats die of that bat dies? If 10% the bats were killed with silver or fire, would the vampire be able to regenerate the missing bits? If Sydney ever finds out that some vampires can do this, she will have questions.
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Yeah, its a colony of bats, I used to be big into vampire bat movies and that came up in almost every single one of them, its a colony.
What about spiders though? I am pretty sure that is a ‘Vance of spiders’.
A group of bats is called a ‘Cloud’
It’s a flock of bats.
The reason behind this is simple and will help everybody remember for future reference: It’s because biologists are silly people and purposefully made it so a little spoonerism can turn them from a flock of bats into a block of flats.
it’s a wrap of mummies, a corpse of skeletons, an illusion of zebras (or zebra), a fantasy of unicorns, a kiss of vampires, and a shamble of zombies.
why on Earth would it JUST be a ‘flock’ of bats? try a tea-tray of bats, a cave of bats, a flap, or a twitter, an echo, a shadow or shade, or even, dare i say it, an adorable of bats.
A kiss of vampires? Somebodys been reading anita blake novels.
Heh. Other hot vampires are out there too mind. Some of whom are not likely to bite you on sight. The lead from Innocent Blood for example. Well, in her case she does have a taste for Italian.
At least it’s not a Kiss of a Spider Woman :P
BITE YOUR FILTHY HEATHEN TONGUE!!! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOO MANY ANITA BLAKE VAMPIRE HUNTER NOVELS!! (J/k)
It’s a blessing of unicorns, actually.
Because, as Gabe pointed out, a group of unicorns IS a blessing.
My favorite is a Murder of crows.
I’m rather fond of “parliament of owls”, “wake of buzzards/vultures”, “unkindness of ravens”, “smack of jellyfish”, “business of ferrets”, and “proponanogue of professors”.
don’t forget a shipment of carnivorous waffle irons http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1200/fv01189.htm
I’m not a hunter, but I’ve hung out with people while they were hunting. Mostly deer, but one friend liked to hunt various birds. They don’t get blown into hamburger, and the shotgun pellets don’t have that much penetration at the range you usually shoot them, even if they were relatively close. I’m sure the gibbets thing might happen in a really close range like inside a room, but unless the farmer with a shotgun can fly, those bats don’t have to worry about that particular problem.
As to them having their normal vampire resistances when in bat form, I’d kind of expect that as they are still the vampire, just kind of transformed and fragmented.
As to the loss of some bats, that’s a toughie. I make some wild speculation that the bats don’t actually represent one portion of the vampire, but rather they represent a division of the total mass, though reduced, otherwise there’d be a lot more bats for an average mass adult human sized vampire, since a vampire bat (the normal kind) only weighs around 40 grams. So each kilo of mass would equal about 25 bats, and if the vampire weighed around 80kg that would be around 2000 bats. That would probably be rather noticeable in most situations I’d expect. ;)
Ok, got a little sideways there with some of the thinking. So if some of the bats never made it back when the vampire reformed, I’d expect the missing mass to be distributed rather equally. After enough loss, it would probably be fatal due to missing tissues and other important bits. In a comedy, the vampire would probably just shrink, but that gag seems a bit much for this setting. :)
Of course, it’s all speculation on fiction that exists in a world with different physics and apparently magic as well, so guesswork is the best we can call it. :)
You’re overlooking one thing about bats and large caliber firearms. The noise. I’ve seen a shotgun be discharged near a cloud of bats (rocksalt intended for a raccoon in a tree near then). It borked their echolocation (presumably just from the bang) and they flew into everything, including the ground, for about 15 seconds.
Very interesting, I had not considered that.
The other thing which struck me about Robert Rosenthal‘s remark, interesting though it was, is that it assumed the attack was used with the intent of hunting for food. This is less likely for bats, than with birds. As such it might not be loaded with birdshot. Combined with the fact that bats are a lot smaller than typical game birds and I bet (in my non-expert opinion) that buckshot would make a real mess of them.
Has anyone tried using a dog whistle on bats? No offense to Yorp.
Actually, the oft heard statement that you can’t hear bats sonar is simply not true. Most younger people CAN hear it, by actual test (asking if they hear that clicking) and it is, indeed, clicks. Very high pitched clicks.
And I meant to add, that the highest pitched dog whistles can’t be heard. OTOH, dogs don’t seem to hear them from much distance either. Again, by testing on my dog, who’d pop his ears up when I blew one with the plug screwed in till I could not hear it.
Side note: the bats in question for that minor experiment were probably little brown bats, they were flying over a lake in West Kentucky where we were at a picnic, and had been throwing pebbles for them to chase, so they were pretty close. So I mentioned I could hear the clicks, several others said the same, so I started asking who could and who could not.
Hunh. Interesting. That’s kind of like how I can tell you if the TV in the other room is on or off, even if the mute is on.
Most lights and computers etc release a high-end tone that stays until turned off.
At a picnic? How many of those people were related? Acute hearing does seem to run in families… much like many other autistic traits. Even if those people were related, this is probably not a statistically representative sample.
Saying, because I remember when I was a little kid at family picnics, my hearing did not seem to be much more spectacular than other people my age. Not everyone was related, but most of the people were chosen to be tolerable to most of the other people (except, of course, it seemed like every family brought one or two intolerable people. Sigh.)
A few years later, more than 500 miles distant, I got my hearing checked. Results were “How did you do that? You heard every tone. You’re not supposed to be able to do that. Some of those tones are outside the range of human hearing.”
To be clear, the latter event happened about 40 years ago, and I do not have that sort of hearing any more.
Operator: ARC-Light, Operations.
Dabbler: ANYTHING yet??
O: *sigh* No, Miss Tantalis. No new reports.
D: Ha – have you checked the showers? Maybe someone’s trapped in a locker??
O: No, Miss Tantalis. And that only happens in screwball 80’s sex comedies.
D: Dammit! Um… how about Mathias? He’s always got something going on!
O: He’s asleep, Miss Tantalis. And I have standing orders concerning him and you, you know that.
D: Oooh, it’s the General, isn’t it?? He’s got a sexy secretary in his office ‘taking dictation’, doesn’t he??
O: I am NOT interrupting the General with a request like that, Miss Tantalis!
D: Oh, COME ON!! I’m telling you, there is a MASSIVE source of sexual tension, somewhere nearby, I can FEEL it! My senses have been tingling all evening! I HAVE to find it! I NEED to…
O: Miss Tantalis, if anything… of this nature comes to our attention, we’ll let you know…
D: It’s just… it’s making me so HUNGRY… *hangs up*
He he. OK that is now added to headcanon.
+1
+1
Yo! DaveB! Make this into a single pane extra! PLEASE?! Vote Incentive maybe?!
+1 (many times over!)
Small details check:
They have not managed to find a replacement choker for either Maxima or Hiro. It is the kind of thing that I would expect one, or more, member(s) of a unit to carry a generic spare in their utility belt. Lacking that, or at least the discreet ear-mike and microphone version, means that both the units leader and second in command are reliant on Harem to relay messages.
Sydney could substitute, in a pinch, but at the risk of the message being colourfully interpreted!
One other funny thing is that despite how important it is, for her job, Maxima has not visualised replacing it, in her envisaged taunting of Dabbler. She gave herself a fresh shirt though, so that is clearly playing on her mind. But no choker.
Eh, this could just be DaveB. He’s VERY inconsistent about the chokers.
He he. Yea, he got a bit tetchy about it the last time I took it as deliberate. Whilst it is probably deliberate in the post-destruction scene,* I imagine it was unintentional in the imagined one.
It is also possible that they have put on replacement ear-pieces, but they are just out of sight.
* A point was previously made about the glasses being destroyed in the fight. We could expect the chokers to be rugged enough to survive if clothing does. But Hiro’s was totally destroyed so it would not be logical for the chokers to still be functional. There is not exactly much room for them to be armoured, in addition to having all their high-tech functions, after all.
As far as loss of bats, I always visualised the bats as vessels for the vampire’s power rather than discrete chunks of vampire, so if some go missing the remainder would reform into a fully formed vampire, but one weakened and potentially even faded into a wraith like state and needing blood immediately.
That sounds like a brilliant way of handling it, both for visualisation purposes and as a potential game or story mechanic.
*slaps paw in an ink pad, and stamps the Yorp Paw Print of Approval, on the concept*
There are several tabletop RPGs out there that have addressed this, actually. The one that I played the most assigned a value of 10 bats per point of health, and most vampires had 10 points of health before being rendered tripod. So that’s 100 bats per average vampire. And as long as one bat remained, the vampire could reform into humanoid shape fully-formed, just down on the appropriate amount of health. This was subject to the game master’s interpretation, of course.
Dammit. That should read “before being rendered torpid”. Stupid auto-correct.
ROFL. I was trying to figure out the intent of the ‘tripod’. I had a vision of Hiro and his .. notable feature. But could not work out how they might be reduced to that state. “Well”, I thought “there are lots of bats in that fleet, and each must have genitalia…”
At which point I gave up and checked, to see if that was a correction underneath.
:-D
That’s the sort of ‘system’, for want of a better word, that I’d picture as well. In fact, I think we already have an in-universe precedent for a closely related ability, which suggests a common mechanism.
In Harem, we have a being who can transform between a single powerful body and multiple weaker ones, all the time retaining a single overall persona. In her specific case, the ability is set up with a quantised scale trading off number of bodies against per-body power, with the weaker bodies retaining any modifications between manifestations and the more powerful form(s) able to use any numerically-appropriate combination of the weaker bodies. The fact that she retains a coherent persona regardless of which combination is manifested demonstrates that the persona is not dependent on having every or any particular body available – the persona that is Harem is an overmind, to perhaps misuse a convenient term, rather than physically anchored to this world.
The (stereo)typical vampire has a less flexible version of this ability. Instead of a single scale with quantisation, the vampire has several discrete and different forms depending on your source – human, bats, rats, (cloud of particles visible as) mist, et cetera. For those forms comprised of weaker units, the number of units increases, but not necessarily in linear proportion. Analogy with Harem implies that although the vampire is physically separated, it retains a single directing overmind and control of each individual body.
Which means that the Vampire faction may be able to answer one of Miss DeShantis’s most pressing questions! In the millennia of vampire history, it’s a betting certainty that a vampire in a ‘distributed’ form has lost a component and the results been recorded. As I see it, there are three main potential scenarios:
Scenario One: the shock of experiencing death in even one body is enough to destabilise or even destroy the overmind. Harem cannot afford to take mortal risks with any of her bodies, especially since other bodies may well be providing essential services at the time.
Scenario Two: the overmind’s power in and connection to this world are distributed more-or-less equally among the bodies. The overmind may be able to cope with the loss of bodies by concentrating on the connection to those which survive, although this would of course be more difficult if a greater proportion are lost at once. Assuming sufficient presence of mind to transform back to a single-body form, a proportional amount of power would be lost, and must be recovered (by means appropriate to the individual) in order to regain full strength. Harem can probably physically survive the loss of a body – but more data is needed to confirm the mental effects for forms comprised of only a few bodies.
Scenario Three: the overmind’s power and sanity are entirely rooted in whatever not-this-world the unmanifested components go to. Destroy a component and you may take that amount of power temporarily out of play, or it may be shared among the remaining components; either way, when the overmind switches to a different form it does so at its full normal power and number. Harem may be as reckless as she likes, provided she keeps at least one body at a time out of harm’s way to act as an anchor to this world and hold open a route for replacements to manifest – or maybe not even that.
Of the three, I would place Scenario Two as the most likely, for reasons of story balance as much as worldbuilding.
Scenario Three is effectively kamikaze God-mode for heroine and non-humans alike, and as such is unlikely in a setting where only they would even approach that level. Krona doesn’t come close: she’s powerful, but still squishy even with checkpoints. Max is powerful and Halo has potential, but only as Archangels in comparison.
Scenario One is reasonable in-story for Harem, giving her no leeway to be any less careful than her colleagues, but it makes forms with large numbers of components into such a vulnerability that I can’t see it ever being used by vampires. An immortal-unless-killed being should consider anything short of 100% safe an unacceptable risk: eternity means enough time and attempts to be sure of catching even the smallest of odds eventually.
Scenario Two maintains the tension of needing to preserve individual bodies, especially for Harem given the (on-screen) unknown psychological effects of losing 20% of your connection to this world, while giving the potential immortals a far more acceptable risk profile.
If this is all addressed in-canon, at some point that my catching-up archive dive hasn’t yet reached…
Just consider it general worldbuilding speculation, in that case!
Clunge has got to be my favourite euphemism for lady bits.
DaveB i’ve been rereading some of your earlier work lately and actually reading your author notes and I’ve noticed you’ve complained a lot about the workload for this. Have you ever considered hiring assistants?
Dave is probably working on tomorrow’s comic, at the moment. But, yes, he has both considered it and does hire the services of a colourist, Keith. Sadly the comic does not generate enough revenue to pay both of them. So Keith can only be hired for the occasional comic.
Mind you the patrons do a brilliant job. Giving Dave a salary, to work on the comic full-time, is what allowed him to increase it to two pages a week, from the original one.
In due course I am sure the readership will gradually increase to the point where we have enough patrons to hire Keith full time. That would then free up some time for Dave to update the cast list information, and maybe get the first chapter published, in paper form.
Which would be a considerable effort, I imagine, as it clearly is not printing-friendly at the moment. Pages would need to be re-sized and any corrections (like early mentions of Maxima’s rank) would need to be made.
The best part of this strip is the Sydney/Krona dialog at the bottom XD
Yes! I can see them becoming good friends. Makes me wish DaveB could have put Krona into the gaming scene in the flash forward at the very beginning.
A woman’s vagina is somewhat stretchy (just think how much it stretches to get a baby out), but that stretch does have limits. For the most part, the size of male and female genitalia have evolved at the same time. If a guy is too big or too small to fit with a female, his genes will not make it to the next generation.
Reproductive biology lesson: Humans are the second largest primate (after the gorilla), but have the largest penis, by far and that is because humans have huge brains. A human baby is born with a brain so large, it can not lift its head for several months. This also means that a woman’s birth canal has to be large enough to accommodate that large head; the rest of the body is still relatively small. This means that the vagina has to have a large diameter, even when not sending a child into the outside world. To reduce the likelihood of nasty microbes getting to the really sensitive inner parts after coming in the larger opening, the vagina has to be fairly long, so that the harsh environment of the vagina has a descent chance of wiping out the little buggers. The male penis has to be long enough to bypass all those protective measures to be able to deposit semen as close to the cervix as possible. The male penis is as wide as it needs to be to fill up the vagina. Thus the male penis is as large as it needs to be to fill the female vagina which is as large as it is to allow the large brain of a baby to get out.
Somehow I don’t see that tempting Sydney to … experiment, with Hiro. Not having evolved in parallel with concrete-penetrating parts, she would risk earning herself a Darwin award, if she tried!
It’s been said that the vagina of a woman becomes more elastic and elongates after owner of said happy place experiences an orgasm. So Hiro could possibly have woopee with a norm woman if he remembers the wise words of Saint Ron Jeremy, “lick it before you stick it”.
Um, David, we are adults here. And have you ever seen a horses’ penis? It looks very human and is big compared to us.
Relaxation of muscles loosens the vagina and anus as you have sex and as you prepare for it. Lubrication is always a must.
Have you seen a horse’s penis? In real life? They do not look ‘very human’
Looks human? It definitely looks mammalian, but I argue with human. Part of the reason for a large horse penis is due to the geometry of horse hips during the act as well as that a baby horse is huge compared to a human at birth. Large child -> Large vagina -> Large penis. Keep in mind that most hooved animals need to be able to run with the herd (or at least mama) within minutes of birth, so they are born more developed than the predators and primates.
Mmm. Odd. “Hooved animals” works well, in both the contexts it is needed, for your comment to stand up. If there are any hooved predators, they are not springing to mind. Likewise, off the top of my head, I cannot think of any herds of animals without hooves. Outside of insects, anyhow. Rabbits for example are burrow dwellers.
Ooh ooh kangaroos! But you did mention mammals, so I guess there is an implied restriction there.
Wolf packs do run, for considerable distances. But they do fit the predator role, despite their group behaviour. Likewise they match your slow development rule.
Mind you the hoof paradigm breaks down in the era of dinosaurs. Likewise if looking at the world of insects. Ants for example can travel in colossal numbers, yet include both predatory and vegetarian species within their family.
Yet this does not contradict your key point, because farmer ants are not migratory. So they can have the benefits of slow maturation, whilst in a relatively safe, climate-controlled and guarded environment. And kangaroos have their own tricks to get a compromise between the two extremes.
Ungulates. Hooved animals are Ungulates.
And that includes pigs, which are omnivorous, though hardly predatory.
Actually, they’ve found bones of a carnivorous pig in the fossil record, as recently as the last Ice Age. They had cloven hooves, although the toe bones were unfused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entelodont
Yeah, at least four squads know what has happened, and, Dabbles has been informed and is heading towards that location as fast as she can
With panel one and two, there is no way that the other Daphne’s didn’t come to a complete stop or pause in what they were doing (hopefully it wasn’t something vital) with a dazed expression and with more than a little drool, and her other squaddies would have asked her about it, and you just know she would have blurted it out (once her brain started working enough to form words :P)
Originally was thinking she would have used a secure channel to Dabbles (so as not to let Maxi know), but as Yorpie pointed out above, neither Maxi nor Hiro are currently ‘plugged in’ to the communications
No no no. In a cartoon, it’s one vampire, one bat. The definitive source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gn4gVpLncA
If that’s how Bugs does it, that’s how it goes.
Ahh, but that is just using a generic polymorph spell. Now, if you watch all the way to the end of that clip, you will see that there are other versions too. “Wala Wala Washington” being one that creates a two-headed vulture.
I imagine “Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, Washington” would transform a vampire into a fleet of bats!
Well, at least we already know what we get with “Abracapocus,” but I still wonder how “Hocusadabra” would work.
They showed that: body of a bat, head of a maroon :P
I guess it’s a good thing that Maxima doesn’t read the comments Imagine if that character saw our discussions about her ladybits..
There would be no commentators left? Just smoking chairs?
Well it is within the bounds of (extreme) possibility, if not probability, that she does. If there is a set-up, similar to the Veil, then the world would be pretty much as we see it today. So there could be super heroes, out of our sight, trying to gauge whether ‘going public’ was a good idea. Using TV programs, films and comics to both ‘test the water’ to see if the public are ready yet and to get them familiar with the concepts involved.
Of which Grrl Power might actually be drawing in a lot of very real elements. Obviously the press conference would just be a future proposal. But other aspects could be inspired by real individuals or events.
So it may be wise not to be too insulting. Our heroines could actually read these comments!
it kinda reminds me of the sookie stackhouse books. Or otherwise known as true blood. In that universe the Vamps just came out to play and the shifters are watching how it goes down.
i am so very ready for a krona/sydney friendship. just wisecracking all the way down. go dave!
Agreed.
If it’s not been mentioned, something just occurred to me from my Werewolf playing days in a tabletop RPG, there was a species called the Anansi that were the settings Werespiders, one of their more … creepy forms was a spider swarm, in which every spider was part of a hivemind and if a certain percentage got killed, the Anansi would have to find and consume more ‘normal’ spiders to regain it’s mass and more than likely it’s humanoid form would change it’s appearance
Nope, if that had been mentioned I would still be having nightmares. I wonder if Vance’s “Vance suit” allows him to overcome the problems of changing his human appearance?
I *like* Krona. Seems like a sweet kid.
Taller women aren’t necessarily deeper, and vice versa. It’s the same for women as for men; neither height nor proportions are predictors of genital dimensions.
On second thought, superhero physique in this setting seems to have its own set of laws, so their sockets and flanges would necessarily be more compatible.
it looks like krona and sydney have become good friends with each other