Grrl Power #1486 - And pause for the not-surprise attack... (Patreon)

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Maybe she went to go eat some spinach, or took a Proton Energy Pills which gives her the power of 10,000 atomic bombs for ten seconds? Look, all things being equal, I'd rather have the power of 1,000 atom bombs for 100 seconds, or maybe even 100 a-bombs for 1,000 seconds. What I wouldn't want is the power of 1 a-bomb for 10,000 seconds, because it seems like you'd wrap up most adventures pretty quickly with that kind of chutzpah, and you'd be standing around for 7,000 seconds waiting for the pill to wear off so you can go get lunch without accidentally blowing up the diner.

The tournament is supposed to be no-holds barred, but they've slowly introduced rules over the years to keep things moving along. Did you guys ever see the earliest UFC matches? They hadn't refined the rules, and so a lot of matches turned into "grappler takes a few hits while diving in to grab at someone's midsection, they go down, and the grappler spends the next 25 minutes trying to force the other guy to tap out. I only ever watched a few matches in the early days, and after that, I've seen the occasional highlight on reddit or wherever, but I'm pretty sure if you get grappled, you've got less than 25 minutes to get out of it these days. Or maybe not. Maybe all the grapplers have had to learn that almost-hyperextend-your-elbow hold to force people to tap out. 

I've peppered in the rules for the UCBA, and I'll try and remember and list them all here. It is a deathmatch, meaning you can kill, but if someone yields, it's pretty bad form to keep pounding on them. Fighting at this level means someone can launch an ICBM, causing the target to yield, but that doesn't necessarily mean the guy who launched it can abort it in the two seconds before it hits. It comes down to a call by judges, though it's rare that anyone gets removed from the tournament for ignoring yields. 

Only a single entity can enter the tournament. In the case of something like a space ship or a gunship, the ship itself is considered the entrant. Crew can man exosuits and fly around outside of the ship and attack other competitors, because a mage could just as easily summon a phantom army or the like, but if the mage goes down, the phantom army would probably disperse, and even if they don't, they can't win that round of the tournament in the mage's place. Similarly, when the space ship goes down, the round is lost for the crew as well. Someone could pilot a mecha-godzilla while wearing Iron Man armor, and when the mega-mech gets destroyed, the guy in the suit can eject and keep fighting, but only if he is the registered entrant and not the mega-mech. 

You can't endanger non-combatants. There's almost never a case where that can happen, since the matches take place 100 kilometers from any other sapient life form (and there's reasonable effort taken to not hold matches in or near national parks or endangered wetlands or nature preserves and the like) but if you have an ability to open a portal to redirect that meteor swarm attack, and the exit portal opens over Times Square, you will be disqualified at best. 

You can leave the combat area for up to 30 seconds. That's generally a bad idea though, because if you step out of the ring for ten seconds to catch your breath, another competitor might try and pin you for 20 seconds, then jump back in bounds once you're ringed out. Also, when you leave the arena, you "spend" those 30 seconds. You can earn more out-of-bounds time at the rate of 1 second for every ten spent in-bounds. This is to keep competitors from jumping in and out of bounds and skirting the edge of the arena. The matches are much more interesting when everyone is battle-royaling in the middle. 

No off-table support. You can bring a bag of holding or your very own mass-fabricator, but you can't bring a laser designator and call down tungsten rods from geostationary orbit or artillery from a land-battleship parked just out of bounds. 

You can possess other competitors. It is advised that all competitors have reasonable mental defenses. If you win the match with someone else's body, you can't ride them into the next match. If possessing someone destroys your original body, or at least the body you entered with, you and your host are out of the tournament. 

Hmm. I think that's it. I've probably mentioned a few things in the comments that I've left out, but I think that's the bulk of it.