Grrl Power #1077 - Coup de grâce appropriation (Patreon)

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To answer some questions about Darude's powers. He can control sand, and also transform into it, IF he has at least his own mass of sand to… hide in, sort of. A lot of superpowers (and magic spells) rely on semantics, so the question isn't, "What is sand," it's "What does Darude consider to be sand?" Sand is really just particulate minerals, but Darude grew up in the desert, so he probably couldn't use sand from a coral beach right off the bat. Sure, if he was the main character of his own comic, he'd almost definitely grow his powers over time and be able to use coral sand and maybe even be able to control concrete, or at least rip the sand out of it. In a manga, there'd be many multi-page sequences of him trying to work past his own definition of sand, like, when does a grain of sand become a pebble, or is there some intermediate designation that geologists use? Maybe when he's a giant sandstorm, small to medium sized pebbles count as "sand" to him because of the difference in scale.

But what Sydney did was to melt the top 3 to 4 inches of particulate matter into a big molten trail of lava/glass, which then rapidly cooled and broke into slabs ranging from the size of the top of a shipping container down to, well, tiny, dangerous splinters that could reasonably be considered sand. Even so, she tied up about 97% of the sand for a few miles in any direction - remember the bits she skipped over was farmland, which will be soil rather than sand, (I think the major differentiator is that "soil" has far more organic matter in it) roads, and the odd building.

To address some other concerns people mentioned; yeah, she absolutely wrecked the ecosystem in that area. If anyone actually brought her attention to how many little desert mice and lizards she just smoked, she might legitimately have a breakdown. Basically, she saw a giant Mummy sized sandstorm and focused on solving that to the detriment of other considerations. The worst thing about her plan was that if Maxima hadn't been able to keep him distracted and he had plowed onward, she could have done all this only to find him pulling sand from another part of the desert. It wasn't really a strong plan in a lot of ways, but at the same time, it might have been the best one? Bottom line is, Darude is potentially a catastrophic level event, and sometimes to beat a catastrophe, you must become a catastrophe.