Grrl Power #1176 - Downgrayedd (Patreon)

Thank you for the support! You guys are awesome!

I'm actually rooting for Maxima's plan, but when it can be not inaccurately spun as "Superheroine plans on unleashing death portal in order to further empower her own militarized super powered police force." mmmmaybe some peer review is in order.

This is the "potentially catastrophic danger" Dabbler mentioned on the prior page. Like a garden, dungeons need to be pruned and harvested, or they will level up and spill past their borders. Gardens have levels in this analogy.

Actually, that's just one of the potential dangers. Anytime you have a large concentration of mana in one place, like when you're initializing a core, things can go wrong in many ways.

I'm fairly confident that a modern military could kick the shit out of most of what might come out of a dungeon IF they were ready for it and educated about what they were fighting. If they were caught by surprise and didn't have silver ammo or whatever they might need, sure, they could get their ass kicked pretty hard, but it's hard to see an AC-130 gunship having a hard time against an army of orcs. Okay, sure, if the orcs have a shaman, things could swing pretty hard. And against an army of earth elementals, 5.56 ammo is just not going to help, and who knows if a 20mm Vulcan can penetrate the hide of an Elder Dragon, but that's kind of my point about education and preparedness.

Also, let me just throw out a pet peeve of mine, is when dudes in fighter jets fly within the arm/wingspan of the giant monster. An F-22 carries AIM-9 Sidewinders, which have a range of TWENTY-TWO MILES, and/or AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles which have a range of up to THIRTY (nautical) MILES. And nautical miles are longer than regular miles! Oh, and by the way, they do have a minimum range of like 0.6 miles. And guess where the idiots in the jets are in every fucking monster movie? That's right, circling the monster's head from fifteen feet away or doing loop de loops around its ballsack. And then the generals are all mystified and sad when the pilot roster goes red one after another. It's fucking stupid.

Of course, my picture in panel 6 of the battleship installation, in reality, wouldn't be nearly that close to the entrance. If I'd drawn it correctly, you probably wouldn't be able to see most of the defenses. You got a battleship with 14 inch guns with a range of 7 miles? Obviously you don't put the thing 300 yards from the entrance. You put it, what, 4 miles back? 5? And this is in an unscalable valley killbox with tons of AA and guns up on top of the walls, and if you're really doing it right, electrified bands of sheet metal lining the valley walls every 50 feet or so. At least, that's how you do it right, but as Gault points out, that'd all be crazy expensive. Expensive enough that eventually budgets get "optimized" and after a few decades all that's left is 600 feet of non-contiguous fencing and a guy with a sidearm operating a plywood toll booth with one of those arms that goes up and down.

FYI, I caught a cold. I'm not saying that to brag, just to let you guys know. And it's not like, "the end is nigh" sick, or anything, just, I have some low grade crud that's been adding some drag factor. I actually rarely get sick. Like, I get a proper cold maybe every six years or so. It kind of makes me feel bad because my wife gets a normal amount of colds and, well, the occasional migraine, which I've never had to deal with. But when I do get sick, it's always some low grade crap that takes forever to burn through my system. It's not Covid either. I got tested twice. Pretty sure it's just a cold. Maybe the flu? Ah, remember when people just caught run of the mill common colds? Those were the days.

So why am I telling you? On Monday, I wrote one page (I normally write two each Monday) and then I drew... one panel of the comic. Mostly I just stared at the screen, or really, a few inches in front of the screen, nudged dialog text around the page, tried to find a reference for an impossible angle I was drawing (I seem to have a real S-Fucking-Tier talent for drawing shit at angles for which there is no photo reference) and then returned to staring at my screen. The kicker is, on Tuesday, I rewrote part of the page and couldn't use the one panel I drew. That's actually ok because the page is better with the rewrite, it's just kind of funny that I had to ditch my all-day panel. Anyway, I am slowly improving, but there's a real possibility that a page or two from now might go up with only flat colors or something cause, man, it's been slow going this week.

Also I'm aware I still owe you a new vote incentive. I'm not going to skip a month or anything, I just hope once I get fully over this I'll be newly energized and can make up for lost time. That's how sickness works, right?