Grrl Power #900 - Recapitation (Patreon)

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Something something Cyberpunk...

I played a little bit of it last night. I think I'm still firmly in the opening tutorial bit. I haven't even done a "Upgrade your cybernetics" bit yet, but I've shot some people and been driven around small chunks of the city. Honestly, I'm the worst partner for anyone to have though, because in the middle of the first firefight, I'm taking time to look corpses and weapons off the floor while the big guy in the other room is laying into us with his "My gun is so big that when you pick it up you walk slow and can't put it in your inventory," and I'm like "Ooh, that pistol looks cool."

Oh, I guess I should talk about this here comic page.

Woo, page 900! Kind of... an inauspicious page I guess, but here we are.

I'm not sure what Sydney was digging for in her utility belt because... well, I knew the attempt would fail, but as I was working on the page I started to think about what possible thing she could pull out that might help. Attacking Concretia is basically a no-go. The golems she forms are pretty tough (tough being an entirely relative term, especially in a world of supers) and if you break one, she can just make another if there's a ready supply of stone around. I say stone, but we've only seen her form golems from concrete and asphalt so far. When she's in her specter form in between golems, she can't be hurt by pedestrian physical attacks either. We haven't seen her get attacked with energy or magic in that form so we don't know how effective that stuff is at this point.

I figure the best thing Sydney could pull out of her utility belt might have been a flare? Like an emergency flare that you can launch by pulling on the back like a holiday cracker, something you'd find on a lifeboat or maybe a survivalist hiking kit. (Is there such a thing as a non-emergency flare? I guess people could use them for light, but if you're using a flare for light, you're probably in an emergency situation already.) She could try and fire the flare out of the tarp and hope someone sees it and posts about it on social media and that someone at Arc-LIGHT is monitoring anything tagged #NYC on twitter. Or... she could try and fire it up into the false ceiling where she hid the stasis pod and, you know, hope the building catches on fire and a fire alarm goes off. That's the kind of thing that could get her a commendation for keeping her cool under pressure while also getting written up for destroying seven stories of private property before the fire got under control.

To clear up one or two misconceptions about the orbs. The orbs have a limit as to how far they will move away from her, (let's call it four meters) that much has been established, but within that perimeter, they can be pushed around, especially if she's not paying attention to them. She doesn't usually let anyone else near them though unless she's using them to clonk someone on the head or doing a double testicle crash test. This is the first time anything like this has happened.

And I know what you're thinking. Concretia's stone fingers shouldn't be able to use a touchscreen phone. There's a reason smartphone styluses aren't made from cement. Well, several reasons. Maybe she tore off a piece of tarp and used that to dial.