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I AM EMPOWERED, pt.2: The Twitter-based YEAR ONE prose dealie continues!
🕑 Added 2019-12-05 14:00:03 +0000 UTC<Note: You can check out I Am Empowered's previous installment here.
As we head into the second half of this ultimately abortive prose experiment's first chapter, prepare for a bunch of interesting factoids about Emp's supersuit that I never quite got around to mentioning in the comic proper. The "suit vision" (and Alien Augmented Reality) bit, VORPP intensity levels, the "mother of all hip bumps," and the fact that Emp always feels like she's naked are all riffs that I do consider canonical, even if they haven't actually appeared in the "real" series. (Er, except maybe for the peculiar riff about bladder-related phenomena.)
Even though this tweet-based project ground to a fault years ago, I still found it remarkably helpful in fleshing out Empowered concepts in a manner that I couldn't do quite as well, or as easily, in comics form.
And now, back to Emp's first-person narration, taking place roughly around the beginning of Empowered vol.1: >
I AM EMPOWERED
Chapter 1: MY STUPID NAME, AND MY EVEN STUPIDER SUPERSUIT (pt.2)
So, to restate: As a strident Suprahuman Studies major deeply insecure about her body, I was appalled by exploitative superheroine costumes.
With that in mind, let me now tell you more about the unearthly "supersuit" that renders me quite literally—if inconsistently—"Empowered."
My superpowers, if you'll please pardon the rather grandiose term, derive from a mysterious, enigmatic, seriously "WTF"-y alien hypermembrane.
Clarification: I don't actually know for certain that the supersuit is truly of alien origin, but I consider that a fairly safe assumption.
I'm pretty sure that my supersuit isn't, say, an especially sweet military—or even Apple—prototype that somehow escaped into the wild.
The suit's übertechnology isn't a precise match for any known alien race's godware, but who knows about aliens and their techno-shenanigans?
To quote Arthur C. Clarke's all-too-frequently overquoted Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
More appropriate to my situation, I'm saddened to admit, is the law coined by another SF author, Ted Sturgeon: "90% of everything is crap."
Anyhoo, the suit does indeed endow me with a nice little arsenal of legitimately cape-worthy Unearthly Powers, however modest they might be.
Wearing a fully intact hypermembrane, I'm as strong as ten men, easy. (Or maybe fifteen to twenty men, if measured in wan, effete hipsters.)
Side note: The metric of "as strong as (blank) men" is a crude, imprecise, and—let's face it—backwardly sexist form of measurement.
This biased assessment not only privileges the male as the preferred default value, but implicitly demeans and devalues women's strength.
As a strong(ish) woman with a degree in Suprahuman Studies, I'm appalled that I'd measure myself using such clearly discriminatory phrasing.
Less sexist, but more abstract: Wearing a fully intact hypermembrane, I'm about ten or twenty times stronger than the average human being.
Formerly unopenable pickle jars tremble with fear at my approach, knowing their unyielding seals must now yield to a Powerful Woman's Will.
Ended, too, is the tyranny of once-invulnerable plastic clamshell packaging everywhere. My inkjet cartridges and light bulbs must be freed!
(Seriously, I've actually had to use my suit's superstrength to open recalcitrant jars and clamshell packages more than a few times, now.)
More conventionally—not to mention battle-relevantly—I can ragdoll bad guys with superstrong punches and go villain-bowling with boulders.
With the suit's strength and my own way-too-broad hips, I can even deliver The Mother of All Hip Bumps, hard enough to roll a BadGuyMobile.
I can leap remarkable, even astounding distances. Unfortunately, in a built-up urban landscape, this often means I'm leaping into disaster.
More on this topic later, but let's just say that super-jumps from rooftop to rooftop are much, MUCH harder than they look.
With a wave of my supersuited hand, I can zap things—or "VORPP" things, really, as that's the sound the resulting energy blast always makes.
Yes, indeedy, it's true: As a superheroine, my powerset includes the gift of DEADLY JAZZ HANDS.
Unfortunately, my badass VORPPing tends to be wildly inaccurate, as one would tend to expect from a jazz-hands-based form of energy weapon.
Clarification: My VORPPing capacity ranges from non-lethal zapping—perfect for swatting pesky, normal-human minions—to very lethal indeed.
At max VORPPing effort, I can do severe damage to cars, mecha, villain-lair walls, criminal rocklife, animated abstract-art sculptures, etc.
Happily, the supersuit seems to sense my VORPP-related intentions when I rock my Power Vogue-ing, so no one gets accidentally vaporized.
Next up: The membranous eyepiece lenses in my supersuit's mask open up an awesome—though bewildering—array of vision-related options to me.
I don't just have beyond-perfect, 20/Ridonkulous vision, as if I'm the world's largest and most bizarrely plumaged peregrine falcon. Oh, no.
And my mask's lenses don't merely give me camera-like zoom and macro viewing capabilities. That stuff, at least, is comprehensible to me.
Seeing in the dark? Easy-peasy, though the suit cycles oddly through night-vision options, some of which are familiar, some of which aren't.
When I'm villain-hunting in a pitch-black warehouse, the suit might show me recognizable thermal imaging, or greenish light intensification.
Other times, it uses much stranger night-vision modes, like a "sparkle-vision" dealie that detects organic electrical activity—I think.
No, what's odder is that my supersuit's lenses occasionally let me perceive puzzling and disturbing imagery that I can't really understand.
If I squint the right way, I can literally look into people's bodies. Sometimes what I see is MRI-ish, and sometimes it's wet, icky, gooshy.
At other times, my wacky "suit-vision" inexplicably—and creepily—shifts into what I've come to think of as "Alien Augmented Reality" mode.
Weird little caption-y thingies filled with incomprehensible symbols start popping up in my field of view, tagged to random objects nearby.
Often, I look up into the night sky and see strange, amorphous shapes rippling across the starfield, labeled with unintelligible captions.
Then I say out loud—if no one's around, that is—"Hey, supersuit, this sad, ignorant hominid can't understand what you're showing her, okay?"
And, PLINK, the anomalous imagery suddenly disappears, until the next time the suit tries to present its Guided Alien View wackiness to me.
Amazing yet creepy: I made the impressive-slash-disturbing discovery that, when I'm wearing the fully intact supersuit, I never have to pee.
No joke: One time I had the suit on for a good 20 hours straight before, startled, I realized that I hadn't needed a bathroom break all day.
Honestly, for a girl with a bladder capacity normally in the "thimbleful" range, not needing to pee counts as a truly legitimate superpower.
Sadly, this power disappears when the suit is damaged, which is problematic for anyone prone to getting tied to a chair for hours at a time.
Needless to say, I try my best not to think too deeply about the hows and whys—and WTFs—of the bathroom invulnerability the suit offers me.
So, yeah, the supersuit's membrane grants me all these unearthly powers and more, all in one shiny, glittery, glisten-y alienware package.
The material's normally quite sparkly, but it glitters much more brightly when it's accomplishing Bizarre Feats of Mysterious Badassery.
Going SuperSparkly is how I know the suit's working, just as a PC's cursor turning into an hourglass symbol shows the hard drive is active.
So far, so awesome, right? Well, notice that I haven't described what my xenotechnologically pseudo- magical Wondersuit actually looks like.
The Cruel Irony looms: My supersuit is a full-body hypermembrane of exotic matter that, as far as I can tell, is only a few molecules thick.
Holding the empty suit, its fabric is so eerily gauzy and insubstantial that it feels not like cloth, but like a weirdly slippery spiderweb.
Imagine if you will what my body, a endless source of shame and disappointment for me, looks like when enveloped by a molecule-thin glaze.
"Mercilessly revealing" does not begin to describe the resulting spectacle. "Wildly, even grotesquely embarrassing" might be more accurate.
The hypermembrane bears no resemblance to any real-world fabric, failing to drape or fold or wrap or CONCEAL IN ANY G-D MANNER WHATSOEVER.
Wearing my supersuit, I look exactly as if I've been stripped naked and coated from head to toe with a gossamer film of glittery body paint.
The Cruel Irony, revealed: I, of all people, wound up prancing around in The Most Humiliatingly Revealing Superheroine Costume EVAR.
My shame: No body-proud superheroine or deliberately provocative supervillainess wears an outfit even REMOTELY as slutty-looking as mine.
Four years in college complaining about offensive, titillating superchica wear, and I end up (under)dressed like this? Cue the sad trombone.
The suit is so unlike any form of human clothing that I can't feel even the slightest sense of its material stretching, tugging or shifting.
So, when I'm wearing the stupid thing, not only do I LOOK essentially naked, I FEEL essentially, absolutely, utterly and completely naked.
Unless I look down at myself—hey, there's my chubby, puffy body, totally on display—I can't tell whether I'm butt-naked or supersuit-clad.
I scoff at mundane nightmares of being nude in public, since my workdays are now waking nightmares of fighting crime while nude in public.
One tiny—as in, nano-tiny—advantage of this mortifying costume: Cassidy will never, ever guess that shy li'l "E-Pow" is the girl wearing it.
Similarly, I'm sure that none of the derpy, Y-chromosomal dumbasses from my Suprahuman Studies classes would possibly deduce my alter ego.
They'd neverEVER think that the new superheroine prancing around in shameful skankwear could be their (ahem) "opinionated" former classmate.
In fact, the word they'd probably use would be "strident," the sexist male's coded, dog-whistle term for Unacceptable Thinking While Female.
They'd never guess that I'd wind up as an embarrassingly sexualized superheroine because, well, I could never have guessed it myself.
As you'll soon see, rarely in my life have I felt less genuinely (lowercase-E) empowered than I have since I became (uppercase-E) Empowered.
As you'll soon hear me say—or exhale, really—on too many occasions to bother counting: "SIGH."
<Next week: In our next I Am Empowered installment, we find out the rationalization for why the hell this narration is formatted as (old-style) 140-character tweets, not to mention why we never, ever seem to hear much about Emp's college or high school friends in the comic. Click here to jump to the next chapter!
Gotta say, the second half of this chapter was a fair bit shorter than the first. I'm not yet sure how long I should make these serialized excerpts from the project's 140-odd pages; any suggestions from you readers as to what length of excerpt would work best for y'all?>
Tomorrow on this Patreon: Stand by for the Friday return of Comics Riffs I Love! (Haven't yet decided if it's gonna be another bunch of weird-ass Frank Thorne page layouts or something manga-related. Ooh, the suspense!)
Comments
Adam Warren
Yeah, that does seem sensible.
KranberriJam
Okay, the Alien AR Mode makes the suit even MORE interesting than before. After volume 11, I am chomping at the bit to learn more about it. As for lengths, I think whatever seems like an appropriate stopping point is better than specific lengths.
Adam Warren
Ehh, I saw the MOAHB as more of a side-to-side thing. The suitvision stuff could be interesting, but I've long struggled with how to the depict the different modes with my (very) analog art technique.
Adam Warren
She first mentions the power to Thugboy and Ninjette late in EMPOWERED vol.1, which takes place well after this YEAR ONE (or FIRST 4-5 MONTHS, arguably) project. Presumably she stumbled across the power after the timeframe of I AM EMPOWERED.
Adam Warren
Yeahp, pretty much.
Moondai
I love these behind the scenes stories!
Tim
One thing though; isn't the suit able to turn itself invisible? That's how she managed to take out dWARF the first time I seem to recall, yet it's not mentioned here.
Tim
Very interesting. I've read the comic since it's start, so I know pretty much all of this already, but it's nice to have it all in one place like this.
Dean Reilly
Didn't you reuse the 'Alien AR Mode' idea for Mechanismo in <i>Hell Bent or Heaven Sent</i>?
Lex of Excel
When you say the MOAHBs, I'm just picturing Emp doing Rainbow Mika's Peach Bomber. Also, the various forms of sight the suit's lenses provide extends far beyond what I originally thought. Might make for some interesting scary moments in future volumes?
Eric
I like these bits.
Adam Warren
Nice.
Strypgia
Like wearing nuthin' at all... nuthin' at all... nuthin' at all... Thugboy would agree, she's Stupid Sexy Emp.
