Characters / Grrl Power: Archon

The official American supergroup. For the main character page, see here.

ARCHON

A team of government-sponsored superheroes who recruit Sydney. Tropes applying to the whole team:

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• Cape Busters: Although the Archon field teams are supers themselves, part of their mandate is to address the antics of superpowered vigilantes — so the government has them performing this function. Certainly, the basically non-powered Archon leadership is in the business of controlling supers.
• Civvie Spandex: Most of the team's costumes are along the lines of military jumpsuits.
• Code Name: Each fieldable member has one.
• Heroic Build: With one aversion, every member of the team is a perfect physical specimen.
• Mildly Military: Some aspects of the team are remarkably informal — such as military discipline administered via atomic wedgie. Possibly justified since standard military disciplinary techniques wouldn't work very well on many of the supers. Two of their stronger members are 'civilian specialists,' even.
• Military Superhero: Archon is provisionally organized under the DoD.
• Secret Identity: Averted. As members of an official peace-keeping organization, all of the members of Archon have public identities.
• Spandex, Latex, or Leather: Systematically averted, from what we can tell. The team's outfits seem to be fairly standard, sensible military-type uniforms. Except Dabbler's, of course, but she's pretty bad with the whole "military discipline" thing in general.
• Superheroes Stay Single: Averted. At least two of the team's members are explicitly noted to be dating, and another two who have expressed mutual attraction are choosing not to do anything because one outranks the other currently.
• Superhero Speciation: Subverted. While each hero has a different thematic and different main powers, several powers overlap — there are several flyers, at least two characters with Super-Toughness, and more than a few with Super-Strength.
• Theme Naming: Archon has five branches identified so far, all of which have their names start with Arc. Arc-Swat for super-combat, Arc-Light for super-investigations, Arc-Dark for some as-of-yet unexplained purpose (likely superpowered espionage and similar intrigue), Arc-Aegis for security, defense, and containment, and Arc-Sparq, which seems to deal with equipment.
  Sydney: That's cool I guess. Do you have Arc-Burgers in the mess and stuff?
  Maxima: What? It's not a franchise... Jesus, swear to me you'll never say this in front of Arianna.

ARC-Swat

Halo

Halo / Sydney Trouble Scoville Junior

"My hyperactivity gives me an initiative bonus!"

The lead character of the comic, Sydney is a hyperactive, tightly-wound geek who part-owns and runs a comic-book shop. She's also the newest member of Arc-SWAT, and is a bit of an oddity, as she's just a normal human bonded to seven mysterious orbs which give her superpowers.

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• A-Cup Angst: Especially when comparing herself with Maxima or some of the other well-endowed supers she encounters. Peggy tells her that it's okay, because Peggy is built similarly, and "the A-Team sticks together." Sydney is not amused. The author has stated that he prefers to avoid having Sydney be really angsty about her cup size. She's a bit annoyed, but mostly deals with it fine. She does get somewhat annoyed when people openly complain about large boobs-related stuff, though, like Concretia angsting over not being able to feel the jiggle in her breasts.
• Alliterative Name: Sydney Scoville.
• Ambiguously Human: Downplayed. Sydney is human, was born to human parents, and neither ARCHON nor Dabbler have detected otherwise. However, her orbs seem to complicate things a bit, since Varia, a super whose power changes depending on the people she's in physical contact with, didn't get anything from her (though the halo expanded to cover Varia as well). Since Varia presumably would've gotten a normal set of powers if she touched Sydney before she had bonded with the orbs, and Varia's powers are at least partially based on genetics, it seems that either the orbs interfered somehow... or Sydney no longer qualifies as human to Varia's powers.
• Ancient Artifact: Halo has seven of them; floating orbs in the colors of the spectrum, each one granting her a different superpower. The current theory is that they replicate the various capabilities of a spacecraft.
  • The orange one is pretty well a Wave-Motion Gun. With the random upgrade she bought while fighting a golem, she now has access to rapid-fire mode.
  • The yellow one makes an illusion of her that she can see and hear through. It also grants her True Sight, the ability to see through illusions or invisibility. She later finds a setting that grants Aura Vision. She unlocks a new ability that allows her to teleport to her illusion's location.
  • The blue one lets her fly. An upgrade she bought while fighting giant tentacle kaiju gives her the ability to open Aetherium causeways, a sort of Fast Travel that normally requires enormous ships or a mass sacrifice of psychics to open, and another upgrade grants her the passive ability of featherfall- she safely lands from any height even without holding the blue orb.
  • The indigo one generates a personal force field with Teleport Interdiction as an added feature.
  • The violet one gives her a telekinetic energy-pseudopod.
  • The green one was unknown to her until well after she joined ARCHON — it provides life support — in its reveal strip, it creates a bubble of breathable air. However, a later strip shows that it also generates other gases, so this is still up for debate.
  • She still hasn't figured out what the red one does — yet.
• Angrish: The things that Sydney says in an angry rant can cause a passing sailor to blush.
• Anti-Gravity Clothing: Sydney's seven orbs, which default position is to float in a circle above her head, hence her superhero name of "Halo".
• Ascended Fangirl: A comics nerd turned superhero.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: She has ADHD, she's on medication one step down from methamphetamine for it, and it still isn't enough to fully regulate the condition.
  Vekter: And [someone] distract Halo with something shiny!
• Augmented Reality: Cora upgrades her glasses into something like a less obtrusive Google Glass, with a translator, targeting reticules, and photo sending (which Frix uses). She hasn’t told anyone else at Archon but Dabbler because she doesn’t want to retake the shooting course without their assist.
• Aura Vision: A sub-power of her yellow orb.
• Awesome by Analysis: When Sydney deliberately crosses her Genre Savvy with her ADHD ability to come at problems from angles nobody would usually expect by throwing the kitchen sink at them and seeing what might stick, awesome can, in fact, ensue, as Vehemence found to his cost. According to her entry in the cast page, one of Sydney's advantages is that she can come up with more power stunts than the people with those same powers. This is demonstrated in the opening pages, where she proves how her attack in a superhero tabletop game actually worked despite the villain's force-field.
• Bad Liar: Sydney cannot tell a convincing lie, occasionally leading to Cassandra Truth-style problems. It just doesn't help that she really was trying to get away from a group of nuns...
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Well, no, she's still an ordinary human, but she is the only member of Archon (only character period, actually) that can survive in space without support since her shield protects her from vacuum, her life support orb provides oxygen, and she gains mobility from the fly orb. The only downside is that since she is able to use only two orbs at a time, she routinely has to swap between breathing and flight to make much progress.
• Barrier Warrior: When using the indigo orb. Not only can she change the size of the force field to cover large groups of people, it's strong enough to take some of Maxima's most powerful attacks without difficulty. It even gives her immunity to some non-physical attacks like Vehemence's aggro aura. It also protects the ground at her feet, as evidenced when Maxima hit someone — at the time anchoring himself to the ground — hard enough to lift the street... and Sydney's shield kept the ground at the same level it was when she shielded herself, making a hole on the raised portion.
• Beware the Silly Ones: She's usually not all that threatening, but she put a robber in the hospital when he tried to rob her, and the police report only read "Oh the humanity". She was also able to knock out a full-on super without the use of her orbs, and when Concretia managed to disable said orbs, Sydney reacted immediately by emptying her entire magazine into Concretia's skull.^note Sydney knows this is non-lethal as this is not Concretia's real body and she can just make another golem body. Do not mess with Sydney Scoville.
• Blind Without 'Em: Invoked but averted: Sydney pretends she's helpless without her glasses to get a villain off his guard. She then boasts about averting the trope (thereby lampshading the aversion), pointing out that no-one is so blind as to not see someone moving right near them just because you take their glasses off, at least not in law enforcement. (She points out that there are people that blind; but, again, they wouldn't be in law enforcement.)
• Boring, but Practical: For all the amazing powers her orbs provide, her fallback option tends to be just using them to telekinetically hit people who get too close. It helps that this is the one function of the orbs that doesn't require her to hold them in her hands. Also, it shouldn't be underestimated, as the orbs used this way have demonstrated being able to break troll bones. Plus, she isn't above fighting dirty with them.
• Brain Bleach: After Cora neglects to use non-lethal ordinance against a villain, Sydney starts reaching for the memory-erasing serum the villain wanted to use on her.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Her wacky antics may make her a major nuisance, but her abilities and competence make her far too valuable to the team to justify dismissing her. Much of the nuisance factor may be a result of her being a Fish out of Water, and is something Maxima is trying to fix.
• Chekhov's Skill: Sydney's love for extremely spicy food and her built-up resistance to their effects. It's just a funny quirk of hers used for comedy, right? No way it'll ever become a significant plot point... Until it is specifically used to cast out an alien entity possessing Sydney and sharing her senses.
• Cleavage Window: Stealth subversion. The cleavage window shirt Sydney wears is a Power Girl T-shirt with a fake cleavage design. The same design can be seen in the comic store window during the exterior shot, as shown here.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: She tries hard not to be one, especially since Frix is polyamorous, but it's an uphill struggle, not helped by a gnomish mechanic openly talking about sleeping with Frix right in front of Sydney. When having to let the gnome mechanic down, Frix mentions that it's a bad idea to openly talk about sleeping with the guy whose girlfriend can cut tanks in two with minimal effort.
• Clingy MacGuffin: Sydney and her power-spheres cannot be separated by more than a certain distance. Although Sydney won't be dragged along if there's a pull on the spheres, the spheres will just stop moving at all — even Maxima's Super-Strength is unable to pull them an inch further. It also effectively keeps her imprisoned if the orbs are separated from her and enclosed so she can't use them.
• Cloudcuckoolander: A card-carrying, tax-paying resident of Cloudcuckooland. She acts like the sun burns her, vampire-style (though it doesn't), keeps up a David Attenborough or Jacques Cousteau-style commentary while scuba-diving, and has a doodle of herself marrying a shirtless Wolverine in her notebook (which she calls "the list").
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • While not containing solely F-words, Sydney's cursing did manage to make a sailor blush... though that might be because of the nuns behind her.
  • In a Funny Background Event, when Sydney is giving the interview, even the censors comment on it.
    News crawler: Please make this girl stop cursing. I feel like I'm playing Diablo with the censor button.
• Combat Tentacles: What she uses the violet orb for on occasion.
• Combo Platter Powers:
  • Sydney's seven orbs each do very different things. One gives her flight, one gives her a very impressive force field, one makes an energy-tentacle... thing, one gives her telepresence and true sight, one makes a powerful energy blast, one generates air, and the last no-one has any idea about. Her current hypothesis for why these powers were grouped together is that it was intended to serve as a spaceflight suite. She can only use two at a time, though, one for each hand.
  • This gets taken even further as we learn more about the orbs. Not only do several of them seem to come with secondary modes, but they also come with a large skill tree. It's possible that at full power she could end up equaling Dabbler or even Max.
• Companion Cube: Sydney's tube, at least in her early scenes. She uses it to hold her power orbs (which otherwise deploy themselves in a ring around her, explaining her hero name), and treats it almost as if it were sentient. Most of her Blatant Lies are attempts at covering up what's really inside it.
• Covert Pervert: Sydney usually keeps her libido downplayed, but she can let it slip sometimes. For example: she has an Edward Elric dakimakura that she uses for self-pleasure, says that she's had "dreams" involving a writhing mass of tentacles, and implies that the only reason that she wouldn't want to watch Maxima and Hiro have sex is that she knows them personally, and feels like that would make it weird. As for her later relationship with Frix, her openness to the pairing was shown a good four years beforehand, when she readily agrees with Dabbler about the appeal of a furred sapient partner.
  Sydney: I've seen that too... I mean I haven't! Shut up! I mean... oh, who am I kidding? I'm on board.
• Curiosity Is a Crapshoot: As annoying and obnoxious as she is, it's a very bad idea to leave her unsupervised. She will wander off and get into an attic/storage compartment and start to play with things she doesn't understand in her boredom.
• Cuteness Overload: Her reaction to meeting a were-hare is quite telling.
• Dark Secret: Parodied. Sydney doesn't want the rest of Arc-SWAT to know that she's a vegetarian. Sadly, one of the people she does tell is one of Harem's duplicates and the other four spill to everyone else within a page.
• Disability Immunity: Her ADHD makes her functionally immune to Truth Serum — it gets her talking all right, but then she just KEEPS ON talking about anything and everything that pops into her head, making it nigh-impossible to get the actual desired information out of her. She later admits that she's actually playing this up intentionally.
• Disability Superpower:
  • The author has joked that Sydney can't be traumatized because she's so distractible. Considering that she was stuck on an alien planet, attacked by an entire army, and lost almost two months of her life (including her birthday) seemingly with no ill effect, they may be right. Subverted when she starts getting trauma-induced nightmares.
  • Her ADHD plays with this trope. On one hand, she can think outside the box and come up with plans real fast, as shown in the fight with Vehemence. However, it's not all upsides, and she does clearly struggle with distractions (in the aforementioned fight she has to stop herself from thinking about Batman while her friends are in danger), and takes medication to alleviate the effect.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • When she's trying to think of a plan to stop Vehemence, she keeps thinking about Batman, including him dancing with a bat-themed codpiece and no shirt in front of Catwoman.
  • Earlier, she finds out that succubus breasts are literally hypnotic, and uses this to distract Vehemence by having Dabbler jump up and down.
  • Later, she totally misses her very shirtless teammate's instructions to use a wrist band GPS device.
• The Dreaded: To the Calamarians. When a scout, unknowingly awakened by Sciona, encounters the team, it only engages in a passive scan until it sees and recognizes Halo's orbs, at which point it immediately sends what appears to be an S.O.S. that calls forth a spaceship and Kaiju launching nuclear weapon level attacks in Sydney's general direction.
• Dropped Glasses: Sydney drops her glasses while eating ultra-spicy ramen, just in time to catch a spiced noodle to the eye. She also later drops them during her first real super-battle, but actually turns that to her advantage; see the note on Blind Without 'Em.
• Ear Worm: Sydney seems to be prone to this problem because of her ADHD. During her Awesome by Analysis moment, she keeps thinking about Batman... and, after her plan takes shape inside her mind, Batman pops up once more singing "I'm the Bat-man!" to the tune of Scatman John, and it gets stuck in her head.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Prior to using, or even getting, her orbs, she's had some kind of martial arts training, as one of her first on-screen actions is taking down a man at least a foot taller and one-and-a-half times as heavy, with military training, super-powers, and a gun, in a matter of seconds, while she herself is unarmed. Her backstory has her being accosted by a mugger, and her giving him a beatdown so thorough, the official report can only say "Oh, the humanity!" Her orbs make her deadlier by giving her more options, such that she can match Math in combat, whose martial arts skills are to the level where he's indistinguishable from a super-powered individual (though he certainly was letting her win).
• Entitled to Have You: Towards Leon. Upon returning to ARCHON, as soon as she can focus, her top priority is barging into Leon's office and declaring him her boyfriend, without any prior notice or commitment. The moment she sees Leon and Krona kissing, once she recovers from the shock, rather than excuse herself and consider other prospects, she forcibly inserts herself into the relationship and starts trying to negotiate "dating rights" with Krona, completely ignoring that Leon's even in the room, until he says something, and then proceeds to kick him in the face. To her credit however, she realizes this was wrong and apologizes to him later.
• Everything Is Racist: She accuses Harem of this in regards to the ability of nerds to swim. She immediately realizes that Anvil, Jiggawatt, and Varia are all giving her the stinkeye.
  Sydney: Nyaiii mean uh... clique-ist.
• Evil Counterpart: Ambiguously Evil counterpart, at least. She's got one of a sort in the villain Hex, although only in their respective superpowers. Hex can fly, shoot laser beams from six orbs floating around her, and can form a force field. Sydney's power are, of course, much more varied.
• Eye Scream:
  • Three million Scoville noodle, directly to the eye. Medic...
  • When Sydney's eyes turn back to normal after she's no longer possessed by Lapha. OooOoooOooooOoooOoOooooooooOooOooW!
• Fatal Flaw: In addition to her Weaksauce Weakness, she has a terrible tendency to stand around and gloat after defeating a powerful foe, to the point that three Kaiju were able to sneak up on her.
• Fire-Breathing Diner: Finding a place that serves food hot enough to induce this is one of Sydney's favorite things. She eventually succeeds.
• Flying Firepower: She can easily fit here as part of her Combo Platter Powers. When using the flight orb and the "pew-pew orb", she can obliterate an army of Mook Mobiles, and a few Kaiju-sized planet-destroyers as well. As she'd rather keep her Deflector Shield up at all times, though, this means she has to switch the flight orb and PPO and shortly falls while shooting. She can switch back very fast, though, mostly meaning she's flying elliptically while firing lasers.
• Gatling Good: The PPO can fire a rapid stream of low-powered fireballs.
• Geek: And assertive about it. Not that a comics-shop-owning pop culture fan like her can exactly hide it. She might also label herself a nerd, but she doesn't really fit the definition used on this site.
• Geeky Turn-On: She is attracted to Leon not only because he's tall but because he is a geek AND a nerd. She briefly considers marrying him and having him change his last name to Scoville.
• Genki Girl: In all her ADHD glory. There are times when she seems to be intentionally channeling Tomo from Azumanga Daioh.
• Genre Savvy:
  • She's a comic-book nerd turned superhero — of course she's going to be this, as shown under Awesomeness by Analysis.
    Sydney: Comics are kind of my thing, your Commander in Chiefness. Turns out actual superheroes work pretty much like they do in comics.
  • She knows how Truth Serum works, so when she's injected with some, she decides to play up her ADHD, going into full Motor Mouth tendencies.
• Goblin Face: Sydney is usually depicted cute enough, but some of her extreme facial expressions can veer into the misshapen. For example, when having a jealousy fit (about a goblin, fittingly).
• Graceful Loser: Zigzagged. On her first meeting with Dabbler, she conked the succubus over the head with one of her orbs after she terrified Sydney with her glamour and then outmaneuvered her. On her second spar with Math, the martial artist maneuvers her into hitting herself in the shin with her own orbiting orbs, and Sydney acknowledges that it was a good move.
• Has a Type: Given her reactions to a werewolf and Cora's fuzzy crewmember, Frix, she definitely likes her men sporting fur.
• Height Angst: Halo sometimes gets peeved about being the smallest super in the cast. (Not to mention the least endowed.)
• He Is Not My Boyfriend: Yeah, but you wish he was, Sydney.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Not quite as extreme as some examples, but her boyfriend, Frix, is from a species which females are usually about 9 feet tall, whereas Sydney is short, even by human standards. She has to get a potion from Dabbler that will even let her take Frix' entire girth.
• How Do I Shot Web?: The orbs don't exactly come with a user manual. Most of them are straightforward enough, but the use of the green orb wasn't obvious until she'd made extensive use of the shield orb and the function of the red orb remains as of yet undetermined. But even moreso than the basic powers each orb has and their uses, the opacity of the upgrade system causes no shortage of drama when she unlocks an upgrade and has to hope she's picking a useful one.
• Hyperventilation Bag: For Sydney when her mouth gets her into trouble, or when she learns that in real life, some things don't follow the rules that fiction made up for them.
• Improperly Paranoid: Sydney is never scared of actual threats. The bank robbery, Sciona's hideout (both of them), the Calamarians; she takes that kind of stuff in stride. It's the vague "maybe this will happen someday" stuff that terrifies her. To wit, Maxima humors Sydney by escorting her to the stratosphere regarding power(s) Sydney hasn't revealed yet, and despite nothing being visible all the way to the horizon, Sydney is still hesitant, because somewhere out there, maybe, just maybe, someone will come along, ready to counter and overwhelm everything she can do....
• Innocently Insensitive:
  • Due to having a hard time filtering anything she says, she tends to insult or otherwise offend people without meaning to do so. It comes to a head during the meeting with the various supernatural entities in the setting when she offends the resident Friendly Neighborhood Vampire with a popular meme.
    Sydney: In Russia, the hunger eats you.
    Ingsol: I AM NOT RUSSIAN!
  • During the meeting with Thothogoth, Dabbler's ex-boyfriend, she compares his head to "a peeled thumb in an Uruk-Hai helmet", and when she shows confusion that demons are not all about chaos, Thothogoth outright calls it a racist remark. He even explicitly says she is being hurtful.
• Jack of All Trades: Her superpowers are by far the most varied on the team. She can lift up to 16 ton (negligible compared to Maxima, but still), shield herself and others, fire some kind of laser beams in several different ways, teleport, use telepresence, have true sight, generate air to survive underwater or in space, and her flight is by far the best on the team. She can cross a planet (of unknown size, but still) in minutes, and effectively space travel. And we don't even know her limits yet. Despite this, while she has a lot of powers, most of them can be done by one of the other team members better. Maxima has stronger laser beams, Harem has better teleportation, and both Anvil and Achilles have a better defense. She does outshine everyone in travel and force fields, though, and is the only character shown to be able to survive in space or underwater without support (Maxima has been explicitly shown with breathing gear, so she still needs oxygen).
• Karma Houdini: Thanks to Harem's prank grabbing Maxima's attention, Sydney apparently gets away with snagging Max's hat — and getting away with pulling stuff on Max isn't always easy. She later loses it again but suffers no punishment.
• Lady Swears-a-Lot:
  • When she gets excited (i.e. a lot of the time), Sydney is prone to swearing in a stream-of-consciousness fashion.
    Math: She's definitely got a blackbelt in cursing. 5th... no, 7th dan.
  • A Funny Background Event when Sydney's being interviewed after the bank robbery has the news caption reading: "Please make this girl stop cursing. I feel like I'm playing Diablo with the censor button."
  • And later we get a flashback of her putting a down payment on a car in cash due to a massive Swear Jar.
  • After coming back from her solo sojourn in space, she borrows thousands of dollars in cash to pay back her swearing into her swear jar, counting off each instance before eventually rounding up and tossing all the remaining cash in.
• Lethal Chef: Describes her spaghetti sauce as "weapons-grade". It apparently involves peppers that are red, but are not red peppers.
• Levitating Lotus Position: Sydney will sometimes assume this position for fun while floating with her flight orb; for example, while watching the training session with Vehemence.
• Limited Move Arsenal: Despite her seven orbs with seven different powersets, she can only use two orbs at a time (one per hand), which occasionally causes her problems.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Sydney's orbs are a Clingy MacGuffin, and cannot be separated from her by more than five feet or so. Even Maxima — who can lift thirty-five tons without noticeable effort — can't overcome that. Oddly, she can't drag Sydney around by yanking on them, either. This allows Sydney a little bit of gloating at Max (especially when she falls on her butt), but is perhaps her one glaring weakness — if they're pinned under something she can't lift, she's trapped. Concretia exploits this weakness by encasing the orbs in concrete, pinning down Halo.
  • She can only use as many orbs as she has hands available, which limits her options somewhat. This comes especially into play during aerial combat. On the ground, she can just keep the shield up and switch to whatever other orb is most appropriate for the situation, but in the air (or in space) she has to sacrifice maneuverability or defense to use her weapons. Less a problem in space, where the lack of gravity allows her to surf on momentum, but that still makes her flight pattern predictable.
  • Her impenetrable shield does not allow air to penetrate it. After holding one around herself from most of the restaurant fight she starts to get lightheaded and is told to drop it for a few moments to get her air back. She does point out the Fridge Logic in that weakness though, like how changing the size of the shield doesn't seem to affect the pressure of the air inside it.
  • She also has no Super-Strength orb (at least not directly — the lighthook can lift about 16 tons), which means that she is exactly as physically strong as you would expect a nerdy young woman who doesn't seem very athletic to be, so she's unable to pick a heavy gun at one point (though she probably could have with proper leverage, albeit with difficulty).
  • She never uses her powers unless she's holding her orbs, hence merely touching them is not enough to activate them. Luckily, one of her allies created a Save Point before this, or that discovery would have killed her.
  • The orbs may be powerful (potentially being creations of an Nth level civilization if Dabbler's theory is correct), but at the end of the day they are functionally still devices that need some source of energy to function. This becomes very relevant after Sydney glasses a huge portion of desert with her PPO, outputting more energy than anything else we'd seen her do to that point, and her orbs seem to start suffering performance issues afterwards, such as the flight orb gradually becoming slower. Fortunately they do seem capable of recharging themselves (slowly), but there are still unanswered questions (such as what sort of energy do they actually use, and where they get it from).
  • Lampshaded aversion: Sydney can still see through her shield, so it obviously lets light through, yet lasers and other harmful light can't penetrate it. It's unknown how the shields differentiate between harmful and non-harmful light, but she'd presumably be okay walking in a radioactive zone.
• Loyal Phlebotinum: The orbs are linked to Halo and can only be controlled by her.^note With the possible exception of Varia, although that's still an unknown. When Lapha manages to take possession of Sydney's body, the orbs refuse to respond to her and slip away from her grasp. (It's likely because Sydney's mind still has telekinetic control over them, but it's doubtful Lapha could do anything even if she touched them.)
• Makeup Is Evil: Downplayed, but Sydney's not wearing make-up makes her feel this way.
• Mars Needs Women: After being rescued by Cora, she ends up hooking up with Frix, a sexy, amphibious, wolf-like alien.
• Masochist's Meal: Sydney likes it hot.
  Sydney: Do you have a dab of pure cap I could garnish this with?^note "Pure cap," here, referring to pure capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers spicy.
• Master of Illusion: Minor example; she can produce an illusory copy of herself she can see and hear through, courtesy of the yellow comm-ball orb.
• Meaningful Name: Sydney Scoville loves spicy food, as lampshaded by Mrs. B. at the restaurant.
• Moment Killer: Often, due to her ADHD and poor impulse control.
• Motor Mouth: On more than one occasion she goes into a bit of a rant. At one point, when she's been drugged with a truth serum by a villain, although it may have genuinely started as a reaction between her ADHD and the serum, she purposefully turns the semi-random babbling Wall of Text that the villains can barely understand into a delaying tactic.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • A background check reveals that she was once arrested for assault. Maxima does not find that surprising. What surprises everyone in the board room is that she was found not guilty due to acting in self-defense because somebody actually tried to mug her. The only description in the official police report is "Oh, the humanity!"
  • Later, she's at a bank when it gets robbed. When her co-worker/business partner hears about it, he's concerned about the fate of the robbers.
  • When in an alley on a space station with Dabbler's friend Cora, they get confronted by a group of muggers. Their response? Laughter.
• Mundane Utility: Halo realizes she could totally cheat at Skeeball using the orbs. She can also use them to hit people with as they hurtle around her. In fact, this sometimes seems to be becoming her primary combat technique.
• Nerdgasm: She begins to hyperventilate in excitement at meeting a were-dire honey badger.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: As long as she keeps her shield up. Nothing can pass through, not even Harem's teleportation, and so far no attack has managed to penetrate it. It's not unbreakable though, as it has been shown to sustain damage (by Orbital Bombardment), but regenerated said damage quickly. Enough sustained firepower would theoretically break through, but we're talking about a devastating amount of energy here.
• Nightmare Fetishist: When Sydney finds out that vampires and werewolves are real, rather than being shocked and horrified, she's overjoyed and squeals with childish glee, even going so far as to hug a very big and imposing werewolf around the waist and commenting on how "fluffy" his fur is, and then proceeding to troll said werewolf with a camera like a photographer talking to a model.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Sydney is very often drawn in cartoony poses while the rest of the cast is drawn more realistically.
• No Poker Face: Sydney is terrible at poker, because she gets exuberant whenever she thinks she has a good hand, making the others immediately fold.
  Alt Text: There's a poker face, a tell tale face, then there's Sydney's face.
• No-Sell: Her orbs are immune to any and all forms of scanning, from magical to technological. Several functions (most notably the skill tree) are only visible to organic eyes. Dabbler theorizes it's some sort of illusory or psychic light that is masking itself^note The Alt Text jokingly suggests that the orbs could mask readouts to make them look like there's nothing being read, but she isn't able to confirm it. Krona was able to see the "source code" of the orbs when the skill tree pops up, but Krona's magic is so unique that she's considered an entire faction of magic all by herself.
• Only the Knowledgable May Pass: Her nerd-test with Leon.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Peggy realized that she pushed Sydney too far when Sydney yelled out "Fuck BATMAN!"
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: As a Motor Mouth with Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! and no verbal filter, she has become very well-acquainted with the taste of shoe leather when she says the wrong thing.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Sydney doesn't look like it, but she is one of the most powerful and potentially destructive supers in the world, and she is not even close to her hypothetical limit. Her Pew-pew orb alone can destroy waves of fighter craft in a single strike, take down enormous Kaiju, and turn an entire desert to glass, all with no particular strain on Sydney herself.
• Perverted Drooling: When presented with a roomful of shirtless, perfectly-muscled superhero hunks.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Downplayed but present, mostly because she has almost no filter on what she says. She's currently being trained by Arianna to have a bit more of a self-censor, with... limited success thus far.
  Arianna: It would be a shame to refine you into a more considerate individual then have you insult every Irish person the first time you stub your toe on camera.
  Sydney: So... don't say stuff like "potato deficient famine jockeys"?
• Pop-Cultured Badass: She obviously has a detailed knowledge of internet memes, enjoys My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic enough to have its opening theme for a ringtone, and when Maxima is testing the strength of her forcefield, Halo starts dancing while singing "Can't Touch This" as well as proclaiming that she is "EENWEENCIBLE!"
• Power Incontinence: Due presumably to her powers deriving from the orbs and not from herself, Sydney has difficulty judging their level. She can't assess how fast she is flying, for instance, or use her energy blasts below maximum output. This has led to both a few accidents and some Achievements in Ignorance.
• Power Perversion Potential: Invoked.
  • When asked to name the orb that produces an energy tentacle, Sydney initially suggests "hentorb," "molestorb" and "The Violator". Eventually, she's forced to pick the more PR-friendly "lighthook".
  • When the superwomen of ARCHON are changing into their uniforms for a press conference, Sydney asks if the super guys are doing likewise. While holding the orb that gives her telepresence.
• Proud to Be a Geek: Sydney is not only very open in her geekery, she explicitly considers geekiness something to be proud of.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Sydney's force Maxima to make a Will Save.
• Required Secondary Powers:
  • While her shield has the Logical Weakness of being so strong that air can't pass through it, she lampshades how it apparently can compensate and eliminate the change in air pressure that changing its size would cause. The green orb's life support function is likely meant to compensate for this.
  • The flight orb cancels out vertigo while she's holding it, which is good because normally she's slightly acrophobic.
  • Although she is nowhere near strong enough to lift a small car, the lighthook can without putting any strain on Sydney. It is eventually revealed that the lighthook can lift somewhere around 16 tons before Sydney starts to feel the strain.
  • Her shield orb allows her to use the blaster orb when inside the shield. She also notes that the blaster orb needs a bit more effort to use, likely as a safety feature.
  • She realizes that the encapsulated nodes on her power diagram actually represent passive powers that activate or stay active when she's not touching the orbs. The node for the flight orb for example grants her "featherfall" and lets her descend slowly to the ground when not touching the orb.
• Rules Lawyer: Sydney, in her superhero RPG game. She knows all the tropes concerning superpowers and how to bend them to her will. This is likely to translate into Genre Savvy later on.
• Skewed Priorities: After receiving an urgent deploy order, along with Peggy, and arriving on the scene of the Fell Alien Invasion, the first thing that comes to mind?
  Sydney: They had a press conference without me?!
• Skill Scores and Perks: The Orbs apparently come with a skill tree.
  Sydney: DING mutha fuckas!
• Smarter Than You Look: Sydney, for all her quirks, is actually pretty damn smart and quick on the uptake. Not only does she combine her ADHD and genre savviness to form frighteningly effective plans, but when her orbs were disabled by Concretia, she immediately realized what had happened, reasoned that a geokinetic villain was most likely able to take some hits, and empties her entire magazine into Concretia's skull, all within a second.
• Spanner in the Works: If a villain tries to do anything where she happens to be, she will somehow be in the right place, at the right time to thwart it.
• Super-Speed: With her current set of upgrades, she can easily make Mach 16, and is able to reach anywhere on Earth in less than an hour. If she needs to get interstellar, she can open Aetherium Causeways to practically anywhere.
• Super-Strength: Can lift 16 tons via the lighthook, which is also not yet fully powered up.
• Squishy Wizard: Sydney has one of the most impressive set of superpowers of the setting thanks to her orbs, both in matter of sheer power and versatility. Beyond them, though, she's an entirely normal human being — and a rather nonathletic lightweight woman at that. She cannot lift a 39-kg minigun by upper body strength alone (and the effort of trying gets her lightheaded) and her punch ranks as "bunny" on the Punchomatic 6000.
• Teleporter's Visualization Clause: In "#499 – Inopportunity", she discovers the ability to teleport to the place where her illusion version is. Has a visual effect at her origin, going to her destination.
• Teleport Interdiction: Her forcefield also prevents teleporters like Harem from going through (in either direction).
• They Would Cut You Up:
  • Her (completely unfounded) fear if her powers are discovered.
  • Also here with an Invader Zim reference.
• Tomboyish Name: On both sides. Her full name's Sydney Scoville Junior.
  Sydney: Sydney is my dad's name, and it's gender neutral and... there you go.
• Tongue Trauma: Narrowly averted when Sydney pulled a robber by the tongue and slammed him to the ground. "Averted" because the robber was another super-powered being who was in disguise. His power just happened to also be extreme stretchiness.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Nonsexual example — she speaks dismissively to the waitress at a spicy-food-oriented restaurant, prompting them to dose her food with "The Unmaker." To the astonishment of all involved, she loves it, and the only problem she has is when a noodle flick into her eye. In fact, getting the hottest food she could appears to be why Sydney dissed the waitress in the first place.
• Translator Microbes: The glasses she got from Cora gives her subtitles to any alien language she hears, including the name of the language. This turns out to be better than Dabbler's language skills.
• Unaffected by Spice: Her deep love of extreme heat shows up several times:
  • In the early strips, she gets one of the spiciest meals at a Thai restaurant she frequents, and then adds three of the hottest sauces on the bar to the dish. The cook and his mother are watching from the kitchen and can't believe what they're seeing. The fumes are so intense that they affect people outside the restaurant.
    Sydney: Great meal as always, Mrs. B! That Ring of Fire stuff is pretty good. Actually has me a little worried about later tonight.
    Mrs. B.: [wearing a gas mask] So glad to hear it Miss Scoville. Living up to your family name I see.
  • Later on, she goes to another restaurant with her ARCHON teammate Peggy, and demands their hottest dish, the kind you have to sign a waiver to actually order. The cook wears a hazmat suit to retrieve the sauce from a safety container, and the bowl it's served in has hazard striping around the rim. Although Sydney has a Fire-Breathing Diner reaction, she tears into the dish and even wonders if the cooks have some "pure cap" ^note capsaicin is the main chemical associated with spicy foods to spice it up, while Peggy and the waitress recoil in horror and the cook faints. All is well until a noodle flips into her eye.
  • Much later on, she gets stranded in space and ends up in an interstellar way station. Once she figures out that an eatery serves a human-compatible dish that's really spicy, she draws a crowd who are amazed that she's eating grakz. Unfortunately, while she enjoys the dish, she doesn't enjoy the gastric fallout.
• Unusual Eyebrows: Mild example: her shaggy lady brows are an unique trait for her.
• Useless Useful Spell: Her True Sight is the strongest anyone has ever seen, able to pierce a Succubus glamor with ease. Unfortunately, it can't pierce more mundane disguises, and illusionists are apparently exceptionally rare on Earth.
  Deus: I'm sure in her line of work she'll eventually meet most of them.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The default mode of the PPO.
• Weak, but Skilled: The first thing Maxima saw that actually gathered her interest during the "bank robbery" is Sydney single-handed taking down a guy One Head Taller, with super-powers, military training, and a gun, after he clocked her, in a matter of seconds completely unarmed, and making sure he stayed down. This is before she pulls out her orbs. That very night, during the super-brawl, she is able to field strategies and tactics, on the fly, that greatly surpassed Maxima, a colonel in the armed forces with actual combat experience. The next day, when she's worried about being given a physically humiliating punishment like "a zillion pushups" she admits that she can maybe do about 10 "girly" pushups.
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • For Sydney, it's mittens. At least, that's the only aspect of the problem she's recognized; if something cut off or removed her hand, or otherwise rendered her unable to hold the orbs, she would also be screwed. (Though it has been noted that mittens, or being disarmed, would not render her completely helpless, as she would still be able to use her orbs as bludgeoning tools since they respond to her mental commands — a trick she's used more than once.) She also gets a good laugh from the rest of the team when she enthusiastically informs them that she's not bulletproof.
  • She has also learned that having her hands held shut is a weakness — she has to hold her orbs to use her powers — just touching her fingertips isn't enough.
  • Besides, she can only use two orbs at once. This means she can't use the flight, shield, and air orbs at the same time... which creates... issues.
  • She literally cannot be separated from her orbs by more than five feet or so, which means that if the orbs are somehow tethered down or placed in a sealed container that she can't carry with her, she is effectively trapped where they are. This also works in reverse — if she is stuck in one location, the orbs cannot be moved more than five feet or so away from her (even for someone with Maxima's level of Super-Strength).
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Masterfully (and hilariously) pulled off by Sydney on this page.

Maxima

Maxima / Maximillia Leander

"I miss the Air Force already."

The commanding officer of the ARCSWAT squad the comic follows. Powerful, beautiful, and a vehement feminist, she serves as something of a straight man to Halo and some of the squad's other, wackier personalities — much to Maxima's regret.

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• The Ace: Played with. She is, without question, the strongest of all the ARCHON supers. She's also aware of this and how this could overshadow the rest of the team, so she takes steps to allow them time to shine without stepping in. The Cast Page lists her power level as "Penumbrate", with a question mark. For comparison, Halo is "Ultra" (level 6), while Dabbler is "Paragon" (level 7).
• Achilles' Heel:
  • Sort of. Her ability to "max out" her stats gives her an incredible amount of versatility, but it does mean she has to sacrifice other stats for the one she is increasing. The easiest way to render her helpless is to hit her with so much power that she is forced to dump everything into armor, rendering her Nigh Invulnerable but barely superhuman in every other way. Of course, that's not something that just anyone can do, but this weakness is why her ability to shift her stats around is top-secret. Even her teammates don't know about it (except Dabbler, who figured it out on her own). Vehemence manages to achieve this with a powerful and sustained electric attack, but both he and onlookers misunderstand what's really happening. This starts a rumor that she has a different Achilles' heel: that electrical attacks will sap her strength.
  • One that is slightly more exploitable is her reliance on oxygen (though this obviously applies to anyone except Sydney, who can supply her own). For all her enhancement, she still needs to breathe, and on missions in space or underwater she has to bring a breathing apparatus with her (or Sydney who, again, can supply her own life support).
• Alien Blood: Her blood is blue. The author notes that this means that her blushes shouldn't be red, but he had used it anyway because otherwise, readers wouldn't realize she was blushing at all.
• Amazonian Beauty: She's considered a Head-Turning Beauty and one the most desired bachelorettes in the world, and has an incredibly toned and muscular body.
• Ambiguously Bi: Downplayed. While she shows interest in men, Dabbler seems to treat her as bi. This is, of course, Dabbler, so it's unclear how much of it is just her wanting to sleep with her.
• Badass Boast: Holy SHIT yes!
  • When talking about her service history:
    Reporter: They have Supers in Iraq and Afghanistan?
    Maxima: Hmh. Not as many as they used to.
  • A warning to potential Supervillains:
    Maxima: They say that Superheroes are best defined by their Rogues Gallery. I can promise you that our rogues will either be incarcerated... in traction... or interred.
• Berserk Button: Misogyny in any form, ranging from crass pickup lines to a prankster coworker shouting that all women should wear burkas. General Faulk lampshades this by elaborating on a comment before Maxima can "go off on some feminist tear".
  Maxima: I didn't even say anything.
  Arianna: You've got him well-trained.
• Blood Knight: Maxima enjoys beating up super-powered criminals a little too much, smiling often at the thought of showing punks just how powerful she really is, while threatening those who would think of breaking the law, or while delivering said beat-down. She is also a brutal Combat Pragmatist, although she apparently cannot resist grandstanding every now and then.
• Body Horror: When her gold skin came in, her old normal skin started to come off like a bad sunburn. By the time she's taken to a doctor, large patches of her human skin, including over half her face, has been peeled off, and from her expression and what one of the doctors said she's clearly stressed out of her mind.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: Along with strength, speed, and invulnerability, Maxima has demonstrated competence in a brutally efficient hand-to-hand fighting style. Word of God is that she believes in doing things as effectively as possible, and in building the most intimidating possible reputation. It's also a bit of a Take That! to comics characters — including Superman, in fact — who seem to the author to rely on raw strength without ever learning how to apply it efficiently.
• Bullet Catch: Maxima's first demonstrated superpower (if you don't count a pretty hard face).
• Challenge Seeker: She has a mild case of this, as she's downright eager to face off against Vehemence in the super-brawl — however, it's partially due to wanting to showcase just how big of a mistake villains are making by trying to take her on.
• Chrome Champion: Maxima looks like she's made of gold, but in reality, it's a much stronger classified material... though they haven't been able to identify what that material is, so it being classified is kinda a moot point. She reveals to Sydney that she has to, as she puts it, "grit up" in order to dull her skin's sheen and make herself non-reflective.
• Closet Geek: Maxima understands more of Sydney's references than she cares to admit.
• Clothing Damage: In theory averted as her protective shield is a bit above her skin and protects her clothing.
  • To date only two attacks we've seen have both breached this shield and damaged her outfit. Her encounter with a golem proved to be a third, much to Hiro's tearful dismay. Please note that she has only been in four combats "on screen" by that point.
  • A villain tries it against her in Times Square by putting grenades down her shirt and in her back belt loop, but thankfully she was ready that time and simply used superspeed to run into a store and grab new clothes in order to stay in the fight.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: By virtue of being Sydney's Commanding Officer, and she has enough comics' knowledge to accomplish it. Usually.
• Colonel Badass: Very, very badass.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Believes in finishing the fight as fast as possible and gaining every advantage, although, being on the side of good, she takes the measure of her opponents first to make sure they will survive her attack. There comes a point where she might consider revoking said courtesy, however.
  • This shines through during her fight with Vehemence, where he narrowly escapes being made a permanent soprano.
  • A later fight, also against Vehemence, shows her using her speed and strength almost entirely to break or dislocate key bones for "maximum deterrent" at minimal effort.
• The Comically Serious:
  • Part of what makes her Not So Above It All (generally caused by Sydney) moments so funny.
    Harem: Have you ever seen someone wind up the Colonel like that?
    Arianna: I am so happy right now.
  • Apparently Omar, an Arc-SPARQ engineer, is quite fond of yanking Maxima's chain by hammering on her Berserk Button.
    Omar: One of these days you'll stop falling for that, Max, until then, the anger album continues to grow.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: Played with when she feels conflicted about Dabbler and Sydney using the succubus's hypnotic body to distract Vehemence from killing her.
• Covert Pervert:
  • She enjoys the beefcake as much as other ARC-SWAT gals.
    Sydney: We only have a problem if [Hiro]'s found a new shirt to put on.
    Maxima: [snort] Shh! Sydney, that's inappropriate. I'm not disagreeing, mind you.
  • Later, Maxima has a Beat before replying to the photographer upon learning that her "tasteful nudes" offer was made to Hiro as well.
  • When they both suffer clothing damage, she admits that she didn't extend Hiro the same courtesy he'd given her, and got an eyeful of what lay beneath his clothes.
• Curtains Match the Window: Maxima has purple hair and purple irises. It wasn't the case when she was younger and her powers had not yet manifested, though: she was then simply a blue-eyed blonde.
• D-Cup Distress: Maxima is specifically annoyed with her bust because it interferes with drawing and holstering her gun.
• Defeat by Modesty: Defied. A villain attempted this by blowing off parts of Maxima's outfit, exposing her underwear. She responded by running off and coming back with a change of clothes in less than a second.
• Diverting Power: Maxima has the ability to shift her attributes around on the fly, distributing her power pool among her strength, toughness, speed, flight, and firepower. Her codename comes from the potential for her to "max out" any one of her stats by pulling power from the others. This ability is a Secret Weapon amongst her allies and the public, but it can also be an Achilles' Heel.
• Fake Weakness: After Vehemence forced her to divert significant power to her defenses with an extremely powerful lightning attack, it was taken as a sign that Maxima is weak to electrical attacks or weakened by them. Maxima does not in fact have any particular weakness to electrical attacks, but both Maxima and Archon are quite content to let those of a more supervillainous nature believe she does have such a weakness.
• Flash Step: Maxima is fast enough to pull these off. Even against a teleporter.
• Flying Brick: She can fly under her own power and reach supersonic speeds faster than Sydney can say "[bleep] FERRET BALLS!"
• Good Is Not Nice: Maxima makes this very clear about herself during the press conference. She sees managing the "quavering masses" and making them happy as Arianna's job, hers is simply to keep them safe.
• Good Is Not Soft: A point Maxima handily makes about Archon at the same time as proving the above trope about herself.
• Hand Blast: So... Apparently, she can do that.
• Hand Cannon: Maxima has superhuman strength and durability. Her sidearm leverages this.
• Heroic Willpower: Maxima has a lot of willpower. She is, however, susceptible to magical hypnosis, though even that isn't entirely effective.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Implied. After her extremely impressive and devastating show of power, one of the reporters asks her if it was really necessary for her to go full power just to make a point. Maxima's response?
  Maxima: Full power? Hah hah hah hah.
• If It's You, It's Okay: While there's no "You" as of yet, Word of God says that Maxima likely wouldn't be nearly as much a hard-ass with a significant other making sexual jokes around her.
  Blog Post: For the record, Maxima mostly thinks it was funny when she punched Dabbler through the wall. Not when she got manhandled. Or, womanhandled. Succubushandled. She does objectively understand that having a squishy mirror-like surface would be fun to play with. She's not so much of a grouch that she doesn't see the appeal. If she had a regular lover, she'd be totally okay with him doing stuff like that. To a point. Not like, jumping out from behind the fridge and doing it, but you know, if they're already fooling around or in the shower together.
• Logical Weakness: She has superhuman strength, is nigh-invulnerable and can manipulate energy, and has military training. However, she's still subject to human weaknesses that don't involve applications of force. She still needs air, food, and water to survive. While combat in space is unlikely, she would be next to useless, both since she'd need to carry air reserves or an entire spacesuit, and, though her Super-Speed is fast, it's negligible next to the vastness of space.
• Meaningful Name: According to the writer, Maxima was so-named due to an ability to redistribute her power into her abilities in order to "max out" one of her abilities if necessary. Though that could just be considered a well-chosen superheroic codename.
• A Mother to Her Men: It's downplayed, but she feels responsible for every person under her command, especially Sydney — leaving her very out of sorts when Sydney winds up stranded on the Alari homeworld.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Suzie Wen happily called her "the goddess of ash".
  Maxima: She gets an exclusive interview.
• Navel-Deep Neckline: After her clothing got destroyed in a battle, Harem let Maxima use her jacket. Due to her large breasts, the jacket could not zip up past her sternum.
• Noodle Incident: Apparently, she accidentally destroyed a mosque once.
• No-Sell:
  • Variant. A super-golem puts out a weakness aura, rendering most people in the area too weak to move, but Maxima destroys it before it can do anything else. When they ask Maxima why the aura didn't affect her, she just says that it did.
  • A downplayed example later in the comic. After being caught in a stasis beam, she displays the ability to still move, albeit very slowly, while under the effects due to her Super-Speed.
• Not So Above It All:
  • Maxima acts like the No-nonsense Military Commander, and for the most part she is, but every now and then we are treated to a glimpse of her less-than-professional side. Such as when she administered "military discipline" via Super-Strength Atomic Wedgie.
  • Also, despite her strongly feminist leanings, she's not above making a lewd joke involving Power Perversion Potential.
  • Sydney's enjoyment of being able to fly prompts Maxima to join in the fun.
  • When having a meeting with Deus, she quips that maybe she just wants an invisible jet, causing a Spit Take from Deus and Maxima looking very pleased with having prompted that reaction.
  • When she realizes how miffed Dabbler's going to be about missing her and Hiro ending up naked after defeating the Super Husk, she actually bursts out laughing.
  • She admits to Sydney while testing one of her unknown orbs in the Arc-pool that she was also hoping for waterbending.
• Not So Stoic: Very few people can get under Maxima's skin, but groping her ass? That gets a response.
• Oh, Crap!: When Sydney casually reveals, as she's filling up Swear Jar II, that she 1) openly engaged a Calamarian in battle, 2) killed it in a straight-up fight, dancing on its flaming corpse, and then 3) survived battle when three more landed nearby, Maxima's face goes from a bemused "you engaged it?" to a near panic-stricken "DEBRIEFING! NOW!"
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Maxima doesn't appreciate being reminded she once (accidentally) destroyed a mosque.
  General Faulk: I don't think you're in any danger of being knocked of your throne yet, oh Destroyer of Mosques.
  Maxima: [slams desk] ONE mosque! And it was an accident! Mostly.
• Only Sane Woman: Maxima often winds up in this role, especially where Sydney is concerned. When Sydney accidentally uppercuts herself into the ceiling, Maxima has Kif tags around her groan.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Maxima has a strong knowledge of pop culture, though she hides it most of the time. In order to get Halo to understand the likely consequences of the irresponsible use of superpowers, she uses the death of Gwen Stacy as a metaphor.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: Maxima only evokes this trope occasionally, but then — yikes. Contrast Sydney's glasses, whose lenses are more or less invisible.
• Slasher Smile: Holy shit, Maxima!
• Slipknot Ponytail:
  • Maxima's bun at the press conference. Analyzed by the author, who admitted that he conferred with his wife to find out how unlikely that would be, especially with Maxima's slippery hair and the bun looking perfect until then (which he agreed would require tons of bobby pins). His idea is that Dabbler gave her a magic scrunchy.
  • Played in reverse after the battle at the restaurant winds down; she uses a piece of rebar to improvise a hair tie for a ponytail.
• Smash Sisters: Due to their similar power sets and fighting styles, she and Anvil fight particularly well together.
• Smug Super: Occasionally lets her World's Strongest Woman status get to her head, which has caused her to let her guard down more than once.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Maxima is very, very sensitive about her looks — she feels like people treat her like a golden blow-up doll at times. This feeds into her fervent feminism.
• Super-Empowering: Gained her powers when a geode she was opening dumped some liquid onto her (and she also swallowed some of it), though the change wasn't instant.
• Super-Hearing: Averted with Maxima, as specified in The Rant. She has very good hearing, and it never degraded with age like normal people's since she got her powers, but it's still within human range. However, she won't correct anyone that assumes her hearing is superhuman.
• Super Power Lottery: Maxima is just plain more powerful than almost anyone. Deus theorizes that this is because she already had latent high-level superpowers when the geode gave her more powers on top of that.
• Super-Speed: To go with the flying brick package. While her top speed is not currently known, she is apparently faster than Sydney, who tops out at Mach 4.
• Super-Strength: Of course, to the point the she sometimes forget that things have weight.
• Super-Toughness: Possibly to the degree of Nigh-Invulnerability — we know that she can catch bullets.
• Terror Hero: Invoked. She deliberately goes for maximum intimidation when introducing Arc-SWAT to the world as a way to scare off lower-level wannabe supervillains.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Sydney gets this vibe from them when she sees Deus and Maxima meet, even asking about them dating.
• World's Strongest Woman: Officially, only two people can come close to Maxima's power, and one of them is believed to be already dead. The other's Dabbler, and only because of the wide range of power she can bring to bear. Vehemence proves to be a third with enough charging.

Dabbler

Dabbler / Xuriel Shahara Tantalis

"Minimum security... like my pants!"

Part demon, part alien, cybernetic, psychic, magical, trained in martial arts, and mutant besides, this beguiling creature seems to exist to make off-color jokes and be a thorn in Maxima's side.

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• Anti-Debuff: In issue #559, Dabbler says that she has: "One hundred thirty-five resistance to debuffs" thanks to a trinket around the edge of her ear. The commentary below the comic says: "Because some act bosses have up to 150% on debuff auras."
• An Arm and a Leg: Dabbler has a prosthetic arm; she lost the original because, as she states, she isn't quite as good of a fencer as she'd like to believe.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Tends to get too distracted to get good enough at one thing to really excel at it, which she compensates for by using a butt-load of skills. (One strip's Author's Note discussed why a certain fight wasn't ended quickly by having her use "binding strip" shots on everyone: Dabbler is great at designing trick ammunition, but can usually only muster enough interest to build two or three of each.)
• Badass Boast: When she first draws her sword.
  Dabbler: Meet Soul Reaver. I'll try not to sheathe it in your heart.
• Berserk Button: Dabbler's usually pretty easygoing and rarely loses her temper. But when she finds out that Decolette's adolescent protégé has been kidnapped by a suspected demon hunter... she gets pissed.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: She gets bored when making ammo for her gadgets, so she usually only has 2-3 shots for anything.
• Can't Live Without You: Dabbler reveals that all Succubi are like this. They were originally created as a Servant Race by mages. Once they were given the ability to kill so that they could be used as assassins, they began to rebel against their masters. As a countermeasure, a failsafe was added so that succubi constantly bleed mana unless they're bonded to someone who serves as their "master". Otherwise, they would die very quickly due to converting life force into mana once the existing mana ran out.
• Casual Kink: Her "swimsuit" looks more like bondage gear than anything you would swim in. Likewise, this comic implies that she likes bras with tentacles on the inside because they make otherwise-impractical bras self-adhering.
• Charm Person: One of her tricks is to hypnotize people just by looking at her. Apparently it works better if they're staring at her breasts specifically.
• Complexity Addiction: Sometimes. She used a tracking spell and incredibly complex math to try and find Sciona's lair as opposed to just casting the tracking spell on a rock and kicking it through the portal that led back to Sciona's hideout before it closed.
• Cute Monster Girl: In her true form she is purple and has hooves, four arms, and horns, yet is still insanely hot.
• Cyborg: She has a cybernetic arm with a teleporter in it, as well as a cybernetic eye (the left, blue one).
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • She can cause it on everyone, and doesn't even have to put effort into it; it turns out that her whole body is literally hypnotic, and she is so hot that no-one ever notices the effect.
  • Sydney later uses this to distract Vehemence from his efforts to kill Maxima.
• Ditzy Genius: To a degree. She's so intelligent that someone once said that her IQ probably can't be properly measured on a human scale, but her succubus nature and lack of focus sometimes gives her trouble. For instance, tracking Cooter to the portal's other side instead of just putting a tracking spell on a rock and kicking it through.
• Electronic Eye: One blue and one green. Apparently one of them is cybernetic, but she doesn't say which to begin with. It's the blue one.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Due to being a succubus and master illusionist. When her powers are active, all the women in the room are prone to start thinking to themselves "Not a lesbian. Not a lesbian. Not a lesbian..." (except Harem).
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Her real name is listed on the cast page, but she just uses Dabbler.
• Everyone Has Standards: After she and Cora encounters Ray Cosmos, she switches from her usual revealing clothes to a far more conservative uniform, implying that she does not want to be ogled by him.
• Exact Words: Maxima tells her that she isn't allowed to do any more naked apron cooking... so she starts cooking while also wearing a mostly-transparent thong.
• Extreme Omnisexual: By virtue of her nature as a succubus. One strip had her sporting a Fun Tanktop reading "My milkshake brings all sapient species to the yard irrespective of orientation or gender."
  • Men, women, living suits of armor...
    Dabbler: I find complex women arousing.
    Maxima: You find stairs arousing.
  • And best exemplified by the sigil Icon gains when Dabbler wears him — before she alters him into a Chainmail Bikini, anyway. Even after she turns it into fantasy "armor" that looks like a Boris Vallejo project, that design remains on the belt buckle.
• Eye-Dentity Giveaway: Dabbler can take many appearances thanks to her glamour, but she tends to keep her blue eye and green eye.
• Eye Scream: Similar to how she lost a hand in a duel, she also lost an eye in a different duel. She has a functional prosthetic there, too, and finds no problem taking it out to demonstrate to others.
• Forbidden Fruit: Part of why she's a bit fixated on Maxima — she's one of the few people that's shown zero interest in her.
• Functional Magic: She's a sorceress as well as a demon, mutant, alien, et al.
• Gadgeteer Genius: As stated by The Rant, she's a better gadgeteer than she is a swordfighter.
• Genki Girl: While not in Sydney's league, Dabbler is shown to have her Genki moments. She fights Sydney like they're siblings.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: Well, purple-skinned teal-striped alien-demon-mutant babe. She can use an illusion to appear as one of the original sorts. Or, more specifically, as the general's Star Trek fetish.
• Hammerspace: Apparently, Dabbler has access to at least two different versions (one via ultra-tech cybernetics, one through magic). Sydney namedrops the trope before rushing in with a cry of "TEACH ME!"
• Heinz Hybrid: Her entry on the cast page says that she's "roughly 1/2 succubus, 1/3 doppelganger, and 1/6 some unidentified alien species". She also has a few cybernetic parts including an arm and eye, and on top of all that is also a mutant, though really, how would you tell?
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Though her otherworldly origins are not known to a majority of even ARCHON, she can walk around amongst them in her demon form since the cover story is that she's a human with a demonic-looking "battle form", as opposed to a demon with a human glamor.
• Horned Humanoid: In her true form, Dabbler sports two small horns on her brow and a pair of bigger, curved ones over the sides of her face.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Initially did not use her sword's true power (including its ability to become two separate weapons) against Heavenly Sword because she wanted to win a straight-up swordfight. After being forced to admit Heavenly's better than her, she kicks it up a notch.
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: Having distracting boobs is an actual superpower for Dabbler, whose breasts are literally hypnotic. This page shows how distracting and compelling her breasts are in grasping attention from and softening reasoning in those in a succubus' vicinity.
  Dabbler: Sydney, did you hear anything I just said?
  Sydney: Maybe? Seriously, no homo, but your breasts are really... nice.
• Informed Attractiveness: A Justified Trope here, although she's drawn as authentically attractive (even when she's in the form of a four-armed purple demon); she is a succubus, and her effects on humans are largely the result of a literally supernatural aura.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: Apparently, in high school, Dabbler's succubus instincts had run ahead of her brain, leading to many incidents such as accidentally panty-flashing the class.
• Jack of All Trades: As her nickname implies... Dabbler outright says that she doesn't excel by doing just one thing, and she has demonstrated powerful and versatile magic, highly advanced technology, artifacts of great power, and great speed and strength. There are things she isn't that good at (as evidenced during her fight against Heavenly Sword), but that is precisely why she has such a diversity of skill sets and tools. Apparently, she has so many skills that she's one of the few supers capable of meeting Maxima's power level.
• Jerkass Has a Point: When she points out a new way to interpret a saying that bothered Maxima.
• Locked Out of the Loop: The general public and lower-ranked Archon agents are not allowed to know that she is an alien succubus. Sydney was supposed to be in this group, but her true sight led to her figuring out on her own. (Of course it also allowed Sydney the chance to find out she had True Sight in the first place.)
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Comes with the territory of being a succubus. Word of God states the author finds it slightly annoying that so many succubus characters don't really act like sex demons, and so pulls as few punches as he can for an SFW comic when it comes to Dabbler's... healthy sexuality. She's specifically forbidden from having sex with members of Archon because of how draining sessions with her can be.
• Malaproper: English being her 137^th language, it can happen she mixes up some idioms, like saying "a misdirecting fish" when meaning a Red Herring. Although whenever the mix-up turn it into something dirty (like saying "knock your panties off" instead of "knock your socks off"), it's probably intentional on her part. Included when playing her "Make Maxima Say..." Bingo Card.
  Dabbler: Hey, wherever my sword landed, no-one touch it, OK? It's mammary trapped!
  Maxima: Booby trapped, Dabbler. The phrase is booby trapped.
• Master of Illusion: As a succubus, she can don the appearance of anyone's fetish.
• Ms. Fanservice: Again, comes with the territory of being a succubus, and she pretty much revels in it.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Her nonhuman form has four arms, although the more human illusion she projects around herself only has two. The other, invisible pair still function, though.
• Mundane Utility: She claims that the reason she stays in "battle form" at Archon HQ is because having an extra pair of arms is just too useful. The truth, of course, is that it is her real form.
• Naked Apron: Rather predictably, Dabbler turns out to regard this as standard garb for cooking (and the apron has a risque slogan on it) — though before the fact is revealed, she has been persuaded to at least start wearing panties.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Okay, "Dabbler" is quite mild as superbeing code-names go. However, her sword is called "Soul Reaver".
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Dabbler is a part alien part demon cyborg martial artist Gadgeteer Genius sorceress.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Despite being literally the sexiest thing most people will ever meet, she's apparently not that great at core succubus skills. Decollete treats her as something of a bumpkin, and in school she kept getting reprimanded for her Gadgeteer Genius stunts when she was supposed to be doing sexy things. Her ex-boyfriend gleefully tells stories about how she was basically a gangly nerd who didn't realize she was hot. Admittedly, part of this might be because her mother is one of the Succubus Matriarchs (so she has a very high bar to measure up to), but her much younger sister is already a better succubus than her.
• The Nudifier: Dabbler does, in fact, have a "Declothesifying Spell".
• Omniglot:
  • Dabbler claims to know lots of languages — lots. Mind you, most of them are probably not from Earth.
    Dabbler: Give me a break, English is my 137^th language.
  • A later strip, however, reveals she didn't have to learn them, instead using a pair of tendrils coming from her ears for direct Neural Implanting.
    Sydney: That's how you know a hundred and thirty languages?! You cheater!
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When she's seemingly sick and lounging around in a grey set sweatpants and sweatshirt, people take notice.
• Overly-Long Tongue: As seen when Kenya once pulls on it to shut her up.
  Anvil: Oh my God! It's like a tape measure!
• Pervert Revenge Mode: Has occasionally ended up on the painful side of this.
• Photographic Memory: She's implied to have one, as she can draw from memory the very complex grid displayed by Halo's spheres when she gains "upgrade points". Which is a good thing, because the grid is otherwise invisible to cameras or any other tech.
• Precision F-Strike: Lets one loose in this page (Warning: Link is somewhat NSFW). The author initially said that he intended for Dabbler to never swear because he thought it would be funny if the sex-maniac succubus with the highest body-count out of anyone on the team never swore.
• Psychic Powers: She possesses several, including a succubus-specific psychic sense for lust, dubbed the "pornosense" by Halo.
• Really 700 Years Old: She claims that Sydney is over a hundred and sixty years younger than her, suggesting her age is somewhere in the 180s.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Deliberately so. She won't share the secrets of her tech with Archon because her culture has Prime Directive-like rules that prohibit her from doing so. She's even set up most of her gear to teleport to a secure location if it's taken away from her for more than a few seconds, so it can't be stolen and reverse-engineered.
• Running Gag: Dabbler harasses Maxima, Maxima responds with a Megaton Punch.
• Sensual Spandex: Her "swim" attire.
• Servant Race: It's eventually revealed that all Succubi were created to be slaves to mages, with a failsafe that makes them constantly bleed mana, thus needing a "master" mage to bond with, else they would be die off in a matter of hours or days. In her case, her master is Thothogoth, her demon ex whom she gets along with.
• Sex Goddess: Comes with being a succubus. Apparently sex with her is extremely pleasurable and exhausting, as seen with Barberian's wobbly state after Sydney finds him the morning after he slept with Dabbler. Dabbler also tells Sydney she sometimes uses an amnesia spell to delete the sex out of her lover's memory, else she would "ruin them" for any future romantic partner, as they would never measure up.
• Shapeshifting: Via glamor-based illusions — according to her cast page she lacks a doppelganger's true shapeshifting ability. During the scene where she's introduced, while she's in human guise, a pair of invisible hands grope Maxima in one panel. They're probably Dabbler's secondary hands.
• Stupid Sexy Flanders: Dabbler shows Halo that she loves seducing and confusing the new recruits.◊
• Succubi and Incubi: A succubus, as well as a couple of other things.
• Super-Hearing: Her hearing is acute enough to tell that there's someone standing cloaked in a corner by noticing that the sound is absorbed there.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: During her first days with ARCHON, she showed up at Maxima's doorstep to play with her boobs. She got punched in the face for her trouble, and got HR on her ass because it was definitely sexual assault.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: At the press conference, she notes that she has powers that "look like magic to the untrained eye," a battle form that "looks suspiciously like a four-armed succubus," and that she's from "all sorts of places, some that you can't even imagine."
• Too Clever by Half: Her conviction in her own brilliance can lead to her doing some pretty stupid things. For example, she tries to track down Sciona's hideout by casting a tracking spell on Cooter/Wyrmil and then using their location and a bunch of complex math to pinpoint where Sciona's lair is located before they arrive. She did this because she didn't think to simply cast the tracking spell on a rock and kick it through the portal generated by Cooter/Wyrmil.
• Troll:
  • Has a "Make Maxima Say..." Bingo Card, with a betting pool currently up to $250. This is revealed right after she says her sword is "mammary-trapped", thus getting Maxima to say "booby-trapped" and letting her mark down the "booby" space on her card.
  • And in her first appearance alongside Maxima, she gropes her butt. Maxima responds about as well as you can imagine.
  • From her character profile: "She has a very sexual and playful personality, and goes out of her way to antagonize Maxima, who she feels is a big fuddy-duddy. She acts ignorant of Earth culture on occasion, but as often as not she's just trying to get a rise out of people."
  • Eventually deconstructed. Her stating her intent to watch as Max tries on new clothes (and sneaking in sexy outfits) ruins a bonding moment between Maxima and Anvil. Anvil angrily slams her into a wall and has a mostly unheard conversation where she points out that Dabbler is genuinely hurting Max by reinforcing the idea she will be completely objectified if she allows herself any weakness.
• Uneven Hybrid: The Cast page lists her as half succubus, one-third doppelganger, and one-sixth unidentified alien. As it turns out, this has to do with succubus DNA (well, equivalent) where they can capture traits from one partner before procreating with another.
• Unskilled, but Strong: While not exactly poor in any of her main fields, her tendency towards — as her name suggests — dabbling in everything means that she's not as good as she could be. She's lost a hand and an eye (on separate occasions) due to overestimating her own swordsmanship. Page #217 notes that "Heavenly Sword knows Fencing and Kendo. Dabbler knows Hack and Slash."
• Xeno Nucleic Acid: Her explanation of how she learns languages so quickly reveals that succubi have T.N.A (tri-helix nucleocarbonic acid), consisting of a double helix that contains the succubus genes and an extra helix from the father that can be selectively used to determine physical traits and help the succubus mate with so many different species. Sydney and Dabbler waste no time in making "T&A" jokes.

Harem

Harem / Daphne DeShantis

"You may be the most powerful super in the world, but if you want to crank the pranks, you're on!"

A teleporting duplicator, Harem's original body doesn't disappear when she teleports, allowing her to have up to five bodies coexisting at one time. Bisexual and something of a tease, she gets on several of the others' nerves.

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• Achilles' Heel:
  • Sydney's shield, which is the only thing she's ever encountered that blocks her teleportation.
  • Maxima exploits one using super-speed that Harem didn't really know her networked self had: multiplied impact dominoes. Impact one Harem very hard or a few of Harem with even mild shocks or bumps within a short time frame, and it stacks up on all of them in a cascade effect. Ghost pains can affect the ones that were uninjured for a while, even.
• Alliterative Name: Appropriate to the superhero thing.
• ...And That Would Be Wrong: She probably has the most flexible morals on the team.
  Harem: I'd make a great thief if I could carry more.
  Sydney: Also if your ironclad morals didn't stop you.
  Harem: That too. Obviously.
• Cannot Keep a Secret: If you tell one of her bodies something or one of her bodies sees something (such as Dabbler's Beholder spell, Sydney's accidental joke about Math's name, or Sydney being a vegetarian), the other four will often react to that something even if the one watching/listening is keeping it together.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: Unintentionally. Anything any of her bodies eat is tasted by all of them, so if more than one eats at the same time, they can experience some odd flavor combinations. As a rule, they eat separately to avoid this.
• Differently Dressed Duplicates: Although all her five copies share one mind, over the years, they've started to differentiate their outfits and even their personalities, despite technically still being one person with one mind.
• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: She’s feeding information on Archon to Deus, and sleeping with him, but it later turns out that she’s also spying on Deus for Archon and Maxima approved at least some of the info she gave him (but not the “silk work”). Given her moral flexibility it’s impossible to tell where Harem’s true loyalties (if any) lie.
• Flash Step: Comes with the teleporting territory.
• Flashy Teleportation: Multiple, her teleportation seems to have a purple glow, and a "vorp" sound effect:
  • See self-duplication below. Her main function so far seems to be fetching the team's arsenal, since most of it is not stuff you can tote around normally.
  • Some specifics are given in #207. The overall weight of all the copies and their clothes are added to what they're carrying for a sort of overall teleporting weight limit (total weight of clones+whatever clones wear and carry cannot exceed X, by Harem's explanation). When they start having to bring in heavy weaponry one considers taking off her boots to try and stay under the limit before deciding she'll just have to "unteleport" for a bit to reduce the load safely.
• Hive Mind: Has five brains, but only one mind.
  • Due to her Self-Duplication powers. Hilariously demonstrated here when Maxima gives one Harem a painful atomic wedgie. All five of her clones react.
  • Given a painful callback when a telekinetic seriously injures one's hand and another is seen having to force herself to realize it's not her body that's been injured.
  • Given a more hilarious callback here when one copy is having a mind-blowing orgasm and another copy, currently in a meeting with her superiors, is doing everything she can to NOT scream in pleasure. A third copy, currently relaxing in a cafe, has no such restrictions. Harem has also indicated that she has learned the hard way not to date using multiple bodies at the same time, because it can give the wrong impression of a date's, er, prowess.
• The Hyena: Lampshaded by the author, who calls Harem a "gigglepuss".
• Inertia Is a Cruel Mistress: She maintains momentum when she teleports, but relative to her own bodies, and she's learned ways to use this as an attack. If she's falling to the ground she can teleport upside down to fall back up, until the momentum is gone. Or, she can teleport into the air, drop for a bit, and then teleport sideways into an opponent to give them a hell of a dropkick.
• Late to the Punchline: That Visual Pun of Sydney dropping Anvil on Vehemence's head? Harem finally got it two nights later, or 271 strips later.
  Harem: Hey Anvil, when you jump out of a plane like that, we should call it the Acme Special. [thought bubble of Sydney making the same joke] Vorp Jesus. Christ. Sydney.
  Sydney: Huh?
  Harem: Because you dropped an anvil on his head!
  Sydney: What? Oh. God, Harem, take your damn time.
• Logical Weakness:
  • She is unable to take passengers (save for Varia when they've touched), meaning that she cannot help a teammate escape. Also, she gets weaker with every copy of her that exists at a time and has a strict upper limit to the mass she can normally take with her, which includes her bodies.
  • Conversely, Harem gets stronger the fewer bodies she has out. Having all five bodies out makes her little stronger than your average 20-year-old athlete. With just a single body out, Harem could probably go toe-to-toe with Anvil, though she hates that, since having "only" two eyes and two ears out instead of her usual eight or ten each makes her feel half-blind and half-deaf.
• The Mole: She's using her powers to play double agent on Archon with Machina Industries because she feels Archon are too full of themselves. And because she thinks it's fun. It has been hinted that she may be a Triple Agent, also because it's fun.
• Mundane Utility: She sometimes sends one copy to study something while the others are taking care of other things; she has a lot more skills at her disposal than it first seems. Understandable, because while she's only nineteen, so are each of her other four bodies, which adds up to a collective 80+ years of life experience.
• No-Sell: Is unable to port through Sydney's shield.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: She's called "Harem" so often that Sydney is initially confused when she refers to herself as Daphne.
• Only Six Faces: Played with. On the one hand, she goes to a great deal of effort to make sure that her bodies look and even act different, despite being identical clones. On the other hand, the appearances she chose are clearly based on other team members, so it can be easy to mix them up if you're not careful.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: She may not be as pop-culture-minded as Maxima; when Sydney does a Looney Tunes-style trick ^note Dropping her co-hero named Anvil on the villain's head in battle and follows it up by doing the Road Runner sound, she comments "I don't understand what you're doing." However, Word of God is that she does recognize the reference; she just doesn't get why Sydney is doing it. She finally gets it nearly 300 strips later.
• Power Perversion Potential: She has five bodies with one mind, and calls herself Harem.
• Screw Yourself: Alluded to in the bonus strip for this page.
  Gwen: ...I want paralytic cunnilingus.
  Harem: ...Yeah, uh, me too...
  Gwen: [Beat] EW!
  Harem: Oh like you wouldn't!
• Self-Duplication: When she teleports, she can leave behind a functional copy of herself. She can create up to five at once, each with different clothing and hairstyle. Interestingly, the more of herself she's got in existence at once, the weaker each one is. Despite this, she prefers to have all five copies at once, as having only one set of eyes and ears makes her feel disoriented and deprived of those missing senses.
• Super-Strength: Capable of this, though she dislikes using it. Her strength is spread across all of her bodies with her max of five equaling out to a physically fit teenager. However, for everybody she loses, the remaining ones gain twice as much strength. With just one body she's apparently as strong as Anvil.
• Technical Virgin: An odd case; she’s keeping one of her bodies ... intact ... because she wants a traditional wedding night. The other four, not so much.
• Twin Threesome Fantasy: She's well-aware of this trope's existence, given her power-set.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: She's actually nineteen, but acts with knowledge on par with Maxima and Arianna (though not necessarily maturity). This is because of her five bodies allow her to basically experience five times as much as normal people. For example, the cast page notes that she usually has one body sleeping and one body studying while the other three do more interesting things.

Peggy

Peggy Kessler

"Superpowers are like vegans — they can't wait to tell you about them."

A sniper and helicopter pilot, and the only active-duty member of ARCHON we meet who doesn't have superpowers or a close approximation thereto.

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• An Arm and a Leg: Lost part of a leg in combat.
• Badass Normal: Peggy is clearly very good at what she does, and feels perfectly able to work with a team of supers.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: When told to try and avoid fatalities in a large-scale combat, Peggy can always resort to, say, shooting a sword out of an opponent's hands.
• Friendly Sniper: Evidently her primary function when the team gets into fights.
• Genre Savvy: Her "supers are like vegans, they can't wait to tell you all about [their powers]" speech was proven correct by the end of the page. It's later proven right again during the team's first battle where many of the villains do in fact boast or show off their powers — though some have to be prompted by Sydney.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Sydney is a vegetarian. Though, that's not a Vegan...
• Handicapped Badass: She's a military sniper who lost her leg in action — but none of her badassitude.
• Improbable Aiming Skills:
  • While not as cinematic as some, she does shoot a sword out of somebody's hands, at sniping ranges, in the middle of a fight. During the same brawl, she also puts out one of Vehemence's eyes at a signal from Maxima - and does it again to the other eye later, though he'd gained enough power that he could No-Sell it that time.
  • During the brawl's denouement, Harem mentions that, due to the darts being ineffective, Peggy had to put bullets in two knees, one hand, and one foot, but she did so with her sidearm from a rooftop.
• Punny Name: She's got a prosthetic leg. And her name is Peggy. Har har. Sydney inserts several feet into her mouth when trying to Ignore the Disability.
• The Team Normal: The only member of the field team with no powers of any kind. Even Math has his Charles Atlas Superpower.

Anvil

Anvil / Kenya Cassidy

"Watch out, the big guns are here."

A super-strong, energy-absorbing powerhouse. Anvil is good friends with Maxima and serves as somewhat of a humanizing element for her as she's more socially savvy.

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• All Amazons Want Hercules: She's briefly seen flirting with Atlus (an alien who's well over seven feet tall) by informing him that there aren't a lot of men on earth who are taller than her. This was alluded to in their fight against Vehemence, as she mentally remarked on how it seemed like every guy taller than her is also a complete dick. Both stem from her Muscle Angst.
• Amazonian Beauty: She has a giant muscular body that's considered incredibly attractive by several character In-Universe, and her abs and muscles are often used in Male Gaze close up panels. Ironically enough, she doesn't consider herself to be one, suffering from a case of Muscle Angst.
• The Big Guy: She's the main muscle of the team, being able to dish out and take absurd amounts of damage. Although she's not as strong as Maxima.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Downplayed, as she's laid-back enough in almost all social situations, but if she needs to shake the recruits a bit (especially Sydney), Sergeant Kenya Cassidy can do the stern, yelling part all right.
• Energy Absorption:
  • Her primary power — she can absorb kinetic energy and use it to supplement her own punches. Finally demonstrated in #202, where a super-strong villain punches her and she absorbs his blows' power, and then sends him flying with a nose boop.
  • And an even stronger one here — she even warns the others to back the hell off due to just how strong Vehemence is.
• Feed It with Fire: She's an energy absorber.
• Finger Poke of Doom: Or rather, Nose Boop of Doom.
  Anvil's other fearsome martial arts techniques: Eskimo Kiss, Cheek Punch, Hair Ruffle.
• Long Hair Is Feminine: Word of God says that Anvil keeps her hair very long due to some insecurity about her femininity, which in turn is due to her height and musculature. She's smart enough to tie her hair up securely if she knows that a fight is coming up, but she doesn't always get the chance — and Vehemence for one opponent, being a canny fighter who has noticed her absorption power, takes full advantage of this.
• Marshmallow Hell: Anvil seems somewhat prone to this effect, thanks to her imposing figure, even by the standards of female supers in the setting:
  • She demonstrates a combat implementation of the trope here.
  • Later, kind of inverting the trope, Sydney rather walks into things, leading Anvil (and Dabbler) to discuss the subject.
• Muscle Angst: Part of why she keeps her hair long, and why she's worried about her upcoming photo shoot.
  Anvil: I appreciate that you appreciate fitness in women, Sydney, but most people have a much more narrow idea of female beauty. The further you stray from it... well, you can probably imagine why I might not be excited about being plastered all over the internet, home of pseudo bravery via anonymity.
• No-Sell: The biggest advantage of her primary power. She absorbs the full energy from any blow and is then able to use that to fuel her Super-Strength.
• Number Two: She has the rank of Sergeant, and is the one relaying Maxima's orders or taking charge when the CO is unavailable.
• Redhead In Green: She seems to understand the effectiveness of this combination. Her outfit at the steakhouse is primarily green, as is her choker. She's also introduced in a green T-shirt.
• Shipper on Deck: Setting Maxima up with somebody... anybody seems to be one of her favorite hobbies.
• Smash Sisters: Due to their similar power sets and fighting styles, she and Maxima fight particularly well together.
• Statuesque Stunner: Easily the tallest member of the team, which caused Maxima to lose a side-bet when she met Sydney. As for "Stunner", the strip where she jumps from an Osprey to gain momentum for her strike is titled "Amazon Delivery".
• Super-Strength: One of the stronger members of the team.

Heatwave

Heatwave / Brook Falls

"You know what I don't get?"

A ditzy pyrokinetic who's dating Mr. Amorphous.

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• Agony of the Feet: She loses her middle toe during the brawl and makes a big deal of it. Peggy, who lost a whole leg in Iraq, isn't particularly sympathetic.
• Battle Couple: She's dating fellow superhero Mr. Amorphous and they frequently fight together.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Almost got into a Cat Fight with Harem when she flirted with Mr. Amorphous.
• The Ditz: Just through her first speaking appearance alone, Brook shows she isn't the sharpest tool in ARCHON'S shed. Word of God is that she isn't actually as dumb as she appears, but she tends to process information in a non-standard order.
  • For example, Brook wonders how Maxima could have kissed Mr. Amorphous (Brook's boyfriend) and left lipstick on his face when Maxima doesn't wear lipstick. By the time she meets up with Amorphous again, she's ready to beat Max up — until it is explained to her that Harem was actually responsible. She then tries to make boiling soda explode on Harem, who teleports out of the way, so Brook only soaks herself. She then threatens Harem by melting the can in her hand ... effectively welding her own hand shut.
  • Later on, after getting stabbed in the foot and losing a toe, Brook suggests during a team briefing that all teammates should wear steel-toe boots.... completely forgetting that it's already standard issue and she didn't wear them that night, as Maxima points out.
• Elemental Absorption: She can absorb heat from an area or object into herself.
• Expy: Her powers and parts of her personality suggest the Human Torch — apart from her being a hot, ditzy, redheaded female, of course.
• Fiery Redhead: She has both a hot-headed personality and heat powers.
• Flying Firepower: Flight is a secondary power of hers.
• Glass Cannon: She may have Playing with Fire powers, but she's only about as tough as a normal human.
• Innocently Insensitive: She seemed to genuinely think that Peggy, who lost her leg in combat once, would relate to Brook losing only her middle toe. Needless to say, she thought wrong.
  Heatwave: You understand my pain don't you Peggy?
  Peggy: (offended) Excuse me!?
  Heatwave: Now we're like sisters! (rushes to hug Peggy, only to fall once to the latter pivots away from her)
• Ironic Name: A heat-based super-heroine whose real name is Brook (a small stream) (water)Fall.
• Mundane Utility: Heatwave uses her heat powers to make popcorn.
• Out of Focus: Alongside Achilles and Mr. Amorphous, she hasn't gotten much focus or screentime, despite being on them team since the start. Lampshaped by Achilles in this strip, when he refers to them as the "B-team" who only appear in the background occasionally.
• Playing with Fire: Her powers allow her fire focused heat beams as well as sheath herself in a heat aura that can be used as an AOE attack.

Super Hiro

Super Hiro / Hiro (Last name unknown)

Super strong and tough, can fly, is very photogenic, and has an ace up his sleeve. Apparently had a respectable army career before becoming a superhero.

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• Captain Obvious: Falls afoul of this when signaling to Jiggawatt what she should do. Her response is "Fucking doy", via sign-language.
• Chick Magnet: Almost all female characters express some level of attraction to him.
• Clothing Damage: As evidenced here, his invulnerability doesn't extend to his clothing, rendering him completely naked. In the Wearing the Cape crossover Sydney tells Hope that Hiro loses his shirt in every fight, without fail.
• Energy Absorption: Turns out to be able to absorb sonic attacks and use them to enhance his strength.
• Flying Brick: His powers are Super-Strength and Flight. It's acknowledged that he comes across as a bit of a "Superman lite".
• Gag Penis: After a Clothing Damage leaves him naked, it's noted he's incredibly well-endowed, much to Anvil's delight and Sydney's horror when she thinks about how he can have sex with it.
  Sydney: I mean just... how? Are superwomen just... different down there? Do they have, like, vagoo's of holding?
• Limited Wardrobe: Discussed and lampshaded when he tears his favorite shirt during the cleanup.
  Harem: One of Hiro's undocumented superpowers is being able to tell his identical tight black shirts apart.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • In his bio on the cast page, "Rakish good looks" is listed under "Unofficial Powers", and almost every female character in the comic gets attracted to him at least briefly.
  • Also, "Seems to keep losing his shirt" is listed in the same bio under "Unofficial Disadvantages".
• Mr. Fanservice: Often loses his shirt, much to the delight of his female teammates.
• Punny Name: His name is a pun on "Super Hero".
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: A borderline case, perhaps; named Hiro, superhero code name "Super Hiro".
• Super-Strength: Supernatural levels of strength is part of his power set.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Has lost his shirt several times already.

Math

Math / Mathias (Last name unknown)

"I can see your beautiful muscles flexing from a mile away!"

An incredibly accomplished martial artist — so much so that his skills skirt the line between training and actual superpowers. He's also a lecherous creep, though usually a lovable one.

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• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: A sympathetic version, but it's clear Math took the job to hopefully find a strong, worthwhile opponent at some point. When he meets one in Jabberwokky his response is "FINALLY!"
• Awesomeness by Analysis: He advises Sydney to always think three moves ahead, so it's likely this is part of why he's so skilled.
• Challenge Seeker: See Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy, above.
• Badass Boast: Oh HELL yes.
  Math: There's no such thing... [punches superhuman across a parking lot] ...as just human.
• Badass Normal: Math's martial arts prowess is so great that Maxima describes it as "indistinguishable from superpowers"; it certainly allows him to mess with Anvil without getting pummeled senseless, and to tackle several empowered villains simultaneously. The official power scale marks him as a Paragon, the same as Dabbler. He can still be blindsided when he gets arrogantly overconfident or Distracted by the Sexy, however. (Though it's possible that he faked getting surprised by Sydney, and was just hoping for guilt-based CPR.)
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Math is the only person on the field team that we know of without superpowers. Instead, he's just a martial artist... one so skilled that it's impossible to tell the difference between him and someone with superpowers. Actually, this is more or less literally true; he has demonstrated the ability to kick a large, stone-bodied supervillain into the air, and then send her flying for yards with a follow-up punch.
• Combat Pragmatist: He's not above tickling an opponent to get free from a grapple.
• Covered with Scars: As seen in his first shirtless scene, he's got several.
• Deadly Dodging: Definitely part of his "three moves ahead" bag of tricks. Notably, he nudges Sydney's leg so that she gets hit by one of her own orbiting orbs, or he dodges a Superpowered Mook's Eye Beam so that another is hit.
• Lovable Sex Maniac:
  • Math is obviously a martial artist in the style of Master Roshi.
    Math: Sensible. That is my kind of woman. Eh, who am I kidding, they're all my type.
  • Deconstructed when, as Maxima calls him on later, he is so distracted when Jabberwokky's jacket falls open and he gets a peek at her breasts that she could easily take him out.
  • It's also shown to annoy other guys at times, particularly Hiro when they're in the showers and Math is consumed with thoughts of what the women are doing, and then complains when Hiro points out they're just showering too. Math seems to view it as some kind of bonding that Hiro wasn't doing right, while Hiro seemed to view it as creepy.
    Hiro: Yes, Math. Because women only do sexy stuff all the time always.
• No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction: During the first super brawl, Math contacts Maxima to complain about how he's not feeling challenged.
  Maxima: I'm sorry the supervillain battle royale is boring you, Math. Try and keep awake by by competing with your teammates for headcount.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Parodied when Math suddenly shows up right behind the bikini-clad Detla.
  Math: Hark! My "exotic and sensual woman in need of martial instruction" sense is tingling!
• Shout-Out: He was named after Matthias who became one of the 12 main apostles after Judas's betrayal. This gets acknowledged in the comic, he only goes by Math because he doesn't like how Biblical his full name sounds.
  Acts 1:24,26: Then they prayed and said: "You, O Jehovah, who know the hearts of all, designate which one of these two men you have chosen to take the place of this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas deviated to go to his own place." So they cast lots over them, and the lot fell to Mat·thiʹas, and he was counted along with the 11 apostles.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: He's good at sneaking unexpectedly on people, especially when they're gorgeous women. Notably when he shows up right behind Detla at the swimming pool, startling her. (In this case, "right behind" means "close enough for skin contact".)
• Those Two Guys: Ironically, he seems to have this relationship with Harem off duty. He is often shown alongside her, and she tolerates his Lovable Sex Maniac antics more than the other women on the team. Since Jabberwokky joined the team, they've started having this dynamic as well, particularly because they share an interest in Dabbler.
• Troll: When he's not busy looking for new and impressive foes to fight, he likes to mess with the other supers, as demonstrated in his fight with Anvil.

Mr. Amorphous

Mr. Amorphous / (Civilian Name Unknown)

A super-stretchy member of the Arc-SWAT team. Currently dating Heatwave.

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• Battle Couple: He's dating fellow superhero Heatwave and they frequently fight together.
• Body Horror: It's momentary, but Hench Wench punches the back of his head through his mouth, which squicks everyone present out, including Hench Wench herself. For his part, he describes the feeling as "like when you get an eyelid flipped over, but for your whole head."
• Expy: To some extent, in terms of abilities, of various famous comic-book rubber men: Mr. Fantastic, Plastic Man, and the Elongated Man. However, he seems to focus less on the stretching as such and more on the benefits control of his body gives him — strength, toughness, disguise, and so on.
• Flexibility Equals Sex Ability: When he's talking about how he can stretch his tongue to Maxima, she jokes about the ramifications of his powers in bed.
  Maxima: Brook's a lucky girl, isn't she?
• Out of Focus: Alongside Achilles and Heatwave, he hasn't gotten much focus or screentime, despite being on them team since the start. Lampshaped by Achilles in this strip, when he refers to them as the "B-team" who only appear in the background occasionally.
• Rubber Man: His primary superpower, although he can't extend over his natural body mass.
• Shapeshifting: Control of his bodily form extends to disguise abilities.
• Straight Man: Personality-wise he's one of the most normal people on the team, and frequently plays the Straight Man to Achilles or Heatwave.
• Super-Strength: Apparently a function of his control of his body's form and density.

Achilles

Achilles / Harold (Last name unknown)

"You can only drive a car off a plane into an ammo dump so many times before it gets boring."

An utterly invulnerable man (to the extent that he takes calming swims in active volcanoes and knocks missiles out of the air with his face). Personality-wise, Achilles is somewhat stuck in the '80s, though it's uncertain whether that's just what he's like or if it's a side-effect of his powers.

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• The Ageless: Apparently part of his invulnerability — nothing can harm him, not even time.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • He gets the worst reception at the power demonstration after headbutting a tank.
    Alt Text: No one appreciates a good defense.
  • Sydney has the sense to have him check for traps on the way into Sciona's lair. True, he didn't need to be dangled from the lighthook and could have just walked, but it was a simple use of his powers and he didn't mind.
  • Shown to great effect during the street fight with the alien mercenaries. He goads Detla into attacking him with her super-sword to get her off Cora, and then just grapples her until managing to choke her out. Since her main "power" was a weapon that didn't do anything to him, she couldn't get away from his grip.
• The Chew Toy: Since nothing can hurt him, his teammates frequently end up knocking him around. He takes it in stride.
  Achilles: Sydney gets to vent her frustrations, I get to check out the ceiling. Everyone wins!
• Clothing Damage: After hanging out in an explosion, he gets mad that the marshmallows in his pocket melted, ruining his jacket. Then we see that the entire back of his outfit is gone. Word of God is that he goes through clothes like The Incredible Hulk does, only without transforming.
• Deus Exit Machina:
  • During the first big fight, he quickly gets trapped under the rubble of the restaurant, so he is out of the fight when Vehemence shows up. His power would have been extremely useful against Vehemence, especially if he was immune to his violence aura.
  • Manages to get Sciona into a grapple where she couldn't break his grip with her own strength or hurt him with her wings... so she pounded him into the ceiling on a pillar of stone to dislodge him, taking him out for the rest of that battle.
• Did Not Think This Through: Pulls off a pretty good plan by blocking Heavenly Sword's energy blade with his eyeball, counting on the shock of seeing that making her drop the sword. He then ends up picked up by the villainess and thrown into a wall, which she then drops on him, taking him out of the fight. Notably afterwards Maxima has him work on his hand-to-hand, particularly grappling, and a similar second situation (against an alien mercenary with a sword) goes in his favor.
• Disco Dan: Still dresses, and acts, like it's the 1980s. May have something to do with how he's actually in his 50s, and going through some kind of mid-life crisis.
• Eye Scream: Since he's invulnerable, he can invoke this trope to squick out the person he's fighting.
  Heavenly Sword: Euugh! Why would you block a sword with your eye!?
  Achilles: To get you to drop it, of course!
• Fastball Special: He can be utilized as a human bullet by his stronger teammates.
• Fights Like a Normal: He's invulnerable, but not really that much more powerful than a normal human otherwise. Notably Maxima has made him do intense grapple training, since if he can keep his grip from being forced by someone with superior strength, that's one opponent pretty much out of the fight since no amount of damage they do can dislodge him.
• Forced Transformation: Apparently this was part of the tests ARCHON has run on his invincibility, and like all the other tests, it failed to actually harm him. He is not immune to being turned into a frog... but that frog will still be invincible.
• Logical Weakness: His invulnerability is his only real power, and he's completely taken out of the fight when he's trapped under rubble, or picked up and thrown.
• Meaningful Name: Well, it's a superheroic codename, but Achilles is obviously named for Achilles, minus the heel.
• Mistaken for Badass: By Detla. She became his student to learn his techniques, but because she didn't know that superpowers were a thing, she believed that he was an extremely skilled warrior, and is stunned to learn that he's actually not a very good fighter, merely completely invulnerable.
• Nigh-Invulnerability:
  • He's described as having "Proper, aggravating invincibility." He's shrugged off attacks that can destroy matter on the subatomic level.
  • He once stopped a cruise missile by headbutting it, and "didn't feel" the resulting explosion.
  • He's the only one other than Maxima to hang out in the massive explosion she caused.
  • His eyeball can block an energy blade.
  • This also extends to his immune system, as he allegedly ate a vial of Super Ebola once to prevent an outbreak.
• No-Sell: As of yet, nothing has been able to get past his powers.
• Older Than They Look: As part of being The Ageless. He's a little over fifty but looks to be in his mid-twenties.
• Out of Focus: Alongside Heatwave and Mr. Amorphous, he hasn't gotten much focus or screentime, despite being on them team since the start. Lampshaped by Achilles in this strip, when he refers to them as the "B-team" who only appear in the background occasionally.
• Required Secondary Powers: Something of an inversion, in that he doesn't have full Super-Strength but he's functionally somewhat stronger than a normal human because his invulnerability means he can't injure himself by straining too hard.
• Shooting Superman: Bad guys often attack him despite the fact that the press conference said outright that he's invincible. One Rant explains that it's a case of Underestimating Badassery; most people assume he's just really tough, and figure they'll be able to pierce his defense with enough power. He's not, and they can't.
• Smug Super: He's completely invulnerable and he knows it. Even Maxima can't even bruise him, so he gets away with a surprising amount of attitude. Upon emerging from the rubble that trapped him for two thirds of the restaurant fight after everything is over, he declares the villains must have all surrendered for fear of him coming back. He intentionally invokes this against the alien mercenary Detla, claiming he'll give her a free hit... before bum-rushing her during her preparing to swing her sword.
• Stock Scream: Lets loose the Goofy Holler when punched through a roof.
• Superhero Packing Heat: To compensate his lack of offensive options, he's seen using a gun during a big free-for-all fight in a supervillain lair.
• Stone Wall: He's Nigh Invulnerable minus the nigh. The problem being, he's otherwise basically just a normal person (albeit 1.5 times as strong as most, since he doesn't have to worry about tearing muscles or anything). He also seems to have some rooting effect for things that strike him, no matter how strong, though he can just be picked up to negate that.
• Unskilled, but Strong: According to Dabbler, he's "not a good fighter. He just can't be injured by literally anything."
• You Fight Like a Cow: His unofficial "Power". Works well on Detla.

Stalwart

Stalwart / Stewart Aegir

A super-strong member of Arc-SWAT, who can increase his body density and weight at will.

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• Balls of Steel: A result of his density boosting. Not even an angry Hiro kicking him in the balls will stop him.
• Immune to Flinching: Not completely immune, but it'll take something really, really big for him to move once his weight's maxed out. And we mean "weighs as much as a space shuttle" maxed out.
• Mighty Glacier: Unlike Maxima and Hiro, he can't fly, and can also be outmaneuvered if he can't react fast enough, like Opal did with her portals.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Is noted for his tendency to overdress, and is rarely seen in anything other than a dress shirt, pants, and tie. Unfortunately, he is just as prone to Clothing Damage as the others, if not more since he doesn't have an invulnerability aura. Achilles even takes note of how his swim trunks are pleated.
• Super-Toughness: With his ability to boost his weight and density, he can certainly take a hit, and only the really big hits will make him move an inch.
• Super-Strength: His strength is outright said to be the second-strongest on the team behind a maxed-out Maxima. A bit of Required Secondary Powers here since he needs to be that strong just to move when his weight's boosted.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Just like Hiro, he too has lost his shirt more than a few times.

Jabberwokky

Jabberwokky / Jasmine "Jazza" Ng

A superpowered martial artist who can empower herself using a variety of styles (Pangolin style, Cheetah style, Crusader style). She was originally one of the villains who attacked Archon at the diner, but was under compulsion and later joined Archon.

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• Ambiguously Evil: Due to Vehemence's aggro aura it's hard to say how much of what she did was of her own volition. She is definitely a hero at the moment, though.
• Animalistic Abilities: Her animal kung fu powers appear to grant her abilities similar to animals. For example, her Cheetah style lets her bounce around the room, and her Rhino style lets her tank the attacks of much larger opponents.
• Animal-Themed Fighting Style: She has the power to copy any animal-based kung fu style, including some made up on the spot.
• Background Magic Field: Her powers tap into the Aethersphere, apparently, which Dabbler describes as "shaped by the collective sapience of its inhabitants".
• Boxed Crook: Ends up joining the ARCHON team as a result of this trope.
• Foo Fu: The Alt Text of one page calls her fighting style "Menagerie Fu".
• Heel–Face Brainwashing: Downplayed. She was briefly Charmed by Dabbler to get some extra firepower in the brawl, but the effect has long since worn off. Doesn't stop Jazza from blaming her crush on Dabbler on the Charm.
• Heel–Face Turn: Has joined Archon on a work release program.
• Hiding Behind Your Bangs: Her falling bangs frequently covering her right eye. At least when she's not in a fight, where the wind of her fast moves usually uncovers it.
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: She only wears see-through fishnet under her jacket and uses this to distract Math long enough to get some hits through his defenses.
• Jack of All Trades: Her powerset is essentially "anything that can be reasonably justified as a combat style", which doesn't even have to follow physics. Case in point, while she prefers animals, she can also fight like a crusader if the situation calls for it, her cheetah style lets her bounce around the room like Sydney on crack, and her rhino style lets her tank the attacks of much larger opponents.
• The Klutz: Introduces herself by slipping on a piece of glass and falling flat on her ass.
• Psycho Lesbian: She wants to punch Dabbler in the mouth repeatedly, then kiss it better.
• Supernatural Martial Arts: She can enhance her very significant skill by invoking various "styles", some of them animal-themed, which grant her various combinations of speed, striking power, and innate resistance to damage.
• Transparent Closet: Keeps being attracted to women (at all the parties by her own admission) but keeps making excuses that this is not her decision. She's not fooling anyone.
• Tsundere: She's evolved into this towards Dabbler, even though Dabbler's kiss should have worn off days ago.
  Jazza: Ah! Your voice is so sexy! Kiss me! No, I hate you! But definitely kiss me!
  Arianna: Should we stop this?
  Maxima: Absolutely not.

Jiggawatt

Jiggawatt / Azarin Nazari

A lightning-oriented super; she can create lightning, control lightning, and turn into lightning, allowing her rapid travel. She seems to have a mildly goofy sense of humor combined with a readiness to do the job she's paid for.

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• Dynamic Entry: Her entrance to the super battle royale, as lightning coming from a cloud and striking no less than three enemies in one shot, is quite impressive.
• Electric Black Gal: Insofar as she manifests the trope, she's a slightly unusual gender flipped version. Actually, her specific appearance and lightning-hurling combat style might make her a bit more like a visual Expy of Storm of the X-Men, although when the writer realized this, he changed her hair color retroactively from white to gold, to reduce the similarity.
• Hand Blast: Her basic offensive power; point at people and zap them with lightning. She's fast enough to knock incoming thrown objects out of the air with a reflex defensive blast.
• Required Secondary Powers: Jiggawatt is, quite unsurprisingly, immune to electric shocks herself. Tasering is pointless against her.
• Ride the Lightning: How she gets around when she needs to be quick. Her most powerful offensive option is to turn into lightning and throw herself at an opponent.
• Sassy Black Woman: Jiggawatt tends this way in the last few panels of this strip.
• Shock and Awe: Her schtick — lightning is her power.
• Steel Ear Drums: Averted. She's rendered temporarily deaf after being caught in a large explosion, and even after being treated by a doctor with healing powers, she still has some permanent hearing loss.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Nearly turns into this during the post-press conference battle. It seems her powers also include the ability to generate positrons (i.e. antimatter), and doing so naturally creates a large amount of gamma radiation. Dabbler reacts with suitable panic to both neutralize what radiation has already been produced as well as discourage Jiggawatt from continuing to use her powers in that fashion.
• Viewer Name Confusion: According to the cast page, she specifically spells her name this way (instead of Gigawatt) because she wants it spelled like Doc Brown said it.

Ren

Adrian Gyron

"Well, I can take a shower in ninety seconds, get dressed in under sixty, and make a bottle of shampoo last six months."

A new recruit for ARCHON, in the same "class" as Sydney.

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• The Big Guy: Is notably taller than all the other recruits.
• Embarrassing Nickname:
  • Ren is hoping to avoid an annoying superhero moniker, like "the Black Hulk" (or as Sydney suggests, "the Blulk").
  • There's also, to an extent, his actual nickname, "Ren." No one is quite sure how he got it, but it's stuck.
• Super-Speed: Has "some kind of super adrenaline" that causes him to perceive time much more slowly, essentially giving him super speed and super reaction time.
• Super-Strength: Ren implies that his "super adrenaline" also boosts his strength. Demonstrated quite clearly in the spar against Vehemence.

Varia

Varia / Xochitl Xochiquetzal

"Hiya Halo, I saw footage of you at the cah pahk battle last night, I'm wicked jealous."

A Bostonian Aztec-American member of the team, again in the same "class" as Sydney, with a gestalt ability that changes based on who she is touching.

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• American Accents: Although she's Aztec by heritage, she grew up around Boston, and has an accent to match. This threw Halo the moment she started talking.
• An Ice Person: Her power from touching Heatwave.
• Big Damn Heroes: She saves Arianna from being incinerated by a super villain at the last second by touching her, gaining fire powers from doing so and transferring immunity to fire to her.
• Crazy-Prepared: In her first appearance, she's going through the base, getting a list of all the powers she obtains from every person. In the Wearing the Cape crossover, shaking hands with fans is her most common party trick, and ARCHON keeps the contact information of people who give her particularly useful powers just in case they can use them in an emergency.
• Disappeared Dad: When Sydney learns that Xochitl never knew her father, she immediately sets up a betting pool. 9:1 alien father, 20:1 alien father and he's a space emperor, making her a space princess. 18:1 a nymph, 15:1 a wizard, 20:1 Quetzacoatl and 8:1 for some other god of the Aztec pantheon.
• Hollywood Magnetism: The power she gets from Jiggawatt is magnetism, which she uses to help rebuild the overpass.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Just because she gets a power doesn't mean she knows what it is and the specifics of its function.
• Lamarck Was Right: If not with her and her Disappeared Dad, the powers she gets from people tend to share themes within families.
• Logic Bomb: In the same strip that showcases her ability, we get this Alt Text.
  Alt Text: So what happens if she touches someone who cancels out powers?
  • Later directly teased in a meeting with For Whom the Death Tolls.
• Logical Weakness: She can't use her powers without touching someone (though Halo wonders if it's possible that she could activate her powers with blood samples and the like), so she can't fight solo, especially since her attacks are useless on the people she gets them from (which thankfully means that the person she touches is immune to any How Do I Shot Web? mishaps).
• Magic A Is Magic A: She always gets the same power from a person.
• Meaningful Name:
  • She's called Varia because she has a "gestalt power", which changes depending on what person she's in physical contact with. There's little in the way of an apparent pattern for her powers, so she has theoretically as many powers as there are people on Earth.
  • Her real name is a subversion: Xochiquetzal was an Aztec goddess of fertility, beauty, and strength, while Xochitl is the Aztec word for "flower". Shortly after explaining that, she demonstrates her powers, which have absolutely no connection to any of that. invokedWord of God says the subversion is a bit of a jab at characters that take it to the point where suspension of disbelief starts to fail.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Sort of.
  • The powers she manifests are dependent on who she's just made physical contact with, so as long as she keeps the right people around, she can have as many powers as the situation requires.
  • In particular, when she touches people who also have superpowers, the powers she manifests tend to be related to that person's own powers. She can "ride-along" with Harem (who otherwise has a strict "carrying limit"), for example, while touching Heatwave gave her ice powers in contrast.
  • The powers she gains from various people also seem to be similar amongst blood relatives — which means that she can sometimes identify such relationships by experimentation. One panel shows her telling a small Chinese girl that she is adopted.
    Girl: Duh, my parents are white.
  • Notably, though, she gets no powers from touching Maxima. They're not sure why, but Maxima does have very unusual (and tough) skin.
  • Touching Sydney doesn't give her any obvious powers, but neither notices immediately that Sydney's halo of orbs extends to revolve around Varia as well. What this means remains to be seen.
  • The people she touches do not need to have powers of their own to activate, as demonstrated during the assault on Arc's home base. She touches Arianna, giving both of them complete immunity to fire.
• No-Sell: The powers she gains from touching a person don't affect them.
• Overly Long Name: Her real name, Xochitl Xochiquetzal, is a mouthful for everyone but her.
• Power Incontinence: She cannot turn her power "off"; it will manifest whenever she touches someone, whether she wants it or not. After an incident at a club that seriously freaks out Olivia, Varia starts considering wearing gloves at all times.
• Required Secondary Powers: The people she touches to get powers are immune to said powers, preventing any problems that might occur from the manifestation. This also goes the other direction; when Varia gets fire powers from touching Arianna, Arianna is now immune to all fire.
• Side Bet: When Sydney finds out that Varia doesn't know who her father is, Sydney sets up a betting pool for the entire team on who/what she is. Possibilities range from her father being a god (making Varia a demigoddess) to an alien king (making Varia a star princess), and a mad scientist who built Varia in a lab.
  Varia: I get a cut, right?
  Sydney: Ten percent.
  Varia: Twenty-five or no deal.
  Sydney: Fine. Unless it's the star princess one and you wind up with a currency with your face on it.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: A jab at this kind of thing in comics.
• Take That!: As mentioned above, she's a jab at characters that take Meaningful Names to the point where suspension of disbelief starts to falter.

Vance

Vance

A new recruit for ARCHON, in the same "class" as Sydney. Claims to be a colony of superpowered spiders with a Hive Mind, may just be a Troll.

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• Ambiguously Human: He claims to be a Mobile-Suit Human wearing superpowered colony of spiders with a Hive Mind, but he may just be hazing Sydney. Word of God is whether or not that's true is undecided until it's officially put into the comic.
• Creepy Good: A Hive Mind of sentient spiders (if his story is true), but a good guy (if a bit of a Troll).
• Hive Mind: Claims to be a colony of spiders with a collective intelligence, which he directly compares to the Borg.
• Mobile-Suit Human: Claims that his "body" is one of these that are made out of special polymers that his spiders inhabit.
• Troll: He hazes Sydney by telling her that he’s a Mobile-Suit Human Hive Mind of intelligent, superpowered spiders. Whether or not it's true, or if he's just lying, is ambiguous. Though considering Varia's Powers work on him, he still most likely has actual skin, even if he isn't human.
• The Worm That Walks: Claims to be a mass of spiders in reality. He may just be messing with Sydney.

ARC-Light

Zephan

Zephan Zoeng

A consultant with ARCHON, Zephan is a retired adventurer with years of experience studying the odder parts of the world.

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• Actually Pretty Funny: Sydney apologizes to him after making a quip about getting the orbs in an old Chinese relic shop. He simply smiles and jokes back that they always have the best stuff there.
• Collector of the Strange: As a scholar of the unusual, he's accumulated bits and baubles, as well as knowledge.
• Cool Old Guy: Totally fine with Sydney's quip about Asian antique shops and generally seems like a laid-back and funny guy.
• Covert Pervert: After Dabbler's entrance, he (and Harem) is the only one entertaining the thought.
  Zeph: I am a Demonologist after all... I'd be neglecting my duties if I didn't offer to study her further.

Gwen

Gwen

Actually a novice magician, but evidently not at a level to take part in combat; she works on the support side at ARCHON. However, she has enough competence to cast a spell that keeps herself and two others from being noticed by a large group of supervillains in the middle of a fight scene.

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• Functional Magic: She's basically an apprentice mage.
• Mundane Utility: Her magic scan spell also has weather info and a Twitter feed.

Pixel Lucado

Pixel Lucado

An Arc-Light special agent with the investigation branch who has some "expertise with artifacts".

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• Badass Adorable: She's only slightly taller than Sydney and she looks like an anime character, but to be a member of ARCHON then by definition you qualify as a badass.
• Brutal Honesty: Flat-out states that people have told her that Halo is weird.
• Invisibility: Can turn invisible in full-jaguar mode.
• Kinky Spanking: Apparently she's into being spanked.
• Laser Blade: Her power as a super is laser-claws in her hybrid and animal forms.
• Most Common Superpower: Pixel notably averts this, having a noticeably slim figure.
• Never Heard That One Before: Said pretty much word for word to Harem after the latter jokes about her being a panther upon finding out she's a pink were-jaguar.
• Older Than They Look: Pixel looks like a ten-year-old, but Word of God is that that's an unintentional side-effect of her art style.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: Unbeknownst to most of ARCHON, Pixel is a werecat, specifically a were-jaguar, almost doubling in height (and growing in other ways) when transformed. Plus has laser claws.
• The Rival: Downplayed, but Sydney is not happy at finding someone who channels the same aesthetic that Sydney does. Pixel doesn't seem to have a problem with it, though, or even to have noticed.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Turns from blue-green to gold when in her were-cat form.

Specs

A super with the ability to see in a variety of spectrums.

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• Hiding Behind Your Bangs: How she wears her hair, a bit ironic given her vision-based powers.
• True Sight: Her power gives her some variation on this.

Lucas Jorsten

A data analyst for ARC-Light who tracks incidents suspected to have been caused by supers or other unknown forces.

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• Never Heard That One Before: After Sydney is prevented from blurting the first thing out of her mouth, he precludes one question off the bat — no, he does not know Peter Dinklage. Nor is his last name George, though it is close.
• Shorter Means Smarter: He's a little person and ARCHON's premiere data analyst.

ARC-Dark

In General

ARCHON's Black Ops branch.

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• The Spook: An entire organizational version. We know the name, an agent who gives away practically nothing, another who is more often anyone other than herself, and nothing else.

X

X / (Civilian Name Unknown)

Sydney: What's your name?
X: ...X.
Sydney: That's forgettably generic.
X: That's the point.

The classified handler Archon has watching Dabbler, just in case she was serving as the vanguard of an invasion force, or something similar. He's laconic and pragmatic, suiting his job as a spy; he evidently uses a high-tech invisibility/stealth suit, which may be his own design.

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• Badass Normal: There's no hint that he has powers, just high-tech equipment.
• Coat, Hat, Mask: His outfit includes as many identity obscuring items as possible, despite the fact he spends most of his time invisible.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": X's real name is unrevealed.
• Invisibility: His suit lets him turn invisible, though it doesn't stop sonic occlusion, an error he intends to fix at the soonest opportunity.
• Let X Be the Unknown: A mysterious spy with the codename X.
• The Spook: We know an intentionally non-informative codename and his affiliation, and that's it.

Chimyriad

Chimyriad / (Civilian Name Unknown)

Maxima: Do you have to do the creepy faces every time, Chi?
Chimyriad: I mean... wouldn't you if you could?

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• Deadpan Snarker: Sometimes to her detriment.
• Shapeshifting: She can shift her appearance, including clothes, and seems to like making her face unsettling in the process.

ARC-Sparq

In General

The branch of ARCHON that works on equipment and technology.

Digit

An inventor with ARC-Sparq who used to be a vigilante alongside Mr. Amorphous. She was pulled from field duty after a few incidents involving untested inventions.

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• Ditzy Genius: From what her brief scenes of dialogue and The Rant show about her, this trope is in full effect.
• Expy: The author readily admits she's heavily inspired by Gadget Hackwrench of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
• Lethally Stupid: Combined with engineering genius. Fortunately, it's only been fatal for enemy combatants so far, though she is known for her lack of basic common sense with dangerous equipment like harpoons.
• Rough Overalls: Digit is a Gadgeteer Genius wearing overalls. As Sydney notes, they hardly hide the fact that she is a shapely blonde babe.

Iron Cloth

Iron Cloth / Ashley

A fabrikinetic who works in ARC-Sparq designing uniforms and body armor, in addition to developing several fashion lines.

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• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: He's in high demand in the private sector for his work and has several fashion lines.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: The base invasion demonstrates that he can control someone who's sufficiently covered, using a mook's sleeve and glove to make him shoot another mook.
• Mind over Matter: Exclusively with cloth or cloth-like materials.
• Sneeze Cut: When his body armor saves Sydney's life, she decides to send him a gift basket of chocolate-covered super atomic peppers, causing him to feel like someone's walked over his grave.
• Super Costume Clothier: He can control cloth. Rather than use this power in the field, he instead uses it to quickly make highly durable and perfectly sized uniforms for the ARCHON team.

Fashion Ninjas

A pair of tailor ninjas who work with Iron Cloth.

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• Call-Back: Sydney mentions that she didn't expect fashion ninjas, a callback to her philosophy regarding ninjas.
• Gratuitous Ninja: There is no reason for ninjas to work in ARCHON's supply chain except for how entertaining it is.
• Improbable Weapon User: One has a giant needle, the other an oversized pair of scissors. We haven't seen them fight, but The Rant indicates they know how to use them in combat as well as fashion.
• McNinja: They may very well be ethnically Japanese, but superimposing "ninja" onto "tailor" qualifies them for this trope.
• Mundane Utility: They use their speed and agility to take Sydney's measurements in seconds.

ARC-Aegis

In General

The branch of ARCHON dedicated to defense, containment, and clean-up.

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• The Alcatraz: They run the prison for powered individuals.
• Cardboard Prison: Despite an Imagine Spot by Hench Wench it's so far averted, with a total lack of General Population to enforce the aversion. Prisoners are kept in their specialized cells that specifically counter their abilities. The only people to "get out" are Vehemence on supervised release essentially to give him enough regular doses of violence not to die and Opal and Vektor, who are paroled by Deus.
• Extranormal Prison: By design, their cells have to operate in many different ways to counter many different powers.
• Meaningful Name: Aegis is the shield of Zeus and later Athena in Classical Mythology.
• Power Nullifier: There is no such thing as power dampers, so they have to get creative for containment. Teleporters are kept in pressurized environments, for instance, ensuring that teleporting out would kill them. Vehemence, who gets power from violence, is kept in solitary confinement, high as balls, playing Kirby and watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
• Tailor-Made Prison: They have a number of cells capable of being customized to counter different powers.

Other Staff

Arianna

Arianna Shrapnell

"Yes... twist on my finger! MUAHAHAHA!"

The PR representative and legal counsel for ARCHON. Enjoys tweaking Maxima and manipulating the press. (Note: she is assumed here to have taken her husband's surname, but the author admits that it's odd that Sydney didn't realize that they were married for an extended period, so perhaps she still uses her maiden name.)

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• Amoral Attorney: Largely averted so far. She points out she can't screw Sydney over with the Archon contract because then she'd have to sue herself later. And after confirming that a waitress at the steakhouse the villains just wrecked can definitely sue said villains for damages, she offers to help in doing so with much enthusiasm — although admittedly that fits with some of her devious ideas about making life difficult for supervillains.
  Waitress Can I sue the supervillains for lost wages?
  Arianna: Yes... yes you can! And I will HELP YOU!
• Big Damn Heroes: She ends up being the one who takes down Hench Wench, by invoking the powers given to her by the Federal Government to suspend the LLC Hench Wench set up, pending a review by the New York Secretary of State.
• The Chessmaster: Arianna is seen playing Maxima like a fiddle for her amusement and the advancement of her organization as a bonus. Further events may eventually upgrade this status to Magnificent Bastard. However, Max seems to be manipulating right back at her...
• Happily Married: She has been married to Aurelius for 14 years, which suggests that they're both happy about it, though they don't make it especially obvious. It is notable that, when everyone in the base is affected by a magical lust effect, and most of those present jump the nearest person or people of their gender of choice, Arianna calls Aurelius to come into the place as fast as possible; she is reflexively faithful.
• Large Ham: While she's mostly one of the sanest characters around, her manic moments jump headfirst into full-on ham territory, usually with some of the most exaggerated expression in the comic.
• The Merch: Invoked in universe; part of her job as a PR consultant is to push merchandise. She loves Sydney's orbs because it means "collect them all!", and hated Maxima's demonstration because they played havoc with her sales projections.
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: She ends up getting the better of Hench Wench, since she can suspend her LLC on ethical grounds, pending review by the New York Secretary of State.
• Not Me This Time: Since she arranged the fake bank heist, Maxima assumes that Arianna may also have staged the supervillain attack interrupting their team dinner. In a wordless conversation of expressions and gestures across the room, Ariana emphatically insists otherwise.
• Not So Above It All: While she normally leans more towards an Only Sane Woman, she's had her moments. For example, seeing a warehouse FILLED with gold bars leaves her literally breathless. She can get incredibly goofy at times, and when she hams it up, she hams it up. Typically this is when she has an opportunity to access her inner saleswoman via The Merch or to use her considerable legal knowledge. In short, if she has a massive sales opportunity, lawsuit opportunity, or PR windfall she'll take it while hamming it up all the way.
• Only Sane Woman: As a pragmatic (and manipulative) non-powered lawyer with PR responsibilities towards a team of supers, Arianna tends towards this trope. Though she's had one or two manic moments.

Goose

Goose

"..."

A surly-looking fellow with short blond hair and shades who is presumably an ex-military type who provides Archon with security and maybe weapons instruction. He hasn't demonstrated any actual superpowers, but he is clearly more than willing to assist the team in combat and is quite effective about it.

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• Cool Shades: Goose has never been seen without his shades. It's a fair bet that he wears Sunglasses at Night.
• Expy: Goose is acknowledged by the writer to bear an unfortunate resemblance to a certain video game character.
• More Dakka: Goose is rarely seen without a firearm, and usually a large one — sometimes ridiculously large. His function in combat seems to be to send as many bullets as possible in the direction of the opposition.
• Perpetual Frowner: Goose only appears to have one facial expression, and that's a scowl.
• The Voiceless: Goose has never been known to speak on screen. There's no suggestion that he's The Speechless; it appears that he's just not a big talker.

Seneca

Seneca

First Appearance: "Collar Commandeering"

An aloof soldier.

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• Sweet Tooth: Seneca is pretty much never seen without munching on something sweet.

General Faulk

General Faulk

"Don't bother imagining us all in our underwear, because we're all dead sexy."

The officer in charge of ARCHON.

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• Closet Geek: Dabbler reads his fantasy and changes into an Orion Slave Girl. There are other hints too.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Well, it's not too unusual to refer to the one general present as "the General."
• Glasses Pull: For especially dramatic moments.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Apparently the General is a fan of My Little Pony, Pokémon: The Series and Sailor Moon. Though that might just be because he has grandkids.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He's the highest ranking member of ARCHON and is generally a pretty cool guy who doesn't let things like etiquette get in the way of treating his people well. When another general wants to pressure Maxima into doing something that is very much not allowed, Faulk stops him and advises him to not finish the sentence.
• Silver Fox: Downplayed. His hair is black rather than grey, but he is visibly older than most other characters (around his 50s, presumably), and tells Sydney that the "imagining the audience naked" trick won't work since they're all "dead sexy."
• Twitchy Eye: Sports a "My patience is thinning" version when Dabbler engages in some mind-reading to determine what form would turn him on.
• The Wonka:
  • The General is shaping up to be this. The fact that his uniform seems to be a shade of purple helps.
  • Here's a good example of his thought process, though that's likely from seeing those shows with his grandkids.
  • He also apparently keeps a pair of glasses just so that he can dramatically take them off.

Leon

Leon

"It would be a shame if your bank accounts mysteriously disappeared."

The technical expert at ARCHON. A self-avowed nerd with a bit of a complex about dealing with beautiful women (which makes working with superheroines an... interesting prospect).

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• Cannot Talk to Women: The incredibly pretty ones, anyway. He seems okay with Sydney. Also with Maxima, likely because she doesn't flaunt when having discussions with him.
• Geek: Actually, Leon proclaims himself to be both a geek and a nerd, and Sydney has checked him out and confirmed this. However, their use of the latter term doesn't really accord with the definition used on this site.
• Has a Type: Though he doesn't have enough dating experience to confirm it, he apparently is most comfortable around women with Sydney's body frame, since he's become romantically involved with Krona while Sydney was "away."
• Hollywood Hacking: He mercilessly skewers it in one memorable exchange.
• Hacker Cave: His office in Archon headquarters is a fairly clean, well-lit example. We see at least four monitors and several cans of soda.
• I'm Standing Right Here: When Sydney bursts into his office and sees him romantically involved with Krona, the two women begin discussing "dating rights" concerning him as if he's not even in the room. Any and all attempts he makes to voice his input or simply get clarification are met with abuse, verbal or physical.
• One Head Taller: A good deal taller than Sydney, who a few seconds after noting this wonders how "Leon Scoville" sounds.
• Properly Paranoid: When he notices the internet and cellphone signal suddenly going down, he immediately sounds the alarm and initiates lockdown, rightfully guessing they are under attack.

Aurelius

Aurelius Shrapnell

A financial adviser who helps the Archon supes manage their huge paychecks.

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• Happily Married: Aurelius has been married to Arianna for the last 14 years, which suggests that they're both happy about it, though they don't make it especially obvious. It is notable that, when everyone in the base is affected by a magical lust effect, and most of those present jump the nearest person or people of their gender of choice, Arianna calls Aurelius to come into the place as fast as possible; she isn't interested in being unfaithful.
• Meaningful Name: Like Varia, his name is a subversion of this, despite Sydney originally thinking it had something to do with his nonexistent powers. That being said, his name translates roughly to "gold dust," which is a reasonable name for a financial adviser.

Dr. Chevy

Dr. Chevapravatdumrong

A super with the power to heal others. Not technically part of ARCHON, she drops by the base once a week or after any major fight, spending most of her time visiting trauma wards.

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• Healing Factor: She temporarily induces this in others, allowing them to recover from broken bones in minutes.

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