PROGENITOR: WORM (A Wormquest AU)

DragonCobolt · Nov 29, 2021

SUSPICION	TECHNOLOGY	ECONOMY	WARFARE
2	3	3	2

THE METRIC DATA IS NOT AVALAIBLE TO YOUR CHARACTER UNLESS THEY HAVE SUPERHUMAN (10+) DICE IN MIND.
YOU MAY CHECK THE METRICS, BUT YOU MUST NOT ACT UPON THEM.
IF YOU START DOING MONKEY BEESKNEES, THEN I'LL REMOVE THESE.
BUT THEY'RE NEAT, SO DON'T MAKE ME DO THAT.

THE CURRENT MEMBERS OF THE STONEWALL NINE

TEAM MORALE: Dissolved (1/4), Fraying (1/2), Bad (3/4), Average (x1), Good (x1.5), Excellent (x2), Found Family (x3)
TEAM HEADQUARTERS: Yggdrasil, the World Tree
TEAM ALLIES: NYPD (Grudging), Stan Lee (Eager), Cam Nguyet (Whether You Want Her Or Not), Amanda Sykes, Abe Sykes
TEAM ENEMIES: Don Crawler (Nemesis) [IN JAIL], Glasshead (Nemesis) [IN JAIL], Miss Eyes (Nemisis) [IN JAIL], Zipperneck (Rival) [IN JAIL],
Cam Nguyet (Whether You Want Her Or Not)

TEAM WARDS: Tina Shaw, Amy Sykes, Cassie the Humanoid Force, Sloppy Joe, Aisha Laborn, Camilo Vera, Jill Danning

Lily Satō, Head of the Stonewall Nine

AGE: 19 (DOB: 1951)
PASSION: Girls [7], Fuck the Cops [4], Superheroing [1]
LOYALTY: Queer Rights [7], Your Friends [5], , A Better World [1]
BASE WILL: 25 | XP: 1

Lily has seen nothing but hassle from New York's finest and is damn sure not going to let them push her around. And now, finally, a queer woman can hit back harder than the patriarchy does.

BODY	CORD.	SENSE	MIND	CHARM	COMMAND
1d+1wd	6d	3d	3d	2d	2d

Lily, before becoming a metahuman, was perceptive and smart, but had the strength and endurance of a sixteen year old girl after a bad cold. Afterwards, she could become incredibly strong if she manipulated the physics of the items she touched, or the clothing she wore to augment herself. Her max press was five tons without any additional effort, a top speed of 40 MPH for running, and a vertical jump of 8 yards. Also, she can dodge bullets.

SKILLS (Broad, Flexible, Influence)
[Any] New Yorker, Japanese-American, Delinquent (B/F/-): 3d
[Any] Being a Lesbian in the 1960s (B/F/-): 3d
[Any] Superhero (B/F/I): 1d
[Coordination] Sneaking (-/-/-): 2d
[Coordination] Lockpicking (-/-/-): 2d
[Mind] Speak Vietnamese (-/-/-): 1d
[Mind] Speak Russia (-/-/-): 1d
[Mind - Hyperskill] Intuitive Physicist (B/-/-): 6hd
[Charm] Voice of the People (-/-/I): 1d
[Command] Stubbornness (-/-/-): 3d

Lily, before becoming a metahuman, was the bad apple of her family. A second generation Japanese immigrant, she doesn't like or respect her parents - if only because she's grimly determined they'd freak out if they found out what she...felt about other women. She's good at sneaking out and has spent more time at Stonewall than she has at school, as her grades will attest. She's got a stubborn attitude and is about ten years early for punk and ten years late for the Beatniks. She makes do.

ARCHETYPE: METAHUMAN
Source: Unknown | Permission: Super
Intrinsics:

Immutable: Barring superhuman assistance, gadgets, or something wildly unexpected, Lily's powers will not change or improve.

Infectious: Lily is either a strong, stable or weak vector (she doesn't know which.) If she's strong, she has a 100% infection rate until she reaches power equilibrium. If she's stable, she has an 80% shot (the joy of being a Tier 3.) If she's weak, she's got a 10% shot. Infection passes when she uses her powers on anything sentient.

POWERS

Not So Little Anymore...
Dice: 1wd

Hyperbody (+4), No Physics (+1), Booster [2] (+2), If/Then [Must Be Wearing Clothes Over The Parts Used] (-1), Obvious (-1)

Cost per Die: 5 | Total Cost: 20

By adjusting, in minute and gross ways, the physical properties of either what she carries and her own clothing, Lily effectively has her very own suit of strength enhancing exoskeletal structures. This imparts incredibly precise control to her blows, her athleticism, and her jumping. This isn't a subtle effect - her body emits strange flashes and odd noises as air and light interacts unpredictably with her physics alterations.

Fast as a Thought
Dice: 4d

Hypercoordination (+4), No Physics (+1), Go First [2] (+2), If/Then [Must Be Wearing Clothes Over The Parts Used] (-1), Obvious (-1)

Cost per Die: 5 | Total Cost: 20

Just like with her body, but this covers her reflexes as well. She can dodge bullets! ...not that she HAS too. The flashing and eerie hissing makes stealth hard, so she prefers to turn it off when she's sneaking anywhere.

Intuitive Physicist
Dice: 6hd
Hyperskill [[Mind]General Physicist (B/-/-)] (+1)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 12
She's intuitively a PHD equipped physicist on par with Albert Einstein. Maybe better, actually. She literally can't NOT know the exact right answer to any physics question. This really helps, considering her powers.

Everything is a Gun
Dice: 8d+1wd
Range: 2,560 Yards | Mass: Knockback = Base Damage + 6 meters | Base Damage: Width in Shock & Killing

Attack (+2), Area [1d] (+1) Spray [1d) (+1), Heightened Capacity [Mass] (+1), Penetration [2] (+2), Power Capacity [Mass] (+2), Speeding Bullet (+2), If/Then [Must Touch an Object] (-1), Obvious (-1)

Cost Per Die: 9 | Total Cost: 108

By touching an object (any object, really) and canceling their mass and lateral motion relative to the planet Earth, she can turn anything, from an apple to a doorknob to a manhole cover into a projectile. By touching a lot of objects (I.E, using spray), she can hit as many times as she gets sets. By making sure to touch relatively fragile objects and creating deliberate fracture points, she turns the weapon into a kind of kinetic shotgun (using Area.) People hit by this tend to go flying (using the Power Capacity [Mass]), but she can just use narrow blades if she just wants to do the slicing and slashing. The only problem is if she can't touch things with her skin (it has to be a skin to skin contact) it won't work. Oh. Also, the sonic booms.

No
Dice: 10hd
Range: 512 yards

Defends (+2), Power Capacity [Range] (+2), Spray (+1), Obvious (-1), Limited Capacity (-1), If/Then [Must have a Medium to Manipulate] (-1)

Cost Per Die: 3 | Total Cost: 40

By glaring at the air around her, she can render it impenetrable to whatever is coming her way. Maybe the air molecules suddenly lose the ability to move at all and become an impenetrable wall that simply bounces a kinetic projectile off, or negating an explosive's ability to undergo chemical interactions that lead to detonations, or making the air molecules ahead of her simply non-conductive to whatever energy blast is heading her way. This is not subtle - producing bright flashes, loud booms, and strange changes in local atmospheric conditions as the interactions become chaotic beyond the immediate radius. The maximum number of people or places she can protect at once is five people, but the more people she tries to protect, the less effective the defense is. It's literally impenetrable when she's just protecting one person, but if she's protecting five at once, a fast shot or lucky hit might get through.

Physical Fuckery
Dice: 5wd

Range: N/A | Mass: N/A | Speed: N/A

Attacks (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), If/Then [For Variable Effect] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Must Be Related to Repressing a Physical Law] (-1), Locational [Head, R. Arm, L. Arm, Body, R. Leg, L. Leg] (-6)

Defends (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), If/Then [For Variable Effect] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Must Be Related to Repressing a Physical Law] (-1), Locational [Head, R. Arm, L. Arm, Body, R. Leg, L. Leg] (-6)

Useful (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), If/Then [For Variable Effect] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Must Be Related to Repressing a Physical Law] (-1), Locational [Head, R. Arm, L. Arm, Body, R. Leg, L. Leg] (-6)

Cost Per Die: 6 | Total Cost: 120

Whenever she puts her mind to it, Lily can do something. If it can be done by suppressing a physical property or law, she can do it. Needless to say, once she realizes how her power works, she starts studying the hell of out physics. This is really easy, thanks to her intuitive understanding of physics. However, this power requires her to be able to use every SINGLE iota of her body's contact with the surrounding universe. If she has taken any trauma to any part of her body, then these powers short out. If she gets a chance to refocus, she can reestablish her control...unless the body part in question is too damaged to be used (I.E, filled with any combination of shock or killing damage.) In which case, she simply cannot tap into this ability to manipulate the universe. She simply lacks the holistic connection to the universe.

Seriously, Though, everything?
Dice: 1d
Range: Self Only

Attacks (+2), Attack Quality [10] (+10), Augment (+4), Area [10d] (+10), Booster [10] (+10), Burning (+2), Engulf (+2), Penetration [10] (+10), Radius [5] (+10), If/Then [Augment Only] (-1), If/Then [Cannot Spend Use Augment for anything but "Everything Is a Gun"] (-1), If/Then [Must Be Manipulating Matter On A Scale Permitting The Impacts She Wishes] (-1), Self Only (-3)

Cost Per Die: 54 | Total Cost: 54

Hey, what if she touches a mountain face and she negates its inertia and lateral motion for a flash of a second and turns Everest into a five kilometer high rock shotgun? Well, uh...take your pick! Add all of the above! If she uses a chemical tanker, it might explode. If she uproots an oil derrick, it will set things on fire. Anything justifiable in the scene, she can do it. She will have to spend a willpower point to do this. Oh, and be willing to accept the consequences.

Confident as Hell
Dice: N/A
Base Will (+3), Attached [Hyperbody] (-2)
Cost Per Point: 1 | Total Cost: 26
Lifting five tons over her head, running as fast a car, and being aware she doesn't have to be afraid anymore all combine to create a staggering, preposterous level of raw confidence. This is good, cause it makes her good at fighting supervillains and changing the world. The only problem is that if that hyperbody ever goes away...poof. There goes the confidence. Good thing that won't happen! ...right?

Andy Richter, Time Thief and Genius Gadgeteer

Andy's Powers

ANDY HAS 11 BASE WILL.

Hypermind
Dice: 4wd
Hyperbrain (+4), If/Then [Must be within 10 meters of any form if electrical equipment) (-1), If/Then [Can be disrupted by wrapping his head in a Faraday cage] (-1), If/Then [Can be disrupted with any form of non-physical radar jamming too] (-1)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 12

More Hypermind
Dice: 2wd
Hyperbrain (+4) If/Then [Must be within 10 meters of a pretty hefty chunk of computers) (-1), If/Then [Can be disrupted by wrapping his head in a Faraday cage] (-1), If/Then [Can be disrupted with any form of non-physical radar jamming too] (-1)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 8

Even More Hypermind
Dice: 2wd
Hyperbrain (+4) If/Then [Must be within 10 meters of even more computer components) (-1), If/Then [Can be disrupted by wrapping his head in a Faraday cage] (-1), If/Then [Can be disrupted with any form of non-physical radar jamming too] (-1)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 8

Dear God, Sir, How Much More Hypermind Do you Need!?
Dice: 2wd
Hyperbrain (+4) If/Then [Must be within 10 meters of a pretty hefty chunk of computers) (-1), If/Then [Can be disrupted by wrapping his head in a Faraday cage] (-1), If/Then [Can be disrupted with any form of non-physical radar jamming too] (-1)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 8

When Andy is within ten meters of any kind of electrically conductive material harnessed for human ends – lamp posts and microwaves, toasters and hair driers – he becomes smarter than the smartest human being in the world. If those electrically conductive materials are arranged into a computer of some kind, then he becomes a lot smarter, and he gets more and more smarter the more and more computers are around him. Eventually, he hits the four way tie for smartest monkey on this marble. Unfortunately, unlike some metahumans, Andy's "exocortex" is suspended on physical matter and communicated to him via electromagnetic signals, meaning they can be blocked or removed by his enemies.

Time Snatch
Dice: 2hd
Mass: 2.5 kg or less
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), Limited Capacity (-1)
Cost Per Die: 5 | Total Cost: 20

Andy has a fascination with electrical gizmos and computers. But the 1960s was not enough for his subconscious. He is able to reach forward in time into parallel universes and, uh...steal stuff. The stuff can only come from other universes, and he can't do more than 2.5 kilograms at a time, making the stuff he REALLY wants (quantum computers, spaceship engines, laser guns) slightly tricky.

I Can Make Whatever You Want
Dice: 5hd+10d+5wd

Attacks (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), Delayed Effect (-2), If/Then [Variable Effect Requires at least 6wd of Hyperbrain to be active] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect is only for Technology] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Any Gadget Made Must Have the Manufacturable Extra] (-1), Willpower Investment (-1)
Defends (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), Delayed Effect (-2), If/Then [Variable Effect Requires at least 6wd of Hyperbrain to be active] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect is only for Technology] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Any Gadget Made Must Have the Manufacturable Extra] (-1), Willpower Investment (-1)
Useful (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), Delayed Effect (-2), If/Then [Variable Effect Requires at least 6wd of Hyperbrain to be active] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect is only for Technology] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Any Gadget Made Must Have the Manufacturable Extra] (-1), Willpower Investment (-1)
Useful (+2), Endless (+3), Delayed Effect (-2), Touch Only (-2)
Cost Per Die: 7 | Total Cost: 280

Hokay. So! Andy can make gadgets. He's, in fact, one of the better gadgeters in the world – in part because he doesn't NEED A LABORATORY. He doesn't NEED supplies. Because he just...uh...borrows them from the future. (Note, if he chooses to not borrow things from the future, then he will need a laboratory, but won't get a rebate in points.) The gadgets he makes can be, eventually, learned to be recreated by non-metahumans. Now, it still takes him some time to actually build a gadget! Now, there is one tiny problem: He needs to be smart enough to do any of this, and that means that if he's in a Faraday cage helmet, then he's shit outta luck.

Oh, also, the last useful ability is the ability to deconstruct other people's foci. So, if he finds a gadget in the wild, he can take it apart and gets all the Willpower used to build the device in the first place. This is why gadgteers tend to HATE one another. He can also deconstruct any device he's built to get the willpower he invested in it back.

Base Will
Dice: N/A
Base Will (+3), Attached [Hypermind] (-2)
Cost Per Point: 1 | Total Cost: 14

He's a driven, focused guy.

Sabah Attar, Girl Who's Under Your Skin

SABAH HAS 8 BASE WILL

Puppets
Dice: 2hd+8d
Range: Touch/5,450 Yards
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), Delayed Effect (-2) If/Then [Needs Materials To Make Them From] (-1), If/Then [Can only use hard dice with skin] (-1), Touch Only (-2)
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), Attached [Telekinesis] (-2)
Cost Per Die: 4 | Total Cost: 48

By using her telekinesis to sew together, uh, material - don't tell people it's skin, please don't tell people it works best with skin - Sabah is able to make incredibly useful puppets. With a 2x10 result, she can make 10 of them. They last forever and are perfectly loyal to her! ...so long as they're within about three miles. Once beyond that, they act on their own recognizance. She CAN make it with non-skin and she's even pretty good at it, but it is kind of tricky and doesn't always make the best minions. (a 2x1 to 2x3 result produces Rabble, while a 2x4 to 2x6 makes trained minions, and 2x7 to 2x8 makes professionals. 2x10 make Elites.

Matterkinesis
Dice: 9d+1wd
Range: 510 Yards | Mass: 1.28 Tons| Speed: 128 Yards
Attacks (+2), High Capacity [Mass, Range] (+2), Power Capacity [Mass, Range] (+4), Spray [1d] (+1), If/Then [Only Manipulates Unliving Matter] (-1), Limited Capacity (-1)
Defend (+2), Power Capacity [Range] (+2), Spray [1d] (+1), If/Then [Only Manipulates Unliving Matter] (-1), Limited Capacity (-1)
Useful (+2), Duration (+2), High Capacity [Mass, Range] (+2), Power Capacity [Mass, Range] (+4), Spray [1d] (+1), If/Then [Only Manipulates Unliving Matter] (-1), Limited Capacity (-1)
Cost Per Die: 19 | Total Cost: 247 points

This is the big shebang. Sabah is able to manipulate non-living matter to move it around. She's pretty weak. For...a tier 4, meaning she can "only" lift a 1.2 ton boulder off the ground from a "mere" 510 yards and "barely" throw it at 128 MPH. Guh. What a chump, right? This power can defend, attack, and manipulate matter. The matter that she manipulates tends to "stick" to what it was doing for about an hour - so if she flings a rock upwards at 128 MPH, then it'll keep going straight up at that speed for an hour before falling down.

Specialty Puppets
Dice: 2hd
Range: Touch
Attack (+2), Duration (+2), Variable Effect (+4), Attached [Puppets] (-2), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Only Is Attached to Puppets] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Can Mimic Expert Minion Abilities] (-1), Touch Only (-2)
Defend (+2), Duration (+2), Variable Effect (+4), Attached [Puppets] (-2), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Only Is Attached to Puppets] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Can Mimic Expert Minion Abilities] (-1), Touch Only (-2)
Useful (+2), Duration (+2), Variable Effect (+4), Attached [Puppets] (-2), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Only Is Attached to Puppets] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Can Mimic Expert Minion Abilities] (-1), Touch Only (-2)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 4

When she makes puppets, the puppets can do stuff that they would reasonably be able to do. If she makes a bunch of ninja costumes, they get the Elite Ability: Stealth, allowing them to do what minions normally cannot (sneak into buildings without being spotted.) She can attach any elite ability she wants to these puppets!

Armed Puppets
Dice: 2hd
Range: Touch
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), Attached [Puppets] (-2), Touch Only (-2)
Cost Per Die: 2 | Total Cost: 8

...is that a puppet? HE'S GOT A GUN!? BLAM BLAM! If this power is used after the puppet power, then the puppets have guns and can do their damage in S/K damage. The guns look like they're made of felt cloth or bone depending on if Sabah is making them out of which cloth - but no matter how impossible the gun looks, it still can kill.

Immune Puppets
Dice: 2hd
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), Variable Effect (+4), Attached [Puppets] (-2), If/Then [Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect is for Immunities Only] (-1), Self Only (-3)
Cost Per Die: 3 | Total Cost: 12

These puppets don't need to breathe, cannot be poisoned by gas, cannot get cancer, radiation, "live" I guess, forever, and are immune to pretty much whatever would kill a normal human other than straight out physical damage.

Self Stitching
Dice: 2hd
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), Engulf (+2), No Physics (+1), Self Only (-3)
Cost Per Die: 6 | Total Cost: 24

Sabah hopefully doesn't learn about this for a while. But the instant her own flesh dies, she can control it and can instinctively stitch it back together again. This effects her entire body. At the most extreme case, if she is completely atomized, she will reconstitute herself in approximately sixty seconds. She will not enjoy doing this, but she can do it. Death for Sabah now requires some equally permanent effect or for her to lose her powers.

Touch Up
Dice: 1d
Hypercharm (+4)
Cost Per Die: 4 | Total Cost: 1d

Like most teens of any gender or sexuality, Sabah has a few hangups about her body. A few wrinkles gone, a bit less sag here and there. Most people won't notice, but they're gone.

Base Will
Points: 1
Base Will (+3)
Cost Per Point: 3 | Total Cost: 1

She's just a bit more confident. Also, I had 3 points to spare

Lisa Wilbourn, Nose Who Knows

LISA HAS 12 BASE WILL

Become a Foxgirl
Dice: 2hd
Useful (+2), Endless (+3), Self Only (-3)
Cost Per Die: 2 | Total Cost: 8

Lisa becomes a fox girl!

Elementary
Dice: 5wd
Hyperskill [Broad, Flexible] (+2), No Physics (+1), If/Then [The wild dice must be set to the value of the normal die rolled] (-2)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 20

Why, it's elementary, my dear Watson! This is a broad and flexible skill that covers all manners of detective and investigation sneakery. It has no physics, allowing for preposterous levels of information to be drawn, far beyond what would normally be available from a mere glance. The only problem is that it is somewhat dependent on her own mind (5d.) So, if she rolls a 4, 3, 2, 1 in her normal mind dice, she'd HAVE to get a 5x4 - a fast, but not necessarily correct deduction.

Bang
Dice: 10wd
Hyperskill [Broad] (+1)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 40

She's quite possibly the best shot on the planet with any gun or gun like object. This is a byproduct of her incredibly focused intellect.

Coordinated Like A Fox
Dice: 10wd
Hypercoordination (+4), Attached [Fox Girl] (-2)
Total Cost Per Die: 2 | Total Cost: 80

When she is a fox girl, she is able to preform feats of physical coordination that defy imagination. Dodge bullets? She can CATCH bullets. She can shoot bullets WITH HER OWN BULLETS.

Can't Touch This
Dice: 1d
Hyperskill [Narrow] (+0), Interference (+3), Duration(+2), Attached [Fox Girl] (-2)
Total Cost Per Die: 4 | | Total Cost: 3

Remember when I said she can dodge bullets? Say she gets shot at. She rolls a 10x10 using her coordination+ this skill. This now on for the rest of the battle. She can dodge all the bullets forever until the battle is over.

The Nose Knows
Dice: 10wd
Hypersense (+4), Attached [Fox girl] (-2)
Cost Per Die: 2 | Total Cost: 80

Her senses are so preposterously attuned to the world around her that she can see in the dark, read by touch, identify targets by smell, differentiate between distinct sounds in a symphony by their subtle differences, and can sense movement up to a quarter of a mile away.

Oh Shit
Dice: 2hd
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), No Physics (+1), Radius [13] (+26), Self Only (-3), Uncontrolled (-2), Attached [Fox Girl] (-2)
Cost Per Die: 26 | Total Cost: 104

This is a power no one knows she has. Because it's not really a power exactly. It's a combination of her incredible senses and her deductive reasoning. Here's how it works. If anything catastrophic happens within 12 hours - the death of a loved one, a natural disaster, a space station knocked out of orbit and smashed into the ground - and it happens somewhere within 50 miles around Lisa, this power triggers. The game resets to that point with her waking up from a prophetic dream put together by her subconscious, aware of exactly what she did during that day. Once she realizes this power exists (and, also, the 50 mile limit to when it triggers) she is going to be INCREDIBLY CLINGY.

Base Will
Points: 5
Base Will (+3)
Cost Per Die: 3 | Total Cost: 15

She's confident, like most of you, because she has superpowers.

Theo Anders, Arm of the Resistance

THEO HAS 7 BASE WILL

Limb Field
Dice: 8+2wd
Hyperbody (+4), Booster [+8], No Physics (+1), On Sight (+1), Endless (+3), Power Capacity [Range] (+2), Radius [1] (+2), Spray [1] (+1), If/Then [Only for arms] (-1), If/Then [Requires Local Materials] (-1)
Cost Per Die: 20 | Total Cost: 320

So! Everything within a 3 mile range can be touched by Theo by manifesting an arm made of local materials (air, if nothing's there, but he can also use cloth, bits of stone, metal, anything that he can use to reach through.) This does mean it doesn't work in a vacuum, but it can work in an extremely thin atmosphere or with local dirt if he was, say, on the Moon. Anywho, he can make as many arms as he want (for example, if there were twenty people in a ten yard radius, he could make 20 arms to grab each of them by the scruff of their necks.) What is more, he can use this power through screens to cheat the distance. If he sees someone on TV, he can manifest an arm there and pants them! Cool!

Anywho, these arms can lift 1.28 trillion tons, last forever unless he is killed or runs out of willpower. They can throw a 1.6 ton object nearly a tenth of a mile. They can punch someone so hard that they'll go flying 48 yards BEFORE you figure for any extra damage. And did I mention they defy the laws of physics - so, he can pick up a building without spilling the coffee cups inside? Cool!

Tougher Than He Looks
Dice: 3hd
Defends (+2), Endless (+3), Hardened Armor (+2), Armored Defense (-2)
Cost Per Die: 5 | Total Cost: 30

He's tougher than he looks. He has 3 levels of Light Armor, which reduces shock damage to 1, then converts 3 levels of killing damage to shock. So, if he was thrown into a wall for 5s/2k like poor Ned, he'd take 1s/2k, then the 2k would be turned to shock, so that's a total of 3s - a bad bruise, not a potentially life threatening spine snap.

Rachel Lindt, Houndmistress Extraordinaire

RACHEL HAS 9 BASE WILL

Pet Their Heads And They Wag their Tails
Dice: 2hd+2d
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), Touch Only (-2)
Hypermind (+4), Attached [Pet Their Heads] (-2), If/Then [Does Not Provide Hard Dice To Canines] (-1)
Points Per Die: 5 | Total Cost: 30

When Rachel pets a dog, the dog wags their tail! Also, she can now talk to this dog, forever, at any time, using normal conversational English. She can also understand the dog's response. Oh! Also, the dog gets +1d to its mind as hypermind, bumping it from an animalistic 0d to a human level 2d. Good dog! Who's a good pupper?

Make My Doggy GROW!
Dice: 3hd+6d+2wd
Range: 5,120 yards
Useful (+2), Duration (+2), On Sight (+1), Attached [Pet Their Heads] (-2), Obvious (-1)
Hyperbody (+4), Booster [2] (+2) Attached [Pet Their Heads] (-2), Attached [Make My Doggy Grow] (-2)
Hypercoordination (+4), Attached [Pet Their Heads] (-2), Attached [Make My Doggy Grow] (-2)
Defends (+2), Duration (+2), Armored Defense (-2), Attached [Pet Their Heads] (-2), Attached [Make My Doggy Grow] (-2)
Defends (+2), Duration (+2), Interference (+3), Armored Defense (-2), Attached [Pet Their Heads] (-2), Attached [Make My Doggy Grow] (-2)
Attacks (+2), Penetration [5] (+5), Attached [Pet Their Heads] (-2), Attached [Make My Doggy Grow] (-2)
Useful (+2), Duration (+2), Engulf (+2), Attached [Pet their heads] (-2), Attached [Make my Doggy Grow] (-2), Self Only (-3)
Useful (+2), Duration (+2), Attached [Pet their Heads] (-2), Attached [Make my Doggy Grow] (-2)
Points Per Die: 13 | 260

If a dog that Rachel has petted is within range - or even just visible through a screen, or...she can talk to it over a phone (note to self: Invent radio collars for her dogs that she can work through), she can make the doggy GROW! This only lasts for a short time, but the dog will become much larger, much tougher, and much stronger and much faster. Basically, they get +3hd+6d+2wd to their Body, their Coordination, AND they'll get (effectively) 5 levels of light and hardened armor and +5 health levels on each area, making each dog a literal walking tank! ...also, they get laser eye vision. Which can cut through tank armor. Cause, you know. They're dogs.

...the dogs can also fly. At 640 MPH.

Cause they're dogs.

Power Collar
Dice: 2hd
Range: Touch
Useful (+2), Permanent (+4), Attached [Pet Their Heads] (-2), Always On (-1), Automatic (-1), Touch Only (-2)
Point Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 4

The dogs, once she pets them, cannot gain dark energy powers despite being sentient. It's an instinctive byproduct of Rachel's will to both connect with dogs and 'keep them safe' - wild, uncontrolled dark energy powers spreading unchecked through the doggy population terrifies her subconscious. And so, her subconscious makes sure to lock that off.

Healing Touch
Dice: 2hd
Range: Touch
Useful (+2), Useful Quality [5] (+5) Engulf (+2), Touch Only (-2)
Points Per Die: 7 | Total Cost: 28

Though terrified at first this power only works on Dogs, Rachel is relieved to learn it actually can work on just about anything. She touches them, and they glow a little, and then heal 7s/7k to every single part of their body instantly. No muss, no fuss. It, sadly, cannot bring people back to life unless she pushes herself (she will have to permanently burn 1 Base Will to do so.)

Base Will
Total Points: +2
Base Will (+3)
Point per Will: 3 | Total Cost: 6

She's determined. Not as much as others, but enough.

Marsha P. Johnson, The Queen of Stonewall

MARSHA HAS 11 BASE WILL

Flower Power
Dice: 9d+1wd
Attacks (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [All Effects are Plant Themed] (-1)
Defends (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [All Effects are Plant Themed] (-1)
Useful (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [All Effects are Plant Themed] (-1)
Cost Per Die: 21 | Total Cost: 273

A powerful and incredibly flexible ability, Marsha is able to create and utilize plant growths (most people think she can only do flowers, but she can do trees, she can do vines, she can do thorns, oh boy.) These plants often defy physics and understanding - if she wants, she can make a thorn that can cut through tank steel, or a tree that can grow powerfully enough to uproot a building, or an apple that, when eaten, can cure sickness. While her power isn't as "rawly" strong as some other abilities - if she got into a tree V arm wrestling contest with Theo, Theo would win - her powers are so staggeringly flexible that she is an amazing asset. However, her powers do need to be "formatted" - meaning that if she isn't prepped for combat or defense, she is terrible vulnerable.

Queen of Stonewall
Dice: 8hd
Defend (+2), Endless (+3), Radius [3] (+6), Delayed Effect (-2), If/Then [Only Works in an building she owns and operates and has become in, some metaphorical and metaphysical sense, hers] (-1), No Physical Effect (-1), Exhausted (-3)
Cost Per Die: 4 | Total Cost: 64

So long as the Queen is in her domain, no harm shall come to any who are there. This power is an endless effect centered on her, radiating out approximately 40 yards (meaning an exceptionally large building won't be entirely protected.) The effect is entirely psychological - people simply cannot bring themselves to harm anyone while in the field - this includes her allies, she can't shut it down for them.

Beauty Without Compare
Dice: +4d
Hypercharm (+4), Obvious (-1)
Cost Per Die: 3 | Total Cost: 12

She is luminous, with total of 7 dice in Charm.

Fabulous Performer
Dice: +1d
Hyperskill (Broad, Flexible)
Cost Per Die: 1d | Total Cost: 1

This is a mild improvement, but it was all I could think to spend her last point on. Sue me!

Tori Heflin, The Telekinetic Smuggler

TORI HAS 8 BASE WILL

Invisible Telekinesis
Dice: 3d+1wd
Attacks (+2), Booster (+4), High Capacity [Mass] (+2), Non-Physical (+2), Power Capacity [Mass] (+2), Subtle (+1), Spray [1d] (+1), Locational [head] (-1)
Defends (+2), Controlled Effect (+1), Duration (+2), Interference (+3), Power Capacity [Range] (+2), Radius [1] (+2), Subtle (+1), Locational [head] (-1)
Useful (+2), Duration (+2), Booster (+4), High Capacity [Mass, Speed] (+2), Power Capacity [Mass, Speed] (+4), Subtle (+1), Locational [head] (-1),
Useful (+2), Booster (+4), Engulf (+2), High Capacity [Mass] (+1), Power Capacity [Mass] (+2) Attached [Telekinesis] (-2),
Cost Per Die: 45 | Total Cost: 315

By focusing, Tori is able to create telekinetic fields. Unlike many, these fields are completely, one hundred percent invisible. She can protect people in bubbles (selectively, if she wants!) bout 10 yards wide, so long as they are within about 80 yards of her. Her attacks are incredibly narrow stabs that then balloon in the target - they can only be dodged, not resisted with armor (hence the 'non-physical' extra.) If she's feeling exceptionally vindictive, she can just grab your heart and punch it as hard as she can from within your ribcage too. Her max range for her TK attacks is 800,000 yards. That's 450 miles! It can send people flying pretty goddamn far too.

Next, she can pick up and carry stuff. Anything within 450 miles, and her max weight is 2,000 tons. Not as stupidly huge as some people, but nothing to shake a stick at. What is really amazing, though...is this.

Anything she picks up - anything at all - becomes invisible TOO. This includes her own self, if she's using TK to fly. This includes the ENTIRE PARTY if she's carrying everyone. This includes jets. This includes buildings. Anything she grabs, she can turn invisible!

Adaption
Dice: 4hd
Useful (+2), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect For Immunities Only] (-1), Self Only (-3)
Cost Per Die: 4 | Total Cost: 32

Thanks to telekinesis, she can also breathe in space. With telekinesis.

Base Will
Points: 1
Cost Per Point: 3 | Total Cost: 3

You know the drill by now. Powers, better will, had points hanging.

Brian Laborn, The Power in Obscurity

BRIAN HAS 7 BASE WILL

Grueclouds
Dice: 9hd
Attack (+2), Daze (+1), Duration (+2), Radius (1) (+2), Non-Physical (+2), Spray [1d] (+1), Limited Damage (shock) (-1), Limited Width (-1)
Useful (+2), Duration (+2), Radius (+1), Attached [Dazing Cloud] (-2), Automatic (-1)
Cost Per Die: 10 | Total Cost: 180

When activated, this power is a bit slow and sluggish - effectively going off last on every round. However, you have to know it is coming, and this requires a Resistance roll of Sense+Perception to spot where Brian is looking (he just need to glare to do it.) If the resistance roll fails, then you get hit with 5x10 attack in a 10 yard radius. Due to limited width and limited damage, this only does 1 shock to the head. ...it also removes FIVE DICE from their next turn. If a character has no dice, they can't do shit. This happens each round they're in the cloud, so if they're completely debilitated, they take 1 shock to the head every round until the cloud is dispersed or they slowly and painfully die. Since, 1 shock per 6 seconds for an hour is going to kill you. Even better, the cloud also gets a 4x10 useful effect that obscures visibility, chokes out EM frequencies, and negates all but the best dark energy perceptions. That's what the useful is, the jamming field.

Power Thief
Dice: 1d+2wd
Attacks (+2), Variable Effect (+4), Endless (+3), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Is For Mimicking Powers Only] (-1), If/Then [Target Must have been exposed to the Gruecloud at all! Ever!] (-1)
Defends (+2), Variable Effect (+4), Endless (+3), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Is For Mimicking Powers Only] (-1), If/Then [Target Must have been exposed to the Gruecloud at all! Ever!] (-1)
Useful (+2), Variable Effect (+4), Endless (+3), If/Then [For Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect Is For Mimicking Powers Only] (-1), If/Then [Target Must have been exposed to the Gruecloud at all! Ever!] (-1)
Cost Per Die: 18 | Total Cost: 162

If a target has been exposed to the dark energy cloud that Brian can produce, Brian can replicate that power. In himself. Now, usually, it will be a great deal weaker, and it may require expending some willpower, but he can do it. What's more, as he hits more people (or more people volunteer for the admittedly unpleasant whammy), his power catalogue just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Ghost Recall
Dice: 2hd
Useful (+2), Duration (+2), If/Then [Subject must have been exposed to the Gruecloud] (-1), No Physical Effect (-1)
Cost Per Die: 2 | Total Cost: 8

Powers aren't the only thing that Brian can copy. He can also recreate the memories and personality of a person in a ghostly, shimmering cloud of darkness roughly in the shape of the person. Their personality-clone cannot form new memories and only exists for a short time, but has pretty accurate information. If you can convince them to give it up. Is this ethical? Anyway, that's Brian's power set!

Brian's Library

Every Single Power From the Stonewall Nine
THE EYEBALL POWER SUITE (note, as this is multiple powers, it would take Brian a total of 5 rounds and 81 WP to make one permanent eye with each of these powers. However, he doesn't need to make an eye with every part. He can just have an eyeball that flies for 18, or an eyeball that can access the Eyeball Zone for 18 WP (18 to make it, 0 to make the Zone) Fortunately, due to Permanence, each of these WP expenditures does last forever. Or, uh...until the eyeball is squished...

Eye Eye, Sir!
Dice: 1d+2wd
Defends [Evasion] (+0)
Useful [Exists] (+0), Permanent (+4), Touch Only (-2)
Points Per Die: 2 | Cost: 18

By focusing, an eyeball grows inside of Brian's body, then pops out. It's gross.

Why Is It So Tough, It's An Eyeball!?
Dice: 1d+2wd
Useful [Health Boxes] (+0), Permanent (+4), Attached [Eye Eye, Ma'am!] (-2)
Willpower Cost: 2 | Cost: 18

When he creates the Eyeballs (which, as a note, he currently cannot), Brian can only give them 3 extra health levels, making them much smaller.

Eyebeam
Dice: 1d+2wd
Attacks [Eyebeam] (+0), Spray [5d] (+5), Attached [Eye Eye, Ma'am!] (-2)
Willpower Cost: 3 | Cost: 27

The Eyes have laser beams. Because they're eyes. Brian's eyes will have a total of 6d+2wd, rather than 9d+1wd.

Eyeflight
Dice: 1d+2wd
Defends (+0), Attached [Eye Eye, Ma'am!] (-2)
Useful (+0), Permanent (+4) Attached [Eye Eye, Ma'am!] (-2)
Willpower Cost: 2 | Cost: 18

The Eyes have it! ...flight, that is. Brian's can soar along at a mere 10 MPH. They are slightly better at dodging though.

Into the Zone
Dice: 1d+2wd
Useful [Traps Target In Horrifying Nightmare Dimension] (+0), Endless (+3), Traumatic (+1), Attached [Eye Eye, Ma'am!] (-2), Touch Only (-2)
Willpower Cost: 0 | Cost:0

Brian's eyes, like Miss Eye's eyes, have access...TO THE EYEBALL ZONE.

Your Attack, Foreseen
Dice: 1d+2wd
Hyperskill [Dodge] (+0)
Willpower Cost Per Die: 0 | Cost: 0

Formatting his power this way does let Brian dodge better.

Mistress of All Eyes See
Dice: 4hd
Hyperskill [Tactics] (+0), Power Capacity [Range] (+2), Booster [5] (+5), No Physics (+1), If/Then [Can Only Command Eyes] (-1)
Points Per Die: 7 | Cost: 63

For a staggering 63 GODDAMN willpower, Brian can get the STAGGERING ABILITY to command Eyeballs with his mind at a range. AMAZING!!!!!

GADGET ONE: The Gaia Engine

Useful [Gravity Control] (Mass: 500,000,000 tons| Range: 200,000,000 meters| Speed: 50,000,000,000 meters per round [74 times the speed of light])
Dice: 2hd
Useful (Free, Gadget) | Duration (+2), Booster [10] (+10), Power Quality [Mass, Range] (+4), High Capacity [Mass, Range] (+2), No Physics (+1), If/Then [Requires Metamaterials Produced by Lily to Function] (-1), Foci [Fragile, Bulky, Crew x4, Manufacturable] (-5), Obvious (-1), Slow (-2)
Cost Per Die: 10 | Total Cost: 40 WP (1 Base Will To Free Up)

Costing 40 WP from your pool (representing the metamaterials that you provided to construct it), the Gaia Engine is a remarkable device. Requiring the attendance of sixteen trained professionals - among the first hires that Andy ever made - the Gaia Engine is capable of gravitational manipulation at an obscene scale and speed, with ludicrous precision. How absurd? Well, from orbit, you can snatch up the entirety of Manhattan - island and all - and rip it into space and then fling it towards Alpha Centauri at 74 times light speed without damaging a single thing on it, nor causing it damage when it lands on Charon. Cool! You officially can't bitch about me spending 40 of your WP on this fucking thing, you goddamn maniacs!

The duration is approximately a day, so once per day, the crew have to make sure the gravity field that keeps Yiggy in the air is 'reupped.'

GADGET TWO: The Aegis
Defense [Gravity Shield]
Dice: 5hd
Defends (Free, Gadget), Endless (+3), Interference (+3), Attached [Gravity Manipulation] (-2), Foci [Bulky, Manufacturable] (+0),
Cost Per Die: 4 | Total Cost: 40 WP (1 Base Will to Free Up)

Feeding off the Gaia Engine, the Aegis is an attached chunk of material that projects a defensive field around the entirety of the Yiggy's superstructure. Incoming weaponry, unless it goes faster than 5x10, is simply swatted away. This includes beams of light, the rays of the sun, solar flares, and other nasty things.

GADGET THREE: Room Service
Useful [Room Service]
Dice: 3d+1wd
Useful (Free, Gadget), Endless (+3), Variable Effect (+4), Attached [Gaia Engine] (-2), If/Then [Variable Effect Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect is for Room Service Only] (-1), If/Then [Variable Effect only applies within the Yiggy's superstructure] (-1), If/Then [Room Service must be Requested] (-1), Foci [Bulky, Manufacturable] (+0)
Cost Per Die: 1 | Total Cost: 7 WP (1 Base Will To Free Up)

Also feeding off the Gaia Engine's powers, Room Service is simple as hell. You ask for tea, earl gray, hot. Then the fucking tea shows up! This also covers very attractive P-zombies that look like dead celebrities, medical aid, giving you lucid dreams, creating illusions, playing movies, and translating languages.

Here's some basic rules for gadgeteer who want to make powers

---

GADGEETING RULES FOR GADGETEERS

STEP ONE
Decide what power does. All powers can either ATTACK, DEFEND, or be USEFUL. Each thing costs (+2)

Example: I want to make a ray gun that can also heal people. It Attacks [Ray Gun] (+2) and is Useful [Heals People] (+2)

STEP TWO
Apply modifiers for extras and flaws to each power capacity. The full list is found in the Wild Talent's core rulebook. Add them all up into a total cost per die. The minimum point value is always 0 (you can't get extra for going below your maximum.)

Example: This ray gun can fire very fast. It has +3 Spray. This ray gun heals all of you! It has Engulf (+2). Both attack and useful has the Foci (-1) with the Fragile (-1) and Accessible (-1) flaws. This means it costs 2+3-3+2+2-3 for a total of 3 points per die.

STEPTHREE
Count up how much it costs based on how many dice. If it has hard dice, the hard dice are "base cost x2" and if it has wiggle dice, then they cost "base cost x4."

Example: This ray gun has 5d+1wd. It costs (5x3)+(3x4) for a total of 27 willpower.

STEP FOUR
Use your gadget. The gadget can then be taken apart to regain your willpower back. If you want to, you can burn 1 base will to make it a gadget that exists permanently (freeing up those dice for later.) If the gadget has the Manufacturable extra, then it can be made a common, household device that anyone can buy for a cost of 1/2 the willpower it costs to make in base will, taking 1 month per base will spent to make it ready for manufacturing.

Example: Pretend the raygun has manufacturable (even though it doesn't.) It costs 14 Base Will to make it buyable at any street corner, and takes a year and change for the final designs to be completed. Once done, the inventor gets the 5d+1wd that they put into the gadget back into their gadgeteering dice pool.

---

HOW TO INFLUENCE PEOPLE WITH YOUR INFLUENCE SKILLS

There's a big old table from the Kerberos Club book! Here it is!

DragonCobolt · Feb 8, 2022

JustGazzer said:
We're putting immutable on the Modular Atomic Reactor System so it can't be weaponized directly, right?

Yuparoonie!

ThatGazzer · Feb 8, 2022

btw, for those who don't know, Protium is literally just Hydrogen-1, the most common element. You could get it from a bottle of air, or dirt, or water or anywhere at all.

Water would be the major byproduct of Hydrogen Fusion in the MARS, once the H-2 hits an an Oxygen molecule on the way out

Clean Water, enough for the whole world forever, no radiation, no harm, Limitless Power.

That's why I've pushed so hard for it, imo

CyberFemme · Feb 8, 2022

Hmmm, you know this could be a problematic trend. If we keep making our tech and distributing it as widely as possible in a relatively open source manner, while Cam builds all her innovations with safeguards that prevent us from using them in turn, our position will get weaker over time.

Can Friends Only without Immutable allow us to make things that can be altered by others, but only with our say so?

Also, while it's bound to generate some heated debate, perhaps we should consider formally crafting an opposing ideology to ProgHarm? Some kind of distributed, emergent social ecology?

JustGazzer said:
btw protium is literally Hydrogen-1, the most common element. You could get it from a bottle of air, or dirt, or water or anywhere at all.

Water would be the major byproduct of Hydrogen Fusion in the MARS, once the H-2 hits an an Oxygen molecule on the way out

Clean Water, enough for the whole world forever, no radiation, no harm, Limitless Power.

Nucleosynthesis of water is... wildly overkill when you have desalination. And not very effective - it would release far more energy than we actually need.

ThatGazzer · Feb 8, 2022

CyberEnby said:
Some kind of distributed, emergent social ecology?

Shall we pull from the good folks in the ARC? Anarco-Councilst in nature?

CyberEnby said:
Nucleosynthesis of water is... wildly overkill when you have desalination. And not very effective - it would release far more energy than we actually need.

It's just a byproduct of the process, not the main goal. we could just let it evaporate, perhaps collecting it to reuse the hydrogen? The point is it shouldn't be wasted if it's there.

CyberFemme · Feb 8, 2022

JustGazzer said:
Shall we pull from the good folks in the ARC? Anarco-Councilst in nature?

*nods sagely*

And for that certain Progenitor je ne sais quoi we can take a little inspiration from The Lady of Mazes:

"...The Good Book is the result of massive simulations of whole societies - what happens when billions of individuals follow various codes of conduct. It's simple: if most people use the rules in the Book most of the time, a pretty much utopian society emerges spontaneously on the macro level."
The Book was like magic. Sophia had wanted Livia to try it out, so she did to be polite. Using it was like play-acting. Livia found she could slip easily into some roles but had more difficulty with others. One day she was the Courier, and people came to her with packages for her to deliver until she met someone whose role changed hers. The next day she was designated the Tourist, and she did nothing but explore Brand New York until she met a Visitor, at which point her role changed to Tour Guide. That was all very simple, she thought, any idiot could have designed a system like this. but every now and then she caught glimpses of something more - something extraordinary. Yesterday she had run through a chain of roles and ended up as Secretary. Reviewing the Secretary's role in the Book, she found that she should poll inscape for anyone nearby who had one of the roles of Boss, Lawyer, Researcher or about five other alternates. She did, and went to meet a woman who had the odd, unfamiliar role of Auditor.
Livia met the Auditor in a restaurant. Five other people were there, too; all had been summoned to this meeting by their roles, but nobody had any idea why, so they compared notes. One man said he'd been given the role of Messenger three days before, and couldn't shake it. He was being followed by a small constellation of inscape windows he'd accumulated from other roles. When he distributed these, they turned out to all relate to an issue of power allotment in Brand New York that the votes were dragging their heels on. Suddenly the Auditor had a task. As Secretary, Livia began annotating her memory of the meeting. In under an hour they had a policy package with key suggestions, and suddenly their roles changed. A man who'd been the Critic suddenly became the Administrator. According to the rules of the Book, the could enact policy provided conversion to Administrator was duly witnessed by enough other users.
This was amazing. After a while, through, Livia had realised that far larger and more intricate interactions were occurring via the Book all the time. It was simply that few or none of the people involved could see more than the smallest part of them.
- Lady of Mazes, pg 152

She saw a tangle of glowing threads like hair splitting into existence in front of her. Livia shut her eyes to sharpen the image, and found herself immersed in a whirling vortex made up of sharp lines, almost like arrows that pointed and rotated. She reached out her and and grabbed at one.
Towers of data flickered into being around her. The arrow flattened out, broadened, became a plain. Thousands of other lines stood up out of that plain, like a forest.
She moved her virtual body through the forest, checking the tiny labels on some of the lines: Resistance, Capacitance, said one; Condensers, designs and uses, said another. Instead of a forest she imagined she was sailing across a sea of technologies, able with a gesture to pull any invention or principle to herself and, as if she was hauling in a net full of fish, come up with all the other technologies that it necessitated. She grabbed one at random (Ballistics, it said) and pulled.
With it in hand, new options appeared as floating reticles around her. The tech locks were a multidimensional database, and the technological dependencies were just one way to cut the data. If she chose another view, she could see the anthropology and politics that spears, bows, and cannon each entailed. She dropped ballistics to explore more; to her surprise, even the five senses were listed here as technologies. They led her to the politics of the human body, and of other body plans: four footed, winged, finned. The tech locks made no distinction between biology and mechanism.
Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She'd known that. But on Earth, in the Archipelago and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accommodate them. Unlike the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies.
"But how do you work?" She dismissed the database view, and found herself looking at a set of genetic algorithms, compact logical notations. They didn't describe particular machine designs, but rather specifications; in practice, sims would evolve machinery to particular cases and according to local conditions and resources. The locks could work anywhere.
The specifications were the key, they relied on the database and couldn't be duplicated without it. They told how and when to employ energy fields to suppress various powers and macro effects. In Teven, the sims seemed to evolve machines to manipulate programmable matter. Raw materials couldn't be dug out of the ground in a coronal, since the ground only went down a metre or so. What metals or inorganic compounds were available were actually composed of bulk quantum dots which mimicked the qualities of the real thing: with a single command, a chunk of virtual iron could be transformed into pseudo-sulphur or silicon, or given characteristics that no natural element possessed. To disable any device, all the tech locks had to do was change its material composition. All this required was a command sent through inscape.
The locks proclaimed that there were no neutral technologies. The devices and methods people used didn't just represent certain values - they were those values, in some way.
- Lady of Mazes, pg 255

MJ12 Commando · Feb 9, 2022

DragonCobolt said:
To be fair, the stealth is a byproduct of "I don't want this to vaporize everything behind it"

Or maybe the ability to not vaporize things is actually a side effect of the stealth.

There's plenty of places to do high-Isp space launches. Strap one of these suckers on a big jet and launch it at 35,000 feet. Launch it with conventional solid rockets to get the engines into space. Have a low-Isp airbreathing mode for higher fuel efficiency.

If your goal is not to accidentally/accidentally on purpose give people a stealth WMD strike capability that will require metahumans to detect with the current technology (to be fair, Cam might well want to induce people to suddenly start thinking about orbital early warning systems...) these limitations are actually preferable, because they mean that you can't launch a single-stage kamikaze rocket upwards at stupid numbers of Gs (a 5G acceleration for a spacecraft means a likely engine thrust:weight of something like 100:1, which means that if you're basically just making a kinetic kill vehicle it's going to go much faster) and then have it come back down undetectable until it starts reentry. Or if you don't want to do that, placing nuclear weapons in orbit with your stealth rocket launches - especially now with all that spare power you can stealthily enter the atmosphere to boot.

There's a lot of things Cam could have done to make this drive less capable of killing the entire human race. As it stands, it's pretty much the perfect military or evacuating-the-Earth-before-the-unstoppable-alien-horde-hits drive system because it allows stealth in space, it has an extremely high thrust:weight that lets you move a lot of payload for very little engine, and doesn't need to be manufactured in orbit - it could be built secretly in a hidden bunker or something and launched from there.

It's a very powerful, dangerous tool, and given Cam's everything this danger is almost certainly either deliberate - in which case, what is her game, giving people access to this sort of weapon that might allow for effective counterforce first strikes against other people's strategic arsenals - or the specific requirements she needs this engine for make it so that you kind of have to end up giving everyone a ridiculously dangerous tool, which makes you wonder why it's engineered like this when a rocket to do space travel and construction doesn't need nearly this level of overengineering.

10ebbor10 · Feb 9, 2022

Has Vietnam signed the Outer Space Treaty yet? IRL, they only did so in 1980.

Anyway, we shouldn't just think of space. On Earth, every single third world country eith mineral reserves will have just seen the basis of it's economy collapse.

Releasing MARS or cornucopia will make this worse. Progharm can recruit among these countries.

10ebbor10 · Feb 9, 2022

Anyway, Cam's new rocket is a fusion rocket, which means it is nuclear, which means ut falls under UN non-proliferation safeguards.

[X] Nicely ask Cam when the IAEA can do it's mandatory inspection of the entire nuclear fuel cycle, manufacturing plants and sensitive research facilities, to ensure that nothing untowards is going on. An upstanding member of the international community has no reason to refuse. Lily can volunteer as subject matter expert.
-[x] Given these safeguards, Vietnam's engines are clear dual use technology which can not simply be sold or released to the world.
-[x] The atoms for peace program ought to be expanded to deliver access to safer, less militarized engines with far lower peak thrust to any non-nuclear state, keeping them just as useful and less weaponizable. That these can and will be build by US industry is a mere coincidence.

CyberFemme · Feb 9, 2022

10ebbor10 said:
Anyway, Cam's new rocket is a fusion rocket, which means it is nuclear, which means ut falls under UN non-proliferation safeguards.

[X] Nicely ask Cam when the IAEA can do it's mandatory inspection of the entire nuclear fuel cycle, manufacturing plants and sensitive research facilities, to ensure that nothing untowards is going on. An upstanding member of the international community has no reason to refuse. Lily can volunteer as subject matter expert.
-[x] Given these safeguards, Vietnam's engines are clear dual use technology which can not simply be sold or released to the world.
-[x] The atoms for peace program ought to be expanded to deliver access to safer, less militarized engines with far lower peak thrust to any non-nuclear state, keeping them just as useful and less weaponizable. That these can and will be build by US industry is a mere coincidence.

Cam has no reason to allow any of that - it's pointless to even ask.

It would be more productive to learn about her Dark Forest motivation.

Edit: DC, has Yiggy been doing disaster prevention (bleeding tectonic pressure, sapping hurricanes of strength, etc?)
Also, shouldn't Andy and Lily have higher base will since we didn't deploy Buzzy?

Changing my vote to something that feels like it balances the various points raised a bit better:

[X] It's... huh, it's actually not that big a deal? It's very EXCITING at first pass but once Cornucopia and MARS hits the space gold rush will fizzle. The military implications are a thing... but maybe this could be the Stonewall Group's ticket to getting their fingers into the military-industrial complex?
-[X] Still, invite Cam over for tea. This space focus of hers feels a little... surplus to requirements. It's probably a good idea to get a better understanding of her long term goals.

@Parzival95, @JustGazzer, @Torgamous, would you consider switching to the above?

fanficfan · Feb 9, 2022

[X] It's... huh, it's actually not that big a deal? It's very EXCITING at first pass but once Cornucopia and MARS hits the space gold rush will fizzle. The military implications are a thing... but maybe this could be the Stonewall Group's ticket to getting their fingers into the military-industrial complex?
-[X] Still, invite Cam over for tea. This space focus of hers feels a little... surplus to requirements. It's probably a good idea to get a better understanding of her long term goals.

Parzival95 · Feb 9, 2022

[X] It's... huh, it's actually not that big a deal? It's very EXCITING at first pass but once Cornucopia and MARS hits the space gold rush will fizzle. The military implications are a thing... but maybe this could be the Stonewall Group's ticket to getting their fingers into the military-industrial complex?
-[X] Still, invite Cam over for tea. This space focus of hers feels a little... surplus to requirements. It's probably a good idea to get a better understanding of her long term goals.

10ebbor10 · Feb 9, 2022

CyberEnby said:
Cam has no reason to allow any of that - it's pointless to even ask

She does have a reason. Unlike the S9, Cam is pretending to run a legitimate state, not just her personal fiefdom. That means obligations under international law.

She can chose to ignore them, but that means flaunting the promises made during the peace treaty and deligitimizing Vietnam, as well as discrediting her scientific breakthrough.

DragonCobolt · Feb 9, 2022

MJ12 Commando said:
Or maybe the ability to not vaporize things is actually a side effect of the stealth.

There's plenty of places to do high-Isp space launches. Strap one of these suckers on a big jet and launch it at 35,000 feet. Launch it with conventional solid rockets to get the engines into space. Have a low-Isp airbreathing mode for higher fuel efficiency.

If your goal is not to accidentally/accidentally on purpose give people a stealth WMD strike capability that will require metahumans to detect with the current technology (to be fair, Cam might well want to induce people to suddenly start thinking about orbital early warning systems...) these limitations are actually preferable, because they mean that you can't launch a single-stage kamikaze rocket upwards at stupid numbers of Gs (a 5G acceleration for a spacecraft means a likely engine thrust:weight of something like 100:1, which means that if you're basically just making a kinetic kill vehicle it's going to go much faster) and then have it come back down undetectable until it starts reentry. Or if you don't want to do that, placing nuclear weapons in orbit with your stealth rocket launches - especially now with all that spare power you can stealthily enter the atmosphere to boot.

There's a lot of things Cam could have done to make this drive less capable of killing the entire human race. As it stands, it's pretty much the perfect military or evacuating-the-Earth-before-the-unstoppable-alien-horde-hits drive system because it allows stealth in space, it has an extremely high thrust:weight that lets you move a lot of payload for very little engine, and doesn't need to be manufactured in orbit - it could be built secretly in a hidden bunker or something and launched from there.

It's a very powerful, dangerous tool, and given Cam's everything this danger is almost certainly either deliberate - in which case, what is her game, giving people access to this sort of weapon that might allow for effective counterforce first strikes against other people's strategic arsenals - or the specific requirements she needs this engine for make it so that you kind of have to end up giving everyone a ridiculously dangerous tool, which makes you wonder why it's engineered like this when a rocket to do space travel and construction doesn't need nearly this level of overengineering.

Well, see, when you point it out like that, it does seem to be a BIT suspicious, and I'm going to pretend it was intentional until I die becuae it makes for a better story!

CyberFemme · Feb 9, 2022

DragonCobolt said:
Well, see, when you point it out like that, it does seem to be a BIT suspicious, and I'm going to pretend it was intentional until I die becuae it makes for a better story!

There are practical limitations on being able to depict hyperbrains when the author is not one. I honestly wish Progenitor had gone a bit further to address this.
I choose to believe that all hyperbrains are idiot-savants to one degree or another and have their own biases and blind spots that lead to weirdness.

In case this got lost in the shuffle: DC, has Yiggy been doing disaster prevention (bleeding tectonic pressure, sapping hurricanes of strength, etc)?
Also, shouldn't Andy and Lily have higher base will since we didn't deploy Buzzy, or am I misremembering how much base will they had?

DragonCobolt · Feb 9, 2022

They should, I just need to edit their sheets. And yeah, which means Amanda's identity is safe…for now. Also you saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people! That also is good!

10ebbor10 · Feb 9, 2022

MJ12 Commando said:
Or maybe the ability to not vaporize things is actually a side effect of the stealth.

There's plenty of places to do high-Isp space launches. Strap one of these suckers on a big jet and launch it at 35,000 feet. Launch it with conventional solid rockets to get the engines into space. Have a low-Isp airbreathing mode for higher fuel efficiency.

If your goal is not to accidentally/accidentally on purpose give people a stealth WMD strike capability that will require metahumans to detect with the current technology (to be fair, Cam might well want to induce people to suddenly start thinking about orbital early warning systems...) these limitations are actually preferable, because they mean that you can't launch a single-stage kamikaze rocket upwards at stupid numbers of Gs (a 5G acceleration for a spacecraft means a likely engine thrust:weight of something like 100:1, which means that if you're basically just making a kinetic kill vehicle it's going to go much faster) and then have it come back down undetectable until it starts reentry. Or if you don't want to do that, placing nuclear weapons in orbit with your stealth rocket launches - especially now with all that spare power you can stealthily enter the atmosphere to boot.

There's a lot of things Cam could have done to make this drive less capable of killing the entire human race. As it stands, it's pretty much the perfect military or evacuating-the-Earth-before-the-unstoppable-alien-horde-hits drive system because it allows stealth in space, it has an extremely high thrust:weight that lets you move a lot of payload for very little engine, and doesn't need to be manufactured in orbit - it could be built secretly in a hidden bunker or something and launched from there.

It's a very powerful, dangerous tool, and given Cam's everything this danger is almost certainly either deliberate - in which case, what is her game, giving people access to this sort of weapon that might allow for effective counterforce first strikes against other people's strategic arsenals - or the specific requirements she needs this engine for make it so that you kind of have to end up giving everyone a ridiculously dangerous tool, which makes you wonder why it's engineered like this when a rocket to do space travel and construction doesn't need nearly this level of overengineering.

I disagree on a few points.

First, there is no need to take any safety precautions, because while this is a high Isp Engine, it's thrust is quite low, and that matters a lot for impact on the environment. To illustrate.
The Saturn V has a maximum thrust of 35 100 kN, which allows it to accelerate with full fuel tanks at 1.26 g (acceleration obviously gets much higher as fuel depletes.
The key here is that it needs this massive thrust, because 98.5% of it's mass was fuel, tankage and engines (and of that remaining 1.5% payload (the Apollo module and lander), another 66% is also fuel).

Cam's engine has an estimated Isp somewhere in the high thousands of km/s, massively higher than the 2.5 km/s gotten by a an ordinary rocket. With an Isp this high, you beat up the rocket equation and steals it's money.
For a trip to the moon, we can comfortably assume a fuel fraction of 0%. So, 99.5% of the rocket's needed mass is gone.

This means that we can dramatically scale back the required thrust, ending up with a required thrust of a few hundreds kiloNewton. About the same as a powerful jet engine, though concentrated as a teeny, tiny beam of highly accelerated fusion fragments, instead of backwash. This might require a sacrificial block of copper to stop the ion beam from ending up where it shouldn't, but otherwise you can just launch from wherever. A mission to the moon from your backyard (if your backyard contains a moderately sized TEL) is a possibility.

There is no critical need to vanish the exhaust.

---

It's for this reason that I think that the 5G acceleration is much closer to the engines thrust to weight ratio. Say, maybe 6:1. Because the only reason that IRL there's such a huge difference between TWR of engines and rockets is because 99% of the rocket's mass is tankage and fuel. Cam's engine eliminates both for most practical purposes, so you're left with just the weight of the engine and the weight of the payload.

If the engine had a TWR ratio of 100:1, a spaceship powered by it could easily do 80-90 G.

Edit :
@DragonCobolt Most of the math here you can comfortably ignore. That said, there are some implications.

If MJCommando's interpretation is correct, and the engine has TWR of 100:1 while the rocketship does 5G, then a Vietnamese spaceship will have it's engine account for 5% of it's mass.
An American spaceship with the same engine:ship ratio would do 1G, but they can trivially make it do 8G by increasing the engine fraction to 20% of the mass. So, a US spaceship doing the same acceleration and moving the same payload as a Vietnamese ship would only need to be about 15% larger.

If my interpretation is correct, and the engine has a TWR of 6:1, then the Vietnamese rocketship we saw had it's engines account for 80% of it's mass. A US spaceship could not replicate that feat regardless of how high you made the engine fraction, and with engines that can only do 1G, might not be able to take of from Earth at all (Gravity being 1 G and all that).

So options are :
[] US engines are only technically inferior to Vietnamese ones, with little practical differences unless you're trying to cross interstellar distances or hyperoptimizing fuel useage
[] US engines are dramatically inferior to VIetname ones, and if not specially fabricated by Boeing Labs can not take of from Earth with any meaningful payload.

Which of the two is closer to the truth?

CyberFemme · Feb 9, 2022

Has Amy spored beyond Jack Grimes and Zipperneck?

DragonCobolt · Feb 9, 2022

I have RETURNED FROM THE DUMP!

BEHOLD!

ALL THIS SHIT IS GONE!

So, to answers!

10ebbor10 said:
So options are :
[] US engines are only technically inferior to Vietnamese ones, with little practical differences unless you're trying to cross interstellar distances or hyperoptimizing fuel useage
[] US engines are dramatically inferior to VIetname ones, and if not specially fabricated by Boeing Labs can not take of from Earth with any meaningful payload.

Which of the two is closer to the truth?

It's the first one - the engines are very much a "this one is faster" "but both engines go fast enough to kill us!" "...yeah, but this one is faster."

CyberEnby said:
Has Amy spored beyond Jack Grimes and Zipperneck?

Since her main way of sporing is to explode and, thus, kill people...no! You've been keeping her safe. Amanda's been keeping her safe. And even if you hadn't, Amy has been learning how to use a gun from Lisa, because Lisa is only a good influence!

CyberFemme · Feb 9, 2022

DragonCobolt said:
Since her main way of sporing is to explode and, thus, kill people...no! You've been keeping her safe. Amanda's been keeping her safe. And even if you hadn't, Amy has been learning how to use a gun from Lisa, because Lisa is only a good influence!

Hmm, would you be open to us doing what Cam did with her metas? Have Lisa and Andy pre-select a lot of people whose personalities are likely to give us a useful spread of powers and who want to stick around and help us, then set aside an month or two and propagate powers through that population?

It should be easy enough to make a focus that limits the damage Amy does and turns it to stun.

Or would having a few thousand metas - all Tier 5s or higher - be too much of a sudden power jump for the Stonewall Group?

I ask because then we could have a Stonewall 9000 arc that's a counterpart to the Slaughterhouse 9000 arc from worm, where instead of kicking off the end of the world we make it better. 😅

ThatGazzer · Feb 9, 2022

Did some fun math and realized it would take roughly 20 days to get to Alpha Centauri with Yiggy. that's 4.3 light years in under a month

Wanna see if there are any earth-like planets in a Space Roadtrip?

10ebbor10 · Feb 9, 2022

JustGazzer said:
Did some fun math and realized it would take roughly 20 days to get to Alpha Centauri with Yiggy. that's 4.3 light years in under a month

Wanna see if there are any earth-like planets in a Space Roadtrip?

Maybe later?

Now might not be the moment.

CyberFemme · Feb 9, 2022

JustGazzer said:
Did some fun math and realized it would take roughly 20 days to get to Alpha Centauri with Yiggy. that's 4.3 light years in under a month

Wanna see if there are any earth-like planets in a Space Roadtrip?

I knew we should have used more Boosters.

MJ12 Commando · Feb 9, 2022

10ebbor10 said:
It's for this reason that I think that the 5G acceleration is much closer to the engines thrust to weight ratio. Say, maybe 6:1. Because the only reason that IRL there's such a huge difference between TWR of engines and rockets is because 99% of the rocket's mass is tankage and fuel. Cam's engine eliminates both for most practical purposes, so you're left with just the weight of the engine and the weight of the payload.

If the engine had a TWR ratio of 100:1, a spaceship powered by it could easily do 80-90 G.

The description given was: "a bricklike spacecraft roaring through space with two of the L2 engines strapped to the back, with data scrolling along the side indicating speeds and G-forces."

So small engines and a very large payload module - and as you mentioned, Cam's darkdrive is likely to have obviously negligible fuel use over short-duration flights.

More importantly, this is Lily's analysis:

DragonCobolt said:
"They're using capitalism against itself - capitalism loves buying new stuff. And they just invented a perfectly safe, semi-weaponized fusion engine that makes a matter/antimatter rocket look like its playing tiddly winks - that thing was pulling 5Gs and it wasn't even fucking trying!" You threw up your hands. "That thing can go fast enough to turn anyone on the ship into strawberry jam, and the thrust plume ceases to exist the instant it has imparted thrust to the vehicle!" You scowl. "And I even know how they did it."

Engine Intro - Atomic Rockets

www.projectrho.com

Atomic Rockets has antimatter-beam theoretical max pushing a ~100:1 engine TWR, which is why I figured 100:1 TWR was pretty reasonable given this exclamation.

Also, because of its safe nature, you could do some completely bonkers military - and economic - nonsense with this. Given it costs as much as a car and it's safe to use in atmosphere, if the fuel itself isn't super costly to fabricate Cam could start building giant flying transport superaircraft that can get you airflight speeds and maritime shipping quantities.

DragonCobolt · Feb 9, 2022

CyberEnby said:
Hmm, would you be open to us doing what Cam did with her metas? Have Lisa and Andy pre-select a lot of people whose personalities are likely to give us a useful spread of powers and who want to stick around and help us, then set aside an month or two and propagate powers through that population?

It should be easy enough to make a focus that limits the damage Amy does and turns it to stun.

Or would having a few thousand metas - all Tier 5s or higher - be too much of a sudden power jump for the Stonewall Group?

I ask because then we could have a Stonewall 9000 arc that's a counterpart to the Slaughterhouse 9000 arc from worm, where instead of kicking off the end of the world we make it better. 😅

It is entirely within your powers to do this! Though, like, they wouldn't be directly in your control, and even Cam's Progress Cadre wasn't "perfectly" calibrated, despite Cam's 10hd in Hypermind and 10hd in Hyperempathy.

Parzival95 · Feb 9, 2022

I'm totally down to tell Amy that if she has any friends she especially trusts we could rig her up so she can give them powers without killing them. And, you know, spread around whatever DE the S9 have left to vetted allies to expand the cause.

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