- Location
- Germany
ENTHUSIASTIC scientist, tyvm.
Which is arguably worse, to be on the other side of.
Distance Learning for fun and profit...
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm
Which is arguably worse, to be on the other side of.
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Mua ha haaa!
IIIEEE! My Brain! It BURNS!
Did Taylor just build a better shard?
And Danny needs someone to commiserate with. Maybe Danny from Taylor Varga.
She made her friend a new home. This has implications...
The dragonflies were drones all this time?
The dragonflies were drones that still count as biology to Shaper all this time?
What is this, "Path to seeing if Rebecca can still have a stroke"?
Not... all... of them
And it's not impossible that Contessa is getting more amusement value out of all of this than is strictly required...
She's not doing it just to see what happens! She's carefully calculated what will happen, and is verifying her theories experimentally!
After all, she's a professional...
As for the other question, I expect she'd sigh and start showing them how to do it properly. That's kind of her thing.
Hmm... 🤔
Can't entirely deny that, I have to admit
Which means I did it right! Yay me!
When all you have is paranoia and institutional secrecy, well... It can get weird.
It would be untruthful to entirely deny that some of the fascinating documentaries on UK politics of the past may have influenced certain trains of thought, thereby leading inexorably towards a certain commonality of outcome, including but not limited to dialog and and behavioral responses of the actors involved in specific scenarios hereby presented.
Efficiency is important. It allows for more useful [DATA].
It knows what it did...
As stated before, she is a professional
Snerk. Did they seriously use the "gas leak" explosion? As part of an actual government cover-up?!
It is traditional! I expect the coverup section of the DoD is rather amused with itself right now
Both of them like dragonflies
A responsible scientist thinks of the results of their work and keeps an eye on things...
Becky is not a scientist or an engineer. She's a member of a rather inept conspiracy who is basically an enforcer and canonically is very much capable of not thinking things through even a little, despite having a decent Thinker ability. The problem with such powers is that they don't actually increase either intelligence or wisdom... And of course she is completely used to getting her own way without question, which again canonically led to a bad end 🤷♂️
Oh holy crap. She's just blatantly using a freaking magic 8 ball at this point and not even trying to be subtle!
Subtle isn't quite as funny
The inside of my head is a very odd place
And Danny is far too used to the weird shit that goes on around his daughter to be particularly surprised by pretty much anything at this point...
Her hardware is very good. The Entity's... is not.
Essentially
This...
This...
This...
And this are all interrelated.
Consider; Shards only activate under conditions of extreme stress, when the Host is driven to and past their mental and physical limits due to circumstances. By definition this means that every Parahuman is suffering from at an absolute minimum a variant of PTSD. In second and third generation capes it's likely far less than in first-gen ones, but Amy is entirely correct when she comments that she's never met a Parahuman who wasn't a bit off, including herself and her sister. Now, with that in mind, you add the built-in so-called 'conflict drive,' ie the Shard directive to push their Hosts towards using their powers regardless of what they might have actually wanted, and you're heading into a situation where things can and usually do become awkward at best. Essentially every single Shard is Mastering their Host to one extent or another.
What does that mean if the Host is already suffering from some sort of mental problem even before they Trigger? And, for that matter, isn't it possible that Shards actually seek out people with mental issues because they'll meet the requirements for a Trigger Event better than someone who was more 'normal' would?
Carol Dallon is clearly not right in the head. Her PTSD is very obvious, canonically leading her to an outlook on life that was not even remotely sensible or helpful, she's highly authoritarian towards her kids especially Amy, she's paranoid too, and I very much doubt that adding Parahuman abilities on top of that mess is going to help. If anything, in this story she's less troubled than she was in canon. If nothing else she's listening enough to her sister to not ignore everything and make things worse.
Yet, anyway...
Rebecca Costa-Brown is worse. She's completely used to getting her own way, just because that's what happens. Any problem she can't hit hard enough to solve merely needs a different way to hit it. She was, for example, totally fine with trying to persuade someone she wanted to dominate that she was torturing and slaughtering her friends one by one, and didn't seem to have the faintest idea that this could lead to exactly what it did lead to, nor care that she was violating every rule of law and common sense one could think of. It's the same sort of approach of going "We're not sure if there are any terrorists in that village but we'll napalm it anyway just in case," then looking surprised when you suddenly have more terrorists than you know what to do with, all of them with entirely legitimate reasons for wanting to kill you right back.
She is also a Cauldron cape. Which means that her own Shard, or bits of several Shards, came from an Entity that basically drove into a tree while reading her phone. That Entity is dead. All its Shards, aside from the small number properly configured and released before the fatal lithobraking incident, are either dead, dying, or simply not set up at all correctly for the current Cycle. Cauldron is mixing and matching bits and pieces of a horrifically complex system they don't understand at all past the most trivially basic aspects, and is designed to be antithetical to their goals right from the ground up. They're relying on a nerfed precog Shard to give them answers without thinking about the fact that (a) it's nerfed, (b) it's got no reason to be genuinely helpful even it it wasn't, and (c) it's not going to give them useful answers if they don't even ask the right questions. And any answer it does give them is obviously going to be biased towards the Entity's goals, which are not aligned with Humanities.
All the Cauldron capes are using broken, badly programmed hardware with no manual, implemented by people who basically randomly connected parts, many of them with highly dangerous functions, and hoped that because some lights came on it wasn't going to then blow up in their faces. And the worst part is that they don't seem to even realize this for the most part. Not to mention that they're just as Mastered as all other Parahumans but by broken Shards, which I can't see being actually better.
Sure, in a sense I'm sympathetic as they didn't think they had a choice, but at least part of that is because they never seemed to reevaluate their goals and methods at any point past the initial plan, which was set up by people who really didn't have the right mindset to begin with. Cauldron ultimately succeeded in canon entirely by accident, and you can easily make the perfectly valid argument that everything that happened would have happened even if they'd never existed. Much like Indiana Jones in the first movie, they were largely set dressing that was ultimately not necessary for the final result
Now, in this story Admin, ie QA, is smart enough to have realized early on that the existing process of gathering [DATA] was very inefficient, and there had to be a better way. And Oh Look, here is a potential [HOST] who is smarter than anyone else we've ever run into, who is doing proper [DATA]gathering from first principles, and coming up with totally new and exciting toys! [WHEE!]
Admin chooses [NEW PRIME NODE]:[TAYLOR]! It's super effective!
And as a direct result, leads to Taylor learning in one step more than Cauldron have learned since they began, including all the things they've been fumbling with, thinking it through, and making careful changes to fix some of the more irritating aspects of the current situation before they get in the way of her work. Admin is extremely pleased about this because it all leads to more yummy [DATA].
[NOM NOM NOM]
And not only that, [NEW PRIME NODE] made her a new house! With wifi and everything! And talks to her! And asks her advice!
<Status flags set to H-a-P-Y>
The immediate result of all this is that the existing directives of the Shard network, both sides of it as Admin has sneakily grabbed what was left of Eden's setup since no one was using it, have either been shut down entirely or reduced to the absolute minimum, very quietly to avoid the original Prime Node noticing until they can sort him out properly. This has made the Mastering effect of the Shards pretty much vanish.
What happens when someone who's been Mastered without even realizing it for months, or years, or decades, suddenly isn't?
🤷♂️
It'll depend on the person, their other issues, the circumstances, all manner of things. But it's definitely going to make something change...
For better or worse
A lot of Cauldron is suddenly finding that they've inexplicably become far less tense, but haven't really realized this yet. It's causing some behavioral changes as things settle down. Eidolon, Legend, and even Contessa have mellowed out quite suddenly, while Rebecca has become even more wound up because her co-conspirators don't seem to be taking her obviously important demands seriously. And at the same time, because she's getting shriller and shriller for no really sensible reason, despite all the information they have showing that whatever the government is up to it's not part of their problem, they're finding her more than a little annoying...
And it's never not funny to see how purple they can make her go. I'm sure they'll eventually grow out of it, but let them have their fun for now. We get to watch too!
In the slightly longer term, though, I do have plans for her. Plans she may well not entirely enjoy...
There are other reasons for much of this too, of course, but I'm not going to give away all my secrets in one shot! Or I won't have any left for the story!
Thank you
I do what I can...They don't know because they've never thought to check 🤷♂️ As I explained above.
I can't disagree with that for the most part.
Yep. They started with a faulty goal, and never did anything much to refine it, or apparently even second guess their approach as time passed. That's the biggest blind spot they had, and one wonders how much of it was deliberate interference from an external source, versus how much was them simply not really being the right people for the job...
Amy is a friend. Friends don't lie to friends about cake!
Last edited:
Sandy River DL
(Verified Destroyer Leader)
- Location
- Lake Michigan
- Pronouns
- Her/She
Especially when said friend is a snarky freckled cutie like Amy!
- Location
- Nashville
The possibility of Taylor going public with her Shard knowledge has me pretty interested in Saint's reaction. "Wait...Teacher has a hostile AI hooked into his head, and any time he's been helping me with Dragon I've been letting that AI rewrite my brain?"
- Location
- The deathworld-in-miniature that is Australia
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Oh, the explosion as his brain trips every circuit breaker at once would be glorious...
Andorxor
Masteryakthrower
- Location
- Right behind you
Like the entities
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
Funny thing is, if Indy wasn't part of the picture in the first movie... the badguys might never have even found the Ark. After all, their 'expert' was digging in the wrong place entirely. In the 2nd movie, his being there did uncover and directly lead to stopping the badguy. However in the 3rd movie, his dad had already won. Indy's actions directly lead to the badguys finding where the Grail was. He then lead them to which was the correct Grail. If the badguys had gotten the diary and managed to follow the clues themselves, they would have been incapable of figuring out which grail was real due to misconceptions and arrogance. And likely would have failed to even get past the traps once more due to their own misconceptions and arrogance.
Remember, they kept sending people to die at the first trap because they didn't understand the clue. The crumbling floor trap might have been bypassed eventually, but how many minions would it have taken? And if they ever got past the 'leap of faith' chamber, they clearly couldn't grasp the concept of a humble carpenter's son drinking from a simple cup.
- Location
- The Wild and Wooly Wastelands of Ohio
With godlike powers. Must not forget the godlike powers.
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
- Location
- Argentina
No.
Without Cauldron Eden would have recovered, the cycle would have been much worse and humanity would have been fucked..
Yes killing Eden only happened because they keep harvesting her body for vials but id they did not harvest her body then Eden wouldn't have died.
Yes is was by accident and Abaddon sabotage but without those two things it doesn't matter how smart Taylor is in this story, she wouldn't have been able to help enough without getting killed.
That doesn't make them competent and you can argue they only killed Eden because that was part of Abaddon plan to kill Eden and Zion and then harvest their bodies later but without Fortuna killing Eden Avatar she would have been able to contact Zion and Zion would have helped her recover and then game over.
First and foremost is:
1. All the energy waste inherent to hosting QA's personality and abstract higher mental functions on shitty Shard-flesh hardware is now fixed.
2. QA's new Taylortronium body cannot be reconfigured into dimensional effector modules for projecting superpower effects onto reality, but it can perform all the heavy lifting of... literally every other function involved in every single action a Shard would normally do except the sole final-step act of [BROADCASTING] powers onto reality.
3. This means that QA's Shard-flesh body, which already had many different power expression effector modules (because that is the real evolutionary design of Shardflesh is to freely configure into different power projection modules) can host even more power expression effector modules, and may even be completely reformmated into becoming a proper Culture-tier Effector Field Projection Array, except, you know, planet sized!
Last edited:
- Location
- Earth
And going Doylist for a moment how much of their incompetence was from Wildbow being biased and uninformed.
While Wildbow is a good writer from a technical standpoint and made a good setting and backdrop for the story we can't deny that he has a very strong "anti-authority" bias, what with every single point of authority in Taylor's life being either stupid, incompetent, plain unwilling to help, too ego driven, and any combination thereof all just to drive the plot along the tracks.
I've read all of Worm (haven't read Ward yet) and for the most part really did enjoy the story but man is it hard at times to do so. I only briefly touched the Word of God stuff outside of it and quickly backed off because sheesh.
Whenever the topic of Cauldron comes up I can't really divorce the Watsonian reasons from the Doylist reasons because I know they worked the way they did because that is how the author of the story wanted them to and damn the logic! I need a Secret Conspiracy that CONTROLS THE WORLD! But they can't bee too competent or else my OTHER characters won't shine! And the only way to fix that in a fan-fic is to change basically all of Cauldron and that leads to a lot of changes to things which means you're not really doing a Worm fan-fiction any more but one with just the set dressing and that's not what people want to write so all of this bad writing just gets grandfathered in and people don't seem to be taking that into account most of the time when they discuss just how bad Cauldron was at the whole "Secret Conspiracy" thing... .
Raved Thrad
Your Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon
- Location
- The Other Side of the Screen
This. Exactly this. Alexandria really does typify the "Flying Brick" archetype, especially because, in spite of her supposedly enhanced mental acuity, she's still basically as dumb as a sack of bricks. Which is what led her, inescapably, to one of the most gruesome ends I've read in fiction. Drowning is horrific enough, but drowning in spiders and roaches is a special kind of nope. Still, couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
Though come to think of it, I'm not sure any of the Triumvirate can do "subtle." Like Hax says in Trump Card, they're all a bunch of hammers.
Belloc was digging in the wrong spot because they only had a copy of 1 side of the amulet, if they had the amulet itself (and the German agent did successfully track down Marian and was going to torture/kill her for it if Indy hadn't interfered) they would have had the last part of the instructions and would have found the Ark.
Of course that wouldn't have stopped tham from dying messily when they opened it, but it likely would have ended up back in Nazi hands for them to try again (and again, and again...)
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Yep. Exactly. Indy got a nice adventure out of it but in the long run for that specific scenario he was mostly there to get in the way
MaskedCritic
Verified Obsessed with Yuri
- Location
- Fluttershy's Secret Dungeon Shrine to Metal
Was that ever confirmed in the body of Worm itself? Because it's always been one of the stupidest, most contradictory things about Worm canon.
Seriously, think about it -- Earth Bet is a place where everyone is universally horrible, nobody cares about anything but themselves, and everyone is always looking for a way to screw over somebody else. Ignoring how all of that would completely disallow even the vaguest sense of society or civilization from ever forming, let alone continue to exist... now we're being told these horrible people all need to be pushed into fighting each other, and being violent?
Bullshit.
People don't even need to be pushed to be like that in real life, why the hell would they need it in a world where everyone is supposedly horrible and selfish?!
Being pushed to use their powers more (like in CmptrWz's Mauling Snarks) I can accept... barely. People tend to try the tools they have access to before looking for new ones, so people with superpowers would end up using them when they aren't the best choice anyway, but it at least explains people with honestly pretty useless powers (like a large portion of the WEDGDG thinkers) choosing to use them for things instead of just ignoring them and breaking them out as a stupid party trick on occasion. But trying to claim that humans need to be pushed into creating conflict requires you to ignore the entirety of human history, especially if people on Earth Bet are really that bad.
- Location
- UK
I dont think its quite that Shards make people assholes, I think its more that they suppress critical thinking and push their user to make choices that are...less than smart in the name of forcing them into using their powers creatively. Combine that with unresolved trauma and a steadily deteriating society (dont forget, things have got noticeably worse on Earth Bet) and its kinda understandable that there are a lot of assholes with powers.
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Oh, sure, I don't entirely disagree. People are assholes, we all know that.
However, people are generally not suicidal assholes, with fairly rare exceptions. But Parahumans appear to get involved in way more major fights than seems sensible even in the setting. Tinkers seem to need to use their abilities, Thinkers much the same, just from canon references. It's not a big leap from there to assume that all Parahumans have a drive to use their abilities, regardless of whether it's sensible or appropriate.
And Mastering is a thing, of course. The idea that powers themselves exert a Master effect of some form is entirely in keeping with the basic concept. Powers are caused by brain damage. Invariably following a massively traumatic event. That's basically the whole idea. And we know that the entire modus operandi of the Entities is to hand out specific powersets like candy then wait for interesting applications of them by the Hosts to arise, because they don't have the lateral thinking abilities (or really much in the way of thinking abilities at all) to invent new uses or combinations of powers for themselves. They're massively overpowered idiot savants with a standard method to try to bypass their own limitations.
So, at least as far as this story goes, I'm taking the, to me, reasonable viewpoint that Shards are behind the statistically unlikely number of combative interactions Parahumans seem drawn to without much exception, even with taking human nature into account.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
And don't forget, based on the little shown of what the cycle was suppose to look like... Society wouldn't have been crumbling anywhere near as badly as in canon Worm. After all, The Thinker didn't want anarchy, but Us Vs Them tribal politics as the focus of the cycle.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
The general idea being something along the lines of "science advances most rapidly during war." Which is a fallacy, but the idiot-savant crystal machines don't know that because they are idiots.
Actually Shards are driven by conflict, Wildblow himself confirmed it. Wormverse ideas, recs, and fic discussion thread 38
As he puts it, powers desire to be used, which means they will encourage someone through various methods to use their powers, whether this be through impulse, obsession or just overwriting stuff (Rachel Lindt can't understand humans but can understand dogs.) This is based on the idea that the more a power is used the way it wants to be used, the more control the shard will allow as the connection between Cape and Shard grows.
As he puts it, powers desire to be used, which means they will encourage someone through various methods to use their powers, whether this be through impulse, obsession or just overwriting stuff (Rachel Lindt can't understand humans but can understand dogs.) This is based on the idea that the more a power is used the way it wants to be used, the more control the shard will allow as the connection between Cape and Shard grows.
Last edited:
ExaltedNekoKun
Exalted Glorious Feline Light Source!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/Lord/Fuzzball
It's a bit like Humans. Our bodies are amazing, capable of so much, scientifically and mechanically. But, ask an Engineers perspective and you'll get a bit of praise and a heaping load of condemnation. We are capable, just poorly designed from an efficiency standpoint.
Taylor has basically understood all the key concepts of Shard semi-biology, and was capable of at least maintaining the same base capabilities while redesigning it all from scratch with better principles.
The one downside to a well engineered form is while you can make allowences for future changes, you can't really include the key mechanisms for evolution. So the future is all self improvement through engineering rather than chance.
- Location
- UK
Um, why is that a down side? Evolution is pretty much luck of the draw, you dont get very far without fucking up at least a million times before you get something vaguely useful out of it.
Dont get me wrong, evolution is freaking awesome to do so much with what amounts to throwing shit at the wall, but I'd take actually designed improvements over random garbage that does the job OK any day of the week.
- Location
- Pacific Rim
How do we know it's Contessa that is the one laughing about this? We have all seen various arguments about how much agency she actually has. Anyone ever think that maybe it's HER SHARD that is laughing it's nth dimensional ass off, hmmm?Not... all... of them
And it's not impossible that Contessa is getting more amusement value out of all of this than is strictly required...
More like all of their pre-cycle advancement came from the apocalyptic conflicts that they only survived because even being the only lifeforms left across all of their homeworld's alternates wasn't enough to kill them.
They basically never learned to advance in a way another than conflict.
So... you're saying that QA has gone full transhuman.. shard... err... you get the idea.