- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Big reply time now that I've caught up with my own thread! 
This may be quite long, so if you're hoping for a chapter, sorry to disappoint. Rest assured that more will be along fairly soon.
Firstly, I did answer some questions similarly posed on SB, and someone else has already put that answer here. You may wish to refer to it first.
Secondly, I'll answer some specific questions because I find them worth the effort, but I'll point out that they may already have been answered by the above exposition
You are not cleared for that information, I'm afraid.
Yeah, it's not something she can do too many times, although I know quite a few people who routinely carry two phones, and at least one who has three, for entirely valid reasons. In this case, though, they're good test bed platforms, and the long term goal would be to shoehorn in several of her inventions into a single device, but that's two or three generations down the line.
Her subspace stuff is key to everything one way or the other, and while it was some time post antigravity that she finally worked out the power source, she'd come up with the comms idea entirely by herself over a year before that. It's causing problems for some Shards
They do have a very specific blind spot in this area, which isn't doing Rebecca any favors. However, it's also not easy or indeed safe to try Mastering the President, since one can legitimately assume that people in that position would have a LOT of expertise surrounding them looking for exactly that sort of thing. To do it successfully for years would require suborning the entirely of the Secret Service for a start, and probably most of the higher ups in the Military. It would be a massive risk, very difficult to pull off, and could backfire horribly sooner or later.
Thanks, fixed.
All of this, yes ⬆
A lot of fans of Worm consider Cauldron invincible and all knowing. They really aren't
They're not entirely stupid, I fully agree, but they are very tunnel-visiony and locked into a mindset that's not very flexible as far as I can see. And in this case RCB is getting pissy that she's not simply getting her own way, since she's used to that, and she's also so used to it always being a Parahuman that she can't really grasp that sometimes,it really is lupus isn't a parahuman.
That is one interpretation of it. It's not mine
Yes, she's got the hand held one, but has also built a much more complex system that's logging all subspace activity in a large area around Brockton Bay, in an attempt to understand the intriguing relationship between Parahumans and subspace...
No, it's not plagarism.
Plagarism is very much taking someone's work without alteration and passing it off as your own. She isn't doing that at all.
What she did was to invent, from scratch, the theory behind subspace, extend that to subspace communications, extend that to practical engineering of a functional subspace communicator, and build one from spare parts. Having done that she located an extraterrestrial broadcast, decoded it into video and ultimately audio from first principles, and began learning certain fundamental data from it.
This required her to, without external aid, work out how the alien math was presented, including working in a different number base, derive all the relevant underlying concepts, then use that to understand the theory of gravitation being demonstrated. From there she derived her own variant theory, extended that to functional engineering principles to produce a working reference frame regenerator, including hardware and software, and successfully built one.
The data she's gathered from both her subspace theories and her gravity theories have now let her work out how Squealer's tinkertech actually works, which Squealer certainly doesn't know, and it's debatable if the Shard who's behind it knows either. And she not only understands it well enough to duplicate the effect, but improve it so it works properly
No, it's not plagiarism at all. She's not just copying wholesale someone else's ideas, she's inspired by them and working out how to do it herself and do it in a completely repeatable and explainable way. It's no more plagiarism than teaching someone about multiphase electricity and claiming that if they subsequently invent a polyphase linear motor they've stolen the idea.
She's a busy little thing and quite bright
Indeed.
Very much this, yes.
She's not lied at all. She's come up with a theory based on other work she's learned about which is not identical to that, but was triggered by learning about it. She merely hasn't yet mentioned that she's watching ETPBS because she's rightfully a little concerned that when people find out they'll go a bit strange and she's got SCIENCE to do
She could probably have come up with the gravity theory independently eventually if she'd thought about it. Her subspace theory is key to that and a lot of other things too. But it would undeniably have taken longer.
He used a door, because...
...of this.
All too true for the most part, yes.
I'd personally put it as the other agencies not being hypercompetent, but competent. Worm portrays basically everyone as so disfunctional that they'd probably be unable to function at all. In real life there is a certain minimum level of competence that you'd need to actually get to the position where you're, for example, the Director of a PRT outpost, and stay there, but in canon there's very little evidence of this pretty much everywhere. The setting relies on everyone being twits, really. Even a normal level of sensibility would have prevented many of the horrible things that happened in the story.
One can assume that this is partly Wildbow having a real problem with any form of authority, and the story requiring all Parahumans to be far outside the ability of non-Parahuman people to handle in any way at all, which certainly isn't the case if you think about it. Cauldron also work on this basis and discount anything which isn't Parahuman as useless, something that's not helping them very much right now
In theory this would be true for the most part, yes. Based on canon it basically isn't. The PRT are certainly not incompetent but they are very biased towards thinking and working in specific ways. Not all of these ways are helpful.
She believes a parahuman is involved because that's how her mind and her experience works, and she can't bring herself to think outside the box. At least partly this would be a result of her own powers, I'd assume
And she may feel entitled to know this information, but she's wrong. She's been told she's wrong. There are levels of Top Secret clearance and she doesn't have the right specific level to know any more than what she's been told, which is that the matter is the purview of another agency and not hers. When the people who are at least in theory in a superior position tell you this, the correct response is to say "I understand" and drop the matter, regardless of your personal desires.
Exactly, yes.
Correct.
I could easily believe this It certainly fits the evidence so far...
Again, yes, this is true.
But she can act on it.
She can accept that a superior in the government has told her, "No, you are not cleared for anything more than what you see there, people above your pay grade are satisfied that it's not relevant to your remit, so drop it. Thank you for your cooperation. Dismissed."
She may not like this, but as long as she's maintaining the fiction that the PRT is an agency of the Federal government, that's entirely irrelevant, and she has no real choice but to deal with it. That's how it works
Yes.
Probably.
I think.
🤔
Perhaps
"Could you please stop shooting at the thermonuclear device?"
Good old Mr Foot
At that point I couldn't find his name anywhere, and gave him one. It seems to have spread...
Indeed. The only viable advice you can give in such circumstances.
Amazing how many people don't like it
This may be quite long, so if you're hoping for a chapter, sorry to disappoint. Rest assured that more will be along fairly soon.Firstly, I did answer some questions similarly posed on SB, and someone else has already put that answer here. You may wish to refer to it first.
Secondly, I'll answer some specific questions because I find them worth the effort, but I'll point out that they may already have been answered by the above exposition
You are not cleared for that information, I'm afraid.
Yeah, it's not something she can do too many times, although I know quite a few people who routinely carry two phones, and at least one who has three, for entirely valid reasons. In this case, though, they're good test bed platforms, and the long term goal would be to shoehorn in several of her inventions into a single device, but that's two or three generations down the line.Her subspace stuff is key to everything one way or the other, and while it was some time post antigravity that she finally worked out the power source, she'd come up with the comms idea entirely by herself over a year before that. It's causing problems for some Shards
They do have a very specific blind spot in this area, which isn't doing Rebecca any favors. However, it's also not easy or indeed safe to try Mastering the President, since one can legitimately assume that people in that position would have a LOT of expertise surrounding them looking for exactly that sort of thing. To do it successfully for years would require suborning the entirely of the Secret Service for a start, and probably most of the higher ups in the Military. It would be a massive risk, very difficult to pull off, and could backfire horribly sooner or later.
Thanks, fixed.
- The whole point is that tinker tech isn't normally reversible (and the story is exploring what if someone were smart enough to do it anyway). However, the original tech was based on someone's actual understanding of physics, and the Shards themselves also use advanced physics regardless of how tinker tech actually now works (which is to say, it's moot if the tech is basically the original alien tech with a wrong recipe given out and secretly fixed by the Shard, or is being entirely emulated by the Shard). She's simply so smart that she can see what the technology was intended to do as well as the original creators could, even past all the decoys, emulation, and black-boxing. The stuff she complains about is probably that very fakery and decoy circuitry, for that matter.
- Cauldron is correct that no one they have or know about (since they don't have any rare geniuses--take that as you will
- Cauldron is normally more effective. It's just that they've been caught on the back foot by a major need-to-know barrier in a section of the government that they probably never cared about or infiltrated, because up to now, normal people were irrelevant to the actual important parts of the story. Furthermore, it's also entirely reasonable that they think it's a cape (as noted in the below comment) but it's also noteworthy that if they admit that said person might NOT be a cape, they lose any possible excuse of jurisdiction that they claim they have. It's thus impossible for them to back down on this.
- They've also been neutered by a certain source of Thinker fog (I've written at least two different posts in detail on why this is probably the case, but long story short, she's getting out-of-context knowledge over a path that is either incidentally or intentionally invisible to parahumans.) that has apparently affected the Path enough that Contessa can't actually ask who is behind this. AFAIK, to find out, she'd have to actually go there (at which point her power goes "Banana Banana Rutabaga!" or her power would have to scry that area... with much the same results).
- Alexandria is NOT Tattletale (or a "Tinker 4" for that matter; she's a Thinker
- The above assumes that no one already suspects her to be a cape, which is entirely possible since the government is actually competent here and may even be hinting at this sort of knowledge in a few places.
All of this, yes ⬆
A lot of fans of Worm consider Cauldron invincible and all knowing. They really aren't
They're not entirely stupid, I fully agree, but they are very tunnel-visiony and locked into a mindset that's not very flexible as far as I can see. And in this case RCB is getting pissy that she's not simply getting her own way, since she's used to that, and she's also so used to it always being a Parahuman that she can't really grasp that sometimes,
That is one interpretation of it. It's not mine
Yes, she's got the hand held one, but has also built a much more complex system that's logging all subspace activity in a large area around Brockton Bay, in an attempt to understand the intriguing relationship between Parahumans and subspace...
No, it's not plagarism.
Plagarism is very much taking someone's work without alteration and passing it off as your own. She isn't doing that at all.
What she did was to invent, from scratch, the theory behind subspace, extend that to subspace communications, extend that to practical engineering of a functional subspace communicator, and build one from spare parts. Having done that she located an extraterrestrial broadcast, decoded it into video and ultimately audio from first principles, and began learning certain fundamental data from it.
This required her to, without external aid, work out how the alien math was presented, including working in a different number base, derive all the relevant underlying concepts, then use that to understand the theory of gravitation being demonstrated. From there she derived her own variant theory, extended that to functional engineering principles to produce a working reference frame regenerator, including hardware and software, and successfully built one.
The data she's gathered from both her subspace theories and her gravity theories have now let her work out how Squealer's tinkertech actually works, which Squealer certainly doesn't know, and it's debatable if the Shard who's behind it knows either. And she not only understands it well enough to duplicate the effect, but improve it so it works properly
No, it's not plagiarism at all. She's not just copying wholesale someone else's ideas, she's inspired by them and working out how to do it herself and do it in a completely repeatable and explainable way. It's no more plagiarism than teaching someone about multiphase electricity and claiming that if they subsequently invent a polyphase linear motor they've stolen the idea.
She's a busy little thing and quite bright
Indeed.
Very much this, yes.
She's not lied at all. She's come up with a theory based on other work she's learned about which is not identical to that, but was triggered by learning about it. She merely hasn't yet mentioned that she's watching ETPBS because she's rightfully a little concerned that when people find out they'll go a bit strange and she's got SCIENCE to do
She could probably have come up with the gravity theory independently eventually if she'd thought about it. Her subspace theory is key to that and a lot of other things too. But it would undeniably have taken longer.
He used a door, because...
...of this.
All too true for the most part, yes.
I'd personally put it as the other agencies not being hypercompetent, but competent. Worm portrays basically everyone as so disfunctional that they'd probably be unable to function at all. In real life there is a certain minimum level of competence that you'd need to actually get to the position where you're, for example, the Director of a PRT outpost, and stay there, but in canon there's very little evidence of this pretty much everywhere. The setting relies on everyone being twits, really. Even a normal level of sensibility would have prevented many of the horrible things that happened in the story.
One can assume that this is partly Wildbow having a real problem with any form of authority, and the story requiring all Parahumans to be far outside the ability of non-Parahuman people to handle in any way at all, which certainly isn't the case if you think about it. Cauldron also work on this basis and discount anything which isn't Parahuman as useless, something that's not helping them very much right now
In theory this would be true for the most part, yes. Based on canon it basically isn't. The PRT are certainly not incompetent but they are very biased towards thinking and working in specific ways. Not all of these ways are helpful.
She believes a parahuman is involved because that's how her mind and her experience works, and she can't bring herself to think outside the box. At least partly this would be a result of her own powers, I'd assume
And she may feel entitled to know this information, but she's wrong. She's been told she's wrong. There are levels of Top Secret clearance and she doesn't have the right specific level to know any more than what she's been told, which is that the matter is the purview of another agency and not hers. When the people who are at least in theory in a superior position tell you this, the correct response is to say "I understand" and drop the matter, regardless of your personal desires.
Exactly, yes.
Correct.
I could easily believe this
It certainly fits the evidence so far...Again, yes, this is true.
But she can act on it.
She can accept that a superior in the government has told her, "No, you are not cleared for anything more than what you see there, people above your pay grade are satisfied that it's not relevant to your remit, so drop it. Thank you for your cooperation. Dismissed."
She may not like this, but as long as she's maintaining the fiction that the PRT is an agency of the Federal government, that's entirely irrelevant, and she has no real choice but to deal with it. That's how it works
Yes.
Probably.
I think.
🤔
Perhaps
"Could you please stop shooting at the thermonuclear device?"
Good old Mr Foot
At that point I couldn't find his name anywhere, and gave him one. It seems to have spread...
Indeed. The only viable advice you can give in such circumstances.
Amazing how many people don't like it
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