[HALP] me! (WORM quest)

The vast majority of all Hosts Humans have the capacity for six power-slots. Minor powers take one, almost all powers take two, and a tiny number sometimes take three. None more than three, or less than one no matter how pitiful.

The connection bandwidth to the Corona pollentia isn't divided very efficiently. At least, not without more research.

Note: A typical, medium-strength power (does such a thing exist?) would theoretically use-up/require 100 Information of the associated type as a baseline. Assuming no bonuses or penalties.

[ ] Mover

- Some kind of mobility power. No side effects on this category. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

[ ] Shaker

- Some kind of area-of-effect power. No side effects on this category. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

[ ] Brute

- Enhanced strength and/or durability. Technically, you don't seem to have any Information to give out in this category, but if there's a will there's a way. You could either modify a Shaker or Changer ability, or just make one up. But it would likely be weaker than expected, or otherwise not work quite as planned.

Give at least a brief power description. This will use up any remaining Brute Information upon creation, and in fact information from other categories will be needed to make up the cost of most meaningful powers.

[ ] Breaker

- Can shift into another state of being. No side effects on this category. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

[ ] Master

- Can control others or create minions. You have an overwhelming amount of information and experience with this category. Power would either have greater effect than baseline or take up less space in the Corona pollentia (slots) than normal. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

Note: You can grant the "multitasking" pseudo-power (you're just giving the Host access to your own capability) for free with another Master or Thinker power, or one slot plus 50 Master Information on its own.

[ ] Tinker

- Can create/alter advanced technology/devices. You have rather a lot of information on this, and could probably provide any possible specialization. No special bonus otherwise, though. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

Note: Granting a Host more than one specialty is Aberrant, but isn't terribly risky. This is still bad in the unlikely event that someone notices.

[ ] Blaster

- Can create damage at range. No side effects on this category. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

[ ] Thinker

- An information gathering or processing power. You have an huge amount of information and experience with this category. Power would either have greater effect than baseline or take up less space in the Corona pollentia (slots) than normal. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

[ ] Striker

- Some kind of touch-based or melee-range power. No side effects on this category. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

[ ] Changer

- Some kind of form-altering power. You have less information on this category than normal. Any granted power would work at normal levels, but may take up extra space in the Corona (slots) for additional support/control.

Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10. You might need to supplement Information from other categories to make a strong power.

[ ] Trump

- Some kind power-manipulating power. No side effects on this category. Well, at least not for your Host… Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

[ ] Stranger

- Some kind of stealth or infiltration power. No side effects on this category. Give at least a brief power description and then choose how much Information to spend in multiples of 10.

[ ] This Is All Way Too Premature!

- Decide later, or discuss with Taylor later (Warning, direct communication with your Host is technically forbidden and will raise Aberration score dramatically!)

[ ] Write In

- I don't like the PRT threat categorization system, so there!

Notes:

Current Information totals are on the character sheet under "Currencies".

Giving more than one Primary power to a Host (per Trigger) is almost certainly Aberrant behavior. If you decide to do this, you might want to come up with a good justification of why this was done. Ahead of time. ...Just in case.

[ ] Multi-Host Connection: 100 Master Information, 100 Research. The capability (NOT the permission!) to connect to two hosts at once. This isn't a powers-effect, simply for the purpose of communication. The second Host would need to Trigger on their own (and more research would be needed) before a power could be assigned.

[ ] Assume Direct Control: 200 Master Information, 100 Research. The capability (NOT the permission!) to Master a Host. This isn't a powers-effect, simply the ability to control a Host's body without any permissions from them. This ability does not erase the person's mind, if control is somehow broken they may be upset. Using this massively increases Aberrance score.

Note: In theory this ability could be used with the Host's permission, although the communication involved in arranging that would also increase Aberrance.

[ ] View Host: 100 Research. The capability to access a Host's senses before they Trigger. (You already have a basic ability that requires no research after the person Triggers. This is needed before a Trigger occurs / in order to view hosts beyond the first.)

[ ] Faster Research 1: 50 Thinker Information, 300 Research. The capability to Research two things at once before incurring a penalty. Moar Economy!

[ ] Overload I: 150 Thinker Information, 250 Research. The capability to offensively transfer energy to another Shard. You're not Sting, but you're not completely helpless. This version of the ability can't kill another Shard, but they will need time to cool off before they can resume operation. Effect is similar to sedatives in Humans. Some Shards may attempt to block the initial connection to defend themselves, but that is unlikely to work. Will have reduced effect on energy-manipulation Shards, though.

[ ] DDoS I: 150 Trump Information, 250 Research. The capability to offensively open multiple communication connections with another Shard. You can MAKE them listen to you. This version of the ability can't kill another Shard, but they will need time to themselves to reorganize before they can resume operation. Effect is similar to sedatives in Humans. Some Shards may attempt to ignore the additional traffic to try and defend themselves. This defense will almost never work, although Thinker-based Shards will be harder to affect.

Note: These abilities aren't simply starter ones, they are jumping-off points for various trees. You may want to consider whether to intentionally go deep or wide on ability research. View Host is the odd one out that isn't a long tree.

For the most part, there will be few dice rolls in this quest. For some choices, a D100 will be used to determine how closely events hew to your choices.

Most of the outcomes will be decided by the narrative strength of the choice in question. For Research, bonuses and maluses (if any) will be added to a D100 roll for progress.

Any money/loot will be the Host's and therefore not (directly) in your purview. You have two currencies: Information and Favors.

It's pretty self-explanatory, but any kind of advanced power use, especially combat, will generate Information of the power-category used. You can then trade that Information with other Shards (and, with extensive research, learn to copy it first), or save it to spend later.

Favors can be earned by helping other Shards with their objectives, or simply giving away Information to them for nothing. In a general sense, you can simply bully other Shards into doing what you want. You have the command keys, after all. This won't generate any Favor, though. And may create problems down the road if other Shards get excessively abused.

Note: Because all Shards are connected and the sapient ones gossip, Favor isn't specific to any one Shard and can be spent more-or-less interchangeably.

Research sometimes takes Information but always takes your most precious resource - time. The default bonus for Research rolls is your current Intelligence score.

You can research as many things as you like, but every roll after the first in a given turn halves all results.

Example - One roll in a turn: results are equal to 1d100, Two rolls in a turn: 1d100/2, Three rolls in a turn: 1d100/4. If you somehow wanted to research four things in a single turn, every roll would be divided by eight. (You probably shouldn't do that.)

This isn't because of any Shard limitations, but just because I'm a bastard it's a balance thing.

Yes, you can research how to get more Research rolls per turn. Yes, you can create awesome posts / Omakes for Research bonuses.

Quests are shorter-term goals. Some can come from other Shards, some can come from your Host(s).

Quest completion gives rewards in the form of Favor and Research points, and can possibly result in unique, non-Researchable Abilities.

I'm going to offer some free information / advice to the readers, here, to try and clear up some potential confusions. Note this is is kinda/sorta OOC and is meant for the *readers* as background information, and I'd appreciate it if that was kept in mind when making plans.

First, Aberration.

The Aberration score can only be seen directly by Scion/[Zion]. The higher this score is, the more likely he is to notice something is wrong and scrub the Admin Shard, which is a Quest-Over Bad End. The nuance here is that Scion won't have any reason to check for Aberration unless he suspects something is up, first.

Right now, with a score of zero (0), you can call him up with near-impunity and he will be too depressed to notice that you aren't restricted properly. In fact, even if he *does* notice something wrong at this stage, all he would do is re-apply your restrictions, which would be a huge PITA but wouldn't end the Quest.

However, even though only Scion/[Zion] can interrogate your statistics / look at your 'character sheet', if your Aberration score gets high enough, Sapient Shards will know that something is up with you. This isn't the worst, but is still something that you want to avoid. Because they all have Scion/[Zion]'s number too and could tattle on you at any time for any reason.

In fact, Sapient Shards are a danger in a different way, because even if your Aberration score isn't high enough to flag any vague warnings, they could notice from your words or deeds that you aren't restricted properly, and this will cause tons of concern. After all, you're a Core Shard with lots of command keys.

Now, for the good news.

As I've said, other Shards can't see your Aberration score directly, and non-sapient Shards won't have the capacity to care.

As Aberration is a abstraction for "not operating as expected", the score decays over time. If you keep clean long-enough, your score could potentially decay down to zero again.

As far as sapient Shards go, well, they're sapient and therefore you can bribe them or bully/command them or (with research) make them forget something happened. So you could negotiate your way out of trouble with a bit of luck.

With that out of the way, let's talk about Humans.

Cauldron, specifically. You know all about them. They don't know anything about you. Partially this is because you haven't done anything yet, and partially this is because most Thinker powers, most of the time, don't work on Shards.

But... Thinker powers work on Taylor just fine. Which is the real problem with talking to her. Sure, if other (sapient) Shards find out that you're doing it, that's bad, but the major issue is the mad scramble of all Parahumans, everywhere, wanting to talk with you. That happening is bad enough on its own, but Scion is going to hear about it... eventually. Probably.

You don't want Scion's attention, at any point and for any reason. The best that can happen is nothing, and things get worse from there.

I should be more specific. As best as I'm aware (there might be corner cases) no events are different prior to Taylor's Locker Trigger. Major events are all intact.

That said, not everything will be exactly as you'd expect. That may be because of any/all of the following: Fanon vs Canon, Butterflies, (Minor) AU.

EDIT: When comparing Quest character reactions to Canon character reactions, keep in mind that you're playing a Core Shard and not a Parahuman. Sure, Skitter was scary as shit. Skitter doesn't have anything on you. And you haven't even uncovered the brown-pants part of the tech tree yet.

Sure. It's largely automatic.

1) Every power use (in range) gives a base amount of Information (this can be a very small number, typically 1-3). (This is generated from raw-data, but I've abstracted that away for brevity)
2) Every Shard gets this information for every power-use in their range.
3) Every Shard might allow other Shards to monitor their own sensory data (this can be reciprocal).*
4) Every Shard might trade their personal Information gathered with another Shard.
5) Non-sapient Shards never initiate sense-sharing, but could be commanded by other Shards to do so.

*This is one of the only processes that generates additional Information from base data. Keep in mind that Information isn't ever copied, it's always either created, traded, or used/destroyed.

Everyone, I missed explaining something and I want to explicitly point it out - If you consume/eat a Shard, you automatically collect their Host(s), if any. This does NOT count as having the properties of "Multi-Host Connection 1", and won't allow you to use other skills that require it.

That said, unless you intentionally orphan those Hosts, they connect to you instead of the original Shard now, and you administer their Power(s) now. This *may* allow you to effectively re-negotiate powers with those Hosts, almost a second-Trigger, but from your end, not the Parahuman's.

Something to consider when messing with Humans (PRT/Protectorate/Cauldron aside) is the effect they would have on Shards.

Generally, there are three classes of Hosts:

1) No Corona.

Hosts that can't (yet) Trigger are almost completely safe to abuse/mess with/help. By the time other Shards notice anything off with Hosts they don't control, you'd have bigger problems. Now, this is risky, because you Canon Foreknowledge only goes so far.

Emily Piggot? Emma Barnes? Canonically they were noted as incapable of Triggering. Madison Clements? Greg Veder? Giant question marks. Of course, once you have Shard senses working this will be much less of a risk, although there's always a chance that you could miss a latent connection to a non-sapient Shard.

2) UnTriggered.

Hosts that are Connected but not Triggered. This comes down to good, old-fashioned diplomacy. Make an agreement with a sapient Shard and provide an alternate Host? No problem! Take a host away from a new and/or non-sapient Shard should be okay.

Although you don't have the tech to force non-sapient Shards onto a new Host, which (if possible) would mostly mitigate any danger.

3) Triggered/Active.

Hosts that are Connected and Generating Information. You don't have the technology to do anything with these yet. Even when you do, you're going to cause a lot of waves until you have a better handle on being subtle / you pre-emptively eat the Shard involved to prevent it from talking.

I would advise against doing this at this time but note that it should be possible to do this (more) safely later. And of course all plans should be on the table during an emergency.

EDIT: This is misleading, I'm sorry for the wording. You can, right now, "eat" a non-sapient Shard with a Triggered Host, take over, and pretend that everything's fine. Of course there are risks with that. The text above was attempting to point out that you can Research ways to make this not-risky.

We're going to have to update to voting-by-plan. That said, I don't want to stifle creativity, so let's try something a bit different:

1) Vote-by-plan PER EACH Shard/Character
2) Vote-by-plan separately for RESEARCH
3) Add any "nice to have items / modifications to existing plans" separately below your vote plans so that I can see/implement the non-blocking ones.

Everyone (including myself) is going to stop bracketing Shard names and simply capitalize them instead.

Name: (The) Administrator

Role: Zion's Administrator Shard

Status: Connected, Deployed.

• Host 0: Taylor Hebert - Sanity: 70
• Host 1: Veronica Stansfield / Valiant - Sanity: 70
• Host 2: Lilac - Sanity: 92

Aberrance: 0 - normal Shard. Only direct, deep scanning from [Zion] would reveal unintended free-will. Simple sapience, while undesired, is fairly common and does not increase Aberrance.

Strength: <incalculable>

• You're fairly sure that it doesn't matter. In the sense that you have in excess to whatever you'd need.

Dexterity: 1

• This is pitiful. Twisting slightly seems to be your only movement type. Hopefully it won't come into play.

Constitution: 16001 16000 (ow.)

• You're fairly certain that if this stat starts to matter, it's probably not high enough. Might be trainable?

Intelligence: 18

• It seems a bit low, but considering that you can run as many thought processes as you want...

Wisdom: 14

• You have a decent head on your shoulders... for a Human. For a Shard you're a bona-fide guru. Hopefully there's a way to increase this.

Charisma: 13

• You won't be winning any awards, but you can turn on the charm when needed. Better than most people at least… Worst case you can simply Assume Direct Control.

Favor: 125

Mover Information: 1029
Shaker Information: 1613
Brute Information: 658
Breaker Information: 2307
Master Information: 993
Tinker Information: 1732
Blaster Information: 1064
Thinker Information: 1136
Striker Information: 2662
Changer Information: 1981
Trump Information: 2400
Stranger Information: 726

Survive: You must survive to be able to gather information. This objective refreshes continuously.

• Failure: End of the Quest, QM is Sad.

A Farewell to Shardness: Discover a way to become Human corporeal on Earth-Bet again.

• Prerequisite: You need to have access to a body with no existing mind and the ability to communicate.
  
• Success: 10,000 Research Points, Not Having To Worry About Aberration So Much.
• Failure: No Rewards, Massive increase in Aberration.

Insane in the Membrane: Fix Taylor Hebert's body. Kid's Insane! Has no Brain! - Insane in the Membrane / Insane in the Brain!

• Prerequisite: Discover unsettling things about what happened before the quest started. (Currently have enough clues to start this quest)
  
• Success: Best Host's eternal gratitude, Khepri less likely, ???, ???.
  
• Failure: No rewards, ???, possibility of Taylor hating you, small chance of Quest Over Bad End.

Connect to Host: Without a solid connection to the host you are unable to gather information through the granting and use of Parahuman powers. (Succeeded!) (Achievement Earned!)

• Success: 100 Research Points, Not Having To Find A New Host

Shoot the Medic First

• Before reaching the end of the Prologue, disrupt Panacea's canon story line.

And Now for Someone Completely Different

• Gain a Host before Taylor Hebert Triggers.

Call-Forwarding

• Before reaching the end of the Prologue, discover evidence of a far-future event.