[X] Of course. Skitter has proven herself a fairly formidable cape, from what you understand. Not the heaviest hitter but plenty capable in the field, being rumored to have contended with Lung and Bakuda, and to have gone up against the Protectorate and Wards on a number of occasions. The fact she's still alive, intact, and free proves her ability. Having to prioritize Coil is hardly a major price to pay.
-[X] "We should be smart about this. He's a powerful thinker, right? Going after him without a plan is dangerous."
--[X] We should either try to cut off his resources (capes, i mean. And then we either convince Skitter to be fine with us killing his pawns except her friends, or to go with the second option ->) or wait, make a plan, and go after him in a way that doesn't let him escape, meanwhile we hunt other capes.
[X] Of course. Skitter has proven herself a fairly formidable cape, from what you understand. Not the heaviest hitter but plenty capable in the field, being rumored to have contended with Lung and Bakuda, and to have gone up against the Protectorate and Wards on a number of occasions. The fact she's still alive, intact, and free proves her ability. Having to prioritize Coil is hardly a major price to pay.
-[X] "We should be smart about this. He's a powerful thinker, right? Going after him without a plan is dangerous."
--[X] We should either try to cut off his resources (capes, i mean. And then we either convince Skitter to be fine with us killing his pawns except her friends, or to go with the second option ->) or wait, make a plan, and go after him in a way that doesn't let him escape, meanwhile we hunt other capes.
[X][POWER] When you go to sleep, Utilize PSYCHOPOMP to create, modify, or break apart powers.
-[X] Break apart [PHOENIX] and reclaim all motes and keywords (requires at least eight hours of rest).
--[X] Reassemble PHOENIX without FIRE and CONTROL
That was one of my options for a "nullifier" power, Shaker/Control/Thief being another option.
That being said, I'm loathe to lose the Trump aspect of Phœnix, instinctively, since it's a power used for defence against Capes. But if we end up experimenting on it, why not.
That being said, I'm loathe to lose the Trump aspect of Phœnix, instinctively, since it's a power used for defence against Capes. But if we end up experimenting on it, why not.
I agree with you. Dropping PHOENIX is pretty scary. I think we might want to switch between them depending on the conflict, tho. Later, when we have more motes/keywords. Trump/shaker/thief might honestly be more useful than phoenix against, say, a group of capes without exotic damage like the E88, ABB (without bakuda, yhen it would be preferable to have precog or brute i think), or accord's gang.
Scheduled vote count started by paebel on Jun 15, 2024 at 5:07 AM, finished with 26 posts and 7 votes.
[X] Of course. Skitter has proven herself a fairly formidable cape, from what you understand. Not the heaviest hitter but plenty capable in the field, being rumored to have contended with Lung and Bakuda, and to have gone up against the Protectorate and Wards on a number of occasions. The fact she's still alive, intact, and free proves her ability. Having to prioritize Coil is hardly a major price to pay.
-[X] "We should be smart about this. He's a powerful thinker, right? Going after him without a plan is dangerous."
--[X] We should either try to cut off his resources (capes, i mean. And then we either convince Skitter to be fine with us killing his pawns except her friends, or to go with the second option ->) or wait, make a plan, and go after him in a way that doesn't let him escape, meanwhile we hunt other capes.
[X] Of course. Skitter has proven herself a fairly formidable cape, from what you understand. Not the heaviest hitter but plenty capable in the field, being rumored to have contended with Lung and Bakuda, and to have gone up against the Protectorate and Wards on a number of occasions. The fact she's still alive, intact, and free proves her ability. Having to prioritize Coil is hardly a major price to pay.
[X][POWER] Utilize PSYCHOPOMP to create, modify, or break apart powers.
-[X] Break apart [PHOENIX] and reclaim all motes and keywords (requires at least eight hours of rest).
--[X] Reassemble PHOENIX without FIRE and CONTROL
[X][POWER] When you go to sleep, Utilize PSYCHOPOMP to create, modify, or break apart powers.
-[X] Break apart [PHOENIX] and reclaim all motes and keywords (requires at least eight hours of rest).
--[X] Reassemble PHOENIX without FIRE and CONTROL
If I read previous updates right, Bakuda is already Birdcaged by this point.
Now that you mention it, and since we are talking about downtime and research... @paebel what are the restrictions on Prodigy in terms of available "skilks"? Are they just know-hows with the relevant academic knowledge attached, pure know-hows, can it extend to pure academic knowledge ?
Let us say that we activate Prodigy and specify "cape knowledge (local)" as a target skill, do we get a digest of all the capes in the Bay and their powers, or do we just get a breakdown on the one facing us at the moment ? And how far can this knowledge go? Obscure but available to the general public, arcane/trade secrets known to a handful of people, "for your eyes only" stuff, secrets of the universe that Man was never meant to know?
Edit : For IC (shard-based information )and OOC (spoiler avoidance) reasons, I think there should be blocks hard-coded in our Shard on information like the Cycle, or "that one time Eidolon made a really ill-conceived wish".
[X] Of course. Skitter has proven herself a fairly formidable cape, from what you understand. Not the heaviest hitter but plenty capable in the field, being rumored to have contended with Lung and Bakuda, and to have gone up against the Protectorate and Wards on a number of occasions. The fact she's still alive, intact, and free proves her ability. Having to prioritize Coil is hardly a major price to pay.
-[X] "We should be smart about this. He's a powerful thinker, right? Going after him without a plan is dangerous."
--[X] We should either try to cut off his resources (capes, i mean. And then we either convince Skitter to be fine with us killing his pawns except her friends, or to go with the second option ->) or wait, make a plan, and go after him in a way that doesn't let him escape, meanwhile we hunt other capes.
[X] Of course. Skitter has proven herself a fairly formidable cape, from what you understand. Not the heaviest hitter but plenty capable in the field, being rumored to have contended with Lung and Bakuda, and to have gone up against the Protectorate and Wards on a number of occasions. The fact she's still alive, intact, and free proves her ability. Having to prioritize Coil is hardly a major price to pay.
[X][POWER] Utilize PSYCHOPOMP to create, modify, or break apart powers.
-[X] Break apart [PHOENIX] and reclaim all motes and keywords (requires at least eight hours of rest).
--[X] Reassemble PHOENIX without FIRE and CONTROL
[X][POWER] When you go to sleep, Utilize PSYCHOPOMP to create, modify, or break apart powers.
-[X] Break apart [PHOENIX] and reclaim all motes and keywords (requires at least eight hours of rest).
--[X] Reassemble PHOENIX without FIRE and CONTROL
I don't think you really need to with this quest? Neither of the power plans has more than 1 voter so I doubt they'll get used next update. We don't even know if we'll get enough time to break a power.
Still, we should make a list of skills we want to test if PRODIGY has. I'm thinking tactics and strategy? Parahuman combat? PRT procedures?
As for votes... isn't it easier to just count? It's not like we have 80 people voting here (somehow. Have you evee thought about crossposting this Paebel?). The counting here is kinda weird, too. It didn't seem to catch my power vote, for example. Not that it matters that much, i doubt it will pass without another "do you want to do x", and it was more of a "hey we should see about this later" anyways.
I've considered posting it elsewhere, but it'd introduce an extra element of organization in making sure I'm tabulating votes correctly, etc, and I also just tend to prefer discussion to be mostly contained to a single area for the most part.
PRODIGY specifically deals with skills, which is a very loose sort of term, but generally it isn't necessarily granting the knowledge itself? This is probably wrong, but think of it like knowing how to get the desired result, but not necessarily the causal logic that leads there.
I've considered posting it elsewhere, but it'd introduce an extra element of organization in making sure I'm tabulating votes correctly, etc, and I also just tend to prefer discussion to be mostly contained to a single area for the most part.
PRODIGY specifically deals with skills, which is a very loose sort of term, but generally it isn't necessarily granting the knowledge itself? This is probably wrong, but think of it like knowing how to get the desired result, but not necessarily the causal logic that leads there.
Like someone who is a natural talent, you know how to do the thing but you can't necessarily tell someone how it's done. I suspect if we wanted help getting knowledge from the skill we'd have to pick a skillset like investigation, research, or studying. Even those would require active effort. Still, we could likely approximate certain types of lower level thinker powers just by being extremely gifted. This is especially prominent at higher levels where even if the skillsets don't get better we can pick multiple related skillsets.
The ability to recreate Panacea's powers Makes me wonder what sort of effects we can get by combining thinker with various abilities that don't seem thinker focused. Like for example most things with shaker would probably let us perceive stuff within our AOE. Oh I just realized that adding shaker to prodigy would get spicy.
"So this Coil, he's really dangerous?" Protean found herself asking. Her initial instinct had been to simply agree. But something held her back, a whisper from one of her powers, and she listened.
"Extremely. He has moles in the PRT and most of the other gangs. Do you remember the roster of the Empire leaking? Just a bit before Leviathan hit? That was him. He's a powerful Thinker in his own right and has two more under his thumb. They have synergy with each other, though I don't understand his power either. Some sort of precognition I think? I... I have a friend who probably knows more, but the two of us are on the outs right now."
Skitter has a hesitance to her voice about that last bit. She doesn't want to approach whoever this person is, some complicated mixture of guilt and outrage warring with each other.
"Can you mend things with this friend? The more we know the better off we are."
Thinkers are dangerous at the best of times. Protean's own cludged together power made that abundantly clear, as did statements put out by the PRT. She hadn't really done much to strengthen her own Thinker power, not really, but it already paid dividends. What could a precog manage?
"I don't know. I'm not sure I really want to, to be honest, but I can try. Or we can go about it another way. We don't hit Coil himself, we hit his assets, maybe. Ruin his reputation, let the PRT know about Dinah, and how he has the Undersiders and Travelers working for him."
It has the workings of a plan. A first step at least.
"Who are the Travelers? I didn't come across them in my research."
Skitter's voice is growing more confident, more sure. Protean's power whispers secrets to her. Skitter thinks it can be done now, she feels less alone, more sure now that a decision had been made. She works the best under pressure, when she has a clear goal ahead of her, and this tendency can be used to whatever ends Protean desires.
"They're a group of out of town capes. Up from Boston, I think? Heavy hitters but they have some kind of drama going on. I don't really know what it is or what Coil's offering. We could probably hit them?"
She's hesitant to go after the Undersiders directly. Former team-mates, still holds attachments.
"Can we maybe go after them? Remove them from the board, somehow?"
"It might be possible? Last I knew they were going to divide the city up, claim it for their own. Either way we need a plan. You said you sometimes get new powers, right? Do you think you have some way of... countering precogs or Thinkers? I've heard they can struggle when Trumps are involved."
Suggest a lack of trust. Push her to prove herself to you.
"I... honestly, I don't know. I don't really like to talk about it much, especially not with someone I don't entirely trust. But it might be possible? It's something I can work on, definitely. But what about finding the Travelers, Undersiders or... any other capes under Coil's thumb?"
Skitter's insects are calm at this point, no longer swarming as an intimidation tactic. They're calm, almost docile, moving in patterns that are all too organized and human to be natural. They're spread out, dispersed, perhaps being used as some sort of sensory way? Just how far does her control extend?
Her power is especially appealing to Protean.
"A few. Trainwreck with the Merchants, Circus, Uber and Leet. Most of the indies, really? I don't think he has anyone in the Protectorate or Wards, though if they announce any new members, I would be skeptical. They might be a better starting point, even."
Skitter pulls something from a compartment. Insects swarm the object momentarily but it doesn't take long to reveal itself: a phone.
"I'm guessing you don't have a burner. I have a few so take one of mine. I have a number to contact me added in already. We can stay in touch this way, coordinate, and figure this out."
Protean takes the phone and considers the options before her...
[] Attempt to attack Coil's reputation. Skitter suggested he had people in the PRT, and his influence probably spreads to the media too, but maybe other capes will target him? It doesn't seem likely to work that effectively, but it's a fairly low risk opening play.
[] Go after Coil's capes. To an outside observer, it'll just be a heroic teamup going after low level villains. Skitter can be convinced to attack the Undersiders in time, especially with a few successes under her belt. Start with Trainwreck and work through the rest.
[] Try to develop some sort of anti-precog power. It might involve hunting down select capes and some experimentation, but it feels entirely possible. Leave Skitter to gathering intelligence, telling her this might take some time. Once this is in place, attempt to discern Coil's location and simply... end it.
Casey is not going to attacked tonight, so take this as an opportunity to break apart as many powers as you like and create as many new powers as you like.
[][POWER] Utilize PSYCHOPOMP to create, modify, or break apart powers.
-[] Add a KEYWORD to [existing power]
-[] Add motes to [existing power]
-[] Break apart [existing power] and reclaim all motes and keywords (requires at least eight hours of rest).
-[] Break apart all powers, regaining all motes and KEYWORDS, to be used to make new powers.
-[] Do nothing for now.
POWER PANEL
CURRENT MOTES 0
THIEF
PSYCHOPOMP (Rank 12)(Trump): Harvest KEYWORDS and motes from dying capes. Use them to create powers. Gain a minor Thinker power to identify capes.
PHOENIX(Rank 5)(Trump/Brute/Changer)(BRUTE, TRUMP, CHANGER, FLESH, REGEN, FIRE, CONTROL) Burn to ash and rise again, stronger than before. Casey regenerates damage taken, the more damage taken the more rapidly they regenerate. As they regenerate, they shade "feathers" of flame, which they have moderate control over. They grow stronger the more times they regenerate, generating virtual "motes" which may improve PHOENIX by up to three ranks. (10 motes)
ACCELERANDO (Rank 4)(Mover)(MOVER, STRIKER, ACCELERATION, INTERTIA) Casey increases in speed the longer he is in constant movement. It seemingly has no limit, but takes time to spool up. Once he reaches a speed, he can maintain it, and needs some space to slow down. Casey may reach out and touch a single item no more than ten grams in mass. This item gains an iridescent sheen and is propelled at ever increasing speeds, in whichever direction Casey chooses. It will not slow until it strikes something, unless Casey wills it. (4 motes)
GEOMANCY (Rank 4)(Shaker)(SHAKER, CRAFT, FIELD) Casey may shape the world around him. At low motes, he is limited to the most readily available materials and has a range only slightly beyond his body. He is also limited to a single extremely basic creation (pillars, walls, holes, etc). At higher motes, Casey may utilize more exotic materials, expand his range, and expand the number of creations. Complexity of creations may increase as well. (5 motes)
PRODIGY (Rank 1)(Thinker)(THINKER, SKILL) Casey may choose a single skill to have superhuman skill in, and may change this skill with a few minutes of preparation. The number of skills and speed of skill change increases as rank increases. (1 mote)
STATIC (Rank 4)(STRANGER, SCRAMBLE, SENSE) Casey may cloud the perceptions of anyone that perceives him. As rank increases, his ability to cloud perceptions grows. He may not interface with non-biological senses, such as cameras, but he can effect people that see him through the camera. (5 motes)
TRUMP with STATIC will create a sort of anti-power sense effects. At lower ranks, power senses will just be unreliable, at mid-ranks it will effectively block most (not all) precogs, at higher levels you actually know someone is trying to sense you and at rank 10 you can consciously guide what they're perceiving instead.
It will no longer be effective against mundane senses or technology, though, unless that technology is Tinkertech.
Sounds like static+trump will be ideal once we go directly after Coil. Screwing up and even directing his precog powers would be crippling. Honestly if we become a big enough threat and he decides to use his precog powers on us we'll almost need to already have a power scrambling effect up. That means either high level static or high-mid level trump static. Honestly I expect they might take the same number of motes to level to those points, but that's something we could test. From a meta perspective we might eventually be able to make him confront us with trump static, forcing him to pick a timeline where he went to investigate us. I don't, however, know if we could tell if he scries us indirectly, such as by having someone else investigate.
[X] Go after Coil's capes. To an outside observer, it'll just be a heroic teamup going after low level villains. Skitter can be convinced to attack the Undersiders in time, especially with a few successes under her belt. Start with Trainwreck and work through the rest.
[X] Plan: A Few Experiments
-[X] Break down PHOENIX, ACCELERANDO and GEOMANCY
-[X] Create a new power with CHANGER, FLESH, and CONTROL. Give it 5 motes.
-[X] Create a new power with BRUTE, FIRE, and REGEN. Give it 5 motes.
-[X] Create a new power with SHAKER, INERTIA, and THIEF. Give it 1 mote.
-[X] Create a new power with MOVER and ACCELERATION. Give it 1 mote.
-[X] Add TRUMP to STATIC
-[X] Add CRAFT to PRODIGY and give it 4 motes.
Might give us some ability to grant or manipulate powers? Striker might not actually be helpful so making TRUMP CRAFT first then adding STRIKER is probably a good way to do that one.
TRUMP THIEF (possibly add SHAKER?)
Because our QM mentioned TRUMP, SHAKER, THIEF and I want to know if we can steal powers. Hell maybe it'll let us get keywords without killing?
FLESH THIEF
because I just want to see what body horror that would do.
CRAFT THIEF
because I want to know what weird power that'd give us
SHAKER FIRE
That's just powerful offensively. Sprinkle in craft for some permanence, control for some more detailed work, or even acceleration for some wild effects.
FIRE MOVER
Just sounds like fun. Who doesn't want to be a rocket? Sprinkling in the ACCELERATION or INERTIA keywords would add more direct mover powers, but honestly I wouldn't recommend it.
I'm not sure I want to test it but FIRE THIEF would almost certainly give us cold powers. Shaker would likely be broad, field might do some weird stuff, striker would likely let us freeze whatever we touch near-instantly. Adding Changer and/or Brute would likely allow us to be covered in flame that grows stronger the more we steal. CRAFT or CONTROL could let us direct the stolen flame.
BRUTE INERTIA
honestly sounds fun. You could even just sprinkle in inertia to another brute power.
INERTIA THIEF
Because it could mess up our opponents, and hell maybe even stop their heart/blood. (FLESH might be required to have an effect on living beings.)
Casey is not going to attacked tonight, so take this as an opportunity to break apart as many powers as you like and create as many new powers as you like.
That was incorrect actually, I must have not noted it down when I applied motes previous and then it turned into a copy/paste error. It's at 5 motes, which is when it'll start to hit diminishing returns. All numbers are up to date now.
