- Location
- Elsewhere
For me, it works fine on desktop . I've checked both Firefox and Edge. It doesn't work on mobile for me though.
A Champion in Earth Bet [Worm/Original Setting]
- Thread starter sun tzu
- Start date
Prince Charon
Just zis guy, you know?
It could be a regional issue. It works for me on Firefox, haven't tried Edge.
- Location
- Auckland
It works for me on Edge.
You know after delving around looking at Worm / Ward / Parahuman Fan works and the like, I find that there doesn't seem to be a lot of works that try to do something with the way powers are... made? / gifted? / inflicted? in Worm.
Which I get to an extent, just because a particular setting has the option doesn't change the fact everyone has experience making Fan work stuff the traditional way, you know screwing around where characters end up or what powers they have, crossovers and the like, and I appreciate and love those.
But I swear I have found only two Quests that do something with the way powers happen in Worm (not including works where the Writer has pre-worked powers to chose from, you can do something like that in any superpowered setting).
Halping Quest : Which was like a super ambitious thing in concept alone, where the Author was running it on Sufficient Velocity and Space Battles at the same time and each forum controlled a different aspect of the quest, and even that isn't touching the rest of stuff that was going on in it. Where you "played" as one of Eden's shards that managed to get separated from the main body, and where collectively the Questers choose / made a character and then choose / made a trigger event for that character. Where then the Author took those choices and with the Shard the Author made for the quest, applied that information with Worm's power generating rules and logic to make that characters power. Like, God that is cool, not even getting into that it was set up to so that should a character die the shard would be assigned to someone new with this same process and thus make another, different, power using that Shard as the foundation to be built upon.
But okay, that is a lot of investment for making something that grand work, and it admittedly is very focused on the concept itself, lets dial it back a bit.
Assume The Worst : Just focusing on one character, and developing their story, but to make that person's power they set up a Write-In Vote to figure out the Character's Trigger Event. I don't know if the Author had a Shard already written out, but I think they did and just didn't show it to the viewers so as to get that unknown / mystery feel. After a Trigger Event was chosen the Author made the power (which was a Stranger power, due to the Trigger Event being hounded by Paparazzi and the character very much not being able to deal with how bad it got) and focusing on an In-character view, didn't show off all the details of what that power was, so the Questers had to discover its aspects and ways to use it to the best of their abilities with their character.
Ain't that neat. These two are the only one's I think I have found that do something like this, AND Halping Quest died back in 2020, and Assume The Worst had the Author having a writer's block just about when I discovered it, not from the power thing, just wondering where to take the story!
I have a Itch, and I can't find anything to scratch it with! Does anyone know if I missed any famous and beloved Quest or Fan Work thing that does something like this?! Worm has been published for around a Decade now, how are these two the only ones I've found... aaaahhhh.
Okay, I feel better now.
Which I get to an extent, just because a particular setting has the option doesn't change the fact everyone has experience making Fan work stuff the traditional way, you know screwing around where characters end up or what powers they have, crossovers and the like, and I appreciate and love those.
But I swear I have found only two Quests that do something with the way powers happen in Worm (not including works where the Writer has pre-worked powers to chose from, you can do something like that in any superpowered setting).
Halping Quest : Which was like a super ambitious thing in concept alone, where the Author was running it on Sufficient Velocity and Space Battles at the same time and each forum controlled a different aspect of the quest, and even that isn't touching the rest of stuff that was going on in it. Where you "played" as one of Eden's shards that managed to get separated from the main body, and where collectively the Questers choose / made a character and then choose / made a trigger event for that character. Where then the Author took those choices and with the Shard the Author made for the quest, applied that information with Worm's power generating rules and logic to make that characters power. Like, God that is cool, not even getting into that it was set up to so that should a character die the shard would be assigned to someone new with this same process and thus make another, different, power using that Shard as the foundation to be built upon.
But okay, that is a lot of investment for making something that grand work, and it admittedly is very focused on the concept itself, lets dial it back a bit.
Assume The Worst : Just focusing on one character, and developing their story, but to make that person's power they set up a Write-In Vote to figure out the Character's Trigger Event. I don't know if the Author had a Shard already written out, but I think they did and just didn't show it to the viewers so as to get that unknown / mystery feel. After a Trigger Event was chosen the Author made the power (which was a Stranger power, due to the Trigger Event being hounded by Paparazzi and the character very much not being able to deal with how bad it got) and focusing on an In-character view, didn't show off all the details of what that power was, so the Questers had to discover its aspects and ways to use it to the best of their abilities with their character.
Ain't that neat. These two are the only one's I think I have found that do something like this, AND Halping Quest died back in 2020, and Assume The Worst had the Author having a writer's block just about when I discovered it, not from the power thing, just wondering where to take the story!
I have a Itch, and I can't find anything to scratch it with! Does anyone know if I missed any famous and beloved Quest or Fan Work thing that does something like this?! Worm has been published for around a Decade now, how are these two the only ones I've found... aaaahhhh.
Okay, I feel better now.
...Huh.
So, as I have recently learned, while Lagos is (by a very wide margin) the largest city of Nigeria, it's not actually it's capital. That honor goes to Abuja (which is much smaller, closer in size to Washington D.C.).
Buuut, Lagos used to be the capital city; Abuja only took that spot in 1991. Given Earth-Bet's timeline diverged in the 80s, that means there's no irreconcilable contradiction.
So, as I have recently learned, while Lagos is (by a very wide margin) the largest city of Nigeria, it's not actually it's capital. That honor goes to Abuja (which is much smaller, closer in size to Washington D.C.).
Buuut, Lagos used to be the capital city; Abuja only took that spot in 1991. Given Earth-Bet's timeline diverged in the 80s, that means there's no irreconcilable contradiction.
- Location
- Philippines
@sun tzu out of curiosity, what's your stance on the 17 Endbringers waiting in the wings?
Were their forms and powers already selected in advance when they were first activated so we'll see Khonsu, Tohu and Bohu or are the 17 other EBs currently blank slates and gathering data to adapt their form and power?
Though I admit, I am looking forward to Avatar and Eidolon fighting Tohu. I've got the feeling it'll use Eidolon and Glaistig Uaine as two of its masks.
Were their forms and powers already selected in advance when they were first activated so we'll see Khonsu, Tohu and Bohu or are the 17 other EBs currently blank slates and gathering data to adapt their form and power?
Though I admit, I am looking forward to Avatar and Eidolon fighting Tohu. I've got the feeling it'll use Eidolon and Glaistig Uaine as two of its masks.
Forms and powers built in advance by Eden.
Order of appearance, not so much.
- Location
- Philippines
Cool.
Also, I was rereading earlier chapters and it was mentioned that New Wave was basically it as far as independent heroes in BB went, which even in Worm wasn't true.
Less well known capes like Sere and Dovetail existed. They actually appeared and fought Taylor funny enough.
Like you said, the world's bigger than what Taylor saw. So even in BB there were several more minor capes both hero and villain that simply didn't become very relavant to Taylor and the Undersiders' PoV.
Edit:
Didn't wanna double post.
Been reading Dragon's threadmark in the Wildbow Series Feats Thread Wildbow Series Respect Thread
It's a shame the PRT presumably destroyed String Theory's F-Driver before Dragon could replicate it, or the various more exotic Bakuda bombs. They'd have been very useful against an Endbringer,
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You know I have had this thought a few times, about how Worm / Shard powers could be an outside context problem for other universes.
And while I only really know stuff about the universe Avatar is from, from the details I picked up in the story. One specific one keeps appearing in my head a few times.
That's if one of Nollius torture-prisoners triggered with a certain kind of power. Like a shard was able to connect to Avatar's dimension because Madman keeps jumping between them, and it manages to make it so a few people in that dimension can trigger, CONNECTS to one of Nollius's victims in Avalon and just sees Magic for the first time.
Figures out Magic is a kind of energy that can be manipulated and that its prospective host seems to be surrounded by it, and just, makes it so the host automatically absorbs all Magic in a radius around themselves, no protection from it, just shard bullshit, and the host can use that energy to do stuff.
The prospective consequences of that, just knowing what little I know about Avatar's world is great. Have the Host free King Arthur by accidently disabling the curses and statis put on him by absorbing the magic making them up. Have a prison break from Avalon. Have Nollius swear bloody and horrific vengeance on what might have been just some janitor that got kidnapped.
Now that seems like a fun way of the Shard's to make an impression on Avatar's world.
And while I only really know stuff about the universe Avatar is from, from the details I picked up in the story. One specific one keeps appearing in my head a few times.
That's if one of Nollius torture-prisoners triggered with a certain kind of power. Like a shard was able to connect to Avatar's dimension because Madman keeps jumping between them, and it manages to make it so a few people in that dimension can trigger, CONNECTS to one of Nollius's victims in Avalon and just sees Magic for the first time.
Figures out Magic is a kind of energy that can be manipulated and that its prospective host seems to be surrounded by it, and just, makes it so the host automatically absorbs all Magic in a radius around themselves, no protection from it, just shard bullshit, and the host can use that energy to do stuff.
The prospective consequences of that, just knowing what little I know about Avatar's world is great. Have the Host free King Arthur by accidently disabling the curses and statis put on him by absorbing the magic making them up. Have a prison break from Avalon. Have Nollius swear bloody and horrific vengeance on what might have been just some janitor that got kidnapped.
Now that seems like a fun way of the Shard's to make an impression on Avatar's world.
- Location
- Philippines
I had a random thought. We've seen snippets of what would happen if other members of the Global Champions got isekai'd.
But, how would Earth Bet had faired if it was the entire roster.
I have this image of a Global Champions and Guild collaboration, with the GC having a major sidequest on Techno Paladin working with tinkers to try to find a way back to Earth Gimmel, since the entire team disappearing would embolden a lot of villains.
But, how would Earth Bet had faired if it was the entire roster.
I have this image of a Global Champions and Guild collaboration, with the GC having a major sidequest on Techno Paladin working with tinkers to try to find a way back to Earth Gimmel, since the entire team disappearing would embolden a lot of villains.
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You know how the Guild is being cautious about fighting the Brazilian cartels?
It'd be a lot less cautious.
- Location
- Philippines
Speaking of the Guild, which of the capes the Avatar has worked with or fought would he classify as A lister material by Gimmel standards? I know he listed the Triumvirate as examplez.
And how does the Gimmel rating system take into account for more support powers like Tattletale or Dinah's or Strider.
Capes that might qualify as A-list material on Gimmel include Dragon, Ice Queen, Blood Count, Skull King, maybe Weaver, maybe Leonardo.
But a lot of Bet's parahumans would be OCPs for Gimmel, such as the majority of Thinkers and many Tinkers.
- Location
- Philippines
Personally, I think Weaver would be B lister. Above average due to range and sensory feedback and multitasking, but isn't gonna be very effective against non squishy targets or those with effective AoE or superior range or speed, unless she's going with asphyxiation or having her bugs crawl into various orifices as her main go to. Great at street level stuff, and for battlefield support and info gathering for most situations due to her bug senses but struggles to fight oh higher tiers.
And Leonardo as a definite A lister. Versatility is its own power. He just needs the experience to become more effective in choosing specialties and what to build with them. Essentially, the better he becomes at munchkining his specialties, he's easily Dragon's equal when he matures.
Thinkers I get, for Tinkers, rapid building aside, wouldn't fighting them be similar enough to fighting tech geniuses or those with super tech? The nature and methodology is different, but "person with supertech" isn't new to Gimmel
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Some Tinkers, sure.
But then you get people whose tech does things no-one in Gimmer knows how to do (see: anything relating to time, such as Bakuda's time-stop bombs or Leonardo's precognitive combat visor).
You know those space whales have got a pretty decent ability to mess around with time don't they?
Which I guess makes sense. Considering that the space whale species' end goal is to beat the very concepts of entropy, heat death, and extinction, so that the species can be eternal.
Being able to manipulate time seems pretty useful for that goal, honestly a lot more than being able to shoot lasers.
Which I guess makes sense. Considering that the space whale species' end goal is to beat the very concepts of entropy, heat death, and extinction, so that the species can be eternal.
Being able to manipulate time seems pretty useful for that goal, honestly a lot more than being able to shoot lasers.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
Those, ultimately, are the same problem. But you are correct that the take on the problem the entities were looking for was "how to expand infinitely without consequences"
Ah yeah that's it. Still time manipulation would probably help.
Heh, now I'm just thinking about when I first realized that the "Worm" the story was named after was Scion / Zion. That was magical.
Because that is what the entities are. A bunch of inter-dimensional, inter-galactic worms, who despite having the knowledge of who knows how many civilizations, and ecosystems, and unrestrained thinker powers, still can't get it in their heads that unending growth isn't sustainable, or at least that they can pursue that dream without slaughtering everything thing they come across. Including each other!
Because they really are barely sentient and sapient sea worms that just sort of, stumbled into evolutionary dominance and think that never ending conflict is what will save them because "hey, it's worked so far".
Can you imagine the Entitie that figured that out. Somewhere in the universe a Worm has had the idea of existing in a less slaughtering, ecological genocide way, and knows that it will never be able to reach the rest of its species and tell them to chill out, and then remember that the first member of their race who had a genuinely good idea of leaving their planet and reaching the stars was immediately devoured after crippling itself to share this information.
God I love those stupid space Worms / whales.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
As I once put it, the entire point of the Entities is that they were glorified slugs that somehow lucked into godlike power, but didn't actually change their mindset.
Their previous motives were hunger, self-preservation, and the desire to reproduce. Once they became the Entities as we think of them, their capacity to understand and interpolate potential obstacles and solutions connecting to those motives increased enormously - but they didn't have the particular sequence of advantageous mutations within their CNS that allowed humans to achieve that kind of growth in problem-solving skills through a process that eventually led to the complex, messy, arbitrary cognition of the Homo genus.
Instead, they just pushed the goalposts for what it meant to fulfill a given basal desire forward in step with their ability to predict future events and alter their present circumstances. Eventually, that led to them reaching a point where the only likely obstacles to satisfying their need for sustenance and their desire to reproduce were a projected limit on the throughput of their expansion - whether their reality was actually finite or not, predictions indicated that they would reach a point where there would be so many of them that it would lead to competition for resources.
Due to the pre-Entity organisms' ability to inherit memories from their progenitors (and possibly from others of their kind that they ate?), this prospect was essentially a PTSD trigger for the entire species, due to a previous bottleneck event in their evolution that led to their ancestors killing and eating each other in desperation that left the survivors - and thus their descendants - psychologically scarred.
They couldn't conceive of answers to their problems that would easily occur to a human, like "don't try to reproduce at the maximum possible rate". To them, these animalistic drives were immutable and absolute laws of their existence - but in the face of the cosmos' vast indifference, and the scale which they were now operating on, the continued dogged adherence to these drives became increasingly farcical and nonsensical.
Entities can seem extremely intelligent, but they aren't intelligent in the way a human is. Their intelligence is more akin to the way slime mold colonies are very, very efficient at determining the shortest path between their current location and the nearest source of nutrients - but they've stacked together so many such flavors of not-quite-intelligence, and their shards give them such a broad variety of ways to manipulate reality, that it's easy to mistake them for omniscient, omnipotent posthuman gods.
But in the end... they really are just worms. However powerful they may become, Entities that follow the model of Zion and Eden are doomed to exist in a kind of metaphysical twilight: too complex and vast for their simple desires and simple cognitive structure to produce coherent outputs, but not complex enough in the right ways that would let them recognize the consequences of this, or try to engage with the central problem that plagues them.
EDIT: This also heavily informed my impression of Cauldron (although I'm now more aware that I don't really have enough firsthand knowledge of the source material to be confident in that impression). Their efforts to be ruthlessly, maximally efficient, their denial of any quality or element of the human experience that didn't have a direct utility to the problem they were concerned with - their entire ethos was one which operated within the stunted, animalistic logic of the Entities themselves. They were trying to beat the Warrior at its own game, and weren't able to realize how foolish that approach was.
In the end, the only chance humanity had was to make use of faculties where we had the advantage - reducing everything to a clash of armies was a losing proposition from the outset, because the Entities were infinitely better-equipped to win such a conflict.
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- Location
- Philippines
According to WoG from Wildbow, Phir Se's power is legit timetravel.
But for the Entities, timetravel is always a net negative in terms of energy, so it's not a big part of their kit.
That doesn't solve their problems at all, though. Their problem is that they are so vast and so powerful that it is inevitable that the only way they won't end up being the last matter in the multiverse in a billion years is if they collectively commit suicide first. When that happens they will fall back into the cannibalistic murder spree that characterized their existence on their home world because literally nothing else would exist to eat. The only way to prevent that from happening is by learning how to reverse entropy, or ascending to a new plane of existence, or reforging the species to not need sustenance, or something along those lines.
All of those things require research, and research requires data. Entities are not creative, so they use the Cycle to outsource to people who can fill that gap, such as humans. Once they've picked the multiverse clean they'll come together, pool their resources, and see if a solution is possible.
"Just stop breeding" isn't a solution. It doesn't address the problem in the slightest.
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- Pittsburgh, PA
My argument is that the Entities, given the level of power they're shown to possess, have already overcome things like entropy and the need for sustenance.
The issue is that their ceaseless reproduction's logical endpoint is a cosmos in which all matter and energy, at every point in time from the Big Bang to the farthest fringes of heat death, has become a tesselated mass of Entities.
Their cycle is intended to find a means for them to continue endlessly replicating, even after that point. Should they find a solution to that, they'll simply move on to the next potential bottleneck - which is the point. It's an incoherent goal with no actual endpoint, precisely because these are glorified amoebae which have become able to act on a scale that IRL is reserved for sapient lifeforms.
They manifestly have not. Every time you see something that looks like infinite energy from a human perspective it's actually smoke and mirrors where they steal energy or matter from other universes or something similar. It always ends up costing more than it creates.
As for the Entities themselves, they're mostly solar powered. During the Cycle, Shards refill their batteries by collecting the solar energy that hits the alternate Earth they're deployed onto.
Even for Entities, you can't generate mass or energy ex nihilo.
That's inevitable regardless. Like I said earlier, Entities are so powerful and so massive that nothing can realistically kill them other than each other, meaning that in a billion years they're going to be the only matter or energy left in the multiverse simply because they will have eaten everything else.
Endlessly breeding isn't the problem - even if the entire species stopped breeding altogether and only ate enough to maintain low power mode, the only result would be that instead of one billion years, it's a few billion years.
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Really, though, all I'm doing here is repeating the analysis that the Entities themselves made. It's in one of the interludes, the Warrior's or Contessa's I think. The Entity directly states in its narration that one of the potential solutions to their problem is reversing entropy, meaning that they haven't done that yet. If they had that nut cracked they wouldn't care about all of reality being a tessellated mass of Entities - all they care about is avoiding cannibalism, which beating entropy would do.