Of course Levi doesn't mind control people. He is a boy you know? And like any boy he prefers big flashy attacks compared to subtle mind attacks. That's more of a girl thing anyway. That's why his sister Simurgh is so good at it.
A Flung Light (Worm/minor toaru cross)
- Location
- Santiago de Chile
Ehem, em, I'm afraid to ask, but, uh...
How exactly do you know that? I mean, since Levi can't tell you which way he identifies, you must have assigned they (or it? Not even sure is that) a gender based on something. Perhaps behavior? Or physical examination, like one would a domesticated animal?
Tension
- Location
- Earth
Tension
Thursday, 28th April – Brockton Bay, Docks – Winslow High SchoolWe sat together in Winslow High's cafeteria. As had become usual it wasn't just Keiko and myself, but Charlotte as well. We chose a table to the side, but with a good view of the entire room. The bustle and background noise of the other students ensured no one else would overhear us.
I almost got killed yesterday.
A complete unknown had hit me in the worst way possible.
Despite all my preparation that teleporter had hit me completely unprepared.
It was something I had to prepare an answer for going forward.
Never rely on luck. It runs out.
Almost. Coil. He could make two choices, then keep the better result.
How exactly did his power function? Did he actually create new timelines?
Unlikely. Creating matter was expensive. The power requirements were too vast. More likely was a state of quantum superposition that stayed undecided until it collapsed upon observation. The choice.
Why did he keep a failure, however close of one?
Did his other choice somehow go worse? Why did he make two risky choices instead of playing it safe in one of them?
Time continued on as he made his choices. He did not get as many attempts as he wanted.
I was rather elusive, had no known haunts, no known interests to force my hand. He had to take the opportunities he could get. Perhaps he had chosen to make two attempts at me and the other one went even worse?
If it was Coil at all. But those two looked like mercenaries he'd use.
Speculation. Too little information to know for sure.
I'd revisit that once I had more information.
It felt a little strange to be back in school after that and doze the day away while teachers who didn't want to be here read listlessly from their script.
At first glance it looked like a day like any other.
"I can't believe we did that," said Charlotte.
Charlotte absently stabbed at today's mystery meat.
"Oh, we showed them," Keiko gestured wildly with the chicken nugget she had stolen out of my lunch box even though I had prepared an identical one for her.
But habits weren't that easily broken.
"We did," I smiled as I took one nugget out of Keiko's box.
But only at first glance.
The Hitler Youth kept close together today. Usually they had no trouble going around in pairs, today there was no group with less than four.
One of those groups just made their ways to the trays. Usually they'd chat about anything and nothing. Not today. Today their attention was not on each other, but on the room.
They eyed it warily.
For good reason.
A couple of my fellow classmates sat on a table not far from the waiting line. Mark held the newspaper in front of him. The headline was visible to all.
The End of an Empire!
I didn't need to read his mind to know it was a prop.
He wasn't someone who read a newspaper.
"Victor bound for the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center," he gloated, "Finally that monster gets put away for good."
He was genuinely happy about that.
He also deliberately projected his voice loud enough the Nazis had to hear him.
The future goons clenched their fists, but shuffled along with the moving waiting line.
"The others will follow soon, finally their days are over," Mark went on.
My classmates hollered along with that. Yan was among them and for once in a good mood.
One of them looked about to snipe back at Mark, but Matthew put a hand on his shoulder before he could get going. He simply shook his head and gestured for him to get back in line.
They went on and the comments did as well, though for now it didn't get violent.
For now Matthew was keeping his underlings under control.
There weren't as many of them as usual in school. I'd judge about half. Plenty of them had at least one parent arrested. They were bewildered, unnerved, angry. It was an explosive mix of emotions, especially with all the kids poking at them now that it was considered safe. No longer was there any risk of a cape interceding on their behalf.
Only Hookwolf and Purity remained. Neither would win on their own against the Protectorate.
They forgot that capes never interfered in school spats before.
"Ah, you could cut that tension with a butter knife. Someone's gonna get knifed before the day's out," Keiko mentioned nonchalantly.
"Only a matter of when," I agreed, "might not be today though."
No authority was absolute and Matthew had already spent most of his by lunch time.
I was far from the only one to notice the tension, plenty of kids were watching with worry. Some decided to skip on the afternoon classes. Others were looking forward to it. Some for the chance to settle a grudge, others because they didn't want to leave a friend hanging.
"Shouldn't we do something about this," Charlotte fidgeted.
Not every problem needed to be my problem.
"Warn anyone you like who hasn't noticed it themselves yet," I suggested with a shrug.
There was only so much that could be done without aggressive mind control.
A spike of alarm tore my attention away from that topic.
It came from Blackwell's secretary.
"The schools getting audited," I chuckled.
"What?"
"Dear auditor Timothy Smith just arrived in principal Blackwell's office on the superintendent's orders to check on the schools finances. He's supposed to make sure everything got spent how it's supposed to be spent."
"And?"
"Judging by the growing dread I can sense they very much haven't done that."
Keiko gleefully smiled at that while Charlotte looked merely concerned.
Anyway, lunch time ended and Charlotte split from us as we went to our next classes.
To my surprise the school day ended without a stabbing, though it had gotten close a few times. But calmer minds prevailed in the end.
Oh well, tomorrow was another day to roll that dice.
Thursday, 28th April 2011 – Brockton Bay, Downtown
I stared at the empty flat.
Cupboards were left open. A chair lay on the ground.
The door wasn't locked, merely fallen into the latch.
Psychometry showed they got a curt phone call shortly before packing up. Yesterday. While I was busy assisting the PRT with shuffling the Nazis towards temporary holding cells.
"Flown the coop again?" Keiko grouched.
"Yes," I sighed, "again."
The search for Coil wasn't going well.
Keiko and I spent the last couple hours walking around downtown out of costume. Charlotte had to help out her family with something instead. I didn't pry. We went past every area the Nazis were known to clash with Coil.
This wasn't the first abandoned flat we had entered.
"I had thought he'd take advantage of the Nazis being gone to take over their areas," I did not whine.
Instead we found no trace of him.
The usual street corners his people used to sell drugs were abandoned.
Protection money went uncollected.
Gambling parlors were closed and abandoned.
Of the people who usually staffed them I either found no trace or they knew nothing useful.
Cut-outs.
I wondered how many were even still alive.
"He can't keep that up forever," Keiko remarked.
I tilted my head at her to go on.
"People need to eat, pay bills. Every day he doesn't have them work they either don't get to earn the money they need to do that or he'll eat the loss himself. Either way he can't keep that up forever," she explained.
I nodded. "That doesn't help us right now though," I sighed.
This was a bust.
Back to the drawing board.
Thursday, 28th April 2011 – Brockton Bay, Docks – a tenement building
I knocked on the door of a flat like many others in the docks.
The doorbell was broken.
I had arrived here in my quest for something useful to do. What I had planned here wouldn't help me find Coil. But it was undeniably something good.
I was in costume, but despite that no one had noticed me. I had made sure of that via my little "Somebody else's problem"-field as I came to call the application of my power I had made to hide from Yan.
There was only one person inside that flat. He did not react to my knocking.
So I knocked again. Harder.
Finally the man got up, grumbling and shuffled his way to the door.
He opened the door until it caught on the chain and peered through the gap.
I hid my reaction to the smell of alcohol that wafted off the man.
"Hello, Mr. Irie," I greeted, "I do have something I wish to talk to you about. May I come inside?"
I was polite. I did not threaten him.
It didn't matter. He knew what his son did. He knew I had hit the brothel. He knew I had power.
And he didn't.
My very presence was a threat.
He did the only thing he could, he opened the door for me.
I took in the room. The empty beer bottles besides the couch. The unwashed dishes left on the table. The television droning along on some vapid reality show.
He let himself fall into the couch. His hand absently grabbed onto a half-empty bottle.
He looked gaunt.
"I'd prefer to have this conversation while you are sober-" I glanced towards all the empty bottles, "-ish."
Shame flickered in his mind and he put the bottle back on the ground.
I sat down on the cleanest bit of floor I saw. It didn't make me any less dangerous, but it made me look much less dangerous.
His eyes flicked towards a picture on the wall. Him and his wife both wore a kimono. Huh, they had a Shinto wedding. "I will not help you get to my son," he found his spine.
"I am not here for him," I smiled, "I am here to return what Victor has stolen from you."
Surprise. Disbelief. Incredulity. Suspicion.
"Out of the goodness of your heart, I presume," he drawled out.
This wasn't a man who believed in that. He wasn't someone who trusted people. He wasn't someone who believed in altruism.
He was looking for the catch. For the price. Considering if it would be worth it, for his son. For Mark.
He remembered an old news article. Teacher. A cape that granted other people powers, mostly Thinker or Tinker. A cape that had hid that his power granting had an insidious mind-control aspect. The exact degree was unclear.
He would never believe me if I tried to claim it was for only his benefit, even though it was. Even bringing up that there wouldn't be a mind-control aspect would be a mistake.
So I gave him another truth.
"Victor loves to make others less. To reassert his own view on the world that only white people matter. That they are truly better than us," I met his eyes, "I refuse for him to have that victory. I will take that from him."
Spite. Spite he did believe in.
He gave a nod. Assent.
He still believed there was a price from him, he just thought it'd be worth it. For his son. Oh well, he was in for a surprise then.
The process itself was nearly trivial. Merely an application of the way I had taken how to jog from Sophia for myself to a different skill. I knew how to program from my power. I knew what an appropriate skill level ought to be from casual scans of employees of different companies while walking all over downtown.
His fingers darted over the keyboard of his old laptop.
I pretended not to notice his tears. Instead I gave a satisfied nod and left.
I walked past a returning Mark who could not notice me.
I had others to see to as well. It wouldn't do for his family to stand out.
A/N.:
Blackwell's in trouble. Piggot put Sophia's PRT handler through the mangle off-screen and the handler decided to do the same as Piggot: Make as much as possible someone else's fault.
And so Coil and Mental Out are searching for each other in the haystack that is Brockton Bay. He wished he still had Tattletale for this task right now.
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
Pretty nice way to use mind control, that. Benefit others by teaching them forgotten skills. Geez was the discussion around probable stabbings at school bleak, though - they all sounded so resigned to it. Although Charlotte wanted to do stuff to stop it.
Charlotte is a great character and isn't in enough fanfictions. People forget about her because she doesn't have any powers but she's one of the few characters who is truly a good person.
Delegation is beautiful isn't it
So, we don't see how Coil is hunting Mental Out so far, but the smart play, imho, is question Dinah to get information about things "what's the probability Mental Out's real identity is a registered student of winslow tomorrow", and working down from there.
On Mental Out's side, a day, maybe 2, with a car could allow her to just do a blanket search of the entire city using her power. Using the bus lines would be slower, but cheaper. While Coil himself could probably move out of the way, Noelle is risky to transport at this point, and Dinah would have her own complications. That and getting the timing right would require some tricky questions to Dinah as well.
Alternatively, the ABB could cause issues, forcing one or both of them to drop their hunting for the other.
Like, this is low key terrifying? Nozomi, if she put a minimum of effort into it (or just grabbed it from Victor when she could); she'd be as ridiculously multitalented as he is. Or make her teammates just as multitalented. Actually, she could just upload all her knowledge of the power development program into someone (or with her mind machine interface, into a computer)?
This bit, from the previous chapter confuses me some. While it makes sense that Mental Out would know how to build nanomachines, given Toaru tech, I was under the impression that, unlike regular Tinkers, she can't just use her power to bypass the tooling requirements: it's not tinkertech, it has to actually function. (I mean, she can use hydrokinesis in the manufacturing process, obviously)
I'd imagine that it'd require a bunch of tools to make tools, to actually make functional nanomachines, not something doable on a budget of 40k and shrinking for everything else.
That's a pretty good guess at how his powers work.
Junior Nazi squad isn't doing to good right now and honestly that's a good thing sure there parents and way of life may have been taken from them but that's a good thing when both of those things are horrible.
Happy to see that Winslow is facing the consequences of their actions.
The MC is nice and socially capable like that.
Blaming other people for your mistakes a classic in the real world and in Worm.
- Location
- Earth
They'd be most concerned about her capability to grant powers, especially given their apparent caliber.
Teacher was a major threat and all he could do was grant minor powers.
ThanksThis is excellent, just what I needed to wet my appetite for more Raildex fics.
I hope the worm-parts are explained well enough for you to follow.
quick off the cuff math places the amount of high schools in BB at ~43.
(350k citizens, ~7% in highschool, ~565 students per highschool)
He gets ~6 questions from Dinah a day this early from her. (more later on. 15 when Crawler came visiting in canon)
It's gonna take him a while if he does that and meanwhile he can't use her for anything else.
He is too much of a coward to do that, so it'd take him even longer that way.
Also that's not a question Coil can ask. Dinah can only answer what she can picture. She can't answer if Mental Out is a student, but she can answer if whoever Coil sends would find her at this high school.
Which they might not, even if Nozomi is a student at the school they are checking for one of many reasons. E.g. she simply isn't there today, the guy he sent accidentally browsed past her, Nozomi noticed the guy and mind-controlled him into lying/made him forget.
It is a subtle limitation, but Dinah is dependent on what information makes it back to her in the future she looks at.
She could. Or with the right resources she could go build Testament and automate that process.
She indeed does have to build the necessary tools. I might've been a bit too generous to her at that point and didn't state the limitations of what she made well enough.
It might've been a better choice to have her cook up some pharmaceuticals instead on hindsight.
While micro manipulators are not that hard for her to make, those only allow work to the micro scale and not the nano scale, so the nanites she made are a bit on the bigger end of the possible size of nanites.
They are also single purpose and not general purpose.
Single purpose as in: They work exactly for the kind of wounds she got, not even general healing and will cease to function within a day or two at most (via getting absorbed into her body or removed from it via her blood stream/kidney)
Though I should've mentioned that somewhere.
Her most likely approach to actually make the nanites probably should've been the magnetic helical one using a rotating magnetic field with Keiko's help.
It's also completely wrong
I have to wonder how Coil's power interacts with Nozomi's. If she gets close enough to Coil to start digging through his mind, does he notice in the other timeline and shut down the one where she found him? That would make tracking Coil down harder because actually catching him would be difficult. Can she encounter him and order him to shut down the other timeline? I'd kind of think the answer is no because he is just doing precog rather than actual timeline shenanigans, so he would choose the path where she doesn't encounter him, unless something in her powerset interferes with his precog.
Somewhat? If he's in his base in both timelines, shutting one down when it's mind controlled helps, but not by much. Even just being in his base will possibly allow Keiko to break into his computers, depending on how skilled she's gotten in hacking: defending against an electrokinetic like her is not something they're really designed for, especially with a postcog in the mix
We know this from PRT Quest, if you have a parallel timeline ability(they had one in Roulette, a Ward with Coil's ability but up to five timelines and she has no control over what happens in those timelines, she just gets them all dumped onto her memory immediately without having to play through them).
If a Master gets you in any timeline, they get you in the main.
Well that's a major weakness if I ever saw one.
Needle
- Location
- Earth
Needle
Friday, 29th April – Brockton Bay, Docks – Winslow High SchoolKeiko and I walked through the streets towards Winslow. Traffic moved slowly and carefully today. The swirling fog ensured that. It wasn't so bad you couldn't see your own hand, but a few dozen meters weren't that much of a difference at the speed cars normally moved.
As soon as Winslow was in range of my power I knew things were wrong.
The school was oddly empty, even considering yesterday.
Except for a couple inspectors moving through what should be the school archives and one building inspector there was no one inside at all.
We met Charlotte at the entrance before the closed and barred door. With a chain since the lock inside the door was long broken.
She was studying a piece of paper haphazardly slapped onto the door with tape.
"School's closed until further notice," Charlotte sounded baffled, "we are supposed to come back Monday for more information."
"School's never closed," Keiko moved past her to read it herself, "School's actually closed. What the fuck happened? That didn't happen, not even when Mr. Torres car got trashed with a baseball bat."
"Wasn't it burned down?" Charlotte asked.
"That was his second car," I cleared up the confusion, "his first got worked over with a baseball bat, the second got set on fire."
"They might've gotten concerned about someone getting stabbed," Charlotte mentioned.
"A student actually getting stabbed didn't do that in the past," I scoffed, "they wouldn't close down for 'might'."
"Did a teacher get stabbed for once?" Keiko considered. That might actually do it. For all the slashed tires I couldn't recall a teacher getting stabbed.
"Let me check," I began rifling through the inspectors thoughts. "Huh. Blackwell tried to obstruct Mr. Smith's inspection. She's suspended without pay."
"Typical. Students get stabbed and it doesn't matter, but get in the way of bureaucracy and there's hell to pay. They actually found something?" Keiko groused.
"Money didn't get spent where it was supposed to be spent or missing or not booked correctly in the accounts. They aren't sure yet, the records aren't orderly enough for them to tell," I shrugged. Blackwell wasn't here for me to check what exactly she did, but I wouldn't put embezzlement past her.
"Huh. So what do we do now?" Keiko wanted to know.
"I haven't checked on your improvements in a while," I offered.
We looked at each other and in an unspoken agreement made our way towards the workshop.
Friday, 29th April – Brockton Bay, Docks - Workshop
The shipping container fell onto the ground of the factory with a tremendous clang.
"Whew! That's as much as I'll manage for now," Keiko wheezed through as the crackles of electricity subsided.
"Four tons for ten seconds," I noted down, "any lasting discomfort?" I checked her over carefully.
"I'm fine, stop being such a mother hen," she groused.
"Well, looks like you haven't managed to set your blood to boiling," I gave in, "I'll give you some more decent material on biology for your reading list anyway." We weren't Manton-limited. If we messed something up in our own body we might actually kill ourselves.
Charlotte was looking at the hand prints Keiko left in the container. "She should've sheared through the container, not manage to lift it."
"She actually extended her magnetic field through the container," I explained, "with practice she shouldn't leave any marks on the container at all."
"Huh, so she won't rip the axle out of a car like Alexandria," she stated. That video from her early days still ran around on the internet despite the PRT's attempt to downplay it.
"Now, how did your practice go?" I turned towards Charlotte.
She had an array of bags with different weights in front of her.
"I actually managed this one," she touched the thirty kilogram bag and shortly after I heard it clang on top of the container Keiko had dropped.
She sounded proud. As she should be, mere days ago she only managed ten.
"Is that much of an increase normal?" she sounded a little scared.
"No, it's because of the fight," I shook my head.
"Fighting increases our powers?" she frowned.
"Not quite. You proved to yourself that the world bends to your will in that fight," I explained.
Self confidence mattered to espers. Winning a fight was just one of many ways to gain some.
"That matters? It's not like it's something that can be measured. That exists. I thought only the equations do matter," she looked skeptical.
"Just because things don't actually exist doesn't mean they don't matter," I smiled, "you won't find any atom of love, yet mothers move mountains for their children. There is no speck of dirt that has a nation's name stamped on it, yet millions went to war over where exactly those pesky borders go. Things that don't actually exist matter both for good and ill."
"Huh. Haven't thought of things like that," she shrugged. "Anyway, there's something more I managed."
She skipped next to one of the bags. She held her hand close to it, mere centimeters away from it. She frowned in concentration. Once again the bag vanished and landed on the container.
"That's great," I laughed. Only a range of centimeters. It didn't sound like much. It didn't have any practical application with only this little of a range, but it was the shattering of a limit she previously had. Further progress would be.. not easy, but trivial.
"There is something we could try," I began thinking about Level Upper, "something that'd increase your power temporarily."
"Is it safe?" Charlotte was looking at my hand which was shaking a little.
With a slight assertion of will I ended the shaking.
"As long as we keep it to a laboratory setting and under an hour it's perfectly safe," I told her truthfully.
Never mind the potential AIM Burst creature that would appear if I lost control of the network, but with at most three members of the network that risk was practically non-existent.
It didn't take long for me to prepare the audio files. Mostly for Keiko in case the increase in her powers would finally tip her over the threshold where I could still affect her if I forced it.
"Now, both of you get two audio files. Only use your own, they were tuned specifically to each of you." Which ought to get rid of the coma-risk alongside with not using the calculation ability of the network for research. "One connects you to the network, the other disconnects you. I don't get those, because I'll be acting as the central node," I explained, "this will allow you to use mine and each other's calculating abilities to increase your power some. It'd work even better if we had adjacent powers, but we gotta work with what we got."
"And what does it allow for you?" Keiko asked.
"The same.. and also access to your powers. Though if I pull too much at them you won't be able to use them at the same time as I do. Which is why it's for use in a laboratory setting only." That and the small but existent risk of creating a kaiju.
I earned hesitant nods with that.
""Nozomi is the best choice for the central node,"" both blurted out.
"Okay?" I tilted my head at them, but they only looked at each other and neither was eager to tell me what that was about.
Charlotte managed the fifty kilogram bag with the increase from the network while being fifteen centimeters away from it.
"Nearly there, keep up the good work," I praised her.
Just a little more weight, a little more distance. And of course the time aspect. Which meant I had to go work at the grenades more.
So I went to do that while Charlotte and Keiko kept training their abilities.
I wished I could say I had gotten used to it, but the way household chemicals and appliances were combined to create the horrors Bakuda had made refused that. There always was a different kind of fuse, a different way the payload would ignite, a different way the grenades were trapped against defusing them.
It didn't make sense. It was too variable, even for grenades of the same kind.
This time I worked on the heat grenade. I identified a plasma emitter which produced the heat, but this wasn't what made this bomb truly dangerous. The emitter was arranged in a way that ensured the vast majority of the heat wouldn't leave a radius of a couple meters. Instead of radiating the heat away it concentrated it.
This was an anti-brute bomb. Few brutes could withstand heat that exceeded the corona of the sun, if only briefly.
Keiko couldn't as she was.
I put it aside and went to work on my Hookwolf countermeasure.
He always had metal in his body, even while he was not transformed into his namesake he had an layer of metal under his skin. That way he was always protected from bullets.
My plan turned that into a weakness.
The grenade I made with him in mind would create a brief, but powerful magnetic pulse. Powerful enough it'd align the metal Hookwolf's power uses alongside the magnetic charge of the pulse.
Which turned Hookwolf himself into a magnet.
Metal was everywhere. It won't take long after that for him to get stuck somewhere.
I pushed aside the idea about a discordant pulse. It'd charge different parts of his body differently, causing them to repulse each other and literally repulse himself. Fatally.
He wasn't worth it.
My thoughts turned back to Coil. I sighed.
"What's eating at you?" Keiko asked me in a pause of her skeet shooting. Charlotte was teleporting cans into the air and Keiko shot them with lightning.
"Coil. We ought to find him before he tries something again." If he hasn't already and has just undone the attempt because it didn't go how he liked it.
"I'd love to, but he's completely gone to ground," Keiko shrugged, "no gambling dens, no drug dealers, no goons collecting protection. Nothing."
"Um, he's a mastermind type, right?" Charlotte looked from Keiko to me. I nodded and gestured to her to go on. "Catspaws, moles, spies, neither of those are easy to get into place. Or remove."
I hid my face in my hands. "And I knew the PRT leaks like a bucket without a bottom," I groaned.
At least I had something to look into now.
Friday, 29th April – Brockton Bay, Downtown
The PRT Headquarters had a logo with a shield and the letters PRT on the front above the glass windows. Which were bulletproof.
We weren't directly in front of it, but a couple streets past it bickering over ice cream.
Pistachio was the best no matter what anyone else said.
Despite the PRT's best attempts to not look that way, it was obvious that they were busy. You'd only need to check their tour schedule to know for sure. Every second tour was canceled.
Their cells were filled just short of bursting and the Nazis had all demanded a lawyer. It hadn't kept Director Piggot from unmasking all of them.
PRT officers were racking up overwork hours like there was no tomorrow to make the guard schedules work.
Armsmaster had filed a helmet module design that he says ought to protect him from my power. He really should've better things to do.
There were too many cameras in the building for me to get away with a deep dive into anyone's memories. I could still check on what they were thinking on their own without having anyone's eyes flicker to stars.
It just meant I had to have some patience.
The independents were quiet. There weren't any recent sightings of Circus, Uber or Leet.
Huh, the Merchants were pushing at the empire now that they were without capes. Neither Hookwolf nor Purity had shown themselves despite that.
Unsurprising in Purity's case. She was in no state to. But I hadn't thought Hookwolf capable of patience.
As was the ABB, which the PRT thought happened on Lung's command. They didn't understand the ABB if they thought that they needed to be commanded to expand. The gangs making up the ABB did that on their own whenever they could.
Lung didn't care as long as he got his cut.
Despite both of the gangs pushing against the crumbling Empire goons Director Piggot was pushing analysis resources towards finding Coil. And mostly the wet tinker she thought had made the chimera. Right, we haven't told them about the Travelers.
I wished I could say it took me a while to find a spy. It would be a lie.
One of the janitors was reporting to the Merchants of all gangs. He didn't have access to anything, but that didn't matter if he got told to scrub the prisoner transports the day before one was needed.
At least the Empire was still without one.
There were plenty more. Not all knew who they were reporting to, even. Some were willing to tell whoever paid, reporting both to Lung and elsewhere. Others got blackmailed.
There was a single spy that knew he was reporting to Coil. As far as he knew Coil didn't know he knew, but he got told to run interference with intelligence analysis on Coil's gang one time too often.
Coil himself was looking for all information he could get on me, Keiko or Charlotte. But also when the Empire's prisoner transport would be happening.
I didn't feel like arresting them once again.
It was a good thing that spy was paranoid. While he had buried reports into the bureaucracy as told, he had remembered why he did so and kept the information as insurance if Coil ever thought of getting rid of him.
We had to wait until he clocked out in the evening to get at the information, but as soon as he was outside the PRT HQ there was no camera that stopped me from rifling through his memories.
How the fuck had Coil managed to hide an entire Endbringer shelter?
Last edited:
Tangle 6.5 said:
Wouldn't all the troopers in uniform be pretty easy to deep dive, especially any that are just standing guard? Or did armsmaster manage to get face recordings implemented in all the helmets at such short notice?
- Location
- Earth
While the troopers do wear those helmets, especially where they can be seen by the public the analysts don't.
And troopers get the mushroom treatment:
Kept in the dark and fed bullshit.
So those didn't know anything useful.
So next up is an assault on Coil's base, but Coil is almost certainly prepared for this: he's been using Dinah defensively.
Echidna is likely uncontrollable, as she's been diverging from human baseline into something like a case 53. But her mutations are focused on the bottom half of her body, so maybe not. Additionally, her power while great in the abstract, is a piss poor matchup vs Mental Out: she just controls the clones, unless she starts cloning people immune to MO's power, which she doesn't really have access to.
Either way, decent chance of ambush/attack on the way to his base. However, with Charlotte (who really needs to pick a name) able and likely prepared to disrupt Trickster, Coil doesn't really have a good method to deal with Mental Out, maybe Ballistic tossing large objects from far away? ... Ah.
Coil might 1/2 abandon the base: leave some of the troops, maybe the travelers, but pull himself and Dinah out to a prepared fall back, then rig the base to explode remotely. It'd be costly for him, but short of Echidna rampage, I don't really see any other good options for him, and if he asks the right questions to Dinah he'd know it.
Like, overall, I just want to say that I wake up every Sunday looking forward to this so much. It's really great.
Echidna is likely uncontrollable, as she's been diverging from human baseline into something like a case 53. But her mutations are focused on the bottom half of her body, so maybe not. Additionally, her power while great in the abstract, is a piss poor matchup vs Mental Out: she just controls the clones, unless she starts cloning people immune to MO's power, which she doesn't really have access to.
Either way, decent chance of ambush/attack on the way to his base. However, with Charlotte (who really needs to pick a name) able and likely prepared to disrupt Trickster, Coil doesn't really have a good method to deal with Mental Out, maybe Ballistic tossing large objects from far away? ... Ah.
Coil might 1/2 abandon the base: leave some of the troops, maybe the travelers, but pull himself and Dinah out to a prepared fall back, then rig the base to explode remotely. It'd be costly for him, but short of Echidna rampage, I don't really see any other good options for him, and if he asks the right questions to Dinah he'd know it.
Like, overall, I just want to say that I wake up every Sunday looking forward to this so much. It's really great.
FailLord
2050 lb bombs?
- Location
- Orange Star
So that's how we get the sisters /s
- Location
- Earth
And he has known that since Monday, then gotten it reinforced on Wednesday.
I have left some hints what he was up to, but as Nozomi missed them you might as well
(It's always hard for me to gauge if I made things too subtle, or if making them obvious enough would make Nozomi too stupid for missing them.)
Anyway. I am enjoying the speculation.
Echidna: barfs out a new clone
Mental Out: Thanks for my new minion
Unless Echidna were to clone C53s
So, yeah. Her brute-body is more useful than her cloning ability in that match-up. Not that anyone will want to let Echidna out as a first resort.
Always good to read someone's enjoying it
That's the horrified screaming emoji, not the laughing one. Just so you know
Coil has numerous potential Mental Out counters.
None of them work in a Base Defense Scenario, since if she's in his base, his entire base IS in her range. And he probably wouldn't even know it, unless she's dumb enough to just kick in the door rather than subverting the defenses and then settling in place for him to show up.
With his timeline splits, as soon as one timeline moves into range of her, she'd just make him drop the other one.