A Flung Light (Worm/minor toaru cross)
Minor sensory manipulation. She made him think that he was being attacked in the other timeline. So he closed it.
The MC has gained an understanding of Powers which is neat.
Kidnapping kids isn't cool.
Welp looks like Mental Out does work with the whole timeline thing. Also she got him.
Yeah that's a weird thing to hear from a kid you rescue.
- Location
- England
That sounds cool, no pun intended, but it wouldn't actually work without some extra steps. Assuming a classic pin-tumbler system, each pin needs to be pushed up a variable amount. (Apologies to anyone using dark theme but it's too early in the morning to fix the background)
Making a key to fit the empty space inside the lock plug won't do anything on its own.
Lock picking relies on there being a little free play in the manufacture so you turn the plug a bit, keeping the tension on, then work on the pins one at a time pushing them up till they catch on the way down. In theory, once you have all pins set you can open the lock.
This entire course of events is going to be super embarrassing for the local PRT. What with everything Coil managed to do via basically save scumming and an adviser position.
Interestingly though, I think that Armsmaster is actually going to be kinda happy. The Protectorate actually wasn't infiltrated, the only influence was via the PRT. He was also thinking about how his fuck ups would look much better if Piggot had a fuck up of her own. So he might actually be just plain happy, independent heroes revealed and fixed a major problem for the local PRT.
So he has less personal problems while his boss doesn't look so good anymore. Piggot is going to be furious though, especially because Nozomi and Co were successful and, God forbid, right for not getting the PRT involved.
Interestingly though, I think that Armsmaster is actually going to be kinda happy. The Protectorate actually wasn't infiltrated, the only influence was via the PRT. He was also thinking about how his fuck ups would look much better if Piggot had a fuck up of her own. So he might actually be just plain happy, independent heroes revealed and fixed a major problem for the local PRT.
So he has less personal problems while his boss doesn't look so good anymore. Piggot is going to be furious though, especially because Nozomi and Co were successful and, God forbid, right for not getting the PRT involved.
Shards still can emulate macro scale trends even if they can't emulate the particulars. And Dinah's shard is very good at it.
Powerful electromagnetic fields make it hard for her to affect people. It's not that she can't completely, unless the field is specifically tuned to counter her, it's that she most likely will just kill everyone who she tried to control.
- Pronouns
- Zug
Me when I've got a precog Shard that works on probability but I'm a preteen who's bad at math so I take anything over 50% as an absolute certainty and ignore the inherent unreliability of probability based precog that's shackled and prevented from showing the full sample of possibilities.
I'm not a Dinah fan if you couldn't tell.
It's true though. That's basically her entire character. I don't dislike her but I do dislike how people treat her and her power. Granted even Wildbow didn't treat her power correctly, I think he just didn't quite grasp what he actually gave her. Her percentages should really be wildly swinging around moment to moment for anything that isn't the immediate future. Especially with triggers and the butterfly effect. Her power would be useful as some additional data points for long range planning but should also be taken with a grain of salt. Her power would be actually be most useful for short term plans just like Coil's, people don't seem to realize that though.
They do in canon tho Dinah barely appears in canon but her first appearance has Coil throw a tantrum because his long term odds of success have dropped from before the gallery atk and the same happened again in Sundancer's pov I think it was which if I were to guess were in both cases because of people seeing her for the first time and being put off by Coil's treatment of her.
We also know that in canon she did a bunch of stuff to try to change the odds of surviving gm which is why she helped set up Taylor's outing at Arcadia because Taylor joining the prt raising their odds by 2 % from 31 to 33 % iirc but hadn't yet joined them despite the notes Dinah had slipped her and nothing else she'd investigated had had anywhere near as large a boost so she forced the issue. She explains to the prt the wording was about the odds of Taylor ending up in custody which as she surrendered counted so it wasn't her fault they took that as odds they capture Taylor at Arcadia.
Those are the only canon times numbers for the same thing are given other than Theo's using it to plan stuff out like odds he encounters the nine if he goes right vs left and so on.
There problem here is that Dinah has long term plans in canon. With how much the numbers should be changing, especially when Dinah asks a question, Dinah the preteen should not have the skills nor the resources to make long term plans with her power. She does though, somehow.
Also with the amount of time Coil had Dinah he should have been used to the numbers being wildly inconsistent. Literally every time he asked a question it should have had noticeable effect on the rest of the numbers. This means that by the time he gets to the end of the questions his first should be rendered basically useless. He wasn't used to this though. The numbers seem to change over the course of weeks or sometimes hours, while what should br happening is if you are using the power they should be changing question to question. Especially when you consider that Dinah isn't the only precog and how I doubt she is able to predict other precogs.
Anything a week out should be very suspect unless it's a very contained event, and anything a month out is probably going to have no relevance. Unless some event is basically certain such as Golden Morning her precog should just not be useful for planning around it.
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Most of her planning in worm is within a fairly tight timeframe with the exception of gm which is more doing anything she can to raise the numbers mainly through asking a lot of what if questions such as if Taylor joined the wards. Ward has her do long term plans with the notes that she's far older then and the post gm world makes things a lot simpler for her in general especially with Scion dead, the endbringers inactive and Contessa in a self inflicted coma to stop Teacher mastering her.
With Coil the thing to note is his tantrum was only the first time and over them going down that was right after the gallery atk so he wouldn't have had Dinah for long basically just the ABB atks during which he would be needing to put effort in to hook her on drugs to get her to answer and probably using her at that point highly limited questions on them. That second time with Sundancer I mentioned he is used to it then his reaction then is more huh the numbers dropped I wonder what caused that.
That's part of Thinkers being the "god stat" in Wildbow writing. Not only do their powers work way better than they should, Thinkers also a lot of the time get secondary powers that allow them to do absolute bullshit, sometimes outright breaking laws of physics. Not circumventing them but outright breaking - see Numberman fight vs Taylor as one of the worst examples.
In Dinah's case it is kinda explained as her power being the Navigator or something so it uses her subconscious biases to shape the predictions in the direction that gets closer to the result she wants.
Interesting chapter
I can see the next chapter going in one of two ways: "why the fuck do I make everyone die" and "can it wait until we finish taking down this base?"
On an emotional level Nozomi & Co. Please have them give themselves a name, if only to simplify our comments; or just have them be given a name by the papers or the PRT and have to deal with it. Like, seriously, Charlotte, unless things go sideways today, you'll have participated in capturing a 2 digit number of villains.
Get a name. Get a costume that's more than a darkened bike helmet and some clothes. Get a team name as well.
Between this and the previous takedown of most of the E88, you're almost certainly hitting the New York Times, if possibly not the front page. (Maybe, PRT consultant secretly a villain, kidnapped mayor's child, is the type of scandal that can, depending on how it's framed, can easily hit the front page)
Anyways. On an emotional level Teamname© probably wants to deal with how and why Mental Out "makes everyone die", but we have 5, maybe 6 uncontrolled hostile capes in the area, 1 of which they know for sure is immune to Mental Out, 1 of which might be (Noelle), and 1 of which can make projections that MO can't controll.
While they made a bunch of the mooks unable to acknowledge Teamname©'s presence, that doesn't include Dinah, who appears to have let herself out, meaning standing around and talking is now a relatively risky action, especially with the drastically reduced "I win" radius of Mental Out.
On a separate note, I especially liked how Nozomi summoned a snowball to act as a makeshift gag: it showed that the electrical generator isn't just "cutting her range" it's degrading accuracy and similar things, meaning she still has options other than mind control avaliable to her.
I can see the next chapter going in one of two ways: "why the fuck do I make everyone die" and "can it wait until we finish taking down this base?"
Get a name. Get a costume that's more than a darkened bike helmet and some clothes. Get a team name as well.
Between this and the previous takedown of most of the E88, you're almost certainly hitting the New York Times, if possibly not the front page. (Maybe, PRT consultant secretly a villain, kidnapped mayor's child, is the type of scandal that can, depending on how it's framed, can easily hit the front page)
Anyways. On an emotional level Teamname© probably wants to deal with how and why Mental Out "makes everyone die", but we have 5, maybe 6 uncontrolled hostile capes in the area, 1 of which they know for sure is immune to Mental Out, 1 of which might be (Noelle), and 1 of which can make projections that MO can't controll.
While they made a bunch of the mooks unable to acknowledge Teamname©'s presence, that doesn't include Dinah, who appears to have let herself out, meaning standing around and talking is now a relatively risky action, especially with the drastically reduced "I win" radius of Mental Out.
On a separate note, I especially liked how Nozomi summoned a snowball to act as a makeshift gag: it showed that the electrical generator isn't just "cutting her range" it's degrading accuracy and similar things, meaning she still has options other than mind control avaliable to her.
We sort of see this. Her power grants her fragmentary images of the future, which she matches to a question/idea she has, and then returns the current probability of it. Actually crawling the images rather than focusing on an objective rapidly wipes her out.
The shard is doing all the managing of peripheral probabilities here, the gap is Dinah communicating with the shard, which is as well established, think more like one of those image generator AIs than a human. It takes a composite image, with ideas and definitions and then matches that to the future.
Depends on how they handle it since it would only make the national headlines like that if they revealed it at all including Coil's id and that they were the ones to do so though it will make things interesting going forward since we know the prt was already going to try and strongarm them into joining and now Coil's id is yet another large pr bomb they can sit on but at the same time the prt is going to hate that they have something like that and may go harder to collar them before they can release it. They most definitely are going to be keeping quiet about at least some of the details tho because digging around in Coil's head is probably going to reveal Cauldron and how they'd become an issue if they tried to go public.
Cape numbers would be Hookwolf, Genesis, Sundancer, Trickster, Oliver, Ballistic and Noelle assuming none of the others Coil has ties to are around since he does have ties to most of the independents like Circus and a few others like those 2 cape henchmen he gets Rachael in canon. I would note tho Genesis's projections can't be controlled from them but if her actual body which is on base gets in range she should be controllable and now they have control of Coil there is the possibility of shutting down the stuff causing the mental out interference which only leaves Hookwolf who they have prepared counters for. Even without it though Charlotte worked out how to shut down Trickster, Oliver's power is pretty much useless, mental out probably works on Noelle's clones if that somehow happens and some of the other members like Sundancer aren't issues because she isn't violent and isn't going to use her power in an underground base.
If the Mental Out blockers are turned off they probably win instantly. Hookwolf does not win against the entirety of the Travelers plus the Teamᵀᴹ. Honestly even if the blockers aren't turned off he probably loses. There has to be a way to put the base into lockdown. Hookwolf could break through the walls with some time but it would take a while. In the meantime collect the capes.
If they can do it quietly, yeah. But the blockers are a tinkertech power generator, not a dedicated subsystem that can be turned off separately and/or remotely. Mental Out's effective range almost certainly starts dropping the closer they get to the generator, so it's almost certainly the hardest place to reach quietly. Then they turn it off, ideally without losing the lights or cameras. If they lose the lights, Hookwolf (and possibly Noelle) gets alarmed. If they lose the camera's they lose track of anyone not controlled/seen by someone controlled. And they probably announce to the PRT and whatnot both how to restrict Mental Out's range, as well as what the uncontrolled range is.
Smell
- Location
- Earth
Smell
Friday, 29th April – Brockton Bay, Downtown – a high rise in construction"She isn't killing anyone," Keiko stepped in front of me, affronted.
"Hey, she's a child," Charlotte moved between them.
As if we weren't.
Dinah's gaze did not move away from me the slightest.
Precog, I reminded myself.
All espers had a little bit of it, but generally pure precognitive espers were inefficient. Calculating the future was not trivial, low probability events had to be discarded to get anything more than a couple minutes. If any of them then still happened the prediction would go completely awry.
Tree Diagram – a super computer inside a satellite – managed a month of weather prediction. Not forecasting. Prediction. Not that it mattered, there was no way for me to get a satellite into orbit with the winged bitch around.
"That is not what she said, she said ′make everyone die′", I repeated her exact words. She hadn't chosen the word kill. That must've been deliberate.
Though I had no intention of making everyone die. A few people at most if the PRT continues to fail to keep them.
"Everyone here?" Keiko asked.
The frail girl shook her head. "Everyone. I don't understand. Can't explain."
"Shh. It's alright, you do not have to," I soothed her.
I couldn't help myself, I dove into her thoughts.
She saw the world in a mosaic. Always changing, shuffling, rearranging and altering itself. Each pixel in the mosaic was an entire world, extending backwards and forwards from the point of focus, only constrained by their terminus points. Neither was hard to understand. The first was the present, always moving forwards, shredding worlds as future became present. The second was Dinah's death.
She could not see worlds she did not survive in.
I saw what she meant. Everyone dying. Six months from now at the earliest. Two years at the latest. She could not see it. Something happened and all of humanity started dying. She could not see who killed them, she could not even see how I set this off. She still knew I did, was certain of it though she could not explain it.
Her power must be sabotaged. It made no sense she could see the aftermath, but not what caused it.
I focused on the aftermath. I saw a city with buildings cut in halves. Though they were not cuts. They were caused by disintegration of the molecular bonds. I had seen this before once in a memory not my own. In the ruins of a city that could not be found on Earth Bet.
Scion. Somehow I set off Scion.
Heartening, in a grim way. It meant he saw me as a threat. It meant I had a chance at all.
Billions dead. Fuck.
"You are just letting it go?" Keiko shot me a look.
I had to lean into my power to not let on what I just saw. Conscious body control for the win!
"We still have a base to secure. Now isn't the time," I shrugged. Especially not with Dinah present.
As if the universe agreed with me Coil's phone blinked, signaling an incoming call.
"Later then," Keiko refused to let it go forever.
"Trickster. What is so important you'd call me on this line?" I had Coil answer the phone as he usually did by pointing my remote at him. It was important to keep up the ruse now that Dinah was watching.
"Noelle smells an unknown cape in the base," Trickster mentioned.
Fuck.
"They are a new hire," I had Coil lie smoothly. He was good at that. "It is nothing to be concerned about."
"If you are sure about that.." Trickster did not sound assured.
"I am," I had Coil inject every bit of confidence I could into that brief statement.
"I see." He hung up.
"Did they buy it?" I turned towards BiriBiri.
"Trickster's ported to Genesis. She's called him paranoid," she grimaced, "she's still sending her projection up to check."
Fuck.
"She isn't a changer?" Charlotte looked surprised.
"Nope. She's still down there. Looks asleep while some dog-like is moving towards us," Keiko reported.
"Alright, we're moving. Time to take that generator out. We do that, the base is ours." I decided.
"The gym is on the way there," BiriBiri warned us. I tapped my grenade to show I got what she meant.
Dinah went to me and took my hand.
"Everyone asks me questions. Everyone wants to keep me. Coil. Accord. Ms. Piggot. Hat Lady, sometimes. But not you. Why not you?" she looked at me in confusion.
"Because precognition is overrated," I lied. Because I can't trust a sabotaged tool.
"The PRT would keep you against your will?" Charlotte looked angry.
"I am sure they'll frame it as for her own protection, never mind all the work they'll have her do for them," BiriBiri scoffed.
I rifled through Coil's mind for information about the Travelers. "Tell us about the Travelers. Powers, important information," I pointed my remote at him for show while we moved towards the generator.
"Ballistic can't control the speed he shoots objects with. Sundancer is reluctant to hurt people. Trickster is not. Oliver does not have powers. Perdition got left behind in Boston." Disappointing. I had hoped to get a scan of his time-manipulation. "Noelle is not trusted to control herself. Any person touching her gets cloned. Parahuman clones have a variation of their power and hate the original."
We walked past mercenaries who could not react to us anymore.
"Let's not let Noelle out of that Vault," BiriBiri offered.
"Doesn't sound like they'll be eager to let her out," Charlotte hoped.
"They might, if they feel too pressured," I cautioned.
"I bought their loyalty with assurances I'd find a solution for Noelle's problem, the eventual arrangement of their return to Earth Aleph and the hope that my pet's precognition interferes with the Simurgh's," I had Coil go on. Because fuck. Fuck.
"They are ziz-bombs?" "They are dimensional travelers?"
Horror. The only correct reaction towards anything involving the Simurgh.
"Her last attack was just in February," Charlotte shuddered.
Entire cities get quarantined if her attacks do not get repelled in time. Because she programs people to cause damage in the worst way possible with her precognition and master-powers. She sets people up to commit suicide, and they do it via jumping from a roof and hit a promising scientist who was just driving by. She programmed a superhero to assassinate a Prime Minister. His successor starts a war.
"When did they encounter the Endbringer?" I told Coil to answer.
"2009, in Madison, Wisconsin," he answered promptly.
"Whatever she set up did not account for us," I told them. I believed it too, despite them looking at me in disbelief. "There is no such thing as seeing the future. At best powers can see a future. But the slightest thing can vastly change it. Complexity is any precognitive's bane. There have been four very complex events affecting us recently even if we'd be talking about her February attack, one of them the little experiment we did just this morning." My power, me granting Keiko her power, me granting Charlotte her power. The Level Upper. Though the last was lesser than the other three.
"Oh great. So we don't have bombs set to go off in the worst way," BiriBiri sarcastically pretended to wipe sweat from her armored forehead, "we just got bombs that might go off at any time."
"Pretty much. Noelle is a couple bad clones short of being an S-class threat." Not that I had any leg to stand on about that. I turned towards Charlotte, "Genesis projection past that corner." One of the mercenaries just ahead of us saw her dog-form coming.
I thought about how I played along with Bakuda. It had only made things worse. Sometimes the best way out was through. Accept the losses and break things. Because it always could get worse.
Got to move fast now. "Up you go." I gave Dinah piggyback ride. She was way too light.
"That's some mangy-" Half a dozen darts skewered the dog-projection. "Uh. That was some mangy dog," BiriBiri corrected herself.
"Blink and you'll miss it," I joked as I jogged past the dissolving projection.
Everyone ought to be happy Charlotte wanted people alive, even terrible ones.
"Blink," Charlotte considered, "eh, I'll take it."
"They're moving in earnest now," BiriBiri warned us.
We needed to slow them down. I gave Coil another order.
"The Travelers have been subverted by a Master. Apprehend them, non-lethal only," Coil ordered the next mercenaries he saw, "Ensure Noelle does not notice."
"Now that's just mean," the newly named Blink muttered.
We continued our dash towards the generator ignoring the shouts and demands to stand down behind us. That wouldn't hold down the Travelers forever, but it wouldn't need to.
I rifled through Coil's mind for more surprises. He had bought his powers. Huh. Cauldron. I had a name for them now. Fancy cooking pot. The same group Faultline was hunting after, considering the symbol. He feared them. They had access to a dimensional teleporter, training and testing facilities and alluded to the many ways they had to ensure his debt would be paid.
We skidded past another corner into the final corridor. The generator room was right at its end. The proximity further reduced my accuracy and range for my power.
Two mercenaries stood guard. Two mercenaries I had no chance to affect.
They reacted professionally.
They shot their laser rifles at us. BiriBiri blitzed in front of us, took one of the shots on her body and redirected the other into the wall with a slap.
While for me the generator was a complication, she was empowered by it.
A side-door opened. The gym's.
"What's that racket abou-" Hookwolf aborted whatever he was about to say. "You!" He growled.
"No, you don't," I heard Blink say behind me as space distorted. Trickster. He must've gone ahead of the others.
She kept behind me to deal with him.
"I got the mutt, trash the generator," I ordered BiriBiri and put Dinah back on her feet.
She sped past him towards the mercenaries instantly.
Let it not be said that Hookwolf was stupid. He was suspicious right away.
Time to give him a wrong answer. I formed ice on the ground, it began creeping up his body.
I saw it in his stance, his confidence restored now that he knew what I had prepared. He turned into a wolf again, ice breaking away from his cycling metal. Metal hooked into the ground to keep him from slipping as he quickly ate the distance between us.
I underhand lobbed the grenade at him.
Rejoice, Hookwolf. You made a Tinker build something just for you.
The grenade exploded in a slight puff, doing seemingly nothing at all, if it wasn't for the lights flickering.
The next moment his legs gave out from under him. He skidded to a halt on the ground.
Concrete was generally reinforced by either steel bars or welded steel mesh fabric inside and he was stuck to it now.
He strained against it, drawing the metal back into him and reforming it. I could out-walk the speed he managed that way.
I turned to check how Blink did.
I saw Trickster cussing at a couple mercenaries who couldn't acknowledge Blink was there. His shoe was nailed to the ground with a dart, avoiding his foot entirely. Nice precision.
The sound of crumpling metal would've alerted me, if the absence of interference wasn't more noticeable.
BiriBiri had come through for me.
Finally I stretched my range over the entire base.
Taking control of everyone, including Noelle.
Something inside her body noticed. Fuck. There was a second control node inside the body, mutated like the C53s. It'd take me time to adjust for it.
Her body rammed into the vault door outside my control. It was not Noelle in control either. It was her power.
The door held.
Dust spilled out where the door was set into the walls.
The walls wouldn't.
Fuck.
A/N.:
Nozomi's take on precognition is very informed by toaru-standards and very not informed by worm-standards.
As for the Hookwolf curb-stomp. That's what happens when you annoy a Tinker enough to build countermeasures just for you.
Nozomi's habit to freeze/take control of everyone finally bit her in the ass. Leaving Noelle in the dark would've had high odds of success.
At least she has an entire base of capes and mercenaries to deal with her.
Also if anyone has suggestions for a team name, I'll hear them. I am blanking on it.
- Pronouns
- He
SCHOOL, or something like that, like Item, etc; a reference to toaru's weird team names.
- Location
- England
Special Cape Hero Operatives Outperform Law-enforcement.
- Location
- Earth
Nope. Zion remembers what happened in the last cycle if he runs across Nozomi.
This. This one wasn't specifically tuned to her. It was a first attempt and tried to compensate through power what it couldn't achieve through finesse.
It was created by the generator briefly mentioned the chapter before last and destroyed in this most recent chapter.
Huh. Something to remember for the future. Also I watched a nice video where someone opens a lock by hitting it with a hammer on the side since I wrote that chapter.That sounds cool, no pun intended, but it wouldn't actually work without some extra steps. Assuming a classic pin-tumbler system, each pin needs to be pushed up a variable amount. (Apologies to anyone using dark theme but it's too early in the morning to fix the background)
Making a key to fit the empty space inside the lock plug won't do anything on its own.
Lock picking relies on there being a little free play in the manufacture so you turn the plug a bit, keeping the tension on, then work on the pins one at a time pushing them up till they catch on the way down. In theory, once you have all pins set you can open the lock.
There will be a lot of people who'll want different parts of this kept very quiet.
PRT getting infiltrated to the extent they have been is not a good look for them.
Cauldron prefers to stay out of the public.
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- Location
- Ohio, United States
A very Kids Next Door naming scheme, definitely fits with "local kids distrust authorities"
- Location
- Internet, The
Cheap locks and Masterlock locks and some others are known to be opened that way. There are compilations of people opening them in various silly ways.
For actual quality locks, even the "push pin up until you can turn" method does not necessarily work, or not easily. Turns out (some) manufacturers have continued innovating beyond 100+ year old designs.