fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
I think chemistry might be one of those 2 broad skills. Like we don't get a skill for school work.
A Game of Supers (The Gamer/Original Superhero Setting)
- Thread starter Kinni
- Start date
- Superhero
I think the main reason we don't get skills for school work is not because the skills in question are too broad, but because they are too theoretical. Chemistry is one of the less theory-focused classes, you can actually use the stuff you learned in chemistry class to go and make chemicals (basic chemicals, but still).
Edit: One of hte ways I look at is, is if you have the ability to "Do" it. You can Do Martial Arts, you can't Do English. English is not a Skill. Writing is, and we might be able to get a skill in that if we tried to get one, but not generic English.
Chemistry is a skill you can do, so I'd think it'd a skill we can get.
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- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
Languages is a skill.
Perhaps, but then it falls into a second possibility (besides the fact that we might not be taking a Spanish class or anything in 8/9th grade). To get a Skill, we have to try to get a skill. Put more effort into it than we are putting into school.
Post 13
A.N: And I'm finally back. After an awful bout of depression that totally screwed up my projects, I'm ready to come back to this. I hope you guys are still excited for the quest.
A.N.2: I'll try to keep a rate of at least one post every week.
A.N.3: The best part about a team is that you don't have to solve everything yourself. Also, Glass Mask is my favorite shoujo manga, if it wasn't obvious from the post.
[X] Plan Piece of Cake
The four days before your operation were very busy. You first created a chat room to be able to communicate with your three partners easily.
You asked Susan if it would be possible to get the blueprints of the house, and she answered positively. That was the easy part.
You also inquired about the possibility of a cellphone jammer, but Susan's response made it clear that their resources were not nearly enough for something like that. Too bad, it would have been useful. Still, it wasn't likely that the Red Claws could send reinforcements to that place all that fast, specially if you attacked during the time period suggested by the information. So, while it would be best to finish things fast, you wouldn't really be that hurried either.
Of course, you also took a look at the house on your own time, trying to find any security blindspots or useful information. And you quickly found out some useful things: First, while the padlocks on the gate were heavy duty, the chains weren't of the same quality, so they could be easily broken through with a bolt cutter or similar instrument. Second, Clara had mentioned being able to get a portable ladder that was tall enough to climb over the walls, and you saw that it could definitely work if you also brought some sort of cover to allow you to climb over the barbed wire.
However, not everything was good news. It was sad, but she had to admit that the location of the drug lab was pretty secure. The distance between the walls and the surrounding buildings, as well as between the walls and the lab building itself was pretty long. The yard was also open in all directions, except for a doghouse next to the north wall (opposite of the gate) which was also pretty distant from the building. Sneaking through was going to be difficult.
While you were looking, you installed a few cameras to watch the house and tried to make friends with the dogs... But that was also a no go. They wouldn't be friendly no matter what you did, and they didn't even look at the food you tried to give them. You vaguely remembered something about dogs trained to avoid eating poisoned food, and you made the connection, deciding that those dogs should have been professionally trained..
But it wasn't all bad news regarding the dogs. You unexpectedly gained a skill from your efforts, even if they had been unsuccessful:
Animal Taming Level 1
- The skill to teach animals skills and behaviors that they are smart enough to learn. At this level, you understand a bit about taming, but even the simplest tricks are beyond your teaching capacity.
But most importantly, once you mentioned the issues about the dogs, Roberta managed to come up with a solution. She would bring along nets (like those used for fishing) with weights attached to them, so they would be capable of restraining the dogs relatively easily.
Susan came through with the blueprints of the target house. They were as follows:
The ground floor was split into three sections, a west wing, an east wing and a central part (again, that is considering the front gate as being on the "south"). The west wing had a kitchen and attached dining room, along with a side door. The central section had two bedrooms, a living room, an anteroom (connected to the front door) and stairs to the second floor. While the east wing had a bathroom, a laundry room and another side door.
The basement was only a single room, intended for storage, while the second floor had three rooms and a bathroom. Susan said that the drug lab itself was probably on the basement. So that was the situation. More than what you had before, enough to think about.
And of course, you didn't slack off on your skill training. You decided to work on your acting abilities, since the skill was already only one level away from mastery, and while you didn't know which mastery you would gain from it, having an additional mastery, specially for a skill with such a broad range of use, would definitely be useful.
Normal training would probably not help much at that point, so you took to the streets, and without using any disguise, you did your best to act as all sorts of things to fool the nearby people.
You were pretty sure that you left a lot of people feeling confused. You first pretended to be a ghost, manipulating your expression and movements to give off an impression of otherwordliness, and walking on the edges of streets. Later, you shifted to walking in the middle of the crowd, trying to pass the impression of cold to as many people as possible.
You did all sorts of things like that, but you soon realized that the experience gains were slow, and petering out too quickly to be effective. Frustrated, you decided to do something even more extreme, and went to the park and started pretending to be a tree.
Luckily, that allowed you to stumble across the answer.
Trying to act like a tree meant that you needed to completely suppress your human reactions, and while you were focusing on that, your experience gains increased considerably. So you thought about it and arrived at a few conclusions:
You realized that, at the deepest level, acting wasn't about changing into something else. Instead, it was about controlling yourself to such a level that you can completely separate your inner thoughts from your outer actions. You could be completely aware that you were playing a part at the same time as you were enveloped in the character you were playing, without one being able to affect the other, like you had two minds.
And with that understanding, you finally leveled up.
Acting Level 20
- The skill to act out a role, in a way that can fool viewers. At this level, your acting prowess can be called perfect, with only supernatural means being able to detect your true self.
You have obtained: The Glass Mask.
- The essence of Acting is assuming a role without losing oneself. Upon reaching that essence, it is like you have an invisible mask that can hide your true self. It is now like you have two different minds, one on the surface and one deeper down, and that second one is harder to reach from the outside, making it an amazing mental defense, among other qualities.
That was a strange mastery, way different from what you had expected, but you could tell that it would be something extremely useful for the future, just from the words "mental defense".
Besides that, you had ideas of possibly attacking at a different time than what was suggested in the information, but your hidden cameras watching the place showed that such a plan would be difficult to realize.
There was a reason why that particular time had been pinpointed in the documents, and it was because it was the time where the place was most vulnerable. You saw that other times included frequent movements, with supplies being brought in and "merchandise" being taken out. And there were always guards watching over that stuff, and they also frequently stayed within the house for long periods of time.
The short period of recording didn't allow you to pinpoint any specific patterns, but you could tell that trying to attack at different times would lead to being faced with higher resistance. You weren't that afraid of the concept, but it would be difficult to convince your partners to face such a thing if you didn't have a very good plan.
And one last thing to consider was that Clara came through with what she said she would do, and managed to get the number of the cellphone of one of the gang members that would be inside the house during the attack. She was planning on calling during the operation to attempt to drive them into confusion, but she was open to suggestions about other things to do with that call.
Finally, there was one last thing to think about: You had been having thoughts about getting to know your team members in real life, outside of their roles as anonymous masked members of the Inscrutables gang. Doing so just after you had met them would be impossible, since you would need a certain amount of trust to get them to reveal their true faces.
However, you were already thinking of the future. If you finished that first mission successfully, you would probably have gained enough trust to get them to take off their masks... As long as you also did the same, as a show of trust.
That was something you had to decide. It was possible to get closer to your teammates, which would definitely help with whatever you wanted to do later, but the price of that was the loss of your anonymity. Considering that, your decision would be:
[] Yes, you would reveal your face.
[] No, you wouldn't reveal your face.
And... That was all you had. It was finally time to try and come up with a final plan of action for your operation. Considering all your resources and information, your plan would be:
[] Write-in.
A.N: The school stuff will be depicted in a separate post, an interlude that I will try to finish soon.
A.N.2: I'll try to keep a rate of at least one post every week.
A.N.3: The best part about a team is that you don't have to solve everything yourself. Also, Glass Mask is my favorite shoujo manga, if it wasn't obvious from the post.
[X] Plan Piece of Cake
The four days before your operation were very busy. You first created a chat room to be able to communicate with your three partners easily.
You asked Susan if it would be possible to get the blueprints of the house, and she answered positively. That was the easy part.
You also inquired about the possibility of a cellphone jammer, but Susan's response made it clear that their resources were not nearly enough for something like that. Too bad, it would have been useful. Still, it wasn't likely that the Red Claws could send reinforcements to that place all that fast, specially if you attacked during the time period suggested by the information. So, while it would be best to finish things fast, you wouldn't really be that hurried either.
Of course, you also took a look at the house on your own time, trying to find any security blindspots or useful information. And you quickly found out some useful things: First, while the padlocks on the gate were heavy duty, the chains weren't of the same quality, so they could be easily broken through with a bolt cutter or similar instrument. Second, Clara had mentioned being able to get a portable ladder that was tall enough to climb over the walls, and you saw that it could definitely work if you also brought some sort of cover to allow you to climb over the barbed wire.
However, not everything was good news. It was sad, but she had to admit that the location of the drug lab was pretty secure. The distance between the walls and the surrounding buildings, as well as between the walls and the lab building itself was pretty long. The yard was also open in all directions, except for a doghouse next to the north wall (opposite of the gate) which was also pretty distant from the building. Sneaking through was going to be difficult.
While you were looking, you installed a few cameras to watch the house and tried to make friends with the dogs... But that was also a no go. They wouldn't be friendly no matter what you did, and they didn't even look at the food you tried to give them. You vaguely remembered something about dogs trained to avoid eating poisoned food, and you made the connection, deciding that those dogs should have been professionally trained..
But it wasn't all bad news regarding the dogs. You unexpectedly gained a skill from your efforts, even if they had been unsuccessful:
Animal Taming Level 1
- The skill to teach animals skills and behaviors that they are smart enough to learn. At this level, you understand a bit about taming, but even the simplest tricks are beyond your teaching capacity.
But most importantly, once you mentioned the issues about the dogs, Roberta managed to come up with a solution. She would bring along nets (like those used for fishing) with weights attached to them, so they would be capable of restraining the dogs relatively easily.
Susan came through with the blueprints of the target house. They were as follows:
The ground floor was split into three sections, a west wing, an east wing and a central part (again, that is considering the front gate as being on the "south"). The west wing had a kitchen and attached dining room, along with a side door. The central section had two bedrooms, a living room, an anteroom (connected to the front door) and stairs to the second floor. While the east wing had a bathroom, a laundry room and another side door.
The basement was only a single room, intended for storage, while the second floor had three rooms and a bathroom. Susan said that the drug lab itself was probably on the basement. So that was the situation. More than what you had before, enough to think about.
And of course, you didn't slack off on your skill training. You decided to work on your acting abilities, since the skill was already only one level away from mastery, and while you didn't know which mastery you would gain from it, having an additional mastery, specially for a skill with such a broad range of use, would definitely be useful.
Normal training would probably not help much at that point, so you took to the streets, and without using any disguise, you did your best to act as all sorts of things to fool the nearby people.
You were pretty sure that you left a lot of people feeling confused. You first pretended to be a ghost, manipulating your expression and movements to give off an impression of otherwordliness, and walking on the edges of streets. Later, you shifted to walking in the middle of the crowd, trying to pass the impression of cold to as many people as possible.
You did all sorts of things like that, but you soon realized that the experience gains were slow, and petering out too quickly to be effective. Frustrated, you decided to do something even more extreme, and went to the park and started pretending to be a tree.
Luckily, that allowed you to stumble across the answer.
Trying to act like a tree meant that you needed to completely suppress your human reactions, and while you were focusing on that, your experience gains increased considerably. So you thought about it and arrived at a few conclusions:
You realized that, at the deepest level, acting wasn't about changing into something else. Instead, it was about controlling yourself to such a level that you can completely separate your inner thoughts from your outer actions. You could be completely aware that you were playing a part at the same time as you were enveloped in the character you were playing, without one being able to affect the other, like you had two minds.
And with that understanding, you finally leveled up.
Acting Level 20
- The skill to act out a role, in a way that can fool viewers. At this level, your acting prowess can be called perfect, with only supernatural means being able to detect your true self.
You have obtained: The Glass Mask.
- The essence of Acting is assuming a role without losing oneself. Upon reaching that essence, it is like you have an invisible mask that can hide your true self. It is now like you have two different minds, one on the surface and one deeper down, and that second one is harder to reach from the outside, making it an amazing mental defense, among other qualities.
That was a strange mastery, way different from what you had expected, but you could tell that it would be something extremely useful for the future, just from the words "mental defense".
Besides that, you had ideas of possibly attacking at a different time than what was suggested in the information, but your hidden cameras watching the place showed that such a plan would be difficult to realize.
There was a reason why that particular time had been pinpointed in the documents, and it was because it was the time where the place was most vulnerable. You saw that other times included frequent movements, with supplies being brought in and "merchandise" being taken out. And there were always guards watching over that stuff, and they also frequently stayed within the house for long periods of time.
The short period of recording didn't allow you to pinpoint any specific patterns, but you could tell that trying to attack at different times would lead to being faced with higher resistance. You weren't that afraid of the concept, but it would be difficult to convince your partners to face such a thing if you didn't have a very good plan.
And one last thing to consider was that Clara came through with what she said she would do, and managed to get the number of the cellphone of one of the gang members that would be inside the house during the attack. She was planning on calling during the operation to attempt to drive them into confusion, but she was open to suggestions about other things to do with that call.
Finally, there was one last thing to think about: You had been having thoughts about getting to know your team members in real life, outside of their roles as anonymous masked members of the Inscrutables gang. Doing so just after you had met them would be impossible, since you would need a certain amount of trust to get them to reveal their true faces.
However, you were already thinking of the future. If you finished that first mission successfully, you would probably have gained enough trust to get them to take off their masks... As long as you also did the same, as a show of trust.
That was something you had to decide. It was possible to get closer to your teammates, which would definitely help with whatever you wanted to do later, but the price of that was the loss of your anonymity. Considering that, your decision would be:
[] Yes, you would reveal your face.
[] No, you wouldn't reveal your face.
And... That was all you had. It was finally time to try and come up with a final plan of action for your operation. Considering all your resources and information, your plan would be:
[] Write-in.
A.N: The school stuff will be depicted in a separate post, an interlude that I will try to finish soon.
Only if you had some high grade resources to make the disguise. With the things you currently have access to, any fake face would be seen through by the others.
Really? Because I thought that at level 16 we knew enough about make up to let us make ourselves look like a different, though similar, person. Because that's something that normal skilled people can do with regular makeup. Change their complexion, add some shading to highlight certain facial features, perhaps wear glasses to help change the general shape of their face, seems like we should be able to make ourselves nigh unrecognizable. Especially since the skill explicitely says we could disguise ourselves as someone in particular and have a good chance of not being discovered, it seems like it'd be a piece of cake to try to appear as some random person.
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The Froggy Ninja
The Blade Will Never Die
Is there anything stopping us from acting like someone incredibly enthusiastic about a given skill to increase our focus and study?
Well, 1) I think if our deeper true brain ain't into it, we ain't learning, and 2) I don't think it'd help because, with our high Meditation and what not, I doubt we physically could focus more on what we are practicing. Especially when we use Self Hypnosis to help out.
Yes I know that, but I also mentioned how the fact that we are wanting to appear as Random Chick #3 rather than anyone in particular should make it much easier to do. Clark Kenting is a thing in real life after all, where even simple things like a hat and glasses and bad posture could make you almost unrecognizable. And that is without using Makeup, something inherently designed to help change your appearance.
What level of Disguise would we need to pull off something many different actors and actresses are noted to do occasionally?
- Location
- Source of confusion itself.
[X] No, you wouldn't reveal your face.
I don't think our age is a problem. We think that Roberta is around our age.
- Location
- United States
[x] Yes, you would reveal your face.
-[x] but while disguised to make yourself look different than normal.
-[x] but while disguised to make yourself look different than normal.
- Location
- Source of confusion itself.
Changing vote.
[x] Yes, you would reveal your face.
-[x] but while disguised to make yourself look different than normal.
[x] Yes, you would reveal your face.
-[x] but while disguised to make yourself look different than normal.
'Reveal disguised face' is kind of problematic because it makes a show of trust that's not genuine and will be seen negatively down the line. We're a villain, so if people are thinking we 'get close to' our teammates and dump then within a few months that's fine.
That said the whole point of showing your real face is to basically mix civilian and criminal life. If that path continues more than a few months either we'll completely adopt the 'disguise' as our real appearance and it's kind of a waste of effort, or we'll be tripped up by civilians we know talking to our teammates, and their reaction to learning we manipulated them is unlikely to be good.
Basically I just see disguises as much more effort than full reveal or constant masks for uncertain benefit over the alternatives.
That said the whole point of showing your real face is to basically mix civilian and criminal life. If that path continues more than a few months either we'll completely adopt the 'disguise' as our real appearance and it's kind of a waste of effort, or we'll be tripped up by civilians we know talking to our teammates, and their reaction to learning we manipulated them is unlikely to be good.
Basically I just see disguises as much more effort than full reveal or constant masks for uncertain benefit over the alternatives.
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- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- They/Them
That's a good point but I figured we weren't meant to be mixing civilian and criminal life? I know it's been mentioned before but it seems to conflict with our plan to just use this group or be the power behind the throne. Suppose it's still not really clear what we want from this endeavour.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
That been a problem for awhile now.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- They/Them
If this vote goes through, I think it'd mean we're pretty set on the path of using this team and gang, rather than truly being a part of it. Suppose we could do another reveal of our real face later (who knows, they could do the same) but it's probs a bad start for real trusting relationships.
Originally I think people were just talking about using the gang as a training exercise? Personally I don't want to get too attached. Distance is good since you can get closer if you so choose but it's harder to take back what trust/information has been offered.