Thats... Not how it works in canon at all. She asks it questions, but if the answer to said question relies on her having a specific piece of data to uncover, and she doesn't have that data, then she doesn't uncover it.
Except she routinely uncovers facts that would be effectively impossible to just guess correct, or information that no other human being on the planet knows. Heck, when analyzing Leviathan she gets exact calculations for his density and toughness!
As I understood it, Tattletale's Process works like this.
subconscious.
Step 1: Lisa looks at a lamp,
Step 2: Lisa's shard starts scanning through everything she knows about said lamp, from where she got it, to what she remembers from that one glimpse she caught of the makers mark on the base, that one time when she knocked it over.
Step 3: Shard uses all information to pinpoint where lamp was made, and when.
Step 4: Shard tells Lisa, who tells it to shut the fuck up because she's trying to sleep.
Conscious
step 1: Lisa looks at lamp.
Step 2: Lisa starts deliberately thinking up everything she knows about said lamp.
Step 3: Shard uses all information to deduce when and where the lamp was made.
Step 4: Shard Tells Lisa.
The critical piece that you are glossing over is both of your #3 entries here, as HOW Lisa's shard is able to do that is what I've been focusing on. We know from Wildbow's clarifications that Shards are effectively massive bio-crystal computers with limited sapience, with more capabilities than just their user's power may imply; what we call a "Shard" is a grouping of these bio-crystal computers, with a general theme geared towards a specific task but still capable of accomplishing a wide variety of tasks. So, what does this mean for Lisa's power?
Lisa's power, from my reading of canon and Wildbow's clarifications, doesn't
know everything, but rather is doing Universal Equation-level calculations based on the data and questions/input provided by its user. To augment this, the Shard "talks" with other Shards to help fill in gaps or boost its databanks of pre-calculated data, which is where the (mis)information about Alchemicals/Autochthon is coming from. Similarly, Lisa's Thinker-headaches are caused by the Shard going into a bit of a recursive loop trying to calculate feats that simply aren't possible within the Nowhereverse's Universal Equation math; this is ameliorated by
Loom-Server Migration, as that sub-module works through doing kooky reality-augmenting Bullshit Magic to effectively fool anything/anyone looking at the user that they're playing by the Rules (and possibly even providing "legitimate" explanations as well).
So that's what I meant by the Shard "datamining reality" - it's effectively number-crunching on the scale of post- and pre-cog, but like any good math equation or computer program, it's entirely beholden to the input data to get anything reasonable. Add onto that the ability of the Shard to deliberately feed answers subconsciously to get Lisa thinking in a certain direction, and you have the potential for the power to be utilized both well and poorly.
Ultimately, it's pretty clear from canon that Lisa's power has the potential of being of the most powerful Thinker powers on the planet, given the right preliminary data and question sets. I worked backwards from there, trying to be as canon-compliant as possible, and came up with the reasoning above.
That's the sort of absurd "all shards know everything and are just fucking with everyone" sort of wank-characterization that people normally give PtV or Leet's shard.
I've never seen anything supporting that theory at all, certainly not the canon material and frankly if it does turn out to be true, i'd lose a lot of respect for Wildbow.
Point of Order: Wildbow has confirmed that Leet's shard specifically
does know everything (related to Tinkertech) and is, in fact, fucking with him because Leet was being completely worthless.
1)How hot are the suns over the river?
2) Can Gust hold something in one of those suns? What of Narwhal?
3)Are there any other exotic effect zones post-Bakuda bombing in the Docks area?
1) Not "surface of the sun" hot, because then the atmosphere would ignite and we'd have global firestorms, but somewhere below that point and "able to melt steel and concrete at a reasonable rate."
2) At ground-level, Gust is a relatively mediocre Aerokinetic... so no. Maybe for Narwhal, but her forcefields are frictionless surfaces so it's tricky beyond the fact that the Suns are hot enough to destablize the forcefields after a few seconds of close-contact.
3)
Yes. Lots. No time-stop bubbles yet, but feel free to Stunt in some zany ones as long as they don't immediately solve all our problems. Wait, you said 'Docks area', whoops. No, not around the Docks area - some about a mile away and beyond, but nothing closer.
I think we may have taught Wyld's shard how to make souls. Or at least given it a good start on that.
Sure, she took her first step to figuring out how to make souls. Only a few million more steps to go!
Hah! Awesome! I think I may use scraps of this somewhere else down the line - the parts prior to the "NOW" section, at least - as otherwise it'd be too much of a disruption to have more than one Interlude before 8.3. Good work! +1 XP!
Would Narwhal's projected forcefields pop Siberian if they manifest inside the projection?
No, as the forcefields would immediately break the instant they try to counter or interfere with Siberian's absolute effect. At the very least, with the Siberian having been around so long and Narwhal having been a major S-Class Threat fighter in canon, it seems like this is something that would have happened and pointed out in canon if it did work.
@Gromweld - what's the collateral damage of the Explosive Bolt? If we headshot Jack, would his jumppack get killed too?
Expect deadly shrapnel at the very least, even if the explosion itself doesn't envelop the nearby Twinpack.
because Bonesaw cannot be allowed to tactical hug Wyld. Bonesaw escaping with Wyld is a lose condition.
So selfish! We're trying to recruit all the Best Sisters, so why would we deprive Riley of one as well?!
Since we didn't specify what drones to extrude we wound up spending a lot of Essence on small drones, rather than just one or two the size of that bull. This raised our Anima, which certainly didn't help us in dealing with Tattletale.
I chose to go with a bunch of smaller ones in addition to the robobull because the smaller drones have the best critical parts/weight ratio. Also, we have a ton of them, so they're good Tinker-fodder. Even if we had been more economical, our Stunts called for us to hand out IEU like candy right before talking with Lisa... so I'm not sure what we were expecting, there.
Since the stunt asks for more technology than the action can actually provide, Gromweld kindly chose to give us the Teleport jammer as the most important part, and ignored the rest.
I figured we wanted Armsmaster and Kid Win to not be running on fumes for the coming day after working an all-nighter, so there was that, too. Three hours to make the thing, then do a few usability tests and start work on a second device seemed reasonable.
Talking to Wyld also seems to have been more about improving our capabilities rather than a heart-to-heart. We definitely succeeded on this one though.
I broke the Wyld bits into two parts (the bug-creation and the talk at the end).
Our free action to create an assistant succeeded. Given that we shut down all our charms to have Wyld work on us, we probably didn't need to specify the withdrawal of IEU.
Something that kept going through my mind was the fact that Kaylee is sorta made redundant when we and Dragon are both in the area and able to dedicate our attention to micro-managing things. Case in point: we didn't need Kaylee (or a person appointed by her) to poke Armsmaster to sleep, as Dragon was already on the job there. In the end, I made it so Dragon and Kaylee are sorta working together, where Kaylee was handling tasks that required physical intervention - that would be out of range of our bugs or inappropriate to use bugs for - while Dragon took care of electronic paperwork/details.
As predicted, PRT policy is only concerned about plagues she may be carrying herself, not ones distributed elsewhere.
The PRT expects distributed plagues at this point, but history shows that anything Bonesaw seeds into the environment WILL be used eventually so the only thing left to prevent is the Bad Stuff she keeps on her person that has been held in reserve.
Called it again. We did not simply look at the video of Jack's broadcast, deduce his location, and descended on him with an army.
Uriel dispatched forces to VTV station - Marrow, Bladedancer, and Chevalier went after they left us earlier. Nothing was there except a freeze-bomb and some zombified civilians (which went about as well as you can imagine).
People were quite concerned about this with the original SATCOM stunt, so I wonder if this is the result of our stunt or if this would have happened anyway.
Everything we're doing now - including a lot of 8.2 - is being influenced by the SATCOM vote. For instance, if we had voted to be more active/aggressive, we would have been hunting around instead of staying in one place in 8.2 and playing Administrator.[/quote]
