On the other hand, the ability to remove an intimacy via social attack that would not be Obvious and could be done at range (no spiking) is potentially a very potent power. Heck, I wonder if we could use that to help remove Saint as an issue by doing social attacks through Dragon (I think you have even suggested that?). Even if Taylor does not know everything, she might know enough to think theres no harm in trying.
Based on Taylor's presented attitude about mental influence, I suspect otherwise. She's just too responsible to unleash mental influence at unknown targets, not to mention she has no idea how deeply Saint is in Dragon.
Hmm. I can't be sure but I think Gromweld shot down the idea of imprisoning Endbringers.
Correct, but that was due to mass and effective strength scores, it is functionally impossible to force them in.
Not to mention that he is likely strong enough to resist the imprisoning effect for quite a while (Prayer took 9 minutes), and we know from SoPA that it IS possible to damage the shard-charm. Capturing Scion in and initiating the imprisonment might well result in him blasting straight down with his golden-beam-of-death in an effort to destroy the shard entirely.
Not quite. Inside the Sanctum, the shard connection is cut off, so Scion would lose any shard powers that aren't hosted and fueled directly from his body, crippling all the bigger effects. If that's true, it would do fairly small amounts of damage to Scion's true form, and the primary value would be a captive Scion instance to run a personality assessment/knowledge sweep on.
Which is to say it'd be much the same as him getting hit by the G-Driver. He'd be back in a few hours at most, and he'd be PISSED.
I wonder if the shard-charm can spy on other dimensions too. If nothing else, being able to spy on Cauldrons meeting place would have potential value.
It should be possible provided she's been there before. Cauldron would probably not be dumb enough to do that though.
I will say that this was a bit of a positive note. If Taylor is willing to slap Iris away (even if only gently), it might mean she is getting over the shock and fear of VoV. Maybe the first signs that this (Iris of Innovation (Keep His Terrifying Power Focused Or Risk Vengeance) [Emotion|Anxiety] ●●●○) intimacy is potentially changing? I would like to think so anyway.
Its progress!
Presumably Ascalon would work far more effectively here, since Dragons chains are fully intact. Can you remember how Ascalon exactly does what it does? Does it (potentially?) destroy her beyond recovery, or basically just put her into a coma? Was her recovery in canon possible due to Ascalon not being designed to destroy her utterly, or because the changes Colin had made prevented Ascalon from finishing the job fully?
The specifics are unknown, but Dragon was disabled, not dead.
Possible causes:
-Saint recognizes that they need Dragon to fight Scion. He uses a modified Ascalon to disable her for fear of his personal safety(justified by Dragon finding him), essentially holding her hostage. Not much point to surviving Dragon if Scion kills everything, but at the same time, not much point fighting Scion if he was going to die anyway.
-Dragon's changes(Trigger, Colin's mods) rendered her too difficult to kill for good by Ascalon.
-Ascalon was originally intended to restore Dragon to maintenance mode, a compact, inactive package, Richter just relabeled it.
Also, is it canon that Ascalon is actually a complex cyberwarfare AI, or is that just your deduction? I mean if it works by exploiting Dragons inbuilt blind-spots as Gromweld said, it does not need to be somekind of super-advanced adaptive AI. I mean if Dragon does not fight back, basic intelligence might well be enough. Is it possible that Ascalon is actually a very crude program (atleast in comparison to Dragon as she is now), that works simply because Dragon just stands there and does nothing to fight back while Ascalon is whacking her to bits with a large stone?
Two answers to this:
-Richter is
not a software Tinker. He's an Artificial Intelligence Tinker. Everything he makes is some form of artificial intelligence to do the job for him. Thus as Ascalon, Robin Hood, and similar tools made by Richter, they are all AI packages.
-Gromweld said so.
Whats problematic is that there was no need for her to act the way she did. Crawler was not going anywhere. She could have just waited for Taylor to get into range with the super-eye charm that Alexandria knew Taylor had, and lost nothing. It was not so much stupidity, but rather arrogance and pride that ended up with her half-dead and everything wrecked.
However this was ultimately a symptom of a larger issue. Alexandria believed she knew best and far better than some ward (exalted or not), and she is used to knowing best and always being in charge (of PRT, of protectorate, and partially Cauldron). If she is exalted and enhanced even further, that will just strenghten that belief.
In fairness to her, time is truly at a premium there. Every minute counts when Crawler is coming up to wreck shit, and her Thinker power means she's used to thinking faster and making decisions more efficiently than anyone around her. 99% of the time, people telling her to wait have nothing relevant to contribute, and were acting on the presumption that she was just a super brute.
That said, if she were to be Exalted she'd be even more justified, so yes.
Given Dragons importance, fame and close friendship with Taylor, I could see Saki being willing to use the memory reading function (and her social skills) to find out any such dead man switches and how to disable them. And possibly remove the memory that Dragon is an AI (or otherwise block Saint from blabbing).
Noting again that Taylor does not know the degree of threat Saint poses to Dragon. Even Dragon doesn't know, she considers him something to fear, but she has no idea just how deep he can go.
Secondly, this would be horrible for PR and is pretty illegal to do. We could get away with it with enough effort, but again, what he CAN do is not what he HAS done, and the public learning...well, it'd be a huge mess.
If it really became a binary choice, I have no doubt Taylor would be willing to kill Saint (legally or not) to save Dragon.
If it even became a choice at all, Saint had fucked up big time.
Currently he's a low priority item on a giant list of urgent, critical or disastrous items. He's our "When we have some free time" project.
Frankly, I expect the kickoff point to be when we start working seriously on liberating Dragon.
Armsmaster made a nanothorn halberd.
The nanothron halberd couldn't get past a certain point with leviathan because of how dense he was.
Citation? Because I believe it was noted that the nanothorns worked more slowly as he got to the core material(justifiably, given the greatly increased mass compared to anything else), but they worked.
Do Alchemials have stuff that boosts diplomacy to powerful levels like solars do?
Yes, pretty much all of them are installed except the "Smell Good" one and the "Mind Blowing Sex+attractiveness" one.
