-Meetings with spirits are never boring
-The probability of this leaking is unity.
The PRT will be more or less obliged to talk to the Feds in both the US and Canada, which means a minimum of several hundred people, from intelligence analysts to military to legislators to POTUS and the PM. And of course there's Saint, who was playing data broker in his Interlude.
Unless Cauldron is doing cleanup for some reason, this shit will hit the papers bigtime.
-Someone is going to get the bright idea to sphere nap Iris sooner or later while he's powered down.
Someone else is going to accuse Taylor of mummery, of using her projection to attempt to manipulate the PRT.
Might as well get them out of the way.
-That entire meeting was almost certainly recorded, which means that they would have caught both Crushing Grasp's temper tantrum, and Iris Abbreviated History of The Fall of Creation.And since there is an Old Realm translator, they can confirm what was said without resorting to having an Alchemical translation.
Note the parts about maddened Exalts: if other Celestials show up in-universe, the PRT is going to freak.
It's only really hilarious when you consider that she's explicitly considering Taylor a veteran hero.
A girl two years her junior who's only been an Alchemical for a little shorter than two months.
Two Hard Women staring each other down.
Possibly one of the issues with RBC that I've been struggling to articulate: They're both excellent people, but I suspect they'd enable each other's more......utilitarian impulses. And as things stand, I'm not sure maximum utilitarianism is the way to go about this, in a story that has leaps of faith and trust as two of it's central themes.
And here you get a reminder that Rebecca is a damn good Thinker.
She already put together the whole timeline thing with the advent of PR specialists.
And the implications that Iris/Auto were working on a timescale of decades, and then sent over PR specialists, is going to be reassuring, because it implies that violent takeover was not on their timetable.
At least, it wasn't before.
Huh.
So something new went wrong between Prayer's Exaltation and that of the Twins.
Which suggests that sending Sakura to Estasia might actually be Autobot improvising with available resources, and not part of the original plan.
An unlimited range teleporter has strategic implications for the Alchemicals of Autochtonia, even barring her PR capabilities; just the logistics alone.....
Now that's just sad.
Heh.
So that's Miss Militia, Prayer and Legend as the only three possible combatants, and two are Blasters in a small room with a high-level Brute/Blaster.
They'd have gotten ripped apart, wouldn't they?
Well, Prayer would have survived it....
Careful what you wish for, spectacular scorpion.
It does mean that in his two days of absence from Saki's side, he didn't actually spend any time interrogating Prayer about the current state of affairs in his new area of operations, or determining who his new allies were.
That was remarkably careless of a Primordial War vet.
Yeah, we need to spend time with Iris for non-professional reasons to get our relationship back on something like it's old footing.
I really liked when Taylor wasn't afraid of Iris, or of what Iris could do.
Vision maybe, Iris no.
Also note the implication that Taylor knows, in some detail, what happened to Creation.
I assume she heard the name in passing sometime during when she and her sister were in captivity.
Or, more likely, this is an example of Saki's Lore 1(Parahumans 2) rating; she probably knows much of her public history by heart.
Inconvenient that the Riley reveal came during the whole "Apocalypse Is Coming" reveal.
Guess they'll hash that out later.
Wait, he doffed his pimp suit?
Iris is PISSED.
Philadelphia to New York is ~100 miles, which is where Miss Milita, Legend, Prayer, Grasp and Saki are.
Philly to DC is ~140 miles, which is one possible location for RCB.
Philadelphia to Los Angeles is ~2400 miles, another possible location for RCB.
Philadelphia to Vancouver is ~3000 miles, which is where Dragon is based.
And Iris just wololo'd the lot of them casually.
From the PoV of the PRT, Iris has just displayed a targeted expansion of VoV's range by multiple orders of magnitude, with a repeat of the whole spacetime manipulation and bodyfreeze thing at literally a moment's notice.
If anyone had any reasonable doubts about who/what they were fucking with, it's probably gone.
I wonder what Chevy saw this time.
And given that Saint was probably listening in, I wonder if it hit him as well.
Intentional callback to the legends about Nero fiddling as Rome burned?
This is the most scathing assessment of the Incarnae I've seen in print.
Seems UCS's friendship with Autobot didn't translate to Auto's 3CDs regarding him charitably.
I mean, you can see him mentioning extenuating circumstances for the Exalted, what with the whole Primordial death curse thing, but he just plain damned the Incarnae.
And it's spelt out.
This has major, major implications.
The fact that they inserted Alchemical operators into Creation, found Iris and managed to cut the links in time suggests they had help from Creation-side Auto loyalists, of whom the most prominent are the Jadeborn.
And that further suggests that Lifeboat Autobot took on more refugees.
Certainly Jadeborn, Auto's favored children, and one of the most cohesive and powerful military forces in the Age of Sorrows. Maybe Dragon Kings.
Possibly some spirits; see Luranume, God of Fivefold Luck, who was a collab between Luna and Auto as a contingency.
Or Asna Firstborn, who ran the Loom and would have been able to use it to locate and track stuff.
Probably some more humans(which means Dragonblood genetics), maybe even raksha; raw materials, if nothing else.
And that means they would have looted any resources they could reach that weren't nailed down, to keep Autobot going longer, or to aid the Eight Nations. Souls(human, Jadeborn, Dragon King), artifacts, geneseed, resources et cetera.
This is where they would have needed the Jadeborn.
Also to sever Autobot's links to Creation, because IIRC, as some of his most devoted worshippers, they would have been links.
So the Jadeborn would either have been moved or destroyed.
And here we see the difference between Iris and Vision: one is less indiscriminately homicidal than the other.
Iris realizes that while stopping them from breathing might be impressive, actually letting them choke would be counterproductive.
Hence Shaping to simply allow them go without oxygen.
And here we have an answer to the question that people posed to me several threads ago when I pushed for more suit armor/weapons on our new suit:
Why you would want another suit of armor when you have the Dread Mantle?
Because the power source of the suit is needed to perform large-scale geomancy.
With the apocalypse coming, any time Iris is spending powering the suit is time not charging for Nowhereverse conversion.
So we're going to have to weigh Mantle deployment against losing demesne setup time.
Which means that choice of powered armor loadout needs to be able to keep the occupant alive and combat active.
Pity this wasn't explicitly spelt out then, but it would have spoiled Plot.
:shrug:
Next suit of armor gets built-in weapons.
Iris mike drop.
I wonder if he literally dropped out of the air because he stopped powering himself.
And if Taylor can absorb him into TIE while he's in low-power, because you can bet some moron will think to attempt a sphere-napping.
Heh.
Loling at Uriel here; I suspect dude will be very respectful to Iris.
Or just avoid him.
I can't blame the guy for turning to drink to cope; having an Endbringer+ in the same city as yourself, with the only leash being a fifteen year old Ward would freak most people out.
What a way to learn that your entire existence, and the deaths of your friends, were for naught.
Poor dude. At least comforting him will give Saki her first opportunity to intentionally use her powers.
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