Alchemical Solutions [Worm/Exalted] Thread 6: Fatal Fires Flagrantly Fry Frantic Friends, Family

Kelenas said:
Which is precisely what I did *not* started participating in this quest for. If I wanted Worm's Grimdarkness, I would either read the story again, or play Wildbow's Worm-quest. Gromweld - despite claims and assurances to the contrary - obviously intends to keep the Grimdark as much as possible, given how much effort he's put into making things as difficult as possible, which I'm not interested in, so I'm leaving. Simple as that.
Then why the hell are you here? Yes shit is getting hard, but unlike other Worm quests this one is actually being realistic to the setting. Alchemical Taylor is stupidly powerful, and in any story with a powerful protagonist you need a correspondingly powerful antagonist to keep it from being a cakewalk. Functionally, a happy ending we don't work for is a happy ending we won't value.

This fight also serves the purpose of driving home just how badly we need to work on filling out our Assembly. As powerful as Taylor is she's built to be an Administrator and Coordinator, and as such her modules are not optimized for combat. Even then we managed to actually HURT Behemoth rather than all the superficial crap anyone else has aver done to an Endbringer. Imagine how different this battle could have gone if we'd had a Jade or Moonsilver caste Alchemical in the fight as well.

But back to my original point, you complaining about getting large amounts of grimdark from a Quest that mixes WORM AND EXALTED is like the woman who sued Galagher because she bought a front row ticket to one of his shows and got her most expensive dress ruined. In other words,

WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU EXPECTING?
 
XenonPrime said:
[X] Save the Capes
[X] 4 XP - Presence ●●●●○
[X] 2 XP - Presence (Swarms ●●●)
[X] 2 XP - Investigation (Swarms ●○○)

Welp that could have gone better and worse, at least Echidna is gone now and the Triumvirate didn't get nommed by her. Iris blasting off was a bother but at least he's alive. We've still done rather well for an Endbringer fight, assuming the coming cataclysm doesn't kill everything this has gone rather better than I thought it would.

From the sounds of it the Wards may well have survived intact, I didn't hear anything about Miss Militia being taken out and we've still got quite a few important Capes around.

And for goodness sake people, this isn't an unrecoverable disaster. We're a fucking Celestial Exalted with a speciality in crafting surrounded by super-tech. Behemoth failed to stop us and he failed to destroy Iris.

We're still well on track to bring Autocthon into the world and all our massive Essence expenditure in this fight has likely helped in that regard.

Put your big boy breeches on and let's get cracking on saving the bloody world!
We are a roughly 1 month old Celestial exalted and as such are still really squishy. We are almost dead as it is.
1986ctcel said:
[X] Save The Capes

[X] 4xp - Presence
[X] 2xp - Presence (Swarms ●●○)
[X] 2xp - Investigation (Swarms ●○○)
[X] 2xp - Survival (Training Swarms ●○○)
We already have Presence (Swarms 2)
Abilities:

Performance
Presence ●●●○○ (Specialty: Swarms )
Resistance ●●●○○
Ride
Sail
Socialize ●○○○○
Stealth
Survival ●●●○○
Thrown
War ●●●●● (Specialty: Swarms ●●●, Parahumans ●○○)
You might want to select something else.
 
Peanuckle said:
My guess is that the Cradle was the little shrine thing inside the locker, or that the locker was just an entry point that can be rebuilt.

Iris is flight-capable, I'm sure he'll make it back. If nothing else, Autobot will summon him up and send him on a trajectory back to Earth.

I'm in agreement with the "fuck Coil" crowd. He just lost most of his assets and his most valuable Thinker is in a position where she has to assist in his death. The fact that she's now on his shit-list, and an unmasked villain, means that suggesting Exaltation will probably get good results from her.

It almost feels like an Infernal exaltation: "Your life has collapsed, but we offer you a second chance."
And then Coil will probably kick back and party like twas 1799 until about 250(?) years later he has an infernal meltdown :D
 
Your subconscious awareness through your swarm alerts you to Behemoth's escape from Eidolon's spherical prison, but the re-focused firepower of the defenders and a series of kaleidoscopic lances of power from Eidolon pin the Endbringer to the ground again. Behemoth has taken to re-directing many of the attacks back at the defenders now, which your swarm observes as the returned fire downs several capes: Demon Fork, Shadow Stalker, Narwhal, Lilume, Strider, and Flechette.
My reign was short, yet glorious! I guess I was just too awesome to live.
 
Odysseus2099 said:
Hey Gromweld, just curious, was there any way we could have won this? Or at least come out better than we did?
Depending on our objectives it might be entirely possible to protect the Cradle, if we let the city burn to collaborate with Iris on the matter. Same goes for escaping with Iris, especially as we have confirmation that Behemoth can't track us, flee Brockton Bay with Iris after retrieving the Cradle. Behemoth is powerful, but not fast. The city would be a wasteland and many capes would be dead.

So of our objectives:
Protect the City:
-Docks 80% damaged and irradiated. Danny's life work of revamping the docks is in ruins. Major loss of life in Docks shelters, many of Danny's friends and former co-workers are dead. ABB territory destroyed completely.
-Bay untouched other than some broiled sealife
-Downtown completely undamaged
-Protectorate HQ slagged.
--Labs are toast, as are all the spare gear. Fortunately omnitool implants means we don't actually need them.
--Spiders may or may not be toast, we've yet to see the after action report.
--Crabs mostly boiled.

-Trainyard undamaged
-Boat Graveyard, radioactive slag. Little lost except a bunch of criminal hideouts, slag metal and gang territories.
-The Market, radioactive slag. Fugly Bob's is toast
-Broadwalk, ashed. Merchant territory is toast, but so are most of Taylor's favorite shops.
-Ferry station north undamaged
-Taylor's house destroyed several times over.
-Captain's hill untouched
-Docks South 1/3 damaged, but with low irradiation. Behemoth was too busy fighting for real in this stretch to take his time turning everything radioactive.
-Winslow a giant crater. Cradle confirmed as surviving, so little was lost.
-Arcadia high, undamaged
-Ferry station south undamaged
-Downtown undamaged
-Beachfront property undamaged
-Downtown south undamaged

Protect the capes:
-No proper casualty count yet, but this is probably about the fewest actually dead I've seen for an Endbringer attack, much less the Herokiller. Most of them are reported to be 'down', crippled or incapacitated, not dead.

Protect ourselves/Iris/the Cradle:
-Gromweld's revelation indicates that we didn't fail this entirely. On the other hand this is going to take a lot of mental and physical healing, even if we can restrain ourselves from trying to help fix the city up or hunt Coil down. If Scapegoat or Panacea are healthy enough we can turn off our defensive charms and let them give healing us a shot.
 
Spindler said:
Oh, I missed that. Did the nearest shelters survive? Is there any hope of rebuilding?
That was the bit of the update where Behemoth was melting shelters to get Taylor's attention.
Gromweld said:
But while his lightning bolts are back to having a much shorter range of control, and he's resorted to using scenery as improvised ammunition, he is no longer ignoring any 'targets of opportunity' to focus exclusively on you. Despite your best efforts to pull him away with taunts and hurled rocks, his new, meandering path includes nearly every Endbringer shelter in the Market district. Even worse, your attempts to fly ahead to warn people to evacuate the shelters only causes him to speed up, and target the shelters you've specifically warned.
The best food is history. We must go on a world food tour in it's memory.
 
We're still alive, as are most Wards, and the Triumvirate will want to keep us alive no matter what. I'd say that went pretty well.
As for the Locker, I always had the theory that it isn't the Locker itself that's special, it's the space the Locker occupied. I mean, if you're punching a hole through space to connect to some other universe, doesn't it make more sense if you turn a piece of space into the gateway because the "walls between dimensions" or something there are weaker.

[X] Save The Capes
[X] 4 XP - Presence
[X] 4 XP - Vat Bank

As for the vote, saving Capes is definitely the most important. I tmay sound harsh, but normal people just aren't as important.
We always need more Presence, and we talk through our Swarm enough to make this worth it.
 
Elero said:
We're still alive, as are most Wards, and the Triumvirate will want to keep us alive no matter what. I'd say that went pretty well.
As for the Locker, I always had the theory that it isn't the Locker itself that's special, it's the space the Locker occupied. I mean, if you're punching a hole through space to connect to some other universe, doesn't it make more sense if you turn a piece of space into the gateway because the "walls between dimensions" or something there are weaker.

[X] Save The Capes
[X] 4xp - Presence
[X] 2xp - Presence (Swarms ●●○)

As for the vote, saving Capes is definitely the most important. I tmay sound harsh, but normal people just aren't as important.
We always need more Presence, and we talk through our Swarm enough to make this worth it.
We already HAVE prescence swarms at 2 (its on the front page under abilities and the exp log).
 
Chandra Magic said:
While I won't give too many of Gromweld's secrets away, I will say the following: No, the cradle is not Taylor (that's a rather silly idea). Yes, you can access the cradle from this side of the bridge. Also, yes, the cradle was in Winslow High.

And just to muddy the waters and confuse the situation a bit: you all are assuming the locker was the cradle. What if it wasn't?
Begin Wild Mass Guessing!

Was in Winslow High!

It's the locker door that was flung away!

It's Sally! No, Madison!

It's the Queen Administrator Shard!

Wait, wait, I have it!

Winslow High was a Hellmouth! IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!

/WMG
 
Guys, we really don't need a specialty for everything. Our base abilities are good enough, or will be good enough with a little work, for any non contested rolls. Lets not use up all our XP getting misc things with no plan. If we ever get to the cradle we're going to want dozens of XP to upgrade our attributes at the same time/get essence/get charms.

Buying omni-capable abilities is great, buying niche specialties like training swarms that isn't even that useful is just a total waste.
 
Modified my vote to remove all XP spending except for Presence. Did some quick calcs and we need to start saving every scrap of XP we can for additional charm slots/new charm modules/submodules, Attributes, etc.
 
landcollector said:
Modified my vote to remove all XP spending except for Presence. Did some quick calcs and we need to start saving every scrap of XP we can for additional charm slots/new charm modules/submodules, Attributes, etc.
If we want to make the most usage of our time when we upgrade to E4 (if we do), assuming it takes 3 months like normal and that we can upgrade attributes alongside it, we're going to want 120 XP, before charms.

I'm fine with spending on relevant abilities because they're all very useful, but we're really going crazy with every specialty under the sun here.
 
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