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An Amateur Demonologist's Troubles [Magic Alt-Power]

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Yzarc said:
One word, Purity when she was outed.

The "Unwritten Rules" are unwritten for a reason. Both sides play fast and loose when they can get away with it.
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Yzarc said:
Sophia fed them bad intel. But yeah, things could have been done much better but given that they kidnapped Aster the moment Purity was outed and hid her away while Purity rampaged, it is not that much of a streach to think they planned something like this.
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Inbetweenaction said:
Edit: as for the purity case of PRT are idiots, this is not quite the same. that was a bad judgment call, and then everyone refused to back down, going from "If we have her baby, she will have to sit down and accept any demand we throw at her""IF I DON*T GET MY BABY NOW, EVERYTHING DIES" "she is making counter demands, but we can't negotiate with terrorist... didn't think this far."
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Aurora Raven said:
Wasn't that Coil rather than the PRT?

A lot of PRT bullshit is Coil trying to discredit the Piggot, but it's not like the PRT is totally incompetent with every other agent belonging to Coil.
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IIRC it wasn't even the PRT who took the baby away, though they had 'PRT' support/backup and it was done so fast it HAD to be pre-planned.
 
Well that seemed... out of the blue. Umm, was the human sacrifice necessary? Its not like they actually had anything on her yet. This feels (pardon the baseball terminology) like way out of left field. Sure we had the summons from the first chapter and Predator was stepping back to reevaluate their target, but this feels like a bit of a jump from where it was.
 
While I agree, and did state, that Taylor's actions seem irrational, they make some sense from the perspective of a harassed teenager who just discovered that one of her tormentors is part of an official authority organisation who just called her for questioning after she lashed out at said tormentor. Especially since being wanted for questioning by the PRT means being involved in a parahuman matter, which from the perspective of a paranoid parahuman is the same as telling everyone within earshot (in this case a "gang riddled" school) that she is one of them.
 
Nice magic setting. She's like Sabrina in Chilling adventures of Sabrina .
Love the human sacrifice. The guy had a choice . And he willingly joined a public outing hunt squad for a teenaged girl . They don't even do that for the local Nazis .
 
These devils are kinda tame, aren't they? I expected lots of fire and brimstone and cursing in ancient tone, not jolly good devils.
 
Honestly, my SOD seriously broken. This is about as bad as when Tagg outed Taylor in the middle of school, and in that case, Alexandria actually wanted her to escalate to the point that she'd kill someone. Armsmaster is socially awkward and overly ambitious. He's not an idiot, and won't be the leader of the Brockton Bay protectorate if he was.

Plus, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but Taylor has just escalated a bit too quickly. She is throwing an innocent family man into hell. While he isn't being tormented, I doubt that she has any certainty about that. Remember, the first thing Taylor wanted to do in canon when she got her powers was to be a hero. She just sicced a demon on one of the only forces of law and order in the whole city.
 
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not sure what I was expecting from a Taylor that summons literal demons but this still felt like a drastic shift in tone.
 
The single real job a demon has is to corrupt people and Taylor summoned a few demons and said 'you know what these people annoyed me, so go get em boys' with the amount of latitude she gave them I'm not really surprised things started going to hell quickly, what the demons want? to get more of them summoned, the best way to do that? ensure that the one summoner that they have gets driven into a corner, so that more demon summoning seems like a good idea. Sure summoning demons is generally a bad idea, but when you trust no one and everyone is out to get you? I'm surprised it didn't escalate faster.
 
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Wonder if Cauldron would fall as well since the Procterate/Prt is kinda an offshoot of it and the leaders are also the leaders of both groups.
 
Gnep said:
Oh nice, a story where Taylor doesn't try to solve her problems on her own and just gets help.
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Baby steps? I mean she tried to get some help. I just don't think demons are what most people mean when they say that. Buuuut I guess Taylor gonna Taylor.

Edit: Nevermind, I just read the rest of the chapters. Hooo boy that escalated quickly.

When she mentioned the part of summoning something equivalent to the pain the PRT caused I thought something like the Icon of Sin was going to crawl put of the Pit.
 
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BoopDaSnoot said:
These devils are kinda tame, aren't they? I expected lots of fire and brimstone and cursing in ancient tone, not jolly good devils.
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It's likely that the demons Taylor has summoned are, well, just pieces of the greater whole (to borrow some Fate terminology) forced into a more limited, specialized container. And the whole demons are probs uper-powerful, millennia old at LEAST, so some maturity can be expected.
 
Yzarc said:
One word, Purity when she was outed.
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Purity wasn't outed by the PRT though. She was outed by Coil through an anonymous email sent out to... well, everybody. All sorts of media outlets. Lisa even knew Coil did it.

Buzz 7.6 said:
Lisa frowned and held up a finger. She continued talking into the phone, "-don't agree with this, and if you'd asked me, I would have said you shouldn't do it. No, yes, I think it's an effective measure."

<snips>

When I'd read enough of the page to verify my suspicions, I hit the home key to return to the very top of the page. I checked who else had been Cc'ed on the email and the time it had been sent.

<snip>

The email was a list. At the very top of the list was Kaiser. Following his entry were his lieutenants, Purity, Hookwolf and Krieg, and the rest of the members of Empire Eighty Eight. It wasn't even limited to people with powers, noting some powerless captains and even some of the lower level flunkies.

The list included pictures and text. Beneath each of the villain's names was a comprehensive block of data, noting their civilian names in full, professions, addresses, phone numbers, the dates they moved to the city and the first appearances of their costumed identities in Brockton Bay. There were pictures of them in costume paired with pictures of their alleged civilian identities, roughly matched in angle and size for easy comparison. Most of the entries had zip files attached, doubtless with more data and evidence.

<snip>

The email had been sent not only to Lisa, but to the Brockton Bay Bulletin, a half dozen other local news stations, and several national ones. Everyone that mattered, and a few that didn't.

The email had been sent at 1:27 pm this afternoon. Less than an hour ago. That was the really bad news.

"Coil did this?" I murmured.

Lisa nodded, tightly, "Yup."
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The PRT had nothing to do with the decision to out people. It was over and done with. And since it was national, public news, their hands would be tied. They'd have to intervene. CPS would have to, by law, irrespective of how dangerous or stupid it would be.

That's why they wouldn't out someone like that — it gives them more options. Dragon even talks about that some at one point, about how the only reason they outed Taylor at Arcadia was because Dinah said it would work in their favor. Not because that was policy.

shade argost said:
IIRC it wasn't even the PRT who took the baby away, though they had 'PRT' support/backup and it was done so fast it HAD to be pre-planned.
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See the above. If it was at all preplanned, it was because Coil was involved. The PRT weren't even emailed the ID package. Just major media outlets all over the city/country.
 
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How did Sophia know it was Taylor?
Did I miss something? Did the Demon hunting Sophia go "Hey Prey, I am hunting you in the honor of my master The Demonologist Taylor Hebert. That is Taylor Hebert with the one R"
I mean Sophia by herself is incapable of believing that Taylor has any power at all unless it literally comes with a hand written note and two witnesses. It goes against her whole world image.
 
shakes head,

Most recent/obvious posibility of a trigger event, this was a fishing expedition that caught a shark when they were expecting a sea bass
 
While Taylor's first response to potentially being publicly outed really should not have been to (for all she knew) permanently sacrifice a guy to Hell (doesn't matter if it's not actually permanent, she shows no knowledge of this), about the only way the PRT could have done worse would have been to somehow use the volume of the Endbringer sirens to make that announcement; false/bad intel from Sophia or not, they should not have been that stupid

I guess I'll stick around just to see how ridiculous their decisions get from them grafting the Idiot Ball to themselves
 
Well, that was interesting while it lasted... the prologue and the first chapter were both good, but the 2nd chapter just felt like it slammed into the wall as far as my interest goes.

There needs to be time for that kind of escalation, this went from revenge against 3 deserving enemys to killing (sidestory is nice but she does not know that it does not kill) an relative innocent. Way to much of a single jump for most readers.
 
Watched, but hesitantly. Zero to human sacrifice in 3 chapters?

Okay the sidestory helps, but definitely a wtf moment. Would have preferred a main thread mark and an interlude label because, i tend to miss sidestories sometimes. Usually don't read them at all until I finish a fic.
 
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Teller of Tales said:
Watched, but hesitantly. Zero to human sacrifice in 3 chapters?
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Seconded. It sounds interesting enough, but it stopped just before the point where it would've been clear exactly how dark the whole thing was.
At least it's very obviously played for laughs all along, so no matter what it's going to be a comedy.

And I wonder if her good luck charm is still going and this was actually exactly what was needed to be done to make the world better...
 
Now that Taylor has performed blatant murder, she is evil. If she truly wanted to save the city, she should start by ending herself and saving the world from a plague of demons in the process.
 
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