Turn out, I have a thinker power that allows me to see into (part of) Victor's future.
And then you know, surprised Pikachu face before he meets Truth...or what passes for that creepy bastard around here.
Brockton's Celestial Forge (Worm/Jumpchain)
- Thread starter LordRoustabout
- Start date
Shadow Archon
Protoss Preserver
- Location
- Louisiana
Heck, the Human Replica Droids Joe made to distract the 9 are a perfect example. Joe specifically had to ensure the ones he made weren't capable of sentience/sapience, but he could totally just make people using that tech. Doesn't mean they still aren't artificial.
Another example would be the biological Cylons.
The nanites are fine what he's doing is basically inserting healing nanities into her to help keep her along with Amy and Fletchette who will be offered them alive. None of them will be able to modify or alter them from the sounds of it at most they'll be able to flip them between a few modes such as off and on while also being able to contact Joe for something like I need this visible wound I got in my civ id to heal slowly and naturally.
People harp on about poor crippled QA and how she hates it but the simple fact is like a lot of thing in worm it's overdramatised. To start we know QA is limited so it can't be used for the admin tasks like altering powers but we don't know for sure how as in whether it's software locks, orders, permission limitations or hardware tampering or removal.
However, something important to note is this is the standard routine limitations QA goes under whenever deployed as a normal power so the exaggerations of things like scion tore out key systems inflicting huge damage that throws sparks is just wrong because it's all limitations that are done regularly and meant to be undone when the cycle is over. Due to this the limitations won't be down to something like a giant scar running through QA and probably won't even have any visible signs at all.
Now I'm just imagining a mountain-sized circuit breaker, in the middle of the crystal landmass that is a deployed shard, labelled "God Mode". The options are "On", and "Less-On".
- Location
- Deep inside the sand
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
It's pretty humorous that the chapter that Joe tries to understand Passengers is the chapter he learns diplomacy.
At least now he can better talk with Director Armstrong about the hostages that the director will soon become responsible for. It's looking good too.
I think this is will be one of the first fics that will explore Newfoundland post-Leviathan. At least I haven't seen more than a single fic that took up Newfoundland.
Well, Taylor he can't say he was reminded of you when he was taking a dive into Passenger Space and saw your Passenger.
Looks like Joe's newly gained skills are already paying dividends managing to talk to Taylor without her escalating or him needing to defend himself for his actions.
At least now he can better talk with Director Armstrong about the hostages that the director will soon become responsible for. It's looking good too.
I think this is will be one of the first fics that will explore Newfoundland post-Leviathan. At least I haven't seen more than a single fic that took up Newfoundland.
Well, Taylor he can't say he was reminded of you when he was taking a dive into Passenger Space and saw your Passenger.
Looks like Joe's newly gained skills are already paying dividends managing to talk to Taylor without her escalating or him needing to defend himself for his actions.
Most jumpchains have some kind of attractiveness perk but a lot ignore the social skills aspects.
I appreciate Joe learning communication, diplomacy, acting, and social perception skills the evening before his date with Crystal. However, I wonder if Crystal will notice.
Also, if Crystal ever figures out that Joe is Apeiron, it will be amusing if she misunderstands how he gained his new social skills. If she assumes that his new rizz abilities are comparable to one of Apeiron's incomparable creations then she'll have to ask herself, "How much time and effort did he put into this date?"
What was the old meme, a minute of Bill Gates' time is worth over $30,000?
Having Aisha's shard realize the Celestial Forge is exploring shardspace might be dangerous when Broadcast is desperately searching for information on them.
If Aperion reveals everything that they've done to stem the threat of S9, there's a good chance Jack will second trigger from the realization that the past few days have been elaborately constructed just to have him in this position without any chance of resisting. At which point he will be immediately executed.
But will it though? The shard network already has three examples of hosts somehow seeing into shardspace (case 68) without needing a host or anything else to be present in shardspace so why would it assume that Aisha seeing itself wasn't the same sort of thing? Do we have any evidence the shard detected the Final Frontier?
Also I just realised that Aisha is now technically a C69 as well. Only without the existential dread.
Sakuya's Butler
A refined Butler to a knife wielding Mistress.
- Location
- ↓, ↘, → + Punch
Now we just need the REAL German cover for Blumenkranz.
No offense, but Paperblossom's cover(s) flat out are superior imho, to the original. Partially because she's a native Deutsche speaker, partially because she actually sounds amazingly close to the original at points.
Tetra's next amazing hit single on the charts?
EDIT#1:
Nevermind. Was on my cell and didn't realize that is the really crappy version of Paperblossom's cover. The original cover she did is now unavailable/hidden on Youtube. Pity.
EDIT#2:
Here's the good version.
View: https://soundcloud.com/paperblossom/blumenkranz-cover-final-mix
Just realized that, due to the image, this could be the Simurgh's theme.
Lord knows considering just how reviled Ragyo is (for good F'ing reason) it'd fit like a glove for the Simurgh.
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Those three examples were isolated incidents, notably only possible with the technology sourced from the Celestial Forge. Aisha getting sent images of her shard from them in a safe environment instead of seeing it during a breach into shardspace implies that the Celestial Forge is actively exploring it.
- Location
- Deep inside the sand
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I think Crystal will only think that the cutest boy in the city is on his G game. That maybe Joe was stressed and had other balls in the air that made him not as smooth or clear in a conversation.
Joe's curse would come into effect here so she wouldn't be able to pierce it together with just what she has.
Here's what I remember about that scene without going back to reread it:
Dragon literally catches Skitter and is holding her in a hand so her feet are off the ground.
Dragonbot is using prerecorded lines, which the audience can catch as basically a 'aha, it's not actually Dragon in there' moment. She might have been present for the catching and making sure she actually could keep Skitter contained, but then Dragon jumped out to a different dragoncraft that required her attention.
Skitter argues logicbomb meme stuff at the Dragoncraft suit VI, which has pre-recorded snark lines in response back at her and says Skitter won't be able to logicbomb it.
Skitter then successfully argues the dragoncraft into not being able to move because she might kill Imp without being able to detect her, thus successfully first-lawing that particular 'logic-bomb proof' dragoncraft, and then being able to slip out of its hand and run off to go help Bitch fight her self-repairing dragoncraft.
Yeah that's the confrontation I was talking about I believe her logic bomb meme was saying "this statement is false" but it was able to handle the paradox. Taylor then tried to say Imp was using her power and was around so it couldn't move around because it would crush her, it countered with the cameras seeing her so it knew she wasn't around and then Taylor pulled out the second trigger lie which it couldn't disprove so couldn't move.
And at this point a minute of Apeiron's tinkering time is worth billions.
Capes get glimpses of their passengers whenever a Call Bead fritzes. Non-C69 capes with this experience include all five Undersiders (Not Exactly Hell), Uber (who made a painting of the vision) and Leet, Bakuda and Oni Lee.
The distinction for Aisha is that she opened communication like Glory Girl did, which only happened after she won the memory fight.
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- Location
- US
So the canon explanation is twofold. First, the solution that the entities settled on is imperfect. And second, it wasn't the job of Imp's shard to do this. What happened was as Zion was prepping shards for humans, he noticed that parallels between humans and shard memory storage meant that they would experience trigger visions. And rather than fix that, Zion studied human memory and encoded the results into Aisha's shard. Then he broke it up, and coded the memory erasure effect into every other shard. Aisha's shard is the leftover materials from this process, not a centralized memory erasure shard responsible for every trigger event.
This is a pretty significant divergence from canon, assuming Joe is correct about her shard's role and what it's doing right now.
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- Location
- Cambridge MA
1. Curse Broadcast to be even more annoying than normal.
2. Compose a Passenger message constituting an in-depth presentation on how Broadcast is annoying, wasting his and everyone else's energy, annoying, falsely pretending to credentials he doesn't have, annoying, a security risk, and annoying. Make it look like it's from QA and/or Aisha's passenger, then send it to one or both of them (potentially via Aisha and a call bead?)
3. Get all the passengers to start ignoring Broadcast
4. Keep cursing him to get increasingly annoying
5. Profit?
- Pronouns
- He
She is now. She saw her passenger after all.
Optimal Use of Capabilities (Tascion)
- Location
- Earth
Omake: Optimal Use of Capabilities
Taylor thanked Joe again, and she closed the door while he walked away from her house.
Odd, the door handle; she considered it in her thoughts. It was made of metal, a barely noticed object but a part of her life that she interacted with almost daily. She could destroy that handle from just the most basic application of the abilities she now recognized as so much more than just the armor costume Joe gave her to prove herself. She could cut it into paper thin sheets with barely a thought or effort, and that was possibly the true potential of the gift. Maybe that was all there was, and so Joe gave her a new test of her abilities to use his profoundly powerful equipment appropriately.
She didn't stumble, but another thought burst into her consideration on her way up to her room. Maybe this test was about seeing if she would stop striving to improve with what she already had in favor of something new and shiny. That could be it, she nodded to herself. Automated healing was pretty hands off, unlike learning how to best use a tool that worked as just armor when a user didn't bother trying to understand the full potential. Maybe there was some trick beyond or separate from the real use of invulnerable and nearly invisible cutting wires with the use of her bugs.
Sighing, Taylor sat down at the little desk in her room. She was going to have to go through her notes and look for assumptions about how her 'armor' worked. The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed that just extending its invulnerability outward for cutting up stuff within the range of her bugs wasn't really the intended usage. Cutting stuff up was what her knife did after all, and maybe the cutting threads was just meant as more of a side benefit to however she was supposed to be using it. Still, that did make keeping her notes secure much easier. Cutting tiny little tunnels a hundred feet underground, and then carving her notes into the thousands of rocks down there with the tips of needle points held by her insects was certainly a step up from just keeping a paper notebook with a simple cipher. She still used a cipher though. Nothing stopped somebody from just digging up the rocks, if they used some Thinker power to learn about them.
Physical objects made sense, as an extension of 'just armor'. Unbreakable spider silk threads for cutting, jamming doors open or shut with beetles, forcing capsaicin laden flies into peoples sinuses with no lost bugs, and that sort of thing just seemed so obvious in retrospect. The effects wasn't meant for energy, as near as she could tell. She'd tried a bunch to extend the effect to light, magnetism, and electricity without success. Single photon wide threads of light would be actually invisible, while a shield of solidified magnetism seemed like the sort of thing that would be useful. Trying to extend the effect to electricity was more of a thoroughness thing. She couldn't think of much she could do with that beside shooting lightning at people, which wasn't very interesting. Her watch could shock somebody at close range, while further out she could just cut them up or tie them up, depending on what made sense at the time.
Still, as near as she could tell, the invulnerability effect of her costume only applied to physical stuff. That is to say, stuff made of atoms, and all her attempts to figure out a possible trick for applying the effect to energy just failed. Sighing, she elected to not repeat those tests, and no new ideas on that front occurred to her either. So, if the invulnerability effect applied to atoms, what had she missed? She had tiny threads, for slicing through everything she'd been able to test. She had sheets and rolls of paper, for shields. Maybe she was too focused on the invulnerability and not on the costume part of the description? Was that a thing? Garment was only a costume, and she did fine as a rogue?
That sounds promising. So Taylor picked out a new rock underground, and carved in code what translated as 'What does having a costume mean?' at the top. A costume was something she wore, that was obvious but worth getting out of the way. A costume communicated, though that was more a requirement for Garment than a thing she needed. Still, Taylor left some space there for later. She couldn't think of a way of weaponizing communication, but it was at least novel. Maybe she could make an idea part of her armor, in the same way as her threads. Maybe the concept of a shield or two dimensional surface could exist as part of a her armor. Even her weakest bug could slice through anything of any size, if she could only attach the idea of an arbitrarily shaped 2D surface to the bug. Anything threatening innocent people, she could just slice up then. Or shield the innocent people from the attack she supposed, but that wasn't really dealing with a problem, that was just delaying a problem for later.
That was more than nothing actually, and Taylor happily carved those ideas into the rock. This was the benefit of trustworthy people testing each other. They weren't just given basic stuff and left to flub around with it, but testing and experimenting helped people learn. This was probably worth a whole separate rock, so Taylor picked out a new one with her bugs and carved 'weaponization of ideas, concepts, or communication', and promised to return to that one occasionally until she came up with a way of testing it out.
Then she returned to her notes on costumes. A costume was a tool, as best exemplified by her watch, which was a weapon, a communication device, protection, and all sorts of things. In that light, a costume could almost be an entire power itself. That was Garment, and tinkers like Apeiron and Armsmaster, in a nutshell.
Defining the problem again and again wasn't helping though. Taylor already knew that, because she was the one that wrote it down. She moved her bugs over to check through her rock notes on disproved tests. All types of energy- No she had electricity, magnetism, light, and even gamma rays and alpha particles from the radiation source in a smoke detector, but she'd skipped right over the most basic: heat. This was so obvious she wanted to kick herself. Her bugs popped open the freezer door, using a simple combination of leverage, spider silk, and invincibility. Then they grabbed an ice cube, and anchored it as part of her armor.
In a sensation of painfully obvious application, Taylor's bugs watched the ice not melt others of her swarm shut the freezer door. This was what she had missed: phase changes. She didn't even need grenades, just get ice, heat it up well past boiling while it's stuck in solid form, enclose it in a different shell of invincible material, and then turn off the invincibility effect on the ice. Now that she was really using her brain and applying herself, she could suspend the water grenade within a double shell that included a vacuum for insulation. Taylor planned to test the idea with spider silk threads for suspension of the double hulled shells, but made a note that if she did ever figure out a way to stabilize magnetic fields, then that would work better.
There, now she had an idea for making her own grenades. That was something and she felt better for having gotten further along with understanding how to actually use her armor correctly.
She'd have to come back to it again later, of course. If she could come up with a new use of her costume in just an hour after from Joe coming by and all but telling her that she hadn't figured out the full usage of it, then this probably still wasn't the full extent of it. She started two new rocks, one titled with 'energy' and the other with 'concepts', and underlined the words a couple times. She was sure that at least one of those two categories could be used as an invulnerable extension of her costume. Maybe she'd ask Lisa for help. That felt like cheating though, and she'd resisted. Lisa seemed stressed enough from trying to make the best use of her own watch and tools, so putting more pressure on her for what Taylor felt was really her own responsibility seemed unfair.
With at least some progress though, Taylor felt better about moving on to her healing and finding out how little her healing was limited, just like how only using her watch to tell time was a massive waste. She read the manual, checked a couple things with the onboard VI, and then started practicing. For that, she had to go down the basement. Turning off her sensation of pain was weird, but it certainly helped make the sensation of learning how to punch hard enough to break all the bones in her hands only weird instead of really painful. She tried it a few more times with kicks and headbutts as well, for thoroughness. Still, that felt pretty basic. Punching hard was hiliariously nothing compared to the Celestial Forge, so that likely wasn't even on the list of what she was supposed to use her healing for.
The first real idea that made her list was materials. Healing regenerated her body, and without pain, that meant she had a ready supply of materials. If she even needed a baton, well, she could regenerate a leg and a leg bone would work great in a pinch. Between spider silk and finger bones, she could probably make on demand some great small leverage devices in general, to take advantage of leverage and invulnerability.
She practiced that a bit, and felt like she was making some real progress. Even if this was just the basic stuff, it was coming easier than figuring out how to extend the invulnerability of her costume into cutting threads. Figuring out how to think about things, instead of just reading a manual, was possibly as important a skill as anything else for being a cape.
The thinking about things soon took priority. Not because she was willing to stop practicing, and she needed to get better at pain tolerance anyway, but because even her endless swarm from her shopping bag was starting to have trouble keeping up with all the blood. Her dad would ask some awkward questions, if she didn't clean up properly.
Such was the exciting life of being a herioc cape. Through the use of leverage, spider silk, and invulnerability, a mop and bucket launched up from a corner and into Taylor's hands. At least mopping would give her plenty of time to think. After some disgruntlement over her lack of forethought in not laying down some plastic sheeting, Taylor stated cleaning up her blood. As she worked, she made notes about healing.
The first thought was portability. With healing, all that mattered was time. If she had to retreat, all she really needed was her head. Joe's tinkertech was probably more important in an emergency. In such a case, Taylor decided she could just cut her head off and fling it- fling herself? -to safety.
Actually, that was an important point: how much of herself counted as herself? Could she cut her head in half and end up as twins? Could she just keep doubling? Wait a couple hours and have hundreds of versions of herself able to help out the Celestial Forge by taking care of small problems? Her dad probably wouldn't approve, so she doubted that she was on the right track. Just to be sure, she checked with her watch and confirmed that the healing intrinsically could only regenerate her into a single instance of herself, and for safety reasons, wouldn't regenerate any foreign objects.
That was a lightbulb moment. Her healing was a safety net, for dangers she encountered as a hero but also for self-improvement. Taylor was already exercising of course, but human bodies were just kind of limited. Now though, she had healing and could build on the foundation of her body more directly.
This time, Taylor laid out some plastic sheeting. She had a couple of false starts, with a big one being balancing the invulnerable nature of her costume being both something worn and now also inside her body, but also just that her body was already full of stuff like organs and muscles. Putting metal spikes and support inside her hands for punching, and most importantly making them strong enough to help without her costume, made her hands look weird and she took them out. Still, weaving spidersilk protective layers around all her muscles and organs proved both really useful and educational. Lungs were bigger than she thought, and hearts as well. In contrast, she had no idea where her gall bladder was in her torso. Unless the organ had a particularly well known shape, Taylor was pretty sure she would not be able to provide ready sources of emergency organ transplants while out and about as a hero. She'd also probably have to grope around a bit to find a particular one, or lay them all out on a sidewalk or something. That would be both rather embrassingly and slow. Studying anatomy got added to her never ending list of things she needed to know to be a good hero.
She also made a note to buy a lot of plastic bags and sheets, and some sponges. Bodies were messy. Some more bleach too; the house supply was getting kind of low from today's efforts.
While she was able to more firmly anchor her eyeballs in place, she had to give up on a set of artificial secondary eyelids. Her healing would just reset the muscles she attached to them. She supposed though that if she got hit with a flashbang or something, her healing would suffice. It worked pretty quickly the one time she broke an eye while sheathing it, so she supposed she could rely on it for now.
At the few hours mark, Taylor felt like she'd made a good start. She hadn't thought about healing much previously. It was just the sort of thing Panacea could do. It was important, maybe the most important support power that New Wave and the Protectorate had, but that just proved how important actually thinking about problems was for self-improvement. Maybe she could go talk to Panacea, after the hero got cleared of whatever the details on that misunderstanding were between her and Apeiron. Panacea probably new loads of ways to use her healing, and might be willing to talk shop.
It was like her dad said occasionly, a body can spend most of their time thinking with their brain or they can spend most of their time sweating with their muscles. Doing the first one is smart. Taylor had to just shake her head over her past actions, before meeting Joe and really udnerstanding how much of being a good hero was all about using her brain.
Using her brain...
Which could heal, with no danger of spontaneous duplication or other problems.
Taylor sighed, and was at least grateful that she wouldn't have to show her work and how improving the most basic and important tool of being a hero only occured to her hours after figuring out that she could use her leg bone as a club.
She promptly spread out a piece of plastic, laid down, and started rummaging around the old noggin.
Some hours latter, things clicked into place.
========
Without preamble, Fleet's various instances all cross checked and reported the same thing: Taylor's passenger had instantly stopped all communication with the other shards. Fleet, Survey, and The Matrix began back tracing the most recently received signals, searching for a larger shard or some other possible indication of the cause. Only a second later, the shard resumed communication. Messages came in a burst, catching up with the delay and the settling back into the prior rate as if nothing had happened.
Closer though than the other shards, things were no longer consistent. The shard was flexing, for lack of a better term, as if it was stretching out its physical capabilities. Even as a message went out to Apeiron, the shard added spatial, temporal, and the manipulation of other energies to the local pertubations.
Ripples bumped into the Final Frontier. The ship rode them safely, despite the vast size difference between the continent of the shard and the mountain of the ship. The sudden grip of space warping going absolutely rigid and imperturbable to all sensors did strain the interial dampeners as space itself gripped the Final Frontier.
Trapped in an intangible fist, the force dragged the ship close to the massively larger shard. Radio, sonar, and every other form of exotic energy associated with the shards scanned the Final Frontier.
Then another wave of those energies took on a different form.
[It's kind of small for a probe, but I bet there's a microphone on it somewhere.]
[Hello? Hello? Is this thing broadcasting or just recording?]
[I'm trying to reach Apeiron of the Celestial Forge]
"Aperion to the bridge." Fleet announced over the comm.
Taylor thanked Joe again, and she closed the door while he walked away from her house.
Odd, the door handle; she considered it in her thoughts. It was made of metal, a barely noticed object but a part of her life that she interacted with almost daily. She could destroy that handle from just the most basic application of the abilities she now recognized as so much more than just the armor costume Joe gave her to prove herself. She could cut it into paper thin sheets with barely a thought or effort, and that was possibly the true potential of the gift. Maybe that was all there was, and so Joe gave her a new test of her abilities to use his profoundly powerful equipment appropriately.
She didn't stumble, but another thought burst into her consideration on her way up to her room. Maybe this test was about seeing if she would stop striving to improve with what she already had in favor of something new and shiny. That could be it, she nodded to herself. Automated healing was pretty hands off, unlike learning how to best use a tool that worked as just armor when a user didn't bother trying to understand the full potential. Maybe there was some trick beyond or separate from the real use of invulnerable and nearly invisible cutting wires with the use of her bugs.
Sighing, Taylor sat down at the little desk in her room. She was going to have to go through her notes and look for assumptions about how her 'armor' worked. The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed that just extending its invulnerability outward for cutting up stuff within the range of her bugs wasn't really the intended usage. Cutting stuff up was what her knife did after all, and maybe the cutting threads was just meant as more of a side benefit to however she was supposed to be using it. Still, that did make keeping her notes secure much easier. Cutting tiny little tunnels a hundred feet underground, and then carving her notes into the thousands of rocks down there with the tips of needle points held by her insects was certainly a step up from just keeping a paper notebook with a simple cipher. She still used a cipher though. Nothing stopped somebody from just digging up the rocks, if they used some Thinker power to learn about them.
Physical objects made sense, as an extension of 'just armor'. Unbreakable spider silk threads for cutting, jamming doors open or shut with beetles, forcing capsaicin laden flies into peoples sinuses with no lost bugs, and that sort of thing just seemed so obvious in retrospect. The effects wasn't meant for energy, as near as she could tell. She'd tried a bunch to extend the effect to light, magnetism, and electricity without success. Single photon wide threads of light would be actually invisible, while a shield of solidified magnetism seemed like the sort of thing that would be useful. Trying to extend the effect to electricity was more of a thoroughness thing. She couldn't think of much she could do with that beside shooting lightning at people, which wasn't very interesting. Her watch could shock somebody at close range, while further out she could just cut them up or tie them up, depending on what made sense at the time.
Still, as near as she could tell, the invulnerability effect of her costume only applied to physical stuff. That is to say, stuff made of atoms, and all her attempts to figure out a possible trick for applying the effect to energy just failed. Sighing, she elected to not repeat those tests, and no new ideas on that front occurred to her either. So, if the invulnerability effect applied to atoms, what had she missed? She had tiny threads, for slicing through everything she'd been able to test. She had sheets and rolls of paper, for shields. Maybe she was too focused on the invulnerability and not on the costume part of the description? Was that a thing? Garment was only a costume, and she did fine as a rogue?
That sounds promising. So Taylor picked out a new rock underground, and carved in code what translated as 'What does having a costume mean?' at the top. A costume was something she wore, that was obvious but worth getting out of the way. A costume communicated, though that was more a requirement for Garment than a thing she needed. Still, Taylor left some space there for later. She couldn't think of a way of weaponizing communication, but it was at least novel. Maybe she could make an idea part of her armor, in the same way as her threads. Maybe the concept of a shield or two dimensional surface could exist as part of a her armor. Even her weakest bug could slice through anything of any size, if she could only attach the idea of an arbitrarily shaped 2D surface to the bug. Anything threatening innocent people, she could just slice up then. Or shield the innocent people from the attack she supposed, but that wasn't really dealing with a problem, that was just delaying a problem for later.
That was more than nothing actually, and Taylor happily carved those ideas into the rock. This was the benefit of trustworthy people testing each other. They weren't just given basic stuff and left to flub around with it, but testing and experimenting helped people learn. This was probably worth a whole separate rock, so Taylor picked out a new one with her bugs and carved 'weaponization of ideas, concepts, or communication', and promised to return to that one occasionally until she came up with a way of testing it out.
Then she returned to her notes on costumes. A costume was a tool, as best exemplified by her watch, which was a weapon, a communication device, protection, and all sorts of things. In that light, a costume could almost be an entire power itself. That was Garment, and tinkers like Apeiron and Armsmaster, in a nutshell.
Defining the problem again and again wasn't helping though. Taylor already knew that, because she was the one that wrote it down. She moved her bugs over to check through her rock notes on disproved tests. All types of energy- No she had electricity, magnetism, light, and even gamma rays and alpha particles from the radiation source in a smoke detector, but she'd skipped right over the most basic: heat. This was so obvious she wanted to kick herself. Her bugs popped open the freezer door, using a simple combination of leverage, spider silk, and invincibility. Then they grabbed an ice cube, and anchored it as part of her armor.
In a sensation of painfully obvious application, Taylor's bugs watched the ice not melt others of her swarm shut the freezer door. This was what she had missed: phase changes. She didn't even need grenades, just get ice, heat it up well past boiling while it's stuck in solid form, enclose it in a different shell of invincible material, and then turn off the invincibility effect on the ice. Now that she was really using her brain and applying herself, she could suspend the water grenade within a double shell that included a vacuum for insulation. Taylor planned to test the idea with spider silk threads for suspension of the double hulled shells, but made a note that if she did ever figure out a way to stabilize magnetic fields, then that would work better.
There, now she had an idea for making her own grenades. That was something and she felt better for having gotten further along with understanding how to actually use her armor correctly.
She'd have to come back to it again later, of course. If she could come up with a new use of her costume in just an hour after from Joe coming by and all but telling her that she hadn't figured out the full usage of it, then this probably still wasn't the full extent of it. She started two new rocks, one titled with 'energy' and the other with 'concepts', and underlined the words a couple times. She was sure that at least one of those two categories could be used as an invulnerable extension of her costume. Maybe she'd ask Lisa for help. That felt like cheating though, and she'd resisted. Lisa seemed stressed enough from trying to make the best use of her own watch and tools, so putting more pressure on her for what Taylor felt was really her own responsibility seemed unfair.
With at least some progress though, Taylor felt better about moving on to her healing and finding out how little her healing was limited, just like how only using her watch to tell time was a massive waste. She read the manual, checked a couple things with the onboard VI, and then started practicing. For that, she had to go down the basement. Turning off her sensation of pain was weird, but it certainly helped make the sensation of learning how to punch hard enough to break all the bones in her hands only weird instead of really painful. She tried it a few more times with kicks and headbutts as well, for thoroughness. Still, that felt pretty basic. Punching hard was hiliariously nothing compared to the Celestial Forge, so that likely wasn't even on the list of what she was supposed to use her healing for.
The first real idea that made her list was materials. Healing regenerated her body, and without pain, that meant she had a ready supply of materials. If she even needed a baton, well, she could regenerate a leg and a leg bone would work great in a pinch. Between spider silk and finger bones, she could probably make on demand some great small leverage devices in general, to take advantage of leverage and invulnerability.
She practiced that a bit, and felt like she was making some real progress. Even if this was just the basic stuff, it was coming easier than figuring out how to extend the invulnerability of her costume into cutting threads. Figuring out how to think about things, instead of just reading a manual, was possibly as important a skill as anything else for being a cape.
The thinking about things soon took priority. Not because she was willing to stop practicing, and she needed to get better at pain tolerance anyway, but because even her endless swarm from her shopping bag was starting to have trouble keeping up with all the blood. Her dad would ask some awkward questions, if she didn't clean up properly.
Such was the exciting life of being a herioc cape. Through the use of leverage, spider silk, and invulnerability, a mop and bucket launched up from a corner and into Taylor's hands. At least mopping would give her plenty of time to think. After some disgruntlement over her lack of forethought in not laying down some plastic sheeting, Taylor stated cleaning up her blood. As she worked, she made notes about healing.
The first thought was portability. With healing, all that mattered was time. If she had to retreat, all she really needed was her head. Joe's tinkertech was probably more important in an emergency. In such a case, Taylor decided she could just cut her head off and fling it- fling herself? -to safety.
Actually, that was an important point: how much of herself counted as herself? Could she cut her head in half and end up as twins? Could she just keep doubling? Wait a couple hours and have hundreds of versions of herself able to help out the Celestial Forge by taking care of small problems? Her dad probably wouldn't approve, so she doubted that she was on the right track. Just to be sure, she checked with her watch and confirmed that the healing intrinsically could only regenerate her into a single instance of herself, and for safety reasons, wouldn't regenerate any foreign objects.
That was a lightbulb moment. Her healing was a safety net, for dangers she encountered as a hero but also for self-improvement. Taylor was already exercising of course, but human bodies were just kind of limited. Now though, she had healing and could build on the foundation of her body more directly.
This time, Taylor laid out some plastic sheeting. She had a couple of false starts, with a big one being balancing the invulnerable nature of her costume being both something worn and now also inside her body, but also just that her body was already full of stuff like organs and muscles. Putting metal spikes and support inside her hands for punching, and most importantly making them strong enough to help without her costume, made her hands look weird and she took them out. Still, weaving spidersilk protective layers around all her muscles and organs proved both really useful and educational. Lungs were bigger than she thought, and hearts as well. In contrast, she had no idea where her gall bladder was in her torso. Unless the organ had a particularly well known shape, Taylor was pretty sure she would not be able to provide ready sources of emergency organ transplants while out and about as a hero. She'd also probably have to grope around a bit to find a particular one, or lay them all out on a sidewalk or something. That would be both rather embrassingly and slow. Studying anatomy got added to her never ending list of things she needed to know to be a good hero.
She also made a note to buy a lot of plastic bags and sheets, and some sponges. Bodies were messy. Some more bleach too; the house supply was getting kind of low from today's efforts.
While she was able to more firmly anchor her eyeballs in place, she had to give up on a set of artificial secondary eyelids. Her healing would just reset the muscles she attached to them. She supposed though that if she got hit with a flashbang or something, her healing would suffice. It worked pretty quickly the one time she broke an eye while sheathing it, so she supposed she could rely on it for now.
At the few hours mark, Taylor felt like she'd made a good start. She hadn't thought about healing much previously. It was just the sort of thing Panacea could do. It was important, maybe the most important support power that New Wave and the Protectorate had, but that just proved how important actually thinking about problems was for self-improvement. Maybe she could go talk to Panacea, after the hero got cleared of whatever the details on that misunderstanding were between her and Apeiron. Panacea probably new loads of ways to use her healing, and might be willing to talk shop.
It was like her dad said occasionly, a body can spend most of their time thinking with their brain or they can spend most of their time sweating with their muscles. Doing the first one is smart. Taylor had to just shake her head over her past actions, before meeting Joe and really udnerstanding how much of being a good hero was all about using her brain.
Using her brain...
Which could heal, with no danger of spontaneous duplication or other problems.
Taylor sighed, and was at least grateful that she wouldn't have to show her work and how improving the most basic and important tool of being a hero only occured to her hours after figuring out that she could use her leg bone as a club.
She promptly spread out a piece of plastic, laid down, and started rummaging around the old noggin.
Some hours latter, things clicked into place.
========
Without preamble, Fleet's various instances all cross checked and reported the same thing: Taylor's passenger had instantly stopped all communication with the other shards. Fleet, Survey, and The Matrix began back tracing the most recently received signals, searching for a larger shard or some other possible indication of the cause. Only a second later, the shard resumed communication. Messages came in a burst, catching up with the delay and the settling back into the prior rate as if nothing had happened.
Closer though than the other shards, things were no longer consistent. The shard was flexing, for lack of a better term, as if it was stretching out its physical capabilities. Even as a message went out to Apeiron, the shard added spatial, temporal, and the manipulation of other energies to the local pertubations.
Ripples bumped into the Final Frontier. The ship rode them safely, despite the vast size difference between the continent of the shard and the mountain of the ship. The sudden grip of space warping going absolutely rigid and imperturbable to all sensors did strain the interial dampeners as space itself gripped the Final Frontier.
Trapped in an intangible fist, the force dragged the ship close to the massively larger shard. Radio, sonar, and every other form of exotic energy associated with the shards scanned the Final Frontier.
Then another wave of those energies took on a different form.
[It's kind of small for a probe, but I bet there's a microphone on it somewhere.]
[Hello? Hello? Is this thing broadcasting or just recording?]
[I'm trying to reach Apeiron of the Celestial Forge]
"Aperion to the bridge." Fleet announced over the comm.
I thought his official threat profile had a funhouse-mirror version of his actual stranger power that this would be consistent with, didn't it?
Well, almost.
Lisa would surely conclude that it's like this except he has the ability to reactivate it at will instead of it exclusively applying to people who are unfamiliar with him.
- Location
- <CLASSIFIED>
Nice one.
But now I want a part II.
JoshuaSweetvale
Insectovore
- Location
- NL, 65 Million Years Ago
Welp. Joe's at Commander Drich's level now. Brutally Efficient Von Neumann Wizard A.I.
Passenger space has fluid physics and dimensions; constantly being rearranged, as would be expected from Sufficiently Advanced Animals.
Joe finally seems to understand just how much of an advantage he has over the magitech homogenizing swarm. Negentropy is Boundless.
Trinity Survey tripping over that bible that I pulled out when talking about what Joe wearing Tetra would look like...
Good to see Aisha's Shard is open to discourse.
Hi Broadcast. Hi Q.A. Hello Heartbreaker; interesting to see that one doing its own dominance play by churning out buds en masse.
Indeed, if the Thinker was still around, maybe she'd be auditing shards like Broadcast and slapping them down.
And that last sentence is a blatant shot at Cauldron, even if Joe doesn't know it yet. ^_^
Interesting to see Joe and Survey mistaking Dragon's biotech work for a biological origin, and them still not knowing about Cauldron (beside a vague awareness of Contessa and Numberman), or about Eden for that matter.
Yet.
Passenger space has fluid physics and dimensions; constantly being rearranged, as would be expected from Sufficiently Advanced Animals.
Joe finally seems to understand just how much of an advantage he has over the magitech homogenizing swarm. Negentropy is Boundless.
Trinity Survey tripping over that bible that I pulled out when talking about what Joe wearing Tetra would look like...
Good to see Aisha's Shard is open to discourse.
Hi Broadcast. Hi Q.A. Hello Heartbreaker; interesting to see that one doing its own dominance play by churning out buds en masse.
Indeed, if the Thinker was still around, maybe she'd be auditing shards like Broadcast and slapping them down.
And that last sentence is a blatant shot at Cauldron, even if Joe doesn't know it yet. ^_^
Interesting to see Joe and Survey mistaking Dragon's biotech work for a biological origin, and them still not knowing about Cauldron (beside a vague awareness of Contessa and Numberman), or about Eden for that matter.
Yet.
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Yes, and this is exactly why I think it's contrived and stupid that Joe hasn't figured out that Dragon is an AI. The reasoning for him not figuring it out is a house of cards on a house of cards on a house of card on a house of cards on a house of cards. I didn't say it was impossible for him to not have figured it out, just that it was contrived and stupid.
Edit: I decided to expand a bit. It really seems to me like, at an earlier point in the story, LordRoustabout had decided on a scene or event where Joe figured out that Dragon is an AI and so he's holding off on that realization for the payout. The problem is that the other parts of the story have delayed that payout long enough that Joe's powers and knowledge have grown past the point were it's reasonable for him to not have figured it out. I'm not even saying that continuing to delay Joe's realization is wrong for the story, we have gone this far, it might be best to keep going to get to the scene in question. But that doesn't mean it's not contrived at this point, it being stupid is admittedly mostly frustration speaking.
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- Location
- Malaysia
For us it's contrived and stupid because we already biased with knowledge Dragon is an AI. Problem for Joe is that he also biased in his view and knowledge cause he known AI from pure code and machine and not Dragon who are using biotech and also the fact that Dragon simulated being so well that Joe didn't notice and Joe passenger is probably purposely not hinting that Dragon is an AI.