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Brockton's Celestial Forge (Worm/Jumpchain)

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Nimeroni said:
No. The only reason Joe put up with Lisa is because he need to protect Taylor (due to her perceived importance for the end of the world). Joe will be pissed, but not end-of-collaboration pissed.
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There is also that, as he put it himself waaaaaay back, he genuinely likes the Undies, and he doesn't want bad things to happen to them, so for now he is giving Lisa the benefit of the doubt given she is losing her shit over Joe doing anything, and he wants to give her peace of mind (as far as he can give given his actions).

Now, if Lisa was a bit less paranoid about Joe (justified as it is with how he acts), I think he would have actually give her some leeway on how he would act to the info. But since she haven't told him anything it's more likely that Joe will ignore any of her excuses and just dismantle the place.
 
Mesaphrom said:
(I do like Crystal though, hope shit doesn't hit the fan when she learns Joe=Ape)
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I don't think it'll blow up that much. My guess is Joe is going to tell Crystal on Saturday, as a precursor to them dating, because I doubt that he wants to hide him being HIM from the person who might become his Girlfriend. By that point, Joe would have cleared up the S9 and probably knocked out all of their legacy, and maybe even started cleaning up the city.

As for Joe causing the New Wave stuff, Crystal understands that Apeiron didn't cause New Wave to separate, nor did he force her parents apart. They already were in every way but name, trudging along due to inertia and the pressure to stay together that came from being a public facing superhero team. Apeiron just said the one thing that caused the house of cards to come tumbling down. It was going to happen sooner or later, so there's no real point in crying over spilled milk. Especially because it wouldn't have been any less public.
 
Narsauce said:
I don't think it'll blow up that much. My guess is Joe is going to tell Crystal on Saturday, as a precursor to them dating, because I doubt that he wants to hide him being HIM from the person who might become his Girlfriend.
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They just casually dating, not getting married. This entire thing might not even work out in the end. So telling before you move to something actually serious sounds to me kinda dumb. Secret identity is secret for a reason, if Joe didnt care about other people finding out he wouldn't have bothered with all his defenses.

Narsauce said:
As for Joe causing the New Wave stuff, Crystal understands that Apeiron didn't cause New Wave to separate, nor did he force her parents apart. They already were in every way but name, trudging along due to inertia and the pressure to stay together that came from being a public facing superhero team. Apeiron just said the one thing that caused the house of cards to come tumbling down. It was going to happen sooner or later, so there's no real point in crying over spilled milk. Especially because it wouldn't have been any less public.
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While that's a very logical stance to take, emotions dont care about logic at all and New Wave collapse was full of not exactly positive emotions for Crystal. She might understand that her family went to shit only due to their own actions but whether you like it or not, its Apeiron who was catalyst of said collapse.
 
LordRoustabout said:
Based on their reactions, I was probably lucky that my awareness of the contents of the Workshop meant they couldn't hide any more surprise projects for me to discover at a later date.
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Hmm, 'keeping a surprise secret' strikes me as a Common Household Problem (birthday/Christmas/anniversary presents, surprise parties, etc), and Joe has enough ability to work with memories that — despite now syncing memories with Triplicates before they dissipate — I'm fairly sure that memories could be flagged such that Joe Prime can't recall them, but his clones can…
 
Narsauce said:
I don't think it'll blow up that much. My guess is Joe is going to tell Crystal on Saturday, as a precursor to them dating, because I doubt that he wants to hide him being HIM from the person who might become his Girlfriend. By that point, Joe would have cleared up the S9 and probably knocked out all of their legacy, and maybe even started cleaning up the city.
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There was a WOG on it.

"If... if anything came out of this, will Joe actually admit to being Apeiron? Or would he be already in a point so high it no longer matters anyway? I found this pairing very light and easy to digest so I like reading it.":
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Joe wouldn't pursue a serious relationship while keeping that kind of secret. He would be okay with some hangouts and casual dates, but if things were looking to progress to the next level he'd either share his identity with Crystal or break things off, depending on how they were going. If he decides to reveal his identity it would be after he had a decent sense of how she would react, since that's not something he'd do casually. Like I've said in other comments, it's not the kind of thing that's likely to come up any time soon.
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Due to the "after he had a decent sense of how she would react", I'm pretty sure Joe identity reveal is still far off.
 
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ExploerTM said:
They just casually dating, not getting married. This entire thing might not even work out in the end. So telling before you move to something actually serious sounds to me kinda dumb. Secret identity is secret for a reason, if Joe didnt care about other people finding out he wouldn't have bothered with all his defenses.
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Nimeroni said:
Due to the "after he had a decent sense of how she would react", I'm pretty sure Joe identity reveal is still far off.
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Fair enough on that. I suppose I did jump the gun a bit on the identity reveal thing, especially on date one (did the coffee shop count as a date). That said, if they did become serious, like Nimeroni pointed out, Lord said Joe wouldn't keep that from someone he was in a serious relationship with. Or, for that matter someone he might eventually be in a serious relationship with.
ExploerTM said:
While that's a very logical stance to take, emotions dont care about logic at all and New Wave collapse was full of not exactly positive emotions for Crystal. She might understand that her family went to shit only due to their own actions but whether you like it or not, its Apeiron who was catalyst of said collapse.
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This is also true. Emotions would definitely run high and I have no doubt that Crystal would have more than a few choice words for Joe. But she is also an adult. And hell, I'd say the catalyst for New Wave's collapse was less Joe and more Neil revealing the infidelity. Joe's musings definitely did cause a spark, but despite easy access to a fire hose in the form of Amy, Neil went and threw a tub of gasoline onto it.

Not saying Crystal will be purely logical with the reveal, but she (probably) won't go apeshit on Joe because he pointed at a train wreck and said "Hey, that's a train wreck!"
 
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BelligerentGnu said:
Two - given what Tattletale has said, and what Joe knows about the Travelers, Survey should absolutely know everything there is to know about Coil and his operations by now. Sooooo......why hasn't she told Joe about it? I feel certain that Joe could do a long-distance ritual to completely analyze Noelle, and I'm sure Survey doesn't give the slightest shit about Tattletale's neuroses.

Not intended in an angry way at all, but it does seem like a plot hole now that I think about it.
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As far as I can see no one has specifically answered about Survey. Joe offered offhand for her to look into things for Lisa. Lisa vehemently said no. So that's that.

BelligerentGnu said:
I'm not confused about why she isn't telling Joe. I'm confused as to why Joe isn't picking up that Lisa is scared of his finding out about Dinah specifically. It feels like that would be a different flavour of nervous he would sense.
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Nimeroni said:
Additionally, you all forget that while Lisa knows Coil captured Dinah, she doesn't know it's for her power (and that he keep her drugged). As far as Lisa is concerned, Coil captured Dinah because she's the mayor niece.
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Travelers know about Dinah. Full on drugged up thinker in the basement because their loyalty was dependent on their perceived view on Coil providing help. Tattletale is fully up to speed on the Noelle's situation (I think). It wasn't mentioned on how board she was with the Travelers as a whole. However! So its only one missing link about Dinah if Tattletale look at the right places. All the pieces is there.

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Tattletale pov
LordRoustabout said:
It was insane. Even for Coil, it was insane. She was surprised she had been able to bluff her way through the briefing without screaming. To secure the Travelers, to fully bring them on board, Coil had provided her a full assessment of their situation, their abilities, and their liabilities.

Noelle's presence was a nightmare. The kind of cliché doomsday contingency that was only supposed to exist in bad movies. Coil knew this, knew what monstrous cape represented. Knew that Noelle's presence meant that any move against him would be unbelievably disastrous.
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Marissa pov
LordRoustabout said:
And when they arrived Coil showed them how he was so certain he would be able to help them. That little girl, drugged and forced to comply, a caged thinker, like you hear rumors about but hope to never see.
[...]
She realized too late that she had been staring blankly into the surface of the table. Any attempts to look like she was content with the situation were a lost cause. Fortunately, they had more than enough to talk about without needing to discuss the little girl in the hospital gown. Prophecies of hope delivered from the mouth of an abused child…
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So everyone in Travelers knows about Dinah's true situation and Tattletale knows what Coil has given her about the Travelers.
LordRoustabout said:
Normally it would have been concerning, but right now anything that allowed her an extra lever of control was a godsend. They were closed off, distrustful, emotionally stunted, and desperate. It was the same points of control that Coil had used to secure their services, but he wasn't the only one with access to those buttons.
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And she has been working to subvert the Travelers for herself. That means she's looking into their situation meaning its highly likely that she'll learn about Dinah's true situation. She'll scream the day she realises she need to either to come clean to Joe about that or know that he'll be very cross over her keeping silent about it. Lisa said it herself on how she thinks about kindness.
LordRoustabout said:
In a world of superpowers, only Joe had the strength needed to be kind. That conviction could be admirable, if it wasn't so frightening. Kindness and anger were two sides of the same coin, the capacity for one fueled the other. You had to care to take offense, and she worried about what would happen when that coin flipped. She just hoped she could keep it in the air long enough to make sure it landed in their favor.
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If anything she may get angry over Joe "lying" about his step-mom, or at least may rise some weird red flag 😅

PinkShadowReader said:
Tattletale is fully up to speed on the Noelle's situation (I think).
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IIRC (it's been a while) she knows how utterly damaged they are both psychologically and relationship wise, and how Noelle is the only thing keeping them barely working together, plus how much they are willing to let pass for whatever modicum of hope there is for curing her. And how desperate they are for Joe to be that cure. So much so that Lisa decided to play Coil's game to make sure they don't go the deep end and unleash Noelle onto the city in retaliation (or she herself escapes out of despair).

There was also that she wasn't sure if Joe could or would cure her, I think, but I can't be sure I remember right. I do remember her mentioning that Coil is banking way too much of his supossed ability to control Joe via contracts to make him heal Noelle, and that Lisa was scared of how wrong he was about that.
 
CircleTheSkies said:
To be honest, myself I'm more interested in to what extent this would naturally go the other way - that is, that by examining alien technology can he better understand the culture that originated it?
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Pretty far actually, form follows function, function follows need and needs are majorly shaped by culture.
Let's keep it Stargate for now and compare the Ha'Tak and the 304. They are both the mainline multirole capital ships, curiously the later constantly outperforms the former despite being technologically inferior in almost every way (we're not counting the Asgard pimped Odyssey), why? Simply the cultural difference between the SGC, and later the IOA, and the Goa'Uld. The snake's culture forces them to be wastefully over the top while the SGC, being an off the books operation, is as minimalist as they can while going for maximum efficiency. This results in a ship that, while inferior by all accounts, has more stuff on it if you go pound by pound. The O'neill quote about Staff weapons again really.

Or if you want a real life example just look at Roman and Aztec roads, while the main Roman roads are still being used today with few modifications the Aztec had to be redesigned because they were basically foot paths, they mainly used waterways to move goods.

Figuring that stuff is pretty much the biggest part of Archeology, and that's before you account for Touched by the Protoculture. Joe should get a fairly accurate idea of what kind of people made whatever artifacts he comes across.
 
famfrit said:
It's not really nothing given Lisa's call happened which was one of the events on the schedule even if only as a maybe due to the previous we don't have to do these every day thing.
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Nimeroni said:
Nothing ? We touched on the situation in the city with Lisa's call ("AAAAHHHH, THERE'S AN OUT OF CONTEXT TITANIUM MONKEY WREAKING OUR PLANS") and on the current proposal to deal with Jack's brainwashing (megadeus).
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Lisa's "checkups" are becoming repetitive as fuck. They are basically all the same. Lisa acting all anxious and trying not to be manipulative but triggering mental fortress anyway since trying not to trigger it counts as manipulation. Then the MC still pandering to her for some reason (yes, yes, I know. He is being "cautious" or whatever), then she panics at whatever Apeiron is doing and tries to get him to tone it down or at least not escalate
 
Xeno aercheology sinergizes well with studying tinker tech given is all eldritch alien enabled tech

Being witty at insults is also fun
 
Rem Freeman said:
Not this time.

Really enjoyed this chapter, though I do find it funny that Joe has to play the "romantic expert" when explaining to Garment that Flechette has a crush on him :rofl2:

Garment talking to Joe about Crystal: "You dunce, of course she likes you. You don't understand anything about romance!"
Joe: "Yeah, about that. You do know Flechette has a crush on you right?"
Garment: Surprised Pikachu face
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Garment: No she doesn't, she's only ever worn her costume around me.
Joe: Garment she HAS to wear that
 
readerdreamer said:
Not quite. She was very, very much reminded by her Trigger yes, but not enough for a Second Trigger. Remember, the last straw for Parian had been finding out that her father died. Unless her mom died during the charity show and she found out soon after she got herself chased out of the afterparty for accusing Joe, she wouldn't have been able to Second Trigger even without their help. She would've been much worse off without them, yes, but not Second Trigger levels.
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Except you forget it's been outright said her shard is fed up with the lack of conflict and so was fudging things to force a second trigger to get in on the sweet data and would have succeeded if it wasn't for that meddling kid and her mink.

BelligerentGnu said:
I'm not confused about why she isn't telling Joe. I'm confused as to why Joe isn't picking up that Lisa is scared of his finding out about Dinah specifically. It feels like that would be a different flavour of nervous he would sense.
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Lisa isn't thinking about Dinah because she doesn't care, is used to people who don't care and has been focused on everything else.

Tiz Goldeneye said:
I suspect the reason Joe's alien reverse engineering perks have stopped stacking in universe, is because out of universe even Lord can only write so many things a day. Like it would suck if Joe went, "Ok cool tracking Bakuda, so we will know where she is Friday morning" now the viewers expect him to find out about March, but whoops the S9 are attacking that day so now he can't attack Bakuda because in universe she is low priority, so the viewers don't get their pay off. This is why all projects in universe have been depriorotized over fighting Jack's shard for control of the network, because otherwise Joe is at a fast enough crafting speed and high enough tech level he would cause too many plot points to happen simultaneously.

I think this is also the reason the S9 keeps being delayed in universe due to stuff with curses, arguments, and random problems. If they were going to attack during their original timeframe Lord wouldn't be able to do any of his planned stuff for today regarding Joe learning Taylor's trigger, Brian's identity, healing the hostages etc. all long awaited plot points. So as a result things things in universe have coincidencely kept delaying the S9 until the 1 day a week Joe isn't busy (since if they were even a day later his schedule would be packed again). In universe this is probably Joe's luck powers, but out of universe this is Lord spacing events out for the readers.
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That doesn't really work tho because locating her is what 2-3 days away while the nine are the next morning and the only other thing for that day is the clean up after it and the only other thing for the day after is Joe meeting his dad for lunch so why not bring it forward to tomorrow evening or Saturday morning? One of the common complaints about bcf is that lord has a preset timeline of major events he doesn't update to account for new perks or even does things like nerf them or avoid tapping into them to avoid derailing it and then stick to it even when it means Joe is challenged by or loses to things he shouldn't.

This is especially a large factor when we consider that it also involves March who lord admitted only survived because he wanted to use her for something later and specifically gives her enough time to launch her plan, for Uber to build up alchemy enough to attempt to transfer her consciousness from shardspace and for Leet to feasibly finish his game grid instead of perks moving locating them forward and crushing them before it.
 
Nimeroni said:
Then it's a writing failure, because the chapter read like a 2nd trigger that got interrupted at the last second.
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That's on Worm's canon rules being they are, really. Wildbow declared that for a
Second Trigger to occur, it's not enough for things to be very traumatic. I can see the reasoning for this - given the kind of things parahumans get up to and all the traumas they endure, if trauma alone was enough then there would be a lot more second Triggers. But it happens so rarely that people are remembered for having Second Triggers than the opposite.

So Wildbow stated that trauma alone wasn't enough - thus bringing in the concept of Sechen ranges. For you to be closer to your passenger in terms of connection, you have to be in a mental state as close as possible to your original Trigger. For a Second Trigger? Basically you have to repeat the entire circumstances of what led to your Trigger happening, which is why not every traumatized cape gets bonus powers. Sure, you could lose all your limbs and suffer complete immobility for the rest of your life, that's traumatic - but if you got your powers from being beaten up and not from losing limbs then it doesn't matter for your passenger.

Here in Parian's case, it's basically that. She got really close to her Trigger circumstances - the feeling of being persecuted, the feeling of isolating herself due to her paranoia, and then destroying her reputation by blowing up in public and saying the wrong things, yes these are all things that Parian's Trigger was about. But without that last step, that sudden and immediate loss of a loved one and someone she cares for? Parian couldn't Second Trigger. Mind you, she was still very much messed up and having an emotional breakdown at the experience, yes, but ultimately her passenger doesn't care for what she feels so much as whether she was in the same state as to when her Trigger happened.
famfrit said:
Except you forget it's been outright said her shard is fed up with the lack of conflict and so was fudging things to force a second trigger to get in on the sweet data and would have succeeded if it wasn't for that meddling kid and her mink.
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Nope, all of the explanation I just posted above? That's from LordRoustabout's WoGs shortly before, during, and after the charity show chapters. It had been repeatedly stated that the lack of the loss of a parent was what kept her from Second Triggering.

One such WoG.
 
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readerdreamer said:
That's on Worm's canon rules being they are, really. Wildbow declared that for a
Second Trigger to occur, it's not enough for things to be very traumatic. I can see the reasoning for this - given the kind of things parahumans get up to and all the traumas they endure, if trauma alone was enough then there would be a lot more second Triggers. But it happens so rarely that people are remembered for having Second Triggers than the opposite.

So Wildbow stated that trauma alone wasn't enough - thus bringing in the concept of Sechen ranges. For you to be closer to your passenger in terms of connection, you have to be in a mental state as close as possible to your original Trigger. For a Second Trigger? Basically you have to repeat the entire circumstances of what led to your Trigger happening, which is why not every traumatized cape gets bonus powers. Sure, you could lose all your limbs and suffer complete immobility for the rest of your life, that's traumatic - but if you got your powers from being beaten up and not from losing limbs then it doesn't matter for your passenger.

Here in Parian's case, it's basically that. She got really close to her Trigger circumstances - the feeling of being persecuted, the feeling of isolating herself due to her paranoia, and then destroying her reputation by blowing up in public and saying the wrong things, yes these are all things that Parian's Trigger was about. But without that last step, that sudden and immediate loss of a loved one and someone she cares for? Parian couldn't Second Trigger. Mind you, she was still very much messed up and having an emotional breakdown at the experience, yes, but ultimately her passenger doesn't care for what she feels so much as whether she was in the same state as to when her Trigger happened.

Nope, all of the explanation I just posted above? That's from LordRoustabout's WoGs shortly before, during, and after the charity show chapters. It had been repeatedly stated that the lack of the loss of a parent was what kept her from Second Triggering.

One such WoG.
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Indeed but here's some other ones from after it that say had Survey and Tetra not been supporting her and instead chewed her out then she could have been pushed over the edge and second triggered.

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With this one being most of what I referred to

lord wog said:
Normally, this kind of situation wouldn't be enough for someone to second trigger. Second triggers are very rare and require extreme situations that mirror the original trigger. The thing is, for mental triggers (mostly master, stranger, thinker, and tinker) the person's mental state is more important than the reality of the situation. It doesn't actually matter if the situation is actually as bad as her first trigger as long as they're seeing things that way and experiencing the correct level of emotion. You also had a very rare situation where Parian's Shard actually wanted her to second trigger. Normally Shards try to avoid second triggers as it's very much a last resort measure, but Parian has been a sedentary cape with minimal conflict who's suddenly been thrown into a situation where there's an immense amount of potential data just waiting for her. Because of that, the threshold for second triggering is much lower for Parian, particularly if she can think herself into the right mindset. It's important to remember that Parian didn't trigger on hearing about her father's death, she triggered in the depression and isolation that followed his passing. The actual inciting incident is the hopelessness and isolation, everything else is set up.
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