Brockton's Celestial Forge (Worm/Jumpchain)

[Dylan101]

It's not just that she's blind. It's that she's only capable of observing through precog, and based on the wording of the perk all precognition attributes changes made by Joe to something else. She's blind, and can't possibly conceive of Joe at all, because to her he doesn't exist.

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? The perk makes it so precog can't pick you up and if they force it it returns a Zero-Sum error. Not that actions are attributed to someone else. The Simurgh has fought people it can't see with its precog(or postcog as well) by abusing the fact while it can't see what actions they did, it can see the effects of their actions.

It also does nothing about the fact the Simurgh has postcognition as well. The perk only affects precog as written, but the Simurgh can look at the past as well.

 

[yoduda]

? The perk makes it so precog can't pick you up and if they force it it returns a Zero-Sum error. Not that actions are attributed to someone else.

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That's what it means by a zero-sum error. As in it starts with the flawed premise that the precog is accurate, and missatributes any inconsistencies to other unplottable factors. I hadn't considered that it wouldn't block post-cog, that would give her a way of attributing the changes to Joe.

Anyway it's irrelevant considering the other measures Joe took. She won't be able to notice the problem before it's far too late.

Considering it only blocks precog it's kind of a horrible power on it's own for dealing with the Simurgh. It puts a giant red target on you as soon as you do anything notable.

 

[Red_Faux]

Doesn't Joe have some powers that negate any and all power copying? Cause that would effect Noelle as well. And it doesn't matter if Noelle copies all his friends, he can defeat everyone here a hundred times over. Hell, if he wanted, he could completely, conceptually, annihilate her from existence. She's not a very good shield

 

[Darth Bayes]

This is an example of what happens when a preamble takes over a chapter.

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This definitely read like that.

I really enjoyed the chapter, and I got the impression that you did too.

The mention of Lisa having a reserve felt kind of odd, I definitely had the impression that it was more just exponential growth of thinker headache starting very slowly, and that it would be basically impossible to quantify due to the shard valuing questions oddly, combining resources-require-to-answer, likely-amount-of-conflict/data-generated, and does-this-feel-like-a-worthwhile-use-of-(computational/thinker-headache-capacity)-resources, perhaps.

Lisa also seems to be getting less value from the sechen range than I'd have expected. Actually, have we had confirmation on whether his tech prompts the sechen range? My guess would be that it does until it is sufficiently analyzed/understood and that Joe's team being autonomous and complex and the glove being ontologically hazardous or something would leave her 100% in sechen range while analyzing them for the foreseeable future with near-100% tinker-headache-generation discounts.

Also, I recall someone (I think it was Dr Dire?) saying that Somer's Rock was "classy" not because it was a high-quality bar, but because it hit all the right tropes in a not-really-easy-to-do way (e.g. deaf waitress, general atmosphere). While I could understand Matrix not noticing or caring about that, I'd expect someone interested in old movies like the ones they've watched to make a counterargument along those lines. Survey? Aisha? Duplicate?

 

[StormRider]

This is amazing in so many ways.

First. Lisa does not come out well here. And at the same time she does. She's completely thrown for a loop by simple kindness from Joe. At the same time she's still trying to control the situation instead of just sharing the relevant details with someone that she knows wants to help.

Second, if Contessa shows up she is screwed. A woman that has never really needed to develop most life skills because her power can puppet her through most actions against someone she can't predict at all?

Third, this Summit is about to be interesting...in the Chinese proverb sense. Joe now has the protection he's been waiting for. Now he doesn't need to he nearly as cautious as before, even if he's still likely to be. He is now entirely capable laying down the law in the Bay.

 

[Altered]

I think a funny if somewhat maybe semi important thing here is the fact that Joe believes he was Armsmaster - this is going to force some sympathetic looks his way. Especially since he'll be forced to wonder that if he's Armsmaster and suffered his family shit in another universe - what the fuck is this Armsmaster going through?

 

[Spidey_phd]

Considering Contessa was able to remove powers with a bullet and Joe just got maximum nanotechnology I could see him being able to just take powers away from his enemies. Short of breakers, Case 53s, Endbringers and Scion that's going to one hit KO most enemies.

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Man with knife: "I am Jack Slash."

Apeiron. "No, you were Jack Slash. Now you are just Jacob. Based on the game of Rock-Paper-Scissors going on behind you, you are soon going to be either lunch or a medical experiment."

 

[The Shallow]

Clone is flat out Evil and has Joe's Memories...

CloneJoe!: Let me take care of all family meetings, I promise to treat all members as they should have been treated.
Joe!: No
CloneJoe!: Please, they are legitimately bad people to the extent that your powers are telling you they are bad.
Joe!: ...No

Joe's clone gets fixated on fixing the family problem because Joe still has feelings for them meaning he is driven to destroy them and is smart enough not to fight Joe.

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I actually love the idea of Joe reforming Tenebrion/Joedinger

Clone, appearing: Haha-! Ah fucking fuck, I stand down!
Joe: ???
Clone: Apeiron, I have all your damn memories, I know I literally can't do shit to you. Also holy shit our original power is really fucking annoying. I really want a sample of your god-fucked muscles and some biomass right now...
Joe: ...Aren't you meant to be evil?
Clone: Well I am basically your opposite in most damn ways, including your shitty 'morals', but I'm not gonna push you now, am I?
Joe: Yup, I can see that, your tone comes off inherently douche-y.
Clone: Yeah go fuck yourself too.
Joe: You really are liberal with your swears aren't you?
Noelle: ...Umm, Apeiron...
Joe: Oh, yeah, of course, just a second.
Clone: Could I turn her into a project instead?
Dupe1: Nope! I'll be taking you back to the lab, right now!
Clone: Damnit!

Also yeah biggest threat from a clone is breaking out and doing bullshit like using Alchemy to create Philosiphers Stones to try to create an anti-Joe weapon. Probably would use brute powers("god-fucked" biology) to kidnap various capes to create a massive alchemical homuncul-beast powered by philosopher stones.

 

[Spidey_phd]

Tybalt is his cousin. They share a grandma in Hera.

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It's Greek mythology. None of the regular family relationships make any sense.

Case in point: Aphrodite is effectively the severed genitals of Zeus' grandfather. Olympus nearly had a civil war between the gods fighting to hook up with her.

 

[Mesaphrom]

The unwritten rules are overblown. The gangs don't really give a shit about any of them except the 'no unmasking' rule, as can be seen from the numerous times that they try to kill other capes in canon.

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"The rules are rules as long as the person in power says so" or something along this lines. In Worm it tends to be "as long as you can get away with it, there is no rules". One also have to keep into account that BB is kind of a shit hole, a shit hole awknowledge by people in universe to be a shit hole, and from what I remember the rules are actually followed outside of BB, though "rules" is a misnomer, "guidelines of conduct" would be more appropiate.

Hell, didn't people thought that Clock was being naive when he was complaining about Taylor breaking the rules for the tenth time that month?

And with that out of the way, Joe now have Miniaturization, and you know what that means? Garment will start to pout over Joe not having to go full barbarian to use his Striker Unit! AND he will be able to cram even more stuff in his Kickass Asskicking Boots of Kickassery!

 

[PostLifeSyndrome]

To quote Abridged Ichigo: "I sense a distant future explosion."

 

[Andorxor]

I think bringing a group can deescalate the situation instead of escalating it like Lisa fears.For the others without Thinkerpowers and knowledge about Joe,it is not "Oh shit Aperion has friends as powerful as him" for them it is "Aperion is not as powerful as we feared,he had his friends helping him".
Before it was one man holding all the power,now it is a group,still powerful but maybe managable. If the gangs think they can divide and conquer, they are less likely to go for nuclear options,like the ABB did.

 

[readerdreamer]

How so? At the end of the day, this is just 'and then my tech was an arbitrary amount more bullshit'. It doesn't let him do anything new, just do more stuff with less.

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It was more of the information attached to the Perk that was important. That is, the fact that OCP specifies that "it protects from the Simurgh, Scion, Contessa, but not Coil" gives quite a lot of information that Joe wouldn't figure out for much longer otherwise. Heck, Lisa points out herself - Joe really starts moving once he gets the right information and power, and he literally just got the exact power and information to point a finger at Coil that he wouldn't have otherwise.

 

[Leafy503]

Coil was the Undersiders' boss. He was the man in the shadows, looming over Tattletale and acting as a persistent threat to Taylor. A threat to both Taylor's role in preventing the end of the world, and whatever dangerous mission she had gotten caught up in. Another thing I had no information on and was leaving to someone else to sort out and hope for the best.

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Hmmm, maybe a "favor" from Uppercrust after he heals him? I'm sure that would be within the Elite's capabilities.

 

[PinkShadowReader]

And it was being wielded by a college drop out with serious family and emotional issues and an unstable relationship with the very aspects of his own power.

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Pot, meet kettle.
Oh the irony Lisa!

 

[novorek]

So, I'm honestly having a hard time telling. Are people glossing over the fact that Tybalt is a cat in their mind because he is using his power to make that unremarkable, or are they just looking at the cat walking around in Greek armor and going "eh, still not as crazy as the glowing thread monster and the 7 foot tall pure gold Gundam".

 

[Mesaphrom]

So, I'm honestly having a hard time telling. Are people glossing over the fact that Tybalt is a cat in their mind because he is using his power to make that unremarkable, or are they just looking at the cat walking around in Greek armor and going "eh, still not as crazy as the glowing thread monster and the 7 foot tall pure gold Gundam".

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One of his perks make it so people judge him only on his action, disregarding age, race, appearance, etc. So while they understand he is a cat, and see him as a cat, they don't see it as something to comment about or find strange, the will only do so on what Tybalt does.

 

[Foxy Boxes]

Man I was hoping for something to happen, there's been so much build up and I thought something was about to happen and then all that happened was people sat down and Lisa felt bad. What a disappointment.

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Ummm... You might want to examine your expectations then. Let's assume this covered the meeting in it's entirety: The only change would be adding "people talked."

 

[Foxy Boxes]

On Lisa's PoV:
I envy anyone capable of getting annoyed with her. To view her outlook as something so unreasonable as to be irritating.

I share exactly the same sentiments as her. As someone with... Well, low self-esteem over sells my self-esteem, and a naively trusting nature, she's entirely correct over just how much of a trap kindness can be.

 

[Graviator]

Her parents had tried to trap her in the house, bound through imposed guilt and obligation. Coil had built a web of fear, constructed out of a command of the situation that could not be challenged. In his own way, Joe was worse than either of them. He handed you the chains and let you put them on yourself.

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This is more illuminating about the dynamics between the Forge and shards than the rest of the chapter combined.

We've known for a while that Joe's presence yanks on nearby capes' Sechen ranges. Here, we see the mechanism. The shard's trying to overdrive Tattletale's analysis towards Joe, and needs to be at a high Sechen index to do so, so it repeatedly pulls her into analyzing him through the lens of her trigger event. It works, in that it gets her to focus her power on him and push its limits.

However, the means used to get that high Sechen index also cause her to come away from every interaction with Joe viewing it similarly in some respect to her trigger event. Since she uses her power so frequently, trigger event analogies become the defining feature of their relationship from her end. With that dynamic revealed, it's obviously happening to, say, Leet in Preamble 38. Leet's trying to live up to what he sees as a more fortunate version of himself, regardless of whether he should really be comparing himself to Apeiron.

Separately, the "gunning for him by doing absolutely nothing" quote I memed on yesterday appears to be Joe's precog misdirection applying to Tattletale's power when it tries to read his intent. It unfolds something like...

Power: Joe is planning to take down Coil.
Lisa: How?
Power (misdirected): By not doing anything in particular.
Power: Therefore, not doing anything in particular must be a reasonable strategy. Here's a good guess about how it works...

Adding in cosmic horror, in a comedic way, really brings home just how out of depth practically everyone is regarding Joe.

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Worm is already packed with cosmic horror elements under the hood. It's already sticking pieces of incomprehensible alien savants into people's brains causing violations of physics and common sense. It's already turning people into humanoid mutants or driving them insane. And even beyond the direct effects of shards on their hosts, the glove's brain-poke doesn't particularly stand out among the weirder master/stranger powers.

 

[Nimeroni]

Oh Lisa. You caught on so many details, and yet missed all the important ones.

Yes, Survey beauty could start a war like a modern Helen of Troy (I mean, she is Aphrodite step-granddaughter...), but you missed her 25 bazillions psi/biotics powers or that her stilettos are weapons.
You caught on the team loyalty toward Apeiron, but missed that this loyalty is because Apeiron is the team dad (literally in some case).
You think Joe is trying to manipulate you with his kindness, but you missed that he did that because he saw a bunch of bratty adolescents way over their heads, so he tried to be the responsible adult.

Does Joe actually wear a rig under his suit for efficiency of movement and I just forgot about that, or was Lisa's description of this based on her power drawing an incorrect conclusion? or was she talking about the micromanipulators?

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Joe have micro manipulators in his gloves. It's a 50 CP perk from Railgun. You can see it discussed on the PHO interlude about Joe VS Uber and Leet (2nd fight).

The Time constellation missed a connection as I turned and smiled at the waitress.

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Most important sentence in the chapter.

The neutrality of Somer's Rock just ended. The waitress is in love with Joe now.

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Yes, it's very important, but not because of that poor maiden heart. It's important because Apeiron did a strategy trance just before ordering drinks.

Doesn't Joe have some powers that negate any and all power copying? Cause that would effect Noelle as well. And it doesn't matter if Noelle copies all his friends, he can defeat everyone here a hundred times over. Hell, if he wanted, he could completely, conceptually, annihilate her from existence. She's not a very good shield

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No, he doesn't have a flat "can't be copied" power.

That being said, Noelle need to eat and physically connect to her target to start cloning. Joe is a massively powerful pyrokinetic that could easily keep himself shrouded in flames. Do the math.

Also, even if by miracle Noelle manage to copy Joe, his clone would have his original shard, not the celestial forge. The most the clones could do to inconvenience Joe would be saying something like "he have half a dozen S class threats in his workshop ! ...errr, suddenly, fighting him seems like a losing plan. Can... can we switch team ?".

So yeah, Joe is one of the safest cape against Noelle. Ironically, Lisa don't know that.

 

[JoshuaSweetvale]

-and someone named Contessa.

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Dear sweet holy fucking shit. (To quote Iain M. Banks) - But we'll return to that later!

Let's do this chronologically! To start off, Lisa's power:
It's trying to get her to attend fights in person. Does it allow her more bandwidth when her life's in danger and she hasn't noticed? 'Cuz Tattletale getting risk-averse from that sounds exactly like Leet's maladaptivity problem. ~This is why powers are parasites and not symbionts.~


Also:

Individual fiber diameter possibly subatomic. Complex structures formed from fiber. Current form emulation of biological systems. Organs present, emulated from fibers. Not limited to current form. Not limited. No limits.

She shook off that chain of thought before she could get caught in it.

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Negotiator is getting the tiniest whiff of that Gainax 'spiral energy' meta-canon. AKA true perpetual motion power; Shard catnip. - And then Negotiator and Lisa got mind-blasted by Cthulhu through the Avid Glove ^_^

Miniaturization and Efficiency.

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And you've gone and hit the jackpot. As other readers said, well-timed too! I was expecting the metanarrative conclusion that Earth Bet's also a 'verse for the Forge to pull from. What I wasn't expecting was the accidental hints in the discription! Those were never meant to be read by someone without in-story knowledge, leading to-

-and someone named Contessa. Upon hearing that name my passenger's interest spiked and it only took some minimal effort to put things together. The reaction was the same as what I'd experienced when warning Weld about investigating the origin of the Case 53s. Whoever Contessa was, she was deeply connected to them. And connected to a lot of other things from the feel of it.

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Oh you have no idea, but you'll see. Meet the college dropout Illuminati. (I still think there's an S.I. mind inside of Joe's old Shard, and can't wait for them to meet Jack and Broadcast. He he he.)


Lisa, warn Joe that Coil has a glitchy Titan. Warn him. Warn him about the defective Shard abomination eight-balled into existence by the Simurgh, before Joe gets deep-scanned and Echidna attempts to clone a (were-)demigod!

EDIT:

Military cat, lol. That's an understatement if there ever was but it sums it up nicely at the same time.

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/record scratch - Wait. So what power did Tybalt get?!
...10 pennies on 'Miss Militia'

 

[readerdreamer]

The idea that he can be immune to precog that way doesn't quite make sense.

If she can see the *effects* of his power, she can track him by the vibrations of his voice (from 1/100 second ago), the hole he makes in the air, other people seeing him, etc.

So precog immunity has to mean she can't see the effects of his power either. But his mere existence has big effects. For instance, if he didn't exist, every person in a battle would be in a completely different position than they are now, saying completely different words, etc. so she couldn't see *anyone* in the battle because he affects everyone's position. Because of the butterfly effect, she basically would not be able to see anything that isn't fixed to the ground since before he got his powers.

And that's not even considering that she can't screw with people's minds if their brain cells are 1/100 of an inch from the expected spot because they delayed something by 1/2 second because Apeiron walked through a door a week ago.

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Counterpoint: Fiat and literal divine magic.

 

[Nimeroni]

Power: Joe is planning to take down Coil.
Lisa: How?
Power (misdirected): By not doing anything in particular.
Power: Therefore, not doing anything in particular must be a reasonable strategy. Here's a good guess about how it works...

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To be fair to Negociator, that's one hell of a good guess, AND it check up with everything Lisa knows ("grow in power" at least, and maybe "trigger can't be precog-ed").

Lisa, warn Joe that Coil has a glitchy Titan. Warn him. Warn him about the defective Shard abomination eight-balled into existence by the Simurgh, before Joe gets deep-scanned and attempts to clone a (were-)demigod!

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Lisa would need to trust Joe. That won't happen.

(And, uh, Noelle is not really a threat to Joe, through Lisa have no way of knowing that)

 

[PinkShadowReader]

Joe have micro manipulators in his gloves. It's a 50 CP perk from Railgun. You can see it discussed on the PHO interlude about Joe VS Uber and Leet (2nd fight).

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Apeiron wears Garment literally right now. Are you saying that he has micro manipulators on top of her?

So yeah, Joe is one of the safest cape against Noelle. Ironically, Lisa don't know that.

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Nah, the Matrix, Survey, Tetra and Fleet is one of the most safest capes against Noelle because she cannot properly clone them. She can still get Apeiron devastated as he has many secrets he doesn't want anyone to know of. Just because there is no Celstial Forge clone doesn't mean that they will not devastate him with leaked secrets.

Negotiator is getting the tiniest whiff of that Gainax 'spiral energy' meta-canon. AKA true perpetual motion power; Shard catnip. - And then Negotiator and Lisa got mind-blasted by Cthulhu through the Avid Glove ^_^

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Negotiator noticed that Life Fibers have no limits of their own. Not to mention Joe got Spiral after he and Tetra got seperated.