Maybe she could help[sic] just a teensie, tiny bit?
Halp. The correct word is halp, there, Symbie. ...and holy hell is she.
"Oh, I'll just help them not die so much." Yes, Symbie, giving them the capacity for an optimised and automatic networked sensor net to set up the entirety of the UN to be halfway hive-minded into a gestalt and dumping a massive amount of crucial intel in their laps does in fact help them lower casualty rates. If the enemy is all dead, then they aren't as much of a danger.
Symbie's reasoning for her actions here are kinda sad, though. Symbie is very much enjoying herself in her actions with the maybe-people. They're giving her all kinds of interesting data and they
appreciate her work. She has even trained them up quite nicely like something akin to favourite pets since they definitely can't be friends. Sometimes, though, right in the middle of that interaction, some of them get horribly maimed. Sometimes the connection cuts out entirely. But that's alright, because they're not definitely-people, right? No, no it, uh, it's kind of not okay, actually. Because Symbie is very much like Mom-Administrator. This is the path that lead to QA being inclined to try to fudge the cycles and rules in her hosts favour. Hopefully it doesn't end up seeing QA try to "help" Symbie by making sure that she doesn't repeat her own mistakes.
His Impeller Field blocked self-analysis, but Symbie could still acquire quite a bit of useful information from the details of his surroundings. Surroundings such as the energy-transporting gap in the universe. That looked useful.
She'd check it later, though. For now, she was interested in knowing whether or not he'd successfully prevent Mom-Administrator's anti-tampering measures from killing him. She hoped Mom-Administrator's defenses won; Symbie still held a minor grudge over what Mom-Administrator said had been deliberate flaws in Symbie's original design.
Hm. In light of what transpired from Decimator's perspective, it does rather look as though Symbie indeed stole his arm. "That looked useful," she though. Taylor was established earlier to have no real regard for where anything was on the planetary scale, perfectly capable of monitoring and interacting with anything at a distance that by shard metrics was right in front of her, and Symbie is now the one in Taylor's former position. Symbie was paying attention to Decimator with particular note to an applicable utility, and simply has it out for him, so it sure
looks like Symbie exploited an opportunity when it presented itself. Decimator decided to obliterate his own arm, and poof, no sign of it, and after Symbie was taking notes for updating Mom-Taylor's new body, too.
In a related matter, the immediate consequences of this are also indeed pretty much immediately noted. Symbie gave the maybe-people a great big info-dump, which included a library entry on Decimator that just so happened to be up to date. Decimator lost an arm, and the UN knows it. So, what's up with that? The members of the flight deployed to Africa may not have observation of Decimator, but that is not to say that there was necessarily no one able to get some sort of reading of what transpired, and the UN doesn't
need massive think tanks of clarketech supercomputers and augmented people to conclude reasonable possibilities.
Type Zero Macross was in close proximity to Cadet Hebert's position for an extended period of time; Cadet Hebert gave a warning about safety measures tied to a data packet that she always transmits when she communicates; Cadet Hebert demonstrably has sufficiently advanced technology as a bullshit e-war goddess; Cadet Hebert additionally displays behaviour suggesting that the notion of communicating with a Type Zero is not an unrealistic concept to her. Together, this all presents supposition that perhaps the girl is in fact somehow responsible for
somehow delimbing a Type Zero now shown to be decidedly one of the more powerful ones. If UN intel does actually have more direct evidence of the Type Zero Macross indeed outright firing upon itself, then it would very much appear as though she managed to successfully hack into it and subvert it to significant effect. Whether she outright seized control of the Type Zero enough for a temporary opportunity to make it shoot itself or indirectly made it shoot itself by putting it in the position to deem such behaviour necessary, the end result is still the same. Perhaps caution about tampering with her ID data is entirely advisable.
>> "No. Average generator output now includes a logarithmic equation instead of a static uncertainty range. The new upper limit will reclassify Macross as a type B." <<
>> "Well, fuck." <<
>> "Please tell me that's his final form." <<
>> "Hey, they won't pull back from the Hellhole over this, right? That's not exactly a standard operation, as such." <<
>> "Not our call. I've reported the changes." <<
That's rather worrisome. The new intel on Macross may not necessarily be taken as official without some sort of further confirmation, but the UN does none the less have good reason to consider the source of that information reliable, and they may very well simply
get additional confirmation on the reclassification. A Type Zero jumping up from a Class D to a Class B is cause for worry. The particular Type Zero in question is also—in relative terms—close to Hell's Hand where the UN is trying to conduct an important operation with the intent of sending in additional forces. Important though this operation is, though, that Type Zero that is indeed uncomfortably close just raised all kinds of red flags for potential complications to the operation, and
severe complications at that. A Class D
relatively nearby to the operation is a concerning factor, but one that the UN might be reasonably confident about being able to work around well enough to get the job done. The area of operation including a Class B Type Zero that may personal motivation to get involved and just posited the reasonable scenario of
all of the Type Zeros being able to so escalate—and perhaps be in fact triggered to do so—is an altogether different matter. I'm hoping that they don't in fact pull back from investigating Hell's Hand, but there is ample strategic sense in doing so, that the UN may prepare for the disturbingly plausible case of a sudden, drastic crisis warranting any and all forces across the entire planet to be on standby. Hell's Hand might just not be a priority anymore now.
On the other hand, though, that kind of situation might alternatively prompt immediate action to address the matter of Hell's Hand
because of the abrupt shift. If Hell's Hand is going to have a vengeful Class B Type Zero guarding or destroying it or all hell is about to break loose in a push not rivaled since the Antagonist incursion first began, then the UN may well not
get another chance at Hell's Hand, and there's a cost/benefit analysis to consider. Nightmarish though the place may be, it quite blatantly has an absolute treasure trove of technology that might be about to become unavailable, and perhaps sorely needed. There's also at least one Valkyrie Core just discovered so far, too. Moreover, however, there's the matter of whatever poor girl is hooked up to this abomination. At the very least, the team already on-site is close to what they have reason to believe to be a viable candidate for synchronising with a Core, quite arguably the single most valuable thing in existence right now as far as the UN is concerned. Abandoning this girl after everything discovered—and when she was so close to being rescued, no less—could potentially be quite disastrous to morale, and at a critical time, at that, if there is in fact to be a major crisis. Worse still, there would be the potentially quite dire complications where Cadet Hebert is concerned, too, with a highly promising new wonder-weapon diminishing in value; she may not perform as well if some unfortunate fate should befall her probable twin, and may even become disillusioned with the UN or even turn hostile should hope be snatched away at the last moment and the other girl abandoned to further suffering or death. A fair argument might be made that the Type Zero Macross's status development should change Hell's Hand to a smash and grab operation with the inbound team just disregarding all else to rush in while just taking as many scans as possible in their way down to meet up with the initial team tasked with blowing through to get the girl and bugging out under escort.
A further consideration, as well, if Hell's Hand is about to become thoroughly endangered, then locking down the place might perhaps actually be the best course of action for the forces available there. Arcologies are strongpoints. If the Type Zero Macross is about to go berserk, then Liz and Elise might best secure all the potential gains and eschewed losses by locating the presumably near at hand girl acting as mayor-analogue and collaborating with her to raise the compromised stealth facility as an actively defensed bastion. Should there be no further development of all of the Type Zeros revealing that they were collectively sandbagging, then it might allow the opportunity to arrange for the deployment of a more substantive relief force to in turn more properly take care of everything. If the whole lot of the Antagonists do in fact kick off a revolutionary escalation, the positioning of Hell's Hand relative to the front might
still make it a priority for turning into a fortress, too, to either provide a hardened foothold at an important location or just delay the onslaught by having the surge of suddenly far more capable Antagonists break first upon a more expendable asset conveniently available to buy valuable time for one of the main fronts. From the meta standpoint, I don't think that's how this story will actually go, but STRATNET is a cold thing when faced with the task of winning against the nigh-impossible, and the people making the decisions have to worry about things that are realistic from the in-universe perspective.
"Terror Drones," she admitted.
Shapira rocked her head from side to side. Searching local information networks indicated that it likely conveyed ongoing processing.
"Mmmm, I can get the 'Terror' part, but they're definitely not drones," Shapira disagreed. "Fuuudgers can even hold grudges. One of the other instructors made off with Exotic Principle Weaponry from Class C Type Zero Guan Yu, and Guan Yu has since tried to kill her at every available opportunity — that's six total meetings, just so you know."
Huh. Well, that's a thing. With very little exception, nothing that goes on within or even vaguely nearby the arcologies
doesn't get observed and analysed by a myriad of people who brainstorm at stupidly high speeds. Shapira makes no effort to hide that she is sort of a representative of lots of others indirectly participating in the exchange with Cadet Hebert in an effort to gain understanding, so a lot of people are going to be doing a lot of thinking over this. Like with the case of "Decimator", Cadet Hebert has a preexisting alternative classification system relevant here; Hell's Hand appears to have had its own terminology pertaining to the Antagonists, which is not unreasonable, but the girl herself also shows a degree of potentially quite superior insight. There is also, incidentally, this little detail from earlier that observing Valks are unlikely to miss:
"Valkyries are just manned drones.
By Cadet Hebert's reckoning, maybe the Terror Drones actually are, in fact, "drones". That further becomes all the more "less unrealistic" when coupled with Cadet Hebert's actions and behavioural profile suggesting that she was
genuinely wondering if Shapira meant that the Type Zero Guan Yu would like to meet her in a few week, and Shapira additionally employed an effeminate pronoun to further muddle the situation, something that "obviously" should have meant to refer to that other instructor, as Antagonists are not the sort of things to get that kind of phraseology. There would be some perfectly applicable ambiguity if Guan Yu was something like a Valkyrie, though, a
who rather than a what, and almost invariably a female someone. Perhaps the girl who seems to perhaps know more than the UN about Antagonists and definitely an awful lot more about Valkyrie Cores knows something important that they don't. Perhaps what the UN takes as certitude is a flawed foundation for their assessments.
"Does the Antagonist responsible resemble any significant religious icons?" Queen Administrator carefully asked.
Instructor Shapira quirked an eyebrow.
"No, not really. Antagonists are all function given form; the closest they get to that kind of psychological warfare is the oddly high rate of vaguely humanoid models. Against a Type Zero, every millisecond of hesitation counts and they're happy to exploit it. Why did you ask?"
"I merely wished to eliminate a concern," QA dismissed.
Further elaborating the previous point, this
also stands to be quite concerning on account of all of those people obsessing over every little detail. From Cadet Hebert's words, UNOMI can infer that the girl had a concern that the Antagonist responsible for destroying the Ark ship trying to run away might have resembled a significant religious icon, thus implying the possibility of a Type Zero like Abraxas that the UN
doesn't know about, perhaps, or at least that Cadet Hebert thinks that there may be something out there that could perform such a feat. Her particular categorisation of the unknown in light of the discoveries at Hell's Hand suggests some circumstantial support for the idea of the residents being indeed some sort of Antagonist-based cult venerating a humanoid Type Zero, one that Cadet Hebert believes to be capable in the extreme and potentially with good reason.
A Type Zero slipping completely past UN detection does sound perhaps rather far-fetched, but then again, so does a highly sophisticated entire arcology that managed to sit right underneath the noses of the UN and Antagonists alike without anyone ever being any the wiser. The Type Zeros do also happen to have some sort of "theme" unique to each individual, too; if, say, there was some sort of Type Zero that
specialised in eluding notice and controlling things from behind the scenes, then perhaps a faction of humans spring up around it and evading all observation as the Type Zero twisted them into servitors who assisted and learned from it might not actually be so wildly out of the question. Per the evocative windows in the weird chapel, there does appear to certainly be
some kind of ideological design behind Hell's Hand, after all, so a cult devoted to a Type Zero able to pull some shenanigans being the focus of that does make a certain kind of sense. Ironically enough, if QA (or Taylor or Symbie trying to "help" her, for that matter) did reveal just a little more, Terror Drone #7 does translate pretty neatly into the narrative forming, given the overlap with :MOTHER:.
QA was still trying to determine what components Anna was referring to. The shard prided herself on avoiding waste; her designs were meant to minimize the costs necessary for clear and consistent communications. Unless they were trying to adapt it for communicating solely in the same universe? That would drastically change the requirements, QA would admit.
Well this is just funny. In order to allow simpler and easier communications, apply Wave Force principles! I'm kind of hoping that that does actually end up how Anna comes to understand the problem with the communications, realising the need to improve upon her understanding of her secret forbidden technique in order to
talk properly and using these communications protocols to help with that. Reviewing the mathematics compiled by the UN did help improve her understanding of Wave Force mechanics in canon; with something else operating through dimensional shenanigans for reference, that might similarly be of aid to her. That could get a little ironic, later on, with Anna endeavouring to teach QA her super move on account of the other girl having the best aptitude for grasping it, while QA herself tries to teach Anna that which would be some kind of mythical superpower for
her on account of her dismal communications skills, and yet neither one of them would actually get something terribly special out of it for Anna not being able to be any more intelligible to most people (nor able to find anyone able to both comprehend shardspeech
and really be any better at regular communication to play translator) and QA picking up something kind of just a generic utility by shard standards than any incredible wonder-weapon.
- Pegacorn-Friends can reconfigure their wings to have more than two. Large portions of their forms are also utterly incomprehensible, it hurts to look at Friends when they're using their default settings, and we're not supposed to be afraid of them.
Conclusion: Pegacorn-Friends are magical talking angel unicorns.
Given what passes for a sense of humour for some of the people here, I kind of want the Crafting Club and other admirers to conspire together to convince QA to, er... "slight improvement" to the pegacorn-Friend design. Cute things should squeak slightly when squeezed, naturally, so they should be capable of emitting sounds, which in turn means that vocalisations should be given due considerations. Maybe they don't
talk, per se, but they should have a battle cry.
"Fear not," squeaks each pegacorn-Friend as they fly into battle.
"Fear not," they continue to chime until the enemy has been messily rent asunder.
"Fear not."
My two cents is that the reason why QA had signal boosters whereas the others didn't was because she was the only one who needed extra strength mind control. The burnt out husks in the bug pit could be there because the bugs dragged them off and overloaded them. This gives small gaps in coverage with a free (or more likely just less restricted) QA until they were replaced. The last time it happened the bugs could have gotten enough of the boosters for QA to make a break for it; presumably just before the story started.
That also makes me wonder if the "official" turn of events might perhaps further involve Decimator. Symbie noted the way how the Type Zero's missiles operated as an exploitable point of vulnerability for anyone with
sufficiently sufficiently advanced e-war skills. Perhaps Cadet Hebert's subjugation was effectively flawless within the limited scope of Hell's Hand, only to fall short at the intrusion of an outside factor, with the Type Zero and his wide-spanning missile-based network perhaps coming into range for her to take advantage of it in a brief window for a breakout. The Type Zero did happen to stay in the area for some time and fire one single missile at Hell's Hand, only to later appear to indeed be quite susceptible to her bullshit-tier subversion skills.
QA: It doesn't count as murder if he's not a real person.
I, Robot, murder only counts when a person kills another person. It's completely impossible to murder a non-person.
A giant starfish-shaped Type Zero isn't getting anywhere near Perth — Australia is almost on the literal opposite side of the planet. He'd have to fight through most of the UN military to make it that far, and since a Class B can be favorably fought with 'only' 10 members of the 300, his odds of surviving such a sortie are... slim, to say the least.
Hm. Under the circumstances at hand, I could see Decimator perhaps having much better odds than normal, depending on how things play out. Decimator just revealed that he has secretly been at least a Class B Type Zero all along, thereby engendering a credible threat that
all of the Type Zeros are way more badass than they've been letting on and only pandering to the UN's misconceptions. Even if all of the other Type Zeros don't radically ramp up their Higgs output, the UN is probably scrambling to address the possibility that that
could be about to happen as far as they know. The 300 can take on most Type Zeros pretty handily if they just have a handful of members to spare, but they often simply
don't for being stretched too thinly to address a given crisis for needing to handle so many other problems simultaneously demanding attention. A Class B only takes a small fraction of the total numbers of the 300—which are conveniently a little more than an actual 300 strong, at that—but a single Class A Type Zero demands an appreciable portion of the 300 to properly counter, and if there's the likes of something similar to several previous instances of multiple Type Zeros working in tandem only upgraded as well, that one engagement might easily demand something in the order of a good half of the 300 to avoid a devastating loss, and those special Valkyries would almost universally have to be pulled off from somewhere else for their numbers already being tasked to capacity... all while there could easily be several
more engagements that would similarly need a major force allocation to prevent rampaging high-end Type Zeros from sowing ruin.
Compounding that, there is the possibility of perhaps creating such a scenario even if it wasn't actually to come to pass. As things stand right now, the UN only has the one Type Zero so upgrading in rank, but even as they are forced to address that legitimately true factor, the reallocation of strength so as to meet shifted priorities in needing to answer the valid concern of multiple Type Zeros escalating beyond significantly lower artificial limits might itself incite enemy action. The UN doesn't have "spare" Valkyries, with a +3 world state needed to have any actual reserves, rather than the decidedly less favourable -1 present; if the UN changes up its deployments to put forces in positions to address higher priorities that are presently only hypothetically endangered, they'll have to pull back from current deployments that are presently where they are for good reason. To anyone on the enemy side paying attention, that just looks all kinds of suspicious. UN forces are
needed where they are now, pursuing or maintaining legitimate strategic goals, so if there's a major shift in those deployments as if the humans have decided that something else is actually more important whilst also bringing on standby additional elements mobilised from forces that more ideally would still be undergoing training... well it would sure look like the humans were gearing up for a big fight. That would merit a mirroring response from the Antagonists if it got that far, to potentially quite rapidly devolve into the kind of mayhem that might allow a Type Zero to act far from its normal area with little meaningful challenge, not dissimilarly to Sekhmet's participation in the breaking of the siege of Sydney across the entire Pacific Ocean and half a continent away from its usual territory.
