I sort of imagine someone telling them that Taylor was dead for a while, them being shocked, and then asking why Tu Yu didn't tell them (up until this chapter, it seems we kind of all thought he had, and I'm wondering why he didn't - best answer I can think of is 'I should not have needed to'). I kind of doubt actual smiting of the Australian gods will be needed, just some tense discussion.
I sort of imagine someone telling them that Taylor was dead for a while, them being shocked, and then asking why Tu Yu didn't tell them (up until this chapter, it seems we kind of all thought he had, and I'm wondering why he didn't - best answer I can think of is 'I should not have needed to'). I kind of doubt actual smiting of the Australian gods will be needed, just some tense discussion.
Didn't Tu Yu say that the stocks of Ambrosia continued to drain, even after the creation of Amy's guardian cat?
but from what the Australian gods have been saying, it sounds like they only took from the main Ambrosia stores then, and from that point on were mostly self-sufficient in that regard.
...you don't think Tu Yu might be the traitor do you? it's a bit clichéd, the wise advisor scheming to steal the throne from the naïve king...
The problem in canon with undoing the Simurghs scream effect is that they have no way of reliably detecting it, so no way of telling if it was actually removed, or even if there's anything to remove. If someone who was exposed to her starts acting in a blatantly insane fashion it gets blamed on the Simurgh's scream (although in at least some cases I'm sure it was not), but since they can't detect the effect they can't tell if someone acting normally is a Simurgh time bomb, or not. There are probably a bunch of people who could in canon undo any observed problem with one of the Simurgh's victims, the problem is that doesn't deal with the time bombs.
Didn't Tu Yu say that the stocks of Ambrosia continued to drain, even after the creation of Amy's guardian cat?
but from what the Australian gods have been saying, it sounds like they only took from the main Ambrosia stores then, and from that point on were mostly self-sufficient in that regard.
...you don't think Tu Yu might be the traitor do you? it's a bit clichéd, the wise advisor scheming to steal the throne from the naïve king...
Yes, it is horribly clichéd.
And also completely inapplicable in this situation.
Said TraitorousAdvisor (tm) only has two things to gain from such schemes: either the throne directly, or ruling from behind the throne.
The former just isn't possible here - Tu Yu wouldn't fit into the position Taylor has. Okay, technically he could, he'd just be really really unsuited for it.
The latter - Taylor is too smart for that to work in the long run. Especially since "the long run" is not limited by lifespan.
Now, is Tu Yu manipulating Taylor? Um, yes? He outright thought so in his viewpoint chapter (3.4). I haven't exactly kept it a secret.
Said manipulation doesn't have to be treacherous, or even disadvantageous to Taylor, of course.
As for the Ambrosia stores:
The order of creation went like this:
Lion Dogs sometime before Niusha was created (Taylor says "around the time", but it was earlier).
Ver'ash after that, though likely before Taylors "death".
And Ti Kuan Yin after that, sometime after Taylors "death".
So the stores were still being drained because Neitee and Yeutta kept making more gods, and more powerful gods at that. Lion Dogs are about as powerful as Niusha (just much more combat-capable), while Ver'ash and Ti Kuan Yin are around the same level as Tu Yu.
As for the Simurgh and Ti Kuan Yin:
First, no shipping please.
More seriously, nothing in the story said that she CAN undo Simurgh time bombs.
Because her time bombs are mostly a matter of very accurate predictions - not of direct manipulation. Take a look at the Travellers, including their viewpoint chapter (17.5). They're not afraid of being manipulated into an action. They're afraid because no matter what they end up doing, it'll have been JustAsPlanned from the Simurgh.
Except even the Simurgh can't predict the outcome of triggers. Not perfectly - she can see who has a chance of triggering, and since triggers tend to have some relation to the event that causes them she can likely make very rough estimates on what sort of power the person will get, and of course on how they'll use it afterwards (that's just a normal psych-profile, no precognition required). In the case of the Travellers, she might have had even more accurate guesses than before since they used Cauldron-vials - and that they'd split one of them was likely even more predictable. So she knew that they'd get screwed-up powers, and made plans based on that. Without Echidna (if that vial had worked differently), those plans would have just worked out quite differently.
So she's basically predicting "this person will cause an event desirable to me somewhere down the line". That just has to be as accurate as "this group of people (the Travellers) will cause issues for Taylor Hebert somewhere down the line, with a 90% chance based off their likely powers. This is desirable".
This doesn't involve any manipulation. Just predictions of what you'll do in the future. The "time bomb" can't be undone because it is at it's base a purely passive thing - not even an effect per se. You can be a Simurgh time bomb based on something that you'd have done anyway. Granted, it often does involve some manipulation by her, but that often isn't anything to be undone either - just normal human reaction to stimuli.
Except we also have a Wildbow-statement that they ARE releasing people from Simurgh-camps after extensive screening.
So there is no in-universe case of über-paranoia in the vein of "everyone who has come into contact with the Simurgh is tainted forever, no chance of recovery."
No, instead we have "we can't tell who has been twisted into doing her bidding. Having so many possibly-manipulated people at once is way too dangerous, we got to lock them up. Even if we could tell who exactly was manipulated, the domino effect of manipulations is pretty risky. Hence, we do psych-assessments to make sure those who get released are not only manipulation-free, but also aren't likely to cause trouble outside".
We can't have the former, because if we had the former there would be no releases ever. Heck, there wouldn't be any interaction whatsoever ever with any Simurgh-affected one ever, under any circumstance for any length of time. Yet we have Dragon talking to people she's about to blow up because they got Simurgh'd, and we have PRT-teams trying to keep a semblance of order in Quarantine Zones.
So again, what's a time bomb?
In direct action, it's something like this:
I see this persons future. This person is smart and capable, and will get promoted into an important public office.
If this person was paranoid, they would stab a coworker in the future. This is desirable to me because it'll destabilize an important project that I don't want to occur.
I can manipulate this person. Except if I make them outright paranoid now, they'd never get this job and be in a position to stab said coworker. No, I'll just make them suspectible to paranoia. Then I'll make their spouse (also in my area of influence) more secretive and less emphatic, which is greatly aided by the injuries their child just got.
This will, over the course of the next few years, lead to a marriage with more secrets. This will slowly grow the persons paranoia. This will make them stab that coworker in the future.
Now, can Ti Kuan Yin undo time bombs?
There isn't anything to undo directly. "Time bombs" are just people where the Simurgh has seen that they'll do something in accordance with her plan, and maybe got nudged into that a bit.
Can Ti Kuan Yin give people psych assessments to determine whether they'll act detrimental to society? Yes
Can Ti Kuan Yin undo direct Simurgh brainwashing? Yes, because said brainwashing uses normal manipulation of the human psyche. If the Simurgh makes someone paranoid so they'll stab a coworker in the future, she can undo the paranoia. This undoes the "time bomb" that the Simurgh laid when she made that prediction.
Also, under the notion that the Simurgh can't predict triggers (because she can't predict Shards directly):
A newly created god counts as a trigger for this purpose. Because creating a new god is basically someone with the right access keys (had by being a god) feeding a Shard energy (ambrosia) to create a new person with powers (the new god).
And since the new god was created ex nihilo, instead of being a modification of an existing person, the Simurgh doesn't have any post-cognition to analyze the new gods behavior.
So the Simurgh could easily see "Taylor will make a new god after Canberra is over". That's predictable just off Taylors psych-profile really.
But she could have absolutely no idea what said god would be like.
Also, from a doylist perspective I do hate the "perfect puppetmaster" Simurgh. She's just boring. Taylor actually foiled the Simurgh in Canberra, not because of any silly power interaction but because the Simurghs plans can be foiled if you're good enough. It's just that the Simurgh has so many hooks due to her powerful precognition and planning capabilities that she never fully loses her grasp on anything.
At the same time, I don't want to make Taylor or any other gods hard-counters for any Endbringers. Because that undermines the point of having Endbringers in the story in the first place. The non-predictability of new gods is as far as I'm willing to go for hard-countering Endbringers, everything else is just fixing what they did with hard work.
Also, from a doylist perspective I do hate the "perfect puppetmaster" Simurgh. She's just boring. Taylor actually foiled the Simurgh in Canberra, not because of any silly power interaction but because the Simurghs plans can be foiled if you're good enough. It's just that the Simurgh has so many hooks due to her powerful precognition and planning capabilities that she never fully loses her grasp on anything.
I agree, and I don't see her as a perfect puppetmaster either (and not just because of how hard it is for non-Exalts to get Perfects). That said, the Simurgh is very intelligent, doesn't think like a human does, and has very accurate forecasting abilities which makes being "good enough" very difficult for denizens of Earth-Bet.
Also something to keep in mind is that she doesn't have to use mental influence to make time bombs per se. Nothing stops her from using any other influence to do so. For example killing the right target might turn someone not even present in a time bomb. It is just easier to do so with mental manipulation.
You can write this however you want, just make a nice story. The gods were clearly Edens pet project, so they are special. Also they use motonic physics, so they can be extra hardy against precogs.
In canon however the Simurgh could predict all of her blind spots indirectly. Not being able to predict shards is an artificial limitation. She, just like Dinah, could predict the outcomes of her blind spots, the effects, even if not the things directly.
It was something like: "When you see a stone flying into a black cloud and see it fly back out you can guess what happens in between." So while she might not be able to see triggers, just like Contessa, she could look at the effects of the triggers. I thought Contessa couldn't predict the deviations mainly because she's stupid(She was litterally a random kid that put strange shit into her mouth.) and didn't try to look around her blind spots intelligently.
Now I can't stop thinking, that it could've been a lot worse if she had direct subordinates, familial technology to shards who were specifically designed to control and coordinate hosts. Without giving out powers, but being minor precogs/masters themselves, so they could adjust their hosts behavior towards Simurgh's plans. Hundred or two agents, no more. That would've been deadly combo with Simurgh's main precog ability.
Naytee: And why are we atacking this Coil person?
Taylor: Oh, he is the one that had me killed.
Jeuta: Killed? What? You were dead?
Taylor: What? I thought that Tu Yu told you.
Now, can Ti Kuan Yin undo time bombs?
There isn't anything to undo directly. "Time bombs" are just people where the Simurgh has seen that they'll do something in accordance with her plan, and maybe got nudged into that a bit.
a few things to note. First while people in Worm believe the Simurgh's precog is as powerful as you describe her interlude, where we see that even in a very short time frame she's aware precog interference could prevent her plan from going through as planned makes it clear she can't actually pull off plans like that. I suspect the Simurgh uses her planetary range telepathy and TK to fake godmode precog. Either that or she launches dozens of plots for everyone that succeeds.
Second I'm pretty sure the "simurgh timebomb" was used to describe both her setting up a chain of dominoes that led to some disaster or other without anyone actually being driven insane by the Simurgh to produce the disaster and people who seem normal for a while then one day go on a killing spree for no identifiable reason. The later would have the simurgh do something to them, not just nudge events and they're what the Simurgh quarantine are meant to prevent because no one can identify who those are.
Third if the gods can spot the timebombs before they start acting insane (after they start acting insane EVERYONE can spot them) why did they wait until the old man started acting nuts?
Something to think about: considering that Ziz is running mission control for the other Endbringers, technically speaking any Endbringer can plant Time Bombs.
This counts as an asset to your "Ziz can't perfectly predict triggers" opinion, since otherwise the fact that Echidna was clearly engineered to reveal Cauldron otherwise would poke a hole in it.
Instead, if Levi got the message "hey, there's a pet project of mine in Brockton Bay, could you poke it in these and these and these ways", with Leviathan's actions but the Simurgh's input, that would explain how the Echidna situation unfolded.
You can write this however you want, just make a nice story. The gods were clearly Edens pet project, so they are special. Also they use motonic physics, so they can be extra hardy against precogs.
In canon however the Simurgh could predict all of her blind spots indirectly. Not being able to predict shards is an artificial limitation. She, just like Dinah, could predict the outcomes of her blind spots, the effects, even if not the things directly.
It was something like: "When you see a stone flying into a black cloud and see it fly back out you can guess what happens in between." So while she might not be able to see triggers, just like Contessa, she could look at the effects of the triggers. I thought Contessa couldn't predict the deviations mainly because she's stupid(She was litterally a random kid that put strange shit into her mouth.) and didn't try to look around her blind spots intelligently.
Right. This came up on SB and Aberration recently but the Simurgh is limited and having blocks forces her to look longer, but she's quite adept at working around her limits. Moreso than other powerful capes like Contessa and Dinah.
She can clearly work round her blocks otherwise many plots wouldn't really make sense. Between Eidolon and Scion a lot of stuff should be derailed...but stuff like the Travelers and Cody happened anyway.
I wouldn't blame Contessa's situation on being dumb though. Simurgh just has a different power and is inhuman. Contessa has to rely on her human mind to "model" stuff since she doesn't have access to any of the precog/postcog stuff of her shard unless there's a path. Even with this weakness Eidolon still didn't think he could beat her. The Simurgh though, sees everything even if there are blindspots and has the inhuman intelligence to piece it all together afterwards.
Fun fact: It doesn't matter how good the Simurgh actually is.
What matters is how strong people perceive the Simurgh to be.
Or at least for our purposes here. Because we* are debating the internal logic of characters in the story, and how their actions are perceived.
So whether the Simurgh can actually do anything discussed below or not doesn't matter. She might be able to, people might just think she can, she might fake a weakness etc. - what matters is how its seen.
We take what see in Worm.
So, we need to justify why everyone wears a bomb (the armbands) during a Simurgh fight, that gets blown up if you stay in the area too long.
It's because the combined effort of Thinkers has established that the Simurgh needs a certain amount of time to influence you. However, it must also be the case that taking the influenced people into custody so that they don't harm others is way too risky - or else that'd be standard practice. Hence, I included that she just takes full-on control of people sometimes, but not always (else, there'd be no need for quaranzine zones).
So, we need to justify why it is common practice to have Simurgh Quarantine Zones after the fight is over.
That's more complicated. But it is in my opinion easily explainable by the Simurgh often destabilizing most people in there. The world has simply learned the lession of "having Simurgh-victims around is dangerous". The Simurgh might achieve that through just letting the right people live or killing the right people thus creating some dominoes. It might be done by actively shaping some peoples psyche via her powers, so that their personality changes according to her goals, possibly over the long term. Or it might be that she just outright implants triggers, or can control any victim at any later point. I personally favor the middle theory, but again it doesn't matter much which one is actually the case.
And last but not least, we have a Wildbow-statement (I'm not aware of anything in Worm directly supporting it, mind) that people can get out of Simurgh Quarantine Zones after very excessive screening.
This best fits with people thinking that the Simurgh just messes people up really badly, instead of directly controlling them. Which is why the outtake-process includes stress-tests that should prevent any unstable individuals from getting out.
So in summary, for the purpose of this fanfic I am going with the following: "Simurgh-victims are often mentally unstable, and poor at handling stress. They often develop severe psychological disorders, often years after the fact. Worse, often they inflict similar symptoms on those close to them. Past experience has show that releasing Simurgh-vicims into the general population without extensive screening leads to a large amount of violence and other damages, including in some cases catastrophic suicides (mass shootings, the attempted meltdown of a nuclear power plant and purposeful plane crashes). For this reason, all those affected by the Simurghs scream but not under her direct control (which is immedeately obvious) are to be held in quarantine, until such a time as their mental stability has been proven to such a degree to show that they are not what is commonly referred to as a "Simurgh time bomb"."
That more or less explains everything we see in Worm in my opinion. It doesn't contradict any canon I am aware off, so it should be pretty accurate - if it isn't, I might have to declare AU here.
*Well, at least I am. Because I care about reasonable accuracy in the things I write, unless it's something I deliberately changed.
Also, Ti Kuan Yin obviously can't detect Simurgh-victims directly. She didn't notice that the man was unstable before anything happend, after all. She showed up once he got arrested for dangerous behavior, at which point it was pretty obvious that he wasn't mentally stable (which under the circumstances indicates that he's been affected by the Simurgh).
They're a destabilizing influence on those around them. Put great stress on others. Encourage dangerous behavior. Traumatize other people, create dissent, destroy social support structures and so on.
Not some sort of actual cross-infection, but then again I'm operating under the assumption that Simurgh-victims are just normal people with really (sometimes subtly) fucked-up psyches, instead of being actively supernatural influenced all the time.
I think they would need to do worse than try to break away from her for her to go to smiting them, she would probably be angry and sad about it, but provided they agreed to keep to Canberra, I could see Taylor just allowing them to keep to themselves, because in the end she don't see her gods as slaves, so if they really should wish to be free from her, provided they don't abuse their power Taylor would probably allow it.
Now if they began to treat the people in Canberra like we see mortals treated in creation, she would definitely step in, but they seem inclined to honestly care for their people, even the ones who aren't all that devout, although they care for the devout more so that isn't likely to happen.
I think they would need to do worse than try to break away from her for her to go to smiting them, she would probably be angry and sad about it, but provided they agreed to keep to Canberra, I could see Taylor just allowing them to keep to themselves, because in the end she don't see her gods as slaves, so if they really should wish to be free from her, provided they don't abuse their power Taylor would probably allow it.
Now if they began to treat the people in Canberra like we see mortals treated in creation, she would definitely step in, but they seem inclined to honestly care for their people, even the ones who aren't all that devout, although they care for the devout more so that isn't likely to happen.
Honestly, I can't help feeling that her paranoid distrust of them will come back and bite her in the ass. She was lucky that the BB gods were more or less human, but I can't help but feel like a lot of the weird feelings she's getting from the canberra gods are just because they're different (and she was primed to distrust them by Tu Yu)
Honestly, I can't help feeling that her paranoid distrust of them will come back and bite her in the ass. She was lucky that the BB gods were more or less human, but I can't help but feel like a lot of the weird feelings she's getting from the canberra gods are just because they're different (and she was primed to distrust them by Tu Yu)
I feel the same, at the very most they might be annoyed with her, and eventually if the situation isn't resolved make a bid for independence, but unless Taylor denies them said independence, it's vanishingly unlikely for them to turn violent against her.
She gave them life, that probably buys her enough leeway that for now they are just going to be annoyed, and even if it's left to simmer, they will still just wish to be left alone, and probably even be ready to negotiate sane terms, like them paying 10% of their Ambrosia gain, in return for independence and a promise they wont be required to do anything beyond that.
I feel the same, at the very most they might be annoyed with her, and eventually if the situation isn't resolved make a bid for independence, but unless Taylor denies them said independence, it's vanishingly unlikely for them to turn violent against her.
It's important to note that Taylor's first reaction to Tu Yu's bitching about them was that she wanted both sides of the story. That speaks well of her, even if the Canberra gods don't know that.
Then again, they're acting just a little bit off. Fuck with the God Emporer Goddess-Administrator of Mankind, you get your ass smote
It's important to note that Taylor's first reaction to Tu Yu's bitching about them was that she wanted both sides of the story. That speaks well of her, even if the Canberra gods don't know that.
Then again, they're acting just a little bit off. Fuck with the God Emporer Goddess-Administrator of Mankind, you get your ass smote
I don't think it's that simple, Taylor is rather more tolerant than that, she would feel betrayed in some ways if they wanted to be independent, which seems to me to be the worst they might plan to try, but in the end she probably wouldn't deny them it, since she isn't the type to believe that because she created them, they should forever obey her.
I don't think it's that simple, Taylor is rather more tolerant than that, she would feel betrayed in some ways if they wanted to be independent, which seems to me to be the worst they might plan to try, but in the end she probably wouldn't deny them it, since she isn't the type to believe that because she created them, they should forever obey her.
