- Location
- Over the hill and far away
She's only quarantined 'til she invents a bomb that blows her into looking completely different in another city.
Exploding Canon (Worm SI)
- Thread starter Ghoul King
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm bakuda self insert oni-lady
I'm fairly certain that was the case in canon. Eden pretty explicitely put limitations, just before she died, on Contessa's PTV in order to prevent her from killing entities, the only reason she managed to kill Eden after the limitations were in place was due to Doctor Mother being there + Contessa was already on a path to killing Eden. If either of those things failed, eden would be alive and Contessa would be dead.
In canon there's a whole bunch of scenes where contessa is trying to find a path to kill scion, but keeps getting "No" from PTV, the only time she even manages to make a Path work is by deliberately making it about something other than Scion. In short, my understanding from it, was that Contessa was never on a Path to killing Scion, because Path to victory does not allow paths to killing Scion.
The entire Path o Cauldron, all the experiments, the parahuman army, the spreading of case 53s on earth Bet, all of that was for a path that had exactly zero chance of killing Scion. None of what Cauldron did in the story mattered in the end, nor could it have mattered.
To be honest i feel kinda bad for them, but i'd probably do the same in their place, because it was the only thing they could have done, they were doomed to failure from the moment the restrictions were placed on PTV.
- Location
- Over the hill and far away
Well, nothing stopped them from using their regular ol' human brain at any point. Doctor Mother wasn't even a parahuman. She just said "Oh, hey, you have a shard that lets you turn off your brain? That's cool, I wonder if I can turn off mine too!"
Hiring the requisite (unpowered) five-year-old child would have done wonders for their plans.
- Location
- Madison, WI
Wow, that came out of nowhere... and awww man, Eidolon got to be the hero?!
*starts skimming the comments*
Oh, arc's not over yet, so It might still be active, hrm.
I vaguely want to call bull on Eidolon for being able to pull that based on vague tech-babble by Bakuda, but hey it's Eidolon, if anyone can pull sometime like that, I guess it should be him; since his original version was female and cape name Mary Sue... lolz.
I'm a bit surprised at how they didn't react to Bakuda sprouting Cauldron Cauldron Cauldron, but thinking on it a little more, I guess you just don't posses enough of a threat for them to care? Alexandria already shows she can shut you up easily, so yeah...
*starts skimming the comments*
Oh, arc's not over yet, so It might still be active, hrm.
I vaguely want to call bull on Eidolon for being able to pull that based on vague tech-babble by Bakuda, but hey it's Eidolon, if anyone can pull sometime like that, I guess it should be him; since his original version was female and cape name Mary Sue... lolz.
I'm a bit surprised at how they didn't react to Bakuda sprouting Cauldron Cauldron Cauldron, but thinking on it a little more, I guess you just don't posses enough of a threat for them to care? Alexandria already shows she can shut you up easily, so yeah...
outwrangle
Postmaster General
- Location
- Iowa
- Pronouns
- She/Her
... okay, presumably, this resonance attack works on all Endbringers because they are all made of the same uniform crystalline material and their bodies are just decoration. Shame it doesn't work on the core (not much does), but Eidolon just gained the ability to expose the core of any Endbringer. That's pretty huge, because exposing the core is half the difficulty of beating them.
Unfortunately, this is Worm, so the Endbringers will escalate in response to their "weak point" being exposed and the heroes will try to win by punching the core harder because they think it's a weak point instead of invulnerable physics canceling bullshit. Cue Alexandria losing her other leg trying to kick it, because no one has any idea what they are dealing with and their thinkers can't understand it. Also, Alexandria thinks its all a Simurgh plot and blames Bakuda for losing her other leg.
Still, this power seems like the functional opposite of Scion's stilling power, since it amplifies waves instead of stilling them. If Eidolon could use this to counteract stilling, one of Scion's best moves just became useless. Unfortunately, the move can't hurt Scion directly, and Eidolon will probably cast that power aside in favor of a way to punch god harder. Oh well...
Unfortunately, this is Worm, so the Endbringers will escalate in response to their "weak point" being exposed and the heroes will try to win by punching the core harder because they think it's a weak point instead of invulnerable physics canceling bullshit. Cue Alexandria losing her other leg trying to kick it, because no one has any idea what they are dealing with and their thinkers can't understand it. Also, Alexandria thinks its all a Simurgh plot and blames Bakuda for losing her other leg.
Still, this power seems like the functional opposite of Scion's stilling power, since it amplifies waves instead of stilling them. If Eidolon could use this to counteract stilling, one of Scion's best moves just became useless. Unfortunately, the move can't hurt Scion directly, and Eidolon will probably cast that power aside in favor of a way to punch god harder. Oh well...
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Mandabar
Waifu of choice is Rem. Give that girl some hugs!
- Location
- Florida, USA [Yes. Florida *FacePalm*]
Well that... and Eidolon's powers get weaker with use. He only gets like 5-30 uses of a power before it weakens into uselessness. I think it depends on how strong the power is itself and how forcefully he uses it. Also not sure if he can call up the same power again after discarding it, so he has to hold onto this power for as long as he can.
Lenimentus
Ignorant but learning.
Am I the only one thinking that they can't quarantine Bakuda? I mean no one is stupid enough to try and quarantine and tinker right? They just get executed, probably not publicly but they have to do it. You can't stick a tinker in a city and hope that they won't build something to let them escape, that's beyond stupid. That's like a non parahuman shooting them self in the face and expecting it not to do any damage.
I guess you could put them in an isolation cell, where they couldn't get any building materials or communicate with the outside world.
Probably a resonably comfortable cell to try to convince them to submit willingly, and an order to kill them if they resist containment.
Take a basic cell, make it a bit larger with more comfortable furnature and put a TV with a library of shows and movies and books behind an armoured glass panel.
Frankly, I always assumed that PtV was actually rather suboptimal. Think about it, the whole reason behind the Entities' actions was because they didn't have the imagination/foresight to develop and experiment on their shards, and needed hosts. If they had a shard that could perfectly predict the future, why not just use that to run sims on all their other shards?
I've always imagined the PtV to be self-correcting. The early steps are actually just wild guesses, with the shard using its enormous on-the-spot calculations to compensate for any screw-ups. Which might also explain why Contessa has to get so hands-on, the PtV needs to be on-site to compensate for deviations. Plus, it might also explain why the plans were so shit, the PtV was designed by and for the use of Entities, to solve entity-scale problems. An open question as to how well it scales to us organic meatsacks, especially when Eden's last act was to sabotage it.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Cost. Precog is explicitly on the high end of energy costs in canon. After a certain point of expense, it becomes drastically cheaper to field test them than to precog them, even if you're spending years on the field tests.
- Location
- Wherever
Half-and-half. To a certain extent, the conspiracy's incompetency is in-character and makes sense. Nobody is perfect, and in particular Cauldron was an utter failure at its main goal -that was canon, that was consistent, that made sense.
On the other hand, I'm going to fill in the stuff we don't explicitly see as best as I can while retaining the "whatwhy" stuff in a form that obviates the problems it creates in canon.
Least spoilery example: In Exploding Canon, yes Contessa occasionally personally handles an enforcer event, if for some reason that's more practical than any other option, is the only option that PtV feeds her as workable at all, or if she has other goals she's trying to fill at the same time that calling in a favor or hiring a mercenary would not work for simultaneously filling. (eg manipulating an unrelated cape in a particular way) No, she does not, as canon ultimately implies, personally handle every single enforcer event. That's ludicrous and undermines, among other things, the idea that Cauldron has successfully maintained its secrecy for 20+ years.
So basically: if it happened "on-screen" in canon, it's probably canon to Exploding Canon, but the implications might not be canon to Exploding Canon. (eg where are all the other Cauldron members in the endgame? If you take canon as we see it and extrapolate, canon seems to intend for Cauldron to be literally like 10 people)
Except Contessa explicitly, repeatedly pulls a Rube Goldberg machine effect off with PtV, including talking to other people to get the results she wants. ("Breadth and depth" being the best example, but not the only example) If Contessa wants to ask PtV "Which mercenary do I hire and what do I say to that mercenary to ensure that Joe Bob Mcsecretlearner will die and not reveal any of Cauldron's secrets?" she can absolutely, 100%-canon-I-don't-care-what-Wildbow-says-I-care-what-he-wrote do that.
An interesting idea, one I'd argue is better than canon... but definitely not canon. PtV's limitations against Endbringers is explicitly artificial (Which is just awful and I hate it and liked canon much better when I was assuming there was some naturalistic reason why Endbringers were not precoggable) its limitations against Entities are also explicitly artificial (It was working on Eden until Eden hacked the shard), and if anything to do with Entities was going to produce a natural immunity/semi-immunity to PtV, it would be, you know, an entire Entity. People plugged into an individual shard cannot possibly have a natural protection as a result, given actual canon.
Depressingly.
Not really. You can just as easily assume that tinkertech is non-replicable because tinkers are cheating with secondary powers, and PtV doesn't provide the relevant cheating. There's no Path that lets Contessa become a firebreathing dragon with super-regeneration, either.
Not how PtV works. The Wormverse is clockwork, so unless something protected against precognition interferes Contessa will always get whatever result she Paths for, no matter what intermediaries she operates through. The primary flaw of PtV seems to be that it's an overly literal genie -frame your questions poorly, and you may get an outcome that fits what you asked for but not what you wanted.
Contessa is shown to be too competent and experienced in using her power in canon for this to really work. Maybe she fell into this trap in the earliest years of Cauldron, but at some point her explicit habit of asking several different variations on her core question would lead into her asking the right question to hit onto non-stupid/conflict-focused plans, and she'd transition over to the competency she's supposed to have according to canon anyway.
There's also the point that it is, in all honesty, unlikely her shard was programmed properly for working with a host. Eden somehow accidentally lost/launched it in the crash, having not gotten around to doing any of the things she'd do for prepping the shard for use by hosts, and the only hacking she seems to do before being sort-of-kind-of-killed is that of blocking PtV from being usable against Entities. The conflict drive is unlikely to have been activated -it'd be really dumb if Entity shards always had conflict protocols active at all times, and more importantly than it being dumb Entities wouldn't function as presented if every piece of them was always running those protocols.
So Contessa probably has a shard that functions almost exactly as it does when being used by an Entity... especially since her shard is from Abbadon originally, and while it's not clear what path of "evolution" Abbadon went down, it's definitely a different path. It might not have conflict protocols inherent to it!
It's more accurate to say the Path provided no greater a chance of success than any human-made plan did. It's not that PtV couldn't provide a Path to things with the ability to kill an Entity -it just would lock up if directly asked about Entities (And for some reason Endbringers) and they didn't have enough information to know what the right questions would be to ask to get around that.
Crappy Pokemon metagame metaphor: I'm facing off against Rayquaza and I have PtV. In this scenario, Rayquaza is an Entity, and if I ask PtV "Which move do I use to OHKO Rayquaza" PtV goes "404 error". But if I ask "Which Pokemon using which move would OHKO a Dragon/Flying type with a statline of x/x/x/x/x/x" it'll promptly say "Send out Kyurem-White and use Ice Beam" and there you go, I have my Entity-killer.
Contessa could've used PtV to find a way of killing the Entities, she just couldn't have had PtV explicitly confirm that the path would kill Scion.
I'm just going to say that my read on Eidolon in canon is that a key aspect of his power is knowing what the right question to ask is, for getting the power he wants.
Comparison point: let's say you have a database you want to dig through. It has a tags system, like Sufficient Velocity. It doesn't let you see the tags -it just lets you search for a tag and then spit out everything that has the tag you searched for. If "Resonance Power" isn't tagged with anything you think to search for, you're not going to find "Resonance Power", and you'll have no idea it exists or what tags to look for it with.
Imagine trying to find a specific thread on Sufficient Velocity that you don't already know the tags of and can only look for by searching for tags. (Of which you don't get a list of actually used tags) It'd be a nightmare.
A key part of Cauldron's policy of hiding Cauldron's existence is that they make sure as much of the world as possible treats the idea of Cauldron as so ridiculous as to not even be worth refuting explicitly. Just ignoring Bakuda is a great way to convey to people that no, Cauldron doesn't exist, nobody who matters takes it even slightly seriously, and more importantly is in line with their canon policy.
We don't get an exact count or even a range on the number of uses he gets for a given power. We know that the more "powerful" it is the more likely it is to burn out fast, but canon is honestly very vague on the range, and Eidolon's behavior isn't very helpful in guessing, since he's actually pretty good about changing up his powers when it becomes clear that his current set is either not working or is working only "well enough" when what he needs is a power that works really well in the context.
Simurgh quarantine zones all operate on the principal of killing anyone who tries to escape and making sure they know that's what will happen to dissuade them from actually trying to escape. They're not meant to physically contain people with walls and so on. They're meant to contain them with the threat of death.
Unless you think they should believe themselves unable to kill her if she tries to escape?
Last edited:
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
The worst part of this to me is it flatly contradicts earlier canon.
Infestation 11-7 says...
Lookit that! violating your Cauldron Contract gets you murdered by Cauldrons Private Army of Case-53s!
And then that ceases to exist in favor of Contessa.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
"There's no Path that lets Contessa become a firebreathing dragon with super-regeneration, either."
Step one, get Bonesaw to lobotomize and otherwise tinker with Butcher until memories no longer transfer, alternately clone original Butcher as blank slate.
Step two have blank brained Lung Clone kill Butcher.
Step three kill Lung Clone.
Really not that hard.
Step one, get Bonesaw to lobotomize and otherwise tinker with Butcher until memories no longer transfer, alternately clone original Butcher as blank slate.
Step two have blank brained Lung Clone kill Butcher.
Step three kill Lung Clone.
Really not that hard.
Unfortunately wrong. David's shard is explicitly pregog. It gives him the power he needs before he even needs it.
Mandabar
Waifu of choice is Rem. Give that girl some hugs!
- Location
- Florida, USA [Yes. Florida *FacePalm*]
I forget the name of the fiction that Taylor basicly does this after getting a quasi-Blasto shard. Ends up with Blasto + BoneSaw + Quantum shards with a nice killed butcher clone I believe. Seed I think?"There's no Path that lets Contessa become a firebreathing dragon with super-regeneration, either."
Step one, get Bonesaw to lobotomize and otherwise tinker with Butcher until memories no longer transfer, alternately clone original Butcher as blank slate.
Step two have blank brained Lung Clone kill Butcher.
Step three kill Lung Clone.
Really not that hard.
Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
See quote delivered by Terrabrand.
More logical that she done direct interventions enough to create urban legend of Competent Woman in a Hat, witch is part of PtV for some reason, but not ALL of them.
Due to the fact that precognition is mathematical predictive modelling, not time shenanigans, if you can't predict any subject in bigger model, than due to butterfly effect precision of said model drops. The more important subject is, more rapidly precision drops, because it's affects more.
Therefore all "precog invisible" subjects ARE visible to SHARD, but not to the user.
Speaking of precognition. How different precog powers interact.
Coil uses alt. timelines to ask questions from Dinah. For it to work, Coil shard had to emulate Dinah powers. Next, when Dinah asked any long-term and/or global questions, her shard has to taken Contessa's actions into account, for witch it needs to emulate PtV, witch is clearly impossible.
Therefore, i make a conclusion that part (if not all) of precog shards needs to interchange information to work.
Lenimentus
Ignorant but learning.
That is exactly what I think they should believe, give a tinker enough time and fuck yes they can escape without being killed. I'm sure Bakuda, given enough time, can make a bomb that breaks down the barriers between different worlds and escape into one.
- Location
- Wherever
I have never seen any quote to that effect anywhere and that is incompatible with canon-as-written. Eidolon gets powers by going into a situation, letting go of a power, waiting for his shard to fill his perceived need, discarding it if it isn't what he wants, repeat until he has what he wants. If it used precognition to give him what he needed it as he needed it, canon-as-written wouldn't happen. As such, even if you find a WOG quote and link it, I will ignore it as wrong.
I think you're trying to say I misunderstood canon -no, Terrabrand grabbed a quote from early in the story. It is, in fact, the quote that contributed to me initially assuming Contessa commanded enforcer events rather than doing them manually, personally. The problem is that much later, when canon is covering Contessa's enforcer actions, everything being stated strongly implies that she personally handles all enforcer events and always has.
If you're instead agreeing with what Terrabrand and I are saying, you can ignore this.
No, Wildbow's WOG on precognition is that Entities have been using "look directly at future" precognition and were in the middle of transitioning to simulations when they hit Earth Bet. This is in line with canon, where some precog powers are fairly unreliable, but the PtV ones (Dinah's, Contessa's) are 100% reliable if not explicitly blocked.
Precognition powers explicitly interfere with each other. (Which makes perfect sense all on its own) Coil's power combining with Dinah's is the only time canon ever contradicts this idea, and it's one of the (many) reasons why I prefer running with the interpretation that Coil's power is utilizing quantum-many-worlds-hax-nonsense to work rather than operating via simulation -because the many worlds approach makes the synergy logical, while running with simulation or precognition to explain Coil's power instantly makes it impossible to reconcile his power having synergy with Dinah's.
The quarantine isn't about trapping people in there. In all honesty, if it was an option to dump Simurgh'd people into another dimension and close it off, that would probably already be the canon solution, as it's infinitely superior to walling in a city and minimizing contact. (In fact: it is now headcanon for me that this is one of the reasons why the Simurgh hit Professor Haywire's location, to prevent exactly that scenario from restricting the Simurgh's ability to influence the world) The point of the quarantine is to prevent the Simurgh'd people from causing harm to everybody else on Earth, nothing more.
Furthermore, the only people who'd have any reason to expect such a thing (Cauldron) are the people who'd be most likely to be completely okay with the outcome -or outright desire it, if you assume they want her bombs. It's not like she gets out of their reach by escaping into another dimension, and if she escapes to another dimension she's probably a lot safer from Simurgh'd people and so on.
Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
Ziz has one of the best precog powers, and i'm under impression that she uses modeling, not future-vision.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
False. The Simurgh explicitly sees the past and the future; and not the present. The Simurgh can't be simply modeling because then it'd know the present even if you assume it's modeling the future off of information it's viewing in the past.
Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
Well...
It's open to interpretations, of course, but i see predictive modelling, not future-sight.28.x (Interlude) said:
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Uh.
"This was made easier by another sense. Another power extends in the other direction, and this is not one that can be sensed by most. Possibilities, as another jumble of images. These clarify as the others do, as eventualities are discarded, the targets around her coming into focus."
A sense, a power that extends in 'the other direction', apparently the future. Information from this sense is implied to be part of how she plans. There is also as I understand a WOG on the topic, but I don't know where and it kinda doesn't matter when I have something in that very quote to point out.
How is that not 'one of the Simurghs powers is a direct sense seeing into the future'?
"This was made easier by another sense. Another power extends in the other direction, and this is not one that can be sensed by most. Possibilities, as another jumble of images. These clarify as the others do, as eventualities are discarded, the targets around her coming into focus."
A sense, a power that extends in 'the other direction', apparently the future. Information from this sense is implied to be part of how she plans. There is also as I understand a WOG on the topic, but I don't know where and it kinda doesn't matter when I have something in that very quote to point out.
How is that not 'one of the Simurghs powers is a direct sense seeing into the future'?
Climhazzard
Breaking the limit since 1991
- Location
- Bali, Indonesia
Hah! :lol
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Also, it occurred to me that there was a part of that scene I shoulda grabbed in the first place, in part because later canon/word of god contradicts it as I understand in rather nonsensical ways
This pretty directly implies a number of case 53s in Cauldrons control, specifically as brainwashed and regularly employed enforcers, approximately equal to the number of memory wiped case 53s out in the world such as Gregor, Newter, and Weld.
This pretty directly implies a number of case 53s in Cauldrons control, specifically as brainwashed and regularly employed enforcers, approximately equal to the number of memory wiped case 53s out in the world such as Gregor, Newter, and Weld.