This is a good SI, you actually manage to make it a SI and not just a powertrip. You know useful shit but cant do much with it due to being the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place.
I appreciate the appreciation!
Exploding Canon was actually kicked off by a discussion with someone wherein I was complaining about Worm SIs always being in a position to
immediately track down and successfully befriend Taylor, as if that's the
only way you could be notably influential on canon. Somewhere in there one of us used "showing up as Bakuda" as an example of a SI that wouldn't be in a position to befriend Taylor but
would be in a position to seriously influence canon -this is a woman whose tech was plot-critical weeks after she
died- and then I latched onto it as
ohmygod that's actually awesome.
Also the "I am in a story" not turning into "I create worlds for my amusement" but instead asking if your in a story, what one is it?
Edit for clarity: Just because they are in a fiction most SI assume they are in a story being written by them, when there are many other possibility they almost never consider.
Well, in most cases they assume they're in canon... but they assume they're in
their own understanding of canon, which
amounts to assuming they're in a story they are writing, especially since this often leads to the story lining up with their
headcanon even in cases where it contradicts
actual canon.
Like, canon telling us that Oni Lee's "will" or whatever is being eaten a little bit each time he cloneports because metaphysical "logic" is completely demented and not anything I would ever include in a Worm fanfic I was writing with an eye toward a coherent and sensical whole. However, it's canon -so my SI still has to deal with it being true even while thinking it's
idiotic nonsense.
Whereas most people, if they shared my conviction, would've then written Oni Lee as not having that quality.
You fail in ways that seem like they could happen instead of ones that feel like they are added as a handicap.
Thanks! I've already commented in the thread that some of Bakuda's failings have been me literally writing scenes and then realizing I, as a writer, didn't consider an angle, and then running with that being an oversight instead of rewriting the scene such that Bakuda doesn't make the same oversight, so that makes sense to me.
Other things. My fuzzy memory suggest that the mind fuckery committed by the Sky-Bitch is done via telekinetic micro surgery literally reshaping your brain. All the supposed signs and symptoms are trolling and false leads.
We're not actually told how the "song" works. The closest to being told how it works is that Wildbow has said that Alexandria is immune because her cognition is offloaded to the shard ie not occurring in her physical brain, which tells us
some things.
We also see in the Clairvoyant Interlude that the Simurgh is capable of
subtle manipulations without even using the brain hacking per se. There's a tidbit in there about her shaping her body so that Lisa sees a shape evocative of someone being hanged, though it's not
completely explicit that the Simurgh is going for that appearance. So there's layers of complexity with the Simurgh.
Merchant wrist bands: those didn't start until after Leviathan and the Merchants started allowing walk-ons. The bands signified seniority.
We don't hear about the wristbands until after Leviathan, but all we see of the Merchants prior to Leviathan is some of their capes. There's actually no indication whether they were in use prior to Leviathan or not, at least not that I recall.
Bombs: holy shit your making those things fast.
Basing that on Bakuda in canon. The rate at which she seems to churn them out in canon is nuts, and it's just not in-your-face obvious because it's happening off-screen. Which, to be fair, Wildbow is kind of terrible about having tinkers have reasonable speed anytime we're
looking at them and then the instant they're offscreen it's like they're in a favorable timewarp (The Slaughterhouse Nine escaping Brockton Bay provides one of the more egregious examples), but Bakuda is
particularly striking since most everything she builds is a one-use item where normally tinkers are building
gear. She kind of
has to have ludicrous output to have anything more than a handful of bombs at any given moment, if she produced at a more typical (on-screen) tinker pace.
Also your SI seems to be missing the blatant link between the power blocker and sky bitch appearance.
It's more that Bakuda isn't willing to make
any assumptions because the Simurgh
uses your assumptions against you.
While diamonds are often called a girl's best friend, nobody likes them in the form of explosively forged shards moving at supersonic velocities.
Hey, you can still sell them!
Once you pull them out of whatever they impacted into and clean the blood off, I mean.
