Exploding Canon (Worm SI)

[GoldenCookie]

I mean, yes its generally a good idea to consider that, but its not inherently correct either. Ghoul King could be, and I would argue is, running up against a cultural blindspot/problem.

A person in a wheelchair who often finds themselves in many legal disputes over door width is not responsible for this problem, for all that they at first glance appear to be the only consistent factor. The problem is caused by society at large making doors that are too narrow: there have always been and always will be people who need wheelchairs, and the doors should have been made with this in mind. The complaint that Bakuda gives no reason for not acting decisively against Oni Lee, for all that it is recurrent, is simply incorrect.

Sometimes, everyone else is wrong.

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I agree with you, and what I wanted was actually just some examination of the story on the part of the author instead of being upset with other people. It might not be fair of me to imply he hasn't examined the story, but he's coming back to it after a long time and might not remember all the reasons he had the SI act the way they did. On the other hand, Ghoul King's argument is this:

It's also kind of frustrating to have yet another person going 'Bakuda should've just killed Oni Lee successfully and her not trying is For No Reason' when she explicitly walks the audience through why she finds this too risky and ultimately can't bring herself to do it even though she really wants to. That's not 'for no reason'. You were told the reasons. You can argue that it was a bad decision, you can argue you wouldn't have done it in her place, but claiming it was 'for no reason' is just blatantly incorrect, and I don't understand why this is, like, the third or fourth time someone has taken this utterly bizarre position on this topic. I can only assume that underlying this idea is the same thought process that leads to people writing SIs in which the SI makes insanely risky play after insanely risky play without anything ever going wrong, that I guess other people are genuinely blind to how bad an idea that is and how it couldn't possibly work out that consistently for that long?

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He isn't wrong, and it's a very minor issue that I don't really care about, but what he's saying is that he's annoyed that other people aren't reading his story properly and that the SI genre is at fault. Which is... fine. I just wish he wasn't being condescending about it.

 

[Tithed_Verse]

but it feels weird. I'm not sure how to explain it.

You do seem, um, really defensive instead of baffled. Have you considered that if a number of people have come up with the same complaint, there might be something to it? If you haven't, well, you don't actually have to respond to people, you know?

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You don't get it. You really don't. @Ghoul King is kinda baring their soul here. This is how their brain actually works. No it's not how a normal average brain 'works'. Given that a very small percentage of the population actually comes close to approximating that ideal, this is fine.

But usually characters in stories try to... cleave closer to that ideal than actual breathing humans do. It's part of the whole SOD deal. 'The difference between a truth and a lie is that a lie has to be plausible'. A fictional character has to seem 'normal' and 'realistic' and 'connected'. A real human has to be none of those things.

Mind, ghoul spends a lot of time inside their own head. If I was writing a self insert there would be a lot LESS logic chains. Most of the time I would act, then determine why I did what I did afterwards... if I even bothered to determine why. Which I usually don't. It's kinda pointless.

But that's the thing about a self insert. It's your SELF. And quite obviously Goul has a different self than I do.

Also most self inserts aren't about the self. They're just about an excuse to throw a blank slate into another world.

 

[Ciber]

As an aside, Chimera Squad being properly released shortly means I'm liable to be on less for a week or so, and probably doing less creative writing too, so I don't know when the next update will happen.

Or maybe it will inspire me. That sometimes happens instead. No promises, though.



As far as I can tell, your primary interest in this discussion is to try to convince people you are smarter than anyone in the room, in no small part by refusing to share your knowledge in any meaningful way and then going 'gotcha!' when you can jump on someone saying something that by some metric is not 'correct', without bothering to actually engage with what people are saying. When people have raised counterpoints, you have roundly implied they are stupid, and that's generally the sum total of your contribution; "Your point is wrong because I said so, and you're stupid".

If I seem disinterested in becoming educated by you, it's because you're an asshole, and as yet you have evinced not a single genuinely intelligent-seeming thought. You focus exclusively on making others seem stupid, which is rarely a good sign, on multiple levels.

Additionally, you have operated in bad faith at every step, misrepresenting or misinterpreting what others have said (And not just myself), naturally as part and parcel of your ongoing pattern of making others sound like idiots. This does not suggest I should accept you are saying truthful things in an earnest attempt to educate others, which makes literally everything you say inherently suspect.

I would be perfectly happy if you starting saying meaningfully useful things and engaged in real discussion in good faith, such that I and others became more usefully knowledgeable.

The evidence, quite abundant at this point, is that this will never happen and there's no point in engaging with your ostensible points, because they aren't your points, they're just a vector for insulting people, and you will shift goalposts or misinterpret people if that's what it takes to achieve that result.



Well, it's not so much that this is swept away as not being a big part of Worm fandom as this is derived from what I'd substantially read at the time I started Exploding Canon. Blatant revenge-fics were not something I would stick out for any period of time unless there was something uniquely interesting to help me push past the creepy revenge fantasy, among other things I wouldn't bother to read.

I still read some f-ed up stuff, but generally it was stuff where you had to get pretty deep into it to have the information to start going 'this is fucked up, and not the good kind of fucked up where they intended it, but the kind where I'm not sure I want to meet the author'.

And then Bakuda is interpreting her memories through the lens of 'okay, the stuff I remember reading extensively is probably the more-likely secondary possibilities, and the vague morass of Bad Worm Fanfic was either more stuff for keeping my memories authentic-seeming or was, like, super-edge-case stuff that's useful to be aware of but was extremely unlikely to actually happen'.



I mean, honestly, I'm not really sure where you're getting a lot of this stuff. 'SI is behaving like she has super-Tattletale-power' is, well, kinda laughable on the face of it given how Lisa directly reads the script multiple times in canon so even if you have a point it would be 'just straight-up has Tattletale's power', but more importantly... 'immediately hit upon the right idea, location, and way to disrupt it'? You sure you didn't read another story simultaneously to this and mix them up? Bakuda spends a while wandering around, trying to figure out what to do, her initial ideas don't work, and in the end the only reason her attempts to do anything about it work is because the Triumvirate and Cauldron bring their resources to bear after Bakuda has, somewhat-accidentally, helped reveal the issue exists for them to bring their bullshit resources to bear against. It'd be fair to argue that a proper Thinker should've thought of the idea and been on the case before Bakuda did anything to reveal it, even if I'd (obviously) disagree and argue back that the Simurgh does a lot to interfere with Thinkers and canon tends to show Thinkers over-relying on their power instead of their natural thinking ability, but this characterization of what happened is just bizarre.

It's also kind of frustrating to have yet another person going 'Bakuda should've just killed Oni Lee successfully and her not trying is For No Reason' when she explicitly walks the audience through why she finds this too risky and ultimately can't bring herself to do it even though she really wants to. That's not 'for no reason'. You were told the reasons. You can argue that it was a bad decision, you can argue you wouldn't have done it in her place, but claiming it was 'for no reason' is just blatantly incorrect, and I don't understand why this is, like, the third or fourth time someone has taken this utterly bizarre position on this topic. I can only assume that underlying this idea is the same thought process that leads to people writing SIs in which the SI makes insanely risky play after insanely risky play without anything ever going wrong, that I guess other people are genuinely blind to how bad an idea that is and how it couldn't possibly work out that consistently for that long?

And, like, you note Lung isn't invincible. Yyyyyesss? What's prompting you to say this, and what's your point? The story doesn't treat him like he's invincible, it treats him as very difficult to kill and, among other things, very dangerous to fuck up on trying to kill him. Hell, canon could be argued as treating him as invincible; you're bringing up Sundancer, but she was one of something in the vicinity of a dozen capes in that scene and until she started bringing her ball of fire at Lung the story was writing him as winning! (Which is consistent with the fact that ABB vs entire city was something like a 12-to-1 ratio of capes, and yet the ABB was initially treated as winning, with little story attention given to acknowledging normals being part of the fighting)

Similarly, 'the ABB got way powered up'; have you... not read canon or something? This is the group that, in canon, was able to go toe-to-toe with literally the entire city, and while they lost it took a while, instead of them being instantly squashed. Yes, part of this was that Bakuda was gangpressing random citizens, but she was producing insane amounts of explosives on a continuous basis and when we got fight scenes with Lung and Oni Lee they were both able to put up serious resistance against multiple capes, instead of being, you know, instantly squished. The only capacity in which I 'powered up' the ABB was that in canon Taylor claims early on they have like literally 50 members and I've implicitly assumed that was wrong because that doesn't remotely fit them being a major player in the gang scene when the competition includes the blatantly-much-larger-than-that E88. Fuck, I've been downplaying Bakuda's production rate and versatility compared to canon, because actually writing it out I just can't believe something that's actually compliant with how insanely powerful and versatile she was in canon off of essentially no lead-up time. She triggered, took Cornell hostage, and then, what, less than a month later was one of the most dominant players in Brockton Bay up until her insane methods getting, I must repeat, literally the entire city to turn on the ABB, led to Bakuda and Lung being birdcaged. Tinkers ostensibly take time to ramp up, time she doesn't appear to have had in canon!

You do make a decent point that the Protectorate has had time to make anti-Oni Lee defenses. It's rather undermined by the fact that part of what fairly explicitly happened was that Oni Lee brought an exotic Bakuda grenade, when Bakuda is new on the scene and in canon the Protectorate didn't rapidly develop countermeasures, but I can imagine you're trying to argue something like 'Armsmaster probably has an anti-Oni Lee teleportation thing aboard the Rig', which if it were true would be a good point. It's not something I can personally accept as plausibly canon given we never heard anything in canon about the Protectorate deploying anti-Oni-Lee teleporters during the ABB rampage in canon even though they absolutely should have done so if it was an option, but if a fanfic wrote it as existing I wouldn't necessarily be able to say it was wrong, such as if the fanfic gave it parameters that made it impractical to deploy in the field.

Overall, though, I'm just... confused by this assemblage of statements. They mostly don't seem to have anything to do with the story you read. The handful I don't find readily 'lolwut' are, themselves, so vague I don't even know what you're trying to say, like the commentary about Alexandria.

(By the by; I recently mentioned I rolled dice for the Endbringer attack. Alaxendria died in this attack because the dice said so. By which I mean she got a fate-worse-than-death because my dice said she died, I went 'wait, how the hell would the Simurgh kill Alexandria?' and I ended up interpreting it as 'out of action more or less permanently'... which I'd have just dumped her in another dimension, but Door. I did my best to make it make some fucking sense, but this is honestly the entire reason we got an Alexandria Interlude; because just killing her off-screen because my dice said so would've been, from an audience perspective, fucking ridiculous and indefensible)

... I do appreciate you saying the writing is decent, even if it's a bit... backhanded a way of presenting it. I just find it frustrating when people provide feedback that really doesn't seem to have anything to do with what i wrote. How am I supposed to respond to that, especially while staying polite? If I point out the bizarreness of the statements, it's easy to interpret that as me just being defensive or whatever, rather than... y'know... genuinely baffled.

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I enjoy your writing, but if you are going to write enough word to make them a chapter, why not write a chapter? I really get the feeling that you did not enjoy writing this response.

Anyway, I would think that half the reason they are keeping the SI in quarantine is so she is in proximity to the checkered zombie effect & will hopefully figure out a bomb to counter it.
I feel like this is the sort of thought the SI would have, and its weird that she has not yet put much effort into it.
As the queen of exotic effects, you would think she would be more interested in experimenting with counters to the greatest proximate threat to her life that also happens to be an exotic effect.
Idea!
Wall Bomb:
A 2 stage bomb, the first stage is a low yield shaped charge that is constrained to a plane around the bomb & acts as a sort of sonar pulse so the bomb can map where all the walls around it are & if it is somewhere constrained like a hallway. The second stage portals in a wall of solid steel to fill the mapped area+ a bit to anchor into the walls.
Stick the bomb on the end of a telescoping pole so you can control its exact positioning & angle and you get a useful tool that is not too OP. It would of only be usable at all in fully contained areas, and it matches the limitations of your Budakas powers as I understand them.
Another 2 stage bomb idea would be to use a short lived timestop as an perfect container for a shaped charge. That would let her use much more powerful bombs nearer herself because all the effect would be directed away from her.

 

[Terrabrand]

I enjoy your writing, but if you are going to write enough word to make them a chapter, why not write a chapter? I really get the feeling that you did not enjoy writing this response.

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I kinda feel like you don't write at all if you're saying this. I can and have written tens of thousands of words of shitposts about games or fanfic or whatever, gone and tried to write a story I really want to write, and failed to get out anything, let alone even five hundred to a thousand words, only to effortlesslly produce thousands of words more of jabber about naruto or whatever.

Writing is not merely a skill of pumping out X quantity of words. Figuring out how to say things, where to take the story, and so on are skills, and being able to produce a quantity of words does not mean you can produce that quantity as a story post.

Like, Ghoul King is largely explaining things he already has determined or whatever here. Writing a story involves defining events and what not, not just describing them.

It is an overall harder skill, and one may have the capacity to write words in the context of a discussion but not currently possess the relevant mental energies to write a story.

 

[Callmesalticidae]

As an aside, Chimera Squad being properly released shortly means I'm liable to be on less for a week or so, and probably doing less creative writing too, so I don't know when the next update will happen.

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Chimera Squad looks very interesting and I'll have to strongly consider getting it, but I am very disappointed, given what I've seen so far, that they didn't call it XCOP.

 

[WinterLantern]

I enjoy your writing, but if you are going to write enough word to make them a chapter, why not write a chapter? I really get the feeling that you did not enjoy writing this response.

Anyway, I would think that half the reason they are keeping the SI in quarantine is so she is in proximity to the checkered zombie effect & will hopefully figure out a bomb to counter it.
I feel like this is the sort of thought the SI would have, and its weird that she has not yet put much effort into it.
As the queen of exotic effects, you would think she would be more interested in experimenting with counters to the greatest proximate threat to her life that also happens to be an exotic effect.
Idea!
Wall Bomb:
A 2 stage bomb, the first stage is a low yield shaped charge that is constrained to a plane around the bomb & acts as a sort of sonar pulse so the bomb can map where all the walls around it are & if it is somewhere constrained like a hallway. The second stage portals in a wall of solid steel to fill the mapped area+ a bit to anchor into the walls.
Stick the bomb on the end of a telescoping pole so you can control its exact positioning & angle and you get a useful tool that is not too OP. It would of only be usable at all in fully contained areas, and it matches the limitations of your Budakas powers as I understand them.
Another 2 stage bomb idea would be to use a short lived timestop as an perfect container for a shaped charge. That would let her use much more powerful bombs nearer herself because all the effect would be directed away from her.

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The 'shut up and write' is low key hella rude.

Also, complaining the SI isn't doing what you would do despite the core conceit of SI being the author is bizarre, and smacks of your classic SV smooth brain LoGiC.

 

[nathnathn]

Probably a bit late but il put an idea out on dragon.
With what i know of the space whales and there lack of creativity and available processing power.
Its perfectly possible that that they started at brute force emulating a human brain at a high clockspeed and then starting to modify it to function at a more AI scale its not like they would be concerned with any failed iterations that died in the process.
Just incase im not clear on what i mean by clock speed i mean the equivalent of time dilation

really just an idle thought. And late at night so il leave it to everyone to decide if its worth paying any attention to.

 

[Ciber]

The 'shut up and write' is low key hella rude.

Also, complaining the SI isn't doing what you would do despite the core conceit of SI being the author is bizarre, and smacks of your classic SV smooth brain LoGiC.

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Another cool idea for a non-lethal bomb would be one that temporarily massively speeds up the passage of time within its area of effect but has a smooth falloff. Say anything at the center of the bomb experiences tens of thousands of years, letting it destroy obstacles just by rotting & rusting them away, but anyone who can move can just safely walk out of the field of effect because it falls off smoothly.
Then just carry one on your person with a trigger that goes off when something high energy moves near you to provide a budget emergency mover ability.
Actually speaking of triggers, does Badukas power cover the creation of exotic bomb triggers? You could probably hack that to create all sorts of exotic sensors. We have already demonstrated the ability to make bombs that affect the mind in complex ways, can we make bomb triggers that detect complex patterns of thought like intent to kill?

 

[me.me.here]

Another cool idea for a non-lethal bomb would be one that temporarily massively speeds up the passage of time within its area of effect but has a smooth falloff. Say anything at the center of the bomb experiences tens of thousands of years, letting it destroy obstacles just by rotting & rusting them away, but anyone who can move can just safely walk out of the field of effect because it falls off smoothly.

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This really doesn't work - for what's basically a form of tidal stress, only in a temporal format. Essentially, if you have a bubble of X size where the inside is moving hundreds of thousands of times faster - you can never get smoother differentials than the flat a hundred thousand to one per Y distance average. The problem with just walking out of that kind of thing is that people are not point masses - so someone's leading foot will be aging slower than their trailing foot, and so on.

You can get around this by reducing the actual differential average, but that means either reducing how intense the center gets (making it less damaging and therefore less useful) or increasing the size of the bubble compared to a person (which means it'd take longer to walk out, and also would lead to much more collateral damage).

 

[Ciber]

Well I was thinking of it more as a way to trick her power into giving her an effective mover ability. Even making the center be at only 2x could still give a combat advantage if you can make the dropoff short enough that it does not include your enemies.
Bakuda is a tinker who can't make power armor, so she needs some way to be more survivable in fights. Also her bomb based attacks do not have the range to compete with simple guns, so she needs a way to close the distance.

 

[tricholysis]

no, not really
why should she get a way to be survivable just because she would like one? moreover, she barely could build a mortar and when she tried to convert her bombs' exotic tripwires into a sensor (with her transmitter earring) she got shut down—her shard is prettttttty hard to trick.
she 'needs' some way to be more survivable, sure, but that doesn't mean that Ghoul King is required to give her one.

 

[Ghoul King]

Okay, Chimera Squad is cool, but delays so far have been driven primarily by finding yet another surprise in my apartment and the health fallout from removing it. (By 'surprise' I mean 'yet another disgusting thing from previous tenants that has been here for possibly literally decades') I didn't even pop into Sufficient Velocity because said fallout was... limiting.

I enjoy your writing, and I like this story a lot, but the main character gives me a sense of... disconnect? I mean, their actions make sense and I can understand their logic chains, but it feels weird. I'm not sure how to explain it.

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Disconnect sounds like a sensible thing to be picking up on. A component of my social difficulties is that my emotional landscape doesn't tend to correlate very well with what people intuitively expect it to correlate to, behaviorally. Like, fear is stereotyped as a 'run away' response, but my foundational responses to situations I find frightening trend toward hunkering down and hiding (Which people find reasonably intuitive) or going on the offense. (Which gets people confused because they associate that with anger and think of it as outright opposed to fear)

So my internal, emotional landscape, the thought processes involved, they don't achieve the output most would expect.

And then unlike your average SI, I'm not writing a bland facade of Totally Normal Honest Please Like Me. I'm actually writing, roughly, myself. So this oddness actually shows through.

You do seem, um, really defensive instead of baffled. Have you considered that if a number of people have come up with the same complaint, there might be something to it? If you haven't, well, you don't actually have to respond to people, you know?

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One thing I've noticed is that I trend toward being comprehensive, and this tends to get taken as defensive or angry. Sometimes anger is a motive for the comprehensiveness, but usually it's because I consider comprehensive responses a Best Practice, as it tends to reduce misunderstandings, lead to overall less time spent on the topic because there's less back-and-forth iteration, and if it happens to be the case that I'm talking to assholes it reduces their ability to try to reframe their actions into something defensible-sounding because they can't dispute whatever one thing I said and build up a false-but-plausible-sounding explanation for the one thing, they have to address the litany of issues I'm raising and it's rare that someone can invent a single, convincing-sounding explanation to do so, unless it happens to be an actual misunderstanding and so there's the easy explanation of the truth.

I don't have to respond to people, but I'm not the sort to go 'I disagree with your conclusions so I'm going to pretend you don't exist'. If I disagree with someone's conclusions, it may be because I'm unaware of information that goes into their reasoning that, if brought to light, would change my own conclusion. It could be that the individual simply hasn't thought things through, and there are situations I'll just ignore a poster, such as one-sentence comments with no context from people I have zero familiarity with to even begin to guess what they're trying to actually say, but generally I prefer engagement and the possibility of learning over avoiding emotional distress or the like.

I agree with you, and what I wanted was actually just some examination of the story on the part of the author instead of being upset with other people. It might not be fair of me to imply he hasn't examined the story, but he's coming back to it after a long time and might not remember all the reasons he had the SI act the way they did.

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I actually re-read the story in its entirety before I resumed writing. This is my standard modus operandi if circumstances conspire such that I can't work on a story for an extremely long period of time and I lose track of the details. I further supplement this practice with note-taking for topics that don't naturally stick in my mind but that are still important, such as which characters died in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it allusion to an off-screen death.

He isn't wrong, and it's a very minor issue that I don't really care about, but what he's saying is that he's annoyed that other people aren't reading his story properly and that the SI genre is at fault. Which is... fine. I just wish he wasn't being condescending about it.

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I'm not annoyed, I'm frustrated, and in retrospect part of why it was frustrating was the combination of 'when dealing with Oni Lee, Bakuda was not hypercompetent (And that's bad), while when they were dealing with the Simurgh's tinkertech project they were hypercompetent (And that's bad)'. Like... if someone is disappointed Bakuda isn't a stock hyper-competent nonsense SI, and makes that known, I'm not going to bother to change the story to please them but they can like what they like, even if I personally think the thing is question is terrible. And of course if someone feels Bakuda is a stock hyper-competent SI and disparages that, I might disagree with their logic for reaching that conclusion, such as suspecting pattern-matching is at work ("Oh, of course the SI's faction is an important player in the scene of Brockton Bay who can have a big impact, as usual.") without proper thought applied (ie the point that the ABB's canonical feats are... more ridiculous, honestly), but I won't be annoyed by them holding that position in a general sense.

But getting simultaneously told both of those is just... what?

In any event, I wasn't blaming the SI genre. I mean, the way the SI genre is normally constructed probably is part of why people will look at a decision that could be viewed as sub-optimal and, when it's coming from an SI, consider it bad writing instead of considering whether it's in-character, but I was actually talking about how writing is an outgrowth of the way people think, that probably part of why the SI genre has a lot of these qualities so often is because on some level that makes sense to a lot of people, with this having the natural consequence that a lot of readers won't question it when they see it and may balk when they see a deviation from it, because they share whatever underlying thought process creates such writing.

And in the case of SI stories, one of those thought patterns is the 'SI as rational robot that always makes quoteunquote "optimal" decisions, never making a poor decision due to tiredness, or time pressure, or being distracted, or the emotional factor preventing them from going through with a decision, or any of the other things actual people have to deal with when making decisions'. Even in stories that draw the audience's attention to the SI being under time pressure, distracted, tired, and otherwise overwhelmed.

I enjoy your writing, but if you are going to write enough word to make them a chapter, why not write a chapter? I really get the feeling that you did not enjoy writing this response.

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My typical chapters are 8,000~ words, occasionally spiking up to 13,000~. My typical in-thread responses are 800-2,000~ words. This is a silly statement.

Chimera Squad looks very interesting and I'll have to strongly consider getting it, but I am very disappointed, given what I've seen so far, that they didn't call it XCOP.

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Chimera Squad has you playing more a SWAT team or something in that vein than a police force (Indeed, the police department explicitly exists and you work with them), but you get a Funny regardless.

 

[Iarna]

Happy to see this back, and your uniquely grumpy takes on canon. =D

Then I stop, abruptly realizing I've revealed I know her gender and I'm not sure whether it makes sense for me to know that at this point, panicking for a second, until I remember she took the tampons yesterday. Whew. That's a reasonable-looking assumption on my part from an external view, not me revealing my precognitive info.

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I really love this moment of the main char lacking the narrative omniscience that it's easy for stories to fall into. (I literally was going "but you gave her tampons yesterday" after the first half of the sentence and then...)

 

[Rogue Gemini]

I guess I must have dropped off at one point or another, maybe it was the start of the Simurgh battle, not sure really. I think that I had read this story off and on without actually following it, though I can't remember for the life of me why...

At best, I can state that I sorta understand GK's points on SI's and thought processes. I have a hard time conveying thoughts even though I know what I want to say, because I have the tendency to either over-complicate or stop too often to thinking of a better way to say it.

Stringing thoughts like this is an absolute nightmare to me because I'd be too locked up on saying the right thing rather than letting thoughts flow freely. Then again, it's little wonder why I gave up on writing stories (not including life and everything else).

As for the story after refreshing my memories and catching up, I can certainly appreciate SIkuda making any of this work because I can't even fathom how running around as her kept her alive. Aside from what's happened, obviously. To me, it's certainly better than dying in the cage at least.

I'm definitely following now, if only to help stave off boredom when work and FGO haven't already consumed most of my quarantine time XD.

 

[GSSJ10]

This is certainly the most unique SI I've read, I think. I mean I definetly haven't seen any story where the SI blames Abaddon of all people...er entities. Most just say, ROB, or the SI thinking they're in a story and saying cringy stuff like "I hate you writer me" or something like that. You're take on Dragon being an Abaddon plot and the fixation of Worm fandom on Taylor is certainly interesting.
I'm sure you've had a hundred comments like this, but just thought to chime in myself. Hope you update soon...

 

[Mechasaurian]

@Ghoul King
Right now, in the Unpopular Opinions on Fiction thread, people are really ragging on the "roll dice to determine who survives the Endbringer attack (including the protagonist)" approach.

I'm curious - since you yourself did this for this very story's Simurgh attack (including Bakuda herself), what's your take on it?

 

[Ghoul King]

@Ghoul King
Right now, in the Unpopular Opinions on Fiction thread, people are really ragging on the "roll dice to determine who survives the Endbringer attack (including the protagonist)" approach.

I'm curious - since you yourself did this for this very story's Simurgh attack (including Bakuda herself), what's your take on it?

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Mmm.

Well, for starters I do it because I have a number of Worm fanfics in the works that touch on Endbringer fights and didn't want to be annoyingly repetitive with them. If I'd, like, only intended to write Monster and no other Worm fanfic, I'd probably not have bothered, and similarly it would probably be less-than-desirable if literally every beginning fanfic author went straight to the dice-rolling approach.

That said, there are three basic reasons I find it worthwhile;

Realism

One of the things that's always been a serious hurdle to my ability to enjoy any number of general story types that deal with disaster-type stuff, including mainstream superhero stories, is the part where disasters that kill thousands, millions, or billions of people, will nonetheless respect the contractual immortality of main characters, and will also obligingly avoid killing off anyone the audience cares about in any manner aside a dramatic and emotionally satisfying one.

As a concrete example, in Worm itself the Behemoth fight is a much weaker fight than the Leviaithan fight because we're told it's an epic disaster that kills off 90% of the capes or whatever that number was, but for no believable reason it barely touches characters we personally know, particularly if you completely discount Cody running off to kill Accord and all. (Which you should: this isn't a Simurgh fight where you might as well assume everything bad is her fault even if there's no specific evidence suggesting it is) This is partly because a smaller number of people we know were present for the Behemoth fight, but not entirely; among other points, Regent's death is conspicuously a dramatic, heroic sacrifice, because naturally the Herokiller can't possibly successfully kill off a low-tier body-jacker unless said body-jacker chooses to die. That has nothing to do with a smaller known cast, and everything to do with blatant plot armor, where someone the main character considers to be a friend is invincible unless it's time to wring their death for drama or the like.

Rolling dice for most-to-all characters helps avoid this particular issue.

Breaking up trends

It's rare for me to find an author who I can genuinely enjoy more than one piece of their body of work. If they have ten fanfics in one fandom, and I like one of them, the other nine are probably just shadows of the one I like, in which the same characters engage in the same basic patterns of behavior with the same basic over-arc to frame everything.

Often, digging around in an author's larger body of work, there will be hints of potential there. One story will touch briefly on some character tangential to that story, and do so in a vivid, compelling manner that implies the author could do a lot with that character and have it be engaging and interesting... but they're not a part of that author's core list of favorites, so there is absolutely no chance of them writing a fanfic that delves deeper into that character, no matter how much fanfic they churn out and no matter how varied their premises ostensibly are. They had a really cool, interesting take on Canary in that brief period their fanfic touched on the Birdcage being busted open? Sorry, that's the only time Canary will show up in any of their fanfics.

Similarly, and more obviously connected to 'roll dice for Endbringer attacks', is the issue of author pet hates: characters who conspicuously always die swiftly and possibly not-entirely-believably, or are otherwise removed from the board as fast as possible no matter how much narrative contortion that requires. (I'm somewhat guilty of doing this with Coil, for example, between the Monster omake chain in which he's killed and of course Exploding Canon itself) If an author has multiple stories touch on Endbringers, it is extremely likely they will, intentionally or not, use this as an excuse to kill off their favorite hates without needing a strong narrative justification.

Collectively, these trend issues tend to result in wasted potential, missed opportunities, and just plain repetitive writing, not because something worthwhile was being pursued and you can't have everything, but because the author has a comfortable groove and goes out of their way to stay inside that groove instead of improving their craft and writing new, interesting stories.

Rolling dice for character deaths during an Endbringer attack helps break up these trends: sometimes a favorite will die, forcing the author to fill the void somehow. Sometimes a favorite hate will survive. Critically, probably the exact collage that results will force the author to break from their patterns more generally: even if a favorite survives, secondary elements of their situation may end up so radically changed the author has to do something genuinely new with them. (eg an author who always writes Lisa The Undersider Backed By Coil, with their stories never developing away from that framework, is going to have to do something different if Lisa survives but the Undersiders and Coil all die)

Deductive writing

Connecting to both of the above but with notable consequences in its own right, rolling dice to determine results puts an author at a step of removal from this step of the writing process and forces them into a mentality along the lines of how did this happen?

This might sound kind of meaningless, but how an author is thinking about their story shapes how they write it. Having to deduce what has happened in a story forces an author to think in very different terms, with very different conclusions, from a more typical writing mentality. When people are thinking in terms of potential directions to take a story, they often think in terms of tropes; not necessarily literally thinking of TVTropes pages as they write, but certainly thinking in terms of stuff like 'this is a romance story, so let's have a rival in love show up, just like in all those other romances I'd read/watched/played'. This kind of thinking tends to lead to a reiteration of existing storylines with nothing new to say, and often involves wasted potential when some other possibility was staring them in the face but it wasn't a traditional outcome so they glossed right over it, not so much rejecting it as an option as failing to even recognize the possibility of considering it as an option.

This is particularly pertinent to fanfic: a lot of fanfic starts life with an author noticing something in the original work that would be compelling and interesting in its own right, but which the original work glossed right on past to present traditional, standard storylines with traditional, standard resolutions. In turn a lot of fanfic loses its luster as it develops, because that original impulse to explore a novel idea gets crushed under the weight of traditional storytelling taking the story over like an invasive species; the author started the story seeing possibilities, but once they got into the groove of writing they fell back on the existing library of stock storytelling archetypes and failed to keep an eye out for possibilities in their own writing.

Rolling dice for an Endbringer attack and then interpreting the results can help push an author back into that mentality of looking at what is and seeing what possibilities could result. "Huh. Skidmark died and Lisa is cut off from her support network. Hm. Maybe Lisa takes over the Merchants in the aftermath and..."

---------------------------

A fourth, subtle benefit: laziness. Instead of manually thinking through each character and saying yay or nay to their death, or ignoring the whole topic and looping back to blatant plot armor and whatnot, rolling dice is a relatively quick, relatively mindless way to work out what happens to literally dozens of characters. From experience I can tell you that manually combing through the list and making a judgment call is not only tedious but mentally draining. Rolling dice is still tedious, but it's something I can do when I want to work on the story but don't feel up to doing the hard work of writing an actual scene.

----------------------------

That said, rolling dice for the main character in particular is usually ill-advised; most Wormfic isn't constructed to be able to survive the main character dying. If your entire premise is 'Taylor has a different power: go', killing her off is largely neutering the entire draw of the story. I was willing to do it with Exploding Canon to potentially make a point about SI 'fics, but with alt-power premises I either don't do it or fudge the results a little. (" 1-25 is death... unless I'm rolling for Taylor, in which case it's merely serious consequences. Losing an arm or something.")

It's also not exactly a cure-all: if someone is committed to their mental patterns, even aside the probability of them straight-up cheating ("Oh, Lisa got a bad result. Um. I'm just re-rolling that...") there's the less obvious possibility of marginally re-skinning their patterns. I've seen authors where forcing them to kill off Lisa wouldn't matter because they'd just sub in some other character to be the chatty Thinker who's Taylor's best friend, even if said character isn't chatty, or a Thinker, or particularly believable as Taylor's friend. (As in, I've seen authors who wrote multiple stories with Lisa as a major character, and when they deigned to write a story she wasn't present in she just got replaced by Victoria or something equally bizarre)

It's also something you really need to be committed to ahead of time. While I think it was good for Worm that Kaiser got killed off instead of playing out whatever inane master manipulator trope nonsense was almost certainly lined up for him, in most cases if you're going to chug along with writing a story, then decide to abruptly roll dice for an Endbringer attack, you're just going to be cutting a bunch of plot threads you were developing, and this will tend to overshadow any benefits. I did so basically immediately with Exploding Canon, for example, and while it wasn't hugely influential on the writing process up to that point, it did mean I didn't spend writing time on angles the dice were going to kill. (I'm not sure I should actually name any specifics, though...)

And of course there's other contextual stuff to consider: I didn't roll dice in Monster for Canberra, because that wasn't supposed to be enough of a divergence to justify unexpected outcomes, and it's not like I was going to roll dice for Taylor and Cherie in that case.

So it's not exactly a solution I'd press for everyone to embrace.

 

[Pseudocognisant]

On rolling dice...

It's also often a decent starting point for things if you otherwise can't decide. Roll dice, and if you find yourself wanting a result / not wanting a result, then just ignore/reroll the dice, & congrats, you've made the decision. (This does lose the benefits of avoiding getting stuck in a rut as @Ghoul King was mentioning.)

It's also a very handy technique when DMing, especially for people like me that get decision fatigue or get rabbit holed easily. ("What size is the port?" <No clue. It's some random port that until the start of this session was a name and a dot on the map. [Snip me rabbit holing until I catch myself about to pull up demographics of medieval England on my phone and realize I'm rabbit holing...] Roll dice; look at result; tilt head and think a moment... Does it make sense for this random port to be twice the size of the capital? ...sometimes, perhaps. In this case, not really. Reroll. Village? I can roll with that.> "Village")

But doing a roll when you're abiding by the results and aren't prepared for the consequences is generally a bridge too far. Works fine if the very abruptness matches the tone of the setting (e.g. many RTDs); works fine if any answer is survivable (e.g. if you've done a quick sketch to know that none of the possibilities leave you painted into a corner - this fits Exploding Canon I believe); works fine if you can fudge the answer... not so much if these don't apply.

 

[No One]

It's also something you really need to be committed to ahead of time. While I think it was good for Worm that Kaiser got killed off instead of playing out whatever inane master manipulator trope nonsense was almost certainly lined up for him, in most cases if you're going to chug along with writing a story, then decide to abruptly roll dice for an Endbringer attack, you're just going to be cutting a bunch of plot threads you were developing, and this will tend to overshadow any benefits. I did so basically immediately with Exploding Canon, for example, and while it wasn't hugely influential on the writing process up to that point, it did mean I didn't spend writing time on angles the dice were going to kill. (I'm not sure I should actually name any specifics, though...)

Click to shrink...

Works fine if the very abruptness matches the tone of the setting

Click to shrink...

Something to add to these: Endbringer fights (specifically ones targeting the main setting, anyway) are going to change the landscape. If there's dangling plot threads, those are probably going to get warped anyway: aftermath is generally a massive shift in priorities for all the characters. If someone dies leaving a plot thread unresolved, well, that opens up new avenues: if they live, that plot thread's probably still going to be unresolved, without shifting itself or contorting the story. And it sort of brings home what is usually a tonal shift: people don't get to live just because they have a relevant plot thread, without really damaging the overall weave of the narrative, since that's going to shift anyway.

 

[Ghoul King]

5.3

What I'd like to do is assemble a magical anti-brainwashing flashbang, where I'd throw it at Taylor and it would cancel whatever the Simurgh has done to her, like a curse being broken. If this were a video game or children's cartoon, I would almost certainly be able to do so.

In life-as-I-knew-it, that was a ridiculous prospect that had no possibility of being real. Personality changes are complex biochemical stuff, and while yes if you do something like put a shot of adrenaline in someone there will be a dramatic effect in how they behave that fades as they metabolize the adrenaline, you can't grab someone who's had cancer crushing them down for years, zap it with chemotherapy, and have every psychological and biochemical effect instantly vanish.

In life-as-I-now-know-it... it's actually possible. I find it unlikely, both because Endbringer-favoring rules mean the 'game' is going to be disinclined to make it easy to cancel out the Simurgh in such a manner, and because it'd require a whole bunch of hoops to jump through in terms of defining what constitutes 'external mental influence' or whatever and then deciding what canceling that out even means, but it is actually possible the shards might've decided to pretend there's technology for magically undoing brainwashing. (For... some reason. A lot of powers are pretty confusing in the context of the final explanation...)

And if I am an Abaddon missile, I might not be fully bound by 'lol fuck you that's an Endbringer'. If Abaddon is indeed using me as a kind of assassin, he's not quite playing by the same rules as the other Entities. Probably has to play pretty close to avoid the other shards refusing to play nice with his shard(s), but there's slightly more wiggle room, maybe, than if I was an Eden or Scion cape.

So I burn the afternoon on seeing if I can get my shard to cooperate on such.

Early attempts are just me staring at my tools and resources, rolling around possible angles on the details through my head and having absolutely nothing result from it. No Tinker fugue, no ideas leaping to mind for how to get started, no feeling I need to run out and find some mercury or whatever before I can get started.

I take a break and watch some cartoons, kind of hoping something will inspire me. Maybe I just need to think about anti-brainwashing differently, and something will get me thinking in the right direction. I even manage to find an episode of the current-generation Protectorate cartoon -as opposed to an older one about what currently gets called the Triumvirate plus, you know, Hero- that's about dealing with Masters and whatnot.

Unfortunately, in spite of the edutainment undertone to the episode, inspiration doesn't strike. It's actually a bit of a downer episode, explicitly spelling out that you can't assume that killing -well, depowering is what the episode depicts, but it's pretty obvious this is 'we're talking about murder, but to children, so we can't directly talk about murder'- a Master will cure their victims. Which makes sense to me given that Heartbreaker being left alone for so long makes perfect sense if no one has any confidence that killing him will undo the brainwashing on his victims, for example.

I'm not sure how to take it being a bit of a downer episode. I distinctly recall edutainment tended to turn me off in part because it was irritatingly prone to insisting on relentless cheer even when attempting to talk about dark topics, and not like 'we're being cheerful about abuse because we're confident we can help you learn how to make it stop', but just this weird tone-deaf attitude that came across like they didn't want to depress the kiddies while talking about depressing things and for some reason thought this wouldn't, for example, make certain dark topics seem not so bad. This edutainment episode deviating from that... is this a Bet culture thing -well. Hm. Omicron probably isn't real, but it does occur to me Aleph is right there and canon made it clear Aleph was supposed to be very nearly identical to the real world, aside the recent connection to Bet and a small handful of capes existing. Maybe a lot of my memories of Omicron are pulled from Aleph? That would be consistent with the nudge-nudge-wink-winking about Aleph being Omicron...

Kinda irritating I don't have an internet connection. I could, like, look up if Steve Irwin died to a stingray in Aleph vs having a radically different life in Bet, compared to my memories. Get some samples of edutainment in Aleph vs edutainment in Bet. That kind of thing. This is a theory I could totally do some testing on right now if only I wasn't quarantined!

Ugh.

Anyway, point is that... well, now that I think about it, power mechanics would kinda imply that my portal blocking bombs would probably at least temporarily disrupt certain Master powers, since probably some powers enforce their mental influence via ongoing portal affects. Unfortunately, the Simurgh explicitly doesn't operate on that kind of mechanic, she's making tweaks to your brain combined with precog to see that you'll be in X place at Y time so if she nudges you to do Z thing she can produce K result. And this is one of the things consistent between canon and fanon, which particularly stands out given how many fanfics downplayed Endbringers; in the stories-as-precog theory, that implies the Simurgh is, in fact, quite consistent on this point. (Endbringers varying their jobbing based on unpredictable precog factors actually makes sense, too, so fanon tending to downplay them is only maybe weird in my theory from the ones that had people killing them)

So actually watching the cartoon has firmed up that it's really unlikely I'll be able to build something to just... wipe away the Simurgh manipulation.

So basically the more mechanically plausible route is to try to brainwash Taylor myself.

I fucking hate the idea, but force myself to see if my power will let me do that kind of shit, and the answer is... sorta? Kinda? Ish? I've got ideas floating in my head for bombs that affect behavior, yes, and not just the Super Depression Bombs, but most of them are short-term manipulation. And mostly in the direction of either disabling victims, or driving them to be violent lunatics. Because conflict drive, I guess. The two long-term ideas that come to mind aren't much better; one makes victims mildly hallucinate for, like, months, and my impression is the hallucinations are the 'monsters are stalking me to eat me' sort, not the 'duuuuude I'm tripping' sort. The other permanently wipes people's sex drive out, which... what the fuck, power? That's not useful in combat! That's maybe even anti-useful in combat!

I make a mental note of it regardless, just in case, like, somebody creeps on me and won't take no for an answer and they're somebody I wouldn't mind effectively neutering for life, but what the hell.

Part of my idle thoughts are on Contessa. Like, there's a part of me that's kind of wishing she'd just show up and tell me how to handle this Taylor situation, that she's conveniently the right kind of bullshit for that to be something I can be confident will work out, etc. This is hard, and having an answer made for me would be convenient.

On the other hand, above and beyond my narrative issues with Contessa's existence in Worm, I'm not a fan of how she's a huge volition drain, which remains relevant even now that this is my life. Like, if PtV actually works as canon indicates, and you trust Contessa and have access to her, technically speaking basically any time you want to do a thing the optimal course of action is to ask her to PtV a solution for you and then do it. That just sounds draining and miserable.

Eventually, grumbling to myself about what a fucking waste of time all this is and how much I hate it, I bang a toe on one of my buckets of Simurgh dust and realize I'm a fucking moron.

I already thought about how Endbringer shit interferes with precognition, and that the Simurgh dust has a lot of arbitrary Endbringer immunities enforced even though its 'natural' physics properties are shit. I literally thought about the possibility of cladding myself in a suit of the stuff to become immune to precog. And the Simurgh's Rube Goldberg Machine plots are reliant on its precog.

I don't have a way of undoing whatever alterations have been made to Taylor's personality, not really, not unless she conveniently had no sex drive prior to the Simurgh's arrival and for some fucking reason was given one and fat chance of that, but I can certainly at least take a shot at interfering with her plots. Hell, with all the Simurgh dust in the area, I may have already substantially fucked with whatever she was planning!

… holy shit, is that why Taylor is being bizarrely reasonable instead of hating me on sight? Did I completely unintentionally derail whatever Simurgh plot was supposed to happen to Taylor just by getting Eidolon to do the resonance thing at her?

I mean, I'm still going to collect some of the stuff on my way to checking up on her and... talk her into putting some in her costume or something, but hot damn. Hell, maybe this is the real reason my time here has been bizarrely peaceful compared to, like, the Travelers' Arc; maybe the Simurgh does set up dominoes so roving gangs of murderhobos get into constant fights and shit, only her own dust being everywhere in the city completely fucked all her precog plans and she couldn't properly plan around it before leaving.

I can't stop grinning as I go to sleep.

-----------------------------------------------------------------​

I'm still grinning when I set out to check on Taylor anew.

Having had time to sleep on it, it did cross my mind that I haven't actually confirmed the Simurgh dust is precog-blocking, and I'm not sure how I'd test that per se. Perhaps more importantly, I have basically no way of confirming that the Simurgh is negatively impacted by her own body interfering with precog or the like, and arguably it'd be kinda dumb for the Simurgh's body to block her own precog so arguably it'd be more reasonable to assume she doesn't care...

… but Entities explicitly do some pretty dumb stuff, and there's also that whole thing about the Endbringers only activating so Eidolon can feel relevant.

I mean, I'm not sure anymore whether that's really a thing or not, given that, among other points, PtV is involved in the scene it comes up in, but the point is that there are points for and against this working the way I'm thinking and I've already studied the dust enough to be reasonably confident it won't give anyone cancer or anything.

Also, if it does, it's way the hell too late anyway.

Point being, I'm less convinced this theory is correct, but still pleased enough to be grinning as I make my way to Taylor's hidey-hole.

… my mood sours a little when it occurs to me the mag-bomb turning Simurgh dust blue might be a reference to that thing I remember of people referring to the Simurgh as the Smurf. It could just be a bizarre coincidence, but... Simurgh. And if it's not a bizarre coincidence, that indicates the Simurgh did rummage around in my skull and extract some actual info, which further indicates I actually am a Simurgh bomb.

Ugh. She dies first. I'm tired of the paranoia.

I mean, that was the plan anyway, but originally it was because I have an easier time seeing how I'd blow her up while she's dormant, where Behemoth I'm not sure how I'd deliver devices to him, and even less sure how I'd ensure they survived long enough to activate. Leviathan isn't a lot better, especially because he's lightning-fast and so there's no guarantee he won't just dodge or something if I do get something delivered to him.

But now she dies first to also stop the doubts.

Regardless, I'm in an overall decent mood when I get to Taylor, with the only incident on the way being me skirting around a grocery store I was intending to raid because I hear a couple of people inside, so when Taylor promptly asks me Why did you do it? I'm only mildly irritated. Mostly confused. Still a bit irritated; why do people expect me to immediately know what 'it' is, having not specified a topic? But much less than I'd usually be.

I set down the buckets of Simurgh dust before talking. Oof. The stuff is heavy. "You're going to have to be more specific. I'm not a mindreader."

I don't like how one of the buckets is sitting, the floor a little warped so it's not really sitting flat, so I move it a little with my foot while waiting for Taylor to clarify. Cornell University.

… oh. Great. This topic. I shrug. "I already said; I couldn't say. I don't remember that time." And canon didn't depict it with an Interlude, or really go into detail at all. Nor did any fanfics I remember, for that matter.

There's a moment while, I guess, Taylor processes that? It's briefer than some of these pauses have been, but still noticeable. Not... entirely sure what I'm picking up on here, actually. Something about the way the bugs move, presumably. Like a Case 53?

I just kinda stare at the bugs on the wall, blindsided. I wasn't expecting Taylor to just accept me saying this, it never crossed my mind one could draw a comparison between the hole in my memory and Case 53s showing up with their history missing and all. Shit, I'm so used to rolling my eyes at fiction using the memory loss plot while everybody just blithely accepts the dubious assertion it never occurred to me that parahumans with memory loss is enough of a known thing that I might've been able to say... almost the truth, kind of the truth, however you want to put that, and have people believe it. Oh, uh, talking. "That comparison never occurred to me, but, uh, yeah, actually, kinda."

There's a much longer pause, and I think I know what I'm picking up on; the old message is just being left standing, aside a slow breakdown from the bugs not holding completely still, where what I've interpreted as 'not a pause' has been Taylor breaking up the message, like, the instant I'm done talking. I think. Gonna pay attention, anyway. So you don't know why?

I shrug. "I mean, I... didn't I already say something about bad grades, the first day? Second day? I forget. I'm guessing from contextual stuff I learned later and memories of how family dynamics work and all that my parents probably did that stereotypical China-and-Japan-and-some-other-places thing of demanding I push myself to be the best, so that getting a C or whatever was emotionally the end of the world. But I don't actually know."

You don't sound broken up.

I shrug again. "I don't know. I just don't. That's my best guess, and that's probably as good as it's going to get."

Another pause, and yeah, I think I'm right about what I'm picking up on. Do you regret it?

I stare at the bugs for a couple of seconds, wondering what the hell is up with Taylor that she's stuck on this topic and hasn't, like, bothered to ask about the buckets or anything. Then I shrug again. "I don't even know what happened. I can't give a meaningful answer to that question." I mean, the answer would probably be 'no' even if I did know what happened, not only because I'm mostly sure that wasn't me at all in any meaningful sense of the word, but also because I rarely regret much of anything. If pre-me Bakuda was actually basically indistinguishable from post-me Bakuda, I most likely, in taking Cornell hostage, would've recognized the possibility of undesirable results and considered them acceptable risks.

To be honest, thinking it out, if it were me making the decisions, probably the bad grade or whatever would've come from an obviously racist or sexist professor where this was the tipping point after a lifetime of frustration regarding such stuff. I have difficulty imagining turning to such extreme results if the anger wasn't at society as a whole. And it would neatly explain running into the arms of a racist gang...

Fuck, now I'm not so sure pre-me Bakuda is necessarily that divergent in personality from current-me Bakuda.

… though she was outright sadistic in canon, and I just cannot relate to that mentality at all, so that's at least one big difference.

Oh, uh, Taylor is texting me again. Go away, Oni Lady.

…

sigh

And here I'd been thinking we were maybe kind of hitting it off a bit or something. She was asking questions, expressing interest in my history and all!

Fine, whatever, it's not like the time limit is harsh here. If we stay roughly on canon's timeline, it's, what, three years or so before Jack Slash manages to provoke Scion? Actually, I forget, did Jack hear that prediction and so decide to set off Scion? Because if so we're pretty off the rails of that at this point. Though... I suppose Dinah could've escaped and provide a prediction that sets off Jack... fuck, I don't remember if this is a canon plotpoint or not, and it's kind of important.

Whatever, focus on today's agenda thing!

I gesture at the buckets of Simurgh dust. "Not just yet, I wanted to say you should consider, like, getting yourself a suit and putting this dust inside of it."

There's a sufficiently long pause while the bugs stay on Go away, Oni Lady, that I'm starting to wonder if Taylor is completely done with me and not even going to try to pretend to be polite, but eventually they reform into, Why? and I have this rather vivid impression that it's an incredulous sort of why. I'm not sure if I'm picking up on something subtle or if this is some kind of mental bias. I am a bit used to people not getting what I'm trying to say...

I grin. "Because it's Simurgh dust, my testing has shown the whole thing with Endbringers no-selling powers and shit still applies, so it should block precognitives and whatnot! Which, uh, might include blocking the Simurgh's own precog, though I'm overall doubting that theory at this point."

That stuff is everywhere.

I stare for a moment, not sure what the hell Taylor is trying to say. "Um, yes? Obviously?"

Why the buckets, then?

I raise a finger, then realize that's actually a pretty good point. "Uh, I wasn't really thinking now that you mention it. I keep putting the stuff in buckets to bring back to my place so I have more of it to test just in case I do manage to blow up or teleport out or whatever some of it. Force of habit."

There's another notable pause. Have you managed anything?

I heave a legitimately frustrated sigh. "Turning it blue, and turning it invisible, because those are both so useful to be doing to an Endbringer." I make a face. "I'm really hoping the blue is a stupid coincidence and not the Simurgh deliberately messing with me."

There's an even longer pause. She's inactive, though.

… oh. Oh, right. Uh. Crap, 'Endbringers are jobbing' is one of those things I just take as a given at this point, I sometimes forget that in canon that was, like... Legend made a point about underestimating Leviathan being a bad idea, so there was some in-universe awareness of the jobbing, but the fight with Behemoth was the first time anybody aside I guess maybe Cauldron really got the degree to which Endbringers were more powerful than they'd seemed. And I don't recall whether people really viewed that as evidence of the Endbringers jobbing. Like, I took it that way, I remember other readers took it that way, but I'm not sure canon Taylor or anyone else looked back and went 'wow, the Endbringers are blatantly holding themselves back'.

And while the audience blatantly sees the Simurgh do... something... I forget the details, something about blocking a signal with her body so Dragon doesn't get some piece of info? Or to scramble it coincidentally into the no-look code, so-

…

Oh my fucking god in canon the Simurgh tried to sabotage Dragon's understanding of, like, power potential or whatever it was... I think it was Panacea figuring something out... christ, 'Dragon as Abbadon missile that the Simurgh opposes' makes even more sense than I was thinking earlier. I've got to get in contact with Dragon at some point, figure out, like... if she is an Abaddon missile, does she know? Did she have that built in, or what?

… derail. The point is, the audience got blatant evidence of the Simurgh doing stuff even while 'dormant', but there was no suggestion anywhere in canon that anyone, even Cauldron, was the slightest bit aware of these shenanigans. So... uh, hm. Not sure how to respond to this.

Fuckit. "I really really doubt that 'not currently attacking any cities' is the same thing as 'not doing anything at all'." I mean, I doubt it because outside-context knowledge, mostly, but honestly in retrospect I'm not really sure why everyone in canon seemed to take it as a given they were totally doing nothing? That just seems an obviously questionable assumption. Not that it was a particularly explicit assumption, admittedly, but still...

… you think the Simurgh is messing with you while inactive?

I suspect skepticism. I also suspect this is a time it actually would be useful to have Taylor talking with, you know, her voice. She was, like, low-affect in canon from the bug-pushing thing, not no-affect. And sometimes people aren't being skeptical even though their word choice is stereotypical skepticism. "No? Kinda? Like, it's a dumb possibility, but I also helped arrange for the closest thing to death that's happened to her so far, so if she's petty and emotional at all it's not outside the realm of possibility, and I haven't thought of a better explanation for why magnetizing everything would turn Endbringer material temporarily blue. It could just be a dumb coincidence, blueshift or something else physics-y I'm not thinking of or not aware of."

You what?

… um, I'm not sure what she's reacting to. "What, what?"

Her bugs shuffle around in that manner I'm still kinda wanting to take as agitation before she formulates her next response. Closest thing to death?

I stare blankly for a second before the thought connects to the fact that I have not, in fact, mentioned talking to Eidolon, it wouldn't have been visible, and Taylor probably doesn't have TV or the like and so wouldn't have seen Eidolon kindly crediting me for indirectly helping. Uh. Whoops. "The dust everywhere is kinda-sorta my fault. I tried a resonance-based bomb, she blocked it in her troll-y 'coincidence' way, and I'm not really sure why but Eidolon asked me what I was doing and tried to do the resonance thing with his own power and it resulted in most of her mass sloughing off as dust."

The maybe-agitation thing happens really, really extremely for like... forty seconds? I'm considering asking if she's seizing or something and I need to do something when the bugs form a new message. You talked to Eidolon? Eidolon?!

… oh. Uh. He is a celebrity here, isn't he. And Taylor was something of a cape fan in canon. Like, she'd gotten kinda cynical by the start of canon, but while she wasn't blatantly awestruck by talking with Armsmaster she did stop to think about having Armsmaster underwear as a kid and all. And I seem to recall her talking up the Triumvirate in a more reverent manner... wow. Um. Okay.

"Yyyyeeeesss? It was an Endbringer attack, extenuating circumstances, yadda, but sure, yes, that is a thing that happened." I have no idea how to handle this. At least Taylor is talking to me of her own volition?

The bugs resume doing the maybe-agitation thing for a bit before Taylor spells out a new message. What's he like?

Uh. God. I always hate this kind of question. I shrug. "More pleasant than I was expecting. More patient. Uh. Calmer? I guess I was expecting more nerves, what with the Endbringer battle?" Then I shrug again. "But y'know not really representative of him in day-to-day life. For all I know he, like, was using a power to keep focused during the fight." Or drugs. I wouldn't put it past what little we got about canon Eidolon to turn to drugs to try to keep himself focused and stuff. He had a notable edge of desperation to his character.

You were expecting Eidolon to be unpleasant? That came fast. Hm. Not sure what that means.

Hm. I'm not sure how to respond to this, either. 'cause yeah I was expecting him to be unpleasant, though I'm a bit annoyed Taylor jumped to that framing -I could just as easily have meant that I was expecting nice and got NICE- but I was expecting that because he's a member of Cauldron and Cauldron is awful. And I really, really don't want to be bringing Cauldron into conversation so soon. 'Sounds more reasonable when I think it out than I expected it to' isn't 'obviously Taylor will take me at my word when I appear to put on my tinfoil hat'. Canon Taylor wasn't exactly unaware of people spinning conspiracy theories. There's a reason the tinfoil hat terminology exists in the fandom.

(Ignoring the part where I'm suspecting the fandom was made up by Abaddon... weird thought, put like that)

Whatever, let's be... kind of honest... I guess. "Not specifically no-" This is me lying. Sort of, given he seemed essentially pleasant in canon if you ignore being an in-the-know Cauldron member. Okay, not lying, but being misleading. "-but celebrities are people too, and being good at being pleasant in public for events isn't the same thing as being a genuinely nice person. Someone who is consistently pleasant in public is probably a good actor, even if acting isn't literally their job. And capes are all about keeping secrets from the public, so any successful long-term cape who isn't, like, New Wave or something, you kind of have to assume their apparent behavior is at least somewhat non-representative." All thoughts I've had before, broadly speaking, but not thoughts that were on my mind when Eidolon was in my face.

There's enough of a delay before Taylor responds, without the bugs doing the stuff that I keep wanting to interpret as agitation, that I get the impression this all honestly never crossed Taylor's mind before. Pessimistic.

Uuuugh, I hate one-word responses. And this is, like, comparable to a one-word response in a forum, since there's no tone or body language or the like to hint at the intended meaning. Is she giving a peevish response where she can't disagree and doesn't like it, but isn't holding it against me, just kind of unhappy with a realization about the wider world? Is she dismissing my view by calling it pessimistic? Or is she, potentially consistent with canon Taylor being a bit cynical, using that as a weird sort of praise, where the attitude being pessimistic is comment-worthy because it being pessimistic strikes her as a more realistically plausible viewpoint?

At least the fact that I'm wearing my mask means probably my irritation isn't showing too plainly to Taylor. Assuming she isn't detecting my irritation via antennae picking up smells. Ugh. Whatever, fine. "I guess." Actually- "So are your cramps doing better? Crap, I didn't think to look for more chocolate on the way over." Too buoyed by my kinda dumb theory about the Simurgh being blocked by her own dust. Then a thought occurs to me. "Actually, wait, are you okay on food? It's been a few weeks and my impression is you haven't checked out the drops up North."

There's another notable pause, bugs not moving much. Cramps better. Food situation fine.

Hmmm. Not sure if she's being curt with me 'cause irritation or just 'cause it's a pain to write out words with bugs. "You sure?" I ask, then remember to clarify. "About the food, I mean. Seriously, I'm set, it's not gonna kill me to keep you fed." I'm not too worried, I'm pretty sure I saw her ranging about way back when and all so it's not like she's been hanging out here for more than a month and... literally eating her own bugs or something. Pretty sure. But still would prefer to check. Even aside the villain thing, I've always had the impression Taylor is very reticent about sharing anything that could be viewed as a weakness. And not just in canon, like even a lot of those fanfics where Taylor immediately outs herself to her dad that always felt hugely out of character still tended to have her keeping a bunch of secrets from him, with those secrets tending to be things where sharing them could be seen as revealing weakness. So in the precog scenario, the only way that's not a personality trait of hers is if my facts are correct but the way I'm trying to explain them is wrong.

I'm fine. Go away.

… well, at least she's not calling me Oni Lady. I'll call that progress.

I give a wave. "Okay then, just keep in mind that eating roaches is a terrible idea. I have no idea how safe it is to eat other bugs, you'd probably know better than me." Then I pause, remembering something. "Though I did leave you the scrubbing bubble grenades." Wait. "No, never mind, you wouldn't be able to get their insides germ-free."

There's no response before I've turned and left, and I'm once again kind of irritated at not having any idea how to take it. God, was this why people found Taylor unlikable in canon? My recollection is she doesn't use swarm-speech and so on much, but I'm realizing she didn't use them much relative to her 'screentime'. I have no idea how much she used them relative to face-to-face interactions.

Maybe it is.

----------------------------------------------------​

I still haven't had Cauldron get back to me or managed to trick my power into giving me a way to undo Simurgh personality alterations. At least, not anything I recognize as such. I suppose the claymore that induces a recklessly violent rage may somehow undo Simurgh mind surgery. It's not like I have test subjects. Or more precisely before/after points.

I write a new note asking Cauldron for advice on de-Simurghing people, less because I expect a response and more because it takes nearly no time so why the hell not. I mean, now that I've remembered that regular therapy is apparently successful enough that in canon people were let out after months or years of therapy, I actually have some meaningful hope there'll be an answer that isn't 'have the exact right counter-power that probably doesn't exist because fuck you', but I'm still doubting Cauldron is going to give me a response based on their lack of such so far. Aside the fucking smiley face. Why? What is that about?

Nor has my attempts to blow up Simurgh dust borne real fruit. I tried a few more things after leaving Taylor yesterday, but nothing interesting happened. The closest to interesting was thinking to try a scrubbing bubble grenade, having nothing seem to happen, then deliberately mixing in some mildly moldy paper and trying again... and the mildly moldy paper was protected by the Simurgh dust. Even the bits sticking a bit out of the top were still completely gross. Which tells me the Endbringer Fuck You effect is more generous than I'd been previously assuming, as far as how far out it says lolno.

That's a pain.

Regardless, for today's trip to Taylor's... building, I guess... I made a point of trying to look for more chocolate. Failed to find any, mind, but I did at least remember this time. Candy is mostly gone from shelves everywhere I know a store is, at this point. Last I checked there was one general store with some candy untouched, probably because it was inexplicably deep inside the automotive section, but that was also a week ago.

To be honest, I have no idea how I'm handling today's trip. Taylor is understandably not eager to have a racist university-kabooming supervillain as her best friend, and while I'm basically assuming Taylor is important somehow at this point it's not like I know how. In canon, she brute-forced an army into fighting Scion. Fanfic mostly never got far enough to establish anything like that, or went lazy and just recreated the Panacea+Taylor combo, just different details in how the combo made Taylor overpowered. So... very limited information. And 'we need to hack Taylor into hacking everyone else into being a united army' doesn't jive with the whole 'too many fanfics focus on alt-power Taylors' thing, so while that's certainly an option to keep in mind it seems unlikely to be The Reason.

Which means I don't even have any idea how I'd want to handle the whole long-term... shaping or whatever. Like, let's say I try administering therapy to Taylor to undo Simurgh Shenanigans, and quite reasonably select to get her less violence-happy in an attempt to counteract the Simurgh's effects, only to down the line conclude Peacenik Taylor is exactly the wrong personality for The Plan. There's enough unknowns and weird possibilities due to powers it's very hard for me to clearly pick out any good axioms to pursue. The only probably good one is also the least helpful and most obviously manipulative: trying to get her siding with me as something of a default.

I console myself with the knowledge that this at least means I don't have to worry about my Real Intentions showing on my face or something and thus ruining my plans.

It's not a very consoling thought, but black humor isn't supposed to be consoling so whatever.

With the plan to get Taylor anti-cramp food a bust, I just continue collecting tinker-worthy junk. Which is a weird experience, honestly. Sometimes I look at a thing and have Ideas and it kind of broadly makes sense to me, like finding a portable radio and having thoughts about signals and similar. Other times I'm picking through a room and on my way out I notice I have a plastic shovel or something in my pile I don't remember grabbing, then it vanishes at some point while I'm tinkering, and I have zero clue what I used it for. I'm increasingly suspecting my shard isn't trying very hard to hold me to believable mechanics, and am left to wonder if this level of sloppiness is normal for tinker shards or if it's evidence I am, in fact, working with an Abaddon shard that isn't playing the same game as the rest of the shards.

In any event, I don't hurry particularly, what with the lack of a plan and time pressure being so distant and all, and end up showing up at Taylor's building sometime in... the afternoon, I'm guessing by the sun's position, but it's not like I've got a watch on me. I accidentally cannibalized the last one I pulled from a store like three days ago, after all. Stupid tinker fugues.

Taylor doesn't immediately start harassing me to go away, or demand to know if I was joking about the bug-eating, or whatever. That's sufficiently unusual compared to prior trips I'm... well, worried is maybe a strong word, but certainly very suddenly on edge. It could just be that she's asleep, which would be a little weird but not necessarily a concerning scenario, but it could also be that she's been attacked, or that she's finally fed up with me and fled and I'll have to find her again only now she'll be trying to not be found by me in particular, or that she's caught some illness and I'll have to figure out how to help her get through it.

There's still plenty of roaches in the area, but I'm not sure how meaningful that is. She could've taken all the roaches here and then new ones moved in, for example. I consider calling out, but that seems pretty obviously incorrect: if Taylor is present and awake, she should already know I'm here, whereas if she's not I'm just risking revealing myself to anyone else that might be in the area. Given one possible reason for Taylor to be absent is the presence of a threat, whether having taken her out or just caused her to decide to leave... I'd rather be cautious.

As such, I quietly abandon my wagon of tinkertech fodder before carefully easing my way through the building. I decide to go upstairs first: easier to throw down than up, so if I manage to sneak a bit before stumbling into anything being higher up is probably better, overall.

I really should get around to, like, recreating how my costume had all those hooks for my grenades. That was so convenient. Right now I'm just carrying a few in a purse I found lying around, abandoned and already emptied out by, I'm assuming, looters, and I haven't exactly made my grenades easily identified by touch. Though I suspect that latter point is still an issue with the hooks, but I can at least remember positions there. Not so much when they're all jumbled into a shapeless purse.

In any event, I do my best to avoid having the stairs creak as I go up. I'm not as successful as I'd like, but I've noticed on prior visits that sometimes the building creaks for no obvious reason. I think it's in response to the wind blowing, but it's possible it's just Taylor? Regardless, hopefully it means if someone is present they'll have already written off the creaking as non-indicative.

Nothing has happened by the time I've gotten to the top of the stairs.

Well, aside me realizing I've been misinterpreting this building. With everything I'd seen of the building on the lower floor, I'd been interpreting this as the kind of apartment building working stiffs lived in, possibly working stiffs who sometimes struggled to pay rent sort of thing. Now that I'm a floor up, I'm realizing I wasn't properly accounting for the whole post-disaster thing, that possibly Taylor has been the only person here for weeks, everybody who left did so in a hurry, and the most accessible floor would be the quickest to be trashed by looters and whatnot.

This is not that kind of a building. This is the kind of building people with pricey jobs live alone in, or that a kid going to college might live in if one or both parents makes good money. There's potted plants on freestanding greco-roman pillar things, paintings hung on the hall walls, and when I go to poke inside one of the apartments with its door laying open I can see that all the furniture is very new, both in the sense of being modern iterations instead of a fridge made in the sixties but also in the sense that it's not stuff that's personally seen a decade of wear and tear. The TV is a flat-screen hanging on a wall, and I'm pretty sure Earth Bet is like... fuckit, like Omicron, let's just stick with that, point is I'm pretty sure this isn't just me having failed to notice that flat-screens are already the normal default thing in Bet. I mean, it's a busted flat-screen, looking like someone smashed a rock into the center -I can see a rock below it, anyway- but still a flat-screen hanging on a wall. There's a goddamn fireplace, too, though admittedly we're far enough north that may be less a fanciness thing and more a 'I don't want to freeze to death in winter' thing. I can't tell at a casual glance whether this is one of those stupid decorative fireplaces with no chimney or an actual factual fireplace, and I don't care enough to investigate deeper. (And also don't know enough to guess whether this being on the second floor out of, uh, eight or something, makes a fireplace obviously decorative by virtue of being mechanically impossible to be a real fireplace)

Checking other apartments shows this isn't anomalous. Some apartments have clearly been lived in for a solid decade or the like, not every TV is a flat-screen on a wall, etc, but most apartments have at least one gaming system hooked up somewhere, multiple TVs are common... point is, each apartment has several thousand dollars of crap just lying around, and it's not several thousand dollars of stuff accumulated over a few decades.

I am now intensely weirded out by Taylor having holed up here, and by Bentley having died here. Did Brian have a really nice apartment, much nicer than I'd realized? I do remember Taylor thinking it was a pretty nice apartment, but Taylor's home and school were sufficiently shithole-y that I tended to interpret her interpretations as 'my god, it's not a hole in the wall that will kill me any second now, what is this wizardry' rather than 'nice apartment by the standards of a well-paid middle class individual who think of themselves as poor because they can't buy literally everything they want'.

If this is the apartment building Brian was living in... holy fucking shit, how much money did Coil have? I mean, I'm trapped in an exclusion zone and Cauldron is covering my necessities so I'm not sitting here going 'wow, I should've tried to figure out if I could steal some of his assets after I got him killed', but jeeze the Undersiders were one of his lesser catspaws and they already had the goddamn loft!

I'm so weirded out I actually forget for a minute that I'm up here out of concern something is wrong, but then I startle at what sounds an awful lot like media representations of distant gunfire. It takes me a minute to re-orient myself and... yeah, I'm pretty sure that's coming from the gate area in the North. Probably not a concern, but I resume focusing on stealth and searching for if there's a (local) danger, reminded of my original mission here.

I also make a mental note to raid this place for tinker supplies. There are a lot of abandoned electronics in this building, jeez.

Eventually I've swept the second floor without finding anything of note aside a brief scare with a human skeleton. Yeah, uh, a skeleton picked mostly-clean. Not entirely, there's still enough connective tissue that bits and pieces of it are holding together in the right-ish formations instead of just falling away from each other, but yikes, that's not something I was expecting to see here.

It's not until I'm halfway through scoping out the third floor that it crosses my mind that part of why I'm disturbed is that Taylor has kept Bentley's corpse as un-rotten as she can, and meanwhile this human body has been completely cleared out in a lot less time than it takes for a human body to naturally decompose that far. I don't know the number off my head, but I do know that a human body doesn't go to a goddamn skeleton in a couple of months unless you're, like, in a rain forest or something. Some place warm and humid so mold and all can go mad. Currently, Brockton Bay is not such a place.

This doesn't have to be an indication that Taylor deliberately fed a human corpse to her bugs at maximum speed while carefully preserving a friend's dog's body.

But it could be.

I still haven't found an intruder or heard anything new by the time I start on the fourth floor. The distant gunfire or whatever it was has already stopped, and I've made mental notes of more tinkertech supplies to collect, but that's it. I'm starting to suspect Taylor has just run off and I'm going to have to find her again, not to mention if she has fled she'll probably be actively avoiding me and not receptive to further conversation... that'd be a pain.

I keep searching, though. Powers mean a lot is possible, and normal inferences can be deeply wrong. It's not like I'm having great success with my tinkering, either, so I don't have particularly better ways to spend my time right now.

I notice pretty rapidly there are a lot of spiderwebs in the rooms. Like, there's been spiderwebs in rooms throughout the city as I've wandered around, but this isn't the usual 'humans aren't preventing spiders from moving in' sort of concentration of webs, this is more like what I've seen in a basement nobody had done much of anything with for years. Only much more extreme, more like what I've seen in some arachnophobic movies.

That's suggestive of a few different things, in that it was kinda a standard thing in canon for Taylor to build up spider counts for her costumes and oh goddammit I just realized they're empty.

So okay that narrows things down a lot. The two primary scenarios are that Taylor is around, but has pulled, like, all her spiders to... fend off a threat, or something... or that Taylor has pulled up stakes and left. And I still haven't heard signs of fighting.

I sigh to myself and drastically reduce my efforts to be sneaky, speeding up. The building isn't huge so I'd still rather search up through the floors, but yeah I'm pretty sure Taylor has straight-up left.

Dammit.

-------------------------------------------------------------​

Going up through the apartments continues to see relatively few bugs, yet lots of webbing and other signs of bugs having been present until just recently, while still not hearing any signs of fighting. On the second-highest floor, I finally find a surprisingly pristine apartment, a big space that apparently intrudes up to the next floor, but not even using the maximum potential floorspace, with half or so of it just... empty air.

It doesn't ring any bells for me on sight. I search it more carefully than I've been searching the rest of the building, suspecting this is the room Taylor has actually been living in, and it's certainly... tidy. Shockingly tidy, given Brockton Bay is basically a post-apocalypse zone right now. There's no trash, no sign of bugs getting into things, no bloodstains... one window outside is broken, a blanket set up to minimize air flow in a pretty jury-rigged manner, but aside from that it's sufficiently pristine it's honestly jarring. The broken window is the only reason it would look out of place if you transplanted it into some nice part of some nice town that hadn't been recently hit by the Simurgh.

I'm not entirely sure what to read into that. My impulse, gut response is to think it's a result of Taylor coming here fast and staying here more or less the entire time, relative to the lockdown, but I don't think I really have enough info. Maybe she actually found the place a month after the quarantine started and promptly got obsessive-compulsive about cleaning the place. I don't... think that's the kind of thing Taylor would do... but then again, Simurgh. For all I know Taylor was refusing to interact with me because the Simurgh had already rewired her into being a germaphobe who obsessively washes her hands for thirty minutes after human interaction of any kind.

Probably not that given she seems to have left, but point is... too little info, too major a distortive factor to consider, and also precog can't be fully reliable anyway so I don't know how much to trust my understanding of Taylor's personality, really.

Beyond the eerie cleanliness, the room is... not very useful or informative. There's two different beds, and by smell I'm pretty sure one was in use and the other was not, but just looking at them they look like they were freshly-laundered and put neatly in place by an expert just minutes ago. Which I'd find intensely confusing if I hadn't given Taylor scrubbing bubble grenades, but I did, so it's entirely possible the sheets and whatnot were dirty but not falling apart just days ago and then Taylor applied scrubbing bubble grenades. I'd expect some wear and tear, though...

Anyway, rambling to myself. Back on track: there's a computer, but it doesn't work. I'm not sure whether it's got power and is broken somehow or if it's fine but isn't drawing power, and my power doesn't tell me and I'm not risking a Tinker fugue by trying to dig around inside it to figure it out. Not under these conditions. There's books, and I have no clue what to make of them: books on boxing, books on weightlifting to build muscle, the Art of War, a dozen different martial arts books, books on good parenting...

… wait. Is this Brian's room? It doesn't look anything like what I'd vaguely imagined from the, what, half a chapter spent in it in canon? But the book selection seems kinda sensible for Brian to be reading, and he seemed pretty damn serious about both being a competent villain and about doing right by Aisha, even though he wasn't... very effective at acting as a parent-replacement figure in practice.

…

Okay, that theory would, uh, explain? I guess? Why this room is the one Taylor was hanging in. Sorta? In possibly an intensely creepy way? Like, I'm almost regretting giving Taylor scrubbing bubble grenades because now I have no idea whether the room is an overly-neat shrine to how things used to look by virtue of Taylor obsessively cleaning everything and making sure it was all just so for weeks, or if she's just kinda habitually folding sheets neatly and whatnot and the scrubbing bubble grenades are the only reason it looks like a creepy shrine to Brian.

There's no candles or photos or anything like that, anyway, so it's not a shrine in that sense.

Eventually I give up on combing through the room. I'd been vaguely, in the back of my head, hoping for something like a journal or some such that would act as a clue, but the only journal I found was an extremely minimalist log of the owner's physical conditioning routine. What they ate, how long they jogged, what they weigh now, that kind of thing. No personal references, no goddamn name on it, nothing that would point toward or away from 'is Brian's journal'.

So this is a wash, aside planting more creepy theories in my head. I'm just going to blame the Simurgh for this entire experience and do my best to focus on plans for blowing her up.

The rest of the sweep up through the apartment building is dull, to the point that I'd completely stopped trying to be sneaky by the time I made it to the top floor. More of the same. At least it gave me time to ruminate on the strangeness of the timing of Taylor leaving. If she'd left after I'd failed to be adequately empathic in regards to her probably feeling guilty about killing in self-defense, that wouldn't have surprised me at all. Frustrated me, absolutely, but not surprised me. Our last interaction was downright pleasant, all things considered.

… though now I'm remembering Taylor had a lot of emotional drama relating to not wanting to cozy up to her supervillain teammates and then making a firm resolution to give them a real chance and I'm realizing I honestly don't remember when, exactly, that firm resolution happened. After that firm resolution she seemed to largely drop that 'I can't be friendly with Villains! I might catch their evil cooties or something!" mentality. Before then, though, she was... calling them panic attacks is probably overstating the issue- maybe? Hm. There was kind of a lot of evidence of Taylor being a bit blind to her own emotional state in canon. She certainly didn't dwell on her emotional state as much as one might expect in her internal dialogue. Maybe 'panic attack' is only an overstatement of how she made it sound, not an overstatement of what she was actually experiencing.

So. Uh. Possibly her fangirling over Eidolon and being momentarily friendly to me is why she freaked out? That sounds kinda... ridiculous to me, but I'm honestly not sure if that's 'sounds ridiculous because it's absurd to take it seriously' or 'sounds ridiculous just like all those actual factual lunatic behaviors real people engage in and see no sanity issues with'.

Goddammit.

Plodding down the stairs leads me to wonder about Bentley. The kinda creepy protectiveness toward his corpse indicates that said corpse's current status is probably... some kinda clue...

… so I'm a bit surprised when I get downstairs and the corpse remains exactly where it was, with flies now investigating it, and a roach scampering away as I approach. Well. Pretty strong confirmation Taylor is, in fact, not in the area. I'm... honestly surprised she left the corpse behind, given. I would've left it behind, but I'm less sentimental than most, and most people wouldn't have carefully preserved a friend's dead dog's body.

Hmmm.

---------------------------------------------------------------------​

Absolutely nothing has happened by the time I've rolled the wagon of tinkertech fodder (Some of it loaded up from the apartments I was just searching) back to my lair. Hotel. Base.

… I'm not calling it home.

Anyway, that's... kinda frustrating? Not that I want to be attacked by a crazed supervillain taunting me with having kidnapped Taylor before cackling off into the sunset, but in some sense that would sure be more convenient than having made it back with still no serious clue what happened. Did Taylor decide she hated me more than she wanted to stay at Brian's apartment and protect Bentley's body? Did something happen while I was gone, some kind of cape assault that left no obvious signs of a struggle but still caused Taylor to drag away tons of bugs? In most contexts I'd dismiss such a theory out of hand, but. Parahumans. It could just be a really, really weird power.

Hell, it could be Cauldron. I don't see why they'd go after her now, but I've already been over the point that I genuinely have no clue what's up with Cauldron given they literally can't be their canon selves so really the only reason I'm confident Cauldron is actually a thing is that Eidolon and Alexandria's behavior seemed too in line with Cauldron being a thing. Though I suppose Alexandria might've just been... being stone-faced and unemotional as a mask thing, rather than as a way to try to hide recognizing the Cauldron name when I dropped it...

Whatever, this is frustrating.

A quick scan of my lair finds no obvious signs of Cauldron tampering -wait. No, my most recent note is gone, and all that's left is a... an emoticon, let's go with, of a sad face, with the tears and all. That's twice now they've gone with a comic depiction of a facial expression. Why? There can't be no meaning to it...

Distinctly unhelpful and able to mean basically anything. Ignoring it.

I briefly eyeball the setting sun, wondering if I should go searching for Taylor anyway, but while I actually like nighttime, I suspect going out would be ill-advised in this case. Easier to miss the infected lunatics, and if Taylor is deliberately avoiding me she'll probably be hugely at the advantage in the dark.

So I sigh and set to trying to tinker up some kind of scanner...

-------------------------------------------------------------​

By morning, Cauldron has dropped off new essentials. Most of it is the usual, but the package of toilet paper has a big emoticon thing on a piece of paper taped to its top. This emoticon is a big grinning face, with a free-floating hand giving a thumbs-up. Uuuuh. I really hope this is intended as some kind of practical message instead of emotional encouragement, but I have no goddamn clue what it could mean.

I file that into the ignoring it pile as a result, get everything organized, get myself fed, take a half hour to iron out the kinks in my scanner, and get to testing it.

It's useless.

Of course it's useless.

… okay, that's not entirely fair. What it actually does is send out... 'theta particles', supposedly, but honestly I've increasingly come to suspect my shard is having fun making up nonsense... whatever the case, I can't see it, but pointing the tricorder-looking doohickey at Simurgh dust makes it glow a radioactive blue.

Like, you know, Cherenkov radiation.

Just Simurgh dust, too. So useless.

That particular doohickey goes into my cabinet of 'this is dumb and terrible but maybe I'll find a use for it someday' junk. I'm having trouble imagining a circumstance in which I'd want to generate Cherenkov radiation at will, but for the moment I'm not so short of tinkertech supplies that taking it apart makes more sense.

… aaaaand I just noticed Cauldron jacked some more of my shit from that cabinet. Why do they keep doing that? I've got it fucking labeled! It says right on it that the shit in here is useless or counterproductive junk! Do they think I'm employing reverse psychology?!?

sigh

That utter waste of time done with, I once again take a wheelbarrow out toward what used to be Taylor's place. Might as well start my search where she started from. Might find... tracks? Or something? The Simurgh dust doesn't degrade and isn't moved readily by wind so it's still all over the place, so, you know, maybe Taylor walked through some?

Whatever, it's an idea.

Mood a bit dour already, it doesn't exactly improve when, over the course of the walk, it occurs to me that my historical opinions vis-a-vis how important physical gender is might be yet more points in favor of 'I'm actually an Abaddon-made personality'. Like, it seems awfully convenient to remember having a male body while holding the opinion that switching genders would require an adjustment period but otherwise be no big deal (If one had magic or something to do so without the side effects of surgery and whatnot, but derail) and then ending up in a woman's body. "Oh no," I can just imagine Abaddon condescendingly assuring me, "It's not that you're mildly uncomfortable in your new body because you're a cobbled-together fake personality I hastily assembled after a fairly cursory examination of these 'Hue-Manz' and so I don't know how to make everything connect right, and it's certainly not that the adjustment period is my shard hastily working to resolve problems behind the scenes once you've been installed in a Hue-Manz body. It's totally that you're just having to adjust to a gender change, which you absolutely, positively, believed of your own free will to be not a big deal. Now shut up and get in the meatsuit, Shinji."

If I ever get a chance to confront Abaddon about this garbage, I'm going to be asking for a clear answer on this topic. I don't even care if I am a tomato in a mirror, I just want to know for sure whether my opinions are tomato sauce or opinions I arrived at based on historical interactions that actually happened to someone one could reasonably call me, so I can stop doubting everything like this.

Arriving at... probably Brian's apartment complex, I set the mostly-empty wheelbarrow aside. It's mostly empty so if I forget to retrieve it, whatever, and I don't need it fouling up my efforts to look for tracks. Naturally, now that I'm thinking to look for tracks, the first thing I notice is my own tracks going back and forth. Wow. I didn't realize I'd left such a clear trail. I'm... not thinking of a specific reason to be concerned by that, but it still raises my hackles to notice I didn't notice.

Okay, so, circling around the building... those look like paw prints... that's a bicycle, probably... wait. Maybe she did take a bicycle. Shit. Okay, fine.

I follow that for a bit, but it fairly rapidly detours into some kinda... storefront. Not sure what it was. The sign is too messed-up, and the shelves have been cleaned out. So could be potentially anything. Anything except, like, a pet rock store, I guess. Though Bet probably doesn't have many of those anyway...

… anyway, point is, there's a bicycle in the store, and there's a corpse, and while it's female I can be largely confident it's not Taylor by dint of the shockingly red hair. I mean, I suppose Taylor could have dyed her hair after the Simurgh hit... but I've never seen red hair dye result in a natural look, and more importantly Taylor doing that in a post-apocalypse is a ludicrously unbelievable scenario. Even with Simurgh fuckery.

So then it's back to circling the building, following tracks and trails as I find them, sighing to myself a lot as they invariably dead end or get slotted into my mental 'that keeps going so far I should finish eliminating nearby trails first' list, and wondering if maybe I should just give up and focus on making a rocket that can reach the Simurgh, not get shot down by the USA on the way up, and hopefully do something permanent-like to the Simurgh. Maybe a portal-blocking bomb...

… and then when I'm most of the way done circling, dark letters leap out at me. Initially because I've previously seen that spot from this angle and there weren't any dark letters in that spot, and then in short order because that's bugs. The confusing thing is they're just spelling out, What are you doing? as if nothing of any interest happened.

I stare, shake my head a couple of times, mutter under my breath, "Are you for real?" and after a second call out, "Can you actually hear me?"

Yes.

That was fast. And she didn't bother to 'delete' the prior message, so I guess she really wants to know. Um. What? "You were gone yesterday and had taken all your bugs with you. I figured you'd left because of an attack or something."

Getting food gets spelled out after a relatively small delay. Well. That would explain the lack of evidence of a struggle, I suppose. Kinda... a weird way of responding to what I said...

I sigh to myself again, and start trudging back to the entryway. "So you're fine, then?"

There's a bit of a delay, but Taylor apparently manages to track my view properly and predict where to move bugs because on a new wall I now have line of sight on more bug-text appears. Better than ever. 'kay. That's... anticlimactic...

Fine. Just... fine. Put me through all that stress and have it be totally pointless.

… I should see if I can ask Cauldron for a pair of walky-talkies or the like. Or try harder to talk Taylor into coming to my lair. Or... hmm. No, I really don't think it's practical for me to move to her lair. Mine's more defensible, for one, and for another I have a lot of machinery shit lying around at this point. It would take a... ton of trips, and regardless of the many feats Taylor's bugs had in canon I don't see them helping me cart all this shit back in any kind of timely manner.

Admittedly, I'm not sure... thing is, in canon Taylor was way, way more willing to go out hang out in the Undersiders' lair than she was to let any of them over into her home. There's perfectly reasonable practical arguments one can invoke in that regard, and I'm sure they were at least partially the motive, but I can't help but wonder if there was something a bit more, uh, territorial? I guess? Something in that vein, is the point, underlying her reasons, such that she'd be more hostile to me shifting into her zone of comfort than vice-versa.

… and then I'm derailed from those thoughts and trying to decide what to say by a fucking smiley face drawn on one wall in the entryway. "What the fuck," I say out loud before I can filter my thoughts. I'm tired and have been completely alone for weeks, so sue me, I've fallen a bit out of the habit of censoring my thoughts before they go to my vocal chords. I note, in the back of my head, that it's the same design as that thumbs-up one on the toilet paper. So. Cauldron is... sending me a message. Of some kind. That's got probably emotionally positive connotations? Or PtV is bullshit and it's a nonsense gambit, I dunno, fucking fuck Cauldron and fuck the Simurgh too this world is dumb.

What's the problem? Taylor asks, and I double-take at the message.

"What, did you put that there?" I ask, gesturing at the smiley face.

There's a long pause, and then the message rewrites itself into, Are you okay?

?!?

I walk closer to the smiley face, wondering if maybe Taylor's ease of using the bugs is fooling me on how well she can see stuff with them, but before I can point more closely at it I notice there's... extremely lightly-sketched designs, the black whatever-the-fuck-this-is (Paint? Ash? I'm not sure) applied in very thin lines all throughout the space inside the smiley face, and as I look even closer I see that even the smiley face's thick lines are actually made of dozens of densely-woven images, placed so close together they appear to be reasonably solid lines at a distance. What the- what?

Okay, my split-second wondering if maybe Taylor had done this and was confused by me being confused seems a lot less likely. I suppose she could've drawn this with her bugs, but I'm not seeing little bug-y footprints or anything, and neither canon nor any fanfic I remember had Taylor use her bugs to draw, not in any competent way, certainly not this impressively, this fast. This seems a lot more likely to be Cauldron bullshit. Probably Contessa bullshit. But... why?

The images themselves don't make a lot of sense to me. Lots of rounded pieces in an unclear form, vaguely tear-drop-shaped if I pull back and focus on the overall shape as it blends into the thumbs-up sign to act as the 'point' of the teardrop, 'cause actually there's more of these nearly-invisible light lines tracing out part of the teardrop between the round face and the cartoonish hand giving a thumbs-up. I'm reminded of some Deviantart images attempting to depict, like, writhing masses of tentacles, where there's suggestions of shapes but no clear sense of an underlying skeletal structure or anything, and where a given line represents the contact between two tentacles instead of a specific tentacle's edge.

I am deeply confused, and only get more confused when Taylor grabs my attention by bopping me on the head with a beetle and when I turn to go, "Goddammit I said-" it causes me to see she's drawn out Why are you looking at that empty stretch of wall?

…

…

Finally it clicks. There was that... odd plotpoint about how even a depiction of an Entity would result in a shard popping in to its host human's brain and going 'these aren't the droids you're looking for, move along', where regular humans can look at such an image just fine but are just going to be confused as to what it's meant to represent while parahumans will have their attention slide off and completely forget about having ever looked at the thing, and even forget events surrounding such an incident.

… but I'm a parahuman.

…

What?!?

 

[Pridakarbiter]

I spent most of this thinking that the person who's actually reading her notes was Imp, but that ending kind of makes me question it? So it actually is Cauldron or Abaddon, or something? I don't know.

I have to say this is one of the more interesting SIs, so I'm glad to see it updated!

 

[Kai Merah]

I really enjoy how your character keeps wondering if everything about their life is by Abaddon-design, it's kind of both fascinating and comedic. And I'm wondering if this is Contessa trying to test how much of a shard-host your SI is. Or maybe how cooperative their shard is being with regards to censoring stuff? It's pretty interesting anyway.

 

[Khepri14]

Finally it clicks. There was that... odd plotpoint about how even a depiction of an Entity would result in a shard popping in to its host human's brain and going 'these aren't the droids you're looking for, move along', where regular humans can look at such an image just fine but are just going to be confused as to what it's meant to represent while parahumans will have their attention slide off and completely forget about having ever looked at the thing, and even forget events surrounding such an incident.

… but I'm a parahuman.

…

Click to shrink...

Gotta be honest, never read all of Worm and none of Ward. So I am totally fucking lost here. That said, so happy this is back, whoo!

 

[Projectile]

Baghoulda stubs toe. "Fucking Abbadon, fucking Cauldron, fucking Simurgh, why are you doing this to me." There are way too many keikakus going around for anyone's peace of mind. Little do they know that, in the end, it's all a Taylor plot.

 

[Infinite Eyes]

Hmm... this will probably lead to Taylor thinking you're a lunatic. It will likely be pretty hard to convince her that something is there.

a shard popping in to its host human's brain

Click to shrink...

I think I read somewhere that whole thing is actually all Imp's Shard, and not each shard handling their own host. Anyways, it kinda wouldn't make sense for every shard to be competent at memory manipulation. But then why do the shards kinda give up on keeping the secret once their hosts push it somewhat and make an effort? That whole thing never made much sense to me.