Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Fixed it.
Exploding Canon (Worm SI)
- Thread starter Ghoul King
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm bakuda self insert oni-lady
Dark0w1
LuRK3r-07
- Location
- Republic of the Philippines
It is not as visually appealing as a FOOF explosion.
Has anyone but Streng observed enough FOOF explosions to be able to say whether or not they're appealing?
Dark0w1
LuRK3r-07
- Location
- Republic of the Philippines
I saw a Caesium and Fluorine reaction once. It was very visually appealing. I bet a Dioxygen difluoride reaction will be very visually reactive too.
BTW who is Streng?
VhenRa
MechWarrior
- Location
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm quite certain I'd be too busy running to notice whether or not it was appealing.
A. G. Streng was the crazy fucker* at Temple University who did the majority of actual experimental work with FOOF.
*Somewhat harsh, you say? "Has published work describing reaction of FOOF and chlorine trifluoride", I say.
Things I Won't Work With said:
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Rinn
Coffee Addict
- Location
- Cornfield County, Ohio
What is that gif from?
Dark0w1
LuRK3r-07
- Location
- Republic of the Philippines
From OniAi or Onī-chan dakedo Ai sae Areba Kankei Nai yo ne! also know as "As Long as There's Love, It Doesn't Matter If He Is My Brother, Right?".
- Location
- Wherever
I'm going to point out that the only way you have a point of any relevance is if we implicitly accept that it's impossible for Coil to learn adequate self-surgery by trial and error.
I will in turn extend this to say that this premise is obviously nonsense, because humanity would never have figured out surgery if it was impossible to learn by trial and error.
In general, most every elite, expert skill we teach was first developed by throwing a zillion people at the problem who all fucked up a whole bunch and then the handful of successes were passed on to future generations as "Hey, this works. (Also, don't do the million trillion things that don't work. We know they don't work. We've suffered those failures already)" The elite, expert skills we discourage people with Don't Try This At Home, Kids tend to be the ones where you, as an individual, experimenting is very dangerous and liable to kill yourself or others or cause some other form of severe/problematic damage not worth the theoretical payoff. (That is, the risk is high, and the payoff doesn't justify the risk)
Coil's power obviates the risks of trial and error learning for mechanical tasks, and in this case it's quite literally Do Or Die.
So, no. You can up the size of the metaphorical die all you like (I originally wrote d100, and then decided that it seemed a drastic underestimation of the difficulty involved), but operating from the premise that it is impossible for Coil to luck into the right answer is... no.
Having grown up around military culture, I can tell you with great certainty that 99% of the time, when things go wrong it's not because the enemy did something astoundingly clever and brilliant.
It's because one of the grunts was asleep.
Somebody misplaced the Important Thing.
The commander forgot a critical detail.
The commander failed to convey a critical detail in their orders.
Somebody prioritized not getting blamed for things going wrong over actually ensuring things don't go wrong.
Somebody thought they had things handled. They didn't.
Instead of assigning the most skilled person at the task to the task, the least-liked person was assigned the task because nobody will miss them if they die.
A plan was designed around the assumption that no one would be so stupid as to... Naturally, somebody was that stupid. Often, it's the enemy, fucking up your plan that requires they be, you know, minimally intelligent foes. Sometimes, it's your own people, walking into a clearly marked minefield because they need to pee, it's the middle of the night, they're just not that awake.
Something breaks down at the worst possible moment.
Somebody mixes up two coordinates. If you're lucky, it's innocuous and just slows down the operation. (Potentially costing hundreds of lives anyway, because delays kill) If you're exceptionally unlucky, your artillery ends up firing on the rally point.
It is far rarer for something to go wrong because the enemy is simply so insightful and brilliant as to completely ruin your carefully constructed operation.
Besides, how is anybody supposed to find Coil? (Keep in mind that in canon, Coil trusts exactly one guy to be present when he's changing between Coil and Calvert. His organization does not know that he's Calvert) Why is anybody supposed to be concerned? The man presumably vanishes for hours at a time to sleep and presumably go to his job as a PRT dude. If his people panic every time he's out of contact for a day or so, then man, they're panicking all the time. On what basis would a rescue op even occur from anybody other than the PRT/Protectorate?
Glad to hear it.
Man, if you suddenly woke up as a character you don't want to be, in a setting you don't want to be in, with no expectation that any such thing was coming, would you have a plan ready?
I kicked off Exploding Canon when I did in part because I haven't really given a lot of thought to the question of what I would try to "fix" if I were a Worm SI, and wanted to get going before I ended up doing so, rather than after.
So, I'm glad to hear it's paying off.
Yeah, given that any major attempt to escape has a high risk of death... and crippling the ABB to then abandon them runs into the problem SI me has already commented on to their frustration: "Wait, if I blow up and betray the ABB, I'm that girl who turned on two organizations that took her in. Why on Earth would the Protectorate go 'you go girl!' and let me join/trust me to be an independent hero??"
Not gonna comment on the first point.
Latter-wise, I'll point out that in canon it was less "attacking his pride" and more "insulting him incessantly". A (probably) less dangerous way of piquing his pride would be to imply he's scared or something without making it obvious that it's a targeted statement -pretend nonchalance, or be genuinely distracted tinkering- and then leave him to brood.
Plus, Lung was quite explicit in canon that if the escape had been successful he probably would have let it pass. Competency can be a shield against punishment from disrespect, in Lung's eyes.
I wanna complain about the derail, but it's oh-so-relevant to the fic.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
Uh, no. You've already made the distinction that it's humanity figuring out surgery, not humanity figuring out self-surgery.
It's highly likely you are literally mechanically incapable of performing successful self-*brain* surgery because you either cannot see/reach the appropriate areas or because taking something out without killing yourself requires a degree of immobilization and/or painkillers that you cannot reach while still being even able to theoretically perform it.
Khepri14
Thus kindly I scatter...
- Location
- Following the wind
Uh, what? What's the first? I thought there was only the ABB that she joined.
- Location
- Wherever
You don't need painkillers for brain surgery. Once the skull is opened up, you're done with the hurting. The brain doesn't have pain receptors. Hell, outside of the lips/inside of the mouth, the entire head is pretty poor on touch/pain/etc receptors.
Being unable to see just makes it more trial-and-error-y than being able to see, increasing the size of the metaphorical die, but not an insurmountable obstacle.
You can survive with quite literally half of your brain missing. You can survive such that most people have no idea there's any damage. There's bizarre (true) stories out there.
There are true stories of people doing stuff like a successful self-caesarean. No, seriously. Compared to that, brain surgery is a walk in the park if you've already got a hole in your head to work with anyway.
The obstacles you seem to think exist really don't.
I'm alluding to the Cornell University.
It's not like Bakuda blew up a rival school. She blew up her own school.
So turning around and blowing up the ABB would be two cases of blowing up "my people". But hey, third time's the charm, right? I'm sure people would be lining up to hire the great Bakuda with a reputation of "teamkilling asshole". That's how reality works, right?
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Eh, it's Cornell, not like anyone's really upset about it.
Say what you will about Cornell; the campus is beautiful. I'm sure a Bakuda bomb wouldn't help that.
- Location
- USA
I don't know about that, she can make some bombs with pretty dang weird effects...
An eternally-burning ball of plasma hovering above all those gorges would be pretty awesome.
Khepri14
Thus kindly I scatter...
- Location
- Following the wind
First of all, Cornell is a school, not an organization. You pay to go to these colleges and learn and/or use the facilities they offer there. There's no "my people" there(I go to college and I don't consider it to be an organization or the college to be "my people"/have "my people" there). There might be friends there, but based off of canon Bakuda, she was probably one of those high/over-achievers that either never had friends or concentrated solely on their school work, and since she was Asian and all, there was probably pressure from her parents that contributed to everything that lead to her trigger event(getting a bad grade from a professor). Second, I'm pretty sure that she held Cornell for ransom as an act of revenge or something, not blowing it up(check Google). So no, she's not blown up any "organizations" in canon at all.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I find the point that Coil escaped that pretty hard to swallow myself.
Now I get that there is a "possibility" of it happening but it would be really tiny.
The statement that a person could figure out how to perform brain surgery, if given an infinite amount of tries, is certainly plausible.
But if he only has a few days to do so the probability becomes much lower. If you also add the qualifiers of
- on himself
- without painkillers (the hole still has to hurt, not to mention possible injuries from getting captured by fucking Oni Lee)
- suffering from blood loss
- without proper tools
it sinks again.
But that's not the only problem. If we assume that there are a million possible ways of trying this, that doesn't mean he will get it within one million tries.
I'll try to explain this with an analogy (as english isn't my first language I don't think I could convey this properly without):
If you've ever played a platformer or something similar you've probably been at a place in the game where you keep failing. What you've also probably noticed is that you keep doing the same shit over and over again, even if you know it doesn't work. And even if you aware of this you can't seem to stop making the same mistake again and again. That's because humans have neither perfect recollection nor perfect coordination.
So Coil too will make the same mistakes over and over again costing even more time, amplified by the issue that he can't even see just what the hell he's doing.
Those still do not take into account the problems of restraints and/or guards. It's true that Coil will die if he leaves a certain radius but he's worth nothing if he's dead. So Oni Lee, fanatically devoted to the cause of freeing Lung, would make damn sure they would keep this avenue open.
And yes, Coil might be able to get out of the restraints or escape while the guard is distracted but it will still cost tremendous amounts of time.
I guess my main point here is that, just because something is theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's believable.
Now I get that there is a "possibility" of it happening but it would be really tiny.
The statement that a person could figure out how to perform brain surgery, if given an infinite amount of tries, is certainly plausible.
But if he only has a few days to do so the probability becomes much lower. If you also add the qualifiers of
- on himself
- without painkillers (the hole still has to hurt, not to mention possible injuries from getting captured by fucking Oni Lee)
- suffering from blood loss
- without proper tools
it sinks again.
But that's not the only problem. If we assume that there are a million possible ways of trying this, that doesn't mean he will get it within one million tries.
I'll try to explain this with an analogy (as english isn't my first language I don't think I could convey this properly without):
If you've ever played a platformer or something similar you've probably been at a place in the game where you keep failing. What you've also probably noticed is that you keep doing the same shit over and over again, even if you know it doesn't work. And even if you aware of this you can't seem to stop making the same mistake again and again. That's because humans have neither perfect recollection nor perfect coordination.
So Coil too will make the same mistakes over and over again costing even more time, amplified by the issue that he can't even see just what the hell he's doing.
Those still do not take into account the problems of restraints and/or guards. It's true that Coil will die if he leaves a certain radius but he's worth nothing if he's dead. So Oni Lee, fanatically devoted to the cause of freeing Lung, would make damn sure they would keep this avenue open.
And yes, Coil might be able to get out of the restraints or escape while the guard is distracted but it will still cost tremendous amounts of time.
I guess my main point here is that, just because something is theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's believable.
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- Location
- Wherever
Organization is not one of those fiddly, precise words with one narrow meaning. I'm not sure why you're treating it that way.
Your lack of team spirit is commendable, but most people tend to at least unconsciously expect other people to treat anyone they're vaguely associated with as "my people", even if doing so makes no sense whatsoever.
Regardless, the point is: not a reason to trust Bakuda.
Certainly, and if you personally have had your suspension of disbelief violated, I'm not going to argue that you're wrong.
I will point out that we're back to a question of exactly how competently the "installation" of the bomb was handled, which, again, I wrote incredibly vaguely. If it was just sort of poked in and then the hole covered because lol competency is hard, then the primary difficulty is going to be having the thought, not enacting it. Again, pointing out that the device in question was not constructed to be placed inside someone's head: whatever was done to keep it inside is going to be jury-rigged by default.
There's also the question of exactly how much injury Coil was willing to accept/how much injury he thinks he suffered in the process. I pointed out that you can survive extensive brain damage with no immediately apparent ill effect for a reason. Say the bomb was attached via clamps/whatever, and Coil decides to just cut out the points it's attached at. (Assuming he has a cutting tool. People get creative in emergencies though -stuff like a crossbow made from newspaper and underwear elastic made by prisoners happens- so a cutting tool isn't all that improbable) That's certainly not going to be an optimal solution, but it's a possible one, and Coil is uniquely qualified to determine how much impact self-brain-damage is actually having, so he can even, if he feels he has the time to burn, fiddle around with getting the least negative effect from such damage.
We're also getting into the question of "What was actually done to contain Calvert?", which isn't touched upon by the narrative at all beyond the headbomb itself. You're assuming Oni Lee did anything to restrain Calvert, and also assuming guards. The guards point seems a particularly odd assumption given that a guard would presumably have rung the alarm, or at least been mentioned by Oni Lee as having been KOed/killed.
A Coil Interlude is a possibility, depending on how the story plays out. I'm a lot less sure of my ability to accurately get inside Coil's head than I was with Taylor, though.
Again, assuming guards when the evidence is against, and also assuming that Calvert was put into a proper cell when the handling was literally "Oni Lee, take him somewhere within 300 feet of here, I'm springing this instruction on you with no warning." I find it odd that people are assuming that the Bakuda safehouse has a convenient ABB prisoner-holding facility conveniently within 300 feet with guards on site ready to take orders from Oni Lee to the effect of "watch this guy", such that Oni Lee could drop off Calvert and then come back within a few minutes, everything secure.
I can say with honesty I wasn't expecting people to be criticizing my story by implicitly assuming the ABB is hyper-competent in highly improbable ways. I've actually been worrying people would feel I'm writing them too competently. No, apparently my audience expects the ABB to be borderline-magical in its ability to be competent in constrained circumstances with no forewarning.
Meanwhile, writing Calvert as using his hax power to pull off a mechanically feasible action his power directly eliminates many of the reasons to not try doing is totes unrealistic.
Aaaallll righty then.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
Given that "mechanically feasible" is still disputed, it shouldn't surprise you that this is getting criticized. But hey, if that's how you want act.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- She/Her
No, I'm assuming one or the other.
You're correct that the evidence is against guards being present but that means that he should have been in restraints as no person intellectually capable of understanding the concept of a hostage would follow up said hostagetaking with "just leave them in a room somewhere". It doesn't have to be a supermax cell, just slap a pair of handcuffs (or something similar) on him. That's not being "hyper-competent in highly improbable ways" it just gets you into barely competent territory (a competent organisation would have posted guards. Police attempting to find/free hostages is presumably still a thing).
- Location
- Wherever
Let me be a bit more explicit: I think there is a double standard of audience expectation here.
The "good guys" (Bakuda/SI me and her allies) are being attributed high levels of competence, up to and including expectations of having facilities in place to deal with unexpected circumstances, which are of course high quality facilities of the sort that makeshift tools cannot be created/extracted from, because of course the illegal gang has managed to create or co-opt a facility for secure storage of human beings without said facility being discovered, and of course said facility is conveniently within spitting distance of the building our viewpoint character happens to be operating out of -it's not like Oni Lee got any forewarning that Calvert was going to be put on such a leash when he was sent out to retrieve the man, so he wouldn't have had any reason to think he should tell people to set up such a facility nearby Bakuda's location. SI-me is being assumed to have handled the installation in such a way that removal is incredibly difficult. (Never mind that in-story SI-me utterly failed to even imagine the possibility of Calvert removing the bomb)
This is a very high expectation of minimum competence/luck, and people are ignoring/failing to bring up the myriad difficulties that would be involved in making it happen. Of course it's all been handled, because... reasons? I guess?
The "bad guy" (Calvert), meanwhile, is being held to the full standard of actually having to have a reason he could plausibly pull all this off. People are first saying "he's not a brain surgeon" (The fact that Bakuda isn't either being completely ignored), then focusing on the lack of tools (Premised in this bizarre expectation of a proper prison cell), then focusing on the biological difficulty in surviving (But not wondering why Bakuda didn't accidentally kill him during her surgery, without the benefit of an undo button), and then focusing on the difficulty escaping at the end. (Premised in the expectation of guards, the story-as-written to the contrary)
I would consider this to be an understandable difficulty with suspending disbelief, one strongly suggesting that I need to rework the scene or add more later to clarify why things played out the way they did, except people have no similar issue with expecting still higher levels of competency from Bakuda/the ABB. Some of this can be put down to "Well, Bakuda is a tinker/she did surgery in canon" type stuff, where there's an existing basis to the objection... but a lot of it is bizarre and baseless, most particularly the expectation that there is a high quality, guarded prison facility conveniently nearby and under ABB control. Why, exactly?
The result being I genuinely have to wonder if this is driven more by people's dislike of Coil than any actual issue with the integrity of the story -that people are trying to undermine "Coil not dying" because they want him dead, and not because the scene is any less plausible than anything else written thus far.
"Just leave them in a room somewhere with a bomb inside their head, set to detonate if they leave a leash range."
Very insecure. It's like no measures were taken at all! /sarcasm
Regardless, my line (hyper-competent etc) was more in reference to the expectation that Coil is in some room that is, of course, free of potential tools for him to use to free himself, because of course such a facility is within 300 feet of Bakuda's current location and under ABB control. Oni Lee's a precog, he knew Bakuda would force him to store Calvert within such a leash range when he was sent to retrieve Calvert and could plan accordingly.
Wait, no he isn't, no he didn't, no he couldn't.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- She/Her
He's a hostage. He loses all worth if he dies. That's why you restrain him.