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Fragmentation (Original Superhero Setting)

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Locking the vote. Could I have a vote tally for the preference voting, please? I know the rest of the vote is like this:

[x] Hand over some items:
-[x] Bubble Bomb: Turned out more powerful than you expected, you don't have a use for it, and it's a bit dangerous.
-[x] Pineapple Grenade: You weren't expecting them to be a problem and you're disappointed. Pineapples are delicious!

[x] Lie/be misleading about others:
-[x] Grand Theft Automaton
-[x] Steal Wool

[x] Teleport out:
-[x] Super-Celes's Go-Ballistic Exponential-Doses

[X][MG] Keep
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Vote Tally : Fragmentation (Original Superhero Setting) - Original | Page 257 | Sufficient Velocity [Posts: 6426-6500]
##### NetTally 1.9.10

Options:
Light-absorbing metal shards
Rainbow Crystals
Solidified Light
Starfields
Water

Winner: Starfields
[1] AlphaDelta
[1] AramilOniasha
[1] Deathbybunnies
[1] NyxNull
[1] Vebyast
[1] WolfKit
[2] Mellithae
[2] Valmond
[4] Nachtigall
[5] Jirachi47

First Runner Up: Solidified Light
[1] Mellithae
[2] AlphaDelta
[2] Deathbybunnies
[2] Jirachi47
[2] Nachtigall
[2] Vebyast
[3] AramilOniasha
[3] Valmond
[3] WolfKit
[5] NyxNull

Second Runner Up: Rainbow Crystals
[1] Jirachi47
[1] Nachtigall
[2] NyxNull
[3] AlphaDelta
[3] Vebyast
[4] AramilOniasha
[4] Deathbybunnies
[4] WolfKit
[5] Mellithae
[5] Valmond

Third Runner Up: Light-absorbing metal shards
[1] Valmond
[2] AramilOniasha
[2] WolfKit
[3] Deathbybunnies
[3] Nachtigall
[3] NyxNull
[4] Jirachi47
[4] Mellithae
[5] AlphaDelta
[5] Vebyast

Honorable Mention: Water
[3] Jirachi47
[3] Mellithae
[4] AlphaDelta
[4] Valmond
[4] Vebyast
[5] AramilOniasha
[5] Deathbybunnies
[5] Nachtigall
[5] NyxNull
[5] WolfKit
 
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    • Special thanks to @saganatsu, @DB_Explorer, @LonelyWolf999, and my eight other patrons not mentioned here. An enthusiastic pair of "Thank you"s to @Torgamous and @fictionfan for their patronage as well. Numbers going up make my brain produce happy chemicals~


    Winner: Starfields

    [x] Teleport out:
    -[x] Super-Celes's Go-Ballistic Exponential-Doses

    With no remaining charge and all the good materials spent, you don't have much to do for the last five minutes of your workshop time. Skye continues fiddling with a handheld camera, more focused on pulling it apart than turning it into something else. Overall, you'd say you're pretty much done.

    "Celes, I'm officially yielding my share of the workshop to you, OK?"

    "Re-ceived~ I'll just order the anti-teleport stuff off, shall I?"

    "Yup, thanks."

    You drag your new pink backpack to one corner of the room and begin clearing away the surrounding items. Once you're sure everything else is out of range, you return to the corner and look directly at one of the ceiling security cameras.

    "Are you all paying attention?"

    There's a three-second delay before an overhead speaker crackles to life.

    "It'd be hard not to do so," a synthetically distorted voice booms. "We'll talk soon. You are aware that you only have five minutes left on the clock, yes?"

    You flick your wrist dismissively.

    "We've effectively demonstrated why unrestrained access to resources is ripe for exploitation, so I'd say that's a win. And now, for our next magical trick..."

    You take an Escape Pod in both hands and crack it open. A tendril of lime green light shoots out from the now-broken pod, wraps around the nearby backpack, and drags its victim through a space too small to accommodate it. The pea pod turns to dust soon afterward, its function fulfilled.

    To their credit, the CBCC doesn't seem to be any slouches when it comes to possible security breaches. You don't even have time to finish brushing away the dust before the intercom crackles to life once more.

    "Spacial warping?"

    You smile and shake your head.

    "Worse, but I'd like to be promised the reward for pointing out a serious CBCC security breach before I actually tell you about it."

    "Your activities for tonight have eaten a significant chunk of our budget for the foreseeable future.

    "You didn't buy most of this stuff, though, did you? It was looted from villains n stuff. More importantly, we're dealing with two unrelated subjects. One: I found a security breach. Two: We built a bunch of stuff."

    "And you used two of the items you built from our materials to demonstrate the breach. The primary goal of these testing sessions is to find your limitations; if you can subvert CBCC defenses, that's something we need to know about."

    You frown and shake your head. The bigger reward will come from ransoming off their own workshop back to them; it'll still be a win as long as they aren't too focused on the possibility of you teleporting away something important. Still, that doesn't mean you're going to just let it go.

    "We're just required to tell you what something does. We don't need to tell you how it does it unless that omission would directly harm others. Seriously, are you really going to be difficult about this?"

    "So sayeth the girl who dropped a CBCC employee."

    "Unintentional power interaction that has probably been patched in the time since," you return evenly. "You haven't been able to prosecute people for accidents since, like, the fifties. Seriously, you're not going to get anywhere by trying to strongarm us. We take after our father in that regard. If you're going to offer a reward, you need to offer it to everyone, even the people you don't much like at the moment. If it makes you feel any better? I do have another two pods you can poke at should you decide against being an arse."

    There's a conspicuously long delay before a harsh buzzer sounds. You think that might be a good sign? If they were going to outright refuse you, they would've just continued to be stubborn. The silence might mean that the speaker instead went to fetch someone more important.

    "Playtime is over, kids. Please drop any incomplete projects, collect the completed ones, defuse any safety issues, and prepare to explain what the hell you've been doing for the last half a day. Please tell us when it's safe to come in."

    You sigh and start gathering the boxes and balls containing your various inventions. It almost seems like a waste to explain them to the CBCC, but the casings did help hide your activities from the Beyond for a while. You aren't even sure they've really internalized how much good stuff they're letting you carry off. For example, three one-gram longswords? Really? Did they even realize how long it would've taken you to upgrade a weapon to that point without rampant exploitation?

    Well, whatever. You can explain plenty of items without actually explaining them. You form an improvised pen out of boxed items, then gently place each of the spherical casings inside.

    "All our equipment is stable."

    "We just have to gather and explain it at this point. You have a lie detector on hand, right?"

    The doors to your workshop slide open, revealing… a Mars rover? Um. Okay, obviously not a Mars rover, but you're a little surprised to see a sensor-laden remote platform instead of an actual Builder. Maybe they're a bit sick of you at this point?

    "If we answered that, you would know if it was safe to lie."

    Celes rolls her eyes and pokes a boxed Gram with her foot.

    "Actually, we just want to tell you the functions of our stuff without worrying about 'revealing' it. Eleventh hour powerups provide bonuses to Magical Girls, which we'll often qualify as when we're fighting."

    "You need to know what our creations do," you stress. "You don't need to know what they look like. As long as we're sticking to abstracts instead of sights, there's a pretty good chance that items won't count as 'revealed' until after we actually use it against a foe."

    "We have security footage from before you even started. What's the point of trying to hide the end product when we could see it as it was being built?"

    "You saw some guts and vague shapes," you correct. "We were very careful to build the carriers as we went along."

    "If you go over the footage with a fine-tooth comb," Celes adds, "then a monolithic government organization will be trying to ferret out the secrets of several mysterious new heroines. Good luck getting an accurate picture from that."

    The rover person speaking through the rover silently mulls your arguments over for several seconds.

    "Why do I have the terrible feeling you girls are recording every second of this conversation?"

    ""Because we are?"" You and Celes innocently chorus.

    "We're unaccompanied minors in a government facility," you continue.

    "As per… um, that one court case from 2001, we're allowed and even encouraged to record our interactions under these circumstances."

    "We probably won't release any of it unless you guys decide to make our lives difficult."

    "Tit-for-tat, y'know? If you don't want people to see you prioritizing your own files over the safety of heroic minors, then don't act like you're prioritizing your own files over the safety of heroic minors."

    There's another long pause. You suspect they might be talking things over with a muted mic.

    "You girls are remarkably similar to a swarm of law-studying locusts," the speaker grumbles. "I can't promise we won't need to see the various items, but depending on your descriptions, I suppose this may be adequate."

    You flash a quick smile at the rover and begin checking points off on your fingers.

    "We have three exceptionally sharp daggers, armored and slightly shielded unitards with some cosmetic bonus stuff, a barely-repaired spider minion that'll do whatever it used to do - we'll work more on that later…"

    "...Communication earpieces, a smart tablet, a watch that warns us when we're being monitored, a smallish extradimensional storage bag, a blood-clotting paste, a bunch of ants that disinfect stuff, a sort-of-healer that will only work on us and the rest of our family…"

    "...A piloting droid that can take over for drunk-slash-wounded drivers or pilots in an emergency, a smartphone that basically temporarily breaks spy cameras, a black box that frustrates those trying to ferret out its secrets, three eternally high-end laptops, a near-invulnerable floating camera, a squirtbottle filled with magical rock ants that can't harm living material..."

    "A power generator that will safely and sustainably produce energy based on how famous we are, a normal kitchen sink, a couple disguises that'll make it easier for us to hide our identities, three high-end longswords, sunglasses that effectively dim the surrounding area as well..."

    "A gun that shoots homing spheres - tired, sorry, spears - two swords that can't actually harm people, a robotic pet tree, another tree, auto-sorting drawers, an upgraded alloy fabricator, a long-cooldown ball of healing, yes we know to be very thorough to avoid making healing-resistant diseases…"

    "Yet another nonlethal melee weapon, a comfortable padded pouch for kitten-sized animals, the 'escape pods' demonstrated by Fornax a minute ago, a flying pig—"

    "That's it, I am done. This isn't going to work out. New question: Is there anything that, in your judgment, could be easily destabilized or has the potential to present a significant danger to yourselves or others?"

    You share an uncertain glance with Celes Lyra. You'd been expecting them to wait for the full list, if only so they could know when to veto stuff out of hand. Leaving it to the judgment of a couple teenagers seems… reckless? You like to think you have good judgment, but most other teens certainly don't.

    "We were going to cover those last," Lyra ventures. "Well, whatever. We wanted a ready supply of delicious pineapples, but the 'pineapple grenades' we ended up with weren't quite what we were hoping for."

    "During the earlier power-assisted splurge, I ended up producing a 'bubble bomb,' or something that would add a few hundred meters of space between a protected area at the epicenter of the blast and their surroundings. It turned out more powerful than expected, I no longer have a good use for it, and it's unacceptably dangerous."

    "The rest of it? We were careful to steer clear of stuff you'd confiscate. Yes, there are some firearms in there, but they're of the bolt-action precision variety instead of something like a rocket launcher or machine gun."

    "For future reference, I wouldn't normally be able to produce a fraction of this stuff. Thanks to that one hiccup with your supercharger, I had 225 days of charge to play with. Caelum leveraged that to get even more, although we did have to spend much of it inefficiently."

    "Caelum is the primary Builder of our group. She was the one actually designing stuff, but she also has a side power that lets her have up to a day of charge for powers if that power was necessary to imitate a given Builder project. A loophole with her powers used to let her copy a day's worth of charge for each 'project' completed by Fornax even if the original version of that project cost much less than a full day. She could also repeat projects any number of times."

    "Fornax and Lyra have referred to those interactions as 'exploits,'" Skye Caelum interjects tonelessly. "The exploits in question have since been patched out for the sake of game balance."

    You gesture at Celes to be quiet while the observers think. There's almost a full minute of silence before you get an adult back in the room.

    "This is so stupid. I've been told our budget can't really handle detailed breakdowns for everything you've made, and given the sheer number of possible combinations, there isn't much point in making a giant list of everything you have. At this point, we're just going to slap 'potential S-class' on each of your files and call it a morning, alright?"

    While you're shaking your head, Celes throws out one hand and points at a random patch of wall behind the rover.

    "Objection!"

    Sister, I love you dearly, but you are such a dork.

    "Caelum is directly responsible for the vast majority of items before you," Celes continues heatedly. "I mostly just provided an extra set of hands and Fornax had a bit over two hundred days worth of charge to play around with. The CBCC has historically been a bit trigger-happy when it comes to classifying power-copiers and we've accepted that, but Fornax and I are not worthy of the same treatment. Most importantly, our gadgets are based in utility. It would make us difficult to put down, but that's no excuse to slap a blanket S on us."

    "...You do realize you just tossed your teammate under the bus, right?"

    You and Celes shake your heads before she jerks her chin toward you. You take her hint and the reins.

    "Caelum is fine with being PS-classed and wants to attend Paragon anyway. Lyra and I would rather the government not go all Big Brother on us, thanks."

    "What little justification you had for S-classing us is irregular and anomalous. I was able to take control of a poorly-secured magical artifact that did itself constitute an PS-class threat."

    "My powers had, past tense, a loophole to let me multiply the fifteen days of charge by fifteen. Since that's obviously broken as hell, I can't do that anymore."

    "We're immune to mind control and we're not going to stop being heroes until we retire from the Cape scene altogether, so you don't need to have a detailed threat assessment or countermeasures for us. If we need your help with something, we'll call it in; as shown by the events of, oh, several hours ago, we're not reckless enough to try tackling unreasonable threats on our own."

    "We wouldn't have taken the name 'Progeny' if we were a bunch of pushovers. If we can't fight something, and I know that'll be a pretty big list, then yes, we're okay with running from it."

    "Oooh, idea! Transform, okay? Then say 'but if at first we don't succeed' and take a heroic pose I can be symmetrical with.'"

    Cooperating with Celes's whims is second nature by this point. You concentrate on changing and skip straight through the whole transformation sequence. You go from wearing a fake Magical Girl outfit to your real MG uniform without completing the intervening steps. You hold your head high, raise one fist, and half-lunge away from Celes, trying not to feel utterly ridiculous as you do so. You're sure Celes is echoing the motion, which helps.

    "But if at first we don't succeed," you parrot.

    "We'll blame it on our parents."

    . . .

    "I trusted you, sister!"

    "Worth it!"


    "I trusted you, sister!"

    "Forgive me, for it is my nature."


    "I trusted you, sister!"

    "Bad call. See you in Hell, Evelyn."


    "I don't know what I expected."

    "Me neither. You'd think pattern recognition would've kicked in by now."


    "I trusted you, sister!"

    "Remember this the next time you consider stealing Boardwalk."
     
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  • Threadmarks
    • Alivaril said:
    "Your activities for tonight have eaten a significant chunk of our budget for the foreseeable future.
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    And we haven't even stolen the building yet!
    Alivaril said:
    a normal kitchen sink
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    :rofl:
    Alivaril said:
    "Fornax and Lyra have referred to those interactions as 'exploits,'" Skye Caelum interjects tonelessly. "The exploits in question have since been patched out for the sake of game balance."
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    At this point they must know that we're in active communication with our partners. We're really doing a good job supporting our implied origins.
     
    Alivaril said:
    Leaving it to the judgment of a couple teenagers seems… reckless?
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    Look at it from their perspective:
    • Even if they wanted to confiscate something, we black-boxed our stuff well enough that they'd have to ask us which box to take.
    • Anything we wanted to keep would've been teleported out with the backpack.
    • Our descriptions are uselessly vague because we made so much stuff that there's not enough time for more detail.
    • We've already sent enough of their thinkers home with headaches that it's obvious that that approach isn't going to help.
    • They've just learned that we built - and have undoubtedly had active - a number of objects specifically designed to mess with information-gathering powers and tools.
    In short, they quickly realized that they don't have a choice about trusting us.

    More hilarity which I've just noticed:
    Alivaril said:
    a flying pig—"
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    Every time they look at us they're suddenly operating under Magical Girl rules.

    That must have been incredibly annoying until they figured it out. Then it would have been even more annoying, because "making fools out of the government observers" is a pretty powerful narrative.
     
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    ...This entire incident is going to be legendary in the CBCC. They're going to be figuring out things about stuff Progeny did here for years, and probably will never solve all of it. We're going to have a reputation with the government, and it's going to be hilarious to see how they approach interacting with us in future events.
     
    ImperatorV said:
    ...This entire incident is going to be legendary in the CBCC. They're going to be figuring out things about stuff Progeny did here for years, and probably will never solve all of it. We're going to have a reputation with the government, and it's going to be hilarious to see how they approach interacting with us in future events.
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    More power for the fame generator! :D
     
    ImperatorV said:
    it's going to be hilarious to see how they approach interacting with us in future events.
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    The fun part those three are still the only ones with admin access to the mg maker, and the school will probably want them to fix their pets looking evil at some point. Not to mention the lawsuit that's coming.

    Meanwhile, they've straight up stated that being famous literally gives them power (electric power at that). So, being showy is in their best interest.
     
    We were worried about the CBCC strong arming or something, but Celes and Evelyn just rolled over them like they were doormats. So much for being worried about surveillance, the poor things won't stand a chance :p

    Also, we're pretty much confirmed as Progenitor's kids in their eyes. This level of bullying is straight up in his venue. No wonder they just gave up on making us do something we don't want to :grin:
     
    I'm wondering what the vulnerability we're going to argue is. If it involves Celes's power it might be something like "your anti-teleportation system counts as a single conceptual entity and isn't covered by a power nullifier", which is not particularly actionable.
     
    Vebyast said:
    I'm wondering what the vulnerability we're going to argue is. If it involves Celes's power it might be something like "your anti-teleportation system counts as a single conceptual entity and isn't covered by a power nullifier", which is not particularly actionable.
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    It is somewhat, they could attempt to get around it by turning it into a few dozen different systems. Also throw on some systems to check the other systems, and a few other things to make it so that unless the Power Nullifer knows EXACTLY WHICH SYSTEMS to turn off they would atleast trigger alarms.
     
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