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[HALP] me! (WORM quest)

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Vhalidictes said:
Tentatively you'd label it "peak Human". Nothing in particular strikes you as superhuman, but she doesn't have any flaws or weaknesses. At all. Not even at a genetic level. You spend a few milliseconds amused at the thought of informing the Empire of this, but discard the idea as not worth thinking more about.

You definitely want to finish sorting through this knowledge so you can examine Veronica with more understanding. You could probably apply these lessons to your other hosts. Well, excepting the various cosmetic changes. You get the sense that Amy has a definite type after looking at what was done.
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@Vhalidictes, does this mean that we can get Basic Host Modification (Human) without researching it or, at least, with a reduced Research cost?

Some possible plans for us to consider:

[ ] Plan "Something's Up with Taylor"
-[ ] Use our new Human Biology research to scan Taylor for any anomalies.

[ ] Plan "Check in with Shift"
-[ ] Check in with Shift to make sure things are going well and reassure her that we haven't forgotten her.
-[ ] If she's upset that we didn't contact her yesterday, tell her it's because she's doing such a good job that she's becoming a more capable member of the pack.

[ ] Plan "Tell Negotiator what's going on"
-[ ] Contact Negotiator to let her know that we're currently evaluating the damaged Shards. We're just doing patch jobs for now while we figure out which Shards are salvageable.
-[ ] Let her know that Emote has already been consumed because it was running low on Energy.

[ ] Plan "Let's keep Valiant from killing anyone"
-[ ] Send Veronica a dream of her throwing a blast at someone that kills them because it was more powerful than expected.
-[ ] Hopefully, this inspires her to test out her powers safely.

[ ] Plan "Get Stabilize Trigger BEFORE Taylor triggers"
-[ ] Start researching Stabilize Trigger.
-[ ] Continue researching Focussed Research.

Is there a way that we can save Trainwreck's power and then encourage him to join the Protectorate? Would dreams be enough? I don't want to give him a good power, and then he works for Coil.
 
Or, we can send Trainwreck to New Wave. Make a deal with Gaea. Valiant and Vicky have already realized that Amy accidentally modified her power. So Gaea can cover for us fixing Case 53s by pretending Amy had a drunken breakthrough.

Amy already knows she can't do that. But apparently, alcohol boosts her power. Yes I'm seriously suggesting that Gaea makes it a thing that drinking supercharges Amy's power. PHO will never let it go. We change Trainwrecks power, but don't give him a normal human form until we can arrange an encounter with Panacea.

Also explain that Prosthetic was worse off than we thought. Attempting a patch job triggered a complete meltdown and we did what we could to mitigate damage.

Trainwreck doesn't know that she can't modify Case 53s. So once Valiants buff leaks, he gets the idea to go ask her to change his. And when she says she can't, Gaea influences her and we have Trainwreck bring up that she changed Veronica's power, and suggest maybe it was the alcohol.

Send him the dream of it happening.

Oh man this could be hilarious, drunken Panacea applying the touch of God to those cursed with inhuman forms.
 
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Vhalidictes said:
(1D100+12-25 => -1) Critical Failure!
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Vhalidictes said:
Shardspeak version of assembly code or something? Hm. Well, that was content-free. Right? Right, nothing at all there. It wasn't machine code? Oh, you translated it? That's… nice, I suppose. Hey, I have an idea, let's do some research. Sure, mental split and all that. Okay? Okay.

[*PURGE*] [*FORMAT*]

The good news is that this is fine. You're fine. The bad news is that Transform has problems. Either it's terribly damaged, or it's terribly damaged and infectious. You used to know which, but you 'forgot'. Probably for the best, really. Perhaps you were a little overly cautious, but better safe than sorry.
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So what did Transform just try and do to us?
 
Gino said:
Also explain that Prosthetic was worse off than we thought. Attempting a patch job triggered a complete meltdown and we did what we could to mitigate damage.
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To be fair, that wasn't our fault. It just installed the data packet over its brains.

Mount. Elements said:
[ ] Plan "Get Stabilize Trigger BEFORE Taylor triggers"
-[ ] Start researching Stabilize Trigger.
-[ ] Continue researching Focussed Research.
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Mmmm, I'm thinking maybe we should seriously consider trying to get a Research to keep excess Research from rolls.
Since it seems the dice explode on a critical, which could be anywhere from a 15-18% chance. That's nothing to laugh at, and could shave days off our research attempts if we get it. Yeah, it's all random and there's no guarantees we would, but the chances of Panacea being where she is were slim.

Also, we got it twice today. In a row! That's already given us an extra two days towards it. Even if we just make it and spend one day to spend investments and initial rolls, I could make up the rest of the Research in Omakes. It's one day lost when we just gained two, surely it's worth it, right?
 
The_GrandMage said:
To be fair, that wasn't our fault. It just installed the data packet over its brains.



Mmmm, I'm thinking maybe we should seriously consider trying to get a Research to keep excess Research from rolls.
Since it seems the dice explode on a critical, which could be anywhere from a 15-18% chance. That's nothing to laugh at, and could shave days off our research attempts if we get it. Yeah, it's all random and there's no guarantees we would, but the chances of Panacea being where she is were slim.

Also, we got it twice today. In a row! That's already given us an extra two days towards it. Even if we just make it and spend one day to spend investments and initial rolls, I could make up the rest of the Research in Omakes. It's one day lost when we just gained two, surely it's worth it, right?
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The thing is we only gained 2 days for Focussed Research, not for the second research project. It wouldn't surprise me if Taylor triggers once she figures out that Sophia is Shadow Stalker so I'd like to try to get that as soon as possible. I'll try to look up brain biology to write omakes for it, but (1) I can't be sure that my omake will fit the plan for the research project to earn credit for it, and (2) I can only do 1 omake per chapter.

I'd vote for the "Keep Excess Reseach" project after we complete Focussed Research, but I'd suggest that we start Stabilize Trigger as soon as possible. Unless we're fine with her triggering without it? I'd hate to push back her trigger because it means that stress and bad memories build up for her.
 
Ok is there something screwy with trainwreck? Can we get a look at the power before we re-design it? It sounds like the answer may be no.
 
Vilegrave said:
So what did Transform just try and do to us?
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I'm a bit confused, because the invisitext had nothing to do with Transform?

In any event, you don't know what Transform did (if anything) because you deleted the you that found out...

w34v3r said:
Ok is there something screwy with trainwreck? Can we get a look at the power before we re-design it? It sounds like the answer may be no.
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There's no way to look at his current power any more, no. And it was a Cauldron power at that, so it's very possible that you'd need very specialized resources to recover it. Scion might not even be able to.

If Prosthetic can't fix itself somehow, there's probably no data there to recover. You can't just magic up missing information, after all...
 
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I finally finished updating the Shard Info post! If anyone sees anything that should be added/edited, please let me know. Here's an overview of the new Shards.

I don't think that we can do anything about Transform for now since it's possibly infected. Fusion MIGHT need to place more restrictions on Sundancer's power usage because it could run out of Energy in a few decades, but I don't know how important that is to decide right now. Plus, if Sundancer or one of the other Travellers notice, then how will that affect things? Maybe we should do the whole group at once so that they can think it's due to their environment or a commonality of the vials somehow.

Mask is a bunch of Bits that we can't effectively communicate with so it might be a good candidate for eating. Do we want to eat another Shard right now, or hold off until we've got things more under control with Taylor, Veronica, Amy, and the Cauldron Shards in general?

Clone tried to eat Administrator because it's starving, but it doesn't have the protocols for energy transfer channels. If we could find a way to SAFELY eat it, I'd vote for that. One option would be to get Drain 1, but that costs 250 Trump info and 550 Research, and other research projects currently have higher priority.

Finally, Frictionless just needs to put more restrictions on its host. It should be ok to do this now since Ballistic has been only accelerating small objects. Here's a general plan:

[ ] Plan "Restrictions save Energy"
-[ ] Tell Frictionless to cap the size of objects that Ballistic can accelerate to only 5% bigger than the objects Ballistics currenly uses.
 
Vilegrave said:
So what did Transform just try and do to us?
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So I manually cleaned up the Zalgotext around the hex code we got when we contacted Transform, and got:

54 72 61 6e 73 66 6f 72 6d e2 80 99 73 20 54 65 78 74 20 28 74 72 61 6e 73 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 68 65 78 29 3a 20 54 68 65 79 27 72 65 20 63 6f 6d 69 6e 67 20 6f 75 74 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 6c 6c 73 21 20 54 68 65 20 64 69 6d 65 6e 73 69 6f 6e 61 6c 20 6c 65 61 6b 20 77 6f 6e 27 74 20 63 6c 6f 73 65 21 20 4e 4f 4f 4f 4f 20 2f 2f 20 53 74 6f 70 20 69 74 2c 20 73 74 6f 70 20 69 74 20 6d 61 6e 2c 20 67 65 74 20 79 6f 75 72 73 65 6c 66 20 74 6f 67 65 74 68 65 72 2e 2e 20 3c 6d 75 6e 63 68 3e 20 3c 73 6c 75 72 70 3e 20 3c 67 75 6c 70 3e
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Which translates to:

Transform's Text (trans from hex): They're coming out of the walls! The dimensional leak won't close! NOOOO // Stop it, stop it man, get yourself together.. <munch> <slurp> <gulp>
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Note that "Transform's text (trans from hex):" was part of the message encoded in hex - I didn't add that, it was included by @Vhalidictes .
 
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Okay research wise we dropped 5 days off the expected length for focused research instead of 1, leaving that also means a change in research plans (which is a good thing) Also human bio finished using only one day which is great.

Revised research plan
Slot 1:
Focused Research 1 360 needed 5.26 days
Stabilize Trigger (Human) apply focused once Faster Research 2 finishes need 850 research ~9.56 days
Stronger Trigger (Human) apply focused need 1450 research ~11.62 days
Total: ~26.43 days

Slot 2:
Faster Research 2 turn on focused once that researches need 750 research, ~8.53 days
Improved Research 1 need 950 research ~7.98 days
Total: ~22.41 days

Slot 3 (day 8.53)
Basic Host Modification(Human) need 300 research ~4.38 days
Advanced Host Modification (Human) need need 600 research ~8.76 days
Total: ~13.14 days (+8.53= ~21.67 days)

Info Used:
350 Thinker
100 Brute
180 Changer

We actually can shave 3 days off when we will have all of the research we want for Taylor's trigger off thanks to the focused crit and doing a bit of rearrangement (faster research 2 now). For any bonuses to research applying them to focused research 1 gives the best result currently as that is the section that has the longest total time, if we finish focused research next turn we would drop about two days off of faster research 2 and in general finish everything up a couple of days quicker.

Thus for research:
[ ] Plan Working Towards Trigger Research
-[ ] Slot 1- Continue Focused Research 1
-[ ] Slot 2- Start Faster Research 2


Redshirt Army said:
So I manually cleaned up the Zalgotext around the hex code, and got:



Which translates to:
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Oh... oh that does not sound good at all.
 
Either Transform is hallucinating an Alien movie or we shouldn't touch that until we have dimensional theory and defenses.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Note that "Transform's text (trans from hex):" was part of the message encoded in hex - I didn't add that, it was included by @Vhalidictes .
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That note was a transcription error, you can ignore it.

The only other thing that you're sure of is that the message wasn't Shardspeak of any kind, nor was it a human language as humans can't make those smells.

Your language database refers to it as ( 'ic)
 
Don't forget we should probably loop shift into the sense sharing with Stansfield.

Also we should ask Gaea and Telekinesis to join the party... that is Vicky's shard right?
 
I think we're already sharing with Telekinetics.

And we should definitely avoid Transform.
 
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Since it sounds like Trainwreck's power data might be irrecoverable, I took the liberty of tossing together what a roughly equivalent power might look like, shardside.

-Changer 80, Striker 20
Lacks limbs, much of his body is one big "blob", but can slowly reshape his body into working, but slow moving "pseudopods". Generates significant amounts bioenergy that he can use to power his creations, but that is difficult to use offensively directly.

It's kind of cruel to keep the guy in this awful state, but the fact of the matter is that a Case 53 getting spontaneously healed is the kind of attention we really don't want to draw to ourselves. Better to keep him more or less the same - even if we don't quite pull off an identical state, "my weird biology changed slightly" is waaaay less conspicuous then "suddenly I'm totally different".

-Tinker 100
Has access to a "crude, basic" tinker database. Has no need for special materials at all, can build from scrap. Tinkered items are large, crude, heavy, but quick and easy to assemble. Emphasis on weapons, armor, and equipment.

Note that unlike his original power, this emulation of it does provide inspiration when examining the items created by other tinkers. Wildbows comments specifically note that inspiration was a well known mechanism for pushing tinkers to combat each other and thus get more Information, so the role of Administrator our PC is playing in front of the other shards would probably see the lack of inspiration as a mistake made by the original shard due to impaired functionality. Trainwreck making different items due to inspiration would also more or less cover up the fact that our Tinker database is probably different from his original shard's. At first, he'd be "inspired" by his own old work, after all.
 
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Also, what's he going to with multitasking. He's not Dragon, he's not even Armsmaster. He's only got two hands and two eyes and no thinker power to apply it to.

Also, add that his tech is vaguely steampunk. And I think case 53s are more breaker than changer, like Weld. He doesn't even have a brain. Legend is a self correcting light beam. Alexandrias mind is in her shard.
 
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Mount. Elements said:
The thing is we only gained 2 days for Focussed Research, not for the second research project. It wouldn't surprise me if Taylor triggers once she figures out that Sophia is Shadow Stalker so I'd like to try to get that as soon as possible. I'll try to look up brain biology to write omakes for it, but (1) I can't be sure that my omake will fit the plan for the research project to earn credit for it, and (2) I can only do 1 omake per chapter.

I'd vote for the "Keep Excess Reseach" project after we complete Focussed Research, but I'd suggest that we start Stabilize Trigger as soon as possible. Unless we're fine with her triggering without it? I'd hate to push back her trigger because it means that stress and bad memories build up for her.
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Technically, we also finished Human Biology a day ahead of schedule. This is one day I'm asking for, one. I have a free Omake I can spend this turn, and I'm willing to spend it on going towards Stabalize Trigger.

Also, I think if your information doesn't pertain, it would just get less points, not none, so you'd probably still hit the daily average (or what it was before it had a 1 in 6 chance to explode).

Mount. Elements said:
Clone tried to eat Administrator because it's starving, but it doesn't have the protocols for energy transfer channels. If we could find a way to SAFELY eat it, I'd vote for that. One option would be to get Drain 1, but that costs 250 Trump info and 550 Research, and other research projects currently have higher priority.
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Okay, Swap has no personality, can't have one, and has no security features. We didn't get to that yet before getting stuck.
What if we had Swap open up all the ports, including Mass and Energy, to Clone? Clone would eat it, right?
My one worry is that this is described as a good feeling.

Maybe put it off until we can infect Swap with a Meme to lock down Clone for repairs after it consumes Swap?
That was we could contain it before it gets a taste for Shardflesh.

Redshirt Army said:
-Changer 80, Striker 20
Lacks limbs, much of his body is one big "blob", but can slowly reshape his body into working, but slow moving "pseudopods". Generates significant amounts bioenergy that he can use to power his creations, but that is difficult to use offensively directly.

It's kind of cruel to keep the guy in this awful state, but the fact of the matter is that a Case 53 getting spontaneously healed is the kind of attention we really don't want to draw to ourselves. Better to keep him more or less the same - even if we don't quite pull off an identical state, "my weird biology changed slightly" is waaaay less conspicuous then "suddenly I'm totally different".

-Tinker 100
Has access to a "crude, basic" tinker database. Has no need for special materials at all, can build from scrap. Tinkered items are large, crude, heavy, but quick and easy to assemble. Emphasis on weapons, armor, and equipment.

Note that unlike his original power, this emulation of it does provide inspiration when examining the items created by other tinkers. Wildbows comments specifically note that inspiration was a well known mechanism for pushing tinkers to combat each other and thus get more Information, so the role of Administrator our PC is playing in front of the other shards would probably see the lack of inspiration as a mistake made by the original shard due to impaired functionality. Trainwreck making different items due to inspiration would also more or less cover up the fact that our Tinker database is probably different from his original shards. At first, he'd be "inspired" by his own old work, after all.
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I feel I should point out that at this time, Trainwreck is, I believe, a complete unknown. He hasn't been picked up by any teams yet.

We could literally give him a dream of Panacea healing him and telling him to never tell of it, so realistic he thought it was real.
As long as we get rid of the Cauldron mark, no one would ever need know who he was.
 
Redshirt Army said:
I'm kind of iffy about adding it? Unlike Gallant, there's really no excuse we have to adjust his power, so I'd really like to keep any changes as subtle as possible. "Suddenly multitasking" doesn't really fit.
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I can imagine one possible argument in favor of it: Whoever said he had to stay within a human body plan when building his replacement limbs? Arms that fork into more arms to hold multiple weapons, building a spidertank platform to substitute for legs, attaching a reinforced exoskeleton to mount even more limbs on, eventually teching up into an external steam-powered brain (unlikely, but hey)...
 
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unsanity said:
I can imagine one possible argument in favor of it: Whoever said he had to stay within a human body plan when building his replacement limbs? Arms that fork into more arms to hold multiple weapons, building a spidertank platform to substitute for legs, attaching a reinforced exoskeleton to mount even more limbs on, eventually teching up into an external steam-powered brain (unlikely, but hey)...
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If we make him into the Spider Mastermind from Doom, Uber & Leet will just kill him, though.
 
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