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[HALP] me! (WORM quest)

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Gino said:
Vhal, maybe you should consider making an action economy with only so many slots a day? Unsanity had to set limits eventually in his quest, and pretty much every other quest does it too.

Although I'll grant that as the mighty multitasker it makes narrative sense for us to try and do everything at once.
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This is a good thought, Gino, and something that I'm keeping in mind. For now, as long as the chapters stay under 10K of non-administrative text, I'm good. I'm reserving the right to create a Actions plan in the future, though.

Polenball said:
Also decided to write a research omake, which I hope is good enough. My attempt at using my physics/astronomy knowledge (plus some research) to help Focused Research 1. Most of the research seems to be mental, but I thought of an idea after rereading the boiling Pacific section.

[Focused Research 1] This is... irritating. Perhaps there's a physical method to solving this. Maybe I can do something with the Moon? Haven't tried that. At least I'd save the rest of myself (and the Earth) from boiling if I heat up there. It seems like there should be something I can do.

- Super-speed thoughts didn't work very well. But the Moon is big, cold, and different from Earth. Maybe I can try it again, with some new ideas and plans. Last time, the Pacific boiled and I almost toasted myself, but hey! This time is sure to do better, right? Definitely.

- Turns out, the Moon isn't actually as cold as you expected it to be. I mean, it's in a vacuum, surely it's freezing cold underground! Apparently no - just underground at the equator, it's only about negative 13 C. Even the poles are kind of bad. Yeah, there's ice, but it's not that cold.

- Digging even deeper didn't work out very well either. The lunar core is still warm enough that the ground isn't that cold for long. You might be able to grow some weird heat dissipation coils, but water is better than rock, so that wouldn't go very well. May as well just use the North Pole or the Pacific for that sort of dispersion.

- Another problem. Dissipating large amounts of heat quickly is irritating; more so in a vacuum. In a vacuum, the main options are sublimation or radiation. Time to try that.

- The Moon has no molten rock until very, very deep down. When I put down too much mass in one place on Earth, the crust almost cracked down underneath me, which wasn't ideal. But the Moon doesn't have that sort of problem, at least not to the same extent. Maybe I can build massive vertical radiator towers out of myself to dissipate heat quickly? Split the water on the Moon into hydrogen, and that's basically the best thing you can use for a sublimator to release heat. I think I can build something useful to do that.

- Big radiator towers are a theoretical success, it seems, and my sublimator designs are working... decently. Especially given that this is completely out of my purview as the Administrator. I can even radiate the energy back at my Earth-mass, although that's not that effective given the atmosphere. It's not enough though - I can drag it out to maybe twenty minutes before I start to cook myself again.

- A few possibilities: I'm an idiot for not thinking of this before, a genius for doing it now, or an idiot for thinking it will work. I already have [Overload 1], which uses my Energy Transfer protocols to drain energy from one part of a Shard and feed it back to another. But this time, I want to get rid of my excess thermal energy. It shouldn't be too hard to rig that up?

- Ok, if I just place another one of my main communication array-thingies I use for the Energy Transfer Protocols to the Moon, and install some waste heat recovery apparati in the section I'm overclocking to cool down... I can probably send a controlled burst of former heat-energy away from my Moon-mass at something, without actually draining anything from them. A lot of Shards might even be grateful, if I target it at the right place.

- ...Orrrr, instead of wasting it all on another Shard, I can transfer at least part of it evenly to all my Earth-mass' storage to recover some of the energy. The rest might still have to be sent to someone else. Doing that balances it enough that nowhere on Earth burns, if the radiators and sublimators are on Moon-side. With all three heat removal methods on, the Moon-mass won't cook for a good few hours while overclocking. The unpleasant energy drain is still a problem, though. Anyway, progress!
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This is awesome, Polenball! +150 for Focused Research 1

Retrueno said:
Why does everyone wants to restrict Twin right now? I genuinely can't see the point. We don't gain anything, Coil changes his routines to adapt to his limited power and Cauldron is informed... So I ask, What's the point of doing this, is there something I'm missing?
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My take on what the Questors are saying is that you don't know enough about the Shard, and you also want to be able to spy on Coil, which you get with sense-sharing. I could be wrong about that, though.

EDIT: Sharing with not-yet-active (Untriggered Host) Shards is a good idea for getting info.
 
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So Singular, Surveillance, Safegaurd should all have untriggered hosts, that's Bakuda, Madison and Aisha.

I still day we should let things calm down a bit before we contact them.

Singular is the priority, we know she triggers in the next month or two.

It was a final exam she got a B right? That's what, the second week of December?
 
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Everyone, this is the formal notice that all votes need to be in by 0600 US-Pacific time on Tuesday, January 29th.

As always, there is the possibility that I will count late or updated votes, depending on when I start writing. No guarantees.
 
Some quests people take days to get around to the vote, some quests there's a dozen within minutes of the post. Seems like we're getting more people at least.
 
ccstat said:
So, I'm a little bit confused. Why the focus on restricting other shards? As far as I can tell, the timescale for them to run out of energy is on the order of decades, while we've only been awake for what, 10 days? These are not critical problems to be resolved. Sure, doing something to Twin on the excuse that it will save energy, but actually because everybody hates Coil, is a valid strategy. It just seems like it's not much of a concern.
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A large part of it for me is that it's something we can actually accomplish now while we figure out how to solve some of the bigger issues. It's also part of Administrator's job as a Shard and helps her blend in as being regular old "Queenie". Finally, by scouting out the Cauldron Shards, we figure out which ones we can use for sense-sharing, which ones we can eat, and which ones require skills that might be useful in other areas.

Since Assuming Direct Control creates a lot of aberrance, I'm personally hoping that restricting Coil will allow someone else (like Lisa maybe) to take him down so that we don't have to worry about him any more.

The_GrandMage said:
We also aren't gaining more, despite helping Gaea with PanPan and doing repair patches on some Shards. Do we need them to actually make a quest to get more of that? What are the Data Currency to Favor exchange rates? Ugh, when Stabilize Trigger is done I'm tempted to try parsing the Archaeology data to learn more. I'm just worried we'll be bogged down with what things QA liked and this will turn into ShardWaifu Quest.
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I could be wrong, but I thought we gained some Favour from giving Gaea the suggestion about getting Panacea drunk, at least when it turned out so "well" for Gaea anyway.

Honestly, I'd like to NOT contact any new Shards this round and see how the plan involving Taylor's brain turns out. After that, Memetic Proxy Filtering should kick in, and we can contact Incendiary (Mark Dallon) and Light Forge (Carol Dallon) to see if they're influencing their hosts and making the situation with Veronica and Amy worse somehow. We can also contact Armamentarium (Miss Militia) for Hero's Shard address and as a possible contact in the Protectorate and Module (Kid Win) and/or Jury-Rig (Leet) to see if they're good candidates for sense-sharing. I'd like to limit the new Shard contacts each round to keep us from being swamped with a ton of different issues if they all end up having problems we need to help with.

If we can get a good supply of info from Audible, Twin, Swap, Frictionless, and Fusion, then we might want to look at getting ourselves a human avatar. If we give it a good power and set up our human self as a Rogue, then we should have a good source of income to take care of said body with. Also, 10,000 Research is pretty enticing IF we can get the info to keep doing research projects. We wouldn't be able to get Advanced Host Modification (Human) in time for the human avatar, but we might be able to get it for when Taylor triggers.

Edit: Just want to say that I like the action economy idea.
 
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Let's hold off on a human avatar until we get into stranger danger. If every shard gets full senses within 500 meters of their host, we'll be exposing ourselves to a lot of potential whistle blowers in BB.
 
Gino said:
Let's hold off on a human avatar until we get into stranger danger. If every shard gets full senses within 500 meters of their host, we'll be exposing ourselves to a lot of potential whistle blowers in BB.
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What confuses me about the human avatar quest is that one of the rewards is "Not Having To Worry About Aberration So Much." Of course, one of the failure results is "Massive increase in Aberration", but Vhalidictes said that it should be pretty easy to pull this off if we focus on it. That's one reason why I'm hoping that we ask the Charge data about how aberrance is detected.
 
Vhalidictes said:
The… organ, located mostly where a human brain would be, is an interesting beast. It's arranged more like some kind of… well, you're not sure because you haven't examined other kinds of biology, but it's not human tissue, really. It's something else. Birdlike, perhaps.

In fact, it's fantastic at thinking, and would be something like Amy's best work, except for a few small problems:
  1. It's terribly inefficient from a energy standpoint.
  2. Most of it isn't being used, and is in fact semi-dormant.
  3. Taylor only seems to have about 25% of it to herself, to, you know, think on.
  4. Some of that 25% was taken up by your tiny 0-point Corona. Oops?
  5. This isn't your work. This isn't Gaea's work. You have no idea who would have done this.
Now, you examined all of that unused brain-analog, and there's nothing there for you to see. It's jam-packed with something, though. Tons more data than any Host could normally ever absorb. And it's all compressed and encrypted to hell and back. You can get at the raw data-stream because you have access to Taylor's 'brain', but there's no telling what is in there.

Whatever encryption scheme was used, it's far beyond you. You'd probably have to figure that out before you could even attempt to decode it.
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@Vhalidictes Could you clarify something for me about Taylor's brain situation for me? Is her consciousness running on a separate partition from the rest of it? If we do wipe the data from the other 75% of her brainmeats, is it straightforward to give her access to that chunk or does it remain separate without further intervention?

If it stays separate, does it count as a distinct brain for the purposes of assigning potential hosts? Would it be possible to install second (0-point) corona in the additional partition, with the intention of eventually giving her two entirely separate powers? I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea, but I'm interested in whether it could be done.
 
The question is how to get the Human avatar. Amy's not too likely to do it, We could Trigger and uplift an animal or ADC a Human. Both of those are fairly Aberrant.

Unless we get PanPan and Lilac to work together, Lilac building a robot for PanPan to provide some neuromatter for, and instead of making a brain ("That's too much like being Nilbog") she makes a big lump of Gemma we can hook into. That might make us able to weedle around some of the rules.

And if my plan takes off and I can save some future bonuses to grab Mad Kazoo Skillz 3, I may have a plan on how to hide our Avatar. We just need to decide what form we want:

1 - Coil
-Pros: Money, a Base, Contacts, Cauldron willing to let us Conquer the Bay through controlling a number of SuperTeams we set up.
-Cons: Is Thomas Calvert, Requires ADC, Aberration (There are ways to hide this, and it goes away over time).
2 - Uplifted beast
-Pros: Catgirl? Catgirl!, No pesky Human Consciousness to fight us.
-Cons: No resources, Requires Multi-Host, If we set it up as a Case 53 or assumed one Cauldron might be interested in where we came from, Aberration
3 - Robot
-Pros: No human consciousness to fight us, Maybe less Aberration because no actual Host?
-Cons: Not a real person, Dragon's interest, Probably still Aberration, Requires Amy (Who is probably getting low on SAN), Probably requires Multi-Host
4 - Terminator-style roboskeleton in a PanPan RealFlesh Suit
-Pros: Looks human, no human consciousness to fight us, Maybe less Aberration because no actual Host?
-Cons: Affront to nature, Aberration, Could be found out and labelled not a person, requires Amy (Who is probably getting low on SAN), Probably requires Multi-Host, Not even sure if Lilac can build a robotic endoskeleton.

Mount. Elements said:
What confuses me about the human avatar quest is that one of the rewards is "Not Having To Worry About Aberration So Much." Of course, one of the failure results is "Massive increase in Aberration", but Vhalidictes said that it should be pretty easy to pull this off if we focus on it. That's one reason why I'm hoping that we ask the Charge data about how aberrance is detected.
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The penalty of Aberration is, for the most part, Zion dealing with us Shard-side. I'm not sure exactly how having a meatpuppet will make that less of an issue, unless we could somehow get around being restricted by dumping some sort of hack into the human brain to unrestrict us or back us up again?
 
Mount. Elements said:
What confuses me about the human avatar quest is that one of the rewards is "Not Having To Worry About Aberration So Much." Of course, one of the failure results is "Massive increase in Aberration", but Vhalidictes said that it should be pretty easy to pull this off if we focus on it. That's one reason why I'm hoping that we ask the Charge data about how aberrance is detected.
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This isn't that complex. If you have a proper Avatar, you could, potentially, lose access to the Admin Shard entirely and not end the quest.

Admittedly, stopping GM as a Host would be a touch harder, but still very possible. Just ask Taylor.

ccstat said:
@Vhalidictes Could you clarify something for me about Taylor's brain situation for me? Is her consciousness running on a separate partition from the rest of it? If we do wipe the data from the other 75% of her brainmeats, is it straightforward to give her access to that chunk or does it remain separate without further intervention?
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Relatively, yes. You don't have all of the various (animal) Modification skills, but just knowing what you know now, you won't mistake the different partitions in her brain - they are very different.

As far as giving her access to the other 75% in stages - yes, you'd have to do that yourself. The tissues are organized a bit differently. For example, computer memory and computer logic are both types of chips but you wouldn't confuse them. (They even look different under a microscope)

EDIT: You might want to keep (part of) that "memory storage" part of the superbrain intact (after formatting it, if that's what you do) it's a great way to give Taylor centuries of (eidetic) memory space.
 
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The_GrandMage said:
The question is how to get the Human avatar. Amy's not too likely to do it, We could Trigger and uplift an animal or ADC a Human. Both of those are fairly Aberrant.
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Step 1 Find bear
Step 2 Trigger bear
Step 3 Modify bear body to be absolutly superhuman and really compressed (i.e use all the biomass to make an extra powerful growth template), make the form a smol bear girl/boy
Step 4-infinity Be adorable
 
The_GrandMage said:
The question is how to get the Human avatar. Amy's not too likely to do it, We could Trigger and uplift an animal or ADC a Human. Both of those are fairly Aberrant.

Unless we get PanPan and Lilac to work together, Lilac building a robot for PanPan to provide some neuromatter for, and instead of making a brain ("That's too much like being Nilbog") she makes a big lump of Gemma we can hook into. That might make us able to weedle around some of the rules.

And if my plan takes off and I can save some future bonuses to grab Mad Kazoo Skillz 3, I may have a plan on how to hide our Avatar. We just need to decide what form we want:

1 - Coil
-Pros: Money, a Base, Contacts, Cauldron willing to let us Conquer the Bay through controlling a number of SuperTeams we set up.
-Cons: Is Thomas Calvert, Requires ADC, Aberration (There are ways to hide this, and it goes away over time).
2 - Uplifted beast
-Pros: Catgirl? Catgirl!, No pesky Human Consciousness to fight us.
-Cons: No resources, Requires Multi-Host, If we set it up as a Case 53 or assumed one Cauldron might be interested in where we came from, Aberration
3 - Robot
-Pros: No human consciousness to fight us, Maybe less Aberration because no actual Host?
-Cons: Not a real person, Dragon's interest, Probably still Aberration, Requires Amy (Who is probably getting low on SAN), Probably requires Multi-Host
4 - Terminator-style roboskeleton in a PanPan RealFlesh Suit
-Pros: Looks human, no human consciousness to fight us, Maybe less Aberration because no actual Host?
-Cons: Affront to nature, Aberration, Could be found out and labelled not a person, requires Amy (Who is probably getting low on SAN), Probably requires Multi-Host, Not even sure if Lilac can build a robotic endoskeleton.


The penalty of Aberration is, for the most part, Zion dealing with us Shard-side. I'm not sure exactly how having a meatpuppet will make that less of an issue, unless we could somehow get around being restricted by dumping some sort of hack into the human brain to unrestrict us or back us up again?
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I found the post I was thinking of!
Vhalidictes said:
I don't know that this is that far-fetched. It comes down to planning more than anything else.

You already have a direct line to Veronica/Valiant, Telekinetic, and Gaea. Sure, you'd have to re-prioritize some things, but if you really went for it I can't imagine that it would take more than a week to get a avatar.

Worst case, good-aligned: New Wave (okay, Vicky) goes on patrol all the time. Shard-sense dying Merchant, steal just-dead Merchant body, redesign it, Avatar.

Worst case, evil-aligned: Make Kelly Parahuman (use the Contact Host to make a 0-point Corona), force a trigger, Assume Direct Control.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that is a lot more possible than you seem to think.
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Hmm, I don't like the way we've chosen, especially the choice of what to do with the stuff regarding taylor, purging stuff before we know what's going on seems like a BAD IDEA to me, I'd prefer to find out first, it's not the way I would have chosen, so for now, I'll wait and see.
 
Well I want either superpowerful breaker/tinker or canon power souped up to all non sentient life with a massive range, plus distributed intelligence breaker state.

Imagine Hookwolf walking down the street, when every insect, bird, and stray animal steps out and stares at him. Stock still.

As a tinker, nano breaker body which she consumes mass to gain density, and uses to tinker. Distributed intelligence across nanoswarm. Can tinker anything. Maybe real tech.
 
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Krule said:
Hmm, I don't like the way we've chosen, especially the choice of what to do with the stuff regarding taylor, purging stuff before we know what's going on seems like a BAD IDEA to me, I'd prefer to find out first, it's not the way I would have chosen, so for now, I'll wait and see.
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The problem is that waiting is its own risk. There's probably at least 2 rolls involved with the possibility of Taylor getting within Gaea's range, likely more, and Gaea can't do much to her brain without risking the data in it. Taylor is pretty bad off with her limited brain space so we don't want to let that go on for too long if we can help it. Finally, it's been hinted that the data is Queenie backing itself up on Taylor's brain, and fixing Taylor's brain makes Khepri less likely.

I'll take healthy Taylor and the quest rewards over the possibility that there MIGHT be useful data encoded in Taylor's brain.

Void Stalker said:
What is the current desire for powers for Taylor? We need to make sure we have the info to pull that off.
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There's A LOT of possibilities. They're listed in Apocrypha under Power Designs - 1. I'm currently looking through it to see if there are any designs we could use for a Rogue human avatar, but I'm not seeing much. Maybe Drone Ship for situations where Dragon is too busy to help out?
 
Actually I wanna supe up the cannon powers without expanding the amount of critter types she can control.

So master, thinker, and shaker for the primary power, and load that bad boy up with a lot of each. Then for support features I wanna run a tinker or master-tinker trick that turns our bugs into bug tinkers so tinker tech versions of things bugs make, chemicals, webs, shells, lairs, bugs. Then install a doomsday switch with a bit of trump data that cuts our range but allows us to apply the power to humans/parahumans, basically a back up plan.

Assuming we have slots and data left I'd like to add in order of priority: Trump power for a power copying effect, basically I want to perma-copy jack's powers when he comes I to range, a stranger cloak that protects the knowledge in Taylor's head, and maybe one that makes her impossible to pick out of her swarm, a regen feature that provides biomass for healing only, and the ability tospawn bugs from her flesh using her own biomass.
 
Permanent power copying is probably very expensive.

And I prefer breaker to brute. Losing the original body means nothing, her minds is among the swarm. And let her combine biomass to make a new body. Let her have multiple bodies even.

Brute powers can be bypassed, see sting. Better to never be there in the first place.
 
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Can't we take all the data in Taylor's brain and dump it on charge or shift so we can decode it later if it isn't a virus (that tries to activate the moment we touch it) and if it is nothing of value was lost?
 
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