Hmm, yeah, I could maybe see that. There would be the problem that, if Brianne was willing to blurt it out to Amy, what if she blurted it out to Vicky? But yeah, if Brianne didn't say anything and didn't seem to judge Amy for anything other than the 'infection', it could be good for her.
"More like the shard is just a big chunk of entity, somewhere between a crystal and a braincomputer, and it's constantly adapting and shifting gears to take in the data that the host is granting. When that starts slowing down, because the shard has seen enough permutations, then it devotes a chunk of itself to the processing for a new host (or to the existing host again), extending a tendril across realities." - Wildbow on SB
I think that Rune would also count. I'm also not sure how young or old Scrub was. Or at least wasn't until I looked at the Wiki page and learned that he's apparently just "teen aged", without listing any specific numbers, along with possibly Whirlygig.
Still not sure if I get it. I can take two eggs - fuse them and get just an ordinary egg, because they were identical. Those eggs just going to be normal, some matter disappear? Сan I use different items, than results of fuses and so on, until I get pandemonium of different properties? Or they going to dilute and everything will become a shapeless mess? Or other properties going to disappear?
Infinite loop:
egg + gold = golden egg | apple + pen = apple-pen | stone + water = stony water | bulb + toy cube = cube bulb|...
golden egg + apple-pen = gilded apple-pen egg | stony water + cube bulb = semi-liquid cubic lamp|...
(gilded apple-pen egg) + (semi-liquid cubic lamp) = abomination? |... + ... |
This is wrong principle? egg + gold = golden egg | apple + pen = apple-pen|
golden egg + apple-pen = gilded pen (some properties lost)
This is how different things fusing. egg + egg = normal egg
normal egg + normal egg = another normal egg...
This is how identical things behave.
Where did the all those eggs go? Dimentional shenanigans? Can I feel this space? Or it's just gone. This eggs going to act like normal ones in fusing, because duplicates of properties don't matter?
Water, that behaves like stone. Mineral water is still a mundane liquid with dissolved stone particles. But stony-water is something dry and
abrasive, but fluid. Something similiar to fluidized sand. Do not to be confused with watery-stone! It's a stone, which behaves like water. Transparent body with an approximately solid shape, but which can pull things inside when pressed hard enough. Like giant dew drop, but stronger. It also shattering in very cool patterns - it's surface ripples like a paddle and sheds thin pieces of the top layer, which coagulate into small hard droplets with the same properties.
Still not sure if I get it. I can take two eggs - fuse them and get just an ordinary egg, because they were identical. Those eggs just going to be normal, some matter disappear? Сan I use different items, than results of fuses and so on, until I get pandemonium of different properties? Or they going to dilute and everything will become a shapeless mess? Or other properties going to disappear?
Where did the all those eggs go? Dimentional shenanigans? Can I feel this space? Or it's just gone. This eggs going to act like normal ones in fusing, because duplicates of properties don't matter?
Combining two completely identical eggs would result in one egg completely identical to the component eggs, with the excess traits being discarded, whether that's by them being digested away somehow or them just vanishing.
Combining one egg with a crack on the top but not the bottom with an egg with a crack on the bottom but not the top would result in a single egg with the 'uncracked bottom' and 'uncracked top' traits - the best of both worlds.
If you did that combination again but put a crack in the middle of each egg, you'd end up with an egg that's cracked in the middle but not the top or the bottom.
If you combined, say, a metal club (material = metal, shape = blunt) with a wooden sword (material = wood, shape = sharp), then either:
- The best traits would be taken, discarding the worst. In this case, a metal sword (material = metal, shape = sharp), with (material = wood) and (shape = blunt) being discarded.
- Each trait would be applied in different areas where it fits best. In this case, a sword with a sharp metal blade and a blunt wooden handle.
In the case of my 'AAAA' 'BBBB' example, the location of each letter indicated that the traits would contradict. For example, maybe the first position was weight, and Weight A was light, while Weight B was heavy. The resulting object would either only have one of the two, or it'd have a different spread of weights across it.
In the case of 'CCCCC', maybe the fifth C meant something like 'has an antennae sticking out of it' or something, a trait that neither item A nor item B possessed. Even then, it could still be discarded if Item (AB)C would be best if it was aerodynamic.
You theoretically could combine things until you had a mishmash of different properties, but you wouldn't get a 'shapeless mass', since that wouldn't be the "best of both worlds". Combining water with an inferior rock then a superior rock, for instance, would have the same results as just combining water with a superior rock.
Not sure if I quite understood what you're getting at. Panacea's worry is that, since she's not the only person who knows her secret any more, that's one more way for other people to find out. There's no way she's not going to be worried about that, even if she did think Brianne could keep the secret.
Breadth, from my understanding, is a shard's affect on a person over time. Kids have higher breadth because they had the shard through more developmental milestones. Depth is how much the host naturally aligns with the shard's desire for conflict. High depth makes powers stronger or at least easier to control. The 'conflict drive' isn't shards flat-out controlling their host's emotions or anything like that. It's small influences over time, shaping the host into naturally being the sort of person they want.
Or they go the Rachel/Labyrinth/Burnscar route and just go ham.
I think that Rune would also count. I'm also not sure how young or old Scrub was. Or at least wasn't until I looked at the Wiki page and learned that he's apparently just "teen aged", without listing any specific numbers, along with possibly Whirlygig.
Not sure if I quite understood what you're getting at. Panacea's worry is that, since she's not the only person who knows her secret any more, that's one more way for other people to find out. There's no way she's not going to be worried about that, even if she did think Brianne could keep the secret.
Breadth, from my understanding, is a shard's affect on a person over time. Kids have higher breadth because they had the shard through more developmental milestones. Depth is how much the host naturally aligns with the shard's desire for conflict. High depth makes powers stronger or at least easier to control. The 'conflict drive' isn't shards flat-out controlling their host's emotions or anything like that. It's small influences over time, shaping the host into naturally being the sort of person they want.
Or they go the Rachel/Labyrinth/Burnscar route and just go ham.
I'm pretty sure Depth also has something to do with how aspects of the mental pollution are organized to effectively be how the personality originally was while Breadth is the opposite. Like how Spawner built themself as a entire person out of the mental pollution of two other people and a Master effect.
Really Spawner is the perfect example of the difference between Breadth and Depth by how different they are from the rest of Bonesaws Clones. Her earlier clones, the ones that connect to their Shards before they're done developing, are defined by their Shards almost more then by their artificial memories and Spawner seems to be as well but also seems to be defined by how the different sets of mental pollution play off of eachother and how they're resolved and how those resolutions, the processes themselves rather then the results, form entirely new personality traits right along side the resolved composites of those once-conflicting traits.
yup. Victor actually met her when she was like 13-14 and then she married him when she was like 16. and in canon, she's still a teenager, although an older one. And the saddest and creepiest part isn't even the fact that Victor was WAY older than her, it was the fact that the Neo-Nazis clans matched them up together for the purposes of breeding more racially pure children together. And this is a common practice in Neo-nazi encaves in the wormverse. Victor was actually meant to marry Othala's older cousin originally, but things fell through on that front so she was considered the backup.
So is not only Victor basically a pedophile, Othala's whole family is okay with the idea of her being with a pedo in the name of racial supremacy.
For all that fanfics like to try to redeem purity, it makes me wonder why nobody ever tried that shit with Othala too. because hello.... she clearly never consented to any of this and was probably brainwashed into thinking she consented to this.
For all that fanfics like to try to redeem purity, it makes me wonder why nobody ever tried that shit with Othala too. because hello.... she clearly never consented to any of this and was probably brainwashed into thinking she consented to this.
It rise a question about possibility of redemption for other villians. Because we do not know about how most of them really tick and what story stay behind their actions. Maybe at some point there will appear pacifist-route fanfic or something, where the main goal is to redeem villians as much as possible. However, I see it more like tragedy of sort, where main character give up on their goal and became something terrible. Maybe S9 member? But all those tries to make world a better place weren't lost. Some people become better, some people took this path of redemption for others and now need to stop twisted shell of the first pacifier. I am pessimist - so my thoughts about it may be too dark.
This is very hard thing to write, but maybe someone, somewhen...
yup. Victor actually met her when she was like 13-14 and then she married him when she was like 16. and in canon, she's still a teenager, although an older one. And the saddest and creepiest part isn't even the fact that Victor was WAY older than her, it was the fact that the Neo-Nazis clans matched them up together for the purposes of breeding more racially pure children together. And this is a common practice in Neo-nazi encaves in the wormverse. Victor was actually meant to marry Othala's older cousin originally, but things fell through on that front so she was considered the backup.
So is not only Victor basically a pedophile, Othala's whole family is okay with the idea of her being with a pedo in the name of racial supremacy.
For all that fanfics like to try to redeem purity, it makes me wonder why nobody ever tried that shit with Othala too. because hello.... she clearly never consented to any of this and was probably brainwashed into thinking she consented to this.
They could have avoided all of that by just using surrogates as well. Like sure eugenics the shit out of your bloodline, nobody gives a shit, but leave relationships out of it.
Unrelatedly you could probably use those mouths to combine the training from a bunch of trained mice or something to pretty good effect.
Being a pedophile is a plus to 'nazi enclaves'. The cruelty and inequality are the point for those types.
Quite frankly there are a lot of regions in real life doing the same kind of grooming right now for 'religion' and i suppose for racism too. Anyway expecting nazis that grew up on the 'culture' not to be nazis just because it's on their best interests - like othalla - is the same as expecting a child victim of a cult to not be a cultist - unlikely.
Being a pedophile is a plus to 'nazi enclaves'. The cruelty and inequality are the point for those types.
Quite frankly there are a lot of regions in real life doing the same kind of grooming right now for 'religion' and i suppose for racism too. Anyway expecting nazis that grew up on the 'culture' not to be nazis just because it's on their best interests - like othalla - is the same as expecting a child victim of a cult to not be a cultist - unlikely.
you'd be surprised at how many children end up running away from those cults. women and young girls tend to escape polyamorist Mormon cults in Utah all the time. and look up the survivors of the Children of God Cult. they were sexually abused in that cult on a regular basis and it was so normalized for them in there that they didn't think there was anything wrong with it at first. But, they still felt there was something wrong and decided to leave on their own.
You know it just occurs to me that the Miniaturization Tinkering Perk would probably mean that Brianne could figure out a decent amount of ways to combine foods into ultra-dense sources of nutrition which would probably be pretty healthy and convenient.
That and that she could probably make some tea-plants or something both fast-growing, possibly also by making nutrient dense soil or hydroponics or airoponics or the like, and containing ADHD and/or nootropic drugs instead of caffeine and other chemicals.
Also that the Stand Perk doesn't seem to necessarily say that you would be the User of the Stand that it provides you with. Merely that you would have that Stand. That's something that I found rather interesting.
Being a pedophile is a plus to 'nazi enclaves'. The cruelty and inequality are the point for those types.
Quite frankly there are a lot of regions in real life doing the same kind of grooming right now for 'religion' and i suppose for racism too. Anyway expecting nazis that grew up on the 'culture' not to be nazis just because it's on their best interests - like othalla - is the same as expecting a child victim of a cult to not be a cultist - unlikely.
Also that the Stand Perk doesn't seem to necessarily say that you would be the User of the Stand that it provides you with. Merely that you would have that Stand. That's something that I found rather interesting.
A/N: This is an edited version of Chapter 7. Ch1-10 have been edited, anything beyond that is being rewritten.
Original Chapter 7 below:
Aeon held up a phone with the words 'Uno' written into the notes app, and Lisa groaned.
"How is your ghost-lizard so good at this game?" She complained.
"At least it can't read your mind," I said, looking down at the sixteen cards in my hand.
I played a Draw Two, and Lisa, whose turn was next, gave me a flat look.
"Hey, you could get a good card from this and use it on Aeon," I said. "It's just the logical play!"
"It's a good thing I have this, then!" She put another Draw Two on the stack and shot a triumphant look in Aeon's general direction.
One of its eyes was pointed at her, while the other eyed the pile. It flipped the final card in its hand around - another Draw Two.
'Thanks, guys,' it typed. 'I wouldn't have been able to play that without you '
Lisa threw her cards at the phone, and Aeon scuttled out of the way, cackling.
Two days had passed since I'd saved Lisa and, since then, we'd ended up spending most of our time together. We shared several classes, and it seemed like she'd started at Arcadia recently enough that she hadn't made any friends, either.
Outside of school, we'd ended up sticking together, too. I hadn't wanted to get on a crowded school bus, and she preferred to stay out in the city as long as possible after school, so we'd go to the library together to read or study together. Turns out, going through a dangerous situation together really was a great way to connect with people, go figure.
Once Aeon had thoroughly reamed me out for getting attached to her so quickly, it had started to come around. Time spent with her was time not spent constantly stressed, sinking into the mire of dread that someone could find me out and arrest me.
Since it was Wednesday, it was a half-day for everyone at Arcadia. As part of the school's curriculum, a lot of the students spent school hours at internships, courses, or other learning programmes. It was why the Wards were rumoured to attend Arcadia - they'd been seen patrolling and attending events during school hours, and Arcadia's system was the best way to obfuscate them coming and going.
On a darker note, since it was Wednesday, that meant canon start was in two days, and the Lung fight was in four. Not only that, but the conversation with my guardian I'd put off until the weekend was also fast-approaching. I was going to have to make a decision on that, and soon.
Even if the best course of action was to just not interfere and hope that canon would remain intact enough for Khepri to kill Scion, I'd almost certainly scuppered it. Panacea was in a worse emotional state now, thanks to me. Even though it had been two days, she was still avoiding me.
The infection… I was 70% sure it was at least mostly a bluff. I didn't think she trusted her power or her self-control that much. Besides, it'd be crossing a line she'd be loath to even toe without a whole lot of downwards spiralling first.
(It had been 90%, before I'd started getting minor cold symptoms.)
What's more, I'd seen almost-certainly-Gallant talking to a redheaded boy and another boy with long hair and darker skin. They'd all looked at me as I'd walked past, then went back to acting just a bit too casually.
There was no guarantee they were Clockblocker and Aegis, but the evidence was building up. Since Dean was sitting next to me in maths class, where we were ordered by surname, it'd make sense for 'Stansfield' to be right next to 'Steele'.
The butterfly effect was a bitch, and I was almost certain that my actions meant that, between the Wards and Panacea, the bank robbery would go differently, if it even happened.
Even before the bank, the Lung fight starting at all required a string of very specific events. Taylor had to go out on the right day, go to the right place at the exact right time to misunderstand Lung telling his minions to shoot the Undersiders.
That was just on Taylor's side. The Undersiders had probably already pissed Lung off, but if they or the ABB tried to have the fight on a different day, or if they took a different route on the dogs, the Lung fight would change.
Armsmaster, too, would've had to be patrolling in that area at the right time to meet Taylor and tell her that there was so little information on the Undersiders, prompting her to use information-gathering as a justification to join their team. Chances are, a giant unknown tinkertech spaceship appearing had messed up his schedule in some way or another.
What happened in canon was a one-in-a-million event, fragile enough that any one of the butterflies I'd let loose could easily prevent it. Since nearly every event in canon had been a domino effect from that one night, all of it would be nullified.
So, in a roundabout way, I had free reign to do whatever I wanted.
It was as terrifying as it was freeing.
"Lost in thought?" Lisa asked.
I nodded. "Thinking about where to go from here."
"Let me go grab the box," she said. "You've gotten everything you could, right?"
I nodded.
'The box' was a big plastic container I had filled with carefully sorted-out electronic components and raw materials. I'd been using Armsmaster's power in small doses, just enough to get accustomed to it. The first time had been more intense than I was expecting, but when I was actually ready for it, it was easier to manage.
My body warmed up for the first time since Monday. I'd almost missed having that.
It's not like I'd just been sitting around with Armsmaster's power active, though. I'd gone over the apartment and, later, Lisa's house (where we were now), taking apart everything electronic and putting them together with less components.
Between my various tinker powers, it had been intuitive to a degree I'd never felt with anything in my life. There were only so many components I could get via this method, especially with subpar tools, but it was nearly enough to get a start.
I made up for that deficit with my stomach. Now that I had an actual tinker power, my mouths' object-fusion abilities were really starting to become useful. Lisa and I had gone to the beach on Tuesday to pick up trash that I could fuse with samples to turn into raw materials. The less I thought about what that process had been, the better.
Lisa dropped the box in front of me as the heat intensified.
"I'm getting a new power, watch out," I said.
A grin spread across her face. "What is it? Tinker power? Something else?"
"I dunno. I'm not getting anything right now."
She pouted. "Another dud?"
I nodded.
The heat died down after one unit of normal heat and three units of intensity, and I still didn't know what I'd gotten.
"Well, full steam ahead, then?" She asked. "I've always wanted to see what it looks like when a tinker does their thing."
"Probably not as interesting as you think," I said. When she furrowed her eyebrows and opened her mouth, I clarified "And this isn't just self-deprecation. It's going to be slow and tedious."
Aeon ambled in, chewing on a glove it had found somewhere. I absentmindedly tugged it out of its mouth.
"Still, it's not every day you get to see a cape in action."
I politely didn't mention that she'd seen me 'in action' every day since we'd met. Instead, I unpacked the box and got to work. Her father, apparently, wasn't going to come home until eight or nine at night, which left me with plenty of time to tinker.
While my ADHD-Primarily-Inattentive - still known as ADD in 2011 Earth Bet - near-completely shot my ability to control my focus, when I did manage to get stuck into something, I got stuck into that thing. There was nothing better than sitting down to do a fun activity for hours, and tinkering was no different.
As I built the device, flickers of insight came from my biggest power. Ways to reinforce what I was making, or just ways the power was automatically shoring things up. Armsmaster's power took these reinforcements and ran with them - if I could safely make these wires and supports thinner, I'd damn well make them thinner, if it had anything to say about it.
The two main things holding me back were detail work and noise levels. The toolbox I'd borrowed from the guardian's apartment was hardly suitable for crafting micro-scale processors. My power helped me build better tools, at least, letting me get through the first stages of the tinker cycle.
I had to pack everything away at Lisa's urging when her father's car pulled in. Well, mostly - I still had my phone on me, so I did the coding overnight, typing away on my phone's tiny keyboard. Her father left again at half past six in the morning, leaving me a chance to make one final push towards finishing the project.
Something landed on my shoulder, and I looked up blearily from the visor in my hands.
"Hey, school's starting soon, dipshit. Pull your head out of your tech and get moving," Aeon snapped.
"Five-" I yawned- "Maybe ten more minutes. I'm nearly done."
"Fine, but I'm zapping you once that's up."
Twelve minutes later, I learned that I could apparently run around the house while working on a piece of tech and not trip over myself. A secondary power? I'd gone from the sort of balance someone would have just after a growth spurt to near-perfect poise.
"Finished!" I exclaimed, raising the helmet in triumph.
Aeon sighed and clambered onto my shoulder. "Next time, I'm shocking you half an hour beforehand."
I pulled the rest of the suit from where I'd stashed it and clicked the helmet onto its head.
Done.
The second unknown power triggered.
Quantity/size? It asked.
Wha-
Quantity/size?
It wasn't giving me time to think.
Quantity.
The finished mobility suit jolted and then, like a clipping issue in a video game, four more suits exploded out.
…What? What the fuck?
"Are you rea- uh." Lisa was waiting at the door, her bag slung across her back. "You were more productive than I thought."
"I just learned what the new power does," I said, head swimming. "Looks like I get extras of whatever I make."
The other option had been size. I snatched a sheet of paper I'd been using to scrawl equations on and folded it into a paper crane.
Quantity/size?
Size.
It grew, becoming three times bigger in all three dimensions.
I recognised that power, and not quite in the same way I'd recognised Armsmaster's.
"Oh, motherfucker," Aeon sighed. "We're idiots."
School sucked, but it sucked even more when you were distracted and sleep-deprived. I was barely able to pay attention to anything without slipping back into the same old haze of tiredness and stress.
While I'd designed the suit with the intention of being able to compact it and hide it easily, we had a panic when we realised we'd have to find places for five of the things. For the moment, we'd stashed them in the house's basement and prayed her father wouldn't find a reason to go down there.
My maths worksheet, thankfully, hadn't multiplied when I'd finished it. It was only after I'd solved the last question and put my pencil to the side that I realised I hadn't gotten the quantity/size prompt.
That was both good and bad - I wouldn't have to worry as much about everything I didn't make from scratch, but it also meant I'd need to manually upgrade each thing I made myself, if I picked quantity.
…
There was no distracting myself from this any longer. I pulled the paper crane from my pocket and set it down on my worksheet.
Gaining new, seemingly random powers over time, all related to crafting.
Getting items for free with some powers, like the Scout ship with my spaceship tinker power.
Building up some sort of charge - and there goes the heat, speak of the devil - to 'purchase' those powers with, generally getting stronger powers for more energy.
In fact, hadn't I briefly considered that I was getting more heats from the conflict of hard conversations? The equivalent to something that'd be interesting enough to get a play-by-play in a hypothetical story? I wasn't in a story, of course, but the general idea still fit.
This whole thing was absurd but, without me even realising it, the evidence had stacked up high enough that, once I'd seen it, I couldn't look away again.
The Celestial Forge.
The property it was based on, a sort of story prompt character builder called Jumpchain, was the epitome of power-fantasy wish fulfilment mega-crossovers. The Celestial Forge was a collection of all the best crafting-related powers your character could get, based on hundreds of different works of fiction.
And everything I could think of about my power was pointing towards that.
The duplication power was one of the more distinctive things in that catalogue. 'Workaholic', from the Sonic the Hedgehog jumpchain document, oddly enough. Whenever you make something, you either get four more of them or the one you made gets three times bigger.
Thing is, there wasn't an off-switch. Not that I could remember from the power's description, and not that I could sense from the power itself. It didn't give a third choice, just Quantity or Size.
I'd never be able to finish making a single thing in front of other people, or they'd see it either have a clipping error or suddenly swell up. I'd need to make sure to complete my art project at home, to make sure it wouldn't spit out a bunch of copies in full view of my entire class. I'd need to be paranoid, fully figure out what counted as creation and what didn't.
Workaholic was one of the few powers I was even going to be able to recgonise at all. There were, what, thousands of powers in the thing? What's more, most of them would be from works of fiction I was utterly unfamiliar with.
The spaceship tinker power was nearly as much about appearance as it was about making the actual ships. There were ten or so different design principles that I knew about, including biologically-grown ships. It reeked of different factions in a video game, but I didn't recognise a single one of the possible ship aesthetics.
The durability power - whether it was based on video game durability systems or ancient technology from an anime, I could pretty safely assume it was generic enough that it didn't matter. There were a lot of generic powers in jumpchain documents, stuff that you didn't need knowledge of the source material to understand. I could only hope I'd be getting that sort of thing, to avoid nasty surprises.
The vehicles power was similarly generic, mostly just making machines more intuitive for me to understand, with a focus on things that go zoom. It could be from any number of racing-based series.
Armsmaster's power was one of the ones I recognised, the single Worm power that had gotten into the first version of the Celestial Forge, back when the power-list was in the hundreds and not the thousands.
The mouths, I had even less clue about than the spaceships. At least space travel was an indicator of sci-fi. The mouths could originate in anything from biopunk to high fantasy to cosmic horror.
I hoped it wasn't cosmic horror.
Electric Aeon…
"Welp, I figured that one out," it said, peering down the back of my shirt. "There's a star-shaped birthmark on your upper back."
…Oh.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. In that series, every protagonist had been a member of the same family known for their star-shaped birthmarks. That meant Aeon was something called a Stand - a spiritual entity called forth from the user's soul and powered by their fighting spirit. Classic anime stuff.
The problem here was that Stands tended to be passed along families. If one of them awakened their stand somehow, their family members generally did so as well.
Like the guardian.
Was he related to me closely enough that he'd get one too? The fact I wasn't actually Brianne wouldn't be an issue - someone with a stolen body had manifested stands in that body's descendants in the show.
The guardian would've had it for a few days, though, and he hadn't contacted me. It seemed like he thought I had powers and, since I was almost certainly the cape he was in closest contact with, I would've been the first person he'd tried to check with. Assuming he did think I had powers, and I wasn't just misreading the situation.
Fuck.
And I hadn't even gotten to the worst parts of this whole Celestial Forge situation.
Things like learning about the technologies of new species was exactly what shards existed for. Anything I built would be ripe for analysis, for genocidal aliens to pick it apart through their scans and use the principals to improve themselves. Having a shard would've sucked, but at least it wouldn't paint a target on my back.
But the end of the cycle was still a vague, far-off notion. I knew logically that it was a big, awful threat, but since it wasn't right in front of me, my brain was refusing to give it the emotional weight it deserved.
The stuff that could happen to me at any moment, on the other hand, was far more tangible. Getting powers like Workaholic that I couldn't turn off. Receiving unstable or radioactive materials in the same way I'd received the ship, and people getting caught in the crossfire. Having an obvious or dangerous power suddenly manifest in public, outing me or worse.
Maybe if I was still myself, if I still had my mum and dad and friends and everyone I loved there to support me, if I wasn't trapped in a superpowered hellworld on the verge of an apocalypse, I could've made it through. I would've been stoked, even. Except, the situation I was actually in just gave me- so many goddamn problems.
Heat, intense, right from the start. I wanted to cry.
And I still didn't know why the genuine fuck whatever I was stuck in had chosen me, of all people. Shitty, useless, incompetent me, shoved into the living corpse of some background character and given the tinker equivalent of a goddamn thermonuclear bomb to sit on.
I was the last person I would've picked to handle this sort of responsibility! I had the inventiveness of a piece of plastic and the willpower and moral fortitude of a damp paper towel. Even if I didn't fuck up and die, even if I didn't go mad with power, there were so many people who'd be able to do so much better than me with this.
Why not hand this to Chevalier? Dragon? Golem, even? One of the proper heroes who had the guts to actually do things!
The heat dissipated. No new powers that I could feel.
Then, the screaming started.
I shot to my feet like everyone else, looking towards whatever was causing it.
…
You cannot be serious right now.
Him?
If I had the Celestial Forge, why had he showed up? I mean, he was very much implied to be a scientist in the source material, but I could think of at least two more science-y scientists from that game.
"I. What? Huh?" Aeon spluttered.
A pair of glowing, pinpoint eyes surveyed the room, sharp in a way that didn't immediately show through in their owner's relaxed posture.
Though he was smiling (not that he could do anything but smile), the one mittened hand that wasn't shoved into a pocket was inches away from the doorknob.
I mean, it made sense, to the fraction of my brain that was still thinking rationally. He'd just been dropped into a room of shouting humans.
His eyes - or eye-sockets, I guess - made contact with mine, lingering for a moment before moving on.
Dean pushed through the throng of students, putting himself between them and the intruder.
"Who are you?" He asked, more gently than I was expecting.
"i guess i caused a bit of a fuss, huh?" The newcomer said. "the name's sans. sans the skeleton."
Aeon let out a muffled cry and slammed its head into the desk.
Aeon held up a phone with the words 'Uno' written into the notes app, and Lisa groaned.
"How is your ghost-lizard so good at this game?" She complained.
"At least it can't read your mind," I said, looking down at the sixteen cards in my hand.
I played a Draw Two, and Lisa, whose turn was next, gave me a flat look.
"Hey, you could get a good card from this and use it on Aeon," I said. "It's just the logical play!"
"It's a good thing I have this, then!" She put another Draw Two on the stack and shot a triumphant look in Aeon's general direction.
One of its eyes was pointed at her, while the other was fixed on the pile. It flipped the final card in its hand around – another Draw Two.
'Thanks, guys,' it typed onto my phone. 'I wouldn't have been able to play that without you '
Lisa threw her cards in its direction and it scuttled out of the way, cackling.
Five days had passed since I'd met Lisa and, since then, we'd spent most of our free time together. We shared several classes, and it seemed like she'd started at Arcadia recently enough that she hadn't made any other friends yet either.
We'd ended up sticking together outside of school too. I'd run out of patience with the crowded school buses, and she seemed reluctant to go to her house, so we'd walk to the library and hang out there. Turns out, going through a dangerous situation together really was a great way to connect with people, go figure.
The guardian had been tetchy when I called post-mugging-interference, asking to bring someone over on such short notice. Something about how I sounded must've changed his mind, because he'd sighed and given Lisa permission to stay over.
Once Aeon had thoroughly reamed me out for getting attached to her so quickly, it had started to come around, too. Time spent with her was time I wasn't constantly stressed, sinking into the mire of dread about the idea that someone could find me out and arrest me.
Since it was Wednesday, it was a half-day for everyone at Arcadia. As part of the school's curriculum, a lot of the students spent school hours at internships, workshops, or other learning programmes. It was why the Wards were rumoured to attend Arcadia – they'd been seen patrolling and attending events during school hours, and Arcadia's system was the best way to obfuscate them coming and going.
On a darker note, it was now the 16th of March. Canon start, the Lung fight, Dinah's kidnapping and Bakuda's bombing, they were all approaching at a steady pace, and I hadn't done a thing about it.
Maybe the best course of action would've been to just not interfere, hoping that canon remains intact enough for Khepri to kill Scion. Problem is, there's no way that was going to happen. Panacea was in a worse emotional state now, thanks to me, so the chances of her getting into the exact right circumstances to Kheprify Tayor were going down. I hadn't even seen her at all since Friday.
The infection… I was 70% sure it was at least mostly a bluff. I didn't think she trusted her power or her self-control that much. Besides, it'd be crossing a line she'd be loath to even toe without a whole lot of downwards spiralling first.
(I had been 90% certain, before I'd started getting minor cold symptoms. It was probably that Brianne had allergies or something – it was the right season for it – but the thought still itched at me.)
What's more, Aeon had apparently seen Dean giving me concerned glances when I wasn't looking. The fact he'd been quietly talking to a redhead while doing it was just the icing on the cake.
There was no guarantee that had been about me, but the evidence was building up. I didn't know this Dean's full name, but our maths class was seated in alphabetical order by surname, and 'Stansfield' would be right next to 'Steele'.
The butterfly effect was a bitch and, between my interactions with the Wards and Panacea, the bank robbery would almost certainly go differently, and that's if it happened in the first place.
Even before the bank, the Lung fight happening at all required a string of very specific events. Taylor had to go out on the right day, then go to the right place at the exact right time to misunderstand Lung when he tells his minions to shoot the Undersiders.
That was just on Taylor's side. The Undersiders had probably already pissed Lung off by now, but if they or the ABB tried to have the fight on a different day, or if they took a different route on the dogs, the Lung fight would change.
Armsmaster, too, would've had to be patrolling in that area at the right time to meet Taylor. Her justification for joining the Undersiders had been partially based on him telling her how little he knew about them. There was no way the spaceship appearing hadn't messed up his schedule, so that was going to change, too.
What happened in canon was a one-in-a-million event, fragile enough that any one of the butterflies I'd let loose could easily prevent it. It was that specific event that had set off the Brockton Bay powder keg, so that was going to be different, too.
In a roundabout way, I had free reign to do whatever I wanted without worrying about canon.
It was as terrifying as it was relieving.
"Lost in thought?" Lisa asked.
I nodded. "Thinking about where to go from here."
"Let me go grab the box," she said. "You've gotten everything you could, right?"
I nodded.
'The box' was a big plastic container filled with scavenged electronics and raw materials. I'd been using Armsmaster's power in small doses, just enough to get accustomed to it. The first time had been more intense than I was expecting, but when I was actually ready for it, it was easier to manage.
My body warmed up for the first time since Friday. I'd almost missed having that.
It's not like I'd just been sitting around with Armsmaster's power active, though. I'd gone over the apartment and, later, Lisa's house, taking apart everything electronic and putting them together with less components.
Between my various tinkery powers, it had been intuitive to a degree I'd never really felt before. There were only so many components I could get with this method, especially with subpar tools, but it was enough to make some basic tech.
As for the materials for the casing, I used my stomach. Now that I had an actual Tinker power, I was using my mouths' object-fusion ability for more than just goofing around. Lisa and I had gone to the beach on Tuesday to pick up trash, and I'd gone home and fused it all with different material samples. The less I thought about what that process had been like, the better.
Lisa dropped the box of materials in front of me as the heat intensified.
"I'm getting a new power, watch out," I said.
A grin spread across her face. "What is it? Tinker power? Something else?"
"I dunno. I'm not getting anything right now."
"Another dud?"
I nodded.
The heat died down after one unit of normal heat and three units of intensity, and I still didn't know what I'd gotten.
"Well, full steam ahead, then?" She asked. "I've always wanted to see what it looks like when a tinker does their thing."
"Probably not as interesting as you think," I said. When she furrowed her eyebrows and opened her mouth, I clarified "And this isn't just self-deprecation. It's going to be slow and tedious."
"Still, it's not every day you get to see a cape in action."
I politely didn't mention that she'd seen me 'in action' every day since we'd met. Instead, I unpacked the box and got to work. The earliest I'd seen the guardian come home was at 11PM, and that was when he came home. I had plenty of time to tinker.
I had ADHD-Primarily-Inattentive, though it was still called ADD in 2011 Earth Bet. While near-completely shot my ability to control where my focus went, when I did manage to get into doing something, I got into it. There was nothing better than sitting down to do something fun for hours on end, and tinkering was no different.
As I built, flickers of insight came from my biggest power. Ways to reinforce what I was making, or just ways the power itself was directly making things more durable. Armsmaster's power took these reinforcements and ran with them – if I could safely make these wires and supports thinner, I'd damn well make them thinner, if it had anything to say about it.
Here, I ran into an issue. I wasn't actually able to work on as small a scale as I wanted to. The toolbox Lisa had borrowed from her Dad was hardly suitable for crafting microcircuits, let alone nanocircuits. My power helped me build better tools, but they were still far from ideal.
I had to pack everything away at Lisa's urging when the guardian pulled up outside. Well, mostly everything. I still had my phone on me, so I did the coding overnight, typing away on my phone's tiny keyboard. The guardian left again at half past six in the morning, and I got right back to work.
Something landed on my shoulder, and I looked up blearily from the visor in my hands.
"Hey, school's starting soon, dipshit. Lisa's already ready to go. Pull your head out of your tech and get moving," Aeon snapped.
"Five–" I yawned– "Maybe ten more minutes. I'm nearly done with the visor section."
"Fine, but I'm zapping you once that's up."
Twelve minutes later, I learned that I could apparently run around the house while working on a piece of tech without staggering or misstepping once. A secondary power from something or other? I'd gone from the sort of balance someone would have just after a growth spurt to near-perfect poise.
"Finished!" I exclaimed, raising the helmet in triumph.
Aeon sighed and clambered onto my shoulder while Lisa clapped. "Next time, I'm shocking you half an hour earlier."
We'd moved the operation to the basement of Lisa's house when the delicate, half-built components became too plentiful to hide. Her father didn't seem that bad to me, just a bit distant, with a work schedule nearly as unhealthy as my guardian's.
It was also better for the noise level. I was starting to get paranoid that the neighbours would hear something incriminating through the walls, even if Aeon assured me they didn't give a shit.
Not needing to be as careful not to make a racket also had an unforeseen side effect. To make the outer panelling, I had to get each sheet of metal into roughly the right shape before doing any detail work. That meant I could actually delegate those parts to Lisa.
Her enthusiasm at actually helping to build tinkertech carried her most of the way through the tedium of cutting metal into roughly the right shape. She couldn't do nearly as good a job as I could, but working from something mostly-correct was easier than starting from scratch.
Finally, on the afternoon of Thursday the 17th, everything was ready. I laid out each piece of armour in a line, checking everything was present one final time. Then, I started to assemble them together, letting the suit take form.
I couldn't help but grin to myself. "Done."
The second unknown power triggered.
Quantity/size? It asked.
Wha–
Quantity/size?
It wasn't giving me time to think.
Quantity.
The finished mobility suit jolted and, like a clipping issue in a video game, four more suits exploded out.
…What? What the fuck?
"Can I come in now– uh." Lisa was waiting at the door, a textbook tucked under her arm. "I didn't realise we'd gotten that much done."
"I just learned what that newest power does," I said, head swimming. "Looks like I get extras of whatever I make."
The other option had been size. I snatched a sheet of paper I'd been using to scrawl equations on and folded it into a paper crane.
Quantity/size?
Size.
It grew, becoming thrice as long, thrice as wide, and thrice as tall.
I recognised that power, and not quite in the same way I'd recognised Armsmaster's.
"Oh, motherfucker," Aeon sighed. "We're idiots."
School sucked, but it sucked even more when you were distracted and sleep-deprived. I was barely able to pay attention to anything, constantly on the verge of slipping back into a haze of tiredness and stress.
While I'd designed the suit with the intention of being able to compact it and hide it easily, we had a panic when we realised we'd have to find places for five of the things. For the moment, we'd stashed them in Lisa's house's basement and prayed her father wouldn't find a reason to go down there.
My maths worksheet, thankfully, hadn't multiplied when I'd finished it. It was only after I'd solved the last question and put my pencil to the side that I realised I hadn't gotten the quantity/size prompt. Modification didn't seem to trigger it in the same way making something from scratch did.
That was both good and bad. I wouldn't have to worry as much about the power going off willy-nilly, but it also meant any upgrades I did on already-existing equipment would have to be done multiple times if I wanted to get more than one of them.
…
There was no distracting myself from this any longer. I pulled the paper crane from my pocket and set it down on my worksheet.
Gaining new, seemingly random powers over time, all related to crafting.
Getting items for free with some of the powers, like the Scout ship with my spaceship tinker ability.
Building up some sort of charge – and there goes the heat, speak of the devil – to 'purchase' those powers with, generally getting stronger powers for more energy.
In fact, hadn't I briefly considered that I was getting more heats around things like difficult conversations? I'd thought of it in terms of 'shard rewards for getting into verbal conflict', so I'd dismissed it when I'd learned my powers weren't shard-based.
It wasn't conflict, though, or it wasn't just conflict. 'Anything interesting enough to make it into a story' seemed to be what triggered the heat. I wasn't in a story, of course, but the general idea still fit.
This whole thing was absurd but, without me even realising it, the evidence had stacked up. Once I'd seen it, I couldn't look away again.
The Celestial Forge.
The property it was based on, a sort of story prompt character builder called Jumpchain, was the epitome of power-fantasy wish fulfilment mega-crossovers. The Celestial Forge was a collection of all the best crafting-related powers your character could get, based on hundreds of different works of fiction.
And everything I could think of about my power was pointing towards that.
The duplication power was one of the more distinctive things in that catalogue. 'Workaholic'. From the Sonic the Hedgehog jumpchain document, oddly enough. Whenever you make something, you either get four more of them or the one you made gets three times bigger.
Thing is, there wasn't an off-switch. Not that I could remember from the power's description, and not that I could sense from the power itself. It didn't give a third choice, just Quantity or Size.
I'd never be able to finish making a single thing in front of other people, or they'd see it either have a clipping error or suddenly swell up. I'd need to make sure to complete my art project at home, to make sure it wouldn't spit out a bunch of copies in full view of my entire class. I'd need to be paranoid, to extensively document what counted as creation and what didn't.
Workaholic was one of the few powers I was even going to be able to recgonise at all. There were, what, thousands of powers in the thing? What's more, most of them would be from works of fiction I was utterly unfamiliar with.
The spaceship tinker power was nearly as much about appearance as it was about making the actual ships. There were ten or so different design principles that I knew about, including biologically-grown ships. It reeked of different factions in a video game, but I didn't recognise a single one of the possible ship aesthetics.
The durability power – whether it was based on video game durability systems or ancient technology from an anime, I could pretty safely assume it was generic enough that it didn't matter. There were a lot of generic powers in jumpchain documents, stuff that you didn't need knowledge of the source material to understand. I could only hope I'd be getting more of that sort of thing. I was going to be unfamiliar with most of the series in the CF, and most of them probably didn't even exist on Earth Bet.
The vehicles power was similarly generic, mostly just making machines more intuitive for me to understand, with a focus on things that go zoom. It could be from any number of racing-based series.
Armsmaster's power was one of the ones I recognised, the single Worm power that had gotten into the first version of the Celestial Forge, back when the power-list was in the hundreds and not the thousands.
The mouths, I had even less clue about than the spaceships. At least space travel was an indicator of sci-fi. The mouths could originate in anything from biopunk to high fantasy to cosmic horror.
I hoped it wasn't cosmic horror.
Electric Aeon…
"Welp, I figured that one out," it said, peering down the back of my shirt. "There's a star-shaped birthmark on your upper back."
…Oh. You have got to be kidding– and nobody even noticed before now?
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. In that series, every protagonist had been a member of the same family known for their star-shaped birthmarks. That meant Aeon was something called a Stand – a spiritual entity called forth from the user's soul and powered by their fighting spirit. Classic anime stuff.
The problem here was that Stands tended to be passed along families. If one of them awakened their stand somehow, their family members generally did so as well.
Like the guardian.
Was he related to me closely enough that he'd get one too? The fact I wasn't actually Brianne wouldn't necessarily change that. Someone with a stolen body had manifested stands in that body's descendants in the show.
The guardian would've had it for a couple of weeks now, though, and he hadn't said anything about it. I was pretty sure he suspected I had powers and, since I was almost certainly the only cape he knew, I would've been the first person he'd check with. Assuming he did think I had powers, and I wasn't just misreading the situation.
Fuck.
And I hadn't even gotten to the worst parts of this whole Celestial Forge situation.
Things like learning about the technologies of new species was exactly what shards existed for. Anything I built would be ripe for analysis, for genocidal aliens to pick it apart through their scans and use the principals to improve themselves. Having shard-based powers would've sucked, but at least it wouldn't paint a target on my back.
But the end of the cycle was still a vague, far-off notion. I knew logically that it was a big, awful threat, but since it wasn't right in front of me, my brain was refusing to give it the emotional weight it deserved.
The stuff that could happen to me at any moment, on the other hand, was far more tangible. Getting powers like Workaholic that I couldn't turn off. Receiving unstable or radioactive materials in the same way I'd received the ship, and people getting caught in the crossfire. Having an obvious or dangerous power suddenly manifest in public, outing me or worse.
Maybe if I was still myself, if I still had my mum and dad and friends and everyone I loved there to support me, if I wasn't trapped in a superpowered hellworld on the verge of an apocalypse, I could've made it through. I would've been stoked, even. Except, the situation I was actually in just gave me– so many goddamn problems.
The heat picked that moment to show up. Intense, right from the start. I wanted to cry.
And I still didn't know why the genuine fuck I had been chosen for this, of all people. Shitty, useless, incompetent me, shoved into the living corpse of some background character and given the tinker equivalent of a goddamn thermonuclear bomb to sit on.
I was the last person I would've picked to handle this sort of responsibility! I had the inventiveness of a piece of plastic and the willpower and moral fortitude of a damp paper towel. Even if I didn't fuck up and die, even if I didn't go mad with power, there were so many people who'd be able to do so much better than me with this.
Why not hand this to Dragon? Chevalier? Golem, even? One of the proper heroes who had the guts to actually do things!
The heat dissipated. No new powers that I could feel.
Then, the screaming started.
I shot to my feet like everyone else, looking towards whatever was causing it.
…
You cannot be serious right now.
Him?
If I had the Celestial Forge, why had he showed up? I mean, he was very much implied to be a scientist in the source material, but I could think of at least two more science-y scientists from that series that'd qualify for the 'Assistants' section of the CF.
"I. What? Huh?" Aeon spluttered.
A pair of glowing, pinpoint eyes surveyed the room, sharp in a way that didn't immediately show through in their owner's relaxed posture.
Though he was smiling (not that he could do anything but smile), the one mittened hand that wasn't shoved into a pocket was inches away from the doorknob.
I mean, it made sense, to the fraction of my brain that was still thinking rationally. He'd just been dropped into a room of shouting humans.
His eyes – or eye-sockets, I guess – made contact with mine, lingering for a moment before moving on.
Dean pushed through the throng of students, putting himself between them and the intruder.
"Who are you?" He asked, more gently than I was expecting.
"i guess i caused a bit of a fuss, huh?" The newcomer said. "the name's sans. sans the skeleton."
Aeon let out a muffled cry and slammed its head into the desk.
A/N: For new readers, don't worry, if I didn't have a plan for Sans (story-wise, tone-wise, and crafting-wise), I would've rerolled him. After a later chapter, several people said they'd been worried at first but came around on the idea. If you still don't like it, yeah, that's fair.
For returning readers, I decided to cut out a few freebies that I didn't think were relevant enough to the story. In this case, the freebies from Sonic and Summon Annoying Dog from Undertale. I reserve the right to add any freebies back in if I feel they would benefit the story; right now, I just want to remove some of the chaff.
A/N: The truth come out. Does Brianne Steel is Celestialforge?
...
*Deep inhale*
So this is more or less how I've felt about that last roll since I first hit it.
For the SB crowd, how do you guys feel about my use of bolded text for Sans' speech? I used actual Comic Sans for him on my google doc, which isn't in the list of fonts on SB, so I'm trying bold instead. Is it too distracting?
Also, I should probably address the sudden break between this chapter and the last. You know how I was writing the tenth chapter, and I posted Chapter 6 once I'd gotten 3k words into it? Well, uh, the tenth chapter is now over 10k words. Yeah.
In other news, while I was bored and looking for ideas of more characters to make in Mannequin, a good friend requested that I do Lisa M's father, so I'll be updating the 'full cast' image in my Media threadmark shortly. Aeon is also in there, too.
There's also versions of some of the characters in alternate outfits that I made out of boredom. The guardian's shirt design is based on a design made by the wonderful YseultNott.
3.0330 Workaholic (300 CP) (Sonic the Hedgehog) (Time)
Sometimes you wonder how some geniuses are able to build entire armadas within days or weeks of their last defeat. You become a walking factory of production. Building en masse is something that comes without issue to you. That one bot that took a week to build? Now that one bot is now 5. Or roughly 3x the size it was before. How do you even have the resources to build so much you say? The hell if I know.
1.0450 Sans (300 CP) (Undertale) (Assistants)
A short and stocky skeletal prankster who's supposedly a sentry in Snowdin, but is always slacking off (usually by doing another job instead). Very lazy and laid-back, Sans is a good friend to have, if only for the bad laughs and good food. He's not very good at fighting... Supposedly. In reali- hey, you want to make me your companion? that's pretty cool, but you could have just asked to be my friend, buddo. and i make a mean 'dog. yeah. apostrophe-dog. it's short for hot dog.
Well, there are 'turn off perks' in the Jumpchains. Dunno if they're in the Celestial Forge, either in the base, or the added stuff you put in. Comedy option would be rolling it after figuring out workarounds.
Something I just realized, while thinking of how Amy would react to whatever Sans' biology is: Brandish is going to flip out over this.
To be honest, I hate the Forge and any Tinker power but the Forge above all else; I just don't get the point of wasting thousands of words for the development of the technology/magic one needs to not instantly die in Worm.
But then things like that happen, that make me read all the stories of the Forge that I find....
Well, there are 'turn off perks' in the Jumpchains. Dunno if they're in the Celestial Forge, either in the base, or the added stuff you put in. Comedy option would be rolling it after figuring out workarounds.
There's one in Quality: Safety, iirc. A Teen Titans one?
Wait, no, Toggle from Young Justice. And it's in the Protection domain.
2.0050
Toggle
100CP
Protection
Young Justice
Toggle allows its user to forgo learning to control their powers by simply allowing them to turn their powers off when they aren't needed. This can be done per power, so there isn't a need to go without the ability to teleport because you don't want to use your super strength. Also works on out of Jump powers. You can think of this like a dial. It can be on, or full power, as well as off, or no power, and anywhere in between those two states.
To be honest, I hate the Forge and any Tinker power but the Forge above all else; I just don't get the point of wasting thousands of words for the development of the technology/magic one needs to not instantly die in Worm.
But then things like that happen, that make me read all the stories of the Forge that I find....
"Oh, hey, it's near Alphys- SNAS UNDERTALE???????"
Thing is, I would've maybe been willing to reroll if it would've hurt the plot, but Sans is unironically good for the themes of the story. Here's Bri, who just found out that she has the potential for incredible power, and is being plagued by the thought that she's not the right person for it, that it'd be better in someone else's hands. Then, here comes Sans, notably powerful but also notably lazy. He's older than Bri, so he can act as a mentor figure and (somewhat of) a voice of reason, too.
I'm actually planning to play up his science-y side, as per being rolled from the CF. Think of it as this Sans being taken from an interpretation of canon Undertale where the scientist thing is a more major part of him.
Well, I think part of why Sans was the way he was in canon was he was fully aware of the fact that nothing he was doing really mattered; it could be reset at any point, beyond his control and he would have no real idea as to what got erased/undone. First by Flowey, then by the player. And just felt things were pointless. Though if I recall he was still kind of laidback/jokey. Just not to the same extent.
So him being more science-y here, makes perfect sense.
I love your SI's reaction this chapter. It makes perfect sense that she figured it out right there—"Workaholic" is one of the most recognizable perks for anyone who's ever read a Celestial Forge story in which it appeared—and her understated panic is both totally reasonable under the circumstances and very amusing to read.
Sans perk came in at the perfect time to make a psychologically-fraught situation even more chaotic.
Bold text works perfectly fine for Sans, I think. It's immediately noticeable, but not unpleasant to read (unless it goes on for paragraphs). Probably much less obtrusive than Comic Sans would be.
Well, I think part of why Sans was the way he was in canon was he was fully aware of the fact that nothing he was doing really mattered; it could be reset at any point, beyond his control and he would have no real idea as to what got erased/undone. First by Flowey, then by the player. And just felt things were pointless. Though if I recall he was still kind of laidback/jokey. Just not to the same extent.
So him being more science-y here, makes perfect sense.
Yeah, that's exactly what happened with him. Being on Earth Bet is going to be both good and bad. On one hand, he's the only monster in a world of humans. Alphys isn't there to support him, and he just left her behind in the Underground to fend for herself. On the other hand, he doesn't have to worry about resets any more, which were the main reason cited that it was "kinda hard to give it [his] all".
I love your SI's reaction this chapter. It makes perfect sense that she figured it out right there—"Workaholic" is one of the most recognizable perks for anyone who's ever read a Celestial Forge story in which it appeared—and her understated panic is both totally reasonable under the circumstances and very amusing to read.
Sans perk came in at the perfect time to make a psychologically-fraught situation even more chaotic.
Bold text works perfectly fine for Sans, I think. It's immediately noticeable, but not unpleasant to read (unless it goes on for paragraphs). Probably much less obtrusive than Comic Sans would be.
Huh, I never actually considered that bold would be preferable over comic sans, but it makes perfect sense.
Workaholic has a very distinctive effect, to the point where I can't really think of anything like it (other than a few more minor CF perks). The exact '5x as many or 3x bigger' numbers only add to the distinctiveness.
There'd be a few other distinctively Celestial Forge things she could've gotten. Something like Fashion (the one that gives Joe the durability of anything he's wearing in BCF) would raise suspicions, and the Cosmic Warehouse would be a major giveaway. She'd probably think about it if she got a power that let her make stuff from a piece of media she knows - "Tinker of Fiction? Celestial Forge? Oh shit, CF would fit with the heat thing. But I don't know what perks are right off the bat, and I don't have a warehouse. What gives?"
Tbh I was kinda worried that I'd get an outcry of "Why is she so upset over having one of the most OP abilities available in fanfiction?!" But I'm glad her reaction was believable. On some level, it is going to take some of the stress off, but on other levels, it's just adding a bunch more stressors. It's sorta like when you win the lottery or get a huge inheritance and have 'friends and family' sidling up to you, trying to get a slice of the pie.
Also, if you duplicate things you make, does that include food, such as hotdogs?
what counts as finishing something?
i.e a Hot dog with One sauce is good and fine, but if you were to add another sauce, would it count as making a different hot dog entirely, and therefore duplicate it?
Infinite hot dogs?
We are officially in paradise. And Sans won't lose his job.
Also, is fusing things with mouths count as creation? It could be infinite source of weird stuff and materials - perfect for junk shop. Or can she fuse 'monster attack' with other items?
I think, if they have a soul, than maybe? However, endringers is just a part of bigger thing - projection. They much more bigger on the other side... We also do not know how monster magic work exactly, how it interacts with something completly alien or how it affected by dimensional shenanigans.
