dhasenan
always lowercase
- Pronouns
- She/Her
And vice versa. I imagine, though, it wouldn't be difficult for Dragon or Tim to whip up a low-profile bio containment suit. That would prevent contamination in either direction.
Magical Girl Escalation Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)
- Thread starter Silently Watches
- Start date
And vice versa. I imagine, though, it wouldn't be difficult for Dragon or Tim to whip up a low-profile bio containment suit. That would prevent contamination in either direction.
Crusader Jerome
Subsisting on Supplication
- Location
- My home away from Rome
From Psychic Smasher 3.x:
For reference, since this was a long time ago.
- Location
- Ural, Russia, Earth
I expect Dimensional Transfer spell to have some kind of built-in biofilters, similar to Star Trek transporters.
Otherwise, the Enforcers could have accidentally start a pandemia across al Earths when they jumped around doing reconnaissance.
- Location
- Georgia
The problem is that 'he shards he originally planned to keep out of the cycle ' could refer to what was constituting the Scion body itself, not the larger organism where it stored most of its power and mass, since all such shards we see are the ones Scion was personally, actively using. Moving those powers closer to the self using them could offer an efficiency of use bonus that would appeal to the organic evolution given for the Entities as fighting for every scrap of energy they could hold on to. They spread the majority of their biology over a number of uninhabited worlds, according to Worm, to ensure nobody would stumble upon them by chance. Eden made a mistake during final approach that caused her to crash on an inhabited reality and be vulnerable as a result to life there.
There's also the fact that the primary bodies of the power granting shards were likewise set up in uninhabited planes so they could harvest the energy needed to fuel their powers without fear of discovery. Either of these interpretations could give us the ability to make power vials, should we pursue that approach. Personally, I would really like to involve the recently reformed TSAB* in studying any non-Endbringer remnants. It would be the work of millennia to even scratch the surface of the knowledge that could be gleaned from any such bits, and be a necessary precursor to armadas Travelling out to locate and destroy other Entities.
In the shorter run, it would give the people of the Administered worlds reason to develop FTL travel to other stars by proving that there is other life out there, and that it isn't all friendly.
*From SWs comments, not in the story itself, this is set after Hayate and co. rooted out the worst of the corruption seen in Vivid.
Unless I'm misremembering, the big detail here is that the TSAB is made up exclusively, or nearly so, of mages of some level, meaning they all have barrier jackets, which can block ordinary disease transmission. That is why I specified Missy et. al., while not mentioning us and our mage/GB allies. Knowing the health status of the people going to other worlds can help us reduce the risk we are exposing those worlds to, but you are right that plagues can go both ways.
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
I will confirm that Scion's body is not on Earth He. Shards themselves are on worlds that humans cannot normally reach. This is why the Earth Bet cluster has 15 worlds when Scion put a cordon on a much greater number.
Mystearica
Quoth the Raven
- Location
- meditating over Titan's Tower
Slight rant incoming, I need to bitch for a couple paragraphs about quests and how much they suck for telling a story (in my opinion).
Every time I reread this (having just finished doing so), I get to the end of Arc 2 and am infuriated by the reminder that vanishingly few of the voters at that time were possessed of the eyes and functioning cerebellum needed to realize the Purity quest was gonna end with a possible recruitment. Like of all the arc activities that have been presented to us over the course of this story, that was the most obvious by far. Shit like that is what makes me hate the quest format. Mob rule is not a proper method of storytelling, especially when you have a sneaking suspicion the mob is legally blind.
Like on a related note, this last AAR just drives home how shitty quests are in general as far as storytelling goes. At least with a real story you never get these little tidbits dangled in your face about shit you missed because you were busy dealing with other equally important shit. Either it would end up in the story or it wouldn't come up at all, which is infinitely preferable. Why taunt me with things people didn't vote on? Like I don't think a single thing we did this arc was unimportant, there wasn't some obvious dead activity that could have been easily replaced with hanging out with Laura and Kayleigh... at least not without missing yet another potentially super important thing, because it's certainly not obvious from the word go which actions will be gamechangers and which ones are duds. Whatever badness goes down in Arc 13 had better be fixable, is what I'm saying. Wholly outside of being two of our only friends our age, Laura in particular is an outright friendly contact in what seems like the only reputable gang in the city. If that relationship is damaged irreparably because we had to deal with, in no particular order: superpowers in a can, device hijack by way of desperate endbringer, working on EB battle plans with an extradimensional military, improving the combat capabilities of the PRT by like threefold, parahuman dictators on an alien earth, keeping Vista from snapping protectorate necks, and also working with the friggin Triumvirate... I'm gonna be pissed.
Like I can't help but feel that a lot of the things we "missed" would have made their way into a normal story anyway, or at the very least would never have been mentioned so there wouldn't be this feeling of having missed out at the end of every arc. It feels like we never really win, we just scrape by. It's like a test where the most you can get is 93/100, and at the end of the test the teacher points out where you fucked up despite knowing a perfect score is outright impossible. It's designed so we can't do everything, and the AARs are salt in the wound.
/rant
TL;DR It's a great story, but the FOMO caused by these after action reports is real as hell. And it's made worse in that I don't think there's anything we could have done in this arc to improve it without losing out on something else.
Every time I reread this (having just finished doing so), I get to the end of Arc 2 and am infuriated by the reminder that vanishingly few of the voters at that time were possessed of the eyes and functioning cerebellum needed to realize the Purity quest was gonna end with a possible recruitment. Like of all the arc activities that have been presented to us over the course of this story, that was the most obvious by far. Shit like that is what makes me hate the quest format. Mob rule is not a proper method of storytelling, especially when you have a sneaking suspicion the mob is legally blind.
Like on a related note, this last AAR just drives home how shitty quests are in general as far as storytelling goes. At least with a real story you never get these little tidbits dangled in your face about shit you missed because you were busy dealing with other equally important shit. Either it would end up in the story or it wouldn't come up at all, which is infinitely preferable. Why taunt me with things people didn't vote on? Like I don't think a single thing we did this arc was unimportant, there wasn't some obvious dead activity that could have been easily replaced with hanging out with Laura and Kayleigh... at least not without missing yet another potentially super important thing, because it's certainly not obvious from the word go which actions will be gamechangers and which ones are duds. Whatever badness goes down in Arc 13 had better be fixable, is what I'm saying. Wholly outside of being two of our only friends our age, Laura in particular is an outright friendly contact in what seems like the only reputable gang in the city. If that relationship is damaged irreparably because we had to deal with, in no particular order: superpowers in a can, device hijack by way of desperate endbringer, working on EB battle plans with an extradimensional military, improving the combat capabilities of the PRT by like threefold, parahuman dictators on an alien earth, keeping Vista from snapping protectorate necks, and also working with the friggin Triumvirate... I'm gonna be pissed.
Like I can't help but feel that a lot of the things we "missed" would have made their way into a normal story anyway, or at the very least would never have been mentioned so there wouldn't be this feeling of having missed out at the end of every arc. It feels like we never really win, we just scrape by. It's like a test where the most you can get is 93/100, and at the end of the test the teacher points out where you fucked up despite knowing a perfect score is outright impossible. It's designed so we can't do everything, and the AARs are salt in the wound.
/rant
TL;DR It's a great story, but the FOMO caused by these after action reports is real as hell. And it's made worse in that I don't think there's anything we could have done in this arc to improve it without losing out on something else.
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- Location
- Ural, Russia, Earth
If I was here then, I would have voted against Purity questline exactly because it could have ended with a recruitment. It would be distasteful to help a hardened criminal to hide from concequences of her actions.
How long she was with the Empire? Ten years? Eleven?
It's still important to know where and why you fucked up. It's one thing if you just misremembered some name or date, it's another if your entire line of reasoning was wrong and if you won't hit the books to fix it, next time you'll lose much more than 7 points.
MGET is essentially a time-management quest, and reviewing things we missed is an important part of it.
- Location
- Georgia
I don't see the AARs as being about telling us we were wrong so much as making it clear that every option went somewhere, that SW had plenty of plans for us to choose from. I do have to agree that mob rule is the worst aspect of the quest, as that is the reason we gave both vials away when we had other options to get the information, options that had been discussed. Instead, we essentially poured the vials down the kitchen sink because enough people saw no immediate value to them.
The thing I like, in retrospect, about recruiting Purity was that she wasn't running from her actions, she was trying to atone for them. There is definite value in redemption stories for me, provided they don't make that redemption too easy. Her years of villainy earned her her penance, but if we'd recruited her back then, we would get to see that penance, while now we only know that it is occurring down in New Orleans.
- Location
- Ural, Russia, Earth
Eh, I'm too Lawful to accept Purity's half-hearted attempts to change her life or joining Taylor's team with rebranding so nobody recognised her as 'atonement'.
If she really wanted to turn a new leaf she would have turn herself in.
Which she did, in the end. Sad, that she did it not by her own free volition, but because she was cornered and threatened with deadly force as runaway Ziz-bomb.
- Location
- Russia
To be fair, she was afraid for her child, and that´s why she didn´t turn herself in straight away. And for most good mothers, the safety of their own child trumps literally everything, whether it´s legal, moral or plausible.
Meh, I'm more Chaotic myself, and I feel like 'turning herself in' doesn't have to be the only, or even the good way to atone for stuff, not in Wormverse. Things might be getting better with Cauldron gone and all that, but I'm still wary of trusting authorities in this world. Not gonna to argue though, Law and Chaos just don't agree on such stuff, and no matter the arguments used, it won't change.
Turns out that trying to fully shake off years of indoctrination by a charismatic Neo-nazi that got to you as an impressionable teen isn't very easy to do. That shouldn't surprise you.
- Location
- Ural, Russia, Earth
I'll eat my hat if it wasn't possible for her to strike a deal similar to what she struck here in the end. "All the information I have on the Empire and me on probation with whatever restrictions you want. In exchange Astrid won't be separated from me and you guarantee her safety."
(I don't have a hat, by the way)
- Location
- Russia
I´m pretty sure that that´s not lawful, and is instead a technically illegal thing the Protectorate do because they are really, really low on parahumans. Point of notice, Purity as a person has already entirely disregarded the law as something that may help her in any way, especially due to how escaping Simurgh containment would be pretty damn illegal I'd imagine. She's of the opinion that the law has abandoned her, and so there's no point in trying to deal with it.
Either way, I personally wouldn´t trust them to follow up on that deal and not to screw me over. Why would she? Even though she actually ended up doing it out of a simple lack of any other choice.
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Not really? It is entirely within the justice department's powers to grant witness immunity (IE: If won't charge you if you spill on your fellow criminals) and witness protection (IE: relocation + new identities). Requiring that she join the Protectorate isn't that unreasonable a condition for her the PRT to throw in.
- Location
- Georgia
If she turned herself in and didn't have ironclad proof that Max Anders was the criminal Kaiser and somehow avoided the mess of unwritten rules that protected him because he was so useful against Endbringers, the very act of confessing and turning herself in would likely have led to her losing custody of her daughter to her estranged husband.
Worm governing seems to be built on the premise that the 'hard choices' of knowing somebody is a criminal and letting them get away with it so long as they are periodically useful are the things that always happen, every time. What is 'right' is only considered as an afterthought, generally discarded in favor of what is expedient. I wouldn't trust that government further than I could throw a car without the aid of powers, and that's without living in the world and seeing how bad things really were. You just can't get that kind of visceral reaction to a fictional system.
That's also without considering the conflict drive from her shard, a drive intentionally aimed at keeping parahumans from cooperating enough to interfere with the Entities' plans.
Actually that sounded a lot like "Scion attempted to initiate Earth Shattering mating sequence but the broken Eden couldn't support it and they both exploded into shards"
Actually, people knew, they just disliked Tattletale/Purity that much, that better we get nobody than getting them.
The sole recruitment candidates that were halfway viable were Vista and Dragon, as they're SV favorites.
We were more interested in bit characters and OCs than them for the matter. Even Simurgh had more support.
Same goes for the vials. The sole serious interest in them was as Tinkering feedstock, so as soon as that proved to be a dead end they were gotten rid of expediently.
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Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
And let's not forget the salt when she rolled low on the LC check. Then the resistance for the... four different options planned to make her more capable? It's like I just can't win
- Location
- Georgia
There was interest in using the vials. Several of us fought against giving both of them away because it was such a massive waste. At least some of the voters pushing to give away both of the vials admitted it was because they disliked Kayleigh, our one contact who is a viable candidate for granting powers. We could have tried Kurt, but he's already shown he can't be trusted with power.
I agree that the OCs are interesting and fun. If we can get people voting to explore other worlds, we might find better candidates for powers, but lacking an immediate use for the vials, a before the EB fight use specifically, people voted to pour our superpowers down the drain.
Just as a note, this reduces my desire to see more of these worlds not one bit. It just means my speculation on what might be out there has a broader field of dreams.
- Location
- Russia
Now that I think about it, I think I'm beginning to notice a pattern.
This quest's playerbase hates the element of the unknown, no matter how small a chance of failure. The power vials? Something like: "Why use a vial, for an unknown power that isn't even necessarily useful in any way, when we can get a guaranteed mage instead if we spend a bit more time? Useless, discard"
Same way with how we're refusing to get closer with others due to the randomness of the linker core mechanic, aka "we'll spend all this time making them a friend, all for nothing!"
This quest's playerbase hates the element of the unknown, no matter how small a chance of failure. The power vials? Something like: "Why use a vial, for an unknown power that isn't even necessarily useful in any way, when we can get a guaranteed mage instead if we spend a bit more time? Useless, discard"
Same way with how we're refusing to get closer with others due to the randomness of the linker core mechanic, aka "we'll spend all this time making them a friend, all for nothing!"
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Virgo Supercluster, Earth-1218
except we've just been shown (repeatedly!) that there ARE mechanical benefits to socializing, they boost the Linker Core potential, and if that fails it'll reduce the Mutation potential if we stick with them.
By this point Kayleigh probably has a near guaranteed Core from our sporadic interactions with her, but if we don't stop getting pushback from people who hate her for being a teenager instead of a child soldier we'll never know it.
*shrugs*
I don't hate her for being a teenager, I just don't trust her with anything to do involving us since her Shipping-induced lack of judgement is a strong mark against her.
- Location
- Ekaterinburg, Russia
Please note, I said no mechanical benefits for Taylor. Social activities mechanically benefit the person we are social-ing, but not Taylor directly.
This is different for Tim, for example. For him, schmoozing with other Tinkers provides a tangible mechanical benefit of cooperative tinkering boosting his inspiration.
And that's not going into the hilarity that is Social Link Perks of AGG: Rise.