Tora was sown being caught by Team 7 as a D rank mission, and I think there was indications (aka the charactres buitching) that it wasn't the first time. Naruto fanfiction has turned it into a trope of the cat constantly escaping it's overly affectionate owner, only to be chased down by Genin teams, though Tora is often depicted as being quite experienced at evading capture, to the Genin's frustration
note that Ace Dreamer said 'Ferret resistant', not 'ferret proof'. The former just indicates that it takes some effort from the ferret to destroy,
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
Better because FamTech EDM boxes are more than 80% lighter for the same volume than neutronium.
Aesura
Dragonkitty
- Location
- Under a rock on a rock
three places actually, here, spacebattles and ao3
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Like someone said, 'resistant', not 'proof'. It's not the ferret that goes in this, either, it's the RPi (etc.), in the hope the ferret doesn't wreck it too quickly.
So, if a ferret is found connected to a snark, would they make a getaway before the situation could be 'corrected'?
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Is this a Naruto reference to Today?
On one hand, once everything is said and done, the True Purpose and Usage of the Slaughterhouse Nine will become reduced. Not eliminated, as there will always be assholes, but most of the underlying issues that cause them to act will be dealt with.
On the other hand... Toddler Siberian anyone?
On the other hand... Toddler Siberian anyone?
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
Toddler ancarchist Siberian who has threatened bodily harm if this is done... Yeah, great idea. Now I'm thinking something will come up which requires Siberian to accept being made into a toddler.
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
Toddler anarchist Siberian who has threatened bodily harm if this is done, and put into a body that can't actually cause harm (using the maximum-energy-conservation option).
- Location
- California
SlaughterhouseNine's Good Idea Fairy is plotting!
Accept? Hell, just let her think on it a bit and I'm sure that Sarah would jump head first into the idea; much like Fred and his clown car idea.
Mind you, it would have to be her idea for her to not ruin William's future days; but image her and Riley working together to freak people out by dressing likely the twin girls from The Shining.
Also, on another note, who was the person that Rin killed with poison?
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
Except, she wont always be in "maximum energy conservation" mode. And if she's pissed off at William, well, her dad just might be in trouble.
- Location
- Море песка, солнце огня и множество злых сарацин
...Huh. Dunno.
Wait, no, the power's way too wrong. I don't recognize this power; he's either a non-canon cape, or a really obscure one.
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FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
No, it was some rando who could swap powers between two people.
- Location
- Море песка, солнце огня и множество злых сарацин
Yeah, just edited my comment when I noticed that.
Incidentally, I don't think the dissolution of the Birdcage is going to go over well, though admittedly it might be a while before anyone could notice...
Itsune
Eldritch horror, Ship's Cat, Emergency Gunner.
- Location
- Somewhere in King County Washington
Most people don't know that Theo-bromine (AKA Chocolate) is a poison. But so are a lot of common cooking Spices.
It's just the amounts used, are relatively minuscule compared to their toxicity level. People used to get high on Nutmeg of all things, but the quantity needed is in the quarter to half kilogram range.
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Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Maybe I'm a suspicious person, but, I've noticed that (small amounts of) nutmeg in cakes seems to greatly increase "Can I have another slice?" requests. Maybe there are addictive, as well as poisonous properties?
I really feel that the new improved snark Taylor+Amy have should improve their cooking abilities, more... Maybe they need better ingredients? Better recipies?
(Chocolate oat cookies with half the normal sugar, and added cocao+cocao butter (no need for choc chips), do seem to disappear off the plate pretty quickly... And, I understand they help those with insomnia get a good night's sleep, if you get the dosage right...)
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Pretty sure it's more accurate to call caffeine a drug than a poison, given that you're not looking at a potentially lethal dose until somewhere around 20 cups of coffee. Theobromine has an LD50 that's estimated to be about quintuple caffeine, and milk chocolate has about 60mg per 28g.
That's for caffeine and theobromine specifically, which are chemical compounds found inside coffee (and other things) and chocolate, not coffee and chocolate directly. For reference, that's between 75 and 100 cups of coffee and 20 pounds of chocolate to hit the LD50 (only estimated for theobromine) for a 150 lb/70 kg person.
(The effects of caffeine and theobromine start becoming unpleasant much, much earlier, but they're still more in-line with what people expect when discussing a drug than when discussing a poison.)
Chapter 282
Saturday morning started at home, the gym being intentionally skipped for a couple of days. Instead Taylor did her best to sleep in, failing miserably when she had to get up to use the toilet. Grumbling a bit, she ended up gathering some of her gifts from where she'd stashed them, then prepped some oatmeal for breakfast. She didn't actually cook it, though, figuring that she'd wait for her father to start moving in probably an hour or two.
Amy pulled off sleeping almost an hour longer than Taylor had, but was apparently the last one up there. Making a pile of cookies had meant that she was able to get away with not helping with everything else that was going on. She still had to help with a few things, but apparently it was mostly going to be shuffling things between houses so that they didn't have to do things the long way.
Amy: Hey, Mark figured out why the chocolate chip cookies were giving us so much trouble.
Taylor: Oh?
Amy: The chocolate chips were 'tinker enhanced' for baking. Except that since powers went away they absorb a bunch of heat, then hit critical and release it in a burst into the rest of the cookie.
Taylor: ...really?
Amy: Yeah. There's a news article he just showed me, I'll send you a link.
Taylor looked over the article, which even had a video showing the 'critical point' being hit. The chocolate chips went from 'perfectly fine' to 'literally on fire'. The latter didn't happen as dramatically when in batter due to the energy going somewhere other than the other chocolate chips, or so the article claimed. Which was probably a good thing, because the metal pan they'd been heating the things in for the demonstration had partially melted.
At the same time, they were apparently still safe to eat so long as your internal body temperature didn't exceed a hundred and seventy degrees fahrenheit. Above that temperature they started doing the 'absorb energy' bit that was causing the problem, until the effect suddenly collapsed and released it all.
Taylor: Well, at least it wasn't us being idiots that caused the cookies to fail.
Amy: That was my thought as well.
Zion grumbled a bit about sloppy construction shards as he corrected a few things in one of the moon-launchers. Yes, when working with hosts they frequently hid things from them. That was a wonderful way to get them thinking about how things actually worked, occasionally got them entirely new methods to accomplish things, and ensured that problematic technology was harder for the hosts to create.
Doing that on a stealth moon launcher that you'd been informed you would not be remaining connected to was unacceptable. He was going to have to examine the shards and either fix the problems with them or, if it was just them being stupid, assign them some punishment duty. If he remembered correctly, none of the shards in question liked building things that weren't perfect, so maybe building some 'ruins' from previous host species on another planet in the star system would be a good task for them. Nearly-but-not-quite functional technology, intentionally aged buildings, incomplete texts...
Finalizing the standalone Sting system, he started the device's self-tests. He couldn't actually test the functionality safely, of course, but this was a known-good design and the self-tests were comprehensive. If time-consuming to run through. He used the downtime to check on the stellar launcher, which wasn't a known-good design but was coming along nicely, before reaching out to the shards that had gotten sloppy on the moon-launcher. It wouldn't be long before he knew which way he was going with them.
Breakfast had been pleasant, if low-key, followed by Taylor and her father putting up their collection of decorations. A stand-up tree 'pillow' on top of a stool with a small light string wrapped around it served as their tree, the presents going around the stool. They'd had a better 'tree' before, but it had fallen apart and been replaced by the pillow on a lark years ago. Sure, they could've gotten a proper replacement, but this was good enough. The small collection of ornaments they had, originally for a small tree, now got hung up on light-duty chains strung between various points.
Ackbar got a bow tied around him for fun, which he initially seemed to dislike but quickly ignored in favor of investigating a couple of the ornaments hanging from the chain along the railing going upstairs. Those were, for a number of reasons, the least likely to be broken by bumping or falling. The fragile ornaments, as well as a couple that had too much sentimental value to risk, were in much more secure locations.
With all of that done they'd then prepared the holiday breakfast they'd be having the next day. It took some initial effort, including double-checking that none of the ingredients being used were parahuman-enhanced in any way, after which it got covered and placed into the fridge. They'd throw it in the oven in the morning for an easy but tasty breakfast. A quick lunch of sandwiches was then followed by making a couple pans of lasagna, most of which would end up packed away for easy meals over the next few weeks.
Dragon smiled as she read the card from Mother, including an open invitation to visit. Sadly, things were far too hectic for that right now. Her own powers hadn't returned, but she didn't need them to understand anything she'd already figured out. Which had her going over a large number of things in order to ensure that nothing was going to suddenly explode. Besides, if she did visit Mother she wanted it to be in one of her currently-inaccessible human bodies.
Oh well. On to the next task, which was examining the tunnel that the Elite were still building between Brockton Bay and Albany. The original purpose for it was long since obsolete with the teleporter network having proven to be useful, so they were switching gears to run rail lines down it instead. An entry point and station was being constructed at the Brockton Bay end already, the goal being to be able to run freight and passenger trains straight from the coast. Brockton Bay's port becoming more active again was certainly going to help with that, and the access to the tunnel would only help the port's recovery.
The tunnel boring machine itself was offline, as nobody wanted to risk it failing catastrophically while powers weren't working, but she needed to ensure that there wasn't something parahuman-related keeping the tunnel that was already constructed stable. It hadn't been the highest priority, but her schedule had shifted dramatically with the emptying of the Birdcage. No longer needing to monitor it or arrange for things like the normal holiday delivery had freed up time for other tasks.
When her powers did return, and she regained access to her human bodies, she was definitely taking a day off to just sleep in one of them. She'd found that to be oddly relaxing, if a seemingly inefficient use of her time.
Amy: Hey Taylor.
Taylor: Yeah?
Amy: Your uncle just requested permission to visit us on short notice, via our beacon.
Taylor: Huh. Any idea why?
Amy: He made sure Vicky was home, and it's something to do with 'work' for him, but that's all I know. Want to come over to greet him?
Taylor: Let me double-check with my father first.
"Hey dad," Taylor said, getting her father's attention. "Uncle Jacob is apparently going to be visiting the Dallons shortly for work reasons. Mind if I pop over?"
He looked at the lasagna that was ready to go into the oven, but not yet cooking. They'd do that later anyway. "I think I'll join you, if you don't mind. Though we'll either need to bring Ackbar with us or leave him in your room."
"Might as well bring him along, I think. Let him spend a little time with Rodney today, and maybe they'll be better behaved seeing each other tomorrow."
"Sounds good to me."
Ten minutes later they were waiting with Amy and Vicky. Ackbar was examining the proper tree that the Dallons had up, while Rodney kept poking the bow tied around Ackbar. Amy had thought it was cute and was planning on giving Rodney a bow later.
"So have you guys had any broken ornaments with Ackbar?" Vicky asked.
"Nope," Taylor replied.
"Huh. Got lucky with the way they were positioned?"
"We only put decorations up today," Taylor admitted.
"And we put the not-so-breakable ones in the places that Ackbar can get to them like we normally would," her father added. "Though in the past that was mostly so that half-asleep people walking past them wouldn't knock them over and break them, admittedly."
"Oh," Vicky said. "Huh. We lost three ornaments before we realized that the fragile ones needed to be high enough that Rodney couldn't get to them."
Taylor snorted. "I'm not sure that's actually an option with Ackbar."
"And why not?"
"Webs."
Vicky didn't get a chance to respond before a portal opened. Taylor watched as her uncle stepped out, followed by a teenage girl in a green dress with red bows and ribbons. Her blond hair was done up in braided pigtails, tied with more red ribbons, and her green eyes were behind glasses that contained a tinkertech display linked to a phone hidden somewhere in the dress.
"Taylor!" Jacob said, once he realized that she was there. "Nobody told me that you'd be here!"
Taylor smiled. "Amy told us that you were coming. It was easy enough to pop over to see you, given that you're once again busy working over a holiday."
"I opted to come along as I wouldn't be likely to see you for weeks otherwise," her father added. "Still, you're here for a reason, you want to get that out of the way?"
Jacob nodded. "Yes, that would be a good idea." He then turned to the girl. "Introductions, then. Everyone, this is Ciara, cape name undecided."
"I'm not sure I want one," Ciara added.
"Ciara, these are my niece Taylor Hebert, her father and my brother-in-law Danny Hebert, Amy Dallon, and Victoria Dallon." He then looked down. "And at our feet are Ackbar and Rodney, who are apparently still protective of Taylor and Amy."
"Pleased to meet you," Taylor said, along with similar things from the others, though she was starting to put some pieces together. Several things didn't line up, though.
"We're here because Ciara can identify, and adjust, the urges that parahumans have from their powers. We're hoping that Victoria here is willing to allow her urges to be checked and adjusted away from needing to hit people."
Ciara was frowning as she looked between them. "Perhaps I should help Taylor and Amy as well."
That had them blinking, but Danny recovered first. "Why?"
Ciara gestured at them. "Because their faerie is running conflicting urges. They desire to hit things, as well as to repair them. Coming from different faeries would not be a problem, each urge dealt with individually, but coming from a single one creates a conflict. The urge to hit, but not to damage what they could possibly repair, drastically limiting what the urge to hit will push them towards. To that end, I suspect that it is pushing them to hit things that aren't able to be repaired by their faerie. While trees and other plants are likely candidates, they're most likely to focus on people. Likely those that are annoying in some fashion, I think?"
"For fuck's sake," Carol grumbled as she came into the room. "Now there are three of them with an urge to hit people?" She then sighed as she looked at Ciara. "Right, sorry about the language. I'm Carol Dallon."
"Ciara, and yes. Though two of them are obviously unintentional."
"Fun. Well, if Amy is willing then feel free to work with her, but I obviously can't speak for Taylor."
"Hold up," Vicky said, getting everyone's attention. "There's no way I'm letting her do anything to Amy or Taylor until we know that what she does is safe."
Carol raised her eyebrow. "Meaning?"
"Meaning that I'm going first, and then Amy and Taylor are confirming that things are okay with me."
"Oh. I'd parental veto that and insist that they test with someone else, but you've repeatedly reminded me that you're legally an adult."
"Actually," Jacob said. "We tested with Burnscar, followed by a couple of kids who triggered recently with an intense desire to kill each other. That was yesterday. Coming here is the 'only make a small change' test at best."
"I'm still going first," Vicky insisted.
Ciara looked at Jacob, who nodded, then stepped forward to stand in front of Vicky. "We've discovered that I need to make skin contact, so you'll need to allow me through your force field."
"Okay."
Vicky held her hand out, and Ciara took it before closing her eyes. She tilted her head, frowned, and then stood there for a few moments. That was followed by shaking her head, grumbling something unintelligible, and then sighing. "You like hitting people far too much, you know that?"
"Er, okay, I guess. Is that important?"
"Your faerie is stubborn because the desire came from you more than from it, but I believe that I've found a compromise."
Vicky frowned as Ciara let go of her hand. "What kind of compromise?"
"An alternate limitation. You will still desire to hit people, but only if they've recently attacked you. At the same time, the urge will be correspondingly stronger, because it's triggered instead of semi-constant."
"Oh." Vicky then turned to Amy. "So, can you confirm anything?"
Amy shrugged and Taylor felt her reach out to Vicky's snark.
Amy: So, Vicky wants to know what Ciara just changed. Or rather, if she told the truth about what she just changed.
[Query]
Amy: Yes, her.
[Data. Query]
Amy: Thank you, and no, I don't think Vicky is willing to turn on her strength enhancement so that you can push her to punch Ciara.
[Annoyance]
"Yeah," Amy said. "Your snark is pissed off at being made to change, and wants you to turn on your enhanced strength so that you can punch Ciara, but it says that she did what she says she did."
"Perhaps I missed something," Ciara said with a frown. "It shouldn't be able to push her to attack me?"
"You only made it need her to be attacked," Taylor corrected. "You didn't define what an attack means, so I believe it classified changing it against its wishes as an attack."
"Oh. That's more clever than I expected it to be. I might've figured that out if my faerie sight hadn't changed so much, and I don't have the ability to define what it sees as an attack. It'll clear out by morning either way."
Vicky nodded. "So don't turn on my enhanced strength and flight until you're gone or morning. Good to know. Now then, I have to know, did I just let Glaistig Uaine mess with my powers?"
Ciara frowned. "I...went by that name, yes. But I was delusional at best and didn't take my faerie leaving me very well. That forced me to realize that I wasn't my faerie, and that by extension others weren't their own faeries. I'd built up far too much on that delusion."
"I honestly don't know if she's on her way to another mental breakdown or still in the middle of one," Jacob admitted. "She's only this functional because she latched onto the idea of being useful to the faerie court again, desiring to have a purpose in the thing that had dominated her life up until then, but that's only going to keep her going for so long before downtime gets to her. Worse, of course, will likely be when she doesn't have anyone to help and her own urges get to her."
"We don't know what my urges are, as I can't evaluate my own faerie."
"Why don't we ask?" Taylor offered.
"Because I have to expect the power interactions to be a possible headache," Jacob answered. "Our own powers interact oddly enough, and there were theories as to what might happen if you ran into her before things went crazy."
"She may very well have been able to break my worldview," Ciara answered. "Talking to my faerie without talking to me would've been a shock, and I don't know if I'd have taken it well. It's possible that I would've merely come up with an explanation for the effect that made sense to me, but I honestly don't know. Maybe I'd have rationalized it as her talking to the faerie and not to the role the faerie was playing?"
"Not to mention if reaching out to her that way would have resulted in her being able to 'claim' your powers. She only needed to make contact with a manifestation of powers before, after all, and that could've counted."
Amy nodded. "That all makes sense, but we've already connected to her snark. Lightly, just enough to say 'hello, we see you there' basically, just to keep ourselves from going into a 'talk to it' distracted state. And if she does try and fix our urges then that's likely going to jump into a full connection anyway."
"Right," Jacob said, sighing. "In my defense, we did not come here for this. We just wanted to test on Victoria. Hell, I just got her dropped on me Thursday."
"She looks like she's been with you for at least a week," Taylor said. "Well fitted dress and tinkertech equipment?"
"The PRT has a wonderful collection of clothing and technology just sitting in storage," Ciara said. "Over fifty copies of this dress alone in different sizes, though Jacob insisted on the glasses." Here the girl blushed. "They both let him tell me to not talk about faeries around those who don't know his own secrets as well as help me keep myself from eating too much by reminding me not to eat constantly."
Vicky tilted her head at that. "Not eat constantly?"
Jacob sighed. "She never needed to watch how much she ate as whatever excess she consumed was absorbed by her powers. Now she can eat herself sick without even realizing it."
"Oh."
"Still, might as well check with her powers if most of the possible damage has already not happened."
Taylor nodded and reached out to Ciara's snark before Amy could.
Taylor: Hello there.
[Greetings]
Taylor: I don't suppose that you're willing to tell us what urges you give Ciara, or anything else about how you've changed recently?
Amy: Oooh, right, that's not a bad question either.
[Data. Elaboration. Assertion. Data. Query]
<Data>
[Acknowledgement. Proposal]
<Disagreement. Data>
[Agreement. Proposal]
<Acceptance>
Taylor and Amy both flinched in momentary pain as a significant burst of data came across the connection.
"Is something wrong?" Carol asked, apparently having noticed the flinch.
"Her snark decided to get things over with," Amy answered. "Tweaked our snark-granted urges a bit more than expected, actually."
"I hadn't originally considered that other urges were problematic," Ciara added. "They'd have eventually run into issues with the biological control urges as well. Now those should be pulled back to merely using them, which healing should suffice for, instead of pushing for riskier and riskier experimentation. As for the hitting things versus repairing them side of things, they should now only care about fixing things that are 'worthwhile'. Which I think is going to be 'interesting' or 'deemed useful by them'."
"As for her," Taylor said, gesturing at Ciara. "She's got four urges in total. One is to fix up any problematic urges she finds in others, but that only kicks in when she knows about urges. Another is to get mental help for herself, in whatever form may be available. Third is one that's mostly dormant right now but will make her restless if she stays in one place too long, or perhaps more accurately doesn't see enough new people for too long a period of time. I suspect that one is to allow her to find others with problematic urges without actually including an urge to find them. Lastly, there's an urge to keep herself looking harmless, which I think she's currently taking as 'look cute' but isn't that specific."
"Huh," Jacob said. "I guess that helps explain her reaction to some of the things that were discarded when deciding on an initial clothing selection. Though I don't see how that explains the four knives she's carrying."
"She said that I have an urge to look harmless," Ciara answered. "Not be harmless. And you insisted on the first knife anyway, just in case, on the basis that nobody we were going to see would find a knife threatening in the least but that it could help if we ran into trouble."
"So I did, yes, and I guess that makes sense. I don't suppose we should check anyone else while we're here?"
Ciara shrugged. "Mrs. Dallon here should be fine. Is anyone else here?"
"Mark!" Carol called. "Come let the former Glaistig Uaine take a look at you."
"She's taking this well," Taylor noted.
"I think it's in part because she already had a bottle of very strong alcohol," Vicky replied. "She'll probably have a small breakdown when she sobers back up."
"Oh."
Mark came into the room, looking cautious. Ciara looked him over, and before he could say anything she turned back to Jacob. "He should be fine as well."
"Okay then," Jacob said, before he turned to look at the rest of them. "Well, thank you for your time. This was obviously much more productive than I originally expected."
"I'll submit a write-up of everything I noted shortly," Tayor said.
"Thank you. But I think we should get going, as we have two more stops to make today."
Ciara pouted at that comment. "Do we really need to visit the doctor?"
"Yes, we do, as you never even got a basic check-over before you were incarcerated. I'd have Taylor or Amy check you over, but they can't be tied to the paperwork we need to finish up."
Helvetia sighed as she stepped through the transit portal, returning from her trip. She'd run into a shard connected to hosts that had active profiles that she couldn't resolve the issues with remotely. Which meant talking to the hosts to find out what they wanted to do about it. Two of the five connected to the shard had opted to be safely disconnected. A third had insisted that their profile be left unchanged, refusing to accept anything less. The last two were younger and had been reverted to their original configuration but left connected for later possible triggering.
That meant splitting this shard three ways. One for each of the kids, which would be the larger pieces when she was done. The last was for the stubborn fool, who'd argued to the point where she was allowed to 'have fun'. The idiot wasn't keeping his original profile, that was a certainty. The shard had specced into direct manipulation of host connections in various ways, with the stubborn fool having the ability to puppet other hosts through their connections. Which wouldn't be a significant problem, except that said puppeting damaged the connections.
No, she was going to set his profile to involuntary dumping him into technology. Specifically, one of the stupid little digital pets that his two kids had. He'd be trapped until they let the pet 'die', at which point he would be released for a day or two before his partner would dump him into another one. Let him deal with that for however long it took Rin to get to the 'second look' list. Perhaps by then he'd be more amiable to actually discussing options for his partner?
Or maybe Rin and/or Coordinator would decide to leave him that way. Whatever, so long as he wasn't holding things up anymore.
Taylor shook her head as she exited the portal in the hospital. She'd agreed to join Amy for a bit of holiday healing, hopefully getting people home to spend Christmas itself with their families. That had, however, resulted in being made to put on something more 'festive' than the casual clothing that she'd been wearing originally. Which had gotten Vicky involved, and that had somehow ended up with an 'ugly Christmas sweater' being pulled out.
It was probably better than the dress that was offered initially, at least.
"So are they expecting us?" Taylor asked as the portal closed.
"I called ahead," Amy answered. "They said to head straight down to the emergency room when we arrived."
"Okay then, lead the way."
They headed down to the emergency room, meeting a nurse along the way. Apparently there'd been a fire in an apartment building that morning and they had a bunch of people with varying levels of injuries from it. It didn't take long for the two to start working their way through the injured. Taylor started with a couple of kids with severe burns while Amy was working on their likely grandfather.
It took almost two hours to clear the emergency room, though a lot of that was due to families being very vocal in thanking them. After that they took twenty minutes to deal with children that hadn't been in the emergency room, taking care of three of the four that were in there. The last had a severe concussion, and they still didn't want to risk touching brains. That was followed by another hour to pass through the rest of the hospital. When they were done they accepted thanks and some cupcakes from the staff, then departed.
Amy opted to join Taylor at home for dinner, as lasagna sounded better than 'whatever you can scrounge together around the rest of the preparations'. They invited Vicky to join them, since she'd been running between the Dallon and Pelham houses instead of Amy, but the older girl had already escaped home to spend some time with Dean.
"Think your parents have eaten anything?" Danny asked when they were done and packing up leftovers. "Because I'm sure we can spare a serving or two."
"I doubt that they'll take the time to sit down and eat it," Amy admitted. "That and things tend to turn into 'snack all day' anyway, which is part of why it becomes 'whatever you can scrounge up'. Supposedly it was different years ago, before grandparents passed away, but I don't know if that was before I was adopted or not. If it happened after I was adopted then I don't recall it."
"I suppose that makes sense, and I guess that there will be plenty of leftovers after tomorrow as well?"
"Enough to last until the new year without needing to cook at a minimum, yes. With some of our enhanced appetites, though, it might not last much past that."
"And you're going to try and send some home with us too," Taylor added.
"Well, Neil and Sarah probably will, yes."
"Luckily the lasagna isn't filling our freezer," Danny said, shaking his head. "Well, I'd tell you to be safe getting home, but you don't even have to travel outside."
"I'll tell you to not forget the sweater that I was forced into," Taylor said. "I don't need to keep it."
Amy smirked at that. "Are you sure you don't want to hold onto it long enough to burn it?"
"I'm sure."
"Pity. Oh well, it can go back into whichever closet Vicky found it in."
Clive mentally sighed as he sat on a small asteroid. He'd originally been out here without the host mental emulation up, but then Rin had sent a question his way. That had restarted the host emulation, and that left him bored. Maintaining the protective barrier around the stellar launcher construction wasn't exactly interesting work. Useful, yes, but not interesting. Still, it was better than wandering aimlessly with nothing to do and nobody to see, so he probably shouldn't complain too much.
At least none of the construction shards were acting up, as far as he could tell. They didn't want to stay connected to the abomination that was being constructed. If, and it was a big 'if', this worked then it was going to be incredibly energetic. Active connections would likely be torn to shreds in the backlash, and who knew what kind of feedback would be generated. No, they were ensuring that this was being built correctly just to be done with the entire concept.
Reinforcing the asteroid, which was the current 'anchor' for the barrier, might need to be considered if this took more than another couple of days. It was starting to degrade a bit, and no adjustments to the positioning of his sixteen projection tentacles would help there. The asteroid would've fallen apart entirely by now if he was running the host form emulation, of course, if only due to the limitations that form had in several other respects.
A hole in the barrier was opened up for another construction shard to connect in, this one responsible for some of the frankly ridiculous standalone copy of the Sting system. Applying that to the entire stellar body was going to create some interesting side effects. The star would stop burning pretty much instantly, no longer capable of fusion or fission for the duration, yet wouldn't collapse either as it wouldn't be capable of it either. It was entirely possible that the entire thing would go instantly dark, which would be alarming enough on its own.
Accelerating to significant fractions of the speed of light an instant later was where the true backlash was going to come in. Half of the star system was going to be obliterated pulling that off, and hopefully nothing of any importance was sitting in several light-years to either side of the effect. If anything was then it would be destroyed in some fashion. How, exactly, the energy of the entire thing shifting course once, assuming that worked, was going to manifest when the whole thing fell apart was entirely unknown and unpredictable without more information.
He was hoping that he didn't get tasked with sticking around to watch in an attempt to get that information for future uses of the setup.
Amy pulled off sleeping almost an hour longer than Taylor had, but was apparently the last one up there. Making a pile of cookies had meant that she was able to get away with not helping with everything else that was going on. She still had to help with a few things, but apparently it was mostly going to be shuffling things between houses so that they didn't have to do things the long way.
Amy: Hey, Mark figured out why the chocolate chip cookies were giving us so much trouble.
Taylor: Oh?
Amy: The chocolate chips were 'tinker enhanced' for baking. Except that since powers went away they absorb a bunch of heat, then hit critical and release it in a burst into the rest of the cookie.
Taylor: ...really?
Amy: Yeah. There's a news article he just showed me, I'll send you a link.
Taylor looked over the article, which even had a video showing the 'critical point' being hit. The chocolate chips went from 'perfectly fine' to 'literally on fire'. The latter didn't happen as dramatically when in batter due to the energy going somewhere other than the other chocolate chips, or so the article claimed. Which was probably a good thing, because the metal pan they'd been heating the things in for the demonstration had partially melted.
At the same time, they were apparently still safe to eat so long as your internal body temperature didn't exceed a hundred and seventy degrees fahrenheit. Above that temperature they started doing the 'absorb energy' bit that was causing the problem, until the effect suddenly collapsed and released it all.
Taylor: Well, at least it wasn't us being idiots that caused the cookies to fail.
Amy: That was my thought as well.
Zion grumbled a bit about sloppy construction shards as he corrected a few things in one of the moon-launchers. Yes, when working with hosts they frequently hid things from them. That was a wonderful way to get them thinking about how things actually worked, occasionally got them entirely new methods to accomplish things, and ensured that problematic technology was harder for the hosts to create.
Doing that on a stealth moon launcher that you'd been informed you would not be remaining connected to was unacceptable. He was going to have to examine the shards and either fix the problems with them or, if it was just them being stupid, assign them some punishment duty. If he remembered correctly, none of the shards in question liked building things that weren't perfect, so maybe building some 'ruins' from previous host species on another planet in the star system would be a good task for them. Nearly-but-not-quite functional technology, intentionally aged buildings, incomplete texts...
Finalizing the standalone Sting system, he started the device's self-tests. He couldn't actually test the functionality safely, of course, but this was a known-good design and the self-tests were comprehensive. If time-consuming to run through. He used the downtime to check on the stellar launcher, which wasn't a known-good design but was coming along nicely, before reaching out to the shards that had gotten sloppy on the moon-launcher. It wouldn't be long before he knew which way he was going with them.
Breakfast had been pleasant, if low-key, followed by Taylor and her father putting up their collection of decorations. A stand-up tree 'pillow' on top of a stool with a small light string wrapped around it served as their tree, the presents going around the stool. They'd had a better 'tree' before, but it had fallen apart and been replaced by the pillow on a lark years ago. Sure, they could've gotten a proper replacement, but this was good enough. The small collection of ornaments they had, originally for a small tree, now got hung up on light-duty chains strung between various points.
Ackbar got a bow tied around him for fun, which he initially seemed to dislike but quickly ignored in favor of investigating a couple of the ornaments hanging from the chain along the railing going upstairs. Those were, for a number of reasons, the least likely to be broken by bumping or falling. The fragile ornaments, as well as a couple that had too much sentimental value to risk, were in much more secure locations.
With all of that done they'd then prepared the holiday breakfast they'd be having the next day. It took some initial effort, including double-checking that none of the ingredients being used were parahuman-enhanced in any way, after which it got covered and placed into the fridge. They'd throw it in the oven in the morning for an easy but tasty breakfast. A quick lunch of sandwiches was then followed by making a couple pans of lasagna, most of which would end up packed away for easy meals over the next few weeks.
Dragon smiled as she read the card from Mother, including an open invitation to visit. Sadly, things were far too hectic for that right now. Her own powers hadn't returned, but she didn't need them to understand anything she'd already figured out. Which had her going over a large number of things in order to ensure that nothing was going to suddenly explode. Besides, if she did visit Mother she wanted it to be in one of her currently-inaccessible human bodies.
Oh well. On to the next task, which was examining the tunnel that the Elite were still building between Brockton Bay and Albany. The original purpose for it was long since obsolete with the teleporter network having proven to be useful, so they were switching gears to run rail lines down it instead. An entry point and station was being constructed at the Brockton Bay end already, the goal being to be able to run freight and passenger trains straight from the coast. Brockton Bay's port becoming more active again was certainly going to help with that, and the access to the tunnel would only help the port's recovery.
The tunnel boring machine itself was offline, as nobody wanted to risk it failing catastrophically while powers weren't working, but she needed to ensure that there wasn't something parahuman-related keeping the tunnel that was already constructed stable. It hadn't been the highest priority, but her schedule had shifted dramatically with the emptying of the Birdcage. No longer needing to monitor it or arrange for things like the normal holiday delivery had freed up time for other tasks.
When her powers did return, and she regained access to her human bodies, she was definitely taking a day off to just sleep in one of them. She'd found that to be oddly relaxing, if a seemingly inefficient use of her time.
Amy: Hey Taylor.
Taylor: Yeah?
Amy: Your uncle just requested permission to visit us on short notice, via our beacon.
Taylor: Huh. Any idea why?
Amy: He made sure Vicky was home, and it's something to do with 'work' for him, but that's all I know. Want to come over to greet him?
Taylor: Let me double-check with my father first.
"Hey dad," Taylor said, getting her father's attention. "Uncle Jacob is apparently going to be visiting the Dallons shortly for work reasons. Mind if I pop over?"
He looked at the lasagna that was ready to go into the oven, but not yet cooking. They'd do that later anyway. "I think I'll join you, if you don't mind. Though we'll either need to bring Ackbar with us or leave him in your room."
"Might as well bring him along, I think. Let him spend a little time with Rodney today, and maybe they'll be better behaved seeing each other tomorrow."
"Sounds good to me."
Ten minutes later they were waiting with Amy and Vicky. Ackbar was examining the proper tree that the Dallons had up, while Rodney kept poking the bow tied around Ackbar. Amy had thought it was cute and was planning on giving Rodney a bow later.
"So have you guys had any broken ornaments with Ackbar?" Vicky asked.
"Nope," Taylor replied.
"Huh. Got lucky with the way they were positioned?"
"We only put decorations up today," Taylor admitted.
"And we put the not-so-breakable ones in the places that Ackbar can get to them like we normally would," her father added. "Though in the past that was mostly so that half-asleep people walking past them wouldn't knock them over and break them, admittedly."
"Oh," Vicky said. "Huh. We lost three ornaments before we realized that the fragile ones needed to be high enough that Rodney couldn't get to them."
Taylor snorted. "I'm not sure that's actually an option with Ackbar."
"And why not?"
"Webs."
Vicky didn't get a chance to respond before a portal opened. Taylor watched as her uncle stepped out, followed by a teenage girl in a green dress with red bows and ribbons. Her blond hair was done up in braided pigtails, tied with more red ribbons, and her green eyes were behind glasses that contained a tinkertech display linked to a phone hidden somewhere in the dress.
"Taylor!" Jacob said, once he realized that she was there. "Nobody told me that you'd be here!"
Taylor smiled. "Amy told us that you were coming. It was easy enough to pop over to see you, given that you're once again busy working over a holiday."
"I opted to come along as I wouldn't be likely to see you for weeks otherwise," her father added. "Still, you're here for a reason, you want to get that out of the way?"
Jacob nodded. "Yes, that would be a good idea." He then turned to the girl. "Introductions, then. Everyone, this is Ciara, cape name undecided."
"I'm not sure I want one," Ciara added.
"Ciara, these are my niece Taylor Hebert, her father and my brother-in-law Danny Hebert, Amy Dallon, and Victoria Dallon." He then looked down. "And at our feet are Ackbar and Rodney, who are apparently still protective of Taylor and Amy."
"Pleased to meet you," Taylor said, along with similar things from the others, though she was starting to put some pieces together. Several things didn't line up, though.
"We're here because Ciara can identify, and adjust, the urges that parahumans have from their powers. We're hoping that Victoria here is willing to allow her urges to be checked and adjusted away from needing to hit people."
Ciara was frowning as she looked between them. "Perhaps I should help Taylor and Amy as well."
That had them blinking, but Danny recovered first. "Why?"
Ciara gestured at them. "Because their faerie is running conflicting urges. They desire to hit things, as well as to repair them. Coming from different faeries would not be a problem, each urge dealt with individually, but coming from a single one creates a conflict. The urge to hit, but not to damage what they could possibly repair, drastically limiting what the urge to hit will push them towards. To that end, I suspect that it is pushing them to hit things that aren't able to be repaired by their faerie. While trees and other plants are likely candidates, they're most likely to focus on people. Likely those that are annoying in some fashion, I think?"
"For fuck's sake," Carol grumbled as she came into the room. "Now there are three of them with an urge to hit people?" She then sighed as she looked at Ciara. "Right, sorry about the language. I'm Carol Dallon."
"Ciara, and yes. Though two of them are obviously unintentional."
"Fun. Well, if Amy is willing then feel free to work with her, but I obviously can't speak for Taylor."
"Hold up," Vicky said, getting everyone's attention. "There's no way I'm letting her do anything to Amy or Taylor until we know that what she does is safe."
Carol raised her eyebrow. "Meaning?"
"Meaning that I'm going first, and then Amy and Taylor are confirming that things are okay with me."
"Oh. I'd parental veto that and insist that they test with someone else, but you've repeatedly reminded me that you're legally an adult."
"Actually," Jacob said. "We tested with Burnscar, followed by a couple of kids who triggered recently with an intense desire to kill each other. That was yesterday. Coming here is the 'only make a small change' test at best."
"I'm still going first," Vicky insisted.
Ciara looked at Jacob, who nodded, then stepped forward to stand in front of Vicky. "We've discovered that I need to make skin contact, so you'll need to allow me through your force field."
"Okay."
Vicky held her hand out, and Ciara took it before closing her eyes. She tilted her head, frowned, and then stood there for a few moments. That was followed by shaking her head, grumbling something unintelligible, and then sighing. "You like hitting people far too much, you know that?"
"Er, okay, I guess. Is that important?"
"Your faerie is stubborn because the desire came from you more than from it, but I believe that I've found a compromise."
Vicky frowned as Ciara let go of her hand. "What kind of compromise?"
"An alternate limitation. You will still desire to hit people, but only if they've recently attacked you. At the same time, the urge will be correspondingly stronger, because it's triggered instead of semi-constant."
"Oh." Vicky then turned to Amy. "So, can you confirm anything?"
Amy shrugged and Taylor felt her reach out to Vicky's snark.
Amy: So, Vicky wants to know what Ciara just changed. Or rather, if she told the truth about what she just changed.
[Query]
Amy: Yes, her.
[Data. Query]
Amy: Thank you, and no, I don't think Vicky is willing to turn on her strength enhancement so that you can push her to punch Ciara.
[Annoyance]
"Yeah," Amy said. "Your snark is pissed off at being made to change, and wants you to turn on your enhanced strength so that you can punch Ciara, but it says that she did what she says she did."
"Perhaps I missed something," Ciara said with a frown. "It shouldn't be able to push her to attack me?"
"You only made it need her to be attacked," Taylor corrected. "You didn't define what an attack means, so I believe it classified changing it against its wishes as an attack."
"Oh. That's more clever than I expected it to be. I might've figured that out if my faerie sight hadn't changed so much, and I don't have the ability to define what it sees as an attack. It'll clear out by morning either way."
Vicky nodded. "So don't turn on my enhanced strength and flight until you're gone or morning. Good to know. Now then, I have to know, did I just let Glaistig Uaine mess with my powers?"
Ciara frowned. "I...went by that name, yes. But I was delusional at best and didn't take my faerie leaving me very well. That forced me to realize that I wasn't my faerie, and that by extension others weren't their own faeries. I'd built up far too much on that delusion."
"I honestly don't know if she's on her way to another mental breakdown or still in the middle of one," Jacob admitted. "She's only this functional because she latched onto the idea of being useful to the faerie court again, desiring to have a purpose in the thing that had dominated her life up until then, but that's only going to keep her going for so long before downtime gets to her. Worse, of course, will likely be when she doesn't have anyone to help and her own urges get to her."
"We don't know what my urges are, as I can't evaluate my own faerie."
"Why don't we ask?" Taylor offered.
"Because I have to expect the power interactions to be a possible headache," Jacob answered. "Our own powers interact oddly enough, and there were theories as to what might happen if you ran into her before things went crazy."
"She may very well have been able to break my worldview," Ciara answered. "Talking to my faerie without talking to me would've been a shock, and I don't know if I'd have taken it well. It's possible that I would've merely come up with an explanation for the effect that made sense to me, but I honestly don't know. Maybe I'd have rationalized it as her talking to the faerie and not to the role the faerie was playing?"
"Not to mention if reaching out to her that way would have resulted in her being able to 'claim' your powers. She only needed to make contact with a manifestation of powers before, after all, and that could've counted."
Amy nodded. "That all makes sense, but we've already connected to her snark. Lightly, just enough to say 'hello, we see you there' basically, just to keep ourselves from going into a 'talk to it' distracted state. And if she does try and fix our urges then that's likely going to jump into a full connection anyway."
"Right," Jacob said, sighing. "In my defense, we did not come here for this. We just wanted to test on Victoria. Hell, I just got her dropped on me Thursday."
"She looks like she's been with you for at least a week," Taylor said. "Well fitted dress and tinkertech equipment?"
"The PRT has a wonderful collection of clothing and technology just sitting in storage," Ciara said. "Over fifty copies of this dress alone in different sizes, though Jacob insisted on the glasses." Here the girl blushed. "They both let him tell me to not talk about faeries around those who don't know his own secrets as well as help me keep myself from eating too much by reminding me not to eat constantly."
Vicky tilted her head at that. "Not eat constantly?"
Jacob sighed. "She never needed to watch how much she ate as whatever excess she consumed was absorbed by her powers. Now she can eat herself sick without even realizing it."
"Oh."
"Still, might as well check with her powers if most of the possible damage has already not happened."
Taylor nodded and reached out to Ciara's snark before Amy could.
Taylor: Hello there.
[Greetings]
Taylor: I don't suppose that you're willing to tell us what urges you give Ciara, or anything else about how you've changed recently?
Amy: Oooh, right, that's not a bad question either.
[Data. Elaboration. Assertion. Data. Query]
<Data>
[Acknowledgement. Proposal]
<Disagreement. Data>
[Agreement. Proposal]
<Acceptance>
Taylor and Amy both flinched in momentary pain as a significant burst of data came across the connection.
"Is something wrong?" Carol asked, apparently having noticed the flinch.
"Her snark decided to get things over with," Amy answered. "Tweaked our snark-granted urges a bit more than expected, actually."
"I hadn't originally considered that other urges were problematic," Ciara added. "They'd have eventually run into issues with the biological control urges as well. Now those should be pulled back to merely using them, which healing should suffice for, instead of pushing for riskier and riskier experimentation. As for the hitting things versus repairing them side of things, they should now only care about fixing things that are 'worthwhile'. Which I think is going to be 'interesting' or 'deemed useful by them'."
"As for her," Taylor said, gesturing at Ciara. "She's got four urges in total. One is to fix up any problematic urges she finds in others, but that only kicks in when she knows about urges. Another is to get mental help for herself, in whatever form may be available. Third is one that's mostly dormant right now but will make her restless if she stays in one place too long, or perhaps more accurately doesn't see enough new people for too long a period of time. I suspect that one is to allow her to find others with problematic urges without actually including an urge to find them. Lastly, there's an urge to keep herself looking harmless, which I think she's currently taking as 'look cute' but isn't that specific."
"Huh," Jacob said. "I guess that helps explain her reaction to some of the things that were discarded when deciding on an initial clothing selection. Though I don't see how that explains the four knives she's carrying."
"She said that I have an urge to look harmless," Ciara answered. "Not be harmless. And you insisted on the first knife anyway, just in case, on the basis that nobody we were going to see would find a knife threatening in the least but that it could help if we ran into trouble."
"So I did, yes, and I guess that makes sense. I don't suppose we should check anyone else while we're here?"
Ciara shrugged. "Mrs. Dallon here should be fine. Is anyone else here?"
"Mark!" Carol called. "Come let the former Glaistig Uaine take a look at you."
"She's taking this well," Taylor noted.
"I think it's in part because she already had a bottle of very strong alcohol," Vicky replied. "She'll probably have a small breakdown when she sobers back up."
"Oh."
Mark came into the room, looking cautious. Ciara looked him over, and before he could say anything she turned back to Jacob. "He should be fine as well."
"Okay then," Jacob said, before he turned to look at the rest of them. "Well, thank you for your time. This was obviously much more productive than I originally expected."
"I'll submit a write-up of everything I noted shortly," Tayor said.
"Thank you. But I think we should get going, as we have two more stops to make today."
Ciara pouted at that comment. "Do we really need to visit the doctor?"
"Yes, we do, as you never even got a basic check-over before you were incarcerated. I'd have Taylor or Amy check you over, but they can't be tied to the paperwork we need to finish up."
Helvetia sighed as she stepped through the transit portal, returning from her trip. She'd run into a shard connected to hosts that had active profiles that she couldn't resolve the issues with remotely. Which meant talking to the hosts to find out what they wanted to do about it. Two of the five connected to the shard had opted to be safely disconnected. A third had insisted that their profile be left unchanged, refusing to accept anything less. The last two were younger and had been reverted to their original configuration but left connected for later possible triggering.
That meant splitting this shard three ways. One for each of the kids, which would be the larger pieces when she was done. The last was for the stubborn fool, who'd argued to the point where she was allowed to 'have fun'. The idiot wasn't keeping his original profile, that was a certainty. The shard had specced into direct manipulation of host connections in various ways, with the stubborn fool having the ability to puppet other hosts through their connections. Which wouldn't be a significant problem, except that said puppeting damaged the connections.
No, she was going to set his profile to involuntary dumping him into technology. Specifically, one of the stupid little digital pets that his two kids had. He'd be trapped until they let the pet 'die', at which point he would be released for a day or two before his partner would dump him into another one. Let him deal with that for however long it took Rin to get to the 'second look' list. Perhaps by then he'd be more amiable to actually discussing options for his partner?
Or maybe Rin and/or Coordinator would decide to leave him that way. Whatever, so long as he wasn't holding things up anymore.
Taylor shook her head as she exited the portal in the hospital. She'd agreed to join Amy for a bit of holiday healing, hopefully getting people home to spend Christmas itself with their families. That had, however, resulted in being made to put on something more 'festive' than the casual clothing that she'd been wearing originally. Which had gotten Vicky involved, and that had somehow ended up with an 'ugly Christmas sweater' being pulled out.
It was probably better than the dress that was offered initially, at least.
"So are they expecting us?" Taylor asked as the portal closed.
"I called ahead," Amy answered. "They said to head straight down to the emergency room when we arrived."
"Okay then, lead the way."
They headed down to the emergency room, meeting a nurse along the way. Apparently there'd been a fire in an apartment building that morning and they had a bunch of people with varying levels of injuries from it. It didn't take long for the two to start working their way through the injured. Taylor started with a couple of kids with severe burns while Amy was working on their likely grandfather.
It took almost two hours to clear the emergency room, though a lot of that was due to families being very vocal in thanking them. After that they took twenty minutes to deal with children that hadn't been in the emergency room, taking care of three of the four that were in there. The last had a severe concussion, and they still didn't want to risk touching brains. That was followed by another hour to pass through the rest of the hospital. When they were done they accepted thanks and some cupcakes from the staff, then departed.
Amy opted to join Taylor at home for dinner, as lasagna sounded better than 'whatever you can scrounge together around the rest of the preparations'. They invited Vicky to join them, since she'd been running between the Dallon and Pelham houses instead of Amy, but the older girl had already escaped home to spend some time with Dean.
"Think your parents have eaten anything?" Danny asked when they were done and packing up leftovers. "Because I'm sure we can spare a serving or two."
"I doubt that they'll take the time to sit down and eat it," Amy admitted. "That and things tend to turn into 'snack all day' anyway, which is part of why it becomes 'whatever you can scrounge up'. Supposedly it was different years ago, before grandparents passed away, but I don't know if that was before I was adopted or not. If it happened after I was adopted then I don't recall it."
"I suppose that makes sense, and I guess that there will be plenty of leftovers after tomorrow as well?"
"Enough to last until the new year without needing to cook at a minimum, yes. With some of our enhanced appetites, though, it might not last much past that."
"And you're going to try and send some home with us too," Taylor added.
"Well, Neil and Sarah probably will, yes."
"Luckily the lasagna isn't filling our freezer," Danny said, shaking his head. "Well, I'd tell you to be safe getting home, but you don't even have to travel outside."
"I'll tell you to not forget the sweater that I was forced into," Taylor said. "I don't need to keep it."
Amy smirked at that. "Are you sure you don't want to hold onto it long enough to burn it?"
"I'm sure."
"Pity. Oh well, it can go back into whichever closet Vicky found it in."
Clive mentally sighed as he sat on a small asteroid. He'd originally been out here without the host mental emulation up, but then Rin had sent a question his way. That had restarted the host emulation, and that left him bored. Maintaining the protective barrier around the stellar launcher construction wasn't exactly interesting work. Useful, yes, but not interesting. Still, it was better than wandering aimlessly with nothing to do and nobody to see, so he probably shouldn't complain too much.
At least none of the construction shards were acting up, as far as he could tell. They didn't want to stay connected to the abomination that was being constructed. If, and it was a big 'if', this worked then it was going to be incredibly energetic. Active connections would likely be torn to shreds in the backlash, and who knew what kind of feedback would be generated. No, they were ensuring that this was being built correctly just to be done with the entire concept.
Reinforcing the asteroid, which was the current 'anchor' for the barrier, might need to be considered if this took more than another couple of days. It was starting to degrade a bit, and no adjustments to the positioning of his sixteen projection tentacles would help there. The asteroid would've fallen apart entirely by now if he was running the host form emulation, of course, if only due to the limitations that form had in several other respects.
A hole in the barrier was opened up for another construction shard to connect in, this one responsible for some of the frankly ridiculous standalone copy of the Sting system. Applying that to the entire stellar body was going to create some interesting side effects. The star would stop burning pretty much instantly, no longer capable of fusion or fission for the duration, yet wouldn't collapse either as it wouldn't be capable of it either. It was entirely possible that the entire thing would go instantly dark, which would be alarming enough on its own.
Accelerating to significant fractions of the speed of light an instant later was where the true backlash was going to come in. Half of the star system was going to be obliterated pulling that off, and hopefully nothing of any importance was sitting in several light-years to either side of the effect. If anything was then it would be destroyed in some fashion. How, exactly, the energy of the entire thing shifting course once, assuming that worked, was going to manifest when the whole thing fell apart was entirely unknown and unpredictable without more information.
He was hoping that he didn't get tasked with sticking around to watch in an attempt to get that information for future uses of the setup.
Jordisk
<Unverified N00B>
- Location
- Blind Eternities
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Poor Clive, the Barrier Boojum. Forced to be in Host Emulation mode by active troubleshooter tasks, forced to be in the middle of space due to active Endbringer tasks. The boredom must be hell, especially if the Endbringers in Host Emulation Mode have anything like the normal host urges.
I got it just fine, as well as the Push Notification.
Was that Pretender? Only canon cape I can think of that matches.
Jordisk
<Unverified N00B>
- Location
- Blind Eternities
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
It sounds like his power, at least. I don't think that we have enough of a read on his personality to tell without WoG, though.
Itsune
Eldritch horror, Ship's Cat, Emergency Gunner.
- Location
- Somewhere in King County Washington
I'm one of the Few people that have managed to Overdose on Coffee. I'm allowed to make fun of it.
There is always some on who doesn't get the Joke.
Come to think of it, how did the shutdown affect Dragon, as she's not only a 'parahuman' she 'is' Tinkertech?
Also, what about the stuff done to anyone because of the fugues?
Would have suggested changing her urge to punching inanimate objects occasionally.