My Shining Plumbob--(Worm/Sims/Gamer)
- Thread starter Aurora Moon
- Start date
Aurora Moon
Verfied Insomniac with too much time on her hands
- Location
- USA, Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
changed Danny's line about the plumbob.
- Location
- Philippines
I don't know what Sim series you're using, as I am more of a Sims 3 guy (waiting for all that ultimate collection of Sims 4) but one way Taylor can earn some Simoleons in her situation right now are writing and painting.
With a decent computer she can write novels and aim for the romance genre (which has the highest payoff) and earn royalties for a couple of weeks.
Painting meanwhile takes some time, as the biggest earner IIRC in Sims 3 is the large canvas.
Hope this helps @Aurora Moon
With a decent computer she can write novels and aim for the romance genre (which has the highest payoff) and earn royalties for a couple of weeks.
Painting meanwhile takes some time, as the biggest earner IIRC in Sims 3 is the large canvas.
Hope this helps @Aurora Moon
Chapter Five: PRT testing
Aurora Moon
Verfied Insomniac with too much time on her hands
- Location
- USA, Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The week full of exams went by in a flash before Taylor knew it, and now it was finally Christmas Break. A glorious week free of school and responsibilities leading up to Christmas Eve itself. And once the new year's eve was over, they'd return to school once again.
But for now, Taylor was happy to have the mini-vacation no matter how much she liked school. Exam week had been hell even on model students like herself, after all.
She just had one more thing to deal with before she could truly relax, and that was to go through the PRT testing she had agreed to weeks ago.
For some bizarre reason, they still insisted that she wear a makeshift mask when visiting the PRT building despite the fact that everyone in the entire city most likely knew about her civilian self by now. Something about how they had to follow regulations even when the cape in question was outed… especially because Taylor was a minor. The PRT still needed to show the public that they cared about underage capes' privacy.
Reading between the lines, this regulation had most likely been cooked up by the youth guard.
Taylor couldn't help but smirk at that. Wait until she told Chloe about that...the blond girl had a low opinion of the youth guard and constantly trolled the forums online mocking them with her photoshopped memes.
While Taylor herself thought that the group had good points occasionally, they sometimes could get overzealous in their quest to protect the youth everywhere. So as a result, they often partnered with other groups like "Moms Against Violent Entertainment" (also known as M.A.V.E), which called for the ban of not only violent video games but also for "violent music". It just so happened that heavy metal was on this list... hence Chloe's grudge.
Put simply, the youth guard had their fingers in many pies, and as a result, were universally disdained by not only the youth they purported to protect but also by various organizations out there as a result.
Anyways, Taylor did the song and dance where they all pretended that they didn't know who she was, and went inside to start PRT testing.
To her surprise, they were starting off with a basic interview first and told her that they were gonna do a physical exam next.
She had honestly thought she was just gonna show off what she could do while the bigwigs tried to figure out how it worked. The guy in the lab coat chuckled and told her that they did that too, but they saved that for the end.
So she sat down and got interviewed about her powers. How did she think it worked, what she could do, that sort of thing.
They seemed incredibly interested in the fact that she could "level up" in skills, and that everything seemed to max out at 10 even though she hadn't reached that level in any of her skills yet.
Truth be told, Taylor was kinda annoyed by the level cap… it made her seem like she was a low budget version of Dauntless or something like that.
But then again, everything else maxed at 10 had been ridiculously powerful… the couch and beds that had been rated a 10 on the comfort and sleep level? It had been amazing as hell and instantly made everyone relax the moment they sat or rested on them.
Maybe in the sim-life game, that level was considered god-tier powerful? What if she was actually more powerful than Dauntless?
…… pfft, yeah right. That was clearly wishful thinking on her end there.
It was strange how everything was on a scale of zero to ten though.
Taylor told the guy the rest of the basics, like how she could freeze time and see everything in the third person view then. Apparently, she could also record things with her power but she hadn't tested it yet and didn't know if she could transfer the recording to a computer or not.
She also told him about build mode, but that she couldn't build on land that didn't belong to her or the rest of her household. Also the parts about how she could automatically change outfits on a whim, and so on forth.
Finally, the interview was done with, and Taylor was able to meet with another lab coat-wearing person… a female doctor this time.
she was weighted, then scanned by some medical tinker tech device that looked like an MRI machine but did so much more than a regular one. It was able to scan the entire body down to the cellular level…. Which sounded very impressive on paper.
They took her blood for some tests, and then afterward she was asked to run on a treadmill machine, which apparently measured how fast she could run, how long she could run for and so on forth.
She didn't mind at all, mainly because it worked towards leveling up her fitness level. She was so close to level two that she could taste it, thanks to gym class during the last school week of the year. Well, not literally but whatever. 20 minutes in she finally heard that telltale pinging sound that she had come to associate with leveling up, and she got a notification as well.
[Fitness level two! You now can discuss fitness topics with other sims, and gain some exp towards it as you do that.]
Taylor frowned slightly. That was it? Every level seemed to unlock specific things she could do, but this was disappointing. The exp gain every time she discussed her workout routine was kinda nice, but nothing had really prevented her from discussing it in the past… so why was this a special perk for level two? She could only hope that the other levels had more promising rewards than this one.
Taylor made the signal that she finally had enough, and stepped off the treadmill panting slightly.
"Hmm… slightly above average stamina, but nothing too unusual for a baseline human. Normal human speeds…" The woman mumbled out loud as she wrote down her notes.
It was here that things took an unusual turn from now then.
"Uhh… you want me to put my arm in THAT THING??" Taylor's voice went up a few octaves as she pointed at what looked to be a torture machine, full of needles and other strange devices.
Taylor wasn't scared of needles exactly… but she also wasn't a big fan of them. Enough said on that subject…
"It's just so we can test your brute rating. At the first sign of injury, the machine will automatically stop. You'll hardly feel a thing…" The woman said in her best reassuring voice.
Taylor wasn't convinced at all, but she did as she was told anyway.
She knew it would hurt, and she was right. The needles and other stuff started stabbing or pinched her in certain locations of her arm, and only stopped at the first sign of drawn blood and bruising.
The only positive it had going for it was the fact that it had lasted a few seconds, and it was over with… they didn't need to test any more than that, and thank god.
"No brute rating at all.." The woman mumbled, writing down things again.
Her arm was still throbbing painfully and uncomfortably as she pulled her arm out of the machine.
Ugh. and she was so sweaty from the long workout she had on the treadmill too… the pain and her sweaty body combined only served to put her into an even worse mood.
The woman was staring upwards at her crystal now, and Taylor followed her line of sight to see that her crystal now had changed from the usual green color to a yellow color.
"Any reason why it changed colors?" The woman asked.
"Umm… let me check." Taylor replied, and she opened up her UI and asked her inner game tutorial voice for some help.
[Sims have needs that need to be fulfilled. If those needs are not met then your sims' condition will go from good to worse. This is indicated by the sims' plumbob colors…. Green is great, Yellow is neutral, orange is bad and red is dangerously bad. If a sim's crystal is red, it might indicate that they're close to dying! So keep that crystal green at all costs!]
Taylor said some of this out loud, and the woman wrote it down in her notes. She then looked at her needs meters, and noted that her fun meter was way down, and so was her hygiene meter.
Not that it was surprising... She wasn't exactly having fun at all, especially so because she got stabbed in the arm by some torture machine.
And she had to admit, she could do with a quick shower right now.
She said as much to the tester, and the woman nodded. "Sure, we have a shower nearby. After you're done, we'll move on to the next phase."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She changed into some fresh sweatpants and sweatshirt after her quick shower, which was enough to get her crystal back to green, even though her fun meter was still orange, which meant it was dangerously low.
She'd have to do something about that later.
The next phase she had to do? It turned out to be meeting with Clockblocker and Vista in an open gym room that had a large padded mat in the center of it. It also had a table full of laptops, a coffee maker and a plate of doughnuts to the side of the room.
There were a bunch of scientists in labs coats there too. Taylor recognized the guy from her interview segment from before, and the woman who had made her put her arm into the torture machine was there too. The rest she didn't recognize because she had never met them before.
Apparently, they had been eating doughnuts and having some coffee while they waited for her.
"So… are we here to test my fighting capabilities?" Taylor wondered.
Clockblocker simply shrugged, and she couldn't see his expression at all behind that mask of his. "Kinda? You have a time stop ability that activates when you have an out-of-body experience, correct? So I was brought in to see how our powers interact and all that. But yeah, we'll also be sparring today."
"We'll also want to see how the rest of your abilities work, Taylor. Namely, this inventory space of yours that you say your power has, as well as its recording ability that you mentioned." The woman from before called out.
"Well, come on then… we'll spar a little, and see how we fare up against each other. I'll use my power on you during that time, so watch out for that too." Clockblocker cheerfully replied.
"Alright." Taylor agreed to this easily enough. She then turned on the UI's camera mode before getting on the sparring padded mat.
The two of them circled around each other, gauging each other for possible weaknesses. Finally, they leaped at each other. Taylor tried to dodge Clockblocker's attack and attack him from the sides, but she was still a total novice at fighting so Clock was able to go on the offense by grabbing her fist before she made contact with his body.
Suddenly, she felt her body freeze up and she found herself being forcibly ejected out of her body into third-person view. Time was still moving normally, so she saw the others chat and write down in their notepad. Taylor's body, on the other hand, was still frozen in that attack pose.
Clockblocker chuckled slightly. "Yeah, she's a total newbie at this… you can just tell."
Taylor couldn't help but scowl mentally at this. She knew she was one, but he didn't have to rub her face in it like this!
Okay. She clearly needed to find a way to mess around with him somehow while her body was still frozen in time, just to show him that she wasn't to be under-estimated.
She tried tapping on build mode, but it just told her that she couldn't build here as she didn't own the land. Then she had another idea. The first time she went into this out-of-body mode, She had dragged that first aid kit all the way from that camping store back to herself just so that she could store it away into her inventory.
What if she was to do the same thing here somehow? She could drag the items over to Clockblocker and put them around him in a circle, and mess with his mind this way!
Smirking slightly, she froze time itself and went around the room seeing which objects she could drag over to Clockblocker. Much to her annoyance, she couldn't drag the furniture around… the chairs and tables were completely stuck like they were welded to the floor.
However, she did discover that she could drag plates of food around… so maybe she could only drag smaller things around that was of a certain weight or something? She was merely an incorporeal entity right now, so that made sense in a weird way.
She didn't want to take all the scientists' food plates away from them and place them on the floor around Clockblocker though… that would be a total waste of food, and not to mention rude.
So she had to look for something else, something small she could move around…
Frowning slightly, she clipped through the walls and went up some floors until she found a floor that was full of cubicle office spaces with at least a dozen people typing away at their computers.
One of the office spaces caught her eye, as seeing that space was completely decorated in troll toys. She grabbed one of them and discovered that she could drag them across the table and into the floor. She could even pull them into her inventory.
She chuckled slowly, before finally giving in to full-blown laughter. This was perfect… she could troll Clockblocker, with troll toys. He'd be sure to get the message...
She grabbed every single troll toy she could see and dragged them all into her inventory space. Amazingly enough, they all seemed to stack up together into one slot. Well, that certainly made managing her inventory space a lot easier.
There was a nameplate adhered to the outside of the cubicle office where she had grabbed all the trolls from, and it read, "Jason Atkins."
"Jason, I'll give you those trolls back when I'm done with them, I promise." She said out loud, even though nobody could hear her while she kept time frozen. Come to think of it, she hadn't tested if anybody could hear her while in normal time, did she? She'd test that while she was trolling her opponent today.
She returned back to the gym and dragged the troll toys out of her inventory space so that every single one of them was now facing Clockblocker in a circle. For added effect, she dragged one final troll doll into her frozen body's hand just to let everyone know that it was her doing it.
Finally, she let time run again…. And… Clockblocker's reaction was priceless, just as she knew it would be.
"The hell?!" He yelped as the troll dolls around him had appeared out of seemingly nowhere.
"What's the matter? Don't you like them?" Taylor asked mockingly, but nobody seemed to hear her. They didn't seem to react to her comments, but they definitely reacted to the troll dolls appearing out of nowhere. Well, that answered her earlier question.
Clockblocker jumped away from the troll dolls and slowly walked away backward as to keep an eye on the dolls. And Taylor took this opportunity to slowly drag the troll dolls towards Clockblocker one by one...
"Okay, that's just creepy…!" Clockblocker sounded like he didn't know whether to laugh or just be creeped out.
Clockblocker's freezing effect on her body finally wore off, and Taylor found herself being snapped back to her body. She blinked, and then turned to face Clockblocker and held up the troll doll in her closed hand.
"By creepy, you mean the trolls or the way I can move them around?" Taylor smirked slightly.
By his posture, She was pretty sure that Clockblocker was gaping at her from behind his full-face mask.
She stopped the camera that came built-in with her powers and got a notification that the video was now saved… somewhere? It wasn't clear on that, but now she'd see if she'd be able to transfer that video over to a real computer somehow...
She turned around to everyone else, who were openly staring at her as well, and explained: "Okay… so it seems that while Clockblocker can freeze my physical body it still doesn't stop me from having my out of body experience, and doesn't stop me from freezing time itself either. I recorded the whole thing with my powers, so now I'd like to see if I can transfer it to a computer."
One tester recovered from his shock more quickly than the others did, and said, "You can use my laptop if you'd like."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hours later, Taylor was starting to regret ever telling the testers everything she could do so far.
Apparently, mentally transferring a video she created with her powers had taken some doing, and she ended up doing a very complicated series of steps that finally worked in getting the videos she recorded though her UI interface into one of the power testers' laptops.
And of course during this entire process she also discovered that she could've just brought recording drones and whatnot from build mode this entire time when she asked her help menu on how to record and transfer videos. That process would've been way easier than finding a way to telepathically transfer something in your head directly to the laptop.
Naturally, Taylor couldn't help but facepalm when she discovered that she had gone for the most complicated way possible to keep records of everything that was happening. She was definitely keeping drones around from now on, just to save herself the headache.
So the only thing this recording ability of hers was useful for, was to give her a "photographic" memory… she could record everything she saw and then replay them at a later time in case she needed to report on something that occurred. But that was it. A little bit of a letdown, really.
At any rate, her display with the trolls had gotten all the scientists excited, as they wanted to know what else she could move around while she was in the "third person" mode.
They were interested in the fact that she apparently could steal Jason's trolls from two floors up, and wondered how far she could go when she was outside her own body.
After an utterly unamused Jason showed up to grab his trolls back from Taylor, she was then forced to spend hours in a testing room showing off what else she could do with this ability of hers. To say it had gotten tedious and boring for her was an understatement.
But on the plus side, she almost had no limit in her incorporeal body… she discovered that she could fly over the entire city and go anywhere in the city. That was the only thing that had been fun for her… but she discovered that she couldn't go out of the city into the nearby woods at all. So she was mainly confined to city limits… which was still a lot of mileage to go around.
And this didn't take her long to do, because she had done so while time was frozen. Of course on the downside this made the power testing seem ten times longer than what it actually was… oh well.
It also had been somewhat trippy trying to control her own body while still in third-person view, too… But she discovered that she could give her sim-body commands.. such as going somewhere or doing push-ups on the floor. It couldn't do anything on its own without her say so though, and usually just stood there smiling vacantly at everyone otherwise. Which was kind of creepy? Even the scientists seemed weirded out by this.
It would also randomly say something in some nonsensical made-up language if people interacted with her body while she was doing the "out of body" bit… which had her vowing to never use this aspect of her powers in real-time unless she was alone. How embarrassing would it be, if her body went around spouting gibberish at others while she was off elsewhere?
People would think she lost her mind! Granted, it would literally be true since she was having an out of body experience, but still ...!
………………
At any rate, she was being taken home now after all of that was done with.
"How was it?" Danny wondered as he drove them all home.
Taylor groaned loudly.
Annette made a sympathetic expression as she looked back at her daughter in the backseat. "That bad, huh?"
Taylor then shook her head. "Not so much bad as it was utterly boring. They kept wanting me to do the same things over and over but done a different way each time. All so that they could have scans of what was going on with my body or whatever, every time I did it. If you were told to kick the same spot over and over 50 times, you'd get tired of it too..."
"At least you didn't have to do the paperwork," Annette said wryly, before shuddering slightly. She wasn't a big fan of paperwork at all...even though her husband handled them just fine.
While Taylor had been off power testing with two of the wards and the scientists, her parents had been in the same building signing her up as both an independent hero and as a temporary Ward.
Taylor's parents weren't sure about the Wards program. Annette couldn't help but worry that they might try to turn Taylor into a child soldier, which was the last thing she wanted for her daughter. She wanted Taylor to have a normal childhood (and teenagerhood) as much as possible.
Danny on the other hand was worried that Taylor might get ideas about going out on her own as a hero…. He knew how much Taylor had idolized famous parahumans like Herald, after all. So he tentatively suggested that it might be good to have the Wards on hand to back her up should Taylor get any idea about doing hero work. Also, it might do Taylor some good to get to know other parahumans her age. So they were doing this on a trial basis… and if they saw any sign that the Wards program wasn't what they wanted for their daughter they were going to pull her out.
Danny was used to dealing with paperwork as he dealt with that on a regular basis, so he had taken pity on his wife after 10 minutes of watching her pore over it with a pained expression on her face and had handled the rest of it for her.
The other reason why it had taken them this long with the paperwork, was the fact that Danny insisted on going over everything with a fine comb before they agreed to sign anything, so to speak. He wanted to make sure that there wasn't going to be any nasty loopholes that the PRT could exploit in order to legally screw over the Heberts.
But now that everything was done with, Everyone in the car just wanted to get home and nap for a while. Staying at the PRT building for that long was mentally and emotionally taxing, after all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emily Piggott was sipping at her coffee and going through her emails when Miss Militia walked in with the dossier on their possible new ward.
"Here's the information on our new possible recruit." Miss Militia stated the obvious, as she dropped the files onto Emily Piggott's desk.
"Alright. Anything I need to know about her right away?" Emily asked, and then sipped her coffee again.
Miss Militia raised her eyebrows as she said, "Well, apparently we've got either a Stranger 10 or a Thinker 5 on our hands, or a hybrid of the two. They're still arguing about how to classify her."
Emily Piggot did a spit take at this, nearly choking on her hot coffee as she did so. She coughed slightly, and then yelled, "WHAT?!"
==================================================
Any guesses why Taylor gets that rating? Internet cookies and kittens to anybody who guesses correctly.
But for now, Taylor was happy to have the mini-vacation no matter how much she liked school. Exam week had been hell even on model students like herself, after all.
She just had one more thing to deal with before she could truly relax, and that was to go through the PRT testing she had agreed to weeks ago.
For some bizarre reason, they still insisted that she wear a makeshift mask when visiting the PRT building despite the fact that everyone in the entire city most likely knew about her civilian self by now. Something about how they had to follow regulations even when the cape in question was outed… especially because Taylor was a minor. The PRT still needed to show the public that they cared about underage capes' privacy.
Reading between the lines, this regulation had most likely been cooked up by the youth guard.
Taylor couldn't help but smirk at that. Wait until she told Chloe about that...the blond girl had a low opinion of the youth guard and constantly trolled the forums online mocking them with her photoshopped memes.
While Taylor herself thought that the group had good points occasionally, they sometimes could get overzealous in their quest to protect the youth everywhere. So as a result, they often partnered with other groups like "Moms Against Violent Entertainment" (also known as M.A.V.E), which called for the ban of not only violent video games but also for "violent music". It just so happened that heavy metal was on this list... hence Chloe's grudge.
Put simply, the youth guard had their fingers in many pies, and as a result, were universally disdained by not only the youth they purported to protect but also by various organizations out there as a result.
Anyways, Taylor did the song and dance where they all pretended that they didn't know who she was, and went inside to start PRT testing.
To her surprise, they were starting off with a basic interview first and told her that they were gonna do a physical exam next.
She had honestly thought she was just gonna show off what she could do while the bigwigs tried to figure out how it worked. The guy in the lab coat chuckled and told her that they did that too, but they saved that for the end.
So she sat down and got interviewed about her powers. How did she think it worked, what she could do, that sort of thing.
They seemed incredibly interested in the fact that she could "level up" in skills, and that everything seemed to max out at 10 even though she hadn't reached that level in any of her skills yet.
Truth be told, Taylor was kinda annoyed by the level cap… it made her seem like she was a low budget version of Dauntless or something like that.
But then again, everything else maxed at 10 had been ridiculously powerful… the couch and beds that had been rated a 10 on the comfort and sleep level? It had been amazing as hell and instantly made everyone relax the moment they sat or rested on them.
Maybe in the sim-life game, that level was considered god-tier powerful? What if she was actually more powerful than Dauntless?
…… pfft, yeah right. That was clearly wishful thinking on her end there.
It was strange how everything was on a scale of zero to ten though.
Taylor told the guy the rest of the basics, like how she could freeze time and see everything in the third person view then. Apparently, she could also record things with her power but she hadn't tested it yet and didn't know if she could transfer the recording to a computer or not.
She also told him about build mode, but that she couldn't build on land that didn't belong to her or the rest of her household. Also the parts about how she could automatically change outfits on a whim, and so on forth.
Finally, the interview was done with, and Taylor was able to meet with another lab coat-wearing person… a female doctor this time.
she was weighted, then scanned by some medical tinker tech device that looked like an MRI machine but did so much more than a regular one. It was able to scan the entire body down to the cellular level…. Which sounded very impressive on paper.
They took her blood for some tests, and then afterward she was asked to run on a treadmill machine, which apparently measured how fast she could run, how long she could run for and so on forth.
She didn't mind at all, mainly because it worked towards leveling up her fitness level. She was so close to level two that she could taste it, thanks to gym class during the last school week of the year. Well, not literally but whatever. 20 minutes in she finally heard that telltale pinging sound that she had come to associate with leveling up, and she got a notification as well.
[Fitness level two! You now can discuss fitness topics with other sims, and gain some exp towards it as you do that.]
Taylor frowned slightly. That was it? Every level seemed to unlock specific things she could do, but this was disappointing. The exp gain every time she discussed her workout routine was kinda nice, but nothing had really prevented her from discussing it in the past… so why was this a special perk for level two? She could only hope that the other levels had more promising rewards than this one.
Taylor made the signal that she finally had enough, and stepped off the treadmill panting slightly.
"Hmm… slightly above average stamina, but nothing too unusual for a baseline human. Normal human speeds…" The woman mumbled out loud as she wrote down her notes.
It was here that things took an unusual turn from now then.
"Uhh… you want me to put my arm in THAT THING??" Taylor's voice went up a few octaves as she pointed at what looked to be a torture machine, full of needles and other strange devices.
Taylor wasn't scared of needles exactly… but she also wasn't a big fan of them. Enough said on that subject…
"It's just so we can test your brute rating. At the first sign of injury, the machine will automatically stop. You'll hardly feel a thing…" The woman said in her best reassuring voice.
Taylor wasn't convinced at all, but she did as she was told anyway.
She knew it would hurt, and she was right. The needles and other stuff started stabbing or pinched her in certain locations of her arm, and only stopped at the first sign of drawn blood and bruising.
The only positive it had going for it was the fact that it had lasted a few seconds, and it was over with… they didn't need to test any more than that, and thank god.
"No brute rating at all.." The woman mumbled, writing down things again.
Her arm was still throbbing painfully and uncomfortably as she pulled her arm out of the machine.
Ugh. and she was so sweaty from the long workout she had on the treadmill too… the pain and her sweaty body combined only served to put her into an even worse mood.
The woman was staring upwards at her crystal now, and Taylor followed her line of sight to see that her crystal now had changed from the usual green color to a yellow color.
"Any reason why it changed colors?" The woman asked.
"Umm… let me check." Taylor replied, and she opened up her UI and asked her inner game tutorial voice for some help.
[Sims have needs that need to be fulfilled. If those needs are not met then your sims' condition will go from good to worse. This is indicated by the sims' plumbob colors…. Green is great, Yellow is neutral, orange is bad and red is dangerously bad. If a sim's crystal is red, it might indicate that they're close to dying! So keep that crystal green at all costs!]
Taylor said some of this out loud, and the woman wrote it down in her notes. She then looked at her needs meters, and noted that her fun meter was way down, and so was her hygiene meter.
Not that it was surprising... She wasn't exactly having fun at all, especially so because she got stabbed in the arm by some torture machine.
And she had to admit, she could do with a quick shower right now.
She said as much to the tester, and the woman nodded. "Sure, we have a shower nearby. After you're done, we'll move on to the next phase."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She changed into some fresh sweatpants and sweatshirt after her quick shower, which was enough to get her crystal back to green, even though her fun meter was still orange, which meant it was dangerously low.
She'd have to do something about that later.
The next phase she had to do? It turned out to be meeting with Clockblocker and Vista in an open gym room that had a large padded mat in the center of it. It also had a table full of laptops, a coffee maker and a plate of doughnuts to the side of the room.
There were a bunch of scientists in labs coats there too. Taylor recognized the guy from her interview segment from before, and the woman who had made her put her arm into the torture machine was there too. The rest she didn't recognize because she had never met them before.
Apparently, they had been eating doughnuts and having some coffee while they waited for her.
"So… are we here to test my fighting capabilities?" Taylor wondered.
Clockblocker simply shrugged, and she couldn't see his expression at all behind that mask of his. "Kinda? You have a time stop ability that activates when you have an out-of-body experience, correct? So I was brought in to see how our powers interact and all that. But yeah, we'll also be sparring today."
"We'll also want to see how the rest of your abilities work, Taylor. Namely, this inventory space of yours that you say your power has, as well as its recording ability that you mentioned." The woman from before called out.
"Well, come on then… we'll spar a little, and see how we fare up against each other. I'll use my power on you during that time, so watch out for that too." Clockblocker cheerfully replied.
"Alright." Taylor agreed to this easily enough. She then turned on the UI's camera mode before getting on the sparring padded mat.
The two of them circled around each other, gauging each other for possible weaknesses. Finally, they leaped at each other. Taylor tried to dodge Clockblocker's attack and attack him from the sides, but she was still a total novice at fighting so Clock was able to go on the offense by grabbing her fist before she made contact with his body.
Suddenly, she felt her body freeze up and she found herself being forcibly ejected out of her body into third-person view. Time was still moving normally, so she saw the others chat and write down in their notepad. Taylor's body, on the other hand, was still frozen in that attack pose.
Clockblocker chuckled slightly. "Yeah, she's a total newbie at this… you can just tell."
Taylor couldn't help but scowl mentally at this. She knew she was one, but he didn't have to rub her face in it like this!
Okay. She clearly needed to find a way to mess around with him somehow while her body was still frozen in time, just to show him that she wasn't to be under-estimated.
She tried tapping on build mode, but it just told her that she couldn't build here as she didn't own the land. Then she had another idea. The first time she went into this out-of-body mode, She had dragged that first aid kit all the way from that camping store back to herself just so that she could store it away into her inventory.
What if she was to do the same thing here somehow? She could drag the items over to Clockblocker and put them around him in a circle, and mess with his mind this way!
Smirking slightly, she froze time itself and went around the room seeing which objects she could drag over to Clockblocker. Much to her annoyance, she couldn't drag the furniture around… the chairs and tables were completely stuck like they were welded to the floor.
However, she did discover that she could drag plates of food around… so maybe she could only drag smaller things around that was of a certain weight or something? She was merely an incorporeal entity right now, so that made sense in a weird way.
She didn't want to take all the scientists' food plates away from them and place them on the floor around Clockblocker though… that would be a total waste of food, and not to mention rude.
So she had to look for something else, something small she could move around…
Frowning slightly, she clipped through the walls and went up some floors until she found a floor that was full of cubicle office spaces with at least a dozen people typing away at their computers.
One of the office spaces caught her eye, as seeing that space was completely decorated in troll toys. She grabbed one of them and discovered that she could drag them across the table and into the floor. She could even pull them into her inventory.
She chuckled slowly, before finally giving in to full-blown laughter. This was perfect… she could troll Clockblocker, with troll toys. He'd be sure to get the message...
She grabbed every single troll toy she could see and dragged them all into her inventory space. Amazingly enough, they all seemed to stack up together into one slot. Well, that certainly made managing her inventory space a lot easier.
There was a nameplate adhered to the outside of the cubicle office where she had grabbed all the trolls from, and it read, "Jason Atkins."
"Jason, I'll give you those trolls back when I'm done with them, I promise." She said out loud, even though nobody could hear her while she kept time frozen. Come to think of it, she hadn't tested if anybody could hear her while in normal time, did she? She'd test that while she was trolling her opponent today.
She returned back to the gym and dragged the troll toys out of her inventory space so that every single one of them was now facing Clockblocker in a circle. For added effect, she dragged one final troll doll into her frozen body's hand just to let everyone know that it was her doing it.
Finally, she let time run again…. And… Clockblocker's reaction was priceless, just as she knew it would be.
"The hell?!" He yelped as the troll dolls around him had appeared out of seemingly nowhere.
"What's the matter? Don't you like them?" Taylor asked mockingly, but nobody seemed to hear her. They didn't seem to react to her comments, but they definitely reacted to the troll dolls appearing out of nowhere. Well, that answered her earlier question.
Clockblocker jumped away from the troll dolls and slowly walked away backward as to keep an eye on the dolls. And Taylor took this opportunity to slowly drag the troll dolls towards Clockblocker one by one...
"Okay, that's just creepy…!" Clockblocker sounded like he didn't know whether to laugh or just be creeped out.
Clockblocker's freezing effect on her body finally wore off, and Taylor found herself being snapped back to her body. She blinked, and then turned to face Clockblocker and held up the troll doll in her closed hand.
"By creepy, you mean the trolls or the way I can move them around?" Taylor smirked slightly.
By his posture, She was pretty sure that Clockblocker was gaping at her from behind his full-face mask.
She stopped the camera that came built-in with her powers and got a notification that the video was now saved… somewhere? It wasn't clear on that, but now she'd see if she'd be able to transfer that video over to a real computer somehow...
She turned around to everyone else, who were openly staring at her as well, and explained: "Okay… so it seems that while Clockblocker can freeze my physical body it still doesn't stop me from having my out of body experience, and doesn't stop me from freezing time itself either. I recorded the whole thing with my powers, so now I'd like to see if I can transfer it to a computer."
One tester recovered from his shock more quickly than the others did, and said, "You can use my laptop if you'd like."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hours later, Taylor was starting to regret ever telling the testers everything she could do so far.
Apparently, mentally transferring a video she created with her powers had taken some doing, and she ended up doing a very complicated series of steps that finally worked in getting the videos she recorded though her UI interface into one of the power testers' laptops.
And of course during this entire process she also discovered that she could've just brought recording drones and whatnot from build mode this entire time when she asked her help menu on how to record and transfer videos. That process would've been way easier than finding a way to telepathically transfer something in your head directly to the laptop.
Naturally, Taylor couldn't help but facepalm when she discovered that she had gone for the most complicated way possible to keep records of everything that was happening. She was definitely keeping drones around from now on, just to save herself the headache.
So the only thing this recording ability of hers was useful for, was to give her a "photographic" memory… she could record everything she saw and then replay them at a later time in case she needed to report on something that occurred. But that was it. A little bit of a letdown, really.
At any rate, her display with the trolls had gotten all the scientists excited, as they wanted to know what else she could move around while she was in the "third person" mode.
They were interested in the fact that she apparently could steal Jason's trolls from two floors up, and wondered how far she could go when she was outside her own body.
After an utterly unamused Jason showed up to grab his trolls back from Taylor, she was then forced to spend hours in a testing room showing off what else she could do with this ability of hers. To say it had gotten tedious and boring for her was an understatement.
But on the plus side, she almost had no limit in her incorporeal body… she discovered that she could fly over the entire city and go anywhere in the city. That was the only thing that had been fun for her… but she discovered that she couldn't go out of the city into the nearby woods at all. So she was mainly confined to city limits… which was still a lot of mileage to go around.
And this didn't take her long to do, because she had done so while time was frozen. Of course on the downside this made the power testing seem ten times longer than what it actually was… oh well.
It also had been somewhat trippy trying to control her own body while still in third-person view, too… But she discovered that she could give her sim-body commands.. such as going somewhere or doing push-ups on the floor. It couldn't do anything on its own without her say so though, and usually just stood there smiling vacantly at everyone otherwise. Which was kind of creepy? Even the scientists seemed weirded out by this.
It would also randomly say something in some nonsensical made-up language if people interacted with her body while she was doing the "out of body" bit… which had her vowing to never use this aspect of her powers in real-time unless she was alone. How embarrassing would it be, if her body went around spouting gibberish at others while she was off elsewhere?
People would think she lost her mind! Granted, it would literally be true since she was having an out of body experience, but still ...!
………………
At any rate, she was being taken home now after all of that was done with.
"How was it?" Danny wondered as he drove them all home.
Taylor groaned loudly.
Annette made a sympathetic expression as she looked back at her daughter in the backseat. "That bad, huh?"
Taylor then shook her head. "Not so much bad as it was utterly boring. They kept wanting me to do the same things over and over but done a different way each time. All so that they could have scans of what was going on with my body or whatever, every time I did it. If you were told to kick the same spot over and over 50 times, you'd get tired of it too..."
"At least you didn't have to do the paperwork," Annette said wryly, before shuddering slightly. She wasn't a big fan of paperwork at all...even though her husband handled them just fine.
While Taylor had been off power testing with two of the wards and the scientists, her parents had been in the same building signing her up as both an independent hero and as a temporary Ward.
Taylor's parents weren't sure about the Wards program. Annette couldn't help but worry that they might try to turn Taylor into a child soldier, which was the last thing she wanted for her daughter. She wanted Taylor to have a normal childhood (and teenagerhood) as much as possible.
Danny on the other hand was worried that Taylor might get ideas about going out on her own as a hero…. He knew how much Taylor had idolized famous parahumans like Herald, after all. So he tentatively suggested that it might be good to have the Wards on hand to back her up should Taylor get any idea about doing hero work. Also, it might do Taylor some good to get to know other parahumans her age. So they were doing this on a trial basis… and if they saw any sign that the Wards program wasn't what they wanted for their daughter they were going to pull her out.
Danny was used to dealing with paperwork as he dealt with that on a regular basis, so he had taken pity on his wife after 10 minutes of watching her pore over it with a pained expression on her face and had handled the rest of it for her.
The other reason why it had taken them this long with the paperwork, was the fact that Danny insisted on going over everything with a fine comb before they agreed to sign anything, so to speak. He wanted to make sure that there wasn't going to be any nasty loopholes that the PRT could exploit in order to legally screw over the Heberts.
But now that everything was done with, Everyone in the car just wanted to get home and nap for a while. Staying at the PRT building for that long was mentally and emotionally taxing, after all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emily Piggott was sipping at her coffee and going through her emails when Miss Militia walked in with the dossier on their possible new ward.
"Here's the information on our new possible recruit." Miss Militia stated the obvious, as she dropped the files onto Emily Piggott's desk.
"Alright. Anything I need to know about her right away?" Emily asked, and then sipped her coffee again.
Miss Militia raised her eyebrows as she said, "Well, apparently we've got either a Stranger 10 or a Thinker 5 on our hands, or a hybrid of the two. They're still arguing about how to classify her."
Emily Piggot did a spit take at this, nearly choking on her hot coffee as she did so. She coughed slightly, and then yelled, "WHAT?!"
==================================================
Any guesses why Taylor gets that rating? Internet cookies and kittens to anybody who guesses correctly.
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Doru
Digital Disaster
- Location
- Canada, the internet
Taylor can sit at home, give her body commands, record a cape's life without anyone knowing, move small objects where ever she wants, spy on anything in the city, could level up crime skills to the point that she could steal something halfway across the room, and stop time for everyone without any tells.
If not for the Plumbob, Taylor could be the perfect spy, and the supernatural Sim types would give her superpowers, letting her go fight crime with legit magic, clorokenisis, vampirism, werewolf powers, being undead in general, alien powers, mermish powers, fae powers, or robotic abilities.
If not for the Plumbob, Taylor could be the perfect spy, and the supernatural Sim types would give her superpowers, letting her go fight crime with legit magic, clorokenisis, vampirism, werewolf powers, being undead in general, alien powers, mermish powers, fae powers, or robotic abilities.
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Kagemoto
I stand against the Infinite Horizon
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high.
Kemayo
A Certain Cheerful Tone Of Voice
- Location
- Missouri
Well, for Stranger, she's the infiltrationyest infiltrator who ever infiltrated. She can go anywhere and see anything that's not actively hidden, leaving no evidence of her presence whatsoever. She can steal small objects (like, say, documents) anywhere in the city, apparently-instantly. Also, since she can drop stuff out of her inventory in time-stop, if you gave her a pile of containment foam grenades...
(For contrast, Imp is a Stranger 5, and is obviously inferior to Taylor's sneaking power in most ways.)
As for Thinker, similar logic, just focusing harder on the information-gathering. Lower rating because she's restricted to human senses and has to actually pseudo-manually go looking for it rather than having some passive information feed.
- Location
- earth
Surprised she's not just getting the flat Trump 8 or so for scaling and a bunch of subratings.
- Location
- Odessa
She either is a stranger and visits those locations personally or she is a thinker and can 'thinker' information about locations like she was there personally... and even if she literally goes somewhere, since her body is still in previous spot, power still can be classified as thinker 5 remote observation (everything higher is precognition), the pros for stranger is that she can only be listening at one spot at one time and no headaches. But her rating will also include high shaker rating - ability to pick up items at huge distance from her body and thinker either way for freezing time for herself and 'skill growth'.
P.S. Personally I think it is much closer to thinker 5 with stranger subrating then to direct stranger, but idea of a girl that can't have a secret identity having a stranger 9 rating...
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- Location
- Seattle
Lets see... Easiest ways to get actual powers. Aleister's Alchemy Station §850, Level up alchemy to 9, Then you can do a witches brew with only a toad, a moonstone, and a light beetle. Being a witch with only a little training you can get a fire and ice blaster power. Getting Martial Arts up to 5 and meditating for like 5 hours will let her teleport, once...
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The way this is worded, it sounds like they are actively typing instead of frozen in time typing.
Just thought I would mention it. I know it is more of a problem with the English language. But still.
Thanks for the update. Enjoying the story!
Ashkari
(Verified Ink-slinger)
- Location
- United States
You know, it occurs to me that if Taylor could figure out some way to get 'permission' to modify an area from her power, she'd make an absolute goldmine of a security system.
I mean, there's all sorts of ways to kill off sims. The classic 'wall them in' or 'remove the ladders' tricks being classics. And with being able to just pass through floors and shift inventories around, writing some books with titles like "Hey someone's entered the building" would let her communicate with people in ghost form.
I mean, there's all sorts of ways to kill off sims. The classic 'wall them in' or 'remove the ladders' tricks being classics. And with being able to just pass through floors and shift inventories around, writing some books with titles like "Hey someone's entered the building" would let her communicate with people in ghost form.
Ashkari
(Verified Ink-slinger)
- Location
- United States
Dammit, I really hate how on mobile SV/SB have all those user links directly beneath the reply box... I'm forever mis-tapping and accidentally linking to someones profile and losing all my work.....
I had a nice post about Taylor's ratings.. but now its poofed because it was an edit of my prior comment and the draft autosave doesn't happen with edits... le sigh.
——————
So, to try again....
Seems pretty reasonable to give her a high thinker rating for info-gatherin.
Her Stranger 10 actually seems pretty warranted depending on what system your using for classifications. As a threat rating, if you're rating general threat (as opposed to specifically the threat vs a PRT team trying to bring you in), an extremely high stranger rating isn't off at all.
Canon Threat Assessments are speculative, often politically motivated, and the PRT tends to toss out higher than needed numbers 'just in cast'.
Here we have a Taylor who can security breach any building anywhere in the city, from her house or any other location, completely undetectably. She can probably steal basically anything that will fit in her inventory that isn't furniture, from anywhere in the city — so that includes things like personnel files, reports, ID cards, wallets, money, etc. Again all completely without ever risking being found out. Similarly, if she can move stuff around at that scale, including people's food... then she could easily remotely poison everything in everyone's refrigerator or cafeteria without them knowing.
To top it off, she can view and listen in on anything that happens anywhere in the city, and record it if she wants. Again, completely undetected. Even in a combat situation this is a manor threat, if she can simply go out of body and freeze time so she can scout the opposition and have as much time to formulate a plan as she wants. With some creative use, she can even use that to potentially attack someone without them ever knowing where she is, through the simple means of dropping things on people. Possibly even by putting dangerous things in people's pockets.
In short, she is the ultimate infiltrator / investigator / spy /assassin, who can operate 100% silently and invisibly with no way whatsoever to detect her presence until she's gotten what she wants. Secret identities cannot be safeguarded against her in any way, unless you simply never go home and never take your costume off to shower. And even then they might not be safe.
There might even be some aspects of... whatever the special ability purchase system is (I forget the name) that gets involved. Depends on if she told them about the lifetime achievements / dreams /etc features. There's some pretty bonkers stuff can get from fulling wishes and stuff eventually.
Edit: Lifetime Rewards is the name. There's definitely some Master/Stranger powers in there:
————-
Of course, it's gonna get interesting when/if the PRT discovers there's a hell of a lot more she could do.
She's got a potential major Trump rating if she is able to invest others with alternate Life States.
She may also end up with a fairly potent Master Rating for the same thing, if it turns out she can order other household Sims around. She could start doing things like attracting werewolves and witches, or building robots, and using them as minions.
Speaking of Simbots, there's the Tinker rating too - mad science is definitely a thing in The Sims, anywhere from breeding Cowplants (or w/e they're called), to making Aubrey from Little Shop of Horrors, to building rayguns, cloning pods, robots, and even rocketships that can bring back aliens, among other things. If she gets into mods, there's also enchanting magic items, too — meaning she's multiple kinds of Tinkers, even.
I had a nice post about Taylor's ratings.. but now its poofed because it was an edit of my prior comment and the draft autosave doesn't happen with edits... le sigh.
——————
So, to try again....
Seems pretty reasonable to give her a high thinker rating for info-gatherin.
Her Stranger 10 actually seems pretty warranted depending on what system your using for classifications. As a threat rating, if you're rating general threat (as opposed to specifically the threat vs a PRT team trying to bring you in), an extremely high stranger rating isn't off at all.
Canon Threat Assessments are speculative, often politically motivated, and the PRT tends to toss out higher than needed numbers 'just in cast'.
Here we have a Taylor who can security breach any building anywhere in the city, from her house or any other location, completely undetectably. She can probably steal basically anything that will fit in her inventory that isn't furniture, from anywhere in the city — so that includes things like personnel files, reports, ID cards, wallets, money, etc. Again all completely without ever risking being found out. Similarly, if she can move stuff around at that scale, including people's food... then she could easily remotely poison everything in everyone's refrigerator or cafeteria without them knowing.
To top it off, she can view and listen in on anything that happens anywhere in the city, and record it if she wants. Again, completely undetected. Even in a combat situation this is a manor threat, if she can simply go out of body and freeze time so she can scout the opposition and have as much time to formulate a plan as she wants. With some creative use, she can even use that to potentially attack someone without them ever knowing where she is, through the simple means of dropping things on people. Possibly even by putting dangerous things in people's pockets.
In short, she is the ultimate infiltrator / investigator / spy /assassin, who can operate 100% silently and invisibly with no way whatsoever to detect her presence until she's gotten what she wants. Secret identities cannot be safeguarded against her in any way, unless you simply never go home and never take your costume off to shower. And even then they might not be safe.
There might even be some aspects of... whatever the special ability purchase system is (I forget the name) that gets involved. Depends on if she told them about the lifetime achievements / dreams /etc features. There's some pretty bonkers stuff can get from fulling wishes and stuff eventually.
Edit: Lifetime Rewards is the name. There's definitely some Master/Stranger powers in there:
* Professional Slacker & Vacationer = Imp's power targeted at your boss, kinda. Basically maintain your job without ever working.
*Observant = More info-gathering, discovering other people's traits twice as fast.
*Office Hero, Attractive, Legendary Host = You are very much like Nice Guy.
* Discount Diner, Bookshop Bargainer, Haggler, Complimentary Entertainment, and several others that force others to give you freebies/discounts.
*Moodlet Manager - The ultimate Nice Guy / Gallant experience, if you can stick in some else's inventory (ie pockets) and trigger it on them.
*Observant = More info-gathering, discovering other people's traits twice as fast.
*Office Hero, Attractive, Legendary Host = You are very much like Nice Guy.
* Discount Diner, Bookshop Bargainer, Haggler, Complimentary Entertainment, and several others that force others to give you freebies/discounts.
*Moodlet Manager - The ultimate Nice Guy / Gallant experience, if you can stick in some else's inventory (ie pockets) and trigger it on them.
Of course, it's gonna get interesting when/if the PRT discovers there's a hell of a lot more she could do.
She's got a potential major Trump rating if she is able to invest others with alternate Life States.
She may also end up with a fairly potent Master Rating for the same thing, if it turns out she can order other household Sims around. She could start doing things like attracting werewolves and witches, or building robots, and using them as minions.
Speaking of Simbots, there's the Tinker rating too - mad science is definitely a thing in The Sims, anywhere from breeding Cowplants (or w/e they're called), to making Aubrey from Little Shop of Horrors, to building rayguns, cloning pods, robots, and even rocketships that can bring back aliens, among other things. If she gets into mods, there's also enchanting magic items, too — meaning she's multiple kinds of Tinkers, even.
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- Location
- United States of America
- Pronouns
- She/Her
OMG, Taylor is The Sleeper!
- Location
- Somewhere in the Ashes
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Her 3rd person mode is an unholy mix of Shaker, Stranger, and Thinker which can be used to more or less replicate some powerful Mover abilities as well. It's just gross.
- Location
- Mythodea
If I had this power, the first two items to get would be a portable boombox and a creepy doll/marionette.
Imagine just walking out of a Toilette stall and suddenly there is music behind you. You turn around and now there sits Chucky with a boombox in its lap where you sat a moment before.
Imagine just walking out of a Toilette stall and suddenly there is music behind you. You turn around and now there sits Chucky with a boombox in its lap where you sat a moment before.
Ashkari
(Verified Ink-slinger)
- Location
- United States
- Location
- Mythodea
Oh.
God.
That would be even better. Totally forgot about Justice Duck
- Location
- Odessa
The biggest obstackle for thinker rating is that she gets no thinker headaches. Which as I understand are a rule for thinkers. So testers probably are stumped, this looks more like a thinker rating, but works more like stranger power.
- Location
- UK
I'm...not sure where you got that from, but Thinker headaches don't indicate a Thinker. They just happen to be most common in powerful Thinkers, hence the name. Thinker refers to a power that lets the user get more information, skills or some form of enhanced perception. As such, Uber, Alexandria, Chevalier, Victor and Accord are all Thinkers and none of them suffer from Thinker headaches.
Ashkari
(Verified Ink-slinger)
- Location
- United States
This is incorrect in two ways.
First, Threat Assessments are not made on the basis of 'kind' of power, but rather the type of threat and the type of proportionate response required to combat it. In that respect, Thinkers are all about force multiplication through precise planning or information gathering.
Second, not all thinkers get headaches, anyway. Contessa for instance does not. Clairvoyant. Leonid. Victor. Uber. Just to name a few. I don't believe Number Man or Accord do either, afaik. In fact, primarily I think thinker headaches are limited to precog/pericog types. Remember, enhanced senses go under the thinker heading too. For that matter, Skitter herself is classed as a thinker, and she doesn't get standard thinker headaches either.
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Background lore information for this story
Aurora Moon
Verfied Insomniac with too much time on her hands
- Location
- USA, Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So, it occurred to me that there were a lot of background changes going on in my sims4/gamer story that wasn't likely going to be brought up in-universe because most of the story is going to be from Taylor's POV. And how would she know that it's odd that there's an absence of Gallant's presence, for example? She's never met him or known of him, so that would never be brought up.
But readers would probably want to know about things like that.
So here I'm going to list a lot of changes to the canon that probably won't get brought up in the story.
So as you guys know… There's no Cauldron group in this story at all, and the endbringers aren't really a thing that happens either. So that means there's no endbringer fight every four months or whatever…. And that there are no vial capes at all.
That means that any cauldron-created capes never ended up as capes in this AU, because most of them were usually people without the tumor-like growth in their heads that gave others powers.
So, as a result, there's no more:
Of course, Because the Eden shards are being sent to hosts the "natural" way alongside with Scion's shards, a few people still ended up having the same powers they had in canon.
For example, Legend and Hero, one of the few people to keep their powers from canon, still exists. But because they were natural triggers this time around instead of drinking their powers from a vial, their powers will still manifest a little bit differently than they did in canon.
Oh, yeah, that's the other thing. In this reality Hero never died… because there was no Siberian around to kill him.
Herald (Ziz), Hero, and Legend make up the Triumvirate and were the first founding members of the Protectorate.
Eidolon, or David, is still around but he has an entirely different power set this time around, so he can't unknowingly summon endbringers this time around. I don't want to spoil things too much, as seeing he might eventually show up in the story.
But the other thing that majorly changes the face of Earth Bet now that Endbringers isn't a thing?
Namely, how we treat villains. Without Endbringers, the PRT and local police forces have no reason to tolerate the worst of the lot, in the hopes that they'll help out at Endbringer battles.
So as a result, people tend to be harsher and cracks down on villains more often, especially if they've racked up a huge body count or committed plenty of crimes.
The real consequence of this is that all the gangs in Brockton Bay aren't as much of danger like they were in the original city, with most of the gangs' capes already in jail or dead. Only the most powerful ones that would be hard to arrest or keep contained tend to be out free on the streets. So people like cricket and the twins were jailed, etc… but Krieg and Hookwolf is still around. Likewise, Skidmark and Squealer were both jailed and or taken away into PRT custody, leaving capes like Mush to be a mostly ineffective gang leader, rendering the merchants nearly harmless.
Also, Lung isn't the leader of the ABB… because he had no reason to leave Japan because Levitivan wasn't around to set off that chain of events. So at this point in time, the ABB is just a small-time gang, created by young Asian teenagers and men banding together in response to the Neo-Nazi gang harassing and harming people living in the Asian districts.
The city still has a gang violence problem, due to the two main gangs fostering a major grudge against each other for certain reasons. But still not as bad as it was in canon.
Marquis on the other hand? He's still around, as much as Carol Dallon wishes it was otherwise. And he's still the Kingpin of crime in Brockton Bay. In this reality, he managed to evade authorities and the law by having people act as his double in public so that he would always have an alibi, and "evidence" that he wasn't the Marquis should anybody try to reveal his civilian persona to the entire world. He once made a complete fool out of Carol Dallon as a result, and that's one of the reasons why she still fosters a huge grudge against him to this day.
Of course, this means that Amelia and Vicky aren't adoptive sisters in this world, and instead have a very tense relationship of the non-romantic variety with each other… as we already saw in one chapter.
Any questions? Keep in mind I won't answer any that could be considered spoilers for any future chapters.
But readers would probably want to know about things like that.
So here I'm going to list a lot of changes to the canon that probably won't get brought up in the story.
So as you guys know… There's no Cauldron group in this story at all, and the endbringers aren't really a thing that happens either. So that means there's no endbringer fight every four months or whatever…. And that there are no vial capes at all.
That means that any cauldron-created capes never ended up as capes in this AU, because most of them were usually people without the tumor-like growth in their heads that gave others powers.
So, as a result, there's no more:
- The Travellers (Trickster, Sundancer, etc)
- A good chunk of Cauldron capes. No more Alexandria, etc.
- Battery (this also means that Assault formerly known as Madcap doesn't join the ENE branch when he eventually defects and joins the PRT. This pairing no longer exists as the logical consequence of altering things greatly. In fact, Madcap now goes by some other name now, because the name itself no longer makes sense without Battery around.
)
- Canary. But on the bright side, this means she never goes to the birdcage.
- As mentioned above, there's no more Gallant. Instead, Dean's power ended up in the hands of somebody else, a villain this time. The villain triggered naturally because Sicon had QA spread the Eden shards and send them out to human hosts.
- No more Coil… at least, not the Coil as we know him. Like with Dean's powers, Somebody else got the power instead. They go by a different name instead of Coil, however…
- No more Siberian, because Manton used to be a Cauldron cape. The same goes for shatterbird. In fact, as a consequence most of the Slaughterhouse nine as we know them doesn't really exist anymore. Jack Slash and Crawler are still around though because they're natural triggers. They're not paling around in a group though.
- Triumph. Same Deal as Dean, the power went to somebody else instead…. A different person who's working as a hero in California. We most likely won't hear much about this person.
- Mama Marthers, although we won't be dealing with any fallen members considering that there are no endbringers to be had.
- And finally, there's no such thing as case 53s. There are still going to be some "monster" capes who ended up being transformed by their own powers, but they'll still remember who they are and what they used to be.
Of course, Because the Eden shards are being sent to hosts the "natural" way alongside with Scion's shards, a few people still ended up having the same powers they had in canon.
For example, Legend and Hero, one of the few people to keep their powers from canon, still exists. But because they were natural triggers this time around instead of drinking their powers from a vial, their powers will still manifest a little bit differently than they did in canon.
Oh, yeah, that's the other thing. In this reality Hero never died… because there was no Siberian around to kill him.
Herald (Ziz), Hero, and Legend make up the Triumvirate and were the first founding members of the Protectorate.
Eidolon, or David, is still around but he has an entirely different power set this time around, so he can't unknowingly summon endbringers this time around. I don't want to spoil things too much, as seeing he might eventually show up in the story.
But the other thing that majorly changes the face of Earth Bet now that Endbringers isn't a thing?
Namely, how we treat villains. Without Endbringers, the PRT and local police forces have no reason to tolerate the worst of the lot, in the hopes that they'll help out at Endbringer battles.
So as a result, people tend to be harsher and cracks down on villains more often, especially if they've racked up a huge body count or committed plenty of crimes.
The real consequence of this is that all the gangs in Brockton Bay aren't as much of danger like they were in the original city, with most of the gangs' capes already in jail or dead. Only the most powerful ones that would be hard to arrest or keep contained tend to be out free on the streets. So people like cricket and the twins were jailed, etc… but Krieg and Hookwolf is still around. Likewise, Skidmark and Squealer were both jailed and or taken away into PRT custody, leaving capes like Mush to be a mostly ineffective gang leader, rendering the merchants nearly harmless.
Also, Lung isn't the leader of the ABB… because he had no reason to leave Japan because Levitivan wasn't around to set off that chain of events. So at this point in time, the ABB is just a small-time gang, created by young Asian teenagers and men banding together in response to the Neo-Nazi gang harassing and harming people living in the Asian districts.
The city still has a gang violence problem, due to the two main gangs fostering a major grudge against each other for certain reasons. But still not as bad as it was in canon.
Marquis on the other hand? He's still around, as much as Carol Dallon wishes it was otherwise. And he's still the Kingpin of crime in Brockton Bay. In this reality, he managed to evade authorities and the law by having people act as his double in public so that he would always have an alibi, and "evidence" that he wasn't the Marquis should anybody try to reveal his civilian persona to the entire world. He once made a complete fool out of Carol Dallon as a result, and that's one of the reasons why she still fosters a huge grudge against him to this day.
Of course, this means that Amelia and Vicky aren't adoptive sisters in this world, and instead have a very tense relationship of the non-romantic variety with each other… as we already saw in one chapter.
Any questions? Keep in mind I won't answer any that could be considered spoilers for any future chapters.