As Jack Slash has painfully taught us, if you're in Wormverse, the biggest, most important cheat power you can have is to somehow get Shardspace "on your side". I've seen fics where the protag achieves this by providing a better service at a lower price than their competition (e.g. One More Trigger, where the team's training methods just happen to scratch the itch of "consistently novel power use in a combat context" that Zion configured his side of the aisle to seek out), and I've seen fics where the protag's non-parahuman outside context power intrigues nearby Shards enough to start buddying up (e.g. mpπplayer's stuff), but it's novel to see a protag get into this situation because their outside-context power is itself "on the network" and is thus drumming up enthusiasm in the background as a side effect of normal Passenger chatter.
There's bigger, even in canon (looking at you, Path To Victory), but it's definitely no small thing. There are a
lot of little ways Shards can make your life easier or harder, and when powers that involve other powers get involved there's very few limits. Achronal Engine liking Jacqueline is the most important part, given that Achronal Engine is the one in her head, but the rest of it is pretty big too.
An outside-context Shard being interesting to other Shards and being the popular kid among them seems like a pretty obvious plot beat, one I'm pretty sure pretty much
has to have been done before, but now that you mention it I can't think of any other examples either. It's like Dinah showing up at the Bank Heist or Jacqueline calling Blackwell "Principal Blackheart", it seems like it should have been done before but I can't find any examples.
Given just how many outside-context powers fanfic has subjected Worm to, that feels
weird, even with how many of them aren't Shard-based. Some of them should absolutely be
incredibly appealing to other Shards for their raw Data potential alone, but I can't say I've seen it happen before. Even A Darker Path just had the outside-context Shard achieve power in Shard society through raw might and intimidation.
Until now, I wasn't sure whether AE actually had a way to generate negentropy, or whether it was just "faking it" by importing potential energy from the alternate Earth where it was deployed. I figured the latter wouldn't be as interesting, since, after all, there are already plenty of Parahuman powers that can fake negentropy (Panacea's healing, Grey Boy's time loops...)
No, this was planned from the first mention of the second law of thermodynamics, and Achronal Engine's mention was meant to be explicit, if quiet, confirmation.
All Shards, or at least all the ones with Hosts and probably the vast majority of those without, violate Conservation of Energy if you only look at a single universe at a time, it's an extremely basic function for them, so Achronal Engine wouldn't make that mistake.
...I wonder if Accord will ever butt his head into the story as things progress. A parahuman whose power is literally "make things less chaotic" seems almost deliberately crafted to be the perfect catnip for the guy.
Maybe.
Even more than the fact that Jacqueline's power would be appealing to the man, they make
excellent foils for each other. Their ultimate goals are basically the same, both aiming to fix the broken world they live in, and they both plan to use other people, systems, and organisations to do it. They're both Parahumans who have very little direct combat power but the ability to impact both other Parahumans society at large through means that their powers help them with but which are themselves fundamentally non-parahuman in nature.
Accord's help him more directly, by planning them out, while Jacqueline's aura mostly serves as a social lever and way to do stuff/present the possibility of doing stuff for people, but the result is similar. They both possess a great deal of soft power while having considerable amounts of hard power tied up with them despite not personally posing much more of a combat threat than an average person of their body type. They're both very much the exception in both canon Earth Bet and in Worm stories in general for it.
They're both playing a very different game from the rest of Parahuman society, especially the part of it we tend to see.
And yet they're not really playing by the same rules. They're on the same board, but they're looking at it from very different angles. Fundamentally, they're two very different people despite their similarities, and their ways of shaping society are even more divergent.
Accord is a planner. He's
the planner, at least on Earth Bet. There are people who are better at actually getting results than him, though not many, but nobody plans things out like Accord. He's precise, meticulous, and he's done his research in excruciating detail. Unforeseen elements do happen, and sometimes his information or his assumptions are wrong, but if things go right he's planned everything down to the last detail.
In comparison, what Jacqueline has barely qualifies as a plan. Accord certainly wouldn't acknowledge it as such. She's not the
worst long-term planner among capes, given that she has an eye on the long term at all, but her plan for the long term is more of an outline. She's got ideas for building up useful resources, a few vague areas where resources should be applied (but very few specifics), a lot of opportunism, a willingness to get other people to help her with the details, and, most importantly, a lot of built up skill and thinking on the matter dearest to her heart: people's feelings.
Accord, at his best, accounts for how other people feel about him and his plans as an obstacle, something to overcome. And a particular difficult and hard-to-understand one at that. Oftentimes, he fails to account for the matter at all, with both individuals and broader society. It's one of his two biggest weaknesses, the other being the sheer unpredictable nature of Parahumans, Endbringers, Triggers, and Shards. The man simply comes off as deeply unlikeable, callous, and abrasive, despite his ostenible civility and icy politeness, and he never does
anything to fix that, and his plans are frequently viscerally repulsive even when there's sound reasoning behind them.
Jacqueline, in contrast, has managing (or, less charitably, manipulating) people's feelings as her go-to response in pretty much every situation. She thinks on a social level first and foremost, and if a problem
can be addresssed in that manner she will. This isn't always in a positive, friendly manner, as evidenced by her teardown of Purity and her plans for the Empire in general, but even when she's hostile she's attacking opinion, public or personal, and ways of thinking as her first resort. Unless she's dealing with something that simply can't be addressed that way, like an immediate physical threat, "people's feelings" is always her primary area of concern and action.
It's what she's good at. Aura or no aura, though the aura, and, in particular, its healing, is definitely a
major advantage in that field. It's Jacqueline's greatest personal goal, focus, and strength and Accord's greatest failing, inconsideration, and weakness. (Personally, and arguably in regards to his powerset.)
Jacqueline and Accord make great foils for each other. They're arguably better foils than Jacqueline and the character Jacqueline was specifically designed to
be a foil for. (I'll talk about that if asked, but this already long and that would have to be at
least equally so.
Plus I'm curious if anyone's figured it out.)
Unfortunately, like that character, Accord is also difficult to work into Orderly. There's an endgame planned out, and while he could perhaps be included in it to some degree, it really couldn't do him justice. He'd end up feeling jammed in if he played a major role in it, or really anything beyond a cameo, and putting him in before it wouldn't work much better.
Jacqueline's also just not really on his level. Not yet. She's shaping up to be, but she's still mostly
just shaping up. She wouldn't necessarily have to be his
equal when their storyline started, but she would need at least a solid foundation and
some experience actually playing the broader game for it to work like how I envision it.
Then there's the matter of introducing him. I just don't know how to do that. It would have to be about
him, not the Ambassadors, and I don't think he's stupid enough to imitate Coil anyway.
Finally, Accord is
hard to write. Not him personally, but his plans. If you're really engaging with him, you need to write those plausibly and be able to at least follow them when you're writing. By no means an easy task. There's a reason why most fics keep him as a distant side character engaging in the background, take him out quickly, or don't deal with him at all, and it's not
just because he's obnoxious and catching his attention and giving him time to plan is a terrible idea from an in-universe perspective.
TL,DR: Accord as a character has an immense amount of potential, particularly with Jacqueline as the protagonist, but it's immensely difficult to actually bring that potential
out, particularly with Jacqueline as the protagonist. I don't know if I can pull it off, and even if I figure out how I don't think I
should before the planned endpoint of Orderly.
Maybe for a sequel, but I'm not going to seriously consider any until Orderly is wrapped up, or at least nearly so.
All that stuff they hold now being shared
