Not really, it warns you the person can shapeshift. The subratings of brute, mover, etc warn you what the new form can do, but being caught off guard because you didn't know he can change forms would be bad.
Although I have yet to see seen a villain say "This isn't even my final form!"
Not really, it warns you the person can shapeshift. The subratings of brute, mover, etc warn you what the new form can do, but being caught off guard because you didn't know he can change forms would be bad.
Although I have yet to see seen a villain say "This isn't even my final form!"
Disclaimer: Worm is owned by Wildbow, and he can keep it.
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Chapter 54: Insidious
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August Prince.
August... Prince...
Alec knew the boy had been hurt. The kid, all of nine or ten years old, had Triggered. That didn't happen to normal, happy, healthy children. At least, not ones who weren't Valefor.
And Alec wasn't sure he believed the story behind Valefor, really. It would fit with what he knew of the Cycle but only near the projected end. Where 'Triggers' were supposed to be a low threshold to help ensure that everyone on the planet had powers and were fighting each other.
Alec's fingers tapped at the steering wheel of his van with a frenetic, irritated rhythm.
"So..." Minerva asked, breaking the tense silence that had filled the van as Alec drove. "Who was that?"
"...A parahuman," Alec said after several seconds of thought wherein he realized he'd never asked the boy's name.
"...He's a kid," Minnie said as, in the back of the van, there was a muffled thump and a not so muffled 'Fuck!'. "He is a kid, right? Not some Changer-Stranger-danger thing going on, is there?"
"Yeah," Alec tersely told the woman. "He's a kid. Triggered in Hollywood after his director got a bit too handsy."
"Cheesus crust..." the woman muttered as she sank down in her seat. "Did you call the Protectorate? It's definitely not safe for him to be out on his own. He's, like, eight!"
"I gave him Alexandria's number," Alec told the protector of mice. "Told him to drop my name and Alexandria herself should come and check on him."
'Where am I?!' Narwhal shouted from the back of the van.
"He's still a kid," Minerva pointed out. "Leaving him on his own like this is... Okay, it's really bad when I'm the one saying it's irresponsible, isn't it?"
"He's a Master," Alec said as they took a turn off the main strip of Vegas, down a road that probably hadn't existed in his reality which led to the Las Vegas Protectorate building. "Kid needs to be in control or his power is going to poke and prod at him. I don't -like- it, at all, but trying to force the issue would just cause problems."
"...So you're treating him like a cat?" Minerva asked. It took Alec a moment of thought before he eventually agreed, nodding at the comparison. "Okay. I don't like it, but I get it."
For a moment, the only sounds inside of the van were the quiet rumble of the engine and the loud stumbling of a hungover Narwhal.
"Where am I?" the tall woman deeply growled out when she finally found her way to the front of the vehicle. "Why doesn't your house have any- Are we in your van?!"
"Yes, we are," Alec told the woman as he pulled over in front of the Protectorate Headquarters. "What would you like for that headache, Narwhal? Water? Aspirin? Parahuman healing?"
"Parahuman healing?" the giant asked, confusion in her voice.
"Coming right up." Alec grinned as he leaned over and tapped the woman's arm, Gifting her with a brief hit of Temporal Perfection.
"What?!" Narwhal demanded, jerking further back as her forcefields sprang to life around her. "What did you- and my headache is fading. You know you could get in trouble for doing that, right?"
"Oh, wow, geeze," Alec sarcastically fired off. "I put a bullet in Heartbreaker's skull but it's the healing I'll get in trouble for! Not illegally crossing international boundaries, hunting Nazis for sport or drowning child sex traffickers, but the healing!"
"...You're an ass, aren't you?" Narwhal asked as she pinched the bridge of her nose.
"Sarcasm is the mind's natural defense against stupidity," Alec fired back.
"You realize that you just confessed to a number of crimes and that I'm an officer of the law, correct?" Narwhal asked. "I am going to have to act on-"
Narwhal disappeared from the van, Switched with a patch of empty air directly in front of the Protectorate building.
"...That's going to cause her a lot of problems, isn't it?" Mouse Protector asked as Narwhal looked around in confusion, her eyes sliding right off the side of the van.
"Hmm?"
"Well, I mean, I didn't see any place that she could hide a passport," Minnie explained. "Did you?"
"I did not check," Alec admitted. "That seemed a bit more inappropriate than I'm actually willing to, you know, do."
"So..." Mouse Protector led off as they watched Narwhal stomp her way to the Protectorate's front doors. She pulled and they didn't open, so she had to awkwardly lean down next to a speaker next to the door. "What's next?"
"Next is me going off to kill the leadership of the Fallen nearby," Alec admitted as the compass in his dashboard began to slowly rotate. "They've got a thing for, you know, kidnapping and 'breeding' parahuman kids. You might want to hang out here, burn some of the Legend money you're getting. Or go home for a few days until things hit the news. They've got some real nasty Masters, folks that can manipulate your senses if you so much as hear their names, or one guy who Triggered as a baby and can give people commands that they have to obey, even as they try and fight them."
"...Don't you get copies of powers from people that you beat, though?" Minerva asked, uncertainty creeping into her voice.
"Unfortunately," Alec agreed with a nod. "Master powers look useful but the thought of them just makes my skin crawl," the man admitted. "I'm much more comfortable with a gun. Less moral ambiguity."
"...I can't believe I actually agree with that," Minerva muttered. "You're a bad influence, you know that?"
"I do," Alec agreed as someone finally let Narwhal into the Protectorate building. "When you go and make your report to Legend, can you have him pass a message on to Alexandria for me?"
"Uh..." Minerva looked uncertain for a moment before shrugging. "Sure?"
"Tell him to tell her 'You either do the right thing, or I will.'"
"...I feel like there's a lot of meaning in that."
"There is," Alec agreed with a sigh as he leaned forward, crossing his arms over the top of the steering wheel. "Alexandria justifies things to herself by saying that everything she does is for the sake of saving other people. That kid? He's the line in the sand. She either does right by him or she's going to have to admit that she's not trying to save people."
Alec sighed quietly as he looked out to the distance, to the desert sands glowing under the cruel daylight.
"If you can't stop to try and help a child, crying and alone? Then you're just another monster. You might have chains, things like 'morals' or 'civility' but..." Alec sighed again as he struggled to put his thoughts into words.
"It's your choices that define who you are, not the justifications you give yourself."
That's a powerful line and really sums up what's wrong with Earth Bet. Superpowers may make it worse, but it's a bunch of people justifying why it's okay for them to be a monster that makes it a hellhole.
I'm really enjoying this side story. Alchemist in a place where he can do objective good is nice. It's honestly probably a nice break for him. Things have gotten complex in the mainline and having some real bad guys to work off stress with is just perfect.
"...So you're treating him like a cat?" Minerva asked. It took Alec a moment of thought before he eventually agreed, nodding at the comparison. "Okay. I don't like it, but I get it."
"I don't like it, but I get it. Sometimes hard decisions have to be made by hard people. Sometimes there just isn't a good answer. Sometimes, you have to resort to… cats."
The character sheet is inflating the word count. I'm glad I finally figured that out. I couldn't figure out how I was getting through the chapters so quickly.
Morality in Worm is weird, human Master powers are incredibly horrifying.
That's a powerful line and really sums up what's wrong with Earth Bet. Superpowers may make it worse, but it's a bunch of people justifying why it's okay for them to be a monster that makes it a hellhole.
Far too many people in fiction and in reality try to claim the ends justify the means, and then cherry pick the ends.
The ends can, in fact, justify the means. HOWEVER, you have to include all the ends. So for Cauldron's human experimentation? The case 53's are part of the ends. Not just part of the means. All the people who died in the Brockton Bay experiment? Part of the ends. The people raped by the fallen to pump their numbers? Part of the ends.
The character sheet is inflating the word count. I'm glad I finally figured that out. I couldn't figure out how I was getting through the chapters so quickly.
I apologize for that. The chapter itself wasn't very long but I wanted to make sure that things moved in a consistent manner forward and the characters, as well as their locations and motivations, were clearly spelled out.
You can't seriously be telling us that your world's healers can just... rip and tear their way through some of the strongest parahumans here? I mean, if he's just a healer? What are your actual parahumans like?
Superman? What's a- He... can move the moon? With, like, a giant device? Right?
His bare hands? And he can move faster than the speed of light?
I apologize for that. The chapter itself wasn't very long but I wanted to make sure that things moved in a consistent manner forward and the characters, as well as their locations and motivations, were clearly spelled out.
Which, it turns out, only took about 1.1k words.
Hah! You're kidding, right?
You are kidding... right?
You can't seriously be telling us that your world's healers can just... rip and tear their way through some of the strongest parahumans here? I mean, if he's just a healer? What are your actual parahumans like?
Superman? What's a- He... can move the moon? With, like, a giant device? Right?
His bare hands? And he can move faster than the speed of light?
A more amusing thing is to discuss what DC classifies as a street-level parahuman. If you were to tell them that POISON IVY is classified as a street-level parahuman for their standards, then every single potential power scale gets absolutely broken.
Or how about what they could deem as the scariest changer, Clayface? In theory, he can't be killed by pretty much anyone who isn't Legend or Eidolon. As long as a piece of him remains intact, he will eventually come back. And he can literally be anyone with extreme difficulty of ever telling the difference. Or how about a scarier option that leaves his swamp sometimes, Solomon Grundy, who in a single incarnation, was capable of threatening Superman?
The character sheet is inflating the word count. I'm glad I finally figured that out. I couldn't figure out how I was getting through the chapters so quickly.
Morality in Worm is weird, human Master powers are incredibly horrifying.
Al has had access to ones on par and even worse for a long time, now. Charm Person/Monster, Suggestion, Dominate Person/Monster, Mindrape, and lots more can do some pretty awful and skeevy things. And that's just D&D/Pathfinder, and just a handful from there. He has access to far more elsewhere.
Jacob paused as he entered his little poppets tea room. It was not the lack of blood, brains, or body parts that gave him pause, nor was it the plastic table and tiny tea set - a waft of steam and the smell in the air confirming that it was indeed filled with some kind of tea - and little teacakes in one of those multi-layered trays. The rows of spiderbots resting on the shelves and ceiling of the ex-children's room was a nice touch though.
It was the large man sitting in the tiny plastic chair across from a very excited bonesaw. She was dressed not in her usual blood stained apron indicating that she was tinkering, but a frilly dress and a… wand? A stick or some kind with a star on top. Oh dear, she was in one of her tea party moods again. Best to play along.
Turning his eyes onto the man, he seemed like a okay bloke, nothing to worry about. He might be a bit uncomfortable sitting on that tiny plastic chair suited for a younger person with shorter legs, but that's not his problem.
"What's going on here, poppet? Who's your guest?" Jacob sauntered in, taking a seat offered by her, knees almost to his chest.
"Oh, this is Mister Alec, he was telling me all about magical girls!" Bonesaw almost squealed. Jacob winced, he hadn't heard her squeal since she got her first toy to use powers.
"That's nice." He took an offered teacake. Tasty. "What about them?"
"Oh, they're amazing, they're the goodest of girls-" something in Jacob's brain was trying to warn him of something as he listened to Bonesaw but he couldn't think anything." -and they fight bad things and-"
"Riley."
The two looked at their guest.
"You haven't offered any refreshments to our host."
Bonesaw brightened up, "Oh yes Mister Jack! We have some new blends today!" She clapped her hands and then presented some small tin boxes. "We have earl grey, green tea, spiders, chamomile,-"
"Spiders?" He asked, hand paused over taking another teacake.
"Spiders it is!" She grinned
"No wai-"
But it was too late, as the collection of spider bots laying in ambush began rushing in and began the assault on the rest of the S9. Being the one who built most of their personal defenses, Riley knew exactly how to dismantle them.
—
Alec sipped his Chamomile from the tiny cup, pinky out, ignoring the screams and explosions outside as Riley brought her attention back to him.
"Now tell me more of this Sakura and her cards!"
@Mister Ficser no need to apologize. You're pumping out updates daily and that's no easy feat. I just kept scratching my head when I'd see a 3k update and blast through it so fast.
Looking forward to Al's future shenanigans.
I'm really enjoying this side story. Alchemist in a place where he can do objective good is nice. It's honestly probably a nice break for him. Things have gotten complex in the mainline and having some real bad guys to work off stress with is just perfect.
Grundy is magic, he should always be a threat to Kal and Kara. How much of a threat varies wildly from one incarnation to the next, but regardless of whether the current one has the durability to last more than a moment, he should always be able to harm them. Of course, very few DC writers remember this (or are allowed to remind us of it if and when they do).
I miss Nice Grundy, but it's unlikely he will ever get another (re-)incarnation. As pointed out near the end of his appearance in Starman, there really wasn't an awful lot of good or nice to be found in Cyrus Gold even before he was murdered and his body dumped in Slaughter Swamp.
(Ugh, and checking up on Grundy's history has reminded me yet again how much I loathe A Certain Wannabe Great Writer/Edgiest-of-Edgelords/Self-Absorbed Total Fucking Wanker/Talentless Hack and I remain completely bemused that they somehow have a long-running career despite the shit they inflict onto the world.)
Yeah, should be a bit more specific. I mean more that if Superman didn't get help quickly in that fight? Grundy would have been more than capable of just beating him to death.
Most incarnations of Grundy usually aren't able to do that.
