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Project Prometheus (Original Setting Superhero Quest)

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Parabola said:
I think the most straightforward answer to this is that the Philosophers might not be the final boss here - perhaps that's the Interlocutor?

If so, it'd explain them not being a bigger threat in a universe where they did know our secrets: they'd still want the method of making metahumans of their own, but we wouldn't be a threat to them per se, because they'd immediately try to co-opt it / have us unwittingly help them.


Given that Horizon is next to the sea, I think an amphibian of some kind is not a bad idea. Perhaps a frog? She is a witch, and a frog would be a lot easier to carry around than a crocodile or something.
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Hmm. Turtles? Turtles could work.

Or we could UNLEASH THE LOBSTERMEN.
 
Parabola said:
I think the most straightforward answer to this is that the Philosophers might not be the final boss here - perhaps that's the Interlocutor?

If so, it'd explain them not being a bigger threat in a universe where they did know our secrets: if they're more worried about the Interlocutor, while they'd still want the method of making metahumans of their own, we wouldn't be the threat they'd focus on, because they'd immediately try to co-opt PP / have us unwittingly help them.


Given that Horizon is next to the sea, I think an amphibian of some kind is not a bad idea. Perhaps a frog? She is a witch, and a frog would be a lot easier to carry around than a crocodile or something.
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Look I am just saying monitor lizard could be cool

Also I tryed to set up the possible recruit I made with an amphibian because I wanted to give him animal empowerment with wild hunt plan
 
EternalObserver said:
Personally , I'd go Song to maintain our cover of not having metahuman projects going on, as well as giving as a frontliner. I've accounted for Belle Sabreuse' position long before I've pitched about Song, and I think I still want him in that position.
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Song is kind of a bad candidate for that, considering he's pretty old and well-known enough people will notice him developing powers.
 
God damn you butterman(originally a typo but it gonna run with it) for making a story so incredibly engaging and a cast of characters so fleshed out and interesting and funny and lovable(except Crusades there's not a single person there I have it in me to like except Ronin) and then not having several more days worth of chapters already posted for me to read!

DAMN YOU AND YOUR HUMAN LIMITATIONS!

RRAHH (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
 
StarSingerBlue said:
Song is kind of a bad candidate for that, considering he's pretty old and well-known enough people will notice him developing powers.
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I mean, that's also why we've been brainstorming ways we could get around that ever since he was revealed as a candidate? Like giving him transformation or Deadman's powers, or figuring out ways of de-aging him.

My overall point was he's likely better candidate for cover than Yara, with her getting powers reaching A-S right after Hero Worship makes it more sus, even with her being just at the right age of convenience.

Of course, you could argue about Soraia or Shelley as the next candidate as well, but 1) we sorta already have a plan for Shelley that was discussed before, which requires her to not go now, 2) compared to all others, Soraia has like the least discussions on what combination is right for her, which made me unsure of where to place her, 3) I still want a front liner, which is why I'm forwarding Song, who Bitterman had revealed a synergy that could be good for him, and 4) if we're talking about REP problems, while Song indeed has the biggest problem in that regard, don't forget Soraia and Shelley are public figures of the community in Apiary, the former even moreso as an administrative staff. They all need cover stories as well (tho depending on what may happen in coming turn, with Crusade and Philosophers pressuring JU more and more, they may not be as necessary for long)

There's also Cain of course, but I've posted my stance on him before: I want him to have more screen time and character moments before we officially decide to really induct him to the crew.
 
Bitterman said:
"What was the Elysium Station like?" you ask matter-of-factly.

She leaps back like she's seen a ghost, her face suddenly pale. You gaze at her impassively, not wishing to push the issue if she was unwilling to share.

That, oddly enough, seems to be what gets her to answer you.

". . . I never saw the Station until right before I came to Horizon," she admits "I am what the Station-residents call 'rung-trash'; an orphaned child living in the empty spaces in the middle part of the Ladder. We're little more than workers to perform dangerous labor to them."
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Bitterman said:
She looks away. ". . . I was an orphan, true, but I did have family. A band of other children with whom I lived with for as long as I can remember. We all dreamed of one day living in Elysium-proper.."

She closes her eyes in agony.

"They're all gone now."
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Call it a hunch, but I have a feeling the rung kids worked with the Defiance Unit to break into Elysium, and that White Hawk sold them out for a place in the Horae Guard/the Philosophers.
Bitterman said:
"The most popular tag in the last week has been Valiant Justice/Valiant Gold. They're calling it 'JustGold'."
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We've got to make more ship moments between Mona and Ellie in front of the public. JustGold being no 1 ship is a tragedy.
 
EternalObserver said:
Soraia has like the least discussions on what combination is right for her, which made me unsure of where to place her
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Still pretty sure she ends up our first real primary info/utility build and we do something like ispy/miss conception/millions/hunch after 1 spoonful while trying for some invis oriented synergy.

The plans for Shelley and Song means neither will be, the thread plans on using Cain later than some of the other heroes, Homer isn't going to be that type of build. So unless Yara ends up with that type of info oriented build as a psychic with invuln, which I do doubt, she seems primed to fill this niche first of our options.

Plus frankly a info and invisibility oriented powerset is probably a lot easier to hide the power of and build cover stories for.
 
Pawn Lelouch said:
Still pretty sure she ends up our first real primary info/utility build and we do something like ispy/miss conception/millions/hunch after 1 spoonful while trying for some invis oriented synergy.

The plans for Shelley and Song means neither will be, the thread plans on using Cain later than some of the other heroes, Homer isn't going to be that type of build. So unless Yara ends up with that type of info oriented build as a psychic with invuln, which I do doubt, she seems primed to fill this niche first of our options.

Plus frankly a info and invisibility oriented powerset is probably a lot easier to hide the power of and build cover stories for.
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Mostly because we have limited supply of Ambrosia I haavent really been cionsideriong She;lley... But I figured we were optimizing her for ESP
 
Crazyone47 said:
Mostly because we have limited supply of Ambrosia I haavent really been cionsideriong She;lley... But I figured we were optimizing her for ESP
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I know at least Kermie and I are planning to fight to make her a Nox build, potentially with Autobiokinesis for blending into crowds, which inherently is pretty optimized for Esp and cover stories. But yeah, she's probably not going to be empowered till we have something worked out with the R-Train I imagine.
 
I'm also interested in a hybrid Nox/Red Huntress build… though first, I have to think of a build name that isn't "The Ultimate Predator".
 
Pawn Lelouch said:
Still pretty sure she ends up our first real primary info/utility build and we do something like ispy/miss conception/millions/hunch after 1 spoonful while trying for some invis oriented synergy.
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I was thinking of making her more of a teleporter considering we really need one. We can mix Memoria and ISpy for what I think is a good information-gathering build.
 
masterofmadness said:
Honestly, I am starting to wonder how you expected us to win in the first place if this is us doing well. How were supposed to deal with the Philosophers crap if they knew how to create metahumans too!

Like we have at least three different plots by them we are barely even beginning to manage to hold off with everything we have now! How were we going to be able to deal with more!
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I honestly kinda agree here.
 
I think we are mutually in a bit of a spot.

From the QM side: Mona is wacky strong and our shenanigans leading to secretly only needing to lose out on one "pre-Movement-association" led to us being a lot more successful than expected, leading to a lot of other opportunities we wouldn't have otherwise had and getting into the Apiary and behind its defenses, meaning that we've been able to maintain a lot of operational secrecy. Because of this and the borderline-painful levels of integrity Bitterman operates at, we simultaneously don't know some things we reasonably could (lore gated behind ops checks and luck checks, my beloathed) and our opponents don't know a lot of things they were at least a little bit expected to know. Which has led to an improvisation-based-shadow-war, and putting one set of genius-level-planning on the QM side of the ball against a dozen genius-level-planners? Look, I've run enough tabletop to know 1v4 is a bad matchup, never mind 1v12. It _is_ a cooperative sort of endeavor so we're creating a really interesting story, but the lack of expected information on both sides is leading to unexpected actions and unexpectable outcomes.

From the player side: there's a lot of things we don't know, we keep running into time-limited activities where we're able to (figuratively) catch a falling person wearing a bunch of shiny rings instead of arriving and finding their body and a few hidden rings. We are aware of things we can do something about and because we keep running into really interesting characters and want to engage with them as characters rather than corpses (Horizon has enough of those). The requirements to accomplish something seem out of reach and yet we keep striving and keep reaching and keep finding new things out of reach and keep reaching and the day we reach and it fails is gonna hurt. I'm sure there's other things here but as someone who's only been here for the last week or two I don't know everything, even if I did read through the whole thread to get here.

I'm _sure_ I'm missing something, and I'm just as much out here in the cheap seats as everybody else, but (to continue to use the Audience / Stage / etc. metaphor) I've directed enough TV shows to know the challenges in putting on a play and the mutual not-knowing-of-things is making things more difficult on both sides.
 
It also depends on how much technical education Lantern has. Theres a huge variance between
"Their science guy did a bunch of lab shit to some Goldnine, and then they put what's-her-face in a tube and poured the stuff in, and then she had new superpowers."
And
"Dr. Mammoth Ibis, working from Valiant Silver's notes, developed a process using Goldnine and DNA from deceased metahumans, to give baseline humans superpowers. It works by [technobabble]. Their first succesfult test was performed on Mona Merola-Morales, incorporating samples from Novalight, Soldier X, and Crimson Soprano. Her new powers include flight, energy blasts, and enhanced durability."

Even the first one is a big deal because they'd have a more realistic view of our capabilities, and they'd have a direction to start researching and they could ask Lantern to do more specific spying to skip parts of the research process, but it's not nearly as bad as the Mysteries of the Hand being able to do our thing on top of their existing advantages

Unrelated: Given SB traced all our financials, im concerned she'll get involved in the Ghost Dragon Triad mess
 
It is possible they don't actually know the state ot our finances and just forged something. It only needs to hold up to a cursory inspection by crusade since it supports what crusade wants to hear.
 
Orbmorb said:
but it's not nearly as bad as the Mysteries of the Hand being able to do our thing on top of their existing advantages
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Yes, I think people are not taking into account the massive investment required to get to Ambrosia.

Nora, an Algernon who specialized in the study of metahuman powers, nearly rebounded into oblivion for Project Prometheus. Then it took another Algernon specializing in genetics, Ibis, to finish it based on those notes. And he still used his power to prepare the first sample.

This isn't some beginner recipe you learn by reading an eyewitness account of the chef. So in the event Lantern spied the project, we would mainly be concerned with PR first, goldnine supply second, and then third is infiltrators coming to steal the notes and/or sabotage equipment.
 
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Also I'm even more convinced that we should give Song a Deadman combo, since apparently keeping our process a secret has been a very, very important reason we've not just straight up lost and been put into something like a death-spiral or at least a, "How badly do we want to lose for the next half-dozen issues while building up the ability to then win afterwards if we can endure" situation.

So, like, yes, let's keep the Bullshit coming in terms of excuses or so on!
 
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