Actually, thinking more on it, some parahuman sex workers might well in fact have triggered first. A lot of the sorts of desperate circumstances that could lead to triggers could also lead to a need for money in a low-opportunity environment -- but it's not called The Oldest Profession because of low and inconsistent demand. If a person already has an inclination in that direction, or just a lack of aversion to the inherent aspects of one or more types of sex work, and the main remaining barrier is the danger involved, there are a lot of powers that could drastically reduce that danger one way or another. And beyond access to money, if the parahuman has heroic inclinations, well, hey, there's an under-officially-protected group right there that they could lend their new abilities to.
Generally, people that trigger have more lucrative moneymakers than sex work. At that point any economic desperation driving one into sex work is basically gone, so if a parahuman triggers and
then proceeds into sex work, either their power was not monetizeable, or they were just down for sex work in general without being driven into it by desperate circumstances.
Capes that are sex workers therefore usually start as unpowered sex workers, trigger from some aspect of their life (whether the abuses society gladly heaps on sex workers, bad clients, or any other part of their life), and at that point they don't have a driving economic need but they've familiarized themselves with the job, are overall down with it, and even if they don't continue it directly, their friends are there so they'll still protect them.
I wonder if Ereshkigal can bring a vehicle of some sort into her shadow realm? An electric scooter or something, maybe? Then she could, for instance, have skipped the long bus ride, presumably taken a more or less straight line through where the bay is in the now-shadow world, and ended up in the shadow world under her old house without risk of being spotted on the way. And it could have great future utility, of course.
She can, she doesn't need to, and it wouldn't really help.
She absolutely can bring anything that fits into a shadow down there. She doesn't need to bring a vehicle to move around fast, she can literally surf the internal darkness.
But the thing about that kind of fast travel is she doesn't have a
map. If she misses her angle on crossing the Bay she's off under the Atlantic Ocean and she really doesn't have any way to get back up that doesn't put her deep underwater, until she finds a shadow that
isn't a kilometer underwater. And she doesn't have any way to navigate to find one from her underworld. Crossing bodies of water is basically going fully blind and hoping you're pointed in the right direction.
And if she
does successfully get back to land? I mean, she's looking at the city from below, through patches of shadow. Any landmarks that are even visible look real different from down there and whether you see them at all is spotty. She can use her underworld to fast-travel 'away' but trying to go to a particular place is a real navigational exercise and Persephone is
not the kind of survivalist that can pull that off.
Third, now this family's in Cauldron's debt; they're additional, new willing agents.
Exactly how much they can accomplish for Cauldron's sake is its own question (they clearly aren't powerful, neither shardwise nor politically), but Cauldron are believers in the value of
position. Just having a body in the right place at the right time can do a surprising amount, especially when you can
perfectly guide and activate them.
And they certainly weren't soft civilians. They reacted to Persephone's attack with
instantaneous coordinated violence. Attack a
military base and you will get a less decisive response. NotRichard was literally faced with a shadow monster out of nightmare and he didn't freeze or scream. He blinked, registered it, and
immediately threw the nearest viable object at it while barking out warnings for the others - that "Get out of here" wasn't to Seph, it was to his wife and daughter. They disobeyed, but they disobeyed in an equally decisive response to the aggression, stationing themselves next to the closest source of lethal weapons and throwing them as soon as the target came in view.
Cauldron doesn't seem to be much interested in good publicity, though; if anything, it might be the reverse. Their self-conception is that they are the people making the Hard But Necessary Decisions, things ordinary people would recoil from... which is why ordinary people can't be trusted to save the world, why Cauldron has to step in, and why it's okay to act the way they do and not worry too much about maybe there's a better way, because The Stakes Are Just Too High For Softness.
Yeah this is pretty much exactly Cauldron.
Ahh, I'd not thought of it that far. But, yeah, good point, it's probably a safe bet they can't, but relying on that being a certainty could end pretty badly for her if she's wrong. So that's another reason not to abduct them, yeah.
Probability-wise it's a reasonable assumption that the immediate response isn't going to have a somewhat esoteric ability like that. But at the same time, Seph was like one minute out from having learned that she was facing off against a secret conspiracy organization with enough pull to straight-up
replace people with immigrants that speak medieval Low Saxon. (Like, Seph is fluent in German, she didn't go into this but the language they spoke
does not exist on Earth. It's so far off modern German it's effectively a different language, but it's immensely closer than the actually-existing next-closest language - probably Dutch. She hasn't consciously analyzed this but her subconscious is telling her that language doesn't exist, and anyone who speaks it does
not come from the world as she knows it)
So... it's also a reasonable assumption that even if the ability to penetrate her underworld isn't in the initial support a Cauldron picket would be getting, the organization is big enough to have that ability on-tap.
Ohh. They can't just wipe memories, they can write new ones?
Apparently! I mean, we already have a tinker with comparable abilities, Cranial, so Slug is honestly just the same abilities as an inherent powerset. (Presumably Cranial has more going on, but that's the core of it anyway)
Though one potentially notable point is that Persephone probably has powers from a Warrior shard. Thinker shards are pretty easy for Cauldron to grant powers from, even if they can't control the details very well, but if for some reason they needed a Warrior shard involved, a long process like this might be their only option for trying to shape the result.
There are actually a bunch of Thinker shards out of their control too. They do have
most of the Thinker shards, because Thinker kept most of her shards in reserve to be distributed later and they have her main body, but Thinker
did launch off some shards that Cauldron has no access to - Vikare's, for instance.
Sure -- but Cauldron doesn't actually have to know why they're doing something, if they're just trusting PtV. Persephone's power doesn't seem like a silver bullet, or something drastically world-changing or the like... but we don't know what her shard is. Canon Taylor got bug control, after all, which also doesn't seem that impressive even though she got creative with it -- but she got it from Queen Administrator. And once she had the bug control power, it could, at least according to my understanding of canon, later be modified to bring out much more of QA's potential, to the extent that Random Bug Control Girl ended up being a vital part of the victory over the Warrior.
I'm also talking from the reader perspective, for analysis. But yes, Cauldron could easily know something, or not know a damn thing except PtV highlighted it as valuable. And even if her
power doesn't seem that big a deal to Cauldron, you're right that it is very possible it's coming from a shard that can be jailbroken to do things much more Interesting to them than it's doing right now.
Though, presumably they did want at least something about Persephone herself, otherwise they could have just waited until they were sure she had the potential to trigger, abducted her, tortured her until she triggered, and then mindwiped her -- especially if they could indeed then also implant new memories making her loyal to them.
Well, also, she wouldn't have existed without the plan. Richard's interlude sounded like he legitimately never loved Persephone's mother and was only with her For The Plan. Which means it's been in play for at least 19 years and that was mostly low-effort investment and waiting (as Persephone just mused on, Richard really didn't parent her much at all and just kinda dropped in to remind people he was there too), but Persephone definitely wasn't something just grabbed off the shelf, she was something handcrafted.
Tbh though, abducting her and torturing her until she triggered is honestly
more effort-and-resource-intensive than what they did? Having created Persephone, and a childhood that left her sole meaningful parent as her mother, why would you bother abduct-and-torture? Just have the distant father kill the mother she loves so much. It's a five-minute job and creates a far stronger trigger impetus than a week of torture.
But also worthy of note: Contessa did path the trigger. She didn't path every possible aspect of it, thus why her path didn't tell her 'his 'son' is gonna witness this'. But she was able to miss that because it wasn't a meaningful detail as far as what Cauldron wanted out of this goes. Which means Persephone escaping and now being free-range is either a desired result of the path, or it isn't a meaningful detail.
