To be clear Tinkerbell is never gonna show up here. She's part of the Worm worldbuilding I've made but she's in a section far, far away from here. With that preface:
Tinkerbell's original primary power was as a Mover, functioning via warp gates, within some distance, and anything could go through the gates, not just herself. This waterlike portal. (This is why she's un-nukeable, the first time she got nuked she gated it underground, and she's trained her reflexes to have even more effective responses since. Frankly she's hard to hit even with anti-personnel weapons, this is her coremost power and she dances around an engagement like you'd expect from an expert Mover, and bullets go strange places that you really didn't want them to) And her range is staggering, she can cross hundreds of kilometers.
The second was an intangibility Mover/Stranger, somewhat analogous to Sophia though via different principles.
Tinkerbell's secondary was a Striker power where she could render things intangible as long as they were in close contact distance - she would usually use this to pass through solid obstacles, or to render a weapon intangible while she sent it through a person and any protection they might have. After absorbing the owner, it ramped up to 'no it just stays intangible until she decides otherwise' and could propagate through a medium to render wide swathes of space beyond her ability to contact intangible, opening up much longer-ranged intangible-weapon powers and a whole slew of other tactics. (This was how she gated the nuke underground - spread her intangibility through the earth to create a pseudocavern, yote the nuke into there, and then snapped it back to solid earth as it detonated. It didn't eat the entire impact but she survived)
The third member of the cluster was an aerokinetic Shaker who could control the atmosphere around her, which included Blaster elements of highly compressed air - airblades like Stormtiger, gale-force winds, etc.
Tinkerbell's secondary was lower-key, basically amounting to throwing things around with wind (including her own body). After absorbing, it escalated to massive gale-force winds, with the same emphasis on throwing things around and smashing them flat. She still can't do airblades but she can break down buildings, throw herself a kilometer, and impact weather hundreds of kilometers out because this butterfly flaps her wings with authority.
The fourth member of the cluster was a pyrokinetic, extremely destructive and wide-area Blaster. This kind of intense heat that liquefies and then vaporizes most things.
Tinkerbell's secondary was basically just 'a gun' of fire, a blaster power but it really wasn't any more destructive than a rifle. After absorbing the others, it escalated to much stronger firebolts - she still can't do the wide sweep, but they're just as hot so they burn through pretty much everything once they touch it and most things before they touch it, and they detonate after impact with a level of force she can control but that can reach up to 'carpet bombing'.
The fifth member was probably one of the most viscerally alarming, though she herself was the type to tremble in a corner (thus why she developed such a power). Shaker/Blaster with what amounts to a death fog, this dark mist that drains energy out of its area of effect, slowing people down, weakening them, and eventually killing them. And she could funnel the drained energy into prompting extremely accelerated growth/regeneration in a subject, or into her other abilities (powers and physical amplification).
Tinkerbell never got the wide-area effect, but could drain energy and use it as the original could within a near-contact range, including draining, say, kinetic energy from an attack about to hit her (though it was only fast enough to reduce the impact, initially). After absorbing the rest of the cluster, instead of increasing her area of effect, the speed and intensity of the drain increased - she could drain a lot of attacks dead before they even hit her and heal herself with the energy she'd just absorbed (though she's not actually an Endbringer so she can't just do this to a point-blank nuke, though a nuke at a sufficient distance...), and draining against a person could kill them immediately, or straight-up eat the chemical bonds holding something together.
The last member was a Brute with a Rachel-type Meat Dimension power - could summon 'flesh' to cover herself, though the flesh was less meaty than Rachel's, more of a silicon-based biochemistry with a carapaced look. Essentially she did to herself (on greater scale since it was singular) what Rachel did to her dogs.
Tinkerbell's original secondary was a Master power, gave her cute little silicon minions she could project at will that weren't all that strong - mainly useful for scouting, distraction, and mobbing tactics. Once she absorbed the cluster, the minions could become a lot bigger and a lot stronger, capable of presenting a Rachel's-dogs-level threat and deployed en masse. (She can also just shape this stuff into weapons for herself, obvs, which is a lot of her favoured way to fight. Blocks of silicon-crystal 'bone' and pseudochitin spears interface better with her wind powers flinging them around or her intangibility powers phasing them halfway through people before solidifying, while her fire, though stronger at base and excellent for pure destruction, is harder to manipulate with them for anything elaborate)
Put it all together and you end up with this nightmare opponent that does not abide by the laws of spatial correspondence, only stays in the same time zone as long as she's willing to be here, sucks the kinetic energy out of bullets before they hit her and uses it to make herself stronger or heal herself from the handful that made it, can kill with a touch, can blow up a tank with a firebolt, can rip a building from its foundations, can pass through walls and armour, has minions to enforce her will beyond her own reach, will almost never be hit by anything she can't just laugh off, and can do all of it from the next province over through warp gates.
After the initial Child's Crusade and the chaos of trying to suppress and defeat her, the Soviet Union pulled back because ceding a little area to her was safer than the horrifying level of damage she could inflict across the countryside. Then they nuked her and when that didn't work (in fact it kinda anti-worked, it gave her a huge burst of power to lash back at them) they just quarantined the area because honestly, one safe space was about the limit of her ambition. She still pops up basically across Russia and Central Asia offering kids a home away from the adults in their life, but she has no particular territorial ambitions. (Originally she was kinda fucked up by her experiences and didn't take no for an answer - we're talking a thirteen-year-old girl that triggered in some nasty shit, was then buried in a mass grave, and fought a one-girl independence war against the Soviet Union - but she pretty quickly scaled back after realizing the Soviet Union was more willing to leave what she had alone when she wasn't out kidnapping peoples' children, and has reached a much better point of mental stability and doesn't actually think she needs to take them away from adults for their own protection even if they think otherwise anymore)
I've not played Honkai Impact, though the name sounds familiar.
Of the S-class threats she's probably the most reasonable because she is in fact fully human and her cognition is 'traumatized human' rather than 'literally a goddamn shard' or 'just that much of an asshole' (Jack Slash)
Yeah, who'd have thought? It's not like the E88 already had a whole major global war demonstrate that for them or something.
re the USSR:
...I feel like I'm missing some background information when it comes to the details here, though.
re Tinkerbell's trigger:
...Yikes.
I do wonder how the economy of Neverland works. Presumably Tinkerbell isn't telling the children "Congratulations on being rescued! Now here's a hoe, and you'd better learn to do heavy farm work fast or we all starve.", but there's also only so much work just her power-generated minions can do. And even if she was a farm kid, she might not have started off with the knowledge needed to do that all herself, anyway. Is/was the economy based mostly on raiding?
The kitchenette in the Wards HQ was clearly not used much. Alex had had to specifically request actual ingredients rather than just snacks. Not that the PRT cafeteria she'd been eating at the previous days was bad, really. Frankly it was a prince among cafeterias. But Alex liked cooking, it was relaxing and meditative, and some relaxed meditation was in dire demand these days. The taste of home was a comfort she kind of needed right now, and enough tests had come in to liberate her from dietary restrictions.
So her laptop was open on the countertop with the recipe for Moravian sparrow (literally no one knew where the name came from, it was a pork dish), with the cumin-seasoned sauerkraut and onion cooking away on one burner, while she stirred the pork shoulder and onion (there was a lot of onion, it was the primary vegetable). Plus some fruit dumplings on the side - meat alone didn't make a meal, apricot dumplings rounded it out with starch, the necessary fruit intake, and were sweet enough to be dessert too. Not that she needed the recipes on hand anymore - she'd been cooking for years, she'd pretty much memorized anything she cooked regularly - but it was habit and good policy to keep it available for reference.
She'd initially learned from her mother's old cookbook, a battered old book handwritten in Moravian-dialect Czech. But that book had been in terrible shape, and not exactly easy to read at a glance, so Alex had transcribed everything into files on her laptop long ago, so all that family lore wouldn't be lost. She'd mostly refrained from using the book itself since - it was in bad shape and she didn't want to damage it, she'd taken pictures and transcribed everything, but she wanted the book itself to survive, written in the handwriting of her mother and god knew how many generations of grandmothers.
The transcription was still in Czech on her laptop. She had files she'd translated into English, but she preferred to cook in Czech. It was the language she'd first worked from, the language her mom had written it in, and she never really got to speak it since her mom died and her dad ditched. There wasn't much communicating going on in that house at all, and there was nowhere else she got to speak Czech in Brockton Bay. She wanted to use it as much as she could so she didn't forget the language entirely. She was pretty sure it'd been her first. She'd learned English early enough, but Czech was the language of the Masaryk household, back when there'd been one. That was what her mother had always spoken first, always sung her to sleep with.
Even when Alex picked up something from another cuisine, she still translated the recipe into Czech if she used it regularly enough to make a cookbook file. Which was honestly a weird habit come to think of it.
Meh, Alex had been cooking for a long time, she had earned her weird tics by now.
And she'd earned herself a cooking break. Her new armour plating was shaped and hardened, and cooling down from the heat treatment to be tempered later tonight. There were no other imminent, need-to-be-done-now tasks on the horizon - she'd have to do repairs on the soft layer, add in a few more actuators to start familiarizing herself with enhanced speed and strength, and attach the new plates, but she had time before the next search. Plus disassembling the presently-caged drone and the drill Spiral had left behind for what she could learn from them (the transmitters were obviously disabled and there was no self-destruct, Alex had been able to make sure of that while they'd been leaving the Docks in Claire's car). And new construction past all that, but she could do all that after she cooled down a bit.
… probably an internal electronics interface. She'd really been feeling the lack of imaging software to hook the Spiral-detector into, and she remembered that moment of chilling fear as she tried to rapidly map the entire environment of the warehouse before any threats in it shot her. Part of that meant she'd have to learn something from Claire about how she handled entries like that, but a helmet radar or sonar to map the place in an instant and highlight points of interest would help until she got good, and probably even after. Build it to integrate with other systems and detachable from the rest of the helmet, and it could be her VR system so she could do treadmills without dying of boredom too.
And… well, if Claire had been right about what she'd done with the radio being beyond Armsmaster, it was a clue to her specialty. Working with electronics and radio systems could definitely get her a better understanding of her own texture as a tinker.
And she was going to have to do something with Armsmaster's halberd. She'd been loathe to cut it down, but it had proven too big for her to wield perfectly, and imperfect was unforgivable in live combat, especially the kind of high-stakes live combat she was getting into. She did have the space cleared out to shorten it. Or maybe she could use that space to fit some kind of system to make it handier…
There were way more cool ideas beyond that, she did want to finish a weapon of her own, but she had like a day before she went out next, had to be realistic with her time. And some kind of mobility aid, jetpack or something. Spiral getting away had been super-frustrating, and Alex refused to be stuck waiting while her target flitted off again.
… it was easier to think of her as Spiral. Honoka was someone Alex knew. Someone she'd hoped to have in her life. Honoka, at least, she could try detach. Her father… his capename wouldn't help. There was no disconnecting that.
Then there was a red-haired head leaning over her shoulder, sniffing. "Damn, that smells-"
He was cut off by Alex's entirely unsqueaklike noise of surprise and her instinctive backfist into the encroaching face in her personal space. Then she recognized the reeling boy clutching his nose as Clockblocker - Dennis. "Gah! I'm sorry Dennis, you surprised me!" She hadn't had people around when she cooked before!
Dennis was still clutching his face with one hand, but spared the other for a thumbs-up. "'s coob… mab, you hid lige a mag trug."
"I really hope I didn't break anything…" Alex gently pulled the remaining hand aside to see if she'd need to grab the first aid kit. She didn't think she'd hit hard enough to break anything but she hadn't exactly been regulating her force. "... okay, it's intact, but you'll want some ice." She turned away to reach into the freezer for the necessary supply.
"I was gonna say that smelled good but I dunno if I'm gonna be smelling anything for a while now," Dennis said, voice much clearer now that his hand wasn't blocking his nose.
"There's plenty if you want some," Alex offered. She preferred to cook single portions, so she could cook more - the fuck was she supposed to do to decompress for the next three days, if she cooked a four-serving meal? - but sometimes they just couldn't be efficiently subdivided like that. Moravian sparrow for four meals already used just a pinch of salt and cumin, it was not practical to quarter that. But hey, if she could get rid of it all in the one night, she could cook again the next moment she felt like it.
"Hopefully I'll be able to taste it without a sense of smell," Dennis lamented.
Alex pressed a bag of ice cubes up against his nose. "If it doesn't work, it's because you were sniffing glue, I did not do that much damage, you drama queen."
Dennis grinned, sticking out his tongue.
"I'm calling in for one of those servings!" Dean called out the moment there was a break in the conversation, from the couch where he was getting his ass kicked by Vista in a racing game.
Alex flushed slightly. He had had her cooking before - she'd brought leftovers to eat at the salle, and shared her lunches with him before, at school - but it was always a bit embarrassing when he leapt on every opportunity to have it like that. It was the reaction she wanted from people, but it was still weirdly embarrassing to get it. She turned away to hide the expression. "There's about one more serving left, who wants it?" Or two. She could grab dinner from the cafeteria if there was enough interest to eat everything she'd cooked.
Missy was glaring at her back. She could feel it. Alex wasn't entirely sure why the younger girl wasn't fond of her, but it wasn't incredibly hard to tell. That was a glare of 'I want the food but I don't want it from you and I resent my desire to ask'.
You got good at interpreting glares, as a juvenile delinquent. It could be a very nuanced form of communication.
"Gimme," Sophia said without a hint of mercy for Missy. "The food at home sucks."
"Sure. Missy, you want some?" Alex turned to ask the blonde. "There's enough for you too." Maybe some good food would go some way to resolving whatever the fuck this was.
Missy cast a look to Dean, sitting next to her on the couch, and nodded, surprisingly docile. "... sure. Fine. Okay."
"Anyone else?" Alex asked, looking around the common room. "I can start another batch if there's enough call for it." There was already one order - her own dinner - so she only really needed one.
Carlos waved the offer off from where he was 'sitting', such as it was (he was just casually hovering where he had a view of the TV screen). "I like spices in my food. I saw you seasoning that, it was way too white-people for my tastes."
"Flavours can be subtle, 's not my fault you burnt out your tastebuds," Alex shot back with a grin. Not that she didn't have spicier recipes - she could drown him in a third-of-a-cup of paprika in goulash if he wanted, her family recipe used hot paprika rather than the more common sweet, before ever leaving her native cuisine - but that was clearly not the level they were engaging on right now.
"Literally. Lesser flavours were of no interest, so I set my tongue on fire to make sure I didn't have to taste 'em." Carlos stuck it out for emphasis, or possibly to demonstrate.
"I know you're joking," Rory began, "but also don't set your tongue on fire. Health and safety aside, I'm gonna have to fill out reports."
Carlos shuddered. "I wouldn't do that to you man. I know my own future, I'm not gonna set an example I know you'll all be eager to follow."
"I'm all for a good joke but it doesn't grow back for us," Dennis pointed out. "That would actually hurt. You may've forgotten, but pain sucks."
"... honestly, I kinda did. It's just funny now. Your reactions are funnier."
Rory shook his head with a sigh. "I know not all Brutes are like this. I'm a Brute… anyway, no thanks, I'm gonna have dinner at home and I don't wanna miss my mom's cooking."
"Let me recommend it anyway," Dean said. "Alex's cooking is the best."
Alex preened a bit. She had done a lot of cooking so she got to be proud of it.
"I'll try something later," Rory promised. "Just don't want to spoil my appetite before dinner."
Alex nodded. "No problem. I can do something for lunch."
"It's a date." Rory grinned. Urk. Why did he have to put it like that? Now she was thinking weird thoughts.
"Phrasing, Rory," Dean pointed out, clearly seeing her reaction and trying to cover for her.
"It's perfectly normal phrasing," Rory grumbled. "It's not like I'm averse, tho. She's plenty cute." Dammit please purge the weird thoughts rather than reinforce them!
"Dammit Rory," Dean muttered, looking to Alex.
Sophia clearly followed his gaze and caught sight of her face, because she broke out cackling, so hard she fell off the chair arm she was perched on. Alex wasn't sure what her expression was exactly, but given her mental state it must be quite an entertaining one.
Rory caught sight of it and winked at her, which wasn't helping. At least he didn't say anything more.
Chris hadn't answered, so Alex turned to him for a change in subject. If it was back to cooking, she could be calm. He was sitting in the chair, fiddling with a piece of tinkertech in his lap - looked like a lasing chamber - but his head was up and he was clearly following the conversation. "Chris?"
He yelped, red crawling up his cheeks as he jumped. "Ah! Uh, no, I mean I'm curious but I'm not gonna ask you to do a whole batch just for me-!" He didn't seem to be finished with what he was saying but he hadn't taken a breath before starting, so he ran out of air around there.
Alex waved him off with a ladle, already starting on a load of goulash. Moravian sparrow wanted the meat to be prepped at least four hours in advance, so the next batch of that was tomorrow, but goulash she could do on the spot. The more conventional recipe for Czech goulash, not her family recipe, with only a teaspoon of hot paprika to strengthen the flavour and the rest the sweet type grown in Hungary. She'd have to try to awaken Carlos to white-people food later with her family goulash recipe or a batch of katův šleh, but Chris was as white as the driven snow, without further information on his culinary preferences and experiences she wasn't gonna blow out his tastebuds with a full hundred milliliters of hot paprika. "It's fine, it's all gonna get eaten sooner or later. Fridges and microwaves exist." Goulash reheated real well anyway. Bread dumplings went great with goulash but they took three hours to make, so not on today's menu. Definitely tomorrow though.
Dennis sighed contentedly. "This is what it's like having a girl around, huh?"
Alex stumbled. Shit right she was a girl now. Why the fuck did cooking hit different as a girl dammit? She refused to let people make this weird. Headpats and hugs were one thing, or rather two things, but she was not giving up the kitchen.
Dean, for his part, had a look of absolute horror on his face, like he was watching an oncoming disaster.
"Excuse me?!" came simultaneously from Sophia and Missy.
Dennis waved the hand that wasn't pressing ice to his nose. "You guys don't count, not like this. Missy's mad and Sophia's scary." How was he reading her as the girlier one next to actual girls?!
Sophia flicked her finger against his somewhat-sensitive nose, drawing a yelp of pain. "Just because I'm not a housewife doesn't make me not a girl." She strode back to the couch to receive Missy's waiting high-five.
Alex sighed, shaking her head and speaking as she started up the goulash, peeling the onions. "Cooking isn't feminine, it's being an adult. Your metabolism can take anything you throw at it right now, but if you don't start eating healthy by your mid-twenties, they're gonna have to call you Cholesterolblocker instead. Fast food ain't gonna cut it, and healthy food gets expensive if you don't make it yourself. This isn't the medieval, you're not gonna have a wife by the time you leave your mom's place." Even when your mom survived into your adulthood. "And she may not know how to cook either."
Alex wasn't going to mention that she knew how to sew. The way this conversation was going it was definitely going to be held up as an exemplar of housewifery. Even though it was again, just basic life skills. Clothes took damage quick and easy, required little adjustments, someone had to do it and it was way cheaper to learn the basics yourself than visit a tailor every time. And it was normal to go beyond the basics once you were there, there was no point stopping on developing a skill once you'd started.
Sophia broke out laughing. "Cholesterolblocker, I like that one!"
"Isn't cholesterol the one thing not being blocked tho?" Missy asked. "Arteryblocker maybe?"
"Nah," Sophia said. "The moment's passed."
Missy grumbled, starting a new race with Dean on the console.
Dennis mimed an elaborate demise, pierced from three different directions, well aware he'd lost that round and fairly good-humoured about it.
Alex's smile was her own little secret since she was facing the kitchen. Well, hers and Dean's, but his emotion-sight was cheating. This was what it was like having people around at home, huh? Appreciating her cooking, wanting to try it? She'd have to try harder not to punch them, even if they startled her.
Not that the PRT cafeteria she'd been eating at the previous days was bad, really. Frankly it was a prince among cafeterias. But Alex liked cooking, it was relaxing and meditative, and some relaxed meditation was in dire demand these days. The taste of home was a comfort she kind of needed right now, and enough tests had come in to liberate her from dietary restrictions.
So her laptop was open on the countertop with the recipe for Moravian sparrow (literally no one knew where the name came from, it was a pork dish), with the cumin-seasoned sauerkraut and onion cooking away on one burner, while she stirred the pork shoulder and onion (there was a lot of onion, it was the primary vegetable).
The transcription was still in Czech on her laptop. She had files she'd translated into English, but she preferred to cook in Czech. It was the language she'd first worked from, the language her mom had written it in, and she never really got to speak it since her mom died and her dad ditched. There wasn't much communicating going on in that house at all, and there was nowhere else she got to speak Czech in Brockton Bay. She wanted to use it as much as she could so she didn't forget the language entirely. She was pretty sure it'd been her first. She'd learned English early enough, but Czech was the language of the Masaryk household, back when there'd been one. That was what her mother had always spoken first, always sung her to sleep with.
I think if this shows anything about Alex it's just her general level of dedication. In a lot of multilingual households, if the parents of the house aren't speaking the language around the kids those kids are going to leave it behind. I forget exactly how old Alex was when her mom died, if it's been mentioned, but clearly she's the sort to have more intense feelings about her heritage than most.
… probably an internal electronics interface. She'd really been feeling the lack of imaging software to hook the Spiral-detector into, and she remembered that moment of chilling fear as she tried to rapidly map the entire environment of the warehouse before any threats in it shot her. Part of that meant she'd have to learn something from Claire about how she handled entries like that, but a helmet radar or sonar to map the place in an instant and highlight points of interest would help until she got good, and probably even after. Build it to integrate with other systems and detachable from the rest of the helmet, and it could be her VR system so she could do treadmills without dying of boredom too.
And… well, if Claire had been right about what she'd done with the radio being beyond Armsmaster, it was a clue to her specialty. Working with electronics and radio systems could definitely get her a better understanding of her own texture as a tinker.
… it was easier to think of her as Spiral. Honoka was someone Alex knew. Someone she'd hoped to have in her life. Honoka, at least, she could try detach. Her father… his capename wouldn't help. There was no disconnecting that.
Richard's capename was Chalice, right? Wonder what that implies. Spiral was pretty clearly a tinker specializing in rotational force, if all those quadcopters and drill are any indication.
He was cut off by Alex's entirely unsqueaklike noise of surprise and her instinctive backfist into the encroaching face in her personal space. Then she recognized the reeling boy clutching his nose as Clockblocker - Dennis.
"I was gonna say that smelled good but I dunno if I'm gonna be smelling anything for a while now," Dennis said, voice much clearer now that his hand wasn't blocking his nose.
"I'm calling in for one of those servings!" Dean called out the moment there was a break in the conversation, from the couch where he was getting his ass kicked by Vista in a racing game.
Alex flushed slightly. He had had her cooking before - she'd brought leftovers to eat at the salle, and shared her lunches with him before, at school - but it was always a bit embarrassing when he leapt on every opportunity to have it like that
"Gimme," Sophia said without a hint of mercy for Missy. "The food at home sucks."
"Sure. Missy, you want some?" Alex turned to ask the blonde. "There's enough for you too." Maybe some good food would go some way to resolving whatever the fuck this was.
Missy cast a look to Dean, sitting next to her on the couch, and nodded, surprisingly docile. "... sure. Fine. Okay."
It's nice seeing Alex building these connections with the other Wards, even if in the background you can basically hear the ticking clock of her dad tracking her down. (Like, after that encounter with Spiral, the search field for them has got to be narrower even without Contessassistance.)
"It's a date." Rory grinned. Urk. Why did he have to put it like that? Now she was thinking weird thoughts.
"Phrasing, Rory," Dean pointed out, clearly seeing her reaction and trying to cover for her.
"It's perfectly normal phrasing," Rory grumbled. "It's not like I'm averse, tho. She's plenty cute." Dammit please purge the weird thoughts rather than reinforce them!
"Dammit Rory," Dean muttered, looking to Alex.
Sophia clearly followed his gaze and caught sight of her face, because she broke out cackling, so hard she fell off the chair arm she was perched on. Alex wasn't sure what her expression was exactly, but given her mental state it must be quite an entertaining one.
Alex wasn't going to mention that she knew how to sew. The way this conversation was going it was definitely going to be held up as an exemplar of housewifery. Even though it was again, just basic life skills. Clothes took damage quick and easy, required little adjustments, someone had to do it and it was way cheaper to learn the basics yourself than visit a tailor every time. And it was normal to go beyond the basics once you were there, there was no point stopping on developing a skill once you'd started.
Overall this was a wonderfully chill and domestic chapter with some great interactions between Alex and the other wards and just... a peek into how the wards act when they're just being teenagers.
Sophia flicked her finger against his somewhat-sensitive nose, drawing a yelp of pain. "Just because I'm not a housewife doesn't make me not a girl." She strode back to the couch to receive Missy's waiting high-five.
The thing with multiple pov stories like this is that everyone has their favorites and when I see an Alex chapter I get excited. Not saying the other is bad but I just prefer Alex more. This chapter was great. I love that whole interaction. Even more then the tinkering and fighting, which is not normal for me when I read worm fics because the powers part is usually the most interesting but for this fic I like the character interactions more. I think they're just really well done and the hook with Alex's situation adds that extra hook to it. Anyway, thanks for the chapter.
I mean by the standards of Teen Boy Brain, Alex definitely checks a lot of the standard boxes that cause crushes to develop (is a girl, is physically attractive) while also having a noticably more relaxed personality than either of the other girls on the team. Aside from punching you in the face if you sneak up on her.
Given that the Shard in question is Eden's counterpart to Scion's Stilling, aka 'Giant Golden Fuck-You Beam', and can in theory replicate all of that power's effects eventually, yeah, just a bit.
It's hilarious, Alex's primary interest here was getting to cook, she was entirely willing to cook, share out every portion with other people, and then eat her own meal at the cafeteria.
I think if this shows anything about Alex it's just her general level of dedication. In a lot of multilingual households, if the parents of the house aren't speaking the language around the kids those kids are going to leave it behind. I forget exactly how old Alex was when her mom died, if it's been mentioned, but clearly she's the sort to have more intense feelings about her heritage than most.
And yeah, for her it's sorta... the home she remembers is Czech. They spoke English often enough, they needed to keep in practice, but the language of choice was Czech. The warm memories, the lullabies, the life lessons you could impart to a six-year-old, it was all in Czech. She's kinda clinging to it because she pretty strongly associates 'having a family' with the language. It's a reminder. The one thing she gets to keep from better days.
And heritage is... well, in a city like Brockton Bay, it's something you think about a lot. Your attention gets drawn in by all sorts of claims and arguments over that. And Alex is really attracted to, like. Roots. Connections to the world. A firm sense of her place in history. She doesn't really have much in the way of home or family, she doesn't have a lot of friends, culture is one of those things that can keep her moored and give her a sense of who she is and where she belongs.
So... better with batteries, better with radios... what's the throughline here...?
At the moment, Alex is thinking it's electronics. She may or may not be correct.
Richard's capename was Chalice, right? Wonder what that implies. Spiral was pretty clearly a tinker specializing in rotational force, if all those quadcopters and drill are any indication.
It doesn't necessarily imply something about his powers. Powers are only one theme someone could base their name off of. It could be something about his goals, his history, his personality...
Dennis is more than just the class clown. But he does tend to play that role. He likes to lighten the mood, and amuse himself.
also he did in fact just get backfisted in the face
and alex knows how to punch, she hits goddamn hard
so he played up his pain a bit and the idea he would never smell anything ever again as he recovered, but his initial reaction was 'jesus christ ow must clutch the wounded part'
Awww, cute Dean wanting his best friend's food. And apparently a long-time fan.
She is a very good cook. And honestly he doesn't get home cooking that much. Only from Alex and from Victoria's family events. His mother has never cooked a day in her life, 90% of his meals are made by someone his parents hired. And the quality is up there, they hire professionals, but there's not the relationship and care and 'i actually like these people, i'm not getting paid to do this' of food you get from friends and family.
It's something he kinda likes to indulge in when he can. Especially because he can perceive that emotional context directly. He gets that part of the experience much more consciously.
It's nice seeing Alex building these connections with the other Wards, even if in the background you can basically hear the ticking clock of her dad tracking her down. (Like, after that encounter with Spiral, the search field for them has got to be narrower even without Contessassistance.)
Tbh, I don't think Sophia really teases. Like, teasing is good-natured and friendly, and as much as Sophia can maintain a decent dynamic with the Wards when everything's calm and low-key like this, she's not actually friendly with them. She'll interact because that's what humans do, and sometimes that interaction will take on a friendlier tone such as her and Vista teaming up against Dennis, but she doesn't actually like or respect these people or want to be here. She might tease her actual friends, but the Wards aren't on that list unless Alex finds an exception.
Bullying, on the other hand. Well. She is very observant, very thoughtful, and while she isn't an active bitch all the time, she is prickly, she has a bitchswitch and it's easy to set off in ways that aren't really intuitive to people that don't have a lot of experience with her. So she's just kinda passively racking up emotional ammunition, and if someone manages to really set her off (which isn't all that easy, she'll be brusque but she knows she's on probation and knows she's being watched, you've gotta get under her skin to the point where she forgets the consequences next to her feelings in the moment), she will start firing it to fucking hurt you.
Alex may claim not to be a housewife but she's absolutely a housewife.
Overall this was a wonderfully chill and domestic chapter with some great interactions between Alex and the other wards and just... a peek into how the wards act when they're just being teenagers.
The slice of them having a complete blowout in canon was at a really bad time for everyone involved. I mean this doesn't mean they can't flare up, but prior to the city going completely Mad Max, they can maintain a dynamic and at least team up against a guy being weird about gender.
The thing with multiple pov stories like this is that everyone has their favorites and when I see an Alex chapter I get excited. Not saying the other is bad but I just prefer Alex more. This chapter was great. I love that whole interaction. Even more then the tinkering and fighting, which is not normal for me when I read worm fics because the powers part is usually the most interesting but for this fic I like the character interactions more. I think they're just really well done and the hook with Alex's situation adds that extra hook to it. Anyway, thanks for the chapter.
Thank you. Alex chapters are really fun at the moment, since she's the one with a social environment right now.
And tbh, what makes Worm powers interesting in the first place is the fact that they're very much an expression of the characters and their issues. It's why they can be so creative, because they're so incredibly individualized. The same person wouldn't develop the same power in a different situation, and a different person in the same situation won't develop the same power, not even with the same shard.
Well, Chris absolutely does. She also brings his self-esteem issues into sharp relief because he's afraid she's gonna do his own powers better than he is, but at the same time, cute girl with a power very close to his, the kind that invites interaction and collaboration and someone who can actually comprehend and hopefully appreciate when he nerds out over tinker shit. He's definitely having thoughts here.
Dennis... well, 'crush' would be overstating it, but he's spending a lot of time Wards-ing, and he's boy enough to enjoy spending that time with cute girls. And now there are two cute and of-age girls in the Wards, and of the two, Alex, for all her neuroticism, is nowhere near as prickly as Sophia can get.
Rory doesn't have a crush, but he's not romantically attached at this point (he hasn't even met Prism yet), he's open to the concept (he ended up dating Prism after knowing her for like a week or two so he's obviously willing to do casual dates and try things out), and Alex is cute enough he sure wouldn't say no.
Carlos, he's aware she's pretty, but isn't really having any particular ideas with respect to doing anything about that.
And Dean, well, he's had multiple chapters to hint where he's at.
It is consistent with the facts known about the vial. The info packet did say unmitigated Ripple had proven to have one of the strongest vial results, which would be the kind of class the A-team Quadrumvirate were in. And 'below our modern reliability standards' suggests that experiment was one of the early ones, before they discovered the Balance sample and started regularly cutting their vials with it for safety, which would again match the Quadrumvirate, since they were all early vials, the baby of the group was Alexandria and she drank in like, 1984/85.
(Hero, in fact, was the first vial. Or, the first crop-of-ten, since they were all pr much simultaneous)
Though since the survival rate of those unmitigated vials was like 80%, and 'functional in human society' rate was 60% - one straight-up died, two deviated, one of the deviants may have been turned into a slavering murder monster or may have just been angry and the other may have been rendered permanently catatonic or may have just been kinda traumatized by being monsterfied, and the fourth was Doormaker who while alive and undeviated had serious power incontinence issues - you can rather understand why Cauldron prefers to cut their vials with Balance these days, at least for the ones that're going to paying customers and agents they wanna get work done with. More purity leads to stronger results - again, the Quadrumvirate powerhouses are all early ones, probably before they started using Balance vials - but losing 40% of your new recruits or customers is kinda untenable.
They'll only do an unmitigated vial at a specific request and they'll warn you the whole way through of the risk factors. The one who the Ripple vial was going to was kinda extreme and hammered the 'inject it into my VEINS' button at every opportunity Cauldron gave to reassess. (Yes, the intended recipients are all defined, in greater and lesser degree. The one who requested Ripple has heard of brakes at some point, and decided they were for sissies)
I mean by the standards of Teen Boy Brain, Alex definitely checks a lot of the standard boxes that cause crushes to develop (is a girl, is physically attractive) while also having a noticably more relaxed personality than either of the other girls on the team. Aside from punching you in the face if you sneak up on her.
Tbh Missy is failing to hit switches more because she's a baby than because of her personality. She's absolutely got a chip on her shoulder but more pertinently she's eleven years old. The next-youngest on the team, Chris, is like fourteen at the youngest, maybe fifteen. She is just not 'I am looking respectfully' territory for anyone.
So for all intents and purposes Sophia is the only girl (in the sense of 'person one of the boys might find attractive') on the canon team. But her personality is, as noted... difficult. She's not always a cast-iron bitch but she tends to be brusque and actively disinterested in the other Wards ('cause hell, she doesn't wanna be here). Sophia is for looking at, not actually thinking of a relationship with.
Alex can be pretty difficult herself, but they haven't seen a lot of it, most of that 'difficult' is manifesting as anxiety and denial rather than rudeness, and they're not really the type of people that are likely to set her into 'hunts bullies for sport, was constantly getting into fights because she didn't have the patience to respond to absolute bullshit without lashing out at it' mode. (Well. The boys aren't...)
Oooooh, gotcha. Well that is.... a hilariously broad specialization.
Yeah Hero is kinda cracked. Eden never really got around to putting the restrictions on that shard in the first place, and that shard is the one Scion picked for his primary toolkit. (I sorta assume after he bit it... well, got bit... Cauldron tried to recreate him by tossing out that same sample, but lack of a ridiculous tinker in their crew suggests that such attempts failed. Unmitigated vials fluctuate pretty wildly to begin with, and Hero's vial may have had a low R-value, reliant on a whole host of personality factors to produce a comparable result. Combine that with the fact that the 'worthy of a Triumvirate-scale vial in terms of ability and reliability' candidates don't exactly grow on trees and you don't really want to kill half of them off because two lesser capes is way better for most purposes, so they probably didn't run super-extensive tests on it other than cramming it into Case 53s. Though the fact that they still didn't have a brainwashed supertinker suggests they either didn't want to put it into the hands of someone whose reliability isn't exactly the highest, or that producing Triumvirate results is really picky and has a really hard time repeating itself)
It's not exactly 'wavelengths', though that's how it's usually described. Or like. It means it on a much deeper level than tinker specialties normally do. A lot of the time, it's talking about energy transmission. It just transmits in waves, and to some degree is overlapped with the concept - Entities are basically at the point where nothing is solid-state, and they can in fact perceive the Planck-scale gaps between one minimum unit of energy and the next, so even things that we would call a single event are, to them, a repeating sequence - a wave.
The Stilling shard is, basically, that part of the Entities, the shard that perceives and interacts with the universe on the smallest fundamental level, the point at which everything is a wave, even a brick is 'the waves that we call particles, oscillating around the general shape that we call a brick'. Fundamentally he's just transmitting energy, but because he's doing it at such a fine scale it can do all kinds of zany shit, from cancelling powers to dissolving chemical bonds to fucking healing people because there is no non-ridiculous way to heal with this kind of power unless he was actually just suppressing the nervous signals that transmit pain and the fact that's the non-ridiculous option says so goddamn much about how wild this shard's wheelhouse is.
That kind of absurd flexibility is why it was Scion's primary choice of tool. He could use that to accomplish damn near anything the doctor ordered. When you're the guard meant to respond to any situation and you don't know what it might be, a tool that flexible and powerful is your ideal. And Hero got access to that flexibility because Eden never got around to preparing that shard for human use, tinker powers are fundamentally built on flexibility to begin with, and frankly I'm not entirely sure the shard ever even got the memo that it was supposed to give a subset of its ability to a host instead of the whole thing.
Like, you wouldn't normally think of disintegration beams and highly effective power sources as 'wave' things. Those are available because, essentially, this is the Entity's definition of a wave, not a human's. And by that definition, energy is a wave whose transmission can be optimized, and a physical object is a collection of particles connected to one another by binding energy (waves) - and anything that has a wavelength can be combined into one, if you're in-phase you strengthen it, and if you're reverse-phase you suppress and cancel it. The latter being the bulk of what Scion used it for, because he was mostly fighting onscreen and destructive interference is just a really precise and efficient way to make someone stop doing something you don't want them to be doing (like living, or using that power against you). (And if that wave that just got cancelled through destructive interference is the binding energy holding your particles together, well, you have now been disintegrated)
So 'wavelengths' isn't really all that broad by tinkerspec standards... if it's fucking normal. It's just that for Hero, it isn't talking about electromagnetic waves or physical waves (either or both is completely normal for a tinkerspec). It's talking about quantum waves, or like, the entire concept of wave functions extending up and down the scale. The fact that Hero had sonic technology - something we could actually perceive as a wave within classical physics, a physical wave - suggests the latter. Most of his listed stuff would feel 'energy generation/transmission' to me and I would never be inclined to describe it as a wave without prompting, so it's interacting with Planck-scale waves, but the fact that Wildbow has in fact offered that prompt, coupled it with explicitly wavelike technology, and directly said it's Eden's Stilling shard, so the only way to square all of that is to dive into deeplore subatomic physics where shit starts getting weird.
I dunno if it's all of the others, exactly. Like there's any amount of room for OC S-classes. But our canon list is like...
Endbringers. Literally shards.
Machine Army. Literally rogue tinkertech.
Three Blasphemies. Literally independently-functioning tinkertech, possibly shard-driven or shard-created. If there's a person you can negotiate with, they're nowhere nearby and capable of Mastering people on such a broad scale that 8-10 tinkers spontaneously and simultaneously got the idea of creating A Blasphemy, and you just have to hope that person is a human and not Simurgh. (Seriously they are an actual fucking creepypasta they are so weird even by Worm standards)
Ash Beast. Unclear if even sapient anymore, or this one poor fucking dude that can't see anything or talk to anyone because the power is always-on and is just kinda wandering around. If there is a person in there, they can't communicate with it.
Slaughterhouse 9. Human. Just that much of a dick.
Fallen. Human. Just that much of a dick.
Sleeper... who the fuck knows. Honestly he's one who can be lived with because he doesn't seem to really do much, though good luck communicating with him.
Nilbog is the closest comparison, as someone who decided society sucked and set up a world of his own, and he literally hasn't had anyone to talk to for a decade that he didn't fantasize into being, so what coherent mental faculties he had after his trigger decayed pretty badly, and even at that high point he went 'destroy all humans' pretty damn fast.
Not that there aren't parahuman-held microstates and such, but they're usually a team effort, not enforced entirely by This One Cape We Can't Take Down.
re the USSR:
...I feel like I'm missing some background information when it comes to the details here, though.
The Storozhevoy mutiny is one of those interesting little episodes in Soviet history where there was clear revolutionary sentiment for a change in the Soviet Union - towards a still-communist system, not 'capitalist liberty'. Somewhat like the Prague Spring, they still wanted communism, but they could tell this communism wasn't working, and got stomped down by The Party.
(Ironically, it was initiated and led by the political officer Valery Sablin, the guy whose literal job is to ensure loyalty. He learned his communism well at political officer school, well enough to decide his bosses were the ones being disloyal to the Soviet dream)
(It was actually the inspiration for The Hunt For Red October, a ship making a break for the Baltic and pursued by everything the Soviet Union could send at it, though the true story is basically the exact opposite on every axis. It was an attempt to save communism, not to flee for the glories of the capitalist west)
It was actually that book specifically that triggered Shein. Or, well, catalyzed the trigger, because tinker triggers are a long buildup process. The fact that the boldest, most worthy thing he'd ever attempted in his life had been twisted into capitalist propaganda, that no one understood the truth, was his final trigger and the reason it was specifically a specialty in communication, in getting the word and the message out so it would never be twisted into a lie again, it would never be turned into a parody debasing the name of the most noble man he'd ever met. (And then he got killed and his own story suppressed and turned into a lie to justify further nasty shit. Kinda didn't work out great)
Some KGB flack handed him one of the first copies of the book to be an asshole to him, this sort of message of 'look at how your actions have betrayed the Soviet Union', and it kinda backfired. In said KGB flack's defence, he was literally one of the first parahumans total, the knowledge that being an asshole to people is how you get parahumans wasn't even out there yet.
Fun thing is that's the post-trigger stuff. But. Well. The trigger was bad enough it got her dumped in a mass grave and drove her to a crusade against every adult in the world. So you can come up with some ideas, especially if you know the source I'm riffing off of for her. What, you think Gesellschaft were the only ones to come up with horrible nightmare camps and human experimentation into how to make triggers happen on demand?
I do wonder how the economy of Neverland works. Presumably Tinkerbell isn't telling the children "Congratulations on being rescued! Now here's a hoe, and you'd better learn to do heavy farm work fast or we all starve.", but there's also only so much work just her power-generated minions can do. And even if she was a farm kid, she might not have started off with the knowledge needed to do that all herself, anyway. Is/was the economy based mostly on raiding?
Nowadays, skill bases have been developed and can actually be really high. Not only have the kids grown up, but as she's grown to accept adults existing in her presence, it's served as a pretty decent refugee silo. The Soviet Union fractured back in '95, in a way that leaves a lot of petty warlords sitting around with their own slice of the pie, a generally terrible humanitarian situation, and even the big-ticket groups like Red Gauntlet and the collection of squabbling spies, political operators, and generals that can put off their internal conflict enough to call themselves a national government are fighting each other, they're just doing it in the back alleys instead of in the open.
The good areas in post-Soviet Russia are basically cyberpunk hellscapes where everyone puts on a face of living in a society together but nobody is in control and every faction is shadowrunning against every other faction with whatever elements of the Russian army are under their personal control because there really isn't any state to smack this shit down, nobody has the monopoly on violence so there is a lot of competition to seize a controlling market share of it. The bad ones are like Syria, split between warlords that decided they had a regiment and the people claiming to be up top are out to lunch, with pretty regular active fighting in the field and child soldiers (often parahuman child soldiers).
Of those warlords, Tinkerbell takes one of the loosest hands. She won't exploit you, she won't persecute you, the only thing she demands of you is that you live in peace without harming anyone, especially not the children in your care. She has no expectations, no ambitions, and honestly she's basically an anarchist. And she can hold out against, apparently, anything the whole damn world throws at her - the Soviet Union couldn't crack Neverland, none of the remnant factions are gonna do it. Neverland has near-absolute freedom and what is honestly one of the highest safety levels available in the post-Soviet hellscape.
It makes it a pretty good draw for people fleeing the fighting and scheming elsewhere. If someone's beloved peasant village got blown up in the crossfire, or someone came out on the short side of factional politics, it's a place where you can go that you know you're gonna be protected, and even if an Elitnaya team shadowruns in and kidnaps you for your great skills in whatever field, she will literally go hunting them to get you back (she's done it before, and it's only legends in their own right like Tchaikovsky and Rukavitsa, the Russian equivalent to Protectorate Core Lineup, that have survived crossing her like that).
So refugees do float in, and often the ones specifically looking at Neverland are going because They Were Useful to one of the various post-Soviet players, that usefulness got them exploited in ways that were not to their benefit, and they know Tinkerbell has no real ambitions and literally built a place specifically where that kind of thing wouldn't happen. And once they're there, while they're not being exploited, they are still using whatever that useful skill of theirs was - in what they want to do rather than what someone else demands, but it's still there and still doing things. So Neverland can be a weird land of mad geniuses pursuing their passions, sometimes.
It did take some time to get to this point, though, and back in the early days before Neverland had a healthy skillbase, it would most likely have been raid-based (kinda enhancing the Lost Boys comparisons), yes. Tinkerbell's core power can get her basically anywhere, and can bring a whole gang of kids with her. Raids are real easy, within the throughput limit that is Tinkerbell's power alone (plus whatever other powers came into play, because kids that triggered from society's shit are pretty amenable to her pitch of a world beyond adults). (Sometimes trading, she was not above yoinking something valuable, like tanks from the garrison specifically meant to contain her because she's actually kinda a gremlin, and popping down to the Middle East to trade them for stuff more useful to Neverland) Beyond that limit, though, raids were basically impossible prior to the Soviet collapse - you're not exactly getting a crack team of teenagers through a Red Army cordon.
But Tinkerbell also had pretty direct control over the population numbers back then. Beyond the initial seed population of kids living in the area, due to the young ages of everyone involved there really wasn't a whole lot of traditional population expansion, there's no immigration through the cordon, the people coming in are specifically the people Tinkerbell brings in. So she could just not bring new people in until she's got some slack in capacity, between new capes joining, new or better-trained assets for the raids she can do (like, one more kid learning to drive a truck is a pr great increase in the amount of goods she can yoink per raid), and the development of skills for growing, harvesting, and making their own shit.
Her ambition on that was always a bit higher than her capability - so many more kids could be saved from the cruel and unreasonable world adults have made if she can push herself to do one more raid per week to keep them supplied! - and she absolutely ran herself ragged going beyond her limits, but she was still aware of those limits and kept herself somewhat indexed to them.
The Soviet collapse helped in this respect. The cordon fell off because no one could justify keeping Neverland under threat when she could still raid and attack whatever she felt like when they needed what forces they could scrounge up to face the true threat, each other. It opened up raids and trades that didn't rely on Tinkerbell doing it personally, and it really dramatically lowered the security level of the entire former Soviet Union, which made the raiding much easier. There was really only a short spike of that, though - between the development of skills and the availability of trade, Neverland had basically reached self-sufficiency, and while they could do better with more yoinked stuff, seeing everyone around them doing poorly kinda made them feel worse about it, so they trailed off on raids for most goods. They'll still steal military equipment from warlords and factions they feel are assholes (most of them), but that's about it. (Either they use it themselves, they trade it on to someone more morally acceptable like a town that needs some protection lest it fall under a warlord's control, or they trade it to another asshole for the highest price they can scalp out of 'em. Sometimes they trade it back to the guy they stole it from in the first place, Tinkerbell loves pulling shit like that and making them stew in it)
And it wasn't immediate, but Tinkerbell slowly recontextualized her trauma, between aging into adulthood herself (she's like, twenty-nine by now) and seeing the shit happening in the countryside and realizing adults were suffering too and her real enemy was authority, not adults. As she got more comfortable with this, she opened Neverland up to adult immigrants rather than people that just aged up from childhood, and then things really took off as outlined above.
Tbh you aren't wrong, this was material developed for another fic entirely. It just kinda came up but probably best not to talk at great length about things that just kinda came up.
Though the fact that they still didn't have a brainwashed supertinker suggests they either didn't want to put it into the hands of someone whose reliability isn't exactly the highest, or that producing Triumvirate results is really picky and has a really hard time repeating itself)
Yeah, I'd guess that the stronger they expect a power to be, the more reluctant they'd be to give it to someone they don't expect to already be on their side, just in case the power includes something that prevents them from doing the brainwashing.
...Which then led into the thought: it's early days, but it looks like Ripple _might actually be a second Hero_, power-wise. Something Cauldron's presumably wanted since, well, before Hero died, even. Aaaaand Ripple both knows Cauldron exists, even if she doesn't have all that much in the way of details, and is actively opposed to it.
re the canon S-class threats:
Ah, thanks.
Though... huh. The Three Blasphemies respawn via groups of mastered tinkers?
Honestly, I don't know much at all about Sleeper, but between what I have picked up and the name, I kind of just imagine that they're someone who's really comfy in bed and got a power that not only means he doesn't need to get up but also that no one can make him.
...And I just got the humorous idea of him actually triggering from his alarm going off and he didn't get enough sleep and he hates his job and it's only Tuesday and this is never going to end -- and one DESTINATION, AGREEMENT later, he can happily switch his alarm off and pull the blankets back up as Earth Bet's latest S-class threat.
re the Storozhevoy mutiny both IRL and in this universe:
Oh, interesting! Thanks.
So you can come up with some ideas, especially if you know the source I'm riffing off of for her.
The source isn't coming to mind, buuuut I'm not sure I want those ideas anyway, so.
Ah. Well, if you look at it one way, Tinkerbell could be viewed as the program having Gone Horribly Right! I mean, she has the power of an S-class threat, but she's fully capable of human interaction and in fact actively wants to help people instead of tormenting and killing them for fun. Would have been a tremendous victory for them, if, you know, she hadn't also been extremely traumatized and very, very, very angry with them.
re the economy of Neverland and the current state of the former USSR:
Ah, thanks!
she opened Neverland up to adult immigrants rather than people that just aged up from childhood
Ah, so she wasn't previously kicking out people who aged into being adults, then; I wasn't sure, and the time scale's short enough and the potential supply of child immigrants high enough that I could see that working.
(Without it being bad writing and/or having unfortunate implications, I mean, which I assume you'd not do, but the situation reminded me of Little Lamplight from Fallout 3. So, town of children. Been there, as a town of children, for about two centuries. Ordinary, mortal humans. They kick out anyone older than 16. There is, so far as I've read and heard (though I've not actually played Fo3), no mention of immigration, and it's not exactly in a high population area to get under-16 immigrants from. So... did the developers somehow not realize what they'd implied about how the town works, despite how obvious it seems as soon as one actually asks the question of how those population dynamics can exist, or did they consider all the things they could put in the Capital Wasteland and decide that, yep, that was totally high enough on the list to go in at something else's expense? I'm guessing it's the former, at least, given how shallowly they seem to have thought about so much else.)
Tbh you aren't wrong, this was material developed for another fic entirely. It just kinda came up but probably best not to talk at great length about things that just kinda came up.
Yeah, I'd guess that the stronger they expect a power to be, the more reluctant they'd be to give it to someone they don't expect to already be on their side, just in case the power includes something that prevents them from doing the brainwashing.
Not just that the power might prevent the brainwashing, but the brainwashing itself isn't exactly perfect. It's creaky. A fair number of Case 53s have in fact recovered a fair amount of their memories.
You can do a lot with the Slug's brainwashing, but you can't reach perfect. For someone carrying something extremely high-value, for a long period of time, you probably want perfect. And that means people who are genuinely loyal, and genuinely trustworthy. Synthetic loyalty and synthetic character won't do.
And, well. People who fit that bill don't grow on trees. They're high-value. There are only so many you can throw down a hole where you're basically flipping a coin to see if they're A: alive, and B: sane.
...Which then led into the thought: it's early days, but it looks like Ripple _might actually be a second Hero_, power-wise. Something Cauldron's presumably wanted since, well, before Hero died, even. Aaaaand Ripple both knows Cauldron exists, even if she doesn't have all that much in the way of details, and is actively opposed to it.
It is a possibility. It'd mean the intended recipient of the Ripple vial was, in addition to 'actively eager to eat a pretty damn risky vial', also someone Cauldron would have been willing to trust with that power if it went full Hero. But there's not much known about them yet, so that is possible.
Though... huh. The Three Blasphemies respawn via groups of mastered tinkers?
It's not entirely known how they respawn (it's possible the survivor just repairs/rebuilds the others). But how they were created in the first place, just, 8-10 Tinkers suddenly, simultaneously, and spontaneously came up with the idea of creating a Blasphemy. None of them had ever met, they lived thousands of kilometers apart, they were not communicating, each of them 'independently' came up with the same idea in the same timeframe despite being from completely different specialties (like, one of the Blasphemies might be biotinkered and another might be a robot girl).
The production process itself took time and 5-7 Plausible Blasphemy Makers were stopped and intercepted before completing the project after the good guys caught on there was some kind of pattern going on here, but three made it through (the heroes caught most after the first two tipped them off to the pattern, there were some pretty specific materials required, but one made it through their net).
So like, obviously this was not spontaneous chance. Something fed those tinkers the concept and made them focused enough to make it, and load them up with pr much the same programming. So what the fuck was it? Tattletale theorizes it was the shards themselves feeding the designs. Could've been Simurgh. Could've been a human Master who's just like 'hey you tinkers, make me some waifus'. Who the hell knows.
Honestly, I don't know much at all about Sleeper, but between what I have picked up and the name, I kind of just imagine that they're someone who's really comfy in bed and got a power that not only means he doesn't need to get up but also that no one can make him.
...And I just got the humorous idea of him actually triggering from his alarm going off and he didn't get enough sleep and he hates his job and it's only Tuesday and this is never going to end -- and one DESTINATION, AGREEMENT later, he can happily switch his alarm off and pull the blankets back up as Earth Bet's latest S-class threat.
Tbh my own thinking - and this is just spitballing, I've not locked anything down for him - is that he's called Sleeper because he has long 'dormancy' periods. Because he's just walking around and living his life in between extremely obvious bursts of power, and nobody knows who he is.
Like there's a civilian population in the quarantine zone, Sleeper is one of them, and nobody knows who it is, but if they cause any problems for that civilian population (including a lack of relief supplies), he's prompted to actually do something and there is nothing anyone can do to stop him.
Basically he's just really calm by cape standards, and doesn't act out much, probably because when he does act out Shit Changes so he only needs to do it once per irritation.
The source isn't coming to mind, buuuut I'm not sure I want those ideas anyway, so.
Ah. Well, if you look at it one way, Tinkerbell could be viewed as the program having Gone Horribly Right! I mean, she has the power of an S-class threat, but she's fully capable of human interaction and in fact actively wants to help people instead of tormenting and killing them for fun. Would have been a tremendous victory for them, if, you know, she hadn't also been extremely traumatized and very, very, very angry with them.
Tbh it's kinda... well, Gesellschaft managing to make their nightmare camp program straight-up reprogram the victims into living weapons isn't the standard, or was at least a later development. So y'know, once you've experimentally created a trigger and got your data from that, you've kinda got a parahuman that hates you lying around. There are very low odds of ever getting any use out of them.
And the containment of hostile parahumans is an incredible conceptual and logistical challenge. It's led to absurd horror concepts like the Birdcage. The simpler solution is to just kill the fuckers - or, more practically, just keep experimenting until they Expire. They, um. Usually aren't capable of literally growing in power as each one dies until suddenly your guard can't control the situation anymore. So most of the time it works fine.
And we can basically assume the US had comparable programs. The US is the nation that specifically made a point of pulling Nazis into their scientific community, and has its own history of Hilariously Unethical Medical Experimentation and weird coked-out shit like trying to develop mind control and psychic powers for military use. If I had to pick just one group to run a program like this, it'd be the US government.
The relative ethical details are an exercise for the reader. Honestly for all the Soviet Union's own problems they don't really have the history of questionable human experimentation the US does.
Not just that the power might prevent the brainwashing, but the brainwashing itself isn't exactly perfect. It's creaky. A fair number of Case 53s have in fact recovered a fair amount of their memories.
You can do a lot with the Slug's brainwashing, but you can't reach perfect. For someone carrying something extremely high-value, for a long period of time, you probably want perfect. And that means people who are genuinely loyal, and genuinely trustworthy. Synthetic loyalty and synthetic character won't do.
And, well. People who fit that bill don't grow on trees. They're high-value. There are only so many you can throw down a hole where you're basically flipping a coin to see if they're A: alive, and B: sane.
It is a possibility. It'd mean the intended recipient of the Ripple vial was, in addition to 'actively eager to eat a pretty damn risky vial', also someone Cauldron would have been willing to trust with that power if it went full Hero. But there's not much known about them yet, so that is possible.
It's not entirely known how they respawn (it's possible the survivor just repairs/rebuilds the others). But how they were created in the first place, just, 8-10 Tinkers suddenly, simultaneously, and spontaneously came up with the idea of creating a Blasphemy. None of them had ever met, they lived thousands of kilometers apart, they were not communicating, each of them 'independently' came up with the same idea in the same timeframe despite being from completely different specialties (like, one of the Blasphemies might be biotinkered and another might be a robot girl).
The production process itself took time and 5-7 Plausible Blasphemy Makers were stopped and intercepted before completing the project after the good guys caught on there was some kind of pattern going on here, but three made it through (the heroes caught most after the first two tipped them off to the pattern, there were some pretty specific materials required, but one made it through their net).
So like, obviously this was not spontaneous chance. Something fed those tinkers the concept and made them focused enough to make it, and load them up with pr much the same programming. So what the fuck was it? Tattletale theorizes it was the shards themselves feeding the designs. Could've been Simurgh. Could've been a human Master who's just like 'hey you tinkers, make me some waifus'. Who the hell knows.
Tbh my own thinking - and this is just spitballing, I've not locked anything down for him - is that he's called Sleeper because he has long 'dormancy' periods. Because he's just walking around and living his life in between extremely obvious bursts of power, and nobody knows who he is.
Like there's a civilian population in the quarantine zone, Sleeper is one of them, and nobody knows who it is, but if they cause any problems for that civilian population (including a lack of relief supplies), he's prompted to actually do something and there is nothing anyone can do to stop him.
Basically he's just really calm by cape standards, and doesn't act out much, probably because when he does act out Shit Changes so he only needs to do it once per irritation.
Tbh it's kinda... well, Gesellschaft managing to make their nightmare camp program straight-up reprogram the victims into living weapons isn't the standard, or was at least a later development. So y'know, once you've experimentally created a trigger and got your data from that, you've kinda got a parahuman that hates you lying around. There are very low odds of ever getting any use out of them.
And the containment of hostile parahumans is an incredible conceptual and logistical challenge. It's led to absurd horror concepts like the Birdcage. The simpler solution is to just kill the fuckers - or, more practically, just keep experimenting until they Expire. They, um. Usually aren't capable of literally growing in power as each one dies until suddenly your guard can't control the situation anymore. So most of the time it works fine.
And we can basically assume the US had comparable programs. The US is the nation that specifically made a point of pulling Nazis into their scientific community, and has its own history of Hilariously Unethical Medical Experimentation and weird coked-out shit like trying to develop mind control and psychic powers for military use. If I had to pick just one group to run a program like this, it'd be the US government.
The relative ethical details are an exercise for the reader. Honestly for all the Soviet Union's own problems they don't really have the history of questionable human experimentation the US does.
Counter-counterpoint, that's because the writers don't want the CIA to do one of the many things they do that they legally aren't allowed to within the US to them.
Counter-counterpoint, that's because the writers don't want the CIA to do one of the many things they do that they legally aren't allowed to within the US to them.
Yeah Marvel Canada is just the writers engaging with the shit that the US does, from a safe enough distance that their almost-entirely-American readers don't go "... hey! I resent that!"
