So yeah, even if they *wanted* to reverse engineer a 'turn powers off' tech using a couple tinkers and someone with a Trump power close enough to make that happen, they don't really have the latter and there's probably Cycle Bullshit going on specifically to prevent host populations from developing the ability to widely negate powers. Like, maybe Cauldron could find a relevant shard in Eden's corpse, but implicitly they haven't managed to do that yet, or they'd absolutely be keeping it around as an ace up their sleeve.
So instead you have an existing power structure jerry-rigging terrible quick fixes to try to justify its continued existence for a few more years, with the world mostly coasting on societal inertia as a whole while society crumbles at the edges. Time for someone in-universe figure out how to build a better system.
I mean, Cauldron has a relevant shard. We know that for sure.
We know Scion's Stilling shard can cancel out powers. And Hero got Eden's equivalent of that shard. So we know they have it.
The trick is in making that shard produce either a trump who has the appropriate power suppression ability, or a tinker who can build a power suppressor, now that Hero's dead. They might honestly have pulled it off, because that would sure help with their prison stuffed full of angry C53 parahumans, but even if they have, it's not something they can mass-produce and make available to everyone else's prison system.
(also yet another reason why it sure woulda been great if eidolon had figured out how to actually recharge his powers at any point other than 'it is literally golden morning right now' huh)
(also yet another reason why it sure woulda been great if eidolon had figured out how to actually recharge his powers at any point other than 'it is literally golden morning right now' huh)
I got the impression that the point of Eidolon was that his shard works off his psychological needs and thus in addition to creating the Endbringers ("worthy opponents") has been throttling his powers to challenge him more?
I got the impression that the point of Eidolon was that his shard works off his psychological needs and thus in addition to creating the Endbringers ("worthy opponents") has been throttling his powers to challenge him more?
It does respond to his psychological needs, but his needs aren't for it to be throttled down. It throttles down on its own for various power issues. That's what creates the psychological crisis in the first place - he's getting weaker.
And bear in mind, Eidolon is It. He's the strongest parahuman in the world that's actually on the side of society. He is the primary bet for a lynchpin to take on Scion. He doesn't need a challenge, psychologically, he has the ultimate challenge right ahead of him - nothing else compares. What he needs is to be at the absolute inconceivable top of his game for whenever the time comes for him to fistfight a god. He's had that looming over him for a long time and he knows, bone-deep, he is the best chance humanity has when that god gets tired of us.
And he's getting weaker. So, imagine the stress the guy's under.
But, he thinks he's found a way out. When he fights to the fullest and is pushed to his limit, he can feel more power at his fingertips. It may just be his emergency reserves, but if he can catch hold of it, he'll have something he can work with when it comes showtime. So he thinks if he can really throw himself into a fight against an opponent that forces him to pull out everything he's got, he can catch hold of the power he needs to do the impossible task lying ahead. He just needs opponents for that. Training dummies to get him in shape for Scion.
I thought the "worthy opponents" thing was just a theory percolating in Eidolon's subconscious until Scion's version of PtV dredged it up to distract him for a cheap shot?
It does respond to his psychological needs, but his needs aren't for it to be throttled down. It throttles down on its own for various power issues. That's what creates the psychological crisis in the first place - he's getting weaker.
The way I like to think of this is from a technological perspective.
When an Entity arrives at a planet and deploys it's shards, there's a certain amount of set-up they need to go through. Partly to work around the nature of the new host species, but also to reconfigure them from a form and function optimized for interstellar travel to a form and function better-suited for operations on a host planet. This includes their power supply. During the long cruise between stars they're running off of stored power from the last planet they destroyed, but now they'll have all kinds of local resources to tap into -- solar, geothermal, radioactive, etc. -- and the parts of them which harvest those resources for use need to be set up and turned on once they land.
Eden's crash-landing and subsequent ganking at the hands of Chibi-Contessa and Grad Student Mother interrupted that. Most of Eden's shards -- and particularly all the ones accessible to Cauldron -- never got "switched on" and are effectively running off battery power, the leftovers from what they used up in flight. Push those shards to exert themselves and that stored power will begin running out, as we see with Doormaker in canon.
And bear in mind, Eidolon is It. He's the strongest parahuman in the world that's actually on the side of society. He is the primary bet for a lynchpin to take on Scion. He doesn't need a challenge, psychologically, he has the ultimate challenge right ahead of him - nothing else compares. What he needs is to be at the absolute inconceivable top of his game for whenever the time comes for him to fistfight a god. He's had that looming over him for a long time and he knows, bone-deep, he is the best chance humanity has when that god gets tired of us.
I have a bit of a pet theory that with each Cauldron vial used, the pool of available shards for them to tap into shrinks, and by the time canon starts they're starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. The earliest vials would have had the greatest potential, and that seems borne out by the Triumvirate. One more reason the Case-53 program was stupid and evil and needed to end.
I also kinda suspect that the two Entities' shards fit to their roles: Thinker and Warrior. Eden got the brainy shards, Zion got the brawny ones. This would mean that Cauldron should never have planned to fight Zion head-on; that's playing to his strength and Eden's weakness. They should've been aiming more for jailbroken Thinker/Tinker/Master/Stranger vials than Brute/Blaster/Mover/Shaker.
But, he thinks he's found a way out. When he fights to the fullest and is pushed to his limit, he can feel more power at his fingertips. It may just be his emergency reserves, but if he can catch hold of it, he'll have something he can work with when it comes showtime. So he thinks if he can really throw himself into a fight against an opponent that forces him to pull out everything he's got, he can catch hold of the power he needs to do the impossible task lying ahead. He just needs opponents for that. Training dummies to get him in shape for Scion.
I also wonder if maybe his power activated the Endbringer contrl shard while he was sleeping or something. Wouldn't be the first time a shard screwed over its host while Halping.
I thought the "worthy opponents" thing was just a theory percolating in Eidolon's subconscious until Scion's version of PtV dredged it up to distract him for a cheap shot?
"Denied," the Director said with a near-violent shake of her head. "None of you are test subjects. If we're performing human experimentation, then as the one giving the order, I'm the test subject."
"... I think there'll be visible changes even if not a 'deviation'," Alex spoke up. "The paperwork said the vials tend to restore the drinker's health. And, uh…"
I do want to try and figure out what powers Emily would have. Like it feels like she'd get some kind of Thinker/Trump mixture considering how much of her life is based around dealing with and neutralizing capes.
I thought the "worthy opponents" thing was just a theory percolating in Eidolon's subconscious until Scion's version of PtV dredged it up to distract him for a cheap shot?
No, he hadn't thought of it with relation to the Endbringers at all. But he was consciously thinking that if he could fight for real, go all-in against an opponent that could push him to his limits, he could grab hold of the power that was eluding him.
The way I like to think of this is from a technological perspective.
When an Entity arrives at a planet and deploys it's shards, there's a certain amount of set-up they need to go through. Partly to work around the nature of the new host species, but also to reconfigure them from a form and function optimized for interstellar travel to a form and function better-suited for operations on a host planet. This includes their power supply. During the long cruise between stars they're running off of stored power from the last planet they destroyed, but now they'll have all kinds of local resources to tap into -- solar, geothermal, radioactive, etc. -- and the parts of them which harvest those resources for use need to be set up and turned on once they land.
Eden's crash-landing and subsequent ganking at the hands of Chibi-Contessa and Grad Student Mother interrupted that. Most of Eden's shards -- and particularly all the ones accessible to Cauldron -- never got "switched on" and are effectively running off battery power, the leftovers from what they used up in flight. Push those shards to exert themselves and that stored power will begin running out, as we see with Doormaker in canon.
I could definitely see that. It would explain why the 'dead' shards are apparently running so thin that Eidolon is running down their supplies.
Or it may be because those shards don't have hosts, and taking a host (even if they weren't activated) brings them online and puts all those things out there.
Though I would highlight Doctor Mother there - it's true that she doesn't have a doctorate, but it's a limited truth. Like. She invented her field. Who would accredit her? She had an education to begin with and sought out more as necessary, but she never bothered getting accredited because that's just something to hang on her wall, she doesn't care about it and it's a waste of time. She's a Doctor in every meaningful sense - there are plenty of formally-accredited scientists in Cauldron and they certainly seem to think she's their intellectual and educational peer or superiour. She just never bothered because she has work to do.
I have a bit of a pet theory that with each Cauldron vial used, the pool of available shards for them to tap into shrinks, and by the time canon starts they're starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. The earliest vials would have had the greatest potential, and that seems borne out by the Triumvirate. One more reason the Case-53 program was stupid and evil and needed to end.
I think the reason the Triumvirate are higher-power than the vials they sell is because of other factors. Because it was the early pre-53 program - which means A: knowing, willing hosts that usually aren't on the brink of immediate death (which allows for a much smoother connection between host and shard), and B: they hadn't discovered the Balance formula yet. Balance creates massive benefits in terms of safety and stability, but a multi-shard connection diminishes what the core power shard can do and splits the bandwidth of the host/shard connection.
It's largely selection bias, I think - they tested a lot of vials even in those early days, but we have a total of, like, seven that are worth remembering? (Quadrumvirate, Doormaker, Slug, Grey Boy) We hear pretty much nothing about all the others and I think the reason we don't is because, well, half of them died or deviated, and most of the other half were, while still superpowered, just not in the same range of power & utility as those seven.
And we can see that high-power vials still pop up when someone drinks unmitigated even quite late in the program - Siberian was a 2000 vial, 16 years into their experimentation and over a decade past the Quadrumvirate, and could fight all four of them and come out on top. And it wasn't like Manton had a super-special vial he knew was going to outdo everything else ever, if he had he'd have already tested it, all that's special is that he drank unmitigated like the Quadrumvirate did.
It's just that after mass testing in the C53 program began, almost all the people drinking unmitigated are test subjects. And most of the ones that got particularly interesting powers, Cauldron kept them, the ones tossed out free-range for various relevant programs are the dross, the ones Cauldron was willing to let go. The good ones, they kept in the dungeon to be Slugged and deployed when the time comes. And since they were kept in a dungeon their powers never really had the chance to practice and develop to the point people like the Triumvirate did.
'cause remember, powers develop over time and practice even without a Second Trigger. Skitter at the time of her arrest was an entirely different monster from first-night Bug. And Antares has demonstrated even more radical changes than Skitter. Not only does the host get better with the power, but the power itself gets better. The shard refines what it's doing, tunes the finer details towards the host's needs and tastes, and improves the connection and overall throughput. The core description never changes, but the riders and fine details of how that description manifests itself can change and quite radically, and the quantitative elements of the power, the basic numbers, are constantly fluctuating with how tuned-in the host is at the moment, but the baseline is consistently rising the more the powers get used. (You can see this most directly in Taylor's range)
So a significant element to why the Triumvirate are so strong is because they're the veterans. They're the ones who've been running from the early days. And that process of iterative improvement has been going for twenty-five years.
So you've got a lot of factors going into the Triumvirate other than just luck-of-the-draw when it comes to shards. They have luck-of-the-draw too, not all of the 84-87 early-generation vialcapes are half as exciting, but when you put together all the other factors - consent, lack of mitigation, veterancy, and the sheer degree of institutional support - it starts looking like fairly normal luck-of-the-draw rather than having a better hand to draw from in the first place.
There are a finite amount of shards but it's not very finite. And they can keep going back to the same shard again and again, they literally know where its physical position is (for my money, that's what the numerical codes of the samples are - literally just the position of that sample on a five-dimensional grid). There's a finite amount of power supply each shard has, but that's a power supply that was meant to last a whole bunch of hosts for the whole 300-year cycle, so it isn't really low unless you're specifically tapping into the dead/offline ones like Eidolon is. I just don't think Cauldron has meaningfully impacted selection in thirty years of testing and deployment.
I also kinda suspect that the two Entities' shards fit to their roles: Thinker and Warrior. Eden got the brainy shards, Zion got the brawny ones. This would mean that Cauldron should never have planned to fight Zion head-on; that's playing to his strength and Eden's weakness. They should've been aiming more for jailbroken Thinker/Tinker/Master/Stranger vials than Brute/Blaster/Mover/Shaker.
Nah, I think they have basically the same shards. Zion's demonstrated more than enough Thinker/Tinker/Master/Stranger shards in all the natural triggers, we know Eden has numerous analogue shards right down to Zion's most classic personal-choice shard. And they gangbang the planet together, they have the same pool of data to develop and refine the next generation of shards, and there's no reason not to share it between them.
There are gonna be differences in their shard alignment because each one budded at different rates and in different ways, but that's gonna owe more to their individual hosts than to the parent entities of the shards. And it probably more or less evens out at end-of-cycle, when they recollect all the shards, put all the data together, and organize the shards into however many disparate Entities there are at end-of-cycle (whether that's 'as many as possible reach the minimum viability level' and everything distributed across them, or varying ranges of beefy, and honestly it's probably as many entities as possible 'cause the Entities do look more like r-strategists than k-strategists).
I think the difference is just the orientation of the hub shard, the personality and capabilities of the Entity's core 'brain'. It's about how they use it, not what the tools are.
(Though, the canon winning combo against Zion was Master/Stranger/Blaster/Tinker. But almost entirely comprised of Warrior shards, only the Stranger was Eden. Maybe some of the Tinkers but you'd basically have to make that up because the ones that got names and faces did not look like vial capes to me)
I also wonder if maybe his power activated the Endbringer contrl shard while he was sleeping or something. Wouldn't be the first time a shard screwed over its host while Halping.
I mean, his power is the Endbringer control shard. It's the admin shard, the one that gives all of them their marching orders. So it would've just contacted the Endbringers directly.
It definitely did it subconsciously, though I don't know if he'd have to have been unconscious to make it happen - powers do respond to subconscious impulses while the user's awake, just look at all the times Taylor suddenly has a swarm Appear while she's in the middle of an emotional moment. But it certainly is true that while he's asleep is the moment he has the least ability to reign in his subconscious before his power flips a switch he would have desperately kept unflipped if he'd known about it.
I do want to try and figure out what powers Emily would have. Like it feels like she'd get some kind of Thinker/Trump mixture considering how much of her life is based around dealing with and neutralizing capes.
Natural powergen falls around three basic axes - the competencies of the shard itself, the underlying throughline of the host's life and personality, and the trigger.
The trigger defines the fundamental orientation of the power, which of the fundamental categories it fits into, and how it fits into those categories. The power is essentially a solution to that trigger - usually not one that is actually helpful on a human level, but one that a space alien with no real understanding of humanity thinks would resolve the problem. If you get hurt, you get a power that prevents you from getting hurt (Brute). If you have something that's going to hurt you, you get something to deal with it (Striker). If the something that's going to hurt you is far away, you get something to deal with it at a distance (Blaster). If it's all around you, you get something to deal with the world around you (Shaker). If the problem is peoples' attention, you get the ability to hide from it (Stranger). If the problem is you, you get to change what 'you' are (Changer). If the problem is where you are, you get the ability to go elsewhere (Mover). If the problem is isolation, it gives you a friend (Master). If the problem is powers, you get something to deal with powers (Trump). If the problem is lack of information or skill, you get information or skill (Thinker). If the problem is contradictory, you get a new self to encompass both sides of the contradiction (Breaker). If the problem is complicated and takes time to develop, you get the ability to use that time to develop your own solutions to the problem (Tinker). This is honestly pretty simplistic because the shard just doesn't understand you very well and it's responding to very basic drives with very basic answers.
So Taylor's crisis was complete isolation from everyone - the realization that no one gave shit enough to get her out of the locker. The shard answer to that is a mass-minion Master - to give her an endless quantity of friends and companions to make up for everyone in the world that had abandoned her. What those minions are is not defined at this point! Nor is how the control works. At this stage, the power is "I have a lot of minions, they are..." and the details will fill in later.
Or, in Persephone's case, she faced a mixed crisis. She'd just been betrayed and isolated by/from her father, and she'd lost her mother, so there's a Master element, but it's very limited, so this is just some spice in her power. Her fundamental crisis is A: an enemy that came from somewhere deeply intimate and has just taken something desperately precious away from her, who she desperately needs/wants to kill, and B: she just lost the place she belonged, and is being chased by a monster, she wants to be somewhere else. A's answer is a Blaster power, which will strike from somewhere deeply intimate and difficult to respond to, with extremely high lethality, and will have special effects in response to the loss. (Normally you get two of these traits, splitting it across three means the traits are dulled somewhat - it's extraordinarily difficult to evade but it's possible, and while the lethality isn't dulled, the applicability of that lethality is dulled and it has a hard time getting through protections) B's answer is a Mover power, which won't be all that fast but will be good at maneuverability and avoidance (because the complicating factor in her escape was stumbling over things, the resolution to that is to be better at getting around them), and will get her out of this space she's trapped in that isn't a home anymore, in a manner where she creates something that grants movement rather than just teleporting herself.
Note that how the PRT labels a power depends more on the expression and the utility of the power. It doesn't actually match the way the shards build the powers. So these categories can in fact differ pretty wildly between the two uses, and they really shouldn't be the same list Wildbow. For instance, by shard definitions, Dragon isn't a Tinker, or at least isn't primarily that. She's a Thinker who can analyze and reverse-engineer tinkertech. But the PRT just sees how the power expresses - Dragon building tinkertech - and classes her as a Tinker because that's what she's doing in the field and how you would respond to it if you had to throw down with her. And Rachel is actually a Blaster by shard definitions - she was faced with a threat at a distance she couldn't do something about, the loss of a beloved pet, and developed the power to create an effect at a range, empowering that pet so she couldn't possibly lose it. But how that expresses is her having a bunch of very buff minions, so the PRT classes her as a Master because she presents the threat profile of a Master, however exactly the power is making that happen. But there's literally no power influence in making them minion for her, they just love her and want to make her happy. The only thing her power does is make them big and strong. There are edge cases like this.
The shard answers that problem as best it can within its own competencies - and if its competencies don't extend in the right direction, it might just not respond to what would be a trigger to another shard because it can't answer this problem, or it can't really do anything interesting with this. The shard will shape the parameters within that fundamental orientation pretty directly - like, Queen Administrator's thing is directing a large amount of disparate parts, so she will always come back with a power whose real point of excellence is fine control of all its various elements, whether that's controlling creatures or telekinetic points-of-control, and she just won't trigger if she can't do that, because the problem either falls outside her competencies, or it's just fucking boring. A lot of the time when you're genning an OC, the shard is a black box, so you can fill in whatever you want in this space.
So, coming back to Taylor, QA's mass-fine-control competency not only covered the needs of Taylor's trigger, it fell pretty squarely directly within it. All it needed to do was assert control over... something.
Persephone, I'll leave a black box for now.
And the specific texture of the power - the aesthetics and finer details - are filled in with imagery and contours taken from the host's life and personality. Imagery and element of the power tend to be taken from the trigger event itself, preferentially, but the shard will dive back through the host's memories to find persistent throughlines if nothing in the trigger itself is as good a fit. And a lot of other contours of the power will be defined by those persistent throughlines - the host's needs, thoughts, and talents.
Taylor had a number of things rather sharply outlined within her mind in the locker. One of those aesthetic features was bugs crawling all over her, which was both an excellent vector for massed minions, and a Problem QA could resolve by giving Taylor control over those bugs. So the element of her power was filled in with '... bugs, they're bugs'. If the bugs hadn't been there, she might have got little animate blobs of blood? Or if she'd come to the same basic crisis outside the locker, QA would have picked up different imagery - preferentially from the moment-of-trigger but failing that it would've dove back through her memories for something that stuck out. And one of the major throughlines for Taylor is control - she's got desperate control issues because she didn't have any control over her life - so the power gave her absolute control rather than mere service.
Meanwhile, for Persephone, there wasn't appropriate imagery in the trigger itself, but she's incredibly goth so shadows and darkness were a persistent image in her psyche, and were therefore selected as her 'element'. While the expression of material properties owes to her interest and experience in the subject, as the kind of girl that studies materials engineering.
(This is why Worm powers are so interesting. They're such direct responses to who the host is and what's going on in their life that no one else will have the same power - there are gonna be commonalities of parameters but in specific contours everyone's will be unique. Change the circumstances and the same person could get a completely different power. Worm powers are interesting because they're direct expressions of the people who have them, and people are interesting)
That's how powers are normally developed. Vials are a special case in a number of ways, but there are two big ones that apply to the powergen process itself.
For one, you start with the shard - you literally choose a usually-pretested shard so you have some preexisting sense of the shard's tendencies and competencies. And there might be multiple shards in play, so a vial cape is often this kind of one-person cluster trigger that's picked up elements from varying shards. Most modern Cauldron vials are at least a two-way mix between a core power shard and Balance, Eden's 'what the fuck are humans anyway?' emulation shard, and it's not super-rare to have additional elements put in there. Balance usually doesn't contribute too much to the power, and is essentially included in the mix to force-establish communication so the power shard knows what the fuck humans are and can calibrate the power to one - normally you wouldn't require this, natural-trigger shards can just open up a channel and ask the relevant Entity's Balance shard what they need to know about humans, but Cauldron shards are normally inactive and offline and may have the relevant communication systems broken if not just turned off, so Cauldron has to essentially ram them both into the same person to establish that connection. And it generally detracts from the power because Balance doesn't have a lot to offer most powers, but is still occupying part of the shard-connection infrastructure that's getting built in the brain. (Oliver is a unique case where Balance is in fact pr much his whole-ass power, since Echidna got the core power shard)
For two, there's no trigger. Even if there is a preexisting trauma that would qualify (it's rare in vial buyers because they tend to be rich and privileged, but it does happen sometimes), that trauma isn't usually proximate and on the drinker's mind at the time they're drinking and the shard connection is building. So the shard basically picks up on whatever they're thinking at the moment and otherwise kinda goes freestyle and just leans into its core competencies. For approved Cauldron capes, there's a package they offer for buyers that essentially uses psychological (and probably subliminal/hypnotic) techniques to build a pseudotrigger that patterns the drinker's current thoughts to create a power profile in line with what's desired, and they probably use a similar system with agents where they're trying to create a specific power profile. For unapproved vial drinkers, 'see what we get' test subjects, and buyers that didn't shell out for the Shaping/Morpheus packages, the shard has to range much farther, because the drinker's proximate thoughts aren't monofocused on a trigger, which means it needs to cast about throughout their life to get ideas and otherwise does whatever it feels like.
Alex is easy mode when it comes to vialgen.
I'm gonna blackbox what exactly her shard is again, but she drank a pure single-sample vial, so whatever her shard is, it's only that shard, there's no Balance or secondary power shard in the mix.
And while she didn't have a trigger, that's really just because she didn't have a shard, she absolutely had the trauma going on, and it was very proximate, very much on her mind at the time. This puts her very close to natural triggers in typology, both in that the shard was able to build a very strong host/shard connection, and that there's a trigger event less than an hour ago and still on her mind that the shard can reference when it's building the power.
Her pseudotrigger is, essentially, her relationship (or non-relationship) with her father, culminating in his murder of Rosemary Duensing as the moment-of-trigger. It's a long-running pattern which means it's a tinker power, combined with her existing workshop tendencies to align her basic throughline with tinkering. I'm gonna pull back the curtain a bit and talk about things she hasn't discovered about her specific contours as a Tinker, so this is gonna be under a spoiler box for people to choose whether to discover in-fic or to read this.
Within Tinker subtypes, Alex is a Hyperspecialist primarily - the intense focus on her father creates a similar monofocus in terms of specialization. She hasn't discovered this yet, but she literally can't Tinker outside of her specialty. She's completely mono-locked on it. This doesn't mean she can't create overtechnology, that's a basic pool most all Tinkers have access to. But she can't create superscience. Outside her specialty, she's restricted to creating hard sci fi technology - things that function within physics-as-we-know-them, without shard involvement. Armsmaster can create timestop halberds and spacewarping halberds, Alex can't. Kid Win can create Manton-limited lasers that don't burn biological matter and energy-hardening rails that literally make electricity a solid object, Alex can't. Outside her specialty, Alex can create highly advanced technology, but it's still technology, it's not goddamn space magic.
What she gets in return is that whatever the heck her specialty is, she is the undisputable god-queen of it. Nobody can come close. Even other people with the same specialty can't do it as well as she can. (At least, not at the same rate. A more experienced Tinker with the same specialty might still be ahead of her, but she'll be catching up fast. Even moreso because she has an incredibly strong shard connection by vial standards - not as strong as a natural trigger's connection, but far stronger than the vial average)
Other elements of her pseudotrigger (the lethality, the focus not just on a single individual but on a pattern of ethical behaviour that led her to reject that individual, and the social nature of the problem) indicate other potentially-relevant subcategories, but it's most strongly Hyperspecialist.
Contrarily, Battery leaned almost entirely on the shard going freestyle, because she really didn't have any trauma going on and her main proximate thoughts were 'fight Madcap' and she was really very nonspecific as to how.
So, when discussing Emily (I didn't forget the topic at hand!), we start with the shard. We have four vials, all cut with Balance.
Vial B is 85% 'Parashu'. Vial D is 85% 'Spire'. Vial E is 85% 'Optic'. Vial C is a mixed vial, 60% Unary and 30% Vestige. While I'm not gonna say right here what all those shards do, I will say that I was lazy. Other than Alex's shard I didn't make one up. All five of the other shards at hand are Official Cauldron Samples, either from canon or from Weaverdice material. So if you wanna know what they are you can find out, otherwise they'll remain blackboxed in this discussion.
While Emily could honestly pick at random, the vials most likely to draw her eye are C and D. The word 'vestige' is very narratively appropriate for her and she mcfuckin' knows it, while 'spire' fits her she-doesn't-admit-to-having-them aesthetic sensibilities. So those are most likely the ones that'd be in play.
She has her own trauma, but it's not really proximate or actively on her mind, so that's going to fade to just another element in the mix, and the shard is gonna have to cast a pretty wide net.
Proximate thoughts are going to be oriented towards Cauldron, given why she'd be drinking this in the first place. As an untouchable threat, that would lead towards a Blaster orientation, probably with an absolutely staggering range or some degree of removal from the blast itself given the remote and ghostly nature of the threat. Whether that produces an attack or a more abstract effect is pretty open, as well as whether this even becomes primary because while it's her proximate thought, it really doesn't have the intensity of a true trigger. But this is a component. A degree of versatility with the shard just kinda throwing up its hands and letting Emily pick between a toolset is also highly plausible, because Emily herself is so lacking in information about what the threat is, the shard doesn't have a damn clue either. This proximate orientation would probably be fairly common to anyone from the Cauldron Investigation Team that takes a sip.
Another proximate component is a Thinker component. Thinker is often a response to stresses caused by a lack of information, and this investigation is pretty sharply defined by a lack of information. So one of the stressors presented has a clear resolution in some form of Thinker power. The Thinker powergen docs are a travesty, so exactly what form is down more to vibes, since there really aren't clear guidelines.
What's more distinct to Emily is her throughlines. (Though there's still gonna be a degree of commonality here because the CIT members likely to take a drink are all frontline PRT agents, and Emily was one herself. They all chose the same career so there are gonna be commonalities in their throughlines)
One of these throughlines is a strongly martial, fight-oriented bent. She chose a paramilitary career (which is rare enough for women), she was an elite in it, and she only stopped literally physically fighting when she was no longer physically capable... and took up a desk job instead of a generous retirement package so she could continue metaphorically fighting. So whatever her power is, it's going to be combat-oriented in a very direct sense. She's never going to be a backseater like Lisa and any backseat utility her power gives her is gonna be ancillary.
This will lean towards directly physically fighting, with her body. The way she does it may change, but you don't get so far in a combat career without athletics getting burned into your core, and probably an enduring love of it. So her body is going to be one component of this theme.
Now we start to get to elements that are more specific to Emily. Since we left off on her body, we're gonna come right back to the bits that tie to her body. Namely, its condition. This has been an ongoing source of stress, shame, and pain. She's self-aware enough of all of those to file them to the side and not really care when Tattletale tries to needle her weak points and finds steel battleship plating over all of them, but it's not like they don't bother her. She just focuses on the things she can impact and dedicates herself so thoroughly to her job that she can mostly not think about the things that're bugging her.
But she used to be peak physique, and now she's, to use her own terminology for a moment, a lardass that can't fight, can't even goddamn work out, and should be in a wheelchair but for her own stubborn pride. That's fucking humiliating. That creates a Changer component within her throughline - shame and issues with the self are strong fodder for that.
And between her deteriorating looks and her bitter, hard-edged personality, she hasn't had a damn date in at least six years, let alone a relationship. So add frustration and loneliness to that mix (firmly denied and she focuses on work, but it's still there). She's very isolated and the last time she had friends was like ten years ago, and she watched them get eaten. So this creates a Master component.
And it just fucking hurts. She's badly wounded and she's in some level of pain pretty much constantly. This is a Brute component right there.
Regardless of how her physical condition plays into the trigger, of course, you can expect a pretty complete physical restoration. Shards want their hosts fit enough to do the job and restore their condition as a fundamental baseline (this is what happens with C53s in fact, it restores their condition but it has no fucking idea what their condition is supposed to be so it kinda guesses). And because all of the vials in question have Balance in the mix, it's highly likely to restore her to her own physical peak rather than deviate her, unless it's a highly deviation-prone vial to begin with.
Her ongoing (abusive) relationship with powers creates a really strong Trump component, as you noted. Powers are at the root of pretty much everything she's dealing with, both practically and emotionally. Depending on specifically which element of her life and thought processes you (she) focuses on and has come to mind, Emily basically has something going on with every single part of the Trump spectrum, so almost anything is possible here. (It's why in Lady, the one thing I knew about her power from the start was that she was a Trump. It's one of her strongest throughlines. One of the most thematic possible powers for her is, like, Eidolon or Glaistig Uaine, where she commands powers, exactly as she commands capes. But this is very much dependent on a shard that allows it)
The fact that her career involves thinking about it doesn't incline towards a Thinker element - you'd mostly see this in a crisis of competence or a failure scenario where Emily is actively lamenting a lack of information or a mistake. (Though as noted, the investigation's lack of information does mean it pops up as a proximate thought)
The fact that her career is commanding capes doesn't incline her towards a Master throughline, because Master powers are contingent on people not listening to you so you get the power to make someone listen/obey/etc. It actually inclines against, despite the thematics. But the fact that she's emotionally isolated as noted above brings it back into play as a possibility.
There's also a Shaker element in that what's stressing her out, above all else, is the world around her. Her signature thought to herself is "It's like the world's gone mad, and I'm the only sane person left." It literally bookends her interludes, because all of her core stressors (beyond whatever she was dealing with before Ellisburg - I have a pr firm idea of her pre-Ellisburg life but her issues from her youth have mostly been dealt with, faded into the distance, or gotten hilariously overshadowed with her adult crises) orient around the sheer deranged nature of a powered world where things like the Slaughterhouse 9, Nilbog, and Thomas Calvert exist. Powers are at the root of what made the world like that, but her main stressor is just the fact that the world is like that.
You'd have to stretch to find a Mover element, but you could. What she really wants to escape is the present. If she had the choice of places to escape to, she'd pick February 1, 2001 and she'd hammer the button so hard it broke. That was when she had friends, her health, and a life, and some modicum of faith in the world around her and the people above her. Whether a shard can do this is incredibly specific, but this is the strongest Mover element she has. (Though you could pull out teleportation from how she's boxed in by the facts of the world around her, or flight because flight loves coming to people who've had their dreams crash and burn)
Tinker is really more of an expression, and all of her problems are long-running and complex enough that a Tinker solution could come to mind - frankly a Tinker is probably the only power type that could address all of these elements.
Of course, that's nine of the power categories. (You could make a case for Breaker, but she's basically got no Stranger throughline, and none of her problems are punchably close enough to allow for a Striker) What she gets won't and can't lean heavily into all of them. But these are elements it can pick up, and how they would express.
If you had a trigger, you could hone down on elements that are direct and immediate stressors and touch on the throughline as step three, but with a vial, you basically have to cast a net across her entire life. And there's really just a lot going on in a life, so exactly what the expression is depends incredibly heavily on her mood and thoughts at the time, and what the shard itself is good at and interested in.
And since the shards are blackboxed, that's about as far as we can go.
The shard answers that problem as best it can within its own competencies - and if its competencies don't extend in the right direction, it might just not respond to what would be a trigger to another shard because it can't answer this problem, or it can't really do anything interesting with this. The shard will shape the parameters within that fundamental orientation pretty directly - like, Queen Administrator's thing is directing a large amount of disparate parts, so she will always come back with a power whose real point of excellence is fine control of all its various elements, whether that's controlling creatures or telekinetic points-of-control, and she just won't trigger if she can't do that, because the problem either falls outside her competencies, or it's just fucking boring. A lot of the time when you're genning an OC, the shard is a black box, so you can fill in whatever you want in this space.
So, coming back to Taylor, QA's mass-fine-control competency not only covered the needs of Taylor's trigger, it fell pretty squarely directly within it. All it needed to do was assert control over... something.
This is shaking loose another memory from back during the initial time where I was really into Worm: People being like 'Brute!Taylor would be a giant insect' annoyed me so damn much. Like you said, a brute power enabled by QA would be something like a million of tiny short-range forcefields that Taylor has perfect conscious control over.
I said this in Discord but it's really great. (Though Alex's hair is more 'wavy' than 'frizzy', but I do understand the limitations to working with pencils)
This is shaking loose another memory from back during the initial time where I was really into Worm: People being like 'Brute!Taylor would be a giant insect' annoyed me so damn much. Like you said, a brute power enabled by QA would be something like a million of tiny short-range forcefields that Taylor has perfect conscious control over.
Could also be like, cover herself in a fuckload of bugs that are Brute-level reinforced so it's basically scale mail armour made out of bugs, if her power had the bug theming still. But tbh that's basically just a million tiny short-range forcefields except gross.
There are other ways QA could do Brute, but fundamentally they would all lean into that sort of fine control. A QA Brute would never be particularly strong as Brutes go, but it would inevitably be incredibly graceful and flexible in a way Brutes usually never even consider. Capable of moving in ways humans normally can't, completely in control of every smallest factor of that movement, as a baseline, not counting whatever spice is added to that (and there's almost always some spice to Brutes, even if they're just bricks they're bricks in a very unique way). A QA Brute can stand balanced on their little toe and have no real trouble with it.
Giant insect would be more of a Changer trigger, which QA wouldn't be super-great with, but could vibe with if it was part of a power package that included command of a horde of insects. But the horde of insects is where QA is really getting her QA on. And the giant insect, if it has Brute elements beyond just being big, is gonna have that sort of body control.
A QA Brute would never be particularly strong as Brutes go, but it would inevitably be incredibly graceful and flexible in a way Brutes usually never even consider.
One of the ways WibblyBow expounded upon possible powers for QA is a Brute option:
Dwood - Yesterday at 4:15 PM
Wildbow: can the QA shard add brute flavors to its triggers?
Wildbow - Yesterday at 4:16 PM
Generally QA is going to operate around the fulcrum point of being a 'controls many minions' master trigger and is going to seek out hosts that hit that note. In the most forced context, you'd probably get a 'mass/tower of rats' brute body.
So a Brute power would likely revolve around likely creating rat armor(or something composed of many organisms).
IMO the obvious way to do a QA brute is basically just Aegis. An "individually control every cell in your own body" type thing which gives impossible toughness and regeneration more or less as a side effect.
It's been my pet theory for a while that part of the reason Aegis was a protagonist candidate if Taylor got endbringered was because he could have become Khepri in more or less the same way Taylor did, just increasing range instead of decreasing it.
Tbh I don't think they're that deep in her systems. She would have to exert some effort to keep them from finding out, but she does that as a matter of course in everything she does.
Oh? I thought it'd at least start out pretty surface-level when Colin calls her?
Well, if they can be kept from finding out, hopefully Dragon's law-obeyment shackles won't come into play either. On the plus side, Cauldron seems pretty illegal -- but on the minus side, I'm not sure how much Dragon might be forced to make sure, say, the chief director of the PRT knows about this.
It's more that, well. They're often in a pretty bad place in their life, or mentally. They are, right from the root, making a very dangerous decision, and something is pushing them to that. Often enough the damage is done by the law and its enforcers, but it's still there.
They're not necessarily making a very dangerous decision, though. All that's required to be a criminal is being in violation of the law, and the law can change. Something that was legal yesterday can be illegal today. Add in old laws that are just (usually) not enforced instead of having been taken off the books, and it seems not all that difficult to become a criminal without doing anything different, or without even knowing it.
... there's some other sorcerous secret going on in there. The advice alone still ain't getting that snappy sound, just this kinda sad scrape.
Yeah, same; I still have no idea how people manage that.
Pale Wolf said:
It doesn't seem to have been a Cauldron tinker who made the Birdcage, it doesn't bear Hero's marks, so there's really no arrow pointing to Cauldron for its construction.
Huh. I thought it was canon that Dragon, both actually and as far as the public knows, built it? Is this another place I've gotten an incorrect impression of canon?
And regarding the American justice system, well, hey, it has gotten better than it used to be! Of course, given that how it used to be was this, that's not exactly a high bar.
Pale Wolf said:
but even if they have, it's not something they can mass-produce and make available to everyone else's prison system
Huh. I thought it was canon that Dragon, both actually and as far as the public knows, built it? Is this another place I've gotten an incorrect impression of canon?
Yeah, but Colin does have a brain. So when he calls he's not just gonna spring it on her in casual conversation over a connection of unspecified security. He's gonna preface with 'I have a titanic motherfucker of a secret to tell you' so she can make sure she's in private, secure the line, etc. Make sure both parties have taken the necessary security steps to be talking about something this sensitive, rather than just on his end.
Well, if they can be kept from finding out, hopefully Dragon's law-obeyment shackles won't come into play either. On the plus side, Cauldron seems pretty illegal -- but on the minus side, I'm not sure how much Dragon might be forced to make sure, say, the chief director of the PRT knows about this.
They're not necessarily making a very dangerous decision, though. All that's required to be a criminal is being in violation of the law, and the law can change. Something that was legal yesterday can be illegal today. Add in old laws that are just (usually) not enforced instead of having been taken off the books, and it seems not all that difficult to become a criminal without doing anything different, or without even knowing it.
That's true but Colin basically works as superSWAT. He doesn't deal with the criminals doing soft things that are likely to change or are violating unenforced laws nobody remembers. He deals primarily with violent crime, or at least active robbery. So that's the kind of criminal he thinks of when he uses the term.
Huh. I thought it was canon that Dragon, both actually and as far as the public knows, built it? Is this another place I've gotten an incorrect impression of canon?
The Birdcage was built in 1996. (Speaking of other things falsely attributed to Dragon, containment foam debuted in 2000)
Dragon was directly under Richter's command until 2005, when Newfoundland sunk. Her hero career did not begin until then.
Even as a 'heroic tinker', she was actually just an AI building advanced-but-conventional technology and working as computer security until she triggered in 2006.
While we don't know exactly how old she is or when she was 'born' or doing things under Richter's command, she absolutely was not a tinker at that point. While I'm very dubious that containment foam is tinkertech so she could still be involved in that one (but I doubt it because dammit stop shrinking the world, let people outside the core cast do things), the Birdcage is very much tinkertech, which means it was completely beyond her capabilities.
The actual builder of the Birdcage is unknown, but it's very much not Dragon. She just took over administration. (It may be Mr Baumann, or a single tinker he hired, or a team of tinkers he hired. I'd bet on a team because if you're building A Truly Inescapable Prison, you go all-the-fuck-out... actually Sphere might've been on the team or might've been the team, the Birdcage is very much dead-center in his specialization)
And regarding the American justice system, well, hey, it has gotten better than it used to be! Of course, given that how it used to be was this, that's not exactly a high bar.
Because a Trump is a person and can only be in one place at a time. And Tinkers can't mass-produce. If they have something, it just isn't gonna be in the quantity that they can parcel it out everywhere.
They can make as many capes as they like. But they can't mass-produce a specific cape. Powers are deeply personal and unless it's a very direct expression of a shard's core theming, a vial sample that produces a trump or tinkertrump in one test subject just... isn't gonna do that in the next one over. They've got what they've stumbled across and really nothing more than that, and they can go digging around in a hole that turned up one power that was Interesting in that particular way, but that doesn't mean they'll have even found it again, let alone isolated the causative factors to the point where they can replicate it on demand in as many test subjects they please.
Which is distinct from the sheer logistical nightmare that parcelling these guys out if you had them in sufficient quantity would be. We're talking hundreds of trumps for the US alone (and one Trump is too many for America ). People are gonna notice the uptick, it'd play merry hell on the secrecy that lets them do almost everything else.
Jane answered this, but Scion's main tool-of-choice shard is Stilling, which focuses around energy wavelengths and the transmission and cancellation thereof. It was also discussed earlier in-thread as Hero's shard - he had the Eden version.
@Pale Wolf re the security of that call:
...Hm. We seem to have significantly different ideas about how Dragon's compromised; I'd have thought putting such emphasis on security would if anything be more likely to attract the Dragonslayers' attention, and I thought Dragon couldn't detect the backdoor they were using, and thus could only secure it by accident. Clearly this isn't the case in the universe of this story -- well, based on what you're saying here, at least, but I'm assuming your thoughts on the matter probably won't have changed significantly by the time it does show up in the story -- but is it the case more generally?
