Darth.
Definitely a heretic
- Location
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The Protectorate has his identity. I doubt they will want him around them. He hasn't established himself like Taylor had in canon before being outed.
Stealing Fire (Worm SI)
- Thread starter Jack Stargazer
- Start date
Jaune Pendragon
King Of Servants
- Location
- Avalon
IT is ALIVE...
- Location
- Erebus
god, that's a horrible reference. This is a fanfic using spacewhales, and it's got better science than that game did.
2.A - Armsmaster Interlude
- Location
- Canada
Reports of my death were only mostly exaggerated. Since my last post I've gotten a new job, gotten engaged, been the hostage in a bank robbery, and eaten a lot of chips. The last part isn't as important to you, but it was a great time for me.
My muse vanished for a while in streams of legal documentation and case work, but it returned long enough to get into Armsmaster's head and advance the plot a bit, so here's the next section. I haven't written the next part, and I may try to get a bit of a backlog going before posting the next bit, so no promises on the next update.
If you see any misspellings or grammar errors please let me know, this chapter has not been edited.
2.A - Armsmaster Interlude
Collin Wallis woke up at precisely 4:03 AM.
The last few weeks had been… not amazing for Colin. The chaos in the city brought on by the gang war and Bakuda's mad bombing spree had resulted in hundreds of casualties, millions of dollars in damage, and a 47.5% loss in his personal efficiency metrics.
It would take weeks of relatively "normal" chaos to recover to a respectable level and get his time management back on track.
Colin hated inefficiency. While part of that was a natural feature of his life - he had never been too forgiving of associates who wasted time on frivolous things when there was work to be done - he was certain that a part of that hate stemmed from his power. He had high enough clearance to read the profile reports of villains in the ENE region, he knew what Accord's power had done to his own personal obsessive-compulsive complex. Colin had done enough self-reflection to know that his own neurotic tendencies had likely been seriously enhanced by his power. All in all, it could have been a lot worse.
As he stood from the cot in his lab into the boots of his power armor, he consumed the waiting nutrient bar on the table and reached out to grab the mug of coffee coming out of the auto-brewer. His suit began to form around him, placed by automated waldo units. Inspired by that Aleph movie - amazing what you could pull inspiration from. Saved him an average of 3.4 minutes per day in donning his armor, an efficiency gain which paid dividends over time.
As his helmet closed over his head and the display began booting up, he walked to the main terminal and began to view the status of his various automated projects, sipping at the coffee as he walked. Perfect temperature, as it should be.
As he walked a window popped up in the corner of his vision, a brief glimpse of the Guild logo, fading into a more personal image which caused him to smile slightly despite his own personal exhaustion.
The image resolved into a face, which looked about as tired as he felt. The face formed a wan smile as it began to speak.
"Good Morning Colin, I've taken the liberty of quickly summarizing the updates from the last two hours while you've been asleep." Dragon said, as a stream of data began flickering through his heads-up display.
4 attacks. 2 E88 strikes on ABB locations, relatively small time, no Parahuman involvement. Stormtiger and Cricket hit an ABB brothel only to be chased off by Lung - apparently Cricket had suffered severe burns, but nothing Othala couldn't fix and Oni Lee had responded to a request for help from some ABB goons attacking a MedHall research facility and community clinic which had been… defended by E88?
Armsmaster paused and began to review this last report more closely. He pulled up the surveillance information - Dragon had made great strides in back-engineering one of L33T's old camera-drones, and while some of the features that made that failure of a Tinker's creations so effective, at least temporarily, had eluded her, the versions she created were still fairly effective at monitoring events throughout the city.
Technically this kind of wide-scale monitoring was not proper law enforcement procedure, and none of the information gathered this way would likely be court-admissible, but given the current situation in Brockton Bay, Armsmaster was not going to give up the tactical advantage.
There weren't enough drones to provide anywhere near city-wide surveillance, but most major parahuman conflicts tended to be pretty visible from above, especially when viewed in infrared. Colin watched the first quite high and zoomed out overhead view, followed by a much clearer view of the later stages of the conflict, culminating in some kind of large explosion which collapsed the three story medical office into a pile of smoking rubble.
"Seismometers registered a minor seismic event in the area around the time the building collapsed, and spectral analysis shows that some of the material in the building is simply gone, not just buried under rubble. It's possible the collapse may have damaged the sewer system in the area as well. 15 fatalities, 34 injured were sent to Brockton Bay General as the closest hospital. 28 of those are marked ABB or E88 Members, the other 6 appear to be civilians, perhaps employees working late. It looks like they haven't all been identified yet." Dragon's voice interrupted Colin's focus for a moment as she summarized a number of graphs and reports attached to the data stream.
"Localized teleportation effect?" Armsmaster responded, taking another sip of his coffee.
The view zoomed in on the rubble, and a wireframe began to illustrate Dragon's analysis with datapoints drawn from a number of sensors, both in the drone and networked in through Armsmaster's local network.
"Actually, based on gravimetric readings, this may have been a localized micro-singularity. Bakuda's bombs have some truly exotic effects, and this may not be too outside the norm."
Colin coughed, and nearly spat out the mouthful of coffee he had just taken. A strangled "What?" escaped his mouth as he sputtered for a moment before recovering.
"A singularity? Are you sure? How large? Is it still active? Is it growing?" Armsmaster's mind raced. A fool. Only a goddamned fool would use something so dangerous in a bomb. A microsingularity which could grow or which lasted too long could destroy the planet given enough time, that was an Extinction-Level Event waiting to happen.
His hands danced over the keyboard, pulling up reading after reading as his mind raced.
Suddenly the screen flashed black for a moment and he frowned reaching for the reset before he finally noticed that Dragon was trying to get his attention.
"As I was saying," Dragon noted, staring at him with a digital eyebrow raised "the microsingularity seemed to only exist for about 5 seconds, pulled in and presumably annihilated everything in a 10 meter radius, and then vanished. Gravatic sensors show no other anomalies anywhere in the city, and no other areas appear to have been effected. It seems to have been merely a small scale effect."
Dragon frowns. "Though, I'm not sure I like not knowing whether Bakuda could scale that effect up. On a larger scale, the gravatic sheer of a singularity could tear apart any forcefield or material I can think of. It certainly ups Bakuda's threat level if she is capable of something like that."
Colin grunted, and drank the rest of his coffee before placing the empty mug in a receptacle in the machine. "We have to deal with Bakuda soon. If we give her much more time to build, the entire city could be at risk. If she is this irresponsible, possibly even more."
Dragon's virtual face took on a solemn expression and she nodded. "Yes I agree. We have 18 hours before the planned attack. Lets go over what we know…"
As Dragon outlined the key evidence on Bakuda and Lung's locations and the plan of attack, Colin began cycling through the readouts and configuring his equipment loadout. For several hours, they continued preparing.
----
8:14 AM EST, April 24, 2011
In the middle of a long explanation about ABB movement patterns, Dragon suddenly paused. Colin looked up from his configuration menu. "Is something wrong?"
Dragon frowned. "I thought I detected… something. With a rogue tinker on the loose in the city, I've been monitoring internet, utility, and communications traffic for the standard Tinker indicators. One of my programs alerted me to a high bandwidth cellular connection suddenly appearing shortly outside Brockton General Hospital. No conventional cellular modem has the capacity to operate at the levels of bandwidth of this connection, and it spoofed a dozen simultaneous connections to the closest cell tower within moments."
Armsmaster pulled up the scan, but Dragon's programs were significantly outside his area of specialization. The information streaming across the screen was almost raw data, and very difficult to make much sense of. Seeing his reaction, Dragon isolated and highlighted several areas, and opened another screen showing a map of Brockton Bay, with the location highlighted.
"I tracked the signal for about 3 minutes, moving southbound on Wallis Street, at an average of 23 miles per hour. Then it vanished."
Colin's eyebrows rose at this. "Vanished? Can you track what what accessed?"
Dragon's eyes narrowed, and a range of screens began to appear on Colin's monitor. Data flew by, and hundreds, thousands of connections began to appear. "Whatever it was, it momentarily took over roughly 15% of that tower's total bandwidth. It must have been some kind of prepared program, or virus, because it operated far too quickly to be done manually, even by a Tinker. The program sought out dozens of different systems, searching for vulnerabilities, accessing government and non-governmental databases, seeking out data in Toronto, Mumbai, Vancouver, and New York. There are too many individual streams, I cannot tell what the actual goal of the program was without more time to analyze each branch."
"It's slightly worrying to see a program even you can't trace within minutes Dragon, even moreso worrying that you then lost track of it entirely." Colin responded. "Is there anything about the point of termination that could shed light on why you lost the signal?"
Dragon shakes her head. "Not that I can see. The program sought out certain information - publicly available government records and forms from Delaware, a manifest of the PHO Cape Database in New York, communication and internet access logs in Toronto, login credentials for an Endbringer memorial site in Japan, the list goes on. Several of these had reported back to the source before it suddenly went completely dark to me. I cannot find any connection on any of the other towers in the area that matches the same signature. It is possible that it detected my probes and shut down."
Colin pulled up his own, not as effective search algorithms and began to run a scan. "Hmm. I have something. There was a notice from some troopers at Brockton General about an hour ago that Panacea had invoked the Kyushu Accords on what may be a new trigger. She spent about two hours in the room with this person, and when she left she asked to be brought to the PRT HQ. Following standard protocols for an out of character response when interacting with a new trigger, the Lieutenant on scene called in Master/Stranger Protocols on Panacea and the new trigger, temporarily codenamed "Regen", as the doctors called in Panacea after noting that the subject was healing much faster than usual from some serious injuries."
The screen continued to scroll downward as Armsmaster continued reading the report. "It looks like he came in from the ABB and E88 fight that occured while I was asleep. No gang signs, no identification, and he was wearing some seriously damaged civilian clothing. He could have been a Medhall employee working late, wrong place wrong time, teams are still trying to dig out any computers in the rubble, but it's seriously low priority right now."
Armsmaster highlights a document, and notes the tracking device on the PRT transport vehicle usually stationed at Brockton General when Panacea is in attendance. "But look at this. PRT Transport 185 left Brockton General with Panacea, 4 troopers and codename Regen two minutes before you first picked up the signal. The transponder shows the vehicle travelling southbound on Willis Street at precisely the same time you picked up the cellular tower connection."
Armsmaster hits a few keys, and the two datastreams sync up. The location data is identical, but when the cellular tracking ends, the transponder data continues. "Reports from the squad before the transport left indicates that neither Regen nor Panacea had any electronic devices on them other than Panacea's phone. Panacea's phone is PRT issue, but does not have nearly the bandwidth to make the connections you detected."
Armsmaster rises from his seat and triggers a command in his visor. An armory to the east of the screen opens and a particular halberd extends outward perfectly timed for him to grab - his anti- tinker weapon.
"Transport 185 is scheduled to arrive in the garage in 6 minutes. I can be there in 3." Armsmaster opened a radio channel to the garage, and ordered Transport 185 to be locked down pending his arrival when it came in.
Closing the channel he turned back to Dragon.
"I need to find out what this Tinker is doing, and in the worst case scenario we may have a Tinker/Master who has compromised Panacea." Armsmaster grimaced. "This is the worst possible time for this."
Dragon nodded, her virtual face grave. "Understood. Colin, be careful. I don't have any suits in the area, and I am not finished modifying my primary suit for the Lung fight this afternoon. I can't get anything there for 4 hours, minimum."
Armsmaster nods. "I can handle this. See if you can pick up that program or what it was looking for. It might give us an idea of what's going on here."
Armsmaster begins walking out of the lab, mentally reviewing the quickest path to the vehicle bay. This would have to happen now. What's next, the Slaughterhouse Nine come to visit?
He grinds his teeth under his helmet. No, even he can't be that unlucky.
He continues down the path to the garage, mentally reviewing his anti-tinker and anti-master protocols.
My muse vanished for a while in streams of legal documentation and case work, but it returned long enough to get into Armsmaster's head and advance the plot a bit, so here's the next section. I haven't written the next part, and I may try to get a bit of a backlog going before posting the next bit, so no promises on the next update.
If you see any misspellings or grammar errors please let me know, this chapter has not been edited.
2.A - Armsmaster Interlude
Collin Wallis woke up at precisely 4:03 AM.
The last few weeks had been… not amazing for Colin. The chaos in the city brought on by the gang war and Bakuda's mad bombing spree had resulted in hundreds of casualties, millions of dollars in damage, and a 47.5% loss in his personal efficiency metrics.
It would take weeks of relatively "normal" chaos to recover to a respectable level and get his time management back on track.
Colin hated inefficiency. While part of that was a natural feature of his life - he had never been too forgiving of associates who wasted time on frivolous things when there was work to be done - he was certain that a part of that hate stemmed from his power. He had high enough clearance to read the profile reports of villains in the ENE region, he knew what Accord's power had done to his own personal obsessive-compulsive complex. Colin had done enough self-reflection to know that his own neurotic tendencies had likely been seriously enhanced by his power. All in all, it could have been a lot worse.
As he stood from the cot in his lab into the boots of his power armor, he consumed the waiting nutrient bar on the table and reached out to grab the mug of coffee coming out of the auto-brewer. His suit began to form around him, placed by automated waldo units. Inspired by that Aleph movie - amazing what you could pull inspiration from. Saved him an average of 3.4 minutes per day in donning his armor, an efficiency gain which paid dividends over time.
As his helmet closed over his head and the display began booting up, he walked to the main terminal and began to view the status of his various automated projects, sipping at the coffee as he walked. Perfect temperature, as it should be.
As he walked a window popped up in the corner of his vision, a brief glimpse of the Guild logo, fading into a more personal image which caused him to smile slightly despite his own personal exhaustion.
The image resolved into a face, which looked about as tired as he felt. The face formed a wan smile as it began to speak.
"Good Morning Colin, I've taken the liberty of quickly summarizing the updates from the last two hours while you've been asleep." Dragon said, as a stream of data began flickering through his heads-up display.
4 attacks. 2 E88 strikes on ABB locations, relatively small time, no Parahuman involvement. Stormtiger and Cricket hit an ABB brothel only to be chased off by Lung - apparently Cricket had suffered severe burns, but nothing Othala couldn't fix and Oni Lee had responded to a request for help from some ABB goons attacking a MedHall research facility and community clinic which had been… defended by E88?
Armsmaster paused and began to review this last report more closely. He pulled up the surveillance information - Dragon had made great strides in back-engineering one of L33T's old camera-drones, and while some of the features that made that failure of a Tinker's creations so effective, at least temporarily, had eluded her, the versions she created were still fairly effective at monitoring events throughout the city.
Technically this kind of wide-scale monitoring was not proper law enforcement procedure, and none of the information gathered this way would likely be court-admissible, but given the current situation in Brockton Bay, Armsmaster was not going to give up the tactical advantage.
There weren't enough drones to provide anywhere near city-wide surveillance, but most major parahuman conflicts tended to be pretty visible from above, especially when viewed in infrared. Colin watched the first quite high and zoomed out overhead view, followed by a much clearer view of the later stages of the conflict, culminating in some kind of large explosion which collapsed the three story medical office into a pile of smoking rubble.
"Seismometers registered a minor seismic event in the area around the time the building collapsed, and spectral analysis shows that some of the material in the building is simply gone, not just buried under rubble. It's possible the collapse may have damaged the sewer system in the area as well. 15 fatalities, 34 injured were sent to Brockton Bay General as the closest hospital. 28 of those are marked ABB or E88 Members, the other 6 appear to be civilians, perhaps employees working late. It looks like they haven't all been identified yet." Dragon's voice interrupted Colin's focus for a moment as she summarized a number of graphs and reports attached to the data stream.
"Localized teleportation effect?" Armsmaster responded, taking another sip of his coffee.
The view zoomed in on the rubble, and a wireframe began to illustrate Dragon's analysis with datapoints drawn from a number of sensors, both in the drone and networked in through Armsmaster's local network.
"Actually, based on gravimetric readings, this may have been a localized micro-singularity. Bakuda's bombs have some truly exotic effects, and this may not be too outside the norm."
Colin coughed, and nearly spat out the mouthful of coffee he had just taken. A strangled "What?" escaped his mouth as he sputtered for a moment before recovering.
"A singularity? Are you sure? How large? Is it still active? Is it growing?" Armsmaster's mind raced. A fool. Only a goddamned fool would use something so dangerous in a bomb. A microsingularity which could grow or which lasted too long could destroy the planet given enough time, that was an Extinction-Level Event waiting to happen.
His hands danced over the keyboard, pulling up reading after reading as his mind raced.
Suddenly the screen flashed black for a moment and he frowned reaching for the reset before he finally noticed that Dragon was trying to get his attention.
"As I was saying," Dragon noted, staring at him with a digital eyebrow raised "the microsingularity seemed to only exist for about 5 seconds, pulled in and presumably annihilated everything in a 10 meter radius, and then vanished. Gravatic sensors show no other anomalies anywhere in the city, and no other areas appear to have been effected. It seems to have been merely a small scale effect."
Dragon frowns. "Though, I'm not sure I like not knowing whether Bakuda could scale that effect up. On a larger scale, the gravatic sheer of a singularity could tear apart any forcefield or material I can think of. It certainly ups Bakuda's threat level if she is capable of something like that."
Colin grunted, and drank the rest of his coffee before placing the empty mug in a receptacle in the machine. "We have to deal with Bakuda soon. If we give her much more time to build, the entire city could be at risk. If she is this irresponsible, possibly even more."
Dragon's virtual face took on a solemn expression and she nodded. "Yes I agree. We have 18 hours before the planned attack. Lets go over what we know…"
As Dragon outlined the key evidence on Bakuda and Lung's locations and the plan of attack, Colin began cycling through the readouts and configuring his equipment loadout. For several hours, they continued preparing.
----
8:14 AM EST, April 24, 2011
In the middle of a long explanation about ABB movement patterns, Dragon suddenly paused. Colin looked up from his configuration menu. "Is something wrong?"
Dragon frowned. "I thought I detected… something. With a rogue tinker on the loose in the city, I've been monitoring internet, utility, and communications traffic for the standard Tinker indicators. One of my programs alerted me to a high bandwidth cellular connection suddenly appearing shortly outside Brockton General Hospital. No conventional cellular modem has the capacity to operate at the levels of bandwidth of this connection, and it spoofed a dozen simultaneous connections to the closest cell tower within moments."
Armsmaster pulled up the scan, but Dragon's programs were significantly outside his area of specialization. The information streaming across the screen was almost raw data, and very difficult to make much sense of. Seeing his reaction, Dragon isolated and highlighted several areas, and opened another screen showing a map of Brockton Bay, with the location highlighted.
"I tracked the signal for about 3 minutes, moving southbound on Wallis Street, at an average of 23 miles per hour. Then it vanished."
Colin's eyebrows rose at this. "Vanished? Can you track what what accessed?"
Dragon's eyes narrowed, and a range of screens began to appear on Colin's monitor. Data flew by, and hundreds, thousands of connections began to appear. "Whatever it was, it momentarily took over roughly 15% of that tower's total bandwidth. It must have been some kind of prepared program, or virus, because it operated far too quickly to be done manually, even by a Tinker. The program sought out dozens of different systems, searching for vulnerabilities, accessing government and non-governmental databases, seeking out data in Toronto, Mumbai, Vancouver, and New York. There are too many individual streams, I cannot tell what the actual goal of the program was without more time to analyze each branch."
"It's slightly worrying to see a program even you can't trace within minutes Dragon, even moreso worrying that you then lost track of it entirely." Colin responded. "Is there anything about the point of termination that could shed light on why you lost the signal?"
Dragon shakes her head. "Not that I can see. The program sought out certain information - publicly available government records and forms from Delaware, a manifest of the PHO Cape Database in New York, communication and internet access logs in Toronto, login credentials for an Endbringer memorial site in Japan, the list goes on. Several of these had reported back to the source before it suddenly went completely dark to me. I cannot find any connection on any of the other towers in the area that matches the same signature. It is possible that it detected my probes and shut down."
Colin pulled up his own, not as effective search algorithms and began to run a scan. "Hmm. I have something. There was a notice from some troopers at Brockton General about an hour ago that Panacea had invoked the Kyushu Accords on what may be a new trigger. She spent about two hours in the room with this person, and when she left she asked to be brought to the PRT HQ. Following standard protocols for an out of character response when interacting with a new trigger, the Lieutenant on scene called in Master/Stranger Protocols on Panacea and the new trigger, temporarily codenamed "Regen", as the doctors called in Panacea after noting that the subject was healing much faster than usual from some serious injuries."
The screen continued to scroll downward as Armsmaster continued reading the report. "It looks like he came in from the ABB and E88 fight that occured while I was asleep. No gang signs, no identification, and he was wearing some seriously damaged civilian clothing. He could have been a Medhall employee working late, wrong place wrong time, teams are still trying to dig out any computers in the rubble, but it's seriously low priority right now."
Armsmaster highlights a document, and notes the tracking device on the PRT transport vehicle usually stationed at Brockton General when Panacea is in attendance. "But look at this. PRT Transport 185 left Brockton General with Panacea, 4 troopers and codename Regen two minutes before you first picked up the signal. The transponder shows the vehicle travelling southbound on Willis Street at precisely the same time you picked up the cellular tower connection."
Armsmaster hits a few keys, and the two datastreams sync up. The location data is identical, but when the cellular tracking ends, the transponder data continues. "Reports from the squad before the transport left indicates that neither Regen nor Panacea had any electronic devices on them other than Panacea's phone. Panacea's phone is PRT issue, but does not have nearly the bandwidth to make the connections you detected."
Armsmaster rises from his seat and triggers a command in his visor. An armory to the east of the screen opens and a particular halberd extends outward perfectly timed for him to grab - his anti- tinker weapon.
"Transport 185 is scheduled to arrive in the garage in 6 minutes. I can be there in 3." Armsmaster opened a radio channel to the garage, and ordered Transport 185 to be locked down pending his arrival when it came in.
Closing the channel he turned back to Dragon.
"I need to find out what this Tinker is doing, and in the worst case scenario we may have a Tinker/Master who has compromised Panacea." Armsmaster grimaced. "This is the worst possible time for this."
Dragon nodded, her virtual face grave. "Understood. Colin, be careful. I don't have any suits in the area, and I am not finished modifying my primary suit for the Lung fight this afternoon. I can't get anything there for 4 hours, minimum."
Armsmaster nods. "I can handle this. See if you can pick up that program or what it was looking for. It might give us an idea of what's going on here."
Armsmaster begins walking out of the lab, mentally reviewing the quickest path to the vehicle bay. This would have to happen now. What's next, the Slaughterhouse Nine come to visit?
He grinds his teeth under his helmet. No, even he can't be that unlucky.
He continues down the path to the garage, mentally reviewing his anti-tinker and anti-master protocols.
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- Location
- Canada
Hell, it's been so long I needed to reread it if only for narrative continuity.
- Location
- Canada
I had reread the last chapter to try to remind myself of which story it was and was quite lost until the end of it when I realized what story it was and reading the latest chapter confirmed it. Though I'll probably do a full reread if you start posting more.
edit:
Anyways, welcome back! I wonder if your bank hostage situation will influence the Undersiders bank scene or have you butterflied that away with your interaction with them? I also wonder how the Kyoto Accords deal with him committing crimes immediately after being accepted into them, or if Panacea's reference is even enough to have him be accepted (if not and it needs to be confirmed by someone else then he'd probably have immunity for the crimes he committed before it became official). Verymuch hoping that his legal research covered the issue of Dragon finding his hacking and he's able to pull our regulations and laws protecting himself here and making Armsy look like a fool.
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- Location
- Canada
The bank robbery already happened on April 14, 2011 the SI didn't show up until the evening of April 23.
Which I obviously decided way before I was actually in that situation and could have written it from personal experience, but as the SI is an eigenself from mid-2016 he wouldn't have been in that situation himself.
Jonn Wolfe
(Verified Sarcastic) (Not a Wolf)
- Location
- Beyond Sanity Since 1971
Glad to see this come back! Enjoyed rereading!
Heh... I can so see how this could go.
Heh... I can so see how this could go.
*long explanation of something that only Colin understands*
Jack: "Wow. The internet was right. You are a dick."
Colin: "Excuse me?"
Jack: "Don't think I will. You're a dick, and I don't respond well to having sharp things pointed at me or being accused by said codpiece. So, either calm down and talk like a rational human being, or get Miss Militia down here to translate your complete lack of people skills. Because honestly? You suck at how to people. Amy? If you could call your mother, it looks like I'm going to need a lawyer for some damned reason."
- Location
- Brazil
Given what he knows, his response is understandable, and he hasn't done anything bad yet.
Armsmaster gets far too flanderized in his "social inability". His interlude from when he put up an old version of Dragon to save the one which Saint damaged (and he loved) had him as a smart, rational man.
His first encounter with Taylor is just a wary "... Am I going to have to fight you too?" and then giving her a solid sell on the Wards:
You don't get to be so popular that teenage girls are buying panties with your logos, and be like the second or third best Protectorate hero after the Triumvirate, if you can't put on some charm. He even explicitly does talk shows and interviews and such.
We see him through Taylor's eyes, so we kind of forget that to the rest of the world, he is the superhero equivalent of a rockstar. When the Protectorate poses in the classical V formation, he is there.
So, I expect a very wary Armsmaster (because a Master/Tinker is fucking terrifying, and this one almost slipped inside the Rig), but he should be aware it's just his hypothesis.
@edit: @Jack Stargazer Wait, they were taken to the PRT, so why is Armsmaster the rest? The Protectorate stays in the Rig. Should probably make some mention of that being his secondary lab or something.
Armsmaster gets far too flanderized in his "social inability". His interlude from when he put up an old version of Dragon to save the one which Saint damaged (and he loved) had him as a smart, rational man.
His first encounter with Taylor is just a wary "... Am I going to have to fight you too?" and then giving her a solid sell on the Wards:
You don't get to be so popular that teenage girls are buying panties with your logos, and be like the second or third best Protectorate hero after the Triumvirate, if you can't put on some charm. He even explicitly does talk shows and interviews and such.
We see him through Taylor's eyes, so we kind of forget that to the rest of the world, he is the superhero equivalent of a rockstar. When the Protectorate poses in the classical V formation, he is there.
So, I expect a very wary Armsmaster (because a Master/Tinker is fucking terrifying, and this one almost slipped inside the Rig), but he should be aware it's just his hypothesis.
@edit: @Jack Stargazer Wait, they were taken to the PRT, so why is Armsmaster the rest? The Protectorate stays in the Rig. Should probably make some mention of that being his secondary lab or something.
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- Location
- England
He could have been efficiency-Accord.
Somebody makes two trips to the storage room when they could have done it in one? That's a murderin'.
- Location
- Canada
This should probably be mentioned, but I have two reasons for this. One is that Lung only recently escaped from custody, and that happens on the Rig, which gets seriously damaged as he busts out. In my mind there is no way Armsmaster wouldn't have his lab close to the cells for effective response to attempts to break out, so it was damaged at the time and hasn't been repaired to full yet.
The other is that Bakuda is still blowing up the city, and the response time for anyone not named Velocity is much lower from inside the city.
Canon rarely goes into it, but having the superheroes and the civilian HQ in separate buildings is just idiotic to me. An intelligent villain attacks the civilian HQ, takes out or takes hostage the civilian leadership with very little effort, and the heroes are still minutes away at best from responding. Even if they are lucky enough to have tinker defences, dumb uncontrolled defences are easier to subvert than actual parahuman guards
Last edited:
- Location
- Canada
In a world with people who can turn invisible or modify the minds of everyone they meet to make them think they are your best friend, 'suspicions' are usually all you have to go on before it is far too late to do anything about the problem.
- Location
- Villa Straylight, Freeside, Earth Orbit
Just found and read through this whole thing and I am enjoying getting some Transhumanism fun! I cant wait for Jack to try and explain just what he was up to abusing all the cellular bandwidth for a few minutes, because if nothing else he broke a few laws about unauthorised access to systems for breaking into the cell network like that.
The Froggy Ninja
The Blade Will Never Die
Any singularity that small would have an event horizon too small to consume matter faster that it radiated energy away. There's basically no way it could grow to consume even a city much less the entire planet.
Modus_Tollens
SCREAMING AT THE APOCALYPSE
- Location
- ALSO SCREAMING.
If I sense an implant in somebody when a noted tinker has been putting suicide bomber implants in everybody? Especially trying to enter my base? I'm not taking any chances. Its nothing personal, you might be a great person, but you also might be a great person that spontaneously turns human beings into glass or warp-spawn or tapioca pudding. You might not even know it.
I'd be in full XCOM/SCP Foundation mode. Its sensible. Good for Armsmaster.
- Location
- Myanmar
He was not trying to enter the base...it was PRT that invited him...Also what made Armsmaster think he should point a weapon at someone with a tinker bomb that could possibly be a mini black hole in the head? or a Master/Tinker... it would be better for him to not meet the suspect at all or let a normie interview him in some isolated area.
Doubt Armsmaster knows Jack was involved with that mini black hole, or that there are bombs in people's heads rather than as grenades on Oni Lee's belt. As for the Master bit - from Armsmaster's PoV it took Jack two hours to get to Panacea, so he's probably just thinking he should (efficiently) find out what this new tinker who has compromised Panacea is up to with his virus/device.
Working with the available data (and possibly with a push from his power) he thus makes a decision that's likely to bring some conflict.
Modus_Tollens
SCREAMING AT THE APOCALYPSE
- Location
- ALSO SCREAMING.
And if you see something you weren't expecting. The guy shows up and... huh... my friendly neighborhood tricorder says you have anomalous implants in a couple places. I didn't know it was there until two seconds ago. I should probably trigger a yellow alert because, well, who knows what could come of this. And he is probably throwing all sorts of weird triggers for my body language reading software.
Nothing conclusive, but definitely enough to raise tension.
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Armsmaster is right about being paranoid. He is wrong about threatening the suspect while important civilian (Panacea) is inside the potential blast zone. That's unprofessional and stupid as all hell. Could he still do it? Eh.. maybe. We don't know how his actions are regulated, but we do know that tinkers are usually the most mentally damaged of natural triggers...
- Location
- Myanmar
I agreed I'm just pointing out suddenly pointing a weapon at any cape with unknown power is not a very wise decision. Especially when you think he has "tinker bombs" on them... well he's not known for making good decision anyway...