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The Warcrafter

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Aurora Moon said:
Huh. the fact that Oni lee's memory tends to degrade over time thanks to his power... I wonder if that would degrade the memories of the previous butchers too, or if this means that the previous butchers get more control over Oni lee's body and powers.

After all, an empty shell would be easier to possess and control....
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I'm thinking it would degrade all memories and afaik that side effect is not common knowledge so even the Oni Lee is essentially a blank slate for the previous butchers to work with eventually they ALL will be because, let's be honest, butcher is gonna wanna play with his new toy a bit.
 
Aurora Moon said:
Huh. the fact that Oni lee's memory tends to degrade over time thanks to his power... I wonder if that would degrade the memories of the previous butchers too, or if this means that the previous butchers get more control over Oni lee's body and powers.

After all, an empty shell would be easier to possess and control....
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If this was the plan then shell could be the relevent term there. I think that it'd actually be a case of the 'clone' On Lee left behind from a teleport which might kill Butcher. It could go wrong, but it could leave Butcher attached to a person who is going to turn to dust in mere moments...
 
Merior said:
If this was the plan then shell could be the relevent term there. I think that it'd actually be a case of the 'clone' On Lee left behind from a teleport which might kill Butcher. It could go wrong, but it could leave Butcher attached to a person who is going to turn to dust in mere moments...
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Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. I remember there was one story where Stormtiger killed the Butcher and then immediately killed himself before he could go crazy. Of course, there's a good chance that it would just try to hop to the nearest other parahuman, but I bet something interesting will happen when it tries to jump to a fake shard host . . .
 
Dear RHJunior,
Ask and you shall receive...well, feed back at the very least. Things are not going well with our teams of intrepid heroes. So Taylor VS Jack and Bayleaf VS Butcher. I am sort of more interested in the B vs B (vs Lee) as both jump into a new body (only once or Bayleaf) and I am curious who will win the battle of wills if Bayleaf kills the Butcher's latest host. Jack's end should be just Taylor pulling a gun and blasting him (Harrison Ford style)...though ghost blade vs jacks blade might be interesting to read as well, now that I think about it.
Oh...I just had a thought...what happens if Lee kills the Butcher? Yes, she will transfer to him, but his brain is toast or close to it. Nothing good I imagine.
Thank you for letting us read your work and I can't wait to read more of it.
Sincerely
John
 
Strictly speaking Oni Lee's power is not teleportation; it is short-range replication. He doesn't actually teleport himself, he creates a copy of himself at a targeted location and then the original decays into ash after a few seconds. Everyone assumes it is teleportation, but it is not. That it is copying is why it has the long-term mental effects; the copies are imperfect and with each successive copy the errors build up and get worse and worse, steadily degrading his mind until there is almost nothing left of him as a person. It just looks like teleportation from the outside if you don't know what is actually happening and aren't aware that the shards responsible for powers don't really give a flying fuck about their hosts well being.
 
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Also RH, one of the things I really enjoyed about this chapter is you struck a good balance between having the remaining S9 be evil, clever, and too tough to just curb stomp, while still allowing the Alliance's set of outside context solutions to still prove useful. I also was intrigued by Bonesaw's bitterness towards God, it sort of drives home the fact that she's a child that had everything taken from her and now believes that good is weak. Afterall, if God could protect people why didn't he protect her? I kinda want her to survive if only to see if this will be developed further.
 
One thing I'm surprised about, is that no-one suggested the "Tagg" option for dealing with the forted up S9. If only to have the suggestion shot down.

I mean, given the S9's history, the usual casualty levels when they are cornered, and Jack's record of near miraculous escapes, it wouldn't be completely unrealistic for someone to suggest just cordoning off the area, writing off the hostages as effectively already dead and just leveling the place with artillery, burning it with napalm, and then salting the earth.

Now, granted, the optics for the PRT if they took that option wouldn't be the best, but they ARE dealing with the S9 and the Butcher. Some might think that the PR hit would be worth it, to take them off the board.

Of course, you might also see this sort of suggestion made by a weasel 2nd or 3rd tier PRT commander as a power play within the PRT. Make the suggestion, get shot down, then if Jack gets away, you get to say "I told you we should have..." and if he doesn't, you were "Just playing Devil's advocate, to get every option on the table, I never expected, or wanted, it to go that way."
 
Feedback it is then.

Overall, this was Taylor's day and she was awesome.


There was a lot of pop-culture touchstone-ness though. Both Piggot and Taylor (and Bayleaf but duh) referred to the stereotypical fictional villains Jack Slash seemed be imitating/riffing off. I always read Jack Slash as straight-up Charles Manson.

More importantly, neither Taylor nor Lisa made that connection in canon, and overall there wasn't a lot of 'comic/cartoon superhero' in fiction on earth Bet, at the very least since Scion. Reading between the lines, and I think it was an offhand mention in someone's thought process, the joke wasn't funny anymore when it was actually happening (and people were dying) in front of you, so the whole 'comic heroes' thing was kinda buried in collective memory.

The characters here read like they've had the Earth Aleph/Earth SV pop-culture experience. This can be accepted for Piggot, who was a kid in the late 70's (I think?), just before Scion showed up and when Hanna Barbera was doing Spiderman and Superfriends. (Unless I have my timeline wrong.) Taylor can be excused for being well-read and having a mom whose job it was to TvTropes literature for a living.

Worm doesn't draw direct parallels to superhero fiction, because done poorly, that associates Worm into the same category as DC's morality plays and Marvel's soap opera.

I was kinda hoping for some expository line of thought to the effect of Piggot/Taylor's realization of Jack's place in the world to get qualified with 'most people on Earth Bet wouldn't see it,-' or something. Right now both of them seem to see Jack like they'd actually watched The Dark Knight (and internalized it) which is a bridge too far for Earth Bet.
 
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RHJunior said:
Not to be a noodge (he noodged), but.... as cool as all the "likes" and "Funnies" and such are...

I really sorta crave feedback a little bit more? Is there anything I can do to encourage more?
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Ways to get more feedback from readers!

Write a fate crossover and get things wrong about fate.

Write a Naruto fic and actively ship any two characters! (Enemies and fans of the ship alike will crawl out of the woodwork)

Include politics or religion in your writing!

Or honestly play more to the morally grey and be willing to off some of your cast. No offense but this is a bit too much of a fix fic for me to get worked up about it. It's good, it's fun, it's funny.... but that doesn't leave a lot to talk about at least in my mind.
 
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This was not at all what I expected, and surprisingly good! ...Until chapter 14. Adding a bunch more Warcraft powerset characters, particularly when they were Greg and Sparky of all people, pretty much ruined the whole fic... especially after it was heavily implied that there definitely wouldn't be any more after Taylor's trigger and the faux-shard fix.
 
Warclaw_Prime said:
One thing I'm surprised about, is that no-one suggested the "Tagg" option for dealing with the forted up S9. If only to have the suggestion shot down.
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This does bring up the question of why they didn't do this with in canon with Nilbog and Ellisburg.
The easy, go-to answer is that when dealing with Biotinkers, even nuking isn't a 100% guarantee. There are species out there IRL that live in boiling deep-sea fumaroles or that depend on the raging inferno of a forest fire to spread their seeds; bioengineering a spore or seed that could survive such a conflagration-- or even multiplies like mad under such conditions-- would be well within their limits. In truth perhaps I was being biased in attributing the Slaughterhouse 9's survival too much to Cauldron mollycoddling; simply having a horrifying tykebomb like Bonesaw would make any smart strike force hesitant to just "fire and forget."

JoshuaSweetvale said:
There was a lot of pop-culture touchstone-ness though. Both Piggot and Taylor (and Bayleaf but duh) referred to the stereotypical fictional villains Jack Slash seemed be imitating/riffing off. I always read Jack Slash as straight-up Charles Manson.

More importantly, neither Taylor nor Lisa made that connection in canon...(snip)
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It's true, I did "cheat" and use a few pop-culture references. But that is what they're there for, after all.

I could have used some more obscure "artistic" references (like, say, the scene in the original Phantom of the Opera, where the Phantom tries to trick the hero and heroine into choosing between two levers-- one which will open their prison door and free them, the other which will blow the Paris Opera house, and them, sky high... what, not obscure enough for you?) but I didn't feel like sending the readers on a wikipedia binge.
Or I could try to reinvent their entire damn pop culture from scratch... which would suck, and I would be accused of being derivative anyway. No thanks.
Anyway, I contend that stuff that imported over from Earth Aleph would tend to have a hardcore fanbase, if for no other reason than it was from another entire world. Especially movies about superheroes; capes seen through the eyes of people in a capeless or near-capeless world? Box office gold. So knowing lots of pop-culture references the reader is familiar with? As likely as anything else at least.
 
According to Wildbow the S9 were explicitly being protected by Contessa from sensible, mundane countermeasures like snipers because Cauldron thought that the Siberian might possibly, maybe be useful against Zion.
 
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Neruz said:
According to Wildbow the S9 were explicitly being protected by Contessa from sensible, mundane countermeasures like snipers because Cauldron thought that the Siberian might possibly, maybe be useful against Zion.
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oh indeed. I'm just saying that, in retrospect, it would probably not be the ONLY reason.
 
Also; using pop-culture references when one is employing Blizzard-related thematics is perfectly fine. Blizzard have a long history of employing pop-culture references in their works, World of Warcraft is by far the most dense with pop culture references, but by no means the only Blizzard product that contains such.
 
Neruz said:
The S9 were explicitly being protected by Contessa from sensible, mundane countermeasures like snipers because Cauldron thought that the Siberian might possibly, maybe be useful against Zion.
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True, but the S9 also had a nasty habit of kicking off one of their runs and then vanishing back into hiding. That implies planning and exit strategies. When you have to haul around people like Crawler that are "not insignificantly problematic to move via stealth" that means a LOT of planning. In a worst case it could mean nuking a city after they already pulled their vanishing act.. which would mean that the S9 were out of the "immediate vaporization" range of the nuke. So long as Bonesaw is functional she'd be able to repair the damage from things like radiation poisoning.

Personally I agree with a lot of people that the S9's continued survival is a "unique plot point" but there are unfortunately a few reasons to argue in favor of it.
 
Neruz said:
According to Wildbow the S9 were explicitly being protected by Contessa from sensible, mundane countermeasures like snipers because Cauldron thought that the Siberian might possibly, maybe be useful against Zion.
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Then she must be both an insomniac and over stressesd to an insane degree if you consider him ownership of firearms and heavy weapons in the USA, American attitudes and the various crackpots and others who have access to heavy fire power.

Seriously stopping some one putting a round in Jack Slash is probably a full time job for a team of people.
 
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kelgar04 said:
Then she must be both an insomniac and over stressesd to an insane degree if you consider him ownership in the USA, American attitudes and the various crackpots and others who have access to heavy fire power.

Seriously stopping some one putting a round in Jack Slash is probably a full time job for a team of people.
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She is almost certainly a meat puppet for her Shard that hasn't actually functioned as a real person for years\decades, yes.
 
Neruz said:
She is almost certainly a meat puppet for her Shard that hasn't actually functioned as a real person for years\decades, yes.
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im thinkin that her path had a step that included "step {random number} visit {random parahuman name} and request that they eliminate need to sleep" or somethin similar same with all the other bodily functions
 
In Ward, the sequel to Worm, Contessa got caught by Teacher because she chose to not rely on her powers. She lasted two days on her own.
 
Cloud Hunter said:
What about the rest? Do they kill less or more capes than they create? I don't think they do, so what's the rationale for keeping them alive?
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Irrelevant. Cauldron had a large number of capes they thought might be useful they kept imprisoned (and tortured them under some delusion this would make them more likely to work with Cauldron), assuming that keeping those prisoners was a rational idea they could have kept Manton locked up similarly. That would cover the "he might be useful fighting Scion" without all the damage he did.
 
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