- Location
- Canada
1) The tall and distinctive-roofed (alternatively: exceedingly wide sprawling complexes) towers used for nav beacons in mental map construction do not get replaced at nearly a rate enough in any city to break skyline recognition within 2 years, unless the city has been notably bombed and over half of them have been levelled.
The only cities that can sprout new downtown buildings as fast as you suggest are ones that are growing INSANELY FAST, with lots of construction planned and ongoing since before Purity left E88.
2) If she knows approximately where it is, that's at LEAST down to block level, and thus she won't be making TWO screw-ups.
3A) "The CEO's ex-wife throughout her marriage did not learn exactly where the HQ is" isn't much dumber than "The CEO's ex-wife doesn't nervously keep an eye on where the HQ has been moved to, despite having custody and being far less wealthy than the CEO and thus sure to lose a custody battle."
3B) Purity has been flying around E88 territory, including downtown, for a decade. You'd think given that time she'd know most of the major buildings downtown by sight.
This is the Philadelphia Night Skyline.
This is daytime from about 150 degrees away i.e. almost oppsite viewpoint.
I count four (4) MASSIVE primary nav beacons: The square pyramid roof, the two pointed roofs with tapering sides (one has a huge mast on top) and the huge-rectangular-block-on-top tall tower. And the triangular prism roof with the huge glowy + at night is a nav beacon you see coming from one direction, but not the other. The clock tower in the foreground of the daytime image is another example of such (it would definitely be illuminated at night).
If you cannot navigate about as well as in the daytime down to at least "this is the right block, and those beacons are in that direction from this block, so I know it's this corner of this block", YOU ARE BLIND.
Brockton Bay is much smaller than Philadelphia, so expect rather fewer towers, which means distinctive towers are even easier to isolate and mind-map.
I know the splash image on the Worm website is not actually supposed to be the bay, as it has far too many towers for a 300K-ish city. It looks like at least 2 million people in the city to me, but let's use it for a moment to identify some buildings.
And even that has at least these obvious nav beacons I can pick out in 5 minutes:
1. The squat wide building at left near waterfront with an antenna with blinker lights on it (this could be a nearby needle)
2. The tall narrow building at center near waterfront.
3. The triangular prism roof building inland and slightly beyond the tall narrow one from the squat wide one (near center of image to right of tall foreground tower)
4. The pyramidal roofs near waterfront, perhaps a vintage site, which means lights illuminating the sides and roof sides at night (far right)
5. The pointed needle inland near three towers (just to right of squat building at left)
6. The needle with blinker light on a tall square tower inland from the pyramidal-roofed possibly vintage building(s) (far right of image)
You can remove at most one such building within 2 years in a stagnating city that's not being bombed to oblivion, otherwise no one wants to pay for the demolition. Which won't kill the mind-map! And you won't be adding more than one or two (if you really stretch it) landmark towers in a slowly dying city. Only monumentally rapid growth could add much more than that. Even then, adding other nav beacons still keeps the existing map functional enough to just add them. Given the presence of the bay, you only actually need ONE (1) nav beacon to find something downtown down to block level, as "nearest distinctive point of bay, or just nearest shore point of bay" plus that nav beacon already gives you two vectors (off the base line between the beacon and the Bay, or perhaps the line to the Rig--I know it's not officially called that but if you park a former oil rig in a city with no other oil rigs a local nickname WILL be "the Rig"--in the bay) that intersect somewhere.
NOTE: I'm not a flier so I don't have the navigational instincts Purity should have from a decade of flying around near Downtown. She should be capable of referencing a mental library of at least 6-8 nav beacons, while 4 would suffice to find any building downtown she's reasonably familiar with i.e. the Medhall building or New Medhall building (it should have been mentioned in-story if it was new)
1. Which means visiting Max by flight makes ZERO sense. Walking through the front door as the CEO's ex-wife asking to chat with him is far, FAR more inconspicuous.
Can you imagine this:
PRT Console: "This is the PRT hotline, how may I help you?"
Cape Groupie: "I just saw a bright streak of light zoom into the Medhall building, it looked like Purity..."
PRT Console: "Oh... no that's..." scrabbling about for excuses... "uh... maybe Lady Photon, the other glowy flier in the city, is hooking up with some executive at Medhall. Pay no attention to it!"
*PHO EXPLODES*
2. Which is why I can't believe Max drove her away enough/let her go unless she was also a joke. As in "navigational Circular Error Probable is the size of the Bay". Either that or she was too zealous for him and he not enough for her.
There's a problem though with Velocity.
We can assume Velocity can run sustained about 15 KPH (sprint for humans is max about 40 KPH but let's use 36 to assume he's not that genetically/age oriented for sprints) without power use as a reasonably fit man (average man goes 8.3 mph or about 13 KPH), and if he can move 100x as fast (the world seems 1/100 speed to him) then if Purity is near him in speed... he's going 1500 KPH with max spikes of 3600 KPH for 100m dashes), which if Brockton Bay is perfectly square gridded means to maintain pursuit of Purity in a suburban area (allowing him to maintain line of sight) requires he be sqrt(2) or about 1.4 times faster than her. However, being more than 2x (I'm eyeballing here) faster than her at their max speeds would result in closing the distance even with the grid angle issue, which basically means she absolutely has to fly diagonal to the grid until she can reach downtown and break line of sight by sheltering in some tower or similar where he has to go through doors to reach her due to lacking flight. Trying to break LOS outside downtown results in him catching up too fast and nabbing her before she can even stop power use without dropping too far to the ground, 100x reaction speed is OP.
Result? Purity must fly at least 70% of Velocity's sustained ground speed if she only flies diagonal to grids after sighting him (needles should be Velocity's main arsenal as he can get into position to throw really fast and sling it (if range is needed) to leave his speed field before the enemy can react, and they are small enough to stay in his field like clothing when on the move, have relatively high armour penetration due to impact area, and don't need much force to punch through, use an extremely potent skeletal muscle paralytic and Velocity can lolpwn a LOT). It is more likely that she is about 80% of his speed . So Purity flies about 1200 KPH... around or over the speed of sound.
3. See above photos for expected optical clarity (Philadelphia with more people and more industries only has light and particulate pollution that stops you from seeing stars. Hell New York's downtown core isn't as polluted as you suggest (which would be needed to scatter light enough to prevent night vision).
If her night vision was that bad, then at her established speeds navigating anywhere downtown would be about as safe as flying a F-35 through Manhattan at 20m (about 66 feet) above street level. Reaction time just isn't enough at 1200 KPH (a third of a kilometer per second, humans typically take about 0.5 seconds to orient and react to stimulus, and in the case of complex navigation it takes longer) to not hit buildings.
You people keep telling me that the Bay is not big on manufacturing. This has IMPLICATIONS on the amount of air pollution we can ascribe to the Bay, which in turn determines visibility with glare. If you can drive a car with headlights on at night while still able to see buildings up ahead (like how you can see towers in the distance in Philly on the right streets, or see the CN Tower in Toronto driving along the Gardiner Expressway from many kilometers off), Purity high in the air out of ground-level dust and air pollution can navigate trivially.
A car headlight on high is blinding to someone up close. Since Purity flaring her glow is not described as the flash of a flashbang, she cannot be much brighter than that and thus will not affect her own night vision (if it, as you claim, isn't enhanced).
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