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Whirlwind Productions (Cyclone's snippets & update announcements)

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niiiice. So her program would broadcast. Because she can't shut it down. But she's still alive, so it can still get worse.
 
Some people are ashamed of coming out of the closet.

Taylor is ashamed that she got shoved into one on national TV.
 
Contingency needs a sequel. I wanna see the backlash from the holoprojectors and the 'nuclear backup' option.
 
Cyclone said:
Contingency

Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker.

This changed things. What I'd found online disgusted me. There were reports of excessive force, people pinned to walls, even dropped off buildings, if you believed the wilder tales. I didn't; Sophia was strong, but I doubt she was strong enough to hold someone off the edge of a roof. Worse, people were cheering her for it, just because her victims were allegedly criminals. "Acceptable targets."

Most people agreed they deserved it, but I wasn't so sure. After all, she considered me an "acceptable target," just because Emma thought it'd be fun. How many of those gangbangers might have actually been innocent victims of her sadism?

Through that lens, it painted an unpleasant picture. She was a psychopath who enjoyed hurting people.

If they kept to what they had been doing, I could endure it, like I always had, but Sophia -- Shadow Stalker -- might escalate. And I might not survive it if she did.

I needed a way to head that off.

Half the summer flew by as I tried unsuccessfully to come up with something. It all boiled down to those two words Principal Blackwell repeated every time I tried to complain: "No evidence."

Fortunately, I still had a few weeks before summer break ended to figure out how to get some, and I had all these ideas. A little cloaked surveillance drone should do the trick...

* * *

They made her a Ward.

They made Sophia fucking Hess a fucking Ward.

I had powers. I was what's called a Tinker. When I realized that, I'd actually considered joining the Wards, but no. Not happening. If they let people like her in... not a fucking chance in hell.

For the longest time, I thought the Winslow faculty was just incompetent and apathetic. Then I thought, hey, popular girl, track star, etc. vs. the freaky loner girl. Now, though, if she did something to me, they might actually cover it up.

I was going to need more evidence than I'd thought. Incontrovertible evidence. I also needed a contingency, something they couldn't cover up if they tried. A nuclear option.

* * *

It was with a bounce in my step that I approached Winslow. I had all the evidence gathered and stored, my contingency set up. Video and audio recordings of several months' worth of bullying: verbal abuse, physical assault, theft, all of it, along with recordings of when I'd asked for help and been denied, and all of it was tied to a holoprojector set to broadcast it, along with their identities, over the city if I didn't reset it every three days. It was even tied to the cloaked surveillance drone that I still had following me around, so if I was murdered, there'd be footage of it broadcast across the city as well, just in case.

Ultimately, though, I just wanted it all to stop, so I'd give them a chance to back down.

I slowed as I approached my locker. What was that smell?

Dread welled up inside me as I opened it, confirming my suspicions.

I didn't see who pushed me in, but the drone had caught it.

They locked me in.

Something in me broke in the hours that followed. All that planning, all those gadgets, and it wasn't enough.

I was insensate for a week.
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Why would Tinker Taylor open a locker that smells bad,
that just dumb.
 
...because she doesn't own another locker. It's not like she has a real choice in the matter, after all. And the terrible trio have the same class schedule of breaks and all that, so there's really no way she could wait and just open it when they're not around...
 
armorfiend said:
...because she doesn't own another locker. It's not like she has a real choice in the matter, after all. And the terrible trio have the same class schedule of breaks and all that, so there's really no way she could wait and just open it when they're not around...
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No the thing is her getting in the locker with all this surveilance makes no sense. Why? She'd have things watching it or just wouldn't go there when she smelled it.
 
Larekko12 said:
No the thing is her getting in the locker with all this surveilance makes no sense. Why? She'd have things watching it or just wouldn't go there when she smelled it.
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Why would she think that they were planing on shoving her in? She might just think they filled her stuff with garbage and she needed to see the damage.
 
UltimateGrr said:
And now the entire city knows Wards ENE have a violent psychopath on the payroll because Taylor made sure she'd escalated the only time she needed to.
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And no one but the Villains will win when the School board guts the school, when the Local PRT branch's funding and staff gets gutted and wards get pulled out. When Calvert ascends. Etc. No one wins in these blowups.
 
Larekko12 said:
And no one but the Villains will win when the School board guts the school, when the Local PRT branch's funding and staff gets gutted and wards get pulled out. When Calvert ascends. Etc. No one wins in these blowups.
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I disagree. If the school gets purged and new, competent staff is brought on, that's a win for the students at Winslow. If the PRT implements reforms to keep this from happening elsewhere, it's a win for any potential victims of Wards in similar set ups. If said new regulations allow Seneca to get rid of Feint, it's a victory for all of humanity.

Seriously, one scandal on this scale isn't going to destroy the PRT.
 
Larekko12 said:
And no one but the Villains will win when the School board guts the school, when the Local PRT branch's funding and staff gets gutted and wards get pulled out. When Calvert ascends. Etc. No one wins in these blowups.
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Are you being serious?

The correct and probable response to this sort of scandal isn't "gut the school/local PRT branch, cut their funding, and let them rot." It's "gut the school/local PRT branch, replace them with new people who have good reputations, increase funding for oversight purposes, and be very, very public about it."
 
Cyclone said:
Are you being serious?

The correct and probable response to this sort of scandal isn't "gut the school/local PRT branch, cut their funding, and let them rot." It's "gut the school/local PRT branch, replace them with new people who have good reputations, increase funding for oversight purposes, and be very, very public about it."
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The most likely response is throw who they can under the bus while claiming not to know about any of this.
 
VolantRedX said:
The most likely response is throw who they can under the bus while claiming not to know about any of this.
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Exactly. Hence "gut the school/local PRT branch and replace them with people with good reputations." The "increase funding for oversight purposes" is for the "See? We're doing something so it won't happen again!" angle.

Anything that hints of abandoning the situation like @Larekko12 is apparently assuming will happen will only cause more bad PR for the school board and national PRT.
 
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azoicennead said:
... I thought Taylor only broadcast the proof of the bullying and the names of her bullies. Outing Sophia as Shadow Stalker is a significant step beyond that.
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It was a nuclear option against a possible cover-up of Taylor's murder, the entire thing was designed to show the entire city and country exactly who would be responsable if they tried to make the evidence disappear.

And you're thinking a little too small with the consequences, this kind of scandal is the kind that gets Extraordinary Congress meetings, both for the theme of bullying and attacks against the Wards program (which is controvertial enough to allow something as ridiculously overpowered Young Guard to even being contemplated).
 
Cyclone said:
Exactly. Hence "gut the school/local PRT branch and replace them with people with good reputations." The "increase funding for oversight purposes" is for the "See? We're doing something so it won't happen again!" angle.

Anything that hints of abandoning the situation like @Larekko12 is apparently assuming will happen will only cause more bad PR for the school board and national PRT.
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Also, anyone who considers themselves an enemy of the PRT can use the broadcast and evidence to absolutely crucify them. So pretty much every villain gang, like say Empire 88 watching a black girl lock a white girl into a biohazard, now has a platform with which to shred the PRT's reputation. And they can mash on this event pretty much until the world ends, that kind of visceral footage does not go away.

If the PRT shows any weakness, it behooves the villains to shine a spotlight on it because the more time the PRT spends covering its ass, the less time it spends doing actual cape work.

Kind of unfortunate for Taylor, she's pretty much outed herself and this is gonna follow her for the rest of her life. Might want to consider New Wave, they could certainly use a tinker.
 
Auks said:
I disagree. If the school gets purged and new, competent staff is brought on, that's a win for the students at Winslow. If the PRT implements reforms to keep this from happening elsewhere, it's a win for any potential victims of Wards in similar set ups. If said new regulations allow Seneca to get rid of Feint, it's a victory for all of humanity.

Seriously, one scandal on this scale isn't going to destroy the PRT.
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Eh. This kinda presupposes that there is a new competent staff wanting to do good to be brought on ands not that what they had is all they could get in the first place to handle the situation and that the other factors that let things get that bad are in any way changed. The shit property values, and an unruly disadvantaged school populous with ties to gangs.

In the case of those reforms they can do as much harm as good in that they make recruiting harder and in deeply increase scrutiny on an already delicate populous that does not like it in the first. For every shadow Stalker there are other parahumans that had rough starts who were recovered by the program but may have been kicked off with a firmer hands and less trust.

And in the mean time trust decreases, recruiting goes houses are clean and Calvert moves in while the E88 act up.

Cyclone said:
Are you being serious?

The correct and probable response to this sort of scandal isn't "gut the school/local PRT branch, cut their funding, and let them rot." It's "gut the school/local PRT branch, replace them with new people who have good reputations, increase funding for oversight purposes, and be very, very public about it."
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I don't mean let them rot.

I mean they'll lose support. Parent will withdraw their kids from the program or not sign up. The Youth Guard will be actiing up and leveraging penalities. The Staff will be gutted to be replaced with seemingly competent, but new people which will negatively impact cohesion and functioning.

Parents will lose support in an already undersupported school with a bad rep.

And the new people either might not exist (Winslow) or be worse than what left (Calvert).


Lawyers a bounce in scenting blood in the water for massive settlements.

People are going to be working to fix it yeah, but It's a painful trying and long period of fixing with strenuous growing pains. That negatively affects everyone involved and leaves everyone inside weaker than when they started while the barbarians are literally at the gate.
 
Wow, you're right. Clearly, the obvious solution is to just give up, because obviously, trying to make things better is a hopeless endeavor that only results in everything getting worse, and clearly, letting such gross incompetence continue is much better than actually trying to fix it.

People will go where the money goes, and when a federal agency has a fuck up this huge on a regional level, they tend to start pouring money into the region alongside new personnel transferred from better areas in order to save face and fix it.
 
Cyclone said:
Wow, you're right. Clearly, the obvious solution is to just give up, because obviously, trying to make things better is a hopeless endeavor that only results in everything getting worse, and clearly, letting such gross incompetence continue is much better than actually trying to fix it.

People will go where the money goes, and when a federal agency has a fuck up this huge on a regional level, they tend to start pouring money into the region alongside new personnel transferred from better areas in order to save face and fix it.
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I am not saying that. I'm saying that a blowup was bad and that A quiet move backed by the theat of a blow up would have been better.
 
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