Sure, he doesn't want to do that if he believes he needs to keep that timeline... But up until now he hasn't had a reason to assume he couldn't just send in the attack in a separate timeline. Yet it seems he instead chose to send a small scouting party with TT quite a few times. So I wondered why he didn't decide to send in a full assault to get different data at some point.
This is actually an interesting question.
The mercs will treat small unit deployments as routine. Full assaults will make them act odd
Irrelevant. In FullNothingness's postulation, Coil is
never intending to keep that timeline. It's like timelines he forms to ask Dinah questions "for free" (at least until he learned that didn't work so well) and timelines he forms to engage in recreational torture: he knows ahead of time he's ditching it, so he can do whatever he wants in it, and darn the consequences.
So, here, he mobilizes his entire force, pulling everything that won't take inconveniently long to pull in, even abandoning normal defenses. (This is akin to recreationally blowing up his base just for fun in a throw-away timeline. Well, and to test to make sure the self-destruct works as intended.) Then he sends that in in a coordinated recon-and-destroy mission. His preliminary expectation is that he'll overwhelm it, and probably suffer more losses than he wants to, but that it'll still come out with the end of the Cape he's got in there.
Where this gets particularly interesting, considering what we've been told about what his power knows, is that his power can't predict the Cape's choices all that well, since it only knows he can make and control zombies, and add some turrets. Unlike "normal," it doesn't have stupidly-accurate knowledge of everything going on sufficient to model people's actions even if they're new to Bet and new to their powers. (This is one of the reasons, incidentally, that I think the precog-Coil explanation fails to hold water, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.) So it can't tell what the "dungeon Cape" will do. It doesn't even really "get" that he's a "dungeon."
Therefore, if Coil mobilized his forces in a throw-away timeline for a full-scale raid, his power would model the same turrets-and-zombies foyer it has been for the scouts. In this scenario, the foyer is overwhelmed by numbers, though not as quickly as Coil might have thought due to the known property of the Cape animating the dead as new zombies.
Tactics would turn to kill-and-burn, waiting for zombies to form, and kill-and-burning those, until no more were in evidence. Then the forces would finally move in to the old Core Room and find the immobile Cape. It might find the Cape in some other, more defensible room, if it models that it has its zombies move it, but the knowledge of the Cape's reformat-of-terrain power is, I believe, hidden from Coil's shard as of yet. (Revealing the room that was behind the old core room changed that, but that happened in this most recent chapter.)
So, if Coil sent in his full forces to get all the info he could, his power (not knowing there was a chance of making errors) would model for him a very, VERY inaccurate picture of the space the Cape controls. This means that, when Coil finally did something involving the Cape in a kept timeline, what he'd see happen would be wildly different than what his power predicted would have happened.
I presume that, despite playing out the full prediction for Coil at the beginning so he can make his choice, it doesn't actually puppet him into acting in ways that are incongruous with what's actually happening; it wipes his memory of both then replays the thrown away timeline for him while letting him live out the kept timeline. So what Coil would see here is "normal" to him. He'd find the dungeon space changed DRAMATICALLY in possibly very short time, from his perspective.
Remember: he thinks he's kept tabs on it in roughly real time, thanks to scouting in the thrown-away timelines that had entirely the wrong layout. So when he comes in shortly after his last scouting throw-away timeline, his power and he are both surprised by the ACTUAL state of the space. It seems to Coil to have changed completely since his last scout, when in reality, his scoutings have been increasingly inaccurate as the dungeon changed without his or his power's knowledge.
This also means that whatever the predicted-kept-timeline was is changed dramatically. It is highly unlikely that Coil-in-the-real-timeline will choose to end the other timeline at the same time he would have.
How his power chooses to proceed from here leads to a number of possibilities.
- It could choose to collapse the unkept timeline immediately, because it doesn't want Coil to think that he actually has the ability to choose it, still.
- This would make Coil think the Cape's dramatic change of the cell blocks has also somehow forced him to select THIS timeline now.
- It could choose to wait until he tries to collapse this timeline, keeping the one where he hasn't exposed himself to the Cape. Then collapse the "wrong" one.
- This is closest to what has happened, here, except that in this version, Coil's power made the choice to keep the "wrong" timeline from the get-go to jump-start info-gathering.
- In this version, Coil therefore still behaves much as he will here.
- If Coil doesn't collapse any timelines until after it had predicted he "would have," it has two more choices:
- It can collapse the predicted-dropped timeline (whether Coil wants to or not) as soon as it had predicted it would. This response seems the most "Shard-like," to me, because it's following through on simplistic programming rather than making careful choices to keep up a charade.
- Or, it can resume the prediction algorithm to keep simulating the other timeline until such time as Coil chooses to drop one or the other, at which point Coil probably drops the "wrong" one (from his perspective).
- It could immediately try to preserve the charade that Coil is seeing two timelines in real time and actually has a choice at any moment (rather than it already being made), and start making things to VERY WRONG in the timeline it's just been playing out a simulation of. This would entail making up believable bad things that he's only encountering in the sim timeline leading up to actually killing him in it, so he feels forced to drop it.
- This would lead to him wondering what went wrong in the now-dropped timeline, since nothing of the sort happened in the kept timeline, hypothetically.
- This would also highlight the silliness of emulating the power Coil thinks he has with a precog power.
Tattletale made a strange leap of logic in this story too, when she called a liquid flowing out of mana tap a mana potion, because as at this point she had no reason to believe in magic and by extend, mana potions. Mana as a term has been brought up in the conversation later on, by dungeon, where Tattletale initially refuses the idea of magic despite she made a reference to clearly magical system earlier on.
Nah, this one works out, because not only has Tattletale doubtless been exposed on some level to video games with "blue mana potions," her Shard certainly can pull that reference from the communal Shard Database to provide that potential pattern to match.
One way to play Tattletale's power
right is to ask yourself if a person with expertise in a field could leap to a particular conclusion. If there aren't a bunch of alternate, equally-likely professional judgments that different professionals might leap to, her power will latch onto the one that matches the context and observed details the best.
It only fails on this if Tattletale herself has no point of reference. As long as she has
a concept of "mana potions," and a gamer might look at that fountain and immediately think, "That looks like mana potions from a video game," her power can put those together for super-intuition. Where it would run into trouble is if it also pattern-matched to "window/toilet cleaner." And since it's a bathroom, it probably would have context on "toilet cleaner," but would still likely give her "mana potion" based on the contextual presence of zombies (she heard them singing and was told about them) and on the fact that it's bubbling OUT of the sink rather than being used to wash things away IN it.
Remember, her power is vulnerable to being wrong. If she didn't have "it's a Cape producing this" on top of everything else, her power might conclude that it's meant to LOOK like mana potion but could be toilet cleaner or windex. Unless her own senses gave it enough to chemically analyze and say, "Nope, doesn't smell like cleaner." Though if her power can work off her senses that sharply, even if she doesn't experience it as super-senses, she probably has bloodhound-like ability to track people based on "intuitive" sense that their "presence" is stronger in a particular direction, as well as to detect poisons and the like "intuitively."
