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John Taylor VS MSPA Reader

Setting my cards on the table.

Taylor can't resist Reader's BFR, nor can he come back from it, as it's 1-A in range. Becquarel was able to actively shut down his BFR before the Reader had fully mastered his powers, but a little more experience allowed him to teleport to and from Bec's island without interference.

Precognition is also a no, the Reader shares his Acausality and has no sold precognition in verse. Furthermore, unless someone can provide feats of Taylor nulling tier 1 hax, that's out too.

The Reader can go for a long time without oxygen, both in space and at the bottom of the ocean, so teleporting the air out of his lungs won't be an auto win.

This deoends on what Taylor starts with without precog. Stuff like Paralysis and Death Manipulation will net the win, but Reader's first move is going to be BFRing him to a Low 1-A location.
 
It's touch based. Reader touches his enemy, teleports them both to the Outer Ring, stops touching and teleports away.
 
Also, a thought just occurs to me. The profiles seems to suggest that John's paralysis and body puppetry rely on sight. Is this true? Because is so,cReader just teleports outside his range once affected.
 
"Furthermore, unless someone can provide feats of Taylor nulling tier 1 hax, that's out too."

His power null is 1-B but not 1-A
 
The Wright Way said:
Taylor can't resist Reader's BFR, nor can he come back from it, as it's 1-A in range.
Range isn't potency. If the move isn't 1-A in potency, he'll resist just fine.

Precognition is also a no, the Reader shares his Acausality and has no sold precognition in verse. Furthermore, unless someone can provide feats of Taylor nulling tier 1 hax, that's out too.
One of John's methods of powernull involves finding a past state a person was in and resetting them to that state.

from Nightingale's Lament
She stretched slowly, voluptuous beyond reason. "Don't you want me, John? I can be anyone you ever wanted, and you can do things with me you wouldn't dare do with them. I live for pleasure, and my flesh is very accommodating."
"No." I made myself say it, even though the effort brought beads of sweat out on my face. I learned self-discipline early, just to stay alive. And I was used to not getting what I wanted. But it still took everything I had to stay where I was. "I need ... to talk to you, Sylvia. About the Cavendishes."

"Oh, I don't think about them any more. I don't care about the outside world. I have made my own little world here, and it is perfect. I never leave it. I glory in it. Have you come here to tell me of the Nightside? Is it still full of sin? How long has it been, since I came here?"

"Just over a year," I said, taking a step forward.

"Is that all? It feels like centuries to me. But then time passes so slowly, in Heaven and Hell."

I took another step forward. Her body called to my body, in a voice as old as the world. I knew it would cost me my life and my soul, and I didn't care. Except some small part of me, screaming deep within me, still did care. So I did the only thing I could do, to save myself. I called up my gift, my power, and looked at Sylvia Sin with my third eye, my private eye. I used my gift to find the woman she used to be, before the Cavendishes changed her, and brought her back.

Sylvia screamed, convulsing on the bed, her white flesh boiling and seething, then one shape snapped into focus, one body rising suddenly out of all the others, and the changes stopped. Sylvia lay on the bed, curled up into a ball, breathing hard. One woman, with flesh-coloured flesh and a pretty, ordinary face. I was breathing hard, too, like a man who'd just stepped back from the very brink of a cliff. The overpowering sexual pressure was gone from the room, though faint vestiges of its presence still lingered on the air. Sylvia sat up slowly on the bed, naked and normal, and looked at me with merely human eyes.

"What did you do? What have you done to me?"

"I've given you back yourself," I said. "You're free now. Entirely normal."
Reader would need a very specific kind of defense or resistance in order for this option to fail, since it's not "direct" power null; it's him taking your very state of being and reverting it back to a point before you got whatever powers you have.

The Reader can go for a long time without oxygen, both in space and at the bottom of the ocean, so teleporting the air out of his lungs won't be an auto win.
This is nice. John has many better options, though, and he's only ever done this twice.

This deoends on what Taylor starts with without precog.
Well, Reader's quite out of luck then, because precognition isn't something that's passive anyway, and John frequently starts with his eye. Which allows him to "study the reality" of whatever he's looking at while he's using it.

from The Bride Wore Black Leather
I concentrated, raising my gift again, using it to study the reality of the thing before me, opening up my inner eye, my private eye, to See the world as it really is. And then I almost dropped the shard as I realised what it was I was holding.
"What?" Bettie said excitedly. "What did you See?"

"Temporal energies," I said. "This mirror shard is soaked in Time, in Time magic. I can actually see inverted tachyons, shooting up and down the broken edges."

Bettie gave me a hard look, only slightly spoiled by her pouting mouth. "Yes, very nice, darling, very dramatic. But what does that mean?"

"It means, I know what mirror this came from," I said, pulling a handkerchief from my pocket and carefully wrapping up the vicious-edged shard before tucking it very carefully into my coat pocket.
This immediately tells him that Reader has no real magical defenses in place, meaning he's likely to use any number of esoteric things that would net the win. And they will net the win, because (as you can see in the above quote, even), opening his eye boosts his reaction speed, and frequently allows him to beat people before they can attack him first.

EDIT:

It's touch based. Reader touches his enemy, teleports them both to the Outer Ring, stops touching and teleports away.
So basically, John has plenty of time to hit the Reader with God knows how many options before the latter even gets a chance to BFR...
 
Discount John Constantine FRA.

Only way I see Reader winning this is if he teleports out of range immediately and plot haxes from a distance.

However, I do have criticisms.

I have given examples of Reader using his BFR against people who can stop BFR.

John will not have "plenty of time". Reader can just teleport behind him. He's not going to walk over to him. Still outsped by "think once = ded" stuff though.
 
The Wright Way said:
However, I do have criticisms. I have given examples of Reader using his BFR against people who can stop BFR.
The thing which John gets his resistance from is...a little less simple than that. It comes from being unaffected by a flux fog, which works like this:

from The Good, the Bad and the Uncanny
Everything looks blurred and out of focus in a flux fog because you're seeing a dozen different dimensions, a hundred possibilities, for every object or person or direction. People and places can change subtly even as you approach them; familiar faces can become strangers, and in the blink of an eye you're trapped in a world that never knew you. The only real defence against a flux fog is not to be there when one manifests.
This seems quite a bit more potent, imo.

John will not have "plenty of time". Reader can just teleport behind him. He's not going to walk over to him.
The reactions boost that comes with opening his eye would probably mean that he does, unless the rules on speed boosts in equalized matches have changed since I was last active.

Also, dear boy, if you think John's third eye only sees in one direction, then I have bad news for you...
 
At the present moment, it's good to be back.

...I'm sure I'll regret saying that before the month is over, but I'm sticking to it for now.

Anyway, yeah. If there's nothing else, then I'm voting John for the reasons I already gave.
 
Wait

>After being sent to an alternate timeline by Count Video, he used his eye to quickly find his native timeline and send himself back

Does this guy somehow negate resistance to BFR?
 
That's temporal BFR, across timelines, not universes/dimensions. Not the same thing.

Also, Count Video is one of the most powerful beings in the Nightside anyway. He gets his powers from technology implanted in his body by the Engineer. A.K.A. a "Transient Being" who's implied to embody the very concept of technology in the setting. Transient Beings come from Limbo (one of the 1-B spaces in the setting), and are for the most part well outside of John Taylor's league of power.

He even becomes one of the city's new Authorities, alongside Jessica Sorrow and a few others.
 
Well, after Uncanny, John enchanted his coat with protections against time manipulation, so he has that as an extra layer now on top of everything else. And temporal BFR is something John can easily return from anyway, especially now that he has Walker's timepiece that lets him freely travel across time and space.

Not that it makes much of a difference in this fight, as things are right now.
 
Simple. He enchanted it with the appropriate magical protections after finding out one of his acquaintances and potential future enemies had access to an elven wand that manipulates time in various ways.

Because that's just something he can do, apparently.

EDIT: Have you not read John's profile? All of this stuff I'm mentioning is written there.
 
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