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Wokistan

Bioluminescent African American Working At The CIA
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Forum move's done, now I can dump a ton of shit onto the wiki all at once and this can be the first thread of that. If you don't want ward spoilers, avoid Contessa, Bonesaw, Grue, Scion, Legend, Victoria, and all the verse wide standard stuff.

Characters​

Contessa's updated page is on the top of my sandbox. To summarize the changes:

  • Social influencing
  • Pain resistance
  • Mind resistance
  • Memory resistance
  • "Likely more" resistances
  • A key for her as a Titan
Besides being a Titan, Scion would also get the additions because they're due to PtV.

Things in blue were things I had considered questionable.

Heard some arguments offsite against this, felt it fair to represent them here so threadgoers can decide. Italics will be summarized arguments against it.

Cracks don't necessarily have to immedately blitz Valkyrie to reach here here, they could be at any arbitrary speed faster than Valkyrie and eventually hit her. PtV bullshit has already been demonstrated and stated to allow users to successfully attack people much faster than the user through prediction and weird exploitations like light tricks and exploiting instincts and reflexes and blind spots and lapses in senses etc, point being that Contessa's bolts don't need to be super fast to hit Valkyrie because she's using the cheat power. We don't know when valkyrie would start to fly/run away, and we know the cracks can follow people around.

My old general response to stuff like that:

Valkyrie is the person in the setting best equipped to avoid these sorts of cracks. Doormaker and Eidolon let her hop to other universes, she has several teleportation capes, she has a few time alteration capes, she has many precogs of her own and her own personal clairvoyant powers, and perhaps most of all, she has Grue with her. Grue has already been proven to be able to nullify even the abilities of Titans, who can all degrade reality like this (Contessa's just the only one to really weaponize it intentionally.) I find it far more presumptuous to say Contessa's special cracks can now do stuff like override Grue's null and follow her between universes (this one actually creates a plot hole even, if it could already go between universes and thus breach that 4D barrier, the **** can Simurgh even do to stop Contessa?) than it is to say it was fast enough to catch Valkyrie off guard from such a far distance. Would probably just go with an "up to" speed rating anyways, since the cracks generally move at much more normal speeds and distances.

So yeah. This argument was a while ago, I'll ask the other party about how they feel with their representation here so may revise things, but with both sides in mind, discuss.

Contessa being able to requisition basically anything isn't wrong, nor is Titan Contessa having control over basically every Titan at some point. It just seems kinda weird for some intangible reason. I'd support it CRT wise, but it should still probably get special mention since that's a lot of abilities.


Obviously other additions I made can be questioned, but I'm not expecting too much of that because of the references stuff. The other two things are more arguing based on context, and kinda need knowledge of the verse.

Likely Immortality 1: Jack says she could grant this.

“A romantic goal, one I might pursue if I were a younger man,” Nilbog said. “But even gods get older.” “They do,” Jack agreed. “Well, we could give you that youth. Bonesaw could grant you immortality.”
~ Sting 26.4
Bonesaw herself is stuck looking twelve because undoing that is too much of a hassle and she says herself she might end up surpassing age 100 still looking like a twelve year old

Some of those structures were the same ones that kept her apparent age at twelve. She had never gotten around to undoing that, in part because it required her to overhaul so many systems that were hooked into it. She wasn’t sure she wouldn’t end up over a hundred years old and still postponing the change to her appearance.
~ Last 20.e4
There's also that Bonesaw and Mannequin working together resulted in Cherish's torment potentially lasting tens of thousands of years.

Cherish (Imprisoned) – Regent’s sister, has the ability to manipulate emotions and sense emotions in a distinct enough way to track and identify individuals at a distance. Attempted to use her power in a subtle fashion on the rest of the group, only to find that they knew what she was planning. Following the escapades in Brockton Bay, she was trapped in an impervious, life-sustaining shell of Mannequin’s design and sunk to the bottom of the derelict Boat Graveyard, where she is expected to live for several thousand (or tens of thousands of) years.
~ Worm Cast Page
She’s hooked up to the same systems that keep Mannequin going. Chances are strong she’ll live for a few thousand years. Maybe ten or twenty thousand, depending on the degree of wear from tides.
~ Wildbow comment
In total, I think it's plenty likely she's able to stop her aging if she wants.

Another thing was Enhanced Senses. Bonesaw's organs can detect invisible people.

Sensory organs she’d implanted into her body activated. She was aware of movement, even though her eyes couldn’t track it.

The tinker, she decided.

“Are you coming after me?” Riley asked, quiet. “It would be a very, very dumb thing to do.”

Two of the metal plates down the hallway lifted up, curious people looking in.

The cloaking effect stripped away, pixels and lights peeling away to reveal the black-skinned girl.
~ Last 20.e4
Explosion Manipulation. One of Bonesaw's plagues makes people explode, with the gore that goes flying also transmitting the disease.

The man stumbled five or six steps before his body began to swell. His right arm bloated up to three or four times the usual size, turning crimson, before it exploded violently, sending shards of bone and a spray of blood into the people nearest him. He screamed, only for his cries to grow shorter and more frantic, as the rest of him reached that critical mass. In another ten seconds, the remainder of his body detonated.

Bonesaw was already skipping over to the rest of their group, grinning wide, “Mannequin! Aww! Did the villain break you? Poor baby. Like a little girl with a ken doll.”

A blade sprung from Mannequin’s remaining hand. Bonesaw tittered.

Behind the child tinker, those in the crowd who had been struck by the blood and flying bone of her first victim were starting to scream as their bodies swelled as well.
~ Interlude 12
Power Nullification and Power Modification. She has that Trump rating for a reason. As for nullification:

Little Bonesaw, for her test, designed a parasite that would stay in her system for forty-eight hours and strip her of her powers for as long as it remained.”

“Because it’s not fair that Hatchet Face didn’t get to give his test. And I wanted to break her out of her rut, so I made it so the parasite’s effects would be permanent if she didn’t drink lots of blood.”
~ Plague 12.4
Mod:

She tilted my head back and felt around the edges of my mask, trying to find the part where she could pull it off. “I’m really good at figuring out where the Corona and the Gemma are. I can even guess most of the time, if I know what powers the person has. And I can pry it wide open, make it so the powers can’t be turned off, or I can temporarily disable it, or modify it. The powder I blew into your face? It has the same prions I put in the darts I shot your friends with. Cripples the Gemma, but it leaves your powers intact. Can’t experiment with your abilities if I’ve fried your whole Corona Pollentia, right? Right.”
~ Snare 13.9
Also Cherish's ultimate fate and the cape hybrids.

Paralysis Inducement:

Bonesaw exhaled a second cloud of dust into my face.

I held my breath for as long as I could, but there was a limit. When I did breathe, my chest seized up, and my ears immediately started ringing violently, a headache settling into place. The muscles in my arms and legs locked up.

She sprayed an aerosol around herself, killing my bugs. Not that it mattered. My facility with my power was getting clumsier and clumsier as the headache increased in intensity.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

“Bring them,” she said. The mechanical spiders leapt to obey. Within moments, me, Tattletale, Trickster, Sundancer and Ballistic were being dragged inch by inch towards the dining hall. Towards Grue.

No, no, no.

It took long minutes for us to get there. I could hear faint rumbles of the ongoing battle and Bonesaw’s humming. It was all I could do to keep breathing. It was like my body had forgotten how, and it demanded my constant attention to maintain that simple rhythm.

With the aid of her spiders, she stacked us like logs. Ballistic and Trickster went on the bottom.

I couldn’t even grunt as the spiders leveraged me onto the pile alongside Tattletale. I stared down at the mask of the third person below us.

Imp. She’d got Imp.

Bonesaw crouched so her face was level with mine. “This is going to be fun.”
~ Snare 13.8
Regeneration negation:

Pagoda lurched backward and broke contact with Amy, her power no longer giving her an insight into what was happening with him. He sat down, using one hand to prop himself up. A moment later he slumped over, his eyes shutting. His breathing stopped.

“A chemical trigger for something I already put in his DNA, when I was patching his regeneration abilities together. Reverses the regeneration so it does the opposite, starting with the heart.”
~ Interlude 11h
9-C with cleaver. Chopped through Ashley Stillons' arm with two swings.

A heavy impact at her arm made her legs buckle, sharp pain shooting up to her shoulder and neck. A cleaver. Bonesaw had brought down a cleaver on her forearm. It had sunken into the bone.

Ashley reached around with her other hand, and didn’t make it the full distance. Jack moved his hand, and the skin of Ashley’s arm split.

A razor blade gleamed in the dimly lit living room. Jack had been holding it between two fingers.

Bonesaw hauled the cleaver out, and Ashley dropped to her knees from the pain. The cleaver came down again, and cut the rest of the way through the bone.
~ Eclipse x.8


The shotgun should probably be 9-A or at least be listed as penetrating that sort of thing. On top of even regular 9-B bullets being able to pierce way further and shooting straight through Bitch's already bulletproof dogs, it seems like he was about to kill or badly injure Bastard (Who's 9-A off hurting him) with it.

Bastard pounced on Mannequin, taking one of the villain’s arms in his jaws. Clenching, he began whipping Mannequin around like a rag doll. Twice, Mannequin’s lower body was bludgeoned against the nearby wall.
Yeah, didn’t expect us to be that tough, did you?
Mannequin turned the tables in a second. Between one of Bastard’s shakes and the next, the villain stopped flopping around. I realized he’d ejected the knives from his toes and staked them in Bastard’s neck and snout for leverage. His one free hand dangled at his side.
Moving was agony, but I was lurching towards them in a half-run before I fully realized why. Mannequin raised his free hand and pointed it at Bastard’s left eye.
I caught his arm and hauled it back in the same moment he fired. Bastard repaid my kindness by whipping Mannequin to one side, striking me. Both Mannequin and I fell sprawling to the ground. ''
~ Snare 13.3
9-A Undersider dura mag seem kinda high, but luckily we don't actually have to do that. Given it's a gun, penetration's important here. So, their costumes work well against that but not necessarily blunt force, easy fix. As for the irl analogues, look how real bulletproof vests aren't just blanket protection against everything (not even knives, oftentimes) and how even with plate armor and stuff you could still seriously injure people with maces and hammers where swords wouldn't do anything. It's a good penetration resistance and should still be wall level against force though.

Subsonic combat speed, probably. Firstly, bullet dodging.

Bastard lunged for him, jaws snapping shut, but the Mannequin cartwheeled back and away. Vista fired her gun, sending a single green spark zipping ahead. Mannequin swayed to one side, bending his body at impossible angles to avoid the shot. The bullet hit the wall, then briefly flared, disintegrating a scab-covered vending machine.
~ Sting 26.3
Secondly, he can fight Battery at the same time as Prism. Prism's a duplicator, Battery's a speedster.

Mannequin was holding his own. The hits that did land seemed to have little effect, as he went limp and bent with them. It seemed he was keeping to the old adage of a supple willow bending in a hurricane that topples a sturdy oak. Even when Battery was moving at super speed, he was quick to take the advantage of a kick that went too high or a sweep aiming to knock his feet out from under him. He ducked beneath the former and hopped over the latter, then using his grappling-hook hands to haul himself a distance away.
~ Prey 14.6
Battery is faster in the sprint than Assault, who caught Chariot, who can go at 100mph.

"There's a kid calling himself Chariot. Been racing around the city with a powered suit that lets him move a hundred miles an hour. Assault finally caught up with him last night, brought him into custody. Wound up calling the kid's mom, got him to agree to talk to our recruiter. You. You'll be meeting the kid in his home."
~ Sentinel 9.4
This doesn't mean subsonic Taylor. Her swarm sense has already acted much like a combat thinker ability in many aspects, off the top of my head her weirdly good aim with a gun despite barely shooting, nailing 3 S9 dudes with a pistol while running in particular comes to mind. Sensory input also helps for anticipation, before Taylor managed to really piss him off Mannequin probably wasn't trying to move as fast as possible, she's dealt with people faster than her before, was largely on the back foot when it came to actual melee, etc. No crazy scaling chains for subsonic regular humans here

Stealth Mastery: Broke into PRT headquarters and could evade Taylor's swarmsense.

Just plain old regular resistance to Mind Manipulation, not just limited. Idk why fighting off her shard's overriding of her identity would be limited beyond her eventually losing to it, but there is also that one time she didn't kill herself despite Cherish.

I want to kill myself.
My own voice, indistinguishable from the one in my head. **** me. She had a bead on me, now.
It’ll be painless, a way to avoid all of the horror, so I don’t have to watch my friends die.
So I won’t have to watch Bitch or Tattletale or Imp die the way Regent did. So I don’t have to watch Grue die.
No, a moment’s consideration and the spell was broken. I’d stopped thinking of Rachel as ‘Bitch’ some time ago.
“Aw,” Screamer whispered. “Golem’s refusing my deal, and Cherish says you’re not playing along with the rest of it, so I’m gonna have words with some of the others.”''
~ Sting 26.2
It fits in with the general trend of Masters resisting Master effects, but I go more into that later. Even if that doesn't go through, this would work for her specifically.

More to her limited power null resist. Bonesaw did a thing that normally power nulls, but against Taylor her power just became very crude.

I was scared. I could admit that. I could barely think straight, I couldn’t move, and whatever she’d dosed me with was rendering me unable to use my power. It was there, it wasn’t like what Panacea had done; it hadn’t shut it down entirely. I could sense what my bugs did, and I could maybe give them crude instructions, but I couldn’t do anything even remotely complicated or delicate.

(...)

She tilted my head back and felt around the edges of my mask, trying to find the part where she could pull it off. “I’m really good at figuring out where the Corona and the Gemma are. I can even guess most of the time, if I know what powers the person has. And I can pry it wide open, make it so the powers can’t be turned off, or I can temporarily disable it, or modify it. The powder I blew into your face? It has the same prions I put in the darts I shot your friends with. Cripples the Gemma, but it leaves your powers intact. Can’t experiment with your abilities if I’ve fried your whole Corona Pollentia, right? Right.”

She angled my head and stared into my goggles with her mismatched eyes. “Dealio is, the Corona’s way too small to be doing what it’s doing. As parahumans, our brains are doing these amazing things. The framework, all the details our minds are using to decide what works and what doesn’t, the sheer potential, even the energy we’re using, it’s too much for our brains to process, and it’s waaaay too much for a growth that’s no bigger than a kiwi. All of that? It’s got to come from somewhere. And the other reason you can’t just carve out the Corona? If you do, the powers still work on their own. The person just can’t control them. It becomes instinctive, instead.”

She began feeling around my mask for a seam, buckle or zipper, searching. She talked as she grabbed the part of my mask that bordered my scalp and tried to peel my mask down towards my chin. “So you can see why I find it very interesting that you still have the ability to control bugs, even when your Gemma is out of order.”
~ Snare 13.09
My personal theory is that this is due to her having double triggered, given when Grue second triggers his powers start working again and very crude bug control would apparently have been how Taylor's power functioned if she hadn't triggered twice at once, but I don't think this is solid enough to apply as some generalized resistance to all the 2nd/double triggers. This isn't just "bonesaw didn't do it right", as she specifically notes that it's weird that her shard's strong enough to just override the fact that Taylor at the time lacked the biology to use her power.

“But I haven’t been able to find it. It’s not physically there, or it’s so small that I haven’t been able to track it down. If your ‘passenger’ is strong enough to let you work around a disabled Gemma, if your powers work without your say-so, maybe it’ll be easier to spot.”
~ Snare 13.09
Maybe a limited resistance to Pain Manipulation, given that a past experience with that power screwed up her perceptions of pain giving her an unusually high pain tolerance. Panacea noted that her pain response was low for biological reasons.

“Whatever,” Panacea said. “Works for me, actually.”
Then she touched me, and the pain went away. I relaxed so suddenly I felt like I’d suddenly become part liquid. I’d been so tense my head wasn’t even touching the countertop, my legs and shoulders tense.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks.”
“You have a high pain tolerance,” she said.
“One of Bakuda’s bombs, way back when,” I said. “I think it messed with my head, as far as my perception of pain. I found out what it’s really like to feel pain, real ten-out-of-ten pain. A part of me knew it was too much to be true, and other stuff’s affected me more because I knew it was tied with something real. Case in point, a burn is still a ************.”
“Well, we’ll fix it,” she said.''
~ Venom 29.9
Limited resistance to Information Analysis. Taylor can channel her emotions through her bugs.

I was using my bugs to channel my feelings, even with my concerns about my passenger and how it might be merging with me. I was wearing that aura of indomitable calm, even though I wasn't sure I liked the Taylor of this past year and a half, who had been doing just that as a matter of both habit and necessity.
~ Extinction 27.3
She interferes with, among other things, Armsmaster's lie detector, and Cherish's emotion sensing. Quote is in response to someone asking who besides Alexandria had a bad read on her. This is a WoG, but a WoG based off referencing stuff that happened in the work itself.

Armsmaster's lie detector.

Cherish gets a partial read on Skitter, but extrapolates wrong. Jack remarks on this on two occasions, especially how (he feels) if the read had been correct, he could have convinced Taylor to kill Battery.

Powers set aside, she expresses frustration at people misreading her motivations, especially at the meeting with Accord/Valefor/the Teeth. Virtually everyone around her has trouble grasping what she's doing and why: her dad, Emma (most recent encounter), D&D, Grue, even Tattletale at times.
~ Word of God
Speaking of Alexandria, yet another WoG:

Wildbow - Had taylor broken, raged out, in the sense of chapter one, they would have had a scapegoat for everything that happened in Brockton Bay. She could have tapped Cauldron resources and been on the alert. But Taylor offloaded all cues to her shard. She appeared far calmer and more subdued than she was, Alexandria calibrated her approach with this in mind, and things tilted off differently.

Wildbow - Taylor was absolutely not a killer at that stage, unless she had a reasonable target, and Alexandria presented herself as that target. Alexandria looked at Taylor, talked to her, and saw someone different. All of the profiling and information worked -against- her.
~ Word of God

  • I don't remember him having a pistol.
  • New key, no Power Absorption, yes Power Nullification. Post Valkyrie rez. His clouds are still power dead zones and this even works against Titans with their unrestrained shards, but he explicitly can't copy powers anymore. (Last 20.6) It also works on Tinkertech, so both 2nd trigger and post rez get Technology Manipulation. Possible Inorganic Physiology, as the jury still seems to be out on exactly what the Flock are.
  • Power Bestowal for 2nd trigger. He seems to have shared Crawler regen with the Undersiders and Travelers.
He touched my hand, held it between his own. I could feel something thrumming through me, willing me to take hold of it.

It took me a minute to figure out how. The exposed bone of my forehead itched, then sang in an exquisite agony as it mended. My skin was next. My seized up muscles were last. My power was last to mend, and I regained my control, though the diminished effect continued.
~ Snare 13.09
  • Just put his lifting at athletic human for him being very athletic, taking a random instance of him picking up a thing while he's tired to list him as regular human seems weird considering he's already 9-C and that would give him weaker lifting than Taylor which just doesn't make sense.
  • Sound Manipulation, he can do the wavelength thing with his darkness to modify sound in many more ways than just blocking it entirely.
His voice echoed, reverberated, with a hollowness to the sound, like something alien and far away. He was using his power to play with the sound, “Tattletale, see to the door. Bug, with me.”
~ Agitation 3.7
  • Edit the AP description a bit. He can copy physical strength, and he did copy Hatchet Face and Tyrant at one point, but killing Burnscar was actually from copying Siberian.

Entity gets FTL speed. It was put at unknown before because of the absurd number of powers it could use to make crossing universes not require anywhere near MFTL+, but there is a quote describing entities not caring about things that limit how fast light goes.

Two beings spiraled through an airless void, past suns, stars and moons. They rode the ebbs and flows of gravity, ate ambient radiation and light and drew on other things I couldn’t perceive. They slipped portions of themselves in and out of reality to reshape themselves. Push further into this reality to ride the pull of one planet, shift into another to ride that slingshot momentum, or to find some other source of momentum elsewhere. Ten thousand thousands of each of the two entities existed simultaneously, complemented each other, drew each other forward. They shrugged off even the physical laws that limited the movement of light, moving faster with every instant. The only thing that slowed them was their own desire to stay close, to keep each other in sight and match their speeds. Yet somehow this movement was graceful, fluid, beautiful even. Two impossible creatures moving in absolute harmony with the universe, leaving a trail of essence in their wakes.
~ Snare 13.09
Also, MFTL+ when using Secondhand's power, because for whatever reason, they made someone in Worm of all verses that fast.

He relied on the dense lines and numbers his lenses fed him to position his body and weave through the pockets of air and air currents. He approached a tough spot where something was burning on the far wall, and he adjusted settings, drawing on his battery for a bit of extra power. The benefit was slight, as the heat reached him less and the air worked with him a little more, and the battery power raced from a hundred to sixty in those long, long picoseconds.
~ Dying 15.y
Thank you Wildbow, very cool

In all seriousness, he's moving fast enough that picoseconds are a long time. Reactions has anything less than 3.336 picoseconds classed as MFTL+. Secondhand's thing is basically a fake time stop, so as high as the number is, it doesn't actually break anything or even scale to anyone else besides full Entities for having this among their shards.

AP: At least High 8-C, likely/possibly 7-A: Legend can deal real damage to Titans, though his first titan fight had Dauntless explicitly hitting harder than him.

Blasting through Skadi's armor.

Traced by Oberon’s power, Skadi plummeted from the clouds, axe-hands swinging down. Legend unloaded everything he had on her as he flew straight down. Chunks of her armor came away, revealing what was beneath- more armor with sucking muscle holding each segment in place.
~ Radiation 18.7
Destroys Ophion's needles, which are a part of his body.

Ophion cast out needles. Legend blasted each needle out of the air before it could reach one of the giant flesh-beasts.
~ Infrared 19.4
Going all out and hurting Fortuna.

The fighting continued, Legend going all out. Titan Fortuna was taking damage, and she didn’t seem to care.
~ Infrared 19.4
Legend hit Simurgh harder than Victoria had seen him do before, while she watched him carve into Titans.

The room went from dark to bright as Legend used another laser. Hitting harder than I’d seen him do, especially in confined quarters.
~ Last 20.7
Legend is apparently on the level of Titans, including Dauntless himself. (Fume Hood is a Titan in this scene.)

I wished it was better. I wished I had confidence for this next phase, or that Fortuna would beat the Simurgh. Hopefully some combination of Legend, Dauntless, and Fume Hood working with Fortuna would stall her or scare her off.Last 20.7
All 3 would need to be told to leave The Simurgh alone for her to win, as opposed to just Dauntless. (Fume Hood does dura neg and should have the same reality breaking characteristics as the other Titans.)

“The Simurgh set all the pieces down. Everything went where she wanted it,” I said. “I don’t know if she wins, though. For that to happen, we need to tell Dauntless and Fume Hood to back off, tell Legend to leave her alone.”
~ Last 20.8
There are also some vague mass destruction things of him that are technically possible at High 8-C, but I think they'll still help. Also some assorted bit feats.

Legend's lasers could level city for miles around.

Her weakness, if it could be called that, had always been that she had always been an ordinary, athletic person at her core. Now she was strong enough that lasers capable of leveling city for miles around weren’t slowing her down.
~ Infrared 19.4
Phrasing here implies Legend's more notable in the fight vs Titans than Dragon, Defiant, and Narwhal, or at least on par. Dragon and Defiant actually manage to cripple a few Titans at one point, taking them out of action.

The heroes were spread so thin with all the Titans we had around us. There had been fifty or sixty, we’d picked up another thirty or so in reinforcements, which felt more like they were at least partially covering what we’d lost in the chaos and happenstance injuries. Now we had Titan Fortuna, Ophion, the Nemean, the Impaler, Shortcut, the Ashen, and the Custodian.

Ten capes for each? Maybe?

Granted, one of those capes was Legend, Dragon and Defiant and Narwhal were present too. And I wasn’t counting the Giants.

But even so…
~ Infrared 19.6
Legend destroyed a lot of the city.

“Sleeper.”

“Restless but still around. Earth Zayin in the palm of his hand. He started to emerge, Legend faced him down.”

“How?”

“Leveled about thirty square kilometers of city.”
~ Sundown 17.9
Legend could destroy the entire Cauldron facility, which is city sized.

“Very small, agreed,” Teacher said, unruffled. “But according to our precognitives, the Legend who thinks his side has lost on all fronts is going to lay siege to the facility, tearing it down with his power.”
~ Dying 15.x
Legend having built up a charge due to being in a Khonsu field would have turned the battlefield to a smoking ruin, and seems to have vaporized his way through a mile of ground before vaping enough water that the resultant steam would have flash fried everyone. This should be calcable, but is a weird scenario and isn't 7-A, so it's better suited to this bit feat section.

It was impossible to say exactly how he did it, but Eidolon managed to catch the light before it could turn the battlefield into a smoking ruin. It condensed into a ball, swinging around past Eidolon as if he were a planet and it was in orbit, and then flew into Khonsu and Alexandria with a slingshot turn.

It wasn’t a long, steady stream like the one in New Delhi had been. It was a white bullet sliding out in a heartbeat, cutting past Khonsu, Alexandria and a good mile of landscape, before driving into the ocean at the horizon’s edge. Steam billowed out explosively.

Eidolon crossed the battlefield in a flash, weaving to the left of one of the two remaining columns of altered time, the right of the next, and erected a wall to keep the steam from frying the flesh from our bones.
~ Scarab 25.6
Taylor describes Legend as having more offensive ability than 99% of the planet, and we already know there are enough High 8-Cs that that alone would not qualify.

He was conserving his strength. As much as both he and Siberian were powerhouses with more offensive capability than ninety-nine percent of people on the planet, this was a strategic battle. It was easily possible he was planning to keep this up for hours, harrying her, keeping her from getting her feet under her.
~ [Prey 14.7]
Legend removes Alexandria's clothes. This sounds ridiculous, but parts of her costume endured her holding Echidna inside Sundancer's sun for a while, giving them a tier 7 dura feat.

Alexandria had been stripped of much of her costume, but she fought on without a trace of modesty. Legend, too, seemed unfazed, unaffected by however many years he’d spent in Khonsu’s trap.
~ Scarab 25.6
(Here's the metal part of her costume surviving Sundancer.)

Alexandria was there in the midst of it, panting for breath. Her costume had burned away, and only the metal pieces remained, including helmet, belt and metal underwear, each so hot they were melting and running over her skin.
~ Scourge 19.7
That last one was more just for fun

Durability: Unknown, at most Low 7-B: It's kinda complicated, but I think Leviathan 1 hit KO is either inconsistent, or explainable by different factors.

Here, Legend takes Titan hits while staying in the fight. At worst, titans are stronger than The Simurgh. Legend did go off to fight Cineral, who is the source of the High 7-C feat.

Skadi’s blade had clipped Legend. Flesh became lasers, radiating out, curling back into one another in loops. A defensive measure.
~ Radiation 18.7
Legend's taken several hits from Titans.

Legend was part of the perimeter around the Machine Army. He had taken a few too many hits from the Titans, and his ‘recuperation’ was floating in the sky near the portal, bombarding the area.
~ Infrared 19.z
Weapons stolen from Dragon, a top Tinker, wouldn't be able to beat Legend.

“Very small, agreed,” Teacher said, unruffled. “But according to our precognitives, the Legend who thinks his side has lost on all fronts is going to lay siege to the facility, tearing it down with his power.”
“We could defeat him,” Mischa said. “Shoot him down before he can.”
“You could not. He is much harder to take out of action than many think.”''
~ Dying 15.x
Legend was totally fine after he had heated up enough to burn Alexandria's clothes, a mile of landscape, and cause a gigantic steam explosion.

Alexandria had been stripped of much of her costume, but she fought on without a trace of modesty. Legend, too, seemed unfazed, unaffected by however many years he’d spent in Khonsu’s trap.
~ Scarab 25.6
Legend takes a hit from Leviathan and isn't 1 shotted.

There was a crash as Leviathan whipped his tail toward Legend, a blade of water soaring through the air to strike the hero out of the air. The onslaught of lasers interrupted, Leviathan shifted from a crouch on one side of the road to being the midst of the defending heroes in one fluid motion, resuming the carnage in the span of a heartbeat.
~ Extermination 8.3
Finally, here's the OG Behemoth tanking quote.

Legend’s flight powers let him accelerate to a speed that exceeded sound and continue accelerating, to no hard limit. The soft limit was that he had breaker powers that kept the acceleration from tearing him to shreds, altering his body into something else entirely as he gained speed. The drawback to this was that his brain also shut down on a cognitive level as the transformation occurred. He had never let himself go so fast that he lost the ability to consciously control his movements.

There were other benefits too. He was better at registering and processing light waves, regardless of which state he was in. He could see with perfect clarity up until the point that an obstactle intervened or the atmosphere occluded his vision.

If an opponent attacked and struck him, he instinctively transitioned into his energy form for a split second. In that state, he absorbed energy of a variety of kinds, including the kinetic energy that was transferred with a punch or with a bullet. His opponents were forced to whittle him down, each attack only a fraction as effective as it might otherwise be. Even then, a share of that small amount of damage was healed a second later as he used the absorbed energy to mend his body. Conversely, his enemies could try to hit him with enough speed and force that even a hundredth of a second of contact was sufficient to take him out of the fight. Leviathan and Behemoth had managed to land blows of that magnitude.
~ Interlude 14.5
The deeper into the Breaker mode he is, the less conscious he is. If he goes too far, he's unconscious, so KO'd. Behemoth can hit hard enough to one shot him (And he indeed does get taken out of the fight during Crushed), Leviathan's capable of doing so as well because of controlling massive amounts of water (Inferring this given he does take a Leviathan hit fine and takes hits from the physically stronger Titans), and it could cause issues if he's hit at a bad time, like with how the time Leviathan takes him out during Arc 8 seemed. Behemoth's a hard limit and he'll still be KO'd, so "at most", but Leviathan being able to take him out shouldn't invalidate him enduring Leviathan and several things that hit on par with or harder than Leviathan.

Regeneration: Mid.

Legend regens a smashed head.

I floated up further. Legend wasn’t that far away. I could see him in the air, drifting slightly, the wound with loose, curving lasers unspooling out from his upper body and bleeding out in white and blue that contrasted with the dark sky. He was slowly knitting itself together. As more of his face formed into human features, I saw him grimace in pain.
~ Radiation 18.7
Legend regenned from a face that was apparently opened before.

Portals opened. Our ground troops arrived. Legend was in the air, healed from a recent injury, his face all closed up now, but for a single line of light blue. While mending he had tried to hold back the Machine Army after the Simurgh’s most recent visit.
~ Last 20.1
More on Legend's damaged head.

Legend, approaching from the side, flew to the stage. When he looked over the crowd, a slice of his face shimmered in rainbow hues, with smokey waves rolling off the top and back of his head. An eye like a perfectly round white disk ringed by darker colors sat where his eye was supposed to be.

“The Simurgh! Pay attention, even if you won’t be fighting her. You can’t know what will happen!” Legend announced, and he was confident, assured. If the head injury had impaired his faculties any, it didn’t show. “Our analysis of the Simurgh comes from years of experience! I can tell you, don’t let your guard down. She will surprise us. She will throw curveballs at us. In all the times we’ve engaged with her, she has had new tricks. Stay the course!
~ Last 20.1
Range: Kilometers. See the above mass destruction quotes about "lasers destroying city for miles" and "Legend just leveled 30km2 of city to make sleeper go away".

Messed up on the durability, as bisection is still 9-C. Would probably go with "at least 9-C" to compensate for the dude being armored.


I would eventually like to rework her file, but for now:

  • Victoria's powers aren't actually stronger in Ward, despite their better feats. As such, she'd lose a key. There's also another quote that negates maybe the last thing that could keep her having a 9-B key, being the bit where she's stuck in a fight with 5 of Bitch's dogs. She says she could have just torn through the dogs when reminiscing on things she could have done differently to maybe have ended up with a better family situation, which implies that her holding back from killing because it's illegal also extended to Bitch's dogs meaning they're not really a reason to keep her lower.
“Both. By- by any of us paying more attention or communicating more, or paying more attention to powers and how powers work, or being a little bit more of an actual family. It could have been better if I’d fought better or harder and torn through some mutant dogs and gotten home sooner, if I’d dodged that one acid spittle or follow-up hit and avoided being taken out of commission, or if one less person had died maybe those of us who were grieving might have been clearer headed and we could have steered things away.”
~ Torch 7.2
  • This also means she's not only locked into fearhax as opposed to general empathic, but due to events that happen in Ward, she wouldn't be anyways. Sorry guys I gotta rework her file
  • 7-A and Speed of Light attack speed via the anti-titan laser Dragon made for her. As for the speed, beam's explicitly SoL.
Just gotta get my gun in good enough shape I can shoot if I need to. We might have to go after Titan Fortuna. If she’s anything like her old host, she can do anything perfectly, and get the ideal outcomes. Raises the question: what can she do about a beam that moves the speed of light, fired from the clouds?

I wasn’t being rhetorical, asking myself that. I was genuinely concerned.
~ Infrared 19.3
  • As for tier, it damages titans a bunch, but here's an easy one. Also, Dragon, who made it, takes down two titans with other weapons of hers and was considered the biggest threat to the titans by Skadi (Titan who is forcibly teleported to whatever the biggest threat to it is), so it's not like anti titan gun from her is an outlier.
Then I pulled the trigger.

The beam cut into Ophion, and it did damage, this time. Its head was like chewed gum with spikes and metal contorting its shape, and that gum split and burned. Less than I would have liked, but I was carving into him. The gun shuddered, and the damage I’d fixed and pinched together was pulling further apart now. Handholds became gouges and furrows as I repositioned hands to hold onto the weapon.
~ Infrared 19.3

Core power null isn't actually power null for everything.

Reddit user provides an interpretation of how their core really works, Wildbow says they're right]

Instead of general power null, it messes with things that work around altering space, like Chevalier's expansion power.

So this is probably a thing. Reminder that currently, Entities are accepted as 4D and they're the source of shards.

  • WOG has shards as tesseracts, 4D
  • Tattletale hypothesizes about shards existing across all the universes (fourth direction), theorizes their tiny area of influence in the human brain (the Corona Pollentia) is just where it's interfering with the base 3D space
“Insofar as we’ve even thought about passengers, we’ve been sort of inclined to think about them as being pretty small. After all, the way Bonesaw talked about them, they’re these things that work their way into our heads, bond with our brains and then burn themselves off in the process of reconfiguring how our heads work. Right? But anything as small as what she’s describing wouldn’t possibly be able to do what we need to manage our powers. So what I’m asking is… what if they’re big? Massive. What if each and every passenger is picking us, for whatever reason, they find us and then they bind to us. They connect to us by rewiring a tiny part of our tiny brains, and through that extra lobe, they connect us to all the other parallel Earths, including the one where they reside? Maybe they’re physical, maybe they’re more ethereal, I dunno, they could be plant or animal, but they’re there. Lifeforms that could be titanic, the size of cities, continents or moons, lurking in some other parallel Earth and attaching themselves to us with a thread, a fine hair that stretches across dimensions to a lobe in our brain, sending and receiving all necessary data. And things like that are connected to each and every one of us who have powers and those of us who don’t, existing only to process our abilities, to absorb and channel the necessary energies, signals and information, and make each and every one of us into…”
~ Scourge 19.3
  • Eden, an Entity like Scion, breaks down the barriers between worlds by crashing into the ground (WoG, Contessa's Interlude)
  • Scion moves in extra directions, universe to universe (4D movement)
I didn’t have the portal man, but I did have this as a means of traveling sideways, like Scion could travel in this direction that wasn’t up or down, left, right, forward or back.
It didn’t let me cross all the way into other continents. Movement was analogous.''
~ Speck 30.6
  • Shardspace isn't aligned with the rest of the universes, the only point of entry (at the time) was Scion. As we'll see later, this is because Shardspace seems more to underpin all of reality in a separate existence, but here's the quote for it just being apart.
The tinkers fired their weapon. An interdimensional ram turned into a gun. They’d finished it while they weren’t under my control. Defiant was the one ready at the switch.
I discovered why he was concerned about the power.
It kept things from being contained. I got a glimpse, a flash of a look into the world beyond him, a world he’d shut off, to which his body was the only conduit.''
~ Speck 30.6
  • A Shard tears through the ground in Shardspace, causing a seemingly infinitely deep chasm. Note that these arms have already been noted to extend much too far for Victoria to be able to keep track of if they want to.
The hand dipped low, striking the damaged section of floorboards. It carved out a furrow, turning a hole into a ditch, a gap in the room with only ruined wood below, like it was broken floorboards or rafters with foot-wide gaps between pieces of wood, all the way down to ******* infinity.
Which meant that when I shifted course to favor the smallest portion of the gap leaped the ditch, I was simultaneously going weak kneed, my mind wrestling with the idea that it might really be infinity, that what happened here could really be forever.''
~ From Within 16.9
  • Not 3D, phasing more arms into that space as opposed to multiplying
“-It’s not three-dimensional,” Sveta finished her statement.
Four dimensional?
The closer we got, the bigger it was, and the more its arms multiplied. More joints existed in more shades of color, and the color that radiated out from those joints was mild, less than a candle might shed, but so numerous collectively that they made something brighter. They were the source of the seemingly sourceless illumination that made it possible to see in the rest of the room. I could map it from room to room, including that cold golden light that was apparently meant for me.''
~ From Within 16.9
  • More infinite drops in Shardspace and endlessly long arms
Dark floorboards an infinity below me on three sides were illuminated only by the many green-tinted joints and digits that the endlessly long arm had at irregular intervals. I moved to back up, ready to leap again and retreat toward the back of the room, and an arm moved to block me. I turned another way, and an arm swept across that exit to sweep out and destroy floorboards between two of the penetration points.
~ From Within 16.9
  • Shard isn't really abiding by 3D spatial norms, apparently size seems to vary depending on distance, Victoria getting close makes it seem huge and makes the space around it and her seem more and more warped
I looked up, and I saw what I could imagine another planet might look like, if it were separated from our world by only a few hundred miles. A tangle of reaching limbs, recesses, never repeating, not a funhouse mirror or kaleidoscope, but wholly unique when I looked at any portion. Its dimensions distorted the dark portion of the room in retrospect, making it seem like the distance to the gate was miles, and those miles were punctuated by hundreds of arms that were planted on ground that had ceased to be floorboards and was now a plain of what looked like hard, packed salt, granular against my scraped knees and palms.
~ From Within 16.9
  • Several quotes on Shards doing stuff of infinite length, all from From Within 16.12
We emerged from the worst of the thicket to a spot where a tear across the landscape had felled most of the crystals and sent them somewhere else. And to our left, head the size of a house, was the thin, tall woman, with spikes radiating from her head to infinity in each direction, empty eye sockets staring us down.
That was there. Here, spike-headed woman was still out there, struggling to reach across the chasm. Barring our way. In the background, I could hear another scrape, the raking claws of the giant woman with spikes that extended to infinity.
Operating by different rules. Spikes and claws of infinite length and that seemed to extend to weird rules about reflections and placement.
Because the agents were only one small part of a much bigger system, the crimson landscape had been the real system, and the smaller agents had been capable of reaching to what I could well believe was close to infinity.
It was dizzying to consider the implications.''
  • Titan Fortuna's means to end The Cycle early was to spread Shardspace into reality. Note that ending The Cycle means destroying every single version of that earth (more than there are molecules in one universe), further supporting Shardspace being on another, more significant level than regular universes. Cracks can manifest anywhere, but they'll all lead to Shardspace. No specific quotes here because the Fortuna draft is higher on this CRT already and this stuff can be found throughout arcs 18, 19, and 20, but I could grab specifics if people really want it.
So, what does this actually do?

  • Everyone who can directly interfere with shards/Shardspace gets a bump to their abilities. This includes, off the top of my head:
  • Shardspace people get some stuff, Entity scion should have "At least High 3-A in Shardspace" given that even a single shard is able to present itself infinitely in 3D and a not insignificant distance in 4D (just a tiny portion of it being able to manifest in every universe as per Tattletale) and he's made of waaaaaay more than just one. This is limited to Shardspace however as almost none of the shard is usually phased in to the normal set of universes. For regular Scion, besides his Trump powers this just means he's unlikely to run out of mass to regen from any time soon. I suppose this could be listed in his durability, like "Unknown, High 3-A in total due to infinitely large mass supplies" or something.
  • Composite Tinker gun/Interdimensional Ram gets "Likely/Possibly High 3-A for destroying Scion's form in Shardspace and doing serious damage to the place, the prefixes being present because it was aided by Sting.

    Dargoo contested a bunch of this shit on discord, so expect some sort of alterations.

Suggested Standards​

Things referred to as lasers are treated as light speed. This stems from a few main things: Some laser people explicitly being SoL, Defiant remarking on a difference between how fast laser hit him and other random energy projection, and that it doesn't actually get any weird outliers and shit because all the lasers that are dodged are either off prediction or from one of the explicit lightspeed people so it makes no sense either way.

As for the SoL statements, This is for Legend, the laser man.

Echidna tried to move to one side, but Legend’s beams followed unerringly, swelling in size and number. Thirty, forty, fifty… each cutting their way through her flesh as though she were made of little more than snow. Smoke or steam billowed around her as her flesh charred and boiled. The lasers might have been affected by the time distortion, but that didn’t matter when the lasers were moving at the speed of light in the first place.
~ Scourge 19.5
And this is for a laser beam Dragon made for Victoria to be able to damage Titans.

Just gotta get my gun in good enough shape I can shoot if I need to. We might have to go after Titan Fortuna. If she’s anything like her old host, she can do anything perfectly, and get the ideal outcomes. Raises the question: what can she do about a beam that moves the speed of light, fired from the clouds?
I wasn’t being rhetorical, asking myself that. I was genuinely concerned.''
~ Infrared 19.3

This is Defiant, someone who would certainly be able to tell real lasers apart from generic energy beams, noting a difference in their travel time.

He took evasive action as more of the Machine Army’s lasers sought to cut him to pieces. Where he could, he flew back, kept his distance, even though it made his effective responses worse. When he fired his own energy weapons, the sheer distance between himself and the robots added a time lag. The lasers didn’t really face the same lag.
~ Last 20.a
Now I'll post every time I can remember where a laser is dodged or blocked (not just tanked), and explain either how it's not an issue or that it would be weird either way because Legend did it. Sometimes both.

The Legend group:

Legend’s lasers tore into the spot where Madcap had been a half second ago. The villain sprinted toward Jamie, moving faster with each step.
~ Interlude 12½
The calc itself says it's an outlier and was just done for a laugh. However, since this is Legend, it's an outlier whether or not we take SoL lasers as a standard because Legend's got a direct statement.

The Alexandria-clone floated up, interjecting herself between Legend and his targets. He adjusted the beam’s orientation, and she moved to block it. He divided it in two shots that she couldn’t block, and she charged him. Legend broke off to flee.
~ Scourge 19.5
This isn't even blocking in the regular sense, Legend's already shooting and clone Alexandria is just flying where the beam already is to shield others.

Legend and Alexandria still fought above us. I could, when he passed into my range, note how he got faster the longer he flew, giving him the ability to put distance between himself and Alexandria, but he couldn’t stop to take aim and shoot without losing that acceleration and giving her a chance to close the gap.
The result was that he was flying in loops and circles, using the turns to find opportunities to take aim and fire on her. She dodged most, but the hits that did land bought him distance and time to stop and laser down clones who were attempting to escape.''
~ Scourge 19.6
Several things here: Alexandria's a high level Thinker with a great body reading thing, and can anticipate attacks with ease (aimdodging), Legend's partly into Breaker form given the acceleration, meaning his cognition is diminished, Legend's also preoccupied with blasting waves of other clones because they can't let even one leave this fight, and Alexandria clone is still getting hit fairly often. Wouldn't make Alexandria crazy fast, does mean her Thinker power is very good but we knew that already.

Mischa had known he was risking an all-out attack from Legend while his targeting was diverted, but he had assumed it was a risk he could see coming. The forcefield pyramid would go down, Legend would fire, Mischa would throw the switch, and the halo would counter the incoming fire.
~ Dying 15.x
So, several things with this one. First of all, this shit's an auto targeting thing stolen from Dragon, the current top Tinker. She could just have stuff that fast, and has other lasers.

Good. He tapped on his screen, adjusting the halo’s auto-targeting. Map to stress, draw up a three-dimensional map of wavelengths and patterns, adjust, adjust-
~ Dying 15.x
Second of all, this halo thing shoots lasers itself, so if laser scales this actually makes more sense.

Mischa adjusted settings. He had to reserve some of the halo’s power for any of those slingshot stones. That limited his offense, potentially, he had to exclude Saint himself, control the power so he wouldn’t fry the Victory I’s cockpit, which was ironically more difficult and required more power for the control systems than the full-strength laser would alone…
(…)
To make sure the hero knew the danger, he focused the halo’s lasers on the section of wing that still flew on trajectory to strike the platform, demolishing it.''
~ Dying 15.x
And finally, it can't actually protect against Legend perfectly. He damages Mischa's suit a bit earlier, and tears it apart when he's not distracted.

But that didn’t do anything for Mischa, and the lasers were reaching around the wing to rake the Isaiah. Damage to some cameras, damage to movement trackers, making the halo defense five percent less accurate against moving targets. Damage to armor plating and overall structural integrity. One piece of ‘arm’ on the Isaiah hung free and tore slowly at everything it hung off of.
~ Dying 15.x
And Mischa- he had to pilot to avoid Legend’s assault, as Legend focused beams on targeted areas. The Halo protected against some, but there was nothing to distract Legend now. Controls, weapons, the halo itself, flight systems, oxygen- all were surgically burned away.
~ Dying 15.x
So it's a combination of precog software, being fairly reasonable to actually be that fast, and relying on Legend being preoccupied.

Now, for the only non Legend laser dodge I can think of:

He calculated trajectory, shifted his weight, and took a quick step to the right.

The laser beam was invisible, and raked a line across the street, carving out a furrow that had glowing orange edges to it.
“What? How!?”

He frowned a bit.

“Dude, Five!” Finale raised her voice. “You just dodged a laser!”

Five sighed.
~ Last 20.e3
Would like to note that in the actual text the word "laser" is in italics, because Finale is very impressed with this. Not major but it does sell the laser dodge as exceptional.

As for why this is fine, Five is a clone of The Number Man. Same dude who aimdodged 10^90 attacks that one time in the Cauldron Bunker. Amazing math means he just knew where the robot would shoot before it did itself. Thinker power that eclipses Alexandria's.

So yeah, I think things called lasers should be Speed of Light attack speed.

I don't think we should be assuming souls exist for this verse.

Firstly, Our resident soul manipulator isn't actually manipulating souls.

“She collects souls of dead and dying parahumans,” Marquis replied. “Or the souls of any living soul that gets on her bad side. But they’re not souls, really. Teacher says they’re psychic images, photocopies of a single individual’s personality, memories and powers. She can have a handful active and doing what she wants walking around at any given time.”

“They’re not faeries. Or souls, or psychic images. Our powers aren’t part of our bodies, exactly. I would be able to alter them or take them away if they were. What I saw when I touched glass-“

“Glaistig Uaine.”

“Her. I feel like I just got clued into a missing piece of the puzzle. They’re sentient. Maybe they’re sleeping, like she said. But they’re not dumb, and I think I’m getting an idea of what happens when they wake up.”
~ Interlude 16
On a similar note, no magic either. Furthers the idea of mystical stuff like souls not really being a thing.

There were capes who were deluded enough to think that their powers were actually magic. There were capes who were neurotic in a way that didn’t shut them down or leave them unable to function. Glaistig Uaine was one who fit both categories, and she was powerful enough to make people listen to her. He’d never thought he could benefit from it.
~ Interlude 16
Here we have Amy make reference to this idea of the soul as a culmination of one's self, being their body, awareness, and unconscious feelings, and then immediately say "It's not actually a soul but I like that name".

"I know the tension in your shoulders. I know how your eyes are so fatigued you probably can’t read the print above the elevators. I know that you have a sense of awareness of yourself, the hum of your own body, the nimbus of feelings you’re not aware of… I tend to think of it as the soul, even though it isn’t. Yours is weary.”
~ From Within 16.y
Also, the function of the soul as this immortal essence of a person that can be used for the afterlife/reincarnation is taken up by Shards. This is one of those things that is rather pervasive, but generally a lot of this stuff comes up within the Eclipse Interlude arc, Arc 16, and Arc 20. Spoilers, but off the top of my head:

  • Glaistig Uaine/Valkyrie can bring back dead people she's claimed, with the help of Bonesaw (Very end of Worm, pretty much any place she, Clockblocker, Sarah Pelham, Kid Win, and Grue are in Ward)
  • Ashley 1 lives on in a way within 2 and 3 (Eclipse in general)
  • March fully intends to spend eternity with Foil after killing her, reasoning that they'll be together forever in the shardspace data logs (Heavens 12.all, lot of it)
  • Ashley 3 is scared of being overwritten by Ashley 2 after the latter dies
Choose, I remembered. That had been our Ashley standing there beside her in the dream.

You don’t have to hide that you’re hurt, Damsel.

I knew Ashley, and I had a good sense of how she thought and processed things. Seeing the dream, I knew what was on her mind. She thought, given the chance, we’d get rid of her and get Swansong back.

I wasn’t so sure we would, but it didn’t matter, because she was convinced. I could tell.
~ From Within 16.10
  • Ashley 2 (who is already dead) temporarily possesses Ashley 3 when she's acting erratically and about to harm Kenzie because they're technically the same person so her shard memory can just do that (Last 20.10, it's kinda long but I can post the specific on demand)
  • The still dead Ashley 2 is out and about in the Shard Network afterlife (Last 20.11, another long one) and is chatting with others who've taken Bonesaw's dreaming death plague
  • Kenzie somehow found a way to communicate with the dead Tristan Vera, who's in that shardspace himself (Last 20.e5)
  • Tristan's able to be "revived" by connecting him to an earthly robot and hologram
Someone else, with his head almost shaved at the sides, the hair at the top a deep red.

“If this is a joke-” Byron said, barely audible.

“Nah,” Tattletale said. “But-”

Byron was already breaking the hug, with an apologetic look to Missy. Not that that was in any way warranted. Obviously this took priority.

Byron moved to hug his brother, and as he touched Tristan’s shoulder, Tristan fritzed. The camera and the attached prehensile tentacle with the claw at the end was briefly visible.
~ Last 20.end
So why not equate shards to souls you may ask? Well, that would be incredibly bizarre. For one thing, this implies that only a certain type of alien and powered humans have souls, so you'd still get unpowered people being soulless on top of this being strange. Shards are also just blatantly not souls despite fulfilling these functions. They're parts of extremely powerful aliens distributed to species for a research cycle those aliens run, and they'll bond to the studied species, grant them powers, and influence their actions. It'd be like my cells all being able to be parasites and saying I have very high end soul manipulation because of those cells doing weird stuff relating to death.

Ultimately, given that the role of the soul is filled by a thing that is explicitly not a soul and would make no sense to be equated to a soul, alongside a different view of souls also being explicitly stated to be not there, I do not think we should be assuming soul manip works on Worm characters. I guess we'd just put a note on the verse page or something.

Don't worry i'm not pulling weird bullshit to be annoying in threads this also kinda locks worm out of interacting with "normal" souls

Characters should generally get a resistance to their own abilities. This is shown to just be a trait of several power subsets.

Precogs interfere with others, which would give precogs a form of precog resistance (Contessa, the speaker, is special, but that's not important to setting a general trend)

“My power is a form of precognition,” she said. “Unlike most such powers, other precognitive abilities do not confuse it. That said, there are certain individuals it does not work against, the Endbringers included.”
~ Crushed 24.2
Coil can't use Dinah within his power because of the weird precog interference thing

Coil's powers get discombobulated by other causality interference, which is why he can't just have Dinah give every answer in Coil-generated universes that he discards.
~ Word of God
Victoria resists emotion stuff specifically due to her own emotion stuff

As someone with the ability to control emotions, I was supposed to be harder to read and affect. It was why I’d deflected Crystalclear earlier.
~ Daybreak 1.5
Regent is resistant to several things. He becomes important for the later bit as well though.

Ulzgoroth:Definitely aren't. She uses her power on him more than anyone else, probably. Insofar as it's a targeted thing.

Wildbow: This. Immunity to powers via. relationships isn't a guaranteed thing. Alec isn't 100% immune to Cherish, or vice versa, but they're both resistant enough to one another that it isn't really worth the effort.

Remember, Cherish had a dead man's switch bomb bike-locked to her neck in case Alec got into a position to hijack her.
~ Word of God
She reached for the three people who stood between her and her brother, manipulated their emotions towards Alec. Filled them with suspicion, paranoia, hate.

They didn’t budge.

“Cut it out, Cherie,” Alec said, “I’m controlling them.”

“If I remember right, you lose control if they’re hit by enough emotion,” she smiled. She turned up the intensity.

“If I’m farther away. Seriously, stop. It’s irritating.”

One of the men fell to his knees. His hands were clenched at his sides. Beads of sweat rolled down the faces of the other two, tears appearing in their eyes.

“While I’m doing this, you can’t tell them to attack me.”

“Unless I’ve gotten stronger over the past few years,” Alec answered. The man who was still standing reached for a knife and started walking towards Cherish.

She hit the knife wielder with fear and indecision, saw him stop.

For nearly a minute, they engaged in a tug of war over the three subjects.
~ Interlude 11g
His emotions were so muted. Dim. How much of that was Jean-Paul or Alec’s personality, and how much was his natural immunity, built up over years of exposure to Daddy? She couldn’t get a sense of what he was feeling, which was disappointing.
~ Interlude 11g


“Come after me, I go after them. You may be immune, but they aren’t.”
~ Interlude 11g
Regent just getting his powers makes Heartbreaker, a rather powerful emotion manipulator (and his dad) have trouble affecting him, showing resistances coming from the powers as well as his overexposure

Alec shrugged, “So yeah. I worked for him for three or four years. We did jobs, I learned the family trade. Called myself Hijack at first. He started to get on my case. I think maybe he was having trouble affecting me the same way he did before my powers kicked in, so he compensated for that by riding me. Pushed my limits, made me do stuff that was dangerous, stuff that was hard on my conscience. Wanted me to break, beg him to stop, so he’d have leverage to get me to do what he wanted.”
~ Buzz 7.1
Wildbow talks about having emotion powers giving you emotion resists

Having emotion manipulation usually appends a degree of emotion manipulation resistance. They'd probably both be pretty darn resistant to one another. That would include Gallant fuzzing Cherish's emotion map. His blast could theoretically knock her on her ass but wouldn't do much more than that (and against those she was controlling, would probably dash whatever effects were present to the winds, or sufficiently confuse/paralyze them to stop whatever Cherish had them doing).

When I say 'pretty darn resistant', I'd really say that the 80-100% resistance they had would veer one way or the other depending on how in concert they were with their passenger at the time of the encounter.
~ Word of God
Gallant can't get a good read on Victoria, who notably has her aura

20:05 Ridtom: I wonder what Dean sees when she uses her aura? Just a spotlight?

20:05 Prothean: A really angry/impressive/sad/whatever person

20:05 Prothean: ?

20:07 Wildbow: Maybe he's interested in her because he can't get a perfect read on her
~ Word of God
Sundancer has her secondary power to normalize all heat differences around her, so she doesn't get burned by her own power but also others

There’s other limitations or advantages that come with the powers. Sundancer over there can’t be burned. Temperature completely and one hundred percent normalizes within a certain range of her body.
~ Scourge 19.3
There's also the entire concept of the Manton Limit, where the powers manifest in a way that makes them not harm the user. However, a few things show this as actually providing a more generalized resistance as opposed solely to being an intrinsic thing.

The Ashley Stillons clones can't harm one another with their powers, despite being different individuals

It was reassuring to see the only other person left in existence that understood, that she couldn’t hurt with her power, should a freak accident happen. It was terrifying.
~ Eclipse x.8
Citrine notes how these resistances are a thing she can play around with

"More gravity, less gravity, more intense temperature variation, less intense temperature variation. Friction, light intensity, the progression of time… More possibilities than I can count, many so minor you wouldn't notice. But if someone powered is in the area, and I find the right attunement, as though I were searching a radio station, I can cut off their powers. If I'm exact enough, which never takes more than twenty or thirty seconds to narrow down, I can use my power to cancel out the filters that keep someone's powers in their control. I can also remove the filters that keep their power from affecting them."
~ Imago 21.4
Ingenue can cancel Ashley 2's resistance. Ashley ends up dying due to this, and Ashley's is the one already noted to work on the other EE.

Swansong used her power to blast the nearest bugs. She pulled away as though she had touched a hot stove.

He didn’t look away from Ingenue, trusting smaller eyes at the side of his neck to see the essential details of this ongoing conflict. Two of Swansong’s fingers crumbled, falling to pieces.

“She gave me my control back,” Swansong said. “To think I had some respect for her. She’s an idiot.”

She gave you that control back at the cost of your immunity to your power, Spawner thought.
~ Dying 15.z
Ultimately, we can see that a resistance to powers like one's own due to having those powers is a standard set by the verse itself. Therefore, people who aren't breaking the manton limit should resist their own stuff, for the most part.

Feel free to take this CRT one part at a time. Probably the safest way to do this.
 
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Literally impossible for you to have read this already, this isn't a calc smh
 
Literally impossible for you to have read this already, this isn't a calc smh
I mean I did see it ahead of time in your sandbox, and it does involve calcs so my reading speed increases dramatically
 
I agree with everything except 4-D shards, but i'll let YouKnowWho argue with that if he comes. He knows better.
 
Oh yeah, that does remind me that I think Entities should be Low 2-C considering they're made out of a ton of these 4D things and that definitely sounds significant enough but

eh, I'm no dumensions man
 
I'm aware a lot of you guys have seen 90% of this thread because it's been languishing in my sandbox for a few months, but the generalized resistance standards and bit about Contessa's attack speed I typed in today. Would appreciate some confirmation those bits were actually read with those being like "i agree with all" or "I agree with all minus shards".
 
I read that like, yesterday when you mentioned it again, I'm pretty sure

... okay now that I look, Contessa's stuff is new, but I think I agree with MHS attack speed in this case, and I am aware of all the resistance stuff and thus also agree with it so
 
Most of this looks either fine to me, or is something I can't have much of an opinion on due to having not yet read Ward. Who knows if I'll ever read it.

I do have some issues, though.
  • Bonesaw's sensory organs are just Enhanced Senses, not ESP, which is beyond the physical. Bonesaw's kicks in just with something she can't see, and presumably operates simply being tuned into something else, such as vibrations, smells, whatever, etc.
  • Unsure about Siberian resisting Power Nullification. Potentially. She also could've just avoided Hatchet Face specifically; I doubt much of the Nine wanted to be in prolonged melee range with an unstable, cape-killing power nullifier. Even if she was, I feel that's just because Manton himself wasn't in range.
  • Legend's regen doesn't sound necessarily mid. His face is just busted. It does not describe him reforming his brain, even if it was likely to be damaged. It could always just be non-lethal brain damage. High-Low to Low-Mid, I'd say.
 
Bonesaw thing seems fine, either way I'm just listing she can detect invis people. Siberian thing also seems fine, on another time reading the Cherish quote indicating some sort of threat of him nulling her while she sniped him with suicidal emotions, I'm thinking she's just talking about if he happens to wander too near her. Legend thing I'm more neutral towards, it seems like it would be odd to somehow be smacked in the head by a Titan in a way that only affects the surface of his face, but I suppose it isn't impossible and the quotes do say "face". Wouldn't push super hard against that as opposed to some other stuff, but I still do prefer my end.

“He is immune to powers, but he didn’t get close. See, difference between me and Daddy is that I have range. I can use my power even if I can’t see the person I’m using it on. Through walls, from the building next door. Hatchet didn’t get close enough to me to turn off my power. He tried, but it works both ways. I was prepped to run any time my power stopped working, because it told me he’d found my trail or guessed where I was.”
 
I'd be fine with crim's suggestion.
 
Fitting for me to be on vacation right as CRTs open.

I heavily disagree with infinite mass/energy entities as per our discussions on discord, so I’ll try getting out a response when I’m at my PC tomorrow.
 
"except the standardised resistances because it's bullshit and bad :^)"

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can ignore "I now resist my dad's ability because I have a master power" smh

Weld will take over the wiki
 
I mean at the very least, that is how it works in verse
 
I mean yeah, Weld is a metal man when it comes to organic powers and he's a man man when it comes to inorganic powers
 
I'll just write some explanation on his page about how he cheats around the system and say your power should demonstrate the ability to affect both subsets.
 
lol imagine being the CRT that actually needs to be be bumped during the big CRT rush
 
Okay I recently checked Jack Slash's page again and GOOD LORD THAT IMAGE IS STILL AWFUL WHY HAS NO ONE FIXED IT

Like, sure, maybe you don't like the original but the current one looks like a Minecraft Youtuber, as described by Crimson with horrific accuracy

310.png

This at least isn't downright painful to look at, and the Slaughterhouse 9 PSA rendition would also be great (though I don't exactly have it on hand I'm sure you know the image)
 
Lol just render it and put it on then
 
Honestly like, do we even need a render? Like, sometimes the surroundings complete an image, and it's not like we'd be hard pressed to fit it on the page

That said I will take you up on the challenge of putting it there once I get home, at the very least
 
> Honestly like, do we even need a render?

Every time someone puts a non-rendered image on a page, an Image Helper blows their own brains out.
 
Well after forgetting about that for 2 days, where's the corpse of an Image Helper so I can step on it and emphasize my superiority
 
Well, first off I'd like to apologize for likely delaying this thread. I jumped in some other debates that occupied my time for a while, but since it seems like I'll be good until Thursday until the Persona debates resume, I'll go through this as thoughroughly as I can. This will likely drain me as much, if not more so than the Persona revisions since there's so much to go over, and I'll be busy with classes and tax returns tomorrow so I might not be able engage in debate until later in the week.

Character Additions​


I don't have any issues with what's proposed, barring this:

So yeah. This argument was a while ago, I'll ask the other party about how they feel with their representation here so may revise things, but with both sides in mind, discuss.

I had to really read between the lines on this calc to understand what was even happening. Just from the quote that was provided on the blog, we do not know how the circumstances in which Fortuna was able to tag Glastig, it doesn't cite that the cracks tagged Glastig at the maximum distance possible (which isn't even a given distance, just "impossibly far"), and the 200 mph figure wasn't used correctly (you would need distance and timeframe to get the reaction speed for Glastig from that feat, and the moment you do that getting the speed needed to blitz her would be a calc stack).

Overall Verdict: The calc used to get Fortuna's attack speed is flawed in a number of ways, and makes too many assumptions for me to comfortably put it on the profile. Fortuna's attack speed should be "Unknown" or just equal to her other speed rating.​


Jack says she could grant this.
Her granting someone immortality doesn't mean she did the surgery on herself. While we do get a solid statement on Longevity I don't think the examples of her being able to extend other people's lives should apply to herself.

Enhanced Senses, Explosion Manipulation, Power Nullification/Power Modification, Paralysis Regeneration Negation, 9-C are all extremely straightforward.

I do think you should distinguish what abilities on her profile are accomplished with preparation and what abilities she has just with her modifications, though. Out of the abilities listed, Enhanced Senses, Longetivity, her axe, and Paralysis are all from medications and standard equipment, Explosion Manipulation, Power Mod/Null, and Regen negation are all done with preparation. The rest of the abilities on her profile should be similarly distinguished.

Overall Verdict: Bonesaw doesn't demonstrably have Type 1, however there is sufficient evidence for Longevity. The rest of the proposals are sufficiently proven, however should be organized on the profile.​


The shotgun should probably be 9-A or at least be listed as penetrating that sort of thing. On top of even regular 9-B bullets being able to pierce way further and shooting straight through Bitch's already bulletproof dogs, it seems like he was about to kill or badly injure Bastard (Who's 9-A off hurting him) with it.
Could the citation for Rachel's dogs being bulletproof be provided here? It isn't listed on her page, and it would be completely necessary to prove the given rating, as otherwise the feat itself can be explained away with penetration. A bullet with 9-B levels of kinetic energy would utterly **** over a 9-A depending on how small it was.

Firstly, bullet dodging.

Vista wasn't using a firearm, iirc she was using one of Kid Win's blasters that doesn't have a given projectile speed.

Battery is faster in the sprint than Assault, who caught Chariot, who can go at 100mph.

Battery's speed is variable based on how long she charged her power. Do we know if she was going at her top speed in this feat?

Broke into PRT headquarters and could evade Taylor's swarmsense.
How this wasn't on the profile already astounds me.

Overall Verdict: Some more evidence for 9-A should be provided, for his shotgun. The speed justifications need to be explained a bit further too. Stealth Mastery is fine.​


Just plain old regular resistance to Mind Manipulation, not just limited. Idk why fighting off her shard's overriding of her identity would be limited beyond her eventually losing to it, but there is also that one time she didn't kill herself despite Cherish.
Yeah, Masters resisting Masters is something I recall being brought up in Ward, and it's good to see that it's retroactively consistent. This is fine for me, although the potency of the resistance is pretty uh, shitty (Masters can still affect other Masters, it's just less effective than muggles).

More to her limited power null resist. Bonesaw did a thing that normally power nulls, but against Taylor her power just became very crude.

Taylor explicitly explains that what Bonesaw did was different than shutting off her power entirely (when she compared it to Panacea), and Bonesaw wasn't using the same parasite that she put on herself that would have permanently removed her powers. Nor was it explained that Bonesaw was using something that shut down powers entirely to begin with.

There's nothing to suggest that Bonesaw just hit Taylor with something that dampened her powers rather than Bonesaw hitting Taylor with something that would have shut off her powers and Taylor resisting it.

The resistance to Pain and Info Analysis is fine.

Overall Verdict: Pain/Info Analysis/Mind resistance is fine. Power nullification resistance isn't sufficiently proven, as there's no reason to assume that Bonesaw wasn't using something that dampened powers instead of shutting them off as per what Taylor described.​


I don't remember him having a pistol.
He has a gun:
Buzz 7.8 said:
Grue’s right hand was already withdrawing a gun from his jacket pocket as he backed up.

...

His arm jerked twice as he fired the gun at the oxygen tank he’d fetched from the back of the ambulance. The first shot missed. The second didn’t.

Which is probably a pistol since he could conceal it in a jacket.

New key, no Power Absorption, yes Power Nullification. Post Valkyrie rez. His clouds are still power dead zones and this even works against Titans with their unrestrained shards, but he explicitly can't copy powers anymore. (Last 20.6) It also works on Tinkertech, so both 2nd trigger and post rez get Technology Manipulation. Possible Inorganic Physiology, as the jury still seems to be out on exactly what the Flock are.
There are zero citations here, minus him being unable to copy powers.

Power Bestowal is straightfoward.

Just put his lifting at athletic human for him being very athletic, taking a random instance of him picking up a thing while he's tired to list him as regular human seems weird considering he's already 9-C and that would give him weaker lifting than Taylor which just doesn't make sense.
Being an Athlete in one regard doesn't automatically make you an athlete in other regards. For example, a cross-country runner would obviously be called an athlete, however you would not expect them to have a remarkable lifting strength. A deadlifting champion might have great lifting ability, but can they run as fast as trained athletic runners?

You should justify Grue's rating with evidence that he can lift objects with ease that would be challenging to people who do not work out. I get him being "weaker in lifting than Taylor" sounds off but I'm imagining there's a feat we can actually use to explain this rather than him just being generally athletic.

Rest is fine.

Overall Verdict: Grue does carry a firearm, which is likely to be a pistol. Some stuff needs to be cited, and feats should be provided for lifting strength rather than a general "he's an athlete".​


Entity gets FTL speed.
The quote doesn't seem to evidence anything other than travel speed. Is there proof that they can react to and engage in combat at FTL speeds?

Also, MFTL+ when using Secondhand's power, because for whatever reason, they made someone in Worm of all verses that fast.
Thank you, Wildbow. Very cool indeed. This is fine.

Overall Verdict: This works™​


AP: At least High 8-C, likely/possibly 7-A: Legend can deal real damage to Titans, though his first titan fight had Dauntless explicitly hitting harder than him.

So I don't know Ward things. This might be a stupid question then. Doesn't Titan durability function on the same principle as Endbringers? As in, it gets exponentially harder to hurt them the deeper you wound them?

Other than that, assuming Titans are High 8-C/7-A, this checks out.

Legend destroyed a lot of the city.

This happens over time, so it's not a great feat. Granted there's the above quote that his singular lasers can pull off shit like this so it doesn't really matter.

It's kinda complicated, but I think Leviathan 1 hit KO is either inconsistent, or explainable by different factors.

From what I understand, it's his breaker state that allows him to take hits like these; there's nothing here that suggests he can facetank a Low 7-B attack without entering it.

Legend regens a smashed head.

His head, from what I read, wasn't fully removed or explained to be actually smashed / crushed to the point where we'd consider a Mid regen rating. We just know that his head was damaged, that he regenerated his face, and that the injury could have messed with his mental faculties (something a concussion can do).

Range is fine.

Overall Verdict: Mid regen isn't sufficiently proven. Durability is alright if we're saying he needs his breaker state to accomplish this. Scaling is okay, however this assumes the feats for the Titans are legit.​


Skipping Echidna / Miss Militia / Endbringers with the big bold text analysis since they're either already accepted or just uh, fixing minor flubs.

And that's that for the characters. On to the part I was dreading:


4-D Shards​

Ah shit, here we go again.


You might want to list out what Wildbow actually posts here:

I'd imagine them as crystals, but folding/unfolding like tesseracts, with the entities themselves having a more organic overall shape.
...
"Would the concept of size be applicable to them?"...
Yes.

He says they look like tessaracts, he does not say they are actually 4-dimensional, and explicitly says that they have limited sizes. He's talking about their appearance, not their nature.

Tattletale hypothesizes about shards existing across all the universes (fourth direction), theorizes their tiny area of influence in the human brain (the Corona Pollentia) is just where it's interfering with the base 3D space
Yes, this is her hypothesizing on something she didn't fully understand at the time. Them existing in all universes runs into a large number of problems in that the capacity they exist in other universes isn't defined (and if it was in any significant capacity, you'd imagine that you'd see shard-forkery on nearly every alternate earth as a result).

Especially in this field Tattletale has demonstrably been wrong before, so I'm not really buying this unless there's more of an explanation as to what she means by "exists in every universe".

Eden, an Entity like Scion, breaks down the barriers between worlds by crashing into the ground

You're describing it a bit weird for how it was described in the text.

Interlude 29 said:
Fortuna strode forwards anyways. Her special knowledge let her push her way past almost effortlessly, choosing the right spot, the right amount of strength. The godling was in a chasm, a crater caused by the impact. It stretched out in every direction, a pool of flesh, and it reached into several worlds at once.

Interlude 29 said:
He could make doors.

He could also close the other doors, the gaps left around the other entity. It would minimize the chance that the golden man could find them.

“I can’t… too much to look at,” he said. “So many worlds at once.”

Shards being able to move between worlds isn't any groundbreaking information, and we see that these "broken barriers" between reality are actually just manifestations of Doormaker's shard.

Scion moves in extra directions, universe to universe (4D movement)

A 3D object can be moved in a 4D direction, so this isn't really evidence of shards being 4D. It's just an explanation of his dimensional travel.

A Shard tears through the ground in Shardspace, causing a seemingly infinitely deep chasm. Note that these arms have already been noted to extend much too far for Victoria to be able to keep track of if they want to.
As I have already discussed with you, a character looking at something they can't fathom or see the depths of and calling it "infinite" does not an infinite depth make. I can't see to the bottom of the Pacific, however that does not mean the Pacific is actually infinite in depth because my vision is not infinite in scope.

Shardspace isn't aligned with the rest of the universes, the only point of entry (at the time) was Scion. As we'll see later, this is because Shardspace seems more to underpin all of reality in a separate existence, but here's the quote for it just being apart.
It's not connected to the other universes and was sealed off by Scion, yes. It's still a part of the Multiverse, though, and nothing here proves it isn't.

More drops that appear infinite to someone without the ability to see infinite distances in Shardspace and what look like, to that person, endlessly long arms

FTFY. This isn't proof of infinitely-sized shardspace.

I'm slightly frustrated because I've already discussed the issues with these statements with you and they're still being used here.

Not 3D, phasing more arms into that space as opposed to multiplying

Conjecture from Sveta, who shouldn't have the grounds to say whether or not something is 3-dimensional. Everything described here can be explained with elaborate Spatial Manipulation.

Shard isn't really abiding by 3D spatial norms, apparently size seems to vary depending on distance, Victoria getting close makes it seem huge and makes the space around it and her seem more and more warped
Since when was spatial warping evidence of 4-D?

Several quotes on Shards doing stuff of infinite length, all from From Within 16.12
These are all from the POV of characters who cannot actually see infinite depths, and the only conclusion we can draw from this is "it reached out as farther than the person can see".

Note that ending The Cycle means destroying every single version of that earth (more than there are molecules in one universe), further supporting Shardspace being on another, more significant level than regular universes.
No. Just, no.

This proves that shardspace doesn't occupy the same area as regular universes, not that it "exists on a more significant level than regular universes". The plan was to obliterate all the relevant alternate versions of Earth, this just explains that shardspace doesn't contain planets like Earth.

I was hoping your draft for Fortuna would actually provide better evidence than what's listed here, but the citation for "higher dimensional manipulation" doesn't even mention higher dimensions.

Overall Verdict: Wildbow has not stated Shards are 4D. None of the given statements or descriptors explicitly say they are 4D, only that they mess around with space. None of the citations actually prove infinite shardspace, and haven't been expanded since the last time this topic was debated. However, 4-D movement is acceptable, mostly because most forms of dimensional travel require movement in a higher dimension on principle. Hard no on High 3-A Scion, as even if we assume he is 4-D there is literally nothing concrete to suggest he is infinite, and him being truly infinite is both strictly against WoGs and the entire premise of the Cycles.​

 
I'll do anything I can't just pull up off the top of my head later. I'll apply stuff you've approved, since I doubt they'd end up with any more resistance.

I'd rather do the 4D shards thing very later, as in after all the rest of the thread's settled. Without further ado:

"we do not know how the circumstances in which Fortuna was able to tag Glastig"
See my bit about how it really doesn't make sense for GU to get tagged while also having reacted to the cracks, given teleporters/doormaker/grue

"it doesn't cite that the cracks tagged Glastig at the maximum distance possible"
Victoria couldn't find the endpoint without reading the logs. Given she's flying and Contessa's the origin point, not her, the horizon distance is actually a slight lowball. It's not the max possible.

"and the 200 mph figure wasn't used correctly (you would need distance and timeframe to get the reaction speed for Glastig from that feat, and the moment you do that getting the speed needed to blitz her would be a calc stack)."

It doesn't actually need to be, it was just a "reminder GU's subsonic" sort of thing. She can get there off scaling, she can get there off her own feats. Using the subsonic timeframes for her makes more sense then not using them.

"Her granting someone immortality doesn't mean she did the surgery on herself. While we do get a solid statement on Longevity I don't think the examples of her being able to extend other people's lives should apply to herself."

Bonesaw's self mods have always been much more extensive than the modifications she gave anyone else, not counting the clones who she grew in her lab. It wouldn't really make sense for her to have been unable to do that to herself when she can do it to others and can also seem to extend her own lifespan a ton anyways. If your gripe is we don't know 100% whether she did that specific thing to herself, that's covered by "likely/possibly".

"I do think you should distinguish what abilities on her profile are accomplished with preparation and what abilities she has just with her modifications, though. Out of the abilities listed, Enhanced Senses, Longetivity, her axe, and Paralysis are all from medications and standard equipment, Explosion Manipulation, Power Mod/Null, and Regen negation are all done with preparation. The rest of the abilities on her profile should be similarly distinguished."

This actually reminded me of some Ward stuff that may make this less a thing (Special gun she made that she can adjust payloads on the fly, an entire lab stored inside her leg she can break out for quick field tinkering) that I'll add onto the CRT with the "later" pile and tell you about it, but of the list as is now, the paralyizing powder was also nulling powers. Others fine, agree with noting stuff she doesn't necessarily have on hand until her mobile lab ruins that

I'm just gonna put this as a whole into that soft "later"

"There's nothing to suggest that Bonesaw just hit Taylor with something that dampened her powers rather than Bonesaw hitting Taylor with something that would have shut off her powers and Taylor resisting it."

Think you missed the bit where Bonesaw talks about how powers need the gemma to work, taylor's gemma is out of order, and her powers are still working for some reason.

"She tilted my head back and felt around the edges of my mask, trying to find the part where she could pull it off. “I’m really good at figuring out where the Corona and the Gemma are. I can even guess most of the time, if I know what powers the person has. And I can pry it wide open, make it so the powers can’t be turned off, or I can temporarily disable it, or modify it. The powder I blew into your face? It has the same prions I put in the darts I shot your friends with. Cripples the Gemma, but it leaves your powers intact. Can’t experiment with your abilities if I’ve fried your whole Corona Pollentia, right? Right.”

She angled my head and stared into my goggles with her mismatched eyes. “Dealio is, the Corona’s way too small to be doing what it’s doing. As parahumans, our brains are doing these amazing things. The framework, all the details our minds are using to decide what works and what doesn’t, the sheer potential, even the energy we’re using, it’s too much for our brains to process, and it’s waaaay too much for a growth that’s no bigger than a kiwi. All of that? It’s got to come from somewhere. And the other reason you can’t just carve out the Corona? If you do, the powers still work on their own. The person just can’t control them. It becomes instinctive, instead.”

She began feeling around my mask for a seam, buckle or zipper, searching. She talked as she grabbed the part of my mask that bordered my scalp and tried to peel my mask down towards my chin. “So you can see why I find it very interesting that you still have the ability to control bugs, even when your Gemma is out of order.”"


There's also the whole thing about how Sundancer was of that group. If Taylor retaining her power but just bad was a flaw of Bonesaw's stuff, Sundancer's power but just bad would still end up enough to cause a lot of damage, because her calc puts her at Low 7-C and she's the one who could solo Echidna and Taylor considered asking her to nuke the PRT headquarters. Even at a fraction of that, bam that's several members of the 9 dead, that's a captive potentially dead, that's the building set alight. I don't think it makes much sense to say that actually everyone's powers probably still worked to some extent due to that.


"He has a gun:"

Oh nice

The rest of Grue goes into the later pile with mannequin, and on top of the 4D shards thing.

"The quote doesn't seem to evidence anything other than travel speed. Is there proof that they can react to and engage in combat at FTL speeds?"

Given how the quote also notes that while they're doing all this stuff, they're riding gravitational tides, shunting themselves between universes to get optimal speed boosts, keeping in sync with one another and moving all gracefully, I don't think it makes very much sense for this to be a case of travel speed that's way faster than reactions.


"So I don't know Ward things. This might be a stupid question then. Doesn't Titan durability function on the same principle as Endbringers? As in, it gets exponentially harder to hurt them the deeper you wound them?"

No, that wasn't shown or said to be a thing. It was possibly a thing with the Shin giants, but all we have for that was some vaguer comparisons. Comparisons vague enough that I think scaling the High 6-A wouldn't necessarily be accepted for them. Different entities anyways.

"From what I understand, it's his breaker state that allows him to take hits like these; there's nothing here that suggests he can facetank a Low 7-B attack without entering it."

Yes, but his durability is already based off this. It's listed basically as an effective durability, because he just automatically shifts into breaker to absorb force. Can legend outside of Breaker take a Low 7-B or even High 8-C attack? No, but both in the sense that he has no durability feats and in the sense that he automatically just leaves his normal form so is incapable of actually being hit with that.


"His head, from what I read, wasn't fully removed or explained to be actually smashed / crushed to the point where we'd consider a Mid regen rating. We just know that his head was damaged, that he regenerated his face, and that the injury could have messed with his mental faculties (something a concussion can do)."

With the size of Titans being taken into account here, and that it seems an entire half his face was gone, it seems very unlikely he got hit in just the right way to not incur any form of legitimate brain damage whatsoever. I still think "at least high-low, likely/possibly mid" works better for that.

You forgot them
 
I was working on a response, had to retype it since I forgot to save it and I came back to this thread after some amount of time.

I blame the Persona CRT

> See my bit about how it really doesn't make sense for GU to get tagged while also having reacted to the cracks, given teleporters/doormaker/grue

There's a variety of ways she can get tagged by them while also reacting to them. Namely, for one, her attempting to contain/stem the growth of the cracks as opposed to just GTFOing.

Plus, again, how far away was she from the source (Fortuna) at the time? We know Victoria and co. were detecting it from a large distance away, was she with them at the time?

> Given she's flying and Contessa's the origin point, not her, the horizon distance is actually a slight lowball. It's not the max possible.

I get that for the cracks themselves, but not really Glaistig herself. Unless she was the only target the cracks were going at, from what I read it seemed like an omnidirectional attack that attempted to nab multiple capes at once.

> It doesn't actually need to be, it was just a "reminder GU's subsonic" sort of thing. She can get there off scaling, she can get there off her own feats. Using the subsonic timeframes for her makes more sense then not using them.

From what I understand, you can't use a character's speed rating to calculate the speed needed to blitz them, that would kind of fall under a form of calc stacking.

> Re: Immortality

Possibly is fine, then.

> This actually reminded me of some Ward stuff that may make this less a thing (Special gun she made that she can adjust payloads on the fly, an entire lab stored inside her leg she can break out for quick field tinkering) that I'll add onto the CRT with the "later" pile and tell you about it, but of the list as is now, the paralyizing powder was also nulling powers. Others fine, agree with noting stuff she doesn't necessarily have on hand until her mobile lab ruins that

ofc Wildbow would write something like this. She's still limited in time and combat applicability when it comes to some of the super specialized stuff, but that's more for VS threads.

bruh

> Think you missed the bit where Bonesaw talks about how powers need the gemma to work, taylor's gemma is out of order, and her powers are still working for some reason.

Yeah I missed that. Looks fine. IDK about the second trigger theory, though, personally.

> Given how the quote also notes that while they're doing all this stuff, they're riding gravitational tides, shunting themselves between universes to get optimal speed boosts, keeping in sync with one another and moving all gracefully, I don't think it makes very much sense for this to be a case of travel speed that's way faster than reactions.

I mean, unless they're doing this over short distances there's nothing here that requires they have FTL reaction speed. That and between Shards like Harbinger's and Contessa's I'm pretty sure they can set themselves up to keep in sync throughout this without needing to make adjustments in significantly short timeframes or distances.

> With the size of Titans being taken into account here, and that it seems an entire half his face was gone, it seems very unlikely he got hit in just the right way to not incur any form of legitimate brain damage whatsoever. I still think "at least high-low, likely/possibly mid" works better for that.

I can turn that right around and say that, considering the size of the Titans, there shouldn't have been anything left of his head if it didn't hit him in the right way. Considering that, I don't think it's unbelievable that he didn't sustain brain trauma that would indicate Mid regen.

Checks out, no opinion on the laser. I think I'd actually need to read Ward for that one. If others who have read Ward OK'd it then it's probably fine.

Legend's lasers being FTL is consistently stated. And I agree that there is zero feats where people legitimately react to them.

> The calc itself says it's an outlier and was just done for a laugh. However, since this is Legend, it's an outlier whether or not we take SoL lasers as a standard because Legend's got a direct statement.

It's more likely this is an aimdodge than an outlier. It's literally just a description of Legend missing him. I don't think that part of the calc was seriously evaluated by Damage since DMUA wasn't treating it seriously.

I mean, I agree with this, but did we seriously consider Shards equitable to Souls for a time? Really?

I disagree with this outside of Masters.

There is your power stopping you from getting affected by your own power, yes, but this does not mean that you are always resistant/immune to similar powers or similar physical attacks of the sort. The breaks on one person's power aren't a sort of limiter on another person's power by de facto. We do actually have extremely consistent statements and feats of Masters having trouble affecting each other, however I fail to see this trend demonstrated between other power groups outside of a person having built-in protections with their power.
 
I do not think we should be assuming soul manip works on Worm characters.

I've strongly disagreed with this sorta thing since it was tried with Medaka Box. But I don't remember the outcome of that thread, and I'd rather not get into the discussion again since it was ******* horrible, so you can find most of my arguments there.

But tl;dr we should just assume that soul manip works, AND that shard stuff isn't soulhax. Just because a verse has other things do what souls """usually do""" without being called souls doesn't mean the entire verse should be immune to soulhax. Emphasis on the "usually do" because there is a nigh 0 chance that Wildbow has covered all things that people have applied to souls and explained it through shards. From a look it just seems to cover a few broad strokes, but is by no means exhaustive.
 
It's more likely this is an aimdodge than an outlier. It's literally just a description of Legend missing him.
I know, but the way it's phrased feels way more like Legend fired and then Assault moved out of the way

Like, an aimdodge is indeed way more likely, it's just that I feel it would have been written differently if it was that
 
So I have a stupid amount of college shit around now, so I'll just respond to the Bonesaw bit for now. 10/10 slowmo thread. Ward Spoilers.

Riley pulled off her apron, throwing it aside, dried her hands on the front of her dress, and then picked up a parasite gun. The butt-end of the gun reacted to her grip, tail encircling her wrist before sliding a needle tip beneath her skin. Once it was in, it forked out, fibrils extending up her veins, between skin and muscle until it reached the spot over her heart, where it drank greedily, a ‘vein’ standing out across her chest and down her right arm as the fibril extended out as a tube.

She tilted her face skyward as she felt a fibril go against the current of her jugular to reach up to her brain. She’d added more nerve endings to the interior of her skull to be better aware for any works she did in there, and she could feel it finding its way.

She had a three-microsecond seizure as it made the connection. Once it was done, the gun was an extension of her, grown from her own cells, with tiny hands going to work in the fluid ‘womb’ of the weapon. For the time being, she worked to create an extinction-tier payout. If she needed to change anything or if she wanted to create something, the process of creating any tinkertech smaller than her first or any injectable drug was as simple as thinking of it and putting it to work in the micro-laboratory in her gun.

She’d heard of what had happened to Contessa. It wouldn’t happen to her. (Infrared 19.z)
So yeah she can just think about her shit and it will build in her gun. This also has her able to build something that can kill herself, despite her being immune to pretty much all of her own stuff.

******* tinkers lol

More Ward spoilers, although mostly from the chapter name, tbh. I'll just spoiler it for people who trust I'm not inventing quotes but don't want spoilers I guess
The fresh fluid was loaded. She capped it, inserted a droplet of catalyst, and screwed in the key. It was her kit for a worst-case-scenario. In a scenario where she was imprisoned and needed out, or if she found herself in another situation like she had when the portals had ripped wide and tall, she could access her thigh bone, empty the contents, and they would congeal or grow into a setup sufficient to get started up again.

A liquid workshop. (Last 20.e4)

Bonesaw has an emergency toolkit of sorts in her leg. While not as silly as her lab gun, given that we've seen that Bonesaw works really fast for a Tinker and her adhesive stuff and opaque gasses, I don't think that it'd be unreasonable for her to slip away in a fight and tinker something specific if her standard stuff isn't working properly.

Also, wouldn't her dead man's switch have everything she's done besides the poison that would also kill herself anyways?
“You know I loaded myself with a mess of epidemics, Defiant,” Bonesaw said. “You kill me like that and I’ll explode into a cloud of a bajillion plagues. It can’t be easy.”

“It is,” Defiant’s voice was distorted by his helmet, vaguely computerized. There was a processor at work somewhere there, Rey observed.

“What, you’ll unleash a thousand plagues on this world to finish me off? Me? A little girl?” Bonesaw smiled wide.

“Yes.”

“You’ll get sick.”

“Biohazard safe,” Defiant said. His spear shaft tapped against his armor.

He’ll die in a hundred horrible ways,” Bonesaw said, pointing at Rey.

“Villain. Acceptable loss.” (Interlude 19)
Some form of it is back, as of Ward, making using this not mutually exclusive with using the tinker gun. She seems to have put a lot of the stuff Amy removed back.
Riley looked up from her work, the surgeon’s end of a twenty-four inch set of complex dilators pinched between her lips because her hands were full. The working end of the dilators were set in the open surgical site of her own thigh, where she had cut past skin, muscle, adipose tissues. She’d also had to cut and-or use the dilators on prior alterations she’d buried in her leg, including the subdermal ‘skin’ she’d grown around the the maille sheath she’d set around her femoral artery some time ago, and three spherical eggs she’d implanted in her thigh, in case she was ever in an emergency severe enough to literally cut them loose.

Or, she supposed, if someone caught her off guard and did enough damage to her that they got loose on their own. Either way, her inner thigh would be cut open from hip to knee, or it would be obliterated in some other fashion, these critters would be free and awake in seconds, and the threat would be regretting his or her existence, unless that threat was one of the fourteen individuals she knew of that should survive the attack. Three of those fourteen individuals would at least be distracted, potentially buying her time, and there were two more she had other countermeasures for.

“Um, sorry, but did you hear me? Cars are hard to come by, and so are cleaning services. If you warned me, I would have put down a tarp or plastic.”

“I heard you. I won’t get blood on your seats,” she promised her driver. She gave one egg a stroke with the back of her thumb, her hands still holding a narrow drill and an articulated tool that was combination scalpel and forceps. The egg’s membrane was relatively fragile and thin enough that she could see the Select Omniphage as it shifted position and pressed against the surface, nuzzling her thumbnail. ((Last 20.e4))
Now, that she knows 14 people would survive it means we can rule out it including her sound plague (and given she made that in Ward, no you can't cheat that in there) and it's unlikley the thing she was making to kill herself would be in there either (so she doesn't die if someone smashes her leg).

So what is the significance of this?

The gun should be optional equipment, and the lab and internal plagues should be standard because they are literally inside her body. The gun gives her access to any of the "prep time" category whenever, and can also be used to make new shit on the fly, perhaps if she needs to get around a resistance.

Beyond this, there are a few things I wouldn't agree with being too nonstandard/prep timey for the normal key.
  1. Power Modification is a bit of a weirder one, since it's done through her directly operating on her victim, but I feel that it would be misleading to shove it off in the prep key. It implies that it's just off limits in a match with no gun and she can't get away to tinker, while all she really needs is to paralyze or otherwise incapacitate her victim and then go to town with her very much standard surgical equipment. In citing the power mod I would have to give it a bit of a description anyways, so people would know that it's through her tinkering on people.
  2. Power Nullification was shown in tandem with the same stuff that paralyzed everyone, and as such shouldn't be prep limited. The parasite that would do it permanently is prep time however.


 
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