The interview between Miss Militia, Dinah, and Gary Nieves continued on the screen, the timestamp marking it as having happened ten minutes in the past. The onlookers who’d gathered to see what Golem was showing us had peeled away, turning their attention to other, more current feeds at the front end of the bullpen. On those feeds, if I squinted to see, Gary had pulled off his jacket and stood in the corner, arms folded.
On our feed, Miss Militia stepped out of the room. Gary turned to Dinah, and spoke, “The more you talk about how people with the ability to see the future can manipulate things, the more I question why I’m here, in this nightmare of a place.”
“You’re worried I manipulated you.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Not to get you here. To get you to change your mind about things? Some. But you have to keep in mind, I used my power to find someone with the power and ability to change the course of things. A brainless patsy who didn’t believe or have any convictions wouldn’t have worked.”
“Why not?”
“I can only ask so many questions a day. My biggest manipulation was in choosing you in the first place. I couldn’t function if I had to manipulate your every move, and if I picked someone weak willed who easily changed their mind, then I’d have to constantly watch that their mind didn’t change back.”
“You could still be manipulating everything I say, finding the best numbers.”
“Gary,” Dinah said. She twisted around in her chair, and she lifted her blindfold to give him a serious look, eye to eye. “You aren’t that important. I have other things to focus on.”
He seemed to absorb that. I thought there was an opportunity to ask a question without interrupting our watch, but then he said, “A very blunt way of putting it.”
“I’m being honest. I’m not going to pretend we’re equals or fluff up your ego.”
“Yeah,” he said. That small face on on a fifteen inch screen didn’t look happy, but it didn’t look mad at her either.
“This thing about the Harbingers killing Citrine at Contessa’s command?” I asked. “That’s the message she sent?”
“I wasn’t there, but I read the notes you guys gave us,” Golem said. “Contessa tells one Harbinger to leave, the Harbinger left to communicate with Jeanne and Kurt Wynn, who were making calls from their office, calling in favors and resources. They had assumed a leadership and tactical role, and were making their last preparations before joining the fight.”
“They were going to ask me where they were needed as soon as they were back,” Kenzie said. She stared at the screen without blinking, which was part of why I studied her more, and which played into a double-take on my part. I looked closer, and the image reflected on the surface of her eyes wasn’t what was on the screen. One glowing screen was in front of her, and four were arranged on her eye.
“They left as soon as they got the report, trusting Contessa. The anti-parahuman faction had prepared a bomb. Kid Cassandra alleges they wouldn’t have missed the bomb if they hadn’t received the message. By that logic, sending them the instruction killed them as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger of a gun. Do I have that right?”
He’d asked Rocketround, who stood nearby. Rocketround, wearing the PRTCJ uniform with his stylized rocket icon on his chest, only nodded.
“Do we know what else Contessa’s done?”
“No,” Golem said.
He tapped a button on the keyboard a few times. Each press seemed to tick things forward by ten seconds.
Miss Militia re-entered the room.
“We’d like more information on what you’ve been doing and why, if it’s no trouble,” Miss Militia said, while taking her seat.
“Sure. If you could avoid phrasing things as questions, I’d appreciate it.”
“Doable. I imagine you’ve asked a number of questions today.”
“Three. I anticipated coming here and I wanted to keep my options open. I’m not ruling out that the Wardens, PRTCJ or any of the subordinate teams might try to kidnap me. I hired mercenaries to get me out, just in case.”
“Palanquin.”
“Among others. I am a target.”
“Understood. I understand you can ask more questions than you used to.”
“Forty to fifty. It’s not as many as it sounds like, but it’s more than it used to be.”
“It might get easier as you work with the anti-parahumans or other high-conflict factions.”
“Some. Is this leading to you painting me as conflict-seeking and dangerous?”
“I didn’t mean to give that impression, no. I think you came here at what you see as great risk to yourself because of what you see as a critical danger.”
“What I ‘see’.”
“We’re absolutely looking into this, Dinah. But as clear as your power is to you, we have to make our own judgment calls. We have two people with very credible powers with apparent agendas, sitting opposed to one another.”
“My agenda is and always has been what’s best for humanity. I predicted the end of the world. I positioned the right people in the right places. Khepri.”
“You did. But I could ask two people what the perfect end result looks like and get two very different answers. This is why I need to question you about things like your involvement with and focus on the anti-parahuman movement.”
“They were a bigger threat than anyone was aware, because they’re a massive weak point that nobody on our side is aware of, while foreign powers are eager to foster them. They were the biggest factor with the least noise around them.”
“Tell me about this noise.”
“Other thinkers, complicating factors, power-induced randomness, blind spots. An example would be how I couldn’t act against Teacher as long as he had Christine Mathers. If I look at her future then she starts appearing in all futures I can see. I slowed him down when I could but that was a lot of effort and a lot of risk he’d target me. There are a few things like that.”
“My colleagues want to know how you started and how this is supposed to end.”
“I started by identifying key players and figured out the courses of action that helped them climb. Up until the election I was putting a lot of time and energy into working out if I could put Gary or one of the other two in charge, but I didn’t like the numbers after that point.”
“You manipulated the election.”
“No. I could have, but it wasn’t worth it. I changed my focus to putting things in as positive a place as they could before the portal disaster.”
“Tell me more about that.”
“Massive interdimensional effect. I couldn’t see past it and I didn’t know what it was. I planned things and ensured everyone was as healthy and safe as possible before it went off. Then I steered things after.”
“Steered Gary.”
“Only a little. The movement was rising around him and people were angry. Cheit’s theocracy desperately wants Gimel and interfering with their agents has been a major focus of mine. Keeping them in the background. Keeping the anti-parahumans they were fostering as a thing that was simmering. Keeping Shin’s role in things simmering.”
“My colleagues will want proof.”
“I can send you my redacted notes on questions asked, with the when, why, and who, as it pertains to that.”
“Will you talk to a thinker?”
“No. No mind control, no interference, no powers or people I don’t know and trust.”
“It would be a thinker, not a master. Someone who reads, but has no other impact.”
Dinah shook her head.
“You have to realize this makes convincing people much, much harder, if you refuse.”
“I realize.”
“Let’s go back to the process and end goal.”
“You realize how scary we are, right? How scary you are, Miss Militia?”
“I think I see where you’re going with this, Dinah, and I know what you’ve been through and how it might color your perceptions. But don’t make the same mistake the anti-parahuman groups do. We aren’t our powers. We’re people.”
“If you picked twenty random people out of a crowd and asked me to put my life in their hands, I wouldn’t be able to,” Dinah said. “The difference is that when they have powers and they have an incredible amount of say, the ability to take my life into their hands no matter what I want, there’s no choice in the matter. Believe me, I get the irony of it being me who is saying that. I know how much power we have.”
“Do you drive?” Miss Militia asked. “Sorry, that was a question.”
“Yeah. I drive.”
“Then you put your life in the hands of more than twenty people every minute you’re on the road.”
“I have car insurance, Miss Militia. My car has seatbelts and airbags. There’s no insurance against what a parahuman can do to you except being very wealthy and hiring competent mercenaries. I can do that. Gary can’t.”
“You want rules in place.”
“Laws, consequences. The goal was to have all violent retaliation fail, to put Gary Nieves at the head of an outraged and energized majority of the population, letting him choose a course of action. Gary?”
“You’re asking what I’d do?”
On the screen, Dinah could be seen wincing. “No questions, please. And yes. Your actions, assuming you were in charge.”
“Sorry. If I was going to go with the most extreme idea, because I don’t think small could have any impact…”
“Do,” Dinah said.
“A city-wide strike. Or… a strike across the resettlement camps. Peaceful resistance, work limited to subsistence only. Shelter for ourselves, food, clean water. Parahumans want amenities, clothes, convenience, they want to reap the benefits of the society the rest of us build. It’s a long shot, we would be opening ourselves up to being preyed on and to retaliation, I know that, but…”
“The Wardens would do their best to stop any predation or retaliation. Most of the heroes would,” Miss Militia said.
“I can’t help but doubt that,” Gary said. “But I would respect it if you did.”
“They would have,” Dinah said. “You could get the message out at a time shortly after the internet is online at the new settlements, when a pair of videos are making the rounds. A man and a woman talk about how they wish they’d struck out on their own, and discuss self sufficiency. I went and looked.”
“Going to look for specific futures and eventualities devastates you,” Miss Militia murmured.
“Yep,” Dinah said. Her smile was slight but confident. “But it was important. The words inspire people who need inspiration and who want to do something different but don’t want to leave the settlements. Which is most. Gary has the capacity to direct that inspiration to something they can do. The weeks that follow the resulting strike are ugly, but only two people die, and they’re people who would have died regardless. Mostly it would have ended up being about control, with the worst instances resembling hostage taking or tyranny, and the Wardens would have stopped those instances.”
“I don’t necessarily believe you,” Gary said. “It sounds too neat.”
“That’s fine, I get that a lot,” Dinah answered. “In the aftermath, fences mend, the worst villains are gone, a big disaster I can’t clearly see sits in the middle of where the city used to be, but the damage to the city is controlled. Nothing suggests it reaches further in the next five to ten years. Not in that course of events. Not so long as the most reckless villains are dealt with and everyone’s focused on cooperation.”
“That’s your goal,” Miss Militia said.
“It was,” Dinah’s voice had a touch of anger to it, even through the computer’s speakers. “She ruined it.”
“By killing Kurt Wynn.”
“Gary can’t take power, there are no numbers that scale those steep odds now. Violent anti-parahumans will precipitate the disaster you’re worried about in the center of the city. Now ask me what our new odds look like.”
“You want me to…”
“I want you to ask me, Miss Militia. It’s fine.”
“What are the odds?”
“Eighty point three six one five percent chance of mass death that extends across realities. That remaining nineteen percent? Fifteen percent of it is worse. Where we don’t even get to die. The other four percent isn’t pretty either. Do you see why I’m upset?”
“I run the risk of sounding overly aggressive by bringing this up, but someone could charge you with playing with fire, with a very incendiary group, and put yourself in a position where this sort of chain of events or disaster on this scale was possible.”
“I took every precaution,” Dinah said. “I double checked every major move I made. I triple checked they wouldn’t lash out, and I mitigated the damage if the anti-parahumans had to act, except when I was blinded. There were two instances where I had to let Teacher use them unfettered, because he would have found me if I’d stepped in. Those times excepted, I kept them out of your hair. I would have kept Kurt Wynn alive and Jeanne Wynn uninjured. I was as careful as you could expect me to be.”
Miss Militia wrote something down.
“I made no mistakes. I wasn’t reckless. I was careful and she woke up, blinded me, and slapped everything I was setting up out of my hands, and she did it for a reason. And in every one of those eventualities I talked about? She makes it through. She’s there, after all the blind spots pass, and she leaves us to our fates, for as long as we still exist in any sense.”
Through the speakers, Miss Militia’s chair scraped against the floor. “I’m going to go talk to my team.”
Kenzie reached over and hit the pause button.
“You can see where we’re concerned,” Golem said.
“Yeah,” Capricorn said.
I expected Kenzie to say something because she’d been the one to pause, but instead, she sat there, staring at the screen.
I crouched, and I brought my face closer to hers, to look at the reflection of the screens on her eyes. Each one moved independently, the tiny black silhouettes that were Miss Militia, Gary, and Dinah all at different points on different screens. Eight screens at once, and-
“Done watching,” Kenzie said.
“You watched the entire recording,” I said.
“How?” Golem asked.
“Split it into parts and watched all the parts at once, with some lipreading tech, because that’s easier than dealing with sound. Um, Breakthrough needs to go.”
“We do?” Rain asked.
“I had questions,” Golem said, “And frankly, I have way more questions since you’re apparently wanting to leave right away.”
“It’s nothing bad,” Kenzie said. She grabbed the mouse and selected a point on the time bar for the recording.”
“-can do, with the curfews-” Gary said.
“That’s before…,” Kenzie said. She moved the bar again, twice in short succession.
“-either the group attacking the evacuee caravans or a group making a move tomorrow morning. I can help you with the caravans.”
“Tell us about the caravans.”
“They’ll be raided by a group calling itself Deathchester. Reckless power use, violence, they’ll steal from people who only have the most precious things they could afford to bring with them, and those people aren’t in a position to fight back. You can save some lives right now by sending some people to go recruit heroes and send them to the location. The Inwood highway.”
“We’d need to vet you first.”
“Send them now, vet me in the meantime.”
Kenzie hit the pause button. She twisted around to look up at the rest of us.
“I don’t get it,” Rain said.
“Deathchester. It’s the area of Boston the original Damsel of Distress tried to take over. This is new Damsel, Sidepiece, and Nailbiter, along with, uh…”
She reached over to the computer, opened a browser, and typed in a long sequence of numbers.
“You know,” Golem kept his voice quiet, “It’s a good thing I like and trust you guys, because the way Lookout was talking about the recordings, she had database access to play multiple recordings at once and relay it to whatever tech she’s using. And now she’s-”
Kenzie hit the submit key, and surveillance footage from a camera outside a store showed a group of capes striding along the sidewalk, a couple of them hopping up onto cars in deadlocked traffic. Black clothes, torn clothing, and blood seemed to be a dominant theme. Some had armbands, scarves, or coats in checked white and black.
“-doing that,” Golem finished.
Kenzie rewound a bit, bringing up the shots with clearest views of faces and masks. As the camera tracked each face, it stuck names over their heads.
Torso. Gibbet. Nailbiter. Trophy Wife. Sidepiece. Backwoods. Mockument. Hookline.
“Most of these guys are ones we’ve been dealing with off and on in the heart of downtown,” Golem said. “You’ve got ones like Trophy Wife who start up an enterprise or something and other low level villains will join in.”
“What enterprise?” Tristan asked.
“Poaching, animal slaughter. We sent in people from the city core who have some familiarity with them. They’re a small team but they’re smart and reliable.”
“Yeah, that’s super great,” Kenzie said. “Um, so can we go?”
“Why is this so important?” I asked. “You want to see Damsel?”
“Kind of, yeah, but also because we know how to deal with a lot of them, and because there’s no way she didn’t account for us going in the numbers, since we have to go once we hear about this, obviously.”
“Kenzie, slow down,” Sveta said. “Why do we have to go?”
“Because there’s no way we don’t go if we think Cassandra mentioning this is meant for us to hear and us going to help,” Kenzie’s voice was rapidfire. She saw Sveta motion to take a breath, and paused to do so. “And because Damsel’s there, and others we know how to beat are there too. And Damsel.”
I reached out and touched her forehead. “You’re warm. I got you sick.”
“Nope. No. I’m fine. I overheated my brain a little bit by watching all that video at once, that’s all. Really. So you don’t need to worry.”
“Kenzie. That’s far more worrying,” I told her. I looked at Golem. “Is there water?”
“On it,” Tristan said. For a split second, I thought he would absentmindedly turn into Byron and we’d have another health crisis. “Point me the way to the office cooler?”
Golem did.
“I want to call in my brownie points. Every time I’ve been good or helped or put a smile on your faces, or did what I was told, or made a machine to help Tristan talk while deep in his brother, or held back or shut up or any of that, if I got any points at all I want to spend them now and I want to go.”
“Codenames,” I told her. “Golem’s trusted, but…”
I saw her put the brakes on, which was really my point. We were being really sloppy, even with Rain’s introducing of us to Bullet Time, and Golem was trusted, but I was tired and the shitty thing was that when I was sick and tired, I became more like my mom. Rules and petty manipulations.
Her having to stop to rein herself in and check her words meant she wasn’t rambling or getting worked up.
She visibly slowed herself down, but she looked anxious.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I told her. “We’re being pretty loose with those rules. That was a kneejerk thing from me.”
“Okay,” she said.
Tristan made it back, and handed Kenzie a glass of water, which she downed. He took a paper towel he’d wet and folded, and pressed it against her forehead while her head was tipped back to drink the water. She lowered the cup from her mouth but kept her head back, eyes closed. She sighed, full-body.
“I want to go,” she said.
“Really? You seemed a bit wishy-washy about it,” Rain said.
Kenzie’s eyes opened, and she moved her head fast enough she nearly lost the paper towel compress, catching it with one hand. All energy, almost alarmed at being misinterpreted.
“I was kidding,” he said.
“You want to do this?” Golem asked.
“Possibly,” I said. I looked at the others. “Probably. Unless we get an objection as strong as Kenzie’s desire to go for it.”
“Let me run it by people,” Golem told us. “Decide in the meantime, and don’t leave so fast you don’t tell us something about Contessa.”
“Deal. Thank you,” Tristan said.
“The other group of heroes are five minutes away,” Kenzie said, as she brought up an overhead map of the city. “We’ll be six minutes behind them.”
“If we go,” I said. “Look, I don’t want to be paranoid, I know we technically met Contessa’s predicted outcome of having two members of Breakthrough out of action for the long term, but I’m not positive, I’m worried. Nothing says we were out of danger the moment Teacher ran. I know this is a touchy subject so soon after Swansong-”
Kenzie drew her shoulders in together a fraction. I put my hand on one of those shoulders.
“-But one of us could still die as a direct consequence of the events we set in motion during the fight.”
“We could die anytime,” Tristan said.
“Let’s just be mindful of the risks. These are some unpredictable, violent, and dangerous villains. Some of them are goofballs, but not all of them are,” I said. “We’re not at the top of our game, or I know I’m not, and…”
I trailed off.
“I’m not, I’ll admit that,” Tristan said. “I’m going stir-crazy.”
“I really want to though,” Kenzie said.
“On a scale of one to ten, how are you doing?” Sveta asked her.
“…Four? But I won’t be fighting. I just want to be there and help people and then see her after you’ve all kicked her ass.”
“Making us do the hard work,” Tristan said.
“Unless you’ve got a way to age me up by six years,” Kenzie said. “Yeah. That’s how it goes.”
“I’m just teasing,” he said.
“Not super great then,” Sveta said. “Seven for me?”
“Six,” Rain said. “I prefer to tough things out than complain, but… six. Maybe seven since I’m happy to have met a guy I can talk to about workshop stuff with.”
“Putting all of us between ‘poor’ and ‘good’, with an average that’s below par,” I said. “Yes?”
“Yeah,” Tristan said.
Kenzie tapped on the computer. It brought up the meeting room, the time differential replaced with a ‘live’ icon.
Golem was knocking on the door to the room in reality and in the video feed.
“Come in,” Miss Militia said. “Hi, Golem. Problem?”
He shook his head.
“Heya,” Dinah said. “It’s been a little while.”
“Hi,” he said. “Good to see you. Been too long, yeah. I’ve been listening in with Breakthrough. They’re considering going to Deathchester, should…?”
He stopped himself.
“Sorry, that was almost a question.”
“It was a question. It clarifies the numbers,” Dinah said.
“I don’t know if that means it improves them,” Miss Militia said.
“It does. Just… working on clearer terminology and understanding of my power. Yes.”
Miss Militia looked up at the camera. She seemed to think for a long second. “I wouldn’t object. Except they need to know the rules. Did they overhear the restrictions we put on the other team?”
“Yeah,” Golem was audible through the speakers. “I’ll go over them. Sorry to interrupt.”
Guess we’re doing this, then, I thought to myself. Hearing it improved the numbers was maybe more inevitable a thing than Contessa telling us it was so. We had to.
I looked at the others. They seemed to get it too. Kenzie was bouncing.
Fuck. I’d have to get my costume.
Tristan punched one fist into his palm.
Golem was out of the meeting room, and started toward us. When we all headed his way, he stopped, waiting for us to come to him.
“What are the restrictions? Minimal power use?” I asked.
“The powers you can use are restricted based on the power,” he said. “Powers you willfully use or turn on are a no. That would be your aura, Antares. Probably your power, Capricorn. Sveta should be fine. Lookout should be fine. Precipice…”
“I turn on all of mine,” Rain said.
“Are there any you can turn on now and keep on?”
“My blades.”
“Do that, then. This way. The portal at the end of this hall will put you close to the Inwood region. We opened it ourselves.”
“I can keep my flight on?”
“Same idea, yeah,” he said. “Someone had a metaphor for it.”
“The ice is cracked, it’s fine if we spread out our weight and don’t make any sudden movements,” I said. I started flying.
“I think their metaphor was about animals on the other side of the glass at the zoo, and not wanting to tap or tap so much it irritates whatever’s on the other side. Yeah. If you have to use a power, don’t use it while everyone else around you is.”
“The villains aren’t going to be playing by these rules,” Tristan said.
“No. We instructed the Huntsmen to communicate with the villains if they could. They should warn them of the risk.”
“That’s not going to work, knowing Damsel,” I muttered. “And if she’s in charge-”
“No guarantees,” Golem said.
“She likes to be in charge,” I said.
“Yeah,” Kenzie said, still bouncing.
Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck.
“That’s about it. She says the numbers get better and I trust her,” Golem said. “Before you go, is there anything you can tell me about Contessa? Stuff I can pass on? I let you through security and I tacitly signed off on this… it’d be nice to throw the skeptics a bone.”
“I hate that we have skeptics,” Sveta said. “You guys already know this, probably, but she let her guard down before she got caught. Gave herself a day without using her power, and that’s the day Teacher attacked her. Or so she says.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“I think the words that come out of her mouth are engineered just as much as she engineers every last action to produce an outcome. Dinah has a limit to the number of questions she can ask. Contessa doesn’t. She can manipulate every last detail.”
“Fair.”
“I don’t think we got into the nitty-gritty details when we briefed you after the raid, but when it came to deciding how I should deal with Saint, she immediately assumed I’d kill him. Then she shut off her power before I could ask whether I had to. I think that’s an ongoing problem. She takes the most efficient route, regardless of the casualties or side effects. What Dinah is talking about, with how her plans were spoiled? I think that might be a side effect.”
“Something that happens regularly,” I elaborated. “If she isn’t mindful about it.”
Sveta nodded. “Maybe Contessa gets stronger when she can build up plans over days and weeks, and she was just woken up when we met her and she didn’t have a backbone of pre-existing plans and safeguards in place. So she took the cutthroat route. And maybe it gave her an added two seconds of confusion for Teacher if she killed someone she had worked with for decades. I think that would be okay in her books. That’s why I think she’s awful.”
Golem looked at me, then at Tristan and Rain.
“…I’ll pass that on.”
“I’m biased,” Sveta said. “But I don’t think I’m wrong.”
He nodded.
I could see the staff and the general effect that surrounded one of the portals in and out of this place.
Kenzie had her coat over her arm, and pulled it on, wrapping her scarf around her neck. I still had my coat on, and made sure to button it up.
Fuck. I wasn’t even going to get to put on my costume.
“Here,” Golem said. He indicated the portal. It was the same rip-in-reality style that Kenzie’s cube made, rather than the electricity-framed doorway that Teacher’s tech tended to produce, or the three-dimensional-hole style that Faultline’s group and Khepri had made.
I did have to wonder if putting more actual fucking holes in the glass or the cracked ice wasn’t a really questionable idea.
But they had to have thought of the same thing. They’d have taken precautions, especially if they had Teacher’s tech for tracking all of this stuff.
Golem’s word was enough to get us through the checkpoints. It put us in the city.
He walked with us right up to the tear.
“What you said about that two seconds of confusion? It might line up. Some of our thinkers were there in the room before he ran. They reported he was distracted.”
“Makes sense. We were pressuring him,” Tristan answered.
“They also reported that your group showing up was part of what made him decide to shut down. You, specifically, Antares.”
I frowned.
“I don’t know why and I don’t know what it means, but I figured you’d want to know,” Golem said.
“I have no clue,” I said.
“The guns,” Sveta said. “You picked up six guns, using your forcefield.”
I looked through the portal at the distorted picture beyond it. I thought of the rising anger, the frustration at Byron’s condition and not fucking knowing. Then the black mood that had settled in, as Kenzie had reported that Swansong was dead.
In the midst of that mood, the Wretch hadn’t moved how I’d wanted it to.
I’d moved like it wanted.
“Thanks, Golem,” I said. “You’re the best.”
I flew through the portal. Even remembering the black mood left my own attitude today touched. Being grumpy as fuck because I was sick, my eyes closing in the face of the sudden cold, it certainly didn’t help.
The top of the building was protected by a fractal forcefield that looked like a blooming flower. Layers peeled away to give us an avenue out and forward.
I could see the traffic that had stopped, three blocks away. The people that had left their cars and backed away, but who weren’t willing to abandon their vehicles entirely.
Rain had his silver blade out as he emerged with a bit of swagger, Tristan right behind him. I gave him a look.
“He’s happy because he has two friends. Golem wants to hang out,” Tristan said.
The others followed. Kenzie all bundled up, tech in each hand. Sveta looking normal, though she’d had her mask in her pocket.
“I’m scouting ahead. You guys okay making your way down? I’d carry you down but my arms and hands are a mess right now.”
“Aha, I don’t trust you to haul us around while sick,” Tristan said. “Fuck me, I don’t even get to use anything except my strength?”
Kenzie said something, but Sveta talked over her. Kenzie was talking to Tristan and Sveta to me, so I listened to Sveta.
“Yeah,” Sveta said. She put an hand on my arm. “We’re okay. Scout.”
A small part of me wondered if she was telling me to go because she had something to say. A suspicion.
Except that wasn’t Sveta. My mood was just dark, my interpretations the worst.
I flew away, over rooftops, and closer to the scene of the ongoing crime.
A group of ten villains who weren’t holding back. I could see Trophy Wife with her rack of animal parts and keepsakes mounted on her back and sweeping up behind her head and shoulders. I could see Hookline, who we’d chopped up the last time we’d run into him. No Kitchen Sink. I’d caved in his chest, and he apparently wasn’t in good enough shape for mass robbery.
And Damsel, with Sidepiece and a cape I didn’t recognize in her company. Having the time of her fucking life.
I flew closer to watch her and see if they had a clearer agenda, and the jester-type figure I pinned as Mockument pointed at me, calling out a warning.
She twisted around to look, and I didn’t miss that her expression changed. A fleeting look, more Swansong than Damsel. I’d thought of white behind black or black behind white, of villain and hero and the layers behind layers, and here I caught it, manifest and clearer than ever.
Just for a moment.
Damsel, too, seemed to catch it. Her expression twisted, anger not just at me, but at that same moment. She raised a hand, long blade-fingers pointing.
What a fucking mess this all was.
Did…..Did Contessa kill Swansong so that Antares would be in a bad mood so that Waste-chan did things it wanted to distract Teacher momentarily to prevent him from entering Shard Space?
Mother fucker. That’s fucking brilliant and a dick move.
It sounds like Contessa and Dinah Alcott are operating on Orange and Blue morality now. Like our ethics can no longer apply to them. Which is fucking scary.
Ziz, Dinah and Fortuna are amongst the few Thinkers who get to handle consequences of such magnitude that their plans end up looking inhumane from anything short of very long term. Worm was basically written and steered by the three of them.
Ward being the same would be no surprise.
Damsel, too, seemed to catch it. Her expression twisted, anger not just at me, but at that same moment. She raised a hand, long blade-fingers pointing to the Top Web Fiction.
What a fucking mess this all was. Third place? Fucking why?
http://topwebfiction.com/vote.php?for=ward
The hits just keep on coming, huh. Victoria…
Also, I guess we’re deciding to trust Dinah. I guess we’ll see.
I just thought about it more and Jesus, this Damsel situation promises to be an epic-level clusterfuck. Mostly because of Kenzie, but also because who knows what’s going on inside Damsel’s head at this point. Has she started inheriting Swansong’s memories yet? I can only imagine she’ll reject those as much as possible and lash out as a result. But all the warning signs are there that Kenzie wants to make a new Ashley…
My tearducts are sadly not ready for the large majority of this arc’s possible outcomes.
Calling it now, just in case: Dinah’s passioned speech about Contessa feels too overprepared.
This is a Die Hard 2 situation. Thry’re working together because each covers the other’s blinf spots perfectly.
-“He’s happy because he has two friends. Golem wants to hang out,”
I’M SO FUCKING WORRIED FOR THEO. Rain should never be happy according to Wardverse and having friends means that he’s happy. How Rain will be unhappy against? No more friends. I’m very worried for Theo :(.
-They have restrictions with using their powers because of the shard-clusterfuck. I doubt the villains will care about the same restrictions so our good guys will have to fight with one hand tied at their back against villains having both their hands free. More worries.
-Damsel have Swansong’s memories and she must hate Vic for letting Swansong die. Not good at all.
-Gary is an anti-parahuman asshole but he’s listening to a teenage parahuman without any objection. Hypocrite much?
-Vic’s Wretch have a mind of its own just like Taylor’s power had at times. Vic will share Taylor’s fate, isn’t hard to see that. The Tyrant will be for Ward what the Queen Administrator was for Worm.
-I still trust Contessa over Dinah and I’d like to see what Contessa thinks about these accusations and how she’ll defend herself.
I honestly live for mentions of khepri. “Hey remember that mega parahuman who saved the world by taking over our bodies.????” Seriously, should be brought up more.
Alllsso, Rain now has two friends. Yay! Does this not count breakthrough then? Poor fucking Rain, hahaha. Pretty salty there tristan.
A few observations about powers of several people seen or mentioned in this chapter:
1. Kenzie displayed a thinker or thinker-like ability to mentally process eight different videos with subtitles. Has this always been a side-effect of her power, or did she spend too much time in company of QA’s bud, and is getting enhanced multitasking from there – possibly via a tinker-scan or maybe via some connection Darlene’s power has formed between Kenzie’s shard and Aiden’s.
If it is the latter, then it would be a somewhat unexpected, but not necessarily entirely new side effect of Darlene’s power, since connecting the body of the Vera brother who was “away” to her network probably also required establishing some sort of connection with Capricorn’s shard. It would also explain why at the beginning of the previous arc Chicken Tenders were able to assemble eye cameras under Kenzie’s direction well enough for Kenzie to make them work with only slight adjustments.
2. Dinah was supposedly able to tell what would happen if Contessa took one of the options she ended up discarding. Does it mean that she managed to predict Contessa’s release before it happened and asked her power what could happen because of it beforehand, or does it mean that the present moment is no longer one of Dinah’s “terminus points” (I would have to check in Worm, but I think it was one of Dinah’s limitations then), and now she is able to answer theoretical questions about how would future look like if this-and-this happened in the past?
3. Sveta said that Contessa’s power always shows the most efficient path leading to the victory conditions defined by her. It would fit the series of questions Fortuna had to ask herself during her interlude to figure out how to kill Eden and ensure that she also managed to save her family at the same time. Looks like Contessa’s brutal efficiency is just a result of her power’s limitation, not a flaw of her character.
It puts Contessa’s words about “small things” from chapter 30.7 of Worm in new light in my opinion – part of what she might have meant then could be that she hoped to have more time to define her “victory conditions” in such way that she doesn’t cause unnecessary damage to people simply because it gets her a little bit of efficiency she doesn’t really need. This limitation would also explain why Contessa doesn’t want to use her power for everything – if she doesn’t follow a path to do something, she doesn’t need to worry that she will end up doing something she would rather avoid for any (for example moral) reason, simply because it would be slightly more “efficient” to do so.
Poor Contessa… I don’t know about you, but I would consider having a power which defaults to proposing “efficient” paths without bothering with such things like conscience to be a real nightmare.
4. Apparently Victoria thinks that the Wretch works with her best when she is doing exactly what her shard wants her to do, and fears that the shard achieves it by influencing her mind? Sounds reasonable considering what we know about shards and capes who have particularly strong connections to them. Teacher’s reaction seems to confirm that he also feared that this is what was happening to Victoria.
The bad news is that Victoria may be right about being controlled, especially since Teacher probably knows a lot about the topic, and wouldn’t be scared without a good reason. Even if Victoria wasn’t controlled this realization may have some ugly consequences, since she may start to second-guess her every thought, every action, especially during fights, and in other high-stress situations, and that may make her hesitate in a critical moment. A potentially positive result of this entire situation is that if Victoria suspects that her shard is affecting her mind to such extent, she may be more willing to believe that Amy was similarly affected when she “wretched” her, and may be more willing to forgive her sister as a consequence.
By the way, could it be possible that Victoria reached the state where she was strongly connected to her shard (and thus susceptible to being mind-controlled by it) when Amy put her in “healing trance” after Crawler’s attack? Could it be that Amy realized that it happened at some point (possibly only after meeting Glaistig Uaine in Birdcage), and this, not willingness to spare Victoria a memory of being “cocooned” and subsequently “wretched”, is why Amy made sure that Victoria is still unable to remember that time?
Re 4. Just to make it clear why I think that Amy might have inadvertently “strengthened” Victoria-shard connection while she was “wretching” her. Amy’s overall mental state as well as what exactly she turned Victoria into (a form similar enough to Eden that as far as I remember Taylor used Victoria during GM to get emotional reaction from Scion) suggests that Amy’s actions at the time were largely controlled by her shard. This may mean that Amy did what her power was originally supposed to do as a part of the Warrior entity.
What would the original purpose of Amy’s power be? I think that there are strong clues that it was restoring “Mantoned” shards to their full functionality when the entity was ready to leave a currently occupied planet and continue its journey through space (and possibly also “Mantoning” them in the first place). It would explain why:
– Amy’s power was able to detect the shards gathered by the Faerie Queen (I assume you need to detect something first to be able to work on it),
– the Red Queen title (it seems to apply to shards that play vital role in the cycle – QA handles ongoing administration and possibly also communication between shards, FQ gathers them when it is time to leave a planet, RQ adjusts shards restrictions so that they don’t break the cycle – for example by killing their current hosts too quickly, or threatening the hub or other shards),
– Amy managed to modify Taylor’s connection with her shard to give her way more power than a parahuman should ever have (she basically did something similar to what her shard was supposed to do when it was time for the entities to move on to the next phase of the cycle and leave Earth).
It would also explain why Amy’s power is so strong. If her shard happened to be the only one capable of restoring full functionality of other shards, then Scion couldn’t cripple it to the point where it would be unable to perform this function anymore (because there would be no way to continue the cycle). Even if Scion had another shard capable of performing the same function, he might have kept Amy’s shard able to do it as a backup option. If I’m right, then it could be possible that Amy could fully “un-Manton” any shard (though it may also be possible that there are some restrictions – for example she could be able to do it only with shards collected by FQ, or only Warrior’s shards, or only when connected to currently disabled shard network etc.)
Oh, and if it wasn’t clear, there is probably a strong correlation between restoring shard’s full functionality and strengthening their connection with their host. “Mantoning” shards probably included making sure that they won’t immediately overwhelm their hosts’ minds, and take full control over them. After all a host whose mind is completely taken over by a shard wouldn’t have any more creativity that the shard itself, and as such would be completely useless from entities’ perspective. The way QA quickly overwhelmed Taylor’s mind in arc 30 of Worm seems to prove that un-Mantoning a shard connected to a host leads to the shard quickly overwhelming that host’s mind just like I described above.
You may be right about this, since Glaistig Uaine saw the shaper cleaning up at the end of the cycle.
> “Yes. The other nobles, their tasks are more immediate, shorter in term. What makes us truly noble is our role before and after this act. The others sleep, and we toil. We’re practiced, stronger, for that constant effort. The champion and observer ensure the next act goes on without a hitch. The shaper and demesnes-keeper clean up after we are all done here, one way or another. So it goes.”
Perhaps the original plan would be for Amy’s shard to reshape things after the shards are full. Could Amy’s power work on herself and essentially keep her alive eternally until the end of the cycle comes about?
‘doh. Forgot that Amy’s power is limited against working on herself. If the cycle originally takes a long time to complete, I wonder whether this means that her shard would have continued on in buds for some time.
> Perhaps the original plan would be for Amy’s shard to reshape things after the shards are full. Could Amy’s power work on herself and essentially keep her alive eternally until the end of the cycle comes about?
I think it is more likely that Scion could use the network to make shards perform their primary functions without any parahumans attached to them. Of course there are still many things we don’t know – for example if (or to what extent) Amy’s will could substitute Scion’s, if to perform its primary function correctly Amy’s shard would need other shards to assist it through the network, if Scion had to wait for Amy’s death to fully control her shard, etc.
@Alfaryn
> What would the original purpose of Amy’s power be? I think that there are strong clues that it was restoring “Mantoned” shards to their full functionality when the entity was ready to leave a currently occupied planet and continue its journey through space
Good idea, but Amy is second-generation cape, so her shard should (probably) be bud of Marquis’ one, which doesn’t seem to have any effect on other shards.
Remember that typical second generation capes usually get their powers in circumstances that are not particularly traumatic as far as trigger events go, and get relatively weak powers. Amy most certainly doesn’t fit the second point, and probably also the first, which makes me think that she is not a typical second generation cape, but essentially a first generation cape (in that she got not a bud, some collection of “waste” etc., but a shard as unrelated to her family’s as most randomly selected Scion’s shards would be) who just happens to have cape relatives.
Of course her power does have some slight thematic ties to Marquis’, but it could be a result of her shard drawing information about Marquis and his power during her trigger, and “masquerading” as his shard’s bud as a result by using this information – possibly to play on her insecurity due to the fact that she was adopted (which if I remember correctly she always suspected, but obviously became much worse when first Tattletale confirmed it for her, and later she learned just who her biological father was – at which point apparent similarity of her power to his only made things worse). Remember that shards as a general rule give parahumans powers that play on their fears – both directly related to the trigger events, and not.
1) Her brain overclocking fever is very reminiscent of Defiant’s tech, while remaining very Kenzie-aligned (a video-in multiplexer, basically). Using her own brain as processing ‘box’ is the slightly worrying part of it.
2) Iirc, Dinah can’t predict through Contessa’s sphere of influence. Whenever she uses PtV and sets a path, it blanks out the whole chunk of affected future probabilities and Dinah has to wait for them to happen to see them.
I suppose this is the direct consequence of Scion being more thorough neutering Dinah’s shard than Eden was with Fortuna’s.
4) At this point I’m not entirely sure if it’s a bad thing. Note that even following her shard’s will didn’t push Victoria into some uncontrollable berserk rage. Born of a foul mood, but still reasonable – she didn’t fire a single round out of these guns, even with Teacher in sight.
Both embracing this path and keeping her warrior monk credo (thus losing the wretch’s full cooperation) would be very interesting to explore.
> Looks like Contessa’s brutal efficiency is just a result of her power’s limitation, not a flaw of her character.
> It puts Contessa’s words about “small things” from chapter 30.7 of Worm in new light in my opinion – part of what she might have meant then could be that she hoped to have more time to define her “victory conditions” in such way that she doesn’t cause unnecessary damage to people simply because it gets her a little bit of efficiency she doesn’t really need. This limitation would also explain why Contessa doesn’t want to use her power for everything – if she doesn’t follow a path to do something, she doesn’t need to worry that she will end up doing something she would rather avoid for any (for example moral) reason, simply because it would be slightly more “efficient” to do so.
> Poor Contessa… I don’t know about you, but I would consider having a power which defaults to proposing “efficient” paths without bothering with such things like conscience to be a real nightmare.
What an interesting perspective on Contessa. It would really be a nightmare to contend with being in her shoes if that is the case, particularly if the alternative to using her power might be much worse than using it.
Do we know whether PtV is able to predict broken triggers?
> By the way, could it be possible that Victoria reached the state where she was strongly connected to her shard (and thus susceptible to being mind-controlled by it) when Amy put her in “healing trance” after Crawler’s attack?
> Could it be that Amy realized that it happened at some point (possibly only after meeting Glaistig Uaine in Birdcage), and this, not willingness to spare Victoria a memory of being “cocooned” and subsequently “wretched”, is why Amy made sure that Victoria is still unable to remember that time?
That would be quite interesting as another factor in Amy’s actions. I wonder how much Amy knows about the broken triggers and impending danger. Hunter’s shard filled in many of the blanks in her personality after Amy messed up while working directly on her connection to her shard, and Victoria’s connection with her shard seems different from what it was early in Worm.
Wildbow made a comment on Reddit awhile ago about what happened during the missing time between when Victoria is first “cocooned” and “wretched” days later that may be worth reading, if you haven’t seen it already.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/ciscq1/question_about_amy/ev8y062/
I’ve taken a look at the Wildbow’s comment you’ve linked, and I don’t believe I’ve seen it before, which is unsurprising, considering that I avoid reading WoGs as a general rule – instead I prefer to give myself more challenge and try to solve mysteries of the paraverse without such hints. That said, I think that I’ve seen other people’s comments that looked like they might have been based on this particular WoG.
Apropos nightmarish precog powers – Dinah’s power also seems to have a very nasty drawback. As far as I remember Dinah mentioned early on in Worm that worked better when other people were asking her questions than when she did it herself (though it might have been a result of her inability to think clearly under the influence of the drugs), but if what she said in this chapter is true, then she simply can’t stop her power from answering any questions she hears. Not only is this a critical weakness (you could easily disable her power by asking her around fifty random questions about things her power could answer), but would also lead her to experience nasty headaches not only when someone did to her deliberately, but also when people were simply careless about what they speak around her exactly. I imagine that it would often lead Dinah to separate herself from people (especially strangers who don’t know or aren’t used to her power, or chatterboxes who simply can’t learn to control their impulses to think what they are about to say before they speak) just like Lisa had to separate herself from all sources of information in chapter 21.7 of Worm.
Sounds like Dinah is likely living a very lonely life, and not only because her power makes other people afraid of her.
Re. 2. I’ve taken a look at interlude 11.f of Worm, and it looks like I was right about “The now, the present” being one of Dinah’s terminus points (at least during events of that interlude – there is obviously no 100% guarantee that this particular aspect of her power hasn’t changed somehow since then). If anyone wants to see the exact wording, this particular terminus point is explained in the second paragraph of the interlude.
1
I wonder how did K-Cassandra find this out.
2
I don’t know why, but this gave me the creepiest shivering creeps.
On the other hand we now know what Parahumans 3 will look like: a mix of ‘Cast Away’ and ‘I am Legend’. Orrr…
“Touch my fedora”.
An interdimentional tentacle tentatively touches the fedora.
Contessa(‘s copy?) and Abaddon shot from the ruins through the sky.
3
Yep. Creepy indeed.
Somehow this whole chapter had a subtle… sinister tone. It’s probably just me.
…
..
.
4<“[…] or made a machine to help Tristan talk while deep in his brother[…]”.
“… while deep in his brother…”
“… deep in his brother…”
“… in his brother…”
I hate my mind.
I also hate the fact that italics took over my comment without my consent.
Ups?
Messy typo thread:
“She put an hand”
Link to typos in this chapter reported by Juff:
http://www.parahumans.net/2019/08/20/from-within-16-3/#comment-103033
I’ve noticed a problem with interlude 15.x that may qualify as a typo, but can’t post it there since that comments section is closed for some reason.
The name of C.U.I.-controlled cape paramilitary unit we know from Worm has always been spelled Yàngbǎn in that book, but in interlude 15.x of Ward it (where the name is mentioned five times) it’s spelled Yangban – without any diacritics.
Comments are still not working on Chrome, at least not my Chrome.
Good chapter, and I know why Theo wants hang with Rain- shared background in horrible racist families, Empire Eighty-Eight and the Fallen. Though I really liked Purity in her interlude, because I think she’d been manipulated by Kaiser. And if she was in breaker form when they met, her shard could have helped convince her to join him by thinking ‘Ooh, racism, that’s good for conflict!’, though honestly I’m not convinced shards understand racism, since they can’t even understand twins.
Also, I honestly trust Dinah more than Contessa. Dinah’s always tried to steer things to save as many people as possible, whilst Contessa just picks a victory and goes for it. They’re both pretty horrible characters to get on the wrong side of, but high-end thinkers of a precognitive nature are always tricky to deal with.
> though honestly I’m not convinced shards understand racism, since they can’t even understand twins.
They may not fully understand twins on a level necessary to form a connection with only one of them, but they probably managed understand human concept of racism well enough by observing human minds. This is how they adjust their powers to their hosts after all. Similarly they probably also understand human concept of twins well enough. It is just that humans themselves don’t understand twins on a level necessary to form a proper shard-human connection with only one of them, so any insights the shards got from humans on this matter wouldn’t help them to avoid making C70s, or giving nearly identical powers to clones or people like Fenja and Menja.
I heard someone posit the theory that Contessa’s PtV serves her ends to a degree but ultimately is aligned to make a new hub, worm, Abaddon, etc. (Whoever said this sorry I’m not giving you credit I can’t remember who). I think that its not a bad theory because it serves Abaddon’s goal, helps explain the initial crash that killed the scholar, and may also be the best thing for humans. Right now without any sort of hub, the shards are breaking reality and as Dinah shows most likely lead to the end of humanity. But the shards can be fixed and realigned if they have a hub to communicate with. The problem is making a hub under restrictions to not destroy harvest humanity and leave. I honestly expect this to become something similar to the AI issue. Can we conscience creating a being easily capable of ending humanity, with the hopes that we can restrict it so that it greatly aids us? But in the end, the only way I see this story going long term is that either all the shards are “turned off” and everyone loses their power, humanity returns to normal; or a new hub is made to guide the shards to our goals.
You’ll get your answer as soon as conscience starts being a verb. Neologisms are fun and all but why not use the words that already exist?
While I do appreciate the complaints of linguistic prescriptivists that’s not really a necessary or helpful comment. Yes, you are technically correct that conscience is not a verb. That said, you knew what I meant and are purely looking to be contrarian.
British english allows nouns to be used as verbs without further modification.
In this case it is a common contraction of “i cannot in good conscience allow/do/withold…”
If the true verb is clear in context, the contraction to verb conscience makes the sentence less ponderous.
Really this idea is one of those “mythical” grammar rules that comes from confusion between prescription and description- English simply does not strongly distinguish between verbs and nouns. “Conscience”, for instance, is a deverbal noun- a verb that generally gets treated like a noun mostly because “consciencing” sounds weird, which has also been bootlegged into a term for the abstract mental/philosophical process it describes taking place.
> “Nope. No. I’m fine. I overheated my brain a little bit by watching all that video at once, that’s all. Really. So you don’t need to worry.”
> “Kenzie. That’s far more worrying,” I told her. I looked at Golem. “Is there water?”
Poor Kenzie. From a comical perspective, though, I love how matter of fact Kenzie is about things like this. Is overheating her brain just something that just happens when she multitasks too much now?
This probably won’t happen, but I wonder what would happen if Kenzie ends up scanning and using Dragon and Defiant’s body augmentation tinkertech. If we take her comment literally, I wonder whether she has not already done some biotinkering on herself beyond the eye cameras and what we’ve seen her using. Kenzie looks up to Dragon and Defiant, too. It would be an interesting throwback to the discussion about them that Sveta and Victoria had in the car with Tattletale, and Sveta remarking on seeing the brain as inviolable.
It’s great to see Dinah again and how she has matured. I’m excited that we get to see more of how her powers work now. She was a favourite of mine who I hoped to see more of after Worm.
It’s interesting how she has found a way to operate by limiting herself to interacting with the people that she trusts and avoiding parahumans. She is so casual with Golem, and she seems quite comfortable with Miss Militia compared to the way she engages Gary and the topic of involving a Thinker.
> “Will you talk to a thinker?”
> “No. No mind control, no interference, no powers or people I don’t know and trust.”
>“It would be a thinker, not a master. Someone who reads, but has no other impact.”
It’s quite interesting how Miss Militia presents this, speaking to her personality as a sympathetic and understanding party who nonetheless upholds her responsibility to the Wardens and hero groups. It echoes back to her role in the PRT with Skitter and feels like great writing.
Thinkers are not exactly safe to engage in simply because they only read on the face of things. They are the highest priority classification to target in PRT direct engagements, higher priority than Masters, all numbers being equal. Coil was a Thinker. Tattletale, Contessa, and Dinah are thinkers as well and they have all made some of the largest impacts on multiple Earths out of all the parahumans in the story.
Since Thinkers can use what they gather from their reading to impact things in a number of counterintuitive ways, it seems a little disingenuous to present this only in the light of Thinkers being non-threatening read-only capes as opposed to Masters. But it is likely something Miss Militia sees as a necessary compromise to try to get Dinah to work together with the heroes, with a Thinker Miss Militia herself trusts.
Even though Dinah’s decision is surely informed by her experience with Coil, the objective risk of interacting with a Thinker may still be quite high. I don’t fault Dinah for her perspective on powers, and it would be quite interesting to see a society in which the capes and non-capes work together as she proposes. It is actually a rather refreshing counterpoint to the fatalistic Because Destiny Says So trope driving cape power usage that we’ve been exploring.
> The weeks that follow the resulting strike are ugly, but only two people die, and they’re people who would have died regardless. Mostly it would have ended up being about control, with the worst instances resembling hostage taking or tyranny, and the Wardens would have stopped those instances.”
This seems different from any of Contessa’s three options, as there are no massive civilian deaths as in option B. I wonder what Dinah’s blind spots are and how they align with Contessa’s blind spots.
Now that we’ve seen Kenzie’s tech begin to work for the Capricorn brothers, I wonder which Breakthrough member in option A would “not die, but will suffer for so long it may as well be indefinite.” It may not have been either of them if her tech could be made to work.
Speaking of which, have we seen which member of Breakthrough is enduring torment in plan C? Assuming that we are on the path of plan C.
> “Two members of Breakthrough are removed from the equation as a result. One endures some torment for… quite some time.”
If we assume that Contessa and Dinah are both telling the truth as they see it, did Contessa miss the path to the future Dinah is describing here? Could that have been due to their precog powers interfering with each other? Does this mean that both will interfere with each other as our story progresses?
Here’s a thought: what if Contessa and Dinah are both missing some crucial things about the big bad threat? Do they both have worrisome blind spots? It would seem that Dinah is able to see past some of Contessa’s blind spots but has some of her own. I wonder what Contessa’s power tells her about Dinah and how PtV perceives Dinah’s shard.
I am more inclined to think that both are working off of only part of the picture and that the world impacting consequences aren’t due to either of them being malicious. At least we have seen no indication that either of them is so far, though both Dinah and Contessa have their personality flaws and biases.
Speaking of which, where is Contessa while this is happening, and what do other Thinkers have to say about this? I hope we will get to see more Thinkers in action as this unfolds.
‘doh. Could not post comment earlier and ninja’d by Alfaryn on some of the points meanwhile.
(Ninja’d by grinvader on the matter of Kenzie and Defiant’s tech also.)
> >“It would be a thinker, not a master. Someone who reads, but has no other impact.”
> It’s quite interesting how Miss Militia presents this, speaking to her personality as a sympathetic and understanding party who nonetheless upholds her responsibility to the Wardens and hero groups. It echoes back to her role in the PRT with Skitter and feels like great writing.
[…]
> Even though Dinah’s decision is surely informed by her experience with Coil, the objective risk of interacting with a Thinker may still be quite high.
Actually because of her role during Skitter’s interrogation Miss Militia should’ve understood why Dinah would be wary of thinkers who “just read”. After all she was there when Alexandria used her thinker power to “just read” Skitter, and we know how that ended. So while Dinah’s decision is “surely informed by her experience with Coil”, it is most likely not about just that, or about the fact that thinkers are objectively dangerous in general. It is also about how PRT and the Protectorate (including Miss Militia herself!) Taylor, after Dinah ensured her surrender. Remember that Dinah was angry at Tagg even before Skitter’s interrogation started – just putting Skitter in a high-security cell was enough to provoke such reaction.
Dinah might have deliberately destroyed her savior’s happiness to put her on a path to defeat Scion, but it doesn’t mean that she wasn’t sorry about it (she even gave Taylor a note about it after all), and she clearly wasn’t willing to just let PRT and the Protectorate treat Taylor any worse than absolutely necessary without a protest (and let’s face it – that interrogation wasn’t necessary to put Taylor on a path to save the world.)
That is a good point. I had forgotten that Dinah knew about Tagg and Alexandria’s participation in Skitter’s interrogation. Though Miss Militia’s personality has consistently been a mix of sympathetic and understanding toward misunderstood characters while still being biased towards following the rules and deferring to the hero groups, so I feel that perhaps it is still in character for her to attempt to phrase it that way as a token attempt to follow the rules.
It might also make sense for Miss Militia to make token attempts to follow the rules and not to appear too biased towards Dinah given that they are being observed and recorded by so many capes who may distrust Dinah. She does drop the line of suggestion once she has played the obligatory “good cop” role and informed Dinah about the consequences of not following the protocols.
> Dinah shook her head.
> “You have to realize this makes convincing people much, much harder, if you refuse.”
> “I realize.”
I agree with you, Dinah was sympathetic towards Taylor throughout Worm, even if she could not do anything to stop her from having to become Khepri. She hangs her head after Khepri shows her the two pieces of paper to “cut ties” and “I’m sorry.”
Miss Militia clearly wants to appear as a good person to Dinah, but maybe she simply doesn’t realize that something so subtle as mentioning thinkers who effectively read minds around Dinah may not be the best idea, especially right after Dinah mentioned putting Taylor on a path to become Khepri. From MM’s interlude in Worm:
Looks like for Miss Militia you have a problem when it is something big and concrete – someone is trying to kill you, and she might simply not fully realize why Dinah would resent being reminded of an unpleasant past event, like Taylor’s brutal imprisonment and interrogation was to Dinah. In other words perhaps Miss Militia made a mistake, because her empathy has been somewhat dulled by her traumatic childhood?
>> The weeks that follow the resulting strike are ugly, but only two people die, and they’re people who would have died regardless. Mostly it would have ended up being about control, with the worst instances resembling hostage taking or tyranny, and the Wardens would have stopped those instances.”
> This seems different from any of Contessa’s three options, as there are no massive civilian deaths as in option B. I wonder what Dinah’s blind spots are and how they align with Contessa’s blind spots.
> If we assume that Contessa and Dinah are both telling the truth as they see it, did Contessa miss the path to the future Dinah is describing here?
Remember that Contessa asked for paths that would make the people who voted most happy. Maybe the future Dinah had in mind would for some reason make these particular people unhappy despite the low death count?
For example what if all Contessa’s paths (unlike Dinah’s) would lead to the Undersiders being re-united with Taylor, Victoria repairing her relationship with Amy, and so on. Happiness of each of the voters may depend not so much on what would happen to the city, as on overcoming their traumas, realizing their personal dreams etc.
You could argue that in a way even Swansong got exactly what would make her happy. After all her last words were:
Good point. If that is the case, I wonder now whether Contessa could simply ask her power what would make Breakthrough and the Undersiders happiest, or even simply ask what would make people on all earths the happiest. Perhaps that is what she actually did despite asking everyone to make a decision, as Antares suspected. Although, if she is able to simply ask her power what everyone would decide, I wonder why she asked everyone to spend time making a decision in the first place. It would seem that asking for a decision could have been another step in a larger PtV.
I think that if Contessa is focusing on making only some people happy, then it may be something that Taylor inspired with her words in chapter 30.7 of Worm:
It could be that Contessa thought something like “These people who have saved me are decent enough and at the same time aren’t big enough players to be considered bullies, or to lose sight of ‘little things’ I wonted to focus on more. Maybe focusing on helping them is a better, more humane way to use my power than focusing on some abstract ‘objective good’. And I do owe them a debt of gratitude.” In other words Contessa may have decided to try to adopt her rescuers as her “anchors”.
Alternatively It could be that Contessa decided to focus on these particular people, because she saw some great potential in them, and decided it would be a smart move to get on their good side. Maybe it has something to do with the plan to let Rain access the “door” in his dream room that Kenzie has come up with, maybe it is about Colt’s ability to “get” capes dreams? Maybe it is whatever Teacher saw in Victoria that apparently scared him so much? Maybe it is a combination of some of these things?
Finally maybe it is not about Contessa’s rescuers, but someone else who cares about them. For example Contessa could have decided that pissing off Amy by letting something bad happen to her sister isn’t a brightest idea in the world. Teacher’s unwillingness to continue with his plan after he saw Victoria may also have been motivated by a similar logic.
Two thoughts
one: Kid Cassandra doesn’t get. It doesn’t matter what the probabilities are. If the numbers start at 80% good odds and they go down to 0.01% good odds that doesn’t matter. Contessa can hit the 0.01% every time. If the 0.01% is better than the 20%, Contessa can engineer a situation with 99.99% to 0.01% odds against success and then succeed every time. Diana thinks she can tell if things are getting better or worse by watching how the odds change, but that fundamentally doesn’t work as a way to think about the world when Contessa is involved. Diana is untrustworthy not necessarily because she intends any harm, but because her whole way of thinking about the world doesn’t work.
two: Contessa saved the world by killing number man. Detail from this chapter
““I wasn’t there, but I read the notes you guys gave us,” Golem said. “Contessa tells one Harbinger to leave, the Harbinger left to communicate with Jeanne and Kurt Wynn, who were making calls from their office, calling in favors and resources. They had assumed a leadership and tactical role, and were making their last preparations before joining the fight.””
They were about to join the fight. We know from the Teacher perspective scenes that the world was close to breaking at several points. Maybe citrine joining the fight and tuning during a key moment would have been the last bit that the ended the world. When reality is that thin, fideling with its parameters is probably not safe.
Re: one. Remember that there are plenty of blind spots involved in the picture. Contessa’s power isn’t able to guarantee a success in duch situation, just like she was unable to find a path to kill Scion. Judging from what happened in Worm Dinah’s probabilities work better in such situations than Contessa’s paths.
Re: two. I think the explanation may be a bit more complicated than that. Considering that Number Man might have been the closest thing to a friend Contessa had in pre-GM Cauldron, it seems inconceivable that Contessa would knowingly cause Number Man’s death if telling Number Boy to tell Citrine and her husband to just stay where they were and not join the fight would achieve the same result. After all there is no reason to think that Number Man wouldn’t follow Contessa’s instructions in such situation, or that he would be unable to convince Citrine to do the same. In my opinion this means that one of the following things have happened:
A. Contessa asked for paths that would make the voters happy and for a way to explain those paths in terms that would be sufficient for voters to make their decisions. This means that Contessa herself didn’t know what the outcome of any of the three options would be beyond what she told the voters, and since none of them cared much about Number Man, and Contessa probably did not ask her power to include herself among the people who would end up happy or to protect any particular people (remember that option A would even end with her own death), her power did not feel obligated to give he a path which would take Number Man’s survival into account. Because of it the path ended up being the most efficient one in this regard (as it is by default), and telling Number Boy to tell Citrine to go home might have been slightly more efficient than telling him to tell her and her husband to stay put, avoid using their powers, and watch for car bombs (even if the entire difference in efficiency would be that Contessa had to say a few more words in the latter case). If this is true, than Contessa ended up killing Number Man unwittingly, simply because she didn’t make stipulation to keep her old friends alive or to get a path that would give a result she would be happy with herself.
B. It is possible that Number Man had to die for another reason that is not clear yet, but has nothing to do with making sure that he and Citrine won’t push the stress level Teacher’s devices were monitoring beyond 100% mark. For example (and this is one of many possibilities) if Contessa really does have a hidden agenda as Dinah suggests, or has been mastered somehow, Number Man would be one of the people most likely to realize it and rise an alarm.
This is all, incredibly interesting. I still maintain neither Dinah or Contessa are being straightforward about this, about what’s really going on but I honestly couldn’t care less. They’ve got more tangible and tedious realities to worry about with the threshold looming, and with Sleeper and The Machine Army in the background.
I’m also sharing Vic’s nervousness about this encounter with Damsel coming up, because they’ve got a handicap and the villains really couldn’t care less. I’m also not liking Victoria’s seeming inability to get a grip on her mood (which is totally fair given the nonstop tragedy WB protags go through but still), and I hope she can still be “okay” enough to make good judgement calls in whatever follows.
Also can I just say I really hope we get some substantial chapters about Sleeper and the MA because I’ve been geeking hard about Sleeper ever since Khepri have him a pass. Plus, I want to know who’s behind the Machine Army and what their goal is. Not like I haven’t been looking forward to every update but god damn am I excited for something on sleeper
Wouldn’t get my hopes up about the Machine Army. The Tinker who built its seed is probably long dead, and its only goal is survival/expansion ala Neumann’s grey goo.
Sleeper’s the interesting one. He probably finished all the books around in Zayin. Step 1, portal him into a remote library while evacuating the city…
@Quioxte above; it seems to me that Contessa could just as easily have been able to tell Citrine and NM that they oughtn’t join the fight, no? NM trusted her enough to not check fr car-bombs if she didn’t mention them, I figure he trusted her enough stand down if asked.
Typo Thread
“I can (extra space)
killing Citrine > killing Number Man
“It was,” > “It was.”
put yourself > putting yourself
said, “And > said, “and
recording.” > recording.
before…,” > before…”
quiet, “It’s > quiet, “it’s
help,” Kenzie’s > help.” Kenzie’s
“Yeah,” Golem > “Yeah.” Golem
Link to a typo thread started by grinvader above:
http://www.parahumans.net/2019/08/20/from-within-16-3/#comment-103010
Fortuna: “How can I make life miserable for everybody?”
Answer: “Pretend to be captured by Teacher, so that when you are inevitably “rescued”, a bunch of powerful parahumans would follow whatever directions you give them, with no questions asked.”
Okay, I’m joking about her motives, but Fortuna getting captured intentionally makes a scary amount of sense.
“Fortuna getting captured intentionally makes a scary amount of sense.”
Hard disagree here. How does her allowing her capture move her toward anything she might want? Fortuna was just suffering in a coma for two years. There’s virtually no affirmative goal that she could be working towards that would have been better served by inaction than her being able to guide events to move them where she wanted. Her allowing herself to be taken out put extreme limitations on her by restricting what her start conditions were.
If she’d been free, Teacher and his army could have been taken down with minimal costs. She could have told people how to do it and she would have done it in a way that she’d be believed. If she wanted to influence events on Gimel, she could have just started doing so back then. She could have been the de facto dictator of Gimel long since. Step one would probably have been “Walk up to the Wynn’s and say ‘I want in.’” etc.
I’m at a loss to come up with any goal she might want to pursue that would be less well served by her being free for the two years she was in that coma. If the Overseer was correct, the only reason she did that is that she let her guard down and Teacher put her in a trap that she literally couldn’t escape from once she knew it was there, so she protected her mind. I can’t think what she’d gain by that if her hand wasn’t forced, so I have to conclude the whole thing was “put myself in trance that protects me from their mind control until the time my power predicts help that can actually get me out arrives.”
@Kessler
I can’t help imagining Contessa asking questions to her Shard, only for the “camera” to pan her fedora for the answer.
Like Homer Simpson talking to his brain.
I’ve just realized something about Victoria’s shard. In a way, despite being connected to Scion’s network as long as he lived, it is not Scion’s. Not fully. Just like some of the Eden’s shards came from Abaddon, part of Victoria’s shard (the one responsible for her aura) came from Eden through Gallant. I wonder how often the paired entities traded parts of their shards (and who knows – maybe also entire shards) between them, and if the answer to this question may have some important consequences in the future.
Sounds like the characters are leaning towards Dinah’s side, which they really shouldn’t. When it’s pointed out how she was indeed playing with fire by stoking anti-parahuman sentiments, she just says ‘I did nothing wrong?’ So what? You can always do everything right, and failure is still a possibility. And in this Dinah is a typical Thinker – it’s always that unknown and unpredicted X-factor that messes up everything. That’s true for normal plans and super powered ones.
Also of note is her mentioning Khepri in her defense of how she’s always does what’s best for humanity. I think the Undersiders should have a few words on how that works out for the individuals she sets up. In this Dinah is really just a different flavor of Cauldron – both work under the cause of “what’s best for humanity” that inevitably involves a lot of screwing over others to get there.
And that seems to be the source of Dinah and Contessa’s conflict. Dinah is still operating in the same ‘greater good’ that saw her outing Taylor. Contessa’s no longer working towards “greatest good” but rather “a good people can be the most happy with.”
Because let’s not forget Contessa’s acts now we’re set in motion by other people who voted. Interesting that Breakthrough doesn’t chime in about that part.
Okay, so it seems that Dinah had some plan, calculated it as well as she could, and ensured that nothing too bad will happen if there will be no unforeseen interference with it. And that could even work, because there are very few things which Dinah can’t foresee. But then unforeseen interference happened, Dinah’s plan went back-asswards (which is entirely expected in that case), and Dinah is upset because she hoped to be the only player on future’s playfield (which is also entirely expected and understandable, but she’s unfair to Contessa. she hardly could know about the existence of Dinah’s plan, let alone what would be needed to not interfere with it, and ascribing Number Man’s death to her is definitely not fair, as Contessa’s path most likely just contained something like “93. Send Harbinger 4 to Citrine with a message about blah blah blah”, with reasons for that being anyone’s guess at the moment).
And Sveta’s and Victoria’s judgements are just really fucking dumb.
_______________________________________________
> It sounds like Contessa and Dinah Alcott are operating on Orange and Blue morality now. Like our ethics can no longer apply to them. Which is fucking scary.
Moral assessments of some commenters look much more blue and orange to me. Specifically, that part where they ascribe responsibility for all that ever happens to precogs, solely with a reason “she has seen that outcome ahead of time, ergo, she’s responsible for it”. That mostly concerns Dinah, in Contessa’s case it takes the form “she has chosen it over another outcome, ergo, she’s responsible for it” – which kinda makes more sense on the first glance…but in her case, not really. Shit always happens, and if Contessa chooses between Shit 1, Shit 2, …, and so on up to Shit 10000, people will blame her for choosing shit. You chose 100000 civilian lives over my friend Bob? You monster, you killed Bob! You saved Bob, but Joe died? No better, now you killed Joe. Bob and Joe live, but Sam got badly wounded, and it will cost him 5 years of life? You might just as well walk up to him 5 years before he would die otherwise and pull the trigger of a gun. So Contessa will be blamed no matter what, unless her plan produces an absolutely perfect result when all the humanity ascends into heavens and becomes gods (though still there might be someone complaining that they didn’t want to become that kind of god, but horrible Contessa forced them).
1. > I have car insurance, Miss Militia.
Really? Car insurance in post-apocalypse settlement on other Earth where a lot of people live in tents and hunger is very possible? Sorry, but I think it is too much stretch.
2. > when it came to deciding how I should deal with Saint, she immediately assumed I’d kill him.
Unless it was also a play 😉
Insurance companies were one of the first financial concepts that humanity invented- documentation for it dates all the way back to the times when “caravan devoured by lions” would be a mildly noteworthy claim. You especially want insurance when you and others are barely scraping by, because there is so much more risk of losing what little you have. For instance, subsistence farmers in rural India can buy into cooperative-style crop insurance policies that pay out if there’s, say, a drought or major flooding during the growing season.
I love the way this was set up. If the last few chapters had been from Victoria’s perspective, we’d probably have noticed it when it happened. But this way, we get the same split second, delayed realization of horror that she herself experiences.
like worm all over again, huh- Poor Communication Kills: the setting 🙁
ill admit, im..worried about both of them-
regardless of their intentions, both of their powersets (and goals, assuming Fortuna isnt pursuing some random/pointless power-grabbing endgame) don’t… well, they leave me worrying about moral/empathy decay- look at how self-defeatingly Callous the Triumvirate became, to the point Alexandria literally killed herself via uncommon stupidity by hard-manning away her actual empathy and over-relying on cold logic when she got so burnt out she literally lost the ability to care about the cost of what she was doing….
we ALL know the expediency/desperation-paved road to hell cauldron laid themselves-
what effect is such a potentially traumatizing power having on Dinah- she’s still, literally, just a kid, and we’re so easily warped/molded at that age even WITHOUT her little nightmare with Coil- id be concerned about a point where she essentially stops caring due to compassion fatigue alone, not even taking moral/personality drift from trauma/shard influence into account, dislike about how Taylor’s “life” with her earth ended put entirely aside- due to the very scope of her power, by this point her actions/beliefs are almost as suspect as Countessa’s…
One thing worries me about what Dinah said, or rather didn’t say to Miss Militia. She didn’t explain what would happen to Teacher’s Cauldron and the heroes who attacked the complex if Contessa didn’t enter the equation. Did her plan involve letting Teacher win, and the heroes be slaughtered or mastered by his capes?
Alternatively maybe this line is the key?
Could it be that Dinah was talking not about how capes are scary in general, but about how Dinah herself, and Miss Militia specifically are? Remember that Contessa’s plan ensured that Miss Militia was knocked out, and her team wouldn’t advance deep into the complex. Maybe without Contessa’s intervention the heroes would win against Teacher anyway thanks to Miss Militia (possibly even thanks to some “scary” aspect of her power and/or character we don’t realize would be critical in confrontation against Teacher), but this specific outcome while acceptable to Dinah, wouldn’t be acceptable to either Contessa or the voters?
One thing to keep in mind is that while Miss Militia’s power seems simple from outsider’s point of view, we know that she is one of the very few capes who remembered their original trigger vision. This may mean that MM may be uniquely suited to interact with Teacher’s portal to the “well of power”, and Dinah may have wanted it to happen, while Contessa for some reason made sure to prevent it.
Here is another thing that may support that theory. One of the things brought up in conversation with Colt while Breakthrough visited her in chapter 13.2 was the importance dreams of certain capes, and how Colt’s ability to “get” dreams meant that she could be important asset in figuring out the shard side of things. Add to it that Rain’s cluster dream room apparently contains a counterpart of Teacher’s portal to the “well of power”, and remember that in Miss Militia’s interlude in Worm doesn’t dream at all, but remembers her trigger vision with perfect clarity instead, and I think that you will understand why I think that could be very important whether Miss Militia was allowed to interact with Teacher’s “dark portal” or not.
@Alfaryn
> One thing worries me about what Dinah said, or rather didn’t say to Miss Militia. She didn’t explain what would happen to Teacher’s Cauldron and the heroes who attacked the complex if Contessa didn’t enter the equation.
Possible explanation – Teacher will be defeated without mass deaths. For example, tool Teacher used in attempt to disable Contessa power before she shut it with syringe – he could have used it in some other situation and it could backfired. I.e. if Contessa enters the equation – we have options A, B and C; if she did not – we have Dinah’s “better tomorrow”.
How many of you think that we won’t see a fight between Breakthrough and Deathchester, at least not a serious one? Personally I think that miss de-escalation will try to negotiate, and may possibly drop her flight and tell Rain to drop his blades (knowing that they won’t be able to safely re-enable these powers during this confrontation) as a show of goodwill, and to prove to Ashley that they are serious about danger of power use in the city.
If there is any fight, I guess it would go like this:
1. Victoria tries to tell Deathchester about danger of using powers in the city now, and drops her flight, and possibly tells Rain to unsummon his blades,
2. Deathchester sees it as a sign of weakness, and attacks,
3. Nobody in Breakthrough uses their activated powers to defend themselves (they may even not defend themselves at all, and just let Deathchester capture them),
4. Ashley realizes that a lack of serious resistance by Breakthrough proves Victoria’s words and starts to negotiate.
I think that Victoria’s attempt to resolve the situation is likely not only because what Ashley means to Breakthrough (particularly to her and Kenzie), because she is aware about how bad the “thin ice” situation is, or because of her usual tendency to de-escalate, but also because she was recently spooked by realization that her power may be trying to reinforce her violent tendencies, and because she sees similar “layers of white” in Damsel, that she saw in Swansong.
Finally it would be really awkward for Breakthrough to fight Damsel so soon after they lost Swansong, wouldn’t it?
Here’s one crazy possibility. Not something I believe is going on, just a thing that I though is worth mentioning, because if it is true, it’s bound to lead the story in an interesting direction.
What if the two precogs are actually working together, and Dinah is falsely accusing Contessa to provoke someone’s reaction that is necessary for their plan to succeed?
Of course it is not something that would be easy for Dinah to pull off (for example because her power severely punishes her for lying about probabilities she gets from her power), but I think that Contessa could counteract this problem by giving Dinah instructions about how she should behave during the interrogation to avoid this problem, at least to the extent where it would be obvious for Miss Militia and everyone watching the interrogation that Dinah just got a thinker headache.
It would explain why Dinah made sure that she ended up answering only one question about probabilities (that we know of). One she chose herself! Could it be that Dinah suggested the question simply to convince Miss Militia that the answer she gave her was true, while she was actually lying, or was misleading MM while technically telling the truth when answering this one question? For example – probabilities she described as being a result of Contessa’s awakening could be true, because Dinah’s power would punish her for lying about it, but nothing says that Dinah was telling the truth about what would happen if Contessa remained in her trance – she was asked no questions about it that would trigger her power.
This scenario would also explain why Dinah didn’t let Wardens use a thinker to confirm her words – it would be because any decent cape specializing in detecting lies would likely quickly discover Dinah’s deception.
Side note – even if we disregard the “Contessa and Dinah are working together theory”, the fact that Dinah steered the interrogation in such way that Miss Militia ended up not only asking her only one question, but even this question was chosen by Dinah, should rise warning flags at least as big as her refusal to be observed by a thinker who could confirm her words. She is clearly if not outright lying, than at least hiding something important or deliberately misleading from the heroes in some way.
Here’s another thing that makes me think that Dinah is manipulating the heroes. Remember how after Taylor surrendered Dinah came to Tagg’s office and protested against the way PRT treated Taylor, while at the same time saying that she can’t meet Taylor face-to-face because “the numbers will change”? Taylor overheard that conversation which lead her to reveal to Tagg that she could hear through her bugs (since the insects in his office visibly reacted to her emotions), and that in turn lead Tagg to decide to interrogate Taylor with Alexandria.
I have no doubt that Dinah’s anger at PRT at the time was real, but I wonder if her visit to Tagg was a deliberate attempt to cause the interrogation to happen with all its results (deaths of Tagg and Alexandria, and Cauldron’s failure to make Taylor one of their members), or if the fact that Breakthrough overhearing her in this chapter was also a part of Dinah’s deliberate manipulation to make them go after Deathchester and further Dinah’s agenda by ensuring whatever result this confrontation will cause.
Of course we need to remember that it is not certain that Dinah knew Taylor or Breakthrough would overhear them, or that it would result in Taylor’s interrogation and Breakthrough going after Deathchester respectively. It is entirely possible that simply ask herself “Would the numbers be better if I visited Tagg/Miss Militia right now?” but if we consider that:
– Dinah can see specific futures if she wants (even though it cripples her power for a while),
– it has been a few days since the battle against Teacher (so if right after the battle Dinah decided that she needed to see particular future – for example one in which Breakthrough goes after Deathchester, she would likely recover),
– last time Dianh was overheard by the protagonist in a critical moment, it immediately lead that protagonist’s action which turned out to be critical to Dinah’s overall plan,
then I think it is entirely possible that Dinah not only planned to be overheard by Victoria and co., but also that the confrontation between Breakthrough and Deathchester will bring results every bit as important for Dinah’s current plan as Taylor’s interrogation by Tagg and Alexandria did for her plan of stopping the end of the world back in Worm.
> Dinah’s power would punish her for lying about it
Do we know this only from her words? May be she lied about *that* 🙂
Technically no, but considering the context in which she explained her limitations in interlude 11.f of Worm (including the one that she “can’t lie about the numbers”) I think it is very unlikely that she would lie then.
Just start reading that interlude from the sentence
> Time’s running out.
and you will see what I mean.
@Alfaryn
> Just start reading that interlude from the sentence > Time’s running out.
Nope. In this scene she could have lied *only* about “can’t lie about the numbers”, while all other was truth.
Have you seen The Prestige? Scene where they trying to work out how a Chinese magician performs his trick and Borden imply that magician pretending to be a cripple for years, including off stage.
“This is the trick. This is the performance. This is why no-one can detect his methods. Total commitment to his art. Lots of self sacrifice. It’s the only way to escape all this…” (c) Alfred Borden
Dinah’s trick could be her way to ensure she have trump card in a sleeve.
> Did…..Did Contessa kill Swansong so that Antares would be in a bad mood so that Waste-chan did things it wanted to distract Teacher momentarily to prevent him from entering Shard Space?
> Mother fucker. That’s fucking brilliant and a dick move.
Probably not consciously. Contessa’s power gives her steps to follow without explanations about why those steps need to happen. She might not even have known who would die.
> Apropos nightmarish precog powers – Dinah’s power also seems to have a very nasty drawback. As far as I remember Dinah mentioned early on in Worm that worked better when other people were asking her questions than when she did it herself (though it might have been a result of her inability to think clearly under the influence of the drugs), but if what she said in this chapter is true, then she simply can’t stop her power from answering any questions she hears.
Yeah. She made the same claim back in Worm 22.1:
> When it’s pointed out how she was indeed playing with fire by stoking anti-parahuman sentiments
What stoking? Steering things so that a moderate voice ended up in charge instead of a violent hothead is the opposite of stoking.
> You’ll get your answer as soon as conscience starts being a verb. Neologisms are fun and all but why not use the words that already exist?
We can verb if we want to;
we can leave plain nouns behind.
‘Cause if your nouns don’t verb,
then they are lame words,
and they’re no tools of mine.
We’ll neolorgasm where we want to.
Creativity is fine.
We can English like we don’t
have sticks up our bums;
leave the Nazis far behind.
We can verb
(with nouns!)
Thanks for reminding me about that bit from chapter 22.1. I’ll have to re-read this entire chapter (and likely the entire arc and other chapters of Worm featuring Dinah) anyway, since everything she said and did then seems like it may be very important if I want to figure out what she is trying to do now, but it is good to have a quick reminder about something so directly connected to Dinah’s words from this chapter, especially since (as I stated above) I’m afraid that Dinah may be trying to do exactly what she ended up doing (wittingly or not) in arc 22 of Worm – let herself be overheard by the protagonist to cause that protagonist to act in a way that set said protagonist on the path envisioned by Dinah.
Let’s just hope that the result of confrontation between Breakthrough and Deathchester won’t be as painful for everyone involved as Taylor’s interrogation by Tagg and Alexandria was. I worry that it might be, because it was never confirmed that Dinah has ever been Contessa’s blind spot (and Contessa has been noted to be the one precog whose power generally isn’t blinded by other precognition powers), and because I’m unsure if Capricorn’s current situation really counts as “one Breakthrough member taken out of the equation, and one Breakthrough member enduring a torment for… quite some time,” as seems to be the case at the moment.
From the previous chapter:
I wonder if it means that Dinah doesn’t know about Taylor’s survival, because it was a direct result of Contessa’s intervention? Does Taylor in a sealed world count as “behind Contessa’s point of influence”, or not?
Actually, since Scion and the shards were kept in places which were impossible to explore with powers (most likely including precog powers – in case of shards at least until they connected to their parahumans, at which point a lot about them could be predicted indirectly by predicting their parahumans’ behavior), and Teacher’s students apparently managed to do the impossible and build the portal to that supposedly inaccessible space, could it be that Teacher’s portal-sealing devices do the opposite – seal an Earth in such way that not only you can’t access it via a portal, but also shields it from thinkers outside it? The back in chapter 30.3 of Worm the seal on C.U.I. seemed to block the clairvoyant at least:
By the way, perhaps Teacher’s devices also explain why North Americans seem to be so overrepresented among Bet survivors? Maybe many of the non-NA governments successfully did what C.U.I. attempted to do? Move bulk of their population shortly before or as soon as GM started to another Earths, and then use Teacher’s tech to seal them? If I’m right then Khepri couldn’t find them using the clairvoyant (she found C.U.I. only because she knew where the portal that C.U.I. used for evacuation had been before it was closed). This in turn means that there could be much more GM survivors from Bet (both capes and civilians) that it is suggested in Ward.
Why North American governments were apparently not offered portal sealing devices? It could be because someone out there in Cauldron knew that Dinah predicted that defeating Scion would be possible only if a certain North American cape confronted him.
> her power did not feel obligated to give he a path which would take Number Man’s survival into account. […] If this is true, than Contessa ended up killing Number Man unwittingly, simply because she didn’t make stipulation to keep her old friends alive or to get a path that would give a result she would be happy with herself.
I don’t think it would be fair to put it that way – both to Contessa and to all the other participants. If viewed from such angle, no one except Contessa (and her shard) has any agency at all, and Contessa is the one and only cause for everything that happens, intentionally or unwittingly. That’s a far too strong statement, even for someone as powerful as Contessa. NM was killed by anti-parahumans who had set up the bomb, plain and simple.
So, thinking more on the contessa-abaddon thing, what if abandon is a character? It would have to be someone assumed to have an Eden shard, as Scion would have recognized his own.
We know that both Scion and Eden planned to pose as parahumans, and we know one shard that used to be an Abaddon shard was live when Eden shards didn’t seem to be.
> So, thinking more on the contessa-abaddon thing, what if abandon is a character? It would have to be someone assumed to have an Eden shard, as Scion would have recognized his own.
Alternatively Abaddon could simply arrive on Earth after Scion’s death. Either way a thought of the hub of the third entity infiltrating human society by doing a better job of pretending to be a regular human has crossed my mind a long time ago. I think it is possible, though I think that such infiltrator could be identified somehow by a careful observer. For example I expect that this person would interfere with thinker powers that could be used to discover its true nature otherwise. The problem is that such interference could be subtle enough that it would not be easy to spot. For example it could be that precogs wouldn’t say “this person is my blind spot”, but simply never remembered to mention this character when describing what they saw with their powers. People who could detect shards or powers – like Valkyrie, Chevalier, Ingenue or Amy – could display similar signs of being selectively Imped when in contact with Abaddon’s hub.
Of course, it could be Simurgh…
I think the reason I believe Abadon to have been present before is Scion noting Contessa’s shard to be live, and finding it odd. Given that he had his own PTV, and so should understand them, this precludes PTV just normally staying live. Given that appears many of the other Eden shards were dead at that time, and given that the shard physics seems to rely on proximity, I feel Abaddon could be present, but most limitless before as well.
Alternately, Abaddon’s kind sprout PTV like an egg to start events that create more of it by preying on eden/scion type entities as incubators.
The “shard physics” you are referring to apply to entities who Mantoned most parts of themselves to act on a scale humans can deal with, and subsequently chopped themselves into pieces. Nothing says the same rules have to apply an entity while it is travelling through interstellar space. I imagine that Abaddon could keep long-range connection with its shards using something like its equivalent of Broadcast shard.
Another thing to note is that we really can’t depend too much on our knowledge of Warrior and Thinker to judge what Abaddon is or isn’t able to do. Remember how the Thinker described the third entity in Fortuna’s interlude:
Apparently Abaddon’s means of communication and means of travel are very different from the ones used by the other two entities. Its life cycle also had to be, since it did not have a partner. We can a lot of our knowledge we got about Warrior, Thinker and their shards simply doesn’t apply to Abaddon.
Sorry for a missing word:
We can a lot of our knowledge > We can assume a lot of our knowledge
For example we don’t even know if Abaddon even follows the basic “find a new host species, split into shards to grant them powers, make them fight one another to find new uses of the shards” pattern, and even if it did, and ended up doing it with humans for some reason, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the abilities granted by those shards would not only not follow PRT classifications, but didn’t even feel like cape powers.
Who knows? Maybe for example contrary to the common assumption in paraverse, magic or true telepathy can exist, and could be granted by the third entity?
Other possibilities are that Abaddon’s shards could:
– not leave their hosts any free will,
– grant versatile but identical powers to everyone (same exact magical abilities for everyone!) and trust hosts’ to be creative enough to find a wide range of uses of these abilities,
– communicate with their hosts in an obvious way,
– drive hosts and/or host species into something else than conflict,
– prefer attaching to something else than humans.
It all depends on what Abaddon would want to achieve by spreading its shards on Earth and how (assuming it would see a reason to come to Earth at all of course, and that it could reach it in reasonable time, and not after next hundred millenia for example).
Here’s an idea about Dinah, and why what she planned was different from the options given by Contessa. What if Dinah is in a way an anti-parahuman herself, and sees parahumans as humanity’s biggest problem? What if she wants parahumans (at least other than herself) to all end up under strict non-parahuman control, stripped of their powers or simply dead? This way she would not only “save” humanity from all this conflict “brought by parahumans”, but could also feel that she has her “insurance” that no parahuman will ever do to her what Coil did.
@Alfaryn
> What if Dinah is in a way an anti-parahuman herself, and sees parahumans as humanity’s biggest problem? What if she wants parahumans (at least other than herself) to all end up under strict non-parahuman control, stripped of their powers or simply dead?
Yes, and she may even want herself to stripped of her power with everyone else. I would even agree with this position but only if all parahuman-created problems (Machine Army and so on) would be solved as well or beforehand.
@Alfaryn: I took it so that it’s all but spelled out in this chapter. PTSD is not the best way to make decisions for all humanity…