Assuming that Eden wanted a "battle of the machine" scenario for Earth so she ordered all Shards to grant exclusively Tinker power before the crash.

So now every Parahumans were Tinkers, with specialty dictated by their Shard, regardless of their Trigger conditions. Including vial capes. Cases 53 would still remain Case 53 though. Contessa would be the only exception, together with Eden shards that wouldn't supposed to be handed out since they weren't calibered. (So that Eden stay neutered and Cauldron still formed)

What would everyone's speciality be? What would change in the Wormverse's deal with capes?

Note: I imagine Taylor would be a Drone Tinker, specialize in mass army of weak but perfectly coordinated drones while she stayed miles from the real battle. How many capes would do this (holed up in their lab and send a remote controlled war machine to battle, which may or may not expendable but ultimately not endanger themself).

I just finished Claw, definitely enjoyed it, but with the ending and other comments I’ve read here, I feel like I’m still too strongly favoring Mia. I did think Gio was basically right at the end in her decision, but I also think Mia was like 90% right with taking Ripley and 100% right with Tyr.

Natalie’s only advantage is that she wasn’t involved in crime, otherwise it seems like she would have sucked at raising Ripley. In a regular world I think that still might win out, but they are living in a rapidly deteriorating dystopia where having Mia’s skills are at least helpful to balance out the liability her lifestyle brings.

I do think that Mia realizing she probably shouldn’t go after her kids is a good think and a correct decision, but honestly I think it’s healthier for Ripley to stay in contact with her than Natalie after she puts her own life together.

So am I missing more of what’s wrong with Mia? Admittedly it took me listening to the Worm podcast to realize how Taylor was pretty fucked up, so I know I might just be clinging to my protagonist.

What was the plan with Taylor turning herself in? Why did Alexandria try to bait her into attacking at all and why were Dauntless and Dragon so cool with her killing the director and Alexandria both??

My OC has the Brute Power wherein if they get injected with a chemical substance, they'd suffer no unwanted repercussions.

In other words, the OC can get incrementally stronger by consuming all sorts of chemical substances ignoring their side effects.

What do you think of this power?

P.S. Some of those substances may give the OC a thinker rating by consuming substances that grants heightened perception for example. In other words, the OC may not be limited to Brute Powers.

Weren’t taken straight to the judges when the trio discovered them (and had secured them in the HoHS)? It’s been a while since I finished Pale, but surely that’d prevent a whole lot of hassle and significantly weaken the conspirators’ claim? Obviously with hindsight I know that >! The alabaster (and the aurum, at that point? Can’t remember exactly) were working to the benefit of the Carmine Exile’s birth !< but without the trio’s knowledge of that why wouldn’t they?

Surely it’d be a lot safer than just keeping them inside Kennet - was it that they wanted to keep the option open of utilising the furs themselves, or that it would be simply too dangerous to make the trip and thus be at the mercy of any particularly power-hungry Others (or the conspirators themselves (through, I imagine, degrees of separation))? And if that was the case then they could ask the judges to come to them (as they did in the arrest of Edith) being that it was something of such significance to the region, but idk.

Anyway, I just wanted to know if there had been any clarification on that which I’d missed on my initial reading of the serial.

Thanks!

I've been really thinking about it for awhile and honestly what was stopping Taylor from making friends outside of School?

Like I get that she isn't the most social person out there obviously, but at the same time she was desperate for effection and Socialisation with people who weren't just her father, you can't be wanting affection but not also putting in the effort to put yourself out there you know?

So why didn't she just like a join a book club, do some community service or something could have solved alot of her problems

Was it normal to send Wards to remote Endbringer fights? She was barely out of camp by that point, and also, you know, underage. It's not like Behemoth attacked BB. Did she volunteer or was she ordered to go?

I know she only did search and rescue (probably after the fight), but it's still pretty weird. She could've been badly hurt by some random electrical wires or radiation.

As this species studied the dead Entity and it's Shards more and more, the more advanced their society had become. However, ultimately, they hit a dead end: they realized that despite their best efforts, the evolved alien species, were unable to handle more than a limited fraction of the power that Shards could give them. So, inevitably, they begin to experiment on how to "upgrade their hardware" in order to handle more of the Shards" seemingly endless software ". At first, these experiments started out benign and small, with them experimenting on their local fauna, but then moved on to experimenting on themselves in haphazard and reckless ways, eventually abandoning what ethics and morals their society had, in their seemingly insane and fruitless attempts to "evolve further " for the sake of the seemingly endless potential that the Shards can grant them. Then... a breakthrough. They come to the realization that their universe is only one of many in a multiverse, that there are more Entities out there for them to seek out ,and finally...that the Shards, for all their god-like power, have only so much power to give before they give out at last. This spurs the alien species to finally travel beyond their universe to find and hunt down as many Entities as they can, alongside with any beings that have had symbiotic/parasitic relationships with those Entities and their Shards, capturing and experimenting on them in renewed hopes of finally seeking the solution in how to evolve endlessly forever and ever without ever losing the power of their Shards...thus ironically becoming the facsimile of an Entity themselves, and somehow, a much greater(?) threat to the multiverse due to their immense and innate knowledge of Entities and Shards and how to manipulate and configure the latter for their needs.....

Long story short: after killing an Entity, an entire alien species becomes a more evil and selfish version of Cauldron, killing other Entities and enslaving, experimenting, and destroying worlds where the inhabitants have a parasitic/symbiotic relationship with said Entities, pursuing their own evolution over and over again.

With Carmine and Aurum trapped but still alive, are those roles permanently vacant now? Or does them being trapped in a pocket realm mean there is technically no Carmine and Aurum overseeing the Ontario area, and thus new judges can be take over?

How would a new judge get made with no incumbent to unseat anyway? Would the Alabaster and Sable just arrange appropriate contests and whoever wins gets the job?

Man, being a practitioner fucking sucks. I almost liken it to being a member of the most brutal cartels; yeah, you might get some wealth and infamy, and yeah, you might be able to throw your weight around and accomplish things, but for the vast, vast majority? You best keep your head down and don't try to exercise any power, lest you meet a date worse than death. Hooooly shit, it just seems that people's lives are immediately and vastly worse the moment they awaken. For some reason it feels even more brutal than being a Cape, despite the fact that capes also face fates worse than death. It just feels like practitioners lose both identity and agency in a way that capes don't necessarily. Idk, just a dumb rant.

I had read Pale until I got to just a little bit after the end of summer event and I'm now rereading it now that its a finished work.

When I read it the first time, the outcome of the carmine challenge and the build-up to it seemed pretty natural : They were told numerous time that they probably wouldn't win this one and that they maybe shouldn't even bother trying.

But now that I'm re-reading, I can't keep the outcome I know out of my mind and I can't keep from wanting to scream at those girls to let Verona do some fancy-artsy tailoring and just give those damn furs to John Stiles pronto so that they can bypass all the fairy plots bullshit.

Would that have worked ? I don't remember every detail of the challenge and of the outcome, I'm just getting catched up to that point but to my mind, if they had given the furs to John as soon as they had them they would have just won.

What do you think ? Does the story examines this further (I'm okay with light spoilers but not too much) ? What do you think would have stopped them ? Is the fact they didn't even think of this a result of a fairy plot to keep them too busy to properly strategize ?

This is pretty irrelevant but does anyone else disagree with how the PRT labels a cape? All PRT classifications are based on how they respond to something and not what it actually does, btw. Cause sometimes they’re consistent with that, and other times (mostly strikers) it doesn’t feel right.

• My pick would definitely be Chevalier cause yeah, he’s a striker and thinker, but that wouldn’t be the main issue when dealing with him. They labeled Fletchette as a blaster cause her ability goes in tandem with her bow, so should Chevalier be more closer to a brute/blaster on top of the striker classification?

What exactly were the dragon slayers so afraid of when they killed Dragon? That she’d go rogue as an AI? I’m struggling to understand why it made sense to kill her especially since she’s just a big influence on the war against the 9. Even with them taking over, there’s no way they’d be able to operate everything that she had going on between the three of them.

I don't just mean them turning bad (or, not that on it's own). I mean them actually going forward with being actively terrifying in some manner.

What horror villain tropes would you see some capes fitting in? And how do you think it would probably look from various perspectives (Cape to Cape, Cape to PRT and Cape to Civilian)?

I'm interested in possibly running a campaign, but I'm very new to ttrpgs, and being able to get a feeling for how the sessions look seems like it'd be useful.

I'm posting this as a general question, but I also want to direct attention to something specific mentioned in Ward

!In the epilogue of Ward (20.end and 20.e5), one character has been resurrected from Shardspace using Tinker tech, four others (various Titans) have been named as candidates, and a character has implied there are other unnamed candidates. So the question is, who can be resurrected from Shardspace? What might be the rules for that?!<

For some reason I've barely seen anyone talk about that development in the story.

So we know that Queen Administrator was heavily crippled and is confirmed by WOG to be the counterpart of High Priest. Its primary purpose is coordination and multitasking shards.

Did the shard ever do anything to ensure its host’s survival through an extra ability? After all, Taylor was very well liked by QA due to her finding her power uses and always getting into conflict where her abilities can be explored. Is it ever possible that QA has:

1. A subconscious thinker ability that allows her to come up with “paths/plans” that allow her to always trump shards in the end.
2. A subconscious master ability that secretly influences people around her and causes them to make mistakes that she’s able to take advantage of.

After all, Broadcast had a powerful sub-ability as well that even the user didn’t know. And idk, aside from plot armor, it wouldn’t be that bad of an explanation.

If worm ever gets an adaptation, it'd have to be animation. We all know that, but that still leaves a lot open for discussion.

The studio that did Arcane would do great with Worm. 3d people and environment, with 2d power effects. Grue's darkness rolling off of him in 2d. Parians puppets starting as 3d, then shifting to 2d as they come alive. It would also be great foreshadowing for >!Siberian.!<

Case 53's and Endbringers could also be animated differently. If everything is normally animated on 1's, then they should be 2' or 3's or something like that. Similarly, Scion should be 60 fps, live action, or claymation.

My only other wish is that everyone in E88 would be voiced by POC's.

I'm really trying to get into Emma's mind (not a nice place to be), so I got stuck on this question.

Say, Taylor either commits suicide or dies on accident (say, gets pushed down the stairs by Sophia and breaks her neck*), but neither Emma nor Sophia are implicated. No investigation is made. Just dead Taylor. And that happens about the same time as the locker prank, so Emma stopped doubting her actions a long time ago.

What would Emma's reaction to Taylor's death be? Both short-term and long-term? As a bonus, you can suggest Sophia or Madison's reactions.

* edit: that's just an example. I mean she dies for any reason related to bullying. Suicide is the most likely option, but I wanted to cover my bases.

What kind of tech would someone that creates tinkertech based on myth?

View Poll

Throughout the final battle the Carmine faction was confident that they had already won. The worst that could happen was a stalemate that favored Charles, but when he was stabbed with the spike he was pretty much instantly, definitively, defeated. Retreating to the Crucible was just a last desperate attempt to salvage the situation. Why didn't they see it coming?

Sidenote. I thought looking into the future biased reality towards the future that was seen. Why didn't Seth and Cameron's constant scrying during the fight have any effect on Charles's fate?

I will go first. For velocity a brute power where the higher acceleration he gets the higher mass he gets for example if he is moving at 100 miles per hour then he gets the mass of a truck while if he is moving at 10 miles per hour he weighs as much as he does in his breaker state.

When Shatterbird announces the Nine's presence in Brockton Bay, she shattered amongst other things, eyeglasses. Problem is, we stopped using glass for the standard lens material years before Scion showed up. We use a plastic resin these days as the standard, which doesn't contain any silica at all.

So, is Earth Bet simply continuing to use a more expensive, heavier and less impact resistant lens material, or did WB simply not know that we don't use glass in glasses when he wrote Worm?

I don’t know if this was answered before, but I just want to know.

Let’s say a typical cycle lasts 100 years and a host dies within that time, do shards redeploy so that they can gather more data or do they just work with what they gathered.

My thinking is that no person may use a power the same way so they might be able to get new data within the same cycle.