peterverse | endbringer, meet gun

peterxy posting in

...Very unseasonable rains can be seen in the distance from the shores of Acapulco.

The Brockton Bay Protectorate starts organizing volunteers to be transported or teletransported in batches to it. Heroes, rogues, villains, anyone's assistance is appreciated. A rendez-vous point is set for non-Protectorate capes wishing to volunteer, and Protectorate capes are informed of the situation via communication devices.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thinkering

"That's not that long. You could join up, use Branding for its ostensible purpose, get some action figures made, it's certainly the safest way to build up some attention."

From:

mxglam

"Hm."

From:

thinkering

"I mean, or not, but it's a strong contender."

From:

mxglam

"...okay, any other ideas? My current one is just converting the recklessness into badassitude by being very good and publicly so. I mean, it's like at least 60% of the reason I decided to start following heroes around to see if I can help in a way that other people can credit me with. I could go solo vigilante, but disbelief is common enough a reaction to an unfortunate event that I wouldn't start out very effective.

"For that matter, any public identity of mine would have to say my powers are the kind that grow with time. Like Dauntless'."

From:

thinkering

"...You know what would make you really legit scary? You can conjure stuff up. You can fake Tinkering, but what you could also do is give a Tinker an effectively unlimited budget for a temporary-use item. Like, anyone who knows Tinkers knows that the phrase 'Tinker with an unlimited budget' means anything can happen."

From:

mxglam

"Yeah, that sounds pretty good actually. I thought about pretending to be a really versatile yet secretive Tinker, but the main problem with that is that it'd limit me a lot when I wanted to do anything that's not particularly Tinkerish. Your idea is a bit better there, though it'd still associate expectations with Tinker tech and would also shine less of a spotlight on me, which isn't bad per se, I don't care as much about attention as I pretend I do, but it would mean it'd take a while longer for me to be notorious on my own."

From:

thinkering

"Yeah. Also I'm probably not a good pairing for that because I couldn't adjust the collective expectations and if you don't know what the tool or part I want is, it might not come out right. Could it? How much does your power do the work on that sort of thing?"

From:

mxglam

"Well, it does a lot of the work there, like, I can't make something be specifically chartreuse because I don't know what chartreuse looks like, but if left undirected my power will produce chartreuse things mostly on accident if they're relevant to what I want to do.

"Which is to say, I don't need to technically know how to do a thing to do it, I just need to believe I can. And it certainly helps when someone else believes I can, too - I fixed Santuario's basketball by mostly bullshitting my way around replacing a bunch of likely-looking parts."

From:

thinkering

"So maybe it would work with me. Might want an extra person around, though, a non-tinker who expects it all to come together by the power of tinker bullshit."

From:

mxglam

"The power of tinker bullshit is my best friend. And as far as Endbringers are concerned, tinker bullshit is probably enough to damage them a lot, but making everything look tinkerish in all battles is- not impossible, tinkers are the most overpowered things ever, but still, it's an extra constraint that should be avoided, I think, if it can."

From:

thinkering

"That and Tinkering takes time. I still wanna -" She pauses. "You should absolutely never go to a Simurgh fight."

From:

mxglam

"I should- why?"

From:

thinkering

"Think about it. Precog who likes fucking with people and has mind-affecting powers."

From:

mxglam

"I really don't like constraints like that," they groan.

From:

thinkering

"It won't stand out too much. You don't go to multiple Simurgh fights unless you're outright immune anyway."

From:

mxglam

"I suppose, but I really wanted to kill her."

From:

thinkering

"You and me both."

From:

mxglam

"What's her safe distance? Maybe I could hit her from there."

From:

thinkering

"It's not so much a safe distance as the point at which people no longer feel the song effects. Her precognitive range is definitely farther than that."

From:

mxglam

"True, but can we really make any plans taking the Simurgh's precognition into account? She's always playing the game one level higher than you, whatever level you're playing at."