branding lady, meet meek little lamb

[mxglam]

Glam isn't allowed to actually patrol the following day (it's a Sunday), so they mostly browse the 'net and read books. Echo's busy with her family (and she is allowed to go out patrolling), and Lorica's... doing something.

They're slightly worried about the fact that Yates hasn't replied to their email, but it's the weekend, so maybe that's why.

Has she replied to the email by Monday?

Comments

[mxglam]

Duck on the desk!

[thinkering]

"Ha. Okay, so your range qua range is big enough to be legitimately challenging to test, but for other reasons, when unassisted you are mostly visual-or-immediate-staging-area range. Next time I'm around the world at a Simurgh fight after she flies off I'll get you a private feed of some place."

[mxglam]

"Yeah, that sounds good." Pause. "I could make my gun remotely."

[thinkering]

"And then the Simurgh figures out how it works because she's the fucking Simurgh and everyone present knows your secret weakness. This would be bad. Everyone should only know your secret weakness if I disappear mysteriously and my robots think you did it."

[mxglam]

"...that is an actual thing you thought of and arranged, isn't it."

[thinkering]

"Who, me?"

[mxglam]

"I'm a little bit in love."

[thinkering]

"My paranoid threats to your efficacy as a cape are a love potion now. I'll have to report myself for further powers testing immediately."

[mxglam]

They laugh. "I'm pretty sure they wouldn't work on most not-me people."

[thinkering]

"Fair enough."

[mxglam]

"But anyway, I'm not a Tinker, how would the Simurgh copy me? Especially if I was very far away."

[thinkering]

"She can fuck people up in ways that don't manifest for years, you don't think she could investigate your power from the opposite hemisphere if it were annoying her?"

[mxglam]

"Well, but how would she actually use it? She can't conjure things, she can only build them, and my things are make-believe."

[thinkering]

"The problem isn't, 'she copies your gun'. The problem is, 'she sings that the gun is not real into everybody's heads, and they remember that, and not all of them are trustworthy'."

[mxglam]

"...she can do that? Sing information into people's heads?"

[thinkering]

"I don't know, but I don't think it's a risk you should take at least until you've killed both of the others."

[mxglam]

"Right. Okay. Not arguing with the person who is immune to her. Fucking Simurgh."

Gasp! Swearing Glam!

[thinkering]

"I mean, unless you've been under the influence before you've probably got uncontaminated judgment and my main advantage is conservatism. But neither Leviathan nor Behemoth could nope you as totally and permanently as she could, so you should save her for last."

[mxglam]

"Well I've never been anywhere near the Simurgh so probably not, but you never know, maybe this is a long con and she actually can affect everyone everywhere and the song is just a decoy. If anyone would do something as ridiculously convoluted as that, it's the Simurgh."

[thinkering]

"If that's how she works maybe I'm not immune to her after all and she's setting me up, but at a certain point we'll be totally paralyzed if we don't make certain baseline assumptions."

[mxglam]

"Yeah, it was mostly wild speculation, I'm just staying as far away from her as I possibly can."

[thinkering]

"And keep your guns out of her way until it's worth gambling your whole powerset on it."

[mxglam]

"Right."

[thinkering]

"So anyway, you have some ludicrous range limit but mere human attentional capacity. Maybe a robot who believes in you really hard wouldn't help, but one who tracked things for you might?"

[mxglam]

"Maybe? I mean, I think other people paying attention to my stuff doesn't make it not disappear- unless it does. I'm not sure how to test that without revealing my secret weakness, though."