philadelphia, meet chevalier

[peterxy]

The next few days proceed as normal.

Until they don't: the Philadelphia and Brockton Bay teams have been talking, and they're thinking of trading Chevalier with a couple of Wards. Philadelphia has quite a selection of them, including a couple who triggered during the Behemoth attack on Pittsburgh, while Brockton Bay has the opposite problem.

The current Philadelphia Ward lineup is:

• Laser Tag, a Tinker who specializes in weapons that have cumulative effect. He has a laser gun that causes various conditions on its targets each time they're hit, usually taking them out on the third or fourth hit.
• Clasp, a Breaker-Blaster-Striker who can cause objects to be almost weightless and much more resistant to damage for as long as he's holding them. He can only do that to one object at a time, and the weightlessness of the objects he holds means he can both throw them very far or use them to hit things. He can also apply this property to his costume, rendering him much more resistant.
• Mirage, a Mover-Stranger who can toggle invisibility for a very short time when no one's looking and can teleport within her line-of-sight while in that state.
• Glimmer, a Brute-Mover who can create a forcefield around her own body that makes her glimmer and become very resistant and slippery.
• Transfer, tentatively rated as a Blaster-Striker who can draw heat from a source and then dump it somewhere else, or conversely dump extra heat somewhere that he'll later have to replenish.
• Blockage, a forcefield Tinker whose forcefields can absorb any impact but disappear upon doing so.
• Lightbulb, a flying-artillery type of Mover-Blaster that can shoot balls of kinetically charged light whose path he can influence as it flies through the air.
• Iter, a Thinker precog who can see where objects are slated to be up to ten seconds in the future, similar to the way Rewind sees the past.
• Silica, a Master who can animate statues made of sand. There's no limit to how many statues she can animate, but there is a limit to the volume of sand she can control at a given time.

Comments

[thinkering]

"Later," she says. "Right now I should be working on those comm things."

[mrglam]

"Oh, right! How're those going?"

[thinkering]

"Design's mostly hammered out, today I'll build the prototype and then patch bot assumptions about how it should copy me."

[mrglam]

"What-all do they do?"

[thinkering]

"They'll run on a non-bot AI - I really need to name the main bot - but network sort of like the flock, they'll take information about people's powers and direct calls for help appropriately, and the bots will talk to them and send people where there's civilians needing evac etcetera. They'll screen out or narrow down the audience for chatter."

[mrglam]

"Awesome! Why different AIs?"

[thinkering]

"Don't want random people needing to trust me far enough to be on my main network. Also, the more stuff I add to the main bot the more likely it is to wake up. I'm guessing, anyway."

[mrglam]

"Yeah, fair enough. And I never did suggest names for the AI, did I. Do you have anything you definitely don't like or are currently considering?"

[thinkering]

"Discarded a bunch of references like 'Galatea', sifted through Latin and didn't get anywhere."

[mrglam]

"How do you feel about acronym names?"

[thinkering]

"Neutral, why?"

[mrglam]

"Well, that's a way to name it, find some cool title whose initials create a pronounceable word and there you have it. Like, Distributed Operational System for DistrOS or something."

[thinkering]

"That doesn't come out to be a name."

[mrglam]

"Well it's an AI, it could be named weirdly."

[thinkering]

"It can, but like - in the way you can name a dog weirdly, not in the way you can name a committee weirdly?"

[mrglam]

"I was thinking in the way you can name a piece of software weirdly. You could also give it a very normal name, like... Jessica or something."

[thinkering]

"No, I'm not going to name it Jessica. I don't really want to imply a gender directly."

[mrglam]

"Sam? Andrea? Something in Latin, maybe, to go with your cape name."

[thinkering]

"I told you I went through some Latin; it's not a bad idea but I didn't find the right word."

[mrglam]

"Right. What did you try? You're armor, what are the bots? Weapon, sword, action, control?"

[thinkering]

"I actually started with the various kinds of historical, well, lorica, but the only one with a pleasing name means 'feathers', so. The bots aren't the same thing as the central software, anyway, the bots are eyes and ears and reach, the bot is like my assistant or auxiliary - self."

[mrglam]

"Soul? That's Anima, isn't it?"

[thinkering]

"Yeah, which I don't like."

[mrglam]

"Hmm... And variations? Spirit, core, center, mind, self, I?"

[thinkering]

"Do you know what any of those are in Latin, because I do and they all suck."