lung, meet rewind

[msrewind]

She gets the note just before lunch. She's in the PHQ in less than twenty minutes, then she knocks on Piggot's door politely.

Comments

[mxglam]

"Okay, so, from there, either Lung wants to just bait her or he doesn't. If he does, whatever, nothing to be gained. If he doesn't, he has to provide evidence that Rewind's parents are alive, which can come in the form of a recording or be in real-time. If it's a recording and Rewind-the-copy can't convince Lung to provide real-time evidence, also nothing to be gained. If it's real-time, either he'll produce her parents in person or he'll use some form of remote transmission."

[thinkering]

The bot draws in the tree.

[mxglam]

"So now we're planning out the produce-parents-in-person branch. There's a strategic difference between what we'll do if they're together or in different locations," they recapitulate. "If they're together, Transit can pop relevantly close to them and rescue them at the same time, correct? What's his maximum distance?"

[thinkering]

"Thirty miles. That's not the limiting factor in a situation like this, the limiting factor is if there's a place he can stand such that the only safe landing in a certain direction is where he wants to be."

"Not a lot of tall buildings near the address," the bot says.

[mxglam]

"No, I meant, the maximum distance he can be from passengers."

[thinkering]

"Two point zero eight inches, counting armor thickness," the bot says.

[mxglam]

"Okay so parents need to be pretty close together, in which case Transit can reliably rescue them if they're not rigged with something. Uh, yeah, that's actually an important branch to the tree, parents rigged or not. So, if they're close together and not rigged, the problem has been solved by Transit popping there and popping out, right?"

[thinkering]

"Unless the bot has trouble with getting him a path for any reason, there's usually a way to get to a ground floor location from a nearby tall building in one hop barring subways that neighborhood doesn't have, yeah."

[msrewind]

"Your robot said there weren't lots of tall buildings around that warehouse, didn't it?"

[thinkering]

"No tall buildings is bad. Sparse ones is good, it means he doesn't have to hope he doesn't land in the seventh floor bathroom of one while he's angling down from the sixteenth floor of another. But bot, do we have a good path origin point?"

"Yes. He can fly to the top of a nearby tower and should have a clear angle to any point in the warehouse."

[msrewind]

"Oh. That sounds good, then?"

[mxglam]

"That it does, yes. So, that's one branch of the plan tree we got covered. If they're separated and not rigged with anything explosive, I could speedster them together for Transit to pick them up?"

[thinkering]

"Maybe combo speedster-brute in case they're attached to things that are hard to move."

[mxglam]

"Will do. Now, suppose they're together and rigged with something? I guess that depends on the something but I think the most obvious ones are gun, explosive, poison...?"

[thinkering]

"Might not be obvious by looking. Could just be an ominous looking black box."

[mxglam]

"Which I could contain, if it's far enough away."

[msrewind]

"And Lung doesn't have a tinker or enough money to hire the Toybox," Rewind points out.

[thinkering]

"You don't have to be a tinker to put together something basic and stick it in somebody's personal space, not every danger is cape danger."

[mxglam]

"Yeah, okay, so we need to come up with something that doesn't depend on the strict method he'll use, hmm."

[thinkering]

"More copy-powers? Geez, I hope I never have to take point on strategizing without you on hand. You've done breakers, can you do strikers that grant breaker states?"

[mxglam]

"Like, what, a copy that makes someone else become a breaker temporarily? I can't really affect things I haven't conjured like that."

[thinkering]

"Inconvenient. Work on it," says Bella again. "Hm."

[mxglam]

"I could try to conjure something to protect them that's shaped like their body? Like, some sort of diamond encasing between them and whatever the thing-of-danger could be. That will be hard to do, though."

The unstated reason, whose implication Rewind will hopefully miss, being that the less people are expecting things to appear the bigger their resistance to it.

[thinkering]

Glam's shoulderbot whispers very softly, "You could reveal that you're 'there' a split second in advance."

[mxglam]

"Hmm, but yeah, I could do it I think," they say after hearing the thing. "I could even get a me-copy there and use it to distract people from Transit's arrival."