u/Nekomachus

Could any of the hax that shards have access to, for example, create a universal debugger program that predicts when an arbitrary program will terminate?

Supertasks are out of the question, since the whole deal with >!Entities!< is that they don't have the infinite to work with, just the large. I know that precog wouldn't help, because that is just calculations doen rapidly and in real-time, but Phir Se and Epoch (if not Perdition and Gray Boy) are genuine time manipulators; would time travel help?

What other computation problems could be made tractable through shard assistance?

Master (Striker), or Master/Trump (Striker), or plainly a Nine Trump?

If it makes a difference, I'm thinking of summoned minions a la Spree that are zombies-lite that spread through touch.

If Clockblocker, Panacea, Scapegoat, and Teacher stood in a circle and used their two arms and one leg each to touch each other (foot-over-foot to neighbor then Mexican standoff arms), each touching the other three at the same time, who would be able to pass their effects off the fastest?

Clockblocker is trying to freeze the other three to prevent them from doing anything to him.

Panacea is trying to make whatever change is fastest to prevent them from doing anything to her.

Scapegoat having to page through realities manually is probably going to lose the race, but he's trying to bail out whatever is being done to him to the other two.

Teacher is trying to Master them to prevent them from doing anything to him.

Worm is a whole sandbox, and so little of it is touched in fanfic. I hate it when the E88 is used as a shorthand for Nazis— because it should be the larger threat, the Gesellschaft! I want to see an African warlord who isn't Murder Night. I want to see what's going on for citizens in China under those 40 or so Yangban. I want to see a Garama cape do anything.

I don't ever want to see Taylor again. I want that bug squashed and banished to Aleph!

(jk tay tay i <3 u)

Specifically Jamie, Riley, or Ciara, though I'd even go for a Friendbringer fic so long as it doesn't involve Taylor. No Jack fics; I've read all the interesting ones already.

Say someone gets into a fight with an abuser they depend on, or a powerfully connected person, or you just wanted to rough someone up and they outright die (since shards are amoral, I don't want to use all good examples). If stress climaxes not during a fight, but right after, from the fear of retaliation or arrest, how would that shape the ensuing trigger?

I don't know why they are called stewards, but this is a pool.

Sadly there does not seem to be a way to post a poll here, so I will just ask en forma de discusión.

I'm having a major neurodivergence failure at the social interactions in 4.4. What bothered the teacher about Kenzie's all-nighter, and what did Houndstooth say that was so offensive to Ashley?

This is an important real-life question to me, because I make neurotypicals upset easily, and Ashley in that scene reminds me of the way people react to the things I say. "Subnormal human" as she puts it in the next chapter.

Is "I turned my attention to" a regularly occurring phrase in other WB works? Nothing wrong with having a favorite phrase, I just notice that it shows up in Worm a lot, to the point where even the famously deleted line after "Finally, everyone was working together" was "I turned my attention to Scion." It could just be idiosyncratic to Worm what with the protagonist being a pseudo-clairvoyant, but I haven't read anything else he wrote.

A trigger event is supposed to be Spider-Man seeing his uncle get shot and being told great power comes with great responsibility, or Batman watching his parents die in Crime Alley, or Mr. Freeze watching his wife's health fail. A traumatic event makes the character go from being a civilian to a participant in the game of cops and robbers, and this typically coincides with when they got their powers (and in Worm, Batman and Mr. Freeze would be a Thinker and Tinker respectively, not non-powered). Someone with powers that does nothing for years until something pushes them to act hardly exists outside of comedies. That's what a trigger event is a reconstruction of, zipping those two things into one thing with the same explanation.

What are vials based on? They're not the likes of Joker or Jessica Jones falling into toxic waste, and lab accidents typically give powers to the scientist, not to the experiment, though there are the likes of Bane and lab-created beings like Vision (which I supposed Dragon fills the archetype of).

• A light-based illusionist (not Nyx) or someone like Screamer or Leonid could operate out of a Gray Boy well, for the same reason Stilling could get out and March's copy of Sting could get in, but more pertinently, for the same reason you can see and hear the inside of one.

• Valkyrie could probably alleviate all time bubbles at once by going to an uninhabitable earth with a Shaker or Trump making her immediate area survivable or making her able to survive and then systematically turning as much land as she can into an impassible time well, until Gray Boy runs out of power like Doormaker. Seeing that "the cost of replenishing [Eidolon's battery] was high," she doesn't keep the shades charged just by virtue of having them. This has the added benefit of her not being in the blast radius of a broken trigger when they're all freed at once.

• Scion and Hero could blast rainbows if they wanted.

• I think about this in any fiction where someone is transformed into a different material than flesh, like that patchwork girl whose throat Satyrical slit, or is otherwise taken apart yet still alive, and I don't find it talked about very often, in Worm or outside of it: Even if parahumans didn't have conflict-reduced life expectancy, a Case 53 without regeneration is screwed as far as being able to receive mundane medical treatment and would probably have an even unhappier old age than the rest of mankind. Where does Hexie go if she has breathing troubles? How could you put an IV in that escapee Number Man fought in his interlude?

• The Speedrunners may or may not have been the hipster/steampunk equivalent of Uber and Leet.

The S9K clones. The Number Boys are kids, but Tyrant looks like Gigachad, but-but Mannequin has to be gaslit into having a version of Alan's memories where he is a kid and not a grown man. I'm not sure how old I'm supposed to picture the Manton who kept Doctor Mother safe up until he didn't. Come to think of it, I went through Sting picturing everyone who wasn't explicitly a kid as an adult, including the Mannequins, but those matter less because they're total cyborgs. Did I gloss over something in Interlude 25 about accelerated aging?

[downtime] they seem to have. The dialog about a hypothetical pimply-faced parahuman with a porn addiction in 26.2 is funny, but why are they on a porch? Why is Taylor reading?

I know they're a little hushed about what's going on, hence chasing Eidolon off and treating this like a Simurgh fight, shouldn't that impel them to rush more and not less?

Round 1: 1st trigger
Round 2: 2nd trigger