Hey, Wildbow fans, guess what?

There’s another brand new Pact liveblog around! Go check out Possibly Reading if you’re interested in that!

---

Asks!

I’m pretty sure the definition of the Trump rating was given somewhere in the text already. Either way, it’s not a spoiler to let Krix know that the rating is just a catch all for “Powers that have to do with powers”. This includes power granting (like Othala), power stealing/copying (like Grue), being able to mess with others powers (like Bonesaw), etc. An interesting side note from Weaver’s dice is that Trump powers generally come up when the trigger somehow involved Capes.

Ahh, that makes sense. Metapowers (not to be confused with meta powers).

I feel like it’s worth noting that if we’re counting Bonesaw, maybe Bakuda should have had a minor Trump side rating too, on account of her ability to reproduce other people’s powers in bomb form.

That last note ties perfectly into my existing theories about how power selection works for first generation parahumans. I think the Dandelions pick a human under duress and bestow a power designed, in part, to help them in their trigger event (or the power designs itself to do so upon contact with the human), and giving someone who is being plagued by the use of powers a power that affects powers is pretty straightforward. If a little confusing to write.

(Is Weaver’s Dice some form of Word of God repository?)

What happened to the Between: PB1 post? I read it earlier, but then it disappeared.

The between post following the Kill Six Billion Demons post is messed up. It used to be visible, but now it no longer shows up on the wordpress site and the link in the twitter feed goes to a page not found.

Sorry about that. It seems like I accidentally turned it back into a draft? But I found out and fixed it fairly quickly, I think.

Even so, thank you for letting me know. I can’t trust that I’ll always catch errors like that on my own.

What are the rules on interacting with Krixwell’s Twitter accounts?

Sharks: I’d reply “the same as his tumblr”, but up to you.

Yeah, that’s about right. The situation is very similar to the Tumblr blogs – I don’t look at notifs or replies on the liveblog account if I can help it, and I’d really rather you didn’t send me anything to do with Worm or anything else I’m liveblogging on my main account.

(And my third, oldest account is just that, old and even more abandoned than my main. Not sure why I even stay logged in on that one in the app. Anyway, if you guys end up looking at that one somehow, the same rules apply as with my main.)

Coilpet has to be the sickest possible Wormship that can exist. If Coil would not call Dinah “pet” so creepily all the time, I think more people in the fandom would respect him as a Bond-villian mastermind.

Yeah, eww.
The pet thing creeps me out more than most other creepy/skeevy things in Worm.

The “jetpack and exploding guitars” tinker is a reference to another webserial called Legion of Nothing. Main character is a tech genius, at some point he make a rock guitar themed weapon, more for fun than anything else. But he ends up having to use it. It’s made so that it can be sacrificed: you smash it into an opponent and it explodes. Because rockstar smashing their guitar.

Huh, sounds pretty awesome!

Personally, the idea of a rockstar cape with a guitar reminded me a bit of Guitar Villain from Miraculous Ladybug. But his guitar wasn’t explosive, and if I remember correctly, smashing it seemed to the heroes to be their goal for a while, not an attack to dodge.

1) So just in case you were interested, here is the origine of the names of each dragon suit : cawthorne is a town in England which was said to have a dragon nearby, melusine was a legendary women who could transform into a dragon, glaurung is the father of dragons in the Silmarion, Ladon was a 100 headed snake that protected the Hesperides garden in greek mythology, Niddhug is the dragon that gnarl at the root of Ygrdaesil

2) Astaroth is a demonic snake (probably a demonization of the godess Ishtar by early Jews), Pythios was a snake killed by Apollo, Azazel is a Canaan demon, and finally Uther Pendragon was the father of Arthur

Nice!

Let’s see… I knew Uther (recognized it after the general theme of the names was brought up) and Nidhogg (didn’t recognize it, but might if I had thought harder about it)… Ladon and Glaurung sounded familiar after the dragon theme was spelled out, but I didn’t know the contexts.

I like that the Melusine is named after someone who could transform. Fitting. 😛

Ladon sounds like a spectacle. (I think there’s a Homestuck character or two who might be particUlarly stUnned by the sight.)

In Monarch 16.1 liveblog, “It felt more like getting a truck dropped on me than I would have expected an electrical charge to feel like, but I could feel the not-unfamiliar sensation of snakes writhing across my body.” is quoted twice.

Thank you, will fix right away!

---

Alongside the asks, I was also asked to post these messages from Sharks, which you can translate here:

753398445n, V’z tbvat gb jvguubyq lbhe cbfg sbe abj orpnhfr juvyr Xevk qbrf xabj gung gur cnffratref pna uryc crbcyr, ur qbrfa’g xabj gur qrterr. V qba’g jnag gb tvir uvz nal vqrnf nobhg ubj vagryyvtrag be serr-guvaxvat gur cnffratref ner, rfcrpvnyyl fvapr ur’f nyernql orra fbzrjung fcbvyrq ba gur Fcnpr Jbez. Vs lbh jnag gb cebivqr n pbhagre-nethzrag, srry serr. ^-^

(In case these are responses to the asks they were sent after, the above followed the Coilpet ask and the below came right at the end, after the doubled quote ask.)

“Url, SLV, lbh’er va n fubeg frpgvba bs gur fgbel gung’f abg irel cbchyne; V guvax Jvyqobj npghnyyl ncbybtvmrq fvzhygnarbhfyl jvgu eryrnfvat, yvxr, 16.4 be 16.5 be fbzrguvat orpnhfr ur jnf univat fbzr crefbany pevfrf gung yrsg uvz jvgu gbb yvggyr gvzr gb jevgr hc gb uvf fgnaqneqf. Lbh’er qrsvavgryl trggvat irel pybfr gb fbzr irel tbbq cnegf gubhtu yngre va nep 16! :)”

Naq V’z jvguubyqvat guvf orpnhfr V qba’g jnag gb tvir Xevk cerpbaprvirq abgvbaf nobhg “tbbq” be “onq.” Cyrnfr jnvg hagvy ur’f svavfurq gur puncgre, be whfg gryy zr gb ubyq bagb vg hagvy gura naq V jvyy!

---

Prediction:

Taylor is likely going to figure out that Dragon is an AI either right before or right after what Lisa’s up to, which may well rely on that fact, comes into fruition.

The big question is whether or not Lisa knows about it already. It seems like something she’d mention, so I’m inclined to think that at best, she had a suspicion, which she might be getting a confirmation of in the process of whatever she’s doing?

Whatever the case is with that, I think Taylor will figure it out or build up her suspicions until she does figure it out, but because that isn’t a twist on our end, it will be far less relevant to the ending of this conflict than the reveal of what Lisa’s been doing in the background.

It might help in dealing with the Azazel, though.

---

Huh. I just happened to run into something about the demon Azazel in a completely unrelated context.

Namely, in a list of some naming references in Wheel of Time to real life things and myths (the implication of the latter being that the events of the series inspired our myths), I found this:

Nae’blis: Iblis, Another name for the devil in Muslim circles. Iblis, formerly called Azazel, was a jinn when captured by angels and carried off as their prisoner. He grew up among them and became an archangel. He was cast down when refusing to prostrate before the man Adam. Since he has roamed the earth, his domain, seeking to capture the souls of men. [Encyclopedia Mythica]