Hello from a fourth keyboard!
This time I’ve gone even further away from what I’m used to. Literally. My laptop is at least two meters away from me and I can’t even see its screen. Instead, I’ve got a slightly bigger screen perched on my bedroom desk, and my laptop is connected to both that and the even bigger TV above it. No more split screen, now I can have the blog on one screen and Worm or K6BD on the other like a pro.
The finishing touch to the setup is a wireless keyboard with a built-in mousepad, which is so much nicer than the back-pain-inducing “wired keyboard on lap plus the laptop sitting on a table so I had to lean forward every time I needed the mousepad” setup I used for the last session of 17.6.
*runs into technical difficulties to fix before continuing the post*
It’s a work in progress.
K6BD patron comments:
1. Is it making more sense that they didn’t bring White Chain? I can only imagine that White Chain would be flipping the fuck out regarding some of these activities.
Yeah, uh, even before White Chain’s recent… uh…
…Problem Sleuth weasel-style the-fuck-out-flipping behavior…
…she probably wouldn’t be cool with the entire premise of the operation, let alone the specifics.
2. You might not recall but “000001” actually showed up all the way back in book 1 chapter 4 to deliver half a line of dialog: killsixbilliondemons.com/comic/concordance-of-the-demiurges
Oh yeah, that’s right! Thank you, Mottom, for cutting off the priest from committing further crimes to the Early Modern English language.
Asks:
Yay! You’re back!
Yay! I’m back!
Alt text you don’t understand is often referencing something in the author’s note that you don’t read.
Yeah, I’ve been filled in on a couple of those. Probably a bunch more I never realized were weird though.
HP being tied to LV and LV requiring kills can’t BOTH be true, as monsters have large sums of HP, even monsters which can’t have killed anyone. AT and DF also are strongly tied to one’s willingness to harm the other party, as the values for many bosses vary between routes. Also, LV is a measure for how little killing affects you, and even having killed only Coil Taylor’s distanced herself pretty well (XP can vary between Neutral and Genocide, and isn’t tied to fight difficulty).
I guess we’re still kind of stuck on mechanics versus lore, which is kind of weird considering Undertale blurs the line to make the mechanics part of the lore. The thing is, mechanically XP and LV only increase when you kill, and max HP only increases when LV increases. As far as the game’s mechanics show us, the progression of max HP is tied to killing. But perhaps the base max HP isn’t?
(Sidenote: If HP is Hope (disclaimer: I’m not sure if that is fanon or something I vaguely recall from the game), are we to understand that murderous half-possessed Frisk gets more hopeful as LV increases and Chara takes hold, while pacifist Frisk’s hopefulness never changes? Neutral runs also mess with it.)
Taylor has killed many bugs, even if we only count the ones she killed with other bugs and not the ones she forced to march into certain death. Her LoVe should therefore be high, unless bugs don’t count for some reason. (I don’t know Undertale lore)
Hm. This is a very good point, actually. And it ties in neatly with the thing the other asker said about LV having to do with detachment, since Taylor from the start hasn’t given a single fuck about any of the bugs.
…which now that I think about it is an interesting contrast between her and Rachel.
oh shit, Krixwell has lost control
He’s loose.
When you’ve finished K6BD, please don’t do another Patreon bonus. Is it really a good idea to, when you can only do one or chapters a month, make one of them a work that isn’t the blog’s purpose?
I’ve been thinking much the same thing. I’ve agreed to reading one of Wildbow’s drafts (Face) as a Patreon bonus after K6BD, and maybe one or two other short things, but after that I will very likely be removing the tier and trying to do another reworking of my rewards in general (clearly no one is interested in the middle tiers I set up, so they might as well go too). Will have to discuss a bit with the K6BD patron when the time comes.
“Yeah, um, let’s have one thing clear: I don’t fully believe Incubus that this is all Allison, by any means.” I sort of do. I believe the entity piloting Allison is 100% made of pieces of her mind. What I don’t buy is that these specific pieces separated themselves into this form entirely naturally, without shaping from Incubus.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
When I said it wasn’t all Allison, I meant it wasn’t all her doing. Like, Incubus certainly had a hand in it, even if the pieces are all Allison.
You should return to Infestation 11.6, ctrl+F the word ‘share’ and read that paragraph and the next one. Also, from Alexandria’s interlude: “The sample [William Manton] took, F-one-six-one-one”
*checks the codes for the Traveler samples*
…Deus.
I was expecting you to be pointing out something fucked up about that sample that might relate to Noelle, but that’s the sample I said sounded like Genesis and judging by the rest of the line from 15c, I was on the money:
“The sample he took, F-one-six-one-one, it tends to give projection powers. I suspect his real body is unchanged. But I’m wondering if we shouldn’t leave him be.”
As for 11.6:
Skidmark confirmed smarter than Krouse
“…That. That sounds bad. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing that can make things weird. ” Hey Krix? Remember our old friend Skidmark? Remember that dude? Even Skidmark knew that taking only half a vial was a bad idea. So yes. That sounds bad.
Another nice payoff from some earlier foreshadowing in this chapter. Remember back when the Merchants were having a tournament with stolen Cauldron vials as the prizes, and the guy who won (Scrub) triggered in the process so he couldn’t use it? So Scrub offered it to his two friends instead? As perhaps the one sensible, self-restrained action he’s ever done, Skidmark had read the instructions first and warned Scrub not to split a vial… Looks like Krause is about to find out why!!
Right, that’s why the notion of taking only half the potion felt weirdly familiar!
I don’t know if Krouse is about to? Thing is, the Travelers have seemed to be treating the cause of what’s going on with Noelle in the future as a mystery, but if there were immediate and obvious negative effects of using only half the vial, you’d think Krouse and Noelle (and possibly the rest) would remember that and piece it together.
Then again, Noelle seems to to some extent blame Krouse for it, but that might just be for making her drink at all.
It’s apparently impossible to send just an “F”. Sorry. So uh… F
It appears that there’s a minimum word count or something. Whatever. “F, to pay respects.”
eff
Huh, I didn’t know that. I appreciate all of your efforts, though!
I would’ve been very disappointed if nobody took me up on that. 😛
What’s going to happen with the other half she didn’t drink? How do you think they’ll escape?
I’ve given the first question some thought since finishing the chapter.
Oddly enough Oliver is the big sticking point for me when it comes to the other half of the vial. Noelle only drank half because of it being “unfair” that someone wouldn’t get one, but Future Oliver still doesn’t seem to have a power and he’s not in the same boat as Future Noelle, so it doesn’t seem like he drank it.
Which leads us to the idea that Cody drank the other half and something happened to him as a result, but that has even more problems. That leaves a full vial for Oliver, it means he has to not drink one of the full ones right now when he has the chance, and we’re back to the issue of “if drinking half had immediate averse effects, why don’t the Future Travelers seem to realize the connection”.
We also come back to that last one if we go down the route of “No one drank the other half because something bad happened when Noelle did.”
So ultimately we’re left with a few options:
- One (or more) of my various assumptions is wrong.
- Oliver didn’t want a power / was skeptical of the half vial.
- They lost or broke the half vial.
Several of these options leave the half vial around for someone outside the Travelers to potentially get ahold of it. Maybe someone we don’t know yet are also having trouble because of it? Hell, it’s even possible for that hypothetical someone to be a bigger reason for the events of this Arc than the Travelers themselves are, though I doubt that’s a route Wildbow would take.
[Reddit post]
[art by Comfortable-Regret] Canon vs Fanfic Taylor
[comment by JoesAlot]
The Virgin Canon Taylor
- Experiences emotional conflict like a loser.
- Edgy black hair. Not even a natural hair color.
- Is an actual stick figure. Super ugly.
- Takes a million years to actually get rid of Lung. Every fight with him is a “close call”.
- Doesn’t even have an altpower involving cannons; controls bugs instead. Lame!
- Has a romance with Brian. Ew?!
- [two redacted bullet points]
The Chad Fanon Taylor
- Incapable of sadness; can only feel idealistic determination and fierce, anti-hero brutality.
- Flowing brown hair guarantees maximum relatability.
- Superpowers ensure her body is fully developed at the ripe, mature age of fifteen.
- Lung is immediately atomized upon laying eyes on Taylor. She doesn’t even notice.
- Always has a cool superpower with flashy lasers and guns.
- Has only the hottest affairs with either Lisa or Amy.
- [two redacted bullet points]
“In my fanfic, Taylor is just like in canon except instead of controlling bugs, she can temporarily transform into a representation of the Taylor from a random other universe (AU fic). This affects her personality, physical appearance and powers, but she retains all her original memories and knowledge, and the time limit on her original power doesn’t get disrupted. Her ultimate technique, available only when her power is boosted, is to turn into the representation of the stereotypical fanon Taylor, with all the powers.”
(Feel free to steal that idea.)
I much prefer canon Taylor, though let’s be real, Taylor with Lisa or Amy, or even better, both, would absolutely be my jam.
Also… you might’ve missed an implication spoiler? “Every” fight with Lung kind of implies there will be a third one, like I’ve been saying since the first or at least the second. I don’t know, I could be reading too deeply into it. Lung is kind of old news to Taylor at this point, and even if he shows up in full dragon form she’s faced tougher enemies.
That said? I still haven’t given up on the Birdcage breakout, whether it’s because of Amy piecing things together or because it gets targeted by an Endbringer. Maybe Lung will have some backup for the third round, if it ever does happen.
Hah!
Credit cards useless without Tattletale? Oh yeah nice thought but we still haven’t quite gotten around to implementing the PIN concept here yet. As of fairly recently it’s possible to get PIN-optional cards but there are no PIN-mandatory cards available in the US yet because many places still aren’t set up to accept them.
w h a t
That was in fact the dumbest Homestuck reference. How did you even remember that that was a thing?
Because it’s really dumb and I remember dumb things.
The excess typos are probably due to this arc being written and released at an accelerated rate (one chapter every day).
That makes sense, yeah. 17.6 in particular is over 8000 words of tons of stuff happening (I checked at the end, because it felt so damn long even when accounting for the fact that I’d spent a couple weeks on it), all written in one day, so it’s very fair that Wildbow would start to get tired or something towards the end and make/miss more typos than normal.
Hell, it’s taken me months to write half that in one of my own fics.
““Fuck destiny” is something a lot of fictional characters I like can agree on.” Have you seen The Witcher tv show? If you like that attitude you’d probably like it.
Netflix seems to agree with you, because during the sleep that separated me getting this ask and me answering it, at some point they dropped this into my phone notifications:
I haven’t seen the series, played any of the games or read any of the original books, but I did hear the song “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” (not worth the internet hype; without context at least, it’s okay but nothing more) and watch this video on the series’ background and performance as an adaptation. I don’t particularly recall much spoilerways though, off the top of my head.
I might take a look. 🙂
Happy Valentine’s Day! (To Sharks and Krixwell)
Happy belated Valentine’s! I love you all ❤
When I started this post and ran into technical difficulties, my dad saw the headline “K6BD patron comments” at the top and pointed out that it looks like a ham radio handle (he does ham radio himself). And he’s right! Most handles worldwide start with two letters, but a single K in particular is the US prefix, so it works.
Looking it up on QRZ, it turns out the real Kill Six Billion Demons, the prophecied successor of the Conquering King, is a guy named Ramon who teaches telecommunications in Clovis, California.
Also I’m discovering that Google actually gives relevant autocompletions for “krixwell” (in incognito mode) now, even ones I wouldn’t really expect WordPress SEO to set up, and that’s kinda… I don’t even know. I like it, though.
(Of course, I can’t actually press enter and do an actual search for myself anymore, because I risk getting results from spoilery discussions of the blog.)
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