Tag: Arc 12

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But I wouldn’t be able to kill Siberian.  She’d fought Alexandria, Legend and Eidolon at the same time and walked away unscathed.  She hadn’t been able to hurt them due to her inability to fly, but she’d still survived.

Confirmation that she can’t ignore the first law of motion, only the second (I previously mentioned her ignoring the third too, but I’ve realized that was just a consequence of ignoring the second).

More to the point, she can treat incoming forces like they’re not there, but she can’t make her body move like there are forces acting on her that actually aren’t there.

If I attacked Jack, she would come after me and I’d probably die.  Would it even work?  Bonesaw was a medical tinker.  She could theoretically save all three of them.  Then I’d accomplish nothing but getting the Nine pissed off at me.

That’s why you’d go after Bonesaw first.

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I could kill them right now.

The Nine?

It would be so easy.  Jack, Bonesaw and Cherish were all in my range.  I could drop poisonous spiders on them, sting them each with dozens of bees and wasps in the hopes of provoking anaphylactic shock.

Ohh, she was being literal. She has the ability to kill them, she’s not just expressing a restrained desire to.

Honestly, I think the only one who’s going to stand in Taylor’s way here is herself. And maybe the threat of revenge from other Slaughterhouse members, but I think it’s going to be primarily a part of Taylor’s mind that doesn’t want her to become a killer, even if the people she killed were mass murderers who have killed and would continue to kill tons of innocent people.

That’s already a strenuous argument before you consider the standing order of “kill or the world ends sooner” on Jack Slash in particular.

But there’s another thing too: This brings us right back to Arc 11 and the topic of bystanderism again, because it forces us to ask if Skitter is already a killer. Did she kill that one wounded Merchant, Thomas, by leaving him to die, or does that not count?

I don’t think it quite counts, but it’s still relevant to the argument, and I think Taylor might look at it differently than I do.

It would be easy, and I might save the world by doing it.  I’d get revenge for the countless people they’d murdered, for their attacking Tattletale, and maybe even save hundreds of people’s lives by distracting Shatterbird.

And by preventing them from personally killing tons of people later.

As much as I like these villains, when it comes to this moral dilemma, I’m honestly very much in favor of killing them.

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Plague 12.5

Hello, everybody! This is the guy who reads the thing, back to do more of that!

Last time, our main girl had to leave a hurt friend behind and run off to tell other people, like her dad and the people she decides over, about the fact that the glass bird is going to do bad stuff to the whole city soon.

This time, I think we’re going to see how that goes for her, and probably get a first look at how much of a hurt the glass bird makes. I hope she actually finds her dad and we get to see her try to tell him about the trouble without giving away the hidden truth of how she learned about it. Or better yet, forget completely about that and get caught off guard by her dad asking about it.

And then she’s going to have to tell the people in her area about it. That’s a lot of people, but she has a lot of small creatures, so she might be able to tell them in a way at least some of them will accept. She doesn’t have time to ask them all to come to one place so she can tell them in person, which would be the best at making people go and be safe.

In the bit at the end of last time, I also talked about Tiny-Run using her small creatures to lower the hurt done by the glass bird, such as by having them be in the way of the glass to slow it down. I still think that’s a thing she might do.

So yeah, without further waiting, let’s stop talking like this and get on with it! 🙂

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The idea of magic that doesn’t follow human ideas is something I’ve given some idle thought to in the past. Stretching back to before I started Worm, I believe.

Worm lowkey does do something kind of like that with some of its powers, though it’s nowhere near as extreme as the sort of examples I’ve been thinking about, and Worm’s examples of this do still make sense from a certain human perspective.

No, what I’ve been thinking about is things like this: What if magic’s idea of what is or is not part of a whole is different from ours?

What if you try to turn a rock into a top hat, and your magic thinks the head and left shoulder of the man who is currently balancing the rock on his head, as well as a chunk of the air around him, is part of the rock? If the spell worked, you’d end up with a top hat balancing on the blood-gushing, headless torso of what used to be your wizarding assistant.

Whoops.

And magic might not even have a good grasp on what a top hat is. Usually with transmutation magic in particular, this part is explained by way of the caster picturing the target item in their head, but what if magic didn’t know enough about top hats to correctly fill in the blanks of the things the caster didn’t explicitly picture? What if the caster didn’t consider what material the top hat should be, and it ended up being made of iron, or lava? I guess the poor assistant’s body can’t get any more dead, at least.

And even if the caster did picture it as made of silk or something, how is magic supposed to know what we humans mean by “silk”? Or how the hat’s silk is supposed to be treated to make the whole thing stick together? 

Basically, what I’m getting at here is that magic is distinctly fictional because it almost always works conveniently, even when it’s not easy to use it. It follows human ideas because magic that doesn’t follow human ideas would be difficult to use not only in-universe, but narratively. It doesn’t fulfill the narrative role magic usually has, and humanity actually using it effectively would likely require more science and magitech to trick the magic into doing what we want it to, than pure wand-waving and magic words. (It’s not like humanity would give up.)

Magic like this would need to be Sufficiently Analyzed to even be properly useful – just like electricity, radio waves and other phenomena we’ve taken thorough advantage of in real life.

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Glass and sand are both made of silicon dum-dum.

Sand and glass are essentially the same thing, just in different forms. Shatterbird can affect all forms of silicon from glass to quartz sand.

I mean, yeah, I know that glass is made from sand and is essentially just another form of it, but it’s a superpower we’re talking about. Magic by another name. Without testing/exposition, you never really know what sort of limits there are going to be, at what point the power is going to say “no, this is similar but it isn’t in my job description”.

So I’m absolutely fine with Shatterbird being able to control sand – I only questioned it in the sense of “oh, it extends to this form too?” – but I don’t think it would be any weirder for someone to have a power over glass and not have it extend to sand.

Hell, in most other settings, I would consider that more likely because magic doesn’t usually care about chemical composition and stuff like that, or include crabs and such alongside insects. Worm’s powers are a little different from the norm of magic in fiction because it doesn’t quite follow human categorizations and ideas.

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“It was the strip of cloth that made the upper part and front leg of the letter R.” It took me a few seconds to understand but then I giggled for like ten seconds straight. I’m still having little burts of laugther.

Hehe, I’m glad you appreciated that! :p

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Hello! I was just wondering if you are still taking worm doc recommendations? If you are I think worm d20 might be a safe option. It stopped before the end of arc 13 I believe so Kroc should be save to read it soon ish, and I don’t think there are any other spoilers except confirming the Sarah thing. Have a nice day.

I’m… honestly not sure if Sharks actually intended to send me this ask. Accidents do happen sometimes, even for ask screeners. But yeah, if there’s spoilers in it, I don’t understand them for now. Apparently there’s a “Sarah thing”. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I do really like the idea of Worm TRPGs, in part because a lot of powers fit well as spells. And then of course there are less rigid systems specifically designed to lend themselves to superpowers.

I doubt I’ll be playing one anytime soon, but if Sharks finds that the documentation for one becomes non-spoilery, like Worm d20 apparently soon will, maybe I’ll take a look at how they did things. 🙂

(By the way, shortly after I was sent this ask, another friend told me that the people behind We’ve Got Worm just started up a TRPG spinoff podcast set in the Wormverse – I wonder if that may have prompted this ask?)

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The line “this is not an exit” is a reference to American Psycho.

Ah, I see!

Judging by the scene I just watched from it, which may have been the final monologue, it seems to be an appropriate work to make a reference to in a story like Worm, what with the whole “fall to villainy” angle.

End of Plague 12.4

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Alright, so they did come to talk. We still got some action, though, what with… Tattletale… being… grievously injured… yeeeah. That’s not good, though I’m sure she’ll live at this point.

This was a fairly interesting one. We learned about the Slaughterhouse’s tests, got a little further characterization of Cherish, Bonesaw and Jack (and a confirmation that Siberian is a cannibal), and brokered a deal that I’m not entirely sure was a good idea, even before the Nine lay down their demands.

Bonesaw remains the best Slaughterhouse member. She’s so adorrible and I love that.

Trickster’s in for a surprise when he finds out what everyone else has been up to.

So, next chapter: It’s a race against time – Taylor has less than 30 minutes to warn the people she cares about of Shatterbird’s incoming glass nuke, primarily including the citizens of her territory and her dad. In the latter case, she doesn’t seem to have given thought to how she’d warn him without cluing him in on the fact that she has connections who could actually genuinely tell, but of course that’s not as important right now as keeping him alive.

As for warning the citizens, I’m fairly sure she’s going to use bugs to direct them away from any glass she can find, either via text or via actively chasing them away from the glass – time is of the essence, after all. She might also cover the windows in bugs to block the glass and slow it down.

Somehow getting the Endbringer sirens going might help by getting people all over the city to evactuate to the shelters, but it might also create a panic, and no one’s actually manning the shelters and making sure the evacuation goes smoothly. Plus, there’s probably not enough time to do something like that, let alone to let people evacuate, and Shatterbird might decide hurrying up her plan is necessary if people all over town start moving away from where they can see and feel it.

Whatever happens, though? Unless it covers a shorter span of time than I’m expecting, next chapter’s gonna have a heck of a body count (though mostly offscreen). Quite likely a much bigger one than Extermination as a whole.

See you then!