Battery drew a phone from her belt and tapped her fingers on the keypad for a moment.  She gave Tattletale a dark look as she held the phone out.

…what? Is this so you can put it on speaker?

A woman’s voice said, “Not like you to tip your hand, Tattletale.”

She is acting a bit less subtle than usual. Now the PRT can demand the return of the earpiece, and she’s given them more to go on when it comes to figuring out her power.

They’ll also change the encryption key either way, but that won’t help for long if she has the earpiece.

“Director.  Are we really going to pretend you didn’t know I was listening in?  You’ve been putting out misleading details to screw with my information gathering.

Has she, or did you just pick up the misleading details meant for Chariot?

Done quite a good job of it, if I may say so myself.  Very subtle, all of it just right enough that even I was thrown off.  Couldn’t trust much of it.”

Huh, not bad, Piggot. I’ll give you that one.

(Of course, if it was the misinformation meant for Chariot, Piggot can’t exactly say so.)

Battery stepped forward, glancing over at our team, “This one is already set to the encrypted channel, it’s faster if-”

Tattletale probably did that with the one she has, didn’t she. There’s a good chance she’d Know how to if she tried.

Tattletale interrupted, “Uplink three-three-five, encryption forty-two mod three-four-two-one-zero-zero-six-six-three-one-zero-”

Ahahaha

Shenanigans like these are part of why I like her so much. 😛

“You have access to our channel,” Battery growled, interrupting Tattletale’s spiel of numbers.

Tattletale shrugged.  “Have for a while now.”

I wonder how much info she’s been able to glean that way.

Battery raised one hand to her ear.

“Yeah, Battery,” Tattletale grinned, “Let’s do as the Director says and get down to business.”

Pffft.

So wait. Wouldn’t Lisa have heard Piggot tell Chariot– oh, that’s how she knew that “they want to talk” last chapter. I guess Piggot didn’t specify Tattletale after all? In which case this is on Chariot, Glory Girl and Battery. (Yes, all three of them, even if it was all Chariot’s decision.)

“Me?”  Tattletale quirked an eyebrow.

I suppose Lisa’s about as surprised at that as I am.

Piggot should definitely know this is a bad idea, even if they’re not entirely sure how Lisa’s power works.

“Sure,” Chariot said.  Just behind and to one side of him, Glory Girl was glaring at Tattletale.

Right, I suppose she wouldn’t like Lisa either. She probably thinks Lisa’s talked Amy into joining the Undersiders, too. And she’s not entirely wrong if she does.

She looked like she was ready to hit people.  It was the kind of latent hostility I was used to seeing in Bitch.

Victoria can be pretty scary if you get on her bad side, even without her aura. And right now she seems to be in a frame of mind where it doesn’t take much to get on her bad side.

“Not terribly fair to my teammates, if it’s just a one-on-one conversation.”

Ahh, so that’s how we’re solving that.

“Are you going to take this or not?” Chariot asked, his hand still extended in her direction.

Well, maybe.

“No real point,” Tattletale shrugged.  She tucked her hair behind her ear and turned her head.  “Already have one.”

…fuck, I forgot about that! Ahaha, nice!

So does Taylor get the other one?

Prey 14.4

Oink! Krixwell here, ready to read some more Worm!

So. Last time, the Protectorate showed up, and Piggot wants to talk to Lisa. I do not trust this in the slightest, knowing Piggot’s plans of backstabbing the villains of Brockton Bay. Even if the main topic on the surface is Siberian’s “creator”, she’s quite likely going to try to set up the situation that allows that backstab.

At least she’s talking to Tattletale, which might have some interesting results. Though as a downside, that probably means we’ll have to rely on context clues to tell what Piggot is saying as it happens, unless Lisa puts Taylor on the line for some reason. Hrm.

As for Siberian… their real body is, as far as we know, still in the crater, possibly suffering from whiplash (the car being invulnerable wouldn’t help against that), so unless the Protectorate, Wards and Undertravelers all spectacularly fail to pay attention to the crater, they can at least arrest the real body. Question then is whether they’ll be able to hold on to them with the Monochrome running around.

And that’s if Piggot doesn’t completely mess up the priorities here.

So yeah… let’s hear what the Jirector of the PRT has to say!

Anyways, if it’s not too much trouble /too personal, can we see this philosophical discord? Would love to discuss these kinds of morality questions.

Okay, so I asked the owner of the server – technically known as flopside, but everyone calls it altgen – if it was okay, and I got the go-ahead.

Here are some things to note, though:

  • Altgen is a spinoff from @loreweaver-universe​‘s Discord server, though it has established itself as more of its own thing at this point. As a result, it is closely tied to the Discord liveblogging supercommunity and has multiple livebloggers frequenting it, meaning spoilers for certain things need to be handled with care (most notably Worm, Ward, Steven Universe, Madoka Magica, Wander Over Yonder, Rick and Morty, Camp Camp, My Hero Academia, Adventure Time and Little Witch Academia). There is a channel called #altspoil, which can be used to contain content that is spoilery to one or more of the local livebloggers, myself included.
  • It’s not exclusively a philosophy server. That’s just one of the channels. Altgen, more broadly, is for chill and civil discussion of certain topics that are not allowed on the regular liveblogger servers, such as serious news, politics, religion and NSFW content. And yes, that last thing does mean there are porn channels, though they are manually age-gated. There’s even #spoilporn, where your filthiest, most spoilery Alexandria porn is safe from my innocent gaze.
  • I’ve limited the invite below to 25 uses, just to be safe in case this post winds up in the wrong places. I doubt those are all going to be used up by you guys anytime soon, but if that happens, feel free to let me know and I might make a new one.
  • Please do not join just to talk about Worm with me directly. There are reasons I don’t have a Discord server of my own (I prefer to have all my Worm talk screened and visible on the blog, among other things), and I don’t want that to get taken out on other servers I’m in.
  • I’ve said a lot here, but seriously… We’re chill, I promise.

With all that said, here’s the link! Welcome!

How do you think Taylor will react to what Amy did to Victoria, New Wave or the other Undersiders(We somewhat saw Lisa’s reaction)? And what do you think would be a fair punishment? There are Heartbreaker and Canary as contrast, we saw the Trial and the Birdcage, but also know her mitigating circumstances. What would be reasonable and what do you think will likely happen?

I think it depends a lot on how they find out, but I think when she has the full story including Amy’s POV, Taylor may be conflicted but I don’t think she’d be too hard on Amy for it.

New Wave might already know. Judging by her behavior when she came across Amy in public, I don’t think Victoria cares if people find out they’ve had a falling-out, and from there it’s not a long way to questions about why. Also, their parents would want to know why Victoria didn’t bring Amy home, though Victoria could’ve just lied and said she couldn’t find her, or that Amy refused to come back because she didn’t want to put the rest of them at risk of Bonesaw. In short, though, I think there’s a good chance Victoria told her parents what Amy did. Their reactions would be shaped by that perspective, although I suspect Flashbang is giving Amy some benefit of the doubt.

Among the Undersiders, besides Taylor, the only one whose reaction I’m really interested in is Alec, because as you say, this is comparable to Heartbreaker. However, Alec isn’t exactly much for big reactions, even (or maybe especially) to these things. If he started a liveblog of reaction video channel, I’d probably drop it fairly quickly.

As for punishment, I don’t think Amy deserves any. Even less so than Paige. At least with Paige, there was an argument to be made for carelessness, but with Amy, there are so many more mitigating circumstances. She was heavily compromised, and her personal space was violated in a way she had warned Victoria against repeatedly. It was an accident that she was actively trying to prevent. She’s no more responsible than the people who take care of a natural sightseeing spot are for tourists that fall off cliffs because they ignore warning signs and cross safety fences. Less so, even.

(Fun fact: There are such spots in Norway that don’t have fences because some tourists are more likely to go too close to the edge of a cliff when there’s a fence in their way.)

I’d argue that, fundamentally, Tattletale isn’t a bad person, she is someone being held at gunpoint, who’s only real weapon when cornered is digging into people’s psyche for their own problems. Would Amy have done the same thing if Tattletale hadn’t brought that up? Maybe, maybe she would. It wouldn’t change the fact that their family is still fucked up and needs some therapy, and that, as well as Amy’s listlessness with her powers, probably contributed significantly. Tats is still mean, though.

I certainly don’t think Lisa is anywhere near as responsible for these things as Amy thinks. I mean, sure, Lisa’s been known to mess with people’s heads, but ultimately all she did was remind Lisa of the potential for her secrets to come out and mess things up. Then Amy went through a lot of stress because of Leviathan and her dad and Gallant and Bonesaw and Mannequin and Siberian and… you get the point. I think Lisa is for the most part a scapegoat for Amy’s stress, even if Amy doesn’t realize it.

Yeah, it was a dick move on Lisa’s part, but not much more than you’d expect during a confrontation between hero and villain. Hell, Amy herself said some really mean things during that confrontation, too.

Worm is officially subtitled “Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons” which while close isn’t exactly the same as “the road to hell is paved with good intentions" 

Sharks: (I don’t actually know if it’s official.)

Ah, yeah, that also sounds quite applicable to… actually, not just Taylor’s story. A lot of characters’ stories.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons also comes up sometimes.

I think regarding being friends with bad persons, way more interesting than Tattletale is Regent, who is a rapist and murderer but tries to be a better person with varying success due being emotionally dead inside. Taylor herself thought about that in 14.1 … for like 5 seconds. What is your opinion?

While I don’t mean to excuse his past actions, I think it counts for a lot if he actually wants to and tries to be better. Intent matters, and if he intends to be better and does what he can to follow through on that, that’s a good thing. It doesn’t erase his past actions, and it’s very unfortunate how blasé he is about them, but it does make him much more sympathetic than he would otherwise be.

Also, the point about this topic having already come up earlier in the Arc is a good one. Now that that’s been pointed out, I think we might have an Arc theme going here, and I suspect it’s going to come up again when we learn about the Travelers and the 325.