Had my teachers been looking me in the eye while calculating ways to make things easier on their resident superhero?

Maybe.  More likely that it was some combination of ineptitude, laziness and ignorance, on top of being influenced by the school’s link to the Wards program.

Perhaps.

Armsmaster slammed my upper body down against the counter of the nurse’s station, hard.  I grunted, as much in reaction to being brought back to reality as in reaction to the blow.

Okay, Army, I get that you’re pissed, but be a little gentle, please? We just had that body fixed.

“Armsmaster!” Legend’s tone was a rebuke to Armsmaster for the show of force.

See? Leggy agrees.

(Sheesh. Army, Leggy… we’re being invaded by Rubies up in here.)

“I’d like these people,” Coil pointed at us, “To go fight Kaiser, tomorrow night at eleven in the evening.  You remember them?  The Undersiders.  And you remember Kaiser?  From the pictures I showed you?”

Hm, so are these “numbers” the probability of success?

“Yes.  You asked me this before.”

“I did.  But I want the Undersiders to hear what you say.  Give me a number.  How would they do, without my help?”

“Forty-six point six two three five four percent chance they all come back.  Thirty three point seven seven nine zero one percent only some come back.  That’s one question.”

That’s quite precise!

Also, that adds up to 80.40255%, implying there’s a 19.59745% chance of the third option that this girl didn’t mention: Nobody comes back.

Coil paused to let that sink in, then looked up at us, “She calculates possibilities, we think she does it by seeing all the potential outcomes of an event in a fraction of a second.

So it’s kind of like the future vision from Steven Universe, but with a much more mathematical approach.

The man who decides outcomes can check how likely the outcomes are without his influence. How much power does he have, though? Could you represent his influence in the form of a standard +x percentage points to the probability for that outcome, or something?

Her power categorizes these outcomes and helps her to figure out the chance that a given event will come to pass.  It isn’t easy for her, and I try not to tax her abilities, but you can surely see why this is so valuable.”

Absolutely. She’s excellent for risk evaluation.

“Ah.”

“The one you were talking to a few minutes ago is Bullet.  She’s the smartest in the group.

The white one that wanted Taylor’s food?

Her breed craves exercise, they’re meant to run around all day with hunters… except she was used as a beta to warm dogs up for one of the dogfighting rings around here and her shoulder was torn up pretty badly.

Ouch.

Even with the shoulder healed as well as it’s gonna get, it hurts too much for her to run as much as she needs.”

I spotted Bullet in the crowd.  Sure enough, she was lagging behind the rest.  I thought maybe she was favoring one leg.

Aww.

There’s a certain irony in the name. She’s got natural potential to be fast as a bullet, but she’s a bullet that was misused and damaged, and now she lags behind the others.

“If your power heals, why doesn’t it help her?  Or Angelica’s eye and ear?”

Bitch shrugged.

Really, this kind of thing goes for any healing power. How does the power determine what needs to be healed? What the state to which the target should be returned is?

I don’t think what happened with Sirius is really healing, though, so much as getting rid of internal interlopers and injuries that might get in the way of the transformation. Alternatively, the worms simply can’t survive in the environment that a hellhound’s body becomes.

“Lisa said it has something to do with me making a ‘blueprint’.  It’s babble to me.

Sounds like Rachel subconsciously decides what the true state should be.

I actually briefly talked to someone about something similar earlier today – the topic was how Steven Universe’s healing powers worked. Specifically, in a world where not every character it’s been used on is organic, how does the power determine what it should work on? My take on it is that it works on whatever Steven himself perceives as “alive” – including a teddy bear – and by extension, it returns the target to the state that Steven considers healthy and whole.

With Faultline’s theories in Gregor’s interlude, we’ve got confirmation that some of the powers in the Wormverse, and notably the Manton effect, have been theorized by researchers to work similarly to that – it would make sense for both Rachel’s and Panacea’s healing (if we’ll call this side effect of Rachel’s power that) to be among those powers.

All I know is that it doesn’t help older health problems.  It gets rid of disease and cancer, and parasites, and most damage they take when they’re big.  That’s all.”

Hm. Maybe not so much Rachel’s subconscious deciding how the dogs should be as essentially checking how they are before the power is used on them, minus disease, cancer and parasites… no, something’s not quite adding up about this formulation.