A Ghost of a Chance (Worm v1 CYOA, Alt-Taylor)

[cliffc999]

As mentioned before Fautline dislikes Thinkers. But I think main person that would screw it up is Tattletale as she has obsessive need to be the 'smartest' in the room.

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Kinda the point, yes. TT's life story is a tale of self-sabotage and Tattletale's exceptional talent at being the dumbest smart person in almost any room she enters.

While I can't see it happen in any canon situation as they simply wouldn't be able to cooperate long term, I think it would be a fun AU to read about. It may be also a potential good excuse for potential Taylor in Fautline's Crew as those stories are really, really rare.

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Not a project I think I'd really want to pick up, especially not as I've got a looong way to go yet on this one, God willing, but if my idle musings inspire anyone else to pick that ball up and successfully run with it then I'd be delighted. The community can always use more good stories.

Canon Taylor also has some... questionable decisions

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Oyez. I said she was dangerous, I never said she was wise. That's not really a trait you think of regarding anybody in Worm.

(add)

Possible, but with her powerset you may also look for more effective ways to make money then pickpocketing of all things if her goal was to make money to escape.

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It just occurred to me right now that Tattletale should have had really good odds of picking the winner of a horse race just by watching the horses standing and waiting in the paddock for a while. Especially since if she's going to the track regularly she starts seeing the same horses again and again, and now she's got entire prior races' worth of data for her shard to crunch.

So if she'd gone to Boston and started handicapping at Suffolk Downs... look, the gambling ATMs that most of the people there use for the small bets don't ask your age or your social security # before you use them (AFAIK), and hitting a couple $400-500 pots every day is way more than she'd get pickpocketing, and way the hell safer, and her power also lets her know where to stand that the security cameras don't see the same girl every day and when the track security guys are looking and when they are not. She does this for just one month and by this point she's got enough stake built up she can buy a business-class ticket to San Francisco and have enough left over to start buying the paperwork for a solid new identity.

And I really doubt Accord's organization would notice this, let alone care. Even for Accord this is still small enough amounts in all the giant slew that is large-scale legalized gambling that its well down in the statistical noise.

Pickpocketing. Really, Sarah?

 

[Impossis]

If TT really wanted to get a job as [smug who is also not someone to mess with] she should have applied to the IRS, where as long as she had a handler to direct her focus she'd probably do well for herself

 

[Corundrom]

All these people are talking about how "The smartest thing Lisa should have done is join..." are stupid as hell, the whole reason she ran away from her parents is because she was being abused for her power, that's like asking someone who was sexually assaulted by her family and managed to escape to become a prostitute

 

[anIndividualist]

If TT really wanted to get a job as [smug who is also not someone to mess with] she should have applied to the IRS, where as long as she had a handler to direct her focus she'd probably do well for herself

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And the IRS would instantly hire a powerful Thinker, no matter what the law has to say about parahuman staff.

 

[cliffc999]

If TT really wanted to get a job as [smug who is also not someone to mess with] she should have applied to the IRS, where as long as she had a handler to direct her focus she'd probably do well for herself

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She's sixteen so the only legitimate government employment she could find would be the Wards.

... which would also have been a far better idea than her canon lifepath, now that I think about it.

Even granted that she's run away from home because her parents were abusing her, that is exactly why the first thing the PRT would have done upon her entry is to say 'You know, for the first time in forever we're going to actually agree with the Youth Guard. Sending her back there would be idiocy. So you lose custody as unfit parent, and you lose custody as unfit parent, and ward of the state -- pun intended -- ahoy!'

It's not even like Sarah can plausibly be ignorant of this possibility. Youth Guard's entire shtick is trying to use the power of PR to keep the PRT from hosing the Wards program. It thus follows that YG's activities are actually known to the public.

And she deliberately came to Brockton Bay in canon, so the fact that the Brockton Bay Wards are going through hell is a non-factor in this hypothetical. She could just go to Boston, NYC, or anywhere else and join a Wards outfit that doesn't have to worry about potential maiming by Nazi blade-wolves.

 

[LightLan]

She's sixteen so the only legitimate government employment she could find would be the Wards.

... which would also have been a far better idea than her canon lifepath, now that I think about it.

Even granted that she's run away from home because her parents were abusing her, that is exactly why the first thing the PRT would have done upon her entry is to say 'You know, for the first time in forever we're going to actually agree with the Youth Guard. Sending her back there would be idiocy. So you lose custody as unfit parent, and you lose custody as unfit parent, and ward of the state -- pun intended -- ahoy!'

It's not even like Sarah can plausibly be ignorant of this possibility. Youth Guard's entire shtick is trying to use the power of PR to keep the PRT from hosing the Wards program. It thus follows that YG's activities are actually known to the public.

And she deliberately came to Brockton Bay in canon, so the fact that the Brockton Bay Wards are going through hell is a non-factor in this hypothetical. She could just go to Boston, NYC, or anywhere else and join a Wards outfit that doesn't have to worry about potential maiming by Nazi blade-wolves.

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my head canon is that while Lisa's shard doesn't really give her incorrect information, it tends to give her information that increases conflict and therefor keeps her from the optimal choices for herself.
powers want to be used after all.

 

[cliffc999]

... I hadn't considered that possibility. And Lord knows there's precedent for shards that deliberately hose their users not just with urges to do dumb stuff but with active sabotage and disinformation of what the shard is supposed to be gifting them with because they want that sweet conflict NOW dammit. Just ask Leet.

 

[Soundbyte]

She's sixteen so the only legitimate government employment she could find would be the Wards.

... which would also have been a far better idea than her canon lifepath, now that I think about it.

Even granted that she's run away from home because her parents were abusing her, that is exactly why the first thing the PRT would have done upon her entry is to say 'You know, for the first time in forever we're going to actually agree with the Youth Guard. Sending her back there would be idiocy. So you lose custody as unfit parent, and you lose custody as unfit parent, and ward of the state -- pun intended -- ahoy!'

It's not even like Sarah can plausibly be ignorant of this possibility. Youth Guard's entire shtick is trying to use the power of PR to keep the PRT from hosing the Wards program. It thus follows that YG's activities are actually known to the public.

And she deliberately came to Brockton Bay in canon, so the fact that the Brockton Bay Wards are going through hell is a non-factor in this hypothetical. She could just go to Boston, NYC, or anywhere else and join a Wards outfit that doesn't have to worry about potential maiming by Nazi blade-wolves.

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You're assuming she watched the news and/or was a Cape geek prior to her runaway. Otherwise, she'd only be able to find them on commercials and ads, and no one really pays attention to those. At least, I don't pay attention to the drug awareness and child abuse ads and I'm only a year or two older than she was when she ran away. I imagine Youth Guard ads would be pretty similar to them.

 

[cliffc999]

You're assuming she watched the news and/or was a Cape geek prior to her runaway.

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Well, an argument based on the premise that 'Tattletale was nowhere near as intelligent or clued-in as she believed she was' is obviously going to focus on moments where she failed to think it through or remained ignorant of available clues.

 

[DasStan]

How the hell is anything about "what Lisa could/should have done" in any way on topic?

 

[Erddad890765]

And yet this exactly as I imagine him to be.

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EWWWW... EW EW EW... I vomited a little.

Greg is bad in canon, but that was not Canon!Greg. That was full-throttle Fanon!Greg.

If Tattletale had been anything like the actual planning brain she thought she was, the first thing she should have done on her arrival in Brockton Bay is go to Faultline's Crew, show her power, and go 'I can guarantee that no client you negotiate with will ever be a narc or trying to set you up. I can be a one-woman Internal Affairs department for your entire organization and guarantee that no PRT or police informants ever get a job in the club. I can get the passwords and bank codes for any mark you can get me enough data on. And that's just off the top of my head!'

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Lisa may be yet another perfect example of 'High Intelligence (mostly thanks to shard)/very low Wisdom' character, although it may be argued that her Intelligence is also hardly noticeable.

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Kinda the point, yes. TT's life story is a tale of self-sabotage and Tattletale's exceptional talent at being the dumbest smart person in almost any room she enters.

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'Tattletale is really nowhere near as good at doing the "smooth criminal" thing as she thinks she is.'

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Note underlined part. Tattletale isn't dumb. She's actually pretty smart when compared to most people. Not a genius, but pretty smart. The problem is that her entire life she has been spoiled, and then her power spoils her in terms of information. She never needs to up her investigative skills too much because her power splits the difference. This means that the part that you normally learn, making that subconscious realization that other people can use your own methods against you, never sinks in for her. Sure, she knows it, but it's hard to conceptualize as real. That means that she tries to OutThinker others when she should just not try to play the game.

She's sixteen so the only legitimate government employment she could find would be the Wards.

... which would also have been a far better idea than her canon lifepath, now that I think about it.

Even granted that she's run away from home because her parents were abusing her, that is exactly why the first thing the PRT would have done upon her entry is to say 'You know, for the first time in forever we're going to actually agree with the Youth Guard. Sending her back there would be idiocy. So you lose custody as unfit parent, and you lose custody as unfit parent, and ward of the state -- pun intended -- ahoy!'

It's not even like Sarah can plausibly be ignorant of this possibility. Youth Guard's entire shtick is trying to use the power of PR to keep the PRT from hosing the Wards program. It thus follows that YG's activities are actually known to the public.

And she deliberately came to Brockton Bay in canon, so the fact that the Brockton Bay Wards are going through hell is a non-factor in this hypothetical. She could just go to Boston, NYC, or anywhere else and join a Wards outfit that doesn't have to worry about potential maiming by Nazi blade-wolves.

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I mean, it's been a while but IIRC I think her stated reasoning (not her actual reasoning, but her justification to herself and others) for not joining the Wards is because the Youth Guard wouldn't support taking her away from her parents because that would strengthen the precedent of the Protectorate taking children away from families to put them with families that will support children becoming soldiers for the government. That's not unbelievable, and I think that she would do enough research that she could conclude that it's true on a national level. Of course, that's where somebody who really had her level of intelligence would look for ways to get around it, whereas she decided that was it and moved on to her next plan.

 

[Anodarai]

Joining the Wards might have been the smartest choice, but it would mean giving up her 'freedom'. I mean, she's living the teenage dream: no school, no rules, can do whatever she wants, and thanks to her power has a better life than an average runaway.

 

[cliffc999]

DasStan - Because I'm the thread OP and I let myself get distracted by exploring the Tattletale backstory in here, so I could hardly tell anybody else they can't. And I actually did get several useful insights I might be able to use later for the story or at least to inform my deep background to the point it helps me write other parts of the story, so, not a total waste of time.

But yes, if it really is starting to cause a derail to the point other people are now calling OT, then now would be a good time to step back. Thank you for reminding me to refocus a bit.

 

[matacusa]

Hey, cliffc999. Sorry to ask you this, but could you please try to reply not to every comment individually, but rather in batches of at least one or two thousand words?

...The number of notifications coming from this thread is crazy.

 

[Trek]

Hey, cliffc999. Sorry to ask you this, but could you please try to reply not to every comment individually, but rather in batches of at least one or two thousand words?

...The number of notifications coming from this thread is crazy.

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Or break them up even more. There is a word limit that needs to be exxeded before a notifcatiion is send out.

 

[cliffc999]

Orientation 2.4

Finally!

I felt like a woman who'd been bedridden with terminal cancer and woken up the next morning as a high-end Brute. I felt like an F-18 whose catapult had just been given the steam and whose pilot had firewalled her throttle for takeoff. I felt every nerve ending in my body thrill and tingle as if I had never been more alive.

I smiled down at the cell phone I had stolen. 1.3 gigahertz dual-core processor. 500 megahertz auxiliary GPU. 1 gigabyte of RAM, 32 gigabytes onboard storage plus auxiliary SD card. Wi-fi with theoretical maximum of up to 600 megabits/s of throughput. From one perspective it was just a standard 21st-century smartphone, albeit one of the highest-end commercial models. An insignificant toy to wave in the face of Coil's entire fortress and all his men and weapons.

And from another perspective, I now held in the palm of my hand orders of magnitude of more processing power and data storage than had existed in every device on the planet all put together forty years ago. The original Cray-1 and Cray-2 supercomputers that had been the pride of the NSA at the dawn of the digital age were miniscule compared to what we took for granted nowadays as an everyday convenience. And the total amount of computational power that had been used to send astronauts to the moon and back were comparatively less than a dust mote confronted with a mountain.

So if I'd already been able to hack at least the routine layers of the internal network of this base with a digital thermometer, then what could I possibly do with this?

Even with the limitation of having to stay curled up on my futon like a poor sick little girl, with having to clutch the phone closely to me as I faced away from the door and able to move only my thumbs, I could still act far more quickly than I had working with enormously less I/O bandwidth and under a blanket. Jailbreaking the phone was the work of a moment, triaging and then disposing of all the data on the drive useless to my purposes less than a minute more. As always whenever I really got to Tinkering on actual parts my fingers began to move with impossible speed and dexterity at least slightly beyond even that which prana-bindu gave me, the well-documented 'Tinker effect' letting me do with bare hands what non-Tinker master craftsmen could barely do with precision instruments.

Which is how I typed out over seven thousand lines of script and saved it to a text file in less than five minutes. At that point it was simplicity itself to use the file manager to change the text file's extension to an HTML file, so that I could then use the file manager to open it with the onboard web browser. I'd already disabled the antivirus so my malicious code immediately broke the web browser as soon as it tried to parse and instead used a simple memory injection hack to load an executable file into memory that would then save itself to the hard disk as a new app, one that I'd needed to compose and then load as a virus because I couldn't just write it directly. After all, this phone had inconveniently not come with an onboard coding environment or compiler.

Which is why I'd provided my own crude version just now. And once I had it, then I could write and compile a better one. And once I had that I could start writing myself some real hacking and datamining tools and start putting them to work.

Less than two hours later I had everything I needed for the next phase. Anything and everything on the network short of whatever secured machines or databases Coil had kept physically segregated from the internal LAN was mine for the taking. I'd made an admin account of my own on the same privilege level as Coil's, then blanked awareness of it from any of the account lists that would display to other network admins so it was invisible, then covered my tracks in the event logs. I could have made an entire virtual network to leave them all wandering in entirely unawares while I operated in the real one I'd just stolen from them hook line and sinker, but the statistical range of time I'd need my activities to remain hidden was a maximum of six hours (95% confidence) and this was the late shift anyway so there was no need to spend that much of my limited time going to that extent.

I hadn't needed that long to just hack, of course. I'd also needed to read what I'd hacked. Fortunately I had mental techniques for speed-reading even if I was hardly going to be Alexandria, and with it I'd positively rampaged through the available comm logs, internal e-mails, personnel files, base schematics, and even procedures manuals. Coil's fetish for military organization was sure coming in handy at this moment. His men were highly trained, but if you knew exactly what they'd been trained to do…

Of course this sort of thing had limits as a strategy, because the entire point of being an experienced professional is that you have these things called intelligence and initiative and are expected to use them. But those are what you used when you were reacting to a crisis situation that simple rote learning didn't cover. Until after you knew you were in one of those then you stuck with SOP because handling the routine stuff is what SOP was for.

So, time for phase two. Being the digital demigoddess of most of what I surveyed was awesome but I'd still be dead if either of those two mooks out there decided to just open the door and start shooting. And while I could unleash some awesome Tinker-fu to undo the rivet on this damn manacle I'd been riveted back into, then deal with the problem of virtually nothing in this cell to repurpose into handy death gizmos, and then use said death gizmos to deal with the door and the men, why should I go that route when all four of those problems had one potential solution?

So I crept as close to the door as I could on the maximum extension of the chain, then held my arm out at arms' length until I finally got the phone within Bluetooth range of the men outside the door. It wasn't ordinary Bluetooth now, of course, but it was still an ultra-short-range transmitter that let me hit their earpieces directly and not via the base network so that the guards immediately outside would hear what I said but nobody else in the base would.

My thumb on the touchscreen triggered the pre-recorded message. "Bring Miss Hebert to the interrogation room and wait there with her for the specialist to arrive. We're going to change the program a little." I said, and Coil's voice sounded in their earpieces while carrying my words.

"Yes sir," I heard them acknowledge, and I used the delay of the one guard going to fetch the rivet cutter that they'd need to get me out of the chains to secure and stash the phone where they wouldn't notice it on me when they finally came in here. Fortunately, prisoner pat-downs every time I was moved were not on the program because Coil apparently felt that keeping the Tinker at arms' length was a better way of keeping her from yoinking things than by having men constantly crowding her personal space every time she wasn't alone. And thank goodness, because otherwise that would be eugh.

So, yet again I cheerfully dealt with the problems regarding lack of opportunity in this box by simply triggering the guards with the proper stimulus to make them take me out of the box and where I wanted to go. They followed their usual procedure of ordering me to stand back against the wall, did their usual entry-and-clear routine, brought out the rivet cutter and popped me loose from that damn chain for what would be the last time, and then marched me off ahead of them as per procedure.

When we came to the interrogation room they unlocked the door, pushed me inside, and entered with me. No stupidly leaving the prisoner alone for the lone torturer, of course. As always, these guys would be with me every step of the way I was outside the secured box until I was either back in there and safely fastened down again or until they were relieved.

"Wasn't the specialist supposed to be here?" one of them asked suspiciously, looking at the empty interrogation room we'd stepped into. I continued moving forward a step off the idle push one of them had given me towards the table, separating them from slightly as they stopped to take in the new situation.

"Wait two or three minutes, then call it in," his partner replied. "I don't want to bother Mr. Coil if it turns out the guy's just stopped on the way here to take a piss."

"Yeah. The mood he's been in today, that's a good id-"

Guys, the problem with stopping to debate options is that if you're looking at each other then you're not looking at me.

So as soon as I'd heard the soundproof (interrogation room, remember?) door finish shutting behind us I simply turned around and, moving far more quickly than anybody save the Undersiders had ever seen me move, delicately jabbed one thumb up under each of their chins and into their larynxes.

The important thing to was, of course, that ever since I'd gotten here I'd been verbally defiant at various points but I had never offered any physical resistance. I'd been at least superficially compliant, I'd been apparently cowed, and for much of today I'd been 'sick' as well. And surprise was not an event you ensured just by having Stranger powers or sneaking around in a ninja suit. Surprise was an event that took place inside the mind of an enemy, and it worked by lulling them with a consistent pattern of expectations and then suddenly violating it when they were looking the wrong way. Because if you're going to tackle multiple men bigger and healthier than you are, don't waste your one opportunity for a sucker punch on something trivial. So I'd held back on that option until now, when it mattered the most, and that made blindsiding even men like this the easiest thing in the world.

Choking and gasping from the sudden trauma to their tracheas, they both began to buckle at the knees. Now throat punching someone could very easily kill them with a crushed trachea if you did it wrong but my first blows here had to not just stun them but also lock them up beyond the ability to so much as twitch a panic button. And with the solar plexus and groin shots unavailable due to body armor and athletic cups that meant going for the throat shot. And I was superhumanly adept at controlling the force of my blows, so I could hit just hard enough and not too hard.

Even with all their training and my pulling my punches back to non-lethal they would be immobilized for almost a second by the shock – hey, taking a sudden shot to the throat hurts -- and I needed far less time than that to simply pull both my arms down and then thrust back up again hard with both of my palms open to meet their now rapidly descending chins. The force of that uppercut combined with the initial throat shot having sent them reflexively into throwing their heads forward knocked them out as surely as a heavyweight boxer's haymaker, and I just stepped back with a smile and let them fall to the ground.

Okay, that worked. Whew! Now with the advantage of as much surprise as I'd set up I could be almost sure I'd have won that fight even if the unforeseen had happened and I'd missed my initial window, even in my current condition. But I was much happier that things had gone according to plan there.

I had of course already set the interrogation room's own monitoring cameras into a loop before I got here so that the security center would just keep seeing the same empty and unused room they'd been seeing all day, as well as futzed the door sensors so that nobody logged an unscheduled entry or exit at either end. And the security center wouldn't notice the absence of the guards outside my cell in the hallway because I'd made sure to leave the hallway camera up during the outage earlier to reassure people… but I'd looped that footage shortly before I prompted the guards to move, so all anybody would see is two men standing stationary at their posts like everything was routine. Until their reliefs came down for shift change nobody would notice that I was gone, and that wouldn't be until several hours from now.

And I'd chosen the interrogation room in particular because among all the other things it would have it would have a supply of suitable drugs, meaning that the problem of keeping either of these guys from waking up without having to become a cold-blooded murderer was now solvable. So one shot of pentothal for you, and one shot for you, and we strip you to your skivvies and strap you to these handy prisoner restraint tables specifically designed to hold even large and strong men absolutely helpless because torture chamber. That plus a couple of gags and noselines for oxygen (never leave someone gagged for a prolonged period of time without ensuring airway, otherwise you just probably committed manslaughter if one of them so much as coughs up some spit or clogs their sinus) and now I can get some peace and quiet and a couple of hours to work with your gunbelts, your weapons, your body armor, and all the various electronic and mechanical implements and chemicals that Coil's fully-stocked interrogation chamber has available for repurposing.

Now, at this point my tactical tree had a fork. If I was capable of cracking the communications barrier around the bunker from inside this room, then I'd of course do that and call the cavalry right now.

But a quick survey of available resources told me that unfortunately I couldn't. While there were several possible exotic transmitters I could have built with available resources the problem is that an exotic transmitter requires a matched exotic receiver, which obviously wasn't available yet. Nobody would be listening for a hypothetical quantum-entangled point to point unit or similar, because I'd have needed to already set up the other end of that pair on the outside before I'd been yoinked in here. So that route was closed. And as for other possible routes, any message outward would need either Internet access for Dragon, standardized radio frequencies for the police or the PRT, or telecom for either… and from this room that was zero for three, because all three of those were of course commonly known methods of communication and Coil wasn't going to miss any bets at closing out options that he already knew about.

Which meant I'd have to get at least a partially useful set of walking-around gear done before I dared to leave this room, because I'd have to get next to an exterior wall and where I could actually touch the conductive mesh grid that shielded this base so I could turn it into a giant antenna instead. Well, I had seen those construction workers walking around during my trip to the clinic earlier today, and the mud on their boots had meant they were working either on the lowest-level drainage or else with an exterior wall open to make a new tunnel or similar. So that where I'd already mentally plotted out I'd go next.

And thus I spent my remaining time hurriedly working in here preparing for that next move, refitting one suit of the guards' body armor as best as I could for myself and supplementing the guards' own weapons with custom ones of my own (I was hardly going to be throwing away their pistols like some horror movie ingenue, but that didn't mean I wanted lethal force as first option either). And also finding and assembling the parts necessary for my doomsday option.

Now, I really, really did not want to use that doomsday option. But if I fucked up somewhere along the way or underestimate his timeline-splitting powers and Coil somehow got me in his grasp anyway and was about to kill me, then I wanted even less to not have it available to use. So with a grimace I finished assembling it, then closed the case and firmly told the detonator it was not time to arm yet so stay in standby mode until further notice please. Then I stuck it in my pocket and-

Shortly before I'd finished the forty-five minutes I'd allotted myself for arming up my phone insistently beeped a very particular alarm I'd programmed into it ahead of time. One of the preset alert flags I had my data-miner set to look for had just tripped. Coil's sources had just sent in the word that my father had made the phone call as he'd been ordered to, and the men on duty in the communications center had received that data and logged it in the files here as they'd been ordered to. The Dragon clock was now officially ticking, and it was almost – I checked the time display and saw that it was 10:09 pm -- almost two hours before I'd expected the earliest window for it. Well, that's why I'd built some flex time into my schedule tonight instead of just waiting in the box until almost midnight. Time to make the call.

* * * *​

"Their orders are to absolutely not allow you any opportunity to regain consciousness before taking you but to ensure that you are taken alive." I wrapped up, my voice synthesizer letting me do a seamless interpretation of the man that the base's personnel files had flagged as Coil's aide-de-camp. The internal surveillance recordings of the base -- it was just like Coil to actually tap his own base's phones to make sure nobody was talking behind his back and a very convenient habit for me that he had – had provided me with enough samples of Creep's or anybody else's voice around here that I could imitate or any of them that I wished over the line. It had certainly worked just fine for me when I'd used Coil's own voice against my guards.

And there we go. Coil has now been told exactly what he least needs to hear to convince him that he needs to drop any timeline he's holding outside this base and turtle up in here pronto. From now on he'll be frantically splitting choices in his command center trying to react to this horrible unplanned emergency as best he can and exploring multiple options at once, but all of the splits will start from inside this bunker and that means if he wants to get away from me now he'll have to do it the hard way, by actually running. John's memories knew the real nature of Coil's power as it had been clarified by the author of Worm. That it was a highly specialized variant of real-time precog and not actually living in two timelines. Only Coil ever perceived any of his 'dropped' timelines. For anybody else, if you could see the real Coil then you already knew you were in the timeline that Coil had kept.

And he'd kept this one, where he was in this base. He couldn't leave by collapsing time now, he'd have to actually get up on his feet and march himself out of here. And who was more likely to leave here first, the master of his domain who considered this to be the safest place he could normally be or the escaping prisoner whose primary goal was to find a hole and use it ASAP?

I'm finally one ahead of you, Coil! I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me!

Now to be fair, what was actually going to happen would be that the instant Coil gets to his command center he'll find out Creep didn't actually call him and there's no PRT emergency whatsoever – or at least not yet -- and that means about one minute from now he's going to go absolutely berserk. Which meant things would now turn into a race. Could Coil find and kill me before I could find and use an out-dial channel? Well, now we'd find out. I'd have much preferred having this over and done with before he'd even know I was gone, but I had to start moving before Dragon interrupt because once the PRT was genuinely alerted to my absence then Coil would start going berserk anyway.

So, external events were going to set my schedule even if it wasn't quite the schedule I wanted. But hey, this was still infinitely better than being stuck in that goddamned box. And things like this were why amateurs made step by step plans like a Mission Impossible episode and professionals made plans based on setting and achieving individual sub-objectives that could all be leveraged towards incremental process towards the main objective even if some of them didn't work. Because of course the original battle plan was going to get interrupted by something unforeseen as soon as the enemy began to move. That's why he was called the enemy.

I clicked the touchscreen and started the countdown for my Chaos app, a voice-synthesizer chatbot lurking in the heart of Coil's command center and primed to start giving out false commands and replies on the radio as per an action-response table I'd encoded to go off trigger words. I wasn't coding my own AI or even VI on top of everything else I'd done in the past couple of hours but the point was to have false alarms and sightings, of me and other things, pop up across the base and keep disrupting their search patterns as Coil's men commenced their sweeps. And to do so in an automated manner instead of requiring me to stay still and keep fiddling with my cell phone as opposed to getting on with my business. And to do so in a statistically charted fashion that would hopefully suggested scattered genuine sightings mixed with the fog of war instead of my algorithms playing helter skelter.

The sudden sound of the base's red alert klaxon told me that Coil had reached the command center and found out the first layer of my deceptions. The endgame was now afoot, and may she who makes the fewest mistakes win.

Let's roll!

---

Author's Note: It broke off here because I'll need an interlude for the Dragon interrupt and accompanying reactions to that. Also because the following moments will be the most critical of the action setpiece and while I know where I'm starting and I know how I'm ending, I'm going to need to get everything in the middle as close to exactly right on the timing and setup as I possibly can.

But yes, kudos to SirWill and Sethraw for figuring out that 'Creep' was Taylor spoofing the call to Coil. Now he's dropped his only hope of not being stuck in the bunker when the entire mess comes crashing down on it.

Oh, there was a deliberately left clue in the prior Coil segment that the call was fake; the fact that the Coil in the other timeline at home was not getting a run signal being urgently phoned/texted/etc. to him at roughly the same moment to hurry up and get the fuck out of the house before Armsmaster and Miss Militia arrived, as sent to him from his duty watch officer in the bunker. Who would of course have been getting the PRT alert in that timeline at that time as well. If it had been real.

If Coil was really the split-second supergenius crisis manager he believed he was, then he'd have noticed that. As is, he made that one fatal little mistake that, as Sherlock Holmes could testify, is all you need to catch even a man like Moriarty. (As to why Taylor took the risk, its because sometimes you just have to take the shot you're given.)

And as Holmes also pointed out on another occasion, sometimes the curious incident is what the dog doesn't do in the night-time.

 

[Blade4]

I mean if alec did hand himself over he could probably join as a probationary ward, considering he was being mastered and needs protection from heartbreaker. But only if the branch really wants someone like him despite his many flaws because their desperate. Also it would require much more work then just doing his own solo thing so its likely that he wouldn't particularly want to join unless he is really forced.

Click to shrink...

Problem is Alec is a son of heartbreaker with a related power and a long list of serial murder and rape. He stopped because he got away from his family but that was both to better hide and because he is so damaged and jaded he could care less. He has committed enough atrocities he derives no pleasure from it. No hero team would accept him for fear of waking up in the night unable to control their bodies and he does not want to be a hero. Or villain that matter. Put him in a room with a full gaming system and movies and he probably just sit there for lack of drive for anything else. Frankly the prt would rather use him as a canary precedent and put him in the birdcage. This last crime even gives a great precedent. Don't kidnap, perspective, wards out of their homes in the middle of the night. Taylor might not have signed the paperwork but she did agree to a apprenticeship...

Bitch has a way higher ability to join up, her initial charge was not her fault + during her trigger and many of the following ones could be based on her being mentally challenged and being pursued. She would also likely to be able to work with the PRT reasonably well if they treat her decently. Depends if piggot feels its worth the effort to do so and worth the risk that she doesn't cause a PR disaster while shes getting accustomed to everything.

Click to shrink...

Bitch is in her own way even more damaged than Alec. She fundamentally cannot understand people and from her perspective others forever betray and hurt her. She only joined the team because coil promised her a pack and safety and well she has no pack and she is not safe. She is going to want to grab her dogs and just run and this time she probably never trust anyone again. To her any deal The prt puts in front of her are more lies to uses her then stab her in the back. The prt if when they catch her will either put her in a asylum or in the birdcage with Alec as a package deal.

Sorry the lateness of this. Meant to type it in morning but then stupid shit happened.

 

[gaouw]

Ohhhh...

Here we go!

 

[Gallant]

Hot damn, Coil was a pain in our necks for years and totally deserves this. That was extremely satisfying to read. My only real criticism is that this chapter did not feel like it was 4.2k words, the action flowed so naturally. So I guess that isn't really criticism, now that I think about it?

Anyway, all that aside thank you kindly. I'll always appreciate new chapters for my favorite stories.

 

[larslolxz]

John's memories knew the real nature of Coil's power as it had been clarified by the author of Worm. That it was a highly specialized variant of real-time precog and not actually living in two timelines. Only Coil ever perceived any of his 'dropped' timelines. For anybody else, if you could see the real Coil then you already knew you were in the timeline that Coil had kept.

Click to shrink...

Um, what? I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. Actually acting on this would make the 'fake' Taylor make mistakes because of the assumption that she's real by default. It's not like the people in Coil's fake timelines are suddenly going 'oh, I'm fake, but let's act exactly as I would otherwise because otherwise it would be unreliable' or something like that. The entire point of Coil's power is that even if it's actually precognition, the only way it's distinguishable from real timeline-splitting-and-collapsing is that Tinkers can't build some kind of bullshit universe bridger to take advantage of that.

 

[Jiro_T]

It's not even like Sarah can plausibly be ignorant of this possibility. Youth Guard's entire shtick is trying to use the power of PR to keep the PRT from hosing the Wards program. It thus follows that YG's activities are actually known to the public.

Click to shrink...

Since YG was invented by Wildbow for the PRT Quest, this is absolutely one of those cases where it's Wildbow's worldbuilding that's messed up rather than the character being stupid. Once he invented it, it retroactively existed in Worm when Sarah could have used it, but since Worm was already written, the characters weren't written as actually knowing about it.

 

[Kellcat]

TaylorSI is in an interesting situation, and thanks to WoG, we know that Coil really is in the base, so the effects of splits are limited...on the other hand, her belief that she is real!Taylor and not simulation!Taylor is only correct in reality and incorrect in the simulation, so hopefully simulation!Taylor (assuming she is real!Taylor) won’t reveal too many clues to Coil and let him get a leg up on real!Taylor...

 

[sandmanwake]

Less than two hours later I had everything I needed for the next phase. Anything and everything on the network short of whatever secured machines or databases Coil had kept physically segregated from the internal LAN was mine for the taking.

Click to shrink...

Steal all his bases and cash. Steal all the cash of his mercs also.

the problem of keeping either of these guys from waking up without having to become a cold-blooded murderer was now solvable.

Click to shrink...

Bah! Pretend to be Coil and send some of his mercs to eliminate the Undersiders as loose ends.

 

[Trek]

All this stuff and even killing coil is vastly devalued by the fact that by now because of outside interference a lot more people will know you are a parahuman. You really need a plan of how do deal with that and minimize that damage after you finish up here. It wouldn't be very good to get blindsided and get put in even worse situations just because you didn't plan ahead.

Mc should totally steal all of coils stuff that she can. Cripple him even if he can escape!

 

[jai97]

It broke off here because

Click to shrink...

It would be great cliffhanger?