With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

Apparently, there's a mix of both time travel to directly look at the future and simulations, depending on the parahuman in question.

 

Part of the problem is that the author, Wildbow, has made a number of pronouncements, in various places, and they don't seem to be consistent with either each other or the text of the story. In consequence, canon tends to be assumed to be the text of the story (which sometimes seems to contradict itself; more than Taylor Hebert being an 'unreliable narrator').

Yes, I've read (most of) Worm, but not the newer (Ward) stuff. In theory, the Entities and their shards which give cape's powers do not have time travel, it's all simulation. Ridiculously expensive in terms of power usage simulation, if you want the really good stuff. The only 'time travel' in the story appears to be dimensional trickery, by shards, though 'time travel' may be how individual capes describe their powers.

Please realise, I may be completely wrong about the above.
(But, it's my best understanding, after having invested hundreds of hours in Worm and Worm-related stuff. Yes, I'm mad. )

EDIT

You think the above is bad? The Entities appear (probably) to have FTL. And, Faster-Than-Light travel is, arguably, time-travel; does horrible things to causality. It gets horribly, horribly, messy, trying to figure-out what's up in Worm... Particularly when the author throws around ridiculously silly numbers, like 10^80 Earths (or, at least, parallel dimensions)...

Basically, think 'a wizard did it', and try and enjoy the story.

Spoiler: because you want the quote...

Spoiler: or, if you prefer...

A lizard did it.

 

There's a lot of fanon bullshit in the Worm fandom. This is one of the bigger pieces of it. (Also, that telepathy and souls don't exist in the Wormverse.)

Most precogs in Worm are just running simulations, because that's cheaper. Worm also has straight-up no-kidding time-travel and time-manipulation powers, but they're energy-inefficient, so most of the time the shards are just faking it, but that's not the same thing as saying they have to.

(The worst piece of fanon bullshit is from people who've read a lot of fanfic but not Worm itself, who look at abilities in Worm as though they're X-men powers, where everyone who does X is doing X in the same way, and they all have a logical basis that you can extrapolate from and game.

Abilities in Worm come from a piece of an alien supercomputer being connected to you, and that shard of a supercomputer personally manages your power. So, it's less "You can do X" and "A particular piece of a supercomputer is using a tiny fraction of its abilities to let you do X, so long as you're within the letter and intent of whatever rules it has". The entire point of this is for the alien supercomputer to gather data, so out of 100 parahumans who can do X, there might be 100 slightly-different ways they're doing X.)

 

Best guess based on modeling the available data is how Contessa gets around Path to Victory blindspots, so that seems likely.

I could see Coil's timeline simulation throwing major errors, but since Coil is likely to be killed as soon as Paul becomes aware of him... It's not a major concern.

 

... That's not how tattletales power works.
She has enhanced deductive reasoning, not mind-reading.

 

You're on to a loser, here... We don't know what's going on behind the scenes, at the shard level. Is there a shard that does telepathy, that her shard can tap for info, if pushed? (Not normally used as it used hideous amounts of power?) We really don't know.

 

Tattletale tried to figure out wtf Paul is and the shard probably went "wtf is this shit" and as a result Lisa collapsed.

WOG states that theres no true telepathy in Worm, not like you'd see in other comic book settings in DC and Marvel. Any pseduo telepathy is more of a combination of shard based precognition and physically messing with the brain.

Not saying the Shards couldn't eventually learn to do it but as of now no true telepathy exists. Plus Paul has interdimensional shielding and since all Parahuman powers are interdimensional most thinker powers will probably not work very well or at all on Paul.

 

Tattletales powers can best be described as Sherlock on steroids.

 

How her power works is actually explained quite clearly. She gathers information and plugs that data into her shard-entity-brain and it analyses it and pulls likely conclusions.

The more data she gives it/the more accurate the data, the closer the conclusions will be to truth.
It can't pull information from nowhere or 'tap into' other shards. Lisa is the one absorbing info for it, through her own senses.

It's sherlock Holmes super-deduction as preformed by an organic supercomputer plugged into her brain.

People just ignore that and chalk it up to mind-reading though, presumably because that's less effort to write about.

 

As funny as that is, I'll point out that Scion is a composite organism composed of independently-sapient components, and the sections getting repeatedly knocked out would probably have the offending data purged from them by the sections that haven't learnt it yet. The Entities have been around for a while; they've probably been exposed to attacks like that before, and figured out how to adapt to them.

 

Mr. Zoat finally dips his toes in Worm?



And Dear Lord, I'm dying here, waiting for that conversation between Halbeard and YL.

 

I'd be inclined to agree with you. TT/Lisa is a character who appears a lot, and her powers seem reasonably consistent. But, we still don't know, for sure, what's going on at the shard end. Evidence suggests The Warrior has basically given up, because of the death of The Thinker. So, the (possibly existing) shard-net is just drifting along.

If things were going better for the Entities, maybe they could shove info to Lisa's shard, that they wanted it (thus her) to 'know'? Instruct the 'new capability' acquisition shards to attack our YL SI? We just don't know.

Odds are that Taylor having Queen Administrator was one reason for her success, as (Warrior) shards would be inclined to listen to her, even before she was 'hacked' to be able to control parahumans (probably via their shards)...

Anything more? Please see my previous post.

 

Yes but it still has limits, it can’t magic info out of nothing. It can provide answers based on existing info and every little detail about the environment which goes unnoticed by people but it still has limits.

 

Shade's a high-tier threat to any of the JSA. (Except Flash of course. There is NO high tier threat to someone who can move at near light speed and think on attosecond timescales if he's being handled with even a modicum of realism. Which, of course, he never is because comics. Which is fine because he'd be the most boring superhero ever, so OP that he'd OPM look like wimp, otherwise. </tangent>) If I remember correctly he once gave the JSA a run for their money all by himself.

Regarding the Stargirl TV show....I've not seen it (and, honestly, considering that I spend a grand total of maybe 20 hours a year - most of that being a single show that puts out around 15 episodes every season - watching TV, probably won't), but it's really sounding like one of those shows that put something above telling a good story on the list of priorities. That seems to be happening a lot lately. It always results in really crappy shows and movies. Hell, it even happened to the latest season of the above mentioned TV show that's the only thing on TV I make any effort at all to keep up with, though I'm hopeful they learned their lesson from the backlash and brought on some decent writers in time for the new season.


....And now I have a sudden urge to finish reading Worm.

Didn't he have a wife and step-kids to take care of back on Thundara? Or is this...enough later in his timeline and that's no longer a concern? Considering the potential lifespan of an enlightened lantern he could easily outlive them.

If that's how it's supposed to work then there's some really shitty writing going on there even in the main story (which, full disclosure, I've not finished yet. I was somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 through it last time I read it and haven't gotten back to finish it yet). Some of the conclusions she gets to she does so with zero context clues. That's not super-deduction. It's straight up divination.

Which, granted, still isn't mind-reading. Which is also obvious by the fact that she's occasionally able to tell people things about themselves that they didn't know.

 

It definitely does tap into other shards.

Spoiler: Ward spoilers

When Victoria and the other members of Breakthrough visit Tattletale's shard in the shard-space, it displays images taken from the memories of Victoria's family members, taken from recordings that their shards had stored, and that Tattletale would have had no way of knowing about.

 

Keep in mind that even with all the data she has, she does fuck up at times and get things wrong, so it's isn't fullproof.

I haven't read Ward and I have no intention of doing so but I heard that it ignores and retcons stuff from Worm, not sure how true that is but it's something I've heard.

 

It's actually fairly careful about never showing all of the infomation she has access to.
She's noted to be spending her own free time digging up as much as she can about everyone online so she always has more data to feed into the Space Brain, just to cloud the issue so she can get away with more.

In her POV segments though (the interlude where we see her first meeting with Coil, when she's kidnapped by his goons) she makes some egregious leaps of logic (guessing someone's bank pin from a bunch of bullshit about him) but we never see if she was right about the bank pin, because before she gets to try it, everything she deduced about that guy is proven wrong and him and his teammates promptly kidnap her.

She is, see, seen to come to false conclusions when her infomation is flawed, or she simply doesn't have enough to plug into the shard-brain and it has to start making wild guesses.

Some of her deductions are... sketchy, because WB isn't doing proper sanity-checking on what info she's plugging in to reach which conclusions.
To be fair, that's always the problem with a non-genius trying to write the POV of a supergenius.
But that's a writing issue. An out-of-story limitation of the author.

In-story it's clear that her shard never pulls information from other people's brains or other shards or from the ineffible mind of the universe, or whatever other bullshit people come up with. Because those would be entirely separate superpowers that Tattletale does not have.

Tattletale's gimmick is making educated guesses based on things that she knows. It only goes by the things that she knows, or thinks that she knows.
Tattletale doesn't have any senses that should be able to deduce anything of really important from Lord Protector Paul.
She can't read his mind so she can't stumble onto his name, she doesn't know what a power ring is, she can't perceive magic, she can't perceive dimensional travel.

As far as she can tell, he's "floating glowing man with large energy weapon"
Which makes it interesting that she collapsed upon seeing him.

We don't know if entities can seize control of shards that are disconnected from themselves.
Thinker might have been able to do that, because recombining all the shards back into their full Entity Form was her job.

Warrior Entity is a dumb thug. He can't even put himself back together, I doubt he can hijack thinker-shards that aren't connected to him.

Uuugh.

The more wildbow writes, the less consistent his work becomes. I'm ignoring Ward, and the concept of shardspace.
Tattletale, As-She-Is-In-Worm, does not seem to have any mental connections to other people.

 

I think that Fate would be a better match up for the Shade.

Fate is a powerful sorcerer and while the Shade has been portrayed as being very powerful, Fate has beaten extremely powerful beings before.

The Shade can have Flash's shadow just kill him, while Fate most likely has protections against that sort of thing.

While it is possible that he outlived them, it is also possible that he gave them some way to increase their lifespan.

His step-kids are probably grown adults now so they don't him to take care of them.

Thundera is also most likely secure now, so he doesn't need to oversee it so much that he can travel to other universes.

The reason he's doing this could be because he wants to build civilization in other universes where it seems like civilization is on its last legs, or just to gather knowledge and resources.

 

Nope, Scion locks off his personal dimension to all forms of dimensional travel.

The moment Paul tries to throw an Endbringer into space is the moment it stops messing around and pops his head like a zit.

Most Shard abilities of that vein would bypass any ring generated barrier due to messing with space.

They have time looping abilities, not time travel.

Technically there is a telepathy Shard, the Entities just only rarely use it because it's a massive waste of power and has to be separately calibrated for each being it's used on.

 

No, the Warrior Entity only locked off the forms of dimension travel it knew about. Possibly by putting limitations into the shards being distributed, but that much is speculation on my part. External dimensional threats, especially those based on means that the Entities hadn't previously encountered, are still viable. Such is the nature of an Outside Context Problem.

Behemoth died in canon, and he didn't pull out all the stops in his final moments. The retaliation came in the form of new Endbringers that emulated the means of his execution: temporal powers for Khonsu, and coordinated parahuman abilities for Tohu.

The author has already stated that Lord Protector has defenses against interdimensional shenanigans exactly like what you're referring to here.

CITATION!

Holes in time, wells, echoes, slowed and accelerated time. Eidolon's second in command in Houston prior to Echidna, Dispatch, had the primary power to create a bubble of accelerated time around himself.

FURTHER CITATION!

The reason that they don't use telepathy is that the only data Entities would get from it is data that they passively gather without it. It's a waste of resources due to redundancy, not difficulty.

 

Lord Protector probably has all sorts of defences and ways to get around someone trying to manipulate dimensions.

He already has a way to travel dimensions, so it is extremely likely that he also has defences against dimensional manipulation.

He also has a vast database of advanced alien tech, so he most likely has all sorts of goodies in there to help him.

He doesn't necessarily need to get close to an Endbringer to kill them.

This version seems to try and conserve his energy, likely because he lacked a Lantern to recharge for a while, so he most likely tries to use less energy intensive ways of dealing with things.

Combined that with whatever advanced weapons he has all he would have to do is just shoot them from a distance.

Also I think the only Endbringer that could potentially give him any trouble would be Behemoth, due to his energy manipulation powers, and even that may not be a guarantee due to Lord Protectors advanced tech and power ring.

Leviathan can try to shoot him with water, but that probably won't work, Khonsu could try and manipulate time around him, but power rings tend to be resistant to time manipulation and he most likely has tech to help with that, Simurgh could try to attack him with debris or make Tinker Tech, but again that probably won't work, and her whole precog and psychological manipulation thing may not work on him as we've seen with Tattletale that he may be immune to Thinker powers,etc.

Again dimensional defences that he most likely has.

Paragon and renegade may have a fairly easy time of dealing with this setting and its various threats.

Paragon can just use FEED ME on the Endbringers and even potentially Scion to beat them.

We've already seen that it can beat reality warping powers, like those of Devlos Ungol, and said powers were derived from the tech left behind by a Multiversal level threat i.e. the Anti Monitor.

Renegade also has access to advanced New God tech, and it wouldn't be surprising if they have something that can deal with things like Scion.

Provide a link that proves this.

Not you quoting it or just repeating that, but an actual link where this is stated.

Also even if they do have telepaths, that doesn't mean they'll be able to read his mind since he most likely has defences against mental intrusion.

 

You're probably right in the context of a story. With a good writer taking some creative license it would be a fight. Like I said, it's a good thing that Flash isn't handled realistically.

When I think about theoretical fights with Flash my mind goes "Near light speed movement and attosecond reflexes. Everyone else is unconscious before they know they're in a fight." Which is what would logically happen. Even if it's his own shadow it's still being controlled by someone with normalish reaction times. But obviously that's not what happens in the comics because the people who write for Flash have the sense to not write him logically. In other words, they're better storytellers than me. There's a reason I'm always reading stories and never posting them.

And Fate? I'd imagine Fate would sever Shade's connection to the shadow dimension. Fight over.

 

No, it locked off all, there was a generated barrier.

Behemoth in canon died to Scion, and it actually did pull out all the stops in it's final moment, Scion just no sold it.

No Zoat has not.

None of that is time travel...

 

The Shade may be able to become intangible because of his shadow like nature, so the Flash may not be able to hit him.

It probably locked off all dimensional travel it knew about, so that leaves a very big chance that LP used something that he didn't know about.

 

While there's probably a dimensional black list for Shards, there does seem to be the ability to directly prevent travel.

Teacher created a device that can lock dimensional travel, which Khepri used on Scion before dropping a couple hundred Earths' nuclear arsenals on him.

It didn't do much because Scion, but it does point to there being a manner of blocking dimensional travel. There's no reason for Scion to have limited his personal kit after all.

 

This might not be a dimension travelling lord protector. The simpler answer is that we know he had plans for space travel and thundercats is on an alien planet in the same universe as worm.

Thundercat villains doing their thing to fight off entities with evil magic?

 

When I make assertions about canon, I provide a link to either the story update with the information, or a statement by the author of the story regarding the setting, coupled with a link to the source. I'm now holding you to the same standard: Link and quote where the barrier was made.

CITATION!

Any efforts by Behemoth to go nuclear were conventional enough that Grue was able to counteract them long enough for Scion to deliver the killing blow. Unless you want to argue that Grue is stronger than a fully unchained Endbringer...

FURTHER CITATION!

Darko was already diligent enough to provide the quote, but I don't want you to pretend that I failed to provide a counterargument to one of your positions due my deferring the task of pointing out an author post to someone else.

I'd argue that temporal acceleration is a form of time travel, but perhaps Epoch is more your speed? He can move things forward, back, or hold them in place in time for ten seconds.

 

Interesting theory, but it's probably still a dimension hopping thing.

And Lord Protector wouldn't exactly qualify as a villain.

 

Loath though I may be to defend Vae, the quote from Zoat says "interdimensional scanning" which is something different and distinct from "interdimensional shenanigans."

Granted, it would make those things much harder, but you don't need to see someone to fuck them up.

 

When you travel through dimensions, you're going to want to have some things on you that protect you from getting torn apart by the various shenanigans that may occur during the trip, kinda like astronauts tend to wear equipment and suits that prevents them from dying in space by suffocating or being exposed to radiation.

It would make perfect sense for him to have those types of defences when traveling to other universes.