Alea Iacta Est - a Worm AU Fanfic

Realistically, she would have to have physical contact with each of the dice she is throwing in order to control them well enough to get a reading.

 

Makes sense to me. Message length limited by how many dice she can fit in her little fists, then.

 

Hm, so if Taylor were to scry for "Closest date for a mass convergence of capes with atleast +5 cape deaths and +5 civilian deaths" She might hit an Endbringer attack?

 

It'd be easier to take a D100 and then type out a sheet of paper listing names of capes. "Which one of these capes will X, Y, Z, in the nearest future?"

 

Perhaps then. "What is the closest date the Endbringer alarm will sound?"?

 

Still worth it!

 

If they can do that then she's properly broken the system, have a map of the world covered in lights with one for every country and all numbered. Ask it when the light will next turn color X, have smaller maps of every country showing lights all over it numbered from 1 to 1000, if the country is too big split it up into areas first and then individual places and ask again which light will next turn color X. Finally ask how many days until the light lights up as that color, given just 4d10 they get a few decades into the future.

Then all you need is a system to turn the lights different colors depending on what happens and to not screw up, have Dragon or someone monitor it if needed, and you've got the ability to accurately predict the time and location of any major event. As long as the system never changes anyway as that invalidates past results. For predicting events past the next one just change it to something like which will be the second light to turn color X. All of that and all of a sudden those blind spots really aren't blind spots anymore.

Although that makes something come into question, since she can accurately predict someone choosing something in the future that would mean she can effectively transmit information from the future. What happens if during a talk to Armsmaster for example they decide in one year he'll write down his biggest discovery over the year, as it's nowhere in a blind spot she could possibly then roll to figure out what he'll write in a year which should give him a discovery from a year in the future helping his tech jump. However then she can tell him that discovery which means he'll have a different one in a year that if she used her power again she'd also see. This could even be applied to normal science, so can she use her power to send science or tinkers years ahead of their curve? Interesting question to be sure.

Also a thought on predicting stuff, could she do something with a bag of tiles similar to HGttG? Have a bag of tiles and just reach in and throw a handful down? Because that deals with the letter issue quite effectively, although even if you're just rolling d20s you get nearly a character per die so who knows?

 

Did you forget Armsmaster is a Miniaturization Tinker? Cue Taylor rolling about 3000 0.1mm dice that she has rolled around in both hands for ait and then the result is read by Dragon in realtime using her sensors as Taylor scoops up another handful of tiny dice.

Don't forget that actual D100's exist and he can probably make some small tesseracts for Taylor to roll if they want some really fancy messages.

 

All good ideas.

There are custom d30s with the alphabet printed on them, you know ...

 

Depending on how bullshit her shard's interpretation mechanism is, just go for the jugular and bust out the Tarot.

 

I'm surprised that Danny didn't ask Taylor to predict the lottery as proof-of-power.
Using said prediction to win money might be illegal, but the act itself would help illustate the breadth of what Taylor's powers can do.


I wonder whose version of the power would count as superior.
On one hand, Taylor doesn't seem to have any issues with thinker headaches or limited amounts of questions.
On the other hand, Dinah gets actual visions that aren't always dependent on her knowing to ask just the right question.

 

Ayup.

I'm thinking Thinker 15-20 if our assumptions are right and the only limitation to her power is the medium she's using?

 

I just had an amusing thought. They attempt to use the 30 side word dice, but her powers refuse to cooperate until the extra four spaces are replaced with <space> < , > < . > and < ' >.

As befitting of its host being the daughter of an English teacher, the Probability Shard refuses to talk to them unless it can have impeccable grammar.

 

This one jumped out at my inner Spacebattler: if she can make toothpicks fall where she wishes, can she do that with projectiles, like bullets, tranq darts, or the Tinkertech quarrels they gave Sophia? Does it matter if she's dropping them, or can she control thrown or otherwise accelerated objects?

EDIT: For that matter, what about beams or bolts from an energy weapon, if she gets one?

 

That's a tricky one. Bullets aren't random in the way dice are and I don't think she's "Lucky" in the way of Matrim Cauthon so she probably (forgive the pun) can't fire blindly...

 

That's why I quoted the bit about toothpicks landing 'wherever on the table she wanted,' rather than some other part.

 

That's brilliant! Throwing darts at a map is a legitimate method of choosing a random location, all of those discussions of how to choose complex pieces of data like locations have been thrown out. Just take a big map/calendar/word list and throw darts at it. Where is the next S9 attack? *throws dart at map* When will it be? *throws dart at calendar* What ice cream flavour would be best to get at the store? *throws dart at list of ice cream flavours* What cape is the best chance of killing the endbringers? *throws dart at list of capes*

The possibilities are simply endless and just require access to some blu tack/pins, a printer, and some darts.

 

There's that, too (very useful), but I was more thinking of combat applications (because that's the stereotype of 'what Spacebattlers think about with any new superpower/invention').

 

The issue is that her power is based off predicting things so unless you can figure out how to have them determine something it's not viable, I mean throwing a dart at a map is choosing a location so valid, but would throwing a knife at a person count as choosing a body part?

Guns are a no go though as she has to touch what she's using her power on so throwing weapons is basically going to be a limit as it's been stated she loses too much control to accurately do things if she's touching them everything she uses. It's the reason why hundreds of mini dice wouldn't really work, there is no way to make sure she touched all of them and no way to tell which ones she touched so no way to tell which bits of the data is accurate.

 

You forget that these are specifically Tinkertech mini-dice that she rolled around in her hands before tossing them. A miniature indicator light to determine weather an individual die has had skin contact since it was last reset is child's play. Determining the message is also beyond simple with Dragon's sensors reading each die as they come to a stop and putting the message in order that they come to rest. She doesn't even need to do it herself since she is limited to human level processing speeds, a non-tinker programmer could come up with a program to do that so long as that had access to sensors with high enough fidelity in the first place.

Regardless that was just for amusement sake and would be unneeded unless the Probability Shard is particularly verbose, which would be entirely possible if you mix it with my crack suggestion that it demands it be allowed proper eloquence before it starts talking in sentences rather than raw percentages.

 

Or you take my suggestion for pulling stuff people write down from the future to send science hurtling decades into the future in a matter of hours. That'd require high quantity data transfer. A bigger issue would be that the data suits the output, simply colour coding the dice or something might not work and you'd very possibly need a way of figuring out what order they're in that Taylor is capable of without needing high tech sensory data or her power would fail to order them correctly as it's likely based off her perception of the medium.

All tricky stuff really.

 

I believe theorycrafting is going to be put on hold until we can see how Taylor is able to interpret the data. There seems to be some leeway since she is able to instinctively place a decimal in a number series from her dice, but she was also unable to immediately discern that 00-0 meant that Danny held nothing in his hand.

 

Some of it sure, some can be done anyway with overly complex wording such as rolling a d8 for the first three bits of the ascii representation of the text she's trying to divine. Something like the darts on a map thing on the other hand should be pretty reliable as it's super easy to interpret and understand.

 

Okay. When she tosses something, she has to have enough skin contact to be able to control how it leaves her hand, otherwise it's just tossing at random. So "hundreds of mini-dice", tinker tech or not, is right out.

The shard may or may not draw a distinction between throwing something for information-gathering and throwing with intent to injure.

Likewise, darts are not dice. The shard may also draw a distinction there as well.

She can get a percentage chance of something happening in the future, especially as the act of prediction may well alter the chance of the thing happening. She can not (at the moment) determine an exact location for anything; not without asking "Chances that it will happen at x location" or "Chances that it will happen on this city block". And she can't even do that unless she would have learned that information on her own without using her powers.

She may or may not be able to get extra information via Scrabble tiles or using a die to create coded messages. Of course, if the message requires decoding, and so she didn't know the meaning of it when she threw the dice, that may not work either.

 

So use toothpicks instead of darts? Toothpicks aren't dice after all and they do work with her power.

Now excuse me while my brain tries to reconcile her being able to predict pseudo-random events accurately as shown by guessing the page number of a book they hadn't opened to a page yet while being unable to predict the result of another pseudo-random event like what light someone turns on next (where the lights are on a map and represent S9 attacks). Because that's proving tricky.

 

Taylor Hebert indirectly beats up everyone with her mind. I am so on board with this. Hopefully she can avoid both mere street-level crime fighting and being kidnapped for her power.

 

Because S9 attacks represent the culmination of many people making many decisions, and could be altered by the very fact of making the prediction (unless nobody reacted to the prediction at all).

Predicting the page number is a few seconds away, and it requires Danny to do one thing, which he intended to do, without looking at the dice (which might have altered his action).

Toothpicks are also small items which can fall in patterns.

Her shard sneers at people attempting to assign mere human 'rules' to its actions.