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

[CrazyNoVa]

In my story, Thundercats Earth is a necropolis. Third Earth is way across the galaxy.

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Sorry, I meant the Thundercats universe where Lord Protector got stranded in.

 

[Vaermina]

On his own, yes. But with others, not so much. I agree that Paul might not be able to defeat Scion or the Endbringers by himself, but he would still be much more useful or versatile in a fight than any of the villains he's killed.

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His versatility doesn't matter unless it can grant him the exact same capabilities as the villains he's killed.

And it can't.

 

[Darko]

Endbringers/Scion are beyond a Lantern's ability to fight.

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And?

They're beyond the ability of most people in the setting to fight.

That doesn't mean that he can't be useful in helping people by evacuating civilians or bringing heroes on the scene much more quickly than anything else.

And Lanterns can fight the Entities and Endbringers, because they've done some truly bullshit things in various settings.

I want to point out here that the vast vast majority of settings with reincarnation tend towards the Sailor Moon end of the spectrum instead of The Mummy one.

Meaning this is just him insisting that the universe should run on his personal logic instead of him acting in a measured and sensible manner

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Or he doesn't wanna risk because he's freaked out and thinks it may not be worth it.

His versatility doesn't matter unless it can grant him the exact same capabilities as the villains he's killed.

And it can't.

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Yeah, it's not like a power ring can't create giant monsters like Lung or create spikes like Kaiser.

Oh wait, yes it can.

 

[CrazyNoVa]

His versatility doesn't matter unless it can grant him the exact same capabilities as the villains he's killed.

And it can't.

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Yes, it can. Power Rings are more than capable of doing those and then some. The abilities of villains like Lung or Kaiser can easily be replicated by a Power Ring. Hell, in Kaiser's case, I'd argue that Power Rings are even better, because they can transform and manipulate matter far better than he can.

 

[Vaermina]

Yes, it can. Power Rings are more than capable of doing those and then some. The abilities of villains like Lung or Kaiser can easily be replicated by a Power Ring. Hell, in Kaiser's case, I'd argue that Power Rings are even better, because they can transform and manipulate matter far better than he can.

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When I say "exactly the same" I mean exactly the same.

Power Rings can duplicate the effect, they can't duplicate the method, and for Worm the method is just as important as the effect.

 

[Darko]

Or even worse, because Widbow once chimed in on a thread about "what if a Superman SI showed up" and part of the explanation was that an alien being around suddenly means Scion has purpose again because safeguarding the cycle from alien interference is the Warrior not Thinkers job to handle and in Paul's case what do you know, there's a while planet right there, guarded by the guy interfering...

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An author on spacebattles once had his YJ SI show up on Earth Bet and Scion took notice.

He then promptly ran as far away as possible.

The reason he did this was because he also took a peek at the DC multiverse and saw the myriad things there that can and will turn him into paste if he gets any ideas.

 

[Lurking Shade]

But he's already not human, isn't he? So wouldn't trying to patch up his humanity just do nothing?

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As in figure out humanity well enough that emulating human emotions is no longer a weak point that lets you bully him to death. Being on my phone made it a bit inconvenient to grab the actual post but it's down below.

His lack of motivation and vulnerable, undeveloped humanity are his biggest weaknesses and the introduction of Superman to the setting counteracts those. Scion as an Eden-less entity as a mirror to a family-less Superman should get the input and reference points he needs to develop more as a human being and figure out how to manage being bullied to death, and having a Superman around gives him a job to do.

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As to what Zion's response would be, Zion doesn't categorise things into heroes and villains. If he killed all hosts in a large geographic area, that might draw his attention. Killing a relatively small number in a relatively small geographic area... Probably not.

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Might've misunderstood your post about his MO, I thought the plan was that he would be moving from location to location clearing out all the villains, because that would eventually be a failure point if it stabilized things too much, cut out intended supports to keep things running, or risked interfering with the end state of almost everyone having powers. But regardless the portal being there will ensure Zion's attention, dealing with and integrating unexpected variables is basically Zion's entire purpose for being there on the ground. Someone powerful showing up from nowhere especially through a permanent portal? That is getting forced into the cycle FOR SCIENCE!

(Part of Wildbow's comment on a reddit thread about "What if Superman ends up in Earth Bet)

Scion exists to handle unexpected variables along the lines of weapons the people might produce that somehow get past the thinker, shard interactions that scale beyond the test, or... aliens from another world. Yeah, Scion exists specifically to combat and manage forces like Superman. In the medium and even the long term, dropping a Superman into the picture means that Scion has a reason to exist, one that goes to his core functioning, core purpose, where the lack thereof is his biggest weakness. Superman as an unknown variable is a valuable variable, and any attempts to get home may be forestalled - Tinker makes a gate, uses Superman's signatures or whatever to key a way home, and Scion shows up to Still it.

Depending, they may ultimately fight (and a less dejected Scion with a purpose reinforced by thousands of cycles is no slouch), or Scion may employ other mechanisms, using the broader cycle. Having Superman trigger* and getting into his head & biology is definitely in the cards (especially when Supes is a family man that's potentially gone months or years without his family), and Scion as a trusted force calling Superman an Endbringer or going on the hard offense vs. Superman could in itself leave Superman with very few people willing to work with him. The trigger works if Scion needs that measure of control to manage this very powerful alien that's stampeding around the broader experiment, as is drawing more on the forces of the setting, like actively using the shard network with a hand on the rudder.

But in the end, Scion wants the cycle to continue and escalate, he wants to turn Superman into a caged beast that can contribute to the experiment, and he's equipped pretty much as a guard/management feature against superman isekais, with a fair few tools to handle even someone as strong as Superman. Invincibility penetrating shots (if he even deigns to shoot and doesn't just radiate that damaging influence in every direction, disintegrating any cover), back-end tools with the shard network, ability to step into other dimensions.

So Gold Morning doesn't happen because Scion doesn't throw a tantrum. His lack of motivation and vulnerable, undeveloped humanity are his biggest weaknesses and the introduction of Superman to the setting counteracts those. Scion as an Eden-less entity as a mirror to a family-less Superman should get the input and reference points he needs to develop more as a human being and figure out how to manage being bullied to death, and having a Superman around gives him a job to do.

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* Power doesn't matter as much as the fact that Scion is basically taking one part of his extended alien mass in another dimension and reaching into Superman's skull to have some leverage over his head. Stick him with more drawbacks than powers, send him down a path that has him as a contributor to the cycle, not an obstacle.

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[Steelplaza]

Entities and Endbringers

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villains like Lung or Kaiser

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for Worm

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Wildbow's comment

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I've been trying to hold my tongue, I've been trying real hard, but what the fuck people?!

You're going on about a setting that hasn't appeared in this story for years! To hell with Worm, to hell with Worm canon, to hell with Wildbow, and to hell with every character in that stupid web serial.

Come on, don't you have anything to say about the story currently in progress? You can even talk about Sailor Moon if you want; at least that's relevant since Endymion is going to be a continuing character for a while.

 

[boo600]

As in figure out humanity well enough that emulating human emotions is no longer a weak point that lets you bully him to death. Being on my phone made it a bit inconvenient to grab the actual post but it's down below.





Might've misunderstood your post about his MO, I thought the plan was that he would be moving from location to location clearing out all the villains, because that would eventually be a failure point if it stabilized things too much, cut out intended supports to keep things running, or risked interfering with the end state of almost everyone having powers. But regardless the portal being there will ensure Zion's attention, dealing with and integrating unexpected variables is basically Zion's entire purpose for being there on the ground. Someone powerful showing up from nowhere especially through a permanent portal? That is getting forced into the cycle FOR SCIENCE!

(Part of Wildbow's comment on a reddit thread about "What if Superman ends up in Earth Bet)

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The full quote, to be clear. Mostly because of things like the "YJ SI ends up in Worm, and Scion runs away stuff" - a lot of people really hate worm (without having read it) and write hate-mail for it, because they think it's Teh Competition for DC and Marvel.

Spoiler

I'll stress that I don't know enough about Superman continuity to remark too much on the Rebirth version specifically, will just assume comic version with a high baseline strength.

Standard superman could probably drive Leviathan into submission. Maybe not kill, and hurling Leviathan is harder than one might imagine with the water echo materializing matter between the grip and the giant, variably hyperdense scaled beast, but for all intents and purposes the end result is the same: the fight might go worse initially, especially if Superman tries frost breath, but Leviathan is down and out, Brockton Bay doesn't take a fraction of the damage it did in-story.

And, as happened in-story, Scion is liable to show up further into the fight. Instead of delivering a look of disgust to Eidolon, he gives a great deal of attention to Superman.

Short term consequence: Brockton Bay is saved.

Medium-term consequence: the shard network begins producing Endbringers that Superman can't stop that Eidolon could. Superman is forced to work with the top heroes to understand what's going on, there's mass panic, and things might even go more smoothly, in the medium run. Eidolon gets to be more of a hero with worthy opponents (but the power drain starts accelerating). This may lean to Eidolon being forced to tap into the real power source and start draining capes. Cue some back and forth on morality and whether it's right, even when Eidolon limits himself to taking the lives and power reserves of capes who are already dying (maybe at first when they've given consent in advance, but throw in edge cases and Superman believing he can rescue people, and ramping pressure from the new Endbringers...), cue a few Eidolon vs. Superman conflicts. Eidolon's powers give him the strength he needs to match and even beat Superman - a worthy opponent without needing an Endbringer.

I do know that Rebirth Superman supposedly heavily emphasizes family and being a leader. Being cut off from Lois and his kids while also facing a world that's in pretty dire straits may strain and test him a lot on levels that have nothing to do with super strength.

Cauldron is liable to intervene on some level, if Superman is honest about his origins, and try to tap him as a resource, but he's also a reporter and in trying to figure everything out, he might start to zero in on the fact that Cauldron is sketchy.

Jack Slash gets stomped, Siberian gets found out and stopped, the worst major players get handled.

Long term consequences: Gold Morning doesn't happen in 2013.

At the end of the day, the very reason the entities have a Warrior and a Thinker is that they exist to forestall unknown factors. In the absence of the Thinker Eden, Cauldron did arise and while their end goals are different their ultimate functionality is very similar to Eden.

Eden exists to forestall those scenarios where people might figure out what's going on, band together, and work around the problem (as happened in story, more or less). We see her doing this in the alternate history where Eden is around. She also does the finer tuning of processes and adjusting of experiment/shard-host interactions as required to manage everything.

Scion exists to handle unexpected variables along the lines of weapons the people might produce that somehow get past the thinker, shard interactions that scale beyond the test, or... aliens from another world. Yeah, Scion exists specifically to combat and manage forces like Superman. In the medium and even the long term, dropping a Superman into the picture means that Scion has a reason to exist, one that goes to his core functioning, core purpose, where the lack thereof is his biggest weakness. Superman as an unknown variable is a valuable variable, and any attempts to get home may be forestalled - Tinker makes a gate, uses Superman's signatures or whatever to key a way home, and Scion shows up to Still it.

Depending, they may ultimately fight (and a less dejected Scion with a purpose reinforced by thousands of cycles is no slouch), or Scion may employ other mechanisms, using the broader cycle. Having Superman trigger and getting into his head & biology is definitely in the cards (especially when Supes is a family man that's potentially gone months or years without his family), and Scion as a trusted force calling Superman an Endbringer or going on the hard offense vs. Superman could in itself leave Superman with very few people willing to work with him. The trigger works if Scion needs that measure of control to manage this very powerful alien that's stampeding around the broader experiment, as is drawing more on the forces of the setting, like actively using the shard network with a hand on the rudder.

But in the end, Scion wants the cycle to continue and escalate, he wants to turn Superman into a caged beast that can contribute to the experiment, and he's equipped pretty much as a guard/management feature against superman isekais, with a fair few tools to handle even someone as strong as Superman. Invincibility penetrating shots (if he even deigns to shoot and doesn't just radiate that damaging influence in every direction, disintegrating any cover), back-end tools with the shard network, ability to step into other dimensions.

So Gold Morning doesn't happen because Scion doesn't throw a tantrum. His lack of motivation and vulnerable, undeveloped humanity are his biggest weaknesses and the introduction of Superman to the setting counteracts those. Scion as an Eden-less entity as a mirror to a family-less Superman should get the input and reference points he needs to develop more as a human being and figure out how to manage being bullied to death, and having a Superman around gives him a job to do.

Even being super generous to Superman, I think it'd be unfair to give him the win vs. Scion, given what Scion is. I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's not a test of strength. It's a test of Superman being able to come to grips with the setting, Cauldron, getting past the various obstacles and come to terms with the morally grey and political aspects of the setting (Dragon's fetus pilots, seen with X-ray vision, the PRT as a managing force). At this point, though, you run aground on the 'narratively satisfying for a superman story' part and the fact that even with all that Scion is supposed to be able to handle superman isekais, even without the thinker.

Except if it's a comic. Then there's a solid chance the writers change at the midpoint or the last leg of the story, key character elements like Scion being what he is get thrown out the window, we get a rushed resolution, something about the entities being responsible for Krypton exploding, Superman gets angry, kills Scion, goes home, vaguely unsatisfying ending.

(Fuck, I'm still so frustrated over that happening with some of my favorite comic runs.)

A big part of Worm's value is that it's a superhero story with A) A planned ending, and B) One writer. And it's written with a great deal of love for superhero media, and a great deal of hatred for the One More Day/Captain Marvel impregnated by her rapist with her rapist before leaving with her rapist/DC equivalent bullshit that keeps falling out of the gaping bile sacks of some of the writers there.

Kind of like WTR.

Spoiler

In any case, Paul (or any other lantern) would rapidly get Scion's attention, especially if he showed up to an Endbringer fight, simply because a lot of the powers the shards have come from aliens they've eaten. There's a tinker who works with superfluids, including ones that warp gravity, that comes from a race of crabs whose biology did that stuff.

And the entities know, and assume, that powers outside their control can and will be a threat to both them and the cycle.

Now, full-on mainline DC, where Superman punches through time and Hal Jordan can throw planets through the aether and just resist omnipotent beings wiping him from reality with a thought because muh WillPoWaH? Yeah, Scion loses a direct fight there no question. The ones that just fire beams of planet-destroying force? Probably lose, just because a locked-in Scion starts using PtV and social shards - something DC tends to lack equivalents to - and just gets them on his side, or to give him their ring/energy, etc, in a very Hellfire Club + Jean Gray kind of way, but with the corrupter in question legitimately having power.

Humans are the easiest part of cybersecurity to hack, unfortunately, and most of the heroes in DC are kind of dumb a lot of the time to preserve Teh Plot whilst endlessly stacking new powers on their pecs.

As for canon YJ... yeah, no, Scion actually can stomp in raw power, much less hax. He's faster than anyone but the Flash, and the Flash in canon YJ is... extremely unimpressive for someone who can supposedly move at light speed. Add in Stilling, used wisely - and Scion when he's not playing around is the Warrior, after all - and a simple omnidirectional radiance takes out the entire league, adapting to their defenses if necessary. Much less PtV.

This isn't a takedown of the YJ JL; it's kind of like throwing them up agaisnt Doctor Manhattan, but motivated. A spite match, and one that says nothign about their character, or how well they're written. Just powerscaling, and oh no, the low power setting lost against the cosmic character. Shock. Shock I say! Much calcs!

As for WTR... if Paragon wandered into that world, Scion would probably have to bust out PtV, and the tattoos would mean it would be expensive (though given the many redundancies in PtV specifically in how it gathers information, it would very much still work). If he went Ophidian Avatar, and avoided having a physical body as a weakness via transubstantiation, then a direct fight could bode poorly for Scion (though given the scale of fights Paul has struggled with against the Reach, Ophidipaul is definitely below the full Warrior Entity... who conveniently only exists in the space between Galaxies, before they crash onto a planet. Oh, well) It depends on how well PtV and Stilling would allow Scion to hurt the Ophidian, and would definitely involve some sort of hostage-equivalent or other emotional manipulation via PtV to prevent Paul from just chilling in the Honden or heading to another planet, which is something Scion currently can't do.

Or Scion would hide, start actively studying Earth's schizotech and Source connection (while dearly missing Eden, who specialized in this) before attacking anyone who could reveal him moments before they stumble onto him and killing them with PtV precog. Depending on how far his head is lodged up his ass; again, the entities like to steal the powers/tech of anyone they find. He's absolutely go gaga for the Garrick Formula and power rings, just as energy sources and physics bypasses to study. And barring storytelling, and Narrative, and giving him Eden outright, the twin entities would probably win and eat YJ Earth, just like the Reach did - at least until the Demons Three burst free and go hog-wild.

Now, given that the author still hasn't read Worm, and likely isn't going to have time to, I declare Worm to be Discussed. All the powerscaling has been done, in all the relevant scenarios. Everyone has been given the Face they deserve, while also being achknowledged as beatable in the circumstances they'd lose in. There's vagueness, so everyone can presume a grey area is just absolute victory for their favorites. We're done. Go home. Be with your families. (And so on)

 

[CrazyNoVa]

When I say "exactly the same" I mean exactly the same.

Power Rings can duplicate the effect, they can't duplicate the method, and for Worm the method is just as important as the effect.

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Care to elaborate? Why is the method just as important if the result is the same?

As in figure out humanity well enough that emulating human emotions is no longer a weak point that lets you bully him to death. Being on my phone made it a bit inconvenient to grab the actual post but it's down below.

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If Scion ends up becoming more sane, and less inhumane, isn't that a good thing, though? It means he might not go crazy in the same way he did in canon. He might even be glad at finding a possible solution for the heat-death of the universe if he regains his formerly lost sanity.
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[Ardy]

In my story, Thundercats Earth is a necropolis. Third Earth is way across the galaxy.

Lord Protector sees 'Scion' in the same way as most people on Earth Bet do; a pro-social Ash Beast, wandering around the place doing sporadic good deeds without rhyme or reason. If he takes him into account at all it's to consider if he could help straighten his mind out.

As to what Zion's response would be, Zion doesn't categorise things into heroes and villains. If he killed all hosts in a large geographic area, that might draw his attention. Killing a relatively small number in a relatively small geographic area... Probably not.

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Please Zoat, stop arguing worm! You have no idea what you're talking about and more and more irrelevant arguments are starting because you haven't read the book and the wiki/fics are shit at keeping things even remotely canon

 

[Zig]

So to try to get this on a completely different tangent, would an SI in Heroes recharge off of the solar eclipse?