Gideon

Lets be honest. I19 more or less had to be this week, if they didn't want it to have to wait till the middle of december (no games company in their right mind is going to schedule a major content update/launch/etc against a WoW expansion launch, no matter what you think of Wow itself.)

Actually, I have a take on the well thing that's completely compatible with both the "well as source" and the "just our origins but deeper" thing.

The Well is a Destiny Engine.

How your powers and skills work, what you do, is determined by your origin, yes. You can be that gadgeteer genius or the deep mage. What happens when you encounter the Well, especially in our case of the longer, slower path, is it grants you a far stronger potential destiny. You can create better gadgets, tap deeper power levels, become a paragon of your species/mutant ability. The way in which the extra power the well's thrown into what I shall choose to call the Thread of Your Life expresses itself can be dependent on how your life already works (deeper insights into tech/magic/etc) or if you want it to, it can dump all of that into raw power (Statesman, etc.) Whichever way it works, the upshot is the same, your ability is improved. You have a greater potential for power and ability. The expression of that power is down to you. This is how I can reconcile the Well existing as a mystical power, and yet still have someone like Josie Ironside be improved by incarnatehood, as that extra push of Potential Destiny manifests itself in a stronger, deeper, more skillfull ability to crate machines, as well as cybernetic upgrades, et al. Damia deepens her connecttion to the place/idea she draws her powers from, etc.

As a matter of fact, this base concept was part of the background for Savage Angel from way back. An "unto every generation..." chosen one schtick, where the god that engineered it hadn't actually specified how the hero would get their power, leaving the universe to fill in the gaps (being a god means you're powerful. doesn't necessarily mean you're all that smart.) So the chosen one got her powers due to being a nano-aug which was to save her life after a building fell on her. Tech powers, mystical excuse.

The Well is Possibility. The Well is the Potential for Power. The Well is an ability to add "Roll twice, take your preferred result" to your characters skill roles (oh sorry, wrong game.)

What I do not believe the well is is a big fat "You're all magic now."


All that's left to say is Unmei kaihen!

This does indeed appear to be composed entirely of Win and Awesome, topped with Awesomesauce. A Winner is EU.

Nah seriously, quite aside from the technical gains, it goes some way towards fixing the perceived gap between the way they treat the EU an the US. Which is good.

It's now avaiable on the EU side at least. I assume this means it's available for everyone.

Officially speaking, as others have stated, if I have my characters interact in story or background with canon NPC's, then mine are always, like Desdemona, a footnote. The principal I apply to it is most famously formulated as:

"For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday"

I actually made this a large part of Sylpheeds backstory. The company whose resources that were used to build her were bought out by crey, who decided they wanted their "property" back.

Cue one huge court case and a lot of fighting off goons later, and she's got recognised citizenship and self-determination.

Crey still don't like it though.

In terms of Cosmic Power levels, I think I mainly just have the one, which is Sara. Her invulnerability... lets just say it has pretty much fluctuated as plot demanded, but she's still harder than anybody really has a right to be. Attack power wise, she's not insane, but for the most part, stripped of the various bits that crept in due to overenthusiastic plot and background hole-filling, her main godlevel power is her inability to be killed by pretty much most forces available that wouldn't also take out several important things (like most of the surrounding countryside.) Maybe paint her in with the Jason Caine thing. You can knock her down, but killing her permenantly is a lot lot harder.

As for how she wound up that way... it wasn't intended, she just kept getting extended as plot demanded. I had a long conversation with Birdy at one point about how she'd wound up much harder than she strictly needed to be, and I think that's still true. We create these ideas, go "wouldn't it be cool if..." and before you know it, your nice little mobile fortress is surviving the pheriphery of nuke blasts. It's a slippery slope.

The others were designed to be much more street level. Damia, I just have to keep a lid on since she has the potential for godcreep.

Cosmic-level plot? Sounds fun. means I can wrangle the upper end of my character roster into action.

Josie muttered a naughty word or two, under her breath ::Bodi, we're out of time. Powering up transmitters. Take my signal and rebroadcast, we're locking him out of bomb control.::

::Got him. Encrypted decay-cycling signal, straight out of the movies that one, from his belt device. I think we can break it and spoof it, if we had to. But he's going to let it run down in 30 minutes.... Either he's suicidal, broken enough to blow us all to kingdom come regardless of whether he gets what he wants... or this thing stinks like a week old fish.::

While Jo wrestled with the encryption sequence, with the aid of the ad-hoc system that she and BODI had built, she was letting her optical prosthetic do Lord Recluse costume do pattern-matching.

::We need someone to work out if those bombs are really there. If there's something in nanotech that can give a blast yield like he claims, it has to be pretty high-end stuff. Know any nanotechnologists? I'm still betting he's nutzoid though.::

::I'm into the network. Trackback's slow going, but at the very least it gives us an eyeball on the security grid. Linking into the tacnet now.::

Jo was working overtime now, her neuralware linking through Bodi, to the one borrowed core. Not enough, but where Joanna could stay withn the bounds of the strictly legal, Josie could bend those edges like crazy. A few threads on a mainframe in Paris. Some more on a high-end gpgpu beowolf cluster at a university in Adeleide. From a hundred fleeting moments of CPU time in a hundred places, she built a distributed system, all funneled back through her own expert systems, tied into the BODICIA core. A fearsome analytical engine, at the joint call of one of the most devious technical minds to step out of the Islands, and one of the most complicated AI's yet produced. This she bent to the task of isolating, extracting and quantifying the Spoiler's signal, checking for patterns, algorithms, to create a mimicing signal, right down to any sequences being broadcast.

::Right, I'd guess this scrawny little goit will probably be using a signal based on a seeded generator algorithm to create a unique sequence, precisely to avoid what we're trying to do. All we have to do is reverse engineer it... oh, this is so on.::

::I'm on it.::

Latching onto the omnipresent wireless signal, Jo began the subtle and intricate work of decrpyting and subverting the signal to lead her back down to the routers, and thence back into the machine being used by the Spoiler's men. Reading the data-flows, she began to eavesdrop on the network traffic, hunting back for encryption keys, passwords, and other fun telltales.

Buffered from the nastier effects of the shock pulse as she was by some of the more *ahem* interesting parts of her augmentations, it still took Jo a good half second or so to completely find her feet again. Standing near Bodi, her own cybercoms systems kicked in, frequency-hopping encrypted tranceivers uplinking to a 'forgotten' extra transponder conveniently bolted to the side of Paragon Newssat 7, which tight-beamed the signal to a small bunker somewhere outside Paragon.

ISOSLink> cmd powerup Battlegroup P1 auth-key <************************************************* >

Units Helm-6, Gunnar-4, Bagman-4 Power 100%
Units Rafe-2, Venus-2 Power 100%
Unit Friday-2 Power 100%

All units report upgrades complete.
Readiness Status Descriptor: "Arrrrrr."

ISOSLink> cmd transport lock-coord def danger-close.
Transport Locked. Transport when ready.

ISOSLink> _

All of this took perhaps 6 seconds. Now, of course, she had the big dilemma. A younger, more callous Jo would perhaps have called the summon right there, and be damned to the consequences, but.. maybe it was old age, who knew? She remembered quite well what it was like to be collateral damage. There'd been quite enough of that. Keeping the command channel open, she opened one tight beam channel to BODI, at the same time as setting her E-War rig into passive snoop, listening out for C&C channels for the troopers, for the bombs, anything she could get her hands on.

Bodi, you reading me?

Joanna took the swagbag with a grin. "Thanks, I foresee a good haul today. Wasn't planning to turn up originally, but the amount of fun to be had persuaded me. Plus, I find outstanding specifications quite fascinating too." Stowing her swag, she looked around at the crowds, hero fans and heroes alike. "I should do this sort of thing more often, seems there are some overlooked perks. A girl could get to like the relaxed nature of it all."

This was a calculated risk.

Ordinarily, when walking the streets of Paragon, 'Joanna Ferro' would be carrying a small array of fuzzers, diffusers, and countermeasures designed to intercept unwelcome attention. Stepping into a room with this many heroes and this much coverage, however, would have rendered all of that not just useless, but possibly a liability. No, this time she was just going to have to rely on good, old-fashioned brazen courage and a little bit of makeup. Truth be told, this way was almost more exciting. Risky, but exciting.

Ambling merrily along, Jo scanned the program pamphlets in her freebiebag, making a general line for the Vigil stands, first of all. Just another of the crowd of happy hero fans come to take part in the festivities. Reaching the UV stands, she grinned. "Did I miss anything good?"

I'm also still here. Started about 2 or three weeks after EU launch, only had one three-month gap, when I just burned out on the game.

Another avatar drops into the redside. Female, black leather, black shirt, black mask/bandanna showing the lower half of a chromed face. the userID and user comments proclaim this paragon of chromed virtue to be "The Dread Pirate Roberts." With smaller footnotes going "Day 17. People still expecting me to be male. Hilarity ensues." After a brief pause for log reviewing...

"Of course, anyone who believes the tripe they put in the Rogue Isles Protector isn't even worth the effort of worrying about. We all know about heavy handed tactics, on both sides of the debate.

Point is, there could be any one of half a hundred people responsible for what happened.Point is, you're blowing the whole damn thing waaaay out of proportion. Conspiracies, wars, cats and dogs living together, the end of the world. This isn't a war. it's a couple of skirmishes in contested territory. if the Priest did get offed by someone on the righteous side of things, and believe me, that's just as likely as revenge from the wrong side of the tracks, then I'd imagine it's someone who didn't like his attitude and decided to rid us of one turbulent priest.

Basically, what you have here is what the corpus delicti would have referred to as "an eye for an eye." Whether that's right or wrong, good or bad, I leave to the peanut gallery. As for this grand Conspiracy of Unusual Size? I don't think it exists."