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TheMushroomLord Member

I am me... I hope.

STATUS: Happy Halloween! 1 yr ago
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Status

Recent Statuses

1 yr ago
Current Happy Halloween!
2 likes
1 yr ago
I used to love the holiday season as a kid, but these days I’m terrified that the strange man in red is going to break into my home again and leave another suspicious package under one of my plants.
4 likes
1 yr ago
Alright, that's it! I've had enough of this damn heat. Bring me my matches, it’s time to burn the sun down.
2 likes
2 yrs ago
If there are 3600 rats living in my bones and I eat one every second, how long will it take me to eat all the rats? Assume each rat undergoes binary fission exactly once every hour.
2 yrs ago
Adventurer, the rats in my basement have merged into a fractal entity! I will pay you 4 silver coins to slay the infinite rat(s) in my basement.
6 likes

Bio

I am me... I hope.

Most Recent Posts

In Reborn in a Fantasy World, This Time I Shall...! → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
??? — Dilapidated Shack
@Zeroth@ERode@PKMNB0Y
It took Petra a bit to figure out the art of locomotion. Her first attempt had been to form herself into a ball and to rotate her ‘innards’ in such a way as to roll around, but actually forming – and more importantly, maintaining – a shape that refined had proven quite challenging, and she’d ended up giving up once it became clear that even if she could manage it her body simply didn’t have the rigidity to prevent itself from deforming under its own weight.

Her next attempt was to simply shift her mass along the ground, which worked, but it was slow enough to give Petra the impression that she'd make snails look like Olympic sprinters if she tried it. Actually taking a cue from snails worked a little better, rolling her ‘foot’ in a wave motion, so as to propel herself forwards, though coordinating the whole program such that it wouldn’t simply spin her in circles was a nightmare and in the end it was still agonisingly slow. Whatever, it’d have to do for now.

Extracting herself from whatever it was she’d been under, Petra didn’t have time to get her bearings – not that she was quite sure how to go about doing so in the first place – before she felt the ground beneath her shake – a rather unusual sensation considering she only had that strange sense of proprioception with which to feel out the way the vibrations caused her body to subtly deform.

Petra wasn't able to modify her mental programming in time to carry her back under her shelter before the approaching thing grabbed her, lifting her mass into the air. By some miracle, the programming Petra had created continued to pull her mass inwards as she was lifted, because without it, she was pretty sure she’d have literally fallen apart. Whatever it was that picked her up, it was clean – far cleaner than her environment at least – but it ‘tasted’ distinctly organic.

Was it a person? Did they know she was a person? Were they going to kill her?

Before she could do anything, Petra’s train of thought was cut short. A vibration, transferred both through the arms that had picked her up and the air surrounding her body hit her. The vibration really shouldn’t have made any sense to her – even if it happened to be in English, her current senses were simply too far removed from actual hearing for her to even have the slightest chance at understanding – and yet somehow the meaning behind the words was seamlessly imprinted upon Petra’s mind.

“You.”

Just as she’d been able to perceive and modify her anatomy, Petra was met with yet another seemingly supernatural effect. This time in her apparent ability to translate what really should have been gibberish. Was it magic of some kind? She didn’t feel any noticeable difference in the drain compared to her other two seemingly supernatural feats, so was this somehow different from those?

“Were you human too? Give a proper sign.”

Oh, right. The catastrophe at hand. They wanted to know if she'd been human. That was probably a good sign! Or maybe a really, really bad one, but nonetheless it seemed as though it was her best option given the circumstances. Just one problem; how exactly was she meant to give a proper sign?

Petra briefly considered morse code as an option, until she remembered that she knew exactly two letters of that. Binary was another option, but that seemed like it’d take a while and would require her captor to be able to translate it… what about the translation function then? Did it work both ways?

Testing her idea, Petra started forming a new program to extrude a new pseudopod and repetedly slap it against her body. Somehow she only fucked up twice in this endeavour and neither failure resulted in any loss of mass – she was truly getting better at that, her burgeoning mastery of her own body surely a good first step towards mastery of the entire globe.

The wet sounding slaps really shouldn’t have had any meaning to them beyond their constant pattern, but what was language if not patterns people had prescribed special meaning to? Assuming she could translate her own sounds in the same way she had the other person’s – which was admittedly a pretty big assumption – there really shouldn’t be a reason she couldn’t just make up the meanings to words as she went…

“̴H̵̶̶̦͉̓̌u̵m̴̶̴̠̦̊̽á̶̶̴̳͇͠n̷… ̷y̵ę̵̶̶̝̿̀s̶… ̷m̷ȩ̴̵̷̥̐̕… ̷W̶a̴s̷– ̷h̶u̵m̵a̴n̵… I wa̴s hum̴a̴n, yes̷.”
In Reborn in a Fantasy World, This Time I Shall...! → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
??? — Dilapidated Shack
@Zeroth@ERode@PKMNB0Y
Black. Everything was black. It was as though Petra had been plunged into complete darkness. Actually no, maybe that wasn’t quite the right way to describe it… The experience felt less like an absence of light and so much as an absence of her sight altogether; as though the pieces of her brain that were supposed to process the information coming from her eyes simply didn’t exist anymore.

What was going on?

Petra focused on her muddled memories, slowly trying to piece together what exactly had happened. That was right, she’d been on a flight hadn’t she? And something had gone horribly wrong… had her plane been attacked? It had all happened so fast and her memories were all jumbled up – not neatly organised like she generally kept them – which made it hard for her to tell. Hard enough that Petra couldn’t make heads or tails of what had happened. Even so she could remember one thing, in those frantic few moments before she’d blacked out she’d been badly injured and had been sure she was going to die.

Well, fortunately, it seemed like that prediction had been wrong, she wasn’t dead – not yet at least. Though apparently she couldn’t see or hear – or feel anything from most of her senses for that matter – an experience she quickly decided was deeply unnerving . On the bright side, she wasn’t hurting anywhere despite very much recalling having been hurt somehow before she lost consciousness; although, considering the circumstances perhaps that wasn’t a silver lining.

Had her brain been damaged in whatever incident she’d gotten caught up in? Was she currently bleeding out in the wreckage of the plane, this whole experience a hallucination conjured up by her oxygen starved brain in its final moments?

Petra pushed that line of reasoning down before it could pull her into a panic. If she were imminently going to die, freaking out about it would only make that death more uncomfortable, and if she had time before she died then panicking still wouldn’t help. What she needed to focus on right now was something tangible. Something actionable.

Focusing her attention inwards, Petra latched onto whatever she could find. While the senses she was familiar with and had spent her whole life growing to rely on where all gone – sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and even most of the more esoteric ones like balance and temperature – were all apparently gone, Petra could still feel some manner of sensation on the peripheries of her mind.

The first and most profound of her senses was what she thought must have once been her sense of proprioception. Petra was pretty sure the sense seemed a hell of a lot more refined and pronounced than it ever had before now – perhaps a side effect of her being cut off from all other sensory input – at least until she actually took note of what the sense was trying to tell her.

If it were to be believed, her body was some kind of puddle or blob, its central mass slowly shrinking as it painstakingly spread itself across the ground in a network of tendrils like roots or veins. In other words, whatever brain damage had taken away her other senses had also fucked this one up.

Turning her attention to her next sense, Petra found it to be even more useless and broken than the last. It was almost like taste or smell, but with her entire body and somehow experienced as something closer to touch than either taste or smell.

Pushing the smell-touch aside, Petra tried to focus her attention on the next sense in her arsenal, but found herself coming up empty… That was it? That couldn’t be it right? Just two broken senses that would do nothing to help her in her current situation…

Petra felt the panic she’d pushed down just moments earlier started to creep back up on her. When she’d had something more important to focus on she’d been able to push all that aside, but now what was she meant to do?

Panic mounting Petra desperately searched for something, anything, that she could use, until she felt a sort of draining sensation from some esoteric part of herself she hadn’t previously been aware of and her perception was flung inward, into her body. Where just a moment before Petra had been struggling with the lack of information her remaining senses were feeding her, suddenly she found herself instead overwhelmed by the sheer amount she was receiving.

Countless processes and interactions danced around Petra’s consciousness, working together like some kind of impossibly complex Rube Goldberg machine running off the chaos of the universe itself. It probably took Petra a full minute to calm down enough to actually process what she was seeing, and a further minute or two beyond that to actually comprehend it. Was she looking at her cellular processes? Somehow she was certain she was.

Petra wasn’t sure how long she spent just staring at the countless chemical reactions that somehow came together to constitute her, but with almost herculean effort she eventually managed to tear her focus away from it. It was beautiful certainly, and interesting beyond comparison – without a doubt she’d be back to explore every inch of her anatomy later – but right now what she needed to see was the bigger picture.

Through force of will, Petra shifted her perspective, zooming out and away from the molecules that constituted the most basic building blocks of her biology, in favour of viewing her body as a whole. Well, shit. For the briefest of moments Petra thought her body must have been completely splattered in the accident and that that was what she was looking at, but only for a moment before she realised that didn’t make sense since she was clearly still alive and thinking – not the apparent truth of the matter made all that much more sense.

Apparently Petra had been too quick to dismiss her remaining senses as faulty earlier; at some point while she was out, her consciousness had apparently been transferred to some kind of amorphous blob.

Petra probably freaked out about the state of her body for at least a couple of minutes before her curiosity once again took over as her dominant emotion. In retrospect, it probably said something about her mental state that she was able to get over such an extreme change so quickly, but in all fairness, she wasn’t exactly over the change so much as just really, really curious about it.

Her body really was branching out like she’d sensed before, though it did so incredibly slowly, spreading out in a manner she found vaguely reminiscent of a slime mould feeding. Actually, based on what she was ‘tasting’ through the vein-like projections that now comprised the bulk of her mass, she was pretty sure it was more than vaguely reminiscent of a slime mould eating.

Zooming her focus in on one of her feeding pseudopods, it doesn’t take long for Petra to witness a clump of organic matter get drawn into her body. Expecting to see the foreign cells get dragged off to some sort of digestive cavity for processing, Petra is surprised to see them instead torn apart on the spot before being engulfed by specialised cells for digestion.

Intracellular digestion? Wasn’t that a super basal trait? Wouldn’t that put her quite a long way from anything even remotely human? Even cnidarians had gastrovascular cavities.

Intrigued by her observation, Petra did a quick scan of her body, and sure enough, despite finding a massive variety of different cell types and proteins spread throughout her body, Petra couldn’t find anything even remotely resembling a proper organ. She did at least have a nervous system of some description, so she was definitely an animal of some description, but certainly not a vertebrate. Actually, screw not being a vertebrate, wouldn’t this all suggest that whatever she was, the last common ancestor it shared with a human was probably somewhere between a jellyfish and a fucking sea sponge?

Putting aside the realisation that, biologically speaking, she now probably shared more in common with the most primitive animal alive than she did with her own parents, Petra returned her attention to her still feeding body. Her body didn’t seem to be having any problems acting on autopilot and doing its own thing, but even so, Petra wasn’t completely comfortable with eating entirely unidentified substances. It was probably fine, but Petra couldn’t help but picture images of wild bears with metre long tapeworms dragging behind them – she knew full well how frequently wild animals got parasites in the wild, and she didn’t particularly want to take any chances.

Willing her body to stop doing its thing, just as she would to stop a shiver or involuntary tremor, Petra watched as exactly nothing happened, not so much as a nerve impulse to indicate that her body had even registered her command in the first place.

If Petra still had a stomach, she probably would have felt it drop the moment she realised her body wasn’t actually under her control, and it took all her willpower not to start blindly panicking then and there. She reminded herself again that even if she did panic, it wouldn’t achieve anything other than prolonging the time it would take her to figure out a solution.

First thing first, Petra focused her attention on what exactly her pseudopods were doing as they fed and it quickly became apparent to her that rather than performing actions based on some immutable genetic programming, her pseudopods instead seemed to be receiving instructions through her nervous system. That was probably good to know. Her awareness tracing the nerves through the pseudopod, Petra followed them until she reached a cluster of neurons, a ganglion smaller even than a grain of sand but just one of countless such grains spread throughout Petra’s body.

While she obviously had a distributed nervous system of some description, tracing her nerve pathways, Petra found that she possessed a sort of cordoned off inner membrane within which her physical composition was slightly altered, and more importantly, the density of her ganglia was far greater. It took Petra a while of just watching the intricate dance of nerve impulses, both within and outside of her ‘core’, before she was able to so much as guess at how it all worked.

As far as Petra could tell, all her ganglia were either dedicated to processing sensory information or towards using that information in order to coordinate her bodies physical actions – which for the most part seemed to be finding and engulfing food. All of Petra’s ‘sensory ganglia’ were, and while she possessed ‘decision-ganglia’ outside of her core, it seemed the vast majority of them were contained within it. Well, perhaps decision-ganglia wasn’t the best moniker she could give the things, since observing the process she got the distinct impression it was more or less deterministic.

What was the point though? The who set up seemed like overkill for the apparently very simple behaviours of her species; Petra didn’t think a brain was all that necessary for the behaviours she’d shown thus far, but certainly not a relatively sophisticated one like this; if anything her ‘brain’ seemed as though it’d be more of an energy sink than anything else.

Taking a step back, Petra tried looking at the bigger picture. The fact that she was confused about this meant that either she was misunderstanding something or there was a currently a gap in her knowledge. Well, there were definitely gaps in her knowledge… More importantly, the ‘why do I have a brain’ question wasn’t important to her current situation, even if it was interesting, in other words, it was something she could look into later, once her immediate problems were solved.

Speaking of which, after analysing her brain for some time, Petra finally felt as though she might have a solution to her current predicament. Some small part of her insisted that trying to fuck with what passed as her brain was probably an absurdly bad idea, but then again, would being stuck as a passenger in her own body be any better? Maybe actually, there was so much cool shit to study in here… but that was beside the point!

In any case, it was pretty clear to Petra, that whatever mechanism by which she was now inhabiting this body, there was no way her mind was actually running on its ‘hardware’ so to speak – its nervous system was simply too simple for that to make sense. That probably meant it wouldn’t irrevocably fuck her up if she messed with that hardware a little… Maybe... if she was lucky.

On a hunch, Petra focused her will, just as she had when she’d thrown her awareness into her body and willed it to bend to her wishes. It felt vaguely like she was pushing into a wall with her thoughts and after a moment of nothing seeming to happen, just when she was about to give up, she felt some kind of resistance give way, and that same draining feeling that had started when she’d first ‘entered’ her body briefly got a lot worse as her network of pseudopods stopped spreading entirely.

Petra made sure to spend a few moments running tests on herself – mostly doing maths and word games in her head – just in case she had ended up fundamentally breaking something in her brain. When she felt reasonably confident that she was fine – or at least as fine as she could be given the circumstances – Petra set about fixing the remainder of her pseudopod problem.

Her work was slow and clunky at first – more or less requiring her to ‘program’ herself new instincts in a language she didn’t understand – and she occasionally made mistakes – causing pseudopods to forcibly separate themselves from her body or to simply slough off it – but as she progressed her skills gradually improved, and by the time she was done, she’d managed to retract herself into an almost round bell like shape.

Pleased with her handiwork, Petra began mentally cackling to herself in a symbolic gesture that just felt right for the situation. She briefly considered trying to create a ‘program’ to make her body jiggle in time with her manic laughter, but even if she was channelling her inner mad scientist, considering she’d already just lost a not insignificant amount of her mass just trying to retract her pseudopods, she decided not to try again with her entire body on the line. Instead, she set about trying to create a means of moving her body along the ground.

Now that she was actually listening to her senses, Petra could tell she had something on top of her, though she didn’t get the impression it was particularly heavy or anything.
In Reborn in a Fantasy World, This Time I Shall...! → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
In Reborn in a Fantasy World, This Time I Shall...! → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
In Reborn in a Fantasy World, This Time I Shall...! (Interest Check) → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Interest Checks
Will keep an eye on this. Isekai truly is brainrot, regardless of my thoughts on the genre outside of RP.


Isekai is for intellectuals of the highest calibre, who, without appropriate materials upon which to dull their minds, would find it all but impossible to relate with the common man.
In Reborn in a Fantasy World, This Time I Shall...! (Interest Check) → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Interest Checks
Also interested.
In Parahumans: Earth Drega → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay

All Tandems | Bank
June 19, 2021
Tandem was not having a good time. Most of the time having multiple trains of thought was great – planning was so much easier when you had three times the minds to work with and bounce ideas off – but then there were the situations where having three minds was decidedly less fun. Being on the verge of total breakdown, the panic from each mind feeding into and amplifying that of the other two, was definitely fell into the less fun category.

Even so, her panic itself was the last thing on any of Tandem’s minds right now. Even as tears stung her eyes and the force of her hyperventilation made her chest ache, Tandem forced her panic down to the back of her minds. It was just background noise. Something, she couldn’t afford to think about. Right now, she had to focus on the situation at hand, as hard as it might be to do so.

Right, she had plans for this sort of thing, lots and lots of plans. Even when things as minor as keeping her breathing under control felt insurmountable to her, Tandem could always fall back on her plans. Plans meant a degree of safety. As long as she could plan, she had a measure of control, even when things were totally out of control.

What was the first step? Manage her clones – that was always the first step. Letting them just stand around dumbstruck was a bad idea, and teleporting them around randomly wasn’t much better. She needed to keep herselves moving, far enough from each other that they’d be difficult to injure all at once, but not so far apart as to limit her mobility. Done.

What came next? Finding the hostages, they were the priority here.

Rapidly shunting her bodies between floors, Tandem spent only a fraction of a second in any given room, skipping them entirely if they didn’t seem likely to hold the hostages, or she saw signs that the mercenary capes might be present – just enough time to verify that the hostages probably weren’t there, before moving onto the next floor. As fast as she was going, she thought there was a decent chance she’d miss the hostages entirely and have to do a second sweep, but even so, she felt this was the fastest method of searching.

In the end, her concerns about needing to loop back turned out not to be unfounded. On what she figured must have been pretty close to the top floor, she found the hostages, huddled up near the centre of the room. It was obvious Blackburn had been here – hostages aside – from the puddles of liquid metal spread throughout the area. Tandem had seen quite a few of Ironside’s puddles on her way up, but even compared to some of the other areas of the building, this seemed like a lot.

The moment the hostages noticed her they immediately began begging her to leave in hushed whispers, and in an instant what meagre resolve Tandem had managed to build up crumbled as she was thrown back into the place she spent her every moment trying to avoid.

Tandem had thought about hostage situations a lot over the past 5 years, but on some level, the concept still didn’t make much sense to her. If you had a hostage, hurting or killing them would only serve to drive down the value of that hostage and more importantly it would make it far more difficult for people to negotiate with you in the first place. It was seemingly in the villain’s best interest to never hurt a hostage, but at the same time, if you never hurt a hostage then the threat wouldn’t hold any value.

To Tandem, the whole idea of hostage-taking seemed like a poorly thought out plan at best, one that didn’t make any logical sense if you thought it through to its conclusion, but at the same time she knew it worked because people weren’t logical under pressure. People made stupid decisions when they panicked, and so the threat worked. She knew that much all too well.

Before Tandem’s thoughts could spiral any further, she was snapped out of them by a horrible shrieking sound, a sudden surge of adrenaline snapping her back into reality as her three sets of eyes locked onto the massive humanoid construct that she had to assume Kintsugi had created. Tandem hardly had time to register the creature’s arrival, let alone to take stock of its features, before it charged at her, just barely managing to dismiss the clone it targeted before that clone was annihilated.

Though she honestly couldn’t say when, apparently at some point while she’d been out of it, Tandem had thrown up – the half-digested instances of the nutrient smoothies she had to drink, coating the insides of her masks and dripping down the front of her costume. Tandem hardly gave it any thought, only sparing a fraction of a moment to inventory the worst of the mess.

She’d fucked up again. She should have kept her mind on the plan rather than freaking out. Should have searched and secured the area once she’d found the hostages. Instead, she’d spent however long freaking out over nothing, and now she was paying the price for it.

The urgency of the situation the only thing keeping Tandem from slipping back into breakdown mode, she began desperately trying to piece together a plan for dealing with the Kintsugi’s construct. She was almost certain it was physically a lot stronger than her, not to mention more durable, but at least as far as she could tell it didn’t have any good options for attacking all of her bodies at once, not unless she brought her clones together for some reason. As much as she thought the idea of trying to slot powers into generic catchall categories, right now it really seemed as though she was up against a ‘generic brute’ type, at least until she could figure out more about the power that created it.

First thing first, she should try to debilitate the construct from a distance. To start with, Tandem tried conjuring up a sheet of paint directly above the concrete man. While the thing did have a head, it didn’t seem to have a face or any sensory ‘organs’ that Tandem could make out, even so that didn’t necessarily mean it didn’t ‘see’ through its surface or something, and even if it didn’t, it cost her basically nothing to check. At the same time that she was trying to blind the construct, another instance of Tandem set about creating a large puddle of lubricant, stretching the floor between the construct and the third Tandem whom the construct appeared to be targeting.

A moment was all it took for Tandem to determine that neither tactic would be effective against the construct.

Covering the creature in paint did little more than make the thing more colourful. There was still a chance it was detecting its surroundings by something like sound or touch, but in all likelihood, it was using a more esoteric, power-based method, in either case, even if she could find a way to cripple its senses it probably wouldn’t be worth the time it took to figure it out.

As for her attempt to trip the creature up, either it was too heavy for it to be easily slipped or whatever mechanism it used to move its body also prevented it from slipping. Tandem briefly considered giving ball bearings a shot but decided not to for the time being; it might work, but it was a lot harder for her power to clean up and might end up catching her allies or the hostages if they needed to move.

With her initial probing attempts having failed to find an opening, Tandem switched instead to trying to use physical barriers to control its movements, rapidly constructing piles of sandbags, bricks, and other such materials from within her inventory in the creature's path. Unfortunately, this too failed to restrict it to any meaningful degree, the living statue simply ignoring the obstructions at best and at worst creating dangerous showers of shrapnel as it barrelled right through them. Tandem quickly abandoned that idea.

Feeling as though her attempts at restricting the construct weren’t helping, Tandem decided to switch to the offensive. Provided the concrete it appeared to be made of wasn’t reinforced by Kintsugi’s power, she felt pretty sure she could do some damage if she hit it with her manhole cover, but with the way the construct moved around, that was a pretty big if. You’d think a creature that big and literally made of stone would be less agile than it was… What else was there?

…

Immediately after dismissing one of her clones to avoid yet another charge from the monster, Tandem created a replacement clone directly behind it, the new clone reaching out to grab onto the constructs arm. It was hard to tell just by looking at the thing, but depending on how exactly Kintsugi’s power created the constructs it was possible they were made up of multiple smaller parts, in which case she might be able to simply shunt those parts off into her inventory.

The Tandem felt her stomach drop the moment it touched the concrete man, and the other two visibly flinched when their other received the constructs backhand, getting hit hard enough to be flung back several paces by the blow. Tandem had thought she’d gotten used to the experience of being maimed or dying, but it turned out that it was a whole other story when she wasn’t the one inflicting it on herself.

While the injured Tandem writhed in agony, the two watching Tandem’s observed that in a single attack, the construct had almost certainly broken a lot within their counterpart. They almost reflexively dismissed the injured clone, if only to end the pain, but held off – the constructs focus still appeared to be on the crippled Tandem and this was too good of an opportunity to pass up for comfort.

Pushing as much of the pain of the injury onto another Tandem, the injured one forced herself back onto her feet, even as the construct closed what little distance it had created between them. Meanwhile, the final Tandem instance adopted a stance as though she were about to throw a fastball, though she held nothing in her hand. She just needed to hold it still for a second, and then she could end this.

Just as the construct had taken the last step and was about to bare down on the injured Tandem, something that was somehow far larger than it came hurtling through the window, seeming to home in on the construct before in the blink of an eye the newcomer had grabbed and thrown the Kintsugi’s creation out of the newly opened up hole in the wall. The whole thing happening so fast, that even with three pairs of eyes watching it happen, it still took Tandem a second to comprehend what had happened. Bird guy had just taken out in a second the enemy that Tandem had struggled to do exactly nothing to for the better part of a minute.

"I-Is...Is everyone alright...?"

Her teammate's voice snapped Tandem out of her daze. She was not in fact alright, but that didn’t matter right now.

Tandem had been panicking during the fight, but it’d been an almost useful sort of panic, one that left her relatively clearheaded and let her focus on what needed to be done. Now that the adrenaline was beginning to fade, however, Tandem found herself rapidly reverting to a far less controlled sort of panic. She needed something to focus on.

Right, the hostages.

Tandem took a moment to replace her clones, first the badly injured one, followed shortly by the one she’d been using to take on the brunt of the injured one’s pain. The new instances didn’t hesitate before setting about their task, quickly moving to obstruct all entrances and exits to the room, save for the massive hole in the wall, with various materials from her inventory. Only once that was done did Tandem begin running around trying to systematically remove each and every one of the many metallic puddles that filled the room, shunting the stuff into her inventory.

A buzzing in her ear briefly startled Tandem before she realised it was just the comms device she’d been given. It was Keystone on the other end, and Tandem was particularly careful to actually listen to the thinker’s advice. Using containment foam on the waypoints would have been a great idea, if she’d actually had any, and it would have been a game changer against the Kintsugi construct. If only she actually had any.

Tandem recalled back to when she’d requested to receive several gallons of the raw containment foam fluid, and had been offered the grenades instead. She’d rejected the offer at the time, thinking at the time she might be able to strong-arm the Protectorate into giving into her demands if she did, but in hindsight her stubbornness had been really stupid.

Also, on the topic of the comms devices, Decree had contacted her earlier asking to be told if she found the hostages, hadn’t she? Not that it really should have mattered. Tandem should have been in contact with her teammates from the get-go, especially for important things like having found the hostages or putting them in danger, but the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. Yet another way she’d fucked up.

Having left it in her inventory for quite some time, Tandem was able to activate her own comms device with preternatural ease, though it still took her a moment to actually remember the process for doing so.

“Um, this is Tandem. I’ve located the hostages somewhere near the top of the building… Bird guy is also here. I’ve put barricades up in front of the entrances, but I can remove those if anyone needs to get in. There are a lot of Ironside’s puddles in here, but I’m removing them now.”

Tandem couldn’t manage to keep the shaking out of her voice and she spoke fast enough that she would likely be somewhat hard to understand, but right now she couldn’t afford to stress about minor details like that. To an outside observer, Tandem would not appear to be in a good state, while any sign of injury had vanished along with the only injured clone, Tandem somehow managed to appear exhausted even through her mask and costume, her breath uneven and her shirt covered in the now crusting remains of when she threw up on herself, shivering violently in the aftermath of the adrenaline spike.

“Are you able to start flying people down to safety.” Tandem addressed Muninn. She didn’t bother turning off her comms device, it was probably better if their teammates knew what they were doing or at the very least that Keystone was able to point out any bad ideas she had. “Also, to any people not currently being carried down, I need you to watch the puddles and warn me if anything happens… please.”

With that, Tandem turned her full attention back to clearing out Ironside’s waypoints as fast as possible.
In Parahumans: Earth Drega → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay

All Tandems | Bridgewater Bank
June 19, 2021
It took 10 minutes for the Wards to be loaded up into a van and driven to the bank where the robbery was taking place. Along the way, they were briefed on the details of the robbery and suggestions were made as to how they might handle the situation. Tandem didn’t particularly agree with the suggestions made for her – she could better utilise her power if she operated her clones together, especially if she was going to be putting those bodies at risk, not to mention that she couldn’t separate them by more than 24 feet in the first place.

Despite her disagreements, Tandem didn’t voice her opinion on the matter, they were only suggestions after all, and in any case, she was distracted by something that had been mentioned earlier in the briefing.

There were hostages. It was a hostage situation in a bank.

When that part had first been mentioned in the briefing, anyone paying Tandem any mind at all, or even just looking her way really, would have noticed her clones flickering in and out of existence for a few seconds after the fact. Dismissed and replaced one after the other in a desperate attempt to cut off the inevitable trains of thought before they could take root. It hadn’t worked, and now, whatever excitement she’d felt only minutes earlier at the prospect of engaging with capes in a proper fight, was completely gone, replaced by an all-consuming panic that threatened to overwhelm her.

Tandem was standing outside the bank building. Right. She’d teleported out the moment the van had come to a stop. She had to focus…

It was one of the things she’d thought about a lot since signing up for the Wards, so she knew the first thing she should do was get her hands on a proper weapon. She might have to fight someone, and while she had plenty of things she could use, it’d be a problem if the Protectorate found out she was carrying even a fraction of the stuff she was.

Scanning about, Tandem quickly spotted what she was looking for. Creating a clone over by a manhole, she quickly used its foot to shunt the cover into her inventory. The manhole cover would be far too heavy to throw with her own strength, but she didn’t need to rely on that in order to throw it with her power, and its weight would allow it to do quite a bit of damage to whatever she threw it at.

Normally, the idea of using her power for something like that would get Tandem excited, but somehow the fact that today she might end up actually needing to do it made it distinctly less so. She didn’t want to hurt anyone… An imagining of what the manhole might do to a person if she launched it at them, bubbled to the surface of the clone that’d collected its mind, and she quickly replaced the clone.

No. It was just a precaution. It was fine. She didn’t have time to think about that right now. What she needed to do was plan. Figure out a way to make sure everything stayed okay.

Right. The hostages.

Could they find a way to get the hostages out, or short of that, secure wherever the hostages were being held before they could be executed? That might work, right? Hornet could probably identify where all the hostages were being kept, sorta like they’d talked about before, and Keystone might be able to do something similar with his power. Then it’d just be a matter of getting into the room, which probably wouldn’t be all that hard with two teleporters and a flyer on the team, after which they could work on protecting everyone.

Bang!

Just as a plan started to come together in Tandem’s mind, a loud bang rang out from inside the building, causing all three of Tandem to jump and shattering what little stability she’d managed to regain.

Suddenly whatever plan Tandem had been formulating was gone from her minds, and she found herself having teleported her bodies directly into the bank.

If being outside the bank had been bad, being inside the bank was a nightmare to Tandem. She vaguely registered that Decree had said something in her earpiece, but her attention was elsewhere so she couldn't say what; actually seeing the hostages forced memories Tandem had long since repressed back up to the surface of her mind, and this time there was no just dismissing the offending body. She’d started to hyperventilate at some point, her breaths seeming to get shallower and more rapid with every passing moment.

Tandem felt tears starting to sting at her eyes, and bile rising in one of her throats; she shunted it all into her inventory. Now wasn’t the time to feel sorry for herself, getting to test out her ideas on capes was supposed to be fun, right?
In Parahumans: Earth Drega → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay

Tandem 1 | PRT Headquarters, Meeting Room | @Mintz
June 19, 2021
Huh. So apparently the birdman hadn’t even known he could change his size. Well, he was a fairly new cape, so that sorta made sense; as much as Tandem thought powers were awesome now, when she’d first gotten hers she’d been terrified of parahumans, it had probably taken her a year or so to finally realise how cool powers were and to start properly figuring out how to use her own.

Tandem figured the size-changing ability must be the sort of power to do its own thing when the bird guy wasn’t focused on it, but she wondered whether it was something he could take conscious control of when he wanted, like breathing was, or if it was always out of his control, like a heartbeat. If it was the latter that’d be somewhat unfortunate, but there would probably still be rules behind when and how it did what it did that could be exploited once bird guy figured it out.

As for the mothman thing, bird guy’s explanation sorta made sense - his feathers and fur were, as he’d pointed out, very dark - although Tandem still thought that people jumping to him being a moth was kinda weird. Even if moths only came out at night, Tandem was pretty sure they didn’t have white eyes, and for that matter, could moths even be black in the first place? Still, being hard to see in the dark was an interesting aspect of his power, especially since he’d already mentioned he could fly silently and see in the dark.

Did Wards do night missions? She’d never seen Wards out after dark, but it wasn’t like cape encounters were all that common in the first place. Thus far it looked like the Wards followed normal people schedules, but it’d make sense if they sometimes had to operate after dark; Tandem knew from personal experience that some criminals were very much active at night.

Before Tandem could continue her questioning of the nervous cape or share her speculations on how his power might work, she was interrupted by a man in a suit entering the room. The newcomer introduced himself as Vice Director Fukuda and addressed the Wards…

Tandem 2 | PRT Headquarters, Meeting Room | @Duoya
June 19, 2021
Tandem decided that other than being a bit of a grump, Keystone was actually pretty cool. He’d said that the only reason he didn’t have a gun was because he’d been denied a pistol, which checked out with all the stuff she’d been told she wasn’t allowed to carry. Well in her case her power let her ignore those particular rules, so if the situation called for it she’d be more than happy to hand Keystone a gun or two, though she wouldn’t say so right now - even if she whispered it, it’d be really silly to say she had firearms while standing so close to Axiom.

More importantly, Tandem had picked up some interesting bits and pieces about Keystone's power. For one, Keystone had pretty much confirmed his power could see into her inventory to some extent; if his comment about her having a first aid kit hadn’t been an admission, his request that she not to “set something off” certainly was. More interestingly, Keystone’s power seemed to have given him her name - or her cape name at least, though she reasoned it wasn’t all that unlikely that it had given him both and he just hadn’t used her real one because secret identities were meant to be secret, even when they absolutely weren’t.

He’d said his power was about finding weaknesses; did that mean her name was somehow a weakness then? Or did his power give him extra information along with the weaknesses? A ‘that’s Tandem, you should blow her up’ sort of thing. She’d ask him about that in a bit, but for now, she was interested in the other part of what he’d said, that he wanted to team up on patrol with her.

Of course Tandem really wanted to patrol with Keystone… well she really wanted to patrol with any of her new teammates, except for maybe Ethos, but Keystone’s power was the most interesting of the lot and she was itching to ask him all about her weaknesses and those of her teammates, and then trying to come up with workarounds. Very few powers had the intrinsic capacity to grow, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t improve their use, and thinking about how to do so was always lots and lots of fun.

"Sure, sounds fun.”

Before Tandem could say any more, Vice Director Fukuda entered the room.

Tandem 3 | PRT Headquarters, Meeting Room | @King Cosmos
June 19, 2021
Tandem had startled Hornet when she’d teleported in front of her. Oops. In hindsight she probably should have seen that coming, it wasn’t like surprise was an unusual response to having someone teleport in front of you, actually, it was probably the normal response to that happening. Still, it was a lot more convenient than having to walk around everywhere and there were plenty of cases where she needed to dismiss and resummon her selves, so it wasn’t like she could just not do it…

“Um– sorry… would it be better if I appear behind you next time?”

After a moment she had a better idea, or rather thought of a way to apply an idea she’d already had. “Ah! What if I gave you a signal first? Like with coloured paper or something.” Excited to show off her idea, Tandem didn’t bother waiting for an answer before demonstrating her idea by summoning a piece of yellow confetti in the air between the two of them.

Moving on. The ability to sense where she could teleport was awesome, and frankly, it made Tandem a little jealous. There was so much she would be able to do with a power like that.

“You’d be awesome at search and rescue! I tried to go into a burning building once, but my power’s not really good for that so I had to run away… but you’d probably be able to find everyone really quickly and could jump right to them! That’s really, really cool!” Tandem paused for a fraction of a second, thinking, before having another thought. “Does your power only work on people? If it works on animals we could all carry around boxes of rats or bugs or something and then you could teleport all around us… well, I wouldn’t be able to, but the others might.”

Tandem briefly considered pulling a dead mouse out of her inventory to illustrate her idea, but recalled how she'd gotten in trouble when she'd done something similar during official power testing, and decided against the idea. It'd be annoying to lose time getting told off right now.

It was kind of a shame that Hornet didn’t know how potent her invincibility was, though it did make sense as to why they couldn’t safely test that. Tandem supposed she was lucky in that sense - if she ever wanted to try something with her power that might be dangerous she only needed to make sure one of her bodies came out unscathed, which certainly made power testing a lot easier. Still, there had to be ways to safely test Hornet, right?

“Does your power strengthen other things you teleport with you? What if you teleported with a stick or piece of paper or something and then tried to break that?”

Tandem moved to touch the piece of confetti she’d dropped before with her shoe, shunting it back into her inventory. She was about to suggest the two of them try training together at some point, especially since their respective mover powers seemed like they’d synergise really, really, well with one another, but before she could get the words out, Vice Director Fukuda arrived.

All Tandems | PRT Headquarters, Meeting Room
June 19, 2021
Two of Tandem’s three heads whipped around to observe the vice director as he addressed the room, the third instead looked to Axiom and her new teammates to gauge their reactions to whatever was said.

They’d be dealing with a bank robbery? Tandem had never really understood why someone would try to rob a bank or steal money at all for that matter. Wasn’t it easier to just take the thing you wanted the money to buy in the first place? Whatever, that detail wasn’t the important one, what mattered was that the robbers were mercenaries. Cape mercenaries.

A knot of anxiety bloomed in Tandem's chests. She’d gotten by all this time by avoiding any head-to-head conflict with other capes, generally satisfying herself with observing them and at most heckling them a little, but it looked like today she’d finally be getting into a proper fight. Tandem could feel her hearts pounding as her minds rushed with countless possibilities for ways this could go wrong, yet despite her anxiety, she couldn’t help but also start to grin beneath her masks. The option to avoid intergang conflicts had been lost the moment she’d decided to join the Wards, and scary as it was, getting to finally try out some of the ideas she’d been sitting on was really, really exciting.

From the looks of things, bird guy was also excited, judging by how large he’d suddenly grown.
In Parahumans: Earth Drega → 2 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay

All Tandems | PRT Headquarters
June 19, 2021, 9:08
Any questions? Of course she had questions, so many questions! Not about their schedules though. That wasn’t all that interesting and the other's could deal with sorting that out if they cared.

Faith had been the first person to introduce herself after Tandem. Her power was cool but Tandem had already had the chance to discuss it with her extensively, so that didn’t interest her as much as the others. Although Tandem still thought it was a little odd how careful Faith was about not using her power, avoiding accidents made sense with a power like that, but surely no one would care about little slip-ups. Not using her power at all must really suck big time, Faith was too nice for her own good.

As one of the people who’d accepted her offer of candy, Tandem decided she liked the bird person. Their power was as they put it, a bit self-explanatory. They were a big bird creature and could do big bird creature things. Being silent and having enhanced senses was pretty cool though; Tandem bet they’d be awesome at scouting things out in the dark. She briefly wondered if they were strong enough to carry people around – well they did mention their claws being quite sharp, but maybe someone could ride on them like a horse? Also, she’d seen them do a size-changing thing when they took the candy? Was an aspect of their power that could be used?

Keystone had gone next in his explanation he seemed to be a bit grumpy, but Tandem could deal with grumpy and it sounded like that was a result of his power anyway, which made it the extra cool kind of grumpy. For that matter, of all her teammates, his power was probably the one that interested Tandem the most and she definitely wanted to probe him for information, both on her own weaknesses and those of her teammates – as well as just to find out where exactly the limits to his power lay. It helped a bit that Tandem figured that with a power like that on their side the chances of there being a secret double agent on the team seemed significantly slimmer, not when calling out someone's secret allegiances probably counted as a weakness… unless his power didn’t work like that, but it probably did, he’d been able to pick out that she was carrying a first aid kit in her inventory after all – several actually – so he should probably also be able to do that. She should ask.

Where Decree was the kind of master Tandem could get along with Ethos was anything but. Tandem immediately decided Ethos was the one cape in the room who she didn’t like one bit – and the only cape whose power she wouldn’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole.

Hornet’s power was also interesting, even if she decided to leave all the important details out. A teleportation ability that granted short-lived super strength and invulnerability? It sounded as though Hornet’s teleportation targets were a little more restrictive than Tandem’s own since she said she apparently had to teleport next to people, but depending on her range that might still be better and she wouldn’t have to worry about ‘clone weaving’ so she would probably be able to pull off teleports in quicker succession. How did her invulnerability work and how long does it last? Also if she could teleport to people could she sense them with her power as well, or did she have to know they were there first?

Richter was second to last to speak. He didn’t really explain his power so much as to demonstrate it by disintegrating a coin. He also warned the group that he couldn’t turn off his power, which put him in a similar boat to Tandem, though more inconvenient in his case. Some part of Tandem wondered if getting disintegrated would hurt or not – on the one hand if it did she definitely didn’t want to try it, but on the other, a not insignificant part of her wanted to poke him to find out.

Since the tinker girl didn’t speak up, that just left Shattercrash. Tandem still didn’t like her very much – she was too loud and intimidating – but at least her power looked cool and she was still quite a bit better than Ethos personality wise. Annoyingly Tandem wasn’t able to get a whole lot from Shattercrash’s explanation of her power. What the hell was kinetic energy? She’d almost asked but decided not to, that was probably the sort of thing that everyone was meant to already know.

Seeing as it was question time, Tandem decided she should ask some of her own. Debating it amongst herselves for a moment, Tandem's curiosity finally won out over her paranoia and she reluctantly shuffled her clones around so they were all in the room.

Tandem 1 | PRT Headquarters, Meeting Room | @Mintz, @Silver Carrot
June 19, 2021, 9:08
Popping into existence behind Decree and the bird guy Tandem immediately set about trying the get the changer’s attention.

“Psst. Hey bird guy. What was that thing you did with the size change earlier? How does it work?” Tandem’s whisper could barely be called a whisper for how loud it was. “Also I think some of my friends were calling you mothman before, but you don’t really look much like a moth. Maybe you should fly around during the day so people can see you're not a moth.”

Tandem 2 | PRT Headquarters, Meeting Room | @Duoya
June 19, 2021, 9:08
The second Tandem approached the thinker where he was asking Axiom questions, waiting for a moment to slip in and speak to the guy. While there were a whole lot of questions she had to ask the guy regarding her own weaknesses and the weaknesses, the weaknesses of her various plans, and the weaknesses of her teammates, not to mention the guy’s power in general, first she had a more pressing issue to get out of the way.

“Hey Keystone. If your power hypothetically maybe at some point tells you that I’ve got something in my inventory that I could get in trouble for could you keep it a secret?”, unlike her counterpart this Tandem spoke in a voice that was actually deserving of being called a whisper. “I promise it’s not to hurt anyone, just for emergencies and stuff like that. You seem like you get being prepared, right?”

Tandem 3 | PRT Headquarters, Meeting Room | @King Cosmos
June 19, 2021, 9:08
The final Tandem popped up next to the Hornet girl, not hesitating any longer than it took her to take a deep breath before immediately diving into her questions.

“Hey, you said you were Hornet right? You said your power lets you teleport to people, how does that work? Do you need to see your target or does your power let you know where people are? What’s the range and is there a limit on how quickly you can use it? If you can teleport to me, maybe we can practise coordinating our powers? Also, you said you gain invulnerability? How does that work? Can you still be thrown around or do you become super heavy or something?” Tandem’s excited stream of words continued without pause until the very last of her breath had been exhausted and she’d needed to wheeze out the final words.
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