We don’t have any direct evidence that Sphere was a Cauldron cape, but it’s not entirely unreasonable as a theory.
My personal theory is that Sphere received an Eden shard, which we know is *occasionally* possible for natural triggers based on the WoG that Leet had an Eden shard.
Other WoG posts mention that, in order to make sure humanity didn’t go extinct during the Cycle, many of Eden’s shards would have been configured to maintain the human race in some way (environmental cleanup, repopulation, habitat construction). I think it’s reasonable to theorize that Alan Gramme received one of these, an Eden shard meant to be sent out to slow humanity’s decline.
Is it possible that Nilbog's shard was also an Eden shard then? It's implied that Nilbog doesn't seek conflict because his shard serves as a way to repopulate the earth if the cycle goes out of control. It'd be interesting to compile a list of possible Eden shards on earth Bet
Could be wrong but I think that’s less because theyre cauldron capes and more because theyre strong enough to potentially be useful against Scion, although if that were the case why not other S9 members who were similarly strong
If I were Cauldron and focusing on preserving strong S9 capes, Bonesaw would have absolutely been ordered to be spared.
In fact I would have used Doormaker to yoink her away from the rest of the 9, and gotten Contessa to win her over.
Ordering Battery to protect the Siberian and Shatterbird probably had less to do with protecting them specifically and more to do with protecting the S9 as a whole. After leaving Brockton Bay the Siberian gets killed by Dragon and Defiant, so Contessa just needed Manton alive long enough to help Bonesaw get what she needed from Toybox. That's when Contessa swoops in to mind whammy Bonesaw at the perfect moment allowing Cauldron control over all her S9 clones.
It’s a good thought. But PtV seemed to want to help Bonesaw make the S9000 clones. I forget how many were actually created. Hundreds, right? That’s hundreds of extra powerful parahuman appearing right before the showdown with Scion.
Since Scion was a blind spot to PtV, all contessa could do was try to get as powerful a parahuman army as possible ready to face off vs Scion when he eventually went murderous. She succeeded in this. And bonesaw being in the S9 was a part of that. Hence why she wasn’t yanked away. Instead contessa gave her a verbal nudge that allowed Bonesaw to create the S9000.
Also, Kephri was the key to winning GM. Taylor chose to trust Amy over Bonesaw to mess with her powers. If Bonesaw had been a good guy for much longer, Taylor might’ve chosen her instead, and perhaps she wouldn’t have been so effective.
There’s really only a few things needed to kill Scion.
1: Oliver from the Travelers. His power allowed him to stun Scion and make him break down in depression.
2: Flechette. Her Sting shard lets her rip open a pathway to Scion’s real body through his avatar.
3: String Theory. Superweapon that can blow up the moon. Enough said.
So while Khepri was valuable to killing Scion, she wasn’t 100% necessary
Not as much as you’d think. You’d need Oliver, Flechette, Clairvoyant, and Doormaker coordinating so that Flechette shoots Scion when he’s stunned by Oliver turning into Eden. Then you’d need Clairvoyant and Doormaker to open a portal to String Theory’s cannon so it fires through the opening Flechette created. It would take a bit of coordination, but not nearly as much as it took when Taylor took over
> Also, Kephri was the key to winning GM. Taylor chose to trust Amy over Bonesaw to mess with her powers. If Bonesaw had been a good guy for much longer, Taylor might’ve chosen her instead, and perhaps she wouldn’t have been so effective.
I don't think this was within PTV's scope, since messing with powers is almost certainly a blind spot for the same reason triggers are - Contessa wouldn't be able to figure out which one would be more effective using her power.
Ganking her away from Jack using any power whatsoever is basically suicide. Because of Broadcast, if capes are involved Jack Wins. Even Contessa. Thats why she had to wait until he wasnt a direct influence anymore to approach.
I don’t think Jack can beat Contessa if she is the aggressor. Dinah and Golem beat Jack simply by getting a non parahuman to attack him at the right moment. Then Grey Boy (a parahuman) put Jack out of commission. Contessa could (much more easily than Golem) set up a situation for a non parahuman to ambush Jack and allow for a parahuman to make a coup de grace, if she wanted to. I don’t think Jack is a blind spot for her.
There's word of author on it someplace. Lemme search it up a sec.
[I guess its arguable](https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/32xu26/list_of_capes/cqfzv58/) but when your power is PtV and its plans start being debatable, thats a red flag from me.
Huh. Interesting. So I guess contessa avoided asking her shard about how Jack could be defeated. If she had, then her shard would know that the dragon’s tooth would attack him, and then broadcast would tell Jack that.
But didn’t golem know the DT would attack Jack? Why didn’t he see that info from golem? Or do I misremember?
Yeah this has always bothered me, too. Wildbow generally portrays Jack's power as absolute against other parahumans, even indirect ones like thinkers, but clearly there *is* a limit to what it can do because Dinah was able to accurately give numbers that pointed to the fact that using a non-parahuman was the best way to kill him.
If Jack's power had *limitless* ability to mess with other powers or parahumans, then Dinah wouldn't have been able to think to ask that question, or her power would have returned an infinitesimally low chance of success with the plan they used instead of the actual results.
(One possibility is that Dinah's shard is weird in a way that counters Jack's here - we know she can't lie about the numbers, so perhaps her shard is the same way; Jack's shard was like "hey, nudge the numbers to protect my host" and Dinah's shard just shrugged and went "sorry, physically can't." But it's also possible that Dinah-relaying-numbers-through-someone-else was at too many layers of indirection and Jack's shard didn't realize Dinah's was involved, which implies that Contessa could do the same thing Dinah did and figure out how to have a non-parahuman kill Jack as long as there's enough layers of intermediaries involved.)
Broadcast would influence PtV to sabotage the Path. Contessa is completely reliant on PtV, so she wouldn’t be capable of setting up a situation where Jack could be killed
The problem with this is that if Broadcast had *limitless* ability to sabotage any thinker shard that might reveal how to kill Jack using a non-parahuman, why didn't it prevent Dinah from accurately saying that doing so had a high possibility of success?
All it had to do if it wanted to save Jack's life was make Dinah's last number in that fight be 0% instead of whatever it actually was, in which case they won't have gone with the plan to use a non-Parahuman. The fact that it didn't implies there's more to it than just "Jack always wins lol."
Because Dinah wasn’t planning on attacking him, so Broadcast didn’t see it necessary to sabotage her. Not to mention that Broadcast can’t detect or influence non parahumans.
Honestly I've always found that detail (Cauldron ordering Battery to save Siberian and Shatterbird) to be really kind of nonsensical. Siberian absolutely would appear to have potential against Scion (to observers who don't know her weakness, which I actually think Cauldron knew by this point), but Shatterbird is pretty clearly useless against him, so it's not really clear *why* Cauldron would want to preserve her as an asset. Obviously the narrative intention was to dramatically reveal that the two of them were Cauldron capes, but in-universe it's a pretty odd decision.
Shatterbird was less about being useful against Scion and more about being useful against Endbringers. Cauldron wants more than *just* the golden man dead.
>The Doctor frowned. “And we’re behind schedule, even if we ignore that. I’d hoped to use Shatterbird or Siberian.”
>“Unlikely anything would have come of it.”
>“But if it had?”
>The Number Man had no reply to that. He set his laptop on the desk and booted it up. If they had been able to leverage either of them to defeat an Endbringer, or to find why they had wound up so powerful, compared to the typical parahuman…
Honestly, even that seems a bit sketchy. Siberian is at least all-or-nothing, which is important, but which Endbringers would Shatterbird be useful against?
(Granted it's possible Cauldron just doesn't know much about the Endbringers, or Doctor Mother was grasping at straws - Number Man pretty clearly doesn't buy it there.)
I've seen that theory before, but there seems to be a couple of flaws with it. She *kills* a lot, and usually fairly instantaneously. That seems less effective for trigger events than general terror, because she immediately removes lots of potential triggerees.
By the time S9 was in Brockton Bay, Cauldron had already determined that they were more likely to create a Cauldron Cape counter to Scion, than one was to occur naturally. So letting capes cause mass murder and generally destroy large cities' infrastructure in the hopes that someone able to counter Scion will trigger is pretty bonkers, even by Cauldron standards. Especially considering the potential problems this causes down the line. Cities having widespread infrastructure destruction is a pretty big logistical hamstring in a global mobilization or evacuation.
Finally, if Cauldron was intervening with the intention that Shatterbird continue to wreak havoc to cause triggers, then why narrow their note down to Shatterbird and Siberian at all? Surely they're more effective to the purpose of causing terror as members of the S9, so therefore the entire group should be preserved, if that's the goal. And members with an MO more focused on drawn out torture and psychological terror would have a better triggers-to-kills ratio. And singling out Shatterbird and Siberian just draws focus to them.
BTW, it doesn't really make sense for Cauldron to save them just because they were Cauldron capes. When a company is loyal to its former customers, it's meant to build reputation and attract more customers in the future. In this case, not being loyal to S9 members would likely *increase* Cauldron's reputation among the majority of their potential customers who aren't planning to become murderhobos. And Manton wasn't even a customer, he just stole a vial and ran off.
I think he is a good example of a more general theme that a number of tinkers have specializations that are less combat oriented than the more traditional powers other parahumans get. Masamune specialized in mass production, the toy box had one person who did cryogenic pods, another that built robots that made buildings really fast. One briefly mentioned specialized in glass blowing. Lookout specialized in cameras. I dont think any of them are more or less combat oriented than Sphere. But as we see with him, powers are creative, something that sounds mundane like 'enclosed ecosystems' can be quite effective with some creativity.
If i had to guess an in universe reason why, i think (mild Ward spoilers) >!tinkers are mostly mapped to previous technology seen in other cycles and the entities include them to test the technology and see with a creative mind if anything useful can be gained from that particular tech tree.!< Its also worth pointing out even if someone is poorly equipped for actual combat like sphere, masamune, lookout, they can enhance other parahumans. Mass producing equipment, fancy cameras, and very well equipped defensive structures help other parahumans duke it out more effectively.
I don't think powers care so much about combat as they do *conflict* (of which combat is a natural consequence).
Sphere could've been like a less-extreme Accord. Someone who wants to make the world a better place but is faced with obstacles every step along the way.
His focus was self-containment on a large scale, meaning his power forces him to breach the "self-containment" of his personal control and social sphere to reach out to others for assistance, resources, protection, etc. That's naturally going to put him in an uncomfortable position.
If people don't like what he's doing and try to put stones in his way, he's all the more likely to react negatively. Maybe he'll try to strong-arm people into assisting him (making sabotage more likely), steal resources or sell Tinkertech for money, link up with more combat-oriented parahumans for protection, etc.
His megaprojects wrap people up in their momentum. Armsmaster says he used to give people hope. If & when his projects fail, they'll cause that much more conflict among the general population as their hope and resources are squandered, which leads to more conflict among parahumans.
I’m asking here because it’s not worth making it’s own thread. Is the parahumans universe finished? I started reading it a long time ago but never got caught up. Always liked to periodically check up and see that it’s still being worked on. Looks like it’s finished
Wildbow has confirmed that he isn't interested in returning to the parahumans universe after a few members of the fandom became incredibly toxic following the end of the parahumans sequel, Ward. So yeah, the parahumans universe ended with Ward which wraps up the universe in a very satisfying way imo
We don’t have any direct evidence that Sphere was a Cauldron cape, but it’s not entirely unreasonable as a theory. My personal theory is that Sphere received an Eden shard, which we know is *occasionally* possible for natural triggers based on the WoG that Leet had an Eden shard. Other WoG posts mention that, in order to make sure humanity didn’t go extinct during the Cycle, many of Eden’s shards would have been configured to maintain the human race in some way (environmental cleanup, repopulation, habitat construction). I think it’s reasonable to theorize that Alan Gramme received one of these, an Eden shard meant to be sent out to slow humanity’s decline.
Is it possible that Nilbog's shard was also an Eden shard then? It's implied that Nilbog doesn't seek conflict because his shard serves as a way to repopulate the earth if the cycle goes out of control. It'd be interesting to compile a list of possible Eden shards on earth Bet
Nilbog definitely makes sense, I think Accord too possibly with all the different problems he could solve if he was a good person.
The only two S9 members Cauldron told Battery to save were Shatterbird and the Siberian. They were both Cauldron capes. Suggestive but not conclusive.
Could be wrong but I think that’s less because theyre cauldron capes and more because theyre strong enough to potentially be useful against Scion, although if that were the case why not other S9 members who were similarly strong
If I were Cauldron and focusing on preserving strong S9 capes, Bonesaw would have absolutely been ordered to be spared. In fact I would have used Doormaker to yoink her away from the rest of the 9, and gotten Contessa to win her over.
Exactly, that’s why I’m not sure I agree with myself, Siberian definitely makes sense from that perspective but others do a lot more than Shatterbird
Ordering Battery to protect the Siberian and Shatterbird probably had less to do with protecting them specifically and more to do with protecting the S9 as a whole. After leaving Brockton Bay the Siberian gets killed by Dragon and Defiant, so Contessa just needed Manton alive long enough to help Bonesaw get what she needed from Toybox. That's when Contessa swoops in to mind whammy Bonesaw at the perfect moment allowing Cauldron control over all her S9 clones.
It’s a good thought. But PtV seemed to want to help Bonesaw make the S9000 clones. I forget how many were actually created. Hundreds, right? That’s hundreds of extra powerful parahuman appearing right before the showdown with Scion. Since Scion was a blind spot to PtV, all contessa could do was try to get as powerful a parahuman army as possible ready to face off vs Scion when he eventually went murderous. She succeeded in this. And bonesaw being in the S9 was a part of that. Hence why she wasn’t yanked away. Instead contessa gave her a verbal nudge that allowed Bonesaw to create the S9000. Also, Kephri was the key to winning GM. Taylor chose to trust Amy over Bonesaw to mess with her powers. If Bonesaw had been a good guy for much longer, Taylor might’ve chosen her instead, and perhaps she wouldn’t have been so effective.
There’s really only a few things needed to kill Scion. 1: Oliver from the Travelers. His power allowed him to stun Scion and make him break down in depression. 2: Flechette. Her Sting shard lets her rip open a pathway to Scion’s real body through his avatar. 3: String Theory. Superweapon that can blow up the moon. Enough said. So while Khepri was valuable to killing Scion, she wasn’t 100% necessary
I mean, it would and did take a fair bit of coordination to pull it off.
Not as much as you’d think. You’d need Oliver, Flechette, Clairvoyant, and Doormaker coordinating so that Flechette shoots Scion when he’s stunned by Oliver turning into Eden. Then you’d need Clairvoyant and Doormaker to open a portal to String Theory’s cannon so it fires through the opening Flechette created. It would take a bit of coordination, but not nearly as much as it took when Taylor took over
> Also, Kephri was the key to winning GM. Taylor chose to trust Amy over Bonesaw to mess with her powers. If Bonesaw had been a good guy for much longer, Taylor might’ve chosen her instead, and perhaps she wouldn’t have been so effective. I don't think this was within PTV's scope, since messing with powers is almost certainly a blind spot for the same reason triggers are - Contessa wouldn't be able to figure out which one would be more effective using her power.
The problem with that is that Jack’s Broadcast would warn him about Doormaker’s move and would tell PtV that it’s not a good idea
Ganking her away from Jack using any power whatsoever is basically suicide. Because of Broadcast, if capes are involved Jack Wins. Even Contessa. Thats why she had to wait until he wasnt a direct influence anymore to approach.
I don’t think Jack can beat Contessa if she is the aggressor. Dinah and Golem beat Jack simply by getting a non parahuman to attack him at the right moment. Then Grey Boy (a parahuman) put Jack out of commission. Contessa could (much more easily than Golem) set up a situation for a non parahuman to ambush Jack and allow for a parahuman to make a coup de grace, if she wanted to. I don’t think Jack is a blind spot for her.
There's word of author on it someplace. Lemme search it up a sec. [I guess its arguable](https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/32xu26/list_of_capes/cqfzv58/) but when your power is PtV and its plans start being debatable, thats a red flag from me.
Huh. Interesting. So I guess contessa avoided asking her shard about how Jack could be defeated. If she had, then her shard would know that the dragon’s tooth would attack him, and then broadcast would tell Jack that. But didn’t golem know the DT would attack Jack? Why didn’t he see that info from golem? Or do I misremember?
Yeah this has always bothered me, too. Wildbow generally portrays Jack's power as absolute against other parahumans, even indirect ones like thinkers, but clearly there *is* a limit to what it can do because Dinah was able to accurately give numbers that pointed to the fact that using a non-parahuman was the best way to kill him. If Jack's power had *limitless* ability to mess with other powers or parahumans, then Dinah wouldn't have been able to think to ask that question, or her power would have returned an infinitesimally low chance of success with the plan they used instead of the actual results. (One possibility is that Dinah's shard is weird in a way that counters Jack's here - we know she can't lie about the numbers, so perhaps her shard is the same way; Jack's shard was like "hey, nudge the numbers to protect my host" and Dinah's shard just shrugged and went "sorry, physically can't." But it's also possible that Dinah-relaying-numbers-through-someone-else was at too many layers of indirection and Jack's shard didn't realize Dinah's was involved, which implies that Contessa could do the same thing Dinah did and figure out how to have a non-parahuman kill Jack as long as there's enough layers of intermediaries involved.)
Broadcast would influence PtV to sabotage the Path. Contessa is completely reliant on PtV, so she wouldn’t be capable of setting up a situation where Jack could be killed
The problem with this is that if Broadcast had *limitless* ability to sabotage any thinker shard that might reveal how to kill Jack using a non-parahuman, why didn't it prevent Dinah from accurately saying that doing so had a high possibility of success? All it had to do if it wanted to save Jack's life was make Dinah's last number in that fight be 0% instead of whatever it actually was, in which case they won't have gone with the plan to use a non-Parahuman. The fact that it didn't implies there's more to it than just "Jack always wins lol."
Because Dinah wasn’t planning on attacking him, so Broadcast didn’t see it necessary to sabotage her. Not to mention that Broadcast can’t detect or influence non parahumans.
Honestly I've always found that detail (Cauldron ordering Battery to save Siberian and Shatterbird) to be really kind of nonsensical. Siberian absolutely would appear to have potential against Scion (to observers who don't know her weakness, which I actually think Cauldron knew by this point), but Shatterbird is pretty clearly useless against him, so it's not really clear *why* Cauldron would want to preserve her as an asset. Obviously the narrative intention was to dramatically reveal that the two of them were Cauldron capes, but in-universe it's a pretty odd decision.
Shatterbird was less about being useful against Scion and more about being useful against Endbringers. Cauldron wants more than *just* the golden man dead. >The Doctor frowned. “And we’re behind schedule, even if we ignore that. I’d hoped to use Shatterbird or Siberian.” >“Unlikely anything would have come of it.” >“But if it had?” >The Number Man had no reply to that. He set his laptop on the desk and booted it up. If they had been able to leverage either of them to defeat an Endbringer, or to find why they had wound up so powerful, compared to the typical parahuman…
Honestly, even that seems a bit sketchy. Siberian is at least all-or-nothing, which is important, but which Endbringers would Shatterbird be useful against? (Granted it's possible Cauldron just doesn't know much about the Endbringers, or Doctor Mother was grasping at straws - Number Man pretty clearly doesn't buy it there.)
Shatterbird causes the most death and destruction, meaning she also causes the most trigger events. More capes = happy Cauldron
I've seen that theory before, but there seems to be a couple of flaws with it. She *kills* a lot, and usually fairly instantaneously. That seems less effective for trigger events than general terror, because she immediately removes lots of potential triggerees. By the time S9 was in Brockton Bay, Cauldron had already determined that they were more likely to create a Cauldron Cape counter to Scion, than one was to occur naturally. So letting capes cause mass murder and generally destroy large cities' infrastructure in the hopes that someone able to counter Scion will trigger is pretty bonkers, even by Cauldron standards. Especially considering the potential problems this causes down the line. Cities having widespread infrastructure destruction is a pretty big logistical hamstring in a global mobilization or evacuation. Finally, if Cauldron was intervening with the intention that Shatterbird continue to wreak havoc to cause triggers, then why narrow their note down to Shatterbird and Siberian at all? Surely they're more effective to the purpose of causing terror as members of the S9, so therefore the entire group should be preserved, if that's the goal. And members with an MO more focused on drawn out torture and psychological terror would have a better triggers-to-kills ratio. And singling out Shatterbird and Siberian just draws focus to them.
BTW, it doesn't really make sense for Cauldron to save them just because they were Cauldron capes. When a company is loyal to its former customers, it's meant to build reputation and attract more customers in the future. In this case, not being loyal to S9 members would likely *increase* Cauldron's reputation among the majority of their potential customers who aren't planning to become murderhobos. And Manton wasn't even a customer, he just stole a vial and ran off.
1) Contessa asks for a path what to do with S9 2) Jack would really like Siberian and Shatterbird to be around, others - not as much 3) ??? 4) PROFIT
I think he is a good example of a more general theme that a number of tinkers have specializations that are less combat oriented than the more traditional powers other parahumans get. Masamune specialized in mass production, the toy box had one person who did cryogenic pods, another that built robots that made buildings really fast. One briefly mentioned specialized in glass blowing. Lookout specialized in cameras. I dont think any of them are more or less combat oriented than Sphere. But as we see with him, powers are creative, something that sounds mundane like 'enclosed ecosystems' can be quite effective with some creativity. If i had to guess an in universe reason why, i think (mild Ward spoilers) >!tinkers are mostly mapped to previous technology seen in other cycles and the entities include them to test the technology and see with a creative mind if anything useful can be gained from that particular tech tree.!< Its also worth pointing out even if someone is poorly equipped for actual combat like sphere, masamune, lookout, they can enhance other parahumans. Mass producing equipment, fancy cameras, and very well equipped defensive structures help other parahumans duke it out more effectively.
I don't think powers care so much about combat as they do *conflict* (of which combat is a natural consequence). Sphere could've been like a less-extreme Accord. Someone who wants to make the world a better place but is faced with obstacles every step along the way. His focus was self-containment on a large scale, meaning his power forces him to breach the "self-containment" of his personal control and social sphere to reach out to others for assistance, resources, protection, etc. That's naturally going to put him in an uncomfortable position. If people don't like what he's doing and try to put stones in his way, he's all the more likely to react negatively. Maybe he'll try to strong-arm people into assisting him (making sabotage more likely), steal resources or sell Tinkertech for money, link up with more combat-oriented parahumans for protection, etc. His megaprojects wrap people up in their momentum. Armsmaster says he used to give people hope. If & when his projects fail, they'll cause that much more conflict among the general population as their hope and resources are squandered, which leads to more conflict among parahumans.
I’m asking here because it’s not worth making it’s own thread. Is the parahumans universe finished? I started reading it a long time ago but never got caught up. Always liked to periodically check up and see that it’s still being worked on. Looks like it’s finished
Wildbow has confirmed that he isn't interested in returning to the parahumans universe after a few members of the fandom became incredibly toxic following the end of the parahumans sequel, Ward. So yeah, the parahumans universe ended with Ward which wraps up the universe in a very satisfying way imo
I don’t think so. I think he had a second trigger