Mystic Muse's Mostly Mildly Mediocre Random Banter #238

[Peelee]

[Meanwhile.] Hey, Bookmark! Turns out, you don't need symbiotes! Just invoke Gauss's operator, find a way to block Hilbert's arrow and call it a day!

Ya know, that's the second best simple explanation in a webcomic for explaining transformations that I've seen! I wonder if others will get on that train.

[Rater202]

[Meanwhile.] Hey, Bookmark! Turns out, you don't need symbiotes! Just invoke Gauss's operator, find a way to block Hilbert's arrow and call it a day!

But if I become, or permenantly bond with, a symbiote powerful enough to be considered a symbiote dragon no arrow will be able to permanently kill me and with repeated controlled exposure I shall become immune to any special properties Hilbert's arrow might possess.

Not quite sure how to find a way around the vulnerability to light-aligned cosmic power though but realistically how often am I gonna encounter that?

[Peelee]

But if I become, or permenantly bond with, a symbiote powerful enough to be considered a symbiote dragon no arrow will be able to permanently kill me and with repeated controlled exposure I shall become immune to any special properties Hilbert's arrow might possess.

Until Hilbert's arrow gets its own powerful enough symbiote.

[Rater202]

Until Hilbert's arrow gets its own powerful enough symbiote.

An arrow bonded to a symbiote does nothing until someone fires it.

...Also, if I've developed resistance from controlled exposure adding a symbiote doesn't change that.

Edit: Also, you'd be surprised what the Arms Race Gap regarding Symbiote Powers is like. Generally speaking, if another symbiote is stronger than you you're not gonna be able to surpass them without outside help and even then...

Like, Venom's been powered up several times, sometimes at the same time as Carnage, but is always just weak enough against Carnage that he can't be defeated without multiple people teaming up and/or using specialized weapons.

Carnage has likewise been powered up all to hell, and yet is no match for Toxin... How has never been powered up and has only had three hosts. (Symbiotes get more powerful every time they change hosts.)

If I get the head start the arrow would never be able to catch up.

[Peelee]

An arrow bonded to a symbiote does nothing until someone fires it.

A powerful enough symbiote can, why not.

[Rater202]

A powerful enough symbiote can, why not.

Most symbiotes prefer to use themselves as weapons. Or, baring that, a host with natural weapons or martial arts training.

A symbiote would only shoot an arrow made of itself.

Most symbiotes also won't take a host that can't move on it's own.

Also the arms race gap I've mentioned.

[Tvtyrant]

An arrow bonded to a symbiote does nothing until someone fires it.

...Also, if I've developed resistance from controlled exposure adding a symbiote doesn't change that.

Edit: Also, you'd be surprised what the Arms Race Gap regarding Symbiote Powers is like. Generally speaking, if another symbiote is stronger than you you're not gonna be able to surpass them without outside help and even then...

Like, Venom's been powered up several times, sometimes at the same time as Carnage, but is always just weak enough against Carnage that he can't be defeated without multiple people teaming up and/or using specialized weapons.

Carnage has likewise been powered up all to hell, and yet is no match for Toxin... How has never been powered up and has only had three hosts. (Symbiotes get more powerful every time they change hosts.)

If I get the head start the arrow would never be able to catch up.

That's why we make the arrow an animated sentient arrow.

Or we just tie a bell to the arrow.

[Anonymouswizard]

Most symbiotes prefer to use themselves as weapons. Or, baring that, a host with natural weapons or martial arts training.

I'm like 80% sure an arrow has natural weapons.

So clearly the solution is to attach motorised wheels to the arrow. Then we've pretty much filled all your criteria.


I mean, if you got to that point and somebody really wanted to kill you, they'd better be a Strategist potentially with the World Breaker's Hand. They're pretty much all able to turn your symbiote off for long enough to matter, the latter to just remove it from existence with a wave of their hand.

And that's after the Strategists were deported from being universally Imperator-level. The issue with a fictional arms race is that eventually somebody can find a way around it, and 'sent straight to nonexistence' is one of the few things hard to build an immunity to.

Of course then the Strategist dies of having a bookshelf fall on them. But they'll be back in a bit.

[BisectedBrioche]

V0.7 of my Lara Croft cosplay's complete! ...it's super weird seeing myself as a brunette (brown contacts I can get past because I'm the only one of my siblings without them, but the hair just feels so...different).

Oh hey, the article about me on Cabin Radio got posted! It's too much for me to look at myself so please enjoy.

That's so cool! Congratulations!

[Anonymouswizard]

V0.7 of my Lara Croft cosplay's complete! ...it's super weird seeing myself as a brunette (brown contacts I can get past because I'm the only one of my siblings without them, but the hair just feels so...different).

Looking good!

It is weird that all your siblings have brown contacts, do they do a lot of acting or something? ,

[Peelee]

Looking good!

It is weird that all your siblings have brown contacts, do they do a lot of acting or something? ,

Where do you think BB got hers from?

[Rater202]

I mean, if you got to that point and somebody really wanted to kill you, they'd better be a Strategist potentially with the World Breaker's Hand. They're pretty much all able to turn your symbiote off for long enough to matter, the latter to just remove it from existence with a wave of their hand.

And that's after the Strategists were deported from being universally Imperator-level. The issue with a fictional arms race is that eventually somebody can find a way around it, and 'sent straight to nonexistence' is one of the few things hard to build an immunity to.

Of course then the Strategist dies of having a bookshelf fall on them. But they'll be back in a bit.

I mean, you can protect from being reality warped out of existence by 1: Having some vital piece of Cosmic something-something within you* or 2: Being a reality warper yourself.

Assuming that I go with the "reasonable" version of becoming a dragon, which is to say my "starting" condition is that I'm bonded to a weapon V bio-suit,, something cloned from The Grendel, a symbiote dragon that attacked Earth back in... Well, people confused it for Grendel coming back for another round and when Thor showed up to fight it they thought he was Beowulf.

Apparently in the Marvel Universe the story of Beowulf as we know it is the result of the real Beowulf fighting Grendel and Grendel's mother being combined and conflated with Thor fighting The Grendel and its "sister", who is unnamed but in the modern any answers to the Alias "Big Mother."

Anyway, that gets the job started and, as a bonus, weapon V bio-suits are engineered to be either mindless, fully subservient to their hosts, or both, and are infected with a targeted psychic virus hat does some kind of psychic surgery that partially severs them from the symbiote hivemind. IT's still part of the Hivemind and gains all the benefits(and can be sensed by other symbiotes) but can't be controlled or influenced by other members of the hive mind.

...But... While Weapon v symbiotes are a lot stronger than symbiotes that aren't derived from a symbiote Dragon(the orignal Sym-Soldiers could completly ignore being sprayed with napalm and weapon v suits are meant to be stronger) they're not dragons themselves.

In Absolute Carnage, when the Carnage symbiote was revived as "Dark Carnage" by merging it with the remains of the Grendel, Cletus was able to turn it back into a Symbiote Dragon, and make it much stronger, by devouring symbiote Codices and other Symbiotes... But Carnage consumed thousands of codices and dozens of symbiotes to get to that point.

There are definitely enough codices to go around following King in Black... But they're mostly in New York City, London, Hong Kong, Wakanda, and Krakoa, the main points where Knull's invasion forces were strongest. New York City's out because the marvel Us has severely cracked down on aliens and has given the Alchemex Copreration carte blanch to attack and detain anyone associated with symbiotes for experiments. If I can get to Doctor Steve first and convince him to help me I might be able to use Alchemex resources but otherwise...

London and Hong Kong, meanwhile, have much more regulated Supers with state-sponsored and mystically guided teams. Combine that with my American accent and inability to speak any form of Chinese and I'd stick out like a sore thumb. Also, as far as I know, no supers got infected in Hong Kong and only the one super got infected in London and she's a minor powered nobody.

Wakanda... Yeah, I'd get caught at the border and get my ass whooped.

So that leaves Krakoa... There are two ways I could get in... 1: Swim-up Dead Mutant's Cove, the one area o the island where they can't set up ocean security because the waves are too choppy and hope my symbiote can protect me from being crushed, drowned, or smashed against razor-sharp rocks... But someone already did that so they're gonna be wise to that trick

2: Join ORCHIS, an Anti-Mutant organization secretly run by Sapient Sentinels who think that sentinels are oppressed because Mutants won't let the sentinels kill them and because humans destroy sentinels every time the Sentinels become self-aware and decide to enslave humans. They think They're the Geth but really they're just Skynet. They're based in a space station orbiting the sun that was originally built by Tny Stark but they stole it using legal Loopholes.

ORCHIS has a few things that makes it viable 1: There is, or at least once, a Krakoan gate on the station. It's not known if ORCHIS destroyed it after discovering it. 2: They have multiple copies of the bodies of various members of X-Force. X-Force keeps attacking the station, being killed by Nimrod, and then respawning on Krakoa and trying again. 3: Abigail Brand, a hybrid of alien and mutant and head of SWORD, has betrayed both her fellow mutants and common sense by joining ORCHIS in secret. She has a plan for making the "Earthers" a major player in the Galactic Scene, but it's very convoluted, involves screwing over Krakoa, and she's a dumbass if she thinks that ORCHIS won't kill her the second she's not useful to them considering that she's 50% Homo s superior and ORCHIS is devoted to 100% extermination of all traces of Homo s superior.

(She claims to dislike Krakoa because they only know her as Brand, a reference to her mutant power... Except that' the name she gave them.)

And Brand has a Codex. she was possessed by a Symbiote when the Symbiote Imperium attacked the SWORd station in Spider-Man and the X-Men #4

If I can get to the ORCHIs station, I could have my symbiote nibble on some of the X-Force corpses in the morgue or afterward, my Symbiote would have Mutant DNA, so I should register as being accompanied by a mutant and thus be able to walk through the gates. Once I get what I need, I steal anything of value I can get away with from the ORCHIS Base and then screw off.

(The Station is Stark Tech. They might have some Extremis hidden away somewhere. Extremis does fun things with Living Abyss.)

Once on the Island... The entire Island and therefore everyone on it who eat the native produce is infected with multiple codices and also a benign version of the Transmode virus. Just living on the island and eating the fruits and vegetables grown on the island should eventually build my symbiote up to dragon power while giving it a lo to adapt to... And some of the Codices infecting Krakoa the Island originally came from Cyclops and Jean Grey, whose powers and genetics combine to create time travelers and reality warpers. (And whose symbiotes were modified to adapt and evolve much faster, which... Yeah, really useful to have. Might make the full power up from absorbing their codices permanent and accelerate my evolution in general)

It'd basically just be a waiting game until my symbiote had evolved enough that I could psychokinetically extract codices from people without hurting them and then start harvesting codices from people.

Of course, I'd have to avoid telepaths... And Gwenpool, like the plauge. Symbiote hosts are resistant to mid-reading, but there are a disproportionately high number of omega-level telepaths. And Gwenpool might recognize me as another dimensional traveler with meta knowledge.

But, if it worked, I'd be bonded to a symbiote dragon with reality-warping capabilities from the aggregate of millions of mutant powers.

*Brandy Selbie, current host of the Star Brand, was utterly unaffected by the reality-warping of the Pandemonium Cube... And kept everything she gained from her time in the altered reality(going from being a baby to... I wanna say a six-year-old? She's young enough that she completly forgot that she sensed the Eternals sneaking into Avengers Mountain when Sprite read her mind and used an illusion to turn into her 'magical sleep friend.' She also in the other timeline was raised by Rocket Raccoon and Groot, and so is ridiculously sarcastic, violent, and foul-mouthed for someone her age.)

[Peelee]

Assuming that I go with the "reasonable" version of becoming a dragon

I think this may mean something different to you than it does to others. Definitely to me.

[Rater202]

I think this may mean something different to you than it does to others. Definitely to me.

"Reasonable" as in I don't have everything I need from the beginning and have to put actual effort into it.

You'll note that I have it in quotation makes. That was for a reason.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, you can protect from being reality warped out of existence by 1: Having some vital piece of Cosmic something-something within you* or 2: Being a reality warper yourself.

Yeah, that kind of does nothing. Nobles kind of avoid being WBHed out of existence by not only being one cosmic rung below Strategists, but because the Strategists find it much more useful to destroy the concept rather than the person embodying it. You just don't have that protection.

As for the latter, WBH solves a lot of issues. When it comes to destruction an Excrusian just reality warps better than you. Their biggest issue is if they don't have WBH, but honestly by the time your symbiote cones back online they might not even be in Creation anymore.

*stuff*

Cool, but Strategists don't really care about that. All they need is time to use their destruction abilities, which isn't long at all. You're just gaining more worldly power, while they're operating on a divine level.

Could you take one down? Probably. But we're kind of at the point where the powers are meaningfully different enough that it kind of becomes who moves first, and honestly the Strategist has a much more foolproof way of coming back. They die regularly, even the literally immortal ones.

[Rater202]

while they're operating on a divine level.

Oh, in that case, I'm overthinking it.

Symbiotes were originally created by Knull to kill gods, or anything that is fundamentally similar to a god, and steal their power.

[Anonymouswizard]

Oh, in that case, I'm overthinking it.

Symbiotes were originally created by Knull to kill gods, or anything that is fundamentally similar to a god, and steal their power.

Oh don't worry. Strategists aren't gods, they kill those fairly regularly. They're the nobility of the Void that existed before Creation, and they want the part that Cneph stole back. Being a god kind of relies on being part of Creation, which they never have been (even if they have powers that interact with it).

So you can try, but all you'll end up with is a very pissed off Ninuan who's just had to come back from death six times since your last encounter, and urgh she's already had to pay her bills and have a shower today so can you just please piss off into nonexistence.

[Rater202]

They're the nobility of the Void that existed before Creation

And Symbiotes are the Void that existed before Creation. Pieces of primordial emptiness and darkness brought to live by an eldritch being older than the universe because he's pissed off by the existence of planets and stars and blamed the Celestials for it.

So we're looking at a situation where the symbiote is weaker but also has a much heavier conceptual weight.

[Anonymouswizard]

And Symbiotes are the Void that existed before Creation. Pieces of primordial emptiness and darkness brought to live by an eldritch being older than the universe because he's pissed off by the existence of planets and stars and blamed the Celestials for it.

So we're looking at a situation where the symbiote is weaker but also has a much heavier conceptual weight.

All that means is that it's Arcana! You've just made the Strategist's job easier, their power of Lore is about about using and binding Not-thhings.

[Keltest]

So who else feels like theyre watching a game of Calvinball right now?

[Peelee]

So who else feels like theyre watching a game of Calvinball right now?

It's certainly a heck of a thing to witness!

[Fyraltari]

So, this is what I sound like like when I talk about Doctor Who.

Good to know.

[Peelee]

So, this is what I sound like like when I talk about Doctor Who.

Good to know.

The show itself tends to be a bit simpler.

[Form]

So who else feels like theyre watching a game of Calvinball right now?

I'll say, anyone up for a game of Mornington Crescent?

Please say no, please say no, please say no

[DataNinja]

So who else feels like theyre watching a game of Calvinball right now?

No, no, Calvinball I can understand.

[Anonymouswizard]

So, this is what I sound like like when I talk about Doctor Who.

Good to know.

Nah, that's generally understandable.

More like when you're talking about Faction Paradox.

I'll say, anyone up for a game of Mornington Crescent?

I'll start.

Archway.

[Form]

V0.7 of my Lara Croft cosplay's complete! ...it's super weird seeing myself as a brunette (brown contacts I can get past because I'm the only one of my siblings without them, but the hair just feels so...different).

Complete with a pair of Desert Eagles and holsters even, judging from the background. Shoulder holsters I'm guessing, so they're visible during streaming? I'm curious what v1.0 will look like.

Archway.

An aggressive opening, I see. It would leave you vulnerable to the Camden Town block, but I'm not going to attempt that as it'd be risky to me too. I'll start at Borough.

[Fyraltari]

Nah, that's generally understandable.

More like when you're talking about Faction Paradox.

Oh White Guardian, no!

[Rater202]

So who else feels like they're watching a game of Calvinball right now?

No. Calvin Ball is making up the rules as you go along.

This is two people trying to reconcile established rules from two completly different settings to decide who wins even though it really doesn't matter and the two people have their own biases.

So, basically, you're watching Death Battle.

[Peelee]

Complete with a pair of Desert Eagles and holsters even, judging from the background. Shoulder holsters I'm guessing, so they're visible during streaming? I'm curious what v1.0 will look like.

Lara Croft has dual Desert Eagles? Geez, that may be the most unrealistic thing about her.