Comic 1188 - Discuss blooding Mom's red
Posted on 21st May 2019, 5:58 PM
in Like a Bullet from Behind
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Author Notes:
"I..." He pauses. Hesitates.
"I would become sidetracked," he finally states. "I know I would. I appreciate the offer, though."
"We could sync," Fuse suggests. "I'm a hacker and I'm sure Dr. Finch knows something about math and... codes and shit. Could be enough of a boost to help Pierce along."
You consider it--but if you have half the party synced for the decryption process, it may detract from what else you can accomplish while you wait. You have a few ideas, and you'd rather keep everyone's minds free for that (and not risk oversyncing if any of it drags out).
You instead offer to give Pierce a cleantex effect.
"Oh, that would be helpful," he replies.
You cleantex Pierce, and he begins working on decoding the messaging ritual.
"So what're ya thinkin'?," Michelle asks.
You think you might want to try blooding Mom's red, if they're okay with it.
The mouth on the wall speaks up. "The various roles of the brain are distributed through my being," they state, "and mostly confined to the majority of my mass at your previous residence. It would take a great deal of blood, and you would need to return there for the process to be anything resembling expedient. I am otherwise fine with this arrangement."
You remember that being the issue before--that it would take a lot of blood, since Mom's red doesn't just have... like... one regular sized, human brain to tap into.
Fortunately, you've advanced to a point where you can produce a lot of blood. As much as necessary.
From there, you could potentially sync with Mom's red and learn to talk with blood, among other things.
You'd also like to practice a force sync or two, to further train your mental/spiritual abilities... and just to kind of see where things are at.
"We ain't been back to that house in a while," Michelle remarks. "Could be risky."
"Yeah," Caius adds, "it was lookin' kinda shady last time anybody passed it. Like they cleared tha whole neighborhood out or somethin'."
"I believe Mine's blood-soaked sheets should still be in her room," Dr. Finch points out. "Yes? We've taken linens from that house, but mostly... well, mostly clean ones. If that's the case, she could potentially portal her way there. It would be less likely to catch the attention of anyone monitoring the street."
"That's if they haven't bugged the whole house," Fuse replies. "Or rigged it up to explode or something. Thale can do half of whatever Mine does, and Carpenter's caught us with our pants down a few times already. They could've poisoned the sheets or stuck miniguns to the ceiling, for all we know."
"That sounds a little over the top," says Michelle.
"Arvin Carpenter is nothing if not over the top," Liz retorts, "and Patton's back is to the proverbial wall."
"It is a risk," Dr. Finch states, adjusting his glasses. "Hmm. Hm."
"Could be worth it, though," adds Caius. "That's another couple tricks in our playbook, an' we'd know what they done to tha house. That's uh... what'dya call it--"
"Intel," Dr. Finch finishes.
"Yeah, intel," Caius affirms with a nod. "Whatever trap they got set up's prob'ly bankin' on us drivin' up and walkin' in tha front door. They don't know jack about tha portals, so if they got an ambush set up, we'll be ambushin' tha ambush."
Michelle smiles, and throws her hands up. "Well, I like it. This is tactically sound AND a terrible idea at the same time, which puts it right in our comfort zone. What's the call, Blondie?"
Also, discuss with Mom's Red about the possible ramifications from syncing with them. They'd be the most alien thing to sync with yet - Who knows what humanity we may lose? Blood dissociation like with the shooting is a real thing to worry about, here.
Mine can check whether the sheet's not been messed with, and then either have it produce more blood in the room to check for cameras or the like, or just have it crawl into the vent, drop next to the door to Mom's Red and then either make more blood in there to flood it, or just... do whatever.
Source: http://bloodismine.thecomicseries.com/comics/1112/
How about the reverse? Can Mine freely open a portal to where her blood has once been? Because... she has bled in the underground saferoom before. She did it to teach Mom's Red to speak proper english. If it works, she could just... open a portal free-floating in the air right above that little pedestal thing, and hose a stream of blood straight into it. No need to risk detection or potentially revealing her various scouting tricks to the enemy.
Or as CiciEnixa suggests, have Mom's Red stream our blood into the basement.
Let's just go in. No caution. Caution probably isn't going to do us much good during the main event. And doing anything to prepare could just trip whatever (if anything) is waiting for us.
An alternate way to get into our house might be to dive into Mom's Red in our bunker and be portaled out of Mom's Red in our basement. If our basement door is closed no one might even know we entered our house.
One of our top priorities (in my opinion) might be if we portal to the house we should check to see if Mom left a ghost (she died in her bed because of an infection and she did not want to see a doctor and over the counter drugs were not enough). I wonder what would happen if Mom's ghost or a ritual-strengthened or Odin-strengthened Mom's ghost possessed Mom's Red or Baby Red. Bringing Mom back would be so sweet and piss Thale off so much (make him lose his mind in rage) whenever we choose to let him find out.
One big question is whether Mine's blood could take suggestions from her friends' brains so Mine's brain does not have to spare her attention for her friends to use blood powers. This might be a big deal to resist The Many (everyone becoming The Blood a little, just like Mine can) or see if everyone can use Mine's powers independently. This is like the OPPOSITE of Thale. And might make Bunker X ridiculously easy (if everyone has blood powers and they gang up on the enemy with that) unless there is a floor of Bunker X that is cut off from The Red.
Carpenter and Nil will have at least this many dangers at their bunker and we NEED to start working on how to be prepared for them (my best guess is that Bunker X may have what we need even though I don't know what that might be):
* the flesh-eating bacteria we know Carpenter has. This might require us to use spacesuits (masks will not be enough) and hope Carpenter has not weaponized nanobots, which might be able to breach our suits when the bacteria could not. Even remote-controlled golems might be eaten by this stuff. Maybe trading up some white blood cells or nanobots could get us protection if we are willing to use it.
* Nil deletion ritual mines that could delete us from existence if we don't avoid them (so remote-controlled golems are a good idea so long as we aren't careless and lose them all to that ritual)
* powerful robots that need EMP or hacking to counter
* Psychic attacks from The Many (our remote control to the golems needs to be immune to that)
* Maybe electrification of Carpenter's HQ (maybe not just the doors but everything)
Thale might have the best of the Zone 50 stuff stashed away at his HQ and that might be very powerful. We might have to defeat Bunker X or steal his warehouse of less good Zone 50 stuff to have a chance against that.
Can the tradesmen sell us rituals? Buying an anti-Nil ritual would be very good, if we can't get it from Bunker X instead. Buying a regeneration ritual might fix Mine's brain and also be the ultimate first aid if people are too hurt to make it to the bunker's bioprinter.
We need to figure out if we can produce blood from our aura or extend our aura into wherever we spray our blood. If we can spray our blood on someone and extend our aura around them can we cut off Queen? That would make Thale's trick of cutting off the blooded part not work because when we spray someone with blood it might cut off their entire body from Thale.
Learn how to unblood people, to be ready to use blood flies or blooded mosquitoes (find some mosquitoes and let them drink our blood to blood them, because mosquitoes are easier to control than blood fly golems) to try to blood, unQueen, and unblood crowds of people to free them from Thale
Below is a list of random ideas for the future
* Creating blood electrocution bombs with blood flies or blood eggs
* Using the alien chill CD on The Many
* Figuring out a way to shoot with the blood wand around corners (a bent stock or bandage tentacle) or trying to attach a blood wand to a blood fly
* What if we traded up some of our ritual supplies?
* Practice blood portals exactly like the video game Portal to start thinking in portals
* Figure out how to make a lot of money so we can buy PMC equipment from a military surplus store (maybe Macland could get us the paperwork to incorporate as a PMC or learn where a black market might be). Nanobots and Stratemeyers and active camouflage (think like a Cuttlefish at least, if we don't have cloaking, or we could uptrade some 20th century digital camo) and fancy helmets with HUD and night vision like Halo ODST and power armor sound fun, but I don't know the upper limit of how cool the stuff can be (example: are personal shields a thing or is that beyond current technology?), so I am probably missing a lot of cool ides of what we could buy if we were a military or PMC. We do have good magical weapons, but we have to keep that secret, too (so PMC equipment could be used instead) or the anti-magic feds will come after us. Is there anything we could produce from our Red that could make us money? What is the limit? Can our Red only produce biological things or can we create gold in it or whatever? Or grow gold from a seed of gold put in the Red if we can't make gold out of nothing?
* Turn our blobberts into blood portals so we can toss blobberts around to portal things away instead of having to always put the portal on the floor or wall. For example, we could drop a large blobbert portal down onto Thale's HQ and portal it away (into space or Mars if possible, especially Mars it might cut off Thale's control of Queened people because it is too far from Earth)
* Learn if we can feed Mom's Red with our own Red, in case Mom's Red needs to use up some Red to accomplish something
* Bioprint gecko gloves so we can climb walls like Spiderman. Any other cool biological tech we could make easily (e.g. web shooters if we really want to)?
* Ask Mackland to deliver a bioprinter (that's better than ours) to a drop site, then we blood portal it to our base. May or may not be worth doing that, actually
* Anything we can do with our super-cool alien computer in our bunker besides trying to crack door codes? I feel that is a little underutilized.
* Figure out how to turn off the bunker doors and use blood portals instead. Thale can't get into our bunker if the door is off (unplugged or whatever?)?
* Ask the tradesmen where Thale's Zone 50 warehouse stuff is (it was probably moved after we saved Liz) and decide if we can blood portal it away quickly (flood it with blood from a blood egg portal then make a giant blood portal to move it to wherever and hope Thale doesn't have GPS trackers on it?). That might be a real problem he might have learned from last time and put GPS trackers on all the boxes. Not sure how to stop that or make it irrelevant unless we blood portal it to Mars and then Thale would know that we have access to the bunkers ... Also I think Thale only knows about portals into our Red and not portals from one place on Earth to another, so we have to choose when we want to tip our hand there. Tipping our hand to steal his Zone 50 stuff is a good time (so we may want to be very careful NOT let Thale know about blood teleportation until then), but combat some other time is also a good time.
* Delegate the car uptrade ritual to the people we rescued from the city but did not make part of our team? We might also need to think about how to make sure the uptraded car will be able to fly and not just be a tank or something
* Blood armor (covering armor with blood then making that blood a portal, so anything (especially bullets and beams) shot at the armor gets portaled away instead of hitting the armor. At least Caius's riot shield should have that.
* What if we offer to trade knowledge to the Tradesmen during the knowledge ritual for a surprise knowledge reward? Do the ritual backwards basically (payment then answered question instead of question then payment). As long as the transaction is balanced, the Tradesmen could tell us stuff they want us to know that we would not know to ask for. Not sure how we could choose what knowledge to give the Tradesmen that we know they don't already know.
* make sure the door to our house's basement is closed (I really hope it is, I don't want enemies to be able to find Mom's Red that basement door was strong for a reason)
* Possible Bunker X threats: Evil Mine, Evil Mine's Mom final boss, or whatever the Mars Red fragment used to be
* How good is the combat CD if the enemy has big guns (Stratemeyers or tank-busting autocannons (some close air support craft like the A-10 have tank-busting autocannons that can kill modern tanks) might blow off a head or limb)?
* Could Red control the time acceleration if she is in the Red herself? She seemed to do well when she fought that silkworm ghost tentacle. If we ever do decide to put a room in our Red and do stuff with our friends there we might want Red there too if that helps her not mess up the time acceleration
* I wonder if we have time to try to improve Fuse's pyrokinesis
* Can we create stuff in our Red that is not bound by normal physics? It thought physics was basically tracked into the Red like dirt, so alternate physics may be possible
* If we unQueen people will that break the hive mind?
* If we use the soul gun on Thale will that break the hive mind?
* If we break Thale's hive mind will that solve our problems or will the oversynched people still think like Thale and be a threat?
Practicing with blood portals and speaking is probably a great idea, especially if we have to shut the bunker doors down as mentioned. If we can find a way of rapidly blooding someone, a swarm of reverse mosquitoes or other blooding bugs, that would be awesome. It certainly wouldn't hurt to ask Mom's Red about how Mom fought against other Red's as we have both Thale and what's his name frozen up in Bunker two to deal with.
As for going home, I think either portaling through our bloody sheets or scouting with a blood bug via the same entrance is the best bet. Definately worth asking the Tradesmen about anti-Nil rituals or other protections. Also, we should ask them if they know the meaning of life, the universe and everything. :) Just in case they actually know, and I'm curious to their reaction to the question.
Checking for mom-ghost seems exciting, "one Blood many minds" seems like something worth trying (and like something Thale cannot understand or do himself).
Aura/Blood/Aura seems to be something we all largely agree we want to get better at.
I also like the PMC and anti-Queening mosquito ideas, but keep in mind that we do *not* want Thale learning of the mosquitoes and imitating that.
If we learned to generate EMP from our blood (blobberts? blood portals?), would that be good enough against Carpenter's robots? Or are blood portals near Nil too dangerous?
"we should probably perceive through the portal first, to verify the situation."
We should perceive through the bloody sheets on Mine's bed to see what we can see.
The sheet itself is a container technically if we think about the blood being absorbed into the fabric. The lining should be a 'container'
Also, shouldn't Big Red know what's been going on about the house?
And Mom's Red can only perceive what is going on at the house from it's seclusion in the hidden basement. If anything did go bad to the point that Mom's Red would have to escape, it did mention it can break free and take off, destroying the house in the process.
...Come to think of it, we don't need Mine to do anything dangerous anymore; we can use golems, portals, and pulling from the red for entire missions now.
I did that myself a few weeks ago.
Anyways, my suggestions going forward- Practice more with that wand we made, maybe stockpile some ammo for it in the Red so we don't have to make it on the fly. BOne spikes, try to make them denser if possible. Maybe some hollow, pointy ones that we can use to blood someone like we have with that alien IV dart gun.
Since we can make blood and stuff within our aura now, we may be able to make better Golems- since we don't have to pull them piece by piece out of our own wrist anymore, that is. Possibly, we could construct them out in the open like an... alien... aura... 3D printer.
I am worried a bit about the, ah, noise... and mess... we just left in Ilworth testing out Combat #11. It miht be worth checking in on Mav, Crease, and Zene to make sure they aren't freaked out by the trashed house... or possibly witnessing those monster forms.
This one's not so much a suggestion as a speculation, but I'm putting my money on Helen being the writer of things like "Combat #11".
Hang in there, MM.
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