[Rail] Academy City OOC Thread III: Electromagnetic Hyper-cannon Go!

[Terry576]

Yeah, totally. Sorry about the delay, I'm getting SLAMMED with work now.

Lemme take like a 45 minute nap and I'll do it.

(Else, you'll get the post around 9PM)

EDIT: Screw it, I'll write it tomorrow when I wake up or get home. Expect Hajime and Anti-Skill at either 6AM or 6PM.

[Surtr]

Is there any open plots that a character can walk in? After the event of introducing my character, I'm not sure what to do next.

[Lord-Cao-Cao]

I could involve you in the same plot arc that Shougo is currently in. I was thinking of also 'inviting' Crocell and Kasai, too; but only if they want to. Of course, the letter will give you the means to opt out. If you haven't already, though, could you please look up the ToAru setting on their wiki/watch the anime/read the Light Novel? Knowledge on the setting will greatly assist in helping tell the story.

[AnimeKid]

I would be totally coo with Crocell being involved in whatever you have cooked up Cao. Out of all my characters Tobio is still my favorite and "main" character. However Crocell is growing in his own way.

[Surtr]

I'll read the wiki on the net but not the anime or novel as I have no idea where to buy that. Anyway if I can be involved in a plot, whatever it is, then cool.

[Lord-Cao-Cao]

At the risk of sounding stupid, I am going to say

>2012
>buying anime/light novels
>ishiggy diggy

You can watch ToAru on the internet for free, and if I remember correctly, the Light Novel is on Baka-Tsuki.

[Surtr]

can't I just read a wiki or something? I don't want to searching the net for "Free"
Episodes. As for the light novel, link me and I'll read it.

[Lord-Cao-Cao]

http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/in...jutsu_no_Index

Here.

Also, To Aru was a publicly released series, so it's literally available on almost any site which, say, streams anime (or you could just torrent it). It's not hard.

[Lady Serpentine]

I could involve you in the same plot arc that Shougo is currently in. I was thinking of also 'inviting' Crocell and Kasai, too; but only if they want to. Of course, the letter will give you the means to opt out. If you haven't already, though, could you please look up the ToAru setting on their wiki/watch the anime/read the Light Novel? Knowledge on the setting will greatly assist in helping tell the story.

If you want Kasai to be in, I'm fine with that.

[Surtr]

Right, I'll torrent it. The anime can't be bad if it spawned a FFRP thread made by a fan. When will the plot start by the way.

[AnimeKid]

Hmmm......?!

Hey guys, I just had an idea. It would make the Jaguars a more stable recuring threat and make their actions and why they aren't all dead yet believeable.

You guys remember that Technomancer villan I pitched a while ago? If not here was the run down.

The villain this extraordinary Technopath who was sent to a remote research facility by Academy city. Being treated like a lab rat he grew to resent Academy City.

One day while they were testing his ability to connect his mind to the internet and his hacking abilities, they managed to receive permission to do a trial of hacking a Dummy Corporation that had been set up to look like a real one. However due to coincidence and bad timing an elite and malicious hacking group was doing the same thing. Only they were sending in a virus. The Technopath and the virus came into contact and the virus infected and took residence in his mind.

The reason that this happened is because in order to increase his intelligence capacity and speed the research facility could have run a test that made his use his Techopathy to willingly make himself a cyborg and integrate machinery seamlessly into his mind making it to where his mind is like a computer, but retaining his human ingenuity and emotions. This led to the Technopath going on a rampage that killed the scientists involved and escaping to freedom and going into hiding.

Now his hatred of Academy City combined with the virus's need to delete have led him back to Academy City to try to destroy it.

This led to him becoming the leader of the Jaguars. It also is why the Jaguars are never fully stamped out. A few always escape due to him messing with some of Academy City's security and surveillance systems. However he does allow a few members to be killed or captured. After all, if they all got away someone would get suspicious. Not that the detective isn't that is.

[Terry576]

Oh man you have totally underestimated The Detective. He is not just suspicious, he is always suspicious.

Also; let's quote up some Anyr:

It sounds like he might make a decent villain. However, some aspects of the plot do stretch suspension of disbelief:

1) The CIA likely wouldn't be a worthy trial for a decent Academy City hacker. In canon 'outside' technology is easy for them to compromise, because from their perspective it's 30 years out of date. One character was even shocked that anyone would still be using such incredibly low tech to hide sensitive data, comparing it to 'seeing a car run on coal'.

2) Viruses made to infect computers can't infect a human mind; That would be like an organic virus causing disease in a television. I can't really think of any ways to make this one plausible, aside from making the virus have been intended for minds from the start. We might have to just handwave it with some technobabble and leave it at that.

2 is the one I want to understand. Also why an elite hacking group was hacking a dummy corporation set up by Academy City for a test run.

And this makes it even less plausible for how the Jaguars are a Skill-Out group, as well as why Crowley is letting the insane malicious technopath who he has no control over trot around.

E: Mostly because I refuse to believe teenagers are capable of vicious, sociopathic, Chaotic Evil D&D murder.

[AnimeKid]

Note how I said Malicious. They were doing to wreck sh*t. Plus Anyr helped me out and pretty much okay-ed it as evidenced:

Ah the way I was thinking of it was that the Technopath had reached a level of power to where his mind was like that of a supercomputer, quite literally. If that did not work then in order to increase his intelligence capacity and speed the research facility could have run a test that made his use his Techopathy to willingly make himself a cyborg and integrate machinery seamlessly into his mind making it to where his mind is like a computer, but retaining his human ingenuity and emotions.

Well, out of those two options the second sounds like the most plausible. It's still a stretch that a virus intended for a completely different type of system would be able to affect him, but it's not really that big an issue. We are in a cinematic universe that probably uses Hollywood computer logic, after all.

And if not the CIA how about a dummy protocal? Like a fake company set up by Academy City that was really to be used as a digital testing ground for Subject: The Fool? (The name of the project. The Fool standing for the Arcana in which it is zero, being nothing but having infinite possibilities.... I have been playing a little to much Persona 3)

My thoughts exactly (well, minus the bits about Persona 3).

Whether or not the character is actually needed as a villain, there doesn't seem to be any harm in adding him to the pool. As an aside, though, planning contingencies in case a game dies is a surprisingly <b class dangerous practice. From what I've seen, that sort of mentality (well intentioned as it is) can often make games die. Seriously, we're better off just focusing all our attention on making the original a success, rather than getting distracted by a mirage.

As for your last point. Of course teenagers are capable of it. Sure it's rarer than in adults but it still happens whether you refuse to believe it or not. If you need some proof that Teenagers can be malicous look up a Sukeban called the Kanto Women Delinquent Alliance.

Also what the h*ll does Daisuke count as then? Not only did he murder Shougo's father but attempted to do the same to him.

Plus, he's not just trotting around like Souji was. He is actively hiding. Like gone underground. As far as anyone is probably concerned he died along with those scientists.

[Terry576]

I believe they are capable of murder, yeah, not sociopathic D&D style murder. Not "there are several orcs on the premise. They appear to have taken the group hostage, and are threatening one of them..." murder.

[AnimeKid]

Well, all it takes is one bad day. Seriously though it is possible. Heck it might acutally be more likely considering teenagers are more prone to do stupid **** than adults. A kid can do just about anything an adult can do. It is just more shocking when they do.

After all sociopathic tendencies are not limited to adults.

[Terry576]

...You are misunderstanding me.

Teens are capable of murder, yes. Not

With one boy both his arms were twisted in impossible directions. Another looked to be bleeding from the head severely with a cracked skull. The two girls looked like they had bones jutting out of their arms along with ripped cloths. The last boy had burns all over his face with his eye looking like it had been welded shut.

You could have fixed it by removing "arms were twisted", and had two people standing over the bodies in horror, thereby solidifying the position as "accidental murders", but

Standing over them were a group of boys in basic delinquent wear carrying metal bats. One was flicking an old fashioned lighter open and closed as a reflex. Standing as the baddast of them was a girl. She was wearing an Onizuka uniform and held a metal bat as well. Only hers was slightly bent from use and still had blood on it. Blood that she licked off.

Don't get me wrong, they are definitely villainous. Just not really "Skill-Out", or a gang, so much as teenage caricatures of vicious murderers.

[AnimeKid]

I get what you are saying. I put things that way on purpose because that was to show yeah these guys are horrible people. Not every teenager is going to be 'Oh I killed someone. How horrible, what kind of monster am I?!'

So yes, they aren't really Skill-Out or a gang. That is how they were described in the game database. Someone had already made the Jaguars and put them in there. Plus keep in mind it would be the Technopath would be the one recruiting them.

And Daisuke and the small crew he had with him most certainly weren't accidental murderers. He may not have licked any blood since it happened off screen but he did still cause Shougo to have that scar over his neck. He clearly wanted Shougo to suffer before he died.

[Lord-Cao-Cao]

Well, to be fair, Daisuke did kind of have a severe hate-complex on those he viewed as 'scum'-I may not have pulled it off properly, but Daisuke lost his mother to poor, desperate people when he was young. Rather than be afraid of them, Daisuke, upon attaining his psychic power, decided to take his wrath out on them and 'clean up the streets' so to speak. Now, one has to remember that Nimori Haradas' students were poor, often delinquent Skill-Outs; the exact sort that Daisuke so despised. When he was punched in the face by a nobody who, in his eyes, was teaching these thugs how to accost others more efficiently, Daisuke had a fit of childish spite magnified by the loss of his mother and channeled through his considerable resources, which only grew when he saw Haradas' pride unbroken despite his efforts.

Even then he didn't have the guts to kill Harada himself and hired a bunch of particularly nasty teenagers to do the job for him-And they regretted it (or at least one did, before Moroe killed him).

When he made the attempt on Shougos' life, one also has to remember that A: Rather drunk, and B: Saw Shougos' intrusion as a break-in leading to an attempt on his life. If you read closely, none of Daisukes' gang was particularly comfortable with it (and many left as soon as they could-Except 'Boil' or Kiril, for reasons I will explain in the future). Yes, Daisuke was spiteful and downright nasty, but in his own eyes, his actions were justified-For him, he was purifying the streets of filth and making it so that nobody would ever have to lose someone like he did (the irony of him taking Shougos' fathers' life was lost on him). And more importantly, he only got away with his actions because of his power and position. Think of Joffrey Baratheon from a Game of Thrones. It's like that.

Oh, and Boil only did that to make Shougo stop struggling. As one could guess, his psychic power is to make things boil-Flesh included, by contact.

Ashikaga Yoshiharu is a wealthy and respected member of Academy City who donates a good deal of his considerable wealth to Academy City and who actively works to promote it. Because of this, and because his son is also a fairly powerful Level Four, people are willing to look the other way to some extent.

Key word being 'some extent'-He was to be brought to justice, but due to the fiasco at the hospital, he was essentially tipped off and managed to escape.

[AnimeKid]

Ah. I see. So then I have to scrap my idea of teenaged murderous psycopaths who take pleasure in others pain and occasionally kill? Cause I was just using was the game wiki already had posted in it. I didn't create these guys myself nor their attitudes.

Cause I was essentially going to probably make them orphans for the most part. The were also going to be of the live underground sort. Kind of like in the sewers.

[Anyr]

Ah. I see. So then I have to scrap my idea of teenaged murderous psycopaths who take pleasure in others pain and occasionally kill? Cause I was just using was the game wiki already had posted in it. I didn't create these guys myself nor their attitudes.

Cause I was essentially going to probably make them orphans for the most part. The were also going to be of the live underground sort. Kind of like in the sewers.

Well, an entire gang of teenage psychopaths might be stretching it. As Lord-Cao-Cao illustrated, gangs aren't monolithic entities whose members all think alike. Even 'savage anarchists' like the Jaguars can be composed of many different types of scum. Some of them could be true monsters, like the ones we saw earlier; Others could be run of the mill delinquents, who beat people up to make themselves feel big; Still others could be impressionable cultists, who've been seduced by ideas about the primal power of chaos to change the world. The list goes on. The Jaguars as a whole can have a reputation which, in reality, only reflects a small portion of its members.

But as to the view that no teenager in the Toaruverse could be so horrible? That seems to be contradicted by canon. Both the source material and this RP already contain plenty of teenagers who display (or surpass) that level of sadistic cruelty. Please note that this observation only applies to the fictional universe in which this RP is set. The possible existence of such people in the real world has (IMHO) little relevance to the topic at hand.

[AnimeKid]

I am perfectly fine with your explanation. Thanks for helping to sort things out Anyr. So what do you think of my Technopath being the leader of the Jaguars?

[Lord-Cao-Cao]

I could work with that. And Anyr is right-ToAru canonverse is infamous for producing completely amoral psychopaths. Because of the way psychic powers work, Espers might generally be more susceptible to it than others.

Still, to be fair, many of them probably wouldn't be "I WORSHIP THE DARK GODS" and be Sunday Morning Cartoon Villainy and do evil for the sake of doing evil. Most of them would just be messed up kids.

[Atrum-Persavor]

There will be much soul-crushing despair when my arc gets going, though.

Pretty much a lot of "oh my god, what have I done", soon.

[Anyr]

...So what do you think of my Technopath being the leader of the Jaguars?

I'm fine with it; At this early stage, there's not much more I can think to say. The concept could turn into anything from 'tough guys being bossed around by useful nerd', to an evil version of the Dollars from 'Durarara!!'.

[AnimeKid]

Thanks. Okay one last quick question. Do you think that since Academy City is 30 years ahead of the rest of the world that they would have nanobots?

[Anyr]

Thanks. Okay one last quick question. Do you think that since Academy City is 30 years ahead of the rest of the world that they would have nanobots?

Yes. For example {light novel spoilers ahead}:

Spoiler

Show

In canon, they're injected into students who leave the city, so that they can be tracked in case of emergency. But that's peanuts compared to the Director's secret network of surveillance nanobots (called UNDER_LINE), which float invisibly throughout Academy City. Why rely on clunky cameras or satellites, when you have spies which can hide in the air itself?

[AnimeKid]

Sooo, where is everybody? Is there stuff happening IRL?

[Terry576]

When a forum is down for four or five days, most people don't immediately check it every day. They leave it for a while, because it hasn't been up.

[Lady Serpentine]

I'm around, but my computer keeps eating my posts. >.>

[Lord-Cao-Cao]

I'm here, too. I'm just waiting for Keveak to reply, so we can get on with Saturday.