Simon's right, Jiraa is an excellent viewpoint character to cut to.
Oh, hi, Six Blades! Shame you're about to have your ass handed to you.
Right, as guessed Probably Better doesn't have a scan of the journal. Oh, they WANT it as an object of power, but they don't know the current plan to finish Kaenemor's spell.
These new drones will not overly impact PB's processing. The distance is too short to have set them up to a fully autonomous mode, and for appreciable data lag. However, adding hundreds of thousands of roving sensor feeds to process may slow them that fraction of a second.
We've ALSO learned PB doesn't have good psychology skills. It can predict and counter combat moves because there are only a limited amount of options in a situation, and they can brute-force compute them, but JUST ENOUGH would have known at a glance Jiraa has no clue who has the journal or where they are. Again, another weakness. Phew!
For Lola's party, that's good, because they won't be instantly swarmed. That's bad for everyone else because PB has to brute force search and interrogate. Given the THOUSANDS of drones this buys them maybe a couple of minutes. Enough time?
Yeah, as you've spotted, we basically have a race against time based around knowledge.
The other aspect in terms of how Justin might have theoretically handled this differently is that they probably wouldn't have resorted to torture and threats, at least not so unsubtly - they wouldn't have ended up in such a chaotic situation in the first place, most likely.
If Matheson, Baltine and Hutchinson wanted a chaos agent, they certainly got one with PB, albeit perhaps not in the way they expected.
Hey: disgruntled rich people seeing themselves as the victims, then whipping up chaotic elements in order to undermine institutions that keep society ticking over nicely, and then the whole thing gets out of hand and they lose control of their own creation?
My analyses do, of course, have the advantage of this being a SERIAL. Since the reader has to stop and wait for the next chapter there's time to mull things over.
Oh, hi, Jiraa! Nice of you to help where you can.
Simon's right, Jiraa is an excellent viewpoint character to cut to.
Oh, hi, Six Blades! Shame you're about to have your ass handed to you.
Right, as guessed Probably Better doesn't have a scan of the journal. Oh, they WANT it as an object of power, but they don't know the current plan to finish Kaenemor's spell.
These new drones will not overly impact PB's processing. The distance is too short to have set them up to a fully autonomous mode, and for appreciable data lag. However, adding hundreds of thousands of roving sensor feeds to process may slow them that fraction of a second.
We've ALSO learned PB doesn't have good psychology skills. It can predict and counter combat moves because there are only a limited amount of options in a situation, and they can brute-force compute them, but JUST ENOUGH would have known at a glance Jiraa has no clue who has the journal or where they are. Again, another weakness. Phew!
For Lola's party, that's good, because they won't be instantly swarmed. That's bad for everyone else because PB has to brute force search and interrogate. Given the THOUSANDS of drones this buys them maybe a couple of minutes. Enough time?
Yeah, as you've spotted, we basically have a race against time based around knowledge.
The other aspect in terms of how Justin might have theoretically handled this differently is that they probably wouldn't have resorted to torture and threats, at least not so unsubtly - they wouldn't have ended up in such a chaotic situation in the first place, most likely.
If Matheson, Baltine and Hutchinson wanted a chaos agent, they certainly got one with PB, albeit perhaps not in the way they expected.
Hey: disgruntled rich people seeing themselves as the victims, then whipping up chaotic elements in order to undermine institutions that keep society ticking over nicely, and then the whole thing gets out of hand and they lose control of their own creation?
Rings a bell.
All fair points...
My analyses do, of course, have the advantage of this being a SERIAL. Since the reader has to stop and wait for the next chapter there's time to mull things over.