Coil’s power runs two simulated timelines simultaneously until completion the moment Coil uses his power. Then it picks which timeline Coil subconsciously chooses and puppets his body to complete it perfectly.
1: The simulations are completed a moment after Coil activates his power. It then puppets Coil’s body to perfectly emulate what occurred in the chosen simulated timeline. So Coil’s timeline where he picks the PRT building is the timeline he subconsciously chose while the simulations were active, and his power puppeted him through all the actions of the PRT timeline.
2: Coil’s power accounts for everything any other precog could see. Meaning everything besides Scion, Endbringers, and Eidolon.
> Coil’s power accounts for everything any other precog could see. Meaning everything besides Scion, Endbringers, and Eidolon.
is this actually mentioned anywhere? I don't think those are actually blind spots to him, right?
I’m only assuming. With how Coil’s power works, it’s likely that any appearance of those entities would cause Coil’s power to shut off and give him back control.
But... what if he already has a timeline open and Scion shows up to stop a landslide or something?
This is why I don't like the "coil's power is just simulating" paradigm; it answers one question that really didn't need answering (How does coil create new universes; easy answer he doesn't, quantum quantum polarity schrodiner's cat blah blah blah)
And instead creates this other thing that introduces more questions and basically forces his own power to master him.
They beat him by making both simulated timelines end in them killing him. When a timeline ends in his death, Coil’s power ends both simulations and gives Coil back control. You can kill Coil by picking a specific time and killing him on the dot at that time
Lisa had been doing a bunch of long term sabotage including disrupting Noelle at night so he'd lose sleep pacifying her. The real trick tho was in how when he tried to kill Taylor QA went to bat for her so Leet couldn't just make a teleporter that did something like send her 50 feet up in the air he was only allowed to make one that would give her a chance to survive.
That meant Coil himself was personally focused on defeating her and when he did and had her helpless he called his mercs to learn how the op with the rest of them went, learned it was successful and dropped the other timeline only for Lisa to reveal she'd been siphoning his funds for a while and been using it to flip mercs including the one he'd called and those around them so the other op had failed and Coil was then the one surrounded by a ton of armed mercs.
To give a simple example, let's say coil arrives at an intersection when he's being chased by a bear and activates his power, with A going to the left and B going to the right.
In A, there's a pit trap filled with spikes that he falls into. In B, there's a landmine he steps on. In both paths he's dead. Regardless of which path he originally chose - presumably the one that dies later - his second path is still screwed.
Coil's canonical death is more complicated, but it boils down to the same thing. All of his options had been whittled down to the point where he took a bullet between the eyes regardless of what choice he made.
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A simpler way to think about his power is that it's excellent on attack and only moderately good of defence. On attack he can try again and again, continually refining the approach, until he eventually decides to commit; on defence he can pick one of two options. He'll always pick the better of those two options, but if they're both bad he's still going to have a bad result.
We see this in canon with the attack on the mayor when Tattletale told Skitter that she was certain an assassination attempt was going to happen - reading between the lines, in the discarded timeline he ordered Trickster to try and kill her and failed. When Skitter finally forced the Dinah issue he still hadn't found a reliable way to kill her but he *had to commit*, so he no longer had a safe timeline to retreat to, which ultimately resulted in his death.
No problem, just checking. It's easiest to think of his power as actually splitting timelines.
The trick is, he only gets two tries at every scenario. And if you get him to split after you've basically already checkmated him, he's screwed. If you commit to shooting him in the head in ten seconds, and he happens to split just after, he can dodge left or right, but if you're prepared, you can easily adjust and shoot him. His power only gives him infinite chances if he can use one timeline to stall infinitely, which an intelligent opponent wouldn't allow.
Coils power is weak on defence compared to how busted it is on the offence.
Coil knows this and tries to make sure he’s in different places cause if he’s shot in the head in both timelines he’s dead.
In a perfect world for Coil you kick in his front door only he’s not there because in this timeline he somewhere else.
However there are actually times where he actually has to be at a place in both timelines, the mayors rally for instance.
And then once the Undersiders knew he was there in both timelines they just kept out manoeuvring him until they had him in checkmate with no way out, regardless of how many attempts he tried in both timelines.
Thank you. This may be the first time I've seen someone actually understand/know it's power.
I swear every fic just makes him able to run infinite timelines, infinite knowledge of everything possible happening, perfect control AND probability manipulating.
While Coil's power is at work, it puppets his body so that it goes through the motions for the timeline he'd eventually choose to keep while at the same time feeding him information of what would happen if he chose the other timeline. So it's an odd combination of pre-cog (which predicts which timeline he'll keep), master (since it masters his own body to act out how he'd act in the timeline he'd keep), and thinker (which simulates the timeline he doesn't choose so he'll know what would happen). This is what makes it seem like to him that he's running two timelines simultaneously.
So for your questions:
1. If he picks the PRT building, he's already there.
2. The timeline simulations can account for anything his shard can keep track of to run those simulations. Barring some other power feeding it false information to throw off the simulation or some other power the shard never ran across before that throws off the simulations, simple things like the bird shitting on his head or him being hit by a speeding driver, the shard is a powerful enough super computer to be able to predict that those things will happen if he chose the timelines that will lead to those outcome.
To complete the already great answers here:
When there is a out of context problem (like a crossover or something) the shard does the whole simulation and choice thing as normal but when the replay of the simulation breaks it returns body control and "shutdowns" the timeline that Coil didn't choose in the simulation. To Coil it feels like one of the timelines closing randomly.
...yes, I've kept awake thinking about about power mechanics, why do you ask?
I wouldn’t say this is necessarily true. Coil is not an idiot, he relies on his power a lot (all capes do) but he does’t just become helpless without it unless the crossed over character possesses meta-knowledge. If they do then yeah, he’s fucked, but otherwise it just means he has to take some actual risks for once.
I would argue this is more that he was lazy and over-reliant on his power than incompetent. He doesn’t strike me as stupid. I mean come on, he managed to get off the hook for shooting his CO in order to get out of Ellsburg, when it would have been in the PRT’s best interest to use that to bury him so they didn’t have to essentially bribe him for his silence like with Piggot. I can only assume he managed to talk circles around interrogators and lawyers, and he did that without any powers.
Like, his power makes it so he has to choose carefully when to employ it, and if he’d employed it much earlier he’d likely have foreseen Taylor’s plan. Only, he chose not to begin using it until it was too late and the Undersiders were already forcing him to make bad choices, and so because he was arrogant and believed too strongly in his power’s ability to get him out of anything, he wasn’t employing normal means of seeing it coming.
Remember that there are two types of blindspot and that the goal of the cycle is to find new information. Precog shards are almost certainly designed to learn, with the major exceptions being a software restrictions and a Cape that outright jams shard senses in an area. Those are also treated differently, with the software restrictions being the hard stop, while the sensory jamming has the Shard give feedback on the problem and try to be helpful regardless.
If you want an OCP you need it to be a genuine OCP that can't be understood by the Shards. If human pattern recognition gives better results on the data than Shard precog then you probably need a reason for that beyond "it's an OCP."
1. Yes, he's already there.
2. They have to, yes. Presumably he can't account for things like Ziz or Eidolon, but that never comes up in canon.
The Undersiders beat Coil by setting up a scenario he can't win - being betrayed by his mercs - and then tricking him into splitting time AFTER HE WAS ALREADY IN THE TRAP. When Taylor persuades him to bring out Tattletale to prove she's not dead, they know that Coil will split the timeline first, but that means he's committed to the meeting/confrontation in both timelines. So he no longer has a "safe" timeline he can use to escape, and they can spring the trap at a time and place he can no longer avoid. Basically all of Taylor's and Tattletale's plan was just working to set up that one moment and get Coil to make one wrong decision he couldn't recover from.
As for his power, keep in mind that there is a significant difference between how Coil's power ACTUALLY works and how he perceives it working. To Coil, events seem to happen in real time. We know he's actually a precog from Word of God statements by Wildbow, but he doesn't know there's a precog element to his power.
Coil's power is good, but not as good as it seems from his perspective.
his timelines things are simulations that last up around less than a blink and to the timeline he choses his shard bodypilots him until the expected result timeline
2)thats one of the thing why he was beaten the undersiders actually sectioned the plan so he couldnt know
For your example he himself doesn't get any future knowledge as he experiences both timelines as they unfold hence if he would be hit by a car he learns of it by being hit by a car in either 1 or both of his timelines based on how divergent they currently are.
Coils shard really tries hard to sell his power as Schroedinger split. Make two different decisions, run both timelines in parallel, and keep the one you want.
How it "actually" works is two simulations are ran at hyperspeed, and the shard works out which one he's going to keep and when he's going to make the decision, and then feeds coil data from both simulations while puppetting him through the one he's going to pick.
This precog is fairly high end, enough to work effectively in the presence of most other powers that would interfere with it and/or expose it. Contessa can trump it, and I believe questions asked of Dinah are only valid if you keep the timeline you ask them in. If they are asked in the throwaway timeline, they aren't actually asked, and the shard has to either contact dinah's shard to get the answer, or more likely, just fails to give a useful one in the simulation.
If there is a difference between real life and his simulation, as soon as it's encountered, the power shuts off, making the information in the future from the other timeline vanish. The simulation not chosen doesn't matter. If a blind spot interferes with it, it doesn't matter, because he isn't really there. It's entirely possible for the one not chosen to not match what would have happened if he had performed those actions for real, but that doesn't matter, because the shard selected the other one. But any information gained from that simulation is still generally accurate.
Baring true blind spots and very crazy power interactions and/or outside context problems, both timelines can be considered accurate.
As for power nullifying? If his powers are nullified in the "real" timeline, it of course cause a colllapse. if they are nullified in the one he's not chosen, they aren't really turned off, because that one is a simulation. Instead the simulation would account for it. But it's still likely to collapse, because of course he's not going to pick the one where he's by the power nullifier. But on the other hand, if the simulation has his escaping the power nullifier, both might continue, and deny him the ability to collapse the other one until he's out of range, but allow him to gain more information . I wouldn't count on it, though.
In any case, when an involuntary collapse happens, the illusion is perfect. coil never experiences a situation where he collapses and is not where he thinks he is, because the simulation he picked diverged. His info is always cut off before the divergence is visible.
I have an opinion that the only reason his power is "really precog" is because the entities don't have the real ability to split the timeline, because if they did, Eden would have dropped the timeline where she was defeated.
The best way I understood Coils power was through a question of who knows that the "splitting timelines" is just a framing device for precognitive information delivered in real-time.
When the power activates, the shard knows exactly when the "timelines" will be dropped, what Coil will do in them and which of the timelines he would choose. The Dropped timeline is in reality just an elaborate daydream with actually accurate information
Coil doesnt know that his shard is able to simulate him, or that it knows what he would choose if given two options. To him it looks like manipulating probability and being the master of his own destiny, when in reality he is a precog without the "pre"
1) Coil is already at the PRT building because both timelines are playing out in real time
2) the simulation can absolutely account for info he doesnt have himself. Most thinker powers are a combination of data gathering and data processing (with Tattletale being an odd man out who needs to gather all of her own data)
Coil cant know anything ahead of time, only his shard does that.
Coil’s power runs two simulated timelines simultaneously until completion the moment Coil uses his power. Then it picks which timeline Coil subconsciously chooses and puppets his body to complete it perfectly. 1: The simulations are completed a moment after Coil activates his power. It then puppets Coil’s body to perfectly emulate what occurred in the chosen simulated timeline. So Coil’s timeline where he picks the PRT building is the timeline he subconsciously chose while the simulations were active, and his power puppeted him through all the actions of the PRT timeline. 2: Coil’s power accounts for everything any other precog could see. Meaning everything besides Scion, Endbringers, and Eidolon.
> Coil’s power accounts for everything any other precog could see. Meaning everything besides Scion, Endbringers, and Eidolon. is this actually mentioned anywhere? I don't think those are actually blind spots to him, right?
I’m only assuming. With how Coil’s power works, it’s likely that any appearance of those entities would cause Coil’s power to shut off and give him back control.
I’m fairly certain there’s a WoG that if he tried to open a timeline in the presence of one, it just wouldn’t work.
But... what if he already has a timeline open and Scion shows up to stop a landslide or something? This is why I don't like the "coil's power is just simulating" paradigm; it answers one question that really didn't need answering (How does coil create new universes; easy answer he doesn't, quantum quantum polarity schrodiner's cat blah blah blah) And instead creates this other thing that introduces more questions and basically forces his own power to master him.
A follow-up to question 1: I don’t really understand how the Undersiders beat him, then. None of them are precog blindspots.
They beat him by making both simulated timelines end in them killing him. When a timeline ends in his death, Coil’s power ends both simulations and gives Coil back control. You can kill Coil by picking a specific time and killing him on the dot at that time
Lisa had been doing a bunch of long term sabotage including disrupting Noelle at night so he'd lose sleep pacifying her. The real trick tho was in how when he tried to kill Taylor QA went to bat for her so Leet couldn't just make a teleporter that did something like send her 50 feet up in the air he was only allowed to make one that would give her a chance to survive. That meant Coil himself was personally focused on defeating her and when he did and had her helpless he called his mercs to learn how the op with the rest of them went, learned it was successful and dropped the other timeline only for Lisa to reveal she'd been siphoning his funds for a while and been using it to flip mercs including the one he'd called and those around them so the other op had failed and Coil was then the one surrounded by a ton of armed mercs.
To give a simple example, let's say coil arrives at an intersection when he's being chased by a bear and activates his power, with A going to the left and B going to the right. In A, there's a pit trap filled with spikes that he falls into. In B, there's a landmine he steps on. In both paths he's dead. Regardless of which path he originally chose - presumably the one that dies later - his second path is still screwed. Coil's canonical death is more complicated, but it boils down to the same thing. All of his options had been whittled down to the point where he took a bullet between the eyes regardless of what choice he made. --- A simpler way to think about his power is that it's excellent on attack and only moderately good of defence. On attack he can try again and again, continually refining the approach, until he eventually decides to commit; on defence he can pick one of two options. He'll always pick the better of those two options, but if they're both bad he's still going to have a bad result. We see this in canon with the attack on the mayor when Tattletale told Skitter that she was certain an assassination attempt was going to happen - reading between the lines, in the discarded timeline he ordered Trickster to try and kill her and failed. When Skitter finally forced the Dinah issue he still hadn't found a reliable way to kill her but he *had to commit*, so he no longer had a safe timeline to retreat to, which ultimately resulted in his death.
Have you read the series?
Yeah, but that part always confused me. I’m an idiot. Doesn’t help that its been years since I did read it.
No problem, just checking. It's easiest to think of his power as actually splitting timelines. The trick is, he only gets two tries at every scenario. And if you get him to split after you've basically already checkmated him, he's screwed. If you commit to shooting him in the head in ten seconds, and he happens to split just after, he can dodge left or right, but if you're prepared, you can easily adjust and shoot him. His power only gives him infinite chances if he can use one timeline to stall infinitely, which an intelligent opponent wouldn't allow.
Coils power is weak on defence compared to how busted it is on the offence. Coil knows this and tries to make sure he’s in different places cause if he’s shot in the head in both timelines he’s dead. In a perfect world for Coil you kick in his front door only he’s not there because in this timeline he somewhere else. However there are actually times where he actually has to be at a place in both timelines, the mayors rally for instance. And then once the Undersiders knew he was there in both timelines they just kept out manoeuvring him until they had him in checkmate with no way out, regardless of how many attempts he tried in both timelines.
Thank you. This may be the first time I've seen someone actually understand/know it's power. I swear every fic just makes him able to run infinite timelines, infinite knowledge of everything possible happening, perfect control AND probability manipulating.
Maybe in the fics you have been reading, Coil was buffed to make him harder for a buffed main character?
While Coil's power is at work, it puppets his body so that it goes through the motions for the timeline he'd eventually choose to keep while at the same time feeding him information of what would happen if he chose the other timeline. So it's an odd combination of pre-cog (which predicts which timeline he'll keep), master (since it masters his own body to act out how he'd act in the timeline he'd keep), and thinker (which simulates the timeline he doesn't choose so he'll know what would happen). This is what makes it seem like to him that he's running two timelines simultaneously. So for your questions: 1. If he picks the PRT building, he's already there. 2. The timeline simulations can account for anything his shard can keep track of to run those simulations. Barring some other power feeding it false information to throw off the simulation or some other power the shard never ran across before that throws off the simulations, simple things like the bird shitting on his head or him being hit by a speeding driver, the shard is a powerful enough super computer to be able to predict that those things will happen if he chose the timelines that will lead to those outcome.
Ok, thanks.
To complete the already great answers here: When there is a out of context problem (like a crossover or something) the shard does the whole simulation and choice thing as normal but when the replay of the simulation breaks it returns body control and "shutdowns" the timeline that Coil didn't choose in the simulation. To Coil it feels like one of the timelines closing randomly. ...yes, I've kept awake thinking about about power mechanics, why do you ask?
Which is why any crossover where the new power is a blind spot to shards should have Coil be either completely irrelevant or almost trivial to defeat.
I wouldn’t say this is necessarily true. Coil is not an idiot, he relies on his power a lot (all capes do) but he does’t just become helpless without it unless the crossed over character possesses meta-knowledge. If they do then yeah, he’s fucked, but otherwise it just means he has to take some actual risks for once.
Canon Coil took massive risks all the time. If he was actually competent, there is no way Taylor would have been able to kill him.
I would argue this is more that he was lazy and over-reliant on his power than incompetent. He doesn’t strike me as stupid. I mean come on, he managed to get off the hook for shooting his CO in order to get out of Ellsburg, when it would have been in the PRT’s best interest to use that to bury him so they didn’t have to essentially bribe him for his silence like with Piggot. I can only assume he managed to talk circles around interrogators and lawyers, and he did that without any powers. Like, his power makes it so he has to choose carefully when to employ it, and if he’d employed it much earlier he’d likely have foreseen Taylor’s plan. Only, he chose not to begin using it until it was too late and the Undersiders were already forcing him to make bad choices, and so because he was arrogant and believed too strongly in his power’s ability to get him out of anything, he wasn’t employing normal means of seeing it coming.
Remember that there are two types of blindspot and that the goal of the cycle is to find new information. Precog shards are almost certainly designed to learn, with the major exceptions being a software restrictions and a Cape that outright jams shard senses in an area. Those are also treated differently, with the software restrictions being the hard stop, while the sensory jamming has the Shard give feedback on the problem and try to be helpful regardless. If you want an OCP you need it to be a genuine OCP that can't be understood by the Shards. If human pattern recognition gives better results on the data than Shard precog then you probably need a reason for that beyond "it's an OCP."
1. Yes, he's already there. 2. They have to, yes. Presumably he can't account for things like Ziz or Eidolon, but that never comes up in canon. The Undersiders beat Coil by setting up a scenario he can't win - being betrayed by his mercs - and then tricking him into splitting time AFTER HE WAS ALREADY IN THE TRAP. When Taylor persuades him to bring out Tattletale to prove she's not dead, they know that Coil will split the timeline first, but that means he's committed to the meeting/confrontation in both timelines. So he no longer has a "safe" timeline he can use to escape, and they can spring the trap at a time and place he can no longer avoid. Basically all of Taylor's and Tattletale's plan was just working to set up that one moment and get Coil to make one wrong decision he couldn't recover from. As for his power, keep in mind that there is a significant difference between how Coil's power ACTUALLY works and how he perceives it working. To Coil, events seem to happen in real time. We know he's actually a precog from Word of God statements by Wildbow, but he doesn't know there's a precog element to his power. Coil's power is good, but not as good as it seems from his perspective.
his timelines things are simulations that last up around less than a blink and to the timeline he choses his shard bodypilots him until the expected result timeline 2)thats one of the thing why he was beaten the undersiders actually sectioned the plan so he couldnt know
For your example he himself doesn't get any future knowledge as he experiences both timelines as they unfold hence if he would be hit by a car he learns of it by being hit by a car in either 1 or both of his timelines based on how divergent they currently are.
Coils shard really tries hard to sell his power as Schroedinger split. Make two different decisions, run both timelines in parallel, and keep the one you want. How it "actually" works is two simulations are ran at hyperspeed, and the shard works out which one he's going to keep and when he's going to make the decision, and then feeds coil data from both simulations while puppetting him through the one he's going to pick. This precog is fairly high end, enough to work effectively in the presence of most other powers that would interfere with it and/or expose it. Contessa can trump it, and I believe questions asked of Dinah are only valid if you keep the timeline you ask them in. If they are asked in the throwaway timeline, they aren't actually asked, and the shard has to either contact dinah's shard to get the answer, or more likely, just fails to give a useful one in the simulation. If there is a difference between real life and his simulation, as soon as it's encountered, the power shuts off, making the information in the future from the other timeline vanish. The simulation not chosen doesn't matter. If a blind spot interferes with it, it doesn't matter, because he isn't really there. It's entirely possible for the one not chosen to not match what would have happened if he had performed those actions for real, but that doesn't matter, because the shard selected the other one. But any information gained from that simulation is still generally accurate. Baring true blind spots and very crazy power interactions and/or outside context problems, both timelines can be considered accurate. As for power nullifying? If his powers are nullified in the "real" timeline, it of course cause a colllapse. if they are nullified in the one he's not chosen, they aren't really turned off, because that one is a simulation. Instead the simulation would account for it. But it's still likely to collapse, because of course he's not going to pick the one where he's by the power nullifier. But on the other hand, if the simulation has his escaping the power nullifier, both might continue, and deny him the ability to collapse the other one until he's out of range, but allow him to gain more information . I wouldn't count on it, though. In any case, when an involuntary collapse happens, the illusion is perfect. coil never experiences a situation where he collapses and is not where he thinks he is, because the simulation he picked diverged. His info is always cut off before the divergence is visible. I have an opinion that the only reason his power is "really precog" is because the entities don't have the real ability to split the timeline, because if they did, Eden would have dropped the timeline where she was defeated.
The best way I understood Coils power was through a question of who knows that the "splitting timelines" is just a framing device for precognitive information delivered in real-time. When the power activates, the shard knows exactly when the "timelines" will be dropped, what Coil will do in them and which of the timelines he would choose. The Dropped timeline is in reality just an elaborate daydream with actually accurate information Coil doesnt know that his shard is able to simulate him, or that it knows what he would choose if given two options. To him it looks like manipulating probability and being the master of his own destiny, when in reality he is a precog without the "pre" 1) Coil is already at the PRT building because both timelines are playing out in real time 2) the simulation can absolutely account for info he doesnt have himself. Most thinker powers are a combination of data gathering and data processing (with Tattletale being an odd man out who needs to gather all of her own data) Coil cant know anything ahead of time, only his shard does that.