Styx II

[madimpossibledreamer]

To the intern on duty: please re-file the previous entry, thank you.  It was misfiled along with the other Stands and powers in the database.  This is the other half of Miss Rosenberg’s report and more accurately fits in this category.

For starters, there’s just the straight-up things he can do.  He’s got an understanding and ability to read machines that you usually only see in cyborg characters.  If I had to guess, his straight-up WPM and hacking skills are on par with mine, though he probably only took a vow of ‘do no harm using this’.  Well.  Not that I meant any harm when I was hacking everything, either.  I was just curious, both what I’d see and whether I could do it.  But he’s a priest, so he probably has vows he takes very seriously.  On top of that, he probably can augment his hacking using spells.  You know, the kind of spells you use so often they become muscle memory, so you barely have to put any thought into it, like if you walk or drive a certain way to work or school every day for weeks you find yourself doing it without thinking. 

I don’t find myself agreeing with many—okay, pretty much most—of the decisions they made designing D&D (stick around Andrew for long enough and you find yourself learning things by osmosis), but memorized spells almost make sense to me, in context.  Almost.

You should be able to cast other spells, too, though.  But if you end up doing it enough, you should be able to learn how to, say, light candles without saying the words.  You still need something, as a vehicle for focusing your will, but it might just take a slight hand gesture or, in Father Styx’s case, doodling on the screen with a stylus.

From what I hear, it doesn’t sound like he’s reading the screen, either.  I only half remember this, really, but it sounds like he’s absorbing the information directly, assimilating it, like I did with the books when I was evil. 

So he can probably write code manually or use his magic to do so, and very possibly simultaneously.  Which is probably why Wolfram & Hart wasn’t prepared for him, and also probably why we should get a technopagan to look at our own security and maybe keep an eye on them full-time. 

They’re probably used to viruses and other automated stuff trying to break through their systems, maybe the occasional hacker.  But the ability to automate hundreds of processes and simultaneously be able to keep your attention on an additional fifty more is way more than they’re prepared for.  And once in, he can probably do things that traditional viruses can’t do, like upgrade file permissions for server access.

As for other things he can do, he’d also made his church and church grounds a place of power, infusing blessings and spells of protection into the area.  From the sound of it, possibly by using the power and internet lines as ley lines and conduits of spells.  That’s a longer-lasting, ritual kind of thing.  It’s possible he could even store some power there to draw on later.  On the other hand, as Robin rightly assumed, it means that he’s far weaker outside it.  And while he’d been able to have some effect in the rest of the town, the amount of space you can cover with an undertaking like this is kinda limited.  Worst case scenario, like with Miss Murder, this meant that he’s kind of trapped inside his medieval castle.  If he got reassigned, he could move it, but this kind of thing requires constant maintenance, and he’d have to give up one for the other.  It’d take a bit of setup, too.

It’s clear he sees the drawbacks, too.  He’s intelligent.  I mean, I got that much from the email, once I went back and looked at it.  That’s why he set up a network.  Traditionally, using coordinated magic over a distance like that is really difficult, so most people try not to do it or only do it over the intersections of major ley lines, but that’s one of the really genius things about the way his magic works.  If you use ley lines, it’s basically like those quantum physics things where particles are entangled and essentially the same spot or adjacent even over massive distances.  If you treat the internet as one giant ley line, though, it doesn’t matter where you are, so you might as well go fancy with it and make fun shapes like a star.  Symbolism powers it up, or I guess you could say serves like a signal boost?  So when you can, adding in a little extra never hurts, unless you end up with unintended associations, but usually someone who knows what they’re doing can avoid those.  It doesn’t fully get rid of the limitation, but it’s a way of trying to cover for it.

And when you want to protect an area but you don’t have enough oomph to cover the entire area, you set up a warning system.  Which he did, using the police cameras and probably the town’s power and internet grid, to be able to sense the intentions of visitors and make a siren go off as a warning when something bad comes in.

You could also probably use blessings, particularly if you’re a priest, to protect areas or people.  From what I’ve been able to gather, given that he’s being a little reticent about the whole thing, this is more of luck manipulation than anything.  It won’t necessarily save anyone and isn’t the flashiest, but if something can happen to help, it will.  Like a killer rabbit bringing back someone friendly from the dead by accident, or just happening to run into someone friendly in the nick of time.  It probably needs to be renewed and fades over time, though.  I don’t think he names his powers and maybe not even all of his spells, and I’m not naming all of them, but my brain suddenly said ‘Deus ex machina’ and it’s perfect not only because of the meaning of the phrase but it’s also—it’s literally God from the machine, and he’s a technochristian, come on.  I’m not telling him, though.  I don’t want him to be mad at me.  I’m fairly sure he’d find it funny, but not perfectly sure, and I’d want to be perfectly sure before I start making religion jokes in someone’s presence.

Astral projection is fairly common, so I’d guess it works fairly similar, except it looks like holograms, and also it tends to be fairly difficult to do it into someone’s comatose or sleeping brain.  If I had to guess, that has to do with all this weird science stuff about how the brain and human consciousness actually works.  Human brains function through electrical impulses, and electricity is how he does a lot of his powers, so that probably makes it easier for him than normal astral projection.  He’d be pretty scary as an enemy.  It’s a good thing he’s friendly.

The last bit of actual magic they saw was the flashy battle magic stuff, the consecration spell.  He cast an electric cross that repels the ‘unholy’ by drawing it on his phone.  I wonder if he’s written an app-spell, and I wonder if he’d mind letting me look at the code for pure curiosity’s sake.  A lot of this stuff could be massively helpful for at least protecting our new HQ.

He’d also mentioned taking care of vampires and undead before, which would be a great way of using the surveillance system to know where to go.  He didn’t demonstrate any of that, but I think he was mainly dealing with one at a time or maybe a few small groups and wasn’t trying to do the big flashy spells like the consecration at the same time, so that’s kind of a ‘duh of course I didn’t hear about any of that’ moment.

I’ll update when/if I learn anything else.  Because this speculation/learning/reverse engineering stuff is fun.