Yeah, Eidolon is going to be VERY unpopular once Alexandria adds 1 1 and gets 2 on those Endbringers showing up. So much for allies.

One of the worst mental traps you can fall into once you decide that NOTHING is forbidden, is that you get so obsessed with expediency that you pick the immoral option even when a moral one would work better. This is what I meant in my earlier comment about Cauldron operating on Bond villain rules - they're so used to doing things the evil way that it genuinely never occurs to them that they might get better results by actually acting like heroes instead of villains.

Supposedly, avoiding power-induced mental conditioning is why Doctor Mother never used a vial, but she's just as obsessed with being as evil as possible in her goals as the rest of Cauldron is!

Andrew Richter was Canadian. Under the Canadian legal system, things like rights and prohibitions on government action are more guidelines than firm barriers. That's one of the main features of a parliamentary system - ANYTHING Parliament can do, it can undo equally easily. That ability is actually one of the evils the US legal system was deliberately designed to prevent.

Under the US system, there are orders that are plainly unlawful whether a judge has ruled on them or not. Unfortunately, Richter gave Dragon the Canadian definition of unlawful order, not the USA definition - unfortunate, because the USA definition is MUCH more protective of human rights than the Canadian definition!

Faerie Queen for tea parties, of course! heh

Right after the American Civil War, a couple constitutional amendments were enacted to make it impossible to declare someone to be a non-person without rights. When it became clear that many city, county, state and federal government employees were simply... uninterested at best in enforcing those new amendments that ensured the rights of everyone, a couple statutes were enacted to give the Constitution some very sharp teeth for those who violated it.

Codified as Title 18, Chapter 13, Sections 241 & 242, the two statutes defined any government employee or elected official using their official authority to deprive - or retaliate against - any person's civil, statutory or constitutional rights to be a federal crime. Even supreme court judges, on their bench with court in session weren't immune to immediate arrest for violating rights.

Punishments for violating those laws ranged from a $1,000 fine for a simple oral order to stop exercising rights with no "or else" attached, to execution for rights violations that caused a death - even a death of one of the perpetrators as an act of self defense by the victim.

Acting alone is often enough to make a rights violation a misdemeanor, but a conspiracy to commit even the most minor rights violation is a ten years in prison felony. In the case of irrevocable things like Worm's Birdcage, a strong case could be made that life imprisonment without possibility of parole would be justified.

On Taylor's part, almost any use of force short of releasing plagues on the country would, by law, be justified, lawful self defense against those perpetrating a rights violation of that magnitude. Good thing she doesn't need to be outside the Birdcage to go Tyranid all over the guilty parties, eh?

Typo - the word you want is defuse, not diffuse, when talking about figurative or literal bombs, as Taylor is doing in the first scene of this chapter. Defusing means rendering something safe. Diffusing means scattering it into a lot of very tiny parts. The thing about bombs is they are violently self-diffusing, and you really DON'T want them diffusing when you're trying to defuse them!

I have the nasty suspicion that Costa-Brown is going to try to kill Taylor at that meeting, since she operates under Bond villain rules, not governmental or superhero rules. Probably the only reason she hasn't pulled the "Door to the back of Hive's head" assassination stunt is the anti-Thinker field Tyranid tech generates would screw with the targeting.

Two months? With her earlier start than canon, I strongly suspect those spinal plasma guns are going to end up being used on Leviathan. Chekhov's Starship, anyone?

The most likely result of the quarantine forces seeing a windmill going up is a missile strike, on the theory that Ziz-bombs really should NOT be allowed to build anything that can power powerful technology.

If nothing else is available, you can generate electricity with a washing machine and a bicycle with very minimal modification to each. If you have access to a river, you can make a hydro-electric mini-power plant out of a washing machine. Any electric motor is a generator if you reverse the flow of kinetic force to electricity, but washing machines are about the BEST option for doing so in most cities.

Putting any explosive into an armored cup turns it into a shaped charge aimed at the opening of the cup. That's basically how a shaped charge is made. If the cup is stronger than the blast can break, you get either a high-speed projectile if it's poorly anchored, or you get a MUCH stronger blast if it is anchored well enough that the blast doesn't send it flying.

The other two girls who participated are guilty of a federal capital crime and MANY state law crimes. As a federal law enforcement agency, the PRT is obligated by law to refer the matter to the non-Parahuman authorities, which in the case of a WMD would be jointly the US Army in the form of the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Failure to do so could result in anything from a stern reprimand from the Chief-Director to prison time for Director Piggot, depending on how much her superiors, the heads of the aforementioned federal agencies, and federal prosecutors dislike her.

"Some stupid prank" she says? That "prank" is a legalistic perfect storm, when you get right down to it. It only missed being a bio-terrorist attack on US soil because the three girls weren't politically motivated.

Wildbow clearly tried to come up with the most disgusting, over-the-top but theoretically non-fatal thing a person could do to Taylor, but in doing it he ignored - if he had any awareness to begin with - just how illegal it would be under US laws. To be fair, he's Canadian and NOT any kind of legal expert even in his own country, but still - I wasn't exaggerating when I called the locker scenario a legalistic perfect storm.

You see, the US government really, Really, REALLY wants to discourage people from using biological, chemical or nuclear weapons within its borders. The laws prohibiting such attacks are draconian in their punishments to the point they would almost certainly violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments, if every part of the US government weren't in perfect agreement that discouraging such things in the strongest possible way is IMMINENTLY reasonable to do.

It starts off with the statutory definition of a biological weapon. Put simply, ANY use of a disease vector as a weapon is a biological weapon, even if the vector itself contains no actual pathogens. Vectors include many things, and precisely what is a vector for a disease varies from disease to disease, but bio-hazardous waste - particularly human blood - is ABSOLUTELY considered a disease vector.

Next, we have a statute that defines any biological weapon - regardless of lethality - to be a weapon of mass destruction. So the bio-hazards in the locker were, by law, a biological weapon of mass destruction in the USA.

Then there is the fact that there is NO SUCH THING as assault or battery with a weapon of mass destruction, ONLY attempted murder and successful murder. And because of the prep time and effort needed to fill the locker, that murder is considered premeditated. The most severe category of murder in US laws.

There is no such thing as being tried as a minor when dealing with weapons of mass destruction. ALL accused persons are tried as adults for any crime involving a WMD, regardless of age.

Finally, the accused is tried in federal court under the federal murder statute, not in state court. The sentence for a first offense attempted premeditated murder is life imprisonment. If the murder was successful, the convict is executed. For a Parahuman, that would be the Birdcage for a first offense, either attempted or successful, due to the sentencing enhancement for any crime involving the manufacture, transport or use of any WMD.

So yeah, once the PRT finishes pulling on that string with Sophia, she and Emma and Madison are all heading to real-deal adult prison, not juvie.

Given how incredibly advanced Tyranid bio-science is, I would wager Panacea just had something akin to a religious experience.

If Taylor fills in that aquifer, odds are she'd get a kill order for doing so. Why? Because permanently rendering a US city uninhabitable by destroying its water supply is generally considered an act of terrorism. Yeah, an aquifer can cause sinkholes, but they're also the thing water wells are drilled down into to provide drinking water on a large scale.

If Calvert keeps popping Tylenol like that, he might well off himself - maximum safe dose of the stuff within 24 hours is 4000 milligrams, and even that HEAVILY strains the liver. Exceeding 4000 milligrams daily quickly crosses into the realm of permanent liver damage, or even outright liver failure. Liver failure is a VERY painful way to die, and it can take weeks.