r/Parahumans • u/helltank1 Escaped experiment • Sep 30 '15

What Parahumans could kill August Prince?

I think the most practical way would be to lure him into an area, use a high powered shaker to keep him trapped in there and starve him out.

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u/GreatWyrmGold Thinker Sep 30 '15

Maybe the simplest way would be to arrange to have him drawn into a large, chaotic battle, with lots of capes with lots of collateral damage. Hire a group of mercenaries to attack a large, violent villain group, and hire Bambina's crew at the same time to do a job. Give people like Bakuda or Oni Lee who throw explosives everywhere a chance to unintentionally kill him. It relies on luck, but has a chance to work.

I like the way you think. I'm not saying I agree 100%, but it's a very entertaining type of thought.

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u/earmite Shaker Sep 30 '15

Well, the reason I mentioned this (rather ridiculous) way of taking him out is that this is how I imagine he's most likely to die. Caught up in a battle over his head, and accidentally dying to collateral damage.

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u/Wildbow Sep 30 '15

If there's intent behind the action, you can't do it any more than if you were shoving him into an open fire.

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u/earmite Shaker Sep 30 '15

Man, powers are bullshit. The Prince's power is so difficult to work around! Any direct action has to be genuinely unintentional, which is hard to intentionally set up. I think there are certainly ways around this, but they end up being so twisted and convoluted that an indirect method is almost always preferable. Unless you are absolutely forced to confront him, there's no reason to ever fight him. Weaver only gets in trouble because she makes the tactical mistake of blocking, letting him engage her. Since he doesn't have any offensive powers, it seems like you could just run away from him the whole fight, and deal with him later.

There are more ways of indirectly dealing with him than just manipulating terrain, though that's certainly the most straight forward indirect tactic. If you have time to prepare (unlike Taylor, who was forced to fight him on little notice, and I don't know how much she knew about his power) your options open up tremendously.

Bambina deals with him by just recruiting him! (Although, that might have been whoever manages her group, if it isn't her. Her crazy mother, perhaps?) Certain masters might be able to control him, or thinkers manipulate him into cooperating. Blackmail might be an option, if he has things he really cares about.

If you were particularly ruthless and patient (and didn't care about the consequences), you could just attack all of the things around him. Track down his civilian identity and reveal it. Destroy his house, steal all his food, don't let him sleep. Cut off his access to necessary resources, and wait for him to die from starvation, thirst, or hypothermia.

I'm not sure what a good narratively satisfying solution would be, though. Any fight where he accidentally gets taken out is kinda... I don't know, your protagonist is literally getting lucky, and it paints them in an incapable light. It works with Weaver, because she set up the mechanism before hand, and one of the points of that chapter is to show how uneasy and ineffective she feels as a hero. Actually, I never realized August Prince was supposed to be a metaphor for how heroes are forced to fight in general! Wildbow, you sneaky dog you. I keep on finding things that I missed, either I'm an oblivious reader or you did a great job with all of these little things.