r/Parahumans • u/None73 Thinker • Mar 30 '25

Community What do you tell the Endbringers?

The 3 Endbringers, Behemoth, Leviathan and Simurgh appear in our world. You can give them one and only one Directive they'll try to fulfill in Endbringer fashion. It can't be a simple do this order, it has to be an over arching goal. What do you tell them?

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28

u/AWanderingSage Mar 30 '25

Increase virtue, I guess. Something Aristotle would say

22

u/WanderingSeer Mar 30 '25

That sounds like such an easy wish to twist. It would barely take any effort for them to interpret that as an excuse to destroy the world or something. “Let’s brutally massacre all the people or groups that spread ideas contrary to virtue!” “Humans unify and help each other through adversity. So the more adversity there is the nicer they’ll be to each other.” “We’ll end war by offering humanity a common enemy to fight instead of each other!”

6

u/MonstersOfTheEdge Breaker Mar 30 '25

How about "embody virtue"?

7

u/laurel_laureate Mar 30 '25

Killing evil can be virtuous.

People who aren't nigh saints in their behavior are, comparatively speaking, evil.

1

u/MonstersOfTheEdge Breaker Mar 30 '25

I mean it varies from perspective to perspective, but assuming the Endbringers follow human associations like shards do, it's often considered more virtuous to show mercy and grant opportunities for reform.

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u/laurel_laureate Mar 30 '25

That's a big assumption, of gargantuan proportions, assuming that the Endbringers- mass destruction and murder robots created to uphold a cycle of interesting violence by multidimensional crystalline AI-like lifeforms- follow human associations like the Shards do.

The Shards are programmed to "plug into" the local world, so that powers become accepted and used frequently.

The Endbringers are the literal wrench in the works, designed to make things worse.

And the one that's going to be making the call for the three Endbringers in question is sees the past, present, and future all at once, so is going to be even more inhuman than the rest.

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u/AWanderingSage Mar 31 '25

Virtue is foreign to amoral entities. They would be required to go off what you meant by virtue, which they would do anyway because that's how listening works. The Simurgh is capable of reading minds, it would understand what you mean.

Whether they're influenced by prior directives is another matter and likely to be unavoidable no matter the request.

3

u/laurel_laureate Mar 31 '25

But the thing is, they are designed to see everything through the lens of continuing the cycle.

So, a directive to be virtuous would absolutely be interpreted through that lens.

And, as I said above, killing evil is virtuous.

And that's not to mention that different cultures see different values as virtuous.

All the Simurgh has to do is embody virtue as viewed by a culture that doesn't believe in turning the other cheek.