posts re: Celeste abilities

so I'm maybe a quarter of the way through reading Worm like Saber suggested, and already it has me putting WAY more thought into my character's abilities
both of them
the one I'd put focus on is Prediction, which is basically "I can turn my brain into a very precise damage calculator if I focus, and run all the calculations at computer speeds to figure out what I should do"
this was kinda introduced as an excuse for me to actually break out the damage calculator mid-battle and make decisions that didn't necessarily seem to make sense without having the statistics to look at
specifically, the Clay fight had a particularly jarring example
what turned out to be the optimal move did not make any sense from a common sense perspective
Gardevoir is physically frail, Excadrill hits like a tank shell, and this particular Excadrill has X-Scissor
so I had to come up with some way to explain why she knew that sending out her shiny Gardevoir, Micaiah, was the safest option
from a gameplay perspective, the answer was that I did the calculations and she was the most durable pokemon I had in the given situation
which was kind of a record scratch moment for me
"wait what, that can't be right"
		[insert derailing here]
uh, to get back to what I had been saying before getting derailed and then stepping away and coming back to, well, whatever that image was
I don't know if the Prediction ability was a good way to explain the damage calculator thing, but it is the way I chose
the other ability she has, and the one I've neglected pretty heavily over the course of the run
is that she's an empath
she can sense people's emotions and intent - this is different from a telepath or a mind-reader (there's no pretty term for that one :c), she cannot read people's thoughts nor transmit her own
but being an empath does carry some other uses, only one of which I've touched on in any meaningful capacity
and the other two obvious ones I barely mentioned