The second Planetary Annihilation Multicross fanfic, and written as a spin-off of the first, Faith in Superior Firepower tells the story of Sufficient Velocity.com and SpaceBattles.com user Faith and her travels through the multiverse. Falling asleep after a long night of work, Faith awakens in the chassis of a Progenitor Commander, set loose upon the multiverse as part of the schemes of the ever-antagonistic ROB.
As of February 18th, the story is complete. The author had plans to continue it, but ultimately decided to end it where it was, citing lack of interest.
On February 25th, 2018, to the shock of everyone, a sequel was posted, Hope In Dark Times
, which follows the adventures of Faith's clone sister, Hope.
Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity story and discussion threads.
Faith in Superior Firepower contains examples of:
- Absent Aliens: The Progenitors, existing only as a distant concept partially responsible for giving a totally unprepared florist an arsenal of planet-destroying weapons.
- Aliens Are Bastards: Surprisingly few, largely due to the limited length of the fic, but they're present nonetheless.
- The Zoltan of FTL: Faster Than Light are responsible for enslaving, manipulating and waging war against most of the other races in their setting as part of their quest to become the galactic power.
- Ascended Extra: General Whalebrook, from Sanctum , exists in the original work as a background character and Voice with an Internet Connection for the protagonists during the later stages of the DLC. He takes a more prominent role in Faith in Superior Firepower, becoming the de facto leader of the people of Elysion.
- Attack Drones: All of Faith's units are automated robots, so they all fit this to some degree. Following the spirit of the Trope are the Firefly Interceptor drones, lightly armed and automated attackers deployed in swarms.
- Author Avatar: As a self-insert fic, Commander Faith is an obvious example of this.
- The Battlestar: As of Log 72, most of Faith's larger space vessels can deploy fighter wings or automated drones. The Juniper-class Cruiser is designed specifically to fill this role, as a Type 1.
- BFG: Many of Faith's higher-end weapons, such as the Mercury's several-kilometre-long spinal rail cannons, firing enormous shells at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Other weapons of note include the SAFE (Super Awesome Friendship Emitter) Lasers, which, whilst useless on their own, are able to infinitely chain beams between emitters, allowing a single emitter to strike with the power of potentially thousands or millions.
- Clones Are People, Too: After accidentally creating a mind clone of herself, Faith struggles with identifying her clone as a separate person. Eventually the pair settle for being sisters.
- Color-Coded Armies: Being based off an RTS game, this trope is in full effect and all of Faith's units are prominently green in color. This makes it easy for her friends (and foes) to identify her forces.
- Cool Starship: Although Faith has many starships, and tries to make them all as cool as possible, her first 'flagship' vessel, the Starsong, is the envy of many denizens of the FTL universe (mainly due to the absurdly advanced tech powering it).
- Construct Additional Pylons: Being based off an RTS game, the construction of Metal Extractors, Energy Generators, and Resource Cores to generate requisite metal and energy is a necessary step for Faith to establish a foothold in each world she visits.
- Command & Conquer Economy: Pretty much by default. As a Planetary Annihilation Commander, the entirety of their forces are made by explicit order/instructions from said commander.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Being a ludicrously overpowered, brutally efficient, self replicating mechanism of war (albeit unwittingly), Faith is more than capable of dishing these out, refraining largely for moral reasons.
- Not that she held back particularly much against Sanctum's Lumes, with her gunships obliterating Lume infestations throughout Elysion One and Brightholme in seconds.
- The Plague of Red Faction were likewise not spared - several thousand of Faith's war machines teleported directly into the largest Plague Hive they could find before destroying everything in sight.
- Disintegrator Ray: Although she doesn't possess any literal disintegration rays, Faith achieves much the same effect with nanomachines thanks to the Nanorifle - any target hit is torn apart on a molecular level.
- Downer Ending: Faith ends up hating her actions so much that she chooses to shut her commander down, effectively committing suicide (the author wrote a note informing readers that this was most definitely NOT the case in real life, and thanked them for caring about her.
- Sequel Hook: ROB made several clones of Faith and is keeping them around as a damsel to rescue for the next poor schmuck that he uses in his plans, and the author has stated that Hope is still active.
- Easy Communication / Easy Logistics: Again, by default. The Quantum Resource Network allows Faith to transmit resources across a star system to wherever they're needed instantly.
- Energy Weapons: Various kinds of Plasma, Laser, Ion, and other EM radiation weapons, such as the Fire Beam, exist within Faith's vast arsenal.
- Fix Fic: Faith's ultimate goal in each setting is to make things a little better for the people living there.
- Gone Horribly Right: Faith's attempt to pawn human politics off on an alien race in the FTL universe succeed spectacularly, and ROB takes over. Given ROB is an acronym for Random Omnipotent Bastard...
- Humans Are Bastards: In full effect in most universes Faith visits.
- In the Sanctumverse, the Bright Foundation altered the atmosphere of a planet (making it poisonous to the wildlife) and then, in response to aggression from the aforementioned wildlife, created an entire colony on the planet just to justify shipping in a hundred and fifty thousand meatshields to protect their operations there. Not to mention their various kinds of morally dubious research - such as the Mind Control tower, which is advertised to work just as well on humans as it does on the Lumes.
- In the FTL universe, humanity reverted to a system of feudal nobility, with an incredibly powerful minority of 'nobles' treating the rest of their race like slaves. The resistance movement that began as a result of this was just as bad - nuking entire cities to kill just a handful of Federation officials.
- Hypocrite: Faith accuses the Core Guardians of this after she remarks that humans are an aggressive, warlike race.Faith: "Of course. Uplifting species, especially such warlike ones as humans, is never a good idea."Faith: [Internally] The people I was talking to, five soldiers and a terrorist, had the gall to look offended when I said that.
- Jerkass Gods: ROB kidnapped a nineteen year old university student, turned her into a giant robot, and sent her around the multiverse for kicks. He subsequently went and gathered a group of villains Faith had previously fought, unifying them into a single entity with one clear goal - Faith's elimination.
- Made of Indestructium: Faith's units are largely comprised of Progenitor military-grade alloys - whilst not indestructible and actually rather weak to weapons of her power level, compared to the significantly weaker weapons of other universes, her units tend to come off as this.
- Magic from Technology: The Resource Cores are explicitly stated to make both matter and energy from nothing. The Energy Generators are also capable of both creating and destroying energy as needed, completely disregarding thermodynamics. As of Log 72, Faith and Hope also have access to Element Zero, further violating the law of conservation of energy.
- Magic Tool: The default Planetary Annihilation Fabricator, and its ranged equivalent the Nanorifle, can be used to capture and assimilate technology, hack devices, destroy targets, repair targets, and construct even large buildings and starships from effectively nothing.
- Officially Shortened Title: To ''FiSF'', usually, although Superior Firepower has also been used on occasion. Given the full title is a pun on the writer's name and the fic's nature as a self-insert, the latter could be considered the fic's official unofficial title.
- Outside-Context Problem: Faith fits this to a T. Combining her own metaknowledge with the Progenitor's insanely advanced military technologies, Faith represents a huge outside context entity for each universe she visits.
- Pretext for War: After losing a science outpost to hostile wildlife, the Bright Foundation establish a colony on that same planet in order to justify the deployment of a large military and special forces units to protect their scientific investments.
- Ridiculously Fast Construction: The single most time consuming non-supership/structure in Faith's default arsenal is the Resource Core, capable of completely disregarding the Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy. It takes a whole ten minutes to construct one.
- Save the Villain: Faith refuses to kill other sapient beings, and prevents them from dying whenever possible. This comes back to bite her in the ass when the various villains band together to oppose her.
- Spanner in the Works: As a nineteen year old florist with incredibly limited tactical experience, Faith's plans tend to be more prone to these than is entirely safe.
- Spider Tank: The Osiris Commander is a four-legged war machine. The SAFE Spiders are smaller, six-legged mecha with high-powered laser cannons on their back.
- Stealth Expert: Faith is able to rapidly and stealthily access most computer databases she comes across, and only advanced military-grade AI even have a chance at detecting her intrusion. Additionally, Faith possesses actual stealth technology that hides units half a step outside reality - as one might imagine, this tends to be a rather effective place to hide, making her units invisible to both the naked eye and all but the very most advanced sensors.
- Sufficiently Advanced Technology: Faith's technology allows her to manipulate and absorb kinetic energy to create a discount time-slowing effect, mind control people, teleport across galaxies with ease, temporarily step out of existence, create and destroy energy from nothing, and alter gravity.
- Theme Naming: Faith uses it a lot.
- Her first set of corvettes are named after travellers - Pioneer, Rider, Tracker, Cavalier, and Pilgrim classes.
- Her first set of frigates follow similar rules - Voyager, Migrant, and Wayfarer classes.
- Her fighters are named after types of flowers, starting with the Gagea.
- Her Mass-Effect verse ships are named after trees (and/or Pokemon Professors) - Birch, Rowan and Juniper.
- The ships themselves are named after characters from other franchises, with each fleet having its own theme.
- First Fleet: Named after war heroes from the Halo Universe, starting with the Jacob Keyes.
- Terraform: Faith creates an enormous pit on her swamp world and drains the water from the swamps into the chasm to create an ocean, making the entire planet into a drier, more temperate world.
- Wave-Motion Gun: The SAFE Lasers, individually, are basic but powerful infantry-scale laser weapons. They are also capable of infinitely chaining together, each SAFE Laser passing its charge onto the next. This allows them to focus the firepower of hundreds of thousands of SAFE Lasers into a single shot, turning them into this.
- Zerg Rush: The preferred tactic of both the Lumes and the Martian Plague. Unfortunately for both, Faith has superior firepower.
Hope In Dark Times provides examples of:
—-- Meaningful Name: Given that the original story ended on a soul crushing Downer Ending with heavy elements of
Creator Breakdown, the title can be seen as a sign of Creator Recovery, as well as an acknowledgement to the devotion of Faith's fans. - Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Hope accidentally allows the Engi to gain access to Commander technology due to leaving one of her subordinate Artificial Intelligence creations within access of them.
