Headscratchers / inFAMOUS: Second Son

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• So, wait, why wasn't Reggie interrogated by Augustine? As far as we know nearly every other member of the Akomish was questioned and burdened with concrete, why would Reggie be exempt? Just because he's a cop?
  • I had assumed it was that he talked. Seemed like a fun plot point for later. But then no attention is paid to it ever again.
• Why was Reggie stupid enough to think Delsin could safely get through the DUP-sanctioned customs when entering Seattle?
  • He was probably still in denial about Delsin being a Conduit.
• The DUP uses drones that carry Shards, to track Conduits, which Delsin then helps himself to in his quest to level up. But Shards are the result of Ray Sphere explosions, which create (or unleash) Conduits. When your goal is to eradicate/control people with superpowers, creating more of them seems at least counter-productive.
  • They could be left over from prior blasts, since people were collecting them for God-knows-what. Or they could be normal pieces of earth that were irradiated during the Beast's rampage.
• Does it bother anyone else that Augustine was out-of-this-world lucky her plan to have Hank lure Delsin in worked? Hank's a poor liar (evidenced by the fact he doesn't even try and come up with a cover story for knowing about Delsin and core relays) and if he lost a fight to Delsin with nothing but a chain and smoke dash in a burning factory, he'd sure as hell lose a fight to three-powers Delsin in open air. The ONLY reason that plan came close to succeeding was thanks to Delsin having bickered with his brother and thus been bullheaded about going ahead with cooperating with Hank. Had they not had that argument when they did, something Augustine had no way to predict or control, Hank would have blown it before they got off the mainland.
• So what exactly happened to the plague? Wasn't the whole reason we had to kill every Conduit because a plague was popping up that was murdering all the normal people? Wouldn't it still be around with all the Conduits running about?
  • It's kind of complicated but makes sense. The plague was carried by Conduits, but not every Conduit was a carrier of the plague. When Cole used the RFI it wiped out 90% of the Conduit population on Earth (or at least in the US). the 10% that survived weren't carriers, so the plague's been wiped out and there're just enough of the Conduit gene left in humanity to start resurfacing over the next seven years.
    • I thought the plague was caused by radiation poisoning from Ray Field energy that was left after the Ray Spheres that were used in Empire City and New Marais. Both normal humans and dormant Conduits were affected by this disease. Conduits and other people who were not affected are not carriers like ailments that involve bacteria and viruses. When a Conduit's powers are activated, they are unaffected by it and it also seems that Conduits also need Ray Field energy to live; not only for their powers. Thanks to the Ray Field Inhibitor, the Plague was nullified and killed most of the people with a Conduit gene. I have a theory that the Plague was the result of an unstable Ray Field energy field that became stabilized with the use of the RFI. Thus leading to the events that happened after Infamous 2 because if there was no Ray Field energy there would be no Conduits.
• Fetch, Eugene and Reggie all fell into the water before Delsin's first fight against Augustine. Reggie only had concrete on his legs and one arm, but Fetch and Eugene were both completely encased. No explanation is given for how Fetch and Eugene escaped, but Reggie didn't. They could have used their powers, sure, but neither of them so much as mentions it when they reappear to assist Delsin on his climb up the tower to the final battle.
  • I'm willing to bet the reasoning is that the concrete shattered on impact with the water. The concrete Augustine was suspending them with was fairly high and given enough height, the plates would break. Luckily, Fetch and Eugene are conduits so they could survive such a hit. Reggie? Ha. No.
• How did the DUP capture Fetch and Eugene in the first place, at the same time, so suddenly and with no prior warning?
  • Perhaps the same way Delsin nearly got caught - Hank lured them in and betrayed them.
    • Unlikely. Fetch makes it perfectly clear that she doesn't trust Hank, so there's no way she would fall for it. Besides, how would he have contacted them?
  • Its likely that Augustine never lost track of them to begin with and just let them run around because it gives the DUP a reason to keep being funded. As soon as Delsin proved himself too dangerous she called all necessary forces on them to cut him off from his backup.
• Why was Augustine so dismissive of Delsin getting Conduit powers from Hank? Secondary Conduits, while only labeled as such in Infamous 2, were present even in Infamous 1. The Elite Reapers all used lesser forms of Cole's lightning power. Granted most Secondary Conduit stuff in 2 was the result of the machine that Lucy Kuo was hooked into, but that still doesn't erase that there have been empowering events outside of that. The DUP makes extensive use of Secondary Conduits, it is why most of the soldiers have concrete powers! In fact, before Delsin figured out he could power up from absorbing Core Relays, his abilities were weak like a Secondary Conduit.
  • Mostly the wording of it. Bare in mind that "Secondary" Conduits are more often called "Forced" Conduits, and have had their powers imposed on them from an outside, artificial force such as a machine. Given that he described it as if it was some kind of infectious disease, she likely thought he was delusional due to the constant bio-terrorist labelling and smoke inhalation. Doesn't quite justify it, but might explain it.
• Did Augustine not really care that he was a Conduit and wanted him to go make chaos so she could keep DUP alive? It is like the head of Homeland Security leaving someone alone after they confessed to being a terrorist on the grounds that they don't believe them. It wouldn't matter that they don't believe them, they would still take them in for questioning! So even if Augustine WAS playing the long game of having another, unknown conduit on the loose, someone present should have reported it to those ABOVE Augustine.
  • The DUP is deeply stupid with one exception.

• Does the Evil ending not make much sense to anyone else in regards to Delsin? if he does "shake every hand" of the conduits imprisoned there, he will have all their powers, but at the same time none of them, owing to the fact he NEEDS core relays to activate them, that means he would probably need hundreds if not thousands of core relays, plus he would have to take his time to shake a hand, then do the core relays, repeat, he couldn't just shake and shake and shake, as it would reset without the absorbing part, that's if he even knew what powers he was getting in the first place.
  • I always thought that the core-relays just allowed Delsin to accelerate the development of his current abilities rather then taking literal years to learn like their sources. Also, if Delsin sequentially picks up his other abilities one after another, it's possible that he can absorb the core of the conduit's power and then start developing it later on despite the power-lock. Finally Delsin's core ability is POWER COPYING, not the copied powers, it's possible he could improve his ability to absorb conduit powers to the point of removing any practical limitations like needing core-relays. Granted, most of the conduits would probably sense something was amiss when every time Delsin shook someone's hand they both started writhing as Delsin got their backstory.

• Also does nobody else question the "Good" ending? Letting out ALL the conduits out of essentially imprisonment, surely a few caught by the D.U.P were caught because they used their powers for, let's say, less than honourable ideas. Just say every 1 or 2 out of 100 is a murderous or evil one, remember Fetch's redeeming quality for Delsin was that she was "only" killing drug dealers and she's one of the good ones.
  • Gotta have someone Delsin can go after if a second game gets made and adding in some juicy moral ambiguity to his actions in the first game makes it easier to fit the karma meter in.
  • That's what the government gets for "suspending" their rights and illegally imprisoning them. You can't just go "well these handful deserved it". It's the same reason everyone was released in between Arkham City and Arkham Knight.

• Why didn't Delsin summon his smoke powers when Augustine refuses to believe he 'caught' his powers from Hank? The minute she dismissed him, he could have gone 'No look, I've got smoke coming out of my arm, please don't torture my surrogate parent or my tribe.'
  • That wouldn't change anything. She knows he's a Conduit, she just doesn't believe Delsin "caught it". For all she knows, Delsin just has Smoke powers like Henry.
    • Did she know? The standard procedure would have been to capture him. Nothing in the game hints that she knew that he was a conduit, nor was there ever a "plan" that involved him. If anything, she looks like an idiot for leaving this wild card conduit free with a reason to go after her and the DUP (essentially torturing and leaving an entire Native American Tribe to die a slow and painful death). She already had a carefully thought-out plan with three conduits she already knew the ins-and-outs of (one of which was actively working for her) and everything she does after capturing Hank that involved Delsin was to capture and contain Delsin as standard procedure whenever the DUP encounters a "Bio-terrorist".

• In First Light we learn that Augustine is using Eugene's video power to make hard-light training simulations for her agents. Given how useful that is, why on earth does she release him as part of her plan?
  • Her plan was always to recapture both Fetch and Eugene after letting them rampage in Seattle for a bit. She never really thought her plan would fail, so releasing Eugene was always going to be a temporary thing. Also his powers are useful but only for training purposes, which at that point the D.U.P. didn't need to train conduits in mass, they all used Augustine's concrete power and over the last 7 years likely hammered out a consistent training program for them.

• So... do all Conduit abilities involve absorbing an element? Maybe I'm just confused, but it seems like all of the abilities we can play have that limitation (for reason of gameplay, obviously). So could a conduit theoretically be able to control something like gravity or density without having to absorb it first?

• Why would someone tell people that drugs cause super powers. That seems like it would cause the war against drugs to fail worse than the DARE program.
  • "Don't do drugs kids. It will corrupt you and give you scary super powers." "That sounds awesome, hook me up!"
  • At the time, "bio-terrorists" are framed as being Always Chaotic Evil and as abhorations of god and nature deserving nothing more than extermination for the crime of being different. It would be like in the 1950's and anti-weed PS As saying that drugs can turn men homosexual, and "homosexual = bad". Is it stupid? Yes, but it's the kind of stupid you'd expect from Real Life.

• Why did Augustine afflict the Akomish Tribe with slow and painful concrete wounds, anyway? I get that Augustine can be petty, but it was a tad excessive. It couldn't have been a way to ensure that there were no witnesses, because the methods left them alive and would only have killed them eventually, and the entire plan hinged on there being witnesses. Hank had no real secrets to give anybody anyway because he was actively working for Augustine at the time. She didn't do it to teach Delsin a lesson for defying her, because the Good Karma choice had Delsin confess that he is a conduit and she just shrugs it off and acts like she doesn't believe him and she does it anyway. He didn't even really do anything that would warrant such a response apart from saying "conduit" instead of "bio-terrorist". It couldn't have been to make it look like Hank killed them to make conduits look scary to the public because it is practically public knowledge that everyone in the DUP has concrete powers and all of the wounds have large pieces of concrete jutting out of them. It couldn't have been because she was planning to lure Delsin to Seattle for her Evil Plan, because nothing in her plan involved him and every plan she had that involved Delsin was to capture him. This would indicate that she really didn't believe him when he said that he was a conduit, did not take any measures to check and make sure that he wasn't a conduit (and they have the tech to do that) when they had him (even when they knocked him unconscious and just left him there) and they tortured and nearly murdered dozens of people for information they likely knew they didn't have. Also, even with the DUP's (frankly absurd) level of leeway and authority presented in the game, the whole point of her Evil Plan was to endear the DUP to the public by demonizing conduits and making the DUP look like their protectors, and needlessly torturing and exterminating an entire Native American tribe one-by-one after they caught the one escaped convict that escaped on their watch would be the LAST thing they would need for such a plan to work.
  • She’s a sadist, plain and simple.

• Why does Hank never change out of his prison outfit? Fetch and Eugene change probably before they even get to Seattle, and even suspected Bio-Terrorists get those vests off as soon as they can, so why does Hank, even after he "escapes" from Augustine's tower, keep running around in prison orange? You’d think a guy who’s escaped as many prisons as he has would at least have enough common sense to do that.