Questionable Questing

In a sense. Unfortunately, there's a little bit of conflicting information - if he was only limited to two timelines and had to follow one of them, he couldn't pull off that coin trick unless he was lucky. All it would have taken is for both timelines to have landed tails once (a 1 in 4 chance), and it would have undermined his whole presentation.

And I don't think Coil is the type to leave things to chance.

The additional complication is that, in each simulated timeline, the simulated Coil is aware of the (simulated) course of events in the *other* simulated timeline up to that point in (simulated) time.

So, it's not actually conflicting information. The coin trick is possible because the simulated Coils are allowed to act on information obtained in the other concurrent simulation.

The only practical difference between how Coil's power actually works and how Coil thinks his power works would come when his power interacted with other precog powers (or similar phenomenon that ordinarily interfere with precogs) -

- but since the style of precognition that Coil uses actually gets around most of that sort of interference (including - explicitly, if I recall correctly - the Endbringers' immunity), there IS no practical difference.

The distinction only serves to keep Worm's setting consistent; Wildbow wanted no time travel of any kind, and creating new timelines (essentially whole new universes!) only to destroy them again later comes far too close to that.

Plus, sounds kinds energy inefficient, don't you think?

I feel vague disagreement but not with any full point you've made; It's like I feel that I can agree with everything, but I should feel disagreement with some small part of at least something. It just isn't popping out at me, but I think it's likely to do with the practical difference count. Maybe a niggling of something.

Also, the coin trick was poorly done. He should instead have not flipped the coin yet in one timeline and flipped the coin in the other one, and closed it if it fucked up. Then selected it if it worked. Then repeat. That is the only way to 100% a coin flip with his power, since the knowledge between the two would not effect that trick.

I did not expect such a response to my mind blown moment. I'm only now reading through real worm at any decent pace and I'm not far, so I'm just making these discoveries.