un: theball | text

[stresstokens]

Hey. Hope everyone's recovering from that stupid maze okay.

I'll just get right down to my point of inquiry. For a place that claims that we're meant to save the universe, I've noticed a pretty dramatic human-bias around here that strikes me as kind of odd, considering how diverse the universe actually is.

So I'd like to get a show of hands. Who here is from a world where humans are the only sentient species around, and who here is from a world with more than just humans kicking around? What other sorts of species are around? I'd like to know how much of it is selection-bias based on who's running this place and how much of it is them drawing from places that just don't have any non-human populations. I wouldn't mind hearing about what sorts of non-humans you have around either, but that's probably less important, statistically speaking.

Lastly... what do you see when you look at this picture?

[ Inserted is a photograph of a suave looking goblin man in a tuxedo with a pencil-thin moustache. He's holding a champagne flute towards the camera with his arm around -- something. If you've been infected by the curse, you'll see the goblin man's arm is around a black tabaxi woman, but if not, his arm looks as though it's simply hanging in mid-air. ]

[ OOC NOTE: due to the extremely low likelihood we'll ever get kalina in-game, the picture is just for flavour! if you'd like your character to be infected by the shadowcat and thus able to see her image in the photo, it would be due to any circumstance in which any of riz's bodily fluids were absorbed into their own body in some way, i.e. blood or saliva. feel free to handwave a circumstance in which that could happen, even if it's riz's blood lingering on one of the labyrinth's traps that then got into an open cut of theirs, a glass in the labyrinth he drank from that they then used, etc., etc.! Please see this comment for more information! ]

Comments

[stresstokens]

I guess it's not so different from the Adventuring Academy when you get down to it. Being an Adventurer does mean by and large that you don't have to adhere to the same set of laws as everyone else, so. You know what they say about rocks and glass houses.

Big difference being, we don't actually work for the government. We just aren't generally arrested for beating the baddies.

[ Or committing frankly ridiculous amounts of murder. ]

Efficient's definitely the way I'd put it. Sounds like the government figured out how to use this new phenomena to their advantage. [ Not necessarily a bad thing. Riz is just a suspicious bastard as a general rule. ] And if you have powers but you'd rather not do anything with them, they leave you alone? There's no like conscription or whatever?

[equivo]

I imagine you'd need the exceptions for liches and dragons, among other things. Especially liches. Murder trials for the already dead have to be a whole new kind of complex, especially if the guy respawns from his phylactery mid-proceedings.

[ Maybe he'll file quizzing Riz about the fantasy legal system for some future occasion, now that he thinks of it. ]

And there's no conscription, technically. Not in the United States. But let's just say that depending on the power, you might be strongly encouraged to sign up. If not by the government directly, then by the prospect of ending up conscripted by some other, even less ethical organization.

[stresstokens]

Not a bad guess. We killed a dragon in our freshman year. We haven't encountered any liches yet, though.

We didn't kill him because he was a dragon, for the record. I'm pretty sure there are perfectly nice dragons out there. That particular dragon was just a huge dick.

[ Riz decides to leave out the part about him being their vice principal, or the bit about him eating him, which veers a little too close to cannibalism to be suitable for polite company. ]

I'm catching your drift. It makes sense. I have a hard time seeing these powers cropping up out of nowhere without some people wanting to seriously capitalize on them. Even the good guys. I'd be surprised if people weren't trying to purposefully engineer them too. [ Born from trauma? Easy. Traumatize your soldiers. It's a cynical thought, but Riz doesn't think it's an unrealistic one. ] For some people, the government probably sounds like the safest bet.

[equivo]

I wouldn't have assumed it was just because he was a dragon.

[ Which is more of a mark in the gang's favour than it probably should be, coming from Krouse. ]

Although the only dragons I've ever heard of, personally, have also been huge dicks. One of them was a zombie, though, which might be a factor there. I guess we just have to keep our eyes out for the nice ones.

And people have tried cultivating powers. It doesn't really work out. Best case scenario, you get one or two out of a batch of however many newly fucked up individuals, and they probably have a power related to specifically dealing with whatever it was you were doing to them.

[ That's true enough to use as a generalization. The specific exceptions don't have anything to do with the topic at hand, and encompasses information Krouse officially isn't supposed to have. ]

[stresstokens]

Yeah, something about a culture that encourages hoarding wealth also kind of encourages dickish behaviour. Funny how that works. If you ever run across a dragon's horde, by the way, just leave it alone. Dragon Madness is a whole thing.

[ Tolkein was right! ]

Yeah, that tracks. Anything meant to just hurt people like that is doomed to failure. I just know that it's something people would naturally try, you know? [ Powers directly related to the trauma, though -- now that's interesting. If he runs into people from Krouse's world, that gives him something to go off of.

(Which is shitty. You shouldn't speculate about people's traumatic pasts. But he's gonna.) ]

So if your inciting incident was drowning, you'd be more likely to get the power of controlling water, stuff like that?

[equivo]

'Avoid dragon hordes due to ambient Dragon Madness'. I'm writing that down. Good to know.

[ Krouse manages to refrain from namedropping Thorin Oakenshield, firstly because the name probably won't mean anything to Riz, and secondly because being able to namedrop Thorin Oakenshield from memory doesn't exactly contribute to the vibe he's going for. They've got power mechanics to get into. ]

People even try doing it to themselves. Works even less of the time, according to the PSAs.

And sometimes, but it's not always that direct. You might get the ability to control water, or you might transform into a state where you don't need to breathe, or alter your buoyancy so you can float to the surface. It's hard to predict a power from a trigger event alone.

If you wanted to profile a cape, understanding the power is usually more helpful than understanding the trigger. Someone who can, let's say, manipulate emotions? That's probably someone who's insecure about other people, concerned about what they think, craves a sense of control. Someone with a ranged power won't want you up close not just because they're less effective, but because they need the distance between them and a threat as a security blanket. But you have to be careful about what you assume, because not all powers are intuitive, and a lot of capes hold something back.

[stresstokens]

I didn't think it would. Not that it's impossible to traumatize yourself, but I figure the element of surprise is pretty important, especially for something big enough to awaken some sort of latent abilities or whatever. I've seen some pretty wild stuff, and I'm pretty sure even I wouldn't have any.

[ Riz is a smart guy -- but he's also pretty stupid, and distinctly unaware of the fact that he's traumatized without getting any special powers out of it. ]

So the powers are related, but not so directly related that you'd be able to peg what the actual problem was that caused it, huh? That's probably good, for the capes. I feel like that sort of thing could be pretty easily weaponized, if you're a shitty enough person to go that route. And it's another good reason for the secret identities. There's no reason to have everyone around you be able to take a stab at what your weaknesses might be. Even if their power counteracts it, it might still be a weakpoint.

[ In another universe, Riz was one hell of a supervillain. ]

Are most of these powers pretty useful? Or does anyone ever get saddled with a dud? Most powers can be useful if you're creative enough, I know, but even back home, we've got some duds. Like, nobody ever stocks Find Traps. Stuff like that.

[equivo]

I'd guess that if you knew it was coming, you'd be at least a little prepared to deal with it some other way than a power you don't have.

Correct, with one more deterrent factored in: if you try pulling that on people, and you get it wrong, make it too obvious? People frown on that. It's not sportsmanlike behaviour. Most cape fights don't call for escalating like that with long term consequences for your rep.

[ He would make a hell of a supervillain. Krouse almost could fool himself into thinking they're really talking shop, himself in the role of semi-benevolent old hand. ]

And some powers do suck. Weak powers, ones with complicated conditions to work, only situationally useful ones, ones with drawbacks that outweigh the benefits. Or the other end of the spectrum, which can be more of a problem. Powers that are too destructive to bring into play fully, or at all. There's not much you can do with a power that blasts lethal radiation over an area, for instance.

Then there's the case 53s. Powers that change people externally. Things that cut you off from having a secret identity, because it's hard to hide being made of metal or having translucent skin. That's a different kind of problem.

[stresstokens]

I didn't know sportsmanship really factored into the equation. I guess that's a much more honourable way of going about things.

[ He very recently watched Fig terrify someone so badly that he jumped off a dock and into oblivion. He rode on the skeleton of one of his enemies trapped in eternal suffering and everyone seemed to have a good laugh about it. His principal plucked the sun out of the sky during a battle. There being any concept of fairness had never really occurred to him. ]

Case 53s? What are cases 1-52 then?

[ A beat. ]

You don't have to answer that. Getting stuck looking completely different's gotta suck. And that makes some people talking about meta/para/etc. humans being considered non-human make a little more sense to me. It doesn't just cut you off from having a secret ID. It's gotta cut you off from a whole bunch of things. Even if there are equality laws in place.

Which I assume there are, considering they've got this whole recruitment thing going.

[equivo]

Or more pragmatic. As long as you're not the first to cross the line, you have more leeway in how you respond when someone else does it to you first. A lot more if you're a hero, a little if you're a villain.

I actually can't tell you what all the cases are. Some of them are still classified, others are hard to get a hold of. Most of them aren't important. It's just the numbering system the PRT uses for potentially parahuman-related anomalies.

As for if there's equality laws, I think that would depend on who you asked. Legally speaking, they're people. Practically speaking, that doesn't help much. There are a lot of ways people can find to make you feel unwelcome that don't count as crimes.

It's a hard life.

[stresstokens]

Yeah, how things wind up turning out functionally speaking is pretty different from what the law lays down. But it's better than nothing. I get how it is, though. I'm a Goblin, remember?

[ Maybe Krouse doesn't. But Riz has cottoned onto a few things by now, and he's pretty certain that even if his people are fictional in Krouse's world, Goblins probably have more or less the same reputation. ]

Your world got kind of fucked over, power-wise. No offense. It just sucks that you can get stuck like that when you're already not having a great time.

[equivo]

Yeah. I hear you.

[ It's shitty, but there's a kind of relief in knowing he doesn't have to get into it past that. He supposes the least life experience can do is abbreviate some fraught conversations from time to time. ]

And no offense taken. I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the status quo, if the glowing picture I've been painting hasn't given it away. Knowing most other worlds with powers don't work like this is really just the cherry on this particular shit sundae, but it's not exactly surprising. Some people have to come from the rough neighbourhoods of the multiverse.

That's most of the highlights I can think of right now, but if I come up with anything else that seems relevant, I can drop you a line.