etraya | un: theball

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un: theball | text

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! ]

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Is there someone invisible in the picture? Afraid that detecting the unseen isn't one of my talents.

And the thing about humans, at least where I'm from, is we apparently didn't historically play well with others. There used to be these other guys called Neanderthals on our planet, but the running theory is we wiped them out. Ditto for most of the megafauna, and we're working hard on the minifauna.

And something like that. There are tinker clones and constructs, people mutated by powers, and people mutated because of their powers. Philosophically and biologically, it gets messy.

Something like that. Nobody who isn't from my plane should be able to see it, and even those people are far and few between. But I figured it was worth a shot here anyway.

Earth seems kind of messed up, huh? I don't think we have anything like that, and our humans aren't exactly the ones with a bad reputation back home. [ But they're out there wiping out entire species willy nilly? Scary stuff. ] Why'd you guys wipe them out? Is there some sort of species supremacy going on over there?

Though I guess that wouldn't make a ton of sense with trying to make non-humans while wiping out the other ones. Are those mutations more genetic mutations? Any trends in those? I'm starting to think that this whole meta-human thing is the one thing consistent across all Earths.

For the record, where I'm from, humans with powers are normal. They're still just called human.

Convenient way to reconnect with anyone from your plane you missed.

[ Or to coax them out if they were keeping it to themselves, for whatever reason. Krouse sort of wishes he had a similar trick. ]

And you wouldn't believe how messed up Earth is.

No one's sure why we did in the Neanderthals. For our more recent extinctions, it was hunting, then ruining the environment. You might be wondering why we'd ruin our own environment, which is an intelligent question with a stupid answer: it's making a few people rich.

Our humans do see themselves as the top of the food chain, but not all of us agree on that, which is where the making non-humans seems to mostly come in. None of them have managed to get to a point where we end up the Neanderthals, but it's a possibility.

For the people not made in a basement lab, it's not genetic, as far as anyone can tell. No one's entirely sure where powers come from, but they started showing up around thirty years ago. Powers trigger when someone with the potential to become a parahuman experiences enough stress to develop them.

Sometimes the trigger goes wrong. That's where the mutation comes in.

It sounds like your universe ended up with a higher quality homo sapiens.

It's not like my world doesn't have a bunch of messed up history of its own. But you're right. That's super fucked up, even by my standards.

[ Maybe it's not fair to judge Earth's humanity based off of thousands of years of history, but it's hard not to zone in on the whole multiple extinctions thing. ]

Parahumans is a new definition for me. Everyone else seems to be calling them metahumans. Another calls them Quirks. But the one consistency across the Earths seems to be that special powers always exist, whether they just pop up out of nowhere or they have to be made in a lab. Once or twice is a coincidence, but it's like all of you Earth guys. I'm gonna need a separate chart.

[ Or another two. Or three. He's going to have to start labeling the Earths too. It's exhilirating. ]

I don't think our humans are better or worse. They're just in a different context, you know? They're still not as inherently magical as other races, like Elves, or Infernals, or Celestials, but I think accessing magic is still a lot simpler for them than it is for you guys. Are you a parahuman too?

It is what it is. Which is fucked up, but that's the world we've got to work with.

It could be a sampling bias. There are Earths that don't have many people with powers, or theoretically any. Or maybe that's just how Earths tend to go. It'd be helpful if we could get a look at a broader selection, but I guess we work with what we have.

When you've got your chart done, I wouldn't mind taking a look at it. I'm not a multiverse expert, but I have read a couple articles.

[ A couple hundred. ]

I'd say we don't have magic in my universe, but given the amount of things I thought I could count on that have turned out unreliable I might have to pivot to agnosticism on that.

And a little cultural tip: where I'm from, most people would be offended if you asked them that. I'm not, but just as a heads up.

It could be. But the fact that there could be a sampling bias at all menas there's a whole lot of you Earth guys, which I find even more interesting. As far as I know, my party's the only bunch from Spyre. I should be done compiling all this in a day or so. You can come by and see the clue board.

[ He should not. There will be several of them. Riz is only acting cool via text -- in actuality, he's absolutely spiraling. ]

Sorry about that. [ But Krouse isn't answering the question, which doesn't get past Riz. Insert another little tick in his mental categorization of Krouse: the dude absolutely has secret powers he doesn't want to share. ] Is it considered a bad thing, having those powers?

I'd appreciate that.

I don't know if you've heard about the plan to get in touch with the new city in the sky, but I'm curious about whether they're any different. It could be that we're getting clustered by similarities to make collective accommodation easier. Spyre's not Earth, but it's got enough in common with it that we can understand each other.

[ It's not spiralling if you feel like you're being productive. ]

And it's not necessarily a bad thing. That depends on the power. The main thing is that most people with a power keep their civilian life separate from their cape one. Think of it like asking someone if they're a member of a secret society, if the only way to join that secret society was getting hit by a truck.

I haven't. But if you can get me caught up on the plan, I'd appreciate it. I've been wondering something similar about them. I've got nothing but wild speculation about the appearance of the new city, but I think we can all agree it's pretty suspicious. And if they're fostering teamwork in us, maybe the same goes for them, if it's even populated.

[ He's trusting Krouse to be bright enough to read between the lines about his true speculation: that at some point, they'll be pitted against each other. ]

It keeps on coming right back to the superhero thing. Are they illegal vigilantes where you're from, or is it more of an attempt to separate themselves from potential nemeses in their every day lives?

So far, it's pilfering lamps and neon signs from around the city to make one big coordinated blinker to flash Morse code at the sky in the hopes they signal back. I'm not spearheading it, but I can drop a line to the person who is for you, ask if he can get in touch.

And I don't know if I'd call it suspicious, per se. I'm favouring 'forboding'. It's more portentous.

[ He's also assuming they're going to be facing the other city sooner or later. No one ever says forboding about a good sign. ]

It's kind of both, taken historically. Capes didn't start out with government sanction, so a lot of them concealed their identities to stay out of trouble with the law. Once the heroes got brought into law enforcement through the Protectorate, the practice stuck, mostly defended by the argument about separating public and private lives.

Villains still conceal their identities to avoid getting arrested, unless they don't bother having a civilian life. Even if they don't, there's a bit of a prestige thing in keeping your real name to yourself if you can.

Either way, it's one of the unwritten rules that even if you think you know someone's identity, you keep it quiet and you don't act on it.

Thanks, I'd appreciate that! I'd at least like to know when it's happening so I can keep watch in case they respond.

[ As for the rest of it? It's hard to wrap his head around. It takes him a couple minutes to digest it, but he can't shed the feeling that it seems so unnecessarily convoluted -- but he is from a place where a bunch of violent wanderers are given complete legal amnesty for no good reason, so that opinion doesn't exactly hold up either. ]

Maintaining a secret identity and efficiency in crime fighting(? Others have said that superheroes fight for justice and to keep the peace as the mission statement) seem like pretty complex skillsets to keep running at all times.

Do these villains call themselves villains or what?

No problem. The more eyes on the sky, the better.

[ Maintaining a secret identity does have its downsides. Krouse isn't at liberty to tell Riz that he doesn't know the half of how complicated it is, or how much heroes skate by on those unwritten rules and the collusion of government and media - let alone how much 'justice' and 'keeping the peace' are buzzwords slapped over the real mission of 'maintaining the status quo'.

Not that he's bitter, or anything. ]

If working for the justice system isn't fighting for justice, then I guess that doesn't say much good about the justice system. It is complex, but things have mostly shaken out to be workable, as far as I know.

They do, yeah. A few resist the label here and there, but most of them don't fight it. It doesn't necessary mean you're cackling over an orphan grinding machine. Plenty of villains are just gangsters with costumes and powers. It's not in their best interests to make themselves into enough of a threat to the public that the Protectorate decides to devote resources to taking them off the streets permanently.

Which usually means prison, not a kill order. For the record. My point is, 'villain' doesn't have the connotations it sounds like it does.

Then there are rogues, who are just people who have powers but aren't heroes or villains. Mostly, they're trying to make money off their powers or stay off the radar altogether.

I know my world seems pretty wild to you, but I gotta say, your world seems pretty wild to me too. There's so many layers to this stuff. And it had to have developed pretty quickly, if all of this happened in just thirty years.

[ It's a whole system, a new society, a new way of life, a population divided into the triad of heroes, villains and rogues. What an absolute headache. And which one is Krouse? ]

Did any of the Capes resist working for the government? Stay full vigilante? It just sounds like it'd be difficult to get them all to stay on-board.

I guess it's one of those things that seems normal from the inside.

[ It'd been a hell of a culture shock to adjust to.

Riz might have had an easier time than he did with it, with how quickly he's keying in on certain implications. He wishes he could tell him that he's right about the speed being incongruous, because it was pushed along by something behind the scenes - and it occurs to him that he could, once they meet up in person again. He'd have to make some edits around his sources, but he could really just do it.

Something to think about. ]

They did, but that's one of the catches. Beating up bad guys and tying them to lampposts for their crimes is just plain assault and battery if you're not an official hero. If you're a cape breaking the law with your powers, you're only not a villain as long as turning a blind eye to what you're doing is convenient.

Some people skate the line for a while, but they always end up either folded in or folded out.

You have to admit it's an efficient system.

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?

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.

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.

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. ]

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?

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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