Scratchie writes...

I have heard about Dispatch! I haven't played it myself, but it does sound up my alley, setting wise. I'm delighted to hear it made you think about Dominoes!

This time I'm wondering about the genetics of metahumans. If the powers are tied to the autosomal or the gonosomal chromosome? If it's both, what aspects are are expressed by each?

How many genes are involved in the metahuman phenotype? Are there any identified proteins involved in the pathway that is tied to the powers? How far along are the meta-sciences?

And how does healthcare work there? Especially if someone with invulnerabile skin were to come and take some tests, how would they take samples from that individual?

My first instinct is that it is all autosomal, because my brain's first thought is some superpowers being biological sex-locked is lame, but honestly, thinking about it further, there's some interesting concepts that could come from the imbalance of some metahuman genes being X-linked. Men being less likely to inherit some superpowers would be pretty funny to me, actually.

Ultimately, though, I don't have that many concrete, set-in-stone ideas about the actual genetics of meta abilities in Dominoes, because once you start thinking about the science of it, it's hard to get past the fact that no combination of genes or production of proteins is going to let you control gravity or give you telekinesis.

Loosely, I imagine the genetic workings of meta abilities is beyond our real world's current understanding of gene expression. It's certainly not something well understood by the story's fictional scientific community.

Meta-sciences not being very far along is actually pretty essential to the plot; before the production of the nullifiers by the Red Siamese Cats, any sort of artificial power-negation devices didn't exist at all. There aren't any convenient superpower-cancelling handcuffs in the world of Dominoes. This, of course, is a huge problem and causes a lot of the strife within the story, and the ramifications of that is something I'm planning to explore in the next chapter.

Shiho is definitely the leading expert on meta abilities, and she's leagues ahead of just about everybody else. Now that the professor is dead, she's probably the only one who could reverse-engineer either of the nullifiers from scratch (Kaito is in possession of all the originals), since they were based on her original research, but even that would take a lot of time and resources.

There not being a simple way to cancel powers is indeed a huge problem for healthcare too; ISHA actually has its own health department dedicated to the delivery of health services to metahumans. That's part of why registering abilities with ISHA is so important: once registered, a metahuman has access to ISHA's health system and dedicated doctors and facilities to best account for any unique physiology.

People with negation abilities are highly, highly valued by ISHA, and ISHA recruits them rather aggressively. They often work in ISHA healthcare facilities or detention facilities depending on the nuances of their ability, or work similarly to public health nurses in that rather than working at a single facility, they work out of government offices and go to various sites as needed.

For example, there's Ran. Ran is invulnerable as long as she's charged up on sunlight; she can't turn it off consciously, so if she needs blood drawn for any reason and there's not a negation specialist available, they would have to wait for her solar-energy stores to be exhausted before they could do anything. But thanks to ISHA, Ran can just book an appointment at a ISHA-network hospital or medical office, and they'll make sure there's a negation specialist there for the appointment. Of course, people with negation abilities aren't that common, so the wait for an appointment could be lengthy.

I just want to say that I love how creative and fun are your Detective Conan fic ideas (especially Dominoes and the utterly hilarious How to be an Agent 101)

And I want to also ask if you'd be willing to share some more world-building tidbits <del>(perhaps even some more power and characters reveals. I'm really interested in Akai)</del>

Thank you!! I'm happy to hear it!

Hmmmmm, some stuff about the powers...I'm going to give some minor spoilers here and there for this one, because why not.

To start with, when coming up with abilities, I decided to give the various important families themes for their powers, so they'd feel cohesive.

The most relevant being:

Kudo: Thoughts (Yuusaku) and feelings (Yuukiko)

Hattori: Fire

Akai family: Time and space

Excluding the Kurobas because that's too big of a spoiler.

Elaborating on the Akai family, all extended Akai/Sera family members have time/space themed powers, so every member of the family has a pretty impressive power set, but each is also very specialized and extremely difficult to use. For example, Shinichi’s favorite hero, Eradite, is actually Shukichi Haneda, and he has the ability to “control his own perception of time”, such as making a single moment stretch on for basically forever. All he can do during the pause is think; he’s not actually pausing time. It's a great power for crisis response, as he can think through any given situation as much as he needs to and come up with the best strategy to respond to it. But then he also needs to get said strategy executed in real-time, so its not like he can solve every problem on Earth.

You might notice Haibara and Akemi’s powers also fit the Akai family theme.

Some fun facts regarding the Akais:

Mary used to be an Overseer. Her former hero name has already appeared in the story. She was a pretty big deal, back in her heyday. Masumi, however, is an unlicensed vigilante.

I went back and forth on Akai's powers more than any other character. I ended up giving my original idea for his abilities to Calvados instead, and gave him something else that I simultaneously worry is too strong and too weak.

Masumi’s powers, which we haven't really gotten into yet, are partially inspired by Tracer’s from Overwatch. But she also has a lot more going on than that.

Lots of characters have pretty obvious inspirations for their powers, like Vermouth with Mystique, and some are probably less obvious. Most of them haven't been prominently featured in the story yet, but as a teaser: Genta’s are inspired by Kevin from Ben 10, and Rei’s by Tyki Mikk. Someone in the comments correctly guessed that the more dangerous side of Shinichi’s powers were inspired by the Kingsman movie.

Some worldbuilding tidbits are:

ISHA is a very large, international organization and consists mostly of civilian officials nowadays, but it started with an alliance between superheroes of different nations. "Overseer(s)" gets thrown around a lot, but what the title means depends on who you ask, and it isn't really an concrete designation; general consensus is that it is a title that must be earned through exemplary acts of heroism. When people say Overseers, they tend to mean the big guns in the higher echelon of ISHA: agents that have a lot of sway in and out of the organization, but it also wouldn't be strange to call Matsuda an Overseer.

Becoming an official, 100% legit "superhero" is really, really hard. ISHA does not make it easy; they only let what they deem to be the best of the best into the field. Lots of candidates that don't meet the ideal get folded into other, less public-facing operations, such as reconstruction or threat observation, where the work is less flashy but still rewarding. Heroes are watched very closely by Internal Affairs and "retired" if they become too much of a problem. Mary was "retired" by her own son. She's still pissed about it.

If you don't go through ISHA's channels but still try to be a superhero, you aren't a hero, but a vigilante, which is illegal on many levels. But there is a middle-ground; Kogoro Mouri isn't a hero, but his abilities are registered and he has a license for restricted use of them in emergency situations, so he's not a vigilante either. He worked hard to get that license and it needs to be renewed annually with mandatory training and evaluations. The main problem he faces is liability; if he interferes in a situation, and something goes wrong, he can be considered liable for the damages. That's where Eri comes in, as such matters are settled in a court of law.

We’ve had zero room for this in the story yet, but there are non-villainous metahuman groups standing in opposition to ISHA and international metahuman law. There’s even a semi-independent metahuman nation, similar to Genosha in X-men. Hopefully we get there in the story eventually.

Hi! I'm glad you love Dominoes!

I'm not really involved in the fandom anymore; a lot of DC canon and fandom stuff gradually drove me away over the years, and I've been struggling to love it like I used to. BUT none of my DC fics are abandoned, nor am I focusing on other writing projects. Dominoes is actually still my favorite project and my priority.

So...why isn't anything updating?

Well, the sad truth is, I just can't dedicate myself to writing like I used to. Between my job and my responsibilities, I don't have a lot of free time anymore, and when I do have free time, I can't help but want to use it to go on walks, or go to the beach, or just relax, instead of sitting down in front of my computer some more and writing. All my writing projects have kind of become stressors on their own, since I want them to be good, but get stressed when the words don't come out right. Even DA101, the silly project I started as a joke to be whimsical and fun and help me relax, now kind of stresses me out.

Which is NOT me complaining about its popularity, I'm delighted so many people enjoy my work and am deeply honored by it, but it does mean I can't help but put pressure on myself to meet everyone's expectations, and that makes it much harder to write. But then I feel stressed because I'm not updating and am letting you all down.

Hi!

DA101 is not abandoned, I've been working on the final chapter slowly. It will be posted, though I make no promises regarding when. I know a lot of people are looking forward to the final chapter, but honestly, the pressure of that has been making it a lot harder to write. Nothing I put on paper seems worthy of meeting everyone's expectations.