#trigger events

Alice, the Burnout

Let's start simple. Alice was really optimistic about her new job. She bought into the American dream of the 90's; study hard, get a degree, work hard, prosper. She followed the map, lived how she was supposed to live. But things didn't turn out how they're supposed to.

Alice went to one company after another. Some of them went bust despite her best work. Other times, she was fired for reasons that had more to do with office politics than her actual work. She worked hard, but didn't make the right connections.

Eventually, Alice found a job at a mature company, one which didn't fire her. It was hard working there; she had to endure crunch, sudden changes in project direction, harassment from senior coworkers, et cetera. But that's fine; she's working at a good company now. She just needs to work harder to overcome these challenges. And surely her boss will recognize how hard she's working and reward her appropriately.

She works there for years, waiting for her reward. She gets small raises, usually enough to keep up with inflation, but no promotions. She decides that she just hasn't been working hard enough to earn those promotions. So she works harder. She keeps working harder, sacrificing more, doing whatever will make her worthy of the success she's worked for.

Over the years, she becomes aware of political events which should cause her to question her confidence in the meritocracy. A financial crisis like our world's Great Recession, where the people who caused it get bonuses and the victims get to foot the bill. Awareness of systemic racism and lingering antisemitism and other problems that should have been eradicated decades ago, but which endure. Horror stories from other women in the tech industry, stories which other people are reacting strongly to, even though Alice has grown used to similar events.

But she can't give up on her dream so easily. She can't give up on the ideas that gave her hope all of these years.

One year, a new guy is hired, fresh out of college. He's not a complete idiot, but he's not exactly talented either. Alice keeps being assigned to guide him, or fix his mistakes, or pick up the slack when he misses deadlines. She does this willingly. Upper management clearly has their eye on this kid, and Alice is helping him—obediently, quietly, competently. But at the end of the year, the new guy gets a promotion, and Alice just gets her nominal raise.

She breaks. Alice storms into her manager's office—the man who decided that the new guy was worthy of a promotion over Alice after spending months ordering Alice to pick up the new guy's slack—and demands an explanation. Her manager chews Alice out, pissed that his decisions would be questioned, and threatens to fire Alice if she keeps being a pest.

The first time she set a toe out of line—the first time she was anything less than a perfect little drone—the first time Alice realized that the American dream she had worked for her entire life was a lie.

Deep Thought: Powers

Looking over the Tinker docs...Focal tinker, with a bit of Resource and Controller.

Alice (aka Deep Thought) can build and maintain a big supercomputer housing an advanced AI, which she calls 42. 42 is capable of answering almost any question, as long as it's fed with a sufficient volume of relevant data.

Luckily, DT can build some sensors to gather data about her immediate surroundings and transmitters to communicate with 42, but that's not enough on its own. With such limited information, 42's answers are vague and often inaccurate.

Deep Thought initially supplements her tinkertech with an Internet connection. 42 requires a lot of bandwidth and consumes immense amounts of electricity, but this additional information improves her answers immensely. Deep Thought almost initiates a "singularity"—using the answers to hack various systems, giving 42 access to more data and Alice access to financial resources needed to upgrade 42 and her internet connection.

But all of this—Alice's suddenly frequent absences from work, her mysterious funds, her immense electricity bill—alerted the authorities that something weird must be going on. Ultimately, this lead to Alice's landlord requesting a police investigation of her house. Once they saw the supercomputer towers around the house, it didn't take long for them to figure out that Alice was a huge white-collar criminal.

Deep Thought promptly fled, and created 43—a new AI mainframe, smaller and weaker and starved of data, but enough for her immediate needs. It's something she can show to potential collaborators, other villains who can help her capture her old workplace.

This isn't just a matter of revenge; she has two other reasons. First, their computer hardware and the data in their databases would make a great seed for 44, her planned next AI, bigger and better than even 42. Second, she intends to take the rewards she feels they owe her for her years of hard work and sacrifice, by any means necessary.

Bob, the Grifter

Bob started a startup with high hopes, big dreams, and absolutely no idea whether the product he promised was physically possible. (Think Theranos.) But he's confident, he's charismatic, and if he can pull it off, he'd make a killing. Investors pour money into his project.

Over the course of a few years, Bob goes from optimistically assuming his company would be honestly profitable any year now, to convincing himself that his company's high stock price is a justifiable reflection of the high reward offered with its high risk, to willfully lying about his product and his company finances. The only constant was that Bob had earned every penny fairly and squarely.

When Bob's company came under scrutiny, he was confident he'd come out fine. He wasn't brazen enough to admit to anything, of course, but he was confident that everything he'd done was either above board or hidden well enough that nobody could prove his responsibility. He sold his stock, but otherwise carried on as usual, even when some of his investors started a lawsuit.

That self-confidence collapsed before he even got to court. The lawyer Bob hired storms into his office, furious at how Bob had mislead him about the nature of the case. The plaintiff had submitted reams of evidence, far more than Bob had insisted existed. His lawyer insisted that Bob try to settle out of court, whatever the cost might be.

The trigger comes from two mixed emotions: The realization that he was nowhere near as clever as he thought he was, and terror over facing consequences for his actions.

Venture: Powers

The Thinkers doc identifies a bunch of categories Thinker powers can fall into and the triggers which cause them; this feels like Skill ("helplessness or questions of competence, often scenarios where the thinker is out of their depth"), perhaps with a dash of Social ("emotional factors that...dwell more on the emotions at hand than the isolation or betrayal").

Bob gains the ability to shift between different mindsets, each of which alters the way he processes and retains information. For instance, his combat mindset improves his ability to learn his opponent's "patterns" and learn various combat-related skills (martial arts, marksmanship, etc), while his social mindset lets improves his ability to deduce/intuit what other people are thinking and learn various social-related skills (rhetoric, bluffing convincingly, etc).

This power has a downside that Bob doesn't intuitively know about, and that he ignores any signs of: Each mindset also feeds him "bad data" for other kinds of activities or skills. He makes bad interpersonal assumptions if he stays in his combat mindset, and develops bad habits. The positive influence from his mindsets is a lot stronger than the negative ones, though; if Bob switched between mindsets regularly, he could maintain an Uber-tier (heh) level of skill.

Bob stuck to his power's social mindset for pretty much the entire lawsuit, hoping that it would let him get out of his scandal scott-free. It did not. He then tried to pull off a pretty wild plan that would let him escape the USA with much of his fortune (in the form of gold bars), but overuse of one mindset eroded too many of Bob's other skills (and his ability to evaluate his own abilities, which was never exceptional).

After focusing more on his athletic and combat mindsets, Bob managed to flail his way out of custody and became a low-grade villain—the kind who mostly works as muscle/support for other villains, while being absolutely certain he can be a Big Shot some day.

Carl, the Failson

A rich kid from a new-money Silicon Valley family. He can't program himself, and struggled to start a profitable tech company. He's hardly broke; he can get interest-free million-dollar loans from his folks, and has the business skills needed to build companies that he can sell piecemeal for more than he invested in them.

But he's not the success he thinks he should be. His parents went to a C-tier college and turned thousands of dollars into millions. Between those genes and his MIT education, why can't he turn millions of dollars into billions? He deserves to be a legend!

Enter Cauldron, who "accidentally" mention that Hero is one of their past clients.

Carl buys himself a fancy Cauldron vial. About half of it is a tinker formula associated with computer tinkers. About 10% is associated with thinker powers and Noctis capes; Carl hopes that this will help him maintain his grindset. And another quarter is the premium Hero juice.

Unfortunately, Carl gets a bit of deviation. Physically, this just means metallic ridges a few inches across growing on his forearms, thighs, feet, back, and over his eyes. It also means his powers are nothing like what he expected.

Agile Strategy/Angelo Vestor: Powers

First off, he has electrosentience. That is to say, he can sense electric currents (and magnetic fields) with those ridges. It's not a replacement for eyesight, but it's something. He also has two related tinker powers.

First, he can design a powered armature for himself. It's basically a thin mechanical superstructure which connects and interfaces with his ridges, which can have a wide variety of gizmos installed. Not as wide as he imagined when he asked for some Hero juice, but wide. (One of the first gizmos he designed was a visor with visual sensors, because he can't stand feeling crippled like that.)

Second, he has an instinctive understanding of computer programming. Not programming languages, or even assembly code, but if he uses his armature to connect his mind to a computer, he can usually figure something out. This can be used to hack stuff or to code stuff.

The thing about his tinker powers is that they're bad at focus. In theory, he could build a building-sized mecha that his armature links with; in practice, building that would take so long that he couldn't complete it before losing whatever spark lets him solve impossible technical problems. And it gets worse if he only uses half of his power; the more software stuff he tinkers, the less he can focus on any of it until he indulges the hardware side of his power.

Carl initially tries to use his powers to become a celebrity-tinker-entrepreneur. His initial armature was sleek and futuristic—a shiny chrome second skin, designed to resemble an idealized masculine body. He focused more on the software side of his powers, making some pie-in-the-sky promises about what he could personally develop.

Of course, that didn't work out. He could come up with incredible computer programs, but he couldn't focus on one project long enough to debug it, let alone fix the problems that came from tinker code decay. He eventually realized he had to indulge the hardware side of his power to get anything out of the software side, which kept things going for a while, but somehow it wasn't enough.

Eventually, Carl looked at the pile of random gadgets he had lying around his garage, and started to realize what he could do with them. Why let them go to waste? A billion dollars is a billion dollars. Carl threw together a second armature, one designed around the gadgets going into it rather than for aesthetics, and became the supervillain thief Agile Strategy.

(I'm imagining Carl's civilian suit looking kinda like SotM's Benchmark, while Agile Strategy's looks like spare bits from a dozen different cosplay artists making costumes for a dozen different sci-fi franchises, bolted to a suit of high-tech splint mail.)

Agile Strategy steals valuable objects, sells them quietly, and then adopts a third identity—Angelo Vestor—to invest the profits into Carl's company. This silent investor helps keep Carl's business running, which he hopes will give him enough runway to get a profitable project off the ground.

Dave, the Mediator

Dave was the HR manager at another startup, developing an all-inclusive personal wellness app, which lives by a policy of work-hard-party-hard. The company hires mostly recent college grads, people who will be attracted by benefits like concert tickets and company parties and chances to win big vacations, who won't realize that working unpaid overtime every week is a raw deal.

Dave is cursed with two things that are innocuous in isolation but noxious together. His friendship with the CEO, Buster, is a good thing in isolation; it gives him job security and a greater ability to influence the company than an HR manager generally would. His scruples are also a good thing in isolation, but Buster doesn't have them.

Morale among the employees is pretty bad, and Dave tries to manage it. He tries to balance the needs and well-being of the employees against what's good for the business (and his friendship with Buster). The employees don't need parties, they need longer deadlines and fewer working hours and nicer supervisors—but if they delay projects or hire more employees or replace managers, Buster's business goals are endangered.

Dave convinces himself that the company would go under if they took their foot off the gas even a little, and that the employees would be worse off if they were unemployed, which lets him resolve that internal conflict for a while.

Then things get worse, and Dave follows some of Buster's plans to improve company morale. They're a frat boy's wet dream, booze and hookers and drugs. Buster quickly realizes that letting employees microdose on cocaine during work hours could not only improve morale, but productivity. For a moment, Dave thinks his conflicting drives are in agreement.

Over the next few weeks, cocaine turns from an optional perk into another thing low-level employees are expected to do to keep the company afloat. Dave starts to feel uncomfortable about this arrangement, but it's just taking everything he agreed to a little farther than he anticipated, so he doesn't feel like it's his place to complain.

Then one of the employees collapses, vomiting. Turns out that everyone being pressured to microdose on cocaine means some people are going to macrodose. Management starts arguing about what to do, Dave grabs his phone to call 911, Buster yells that the whole damn business could get shut down if the cops find out they've been distributing illegal drugs like party favors.

The life of an employee, or the life of the company.

Helping Hand Hand Aid: Powers

If that trigger doesn't sound like a binary/multithreaded tinker trigger to you, you probably haven't read the tinker docs. The mad scientist or magi types fit decently well, too; I'm inclined to think mad scientist over magi, since Dave was successfully compartmentalizing the internal dilemma for months.

One half of Dave's tinker power is biochemical tinkering. The thing about this is that, while he obviously knows the main effect of his chemicals, he doesn't know the side effects until they manifest down the line. He can make new chemicals to counter the effects of his old ones, but those have side effects too.

The other half is external cybernetics. He can't design a replacement organ, but he can give you extra metal limbs. Or maybe some kind of external device that provides organ-like functions. These tend to work best on himself; he can give someone an extra arm, but controlling it won't feel as natural as it does for Dave.

Dave uses his power to save the employee, but that doesn't do much to save the company. The unfortunate employee is alive and sent home to rest, but he still feels like shit (and doesn't 100% trust the disgusting cocktail the HR guy poured down his throat), so he goes to the hospital and doesn't hesitate to explain how he got poisoned.

The company's work environment is swiftly revealed through a bunch of interviews and investigative journalism. Buster flees the state before charges can be fired, disappearing to Scion-knows-where; the management collectively decides to throw him under the bus to cover their own asses.

It doesn't work for all of them, but Dave's good reputation among the staff and the fact that he saved the OD-ing employee's life let him avoid criminal charges, or even a bad reputation. He still feels guilty for his part in the company-wide disaster. He uses that guilt to drive him to use his powers for good, helping the local Protectorate.

He can design cyberweapons and poisons and stuff, but he chooses to instead focus his tinker efforts on advanced medical drugs and ways to deliver them where they're useful. (Most of which are bundled into a cybernetic third arm, which is why he was disappointed to learn that the name "Helping Hand" was already taken by a Canadian rogue.)

Hand Aid is a battlefield medic, applying medicine that keeps heroes alive long enough to get to a hospital; he can also help patients recover from long-term injuries faster or more completely. Of course, his medicine all has side effects—often serious ones, ones he can't predict until they arise. Whenever he uses a drug on a patient, he has to keep designing new ones to handle the side effects that crop up from the last batch until the side effects are tolerable or he runs out of time to help them.

Iterating on the same drug, adding in new chemicals to counter its side effects, can make this side effect spiral less severe, but it can't stop it. As long as he cares about his patients' well-being, he's stuck in a cycle of fixing problems he caused while trying to fix other problems.

(If the Slaughterhouse Nine ever goes to the West Coast, he probably gets nominated by Bonesaw. He wouldn't survive the tests very long.)

(Note to self: If you go with the heist fic idea, write up a trigger event for the guy that ODs and gets tinker juice shoved down his throat. Clusters are fun, even if they're two-cape clusters.)

Eve, the Whistleblower

Eve was an accountant at a microchip research center. It wasn't as abusive as the company Alice works at, as dangerous as Buster's, or as fraudulent as Bob's; however, it wasn't very good, either. Eve suppresses a lot of resentment towards her bosses, her job, the company, Silicon Valley, the world in general.

One week, she was assigned to cover for a payroll accountant who needed emergency heart surgery. She quickly realized that the company was engaging in wage theft to cut costs. She quietly gathered the relevant data she could and quickly passed it on to relevant authorities.

Charges were filed, but the company made a quick settlement out of court. Eve was pretty sure they got away with just paying the wages they should have paid months or years ago. Meanwhile, HR was trying to figure out who had ratted them out.

Eve worked to cover her ass, but there aren't a lot of people who could have gathered the relevant data, and fewer who might have released it at that time. Eve memorized the relevant laws that should have protected her, prepared a defense against every dumb, illegitimate excuse the company might use to fire her.

She was caught off-guard when the research center's parent company reorganized its subsidiaries. It wasn't a substantial change, but it was enough that some administrative personnel were transferred or laid off. Eve was deemed redundant, of course, and she had absolutely no way to prove that she was laid off because she'd blown the whistle. In fact, she hadn't even gathered any proof that the company knew she was the whistleblower.

All of these realizations were forming in her head as her supervisor quietly told Eve that she'd never work as an accountant in Silicon Valley again.

Antipath: Powers

Trying to hide and defend herself against a hostile social force, trying to uncover her "misdeed" and punish her, only to have the rug pulled out, only to realize her efforts were for naught and have her world torn down around her ears. Feels like a Master/Stranger sort of trigger, Machination on the Stranger side.

Antipath can force everyone else to look away from or move out of an area she designates—the smaller the area, the more potent the effect. This clears out an area for her, possibly to make it easier for her to sneak through it, possibly for other reasons.

In the moment, people affected by this power think they have a good reason for looking or moving the way they did; however, unless such a reason genuinely does exist, they'll realize that they've been influenced sooner or later (generally once they can't easily justify leaving/looking away).

People who are aware of Antipath's influence can't be driven from that spot by her power again. (At least, not for a while.) It still has some effect if Antipath's moved to a different spot—especially if it's just making them more inclined to search the area her power drove them from initially—but the more aware that people are of her power's influence, the less it affects them. It's a useful tool, but it won't keep people away forever.

Trigger Vibes

Let's start by reviewing the vibes of each Undersider's canon trigger event, loosely in order of recruitment.

Lisa/Sarah comes first, and her trigger vibes are the simplest—partly because she has such a generic Thinker power. She triggered from finding her brother's body and convincing herself that she could have prevented his suicide if she wasn't such an idiot; however, none of the details are really reflected in the nuances of her power.

Lisa trigger vibes: Tragedy that she thought she could have prevented, if she had paid attention.

Rachel's trigger vibes are complicated, because her power is extremely specific. The point of attack has to be a threat to her dog. As is so often the case, though, the trigger background is as important as the actual event.

A drowning mongrel is a crisis for Rachel because she has become isolated from humanity. At best, the people around her, the people who should have been taking care of her, completely failed in their duties, leaving her to survive or suffer on her own. At worst, they actively made her suffer; sometimes this was motivated by a sense of "tough love," sometimes it was plain cruelty, but the difference is immaterial.

Rachel triggered because her only companion, her only source of emotional support, was murdered in front of her. That companion just happened to be a dog.

Rachel trigger vibes: Isolated from the people around her by neglect, abuse, or both; find a dog who makes life bearable; see someone try to kill that dog (possibly to hurt/"teach a lesson to" Rachel).

Brian lied about his trigger event. (Well, his first one; a hypothetical second trigger event can come later.) As per Word of God, it wasn't just about finding out that his mom's abusive boyfriend was abusing his sister and then stoically beating him up; it was about returning to a toxic environment, one which he had been hurt by, seeing his sister victimized the same way.

Anyways, we have clear Word of God about Brian's trigger vibes. "[T]o see the house and be brought back to his weakest, darkest moment, the man's eyes on him...Environment and malign attention and the desire to protect his sister all factored into his power being what it was."

Brian trigger vibes: Being forced back into a toxic social environment, confronted with his abuser again.

We know basically nothing about whatever event gave Alec/Jean-Paul powers. However, we have two directions from which to speculate. Alec has a Master power, but with a bit of the "fucking with people" angle that borderline Master/Stranger triggers have. So his powers probably triggered from hostile social isolation, perhaps a bit more intentional than Taylor or Rachel's.

Second...he grew up in Heartbreaker's sex cult. Well, it's not really a cult per se; that implies some kind of pretense for why everyone should obey and f*k the leader. Anyways, that's a bit of a hostile social environment, where everyone's day could be ruined by one person pissing off the mercurial dictator in charge of everything, where improving your position means pleasing that dictator, and often hurting others to do it.

So, Alec's trigger event probably stems from some kind of abusive neglect inflicted on him by one or more. of his half-siblings or...um...step-(dad's side chick)s?

Alec trigger vibes: Not clear, but definitely not good.

We all know Taylor.

Taylor trigger vibes: Isolation, bullying, and self-loathing

Finally, Aisha. What we know about Aisha's trigger event comes from Scion's interlude, and it's more focused on showing how detached Scion is from humanity than explaining the headspace Aisha was in. The point was that Scion could barely understand that headspace to begin with. The female was more distressed than the male, and hence makes a more appropriate host; nothing else matters.

And it's not surprising that Wildbow hasn't gone into more detail. He tries to avoid directly depicting sexual violence in his stories, and the threat of rape is clearly the immediate threat behind her distress. It's not clear that there was another layer—like, she had been abused a bunch by mom's boyfriend and thought of the rest of the city as a safe space to escape to, but now it's not safe—but that's just a wild guess based on other details of Aisha's characterization and backstory.

Aisha trigger vibes: Unclear, but unwanted attention is part of it

Alright, now to tie everything together.

Setting the Stage

So, we have six sets of trigger vibes. There's one common thread running through all of them except Lisa's: Abuse. Taylor was abused by her ex-friend, fake friend, and other bullies; Brian and Aisha were abused by the boyfriend; Rachel was abused by her foster parents; Alec was abused by Heartbreaker and the Heartbroken.

So wherever this cluster trigger takes place, it has to be somewhere rife with abuse, somewhere that several children can plausibly be suffer acute abuse at the same time and place. Luckily, one of the Undersiders has a trigger event in such a location, a place with lots of kids around, conditioned and rewarded for their cruelty.

High school. Heartbreaker's compound.

Not that Heartbreaker is a good fit for the cluster trigger. Putting aside the bit where basically all the kids around had powers at least loosely tied to his, Heartbreaker wouldn't let Brian escape and casually return, nor would he care if Rachel had a dog. (Unless it barked loud enough, but he is a very different kind of shit parent from Rachel's last foster mom.)

So we need some new high-control group lead by parahumans, who foster the same kind of fear and cycles of abuse as Heartbreaker, through relatively mundane patterns of abuse and control instead of superpowers. If anyone wants to write a Clustersiders fanfic, I'd suggest researching (or at least watching a couple informative YouTube videos about) cults and the like.

The path of least resistance would be a culty parahuman-lead village built around and through a portal or two. You know, like the one Goddess's cluster triggered near, over the course of a few days. Half a dozen acts of extreme abuse in separate households could then end up tangled into one cluster through dimensional nonsense.

But the path of least resistance is, in this case, the path of least interest. Can one act of abuse—or at least a few connected acts of abuse—traumatize half a dozen kids at once?

Putting It Together

Let's start with the outlier. Lisa's trigger event is not directly tied to any kind of abuse. There are a few ways that we could tie her into the trigger, but I think the most interesting puts her on the side of the abuser.

Lisa gets recruited by one of the parahuman bosses to help deal with some problem children. Being more focused on her own needs and appeasing the boss (but I repeat myself), she agrees. Lisa closes doors/blocks an exit that other kids could use to avoid being dealt with, not spending a moment's thought on why the boss wanted her to do that. And holy crap on a cracker, turns out the boss wanted to hurt the kids. And Lisa helped. She's complicit.

This probably isn't the first time, either. She's such a helpful little gopher, one who remained ignorant of the consequences of her own actions—partly because the bosses like it that way, but partly because she didn't want to think about them.

This is her fault.

I feel like Brian could end up in a similar role. He's largely desensitized to the violence, like he is in canon. As long as he and his sister are okay, everyone else is expendable. He doesn't want to hurt them, but he's willing. Even if it means helping a monster who abused him and his parents.

The boss brings him along for more routine disciplinary action. He's done this often enough before—Brian is one of his main enforcers, after all. But his loyalty is divided, and this issue is a good way to solve that issue. Forcing Brian to punish Aisha means he either needs to put "the needs of the community" above family, or disobeys the boss—giving him an excuse to beat that disloyalty out of him.

Rachel's bit is important; her dog is the reason Aisha and the others are being punished. Nobody in the community (aside from the bosses) is allowed to own pets, and Rachel broke that taboo. She's an orphan, allowed to live in her mother's house and eat the community's food, but otherwise neglected until she's old enough to be useful. So when she found a stray puppy, she let him sleep in the house and eat her scraps.

When the bosses find out about this violation, they assume she must have had assistance from the other children. Maybe they picked kids who were disfavored but hadn't technically done anything wrong yet; maybe they picked kids who were less cold to Rachel than most; maybe they're even right, and one of the kids was coincidentally helping Rachel find food or clean up the messes.

I'm not sure there's much I need to write about the specific circumstances of the other three kids in this "community". They're Aisha, Alec, and Taylor, with backgrounds that are similar to their canon ones, shitty home/social lives and all. I'd need more if I was writing an actual fic, but I have no plans to do so.

So I'll just move onto...

The Trigger Event

Lisa fetches Aisha, Brian fetches Alec, goon #3 fetches Taylor. All three are brought to Rachel's house, where the boss is waiting. Goon and Lisa stand at the front and back doors, and Brian follows the boss inside.

The boss explains what the three girls and Alec did wrong. Keeping a dog was against the rules, and all of them helped Rachel keep the dog. Each of them will need to be punished.

The boss tells Brian to stuff Taylor in the closet, where Rachel had been stashing soiled newspapers and poop bags after people started to get suspicious. While he moves a dresser in front of the door, the boss starts strangling the dog. Then, he tells Brian to think of an appropriate punishment for Aisha, with an insinuation of the kind of punishment he would assign her if Brian didn't.

The boss made mortal threats to the siblings—forcing Brian to hurt his sister, or forcing Aisha to do something I'd rather not describe. Rachel watches as her only companion gets the life choked out of it. Alec is in the corner, terrified about what the boss has in store for him. Taylor is in a filthy closet full of flies and other vermin. And Lisa realizes she's complicit in all of it.

The Undersiders are all members of a cult, with a group of parahumans at its center. (Possibly—and I have to give credit to @n0brainjustvibes for this idea—one with a charismatic non-parahuman leader, whose first recruits were mostly parahumans.) Rachel is taking care of a dog, which is against the rules; she's being punished, and a few other troublemaking kids are accused of helping her. (Those are Alec, Aisha, and Taylor.)

Lisa, Brian, and...let's say Madison are brought along to assist one of the cult's lieutenants in dealing with (punishing) those troublemakers. Brian was chosen specifically to force Brian to punish his sister, breaking their bond (so they will only be loyal to the cult leader) or giving the cult an excuse to punish Brian (hopefully to the same effect).

They get as far as strangling the dog and shoving Taylor in a locker full of hidden dog poop (so Rachel doesn't have to take the dog where people might see it) before trigger events start going off.

Rachel and Taylor's trigger events are pretty close to their canon versions

Brian triggers because the lieutenant (who abused him in the past) is trying to make him perpetrate that same abuse on his sister, on the threat of him being subjected to the same abuse (with Aisha being sent to the cult leader for her own penance)

Aisha triggers due to fear about that penance, bolstered by the fact that her brother is apparently about to betray their trust

Alec triggers because he kept trying to make connections outside his duties to the leader, and they always sour. He was hanging out with Rachel a little, stealing treats for her, and apparently Rachel was using those treats to feed a forbidden dog!

Lisa triggers because she realizes she's directly aiding abuse, which finally breaks through her semi-willful ignorance about abuse she's enabled in the past.

And now, we're FINALLY ready to start discussing the cluster.

Cluster Mechanics

The cluster has two sets of three pairs. First are the "distant pairs," driven apart by the trigger event:

Aisha and Brian, driven apart by Brian considering whether to follow orders to abuse his sister, neither certain whether he would have followed through.

Alec and Rachel, driven apart because what friendship they had (the only friendship either thought they had) was torn apart by the cult enforcing its rules

Lisa and Taylor, driven apart because while they used to be friends (Lisa adopted the introvert for different reasons in this AU), that didn't survive Lisa's assistance.

Second are the "close pairs" brought together by the event.

Taylor and Rachel flee the cult compound (with the dog), bonding through shared trauma and supporting each other as they live off the land/steal from the cult.

Lisa and Brian are promoted within the cult, bonding through shared guilt and trauma, feeling forced to continue following the cult's order.

Alec and Aisha are still black sheep, but physically remain with the cult, also bonding over shared trauma and ending up in a romantic relationship (definitely not one sanctioned by the cult).

Each day, one "close pair" and one "distant pair" get boosts. The close pair get a general power boost, a better understanding of each other, and generally enhanced coordination with their pair-member. The distant pair get a specific extra power, a better understanding of each other, and generally enhanced aggression towards their pair-member.

The pairs alternate with the following rules:

Every day, one person will get both pair boosts.

Every six days, each three "close pair" and each "distant pair" will get exactly two boosts, and each cluster member will have exactly one day with both boosts.

Beyond that, there are no rules. Whether Aisha and Brian will have a bad day, or Taylor and Rachel a good one, is mostly up to chance.

Lisa and Taylor can guess who is likely to get boosts on any day with better odds than chance. Part of this is because they also have a knack for remembering who's been boosted this "cycle"; part of it is unexplained. (The reason is because Lisa's shard is good at making inferences and Taylor's is good at coordinating shards.)

Having gone over the general rules, I can now explain everyone's individual set of powers. (If I don't mention it, you can probably assume Thinker powers obviously derived from Tattletale's burn out if overused.) In alphabetical order...

Aisha/Wraith

She has her canon "make people forget I'm standing in front of them" power. She also has a superhuman sense of when people are looking at her (and what they think of her). Oh, and she can see through the darkness generated by her clustermates' powers; the other five can only see through their own darkness.

When she touches someone's limb, she can control it, slowly and clumsily; people tend not to notice being controlled this way as easily as you would expect, unless they punch themselves or knock over something noisy or someone else points it out.

She can also herd cats. Specifically, she can gather them towards a specific point, or scatter a dense group of cats. When cats gather under her power, they get what I'm going to call "hellhound flesh" because it's basically Bitch's power, just less. (The cats don't become car-sized, just dog-sized. Not even the big breeds—think bulldogs or beagles or maybe retrievers.)

On distant-pair days, she can dissolve into darkness and emerge from a large cloud of one of her clustermates' darkness. In practice, only Brian and Rachel's powers usually gather a large enough clump of darkness for her to do this with.

Alec/Black Prince

He can control people's nervous systems, something like his canon power except with better multitasking. If he controls someone's central nervous system for long enough, he can afflict them with semi-targeted amnesia.

He has three notable secondary powers. First is extremely low Brute powers, which let him take a punch better and heal faster. Second is a knack for judging people's general intentions and trustworthiness.

Third and most dramatic, he can create long, blurry strands of darkness that he calls "black whips". He can swing these strands around; if they hit someone on or near their head, the darkness quickly contracts around that head, blinding and deafening them.

On distant-pair days, people and body parts he controls get a quick burst of hellhound flesh—not thick, but very quick to grow and strong enough to matter. Also very freaky.

Brian/Bogeyman

Obviously, he has his darkness. It feels different than canon!Brian's darkness, though; thicker, more volatile, with the sensation that something is crawling on you. Brian can push things with his darkness. Something about human-sized gets pushed about as hard as he can push it; bigger or smaller objects get more or less force proportional to their surface area. He can use this power to crudely feel around in his darkness, which is usually only helpful if a solid object blocks his direct line of sight.

Brian can also paralyze people's voluntary muscles. Only one person at a time, and it takes focus, but it's still handy. Brian assumes he has to engulf someone in his darkness, but skin-to-skin contact them also works.

Brian can give himself hellhound flesh (though not a lot, and he's fatigued when the flesh sloughs off). He also has a danger sense, one which only detects things that endanger other people. (It doesn't let him figure out whether or not he's a danger to others.) And he's resistant to memory manipulation.

On distant-pair days, his powers become harder to notice. People don't notice that it's getting unusually dark until they're smothered in darkness. They don't think it's odd that they're sitting still unless they really want to move. They don't notice Brian's transformed unless he talks to or punches them. Also, his memory manipulation resistance improves to the point that it A. actively restores lost memories (including ones lost in mundane ways) and B. lets him partially overcome his clustermates' Stranger powers.

Lisa/Snitch

She has her normal Thinker power, of course. In addition to its usual mechanics, her power also derives information from the nervous systems of people around her (mostly about what they're doing or about to do). Lisa is not aware of this aspect of her power.

Lisa can generate small globs of darkness around her hands. They let her steal the memories of people if she can engulf their head in the darkness; the process isn't fast, but it lets her learn facts and erase them from the target's brain. It only transfers memories, not skills.

Lisa can also enhance snakes with hellhound flesh, though since she doesn't know how to train them, she usually doesn't. On distant-pair days, though, she gains the ability to directly control snakes that she's enhanced this way.

She doesn't realize that this is 5-6 powers which clumped together, and thinks she got the short end of the stick.

Rachel/Barghest

(Taylor came up with the cape name.)

Obviously, Rachel still enhances canines with hellhound flesh—way more than any comparable powers. Unlike the other hellflesh powers, her dogs are dark in color, and can generate small clouds of darkness around themselves. (The dogs and Rachel can both see through this darkness.)

She also has a "link" with the dogs. It doesn't let her control them, but it lets her send signals, which she uses to command them from a distance without speaking. Also, the link lets Rachel use their senses, which makes commanding them from a distance very useful.

Rachel's Thinker power makes her good at noticing hidden people, animals, and objects. This is handy for foraging, and handier for not getting ambushed. People also tend to forget about any plans they have which involve Rachel. This is inconvenient for Taylor.

On distant-pair days, Rachel can directly control dogs she's enhanced. She doesn't like doing it.

Taylor/Kafka

Taylor's bug control has a couple little upgrades. Sticking a few bugs on someone lets her sense their nervous system; prolonged contact lets her borrow their senses, blurry at first, clearing over time. Also, she can shroud herself in a "cloak" of darkness and teleport bugs from within her range into that cloak.

Memories of Taylor are easily forgotten, from details of her powers to the last pleasant conversation you shared. This is inconvenient for Rachel, though near-constant exposure to Taylor helps.

More Kafkaesque is her ability to transform into a "flesh cocoon". Over the course of 10-20 minutes, this restores her body, similar to how Rachel's power gets rid of parasites and diseases and stuff. The flesh cocoon doesn't heal pre-existing injuries, but trying to hurt Taylor while she's cocooned is pretty pointless. Oh, and Taylor's conscious while cocooned; she can still use her other powers.