The Dubious Dallon

day 107

Here's a bunch of OC's from some really kind folk on Discord.

@arcadianwinters 's Amanda "Firewall", Wards' team leader. Her power in AmazonPG's own words "A breaker state that, when active, replaces Firewall’s body with an identical volume of all-or-nothing indestructible, immovable, and opaque hardlight". Mandy firewall last name is very cool, you should become a fan of hers.

VozTheOrc's Valerie “Val” Starlight Love Maria-Jose Valencia aka "Loba". Her power in Voz's own words :Can manifest the natural weapons and hunting/defensive adaptations of animals. May induct others into a pack that enhances her Changer power, shares the changes with her pack, and enhances their own powers, at the cost of subjecting them to a Master effect that slowly causes them to lose touch with their individuality and defer to her as leader. (Please ignore that last part of her power, she's not happy about it)

Wards' leader after Mandy joins the Protectorate

@qwasey's Jennifer Malloy aka Hole-in-one. Her power in qwaser's own words:  Gives HIO the power to "mark" objects in her mind, being able to keep track of their position in comparison to each other perfectly within a wide radius. She gains an instinctive knowledge on angles as they relate to her objects, as well as  how best to make two marked objects collide. Don't know much about her yet (following qwasers' steps and doing a massive lore back-read), but she's a jaded veteran hero that does what's right even if she lacks any enthusiasm

etherealDesign's Juniper Summers aka Impact, Protecorate leader, worries about fucking up constantly.(Not happy with how her costume looks, will try drawing her for a third time) Ether's description of her power:

a) Generates a field in the microscopic area immediately surrounding the host's body (and body suit, in a similar fashion to FO’s forcefield) that generates friction. All incoming kinetic energy over a threshhold that would be harmful to the host's body (i.e. a runaway train) experiences instantaneous friction until all harmful kinetic energy is lost and transferred instantaneously into heat. This field (and therefore the host's body) can never be warmer than 98.6 degrees F. 

b) All heat over this cap is banked in an internal 'battery' managed by the shard, which can be accessed by the host to turn it back into kinetic energy as a striker power, projecting kinetic energy at the space just outside of this heat shield so that the kinetic energy isn't immediately re-absorbed.

c) power’s battery is drained by the cold, as it attempts to keep the host’s body exactly at human body temperature Shes' very cool and a trans woman, which ups her coolness factors by a lot. Punched the shit out of Behemoth once, and staggered him, but freaked out and left the fight to do SnR

@the-anemia's Elizabeth 'Liz' Holden aka Sibyl. A stranger with the ability to read others body language and social cues, allowing her to predict their movements, and the ability to disrupt others' ability to do the same. Her mom's a literal zizbomb, or was, rather. She's afraid of black cats. I really like her; strangers are my favorite type of cape.

@lemurlord's Kayleigh Ernst aka The Villain Never Known As Avante G-rd aka TVNKAAG (La Tunca, pa' los amiguis).

Lemur's description of her power: TVNKAAG continuously produces a rainbow-colored paint-like liquid from her fingertips. Any object or creature covered by it will be imbued with a Stranger effect - any person observing it either directly or through a digital recording will perceive it as having any properties they can imagine, except the ones actually belonging to the object. The effect is cumulative - if an observer first thinks the object was a toaster and then a monkey, the effect will force both ideas into the observer’s sensorium. Due to this, and the fact that there appears no particular limit on what properties can be “projected”, even short term exposure to affected objects threatens nausea, migraines and loss of consciousness.

After some time of being observed, the effect “settles”, now projecting a set of illusionary properties consistent across all observers. The properties are usually numbered 3-5 per object and are currently assumed to be selected among the most popular across previous observers, but a priority seems to be given to beliefs of sapience and autonomy on objects that lack it. The liquid dries up in this state, and can be scraped off bare handed. NOTE: the requirement for active observers permits storing the liquid in the “active” state inside sealed containers. See Modus Operandi below.

TPS can modulate the amount of liquid produced by her power but she is unable to fully turn it off.

Stranger, so I automatically like her, Annoying post-modernist art student with a Birdcage order. Thinks of her crimes as performance art. Love her.

My girl Ariane Vasil aka Arrhythmia. Quick drawing because I lover her and wanted a bnw drawing of her :)) She's cute! Her power lets her sync the heart of someone she can see with hers and then force both organs to do whatever she wants. So she can give you a heart attack as long as she gives herself one too! She's also trans and a teenage mom!

Blake and Green Eyes. She giggled, causing a froth of bubbles as she clutched the side of a pipe from halfway underwater. She wanted to doodle in a notebook, surround their names with glittery hearts.

Comic based on 29.1

Narwhal art that I forgot to post before pride month ended </3

gestation 1.1

- taylor is like emo spongebob and not like the other girls

- taylor is so funny if this was real life she would be a school shooter 

- did taylor and emma have the classic homoerotic female friendship to enemies arc? 

- i wonder what happened to her mom? died or left i assume

- arent you tired of being nice dont you want to go apeshit

gestation 1.2

- every five seconds she is saying that shes not a violent person and she doesnt have a killer instinct and shes not 'like that'. surely this means nothing.

- ok so what happened three months ago!! something worse than various fruit juices, i guess

- i actually find such a high level of spider organization pretty impressive for a 15 year old

- i understand the idea is to go out and do superheroing but like what is she actually planning to do?? run around the city like spiderman (ha) and save little old ladies from purse snatchers??? surely you dont just walk out of your front door and Jeff The Baby Exploder is standing there with a big red arrow pointing and a sign that says Im Jeff The Baby Exploder (Evil). ???? 

gestation 1.3

- im curious where shes getting the costume making skills from? taylor give up on your lifes dream and get super into cosplay instead. youre already getting bullied, you have nothing to lose. and you probably would have more fun.

- 'crackwhores and gangsters' 

- skill issue on my part, but im unclear on if 'capes' refers specifically to heroes, or to both heroes and villains?

- im sorry but this is so ridiculous girl go home you literally have homework to do

So many. Gonna start high level on this one and narrow it down.

From the 1920s to... probably the mid-70s, there was this implicit bargain with secret identities; the logistics were simpler. You could keep a secret identity with relative ease, the most likely failure points were those closest to you, and that’s manageable. But! You would keep a secret identity in the first place because if they found you, your life was fucked. There is no game being played; there were no pretenses. If they catch you, they will kill you- but first they must catch you.

The implicit consequences for being unmasked, while rarely realized, were genuinely very, very bad! Batman was fighting mobsters who would very much kill him, if they figured it out! Spider-Man concealed his identity because his villains made a beeline for his loved ones any time they figured it out. Cape IDs were genuine secrets, and because this was pre-mass surveillance, pre-internet, pre-media fragmentation, in the era where it was still hypothetically possible for people to up and vanish in the night, or become nameless drifters with no footprint, when millions of people were being shuffled around the country by wars and great migrations and the G.I Bill and a rise in college attendance, it was fairly plausible that secret identities were, in the abstract, genuinely hard to figure out.

This isn’t true anymore. In the modern day, with smartphones, home video, TMZ and the churning cesspit of online forums, in a setting laden with psychics and supercomputers and amazing detectives, it’s harder and harder to justify the secret identities not being blown open. At Marvel, many writers have said “fuck it” and had the heroes go public. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and others have maintained them (mostly) because it’s just so core to the character dynamics that they can’t ditch them.

So what’s happened, quietly, is that writers and fans have started to pay mind to the realpolitik of blowing up a superheroes civilian life, at DC in particular, and why most rational actors won’t do that. The Central City Rogues, at times, have learned Flash’s secret identity, and vice versa, but The Rogues don’t act on it because they know they can’t survive a Flash with nothing to lose, and anyway, they actually do want him around to beat back the potentially city-leveling threats. Many of Batman’s rogues have figured out he’s Bruce Wayne, but sit on the information because they want the game to keep going, or because they recognize that Batman is a known variable and a good way to make sure none of the other villains get a leg up. The end of JMS’s Amazing Spider-Man featured Kingpin nearly killing Aunt May, and in retaliation Spider-Man makes a big show of taking off the kid gloves and just pulls Kingpin nearly apart in front of witnesses, as a show of the kind of force he could always have been potentially bringing to bear if he didn’t have a civilian life holding him back. This extends to Indie Media too; Invincible and Astro City both acknowledge that if you live near a hero, you’re likely gonna notice pretty quickly, but most people are smart enough or nice enough not to do anything destructive with that info. Incorruptable is about a supervillain who rationalizes his supervillainy under the logic that Not!Superman was never gonna let anything too bad happen to anyone, he always win when it counts, and when said hero turns evil he decides he has to step up to protect people because the safety net is out the door.

More and more often, the sanctity of the secret identity is something acknowledged as a pretense; something that society at large allows for, something there’s a gentleman’s agreement not to poke too hard at. 

So now we get to Worm, which codifies this at a high level. No network of individually-developed working relationships where tons and tons of people independently decide to pretend not to know who the hero really is; it’s an actual cultural thing, an unwritten rule that you do not go after people in their civvie lives, you do not try and figure their IDs out, and you absolutely do not get caught if you do try. There is a powerful AI that helps enforce this, a powerful government apparatus that helps enforce this, a well-developed set of nettiquite enforcing this, an underground conspiracy that’ll absolutely drop the hammer on anyone trying to systemically challenge this.

But what really makes Worm Unique in this regard is that this also applies to the villains.

 Villains, don’t have secret identities in most superhero universes; when they get caught the first time, their IDs are out, they’re introduced by both their real names and villain names on the news, and it’s noteworthy when a long-haul villain like The Joker manages to completely avoid having their real name publicized. The best they get, day to day, is not being recognized out of costume, but that’s thin. In Worm, villain identities are subject to a level of respect alien to other settings, and it’s for purely pragmatic reasons; the book shows us again and again how utterly fucked you are if you back a villain into a corner and give them no way out. E88 getting doxxed leads to dozens of city blocks being leveled with untold casualties; Skitter goes full populist warlord when she’s outed and kills some high-profile PRT jackboots; Bakuda’s madness is driven at least in part by her very real need to establish herself as someone who is not to be fucked with because she has no civilian life to return to and nothing to her name except what she can quickly cement in her new and only identity; Shatterbird committed to being a mass murderer because her civillian life was annihilated during her “trigger” and she saw no viable path to deescalate.

Flock!Brandish

If you don't know what a flock member is in the Parahumans' universe, squint and imagine this is just a regular Carol Dallon doing hot woman shit.

Spoilers for Ward Interlude 9 below, and some thoughts on this Carol