today’s worldbuilding project is a superpower setting called “fortress and the damsel”. Fortress and Damsel are people, the two most significant reality-warpers currently active.
Fortress constantly generates an aura of safety, which keeps the people within a certain radius from getting hurt. Like, survive a nuclear strike level protection. It covers miles, so she can easily protect an entire community just by being there. She has some degree of ability to manipulate it, and has been known to shrink the radius to just cover herself if you try to force her to be somewhere, so people “court” (read: lavishly bribe) her to keep her around.
Damsel is in the complete opposite situation, because her power grants anyone trying to rescue her from a dangerous situation with whatever powers they need to succeed. You can win a whole war that way if you can get the right people to keep her prisoner. Just like Fortress, she’s a hot commodity, but instead of obscene social influence, she’s in hell.
The inciting action is somebody trying to use Damsel to kill somebody within Fortress’ radius, only for Fortress herself to show up and go “hey baby, want to be safe forever so nobody can use your power ever again?” and run off with her.
This is a very different narrative depending on if you’re watching Fortress and Damsel or if you’re watching the rest of the superpowered community.
For the two of them, it’s a romance between two people who have been treated like objects in very different ways! Damsel is having a grand old time being spiteful and flaunting her new situation while Fortress lavishly indulges her.
For everyone else, this is the nightmare scenario. Fortress isn’t a superhero, she’s a free agent that can shut down everything from police raids to intercontinental bombings, and she takes bribes! Damsel has the only known superpower that could beat her, because if Fortress was threatening her in some way, reality would shift so she could be rescued.
And instead of serving as an emergency backup against Fortress, Damsel has disappeared into the safe zone to learn how many orgasms she can have before she passes out. There is no contingency plan for horny lesbians.
@pastelbunn much less dramatically than you’d think! Her mother had a drinking problem when she was a kid and made mundane but dangerous mistakes, like leaving the gas stove on or not noticing one of her kids hadn’t come in from playing outside. Any time it impacted Damsel, either her father or one of her grandparents would suddenly get a relevant superpower. The powers fade over time, but they’d just get new ones every time something went wrong at home.
Being within Fortress’ range of influence tends to get really fucking weird, because humans have a natural tolerance for mild harm that a reality warping supernatural force does not! Some examples:
you can’t get surgery within her radius, which is to be expected, but you also can’t get tattoos or piercings because that’s still damage to the body
alcohol and a number of drugs do not get absorbed into the body within the radius. not all of those drugs are recreational.
you can’t take x-rays, get radiation treatment, or get a sunburn within the radius
you can cut your hair or shave because hair isn’t living tissue, but you can’t pluck hairs or wax because it’s technically damaging the hair follicle
there’s a whole variety of kinks that just do not work in there
viruses and bacteria stop being able to impact the body and thus can easily be cleaned up by the immune system. spending a few weeks in the radius clears things like antibiotic-resistant bacteria permanently.
the rate of miscarriages goes way up within the radius, because many viable pregnancies do enough bodily harm to the pregnant person to trigger it
cancer and degenerative conditions stop progressing within the radius, but usually resume when you leave. sometimes spending enough time in there can allow your body time to kill a tumor that has stopped growing, but not always.
@townofcan okay but this is EXACTLY what people do with Fortress, especially the adrenaline junkie stuff. you’ve completely nailed what one of her core group of “followers” are doing lmao
Fortress is an incredibly odd person because she’s living an incredibly odd life. She has been functionally invulnerable since she was an infant, and she has an absurd upper hand in just about any social situation. The confidence on that woman is otherworldly, and combined with a power that does shit like “prevent withdrawal in recovering addicts” and “halt the spread of terminal cancer” just by being around her, it means she is regularly treated like an actual god.
The richest people on earth are obsessed with her, there is a religious movement around her, she has storm chasers who follow her wherever she goes because she is a necessary component of at least four recently developed extreme sports, and if she goes on a road trip it alters geopolitics. Force of nature, that one.
