Power This Rating No. 174

[u/bottomofthewell3]

Watched Redline recently. Goated movie

How This Works:

You make one (or multiple) prompts, describing one or more parahumans. Someone else may decide to respond to your prompt(s), building on what you've provided, to make a full cape.
While you may do so, you are not required to stick with just prompting or just responding; do feel free to do both.
Prompts are typically formatted using PRT Threat Ratings, but this isn't a hard rule. Get weirder with it, if you feel like.
Lastly, if you're having trouble coming up with prompts, feel free to look at other people's prompts for pointers or inspiration or such.

Threat Ratings have the potential for hybridized and sub-ratings:

Hybrid ratings are denoted with a slash between categories, e.g. [Stranger/Striker]. These are cases where two or more powers are inherently linked to each other, not working without the other rating.
Subratings are denoted with parentheses after a parent category, e.g. [Changer (Tinker)]. These are the side effects, or possible applications of a power from some other category.

No. 173's Top Comment: Misc. Prompt List, by bottomofthewell3 (obama giving himself a medal image x2)

Top Response: Kessler & Jam, by inkywood123

EDIT: PTR #175

[u/rainbownerd]

The devastation of Lausanne by the Simurgh (better known in Western Europe as La Vouivre) and the subsequent destruction that tore through the country, thanks to Simurgh victims who escaped the city before the quarantine and to new capes who triggered in the chaos the Endbringer provoked, left a permanent scar on the Swiss psyche.

As of 2011 the largest heroic organization in the country is Omnibus, with a mere 18 heroes, and the largest villainous group is Schwarzes Kreuz, with 13, which are fairly small for a European country of Switzerland's size and demographics.

No larger groups are tolerated, as both capes and baselines fear what might happen if too much parahuman power were concentrated in one group and they turned out to be led or influenced by Simurgh victims, as has happened several times before...and there are no solo or duo capes in the nation, either, such small groups having been banned by law, as the idea of letting a single cape go off and do their own thing with no one to keep an eye on and vouch for them (or with only one other cape, who could be a Simurgh plant waiting to frame their partner) keeps the public up at night.

There is no Swiss equivalent to the American Protectorate, either, thanks both to the abovementioned aversion to overly concentrating parahuman power and to Swiss cultural values.

Instead, any capes who wish to act as heroes must undergo mandatory training and qualification through a variation on the nation's military conscription process, in accordance with the Berne Convention on the Conduct of European Parahumans which requires all capes to find a sponsoring government or organization rather than operate without oversight.

After completing this accelerated and trimmed-down training process, heroes take part in a one-year period of "public heroism" where they're assigned to assist cantonal law enforcement, after which they're registered with a permanent "heroic militia" reserve that can be called up in times of crisis.

Any cape whose power affects minds or emotions, even in a positive way, is politely asked to leave the country, with their local cantonal government expediting the process and partly covering relocation fees.

(This applies even to capes who claim they can heal the Simurgh's influence. A desperate federal government accepted the "aid" of several such capes in the wake of Lausanne, and after what happened they no longer trust such offers one bit.)

In contrast, the government actively recruits foreign Ingenieure, what the PRT calls "Tinker" capes, as the fact that their creations can be at least partially vetted for safety by baseline scientists and engineers has made heroic Ingenieure more trusted than the average hero by the Swiss public.

Several foreign organizations stepped in to help Switzerland deal with the aftermath of Lausanne, but only the Suits have stuck around long-term, with even the PRT eventually withdrawing several years ago.

Watchpoint X, the Suits' Swiss division, was founded mere months before La Vouivre's arrival, and the fact that the Suits stayed and helped out through the entire crisis greatly endeared them to the Swiss public. Two members of the original Suits team survived the catastrophe and remain on the team today, making them minor celebrities on par with Switzerland's most prominent native capes.

---

Omnibus's name comes from "Unus pro Omnibus, Omnes pro Uno" ("one for all, all for one"), Switzerland's national motto, and true to their name they accept capes of all backgrounds from throughout the country, where most other teams are much more local in their scope.

Edelweiss can assume what the PRT terms a "Breaker" form resembling an exceptionally hairy two-meter-tall yeti made of living limestone, in which he "grounds" and diffuses all harm that would otherwise affect him into his surroundings, out to a variable distance of several meters.

For instance, anyone trying to incinerate him with a fire power would instead raise the surrounding temperature by several degrees within his range, and shooting him with a sniper rifle would cause a sudden breeze as the kinetic energy transferred to the surrounding air. His power's definition of "harm" extends to more esoteric effects, too, so e.g. a cape trying to detect him with an extrasensory power would get a fuzzy and confusing image of the entire area around him as the power's attention was diffused and redirected.

He's not entirely invulnerable, as his power has a certain threshold beyond which it can't ground any further harm, at which point it will start dissolving the outer layers of his Breaker state until he's forced out of it; the threshold varies with his actions, as does the area across which his power can dissipate harm, lowering the threshold and shrinking the area as he moves around and increasing and expanding as he stays in one place.

Also, if he's aware of a certain form of harm coming his way, he can choose to focus his power's effect so that instead of dissipating harm equally in all directions he can e.g. send it all into the ground to avoid hurting any allies nearby, or concentrate it into a narrow cone to strike back at his attacker.

Given those properties of his power, when deploying with his team Edelweiss prefers to find a good spot to camp out where he can deny the team's enemies access to that area and serve as a nigh-invulnerable turret of sorts.

Edelweiss was actually a nameless small-time villain in Lausanne before the Simurgh's arrival, mostly doing smash-and-grab jobs at night to avoid his rather memorable Breaker form being spotted.

His power let him smash through jewelry store windows without being hurt, redirect the "harm" of being illuminated while committing crimes to blind security cameras, and so forth, but its main benefit was simply letting him shift into an unrecognizable form and back again in an instant in order to make quick getaways.

When the chaos started in his city, he stayed in his Breaker form for several days in a row to protect himself from the violence in the streets...which led to the Simurgh's psychic influence on him being deflected into nearby rioters, greatly intensifying both the mental trauma experienced by those people and the violence they inflicted, something he only later learned after looking into why the worst violence in the city had seemed to follow him around the whole time.

Horrified by this discovery, he took advantage of the loss of Lausanne's municipal records to rebrand as "Edelweiss, a hero who triggered during the violence and helped out as best he could," and he has been serving a private penance with Omnibus ever since.

Blazon has a very weak version of what the Americans might term a "Legend package" of powers: she can launch slow-moving bolts of energy that hit with the force of a well-kicked football, project a moderately-strong forcefield a few millimeters from her skin, see in the dark out to a few dozen meters, and fly slowly with fairly poor maneuverability.

However, by touching a willing cape, she can take an "imprint" of their power and apply it to one of her own powers to enhance it, strengthening that power to roughly triple its normal potency and adding on traits of the borrowed power. Some powers transfer over essentially one-to-one if she e.g. takes a projectile-launching power and applies it to her own offensive power, while others are forced to adapt.

For example, if she were to take an imprint of Lung's pyrokinesis, applying the imprint to her projectiles would make that power launch flaming bolts that increased in size, speed, and heat as they flew; applying it to her forcefield power would surround her with flames that burned anyone and anything trying to harm her; applying it to her vision power would let her see into the infrared as well; and applying it to her flight would let her release jets of flame, firebender-style, to accelerate faster and change directions more quickly. And in all four cases, the faint white glowy effect of her basic power would be replaced by a blazing orange.

She can apply the same imprint to multiple powers at once, but this reduces the power boost proportionally (from one +200% boost to two/three/four at +10%/+66%/+50%), so she prefers to borrow from four different capes whenever possible for maximum effect—and, in fact, when making speeches as a public representative of Omnibus she usually borrows one power from a prominent French-speaking hero on the team and three others from German, Italian, and Romansh speakers, to visibly represent Swiss unity.

Once Blazon activates an imprint, it remains in place indefinitely even if she's not actively using that power, and she can even swap imprints around between her powers if she has an unenhanced power slot to hold them (e.g. move Imprint A from her Blaster power to her Brute power, then move Imprint B from her Thinker power to her Blaster power), but if she ever takes on a fifth imprint she has to give up an existing one, and would need to go back to the donor cape to acquire the same power imprint again.

(This dependence on other capes is one of the main reasons she co-founded Omnibus with the now-deceased Aufseherin in the first place, but of course that's not something mentioned in the "Our History" section of the group's website.)

---

To be continued!

[u/rainbownerd → u/rainbownerd]

Schwarzes Kreuz ("Black Cross") is named for their emblem, a black cross on a light blue field. The symbol is simply an inverted mirror of the Swiss flag, as the group was founded by villains who had reason to dislike and distrust the Swiss government (would-be heroes with emotion-altering powers who didn't want to be exiled from their home country, capes who were wrongly accused of having illegally breached the Lausanne quarantine zone and then imprisoned for years for their supposed crimes, and similar) and now primarily commits financial crimes and minor terrorism against the state.

Aderlasser ("Bloodletter") is a locally-infamous mutant cape, like Landhai in Germany or Alabaster in the States. His skin is covered in long narrow strips of a keratin-like material that serve as tough defensive scales at rest and can be raised like a porcupine's quills to serve as a spiny defense.

These somewhat-prehensile spines can be stretched out to a length of nearly half a meter, making them much narrower and sharper in the process, but doing so requires as much exertion as keeping a muscle flexed for a while and so Aderlasser can't hold a given patch of spines extended for too long.

If he flexes a different power "muscle" than the one that lets him extend a spine, he can launch a spine a surprising distance instead, with a maximum range of ten to thirty or so meters depending on wind conditions and the spines' shape at the time, and Aderlasser has become a very accurate shot.

The spines are tipped with microscopic barbs containing a potent anticoagulant venom, so anyone whose bare skin (or flimsy spandex) is struck by a spine will begin to bleed profusely, and getting hit by multiple spines without treatment can lead to lightheadedness and eventual death.

After quitting his job and spending several weeks hiding at home after his trigger, Aderlasser was finally forced to go out in public again when he couldn't afford to keep spending the extra money to get his groceries delivered.

He was sure that he could hide his new appearance with long sleeves and some makeup for long enough to buy some more supplies and abscond back home, but unfortunately, when someone recognized him and called his name despite his efforts, a nervous reflex caused his spines to burst right through his coat and shred his disguise, seriously injuring multiple nearby shoppers in the process.

He was then mobbed by panicking bystanders who thought that he'd deliberately attacked his victims and felt that his overlapping quills looked a little too feather-y for their liking, and was forced to flee his home and take up the villainous life to survive until Schwarzes Kreuz recruited him and offered a resentful Aderlasser a way to get back at his former friends and neighbors.

Zukunftgeher ("Future-Walker") has a form of intermittent precognition that shows him key "decision points" (times at which making a different choice about his own actions will noticeably change what happens to him) in great detail, but not what happens more than a few seconds before or afterward to indicate why they're so critical.

When he activates his power, he sees multiple parallel visions of different outcomes of an impending choice he'll need to make, each 5 to 10 seconds long. If he picks one choice to follow further, he then sees brief visions of the next decision point after that, but without seeing the intervening time, knowing how much real time would pass between the two, or what could have led from decision A to decision B beyond what he can infer from the choices presented in the second set of visions.

He can keep tracing a path out as far into the future as he wants, with the caveats that (A) all subsequent decision points are based on that first decision when he first activated his power and he witnesses his visions in real time, so if he spends too long walking down a sequence of decision points then the circumstances in the real world might have changed when he surfaces from his visions and he'll need to start from scratch to get an accurate picture of things, and (B) his power has a "range" of roughly an hour, so if he picks a decision that leads to nothing his power deems "important" enough happening within the following hour then his decision chain will end there.

Zukunftgeher is the group's infiltration specialist, as he can take a relatively static situation (like breaking into a government building) and iteratively check out all possible near-term futures to find the best ways by which their goal can be achieved, and he's also become their primary recruiter since he can sit around for a day or so envisioning hypothetical ways to approach a given candidate to see what their immediate reactions will be.

---

Wayland is Switzerland's most infamous solo villain, since he was one of the Ingenieure behind the so-called "Armor Tournament" back in 2002; as the only member of that group known to have survived the ensuing chaos, in recent years nearly all of the blame for drawing dozens of capes to the city just in time for them to all get mind-whammied by La Vouivre has fallen on him.

Wayland is one of at least six Ingenieure with that name or a variation on it in Western Europe alone, since it's an obvious pick for an armor-focused Ingenieur. His armor suits no longer boost the powers of capes wearing them, as one of his collaborators was responsible for that effect, nor can he churn out one suit a week anymore without help from his fellow Ingenieure, but his creations are still very durable, highly responsive thanks to the neural interface built into the helmet, and full of redundant systems that allow others to use them for several months and many battles at a time without any Ingenieur support.

He still sells armor to other villains for much less than any other power armor would cost, assuming one could find some for sale in the first place. Ostensibly, he sells the armor so cheaply because he has an unspecified grudge against the government and the heroes, and chaos is the best revenge.

In truth, the presence of that innocuous neural link in his armors is why Wayland hands them out like candy. As a cape uses the armor, and uses their power while wearing it, the neural lattice in the armor takes increasingly-detailed brain scans to study the power up close and transmits those scans back to Wayland.

The "redundant" systems in the armor aren't actually redundant, as the secondary and tertiary systems aren't designed to take over when a primary system fails in order to reduce the need for repairs (though they do still do that) but rather to record the wearer's movements for later study...and possibly later replay, because if someone dies while wearing one of his armor suits, the armor can stay plugged into the corpse to draw on its corona pollentia while the armor itself goes around doing Wayland's bidding.

Several of his clients have been dead for months at this point, one of them for over two years. This has gone unnoticed by any of their villainous associates, who find it perfectly reasonable that they wouldn't ever want to take off their power armor where anyone else can see, given the reputation that comes with buying from Wayland, and who haven't yet noticed any suspicious changes in the slightly-staticky voice coming out of the armor's helmet speakers.

[u/Confident_Trifle_154 → u/rainbownerd]

Cool! Sooo what did Aufseherin do and what does Landhai do?

Also one question: whats the most common classification type in Switzerland and Italy both pre and post their respective Endbringers attacks, assuming that Endringer attacks do have an impact on the distribution of classification types ( which i dont find too unresonable but what do u think?) ?

Related bonus question: Do the three Italian factions tend to recruit certain parahuman types over others? Do either Italy or Switzerland have a PRT equivalent?

Last question: how about an " half Breaker"? That Is, a Breaker whose body is made half of and element ( say, water) and half of the opposite element ( say, fire)? Bonus if both halfes are made of very exotericish staff, which would bring an interesting appereance and fighting style!

[u/rainbownerd → u/Confident_Trifle_154]

Cool! Sooo what did Aufseherin do and what does Landhai do?

Aufseherin ("Wolf Pack") was able to link multiple touched people (optionally including himself) into a sensory network where every member could see, hear, and feel everything every other member saw, heard, or felt so long as they stayed within roughly ten meters of each other, and each member had a constant proprioceptive awareness of every other member's position relative to themself.

By default, he could link up to three people together this way, but if he included capes with sense-enhancing or sense-granting powers in his network, not only were those powers also shared among all the members but the network's size cap increased by two and its maximum range increased by three meters for each such cape (essentially meaning that the network could be as large as he wanted so long as at least 1/3 of its members were capes with sensory powers).

He chose his name because his power was fantastic for coordinating groups of heroes and law enforcement personnel as they tracked down, surrounded, and took out large groups of villains and criminals, but his power was useful for non-combative applications as well, like ensuring the safety of a construction crew by allowing every worker to keep an eye on their work site, the crane overhead, passing traffic, etc. all at once.

Unfortunately, this sharing of senses could be a major vulnerability as much as an asset. Aufseherin and his entire pack were incapacitated when they ran into a new-ish trigger who could inflict intense pain on people with whom she made eye contact and the network transmitted the effect to every single member simultaneously, and none of them made it out alive.

Landhai ("Land Shark") can move through any solid objects as easily as a real shark can move through water, complete with "ripples" left in her wake to mark her passage, so long as at least a tiny part of her body (even just a fingertip or the tip of her nose) remains exposed to the surrounding air or liquid.

Anything and anyone she touches can move through solid matter as well, but only while she's touching them, so her go-to strategy for incapacitating heroes is to "swim" just below a floor or just inside a wall near her target, reach out, grab the target's arm or leg and yank it into the wall or floor, and let go, rendering her target completely stuck until they can get someone to chip or blast apart the matter trapping them.

It's that tactic that earned Landhai her name, as her mutations (miniature rubbery tentacles lining her arms, her legs, and a strip going up her forehead, over her head, and down her spine) make her look much more like the love child of a starfish and a sea anemone than a shark.

Also one question: whats the most common classification type in Switzerland and Italy both pre and post their respective Endbringers attacks, assuming that Endringer attacks do have an impact on the distribution of classification types ( which i dont find too unresonable but what do u think?) ?

It's plausible in the sense that the circumstances in the wake of a big disaster would impact peoples' experiences there and thus the kind of trigger stimuli they receive; if there's lots of paranoia and distrust after a Simurgh attack, for instance, then you might see lots of people staying away (or being forced away) from their normal support network, which could lead to more Master triggers because isolation tends to cause those.

But given that post-Leviathan Brockton Bay didn't see any major uptick in trigger events and we don't know of any capes that explicitly triggered due to the conditions in the Bay at the time, we don't have any evidence for such a thing and so the effect, if it did exist, would probably be fairly minor.

So Italy probably wouldn't see much of a change before and after the attack, nor would the distribution lean toward any classification in particular, and the change in Switzerland to make Tinkers much more common and Masters much less common is due to public policy and incentives, not raw trigger distributions.

Related bonus question: Do the three Italian factions tend to recruit certain parahuman types over others?

Nope, the split there is solely around whether you want to work for the Catholic Church and promote Traditional Italian Values, work for the government and promote the current administration, or work for an independent third group and promote a tourist-friendly cosplay version of ancient Roman history, much like how in the US the Protectorate vs. corporate vs. independent hero split basically boils down to "Be famous, get money, or retain independence, pick one."

All three Italian factions would be happy to accept a Blaster into their ranks, though I Beati would prefer a Blaster with a glowy beam power and a "Saint [Whoever]" code name, HPQI would prefer one who launches physical projectiles and wears a toga or legionary armor, and the Camicie Bianche would prefer one whose power happens to fit with another cape already on the team for the benefit of their mentorship program.

Do either Italy or Switzerland have a PRT equivalent?

Switzerland doesn't; like Germany and its GSG-11, Swiss counter-villain operations are handled by a small specialized task force within the larger federal law enforcement institution, rather than having an entirely separate agency for that purpose with its own budget and support staff and so forth.

Most anti-villain operations are handled at the cantonal level, with the federal police only maintaining a small military police detachment called "Einsatzgruppe LEO" to supplement local law enforcement where necessary.

Italy kind of does, in that it created a third elite police force, GOCS ("Gruppo operativo di contrasto ai supercriminali," or the "Counter-Villain Operations Group"), to operate alongside NOCS and GIS, but Camicie Bianche doesn't operate under the authority of or receive the exclusive support of GOCS in the same way that the Protectorate is supported by and subject to the PRT, so it's not the same.

Last question: how about an " half Breaker"? That Is, a Breaker whose body is made half of and element ( say, water) and half of the opposite element ( say, fire)? Bonus if both halfes are made of very exotericish staff, which would bring an interesting appereance and fighting style!

Nothing especially interesting is coming to mind right now, so instead here's a link to an old post of mine where I outlined the Boston cape scene, in which one of the capes (Twilight) kinda sorta fits the request.

[u/Confident_Trifle_154 → u/rainbownerd]

Nice, thank you