Does anyone think about how fucking insane it is that Cauldron inner circle - at one point - was just a single grown-ass woman (Doctor Mother) and her peers (literal children).
Alexandria - 15
Contessa - 14 to 15
Number Man - 12
Random Parahuman Abilities I've been sitting on for a while:
Porting some of these from Reddit.
The Mule is a stranger who becomes increasingly difficult to detect in proportion to how much weight he's currently supporting. The use of extremely cumbersome body armor allows for undetectable, but extremely time-consuming, smash-and-grab jobs and assassinations.
Jawbreaker is a blaster who spits her own teeth as hypersonic projectiles; she can fire them one at a time, or all at once in a shotgun blast of enamel. Her brute secondary causes her teeth to slowly regenerate over the course of 24 hours.
Coldcut is a shaker/striker who can imbue bladed weapons with a cryokinetic effect; any cuts he makes will begin to locally drain ambient heat, in a way that quickly stacks in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts way. While obviously an immensely unpleasant kind of injury to sustain directly, Coldcut's preferred fighting style is to funnel his opponents into enclosed spaces that he's had time to repeatedly mark as his territory with numerous scratches, such that anyone who lacks Coldcut's secondary immunity to low temperatures will rapidly succumb to hypothermia. He runs an extremely-low-overhead cold-storage business on the side.
Pincushion is a thinker who becomes smarter in proportion to how much discomfort he's in, resulting in a consulting detective rocking cenobite aesthetics.
Pitch is a telekinetic whose telekinesis sets whatever she's manipulating on fire.
Manslide is a shaker who can locally reorient gravity so that "down" becomes whichever direction he's running in.
The Centralian is (was) a blaster/shaker with the ability to drill Navidson-style non-euclidean impossibly-deep tunnels into any discrete surface; if large enough, these tunnels would begin disgorging incredible volumes of noxious smoke, and eventually, hundreds and hundreds of monsters of the exact variety you'd expect would get disgorged from an infinite-smoking hell tunnel. Upon the consumption of his recently purchased cauldron vial, The Centralian accidentally generated a pit the size of a football field directly beneath himself and fell hopefully to his death; the resulting disaster area was up for classification as a PRT exclusion zone before it was discovered that the corpses of the pit monsters and the sides of the pit itself were both laden with rare-earth minerals. Now the whole area is actually kind of a boom town for capes with turbolethal powers and tinkers with supply-chain problems.
"BOY I SAY- I SAY BOY WHAT IN TARNATION WERE YOU THINKING TAKING ON AN ENDBRINGER ALL BY YOUR LONESOME?! SHARP AS WET PAPER YOU ARE AND ABOUT AS USEFUL TOO! THEY CALL YA ARMSMASTER NOW THEY'LL BE CALLING YA ONE-ARMSMASTER, THAT WAS A JOKE BOY YA MISSED IT, WENT RIGHT PAST YA!"
It was my first time wearing a costume, my first participation in a cosplay event, and, of course, I wanted to make an impression. I wanted people to come up to take pictures and ask about cosplay.
And I was upset when this didn't happen. I watched as visitors approached other participants and asked to take photos with them, but they passed me by, and I felt like I didn’t fit in. Again.
I tried to be friendly, I even put one of the Argentine cockroaches on my hand to show it and give it to those who wanted to hold it (Argentine cockroaches are very cute, they generally look more like woodlice than cockroaches, they are quite calm and they have a beautiful segmented shell). But it didn't work.
After the event, I told how upset I was to my friend, who came to support me and help me with my performance. I said that I don’t know what exactly the matter was. I had several versions: my costume is bad and ridiculous; no one knows where the character is from and therefore they are not interested; this is an anime event and therefore I don’t fit in; I'm doing something wrong; all of the above at once in any combination.
She looked at me strangely and said that she would soon send me something that would immediately make the situation clearer to me.
Today, she sent me a video that she edited from the videos filmed at the event. I thought she only filmed my performance and took photos the rest of the time. But it turns out she filmed the reactions of people around. Hah, I was wondering why she was always behind!
I watched the video and realized that the reason seemed to be something else altogether. I actually didn’t take into account that insects can make people so nervous (even something as harmless as cockroaches).
Well, at least everything really became clearer. Thank you for this video and your sense of humor, I really appreciate it 🩶