#i remember pain. and not just the mental. sickness. hunger. the advancement of my illness from what it was before to what it is now

[vonbaghager]

TMA Powers: The Wheel and the Deprived

this post got a lot longer than i thought it would so i’m putting it under a cut. i got inspired at work to expand on these older concepts, so here’s a still somewhat-incomplete look at two Powers that popped into my head.

TW for drug use, body horror, depressing anecdotes about Corporate America.

The Wheel

Alternate names: The Millstone, the Grind, Day-After-Day

Spinning in ones place but never advancing, operating in a strict cycle that one can never break out of. The fear and hopelessness of “this is all there is” as the day grinds away into a painful, repetitive routine. To have ones angles, ones personalities and passions shaved away, bit by bit, until one becomes nothing more than another wheel turning in a great and terrible machine.

Understandably more prevalent and influential in industrious societies where activities to preserve ones sanity are seen as frivolous or time-wasting.

Fears embodied: Loss of enthusiasm, loss of creative spark, loss of self, decreasing amounts of personal time, repetition and redundancy, quiet dread in the workplace, workplace accidents.

Examples of influence: 1) Man loses control of his own body for an entire day as it autopilots him through his factory job, during which it is curt and unenthusiastic towards other employees. Even when he regains control of himself, he must still go to work and be reminded of the incident, which gradually wears away on his sanity as he wonders if it will ever happen again.

2) An accident has claimed a life at the local plant. A pair of gears pulled a worker in, and have been malfunctioning ever since, relentlessly screeching as they grind against each other, but still you must work. The noise gradually begins to fade into the background of your life, until it becomes part of you, and you grow unnerved by its absence. It’s not right that you don’t hear it, so you begin taking more hours at work, just to keep hearing it. When the machine is eventually stopped and fixed, you’d do anything to get that sound back. And you know just what to do to recreate the incident...

--Aligns with:

The Web: Have you ever unthinkingly obeyed the order of a superior?

The Flesh: Make it as painless as possible, but the cruelty of the slaughterhouse will wear you down.

The Spiral: How long has it been since you’ve clocked in? When will you clock out? Has that task already been done, or did you ever start it?

The Stranger: New faces come and go all the time. Are you sure there’s people under them?

The Lonely: Too much socialization will impact your workplace performance.

--Neutral with:

The Buried: Being crushed, in this sense, is purely metaphorical, but accidents can happen.

The Corruption: How many hands do you shake a day? How many coworkers come in to work sick?

The Dark: An awful lot can happen during a power failure.

The Eye: Careful watch must be kept on all employees.

The Vast: The world is large and uncaring of your plights, so long as you keep working.

--Opposes:

The End, Desolation, and Slaughter: If you die, you stop working, and that’s unacceptable.

The Hunt: Excitement? Adrenaline? Both are poison. Get back to work.

The Deprived

Alternate names: The Starved, the Empty, Bereft, the Needful, I-Ache-For-It

The fear of lack, the fear that you will never have enough, or have any at all. Not enough food, or drink, or heat, or comfort, or what have you. Not only this fear of lack, but the fear of other beings who lack; humans desperate enough to kill one another for resources or the animals driven to slaughter humans out of hunger, and the fear of the untold destruction and misery humans will cause one another in the pursuit of more and more money, as though they can never have enough.

Fears embodied: Starvation, dehydration, hypothermia and exposure, financial ruin, human greed, the lack of necessary resources such as shelter or medicine.

Examples of influence: 1) A town has found itself in the midst of a lethal cold snap, each day growing more and more frigid, to the point that it becomes impossible for anyone to enter or leave the town for fear of freezing to death almost instantly. Gas freezes solid within tanks, fires begin to dim, the town’s infrastructure begins to fail. The survivors are forced to congregate in the largest, warmest building they can, burning everything they own in order to survive... and then the food supplies begin to dwindle...

2) A man can no longer feel full, his mental journey in dealing with his increasingly severe hunger pangs gradually tearing him apart until eventually he lands himself in a hospital after consuming food until his stomach ruptured. Once he recovered, his mental illness had apparently subsided... but he soon found himself without a penny to his name due to the medical bills he racked up, and his savings are rapidly dwindling.

--Aligns with:

The Buried: Difficult to get what you need when trapped below. You will ache for everything when buried.

The Corruption: Where there is teeming life, there is food for the desperate. Where there is disease, there are people driven to debt for a cure.

The Desolation: The fires will burn away everything good in your life, and still leave you cold in the end.

The End: What are you willing to do to survive? A question all Powers can ask, but the Deprived most of all.

The Flesh: Meat is meat, and you are starving.

The Vast: Some days, it feels like everything you need is always just out of your reach.

--Neutral with:

The Dark: All life on the surface needs the sun. Take it away, and everything crumbles.

The Lonely: Humans are social creatures, and one can certainly suffer from a lack of contact.

The Hunt: You must go. You must get up. You must eat, you MUST find food, you MUST find shelter, you must, you must, you must...

The Spiral: Did... did you take your medication? Did you remember to eat? Did you remember to pay your bills? Certainly, yes, yes you did... you need not worry...

The Web: It is often the case that your deprivation was not your fault, but the fault of someone else working to raise themselves higher and higher.

--Opposes:

The Eye: If everyone knew the reason so many people were deprived, they would not be afraid, they would be furious.

The Slaughter: This pain is not sudden. It is a gradual, building ache, not some thoughtless stab wound or gunshot.

The Stranger: These people are not soulless mannequins or inhuman monsters. They are human, just like you, and will ruin you if it means there’s more for them.