#the overlap between 'people I feel safe being vulnerable around' and 'coworkers' is one person

[madanimalscientist]

Today in therapy talking about how at work I am always chipper and happy to help in and help others and always smiling and upbeat, but if I'm feeling negative emotions beyond 'mild/moderate annoyance' I hold it in until I can get home or around one of the people on my short list of 'people I feel safe being vulnerable around' because I don't like people seeing me vulnerable....like there was an incident that was relatively minor and work handled it really well and honestly it didn't annoy me that much but what did annoy me was like the 8 people asking me 'are you ok? are you sure?' even after I said I was fine and while they were well-meaning it made me feel like they were being intrusive and/or I wasn't performing emotion to their standards and either way it made me feel like a prickly hedgehog.

My therapist asked if it was because I thought they weren't taking me at my word and that upset me

Me: Oh no, even if I wasn't okay I would've said I was. I just want them to stop asking about it, they're not close enough to get to see me not in perfect control of my emotions.

*lightbulb moment*

Me:.....so there's this tv show, Hazbin Hotel, and it's really good, and all of a sudden I am now realizing one reason -why- a specific character is my favorite.....weeelp

[half-man-half-lime]

Worm fic concept, cluster trigger

The events of 20.5 as a cluster trigger, Emma, Sheila (the girl with the undercut who took Taylor’s side with the principal), and maybe Principal Howell get powers from the conflict. I’ve thought of the powers they might get alone, but I don’t know how best to simplify them into powers that aren’t so strong and mesh well together.

Emma, triggering as a bud off of Shadow Stalker (can buds cluster trigger? I have no clue) gets a Breaker state to fit with what the shard knows, with Changer, Blaster, and Stranger aspects and a minor Mover ability (some Bruteness to it, not sure what a non-brute version of this would look like, but it’s not a Brute trigger so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). She’s an effective mass thief with an uncanny Eden/Wretch aesthetic. Parts of her body break off in chunks, evaporating into dark storm clouds that float around her, leaving behind a vulnerable, floating, cloud-based breaker state for them to protect. The storm clouds can lock on to a person in range and absorb a stream of effective mass, making the person more cloudy, lighter, more vulnerable, and less able to interact with the world, while the clouds solidify into a portion of a shell shaped like a part of the victim’s body that would normally have the amount of mass that was stolen. The shell fragments form a constantly shifting and reorganizing shell around Emma, protecting her, mirroring the bedroom she hid in when she was mugged and feeling vulnerable, but if the stream is broken, the victims return to their normal form, and the shell becomes cloud again. Emma can also theoretically focus all the beams on one person, and the shells collectively take their form, copying their personality (though easy to visually distinguish from them in most cases because the shells are still dark gray). The personality copying might be one of the traits that are removed to simplify the power, as well as a power-copying aspect that might otherwise be there as well.

Sheila triggers as a touch-activated (Striker) Weak Point Thinker/Patch Tinker with a powers focus (Trump). She can sense the weak points in objects, powers, tinkertech, and maybe people?? she touches, and her Tinker power gives her ideas for patches that can be slapped on to cover the weak point, generally through some violent execution. The Tinkertech equivalent of putting pressure on a wound by taping a knife to it to keep anyone from stabbing it again. This includes patches that shore up weaknesses in a cape’s powers. (not so sure how much this fits her personality. maybe she can copy weak points instead???) As a Combat/Architect Tinker, her megaprojects involve patchwork construction. She can see how to copy an aspect of a power, or cover a weak point, and her weak point sense gives her ideas for patches on the patches, slowly conglomerating into a massive, messy flesh suit with tons of violent applications. Her constructions are thematically inspired by Dragon and Defiant, the capes she took out her frustration on for not protecting the city. Thus, in contrast to the gallant knight and noble dragon, her tech is aesthetically monstrous and messy, maybe dipping into bio-tinker stuff mimicking the physiology of lovecraftian creatures or something resembling the shards themselves, rather than working with metal or plastic. I’m not sure if this needs to be made less powerful, considering what Cradle could do, but I wonder if there’s a way to simplify it into a single power rather than two interconnected ones?

Howell is the one I’ve thought out the least- some kind of Influence/Swarm Master-Shaker(-Blaster?) power, to make people behave or become subservient maybe?

Emma could get a Tinker power that covers the cracks between parts of her shell, and a Master/Stranger effect that makes victims of her Blaster power docile and not run away.

Sheila might get minor Breaker/Changer abilities that split her arms or other body parts, and attached Tinker-tech, into clusters of slightly bigger versions of those body parts, partially phased out of reality and overlapping one another, and a Master-Stranger effect that makes people more likely to listen to her if she beats them up with her bare hands.

Howell gets a Brute/Breaker form that can bulk up by temporarily stealing mass from allies that have been harmed (they have to be hurt, and they have to agree to help), and her baseline transformation gets stronger over time the more often she does this. Her Tinker Scan works through her powers like Sheila’s does, in this case sensing powers through her Master effect, letting her build patches that copy aspects of those powers or tech, which she can use to enhance or focus her Master power, like Love Lost does.

This is one of those clusters with a gimmick, and it’s focused around the environment and how it affected each person. The school confrontation brought to a head the paradigm shift in Brockton Bay towards villain control over the city. Emma was hurt by it, in that it all being run by Taylor shattered her worldview. This puts her into the Pro-Heroes category, even though she wouldn’t be very heroic as a cape. Sheila was hurt over time by the villains and criminals in Brockton Bay, probably losing people, and definitely finding herself becoming more violent just to keep safe. The heroes didn’t protect her and her loved ones, while the Undersiders did, putting her in the Pro-Villains category. Principal Howell lost her longtime coworker in the chaos that befell the city, and in her desperation to keep the peace, she made compromises with the villains, while obeying the orders of the PRT heroes. She triggered from loss of control over the school she tried to protect due to conflict between the two factions. This puts her in the Neutral category.

The Kiss/Kill dynamic puts Emma and Sheila at odds, with both of them willing to work together with Howell. Emma is inclined to destabilize the villains, to hurt the person who destroyed her worldview, and place herself on top of the food chain as a powerful “Hero”. Sheila works with the Undersiders to protect the city and fend off the heroes. Howell, as the moderating influence, (the Auspistice,) does her best to keep the peace between the heroes and villains. The cape whose faction is doing the best gets a power boost from the other cluster members, who lose more if their faction or goal is doing more poorly.

I don’t know about personality bleed. Maybe they steal each other’s coping mechanisms?