#trigger events

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

Like, full caveats that I'm still only on Arc 6, and I doubt I'm the first person to say this but like...

I'm actually starting to wonder if like... Trigger Events aren't actually it?

Like, when I think of the characters that I know detailed stuff about their trigger events at this point (Taylor, Amy, Vicky, Brian), it's all pretty clear that for all that there was one specific moment where the powers activated (The locker, vicky bleeding out, the foul in the context of the parents, beating up that guy who was going after Aisha) it's all at the end point of a prolonged process.

Taylor - all the bullying Amy - years of latching onto Vicky as the one source of affection in her life Vicky - years of parental neglect over her not having powers Brian - even things with Aisha and his dad - the distance, the shit relationship with dad, the knowledge shit was probably not going great gnawing at him until it all hits?

It seems pretty clear that it takes more than just the one single horrible experience, to trigger? You need a lot to trigger, a whole process, a whole conga line of trauma and bad experiences culminating in the 'worst day' that is the moment you latch onto in the aftermath.

Like, yeah, Capes are all kinda messed up (unless they got their powers from a vial, though they too may be messed up in a different way) but I think you already needed to be pretty messed up to have a trigger?

It just seems to me, based on what I know that if someone who is actually normal and well-adjusted and so on has a good life and is doing just fine has the kind of horrible traumatic experience you'd associate with a trigger... well they wouldn't trigger, usually?

Am I on to something or am I just overthinking shit?

[kyliafanfiction]

I'm sure this isn't the reason, or at least not the main one, but I almost wonder if the reason the culture of 'don't talk about your trigger event, don't ask others about theirs' rose up in part because Cauldron needed to mask just how many vial capes there were, especially among the Wards and Protectorate?

Because like, they can't really tell the truth, so they'd need to lie and trigger events are probably hard to convincingly and consistently lie about them?

The fact that it's tied to deeply held and experienced trauma is probably the bigger issue, but still.

[greatwyrmgold]

Silicon Valley Capes

Inspired by one of Blastweave's posts, I started thinking about Silicon Valley capes. Not in the sense of "the capes Tattletale was talking about when she said 'Silicon Valley capes'," but capes whose trigger events involve classic Silicon Valley stuff.

Information about Deep Thought, Venture, Agile Strategy, Hand Aid, and Antipath—their backstories, powers, and how they used them—is under the cut. ...I kinda want to write a heist fic with some of these characters, each with different motives for the heist, each being driven in a different direction by those motives.

Alice, the Burnout

Let's start simple. Alice was really optimistic about her new job. She bought into the American dream of the 90's; study hard, get a degree, work hard, prosper. She followed the map, lived how she was supposed to live. But things didn't turn out how they're supposed to.

Alice went to one company after another. Some of them went bust despite her best work. Other times, she was fired for reasons that had more to do with office politics than her actual work. She worked hard, but didn't make the right connections.

Eventually, Alice found a job at a mature company, one which didn't fire her. It was hard working there; she had to endure crunch, sudden changes in project direction, harassment from senior coworkers, et cetera. But that's fine; she's working at a good company now. She just needs to work harder to overcome these challenges. And surely her boss will recognize how hard she's working and reward her appropriately.

She works there for years, waiting for her reward. She gets small raises, usually enough to keep up with inflation, but no promotions. She decides that she just hasn't been working hard enough to earn those promotions. So she works harder. She keeps working harder, sacrificing more, doing whatever will make her worthy of the success she's worked for.

Over the years, she becomes aware of political events which should cause her to question her confidence in the meritocracy. A financial crisis like our world's Great Recession, where the people who caused it get bonuses and the victims get to foot the bill. Awareness of systemic racism and lingering antisemitism and other problems that should have been eradicated decades ago, but which endure. Horror stories from other women in the tech industry, stories which other people are reacting strongly to, even though Alice has grown used to similar events.

But she can't give up on her dream so easily. She can't give up on the ideas that gave her hope all of these years.

One year, a new guy is hired, fresh out of college. He's not a complete idiot, but he's not exactly talented either. Alice keeps being assigned to guide him, or fix his mistakes, or pick up the slack when he misses deadlines. She does this willingly. Upper management clearly has their eye on this kid, and Alice is helping him—obediently, quietly, competently. But at the end of the year, the new guy gets a promotion, and Alice just gets her nominal raise.

She breaks. Alice storms into her manager's office—the man who decided that the new guy was worthy of a promotion over Alice after spending months ordering Alice to pick up the new guy's slack—and demands an explanation. Her manager chews Alice out, pissed that his decisions would be questioned, and threatens to fire Alice if she keeps being a pest.

The first time she set a toe out of line—the first time she was anything less than a perfect little drone—the first time Alice realized that the American dream she had worked for her entire life was a lie.

Deep Thought: Powers

Looking over the Tinker docs...Focal tinker, with a bit of Resource and Controller.

Alice (aka Deep Thought) can build and maintain a big supercomputer housing an advanced AI, which she calls 42. 42 is capable of answering almost any question, as long as it's fed with a sufficient volume of relevant data.

Luckily, DT can build some sensors to gather data about her immediate surroundings and transmitters to communicate with 42, but that's not enough on its own. With such limited information, 42's answers are vague and often inaccurate.

Deep Thought initially supplements her tinkertech with an Internet connection. 42 requires a lot of bandwidth and consumes immense amounts of electricity, but this additional information improves her answers immensely. Deep Thought almost initiates a "singularity"—using the answers to hack various systems, giving 42 access to more data and Alice access to financial resources needed to upgrade 42 and her internet connection.

But all of this—Alice's suddenly frequent absences from work, her mysterious funds, her immense electricity bill—alerted the authorities that something weird must be going on. Ultimately, this lead to Alice's landlord requesting a police investigation of her house. Once they saw the supercomputer towers around the house, it didn't take long for them to figure out that Alice was a huge white-collar criminal.

Deep Thought promptly fled, and created 43—a new AI mainframe, smaller and weaker and starved of data, but enough for her immediate needs. It's something she can show to potential collaborators, other villains who can help her capture her old workplace.

This isn't just a matter of revenge; she has two other reasons. First, their computer hardware and the data in their databases would make a great seed for 44, her planned next AI, bigger and better than even 42. Second, she intends to take the rewards she feels they owe her for her years of hard work and sacrifice, by any means necessary.

Bob, the Grifter

Bob started a startup with high hopes, big dreams, and absolutely no idea whether the product he promised was physically possible. (Think Theranos.) But he's confident, he's charismatic, and if he can pull it off, he'd make a killing. Investors pour money into his project.

Over the course of a few years, Bob goes from optimistically assuming his company would be honestly profitable any year now, to convincing himself that his company's high stock price is a justifiable reflection of the high reward offered with its high risk, to willfully lying about his product and his company finances. The only constant was that Bob had earned every penny fairly and squarely.

When Bob's company came under scrutiny, he was confident he'd come out fine. He wasn't brazen enough to admit to anything, of course, but he was confident that everything he'd done was either above board or hidden well enough that nobody could prove his responsibility. He sold his stock, but otherwise carried on as usual, even when some of his investors started a lawsuit.

That self-confidence collapsed before he even got to court. The lawyer Bob hired storms into his office, furious at how Bob had mislead him about the nature of the case. The plaintiff had submitted reams of evidence, far more than Bob had insisted existed. His lawyer insisted that Bob try to settle out of court, whatever the cost might be.

The trigger comes from two mixed emotions: The realization that he was nowhere near as clever as he thought he was, and terror over facing consequences for his actions.

Venture: Powers

The Thinkers doc identifies a bunch of categories Thinker powers can fall into and the triggers which cause them; this feels like Skill ("helplessness or questions of competence, often scenarios where the thinker is out of their depth"), perhaps with a dash of Social ("emotional factors that...dwell more on the emotions at hand than the isolation or betrayal").

Bob gains the ability to shift between different mindsets, each of which alters the way he processes and retains information. For instance, his combat mindset improves his ability to learn his opponent's "patterns" and learn various combat-related skills (martial arts, marksmanship, etc), while his social mindset lets improves his ability to deduce/intuit what other people are thinking and learn various social-related skills (rhetoric, bluffing convincingly, etc).

This power has a downside that Bob doesn't intuitively know about, and that he ignores any signs of: Each mindset also feeds him "bad data" for other kinds of activities or skills. He makes bad interpersonal assumptions if he stays in his combat mindset, and develops bad habits. The positive influence from his mindsets is a lot stronger than the negative ones, though; if Bob switched between mindsets regularly, he could maintain an Uber-tier (heh) level of skill.

Bob stuck to his power's social mindset for pretty much the entire lawsuit, hoping that it would let him get out of his scandal scott-free. It did not. He then tried to pull off a pretty wild plan that would let him escape the USA with much of his fortune (in the form of gold bars), but overuse of one mindset eroded too many of Bob's other skills (and his ability to evaluate his own abilities, which was never exceptional).

After focusing more on his athletic and combat mindsets, Bob managed to flail his way out of custody and became a low-grade villain—the kind who mostly works as muscle/support for other villains, while being absolutely certain he can be a Big Shot some day.

Carl, the Failson

A rich kid from a new-money Silicon Valley family. He can't program himself, and struggled to start a profitable tech company. He's hardly broke; he can get interest-free million-dollar loans from his folks, and has the business skills needed to build companies that he can sell piecemeal for more than he invested in them.

But he's not the success he thinks he should be. His parents went to a C-tier college and turned thousands of dollars into millions. Between those genes and his MIT education, why can't he turn millions of dollars into billions? He deserves to be a legend!

Enter Cauldron, who "accidentally" mention that Hero is one of their past clients.

Carl buys himself a fancy Cauldron vial. About half of it is a tinker formula associated with computer tinkers. About 10% is associated with thinker powers and Noctis capes; Carl hopes that this will help him maintain his grindset. And another quarter is the premium Hero juice.

Unfortunately, Carl gets a bit of deviation. Physically, this just means metallic ridges a few inches across growing on his forearms, thighs, feet, back, and over his eyes. It also means his powers are nothing like what he expected.

Agile Strategy/Angelo Vestor: Powers

First off, he has electrosentience. That is to say, he can sense electric currents (and magnetic fields) with those ridges. It's not a replacement for eyesight, but it's something. He also has two related tinker powers.

First, he can design a powered armature for himself. It's basically a thin mechanical superstructure which connects and interfaces with his ridges, which can have a wide variety of gizmos installed. Not as wide as he imagined when he asked for some Hero juice, but wide. (One of the first gizmos he designed was a visor with visual sensors, because he can't stand feeling crippled like that.)

Second, he has an instinctive understanding of computer programming. Not programming languages, or even assembly code, but if he uses his armature to connect his mind to a computer, he can usually figure something out. This can be used to hack stuff or to code stuff.

The thing about his tinker powers is that they're bad at focus. In theory, he could build a building-sized mecha that his armature links with; in practice, building that would take so long that he couldn't complete it before losing whatever spark lets him solve impossible technical problems. And it gets worse if he only uses half of his power; the more software stuff he tinkers, the less he can focus on any of it until he indulges the hardware side of his power.

Carl initially tries to use his powers to become a celebrity-tinker-entrepreneur. His initial armature was sleek and futuristic—a shiny chrome second skin, designed to resemble an idealized masculine body. He focused more on the software side of his powers, making some pie-in-the-sky promises about what he could personally develop.

Of course, that didn't work out. He could come up with incredible computer programs, but he couldn't focus on one project long enough to debug it, let alone fix the problems that came from tinker code decay. He eventually realized he had to indulge the hardware side of his power to get anything out of the software side, which kept things going for a while, but somehow it wasn't enough.

Eventually, Carl looked at the pile of random gadgets he had lying around his garage, and started to realize what he could do with them. Why let them go to waste? A billion dollars is a billion dollars. Carl threw together a second armature, one designed around the gadgets going into it rather than for aesthetics, and became the supervillain thief Agile Strategy.

(I'm imagining Carl's civilian suit looking kinda like SotM's Benchmark, while Agile Strategy's looks like spare bits from a dozen different cosplay artists making costumes for a dozen different sci-fi franchises, bolted to a suit of high-tech splint mail.)

Agile Strategy steals valuable objects, sells them quietly, and then adopts a third identity—Angelo Vestor—to invest the profits into Carl's company. This silent investor helps keep Carl's business running, which he hopes will give him enough runway to get a profitable project off the ground.

Dave, the Mediator

Dave was the HR manager at another startup, developing an all-inclusive personal wellness app, which lives by a policy of work-hard-party-hard. The company hires mostly recent college grads, people who will be attracted by benefits like concert tickets and company parties and chances to win big vacations, who won't realize that working unpaid overtime every week is a raw deal.

Dave is cursed with two things that are innocuous in isolation but noxious together. His friendship with the CEO, Buster, is a good thing in isolation; it gives him job security and a greater ability to influence the company than an HR manager generally would. His scruples are also a good thing in isolation, but Buster doesn't have them.

Morale among the employees is pretty bad, and Dave tries to manage it. He tries to balance the needs and well-being of the employees against what's good for the business (and his friendship with Buster). The employees don't need parties, they need longer deadlines and fewer working hours and nicer supervisors—but if they delay projects or hire more employees or replace managers, Buster's business goals are endangered.

Dave convinces himself that the company would go under if they took their foot off the gas even a little, and that the employees would be worse off if they were unemployed, which lets him resolve that internal conflict for a while.

Then things get worse, and Dave follows some of Buster's plans to improve company morale. They're a frat boy's wet dream, booze and hookers and drugs. Buster quickly realizes that letting employees microdose on cocaine during work hours could not only improve morale, but productivity. For a moment, Dave thinks his conflicting drives are in agreement.

Over the next few weeks, cocaine turns from an optional perk into another thing low-level employees are expected to do to keep the company afloat. Dave starts to feel uncomfortable about this arrangement, but it's just taking everything he agreed to a little farther than he anticipated, so he doesn't feel like it's his place to complain.

Then one of the employees collapses, vomiting. Turns out that everyone being pressured to microdose on cocaine means some people are going to macrodose. Management starts arguing about what to do, Dave grabs his phone to call 911, Buster yells that the whole damn business could get shut down if the cops find out they've been distributing illegal drugs like party favors.

The life of an employee, or the life of the company.

Helping Hand Hand Aid: Powers

If that trigger doesn't sound like a binary/multithreaded tinker trigger to you, you probably haven't read the tinker docs. The mad scientist or magi types fit decently well, too; I'm inclined to think mad scientist over magi, since Dave was successfully compartmentalizing the internal dilemma for months.

One half of Dave's tinker power is biochemical tinkering. The thing about this is that, while he obviously knows the main effect of his chemicals, he doesn't know the side effects until they manifest down the line. He can make new chemicals to counter the effects of his old ones, but those have side effects too.

The other half is external cybernetics. He can't design a replacement organ, but he can give you extra metal limbs. Or maybe some kind of external device that provides organ-like functions. These tend to work best on himself; he can give someone an extra arm, but controlling it won't feel as natural as it does for Dave.

Dave uses his power to save the employee, but that doesn't do much to save the company. The unfortunate employee is alive and sent home to rest, but he still feels like shit (and doesn't 100% trust the disgusting cocktail the HR guy poured down his throat), so he goes to the hospital and doesn't hesitate to explain how he got poisoned.

The company's work environment is swiftly revealed through a bunch of interviews and investigative journalism. Buster flees the state before charges can be fired, disappearing to Scion-knows-where; the management collectively decides to throw him under the bus to cover their own asses.

It doesn't work for all of them, but Dave's good reputation among the staff and the fact that he saved the OD-ing employee's life let him avoid criminal charges, or even a bad reputation. He still feels guilty for his part in the company-wide disaster. He uses that guilt to drive him to use his powers for good, helping the local Protectorate.

He can design cyberweapons and poisons and stuff, but he chooses to instead focus his tinker efforts on advanced medical drugs and ways to deliver them where they're useful. (Most of which are bundled into a cybernetic third arm, which is why he was disappointed to learn that the name "Helping Hand" was already taken by a Canadian rogue.)

Hand Aid is a battlefield medic, applying medicine that keeps heroes alive long enough to get to a hospital; he can also help patients recover from long-term injuries faster or more completely. Of course, his medicine all has side effects—often serious ones, ones he can't predict until they arise. Whenever he uses a drug on a patient, he has to keep designing new ones to handle the side effects that crop up from the last batch until the side effects are tolerable or he runs out of time to help them.

Iterating on the same drug, adding in new chemicals to counter its side effects, can make this side effect spiral less severe, but it can't stop it. As long as he cares about his patients' well-being, he's stuck in a cycle of fixing problems he caused while trying to fix other problems.

(If the Slaughterhouse Nine ever goes to the West Coast, he probably gets nominated by Bonesaw. He wouldn't survive the tests very long.)

(Note to self: If you go with the heist fic idea, write up a trigger event for the guy that ODs and gets tinker juice shoved down his throat. Clusters are fun, even if they're two-cape clusters.)

Eve, the Whistleblower

Eve was an accountant at a microchip research center. It wasn't as abusive as the company Alice works at, as dangerous as Buster's, or as fraudulent as Bob's; however, it wasn't very good, either. Eve suppresses a lot of resentment towards her bosses, her job, the company, Silicon Valley, the world in general.

One week, she was assigned to cover for a payroll accountant who needed emergency heart surgery. She quickly realized that the company was engaging in wage theft to cut costs. She quietly gathered the relevant data she could and quickly passed it on to relevant authorities.

Charges were filed, but the company made a quick settlement out of court. Eve was pretty sure they got away with just paying the wages they should have paid months or years ago. Meanwhile, HR was trying to figure out who had ratted them out.

Eve worked to cover her ass, but there aren't a lot of people who could have gathered the relevant data, and fewer who might have released it at that time. Eve memorized the relevant laws that should have protected her, prepared a defense against every dumb, illegitimate excuse the company might use to fire her.

She was caught off-guard when the research center's parent company reorganized its subsidiaries. It wasn't a substantial change, but it was enough that some administrative personnel were transferred or laid off. Eve was deemed redundant, of course, and she had absolutely no way to prove that she was laid off because she'd blown the whistle. In fact, she hadn't even gathered any proof that the company knew she was the whistleblower.

All of these realizations were forming in her head as her supervisor quietly told Eve that she'd never work as an accountant in Silicon Valley again.

Antipath: Powers

Trying to hide and defend herself against a hostile social force, trying to uncover her "misdeed" and punish her, only to have the rug pulled out, only to realize her efforts were for naught and have her world torn down around her ears. Feels like a Master/Stranger sort of trigger, Machination on the Stranger side.

Antipath can force everyone else to look away from or move out of an area she designates—the smaller the area, the more potent the effect. This clears out an area for her, possibly to make it easier for her to sneak through it, possibly for other reasons.

In the moment, people affected by this power think they have a good reason for looking or moving the way they did; however, unless such a reason genuinely does exist, they'll realize that they've been influenced sooner or later (generally once they can't easily justify leaving/looking away).

People who are aware of Antipath's influence can't be driven from that spot by her power again. (At least, not for a while.) It still has some effect if Antipath's moved to a different spot—especially if it's just making them more inclined to search the area her power drove them from initially—but the more aware that people are of her power's influence, the less it affects them. It's a useful tool, but it won't keep people away forever.

Antipath considers herself a white-collar vigilante. She robs, sabotages, or leaks information from various corporations and millionaires, but she tries to target the deserving. Unfortunately, this crime is also how she pays rent, so she can't always research her targets beforehand. Sometimes that means hitting a target she isn't 100% sure deserves it, sometimes it means hitting one she isn't 100% sure she can break into and out of.

[greatwyrmgold]

Cluster trigger of two lesbians, Alice and Betty. Alice triggers when Betty, the object of her obsessive crush, almost kisses her. Betty triggers because she thought Alice liked her but just leaning in a little was enough to make her literally melt down, and Betty's enough of a parahuman sciences nerd to recognize that that happened because Alice was super stressed by her getting close.

Was looking into Breaker triggers (to try and get a better understanding of Wanton and Annex) and came across this comment from Wildbow with perhaps the funniest possible trigger I’ve seen for a cape

Game so spectacularly bad that you trigger from somehow actually managing to pull the person you like 😭. How do you even manage that, how do you even explain that??

[clumsypuppy]

god dammit gamefreak

[quinns-art-box]

a tiny something for sakura's birthday!! i love sakuraoi so dearly they're like the best characters in dr1

[greatwyrmgold]

When I start with a trigger event, I try to think of a guy whose life would be more fucked than usual by that trigger event. If that doesn't work, I try to think of details for the trigger event that might fuck someone's life more than usual.

Not only do those details sell the event's efficacy as a trigger, they also add interesting texture that

When I start with a power, I try to think of a trigger event that would fit it; then, see above.

When I start with a guy....well, I do that rarely enough that I don't really have a plan for that. But I usually have a reason why I want to make that guy have a trigger event.

Do you have any advice for coming up with Parahuman powers and matching a character/trigger event to them?

Nothing revolutionary.

Read the scattered and sundry weaverdice documents.

Read dozens of posts of people complaining about the shortcomings and inconsistencies of the scattered and sundry weaverdice documents.

Harvest what compels you and discard the rest.

Remember that the powers textually select for people who'll go out and crack skulls with them, so working in an intuitive direction for that skull-crackery of some kind into the character's backstory is a good idea. An personal enemy, a perceived social ill, a desire to build a posthuman mutant goblin kingdom out of the flesh of your pesky neighbors- some hook by which to avoid your recently triggered cape going "Hmm. That was fucked" and just getting on with mundane life. Which does apparently happen sometimes, but's that's kind of boring.

[hood-ex]

Dick's crazy because if you're stuck in a room with him, and you're like, "How do we get out?" Dick will just be like, "One second." And he'll start banging on his chest, making choking and hacking noises, and he'll spit out a little laser into his palm, and he'll nonchalantly be like, "Here," while wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

She saw something vast. It wasn’t big in the sense that the trees or even the mountains were big.  It was big in the way that transcended what she could even see or feel.  It was like seeing something bigger than the whole wide planet, except more – this thing that was too large to comprehend to start with, it extended.  She didn’t have a better word to describe what she was perceiving.  It was as though there were mirror images of it, but each image existed in the same place, some moving differently, and sometimes, very rarely, one image came in contact with with something that the others didn’t.  Each of the images was as real and concrete as the others.  And this made it big in a way that she couldn’t describe if she were a hundred year old scholar or philosopher with access to the best libraries in the world. And it was alive.  A living thing.

From what I gather, a lot of people get annoyed when fanfics include trigger events that include stuff like this, or [DESTINATION. AGREEMENT] because not every trigger event has them in canon, so why would every trigger event in fiction have them.

And there's some merit to that, but how many trigger events do we actually fully see onscreen in Worm? So far, I think this is the only one? We probably don't actually see them onscreen from the triggering person's POV, I'd assume. Could be wrong.

But the point is - when you only have so many actual instances to work with, and you're writing a fic, you want to use a common touchstone that everyone is familiar with. Everyone knows, for instance, that [DESTINATION. AGREEMENT] means a trigger event is happening, etc?

It's like in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - we only see Xander eat a Twinkie once, true, but he eats it with such gusto and has a specific way you're supposed to eat it that it seems not unreasonable that he's a fan of them. Plus, there's only so many items of specific food that we see him actually eat onscreen (a large number, yes, but still, only so many) and it certainly fits with his observed personality and habits that he might really like twinkies, a lot.

So yeah, it's not 'canon', but it's a fanfic touchstone because it's what there is to work with, you know? Worm's huge, but there's still tons in the setting that has not been and likely never will be fully explored.

[seobot]

[greatwyrmgold]

No fair, I've already got a half-formed cluster.

Alright, let's spitball some trigger events which could be, um, triggered by a graduation. Hardly an exhaustive list; just a few ideas which I was supposed to quickly summarize.

The Catalyst

Some kind of physical confrontation, something that gives the other triggers a single moment to boil over. Either the fight itself or the side effects of the catalyst getting powers fucks with the graduation ceremony, providing a pressure point for students who were already freaking out about graduation.

I can't think of any ideas that aren't either incidental to graduation or ridiculous. Maybe a teacher being attacked by a graduate who blames the teacher for...something? Probably something beyond the teacher's control, but the people actually responsible are anonymous and distant. And the graduation seems like a good chance to get away with it, now that the school doesn't have power over the graduates. Or something.

I wanted some kind of disruption, couldn't think of a better teacher trigger, and—where did the last hour go?

The Schemer

A kid who has been struggling with crap outside of school, who hasn't been doing great academically, and who needs to graduate so they can escape their parents' household, for one reason or another. They've given up on college, but figure they'll scrape through with a high school degree and haven't been paying attention to their grades.

They were wrong, but talked with a teacher and figured out a way to trick the kid's parents into thinking they graduated, despite the lack of a diploma. The kid's stuff is already packed in their car; they just need to "graduate" and drive off.

The graduation ceremony being disrupted kinda wrecks those plans, though; the parents will expect to meet with their child, and expect to see a diploma. Who knows what they'll do if they know they were lied to? Would they try to trap their kid in that house for another whole year? Could they get away with it? Can the student survive a year like that?

The Desperate

A student who worked as hard as they could to succeed academically, despite some learning disability (TBD if this ever gets turned into a specific character). Their grades are good but not great, at the point where colleges accept or reject applicants based on extracurricular achievements. And the student doesn't have any, because basically all of their time was spent on homework, studying, or recovering from the work it takes to get goods on standardized tests when your brain just does not work that way.

Their parents are unsympathetic; if the student wants to live at home, and didn't get into college, they'll need to pay rent. That means they need a job, one they'll "work harder" at than the summer job that kicked them out after two weeks. The parents don't care if factors beyond their child's control make that difficult. The student should have worked hard enough to get into college, they didn't, they deserve the consequences.

Whatever chaos happens after everyone in the cluster gets powers should inflict some kind of permanent injury on the desperate—losing an eye, or half a leg, or something. That makes it all the more dissonant when they react to the trigger disaster better than any of their cluster-mates. At last, they have hope. Hero, villain, or rogue, the student finally has an idea of how to survive.

The Empty

This one is valedictorian of the graduating class—the one with the best grades and the most achievements. Like the previous student, the valedictorian spent most of their time studying. However, due to some combination of luck, resources, and neurotypicality, the valedictorian managed to go farther without exhausting themself to the same degree. They have the grades to get into college with no extracurriculars, plus work for the honor society and student council and such, plus a basic social life!

All of that's well and good. But the valedictorian is worried about their future for a different reason. At a time when graduates are supposed to decide what to do with the rest of their lives, how to turn their passions and talents into a career, the valedictorian has nothing to work with. They don't know what they want to study, what careers might interest them, or even what jobs they'd be good at. Standardized test skills aren't very transferrable.

The valedictorian focused on what's ahead of them: The valedictorian speech, their reward for all their hard work. The one fixed point in their future. But then that point becomes unmoored, leaving them completely empty. No hopes, no dreams, no plans, no expectations that any plans they created would work better than the one they followed so far. Four years of toil, only to have the one thing they knew they wanted ripped away by random happnestance.

What about powers?

You can't create powers without having characters, and I don't have characters. I have three loose outlines of characters and one question mark.

I'm not sure I'd post this without the resonance between those three loose outlines. The Empty and the Desperate are clear foils—both academically excellent with uncertain futures, but uncertain for opposing reasons; the Empty has no motivation, the Desperate has no hope. There's some resonance between the Desperate and the Schemer, since both have problems caused by shitty parents.

If I could find a way to connect the Empty and the Schemer, and maybe find a chord to strike between the teacher trigger and the three students...well, maybe someone else will think of something.

deep sigh... High School Graduation Cluster Trigger is an incredibly compelling idea, but I'll never be able to follow through because getting into the headspace of anyone involved would probably make me throw up.

[greatwyrmgold]

Undersiders Cluster Trigger

Other Wormblr posts about how worried they are about wanting to make an Undersiders cluster trigger a thing made me start thinking about it.

I'm going to give myself a couple definitions and scope limitations.

Today, I'm only going to think about the mass trigger event which gives them powers, not what their powers might be. The massive power grid can come later.

Each Undersider needs to have a trigger event which roughly corresponds to the vibes of their canon trigger event. If the vibes don't match, the powers shouldn't either.

For this exercise, the Undersiders' backstories are fluid, and can be rewritten or intertwined as necessary to make everyone's worst days happen at the same time and place.

Original Undersiders, Taylor, and Aisha—not because I don't like Parian or other recruits/henchpeople, but because Parian's power seems like it would be trickier to weave into the mess.

Trigger Vibes

Let's start by reviewing the vibes of each Undersider's canon trigger event, loosely in order of recruitment.

Lisa/Sarah comes first, and her trigger vibes are the simplest—partly because she has such a generic Thinker power. She triggered from finding her brother's body and convincing herself that she could have prevented his suicide if she wasn't such an idiot; however, none of the details are really reflected in the nuances of her power.

Lisa trigger vibes: Tragedy that she thought she could have prevented, if she had paid attention.

Rachel's trigger vibes are complicated, because her power is extremely specific. The point of attack has to be a threat to her dog. As is so often the case, though, the trigger background is as important as the actual event.

A drowning mongrel is a crisis for Rachel because she has become isolated from humanity. At best, the people around her, the people who should have been taking care of her, completely failed in their duties, leaving her to survive or suffer on her own. At worst, they actively made her suffer; sometimes this was motivated by a sense of "tough love," sometimes it was plain cruelty, but the difference is immaterial.

Rachel triggered because her only companion, her only source of emotional support, was murdered in front of her. That companion just happened to be a dog.

Rachel trigger vibes: Isolated from the people around her by neglect, abuse, or both; find a dog who makes life bearable; see someone try to kill that dog (possibly to hurt/"teach a lesson to" Rachel).

Brian lied about his trigger event. (Well, his first one; a hypothetical second trigger event can come later.) As per Word of God, it wasn't just about finding out that his mom's abusive boyfriend was abusing his sister and then stoically beating him up; it was about returning to a toxic environment, one which he had been hurt by, seeing his sister victimized the same way.

Anyways, we have clear Word of God about Brian's trigger vibes. "[T]o see the house and be brought back to his weakest, darkest moment, the man's eyes on him...Environment and malign attention and the desire to protect his sister all factored into his power being what it was."

Brian trigger vibes: Being forced back into a toxic social environment, confronted with his abuser again.

We know basically nothing about whatever event gave Alec/Jean-Paul powers. However, we have two directions from which to speculate. Alec has a Master power, but with a bit of the "fucking with people" angle that borderline Master/Stranger triggers have. So his powers probably triggered from hostile social isolation, perhaps a bit more intentional than Taylor or Rachel's.

Second...he grew up in Heartbreaker's sex cult. Well, it's not really a cult per se; that implies some kind of pretense for why everyone should obey and f*k the leader. Anyways, that's a bit of a hostile social environment, where everyone's day could be ruined by one person pissing off the mercurial dictator in charge of everything, where improving your position means pleasing that dictator, and often hurting others to do it.

So, Alec's trigger event probably stems from some kind of abusive neglect inflicted on him by one or more. of his half-siblings or...um...step-(dad's side chick)s?

Alec trigger vibes: Not clear, but definitely not good.

We all know Taylor.

Taylor trigger vibes: Isolation, bullying, and self-loathing

Finally, Aisha. What we know about Aisha's trigger event comes from Scion's interlude, and it's more focused on showing how detached Scion is from humanity than explaining the headspace Aisha was in. The point was that Scion could barely understand that headspace to begin with. The female was more distressed than the male, and hence makes a more appropriate host; nothing else matters.

And it's not surprising that Wildbow hasn't gone into more detail. He tries to avoid directly depicting sexual violence in his stories, and the threat of rape is clearly the immediate threat behind her distress. It's not clear that there was another layer—like, she had been abused a bunch by mom's boyfriend and thought of the rest of the city as a safe space to escape to, but now it's not safe—but that's just a wild guess based on other details of Aisha's characterization and backstory.

Aisha trigger vibes: Unclear, but unwanted attention is part of it

Alright, now to tie everything together.

Setting the Stage

So, we have six sets of trigger vibes. There's one common thread running through all of them except Lisa's: Abuse. Taylor was abused by her ex-friend, fake friend, and other bullies; Brian and Aisha were abused by the boyfriend; Rachel was abused by her foster parents; Alec was abused by Heartbreaker and the Heartbroken.

So wherever this cluster trigger takes place, it has to be somewhere rife with abuse, somewhere that several children can plausibly be suffer acute abuse at the same time and place. Luckily, one of the Undersiders has a trigger event in such a location, a place with lots of kids around, conditioned and rewarded for their cruelty.

High school. Heartbreaker's compound.

Not that Heartbreaker is a good fit for the cluster trigger. Putting aside the bit where basically all the kids around had powers at least loosely tied to his, Heartbreaker wouldn't let Brian escape and casually return, nor would he care if Rachel had a dog. (Unless it barked loud enough, but he is a very different kind of shit parent from Rachel's last foster mom.)

So we need some new high-control group lead by parahumans, who foster the same kind of fear and cycles of abuse as Heartbreaker, through relatively mundane patterns of abuse and control instead of superpowers. If anyone wants to write a Clustersiders fanfic, I'd suggest researching (or at least watching a couple informative YouTube videos about) cults and the like.

The path of least resistance would be a culty parahuman-lead village built around and through a portal or two. You know, like the one Goddess's cluster triggered near, over the course of a few days. Half a dozen acts of extreme abuse in separate households could then end up tangled into one cluster through dimensional nonsense.

But the path of least resistance is, in this case, the path of least interest. Can one act of abuse—or at least a few connected acts of abuse—traumatize half a dozen kids at once?

Putting It Together

Let's start with the outlier. Lisa's trigger event is not directly tied to any kind of abuse. There are a few ways that we could tie her into the trigger, but I think the most interesting puts her on the side of the abuser.

Lisa gets recruited by one of the parahuman bosses to help deal with some problem children. Being more focused on her own needs and appeasing the boss (but I repeat myself), she agrees. Lisa closes doors/blocks an exit that other kids could use to avoid being dealt with, not spending a moment's thought on why the boss wanted her to do that. And holy crap on a cracker, turns out the boss wanted to hurt the kids. And Lisa helped. She's complicit.

This probably isn't the first time, either. She's such a helpful little gopher, one who remained ignorant of the consequences of her own actions—partly because the bosses like it that way, but partly because she didn't want to think about them.

This is her fault.

I feel like Brian could end up in a similar role. He's largely desensitized to the violence, like he is in canon. As long as he and his sister are okay, everyone else is expendable. He doesn't want to hurt them, but he's willing. Even if it means helping a monster who abused him and his parents.

The boss brings him along for more routine disciplinary action. He's done this often enough before—Brian is one of his main enforcers, after all. But his loyalty is divided, and this issue is a good way to solve that issue. Forcing Brian to punish Aisha means he either needs to put "the needs of the community" above family, or disobeys the boss—giving him an excuse to beat that disloyalty out of him.

Rachel's bit is important; her dog is the reason Aisha and the others are being punished. Nobody in the community (aside from the bosses) is allowed to own pets, and Rachel broke that taboo. She's an orphan, allowed to live in her mother's house and eat the community's food, but otherwise neglected until she's old enough to be useful. So when she found a stray puppy, she let him sleep in the house and eat her scraps.

When the bosses find out about this violation, they assume she must have had assistance from the other children. Maybe they picked kids who were disfavored but hadn't technically done anything wrong yet; maybe they picked kids who were less cold to Rachel than most; maybe they're even right, and one of the kids was coincidentally helping Rachel find food or clean up the messes.

I'm not sure there's much I need to write about the specific circumstances of the other three kids in this "community". They're Aisha, Alec, and Taylor, with backgrounds that are similar to their canon ones, shitty home/social lives and all. I'd need more if I was writing an actual fic, but I have no plans to do so.

So I'll just move onto...

The Trigger Event

Lisa fetches Aisha, Brian fetches Alec, goon #3 fetches Taylor. All three are brought to Rachel's house, where the boss is waiting. Goon and Lisa stand at the front and back doors, and Brian follows the boss inside.

The boss explains what the three girls and Alec did wrong. Keeping a dog was against the rules, and all of them helped Rachel keep the dog. Each of them will need to be punished.

The boss tells Brian to stuff Taylor in the closet, where Rachel had been stashing soiled newspapers and poop bags after people started to get suspicious. While he moves a dresser in front of the door, the boss starts strangling the dog. Then, he tells Brian to think of an appropriate punishment for Aisha, with an insinuation of the kind of punishment he would assign her if Brian didn't.

The boss made mortal threats to the siblings—forcing Brian to hurt his sister, or forcing Aisha to do something I'd rather not describe. Rachel watches as her only companion gets the life choked out of it. Alec is in the corner, terrified about what the boss has in store for him. Taylor is in a filthy closet full of flies and other vermin. And Lisa realizes she's complicit in all of it.

Everyone present (except the dog and goon #3) collapses and experiences psychadelic hallucinations for a few seconds. Then things descend into chaos.

[kairukitsuneo]

"...and I took that personally." Said D-16.

The cause:

[bone-byrd]

when the world looked brighter

ONE MUST IMAGINE SISYPHUS HAPPY. Also in my timezone it’s still Byakuyas birthday. Four posts in one day. Sheeesh

[greatwyrmgold]

Yeah. People focus on the locker and the garbage in it, and that was definitely stressful, but that's just the catalyst, the immediate crisis that brought the real problem to the fore. She didn't get a Master power just because she was physically isolated in the locker, she got a Master power because she was socially isolated, completely friendless, betrayed by the one person she thought she could trust, again.

I know that Taylors trigger is kind of old news in terms of all the discussion that's been had about it, but I've always thought that this part before the actual locker itself was so fucking disturbing. Like, this whole thing takes months! They wait patiently for months, stopping the bullying slowly in a way that looks natural, getting someone to spend weeks and weeks hanging out with Taylor and being nice to her...

None of this has anything to do with the locker. They don't tie these two things together, the girl wasn't helping them shove Taylor in the locker or gather pads or whatever.

I...its just so fucked up? Having this happen to you, and not having anyone that you can confide in or cry with or even get a hug from? Fuck me.

[eddieb0nes]

my gift for @kro-the-crow hosted by @shsl-islandmode-events !

ishimondo as chainshipping my love..