Metahumanity
A human in Sigma has most of the same qualities that you’d expect a human to have. Despite different experiences, different surroundings, and different hurdles to overcome, humans across Sigma have evolved into the same(-ish), squishy hunks of flesh and bone that we’ve grown familiar to.
However, in the Cloud energy-laden megaverse that the humanish have evolved in, some things still come out for a nice surprise. Metahumans are one of such developments.
The term metahuman, much like any other term that’s used as an attempt to generalize things across Sigma’s universes, is one that is not completely agreed upon. For universes such as old Gamma, where a theoretical metahuman would not be seen as out of the ordinary, the term seems unnecessary. For universes such as Alpha and Beta, where metahumanity is minimal, the designation is desired.
As a result, there are different qualifiers for metahuman status, depending on where you go. In every case, though, the status is more just a cultural one than an official one, as there is no real law or mandate regarding whether someone counts as a metahuman or not.
For simplicity sake, the term metahuman is given to those who exhibit abilities and traits that are not naturally attainable by humans within Alpha. If someone somehow gained the ability to shoot lasers from their eyes, for example, they’d be seen as a metahuman.
Before the Great Unification, every universe had some amount of metahumans, but the amount varied immensely between them. Alpha and Beta, for example, had a very low amount of metahumans, and, most of the time, they were either denounced as fakes, phonies, con artists, magicians, psychics, witches, delusionals, false prophets, and so on and so forth, or treated as mystics, shamans, and actual messiahs. And a lot of them had a funny tendency to disappear in the night, never to be seen again. Just how many metahumans actually existed in these universes, though, is unknown, as there were plenty of fake metahumans, too. Old Gamma, on the other hand, had those with the Arts, and Epsilon, while eternally strange, had a shockingly low amount of what can be considered legitimate metahumans.
After the Great Unification, though, a phenomenon began to occur in each universe: the Metahuman Surge. Different universes experienced the Surge in different ways, but in each universe, there was a sudden increase in the occurrence of metahumans. Sure, there were metahumans moving from one universe to another, but there was also an unexplained spike in metahumans being born, people gaining metahuman abilities, and metahumans seemingly coming out of the woodwork.
In some universes, there haven’t really huge increases. In Alpha and Beta, for example, even after the Surge began, they’ve only seen a tiny trickle of new metahuman recordings. Meanwhile, in Epsilon, there’s been an abnormally large explosion in metahumans, although, to be honest, the people of Epsilon didn’t really notice.
The study of metahumanity is one of many fields that have been labeled ‘Sigma fields’: new branches of study and research that were essentially ‘created’ by the Great Unification. Out of the various Sigma fields, the study of metahumanity is one of the more popular ones, because, c’mon, who doesn’t wanna study people who can shoot lightning bolts out of their hands?
The reaction towards metahumans by Sigma as a whole has been mixed. Universes like Epsilon and old Gamma were fairly apathetic towards the Metahuman Surge, since it was all old news to them anyway. Other universes, like Alpha and Beta, have been understandably cautious about metahumans, seeing them as destructive at best, and capable of causing great harm in the hands of those who might want to use them for their own purposes. In fact, utilizing metahumans in warfare has already seen great success within Sigma, with the Sunlighters in Beta possessing in their congregation a metahuman that has been referred to as a ‘Nationbreaker’, due to his sheer, unparalleled power.
