#powers requests

[k25ff]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Oh hey, I’ve started putting these power requests up on AO3!

I’ll do this about once a day, but for the time being, here’s Saboteur.

[k25ff]

What are Pariah/Anon's snap/crackle/pops?

Crackle.

Your borrowed brain almost trips over itself, and you open eyes you were just watching out behind. What happened? You can still feel the points of contact to other minds, but they’re fleeting, less real than they used to be. It feels like your range has gotten shorter, too.

The form you’re wearing backs away from the safehouse doors, still feeling the hum of whatever High Technological thing is keeping you from transferring to the people inside.

Pop.

You surface from your travels coughing and hacking, your throat dry as sandpaper. Your skin stings and tears as you stand, mercifully whatever space magic makes side effects work prevents you from bleeding. It peels off in sheets, 

Snap.

As he snaps his fingers, you feel all the motor control you thought you had disappear. The body you’re inhabiting suddenly feels wrong, limbs too long, muscles and tendons misaligned, like you’re operating it one limb at a time. You promptly collapse, and the man in green, who’d seen you try to enter his mind and banished you back to the Agent you’d jumped from, steps towards you, out of the room marked ‘002’.

“Russelll...” he says, grinning, “Wake up, Russel.”

And you sit bolt upright in your chair, your real chair, skin flaking from your face and blood pounding in your ears.

How did he know my name?

Crackle.

The monster snaps at your offered hand, ignoring your commands. You back away slowly, reaching for the door behind you, to step out of your Domain.

It doesn’t open.

Pop.

Your skin is plastic, your heart beats thick oil through rubber arteries, your breath hisses out in clouds of choking smoke. Your hands are pitted and crusted with metal callouses, and they creak slightly as you move around.

Your saliva tastes of battery acid.

Snap.

You can’t breathe. The air stinks, of rot and pollution, and you collapse out of a doorway, wheezing. The lifegiving smoke of your home has turned against you.

Your stomach gurgles, demanding food for the first time in years. You groan inwardly. You wonder if there’s a hotdog van near here.

[k25ff]

Oh then I would very much love to hear what power I would an age to obtain

You can see what to do now.

The icy claws of an alien light rifled through your brain, and left behind an unfathomable machine in its place. In your mind’s eye, impossible machines move for half-glimpsed purposes. They slide in and out of the forefront of your consciousness, suggestions to get past the obstacles that life throws your way. You can see what you need to build your machines, and see a glow around the parts, the components as they stand out from your environment waiting to be built into a construction.

When you lose focus, you find your hands moving on their own, and when you wake up from your trance, you’ve upended your living space, pulled apart your television and fridge in order to half-complete what turned out to be a cold fusion generator. And another time, you were raised from your dreamlike state by the shoplifting alarms of a hardware store, arms full of electrical goods. It’s half a compulsion, half a strange thing living in your brain, making you do things.

You tried, once, not to create. For a day. You rejected all the machines your ability suggested, shut your eyes to the glowing outlines of ideal parts. You stopped trying that after three hours. It gives the impression, sometimes, that your power almost has a will, and when it sees its suggestions rejected, starts upping the ante. The machines got more elaborate, which culminated in you passing someone in the street, and seeing a select few of their bones, their organs outlined through their skin. The delicate machinery you would slot their eyes into turned in your head, the parts list playing through your imagination. You don’t think you’ll try that again.

You’ve heard the theory that powers have their own agenda, separate from that of their users. As your fingers twitch involuntarily and diagrams of strange machines turn in your mind, you find that it doesn’t sound quite so far-fetched.

[k25ff]

oooh! (voltage*current) requests are still happening? if so, I would like to enqueue myself.

Your touch makes the world more beautiful.

You walk barefoot, trailing faintly luminescent footprints in your wake. With the slightest mental pressure, a growth of pale blue crystals sprouts, like accelerated moss from where you’ve trod.

They grow higher, taller, their shapes more complicated as they get larger, the gentle chiming that accompanies them growing louder. Choirs of crystal growths build as they spread, singing a haunting song as they harmonise and grow. You occasionally find the skeletons of small animals or birds, encased in large crystals like bugs in amber. Those crystals seem to sing a more joyous song than the others.

Once, a man in a battered coat grabbed you by the shoulder as you walked home, late one night. He had a knife, but before he had the chance to say anything, you panicked. Flailing, trying to push him away from you, the bare skin of your palm touched his face. And then there was screaming. And then there was singing.

You’ve tried to forget. His face, contorted in agony, trying to pull away crystals already bonded to the bones of his skull. The angry, discordant song of your crystals, protecting their master. The snapping of bones, the tearing of flesh.

The time you returned days later to find a human skeleton, denuded of flesh, embedded in a humming cluster of pale blue crystals.

[k25ff]

so, is the "ask what my power would be?" things still allowed? also, chiasmata is amazing, 10/10 v good comic.

Thanks! And yes, it’s still allowed.

You have never known more power, or less freedom.

The light froze and shattered your mind, and you went wholly mad with senses you had never dreamed of possessing. Your scream caught in your throat as your mind stretched, unfolding into a space you never knew existed. The world blurred, and in a moment, you were standing in your room, watching your past self as the cold light hit… you or them?

Unstuck from time, reality revealed a new direction, perpendicular to every direction you had previously moved in. You can feel the sluggish flow of chronology through your skin, amidst your being, and it takes no more effort to move up or downstream than it does to walk down a street.

The implications of your ability filled your brain with overwhelming hypotheticals. What about paradoxes? Alternate timelines? Monsters from the end of time? As you stewed in anxiety, the air shivered and warped, and you stepped out of time, right before your eyes. You didn’t look any different physically, but the way you carried yourself spoke of confidence and experience.

“You’ll be fine, don’t overthink things. At least, that’s what I told me, last time around.” Your double flashed a grin, winked and vanished back the way they came.

Your timeline is a separate thing, and occasionally you feel trapped by the determinism of already having changed the past. A puppet, traveling along rails, the entirety of time frozen in amber, for you to pick through, but never truly affect. You automatically know which moves to make, when to act in order to preserve the timeline. But it’s not that simple. You can push against the inertia of history, change things around, cause events to not happen. Occasionally a future version (or two, or three) of yourself tells you that an idea you’ve just had is a bad one, and it gets progressively more difficult to actually change the past - bizarre coincidences start to stack up, as probability seems to become set against you. It tends not to be worth bothering, but some of the futures, the possibilities you’ve glimpsed in the slowly shifting morass of causality justify the effort.

Burning your power until the air about you turns blue with the steam rising from your pitted skin, parts of yourself disappearing into near pasts and futures, risking your sanity and coherence for an eventuality that everyone will forget. Was it worth it? Becoming a pawn of a fate you barely understand?

You have never known more power, or less freedom.

[k25ff]

An ask. A request. Vessel ready to load.

Well, I hope this is a power ask.

Time flows fitfully, it starts and stops, slows and stagnates.

You gather up the excess from a moment, watching the world speed up as your personal time slows to a crawl. You take time from the quiet moments, allow the world to speed by as it spools around you like golden string in your mind’s eye. And, when you need to act quickly, you let it go and your stores of time activate, stretching a second into an hour. The only problem is that, in order to save a second, a second has to be taken.

You lay out a selection of objects in front of you, and pick up the knife. Concentrating, you start gathering up its time, as fast as you can. You get almost twelve subjective years out of it before the wood and steel turn to dust in your hands. Twelve years, in an object as small as that adds up to mere minutes of time for the whole of yourself, but you can drain the time of a small object much faster than your own. This is how you spend your spare moments, rotting small wooden or metal things to nothing, extracting time from them like some sort of temporal leech.

The currency of time takes its toll, though. You smell ozone as you hit your limits, and confirm it by looking down at your hands. You can see the table through them, translucent flesh exposing the bones moving beneath.

You grit your teeth, and pick up the next object. You need more time.

[k25ff]

i guess i should fulfill the Geneverse Rite Of Passage and send a power request ask eh

WITH THIS BLOOD, I ANOINT THEE A GENEVERSE.

You understand people better now.

Since your change, things have come into focus, blurry and indistinct at first and then solidifying into... creatures, floating behind and above the heads of people you see. No two look the same, although a multiplicity of limbs and eyes is a common feature, glancing around at their surroundings and whispering continuously in garbled voices - the thoughts of the person they cling to like eldritch limpets.

You walk past a man in a suit, catching a snatch of frantic gibbering about lateness from the beak of a feathered, winged thing coiled around his head, covering his eyes. A... thing, glistening tentacles writhing like hair underwater floats gently above the head of a woman sitting on a park bench, muttering observations about the people she sees, connected to the back of her head by a twisting grey-green umbilical. From the skin stretched over the empty eye sockets of one creature, its long, branching fingers gently caressing the face of its host - to the gently pulsating fur of the many-eyed, many-jawed canine creature keeping watch over a child, there seems to be no correlation between form and function, person and monster.

When you realised what your power was, you wondered what your own looked like, so with great trepidation and after psyching yourself up, you looked in a mirror. You have no idea what happened next, but you woke up about ten minutes later, lying on the floor.

You try to avoid meeting your own gaze in reflections, now. Who knows what will look back out of your eyes.