Age of Power: Dawn

XXXXXXXXXXXXX, United States of America
August 31, 2018

Today is a day like any other. Hot as hell outside your comfortably air-conditioned apartment. Your phone's alarm buzzes loudly. Hit the snooze button a couple times and roll back over into the comforting oblivion of sleep. Finally, wake up. Ignore the exercise bike in the corner of your room. Slip on your favorite fuzzy bunny slippers as you trudge out of bed. Make a cup of coffee. Two sugars. One Cream. Give mom a call. Endure her boasting about your older sister the spy as you eat a bowl of Raisin Bran. Surf the Internet. Play a bit of Golden Eye on your N64. Turn on the shower tap. Wait a bit. Water goes from cold to warm to scalding hot.

Muscles relax under the deluge of water once you step in. You scrub the morning's filth from your skin, and thoughts of the coming day begin to percolate through your mind. You'll get to work about an hour later than everyone else, but at least the traffic won't be so bothersome. Gerald, the accounting manager, won't care. On a slow day, you get almost twice the work done than any of the other accountants in the division. Dad says you should ask for a raise. Why? You have everything you need. Internet. You'll-

Your body freezes.

Everything is light. You shout out in alarm. Reflexively, you clamp your eyes shut. If anything, the light becomes brighter and brighter. That's impossible. Still, it gets brighter and brighter. It seeps through your skin. Blood freezes. Muscles snap. You're held aloft by some unknowable force. Bones burn to ash. Cells scream out in alternating agony and pleasure.

And, it's as if perspective shifts. The world looks different from this angle.

Levitating a full foot above the ceramic surface of his bathtub, the brilliant but lazy Robert Smith is scourged with miraculous power. The talented accountant known to his few close friends and family as 'J.D.' is broken down to his basest form. A portly man receives power no man has ever wielded. It is carved into his very flesh.

You come back to yourself. A song at the edge of understanding cascades around and about you. It hints at secrets, and nudges you with forbidden knowledge. Vaguely humanoid shapes, shadows in the sea of light, ghost in and out of your perception. You are not alone. There are others. Many others. THeir powers seem strange and alien and as turbulent as the cone of a tornado.

The world around you hums, it vibrates as if waiting for you to reach out and grasp it! Doing so is as natural as breathing.

The light vortexes violently about you and through you.

The song fades.

The Light disappears.

Something new dawns.

Nothing will ever be the same again.

---

You are Robert J.D. Smith, a successful, if unremarkable, accountant at a Fortune 500 company... and you have been imbued with powers that until just ten minutes ago would've been impossible! Some would call it magic. Others parahuman abilities. Or latent metahuman qualities. You don't know what to call it. But, you do have a sense of what you can do!

You are a Telekinetic. As in, you can move things with your mind! As your powers develop, here is the opportunity to shape them as you wish. These abilities will grow with time and effort, but your starting point is nothing to be trifled with!

This is a Point-Buy opportunity.

Potency- amount of overall force you can control.

Multi-tasking- the amount of objects you can control at once. One object is a specific grouping of matter.

Reaction- the speed at which you can perceive and react to movement of objects


Finesse- level of fine control and precision you possess

Range- how far your power can reach beyond your person. Based on line of sight.

Sense- your level of awareness of matter in the surrounding environment

Point-buy system. You have 30 points to spend. Each stat starts at a base of 1. 2/3 cost 1 point each; 4 costs 2 points. 5/6 cost 1 point each; 7 costs 3 points. 8/9 cost 1 point each; 10 is 7 points.

Additionally, you will have two lesser support powers. Teleportation and Slothful mind. The former will be defined largely based on what you choose here, and the latter is a mental defense power!

---

Anyways, I hope ppl have fun! This is mostly a game meant as a change of pace from my other quest. Totally different protag with totally different powers.

THERE IS A TWO HOUR VOTING MORATORIUM.

Character Sheet:
Name: Robert J. D. Smith
Age: 23
Brief Biography: Grew up in the suburbs of Dallas. Stable family life. Mostly happy. Father was a talented bureaucrat, but without any drive to move up. Mother quit teaching to be a homemaker when he was born. Older sister works in Washington for the CIA. Breezed through High School and University with comfortable grades. Now a bachelor working in the accounting department of a major corporation.
Description: Average Height. Brown Hair. Brown Eyes. Spectacles. Could be attractive, but is slightly overweight. Slouches. Cleanly shaven.

Beyond Clever- You're used to being the smartest person in the room. You remember almost everything. You can do complex math in your head. You can pick up languages with great speed. Made your two years of Spanish a breeze! Not that you've ever applied your faculties for anything beyond skating through school with minimal effort.

Creative Impulse- You have pretensions of being an artist. Your parents even have several paintings hanging in their suburban town house. Creative thoughts, those impulses that go outside the box, tend to crop up quite often. Too troublesome to pursue!

Lazy Reputation- You are lazy and often undependable. It is known. Others do not come to you when they have serious problems or issues. That's suits you just fine!

Comfortable with Mediocrity- As long as you have food on your table, a warm bed, a roof over your head, and a working internet connection, you couldn't care less about rising above the fray.

Abilities:
Telekinesis

• Potency: 5- Control 500,000 N of Force.
• Multitasking: 3- Control 5 objects at once.
• Reaction: 8- React and perceive motions up to Mach 50
• Finesse: 6- level of fine control and precision you possess. Accurate up to within 1 decimeter
• Range: 3- power extends ten meters away from your body
• Sense: 5- 360 awareness on par with other senses up to 10 meters from your body.

WARNING: Exceeding your limits, pushing the boundaries of your ability is tiring. Like a muscle overworked during exercise, if you tax your abilities too far, they will weaken or malfunction until they can properly recover.

Teleportation

• Through conscious effort teleport anywhere within your sphere of perception.
• Currently you may only safely teleport 4 times within a eight hour span. A fifth time will cause unconsciousness.
• May not maintain active telekinetic control as you teleport.
• May not take anything with you when you teleport.
• May not teleport into a space occupied by other solid matter.

Sloth's Mind

• A defensive mental manifestation of your Slothful persona. Those with abilities that affect the mind will find themselves stymied when trying to influence your thoughts! Only extremely powerful mental manipulations might overcome this ability.
• When this ability is actively being tested by an outside source, a heightened sense of malaise and ennui and indifference will come over you.
• If a mental attack fails against this defense, then the attacker is under threat of being sucked into a magnified and elongated sense of sloth. It's basically like someone getting stuck in quicksand!

Link to my discord chat: Discord - Free voice and text chat for gamers