It varies, of course, but I tend to ballpark a page as 500 words, making 2.5 pages approximately 1250 words.
A Champion in Earth Bet [Worm/Original Setting]
- Thread starter sun tzu
- Start date
- Location
- Bedford, England
Huh. Good to know. Anyway, I've been reading this thread without an account for a while, and I've got a few questions, if you're willing to hear them.
- What's the villain scene like in Spain, Germany, and the UK? (excepting Gessellschaft and their child organizations as a) you have expounded in great detail on them, b) On the UK side of things, Camelot works with the King's Men, and c) I'm curious as to whom the Parahuman percentage of the "scum" Lord Walston refers to are)
- Any specific info on the Balkan Wars?
- What's going on in Central America (Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica etc.)?
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Spain, Germany, UK, Balkans, Central America
Huh. Good to know. Anyway, I've been reading this thread without an account for a while, and I've got a few questions, if you're willing to hear them.
Anyway, thanks for reading this post. Good luck on the next chapter!
- What's the villain scene like in Spain, Germany, and the UK? (excepting Gessellschaft and their child organizations as a) you have expounded in great detail on them, b) On the UK side of things, Camelot works with the King's Men, and c) I'm curious as to whom the Parahuman percentage of the "scum" Lord Walston refers to are)
- Any specific info on the Balkan Wars?
- What's going on in Central America (Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica etc.)?
In Spain, one side-effect of parahumans and Endbringers has been the growing irrelevance of ETA. Turns out, a group of a few hundred nonpowered terrorists doesn't mean much compared to the shit Earth-Bet faces every day.
As for the villain scene... well, the big money-maker is the transport of narcotics into the rest of Europe. The big villain organizations mostly fight each other for control over the traffic, with the authorities trying to step in to limit collateral damage (with some token arrests and the occasional seizing of drug shipment, but in the end, they know how outnumbered and outgunned they are, and they don't want to give the villains a reason to actually unite).
In Germany, the Berlin wall fell a few years later than in our world, but once it did, things got messy. East Germany had made it a policy of drafting all parahumans into service to the State, so, after the reunification, Eastern capes were often treated with suspicion like they were all ex-Stasi, and few of them had any desire of working for the government. To date, as a result, the country has a higher rate of rogues among its cape population than most countries... but a lot of those capes just plain went villain.
Then the Simurgh attacked Warsaw, and Poland turned into a chaotic hellhole. This has led to a massive influx of refugees across the Eastern border. Nowadays, the most distinct aspect of Germany's villain scene is the brutal rivalry between its homegrown villains and the new Polish villains, which in turn galvanizes the Gesellschaft.
With that said, Germany's cape scenes also presents some interesting contrasts. On one hand, there's multiple cape-led motorcycle gangs that are just plain brutal. On the other hand, for years now there's been a rise in "Gerhirn-Banden" ("Brain Gangs"), highly-organized criminal groups that rely on Thinker leadership or support.
The UK, following the fall of London, instituted the draft for all parahumans - to have powers and not work for the King's Men is a criminal offense (which, naturally, is itself what drives a lot of offenders). Mind you, the King's Men are even more eager than the Protectorate to recruit captured criminals (provided said criminals are British, preferably English). Note that the draft applies to all parahumans living on British soil, regardless of citizenship.
Since there are a lot of capes who, while not criminally-inclined, have no desire whatsoever to join the King's Men, "draft dodgers" constitute a significant percentage of the UK's villain population. UK authorities respect secret identities for the same reason the Protectorate does, so "draft dodgers" often start out thinking they can just lay low and be left alone... but, sooner or later, the shard-driven need to use their powers gets too strong. Some of them are lucky enough to be in the right city, to join a "gang" that is mostly like-minded people banding together for protection, holding territory without doing anything too nasty to it - more vigilante than villains, really. Most of them, however, end up absorbed in a "real" gang that turns them into genuine villains over time.
When the Scottish secession war happened, a lot of villains from all over the UK actually went there to throw their lot with the rebels. Unfortunately for them, the King's Men's superior organization and intelligence network won the day, inflicting massive casualties (Lord Walston has been known to call the war an "excellent opportunity to rid the country of its villain surplus"). Scotland still houses many revanchists to this day.
And then, there's London itself. London spent several years largely cut off from the rest of the world before Walston reopened it... and promptly ran into Simurgh bombs that had been growing there for years. The King's Men officially consider the city under control, but in practice, there are still massive neighborhoods ruled by insane, evil, and insanely evil capes of various kinds.
The Balkans... are a mess. A big, massive, complicated mess.
With the USSR and most communist regimes lasting a few years longer than they did in our timeline, the 1990s were actually a lot less bloody over there - they avoided most of the Yugoslav Wars.
Things were starting to heat up in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then, in 2003, one of the Simurgh time-bombs from Lausanne started a war that had a massive domino effect; all the tensions exploded in warfare. Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia... After a while, it didn't even matter all that much which regime wanted what, because several of those regimes got overthrown by a local parahuman junta; the current Balkan War thus involves parahuman warlords as much as actual governments by this point, and is viewed as a war of survival.
Central America's situation is pretty terrible. The cartels from Mexico up North and the cartels from South America both wanted the region to be "safe" for their narcotics shipment, and then sent in extra force to crush any government attempt to rein them in - this even included the assassination of several national leaders as a show of force. Nowadays, the region is mostly ruled by local cartels that buy narcotics from down South, fight each other while transporting them North, and sell them to the Mexican cartels to pocket the difference.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
So the cultural divide between east and west started sooner, mostly on account of reintegration never being completed to begin with.
Sounds like the 'I don't recognize my country' sentiment that came around in the new millennium also shows up sooner, and has far more constant reinforcement.
I'm surprised the man wasn't thrown out of office for that alone. A real testament to his stranglehold on the country's government and mind.
Hate to ask what Greece looks like. Forget the debt issues, that place still hasn't healed from the civil war and the Juntas.
Spear
Sun-In-Rags
- Location
- North Macedonia
Sounds about right. Really, It gives me shivers what actual worm parahumans could do here. Keep fighting, keep screaming your reasons for doing so, and when you finally manage to be the last one standing someone triggers and starts it all again. Nationalism and Balkanization folks, fun times!
- Location
- Malaysia
Excuse me @sun tzu, but if you don't mind doing some more world-building, I've been curious about some of the other potential Guild candidates mentioned in this post here, the ones that didn't make the cut like Sonic Boom, Unstoppable, Professor Cortex and Mindshift.
Could you give us a little more info on them - who they are, where they're from, what their powers are, a little backstory, etc.
Sonic Boom, Professor Cortex, Smackdown, Unstoppable
(Most of these guys are based on characters I made for Hero Command.)
Sonic Boom: An Italian Cauldron cape, she was trying to get an acting career off the grounds in the late 90s when the studio was taken over by villains. The hostage situation was resolved after a few very tense hours by heroic intervention, but it left her shaken, leading to her search for superpowers.
What she got from her Cauldron vial was an Alexandria package. Low-to-mid-level Brute, but very high Mover, able to reach Mach 8 close to sea level. Not even bothering with a secret identity, she began using her powers for PR stunts, soon starring in a low-budget superhero movie that was happy about having a photogenic lead who required no special effects.
Shortly afterwards, she rescued a plane after it had lost an engine, providing added support for its wing while it landed (all arranged by Contessa, though she was not privy to that part). As part of favors owed, Cauldron had her use the intense buzz the affair generated to make a number of public statements and PSAs meant to encourage young parahumans to become heroes; this drove recruitment for the Legione Difesa up by a couple percents for a few years, despite Sonic Boom not being a member herself.
In the years since, Sonic Boom occasionally makes a show of doing something "heroic" (when there's no real danger), but focuses on her career, having become a bit of a media icon, with multiple movie deals. She once discussed with her agent the idea of showing up to Behemoth fights to carry people to and from the battlefield, but gave up when the agent said there might be backlash if the public felt she was trying to benefit from Endbringer battles.
Professor Cortex: A Japanese woman who triggered in college, she has acquired a Thinker power that allows her to "skip" a number of steps in many forms of logical reasoning, finding the correct answers to extremely complex problems in an instant with only a vague intuition of why they're the correct answers. She's been working for the authorities in a number of capacities, being one of their strongest, most versatile Thinkers. She is usually kept away from the action, providing answers from a long way away.
However, she is also highly isolated. By all accounts, she had Asperger's Syndrome before triggering, and her power makes it even harder for her to connect with other people - they don't understand her, she does not understand them. She also finds her own power highly frustrating, since despite her considerable intelligence, she keeps having to provide answers without understanding the reasoning behind them. She's tried shifting her role more towards a general study of the nature of parahuman abilities, but the general lack of progress is one of several reasons the authorities prefer to keep her busy with other work.
Smackdown: A New York teen who triggered in the middle of a cape fight, Smackdown received fairly high-end super-strength. With all that power and the cockiness of youth, he started acting like he was invincible, going on a crime spree that was very rapidly cut short by the Protectorate. He was offered a probational position in the Wards, then the Protectorate after hitting 18. He's been with the Protectorate for several years now, but his impulsiveness remains a problem.
Unstoppable: An Indian military contractor, Unstoppable is about as gritty as one can be while still being considered a Garama hero. Having no interest in subtlety or the shadows, Unstoppable prefers to speak openly about his views, fight in the open, and express support for the causes he believes in - mostly, Indian nationalism and the need to crush Pakistani seditionists in Kashmir.
Unstoppable's own powers include mid-range super-strength, but also the ability to "steal" resistance from anything he touches, making himself even tougher (for a long enough duration that using it on heavy rocks in the morning lasts for the rest of the day) while making what he touches more fragile. Notably, his power has an odd relationship with the Manton limit - it won't make living tissues more fragile than they naturally are, but it's efficient at removing power-granted protections.
Unstoppable triggered in the months that followed his injury-related honorable discharge from the military. In the time since, while he has declined to join governmental organizations, he has worked together with local authorities to stop villains, and moved to the Kashmir region to take contractor work from the local military; given his extreme usefulness, prior training and great popularity (and the support he drums for their more hardline actions), he's become one of the few mercenaries the Indian military sees fit to hire.
- Location
- USA
It sounds like Unstoppable could actually be a counter for Alexandria. Also, why does he steal from hard rocks as his go to source of durability? Surely the indian government can provide him with steel or titanium, or eventually omni metal once it spreads out a bit more.
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Why invest precious cosmic energy in reinforcing his avatar muscles? Of he wants to break something, energy blasts let him do it more effectively, and if he wants to move something, telekinesis works just fine. Super-strength would be inefficient!
RoninSword
Sky God
- Location
- Canada
And my reading of him seems to be that he's a pretty beefy guy regardless. The only people who can likely out strength him are other Brutes. Or power armour, etc.
- Location
- Leeds
Just went to Avatars Stat sheet to look it up. He is actually in the superhuman strength range but since he's got three times the ranks in telekinesis (Move Object) and M&M uses an exponential scale...
Well if theres a problem he can't fix with TK applying strength probably won't help.
Well if theres a problem he can't fix with TK applying strength probably won't help.
- Location
- Right Where I Am
So it's really only useful in those situations that require less than a peak human's worth of strength, or the oddly specific situation where he would otherwise fall one peak human's worth of strength short.
- Location
- Leeds
True let me dig out the book to give values to what I said as the 'exponential'.
His strength is 7, this is sufficient to move an impressive 3 tons.
His Move Object is 21, this is sufficient to move 50Ktons. A little less that 20,000 times as much.
By combining his two ranks he is able to move 50.003 Ktons.
It is a very oddly specific range of problems that cannot be solved by telekinesis alone but can be solved by telekinesis +strength.
I know you said that the stats are not completely official, but doesn't Avatar have the ability to perfectly retain any information he encounters (even if he doesn't understand it, from the eidetic memory advantage)? If so, is there a particular reason why he doesn't have for example, information detailed enough on various tech villains equipment to prove useful to Earth-Bet, if he just sketches it out how it would 'look'?
No, that would require spending time and effort staring at blueprints he did not understand (as opposed to spending that time trying to, for example, learn the science and technology needed to understand them). That's not really something he had a logical reason to do before.
It's not like a picture of a power armor will tell you how it works.
- Location
- Leeds
For the record I built my battle suit using a popup book as reference.
The moving tabs made the inner mechanisms and complicated machinery and code very clear and easy to understand.
I think you misunderstand (to an extent). Wouldn't he be able to transcribe his memory of some random tech he scanned into something reasonably analyzable by someone with the relevant tech skills? He also possess a wide variety of senses for scanning and analysis, as well as the superman style 'x-ray' vision.
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- Location
- Leeds
If it were as simple to create tech as seeing it then Kim Peek wouldn't have had an IQ of 87.
Remembering what something looked like doesn't show anything about the bits that you couldn't see and it doesn't tell you how it worked.
Even if we assumed the literal best case for what you're proposing he'd need to have observed every single thing that went into the creation of a gadget and he'd be unable to build anything else or modify it because he wouldn't know what the things did.
That's the best case. Worst case is that its not enough to remember the process as a series of images and you'd actually need some kind of tactile memory or that of the experience and its just flat out impossible.