Immunodeficiency (Worm AU)

[shaderic]

Hahahahah oh god.

I started writing something dumb for fun, then I wanted to try and write something with a PHO generator and wow what is wrong with me.

I wanted to push off the parts of Worm I didn't like, and then shit spiraled wildly out of of control into a crazy AU.

Anything massively wrong with my use of terms and statistics I blame on not having seriously studied either since highschool. Please inform me in the event that I drastically fucked up use of any of this terminology.

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Immunodeficiency

noun
1.
a deficiency in or breakdown of a person's immune system

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♦Topic: So, what's the difference between a metahuman and a parahuman?
In: Boards ► General ► Parahuman

Knuckler12 (Original Poster)

So, what's the difference between a metahuman and a parahuman?


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► JammerSlammer

Dude, there's already an entire megathread dedicated to this shit, head on over to the tutorial board and read it before you go starting a thread.


► Killergram

Google's your friend, mate.


► Jetsetslide

Aren't they teaching this in school? I think I remember having to write a paper on it.


► Bitterbomber

There's no difference, they're both basically the same thing. Fucking weirdos. It's just splitting hairs.


► Galabrad

> Aren't they teaching this in school? I think I remember having to write a paper on it.
Jet, not everyone takes those AP classes.
> There's no difference, they're both basically the same thing. It's just splitting hairs.
And this is just plain misinformation. They're wildly different, and you know it.


► Samwisee17

One's a magic space brain tumor and one's a magic space gene.


► Kekarrot

... While hilariously dumbed down, this is about the right of it.


► MajorSnaker

OK, let me lay the smackdown of knowledge upon you.

In the 80's a golden weirdo appeared. Shortly thereafter, the first people with powers started cropping up. These were the first parahumans, but due to an ongoing war of terminology between research groups (Look up War Of Names sometime, it's kind of hilarious and also educational) there was debate on what they were going to be called. Now, the golden weirdo disappeared around the mid-80's, but no one's quite sure when. This is when the first metahumans start popping up, but people at first just thought they were more parahumans.

But then the researchers actually started noticing major differences between older and newer groups. Parahumans all had a magic space tumor, formally called a Corona Pollentia. But these new guys showing up didn't. Instead, as we eventually discovered, they had a weird string of junk DNA, which occasionally wildly mutated into crazy patterns. Now see, here we have another difference between the meta and the para.

Para's are bullshit, and can do incredibly crazy things. But no two paras are quite alike. Varying power levels, manton limits, power ratings, all this shit is crazy. And that's without taking in the weird-ass Thinker/Tinker groups in the equation. But they're all about as different as can be. And barring the occasional exception, what you see is what you get. A blaster can hit 9000 degrees, but that blaster can never get over 9000 degrees.

Meta's are patterns. Those crazy genes make about as much sense as those brain tumors, but each meta pattern is more or less the same. Like those fox phenotypes. They're all capable of using illusion stuff, can throw around a little fire, and if you see more tails they're generally tougher. The giant phenotype gets much broader than that, and depending on ancestry can manifest lots of other different traits. But they generally obey the pattern. The other stand out quality is that meta's can grow more powerful over time. Their abilities act like muscles, and if they're trained they can get stronger.

Anyway, back to the history lesson. For a while the two groups were lumped, because powers make zero fucking sense. Then the brainiacs in charge actually started noticing wild differences between the two, even as their own little para/meta naming war went on. So, they split the names. Brain tumors became known as parahumans, and the gene freaks became the metahumans.

The reason why people tend to have issues telling them apart is because unless you're a massive geek, then your biggest exposure to people with powers is the PRT and the Protectorate. Who, hilariously enough, are named for parahumans, despite also having lots of metahumans in their ranks. This isn't helped either by a certain well-known film featuring a parahuman with magnetism powers advocating that they were the next stage in human evolution because of their superior genes.

Because Hollywood directors can't be arsed to do basic research if it'd get in the way of a good story.

And because Fox New couldn't get it right if their lives depended on it, and they'll use the words interchangeably, continuing to misinform the general public.


► SirWakkaber

Well, that was pretty informative. Nice job as usual, Snake.


► Bibothor

What Snake forgot to mention is that despite the dumb naming war being a constant thing due to lots of people trying to publish at once, parahumans was the official word for both for awhile, and that's what gone into some legislation. It wasn't until Sakurai published The Mysterious Gene that the two being entirely different categories of super-powers really gained traction.


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► Zanewell

The difference is that anyone can be a para, and nobody cares as long as they put on a mask. But if you get flagged as a meta-potentiate it suddenly has to go on all your fucking papers. You have to go and register with the PRT, even if the genes are inactive. And that means that on every job application you have to write down that you might at one point develop powers, regardless of the fact that you might never do so at all.


► Galabrad

Whoa, dude. Take it over to the meta-legals thread. This isn't the place for it.


► MajorSnaker

Well, I'd say that this is another difference. So it is worth discussing. Basic statistics for parahuman potential are like, one in ten thousand. Of those, it's kind of a shot in the dark exactly how many do become fully fledged parahumans. The studies vary, but basically in a more stable area, the odds of parahuman development tend to be lower. Compare and contrast Brockton Bay with Minneapolis. There's comparable population, but the Bay's parahuman count is through the roof. And having a thicker concentration of parahumans means that, hilariously enough, more parahumans show up.

The jury's still out on just how many people have meta-potentiate genes, because we still don't know all the phenotypes yet. We're still discovering new ones every year, although it is tapering off a bit. But the big reason that there's a larger push for detection and registration of metahumans, is that more meta-potentiates are becoming active metahumans. This isn't a case of 'for every active parahuman there are two active metahumans', this a case of the numbers go up every year.

When meta's first started emerging, it was hard to get numbers because they got mixed together a lot. But research indicates that they were actually a LOT rarer than parahumans. Like, for every ten para's you'd get a meta. The numbers are more complicated than this, but let me put up some figures for you. In 1986, there were 187 confirmed metahuman emergences across the United States. In 1996, that number was 1,369. In 2006, it was 25, 483. Those aren't total population counts. Those are new emergences per year. Metas are becoming more common all the time.

Part of it is easier diagnosis. We know what we're looking for and can screen for it faster, easier, and cheaper. But part of it is also that more and more potentiates are becoming fully expressed metahumans at younger ages. The youngest metahuman in 1986 was 27 years old. That record dropped lower and lower every few years, until for a while it hovered around nine years old. Then the child of two expressed metahumans was born expressed and we had to toss the book out entirely.

Second generation parahumans don't even come close, what little of those we know about anyway.


► Girigan

Actually, that's probably why there's a bigger focus on metahuman studies in the academic fields than parahuman ones. A random lobe in your brain doing crazy shit is harder to gather datapoints on then your DNA having a few weird genomes. There's still a shit-ton of X-factors, but you can at least get some data on what's going on. Statistically, more parahumans becomes capes too. This means that it's a right pain in the ass to deal with all the NDA's needed to just start looking at the biology of a cape, let alone get a family history. Metahumans aren't as involved in the cape scene (though a fair share of them still are) so it's easier to get the data. More data, more patterns, more things to study. So, it gets more funding.

That's not to say para's don't get put under the microscope, but tinker-tech is mostly what gets dragged in there.


► Kelora

So if we know why the muties get powers, why can't we give them to everyone?


► Bibothor

First off, never call a meta a mutant. While correct from a certain point of view, it's a lot like calling a man an ape that happens to walk upright. Which is to say it's basically wrong and liable to get you punched if the wrong person hears you saying it.

Second off, we don't know how or why metahumans get their powers. We can identify and classify the traits of a phenotype, and pick out what genes they have that are really weird compared to a baseline human, but we don't know how all those weird genes add up to 'hydrokinesis'.


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[shaderic]

There has to be the super rare overlap between the two right

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Keeping things relatively simple here, while metahuman potentiates might have buds getting attached to them, the degree of stress required for a trigger basically means that long before that happens they'll undergo a metahuman emergence. Which will then eat the bud.

Is there any greater tag than Fluffy Tails?

Edit: Now that I think of it; without the Endbringers, Kyushu never sank which means that Lung had no reason to leave Japan. I wonder how different the Cape scene is in BB without the ABB?

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Still figuring that out.

Japan's meta/para-culture is actually something I've been considering messing with here, but the trick would be integrating it with the BB storylines.

Is this the reference I think it is?

Click to shrink...

I didn't really realize I was making it until you pointed it out.

... Somehow, this makes the stuff even better.

Hmm, so. Kitsune Taylor?

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Basically.

Well this seems interesting.
Though I do wish Taylor wasn't the protagnoist here.
I really honestly dislike her, and for me to enjoy myself reading her exploits it would have to practically be he in-name-only, in which case there's no reason to even have someone called Taylor as the protagnoist.
My whining aside, I'd just like to state my strong dislike of this whole 'meta-human registration' business, and my hopes that whoever the protagonist will be in the end will fight against the government vehemently as a result of it even being a thing.

Click to shrink...

Hum, I did think about writing stuff centered more around the japanese scene, but since that would be an incredibly wild divergence, spinning up a whole new chunk of the setting seemed like a lot more work than could be easily justified since the more readily identified characters I wanted to try focusing on were in the Bay and American.

Like, I only have two japanese characters half-designed, a giant-phenotype variant 'Oni' who worked as a bodyguard and an actress who became a fox-phenotype in the early 80's and leveraged a major career out of it. The joke is that the bodyguard's emergence was recent, and that the actress has been refining her powers for over twenty years.

Anyway, if the issue with metahuman registration sounds controversial, then you'll be glad to know it's also controversial in-universe. Disclosing metahuman potentia is considered illegal, falling under classic patient confidentiality stuff. The first big pushes for testing were actually at scientific hospitals when the difference between metahumans and parahumans was becoming clear. It was done to try and discover phenotypes before they emerged, and to try and better understand just which gene caused you to grow a tail versus which one made you have long ears. The results indicating who were metahuman potentiates versus who were ordinary humans was kept under lock and key. Except then some jerk broke in and passed the results to a newspaper.

To say hilarity ensued would be an understatement.

Now see, this wasn't actually an act of malice or villainy. It was done because someone thought 'ooh scientists are secretly examining your genes, that sounds scary, the public should know!' And the very next day, his ass went to jail.

But it kicked up a storm of opinions and controversy that never really died down.

Four out of five people say that the results of metahuman potentiate screening should be considered purely a matter of patient confidentiality. Three out of ten feel that testing should be mandatory. 58% of people interviewed feel that the government should keep track of people with dangerous powers, regardless of intent. It's considered a common thought that if you need a license to own a gun, then you should probably have to register if you have the ability to just randomly throw fireballs.


The statistics are all the cherry-picked bullshit you get from watching the news on TV, but you get the idea.

The funny thing is, Worm's cape culture isn't really a stable state. I'm not sure if Wildbow explicitly said it? But without Cauldron or something like it, there wouldn't be the culture you see in canon. Either you get the Africa style of parahuman warlords (or a more clandestine version, like I think South America supposedly has?) or you have the X-men style of parahumans being feared and discriminated against. The flashy, cops-and-robbers-as-much-as-possible state of North American cape culture is a very, very artificial construction.

Click to shrink...

Cape culture is very much artificial, but with metahumans I tried to make their stuff a little bit more nuanced.

Metahumans are, on average, less likely to want to become capes. Part of this is them lacking CONFLICT balls, and part of it is that maintaining a secret identity when you're the only one in ten miles with big fluffy tails is slightly more difficult then it might appear.

Case 53's tended to fall into cape culture because they had basically no actual identity. They were amnesiacs that got swept into the system. Metahumans have lives, careers, families. With the world being that much more stable as well, they're less likely to have to resort to crime or getting support directly from the government. That's not to say it doesn't happen at all though. It's just that compared to parahumans, a lot of them just keep on having somewhat normal lives.

 

[shaderic]

I admit that I kind skimmed through the last 2 pages, but IMO there's still a pretty big question why the not-mutants are the ones being discriminated against more than the not-avengers. Even moreso than in Marvel, that is. If anything, given the world building you laid out here, it should be the other way around.

Not-mutants are predictable, not just in the ability to be found through a simple genetic test, and predisposition for having imediately visible changes, but also in terms of their powers also falling into nice, easily to categorize ranges.

Whereas the entity capes? Other than case 53s, you can't pick them out of a crowd, so they could launch a terrorist attack from anywhere. They way they work is based on them basically having a mental breakdown, and the agent interjection means that even the most sane of them....isn't exactly that sane. They're basically the very definition of hidden ticking time-bombs.

And more importantly for the discrimination angle, entity capes are able to infect people by just hanging out around them, whereas not-mutants are only able to spread through the normal, 9 months+decades of growing up way.

Click to shrink...

In simple terms, it's because metahumans are much easier to scan for, even in their potentiate state.

In more complex terms, parahumans tend to fall into three easily observable categories. Villain, Rogue, and Hero. All of which are predicated around the idea of a secret identity. Metahuman potentiate scanning has always been based around the idea that it's voluntary. You don't have to put your blood up for. People on average will say yes if their doctor asks, though. Partially because the idea of whether or not you might have dormant super-powers or something is kind of cool, and partially because your doctor is asking about it. People still say no, and have their own opinions on why. If you say 'yes', and test positive, you will be informed. That's it. You'll be asked for permission to donate your data to science, and if you say 'no' then that's the end of it.

Something I want to clarify quick. Only full metahumans are required to register by law.

There is some strong legislative conflict going on right now as to whether or not that should change, especially with how the number of potentiates increases every year along with the ratio of how many of the potentiates become full metahumans.

As for parahumans coming away from this scott-free, we're back to that hilarious worm cape dynamic again. Since this is such a wild AU, let me share with you another little detail that hasn't come up yet. Not registering Parahuman powers is considered illegal. But it's also a very weird kind of illegal, like how sodomy is illegal according to the UCMJ. People almost never get called out on it, except if they're being brought in for something else and it's discovered. Now, you might be asking 'how does this work with secret identities'? Basically, it gets swept under good samaritan laws. Protectorate heroes are already registered, vigilantes are acting in a 'known' capacity, and villains... are villains and thus ignoring the law anyway. This just gets added to their rap sheet. The hilarious thing about this, is that it gets used more often against people who commit crimes and aren't wearing masks. So, if it gets discovered you're funneling money towards an illegal organization, and that you've been concealing powers, you'll be prosecuted for both. Well, unless they find out you've been using your powers for illegal purposes, then committing crimes with a power gets added.

Exacerbating this, is that testing for metahuman potential is leagues easier and cheaper then identifying a parahuman. It's a blood test that gets fed into a computer, versus an MRI that has to be interpreted. Add to that, metahuman testing bears replicable results. This gene sequence is the same, ergo you have a chance to get fluffy tails. Each magic space tumor has a unique shape, location, and size. There's trending patterns, but nothing near the amount of predictive stuff you'd have with metahuman testing. And because metahuman testing bears more fruit, there's more people interested in studying it, which helps keep testing cheap.

Of course, now I'm making metahuman testing sound perfect, when it's not. The gene test basically looks at your DNA, and compares it to known metahuman phenotypes. If you're a metahuman potentiate with an unidentified phenotype, you'll pass right through their net. What this means is that if/when you undergo an emergence, your genes get a second look and then they compare it to other known methahumans that have the same phenotype, until they identify as many of the genes they can and then add it to their metahuman testing stuff for comparison. The number of metahuman potentiates is literally impossible to guess because scientists don't even know how many phenotypes there are to look for.

And this is basically one of the pillars that drives the metahuman scientific community forward. The quest to discover, analyze, and try to understand phenotypes.

The parahuman scientific community studies corona pollentia, but their results aren't anywhere near as replicable. Instead, a lot of their effort goes into analyzing tinker-tech and trying to help it reach mass production.

That's just setting up for a self fulfilling prophecy, if you start treating people like animals and criminals is it any surprise when they bite back out of frustration and anger at their situation. Instead of being antagonistic dickbags, providing systems of support and aid would be the much smarter thing to do. Deescalation does work pretty well from what I hear.

Also, shouldn't it be apparent over time that the ones much more likely to be violent are the parahuman s due to being driven towards conflict, which the metas don't have.

Click to shrink...

Hey, it's a mesh of science and politics. Even good intentions can be messy as fuck, and very few people in politics have 100% honest intentions.

As for conflict drive, years of scientific analyses have noted that parahumans are more unstable on average then metahumans. But the exact numbers on this are impossible to get, given that the secret identity thing plays merry hell with keeping track of parahumans in society. Add to that, there's some hilarious fun going on with correlation/causation happening there, since while there's at least a framework for how metahumans work, parahumans just plain fucking don't make sense.