Keksalot

The Broken World: Nations of Azoth

@Flagg

I wanna make a rich, rich, rich, FILTHY RICH almost-industrial merchant state that characterizes itself by having as its capital one of the biggest, most populated and advanced cities in the setting that owes it's success to being situated on an ancient water purification station or archeotech hydroponics farm or just a tech graveyard. All of their lands are merely adjunctions and branches of the City, which gorges itself on all resources that it can find and all migrants who come there in search of better life and churns out wonders made of sweat, blood and coin and dug-up archeotech. A city that opens it's gates to everyone who comes knocking, because all work is the same, no matter the shape and number of digits on the hands that do this work. A city that allows crime legally - as long as the guilds of murderers, muggers and thieves always leave a recepit at the place of the crime, never take more than what they are allowed to, pay the monthly crime tax and keep the streets safe from anyone who tries to commit crime without being a part of the guild. A city that provides it's citizens with one thing a simple man wants the most - stability, where every new day isn't very different from the last unless you want it to be. A city that rarely wages wars because his banking system makes wars in its vicinity unprofitable - the motto of their armed force is "If you start a war, we will call back the bonds and nullify our contracts. And stop pointing the arquebus that we made in my direction. And don't tread our earth with the boots that were sewn by our cobblers. And don't you owe like ten dollars worth of liquor to the bar where my sister works?"

The master of this city would probably be a powerful spirit that personifies the best and brightest features of commerce and capitalism of the Old World. Or just a simple smart man with a knack for organizing systems who will never be killed or dethroned because living in the City without him would be more trouble than it's worth.

Would that work?

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

"Nah. Nah."
The spindly guy was still trying to get his top half out of the jumpsuit. His fingers still weren't listening to him completely but each new motion was a little bit more precise than the last.
"They won't," He continued speaking, looking straight at his interlocutor. "I'll be very obedient when they are around. I know i will."
"Plus there's not a single guard around to beat anyone - they have collars for that. Do you like yours, pretty boy?"
He smiled. His lips were so thin they were almost nonexistent and his teeth were small, sharp and strangely numerous, like really thick needles - maybe something went wrong during his fetal development.

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

Oh, i got it.
It IS their plan. Probably. Anyway i just understood things. Sorry for my outburst.

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

"I don't like it." One of them spoke quietly - a very tall, pale and emaciated-looking boy in his late teens with long black hair that had a single sad-looking white streak in them and wet, almost transparent skin. He looked like a really sad spider and walked a bit like he wasn't sure which of his legs was right and which was left at times. "I don't like anything." Long, spindly fingers began to energetically scratch and scrape at the jumpsuit's fabric until they've got a hold of the zipper, immediately pulling it down in order to free himself from it's skin-tight embrace.
"I don't like these suits. I don't like the air. I don't like Dr. Yukishima. Collars probably have microphones in them so they hear what we say. I don't like it too. Why are you staring?"

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

Because this here is exactly how you create things that want nothing more than kill the peeps who made them wear the collar.
That is, unless we all were specifically bioengineered to be without actual conscience/critical thinking/free will and won't ever try anything funny no matter how hard we are abused.

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

Telling newborn test subjects that they are test subjects or living weapons and will be killed the moment they misbehave...
Fucking A, 10/10. This is literally how all the disasters happen. Doesn't Zion has a whole STATE of psychologists and psychiatrists specifically to make sure that test subjects are not fucked in the head and comply with them willingly?

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

@Superman
I know, i know.
I'm sorry for the sass, i won't do it again. Sorry, honestly.

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

@Superman
oh well his power is okaaaaaay but when a guy just makes a teleporting vector-mancer it is to oh-peeeee i will whiiiiine about it for aaaaal the tiiiiiiiiime

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

fuckin conceptual bullshit
I like it
Though i'm not a GM i will still judge ya.
I think shit's too vague. Like, REALLY vague. Could it be perhaps specified a great deal more? How it works, what are the usual rote actions that this guy is actually able to do without spending like two hours on concentration and manipulation of the ephemera - because at the moment it looks to me like p much an "it's just magic" power.

A L T E R E D M I R R O R (High-Casual)

Ψ

Appearance:(Might change)

Codename:Subject Ψ

Age:7 Years/~1 Second

Gender:Male

Height:193

Weight:59

Personality:As cliched and boring as it sounds, Ψ actually is not a human - inside of an only slightly elongated skull, beneath the pale visage, in the depths of smiling green eyes hides something completely alien to the human mind. No version of Ψ was ever exposed to any sort of society or really meaningful social interactions before reaching it's analogue of puberty, yet it always developed a complete semblance of sentience and conscious thought mere months after coming to life in a highly expensive test tube, all on its own, and it quite unnerved the personnel - an even greater mystery is how exactly did it manage to learn English. Ψ is by no means malevolent or evil - not any more so than any run-of-the-mill high-functioning sociopath who does not feel any sort of obligation to follow the widely accepted norms and does it only out of convenience and to ensure his own safety. Ψ's main motivation at the moment is to make it so that his prolonged existence can't be stopped by anyone except himself - as such, escaping the facility is paramount, though between the attempts he attempts to remain on the best possible terms with his creators and researchers, being friendly to the best of his abilities, and cooperating with the personnel.

Power/Weakness: Explosive Teleportation, Increased Durability, Super-Sight.
Explosive Teleportation - Ψ's body and brain generate a fantastic field of quantum instability that allows him to essentially be in many points of space at once due to a specific sort of probability manipulation - at least that is how the ability is currently explained by the kind people that keep him in here. Whenever he makes a conscious or unconscious effort of will, the field agitates the fabric of time-space and then, after a brief, momentarily build-up, Ψ just ceases to exist in a flickering spatial vortex and immediately appears in the another place of his choosing - or, rather, theoretically, he ceases to exist in one universe and suddenly appears in another, where everything except his position in space is exactly the same. The only cue to the teleportation taking effect being a loud thunderclap produced by air that is quickly filling up the space that Ψ's body has left behind.

What makes this already potent power a truly horrible force, however, is the fact that matter and objects at the destination point of the teleportation do not just change places with Ψ or somehow cease to exist. Instead they are extremely violently displaced in the direction and vector of his choosing - for example, if he teleports into a wall or even a free space that is filled with nothing but air, the volume of rock, air or metal equal to the volume of his body is very quickly pushed away from its previous position to make place for Ψ, and he can effectively control the shape and direction in which all this material will be shot out. It is possible to concentrate all of the displaced material into a very thin 'ray' that will be utterly terrifying in it's penetrating power or force it to be expelled in an explosion all around him, take the shape of a cone or wide line.

Increased Durability - Ψ's flesh is incredibly dense, his blood pressure is very high - though his wounds close quickly, not allowing for lots of blood loss - and his system excels a normal human's one in general resilience. While it does not really provide any sort of long-term endurance or stamina, it is enough to compensate for sudden and often drastic pressure changes that come after his teleportations, cold that he suffers without clothing and sometimes compensate adequately for the hydraulic impact produced by a bullet hitting soft non-vital issues - and yes, they did shoot him in the gut with a 9mm to check.

Super-Sight - Ψ possesses better-than-perfect eyesight and sense of perspective, able to view minute details at quite long distances, see in the dark and notice slightest changes in observed scenery. This is absolutely vital for the use of his power, which requires a big deal of precision and concentration to teleport over large distances or through any sort of semi-transparent obstacles, such as smoke or glass, seeing as they change the way things are perceived through them. Additionally, Ψ's reacts to seen threats much faster than an average person.
In theory, this ability alone could help to make him a great long-range marksman - that is if his hands didn't shake so much. And if he could be possibly trusted around a firearm. And knew how to use one.

Luckily, the power is not utterly undeniable and has it's weaknesses and limitations:
1) Due to an unknown reason, Ψ is unable to teleport into, and therefore displace matter of living animals and humans - plants, fungi, and cadavers are within his reach, but any sort of even remotely large living vertebrates are not.

2) Similarily, Ψ can not teleport into, or displace large amounts of especially dense materials. His upper limit seems to stand somewhere at 11,3 kg/m3, which means that an opaque sheet of lead is sufficient to prevent him from teleporting behind it. For now.

3) Teleportation at large distances that still lie within Ψ's line of sight requires arduous concentration, effort of will and time for the quantum instability field to extend towards the needed point - this implementation of his power also produces some tell-tale signs, such as Ψ beginning to briefly wink in and out of existence whilst being accompanied by his signature thunderclaps and produce multiple transient, phantom, non-manifested copies of himself all over the place. This limitation is why he is still allowed to have the privilege of looking through windows while remaining under observation.

4) Every spatial jump brings after it a brief cooldown period during which Ψ's body is once again tethered to his new position in space - it lasts for a time of 1 to 3 to sometimes 5 seconds or more in the case of long-range teleportation. Ψ can force himself to make another jump or even a series of teleportations in quick succession, but such a strain on his abilities invariably results in his body losing cohesion with itself and produces immediate side effects amongst which are vomiting, intense bleeding from various orifices, sudden drops and increases in blood pressure, short-term memory loss or loss of conscience, hallucinations or emergence of mental instabilities. As of now, the limit of successive jumps to which any version of Ψ was ever pushed is 11, followed by a month of recuperation from bloody flux and three simultaneous brain aneurysms. The reason behind these grisly effects seems to be that during quick successive teleportations Ψ's body doesn't have enough time to stabilize in the alpha universe and thus with every new jump the position of his body is a little bit off - his own cells displace slightly into each other with very negative consequences.

5) Ψ can only teleport himself. He can not bring someone along or carry something with him when he jumps - in fact, he can't even keep his clothing on, which is why he largely doesn't even bother to wear any. A request to give him a tattoo - strictly for scientific purposes, Junior Researcher ████ says - is currently under consideration.

Other:(Looking for a theme.)