super speed minus gates

At all times, the user moves marginally faster than their build would suggest. However, they can define a circuit by a “tagging” the environment with a touch. Placing a tag, or returning to an already placed tag, will provide a slight speed boost. When tags are returned to in the same order they are placed, each speed boost stacks geometrically. Three or more tags define an “arena,” and the user slows considerably outside of the arena, below their normal speed. Removing tags removes the area and the slowness, but tags can only be removed by returning to them.

willful wire drinking each lakes

This is a curse upon fisherman who greedily rob lakes of life. When the user swims in a body of water, all fishing lines and nets surrender to the user’s control. This effect extends, weakly and situationally, to trash (especially fabric, cables, or chains) or natural parts of the lake such as freshwater plant stems. The control is crude, and largely serves to attract objects to the user: each can be absorbed into the body to empower the user. Once integrated like this, the user can form compound tentacles from the wires for attacking or practical use.

going to call it there for the first day, i’m tired and the prospect of putting together another paragraph is daunting me. the other rolls were fun, admittedly.

“circumstantial poison manipulation else gates” lead me to consider the idea of someone who can only manipulate poison inside someone’s body and only if they’re consenting. the gates drawback is tricky. i started thinking along the lines of internal gates, crossing thresholds of poisoning.

“time travel as creature” is just pure whimsy.

“recursive expensive conditional contingent fate anti‍-​manipulation until contructs if law” i love these absolute word salad result.

every time i’m just like

the core power here is “fate anti‍-​manipulation” which is already bizarrely abstract. i guess this is… preventing people from changing the preordinated destinies of themselves or others? “until contructs” [sic] could mean there are like, entities tasks with protecting the weave of fate, and you only need to keep things stable until they intervene. “if law” reinforces this; the fate constructs abide by cosmic law. perhaps as an interesting drawback, these constructs can strike you down if you’re found to be misusing your power. but now we need to parse the big stack of modifiers

“contingent”‍ ‍‍—‍ self‍-​explanatory, actually; your power requires anomalies in the timeline before it takes effect. anti‍-​manipulation is meaningless if there’s no manipulation.

“conditional”‍ ‍‍—‍ defined a superset of contingent, but it lets us further narrow the scope: you only have jurisdiction to protect the fates of certain things, perhaps only peoples and places important to you.

“expensive”‍ ‍‍—‍ well yeah, fate manipulation must be a taxing power to exercise. but this gets interesting if we take it on a more metaphorical level, and imagine that this great task has reduced its user to a tragic, pyrrhic husk

“recursive”‍ ‍‍—‍ this category exists to describe powers that have so many parameters that they can turn into whole new powers. “fate preservation” doesnt really have much of that sort of flexibility, which suggests a more interesting possibility: fate itself can grant you any power needed for the purpose of defending it.

so like. this is very obviously a series villain final boss tier power, right?

day 2. i’m still improving the code. featurewise, i added the ability to reroll specific words, but i also cleaned up the organization of the tables. not every verb goes with every noun, so no more “truth drinking” or “timeline breath.”

i restructured some modifiers so they don’t stack as aggressively (and renamed them), so instead of “modal contingent blah” you get “blah given variables within modes”

(one funny oversight was i forgot to downweight the prefixes, which is why you sometimes got stuff like “semi‍-​self‍-​post‍-​super‍-​retro‍-​self‍-​prediction and neo‍-​meta‍-​meta‍-​perception” [sic])

anyway, the writing exercise.

utility fog while sensorium

Utility fog is programmable matter, a swarm of tiny “foglet” that can lock into any shape at any time for any given purpose. The strict definition is a form of nanotech, but in the context of the power generator, I just mean clouds that Do Stuff. Skitter’s Bug Swarm in Worm would be utility fog by my definition.

Foglets pretty naturally extend the range and depth of what you can sense, so I think it’s most interesting if we invert this.

The user can manipulate shadows outside of the world, invisible and ephemeral. Only the user can perceive the shadows, and they can slowly shape their placement. When the eyes of the user close, all sense of reality is lost and the shadows are imposed on the world. This manifestation expands gradually from the user, so there is a perceptible delay before more distance shadows materialize. The substance created by this power vary depending on density. Thin strands of it provide no more resistance than rope; thick aggregations can be as hard as steel. With eyes closed, the user knows if touching the shadows, and can impart forces on the shadows touched. Before the eyes of the user opens, the shadows retreat back to epiphenomena, much quicker than when they manifested: the user can never witness their shadows as real things.

sight anti‍-​knowledge each sea given metabolism

The “each sea”, part stumped me, because the natural read of the “for each” combinator is temporal, but it can be an abstract mapping. And then I thought of a creative take: consider Mare Cognitum, the Sea Which Has Become Known.

The user is antimemetic: those who witness them do not remember or understand them. Those who have been informed of the user, or otherwise are aware of them, may experience a moment of recognition, soon to be forgotten. The antimemetic effect grows stronger over time after first witnessing the user. Looking away slows but does not stop it. The four stages of the effect are: Mare Cognitum (forgetting the user); Mare Tranquillitatis (forgetting immediate danger the user poses); Mare Ingenii (forgetting plans for circumventing memory loss); Mare Crisium (forgetting anything wrong or strange is occurring); Mare Serenitatis (forgetting everything). The final stages take long enough that if one flees the user, one’s fate amounts to an early onset of dementia in the coming decades. The antimemetic effect is a byproduct of the users’ innate metabolism, rather than conscious aggression. If the user’s health is impaired (by injury, by ination, by illness) the effect is impeded or made to malfunction entirely. In particular, the users’ biology is dependent on the seas, requiring the user to regularly bath in the ocean or drink saltwater. The user always smells of the sea and its unknown depths.

astral projection and insanity each beauty toward necessity while sin given gestures else principle within power‍-​emulation

it strikes me how vivid a picture of a divine curse this conjures.

if the user has sinned, then witnessing a beautiful sight will drive them mad and rip their soul from the body. they have sworn to make holy gestures‍ ‍‍—‍ the sign of the cross, hand seals of prayer‍ ‍‍—‍ to restrain their curse. when their mad soul dances free, it mimics whatever grand display had inspired it.

maybe one of these days i’ll properly write up one of this convulated generations, but for now i’ll keep picking the low‍-​hanging fruit. the other discarded rolls were “earth appraisal like language given preparation” (seems like a straightforward “carve runes on the ground to reveal truths” geomancy ability?) and “metal movement then creativity given reflex as behavior within variations” (which is interesting‍ ‍‍—‍ instinctive metallokinesis that sparks inspiration and every alloy of metal has its own quirks‍ ‍‍—‍ but for me it lacks something).