thelegion | [video] Show Me Your Moves

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[video] Show Me Your Moves

[The camera bobs and judders as someone sets it up, catching flashes of a scruffy, unkempt face and pale arms and the sky for a moment.]

Okay so I've been thinking, we've got super powers here, right?

[The picture steadies pointing out at what appears to be a beach, but is more likely to just be a simulated section of beach on the Legion World. It falls over, and Grif swears as he rights it again.]

...Anyway. By super powers I mean amazing things you couldn't do before, because otherwise you're just from some world where you can do cool stuff most of us can't and that's not superpowers, that's just life being unfair to the rest of us.

[Satisfied that the comm is stable, Grif steps out in front of it as he continues.]

So, I want to see what you guys can do. And because I am all about being fair, I'm going first.

[He swings his arms a little, takes a couple breaths, then bolts to the waterline. He's nothing but a speed blur followed by a trail of thrashed sand. He stops at the surf and charges back just as quickly. At the end he's doubled over in front of the camera, hands on his knees, huffing and wheezing.]

Whoo!

[He laughs as he catches his breath, which makes it somewhat harder, and is grinning despite how much that tiny display of super speed seems to have taken out of him. In good shape, this guy is not.]

It's like... it feels like everything's normal speed to me when I do it and everything's all slowed down. It's crazy shit, man.

[Grif plunks down heavily in the sand and picks up the comm again, still visibly panting.]

So. That's me. Show me what you got.

((OOC: Feel free to threadhop each other and talk about powers if you like! Grif is encouraging sharing.))

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Definitely lost?

I mean, if you're used to controlling energies that don't work the same way here, then I could picture a scenario where you're not able to focus things the same way, and you'd lose some functionality that way, but you're definitely at lower power and it's not just that it isn't flowing the same way here?

[That's, uh.

A little worrisome, maybe!]

[Rich holds up a finger for Donnie to give him a minute, then looks around for something he can use. Right now he's in the Mess so that makes it a lot easier. He props up his omnicom against his carton of juice and picks up a knife with his prosthetic hand and nicks a finger on his flesh and blood one. It's just a tiny cut, nothing to worry about and not big enough to even need a band aid, but it's noticeably bleeding as he holds it up for Donnie to see. He pulls his hand away to wipe the blood on a napkin.]

That look invulnerable to you? My super-strength? Gone. Invulnerability? Gone. I can channel the gravimetric energy just fine and while it's not as strong as it was, I can put out some pretty strong energy blasts, easy peasy. Tested that out in the Sim room.

But the other more latent powers that never required any focus to work? All of 'em are gone. Hell, I'm even tripping over my own feet because I'm used to being a lot more body-aware with the Nova Force. That happened the last time I lost it. I got clumsy as anything because I was used to the motor control it gave me.

This time it only feels like I lost most of it. Some of it's still in there. After having it so many years, I know what it feels like inside me and I can still feel it. But there's not as much as there was. Whether it was taken or it's being suppressed somehow, I can't tell, but some of the powers just aren't there.

[That, actually, gets weirder the more he turns it over in his head.]

I'm not exactly an expert on superpowers, admittedly -

[Because that's just crazy, of course. As opposed to the fact that he's a mutant who hangs out with aliens and some dude whose soul is stuffed in a robot (and for a while he was one himself) and has helped built a dimensional transporter and that's to say nothing of that whole reincarnation bit...

Nothing crazy here.]

- but losing specific manifestations of the same power with others left intact seems like there'd have to be something incredibly specific at the root of it. If it was trouble with everything, or if everything across the board seemed weaker, okay, but...

[Tapping the table he's sitting at (in the lab, of course) thoughtfully for a moment. If there's something specific at work, though, shouldn't that mean there should be a specific solution, as opposed to simply "everything loses some punch here, have fun with that"? Maybe there's something to be done about it.

...maybe this would be a lot easier to figure out if he didn't have more than very specific and practical experience with dimensional anything, ugh.]

Well, that puts a mark in column "someone is behind this" over "something," don't it?

Maybe someone with something very specific in mind.

[He's wondering the same thing that they're all thinking, that maybe their hosts are behind this. Like many of the others, he doesn't put words to the suspicion. It's a bit of a toxic rumor to spread around if they really are trying to help them and there's a high chance they're telling the truth. After all, they're doing what he'd have done in their situation and he knows plenty of other heroes that would be handling this the same way they are. There is a chance they're legit.]

[But in case they're not, he'll save discussing his suspicions with others for doing it somewhere a little more...discreet. There has to be somewhere on the ship he can lure people to, with minimal surveillance, to talk it over. In the meantime, he can talk about the other contenders. He wouldn't put all this past some kind of all-powerful cosmic something fucking with them all.]

Back home in my universe there are very powerful beings called Abstracts. They're...they're almost concepts, they're so powerful. Like Death. As in the Death.

[He taps his head.]

And the way they think is... [He shakes his head.] One of them died near me once. We were going against the Many-Angled Ones, against this -- this death engine made out of the body of a cosmic being, and the Abstract exploded. It got corrupted and exploded into this mess of --

[He's just going to cut that thought off. No little bitty teenage turtle should have what that looked like described to him. Explosions of tentacles and too-many-eyeballs, and too-many-mouths, and... there's even a little twitch on his face as he briefly closes his eyes.]

Anyway, I got caught in the psychic backlash. Nearly destroyed my mind. It left me a warning, because it'd sensed something and I used that bit of cosmic awareness to figure out what to do next in the war we were fighting. But that second of consciousness, that moment...

It was so utterly alien that -- I can't even put it into words.

[He's always terrible at describing this stuff.]

My point is that it might not make sense to us, not on our level. If something sentient did all this to us, had the power to bring us here, to change us, they might be operating on an entirely different scale. And that means we may have to focus on that scale, on the whole game, rather than the odd details that stick out. Because it could all come down to nonsensical, weird, dumb choices cosmic beings made while playing their little games with our lives.

A lot of these things are situations where you can't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The forest is always what it comes down to. That's my experience, anyway.

[He encountered Shub-Niggurath once.

Once was plenty, so he's not going to try and think too hard about what happens when a death engine made out of a cosmic being explodes.]

I guess that's true.

[But even so. Having a problem in front of him means he's itching to solve it. It's just how Donnie is. And granted, this whole thing is nothing but a problem made of other problems, but starting with a smaller one is usually how he'd tackle the larger whole, and -]

I wonder if this isn't tied in to the quantum tethers, though. From what Brainiac's been saying about that potentially overpowering our links to our own realities, and the fact some kind of power imbalance is apparently such a trend in this group...

[He's got that look again. The one that says he's going to drive this train of thought all the way to who knows where.

He's not sure where yet, either, of course, because like hell has he ever had the chance to make a formal study of this kind of thing.]

You know what it says to me? Most of the Legion goes missing, right? Then a bunch of us show up all powered and prepped for heroing exactly where they disappeared -- where they know the Legionnaires that'll be left are looking, and we're tied to this universe in a way that makes it damn near impossible for us to go home.

And most of us have some kinda pre-existing skills or experience that'd make us even more effective [A pause.] Except for Grif.

[Sorry, Grif, you're on his shit list now for responding to talk of war with 'awesome!' His tone's only lightly teasing, though.]

Why depower a guy that can wipe out a whole planet if he coughs the wrong way -- someone used to either working alone or with the kind of people that can crack open planets -- unless it's to make him more of a team player with people not as strong as him? Because without my invulnerability and superstrength, I'm gonna be a glass cannon. I'm gonna need teammates to watch my back.

[Yes, he knows MMORPG terms, sssssh, not a stealth nerd, nope nope. ~~Yes he is.~~]

Seems to me like someone or something is looking to pull people in as replacements. We're the B team.

[The question of the hours is this: is the Legion behind it? Is this their way of getting around this "censure" of theirs? Or is someone or something responding to their thinned ranks and risk of dying and making sure there's a handy fully stocked supply of Legionnaires for their/its own purposes? It's not out of question that the Legion is innocent and something or someone else might want a full team of Legionnaires to do something terrible to the team or make it easier to use it in some way.]

The more I think about that, the less I like it.

[Because if someone...something, is both responsible for doing this on purpose, and has that level of conscious influence over exactly what their powers here look like...

Well, as much as Donnie hates to admit it, even to himself (especially to himself), they hit the nail on the head with the skillset most likely to put him in a cooperative frame of mind. The chance to work with all this crazy far-out tech, and the powers that'd help him catch up quickly and start taking maximum advantage of it?

Sign him up.

Nothing to make a turtle feel stupid like the notion that somebody's playing him like a fiddle.]

But that makes me wonder if everyone's wound up with powers that play right to them so well.

[Or if everyone here is self-aware enough to help them confirm that much. (Grif.)]

That's the way of it, kiddo. The more you know with this stuff, the less you wanna know.

But you can't do anything if you stay ignorant.

I never said it's good to be ignorant. Just that while you're doing what you have to and getting the answers, you still spend a whole lot of time wishing you weren't sometimes.

That's pretty counterproductive.

It's how you stay sane when it comes to these big, reality-bendy, cosmic to-dos. Trust me, there's some things out there that even while you're doing what has to be done, you're learning things you never wanted to know -- sometimes things that nobody was meant to know.

And what keeps you sane is those things always staying insane. Never letting 'em become normal in your head. Because then you can still enjoy all the normal things without all that being a big ol' shadow they're trapped underneath.

[He spent a lot of his life Doing the Job and while he was doing the job he hated learning some things, hated being yanked around by big cosmic whatsits. He spent a lot of time wishing he could live a life in ignorance. And even though he couldn't, even though he had to face it all, it helped to never let go of that tiny bit of "wtf." He never wanted to look out on a life filled with nightmare terrors from beyond time and space and think all that was a normal thing to deal with. He always wanted it to be a thing he wished he didn't know about.]

I just want things to make sense.

[And he's used to the idea that that means he's going to have to make sense of them instead of counting on the things that already make sense to be the only ones he has to deal with, because everything, ugh.]

Never gonna happen.

[He doesn't want Donnie to feel overwhelmed by that, though, or want him to think it's all bad.]

Upside to that's you always see some stuff that don't make any sense that isn't horrible. And since it don't make any sense all you can really do is be glad you were alive to see it.

[It's a big, bad, weird, wonderful universe out there.]

Yeah, I guess so.

[Not that he's ever going to stop trying to make sense of the cool stuff, either.]

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[video] Show Me Your Moves

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cw: for a tiny bit of self-harm

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