[video] Show Me Your Moves

[whyarewehere]

[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.))

Comments

[iamresponding]

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.]

[nerdninja]

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.)]

[iamresponding]

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

[nerdninja]

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

[iamresponding]

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.

[nerdninja]

That's pretty counterproductive.

[iamresponding]

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.]

[nerdninja]

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.]

[iamresponding]

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.]

[nerdninja]

Yeah, I guess so.

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