WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

[McCoy]

Your character wakes up one morning, and everything is different.

 

If an alien, cyborg, or anything other than a normal human, they are now fully human by any and all test available. They have no powers. Any costumes or foci have gone missing. A quick scan of the morning paper reviels no mention of metahuman activity. An internet search for friends, enemies, or their own nom de guerre turns up nothing, or references to fictional characters. He or she is unable to contact any ally that he knew only in their heroic ID, but can readily get ahold of any whose civilian ID they know. Anyone they contact will remember past adventures shared, but as the conversation progresses it becomes obvious they remember them as sessions in a role playing game.

 

(1) What new life does your character wake up too? What would their lives be like if they lived in a world with no superpowers?

 

(2) With no powers or abilities beyond normal, and with no one but them remembering super-powers having existed, what do they do? Do they decide they must have had a psychotic episode and get on with their lives, or do they decide everyone is crazy except them and keep digging? If so, how?

[Iuz the Evil]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Adamant:

Would wonder why he so clearly recalls the events of the past 178 years. He has no secret identity per se, so would be a little taken aback. His life experiences give him a rather odd array of skills (cowboy, prospector, dock worker, baker, chef, accountant, musician, etc) for someone who is only 25 or so. The fact he's not indestructible, immortal, and super-strong anymore would also take some getting used to. Definitely would keep digging, he's wealthy and physically only in his mid-twenties, he has time and resources. Might take a more active role in managing his charitable trust.

 

The Analogist:

Would almost instantly deduce what was going on from crop circle reports in New Mexico, weather pattern alterations in the subarctic, and recent changes on the stock exchange (or some other odd/unusual/seemingly irrelevant data). He's a little nutty, but utterly brilliant. Figuring out wierd mysteries with only his intellect is his schtick. He's ruthless and incredibly stubborn as well, and would never accept the reality that was being imposed on him.

 

Singularity:

Would get back to his life as a professor at Princeton. He'd assume it was a psychotic episode, and try to put it behind him asap. His wife and daughter are the focus of his life anyway, this would only put his 'hobby' of being a super-hero aside (was risky anyway).

 

Chemo:

Would be relieved that Chile was no longer under the thumb of the evil Conquistador (no supers right?). Back to work as a Chemical Engineer, greatly relieved in the 'better world' he found himself in.

[Chuckg]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

One question -- one of my characters has Eidetic Memory, but only got that /with/ her superpowers. (Not Foci-, cybernetics-, or training-based either.) In your scenario, would she still have it?

[McCoy]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Chemo:

Would be relieved that Chile was no longer under the thumb of the evil Conquistador (no supers right?). Back to work as a Chemical Engineer, greatly relieved in the 'better world' he found himself in.

Absolutely no supers more powerful than Zodiac (costumed serial killer in California in the 1970's, never caught). Detroit was never destroyed, 911 was a terrorist event with no metahuman involvement, no contact with ET's.

[McCoy]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

One question -- one of my characters has Eidetic Memory' date=' but only got that /with/ her superpowers. (Not Foci-, cybernetics-, or training-based either.) In your scenario, would she still have it?[/quote']

How could she tell?

 

Would definitely have an above average memory, but checking on the internet or in books already read would find some differences. Did the book change or is the memory somewhat less than perfect?

 

Assume an above average but not perfect memory.

 

[edit] No, let's make this more interesting, assume the character finds years of daily appointment calenders, notes, and journals on a palm pilot that she (1) does not remember owning before and (2) does not remember writing all that in there, but family and friends assure her she has it with her at all times and takes notes compulsively.

[Chuckg]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

And while I wait for that, I'll answer the characters that I can guess:

 

Dr. Pain

Will wake up to find out that he's still just a pro wrestling champion, and the whole thing with Pulsar and getting superpowers and all that must have been one /supremo/ anchovy pizza nightmare.

 

If this is an illusion, he probably won't break out -- he's not high-EGO, not particularly introspective, and doesn't have his entire self-identity tied up in being a superhero, as he had a complete life before his powers popped.

 

Baron von Darien:

 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the Baron -- he's EGO 45 (yes, 45, not a typo), eleven centuries old, and has long experience with all sorts of mystic [stuff].

 

Furthermore, it's *impossible* for him to still be alive -- not unless you excise the memory of his entire life and give him a complete new set as Joe Suburban. If he still remembers his life pre-Embrace, then he knows he should have been dead of old age centuries before the Renaissance.

 

He will not take the 'it must have been an episode' track of thought... it was real, he will know it to have been real, as you cannot hallucinate that many centuries' worth of detailed life. (Think of the time it would take to write that many pages of fiction, for one thing.)

[Chuckg]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

How could she tell?

 

Would definitely have an above average memory, but checking on the internet or in books already read would find some differences. Did the book change or is the memory somewhat less than perfect?

 

Assume an above average but not perfect memory.

 

Starguard:

 

She could tell because in her superpowered form she has Cosmic Awareness, covering not only the complete range of material and energy phenomena, but also direct sensing of souls. Starguard is a human girl bonded with the essence of a slain(?) earthbound(?) (we're still figuring that part out ourselves), archangel. The way she sees the world around her is duplicatable by virtually /nothing/... and it's as natural to her as sight is to us.

 

And that's a set of senses she obviously lacks now... but she can recall what having them, using them, felt like. What things looked like when viewed with her higher senses, as opposed to just the normal five.

 

The reason I asked is so I could know what /fidelity/ she recalled them in... whether it would be impressions vague enough to be rationalized away as bad anchovies, or something sharper.

 

As you said 'above average but not perfect' (as opposed to her normal recall, which is perfect fidelity of anything she's perceived, if she concentrates), she'll be able to recall them sharply enough to know that they weren't just hallucinations, but actual viewing of Reality in a way different than normal humans can do it... and from the lack of perfection in the recall, an additional data point (besides the absence of her awareness) that something is blocking out her mind from full function.

 

Which is the clue she needs to figure out that no, she's not crazy, there really is something going on here.

 

Edit -- ah, that's right, home life. She's back with her folks, a teenaged Canadian girl just into her fifth year of secondary education. None of the abduction or crazy stuff ever happened.

[Kirby]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Your character wakes up one morning, and everything is different.

 

If an alien, cyborg, or anything other than a normal human, they are now fully human by any and all test available. They have no powers. Any costumes or foci have gone missing. A quick scan of the morning paper reviels no mention of metahuman activity. An internet search for friends, enemies, or their own nom de guerre turns up nothing, or references to fictional characters. He or she is unable to contact any ally that he knew only in their heroic ID, but can readily get ahold of any whose civilian ID they know. Anyone they contact will remember past adventures shared, but as the conversation progresses it becomes obvious they remember them as sessions in a role playing game.

Wait, this happened to me! I lost 15 points of wealth along with my powers.

[assault]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

(1) What new life does your character wake up too? What would their lives be like if they lived in a world with no superpowers?

 

(2) With no powers or abilities beyond normal, and with no one but them remembering super-powers having existed, what do they do? Do they decide they must have had a psychotic episode and get on with their lives, or do they decide everyone is crazy except them and keep digging? If so, how?

 

1. Assault (Frank Allan) would probably be a security guard. On the other hand, given his age, he might be working in a desk job. It's conceivable that he might be studying (or have studied) engineering part-time.

 

2. On the other hand, he has a very strong self-image and has dealt with mentalists and magicians before, so it's fairly likely that he might be reluctant to accept that everything he knew was false. He's quite likely to be one of the ones to break out of the trap.

[McCoy]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Wait' date=' this happened to me! I lost 15 points of wealth along with my powers. [/quote']

Shss! Me too, which is why I'm fishing for more ideas on how to get back. I really miss that full life support!

[Marketeer]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Blackberry:

 

Would be deeply distressed. Many of her "powers" are second nature to her, and most of her family and friends wouldn't exist in this universe. She'd be at a bit of a loss, really--she'd normally turn to her relatives for help.

 

She'd probably start by looking for analogues to people she knew. She's not prone to panic, but this sort of thing is almost exactly the right sort of thing to push all her "I'm uncomfortable with this" buttons.

[st barbara]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Simple really. "St Barbara" would simply go back to work as a relief worker for the U N (either UNICEF or UNHCR) in her civilian identity as (I assume) no-one remembers her as "St Barbara". She would cherish the memory of her time with superpowers and might try to write it up as fiction and perhaps sell it to a comic book company.

[Blue]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Uncle Slam awakens to find himself in WWI. He's an average everyday doughboy without superpowers, fighting the good fight. But it's not long before his more traditional skills are realized and he is made a member of a forerunner of the American intelligence services.

 

Anthem's father is a drunk who would beat her. Assuming she survives this without the resistance that she naturaly developed to cope with it, she probably would be a street kid. She'd find herself at a shelter, and while she wouldn't dress in a costume or a cape, she would still tend to get involved in other people's troubles; Just because you don't have powers doesn't mean you don't still have the need to help.

 

Audra Blue would awaken to find that rather than being rescued from a nazi in south america who used her to create his cybernetic experiments, she was simply a child adopted by her benefactor and brought here to live. Without the outrageous skills to help prop up a super-teams intelligence gathering, she still mades due with conventional hacker skills. Nonetheless, the team still collapses under the weight of crime. Audra does not become restrained to the base however; Without the need for chemicals to keep her cybernetics in check, she grows older, and winds up as the youngest member of the city council, where she's constantly in battle with the other members but garners plenty of public support. And if she ever needs to, she's got plenty of dirt on people to keep them in check.

[Zed-F]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Soulbarb is still living alone with her mother. Her father is still dead, suicided due to the accumulated guilt of having abused her emotionally and sexually in the years since the divorce, or so her mother will tell her. Soulbarb's of mixed minds. On the one hand, she's going to miss her powers, and being an everyday teenager is going to suck all the more. She'd might get even more b*tchy than usual as a result, if it weren't for the absence of the demon making her anger feel that much more hollow and empty. On the other hand, she has her soul back all to her own again. She'll probably take this opportunity to re-evaluate her life's direction. If it's a mental illusion, well she's a reasonably bright strongwilled girl, but mental attacks are not her forte; she'll eventually notice something's wrong, but it might take some time.

 

Glaive's reaction depends on what the setting is. If she wakes up back in Astoria, woohoo! Glaive will breathe a huge sigh of relief and get on with her life. The first thing she'll do is try to find out whether her grandmother is still alive (assuming she can't feel her grandmother's presence any more.) Of course, Astoria had magic as well, and if *that* seems to be missing, that will raise red flags in her mind. She's much more ready to believe that her trip to the future and the events that led up to it was a bad dream, than that her whole life was a fantasy; she grew up around the equivalent of Wuxia martial arts as a daily part of life.

 

If she wakes up and is ostensibly supposed to be a normal girl in modern America and have grown up there... then no, that won't fly at all. She has no memories congruent with that scenario, and no family here to tell her what she doesn't remember. She'll find Beastwarden and try to help him get to the bottom of things.

 

Beastwarden's reaction will be similar to Glaive's except that he's less likely to be fooled to begin with and more likely to realize what's going on quicker. He's a shaman so altering perception is something he knows quite a bit about himself.

 

Aviary will still be a frustrated, borderline nutcase ecologist who just wishes she had powers so that she could do something about all the catastrophes she sees just waiting to happen, instead of trying to work through glacial and unsympathetic bureaucracies to get something done. However, if it's a mental attack, she'll probably be gone for a fair while; she's not the most stable sort to begin with and it's not too hard to influence her mentally.

[mikesama]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Snapdragon would wake up in college getting ready for med school. With the same pushy, guilt wielding Chinese parents she's always had. That being said she would investigate and start with her grandfather. (her Grand father is a Chinese river dragon)

[ghost-angel]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Jessica

Would lament the loss of her vampirism for about ten seconds, realize there's an opportunity here and become a house mom - which is really her secret ambition. Hero stuff is cool when you can't be killed, but there's something to be said for the quiet life. And she looks forward to eating spaghetti again.

 

Silence

being 2000 years old and knowing little to nothing about modern life, unless she was suddenly downloaded with it, would know something was up and keep digging. If she woke up knowing about modern life suddenly she would be extremely confused regarding her 'memories' and probably still keep digging.

[SKJAM!]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Your character wakes up one morning, and everything is different.

 

Rock Bottom: Muhammed is suddenly back out on the streets; interestingly enough, they're slightly different streets, since the Blood Red King didn't destroy large portions of Baltimore. He's probably scraping out an existence as a day laborer. On the other hand, he probably has a boyfriend, since he's not made of stone. Muhammed's not at all thrilled about losing his scholarship at Johns Hopkins, but there's little he can do about it.

 

Calculus: Is still a district manager for the White Hen chain of convenience stores sometime in the 1980s. He just didn't have his secret past exposed to have the freakin' city recently. Though he's going to miss the superintelligence, Brian is mostly content to return to normal suburban life.

 

Mask of Justice: Is merely Nick Philips, ace reporter. He's still helped put a number of crooks in jail, just not ones in silly costumes.

 

Kira Midori: Is just an ordinary police officer, is probably a bit dumpier, and has normal non-anime hair. Is going freaking crazy without all her extra psychic senses, and will not accept this world as real, since it's two removed from her starting point.

 

Talion: Works in the bankruptcy department of a major retailer, still doesn't have a girlfriend, but at least isn't getting killed on a regular basis. It's a wash for him.

[BcAugust]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Cyrande- Um... ouch. You're dealing with someone who comes from such a different culture that she's more likely to grow into a complete paranoid then anything else. Besides, her knowledge of superadvance physics and tech will stand out quite a bit.

 

Nox- would be a bank teller, likely a bit sad and alone. She'd look up Pergrine(which would be wierd, since he'll remember her, but they'd never normally have met), and try to find Diomedes SID. She'd... be torn. Actually gaining the courage to go to college, but she'll be glad so many didn't die.

[sinanju]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Your character wakes up one morning, and everything is different.

 

If an alien, cyborg, or anything other than a normal human, they are now fully human by any and all test available. They have no powers. Any costumes or foci have gone missing. A quick scan of the morning paper reviels no mention of metahuman activity. An internet search for friends, enemies, or their own nom de guerre turns up nothing, or references to fictional characters. He or she is unable to contact any ally that he knew only in their heroic ID, but can readily get ahold of any whose civilian ID they know. Anyone they contact will remember past adventures shared, but as the conversation progresses it becomes obvious they remember them as sessions in a role playing game.

 

(1) What new life does your character wake up too? What would their lives be like if they lived in a world with no superpowers?

 

(2) With no powers or abilities beyond normal, and with no one but them remembering super-powers having existed, what do they do? Do they decide they must have had a psychotic episode and get on with their lives, or do they decide everyone is crazy except them and keep digging? If so, how?

 

Hell's Angel - Given her background, Gayle trusts her own judgment above anyone and everyone else's. If she remembers being a superheroine in real life, she won't doubt that it's true. If she can convince any of the other supers she knows (not many, she's a relatively newbie superhero) of the truth, she'll work with them to find out what happened; if not, she'll go it alone. In the mean time, given that her day job is as a science fiction novelist, she'll make good use of her memories as fodder for more novels until she can make things right again.

 

Outlander would be horrified and appalled to discover that she is now a merely human being. So much for her superhuman strength, agility, toughness, intellect, nanotech subdermal armor, regeneration and immunity to aging. Not to mention her pheremone power. This really, really sucks! And whoever did it will die a horrible, painful death as soon as she can figure out who to torture and kill...after getting her powers back. And while she may not have her powers, she still has two centuries of soldiering experience and habits of command, and her knowledge of ultra-tech to help her build up the wealth and power to get the job done.

[ParitySoul]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Brand X would go looking for birth records. Family. Anything that would hint at a real life that was denied him. If lack of such shows up...then he would start working at getting free of whatever illusion has him. Most of his youth was spent in virutal reality training. He's really good at picking real from unreal.

[Lethosos]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Queen of Spades will wonder where her linking bracelet (which houses a little tranceiver to call her armor out of its pocket-dimension) went. Then she'll check her modeling schedule and make a trip to the San Sebastian swamps post haste as soon as she can. The alien wreckage that she pried the Forge out of is bound to still be there... and if not, she'll try and look for evidence of the Skunk Ape, whom she've met before in the past. (Offical campaign background from Vibora Bay.)

 

Her fiances can be supported with her tech-skills now, since she came away with some thing...

[Metaphysician]

Re: WWYCD: Life is but a Dream

 

Microman II: Is an android. Has never been a human before. After he reorients to these new and weird senses, he'll realize this can't be real, for more or less the same reason as Starguard ( detailed enough memories of sensory and thought processes that are completely nonhuman ).

 

Diomedes: Well, there's the possibility he can cheat, in the sense that Athena sends a PM telling him to wake up. OTOH, assuming she's being blocked or spoofed somehow, well, the thing is, Diomedes was a prodigy well before even thinking of becoming a superhero. So, he's in good condition to investigate. And like has been said, the fact that others remember having gamed with him, when there is no possibility of them even having met, is a huge potential tipoff. . .