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H-Tech

So we're still in the GAME MASTERS ONLY section about all the WEIRD SHIT BEHIND THE FACADE. And the first thing we bungle into his H-Tech. This has been name-dropped a few times before, oddly enough, only Heroes have anything to do with this, really. You'd figure there'd be some sort of Mad Inventor class/Secret Life...

Essentially the same slap-dash labourers that designed the Storks and left them capable of mis-delivering souls apparently designed the laws of reality, leaving them full of loophopes and exploits. H-Tech devices are any devices that exploit these holes, and according to conventional laws of physics they simply Should Not Work. The entry here tells us that there will be MORE TO COME, but for now all we're told is that H-Tech devices for seeing the invisible and touching the intangible are kind of common. Also apparently it's relatively easy to make a vest that turns you into a Survivor if you die while wearing it, as it keeps Reapers at bay, leaving the soul with long enough time to figure out how to jumpstart the body's systems.

CRACKS IN THE FACAAAAADE

I.e., more times where the contractors that built reality fucked up and did things on the cheap with plywood and duct tape.

Shatters: Someone had a REALLY INTENSE EMOTIONAL MOMENT and that left a hole in reality related to what happened to them. Like if someone had an INTENSE TIME while getting burned there'd be an area where THINGS WOULD BURN or something. One of the example effects is "gravity reversing," I'm not sure what sort of trauma would trigger that. Absolute terror while bungee-jumping?

ATOMIC GHOSTS: Apparently nuclear weapons DESTROY THE BODY SO QUICKLY that the Reapers never get a call that someone is about to die, hence they completely miss their appointment with the soul that just got de-bodied. And of course all of the ATOMIC GHOSTS are Japanese people who are super-racist against white people. Of course. The example ATOMIC GHOST is a Japanese guy who... possesses white people's bodies and then uses them to do lots of drugs and ruin their lives/health. For instance, since this is Brian, he often possesses white people and uses their bodies to rape their families.

Soul Misfits

A variety of weird things that can happen to souls. Guess we finally get to find out what having a HORSE SOUL means.

No Soul: Apparently the SOUL BUREAUCRACY is so stretched by MORE PEOPLE EVERYWHERE that either they're running out of souls to distribute or just keep fucking up because they're rushing. So loads of kids end up not getting souls. Soulless people have no true consciousness, they're basically just biological machines. Apparently the soulless also tend to act as properly Souled people expect them to, meaning that if you enter some weird little country town with nothing but soulless and expect them to come for you with sickles and cannibalism, they will. So I guess if you're a really upbeat and positive person, Soulless will be your best friends forever.

Identical Twins: One soul, split in half. Not very interesting, really, just the generic TWINS CAN FEEL WHAT THE OTHER FEELS-myths.

Two Souls: Jekyll & Hyde, essentially. One is mostly in charge, but if it's KO'd due to drugs or some weird psychological effect, the other takes over for a while.

Humans with Animal Souls: Will like things that their stereotypical animal soul enjoys and be a bit less smart than normal humans, that's it.

Animals with Human Souls: See, Dog King of LA, the.

Cancer Souls: Some tumors have SOULS, which apparently just makes them into huge assholes who ENJOY killing the person they're in and makes them hard to treat.

Soul H-Tech: If you play with genetics you will most likely, literally, create Soulless monstrosities because the Storks are too fucking dumb to figure out how to shove a human soul into a non-standard package. Frankly the fact that mere genetic changes can affect this makes you wonder if, for instance, people with chromosomal disorders do not have souls in IDA, or what about people who are simply odd mixtures of rarely-mixed genetics? Like a German and a Peruvian or something? Do they also have a higher risk of not having souls? Fucked if I know, the implications are just amazingly stupid.

Awakening

See, Kult Ripoffs.

So basically the world is miserable to keep us busy enjoying FLESHY THINGS and fighting for survival, because otherwise if we didn't do that, we'd invent NEW PLAYTHINGS and these NEW EXPERIENCES would TOTALLY BLOW OUR MINDS and we'd see through the illusion and you know what? We still don't know why this is a bad thing. So far NO ONE has told us SHIT about why the Powers From Beyond are assholes to humanity. Did we borrow their lawnmower and never return it? Fucked if I know! IDA sure doesn't see fit to tell us yet.

So essentially what wakes people up is emotional/psychological extremes. Too much suffering, too little suffering, etc. Being awakened really just means you can remember stuff about THE WOOOORLDS BEYOOOOOOND and have some of the same powers as characters with Secret Lives, but more under control. Like you can command Wrigglers(Misfortunes) without wacky rituals, you can "Get Lost" without needing to be actually LOST, that sort of thing. And of course, since they've Awakened under severe psychological duress, they also tend to be mentally damaged as all hell.

The example Awakened is someone who was sold from a Russian orphanage to AMERICAN PEDOPHILES. So basically she got raped for years and years until she went so crazy that she killed the EVIL AMERICAN with her AWAKENED POWERS and now she's a complete nutcase. But... aside from that, she's actually VAGUELY COOL. Essentially, she's abused to the point where the only people she can empathize with are children, and perceives all caretaker/parent figures as abusers. She Lost-walks her way from dark place to dark place, essentially a boogeyman figure. If she finds a lost child in one of those places, she'll basically keep the child captive until their parents/caretakers come looking... and then kill them.

quote:

Olesya does not need food or water. She only want to sit in the darkness, sing little songs to herself, play games with random items, and be left alone. She uses her Lost-like abilities to travel between basements. If someone opens a door to whatever basement she is in, she will flee. If unable to flee (e.g. surprised while sleeping) she will panic and use her telekinesis to wring their necks. If she encounters a crying child her empathy will be aroused. She will keep the child from screaming (by paralyzing his or her vocal cords), will hold and caress the child, will wait for the adults to come down into the basement, at which point she will kill them. She thinks she is doing the child a favor. She is unable to realize that the children might not want their parents killed.

Awakened Animals: Hello "Jaws!" Basically animals that have been driven insane by horrible stuff become of human intellect and physically superpowered, able to revive themselves from situations that would have killed them, and of enhancing their physical abilities besides.

Supernatural Serial Killers: Basically they're Heroes who're either rapists or dispassionate "professional" murderers.

Jekyll: Basically one of their Psychodynamics sometimes takes the wheel and runs their body for a while. So take one of the Psychodynamics listed in an earlier post and have them care about nothing but the realm that PD is all about.

Algernons posted:

When people are born with little or no mental capacity, intelligence sometimes develops spontaneously. The soul begins to think for itself without depending on the neurons of the physical body. It is this tendency to develop intelligence where there is none that forced the powers-from-beyond to lock human souls in the bodies of intelligent animals (it is safer for humans to have limited intelligence than to develop nearly unlimited intelligence).

An Algernon goes quite suddenly from being profoundly subnormal to being a genius. The more retarded they were, the more likely they are to become Algernons. The change can happen at any time, but it is most likely to happen during a trauma or extreme stress.

Then there's an example Algernon and Jekyll. Basically the Algernon had Down's and now her new intelligence has made her OCD and besides that she very easily gets fascinated with a single thought and forgets everything around herself. All she really does is play the stock market with her MATH MIND and become rich. The Jekyll is a schoolteacher who used a SUPER TECH DEVICE to... become a dominant psychopath who rapes her students and is a total prick besides, except when her Shadow isn't in charge in which case she's just a shy little lady.

Creepy Kids: No, really, that's what the book calls them. Basically these are child versions of the Secret Lifers. Thankfully the only ones noted are Lost, Outcast and Wonderlanders, there are no 10-year-old Androgynes. Lost Kids are kind of cool since they're basically driven by their internal fantasy worlds into imagining that, for instance, "through this old closet is a path to somewhere magical!" and they can actually use that to Get Lost somewhere. Outcast Kids are either weirdos who hex their classmates or they're like Constantine and go screaming insane and get electroshock therapy. Wonderlander kids don't really need any describing.

The Creepy Kid NPC is a Lost child who got separated from her mom in a mall and has been unable to get properly back to reality ever since then, Getting Lost from location to location without much control. Most of her time she spends skipping from mall to mall across the world, joining up with whatever kids she meets there and pranking the hell out of mall security. She could almost be a PC for a very light-hearted IDA game. One accidental wandering into a mall in the Deserted City found her a cursed doll which she can wave at people and it'll tell them the thing they fear most of all, scaring them away and giving her a chance to leg it.

Cults: Somehow this is just a tiny side-note about some Native Americans who made ANTI-BULLET SHIRTS with which they FOUGHT THE WHITE MAN.

~PurpleXVI

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