This is a two thread, two team suggestion game about a quasi scientific superpower. This is one of the two main threads. Intentionally vague, brief descriptions of each team are below.
(unless you don’t wish to participate, of course).
: You control a young person who has until recently led a perfectly normal, boring life, but is beginning to realize he/she has an extraordinarily powerful, unexpected, and dangerous ability.
: You control one or more different larger groups of people who do not have any special “abilities” but who are likely to be very interested in the actions and situations of the main character from this thread.
The setting begins in America in the near future. That is, with current culture and technology, but not necessarily any specific current events.
Again, do not click this unless you want to play in this thread (the main character):
Location: West L.A., California
Your name is Sarah Bronstead. You’re 27 years old, and graduated from UCLA five years ago with a bachelor’s in computer science. Since then, you’ve bounced around a bit, but a few months ago were offered a job by an acquaintance from college as a software developer for a small company in Santa Monica that makes mobile apps.
The company community is still a bit new, but since you never moved far from UCLA, you still have a network of other close friends in the area.
You have a happy family. You visit your parents in Montana whenever you can, although none of you can afford to arrange transportation more than once or twice a year. Your only brother is 5 years older than you and lives in Portland. You are on good terms, but you have very different personalities and don’t keep in routine contact. You mostly see him on major holidays whenever both of you make it home at the same time.
You are quite small (5’1”, 115 pounds), attractive, regularly jog and are in good health.
You live by yourself in a 1 bedroom apartment carved out of the second floor of an old house in West Los Angeles. Your neighbors are usually groups of students who rotate in and out frequently, and you don’t know any of them very well (except their questionable music tastes, which you know intimately).
All in all, maybe you aren’t exactly taking the world by storm, but you feel privileged and thankful about where you are. Things make sense. Or they did. About a year ago, your world actually started to make a good deal less sense...
A string of very odd things started happening around you, seemingly at random. It was innocuous at first. You would be dozing off, or particularly bored, and... things would happen like you imagined they would. First, a doctor’s office receptionist had a box of pencils fall on her head and explode outward in a picturesque cascade of yellow wood, right as you saw it do in your head an instant before. A one in a million coincidence it seemed. But you and your friend ended up laughing it off over some beers as a trick of the mind and you moved on.
Then a dog pulled its owner over in a dramatic somersault as it chased after a cat, precisely like you thought it might, in exact real time. Weirder... were you still confused about the order of events? How coincidental was this, really?
A month later, things got a more serious. A car on the 101 that had its left blinker on for miles on end suddenly turned like it had been promising to, exactly you imagined it would... straight into the median. It glanced off, dutifully tried to turn left AGAIN, and then only after you snapped out of your fantasy, you both slammed on your breaks and fishtailed for a good 50 yards before squealing to a miraculously safe stop. When you ran over to make sure the other driver was alright, he merely glanced at you, white as a sheet, and without saying a word turned and tore off down the highway again. You called the cops for insurance since your car got dinged up a bit. They didn’t seem too concerned about the incident, but of course, you didn’t share with them that you predicted such bizarre behavior down to the tiniest detail... Was it predicting? were you sure? Or caused? How would that make any sense? Were you hallucinating somehow? Planting false memories still?
And then... nothing. A dry spell. For a few months, nothing. Then, more dramatically than ever, out of nowhere, you were walking down a sidewalk, trying to decide whether you wanted to go visit the local camera store across the street. After changing your mind a couple of times, you noticed a man entering the shop, and absentmindedly put yourself in his shoes, then changed your mind again, imagining walking back out. The man walked back out, looking confused. You stopped for just a moment, then deliberately imagined him pivoting on one heel and walking back inside. He did exactly that, instantly. You then imagined him walking in and out again, and so it was. Suddenly, your bewildered experiment drew to a halt as the man started screaming at the store clerk about something. He was drawing a crowd... You panicked, and quickly left. But what you saw was unmistakable. This was not a confused order of events. This was not a hallucination. You were explicitly imagining exact motions in real time based on what you had just seen, and they were happening! And the results were undeniably real. You already heard sirens in the direction of the shop...
It’s been three weeks since then. You’ve been turning over everything in your head constantly, trying to figure out what’s going on, trying to replicate. Right now, you’re in your favorite coffee shop thinking about exactly that, while you stir your drink. You freeze. Out of the blue, something has struck you. A connection, that seems pretty obvious now, you don’t know why it didn’t occur to you before. A certain flavor to your imaginations when all of the strange events occurred.
You think you might be able to replicate it, but there are a lot of people around. You cautiously go into the bathroom away from prying eyes, and check your pockets. You come up with a handful of 8 coins. You throw them into the air over the sink counter. They clatter uselessly and randomly. You gather them up and try again, to no avail. You scoop them up one more time. Stop, breathe, concentrate, throw... All 8 land on their edges... and stay there! You can barely contain your excitement. It effing WORKED! On PURPOSE!
Trembling with anticipation, you imagine the hand dryer turning on across the room... nothing. Hm. You scoop up the coins and throw them in the air again, imagining more edges the proper way now. They clatter uselessly and normally onto the counter. What?! No no no, this isn’t right.
You need to figure out what’s wrong. It was working a minute ago! You can barely think straight. Maybe you just lost focus... You realize that although you want to figure out how this all works, you’re also in a public bathroom. And the reality of everything is making you dizzy. Can this actually be real? What ARE you?
You leave the shop and walk briskly and nervously to your favorite park nearby, to clear your head and try to gain control again. On your very first try, this time, you succeed in imagining a squirrel throw an acorn precisely at another squirrel’s head, with pinpoint accuracy. They both chatter loudly and run off immediately. Then nothing...
It is all extremely frustrating, and your thoughts are racing so quickly you keep losing track of them, but gradually some pieces start coming together. An hour and a few angry squirrels and improbably arranged eucalyptus leaves later, you think you’ve figured out some rough basics.
1) You have a good grasp of the mindset you have to be in to control things around you. It doesn’t actually take very much concentration at all now that you’ve gotten the hang of it.
2) You can make things happen when you imagine them for about 10 seconds, no longer. After that, you lose control, and you can’t get it back again right away.
3) It seems almost random how long until you can make it work again, but it seems to always be about a few minutes, give or take?
4) You can’t make just anything happen. You don’t seem to be telekinetic. And you can’t invent objects. You can’t make cows jump out of thin air in your neighborhood park or snap trees in half arbitrarily. Everything you’ve managed to pull off has been at least plausible? It’s a bit weird. You’re not sure you have a great grasp on it yet.
5) You tried making things happen far away, but it doesn’t work. It seems like you have to be about a couple of blocks away.
6) When you manipulate the behavior of animals, they know something was wrong after they you lose control of them again. They are terrified. Even small animals and birds, but now that you think about it, so far both people too (the one accidental in the car and the one on purpose at the store).
You don’t want to try anything else too dramatic here. There are still people around, but you now KNOW for a fact you’re not crazy. You have true abilities. Astounding abilities. And as far as you know, you’re the only person in human history with such a power. If not, the others were at best still extremely rare and hid it awfully well. The possibilities unravel in their multitudes in front of you. All of them strike you as breathtaking. And also potentially very, very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe even if you do...
You need to make some serious plans...
Author
Topic: A Fateful Series of Coincidences – MAIN character thread (Read 520 times)