Hotel State

Its an rather accurate analogy or model, don't you think? Its a hotel state, and we are the staff. Effectively, they are like guests enjoying the facilities in exchange for money, while the rest of us are the staff. The ones who run the place, but don't actually get to enjoy it. You've got the technicians, the room service, the security guards...(well, technically everyone's required a bit of training as a security guard). Not actually a bad economic model, for earning money and such. Naturally, despite the wealth that flows into the hotel, the staff aren't really paid much. Most of it goes to the management and the owners. Naturally, the staff can't rent the rooms in the hotel itself, nor afford some of the more exclusive facilities despite being the ones who clean them. I suppose the important thing here is not to tell the staff that they are guests, lest they become deluded and forget their place.

Dream Diary 1: Inflitration

The four of us waited in the shadows as the vehicle came rumbling past. A massive brown mobile fortress, the only access to the inside was via the top hatches. Our goal was to disable the guards so that the retrieval teams could get in. Atop it the guards patroled the area, white-cloaked people with KKK styled hoods carrying pendulums in their hands. They walked about the slowly rumbling top, peering at the ground.

Then Xi Min made his move.

As one we lept off our hiding place and landed softly on the surface of the fortress. Without delay Xi Min removed his own pendulum and started swinging it as well to counteract the detection systems of the guards. White-cloaked figures walked past as with nary a reaction. The two other generic friends went to their designated jobs. I slowly made my way forward, then jumped to the side as the vehicle jerked and a white-cloaked guard nearly crashed into me!

I nearly rolled off the fortress, but saved myself by grasping the sides with both hands. In this position I slid myself slowly towards the hatches, pausing every so now and then when a guard walked too near. I didn't know how far Xi Min's sphere of negation extended. I kept this up for a while, until reached the corner hatch. And there I saw a wonderful sight.

A fellow soldier (a junior I recognized from BB), covered in dirt and cameo cream, dressed in dirty rags climbed out and stood there, looking at me. He gave a smile, said something along the lines of "wooot! Thanks man!" and jumped off into the waiting arms of my comrades below. One prisoner saved. More started pouring out, and I carefully arranged myself to watch the area. The retrieval team had been successful! They had entered the giant prison and broken the cages holding our friends. My only regret was that I didn't play a greater role.

Then something stepped on my hand. I yelled. Looking up, I saw a pendulum-holding guard with one foot planted squaring on my fingers. It turned and looked down, straight at me. Alarm bells started going off in my head. I panicked, tried to swing away and...

The alarm bells grew louder and louder until they turned into the sound of my (actual) phone ringing. So I woke up. Damnit!

The Nerdy Side

To quote myself and all the gaming geeks out there:

"If I substitute three levels from my wizard/fighter/bard with two levels of warlock and one level of sorcerer, I should be able to increase my average damage output per round by approximately 1.45 points per swing"

Now substitute all the gaming terms with resistors and electronic jargon and you have yourself an engineer.

A Certain Creative Fanwork

Code Name: SHUFFLE
Gender: FEMALE
Power: KEYED COORDINATE EXCHANGE
Level: 3

She can "key" an object to one of her ten fingers, and exchange their positions by touching the correponding finger to the other. Teleported objects retain their momentum and direction. If the original object is heavily modified or damaged since time of 'keying', the teleportation will become unrealiable. Works on Organic and Inorganic, though the latter is prefarable due to lower variance.

She combines this power with throwing knives attached to ropes to effectively "jump-fly". She can also teleport keyed foes into horrible traps, or into a prison itself. Besides this she is a skilled acrobat and gymnast and a frighteningly skiled card-shark.

Her power, due to the simplicity of using "keyed" objects, consumes very little power and requires less concentration. Shuffle mostly relies on tricks, traps, and tranquilisers (poisons) in battle to defeat foes.

She has some training with a elephant gun for shooting foes from afar.

Code Name: CANDYMAN
Gender: MALE
Power: OBJECT-LINKED CLAIRVOYANCE (REFLECTIVE SURFACES)
Level: 3
SPOILER: His power is actually magic-based

He can 'link' two reflective or see through surfaces (usually glass) together as light-only portals. This translate into the ability to use any looking glass as a camera, linked to things like his glasses, his watch, the screen of his phone...etc.

Strength of link affects clarity of image and is limited by distance. At high levels of clarity it is possible for his image to appear in the glass being viewed through. To 'acquire' a surface he needs to have at least visual sight of it, though touch works better. Once acquired to touch he can look through it without trouble. It is not unusual for him to "sight hop" by using multiple reflective surfaces to gain visual of a normally closed off area.

He is not much of a front-line, usually supports his team with intel via comm links.

Code Name: RICOCHET
Gender: FEMALE
Power: PERFECT COLLISION
Level: 4

She can create a "field" around a particular object which results in "perfectly elastic" or "perfectly inelastic" collisions with all objects. Usually she employs this with metal balls to create barriers, injure opponents, or perform complex long range maestro-type attacks. She encloses a ball in a "perfectly elastic" field and drops the field millimetres from impact. To increase power she uses a specially modified ping-pong racket. She can also use the "perfectly elastic" field on her shoes for mobility, or a "perfectly inelastic" field to perform stunts like bullet catching (all energy is split between her and the bullet, so while she gets knocked back no penetration occurs. Blunt damage will still have an effect due to shock of impact, so if done improperly her bones will break)

She's the team's main power muscle and defense. While not the most tactically sound she is good at improvising on the battlefield.

Code Name: BLACKBOX
Gender: MALE
Power: HISTORY DRIVE (PSYCHOSCOPY)
Level: 3

He employs psychoscopy to download the entire "history" of an object. Effectively, this allows him to extract data from secured disks or thumbdrives as he needs simply find a point in the object's history when it was accessed or unsecured to "read" its contents. Doing so allows him to download information from almost anything, such as video feeds from a camera, or data from a computer. A major disadvantage of his power is that it is very time consuming to sort through an object's history. To overcome this, he can "download" information and "store" it for later reading. This consumes a lot of memory and energy, which is why he "forgets" all unneccessary information once the relevant data is found.

He can overclock this ability in a short time to temporarily gain complete knowledge and understanding of an object's history, the way it was used and its limitations. Doing so lets him use almost any device, weapon or tool with the skill of its previous owners. However as this knowledge is foreign to his mind the strain of utilizing this information to the max strains his mental stamina, and can be employed to a maximum of 10 minutes.

He uses a lesser version of this in his everyday life to speed read, pick up various skills and languages. As such he is a jack of all trades, and has skills in multiple kinds of fire arms and martial arts.

A negative side effect of his power is that he always seems somewhat distracted due to the mass of information clamouring inside his brain.

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Just some ideas running through my head from watching too much of a certain popular anime. I'll clean it up later.

Soul Food

The doctor just sat there, mumbling.

That was how Amelia found him, thin and ragged with bloodshot irises and gray bags under his eyes. Mumbling, mumbling.

"Ethan? Ethan, what's wrong? I haven't seen you for days. You skipped church, didn't answer my calls, are you...Ethan!"

He jerked at the sound of her voice. The look he gave her was chilling. Haunted, like a man who just performed murder or found out his mother died in his abscence. One bony hand clutched the cross around his neck. It hung there by a small silver chain, which was shaking. His knuckles were white. His wrists could not stop jerking.

"...thetic foods..." she caught him mumbling.

"What? What food?"

"Synthetic Foods. Pills. Nutrition jabs. Lab-grown proteins. Drips."

His voice was barely a whisper.

"You mean the Artificial Nutritional Sources project? Didn't it get scrapped? I remember the biologists saying they didn't provide everything grown organics could. Said something was missing. One of the biggest mysteries in the field in fa-"

"I solved it."

"What?"

"I found out what's missing."

"You did? That- that's amazing! You could- we could-" 

"Come look through the scope."

Suddenly, Amelia felt uneasy. 

"Erm. Can I? I mean, it's your discovery, and I have my own..projects..to..."

"Look through it!"

The chain snapped. A tiny trail of blood seeped out from where his fingers gripped the cross and dripped onto the floor.

Hesitantly, frightened and worried, Amelia looked.

"Is- is that...?"

"Yes."

"You mean all this time, we have been-"

"Yes."

"It looks so...beautiful. So fragile..."

"Can you see how it screams? How it begs for release, for a right to exist? It doesn't need words, it talks straight to yours. They are the same thing after all."

She shuddered.

"The soul. You discovered the soul. And every living thing has one. So when we eat something, does that mean...?"

"Yes. Look through the other scope."

"...I think I'm going to be sick."

"True Soul Food. Hah! Guess we never knew how accurate that was eh? Ha. Hahaha..."

The grin he gave her was the crazed, starved smile of one who had not eaten for three days, and would probably never eat again.

Schrödinger

He's here! He's here!

Commotion spreads, the only word to describe the reaction being...excitement. Or reluctance. Or eagerness mixed with fear, joy with sadness. All these feelings suspended simutaneously with each other, flickering between the poles, never quite reaching a state of rest

Rest. Such a simple word. But how does one describe its opposite? Not quite non-existence, not quite shadow. Only the observer could bring it out of the endless, and into the real.

Color surged into being. Light, matter, gravity, these things came first. The observer was approaching. He had never come here before, lost in his own sphere of familiarity. But now, another sphere would be experienced. And thus, experience back.

The world condensed. Walls and tiles, lights as science gave birth to electricity. Shops flowered, smells swirled in the air. Air. That too was observed and thus existed now. Or rather, always had.

The lucky ones, they became the background shoppers, the throngs that filled every such hub of civilization. It savored the words,  new concepts beyond the abstract mathematical potentials that were before. The observer walked about now, sampling the air, browsing the shops. More and more of them flowed into being, and so the world solidified. Yet there were still others left behind. "It" was left behind, now that it understood such things. But there was nothing one could do, until the observer-

The observer sat down.

And closed his eyes.

No! The world wavered. Too soon, too sudden. Light faded. The shoppers grew misty. Smell remained, as did sound. But the others, the left behind...the chance was slipping away.

It couldn't. So close. Just a glimpse...

The observer opened his eyes.

The world returned. Confirmation, acceptance. Nothing else remained.

The others faded away. There was nothing left to observe, and so, nothing remained.

And yet, in the corner of his eye, a tiny glance; a young girl, also sitting on the bench, quietly sipping her bottle of tea. 

It was enough.

The observer- no, the boy yawned, got up, stretched his limbs. He kept glancing at his watch, occasionally smoothing his hand over what little hair remained on his head. A recruit perhaps, fresh out of camp. 

She watched the boy walk away, old potentials fading while the real ones remained. A strange joy filled her, one she could find no explanation for. How strange.

A brief shrug of the shoulders, a small sip of the tea. Life went on, as it always had.

It felt wonderful.

Snippets

A large dog, its fur the color of finely ground coffee, trotting merrily across a zebra crossing and then along a sidewalk, disappearing as the bus turns into the next junction.

Two teenagers sitting side by side upon the swings under the moonless sky, their long dark hair tinted orange by the dull glow of an aging streetlamps. I jog past.

In an MRT, a pair of girls communicate silently in rapid sign language while the world chatters noisily past. My stop arrives.

These are the snippets of life, the stories yet untold.

Always, I wonder: what if? What if I had?