Episode 71 of the Letters Page - Superpower Sources

I have the power!   http://theletterspage.libsyn.com/episode-71-superpower-sources

Magical Girl Transformation Guise is best Guise.

(I've been waiting since seeing the proofs of OblivAeon to be able to make reference to that image. And now I can!)

I laughed so Hard both time now.

Also Not sure Christopher wanted us to tell who it was but who checks the forums?

I had something snarky and hilarious to say but I had forgotten it by the end of the podcast. D: All I know is I want to codify the power sources of my team of Sentinels-world-based heroes and it's driving me crazy. DX

I have a question for general Pre-OblivAeon stuff now.

What happened to OblivAeon to cause so many (18?) shards to be broken off? And how did the majority of them end up on Earth? I want blow by blow stories of how badass and scary he is, wading through alternate universes, and watching as the the Five Freedoms Team of that universe try their utmost to stop him and only manage to break off a sliver of his power.

~Komori

I think that’s what the OblivAeon episodes will answer and I know for sure I’ll be asking about that specifically at worst. 

I call baloney on the number of OblivAeon shards floating around out there.  We only know of a few specific ones outside the six on core-Earth, but there are enough to infer more.  In particular, every universe where there's an alternate version of Captain Cosmic and Infinitor has one.  That's the Quando universe for sure, probably the Inverse Universe (though we'll find out with the Inverse Prime Wardens episode which I'm sure will happen), and also the pun universes.  The pun universes add up to a lot all by themselves, since we know that every "legal" pun corresponds to an actual character, and there are certainly pun universes beyond the three confirmed so far.

Alternate versions of Proletariat should also be based on shards (e.g. Everyman, probably), and we know there are other random ones, like Iron Legacy Parse, that Disparation writers probably tossed around without really keeping track.

While I agree with MindWanderer that I think there would be more than teens of shards, I also fully believe that OblivAeon could lose an infinite number of shards and still be just as powerful.

In the terms of Mathematics, infinity is more a property than a number. It just means "always one more/less/in between."  To demonstrate, infinity can be subracted from infinity, and the result is still infinite. Example: the set of all real numbers is infinite, and you could subtract the set of all positive integers, which is also infinite, and the result comes out much the same as Adam's nail clippings example, in that you have a set that contains every negative real number, zero, and every positive non-integer.

Tachyon picked up an OblivAeon shard?

That’s what they said. 

For the OblivAeon shards, it could be that the characters in the various “pun” universes simply got their power from a different source.  For instance, there’s no reason that Everyman couldn’t have gotten his powers from some strange cloning experiment gone wrong.  So just because there are infinite versions of, say, Captain Cosmic, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all those versions were created via OblivAeon shard.  Certainly some of the Disparation stories we’ve gotten have shown us that the writers of Sentinels Comics / C&A are very willing to change back-stories and power sources for the alternate reality versions of the characters.

Also, while the number of alternate universes (and therefore shards) is theoretically infinite*, practically speaking they are not.  I don’t remember how many issues of Disparations were released (I want to say ~200?), but that puts a finite limit on the number of realities that “exist” within the pages of Sentinel Comics, and therefore have defined origins for the characters shown.  I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to say that the shards we know about are the only shards, and that in every other un-shown reality the heroes got their powers via other means.  (Unlikely that most of the shards managed to find their way into the primary reality? Yes.  Entirely unreasonable? No.)

But I get what they’re trying to go for: OblivAeon has not been damaged an infinite number of times.  Across the entire history of infinite realities*, OblivAeon has been damaged (enough to break off a toe nail) only a handful of times.  There are countless realities in which none could manage even that meagre achievment.  Let that sink in as he attacks your world.

That said, I was a little surprised by their answer.  Since we’ve already seen that OblivAeon can send parts of himself (Progeny) “back in time”, I was expecting them to say that many of the shards would be the result of the defeat of OblivAeon… those shards travelled across time and reality as a result of his defeat, seeding the multiverse with many of the shards that we see.

*On a related tangent, we’ve been treating the multiverse as essentially infinite, but I’m not sure that it is.  Or at least that it is any more…

OblivAeon wants to destroy all realities, and we know that he CAN succeed in doing so.  This means that OblivAeon has the ability to reduce an infinite number of realities to 0.  Somewhere along that process, the number of realities in the multiverse must therefore become finite.

Now, we don’t know how far along that process OblivAeon gets before he is stopped by the heroes.  Maybe the number of realities is still infinite, maybe it’s not.  Maybe it’s a finite number, but large enough (10^1,000,000,000) that it effectively doesn’t matter.  Since we know that OblivAeon was annoyed enough with the heroes of the primary reality to come down himself, my guess is he got far enough along in his plans and we’re no longer dealing with an infinite multiverse by the time of the OblivAeon event.

How limited has the multiverse become?  I have no idea.  But given what we do know, I think that the multiverse is actually finite.

Approximately. There were 25 in the first quarterly run and around 172 in the monthlies if the second volume runs up to the same month as Freedom Five #800 without missing any months. That being said, there is also the fact that the latter set have multi-issue arcs that further limit things (although I can also see some of the La Comodora/Chrono-Ranger era hitting a few realities in one issue, so that might be a wash).

That's a good point. If it's actually not the case, then I suspect Oblivaeon himself has to consciously manipulate time in order to achieve that effect. In other words, after he's gone, all his bits are staying right when they are.

But, like, when?

The question that prompts it starts at about 58:20 and the mention of Tachyon holding one is at around 58:54. It’s part of the explanation of what OblivAeon shards do (empowering normals vs. augmenting existing powers). It’s just in passing, no real story about the situation.

Yeah, it’s the actual story/situation that I’m wondering about, not when in the episode they mentioned it. The fact that they just offhandedly mentioned that Tachyon had held an OblivAeon shard was one of the things that most stuck out to me in this episode - and I wonder what the story is!

Yeah, that's an element that they didn't really talk about. If the 6 shards we know of (Void Guard, Proletariat, and the Lowsleys) and 12 more were broken off by specific major attacks, and Obvliaeon shards are kind of like skin, what about the rest of him?  When Oblivaeon dies, does it leave behind a whole heck of a lot of shards, or are there still only that very limited number – but if so, what happened to the rest of his body?

That's what prompted my question about how small shards could get and if there's like 'oblivaeon dust' floating around after the battle… if you blow up Oblivaeon, where does the majority of his power actually go?

But maybe the answer is to look back at the ARG "The Scion's Aid" page – apparently [REDACTED] was trying to steal 'bliv's power, so either [REDACTED] took it, or the heroes had to do something to get rid of that power to keep it away from [REDACTED]…

We know that more OblivAeon shards are created, at least in the Mist Storm universe. Both Citizen Dawn and Akash’Darsha end up with a whole passel of them. And there’s a mission card that nets you an OblivAeon shard for just beating the snot out of him.

In the episode they said there were only 18 oblivaeon shards, and it seemed like they meant *ever*, not just 'prior to the Oblivaeon fight', but maybe I misunderstood.

At 1:09:13 of the episode they start to talk about how, after the OblivAeon event, these things are "friggin everywhere" because the destruction of OblivAeon has increased the supply of his body parts laying around.

If I were going to square "only 18 shards" with "copies of people everywhere", I would assume that Oblivaeon Shards are also kind of singular things. The shard that empowers Captain Cosmic is the same shard across all timelines; when it broke, a whole mess of timelines got access to it. 

If that's the case, it would make sense that there are at least seven active shards in the main Sentinels timeline despite only 18 people across all of history and all the Mutiverse injuring him. Those were injuries by realities close enough to the "main" one to appear there. 

Off topic but technically not: who’s excited for Xtreme-verse today.

Accident is a category of superpower source that I’m a little tired of; if I were GMing a game of some superhero RPG, I would firmly discourage players from picking this origin. If they have an Absolute Zero level of backstory that makes it thematically fitting, I’d bend that rule, but if they were building Tachyon, I’d firmly push them out of the origin story being “hit by lightning while juggling weird chemicals” and toward something less, well, Golden Age levels of contrivance.

Higher Power for Ra I would disapprove of, but it would work for the original Anubis, since he’s never yet had his power stored in a relic which a normal person picks up and is transformed by.

About energy, KNYFE’s blades are obviously mostly manifested kinetic energy; it’s right there in the acronym, Kinetic Neutralizer. They glow for comic book reasons, which specifically contradicts the physics of our world (in real life, a lightsaber would be weaker than an otherwise identical weapon that shed no light, because glowing means radiating light energy and thus wasting potential destructive yield), and this is enough to let Dawn control them, but I wouldn’t say they’re primarily like laser blades. As for doctor Medico, we know he has a degree of solidity and mass, at least as much as like a Star Trek hologram, so he may be like 99.99% pure life energy, but there’s clearly some kind of particle cloud serving as his body, he can’t pass through a completely solid wall or the like, and when he’s KOed or worse, he collapsed into a pile of powder.

PS, I like that Medico makes “skin to skin” contact with an Oblivion Shard.

Singular for a Host spirit should never be “a Host”, btw. “The Host” is a collective term for the whole throng of such entities; calling one “a Host” is like calling a person “a crowd”. I’ll forgive Christopher this slip of the tongue, since he’s talking at legendary speed, but I still have to pick the nits that can be picked.

I would say that the number of shards that {spoiler} broke off of OA is correct, but each such shard then exists at a random point in spacetime, and then whenever a new timeline splits off, that oblivion shard exists simultaneously in both timelines, with a set of coordinates in each one. Thusly, the Proletariat shard broke off “Blivs”, and let’s say it landed precisely five miles due west of the front door of the Kremlin. In every universe that has a Kremlin, that shard starts out at that position, but in the Inverted Universe, somebody at some point in history went to Russia, picked up that shard, and transported it to America so they could create The Every Man.

Even if the shard appears to be destroyed, it’s only destroying the physical object which represents the coordinate set of that shard in that universe. One such shard is in England, where it gets absorbed by Captain Cosmic and Infinitor; the shard still exists in every universe that doesn’t have any people in England, just sitting there untouched. When Plaything creates an ape body for Infinitor, a new coordinate is created for just the green half of that shard, and thus the shard reappears as if it was physical, but it’s still not the superdimensional crystal flesh of OA, just a “web link” that displays that object within a particular dimension.

Last but not least, my character is the Inversiverse Dante Serpenta, the hero Whitesnake, sworn enemy of the Northeast Sentinels before they gain Infinity Stones and become the Void Raid.