So, I restarted this several times, never quite feeling like what I had down was a good beginning for what I wanted this fic to be. Eventually, I decided to power through and just put it down and build from there. I had some issues coming up with a cape name for her, just like Taylor does in canon, so if any of you have any ideas on that front I'd be happy to hear them. This was shorter than I wanted it to be but I've been having a lot of issues at school so I wanted to get this out before anything else happened to delay me even further despite the lackluster ending.
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As dangerous as generalizations can be, I am about to make one. Cape names tend to be references of some sort. Be it about their powers, their past, their personality, or just something that sounded cool to them cape names tend to mean something. There is a reason no one has been saved by 'The Great Hero Bob', and that's because parahumans are a symbol. When one person suddenly achieves more power than would be even considered possible a few decades ago it's impossible for them to just remain ordinary. This is not a comment on the psychology of parahumans themselves but rather on the culture that venerates them. We as humans used to do as such to folk heroes throughout history, Vlad the Impaler was an important historical figure but because we decided to view him as more he has become the quintessential vampire. The advent of Parahumans has allowed us to do this in mass, a world filled with a handful of living legends for any and every ideal or belief out there. This is why names can be so important, it is a cape's first step in becoming a modern-day demigod and most of the time if you're paying attention, they can tell you something important.
A great example of this is The Triumvirate. The word eidolon was originally Greek meaning a phantom or spirit, through the years it picked up the meaning of an idealized version of a person or thing. It is no mistake then that as a hero Eidolon gives of an air of power that is almost unearthly. Legend is a much simpler name to parse out; like the late Hero, it is a simple word detailing what he wants to be viewed as. The Triumvirate as a whole can be considered legends among legends and the man himself seems to run with this idea. While Eidolon is undoubtedly the strongest of the three, and it's Alexandria that little children most often want to grow up to be it is Legend that gives the inspiring speeches, Legend that can be larger than life than by simply being there without even using his power. Alexandria is a bit more complicated, instead of naming herself after an ideal or taking something out of classic Mythology she chose a city. As the capital of Egypt throughout the Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine eras it was a center of commerce and culture though it is best known for its Great Library, a historical wonder of the world that the heroine has stated was her inspiration for her name. It may seem strange that one of the strongest Brutes in the world would draw attention to what many consider a minor Thinker power when compared to her physical prowess. What's important to remember is that power can be misused, accidentally or purposefully, without intellect and wisdom guiding it. The name Alexandria is a direct reference to that wisdom.
Perhaps even more important is their group name. They aren't called the Triumvirate because they are powerful and there are three of them. They are directly likening themselves to the most powerful people in ancient Rome. While this Triumvirate is well on the path to being more historically significant than its predecessor, I have to wonder if anyone has ever told Alexandria to "Beware the Ides of March"?
Macabre humor aside trends of cape names throughout the years can lend some interesting insights in…
Angerly I closed the book and stuffed it into my backpack doing my best to pretend that I didn't notice how my hands were shaking slightly, today had been rough. I had picked up 'Capes and Cowls, the Frames of the Modern Epic' from the library in the hope that it would help with my floundering attempt to create a cape persona. Since at this point my entire costume consisted of my usual street clothes and a cheap mask I had found in the back corners of a pawn shop it would probably be an invaluable resource, but it still felt like a personal attack when it opened up talking about the Importance of cape names when I couldn't even come up with a good list. I was an Alexandria package, the classic heroic powerset, and despite years of childhood preparing me for this exact moment I was drawing a blank.
Drumming my fingers against the cheap vinyl of the bus seat I glanced out the window, I hadn't gotten much reading in today meaning that we were still a couple of stops from my destination. Currently, we were in one of the better parts of town, but in Brockton Bay that just meant that the obvious gang tags were reserved for the alleyways. You could tell it was Empire 'protected' territory because everyone walking on the sidewalks were white and the small rundown ramen shop on the corner looked like it would be going out of business soon. A few blocks south from here that shop would probably be doing decent business off passerby's and the Bay's decent Asain American population but that was Brockton bay for you, we had second highest percentage of Japanese refugees and immigrants on the east coast but they had to live next to actual Nazi's.
Doing my best to look like I was still mindlessly gazing out of the window I used the window's reflection to take to look at my fellow bus passengers. Once I had determined that, no I didn't recognize anybody, and that the one skinhead on board was in no position to watch me I felt myself relax slightly. I know it was paranoid as hell, but I had taken this bus to the same spot at around the same time for almost a week and part of me was terrified that someone somewhere would make a connection and trace it back to me. I knew that compared to the big players in the city I wasn't much of a catch, but I had read a couple dozen pages on horror stories on lock PHO threads about forced recruitments and I was not going to take any unnecessary chances.
Things would probably get better once I started going out as a hero; I had read somewhere that the first month as an independent was crucial, after that you became somewhat cemented into the public eye and the would stop seeing you as a recruitment target. That was of course when they started treating you as a regular target and things got bad. I knew that statistics were bad for independents, like really really bad, when it had first really sunk into my head how dangerous what I was planning was I had nearly broken down and told dad. He would have done the responsible thing and called the PRT and I would have been a Ward member before the end of the week, but I just couldn't. Trusting my life, my sanity, to the admiration of the PRT and let myself be shoved into the public eye, the mere thought added to the ever-present pressure in my chest. Oddly enough it had been the PRT's insistence that the Wards was more of an exclusive club than a junior police force that had been the straw that broke the camel's back; the idea of putting that much power over my future in a strangers hand for nothing more than a social club didn't sit right with me. Shaking my head, I shifted my focus to something far more important, trying to understand my powers.
My powers were broken, or at the very least not working as they should. I had tentatively classified myself as a Breaker; most of the time my powers were off, but I could turn them on with minimal mental effort. This was mostly to my benefit because my powers had several cosmetic changes that would make it obvious that I was a cape to anybody that saw me. One of the downsides, because of course my power came with multiple downsides, was that I needed to use my power. It started out subtle, the simple knowledge that I could do more, be more than I was. I hadn't even known I had powers at first, brushing it off as just a particularly strange response to the locker incident, but it could get so much worse. A little over two hours without using my power and I got jittery, of course, I couldn't just duck out of the classroom every two hours, and the brief moments I was able to steal whenever I was certain I was alone did little to take the edge off. I didn't experiment with how long I could hold off in-between uses, the fractured memories of the two and a half days I had spent not knowing that there was a way to release the pressure was more than enough of a deterrent. I was mostly alone with this issue, while some of the wilder theories thrown around PHO suggested that all parahumans had the drive to use their powers it seemed more psychological than my problem. The closest I could find to my problem was that most Tinkers had a strong desire to tinker that varied in intensities from cape to cape, apparently, some had it so bad that they went into fugue state with periods of lost time. Sadly, the few types that established Tinkers had deigned to post on public boards basically boiled down to 'Join the Protectorate, then you can Tinker whenever you want'. That, of course, wasn't even touching on the seemingly random inconsistencies on the limits of my power that legitimately scared me.
Brutes were scary and if you knew where to look there were entire websites dedicated to cataloging what happened when they didn't fully understand their limits. Humans could be incredibly fragile in the worst of times and inconsistent super strength was practically begging for a disaster, and assuming the same issues applied to my durability and flight it could be the difference between life and death. Maybe I could find a way to test my powers in a consistent way, that way I could plot out the general trend of fluctuations and try to find a pattern. The issue was how to go about doing that, I didn't have the resources to set up a testing station, especially in the dirty back alleyway I had been using to change into my hero persona. With a groan I dug the book back out of my backpack, there was another twenty agonizing minutes before my stop and I needed a good distraction.