Over at friend of the blog Max's discord server we've slowly but surely been putting together a collective universe of superheroes, supervillains, and superweirdos. Max's contributions can be found on his blog here: https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/search/label/superheroes, and mine can be found below:
Zoe Zhang, A.K.A. Cacophony (formerly Zoetrope): A chaotic sometimes-hero-sometimes-villain.
The Zoe Zhang of the "main universe" was born as a brane-anomaly, inheriting the combined physical potential of every other version of herself across the multiverse - while her other selves were left weak and sickly.
Zoe-prime lived a blessed life as a superhuman celebrity. The other Zoes suffered, from sickness, from bullying, from the stress and financial troubles their families went through to keep them alive. On the night of their 21st birthday, this collective trauma coalesced into something dense enough to sink a pit through their shared subconscious and the very web of worlds itself.
Zoe-prime's PR firm would, when morning came, spin the property destruction of this first incident as a bad reaction to her first time drinking legally. This explanation wore through after the next incident, and the one after. When Zoe sought out and attacked a retired elementary school teacher seemingly at random it became clear that something entirely more unusual than being unable to handle her liquor was at work.
When a Zoe besides Zoe-prime enters REM sleep, her mind is dragged through the hole torn in their collective unconsciousness, and enters Zoe-prime's body as a "co-pilot", for lack of a better term. A handful of other Zoes are insufficient to overwhelm Zoe-prime's will, acting as nothing more than annoying mental voices, but when a critical mass is reached they can hijack her and take her for a ride.
It took a couple nights for any Zoes to realize that this was more than a dream they were having. Reactions once they realized differed. Some relished the opportunity to enjoy a super-capable body for once, others the chance for revenge against bullies, callous hospital staff, and Zoe-prime, who they saw as having stolen their health from them. A few had moral compunctions against using a human being as their remote control drone, and fought against the other possessing spirits when their turn came.
Zoes of similar inclinations sorted into factions, coordinating their sleep schedules and countering their opposition's plans to make the most of their time in the driver's seat of Zoe-prime.
To anyone who is not a Zoe, her actions seem totally unpredictable.
(Powers: Human physical capabilities orders of magnitude above the norm - strength, toughness, senses, rate of healing, etc. While possessed by a critical mass of other Zoes, Cacophony is surrounded by a psychic "HUM" that disorients and agitates those around her.)
Neuteragonist: Masked vigilante dedicated to the neutering & spaying of all pets and strays.
Deja Pee-yew: A supervillain who can reproduce any smell they've smelled before.
Deep Fryend: Sentient seed oil developed by a fast food company that has since been shut down by the FDA & financially ruined by a class action lawsuit. Able to influence and eventually take over people who eat food fried in it. Survives in nomadic phantom-franchise of guerilla food trucks supported by quisling foodie critics who swear by its superior flavour and crispiness.
The White Bison Assassination Agency: A villainous group with no shortage of sympathizers. Founded in the '70s by former-hippie academics who didn't go square like many of their contemporaries. Use ritual combining entheogens and group psychotherapy to mingle their memories, personalities, and expertise, becoming closer to one super-human in many bodies than individuals.
Like the name suggests a White Bison assassin assassinates someone, never killing anyone besides their target, and either dying with their target or soon afterwards. If a disguise is not required, they will wear their distinctive animal mask. They do this in return for an excruciating fee (pegged to the means of their employer) and only if the employer's reason for the assassination is accepted by the White Bison collective. The fee may be waived if the employer agrees to join the collective afterwards.
What reasons the Agency will accept have shifted with the animus of the collective itself - they started out targeting executives of companies that had covered up pollution, arms dealers, and suchlike. There was a stint in the '90s when they went after cheating spouses. Nowadays the collective seems to be more actively political, not just eliminating bad actors but trying to shape their replacements, and is splintering within itself potentially because of this.
W.H.Y.N.O.T.: "Well Here's Your New Order of Things" - a contra-science collective - like an outsider art collective but for science. Range from full-blown cranks to serious hobbyist scientists to guys like that guy who figured out the structure of DNA on LSD, and then some of those cranks have reality altering psychic powers they're not aware of, or have smuggled fragments of alternate dimensions where their pet theories are true. There's a lot of W.H.Y.N.O.T. messageboard drama.
Sister Sepia: Villain. Anomalous origin, opaque to investigation by W.H.Y.N.O.T. and other research bodies. Colloquially described as a "nostalgia devil".
Appears to individuals obsessed with the past, so long as that past occured within the last 200 years. She appears in a photograph (potentially video nowadays), in the fashion of the era which her "anchor" individual is obsessed with (e.g. an old man obsessed with his peak as a high-school football star might see her in a yearbook photo in a period-appropriate cheerleader outfit), and always with sepia-tone skin.
Sister Sepia offers to restore that past to her anchor individual in return for sacrifices of the new. Break off a budding relationship, and she might make their memories as sharp as if they'd happened yesterday. Sabotage a promising fusion reactor, and she can create an indistinguishable-from-life illusion of their desired period, even drawing in key others to add verisimilitude. Give her a bunch of babies, and she can wrap a whole neighbourhood in a sepia veil, re-writing it with a re-enaction of the period repeating over and over again.
Demob: A sort of spirit animating the corpses of "soldiers who didn't make it back after their war ended" in a serial fashion - like WWI ends, some French guy's marching back home, steps on unexploded ordnance that then explodes - he'd be a candidate for Demob.
Each Demob comes back into the world not really understanding what's going on, just that they've got a second chance at life, and over time they get more powers, like calling up the ghosts of fallen comrades as a squad or tapping into the skills and memories of past Demobs, and that accelerates until they realize they're burning out, they're living on borrowed time, and they've got a short window in which to find a worthy candidate to be the next Demob and hopefully leave them enough info on the condition that they can make the most of their second chance.
The XXX Regime: Near-future narco-pornographic censor-state - popular opinion among chronologists is that it will arise from the Democratic Party's attempts to appeal to young men.
"REPORT DISSIDENTS TO YOUR LOCAL COOMGOONS FOR POINTS YOU XAN TRADE IN FOR GOODY GOOD BOY INJECTIONS" (they say xan instead of can)
"Remember CITIZEN your MOOD is CONTAGIOUS - avoid unpleasant sensoria and remember to take your regular MAINTENACE DOSE"
let people enjoy things let people enjoy things let people enjoy things let people enjoy things let people enjoy things let people enjoy things
ALGOL Algol: Once thought to be a supervillain, now understood to be several different individual migratory electro-mathematical alien organisms. The ALGOL Algols' metabolism is based on computation, which they were able to offload and accelerate by injecting animal nervous systems with calculations to later extract after they'd been solved - a process which could range from exhausting to lethal for the injected creature.
Encounters with ALGOL Algols have decreased dramatically since the waning of the use of magnetic-core memory - a technology now believed to have interfered with the organisms' navigation-sense. This decrease, together with a nature documentary about the organisms narrated by the ghost of David Attenborough, has led to widespread sympathy and nostalgia for the ALGOL Algols. What rare encounters with them still occur are now able to be solved without harm to the organisms or the people around them thanks to greater understanding of their behaviour, but some people still put themselves in harms way due to a rosy idea of the still-potentially-dangerous ALGOL Algols.
Pharmarchon: She made a vaccine for cancer but it turns you into a gross-looking naked molerat-person. It's mostly old people who get it because they worry about cancer more and worry about more wrinkles less but there's been a lot of political controversy about all these gross-looking and long-lived elderly naked molerat-people collecting on social security and pensions and holding onto properties and whatnot. There's a split in the naked molerat-person community too over whether their vaccine should be given to everyone who wants it or whether they should charge a lot for it and pool the funds for the community members to be able to sustain themselves in case anti-naked molerat-person legislation is ever implemented.
Diablo Cody's forbidden powerpuff girls adult reboot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-mSBRfF_piag4GKGNP8GD-Lu2JZwaDBg/view
Shokupain: Some people are fucked for life right out of the gates. Some of those people, really just one of those people actually, is a sapient, humanoid loaf of milk bread. He is soft, fluffy, and delicious. His life is pain. He will never die.
Why is he like this? No answer is forthcoming. He just sprang to life one day in a bakery's oven, howling in agony.
Shokupain is filled with aimless and impotent rage, existential horror, and so on, and so tries to sign on with supervillain teams as "muscle". He is so pitiful that he is often allowed to do this, and even have pictures taken of him stomping on a defeated hero's face with his squishy legs.
Several time travelers, oracles, and suchlike figures attest that eventually Shokupain will grow out of his youthful angst and become something of a boddhisattva.
Violence Sandler: People called him the most annoying method actor who ever lived. While he was doing a film he'd only answer to his character's name, even off-set - that's the mildest part of it. While playing Space-Admiral Pultrene in Starpower: Showstopper's Swansong he divorced his wife and disowned his children, as an alien of high civilization would never mingle with lowly Earthlings.
But behind these irritating habits there was a potent and dangerous mind. As part of taking on a role Violence Sandler would learn any skills they'd plausibly know, from martial arts to political graft, acquiring a dizzyingly diverse expertise.
Maybe keeping so many roles in his head broke him. Maybe it was snorting lines of the experimental ganglio-enzyme Neurasplurge at a party. Whatever the case, Violence Sandler stopped being the man he was and became, well, Violence Sandler, many men, a robot, an alien, and a cartoon badger in one body.
Existing in reality instead of film is intensely dysphoric for Violence Sandler. He needs the strictures of genre, tropes, jump cuts and shaky cams. People who play along can make a temporary ally of him. Those who can't face his wrath.
Remedy: A lady that works at a medical insurance company. She is also the inheritor of an ancient Lithuanian tradition of martial arts that uses biofeedback techniques, pressure point strikes, and protein heat shock to cure conditions from warts to autoimmune diseases. She uses her day job to find targets for her superheroic activities, kidnapping them to a rural family property to lock them up and jab them around until they're cured. Most people don't like being locked up and jabbed, so she's taken on the identity of Remedy to get away with such activities - for the greater good of course.
The Hashinoko-Iji: A minority group in Japan, people descended from the village of Kiroyama in the Ishikawa prefecture, where during the Edo period there was a cult that worshiped a wasp-god.
While initially human sacrifice was practiced to propitiate this god, the villagers discovered that the life sacrificed to the god didn't have to be a life lost - the god would accept a sacrifice-by-adoption, taking on the sacrifice as kin.
There's a yakuza family of hashinoko-iji called the Bosozoku Bees and they're all wasp-hybrid people, because hashinoko-iji can have trouble finding conventional employment because they're wasp-people. The Bosozoku Bees are a nice & goofy yakuza (like in the Yakuza videogames) that helps people, and their "powers" are just what parts of them are waspy like one has wings, another has exoskeletal armour, etc.
The Free Republic of Hogtown: Formerly known as Toronto. During the trade disputes with the USA in the '80s some Ontario pig merchants felt the squeeze - and so they started mixing more and more unsellable pig-product into the feed for the rest of their pigs. At some point a prion infection was introduced into this horrid porcine ouroboros, and at some point later that prion infection became Transmissible Clathrate Encelopathy.
TCE kick-started neural development in large mammals, making the infected pigs as smart as humans. They broke out of containment and spread the infection, creating a revolutionary army, and took over a good chunk of Ontario, including its provincial capital Toronto. Renaming the city Hogtown, the ensmartened pigs and their other animal allies were able to scare Canada into a truce by threatening to unleash an airborne strain of TCE across the continent.
There's gammonmen living in the sewers now. They're what happens when a human gets infected by TCE - they become ingenious and insane, big ruddy brutes addicted to ensmartened animal flesh.
The whole city and surrounding environs were redesigned from the ground-up for the use of hands-less quadrepeds. A big investment from the Soviet Union gave Hogtown the funds for this (though Hogtown did not adopt the Soviets' communist ideology as hoped) and the funds attracted scientists, engineers, teachers, artists, utopian kooks, and suchlike, filling the place with human weirdos alongside normal talking animals.
The money tailed off after a while, and Hogtown was never able to fully make the transition into a Singapore-like high-tech island hub. There's tarnish on the chrome dream, everyday tensions between the humans and the animals, and between the self-styled-messianoink pigs of the founding families and the other animals. There is a tentative alliance being discussed with the naked mole rat-people made by Pharmarchon in the States.
And wherever there are weirdoes and the seed of a dream, super-somethings-and-others will follow.
Phaetonite: Also called nibirum - a mineral from a planet that doesn't exist. Maybe it never existed - it's from this maybe that phaetonite draws its properties and its pseudo-existence.
Planets rule times (and are ruled by times - as above so below and all that) - Mars ruling times of war, Saturn the harvest, and so on. Phaeton rules untime, times that never were. Some credit it with the dark ages, others with this post-modern era.
Phaeton's domain and phaetonite are interlinked. Falsify fossil records, plant artifacts where they're not supposed to be, weave narratives of lost civilizations - you get deposits of phaetonite. Get your hands on some phaetonite and the whole field of para-chronics opens up to you - alternate timelines, hypothetical weapons, and so on. Exposure to exploding phaetonite can grant people similar abilities, and/or fuck them up in ways that proper causality can't account for.
Headbug: One million years from now there will be a sick child. Even in that time there is no cure for this child's sickness. By then the wildest dreams of the deep future will have came and went - the Dyson swarm which brought boundless abundance of energy collapsed into the Sun, bloating it like a red and rotting round of ham. This child will not live to see adulthood.
On the crumbling and blasted terra-platform where this child lived their parent grew desperate. They wanted their child to know more than the ruin of their body and their world. And so they cobbled together their child's fantastic machinery of life-support with a broadcast station, performed abhorrent calculations with numbers we don't yet know, and sent their child's consciousness whirling back through temporo-spatial whorls around the dying Sun.
The method worked, in a sense, but it was crude. That child's consciousness diffracted into a million million coordinates. Most landed in empty space, rocks, dust - petered out. When they struck rich neuronal substrate, as might be found in a human brain, they folded them like prions of inconceivable complexity, birthing Headbug.
Headbug resembles a legless, wingless earwig made of soft, pale flesh. Headbug has the traumatized mind of that terminally-ill child from a million years from now. Headbug has total control over the body of whatever higher animal it's in the brain of.
There have been lots of Headbugs - some heroes, some villains, most somewhere in between. Sometimes they seem to be separate instances of similar personalities, other times they share memories, awareness. All have a wonder for simple things like eating and running around, and for the natural world.
Stormsarge: From Hy-Brasil to The Tempest, humanity has long had stories of islands and ships lost in storms, lost in mist.
The USS Albertson was one such lost ship - similar to but less well-known than the USS Eldridge of the Philadelphia Experiment, it was lost at sea with all hands during a routine training exercise disrupted by a storm that appeared quite literally out of nowhere, dark clouds boiling out of a clear blue sky.
Since then the USS Albertson has appeared off coasts across the globe with its remaining crew, led by the self-styled Stormsarge, and it is always accompanied by a ferocious storm. The crew, and especially Stormsarge, are attuned to this storm, unaffected by the chill of its rain, helped along by its tremendous winds, and able to call down lightning when threatened.
The crew do their best to mitigate the damage of this storm & evacuate vulnerable people, while also trading for or looting the supplies they apparently still need. They also appear to be able to steer proactively to coastal cities in great danger - greater danger than their storm would cause, in any case - to help with their defense.
PENITENTIARY ROSE, HERALD OF THE VERM-MILLION WORM(S): Once Milbert Finkle, a member of the contra-science collective W.H.Y.N.O.T. (Well Here's Your New Order of Things) who specialized in quantum consciousness research and developing devices to help those suffering from locked-in syndrome and similar debilitating conditions.
Milbert became Penitentiary Rose one night while engaging in astral projection exercises into his own neurons, where to his horror he discovered a quantum super-organism tunneling through his microtubules and phase spaces: the Verm-Million Worm(s). As the Worm(s) devoured his mind, Milbert found himself entirely un-digested - having no mind of its own, the Worm had no way to break down his thoughts and memories once he was inside it. In other words, Milbert had transcended his frail human body by being absorbed into a fraction of the Worm(s). Being a charitable sort, he decided to share this gift with the world.
Penitentiary Rose's typical M.O. is to attack old folks' homes and hospital wards for those with terminal diseases to "save" those near death by absorbing them. He's not good at taking "no thank you" for an answer. In his downtime he usually operates a pirate radio station, on which he broadcasts messages from other people absorbed by the Worm(s) to their loved ones, or their deranged politically-motivated messages, or whatever else they might want to say.
Other members of W.H.Y.N.O.T. strongly disavow Penitentiary Rose's actions - some going to far as to shun other quantum specialists - with the most popular hypothesis among them being that Milbert is not in fact in control of the Worm(s), but that it's hijacked what's left of his consciousness to its own beastly directives.
A slightly less-popular hypothesis is that Milbert used powerful psychedelics to assist his astral projection, and we're all just figments of the bad trip he's still having.
The Firstborn: A race of gigantic plasma-beings that existed for like a fraction of a second shortly after the Big Bang, yet were so powerful and wise that they saw the potential of the universe after them even if they knew they were going to die in moments, and so left artifacts and energies to empower heroes or villains (as their personal ethics took them) who would arise billions of years later.
