Fridge Logic: Aliens & Superpowers

[Dr Archeville]

Freedom City is a nexus for superpowered beings, both heoric and villainous; it seems most countries have fewer metahumans than Freedom City does. Why? There are a number of reasons, but there's one few have considered: there are so many there because Freedom City is where it is easiest to be a metahuman, not just socially but physically as well.

Freedom City sits on a dimensional axis point: it's the spot where Centurion's life pod entered (and that rift is now housed in the Atom Familiy's home), and it's where Omega has chosen to attack because that's the point where it would be easiest to send the entire universe into the gaping maw of the Terminus. Exposure to Terminus energies is known to cause superpowered mutations (an idea originally posited by Kitt at the ATT, which we've taken up as canon), but a low level "background Terminus radiation" could be enough to warp the local laws of reality such that it's more likely that chemical accidents and radiation exposures and so on would grant superpowers (rather than slow agonizing death from cancer). (Terminus energies are of course not the only reason for superpowers: metahumans existed long before the earliest Terminus Invasion [though T-Rays can probably travel through time], and not everyone exposed to T-radiation gains powers, so there are other factors at work.)

There's less of this background radiation elsewhere on Earth, so there are fewer metahumans there; the laws of reality there are less mutable, less conducive to superpowered mutations. And there's even less when you go off-Earth or out of the Sol system, so extraterrestrials are less likely to develop atypical superpowers (apart from whatever is standard for their species). That's one reason so many aliens want Earth: to find out why it has so many metahumans, or because they know exactly why there are so many and want the T-Ray-soaked realty for themselves.

[Avenger Assembled]

I like all this quite a bit, and strikes me as something worth canonizing.

However, I'd make the small distinction between cosmic/dimensional energies in general and the energies of the Terminus in particular; the Doom Coil is not the same thing as the Cosmic Coil. Harrier's pike may fire Terminus radiation with the cosmic energy descriptor, just as Omega personally may do the same, but cosmic energy does not necessarily have the Terminus descriptor. While Terminus radiation is one of the many dimensional energies in which Freedom City is awash, it is by no means the only one!

(A small distinction, true, but when zealots whip out anti-Terminus Powers nullifier rays to take down heroes, it'll be a good one to keep in mind for cosmic or dimensional heroes not powered by entropy...even if just to get an HP out of the GM for the Complication! <_>

[Dr Archeville]

Right, the Cosmic Coil is a series of paths through the dimensions, the Doom Coil is the thing in the center of the Terminus that sucks up universes.

I've always seen Terminus Radiation as one of two things (if I could reconcile them into one, all the better!). Either it's the "anti-matter counterpart" to Cosmic Energy (like how The Opposing Force is the Negative Zone's version of the Power Cosmic, which has been described as "the life force of the Universe"), or it's a blend of the remnants of all the other energies from all the other universes the Doom Coil has devoured (electromagnetic, quantum, magical, psionic, etc., even bits of energies found in no other place but those devoured universes, including their unique Cosmic/Dimensional energies). (Started out as the first, became the second as it consumed more and more universes?)

(Anti-T-Baby cuffs work by separating out all those energies into their component bits, but they won't work on other Cosmic-empowered beings because their energies are "pure," nothing to separate; Cosmic-Cuffs designed to power down Cosmically-enhanced beings suppress their specific Cosmic energy, but can't work on the bouillabaisse of Cosmic & other energies in a Terminus-empowered being.)