Shard-Strike Universe!

The Shard-Strike Universe

What Everyone Knows

In 2018, the world was wracked by a new kind of storm.For seven days in September following the Autumn equinox, vividly colored bolts of lightning burst from the ground, arcing skyward. These outbursts happened seemingly at random, without warning or associated thunderstorms. The blasts left tiny fiery crystals of strangely altered matter laced into everything for miles around. Major fires erupted where the crystals ignited inside of trees, buildings, and even people, unchecked radiant energies incinerating them from within.

This terrifying phenomenon came to be known as “shard-strikes”.

With the lightning receding and the fires extinguished, what came next was even stranger. As governments, companies, and individuals began to gather and study the few crystals to survive the inferno of their creation, people who had been near the shard strikes developed extraordinary para-natural powers – abilities outside of our standard understanding of physics. Psychic abilities, flight, invisibility, enhanced senses, energy manipulation, invulnerability to conventional weapons… all appeared almost overnight, evoking the image of comic book superheroes and changing the global balance of power. Random individuals now had abilities that could shape the course of nations. Some became warlords, others the saviors of their community, many became celebrities… Most hid, only barely able to control or even understand their new powers and rightly terrified of what others might do to exploit them.

Approximately four thousand paranaturals had been created by the passing storm, often coming from places as remote as the blasts themselves. In the three years since perhaps another thousand more have been transmuted into paranaturals by the rare, isolated shard-strikes that still occur.

Neutrino Opacity/Quantum Fortification

The exact nature of paranatural abilities may never be fully understood but, useful predictions and related technologies have been possible based on Neutrino Opacity theory. NO/QF proposes the Shard-storm introduced two interrelated phenomena to human experience. Paranaturals organically and intuitively use a mixture of both effects to produce comic book-like “super powers”.

The first is Quantum Fortification. This supposes some matter near the shard-strikes became reinforced at an existential level, becoming “more real” than ordinary matter. This makes it incredibly resilient to harm or change. Quantum fortification explains paranatural invulnerability, as otherwise normal ‘fortified’ human flesh shrugs off blades, bullets, and even heavy military weapons. It also resists gross impacts like hitting the ground at terminal velocity, walking through fire, and being drenched in vicious solvents. These things are simply insufficiently ‘real’ to alter the target’s nature. More importantly, quantum fortification allows the second phenomenon to persist for more than mere picoseconds…

Neutrino Opacity allows matter from our traditional, visible universe to intercept the constant flux of high energy neutrinos cascading through every cubic centimeter of space by the trillions of trillions per second. Normally these particles are so energetic that only a handful interacts with the entire mass of the Earth in any given second. Neutrino opaque matter obstructs this constant flux, acting as a transformer stepping down effectively limitless amounts of energy. Without high tiers of quantum fortification, these materials instantly melt, vaporize, and fluoresce into x-rays. Some physicists compare theoretically limitless zero-point energy to NO/QF as “Zero-point is trying to scrape dew off of a leaf when the guy next to you is hanging on to a firehose for dear life!”

The Powers

NO/QF-based abilities are bewilderingly difficult to classify. Roughly two-thirds fit under the umbrella of “psychic powers.” Telepathy, ESP, mind control (body puppeteering, memory alteration, domination), alchemical transmutation, telekinesis, etc. Mental abilities may appear stand-alone or in conjunction with more physical possibilities.

Physically potent effects include energy manipulation and a rainbow of self-affecting abilities, like invisibility, flight, spider climbing, wildly enhanced or entirely new senses, and many variations on invulnerability. Among common archetypes, only super speed and time manipulation appear to be absent. The universe evidently objects to mangling the timeline.

Nearly 25% of all known paranaturals have some ability to dampen or block energy generation from neutrino opacity. This “Null” ability may be selective or generalized, limited to touch or extend out to around 100m. Nulls are evenly split between that being their only power or having additional powers (with a few only able to access their powers while leeching energy). While considered unglamorous by the media/public, Nulls are highly sought after as a critical counter to the influence of the most powerful paranaturals. At least one apex ‘super girl’ has died as a result of an accidental interaction with an unknowing Null in the midst of a raging chemical fire.

Paranaturals are loosely grouped into archetypes (puppeteer, brick, uber, etc.) and tagged for the overall societal impact their powers could cause. The later scale is an informal mishmash of media buzzwords, memes, and a handful of conflicting research efforts. The agreed-upon terms are limited to minor or trivial powers being ‘trace’ or ‘nadir’, while those with obvious global impact are ‘apex’ level.

Demigod Demographics

With paranatural abilities rooted in proximity to a shard-strike and strikes being distributed randomly across the surface of the Earth, paranaturals reflect global diversity. Weighting towards rural and far-flung communities is offset by strikes in dense population centers producing dozens of paranaturals at a time, making the overall mix much more cosmopolitan. Events like the 2020 New Dehli Blast during Holi may have created over 100 paranaturals. Being created in clusters, they often previously know (or despise) others transformed in the same event.

Paranatural abilities are not equally distributed by gender. Binary feminine genders (whether trans or cis) are almost 10 times as common as binary masculine paranaturals. Non-binary genders split the geometric difference being roughly a third as common as feminine forms and three times as common as masculine. Abruptly acquiring paranatural abilities is shocking enough, but accompanied by some sudden realizations about one’s own identity, it can make the experience all the more harrowing (or in some cases affirming).

The impactfulness of abilities gained by most individuals forms a declining ramp, with many Traces and few Apexes. The curve for masculine paranaturals displays a sharp dip through the center of the ramp, with many traces and a moderate number of apexes, but few individuals in the mid-range power levels. With traces so often ignored or undiscovered, there is a widespread but mistaken impression that the powers of males are intrinsically stronger. There is considerable academic speculation that the low overall number of male paranaturals is linked to this ‘missing’ mid-range… Possibly because male paranaturals die or are destroying themselves at the moment of their creation unless their powers are so minor as to be harmless or so overwhelming that their own quantum fortification saves them.

You’ve got the Look

Adding insult to injury for those already resentful of the Shard-Strike lottery (and ignoring the death, destruction, and trauma visited upon most people caught near a blast…), paranaturals show a strong tendency towards slender and even athletic builds after gaining powers. There is some evidence that the same ability to step down neutrino energy to fuel their powers also regulate the metabolism at a high-optimum level, leading to increased physical and emotional energy, which over time promotes healthy lifestyles and a generically attractive appearance.

Which hardly seems fair.

Magic is Real…ish.

What the public (and even most intelligence agencies) don’t know is that a number of obscure spells and rituals have started working since the 2018 equinox. Possibly working again, considering their ancient origins. For the most part those who have discovered this renewed potency have avoided revealing it to the public.

Being burned as a witch is also back in vogue…

What Really Happened
(Spoilers ahead)

On the day of the Autumn equinox two very different events occurred that lead to a global transformation. In Germany, respected physicist Professor Corri Maier secretly siphoned off run time at the CERN particle collider to perform her own private experiments relating to Neutrino Polarization – a theoretical intermediate step to full opacity. At the same time in Australia, a hermetic council of occult practitioners known as The First Spiral gathered for a traditional but usually uneventful recreation of their lodge’s greatest ritual.

This time both activities succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings, fortifying much of the elder ranks of The First Spiral along with Professor Maier and her student assistants. Fluctuations between these two poles on near-opposite sides of the planet set off the shard-strikes at random all over the world and the aftermath continues to infrequently create new strikes to this day. With both parties knowing their activities worked – but not why – they’ve repeatedly tried to recreate the event without success ever since. The two groups have never quite synchronized again.