maskormenace | text; ID reads Trevor Zeitlan

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text; ID reads Trevor Zeitlan

Here's one for you. What do you call a man who is still three weeks from his doctorate when the multiverse kidnaps him? Mister.

In any case, hi, I'm Trevor; Mr. Zeitlan to some of you. I was recently employed to a posting at Xavier's, and as you can imagine there's not a whole lot of accessible material on my subject, which covers abilities of every kind. I'm putting together an encyclopedia of powers based on my extensive experience in my own world and what I learn here, but there's all sorts of teaching materials I'm having to fake as I go along. Incidentally, if anyone would like to help with that, I have afternoon office hours at the Institute, and you're welcome to drop in. I teach mornings.

Okay, so killing two birds with one stone, I have a couple of questions; if you could take a moment to reply to them, or just answer one, you'd help me out no end.

First of all, what was your first experience of using your power? Was it intentional or accidental? Any details about how you felt, or the consequences of using it would be helpful, as I'd like to use other people's experiences to build confidence in my students.

Second question is a little bit of fun, really: If you didn't have the powers given to you by the porter, which abilities would you like to have had instead?

[OOC: If anyone wants to handwave or plan classes/sessions, or teacher/teacher interactions with "Trevor", throw me a PM. These can be backdated to assumed CR if you like ("Trevor" comes off as knowledgeable, but there's an edge of creepiness to him that anyone could pick up on, and no, not just because he has giant eyebrows though that doesn't help his case one bit.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sure, ask anything that you like. It's only fair.
To answer your question, I was studying neurology at Columbia. We were investigating physiological changes to the human brain that might be linked to, or responsible for, significant diversions in the patient's DNA--what later turned out to be abilities.
Actually I should be clear, I never finished my doctorate, but I've been working in the same field for the last two years without it.

Abilities like the stuff we've got here?

Very similar, yes. The trends were different. There were lots of people with what we called Grade One abilities; flight and pyrokinesis, invulnerability, telepathy, things like that. Less on the more unusual end of the range, like psychic targeting. Unusual abilities are much more common here.

And it was something in their genetic patterns that gave them their abilities? Did people in your world always have abilities?

We'd been seeing evidence that maybe it had happened before, but it's what's known as an evolutionary leap, and it was becoming much more frequent. We were essentially seeing where humanity was headed next, and that scared some people.

What does that mean? That bit about an evolutionary leap.

Okay, so, when Darwin was first posing his theory of evolution, there was already a running theory, called saltation. We know now that most evolution proceeds through gradual adaption, but in order for speciation to happen, for species to divert so far from each other that they could no longer be called the same thing, it often takes serious - what we call punctuated - mutation. We were looking into the idea that early developmental changes could lead to rapid morphogenesis--i.e. adaptions occurring at a genetic level as DNA itself forms and replicates, and that the pattern of adaption occurred in such a reliable way that it could replicate itself apparently spontaneously across the population.

[ There are times when Kitty is uncomfortably, painfully reminded that she has only the equivalent of a really shitty eighth-grade education. She stares at that a moment, trying hard to make heads or tails of it, fighting with her competing urges to understand and to not look laughably ignorant.

Ultimately, she decides that this is important enough. So: ]

OK, sorry. Could you maybe put all of that a little more simply?

Worst teacher ever, right? Okay, um. Well, we can do it in rats, for example. Say you have ten unrelated brown rats, and seemingly randomly, in the liters of those brown rats you get a kitten that's blue. It would seem like a spontaneous mutation, but for it to happen repeatedly across the species, in unrelated pairs, there would have to be something in the species' basic make up that made the blue mutation more likely.
Does that help?

Yeah, I think so. But you're saying that suddenly it's happening more. What could account for that?

Well mathematical probability favors it, I imagine. If you assume the mutation occurs x number of times over a population, randomly, then those mutations will spontaneously cluster. The only question is whether or not the cluster successfully deviates or not. That depends on whether the trait is dominant, whether the mutation migrates to a more exclusive environment, and whether the population is large enough to sustain itself without succumbing to flaws brought on by too little diversity.
i.e. By random chance there can be enough superhumans to be noticed, just as much as there's random chance that there are none at all in any one generation. And if superhumans created their own nation, the mutation would flourish.

Yeah, but it doesn't really sound like that's random chance, does it? If it suddenly happens more.

If you roll six sixes in a row, is it still random chance that you'll roll another six?

[ Bad example, but he is boiling down to simple terms. ]

If I roll six sixes in a row I'm bloody well looking for whether the die is loaded, yeah.

And you'd be right to consider it. In this case, though, it isn't so straightforward, because DNA itself is such a complex sample of possibilities. You could say that the human genome itself has a tendency toward certain mutations - polydactyly, webbed toes, third nipples, to name a few - and the implication would be that the probability is more slanted toward changing in a certain way. Loaded, as you put it. Mathematicians call it stochastic convergence.

Well...I guess just what I want to know is whether there could be something in the environment that causes it.

There easily could be. Environmental factors can trigger mutation by deforming or disrupting DNA. Easily.
We didn't find any evidence of environmental factors in our study, but we hadn't been working on it for long. Besides, what happens in one world isn't necessarily the same in others. That said, the prevalence of genetic abilities in alternate universes would support the theory of convergent evolution--maybe sped up in some cases.
Do you think there are environmental factors here, or are you talking about personal experience?

Well, it wouldn't make any sense for there to be environmental factors HERE, would it? Since half of us come in with powers already anyway.

I did wonder! Maybe you knew something I didn't.

Where I'm from originally, though - there does seem to be something like that going on.

What sort of environmental factors are we talking?

Magic. The concentration of magic in my city meant that some of us ended up born with the ability to resist it, or see through it, or sense it.

From an evolutionary perspective, that's a very interesting parallel. With such a concentration were you able to measure any residual effect, like radiation?

Again, sorry, I don't really know what you're asking.

Well you say that there's a high concentration of magic in your city. That makes it seem like you can measure it somehow.