Chaos Out Of Order
Sunday, July 15th, 2018 11:35 pmPrompted and sponsored by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith for the Crowdfunding Creative Jam. The theme was Chaos and Order, and there were some lovely image prompts left out where just any old trickster could get them...
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Khromata didn't intend for it to get this far out of control. Xe liked chaos, not apocalypses. Xir magic wasn't even all that powerful, certainly not to cause... this.
"Take a deep breath, and tell me what you did," Darkmatter ordered. Khromata wasn't a minion, never had been, didn't have the mindset to take orders, but xe stilled at the tinny reverb voice. Darkmatter was a skilled villain who only ever caused just enough chaos, never too much. They'd handle this.
"I just wanted the Manic Mundies to know what it felt like. When you wake up weird and can't be not. I wanted them to get a taste of life on the queer side."
"So you cast a spell to level the playing field?" Darkmatter asked. Khromata nodded sadly. This was a bad fuck-up. People were flooding hospitals with panic about powers, and the flying heroes had been pushing themselves trying to catch jumpers.
"I didn't want to hurt anyone." Xe rubbed xir butterfly-shaped powermark, the birthmark xe had upon exiting an alien cocoon with powers. "I thought it might help them understand transformation."
"You gave an entire city power-dysphoria, gender-dysphoria, and a rainbow of non-straight sexual orientations," Darkmatter said flatly. "You should know best of all, transformation hurts. Caterpillars dissolve into soup in their cocoons, metamorphosis isn't a casual passtime."
"I realize that, now," Khromata wailed. "But I can't unflap the butterfly, it does what it does once it's out there."
"What about sorting?" Darkmatter suggested. "We can't make the transitions stop, that's like trying to halt a thunderhead, but what if you send a second wave out to confine the effects. Like sorting buttons from a random box into color jars?"
"That might work," Khromata agreed, waving up the light board xe used to draft spells, and summoning a map of the city, covered by the confetti xir butterflies had made of the people. "Sort by colors, those are types of change, red for super powers, yellow for gender bending, blue for sexuality. Secondaries for the overlap."
Now the map was gone, but the colors were less confetti and more a color wheel.
"What's that white stuff?" Darkmatter asked, pointing to a thickening line of pastels and shades of white at the edges.
"Oh."
"What's oh?"
"It's fading out already." Kromata pointed to a cluster of ruby that was rapidly turning more rose and floating to the edge. "The effects must not be permanent. I knew my powers weren't that powerful. I guess I got quantity in exchange for quality."
"Don't get cocky," the older villain warned. "You still have to go tell people it'll go away. The panic and chaos are what's killing people, not your powers."
"I'm a trickster villain," Khromata pointed out. "Why would they believe me?"
"They might not," Darkmatter said with a shrug that rolled a puff of cloud into xir face. "That's a risk. But you want to be out there saying it when it happens. Because people will ascribe you a motive in the absence of one. They'll tell a story anyway, just to sort their own experience in a way they can understand. You'll look worse if you let them do it alone, because they want to keep living their lives, and life is a process that makes order from chaos..."
"And transition makes chaos from order," Khromata said, finishing xir motto. "Although in this case maybe it's chaos... out of order."
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Character Notes:
Khromata-- A chaos-powered Trickster Villain. Khromata's gender identity is "Mischief" and preferred pronouns are Xe/Xem/Xir.
Origin: An alien insect species resembling a cross of butterflies and ants attempted an invasion by targeting invisible populations for transformation into shock troops. The major super-groups drove off the invasion and severely injured the Queen, but afterward the cocoons broke open spilling super-powered homeless people with no connection to the person they instinctively want to obey. Khromata reacted by rebelling against any and all forms of orders, including social order.
Powers: Seemingly magical effects carried out by butterflies made of some sort of glowing energy. The area of effect is usually small, but a large butterfly can break into several smaller ones to expand the range or targets.
Terminology Notes:
Manic Mundies is a slang term for the reactionary sort of person who fears anything different, particularly superpowers. It derives from "Mundane" meaning an ordinary, non-powered person. Although Mundane isn't a negative term, Manic Mundie or Mundie is, since it implies added intolerance.
Power-dysphoria is similar to gender-dysphoria in that your inner self wants one state and the current expression is the opposite state. In this case a lot of cis-mundane people got given powers at random after butterfly bites, and it's driving them up a wall because it doesn't fit their inner selves. More naturally are the reverse cases, people who want powers but haven't developed them yet.
Trickster Villains are their own separate category in the world of SuperQueers, people who exist to shake the status quo for the same reasons people climb mountains (it was just right there!). Most Trickster Villains are considered less powerful overall, but not particularly trustworthy, which makes fixing the mistakes they do make harder. Contrast to Opposition Villains, like Darkmatter, who represent an under-served population or philosophy and attack the status quo for targeted change, or Cause Villains, like Tunnel Vision, who attack only certain groups who represent a threat to their cause. Opposition and Cause Villains are more trusted even though they're also more feared, since they can be expected to act a certain way.
