The question of magic

Wavelength loves to talk about "magic powers", "sorcery", and "other dimensions". They like asking the Big Question: "is magic real?" Since it's Wavelength, their default answer is "yes". Of course. But is magic real?

To date, nobody has advanced a comprehensive definition of magic as a distinct power. Part of the problem is that for a large part of human history, any competent scientist would have identified superpowers as "magic".

Webster's gives us: "a power that allows people to do impossible things by saying special words or performing special actions". Anything that actually happened can't be "impossible", so that's unhelpful.

Let's try Wikipedia: "magic or sorcery is an attempt to understand, experience, and influence the world using rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, and language". The original lacked the Oxford comma, so I added it in. 'Cause I'm evil.

Alright, so that's a start. What distinguishes "magic" from run-of-the-mill "superpowers"? It's that last part: "rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, and language". Magic isn't an invocation of your own power, it's a request to some greater power to do something on your behalf, using some specific protocol for the petition.

Based on that, we can rephrase the question of "is magic real". Instead, it's: "is there any greater power out there to which you can petition?" I will go as far as to say there could be. Here's how it would work.

Let's say hypothetically that some high-Stage super, like 7 or 8 or something equally ridiculous, actually existed. Say that he's got something like Beast-Boss, a thing that sits in the human brain and interfaces with the nerves there. So he can read your thoughts, maybe influence them. He'll certainly have a means of controlling some of the fundamental forces. If you give him a power like Cloud, who can affect liquids and gases at range by broadcast from his own body's cells, maybe he can exert this sort of power from the nano-symbiotes in your head. So you ask for something the right way, the super hears you, and you get what you asked for. That's pretty impressive, and I'd even call it a god-like level of power.

How else could it work? Well, there's the little question of how people originally got super-powers to begin with. We understand the mechanisms of inheritance and propagation, but we have no idea where any of this really came from. Like I talked about awhile back, there's any number of potential explanations. It's just as valid to say, I don't know, that Hitler and Nazi occultists released some potential magic energy into the world and that made superpowers possible or something. In that case, magic would be the true origin for super-abilities, and anyone who could directly control magic would have an edge over "regular" supers. But that just opens the door to questions like "how does magic work", and that's not something I feel like wasting my time on writing about.

Telepathy and the supervillain

There's a lot of misunderstanding, confusion, and outright deception about the psychic power of "telepathy". Rather than confirming whether it is or is not whatever people think, I want to talk about the general topic.

Telepathy is a game-changer for superpowers in the way that superpowers are game changers for politics and law enforcement. Back when it was just clubs or maces or swords, you could go get a better one (if you could afford it), or wait for someone to invent a better one. Technological advantages like bronze, iron, and steel allowed their owners to dominate the world stage for a time, but those advantages were always something that their enemies could eventually acquire. Not so with powers (for the most part), and not so with telepathy (as a specific power). Generally, a superpower is something you're born with.

Superpowers are also not something that can be easily reverse-engineered and used. Once you have a piece of steel, you can spend some time figuring out the hows and whys of it. Our civilization has split the atom and we're barely getting our feet wet with understanding powers. That goes double for purported "powers of mind", which aren't tied to a specific part of the cell. We at least know where to look for super-mitochondria.

Superpowers, like steel, are obvious in their application. You generally know that a power is in use because you see it in operation. Either the super's body is glowing with energy (even if it's just the Cherenkov radiation associated with many gravity and electroweak users), or you can clearly see the effects of the power. You can get out of the way, take cover, block it somehow. Your intuition is useful in devising a counter to the power. Again, not so with telepathy.

Because of all these things, the conventional "wisdom" is that telepathy, as a distinct psychic force or something, does not exist, and that things that look like telepathy are really neuro-symbiotic nanomachines or something similar. This is known to be the mechanism that people like Beast-Boss use to control animals, or people like Link use to interface with machines and computers. This is a nice, safe position to take if you're talking to Congress, because it avoids the difficult question of "how do we defend our national infrastructure against telepathy?" and the equally difficult answer of "we don't".

In theory, someone with access to mind-reading, at any reasonable range with no requirement for physical contact, could destroy the planet within a month. They could wreck the so-called First World nations within three months, leaving the rest of the planet intact. They could effectively take control of the NATO member nations within two months. These projections are based on NATO planning from their "heretic office" (which saw its start after the world got a load of Apollo). The only effective defense against this sort of takeover was a friendly team of telepaths. The only other fully examined defense would turn NATO's member nations into bastions of paranoid madness, and was widely considered not to be viable.

This conclusion led people at Wavelength (where else?) to postulate that the world had already been taken over by hostile telepaths, whose sole purpose was to induct new telepaths into their ranks - or to destroy them if they weren't willing to play along. A competing theory says that a benevolent conspiracy of telepaths does exist, but only to protect the world from this sort of attack. Which theory you should endorse really depends on how much you've been drinking, and how a coin flip turns out.

Hints of an underwater civilization

Following the last couple of days of archaeological interest, I want to talk about something that I've heard talked about regarding Sea-czar, the Deep One, and Pelagos. The latter, in particular, has made a career out of underwater archaeology, and these three are apparently involved in some sort of power struggle. At the heart of their conflict is what sounds like an entire sunken civilization - and rumors (on Wavelength, naturally) that it's still active.

Here's the intel I was able to intercept from Pelagos' communications with his current sponsor:

• Underwater ruins have been found dotting the Pacific ocean.
• Most of them date anywhere from 12,000 B.C. to 6,000 B.C., but it's not clear what method of dating is being used here.
• The architectural style is unknown but shows proto-Japanese and proto-Mayan characteristics.
• Signs of radioactive elements (such as uranium) have been found in clearly artificial containers, suggesting that the builders found a use for them in the same fashion as the Baghdad Battery.
• Carvings in an unknown language were found and are being deciphered. There is no translation key available yet, so this process is expected to take several years.

Most of Wavelength's speculation about an active civilization concerns Pelagos' requests for a massive quantity of underwater explosives, deep sonar, and messages (so far unavailable to the villain community) sent to the Pentagon. Of course they concluded that this means that he's at war with some sort of underwater civilization, and not (for example) doing blasting that he's concerned will be picked up by Navy sonar installations and misinterpreted.

No current geological theory allows for a sunken continent in that time range, and no existing - and credible - theory of parabiology allows for a whole civilization of water-adapted superhumans during that time either.

What we know of Sea-czar and the Deep One is that they are interfering with Pelagos' operations. How, and why, are answers they haven't deigned to share with anyone who talks to me.

This information has a place in this guide for two reasons. First, to illustrate the interesting things that a villain can run into, even in an unexpected place like the Pacific Ocean. Second, to remind young villains to always look for opportunity. Both of Pelagos' underwater rivals have found some advantage they can gain by messing with him. Once I get more details on their caper, I'll share what I can for educational purposes, but for now, just remember - if your hero is doing something unusual, it's almost never because he is bored or something. Heroes can have capers too, so find out more about his, and try to take advantage of it.

Groups of Note: Wavelength

I've shared posts from Wavelength before, but I haven't talked about who they are, how it got started, and what's really going on.

What it is

Wavelength is a combination of Internet forum software, file service, and chat room. It uses strong authentication. The admins supply secure file hosting using the latest encryption, and access to the site is only available via the Tor network for serious users. Casual users can browse it via any number of Tor gateways, like onion.to.

Many of you will be quick to dismiss Wavelength as the home of crackpots, loonies, and conspiracy theorists. And you'd be absolutely right. But what many people don't know is that Wavelength has a pretty good predictive success rate. Part of the reason for this is the deep anonymity the site works hard to provide. Real supers (hero and villain), government officials, private military contractors, and other people interested in the superhuman world have all been known to post there under assumed names. Many of the veteran posters are pretty well connected, and really do know their stuff.

How it got started

I don't know for sure, but I'm told that Wavelength actually started life in the packet radio network, which is a low-tech network maintained by hobbyists, like the BBS scene from the 1980's. At the time it was started, and even today, proponents of HAM radio were working to legitimize themselves as a system to benefit first responders - fire, emergency medical response, police, that sort of thing. Packet radio used the same sort of technology, but for data instead of voice, the way modern cell phones evolved to carry more than just telephone calls. Some of the radio operators who maintained these networks wanted to help with disaster relief and information sharing from super-battles. So they started the site which later became known as Wavelength.

Over time, Wavelength evolved into a general clearing house for information - and speculation - about superhumans in general. The site was moved onto the Internet and kept secure through volunteer efforts. I don't know if the original founders are still involved with it today, but the people I've talked to who do run things say they've been at this for the past 15 years.

The truth is out there?

Bullshit is the price you pay for accepting unvetted, anonymous information. The irony is that most of the real stuff that makes it onto Wavelength is only recognizable as such if you're already in the know. This makes it hard for the general public to find out what's really going on. Plus, nothing stops ignorant idiots from jumping on an otherwise-reputable thread and crapping out whatever conspiracy theory is in their head.

That said, this cuts both ways. Some people find the easiest way to leak sensitive information is to post it to Wavelength, knowing that it will be disregarded by 95% of the serious readers. If you're lucky, whoever is in charge of the information you leaked may not be part of the remaining 5% and won't notice. The Pentagon and the CIA both have small teams in charge of reading Wavelength full-time - think "Three Days of the Condor" - but not everyone can afford to be so vigilant.

Relations: the media

I know what every single last one of you are thinking. You've read Superman comics, you've watched documentaries on Deep Throat, and you bought into the hype. You're convinced that you'll meet some plucky reporter who will hang breathlessly on your every pronouncement and give you an easy route to fame.

This is your wake-up call.

The media, taken overall, is interested in selling interesting material through their channel. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, whatever. They make a profit through sales of their product (if they have one), and through advertising revenue. Those profits are used to pay the journalists, editors, and other staff who work at the media outlet. Their profits fluctuate based on how interesting their audience finds their content - or how much the owner thinks the audience will enjoy it. But all that money also buys access - people will take you seriously when you have an airbrushed anchor, a blonde reporter, a news van with a professional logo painted on it, a building in downtown New York with your name on it, and so on.

What this means is that the people most willing to talk about the stories you want them to talk about are the people least likely to have incentive to do so. The more powerful the organization, the more their agenda will dominate yours when you play along with them. This is why Internet forums like Wavelength, ATS, and so on will post absolutely anything, while big news companies like CNN have strict rules about speaking with villains. Independent media - local papers, local-access or the old UHF news, college radio, bloggers, and so on - fall somewhere in the middle.

So how do you decide who you'll contact? The rule is: work with the outlets covering the area in which you can pursue your villainous capers at your leisure. Your stature as a villain dictates the people who have their own reasons to talk to you - if you run roughshod over the heroes in Topeka but Chicago is beyond you, talk to the Topeka media. If you can do crimes anywhere in the Eastern Seaboard, congratulations, you don't need my guide, but at that point you're ready for MSNBC or Fox News.

You should expect to work with a media organization, not a specific person. Reporters come and go. Journalists can get reassigned, quit their jobs, or be fired. Accusations of favoritism, bias, and compromise can cost you the reporter you've been carefully cultivating for weeks or months. Always make it clear that you're willing to cooperate with any member of the organization that speaks to you. And also, always beware the crusading reporter who insists on being the only person to talk to you. If you can get a hold of their editor, explain the situation - you'd rather work with known quantities, and reporters who make you their pet cause are anything but.

Any reporter or blogger coming to you wants something they can put to good use in their publication. They're not your fan club, they're talking about you to their real audience - their readers. You're an interesting curiosity, a means of accessing a world most civilians never get to experience, or an intelligence asset for learning more about super-crime. If you have an agenda, you're going to need to pay for it somehow, and information is the fourth estate's coin of the realm. This goes both ways - they can trade you something useful if you do likewise.

You might consider establishing a drop-box, prepaid phone number, or some similar means of contacting you, if you want to hear from journalists. This adds complexity, because it's one more thing to keep track of and one more avenue for tracking you down (were you dumb enough to bring a cell phone along for your heist?) It's better to demand that journalists who speak with you provide their own contact information. The more removed this is from their physical location, the better - for example, an email address, a voice mail service, or a Post Office box. This also sets the proper psychological tone. You aren't at their beck and call - they are able to speak to you only at your pleasure.

The Bourne movies are a great model for how to make contact with people in the media. Make phone calls from anonymous phones in random locations, never give them too much, and set up face-to-face meetings in places you trust. Always offer them some compensation for their time and risk.

Wavelength Posts: Agartha

This is by far the funniest topic I've read in awhile. Some of these posts are old, but who cares? As usual, my comments are italicized.

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THE THEOSOPHIST WISDOM OF AGARTHA

In ancient Hindu texts, and in the knowledge seeking of the Theosophists, we learn of the Agarthi, or endless interior Earth, where the devas and the asuras do battle. Today we would call these superheroes and supervillains. The tunnels to Agarthi are found under Tibet. The Tibetans have always honored the primal wisdom and kept these dangerous secrets sealed from the outer world.

More truth about Agartha emerged last year. A John Doe patient - for those of you in the United States - was admitted to the Heath Hospital in Cardiff. He was badly dehydrated and showed small puncture marks across his body. He was hallucinating and babbling, in English and two other languages. The attending doctor prescribed what medication she thought appropriate, then sat down to puzzle through this mystery.

The subject experienced moments of lucidity, during which his story came out in fragments. The doctor and one of the nurses called in a psychologist to help make sense of the man's mental state. Together these three pieced together the thread of narrative.

The man, a native of the north, had been exploring the mountains near his home. He had slipped and fallen into a crevasse. The doctor found no evidence of broken bones, so he was presumed to have survived that accident relatively unharmed. He had a light and used it. He must have tried to find a way out - any sensible person would - but the only thing he felt the need to talk about in his delirium was going further into the darkness.

The crevasse was the entrance to a cave system. There was nothing but rock and darkness for what felt like hours, but he reports seeing a faint glow that wasn't his torch. The light led to a bioluminescent fungus - and a flowering, fruit-bearing plant he had never seen before. Hungry, he threw caution to the wind and ate. This was the beginning of what the doctor concluded was the start of the hallucinations - the plant was undoubtedly some local specimen that had taken root and was not suitable for consumption.

The hallucinations took a strange turn. An unspecified amount of time later, the man reported hearing voices echoing from the tunnels ahead. He describes a pair of beautiful humanoid figures, male and female, who glowed with an inner light and found him slumped against the wall. They carried him, as though he were lighter than a child, through the tunnels and emerged into a magnificent underground grotto.

He stayed for several more hours. The strangers fed him, garbed him in robes of light and song, and showed him the wonders of their world. His descriptions of this period of recuperation are exceedingly confused, but he was clear on one point: the strangers had to take leave of him for a time, in order to rescue fallen comrades, who they said were at war with other similar beings elsewhere in the grotto.

In time they judged him healthy and escorted him to the surface. The man professed no memory after that. He had been found alone in the mountains and airlifted with a helicopter to the local hospital, which found its facilities unsuitable to treat his condition.

He stayed for several days. During that time, the doctor found something significant, something she omitted in her report at first. John Doe's brain was infected. The infection wasn't a natural organism - it was a sort of synthetic nanomachine, of the same sort that was reported in the brains of animals the supervillain Beast-Boss reportedly put under his mental control. John Doe had shrieked in pain at one point during an MRI, and was found to be sensitive to strong magnetic fields for several days after. The nanomachines slowly washed themselves out of his body, and the doctor collected numerous urine samples that contained their remains.

Could John Doe have really entered an inner Earth? The doctor believed something else: John Doe had taken part in a shared hallucination, a dream world created by someone or something that had transmitted information into his brain. How much of his experience was real? Only the Agarthans - if they exist - may truly know.

Wavelength Posts: Cyborgs and Super-Science

Today's collection of Wavelength weirdness concerns high-tech topics like super-cyborgs. As far as anyone knows, nobody has cracked the secret of superpowers, but that won't stop our intrepid troupe of truth-seekers on the Internet. That said, significant strides have been made in incorporating super-tissue into existing systems. For example, the American mercenary Cloud has a sort of bio-radio or bio-radar built into his cells, and he's used radio rebroadcast equipment to extend his own range. So who knows.

As usual, my comments are in italics. Here goes!

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SUPER CYBORGS A REALITY

CONFIRMED SIGHTINGS are coming from an Army base in the Midwest about a new project undertaken by THE MILITARY. They have a super in a laboratory and have grafted several artificial systems onto his body. IS HE A VOLUNTEER SOLDIER, OR SOMETHING ELSE...?

This individual's superpowers are being ELECTRONICALLY CONTROLLED and REGULATED through the secretion of hormones and neuroelectric discharges. His body's powers can be amplified and driven BY COMPUTER, used in whatever fashion his MILITARY MASTERS SEE FIT.

Yeah, and if you TYPE IN ALL CAPS, it has to be true. Lowercase is for liars.

A highly placed source has provided my newsletter with tech specs, photos, and more information about this BRAVE AMERICAN whose body is now the plaything of his SOULLESS SUPERIORS. At this time, we are unable to release the information due to concerns about being shut down, but we all agree that something needs to be done.

The individual's capabilities are said to be at Stage 4.5 and combat testing is expected to commence within the week. Our source also confirms that this is only the FIRST OF MANY SUPER CYBORGS.

My source confirmed you need to cut the crap. Stages aren't fractional - if I was feeling charitable, I'd say the author meant "Stage 4 but more awesome".

THE DRAFT FOR SUPERS??!

I know a Stage 2. Are we looking at the re-institution of the draft for American supers? Are we going to be sending super-cyborgs to Iran or China? Someone tell me what to tell my friend!

How about "Wavelength is full of shit?"

PROJECT EQUINOX - MILITARY CYBORG EXPERIMENTS

The cyborg program under discussion is called Project Equinox. You can download a complete PDF from my secure site. Here are the details:

• Stage 2 soldiers are being screened and recruited.
• The program artificially progresses them to Stage 3 or Stage 4.
• Candidates have titanium and ceramic implants introduced into their bodies, grafted onto bone.
• Implants are electronically controlled and siphon power from the Stage 2/3/4 mitochondrial proton-motive force, the same thing that augments ATP recycling in the body.
• The implants provide a far superior control system for many powers, allowing candidates to choose from a menu of preprogrammed options or devise their own.
• The implants also stimulate the cells' mitochondria and synthetic symbionts, allowing new applications of existing powers that the natural Hashmal process didn't provide.

There are eighteen candidates in the program, found in bases around the world. They are being prepped for counter-terrorism, not S.O. or assassination.

Now I'm a little worried. If this guy is talking shit, it's convincing-sounding shit. Every so often, Wavelength does get it right.

The biggest obstacles in the Equinox program are technological, but they also have a simpler problem: how do you keep your soldiers from retiring or going AWOL with a billion dollars worth of state secrets in their bodies? Implanted bombs, brainwashing, or similar techniques are likely, but I haven't been able to learn more.

And this sort of thing is why I hate the military.

I did download this guy's PDF. From the illustrations, the implants are about the size of a grape each and clustered throughout the body. There's no metal-plated Terminators here - the cyborgs he's describing could easily hide in a crowd, which makes sense. I'm not saying I buy into this story, just that it's better than 75% of what appears on Wavelength.

CYBERNETIC POWERS FOR EVERYONE

I heard a rumor that they're able to do "cross-specimen grafts" and give normal people superpowers now. Any truth to this? If not, could some of these implants do it?

Cultured tissue has been successfully grafted onto supers, but the body has to be able to cope with the resulting rejection problems, same as blood transfusions. A Stage 0 receiving a Stage 2 graft would get very sick. A Stage 0 receiving Stage 4 tissue would probably die. It's conceivable someone could encapsulate such tissue into an implant and give it to a mundane, but that's a huge expense for little gain.

SUPER SCIENCE

How much of these physics-breaking superpowers have been replicated in machinery? How soon until I can buy a force field belt?

Unlikely. Study of superpowers has let us make great strides in theoretical physics, chemistry, and other fields. As yet, we haven't been able to translate those into meaningful inventions. That won't be true forever, but that's how it is today.

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That's it for another dive into the pit of rumor we call Wavelength. Go forth and have fun.

Wavelength Posts: Undead Edition

I want to collect the best (or worst) of posts to Wavelength, the popular (?) board for super-related gossip, weird stories, and far-out theories. It's not that I particularly give credence to these ideas. But a lot of newbie villains think having powers makes them awesome. Attention you guys: there's shit out there that will make you run screaming, so get some perspective.

With that, let's start with the undead posts. I've added some commentary where appropriate.

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ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE AVERTED IN BERLIN

DEVELOPING - Researchers at a prestigious university in Berlin averted a potential cataclysm that could have engulfed the human species. Their research subject: an actual zombie. This creature was born with a Lilith-type meta-gene. The mutation concentrated all metabolic activity into the bones, creating connective tissue and muscle out of some sort of carbon nanotubes, similar to the American superhero Brawl and his carbon alchemy.

Yeah, "meta-gene". I smell bullshit coming. There's a true story here, but it's not a zombie apocalypse.

As the creature's body became less and less dependent on flesh, tissues and internal organs necrotized and started to fall away. Researchers were forced to wrap the creature in heavy bandages - not because it needed them, but because it expressed a horror at what was happening to it. Eventually even the bandages were not enough, and the mummified zombie was little more than an animated skeleton. Researchers were baffled at the ability of the creature to think and perceive despite a complete lack of nervous system, brain, or sensory organs.

I feel really, really bad for this poor sad son of a bitch.

During the mutation cycle, it was discovered that the adaption was contagious, like a vampire's viral infection. Researchers were quarantined until the infection could be halted. But for the diligence of the German authorities, this plague could have easily spread, until zombies were overrunning the globe!

Uh, go Germany, I guess.

The worst part of the story is this: as the subject was losing his own tissue, he started expressing a growing hunger for the flesh of the researchers, and actually attacked several of them. Although nobody was killed, it confirmed our worst fears about zombie cannibalism. This is real, folks.

He didn't try to cannibalize anyone. The guy was going mad from his ordeal and he flipped his shit. You would too.

LICHES AND THEIR PHYLACTERIES

The ancient Egyptians stored their dead rulers' internal organs in canopic jars. More recently, we read about the "lich" - a powerful undead mage - and his phylactery, a repository for his soul. We have discovered that the zombie above has actually transformed himself into a lich and escaped from Germany. He even has a phylactery! Read on for details...

He didn't escape, he was moved to a secure - and anonymous - containment facility for his own protection and mental health. By Thor, these people get some weird ideas.

Studies of shape- and size-shifters produced a very interesting question: where does the brain go, when there's no room for it? Well, it turns out that supers with such powers develop a micro-miniaturized "backup brain". In the case of the zombie, he advanced a Stage during his incarceration. His backup brain is now fully in control of his body, and he can pull it out of his skeleton and conceal it anywhere.

This "backup brain" theory is highly controversial. I don't have one, for example. My control of the electro-weak force means my body stays structurally the same, just that the spaces between atoms changes. Still freaky, so I don't think about it.

As long as this phylactery stays intact, he can stay conscious, regrow himself a body, or anything else he pleases. He is immortal, unkillable, and a danger to the human race.

Nobody actually knows what happened to the guy, so this is all speculation.

QUESTION ABOUT ZOMBIE MAN

Does anyone know if his powers include real magic or mind control?

No, they don't. Idiots.

ZOMBIE MAN MOTIVES

We've known for a long time that vampires and werewolves are real. Good vampires like Edward Cullen, or evil vampires like Dracula, are all real. So what about good and evil zombies? Maybe he is a good guy and doesn't want to hurt anyone.

Twilight? Real? Say it ain't so.

GHOST OF ZOMBIE MAN

If Zombie Man rots away completely, maybe all that'll be left is his ghost. Do we have any confirmed evidence of other super-ghosts? Maybe he will be the first.

On Wavelength, "confirmed evidence" means "sufficiently uprated posts". Caveat emptor.

GHOST EVIDENCE IS ON ARXIV

Paranormal researchers have uncovered evidence that human consciousness can be preserved in the "backup brain" described earlier, even if the only physical remains are a few living cells. For example, a haunted hotel was found to contain trace amounts of a dead super's blood and nerve cells. But this was enough - his consciousness was still distributed among the cells, and his gravitational powers gave him the abilities of a poltergeist. He was quite mad, of course. Go do the research, people, this is real.

The paper in question was retracted after serious issues with its methodology, data, and personnel were raised. Go do the research indeed. Downthread, some of the more astute people commented "we can't find this paper" and someone predictably replied with "THEY don't want you to know", so yeah.

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So yeah, undead are sort of real? There's some truth to some of the things talked about here, but even "Zombie Man" wasn't dead, just.. not as fleshy as before.

Beyond, Between, Before - alternative explanations for superpowers

Yeah, more boring education stuff, then back to the discussions on money laundering - I promise.

Today is Mr. Big's guide to how supers came to be. Some of these are my own thoughts. Others are pulled from wackos like Wavelength, or from actual reputable scientists.

By the way, if you read people online talking about the origin of powers, and they start talking about "the meta-gene", ignore those guys immediately because they're full of shit. The actual modification that makes people have powers lives in the mitochondria, and it's passed from mother to child as the zygote begins the process of mitosis. There's no gene for this. If it was that easy, we'd have some sort of weird super-power cyberpunk world where Monsanto was engineering supers or something.

Beyond - the alien theory

The basic idea here is that superpowers came from aliens. There's obviously a million variations to this, but that's it. There's life elsewhere in the universe, and some of it came here and plugged the super-mutation into our bodies.

It's hard to find biologists who will admit to being on board with this theory. Dr. Chastity Williams in the United States put it like this: "You can accept the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which has zero direct evidence but great predictive power. You can suggest an origin through evolution, which violates every piece of evidence we do have. Or you can win the Nobel."

A popular variation is that supers are actually aliens, and that their powers are normal for their alien species. This usually falls apart the first time a power jammer or jacker takes your powers away from you. Proponents of this theory sometimes dodge that problem by claiming there's only one alien species, and that obviously the power drainers are of that species as well. However, self-proclaimed "alien supers" are on record as saying they're from about two dozen distinct alien species, so somebody is wrong.

With that out of the way - there's some fairly credible theories on how and why this would work. It would also neatly explain a lot of myth and legend, or so the folklore folks hope, so you see a lot of support for aliens-did-supers in the soft sciences. The most reasonable theories usually claim that power potential was seeded thousands or millions of years ago, and for some reason only now is it activating in large numbers.

Between - the non-biological evolution theory

This one says that there is some mechanism out there which is also subject to evolution and mutation, that somehow intersected human bodies and now acts as a symbiote of sorts with us. If you hear people talking about "mitochondrial visitors from between the dimensional boundaries" or "aberrant quantum biology", this is the theory they are talking about.

The holy trinity of this quantum-supers theory are Norman Ryan, Barbara Fall, and Tom Richard. You can find any or all of these three writing for alt-science blogs. There's a healthy amount of actual physics mixed in with some frank speculation, but at least it's entertaining.

There's some crossover with the aliens theory in the form of the Alpha-Omega people, who claim that human supers inherited... something.... from "quantum visitors", and that they are observing our progress from a pocket dimension. In practice this may as well be aliens. I first heard about these guys while reading stuff on Wavelength, in a story where Lee Harvey Oswald use magnetic control powers to kill Kennedy with a magic bullet, because Kennedy was actually a super-powered shapeshifter. Seriously, I have no idea.

Before - alternative evolutions and ancient supers

This is the most boring of the lot, so unfortunately it's probably true. Here's my best understanding of this idea: once upon a time, multi-cellular organisms did bond with single-celled organisms. The single-celled creatures were things similar to bacteria. Multi-celled organisms lived thousands of times as long per organism as the single-celled ones, so the latter got the benefits of evolution and mutation much more. Complex life simply snapped up this advanced evolution and co-opted it.

The cranks who inhabit the fringe of this theory have an interesting answer for "where are they", meaning what happened to the progenitors of all these super-bacteria who let us bend physics and tank explosions with our faces. Basically, they could burrow into the earth, live in the mantle, or float into space. Because they individually could survive in environments where humans have never been able to explore, it's logical that nobody would have found them. Alright, so far so good.

So in this version, humans might have had super powers since they were definably human, or maybe longer. But because we hate and fear the "other", we'd usually kill or reject such people - or at least not breed with them - as they expressed their abilities. These days, yeah, we get what's going on. But in the Middle Ages, or the Stone Age, forget it.

Anyway! Sorry for all the boring crap. We'll be back tomorrow with something good.

Supervillains of Note: Mountain Man

Today's "Supervillains of Note" takes us back to America, and someone who's provoked a lot of political discussion.

Mountain Man

Mountain Man is the alias of Jeremiah Hendricks, tax protester and all-around weirdo. He's Stage 4 and pretty tough. His power is control of rock. He lives in a cabin surrounded by rock on all sides, and he uses his stone control powers to move it to different places around the Appalachian Mountains. One day there'll be nothing, the next day, there's a big wooden cabin, dogs under the porch, the whole works.

Mountain Man doesn't believe the U.S. Government has the right to collect taxes, and by Odin, he means not to pay a dime. He's got a point in some respects - as a super, he has almost no need for the services government is supposed to provide for that money - but most villains I know acknowledge the 16th Amendment, we just don't give a shit. So there you are.

He's got a lot of other ideas about who really did 9/11, the JFK assassination, and so on. He endorses a lot of the weirder theories from groups like Wavelength, like the Killclone theory and ancient astronauts seeding super-powered potential in early humans. So far he doesn't have any proof of what he says. Many people listen to him because he's a super and they think that gives him some sort of inside information. For that matter, he could totally be right about half of what he says.

Mountain Man brews his own "super-moonshine", which will probably flat-out kill a regular human being and knocks a Stage 4 on his ass. I make my own mead at home, natch, so I appreciate a guy who takes the time to account for the super-metabolism.

Overall, a great guy to know about, because he's a departure from the "wreck-it-and-run" villain you might all think you have to be. He knows what he wants, he's not afraid to get it, and he thumbs his nose at the Man the whole way.

Past

Hendricks got his powers when he was young. He was involved in an avalanche or cave-in while exploring the mountains at an early age (specifics differ, even when he tells the story). He walked out of the hills covered in rock, and didn't return to normal for two days. Since then he was on the receiving end, and later the giving, of a fair amount of bullying at school. His dad took him out and home-schooled him for the rest of his adolescence. His mother died early, from what I'm told. He has no living siblings.

Position

Mountain Man is a solo villain. He drinks a lot, he hunts, he wanders the mountains, he entertains visitors. He's friendly if you're friendly, but mostly he just does his thing all day.

He is at the center of a few online communities. He posts regularly, reads fan mail, does all that stuff. He could probably start a cult if he wanted to, but mostly he prefers politics to religion. He gets a fair amount of attention on sites like Quatloos and Libertarian-leaning forums.

Personality

Did you see an old show called "Grizzly Adams"? He's a lot like that guy. He's got a big thick beard, a big smile, and he's just generally a big guy. He acts like the big guy - always friendly, unless you push him, and then he turns super-dangerous. He's semi-immortal and he knows it, so he's living life his way.

Powers

He can merge with solid stone to armor up, and he can move or throw or shape stone. His ability to move his cabin (or anything else) through mountains is pretty much the main reason the Feds haven't been able to shut him down. Obviously he's got the usual Stage 4 power platter.

The Transhuman Capability Catalog assigns him TCC E2 - control over elemental earth.

Problems

Mountain Man doesn't have too many problems that he isn't causing himself. His strident political views are probably the major reason the Feds want him. He does make a lot of good points about government taxation of supers, and a lot of villains are on board with his views. His outlandish ideas in other areas don't always endear him to people who might be allies, but that's life.