Shard

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Shards are fragments of Entites that serve as the source of parahuman powers.

Overview

Trigger Events

After an Entity has finished preparing a Shard, it will let the Shard loose, plot for the Shard's arrival, as well as plotting the location it will arrive in and its future host. The Shard will lock on to the host, get a grasp on the host's personality and summarily allow that portion of itself to die and burn out to form the Corona Pollentia. It will then sit dormant for a time, unless the time of the Shard's arrival coincided with the host's trigger event.

When a trigger event happens, the Shard recognizes the event from the state of the host, from context and from the flood of stress responses. It then reads the host to find out who they are and how they respond to situations before reading the situation for itself and accessing what form the danger takes.

The Shard then discards everything it doesn't need, distilling itself down to one efficient, case-specific task, suited to the host. Where the Shard isn't already programmed with inherent safeties and limitations it will use the host's stored knowledge to generate a grasp of what it needs to do.

If there are additional hosts present during the host's Trigger Event, and they are actively using their powers, then the Shard can "ping" off the others and exchange information. This generally allows the host to gain some kind of additional ability that they would not have had otherwise.

If multiple hosts undergo a Trigger Event at the same time, then a multiple trigger will occur. In such an event, several people will get powers at once. Most often, this will result in multiple parahumans who have an array of minor powers that share a concurrent theme. The powers most often compliment one another, or at least work in similar ways.

Multiple triggers are meant for the end-game of the Cycle, serving to stress-test powers as well as compare and contrast the smaller powers.

Second Trigger

The Shard draws from context and explores and/or conceptualizes new uses for its powers. The Shard begins splitting off to find a new, but similar host - piggybacking off the original Shard's context and experience - but then a major event prompts to catalyze and consolidate in the current host instead. To experience a second trigger, a parahuman has to experience a situation highly similar to their original trigger. For example Grue was at one point abused by his mother's boyfriend, and the catalysis for his first trigger event was when that same boyfriend started abusing his sister Aisha. Later on, he was vivisected by Bonesaw, but even though his vivisection was several orders of magnitude more traumatizing than anything that occurred during his first trigger event, he did not actually experience a second trigger until Bonesaw started carving Taylor's skull open. In both situations, a person that had tormented Grue turned on one of his loved ones and caused him to experience a trigger event, and it was this commonality between the trigger events that allowed a second trigger to occur.

Due to second triggers requiring a situation that mirrors the first trigger event, the most common type of second trigger is the "double trigger". Tattletale speculated that it would be impossible for Weaver to experience a new trigger because she may have already experienced her second trigger during the Locker Event, meaning her second trigger occurred during the same event as her first trigger. She speculated that Weaver's mind being being overwhelmed by the inhuman sensory input of countless bugs caused her to trigger with the ability to process all the new info, providing her with an essentially unlimited multitasking ability. Due to the triggers occurring back-to-back, the need to experience a new event that mirrors the original one is removed.

If the Shard is in an adult before finding its way to the child, it can begin this splitting-off process (generally requiring time or a degree of stress to allow for the maturation).

Second triggers are exceedingly rare, and generally do more harm than good due to the level of trauma involved. They rarely serve as flat power boosts for the host. Other than Grue, the only parahuman confirmed to have experienced a second trigger is Narwhal. Narwhal's second trigger gave her the ability to create her forcefields inside people, something she was previously unable to do due to the Manton effect, and the questions raised by her triggering a second time were the subject of one of the PRT's first 52 case files.

Effects on Host

The effects that Shards have on their hosts are dependent on several factors, including but not limited to: age of the host, the host's personality, the host's trigger event, how much the host embraces the Shard's need for conflict and the nature of the Shard itself.