Trigger Event

Researchers theorize that for every person with powers, there’s one to five people with the potential for powers, who haven’t met the conditions necessary for a trigger event. An individual needs to be pushed to the edge, their fight or flight responses pushed to their limits, before the powers start to emerge.

The trigger event is usually a very traumatic experience. In Shell 4.3, Tattletale suggests that the way in which people gain powers might hint at why the villains outnumber the heroes two to one, or why third world countries have the highest densities of people with powers (if not 'capes', exactly).

People who have parents with powers don’t need nearly as intense an event to make their powers manifest. (e.g. Glory Girl got her powers by getting fouled while playing basketball in gym class). See Second Generation Capes, below.

Known Trigger Events

• Skitter was shut in a locker with piles of used tampons and pads. This alone might not have been enough, but time passed and she realized that of everyone who had seen the event happen, nobody was helping her. She had a panic attack, and her powers emerged.
• Grue came face to face with the man who had been abusing his sister. He gained his powers at some point in the midst of beating the man up.
• Miss Militia, in Interlude 7, gives us a first hand look at a trigger event. She was in Eastern Turkey/Kurdistan, which was in the middle of an ongoing conflict, when Turkish soldiers gathered up the kids of a small village and used them as living subjects to clear the path of traps laid by the guerilla fighters. She grew convinced she was about to die, either by walking into a trap or being shot, and her powers activated.
• Scrub gives us a second look at a trigger event in Infestation 11.6, and reveals that trigger events also have an effect on nearby parahumans. Scrub gains his powers during a free-for-all brawl that Skidmark instigates among his own followers, after being beaten and/or in a moment of panic.

Second Generation Capes

• Glory Girl gained her powers after being fouled in gym class. Second generation cape.
• Regent was exposed to intense, violent and negative emotions by his father at a young age as a matter of routine. Second generation cape.