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. Parahumans with a normal brain and neuralogical makeup develop a Corona Pollentia within their hind brain.

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.<ref>Shell 4.3</ref>
• 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.<ref>Shell 4.4</ref>
• 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.<ref name ="I7">Interlude 7</ref>
• 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.<ref name ="11.6">Infestation 11.6</ref>

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.

The Tesseract

So far the tesseract have only appear in two stories: Interlude 7 and Infestation 11.6. As far as we know only Miss Militia is consciously aware of its existence. It is implied that almost all people (if not all) see the tesseract when they manifest, but nobody remembers it afterwards.

Miss Militia doesn't have the need to sleep and when she does she doesn't dream, she experiences memories instead - her mind replaying past events in perfect detail. One of those past events is her trigger event and when she awake she can remember the whole "dream". That's why she appear to be the only one able to remember the tesseract and what really happen during a trigger event.

this thing that was too large to comprehend to start with, it extended. She didn’t have a better word to describe what she was perceiving. It was as though there were mirror images of it, but each image existed in the same place, some moving differently, and sometimes, very rarely, one image came in contact with with something that the others didn’t. Each of the images was as real and concrete as the others. [...] And it was alive. A living thing. [...] The outermost extensions of the creature were flaking off and breaking into fragments[...]flakes and fragments sloughed off of the entity like seeds from an impossibly large karahindiba, or dandelion, in a steady wind. Seeds more numerous than all the specks of dirt across all the Earth. [...]One of those fragments seemed to grow, getting bigger, larger, looming in her consciousness until it was all she could perceive, as though the moon was falling, colliding with the earth. Falling directly on top of her.<ref name ="I7" />

After experimenting with these visions she "awakened" in the same place with no time passed, but she gained her powers.

References

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