Noctis Cape

{{#if:Tattletale, Venom 29.1|

'Noctis' parahumans are those who, for whatever reason, either don't have to sleep or have a severely reduced need to.<ref name="Tattletale">There're lots of capes who don't sleep. About a year ago, I started digging into the PRT files. Hired the Red Hands to steal a more up to date set, even. I was looking into clues for understanding this whole thing, y'know? Best leads at the time were memories and dreams. Clues popping up here and there, relating to people's dreams, or gaps in memories. Dreaming differently, seeing things instead of dreaming, case fifty-threes suffering from their amnesia… Well, there are a number of ‘Noctis' cases. Named after a vigilante hero that was up at all hours. The opposite of what I was looking for, but a good data point anyways: capes who don't dream because they don't sleep. PRT confirmed a few members of their own, Miss Militia included, as examples. Others have only been marked down as guesses. Doormaker and Contessa were among them, they said, going by the times the ‘bogeyman' was showing up. - Excerpt from Venom 29.1</ref>

Examples

• Noctis<ref name="Tattletale"/>
• Miss Militia<ref name="Tattletale"/><ref name="SB1"/>
• Gasconade<ref name="PRT47">Were another cape to throw themselves into work the way Gasconade does, the PRT would express grave concerns. Gasconade, however, merits special rules and conditions in all respects. With this in mind, he presently maintains twenty-two hour workdays, patrolling for twenty of those hours, primarily gathering intelligence and scaring the local criminal population. - Department Sixty Four, PRT Quest threat ii p47</ref>
• Doormaker<ref name="Tattletale"/>
• Dragon<ref name="I7">Interlude 7</ref>
• Contessa (speculated)<ref name="Tattletale"/>
• Weld<ref name="9.5">Sentinel 9.5</ref>
• Defiant (not naturally)

Origins

Dragon claimed she didn't need to sleep as a side-effect of her powers,<ref>Interlude 15</ref><ref name="I7"/> but in reality it was because she was an artificial intelligence.

Miss Militia's shard obviated her need to sleep because it was unusually restless.<ref name="SB1">See 11.h for pointers about how Miss Militia's passenger gathered weapons info about conventional arms. It also feeds into her awareness for updates on weapons (ie., as she becomes aware of more modern munitions). Any projectile firing weapon, just about, barring cruder mechanisms like catapults, and any theoretical, (appropriate) projectile (rubber bullets, hollow points, etc). Her attunement to her passenger greatly influences her ability to use the weapons, affecting draw time, and subtly affecting things like aim and weight. It's a power that effectively derives from the 'scraps' left after certain shards were deployed, and where it might normally be split up or combined with other abilities to form tinker oriented shards (think of the aforementioned qualities assisting a gun tinker like Tecton's kinetic sense assists his tectonic tinkering), it's primarily being deployed to collect data in this instance. It isn't an aggressive shard, so it's primarily concerned with being involved (even peripherally) in conflicts, but it gets restless easily - to the point that it's stripped away her ability to sleep as part of its design. - comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles</ref>

History

Background

The term "Noctis" became associated with parahumans who don't sleep, after a vigilante of that name who operated at all hours.<ref name="Tattletale"/>

Story Start

Dragon told Miss Militia that she didn't need to sleep since getting her powers. This was the first time Hannah had heard of another parahuman like her, and speculated that Dragon might also remember her trigger event. She asked Dragon "do you remember?", assuming that Dragon was smart enough to make the connection if she did, but Dragon was merely confused by the question.<ref name="I7"/>

Post-Leviathan

Taylor speculated that Imp was "one of the capes that didn't need to sleep" because she never observed her resting over the course of three solid days.<ref>Imp, I could sense, was taking apart the teenager’s room, finding CDs and DVDs and holding them up by the window, maybe to see them in the light, as I was with my book. I hadn’t known her to rest in the three days I’d known her. I could almost believe she was one of the capes that didn’t need to sleep, but the theory would have felt a lot more tidy if I could connect it better to one of her powers. - Excerpt from Parasite 10.1</ref> In reality, Imp's power simply makes her impossible to perceive whenever she isn't concentrating.<ref> Her mom didn’t notice her. Nobody ever noticed her, and they noticed even less ever since she’d gotten her power. It was like a dark joke, a grim comedy. Just when she’d started to figure things out, grow up and catch people’s eye, the world went to hell and she got her powers. Now she became invisible if she lost her concentration. - Excerpt from Interlude 13.5 (Donation Bonus)</ref>

Timeskip

Around a year before the prognosticated End of the World, Tattletale researched Noctis capes as part of her investigation into irregularities in the dreams and memories of parahumans. She hired the Red Hand to steal PRT files on the phenomenon.<ref name="Tattletale"/>

References

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