Trigger Event

"…Man, oh man, did you ever fuck the dog, here."

This {{#switch:|File=file or image|Template=template|article}} is in need of a clean-up. You can help out Worm Wiki by correcting falsehoods, checking grammar and spelling, adding citations etc. {{#if:|

Reason: }}

[[Category:{{#switch:|File=Files|Template=Templates|articles}} in need of cleanup]]

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 neurological 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.

Examples

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>. She likely had a concomitant 2nd trigger event based on the tests performed by Number Man.
Grue came face to face with the man who had been abusing his sister, and had previously abused him. 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.
Regent was exposed to intense, violent and negative emotions by his father at a young age as a matter of routine.
Panacea triggered when Glory Girl was injured in a fight.<ref>Wildbow on Spacebattles</ref>

No third or later generation capes are shown triggering in the story, although they do exist; Theo is a third-generation parahuman, as is an unnamed child mentioned in Interlude 14.y.

Natural Trigger

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. these are known by the colloquialism of "grab bag capes".<ref name="R1">Comment on Reddit</ref>

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.

Though it may seem like trigger events generally involve the cape automatically manifesting their new power, this is not always the case.

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 catalyst 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.

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.

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).^{[citation needed]}

Cauldron capes cannot experience a second trigger, because the Shards harvested from Eden's corpse are dead.^{[citation needed]}

Double Trigger

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.^{[citation needed]}

The Tesseract

So far the tesseract has only appeared 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 appears to be the only one able to remember the tesseract and what really happens 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.

Trivia

Pregnancy does not usually lead to a trigger event as it is a normal part of the Human life cycle, events surrounding the pregnancy however, can lead to a trigger event.<ref name="R2">Comment by Wildbow on Reddit</ref>
Dismissing clients of Cauldron, new triggers are generally teenagers, although elderly capes exist.<ref name="I21c1">Comment by Wildbow on Interlude 21</ref>

References