What can be drawbacks to this power?

One of the characters in my story (yes, that one) is an heiress to an old family of assasins/warriors and possess a power to learn any skill that is designed to kill person, including mastery of all kinds of weapons (unless it involves too much raw strength). For example, she learned how to shoot a gun real accurately within days and swordfighting in a week.

As a result, she can take on many highly trained soldiers (who can sometimes can take on walking natural disasters) armed with only a knife (her weapon of choice), at age of 16.

A main drawbacks of her power is the source of that power makes her really mentally unstable, making her aggressive whenever anyone shows any kind of hostility. It doesn't help that her body can literally absorb emotional force (in my verse, you mix your emotional energy, which is emitted whenever you express any emotion, and energy from nature to Augment which is then stored to fuel her Superpowered Alter Id. The stored energy makes her agressive as well.

The clan is far too willing to fuel her aggressiveness and tries to make her as desensitized to violence as possible, like complimenting her when she kills a stray cat or such. The problem is, as she grows up and interact with the main character, she starts to resent her familiy and her ability because she just wants a normal and sane life.

Does her power makes sense/not too broken or should I change some of the details?

It sounds like the character should be severely psychologically messed up as she is without my addition due to the environment in which she lives, but I will throw it on anyway.

Neurological overload. So many neurons firing and forming connections at such an unnaturally fast speed is taxing on her body and her mind, a full day's session of top-speed learning leaving her completely exhausted and in want of food and rest.

Too much activity in the brain at once can also lead to a seizure.

edited 31st May '11 3:35:01 AM by annebeeche

Hmm, the ability only applies to learning murdering skills. Since the cerebellum is part of neurological system so an overload is bound to happen anyways, but is it the same kind with typical one from learning too much? Also, are you sure about learng so much can cause brain overload, because it doesn't sound possible to me; as far as I know, "information" doesn't take any physical amount of space in brain as it does in computer. Ah, I should also mentione that her skill becomes engraved in her cerebellum so to her learning how to snap a person's neck is more like learning how to ride a bike.

Another thing is, could someone with a mentality like that actually successfully pretend to be a gentle girl, for any cause? Because in my current draft, I want to have her known in her class as one. Also, may sound trite but, she has a crush on the main character and in fact, it's him stopping her from killing a stray cat (seriously, there are shitloads of them where I live) and telling her that killing is wrong at the first place that caused her to realize that she was doing something wrong (when she was just seven, no less). So she started to hang around with him more and more and ended up liking him and tries to behave herself because she thinks that no guy would like a psychotic girl like her (apparently she had never ran into a Nightmare Fetshist }.

What makes things more complicated is that one, the MC is more or less asexual and her desire for him is nearly directly traslated into bloodlust. Oh, and there's his (bisexual) best friend's constant flirting, which the MC doesn't seem to mind much.

Really, I'm not sure if there is any way to make her sane.

edited 31st May '11 3:54:02 AM by dRoy

Actually, information does take a physical amount of space in the brain, exactly as it does in a computer. How else do you suppose we could remember things?

Also, no matter how skilled you are with a knife, you just have absolutely zero chance of challenging a coordinated group of highly trained soldiers, assuming they have modern equipment.

(I hate that I only post in your threads to say "you're wrong", but that's only what I'm good at.)

Normally not, but what I have here is a girl who can dodge a bullet point blank and can basically Flash Step, cut through metals like a paper, and keeps it up for many hours. In fact, she's the fastest thing in my verse. Also, it has more to do with her muscle memory. Speaking of which, an addition of muscle memory means that muscle is organized and developed in a way to enable a certain task, is it? If that's the case, would learning many skills at once mean that her muscle is rewired many times?

Really? Sorry but I don't remember you posting. That shouldn't be, because I tend to remember negative remarks rather well.

edited 31st May '11 4:03:47 AM by dRoy

Ah, if the knife cuts through metal, that's another thing.

It seems that the environment in which she was raised would make her an introverted individual that has difficulties developing romantic feelings for other people. It seems her ability to even empathize with people would be really broken. This girl is probably going to have antisocial personality disorder.

Oh, Crap!. That's...going to be a serious problem in my current draft...

You can also makes her just someone who doesn't really understand human morals. This should make any need for information, cooperation and the likes harder.

Y'know, you can also look a bit about Shiki Ryougi.

...How did you know that she was the primary influence of this character design? Oh hell, the series is the work that inspired me to write a novel. Seriously, this work wouldn't even exist without it. In fact, my fic is at least 30% Nasuverse (others influenced by Haruhi Suzumiya, Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Modern Warfare, and etc)

Sorry, just felt like babbling.

edited 31st May '11 5:54:58 AM by dRoy

A human who doesn't understand human morals is exactly what a sociopath or psychopath is. Also, people with antisocial personality disorder.

Darn, I was trying to make her part of the main Three Amigos...

Just a coincidence?

But aside from social troubles, you can put some limitations like some trauma that will make her mind crumble, some obligatory rest before she can go again (it's like a computer that needs to be cooled down or it will damage itself). Y'know, a human mind is still a pretty fragile thing.

edited 31st May '11 6:01:53 AM by Delles

If these problems are caused enviromentally, there's a chance she can be saved, but she would need a lot of help.

If she's going to be one of the Three Amigos, it seems likely that they want to help her, but she has no interest in developing relationships with them. Perhaps she joins the amigos not because she wants to be friends with them, but because of some more objective benefit?

edited 31st May '11 6:00:12 AM by annebeeche

Hmm...that wouldn't really work, because the other two amigo is just as dysfunctional. O

One of them, while understands what is right and have a huge sense of justice, is near completely incapable of feeling emotions at all due to an accident. He will help you if you ask for help and will offer his help if you looked as if you are in trouble, but he will never emphathize with you, although he will listen, and you would be able to tell it because he never, EVER, changes his tone or facial expression. Pretty sure there are some mental disorder for this guy.

Another...he's very cheerful and outgoing. In fact, he's the one who decided to make a club and recruit members, who eventually becomes the starting members of the six man band. He's full of energy and believes that you should enjoy your life. Oh, and he used to be a former leader of a currently infamous gang and was a fight seeking The Berserker of the highest calibre who even killed a person with his bare hand. Horrified because of that and potential consequence, he left it, dyes his hair back, and decides to never speak about it.

Even then, he still longs for that day and the main plot of the first season kicks off because one of the founding members of the club gets brutally murdered and the bodies littered in the school ground, which lead him to create an investigation team (think of Persona4, only insaner) so he can hunt down and kill the culprit, not because he cared much about the lost member, but because he wants, what he thinks is, an Asshole Victim.

This may sound conttradictory, but the both of the male amigos mentioned above wants to have a normal life deep down. It's just that for the latter, the method that the culprit used was identical to his second in command's, one of the morally depraved person he knows, who threatens him to rejoin the gang (he only implied it really vaguely and there is no evidence so he can't really call police on him, well, that's how I think police works...).

The circumstance of her joining...it's a bit silly, because when Ji Ho (that's the latter's name) started a club with Hyun Soo (the emotionless guy), he figured that he would need a face of the club, preferrably a very pretty girl, and upon noticing her attraction to Hyun Soo, he asked her to join as well.

Oh, and she intuitively could tell that he is quite strong and maybe if she went overboard, he could at least slow her down a bit (talk about understatement). In the end, she joined it because it might help her having a normal high school life.

edited 31st May '11 7:48:52 AM by dRoy

^ Actually, that would work better than her befriending two relatively normal people. People tend to seek out friendships with others who have something in common with them. For example, my abusive delinquent cousin always befriended troubled delinquent kids, none of his friends during the time he lived with us were well-behaved.

Maybe she's impressed with the former gang member's killing?

We have Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training for these sorts of situations.

You can have that anywhere between "Can't drive a car/ride a horse" to Raised by Wolves.

The reason why people like you and I don't tend to have awesome skills is because we're typically too busy learning and using skills that are Boring, but Practical. One overlooked aspect of the Tyke Bomb is that they are reliant upon a support network to survive. Those who make up the support network have a great deal of deliciously exploitable power over those in their care. Few people can resist the temptation to abuse such power.

In short, make her minders petty. Really petty.

Actually, that makes a lot of sense. Perhaps she's spent so much of her time learning all these combat skills that she doesn't know how to do anything else since she never had the time to learn, except the bare minimum she needs to do her practice and survive.

edited 1st Jun '11 6:20:16 AM by annebeeche

Making her minders petty? What do you mean by that? Other than that, though, it makes a lot of sense. It's troubling because I was trying to make her a shy and cute girl who would never be suspected as a highly skilled assasin.

Hmm, the power she has allows her to learn those kind of skills much faster than an average Tykebombs. Come to think of it, is there any reason why would such manipulative clan allow her to have at least seemingly normal life at the first place, because if there isn't, I have problems.

edited 1st Jun '11 7:56:41 AM by dRoy

Well, it sounds like the clan is trying to make some kind of living weapon out of her that they can use to kill, well, anything. If that's the case, they wouldn't want her to live a life where there's any chance she'd learn to become beyond their control and free.

edited 1st Jun '11 8:01:29 AM by annebeeche

You're forgetting that with her upbringing, a life of wanton murder is a normal life. And that, with her mental instability, sanity will be quite hard to maintain.

I agree with annebeeche. They'd keep her away from the outside world at all costs.

If you're still going for "nice girl who happens to be a extremely good killer and becomes part of a power trio", I'd describe her as being a genuinely nice girl who wants her family to be proud of her. It's just that, since her family likes her super-killing skills and she has no significant interaction with people who might tell her otherwise, she has no idea this is wrong.

Awesome, an excuse to geek out about brains in fiction!

On information storage and space issues: Information storage in a human brain both does and doesn't take up space. Our current understanding of how the brain functions suggests that learning (which could be interpreted as storage of information, although it's more likely to be the ability to reproduce patterns of activity) occurs at the connections between neurons (synapses).

As such, information is "stored" at the neuronal-network level, rather than the cellular level. As individual cells are able to form several thousand connections each, you don't necessarily have to grow new cells to learn new information - so more information "stored" doesn't necessarily require more space.

However: synapses do have mass, and often the growth of new spines (or entirely new dendrite, perhaps) is required for learning to be "cemented". So learning new information may lead to (slight) changes in mass (and could certainly impact the relative sizes of different brain areas.

Also: the cerebellum (obviously the best part of the brain), while important to motor learning, wouldn't be the only region affected here. The motor cortex is almost certainly going to be involved (especially for learning things like fine finger movements), and anything involving planning (which killing skills certainly should) would be likely to have widespread influence, especially in the frontal lobes.

On brain "overload": annebeeche is right - too much excitation could lead to various forms of epileptic-type seizures and, if these seizure states persist for too long, possibly irreversible brain damage. It's also worth bearing in mind the fact that there is a reason we don't learn that quickly. Due to metabolic constraints, only a small percentage of our neurons can be active at any one time (it has been estimated as ~10%, which gives a annoying old trope a sad second wind). Any more than that, and they're likely to die due to a lack of metabolic fuels like glucose and also (probably) a lack of oxygen. So this character would either die pretty quickly with severe, distributed dementia OR she has some kind of Required Secondary Power.

tl;dr: Brains are complicated, but if you fudge it in your story even a massive nerd like me won't mind. It certainly sounds like an interesting setting with intriguing characters.

edited 1st Jun '11 11:25:37 AM by robintherose

Actually she knows that what she's doing is wrong, thanks to the MC's guide. Being a morally upstand citizen he is, when he saw her trying to kill a stray cat (again, there's a shitload of them where I live), he stopped her and sort of lectured on how life is precious and killing something is so wrong. After that, she sorta got interested in him (after all, no one ever taught her anything about morality and it was really new to her) for about a year...before he had his brain fried (it's a bit complicated).

I'm aware of that. Actually, she does frequently get into epileptic seizure during her extremely brutal training and miss the school (which earns her a reputation of an Ill Girl). The only sign I know is the one shown in Hollywood ("Gargh,garrr...erghaa.....blargh.") and what kind of seizure would be most appropriate for one caused by cerebellum overload?

So THAT's where the old myth came from. I thought it was because how people tended to survive without many percentage of their brains lobotomized or something.

Well, she does have an exceptionally high cardiovascular capacity and would it work? What kind of RSP would be most helpful?

I always appreciate nerds and their adivces because in case you haven't read some of my other posts, I'm quite obssessed with research and try to avoid research failures as much as I can. There are some things that I intentionally ignore (contrary to popular belief and aerodynamics, you CAN fall off from a sky scraper with your fedora on, especially if it's held on by Rule of Cool and Author Appeal!) but if I miss it unintentionally, I tend to have (not literal, of course) aneurysm.

Oh, since you are a self proclaimed brain nerd, I have a fairly important question: is there any way to lose your capacity to feel emotion non permanently? Also, if there is, what is the cause and the way to cure it?

edited 1st Jun '11 4:25:43 PM by dRoy

If Person A was taught all his life that two and two make five and then Person B tries to argue that two and two make four, Person A would insist that Person B is wrong and doesn't know what he's talking about.

Same here. I think your MC's guide would have a hard time convincing her. If she was taught all her life that animals are expendible she would probably not see it as morality but idealistic nonsense.

At least at first. If the guide keeps trying over and over, he may be able to get something across to her.

edited 1st Jun '11 4:45:49 PM by annebeeche

OK, I'm breaking my geek-out down into chunks.

• Cerebellar seizures...well, off the top of my head most epilepsies with a cerebellar focus would lead mainly to ataxia (uncoordinated movements, difficulty staying upright, dizziness (loss of co-ordination between the eyes and the vestibular system) and possibly "intention tremor" - where she wants to make an action but has false starts before she can actually do it). Most forms that seem to exist clinically seem to be due to problems with ion channels in the cerebellum that manifest as Episodic Ataxia.

• I think you're right about where the idea came from (as well as just the general view that we all waste our "true potential"). The metabolism research is fairly new, but actually makes those "10% of your brain" statements theoretically more accurate - although still not really, because even given extra energy our brains are highly evolved to be specifically adapted to a low-energy, sparse-coding system.

• Which brings us to RS Ps: High cardiovascular capacity would probably help to reduce the anoxia that would come with increased activity (although all that blood might also raise intracranial pressure!). She's going to need either a more efficient metabolism, or a much higher energy intake and the biological machinery to get the fuel out of the food and where it needs to be. She'd also likely have much more efficient glutamate uptake carriers (that may work in different conditions from ours) - because the build-up of neurotransmitters such as glutamate (which are released when neurons are firing) can kill neurons in a process known as "excitotoxicity".
  • More dramatically: if she is capable of all of this (and comes from a family/species that also has this ability), then her brain may function completely differently. Without the energy constraints placed on all brains that we've ever been able to study, who knows what kinds of crazy stuff might have evolved. Not sure how far you'd want to take this, but it might lead to some fun postulating.

• Temporarily losing control of emotions is trickier. I'm pretty sure you could find a good psychiatric/psychological explanation (a lot of psychiatric medications can have pretty dramatic effects on mood and emotions), but that's not exactly my area. If you wanted a more neuro-level explaination, well...
  • The amygdala is often described as the "seat of emotion/fear". I'm not sure that it's been that well demonstrated experimentally, but at least in terms of fear it's certainly accepted as a textbook-level "fact" (which is not as concrete as it might sound ). We also know it is possible to drastically alter neuronal firing in human brains using TMS (so cool!). Such a treatment could conceivably shut down the amygdala completely and reversibly (although she'd have to be wearing the magnetic device).
    • Alternatively, one of my "favourite" kinds of seizure is the absence seizure. This is more common in childhood and essentially involves fairly focal seizures affecting the areas of the brain responsible for attention. There are no muscular convulsions or visible signs of seizure other than that the person "spaces out" for the duration, and can't remember anything once they come round. In theory (very much in theory - I have never heard of this happening, but hey: fiction) a similar kind of focal seizure affecting the amygdala could have your desired effect.

So...nerdy.

I've lurked in some of your threads, so I think I have some grasp of your research vs Rule of Cool stance. I think you strike a good balance. Meticulously researching yourself into a boring story is pointless, but what makes me happiest is seeing an author follow the science until it leads them to new territories on which to build their fiction - nerdgasms galore.

And obviously, Cool Hats only come off when it's time to pull an Indiana Jones-style hat rescue. A Theory of Everything that does not include this as a physical law has clearly failed to accurately represent reality.

edited 1st Jun '11 6:16:37 PM by robintherose