Roleplay / Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues

"You think they would just give kids powers and let them be? No. They create obstacles, stories, bad guys, good guys, all so they can see just how far they can take those kids."

Unfortunately, the events that would follow that fateful Wednesday afternoon would shatter the beliefs of the Rogers High staff. Such was the fate of the old: to become mere witnesses and bystanders, as the young take the reigns of fate and lead it into whatever horizon they deem suitable at the moment. If any of the members of the Rogers High staff gained a mere glimpse of that horizon, well... one of them might have burned the entire place to the ground so as to save humanity from the suffering that would follow. For that brief glimpse would give that person the knowledge that nothing would be the same from the moment the clock struck 4:45. Which should be right... about...
[power goes out]

— Stratofarius, the Opening Post

Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues is a play-by-post superhero roleplay hosted on the TV Tropes forums. Created by Stratofarius, the game is a Continuity Reboot of the previous Dawn of a New Age thread created by GrateEscape in 2015. Previous characters and concepts return, but with a whole new coat of paint.

Set in Oldport, Rhode Island, the story opens on a number of teenagers staying after school for various reasons. A power cut leads into a bizarre supernatural incident, where smokey, snake-like apparations attack the children and imbue them with superpowers. Henceforth, the teens must learn how to control their newfound powers and get to the bottom of what exactly happened to them.

A quirky author whose book parallels the empowering event. A mysterious agent armed with technology to nullify their powers. Flashes of the future depicting villanous organisations and a despotic government. Time will tell how all of these tie together- assuming the children can survive until then...

Despite the fantastical threats that face them, the RP focuses on a down-to-earth examination of how receiving superpowers would affect a teenager. Real-life social issues and prejudice affect the characters, as does all the baggage that comes with being a young person still trying to understand the world. Which is not to say that it's all doom and gloom: for all that their newfound powers can be dangerous, they also open up new avenues for heroism, friendship, and fun.

The roleplay can be found here. Supplementary material can be found here.

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Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues provides examples of:

#-C

• 30-Second Blackout: The blackout that affects the school only lasts as long as it takes for the students to get impaled by the snakes. The lights come back on immediately afterwards.
• Abandoned Warehouse: The Heritage Battlefront, a local Neo-Nazi group, shacked themselves up in an abandoned warehouse in the north of town. Benjy comes across them and ends up killing them, setting up a confrontation between him and the other superpowered kids in the derelict building.
• Absurdly Ineffective Barricade: Ivy tries to barricade against the smoke snakes by pushing a desk against the door. It might've worked out except, as Simon points out, the snakes are made of fog and can easily slip through the gap under the door.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: One future has Zia trawling through the DC sewers. They're mostly covered in gunk and slime, with enough space to house discarded furniture.
• Accidental Misnaming:
  • Simon is anti-social, and as a result has trouble remembering people's names. Calling Mirielle 'Mary-Anne', Ivy 'Ivanna', Ciro 'Cyril', etc.
  • In a similar instance, Ivy is only vaguely familiar with Melissa and Irene, and so mistakenly refers to them as Marissa and Eileen.
  • Downplayed when Edward mispronounces Ciro's name during their introduction (Zee-ro instead of See-ro), and continues to do so after Ciro corrects him.
• Accidental Murder:
  • Zia's inability to control her telepathy nearly leads to her murdering Jessica and Ivy via a mental chokehold. Thankfully subverted when she was able to regain control at the last second, though the incident still shook her.
  • Upon first discovering his vampiric abilities, Daigo accidentally murdered a man who was beating his wife. The 'accidental' part is somewhat questionable.
  • In the lead up to the finals, Jacob accidentally uses his time powers to rewind a screwdriver into Barbra, killing her. Fortunately her power is immortality, but the incident still takes a great mental toll on him.
• Achievement Test of Destiny: The roleplay starts a week away from finals. Some of the students stay after school because they're cramming in some extra studying. The students who took Biology are especially freaking out because their teacher is so unpredictable about what he puts on the test.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: Ciro ruffles Michal's hair after the latter acts particularly childish. Michal doesn't know what to make of it.
• After-Action Healing Drama: Carlie gets shot during a confrontation with Daigo, and Hyeon and Benedict must hurry to get her some treatment before she passes away.
• Agitated Item Stomping: Jacob gets very mad at Kev for involving himself with Daigo's plot to plant fake bombs around the school, and lets out his anger by trapping Kev in a time loop and then stomping on a nearby alarm clock.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Sebastian tries to hitch up into an air-vent to escape the locked high school, reasoning that he's small enough for the vent to hold him. The snakes attack before he can try it out.
• The Alleged Car: Zia's bike, affectionally dubbed 'Frankenbike' due to being a mishmash of parts from several other bicycles.
• Alliterative Name: A few of the main characters have alliterative names- Edward Eisen, Finn Flannagan, Sebastian Smith- along with Hyeon's cousin, Jae Jung. It fits with the overall comicbook influence of the roleplay.
• Ambiguous Syntax: Ziz arrives on the roof of the school and projects a question for Jacob- "DISPLAY COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF KNOWN ENTITIES AT THIS LOCATION - ?". Jacob assumes that Ziz is asking him if Ziz should display the list it has, when in actuality Ziz is asking Jacob for the list, leading to both parties getting annoyed with the other.
• Ankle Drag: One of the smoke snakes wraps around Jessica's ankle and drags her into a cloud of fog. The other students can only watch helplessly before more snakes appear to drag them in too.
• Anti Climax Cut: At one point Emmanuel calls Mirielle but is interrupted by the Dark Dragon, who sends him flying into a tree and seriously injures him. Mirielle implores Benjy to use his wings to go and rescue Emmanuel... and then it time skips to later that evening, which offhandedly mentions that the group picked up Emmanuel and bandaged him offscreen.
• Antiquated Linguistics: Hyeon dips into using flowery language to mock an overly formal text that Benedict sent him:
  Verily, ‘twas not my intent to bring dishonor and misfortune upon thy Clan of the Tudor. May you convey my utmost apologies on this day to Mr. and Mrs. Tudor, whose youthful looks are as such to resemble thy siblings.
• April Fools' Day:
  • For April 1st of 2018 there's a player-supplied Flashforward where Ivy and Luna are the only remaining survivors after they kill the Big Bad. They then realise that they're in an April Fools joke, and things resume as normal.
  • The April Fools post for 2019 features a flashforward that seems serious at first, until Ivy plays a particular song.
• Archetypal Character: Crispin tries to enforce the idea that the superpowered kids fit the archetypes present in his story. It's quickly called out as bullshit since the archetypes he points out are shoehorned (Ivy isn't the Mastermind of the group, for one example) and don't cover the rest of the kids that were empowered too.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Hyeon explaining to Benedict why they're making weed brownies instead of smoking it raw: it lasts longer that way, it's more mild if Benedict has a bad reaction and, most importantly, it's delicious.
• Assurance Backfire: Luna tries to reassure Ivy that Travers wouldn't try and kill them in a public place like a classroom. However, Ivy then says that if Travers was to murder everyone in the room, then 'technically' it could count as a private space.
• Atomic F-Bomb: When Finn recovers from one flashforward, Zia is able to hear that his stream of thought is one long, loud 'F' before he cuts himself off.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: Three members of Daigo's gang gained powers to match their unscrupulous nature:
  • Daigo himself became a vampire that grows stronger by drinking blood, or can force mutations in others by forcing them to drink his blood.
  • His girlfriend, Melissa, can turn into smoke. She quickly demonstrates the villainous capabilities of this by breaking into someone's car without leaving any prints.
  • And then his second-in-command, Devin, can manipulate acid. A fittingly poisonous power for his snake-like personality.
• Bad Powers, Good People:
  • Benjy transforms into a monstrous bug creature, who can turn further into a mindless beast when he feels threatened or angry. Despite this, he still has a kind personality.
  • Irene has the ability to manipulate flesh. In spite of her Lovecraftian superpower, she remains an Only Sane Woman who just wishes to make sense of the empowering event.
  • Harriet gains control of a black spear which can cause hallucinations and degrade the memory of anyone it pierces. Hardly the most heroic-sounding power, but Harriet herself isn't a bad person.
  • Sebastian has a coldly pragmatic, eldtritch spirit possessing his body that grants him the power to control shadows. Sebastian himself, however, is a Nice Guy.
• Bathroom Break-Out: Subverted. The Dark Dragon takes over Simon's body and then rushes to the bathroom to change clothes. He then tries to break out from there, only to discover that the bathroom doesn't have any windows.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: How Ivy attempts to leave her class after discovering that Travers is their teacher: she simply tries to walk back out with the casual demeanor of someone who's allowed to. Travers makes note of her, but then allows her to leave.
• Be Yourself:
  • When asked how she can be more likable, Josephine is advised by Travers to just be herself. Otherwise she'll regret bending to other's wills once she's older.
  • This is the advice that Ciro gives to Michal when the latter tries to act more suave towards Lenore.
    "I don't think you need to act like that. I mean, people would tell you to 'be yourself' with this sort of thing, right?"
• Bear Hug: Zia sweeps Mirielle up into a hearty hug when they first meet each other after the empowering event.
• Because Destiny Says So: After Ivan strikes out with finding information in the library, he leaves and immediately comes across another superpower-related plot. He believes it to be an act of fate- which is a more reasonable assumption for him than most, since his power involves manipulating fate.
• "Begone" Bribe: Daigo tries to send off Ciro's siblings by giving them a hundred dollars. It doesn't work, and he sics his monster on them instead.
• Behind the Black: Abby was with Hyeon's group when they were attacked by the snakes- something that the group doesn't realise until after the fact, since she'd been off-screen until that point.
  Hyeon’s attentions then turned on a dime as he looked to Abby with a megawatt smile, taking the flush to her cheeks to mean something entirely different even as he belayed all shock that she had apparently been there the whole time.
• Beyond the Impossible: Strange things happen during the blackout that shouldn't be possible in the regular setting. Ciro's phone is somehow able to register negative reception, and music plays out of destroyed speakers.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word:
  • Ivy's drone Ziz manages to acquire a Nintendo Switch for her. When Luna points out that it's stealing, Ivy is horrified and tries to phrase it instead as Ziz 'getting it for free'.
  • Later on Ivy needs to fetch a bucket of water to put out Michal's flames. When explaining herself to Jemimah, she nearly says that she stole the bucket, only to quickly correct that she's borrowing it.
• Blah, Blah, Blah: How Hyeon interprets a sci-fi movie while he's getting high.
  "Blah blah blah aliens."
  "Blah blah blah science!"
  Hyeon: [thinking] Why do I even own this again..?
• Blatant Lies:
  • When Ciro's siblings come across Daigo's lizard monster, Daigo makes a lie on the spot about how it's actually a man in a costume. It only gets accepted because of how young the kids are.
  • Hyeon's response to Josephine asking if he has superpowers; he stutters out a no, scoffs, casually leans against the wall, and 'sarcastically' asks if Josephine has powers.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • Jenna's power transforms her into a walking mass of insects. Most people freak out at the sight of her, and eventually it causes her to have a minor breakdown.
  • Katheryn gets turned into a sentient mass of ink. She can't talk and has limited movement, meaning she has to spend most of her time cooped up in a notebook. She isn't happy with this, and urges Finn to find a way to reverse it.
  • Vivian's power essentially allows her to rewrite reality. While incredibly powerful, it's also unpredictable and frequently has unfavourable results. Not only that, but it causes the rest of the cast to react to her with fear.
  • Jessica gains powers identical to the Purple Man: her skin turns purple, and secretes pheromones that she can use to control people's minds. The power gets to her head and she nearly causes a group of teenage boys to rape each other. When the other characters find out about this, they understandably react with disgust, which- combined with her new, unnatural appearance- causes Jessica a great deal of angst.
  • Zigzagged with Benjy and Amy. Benjy's power turned him into a giant bug monster that loses his mind if he gets too emotional. Amy was turned into a form of data consciousness that can only operate within electronic devices. Both of their powers have very strong downsides, and have resulted in some angst, but for the most part the duo don't seem to be too upset with their new circumstances.
• Blood Is Squicker in Water: Carlie and Devin are both grievously wounded during a fight in the school. As the sprinklers had been going off previously, it's noted that their blood spreads in the surrounding water.
• Bluff the Eavesdropper: Upon noticing that their principal is approaching them, Ivy switches the topic of her conversation from their superpowers to what little she knows of football.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Barbra tries to stop Jacob in his tracks because her friend just disappeared, she thinks he's shrunk down and is looking for him, and also she just vomited in the area.
• Breakfast Club: Daigo's gang, which he was able to gather together by drawing in young teens who felt ostracised for some reason or another. They all then formed bonds and got up to some minor mischief, but with the advent of their superpowers, some of them were disturbed by Daigo's huge uptick in violence and cut off ties from him.
• Bribe Backfire: Hyeon gives Abby ten dollars to help Ciro put up the flyers for Hyeon's band. She takes the bribe and then doesn't do any of the work.
• Brick Joke: Nadine mentions to Hyeon that Luna can control electricity. Josephine, who can also control electricity, later shows off her power to Hyeon, leading him to mistake her for Luna.
• Bridal Carry: Hyeon supports Carlie by the knees and back and carries her away after she's seriously injured, though he struggles for a moment with how her wrestling training has made her heavy with muscle.
• Brig Ball Bouncing: A flash to the future shows Eddie Longhorn working at the FBI and blasély throwing a ball against his cubicle wall, showing his casual manner in spite of his serious job.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: When Sebastian hurls a bunch of shadow spears at Daigo, the vampire responds by grabbing the nearby Rhys and pulling him into the crossfire, intending for him to take the blows. Rhys responds by using his power to convert himself into metal, deflecting the spears from both of them instead.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Nadine decides to keep her mouth shut about the empowerment and go on with her life. Finn proposes that, if they ignore their superpowers and let the transformed Benjy run rampant, that he'll eventually make his way to her mother's workplace and slaughter everyone there. Fortunately it doesn't come to pass, as Benjy targets a Neo-Nazi gang instead.
• Calling Your Bathroom Breaks: To avoid a confrontation between Nadine and the agent-turned-teacher Travers, Ciro steps in and asks Travers if they can go to the bathroom, lying about Nadine not feeling well. Travers lets them go, but the fire alarm goes off before they can leave.
• Cape Busters: In the future, a 'Post-Human Division' is set up by the FBI to capture and detain the superpowered kids. In the present, this role is carried by Sarah Travers, a government agent whose job involves identifying and monitoring the superkids.
• Cape Punk: The crux of the plot is ordinary teens in an ordinary world suddenly receiving superpowers. Thus, much of the focus is on how they all handle their powers, the many trials and tribulations that they face because of them, and the increasingly hostile response their existence garners from non-powered people.
• Car Fu: A fight in the school's parking lot ends with David using his power to launch a car at his opponent. It misses them and goes soaring into the air. A little later it crashes down next to Finn and Ivy, nearly giving them a heart attack.
• Car Radio Dispute: A subtle example when Finn gives Ivy a lift home. He turns the radio on to agonisingly loud Eurobeat, but Ivy is too shy to dispute it. Instead she stealthily sneaks her hand over to turn it down.
• Carrying a Cake: Mirielle has to carry a box of cookies into her high school. Predictably, she trips over a step and drops the lot. Then Emmanuel comes in and starts scoffing them all up.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • One of the reasons why the students don't immediately tell the adults about the empowering event: who would believe them about magical music and deadly smoke snakes when the adults had been there and not seen any of it?
  • Rose banks on this trope when explaining why they should use giant bug Benjy as a distraction: even if the cops did try and tell anyone about it, no one would believe them.
  • Crispin follows the same logic when he justifies why the government hasn't come for him after he exposed the 'truth' about them: he thinks they haven't hunted him down because it'd be a waste of effort, since no-one would believe him anyway.
  • The principal finds Irene carting around the injured school nurse. No matter how much she tries to explain herself, he refuses to believe that she wasn't responsible for hurting the nurse.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: Hyeon edits a costume design that Abby shows him to be more devilish. This gets him on the topic of a Korean football team, Red Devils, which for reasons unknown makes him uncomfortable enough to dismiss the costume entirely and then change the subject.
• Choke Holds: Daigo attempts to strangle Harriet after she stabbed him earlier. She's unable to break free, and only escapes death by Hyeon's timely rescue.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Usually when a player leaves their character disappears from the story with no in-game explanation. Special mention goes to Travis Murray, who was last seen exploding into a mass of electricity.
  • Some of the non-player characters- Heather, Leslie, Loraine, Omar, and Thelma- disappeared before they could even be properly introduced. This was to make way for a new batch of NPCs that were part of Daigo's gang.
• Coincidental Broadcast: Ivy and Vivian happen to learn about Crispin Hayward when they listen to the radio on their way home.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: A flashforward depicts a future where the Dark Dragon group have captured a number of the kids and tortured them for a year to get information on Ivy's whereabouts.
• Cold Iron: The only thing shown to affect the empowering smoke was a fire extinguisher, which was able to smack into one of the snake apparitions. Whether it's the iron in particular that they're weak to remains to be seen.
• Comically Missing the Point: Before the empowering event, Zia stops a group of students from breaking open a window with a guitar. She points out how unnecessary it is, and that even if they had to, they could've used a chair instead of an expensive instrument. Cue Sebastian picking up a chair and trying to break the glass again.
• The Corpse Stops Here: Irene comes across the injured Nurse Dini and tries to escort her to safety. Principal Shooter comes across them and accuses Irene of being the one who injured Dini.
• Counting to Three: Irene slowly starts to get pissed off when the other students repeatedly interrogate her and prevent her from going home. She starts a mental countdown to ten, at the end of which she plans to use her powers on them to escape. She doesn't get that far before they're interrupted.
• Covered in Gunge: Ciro gets splattered with liquified brain matter after Zia kills Daigo's monster. It's all he can do to keep from vomiting.
• Cower Power:
  • Barbra hides behind Jacob when they approach the warehouse containing Benjy. She even makes it clear that she's doing it in the hopes that Jacob will take a hit for her.
  • When Benjy throws up some liquid for fellow bug Jenna to eat, Luna is disgusted and hides behind Rose, who in turn hides behind Sebastian. It should be noted that Rose is taller than Seb and Luna is much taller than both.
• Creator In-Joke: One of Ivy's posts refers to Zia as the 'boneless' one, a reference to a 'Boneless Brayne' joke between the players.
• Crisis Catch And Carry: After she tries to take a bullet for him, Benjy grabs Mirielle and attempts to climb out of the building with her. This is misconstrued by his attackers as an attempt to kidnap her.
• Cry into Chest: Zia breaks down crying from the trauma of murdering Daigo's lizard monster. Her friend Ciro pulls her into a hug, and she clings to him until she gets a handle on herself and breaks away in embarrassment.
• Crystal-Ball Scheduling: Crispin's book Dawn of a New Age mirrors the plot of the empowering incident, albeit with different characters. When Ivy and Luna realise this, they gather together a small group to hunt Crispin down and ask him about it.
• Curiosity Is a Crapshoot: Ciro's curiosity leads him to examine a strange disc in the Principal's office. Said device electrocutes him and gets him caught by the principal, but that in turn gains him new information and an ally, so the good outweighs the bad.

D-K

• De-power: In one possible future, it's shown that a group called the Overseers were able to manufacture a way to create and remove powers. This is revealed when Zia confesses that she can't read minds anymore.
• Defensive Feint Trap: The Dark Dragon pulls Emmanuel into a trap by covering himself in an electric charge and then running away. Emmanuel tries to grab him, and is sent flying into the nearest tree for his trouble.
• Department of Redundancy Department: When the warehouse group are panicking about the arrival of the police:
  Hans was doing some weird thing that was supposed to be a distraction, and all [Sebastian] could really do was hope that it was enough of a distraction to be a good distraction.
  Fesxis: Very eloquent.
• Description Cut:
  • When Benjy is sent to distract the cops and ends up getting hurt:
    This was unmistakably a cry for help, and it would take nothing but fear to understand it as something else.
    "They're fine!" Barbra hissed, nodding over at the dust storm after Benjy's cry of pain. "He's pretending."
  • Happens again when Hyeon sets up to meet his drug dealer in the park:
    Hyeon: Don’t worry, Longhorn might be a space cadet, but I’m sure whoever he sends will know enough to be discreet and not make a scene.
    [cut to the park, where Longhorn is hanging around with a conspicuous 4/20 sticker on his bag]
    Hyeon: Son of a bitch.
  • When Jacob is appraising the group in Sebastian's house:
    Sure he thought they were pretty stupid, but at least they weren't doing anything dumb like playing around with their powers in dangerous ways that purposefully put others in harms way just because... though honestly, who would do that?
    [cut to Daigo, who has been doing just that]
  • Rose advises everyone to lay low and not cause any problems with their powers until summer comes around. Cut to later that night, where Ivy accidentally exposes her powers to her parents.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Jacob calls Barbra out for planning to pursue Benjy without any thought as to how she was going to go about it.
  • After Zia's group siezes Crispin, Jenna goes into a panic because they don't have any plan for what to do after kidnapping a prolific author.
  • Ivan only realises after he's followed Ciro to Eustis Avenue that he doesn't actually have an idea of what he could do to help with the situation there.
• Differently Powered Individual: While 'superhero' and 'superpowers' are thrown around by the kids, 'empowered' is also a popular term.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: When Emmanuel's mother finds him eating cookies, Mirielle informs her that he hadn't paid for them. His mother then tears into him for breaking his diet, immediately making Mirielle feel guilty. She tries to help him by saying that it was probably just stress from the night before... leading Ms. Vincent to criticise her son even more for not telling her what happened and stress-eating instead. Eventually Mirielle makes up an excuse to drag herself and Emmanuel out of the confrontation.
• Ding-Dong-Ditch Distraction: Ciro turns invisible and follows Principal Shooter into his office. To get out, he knocks on the door with the plan to sneak through when Shooter opens it. He gets caught before he can do so, however.
• Disappeared Dad: Due in part to the large size of the cast, many of the characters have fathers that are absent to some degree or another:
  • Zia's father died prior to the beginning of the RP, having committed suicide when she was young.
  • Finn's father, who's also the previous mayor of Oldport, was arrested after he was caught embezzeling funds. Finn's popularity plummeted as a result, ending with him as a social outcast.
  • Little is known about Benjy's father, except that Amaya offered him a way to skip town after Benjy was born.
  • Emmanuel's mother is divorced, and nothing has been said in regards to his father or where he is.
  • Jessica was the unwanted result of a series of one-night stands. Thus, she has no idea who her father is.
• Disposable Vagrant: Daigo's scheme involves grabbing a homeless man off the street and forcibly mutating him into a monster. He and Melissa then set the monster on the low-income neighbourhood, which is when Kev draws a line and works with the heroes to stop it.
• Disproportionate Retribution: David approaches Irene about working together with their powers, but she ignores them. In response, David forms his coin into a bullet and tries to drill a hole through her head. It's later shown that his extreme aggressiveness was because he wasn't feeling like himself.
• Dissimile: Hyeon's description of This is Spın̈al Tap:
  [T]he greatest rock n' roll documentary ever made that actually wasn't about rock n' roll and really wasn't a documentary.
• Don't Ask: Zia accidentally ends up in a stranger's house, sees them having sex in the shower, and wipes their memories in a panic. She then tromps over to Vivian's house, walks in while still soaked from the shower, and emphatically tells them all not to ask about it.
• Don't Sneak Up on Me Like That!: While she doesn't get physical, Ivy nevertheless has a negative reaction to Hyeon giving her an unexpected shove.
  She immediately recoiled from him with a loud shout, raised her arms in front of her and stared at Hyeon like he had just dropped cargo and took a shit on his desk.
• Double Meaning:
  • How Hyeon manages to convey information to Nadine without Longhorn picking up on it; 'when there's smoke, there's fire', referring to the smoke snakes that Hyeon and Nadine had encountered the previous night.
  • Attempted by Ciro to try and make reference to the smoke snakes to Nadine while her non-powered lackeys were hanging around; the message doesn't get through, and instead they're all led to believe that Ciro is involved with drugs.
• Double Take:
  • When Ivy first sees Jessica, she performs a physical and mental double take when she realises that the girl's skin is purple.
  • Luna does an incredibly fast double take when she looks at their exam teacher, looks back to Ivy, and then realises that said teacher is the government agent that's been hounding them.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Rose wishes that she could have a voice in her head that tells her what to do. She's unaware that the person she's telling this to, Sebastian, actually does have an entity in his head that he's trying to keep secret.
  • Josephine has a friendly talk with a stranger she meets in the park. The stranger in question is Sarah Travers, who has already been revealed in a different plotline to be more nefarious than Josephine suspects.
  • Ivy wonders whether the person who greviously hurt the nurse is someone she knows. It's already been revealed to the reader that the culprit is Simon/Dark Dragon, Ivy's crush.
  • Rose comments that she'd love to be friends with a teleporter, unaware that Lenore, who's standing right next to her, has teleportation powers.
  • Amy alerts Finn to the threat of a bomb at Rogers High. Finn's response is to burst out laughing- the explanation being that he'd just been trying to find a way to get the school to evacuate, and this would allow him to do so without drawing attention to himself.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: At one point, Mr. Claremont walks straight through Ivy. This is because all of the superpowered kids have been rendered intangible and Invisible to Normals- however, observers assume that it's because Ivy has turned into a ghost, in turn causing Ivy to freak out at her seeming incorporealness.
• Dude, She's A Lesbian: When asked what she knows of Benedict, Amy gets excited over how cute and dreamy he is. Katheryn then helpfully informs her that he's gay, shocking her little virtual heart.
• Dynamic Entry: Harriet introduces herself to Sebastian's group by accidentally jamming her spear into Sebastian's back door, ripping it in half and nearly impaling Jacob.
• Elemental Baggage: Any of the characters capable of controlling the elements seem to have a Required Secondary Power where they can create said element from nothing. The only exception thus far is Sebastian, who is, for the moment at least, restricted to controlling his own shadow.
• EMP: Luna's powers go into overload during the school evacuation until she suddenly unleashes all her electricity in a single blast, knocking out every other electronical device in the school.
• Empty Piles of Clothing:
  • When Amy is transformed into data, her clothes are left behind. This causes the other students to freak out when all they can find of her is her clothes and her phone.
  • Jenna loses her clothes whenever her swarm of bugs splits apart and reforms somewhere else, leaving a pile for others to find and ponder over.
  • A slight variant when Luna is transformed into electricity and absorbed by the Dark Dragon: her clothes all come with her, except for the parka that Ivy gave her, which is left in a little pile on the ground.
• Entertainingly Wrong: The reveal that they're Being Watched reaches Hyeon's group just before Rose's invitation to meet up in a local graveyard. Hyeon comes to the conclusion that they're related, and refuses to go to the meeting since he believes it's a trap. They actually have nothing to do with each other.
• Escalating Punchline: Fesxis' response to Sebastian offering his home to the other students:
  Fesxis: Ah, yes, let the giant bug monster do whatever the hell he wants. What a great plan.
  Sebastian: [to Harriet] If you and your... spear, I guess... need anywhere to stay, you can stay here, I guess. We're all in this together after all.
  Fesxis: Ah, yes, invite the lady with a spear you know nothing about to stay with you and the bug monster. What a great plan.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Ciro needs to find something to put under a door so that the smoke snakes can't get through. He thinks about earlier, where Hyeon used a fire extinguisher to fend them off, which gives him the idea of finding a fire blanket in the room.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Melissa is explaining to Daigo why it's actually a good thing if Ciro and his siblings escape their monster, only to suddenly realise that said monster has managed to slip out their grasp and is on the loose.
• Expy:
  • In the previous DONA thread, the teenagers explicitly received their powers from comic book characters. While this is no longer the case, some of the teenagers that were carried over from the last thread still have the powers they inherited from comic books: Zia has Professer Xavier's telepathy, Ciro has Susan Storm's invisibility and force fields, Jessica has Purple Man's mind-control pheromones, and Barbra has Doomsday's adaptive regeneration. Luna is an odd case in that she had Black Adam's powers in the original thread, but here she only maintained the ability to control and turn into electricity. Also, while not from the old thread, Lenore's powers are directly based on Nightcrawler and Emmanuel's super speed is directly compared to The Flash.
  • Daigo is explicitly based off of Dio from Jojos Bizarre Adventure, boasting the same appearance, fashion sense, vampiric powers, familial circumstances, and (before it was retconned) fascination with an Egyptian aesthetic. This has lessened since he was taken over by the GM and developed in a different direction.
  • Finn's appearance, and the chess motif surrounding him, are directly inspired by Battler Ushiromiya.
  • Most of the teachers have their names and appearances derived from comic book writers, e.g. Principal Jim Shooter, Mr. Lieber.
• Extra-Strength Masquerade: So many weird events happen the first day after the empowerment that it wouldn't be unreasonable for the public to catch on to the existence of something strange: a warehouse of Neo-Nazis are found wrapped up in cocoons, an author is kidnapped in broad daylight by a swarm of insects, police officers are attacked by a giant bug monster that was previously reported on social media, and another monster wreaks havoc in front of Muggle witnesses. In spite of all this, the superpowered cast are still able to remain on the down low. There is an implication that some of the events are being deliberately covered up.
• Faceplant: Zia runs off from Vivian's house in a hurry, accidentally bumping into Jessica on the way and knocking her face first into the dirt.
• Facial Dialogue: Daigo and Melissa have an entire silent conversation by emoting to each other, so as to not clue in the child they're interacting with.
• Fake Relationship:
  • Amy and Hyeon have done the popular kid routine of dancing around each other, but wouldn't seriously enter in a relationship since they're Better as Friends.
  • Devin and Jae have dated once, and it was only so that Jae could discourage people from realising she's a lesbian.
• Fantastic Racism: The flashes to the future show that the reception to superpowers is likely to be a terrible one. The kids are forced to abide by curfew, are blamed for the country's degradation, and are eventually sent into hiding by the government.
• Faux Affably Evil: The Dark Dragon guard that watches over Zia in one Bad Future. He encourages her to write and makes small talk with her, but when she tries to appeal to his good nature he politely informs her of all the ways he's dreamt about killing her.
• Fear Is the Appropriate Response:
  • While most of the characters try to help each other escape from the smoke snakes, Ivy and Simon have no patience for that and immediately turn tail and run.
  • It happens with Ivy again when she realises that Jessica could be capable of killing her and making everyone forget about it. Immediately after saying it, she tries to make a break for it.
  • A third instance with Ivy is when Zia tries to enroll her in a fight against Daigo's monster. She points out that her power is really not suited for combat, and then makes her getaway in Finn's car.
• Flashback Cut: When Hyeon runs into Nadine he has a brief flashback to an intimate moment between them.
• Flashforward: Occasionally the GM will offer an insight into the future, or at least how the future could be if current events pan out. In the last thread these flashes were only available to the players, but here they're also seen by Finn as part of his pre-cognition power.
• Fog of Doom: The smoke that envelops the school during the empowering event. It takes the shape of multiple snakes that all impale the students for an unpleasant experience.
• For Want Of A Nail: The events of May 29th spark a future where the cast are discovered by the FBI and hunted for their powers. Longhorn remarks that, had the events of that day been even slightly different, then it would've spurned a worse future where their powers are ousted to the public and cause mass hysteria.
• Forbidden Fruit: The students are told to stay where they are when the school suffers a power outage. The protagonists all ignore the warning and go exploring.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The dragon mask in Simon's room hints that he has a relation to the Dark Dragon group in the future.
  • Hyeon puts on "School's Out" by Alice Cooper and mouths along to the lyrics, including one line about the school being blown up. A few days later, Daigo and his gang set up bombs in Rogers High School.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: The cast is large and the GM usually offers multiple plots for them to follow if they choose. This results in many non-connected plots happening at the same time.
  For example, during the first day after the empowering event: one group went to investigate a giant bug sighting at the warehouse district; another group were called to the auditorium to explain the damages there; a third group went to hunt down an author that they believed could explain what was happening; a fourth group met in the park and decided to get high while planning what to do about the smoke snakes; a fifth group formed after Daigo and his gang created a monster and set it loose on the public; and a sixth group witnessed the nurse's office getting blown up. Some plots connected, some characters passed from one group to the other, and then some had no relation to each other at all.
• Freud Was Right: Finn makes a wisecrack about Zia 'gripping Terry's shaft' (after he had transformed into a sword). She's disgusted and immediately drops the Terry-sword.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • A group of students set out to find Crispin with the intention of interrogating him. It immediately goes downhill when Ivy shouts at him publicly, and gets worse when Jenna attempts to stop his escape by swarming her bugs around him.
  • Daigo rigs up bombs to explode around the school. In the process of trying to defuse them, two students are gravely injured and Luna gets turned into lightning and absorbed by the Dark Dragon, giving the maniacal man a huge power boost.
• Funny Answering Machine: A variation when Hyeon voices his pain from the empowering event:
  Hyeon: Hyeon isn’t available at the moment, if you’d like to leave a message, leave it at the beep. [Beat] Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep oh god.
• Get a Hold of Yourself, Woman!:
  • Finn recites the trope word-for-word as he slaps Zia to bring her out of her panic. Zia is none too pleased, and decks him hard in response.
  • A gender-flip happens when Luna gives Crispin a thunderous slap to stop him freaking out over Jenna's appearance.
  • Another gender-flip when Jacob tries to insist that he can't help deal with a bomb, Lenore's response being to slap him and tell him that they're doing it regardless.
• Gilligan Cut:
  • Ciro tells himself that he's going home to get some sense of normalcy back in his life. Cut to him in his room, having discovered his power to turn invisible.
  • Hyeon expressly tells Kwang that he isn't coming along to school. The next scene has Hyeon arriving at Roger's High with Kwang in his backpack.
  • When Finn shows up at Vivian's house:
    Jessica: You don't think I'm going outside to talk to him, do you?
    [cut]
    [Jessica walks out to talk to Finn]
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Nadine and some members of Daigo's gang smoke, as an indicator of their outcast status or rebellious attitude. In contrast the other characters don't smoke, unless it's drugs.
• Government Conspiracy: The government are trying to shush up the Mass Super-Empowering Event, and are possibly the ones who caused it in the first place.
• Green and Mean: The sinister, snake-like smoke that empowers the heroes is an unnatural shade of green.
• Grounded Forever: The students that are implicated in the auditorium's vandalism are threatened with detention until the end of the semester. Which rings a little hollow when the end of the school year is just a week or two away- even if Shooter meant the next semester it would still mean little to Ciro, since he's 12th grade and thus about to graduate.
• Hell Is That Noise: The sound of ticking that starts up above the 10th grade exams, which clues in some of the students below that there's bombs set in the school.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Many of the heroes are societal outcasts. As a result, a group of them were readily blamed when the school's auditorium was destroyed (one of them did destroy the auditorium, but it was because he lost control of his power and not because he wanted to vandalise). While this later turned out to be a set-up, it still highlighted how easily the teenagers could be mistrusted.
• Hey, Catch!: As a response to Adam showing off some clearly unnatural powers, Hyeon tells him to think fast and flings a hacky-sack at his head. Abby interrupts it before it can find its target.
• History Repeats:
  • When looking for a way out of the auditorium, Barbra suggests using Michal to start a fire. A few days later she pitches the same idea to get out of a test.
  • At one point there's an emergency at Eustis Avenue and Ciro runs there to help out. Ivan isn't as aware of what's happening, but follows Ciro out of curiosity. This same event repeats later that night, when Ivy sprints off to find water for a fire and Jem appears from nowhere to curiously give chase. Jem and Ivan are also both physically imposing, frightening Ivy and Ciro.
• Homoerotic Subtext: The way that Melissa interacts with Irene causes Ivy to briefly mistake their conversation as flirting, rather than a threat.
• How Do I Shot Web?:
  • Jacob has to spend many hours practising to fully get a grasp of his time loop power- and even then, he's still not sure how to describe it to other people.
  • Due to how esoteric they are, Ivan's ability to manipulate fate via media, and Mirielle's power to manipulate relationships via the strings that she sees, are something that causes them no amount of confusion.
  • Ciro doesn't immediately grasp what his force fields are, nor how to use them in a non-instinctive manner. This isn't helped by his reluctance to engage with his powers.
• Hyperaffixation: Posts that take place in Hyeon's car refer to the vehicle as the 'Hyeonmobile'.
• Hypocrisy Nod:
  • Irene wonders what kind of parents would name their child Destiny, then admits she doesn't have much stones to throw since her own name translates to 'peace'.
  • Jenna screams when she sees that Benjy has transformed into a bug monster... only to remind herself that she, too, was transformed into bugs.
• I Didn't Mean to Kill Him: In an act of self-defense, Harriet tries to use her spear to pin Devin's hand and stop him from using his dagger. However, a gunshot goes off nearby, disrupting her concentration and causing the spear to instead go through Devin's abdomen, injuring him gravely.
• I Have This Friend: Hyeon needs to find out where Daigo could have planted a bomb in the school. Remembering that his friend Longhorn had been working on the air ducts a few days ago, he calls him up and offers a 'hypothetical' situation where he and his friends are trying to find a good place to hide a bomb for a game. Longhorn, being Longhorn, accepts it at face value and gives him the info he needs.
• I Know You Know I Know: A situation that Ciro finds himself in while confronting Travers. He knows that she knows that he was involved in the empowering incident, which helps temper his fear when he brings it up to her.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Hyeon's excuse for leaving the school exams is that he needs to get some gum from his car. Mirielle instead claims that her home bakery is on fire.
• Ignore the Disability: Happens a few times with characters trying not to describe Ed as 'the kid in the wheelchair', even though Ed himself doesn't take offense to them pointing it out.
• Ignore the Fanservice: In one side story Melissa tries to seduce Daigo, but fails because he's so pre-occupied with his painting. It's not until she says she's going to have sex with another guy that he pays attention to her.
• I'm Having Soul Pains:
  • The smoke snakes impale the students and cause them a severe amount of pain, but don't leave any damage on their physical bodies.
  • Harriet's spear Severance stabs itself through her body in order to relay information to her, leaving no physical injury but causing her to temporarily black out from the pain.
• Improvised Training:
  • Lacking anywhere public to test her powers, Luna practises her new lightning generation by hurling balls of electricity at a tree.
  • Jemimah utilises 'oldschool' training techniques like gravel push-ups and tree targets, rather than going to the gym.
• In-Universe Catharsis: While he feels bad about it, Sebastian admits to himself that he gets some satisfaction out of seeing Jacob in pain, after the latter had been acting like an asshole.
• Infraction Distraction: Mirielle jams up a microwave and starts a minor fire for the purpose of evacuating everyone without letting them know of the much more serious danger of a bomb in the building.
• Inner Thoughts, Outsider Puzzlement: Daigo's gang asks him a question about their future plans, prompting him to enter an inner monologue while they all wait around awkwardly for him to say something.
• Instantly Proven Wrong:
  • Benedict tries to reason that the empowering event was all a mass hallucination. Hyeon points out the gaping hole in the wall that proves it real.
  • Michal doesn't have a clue how they're supposed to find Benjy since he's probably hidden himself since they last saw him. Barbra immediately shows him a website article showing where Benjy is.
  • Edward reveals at the cemetary meeting that he can create duplicates of himself, which Destiny claims is the coolest power. Then Lenore teleports in with Vivian, and Destiny is forced to admit that hers is cooler.
  • Hyeon tells Benedict that Kwang is too dumb to find anything weird in the school just because Hyeon ordered him to. Kwang then springs up and immediately finds a trail of blood to follow.
• Insult Misfire: Benedict approaches Hyeon saying that he requires the help of Hyeon's 'diminutive friend'. Hyeon takes it as an insult towards his friend Longhorn's height, when really Benedict was referring to Hyeon's squirrel.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Feeling like he has no other choice, Ciro reveals to Travers that he has powers in order to get Nadine to back down and stop trying to get answers out of Travers herself.
  • Finn makes the choice to reveal to his mother offscreen that he has superpowers.
• Invisible to Normals: The empowering event wasn't seen by anyone who wasn't affected by it. Other students and staff took on a ghost-like quality and simply walked through the superpowered kids like they weren't there.
• Invisible Wall: What stops the characters from just leaving the school during the empowering event are a series of invisible walls set up at every exit. Normal people can move through them, but the kids about to receive superpowers can't.
• It Makes Sense in Context:
  • The weirdness of the Crispin plotline is lampshaded by Ivy:
    (the strangeness of having her kind-of-estranged friend arguing with a kidnapped young adult novelist over a government conspiracy to give them superpowers wouldn't become apparent until later that day when she tried to go to sleep. it wouldn't be a restful sleep.)
  • Ed gets some strange looks when he says that 'the nurse exploded' (he clarifies that it was her office that exploded with her in it).
• Kid Hero: The main cast are all teenagers, their ages ranging from 15-18. Crispin theorises that the government chose children to empower so that they could be molded into Child Soldiers.
• Killing in Self-Defense:
  • After transforming into a bug monster, Benjy is attacked by a group of Neo-Nazis. The threat on his life causes him to lose his mind and kill all of them.
  • Daigo mutates an old man into a lizard monster. It first tries to eat Ciro's siblings, and then Ciro himself. Zia stops the latter by exploding the creature's brain.
• Kirk Summation: Finn gives one to the Principal, breaking down the motivation behind his false accusation to prove Finn's own innocence.

L-R

• Last-Name Basis:
  • Benedict and Finn, due to their upper-class upbringings, have a habit of referring to other characters by their last names.
  • For some reason Zia is referred to by her surname, Brayne, with higher frequency than most.
  • Sarah, as a result of being a government agent, is almost always referred to as Travers. Similarly, most of the parents and teachers are on a last name basis with the teenage cast.
• Last-Second Word Swap: When Finn asks Ivy to recount her day, she almost tells him that she ended up kidnapping an author. She stops at 'ki-', realises that it could be interpreted as her nearly saying she killed him, and then swerves into 'kindled' instead.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • A cop in the warehouse talks about his Thanksgiving plans with his co-worker. The co-worker questions why he's talking about it when it's May and Thanksgiving is six months away. The post was written in November.
  • Rose comments that time seems to have been dragging on a lot longer than what it actually has.
• Less Disturbing in Context: Jacob offhandedly reveals to everyone that Benjy's killed people, which horrifies them and leaves out the important distinction that Benjy did so in self-defense. invoked
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: How some of the students react to the empowering event, wishing to wash their hands of the smoke snakes and other supernatural happenings. Naturally, they don't get their wish.
• Like an Old Married Couple: Hyeon and Nadine are constantly bickering with each other, a leftover from when they used to be a couple. They do care for each other, as shown in a quiet moment between them, but otherwise fill the space between them with snark.
  Hyeon: [to Nadine about his car] Also, be careful with her. She’s not like you, she’s delicate.
• Literal Metaphor: When asking around about what happened to Benjy, Ciro is informed that he 'flew the coop'. He literally flew out of the school after transforming into a bug.
• Look Behind You:
  • Barbra causes a scene while locked in the school, only to realise that people aren't looking at her- they're looking behind her, at where supernaturally green smoke is gathering.
  • In the future, Zia gets in an argument with Terry, only to realise that he's staring at something behind her. Something that the reader doesn't get to see before the flashforward ends.
  • A car crashes into Daigo's monster and it's flung into the car's interior. Ciro checks on the driver when she falls out, unaware that the monster is alive and rising up behind him until the woman screams and points at it.
• Lost in Transmission:
  • The school nurse tries to alert Simon's mother about his sickness, but Simon's power causes the phoneline to break up and leaves his mother in the dark about what happened afterwards.
  • It happens again when Emmanuel tries to tell Mirielle about the Dark Dragon. The Dragon's electricity causes the line to freak out, and all Miri can hear is Emmanuel saying 'OH SHIT' before the line dies.
• Love Dodecahedron: There's 30+ members of the cast, all of which are teenagers in high school, and so the romantic relations are everywhere and always changing (either due to circumstances or because Characterisation Marches On). To wit:
  • Amy used to like Sebastian, but now has feelings for Finn. Rose also likes Sebastian, but he hasn't noticed. Seb used to have a crush on Jae, but it faded over time. Jae used to date Devin so that people wouldn't know she's a lesbian. They've since broken up, and now Devin is crushing on Jenna while Jae likes Ivy.
  • Ivy, meanwhile, likes Simon, who in turn has been experiencing some interest in Mirielle. In the future Simon hooked up with Mirielle, but they broke up again due to his work with the FBI. Speaking of Mirielle, she's inspired crushes in both Benjy and Emmanuel.
  • Michal likes Luna, Lenore, and Zia. Marko also likes Zia, and is unaware that his fellow gang members Destiny and Kev have both been sweet on him (though Kev has been moving on recently to Ivan). Zia has a Friends with Benefits relationship with Hyeon in the future, wouldn't mind having one with Nadine now, and also has a crush on her childhood friend Ciro. Ciro is unaware of her feelings, and also those of the three other girls who like him- Vivian and Tamasin, who are too shy to tell him, and Melissa, who's been eyeing him while dating Daigo.
  • Nadine used to go out with Hyeon, and now has her eye on Josephine and Jemimah. Hyeon hasn't gotten in another relationship, though he's been jokingly flirting with Amy. He may or may not know that Jessica has taken a fancy to him (and also to Benedict), as has Luna (though she's been having some strange feelings for Nadine too).
• Lured into a Trap: Agent Travers assigns Daigo's group the task of finding out who has superpowers. Their plan involves creating a monster to bait out the heroically-inclined kids and force them to reveal their power.
• Make an Example of Them: How Melissa manages to convince Dark Dragon to attack the public instead of Travers- if he kills Travers, then she'll just be replaced with a different agent; if he slaughters innocents, however, then he'll be sending a message of fear out to the world at large.
• Make-Out Kids: Daigo and Melissa can barely go a minute without getting all up in each other's personal spaces, much to the discomfort of those around them.
• Manipulative Editing: Ciro's reasoning for not taking their superpowers to the media; he knows that their words might get twisted or taken out-of-context, as he's seen it happen when the media have painted his low-income neighbourhood in a bad light.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Zia with two of her close friends, Ivan and Ciro. She's an athletic punk with a foul mouth and willingness to throw down if needed. Ivan in contrast is quiet, thoughtful, and rather physically unfit, while Ciro is kind-hearted, hates to fight, and has hobbies like cooking and cleaning.
• Mass Super-Empowering Event: The cast all gained superpowers when they were attacked by snake-like entities at their high school. While it hasn't explicitly been revealed what caused the incident, the account of a mysterious government agent implies that the superpowered children were an accident.
• Metaphorgotten: Ivy gets lost in her own analogy when she watches Jenna jump through a portal.
  Seriously, it was like someone had just tossed a leaking sack full of chittering, squirming beans through a door! Not even a mop would fix that kind of mess, some of the beans would start trying to chew through the strands and then you'd just have a ruined mop, so—
• Metaphorically True: In one future Simon claims that he isn't the Dark Dragon. This is technically true, as the Dark Dragon is a separate personality that exists in his body.
• Milholland Relationship Moment:
  • Michal gets himself in a tizzy when he thinks he's offended Ivan by making an ignorant remark about how he can't talk, to the point that he worries that Ivan is going to try and hurt him in payback. The reality is that Ivan was amused by Michal putting his foot in his mouth, and otherwise wasn't bothered at all.
  • Jacob freaks out after he's rude to Irene while she's using her biomanipulation to fix his nose. He worries afterwards that she did something horrible to his body in retaliation: while she was annoyed with the way he acted, it wasn't to the degree that she'd then act maliciously.
• Mind Screw: The presence of the original RP as an in-universe story being promoted by an author has a number of odd characteristics, and some theorize the author has some sort of knowledge of what happened.
• Missing Child: It's noted that the disappearance of several students, followed by absences during a school evacuation, is a great source of fear for the children's parents.
• Missing Mom: While not to the same extent as the fathers, there's a notable amount of departed mothers as part of the cast's various backstories:
  • Ciro's mother has been in and out of his life. The last he saw of her was eight or so years ago.
  • Daigo believes his birth mother is dead, though it's ambiguous what actually happened to her. He then murdered his step mother after she abused him one too many times.
  • Abby's mother left her and her father after the latter discovered some things about his sexuality.
  • Katheryn's relationship with her father has defined a lot of her personality. Her mother, however, hasn't been mentioned at all.
• Mistaken Identity: Hyeon runs into a girl who can control lightning. Knowing that Luna, a member of Nadine's gang, has that power, he cheerfully presents the girl to Nadine. He's promptly called out on his idiocy when Nadine points out that Luna is black, and the girl that Hyeon met (Josephine) is not.
• Mood Dissonance:
  • A flashforward shows Melissa and Daigo dancing together in the high school. Then it shows that they're dancing around the corpses of their classmates that litter the halls.
  • Daigo's gang sets it up so that "Time Out of Mind", a laid-back tune, plays during the second school evacuation, where multiple students are dying or fighting each other.
• Mood Whiplash: Zia's traumatic freak out after she murders Daigo's monster is immediately followed by her freaking out for a much more innocuous reason- her mother calling her to find out where she is.
• Mortal Wound Reveal: Daigo gloats over Carlie getting shot, only to turn around and realise that his own friend, Devin, was impaled by a spear during the tussle.
• Morton's Fork:
  • Jacob has this happen when Barbra tries speaking to him after the blackout. If he responds, then he's going against his mother's wishes. If he doesn't respond, then he's going against Barbra's mother's wishes. His solution is a few words to try and dissuade her from interacting further.
  • Happens again when Ciro restrains Daigo's monster and Daigo demands that he let the monster go. Whatever Ciro does, one of them is going to attack him. The decision is rendered moot by a third option when a car flies into the scene and runs over the monster.
• Multiple-Choice Future: The flashes to the future that Finn experiences are not always consistent with each other, as the future is always changing depending on how people act.
• Murder by Mistake: Rhys attempts to shoot Daigo when he finds the boy attacking Harriet, but Daigo manages to evade the bullet and it instead hits Carlie, who was also trying to take Daigo down.
• Musicalis Interruptus: While driving home, an inebriated Hyeon gets a tune going that's picked up by all the animals he passes. They get up into the main chorus of 'Time Of My Life', only to be abruptly stopped when Hyeon runs over a squirrel.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Dawn of a New Age novel written by Crispin refers to events in the original DONA roleplay, such as Yes playing during the original empowering incident.
  • Benjy is transformed into a bug monster and starts to show attraction to other non-human creatures. In the original DONA, one flashforward showed him in a relationship with a student who had been transformed into a crocodile girl a la Killer Croc.
• Naked People Are Funny:
  • There's a Running Gag where Jenna ends up naked due to her swarm of bugs flying out of her clothes, which is always played for humour.
  • After his first stint as the Dark Dragon, Simon wakes up naked and stuck up a tree. His subsequent attempt to find clothes is presented humorously.
• Neck Lift: In a fit of anger, Daigo grabs his teacher by the collar and effortlessly lifts him off the ground. This dissuades said teacher from following after him when he then storms out the room.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • In a bid to extinguish the self-immolating Michal, Ed creates a 'fireproof' Tulpa to tackle Michal and put him out. Not only is the Tulpa not actually fireproof, but it breaks Ciro's concentration and thus gets rid of the barrier that was in the process of extinguishing the fire's oxygen supply.
  • Another example from the same situation: Simon tries to use his heat absorption to take care of Michal's flames. The sight of it terrifies Michal, however, and causes his flames to grow even more intense.
  • Ivan helps de-escalate a situation between Daigo and Harriet by using his power to modify Daigo's thought process. However, this leads Daigo to believe that Harriet messed with his mind, and thus he confronts her later, which leads to Devin and Carlie getting seriously injured.
• No Communities Were Harmed: The story takes place in Oldport, which is a stand-in for the real life Rhode Island city of Newport. The geography and many of the buildings are the same, but liberties are taken with specific locations and the general economy (such as low income areas existing where they wouldn't in the real world).
• No Such Agency: Agent Sarah Travers has a badge belonging to the Department of Justice, but the actual department she works for doesn't 'officially' exist.
• No Time to Explain:
  • Zia tells Ciro that two people are dying, there's a bomb in the school, something's happened to Luna, and that 'he' is going to try and kill someone, leaving him with a bunch of questions that go unexplained as she then grabs him by the arm and drags him to the last of the laundry list of problems.
  • Jae claims that she has no time to explain when she's dragging Jem around the school, except it takes so long to find an exit that she ends up explaining anyway.
• Noodle Incident: Mr. Claremont makes mention of a 'Groundhog Incident', involving the government getting called out to scour the school for wild animals.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: With the advent of their powers, Daigo's gang goes from being a low-key group of ruffians to a genuine threat, creating monsters that kill innocents and setting bombs in their high school.
• Not What It Looks Like:
  • Nadine comes across Hyeon and Benedict in a compromising position in front of the school. She makes fun of them for looking like a couple, receiving an embarrassed 'Shut up' in response.
  • Barbra tries to convince Jacob to go along with finding Benjy, but Jacob misconstrues her intent and thinks that she's blackmailing him into following them.
  • Upon coming across Ciro and Michal in the school, Lenore asks them about the smoke snakes that gave them their powers the previous night. Vanessa, a non-powered student, overhears this, and misconstrues it as an admission that Lenore and Ciro were smoking weed. An attempted clarification falls flat, as she's too giddy at the thought of Ciro breaking the rules to listen to them.
  • When Michal sets himself on fire, and the other kids converge on him to try and put it out, Ivy instead turns on her heel and books it out the park. She's not actually running away, but instead looking for a bucket of water.
• Odd Friendship:
  • Ivy is a neurotic, shy Shrinking Violet. Luna is abrasive and confrontational. Their mutual love of anime and gaming led to them becoming close friends when they were children, a spark that re-ignited after they gained powers and started hanging out again.
  • Zia is an outspoken punk, whereas Ciro is strait-laced and gentle. They became Childhood Friends after she stopped him from being bullied, and the two have been close ever since.
  • Lenore and Vivian have a mutual love for Dungeons & Dragons, but otherwise couldn't be more different: while Lenore is extroverted and easy-going, Vivian is high-strung and awkward.
• Oddball Doppelgänger:
  • One of Edward's Tulpa clones takes on traits from Ciro. It has Edward's diminutive height and white skin, but Ciro's hair, facial features, and personality. The end result is a mish-mash of the two that Ciro is uncomfortable with.
  • Another Tupla that's mentioned in passing mixes Ed's traits with Destiny's ethnicity and attitude.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Ivy's reaction to seeing that her substitute teacher is the government agent that's been hounding her and the rest of the kids. She immediately snaps to her mobile and texts her pet drone, commanding it to hurry to the school and help her.
  • Simon also has a bad reaction to discovering that their teacher is Travers, mentally dropping a Cluster F-Bomb and having to repress the Dark Dragon from attacking her.
• Ominous Message from the Future: Finn of the future sets things up so that Future Ivy can send a message back to Present Finn when he witnesses her in a flashforward. The message is that he has to kill three of the other kids before the end of summer.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted; across the main and supporting cast, there are two each of Edward, Robert, Tracy, Sarah, and Jae.
• Ordinary High-School Student: With the exception of a few students with particularly traumatic backstories or quirky personalities, much of the main cast were just regular high-school students before they were suddenly attacked and imbued with superpowers.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: Zia is a very difficult opponent to fight against since her telepathy allows her to predict people's moves. Nadine finds a way to circumvent this by faking her first attack and then going for a second, giving Zia too little time to register the real incoming attack.
• Person of Mass Destruction:
  • Ivy can create machines that are far beyond what any one person should be capable of. These spurts of genius and what they'll make are random, meaning it's entirely possible for her to accidentally create a nuke.
  • The upper range of Zia's telepathy is fifteen miles, making it possible for her to affect, manipulate, or even kill the minds of everyone in an average-sized city.
  • The bare bones of Vivian's power is that she can rewrite reality on a whim. In one Flashforward it's mentioned that she wiped entire cities off of the map.
• Playing the Victim Card: Ivy's mother has to deal with a parent complaining that her 'innocent' child got detention. The child in question had broken a beaker of sulphuric acid and could've seriously hurt himself.
• Power Incontinence: Multiple characters have been shown to have control issues in regards to their power, to the point that it's almost rarer for a character to be in complete control of themselves.
  • Zia gets it the worst- nearly suffocating people to death when she gets too frustrated and being unable to turn off her telepathy in general.
  • Michal is repeatedly shown to be too impulsive to control his fire power. This isn't so much of a problem when it's a lighter-sized flame, but it proves to be dangerous when he spontaneously combusts in the middle of a meeting.
  • Jessica instinctively uses her Compelling Voice when she's angry or upset, which tends to happen often.
  • Benjy lost control of his bug form when he was attacked by a group of Neo-Nazis. When he regained control of himself, he discovered that he'd killed them all and webbed them into cocoons.
  • Harriet has some issues controlling the trajectory of Severance, nearly causing her to spear people multiple times.
• Power Misidentification:
  • Nobody knows what to think when Amy evaporates into thin air. Finn discovers soon after that she's been turned into data and uploaded onto her phone.
  • Finn initially believed that Ivan's power was some form of telekinesis, after seeing him move a chess piece without touching it. Ivan clarifies that it's not kinesis, but he's unable to be any more specific than that.
• Power Nullifier: The government are in possession of small, circular devices that can be attached to the head to block out the effects of superpowers. Just touching one is enough to temporarily disable a person's power.
• Power Perversion Potential: Jessica's power allows her to mind control others with her voice. While walking home from school, she's accosted by some boys, which she then forces to fight each other. The power and its potential very quickly get to her head, and she then tries to make them have sex with each other. That she's basically performing rape is explicitly pointed out by Zia and Ivy when she tells them, both of whom are horrified at her using her power that way.
• Powered Armour: Multiple flashes to the future have shown the characters wearing futuristic armour created by resident Gadgeteer Genius Ivy.
• Powers in the First Episode: The cast receiving their powers is the very first event of the roleplay, though some of them don't figure out what said powers are until later.
• The Pratfall:
  • Mirielle is constantly falling to the ground due to tripping over the strings that only she can interact with.
  • Jacob skids across a pile of vomit and ends up falling into it, much to his dismay.
  • Played for Drama when Ciro takes a tumble while on the way to save his siblings. He's so pre-occupied with their safety that he barely notices the pain from it, or that he dropped his phone when he fell (Michal picks it up to return later).
• Properly Paranoid: During the empowering event, a small group of kids jumped straight to "smash the windows and get the hell outta the school" (with Sebastian then suggesting that they go through the vents) when, while strange things were happening, there wasn't enough evidence to justify such extreme measures. And then the smoke snakes came.
• Punch! Punch! Punch! Uh Oh...: Carlie saves Hyeon at the last second from being bitten by Daigo when she punches Daigo in the face. Her elation at breaking his nose quickly turns into alarm when the bones reform themselves and Daigo appears none the worse for wear.
• Rainbow Speak: Colored text is used to represent many different things. Specifically:
  • Red text represents Fesxis's speech, Eric's speech, the Dark Dragon's speech, Huginn's speech, and Wilmarina's speech when she's being uncharacteristically serious.
  • Orange text represents Wilmarina's speech normally.
  • Dark green text represents Harriet's speech.
  • Teal text represents Mirielle's speech.
  • Light blue text represents one of Josephine's inner monologues and Muninn's speech. It's also used in one scene to represent Mirielle's father.
  • Purple text represents Zia's telepathy broadcasts, Jessica's Compelling Voice commands, and Huginn and Muninn speaking in unison. It's also used in one scene to represent Mirielle's mother.
• Reactive Continuous Scream: Jenna realises she's naked and screams, causing Vivian to scream and throw her clothes, causing Jenna to scream in thanks. Then Crispin wakes up, making Vivian scream, making Crispin scream...
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Zia doesn't mince her words when it comes to criticising Crispin's theory about the government:
  "Crispy, your writing is bad and your stories are trite. If the government is trying this secondhand, homeopathic approach to conspiracy - what the flying fuck is the objective? Pissed off, emotionally unbalanced pubescent superhumans?"
• Red Herring: A flashforward has Zia reveal that Simon isn't the leader of the Dark Dragon, because she overheard their talk about capturing him. The reality is that the original Dark Dragon is Simon's evil split personality, so technically Simon is the leader.
• Red Right Hand: Invoked by the Dark Dragon group of the future; all of them have their faces burned by the leader to mark them as a member.
• Relationship-Salvaging Disaster: Ivy and Luna were barely on speaking terms before the empowering, having drifted apart after Luna joined up with Nadine's gang. The incident forces them back together, which Luna lampshades:
  "I wish it didn't take the whole world crumbling for us to talk again- am I right?"
• Retool: This happens in-universe to the Post-Human Division, as shown in a flashforward. Originally a dumping ground for incompetent employees, the division got a newer, more serious coat of paint once superpowered individuals came into the picture. Fittingly, the division's agents are talking about a film remake when this fact is introduced.
• Reveal Shot:
  • Principal Shooter mentions over the PA that Mr. Morrison has been replaced by a substitute for the final exams. Cut to the classroom where it's revealed that said sub is Sarah Travers, the agent that's been hunting down and monitoring all of the superpowered characters.
  • Hyeon gets one of these when he sees Daigo talking with Harriet. Upon getting a little closer, he's shocked to find that they aren't talking at all- Daigo is strangling her.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: When Josephine is introduced to Kwang, she asks the squirrel if he's actually a kid with shapeshifting powers. She's not too off the mark, as Kwang is the pet of the guy who can talk to and transform into animals.
• Road Block: The warehouse group attempt to sneak Benjy from said warehouse to Sebastian's house, but hit a snag along the way when they encounter a police barricade. They create a dust cloud to try and get through, accidentally hurting some of the cops in the process.
• Run for the Border: Fesxis advises Sebastian to flee the country before the masquerade is broken and their powers are revealed... about five minutes after they get their powers in the first place. Sebastian ignores her.
• Running Gag:
  • Someone, usually Ciro, tells Michal to turn off his fire power and be careful with it. Michal apologies and does so. Then he turns it on again next scene.
  • Jenna losing her clothes due to her bug body splitting up and reforming. It happened once when she first got her power, again when she split up to catch Crispin, and then a third time when fire made her panic and lose form of herself.

S-Z

• Screaming at Squick:
  • Jenna's appearance thoroughly disgusts Crispin, and he makes sure that everyone is aware of it. His horrified reaction causes her to experience a Heroic BSoD.
  • Shortly afterwards Ed arrives, screams at Jenna, and throws a pillow at her, disorientating her swarm. Fortunately she's more annoyed at the unprovoked assault than traumatised.
  • While he likes to put up a persona of being composed, Daigo quickly loses his cool and shrieks when Harriet gets snot all over him.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Crispin sees Ivy, and realises that he's about to get sucked into the superhero plot, he immediately tries to jack a car and escape.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Luna mocks Crispin's novel for opening on a janitor, which is how the RP itself started.
  • Crispin says it doesn't make sense that more than four children were given superpowers. After all, a story with twenty or more main characters would be way too much of a mess.
  • Finn makes a dig at the RP when Ivy describes Crispin's book to him:
    "Yeah, I can tell just by the name that it's shit. I mean, 'Dawn of a New Age'? Who writes a title like that?"
• A Shared Suffering: Gaining superpowers hasn't been easy for a lot of the kids. However, they've found a silver lining in that they aren't alone, and many of them have bonded with people that they'd never spoken to before (or even disliked) due to their shared issue.
• Ship Tease:
  • Nadine has a crush on Jo, and their moment of intimacy during the school's second evacuation shows that, romantically or platonically, Jo desires a relationship with Nadine in turn.
  • Simon and Mirielle are shown in one flashforward to have gotten together in the future. Even though it didn't work out, Simon in the present has found himself inexplicably interested in Mirielle's cheerful personality.
  • Vanessa asks Lenore to pass along the number for her drug dealer, since whatever she's taking makes her look fantastic. Michal jokes afterward that Vanessa might be 'in lesbians with her.'
• Sinister Scraping Sound: Daigo's lizard monster scrapes its sharp claws against the ground, emitting a terrifying noise as it pursues its prey.
• Skipping School: Taken to silly extremes the day after the empowering: nearly all of the 30+ superpowered kids end up skipping class at some point or the other. Abby and Irene are the only ones who stay in school until it's evacuated.
• Slow-Motion Fall: Rhys accidentally shoots Carlie in the stomach, and describes the few seconds in which she falls to the ground as feeling like an hour.
• Smart People Wear Glasses: Mentioned when Ziz flies to Jacob to ask him a question. Ziz's creator wears glasses, and it regards its creator as a genius- ergo, anyone else who wears glasses must be intelligent too.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: Hyeon's extended interaction with his ex-girlfriend Nadine and haughty rival Benedict is one long showcase of how sarcastic they can all be towards each other.
• So Proud of You: Played for Laughs when Mirielle uses a microwave to set off the fire alarms and Zia is proud of the bad influence she's had on her friend.
• Somebody Set Us Up The Bomb: It's revealed during the school finals that Daigo has set up multiple bombs throughout the school, which Ivy discovers when her drone finds bomb-related equipment on the roof, and Benedict discovers when his hyper mind picks up strange substances on the way to class.
• Something Only They Would Say: Ivy figures out that Luna is really the Luna she knows, and not a monstrous imposter, when Luna bluntly tells her to nut up.
• Spy Speak:
  • Both Shooter and Benedict refer to the superpowered kids as a 'study group' while in public.
  • Agent Travers advises Ivy and Luna to return to the classroom quickly while they try to leave. They both freak out over the idea that she's speaking code words and delivering a hidden threat to them. Ivy tries to rebuke her, but can't actually figure out a metaphor to respond with.
• Standing Between the Enemies: Josephine stops a fight between Zia and Nadine by placing herself between them. Nadine, who has a crush on Jo, comes to her senses before she can hurt the girl and then encourages Zia to leave.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Mirielle and Simon were an item in the future, but broke apart after the latter joined the government that was terrorising the heroes.
• Stating the Simple Solution: The students end up locked in the school. Since they can't get the doors open, they decide to pick up the nearest object and hurl it through the window. Cue one of the students pointing out that they could try the emergency exit first, or ask one of the teachers what's up.
• Stereotype Reaction Gag: Hyeon assumes that Benedict would know Devin since they're both rich white boys. Benedict shoots back that Hyeon would be offended if Benedict asked him if he knew all the Korean-Americans in town... which Hyeon can't respond to, because he does so happen to know the two other Korean-Americans in the main cast.
• Stupidest Thing I've Ever Heard:
  • Luna's response to Crispin's claim that they're all part of an urban legend experiment.
  • Josephine says this to herself after she ponders whether a squirrel she just found could be a government-trained spy.
• Suddenly Shouting: Inverted when Mirielle asks Simon what's happening with the smoke snakes. He goes on a long, stressed tirade, before calmly eating a piece of bread and informing her that it tastes good.
• Superhero Speciation: No two characters have the exact same power, though there is some overlap: Simon can control plasma, which in turn lets him manipulate fire (which Michal can also do) and electricity; Josephine and Luna can also both control electricity, but Luna can turn into it whilst Josephine has the extra power of cryokinesis. Abby, Barbra and Nadine all have regenerative powers, though their methods are different: Abby has a Healing Factor that fixes up any injury, Barbra can come back from the dead with an immunity to what killed her, and Nadine can also resurrect herself, but she has to gain a completely new body to do so.
• Superpower Lottery: Some of the students won extremely powerful results from the empowering, while others acquired basic but highly versatile powers. Among the cast, Zia, Ivy, and Vivian are some of the big winners (the former due to the sheer versatility and range of her psychic power, the latter two for their ability to essentially manipulate reality itself).
• Take My Hand!: Sebastian tries to save Amy from the empowering smoke by grabbing her hand while the smoke wraps around her other. Ciro does the same with Benedict when his lower body is being dragged into the fog. Both succeed, though only temporarily.
• Take That!:
  • As bad as Crispin's novel is, Zia still thinks it's better than Countdown.
  • Ziz buys a Nintendo Switch for Ivy without using any of her money. When she worries that they've accidentally stolen it, Luna claims it's a victimless crime since it came from Amazon.
• Taking the Bullet:
  • Mirielle attempts to take a slew of attacks that are aimed towards Benjy. The attackers soften their blows when they realise they'll hit her, and Benjy ends up leaping forward to take the now lessened hits for her.
  • Ciro urges a civilian to get to safety before him, leaving himself vulnerable to attack from Daigo's monster.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Michal's Power Incontinence wasn't stopped by the multiple attempts to extinguish his flames, but instead by the group calmly but sternly telling him to calm down.
• Talking Your Way Out:
  • Future Zia tries to escape imprisonment by appealing to her captor. It doesn't work, as her guard is much less compassionate than he seems.
  • Ciro sneaks into the principal's office and ends up getting caught. He's able to talk the principal down from his panic, and even set up an alliance with him.
• Technology Marches On: The trope is referenced In-Universe; when Jenna bemoans that her parents are gonna freak out when they see her bug form, Vivian suggests sending them a text about staying at a friend's house. It's not 1988, they have plenty of ways to lie to their parents.
• Teleporter Accident: Vivian's magical portal deposits her and the gang in her house- except for Zia, who's accidentally shunted into a stranger's house. While they're having sex. No-one is happy.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Hyeon's words before they're attacked by supernatural snakes and granted superpowers:
    "In two weeks, we’ll forget this night ever happened."
  • A similar instance happens with Nadine, the night before police show up at the school:
    "That idiot's wrong. Nothing's gonna happen and he knows it. Tomorrow we'll all be laughing at his face. Mark my words."
  • When Zia's group arrives at Falstaff in search of Crispin.
    Vivian: I mean, what are the chances of him walking out of the door just as we need him?
    Luna: There he is. [points to where Crispin is walking out of a hotel]
  • Similar to the above, when Sebastian's group is recuperating at his house:
    Barbra: No one is just going to walk in h-
    [Harriet smashes through the door with her spear]
  • Travers reassures Josephine that she won't let anything bad happen to her during finals. Soon after, it's revealed that Daigo and company have planted bombs all throughout the school.
  • Fesxis tells Sebastian that, in order not to spook the people who've set the bomb in the school, they shouldn't set off the fire alarm. Guess what Mirielle does just a few minutes later?
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • Ciro tries to advise Michal on controlling his power, only to realise with embarrassment that his advice sounds like it's referring to something more salacious.
    "You just have to put up with it until you can get back to your room. Or sneak off somewhere private, like a toilet or something, and let it out..."
  • Since Harriet has nowhere to stay for the night, Sebastian offers to shack her up in his house. His wording causes her to worry that he'll do something 'strange' to her, much to the amusement of his friends.
• Their First Time: Nadine and Hyeon reminisce over the time they decided to try and have sex for the first time. Emphasis on try, as the whole thing was awkward and they gave up before anything happened.
• There Was a Door: To escape the snakes, Hyeon and Ciro try holing up in a room and barricading the door. Cue the snakes bursting through the wall right besides the door.
• They Just Dont Get It: It takes a good minute for Ivy to explain to her parents that she has superpowers. They first take her confession to mean that she's an alcoholic, and then that she's doing drugs, only to finally realise what she means when she uses her power to reconstruct their TV remote.
• Third Party Stops Attack: Happens twice in quick succession. Daigo tries to strangle Harriet until Hyeon comes in and knocks him away with a guitar case. Daigo then grabs Hyeon and tries to sink his teeth into him, only for Carlie to appear and break Daigo's nose with her fist.
• This Is Reality: When it's suggested that the empowered kids become a legitimate superhero group, Rose shoots it down by saying they aren't in a comic book and things wouldn't end well for them if they tried it.
• Throwing the Distraction:
  • Hyeon throws his iPod away in the hopes that the music will distract the smoke snakes that are attacking him. It does manage to halt them for a few seconds, though it doesn't last long.
  • Elly sets off her personal alarm and then throws it aside in the hopes that Daigo's monster will follow it rather than her. It gives her and her brother a few seconds, but the monster eventually turns its attention back to them.
• Title Drop:
  • The title of the roleplay was first dropped when an author introduced his newest book, Dawn of a New Age, setting up a plot point for the characters to follow.
  • Besides that, the title has been alluded to a few times; Principal Shooter referred to the students as 'builders of a new age', while Daigo has said that their powers will usher in the 'dawn of a new era'. He eventually goes the whole way and calls it the 'dawn of a new age' while fighting Harriet and Hyeon.
• Torment by Annoyance: How Finn gets Zia's attention after she receives her telepathy; he loudly repeats her name in his head until she can't ignore it anymore.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Some of the heroes come across Benjy with a monstrous appearance and surrounded by the corpses of Neo-Nazis. Believing that he's lost his sapience and will kill them next, they attack him. Fortunately it's revealed before he's seriously injured that he's still capable of sentience, and only killed the Nazis in self-defense.
• Transformation Horror: What happens when Daigo forces a drifter to consume his vampiric blood. His body contorts unnaturally and his skin melts off his bones as a new reptilian body grows from within him.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Played for Laughs when Jae suggests punching Destiny to help awaken her power.
• Travelling at the Speed of Plot: While there is a map provided of Oldport, with a given scale for how far every location is from each other, characters sometimes are quicker to arrive than would be physically possible in order to better fit the plot. This is occasionally lampshaded when it happens.
  Outside, due to a string of green lights and coincidences that gave the bus driver his best time yet, Barbra and Jacob were dropped off.
• Twisting the Words: When the principal corners Mirielle and complains about 'her people' being the end of him, she intentionally misconstrues his words as him being prejudiced against the French or bakers (when they both know he's talking about 'people with superpowers').
• The Unsmile:
  • Having been called to the principal about the auditorium's destruction, Ciro forces a smile when he sees Shooter that just makes it more obvious how panicked he is.
  • Shooter himself tries to offer a reassuring smile to the students while the police are investigating the school. It actually creeps them out more due to how unnatural it looks.
• Urban Legends: The in-universe Dawn of A New Age novel, which replicates the roleplay's events, is supposedly based on an urban legend about the government experimenting on children to give them superpowers. The heroes that are told about it don't believe it for a second.
• Useless Security Camera: The surveillance at the school didn't pick up any of the weird happenings. To normal people (or those not on drugs, like Mr. Morrison) the footage looks normal, if a little stiff.
• Vehicular Kidnapping: Played for Laughs. Benedict shows up at school after a night of being missing. The police are also at the school, and Hyeon assumes that they're looking for Benedict (since, being a rich white boy, his disappearance would be a big deal). Benedict's power then goes into overload, making him act erratically, prompting Hyeon to grab him and order Nadine to help get him into Hyeon's car trunk. Benedict does wise up in time to make himself comfortable in the back seat instead.
• Verbal Backspace: Hyeon says that they can't use Kwang to search for bombs because he's the 'dumbest motherfucker' in Oldport. He then sees Carlie next to Kwang, and retracts his statement.
• Victimized Bystander: Daigo's monster kills a man and his dog. Their only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Villain by Default: One of the first antagonists that any of the characters face are a group of Neo-Nazis. Naturally, they aren't good people, and none of the characters hold it against Benjy when he attacks and kills them in self-defense.
• Villain Team-Up: Agent Travers, a member of the government trying to detain the cast, strikes a deal with Daigo's unscrupulous gang, allowing them to continue their villainy so long as it works for her benefit.
• Villainous Gentrification: Oldport has been greatly gentrified, with the people in charge eager to get rid of the last of the rundown areas. This is clearly presented as a bad thing, with Devin, the person relaying this information, saying that even he doesn't agree with their policies.
• Vulgar Humour: Harriet's method of getting Daigo to back away from her: she takes a good whiff of dust and then sneezes snot over him and his lackey Devin.
• "Wanted!" Poster: The future shows that the Post-Human Division have a corkboard up with pictures of all the superpowered children, each of them marked with some form of red writing.
• Watch Where You're Going!:
  • Distracted as they are by the weird happenings in school, Zia and Simon don't notice they're careening towards each other until it's almost too late. Zia swerves at the last second and hits the lockers instead. The two are then too distracted by the arrival of the smoke snakes to interact further.
  • Jae is too distracted trying to get Jem out of the school that she doesn't pay attention to where she's going, and ends up colliding with Mirielle and falling onto her behind.
• We Interrupt This Program: The radio show Sims Sensational is suddenly cut off by Crispin, who speaks to Ivy directly before the show resumes. No-one else is any the wiser to the interruption.
• We Need a Distraction:
  • To get out of the auditorium and away from the principal, Barbra suggests starting a fire to set off the smoke alarms. Ciro and Jacob quickly shoot down the idea.
  • Nadine's plan to sneak out of finals includes kowtowing Ciro into acting as a distraction from her. A wrench is thrown in her plan when the finals teacher is revealed to be the government agent that's after the kids.
• We Used to Be Friends: In the future, Simon has turned his back on the other kids and aligned himself with the government. Future Mirielle's reaction to him when he shows up at her bakery is torn between distrust and fear.
• Webcomic Time: The second in-universe day of the roleplay goes on for so long that over a year and a half passes in real world time.
• Wham Line: Daigo and company plan something related to the school and final exams, but it's not revealed what until Ziz relays some shocking news to his creator:
  Ziz: CREATOR, ARE THE UNITS KNOWN AS STUDENTS ENROLLED IN EDUCATIONAL LECTURES ABOUT THE PRODUCTION OF EXPLOSIVES?
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Brought up when Hyeon accidentally runs over a squirrel. He'd never cared before about causing roadkill, but now that he has the ability to understand animals he's overwhelmed with guilt at his man- er, animalslaughter.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Jenna calls out Ed for knocking her 'head' off with a pillow. Except, due to how their respective powers work, Ed can't hear her.
  • Ivan calls himself out once he realises that Ciro is freaked out by Ivan following him.
• Working with the Ex: The morning after the empowering incident, Hyeon runs into his ex-girlfriend Nadine. The two of them join together to figure out a plan, which leads to a lot of awkardness and bickering between them (much to the amusement of Benedict, their ride-along).
• World of Snark: One of Sebastian's comments hangs a lampshade on how most of the cast are prone to throwing around witty banter:
  There was a new kid- sarcastic. He'd get along well with everyone here.
• Worrying for the Wrong Reason: Zia freaks out when she gets a call from her mother while skipping school. Ciro assumes it's because her mother is angry, but Zia clarifies the real problem- her mother is worried.
• Worst Aid: Some of the kids try to heal Emmanuel by wrapping him in a bandage... for an internal injury. Fortunately he also has a Healing Factor to help him out.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: A variation; one of the initial ideas that Daigo's crew come up with to lure out the heroes is to 'rob' the store of one of their own members. It's passed up in favour of Daigo creating his lizard monster.
• Written-In Absence:
  • Finn's player was absent for a month after having asked the Principal to shake his hand. The other characters in the scene comment on how the both of them seem to go into a trance for that time.
  • Zia's player was pre-occupied with real life for a while, so her absense was justified as a teleporting incident gone wrong. When she returns, Zia finds herself in a stranger's home instead of Vivian's house like she intended.
• You Must Be Cold: After freezing herself to her desk and then getting doused by sprinklers, Josephine is offered Ciro's jacket so that she can feel a little warmer. He then feels bad when another friend shows up and he has no jacket left to offer them.
• Your Head Asplode: Zia performs a variation on Daigo's lizard monster, using her psychic powers to explode its brain. The result is a gooey green mess that spurts out of its eyes.
• Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: Ivy and her mother are introduced while the latter is dealing with a complaint from one of the student's parents. The student in question had broken a beaker of sulphuric acid with his fidget spinner, just for the sake of making a video.

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