Literature / The Perfect Run

"I'm immortal. But don't tell anyone!"

— Ryan "Quicksave" Romano

Ryan Romano starts his day simply. He gets in his car, drives to a location, and delivers a package. He is a courier, and he is proud to always deliver. Unfortunately, he is ambushed by a supervillain, and is killed.

Then he tries again.

Quicksave, as he likes to be called, has a very unique power: He can create a "save point" in time which he will return to upon death, allowing him to live the same day countless times. He is a true immortal, and he has lived centuries in just the four years since he has had his power.

Now he has arrived in New Rome, the socioeconomic capital of a rebuilding Europe. New Rome is the new sin city of Italy, trapped between the Augusti crime family and the Dynamis corporation. Both sides have their own visions of the future. It's not clear which is better, but they are certainly not compatible with each other. Anyone who allies with one side becomes the eternal enemy of the other.

Anyone, that is, except for Ryan. With his ability to reload, he can work with one side and then try the other route in the next loop. While searching for his long-lost friend, he plots out the path to his Perfect Run. One final timeline where he uses everything he has learned to make sure the maximum number of people survive, with the maximum amount of happiness for all.

After all, he just has to keep trying, and he'll get it right eventually.

A Superhero story authored by Maxime J. Durand (aka: Void Herald). It can be found here on the Royal Road.

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This story provides examples of:

• Ability Mixing: Comes in two flavors.
  • First and most common, if someone takes two elixirs, the powers fight over their body. This results in the Genome and their powers both mutating uncontrollably until eventually they settle into some sort of equilibrium. For example, someone with an Orange power that lets her transform into gas at will takes a Red elixir that lets her send out shockwaves of vibrational energy, and the result is that she is permanently transformed into a gas that is constantly vibrating on a microscopic level so she destroys anything she touches. These people are called Psychos, as the fighting powers drive them insane, and they have to drink more elixirs to survive (though they don't gain more powers).
  • Second, some extremely rare people can take two elixirs without becoming Psychos. In this case, the abilities don't mix, they operate side-by-side independently. This means that Psychos have a higher chance of developing world-ending abilities, but two-powered people can still have incredible synergy between their powers.
• Alien Invasion: The event that started it all. An alien ship landed in Antarctica, and a scientist took the technology to painfully uplift humanity to a level where they could fight back. Unfortunately, she refused to accept that this ship was the last of the alien empire, and therefore did far more damage to the human race than they ever could.
• Animal-Themed Superbeing: Some Genomes like The Panda and Mosquito have animal motifs as their main gimmick.
• The Anti-Nihilist: Almost everyone dismisses Ryan as an immature jackass, and his actual friends are worried that he might be literally insane. The truth is that his time-looping ability means that he knows there is no point to the universe, so he may as well have fun and help people out. This revelation came to him after he died of old age, which he had assumed would kill him permanently, and he just restored right back to his old save point.
  Ryan: I'm not insane, I just get the joke.
• Atomic Superpower: Alphonse "Fallout" Manada is a blackened skeleton contained in a cybernetic combat armor, because that's the only thing that can contain the living nuclear explosion he has become. When he first drank his elixir, he immediately exploded, annihilating the city he was in.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The creatures from the higher dimensions are universally compassionate, but also completely alien and unable to understand humanity. They operate entirely within their color, and have a great deal of difficulty understanding anything outside of it. Even the creatures specifically designed to understand humanity have a lot of trouble with it, and many problems in the series are caused by the fact that the elixirs which give people superpowers are intelligent enough to understand desires, but too alien to understand the reasons behind those desires.
• Body Surf : The Psycho villain Francis Grey, aka Psyshock, has this as a subset of his superpower. He hijacks other people's bodies whenever his current inhabited thrall is killed, then rebuilds it into a new copy of himself.
• Chekhov's Gun: The orbital satellite that escapes the Carnival's grasp is eventually used by Adam the Ogre to attack New Rome.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: There are seven known groups of Elixirs. Each power is associated with a color◊: Red for Energy, Orange for Matter, Yellow for Concepts, Green for Life, Blue for Information, Violet for Space-Time, and White for Meta-Powers. And then a hidden eighth color, Black, for Paradox/True Chaos
• Combat Clairvoyance: Some Blue Genomes like Livia can see into the future with such precision that they become nigh untouchable in battle. Combine this with Ryan's time-stop power and the duo can become practically invincible in a fight if done right.
• Complete Immortality: Early in his life, Ryan discovered just how immortal he was: After being permanently trapped in the Monaco Pocket Dimension, he literally dies of old age. Ryan then immediately pops right back up at his last save point, made over seventy-five years ago. It is right then that he realizes that nothing can kill him permanently (short of mental effects, since his personal superpower is Mental Time Travel).
• Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: Dynamis sponsors Il Migliore, the official protectors of New Rome. Of course, Dynamis controls their image, their merchandising rights, and tells them who to fight. Despite this, it seems that most of them did indeed join for the chance to do the right thing. In loops where Ryan exposes the company's crimes, the team leader and team manager are the first to defect, and most of the rest follow suit.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: The Alchemist received a full information dump on how an alien civilization utilized the higher realms to conquer the universe, only to be cast down by the Ultimate Ones until only one ship escaped to Earth. She proceeded to do basically the exact same thing they did. Ryan dryly notes that maybe if she wasn't stuck in an echo chamber of her own making, someone would have pointed out what an insane idea this was.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Ultimate Ones are the gods of the higher dimensions, pure expressions of their colors. They are apparently compassionate, but that matters little because they are so alien that even their attention is likely to drive a human insane. And that's if you're lucky. If you're not, the entire world could be destroyed by an Ultimate One casually trying to pass through, like a child crushing an anthill trying to find out what's inside. The elixirs are the "emissaries" of the Ultimate Ones, trying to uplift humanity to a higher order of being. Unfortunately, they started with a selfish misanthrope.
• Eldritch Location: Monaco teleports anyone who enters it into the Monte Carlo, a hotel casino you can never leave with never-ending rooms, hallways, and various servants that go hostile when the casino "closes".
• Expy: One of the Killer Seven, Fortuna, shares the same name and power as Fortune from Metal Gear Solid 2.
• Extradimensional Power Source: Elixirs enable their users to harness energy drawn from other colour-coded higher dimensions. This is how they can pull matter and energy seemingly from nowhere.
  • Red powers are energy-based. Fire, electricity, and radiation are all Red powers. Transforming into an Energy Being is also a Red power.
  • Yellow powers are concepts. Yelows have absurd powers like "being lucky" or "becoming the land." Generally, a Yellow has complete supremacy over their specific concept.
  • Orange powers grant control over inorganic matter. Glass control, transforming into a mobile statue, and transforming into a cloud of gas are all Orange powers.
  • Green powers grant control over organic matter. Controlling plants is the most famous version, but controlling flesh and blood are also common, as is transforming into a monster.
  • Blue powers are information-based. Telepathy, simulations, and instant Genius intellect are all common Blue powers.
  • Violet powers relate to space and time. Teleportation is a Violet power, as is Ryan's save point.
  • White powers are meta powers, affecting other powers. The most prominent White can suppress other powers, and White technology is required to make the other colors work together.
  • Black is the color of pure paradox, with no rules. The Alchemist declared it too dangerous and did not make any Black elixirs.
• Fantastic Drug: Bliss, a highly addictive drug created by Bacchus' branch of the Augusti and shipped all over Europe. Shroud claims that this drug kills about twenty-thousand people annually, Ki-jung is a former addict.
• From a Single Cell: Bloodstream's power allowed him to act as virus that could regenerate or infect others as long as any of him was alive. Thankfully, he could only have ten clones at a time, but the Carnival and Dynamis still worked together to annihilate him completely. As it turns out, if left unchecked, he would have eventually infected the entire world. And then Dynamis secretly kept a few samples...
• Fighting a Shadow: Sometimes becomes quite the problem when fighting villains like Bloodstream, Psyshock and The Alchemist, since they tend to use Self-Duplication and Grand Theft Me methods to avoid death.
• Gaslighting: Several people are trapped in abusive families this way, constantly told about how important their work is, and how the family needs them, and how it's them against the world... special mention goes to Narcinia, who had her mind shattered after Augustus murdered her family. Then he gave her to his friends to raise, and they used her power to make drugs.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: People with superpowers are called "Genomes" because the elixirs that give them power alter their genomes. However, it turns out that this is the least of the elixir's effects. Each elixir gives the drinker access to an Extradimensional Power Source; without that, the knockoff elixirs that Dynamis makes are limited to being powered only by the individual's body. They can make moderate flames, produce some wind, and use weak telekinesis, but not really anything else. Ryan even gives up his DNA to Dynamis without a blink, well aware that they won't be able to copy even the smallest aspect of his power.
• Godzilla Threshold: Ryan spends most of his fights cracking jokes and playfully dodging his enemies. When facing psychics, however, he drops everything to kill them as fast as possible. Since psychics are pretty much the only things that can cause him permanent damage, he doesn't mess around.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Ryan jokes about this constantly, claiming that anyone who learns his true name will go mad, that anyone looking into his technology will weep with terror, so on and so on. Like many of his jokes, he's hiding the truth behind humor. People have had bad reactions to learning about Ryan's full power before, and when a Psycho looks at Ryan's rabbit plushie with his superpower, he starts screaming.
• Great Offscreen War: The advent of superpowers from the Alchemist's Elixirs led to years of conflicts and war called the Genome Wars. The war killed off billions, devastated entire swathes of continents and reshaped the world, with a Genius supervillain called Mechron being a major player - and all before the story even begins.
• Green Thumb: A not uncommon Green power. Usually, this involves control and supernatural growth of a specific plant, but some people gain the power to encourage the growth of all plants. It's slower and not as useful in combat, but has wider-reaching implications.
• Happily Adopted: One of Felix's sisters is adopted. She is perfectly happy with her new family (except for the same amount of angst about the family business as her siblings), and dismisses her biological parents as raiders and rapists who she escaped. Actually, her parents were kind, gentle people who were trying to rebuild the world—but her father had a power that might be able to kill Augustus, so he killed them and all witnesses. She was only spared because he couldn't help but see the resemblance to his own daughter.
• Having a Blast: Felix, AKA Atom Cat, has the power to make anything he touches explode. Yes, including people. Early on in every loop, he realizes that he can delay the explosion, allowing him to throw explosive projectiles.
• Hero's First Rescue: Ryan's first Main Quest was rescuing everyone trapped inside Monaco, which became his first Perfect Run.
• Hidden Depths: Fortuna, Felix's sister, is a raging narcissist who has never had to lift a finger in her life because of her absurdly overpowered luck ability. She repeatedly tells Ryan that anyone she is interested in has a duty to the universe to fall to her feet and worship her, and she says this as if she's explaining a basic fact of life. She's also an accomplished sculptor who is very apprehensive about her work. Between her luck and her family connections, she considers her art the only thing that's hers alone, and she is very protective of it.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: Andreas Torque, aka Bacchus, is trying to make stronger and purer strains of Bliss, a highly addictive psychedelic super drug, so that he may once again gain access to "Heaven" and "God". Which is to say, the Blue World and the Blue Ultimate One.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Augustus has a brain tumor. An invincible brain tumor that no one can possibly cut out. As Ryan points out, if he hadn't murdered the one man in the world who can cut him, that man would have likely happily helped him.
• I Gave My Word: Ryan always keeps his promises. This is very important, because it's including across loops. He might, on occasion, compromise on a single run for practicality (eg, he promised to destroy the Bliss Factory, but that's politically difficult in most loops), but he always makes sure that he integrates everything everyone asked for into his Perfect Run.
• I Love You Because I Can't Control You: Being a Head-Turning Beauty who was Born Lucky, Fortuna is infatuated with Mathias, and in another loop Ryan, when they seem to be totally uninterested in her.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Adam Fontaine, aka Adam the Ogre/Big Adam, is an avid cannibal that preys on the denizens of Rust Town, even children. Before Last Easter, he was a cunning serial killer known as The Brooklyn Cannibal that then escaped arrest and fled to Europe right as the Genome Wars began.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Fortuna kills two people with one shot during the first attack on Rust Town. Likewise, Ryan successfully shoots a matchstick falling in midair. The latter because of literal decades of practice throughout dozens of loops. The former is just because she's just that lucky.
• In-Series Nickname: The "Knockoff Elixirs" that Dynamis produces are technically each named individually; the one based on Wyvern is named the "Hercules Elixir," and so on. Everyone, including the people who designed them, casually refers to them as knockoffs because they are obviously inferior to the original Alchemist elixirs.
• It Can Think: Ryan encounters a Black elixir, which ends up outside its bottle and unable to die due to unique circumstances. He is very surprised that it can talk. As it turns out, this is not unique to the Black. All elixirs are intelligent, though they usually don't have an ability to speak human language. They are agents sent from the higher realms to uplift humanity. The Alchemist taught them a few specific ways to bond with humans that she thought would be advantageous in the long run. On the plus side, this means that curing the Psycho condition turns out to be as simple as explaining to the elixirs which are fighting over the body what they're doing wrong.
• I Will Find You: Ryan dubbed finding his Childhood Friend Len as one of his most important Main Quests.
• Killer Rabbit: Ryan has a rabbit plushie stuffed with more weapons than anyone knows what to do with. Everyone is surprised and impressed when they realize what it is, but Ryan absolutely refuses to let anyone else touch it, repeatedly thinking of it as too powerful to use outside of Suicide Runs. Turns out it's possessed by a spirit from the Violet world. When Ryan turns it on, it will use all those weapons to perfect and imaginative effect, until it finds a child and starts duplicating. Ryan considers any timeline where he had to use the plushie to be a lost cause by default.
• Like an Old Married Couple: This turns out to be the secret behind the Psycho condition. Yes, really. When the heroes get a translator set up, they discover that the elixirs that make up a Psycho's powers are constantly arguing, both trying to reshape the body according to the first wish they received, and based on their interpretation via their color. Fixing the problem is basically as simple as a third person coming in and saying "why don't you just get a divorce?"
• Living Lie Detector: Luigi's Blue power means that he can force anyone who's already talking to him to speak with total honesty. He uses this to vet new recruits, much to Ryan's frustration on runs where he's technically betraying the Augusti.
• Mad Scientist: Blue elixirs sometimes turn people into Geniuses, implanting knowledge and skills for a specific field. Len is focused on underwater tech, Vulcan on weapons, so on and so on. Ryan is not a Genius, but he has so much experience with Genius tech that many people mistake him for one.
• Mass Super-Empowering Event: In an event that infamously came to be known as 'Last Easter', a mysterious someone called The Alchemist sent Elixirs by package to a seemingly randomly-selected subset of the world population, giving some people superpowers and thus changing the world overnight.
• MegaCorp: Dynamis, one of New Rome's major factions, is this. It has influence in almost every industry throughout post-Genome War Europe, employs several Genomes, and is frequently mentioned to underpay and mistreat its workers.
• Mental Time Travel: Quicksave's actual power is a Resurrection/Death Loop. He prefers to think of it as him just having a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, as that's much less disturbing than his power actually destroying reality every time he dies.
• Mercy Kill: Ryan's Black Elixir power allows him to kill immortals. In cases like Geist, they welcome the chance to actually die.
• Multiversal Conqueror: Long ago, an alien race discovered the higher realms. Using the energy of the realms, they conquered literally the entire universe. When they spoke to the Ultimate Ones again, they were chastised for their hubris, and they decided to conquer the higher realms themselves. They failed utterly as the Ultimate Ones turned all of their technology against them. One ship managed to escape to Earth, and a human scientist became convinced that she needed to destroy the current world order to make humanity strong enough to survive. Except she refused to accept that the rest of the empire was long dead, and her extremism completely unnecessary.
• Mundane Utility: At parties, Wardrobe often turns into Jesus Christ to turn water into wine. For bonus points, this is literal canon.
• More Dakka: Ryan pulls out several firearms and uses them all to try and hit Fortuna. Her powers make him miss all the shots.
• Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters: The Made Men of the Augusti genuinely believe that their organization is a stabilizing force on post-war Italy, with Zanbato in particular going out of his way to be a nice guy. Discussed and deconstructed by multiple people.
  Shroud: No matter the friendly neighborhood gangster publicity, the Augusti do far more harm than good. And even if he killed no one personally, by protecting this shipment, Zanbato indirectly supported an organization causing almost twenty-thousand deaths each year, with three thousand in New Rome alone.
• Never My Fault: The Alchemist sent out Super Serums to random people across the world, fully expecting to cause chaos and making no attempt to warn people of the possible side effects of taking more than one. Furthermore, she could have easily prevented the Psycho Condition in the first place just by teaching the elixirs (which are sapient) not to fight over hosts. When confronted by one of the Psychos she created, she just shrugs and says it's the Psycho's own fault for being too greedy.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Apart from his crazy-overpowered Red lightning powers, the supervillain Augustus's Orange power is being invulnerable to any and all injury, which makes him the World's Strongest Man and one of the biggest post-war threats to mankind. Only Yellow conceptual powers like Bill Costa's ability to cut anything or paradoxical powers like the Black Elixir have any chance of harming him.
• No Man Should Have This Power: Mechron tech is generally considered too dangerous for anyone to have access to. First off, the fact that every single Mechron base has "create an infinite army of robots" as an auxiliary function is not a good look, and Leo Hargraves warns that being able to throw robots at a problem until it goes away will lead to bad places. Not to mention the fact that the base under Rust Town controls a Kill Sat. In the end, the heroes get all the information out of the base that they can, then destroy it.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: During his attempts to free everyone trapped in Monaco, Ryan goes on an adventure where he masters particle physics, And builds a device that can create an exit from Monaco using parts of CERN's hadron collider. We don't see the entire process on how he does this.
• One Nation Under Copyright: The Dynamis Corporation is the closest thing to a government left in post-war Europe. There is literally no mention of any other legal authority in New Rome, from a mayor to a president. Enrique Manada repeatedly insists that they are the only rule of law left, and compared to the literal criminal empire, they certainly look good. Still, multiple people point out that having one corporation rule everything is clearly not the best solution in the long term.
• One Person, One Power: A person can only ever drink one Elixir (or one Knockoff Elixir). Drinking more has a very high chance of Body Horror and violent insanity because the two (or more) powers attempt to overwrite each other. There exist a very small number of people who can drink two Elixirs with no negative effects, like Augustus, who has Shock and Awe and Nigh-Invulnerability.
• The Paranoiac: Augustus does not trust anyone outside his immediate family, automatically assuming that anyone trying to get close is just trying to take advantage and must be destroyed before they can cause any harm. This is why he will eventually try to conquer Europe before he dies, so he can give his daughter a true empire to rule over. Despite the fact that she has no desire for such a thing.
• Powered Armor: A common sight among both Dynamis and the Augusti, because Vulcan made the Dynamis armor before she left for the Augusti. This is all despite the fact that her Mad Scientist focus is on weapons; as far as her power is considered, the armor is little more than a weapons delivery platform. Ryan also has Vulcan and then Len build him one, which he later uses to supercharge his Black-Elixir powers during time-stops to go toe-to-toe with powerful foes like Geist, Fallout and Augustus.
• The Power of Glass: Shroud, one of the Carnival's heroes, has complete control over silicates. He primarily uses this to make himself glass armor that can turn invisible, as well as attacking people with glass shards, but it also gives him some control over the silicon in computers.
• The Power of the Sun: Leo Hargrave is known as "Leo the Living Sun". He can transform into a humanoid star, granting him control over his own gravity, extreme durability and matter regeneration, stopped aging when in this form, and strong enough pyrokinetic powers that he must constantly hold himself back to prevent being a Person of Mass Destruction. Before he got his powers, he was a fireman.
• The Precious, Precious Car: Ryan loves his Plymouth Fury to the point that when Mosquito destroys it, he immediately declares the current loop a failure and kills both of them with an atom bomb to reset the loop so he won't be in a world where his car is destroyed.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: The true motivation of Adam the Ogre and the Meta-Gang. He puts on the pretense of looking for a cure, but actually believes his Psycho Serum is incurable, so is trying to infect and kill as many people as possible before dying.
• Really 700 Years Old: A guesstimate from Pluto reveals that Ryan's real age is between 550 and 999 years old.
• Right-Hand Cat: Ryan's teleporting cat, Eugène-Henry (named after Eugène Wigner & Henry Stapp - proponents of the Wigner's Friend Interpretation of the famous Schrödinger's Cat Thought-Experiment) is a white cat very much in vein of Blofeld's white Persian cat. During his play-acting as President Evil of the villainous Meta-Gang, he is constantly making Blofeld-esque references to how every villain overlord needs such a Right-Hand Cat.
• Sarcastic Confession: Ryan always cheerily tells everyone "I'm immortal, but don't tell anyone!" No one believes him. Of course, he is being completely serious. It's not clear if anything can truly kill him, which is why he's so scared of mental effects; if he's driven insane, the world will be trapped in a never-ending hell.
• Save Scumming: Ryan's main superpower is the ability to create a 'save point', and whenever he dies he can go back to the point of time where he last 'saved' - essentially giving him functional immortality via time-travel.

• Self-Duplication:
  • Bloodstream, Len's father, had the Green power to control his own blood and the Blue power to turn himself into pure information. Combined, he became his own blood, and he could infect others to turn them into copies of himself. Only about ten copies at a time, though, and he could only infect humans. Both turn out to be psychological limits. It was predicted that if Len died, he'd go insane and infect the entire world, killing every living thing within months. Then Dynamis used him to make their knockoff elixirs, turning all their customers into potential new Bloodstreams.
  • Psyshock technically does this, though it's more of a Body Surf. After observing Bloodstream's ability, he realized he could use his psychic and cybernetic powers to turn people into latent clones of himself. He can only have one active body at a time, but if one dies he'll just reshape the nearest thrall into a new copy of himself.
  • The Alchemist turns out to have the ability to create an unlimited number of copies of herself from simulated timelines, with any skills or abilities she might need. She was a worldwide conspiracy of a single person. As it turns out, spending decades with no one but yourself for company leaves you rather narrow-minded, which is why she never saw anything wrong with any of the terrible things she did.
• Semantic Superpower: Yellow powers are "concepts." This results in people with powers like "cut anything" or "being lucky" or "being a ghost" or "controlling death." Generally speaking, Yellows are completely supreme within their own domain, and can only be defeated by bypassing it somehow. Ryan is able to avoid Fortuna's luck and Pluto's bad luck by acting within his time stop, because he is overlaying the Violet world and their powers only affect the human world. Everyone else generally agrees that Yellows are the most annoying to deal with.
• The Shadow Knows:
  • The Rabbit Plushie's shadow is the shape of a monster with tentacles, appendages, and geometry-defying comprehension.
  • Gemini's shadow doesn't match her body. This is because her body is an illusion. The Psycho is her shadow, and can attack others through their shadows.
• Shock and Awe: Augustus' first power is control over electricity. While he generally just uses it to shoot lightning out of his eyes, he can also recognize human nervous systems, throw up shields, and fly using electrostatic manipulation of the air.
• Shout-Out: Ryan loves pop culture, especially videogame lingo, and references franchises often.
  • Star Wars: Ryan loves the Star Wars movies, and says that one of the few good things about the collapse of civilization is that nobody had time to make more movies as a cash-grab, since he's "sure they would've sucked".
  • Worm: "Chitter" is a villainess with power over pests, and is dating a kind, black-masked villain coworker; all like "Skitter", the protagonist of Worm. One of the possible alternative aliases Ryan thinks up for himself is "Clockblocker".
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Since part of Ryan's power is stopping time, he naturally doesn't pass up an opportunity to shout ZA WARUDO!
  • One of the main plotlines regarding the manufacturing of Bliss, potions that give superpowers at the expense of sanity, and an underwater communist utopia is clearly based on Bioshock.
• Smarter Than You Look: Adam the Ogre is a Psycho cannibal who just wants to see the world burn. But he is also intelligent, forward-thinking, and good at reading what motivates people. This makes him almost more dangerous than all the people who can personally create apocalypses, because he's good at manipulating powerful people and finding dangerous technology.
• Sterility Plague: The true purpose of the drug Bliss. It causes sterility in ordinary humans. It's the only thing that Augustus is still passionate about, and most of the older generation Augusti agree. The younger generation all hate it, but can't do anything to stop it.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Felix Veran aka Atom Cat's power is the ability to make anything he touches explode. When he later gains the ability to delay the explosion of things he touches, he can then throw said objects to targets at range, becoming practically Gambit-esque in scope.
• Super-Empowering: Sidekick, a White Genome whose superpower is to enhance the power of other Genomes within a ten-meter radius of his person.
• Superpowered Date: Ryan's Violet powers allow him to take Livia on a date in an adjacent dimension with a beautiful aurora-filled purple sky.
• Superpowerful Genetics: The children of a Genome will inherit some variant of their power. The child of two Genomes will inherit a variant of one parent's power, influenced by the power of the other parent. For example, the daughter of a woman with the Green power to make plants grow and a man with the Yellow power to cut anything gains the Green power to create life from her blood; in other words, to make things grow by cutting herself.
• Superpower Lottery: Some powers are just better than others. Ryan's save point means he's technically the only real person in the universe and therefore immune to all consequences that he doesn't allow, Augustus's two powers make him both invincible and unstoppable so that he elevated his Camorra Mob family into an N.G.O. Superpower, and Wyvern can turn into a freaking dragon. Psychos also tend to be more likely to develop crazy overpowered abilities, though at the cost of their sanity and being horrifically mutated.
• Super Serum: Elixirs, which are the source of superpowers in the world. Colour-Coded for Your Convenience, they are a result of evil experimentation by Eva Fabre, aka The Alchemist. After she encountered a crashed alien spaceship and used the technology and knowledge in it to empower herself, she produced the Elixirs that caused the Mass Super-Empowering Event in a misguided attempt to uplift mankind into a universal master race at any cost.
• Super Supremacist: Augustus is very much this, being a Smug Super with a god complex that believes that Genomes are superior to normal people and should rule over them because of it:
  Augustus: [to Ryan] The likes of us stand above lesser men. They exist to serve us; we don't exist to serve them. It is our will that decides what is right from wrong. It is our destiny, our divine right, to remake the world as we wish.
• Super-Toughness: While Augustus takes this up to eleven, all Genomes are tougher than baseline humans, and are resistant to most toxins and diseases. This means STD Immunity, and ten times the average alcohol tolerance at minimum.
• Technicolor Lightning: Augustus' lightning is all bright red.
• Thememobile: The Pandamobile: a Dynamis-made copy of a second-gen Fiat Panda covered in white and black fur to mimic an actual panda.
• Third-Person Person: The Panda and Mr. Wave.
• Time Stands Still: The public use of Ryan's power allows him to stop time for up to ten seconds with it having a cooldown of how many 'seconds' time was frozen from Ryan's perspective.
• Tragic Monster: Quite a few of the Psychos, it turns out, just got dealt a really bad hand.
  • Sarin and Bloodstream both drank two elixirs very early on, before the horrific side effects were known. Sarin mostly kept her sanity, but spent six months as a dispersed gas cloud before she found something that could contain herself. Bloodstream was reduced to an immortal mass of blood that could only barely remember to keep his children safe. The only reason he wasn't even stronger was because deep down, he hated himself, which prevented him from fully exploiting his own abilities or making too many clones.
  • Mosquito drank a Green elixir that gave him a powerful but monstrous form. He then drank a knock-off Green in the hopes that it would somehow wash away the original. It didn't.
  • Mongrel drank a White elixir. It seemed to have no effect, so he saw nothing wrong with drinking a knock-off. Actually, his White power gave him the ability to use multiple powers at once... without actually protecting him from the side effects. He eventually gained half a dozen elemental powers at once, but he was little better than a feral animal.
  • Acid Rain found a second elixir, a Violet, and planned to find someone to give it to in the hopes that they'd gain time travel to help her. Adam forced her to drink it herself, driving her completely insane in the process.
• To Serve Man: The Clowns of Monaco drop this exact quote. They mean it both ways.
• The Undead: The first person Ryan encounters in New Rome is Ghoul, a Psycho with a combination of powers that gives him the appearance of a skeleton and makes him almost completely impossible to kill. Ryan generally carries around his screaming skull as a good luck charm.
• Unwitting Test Subject: This was basically the Alchemist's entire thing. More specifically, she intentionally allowed for the creation of Psychos to see if bi-colored powers might be more useful than mono-colored ones. She did not warn anyone ahead of time that taking more than one elixir would drive you insane.
• Was Once a Man: Psychos were once regular Genomes who took a second Elixir (willingly or not). Due to their unstable genetic code, they now have a Horror Hunger for more Elixirs, warped personalities, and various flavors of Body Horror that can become a full-on And I Must Scream situation.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Alphonse "Fallout" Manada is convinced that the only path towards the future is to make everyone a Genome. This is why he created the knockoff elixirs, and why he's constantly pushing to improve them. The fact that the knockoffs are made by harvesting blood from a Psycho and that there is a very real chance that anyone who took a knockoff could revert into a clone of the Psycho if he escapes is dismissed as a "necessary evil." Even when confronted with irrefutable evidence of what will happen, he still insists it's better than the alternatives... and then he refuses to listen to any possible alternatives. Oh, and even if his plan does eventually work exactly as intended, he still killed thousands of people to make it happen. It's probably not a coincidence that his power makes him literally a living nuclear explosion.
  Fallout: It's all... for the dream...
• Wetware CPU: Ryan's Plymoth has Genius-grown, non-sentient brain in it to meet its processing needs. Multiple people who see it are horrified, assuming Ryan murdered some random person for an autopilot. Ryan dryly points out that the brain is obviously non-human.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: In a world where Genomes can become a Reality Warper or a Physical God, The Panda has the power to transform into... a Panda. This becomes somewhat better when it's revealed that his transformation comes with a perfect Healing Factor that heals any damage taken, not to mention how Timmy is one of the very rare Genomes who can take a second Elixir without going insane.
• Who Needs Their Whole Body?: In addition to cryokinesis, Ghoul has the power to keep living without body parts that should be physically necessary. As the Starter Villain to the story, and a genuine Asshole Victim, Ryan takes great joy is dismembering him and terrifying the cannibalistic madman with his seemingly insane antics.
• Windmill Crusader: The Alchemist discovered evidence of a multiversal conquering civilization out to consume all of reality. She immediately set about destroying the world in an effort to make sure what rose from the ashes would be strong enough to fight. If she had made any attempt to check the current status of the enemy civilization, she would have discovered that they were all already dead. No one else is coming besides the one broken ship she already found.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity:
  • This is usually what happens when a person drinks two or more Elixirs at once. Sure, they get both powers, but they become raging maniacs, constantly searching for more Elixirs to consume. This is on top of a number of horrific full-body mutations they suffer from.
  • Also, to some extent, looping for a long time and a seeming inability to die is making Ryan gradually unhinged and impulsive, leading him to sometimes throw crude jokes at inappropriate times, break rules left and right, and intentionally offend his allies and enemies Just for Fun.
• Would Hurt a Child: Adam and Psyshock have no qualms with sending orphaned children to die fighting Mechron's bunker.
• Would Not Hurt A Child: The Augusti have a strict rule about not involving children in their dealings. They won't even sell Bliss to kids. Augustus himself, however, has no problem murdering children; he just makes sure that there's no one left alive to contradict his story.
• Yes-Man: The ultimate version. The Alchemist has a Self-Duplication ability, creating unlimited numbers of simulated alternate reality versions of herself. She has limited control over how her duplicates are made, so for example she can make a version of herself that is an expert soldier or physicist, but she can't decide their actual history. She completely fails to realize that every version she creates agrees with her, deep down, meaning that she's trapped herself in an echo chamber of hundreds of people who would never actually raise objections to any of her terrible plans. By the time the heroes find her, she is flatly confused when they try to arrest her for her crimes. She simply cannot conceive that intelligent people who benefited from her plans would have a problem with what she did.
• You Could Have Used Your Powers for Good!:
  • Mechron does this to himself, claiming that he could have vastly improved the human condition if only people had stopped getting in his way. Considering that he announced his presence to the world by a terrorist attack on an international war crimes tribunal for being too soft, he didn't exactly give people much of a chance to play along with him.
  • Narcinia has the power to create any living thing she can think of, including plants with seemingly supernatural properties. She could create plants to feed the hungry, clean up radiation zones, and heal the world. Instead, her family forces her to make drugs. In fact, her real mother was using her own power to heal the world. Augustus murdered her and burned her plants because he doesn't want normal people to have a chance to survive. Then he took her daughter, had her mind shattered, and gave her to his friends to raise as their own.

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