Collective

Collective
Author	/u/zirns
Civilian name	Adam Roads
Alignment	Hero
Affiliation	Noncanon (Ashton)
Status	Noncanon

Character Sheet

Equipment and Resources

• Not even the shirt on his back.

Tinkertech

Gorilla Strength

Collective's base brute mode, giving enhanced strength.

• Appearance: Collective's muscles bulge outwards as he reconfigures his cells.
• Abilities: Makes him about as strong as a gorilla.
• Duration: As long as he keeps it active.
• Notes: Burns more mass per hit.

Camouflage

Collective's way of getting past the pesky fact that he's a horrific mass of writhing worms.

• Appearance: Changes appearance to suit his needs.
• Abilities: Changes the look and texture of his outer shell, usually to keep up his guise as Alex Roads or to duplicate clothes.
• Duration: As long as he keeps it up.
• Notes: Lowers IQ by 10 points when concentrating to keep it up. It takes 10-15 minutes to fully set up as a person, but clothes are less complex and can be changed in seconds. Could theoretically be used to turn into the exact image of a person other then the original Adam Roads, but Collective doesn't have the in-depth knowledge of any body that he does of Adam. Would take months of study to actually be able to mimic another person to any believable extent.

Sensory replication

Makes it so Collective isn't totally blind.

• Appearance: He gains the appropriate appendages for each sense.
• Abilities: Gives him the senses of sight, hearing, and smell at normal human levels. Taste still being worked on.
• Duration: Until dismissed.
• Notes: Loses 5 IQ for each sense running.

Configuration: Armadillo

Makes him bulletproof! Sort of. Not really.

• Appearance: Collective grows dark black, bony armor similar to an armadillo around the front of his body.
• Abilities: Hard bone-like plating grows around Collective's front, with small slits for eye holes. This plating is tough and thick enough to deflect bullets if they hit at an angle (A straight on shot from a sufficient speed bullet, anything supersonic, will still penetrate) and block other damage, as well as some of the damage of bludgeoning hits, though the impact will still hurt Collective even with the armor. Collective can, using his unique biology, roll into a ball and have the armor cover his entire body.
• Duration: As long as he keeps it up.
• Notes: Incompatible with other configurations. Reduces IQ by 15 points. Armor only covers the front of his body, leaving his back open to attacks normally unless he rolls into a ball. Limits range of movement, he basically has to have his arms out in front of him and his head down for the armor to be fully effective.

Configuration: Lyrebird

Sound replication, makes Collective the best singer in the wards.

• Appearance: No outward physical changes, internally Collective constructs a set of organs based on those of the Superb Lyrebird, specifically those involved in mimicry.
• Abilities: Allows Collective to mimic, with extreme accuracy, any sound he's heard in the past.
• Duration: As long as Collective activates it.
• Notes: Reduces IQ by 5 when in use. Collective can only mimic things he's heard. He can't use this ability to, for example, hear someone's voice and then talk in their voice. He'd have to have heard them say a specific phrase to say it back. This can be somewhat negated by splicing phrases that he's heard the person say together, but it'll still be choppy with discrepancies in tone (Like if you spliced together audio clips of a person talking.)

Consumption

Lets Collective eat any biological material. Yummy, human flesh.

• Appearance: No appearance change.
• Abilities: Grants Collective the ability to slowly consume any biological matter he comes into contact with, as well as produce an anesthetic from his worms that'll stop the subject to feel that they were being consumed (And cause complete unconsciousness in things like insects or spiders).
• Duration: Passive (Always on)
• Notes: Consumption is slow, this isn't something that would have any real combat potential. It might take Collective 15 minutes to strip a human body of all it's flesh if he was using his full body to do it.

The intended use of this is to help Kat by getting rid of spiders in a way that isn't distressful to her (So suck a spider inside himself, knock it out so it doesn't feel anything, then eat it.).

Unlike Collective's other abilities, this one is a mix of animal traits rather then being pulled straight from a single one. The consumption aspect is based on various species of worms and parasites that consume different types of biomaterial, and the anesthetic aspect is based on the Hooded pitohui, whose venom causes numbness.

Flavorful Gummy Worms

Transforms Collective into a fun treat that kids of all ages can enjoy.

• Appearance: Color changes on Collective's effected worms.
• Abilities: Collective gains the ability to change the flavor and texture of his worms, to anything his little worm not-heart can imagine (After a bit of study for each different flavor, of course.)
• Duration: As long as Collective keeps it up.
• Notes: Noticeably does not decrease Collective's IQ like his other abilities do, as the worms that he changes still operate normally.

Eat Fresh™

He can now give out little collective balls that everyone can play with.

• Appearance: A mass of worms living outside of Collective.
• Abilities: This ability, when used, bypasses Collective's normal restriction of having any worms that detach from him quickly die. They instead stay in a wormy pile of their own, without the benefit of the hivemind that Collective's shard gives. They only possess the instinct to stay together and reproduce enough to maintain their current mass.
• Duration: With ideal conditions, the worms can stay alive indefinitely.
• Notes: The separated mass of worms can not grow in size, they will only reproduce enough to maintain current mass. If worms are removes from an external source, the mass will not grow to replace them but instead maintain the mass they have after the worms were removed.

The worms can not be reconnected to Collective's hivemind or contribute to his overall mass, once they're out they're out for good, and only good for sitting around and (possibly) eating. They'd lose any adaptations they were currently using, with the exception of 'Flavorful Gummy Worms', as that's an inherent change to the worm's structure.

This isn't an automatic thing that would happen any time a limb is cut off, it's a delicate process that takes a good 30 seconds of concentration to pull off. If a limb is cut off normally it'd still be a mass of dead worms.

This isn't meant to have combat potential, the only use I can think of for it is possibly sacrificing a limb to make a decoy worm, which is a pretty inefficient use of his resources. It's intended use is to give friends presents in the form of medium-sized masses of worms that they can consume at their leisure.

This has the very large downside of removing a large part of his mass, which he must regenerate at a normal pace.

Skills and Specializations

• Genius level IQ (150ish) when not focusing on any other power
• Great understanding of biology
• Some self defense training

Mentality

Due to the nature of his powers, Adam has a fairly alien mindset. He is, in essence, a hivemind of hundreds of thousands of separate worms, coming together to form an imitation of human conciousness. He has modeled himself on what he remembers to be his mind before his trigger, but it's still an imitation of a human.

Collective remembers that Adam Roads used to idolize heroes, and now that he has the power he wishes to fufill the dreams of his past self by becoming one.

Power

Collective's power is biological reconfiguration, with some regen and a minor tinker power to create new abilities by mimicing what he can find in nature. To enable his power to work, his entire body was transformed into a mass of worm-like creatures, that could be used as the building blocks for changes that had to be made. The worms's brains all connect to create a hivemind, each adding their own mental capabilities to the whole. Individually the worms have the average intelligence of, well, a worm, but coming together they can amass the total brainpower of a human with about 150 IQ. This IQ is the maximum he can reach, but using his reconfiguration power to perform other tasks (Such as giving brute strength or camouflaging) takes away from the total processing power available, and in turn lowers the IQ of Collective.

The worms can reproduce quickly and asexually, granting a form of regeneration to Collective. It's not quick enough to matter in a fight, but something like a removed limb could be grown back in around 5 days. This regen is also important for post-fight recuperation.

In combat, the main use of his power is to transform into pre-researched configurations that mimic nature, such as copying a gorilla's muscles or a cheetah's speed.

The main drawback of his power is that individual worms are flimsy, and are destroyed easily. While this can be fixed by his regeneration over time, it's a big issue in combat. Just as we strain our muscles doing punches and performing feats of strength, Collective's worms are strained as well. The difference is that the worms die when strained, so performing his feats of brute-level strength constantly lowers his worm count, which in turn lowers his IQ, making him fight less intellectually and more predictably. Eventually he'll become little more then a beast, engaged in fight or flight instinct. His physical hits also become weaker, as he has less material to form muscles with.

Damage taken during a fight causes Collective much the same problems that straining himself does, in that it reduces his intelligence and combat power. Some types of damage are even more effective then they might normally be. Bludgeoning damage, like a punch or being thrown into a wall, would be very effective against Collective as it effects a wide area of his body and thus kills more worms. Piercing or slashing damage, like being shot or slashed with a sword, are less effective because they'd hit less worms overall.

Researching the forms takes a long time, and he doesn't have much of a natural advantage to this like other tinkers do. All he does is take online resources on how certain biological functions work and try to replicate them using his worms using trial and error.

Misc power info:

Has a critical mass of 150 pounds of worms, the amount Adam weighed when he triggered. Any more then that is created but quickly dies off.

Worms can not survive if they are not attached to the main collective. Severed limbs collapse into a pile of dead worms.

Can theoretically survive with as little as one worm, but it'd take months to reform.

Backstory

Adam Roads always hated worms. Creepy, wiggling little monsters, he always thought. That might be because his dad had an unhealthy fascination with the creatures, often breeding them to see if he could create the biggest earthworm in Washington state. He seemed to care more about his worms then he did his son, often.

What Adam didn't know was that his father was a tinker, particularly a biotinker with a focus on worms. His father was Burrower, member of the Seattle protectorate team. Unfortunately for Adam, his father placed being a hero clearly before being a father.

Adam's trigger came when he was 15 years old. He was exploring the woods in his backyard when he fell into a pit that was filled with worms, one of his father's experiments. Trapped in the pit, alone, screaming for help while worms surrounded his entire body and fell into his mouth, up his nose, into his ears, was where Adam triggered.

He wasn't found for four days. Four days spent in the pit, designated as a missing person. Not that he minded much, the newly birthed Collective found it difficult to argue with his wormlike brethren. He felt them, moving around him, much as he felt his own colony, moving them as he moved himself. This was a time of self discovery for Collective, and he learned a lot about his powers in those first four days.

Eventually Burrower checked his pit, and found the reborn Adam. By now Collective had managed to work out how to speak by vibrating certain worms in a certain order, so he explained quickly what happened, and what he was now.

Burrower was distraught, viewing himself as having killed his son. He couldn't recognize t his monstrosity, this alien creature, as his son, so the only option left was to view him as dead.

The PRT got involved, and after a large batch of power testing decided to recruit Collective into the wards, transferring him to Ashton to help reduce the stress on both him and his father.