User blog:The real cal howard/What is Potential? (WIP; Placeholder title)

So, I decided to buckle down and finally create an energy system for Potents.

What is Potential?
Potential is the resident energy system existing in Potents. Like how Nen is to Hunter x Hunter and Chakra is for Naruto, Potential is the power system for people like Seth and Delia. Potential is what gives superpowers to mortals.

Obviously, there's a difference between potential and Potential. It's also a placeholder name.

Who has Potential?
Potential doesn't exist in everybody. It's very selective, existing in less than .000001% of the population, and even then, most of the people have limited Potential. Their superpowers are little things like being able to hold your breath for ten minutes, being able to see a bit farther than a normal person, having stupidly good pain tolerance, or having supernatural horse riding skills.

Most of the people that matter have extremely high Potential, which takes us to...

General Potential Abilities
To be more specific, these are the abilities that the characters with absurd levels of Potential have.

For one, they have insanely high stats. Or in a much better way to put it, they all have Superhuman Physical Characteristics. And furthermore, they can increase their stats through training. The thing is, it's relative. They can still get stronger by doing normal human levels of training by limiting themselves and working out normally, though they do get more gains if they do superhuman workouts like benching trains or something like that.

They also have enhanced senses. But specifically vision. Hearing and smell are more specific, and some can have better vision than others. For example, despite both, Ava Tippit and Delia Rousseau having increased vision, Ava can see farther than Delia. On a related note, while everyone with high Potential has insane stats, Band is stronger than others while Elliot is faster than others.

Another basic ability is purely hormonal. People with high Potential are naturally more attracted to others with high Potential than they are to others. This is so even more superior Potential can pass down, though there's a chance that a child doesn't have the same Potential.

Finally, another thing they can do is break the laws of physics. Though to an extent, where it's useful. Things like law of conservation of energy and law of conservation of matter don't apply to them, and neither does the universal speed cap of SoL, though they're able to keep Newtonian kinetic energy applying to them while going that fast.

Potential's notoriety
Very very few people know Potential exists. Not even many people with Potential know that Potential exists. This has something to do with many of the cases just being small levels of it as stated above, there are more reasons. For one, the amount of people on earth with Potential high enough to matter fall into three digits. At the absolute best, there's less than 1000 people on Earth with powers of even a fraction of that of the Potents. And there's also government intervention. ACE is a secret government organization similar to SHIELD and the Men in Black dealing with instances like this. Coercion, memory wiping, imprisonment/institutionalizing, and even assassination are tactics employed to keep people in the dark about this to prevent widespread panic of physical gods roaming the earth at random.

Mystery behind Potential
The thing that makes Potential different from things like ki is that it's not understood, and there's an unspoken race to figure out what Potential is. There's many different things about Potential that makes it incredibly hard to pin down. Such as...

1. How Potential is acquired. Like I said, not everyone is born with Potential. And with that, not everyone has Potential develop the same. Some people have it through birthright and it comes with their birth. Others have it develop over time. For some it comes naturally when with others it comes with a need or high stress. Some come through flukes in biological engineering. Delia got hers through birthright. She always had her powers and it's been passed down through all the women of her lineage. Seth gets powers through both, engineering and natural development. Ava gets hers through high stress/through a need.

2. How Potential manifests. Powers aren't the same between people. While some overlap, not everyone can learn to fly for example. The powers that come with your Potential are what you are stuck with. You can make them more varied but they're always tied back to your base set. There's very rare exceptions. So that begs the question, if they're so different, what links them? Why are they both Potential?

3. If Potential can be artificially replicated. That's a question for the ages, as the main villain does want to replicate Potential. As far as I know (I know I'm the creator but scroo u this is for story purposes), the answer is kinda. Given technological advances, it's possible to create weaponry on the level of those with high Potential due to Hephaestium, a metal worth its own blog that in itself has natural power on the level of those with high Potential, and is capable of ignoring some of the laws of physics as well. It's being researched how to create stronger people like that.

4. Who can have Potential. For the most part, humans. And yes, humans are the most numerous by far (which says a lot given its rarity) to have high levels of Potential. But on very very rare occasions, other mammals and some species of birds are capable of having it, though they don't have the same potential for Potential (see what I did there?)

5. Being able to track Potential. This is confirmed to be possible. The question is why is this possible? What did they find to track? Which leads us to...

6. Whether or not Potential is energy. Sounds like a dumb question for something that's referred to as part of an energy system but let me explain. For example, you can see ki in DB, chakra in Naruto, reiroku in Bleach, reiki in Yu Yu Hakusho, Stand Power in Jojo, etc. But Potential isn't like that. You can't "flare" your Potential. While you can increase your power, it doesn't make you have higher Potential. The level of Potential you have you're stuck with and can't increase it. But the real thing is, its means Potential isn't this energy source, but more like something intrinsic to your DNA that can somehow be tracked.

Potential's relation to magic
This is the unofficial no. Because it in itself deserves its own subtopic. Potential is NOT magic. This is very much proven throughout the series. For example, every Potent can be tracked except for Ian, and that's due to him being a magical being as opposed to a human with high Potential. Furthermore, Delia was found before Seth because Seth was under the influence of a magical lich, which blotted out Seth's Potential, and Elliot's magical dagger made him untrackable when it came to Potential. On a related note, magic does the opposite. It can't differentiate who has high potential or not (though it can differentiate who someone is specifically), but the level of magic someone has can be measured.

There's also many more things that separate the two. Magic can be picked up by anyone with an affinity. For example, anyone who has any magical fire affinity can throw a fireball. For Potential, you'd specifically have to be gifted with something that allows for fire powers to do so.

There's also the existence of magical animals. As said above, very very few animals have Potential at all. In the magical world, they're all over the place. Speaking of a magical world, Xarshia is another dimension that's completely magical, and every one there is either magic or a psionic. That also will get its own blog someday. On Earth (or an Earth analogue), we already established that this isn't the case.

But the thing is, the similarities between the two exist as well. All magic users have the general high Potential abilities minus the increased vision, even including being more attractive to people with high Potential. It's a matter of different but the same. And things get weird when we find out that Delia's descended from the magical Demeter, which raises more questions on if she's magical or has Potential, because if magic blots out Potential, then how is she capable of being tracked?

Small thing but if you're undead and have powers, you're likely magic, not someone with high Potential.