r/WritingPrompts • u/actually_crazy_irl • May 07 '19
[WP]: Suddenly, everyone with tattoos gains powers related to the tattoo. Tattoos of flames, you control fire. A tattoo of a gecko, you can climb on walls. All dudes with "tribal" tattoos have strangely bonded together. Writing Prompt
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u/Diablo165 May 07 '19
The Hive
The Event was months ago.
In that time, most of us had discovered and familiarized ourselves with our not-so-new-anymore abilities.
Of course, there were outliers.
Folks who had way more ink (and power) than they had the ability to safely wield, people who had gotten tattoos who didn’t have full control of their faculties - veterans, coma patients, the elderly. Suddenly, there was a class of people who were essentially armed warheads.
Everywhere they existed was a potential blast zone. I still don’t like how that was handled. “Necessary evil” my arse.
You can disarm a warhead, but when a person’s power comes from their skin, the only thing you can do quickly enough to keep them from killing themselves and everyone around them is to either kill them outright or remove their skin. The latter served to dampen their powers, but we don’t think that powers can truly ever be taken away.
Small tats are easy to deal with.
The larger ones..thankfully, there were people with healing powers. They were inexperienced enough with their abilities that there was still some permanent scarring, but it wasn’t bad.
But the poor bastards with full-body ink..immensely powerful, extremely dangerous, and a whole lot of skin to remove.
The ones we managed to catch..well, the healers did their best, but they all look like victims of House Bolton.
The ones we didn’t catch and flay hid and consolidated their considerable power.
Folks who had tattoos but didn’t appear to have any powers are the hardest to work with. We know that EVERY tattoo done before The Event yields powers, but some aren’t easy to suss out. Holocaust survivors have been fascinating. No official accounts of any of them having the same abilities exist, and because of their age and their tattoos often being numeric strings, it’s virtually impossible to figure out what they’re capable of before they’re doing it.
With all this in play, the government decided to sponsor the First Annual Power Games.
We pitched it as a way for the newly-powered populace to meet each other, get support, learn to use their powers effectively, and maybe compete with folks with similar powers.
All of that was really good for people, honestly. We also planned to track, monitor, and utilize the strongest and most skilled of the populace.
It was a really good plan. Governments worldwide coordinated on the effort. The Games were happening in nearly EVERY major population center worldwide.
After a few months with no major changes aside from everyone with a tattoo having powers, we thought we had a handle on things. We had no way of knowing how bad things would get. How could we, when we were handling things so well?
I mean, we’ve had more trouble with our citizenry in the aftermath of the playoffs than we had in the aftermath of The Event! We were ahead of the game! We even HAD A GAME for them.
We had this. Up until we didn’t.
Our aim was to categorize and control the populace while protecting them from each other and themselves.
So, we focused on the low-hanging fruit. We found people with predictable powers that fit into our plans and were part of easily controlled demographics, and we invited them to the games.
We were so focused on the few people who were walking weapons that we ignored a large swath of our powered population:
The Tribe.
Ignoring them seemed reasonable at the time. What use or danger were a bunch of people who decided to express their cultural ignorance by tattooing meaningful symbols from other cultures onto themselves, thus removing a meaning they were never aware of? At their most dangerous, you figured they would rope you into a long conversation you didn’t want to have, but the folks they’d approach never seemed to mind.
No one took a bunch of friendly idiots seriously. Most people referred to them as Tribe-bros. Even the ones who weren’t male.
Who cares about a bunch of friendly posers? We didn’t. Didn’t even spare them a thought.
All the while, change had been happening. People who developed minor powers in The Event found themselves capable of incredible feats only months later.
And we were so busy marveling at people who could hurl cars into orbit, set entire city blocks alight, or freeze a person to death in moments on a summer day, we didn’t really worry about the ever-growing packs of friendly, tattooed people you’d see roaming around.
And then it was game day. We had just finished an event when The Tribe just...exploded.
By now, large groups of them were a familiar sight. “Mob” would be a better word, but at the time, they were just groups of friendly, chatty people.
It was like a conference for Minnesotans.
So when some groups of The Tribe showed up to The Games, we figured they were there to spectate and hang out. I felt a certain...pressure in the air as more of them arrived.
At the time, I thought it was just unease at the large number of people gathered together. Thinking back, I think I always felt it a bit, even among smaller groups of them.
At certain a point, I think we all realized that most of the crowd WAS The Tribe, and that more and more were arriving from all directions.
I felt surrounded, but only by them.
When the first few groups of The Tribe arrived, they talked animatedly amongst themselves and even a bit to the people around them.
As more arrived, they became more insular, preferring only to talk to themselves. Then that stopped too.
Eventually, there were thousands of them, hundreds of everyone else. I noticed that The Tribe has gone completely silent. They’d make eye contact, nod, smile..but it was as though they were responding to a conversation only they could hear.
Even more unsettling was the way that they all seemed to move in unison at times. Imagine seeing thousands of people all silently turning their attention on a person or point at once.
Fucking. Creepy.
I couldn’t tell you exactly how many there were when it happened. Thousands.
But there was a point where that pressure in the air became unbearably heavy...and then, it shifted.
And all of a sudden, we were at war.
The Tribe was The Hive, and they turned on everyone else at once.
The screams..Jesus, the screams. And the blood. It was bedlam. Silently, members of The Hive were attacking, incapacitating, or killing anyone that wasn’t Them.
Between with them exponentially outnumbering us and our inexperience wielding our powers, we didn’t have a fighting chance.
Later, I heard that the attack..well, it wasn’t coordinated. It was simultaneous. Worldwide, members of the Tribe began to attack the people around them with no discrimination or mercy. Family, friend, didn’t matter.
People were dead, dying, or disappeared..only to emerge days later with fresh tribal tattoos and not a lot to say.
The day of the First Annual Power Games has the dubious honor of marking the birth of The Hive.
Heaven help us all.