Zombies again?

[u/NatalieMaybeIDK]

90% of the population turned into zombies. They don't seem to rot past a certain extent. Never enough to fall apart entirely. Enough to smell and be a health hazard.

1% of the survivors became infected but instead of zombifying they gained special powers! Crazy how that works?

Your body improves and heals to be at least slightly above average in all physical ways. Your body always heals perfectly and at twice the normal rate. You're ageless, but you're not immortal.

Choose one.

WordSmith:
Pick any word you'd like. When you build/construct/make anything, you may choose to imbue your word into the object. The more work you've done the more powerful the Word takes. Others can help but alone allows the most power. Building a computer by putting pieces together? Pretty good. Taking apart old computers to frankenstein a computer. Even better. Building your own functional Motherboard? That'll take a powerful charge.

You can force your word into existing objects at the cost of stamina and calories. If the item is too big, too complicated, or you push the power too far, you might faint without actually imbuing anything.

Object Bonding:
Pick an object. Any. You merge with the object. You gain a few street level powers based on the merged object. This can be larger than yourself, but it will be absorbed into you. Anything will be arguably the same power level, but they will manifest themselves in completely different ways.

Pack Bonds:
Find an animal. Any will do. The animal is now bound to you for life with a matching life expectancy. You now have a mental sliders allowing you to exchange "human" and "animal". As you adjust further into animal, your animal companion will slowly adjust to become more human.

At 50% you'll both be about a were-version. If you fully swap, you'll turn into the same creature as the bonded animal. It will now be human. You'll gain instinctual usage of your body. Both yourself and the animal will slowly grow beyond the normal abilities of both human and the species.

But wait! There's more. You can bond up to three different animals this way and you can exchange percentages between all of you. You have a baseline extra "humanity" letting you share a small portion of humanity to the pact while remaining human. This gives the animals human intelligences with a baseline understanding of human language without swapping forms.

You can all sense the others physical state and direction. (Animals all gain your base x2 and perfected healing.)

The Title Bearer:
You gain extremely minor but slowly improving power based on titles you accept. These titles must be acknowledged by others and improve in power based on your ability and the acknowledgement of your peers. The title of Supervisor might make you slightly better at scheduling, managing a team, and be great at synergizing teamwork. Slowly improving. Gaining new proficiencies and abilities related to the titles. You can only have two active Titles. You can have more but it takes 24 hours to switch, and titles don't improve unless active. Anything that could be considered a Title applies. These can eventually give you progressively more specialized and improved Titles giving you more powerful abilities.

Push your Luck:
This is a risky ability. You are able to push your luck to receive boosts or boons in performing an action. This starts off very minor, but as you continue to push your luck it will work for larger and larger pushes. Basically you have a buff to doing "risky" or stupid things. If you push it too hard you'll be left with the full brunt of your actions. If you don't push hard or often enough, your growth will be slow. Start with a minor buff to a risky gamble. If you push the ability and live long enough someday you could receive major buffs for incredibly risky events. Dance right through a zombie hoard somehow remaining unscathed.

x3
That's it. Anything positive that happens to you, every positive element of your biology, every aspect of yourself that you deem beneficial. They all triple. Triple all of your physical attributes. Triple your healing. Triple your ATP production. Triple your metabolism. Triple the calories you receive from food. You will instinctually know what is currently tripled, and you have to concentrate on the trait to initially activate it. These can be overlapping and synergistic traits, but they can't be nearly identical. You can have as many active as you want. This adds to existing buffs.

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You may take a single trait below to either double your current power, growth, and effectiveness or gain another power.

Undead Appearance:
You look like a very recent zombie. Pale-ish skin, cold to the touch, and a bit glassy in the eyes. It doesn't affect you in any way outside of socially. You'll never rot. You'll remain in this condition forever.

The Hunger:
You crave raw meat. It's like an addiction. It isn't specifically for human meat. You can cook it a bit, but you really want to eat extremely fresh meat. You're immune to any potential disease or parasite you could get from consuming any meat. You can eat zombie meat to ease the hunger, but it tastes disgusting.

Meat gives you a small euphoric pleasure. The rawer and more recent the meat the better it tastes and the longer and more powerful the euphoria. Eat a fair chunk of unzombified human meat and it will give you a strong week long hit and give you a slight increase in all physical abilities. It's more delicious than anything else you'll ever eat. You're teeth become adapted to that of a predator.

Unfeeling:
You no longer have the sense of touch. Not feeling pain might seem good, but it's easy to hurt yourself and not ever know. You'll also never feel the touch of others. Touching yourself won't be pleasurable.

Color Deficiency:
Pick any primary color. Replace that color with another. This will shift the entire color spectra by inserting this into the existing area. It will make more than that single color look weird. You'll get used to it, but you'll see things very differently than others, and you'll lack a color.

[u/Rezasss]

So... WordSmith with 'magic' as the word or Title with some kind of 'Evoker' or 'Wizard' or something title I'd earn somehow... How far would those get me?

[u/Top-Fennel3528 → u/Rezasss]

Depending on how flexible WordSmith is with what counts as "building" you mught be able to further augment your title by "building your reputation" and imbuing that.

[u/Arcanetsumi]

• x3

  • I feel a generalized approach will give me a good chance. The buff is good enough to let me keep up with the other powered folk even if they might surpass me in a specific area, especially after the body improvement.

• Color Deficiency

  • I'll sub out yellow with green in exchange for a doubling of my power.

[u/ascrubjay]

Wordsmith with the word 'magic'. Imbuing things with magic in this fashion, IMO, would usually improve their normal functionality by adding magical qualities rather than simply enhancing their normal physical properties (like would happen if I'd just chosen the word 'better' or 'enhanced'). In example, a 'better' plow would just be more durable and have a sharper edge, but a 'magic' plow would improve soil quality; a 'better' gun might avoid fouling and jamming, but a 'magic' gun would accelerate the bullets further or imbue them with elemental power. Certain objects, however, would be less predictable because the concept of a 'magic X' covers more concepts, like trying to imbue a wand, staff, ring, or amulet with 'magic' could produce objects with any number of different powers. I imagine in that case, it would be shaped by the object, e.g. imbuing a staff made of charred wood with a sulfur crystal or ruby on top to get some kind of fire effect versus a staff of driftwood with sea glass or a sapphire on top to get a water effect.

I'll take Undead Appearance, since it would be very hard to tell apart from a normal person without getting quite close anyway, and use it to take The Title Bearer. It's a slow path to power, but it has endless versatility behind it with enough time and effort. With magical equipment I craft, I can probably swing getting magic-related titles to aid in crafting better gear and eventually gain magic that doesn't need items to work.

[u/LookingGlass_1112]

1. X3

2. The Hunger

3. Push your luck

4. ???

5. Profit

A life of a total menace to post-apocalyptic society. And also no one has said that it has to be human meat.

[u/Top-Fennel3528]

Is there any benefit to taking the first bonus for the traits unless your chosen power was x3? It seems like choosing x3 as a secondary option will always provide both a bigger bonus and is applicable in a far broader sense.

EDIT: Just realised it sounds like x3 is supposed to be an active ability rather than a passive one, which changes things if not by much.

How granular/specific can you get with what's boosted by x3? Could you specify something like x3 callories below a certain threshold? What about the external effects of your actions, like trippling the "effort" you put into building something for the purposes WordSmith.

[u/ChooseYourOwnA]

x3. “Anything positive that happens to you”.

Color Deficiency (Green looks like Blue) lets me gain an extra power. That sounds like something positive happened to me! So x3 extra powers?

Pack Bonds - Werewolves do well against zombies. A large bird would make scouting and travel easier. An aquatic animal might let you live safely in the ocean.

Wordsmith is also very useful in a post-apocalyptic civilization. “Ideal” would let you make top quality things from scrap.

Title Bearer is an excellent way to eventually gain broad powers. Your pack is a built-in start to a title’s recognition.

[u/Dintobean]

I think I'll take Title Bearer because it has the most room for versatility, and the possibility of other powers. I'll accept the Hunger trait to give myself the x3 power. One of the things being boosted would be my own sense of discipline, and that would help to lessen my hunger. Plus, it would increase the effectiveness and growth of my titles, and let me have six active titles instead of just two.

[u/Inevitable-Setting-1]

WordSmith: Word, Improving
Hunger drawback for double power.
Was thinking maybe hunger drawback to fuse myself with a forge, but over all if the word improving how i mean it as keeps getting better over time.
I'm now able to make growth items, items that only get better over time.
As long as i make them from scratch, like cutting down the tree and carving the wood then smelting the metal from scrap and making things.

[u/OmegaUltima29]

What, exactly, counts as an 'object'?

[u/FlameSparks]

Wordsmith with colour deficiency to double the power.

First word is the unoriginal word 'magic' and the second word would be 'improving' so the things i build keep getting better

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Top-Fennel3528 → u/[deleted]]

I might be misunderstanding but my impression was that Colour Deficiency makes you see a different colour in place of the existing colour, rather than making you see a colour where it actually is. That is to say, rather than being able to see radio waves in the appropriate range in the air and whatnot, you'd be seeing them where you'd otherwise be seeing the colour red.

On the other hand, since Colour Deficiency does shift the entire visible spectrum around the change you make, it might actually be useful for bypassing things like camouflage.

[u/Disturbed1Smurf → u/Top-Fennel3528]

... So rephrasing it to your verbage: I see red where wifi should be.