Posted: 23 November 2014 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | 1
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I love the Scarlet Witch but I often have to remind myself she's a mutant. Partly because of her association with The Avengers, but also because her "hex" powers just feel like magic. Sure, Spider-Man and Dardevil's powers aren't based in real-world science but there's a reasonable "fantasy science" about them, but I've never been able to fit Wanda's abilities in the "fantasy science" realm.•• Handed the idea that Wanda's hex powers "alter probabilities" -- and in a non-specific way -- I began developing a story that played with just how that would work. If, to cite the example I used above, she points at a gun wielding maniac and his weapon jams, clearly something pretty profound is going on. It had been defined that Wanda could not think "Gun jam!" or even "Maj nug!" The event was based entirely on probabilities. Which meant she was not altering the gun in the moment, but retroactively. She was, effectively, "retconning" a flaw into the weapon which caused it to jam. This meant, as I read it, that her power worked backward thru time itself. The flaw that caused the gun to jam did not simply appear, at that moment, but had always been there. The likelihood that the gun that happens to point at Wanda had such a flaw might be 1 in 1,000,000, but her "hex" reduced those odds to 1 in 1.* This, of course, was something that brought her to the attention of Immortus, in my truncated story. He was going to use Wanda's powers to "alter probabilities" so that Kang won his first encounter with the Avengers, and the world was retroactively in a very bad place. The savior in all this was going to turn out to be the Black Knight, whom Thor had stuck in a "pocket universe" when he was wounded. He'd been pretty much forgotten, after that, but my idea was that when the timeline caught up to the moment of Thor's action, the Knight would just basically fall out of the air. There had been no Thor to put him into that parallel pocket, y'see. _________________ * It might be argued that it's not even as dramatic as all that. After all, distilled down to the basics, the odds of anything happening are essentially 50/50. It will happen, or it won't.
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