The Reverb

Your body absorbs background extremes of emotion, especially negative emotion. When a room becomes thick with anger and stress, you’re able to project a telekinetic wave of force which abruptly repulses people (enemies and allies alike) and small objects away from you. You seem to act as a natural battery, and your very blood could be used to empower rituals a level higher than they ordinarily should be - with no requirement on the ritualist to adjust their foci or components.

Long Description: Other people’s emotions are painful to you. You noticed it as a child, though it took you a while to realise yours wasn’t a normal experience. Too sensitive, they said of you; acting out; attention seeking. Someone would be shouting and you’d feel their anger like a giant tic on your skin, or even beneath it, moving slowly inside you. It was awful, invasive. Their emotion made your skin scrawl and your body grow bloated and hot. Anger was the worst. Angry people go straight to the bone.

Other people describe stress like a restlessness they need to release. You feel it too, but for the longest time, you couldn’t release it. It just built up and up until you were scouring your skin under water, sobbing, unable to get the world off you. You’d experience someone’s emotion like a meaty weight pressing against you and - if left unchecked - into you. If you can’t move away it starts to itch, and then it burns, it stretches things within and around and soon enough you’re stumbling to a ditch or groping a wet latrine lid and vomiting up a black viscous mess. 

It would be better if it did anything; you feeling terrible has never made anyone else feel better. An angry person doesn’t get any less angry for being around you. You seem to gain all of the bad with nothing good to show for it.

Recently, you’ve found a way to expel it. It was there inside you with no way out, as it always is. Perhaps it was the last nail in the coffin, perhaps you were at the very end of what you could take. Devastatingly for you, it happened in a public place, with many superstitious and fearful witnesses. Too much tension had been building, then came the shouting, and you couldn’t escape the throng and press of so many emotions clamouring in the thin air around you. One moment you were choking, unable to breathe for all the emotion as it rose in your throat and swelled in your gut, the next - gone.

People were blasted away from you as if under some violent storm. All directions - but away from you. Glass cracked, ceramic or vases shattered, someone’s head collided against a wall or door edge; you still remember the wet sucking sound of their skull coming away from it as they slid down to the floor. Your skin was alive and tingling and for the first time you were free of everything - empty, clean, just you.

That was when everyone saw you were the only one standing in the hole made.

Since then, dire circumstances have forced you to adapt, and even rely on this newfound expression of your “curse”. Necessity being the mother of invention, you’ve learned how to stomach the sensation of ‘holding onto’ a group or person’s extreme of emotion, forcing yourself only to dry heave and keep it down for use later. You feel sick and nauseous for as long as you do, and cannot focus on much, but in doing so you can release that negativity in a shockwave of kinetic force that has saved your life on more than one account. 

Very recently you’ve begun experimenting with your own emotion. It turns out that in extremes of your anger, arousal, humiliation or your fear you can store and expel it in a similarly violent burst.

Mechanics: When a majority of the characters around you have been roleplayed as expressing a lot of anger or stress for at least three minutes you may call out “Off Game Human Repulse” and stretch your arms out on either side of you to repulse anything under 500 pounds that is currently within six steps of your location. Potence users may resist this: two steps less are taken for each level of Potence they possess (therefore vampires with an Exceptional rating of Potence may ignore it entirely and roleplay themselves as if pushing against a strong wind). This is considered an extreme use of a power. As with any extreme human power you may use it once on night one, twice on night two and a maximum of three times on night three.

Characters who are grappling or biting you automatically lose their grip and are knocked back, ripping flesh in the process if they are latched on with fangs. Characters whose trajectory causes them to bounce off solid objects or characters struck by flying debris take damage relevant to what they as the victim feel they should reasonably be affected by.

You cannot pick and choose targets when using Repulse. All characters within range are affected equally.

Your fresh blood can also be used to empower rituals a level higher than they ordinarily should be with no requirement to adjust the foci or other ritual components, though this depletes you immensely, so it is best you are held or lying down for the ritual’s climax. You must be present throughout it, as your blood will be on tap effectively; it must come straight from the source, and depending on the size of the ritual, may require a lot of blood.