The Naming of Names (and weekly roundup)

SYSTEM: Any

So it suddenly occurred to me to ask whether the word Gemini was based on a plural, and it is. So if a second of Luorno's selves dies, she can still fight crime as the singleton Dame Geminus. It gets better: Geminus of Rhodes was an astronomer in the first century BCE, whose astronomy text Introduction to Phenomena survives. Which means that if you had supervillains named Gemini or maybe Castor and Pollux, and one of them retires or dies, the other can thematically still continue as Geminus.

Two items repeated after I posted them elsewhere, because I can't get here during the week, and one of which is actually dealing with a name:

Today's plot device character: The Midwife, who gives you superpowers if you fit her stringent requirements.

For extra angst, the Midwife is a former super whose spirit was put in a body that is simply unable to support powers, and he-she-it is creating these supers in the hope that some day, one of them will have his-her-its old powerset and then phase two of the plan (takeover!) can begin....

And a longer one:

And, because I wrote about a brain in a jar recently, here are some variations that I thought of. (A brainiac 5, if you will.)

1. The apparent brain-in-a-jar is a drone, an avatar run by some remote operator, as an actual radio-controlled thing. In ICONS, this could be a kind of Doombot for the Ultra-Mind.
2. Variation: it's a person/alien/whatever brain in a jar and there's some technology that imprints the driver's personality on it, so that the brain-in-a-jar becomes that person for a while. The twist I thought of and decided not to write about is that the brain was from another dimension, sent to collect information, and it put up with this because it learns so much more about humanity this way...and everyone who has ever piloted the brain carries some alien taint because the imprinting goes both ways....
3. In comics you don't see it often, but you could also do the classic Curt Siodmak novel (Donovan's Brain? Been a long time since I read it) where someone is being mentally taken over by, yes, a brain in a jar. After he or she shrugs off the brain's influence, you discover that one of the things the brain has been doing is having the victim build it a body...
4. "Ex-term-in-ate!" Yes, a Dr. Who reference. The thinly-disguised Daleks appear and invade and the only one who can negotiate with them is...the brain-in-a-jar. And they provide a nifty upgrade to his "body," too.
5. You know, the ancient Egyptians used to put various organs in jars (canopic jars) as part of the mummification process. I know they didn't actually care about the brain (it was removed through the nose with a hooked stick) but suppose they did. Suppose there was a splinter sect of Egyptians that put the brain in a canopic jar. And suppose the brain can control its mummified body over any distance. You have an intelligent brain, literally in a jar, and a mummy for horror fans, and there can probably be several interesting attacks before anyone realizes that the shambling bandage-clad mummy is trying to gather the five (canonically four, but I added the brain, remember) canopic jars so that he can live again! For extra fun, is the Serpent Sphinx trying to stop him or help him? Bonus points if you can fit in some family relationship with Sekhmet or one of your players.

Charles Brown then reminded me of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Whisperer In The Darkness," where the alien mi-go (the fungi from Yuggoth) put people's brains in jars to transport them across space.

That's a possible origin for a brain in a jar character: brain placed in a container by the equivalent of the mi-go and the new dangerous container has been created for the character after the jar was "liberated" from the faux-mi-go and the original body was, erm, lost or terminated in an accident or worse won't be given back by the alien invaders. So both the original brain and the original body might be villain characters in your game, along with the other faux-mi-go, complete with interesting conflicting agendas.

(Distraction: Someone invented/found a cloning machine that pumps out a copy of person X every nine months...and no one knows how long it's been doing this. Maybe five years. Maybe fifty. Maybe five hundred. One of them is a PC. Not quite Orphan Black, but the PC gets involved in it when discovering another person who looks like him. And then an older one. And all of them are sterile, which has caused at least two of them to become...potential supervillains.... Okay, I'll stop now.)