This post is spoiler-light. It doesn’t reveal any plot details, but it does describe the deeper logic behind the Children’s common capabilities. There might be a few “oh, that’s why that happened” points in here.

I can’t help but notice that The Three Gifts sounds like cheesy crap that an amateur writer comes up with. It’s the kind of mumbo-jumbo that gets thrown in to make something sound mysterious. How did that get past basic editorial common sense?

The Gifts hang a lampshade on things that are generally ignored in action films. Communication issues usually just confuse the audience. Action films would suffer if the heroes needed a long healing time between action scenes. Watching someone heal is boring. There are only so many times you want to do a “find the portal” story arc. Really, one was enough for me.

The standard practice is to ask the audience to suspend disbelief, but I don’t like to pretend that these things don’t exist. It takes the fiction an unnecessary step further from reality. Ok, it’s hard to say if telepathic translation services are more realistic than every alien in the universe speaking English, but I’m pretty sure my way is more fun.

Passage

Clempson’s original life story took place in the Everyway RPG, where portals mostly gave the characters access to an infinite variety of settings. This suffered badly in the translation to science fiction. The challenges in the translation of the portals themselves defined a lot of the requirements of the Gift.

The biggest difference is that all of the worlds are full planets, not just isolated magical kingdoms, and the tech level ranges from modern day all the way back to the stone age. I could have dozens of portals on each planet, but that mode tends to smear storytelling across many worlds, and I love me some world building.

Thus, portals wind up being a couple thousand miles apart, and travel between them can be as treacherous as the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The absence of fantasy-world tech-stagnation also means that the portals have to be able to move as civilizations rise and fall. They have to stay close to major population centers, but not too close. Non-Children have no way of sensing the portals, so the Children would have no maps (and no magical bazar to sell those maps) or local rumors to follow.

Given these limitations, it became necessary to let the Children sense them from at least as far as the next portal over. An experienced wielder of Passage can find a portal across an entire continent, even across trackless jungles. After a few centuries, they can even sense a path that avoids the trackless jungle. Eventually they figure out that they can use Passage like GPS, and never get lost again.

The need to move around required me to make the portals sentient, and aware of the planetary empires. They aren’t above hiding when they think the Child should stay in a world. Passage has therefore become a method of communication with those entities.

Vigor

Vigor is the most straightforward of the gifts, but still provides a few surprises. If you watch a lot of action flicks, you’ll notice that the speed of healing is only limited by the audience’s attention span. Broken arms and bullet wounds can be gone in a matter of days.

I took a swag at the healing speed in most action flicks, estimating that most injuries heal in about ten times the normal speed. For me, this is as realistic as guns that never need to be reloaded. Nonetheless, bed rest isn’t very heroic, so I hung a lampshade.

My universe has a hard limit on which abilities can break the laws of thermodynamics, so I decided that Vigor used a Maxwell’s daemon style mechanism. Healing is the end product of a great deal of Brownian motion, so all it takes to speed it up is a ludicrous amount of luck.

Preventing pathogens was tougher. You need something that can differentiate between harmful and beneficial bacteria, for instance, so having a complex intelligence behind the gift became unavoidable. Not necessarily sentience, mind you, but definitely intelligence. The same intelligence differentiates between the alcohol required to get drunk and the alcohol required to blind someone.

The intelligence keeps a snapshot of the Child when they first passed through, and usually works towards keeping the Child in that state, minus any maladies, deformities, or age-related deficiencies. It cures arthritis, will regrow lost organs, and clears up mental degeneration.

The surprises come in when you apply Vigor to beneficial changes. When you work out, you build muscle. That’s a healthy change. I always wondered how Phil in Groundhog Day could learn the piano if his tendons and neurology reset every day. Vigor considers these kinds of changes to be within the range of healthy, but will consider the normal muscular damage sustained during exercise to be something that it needs to repair. This makes muscle building and physical skill acquisition significantly faster for Children.

Tongues

Star Trek’s universal translator and the Babel fish are crude solutions to the language problem. I didn’t want to go that way simply because it ignores a lot of the complexities of linguistics that I find fascinating.

Tongues allows a Child to borrow another person’s understanding of a language. This distinction means that the Child is incapable of mis-translation with the person they are borrowing the language from. The linguistic kernels are directly translated into words that mean exactly what that person thinks they mean. Tamarian metaphors would pose no obstacle.

This doesn’t mean that it ensures grammatical perfection. We’ve all had cases where we hear someone say something, and know what they mean, even though a conscious parsing of the words suggests something different. Listeners who are not the borrowee will have variable results.

To further complicate matters, Tongues guarantees translation into words that mean the right thing, but the Child’s own expectations of language can taint how the words are presented. Tongues does nothing to erase accents, and has limited benefit for providing instruction on how to pronounce difficult sounds. Every Child needs to learn how to click and cluck.

There are a couple of unexpected implications for this. The first is that Tongues has to work for any language. It’s basically a telepathic code-cracker for human information exchange. It doesn’t even require the language to be a spoken one; it just requires that the person doing the communication be within range, and that they are intending to communicate. It can’t translate code words, but something like Morse code is a snap. Given a little exposure, they could translate Bridge bidding signals and Baseball hand signs.

Another side-effect is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. SW suggests that we have a hard time thinking about things that we don’t have words for. If you turn that on its head, having an extra language should then improve your ability to turn ideas over in your head because you have more avenues. This linguistic perspective also allows skilled Children to tell when they’re within range of someone whose language understanding they’ve been exposed to.

Why three?

Three is a magical number…holy trinity…tripod…triple redundancy…ick. I could make up a bunch of stuff about the significance of threes but, really, three is the number I needed. Two wouldn’t have been enough, and four would have been too many. Five is right out.

I’ve never been happy with how these capabilities generally get glossed over or taken for granted. I hope I’ve presented a new and thoughtful twist on these Stock Superpowers.