Okay, so in the story I was writing for NaNoWriMo this past year, there are pointy-eared people who live up on an absurdly tall mountain, and some of them have weird powers which have, up to this point, gone completely unexplained. The best examples are the top four officials below their leader Isahralah--Mekedzis (who can control water), Hegamel (who has fire), Aiore (electricity), and Vahrago (who can alter people's mental states, mess with emotions, and so on.) These powers are pretty broad within their element--Mekedzis can use his water-based powers to teleport himself between bodies of water, create exact-duplicates of himself out of concentrated water, move faster by "slipping" across the ground propelling his feet with water, and of course just plain blast people with high-pressure water jets if he wants (he's usually not so much the directly-attacking type, though; more sneaky. When he wants to directly attack he tends to do so physically instead of with his powers.)
Not everyone has powers like these, though. Aykathla has some unique abilities that don't really fit under a simple "elemental" description (she can read the Kuan Nusku scroll, she can communicate with all sorts of weird critters the scroll can summon, she can detect the presence of other beings... and there may be a few other things she isn't even aware of herself), which may be an unusual form of Num Power (which her species, as a general rule, doesn't have at all--which is one reason why all the females in her family line are so unusual and kept locked away so well by the rest of their society.) And then there's random soldiers, peasants, criminals, and so on who... don't seem to have any sort of powers at all. But why do some people have them and others don't? Are they just born like that? Well, Aykathla was (and so was her mom, and her mom, and... you get the idea)... but for the most part, they aren't. Nobody else is born with powers (...okay, maybe Isahralah was, but then again he's Aykathla's grandfather so there's still that family weirdness going on there. And maybe he's got both innate powers and gained-through-the-method-I'm-about-to-explain powers.) How did they get them, then? Well...
- In the tower on the top of the mountain, there is one room somewhere with a powerful energy of (probably) unknown origin constantly surging through it. I haven't decided for sure exactly what this energy will look like, but I have two images in my head--one is essentially something like a giant hot tub in the middle of a room, except instead of water there's a swirling whirlpool-like vortex of multicolored, shiny, constantly-shifting energy. The other is a pillar of the same sort of energy rising up from a hole in the floor of the room and going all the way up to another hole in the ceiling, sort of like a waterfall (maybe upside-down, or maybe the normal kind, but either way it resembles a waterfall even though it's... not even water.)
- Either way, the way it works is pretty simple--if you go into the pool/pillar of energy, something weird happens during the brief moments while you're in there and you come out of it with powers ready to go. You come out either just by walking back out through the other side in the "pillar/waterfall" version, or by being forcibly thrown up out from inside of it in the "whirlpool" version. Well, if you come out of it at all--it's possible that it doesn't always work, and sometimes you can dunk someone in and find out that they just... got lost.
- No idea where these "lost" people actually go. Just making them die seems pretty messed up, so maybe they literally do just get lost--sent off to some other planet, or some weird dimensional place? It's also possible that it just plain doesn't work on some people, and they come out on the other side exactly the same as they went in. Or maybe they go crazy, or mutate, or something like that.
- What determines who gets powers and who gets lost/insane/mutated/nothing? No idea. Could be that it's completely random, or maybe it has something to do with how strong someone is when they go in. Considering the society that uses this thing, maybe it's related to one's social status or what family they come from or something... or maybe very few (if any) get the bad side-effects at all, and the whole idea of it sometimes having bad consequences was completely made up to discourage those who aren't approved by the higher-ups from jumping in and getting free superpowers. Or maybe it's personality-related--generic thug types with very little to them below the surface get nothing since there's really not much to work with, while more complicated people end up with powers that fit them in some way. If that's how it works, maybe it's suicidal or otherwise desperate people who get "lost," and people with issues with their own mind/body who come out insane/mutated (so I guess anorexic people would come out morbidly obese since they keep thinking they're still not thin enough even when they're skeletons, people who think they're not very smart come out retarded, people who think they're going nuts come out somewhere well beyond that, and so on.)
- Where does it come from/where does it go? No idea! If I go with the pillar/waterfall version, then it's possible that it will run all the way from the bottom of the tower (or maybe even lower--could go all the way to the base of the mountain, or even all the way to the center of the planet!) to the top of the tower... if not higher. Maybe the only reason the tower is so tall in the first place is so that this whole huge thing is covered up, or at least covered well enough that height and the clouds prevent anyone on ground level from seeing it. As to how long it's been there or where it came from in the first place... I haven't decided yet. Maybe it was somehow created by the pointy-eared people, or maybe it's from before their time (or so old it's always been there, even.)
