The SUE System: The Rise of Marty

There's one last bit of background that has to be laid out before we can start on the campaign journal/anecdotes proper. It would be a metaplot if things happened for reasons, but as it is it's just a sequence of events that sets up the adventures of everyone at large.

This is the Rise of our Marty Stu. Marty, name changed so I can type it without breaking down laughing, will eventually be our primary antagonist; every story in this setting is just prologue to the characters fighting the "real" final boss. I call him the antagonist, but there's never any justification given for the PCs opposing him; they're just assumed to take the 'wrong' side and need Marty's intervention. Given that, it's worth reading the post before this first; otherwise half the terms he felt the need to make up won't make sense.

I should mention before starting that I don't have the "story" in front of me; our GM is extremely, neurotically protective of it, and I was lucky to get a chance to read through it a few times and take notes. I'm not sure I would do a conventional sporking even if I had the entire text; it's so poorly written I'd have to translate everything into comprehensible English even to start. In lieu of that, enjoy my plot synopsis, and bear in mind the author was 21 when this was written. Quotes are in purple.

We begin with Marty in what I would, under normal circumstances, I would call humble beginnings. However, given our GM, I will instead call them sheltered and extremely lucky beginnings. See, Marty, who will eventually dominate the campaign, is quite literally the GM. There's no other way to put this. I've seen wish fulfillment characters before, but none that are literally "me, but with superpowers".  So we start with our GM; imagine Comic Book Guy without the employability in a comfy upper-middle-class suburban lifestyle, fretting over video games and buying katanas from mall cutlery stores so he feels badass.

He starts out kidnapped. Full points for originality. We get about six paragraphs of him suddenly waking up and looking around, all described in this florid, glowing purple prose. Marty, everybody; the first action hero made entirely of pudding.

"A flood of excitement courses through me.  Why would they want to?  What secret could I hold that would make me a target, and a target that should be carried so far, too. "

This is the first we get of psychic!Marty, as distinct from the later actually psychic Marty. Don't expect any reasoning for these Superman-scale leaps to conclusions, friends; we don't need logic when we have being automatically right.

So begins the most amiable, helpful dialogue between kidnappers and abductee in fiction. Bear in mind, he's lying there bound and oozing blood from a head wound, and his first impulse is "oh, better interrogate these guys", so we get facepalm-worthy dialogue interspersed with his highly insightful comments like "I don't know what this is. I'd better get them to tell me what it is." Enjoy psychic!Marty's Craptastic Carnival of Deduction:

"“It wouldn’t happen to have a primary continent named [redacted], with the world-sustaining forces of Life and Death being spawned of the primal concepts of Life and Death self-given form, would it?” He knows the answer.
“Yes.”  This interests me, there are several possible means he could know this.  The unlikely possibilities include him being a time traveler or having stolen the information from my hard drive.  Unlikely.  There is a more probable answer, though.  Probable in a sense of what he has said, not physical likelihood.
“Reality 3200, ‘[redacted]’.  You are its Authyr.”  Scar states this very matter-of-factly.
Bingo.  Even in the future it is doubtful I’d publish [redacted], and even if I did, I doubt that it would have the following necessary to create fanatics.  There’s no reason for someone to identify me by [redacted] if they had simply looted my hard drive.  What I had suspected:  parallel realities.
“I was wondering if this…” I stop to think how to phrase what I’m saying.  “I was wondering if you were some kind of multiverse agents.”
Scar is taken aback.  “You know about the multiverse already?”"

Via what we are repeatedly informed is his skillful Bingo-driven manipulation of his kidnappers (read: asking them more questions), Marty quickly learns how Authyrs work, as well. See my previous post. Now, I don't want to give advice to kidnappers, but if you ever happen to find yourself needing to keep a nascent God somewhere, don't immediately inform them that they're omnipotent and able to escape effortlessly just by turning on God Mode.

Then we get this little gem: "This could be the opportunity to gain the power I’ve been craving." Wait, really? Having Omnipotence for Dummies slowly and patiently read to you might be helpful for being omnipotent? What's next, Marty; do you find an armed cobalt bomb and shrewdly detect an opportunity to get rid of a particularly troublesome anthill? Sweet Azathoth. This isn't just wish fulfillment, it's unlimited wish fulfillment gift-wrapped to specifications. Honestly, this is half the story; just Marty here vigorously congratulating himself for seeing "1+1 2" and deducing the absence of an equals sign, and the world's most helpful kidnappers going "wow, no one's EVER figured THAT out before!". I think I'm going to assume from here on out they were actually being just impossibly sarcastic, and Marty here was too astronomically dense to pick up on it. They get taken aback about once a page, and at no point do they ever have any other emotion than utter awe.

Of course, he's not nearly special enough yet. He learns, when he can get his kidnappers to pick their jaws up off the floor, that he's not just an Authyr, he's a rare kind of Exclusive Authyr, and even rarer, he's an Authyr of multiple worlds.I don't know about you guys, but I've only ever written in one fantastic setting, and have never so much as read anything in any other work of fiction ev-

No. It gets worse, and if I rant as much as it's worth now, we'll never get to the end.

We still aren't done, you see. Once his kidnappers(and no, they aren't ever named) finish telling him how he's a special kind of a special breed of an already ludicrously rare kind of special snowflake, he asks how one traverses from one setting to another--and they show him. Do I even need to mention how stupid this is? This is like  handing someone in prison a hacksaw and patiently explaining to them how it works. It's even more ludicrous than that; most people, upon this stroke of incredible good fortune, would not sit there musing about how clever they were for recognizing the potential for escape here.

The device for going from one universe to another is thought activated, by the way. Heavens forfend poor Marty should have to figure out how to use anything as amazing as a dimensional teleporter. He might be temporarily inconvenienced, for Y'golonak's sake! It's admittedly far more likely he'd be totally unable to use it otherwise, but whatever; as we've seen before, him having actual skills is antithetical to the whole point of the story.

Then we get this:

"“Would you mind untying me?  I’m not armed anyway, so I’m not much of a threat.”  I’m not sure if this is a lie or not, but I doubt my berserker blood would do too terribly much against those energy weapons.  Besides, there’s no reason to alienate them.  They could be useful."

Of course he's a berzerker. Could you not tell? And yes, the explanatory infodump kidnappers might be 'useful' (humans might say helpful); one might want to see if they've decided this is the kind of abduction where they let the target go. The target who, I remind you, is capable of literally anything when he has his hands free to write. I've been here half an hour just trying to describe how moronic this is. Just how monumentally, impossibly, mind-warpingly stupid they would have to be to let him-

"Scar hesitates, but obliges me.  It feels good to have my wrists free.  After he unties my ankles, I stand up slowly, and lean against the wall."

If you encode the preceding paragraphs into DNA and splice them into the human genome, you can recreate Neanderthals. It's that stupid. This is beyond crap; this is a impossibly ludicrous, poorly written, mind-numbingly moronic anti-wit that annihilates sanity to produce lethal radiation, wrapped in this smug, oily tone of utter satisfaction with the author's unmatched mastery in every field. I can't even call it an informed attribute; we're informed of precisely the opposite attribute. Setting aside the kidnappers as the ego fodder they are, our berzerker protagonist has sat quietly and amiably conversed with his captors. Of course, that's just because his amazing capacity to escape is tempered by his discretion in not escaping yet. Literally every action he takes, every thought he has, is justified as coming from some deep inner virtue that we never actually see--except in the fawning of the kidnappers who apparently have nothing better to do than indulge this manchild's ludicrous ego. I've seen more realistic dialogue in a Golden Age comic book--No, forget that. I've seen better stories in cave paintings. In caves with blank walls.

I wish this didn't get worse.

He immediately asks what they want with him. As soon as they suffer some sort of critical cranial lapse and let him go, he reminds them they kidnapped him--and apparently they need his help, and this "explains why they were so willing to let me out of bondage." They needed him to listen. Which explains why they released him before explaining what they need his help for. Marty here is just that awesome; even his kidnappers trust him to patiently listen to their pleas for his assistance. Pleas, mind you, that they shouldn't even be bothering to render. Not to this guy. If this is the best shot they had, they're going about it entirely the wrong way. You don't recruit someone like Marty; you get him recruited by your opposition. Then you hand him a pen.

But I digress. Marty immediately starts grilling them on who they are, who they work for, et cetera, deciding to test their truthfulness based on the similarity of their uniforms. Said uniforms are, by the way, flamingo pink and neon green "S.E.P. suits". He's already stealing from better authors even before he's used his new fancy extra-special exclusive magic powers. Not only that, he's stealing from them ineptly; if one knows they're protective gear, it's kind of logically invalid to assume the people inside are necessarily from the same team. It's nitpicky, I know, but it's more psychic!Marty. Oh, and our two bumbling abductors are apparently the last of a group resisting the Multiverse Integrity Commission. Here's his response to a description of the M.I.C.:"This M.I.C. sounds powerful, I could use it to my advantage." No, GM, no you could not. You could not use a puddle to your advantage if your ass were on fire

One thing he can use, though: " “Alright, I may be able to help you.  First, though, I need paper and your transport device.”  Let’s see if they take the bait.  Hell, I might not even need the M.I.C. if I can pull this off."

Omnipotence, please, and the solution to everything I can't do with it yet. Do I even need to say he gets it? They brought it specially for him, and explain while giving it to him that they never actually did anything to tick off the Commission; they just resisted them. Meaning they disagreed with them. I can't help but remind everyone that the players are expected to enthusiastically join up with the M.I.C. by default.

I'd like to take a moment to suggest that everyone reading this go read something else. Pick up a novel or something, and really enjoy it. Heck, read a technical manual, a menu, an exit sign, anything. Just...remember what else literature can be before moving on.

"I begin to write on the pad:  [{Different system}:  Immediately upon my entering into the {other} universe, I shall be accosted by a vampire.  He shall bite me, bestowing upon me vampirism, specifically of my ‘Fantasy Progression’ sort.  He shall also kill the two who follow me.  He will then begin the trek to the north pole where he shall immediately die, and be eaten by a polar bear.]"

WILL THERE BE ANYTHING ELSE FOR SIR TODAY? Good Cthulhu this is bad. Not only is it wish fulfillment, it's wish fulfillment working by rules that are themselves wish fulfillment. He gets everything handed to him on a silver platter and the first thing he does is find the platter not to his liking and kill everyone involved. He's seriously omnicidal right now; he's killing everyone he's even aware of just to simplify things, and doing it so diffidently it's beyond disgusting. This is a man who could win the lottery and complain about having to redeem the ticket because he's so entitled none of it's worth anything to him except as his just rewards for being him.

I think I know why the plot's unfolded like it did, with the bipolar kidnappers/recruiters: on some level, he can detect how disgusting he's being, and this is his way of justifying everything he gets as being "earned" through as token an effort as possible. Consider: He's a double super secret special Authyr because he wrote things, and this is why he was kidnapped--which lets him completely justify treating them like utter crap, because they didn't ask him first. Then, too, he had to "manipulate" them into telling him everything they were originally going to tell him. He's done nothing this entire story but get power handed to him by the bushel, and rather than one scrap, one mote, one iota of gratitude, he leans on this 'kidnapping' thing to justify killing the best thing that's ever happened to him just so no one can ever remind him that he owes them. I could stand this if it were just unexplained, but this constant "it's only what I deserve"...

Waiting. Waiting...It gets worse, can't stop now...

"The comparison of myself to Kira of DeathNote flashes into my head for a moment.  I then continue writing.  [Once in {reality}, any action I take shall already be foretold by the timeline, thus making myself entirely invisible to time-stream scans."
...I'm just gonna let that comparison sit there; Death Note fans can respond as suits them. He makes a lot of comparisons with himself; never with anything or anyone else. He also instantly makes himself effortlessly unable to be tracked by the one entity he's respected enough to consider misusing. As you might expect, why no one else ever took two seconds to do this is totally unexplained. He goes on.

"[And after my companions have been killed, and I have been turned into a vampire, a very friendly and intelligent squirrel shall come up to me.  This squirrel shall have no means of being tracked back to the {other} reality, and shall take from me the device used to cross realities, and use it to explore the multiverse creating a trail leading away from me.]" I can't describe how brilliant he thinks this plan is. He can, and does, repeatedly, though. And lo, the almighty God-Man snapped his fingers and all problems were instantly solved. He takes a moment to note how much a problem it would be if he had to cross out the one reality and write in the other. Just, you know, in case that wasn't predictable.

He instantly masters the portal device, his benefactor/kidnappers don't bother to check what he wrote, they pop through, and of course it all works as scrawled. Finally, he approves of something. Of the vampire bite: "It is as if this moment has been a craving beneath the surface, festering out of sight my entire life." BENEATH THE SURFACE? The surface of WHAT? What else is there to you?

He has one complaint. Apparently "accosted" is too strong a word, and he spends a paragraph musing about how to avoid the vampire twisting his arm. Oh my. How ever will he solve this terrible dilemma. This is all the character development we get, folks; he learns to let his useless pedantry shine through more. Yes, that's what we need, another excuse to make everything just so.

We're about halfway through this.

Now, there is one shred of realism here. He passes out midway through "the transformation", avoids all the pain, wakes up to hand the magical consequence eraser squirrel the magic portal rock, and sleeps some more. I have no trouble believing this guy could laze his way out of feeling a bit hurt. He comes to with this: "I look around for my shirt, and get a better look at myself.  I look thinner.  No doubt the vampiric fitness taking hold. " Just think for a second on the type of guy who would explicitly write that vampirism makes you fit. His eyes are better, too, so now he's only myopic in mind. Brace yourselves, readers; Marty here is about to be absolutely gavaged in good fortune even more so than before. Like, say, the police he explicitly notes are in the setting just not seeing the blood spatter over an entire alleyway, and we get more psychic!Marty musing on the cleverness of the squirrel plan to boot: "That will cause them to follow a red herring long enough for me to settle into my role here, and preferably to increase my power." Oh, well, I don't know, man. You've had such a tough go so far; is it really fair to expect your preferences to be realized, too? And what role? What purpose could you possibly serve, you useless conglomeration of unjustified entitlement and self-satisfied smirking? WHAT BENEFIT TO OTHERS COULD YOU POSSIBLY--

Hoooolding off....just wait...

"As I walk]  I cross it out. [There is a house on the outskirts of the city.  It is a mansion.  It  The deed to the mansion is in my name.  A single key to the house exists, and is in the door.  The mansion has not been molested despite this.  One Billion dollars in cash is present inside the house, as is a in a safe whose combination is my traditional four number pin]  No reason to write it down, especially should someone steal the pad.  [Also in the house are a wardrobe of my style, the outfit I’ve imagined for {Marty}, ]  I contemplate a multi-tool.  No, it will very soon not be necessary.  [video game V systems of all the varieties I am aware of, and the full library of games for each system.  I will not meet anyone on my way to my house, and I will where I roam to will be where my house is.  Its number is 7200.]
Writing around the blood was a nuisance, but this Authyrial power will make it worth it.  I start walking.  I have a home.  It is on the edge of the city, and I will encounter no one.  I need only keep walking."

Wait. Just wait.
"I stop, pulling out the pad.  [All the utilities, cable television, wired and wireless internet, etc will be fully paid by a glitch that will never be caught.]"

Ladies and gentlemen, Marty in a nutshell: Montana Max as written by Donald Trump. One billion dollars just popped into his possession in a goddamn MANSION he will live in ALONE, and as an afterthought, he steals cable, because who cares about dealing honestly with other people? Wired AND wireless internet as well. Those are different, you know. The degree of utter selfishness here is just staggering. Never mind pinballing around the Mary Sue checklist, it's the stuff he focuses on that really gets me. Myopic and megalomaniac all at once. I mean, a billion in cash? Ignore the effect on the local economy; what are you even going to do with that? It's not accruing interest and you can hardly deposit it without raising awkward questions. Then, too, if we assume it's in twenties (and trust me, we can; it's all I've ever seen the DM carry), that's a stack of bills 3.8 meters on a side. Convenient, really. Then, too, all he wants is video games and more technological amusements. And solitude. Can't risk mingling with the hoi polloi. This guy...this freakin' guy...i've never known anyone so disdainful of the idea of other people. He doesn't want a mansion for the luxury; he wants it for the isolation. Yes, world, write his games, build his systems, make the world he lives in more comfortable for him--and then run the hell away, lest he be forced to acknowledge he is not a self-made island of a man.

And writing around blood is worth omnipotence. Remember that, fellows: If you're ever given the chance to become effortlessly all-powerful, it's worth using slightly dirty paper. I have no idea why he doesn't just write that he stumbles on a new pad, but i guess it's not worth it. He might smudge his perfect face, you know.

More gushing about his vampirism follows. He can regenerate and see in the dark now, and upon exposure to night air, he levels up and gets a magical attack. I did say level; Fantasy Progression vampires don't need any of this pedestrian "XP" to get more powerful. They just do unbelievably stupid rituals that cost nothing and take mere minutes. Right, back to the scribbling:

"[A v Laptop computer with infinite battery life is also in my home.  It’s memory and processing is a couple decades further out using Moor’s law of advancement.  It is running Windows 7 and its programs currently match exactly to my laptop back home.]"

Just for fun, imagine loading Windows NT 3.1 on a modern computer. If you have a copy lying around, I invite you to try it. See how efficient it is. Also, spelling is an excellent skill when acquiring writing-based superpowers and referencing Moore's law so blithely. Just saying. Under the circumstances, I'll let the utter insanity of infinite energy slide--and not just hooking the battery up to the house. No, those peasants at the power plant must toil uncompensated for Marty's Xbox!

What follows is, well, boring fanwankery. He's just so smart for having his laptop with "Terabytes, maybe Exabytes, of hard-drive space and comparable RAM/processing" (ow, right in the electronics engineering...ow...), he's too virtuous to want power over underlings but will totally have them anyway, and he wants one as a blood source because Nyarlathotep forbid he has to struggle. Screw the rules I wrote, I have more rules.

And then we get the most damnable bit of racism, sexism, and homophobia yet. I've joked about vomiting before; this actually made me sick.Triggering for anyone who can still feel:

"And [the blood donor] would be female, wouldn’t it?  I suppose it’s probably the relative intimacy of the act of vampiric feeding, but I just can’t imagine having a male civil servant for the job.  Sure, I could feed on a guy easily, especially some ghetto jerk no one would miss, as I almost certainly will when the time comes for me to kill, but for now, I’d rather have someone more disposed to such an intimacy."

DAMN. YOU. TO. HELL. GM.
Are we even surprised he's every conceivable sort of bigot at this point? Anything to think less of other people.

Just remember the above if ever you start to pity him...and if you're too disgusted to laugh anymore, I'm sorry.

After that, he recalls that vampires are vulnerable to the sun. He is in the sun at present, but apparently isn't a full vampire yet, and won't be until he drinks blood. Not that this will stop him from leveling. How very convenient. Oh, and he wants help:

"[My mansion will be staffed by a handful of civil servants such as a butler, a chef, one or more maids, etc.  Their salaries are also paid by the same glitches that have paid for my utilities.  They are entirely loyal to me, and have been waiting for me to arrive.  They know my face by a painting done and hung in the house by a raving mad artist.  They felt a compulsion to come to this house to take up their jobs, after having had the same jobs elsewhere, and arrived to find that not only they weren’t the only ones to have felt the compulsion (and thus weren’t crazy) but also found that their salaries were already available as soon as they accepted the positions.]"

"One or more maids"...just wait, fellows. Naturally, he can't think of a better way to keep them there than mind control, which must have just been a treat for them to process. 'Hmm, I'm bored... I believe I'll quit my job and wander to a random house in the woods no one knows exists yet and memorize the face in that six-foot smear of blood and snot on the wall so I know for whom I'm doing precisely the same work! But why am I being paid by an ISP?'

"Ninjas.  That’s what was on the back of my mind.  Hellsing’s Butler, Code Geass’ Saiyoko, there are plenty of awesome housekeepers in fiction.
[All the civil servants are also ninjas, martial artists, or otherwise epic combatants.  My butler has similar skills to the Butler of Hellsing.]
Right.  My mansion.
[With a push of a button, my mansion can be put into safe mode.  In safe mode, it becomes a steel clad fortress that could easily double as a bomb shelter.  Further, in safe mode, no light can enter from the outside.  As such, I can put the house into safe mode each day to avoid the sun.  There is no outward appearance change in safe mode other than the windows being covered with steel curtains.]"
'And I think I'll just punch through this tree, while I'm at it. My, what a lovely crazy survivalist compound full of ninja gardeners. Suspension of Disbelief no jutsu!'

And yes they ARE that kind of 'ninjas'. Bonus points for misuse of the word "epic", and for forgetting Walter's name.

"[I also have a civil servant whose job title is ‘Donor’.  Her job is to willingly let me feed v on her once per day.  She enjoys her work, and has the same basic back story and abilities as my other civil servants.  She is just as loyal.]
Anything else?  Right, the RPG mechanics.
[My Donor follows the RPG mechanics for healing ability damage.  As such, she is entirely fine by the next morning if I drain just 1 cup of blood, since that only deals one ability damage.]"

Because blood banks are just so passe...and I'm sorry, Donor, that you're suddenly compelled to let this guy maul you daily with what are explicitly elongated canine teeth. It must suck getting your jugular gauged daily.

That wrapped up neatly, he continues to plot. He knows Star Wars exists, so he intends to 'intercede' circa Return of the Jedi and 'claim the Empire for my own at the height of its powers'.
"And for generals…  Thrawn, most definitely.  And Lelouch.  Ah, Lelouch vi Britannia, yes, he will make a most excellent general.  Hell, I’ll make him the field marshal of my whole damn army."

No he won't. Neither will Thrawn. See, one problem with blatantly fanwanking all over established canons is that other people know things about the characters you're stealing. Like how Thrawn is as much a judge of character as he is a military strategist, which...bodes ill for you. Never mind his reasons for working within the Empire in the first place; you're most of what he was trying to fight. And how Lelouch, insane and jingoistically pro-Japanese as he is, will take one look at your screwed-up little harem anime in the making and start nuking everything of yours he can find. But then, that's why you need them. That's why you need a setting specifically designed to put the whole world's literary endeavors right at your greedy fingertips -- because you can't write your way out of a wet paper sack, and your only contribution to fiction starts with "I'm special!" and ends with an exclamation mark.

Our story ends with him finding his mansion, then deducing that it's in New York. Wait...OUR New York? New "Screw You, Buddy" York, America, Earth As We Know It? This just gets better and better; a mansion just popped into a world with satellite surveillance. I leave you with the final line of this mess:

"A butler opens the door.  Very classic looking butler.  He looks surprised, though it quickly fades in favor of restrained delight.  “Welcome home, Master.”   "

Remember, this is Walter. He's later named such explicitly. Walter C. Dornez, ex-vampire hunter and butler for the Hellsing organization, now enthusiastically in service to this red-eyed, white-haired, longcoat-fetishizing, physically 'perfect', mentally bankrupt natural 1. Once again, Hellsing fans can go nuts here. At least it struck him as noteworthy that another human being was properly happy to see him.

This has been part 1 of the Rise of Marty. He wrote 13 parts, because when your biggest concern is deciding what new toy your parents buy for you next, you have a lot of free time. However, I don't, so I'll bring in the rest as it impacts the story of the campaign we actually played. That's next.