Mortality Manipulation

Background

Mortality Manipulation is the ability to control the fundamental forces of life and death as two sides of the same coin. Rather than being two separate abilities, life and death are understood as aspects of mortality—the state of being subject to death and the transition between living and dead.

The user can influence any part of this spectrum. Some users specialize in only one aspect, such as causing death or healing the living. Others have mastery over the full range, able to kill, resurrect, command the undead, grant immortality, or alter how death functions within an area or upon a specific target.

This ability is distinct from purely destructive powers or purely restorative powers because it operates specifically on the boundary between life and death. A user may kill without causing physical damage, raise the dead without creating new life, or make someone truly immortal in a way that no amount of healing could replicate.

Also Called

• Life and Death Manipulation
• Thanatoskinesis
• Vitality Control
• The Cycle
• Mortalis

Possible Applications

Mortality Manipulation

Demons in SMT have access to mudo spells

Death Manipulation is the power to decide, determine and manipulate the cause of death. Users can decide, determine and manipulate the causes of death, allowing them to choose and control when, how, where, and why someone dies and even induce the circumstances/events that will lead to the target appointed death.

Variations of inducing death focused on the death aspect of mortality:

• Death Inducement: Causing death in a target through various means. This can range from physical disruption of biological systems to metaphysical death.
  • Physical: The user manipulates the physical aspects of death, an example of this would be from manipulating the death of their opponent by disrupting their biological systesms, such as killing organs such as the brain and disrupting the body's vital and biological functions.
    • Examples: Aparoids (Star Fox)
  • Metaphysical: The user can manipulate the metaphysical aspects of death, since "everything that begins, one day will end", an example of this would be manipulating the death of their opponent by manipulating the body and the soul/spirit, mind, conscience, or any other metaphysical aspect of their being. This could also induce the very concept of death through space-time, reality, causality, etcetera.
    • Examples: The Snatcher (A Hat in Time)
• Death Negation: Preventing death from occurring. The user can stop a target from dying, even after fatal wounds or conditions have been inflicted. This may be temporary or permanent.
  • Can keep mortally wounded beings alive indefinitely
  • May prevent death from natural causes or aging
  • Could create zones where death cannot occur
  • May require active maintenance or be a passive effect
• Death Removal: Removing the concept of death from a target entirely, making them truly immortal and unable to die by any means. Unlike Death Negation which prevents a specific instance of death, Death Removal alters the target's fundamental nature.
  • Target becomes incapable of dying
  • May still be harmed but cannot be killed
  • Could be permanent or reversible
• Death Restoration: Restoring death to something that has lost it. This could mean making an immortal being mortal again, or returning proper death to undead creatures who exist in a state between life and death.
  • Reverses immortality or undeath
  • Returns natural order of mortality
  • May cause improperly existing beings to finally die
• Death Sense: The ability to perceive death, dying beings, or locations where death has occurred. This includes sensing the moment of death before it happens, detecting corpses, or feeling the weight of past deaths in an area.
  • Sensing imminent death in a target
  • Detecting undead or improperly dead beings
  • Locating where deaths have occurred
  • Perceiving the "death" of concepts or objects
• Death Communication: Interacting with the dead or with death itself. This includes speaking with souls, commanding undead, or even communing with personifications of death.
  • Speaking with the deceased
  • Commanding undead servants
  • Bargaining with death entities
  • Receiving information from the dead
• Law of Death: Altering the rules and laws that govern how death functions within an area, population, or reality. The user does not directly cause or prevent death but changes the framework around it.
  • Making it so that anyone who dies in an area rises as undead
  • Changing the conditions under which death occurs (e.g., no one can die on these grounds)
  • Altering what happens after death (souls trapped, reincarnation, etc.)
  • Creating new rules for who can die and how
• Death Transfer: Moving death from one target to another. The user can take an existing death (such as a fatal wound or a natural expiration) and transfer it to someone else.
  • Redirecting lethal attacks to another target
  • Giving one's own impending death to an enemy
  • Transferring the death of a living being to an object
• Death Delay: Postponing death rather than preventing or removing it. The user can ensure a target will not die until a specific condition is met, a certain time passes, or an event occurs.
  • Target becomes unable to die until a task is completed
  • Death is pushed back by a set amount of time
  • Conditional immortality with specific end conditions
• Death Acceleration: Speed up the process of death or decay. The user can make wounds become fatal faster, cause rapid decomposition, or ensure that a dying target expires immediately rather than lingering.
  • Wounds that would take minutes to kill become instant
  • Corpses decay at accelerated rates
  • Natural death occurs years earlier than intended
• Death Constructs: Creating physical or metaphysical constructs out of death itself. This could include weapons made of death energy, barriers formed from the concept of death, or servants created from dead souls.
  • Weapons that kill anything they touch
  • Shields that cause death to anything that passes through them
  • Minions formed from collected deaths
• Death Absorption: Absorbing death from the environment, from dying beings, or from killed targets. The user may gain power, healing, or other benefits from absorbed death.
  • Growing stronger from killing
  • Healing by absorbing nearby deaths
  • Storing death energy for later use
• Death Weakening: Instead of causing outright death, the user weakens a target's vitality or brings them closer to death without fully killing them. This could be a gradual process or a debuff applied to living beings.
  • Targets become more susceptible to lethal effects
  • Vitality is drained over time
  • Natural healing and regeneration are suppressed

Applications focused on the death aspect of mortality:

• Causing instant death in a target without physical harm
• Removing the concept of death from a target, making them unable to die
• Raising the dead as servants, thralls, or autonomous undead
• Communicating with or commanding souls of the deceased
• Creating zones where death is accelerated, impossible, or governed by different rules
• Altering the laws that separate the living from the dead
• Sensing death, dying beings, or locations where death occurred
• Preventing death temporarily or permanently
• Dismissing undead or forcing souls to pass on

Mortality Manipulation

The Mask is capable of bring objects to life

Life Manipulation is the ability to manipulate the life force that courses inside living beings or the very concept of life itself. This power grants the user influence over the vitality and essence that sustains living entities, enabling a range of effects from healing to devastating destruction. It can also encompass the ability to generate, control, or remove life force, allowing users to create, enhance, or extinguish life as they see fit.

Life Manipulation is often portrayed as a subset of broader powers like Life-Force Manipulation, but it encompasses more abstract applications tied to the concept of life itself. It is frequently tied to themes of creation, balance, and destruction, making it both a benevolent and devastating ability depending on the wielder's intent.

Possible variations focused on the life aspect of mortality:

• Energy Infusion: Imbues others with life energy, enhancing their natural capabilities or enabling rapid healing.
• Resurrection: Fully restores the life of a deceased being, reversing death itself.
• Vitality Suppression: Reduces or nullifies the life force in others, leading to exhaustion, unconsciousness, or death.
• Biological Amplification: Increases the user's or others' physical capabilities by amplifying their life energy.
• Decay Induction: Accelerates the loss of life energy in others, causing rapid aging, deterioration, or death.
• Life Sharing: Transfers life energy between beings, allowing the user to sacrifice their own vitality to save or strengthen others.
• Symbiotic Life Manipulation: Creates symbiotic bonds that allow life energy to flow between beings, fostering mutual enhancement.
• Aura of Vitality: Passively boosts the life force of those within the user's vicinity, enhancing their stamina, healing, and longevity.
• Environmental Life Force Manipulation: Draws upon the life energy of the environment (plants, animals, etc.) to fuel the user’s abilities or manipulate nature itself.

Possible uses focused on the life aspect of mortality:

• Re-Animation: The user can breathe life into inanimate objects, turning them into living creatures or reviving the dead to create undead servants.
• Plant Manipulation: Enriches the soil with life energy to rapidly grow and manipulate plants for defensive or offensive purposes.
• Healing/Regeneration: Restores vitality to themselves or others, healing wounds, curing illnesses, or regenerating lost limbs.
• Life Stealing/Instant Death: Removes life energy from others to weaken, harm, or outright kill them.
• Statistics Amplification: Enhances physical abilities such as strength, speed, and durability by manipulating the life energy within their own body.
• Soul Manipulation: Life energy is often intertwined with the soul, allowing users to influence or interact with the soul through life manipulation.
• Resurrection: Brings the dead back to life, either fully restoring their vitality or granting them a new form of existence.
• Vital Energy Projection: The user can focus and release life energy as blasts, barriers, or other manifestations for combat or support.
• Decay Reversal: Rejuvenates or reverses the effects of aging, decay, or disease by restoring life energy to its original state.
• Creation of Life: Generates entirely new living beings from raw life energy, potentially imbuing them with unique traits or abilities.

Balanced Applications

Applications that treat life and death as a single continuum:

• Transferring life force from one being to another
• Creating entities that are neither truly alive nor truly dead (traditional undead, liches, revenants)
• Manipulating the boundary between states, such as making a living being register as dead or a dead being register as living
• Reincarnation or rebirth cycles
• Trapping souls between life and death
• Altering how mortality functions within a specific area or population

Example Variations

Death-Focused

The user specializes in the death aspect, but not life. Examples include necromancers who can raise the dead but cannot heal the living, or beings who can kill with a thought but cannot restore what they destroy.

Life-Focused

The user specializes in the life aspect, but not death. Examples include healers who can cure any wound but cannot raise the dead, or beings who can create new life but cannot directly kill.

Balanced

The user has mastery over both aspects, able to kill and resurrect, create undead and dismiss them, drain life and grant it.

Mortality Exemption

The user cannot control mortality for others but has altered their own mortality. They may be immortal, unable to die, or exist in a state where the normal rules of life and death do not apply to them.

Law-Based

The user does not directly cause death or grant life but instead alters the rules and laws that govern mortality. They may make it so no one can die in a certain area, or that anyone killed by a specific method will rise as undead.

Possible Limitations

• Specialization in one aspect may prevent use of the other
• Resurrection may require intact bodies, recent death, or specific conditions
• Creating new life may be more difficult than destroying existing life
• Death manipulation may fail on beings that are already dead, immortal, or outside normal mortality
• Life manipulation may fail on beings that are already dead or are inherently unliving
• Some settings have gods, cosmic forces, or natural laws that restrict or punish mortality manipulation
• Overuse may attract attention from death gods, psychopomps, or cosmic balance enforcers
• Resurrected beings may come back wrong, incomplete, or hostile
• Extended control over undead may degrade the user's own mortality over time

Known Users

• Necromancers who command the dead but cannot heal
• Death gods or personifications of death
• Healers or life gods who specialize in restoration
• Liches or undead beings who altered their own mortality
• Characters who embody the cycle of life and death