Brute

Brute is one of the twelve power classifications created by the PRT still in modern day use. A Brute classification typically indicates enhanced strength or durability, often both. There are no known Brutes without at least some form of self-protection or enhanced durability.

Methodology
Brute powers might manifest themselves in variety of ways. Most Brutes are either some combination of big, strong, and tough or possess some other method of self-protection.

Subtypes
Brutes can be divided in twelve categories, where individual Brutes can fall into multiple groupsWhen figuring out the framework of the trigger and how it applies to the power, take note of the two categories below that stand out the most, and combine them. The detail sheet has suggested powers for cross-interactions. Muscle brutes offer raw mass and offensive tools. They manifest from physical, focused damage to a part and struggle. Armor brutes offer external protection and reactive tools. They trigger from physical, surface level damage and physical helplessness. Shield brutes offer partial protection, and utility. They come about from physical, massive damage and awe. Intensity brutes offer raw elemental power and defensive tools. They trigger from energy-based, focused damage to a part and pain. Field Brutes offer temporary layers of invulnerability or extreme durability. They arise from energy-based, surface-level damage and stress/time constraint Dynamic brutes offer skill-based defensive measures and redirection. They trigger from energy-based, massive damage and despair. Sunder brutes offer aggressive defensive measures that weaken foes. They arise from other, focused damage to a part, and from diminished strength. Repression brutes offer abstract or indirect measures that moderate harm. They arise from other, surface-level damage, and from emotional helplessness. Negate brutes offer all-or-nothing measures, often with matching offense. They arise from other, massive damage, and from horror. Regen brutes offer benefits over time, and healing abilities. They arise from damage over time, and from self-harm. Transfiguration brutes offer transformation and revival abilities. They arise from situations where death is sought or held at bay. Immortal brutes offer one-time, massive benefits, but do not heal easily. They come about from cases where the harm laid in wait or was delayed. - BRUTE, document by Wildbow

In some rare cases, parahumans with enhanced senses fall under the Brute rather than the Thinker classification.

Trigger events
For Brutes, trigger events involve some form of physical harm, where the source and severity of the damage, combined with contextual factors, inform the resulting ability. (See also the table above).

In particular, the nature of the harm effects the powers in the following ways:
 * Harm from a physical, solid source (crushing, smashing, dismemberment, broken bones, etc.) results in powers emphasizing raw strength, biological alterations, armor, shields, and size.
 * Damage from 'energy-based' sources (extremes in temperature, radiation, electrocution, vacuums, etc.) results in more energy-based powers: Examples including personal telekinesis, forcefields and energy manipulation.
 * Forms of harm outside of these two categories (chemicals, poison, disease, etc.) lead to powers relating to growth, phasing, constructs, and more esoteric manifestations of time, space, or reality warping.

Brute powers are also influenced by the degree and nature of the damage, expressed in the following ways:
 * Surface damage tends to create surface level protection, often along the lines of personal forcefields or exterior armor.
 * Deeper tissue damage will involve more thorough changes and restructuring. Brutes along these lines may more closely resemble Breakers, drawing from endless fountains of muscle mass or energy to repel or stand firm against attacks.
 * Internal harm without clear outside source will often express itself by giving powers that relate to absorption or expression of forces. This might be kinetic energy, light, electromagnetism, or something more abstract like time or inertia.
 * Gradual damage will often provide regeneration in some capacity, or biokinesis of a more intentional sort than might be seen in deeper tissue damage.

Common combinations with other ratings
Muscle and Armor Brutes often fall close the Changer rating, have powers that morph their form and appearance. Flight is also a common secondary power for Brutes, to the point flying Brutes are known as Alexandria-packages.

A rare subset of Transfiguration brutes is the Resurrection brute. Who are, as the name implies, able to come back from the dead when they die. however they usually lose something in the process.What kind of trigger event will create a resurrector? They arise from situations where someone wants to die but can't, or in situations where they should die but are held at the boundary for what they perceive as a long time, and are consequently somewhat rare. * A man suffers burns to 70% of his body in an industrial accident that also cracks his head open, and through the miracles of medicine, is kept alive. They put him into comas intentionally, for set periods at a time, only bringing him out to recuperate in the week leading up to a surgery for his head. Every day is pain and agony, and while the drugs take the edge off... it remains a dull, constant, miserable pain. He lives in torment, held on the threshold but not allowed to cross it, even if he might want to. * She had seizures from infancy, and medication only helped a little. They were almost under control until late childhood, and it was then that a seizure hit and did enough damage that she didn't come back from it... for years, anyway. She came to as if from the deepest sleep, and realized that while she was aware and conscious, she didn't have control over her body. Locked-in syndrome. Unable to communicate, or even to move her eyes, she quickly realized the fate she had been consigned to, and the horrors of the fact that even if she did somehow recover, she had been made what some termed a 'pillow angel' - surgically and hormonally altered to stunt her growth, prevent puberty, and consequently make caring for her as easy as possible. Unable to communicate her desire for this paralyzed existence to end, unable to envision a future for herself with her body being what it is, she triggers. * He tried to kill himself with a gun to the side of his head, wracked by guilt over an accident involving a family member, and frustration over the fact that nobody would listen or try to understand the situation. He did inconceivable damage with the bullet, and yet he lived. Humans are more durable than they sometimes believe, and he was a durable sort. He turned to pills, downing as many as he could, and he experienced the worst pain of his life... yet lived through the night. Pain and guilt surging through every inch of him, he hears the answering machine kick in, another condemnation from people who were only thinking as a mob. Do they always have built-in limitations, like Koschei's decreasing intelligence and and eventual immobility? Generally something. The ones who don't have a built in limitation might have the resurrection but not much else, aside from maybe a penchant for getting buried alive by their enemies or otherwise put in situations where they're out of the picture somewhere, suffering until the cycle ends. But generally there's an alternate weak point or a way their methodology can be disrupted. - Wildbow on Reddit <!--https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/6dbh19/questions_about_transfiguration_brutes/di1ivt6/

Examples: Burned Man (see above for trigger) The burned man triggers, and he becomes a brute. He climbs out of the hospital bed as the Red Knight, manifesting a weapon and armor that replenishes itself by absorbing smoke and burned material. He can intensify any part of his body to make his armor glow with veins of intense heat, and where he wades, he brings only destruction and fire, by dint of his size and the heat that emanates off of himself. He can't communicate or do much more than stampede through the area, generating the smoke and burned material that replenishes this body. But authorities intervene, they move to stop him, and in keeping him in one place for long enough, they prompt him to self-immolate. The Red Knight seems to be defeated, the authorities and rescue operations dig through the damage that he'd left in his wake, and they fly the wounded to the nearest hospital... including one badly burned man with a scar on his head. Always immobile, alwys unable to effectively communicate, he endures days, weeks of suffering and medical care before frustration reaches a fever pitch, his shard accumulates enough power and the Red Knight manifests once more, the cycle beginning anew. Each time, he prays that this time someone will riddle out what he is, or that they'll at least let him get far enough away from the wreckage he's seeded with a resurrection point, so that he might break the tether to it and simply burn out and die, instead of his shard and consciousness moving to a clone his shard has seeded among the heaps of rubble and embers. He despairs, because this time might be the time that he loses that part of himself that cares about minimizing the damage he does when he's the massive Red Knight. Examples: Locked-In Girl (see above for trigger) The locked-in girl yearns to get away, wants nothing more than for people to realize she's awake and aware, and they stubbornly refuse to see. There's something of a changer aspect to her power, something of a breaker one, because of the complicated nature of her mind-body connection. Her mouth yawns open and her body moves, if only in convulsion, and she crawls forth as a parasite. She crawls forward as a doll's head on doll-joint limbs, trailing ghostly material and a curtain of cords, ribbons, and strings behind her, and she knows instinctively what to do. She can alter the form, reconfigure the fingers into longer limbs or more skittering legs, she can pick up objects and attach them to these limbs, and she uses this to gain access to another, similar girl in the hospital, one who was denied oxygen for too long during birth, with no mental faculties at all. She works her way inside, through crude surgery and a generally tight fit, and seamlessly closes the way behind her, before working the strings and cords through the host's body and finding a place for the crude tools she'd used to get the door open. She ran away, hopping onto a train and crossing the border. They never really looked for her, because the girl she wore as a host wasn't supposed to be mobile, and another body -her old self- had been so badly mutilated by her exit that it painted another sort of picture, prompting a hunt for a macabre killer. She pretended to be an orphan, until a bully at the orphanage provoked her and her retractable tools, uncanny strength and zombie-like durability became apparent. That led in a roundabout way to people discovering her first host. Rather than be captured and discovered, she faked her death, instead, and managed to get the hero that was hottest on her trail implicated, his position taken from him. He was transferred elsewhere and she was free to start again. She's learned the rules since. She can spend up to an hour inside a corpse before emerging. She has roughly ten minutes to collect every item she thinks she might need, because she can't collect more after accessing her host, and that same ten minute window is time she needs to access that host. As she approaches the edge of the time limit, she feels as though she can't breathe, and she starts dropping parts in a trail behind her. Ten minutes is her best guess as to her real limit. The host has to be a child, it's most comfortable psychologically if it's a girl, and going by her longest stint in a host -one and a half years-, they stop aging when she's within them, among the other, smaller physiological signs. When she started, she told herself she would only use those who had no ability to think, communicate, or move. She would research ahead of time to know where she needed to go and who would work, she would wait until she was in the morgue, autopsy imminent, and she would slip away, collecting scalpels and syringes on her way to her host. Those days are behind her - her fifth rebirth saw her emerge from a corpse into a morgue far and away from the hospital, in the medical examiner's home and office. There was only the medical examiner's daughter, lying in bed listening to music - and the locked-in girl crossed the line she had set for herself. Examples: Grim Survivor (see above for trigger) He tried to die and he triggered instead. He thought it was only a light increase to strength and toughness, but unbeknownst to him, he was generating an anger. It made emotions and action more slippery for those around him, escalating as their number grew. Every person became an antennae, transmitting their feelings in part to the others. He tainted everyone around him, making situations escalate, and making people stupid, especially as they formed larger groups. A challenge from a family member as he sat at a bar became an outright brawl, a police officer drew a pistol he shouldn't have, and the Grim Survivor was shot. Everyone present quickly sobered up at the scene, as the aura flickered out. Then he lurched to his feet, power feeding off of the high emotion, driving him forward. His aura made the fear into mindless, stampeding fear, suppressing the individuals who might stand up to be a hero, to communicate. Pain and frustration made him lash out, first to stop the cop who might shoot again, then to retaliate against family. He patched up the damage in the crudest ways, and it took. Wanting to get far and away from that small town, he took on work as a hired killer. It was an approach that nearly killed him, because his power wasn't strong in those circumstances. Lone individuals were less affected than crowds, for one thing. For another, the more people around when he died, the faster and harder he came back: just a little bit tougher and stronger, especially in the moments following resurrection. No people, no resurrection. Their emotions were the qualifier, and hurt, pain, fear, and anger were the best food. He could use a screwdriver and a metal plate or someone else's body parts to patch up wounds, and he would be fine. Once he realized how he worked, he shifted tacks, became an enforcer, always on a lookout for an opportunity to go full slasher.-->

The mechanism which the brute expresses their power can dip into other areas.

Role in the Cycle
Brute powers are economical, requiring little investment by the entities to investigate. They are a function of the entities constant refinement of their ability to survive. However a small fraction of dedicated brute shards, and unrelated high performing Brute power that crop up during a given cycle, are Entity experiments in true perpetuity, both for continuing the cycle and for their end goals.

PRT countermeasures
Brutes are most dangerous in a melee and are typically very difficult to put down. As such, the PRT's general response involves focused fire, limiting movements, and maintaining a safe distance, depending on the exact Brute rating.