User:ChromastoneandTabby/Fanon Con Alien Competition

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Memory Flash is an alien created for the 2019 Summer Fanon Con.

Abilities
Memory Flash's obvious ability is to generate blinding amounts of light from the bulbs on his hands, which can be brightened or dimmed at will.
 * Example: Memory Flash flashbangs an enemy in a dark building and then dims his lights so they can't easily spot him when their eyes recover.

That aside, his primary ability is actually to recreate 3D holographic displays of memories drawn from his or someone else's minds.
 * Example: Memory Flash's user needs to investigate a crime scene that has already been cleared and creates a display from the mind of a police officer who was at the scene, recreating the area in question in the exact state the officer initially saw it.

These displays are made of solid light, meaning that while they don't have the same physical properties of the matter they're representing, they still create solid objects that can be interacted with. These objects can be used normally unless they require some sort of energy-based power source.
 * Example: Memory Flash needs a weapon pronto and grabs a memory from a bystander of the last time they saw an AK-47. Memory Flash is now armed with an AK-47. Please do not ask how he fires it with no fingers, that is private.

Memory Flash has a photographic memory and never forgets any detail of anything he's seen, making him extremely useful for investigative purposes.
 * Example: Memory Flash is only able to observe a password being entered for a short second, but is able to flawlessly enter the password weeks after viewing this.

Weaknesses
Memory Flash's "bulbs" are rather fragile, and if they get broken somehow, he will no longer be able to use his abilities.

The projections Memory Flash creates are only as accurate as the memories he's pulling from. If the subject in question recalls details incorrectly, those flaws will be present in Memory Flash's hard light projection.

Memory Flash cannot recreate memories that no longer exist, meaning that if his target has forgotten something for one reason or another, their memory of the forgotten thing in question will be inaccessible to him. As an extension of this, details that his target has forgotten about memories that he can access will show up as blank spaces in the physical holograms he creates of that memory. Since very few species have a perfect memory, these blank spaces can show up fairly often.

Planet and Species Information
Memory Flash is a Mynimi from the planet Micoro.

Where "making memories" is a sentimental idea for humans, the Mynimi see it as an extreme sport, with professional "Memory Makers" competing to see who can create the flashiest and most extreme memory displays by putting themselves in ridiculous and sometimes dangerous situations. Numerous Memory Makers die from the sport every year, but that hasn't decreased its popularity in the slightest, with the top Memory Makers being viewed as celebrity icons and given handsome amounts of reward money.

Micoro, prior to its overhaul by modern Mynimi, was a horrific, dangerous place covered in dense forests that nobody in their right minds would ever want to visit. Life was fast and short for anything that wasn't an apex predator, with the Mynimi's ancestors starting out at the bottom of the food chain. Micoro was a dark planet whose surface was constantly shrouded by clouds, forcing the native wildlife to develop extremely advanced vision in order to function. The Mynimi evolved their bulbs to take advantage of this, blinding any predator that got too close and making their escape while their would-be attacker was left stunned.

As the Mynimi developed intellectually, memory became extremely important for the species, as they were forced to perfectly memorize the safest routes from shelter to food and back again in order to survive. Their light-generating bulbs eventually evolved the ability to recreate these memories in a physical, visible form, allowing adolescent Mynimi who had never even stepped outside their cave-like dwellings to instantly familiarize themselves with these pathways.

The Mynimi eventually began using these projections offensively, memorizing every predator that came after them and creating copies of these predators to be used against them. Different attacks were memorized by Mynimi silently observing their predators from a distance, allowing them to "replay" these attacks with their hard light memories against real predators during attacks. With an endless supply of their own techniques turned against them, the predators of Micoro were killed off too fast to evolve counter-measures, leaving the modern Mynimi as the dominant species on the planet.

Approximately sixty-three percent of Micoro has been terraformed by the Mynimi, who have cut down significant chunks of the planet's legendary forests and used the trees as a building material. Certain groups among the Mynimi have protested this practive, but the Mynimi as a species generally hold a grudge against the forest for the challenges it presented to their ancestors, seeing any exploitation of it as fair game. At the moment, this massive deforestation hasn't had a particularly adverse effect on the planet, but time will tell if this destructive terraforming is in any way sustainable.

Etymology

 * Memory Flash's name comes from "flash memory", a type of digital memory stored on flash drives.
 * The species name 'Mynimi' comes from the Greek word 'μνήμη' ('mními'), which translates to "memory".
 * The planet name 'Micoro' comes from the Latin word "mico", which translates to "flash".

Trivia
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 * Memory Flash takes inspiration from flash drive memory and flashbulb memories, respectively.
 * To clarify, flashbulb memories are extremely vivid memories formed as a snapshot of time when something potentially traumatic or of great consequence occurs; for example, when people say they can describe exactly what they were doing when hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, they're usually describing a flashbulb memory.