You are just working your way through life as a huge prick when a genie appears and grants you one general superpower. Your nasty disposition and general laziness being what it is, the one thing you can’t do is to opt to become a superhero or even an ambitious supervillian. That wouldn’t ever work because it takes things that you just don’t have and nothing can fix it. What you want to do is just be is the world’s most major league jerk but on a minor scale (not like Hitler, more like Andrew Dice Clay).
What superpower do you pick and what do you do with it?
I would pick super-athleticism and use it to screw up all major league sports.
NFL football - I would be the quarterback and every play would be a quarterback sneak but no one could tackle me. I would just wander up the field at an extremely slow pace taking up an entire quarter every time moving back and forth and side to side for the touchdown. The NFL would quickly become more boring than soccer.
Competitive freestyle swimming - big dolphin leaps in the pool as I make my way back and forth at a new record pace every time with seal barking noises for effect.
Marathons - show up in a suit with a scotch and tonic and cigar in hand. Run at an extremely fast goose-step and show them what it really takes to make the champion of champions.
Basketball - jump up high and get the ball on the inbound. Shoot. Nothing but net from anywhere on the court every time. There is no good defense.
How about you? What kind of superhero would you be if you had a huge chip on your shoulder, few morals, and little ambition?
Make people do whatever the hell I want them to do. Walk into a wall, sign over all their assets, drop their groceries in the rain. Classic Huge Price stuff.
The problem with having a super power that you then apply in professional sports is that you’re immediately outed as a Super, which means that you’ll be immediately hounded by the government and the public at large to Use Your Powers For The Greater Good (not to mention possibly getting recruited or leaned on by more sinister groups to Use Your Powers For The More Specific Evil That’s Profitable).
To really be a jerk with super powers you’ve got to be able to sham, to disguise, to really bug and harass and annoy people without being traced.
Mind control? Borderline supervilainy there. But ventriloquism plus remote sensing that works from up to a mile away, so you can make sounds and voices in another building and see/hear the effects it has on people, now that would be a lot of fun.
I would gain the power to resurrect the dead. I would beat attractive people to death in their beds, rape their bodies and then return them to life. Leaving them a burned DVD of me doing this in a Mexican wrestler mask.
Or more likely I would just make a ton of money resurrecting Hitler so Jews and Gypsies could kill him for $25 a go.
Telekinesis, but only to the effect that I could affect the digestive process of anyone within about 100 feet. Give me good seats to the Super Bowl or the World Series, and you would either have some badly embarrassed players, or a good control of the outcome.
I would be a universal (ok, maybe just global) remote control. Every ‘reality’ show would see its ratings drop to 0, while my favorites shows all get huge ratings.
I’d also like the ability to remove the crawl from any and every channel, but that might make me a superhero that would overshadow Superman.
That sucks for the first and second victims (because you need at least two to be “serial”). Personally, I always preferred active volcanoes. Less evidence.
My jerk superpower: being able to teleport small objects. Someone puts their keys down somewhere for a second, I teleport them away, they swear they just put their keys right there, then look all over the room, then after a while I teleport the keys back to their original spot, and the result: insanity ensues.
And being able to teleport other people would be pretty nasty. If someone pisses me off I could just teleport them to the middle of the ocean, or Antarctica, or some other inhospitable place, leave them there for a couple minutes, then teleport them back to safety. Not life-threatening, just really obnoxious and annoying.
Telekinesis, on top of being a generally overpowered superpower, is just prime material for general purpose pettiness.
Off the top of my head :
Tie shoelaces together or create invisible “rocks” for people to trip on. Yeah, I’m childish that way.
Messing with sports ? HAH ! Lemme show you how it’s done : force field over both of the court’s baskets, or across both goals. Stopping tennis balls in midair and/or making them bounce at random. Accelerate baseballs to mach 5. Levitate every car on the Indy 500 track a millimeter above ground: spin them wheels, Billy-Joe-Bob ! Make the pins so stable, they couldn’t get a strike with a sledgehammer.
Skirts and dresses. Enough said.
Attention, mimes of the world: you are now in real invisible boxes. Because seriously, fuck mimes.
Do the poke-people-on-the-left-shoulder-while-standing-to-their-right “joke”, only from afar. And to the whole street at once. Get some popcorn first.
In the same vein : you know those kids who kick the back of your seat for 6 straight hours ? That, to half the flight. I guarantee someone’s getting killed.
You there, with the face : how d’you like 300x gravity ? No ? How 'bout .0001 ? Huh. He’s in the lower stratosphere. Guess he didn’t like that one. Oh well, let’s put gravity back to normal for him. I’m sure he’ll appreciate terminal velocity.
I wonder if I can unscrew every nut and bolt on that scaffolding in one go.
I took the liberty of disassembling your car and re-assembling it in your living room on the 36th floor, boss. Great conversation piece !
Boooored noooow. Let’s fling the world’s gold reserves down the Mariannas. It’s not like they’re using all that bullion anyway. While we’re at it, why not dump all the nukes too. That’ll make for a stable, uneventful world won’t it ?
Round of applause for getting the mimes. I really don’t like them. Can we extend the invisible box thing to clowns too? I don’t like them either. shudder
Luck vampirism. I take a dislike to someone, and bad things just…happen. Their car breaks down just when they are on the way to that important interview. They have an acne outbreak right before a date. They get mugged. Their computer always has a virus. Their marriage breaks up. They trip and break limbs. Their pets run away.
And there’s no way to even guess I’m at fault…especially since that would be bad luck for me, and I am very lucky indeed since I stole yours. And rich from gambling, so I can afford bodyguards.
