I’ve never understood this fear. If I ever get superpowers, I’m going to be the one starting up the laboratory. Very publicly, with the government, various major universities, and appropriate private companies as co-sponsors. Be visible enough that I can’t just “disappear”.
By chance, are you a D&D player?
No not a D&D player.
Are there chickens in D&D ?
What are they for?
What do they do?
Do they explode?
Oh. I never posted my original idea. Like @TrueCelt I settled on fresh water, but I went bigger. For convenience, until I make enough money to buy a really nice beach front home on some tropical type island somewhere, I defined my object as the water contents of the Quabbin Reservoir. That’s roughly 400 billion gallons of very nice potable water, and is currently the main supply for about 300 million people.
Reaching it to touch is no problem (I only live about 15 miles away) and the public is allowed to walk and bike around the paths on the grounds. As for dealing with the daily water when I don’t have a use for it, it’s about 25 miles from my current home to this convenient dumping place called the Atlantic Ocean.
Yeah, I’d be ‘polluting’ that lovely saline water with nasty fresh water, but given how many rivers empty into the oceans all the time, I think it would not be a problem for centuries.
So then I just tell everyone facing a shortage of fresh water, is that all they have to do is create a suitable site, like some valley, and build dikes to block low level exits so it doesn’t flood out the nearby areas. (The Quabbin’s surface area is about 40 square miles, but if your valley is deeper/sharper sided, it could be smaller.
Just give me a call when you’re ready. For the cost of first class travel and accomodations and a really reasonable daily fee for my efforts (maybe a thousand bucks?), I will come and provide all the water you’d like. Heck, I could even refill the Aral Sea, though that might take quite a few months worth of effort.
Now, this won’t be a permanent solution, because its a single dumping of water versus a natural drainage basin, but so what? If your water level gets low in a year or so, just call me back for a refill.
So, permanent employment for me, at a pleasant and emotionally satisfying job, while extensively travelling the world. What could be nicer?
Okay, yes, the rising sea level (I mean the natural one that is predicted and ongoing) will reduce demand in some areas. For example, I doubt Florida will be wanting many new reservoirs. Oh, well, I’m pretty old anyway.
Oh, and I’ll make a point of touching the Quabbin in the depths of winter, so not only will my clients get the lovely water, but it’ll help slow down global warming at least a tiny bit.
300 million people?
Whoops! That should be 3 million.
Still. Delhi, India, a potential client, has a population of around 30 million. Just ten reservoirs, or a few larger ones, would handle them. When is the best season for a vacation in India?
D&D can contain anything the players imagine, so yes, there are sometimes chickens, if it ever becomes relevant for them to exist, and mostly what they do is lay eggs, or occasionally get eaten (usually not more than once per bird). But… Well, this will take some explaining…
OK, so there are befits you can choose as you grow more powerful, called feats, that can have a wide variety of effects. And there’s an optional rule that, when you create a character, you can choose to take on a few negative traits called flaws, and gain an extra feat to compensate for the flaw. There’s also a class called “commoner”, that players wouldn’t ordinarily take, because it completely sucks (by design: It’s meant for the ordinary folks you meet, not for heroes).
Well, one April, Dragon Magazine published a joke article, containing flaws that could only be taken by commoners. One of them was called “Chicken Infested”, and had the effect that, any time you attempted to draw any object out of a container, you would accidentally draw a chicken, instead. Where do they come from? Don’t ask us.
And D&D players being the sort that we are, many of us immediately saw the potential in having a limitless number of chickens available on demand. Folks would take one level of Commoner, just so they could get that flaw, and then not even care about the free feat they got as a result.
I mean, not in real actual D&D groups, for the most part. Obviously most wouldn’t allow it, except as a joke. But it was a good joke.
Thank you for that explanation!
When they get their endless supply of chickens though, what do they do with them? Just go around with lots of chickens following?
(Do the chickens never explode then?)
Well, there are a lot of possibilities. The simplest, of course, is to just drown all of your enemies in poultry. There are also spells that will drain the lifeforce of any living thing near you and increase your power accordingly; those work very well with infinite chickens.
And yes, of course they sometimes explode. You can get anything to explode, if you’re determined enough.
I pondered on this a bit.
Money is always nice.
Time is wonderful. But I don’t think I can hold a handful of time to qualify for this situation.
So I started thinking about what shortage or lack limits me in what I can do. I have chronic pain, and am under Pain Management. I receive medication, but Federal law limits my prescriptions as to amount and I can only get a 30-day supply at a time. My doctor is in SCal, butmy home is in NE AZ. When we first moved to AZ, Mr VOW and I chose to keep all of our doctors in SCal, for several reasons. That wasn’t a problem, it just meant we had to return to SCal every three months or so. But onceI startedPain Management, things got difficult.
Doctors are licensed by State. As a result, my SCal dr cannot send my pain Rx to the Rite Aid near my daughter’s house, so I could pick up the Rx at a Rite Aid near our AZ property.
Somy idea was to have my pain prescriptions be what I would produce. Hey, we could travel all over the place, and I wouldn’t be tethered by Federal restrictions on pain medicines.
Instead, I’d leave myself extremely vulnerable to opioid overdose.
Cancel that idea.
I don’t think I want to play this game. Besides, Mr VOW bought a lottery ticket for the billion dollar jackpot. We’d be better off with that.
~VOW
For some reason, my first thought was insulin. Public health, benefactor to humanity, and all that. Maybe sell it for twenty-five cents a dose, which would accumulate a nice little sum for me without being an expense worth considering for anyone who needs it. (That price is just off the top of my head with no real thought; maybe some number crunching would show the need to adjust it, depending how fast I could duplicate doses.)
But then again, cynical me can see all sorts of ways this scenario could turn very ugly very fast, with the “real world” not allowing the results I would want, so maybe I’d toss that idea and start trying to think of some other idea.
Couple ideas: A small but well constructed house, so I could be a more efficient version of Habitat for Humanity. Apartment blocks would be more efficient, but it would be a pain to find an appropriate place to put them every single day.
Or: If I duplicated a water pump that was connected to a large, clean, aquifer, would the aquifer also be duplicated? Lots of people don’t have access to clean water.
Does it work on humans? If I make fourteen duplicates of my favorite NBA player, are they all under contract to the same team? Asking for a friend.
I do play DnD, and I’ve never heard of this.