Let’s see, if we use LSH rules, Nightcrawler’s teleportation is taken, as is self-regeneration, TK, flight, persuasion, & I suppose stopping time…
OK, I’ll go with a form of teleportation wherein I transform to a mobile electron pattern, can travel at near light speed while maintaining perception of my surroundings, & then reassemble. This is technically different from Nightcrawler’s visual-range teleport.
Or short-range teleport of objects lighter than 10kg away from myself, possibly into solid objects. Very potent.
I don’t think I’ve seen either of those in comics.
I’ve always thought that the ability to manipulate air would be interesting. You could effectively mute people or conversations by creating controlled vacuums around them, maybe fly (depending on levels of control, etc), or maybe even be able to go into outer space. There are lots of possibilities, at least from what I can see.
Otherwise, picking a more traditional superhero power, telekenesis.
I’d like to be able to manipulate probability. See, there’s no physical reason that all the air molecules in a room shouldn’t suddenly decide to migrate swiftly across the room and punch you in the jaw, or that the molecules in the wall shouldn’t decide to part briefly to permit me egress, or that a marble statue shouldn’t spontaneously rearrange itself to get off its plinth and do the Chicken Dance: they’re just very, very improbable events: maybe the probability is once in the lifetimes of 10,000 universes, but there’s no fundamental physical laws preventing them. With my stochastic powers, shit like that would happen at my behest. And winning Lotto, which is merely pretty unlikely, would be a weekly source of income.
For pure crime fighting, I would say super senses or telepathy would be the most useful for actually putting criminals behind bars.
Your super smell would locate drugs without need of a dog and with an intelligent brain behind it, or get a good idea of the smell of a perp from the crime scene. Super seeing would help you find those clues nobody else could spot. Super hearing would help you find that hiding criminals heartbeat.
Telepathy would also be extremely useful. Your may or may not be able to testify, but you could root around in their heads and figure out if they actually did it or not, or where evidence is.
If I were being entirely selfish, I would pick super regeneration, for the whole not dying or getting sick bit.
My bad. I thought this was a good fit for “great questions of our time”
Well, when I envision limited superhero abilities, I’m really just thinking of realistic limits to super abilities. For telekinesis, for example, you could lift as heavy a thing as you want, but as the object increased in mass, it would require more concentration and be more draining. You could run as fast as you wanted, provided there was some kind of drawback (strain on your heart, loss of awareness of surroundings, etc). Superintelligence would come at the cost of possibly interpersonal skills.
I guess, in other words, you have to balance the ability. You could maybe have some really sweet ability but give it some drawback so it wasn’t as sweet as it first sounds. Generally, I would say though, it has to be realistic (insofar as you can be realistic about superhero abilities).
What things would you absolutely NOT be able to do with this ability? Once your ability can grant you access to every other power out there, it’s no longer limited.
Time travel, except that I would probably just use it mostly to go back and see what dinosaurs were really like. And maybe to get the true historical perspective on famous people like Jesus.
I’d like to be the Avatar. That means I can ‘bend,’ (manipulate) the classical four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. My powers would be vast but far from unlimited.
If superpersuasion/mental domination is on the table, it’s hard to pass that up. I mean, who needs to teleport to work when you’ve convinced your boss to let you work at home? (Or better yet convinced HR that you should get a very, very, generous buy-out). And <mystic hypno-voice/> “You will give me a ride in your private plane” </mystic hypno-voice> isn’t quite as cool as superman flying, but close enough.
Short of that, I’d really like invulnerability/super-healing. Not that I want to fight crime, but I’d like to say goodbye to my surgeon and hello to cliff-diving, bear wrestling, and wearing Red Sox hats in Yankee stadium (and if superlong life comes with, that’s OK with me).
For me, it seems like there is a clear distinction between picking an ability that allows you to work within the confines of laws, etc. (superpersuasion) and an ability that lets you defy them (stopping time).
You could persuade a company to give you a buyout, or you could just stop time and take any money you wanted from anywhere.
You could persuade a criminal to turn himself in, or you could stop time and tie him up for the po-po.
Considering that some people are harder than others to persuade and the fact that you have to be face-to-face with them (opening yourself up to reprisal once the effect wears off), I would much rather be working behind the scenes. No one would even know I ever did anything, because I would just seem like a bystander.
I think there’s a problem with that: super-intelligence can’t build you a flying machine or any of the other superpowers. Let’s say you were in the stone age, but you were super-smart and figured out how to build an airplane. The necessary technologies and implementations of the manufacturing don’t exist yet, so you’d be SOL. Likewise, you may be able to envision some sort of teleportation device with your super-intelligence, but it might require development of many other related technologies first.
Sorry for the hijack, but I’d like either flying (for the cool factor), or the ability to pass through solid matter (Disneyland turnstiles won’t phase me!).
Nothing. Once you can manipulate probability at a quantum level, you become a god, able to turn water into wine, vitamins into amphetamines and bullets into custard: or if you really don’t like somebody, they simply cease to exist. The ability itself is limited in terms of the OP - I can only manipulate chance - but the applications are limitless.
