Shapeshifting
(midwest.social)
Stamets
TumblrI'd prefer mind control; I'd like to guarantee I won't be fired or upset anyone; also if someone decides they want to cause me harm, now they won't
Also I have family members who aren't physically well and they're not following through with what they need to do to get better (even if only marginally; they are elderly and there's only so much life improvement you can do at that point); it's not good to make people do things they don't want to do (whether because of laziness, not being bothered, etc), but I want these people in my life for longer, and I don't want them to suffer in their old age; it doesn't make me a good person but I can live with that
I'd want the powers of the Jessica Jones villain played by David Tennant where you can make anyone do anything. But instead of using it to rape and shit I'd make rich people turn their homes into homeless shelters and give their wealth away and I could just walk out of any bank or store with whatever I wanted.
A pen surrounded by bags of money. Nothing suspect about that at all.
I use my chimera abilities to get away with so many crimes where DNA would normally pin a person for life! And they're not even sex crimes anymore! I totally am not the Craigslist killer from 2011-2013 in the general Syracuse area, despite what other evidence is available to law enforcement. They just don't think someone could be this stupid to admit this sort of stuff online. Well, here I am.
The "pick a superpower" game needs rules, because otherwise, the best option is omnipotence.
It's kind of a tacit rule that it's about comic book super powers so we don't go biblical with it, but I get it. Hell, marvel has reality benders. I use "pick a mutant power" so at least we're working in x-men lore.
And still, something like Prof X is almost always the correct answer. IIRC he has the power to just make the entire world drop dead if he wants to
I mean, technically his power is telepathy, just dialed up to 11. You could probably specify limits on magnitude.
Any power can be OP if you up the magnitude of it all... E.g. I shapeshift into the sun, ending all life on earth.
I think something as simple as: You can't break the law of conservation of mass, law of conservation of energy or exceed the speed of light would cut out most bullshit.
or shapeshift into someone who has some other superpower you want..
"Yea, I picked the power to change reality at my will. I can literally do anything I want. Water is breathable now. Disease doesn't exist. I created a moon base by snapping my fingers and people can teleport to it. What did you pick?"
"Oh, uh... shapeshifting..."
I picked the ability to transcend physicality and now I'm in a warld of pure imagination, where my ass is even more of a dumpster fire than it already is, because all the air is fire in this warld. I do regret this decision.
So I don't risk fucking up thermodynamics next time I drop acid and making atoms stop being a thing.
Shapeshift into a black hole!
I mean I’ve seen myself “functioning” when I’m a tiny bit high. No way I’m trusting myself with that much power. “Oops, instead of teleporting those guys on the surface, I halfway burried them”
Even shape shifting is dangerous but the worst thing I risk is getting blood everywhere when I flip you off turning my middle finger into a dick thicker than my hand
I would be fuckin impressed though, when that thing fthwamps on the table.
Can't hold game controllers without an erection not practical
I mean the dexterity would be literally fucked up, but imagine smashing your literal dick on a finishing move, while 1v1ing your homie
It would be my middle finger for flipping people off what would I even press with that
If your shapeshifting doesn't break thermodynamics, then you're not able to shapeshift into anything smaller or larger than yourself.
(Though, perhaps, you could stretch it a little by 'cheating' it -- become larger by shifting into a hollow shape filled with air, become smaller by shifting into a shape filled with very dense material. But there are limits to that -- too big, and you'll float away like a balloon; too small and the ground/floor beneath you won't be able to withstand the pressure, so you'll sink down into it -- and you'll never be able to change your overall weight/mass, which might compromise your disguise in some situations.)
When you become a pen where do you put the money? Checkmate shapeshifters.
You can stuff a roll of hundos up any of your holes and when you turn into a pen, the money stays inside you, so if you're willing to sodomize yourself, you can make like five thousand dollars a pop. I've done this forty-six thousand times and I am buying my third house with cash as we speak!
Yeah, but then you'd really know what it sounds like when a hand grenade goes off in a bank vault.
In a case where you can't pick "changing reality" as a power, "time control" is pretty much the next best thing. Pause time, rewind, fast forward
Selective time control, so you can pause, rewind, fast forward things independently. Now you've added immortality into the mix.
- Starting to feel the effects of aging? Just rewind yourself while leaving the rest of the universe in place.
- Got injured or diseased somehow? Just rewind yourself to before that happened and try again. Or, if it's inevitable, just keep rewinding over and over again to enjoy your good health before that happens.
- Always keep your perceptions a few minutes ahead of your body/brain. That way, you can never be hurt or killed by surprise -- you'll always see it coming a few minutes ahead of time, and you can either pause or rewind time in order to avoid it.
- You can keep any loved ones immortal as well, if you choose. Just rewind them to reverse it if they ever age or get injured or even die.
Beyond immortality, it also provides you with other incredibly powerful (and perhaps terrifying) abilities:
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You can, of course, become incredibly wealthy if you choose. Lottery numbers are your playground. Perfectly timed investment choices are trivial. You can accrue decades' worth of compound interest in seconds. (Do be careful, though. You could probably wreck the global economy if you take this too far.) Robbing banks is so beneath you. How much cash does a typical bank have on hand, anyway? A measly few hundred thousand? You could easily make millions, billions of clean, legit dollars in the blink of an eye. Forget robbing the bank, you could easily own the bank.
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From an outside perspective, you never seem to need to sleep. And you can definitely never be caught sleeping and vulnerable. You just need to pause time around you whenever you want to take a nap, then resume time when you wake up.
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It unlocks true 'time travel' -- by pausing yourself and moving the universe forward or backward around you, you can travel freely to the past or the future. And not just yourself, either. You could easily take objects or people with you if you wanted.
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By extending the 'keep your perceptions a few minutes ahead' strategy, you can gain limited clairvoyance -- always knowing what's going to happen in the future. At least, what's going to happen to and around you in the future.
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You can now 'teleport' to any location that you could otherwise get to. Just pause the universe around you while you go there, and resume the universe after arriving. Alternately, you could just slow the rest of the universe instead of pausing it entirely, and now you can cosplay as a super-speedster who can move arbitrarily fast.
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In the (unlikely) event that you actually need to fight someone instead of just using time shenanigans to avoid the fight, you could go back in time and either prevent what made them mad at you in the first place, or kill them while they were young and vulnerable ... or sterilize their grandfather, so they never existed in the first place.
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If you want to fight someone without messing up the continuity of the universe and potentially creating huge butterfly effects, you can just fast-forward or rewind them specifically. Rewind them until they're a fetus. Fast-forward them until they're a dusty skeleton. Really horrify your enemies by doing that half-and-half -- age regress their top half while accelerated-aging their bottom half. Or just pause them indefinitely and leave them as a helpless statue. You could even troll them by slowing them way down -- let them try to fight you while moving at glacial speed. Laugh at them while the bullet they shot at you takes decades to cross the room. (For extra trauma points, you could slow/pause most of their body, while allowing their brain/sensory organs/vital organs to continue at full speed, so they'd be fully aware of how slow they're moving and able to internally agonize about it for a long time.)
I was going to say this too. Time powers can be used to mimic all other powers, therefore making it the best.
Can I slightly cheat and choose all the powers of one superhero (or maybe more of a trickster god)? I want Bugs Bunny powers, since he's the most powerful being in the universe.
Both
I don't understand how these are different things
Telekinesis but with perfect control. Turn lead into gold, bend light around yourself to become invisible, fly wherever you want to go, fake super strength by lifting stuff with it, make peoples heads explode.
Good luck plucking out the neutrons, protons and electrons off each lead atom, I've heard they don't enjoy staying still
Hence the "perfect control" part.
at that point, why not just choose somehing like reality bending or omnipotence
Yeah that'd be my vote too. If there's no range constraints... Like you could just yoink a fuckton of carbon out of the atmosphere, plant trillions of seeds instantly, etc: climate change solved. Watching tv and some politician or CEO is saying evil shit again: rip em in half mid speech for the world to see. Invading another country? Your entire military inventory from bullets to nukes just turned into dildos. War solved. Religious text or paraphernalia? Dildos. Public religious speech? Large diameter dildo. Religion solved.
The amount of good you could do in just a few minutes...
Why no altruism?
Dude you just got super powers chill
90% of people would become supervillains if they got powers.
Change my mind.
i feel like i'd be doing a fair amount of public service with which peoples heads I'd be making explode.
Yeah, they could have gene-edited people's cancer away. Or redistributed food to places that need it.
Yeah, they could have gene-edited people’s cancer away.
Eh... Actually making the genetic edits is the (relatively) easy part. Knowing which genes to edit is the hard part. And 'perfect control telekinesis' doesn't help you with that.
Why bother with a heist? Just turn the tip of your finger into a great big diamond from time to time.
Or more classical: Impersonate a rich person and do some transfers out of their accounts.
Why the tip of your finger? Just use a fingernail, clip it off, donezo.
“What’s your wish?” “I want my fingernails and boogers to turn into diamonds”
“The fuck is wrong with you”
i believe the most powerful super power is mind control, because you can make people believe you have the other super powers, see you using those powers, and then do the thing you needed the super power to do, before forgetting they actually did it themselves
Lol, lazy ass.
“Yee, I wish for a superpower that makes people think I have a superpower”
“Why”
“Can’t be arsed with the whole flying thing, just rather sit on that couch right here”
Mind control can't change your sex (or just make it feel better, with fast recovery), make you live longer, or help out when you're having a rough time on the toilet.
It just turns everyone into your slave. You're a villain by default.
More importantly, it's super boring. People with mind control powers can have whatever they want—materially—with basically zero effort just by forcing people to give them stuff. There's no struggle, and if there is any, it's just you sweating or getting a headache while staring off into the distance.
Mind control yourself, done.
Is there a hero with mind control?
It’s a very interesting take to have a good person struggle with removing another persons agency to try and do good.
I could see using it to help people get over hang ups or bad habits. "You're not terrified of snakes anymore" or "You hate the taste of cigarettes now"
Is there a hero with mind control?
Professor X, perhaps?
(Though, if you get into conspiracy theories, it might be questionable whether he's actually a hero. There are questions about whether or not he's ever used mind control on any of his 'students'.)
Ok. Valid. However, once you turn into the pen, you’re a pen on a shelf next to a bag full of the stolen money, which I assume the bank employees, that were not traumatized by seeing you turn into a pen, will put back into their drawers. Pen probably confiscated, studied, disassembled.
Gotta rethink that one. Lots can go wrong.
My dumb ass would transform into a bowling pin or something. Then the detective would say something like, “Hey WAIT A MINUTE. This is the same bowling pin from the Chicago job.”
That’s a strike
Then the detective's buddy looks at you and says:
"Ooh. Tough split."
Shapeshift into money (gold bars?), get yourself deposited under your name, then shapeshift back into a person and leave during some kind of scheduled reserve review or transfer.
Heist by way of reverse heist.
Shapeshifting into inanimate things is great until you find out it's DnD polymorph rules and it gives you 0 INT/CHA/WIS, I would be afraid of testing tbh
Form of...
A human brain and limbic system encased in a gold bar!
.... yeah so it turns out that if you try to apply ... any even sort of consistent 'rule set' to shapeshifting... it results in either extreme body horror, or physics defying nonsense, or both.
I dunno, apparently caterpillars can somehow retain some memories when changing into butterflies, despite essentially turning into soup, so, maybe there is some kind of way this can make some kind of sense...
