Which Super Power Would You Choose?

Reality warping. Basically, omnipotence.


In the past, either for online superhero role-playing games or in posts on comics-related forums, I’ve come up with ideas for powers such as:

• Reflexive Cognizance — If anyone asks you a question that you haven’t previously thought of, your mind searches all reality and instantly you know the answer. But if you had thought of the question already, nothing happens.

In the online game in which I used this, neither my character nor the others, nor their players, knew that he had that power (I did, of course, and so did the GM, but we kept it secret from the other players). We used instant messaging to make this work (it was on a Commodore 64-specific predecessor to AOL called Q-Link). If any player character asked my character a question, and I honestly hadn’t thought of it, I would just type a period as a signal to the GM to IM me the answer. To the character, it seemed as if he had simply read the answer somewhere but didn’t remember exactly where at the time, or otherwise had some reasonable reason to know the answer.

The idea was that if any character asked him, “How did you know that?” then his power would reveal itself to him as the answer to that question!

• Keepin’-it-Real — I posted this one a couple years ago in the forums of the website of the late, truly great, and very much missed Dwayne McDuffie (truly the Stan Lee of the modern generations — he was even the one who came up with that name for this power!). This was an idea for a super power that a normal human being from “our” reality would have if s/he somehow wound up in the Marvel or DC comics universes (the idea being that Marvel or DC could run a contest, and the winner would get written into a comics miniseries as a major character from “our” reality, as his or her “real self,” with this power that would be perfectly logical for an ordinary human from “our” universe to have once in the Marvel or DC universes).

So what is this “Keepin’ it Real” power? Simple: a person from the “real world” would be completely immune to anything that could not exist in the “real world.” That includes all super powers of any kind, any super technology that violates laws of physics of the real world, etc. No such thing could affect you in any way, for good or bad, directly or indirectly.

No telepath could read your mind. A full-strength punch from Superman would feel like a punch from Clark Kent. Likewise, if you punched Superman, it would impact him as much as if he had no invulnerability, since you’d be immune to that, too, even though you have no super strength. Cyclops’s optic blasts might as well just be red light if they hit you. No flying character could fly if carrying you. You could see any invisible character as if s/he weren’t invisible, and pass right through any force field such as Invisible Woman’s as if it wasn’t there.

A Quinjet or FantastiCar or some such could not take off with you on board. Iron Man’s repulsor blasts wouldn’t even feel like a puff of breeze. No Amazon Purple Ray or Morlock Healer could heal you, either (for good or bad, remember?).

Of course, you could lift Mjolnir as easily as any hammer its size and apparent weight, but you could not do anything with it that you couldn’t do with an ordinary hammer its size and apparent weight. If it’s thin enough, you could even dent adamantium or amazonium or Cap’s shield or some such with a strong enough punch or kick (or with a hammer, whether from a dwarf forge on Asgard or from a local hardware store), and vibranium would not be able to absorb the impact nor vibrations from your punches or a hammer you use, etc. If you used a gun or knife (even one from that universe), you could wound or kill Superman or the Hulk as easily as anyone else.

But an ordinary person and ordinary things in those comics universes would affect you just as they normally would in reality.