For example:
- You can fly but you can never stop flying
- You can turn invisible, but never be seen again
Make billionaires turn inside out when they’re on the same planet as me
It happens continuously and so fast its not perceptible
So, question: when the billionaire dies, does their wealth transfer according to local laws? So an entire lineage could instantly turn inside out, including bastard children on the fringes of inheritance, with only an estate tax to save them?
Bro casted familicide
Unzip failure on all of humanity
Logically since all billionaires die, their lineage would be gradually wiped out.
Where it gets tricky is how they would manage the money. If the money is not directly controlled by them, are they billionaires? So does the CFO of a multi billion dollar company also get turned inside out?
It would be a heck of a monkey paw without stipulations that would make the point worthless.
Every 12 hours, the richest person in the world turns inside out. Just one, every 12 hours. The only way to stop it is if capitalism ends and people no longer hoard wealth.
Counterpoint:
Who cares?
The traumatic shock of any one person personally possessing a billion dollars or more in wealth being Dr. Manhattan’d would eventually lead people to realize that they need to redistribute wealth.
The potential number of potentially innocent people killed by this process is infinitesimal compared to the deaths and uneccessary harm caused by the general hoarding of wealth.
The new, hard mandated moral norm of the planet would be that possessing over a billion dollars gets you functionally smote by god, obviously the universe has imposed a hard cap on wealth accumulation and thus it is actually bad.
You can quibble about inflation, and I can quibble about making some more precise measure based on a formulation revolving around proportion to the median wealth of 100 miles of where the ‘billionaire’ is currently standing.
We are talking about magical superpowers here, presumably there would be a magical way to force actual transparency of hidden assets and what not, account for non liquid investements, all that.
A sane world that exists after this paradigm would put in place basically the reverse of overdraft protection, it would automatically stop any desposit that would make your net wealth exceed the magic number, it would automatically disperse shares of stocks or CDs or bonds or whatever to some kind of public pool or random people such that no individual ever singly has over a billion bucks or whatever the magic number is.
If you did not create a world like that, then ‘random’ people would keep liquifying whenever their net wealth exceedes magic number.
Every incentive would thus exist for all but the literally suicidal to carefully manage their investments and basically create something like the above mentioned system.
… You could probably make a decent anime or show out of this idea.
Its like a Death Note on autopilot, and if it is actually emmenating from a single person, doubtless a number of oligarchs would attempt to hide their wealth, as well as probe the system to figure out its rules, figure out who the actual person with this ‘superpower’ is, and kill them.
This person may not even know it is them, and then they may figure it out on their own, or may be prevented from being assasinated by some other group that did figure out it is them, and wants to protect them because billionaires bad.
Tons of dramatic person to person character dynamics, as well as larger scale social conflict plot setups here.
If you don’t specify a currency or a grade of inflation, this might kill far more people than expected.
1 billion Iranian Rial for instance is just about 23752 USD.
A couple of multi-millionaires would pay you to stop and then you’d implode.
Still a net win for everyone else though, I support this.
How pedantic do we get to be? Like, I’d be fine with flying because I could just hover a millimeter from the ground instead of standing, I would think
My stepson asks all kinds of questions like this and highly scientific pedantry is my go-to move.
“Technically if you were invisible, your retinas would stop working, so I’d go with flight.”
Sometimes pedantry is beautiful
That’s like Arthur Dent’s girlfriend Fenchurch.
Hmm I think anything is fine really hah. I feel like it’d get weird never being able to touch the ground again, like I’d feel so detatched from things
Technically, you can fly towards the ground while being upright(unless the feet are the sole thrusters), to get that feel, right?
Good point. If you fly feet forward towards the ground with an acceleration of 9,81 m/s2 it should feel pretty much like normal standing with gravity.
Flyings fine as long as I have variable velocity.
“I forgot one thing about the guy who had gained the ability to fly - it was actually only for a foot or two, and only an inch or so high”
- The Vandals, An Idea for a Movie
This is pretty simple though right?
Healing factor - always-on healing.
Monkey Paw: Cancer cells also heal
Deadpool?
What if there’s an earthquake and you get stuck under a mountain of rubble? Could take months for you to get out of there. How about a skiing accident involving an avalanche? Could take even longer. When you are completely immortal, you suddenly start to view certain risks in a very different way.
Always on healing includes mental health :)
How crazy of a healing factor are we talking about. Broken bones healed in a day? Or healing from a gunshot to the brain?
Having a healing power that would let me lose an arm or a lung and regrow it would be awesome. But regrowing a brain would be problematic.
Does healing include not aging? Or the tearing and rebuilding of muscles? It would be wild to have a healing factor that allows you to essentially body build in a single day.
That’s basically psoriasis.
Boom. cancer. Now you’re deadpool
Have you not read the hundreds of stories about people unable to die?
I’m always at a comfortable temperature no matter what.
If humanity finds out about that property of you, you might end up as some kind of human battery. If you can’t be cooled down under any circumstances, one could use your body to heat up infinite amounts of water/air with heat pumps and use you to heat entire cities. Super useful for the rest of humanity but not exactly the life I’d like to live. :D
That is a really good one. Because you can’t stop it, but a comfortable temperature is always comfortable.
Being lucky all the time would be cool. The only time I can think it might be a hindrance would be at a casino because they’d think I’m cheating but I don’t gamble so it doesn’t matter I guess.
Just play the lottery once.
Now you are rich, lucky, and screwed. Hopefully those last 2 cancel each other out.
Why screwed?
Because humans are terrible
Large jackpot winners face double digit multiples of probability versus the general population to be the victim of:
Homicide (something like 20x more likely). Drug overdose
Bankruptcy (how’s that for irony?)
KidnappingAnd triple digit multiples of probability versus the general population rate to be:
Convicted of drunk driving
The victim of Homicide (at the hands of a family member) 120x more likely in this case, ain’t love grand?
A defendant in a civil lawsuit
A defendant in felony criminal proceedingsBut since those events are based on probability, you would be one of the lucky few without those problems!
Like I said, hope the last 2 cancel each other out.
Being lucky all the time will feel like nothing matters or is exciting anymore because the outcome is always positive.
Shapeshifting, I will take no questions
I would have the power to be naturally skilled at anything I do and having it always activated would be a bonus.
Jack of All Trades Activated
You are now naturally skilled at all tasks but will never be considered a master in any discipline
Just a bater now can no longer make yourself cum
It’s ok I do house repair for handjobs
I’d take it. Truly mastering any single skill is almost certainly beyond my ability anyway.
I’m only okay at some things so being okay at all things is a total win.
That’s fine, I wouldn’t be a master at anything anyway really, just pretty okay
I would want the superpower of linguistics: the ability to fluently read, speak, and understand any language ever spoken or will be spoken.
I guess in combination with the ‘can’t stop it’ twist that would mean that you can’t stop talking in these old and random languages. So people will think you’re crazy and you’ll end up in some kind of mental illness hospital.
He is saying being fluent and able to understand it too. So never stops means he can’t ever forget a language, as I’m interpreting it.
How is that different from ‘being able to fly’ or ‘being able to turn invisible’? My understanding of OP’s twist is that you don’t have full control over your ability but that the skill is permanently active.
you mean I can’t stop talking and I’m super annoying or I can shut up and use a phone app.
So you want to be Cypher?
I had never heard of Cypher before, but yes. Just like that.
Soundly you here the suffering of animals around you
super good luck. like the the chick from deadpool 2 I think or longshots if it always stayed on.
the bad thing about have always luck on is that bad things can happen to you anyways on prior of your “good luck”
I mean its “always” active. no?
well, if your mom or dad got shot instead of you and that means good luck, then i guess i’m wrong
I guess. I mean in deadpool all the rest of the team mostly died.
hmmmm, “plot armor” sounds nice to be always on.
I’ll take Mr. Manhattan’s power set for 500, Alex. Oh yeah, its naked time.
You just wanna be blue.
For some reason I can’t see this image, but I’m betting it’s Fünke
Peter Funke? The famous anal-rapist?
Shapeshifting. It’s what I wanted anyway and I can always just be continuously toggling the length of my little toenail to be 1mm longer or shorter.
Hell yeah, I get to choose my boob size, and I can have my hair changing colors like in Terraria!
Healing of all kinds. Ageing, sickness, and wounds.
Can’t die. It’s gonna suck in 800 trillion years. Imagine if you can’t sleep either because you don’t need to recuperate.
The dream of engineers: they can’t get sick so no depression, they don’t need to sleep so infinite focus and learning, and half a million years would be sufficient to build a large underground automated city and preparing space travel to find solutions for their curse
Ah yes, I also play factorio/satisfactory/dwarf fortress/rim world. I could easily do 1000 years with each of those, but a million might be streatching it
Recuperate? I don’t sleep to recuperate, only to pass time.
I didn’t say Immortal. Death by violence is certainly possible.
You suddenly die of cancer that you’ve healed faster than your immune system can kill
Eh, I would class that under sickness.
Never becoming deaf and always having good hearing. I’m not sure I’d be able to enjoy life anymore if I became deaf, so just having good hearing would make the rest of my life worth living, without any major side effects I could think of.
Reading this reminded me that my ears are ringing. I can ignore it but if anything draws attention it can get pretty bad.
Ringing sucks. I’m used to random ringing occuring, so I’m good there.
I can live without hearing, thanks to subwoofers, but if I ever go blind I think I’m just going to kill myself.
So permanent good vision; I pick that.
Power to make people have empathy.
