Another random question...
...answers to which may or may not be put to any use whatsoever.
So, if you had, say, a seekrit institute filled with psychic kids, what sort of talents/powers/whatever d'ya think might be in there? Aside from the normal telepathy, teleportation, etc., and aside from anything that's an exact copy of a well-known superhero. Or what about interesting twists or limitations on standard powers?*
("Psychic" isn't really accurate, "powered" is better: it involves not only things that are traditionally purely mental, like telepathy, but physical augmentations as well. Not like adamantium bones or cyber-stuff, but like super-speed or bat-like hearing.)
* Like, I always figured that telepathy would only work on words and images currently in someone's mind, and that people have thought processes just different enough from each other that interpretation would be a problem. A friend of mine put it this way, when I explained it to him: "So you'd be thinking [3.14159] and I'd be thinking [*purple*]?" Yeah. Kinda like that.
So, if you had, say, a seekrit institute filled with psychic kids, what sort of talents/powers/whatever d'ya think might be in there? Aside from the normal telepathy, teleportation, etc., and aside from anything that's an exact copy of a well-known superhero. Or what about interesting twists or limitations on standard powers?*
("Psychic" isn't really accurate, "powered" is better: it involves not only things that are traditionally purely mental, like telepathy, but physical augmentations as well. Not like adamantium bones or cyber-stuff, but like super-speed or bat-like hearing.)
* Like, I always figured that telepathy would only work on words and images currently in someone's mind, and that people have thought processes just different enough from each other that interpretation would be a problem. A friend of mine put it this way, when I explained it to him: "So you'd be thinking [3.14159] and I'd be thinking [*purple*]?" Yeah. Kinda like that.
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So, if you had telepaths in the military or law enforcement fields, you'd also have to either train them to, or partner them with people trained to, suggest or provoke other people into thinking of the information they wanted (either in the interrogation room, or in the case of spies, subtly without letting on who they are and what they want). And have the ability to distinguish between someone planning an actual murder, someone fantasizing about murdering their annoying coworker, a writer working out a murder for a story, and someone thinking about a murder they saw on TV and how they'd do it.
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Another place one would expect to find real psychics would be at the gaming tables in Vegas and Monte Carlo, working for Wall Street, or part of organized crime.
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Hmmmm... someone who can sense life? Useful for sniffing out people hiding, finding buried miners, stuff like that?
Not really psychic but what about a kid who lived in a mold infested house and developed a symbiotic relationship with it? Lichen lad! XDDD Not all of these are useful for paramilitary operations or anything but they might be interesting enough to keep around and study?
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Time manipulation?
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Oooh, yeah, superior scenting ability - like a dog, or Goku! (Or louiselux's Catboy!Gojyo, who was smelling that there was a pregnant lady down the hall.)
A kid like that would be miserable in a lot of common modern human sitautions, because of chemicals outgassing from plastics, and scented personal care products, and cigarette smoke ... .
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Ooooh ... maybe things like:
Most of the other things that come to mind are common superhero stuff, or presuppose the existence of spirits/gods that the power is used to contact or coerce.
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Kid with a cancer organism that gives him some sort of evolutionary advantage, like that is where he gets his psychic powers from? Maybe they were going to operate on it and through the kid it psychically attacked the doctors doing the sugery?
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A kid who can communicate with social insects (like bees or termites) on a chemical level, and make them do things!
(Actually, that one essentially comes up in To Ride a Rathorn ... .)
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A telekinetic could only move objects she had actually touched before, because she'd have to be able to conceive of the force necessary. This means no lifting of cars, but it doesn't preclude moving the gear shift from park to neutral and rolling it.
In light of parallel-universe probabilities, it has always seemed to me that a precognitive should either get just a possible future, one of many, or so many they cannot be sorted. So much of the skill of a precog becomes understanding the situation well enough to choose the most likely outcome or outcomes; the training focuses on that skill.
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Excellent point. Given that at any point, things to go any number of directions, and chain reactions follow suit, that makes a good deal of sense.
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Coda
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Bat-like hearing would be a heavy cross to bear, I'm thinking. (Also, this reminds me irresistibly of Baron Munchhausen's companions, with their limitations.)
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A kid who never forgets anything/has no protective selective memory. Maybe as a result tho he/she hasn't got many higher mental level processes, like can't really think for him/herself can only record everything and repeat it back.
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It seems to correlate to an obsessive personality (gee, who'd have thought? :D): they might have a genetic tendency to a strongly retentive memory, but they constantly reinforce it by going back over things. The woman I remember, in particular, started keeping a diary at a young age and writes in it every day, and rereads a lot. And gets a bit worried at the suggestion that she stop doing that, because it panics her not to remember things.
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Last summer she was diagnosed with ADD (not ADHD). Her brain assigns every noise the same level of importance, and since she is so sensitive to noise, she is constantly distracted by new sounds.
Granted, this is a real-life example, and it is more of a nusance to normal function than a special ability.
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I also always wonder why being able to see the past isn't played up more, especially given its investigative uses.
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I was actually giving some more thought to the detecting-weaknesses/expanding cracks stuff, given the way we've been applying science to some of these other abilities ... how about the kid is very sensitive to vibrations, so much so that she can learn to analyze them to pinpoint cracks/weaknesses/instabilities in solid stuff? Like walls and so on? She could also figure out where conduits were in walls and stuff like that ... whether a volcano was going to blow!
(Presumably she'd need training in structural engineering or geology to exploit this properly.)
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Someone learning to harness THAT ability would to truly frightening, yo.
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Paz