Another random question...

[telophase]

...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.

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, I never thought about telepathy like that before, but you're so right. I'd love to see a story dealing with that.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

When I came up with that idea, whenever it was waaaaay back in my misspent youth, my thoughts were: I can't access stuff I'm not thinking about from my own brain. Why would someone else be able to?

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

That's exactly how Sherwood and I are handling telepathy in something we're working on now.

[bitpig.livejournal.com]

Any real psychic would either be working for the government, finding out where enemy nukes, submarines are hidden, etc. The Department of Defense actually had (and may still have) an active program along these lines — google "Project Stargate" (ignoring the TV-show-related links) for info.

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.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Well, it is* a seekrit gummint institute... XD

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Precogs, firestarters, some sort of parasitic kids who need to be kept separate, building off of that recent news article what about someone able to chimerically adapt foreign organic substances into their body, a precog kid who swears he/she is from the future because they remember living it already but is limited to what he/she remembers and unfortunately wasn't very interested in politics? XDD

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?

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Ooh, and I can't remember what it's called but like Longshot, being able to pick something up and read its history. OOOH! Or also like Longshot... the elusive probability field manipulation?

Time manipulation?

[emtigereyes.livejournal.com]

A highly attuned sense of smell could work for the sensing of life. Downside - poor thing can't work properly when fed a moderately spiced meal, since taste and smell are so closely linked. ^^

[chomiji]

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 ... .

[chomiji]

Ooooh ... maybe things like:

• "Premoting" (to use James H. Schmitz' term, from Witches of Karres): receiving premonitions of danger/disaster if certain actions are taken, but being hazy on the details of what exactly will go wrong.
   


• Ability to speed up/slow down biological processes on a limited scale: make a wound close - or slow its bleeding; or make a plant grow more rapidly (cf. Phyllis Ann Karr, Frostflower and Thorn; also implied in Schmitz cite above).
   


• Ability to physically exploit pre-existing physical weaknesses - like extend already-existing cracks in a wall, for example, so that it becomes possible to break through it (cf. Iron Crown Enterprises' classic Rolemaster spell "Cracks Call")
   


• Ability to analyze chaos/order in a system or organization after a brief period of observation, so that weak/strong points can be identified. This could be vague - maybe the kid can saw "He's the weak point" or "She's what's holding it together," and not know why (cf. White Wolf's "Mage" game - it's a Chaos Sphere ability).

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.

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Build off the idea of that one type of dog cancer they believe is a living organism in its own right that transfers from dog host to dog host and has done so for ages.

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?

[chomiji]

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 ... .)

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Oooh! Nice!

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

Gratuitous Icon Post

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I like your telepathy limitation; perhaps synaesthetics could be latent telepaths!

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.

[emtigereyes.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Maybe some of the recent more woo-woo pop-sci writing (e.g. New Scientist) on quantum entanglement will be helpful to you here.

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.)

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

A combination of empathy/telepathy and pheremones that allow the kid to strongly influence a person.

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.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I remember reading an article online about the very few documented people who have memories so good they can tell you what they were doing/feeling/saying on any given date you mention.

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.

[plasticchimera.livejournal.com]

Imagine someone with the power of simple transmutation? Any of the four elements into any other, i.e. air to water, or fire. Would be a dangerous little snit, especially if it got away from him.

[rachel-renee.livejournal.com]

My daughter has very sensitive hearing, and she used to be scared to flush the toilet when she was potty training. The noise of the water was too loud for her unprotected ears. She hates setting off fireworks, but likes to watch them from a distance. Thunderstorms were a problem for a very long time, until her very science-wired brain was old enough to understand how it worked.

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.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I sympathize; I'm much the same way. My coworker talking in the next cube on the phone distracts me. A change in the sound of the server behind me bothers me (it's currently white noise). I need quiet to sleep, which is why there's earplugs by my bed. Thunderstorms drive me up the wall. At a long-ago job, where we were allowed to listen to Walkmans, a coworker snuck up behind me and turned my volume all the way up, which scared the hell out of me, and he just laughed at me for insisting that it hurt.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Wopuld vocal abilities count? I've always wondered why superhero comics limit vocal abilities to earsplitting yells. There's also mental compulsion using the voice, similar to hypnosis, except with the voice alone, which could be used to create illusions, control actions, alter an ongoing thought process, etc., using primarily the inflections of a person's voice.

I also always wonder why being able to see the past isn't played up more, especially given its investigative uses.

[rabican.livejournal.com]

Actually, Siryn (one of the yellers) gained the power of speech compulsion recently.

[chomiji]

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.)

[homasse.livejournal.com]

I haven't read all the comments yet, so someone might have said this, but someone with the ability to boost odds--basically, increasing the odds of Random Shit Happening. It would probably display itself as someone with incredible luck...but not necessarily only good luck. You would have a MUCH higher than is statistically normal probability of winning the lottery, but by the same token, a higher chance of being struck by an asteroid. Or someone who didn't have things like that happen to themself, but instead to the people around them.

Someone learning to harness THAT ability would to truly frightening, yo.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Healing. Ability to shift between physical planes. Ability to manipulate the chemical composition of what you touch. Ability to photosynthesize and to expel light as energy/waste.

Paz

[puppleball.livejournal.com]

I had a character for a Buffy game who had visions, mostly in dreams, but sometimes if it was powerful enough would phase out while awake. Thing was, they weren't straight forward so you had to figure out what they meant. Kinda like the character in Medium, but much more fucked up so you were left trying to figure out what a squirrel with an orange running up your leg meant. She was totally nuts and in her own world too. I'd have to have her in just for flavor *grin*