SUPERPOWERS TO CONSIDER

• POWER: The ability to leave your body and move around as a loose consciousness. You would be able to move through solid objects and see and hear, but you would be unable to physically affect anything or communicate with anyone. You could use this power to become the ultimate spy and to observe attractive people taking showers. Would that be wrong? I mean, nobody's getting hurt, no unauthorized photographs are getting posted on the Internet, and nobody would ever have to know. You wouldn't even be able to masturbate while you watched! Let me know if you think the shower thing is wrong. If I ever get this power, I'm going to watch hot girls taking showers no matter what, but I need to know if I should feel guilty while I'm doing it.
  
  VULNERABILITY: Your body would be helpless while you were away, so you would have to trust someone to protect it -- even feed and hydrate it in the case of long absences. What if your body died while you were out of it? Would your consciousness die too, or would you be doomed to an disembodied eternity of looking but not touching?
  
  PROPOSED ALIASES: "Specter" or "Ghost."
  
  
• POWER:The ability to injure or kill people with your voice. A person with this power would open his mouth to talk, but instead of speaking words, he would emit an awful nails-on-chalkboard noise. Anyone who heard the sound would experience excruciating pain starting in the ears and penetrating into the head. Prolonged exposure would cause massive and fatal brain hemorrhages. A person killed by this superhero would be easily identifiable by blood erupting from the ears and an autopsy would reveal a liquefied brain.
  
  VULNERABILITY: This power is involuntary and indiscriminate. Your voice would be deadly to everyone withing hearing range, even to yourself. When using your power, you would have to plug your ears and somehow get all the good guys in the area to do the same without tipping off the bad guys. Due to his inability to communicate through speech, this superhero comes with angst baked right in. I envision him as bitter and unlikeable -- maybe not a good guy at all.
  
  PROPOSED ALIASES: "Sonic," "Shredder," or "Siren" (for a woman). Too bad "Screech" is already taken.
  
  
• POWER: The ability to distract enemies by disgorging gushers of creamy, delicious cheese spread. The cheese spread would come from your wrists, like Spider-Man shooting webs. After making a pile of cheese spread, you would give your enemies some Ritz crackers (you would have to buy these and carry them around, unless you teamed up with a superhero capable of spontaneously generating Ritz crackers) and dispatch them at your leisure.
  
  VULNERABILITY: Ineffective against vegan supervillains.
  
  PROPOSED ALIASES: "Mr. Cheese" or "The Creamy Avenger."
  
  
• POWER: The ability to see two seconds into the future. This sounds worthless, but think about it -- you could foil an ambush, evade your opponent's attacks in combat, and clean up at the blackjack tables. Think of all the times you've wished you had thought two seconds ahead!
  
  VULNERABILITY: Two seconds isn't much, man. You'd have to think fast to make good use of this power.
  
  PROPOSED ALIAS: "Foresight" or "Prophet."

+posted by Lawrence @ 12/05/2004 11:46:00 PM