Variations on Common Superpowers

Original post on Tumblr by sadoeuphemist

• Body Duplication - you can create hundreds of duplicates of yourself; the duplicates are all dead. Useful for creating human shields, barricades, ramps, projectiles if you have a sufficient height advantage, and of course faking your own death.
• Density/Size Alteration - very straightforward: you conserve mass, so the larger you become the less dense you are, and vice-versa. The latter is well-established, allowing for the concentration of an entire human body’s weight across a tiny surface area; less common is the ability to inflate yourself like a parade balloon to bob lightly through the air.
• Energy Constructs - you can create elaborate constructs of high-frequency electromagnetic energy. These constructs are invisible to the naked eye and pass through most matter, and so their presence is often not immediately apparent. When interacting with human beings they can cause blistering, nausea, hair loss, and the increased risk of cancer.
• Enhanced Senses (Internal) - you have superhuman senses of balance, interoception, and proprioception. This gives you an acute awareness of the internal workings of your own body and its movements and position in space, and are thus you are impossible to disorient and incredibly difficult to knock over. You can also instinctively monitor your own blood chemistry and vital signs.
• Group Mind Control - you can read the intentions and control the actions of crowds. You cannot reliably get any of the individuals involved to do anything, but you can flawlessly evacuate panicked stampedes or break up traffic jams or direct an angry mob wherever you want.
• Hovering - flight, but significantly lower. You generate a cushion of air that lets you propel yourself forward at hundreds of miles per hour, inches off the ground. You can technically hover in any position, but to minimize air resistance and maximize stability and control, it’s advised to stretch yourself out horizontally.
• Hypervulnerability - your body is of a jelly-like consistency that allows bullets to pass straight through you with minimal damage. You yield immediately to punches and blows and really any sort of force, wibbling and wobbling harmlessly out of the way.
• Laser Speech - you can speak in frequencies of coherent amplified light - basically you shoot lasers from your mouth.
• Mass Absorption - you can, through prolonged contact, absorb the mass of another living being and add it to your own. They grow smaller, you grow bigger; if you hold on for long enough you can leech off enough mass to kill them. If their physical form has any unique properties, such as being made of rock or organic steel, you absorb those properties as well.
• Meta-Telepathy - you have the psychic ability to influence people into thinking you have more useful psychic abilities. People you interact with become more susceptible to cold reading and confirmation bias, and will unconsciously give off cues indicating what they are thinking.
• Partial Invisibility & Partial Intangibility - you are translucent, and can pass through your own body. You are perfectly solid to everything else. Probably has useful medical applications, if you can look inside yourself and reach in to prod at your own organs. Also, there’s hypothetically some new martial art to be developed from being able to, like, punch through your own head.
• Perikinesis - you can psychically manipulate objects within a centimeter around you. If your psychic power was stronger it could simulate super-strength, possibly; as it is you can grasp objects with any part of your body and carry them across your skin.
• Shapeshifting - you can spontaneously rearrange your body parts into different anatomical configurations. Acid reflux squirting stomach acid out of your fingertips? Sure. Soft tissue suddenly backed by bone? No problem. All your limbs stacked end to end to create one really long arm with an eyeball at the end of it? Hell yeah.
• Shapeshifting (Brain) - you can shapeshift the structure of your own brain at will, to create more folds or to enlarge or shrink certain parts. You can also extend thin tendrils from your nostrils to manipulate objects, at the expense of grey matter.
• Super-Slowness - the slower you are, the stronger you are. When throwing a punch you’re somewhat weaker than the average person; if you hold onto something and stand still, your grip is near-unbreakable. By moving very, very slowly you could lift a building, in due time.