I do the occasional daydream when drifting off to sleep, usually of the "weird superpowers" sort. (This is no doubt inspired by reading Worm, where some of the characters are unimaginative with their powers, while others are devious and can take a power that looks crappy and munchkin the hell out of it.) This is mostly about working within a constraint and seeing what I can come up with.
Like, let's say I could create metal out of thin air, anywhere, at a thought (including overlapping with existing objects.) The boring version: Now I'm super rich, because I can create gold and platinum and so forth. More fun to think about: How would I actually "launder" the precious metals so that no one got suspicious? This is actually fairly difficult!
Another direction, the "brute force and utility" aspect: Could I manifest thin planes of soft metals to cut things apart? Hydrogen can form a metal at intense pressures and low temperatures, would that be included? Now I have not only a cutting ability, but maybe the hydrogen expands violently back to a gas, so there's effectively the ability to manifest explosives at a distance as well. Careers as assassin or quarrying expert. :-P
Yet another path to explore: Creating extremely pure solids, rare elements, or very thin planes could be scientifically useful. What would be enabled with those? What about antimatter metals, are those "allowed"? Are there metals in the theorized Island of Stability?
What's curious about all this is that I find myself pretty much incapable of writing fiction, but it's clear that I'm OK with generating and exploring counterfactuals.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2019-06-13 01:18 pm (UTC)Like, let's say I could create metal out of thin air, anywhere, at a thought (including overlapping with existing objects.) The boring version: Now I'm super rich, because I can create gold and platinum and so forth. More fun to think about: How would I actually "launder" the precious metals so that no one got suspicious? This is actually fairly difficult!
Another direction, the "brute force and utility" aspect: Could I manifest thin planes of soft metals to cut things apart? Hydrogen can form a metal at intense pressures and low temperatures, would that be included? Now I have not only a cutting ability, but maybe the hydrogen expands violently back to a gas, so there's effectively the ability to manifest explosives at a distance as well. Careers as assassin or quarrying expert. :-P
Yet another path to explore: Creating extremely pure solids, rare elements, or very thin planes could be scientifically useful. What would be enabled with those? What about antimatter metals, are those "allowed"? Are there metals in the theorized Island of Stability?
What's curious about all this is that I find myself pretty much incapable of writing fiction, but it's clear that I'm OK with generating and exploring counterfactuals.