Powers Rarely Or Never Seen In Fiction

[Cicada 5]

What super powers in fiction that have been seen or rarely seen in fiction would you like to see or see more of.

For me one ability I'd like to see is the the power to increase, decrease, multiply, or divide the rate of anything such as a heartbeat, the speed of bullets going out of a gun, or how fast or strong a person can be. The limit to this would be the power could only affect one thing at a time i.e you can't speed up a bullet while decreasing someone's strength.

 

[RaikuFA]

Shooting bees from your hands. Or having dogs that shoot bees out of their mouth when they bark.

 

[Saltyk]

Paper. Power over paper. We need more people with it.

I'm on my phone. Someone else post a clip from Read or Die.

 

[twistedmic]

The ability to speak, read and write in any language with full fluency and grammatical correctness just by learning a single word of that language.

The ability to tell, from the sound of gunfire alone, they type of gun, the magazine capacity and how many bullets were fired from the weapon. So far only Archer has been shown to have that ability.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Blood. Someone who can control blood the way Magneto controls magnetism. And not just the cliche make-blood-shoot-out-their-eyes powers, the cool stuff, like forcing all the blood in someone to congeal, or reversing the flow of their blood, or making the blood in their skin boil for half a second, or freeze it, or have white blood cells attack the red cells in their crotch. You know, the fun kind of blood based powers.

 

[DoPo]

How about this: the ability to, just by grabbing a living creature, mold their bones as if like clay. Depending on how you think on the science of it, it could be painless or extremely painful.

That exists in Vampire: the Masquerade as the Discipline called "Vicissitude", the signature of clan Tzimisce. Colloquially, the Discipline is known as "flesh-crafting", although they can manipulate any part of the body - flesh and bone. Or they could do one or the other but the results are...let's say "unpleasant" to the victimsrecipients depending on what the manipulation is. If you just want to (literally) smear somebody's face, or maybe sculpt it so it looks like a different one, then manipulating flesh alone is fine. If you want to move bone matter from the chest to somewhere else without manipulating the flesh, it's going to be...unpleasant.

By the way, clan Tzimisce are not really known to be "gentle", "considerate" or even "kind". Their nickname is "the Fiends". They rarely care to make manipulations with Vicissitude pleasant. Whether to look at or to experience doesn't matter.

 

[springheeljack]

Something that is not seen as much outside comic books and that mediocre movie Jumper that no one saw is the ability of instant teleportation.
The ability of mind control is also something that should also be looked into more by fiction writers. Specifically what a normal person would do with them that's not becoming some kind of deity esque figure like Xavier or the evil lord of the mind slaves path.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Someone who is a walking pocket dimension. Anything touching him/her can get sucked in if they want(maximum capacity varies depending on how overpowered you want them to be), and they can release any taken object/person out from any part of their body at any time. For self-defence, they keep a sword in there to emerge at any time and block attacks directed at any part of the body. Also, if the taken object/person is moving they keep the velocity they had when they were taken in. Including bullets.

Haven't seen that one used much.

 

[CaitSeith]

Something that is not seen as much outside comic books and that mediocre movie Jumper that no one saw is the ability of instant teleportation.

Wasn't that a super power in the TV series Heroes?

 

[The Wykydtron]

I guess more good time travel would be cool? I always hated it when stories would add time travel elements in but then I got into Steins;Gate and hey wow turns out stories that feature well thought out time travel can actually be pretty interesting!

Steins;Gate is the exception to me though, the only reason that time travel works well in that is because they go ridiculously in depth in time travel theory and make sure we know what time travel rules we're working with on this one. Often time travel elements fuck up a story just because it introduces so much more stuff that can break your universe and they don't put the work in to prevent it.

Powers wise I do enjoy Sakuya from Touhou and her ridiculous time powers. They took Dio from Jojo and made his ZA WARUDO a million times stronger and gave it to a vampire hunting maid. First time you get to Sakuya in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil is something you never forget.

"Knives aren't too bad, I can dodge these"

*Sakuya stops time, summons a million knives pointing at you then restarts time*

"Oh ok nevermind"

 

[Silent Protagonist]

The ability to transform soy sauce back and forth between its regular and low sodium varieties.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you all of the rich story telling potential of a story that contains a character or(dare I even conceive it?) characterS with that power would have. The possibilities are endless. I have no idea why more creators don't utilize it.

Edit: A more serious answer: the single consistently self aware character that knows their reality is a work of fiction. Not necessarily in a comedic or wacky way a la DeadPool, it would probably work just as well if not better if the character is crushingly depressed by that knowledge and that anyone they try to explain it to will just dismiss them as crazy. They could even express great anger and resentment at their creator for making them that way. A creator could also use this to subvert a lot of the expectations of their chosen medium.

 

[twistedmic]

Edit: A more serious answer: the single consistently self aware character that knows their reality is a work of fiction. Not necessarily in a comedic or wacky way a la DeadPool, it would probably work just as well if not better if the character is crushingly depressed by that knowledge and that anyone they try to explain it to will just dismiss them as crazy. They could even express great anger and resentment at their creator for making them that way. A creator could also use this to subvert a lot of the expectations of their chosen medium.

The movie 'Stranger than Fiction' semi-deals with that idea. Will Farrel's character starts to hear a voice narrating his life and soon realizes that he is in a book and is hearing the author as they write the book.
I remember a scene where he was trying to figure out what genre of book he was inhabiting

 

[Guffe]

China!

oooh, you meant Super power as in powers a single person uses
.>
<.<
my bad....

The power to never be intoxicated, no matter how much you consume of whatever!
No idea how to use it, but never seen it

 

[Legomaniac91_v1legacy]

I haven't really seen kinetic energy absorption used a lot in fiction. The only one that come to mind for me would be Sebastian Shaw from the Hellfire Club and (to a lesser extent) Yang from RWBY. Which is surprising because its one of those powers that could allow you to take on serious, high level threats given enough time. For every blow or blast you take, you store it up so you can unleash it all it one burst. Its a power that could be used to kill Saitama from One Punch Man for God's sake. While there are limitations to the power (have to be conscious to store energy, energy overload, vulnerability to gas and psychic attacks) its a tough one to work around.

 

[Cicada 5]

I haven't really seen kinetic energy absorption used a lot in fiction. The only one that come to mind for me would be Sebastian Shaw from the Hellfire Club and (to a lesser extent) Yang from RWBY. Which is surprising because its one of those powers that could allow you to take on serious, high level threats given enough time. For every blow or blast you take, you store it up so you can unleash it all it one burst. Its a power that could be used to kill Saitama from One Punch Man for God's sake. While there are limitations to the power (have to be conscious to store energy, energy overload, vulnerability to gas and psychic attacks) its a tough one to work around.

There's Speedball from Marvel and Rocket from Milestone. However, they use force fields to adsorb the kinetic energy and Rocket's field is due to a belt she wear rather than a super power.

 

[Kingjackl]

Mind control seems like such a common power, but it wasn't until I watched Jessica Jones that I thought "wait, is this really the first time I'm seeing this?" Maybe it's because it's the first thing I've watched featuring mind control to really deconstruct the concept; most times I see mind control, it's just used to turn somebody's allegiance and the victim gets over it pretty quick after it wears off.

Also, most forms of mind control in fiction tends to have limits on what it can do, whereas Kilgrave could make people perform complex tasks, alter their way of thinking and even override self-preservation.

 

[DoPo]

Something that is not seen as much outside comic books and that mediocre movie Jumper that no one saw is the ability of instant teleportation.

Wasn't that a super power in the TV series Heroes?

Not only that but it shows up A LOT in games. We even have a power so iconic that we call it "Blink" and people know what it is, despite the name having almost nothing to do with the actual function of "short ranged teleportation". I suppose it could come from "in the blink of an eye" (as in "crossing a distance") but I can't remember any game actually explaining it like that. Or even explaining it aside from "you have a teleport power!". It is called something else, too - jump, jaunt, occasionally even teleport.

 

[Sonmi]

By the way, clan Tzimisce are not really known to be "gentle", "considerate" or even "kind". Their nickname is "the Fiends". They rarely care to make manipulations with Vicissitude pleasant. Whether to look at or to experience doesn't matter.

I thought they cared about the beauty of their creations, and about their own twisted appearances, it's simply that their sense of aesthetics is completely batshit insane and macabre.

Also, on-topic, lactokinesis.