What power do you want?
You could get Superman-style flying, which is way better than regular flying: you can go out into space, deep underwater, anywhere you want, as fast as you want. Fancy a day trip to the Red Planet?
Or you could stake out a little Wolverine action, with super-fast healing and an adamantium skeleton. (Silly spellcheck, of course that’s a word!) Razor-sharp claws that rip apart your own flesh every time you use them, are, uh, optional.
The sky is far from the limit. Why not give yourself teleportation, and extend that day trip to the Andromeda Galaxy? Or immortality, so you can wait for the Andromeda Galaxy to come to you? Or telekinesis, which is basically a fancy word for magic, and includes flying as a special case.
(Really, spellcheck? Teleportation is nonsense but telekinesis is totally legit?)
Much as the Airbender movie sucked, the actual bending of air, water, fire, etc. would be pretty undeniably sweet. Another special case of telekinesis, I guess – which, come to think of it, could cover an awful lot of things. After all, what’s invisibility but photon-bending? What’s Magneto but an iron bender?
And nothing says it has to be flashy. How about going the practical route: Find-Your-Keys Man? Remember-Where-We-Parked Girl?
Or, for the debate tonight: Hyperbole Detection Lad! Logical Fallacy Enumeration Woman! Mr. Ad Hominem, non sequitur powers activate! Ah, if only.
Me personally? Well, I’m a nerd (shocker!) so my dream power is pretty nerdy. I’d like to be able to touch a book and instantly, permanently have all of its information dumped into my brain. I’d walk around libraries, just tapping encyclopedias…*swoon.* I suppose you’d get more knowledge by channeling the Internet into your neurons, but I’m old-school. Besides, who really wants 4chan inside their skull?
That’s me, though. What about you? What’s your super power?
Brian D. Buckley 
That’s the super power my father would have chosen. I still remember him getting me my first library card (I was three or four years old), and taking me back into the stacks at our local library. (And, yes, I really do not want the Internet in my head– I sometimes don’t even want it on my computer 🙂 )
I have a few characters with super powers. Probably my favorite is a lawyer who gradually realizes that she has the ability to convince anybody of anything. Not forever, but long enough to get the verdict she wants. The problem is that, once she realizes that her victories aren’t a matter of the merits of the cases, she is very conflicted about how she’s screwing up the justice system, and eventually she retires. She continues to use her ability, even to alter her appearance, but not in court. Mostly.
I also have a character who is a masked hero, but she has no powers.
Remember-Where-We-Parked Girl? Wasn’t she in the Legion of Substitute Heroes? 🙂 (Actually, that’s a power my father would have wanted also — I remember walking up one block and down the next with him some mornings as he tried to remember where the car was)
Your dad sounds cool. 😀 And frighteningly like me. Coincidence??
Probably a coincidence. My father, if he was still alive, would be 99 years old. I get the impression you’re somewhat younger than that. 🙂
He was cool in some ways. I learned my writing slogan from him: “There is only one writing rule: write well.”
Evlora/Shannon’s idea sounds like two different Twilight Zone episodes, the one about the guy who could stop time and the one about the guy who thought he had infinite time to read. Neither one ended well. 🙂
I like your idea, but it takes the fun away from actually reading. I would be tempted to cheat all the time. I think I’d prefer the ability to stop time. Then I have all the time I want to read a book, while everyone else is frozen around me. I’d probably spend most of my time that way.
Plus there’s all the other things I could do with it. It would be kind of like teleportation- I can go anywhere I want, (if I don’t mind walking), “instantaneously”. Like immortality, in that I can stay like that as long as I want. And I would be first in the races- just stop time every few seconds to take and extra step or two.
Although, now that I think about it, I think there’s one thing I’d like more than the ability to stop time…
“Tree powers, activate!”
Hm…but if time is going normally for you while it’s stopped for everyone else…then won’t you age a lot faster and die a lot sooner? :-O
I thought about that. But I’m just going to assume that my ageing has stopped along with everyone else’s. Maybe, instead of stopping time, it’s more like it’s going really, really slowly. I dunno. But I don’t want to get old earlier. That would suck.