LiveJournal Superhero

[unixronin]

OK, so there's some dumb reality show about who wants to be a superhero.  I've never seen it; we have no TV service.  I don't particularly wish to see it; I'm sentimentally attached to my remaining brain cells.

But . . . .

OK, so you wake up one morning and bam, you're a superhero.

(Slightly revised)

1. Who are you, in your public persona?  Geek Boy, Rubber Maid, Pedantic Man?  Do you keep your real identity secret?
2. What are your superpowers?
3. How did you become a superhero?
4. Do you wear a costume?  If so, what is it?
5. And now the toughest question of all:  Why the above choices?

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Since I suppose I probably should answer my own meme ....

1. If I established any "public identity" at all, it would be as the Magus.  The fact that I and the Magus were one and the same person would be a closely guarded secret, known only to my closest friends.


2. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistingushable from magic.  "We are dreamers, shapers, singers and makers.  We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner; holographic demons, and invocations of equations.  These are the tools we employ.  And we know ... many things."


3. A gift of knowledge and equipment from the future Technomages makes a sufficiently satisfactory explanation, facilitated using the Great Machine on Epsilon III.  Think of it as a retroactive bootstrapping.


4. In "working clothes", I would actually look rather like the technomage Galen.  It's as serviceable an appearance as any.  A light glamor will suggest the "right" facial features -- more importantly, features subtly different from my own, in ways that no two witnesses will ever fully agree on.


5. Radioactive spiders, gamma-ray-chamber accidents, and the like fail my bogometer test, as do superpowers miraculously conferred by random mutations.  Clarke's Law is always good, though.  I don't think I could ever pull off the steely-eyed, jut-jawed Man of Steel act.  But I can play the part of the archmage any day, appearing at the crucial moment to dispense some vital piece of knowledge, or to avert some catastrophe or halt some heinous crime by arcane and mysterious means.  And knowledge . . . there can never be too much knowledge.