![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My mutant power
Sep. 21st, 2016 10:01 pmSo all through high school/college, whenever we played those mixers/icebreaker questions and someone asked what I'd want my mutant power to be, I've answered healing/empathy. Because those are kickass and yes I have always wanted to be the healer/counselor archetype anyway. There is probably in some long-trashed notebook the beginnings of an X-men fanfic Stephie and I wrote where there's a self-insert character of me with just those powers. We worked on it during our senior prom, because yes we were those geeks.
Now, though? If I was going to be a mutant in any version of the X-men verse, I think I'd go a bit more prosaic. I want the stupid spot-on-the-wall level gifts. As in I spent part of today at work playing with the idea of a character whose main mutant gift is the ability to warm up liquid, with the difference in temperature they could create being inversely proportional to how much liquid they're working with. A mug of tea? Easy enough to raise that to the point where you never need a microwave to reheat your drink. A person? Yeah now your at the part where you can maybe warm them by a degree at most. Anything bigger and you might as well not bother.
The kind of character who doesn't go study at Xavier's long term, who gets maybe a weekend seminar or some sort of summer class, then goes home and does their own thing for the rest of their life and never learns that the one teacher trying to explain the thermodynamics of how their gift works is also the one in black leather shooting concussive force beams out his eyes on the regular. Who lives out the idea that for every Xavier, Emma Frost, or Jean Grey there are dozens of "telepaths" whose powers mostly make them slightly more empathic or really good guessers at Madlibs.
Also, I'd love it if I could actually drink my mug of tea and have it stay hot the entire time, rather than averaging three reheats in the microwave, and just having the pragmatic gift seems cool to me at this point in my life.
...Okay, I still wouldn't turn down some level of empathy/healing if it showed up.
Now, though? If I was going to be a mutant in any version of the X-men verse, I think I'd go a bit more prosaic. I want the stupid spot-on-the-wall level gifts. As in I spent part of today at work playing with the idea of a character whose main mutant gift is the ability to warm up liquid, with the difference in temperature they could create being inversely proportional to how much liquid they're working with. A mug of tea? Easy enough to raise that to the point where you never need a microwave to reheat your drink. A person? Yeah now your at the part where you can maybe warm them by a degree at most. Anything bigger and you might as well not bother.
The kind of character who doesn't go study at Xavier's long term, who gets maybe a weekend seminar or some sort of summer class, then goes home and does their own thing for the rest of their life and never learns that the one teacher trying to explain the thermodynamics of how their gift works is also the one in black leather shooting concussive force beams out his eyes on the regular. Who lives out the idea that for every Xavier, Emma Frost, or Jean Grey there are dozens of "telepaths" whose powers mostly make them slightly more empathic or really good guessers at Madlibs.
Also, I'd love it if I could actually drink my mug of tea and have it stay hot the entire time, rather than averaging three reheats in the microwave, and just having the pragmatic gift seems cool to me at this point in my life.
...Okay, I still wouldn't turn down some level of empathy/healing if it showed up.