The question of magic

Wavelength loves to talk about "magic powers", "sorcery", and "other dimensions". They like asking the Big Question: "is magic real?" Since it's Wavelength, their default answer is "yes". Of course. But is magic real?

To date, nobody has advanced a comprehensive definition of magic as a distinct power. Part of the problem is that for a large part of human history, any competent scientist would have identified superpowers as "magic".

Webster's gives us: "a power that allows people to do impossible things by saying special words or performing special actions". Anything that actually happened can't be "impossible", so that's unhelpful.

Let's try Wikipedia: "magic or sorcery is an attempt to understand, experience, and influence the world using rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, and language". The original lacked the Oxford comma, so I added it in. 'Cause I'm evil.

Alright, so that's a start. What distinguishes "magic" from run-of-the-mill "superpowers"? It's that last part: "rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, and language". Magic isn't an invocation of your own power, it's a request to some greater power to do something on your behalf, using some specific protocol for the petition.

Based on that, we can rephrase the question of "is magic real". Instead, it's: "is there any greater power out there to which you can petition?" I will go as far as to say there could be. Here's how it would work.

Let's say hypothetically that some high-Stage super, like 7 or 8 or something equally ridiculous, actually existed. Say that he's got something like Beast-Boss, a thing that sits in the human brain and interfaces with the nerves there. So he can read your thoughts, maybe influence them. He'll certainly have a means of controlling some of the fundamental forces. If you give him a power like Cloud, who can affect liquids and gases at range by broadcast from his own body's cells, maybe he can exert this sort of power from the nano-symbiotes in your head. So you ask for something the right way, the super hears you, and you get what you asked for. That's pretty impressive, and I'd even call it a god-like level of power.

How else could it work? Well, there's the little question of how people originally got super-powers to begin with. We understand the mechanisms of inheritance and propagation, but we have no idea where any of this really came from. Like I talked about awhile back, there's any number of potential explanations. It's just as valid to say, I don't know, that Hitler and Nazi occultists released some potential magic energy into the world and that made superpowers possible or something. In that case, magic would be the true origin for super-abilities, and anyone who could directly control magic would have an edge over "regular" supers. But that just opens the door to questions like "how does magic work", and that's not something I feel like wasting my time on writing about.

Mr. Big's last word on telepathy

Well, the inevitable happened. Someone wrote in accusing me of being a patsy, or shill, for the telepathic conspiracy. I'm "providing cover" to these master-minds, apparently, by denying the reality of psychic powers like telepathy.

So here's the thing about powers in general: they come from somewhere. They work a certain way. As a supervillain, one of your most awesome secret skills is being able to figure out a hero's power faster than he can figure out yours. You have all of the public footage of that guy in action, all the press releases, all the journalism, everything. Buying into this psychic nonsense just gets in the way of doing what you really need to do: apply logic, reason, and science to a serious problem.

This is how we get power suppression drugs. This is how we get supervillains in prison. The other side isn't wasting time with this crap any more, and neither should we.

----

Alright, enough of that.

The Mole Master sent me all sorts of pics of his new lair. This isn't like the lairs I advise, but MM isn't the sort of villain I write guides for. So I'm going to talk about some of the best features he's come up with, why they work, why they might not work for you, and what you can do about that.

P.S. somehow that son of a bitch got a new iPhone as well.

Defending the world from telepathy

Given the numerous attack vectors available for an aspiring telepath, how do you defend the world? I don't have access to the full NATO report, so I can't tell you what they thought. I can speculate, so here goes.

First, nobody gets secrets any more. Nobody gets to memorize passwords for anything really secure. They have physical keys, USB thumb drives, whatever. A computer spits out a digital key and you have a device that tells the computers about that key.

Second, knowledge gets compartmentalized. This is a skill that's routinely practiced at places like the CIA, so now you need those guys to train everyone in government to do the same. You need oversight ensuring that it's really happening. And you can't let the oversight know too much either, so you have more levels of oversight on them. It becomes maddenly bureaucratic.

Third, anyone with any real authority has a "shadow" that monitors their major decisions and gets veto authority. The shadow can be one person or (better) a group of people, chosen either at random or from a large enough pool to avoid guessing who it is. The shadows need to know enough about the guy they're shadowing to evaluate his actions.

Even this extreme solution has some problems. First, someone has to take charge in emergencies. It's a human tendency to look to a leader, and that leader will naturally already know (or soon learn) more information than is "safe". Second, people are really bad at keeping secrets like this. It may sound weird, but I really do think people are basically decent trusting sorts by inclination, and get that crap knocked out of them if they grow up in any sort of hard circumstance. Third, all the parts that are technology-dependent are vulnerable when they break down. If the computer techs assigned to repair the systems are compromised, or know too much, the game is over.

An interesting theory (but one I don't subscribe to) is that endless government bureaucracy is an improvised telepathy defense already, they're just not obviously deliberately doing it because they don't want to give the game away. So it has to seem inefficient and Byzantine so a telepath doesn't suspect anything. Take that as you will.

Taking over the world with telepathy

You dense motherfuckers.

Alright, for the doubters: yes, the world would be your bitch if actual psychic telepathy was a real thing. Here's a few avenues.

Financial gain

You can't just milk a Swiss bank of its assets without some work - the private banks are set up with multiple levels of security and oversight - but the good news is that both UBS AG and Credit Suisse have plenty of online services. I estimate it would take about five days to get access to the online banking system of a well-heeled individual with a Swiss account. The steps, roughly:

1. Locate your mark.
2. Identify who manages his finances.
3. Fetch authentication information from his mind.
4. Get a hold of any physical authentication token in his possession.
5. Log in and do a funds transfer.

Step 4 is by far the hardest one, and probably the step you'd want to hire a specialist or team to do for you. Luckily there are plenty of mercenary villains out there who'd want in on this kind of action - and lucky you, you're a telepath, so you can sense which ones are trustworthy and reliable.

Poker and gambling

Good news! If you can read minds, you can win at poker. Get about fifty million dollars in cash together (if necessary by repeating these steps at lower levels) and go to Macau, and visit the Poker King Hall. Buy-in is between 1 and 10 million for the Big Game. You'll be playing against poker veterans and most of these people know each other, so you better have a fantastic poker face and know something about the game before doing this.

You will absolutely get your ass busted if you try this too much yourself. What you need is a series of ringers or confederates, who will actually handle the cards. You'll need to recruit them and offer a sizable percentage - 20% of their personal winnings should be adequate - in return for their cooperation and silence. You'll need to have some of them lose to the others to maintain the facade. It definitely helps to find guys who have talent but no luck, since the doors of the Hall are going to be permanently closed to them after this is over.

This isn't a bad way to make your first billion. At that point you can start looking at investing in small countries.

National conquest

A telepath would in theory be the second-best type of prince endorsed by Machiavelli - the sort who can't think clearly for themselves, but who can recognize excellence in their subordinates and will listen to wise counsel. With the money you make in any of these other schemes, you should be able to get into the leadership circles of some small country, then work your way up to leadership. This gives you several things:

• International prestige, enough to paper over whatever wrongdoing you engage in next for a short time.
• Personal access to other world leaders, which is probably necessary depending on how your theoretical telepathy actually works.
• A huge channel for laundering money from other illegal pursuits.
• Your own military and security force.

J. Edgar Hoover style

You know those stories about the FBI? How J. Edgar Hoover ran it for decades, and Congress was so afraid of him? He had the dirt on everyone in Washington, and he was using mundane intelligence gathering methods. If you are telepathic, all you need is access to the minds of the Legislature, the Judiciary, and the Executive. Every piece of dirt you can get is a piece of dirt you can use. Once you have that level of leverage, the Statue of Liberty will pull her dress up and bend over for you - you own America.

Nuclear weapons

America's nuclear arsenal is a collection of secrets. The location of the weapons, the access codes for arming them, the steps to building them. All these secrets are held in living minds, and you don't need to be a nuclear physicist to benefit from most of them. The Soviet nuke program was possible thanks to well-placed spies - again, a mundane method of intelligence gathering that any real telepath could easily overcome.

Taken in total

What does the overall picture look like then? A reasonably powerful and competent telepath, with enough nerve to do what I've described, could have their own country, have enough material to keep America and other great powers neutralized (through blackmail, nuclear or otherwise), and enough free cash (with more coming in) to fund just about any sort of project. With your own country, you can hire the nuclear physicists necessary to make sense of the American nuclear secrets. With your own nukes, you're a major player.

Want to know why I still don't believe telepathy is a real thing? Because so far, nobody has done any of this stuff. So either it doesn't exist, or there's some amazingly compelling reason not to use it for high-level villainy. Let me know in the comments what you think, as usual.

Telepathy and the supervillain

There's a lot of misunderstanding, confusion, and outright deception about the psychic power of "telepathy". Rather than confirming whether it is or is not whatever people think, I want to talk about the general topic.

Telepathy is a game-changer for superpowers in the way that superpowers are game changers for politics and law enforcement. Back when it was just clubs or maces or swords, you could go get a better one (if you could afford it), or wait for someone to invent a better one. Technological advantages like bronze, iron, and steel allowed their owners to dominate the world stage for a time, but those advantages were always something that their enemies could eventually acquire. Not so with powers (for the most part), and not so with telepathy (as a specific power). Generally, a superpower is something you're born with.

Superpowers are also not something that can be easily reverse-engineered and used. Once you have a piece of steel, you can spend some time figuring out the hows and whys of it. Our civilization has split the atom and we're barely getting our feet wet with understanding powers. That goes double for purported "powers of mind", which aren't tied to a specific part of the cell. We at least know where to look for super-mitochondria.

Superpowers, like steel, are obvious in their application. You generally know that a power is in use because you see it in operation. Either the super's body is glowing with energy (even if it's just the Cherenkov radiation associated with many gravity and electroweak users), or you can clearly see the effects of the power. You can get out of the way, take cover, block it somehow. Your intuition is useful in devising a counter to the power. Again, not so with telepathy.

Because of all these things, the conventional "wisdom" is that telepathy, as a distinct psychic force or something, does not exist, and that things that look like telepathy are really neuro-symbiotic nanomachines or something similar. This is known to be the mechanism that people like Beast-Boss use to control animals, or people like Link use to interface with machines and computers. This is a nice, safe position to take if you're talking to Congress, because it avoids the difficult question of "how do we defend our national infrastructure against telepathy?" and the equally difficult answer of "we don't".

In theory, someone with access to mind-reading, at any reasonable range with no requirement for physical contact, could destroy the planet within a month. They could wreck the so-called First World nations within three months, leaving the rest of the planet intact. They could effectively take control of the NATO member nations within two months. These projections are based on NATO planning from their "heretic office" (which saw its start after the world got a load of Apollo). The only effective defense against this sort of takeover was a friendly team of telepaths. The only other fully examined defense would turn NATO's member nations into bastions of paranoid madness, and was widely considered not to be viable.

This conclusion led people at Wavelength (where else?) to postulate that the world had already been taken over by hostile telepaths, whose sole purpose was to induct new telepaths into their ranks - or to destroy them if they weren't willing to play along. A competing theory says that a benevolent conspiracy of telepaths does exist, but only to protect the world from this sort of attack. Which theory you should endorse really depends on how much you've been drinking, and how a coin flip turns out.

Dragons, dinosaurs, and comments

Yesterday's post generated a lot of controversy. Let's break the comments down into categories.

OH SHIT SON SUPER DINOSAURS. This was the #1 category of comments. Let's just get that out of the way.

Your source is full of crap. This was the #2 category, close to #1. The story came with what I consider impeccable physical evidence and I'm personally satisfied that the party I spoke with is on the level. I'm not giving out any more information than that. If you don't think that I'm a reliable source, stop reading my guide.

This invalidates <scientific theory X>. Yeah, maybe. So? Scientific understanding gets overthrown all the time. Anthropology, archaeology, biology, biochemistry, history, parabiology and parahistory would all be shaken up by this information. But I'm a villain, not a scientist.

Speculation that the evidence I alluded to is some sort of dinosaur fossil. Maybe.

Speculation that the evidence I alluded to is a live super-dinosaur. Maybe. Let's consider the facts: in humans, progression through the Hashmal stages extends lifespan, provides a healing factor, and mitigates many biological dependencies like food and breathing. Beast-Boss's empowered animals are known to grow, and that's just Stage 2. So you can probably speculate on the traits possessed by a hypothetical Stage 3 or higher dino, and come out with Godzilla - able to live under the water for extended periods, not dependent on food, huge size, probably increased intelligence, and very long lifespan - perhaps even one of the dinos the poster was suggesting. Well, that's all possible, isn't it.

I want to see a fight featuring <random hero or villain> vs. Mega Dinosaur. Well hey, you might get your chance very soon, who knows.

It's not physically possible to clone dinosaurs, there's not enough viable DNA. Yes and no. The upper limit for any DNA viability is about 1.5 million years. The oldest viable DNA on record is between 450,000 and 800,000 years old, and Tyrannosaurus dates to 67 million years old. But people like the Scarab Guardian are able to grow animal body parts through a process called anaphasic synthesis even without access to the original DNA, so it's possible that another super might be able to create "dinosaurs" from fossils, even without viable DNA.

In fact, based on what I was told, I got the random idea that the Scarab Guardian might in fact be a descendant of these "first pharaohs", the super-powered rulers of ancient Egypt described in yesterday's post, based on his power set. How cool would that be?

Dragons, dinosaurs, and giant monsters

I just had a very weird conversation. Someone I thought was an otherwise ordinary independent super presented me with some very interesting evidence, and said the following:

I've found your supervillain guide interesting. While I don't personally promote villainy, if one must be a villian, I prefer that they emulate your example.

Your series included speculation on ghosts, werewolves, and other creatures of myth. I want to add some observations of my own.

Animal mastery powers, such as those held by Beast Boss, Sea-czar, and the Scarab Guardian, are nothing new. In the time of Aharu, now called Horus, the animals served the god-kings of the old dynasty. They knew the rules of power inheritance even then and they married and bred accordingly, to conserve the power of their blood. Their servants were the beasts of the field, the birds of the sky, the meaner creatures of the street. Cats were not gods - they were the eyes and ears of the gods.

Familiarity breeds contempt. As the generations passed, mundanes learned our tricks. So we forced our powers to grow, using what we thought were rites of supplication to the greater gods. Today we know it as the Hashmal process. It was torture, plain and simple, but we did it to preserve our dynasty. We even tortured our children, locking them in their youth forever to create envy and amazement from the people.

It wasn't enough. We needed more. We took the lizard, the crocodile, the bird, and we stretched our power to the utmost. We made monsters. Do you think that Stage 2 is the most that an animal master can endow? We learned better.

Our creations struck fear into the hearts of the unbelievers. Our authority waxed again. None dared challenge us.

Well, there was one threat which we still faced - each other. The human heart hasn't changed that much. Jealousy, mistrust, fear. We felt these things. We set our monsters upon each other, and upon our rivals. The common folk thought of it as war in Heaven. Our priests knew better, but dared not question us.

We had long since melded human and animal bodies, created giants of our pets, and even recreated living corpses from dead flesh. We committed the final blasphemy. One of our sand-shifters found ancient bones. The creatures they represented would be monsters in our age, but utterly ordinary in theirs. You know them as dinosaurs. And we resurrected them - and made them more, and mightier, than anything that walked the earth before or since.

If you have been to Egypt, you have seen the Great Sphinx. Think of that as... a pet. A toy. We created dragons that darkened the skies.

I would like to end this tale by saying that the greater gods punished us for our blasphemy. The truth is far more prosaic. We destroyed each other, for the meanest of motives, for the pettiest of reasons. Greatness was in our grasp and we were simply.... too human to use it properly.

If you must be a villain, be a superior one. If you must live in your own way, don't be a slave to your baser nature. If the world's ways do not satisfy you, create a better world and challenge your fellow man by your example.

So... yeah. I know most of you are thinking "by Odin, Stage 2 dinosaurs". I can't fault you, because I thought that myself. But, I also want to say that I approve of the rest of the message. We villains have a unique chance to be better than our corrupt society. We don't have to do what they say, as long as we're true to our own code.

How to take over the world, ocean style

After writing about taking over the world, several of you wrote in with a suggestion for how to deal with the world's largest powers. I want to summarize the various points made.

Like I said in my post about super-swimming, Earth is 70% water, but the interesting things happen on the other 30%. That said, it's not like it's empty. For example, here's a short list of things which we've dredged up from the sea.

• A colossal squid, 43 feet long, and around 900 pounds.
• A Portuguese man-of-war, that can reach 30-150 feet with its tentacles.
• A fin whale, 80-90 feet long and weighing tons.

During World War II, the US Navy did experiments, along with the New Zealand military, into creating a "tsunami bomb" under the name Project Seal. The goal was to devastate coastal cities - which frankly is most of the important ones. Humans may not live in water, but we live near it. As Magma pointed out to me once, "there's been a city at the mouth of the Tiber for the last 10,000 years".

The program revealed that a line of explosives, about 8 megatons and 5 miles off the coast, could indeed create a tsunami. Most of the energy would be wasted hitting the continental shelf, so it was considered inefficient. But hey, you got a better idea?

The United States' Ohio-class submarines (fourteen currently active) carry Trident missiles, with eight W88 warheads. Each of these has a yield of 475 kt, so you need two such missiles to reach 8 megatons. More missiles means more explosions, and each Ohio carries 24 Trident IIs.

Remember what I was saying about giant sea monsters underwater? How hard do you think it would be for someone like Sea-czar to find and take control of an Ohio-class sub with his army of aquatic minions? The real barrier at this point is a knowledge of submarines, nuclear engineering, and hydrodynamics. But once you can do that, a single submarine lets you threaten every city in America, simultaneously, staged from depths that'd prevent anyone but the Navy from acting against you. And even they'd have a rough time.

So yeah, I'm just going to say this one more time: respect aquatic supers.

Werewolves

Short version: yeah, they're real, just like vampires.

Some junior villains felt like I pissed in their Wheaties by talking about chi powers like they aren't a real thing. I'll throw those guys a bone and talk about something that is legitimate - even if it's not what they expected. Most of what I know about werewolves comes from two sources. The first is the supervillain Wolf 359, who is one. The second is the genetic testing of the remains of a guy named Jack Gamble, buried in Providence.

Interview With a Werewolf

First, here's Wolf 359's take on lycanthropy:

Lycanthropy is the condition wherein a human becomes a wolf - or a hybrid between man and wolf. This section of the Transhuman Capability Catalog will be revised in the next edition, but currently lycanthropy is in under TCC T - adoption of animal traits. Other forms of shape-shifting exist under the blanket term "therianthropy". It is surmised that the most common animal observed is the wolf, due to the wolf's proximity to early human settlements, the fear of the wolf by the most widespread members of then-contemporary culture (farmers, ranchers, and woodsmen), and the relative merits of the wolf form versus others.

Therianthropes are Stage 3 or higher human beings. TCC T forensics indicate that animal attack is a factor in adoption of this power. The body adapts to the attacker's physical characteristics and activates savage instincts suitable for an immediate counterattack. A fascinating, if unverified, data point is that every Stage 2 who has been attacked by a therianthrope became one as well. Could this attack vector override the normal Hashmal process of power selection?

Historical Werewolves

Jack Gamble had been locked away in Rhode Island after accusations of witchcraft, but he died before the case could be heard by a judge. Unlike Salem, there wasn't a huge witch scare, so it didn't get much press. But there was enough evidence of interest that a parabiologist named Steve Hodgson received permission from the town of Providence to excavate Gamble's grave. He published his findings, which suggested that Gamble's body had both human and lupine genes. Though actual evidence of super-potential will have long since decayed, he had enough for a hypothesis.

Essentially, Hodgson speculated that Gamble was a super, and that his power let him change his body's gene expression. Only about 9% of all human DNA has meaningful gene sequences, allowing for two or three other alternate forms and the possibility of hybridization between them. Hodgson's hypothesis was later tested on DNA taken from Wolf 359, and accepted for inclusion in the TCC.

How did Jack Gamble become a werewolf? In legend, you'll find stories like people being given a magic belt by the devil. A werewolf's bite is reputed to be contagious as well. Like vampires, it's said that the victim of a werewolf attack can become a werewolf. In practice, we're not sure of the reality of this - Wolf 359 either can't or won't create more werewolves, and he's not talking about the process. I couldn't get anything else about it from him, even speculation.

The Beast of Gévaudan, in France, is widely considered to be an attack by regular wolves, not actual werewolves.

The Transformation

Do you become a monster on the full moon? Apparently not. Hodgson interviewed folklorists and historians, who suggested that peasant superstition attributed occult significance to the full moon. Anything that would make someone fearful - the night, the full moon, Friday the 13th, having your ex-wife meet your mistress - would tend to trigger the transformation.

The transformation is apparently physically painful - the super's body changes its default gene expression to either full wolf or hybrid man-wolf, and then triggers a rapid regeneration cycle.

Werewolves may or may not retain their full consciousness. Because the genes being expressed can include those affecting the glands, a human brain can be overwhelmed with foreign neurochemistry.

Vulnerabilities

Pseudaconitine, the toxin which is derived from Aconitum or "wolfsbane", is a poison no matter who gets it. That said, it apparently interacts with the receptors present in a werewolf's body and not only reverts their hybrid transformation in large doses, but also interferes with the normal super's healing factor. It's been used successfully to hunt and trap Wolf 359.

Despite high hopes from Pyrepower and other young villains, apparently there is not a secret war going on between vampires and werewolves. Pyrepower also assures me that she's a member of Team Edward.

Chi powers and the super-martial artist

Is there anything to "chi"? Also known as "qui", "ki", or translated variously as "breath" or "inner strength", conventional wisdom says that the feelings experienced during rigorous martial arts exercise are no more than a body producing endorphines. So do super-powered martial artists have something different? And have supers revealed the existence of a real thing called "chi"?

The short version is: anyone claiming that "chi energy" is real is trying to sell you something.

That said, there are some significant, and scary, things that supers can do with the martial arts. Let's review just a few that I've heard credible stories about.

• The touch of death. Supposedly martial artists can "stick" to an opponent, reading their body's signals through close contact. It's a medical fact that there's a moment during the human heart beat when a brief, sharp impact will stop it. The fatality rate is estimated to be about 65%, but those are cases where the victim was in a position to receive help. I'm told that some super martial artists have keen enough senses and good enough responses to pick up on this moment and take advantage of it.
• Walking on water or rice paper. Several supers have a metabolism which is partially or wholly supplemented by electromagnetic energy. They're able to use this to run on water, stick to surfaces the way a gecko does (via the Van der Waals force), and even leap great distances (through a combination of repulsive forces against a surface and a super-charged contraction of the leg muscles).
• Pressure points. Like the touch of death above, the ability to "non-violently" disable a dozen men with a few light touches sounds awesome, until you remember what electrical discharges do to muscles. Now go re-read the part about supers powered by EM. Several of the TCC classifications turn you into a walking taser if you do it right.

Let's talk about a couple of supers best known for their martial arts expertise. Both of them are exceptions from the stereotype.

Diver. She's more of a ninja type than a martial artist. Her control over light and darkness are mostly used for stealth applications, but remember, she does that through manipulation of the electromagnetic force. She can probably pull off anything on this list, and several other tricks. Her "laser sword" and "laser kunai" probably make punching and kicking irrelevant in terms of doing damage, but she's the whole package.

Tao. He's more of a speedster than an EM controller, and so can't do several of the things here. He can run on water, but that's because he can shift his weight before the surface tension collapses. He has been known to do a sort of nerve strike attack, and I'm not personally sure why it works. As usual, post if you got something good.

None of the other supers I'm aware of have demonstrated some new unknown form of "chi" energy. Mundane martial artists have yet to do the same, though obviously they can do amazing things compared to untrained mundanes - the way we can kick their asses in turn.

So yeah, the long version is that while people might use the term "chi", it's not really describing an independent sort of energy. We talk about the "runner's high" in the same terms, and chi is really just a combination of that - a release of energy in the body, combined with the body's fighting potential being fully realized.

None of this should remove any of the wonder or grandeur from the idea of chi. Martial artists embody a single-minded dedication that I sometimes envy. The ability to hone their entire self - body and mind - into a living weapon, then charge it with some overriding purpose such as the pursuit of glory, the protection of others, or the perfection of their art, is an amazing thing. It makes me frankly proud to be human, and even if a guy like this is fighting me, I'll show him some respect. To me, "chi" is far more significant when it's seen as the marker of success in the practice of the martial arts. To call it some sort of external energy is like saying midichlorians produce the Force. Let it be its own thing. Let it be the reward for hard work and dedication. And do you know what "hard work" translates to in Chinese? Kung fu.

Powered armor and the scalability of "super-technology"

Astute readers have noticed that I claim we don't have super-technology. "But wait," they say. "What about armored heroes like Scrapper and Lawsuit, or villains like Gridlock?" So I'll talk about powered armor, and those heroes and villains specifically.

Scrapper

Scrapper's superpower is iron manipulation. He can mold it, shape it, cause it to flow like water, whatever. Apparently he's got unlimited amounts of the stuff, too. The armor does things that require large amounts of electricity. I did some research and courtesy of a friend up in the New York area, I got this:

Scrapper generates bioelectricity at Stage 4 levels. Suit uses induction to draw power & run systems. Suit is a modified Raytheon XOS 4 w/ battery packs removed & induction system replaced. Iron superstructure maintained by Scrapper's power & is not part of original Raytheon spec. Company rep claims XOS 4 is "on loan" for "field test". Sure.

So there's no magic here, just the usual hydraulics and superpowers we've come to expect. The suit isn't wearable by anyone else because Scrapper's powers are required to make it work.

Lawsuit

First, let me say this is the corniest hero name on record. Second, she's kind of the same deal. From my Los Angeles source:

Lawsuit is wearing a highly modified CYBERDYNE HAL X suit, built by a company in Japan. She has considerable electrical control powers and uses those to drive the suit's motors. Her machine symbiosis ability is on par with Dr. Link, formerly of the American All-Stars and now working with Persona advising its Icons team. Private sources who followed the money trail uncovered a Persona connection to CYBERDYNE, suggesting that Link himself might have had a hand in the design of the Lawsuit.

Lawsuit can't just shape iron, but she can interface with electronics mentally, so again, she's providing a good chunk of what a "super-suit" might need to work for regular people.

Gridlock

This is a matter of public record, but it hasn't been widely disseminated, so here goes. Gridlock has significant electromagnetic powers (he got his name by shutting down the LA electrical grid and I-5). He uses those to project open-air holograms and manipulate metal, and these days he prefers to assemble metal into big masses and hit people with it, dressing it up like a high-tech robot. Stories that he's a quadriplegic or quadruple amputee wearing a suit are rumors, nothing more.

Powered armor progress

For the mundanes out there who'd like to fly around in a super-suit, don't give up hope - but you aren't there yet. Companies like Raytheon and CYBERDYNE aren't alone. There's about a dozen people working on powered exoskeletons, mostly for military applications.

These companies have two things working in their favor. First, they can get durable supers to help test their inventions. Insurance for this sort of research is very favorable when nothing your machine does is physically capable of injuring its wearer. And second, they've been able to reverse-engineer the physiological adaptions of people like Brawl and try to incorporate them into their products.

They have one huge factor working against them: power. Supers generate their own energy, but a suit can't do the same. There's been discussions (on Wavelength, natch) about how super-blood will be kept in a container in the suit and harnessed for this purpose, but that's not realistic even if someone could make it work. Until someone creates a really efficient generator that can fit into a power suit, their applications and power will be limited.

Movement powers: phasing

Probably the best known user of phasing powers is the hero Covenant, and I can't interview that guy. So here's some speculation and second-hand information.

Important note for active supervillains: contrary to reports, I believe that the Icons member Diver does not have phasing powers, despite her attempts to cultivate the impression that she does. Apparently it's all an illusion generated by her light and invisibility powers, so don't be fooled!

Phasing

Phasing is the act of moving through solid matter without disturbing it - basically, you're a ghost. I was looking for a better name for this, because supers with phasing would have to be called phasers, and this isn't Star Trek. Oh well, screw it.

This is one of the more subtle powers, because not everyone has an opportunity to see you do it. If you are able to phase (I'm not saying phaser here, people!), and you can get away with not revealing it, try not to - it makes a fantastic trump card.

Defenses against phasing

The physical basis for this power is poorly understood. The Transhuman Capability Catalog tentatively calls it a subclass of electromagnetic control, based on the theory that the super is flooding the atoms of his body, and whatever he's passing through, with enough energy to move their electrons into higher orbitals and give the Pauli principle room to work. There's some quantum weirdness past this point which I don't feel qualified to discuss.

This opens the door to some sort of anti-phasing defense, though. Some sort of metamaterial where electrons are already super-charged, or a macro-molecule (a large carbon nanotube for example) where the atoms' electrons are already in a fixed energy state, might resist phasing. I'm not aware of anybody that has actually deployed this sort of defense, but if you hear of one, let me know.

Moving and other considerations while phasing

In general, people don't worry about falling through the floor while phasing. Their bodies develop a mechanism to push off of nearby atoms electromagnetically while in the phased state, and their subconscious mind takes care of doing what their conscious mind seems to want. They can walk up or down stairs, "climb" through solid material, then step out onto a solid support.

From the interviews I've read, people have described it as feeling like swimming. Virtually every phasing-capable super (still not saying it) has developed an adaption for breathing, and some have shown adaptions to high-pressure conditions, the way aquatic supers have.

As a defense mechanism, phasing isn't perfect. It takes effort and energy to maintain the phased state, so weaker users (not saying it...) must still defend themselves from bullets and such in the usual way - by not getting shot. Stronger supers can just stand there and let the lead go through their bodies.

I have yet to see a battle between two such supers, so I have no idea how their powers will interact. That said, I'm sure it'd be interesting.

Movement powers: teleportation

I asked Exodus, probably the most powerful teleporter on the planet, to do a short piece on the hows and whys of this form of super-movement, but he said it was "boring", and Pyrepower wasn't willing to provide the "accommodation" he asked for in return for his services, so screw him. Instead, I'll talk about what is known (or suspected) about teleportation.

Teleportation

Larry Niven's "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation" gives us the obvious definition: "Teleportation is any method of moving from point to point in negligible time". Published in 1971, it included some speculation on psychic and mechanical teleportation. With the emergence of Apollo in 1962, it was hoped that provable psychic teleportation would eventually lead to a mechanical substitute. So far, no dice. Keep hoping, misfits.

Nobody is really sure exactly how teleportation really works. Most of the people who can teleport aren't interested in sticking around to be studied. It's one of the strongest arguments in favor of a radical new cosmology. Maybe we'll get there once a professional scientist develops the power.

Lairs

If you can teleport, your lair is anywhere you want. Seriously, I don't even want to write this section.

That said, your best bets for lairs are abandoned salt mines, underground cave systems, abandoned military complexes, and that sort of thing. It usually takes some doing to find a secure location, so the hardest part about constructing such a lair will be research. Also remember that many such places will need ventilation or may have problems such as chemicals, radiation, or other contamination. To stay safe, educate yourself.

Slightly less exotic lairs can be constructed in hard-to-reach areas such as northern Alaska, Siberia, or the Antarctic.

Defenses against teleportation

We don't have force fields or weird alloys or anything that's likely to keep teleporters from entering a place. This leads to tightened sphincters from strategic defense thinkers and law enforcement types, and it's not likely to change in the future.

That said, there are ways to stop teleporters, but they're costly. Exodus was first caught because he blabbed about his next target to a cute girl who happened to be a Fed. They flooded the complex with an aerosol version of a "generic" (non-tailored) power-suppression drug, harmless to mundanes, and he finally took a Taser to the face once he actually teleported in and couldn't get out again. From what I hear, it cost them about $1.5 million, and they still couldn't keep him locked up for long.

Contrary to public opinion and popular fiction, teleporters don't necessarily need "line of sight" to hit their targets. Just how they reach their target varies from teleporter to teleporter, but an opaque wall isn't always going to work. That said, seeing where you're going is definitely safer.

Conservation of momentum and energy

Niven's article asserted that conservation laws must hold. Apparently they don't - teleporters can and have moved between altitudes or inertial frames of reference without difficulty.

I had a conversation with one teleporter (Papa Legba), who described the act of teleportation as "going out" and "coming in". He mentioned "the rushing of the wind that is not wind". When I asked him if you could "go out" without "coming in" again, he just laughed, and it was not a fun sound to hear. The impression that I got was that conservation issues are dealt with in the passage through the medium he hinted at - teleportation isn't a straightforward bridge between two points in space. Or that guy could just be off his rocker.

Teleportation as the ultimate killing tool?

Teleporters, generally, can't just pull someone's heart out of their chest. Current physics suggests that whatever teleporters do requires a clear energy differential - which is good if you want to teleport someone along with you and you do so by grabbing hold of them, but bad if you want to be selective. Apparently the "force" that teleportation exerts is stronger than gravity but weaker than intermolecular forces.

In layman's terms, a typical teleport can't pull your wallet out of your pocket, or your heart from your chest, but he can drag you somewhere if he grabs hold of you. Higher-powered teleporters, like Exodus, have been observed selectively teleporting objects away from people, even at extreme ranges - Exodus himself was able to pull a pair of pistols out of a man's hands from across the planet.

None of this really matters since you can just teleport a mundane 500 feet in the air and drop them, of course. Supers are another matter, but aren't we always?

The ability to rapidly teleport works a little like a speedster's powers, from what I am told - you basically "program" your mind and your subconscious does the rest. This is how Papa Legba is able to do his notorious "crossroads walk" and visit hundreds of places in a few minutes. Some teleporters have done similar tricks while in combat, moving rapidly and disrupting an enemy unit's formation.

Movement powers: super-speed

Speedsters are an odd lot. Their powers are misunderstood and sometimes controversial. To set the record straight, I've asked veteran villain speedster Hurricane Hal to talk about this. I've done some editing of the text, with his permission.

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Hey all, Hal here. Mr. Big and I go back a few years and I was very flattered to be asked to talk about what I do. And what I do is run! Let's talk about speedsters:

We don't think radically faster than most people. Super-speed isn't time acceleration. Instead, we're moving our bodies faster. This is a combination of force control, muscular adaptions to moving very fast, and alterations to the nervous system. Our subconscious minds do process motion at super-speeds, but there's plenty of evidence that it happens thanks to the myelin substitutes you'll find in speedsters' brains rather than some kind of time-related power.

We don't perceive things at higher rates. Let me see if I can describe what it's like. When you fire a gun, you take aim, you track your target, but the bullet is off and doing its own thing the moment you pull that trigger. Now instead of a gun, imagine that the bullet is your body. You aim your mind at an objective by focusing on what you want, where you plan to move, whatever, and you commit to it. There's a brief moment of disorientation and it's done. Sometimes the subconscious will do its own thing - speedsters can and have dodged bullets without thinking about it, for example. But we notice all these things after the fact.

We don't send up huge currents of air around us - though we can. Most speedsters have a limited amount of control over the air surrounding their bodies, enough to keep us from being burned alive by friction. We create a slipstream effect that puts the air back where it was once we've gone past. Skilled speedsters learn to use this control to guide the slipstream laterally and create a huge gust of wind as we go by.

We don't age quicker or eat more. Some speedsters might develop a large appetite, but research shows that it's mostly psychosomatic. Their bodies feel the calorie burn and produce feelings of hunger. As we get more used to our powers, those cravings fade. A lot of speedsters I know don't even eat food except as a hobby - our bodies metabolize something else.

Obstacles in our path can still kill us. Someone asked me if I could run through walls. I said yeah - if I wanted to die! You've still built up a tremendous amount of momentum and delivering it to a solid object will very definitely hurt. That said, the slipstream will divert things like water vapor, so I don't die if I run through a rainstorm. If it would hurt you to run through something, it'll hurt a lot more to run through it faster, plain and simple!

Super-speed punches don't work like you think. Speedster fans like speculating about a super-fast person who could run up to a target and punch them, claiming that the momentum will do a lot more damage. Yeah - that works! Unfortunately the damage goes both ways. Newton's Third Law of Motion still works, and you'll break your arm. So let me tell you the secret to super-punches.

Linear momentum is a vector quantity, calculated as p = mv. That's mass times velocity. For example, say that you (a burly 100 kg) sprint (5 meters per second, or about 11 mph) at me and punch me. Your momentum is 100 * 5, or 500 kg m/s. The dominant factor is your mass, no duh. Big men have been kicking sand in the face of the macs at the beach for millennia, everyone knows this.

But instead of punching me with your fist, say that you're a speedster using your slipstream control to punch me with air. You push the air forward just before you connect. The mass of a cubic foot of air is about 0.03 kg, which at the above speeds is negligible - 0.03 * 5 is 0.15, orders of magnitude less. It's a breeze. But you're not moving at that speed, and you're not just moving air normally. I can reach Mach 10 with a good punch, and the slipstream effect is another order of magnitude in effectiveness. That makes my momentum calculation to be 0.03 * 34000, or 1020 - twice the punching power of our typical man at a sprint! And I can do that several times a second. Yes, I can tear through rock and steel without too much effort if I want to. And by the way, the slipstream works on water too, which is a lot heavier than air.

My advice to people interested in fighting hand-to-hand as speedsters is "don't" - there's far more effective uses of your power in combat. But if this is your thing - and it is incredibly flashy and intimidating if you can do it - then I strongly suggest learning a martial art that focuses on fast strikes, so you can build up the necessary muscle memory to do it at super-speed. American Kenpo, Kajukenbo, and Baguazhang all teach fast hand strikes. Wing Chun is a great style, because of its fast strikes, but also because the style works with relaxed muscles and that's how speedsters operate.

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Mr. Big here again. Thanks for the contribution, Hal!

Movement powers: swimming

Today I want to talk about one of the under-respected superpowers an aspiring villain can have, which is amphibious adaption or super-swimming.

Swimming

Like flight, there's definite limits past which unmodified humans can't go without risking long-term injury or death. Ordinary air mixtures can't take a diver past about 250 feet, while a modified rebreather allows a distance closer to 750 feet. Navy divers have gone down as far as 2,000 feet in special suits. The only contenders for truly deep dives are specially designed submarines or mini-subs, like the Trieste (36,000 feet). By comparison, heroes like Pelagos have reported unaided dives to 20,000 feet and have probably gone deeper. I have second-hand knowledge of villains like the Deep One and Sea-czar who have reached - and sometimes casually hang out in - the Hadal zone at the lowest level of the ocean.

That's pretty incredible if you stop and think about it. That's 1000 times the pressure of the atmosphere. A mundane would be crushed flat. Even the specially designed subs meant to reach such depths will start breaking down, and it takes hours for them to get down and back again. So why do aquatic supers get a bad rap? "Earth is 70% of water", they say, which is true. The reason is that the interesting parts only happen in that other 30%, because that's where the humans are. So how do you make the most out of an affinity for water?

Lair placement

Like flying, only more so, the ability to reach depths of 1000 feet or greater basically immunizes you from conventional pursuit. Unlike flight, you have nearly infinite options for lair location - you aren't restricted to mountains, you can just dive and dive and dive until you find something you like. For this reason, aquatic villains are nearly impossible to track down. Conventional radio transmitters will cease working quickly if you were tagged for some reason, and satellite tracking isn't an option for governments or military trackers.

It's not completely awesome. Villains on teams, or who want to take a prisoner, mistress, etc. home with them, are out of luck - unless you can grant your ability to someone else, your lair is for you alone.

Caper options

Aquatic villains tend to build capers around the following:

• Piracy on the high seas. Surprisingly lucrative - unlike mundane pirates, depending on the cargo, you can just sink the ship, let the crew abandon ship, and salvage the cargo from underwater. Not always an option, of course. Sea-czar got around this by actually flipping ships, which left the cargo hold high and dry but obviously screwed the crew up but good.
• Use of waterways as an approach or getaway tactic. Villains have operated everywhere from Venice to the Mississippi river by sneaking up on their target, doing the job, then swimming away.
• Storage of valuables in unexpected places. Watch the 2003 "Italian Job" for some ideas here - the thieves drop a safe into the canals, then send a decoy speedboat to lure the cops away while two guys crack the safe underwater. Similarly, the "Kraken Skulls" villain duo would steal fully loaded tractor-trailers. Skulls would drive the truck off a dock into the water, and Kraken would retrieve its contents.
• Use of water as an area denial tactic. This isn't something you can do in every time or place, of course. The Deep One was fond of blowing dams, then swimming through the drowned areas and looting whatever he could.

Some specific considerations for underwater capers:

• If you are driving vehicles off docks and the like, remember that the weight of the engine will tend to pull a car down nose first, and probably flip it. Big rigs do the reverse, since most of the weight is in the trailer.
• When working with a team, remember that you probably can't just communicate freely with them. Some teams are accustomed to a secure radio hookup. In such cases, the underwater members can buy specialized wireless transceivers and similar gear from companies like Ocean Technology Systems. OTS also sells ComRope for wired communication, if you are worried about having your comms sniffed.
• Dive watches (ISO 6425 compliant) are rated for a specific depth, and they're getting better. If you need to schedule your capers, or otherwise just keep track of the time, make sure it's clearly marked as a diver's watch.
• The magic distance for bullet penetration is about 8 feet. Get deeper than this, and people shooting at you from the surface are out of luck. If they're using assault rifles or something, it's more like 10 feet. By comparison, the canals in Venice are fairly shallow - 6 feet or less. The grand canal is closer to 15, but it's still a tight fit.

That's it for aquatic operations! Remember that there are no stupid or useless powers, only stupid or useless supers.

Late Addendum

"Pacific Pirate" writes in to talk about the subject of sonar detection. I'll let her message speak for itself:

Mr. Big, you talked about detection for flyers, but not for us aquatic types. The thing every super-swimmer has to know about once they wade out of the kiddie pool and into blue water is thermoclines. 

Thermoclines are layers in the water that reflect sonar. They're created by temperature differential. They're found at specific depths - you can feel one as you swim through it. They're crucial for us because of the use of hydrophones and sonar is becoming more prevalent. Modern hydrophones are sensitive enough to pick up a typical super-swimmer within a few miles. That may seem like a lot, but it's not when you're diving. Still, it's a problem. Passing through a thermocline hides you from these instruments. 

Understanding sonar in general is probably useful too, so here's some additional information.
Sonar is being used to repair trans-oceanic cables, find oil deposits for offshore drilling, look for wrecks, and gather geological data for volcano monitoring. It's also being used to find our underwater bases, and track us. Side-scan sonar will pick up protrusions from the sea bed immediately. If you plan to build an underwater base, find a cave system, or burrow into the surface if you can. Building a structure up from the sea bed will be spotted. This is only an issue if someone has scanned the area before and can do a comparison, of course. When in doubt, do some research and see if you can find evidence of prior scans. 

Thanks for the shout-out, and good luck with your guide!

Movement powers: flight

I'm doing a series on alternate movement forms available to supers. Some of these things you will have figured out already, or really should have. Others might be new.

Flight

Flight is the dream of man. Gods, wizards, and ancient heroes were all able to muster this power in the stories. A lot of supers have it, via a lot of different options: control over fundamental forces like gravity, some sort of force field or barrier, actual wings, and so on. Almost all supers who can fly also have the required secondary powers necessary to use it effectively: resistance to oxygen deprivation, extreme cold, and so on.

The red line for humans is about 26,000 feet. Past that, an unmodified human will basically suffocate to death because they can't take in enough air to oxygenate their blood. Tibetan natives and other people have shown actual evolutionary adaptions to these conditions, and high-flying supers either share similar traits or possess alternate mechanisms (such as long-term oxygen storage, like whales, or even independent systems for sustaining cells that doesn't require oxygen at all).

Lair placement

Flying supervillains have found it advantageous to build their lairs on mountains. The top ten tallest mountains in the United States are all found in Alaska: Mount McKinley, Mount Saint Elias, Mount Foraker, Mount Bona, Mount Blackburn, Mount Sanford, Mount Fairweather, Mount Hubbard, Mount Bear, and Mount Hunter. Colorado is the big winner for those who prefer the continental United States, with peaks at the 14,000 foot mark throughout the Front Range and Sawatch Range. Such lairs are largely impregnable without serious effort, and to date, no such lairs have been successfully raided by mundane law enforcement. They have been successfully hit by heroic supers, though - you're not the only one who can fly, so beware!

Detection

It's been observed that people aren't accustomed to look up when searching for someone. That's usually true, but military and elite law enforcement teams are getting better training these days, so don't count on just floating on the ceiling. What you can count on is getting to hiding places that nobody can effectively search, even if they suspect your presence.

In general the human body cannot be detected on air traffic control radar, military aircraft radar, and the like. Long-range targeting systems will find it a challenge to pick you up. Sophisticated thermal sensors, motion sensors, and anti-missile systems are all built to pick up small, fast-moving objects - that's you, by the way - so you're not totally undetectable while flying.

Elemental powers and the Hashmal process

I love working with newbie villains. They always ask the questions that get you thinking, or at least show that they're thinking. Here's my favorite from Pyrepower.

"Rock and fire aren't on the periodic table. The four elements are magical, but if there's no magic, why can some people only control those things?"

The Aristotelian or "classical" elements are air, earth, fire, and water. Control of these elements is common enough that the Transhuman Capability Catalog has a whole section (TCC E) for people who manipulate them. So far there's no known instances of controlling "aether" or "akasha", probably because such things have no physical analogue. Notably, there are fewer wind-controllers in China and more people who control metal and wood, which are the classical elements familiar to Chinese.

During a stage transition, the body struggles to adapt to the trauma that's been inflicted, and is usually still being inflicted - for example, being in a burning car wreck. The powers that you get from that experience are often (but not always) powers that will save your life immediately and forestall future incidents of that type. Someone who is badly burned will get fire powers. Someone drowning or being crushed by pressure can get water powers. That sort of thing.

The really neat - and scary - thing is that your body seems to know what's causing the trauma, on a macro-level. It recognizes the problem from a holistic perspective and adapts. Most parabiologists believe in the Stubbs-Robur hypothesis, which basically says that people have the potential for a range of powers, and that the brain is constantly (and unconsciously) sending out activation signals to the body's cells for those powers. When the mitochondria in those cells reach an energy production threshold, the signals are allowed through and your new powers manifest. Most of these powers will concern the fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravity, the strong and weak forces), and as soon as your brain feels the danger has passed, activation signal production ceases. Any limitations on the power from then on are based around your subconscious blocks, not around the mitochondria.

In layman's terms, you get as strong as you need to be to break out of danger, and no stronger. And you get only the power you need, not something more generic. This makes sense from a biological perspective, but it sucks for those of us who wouldn't mind a buffet of godlike abilities and are stuck with something specific. Since the classical elements are ingrained into your subconscious thanks to your education and upbringing, often your brain will accept the limited form of power that controls those elements.

Professor Pulsar described it to me like being an Olympic athlete. There's Olympic-caliber runners, jumpers, cyclists, shot-putters, archers, yadda yadda. But the specific things about their bodies that make them Olympic-caliber for their sport aren't the same. Look at the abs of a top-quality runner vs. a top-quality bodybuilder some time and you'll see what I mean. There's no "general athleticism" quality. In the same way, everyone's power development tends toward the specialized. The body doesn't know you'll want a big spectrum of powers for later, it's concerned with keeping you alive now, and it adapts accordingly.

I do know a guy who tried to work this system. He used hypnosis and conditioning to try and deeply convince himself that a certain type of power would be the most appropriate response to any sort of injury. I know what happened to him, but I won't talk about that here. Buy me a drink some time and I'll let you know how it turned out.