Not-So-Useless Useless Magic and Super Powers

I found this and thought Veeky Forums could do something interesting with it. What can you come up with?

Bullet Attraction skill that draws enemy attention while the rest of the party does their business.

Trash Detection helps you determine what's valuable in a room by deductive reasoning.

Read Your Own Mind supervillian always one step ahead of himself, let alone his perusers.

Instant Hairloss disguise and escape.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=vtyb0oPfzC8
bbc.com/earth/story/20170109-plants-can-see-hear-and-smell-and-respond
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Trash Detection: helps you figure out who is the OP

>remove bugs
Does it also work on bugs planted on someone for the purpose of spying?

Invisible in the dark and one-second supestrength are still amazing powers. For one thing, it takes less than a second to throw a single punch. Also, being invisible in the dark can help you break into buildings at night as long as you can shut off the power unnoticed.

Depending on if super-slow mo affects you entirely, you could probably leverage it as a hilariously powerful means of delaying injury. After all, I might be getting shot, but it takes me four hours to bleed out because i'm bleeding barely a few drops a minute.

Revive Bugs: Use some Summon Monsters to get insect cannon fodder and keep reviving them constantly. Attack, Insect Minions!

1 Second super strength- punch people with your one second burst of strength

Revive bugs and 1 second super strength are great.

From the image
>Communicate with fruit
Any vector for spying is a valid one.
>invisibility in the dark
Half the planet is dark at all times.
>75% levitation
Sounds like it makes you a super lightweight, allowing for incredible gymnastics and acrobatics.
>revive bugs
Save the bees!

One second super strength is obviously very handy for punching and opening jars.
Invisibility in the dark as well, unless it requires nigh absolute darkness.
Remote controller can be sharpened or features could possibly be added to it to make it anything.
If the bullet attraction is wide range enough you could hide behind a rock or inside a tank and take your allie's bullets your way.
You could maybe summon the lamp inside someone?
75% levitation means moon jumping anywhere, which sounds neat.
Desaturation could be used as kinda shitty camouflage?
Reviving bugs would help tremendously in some scientific research methinks.

>75% levitation
>Put on some rollerblades
>RL Jet Set Radio

Best power of the group!

1 second super strength and 75% levitation are fucking amazing powers.
A punch or a jump take less than one second, you could do some amazing stuff with it as long as you train your reflexes.
75% levitation makes you super lightweight what could lead to some pretty impressive speeds and acrobacies.
Both would make for very decent real life heroes.

that's revive bugs

Super slow-mo: Useful for feints without losing your momentum
1 second super strength: punch people real hard
Desaturation: camouflage in urban areas

Considering every superpower is toggleable

For revive bugs, is it zombie bugs, or magically restored bugs?

Zombie bugs sounds hilariously useful.

>"Go my insect minions, die shorting out that technology then come back to life to fuckulate it even FURTHER!"

>ROCK THAT SHIT, HOMIE
youtube.com/watch?v=vtyb0oPfzC8

You and your group go to a casino, you absorb their bad luck, and they give you a share of everything they win

>Instant hairloss
Nah, see i could utilize that myself, I get sick of unwanted hair now and then

>Acid Tears
Collect disability checks.
>Invisibility in the Dark
Ignore night vision cameras, motion sensors, etc.
>Trash detection
Best goddamn cleaner in the world.
>75% Levitation
Pull some wuxia shit, never get hurt from falls
>Bullet Attraction
Get in a tank (or similarly resilient armor), ruin snipers' days.
>Read Your Own Mind
Resistance to telepathy
>Absorb Bad Luck
Charge rich fucks an absolute fortune (+health bills) to make sure their stock market/investment bureau/casino trip/honeymoon goes well.
>Revive Bugs
World's best archaeoentomologist, able to study the mating habits of long-extinct insects with ease.
>1 second super strength
This has been gone over already, but a punch/kick/rip takes less than a second.

%75 levitation is also pretty good

>revive bugs
Go to a museum and find the giant insect fossils.

Can the lamp be summoned anywhere?

It could be used to kill people

>Trash Detection helps you determine what's valuable in a room by deductive reasoning.
that's probably not how it works. It detects trash as in objects discarded and thrown awa, as informed by the accompanying image.
It can still be useful, but in a more limited scope.

>get 1 second super strength
>throw super powerful punch
>turn your arm bones to dust because you don't have super toughness
Bravo.

>make shit up about the scenario to ruin a cute idea
Why are there so many motherfuckers on Veeky Forums that can't help but do it?

Usefulness depends on the range. If it's tens or hundreds of miles, trash detection could be a foolproof way of finding your way back to civilization when you're lost in the wilderness.

I didn't make anything up, you mong. Where does it say you get super toughness?

>Acid Tears
That wouldn't be too bad: If you had Acid Tears you must be already immune to the Acid you're making or Acid for that matter or your eyelids/eyes, etc would just fucking dissolve and you... Wouldn't have to worry about Acid Tears because you'd be dead?
It also might imply you'd have Acid Mucous as well given that the two functions are connected, so you might be able to spit an Acidic lougie at someone.

>Invisibility In The Dark
That's a genuinely good power though: it means your visibility is dependent on the amount of light your body is exposed to and that means if it's over-cast, partly cloudy, or even underwater or any kind of situation where light is obscured you'd begin to fade or become-semi-invisible. ALSO animals with night-vision (cats for example) wouldn't be able to see you at night.

>Communicate With Fruit
An EXTREMELY utilitarian power: if you can communicate with fruit you can understand everything they've seen, heard, or otherwise sensed and would be able to actively sense where fruit was around you. If there's a blueberry within ear shot of you, you'd know where it is.

>Read Your Own Mind
You'd be able to truly perceive your own thoughts, inner emotions, and the true intent of all your urges, desires, hatreds, etc.. You'd basically be immune to mental illness, mental control, it'd be like this super powerful mental fortitude kind of chakra state. It's like being able to separate yourself from yourself in order to improve and understand yourself.

>1 Second Super Strength
Doing something incredible in the span of 1 Mississippi is in no way fucking useless: you'd be a 1 second, 1 punch man, because if you have super strength you'd also need to have the super durability to not tear yourself apart from said strength. Also, it's STRENGTH, who's to say you can't increase that number by a few more seconds? It has the potential to get better.

>useless

Some of those super powers are really quite useful tho...75% levitation would still make you able to run or jump at superhuman levels, one second of super strength has a bunch of applications, bullet attraction would be great for a team if you're placed within or behind a suitably resistant object and invisibility in the dark is still invisibility.

Well for one it's somewhat implicated that people that can produce those forces can survive them unless otherwise stated, you know this but but can't help but try to ruin things on technicalities and what's not been said rather than what has.

Also the OP image depicts the person lifting a car quite happily till their second is up. You mong.

To be a pedantic asshole, the giant insects would die moments after you revive them
The O2 levels in our atmosphere are too low to sustain insects and other antropods of that size

Part 2, lets go motherfucker.

>75% Levitation
Other Anons have already beaten me to the chase, but that basically translates into being able to hover/lighten your body just a little bit: you'd never die from falling, you'd be able to do super-mario-esque-jumps, and it'd be all around incredibly amazing.. You'd also be able to run REALLY fucking fast... So watch out about running into things you speedster, cause your own momentum could seriously injure you.

>Absorb Bad Luck
It depends on if it's a conscious ability or an "aura" because if you can manually do it then people will fucking pay you, they'll pay you ANYTHING to make them more lucky. You'd have sports people, gamblers, politicians, millions of people coming to you with gifts and tribute to make them luckier.
If it's an 'aura' though you'd be a walking disaster, which could be fun- especially if you learned from it and understood the limits and function of your "bad luck".

>Revive Bugs
This has millions of genuine functional uses in the field of science, but you could also, you know, just create massive plagues of locusts or cockroaches, bed bugs, just go into someones house and fuck everything up with revived termites.

>Instant Hairloss
So you can just shed your hair at any time, why is that bad? You'd never have to shave, your body would be super, deliciously smooth.

>Desaturation
Being able to chromatic-shift yourself into black and white and everything in between would be a 'decent' power though, especially if you can work on it: complete and total desaturation to the point of being a featureless "vanta-black" shadow humanoid would have it's advantages.

Fruit can't see or hear bruv, you may be able to communicte temperature/pressure changes with it, but not much else.

Part 3, the last set I can think of/ the ones that aren't just "lel, the power is you die!":

>Trash Detection.
You'd be able to detect anything your society labels as "trash", even if that's just a vague or sixth sense towards any material or object that's broken or no longer functions you'd still have dozens if not thousands of potential industrial uses or jobs to be had. You'd be able to look at a bike, car, dam, and say with confidence, "this isn't trash, this is trash".
But if it extends to WASTE that's even fucking BETTER: you'd be able to sense and discern pollutants, bacteria, anything that's basically wasteful or garbage or polluting something- you'd be an environmentalist bloodhound and it'd be an amazing fucking power.

>Super Slow-Mo
So the reverse flash? You'd be able to slow down your heart, metabolism, various other body functions, etc.. You'd live for fucking EVER, it'd take fucking WEEKS maybe even MONTHS for you to actually starve or die of thirst. I mean, sure, you'd be able to "run super slow", but that's a very face-value impression of the ability.....Unless it's anti-momentum.
If it's "Super Slow-Mo" in the sense that you can actively lower your momentum -that's applied to you or produced by you- that's a horrifyingly good defensive ability.

>Abnormal Armhair Growth
Could be useful, mostly would just be something to talk about: you'd have big, wooly, thick-furred, arms, so that could be kind of neat. You'd be able to insulate yourself at least and could grow/sell your... hair? fur? If anybody needed it that is (you never know).

>Control Remote Control
You can now control anything that can control anything remotely, I.E: you can fucking control computers. You can theoretically control any electronic device that sends out a command signal to another electronic device or machine.... So you can't directly control a drone, but you CAN control the control that controls the drone -without having to physically touch it-.

>communicate with fruit
I can talk to my gay friend pretty easily

>have a massive bow, you can carry it, but you can't draw it
>ballista tier arrows
>activate 1 second strength
>draw and fire


you're now a walking siege weapon


>leave grapes in places and then get them back later, to learn what they have heard
poor mans spying equipment, undetectable to those who do not know about your ability


>armor the fuck up, crysis tier body armor shit, ballistic shield beefed up to the max, ditch main weapon to two-hand that shit instead
>turn on bullet absorbtion to soak all incoming fire
>be accompanied by a squad of people who use alternative methods of engagement, depending on the limitations of the superpower.


>75% of bodymass is no longer affected by gravity while you remain able to use your full strength to climb and shit
>become the best climber, able to scale anything with little to no equipment, besides possibly some special gloves and boots to aid with friction


>scout for enemy base in the middle of the jungle
>detect the trash they inevitably create
>found enemy base

>1 second super strength
This is basically Bruce Lee's fighting style
>one inch punch through walls

>Fruit can't see or hear bruv, you may be able to communicte temperature/pressure changes with it, but not much else.

That's kind of right.

I'm using 100% of my brain right now, but if the fruit was still on the tree/plant I think you'd be able to gather "sight and sound" information out of it because a Tree/Plant DOES have some very limited/alien ability to perceive sound and sight.
So if it was an apple on a tree it could tell you these things from it's own alien perspective and given the nature of the power: you'd intuitively make sense of it.

But if an apple was on a plate in the kitchen you'd be 100% right and you'd only be able to understand it's location (you could call out to it lets say), temperature, whatever it 'felt' sort to speak.

>Acid Tears
Implied secondary power of acid resistance, else you'd just fall apart immediately. Also good for poking your eye and wiping on locks etc.

>Invisibility In The Dark
Damn well useful, especially if it counts a night with a bright white moon like that.

>Control Remote Control
Every remote control-like object becomes a deadly weapon. You can smack people with them, and mess with their electronics from a distance.

>Communicate With Fruit
Welp, the fruit industry would love you, especially those breeding experimental crops.

>Trash Detection
Define trash; place trash-like object in object to be tracked; track object.

>75% Levitation
What, like hovering off the floor, or low gravity? Both have obvious uses.

>Summon A Lamp Once
Alright, it's useful once.

>Bullet Attraction
What you said, OP, with added bulletproof armour.

>Read Your Own Mind
Instant Nirvana.

>Instant Hairloss
Fairly useless, though you could grow your hair long and use it as improvised weaponry to creep people out.

>Abnormal Armhair Growth
Fairly useless, except when you're trying to stay warm.

>Absorb Bad Luck
Obvious power; if you're protected in the vicinity of operations and use it, those operations will have no bad luck and you'll just bang your toe or something.

>Super Slow-Mo
Implied secondary power of stasis. You can travel forward in time whenever.

>Revive Bugs
Entomologists love you.

>Ultra Fast Aging
Probably useless.

>Invisible Handwriting
Will likely be detectable by non-visible means, great for codes.

>1-Second Super Strength
Having access to burst strength is hella useful.

>Turn Into A Laptop Forever
Does this turn you into an AI?

>Seduce Hats
Become a poltergeist.

>Desaturation
Very difficult to see in low-light situations.

See this user: The picture OP provided clearly demonstrates the person lifting up a car and NOT blowing up from the strain of their own muscles extorting super-strength on a not-super-durable body.
Again, if you have the power of "super-strength", you also have the power of super-durability or otherwise you DON'T have the power of super-strength, you have the super- violently tear your body apart into ground beef from the power of your own muscles - power. The two come in a package, you can't have one without the other.

Unless you got them from a Genie, Demon, Lawyer, or Chinese manufacturer of superpowers.

75% levitation is easy. Being a quarter of your weight averages to maybe 40-50lbs, giving you the potential to run, jump and overall move faster. The problem with this is it might have adverse effects on your body in a similar manner that astronauts have with muscle deterioration in space

>1 second super strength
This is basically early Boku no Hero Academia

I've had a chance to think about it more and I thought it was funny enough to share:

>Instant Hairloss
You could grow out the hair on your head REALLY fucking long and use it as a kind of "false-lead" defense mechanism where you detach or shed the whole fucking mess if an enemy tries to grab or pull onto it- like how reptiles can pop off their tails.

Point is, people are vastly overestimating its useful ness.

like, its better than others, but not some god-tier info gathering ability.

Better question is, what is the name of your stando powa

>trash detector lad is an avid environmentalist because pollution keeps throwing off his senses
I bet that giant garbage vortex in the Atlantic Ocean screams out to him like a haunting banshee

if superstrenght comes with the appropriate supertoughness then you could turn it on along with bulet attraction absorb badluck and super slow-mo, while your allies moe at normal speed, and becoe a super support.
In fact depending on how it works it may be even better. If you activate superslow mo and bullet attraction do you attract bullets at normal speed while you are slow, or the bullet attraciton power is slowed down too, meaning you attracts bullets slower? Or they slow down once they touch you?
anyway 1 sex superstrenght and 75% levitation are better than not having those powers so they are still a net positive, as everyone else said.

Unless you only have 1 sec of superstrenght in your whole life.

>「You」

that's one way to interpret the power. It could also mean that you could move 75% off your center of gravity and not fall off, so it would be super-balance.

the question is how long before you can use it again

>absorb bad luck
>[THE NATURAL ONE]

>control remote control
burglary and car theft
>trash detection
enhanced archeology skill
>super slow-mo
high paying Hollywood stuntman
>desaturation
model, actor, rentable special effect

I thought it was remove bugs too

with good martial arts technique "1 sec super-strength" can probably be useful

just takes one strike

from the tone of the pic it seems you can't control the bugs just revive them

fuse 75% Levitation with 1-sec strength and you are basically an anime character

>seduce hats

tips fedora
fedora tips back

But what is stopping you from just reviving them again after those few seconds? Go forth, Insect Legion!

Ok, dump dead aggressive/deadly insects, say wasps (fuck wasps) or fire ants into an enemy's car. Or mail them to their house. Once inside, let nature take its course, reviving as needed.

>why would someone mail me a bunch of Japanese wasp?

>activate 1 second super strength to slam something with a sledgehammer or throw something super hard

75% Levitation means all but one quarter of you is weightless, eh? AC to hell and back with roller skates to remove all movement de-buffs. Anti-tank Rifle Akimbo anyone?

The Question gets Communicate with Fruit.
"Why did you let him go?" "I slipped him a cranberry. He's far enough away; follow me."
You can track people with that power.

I like that control remote control would've been a fine super power five years ago but it does literally nothing now.

And the idiot of the thread award goes to...

Yup, get yourself some of that Dominican amber...

If you wanted to study them, you’d build a chamber with a higher oxygen concentration. But more importantly, as points out, you can just revive them again.

You’d still be excellent at throwing things.

You’d also know how ripe (or unripe, or overripe) it was, and which cultivar it is (a Granny Smith apple will “say” something different from a Fuji). This is not at all useless.

1 second super strength - you can totally punch people dead

revive bugs - put dead bugs in people's food. revive when inside people. profit.

> (OP)
>Depending on if super-slow mo affects you entirely, you could probably leverage it as a hilariously powerful means of delaying injury. After all, I might be getting shot, but it takes me four hours to bleed out because i'm bleeding barely a few drops a minute.

You would need a Granny Weatherwax-style "I aint'nt Dead" sign in case of accidents though. Say you get hit by a car, slow yourself down to prevent blood-loss, paramedics turn up, check for heart beat, can't find one cause you're slow-moed down. Declare you dead at the scene...

Use 1 second super strength to toss tiny objects like coins at people with high speed. Basically a hand-gun!

>1 Second super strength- punch people with your one second burst of strength
This. I don't know what the recovery time is, but if the strength is enough to lift a car over your head, you could probably turn at least one person to pulp. You could also bend, break, or crush a whole lot of shit.

>Any vector for spying is a valid one.
Fruit don't have eyes or ears.

>Half the planet is dark at all times.
I think the idea is that you're only invisible when it's too dark to see you. Might help vs. infrared though.

>Sounds like it makes you a super lightweight, allowing for incredible gymnastics and acrobatics.
Yeah. That could be really handy.

>Save the bees!
Or run some sort of bug protection racket. "It'd be a real shame if all those cockroaches came back to life."

>Charge rich fucks an absolute fortune (+health bills) to make sure their stock market/investment bureau/casino trip/honeymoon goes well.
Yeah, but you'd just lose the money somehow.

Part 4 because I've had all day to think about it:

>Summon A Lamp Once
You could summon a genie lamp and wish for better powers, really, there's no limit to the kind, quality, size, or properties of whatever kind of lamp you want to summon beyond your own imagination and that you can only summon it once.

>Turn into a Laptop
Do you just die? Do you kill yourself via inanimate object polymorph? Or do you become a Laptop advanced enough to contain your consciousness, intelligence, and sapience? Because if it's the more interesting latter then you've basically become an extremely dangerous computer ghost in the shell capable of many strange Digimon-like abilities.

You don't need to control them? Just have a bucket full of beetles or ants or termites, toss them in a control panel, then cackle like a mad man as nature takes its course.

>You don't need to control them? Just have a bucket full of beetles or ants or termites, toss them in a control panel, then cackle like a mad man as nature takes its course.

You could just literally make your own or buy ground up dried bug powder (it's used for cooking as a protein supplement in case you want context) and just throw it onto someone or into a room before reviving all the bugs: instant bugs- be that guy and make it out of powdered scorpions or spiders or something.

Centipedes.
Just don't fucking inhale it- also never point your resurrection at yourself in the event you revive the 0.3 bugs people accidentally eat every week in your tummy.

People eat bugs as protien powder? Holy fuck what is this shit called and how do I avoid it in my life?

Anyways, why not put the powder into an empty lightbulb with some ground glass and hot sauce. Then, throw it at your enemy and watch as they try to remove burning glass bugs from their eyes and nose. Bonus points if you use some carnivorous parasite that will use a human as a host.

You can send things to the moon, only to the moon, one way. But you've never been to the moon so you assume this power just destroys things.
Not useless but amusing.

I'm pretty sure "Read your own mind" is something everybody is capable of and not a superpower.

Also, 1 second super strength would be good. You could punch hard, at least.

Control remote control could also be handy. Set up your home so that everything can be controlled by a remote control. You now can control everything comfortably, without even actually picking up the remote controls.
Or helpful for a rogue-type character. Could help him out of sticky situations by creating distractions. Turning on the TV in the room over there, so the home owner currently going into your direction turns away.

>trash detection
>enhanced archeology skill
but if their trash is your treasure does it still count as trash?

really begs the question of what counts as trash?

>constantly experiment on bugs
>see if you can't apply a computer chip on one of them
>they can't die because you keep reviving them

That is insanely powerful and useful. Human space elevator.

>invisibility in dark
If I get to define dark for the purposes of the power, this is just fine.
>control remote control
Niche, but still useful. You know what has a (loosely defined) remote control? Predator Drones. Also, go build a RC controller with a solid lead case, congrats you now have a telekinetic bludgeon.
>Communicate with fruit
Nobody suspects the fruit basket of spying on them!
>75% levitation
Read that as "decrease your effective weight by 75%" it's not fantastic, but you're better at jumping, uppercuts, and falling unharmed.
>1 second super strength
Just means no lifting heavy objects, fling them away or push them. Also, punching a guy takes way less than a second.

But presumably if you had the power to destroy things, you'd be "eradicating" stuff like trash pretty much constantly.

Eventually, astronomers get wind of the growing pile of random shit on the moon (or you decide that Todd from work needs to disappear and they detect his cell phone's radiation or something) and start trying to figure out where it's coming from.

The it's time.

>invisibility in the dark

so I'm a night elf?

What is the length if said armhair

because I'm thinking spiderman-type shit

I think the bug thing works better for research than bug armies, as you probably cant control the bugs even if you bring them back

>>Read Your Own Mind
>You'd be able to truly perceive your own thoughts, inner emotions, and the true intent of all your urges, desires, hatreds, etc.. You'd basically be immune to mental illness, mental control, it'd be like this super powerful mental fortitude kind of chakra state. It's like being able to separate yourself from yourself in order to improve and understand yourself.
Trust me, this is a curse not a blessing.
You don't WANT perfect self-clarity.

>Revive Bugs
>This has millions of genuine functional uses in the field of science, but you could also, you know, just create massive plagues of locusts or cockroaches, bed bugs, just go into someones house and fuck everything up with revived termites.
You don't have bug control. Just bug revival. They continue to do what they want.

>Welp, the fruit industry would love you, especially those breeding experimental crops.
AAAAAAGGGHH KILL ME NOW KILL THIS MOCKERY OF A LIFE I WANT TO DIE I WANT ALL OF YOU TO DIE AND TO MEET YOU IN HELL FOR THESE COUNTLESS ABOMINATIVE INIQUITIES

What a... fruitful conversation.

I mean, what's the range? I thought it was just talking to them, not global telepathy.

...

Bunch of baby ducks, send it to the moon
Soda machine that doesn't work, send it to the moon
Evil little sister, send it to the moon
Crazy doofus AI, send it to the moon

>Control Remote Control
Potentially nice if I can just walk by and control other people's stuff from a distance. Especially if you count voice control as remote control, also smartphone work as remote controls nowadays.

>Seduce Hat
Publicly shame any hat-wearing enemies you have by having them sprout a forehead boner in public.

>Revive Bugs
Uncounted scientific discoveries from reviving extinct fossils. Free food by reviving the critters from a left over leg. You can also make money by harvesting any rare/hard to domesticate items from bugs by just reviving the same creature over and over again.

You can make a fortune by sending space missions just for 1% of the normal fuel cost. Also fuck yeah, kickstarting the space age.

Sure you can learn anything a fruit has seen heard or felt, but when was the last time you ran into a fruit with eyes, ears, or nerve endings?

bbc.com/earth/story/20170109-plants-can-see-hear-and-smell-and-respond

...

invisiblity in the dark's utility depends on the extent of your invisiblity.

if radar infra red and other forms of vision outside the visible spectrum can't detect you then it's pretty baller.