This week’s Friday Five question comes from Mike, my neighbour and co-worker, who occasionally reads eclexys. Hi Mike! Here it is:
If you were a superhero, what powers would your five worst super-villain enemies have?
This isn’t such a hard question, since of course the powers that my enemies would have would be the worst, most annoying, obnoxious ones around:
- The Thumper’s power would be Instant Evangelical Conversion. All he would have to do would be to declaim Biblical verses in a praiseful voice, and anyone hearing him would be instantly (temporarily) swept away in an ecstatic religious frenzy, and obedient to him.
- Bluescreen, whose power would simply be to Crash All Operating Systems within a certain radius. You know the moment when you’re uploading the final bits in that file that needs to be distributed to all the world to save us from the MegaCorps? That’s when Blue Screen would show up and crash your PC, in the nick of time to foil your plans and victory. Ah, he also has some kind of power to direct where online spam and viral ads attack. Bastard.
- The Appetizer, a super-villain with a twist: he’s an ad exec by day, and a friend to super-heroes by night… sort of. He invites us over for movie nights and in-house LAN-gaming sessions and the like, all the while serving us snacks like potato chips and chocolate bars and colas. His secret power is nothing mutant or supernatural, but simply access to an experimental snack laboratory where he has created a line of snacks that are super-fattening, remove the will to exercise, stay fit, and fight evil… We’d probably all be obese couch potatoes for months before we realized it was him who’d done it to us.
- Black Lamia’s power would be seduction; a mysterious vixen of uncertain origins who spent a long time in te mountains in Tibet, Nepal, and North India, where monks who’d long ago turned to the dark side had trained her in the art of spiritual corruption, she’s able to change her form to please any man or woman, to seduce them without anything but a word or a gesture, and infect them (try as they might to resist it) with a Lasting Crush. Black Lamia would not only distract us from fighting crime, but get myself and my fellow super-teammates into trouble with our respective spouses and lovers. It’d be a horrible mess, until my buddy DeTox crafted a serum that could cure the effect. But the weird thing is, she wouldn’t infect us with love: no, it would be more pathetic, a kind of teenaged infatuation, a hopeless crush. It would be more pathetic than it was dangerous. Oh, what a horror. We would all owe DeTox our dignity.
- I know, the idea of an asthmatic superhero is insane, but that is what I’d be. Work it this way: the X-Men had that psychic dude in the wheelchair, so my team couldn’t really reject me for a respiratory disease. However, it’d get tough for me sometimes, like when we would meet up with Smokey, an obnoxious clown of a supervillain (literally, a clown in a polka-dot three-piece suit) who emits smoke from every orfice. Nobody knows whether the smoke is from the cigarettes he’s continually smoking, from some kind of trick contraption, or naturally-occurring. All we know is that his second-hand smoke is almost crippling to me. While the other members of my team seem able to take him out in rather showrt orderusually knocking the lighted from his hand and holding up pictures of lung cancer victimsI am reduced to an emphysematic mess every time I face him… until one day, I suppose, when I swap a poison cig into his next pack and take him out that way. (Very guiltlessly, since smoking is just slow suicide to begin with.)
Geez, now I have stories of superheroes dancing through my head. Hmmm… Well, if you’d like to check out other F5ers imagined enemies and their powers, have a look in the Friday Five drop-down list to the right. And thanks to Mike for the question!