Hey, I don’t know if you take asks but what would you say about the pros and cons of super senses
I do take asks! Asks are my favorite!
#085 Super Senses
As I’m sure you know (and if not here’s some kindergarten level education for free) most humans have five sense. Taste, sight, smell, touch, hearing (I feel like their should be a one syllable word for hearing, it really throws everything off.) There are various robots, aliens, mutants, fifth-dimensional imps, and fifth dimensional-alien-mutant-robotic imps that have a couple more senses like bar-code-scanning and humidity testing but for now lets just focus on the main five.
TasteFolks with super-taste can generally live pretty cushy lives. While they might not be able to make it as a superhero on super-taste alone they can make it as a super-restaurant critic. That’s a job where you get to eat at fancy restaurants for free and (as if that weren’t enough) you get paid to insult them. As a super-taster you will wield full and complete power over the restaurant industry in your area. You won’t even have to worry about competition from other critics. Your superhumanly enhanced food opinions will be taken way more seriously than anybody else’s. If you want nothing but pizza and donut fusion shops in your neighborhood you can make it so! However, super-taste is not without it’s drawbacks. You’ll experience every bad taste just as strongly as you’d experience any good taste and let me tell you, there’s a lot of gross stuff out there and some of it sometimes find its way into your mouth. That’s going to suck for a super-taster. Also, I’m pretty sure if a super-taster gets poisoned they get super-poisoned (whatever that means to you).
SightSuper-vision is a very handy power to use. You’ll never need to shell out loads of money for telescopes or microscopes or binoculars or reading glasses ever again! Impress all your optometrist-ocquaintances by always absolutely nailing the eye-chart examinations! Paint more vibrantly than ever before due to your enhanced ability to perceive color! Additionally people with super-sight can be a huge help in search and rescue operations and act as a sort of early-warning system in the event of an oncoming alien invasion or non-sentient-space-junk-such-as-meteors-and/or-asteroids invasion. The only problems that come with super-sight only arise if you’re not especially well-trained in using these abilities. When rookie-super-seers first get their powers they often have trouble controlling them and deciding when they need to telescope or microscope or otherwise enhance their vision leading to migraines, eye-strain and seeing things you never wanted to see and now can never unsee unless you hit up Professor Brain-Scrambler’s Memory Wiping Kiosk in the mall, but that guy is an accredited supervillain so I suggest not availing yourself of his services.
SmellA hero with enhanced olfactory systems or a “super-snooper” as it sometimes colloquially known, can be a huge asset in any crime-fighting team. They can act as a human bloodhound, sniffing out drugs, corpses, expired milk, anything. A hero with super-smell is the ultimate tracker and can even act as a taste-tester without the risk of death that that job usually entails. That’s right, we’re talking risk-free employment with kings that’s a pro if I ever heard one. Heroes with super-smell can sniff out poisons and gasses that are widely believed to be scentless. They can smell something and identify the object, food, or perfume’s component scents and even sometimes determine where each component originated from in the world. The major downside to super-smell is that it’s not really a power you can turn on and off at will. Just like tastes, there are a lot of terrible smells in the world, especially when you’re knee-deep in the dirty, crime-ridden world of being a superhero. Plus you’re going to be uncomfortably aware of every time somebody near you farts.
TouchPeople with super-touch can usually determine what an object is made out of just by touching it. This is certainly a cool party trick but it doesn’t have a lot of uses in the superheroic world. It definitely has some uses, but like, if you’re going to be a full-time superhero and that’s your entire shtick, you’re going to spend a lot of the time being bored or sitting in your team’s base. It might be better to just market yourself as some sort of super-touch consultant for when the more “super strength and laser-eyed” heroes need to figure out what some bomb or abomination of science or sandwich is made out of. Or you can start some sort of live-therapy talkshow called “Super-Touching” and help people get to the heart of their emotional issues. Your powers won’t grant you a deeper insight into these kinds of things, but they will give you a great name for your show. The major downside to this power is that you’re going to feel everything a lot. Your nerves will be hyper-stimulated and hyper-sensitive. You’ll probably need to invest in silk everything, clothing, sheets, toilet paper. Everything else might feel like sandpaper.
HearingGosh it’s like BiteLock from Droidsaurs (a super cool team of crime-fighting robotic dinosaurs that are constantly showing up at super-battles and making Professor Paleontologist look like a fool). All of them have monosyllabic names and then this guy shows up with a polysyllabic name. Like slow your roll dude. You don’t need that many syllables. Anyway, super-hearing is really the cream of the crop here, so I guess maybe that’s why it gets that extra syllable (seeing, tasting, touching, and smelling are all words). With super-hearing (and super-training) you’ll always know what’s going on around you. You’ll be able to pick up on every movement, every word, even every breath in a considerably large radius, which, as with the other super-senses, can be very overwhelming without proper training and practice on filtering. Once you’ve got that noise mastered though, you’ll be unstoppable. You can be a ninja, a rodeo clown, a bat, the possibilities are endless. Plus you’ll always know when someone is talking smack about you. This way you can go and fight them. And you’ll always know when someone is saying nice things about you. Except you’ll never know if they’re only saying nice things about because they know you can hear them or if they actually think highly about you. I guess that, in essence, is the true downside to super-hearing. Never knowing if people are being real with you.
Any and all of these powers can be highly useful to a superhero as long as you’re willing to put the work in to master them. Sensory-overload can be debilitating the untrained super-sensor so it’s best to find someone who is more experienced than you at dealing with these things to help guide you through this process. Until you can do that I recommend finding one thing in your immediate vicinity to focus on. Use that object or person or place as an anchor of sorts before you start using your powers. This way if things get overwhelming, and they very quickly can, you can refocus yourself on your anchor and begin to shut everything else out.
I hope this was as helpful for you as it was for me and as always everybody should feel free to ask me questions on superheroing (it was helpful for me because now I can save the post I had written up for tomorrow for Thursday, and the post I had written for Thursday can get bumped to next week and boom suddenly I’m ahead of schedule).