In working on my Bayverse Turtles fic and the fics with @remmushound I am thinking about how the boys have near perfect immune systems and strong healing factors with naturally long telomeres, ie slowed aging. So they can still get sick, injured, and disabled in ways they can't fully heal from.
Like migraines, chronic nerve pain, tendonitis, back pain, but it's like a slow healing cycle.
I'm basing it off my husband's healing factor, times eleven. Our favorite inside joke is him saying "The difference between you and me is that I heal" and me replying "Yes, fuck you" with a grin and a kiss and me butting my head heavily against his 58-inch chest like it's a wall because his abs are rocks and he has like no waist or butt so his thirteenth rib and his hipbone are an inch apart and it's easy to treat him like a wall. He was also splashed with boiling water as a teenager so most of his torso is scar tissue that he doesn't really feel. When he's teaching me the IP Man style martial arts he was trained in, it's fascinating to watch a six foot barrel chested guy do roundhouse kicks in silence, with an arthritic spine, a hip that he'll dislocate for fun, and a near impossible flexibility for his age that flows like water over stone. I think the qigong meditation plus cannabis has worked for his ADHD and spine pain better than anything because he's managed to spiritually manipulate his own neuroplasticity over thirty years. He's bizarrely chill and like a socialist anarchist. He also meets the seven signs of the antichrist because he was born in a city called Bethlehem in a hospital called Sinai, no labor pains, stillborn for four minutes, Jewish, light eyes, his name referring to first beloved son of his father, Tribe of David, supposed supernatural powers, talks a lot about people helping people and keeps being put in Facebook jail for poking at conversatives and liberals about concentrating taxes and power on communities and welfare and healthcare but saying it in a way that "sounds libertarian" and being ignored or mocked. Oh shit that's a huge tangent, whoops.
Plus there's a reason I say husband's like the embodiment of all four turtles. We have katanas and accidental bo and he's still teaching me Cane Fu.
2) So for my portrayals of Psionic Mikey with painful side effects, I'm imagining how muscles and nerves are constantly damaging and repairing and growing scar tissue because I've seen it with husband.
Mikey being so completely physical and athletic would influence the kinetic psionics like biokinesis, the way his chi would flex and expand.
His internal telekinesis would probably wind up creating new pathways, dendrite growth, neurochemical receptors similar to opioid and endocannabinoid.
Hell, I plan on honoring Winnychan's unfinished fic where Mikey goes to the Ninja Tribunal to complete his tests and becomes Usagi Yojimbo's student, who guides him. In a scene I've never forgotten, Mikey physically manifested his chi as green plant matter, which he ground into a healing paste, because he remembered Splinter grinding herbs for healing. There was the idea that Mikey's chi manifestation was green, Life Energy, and it was as physical and tactile and touched starved as Mikey himself.
I'm glad I complimented Winny on that before she passed.
When I was writing the 2012 Psionics I made him essentially Jean Grey but I probably could still refine how the powers actually work.
Since the late 2000s, I've imagined Psionic Mikey being able to heal himself and others but at a cost.
In every iteration, he is friendly, boisterous, and cheerful, but a lot of fan writers starting in the late 2000s started thinking that Mikey doesn't like to contemplate life, that he's completely airheaded, that his head is always empty. But he's got so many thoughts that it's like static, like a radio or television changing channels, and it bursts out of him with physical force. So why not manifest as telekinetic force...
In this essay I
