On the second day of Hogswatch, your Seanan gave away...

[seanan_mcguire]

...a copy of Velveteen vs. The Multiverse!

Welcome to the second of the Twelve Days of Hogswatch. I will be starting a new giveaway every day between now and January 6th (the day after my birthday). Each giveaway will have different rules, and a different deadline, although all prizes will be mailed on January 9th, because I am bad at going to the post office.

This giveaway is for a shiny new copy of Velveteen vs. The Multiverse, the second volume in the adventures of Velma "Velveteen" Martinez, crankiest superheroine this side of the Mississippi. This is going to be a random number drawing with a twist, because I am silly. So...

1. To enter, comment on this post.
2. If you are international, indicate both this and your willingness to pay postage.
3. Explain your superpower. What is it? How does it work? What are your strengths and weaknesses?

I will choose the winner at 1PM PST on Monday, December 30th, by randomly selecting two heroes and deciding the outcome of a fight. (Note: "my superpower is I can do anything" means you will inevitably be defeated by Squirrel Girl. That's what she's for. Remember that in the Velveteen-verse, cunning and treachery often defeats raw strength.)

Game on!

Comments

[sdelmonte]

Happy Boxing Day!

[vincentursus.livejournal.com]

Three cyborg tapirs enter a bar.

[ebenbrooks.livejournal.com]

My superpower is the ability to completely correlate all the contents of my own mind. Alas, as predicted by the eminent scholar Howard P. Lovecraft, this has driven me completely fjaenxiyekmbz.

[beccastareyes]

(Still domestic.)

My superpower is an eidetic memory: I can perfectly recall anything I read/see/hear/smell/etc. The strengths mean that, should I desire to Fight Evil, a bit (or a lot) of homework means I know exactly how everyone else's power works, and any known secret weaknesses. The weaknesses are... well, do you really want to remember all the times you got the crap kicked out of you perfectly? That and it means spending long hours in the library/at the computer as prep work, possibly with a technopath who owes you favors to break encryptions and paywalls.

It's kind of a superpower that works better when giving the information to someone with more ass-kicking power and less aversion to pain, while you sit with a radio and cameras and advise.

[bookblather.livejournal.com]

Hello, I am a librarian superhero living in the US, and my superpower is that I can order anything and sense when something's out of order. Obviously this works best when shelving books, but it works for other things as well.

[museclio]

So, my actual superpower appears to be instantly recalling who knows what specialized skill. This is both extremely useful when someone urgently needs to know who can do underwater basketweaving or who's comfortable riding a trike on a tightrope. Less handy when the person is your mortal enemy, or the mortal enemy of the person who needs the help.

Well it's that or the fact that I kill cell phone batteries.

[childe.livejournal.com]

My superpower is to translate very complex ideas into easily understood explanations. While this helps greatly when being attacked due to misunderstandings and in aiding other superheroes to defeat villains (by explaining the underpinnings of their super powers, and thereby exposing weaknesses), it requires time to communicate. In short, there's not always room in a fight for exposition.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

However, there's always room for Jell-O.

[kimuro.livejournal.com]

I can remember where something was last placed, but the memory is stored like a dream, so I have recall what the person, or persons, who put it there was feeling at the time, the emotional impact of the location, the setting, the storing. From that I recall the emotional details of the surroundings and so deduce the location thusly. Obviously, if the person doing it has no emotional footprint, they'd be invisible to this sort of divination.

Additionally, I can see things at a distance, but only if I'm in a waking dream state, too much asleep and I'm dreaming, too much awake and it's gone.

And I know who's on the other end of the phone before I pick it up (or check caller ID) but that's intermittent - probably works 75% of the time.

Not so very super.

[cailleuch.livejournal.com]

In the US I am.

My superpower is the ability to make things grow bigger than they might be in nature. That ten foot vine that covers the trellis could be one hundred feet long. The growth happens rapidly so I don't grow old waiting for my power to manifest. It also works in animals so that if I need a twenty foot attack bunny that could happen as well.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

My superpower is the power of the sort. I can sort through a room of junk almost instantly; it's done wonders for my gardening as I can sort the weeds, roots and all, into a large pile. My carpet is an amazing color now that I've sorted all the dirt and oil outside. I've been practicing sorting at a smaller scale in the hopes that I shall one day be able to recombine branches into usable wood planks.

The problem is the accompanying exhaustion; while it is not as tiring as doing all that sorting manually, I can easily knock myself flat by sorting something too large. It's also a major hunger-inducer. However, I've gotten a lot of extra grocery money by sorting cans and bottles out of my neighbors' recycling bins. It all balances out.

In a fight, I think the outcome would be entirely dependent upon my level of clever at the time, which would be inversely related to my level of hunger and exhaustion.

(I'd really really love this superpower. Especially in regards to gardening. Damn bermudagrass.)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

i. comment
ii. domestic
iii. In my role as "Are You Fucking Kidding Me?" my super power is being able to unerringly choose the lesser of two evils. Whenever there's a job and I'm the one to do it, remember... it could always have been worse.

[taylweaver.livejournal.com]

Behold! The superpower of proper grammar*!

Supervillains will cower in fear when confronted with the threat of properly formed sentences, and the menacing red pen that will mercilessly correct their every error. My powers lend truth to the saying that the (red) pen is mightier than the sword.

This power works best against enemies with low self-esteem and poor writing skills, who will be reduced to a trembling puddle of shame as I mercilessly correct every paper and story they have ever written, and rephrase each poorly constructed sentence that comes out of their mouths.

This superpower also comes in handy when editing written work such as research papers and works of fiction. It could, in a pinch, be useful in earning a (rather small) income. (It has also turned out to be quite useful in my current profession in the field of special education.)

My power is, admittedly, virtually useless against enemies who excel at well-constructed exposition, and requires either the ability to speak clearly and authoritatively, or a functional writing implement (a red pen is ideal, but pens of other colors, markers, and even pencils will work in a pinch) and materials that the aforementioned enemy has written, such as wince-worthy fan fiction, poorly constructed high school papers, and transcripts of recent text messages.

The downside to this power is that every unnecessary use of the word "like" (as in Valley Girl dialect) causes me physical pain, and the exposure to essays liberally peppered with text-message grammar and spelling will eventually cause my head to explode. Improper use of "literally" will figuratively cause me to vomit, and "I could care less" in place of "I could *not* care less" makes me literally see red (which makes it a bit hard to see anything else). When dealing with savvy enemies who are aware of these weaknesses, it helps to have some earplugs handy, along with a pair of glasses designed to prevent my eyes from focusing on the written word.


*Note: The study of linguistics in college may have corrupted this power slightly, as there are times when my superpower will unleash a torrent of descriptive grammar (how people actually speak, which is what linguists generally study) rather than prescriptive grammar (how people are taught to speak). In other words, I am easily capable of dangling a preposition when called for, which may or may not be useful in facing down a supervillain.

[gammelor.livejournal.com]

My super power is the ability to create worlds and write about their denizens. The strengths are, well, I can create anything! The weakness is that once I create a world, everything after that has to fit into its rules/physics. Oh damn, can't create that thing after all. *sigh*

[sheila okeefe (from livejournal.com)]

My superpower is using sticks to turn string into clothing (i.e. knitting).

[corbeau.livejournal.com]

I'm totally domestic. :P I WISH I was international. My superpower would be that I could pause time so that I can read whatever I want for however long I want and come back to the world without having any time lost. I could read and read and read and catch up with all the books I want to read, but I'd still have a job!!! :)

[alicetheowl.livejournal.com]

I'm a US resident, and my superpower is sleep. I can sleep for hours and hours and hours at a stretch. I've slept entire days away. I can sleep through any alarm, and have slept through marching bands practicing nearby, trains that shook books off the shelves, and cats vomiting on the quilt. When I'm sick, I often sleep it off within a day or two. The only things I can't sleep off are infections which require antibiotics.

My weakness, as you can imagine, is being too busy to sleep, early morning appointments or meetings, and alarms piercing enough to enter my dreams.

[aliciaaudrey.livejournal.com]

I had way too much fun with this. Yes I did. It was it's own reward.

Minutia

Minutia's powers relate entirely her knowing related to small, seemingly trivial bits of information. Generally speaking, this makes Minutia either very interesting or very very boring to talk to at cocktail parties (depending on your tolerance for her suddenly expounding about the fascinating world of tea leaf grading due to a sudden influx of knowledge triggered by an idle comment someone else made in her hearing), strikes fear into the heart of her adversaries (Minutia's cover identity is, naturally, a lawyer, and her immediate grasp of every stupid exception to every point of legal authority she stumbles across is legendary in the field), and, on the rare occasion when you really, really need to know something obscure and nit-picky and nitchy and you absolutely need to know it RIGHT NOW, can really pull your bacon out of the fire. The more odd or obscure something is, the more likely Minutia is to know it, so long as it's true and, further, it has been proven to be true by some other person who is not Minutia herself (which is good, because Minutia would not make a very good scientist, being entirely too easily distracted and prone to wandering off on a tangent.)

Minutia herself is not entirely sure where these nuggets of information come from. Certainly her recollection for every piece of obscure trivia, almost useless fact, or generally irrelevant detail she's ever heard is flawless—assuming its true, at least—and she seeks out more such information out with borderline pathological dedication, but there's no apparent reason why Minutia would know that the electrical system on certain American police cruiser model variants will blow out if subjected to a high speed chase lasting more than fifteen minutes at an average speed of more than eighty miles per hour. Minutia doesn't know that either, yet, but she probably will the next time some petty crook decides to steal a police cruiser and take a hostage on a joy-ride down the Turnpike. And there might possibly be a faint smell of brimstone in the air when Minutia suddenly realizes she knows this, and her eyes might possibly, just for the slightest of moments, glow bright red.

We all know, after all, who that old saying claims is in the details.

NOTE: Minutia must be kept away from Wikipedia at all costs. We once lost contact with her for a solid seventy-two hours because she wanted to look up what actor appeared a movie she had just seen and immediately vanished into a sea of television trivia, comparisons of historical occurrence that all happened on the same calender date, and lengthy treatises on ermine farming practices in Siberia. Any computer she has access to MUST have Wikipedia and all online dictionaries blocked, and further, any legal research she does via LexisNexis or Westlaw must be supervised by her minder, currently under cover as her legal assistant.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

*deploys TV Tropes with an evil laugh*

[ext-2061349.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

USA.
Superpower is teleklutzism. This leads to other people tripping over nothing, slicing themselves open with their knives, stabbing themselves with their sporks, tripping & taking a rake in the face, etc.
The downside is that there are people who are naturally resistant to it, and then it backfires, leading me to... the emergency room.

[lysystratae.livejournal.com]

Last Minute - when things are down to the wire, I can pull damn near anything together and meet the deadline. Sure, it may not be exactly what was originally planned, but it works. On occasion, this has also meant pulling the answer out of thin air (no one has yet to figure out where the data came from, but it's always right) to a perplexing question. Most of the time, it's used when the Halloween costumes aren't finished yet :)

[ccarlet.livejournal.com]

My superpower is being very good at wildlife spotting. No matter how dense the undergrowth or well-camouflaged the animal (or person?) they cannot hide from me for more than a couple seconds. Unfortunately that is the extent of my good eyesight, as I'm farsighted.

Basically I'm a LOTR elf? And I'm in the US!

[l-o-lostshadows.livejournal.com]

My superpower is the ability to pick up any of the books I've stopped in the middle of and remember enough of what's going on to avoid rereading from the beginning. This is really useful, because I'm easily distracted by shiny objects new books.

Weaknesses: Not really much use in a fight.
Strengths: I'm "currently reading" several books by Stephen King and A Feast for Crows, so I might have a heavy object handy to defend myself.

[sirriamnis.livejournal.com]

Yes! I'm in the US.

According to my husband, my superpower is the superhuman ability to put up with ridiculous amounts of bullshit. Which, in the past, allowed me to keep a job in a very toxic environments and keep supporting my family.

Kind of a depressing superpower actually. On the whole, I'd rather have telekinesis.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I can...not turn invisible exactly, but sort of fade into the background. It's not rare for people to come into a room where I'm reading and turn out the lights, because they think the room is empty.

I do also have a black belt, but I figure that sort of training is more or less standard for any hero.

Or were you asking for something fictional?

[bruce cohen (from livejournal.com)]

My superpower is the ability to estimate size by eye. This is very handy for parking a car in a tight spot, finding a suitable container for leftovers, and loading the dishwasher. There's some doubt that it will get me invited to join the Legion of Superheroes.

[sweetzazu.livejournal.com]

My secret power is my imagination. I can imagine a great deal. I can even imagine winning this lovely contest and reading another of your great stories!