Analysis / Required Secondary Powers

This is an in-depth list of all the Required Secondary Powers necessary to be able to use pretty much any commonly seen superpower. It's a grand exercise in documenting things that don't exist in way too much detail, but we just can't help ourselves. Let's go!

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Everything

There are some secondary powers that are required to use any superpower. Pretty much any depiction of superpowers demonstrates No Conservation of Energy. In real life, you've got to get it from somewhere, and it has to go somewhere. Even if you procure these obscene amounts of energy, the human metabolism just doesn't have enough to sustain inherent powers along those lines, either in terms of capacity or the body's ability to handle the strain of these fantastic powers. This is something fiction rarely addresses, and it's a theme you'll see repeated on this page.

The Classics

(or, Everything You Need to Be a Superman Expy)

• Super-Strength: You need:
  • A way to anchor yourself. No matter how strong you are, you cannot defy the laws of physics; strike someone with enough force, and they will move. Even being able to anchor yourself in the ground while you exert yourself is going to be a challenge. There are quite a few ways around it; Superman and others of his ilk use their flying powers to hold themselves in place, while Blob from X-Men explicitly has super-anchoring in addition to his super-impact absorption.^note This leads to an interesting encounter with The Juggernaut, who hit him so hard that he got knocked away, along with the ground to which he anchored.
  • Nigh-Invulnerability, especially in your bones. That level of exertion is going to put some serious strain on your bones and muscles. If you have super-powerful muscles anchored to normal bones, the exertion would pull the muscles off their anchor points (resulting in some rather horrific sprains), if not just snap the bones outright. You'd need Invulnerable Knuckles to punch anything.
  • A way to strengthen the objects you touch. If you try to use your super strength to hold up a plummeting airplane, you'd punch a hole in the plane. This is usually Hand Waved with some sort of "tactile telekinesis", explaining the power as psychic rather than physical.
• Super-Speed: You need:
  • A way around friction. Going that fast will lead to serious Friction Burn. Even if you yourself have Nigh-Invulnerability and can survive it, your suit needs it, too. On the other hand, your footing will have too little friction; imagine how hard cars have it trying to maneuver at high speed, then apply it to your feet. Either you'd need a ridiculously high static friction coefficient to keep your foot from slipping, or you'd need to generate downforce to force your foot to hit the ground harder than your own weight. The various incarnations of The Flash work around this with a thin invisible aura that protects their bodies from air friction (which also allows them to survive in outer space).
  • Super control. Feet striking the ground at super speed would presumably have super impact; you'd push yourself off the ground and at least a few feet into the air. And if the surface you're running on suddenly turns uneven, then you'll either trip or strike down on empty air, essentially ramping off the uneven ground like the world's fastest skateboard (heading for the world's ugliest wipeout). Some characters who explicitly have this ability can take advantage of it to ramp up impossible slopes, like the famous loops of Sonic the Hedgehog.
  • Super stamina. A normal human can run upwards of 15 kilometers per hour, but that uses up stamina faster than walking. It follows that a human with super speed will need increased stamina to maintain supersonic velocity. This is why some characters with super speed are portrayed as needing to eat more and/or sleep more.
  • Nigh-Invulnerability. If you're going fast enough, there's no time for collisions to be resolved quietly. Normally soft substances are going to behave like hard ones. Each blade of grass will become an actual blade, water droplets will become glass shards, snow will become shrapnel. And a lot of dust will get caught in your eyes. It would also be really difficult to pick something up when you're moving that fast. You'd have to extend your invulnerability to people around you if you want to be able to quickly carry them without snapping them in half.
  • Super fast perception. It's no good running through a city at 10,000 kilometers per hour if your surroundings are just as much of a blur to you as they would be to someone riding on your back. You'd have to slow down to something like the speed of a car no matter how much faster you could go, lest you crash into something before even registering that it's there.
  • Of course, if your perceptions are permanently sped up, you're going to perceive normal speed as horrifyingly slow. Imagine all the things you can see all of a sudden, like the refresh rate of a computer monitor. This is going to wear on you mentally, tremendously, if you can't turn off your Time Dissonance somehow.
  • Some sort of Inertial Dampening. That rapid acceleration and deceleration is going to create massive G-forces. (And if you can't stop easily, you're going to find that Inertia Is a Cruel Mistress.) This usually combines with the friction problem, as it's probably impossible to generate enough friction to stop you instantly, and if you did, you'd probably cause a lot of damage. Your internal organs also need protection from inertia, to stop them from splattering out of your body every time you accelerate or decelerate.
  • A way to deal with air displacement. The air would be moving into your body so quickly that it would be like drinking out of a firehose; you wouldn't be able to breathe. There's a reason any vehicle that moves at an appreciable speed has a windshield. The massive air displacement will also cause some serious shock waves that will affect everyone in your path.
  • A way to deal with radiation. Yep — when you go that fast, you expose yourself to gamma rays thanks to the Doppler effect.
  • A way around Time Dilation. This only applies when you approach the speed of light, but most speedsters get to that point eventually. Their authors can't help it.
• Super-Senses: You need a way to apply them selectively. Otherwise, you'd experience Sensory Overload. It's actually quite common for heroes to struggle to develop this secondary power; in Real Life, people who pick up a new sense have a hard time adjusting to it.
• Super-Reflexes: You need some level of Super-Senses and Super-Speed. It's no use being able to react to a bullet if you can't actually detect it coming and move out of the way in time.
• Flight: You need:
  • Some sort of propulsion mechanism. Sure, some heroes get around that with wings, rockets, or other assistance, but if you want to fly like Superman, you have to figure out a way to propel yourself with no effort. Usually, that requires a Reactionless Drive or some form of self-applied telekinetic ability. Even if you do use wings, you have to figure out how to overcome the high mass and awkward shape of the human body, which doesn't lend itself well to natural flight.
  • High-altitude survival powers. Oxygen is thin in the upper atmosphere, so if you want to go up that high, you need a way to breathe. Humans can only go up 8,000 meters above sea level before reaching the "death zone", where prolonged exposure will lead to hypoxia, then unconsciousness, then death. If you want to reach those altitudes without an external breathing apparatus, you'd need breath powers of some sort, either in extracting more oxygen from the surroundings or by just not needing as much oxygen to begin with (which might even allow you to breathe in space). You also have to be cold-resistant (provided you're not wearing heavy clothes) to deal with the colder temperatures at altitude (let alone space).^note The reason higher altitudes make the area colder is because the atmosphere, which traps heat, is thinner.
  • A way to deal with the wind. The faster you go, the more the wind affects you — especially with airborne dust particles suddenly smacking your skin. You'd have to be Nigh-Invulnerable or have regenerative powers. (Storm explicitly has physical resistance to the elements and temperature extremes as part of her Weather Manipulation power set; otherwise, she should look a decade older.) Eye protection is particularly key; notice how all those open-cockpit Ace Pilots wore a set of cool goggles, as it's hard to see otherwise with the wind and the particles whacking you head-on. Also, if you're flying really fast, you have to worry about the heat and the shockwave you create — some means to prevent your violent pass through the atmosphere from replicating The Tunguska Event. It works much like the secondary powers required for Super-Speed, but with the wind being even more violent at altitude.
  • Hair-fixing powers. Hey, if you're going flying that fast without a helmet, you're going to end up with some seriously Messy Hair. Looking good is part of your 100% Heroism Rating!
• Eye Beams: You need super-accuracy. Human eyes naturally make periodic tiny involuntary movements, known as microsaccades. You'd need to be able to stop those movements in order to hit your target and prevent the beams from shifting around and causing collateral damage. The farther away your target, the worse the twitching gets. You also need to find a way to counteract convergence for very close targets; otherwise, the beams will intersect with each other at the point where you're looking. (Unless, of course, you don't want parallel beams.)

Body Manipulation

(or You Look Different, Did You Get a New Haircut?)

• Invisibility: You need:
  • A way to define "yourself". You're invisible: congratulations! But what exactly are "you"? Well, obviously your living cells count as "you". But what about the bacteria living in your digestive tract? What about the dead skin cells and fingernails, which aren't living cells? What about the food you're digesting? What about the dust and dirt that lands on your skin? What about non-cellular bodily fluids, like sweat and saliva? Obviously, if these don't count as "you", then your invisibility isn't particularly effective. But this requires a second required power:
  • A way to make other things invisible. Granted, this is often limited in nature. After all, many works would not consider your clothes part of "you", hence why so many invisible characters need a special suit that can turn invisible with them or become an Invisible Streaker. But to some extent, you're making other things invisible. If you do want to make the things you touch invisible, you'd have to find a way to do this consciously. Otherwise, you'd be forcing things to blink in and out of existence as you touch them, making it easier for people to track you.
  • A way to actually see. The human eye works by collecting light, bending it, and routing it to sensitive cells, which absorb it rather than letting it pass through. But invisibility requires light to pass through. Sight should be impossible if you're invisible, no matter how you're doing it. So you'd need a way to Hand Wave that — some other way for the brain to process what's happening around you. Michio Kaku of Sci-Fi Science proposed a form-fitting suit that bends surrounding light as the most plausible way to actually become invisible, but even that one has small eyeholes that would make your eyes visible — they wouldn't be easily noticed, but they'd be there.

One way around all of this is to employ a Perception Filter — people can see you, but they just ignore you. The upside is that it automatically also foils hearing and smell. The downside is that it requires its own passel of secondary powers with respect to mental manipulation, and it also tends not to work on automation.

• Rubber Man: You need super organs. Especially a super heart — the human heart has to be able to pump hard enough to distribute blood throughout your body, and if you've made your extremities ten times longer, that forces the heart to pump harder. You'd also need super coordination, given that most humans are not used to wandering around with super-long limbs. And there are also all the issues behind shapeshifting that are also on this page. And finally, you'd need a suit that can stretch with you; otherwise, it would be pretty uncomfortable and embarrassing.
• Shapeshifting: You need:
  • Photographic Memory. How, exactly, are you going to visualize every detail of your target? External detail is important in itself — after all, without it your enemies can easily Spot the Imposter. But even internal detail is also important; if you're going to transform into a living being, be it another person or an animal, you've got to figure out the internal structure of your target just to be able to function. If you make a single mistake, that can be fatal — as it would be in Real Life. And that's without getting into being able to accurately impersonate somebody; depending on how long you're going, you'd have to be the most dedicated Method Actor alive.
  • A way to deal with Shapeshifter Baggage. If you're transforming into something more massive than you were before, where does the extra mass come from? If your target is less massive, where does the extra mass go? Or would you stay the same weight regardless of whether you shifted into a mouse or a Tyrannosaurus Rex? That presents its own set of limitations.
  • A way to maintain your shapeshifted state. If you have to focus hard to prevent a Glamour Failure, that can be exhausting. If you don't have to focus, you risk permanent Shapeshifter Mode Lock. And if you've spent all this energy replicating the internal structure of an animal, including the brain, how the heck are you going to going to continue to think like a human? Your powers would need some sort of exception for that.
  • A way to deal with your clothes. Works usually give this a lot of thought; either Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing, or you have a Technically Naked Shapeshifter.
  • A way to know how your target thinks, acts, etc. The last thing you want to do is let everyone know that you replaced your target with yourself, meaning having the knowledge of your target's idiosyncrasies along with some acting skills under your belt is a must.
  • In regards to Animorphism, you also need to familiarize yourself with the various different anatomies of the animals you're turning into and their movement controls, or it becomes a How Do I Shot Web? scenario. Turning into a hawk isn't as cool if you don't know how to fly. Also, if cold-blooded animals such as reptiles, amphibians or fish are part of the shifter list, you need to find ways to regulate your temperatures if you don't want to be disabled by cold weather.
• Sizeshifting: In addition to all the issues brought up by Shapeshifting and Rubber Manhood, you'd need:
  • Super-Strength. There's no other way around the Square-Cube Law — if you grow twice as tall, your strength quadruples, but your weight octuples. To reach truly gigantic sizes and still be able to support your own weight, you'd need your strength to increase at least as much as your weight, or to be superhumanly strong to begin with. You'd also have to deal with the Rubber Man problem of your heart being able to pump hard enough to reach extremities that are twice as far away from it as they were before, though that's also a function of strength — the strength of the heart muscle.
  • A way to regulate internal body temperature. At small sizes, you'd risk freezing to death. At large sizes, you'd risk death from heatstroke. This is another consequence of the Square-Cube Law; if you were twice as big, you'd be eight times the heat-generating mass, but only have four times the surface area to expel the heat.
  • A way to breathe at extreme sizes. Get too big, and you'd be stuck in a higher-altitude layer of thinner oxygen, with a body that needs that much more oxygen to circulate through the body. Get too small, and you might not even be able to fit an oxygen molecule into your body. You'll definitely need some kind of exotic survival mechanism if you want to get small enough to do a "Fantastic Voyage" Plot.

Defense, Immunity, and Healing

(or, Powers That Come in Handy When Opponents Actually Fight Back)

• Force Fields: These are really weird. They're usually selectively permeable; for instance, sound can usually pass through easily, as can oxygen (hence how you can breathe in those things), but not always solid or liquid matter. If you're using one underwater, where are you extracting the oxygen to be able to breathe? If light can pass through them, why can't a Slow Laser? But the bigger question is: when the force field blocks something, how is the energy distributed? It has to go somewhere, but it can't actually move the force field (otherwise, it would defeat the purpose). With no solid structure to distribute or store the energy, you're looking at something that has No Conservation of Energy, which should be damn near impenetrable. But that doesn't happen very often, given that a hard enough strike can break most force fields. (In some cases, a character exerting a lot of effort to generate a force field suffers a Psychic Nosebleed, implying that it's braced against their brain.)
• Healing Factor: You need:
  • Superhuman pain tolerance. Without it, you might be able to survive something no one else could, but you'd be unconscious from the crippling pain for a few minutes while your healing factor worked. Certainly, it's more useful than the alternative, and a few characters indeed have a healing factor that works like this, but it's rarely seen because it would be pretty much impractical for combat.
  • Super stamina, or at least some sort of fantastic outside energy source. Healing takes energy, and accelerated and intensive healing takes a lot of energy.
  • A way to generate cellular mass. It's a similar problem to Shapeshifter Baggage; if you want super healing, you need to get some body mass from somewhere, especially if you're trying to regrow missing limbs or organs. Cells can't generate this much mass on their own; the number of times they can divide is bound by the Hayflick limit, beyond which organs cannot replace dying cells. If you don't ignore the limit, your healing factor is basically Cast from Lifespan.
  • A way to fight infection and foreign substances. Having your guts spilled all over the floor would open the door to all sorts of germs, viruses, and dust to enter your body and cause havoc. There's a reason hospitals strive for perfect sterility. But if you try to extend the healing factor to produce antibodies at an accelerated rate, you'd need a way to prevent cytokine storms from destroying your body. And you'd need a way for the healing factor to recognize a genetic defect, like cancer, and attack it rather than replicate it (otherwise, you'd end up like Deadpool, whose Healing Factor simultaneously spreads and cures his cancer and creates so much damage that he's got massive scarring).
  • Some sort of Morphic Resonance. After all, if you break a bone, you need to set it so that it heals properly; your healing factor needs to do this without healing you incorrectly. In general, your healing factor needs to visualize how your body is supposed to look and fix it aiming for that specific point. (Again, if it doesn't, you get Deadpool.) This includes being able to recognize the bits of your body that aren't your body, like the microorganisms in your gut that are essential to your survival — but at the same time fighting the harmful external entities. If you're missing entire organs, your healing factor would need to essentially create stem cells; otherwise, it will have no existing cells to copy. (But if it can do that, you can regenerate From a Single Cell, which is pretty cool.)
• Immortality: First, you'd need to define how you're immortal. After all, you could have Age Without Youth, or immortality without invulnerability, or Resurrective Immortality. Each of these have their own limitations which bring up interesting questions. Like, can you still reproduce? The human ovaries have a finite number of eggs which cannot be replenished; if you want to bear children when you're Really 700 Years Old, you'd have to fix that. Or, can you still get cancer? Since cancer is essentially an erroneous mutation, if you're immortal, you're going to get it eventually (even if it can't, or won't necessarily, kill you). But the biggest and most obvious required secondary power for immortality is mental fortitude. After all, Who Wants to Live Forever? There are all sorts of consequences that your powers can deal with, but not your mind.
• Intangibility: You need:
  • A way to deal with gravity. If Earth's gravity doesn't apply to you, you're effectively unmoored from a planet whizzing around the Sun and hurtling through the Universe at a frankly irresponsible velocity, and the entire planet will viciously arc out from underneath you. If Earth's gravity does apply to you (but you're still intangible), then you need a way not to plummet right through the Earth's surface. This usually requires some control over gravity or flight-related power.
  • A way to interact with the air. If you can't, then you can't breathe, hear, or speak. Of course, you could be Made of Air, but in that case you can be trapped in a glass jar, like a fart.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: You can't keep it on all the time. Even if your invulnerability is limited to survival and not actually being able to withstand an attack, there are some applications where your body needs to be "vulnerable"; otherwise, things like injections, surgeries, even possibly more mundane things like eating would be impossible. One way around this is to be only Nigh-Invulnerable on the skin, like Luke Cage. Another is to also not require nutrition and to be so invulnerable as not to need injections or surgery.

Elemental Powers

(or, Thank Goodness for the Periodic Table)

• Cryokinesis and Pyrokinesis: Broadly speaking, they both involve manipulation of heat energy and have very similar required secondary powers, including:
  • A way to survive the extreme temperatures. It's quite obvious; you don't want to be affected by your own fire or ice powers. It's particularly problematic for fire users who generate it from within their own body, implying some sort of modification.
  • A way to hold the laws of physics in abeyance. Either you'd have to create or destroy energy (violating the Law of Conservation of Energy), or you'd have to channel the energy around (decreasing entropy, violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics). The cleanest way to sidestep the issue is to base the power on moving heat energy from one place to another, which does comply with physics but creates obvious limitations (although it should allow you to have both fire and ice powers).
  • A way around Elemental Baggage. To make ice, you need moisture. There is some in the air and in your breath, but probably not enough to do anything useful. It also implies some form of aquakinesis. For fire, you're looking at either the body modification to be able to safely expel it, or walking around with a lighter to try and create it (which might mean you can control it, but not that you're immune to it, so be careful).
• Green Thumb: Can you grow poisonous plants? Similar to a Poisonous Person, you better be immune to the poison, because there are some lethal effects of poisonous plants just from the mere exposure. You would also have to be really familiar with the types of plants you’re working with, or something might backfire. And if you are trying to make plants grow in a dry desert or break out of concrete, you better have a lot of energy to make the plants be able to grow and sustain themselves for any offensive prowess. Oh, and hopefully you don't have any pollen allergies (though, sneezing and eye irritation aren't nearly as bad as some of the other side effects of not having these secondary powers).
• Physical Element Powers: These would encompass things that are pretty easy to find (Dishing Out Dirt, Making a Splash, Green Thumb, Extra-ore-dinary, Blow You Away, etc.). However, they're still subject to Elemental Baggage — you'd have to pull them out of somewhere, or carry them around. At least you don't have to deal with the energy disparities the fire and ice manipulators do.
• Lightning Powers: Unfortunately, one of the coolest powers is a lot more difficult than pointing your finger and watching it go. If you want to splice together a pet Pikachu (For Science!, of course), you'd need:
  • A way to direct it. Electricity has a tendency to take the path of least resistance, and all other paths to a lesser degree. Hitting your target without inundating everything around it with current would require a great deal of setup, meticulous planning, understanding of electrodynamics, and several hours of linear algebra. (Is being Good with Numbers a superpower? Because if it is, that's a required secondary power.) The only way around that would be an ability to manipulate electrons to move toward their target and nothing else, or to recreate a lightning rod, which works by brandishing a pointy object with a neutron at the tip, making it the most likely thing for the moving electron to hit.
  • A stupefying amount of energy. Again, it helps to have No Conservation of Energy. To channel a lightning bolt, you need to break down the air between it and the target — and to do that without leaking electrical pressure into your surroundings, you need a difference of 3 million volts per meter. And since the voltage is steadily draining from your end, you'll need a lot of energy just to sustain that difference.
  • Resistance to electricity. To strike something with a sustained arc of electricity (as opposed to a natural lightning flash, which lasts for a split-second), you'd have to complete and hold a circuit that's pumping vast amounts of current through your target, the air leading to it, the ground leading to it, and you. You'll need to be immune to your own powers. You could, in theory, channel the lightning remotely, making it a more general manipulation of electricity, but then you wouldn't see a cool lightning bolt — all you'd get is a bad guy violently spasming until his insides boil out through his skin. (Not that it can't be awesome; it's just not what most writers are looking for.)
  • Resistance to heat, blindness, and loud noises. A sustained arc generates an amount of radiant heat that's difficult to even fathom, let alone defend. It also generates a blinding light and a massive thunderclap; the latter would be strong enough to generate a 120-decibel shockwave (about the volume of a rock concert), capable of shattering glass and causing permanent hearing damage. You'd better be resistant to that, and be willing to share your resistance to any poor bystanders.
• Sonic Powers: You'd need Steel Ear Drums (so that you wouldn't be affected by your own powers), super organs (that can produce such sounds without being affected by them), and super focus powers (to prevent the sound from just rattling off in every direction). This is especially true if you're underwater, since sound travels better through water than air. You'd also need an indestructible skeleton, since your voice reverberates throughout your body whenever you talk^note Every action has an equal and opposite reaction after all., so having noise equivalent to an explosion going through your whole body is not going to be pretty.

Psychic Powers

(or, When You Use Your Head)

• Telekinesis: If you are moving objects with your mind, you have better having some really good focus or you might just drop things as soon as you get distracted. You also need to be a highly capable multitasker if you are moving more than one object at once.
• Telepathy: Most people’s minds are not as organized as media would have it be. People will be thinking many things at once and can be victim to Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!. You will need to sort out the relevant information from all the other things in a person’s mind. There is also the matter of trust, as a mind is a very personal space and invading upon it can make many people wary.

Time and Space

(or, Good Reasons to Call the Doctor)

• Time Travel: While many time travelers are ordinary people who just happen to have a super-cool Time Machine, many of the things they may need to prevent themselves from going crazy can essentially be superpowers. Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory is a superpower; it allows you to keep track of what's changed from one timeline to the next, even when no one else can. Immunity to Temporal Paradoxes is a superpower; you can prevent yourself from being Ret-Gone. Recognition of Temporal Mutability can be a superpower; depending on how time travel works, you might be able to tell whether or not a given change is going to have wide-ranging consequences. Even being an important figure to history can be a superpower, in the sense that the timestream itself will act to preserve your existence, or at least your impact on it (a power which, sadly, seems only to work if you're Hitler). And this is before all the mental resilience you need to be a time traveler, dealing with such gripping issues as The Time Traveler's Dilemma to such mundane issues as jet lag (time zones are a thing!) and Time-Travel Tense Trouble. If your time travel mechanism works like Teleportation, that has its own range of required secondary powers that we'll get to in a little bit. (If you were a time traveler, you'd have seen that coming.) Furthermore, the Earth moves at roughly 30 kilometres per second relative to the Sun, the Sun and everything orbiting it moves hundreds of kilometres per second relative to the galactic core of the Milky Way, and the Earth itself rotates at hundreds of metres per second at the equator, but not all parts of the Earth rotate equally fast. A person on Earth doesn´t notice as they move along with Earth and the point on it they are at and maintain their velocity, but a time traveller would have to also move through space just to keep up with their destination.
• Time Freezing: If time were stopped, everything else stops, too — including light, so you wouldn't be able to see. Indeed, you shouldn't even be able to breathe or move if you freeze time, because that requires air displacement, and the air will not move out of your way. The way around this is with the "time bubble", which essentially localizes the effect so that you can still interact with everything around you, but this still doesn't solve the light problem because the light wouldn't be able to penetrate the bubble.^note Indeed, Larry Niven's novella ARM explored the consequences of this — the photons would collect on the outside of the bubble, and when time restarts again, all of the photons would start moving again at once, creating a blinding flash. This allowed an ordinary flashlight to be used as a deadly weapon. If you try to claim that time around you hasn't stopped but just started moving very slowly, you wind up with all the problems of Super-Speed. And if it were possible to "penetrate" the bubble, things would start acting strangely from the forced change in velocity, including strange visuals from light blueshifting or redshifting as it transitions from one side to another.
• Teleportation: You need:
  • A way to deal with air displacement. It's not total vacuum you're going to on the other end; you have to move all that air out of the way. How exactly does that happen? You might need to deal with Friction Burn, or you might cause a sonic boom.^note Indeed, X-Men's Nightcrawler's iconic "BAMF" sound effect is explained as the result of violent air displacement. You also have to avoid decompression sickness (essentially the result of Telefragging the air) and find out how to safely allow the air to rush in to the vacuum you've left behind at your departure point.
  • Super accuracy. You need to make sure that your landing point is safe, to avoid Telefragging. You may also need to account for not just the curvature of the Earth, not just the rotation of the Earth, not even just the orbit of the Earth, but the path of the entire Solar System as it hurtles through space. In other words, you need to work out your exact destination by reference to all of Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. (This is also a problem for time travelers if their Time Machine doesn't compensate for it.)
  • To know what to take with you and how much of it to take. While many teleporters simply transport whatever's in the teleporter booth, you've got a superpower. So do your clothes teleport with you? It's the same analysis as with respect to invisibility — you need to account for your clothes, other objects you may be holding, your gut flora, dead skin cells, the works. There's also anything or anyone else in the vicinity of your teleportation radius. Do you take that water you're swimming in with you? What about the animals and bacteria in that water? If so, do you take all of them or leave some behind?

Miscellaneous

(or, Heart Needs More Powers To Be Awesome)

• Self-Duplication: You need:
  • A way for your duplicates to tell each other apart from the original. Twice learned the hard way that if you don't have this power, then things are going to get ugly when you start arguing over which one of you is the original.
  • A means of quickly replenishing whatever it is you use to make the duplicates, especially if it comes from your body (presuming that you are "using" something). As Billy Numerous can attest to, spreading yourself too thin will put you in a bind when it counts.
  • A means of staying in touch with one another. You can land yourself somewhere pretty deep if one of your clones knows something important and you have no way of getting in touch with them to repeat it.
  • A way to maintain the integrity of your duplicates. If you plan to use them as a distraction, then what's the point if they can't even last more than one or two hits?

...Boy, sure starting to feel Made of Plasticine now, aren't you?

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