Keystone Superpower

Super-Speed, Flight, and Super-Strength, all granted at once to this semi-aquatic egg-laying mammal of action.

"I have the power to have all the powers I want."

—Eric Cartman, South Park

This is a superpower that gives one access to multiple distinct superpowers. It is not a power that is applied in unconventional ways but rather, a power that grants access to several separate powers, despite most others being limited to comparatively fewer or even just one ability.

To elaborate, while counting as a single power, technique, or ability, this ability is the door to many separate powers. For example, having the Power Copying ability allows Bob to access many other powers, despite him technically only having the single ability innately.

Note that the ability doesn't necessarily have to be a single power or artifact to fit this trope. It can be more than one as long as it technically counts as one ability (for example, Psychic Powers) all the while granting many distinct or separate powers.

In a setting where One Person, One Power is the rule, this can be used to give The Protagonist or The Antagonist the power to stand above the rest of the cast without breaking the rules of the series. Combo Platter Powers and All Your Powers Combined is usually the result.

Related to and common ways of doing it:

• Item Caddy / Material Mimicry: Your power functions differently depending on what object you use it with.
• Power Copying: Copy someone's power via a single power absorption ability.
• Power Parasite: Steal someone's power.
• Self-Made Superpowers: A mad scientist's only power is their intelligence. They use it to gather many others.
• Summon Magic: You can bring forth one of multiple different beings, each with their own abilities.

Compare Swiss-Army Superpower, which is one single superpower used in different applications for a variety of different effects, as opposed to this trope, which is an ability that grants an individual access to multiple separate and distinct abilities. Contrast Super-Empowering, a.k.a the ability to give other people one or more abilities.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bleach:
  • Aaroniero Arruruerie has absorbed the power of 33,650 Hollows including Metastacia and, through it, the shinigami Kaien Shiba's Shikai, and all via his Hollow ability "Glotoneria". It allows him to absorb the powers and abilities of dead Hollows without limit, unlike other Hollows who can only absorb power (and not unique abilities) up to a certain limit.
  • Filler villain Oko Yushima can absorb and reproduce any attack with just his Shikai. Other shinigami are limited to only a few Shikai abilities based on a common theme.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Gaining a Stand, in many cases, grants Super-Strength (or at least strength surpassing the average human) to their user via an apparition that can fight for them, on top of the Stand's special power. A good example is Crazy Diamond, which is supernaturally strong and fast while also giving Josuke healing powers.
• My Hero Academia:
  • The infamous Big Bad All For One's eponymous Quirk allows him to steal the Quirks of others for his own use. After living for more than a century, he has gathered countless Quirks such as Impact Recoil, Air Walk, and Air Cannon that he combines to devastating effect.
  • One For All is eventually revealed to allow access to this when Midoriya spontaneously manifests the Quirk:Blackwhip, which gives him the ability to shoot black tendrils from his hands. The vestige of one of his predecessors, Daigoro Banjo, tells him that the Quirks of all the previous users have been absorbed by One For All and have been empowered by its Stockpiling mechanism, and now Midoriya will have to master all of them in addition to his Super-Strength and Super-Speed.
• Naruto:
  • The Sharingan of the Uchiha Clan has only two abilities. One of the abilities "Eye of Insight" grants the ability to copy any technique among other things.
  • Rinnegan allows the user to master all five elements ( an exceptionally rare ability) as well as the power to learn any technique in a short time.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Rimuru Tempest possesses the skills Predator, allowing him to copy the abilities and transform into any creature he eats, Great Sage, a nigh-omniscient guide that can tell him almost anything about the world, and Pain Nullification, which allows him to Feel No Pain. Combined, it gives him the ability to develop endlessly.
  • There are a host of other variants on power-copying or -taking skills which show up owned by other characters. There's also one character with a skill granting the ability to simply invent and claim any skill below a certain evolution level he can imagine and define, allowing him to start out with one for near-immunity to everybody else's skills.

Comic Books

• Batman: Joker's Last Laugh features the mutant Multi-Man, whose "core" superpower is the ability to resurrect after death. Every time he does, though, he gains a new superhuman ability. It's definitely a case of Blessed with Suck, as both the villains and heroes repeatedly kill Multi-Man (which still hurts) until he's revived with a power useful to their plans.
• Doom Patrol: The Quiz, a member of the Brotherhood of Dada, has the power of having every power you haven't thought of. This means a typical fight against the Quiz involves naming a bunch of powers, only to be defeated by an obscure power that wasn't named (in one appearance, this unnamed power was the ability to create escape-proof spirit jars).
• Lanfeust: Everyone in the world of Troy possesses a single power of varying usefulness (boil and freeze water, induce Potty Failure, heal any wound at night, fart from the ears...). Lanfeust (who can melt metal by looking at it) discovers that he can use any power he can imagine if he's in contact with a piece of ivory from the legendary Magohamoth, but so can the Big Bad Thanos (who can teleport to any place he's ever seen).
• Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): During the Bad Guys miniseries, Doctor Starline gets ahold of several Power Cores, objects that can grant the user temporary use of either Flight, Super-Strength, or Super-Speed. Starline proceeds to merge several cores together into a glove-mounted device called a Tricore, which enables him to use any of those abilities at will.
• Vixen: Vixen's Tantu totem allows her to mimic the abilities of animals. This translates into flight, breathing underwater, poisoning someone with her touch, enhanced strength, enhanced speed, and even the ability to regenerate from a few cells, among other things.
• X-Men:
  • David Haller aka Legion has the ability to create spontaneous mutations, granting him a virtually limitless number of mutant abilities. He has over 200 "Omega Level Mutations" and more are being created constantly. For comparison, about a dozen omega-level mutants are known to exist.
  • Rogue has Power Copying and can absorb the powers, memories, and skills of any person she touches. The length of time for which she has access to these abilities is directly proportional to the length of time she touches the person, something she tries to avoid seeing as she's technically draining the life energy of everyone she touches, not just copying their abilities, and therefore can outright kill someone if she's not careful. Her trademark super-strength and flight that she's had since her debut she actually got from permanently absorbing the abilities of Ms. Marvel.

Fan Works

• Imaginary Seas: Percy's Noble Phantasm, Poseidon Asphalios: An Ocean of Blessings for the Most Beloved, grants him access to every skill used by a child of Poseidon but better by virtue of raw Parental Favoritism as Poseidon's favorite son. This Noble Phantasm also grants him access to Poseidon's own Noble Phantasms, including the armor that makes him invincible so long as he's by the ocean and the trident that Poseidon uses to exert his Authorities over earth and sea. His skill, Savior of Olympus, also gives him the right to use any Mysteries of Ancient Greece and Rome due to saving the Greco-Roman Pantheon time and again.

Films — Animation

• The Incredibles: Jack-Jack Parr seems to have Combo Platter Powers such as Eye Beams, Intangibility, self-duplication and Voluntary Shapeshifting. In the second film, Edna Mode identifies Jack-Jack as a "polymorph" to explain his wide variety of powers; Shapeshifting is his true power, but he can shapeshift at a molecular level, letting him rewrite his own genetics to let him have whatever power he wants.

Films — Live-Action

• In the X-Men Film Series, like her comic book version, Rogue has the ability to drain a person's energy by touching them. Absorbing a mutant's energy allows her to temporarily take on their power.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: En Sabah Nur has the mutant power to Body Surf, in which he will acquire the powers of his host body along with the powers of any previous host bodies he had. By the present day, this has given him a wide armada of powers such as Mind over Matter, Super-Empowering, teleportation, technopathy, Healing Factor, force field generation, and presumably other powers as well. Throughout the film, he also seeks the body of Professor X to acquire his telepathy.

Literature

• In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, most Allomancers are limited to a single expression of Allomantic power, allowing them to ingest and "burn" one specific metal to gain the associated effect. These Allomancers are called Mistings. There are also the much rarer Mistborn, who can burn every metal and use all the powers. In addition, Feruchemists can use metal as a storage medium for various attributes, granting a variety of different enhancements at the cost of spending time beforehand diminished in the same way (for example, spending some time physically weak, storing away the excess stregnth to be called upon later). The Lord Ruler is both a Mistborn and a Feruchemist, and combining the two allows him to access an infinite supply of Feruchemical attributes without having to spend any time weak. This makes him easily the most powerful individual in the setting, and a serious contender for the strongest in The Cosmere, the wider universe that Mistborn takes place in.
• In Worm , the Trump power category refers to Meta Powers, several of which fit this trope:
  • Eidolon, the most powerful parahuman in the world, has the primary ability to use Super-Empowering on himself. He can't control exactly what powers he gets, only whether to keep his current powers or discard one of them to let a new one manifest in its place, but it'll always be something relevant to whatever task he has currently set himself. He normally uses three powers at a time; drawing upon any more than that causes them to get individually weaker.
  • Glaistig Uaine is a somewhat roundabout example of this trope. She can drain the essence of recently deceased parahumans (or living parahumans, which kills them). She can then conjure ghostly figures which look like her claimed victims, complete with the powers they had in life, which are fully under her control. Like Eidolon, she can only have up to three ghosts active before their powers start to weaken. Near the end of the story she claims Eidolon, allowing her to wield three powers from him plus another two ghosts at full strength.
  • Tohu, one of the Endbringers, can copy the powers of up to three capes at a time. One of her three heads will change to resemble the cape she's copying. She copied Eidolon in her first appearance, allowing her to use five powers. In the final battle, she copied Eidolon and Glaistig Uaine after she had claimed Eidolon; this gave Tohu two copies of Eidolon's power plus two more of Glaistig's ghosts, with one more slot left over for a third copied cape, for a total of nine powers.
  • Grue, after his Second Trigger, gains the ability to partially drain the powers of anyone in his smoke, making them weaker while letting him use a similarly weakened version of their power.

Live-Action TV

• The Flash: Clifford DeVoe/The Thinker possesses Super-Intelligence which enables him create a Cool Chair capable of stealing bodies and power absorption. He spends a good portion of the season hunting down metahumans he created and either stealing their powers or their bodies with the powers in them. By the end of Season Four, he's basically All Your Powers Combined of all the Villain Of The Weeks that Team Flash faced and becomes a nigh-Invincible Villain.
• Heroes: Everyone is restricted to only a single power. However...
  • Arthur Petrelli, can absorb powers from any Evo. By absorbing the powers of his son, who possessed Power Copying at the time, he gains a vast arsenal of Evo abilities.
  • Peter Petrelli, Arthur's son, has Power Copying, granting him the power of any Evo near him, permanently. This was later downgraded to a Discard and Draw level, however, thereby restricting him to one power at a time.
  • Gabriel Gray, a.k.a. Sylar, has Intuitive Aptitude, allowing him to understand how another person's power works by studying their brain and become an Instant Expert with it.
  • The comic tie-in introduces Linda Tavara, who can absorb people's life force. If that life-force comes from an Evo, she gains their ability.
  • Downplayed with Monica Dawson. She has adoptive muscle memory, which doesn't give her additional Evo abilities, but does give her the ability to gain any ordinary skill just by watching a regular person do something once.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Decade: Decade's primary power is to shapeshift into any other main Kamen Rider, letting him use all of their powers (sometimes better than the original user). Diend has the similar main power to summon clones of up to three other Riders, which lets him use their powers by proxy.
  • Kamen Rider Fourze: The Cosmic Switch only takes up one of the four slots on Fourze's belt, but adds a touchscreen to his chest which he can use to access any of his thirty-nine other superpowers and mix them with the power he's actually placed in that slot.
  • Kamen Rider Drive: Drive Type Tridoron can replicate the powers of three other Shift Cars at once, grouped into seven themed sets.
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: The final post-series movie sees Kamen Rider Genm exploit the video game-based nature of powers in the series by giving himself the powers of a Game Maker game, which he can then use to make up whatever new powers he wants.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O: Similar to Kamen Rider Decade before him, Zi-O initially relies on collecting the powers of past Riders as "Ridewatches" which grant him auxillary armour with some of their abilities. His first Mid-Season Upgrade, the Decade Ridewatch, not only grants him a wide array of Finishing Moves themed on past Riders, the Ridewatch itself has a Ridewatch slot and its own Partial Transformation/Upgrade Artifact ability, allowing it to mimic the Mid-Season Upgrade forms of other Riders and effectively doubling Zi-O's number of available powersets.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One: Kamen Rider Thouser has the Power Copying variety, which he uses to amass all of the combined abilities of every other Rider over the course of about a dozen episodes. Thouser later uses nine of the powers he copied to produce the Rampage Vulcan Progrise Key, which can select from three different modes each with three different powers.
  • Kamen Rider Geats: Each of the Riders has a belt with two slots for different superpower-granting buckles. Fever Slot, the show's first major upgrade, is a slot machine which grants a random one of the six main buckles that came before it.

Tabletop Games

• Champions has several frameworks (metapowers) that give the owner the ability to use a variety of other superpowers.
  • Variable Power Pools have a pool of points that can be spent to allow the owner to temporarily use a wide variety of superpowers. Most of them have restrictions on when and how they can be used, but the Cosmic Power Pool variant allows the user to use any allowed power at any time.
  • Multipowers have a list of specific powers that can be used. As long as the total number of points is not exceeded, it's possible to use more than one power at a time.
  • Elemental Controls give the user the benefit of a variety of powers, all usable at the same time and at a significant discount in cost, as long as all of the powers are related under a common theme.
• DC Heroes has several powers that each give the use of multiple other powers.
  • The Sorcery Power allows the user to use any other superpower in the game, with some hefty restrictions.
  • The Omni-Power ability allows the user to emulate any other superpower, but each time they do so they must pay the same number of Hero Points as is required to buy the power at base value.
• Mekton has Energy Pools, which can emulate Energy Melee Weapons, Beam Weapons, and Reactive Shields all in one item. Most Energy Pools have a preset array of forms they can use, but for a sufficient point investment they can gain a portfolio size of infinity, letting them take on as many different forms as the user wants.
• Mutants & Masterminds:
  • In 1E, there were several powers, such as Cosmic Powers that have a bundle of powers that can be bundled together. There are also Secondary Effect Power Stunts that are similar to alternate effects/powers in later editions, in being cheaper, but only being able to be used in replacement of the base power. They were all some more limited in what they could replace.
  • In 2E and 3E, any Power can be made into an "Array" through the use of Alternate Powers/Effects, which lets you assign multiple Powers under the same base power to reduce the cost in Power Points. The trade-off is that you can only use one specific Power in your Array per turn, and because all such items are considered to be part of the same power, nullifying or weakening one removes or weakens all of them. To use an example suggested by the Hero's Handbook, "Magnetism" is a Control power that, by itself, gives a ranged Blast attack. It can be made into an Array with Move Object so long as the objects moved are metal in nature.
• Villains & Vigilantes: The Weather Control ability allows the owner to use several other powers by summoning a specific type of weather: Darkness (clouds), Lightning (thunderstorm), Vibratory (tornado), Sonics (hurricane), Ice Powers (snow/blizzard).
• Changeling: The Lost: Fetches are normally only physical copies of the Changelings they're created to replace, but those with the "Mimic Contract" ability can also duplicate any of their Changelings' supernatural powers as long as they're nearby.

Video Games

• Castlevania:
  • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: Soma Cruz has the ability to steal the souls of the demons he kills and copy their abilities. This means that he's potentially capable of using the powers of anything in the castle, even though he technically has only one ability. Returns in the sequel Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow.
  • In a similar vein, Shanoa from Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia can only absorb glyphs by herself, but those glyphs grant her various abilities. It's essentially a copy of Soma's powers, but in her case, it is caused by magical symbols tattooed on her body rather than have it naturally. She can also steal them from demons while they're still alive.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: A master of the Thu'um can bend reality with a shout. How reality gets bent depends on the actual words being shouted, so gaining new powers is as simple as expanding one's vocabulary.
• Fate/Grand Order: Imperial Privilege grants the user the ability to get any skill they have a basis in. Since all roads lead to Rome in ancient times and all sorts of trades took place there, and the Emperor is Rome itself, Romulus can have any skill he wants. Nero Claudius Caesar (Saber) who tried nearly everything in life, can use this skill too.
• In Kingdom Hearts, possessing a Keyblade gives access to a Cool Sword with Absurd Cutting Power, but you also gain access to powerful magic ranging from Playing with Fire to Time Master. Keyblades are also revealed to be Morph Weapons that can transform into any number of forms, including cannons, hoverbikes, and drills.
• Mega Man:
  • The eponymous character has the ability to copy the signature weapon of every Robot Master he defeats through his Variable Weapons System. The comic book and TV show depicted him copying the weapons of other robots with a simple touch.
  • Other iterations in the franchise did this in a roundabout matter. In Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force, Mega Man would be able to use special chips or cards that utilize the weapons of the viruses they fight. They can also transform into forms imitating the powers of a certain individual, be it another NetNavi or a Satellite Admin.
  • In Mega Man ZX, Vent/Aile will gain the powers of the Four Guardians by collecting the Biometals styled after them. In the sequel, Model A allows Grey and Ashe to completely transform into the bosses they defeat to gain all their moves.
• Mortal Kombat: Shujinko was granted the power to copy any special move or fighting style he sees by the Dragon King Onaga.
• Main characters from the Persona series have had the “Wild Card” ability in every game since Persona 3. Most persona users in the game have access to only one persona they can use in battle that reflects their hidden or true self they may not reveal in public. Personas therefore follow a motif related to the character and have abilities in line with that motif like Shock and Awe, An Ice Person, Playing with Fire, etc. The main character however has access to any standard persona, can stock up to 12 personas at one time to use interchangeably, and with a bit of assistance can combine their powers by fusing them together. A bit of Fridge Brilliance since the main character is also the player character and is portrayed as an Every Man Audience Surrogate for the player to project themselves onto, thereby making their "true self" dependent on the player.
  • In Persona 5 it is a big deal when you find out that Goro Akechi has two distinct personas with separate abilities and appearances, emphasizing how unique the player character's ability is in-universe.
• In The World Ends with You what makes the protagonist, Neku, special is that he can use any pin (in this setting, fashion has abstract effects on the world, and pins basically grant powers) he finds. By comparison, most characters (including your partners) only get one pin and a specific ability (for example, Shiki has telekinesis that's limited to animating her stuffed toy to serve as an Attack Animal).

Visual Novels

• Fate/stay night: Heroic spirits are limited to two or three Noble Phantasms. Normally anyway.
  • Gilgamesh has the Gate of Babylon, one of his three Noble Phantasms that grants him access to a Hyperspace Arsenal. It contains "the origin of human wisdom" and thus anything that can be created with human wisdom is contained within. Being the first hero, it also contains every prototype of all Noble Phantasms as all subsequent weapons of legendary heroes came from his treasury after its contents were scattered all over the world following his death.
  • Emiya Shirou, can only use projection magecraft properly. But thanks to this, he can copy the Noble Phantasm of every hero he encounters, granting him their skills alongside it. He can also make the projections have the same power as the original for one attack, a technique called Broken Phantasm. By Shirou's own admission, he could never stand up to a Servant like Saber who dedicated themselves to one weapon even with this power. But his power to project, combined with his Reality Marble Unlimited Blade Works, is the perfect counter to Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon, as demonstrated in the Unlimited Blade Works route.
  • Archer being a future version of Emiya Shirou, can do this as well but is far better at it.

Webcomics

• Grrl Power:
  • Varia's "gestalt" power isn't quite Power Copying, but she does gain powers related to those she's touching, such as magnetism from Jiggawatt or cryokinesis from Heatwave.
  • For Whom the Death Tolls initially appears to have a bunch of powers, but Sydney figures out he's actually got just the one, Nemesis, which gives him whatever power he needs to counter whatever's being thrown at him. The heroes beat him by hitting him with all their powers at once.
  • Hench Wench's power is copying the powers of any supervillain that hires her - and combining them, with a serious dose of Instant Expert.

Western Animation

• Ben 10: Ben only has the Omnitrix/Ultimatrix, which enables him to shape-shift into any alien recorded in its database. Each alien has powers ranging from Super-Intelligence to outright Reality Warping.
• On Jackie Chan Adventures, the demon Shendu has Combo Platter Powers because of his Twelve Talismans, each of which grants him a different ability ranging from Super-Strength (the Ox) to Super-Speed (the Rabbit). But after he's imprisoned in a statue, the Rat Talisman becomes the Keystone: its unique gift is "Motion to Motionless," which breathes life into inanimate objects, and thus allows him to restore his mobility and access the other Talisman powers.
• On Justice League, the android A.M.A.Z.O can scan and copy any power. The first empowered beings with which he came into contact were the Justice League members themselves, which alone granted him flight, super speed, super strength, shapeshifting, the ability to form hard light constructs, and telepathy. Eventually, over time, he amassed enough powers to give him nigh-omnipotence. When the League (which had since dramatically increased its numbers) and the Green Lantern Corps had learned that A.M.A.Z.O was returning to Earth from its intergalactic travels after having seemingly destroyed planet Oa, not a single one of them were able to so much as slow him down when they attempted to intercept him.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Hawk Moth has the power of Super-Empowering, known as Akumatization. By default he can only empower one person or small group, and not himself. However, he can seemingly pick whatever power he likes to grant to the Akumatization victim. This is best shown in the "Hero's Day" special where he gives his Akuma the ability to amplify his own powers^note It should be noted that said akuma was already his Secret-Keeper and The Dragon, and thus becomes able to create an entire army of returning Akumatized minions from throughout the series, each with a different power.
  • Similarly the ability granted by the Peacock Miraculous, Amokization, allows the user to create a creature called a sentimonster with any ability they want charged to assist whoever the amok is for. Unlike akumatization, one can directly use an amok on oneself, and Shadow Moth (Hawk Moth also using the Peacock Miraculous) has used it to perfectly recreate previous akuma complete with all their powers.
  • The ability granted by the Rooster Miraculous, called Sublimation, is the power to choose any specific ability they want. In the case of its first appearance, it's used to never miss a soccer goal, making the ball weave around obstacle to always score.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Every pony has a talent for something. With unicorns, this means their magic is especially effective in that particular area. Twilight Sparkle's special talent? Magic itself.
• Parodied in an episode of South Park, in which the boys pretend to be ninjas, each with their own special gift. When Cartman keeps making up new abilities to show off and be better than the others, they challenge him:
  Kyle: From now on, you only get to have one power! So what is it?
  Cartman: ...I have the power to have all the powers I want.
  Kyle: THAT DOESN'T COUNT, FATASS!

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