Power Misidentification in Literature.
- The Almost Super children's series has most superheroes and villains with one power each except the rare "Super-Supers" who have more than one. Juanita Johnson is initially mistaken for a Super-Super, but her apparent feats were illusions crafted by the rest of her family to disguise her true, useless superpower.
- In Alfred Bester's "Disappearing Act", the government, during a war, investigates a bunch of near-catatonic patients who have apparent Teleportation abilities. However, analysis of their mumbling soon reveals the ability is actually Time Travel all the way to Ancient Rome at least. So they bring in a historian, he takes a look at the reports... all the mumbling is horrible pieces of Anachronism Stew. And since the patients are definitely disappearing and reappearing, the only possible conclusion is they are dealing with two dozen Reality Warpers.
- Graceling Realm:
- Throughout the story, and her entire life in general, Katsa's grace was believed to be the power of killing. She was made into the personal hitman of the king, able to easily take down any opponent with any tactic. Only when she was traveling through the mountains did it eventually come to light that her true grace was one of survival, with killing being a self-defense aspect instead of her full talent.
- Katsa represents an unintentional example. In the same book, Po's misidentification is intentional. He and Katsa initially bond over having similar graces since she thinks hers is killing while he tells everyone that his is fighting. In fact, his grace is perception, which covers both senses and telepathy. He uses this telepathy to read the mind of his opponent when fighting. He hides it because people with mind-reading Graces are often shunned for their power.
- The Infected: Proxy has the power to take the places of people who are about to die. This is axiomatic for the first half of the series, but later turns out to be the first expressions of a much deeper combination of precognition and space/time warping.
- A lot of this in the superhero novel Playing for Keeps, about various D-list superhero rejects pooling their talents. Then again, maybe not as the powers are correctly identified, it is merely their extent and implications that are poorly thought through. For example, the protagonist, Keepsie, has a power which paralyzes anyone who tries to steal from her, or more specifically "take what's hers without her blessing" until they give up. Later, she realizes this extends to conceptual things like her life, health, safety and freedom, and that she can claim a wide variety of things as her own.
- Soulfinder Series: This is a major plot point in the third book, Seeking Crystal. Crystal has always felt like a failure because she's the seventh child of a savant family, but instead of having an impressive power like seventh children are supposed to, she's only got the ability to find things. It turns out she's actually a soulseeker, with the power to help other savants find their soulmates, which is extremely rare. However, the combination of that rarity and that telepathy (an otherwise universal savant power) causes her physical pain to the point that she can't usually do it resulted in no one realizing what her power was until the events of the book. It's indicated that Crystal's problem with telepathy is unique to her, as the antagonistic soulseeker in the book takes advantage of her lack of telepathic ability as part of her plan but is surprised when she learns that Crystal has the same power as her.
- Invoked in The Stormlight Archive. There are ten Surges, or powers, and each of the ten orders of the Knights Radiant use a fixed two of the ten (i.e. all Windrunners use the same two powers). Shallan is a Lightweaver, and her two Surges are Illumination (illusion powers) and Transformation (transmutation). When the Knights Radiant are reformed, Shallan asks to be announced as an Elsecaller instead of a Lightweaver (they share Transformation), so that their enemies won't anticipate her illusions.
- Super Powereds:
- It's not unusual for HCP students to keep a certain aspect of their power hidden or disguise it as another power. For example, Camille spends the entire first year as a healer. It's not until Year 2 that she finally reveals that she's an injury absorber: she can absorb, store, and give back any injury with a touch. This makes her extremely dangerous in close combat, as she can take down even opponents with Super-Toughness by breaking their bones and giving them concussions with a light touch (anywhere on the body is fine). Plus, she had a whole year to amass a varied arsenal of injuries to use.
- Roy/Hershel's father Titan is known throughout the world as the "world's strongest man" and is assumed to have Super-Strength and Super-Toughness. However, he actually has an Adaptive Ability that he's simply used to become incredibly strong and tough (so, in his case, what doesn't kill him will definitely make him stronger and immune to that type of attack). Similarly, Roy and Hershel are also thought to be shifters, with Hershel shifting into Roy, who has Super-Strength and Super-Toughness. In fact, Hershel has a variation of Titan's ability, with Roy being a manifestation of Hershel's ideal self, and Roy's top strength being determined by Hershel's need.
- Few people know what Globe's true power is, since he's been seen exhibiting Super-Strength, Mind over Matter, and a whole smorgasbord of abilities at various times. He's a Reality Warper within a certain spherical area from him, hence the name.
- In Year 4, during the intramurals, Alice deliberately makes it seem to others that she is a telekinetic, while her real power is Gravity Mastery. The others catch on eventually, though.
- Another student from a rival school appears to blast fire from her hands. Vince figures it'll be easy for him to absorb the fire (Vince can absorb any type of energy), except the student is actually an oxygen manipulator and uses special gloves to ignite the oxygen she directs.
- In the spin-off Corpies, Deadlift can pick up and throw incredibly heavy objects with ease, including things that many Supers with Super-Strength would find challenging. He doesn't actually have Super-Strength himself. Instead, he can alter the weight (or effective mass) of any object he touches.
- In Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, Akasha, the first vampire, explains to Lestat that all of their physical abilities such as Super-Strength, Super-Speed and Super-Reflexes are really just manifestations of Mind over Matter. Which is why older, more powerful, vampires can lift objects they should not have the leverage to move or take off and fly.Akasha: Whether you take a step or take flight, it is all a matter of degree.
- Because of the nature of superpowers in Worm and how poorly they are understood, there is a lot of this, as well as the fact that many capes lie or mislead people about their powers, either to keep an ace up their sleeve or to bluff people into running/surrendering.
- Skitter pretends to be able to transform into a swarm of bugs and back at several points, just to heighten her scare factor. She just made a bunch of bugs fly together and then stepped out of a hiding place through the cloud.
- Flechette can empower any projectile she touches to be an Armor-Piercing Attack with No "Arc" in "Archery", with a secondary power giving her perfect aim. She's actually causing her projectiles to exist across the entire multiverse, with all versions ignoring any force that isn't affecting at least one of them, such as gravity, wind, or a target being in their way. The aiming power is what it seems to be, though.
- Scrub makes things disappear, but is actually swapping their places with alternate Earths, which is later exploited to create portals.
- Tinkers are mentally plugged into technological databases that only leak information a little at a time; precognition is sophisticated modelling of the most probable future(s), etc.
- Panacea is an exceptional healer who can repair things with a simple touch in minutes that would take even Bonesaw (arguably the world's scariest biotinker) hours and a lot of equipment to fix (if she felt like just doing a fix-up job, that is). In truth, she has enormous control over organic matter in general.
- Gallant pretends to be a Tinker by wearing power armour and passing off his emotion-affecting lasers as technology rather than an innate ability to mess with people's emotions, as most people are frightened of powers that mess with the mind.
- Tattletale uses her hyperintuition to figure out incredible details from tiny clues, and pretends to be psychic so nobody can figure out what her power really is.
- Regent is a Master who can affect the human nervous system. He pretends that just means creating muscle spasms, but with enough time on a specific target, he can completely control their body. He hides this power because it's impractical in a fight and would paint a massive target on his back, both because Masters who control humans tend to be feared, and it would connect him to his horribly nasty father, Heartbreaker.
- Grue edits his own PHO wiki page to hide certain aspects of his power.
- Glory Girl deliberately spreads the story of her being invulnerable, to hide the fact that her invincible force-field goes down for a few seconds after every strong hit.
- Coil tells people that he can manipulate reality and probability so that events favor him. In truth, he isn't actually certain whether his ability allows him to create two realities, make different choices in each, and then choose whichever favors him the most and destroy the other, or whether it only shows him two hyper-accurate visions of possible futures based on his choices and allows him to choose which to act out (with perfect faithfulness to the vision); while the answer never appears in the series, the author has confirmed it is the latter.
- Parian has the power to create golems out of fabric and cloth... or rather, that's what everyone believes. Word of God had long teased readers by saying that her "true power" was something that could even be effective against Endbringers. Late in Ward, her real power was shown: her power isn't meant to be used on fabric, but human skin. If she uses human corpses as her building materials, she can create immensely powerful flesh golems. Since she's a pretty nice person in general, she hates actually doing this; indeed, that's why it took several years for her to figure out how it worked. The power always worked better on leather, but she never stopped to consider using corpses, until Tattletale's intuition lead her to the realization. When the Godzilla Threshold is crossed and she agrees to use her real power, she gets permission from the friends of the deceased before using their bodies.
- Scapegoat's healing abilities allow him to heal someone, but he takes the injuries he's healing onto his own body. As of Ward we learn it he can use it the other way around, healing himself and transferring his injuries on whoever he touches.
