Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith

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Documented Superpowers

People can do far stranger things than most folks would believe.  To me, this is normal.  I'm familiar with science and the way many things spread out in a bell curve.  I'm also familiar with Nature's tendency to treat DNA like the kitchen junk drawer.  A + B means the far ends of that bell curve contain some truly amazing junk.

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I fry watches, which is my mine has a nylon strap that goes between it and my skin. This makes it die more slowly. But I can also cause clocks to scatter time just by walking into a room. We once watched three timepieces separate -- some speeding and some slowing -- in just a few minutes.

When I take my clothes off in a dark room, sometimes I make a thunderstorm of dancing blue sparks.
That has got to make things 'interesting' at the most inopportune times!
Yeah, I can send a shockwave zapping through several people. I was bemused to read that a taser jolt travels less than a foot through human flesh.
Makes sense, a taser is around 500V and a couple of milliamps... static charges can get up to a few thousand volts, but very little in the way of amperage, and it's the amps that do the damage.
Fascinating. The amperage of my static must be higher than average then. It's not unusual for sparks to leave pink spots on my skin, or occasionally someone else's. Blisters are rare but I've had that happen. (I wore that piece of metal jewelry in the winter once.) Most people don't seem to raise enough of a spark to do anything.
The pink spots are plasma burns, produced by localised heating of the skin... and yeah, to get that you'd have to be generating 10-20 milliamps, and at least a thousand volts. That's 3 or 4 times more than average.

So.. Electra as a super-hero name?
>>The pink spots are plasma burns, produced by localised heating of the skin... and yeah, to get that you'd have to be generating 10-20 milliamps, and at least a thousand volts. That's 3 or 4 times more than average.<<

Fascinating. Any idea what minimum (in temperature or milliamps) it takes to raise a small blister? That was with me wearing rhodium-plated chain and hematite beads over the back of my hand, on a day with a lot of electricity in the air, and then there was this store with a wool carpet and my then-very-young cousin got mischievous. I wound up with the netting imprinted in pink and a blister under every bead.

On the less-harmful side, I can control the light flow inside a plasma ball without actually touching the glass or setting it to audio response mode. My field is strong enough to make the plasma flow react, usually half an inch to an inch away with my fingertips. With my palm above the top of the glass, I can call all the discharge upward, too.

>>So.. Electra as a super-hero name?<<

I'm not actually a lightning elemental, though. That's just one aspect of a hyperdeveloped personal energy field.

And Reality-Wrecking-Ball is so much less elegant.
It's not the electrical current as per sar that causes the burn, but the plasma, which probably contains no more joules than a red hot needle. That said, dry air breaks down into plasma at around 1500v/dc at 50ma assuming it is DC, which it might not be.

For the record though, that plasma would be hot enough to vapourise steel, just would'nt last long.

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