Iâm going to take the free gravel and 7 inch teleportation. The gravel is a valuable commodity which can be sold. 7 inches is enough to get through any doorway.
7 inches is enough to get you mostly through a doorway.
Doors are about 1.5 inches thick. The average chest depth of an American male is 11.5 inches.
Teleporting yourself 7 inches forward would put a door 7 inches from your front and 3 inches from your back. You would have to only be 5.5 inches deep in order to make it entirely through the doorway without merging with the door.
It depends how exactly it works. If it's the very front of my body moves forward 7 inches, yeah, that's not great. I was hoping for measuring from the center or something. What happens if i overlap something, anyway? Nuclear fusion?
Dirt, dust, dead skin? Oils? Gut bacteria? Dental fillings? Food you just ate? Oxygen in your lungs? Oxygen in your blood? Implants for sure, right? What about hair, or nails?
I can imagine a scenario where someone tries this ability for the first time only to wind up naked, perfectly clean-shaven, bleeding profusely from every orifice and extremity, breathless and doubled over in pain, convulsing on a pile of shit, hair and other gross, getting their back sliced open by disembodied toenails.
Free gravel is a clear winner... If there's no limits, you could straight up build artificial islands, you could destroy cities... It's a legit super power. Hell, unless there's extreme limits that make it worthless, you could do a lot.
Teleporting is tempting, and if you could use it fast enough you could fly or at least walk at insane speeds... Depending on the limits, I'd take that over gravel
But any toaster? That's a brain computer interface right there. Even if it's one way, and you have to do it manually and pay for power? With 30 toasters you could type anything. You could learn stenography to do it faster. Or, if you could manipulate toasters past their capabilities, you could generate infinite power or burn down entire cities
For the gravel, I assumed it meant that any place that sells gravel is forced to give it to you for free. Still really powerful, but you have to think about the logistics.
Have a great street magic trick where I ask the spectator to empty a single container out of many with my back turned, but I can always pick out which one
Free gravel for life. So I have an endless supply of product I can sell for profit? Yes please.
And I see no time-limit on the teleportation. 7 inches at a time. Sure. But what stops me from instantly teleporting another 7 inches? And who says I can only do it horizontally. Pretty much giving me the ability to fly here. I'll take it.
I agree with your choices but your logic for the teleportation doesn't hold up. You've assumed your momentum wouldn't be conserved through the teleportation in a weird way. Assuming momentum is conserved, you would still fall just as quickly. In fact, you would reach terminal velocity in short order, and would have to continually teleport to keep yourself from crashing into the ground. By itself that would be bad enough, but you moving through the air between teleports would cause the air to move as well, so assuming you could keep up and hold your elevation, your velocity relative to the ground would increase to some number higher than terminal velocity. Think Chell continually falling through portals. Now you're stuck unless you can also teleport slightly to the side without falling. Best case you go to one of those indoor skydiving places and get in so you can slow down without dying. I was going to explore what would happen if your momentum somehow wasn't conserved, but that would imply some absolute fixed frame of reference or magical mumbo jumbo, neither of which exist.
You could totally travel faster though, without even needing to walk. You would also be super dangerous in one on one combat sports. A well placed 7 inch teleportation can easily get the win in the right sports.
I disagree with your teleportation assessment. Just as I don't think my momentum would be conserved, you think it is. You have no more reason to believe it would than I have to believe it wouldn't. Because there's no foundation for teleportation as it doesn't exist.
I'm not sure what logic you want to use with something that is made up. But im gonna go ahead and assume my teleportation will work on my rules since no rules were ever specified.
You can feel free to use whatever made up rules you want for your own magical power.
I love the thought experiment. However, what really makes me think is how air behaves.
Would the air from the destination get teleported back to fill the void that you left? Does the person just displace the air at the destination when they teleport?
What really gets me curious is what would happen during several quick teleports if the air is just displaced at the destination. Regardless, there would be an extreme vacuum at the starting location for a very short period of time. There was no specific time given about how long a person needs to wait between jumps, so you could leave a heck of a trail of destruction in your wake.
Some air would be displaced backwards after the teleport decreasing the volume of the void, but a void would still be there.
Would the forces be strong enough to suck the person backwards? Would the atmosphere simply collapse the void creating a bit of thunder and heat?
I can't even fathom what happens to time. If you teleport instantly, that may imply that you are traveling faster than the speed of light. The universe implodes?
Free gravel, assuming that means it just sort of appears where I want it in as much volume as i want, means I can simply create a massive stockpile of it in a very convenient location for construction projects and sell it by the yard for literally free money. Or sell it directly and conjure it up right where the foreman wants it.
Teleporting 7 inches is enough to pass through most doors which are less than 2" thick. That is infinitely more useful than you think it is....
If it stops velocity it would also be useful for dropping long distances without dying. A little like Mario doing a butt-stomp just before he hits the ground in Mario 64.
But then you haven't travelled 7 inches. If you want to measure how far someone has travelled, you measure the distance from a body part in one position to the same body part in the second position. If you measure from the back of the foot in one position why would you measure to the front of the foot in the other position?
Not just doors. Many walls are thinner than that. Any window or glass wall, even reinforced bulletproof ones, immediately become an entrance and exit. You could presumably walk into Fort Knox, grab a few bars of gold and walk back out. If you're arrested, no jail could hold you.
You could easily be the most famous magician alive, doing impossible escapes from sealed boxes, or disappearing by teleporting 7 inches into a hollow but completely sealed object.
You'd make ludicrous money from the construction industry with an unlimited supply of gravel, while being able to teleport 7 inches would be useful for break-ins.
Depending on the fine print that comes with these powers, some of them could be significantly less useless than they appear.
For instance, "look 10 hours younger." Always, or can you do this on command? Can do you it on command more than once? Does the effect stack? Does it include your clothes? Etc. Because if it for example includes your clothes and/or makeup, you could use this to disguise yourself pretty elaborately, or equip yourself with a lot of stuff about your person in advance, then take it off and show up anywhere up to 10 hours later and conjure that stuff out of the air. Imagine the Matrix lobby scene, except you don't have to set off the metal detector on your way through.
Infinite gravel could be pretty OP if you can conjure it at a fast rate, and especially so if you can conjure it at a remote location. Like, above your enemy's head. Or inside his vehicle. Etc. Even if it's just some kind of deal where you present your magic coupon at the Gravel Depot, you could corner the world's supply. There are a lot of roads that need building in the world.
Or if your 7" teleportation range has no cooldown period, you could just chain-teleport pretty much anywhere that doesn't require passing through anything thicker than 7". That's tantamount to flight or super speed running, but you could do it without removing your asscheeks from your chair. Or depending on how the telefrag rules work, you could cause a lot of damage to anyone or anything you wanted by just teleporting through taking 7" bites out of your target each time.
Due to a recent Supreme Court ruling certain areas classified as wet land by the US Corp of Engineers are no longer under build restriction. To make them buildable they need fill. A few million tons of gravel fill seems like something someone would pay a lot of money for.
Yeah do you get like a choice of gravel? Because I've got a bluestone driveway that's in piss poor condition, so being able to pick the matching flavor would be really convenient.
2 and 7. Free gravel? Sign me up that shit's expensive. And I think another way to interpret 7 is that you can instantly tell whether any closed container is empty or not, since you can only see into empty containers.
For some reason my mind skipped straight past 2 so I never considered it. I was going to go 5 and 7. 7 for the same reasoning as your own, and I could probably use 5 as some sort of weird toaster-only magic show to make money. 2 Is definitely the far superior moneymaker here, but I'd probably go with 5 anyway because it'd be more fun to have as an ability.
I could use it for all sorts of things such as making money, using it as a throwing weapon, etcetera
With the teleportation I could just chain I and travel to any country while maintaining a safe speed limit for my body during transition in and out of teleporting
Free gravel has to come from somewhere, it's functionally equivalent to summoning it. (Although it could be one of those asshole genie things where they're like "I didn't say how much free gravel)
I figure I can either make bank lending the anthropologists/archeologists a hand with an extinct language, or at least have a bunch of fun bringing it back to life as a personal hobby.
And really? No one's picking nine? Have any of you seen Albert Einstein's calves? He biked regularly. If it turns out I can outrun him now, that won't always be the case as my sedentary ass ages.
No matter how crap my skeleton becomes, I'm giving myself an automatic default level of movement that isn't all that shabby
Bedridden, trying not to attract the attention of the government as I slowly teleport my 99yr old fail body a couple inches at a time towards the bathroom instead of being able to get up and jog.
No stipulations on how frequently I can teleport 7". Like, can't I just teleport 7" constantly and very quickly? Also, sounds like I could probably use this ability to fly.
Gravel is a very important construction aggregate.
Although it depends on the mechanics for how useful 2 would be. Does the gravel just like appear near you? Is there just a guy who gives you bags of gravel? Do you have to go to a specific location to get it? Is there a limit to the through put? Whatâs the volume of output of the gravel. what type of gravel is it? Could it be processed for other minerals?
Like, free gravel sounds pretty damn awesome based on the mechanics.
You can't generate it man. You fill out a form and put a postage stamp on it and then they give you a shipping date and you still have to pay for delivery, the gravel itself is of course gratis though.
Gravel for life and see inside empty container. Find all the empty containers to be filled with gravel just by looking around ad sell gravel container's !
Everyone is saying 2 for the economic benefits of gravel, but you gotta approach this like a monkeys paw curse. Where is the gravel coming from? Best case it manifests, but physically that's unlikely. Maybe a box of gravel every week like a weird sweepstakes? Again, if you're lucky.
No, in this scenario you get free gravel... in your shoes... every moment of every day and every time you take your shoes off and remove the trace amounts of gravel, the moment you put them back on its there again. Always just enough to annoy you and never when you want it.
Oddly enough I think reviving the lost language is probably the least likely to curse you. I mean, maybe it means you lose something else in your brain (like all the other useless trivia I know and all the names I forget) but you'd probably be able to get recognition from academic linguists enough that you probably could get enough journal submissions out of it to have a modest career at a second rate university somewhere.
Most likely with the language the monkey's paw would be that you can't speak any other language. I imagine you'd also be unable to learn any other language again. At any rate, linguists would still celebrate and you'd just have to make friends with people who want to learn that language for some professional, academic reason
Congratulations, you now speak Khitan and only Khitan. Good luck finding one of the few researchers in the world who will understand that you are speaking an extinct language before being thrown in the looney bin for spouting nonsense Andreas Toma-style
3 for everything else. Think about it! Assuming you can teleport in any direction as fast as you can think then you can fly, move super fast, dodge any attack, pass through thin barriers (such as fences, thin walls, etc) swim super fast and depending on the rules of this power maybe you can poop really fast by teleporting away but leaving your poop behind!
I'd pick teleport but I'm afraid of the splicing consequences.
I'd rather just see inside empty objects. I'm sure I could use this in some circumstances. Being able to "know" if a box is empty or not could be perceived as super natural. There is probably a lot of money in that. Plus, a lot of gambling opportunities in things like that cup game. What defines a container? That could change things.
Controlling any toaster with my mind is ambiguous. I'll assume it only works on toasters with power. So I can only turn them on/off to make toast. I could use this power to destroy countries. Power draw of a toaster isn't too bad, but every toaster being turned on at the same time might damage an energy sector. It would take a while to debug as well.
I like the free gravel.
I think I'd pick free gravel and... Seeing inside empty objects. Seems like the most profitable with the least chance of a monkeys paw.
Define container; reasonably, a room could be defined as a container. A container of what? And furthermore, define empty! Knowing when something's "empty" has all kinds of applications. That and teleporting, even a few inches could be incredible, especially dependent on how often/quickly you could do it. 3 & 7, hands down
Say some phrase in Khitan, then teleport. Become a world-famous magician as no one would believe you're actually teleporting. The Khitan is for the show. Also drive all those people trying to debunk your trick insane.
Plus it'd be incredible for heists, there's no mention of a cooldown so just spam it and piston-translocation glitch your way through some complex.
Re option 1: I'm assuming it's like when Arthur Dent learned to talk to birds.
[Arthur Dent] learned to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios, and a fair bit about berries.
3, 7 in is enough to travel through a few mm thick steel wall
7, being able to see through the walls of an actual container can save some time while robbing them
Also,
5, controlling a toaster with your mind is like controlling a pretty impractical relay. Combine it with amateur arduino skills and you can actually control any electro mechanical device with your mind. In that case i would pick 5 and 2. Selling the gravel will pay for the expensive hobby
You im gonna do some jojo shit with number 2 and 3. You can drown anyone with gravel or silently kill them by making it appear in their body(lungs, veins, etc). You can also use it as an armor. And with teleportation you can do a lot of small teleportations fast to badically travel with sny speed. And depending on how teleportation is defined you can do op stuff with it.
3 and 7. With 3 you can essentially walk through walls, and with 7 you will know exactly which boxes you don't need to check when looking for something.
Very very thin walls, depending on how the 7 inches is calculated (like from your center of mass or from the outer boundary of your form? Do your clothes come with you? Etc)
Only if you're less than 7 inches across in the direction you're teleporting. This is only useful for the super-skinny, otherwise you're going to splinch yourself into a wall.
3 - It doesn't say it has a cool down so you can just spam it and go insanely fast
7 - It will be pretty useful in game shows. You can take a look inside a deck of cards and their order in their box. You know those "find the pebble in the right cup" street hustlers.
Why do you think you could find out the order of a deck of cards? You can only see in the box if it's empty.
But, it could be useful for that street hustle... as long as they're not doing the sleight of hand after you pick. You could claim that they were cheating, but people presumably always claim they're cheating.
Put a ruler on the ground in front of your foot, at the 7 inch mark is where the front of your foot will move to. Sideways and you are stuck in something, forward or backwards and you are stuck in something.
You couldn't even teleport through a sheet of paper unless you were thinner than 7 inches.
Khitan and gravel, khitan would be a boon for linguists and i could help them document it until other people can learn to speak with me, and free gravel could be used to pillar up to places if done fast enough and could potentially clog things
I at least like the toaster if we assume instantaneous faster than light control. If I can sit and watch a feed of stocks and toggle a buy/sell toaster hooked up to the stock market 250 ms away, I can pretty easily beat the market and make money.
Similarly you could use the empty container rule to have someone communicate with you by toggling the empty state of a container. If you sense/not sense the container you have a reliable binary communication channel and Morse code is pretty viable too. But it's probably best for a predetermined action because you're racing the latency of light here and we're not multiplanetary yet so you've only got hundreds of milliseconds margin to work with. Unless you contract with NASA or anyone yeeting things into space. Build an instrument that can Morse code via empting/filling a
container and suddenly voyager can send us instant communication. Combine it with a set of control toasters and that's pretty valuable too.
Teleportation: is there a cool down? Because most places can be teleported to in increments of 7 inches if I can chain them.
I would probably would go with 1 and 6. I read an article awhile ago they were used to detect quality of water. I would have the ability to further interpretate what is wrong with the water by talking to the oysters. Might make money along the way and save people/ environment at the same time. As for 6 well is for obvious reason.
1 and 7. Knowing if things are empty might be marginally useful. Communicating with oysters seems fascinating. Oysters are similar to coral in that they are an important part of forming habits for fish. Being able to ask them what's troubling them could be useful for conservation efforts.
2 and 3 are the obvious choices, however id pick 3 and 5. Here are the only interesting pills available.
(2) You can sell it
(3) that's enough to go through a wall
(5) a smart toaster has a circuit board that you could mcgyver into sending commands outside of itself, allowing ur toaster to be an entry point to computer telepathy.
(6) Would be funny to feed this one to a person who had just died and watch their color come back, really fuck with the autopsy
(9) Instantly cures any physical ailments preventing you from running/walking (unless we mean current albert einstein, in which case corpses cant move.)
No it's not. You're more than 7" thick. Even if you got right up against the wall, your nose pressed up against it, the back of your head is maybe 10" away. You teleport 7" and congratulations, you're halfway through a wall.
3 and 7.
3- you could get all those things that were just almost at your reach. Also, is it 7in of displacement or 7inches in front of where you are, like thereâs a 7in wall you can go through it?
7- if you canât see through it it means itâs full. Thatâs so freaking helpful!!!!imagine all those safe opening posts we could have avoided with this power.
If #8 also included being able to write the language as well, I'd definitely pick that. I could become famous and influential in linguistic circles and probably make good money off of it for a short while. Then I could use that money to fund a few projects I've wanted to do for a while, like making a modern Vib-Ribbon for PC.
As for the other pill, probably just #3 since none of the others really appeal to me in any way.
1 & 2 - as CEO of The Happy Oyster company and Gravel Unlimited lIâm absolutely smashing it financially, even with the terminal lamentations of a million misled oysters in my ears.
5 because it would even work on toasters that can do more than just toast, i.e. a toaster plus computer.
3 because the other pills don't sound useful. And it doesn't say how often I can use this teleportation. So I assume through repeated teleportation I'd be super fast.
If it doesn't also teleport my cloths, I'd probably not use it too often though, apart from changing cloths (the 17.78 cm should be barely enough).
It would also be interesting to fly using repeated teleportation. Though if my speed is not also reset through teleportation, I'd still fall, and landing would be dangerous. And if cloths and similar are not teleported with me, I also couldn't take a parachute or wings with me.
I will make 10's to 100's of thousands paving roads with gravel and be more than willing to pave roads for people who can't maybe afford it without consequence.
Empty containers may be profitable as well since I could verify which shipping containers could be skipped for further processing, saving hundreds to thousands of hours of time, over time.
Choosing 3 and 7 seems the most intuitive to me. 3 to move to inaccessible places with like glass windows as separation. 7 to check if containers are empty or not.
I wouldnât interpret 7 inches as the amount of a gap you can cross - I would interpret it as literally translating your body 7 inches in one direction. Unless you can fit your body between two planes 7 inches apart, youâre not going to be teleporting through any barriers.
Start:
~[::::::::]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
End:
~~~~~~~~[::::::::]~~~~~~~~~~~
Not this:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~[::::::::]~
For me the decision comes down how this teleportation power works. If you can teleport 7 inches but in rapid succession and can do so while also running you'll effectively have super speed.
Definition of teleportation: "Teleportation is the hypothetical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them."
Again this is scifi stuff at this moment.
So with this definition I can technically cross barriers which are less than 7 inches like for example glass panes
You could at least confirm if a container is indeed empty or not though. I could see that being useful in some weird situations. For example if someone hid something in a container yard, you can at least rule out all the empty ones.
1 and 2. The gravel to sell and the oysters to get a sense of how communications with other animals work. If I can communicate with an oyster, my understanding of communication could potentially extrapolate to higher animals.
Is it a one-time pill effect or a power you gain? Do you stay looking however you did 10 hours ago forever?
If it's a power, let's say you use it immediately twice in a row. First time: boom. 10 hours younger. Second time: does nothing happen or do you then look 10 hours younger than then how you currently appear? So you look 20 hours younger. Could you keep spamming it indefinitely until you very slowly reach any age you want?
I suppose that depends on whether it makes you look 10 hours younger than you ARE or 10 hours younger than you CURRENTLY APPEAR.
I...I'm spending too much time thinking about this.
I'm going with 7 and 8. I'd publish a series of books on the Khitan language, get that bumped to the top of google when my name is searched, generally come off as interesting, then attempt to go viral playing shell game with randos on a boardwalk in an attempt to get noticed and land on Deal or No Deal or something like that. Then I'd snag the Guinness Book of World Records title for a couple things along the lines of shell game. Once I have a very modest amount of name recognition, I make a company selling rice cakes in such flavors as Buffalo Wing and Beef Jerky because that's a totally untapped market, in hopes of selling out to Frito Lay or whoever
1 and 2, but really only 1. If I can talk to oysters then I can figure out how to grow black pearls better and make some serious cash. If the oysters decide they donât want to help then I can sell gravel.
Depending on how fast the teleport is, whether there's a delay between uses and whether it causes significant fatigue or other side effects, I might take that. Other than that, it's a toss-up for me between the extinct language and communicating with oysters.
3 and 7, teleporting a short distance like that can be extremely useful to get past roors and fences. Identifying whether a container was empty or not reliably is good enough proof to clean out this list
without being powerful enough that the majority of people would actually believe I have magic, plus I don't have to reveal my teleporting ability.
Become the most profitable gravel supplier in history due to having no land acquisition or extraction costs, not to mention no need to plan for when one site runs out of usable gravel.
3 and 5 are a potentially broken combo. In particular if "control a toaster" means control and not just "operate", since then it's basically toasterkinesis, or being able to instantly turn any toaster into a bomb. "teleport up to 10 inches away sounds like it wouldn't be too useful but it does, in principle, allow you to phase out incoming bullets and a fair amount of lateral blade hits if you time it right.
6 and 7 could have some interesting, niche uses in some fields. 6 for example could be used for intimidation if "10 hours younger" is interpreted chronologically: even after taking a serious wound, you'd look pristine for around 10 hours so it might be used to scare or distract some enemies.
I'm... not even sure what 4 or 9 could ever be used for.
The ability to see inside any empty container could be useful depending on how granular youâre being with âemptyâ. Could get a good job screening for contraband or any other job where you expect containers to be empty, as quality control.
Holy smokes, 2?? Obviously see inside empty containers and teleport up to 7 inches!
I'd give anything to be able to tell at a glance what boxes I don't need to open when looking for something and get out of nearly any tight spot or tangle.
Free gravel and can speak khitan. You can sell the gravel for money and you can say just about anything and no one will get mad at you cause no one will understand you.
I think the only thing that would be useful with that would be youâd know exactly what things have stuff in them and what stuff doesnât. Iâm sure thereâs a use for that but maybe not as much as #3
8 could be useful if you're a spy and want to have your own private documents that noone can read
1 you could leave oysters in places suited for eavesdropping, and maybe even coordinate billions of them to tackle down ships etc (?)
5 It would be possible to all of the sudden communicate with all humanity in morse code by turning them on and off, you would hit headlines and maybe demand a crazy amount of money in cardano/bitcoin or else you'll just blow up the toast industry. Plus, this morse code thing could lead to a cult where you might have fanatics at your advantage
5 and 8. Imagine being able to spook people out all around the world by making their toaster go off in the middle of the night. Also, speaking in dead languages will make me very interesting at parties.
But would they though? It would be more like "see Sam over there, yeah he has a great pearl. But not me, I'm sure. Nope, no way." The clam sure doesn't want you putting that knife in to get the pearl.
Doesn't say there's a limit on how many pills of your choice you can take so I assume you'll get an ongoing prescription of them. In which case, I'm taking 6 and reliving my 20s forever.
4 needs specifics, like can I just instantly grow a nose on the palm of my hand at any time and remove it? It might help for smelling things on the top shelf
If you can run physics experiments or a research group as fast as albert einstein or if you can run some calculations or even just your mouth as fast as albert einstein that would be something I wouldn't shake a stick at.
3 and 7. Teleportation? Hell yeah! And you can see inside containers to teleport inside of. 7 probably has some really fun uses if you get creative with it
Why the hell doesn't anyone want to communicate with oysters? They probably have a lot to say!
Also you could just drop an oyster in a board room or something and learn trade secrets.
I imagine all of these powers come as the worst possible implementation like a cursed rabbit's foot.
Like free gravel for life: you don't conjure it out of thin air at will, no, it's magically mailed to you once a day in small quality and you have to remove it from your mailbox or it'll fill it up.
Teleport 7 inches: a magic nimbus appears and lifts you on it. If there's a wall in the way, it just keeps shoving you against the wall.