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As I said above, in the novel I'm working on one of my characters has the ability to manipulate and control forms of electricity (or possibly electromagnetism? I'm no good with physics so I'm not sure), though the specifics I haven't detailed enough yet. Initially his character had three powers, that being super strength/toughness, super speed, and his ability to control/generate/manipulate electricity, but it seemed like too many powers.

I wanted to narrow down his abilities or at least make them more narrow in scope/be more specific/have them relate to one another, so is there a way for all of the powers to be related as a subset of electricity manipulation?

Basically, can electricity manipulation grant super strength, toughness, and speed?

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm only 90% sure I get what you mean, but to me it sounds like as if you were describing an Android or a Cyborg. Someone who is (part) machine, e.g. uses electric instead of biochemical energy. They usually are strong and very fast in fiction. I have no idea what you mean by "control/manipulate electricity" exactly, but I think they are certainly of "generating" electricity in a sense. Would you be so kind and comment on if this is an option for you? $\endgroup$
    – Raditz_35
    May 20, 2018 at 12:00
  • $\begingroup$ The question is a bit hard to understand $\endgroup$
    – Mranderson
    May 20, 2018 at 14:43

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Kind of.

If you're going to hand wave away the issues that come with super strength and speed, you may as well make the whole thing magic.

There is a way, however, to grant your "super speed" and "super strength".

From a theoretical standpoint, the human body actually posses a lot more power and speed than you can normally see. The reason we don't all have super power/speed is because our brain uses what essentially amounts to electrical signals to set limiters on our abilities, thus preventing us from hurting ourselves.

If you so choose, the ability to control "electricity" (depending on how you define it/hand wave it) could be used to turn off those limiters and thus grant the equivalent of "super strength/speed" to your character.

However, toughness will still be an issue. There are some things you might allow the character to do (depending on the extent of his powers) to protect himself and increase his "toughness", such as generate magnetic fields that normally wouldn't be possible in a very small space in order to deflect/slow anything metal (eg bullets).

Most of the time, however, your character will hurt himself using his super speed or strength. I don't think it's a good idea to turn off the limiters your brain sets.

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  • $\begingroup$ Agreed, the body sets those limits for a reason. Although it is possible to go over them, doing so too much would just end up tearing muscles or snapping bones. Though if electrical signals can be generated, perhaps reaction time could be increased. $\endgroup$
    – Jonnyboy
    May 23, 2018 at 7:44
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well, if your electric control is strong enough and you can control really strong magnetic fields you can float even when not holding anything magnetic

With a little directional push and removing the need to touch the floor to move you could become quite fast and agile.

If we want more we can make some questionable fashion choices like iron gloves, steel covered shoes and belts and use magnetism to move them at any speed we want, while taking us along for the ride. A little posturing and pointing with a magnetic field discharge and you can turn your punch into a small rail gun with your fist as the ammo

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If you take what is discussed in the article to the future (imagination) you just might have what you are looking for. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0142331207080152

Fabrics that change shape and toughness.

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  • $\begingroup$ (not down-voting, but please consider fixing this:) This post should be improved to explain the gist of the article and how it is relevant to making an electricity-controller super fast or super tough - in general, link-only posts aren't so useful to stack-exchange (e.g. if the link breaks in the future - there isn't any "meat" or even useful search terms in the post to be useful...) $\endgroup$
    – G0BLiN
    May 21, 2018 at 15:21

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