Gus
Justice RIDES AGAIN!!!
So. Sam's powers. I apologize in advance for geekery. I teach physics for a living, and I can't help but noodle around with how powers mesh with the 'real' world. Basically I subscribe to James Kakalios's idea of how comic books should respect their readers: you get miracle exemptions to have the powers, but the world has to still work the way it normally does otherwise.
Super speed is a particularly interesting case, as is teleportation. I won't touch upon the physiology, as that is a cosmetic choice that is embedded into the history.
Moving faster that the eye can perceive is harder than it sounds. My visual field in my classroom encompasses a little over ten meters. You would have to cross into my peripheral vision, through that space and back out of peripheral field in well under a thirtieth of a second in order to not be seen at all. (25 to 30 frames per second is minimal frame rate to look natural to the eye, and the eye does not 'shutter' like a movie camera, you would probably need to get under a hundredth of a second to get through without at least a blur.) 10 meters in one thirtieth of a second is about the speed of sound. That's not even the hard part. The hard part is that you have to get up to 3 times the speed of sound and back down to zero again in a tiny fraction of your 1 hundredth of a second travel time. That involves an acceleration in the ballpark of 100 thousand gravities. In other words, if Sam weighs 140 pounds (as you note) the force required to get her up to speed in the available time is 14 million pounds. It gets worse: the third law means that whatever she is pushing off of has to experience that same force going the other way. She may have situational super strength and toughness to survive that force, but I guarantee her sneakers don't, nor does the floor if she is barefoot.
Don't worry. Aaron has even worse problems since he weighs in at 890 septillion pounds. Identifying the problems is the key to finding cool loopholes.
First miracle loophole: She only needs to become so ridiculously strong to achieve those accelerations because of inertia. So we change her inertia! When she goes through a burst of speed, let's suppose that her mass briefly drops to zero, or near enough to allow small forces to cause very large accelerations. This means that with the barest effort, she can accelerate to Mach three, corner as tight as she likes, and stop on a dime. It also means that if she trips and runs face first into a brick wall at mach three, she just stops as if she bumped a wall at a slow walk instead of turning into chunky salsa and destroying the wall. Easy to start means easy to stop.
This leads to one last issue: Wind. If she is so light she can twitch her muscles and hit mach 3, then a light breeze could blow her off course. And don't get me started on the headwind. So. Second miracle loophole: Her fur realigns the charge polarity of gasses as she moves through them, reducing the viscosity to zero, allowing her to slip 'between' the air molecules with minimal resistance. (Some effort would still be required to separate the air, but it would flow smoothly around her causing minimal wind from her passage, and no sonic boom.) This would also prevent build up of potentially lethal electrostatic charges in your fur. (Yay!)
Obviously you are free to ignore all of this, but it seems like having a good physical model, especially in a free form role play with no dice, gives a much better idea of what your character is (and isn't!) capable of doing.
Some thoughts on how this changes the practicalities of the power: You would only be able to 'sprint teleport' in short bursts, basically line of sight. You could free up some points from agility for energy (Or whatever) because you wouldn't need to have hyper reflexes; it would be much more like teleportation: blink and you're there.
I like that it makes your fur an integral part of the power as well; this would make a nifty limitation too! If she were ever shaved then 'porting becomes very hard because the wind would slow you down and throw you off...
This would also make it basically impossible to carry somebody with you, unless you could somehow cancel their mass as well.
It does interfere a little bit with your history, because you couldn't run into somebody sprinting and hurt them; you don't weigh enough while sprinting. This is for the best though. If you did hit somebody at mach three, you would both die horribly. Game over, in drippy red font. However the history can be finessed easily enough: Have her pop up in his face, startling him so much that he falls over and concusses himself on the pavement, or has a heart attack or something. I like the heart attack idea because it goes with the whole 'haunted house' theme.
Another thought. What if the energy reserve for making jumps was relatively small, but recharged very rapidly. This makes two interesting changes: first you would have to rest briefly after every 5 or 6 hops, but second, when the reservoir is full you HAVE to jump to drain it. So you literally couldn't hold still for more than a five or ten minutes at a stretch. You would have to zip around the room every now and then to blow off the excess energy. This is not physically necessary, but seems in character and fun.
TL
R: To maneuver at such speeds, weigh nothing while you do. To avoid being blown over while weighing nothing, part the air with your fur electrically. (Which could cause an ozone smell instead of brimstone!)
Super speed is a particularly interesting case, as is teleportation. I won't touch upon the physiology, as that is a cosmetic choice that is embedded into the history.
Moving faster that the eye can perceive is harder than it sounds. My visual field in my classroom encompasses a little over ten meters. You would have to cross into my peripheral vision, through that space and back out of peripheral field in well under a thirtieth of a second in order to not be seen at all. (25 to 30 frames per second is minimal frame rate to look natural to the eye, and the eye does not 'shutter' like a movie camera, you would probably need to get under a hundredth of a second to get through without at least a blur.) 10 meters in one thirtieth of a second is about the speed of sound. That's not even the hard part. The hard part is that you have to get up to 3 times the speed of sound and back down to zero again in a tiny fraction of your 1 hundredth of a second travel time. That involves an acceleration in the ballpark of 100 thousand gravities. In other words, if Sam weighs 140 pounds (as you note) the force required to get her up to speed in the available time is 14 million pounds. It gets worse: the third law means that whatever she is pushing off of has to experience that same force going the other way. She may have situational super strength and toughness to survive that force, but I guarantee her sneakers don't, nor does the floor if she is barefoot.
Don't worry. Aaron has even worse problems since he weighs in at 890 septillion pounds. Identifying the problems is the key to finding cool loopholes.
First miracle loophole: She only needs to become so ridiculously strong to achieve those accelerations because of inertia. So we change her inertia! When she goes through a burst of speed, let's suppose that her mass briefly drops to zero, or near enough to allow small forces to cause very large accelerations. This means that with the barest effort, she can accelerate to Mach three, corner as tight as she likes, and stop on a dime. It also means that if she trips and runs face first into a brick wall at mach three, she just stops as if she bumped a wall at a slow walk instead of turning into chunky salsa and destroying the wall. Easy to start means easy to stop.
This leads to one last issue: Wind. If she is so light she can twitch her muscles and hit mach 3, then a light breeze could blow her off course. And don't get me started on the headwind. So. Second miracle loophole: Her fur realigns the charge polarity of gasses as she moves through them, reducing the viscosity to zero, allowing her to slip 'between' the air molecules with minimal resistance. (Some effort would still be required to separate the air, but it would flow smoothly around her causing minimal wind from her passage, and no sonic boom.) This would also prevent build up of potentially lethal electrostatic charges in your fur. (Yay!)
Obviously you are free to ignore all of this, but it seems like having a good physical model, especially in a free form role play with no dice, gives a much better idea of what your character is (and isn't!) capable of doing.
Some thoughts on how this changes the practicalities of the power: You would only be able to 'sprint teleport' in short bursts, basically line of sight. You could free up some points from agility for energy (Or whatever) because you wouldn't need to have hyper reflexes; it would be much more like teleportation: blink and you're there.
I like that it makes your fur an integral part of the power as well; this would make a nifty limitation too! If she were ever shaved then 'porting becomes very hard because the wind would slow you down and throw you off...
This would also make it basically impossible to carry somebody with you, unless you could somehow cancel their mass as well.
It does interfere a little bit with your history, because you couldn't run into somebody sprinting and hurt them; you don't weigh enough while sprinting. This is for the best though. If you did hit somebody at mach three, you would both die horribly. Game over, in drippy red font. However the history can be finessed easily enough: Have her pop up in his face, startling him so much that he falls over and concusses himself on the pavement, or has a heart attack or something. I like the heart attack idea because it goes with the whole 'haunted house' theme.
Another thought. What if the energy reserve for making jumps was relatively small, but recharged very rapidly. This makes two interesting changes: first you would have to rest briefly after every 5 or 6 hops, but second, when the reservoir is full you HAVE to jump to drain it. So you literally couldn't hold still for more than a five or ten minutes at a stretch. You would have to zip around the room every now and then to blow off the excess energy. This is not physically necessary, but seems in character and fun.
TL
R: To maneuver at such speeds, weigh nothing while you do. To avoid being blown over while weighing nothing, part the air with your fur electrically. (Which could cause an ozone smell instead of brimstone!)
