Luminosity: the Superpower

[linkhyrule5]

What would luminosity (the skill) look like as a partly-magical superpower? I'm imagining it as there really being little XML tags on all your thoughts and emotions, say, maybe with an easily accessible symbolic mindscape so that you can literally see how you fit yourself together, together with Elspeths can't-lie-to-yourself deal, and a reflexive Keo type explicit ability to alter any piece of your mind at will. Any thoughts?

Basically, luminosity-beyond-luminosity the same way that, I don't know, the Hulk is strength-beyond-strength.

(I'd love to see a Bell with this powerset, actually. That just sounds hilarious.)

[anthusiasm]

One of my writing projects has a power like this!

Worldbuilding details are vague and subject to change, but it's basically the symbolic-mindscape thing. In this setting, everyone has a symbolic mindscape, but only people with this particular power are able to enter and alter it. (The ability to alter other peoples' mindscapes is a separate power altogether). Altering one's mindscape involves magically destroying various symbolic representations of memories/feelings/etc, and building new ones. However, the symbolic representations are rather opaque and you can do disastrous things to your brain if you destroy the wrong thing, so you have to be really, really self-knowledgable to do anything safely. It is theoretically possible to do the alter-any-part-of-your-brain-at-will thing, but very few people are able to reach that level of power.

I will probably want to use ideas tossed around in this thread to develop this power. Please let me know if you strongly object to this and I will avoid doing that.

[linkhyrule5]

That's no problem, I actively encourage such things in the interest of having more stuff to read :p.

Yeah, the idea of Luminosity-as-superpower might be something like that, except that everything is not, in fact, opaque and in fact comes with little name tags and links to history and sources and whatnot.

(On a completely random note, who's your avatar?)

[BlueSkySprite]

Her avatar is Ahiru from Princess Tutu.
In the Elcenia Mafia thread, she asked for help obtaining her avatar, which is how I know.

(@Anthusiasm: Sorry if it was rude to answer for you, but it didn't look like you were online? Please let me know if I shouldn't do that in the future.)

[anthusiasm]

@BlueSkySprite no worries friend! Feel free to do that whenever!

@linkhyrule, yeah I see what you're saying. This particular power isn't a proper "luminosity superpower", it's more "really in-depth, advanced self-editing that can do cooler things than non-magical self-editing but can also have more disastrous consequences", but it's definitely in the same family as a luminosity superpower. A Bell or someone with above-average luminosity would be able to hack it easily.

[DanielH]

With this kind of mindscape, if you can enter other peoples’ mindscapes, is there any way to learn what’s what without the chance of permanently damaging that person?

The luminosity version of this sounds like Rose’s mindscape. She can see her thoughts and memories, and she can write on the leaves to do new things.

[anthusiasm]

Altering others' mindscapes is very difficult unless you know the other person intimately or you know a lot about mindscapes in general, but it is possible to do so without permanently damaging the other person if the spellcrafter in question is particularly talented. (Also, people with mind-altering powers tend to have other abilities related to others' minds, like reading surface-level thoughts, detecting emotions, and telepathic communication, so it's easier for them to get to know people intimately).