Power Plays (can we be canny with the uncanny?) – Study 101

So you’re invisible.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? You can go anywhere, do anything, and the whole world can’t stop you… or can they?

What would you really have to do to pull this off? How many of us could make it work, and how would it change our lives if we tried using it to its fullest? If you think you’re ready to disappear, let’s start again:

So you’re invisible. What’s the first thing you watch out for?

ROOM SIZE.

Your most basic problem is that any people near might walk right into you. So of course you’ve got to watch them all, spot anyone who might start heading toward you, and steer far enough around them all that never don’t touch you–and that means without you having to duck back so quickly they might hear your footsteps.

So, walls and furniture and such are the enemy, as much as people. Anything that hems you in or shrinks that buffer zone between you and the folks you’re sneaking past.

–That is, if you have to go into buildings. You might want invisibility more as a general way to see life differently, or avoid enemies that are more “trouble on the street” than determined to get into your home. But if you do have more proactive plans like spying on or sabotaging an enemy, that usually leads to someone’s door and on inside.

Those doors, literally, may be what takes up most of your time getting through. At every closed door you see, you’ve got choices to make–do you wait for the moment that nobody would see it “swing open by itself”? And what if nobody’s opened it so far, so you aren’t even sure if there’s someone watching on the other side? Or if you see somebody using that door, do you “tailgate” in at his heels and twist aside before he reaches back to shut it again? it’s one tricky move to pull off, that close behind someone without him hearing a sound.

That’s the kind of decision it means. How nimble are you, or how patient? Can you risk following the right person all the way through to lead you to the files or meeting you’re trying to find, or do you let one of those obstacles make you fall back and then you search out the rest of the way at your own pace?

And there are other hazards, indoors and out:

• any kind of crowd, unless it’s thick enough that you can twist by people without them being sure who brushed against them
• revolving doors–’nuff said
• elevators–people may not notice them “moving on their own,” but you’re taking a real risk that nobody gets into that tiny space after you
• security alarms, since they’re usually tied to a door opening or sensors for motion or body heat
• streets with any vehicle traffic–you don’t have a prayer of reaching the other side alive until the cars stop for a pedestrian
  • in fact, it’s hard to invisibly follow anyone once they get to their car. Can’t hail a cab, can’t keep up on foot, but just maybe you’d have time to sneak into the back seat (if nobody gets in!) or trunk. (The car might have alarms, but even someone afraid of invisible enemies can’t take those seriously!)
• darkness–just because they can’t see you doesn’t mean you don’t need some light to watch out for them, and people at night are already paying more attention to sounds as it is, though they may miss visual traces more
• dogs or other animals–the whole idea of invisibility is such a human-centered one, thinking what matters is to hide from sight, never smell
• rain, puddles, dry leaves, anything “soft” you have to push through or walk over that shows your passage or makes noise. Watch the weather reports; any kind of precipitation is bad news.

and the absolute worst thing might be simply

• mud. It shows your footprints, keeps showing them after you’ve moved on, and sticks to you to make the invisibility itself useless.
  • (Story idea: you’re watching one enemy “ranting” to his bosses about hearing invisible footsteps… and then he pulls out a paintball gun.)

Really, any time you enter any kind of enclosed space, you’re risking someone will lock it or start guarding the exits. Stepping through that first doorway is reason enough to be on high alert.

If the worst does happen and you have to fight your way out: the more you rush in at someone as if you were an ordinary brawler, the less invisibility is helping you. As long as you slow down and creep around to hit someone from a side he can’t expect, you keep a major advantage–but if you’re in such a tight space or a hurry that you let him guess where you are, it’s not hard for him to hit you just by swinging blindly. Many role-playing game rules get this backward, but in a close fight your biggest invisible advantage isn’t that something as big as your body can dodge, it’s that your fists are too small and fast for him to block what he can’t see. Especially, don’t ever let him grab you or get a gun out… unless you’re tricking him into wasting his bullets shooting in the wrong direction first. Most of all, keep in mind: do you actually need to go through with any fight, or just to shove him away from the exit and move on?

A more important question is, do people know about invisibility at all? If you’re a trained agent infiltrating high-powered threats, both you and they might be watching every one of these tricks to the fullest. They may not have all these precautions in place yet, but if you make one slip they’ll rush a guard over to every doorway. But if you’re the first person to ever disappear, you have a whole world of blissful ignorance to play with… although that should make you all the more determined not give your secret away. This might mean neutralizing cameras before they record a door moving, but it can easily escalate to killing any witnesses.

–If you aren’t aware of how much of this depends on learning to move softly, you aren’t ready to be invisible yet. Are you willing to take days, weeks, practicing even after you’ve gotten the ring or the suit to work? And even then, just running enough to break a sweat, or using a weak deodorant, could get you caught anyway.

The whole invisible mindset keeps coming back to caution, planning, and self-control. For instance, the classic “Would you want invisibility or flight?” game is sometimes called a choice between being careful and being bold. All in all, burglars, spies, or other people with practice in stealth and patience would get a head start as an invisible man.

(Invisible “man”? It’s the common phrase, but I think women might be better at thinking invisibly, and that lighter body type has to help in moving quietly. On the other hand: story idea, a true trickster of a wizard dares someone to tiptoe around using an invisibility spell he’s tied to a pair of high-heeled shoes.)

Speaking of clothing: tomorrow we can look at the types of invisibility, some famous examples, and how they change your equipment and your options.

 

So just how do you get to be invisible, and how does that affect how you can use it? The source might be magic, science, or some variation of these, but the explanation usually comes down to one of three main types:

Total transparency: the classic, from H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man. There’s also H. F. Saint’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man, the book that can “make its readers forget we’re not invisible”–the masterpiece. (Also, ghosts are a form of this–or rather, it’s their lack of physical form that qualifies them.)

The “cloaking field” that warps light all around you is the second type. Examples include the “devices” the Romulan ships introduced to Star Trek, and the Predator movies and many other examples of light-bending stealth suits.

Last, maybe you want to “cloud the mind” like The Shadow, so people can’t quite notice that you’re there. Also a favorite of modern vampire stories and other recent tales.

(One baby-steps variation of these would be ultimate camouflage: a suit (or skin) that changed to exactly match what’s behind you. Or to be honest, match the wall you’ve flattened yourself against; if you move much, or let people look at you from different angles or see open space behind you, no “micro-camera/ chameleon” effect is liable to keep up with all those shifting perspectives. It probably has the same limits as Transparency too, but barely counts as more than regular stealth–except that it’s the one that today’s science IS ACTUALLY BUILDING. It’s in its earliest stages, but promising.)

So which of the main three could you get hold of fastest? If we compare the science, at least, telepathy is the most elegant; some case studies claim it’s already being done, and we all know people who are at least “easy to overlook.” After that, transparency seems more straightforward than bending light (but then again, photonic breakthroughs might be easier than making every kind of body tissue ultra-transparent but still alive). A better measure might be that Transparency is simpler to understand… or just not as convenient.

Think about it:

Transparency’s trademark is usually that only whatever was affected by the chemical, spell, or Quantum Event is invisible–meaning you can’t carry away anything, and invisible theft is suddenly a lot more of a logistics challenge than it looks. Plus, if the effect came from a single event you can’t repeat, you may want to stick to basic spying and escape rather than getting past advanced defenses, stealing complex secrets (anything too detailed to memorize), sabotaging, or assassinating, if you have to do it with mostly your bare hands.

Still, Saint’s hero was a bit luckier: his lab explosion also affected whole rooms of materials, and he even carved out a set of invisible lockpicks, no fool he. Or, story idea: one thing you don’t need tools for is computer hacking, so you peer over someone’s shoulder at their password, then when they’re gone you send the files out and cover your cyber tracks.

So this power might seem better for avoiding trouble than for fighting back–but even there it may have some classic issues out of H.G. Wells. For one, you might only be invisible between meals, once everything you eat has taken the time to dissolve into your unseen stomach again. Besides the sheer uncoolness, daily vulnerable periods like this are the last thing you need if you’re on the run. Worse, if the effect comes from a Wells-like serum in your body, you may have to strip to hide from sight at all. You might want to stay clear of whole latitudes of colder temperature, not that snow underfoot is good for anyone invisible.

A good Cloaking Field will not only keep you fully invisible and wrap around your gear, it should affect some objects you pick up, maybe just a stealth suit having invisible pockets ready. The best Transparency effects might also let you extend the power when you need it, so either way you’re better set up (better equipped? better suited?) for more serious raids and robberies. Except for one thing:

That is, a cloaking or a flexible transparency power are so much more complex, they’re more likely to be unstable, or at least using up their power faster. This might be the nastiest kind of challenge: the rule of thumb to working invisibly is to pick your way carefully around obstacles, but now the longer you take the more you risk the spell wearing off or the suit shorting out in the midst of your enemies! So before you get too enamored of “full-feature stealth suits,” be sure you know how far they’ve developed in correcting this weakness, or whether you have the skill to get in and out before you start pushing your luck. Even the magical invisibility cloaks of Harry Potter’s world are expected to wear out quickly. (Of course, basic transparency treatments may wear off too, but all things being equal that simpler effect ought to last longer.)

In the other hand, those stable Transparent invisibilities are the only kind that run much risk of being permanent. If you have enemies you simply have to stop or no other way to escape them, this might be a necessary sacrifice–but it’s more likely it might happen to you by accident, say from the classic mad scientist mistake of rushing your invisibility experiments into testing before you understand them. Studying Wells and Saint are, again, your best guides to surviving the result: either disguising yourself with a headful of bandages or living in total secret, worrying about who might force you to spy for them, and dealing with the constant temptation to take over the world yourself.

(Both Transparency and the Field also have to deal with one other weakness: by making light go through or around you, they could leave you blind. (George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards anthologies had a villain, Fadeout, who usually left his eyes visible to see.) Most proper forms of invisibility will be working as hard to keep your sight functional as to hide you in the first place–for instance, by letting your eyes catch and read infrared light, provided it’s the IR that hits them so exactly that no made-visible light escapes to give you away.)

Psychic invisibility would be different from all these, completely hiding you at will, as well as being in its way the easiest to devise. Naturally if you’re born with the talent or the right vampire bites you, the biggest breakthrough is done; if not, solving its science or magic may still be simpler than for the other methods.

Another advantage is that by working directly on people’s minds, it may give more complete stealth than simply being unseen. The stronger the power is, the less you have to worry about your footsteps or other giveaways, and you might even keep people from noticing the doors you’re opening.

But mind-clouding can be more unstable than a Cloak, for several reasons. First, maintaining the effect may take concentration, so instead of breaking down for its own reasons it’s liable to give way because you’re at the moment you need it most–say when a guard suddenly comes around a corner, you’re focused on what you’ve just discovered, or having all your worst enemies in the room wears at your nerves.

Second, instead of affecting light itself, it has to deal with your observers’ willpower, and probably how unobtrusive you’re being. The more powerful an enemy is (or just if you have more of them to fool at once), the more you might want to keep back toward the corner of people’s eyes, especially whenever you’re doing something that could draw attention. You don’t want to make that one noise, let alone try to attack someone, and find that breaking the illusion means that you can’t fool them again.

Also, this is the method that has no effect on machinery; you might walk in and out of a bank unnoticed, but later they’ll see you on the cameras. You could still wear a mask, but what if that itself makes you too conspicuous to hide?

So, think closely about your invisibility’s details, before you start putting it to use. It’s too easy to think “I’m invisible or I’m not, it’s not a question of how fast I could fly,” but some powers will still be stronger than others. A weak power might leave a “shimmer effect” if someone looks closely (even in The Hobbit  Bilbo could be seen by his shadow in daylight, since invisibility was just a minor side effect of what the One Ring was really doing). But a more powerful cloaking field could cover up mudstains or radar blips or even mask the space where rain is splashing off you; thorough transparency might stop mud from sticking to you at all (Saint noticed that it’d have to at least reduce dust clinging to you) or hide you from scent. And a strong telepathic grip would slip less, and you just might make a witness forget he saw you at all–or explore all the other tricks telepathy can do, but that’s a Power Play for another day.

All in all, mental invisibility seems the easiest to achieve, especially if you’re trying to master it out of subtler forces such as psionics or low-magic traditions, but it may be the trickiest to use as much more than ordinary stealth. Light-cloaking is flexible and convenient if you can get it, but most useful for helping you take more on more complex missions, at least if you have the skill to beat any time limit it may have. And classic transparency is still best for the “hardcore” invisible man (or woman) who may need to learn the skill from Square One, but prefers the simple split between what’s invisible and how much isn’t.

Now that you see your choices in how invisibility works… what are your options in using it? (And, readers’ answers to my Invisibility Challenge to find actual non-deceptive uses for it.)

 

 

What would you do with invisibility?

–Yes, many people’s first words would be “Girls’ Locker Room.”

But let’s back up and think just what the power means, and just how many things it can do. What it can’t do is let you move faster, see further, or endure any more trouble, you can only do the same things a human being can do before you disappeared–except it lets you do them unseen.

In other words, what invisibility means is bypassing other people’s influence, defenses, and revenge–instead of giving you power, it makes you immune to their power. In theory.

(In fact, I held a special Invisibility Challenge for readers to think of non-deceptive uses for invisibility. And getting from the usual tricks to those options is such a stretch, I had to put them at the end of this guide, sorry.)

Naturally, the more of that power the world has over you, the better defeating it starts to look. Invisibility can be the tool of choice if you’re a fugitive, though it can’t solve the whole problem over the long term. (For one thing, remember how most Transparent powers might leave out the food you eat or even your clothes, or how Cloak and psychic effects might be unreliable. And you still have to sleep somewhere… the list goes on.)

Even if your old life isn’t over, it may come down to how tired you are of it. You might be living under too many expectations, or being barely noticed already; black author Ralph Ellison found his own meaning for Invisible Man. Or it could be a handy tool to dabble in, to widen your life with an occasional hour’s cutting loose or to learn how the world is different when it can’t see you… and of course it’s a favorite choice for children of all ages.

But are pranks and peeping really all you want?

It isn’t hard to find little injustices or unfairness you could correct. Could you really turn away if you saw a bullied boy needed an unseen “guardian angel”, or a SWAT team struggling to rescue hostages? Think of all the corporate whistles you could blow–or help a recovering alcoholic keep her past buried (like you already covered up how you got hold of invisibility).

You’d look hardest at anything that could be solved by hiding something, or by spying it out. (Stealth often seems like the same advantage as enhanced senses but at a different range; the one needs you to get in closer, while the other’s based on keeping a safe distance.) A full set of your options might be, from arranged simplest to riskiest,

• spying, just enough to know who to warn about what
• stealing–maybe like The Hobbit, to take back what had already been stolen
• whistleblowing
• blackmail, or using secrets to frame or manipulate enemies
• sabotage
• assault, even assassination

–and there’s the classic question: when you’re invisible, what won’t you do?

When the world’s trying to hurt you, or someone else, it’s easy to stick out an invisible foot and trip whoever deserves to be stopped. But where do you stop–maybe at protecting people, or at reversing an injustice, or do you start seeing terrorists that need chasing or politicians that need a reminder of who they serve? Invisibility’s a perfect tool for either visionaries or radicals, who want to change the world… but could you make that succeed?

One of the first lessons about invisibility came from Plato himself, when he wrote that anyone who began using the Ring of Gyges–for any reason–would end up being corrupted by what he did. Wells tells a similar story, although his Invisible Man had the extra isolation of being permanently invisible. And they make a strong case: of all the forms power might take, something this focused on defeating other people’s wishes (and hiding yourself from the consequences) has to be one of the most tempting. The longer you had your invisibility, the more slippery the ways you might see “to do good.” (How tempting is that? It was the first fear Gandalf voiced about himself taking the One Ring, even more than how evil the thing itself was. –In fact, it’s in writing this that I see why the Ring would “choose” invisibility as the first power to offer to its victims…)

In fact, many Wells-inspired stories today tend to make invisibility drive its users insane, which has the added chill of an enemy people can’t see but also can’t try to predict.

And there’s another side to how it can start trouble, that’s the first of several questions I’ll be ending all my Power Plays guides with:

“Hidden Power” variations

We’ve gone through how invisibility, maybe more than any other power, changes based on whether you live in a world that knows it’s out there. When you already can’t be seen, the absolute best thing on top of that would be for nobody to even know to listen for footsteps or set up antimagic and other precautions. But the more your secret gets out…

Disappearing’s attractive to misfits and visionaries, but that’s also close cousin to how it would attract the most ruthless people there are. Could any spy organization or underworld stand knowing you were out there, and not on their side? And the fact that you’re hard to find only turns your loved ones into their leverage against you. (Superheroes may have the right idea with their secret identities, but of course that’s never as easy as in the comics–especially if your invisibility’s permanent and you can’t lie to the investigators face to face.)

Then again, you might have been taught your invisibility because you’re one of their agents yourself. Or you could offer your services to the most trustworthy group you could find, both to open up whole new levels of resources and to have their protection. But people are still people… how long would it take before at least one of your bosses wants to send you on a more “gray” mission, and what will that lead to? And, how fast will they start mistrusting you if you protest, when they know how dangerous you are if you turn against them?

–There’s a reason the “invisibility or flight” question is often answered by whether it’s an ability you can keep secret or not!

Tip: if you do get noticed, one way to stop someone from suspecting what he’s seen (or at least stop others from believing him) could be to pretend to be a ghost.

Worldwide Scale variations

What if every king or president has time to get the secrets of invisibility, at least for one or two of his best spies? The absolute best case might be a “whistleblower’s world,” where all authorities thought twice about any dealings they didn’t want to explain. More likely invisibility might be a very personal ultimate weapon, a Mutually Assured Destruction where no leader dared to be the first to send his shadow assassin after another leader… except, how can they know any death or accident wasn’t an invisible ninja at work, and how long would the truce hold? No, as an invisible agent you’d be in great demand.

Most likely every important building would have security against it, from dogs to invisibility-jamming fields. But how effective they are would depend on how clever you are, how much of the power’s potential you’d developed–and just how rare invisible agents were, if it meant not so many buildings were protected.

Story idea: your one cause as an invisible hero is to prevent the world’s greatest peril–other people mastering invisibility.

Story idea: a VIP is killed and you get the blame, because until now you’ve been the only one with the power.

Or, all it takes is one invisible killer to panic a city, if what he wants is public terror.

Life Lessons

Like any power, invisibility can change your life. Even after you’ve put the cloak away for the day, how would walking unseen change how you look at the world?

Of course the first thing you’d have learned from surviving your invisible outings would be self-control. After a few times waiting out and dodging around people to make it to the exit again, you’d be on your way to having a calmness in crisis that the toughest soldier would envy. You would know in your bones what’s worth struggling for, how much is just a distraction–and you’d face more and more problems knowing only the one matters.

More than that, you’d develop your creativity. You’d be learning to see how average people live and think–usually so you could outwit them, but every time you had to predict a guard’s rounds or how to convince him the safe he’s guarding hasn’t been opened, you’d see more about the “boxes” people think in. While your friends are still guided by “we just don’t do that,” you’d know how different a plan could get by demanding help or showing up early, or at least that stepping over those lines isn’t as dangerous a gamble as the crowd assumes.

Then again, sometimes it is. Operating invisibly would teach you to look for small risks but avoid most large ones, because this supposed “perfect consequence-dodging power” is instead making you more aware of how one footstep can change the night, or a rumor can change the world.

(Or, consider one last example: ghosts. A ghost might be the ultimate example of an invisible person who’s been a victim, and in fact they’re only holding onto this world because they’re driven to undo something in it. But look at the irony: they’re usually shown as struggling to be more visible and asking other people to right their wrongs, not to hold back and secretly fix it all themselves; see movies The Sixth Sense and Ghost.)

Most of all, invisibility shows you how much power anyone can have over other people, but all of that often makes them turn their own power against you. And so using it might make you more and more reluctant to trust yourself to others, when you know how much you can do without or in spite of them–or maybe one mistake will complete that isolation in a minute. Or perhaps, invisibility could teach you to value the friends you have, because you know how quickly you could lose them, and also how many small, inventive, or determined acts from you can change their own lives.

If you learn to see them.

 

Invisibility Challenge ideas:

When I asked readers to think of a use for invisibility that wasn’t a form of deception, I never thought of some of the answers I’d get. Such as this one:

help move set pieces in play w/o people seeing you for the performance

Clever. And it reminds me of the story that the black “ninja suit” evolved from Asian theater where stage hands wore total black as a signal that they weren’t there as characters. They had such a tradition of walking amid the action that the first time one pulled out a sword and “killed” a character, it must have looked like death really had struck from thin air.

Or this one:

Was thinking, what say you could control which parts of your body you could make invisible. So go stand in front of a mirror and make the front part of your face invisible and you could see through to the skull and brain. You could diagnose your own skull fractures and brain bleeds. It’d be better than an X-ray!

The most inventive I got, though, is

Invisibility can be a cooling system since the sunlight can’t be absorbed by the body. It could be useful in a desert, for example. It is also a nice protection against laser weapons (or sun based magic). Casting invisibility on your opponent will turn him blind since the vision is based on absorption of radiation by the receptors of the retina. Actually it can be quite applicable as X-ray vision – turning invisible any obstacles in front of you.

Now those are some brilliant (or is it brilliance-bypassing?) thoughts. Turn the power’s classic beginning weakness into a direct, blinding attack? Use it to X-ray anything you can affect? Or, keeping an invisibility cloak to laugh at the worst of the desert sun? Maybe some peaceful tribe never even thought of it as a weapon…

Excuse me, I’ve got some writing to do. So,

Move along. Nothing to see here.

 

 

 

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