This page is a little retread from one of the Dabbler’s Science Corners, but it’s the first time Sydney’s actually discussed this with Harem at length, as evidenced by the fact she didn’t even know her real name. Harem probably said it at the press conference, but Sydney was kind of fading in and out during it. Unrelated, but I am pleased that Sydney is rocking the “Imperious hands behind back” pose, but she’s still fidgeting and trying to scratch her foot through her shoe.

Harem can bring a battle rifle to her teammates, so she could obviously pilfer jewels and hard drives, USB drives, documents, even moderately large piles of cash, and there’d be nothing preventing her from making multiple trips. She’s also make a hell of an assassin, as would anyone who could wholly circumvent any detection, security, and even physical barriers. Of course she’s thought about all this stuff, anyone growing up with powers would. Many of us without those powers would. It’s almost surprising that the worst thing she gets up to (that we know about) is being a double (?) agent with Deus and the occasional prank.

Of course the problem with being able to teleport is alibi. Once it’s known you can do that, every case of something going missing from an otherwise secure location with no evidence of ingress or tampering with the security or vault, people would have trouble not considering you for the crime. Same thing with any locked door murder mystery. Unless you’ve got Johnathan Creek on hand to solve it, suspicion would naturally come your way. Really, it would be a bad idea to use any super power during the commission of a crime (ignoring the fact that it would make it an automatic felony and prompt the involvement of Archon) But if you can rip the doors off a bank vault, it’s a really bad idea to do that, because even assuming you didn’t leave your fingerprints in the steel, it still instantly winnows the lists of suspects down from 7 billion to a few hundred, tops. You can disintegrate stuff with your eyebeams? Guess who we think left this perfectly smooth hole in the side of Fort Knox, dummy.

Actually if you were a criminal with superpowers, keeping them a secret would almost be more important than if you were a hero with a secret identity – Assuming of course that you’re the kind of criminal that likes getting away with stuff and not the kind that likes to instigate brawls in parking lots. You couldn’t tell your crew about them cause they’d flip on you the minute they’re nicked, which means you couldn’t plan any heists that relied on those powers. Obviously there are exceptions. If you could telekinetically feel the position of the tumblers inside a lock, or see them with your N-Ray vision or whatever, you could get away with people just thinking you were a master safecracker, but if your powers left any physical evidence at all, you’d basically only be able to use them as a last resort.

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.