Ask Lemmy

Honestly, I feel like questions like this would make an interesting dedicated community. Like, people having fun brainstorming how to exploit superpowers/magic/etc in a given scenario.

any items (that is, anything, including sentient beings) smaller than 4m^3 within 2m of them can be transported with the subject into or out of fictional worlds, either way.

I think that one of the most immediately-obvious uses in terms of impacting Real Earth is going to be transfer of information. If you can reach any science-fiction universe and pull a data storage device of some sort out, once you've gotten a basic mechanism up to transfer data from that data storage device to and from existing terrestrial computers, you should be able to extract a lot of advanced technology very quickly.

The equivalent of Wikipedia from a future, science fiction world whose laws of physics is the same as our own is probably going to have a pretty considerable amount of impact on Real Earth, after it's scaled up and the technology applied.

You could probably also move some (small) devices to help bootstrap technology, but just the information alone should be pretty impactful.

Get someone else to write a book about my ideal world and then never come back.

The subject can enter and exit fictional worlds from media that the subject did not create, at will.

smaller than 4m^3 within 2m of them can be transported with the subject into or out of fictional worlds, either way.

It sounds like collaboration with another person would effectively nullify that constraint. Like, if I can talk to someone else, and ask them to write a paragraph-long description of a fictional world with smallish thing, then I can pretty trivially obtain thing, for pretty much any value of thing.

I would jump into a children's book and live there for decades, unaging. just so I could live happily, peacefully.

once I was done, I'd immediately jump out and back into an OP fantasy Isekai and never return.

fuck this world.

I've literally dreamed about having such power since playing Myst. I would explore all the fictional worlds I could. Even if I can't write my own, like in Myst. Unless of course, I went into the world of Myst and learned D'ni to write my own world books. Now I can be in my own fictional world while inside someone else's 😌

My first thought was to go into a series like BEASTARS and hope I become an anthropomorphic animal and hope I get to choose which species when I enter. Also, be able to be that anthro when I get out. I doubt it would work like that and I would probably be just a regular human. So scratch that

Then my mind went to "Why not teleport myself into the beginning of Fallout: New Veags?" so I could use the Vigor Tester to up my SPECIAL stats. Then, since the player character technically has access to console commands on the PC version, I could edit a lot of stats about me. All in hopes that when I return I am suddenly a lot smarter than I currently am.

Then, if that fails because I doubt I'd have access to console commands and don't feel like living in a post apocalyptic wasteland to grind skills, I know the next best thing that is a surefire win for me, assuming the item I am after is smaller than 4m^3 and I can get to it before the actual main character or am able to steal it from him, but the lamp from Dosney's Aladdin. Comes equipped with a magic being inside that I could use to edit myself. That's the one genie I can actually picture not having genie like behavior. You know the behavior: wish for an omelette and you get a scalding hot one with no plate. From there, I could make myself as powerful as possible.

If even that fails, I would probably be desperate enough to go into an online story I find a fun read about a 10 year old with a magic ring and steal the ring since I know it shouldn't be that big. All I gotta do is take the ring back with me and I just have to hope I can wish for the genie of that ring to be able to perfectly understand what I mean when I make a wish and to follow my line of thinking about said wish. All in order to avoid the mishap the main character deals with in the story where the genie unintentionally messes up the wish or takes things too literally. Then I have a genie that would be able to grant my every wish, so long as I have his ring.

If for whatever reason the website that the website that story is hosted on is gone and I have no way to find it, then I try something else. There are plenty of shows out there with genies and magic. If all that fails, I would probably go to sci-fi next.

All of course without aging because I don't wanna return a long time later only to realize I have zero clue what happened when I was gone.

"Hey, Friend, do me a favor. Write a fictional story wherein all of my wildest dreams came true, and the world is perfect, and my mom is still alive, and also it's a socialist utopia? Yeah. Literally just that. Like a paragraph long. Doesn't need to be good. Yeah. Everyone I love is immortal. Got it? Perfect. Deuces",

There are stories that contain devices that can create realities, so even if the top level can't be a story you create yourself, deeper levels can be anything you like.

The hard part would be convincing someone in the top level to let you, a mysterious interloper, use such a device.

And the next hard part would be readjusting to mundane reality and trying to pick up where you left off when you finally come home.

... just ask anyone who has "returned" to what ought to be a familiar computer game world after an extended break in the real world and/or other games. Or even other worlds in the same game.

This is an interesting dilema. My first thought was star trek because of all the goodies and I feel objects would be quicker than learning as many fantasy things require you to have some sort of innate ability or chosen status. only so much can be learned and even then the learning is usually not easy and may require you to have talent that you may just lack. Thing is that almost all the cool goodies in star trek require you to go somewhere were the technology itself would rat you out. Go to the enterprise and the computer would immediately warn about an intruder on board. One good one would be to go to the universe of river of the dancing gods at a point you can get the lamp but first go to any safe fictional world and spend time writing out a good long run on sentence full of wishes to ask of the lamp. Another thing to try is to find a spot in doctor who literature where a tardis key (preferably not the doctors) is obtainable and grab it and come back and try an summon the tardis to our earth.

Looks like the power is trivially recursive; so I like the idea of buying a modern history book, entering the last page, and experimenting repeatedly with the potential applications. You've got forever (speed of thought per attempt), so you can basically groundhogs-day everything you do with it.

To improve efficiency, I think you probably nest it a few dozen times. Enter the history book, then immediately enter the history book, repeat 12 times. Run the experiments there with substantially more control and time.

Probably max out all skills by spending time in appropriate settings. If I can learn magic as per, say, mage the awakening, then I'm doing that as well.

Then I'm coming back here and fixing the world with extensive application of five point Mind and Fate magics.

Oh man, takes me back to the Magic Treehouse books.

I feel like the best approach would be to take any work of fiction which has some sort of no-consequence superpower and obtain it to bring back to the real world, though off the cuff I am struggling to think of which example to use (too many superhero origin stories involve traumatic experiences, couldn't be done by people who weren't already extraordinary, or have some undesirable consequence down the road, haha).

The other element is that you probably want to aim for something that gives you as much power as you can get, but not something that completely detaches you from humanity. For example, you could go to the episode of Star Trek: TNG where Riker is given Q powers (though I suppose good luck somehow intercepting that, since I feel like the powers would not be given to just some rando who isn't part of the bridge crew), but then getting powers that make you nearly omnipotent serves to separate you from humanity, and it could become too tempting to develop a god complex.

Maybe I'd just go to something like Apple TV's Foundation series and just steal some imperial nanomachines to keep me healthy and fast-healing for the duration of my natural life, and leave it at that.

Crime

1. Smut
2. Magic
3. ?

Reminds me a little of 11/22/63

It actually can work as a teleportation device - create a short story, deposit a second copy at another location, put your copy in a time-delayed shredder and a mechanism that prints out your story a few minutes after it has been shredded, enter story, wait a few moments to let your copy be destroyed, exit at other location. afterwards the story gets printed out at the old location, recreating the original starting point.