NoneNeeded wrote:But he can change his property anywhere he wants, correct? So he could transform his clothes into bullet-proof armor. Or his car into a jet. Or maybe his wedding ring into a small nuclear bomb. And he could make Ginny some sort of super Martial Artist/Ninja/Cyborg to act as body guard. And I would think one of the first things I would equip myself with was Brainiac 5's force field belt. ANd a car from that Larry Niven Short "Safe at any Speed". And some sort of super sticky super fluid that I could throw at baddies to surround and subdue. Even trying to restrain his powers, they seem pretty nearly limitless in the hands of an imaginative and well-read comic/sci-fi geek.
Unless another well-read sf/comic geek is actively limiting them. Which I am.
Okay, expanding on my previous rules (and it plays a role in Episode 12):
To use his car as an example, while he could, for instance, change his or someone else's appearance or whatever, it would have to happen inside the car, and he can't change the car itself, only the things inside it. He could change the car, but only if it were, itself, on a piece of land (or in a garage or whatever) that was his. That's the way it works. Mainly because I said so.
More rules: he doesn't have to be physically present on his own property in order to affect something else on it. For instance, were, say, Carrie injured in a car accident while he was on a business trip to Denver, if she could make it to his property in Trevayne and Rudy informed, he could heal her injuries even though he was a couple of states over. But he'd have to actively do it: he couldn't set up a generic "Heal friends" rule or something similar that would work automatically.
Way back in episode 5, Ginny was explaining to Rudy that he couldn't simple make someone a brilliant surgeon (for example): they had to have the basic skills already, which Rudy's power could then enhance, possibly to superhuman levels. He can't create them out of whole cloth. Carrie was already talented at psychology and reading people,Rudy's abilities enhanced it considerably. Ginny hasn't shown any evidence of knowing martial arts, so he can't make her a super martial artist. Think of Rudy's power as a performance-enhancing drug: a baseball player might use it to become a more powerful hitter, but it isn't going to help someone with no hand-eye coordination who can't hit a ball to begin with. The skills have to be there already.
Another rule: while Rudy can create a force-field belt on his property (because he can do anything on his property), the amount of superhuman things that will work off his property is limited unless he can come up with a way to make it work that could, theoretically, work in the real world. So unless he could come up with some mechanism how it could plausibly work, it won't work. The drug Carrie used is plausible: there might not be a specific drug that could do exactly what it did to George and O'Meara, but the idea such a drug could really exist is entirely plausible, and thus, for Rudy, possible. A drug that could give someone Superman's powers to fly, however, simply isn't plausible so he can't do it.
This also effects the things that Rudy could produce and carry with him (or give to someone else). The gold statue he created in Episode 2 would simply disappear if someone tried to carry it off the property, because there's no plausible way for gold to simply appear out of thin air in the middle of a bedroom. However, he could create a machine that extracted the gold in seawater and then fabricated a statue, which
could then be carried away, because the gold actually did come from somewhere.
Going back the forcefield belt, the only way it would work is if Rudy could engineer a machine which would itself create the forcefield belt from materials which he could draw from the "real" world. So while he might be able to come up with the idea of a belt that, say, used a negative energy field to create a zone of gravitational distortion which would act as a shield, it's useless unless he could figure out a way to create and manipulate negative energy that would theoretically be able to work without using his power. And since no one has any idea how to do that, well, he's out of luck.
To put it simply, Rudy's restriction for doing something, or creating something, that will work outside a physical piece of property (and no, his shoes and clothes don't count Because I Said So) is that that he can only do or create things that someone could theoretically produce, even it required serious advances in materials or scientific knowledge, without his power.
A sudden analogy springs to mind: within Rudy's boundaries, he's basically on the holodeck of a Starfleet ship. What he can do is subject only to his imagination. But that ends once he steps past the holodeck door, and the only things that he can bring with him are the things that the ship's replicator could create. It can produce a cup of tea, or a phaser, or a simply rock, then the holodeck's replicator could do the same and he could carry it out. But the replicator can't create a living organism, and the holodeck only creates simulations of them, so he can't bring one out because it has no existence otherwise.
Now, these are
his limitations. Which leads to the interesting observation that, in many ways, Lorenzo and Orchid, even with the restrictions I gave them, are more powerful in some circumstances because their powers work anywhere and
aren't limited to reality as much as Rudy's.
