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Dr. Jackson: Egeria, Roman goddess of fountains.
Col. O'Neill: Fountains?
Dr. Jackson: Also childbirth.
Col. O'Neill: How do those two go together?

Superheroes sometimes have an unintuitive combination of powers. Sometimes this is a Justified Trope. For example, anyone with All Your Powers Combined will have Combo Platter Powers at least some of the time. Other times it is the result of either an excess or lack of thematic unity. Sometimes, combinations that look strange to some conceptual categories made perfect sense in the culture where they originated.

This can happen through accretion, as with Superman; as a deliberate change to the character, like the Invisible Woman; or even at creation, like the Martian Manhunter. Sometimes there will be a Hand Wave as an off-hand explanation ("Secondary mutation", anyone?) or a later Retcon to explain how the powers actually work together; other times, it just happens. The most common set is the Flying Brick.

This does not include abilities gained by learning them or some other method of choosing them, as something that can be learned is only random if the character wants to study random things. This means most magical abilities are excluded unless it happens to "natural" magic that a character is born with.

Frequently a result of when a character keeps playing the Super Power Lottery. Compare Required Secondary Powers when the oddball minor powers are actually necessary to make the main power work properly. When one of these powers is significantly less powerful than the rest, it's Flight, Strength, Heart. When it's the standard Flight, Super-Strength, and Super-Toughness package, that's Flying Brick. If it's flight + some ranged attack, that's Flying Firepower.

Contrast One Person, One Power and Single-Power Superheroes, where every super-powered person only has a single power (Required Secondary Powers notwithstanding). Compare Swiss-Army Superpower, Semantic Superpower and Imagination-Based Superpower where some people have single powers that they can use in multiple distinct ways, creating an illusion of "having lots of powers".


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Black Clover:
    • The vast majority of mages are only born with one magic attribute, only able to use spells of that type. However, there are rare cases of mages who can use two attributes. Due to experimentation that involved grafting parts of their grimoire to the other, Mars and Fana can use each other's Mineral and Flame Magic. Hybrids like Charmy can be have two attributes, in her case Cotton and Food Magic. The Dark Triad, by hosting high-ranking devils, can use their own magic attribute and their devil's. Raia's Copy Magic plays with this in while that he can copy any number of other magic attributes due to his spell copying, he can only use spells together that are the same attribute (so he can launch two different water spells but can't launch a water and fire spell at the same time).
    • Mages who make a pact with a Devil gains the Devil's magic attribute on top of their own. The exception to this is Asta, who only has his Devil's Anti-Magic attribute due to lacking any mana of his own. Yuno inherited Wind Magic from Licht's child and only realized his innate Star Magic attribute while fighting the Spade Kingdom. Finally, there is Lucius Zogratis, the alternate personality of Julius Novacrono. Lucius has an unheard-of three magic attributes: the demon Astaroth's Soul Magic, his and Julius' shared Time Magic, and the demon Lucifero's Gravity Magic.
  • Brynhildr in the Darkness:
    • Saori can destroy anything within six metres of herself and rewind time by up to one minute.
    • Mako can create antimatter, detect other witches, fly, shoot Hand Blasts, teleport and use telekinesis. Then she gets regeneration on top of that.
    • Awakened Kuroneko can fly, teleport, generate Deflector Shields and create micro black holes.
  • Campione! has the titular Campione, who inherit the powers of the gods they slay. This is justified, as each God is a Composite Character of various mythological figures which may or may not be related, thus their powers are equally varied.
  • A Certain Magical Index:
    • Sogiita Gunha, one of the Level 5 Espers, apparently has several disconnected superpowers, including indifference to pain, creation of explosions of almost any variety, Super-Strength, a Healing Factor, and an ability to deflect electricity to name a few. This is in direct violation of known laws of espers, and the researchers working on him are continually frustrated by the mysterious nature of his power, especially since he isn't interested in learning more about it.
    • Touma Kamijou has an Anti-Magic right hand called Imagine Breaker, a Healing Factor, and a Spider-Sense. It later revealed Imagine Breaker seals a dragon, or possibly multiple entities inside his body that he can unleash on his enemies when Imagine Breaker is cut off, and he eventually becomes a Weredragon.
  • Dragon Ball: Most of the powers evidenced by the martial artists can be explained as Ki Manipulation, e.g. flight, Kamehame Hadoken, Super-Strength, Super-Toughness, "donating" ki to each other, etc., or else by Bizarre Alien Biology, e.g. the Saiyans' giant monkey transformation or Namekians' ability to merge and split themselves. Other abilities that don't fall under ki use are psychic abilities such as telepathy, mind reading, telekinesis, Psychic Link, and the Flashy Teleportation of Instant Transmission. Those that falls under other are often called mystic abilities, such as the Namekians' ability to create the Dragon Balls or create clothes and objects. In other words, the diverse power sets of many Dragon Ball characters are the direct result of the setting being a Fantasy Kitchen Sink where super-powered aliens, ki manipulation, magic, and psychic powers can and do overlap.
    • Goku has one of the most diverse movesets in the series thanks to his transformations, copy, and psychic abilities. He is one of the few characters in the series that can teleport, read people's memories by touching them, is a telepath, and, at least in the anime, have a mild form of precognition. He also has Super-Senses such as enhanced hearing, eyesight, and smell.
    • Dende who is one of the Namekians from the Dragon Clan. He can create the Dragon Balls on top of healing people with his hands.
    • Cell was created from the genetic material of some of the strongest fighters in the universe, thus he has the racial abilities of Saiyans, Namekians, and Frieza's race. He can grow stronger from near death like a Saiyan, regenerate like a Namekian, and can survive anywhere and survive almost any mortal damage like Frieza, allowing him to regenerate from a single cell and grow vastly stronger. He also inherited the experiences and movesets of the Earth's greatest fighters and Frieza.
    • Majin Buu who is one of the biggest Super Power Lottery Winner in the series. He can regenerate from vapors, absorb others, taking their fighting knowledge and techniques, has a beam that can turn people into any object of Buu's desire, can copy any technique he sees at least once, can teleport, is an immortal, and have healing abilities that far surpasses Dende's.
    • The Kais, the gods of the Dragon World, have their own powerset and abilities. Some of them can heal, teleport, unlock the hidden power within others, can fuse using special earrings, and can create objects and clothes out of nothing. The Supreme Kais have the explicit ability to create new planets, according to the guides.
  • Fushigi Yuugi: Genbu Kaiden has Genbu Warrior Hikitsu holding Water and a Magical Eye as his default, but ends up unleashing his powers with more variety than readers ever anticipated.
  • Alucard of Hellsing has an interesting collection of powers, including but far from limited to regeneration and telepathy. He's so far from other vampires in terms of power he looks like an Eldritch Abomination to them.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Kamen no Maid Guy: Kogarashi has New Powers as the Plot Demands, most of them completely unrelated. In addition to the standard super-strength, inhuman toughness, super-speed and the ability to defy gravity with jumping, he has a paralyzing voice, X-ray vision, levitation, Prehensile Hair, the ability to hypnotize people even without direct eye contact, hands that can evaporate all liquid from anything he rubs on, 37 senses (don't ask), knowledge of every gourmet recipe ever made, the ability to summon and direct underwear-stealing crows, and USB connectivity in his brain. For starters. It's safe to assume Kogarashi will acquire any power at any given time so long as it's funny.
  • Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force: the powers Thoma gained from his Viral Transformation started off pretty simple, with the ability to fire huge blasts, Anti-Magic, inexhaustible stamina, Nigh-Invulnerability, and a Healing Factor. But as more chapters are brought out, the powers he received from the Eclipse virus gets bigger and more random. Currently, he also has psychic immunity, flight, Stat-O-Vision, an EMP Shockwave, an automatic self-defense array that launches 100 million energy blasts, and the ability to make everyone over a wide range experience cardiac arrest.
  • Medaka Box:
    • Medaka originally had one abnormality: The End, that allowed her to do anything perfectly, including other people's abnormalities, but not mimic them. Then she learns how to do that and perfects most of them.
    • Ajimu Najimi has a whopping 12,858,051,967,633,867 powers and abilities.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny and their associated spin-offs came up with various ways to combine the Strike Gundam's three Striker Packs: Aile, Sword and Launcher. These include:
    • Perfect Strike (SEED, this is all of the packs used at once)
    • IWSP Striker Pack (SEED)
    • Destiny Gundam (SEED Destiny)
    • Strike Noir Gundam (SEED CE. 73 Stargazer)
    • Tactical Arms (Astray)
  • My Hero Academia: It’s a rule of the setting that people only get one Quirk each, if any, but some characters get around it by having one Quirk with multiple effects.
    • Heteromorphic or "Mutant" type Quirks, which drastically alter the user's body from the baseline human, are particularly prone to granting "bundled" subpowers, especially in the case of Quirks that grant their user the status of Animal Themed Super Being. Asui "Froppy" Tsuyu is the most iconic example, with her Quirk of Frog giving her all the abilities of frogs, including super-leaping, Wall Crawling, a 20 meter long Multipurpose Tongue, heightened swimming skills, and Chameleon Camouflage.
    • Shoto Todoroki, whose Quirk lets him use fire on his right side and ice on his left side, as the result of being the son of the Fire Hero Endeavour and his ice-wielding mother Rei Todoroki. It's played for drama that his Quirk was the result of a Super Breeding Program enacted by his father, and Shoto was the only one of his four siblings who developed the ability to use both elements with his Quirk.
    • Played with in regards to the villain known as All For One. While he originally only had one Quirk, said Quirk allows him to steal and use the Quirks of other people. However, his power set isn't really random or counter intuitive but rather a series of Quirks that he has picked based on the fact they either synergize with each other or expand his versatility. Specifically, All for One himself prefers simple, straight to the point Quirks like super strength as opposed to any Quirk that requires training or inventive use to be useful. He can also give multiple quirks to people but the human body isn't designed to handle more than one Quirk normally. So they have to be modified into Nomu which are typically mindless combat machines.
    • Izuku Midoriya was originally Quirkless and obtained the One For All Quirk from All Might. Later he discovers that One For All also passes on the Quirks of all its previous holders, and he starts manifesting those as well. He has unlocked all the six Quirks: Blackwhip, Float, Danger Sense, Smokescreen, Fa Jin, and Gear Shift. He also has the ability to communicate with previous One For All users that exist within himself.
  • My Monster Secret: Akane has quite a variety of powers, among them Telekinesis, Clairvoyance, duplicating herself, Mind Manipulation, summoning objects, changing people's sizes, and summon the Lord of Terror. She uses most of these for the purpose of messing with people and obtaining candy, though she does occasionally use them to teach her students some lessons.
  • Naruto: For most people, power sets beyond general jutsu come from their genetics or family secrets. Kekkei Genkai and Hiden jutsu tend to be based around some root theme, but some, especially "dojutsu" (eye techniques), can have an ever expanding array of variety.
    • Dojutsu from least to most varied base form:
      • The Byakugan from the Hyuga clan is relatively simple, granting 360 degree telescopic X-ray vision and the power to directly see chakra. However, later in the series it's revealed that the ancestor of the Hyuga clan supposedly had the same multitude of powers that his brother, the Sage of Six Paths had (with the Rinnegan), while still having the Byakugan. To top it off, it has been demonstrated that several generations' worth of Byakugan eyes can be collected and combined to form the Tenseigan, which allows the usage of a limited variant of the aforementioned Six Paths power, and a flashy chakra mode to boot.
      • The Sharingan of the Uchiha clan has the main ability to allow the user to perfectly copy and understand any technique the user sees, that they could conceivably be capable of performing without outside assistance (i.e. not other genetic or family secret jutsu). It also gives the ability to see chakra in a slightly more limited way than the Byakugan, gives enhanced perception in order to do things like see objects moving at high speed, including a person's movements, and can be used to subtly hypnotize an unwary target. Where it gets crazier is the Mangekyō Sharingan which seems to actually be random, with users having different abilities: one for each eye, and one for them as an individual person. These include advanced hypnosis; summoning a flame that cannot be extinguished; teleportation; sucking objects into an alternate dimension; becoming intangible; and telekinesis. It also grants the ability to summon giant guardian deities with swords that can cut through mountains, which can further be enhanced by other abilities such as a shield that can block almost anything, a gourd that can seal souls, and potentially other abilities. Finally, high enough mastery can grant the ability to do genjutsu that can essentially bend reality at will. Also, with Senju DNA, an Uchiha gains the Rinnegan's powers listed below as well.
      • The Rinnegan allows whoever possesses it to use all five elemental powers (fire, water, earth, wind, and lightning) with mastery, when most people can only master one. A person with the Rinnegan is also a instant expert for all jutsu. It appears to have the same chakra sensing abilities as the Byakugan. Any body produced or controlled by the user can have its eyes added to the user's visual network. Its other abilities usually grouped into seven branches, known as the "Six Paths Technique": Deva Path: control attractive and repulsive forces similar to gravity or magnetism manipulation, and create miniature satellite bodies; Asura Path: sprout additional limbs and faces, and become a cyborg with missiles, lasers, and other weapons; Human Path: read minds, rip out people's souls causing instant death, or temporarily store souls; Animal Path: summon giant animals all connected to your visual network, one of which can split and copy its entire being as a response to physical trauma; Preta Path: drain and absorb chakra of all forms, nullify most jutsu, and form chakra barriers; Naraka Path: summon the King of Hell for lie detection, to heal yourself or others, or transport souls in combination with the Human Path; Outer Path: generate rods from the user's body that can transmit or control the flow of chakra, allowing it to bind a victim or animate corpses (that the user can share or split its powers with, including this same power), and control life and death itself, including revival of the dead, summoning of souls, and banishment of reanimated souls.
      • The Rinne-Sharingan, the dojutsu from which the Rinnegan and Sharingan are derived, has all the benefits of those two plus high-grade dimensional translocation and formation, as well as the ability to perform Infinite Tsukoyumi without the assistance of the Shinju.
    • Then you have some characters whose motivation is to combine the abilities of different families and sources, as well. This avoids the previous semi-limit to combo powers being limited to specific bloodlines. Such characters include:
      • Orochimaru's original goal in life was to master all jutsu, which he sought to do by jumping from body to body, bringing techniques along the way, hoping to eventually take control of a body with a Sharingan, making this easier.
      • Kakuzu sought to master all five elemental chakra natures by using a technique which allowed him to absorb the hearts of other people, where each heart would have control of one chakra nature.
      • Kabuto eventually sought to find his own identity by effectively assimilating the abilities of other people using body modifications akin to DNA transplants. This granted him the abilities of Orochimaru, the three members of Sasuke's TAKA team, and the abilities of all of the members of the Sound Five. This is in addition to his own original abilities as one of the world's premier spies and medical ninja, and his mastery of Snake Sage Mode.
      • After his resurrection during the Fourth Shinobi War, Madara Uchiha has the Sharingan including the Susanoo, the Rinnegan, Fire Style, Wood Style, and Regeneration. Later, he absorbs Hashirama's Senjutsu Chakra and unlocks Six Paths Sage Mode.
  • In NEEDLESS, superpowers are called Fragments and people only usually can have one, such as Fire or Gravity or Magnetism. Protagonist Adam Blade and antagonist Adam Arclight cheat the rule by having a Fragment that allows them to copy and use others' Fragments. Another antagonist, Saten, also appears to be breaking the rules by being able to freeze things, set them on fire and create tornadoes, but he eventually explains that his "Fourth Wave" Fragment holds the power of transferring heat rather than creating or destroying it. So freeze and fire powers he has to use in that order, and tornado is the result of rapidly cooling and heating the air currents.
  • Noein: The Dragon Knights have: Nigh-Invulnerability, the ability to walk through walls, enhanced perception of time, teleportation. Most of them have some form of energy blast and a secondary Personality Powers set.
  • One Piece: Most characters' abilities stick to a certain theme, but the prevalence of the Semantic Superpower among Devil Fruit users results in some that are more of a stretch.
    • Brook: The Revive-Revive Fruit originally appeared to give him the ability to come back to life, once. Post-Timeskip, his powers now seem to have granted him control over his soul, which allows Astral Projection, well enough... and the ability to create ice by drawing on "the coldness of the afterlife."
    • Blackbeard: Dark-Dark Fruit powers grant at least two entirely different sets of powers: One set of powers allows him to manipulate gravity and be a living black hole (hence the name of the fruit), and the other lets him stop someone else's Devil Fruit powers. He also has the ability to eat a second Devil Fruit, from another Fruit user's corpse, however, it isn't entirely clear if this is part of his Darkness powers, or part of his own body's natural abilities. Nevertheless, he has a definite odd combination, now that he can not only control gravity, but also create earthquakes at will.
    • Bartolomew Kuma: The Paw-Paw has the power to push things. A simple power, but there isn't really anything Kuma can't push. He can push the air around him into a dangerous paw-shaped bubble, push people away incredible distances (and seemingly able to control where they land), and push things that don't physically exist, like pain (which he can both push out of people and push in to people). From outsider's perspective, it appears that he can do 3 entirely different things, with the only connection being his paw symbol.
    • Viola: The Glare-Glare fruit has a whole slew of gaze-based powers. They start reasonable, allowing for X-ray vision and extremely good sight in both detail-spotting and observable distance. Then come the extensions from there, in that gazing into someone's eyes lets the user read their mind and memories; if they "see everything", one can assume it probably still counts as part of the power. And then comes the weird one, in that thanks to a Japanese pun ("eye's corner" and "eye whale" have the exact same kanji spelling) she can launch tears that turn into giant whales mid-flight, providing her with a projectile as ridiculous as it's dangerous.
    • Brûlée: The Mirror-Mirror Fruit allows Brûlée to become a mirror image of someone else, move in perfect synchronization as someone else like a mirror image, turn other people or animals into mirror images of someone else, manipulate how reflections look, and access a "Mirror World" alternate dimension that also lets her walk through any mirror (as well as anyone in contact with her) and emerge back into the real world from any other mirror.
    • Any character with both a devil fruit and Haki (the latter of which can be used by anyone with enough training) are a literal example, as they can harden their body to be stronger than steel, predict attacks and see into the future, K.O. opponents merely by having stronger willpower (rarely, but the protagonist notably has all 3 abilities in addition to his devil fruit), in addition to their devil fruit power. In addition, if previous antagonist Rob Lucci, master of another powerset (the Six Powers, of which he has a seventh power exclusive to himself) has learned Haki (something every strong character in the New World is implied to have), in addition to his Zoan Devil Fruit (Cat-Cat Fruit Model: Leopard) then he has 3 completely different powersets.
    • Non-Devil Fruit user example with Sanji whom has Not Quite Flight through a Double Jump, Super-Strength through training, can ignite his body usually his legs (somehow) with Diablo Jambe and has Haki on top of all that. Then during Wano Sanji awakens a exoskeleton which not only makes him Immune to Bullets but also gives him a Healing Factor. He combines this exoskeleton with his Diablo Jambe and Haki resulting in a Next Tier Power-Up.
  • In Pokémon Adventures, Yellow's arsenal of Viridian-blessed Psychic Powers includes Healing Hands, limited tactile telekinesis, telepathy, Super-Empowering, and possibly Energy Absorption. One piece of artwork also suggests that her powers can be used on humans as well as Pokémon.
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • Early on, Pokémon were able to use more than four different moves, and the peak of this Early-Installment Weirdness was Ryuuji's/Drake's Dragonite, which used ten different moves in one single battle.
    • Soon after the aforementioned Dragonite, Pokémon would be limited of having only four moves per moveset. Dande's/Leon's Charizard is the only example where the trainer takes advantage of the Pokémon's huge movepool it can learn from, thus he teaches his Charizard different moves every battle, making it impossible to predict what his Charizard is going to do and making it extremely versatile.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica has some, but not always simultaneously:
    • Mami can create magic ribbons, plus flintlock rifles and a ginormous magic cannon. The manual claims she painstakingly constructs the firearms out of ribbons in a non-magical fashion, but this is a bit dubious. The Movie has her create a fully-functional clone of herself out of ribbons. She may just be so skilled that her ribbon power has morphed into more of an Imagination-Based Superpower.
    • Kyouko has a complicated chain-of-nunchucks spear and can spawn walls of pointy diamond shapes, and less consistently, could create illusory copies of herself. She lost that last power when her family died.
    • Sayaka can summon swords, has an even stronger version of the standard magical girl Healing Factor that comes packaged with her unique Healing Hands, and after dying, eventually learns how to summon her Witch self as a familiar to do battle with her.
    • Homura goes through the largest set, starting out as a Time Master with a Bag of Holding and a rarely-used Magic Missile sort of thing, eventually ditching all that in favor of an Energy Bow inherited from Madoka and magical wings.
  • Rave Master: Haru Glory's Ten Commandments sword at any given time gives its wielder powers to generate explosions, move and attack at super speed, cut intangible objects and seal magic, shoot ice and fire, paralyze and push back opponents, become a ridiculously heavy sword, emit blinding flashes of light, unleash a berserk mode that features enhanced strength and speed, and finally the ability to dispel evil.
  • Reborn! (2004): Mukuro Rokudo has the power of the Six Paths of Reincarnation, granting him six unique abilities. He can take over people's bodies, he has a skill that allows him to perfectly perform the skills of the person he's taking over, he can summon animals, create real illusions, he can increase his combat abilities and he has access to a Super Mode.
  • Rosario + Vampire: Almost every Youkai has the ability to shapeshift into a human, but every race has their own unique powers, meaning that almost every Yokai has at least two abilities. Additionally, Yokai heal faster than humans.
    • The succubi are shown to have one of the widest set of abilities. They can hypnotize men and kissing them in their state allows a succubus to make them into their eternal slaves. They can also create illusions and dive into people's dreams. Among their natural physical abilities, they can lengthen their sharp finger nails and have wings for flying. And apparently, if the anime is concerned, they can fire beams with their giant boobs.
    • While Vampires don't shapeshift into humans due to their very human-like appearance, they do have many abilities beyond their signature Super-Strength. They can transfer their blood into different people, which slowly turns them into ghouls/vampires. They can detect yoki (demon aura), they have deception skills and can charm people, they can regenerate and shapeshift into something different. Their shapeshifting ability is an almost forgotten one, due to modern vampires preferring to look as aesthetic as possible, and their regeneration is usually not that high. However, Shinsou, who are much more powerful vampires, have exceptionally high regeneration powers and they can form armor on their bodies. Alucard is also capable of absorbing other living beings.
  • The Praetorian in Super Crooks (2021) is a superhero whose power is the Superpower Lottery. Every day he gains a new random superpower, with him currently having over 200 powers at once, effectively making him a human Swiss army knife. It's gotten to the point where entire betting rings have been established over what he'll do next.
  • Subverted in UQ Holder!. Santa is an Ability User with telekinesis that can also turn intangible, which initially seems completely random until it's revealed that the intangibility is a result of him being a Revenant Ghost.
  • Ushio and Tora: The titular 2000-years old Youkai has a large array of powers, including: flight, invisibility, phasing through natural materials, shapeshifting (so far all powers common amongst Youkai), as well as fire breath, emitting powerful lightnings, minor wind powers, Prehensile Hair, Healing Factor and, finally, he has a good enough memory to cast powerful spells usually used to control demons.

    Card Games 
  • Super Munchkin: your powers are literally based on the luck of the draw.

    Comic Books 
  • In The Authority, the government assassin Seth boasts having been given over a thousand different superpowers by his sponsors. As he only appears in one storyline only a few of them are actually seen, but he does use his "nuclear poop vision".
  • Carol Danvers: In her "main" identities as Ms. Marvel, Warbird and Captain Marvel, she combines Flying Brick, Flying Firepower (with Hand Blast and Eye Beams options), Hyper-Awareness, Super-Reflexes, Energy Constructs and Molecular Manipulation, Energy Absorption, and a Healing Factor. In her Binary retrofit, in addition to functioning as Golden Super Mode, she trades her Hyper-Awareness and Molecular Manipulation for Elemental Powers over heat, light, radiation and gravity.
  • Cerebus the Aardvark: Parodied with the "reads" character Rabbi. He had hundreds of peculiar and highly specialized powers such as dextrorotatory breath — making the plane of polarization of light spin to the right by blowing.
  • Darkseid was born with the Super-Strength and Nigh-Invulnerability common to the strongest of the New Gods. Then he killed his older brother to claim the Omega Effect, which is essentially Eye Beams. The Omega Effect allows Darkseid to teleport people, torture them, wish them to the cornfield and wish them back. In Final Crisis he gained even more new powers. His new variant on the Omega Effect, the Omega Sanction, can subject its target to a Fate Worse than Death by sending that person to live out a brutal cycle of reincarnation. Darkseid can also create avatars of himself to do his bidding when he doesn't feel like moving himself, move through time, make himself as huge as skyscrapers, teleport without using the Omega Force, mass scale mind control, and quite a few others. This makes sense, considering Darkseid is a god.
  • Doom Patrol: The Quiz is a supervillain who has every power you haven't thought of. Fighting her involves desperately naming superpowers so she can't use them.
  • In Eight Billion Genies, Wang wishes to become whatever he needs to be to survive in the world forever changed by genies and for the abilities he needs to protect whoever he's with. In response, his genie gives him a futuristic combat suit, Charles Atlas Superpower, a variety of weapons including two Power Fists that shoot powerful beams of energy, and a wide variety of skills from martial arts to being able to speak English to hotwiring a car.
  • Empowered: Empowered's super suit gives her super strength, energy beams... and the ability to make phone calls by speaking into her pinky and forefinger and Wall Crawling and the ability to breathe in space, it turns out. Also, her suit can turn invisible. (Not her, just the suit.) The suit's mask offers a bunch of vision based powers as well including X-Ray Vision and the like.
  • Fantastic Four: Susan Storm, who started out with just invisibility, then gained force field powers to allow her a more active role in the stories. A much later Retcon claimed that her invisibility was actually an instinctive use of the forcefield to distort light around her. Johnny Storm also has the Flying Firepower set, and is over on that page.
  • The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk has Super-Strength, is Nigh-Invulnerable, can create a stunning sonic boom with his hands, regenerates, okay, all fit sort of with the "unstoppable force of rage" idea. However, some of his other, lesser-known powers include seeing, and HITTING, ghosts and astral projections, and homing in on the site where the gamma bomb that created him went off. And supermath, the ability to automatically reduce collateral damage when levelling down entire cities. Officially, this is explained as Bruce being a 'hypermind', able to analyze and predict the consequences of his actions near-instantaneously (after all, he was a brilliant scientist before being turned into the Hulk). Hulk is also highly resistant to telepathy and mind control (it's mentioned that he was the only one who wasn't affected by the Cosmic Retcon that wiped out everyone's memory of The Sentry, and neither Professor X nor Emma Frost can Mind Rape him), occasionally capable of absorbing radiation, and has limited reactive adaptation. He's shown adapting to being able to breathe underwater and survive for a fairly considerable time in the vacuum of space (while still needing to breathe eventually). Ultimate Hulk takes it a step further, adapting to the atmospheres of Mars and Venus after limited exposure. Then Avengers: No Surrender adds Resurrective Immortality (again, fitting with "unstoppable force of rage"), which is followed by Living Lie Detector in Immortal Hulk.
  • Deconstructed in Irredeemable. The Plutonian has a wide variety of superpowers because he's actually a Reality Warper subconsciously altering the universe.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes: Ultra Boy is a guy with the powers of Superman, but he can only use one at a time (even the passive ones like invulnerability.) He does have a Legion flight ring so he doesn't have to use his natural flight which frees him up to use one other power. He does seem to keep the Required Secondary Powers for whichever ones he's using at the time though.
  • Martian Manhunter: Super-Strength, Flight, Intangibility, Invisibility, Shapeshifting, Size Shifting, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Nine Senses, Eye Beams, the ability to strain gold from seawater, the ability to create ice cream cones with the power of his mind, the power to animate clothing, underwater breathing, and control over magnetism. Oh, and fire is his Kryptonite Factor. Yes, even though he has heat vision.. And the explanation for all this? He's Martian. That's it. All of this comes originally from only two power sets. In his earliest appearances, J'onn J'onnz's Super-Strength, Intangibility, Invisibility, and Size Shifting, were all explicitly defined as variations on his Martian Shapeshifting, and his Telepathy, Telekinesis, and supersenses were initially described as manifestations of Martian Psychic Powers. His Flight was described at one point during this period as shapeshifting his density to the point he is lighter than air and then using his psychic powers to propel himself along. And these two power sets were standard Martian abilities in the old 1950s SciFi flicks in which extraterrestrials were metaphors for the Red Scare who could hide in plain sight (Martian Shapeshifting) and spy on anyone (Martian Psychic Powers).
  • The original WWII-era Miss America could enlarge objects, turn objects like clothes into living things, move things with her mind, run super fast, teleport, and conduct psychic readings, Depending on the Writer. Regrettably, most of these abilities haven't been mentioned since the character became associated with the Freedom Fighters (DC Comics).
  • Namor the Sub-Mariner: Has everything you'd expect from a being built to survive underwater: strength enough to survive ocean pressure, agility and speed to swim quickly and efficiently... and tiny wings on his ankles that allow him to fly, making him a Flying Brick. This last was eventually explained as a mutation caused by his surface-dweller/Atlantean hybrid heritage. Thus he's considered one of the first mutants of the modern age in the Marvel Universe.
  • No Hero:
    • Joshua Carver has super strength, flight, and quick healing.
    • Smoke Lightning can transform into smoke and shoot lightning.
  • She-Hulk (2004): Danger Man was a hapless worker in a nuclear plant who was caught in an industrial accident that made him bigger, stronger, and more powerful. And also gave him energy blasts, the ability to breathe underwater, and he can have a meltdown if he gets angry. His head and hands glow and have Kirby Dots surrounding them. Although he's also a huge subversion of the whole "radiation accident" origin; He's not a superhero and doesn't want to be. He's still a hapless worker in a nuclear plant, but now when he rolls over in bed he crushes his wife, tears his clothes up with one false move because he's so strong, and gets stared at on the subway because of how obvious his situation is. He doesn't even really have a codename; it's just that his real name is Dan Jermain.
  • Spider-Man:
    • Most of Peter's powers are supposed to be those of a spider, amped up to human proportions, but with Spider-Sense standing in for a spider's multiple eyes. But once having got these powers, Peter quickly invents his web-shootersnote , which are thematically appropriate, but not really connected to the rest of his powers. Later versions of the character have given Spidey "organic web-shooters" to more closely tie his powers together. Over the decades, Spider-Man has developed other temporary powers or devices. A recent secondary mutation gave Peter more spider-based powers including the ability to feel trace vibrations in his weblines, enhancing his spider-sense to where he can practically see in the dark, making his hairs more sensitive, giving him poison stingers in his arms... and the power to instantly recognize what species a spider is by looking at it. However, most of these powers, plus his organic webbing, have been lost in the Time Skip between One More Day and Brand New Day.
    • Francis Klum, the third Mysterio, had the powers of teleportation, telepathy and telekinesis. When Daredevil asked how it was possible for a teleporter to also be a telepath, Nightcrawler suggested that Klum was "teleporting" thoughts and suggestions into people's heads.
  • Spider-Woman: Mattie Franklin, one of the numerous heroines (and villains) who goes by the name, has the powers of all of them. This includes powers such as: strength and agility, flight, energy blasts, some low-level psychic powers, psychic webs, psychic spider-legs... Logically she should also have Jessica Drew's pheromone powers, but they were never demonstrated.
  • Starfire has super strength, super durability, flight, can absorb ultraviolet radiation and project it as energy blasts called "starbolts" from her hands and can assimilate languages through physical contact.
  • While most Star Wars Jedi or Sith are gifted with telekinesis, the ability to sense danger, enhanced reflexes, Force Persuasion, and the occasional additional ability like Force lightning, the Dark Woman from Star Wars: Republic and Star Wars Tales can also turn invisible, walk through walls, teleport, heal people with the Force, and control plants.
  • Static: Almost anything as long as it can be given a vague connection to electromagnetism. Including listening to CDs without a player.
  • Sand Masters in White Sand can telekinetically manipulate sand to serve as shields, weapons, and tools. And then there's slatrification, the power to turn sand into water. Kenton actually points out that slatrification seems to have nothing to do with any of the other Sand Master abilities.
  • Superman:
    • Kryptonians have a standard Flying Brick (Super-Strength, Super-Speed, Flight), heat vision, X-Ray Vision, and so on when exposed to yellow sunlight and low-gravity environments.
    • Superman's original powers were mainly exaggerations of normal human abilities; in the first story, simply because he was from an older planet and more "highly evolved" than us mere mortals. Later this was Retconned as from being born on a world with high gravity and a thick atmosphere. Around the same time, Power Creep, Power Seep caused Super Leaping to become Flight. Later, his habit of using "the heat from [his] X-Ray Vision" became a seperate Heat Vision power, and so on.
    • Supergirl was created after her cousin Superman had got most of his power upgrades, so she had a lot of different powers from the beginning. In The Supergirl From Krypton (1959), her first appearance, she uses her super-strength, hurricane breath and x-ray vision... on the same page!
    • Superboy Kon-El/Conner Kent has Kryptonian powers and tactile telekinesis, though he started out with just the tactile telekinesis and developed the Kryptonian powers as he aged.
    • Lor-Zod/Chris Kent a.k.a. Nightwing also has Kryptonian powers and tactile telekinesis.
    • Chris Kent's girlfriend Thara Ak-Var aka Flamebird has Kryptonian powers and pyrokinesis.
    • In The Killers of Krypton, villain Splyce is a shape-shifter alien with energy-generation powers who can survive in space, prompting Supergirl to deduce Splyce must be some kind of artificially engineered bio-weapon.
  • W.I.T.C.H.: Each of the guardians possesses control over a classical element, but they also possess a secondary power (such as telepathy, telekinesis, mind control and flight). The TV series continues this in its second season.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Originally, Diana's abilities came from Supernatural Martial Arts which granted her enhanced strength, speed, agility and durability, telepathy and the ability to glide on air currents. Post-crisis, Diana possess the standard flying brick abilities, a strong healing factor, the ability to communicate with animals, enhanced senses, the beauty of Aphrodite, restoring her health and strength by becoming one with the earth and the ability to astral project herself into various lands of myth.
    • The post crisis version of Nubia has similar abilities to her twin Diana as well as one which Diana does not possess; the ability to petrify people with her gaze. Nubia was gifted this ability from the Gorgons.
    • Donna Troy has the exact same powerset as her sister Diana, with the only difference between the two being the different functions of their lassos. During her Troia phase, Donna Troy added the ability to project light and photonic energy blasts and shields and the power to project three dimensional images of a person's memories to her arsenal. When she was resurrected and temporarily made a moon goddess, she could command darkness and cold.
  • X-Men has the concepts of Secondary Mutations - Exactly What It Says on the Tin, abilities which are un-related to their primary mutations - and Homo Killcrop - the informal term for the original pre-modern sub-species of X-gene-possessing mutants, whose powers manifest at birth/infancy and are much more chaotic (and thus more varied) than those of the modern sub-species of mutants, whose powers manifest at puberty (stated to be the result of natural selection, as mutant babies tended to have an extremely low survival rate compared to mutant teenagers). A number of X-characters thus fit this trope, including:
    • Wolverine: Healing Factor, retractable claws, enhanced smelling and hearing, adamantium skeleton, and in some cases animal empathy/communication. It's explained that Wolverine is the product of two mutant families. His mother's family has long been "cursed" with bone claws and mindless animal rages, while his father has the regeneration and enhanced senses. Wolverine gets all of them. The adamantium is added, much later in his life, by government experimentation. They'd been wanting to do it for a long while to produce Super Soldiers, but adamantium is poisonous — a test subject who could heal away the ill effects was perfect. Early on, he also had a weird immunity to being detected by mechanical devices like motion sensors, thermal imagining cameras, and robots. This quietly disappeared decades ago and hasn't been mentioned since.
    • His son, Daken, gets all this plus pheromone powers.
    • Emma Frost: Telepathy and turning to diamond.
    • Nightcrawler: He has a long list of minor powers, making him something like a poor-man's-Spider-Man, plus a prehensile tail and shadow-camouflage and some other minor perks. By far his most powerful ability, however, is a seemingly unrelated teleportation power.
    • Angel: Wings for flight and the Required Secondary Powers that make flight work and can heal people with the same blood type. Although the last part was added later because, well, flight is boring. Angel also gained the ability to transform to and from Archangel, who has metal wings with razor-like feathers that can be fired at enemies.
    • Icarus: Wings and associated Required Secondary Powers, the power to mimic any sound, as well as Healing Factor for himself. Unfortunately, the healing factor relied on enzymes produced by the muscles of his wings, so when they were removed, he lost that power and promptly had a Bridge Drop befall him.
    • Sage: A mind that works like a computer and can jump-start the mutations of those with the mutant gene but no powers (or activate the "secondary mutations" of powered mutants, which are often unrelated to their original powers, placing them in this trope's territory.) And telepathy that she rarely uses, despite being nearly on par with Emma Frost.
    • Wild Thing of the MC2 20 Minutes into the Future-verse: The healing factor and animal-like senses and hairdo of her dad, Wolverine, with a smaller dose of the temper. "Psychic claws" in the style of Psylocke's psychic blade? (It's said it was "taught" to her by Psylocke, the mental version of Charles Atlas Superpowers, but no one else without psychic powers has ever been shown to use one, and Psylocke's own ability to use this is at the mercy of whatever's going on with her powers at the moment.)
    • Monet St. Croix: Flying Brick powers, the ability to merge with any mutant member of her family encountered thus far, with different combinations having entirely different personality and powers. This goes, in fact, for all of the St. Croix siblings except for Nicole (who hasn't displayed solo powers just yet.) Also, telepathy, telekinesis, and heightened intelligence. However, she may just have Psychic Powers, her Flying Brick powers being a manifestation of that, like the 'Psionic Superman' theory that was popular in the 80s and 90s.
    • Selene: Animate objects plus suck people's life force to feed her youth and immortality (plus some minor Psychic Powers and Functional Magic, and various inconsistently enhanced physical abilities). Until she got upgraded; as of Chasing Hellfire, it's "turn into living shadow, plus absorb people entirely to feed her youth and immortality, as well as take on the form of victims."
    • Cassandra Nova: Psychic Powers and the ability to give (or perhaps catalyze, a la Sage) powers in others.
    • Omega Red: A healing factor and life draining powers. Super-Strength from draining life, metal tentacles don't fit but were added since the healing factor let him take it. Releasing clouds of deadly gas is what doesn't fit (The Marvel Handbook calls the gas death pheromones. Sweating some sort of toxin would probably explain the healing factor. Healing factor explains strength. Draining life sustains the healing factor). Carbonadium, the metal that makes up his tentacles, is a poor substitute of adamantium; it's radioactive, which explains the source of the gas.
    • Gambit: Power to make stuff blow up, later handwaved as turning the potential energy in an object into kinetic energy. His charm, though, is sometimes said to be psychic in nature. His agility is also enhanced, sometimes explained away as a subconscious manipulation of kinetic energy in his own body. Also, when he was temporary blinded, he could see glimpses of the future in his cards, a power he's never had before or since. And they were dramatically extended in the New Son/New Sun saga - in the end, his powers were basically extended to manipulation of any matter - he gained a healing factor, flight powers, the ability to make stuff explode with a mere thought etc etc etc. The powers had initially been turned off by Mr. Sinister, and at the end of the saga, were 'burned out' by his exertions fighting his Alternate Universe duplicate.
    • Rogue: When introduced in The Avengers Annual #10, she had this status, permanently supplementing her Power Parasite baseline power with the Flying Brick and Hyper-Awareness powers of Carol Danvers. During a time-period in which her innate power was augmented, she could Invoke this power, as she was able to recall any and every power she had ever copied, allowing her to create mix-and-match powersets on the fly. After losing her stolen Danvers powers, she temporarily gained a permanent copy of Sunfire's powers, adding Flight, Wreathed in Flames and Playing with Fire Hand Blasts to her Power Parasitism. Most recently, she dropped the fiery powers and regained Flying Brick status from Wonder Man.
    • Magneto: Control over magnetism, which was quickly expanded to include the entire electro-magnetic spectrum. He also has telepathy, though it is undeveloped.
    • Mimic: Can duplicate the abilities/training of anyone he's around was the original power, but thanks to All Your Powers Combined, permanently has the original X-Men's powers: Cyclops' optic blasts, Jean Grey's telekinesis, Angel's wings (and presumably the secondaries that come along with them), Iceman's ice powers & Beast's strength & agility. He can still copy the powers of others, at half-strength.
    • Apocalypse: Wide array of powers due to alien/future (his Expansion Pack Past gets complicated, though not as bad as Logan's) technology, through which he can use virtually any physical superpower, as well as interface with technology. His inborn power is control of his body down to a cellular level, which in turn grants a degree of Super-Strength, stamina and durability, Super-Intelligence, Immortality, size-shifting... and having gray skin for no good reason. He has also demonstrated telepathy and telekinesis, but it is unclear whether these are natural or part of the suit.
    • Blink: The ability to teleport herself, however she can also teleport objects away from her body by producing crystals from her body which she can throw at people or objects.
    • Marrow: Mutation is to have bone weapons growing out of her body, a healing factor to survive said outgrowth and for unknown reasons pink hair and skin. She also has two hearts... to explain how she could be stabbed in one and be back later when she goes the way of all dead mutants. And yes, as far as we know, she is not a mutant Time Lord.
    • Legion: Son of Charles Xavier. The simplest way to define Legion's powers is "Infinite" — as far as has been ascertained, he possess every single mutant power that has ever or could ever manifest. Unfortunately, he is Blessed with Suck in that he also suffers from a truly massive case of Split Personality disorder, having dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of alternate personalities, each of which has control over one particular power (or small batch of powers). His most well-known/iconic personality, which is the closest we know to the original, is a full-blown Reality Warper with secondary powers including the ability to control time, telekinesis, teleportation and Telepathy, which also counts for this.
    • Downplayed by Cyclops, who has Eye Beams and... a seldom-mentioned instinctive perfect understanding of geometry. Not strictly a Required Secondary Power, but it certainly comes in handy when he wants to bounce his Eye Beams off of several reflective surfaces to attack enemies at strange angles. And it makes him unbeatable at billiards.
    • Jean Grey is nominally a telepath and telekinetic... but at full power, even without the Phoenix, she can manipulate molecules with her telekinesis, go sub-atomic, and do basically whatever she likes short of being a fully fledged Reality Warper - and with the Phoenix, all bets are off. Additionally, her teenage self's new signature ability is a combination of both her telepathy and telekinesis, manifesting her astral form in the real world, absorbing all the psychic energy around her and sending it back out again. Very shortly after it manifested, she successfully went up against freaking Gladiator (something helped by the fact that he's a Flying Brick whose abilities are based on Psychic Powers).
    • Her various children are no slouches, either.
      • Rachel Summers is a massively powerful telepath and telekinetic, and sometimes called 'the One True Phoenix'. Additionally, she's a Chronokinetic of awe-inspiring power, being the one behind Kate Pryde's mental time travel in Days of Future Past. She also later used this power to send Scott and Jean to the future on their honeymoon to raise baby Cable, and one future self became Mother Askani, matriarch of the Clan Askani, a bunch of weird, predominantly female psychics who pretty much wrote the book on psychic time travel, and even later used it as part of the famous 'Cross-time caper' story in Excalibur, which involved the titular team bouncing around a lot of alternate timelines.
      • Nathan Summers a.k.a. Cable is also an incredibly powerful psychic, probably even stronger than Rachel when uninhibited by the techno-organic virus. His birth, after all, was engineered by Mister Sinister to destroy Apocalypse. Even under normal conditions, he's proved capable of using his powers to teleport, as well as 'step between moments', essentially stepping out of time. As Saviour Cable, when the virus was switched off, he became a Physical God capable of holding up a giant island city, fighting the Silver Surfer and repairing everything they were destroying in the process. As he remarked while smashing the Surfer's board, "I didn't turn myself into everything I ever fought against, a god, just to come up short!"
      • Nate Grey, the baby of the bunch, and Cable's Age of Apocalypse counterpart, was explicitly artificially engineered by that world's Mister Sinister to kill Apocalypse, and has fair claim to being the strongest of the family. Aside from massive scale Psychic Powers, he's also capable of: Psychometry, Precognition, Astral Projection (including making astral forms solid, something he did on pure instinct... to Professor Xavier, who was on the verge of becoming Onslaught, who promptly used that particular trick to wreak havoc. Can you say Nice Job Breaking It, Hero?) creating psychic armour powerful enough to hurt Thanos and the Hulk, then later allow the Hulk to beat up Thanos), stop time, and teleport between universes. This isn't a complete list, either. At the higher end, he was a fully fledged Reality Warper, and it was a running plot point in his series that he was genuinely afraid of waking up to find that he'd accidentally rewritten the world around him. By the time of Uncanny X-Men (2018), he'd not only got the Reality Warper part under control, but was powerful enough to effortlessly imprison Apocalypse and Kitty Pryde, keep Magneto (who has a very well-documented history of Mind Control resistance), Angel, Blob, and Omega Red on a psychic leash - though Angel is suggested to have joined him of his own free will, and effortlessly trounce an entire X-Men team that included Jean Grey, Iceman, Psylocke, and Storm... all simultaneously. Oh, and he won an extremely one-sided fight with Legion that lasted for about as long as Nate took to complete a brief Breaking Speech, before having a long and pleasant chat with Jean Grey while almost all of the above, plus Emma Frost and the Stepford Sisters were hammering away at his psychic shields, then created an entirely new plane of existence - the Age of X-Man.
      • And then there's Hope Summers, who under the right circumstances, won the Superpower Lottery forever: she has the power of any mutant around her, at full power and potential, and she can take on as many powers at once as she likes. Stryfe also remarked that she was potentially an Omega Level psychic, like him, which seems fairly plausible. Oh, and while she probably isn't Jean Grey reincarnated (though they do look almost identical, which is mostly just Played for Laughs), she was most certainly born to be the host of the Phoenix. However, her powers are limited by her range, so most of the time, she functions as a Badass Normal.
    • Betsy Braddock, who spent most of her superhero career as Psylocke, would become the next Captain Britain in 2019. The original is her twin brother Brian, who unlike her, isn't a mutant, and thus had no innate superpowers before being empowered by the Amulet of Right to become a Superman-esque Flying Brick. Betsy on the other hand, does, and she retains them fully. Add the magical Amulet on top of that, and you've essentially got someone who has two distinct power sources at once with her innate mutant abilities and her magical empowerment. For the former, she's the third most powerful telepath in the world, can create powerful forcefields, psionic weapons, read minds, control minds, and use a variety of special TK-based abilities. For the latter, she can fly at vastly superhuman speeds, benchpress over 500 tons, is practically Nigh-Invulnerable to most forms of normal damage, and can manipulate a nigh-indestructible forcefield for both offense and defense.
    • Nocturn, the daughter of Nightcrawler and Scarlet Witch in an alternate universe, possesses her father's wall-crawling and agility, her mother's ability to fire hex bolts, and has the ability to temporarily possess people that she just somehow has.
  • Common in the setting of Jupiter's Legacy. Chloe is a Flying Brick with a sonic scream, while Jason has similar Flying Brick powers in addition to super-intelligence and telekinesis. Brandon has telekinesis, eye lasers and the ability to control lightning.

    Fan Works 
  • Most of the main characters of the Alternate Tail Series follow this trope.
    • Stave Magic involves generating a spell based on the number of magic circles. The primary examples are healing, electricity generation, a reflective shield, battle aura, and a massive beam from above. Other powers include illusions and mist transformation. Along with Aera and size-changing, Lily's use of this magic makes him a straight example of this trope.
    • Many of Mira's demons have multiple abilities. Beelzea has hydrokinesis, flight, and darkness magic, while Kitsune can use both fire magic and enchantments.
    • Levy can theoretically create any element with her Solid Script Magic. And adding the abilities of Holy Scriopture, including flight, purification magic, and a bow generated from her arm, she practically has a large arsenal.
    • Played with Lyon. While all of his spells involve ice, many of them can recreate the power of their animal counterpart. He can create dolphins capable of echolocation or scorpions with their own form of ice-based poison.
  • Amazing Fantasy:
  • Archetypal: Lori Loud has these as part of her Archetype "Superhero", which is basically a send-up to the likes of Golden and Silver-Age Superman who would have multiple super-specific superpowers alongside the standard Super-Strength, Super-Speed, Super-Toughness, Flight, Eye Beams, and Super-Senses she prefers using. Played for Laughs because she has so many super-specific powers she forgets when she can actually use them effectively, and many of them are very situational, such as "Super Balloon Animal Making", "Super Cake Baking", "Super Speed Eating" (which is a separate power from her Super-Speed), and "Super Wall Repair" (which does help for the property damages). She has so many, in fact, that Lisa tried to compile a whole database of her observed powers for the family's benefit...and it crashed the private server when she tried to actually put it online.
  • Sparrow from Atonement can have up to five powers at a time thanks to her power-imbuing touch, including ice powers, force-fields, metal-manipulation, flight, golem-spawning, self-duplication and super-strength.
  • In Avengers of the Multi-verse, Danny Fenton and Ben Tennyson are explicitly noted as being the team's two most powerful members due to the sheer diversity of their powers; the only difference is that Danny has access to all of his abilities all the time whereas Ben's powers are "divided" among his various alien forms and he can't access them all at once.
  • In The Awakening of a Magus, Harry seems to have some degree of every special ability on record, and possibly some new ones.
  • In the Worm x Dishonored crossover fanfic, A Change of Pace, Taylor, thanks to the Outsider's Mark, has her canon power of being The Minion Master, in addition to being able to summon a Swarm of Rats, Animal Eye Spy, Flashy Teleportation that leaves ashes in her wake, and Dark Sight. The addition of bone charms adds Not Quite Flight and Foreseeing My Death, making her one of the most versatile heroes in terms of power in Brockton Bay.
  • In Risk It All, the powers that Ren gets from his gamer power are random, resulting in him getting a strange hodgepodge of skills like Supernatural Martial Arts, becoming a Badass Driver, a Double Jump, or the abilty to Flash Step. To add to the randomness, his powers are largely derived from other series like One-Punch Man and Bleach. Even the author isn't totally sure which powers Ren will get, as he rolls a dice every time Ren pulls his slot machine to get new powers.
  • Child of the Storm:
    • Thor, who's a Physical God and a Flying Brick capable of walking on stars, also has the power of the storm to call upon, at one point delivering an altered version of the page quote. If that were not enough, he's also got no small degree of Functional Magic to call on, thanks to his time as James Potter (rather, all Asgardians are magical, he just now knows how to use it). And that's not even getting into what Mjolnir can do...
    • Loki's also a Physical God, with grand-scale Voluntary Shapeshifting, and being the God of Functional Magic, a lot more besides - Stealthy Teleportation is easy and being decapitated is a mere temporary inconvenience (though it's stated that it'll become a lot more than temporary if his head is separated from his body for too long).
    • 'High-Blood' Kryptonians, like the House of El, have this under a 'yellow' sun.
    • The Eternals are mentioned as having vast Psychic Powers which functionally give them this
    • Harry, being the son of Thor (and cousin of Jean Grey), and thanks to a lot of meddling by Doctor Strange, initially appears to have won the Superpower Lottery big time - he's an Omega Class psychic (though not on Jean's (or Maddie's) level), he's developing Super-Strength, and his magic is set to be supercharged. However, for the first book, until chapter 60, only the magic actually appears - and even then, he's got a lot to learn, only really mastering fire magic. When the others start to appear, he's Blessed with Suck:
      • His Power Incontinence makes his Psychic Powers are a danger to himself and everyone else around him. Even after he's got training, his inexperience in psychic combat gets brutally exposed when he goes up against someone that he can't overwhelm with raw power. Up until chapter 60, he's basically a physically fit young teenager. After, his Super-Strength starts coming in (often randomly) and he lives in mortal fear of accidentally crushing someone's hand into paste or worse. Until chapter 70, the only power that works reliably is his magic, and even then, he's still basically a Master of One Magic.
      • Oh, and his mother's protection takes the form of a fragment of the Phoenix Force, which Lily merged with, and has previously used to speak through him, resurrect him, and destroy everything in sight - by the sequel, he's figured out how to tap into it, though everyone with a lick of sense says that this is a Very Bad Idea.
      • By chapter 70, his powers stabilise, and by the sequel, he starts using them with far greater confidence, skill, and creativity, e.g. using his Psychic Powers to mimic the abilities of a Flying Brick.
  • The Sirens from Dolphin Rider Koishi, who unlock their own latent powers in addition to gaining Magical Girl powers. In order:
  • In Code Geass: Awesome of the Rebellion, it's revealed that Mao Zedong has a Communism Geass, which has powers including summoning soldiers from thin air, brainwashing people, levitation, and resurrecting Stalin and Lenin.
  • In A Force of Four, Power Girl has the standard "Flying Brick with Super-Senses and long-range attacks" Kryptonian package.
  • In From Muddy Waters, Izuku's Quirk is All For One, the same Power Parasite ability wielded by his father, the Big Bad of the series. Izuku has been fed Quirks since he was three years old, giving him dozens of powers, including gravity inversion, Super-Strength, Super-Speed, firebreathing, and other abilities. But he limits himself to his physical enhancement Quirks most of the time to avoid blowing his cover and drawing unnecessary attention.
  • In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, this is the reason Harry thinks the Philosopher's Stone is a myth — extending life and creating gold don't really have any logical connection, so it's clearly just an imaginary wish-granting machine. It's real — the connection is that the Philosopher's Stone's actual power is to make Transfiguration permanent.
  • Several characters from Hellsister Trilogy, thanks to their Kryptonian, Daxamite or Amazon heritage. Supergirl's Kryptonian pack not only includes her best known powers -superhuman strength, speed and resilience as well as super-senses, heat vision and supe-breath- but also her more obscure abilities such as super-hypnotism.
  • In Intrepid, Theo's powers were influenced by both his father and mother, giving him the ability to turn into whatever metal he touches and then change his size.
  • Last Child of Krypton: Shinji has Kryptonian DNA, so he has the usual: he flies, he is super-strong, super-fast, invulnerable, has super senses... Asuka is Wonder Woman, so she has almost similar but weaker powers and is not Immune to Bullets. In the rewrite, though, she becomes Supergirl, so she has all Kryptonian powers.
  • In the Daria/Legion of Super-Heroes crossover Legion of Lawndale Heroes, all of the super-powered students at USAES exhibit this trope to an extent. Perhaps the most blatant example of this is Cadet Maryann Lyter, who has the same powers as Ultra Boy of the LSH - and in addition, possesses the ability to see the true appearance of any person, entity or environment, without going insane or dying (should she look at the face of an Eldritch Abomination, or such). It's handwaved in that the ability is a passive mystical trait (in that all humans have the innate ability for either mental or magical abilities).
  • In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku Midoriya is Kryptonian, meaning that he comes with all of the powers of Superman. Aside from this, it's also possible to have multiple power types (i.e. metagene, Quirk, and magic) at once, with some limitations. For instance, Barry Allen, The Flash, has a Forensic Analysis Quirk, but also has his trademark Super-Speed, which came from a Freak Lab Accident. According to the author, it's impossible to have both the Quirk Factor and the Metagene and it's very rare to have a Quirk and the ability to use magic. It's also possible to have both a Quirk and a Mutation completely different from one's Quirk (like the aforementioned Flash).
  • The Night Unfurls:
  • In Quirk: Sequencer, this is essentially Izuku's Quirk incarnate. By ingesting the DNA of an individual, he can copy their sequence or Quirk. However, he won't be able to use it until he combines it with another sequence. Already he has 10 different Quirk combinations.
  • The Puella Magi Madoka Magica story Resonance Days features Cute Monster Girl-ified versions of the witches in the series, who possess abilities dependent on their more bestial forms. Oktavia von Seckendorff is a musically-prodigious mermaid who can conjure train wheels as weapons. Of course, this is all based on her backstory and her appearance in the series: she was a Puella Magi who wished to heal the hand of a musician, but he fell in love with another girl (reminiscent of The Little Mermaid), and she suffered her Despair Event Horizon at a train station. Charlotte can create non-dairy foods, project golden wire from her fingertips, and turn into a giant worm, a reference to both her heavy ties to cheese, her wife, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. On top of this, they're also unilaterally Lightning Bruisers.
  • Sailor Moon: Legends of Lightstorm:
    • Sailor Venus. The other Scouts wield control over an element, but her powers are a powerful impact beam and six virtually-indestructible energy chains that can lock onto foreign surfaces.
    • Jadeite wields the powers of flight, technokinesis, sleep inducement, and force fields.
  • A Shadow of the Titans: In addition to the shadow powers that come with being a Shadowkhan, Jade also has the Dragon, Pig and Rooster talismans at her disposal 24/7.
  • In Shinji Ikiryo, the main character has mastered flight, intangibility, invisibility, energy blasts, possession, the ability to sense other ghosts, the ability to duplicate himself, and manipulate ice.
  • Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton: Asuka gets whole Kryptonian package, including: Eye Beams, Flying Brick, Flight, Nigh-Invulnerability, Immune to Bullets, Super-Strength, Super-Breath, Super-Senses (and X-Ray Vision), Super-Speed (faster than a speeding bullet, literally proven)...
  • Lampshaded by Christopher Reeve in Superman and Man when he swaps bodies with the Man of Steel.
    Superman had great strength. Superman had great speed. He would have to try and see if he had both or either of those powers.
    He also recalled that Superman had other powers. X-ray vision, and heat vision, and half a dozen other visions. All from the comic books. All dreamed up by those idiots down at DC Comics, who really believed that such a thing was possible. Who bought into the myth so much, they tried to rationalize out every bit of it.
    Only here, in this dream, it needed no rationalization.
  • Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation has both main characters and their family, the 25th century descendants of Superman.
  • Subverted in Uninvited Guests. Aaroneiro has the powers of all 30,000 hollows he devoured, but aside from Metastacia, who gave him Kaien's powers, the only ability any of them had was Combat Tentacles. He's absolutely terrified of the other Espada finding out.
  • In Unlucky Choice by _N.B._, the protagonist was granted powers of the Sudden Game Interface and reborn into a multiverse. Due to the eponymous unlucky choice of a nickname, the protagonist's life runs more on Rule of Cool and general, occasionally NSFW, weirdness than on logic. As of recent chapters, he has powers of The Gamer (with race, class and luck set to "unknowable") and a Mad Scientist, chakra, ki, spirit (as in souls of Bleach) and mana-based techniques, apparently faith-based powers, affinities for elements of Naruto-verse, and non-zero affinities for Light, Darkness, Life, Death, Order and Chaos (the latter being dominant). Thanks to Chaos, he also uses skills like "practical potioneering-alchemical-chimerological occultism lvl 80" and titles like "master-shaman of weaponcrafting-artefact alchemy" and tentacle monster abilities — combat and hentai ones!
  • The Vampire of Steel: In addition to the classic Kryptonian package, Zol-Am is a vampire with all associated powers.
  • John in With Strings Attached has the body of a winged muscleman, super-hearing, and power over water. But all powers are justified because:
    • When he was being changed into a winged humanoid by Varx to save his life, there was magic left over that had to be factored in somehow. Varx channeled the magic into mild Super-Strength and super-hearing because he wanted it to be as unobtrusive as possible. Why he didn't improve John's sight, which would have made more sense for a winged guy, can probably be explained by the fact that he was working very fast.
    • When he got his water powers, which come from a magical gem, the gods (actually Jeft) ensured that he would get the gem (rather than Paul) because it worked better on stronger hosts.
  • Hero Academia D×D: Due to being a Fusion Fic of My Hero Academia and High School D×D, several characters, in part due to it being possible to have a Sacred Gear and a Quirk, and reincarnated Devils have the powers granted by their Quirk and/or Sacred Gear plus their devil abilities.
  • A Frozen Flower: Both dormant and awake lamberos possess an array of powers, including Psychic Powers (the bulk of the powers, which includes Mind Reading, the ability to sense other lamberos, memory-wiping either completely or just specific memories, making others hear voices, and mind-raping, which can be lethal), shooting Charged Attacks of energy that can range up to fifteen megatons in an awoken lambero, water and ice powers, Teleportation with Drawbacks, and Healing Hands. Orchid doesn't have all of the powers as an awoken lambero, but she suffers from Power Incontinence either way and is a Person of Mass Destruction that is capable of destroying the entire planet.

    Films — Animation 
  • The Incredibles:
    • Jack-Jack can shape-shift, turn into metal or a goblin, phase through walls, fly, set himself on fire, eat wood, and shoot Eye Beams, and that's just what we've seen so far... and he's a baby. Word of God goes that he has so many powers precisely because he is a baby. When he grows up, he will make his choice of powers.
    • Violet had the seemingly unrelated powers of turning invisible and generating a force field, as a Shout-Out to the Invisible Woman. As the Invisible Woman's entry above explains, those powers could be related — you might use a field of some sort to bend light away to go invisible, and if you can project a field that bends away light, why couldn't it deflect other stuff too?
    • The DVD mentions the hero Meta Man, who possessed flight, super strength, X-ray vision, a sonic scream, magnetic manipulation, partial invisibility, and... the ability to communicate with aquatic mammals.

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • The Atomic Blood-Stained Bus: Algernon is the God of Spring, Rebirth, Renewal and ... er ... Ten Pin Bowling. When the characters visit the gods' offices, they note a plaque on a door for someone dubbed God of Blueberries, Coastal Erosion and Irregular Verbs.
  • While most of the eponymous Children of the Red King only have one power, a few have multiple abilities (Charlie Bone can enter photographs and eventually learns to use an ancestral magic wand, the hypnotist Manfred Bloor develops pyrokinesis, one-shot villain Yolanda Yewbeam is a hypnotist and shape-shifter, etc.).
  • The Chronicles of Amber: The Amberites basic package includes superhuman strength and endurance, regeneration, and dimension hopping; various family members also have prodigious weapon skill, sorcerous powers, or shapeshifting. Most of these make perfect sense given their background (part of which you don't find out about until fairly well along in the Chronicles, because Corwin himself doesn't know it). See the series page for more details.
  • Circleverse: Ambient mages usually have one type of magic. They might have a more limited or a more broadly defined ability — a smith mage might have magic with all metals, or just with iron, for example — but their magic will still be with one kind of thing. And then there's Kethlun Warder from The Circle Opens, who has glass magic and lightning magic — two completely unrelated types of ambient magic. Handwaved, as the lightning magic was stated to have been a result of him being struck by lightning and mixing with his ambient glass magic, which kept him from being killed.
    • Although Tris is normally referred to as a "weather witch", her powers allow her to manipulate all kinds of natural forces, from winds and lightning to tides and earthquakes. She's also capable of using academic magic (and at the end of the series has been accepted to Lightbridge), and two kinds of Seer: wind-scrying is so rare its only other user was misdiagnosed as insane, and identifying magic by sight is an induced Achievements in Ignorance.
  • Codex Alera: Almost everyone in Alera are Furycrafters, giving them powers related to fire, earth, water, wind, metal or wood. The most powerful crafters are able to use all six forms effectively, but even a single-element Crafter will get an impressively broad array of powers. As an example, an Earthcrafter can gain superhuman strength, shift rock and earth to create barriers or tear down walls, calm animals, travel rapidly over the ground, induce lust, and sense people's locations if they're on the ground. Tavi is smart enough to recognize the implications of this, and when he is short of combat engineers enlists the local brothel to aid a demolition project.
  • The Cosmere:
    • Mistborn:
      • Allomancers normally have one of a wide array of abilities, including Super-Strength, Super-Senses, emotional manipulation, limited telekinetic control of metals, and Combat Clairvoyance. Mistborn have all of these at once. They get their abilities by metabolizing certain metals, each of which has distinct effects. Most people with powers can use only one specific type of metal, and an Allomancer without his or her metals is no more powerful than any other human.
      • Feruchemists from the same series have a similarly broad array of powers, because of their ability to alter their own bodies' processes through Equivalent Exchange. It's well within a Feruchemist's abilities to have Super-Strength, Super-Senses, a Photographic Memory, a Healing Factor, and more—as long as they're willing to go with their abilities similarly reduced for an equivalent amount of time.
      • In Wax and Wayne there are no more full Mistborn or Feruchemists, anyone with metallic powers can only have one from either category, with some rare individuals having one from each category. Wax has the very synergistic abilities of storing his weight and telekinetically pushing on metal, while Wayne has the totally unrelated abilities of storing health and creating bubbles of sped-up time.
      • Compounders are people born with a matching allomantic and feruchemical ability. Due to a quirk of the magic system, this lets them break the Equivalent Exchange, getting more out of their feruchemical powers than they put in, creating an infinite loop. One man uses this for Ageless Immortality, and another for a Healing Factor that makes Wolverine look like a wimp.
      • That's the main point of Hemalurgy is this - through piercing an Allomancer with a metal spike (killing them) and then piercing themselves into specific point of their bodies, a Hemalurgist steals their power, although there is a degree of degradation. It is possible to access potentially every Allomantic power, although the more spikes you implant through yourself, the more you open yourself up to the influence of Ruin and later of Harmony.
    • The Stormlight Archive: The orders of the Knights Radiant fall into this. As each order has access to two of the Surges, some odd combinations arise. For instance, the Edgedancers have powers over friction, the ability to heal and the ability to make plants grow, while the Lightweavers can create illusions and transmute materials. Additionally, all orders have the baseline ability to increase their strength, speed and healing capabilities by absorbing Stormlight.
    • Hoid is a traveler in the cosmere and has been collecting abilities for centuries, resulting in him being able to use and combine the powers of a Mistborn with Stormlight, and several other powersets, including those from unwritten books.
    • Word of God is that any two powers will also create a unique effect. This is why every Knight has more esoteric, less defined powers in addition to their two basic Surges. Likewise, twinborn allomancers/ferchemists all have one, though most people are unaware of them. The first confirmed one was Wax's "steel bubble", a complicated effect where he pushes on any nearby metals moving too fast, giving him a very low-level Immune to Bullets ability. He only started being able to use it when he unknowingly became a steel savant, meaning he had been using allomantic steel for so long that his physiology had adapted to it.
  • The DC Universe prose novel JLA Exterminators features scores of citizens developing superpowers that signify their possession by an alien parasite, and many just have one power, but a few have odd combinations of abilities.
    • An Amateur Sleuth named Bryan Francis has the ability to know people's locations by touching their inanimate possessions and is Nigh-Invulnerable (except against his own hand).
    • An unnamed teenage girl who helps Wonder Woman and Aquaman fight two of the more villainous new metas can teleport and has enhanced strength.
  • Dracula: is supremely strong, hypnotic, commands animals, can turn into a mist, addict people to his blood, and climb walls like a spider. Most of these powers can be found in folklore about vampires, or previous vampire novels, but not usually all at once. And just what constitutes "vampire powers" is under dispute — see Our Vampires Are Different for further discussion. Dracula says he studied at Scholomance, marking him as a sorcerer as well as a vampire (though which powers come from which is unclear).
  • The Reckoners Trilogy, being heavily based on superhero comics, uses this heavily.
    • Steelheart: Invulnerability, transmutes non-living matter to steel, energy blasts from the hands, and wind control that grants him flight.
    • Nightwielder: His are actually mostly thematically related. He can blot out the sun over an entire city, control shadows to deadly effect, is intangible, and can fly (since if he couldn't, he'd be at the Earth's core).
    • Conflux: The ability to produce enough electricity to light up an entire city, and the ability to give a weakened version of this power to others.
    • Firefight: He is a pyro without any extras. Actually, she's an illusionist pretending to be a pyro, and she resurrects on death.
    • Fortuity: Future-sight and enhanced reflexes.
    • Limelight: The ability to disintegrate non-living matter, the ability to produce force fields, and healing (both self and others).
  • In Renegades, some prodigies have powers that belong to a themed set (such as Thunderbird, who can fly and shoot lightning), but there are a few with a random assortment.
    • Adrian's Art Initiates Life power lets him tattoo other abilities onto his skin. So far, he can summon a suit of armour, control fire, jump impossible distances and shoot lasers out of his hand. In later books he also acquires immunity to all poisons, diseases and Power Parasite abilities.
    • Max, who can absorb the powers of others, has telekinesis, metal manipulation, matter fusion and invisibility. In later books he also gets ice powers and little bits of Adrian's Art Initiates Life and Nova's Forced Sleep power.
  • The Secret Circle: Unlike the TV show, each of the twelve young witches has a different elemental power in addition to scrying and spell-casting abilities, while Cassie also has powers of conjuration and premonition, Adam is telepathic, and Faye can talk to cats.
  • Wearing the Cape: Actually quite rare, due to the way Breakthroughs happen. Supers first gain their powers in a state of extreme stress, and are shaped by how exactly they react to that situation (so Personality Powers are common as well). Astra, for example, became an Atlas-type super when she was caught in a collapsing overpass: She got Super-Toughness to survive, Super-Strength to break out of the rubble, Super-Senses to find survivors, and Flight to rescue them. Someone else might have gained Intangibility to just ghost through the rubble. The primary exceptions are supernatural Breakthroughs, who have much stranger powers based on myths and legends. This means they often have a random grab-bag of powers that barely even make thematic sense, not to mention the Merlin-type Breakthroughs who gain literal magic and can basically do whatever the hell they want.
  • Fairly common in Worm, even without counting Required Secondary Powers and people who can copy powers. There are 3 common sources of such powers: pings, cluster-triggers and custom orders:
    • Ping is the effect of gaining secondary powers related to parahumans in close proximity during the trigger, i.e. the event that activates your latent potential for powers.
    • Custom orders are part of the rumors about a mysterious organization that sells powers.
    • Circus: Has minor pyrokinesis, enhanced reflexes, Improbable Aiming Skills, and Hammerspace. Presumably a cluster-trigger.
    • Watch: Has short range clairvoyance, bursts of enhanced speed, and can create phantom hands that can reach into people's bodies to do internal damage.
    • Glory Girl: Has a force field that provides Flight, Super-Strength and Nigh-Invulnerability, and pinged her awe/terror aura off Gallant.
    • Triumph: Has a Healing Factor, Heroic Build, and sonic blasts. His parents bought the powers from the mysterious power-sellers.
    • Arbiter: Can learn any language almost instantly, create force fields, and sonic blasts.
    • Vantage: Has scaling Super-Strength and Super-Reflexes, as well as short ranged teleportation.
    • Hoyden: Has Super-Strength, Super-Toughness (that scales with the range from which the attack comes) and has the power to explode things by hitting them or letting them hit her.
    • Eidolon: Combo Platter Powers are his powers. He can choose any three powers to use at a given time, and each gets stronger as he continues to use them. His actual power is "advanced user" access to the greater planetary powers library / energy storage array.
    • Scion: Has Flight, Super-Strength, Super-Toughness, immunity to certain powers, the power to cancel out wavelengths (this usually takes the form of a Disintegrator Ray or Anti-Magic), an extremely rapid Healing Factor (which is actually avatar reconstruction), interdimensional teleportation, Combat Clairvoyance, Bizarre Alien Senses that let him "see" everything around him, and Mind Rape via his power-bestowing "cells". Scion is (the human-sized avatar of) the powers library / energy storage / source.
    • The sequel Ward explains multiple powers as usually coming from "multi-trigger" incidents, where several parahumans all trigger at the same time and place due to the same trauma. In this case, all members of the group (known as a "cluster") gain one primary power with everybody pinging off everybody else. This yields a set of secondary powers as weaker version of the powers of everyone else in the cluster. One of the main characters, Rain, has the primary power to shoot energy blades that cause anything they hit to become incredibly weak and fall apart at the slightest touch or movement, but he also has the ability to completely halt his momentum instantly (which also freezes him in place for a couple of seconds afterward), the ability to invent prosthetic arms (that tend to always be very brittle and structurally weak), and the ability to make everyone in the immediate area feel slightly guilty (which he admits is pretty much useless).
  • In Xanth non-humans and Half-Human Hybrids with Talents often fall under this trope, inheriting one or both parents' species abilities plus their own unique talent. For example: Surprise Golem can inherited her mother's size changing ability (she can go from doll-sized to normal human) along with her own unique Talent of... giving herself any Talent she wants. Though she's limited to one talent at a time and once she's used a particular variant of said talent, it's gone for good.note 
  • Shades of Magic: Most Red Londoners have command over one or two elements of magic, with "triples" being remarkably rare. Antari can control all five — air, earth, fire, water, and bone — and also have an exclusive form of Blood Magic, causing the popular belief that they're specially chosen by Magic itself.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Charmed (1998):
    • The Halliwell sisters have at various times suggested that their powers are supposed to grow with time and use, and some future versions of them bear this out — Piper freezing whole city blocks, Prue accidentally demolishing part of the house with a careless handwave. But the actual power sets they develop over the course of the series don't match up so well — Prue adds astral projection to her telekinesis, Phoebe adds levitation (and empathy, which sort of works) to her premonitions, and Piper adds blowing things up to her freezing time. All of these were handwaved to some extent, but they certainly don't match at first glance.
      • When it comes to their powers, they follow a theme - Prue and Phoebe's powers are both psychic-based, Paige's powers are all Whitelighter abilities, and Piper's powers are molecular-themed.
    • In addition to being half Whitelighter/half witch, Piper's son Wyatt demonstrated a wide array of powers, many of which are only used once and never again.
      • Justified in the case of Wyatt, whose many, varied abilities are implied to be tied to his stated Active Power: Projection. This power is limited solely to a person's imagination, and the level of magic they wield, which Wyatt has a lot of - both as a child, and the firstborn heir of a Charmed One.
    • Cole in season five. Justified, given he stole those powers from the demonic wasteland.
  • Doctor Who: Surprisingly enough, the Time Lords. The Doctor has shown Super-Intelligence, Telepathy, regeneration (including sex shifting), time-related senses (such as being able to sense a fixed point in time), plus a certain Healing Factor which is linked to the aforementioned regeneration. One story has him display telekinesis, though that could be handwaved as being related to the thought box he was creating. Various expanded universe stories also give them other powers, such as making them slightly stronger and tougher then a human, and occasionally giving them other senses as well. These are neither confirmed nor denied in the show, other than a keen sense of smell.
    Nancy: People can't usually follow me if I don't want them to.
    The Doctor: My nose has special powers.
    Nancy: Do your ears have special powers too?
  • Farscape has a lot of characters with a lot of weird powers, but Sikozu really takes the combo platter to new levels: she can re-attach lost limbs, walk on walls, and, near the end of the series, it's revealed that she is a walking anti-Scarran Doomsday Device. At one point, she expresses mild surprise that other people can't do it. Of course, it's revealed that most of her powers (with the exception of the wall-walking) was due to being a bioloid infiltrator. She can also learn any language in record time, which is a good thing because she's allergic to Translator Microbes.
  • Haven: Duke Crocker (and by extension, the Crocker family line) absorbs a Troubled person's blood to gain Super-Strength and have his eyes glow silver for about a minute. If he kills a Troubled person, everyone else in the victim's family is Brought Down to Normal.
  • Heroes:
    • Peter Petrelli and Sylar are the best examples of this. At one point, Peter possesses Flight, Telekinesis, Super-Strength, Super-Speed, Electrokinesis, Telepathy, Cellular regeneration, Self-Combustion, Precognition and is a Time Master. Sylar gains a similar set of abilities, minus of few of the above. The difference is that Peter naturally acquires these powers thanks to his original ability, Empathetic Mimicry. Sylar on the other hand, forcefully takes these abilities by ripping out people's brains by using his ability to understand the inner workings of everything. Both are Brought Down to Normal for a time, before Sylar regains a few abilities, as well as some new ones, while Peter gains the ability to copy one power, and abandon it after learning a new one.
    • The Haitian can block the powers of other "special" people. Also, he can erase memories.
    • And as of season 4, Matt Parkman has gained the power to paint the future, despite already having powers of his own. Interestingly, an episode also showed him flying, but it turned out to have been All Just a Dream.
    • Santiago's father from the webisodes, who has the same power as Santiago himself, plus electricity.
    • Ando eventually acquires the ability to boost the superpowers of others by touch; this ability apparently manifests as red lightning that can blast people with concussive force.
    • "Baby Touch-and-Go", whose touch can activate or deactivate electrical and mechanical devices, and... superpowers?
  • Hyde from Jekyll has super strength, super speed, enhanced senses, genius intellect, super-human aim, genetic and hallucinatory memory, enhanced durability, a limited ability to manipulate electricity, a ridiculously high pain threshold, and the ability to cause mass hallucinations. Oh, and he can control lions. He can also stop injuries he suffers affecting Tom.
  • In Jekyll and Hyde (2015), Hyde possesses inhuman strength, speed, durability, and the ability to heal injuries.
  • Some Kamen Rider series have Riders whose power is to mix-and-match, as they own modular Transformation Trinkets that allow them to use multiple powers at a time regardless if they make thematic sense. In some cases, the ability to combine powers is itself the Rider's theme:
    • Kamen Rider Double is a Fusion Dance between two people, each with their own set of powers they can bring to the fusion. Shotaro can choose one of three fighting styles (Bare-Fisted Monk, Martial Arts Staff, and The Gunslinger), which Philip matches with with one of three Elemental Powers (Blow You Away, Rubber Man, and Playing with Fire) for a total of nine combinations.
    • Kamen Rider OOO takes this further, able to select different powers for his head, body, and legs; with five options for each. At least OOO's powers are tied together by an animal theme. For example, his default form has the eyesight of a hawk, the claws of a tiger, and the leaping ability of a grasshopper.
    • Kamen Rider Build uses Double's system of mixing and matching two halves, but here one half is based on an animal or some other organic being and the other half is machine-based. Every half has a matching counterpart that it's especially effective with, but these matches very, very rarely make any sort of thematic sense; such as his default combo pairing a gentle, agile rabbit with a tough, aggressive tank — but the sheer lack of unity between the two halves is his theme: it's a Duality Motif representing being stuck between peace (the animals) and war (the machines).
    • Kamen Rider Saber
      • The main Riders have a three-part system like OOO, though in this case they can use up to three powers instead of needing to use all three. The powers are categorized into three groups, and the Riders can each pick a mythical beast, a regular animal, and a fairy tale; plus these are all added onto an innate Elemental Power. They eventually each assemble a set of powers that synergizes well with their element, though the nature of the categories means it's still a bit of a hodgepodge: Saber's set is fire/dragon/eagle/Journey to the West, Blades' is water/pegasus/lion/Peter Pan, and Espada's is lightning/Cerberus/hedgehog/Aladdin.
      • Generally averted by the remaining Riders, who have an easier time staying on-theme with their elements due to having less strict requirements on their personal power sets.note  However, there is still one blatant example in Kamen Rider Slash, whose element is sound but mainly draws power from the story of Hansel and Gretel, so his armor and attacks are instead themed around candy and sweets based on the story's Gingerbread House. A few others have combinations that aren't quite as jarring as Slash's, but are still odd: nothingness and a phoenix, smoke and insects, and time and sea creatures (though that last one begs the question of why the sea creatures and water element aren't paired together).
    • Downplayed in Kamen Rider Geats, where the Riders can equip two powers like in Double and Build, but the Transformation Trinkets are much rarer and harder to acquire here. As a result, they generally only manage to get one powerset that becomes their default, and don't really have the luxury of experimenting with combinations. They best they can do is that they might enhance it with a second "Boost" Trinket if they manage to get a hold of it; but Boost is Awesome, but Temporary and only good for one battle before needing to be earned again.
    • Kamen Rider Gotchard, like Build, combines pairs of powers from a varied assortment of random stuff; his default pair is a grasshopper and a steam train. His theme is Alchemy, so his ability to combine reflects alchemical compounding.
  • Misfits: Although most people were only given one power by the Storm, a drug dealer has the ability to transfer powers from one person to another. One of his customers bought telekinesis, walking on water, teleportation and the ability to drive people mad with lust when he touched them. Simon bought precognition, time-travel, and immunity to others' powers. In a few rare cases people gained secondary powers from the storm, such as Nathan gaining immortality and the ability to see the spirits of the dead, and Simon gaining invisibility and super-human aim.
  • Raising Dion: The titular character has so far displayed telekinesis, levitation, teleportation, photokinesis, invisibility, Healing Hands and pyrokinesis. Apparently, it's somehow all related to him manipulating ions. At leas the invisibility and teleportation make some sense since his father had them too.
  • The title character from The Secret World of Alex Mack has telekinesis, electrical manipulation (with some minor technopathy on the side) and can turn into a puddle of watery liquid, which she often uses for escaping unseen from danger or to travel quickly via sewers.
  • In Supernatural, most of the Special Children have Psychic Powers, but some also have Super-Strength or Touch of Death.

    Multiple Media 

    Myths & Religion 
  • Older Than Feudalism: This was commonplace in Classical Mythology.
    • A good example is Poseidon, who, in addition to the oceans and seas, also held dominion over earthquakes... and horses. The horse thing came from a story where Poseidon and Athena were challenged to come up with something both beautiful and practical by some settlers, who agreed to name their city after the winner — Athena came up with the olive tree, and Poseidon with the horse (the city in question is Athens, so you can probably guess who won). Another variant of the myth has Poseidon offering the city a less-handy (but decidedly more Poseidon-ish) saltwater spring. (The myth explains two natural features of Athens, the aforesaid spring and an olive grove supposedly predating the original settlement.) Which lends support to the Retcon idea. Additionally, another myth suggests he created the horse as a gift to Demeter, who challenged him to create the most beautiful animal in the world. A third interpretation is simply that breaking waves look a bit like horses mid-gallop.
    • A lot of such gods have justifications, that usually don't immediately make sense unless you were worshiping them at the time. For instance, Pallas Athena was the patron deity of Athens (obviously), and associated with defensive warfare, wisdom and olive trees- things primarily associated with Athens.
    • This also helps us date the myths. For instance, Athens was also known for its extensive sea trade (which included settling about half of the Greek colonies in Ionia), so this legend probably dates from a time when that association had been made (i.e. towards the end of the Greek Dark Age), and people were asking why they seemed to have favor with Poseidon (or somesuch).
    • The earthquakes are because the land was thought to float on the water, meaning that he could cause earthquakes without touching the land. Also, because earthquakes are (correctly) associated with tsunami.
    • Zeus is widely regarded as the god of sky and thunder, as well as the god of rulers (being the Top God and all), but he was also the god of laws, oaths, hospitality, and assembly. Given how important these virtues were to Greek life, this more or less made him the god of society itself.
    • Hades, being lord of the Underworld/Afterlife, has a wide range of things he was the god of as a result. On top of being the god of the underworld (the good, the neutral, and the bad parts all at once), which made him a god of death (though his lieutenant Thanatos was its actual embodiment), he was naturally also god of night and darkness, since the underworld was shrouded in both. Since the underworld was found, well, under-the-world, he was also god of earth and soil (thus making him partly a fertility god), underground locations like caves, mines, and the like, and wealth both monetary and of rich soil. And if that wasn't enough the River Styx being in his domain connected him with oaths, and the fact that the spirits of dreams came from the underworld also made him a master of dreams.
    • Artemis is the goddess of virginity and childbirth because when she was only minutes old she helped her mother Leto give birth to her brother Apollo. The goddess of the moon part started with the Romans who stopped worshiping Selene the moon goddess and gave her the name Luna Diana.
    • Apollo himself was considered to be the patron of a wide and varied assortment of domains, including (but not limited to) music, archery, the sun, prophecy, protection, disease (both curing and causing it), seafarers, refugees, children, wolves, swans, and the Greek people itself.
  • Catholic Saints and their Orthodox cousins carry on the tradition.
    • St. Christopher is patron saint of bachelors, travelers, gardeners and toothache. Or traveling bachelor gardeners with toothaches.
    • St. Barbara is patron saint against death by artillery, miners, and hatmakers. She is also the patron of the Strategic Rocket Forces.
    • St. Michael the Archangel is the patron saint of radiologists, soldiers, paramedics, paratroopers, police officers, communications workers, postal workers, grocers, supermarket workers, stevedores and longshoremen. Supermarket workers!
    • Saint Nicholas is one of the oldest examples. The saint who forms the base for the Santa Claus is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, children, and students. If that mix wasn't enough, he is also considered the saint of prostitutes. Legend has it he saved three daughters of a poor man of a lifetime of prostitution by dropping money through the chimney, leading into the Saint Nicholas/Santa Claus legends.
    • Jesus himself also counts. As described in the Bible, he does a lot of health-related miracles: healing the sick, raising the dead, exorcising demons, miraculously providing food, etc. But he can also control the weather, walk on water, kill fig trees with his mind, and make sea creatures pay his taxes for him. And then there's the stuff he gets up to in the Apochrypha...
  • Inari Okami, Shinto god of rice, agriculture, industry, foxes (okay so far), fertility (sure, why not?) and...worldly success? Also once revered as the patron god of blacksmiths and protector of warriors.
  • Another Shinto god: Tenjin. Patron deity of poets, scholars and learning. Also a god of natural disasters, especially those related to thunderstorms. (It's a long story.)
  • Name an Aztec deity. For instance, chief deity Tezcatlipoca was a trickster god whose domains included the north wind, darkness, chaos, rulership, discord, hurricanes, obsidian, jaguars, slaves, and beauty.
  • This is usually common for gods in Slavic Mythology. In particular, the most prominent examples are the two most famous gods - Perun and Veles. Perun was the god of the sky, thunder and lightning, order, mountains, fertility, the east direction, nobility, weapons and war, and his symbols were fire, oak trees, iris flowers, eagles and hawks. In contrast, Veles, who was his eternal opponent, is seen as the god of earth, waters, The Underworld, chaos, the west, protector of cattle and the peasants, magic, music, trickery, fertility note  and medicine note . As the enemy and thus opposite of Perun, his symbols were water and several land dwelling animals, particularly snakes and cattle. It was thought that when there was a thunderstorm, the two gods did battle.
  • Hindu Mythology: Shiva is the god of universal destruction. He is also associated with medicine, animals, nature, dance, beauty, time, warfare, and Yoga among other things.
  • Norse Mythology:
    • Odin was god of warfare, wisdom, death, magic, drunkenness, prophecy, homosexuality, hanged men, travelers, healing, royalty, frenzy and the alphabet.
    • Freya is the Norse goddess of beauty, love, fertility, and marriage. She also controls the Valkyries, those warrior women who choose half the slain of every battle to go do Odin's afterlife hall of Valhalla. The other half go to Freya's own hall of Folkvang, where they are reunited with their lovers in death. And when the situation calls for it, Freya will slap a steel breastplate over her flowing white gown, strap on a sword, and wade into battle right next to macho gods like Thor and Tyr.
    • Loki is the Norse trickster god, renowned for his cunning, intelligence, and (sometimes lethal) pranks against the other gods. In some versions, he's also the god of fire, one of the least subtle natural forces there is — but also one of the most capricious and difficult to control once it's allowed to run wild.

    Roleplay 
  • Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
    • Due to taking his powers from Susan Storm, Ciro has the ability to both become invisible and create force-fields, only connected due to the force-fields also being invisible.
    • Josephine has the unique elemental combination of electric and ice manipulation. Her ice can even conduct electricity, which she notes shouldn't be physically possible.
    • Daigo got some powers related to being a vampire- enhanced physicality, a Healing Factor, and the ability to bolster himself by drinking blood- and then some powers that seem more of a stretch- like the ability to control his own blood, manipulate the temperature while out of sunlight, or transform people into monsters.
    • Lenore has powers inspired by Nightcrawler, granting her enhanced strength and agility, teleportation, and an extrasensory spatial awareness. On top of this, however, she also has mild psychic powers that allow her to stick to walls, walk on water, and resist psychic attacks.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Superhero RPGs in which the characters are randomly generated tend to fall into this trope regularly, for obvious reasons.
  • Dishonored Roleplaying Game: Player characters with the Outsider's Mark get a selection of six powers and six passive enhancements they can then gain access to with runes. This means that you could have a character who has Super-Strength, the ability to speak with a specific kind of animal, the power to summon a cloud of fog, the ability to shoot thorns out of their hands, and potentially several more powers with very little thematic connection to each other.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Binders tend to have very unusual mixes among their vestiges - one of the earlier ones is Dahlver-Nar, who grants toughened skin, a stunning moan attack, immunity to Wisdom damage, and the ability to share damage taken with another.
    • Gods can end up with somewhat odd portfolio combinations. For example, Wastri is regularly described as "an obscure demigod of bigotry and amphibians". One Dragon article on Wee Jas, goddess of death and magic, also stressed that her portfolio included love, making her not just the patron of necromancers, but the Lawful Neutral patron of a force that even in the article is described as having no rules. Hell, even her portfolio including death is this—she was initially a pure magic goddess, but a magical disaster in the setting's past caused many people to pray to her to ensure the safety of souls, causing her to become a psychopomp as well.
  • Golden Heroes: an early Australian entry in the field, allowed the player to roll for random powers — but then required her to come up with a justification for all the powers working together. Any powers the GM wasn't convinced were properly explained got cut.
  • Nobilis: while some Imperators have reasonably connected purviews, such as 'Lucifer, Imperator of Pride and Persuasion', you get others like 'Askelon, Imperator of Tremors, the Culinary Arts, and the Forge', or 'Ananda, Imperator of Murder, the Infinite, and the Fourth Age'.
  • The Tane of Pathfinder all have this going on, reflecting both Bizarre Alien Biology and their origins. The Jabberwock has "eyes of flame", the "whiffling" of its wings creates a small windstorm, and it can "burble" to confuse or kill opponents. The Bandersnatch has quills that cause extreme pain, can drive a person mad with a stare, and is a superb tracker, and some types are "frumious" and set themselves on fire when angered. The Jubjub Bird adapts to attacks, has a stunning screech, and its bite is a One-Hit KO.
  • This is how Legacy ends up in Sentinels of the Multiverse. The first member of Legacy's family to have powers developed a danger sense. His son was born with that ability, and also gained superior vision and speed. The next gained super strength, then over time added flight, superhuman charisma, invulnerable skin, and (as of the last Legacy in the game) laser vision.
  • Stuperpowers will often have player-characters who end up with a completely random and unrelated set of abilities. Given that humor is the order of the game, "conventional" superpowers aren't available to players, and the characters are supposed to be playing really lame/obscure superheroes anyway, this is perhaps to be expected.

    Video Games 
  • City of Heroes and City of Villains:
    • Other than epic archetypes, there are restrictions on what powers are available to their chosen archetype, but little restriction to the combination of those powers. Any primary power set can be combined with any secondary powerset, making a character who is Fire/Fire just as likely as one who is Fire/Ice or Ice/Fire. Some sets don't have a counterpart at all, like Poison and Force Fields, so they will be seen combined with just about anything. Using non-matching sets often results in more powerful characters due to metagame synergies.
    • Starting at level 5, you can also start taking Power Pool abilities on top of your base sets, to add Super-Speed, Teleportation, Flight, Good Old Fisticuffs, or other utility powers that might seem totally out of place with the base power sets. Then, starting after level 41, you can get Ancillary power pools based on your class but again otherwise unbound; a Tanker with a shield in one hand and an axe in the other could suddenly start throwing out fireballs, or develop psychic/energy shields, and so on. The villain equivalent is Patron pools, which are thematically bound to said patron and unlocked by missions (though running the quest for one unlocks for all) but otherwise unique. And that's not even getting into Incarnate abilities...

    Webcomics 
  • The titular character from the long-defunct comic Captain Greyhound had Super-Speed and Eye Beams as his power set. No explanation was ever given for where his powers came from.
  • In El Goonish Shive, Grace has complete control over her physical form, telekinesis, and talking to animals. Some of her combat forms add immunity to fire and Super-Strength to the deal.
  • Grrl Power:
    • Maxima has the standard Flying Brick package, metallic skin, Super-Speed and reflexes, and can fire particle beams from her fingers. She also has the power to shift her "stats" between strength, speed, toughness, flight, and blasting power. Deus theorizes that she was likely already a latent powerful superhuman when she encountered an Amplifier Artifact, but even if that's correct it's not clear what powers were natural and which came from the artifact.
    • Halo has seven floating orbs that grant her different powers when held in a hand. The orange one fires an energy beam that can cut through a tank, the blue one lets her fly, indigo generates force fields, violet produces a telekinetic energy-pseudopod thing, yellow makes an illusion she can see through and gives her True Sight later unlocking the ability to teleport to her illusion, the green one gives her the ability to generate air, and she hasn't figured out what the red one does. She eventually theorizes that the orbs are some sort of super-advanced spaceship, or at least a space suit, made by a species so far beyond all other galactic races that no one can even comprehend how they function.
    • And then there's Dabbler, the alien cyborg succubus wizard gadgeteer.
    • On the side of villainy, by design, is Hench Wench, who can copy the powers of every supervillain she contractually works for. And she's a paralegal who knows how to whip up contracts that specifically make her hard to fire, and has separate ones just for escape purposes. All in all she displays super strength, concrete-kinesis, intangibility, controlling an astral form separately from herself, a decent amount of invulnerability, flight, and the ability to create portals. Also merging her body with her astral form appears to give her a healing factor, as it repairs all her visible injuries (teeth knocked out and a hole in her thigh).
  • Protagonist Zoe of Heroine Chic mentions that while Single-Power Superheroes are the most common types of heroes, some do get multiple powers. Hero Valiant has Enhanced/ X-Ray Vision, Super-Hearing, Flight, Super Speed, Super Strength, costume generation and identity concealment. When Zoe gets Geordie's Eternity Stone, she gets all of Valiant's powers.
  • Shows up quite frequently in Homestuck.
    • Each sprite can be prototyped with up to two different items, granting vaguely appropriate powers. Then the Underlings get a random combination of prototypings, while the Kings and Queens get all of them.
    • Jade Harley has a particularly interesting case of this. Since her sprite was prototyped with the corpse of her dreamself, it was merged into her upon her ascension to God Tier. So now she has the combined powers of a God Tier Witch Of Space, a sprite, and her dog (the other prototyping). It's made more complicated by the fact that her God powers and her Dog powers are very similar thematically, making it a bit hard to tell which power comes from what.
  • Mountain Time offers Dave, who can duplicate himself (at least enough times to make a basketball team), teleport, shapeshift, fly, create portals to other dimensions out of nothing, pluck out his heart and turn it into macaroni salad, and cause others to shrink and/or grow. He is also adept at carpentry.

    Web Original 
  • Dreamscape: Jenna has ice, lava, and water powers.
  • Trinton Chronicles: Every character has between 2 and 6 powers normally; in some cases these powers don't seem to belong to the same person!
    • Sabella: Generates electricity, controls water, and is empathic.
    • Robert: Can manipulate magnetic fields and summons other worldly beings.
    • Brandon: Has innate understanding of machines by touch and portal creation, his understanding of machines allows him to create objects that can boost his own power of portal creation or expand the range of other's powers.
    • Aurora: Is capable of creating energy clones, creates objects, induces living dreams/nightmares, can dream-walk, and is tied to the Astral Plane in some fashion.
    • Dan: Has power over time and generates dark and light energies.
    • Coatl: Is able to heal by touch and boost the powers of others at will.
  • This seems to be an easy possibility in WarpZone Project. Supers have one "natural" powerset each, but a character states it's possible to acquire other people's powers. What can be deduced from a villain trying to acquire the protagonist's powers is that the other person must be both accessible and alive.
  • Whateley Universe: A variety of characters, several of which won the Super Power Lottery.
    • Tennyo: keeps finding new things she can do. Flight, ability to ignore gravity and inertia, super-strength, the ability to move through force fields, the ability to produce some form of antimatter, the ability to cast spheres of plasma, the ability to heal frighteningly fast from incredible injuries, the ability to form some sort of plasma "light saber", resistance to temperature extremes, she doesn't need to breathe air, etc. She also has thrown some sort of energy ball that temporarily acted like a neutron star, she may be able to teleport (although she was unconscious at the time), she may give off deadly levels of radiation when she's straining hard in a fight, and in one battle against over a hundred armed badguys, she literally warped reality all around her and opened up a rift in space-time. Oh, and she may be the avatar of some extra-terrestrial or extra-dimensional demon. We don't know yet.
    • Merry: who started out as a combination energizer/technopath/regenerator (reasonable so far), then got roped into a secret church order and endowed with mystical powers (notably the ability to heal herself or others with the side effect of sending her own soul to Hell for a brief visit), and the incident that permanently split her up into Petra and Paige (with two personalities each — it's a bit complicated, okay?) also turned the latter into a werecat...
    • Jimmy T.: Massively versatile shifter including massive size-changing powers. Psychic null. Talks to the dead.
    • Murphy: powers allow her to warp reality, grow back limbs, and cause dead animals to follow her around.
    • Whisper's base power set is technopathy. However, Brian happened to accidentally activate a set of dormant military nanobots during a class trip to a research lab, which gave him healing abilities, the ability to connect to radio, TV, and cellphone networks, a combat Heads-Up Display, and increased his cyberspace abilities. Before he even noticed all of this, he then went to play Good and Evil Online, a fantasy MMO where he was playing a female elf... a fantasy MMO that worked using actual magic, and had an undocumented neural interface feature. The sum result of this is that the now-female Brianna is an actual Sidhe (a fact confirmed by Fey) and has some of the spell-casting powers that her character had. Did I mention that the US Army (at the behest of DARPA) have basically put her under their protection in exchange for her promising to enlist after she graduates from Whateley?
    • Roulette has a set of five (or maybe six) power sets that reset themselves every time she sleeps, much like Croyd Crenson, and like with The Sleeper, there is a chance that this erratic and damaged power will some day kill her.

    Western Animation 

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