If the BAU were mutants ...

[beatrice_otter]

What would their powers be?

Reid almost has one already; could one count his intelligence and speed-reading as a mutant power, or would they be amped up somehow? (Maybe he just has to touch a book and he knows what it says?)

Garcia: is she into computers because she can sense electrical energy?

Is Morgan a bomb expert because he's a firestarter?

Did Seaver survive her serial killer father because she has a healing factor?

Was Prentiss such a good undercover operative because she's a chameleon?

What about JJ, Hotch, Rossi, Gideon, Kevin, Will, Strauss? Discuss.

Comments

[murf1307.livejournal.com]

OMG I LOVE YOU!!!!

This is amazing. I agree with all of your conclusions. For the others, here:

JJ: she's something of an empath, and she can calm people down with a few words or even a touch.

Hotch: Is intense badassery enough? Or maybe he's got the ultimate Sherlock Scan -- he sees someone and can automatically tell the most intimate details about them. Yes, that.

Rossi: Rossi has the power of persuasion. He uses it to interrogate perps (see "Masterpiece" and "...And Back" for examples).

I'm not too sure about the others though. Minor characters...*sigh*

[mcgarrygirl78.livejournal.com]

I think Erin would have a power similar to Storm but she would be able to create natural disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes and such. I can just see her standing in the middle of an F3 funnel, why dont ask me.

I think Gideon might have a power like in the Dead Zone where he can touch something and see what happened or could happen if he doesnt stop it in time. It would go with his brooding nature of carrying the burden of stopping bad things from happening. Also, in a twist, it doesnt happen when he touches everything and he has no control over when it will or wont.

[arwen-lalaith.livejournal.com]

Dammit...I guess now I should really get working on the X-Men: First Class crossover I was working on...a very very long time ago.

[haildorothygale.livejournal.com]

I have very little to add, except to say that it's very cool to find out other people wonder about this stuff too.

Although, I always thought it would be cool if Morgan could generate and manipulate force fields. He seems to like tackling things (people, doors, the occasional ambulance), this way he could hit harder than Tyson and plain charge through walls. :)

[mcgarrygirl78.livejournal.com]

I really like the idea of Emily as a shape shifter. She can change into things with a simple touch, but only for short periods of time and its a very draining experience.

Superpowered BAU

[gsyh.livejournal.com]

Penelope Garcia loves to talk and give nicknames so much, I think her speciality would be super sociality, languages, computer codes are a language eh? She's an excellent programmer (but not as good as Reid in mechanics). She got in trouble a lot as a little girl because she was such a social butterfly, but fortunately for her, the good people remember where she was, where she was supposed to be, so bad people never manage to walk off with her.

Derek Morgan is really hard to kill, he's not super strong (although he is very strong because he's in shape), but he doesn't bruise easily. This is part of how he survived the rough treatment of the abusive Carl Buford...one time, Buford lost control and would have killed Morgan, just like how he later killed the other boys, if it weren't for the fact that Morgan was hard to kill. Morgan has a lot of survivor's guilt about this.

Spencer Reid is mildly telepathic, and he got it from his mother. That's why he's getting migraines, too many violent fingerprints. Diana Reid was a good professor who loved to socialize, in a campus with thousands of students with their confused thoughts... Spencer coops better because he's more reclusive, and when it gets too much, he holes up at Gideon's cabinet to pick his own thoughts out again. Part of why Reid is so multi-discipline is that he grew up influenced by many many personalities - he did the reading, it's his intellect, but during the formative years of his personality...the message board of his mind was open to all.

JJ is a very nice girl, but if you don't watch yourself around her, if you don't have a disciplined mind (for example, the masses), she can talk you into anything. Unfortunately the majority of unsubs have twisted, but strong personalities, so it doesn't work on them.

Emily Prentiss blends in everywhere. Her greatest fear is that she will become like her mother the diplomat - to lose her own sense of self. Sometimes she forgets she's doing it, picking up accents, mannerisms, body memory that she shouldn't have, blending right into the scene. On duty, even tightly knitted cults don't question what Emily is doing there - she blends in.

Will is very normal, but he's immune to psychological tempering, him and his father found that out when a Pied Piper type of of unsub tried to lure him when he was a kid... (His body language during "Jones" was really defensive, the way he wrapped his arms around himself in the police station.).

Jason Gideon can put together whole stories from broken lines. Puzzles was his hobby since he was a toddler. His intuitive logic can deduce where things belong, how they relate. He can see a mother lovingly packing her child's lunchbox, before the lunchbox and only the lunchbox was recovered bloodstained in the woods. He can see the unsub's father speaking the words the unsub speaks now, see the cigarette going down onto the face where the almost invisible scar is now, feel the burn and the recoil in the shaking limbs.

Aaron Hotchner fought back when his father's blows followed him onto the ground. He crushed his father's wrist - and he wasn't even half his father's size. His mother was the one who stayed with his father and returned to him each night, there was nothing Aaron could do about that, but baby Sean, he shadowed his brother from cradle to grade school. His father left them alone, and then his father died, and Sean doesn't remember.
He remembers the sound of pain that Haley made when he pinned her down for a kiss, prom night. Haley likes to jump his back when they are alone, wrap her arms around his neck and her legs around her waist. Haley likes to drag him by the hand, through to their bedroom, through the mall, to dinner with their mutual friends, and she ask why he couldn't be more spontaneous.
When a case is really bad, Hotch doesn't go home for hours, and sometimes he sleeps in separate rooms - he's too afraid of himself.

[dragonladyk.livejournal.com]

Hotch is a werewolf. I know that's not an X-Men superpower, but it makes too much sense: his emphasis on family and hunting as a pack, staying faithful to Haley even after she'd left him (I do not want to hear anything about wolves in captivity being promiscuous and therefore wolves in the wild don't mate for life -- human interference is a significant variable), the way he couldn't stop hunting when Haley asked, and even his own fear of his dark side. Hotch also avoids the woods whenever he can -- if there's an option to be in town, he takes it -- which would make sense if it "calls" his lupine half. Also (and I'm sure this had more to do with fanservice than intentional plotline, but it happened so I'm going with it) right after Haley left Emily's necklines plummeted, which dovetails nicely with the "allure" mythos that a werewolf emits pheremones that do exactly what the power says, particularly when the werewolf isn't getting laid regularly. Werewolves also have incredible healing powers, which would explain why Hotch was pretty much fine after getting blown up in "Mayhem" (among other exaples of Hotch taking beatings that would down other men), and why his hearing loss has mysteriously disappeared. If Foyet was were as well -- thus explaining why he could be the equal of Hotch in a fight -- it would also explain Foyet's facination with Hotch, and why he would try to kill Hotch's mate to "free him up" for a new pack (not realizing, of course, that Hotch's pack is his team). The idea of werewolf!Hotch also explains why he literally could not leave the team for Haley -- mate and pack are of equal priority for a wolf, and in a wolf's mind are one in the same, not that the very human Haley would understand that.

As far as the type of shifting, I could go either way. If it's the traditional full-moon-equals-monster shift, Hotch would obviously take something to prevent the change (colloidal silver, old-schol, diazepam cocktail, new-school) while retaining the wolf-like traits. If we're going Sanctuary-style (I refuse to cite Twilight as a reference), then he'd refuse to shift in order to avoid ending up in a lab somewhere, or on the mutant/Abnormal black market.

Yeah, that was a lot of extrapolotion with implied rather than cited examples, but I'm trying to keep this to one comment. Sorry! If I lost you, lemme know and I'll fill in.

And Garcia is totally a technopath. There's no way she could pull off the often-technologically-impossible (there is no one medical database with everyone's everything, and what databases there are are heavily protected, for example) she does otherwise.

I could actually see Prentiss as the Badass Normal, though if she must be a mutant, then chamelon does make the most sense.

DragonLady