Velocious Invisibility?

[Superfluous Crow]

I was just thinking: If you moved really, really fast would you be invisible (or at least very very hard to notice)? I'm pretty sure that this would be the result if you moved over a longer distance, but if you, for example, vibrated with a very high frequency, would that have any impact on how you appeared to others? Magic in my campaign is largely based on bending the rules of science, so this could be of some use.

[SA]

I always thought that if you (that is, a human body) moved at an extreme velocity you'd simply explode into a bazillion pieces.

Which is kinda the same thing, really.

[Ravenspath]

This is one the core foundations for the Flash from DC comics (the 2nd coolest character ever).

Jay Garrick, the original Flash, never wore a mask as he vibrated just enough to blur his features so that he could not be recognized.

All the Flash could move so fast that you could not see them move, i.e they could be talking to you, pause and then continue the conversation. In that split second pause they would run down the local florist and get flowers or dinner. Persistence of vision. They could move so fast you would not notice they had moved. Or that can be reversed where they move so fast your eye does not have time to register they were ever there.

Barry Allen, Wally West and Bart Allen could vibrate so fast they would slip their molecules between the molecules of other items (of course when Wally did it that thing tended to explode).

[So-Keher]

Even if people couldn't see you, you would still create a sort of shockwave or disturbance in the air. Vibrating would create a turbulence around you and I believe if you were vibrating fast enough it would just appear as if you weren't. Think of your eye for example. It constantly vibrates at a very high frequency but we don't notice.

[SDragon]

Jay Garrick, the original Flash, never wore a mask as he vibrated just enough to blur his features so that he could not be recognized.

A friend of mine and I once had a conversation about how annoying it must've been for him to do that. Go ahead, try making 20 distinctly different facial expressions in five seconds. Now try to coninue that rate for... say, one minute. Assuming no repeats, that's a total of 2,400 expressions. Sure, Garrick might've been physically capable of 2,400 expressions a second (let alone a minute), but the emotional stamina required to keep that up for an entire conversation would be staggering, even for him.

[Ravenspath]

I don't think he did that though. I got the impression he just set his whole body to slightly vibrate so as if it was constantly humming and causing a blur around the edges.

 :offtopic:

[Lmns Crn]

It seems to me that if you're moving fast enough to be hard to see, your "invisibility" becomes sort of a fringe benefit associated with your main power: ridiculous speed (as in the case of the Flash.) I, personally, would not want to rely on speed to gain my invisibility: what happens when you need to stand still for a minute?

If we're going for the tiniest trace of pseudoscientific believability, I don't think becoming invisible by virtue of standing in place and vibrating at high speed accomplishes that.

More plausible methods of accomplishing similar ends might include chameleon-like color-shifting, the bending of light (cliched, perhaps, but real-world scientists are experimenting with limited applications of the same sort of thing), or various methods of distraction or being unobtrusive (you're perfectly visible, but people pay you no heed.)

Like super-invisible-speed, none of those solutions are technically true invisibility, but you might be able to use them to accomplish the same sorts of things.

[SDragon]

"True" invisibility is when light passes through matter unhindered, whereas bent light works by going around the matter in question, completely avoiding it. Applying either technique to a humanoid (or, for that matter, many other species of animal life forms) creates one huge problem: no light is received by the retinas. Not only are you no longer visible to anybody else, but now nothing is visible to you, either. Specialized contacts of some sort might help correct this for true invisibility, though.

I think I kinda like the idea of unobtrusiveness. Sorta like Invisibility grants a +10,000 to your Hide check, and then denies automatic success on Spot checks made looking for you.


 :offtopic:

So Garrick was a dancer? Besides, if he vibrated his entire body, then why bother with a costume? Realistically, he could've gone nude, and even with CCA restrictions, he could've fought crime in his civvies.

[Ravenspath]

So Garrick was a dancer? Besides, if he vibrated his entire body, then why bother with a costume? Realistically, he could've gone nude, and even with CCA restrictions, he could've fought crime in his civvies.

 :offtopic:

They did that in some of the Kingdom stuff! Wally was so attuned to the speed force he became a red blur. The only thing he wore was a hat in the style of Jay Garricks.

[SDragon]

So Garrick was a dancer? Besides, if he vibrated his entire body, then why bother with a costume? Realistically, he could've gone nude, and even with CCA restrictions, he could've fought crime in his civvies.

 :offtopic:

They did that in some of the Kingdom stuff! Wally was so attuned to the speed force he became a red blur. The only thing he wore was a hat in the style of Jay Garricks.

:offtopic::

http://www.thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?33752.last


:ontopic::

Judging from LC's post, you could probably use velocity as the reasoning behind Blur. If you don't end up with a velocious invisibility, at least you've got an explaination for another spell.