Would you become a superhero?

A package arrives at your house with no return address, delivered while you are not home.

It contains a bright and colorful skintight suit made of a spandex-like material, along with a high tech bracelet/watch/smartphone kind of thing and a helmet. The suit is designed to cover every inch of the wearer's body.

Activating the bracelet causes it to announce that it has calibrated to your specifications and will now only work for you. A menu that you can access via it lists super powers the rig is supposed to allow you to use while it is worn.

- The suit is supposedly armored: it should allow you to stand up to bullets, hot flames, and the like without harm but with possibly considerable discomfort.

- The rig is an exoskeleton and should multiply your physical strength by up to a factor of 100, based on voice commands.

- The bracelet can fire a laser/taser that via voice command can have an effect ranging from a mild shock or cigarette lighter up to that of a 50 caliber bullet.

- Besides acting as a smartphone, the bracelet is a police/radar/military scanner and can easily spoof phone/internet accounts.

- The helmet is fully integrated with the bracelet, with an HUD, and along with the suit functions as CBR gear (thus helping keep you from leaving forensic evidence at a scene). It can function as a rebreather for 12 hours or so.

What would you do at this point?

1: Call the authorities and let them have the suit?
2: Repackage it and leave it on someone else's doorstep?
3: Start trying to test/reverse engineer the suit?
4: Ebay baby!
5: Start working out/taking kung fu classes so you'll look better while leaping from rooftop to rooftop wearing it?
6: Something else?

If your answer is 5, please consider the following...

Crime or anti-crime? Both?
Who would you tell about the suit?
Is there someone you know that really deserves a good punch in the jaw from an anonymous superbeing?

Because of my back problems and the fact it doesn't heal or anything like that I'd sell rights to various companies to study the various aspects of it for a limited time making a ton of cash ^.^

I would hunt down and kill Drug Lords, Terrorists, Child Pornographers, Slavers, and Pirates.

I would take all the money they had then give half to the government in taxes to keep them off my back.

Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.

Yes, I would choose number 5. I would use the suit to fight crime and help people. I would tell no one about the suit, because telling someone would risk exposing my identity. As for who do I know of that deserves a good old super powered punch in the jaw... well that would take some time to figure out... I mean there are so many deserving of a good shattered jaw.

I'd be a villain. I'd just take whatever I wanted and do whatever I wanted. Sometimes what I'd want to do would be to beat up some bad guys and take their stuff. Maybe I'd just be a vigilante that steals the bad guys stuff.

If one was going to sell the suit, how would they go about it?

1: Prospective buyers that are willing to pay more than a few hundred are going to want to see a demonstration. What would you set up?

2: How would you test the suit before selling it? Would you?

3: How to perform the handoff? Do you think a doublecross unlikely?

...

If you are going to use the suit to go after criminals, how do you go about it?

1: Do you just kick down the door of the nearest suspected drug house? What do you do about any noncombatants that may be present?

2: How do you go to and from your house? Just leap away under cover of night wearing the suit, or do you set up some kind of base?

3: Do you try to beat the authorities to crimes via the scanner (and risk encountering them at the scene) or go after criminals by some investigatory means (trusting your detective skills)?

I would rob a bank in a super villain getup, then I would become a hero and "capture" the villain by dressing up some convict.

3, then 5...or 3 and 6, depending on whether or not you consider it a 'crime' to go and take over a small third-world country currently in a state of anarchy where the 'global community' can't be bothered to notice - or if they do, go do something about it.

Either way though, definitely test it first. Don't wanna get shot just to find out it was a prank.

I would probably be more like a rogue/vigilante.

If some old lady was getting beat on by some crackheads I would kill them, also pedophiles, serial killers, people who are above the law that do bad things.

But, at the same time if I destroyed criminal/terrorist organizations I would take a cut for me and then give the rest to charities.

My wife would be the only one who would know of my identity, too many people cannot keep secrets.

In addition with all the money I am gaining certain parts of the suit would be reverse engineered/improved upon through various proxy companies/banks. You never know if someone else with a suit is going to come along to challenge you or the suit is somehow damaged.

So many possibilities of course.

Are we assuming that you activate the bracelet (and therefore the calibration command) before you know exactly what it does? If so, selling it would be useless, because no one else could use it but you. Then you're left with either using the suit to fight crime or not using it at all and putting it in a closet somewhere, hoping whoever developed it doesn't want it back.

I would fight crime with it, especially when it tells you everything it can do. I grew up with Greatest American Hero, a guy that had a super suit fall into his lap, only he didn't know all of it's capabilities (darn instruction book wasn't written in a known language), and I always wanted to put on a suit and fly because of it. You can't fly in this scenario, but being able to do everything else would be pretty cool. Hopefully you can take it off when not in action, or else you'll end up being like The Tick.

I would start out wanting to be "heroic", but then, I would succumb to the inevitable temptation of supervillany. Because supervillians get the girl(s). Just look at the Monarch. Do you think he could've gotten the missus (though granted, I'm still looking for surgical scars...) if he had just been some schmuck without the flying cocoon?

I would go with #3.

Practical issues:

1. Being as the closest thing to an urban environment is 2 hours' drive from the town I live in, and the suit has no real options to cut travel time, it's all but worthless to me. I am NOT hiking or super-hopping from one end of a sprawling suburban string of communities to the other, full stop.

2. Regardless of how tough the thing is, it's only a matter of time till the response escalates to a point the suit can't shield against. Stick my nose where it might get blown off? Thanks but no thanks, I'll leave the Darwin Awards to someone else. Maybe if it was made of some form of unobtanium that made me near-godlike in my defensive abilities, I'd consider it, but "bulletproof" doesn't get you near as far as the average civilian would think.

3. This ain't no comic book. Taking the law into your own hands is itself a serious crime. The minute I use that thing, for good or ill, I'm going to have every cop in the province looking to put me in cuffs. Again, not worth the grief.

4. The crime rate isn't high enough in my area to justify extra police presence, much less a superpowered vigilante.

Personal issues:

1. I'm pretty apathetic when it comes to the part of the world that exists outside my own little corner of it. Even if the scanner showed me where to go to stop the bank robber or save the schlub who got himself caught in a burning building, chances are I'd let the pros handle it. That's their freaking job.

2. There's no real incentive for me personally to use such a suit, and as I stated above, it's really not powerful enough to shield from reprisal if I tick anyone off. Even if someone did offer to compensate me, I'm not big on risking my hide for the nobody du jour.

3. As an addendum to the above, I have such a low opinion of the human race that most people don't register to me as being worth any effort on my part. The suit as described doesn't offer the kind of power I'd need to act on that belief - just as well, for the 90% or so of the human race that I believe the world could do without.

Well... I run into a few small issues right off the bat...

1) I live in Maine... check that... I live in RURAL Maine... The crime rate in Maine is low... REAL low... and that's in the big cities like Portland and Bangor. Folks, Portland's entire population would fit inside Madison Square Gardens... all of them... all at once. My chances of actually finding a crime that I was close enough to do something about before the bad guys got away would be ludicrously small.

2) I would probably use the Helmet to play City of Heroes in a much more fantastic way.

3) Ultimately, I think I would probably go to a company that has a solid track record of supporting/outfitting Law Enforcement and US Military with armaments and the like. I would sign a contract with them that allowed them to reverse-engineer the suit for the purposes of mass-producing them for police, fire department and military use. I would ensure the contract gave me a small percentage cut of the proceeds. I don't have much interest in being a billionaire, but comfortable would be nice. Also would write into the contract that my family/descendents hold exclusive rights to that percentage so long as my family line continues.

More a Vigilante path I reckon.

I'm kind of at the point where I think I might become a supervillain under such circumstances, honestly. Not even the "take what I want" kind of supervillain (a Rogue in CoH terms), I would actively plot the downfall of humanity.

I'm not overly proud of this.