Thursday 19 June 2014

KNOW YOUR RAILDEX: ACCELERATOR

Today's candidate is Accelerator!

 What's really cool about Raildex is that nearly the whole damn cast has powers that would beat the shit out of a lot of Marvel or DC groups. I'm serious! It's like everybody who is anybody won their powers in some kind of supernatural lottery. Super strength and speed is old and cliched, but still provides for some awesome fight scenes, but the writers of Raildex clearly wanted to turn all their characters into freaking badasses! Here's part two of the series of features focusing on some of the characters and their unique Esper abilities.
Esper power: Vector Manipulation 

Accelerator is one of the most popular characters in Raildex usually because he is portrayed as this sadistic heel that just enjoys killing people. He even received his own side-storyline A Certain Scientific Accelerator. Although how you tell a story with someone this unstoppable is beyond me. 

Like all Espers, Accelerator's power comes from the thin AIM field he creates around him. This allows him to modify the vector values of anything he touches. Now, non-sciency people, a vector is a theoretical term for what you call when something (anything in the material universe) that has a direction, as well as magnitude (that is to say force). Accelerator is able to manipulate the values of both these things, meaning he can turn something with the blasting force of a bomb into a vector value of zero - which is the equivalent of not moving. This is not entirely true as gravity pulling you also yields a vector, but Accelerator has shown to be able to manipulate those as well. Something with a vector value of zero isn't moving. It has no direction or force. The reverse is also true, Accelerator can tap his foot on the ground for instance and ramp up the vector value to make it feel like a bomb just exploded on the spot, then change the direction of the force towards his opponent.

In fact, he notes during one of his fights that even if someone dropped a nuclear bomb on his head, nothing bad would happen to him at least. For those of you who don't know how explosions work, there are four ways to die: Shock-wave, oxygen depletion, shrapnel and the fire. In a nuke's case, you have the radiation as well. The fire, shockwave and shrapnel all have vector values that can be reduced to zero while the oxygen and the radiation can be affected by changing the direction of vector values. That should give you an idea of just how effortless a time Accelerator has when he fights. 

Accelerator's most commonly used attack is redirection which simply changes the direction of the attack back at his opponent without touching the force. For defense, Accelerator subconsciously creates a filter that analyzes everything as harmful or not, and uses his reflect power to push away anything that could harm him. This power provides Accelerator with an unbreakable defensive that is staunched even further by the fact that his power is also passive (meaning it activates even if he doesn't know he is in danger). Bullets from snipers fired at him won't ricochet, but instead be fired back at his opponent. 

Up till now, Accelerator has used his powers to generate miniature earthquakes by stomping his feet or manipulating kinetic energy by changing the force or re-vectoring the surrounding wind to create storms. He has turned objects into projectiles just by touching them and even shown to be able to throw an entire building across the street by altering both it's force and direction. As mentioned, this is possible because apart from gravity, a building has no other vector and Accelerator can change something from zero to a value just as easily as he does the opposite.

With this powerful assortment of abilities, Accelerator is definitely one of the baddest SOBs on the planet. I once tried to calculate how a fight between Accelerator and a team like the Avengers (from the 2012 movie) would go. Given everything available to fight with, it wasn't a terribly long battle. Guess who won?



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