Urban fantasy wheelchair features?

[illuminist]

Hi folks! I'm brainstorming a paraplegic character (gunshot wound in the past) in an urban fantasy setting. The tech level is modern (smartphones, wifi, etc) and the character has terrakinesis abilities: mentally lifting rocks, shaping and warping metal, transmuting one substance to another.

Do you have any ideas on what features would be cool to have in a fantasy wheelchair? Currently I'm thinking of a floating office chair that responds to mental commands, but I'd love to hear suggestions. Thanks!

Comments

[melannen]

Ideally, the goal of a wheelchair is to make the user able to access as much infrastructure designed for walkers as possible. That means the priorities are less things like flying and going fast and looking cool and having bells and whistles, and more things like fitting into small spaces, climbing stairs, all-terrain, being able to reach things, get in and out easily (and get in and out of vehicles), making sure people only touch the chair if you want them to, comfortable, reliable and simple to maintain, etc.

I'd start by looking at the top-of-the-line personal chairs currently used by paraplegics and think about what your magic could to do make them more useful. Those chairs are already pretty optimized from what I understand - but you can probably find blog posts from users with pie-in-the-sky wishlists for improvements. It's also going to depend on the rules of your magic - for example, many people might still prefer a lightweight and simple manual chair to a carven oak magic chair that does everything but is useless if you don't get it to the druid for a tuneup and recharge every week.

Also, what are the limits of your character's power? If they can move metal around with their minds, and don't have a limit on how much they can do it, they might actually do better with just some simple metal braces that they can use to control their lower body (and perhaps a basic manual chair for at home.)