does that mean she can walk on water?
During a budget time stop, I don't see why not. For anything else?
I don't think so.
if so does that mean rewinding under a shower would completely mess her up?
That is not a pretty image.
Then again, hasn't she rewound during the rain before?
There are probably some unspoken/unrecognized but very required secondary superpowers that Max has so that she doesn't get flechetted by a light drizzle.
I mean, what separates water, solid objects and the air itself on a simply physical level? They're all matter. That Max can move around at all indicates that there's a small bubble around her that allows for at least some forms of matter to interact with her in a "normal" way, just so she can move around in the first place.
If you go with that
interpretation, then the question of the truck or any other object becomes "How much is too much for Max to interact with passively/instinctively?" There's a hell of a difference between a shower, a person, the air, and a truck. If the budget timestop were absolute then Max would be frozen in her own pocket of
space, she wouldn't be able to move out of it (maybe not even perceive anything outside of it either, but I'm getting off-base) so even then, there's some give to her powers.
If a difference is drawn between the Threshold for Interaction™ for a rewind, a budget timestop, and a true timestop (I believe that Max opened multiple doors while Kate was on the roof, that is something she's been shown not to be able to do with a budget timestop on account of everything solid being infinitely dense) then that might free you up on some level.
Like maybe the interacting with a liquid is possible during a rewind, but during a budget time stop it would be something rigid enough to walk on.
I imagine that a true time stop would either be like a rewind where water is like water just with no ability to spread any energy (you know how a footprint on the moon will just stay there because there are no outside forces to disturb it? So maybe water is kind of the same; still identifiably liquid, just very thick and hard to move through because we're the only force that it recognizes) or something in between that and absolute rigidity.
Which I think would be kind of scary, now that i mention it.
Gasses seem to be fine no matter what Max does, if she can't move through air then she's probably fucked things up
bad. That's the only form of matter that there's no reason to think she has a problem in.
She can breathe too, which means that she's not only able to push through air, but also that her bubble of space extends our far enough that she can pull in air.
Also she can still see around herself, even though technically everything should be frozen. That's also weird, and more evidence to the Required Secondary Powers argument. There's a very thorough picking and choosing of what physical laws that are convenient to keep observing, put on hold, or actively break. And it's obviously on instinct, at that. Max hasn't practiced enough with it for it to be any other way.
With solids, it's the opposite of gasses where it definitely seems like they're just not cooperative at all during any kind of time manipulation. The only question is whether this is something that can be experimented with or if it's a hard rule that she can't do anything with solids.
I'd argue the former, but that's yet to be seen.
I don't think that Max is ever going to have to be really good at, but she can try and get close. There's already some passive progress on this, what with everything Max is in possession of being unaffected by a rewind.
I think an interesting experiment would be to figure out whether it's the size of the object that keeps it from being affected (Chloe's truck is too big), a lack of physical contact (already jossed because Max couldn't bring Chloe into a rewind, but I'm mentioning it because it's an option that shouldn't be ignored even though it's been proven not the case. At least in that instance. It could be tried again.), or if it's a mental issue (Max only "considers" objects she's holding or on her person to belong to her).
I think we can use a bike for this. We can ride it, rewind whilst doing so and see what happens. If it doesn't move backwards then I think that put us in the mental issues being the source of the limit. If it does, then we might be in the "it's too big" territory. But who knows?
This probably sounds redundant, but the reason Max can't interact with objects in rewind or budget time stop to say, push bullets off-course, is because that's not what her power is for. Her power is for making or changing decisions, if she could push bullets off-course, it would be about "how many bullets can I poke before I get tired"
The only question that I can ask with this interpretation is whether or not the function or "purpose" of Max's power is set in stone. Because there's obviously a certain amount of necessity involved with the introduction of new applications of her powers. They respond to Max's needs more than anything else, the only internal logic seems to be whether it needs to happen or not.
Until the bathroom, Max hadn't needed to redo a moment of her life that vitally, but once she did she could rewind.
Power #1
She hadn't needed to move as fast, or needed to rewind so far past her limit as she did during the Kate situation. So on instinct her powers did their best to accommodate. She couldn't rewind far enough to get herself to the top of the dorms in time, that would have exhausted her by the time she got there.
So instead, she stopped time at the expense of burning out her powers for a significant amount of time. (Whether that was for the rest of the day, until we got some more energy, caught our breath, I don't know but we couldn't rewind during that conversation IIRC)
So far that has been a one-time deal, but it did happen and if we were in a similar situation it could happen again.
Power #2
The photojumps (Which are much more disconnected from her "base powers" than the timestop ever was) are just the same.
She was stuck in one place, so she needed to be somewhere different. Power #3
That's all to say that the limits that Max has faced with her powers could all be issues of application or a lack of situational pressure. So maybe there's just more learning to do?
Unless some hard rules are put down (I don't know how they would be, Max doesn't know the full extent of what she can do anymore than we do) the only way to figure out what can be done is to try it out, a lot.
We did the budget timestop on a whim a few times in the junkyard, and now it's a part of Max's powerset. We're only scratching the surface.
Power #4
The Budget Time Stop fits less into that necessity schema.
Maybe that's because Max is getting better.
(The Meta answer is that it's because this is a quest so we're more primed to fiddle around with stuff that the source material didn't)
Or maybe it's because it's not actually a separate power unto itself and just a very off-kilter application of the rewind power? I need to go back and reread the description during the junkyard scene. But between the different physics and how easily we're able to do it, it might be something closer to the OG Rewind Power.
would blades of grass act as tiny little blades due to their thinness and being infinitely durable?). So looking at an interpretive answer is a bust too, since Max's perception of the world is tied again to the """sciency""" mechanics of rewind/timestop.
I was going to say something else here, but after I got to thinking about the secondary superpowers, flimsy, less
mass-ive solids might be the first link in figuring out what the limits are on interacting with them are.
Max hasn't been getting her feet filleted everytime she walks, so there's something to that.
