Sir Swindle:
How original were you thinking?
Mostly I just don't want the overhead of fifty bazillion heroes who have been around longer and are better than me in every conceivable way. I want to be part of the first wave, and not have to live in Super Dark Phoenix Psyker Wolverine Galactus' Left Bollock Man's shadow.
So if you want to take the real world and apply superheroes, that's fine. If you want a fictional City of Adventure, or to take things into the past or future, that could be fine. If you want to make a whole new world from the ground up that would work too, though it seems a lot of effort.
Sir Swindle:
How married are you to that concept?
Not immensely, but it ties up a lot of aspects I want to explore into a single mechanically interesting character. I'm certain that some degree of translation will be necessary to make the idea work in whatever metaphysics framework you come up with. I'm not entirely opposed to adapting one of my innumerable existing characters into a superhero, but I do find a lot of traditional super origin stories incredibly trite.
Orson Welles:
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
A wonderful sentiment, one I
generally agree with.