Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

"I'm bored!"

Halfway into my third flight on a government plane, I'd already concluded that planes were slow and boring. Yes, for most people they might be flimsy metal frames going dozens of times faster than either the frame or its passengers could survive an impact at, overlooking the world from thousands of feet higher than most people would ever get on their own, and the quickest way to travel because the government couldn't afford maglev trains... but for someone who had experienced space travel under her own power, all the excitement of mundane flight had been leeched away, leaving only the bad cell reception and an even worse view.

"Am I allowed to make the plane go faster? At least have the pilot hit the afterburners!" I pleaded, more than ready to get off and push if it would cut our travel time by an hour or two. "Save me, General Rinaker, you're my only hope!"

The tall, thin, sixty-something man with the silver hair in a military cut gave me a look over the newspaper he'd been perusing for the past hour, said nothing, then went back to reading as if it were the most engaging activity imaginable. Scowling, I used my Force Awareness to sift through the material of the newspaper and how sunlight from the cold desert morning outside was reflected and absorbed until my mind parsed the collective image not as an interplay of forces but letters on a page.

I snorted half in amusement and half in disgust. The old man was reading an article about the economic impact of the latest Wall Street nosedive after the battle of the Everymen terrorist group with government forces had somehow been caught on camera and spread over the web two days before. It was full of rampant speculation, fear-mongering, and either inaccuracies or deliberate propaganda, including caustic commentary of the Superhero Response Agency for losing the fight.

"Why are you reading that trash anyway?" I asked him since there was nothing else to do. "We're several decades and a magic alien invasion into the twenty-first century, who still writes in dead tree format?"

"Our enemies, of course," he responded immediately as if he'd been waiting for the question. "Which is why I'm reading it to begin with. A wise leader must know his enemy as well as he knows himself before making decisions of strategy."

"The Everymen use print media?" I asked incredulously. "The supertech-selling, progress-crazy, transhuman nutjobs? Those Everymen?" I couldn't see it. The anachronism alone went against their professed goals of uplifting humanity through the fruit of superior technology.

"You'd be surprised how often one's actions do not match one's stated goals in the field of politics, young lady." The General's voice took a patronizing tone that set me on edge. Over our few encounters so far, that had only happened when he'd deliberately antagonized me to make a point. "While the Everymen appear to be your usual terrorist group only enabled by the advent of powers, there are hints of both deeper organization and competent use of misinformation on a grand scale in their actions. Hints in how their pawns act and what they say - or don't." He indicated the newspaper article. "Besides, as you have already found out, even the most abnormal military campaigns contain far more waiting time than they do action."

"Only because you insisted I accompany you on a flight to nowhere, on a mundane plane!" I shouted and threw my arms at the stupid machine around us. "It doesn't even have afterburners, does it?"

"Most cargo planes don't, even military ones," the General informed me with a smile. "Don't worry, we're getting close. Less than an hour's worth of flight, barring unforeseen events." He probably meant another Everyman attack.

"You still haven't told me where we're going or why did you have me come with," I grumbled and looked through the plane at the ground below us and up to the horizon. "Desert, desert and more desert for hundreds of miles. Unless we're going to Vegas." I shot him a suspicious look. He couldn't mean.

"Not quite. A little bit further to the Northwest." He smiled, turned a page and started working on a crossword.

"You can't be serious!" Because it was dumb. "Area Fifty-One, really? You built another secret facility in the one restricted area everyone knows about and every conspiracy nut salivates about breaking into? Man, no wonder your bases keep getting attacked."

"Three times in the past two months," General Rinaker admitted almost... proudly? ...then scribbled in the word for five down - six letters, widely distributed ancient art across Europe, Africa and Asia, most numerous in Western Europe; particularly in Ireland, Great Britain, and Brittany. It was, of course, MENHIR. "Your friend Liz did a great job building up the defenses in her position as the Warden. She's on her way right now in our flagship, escorted by a dozen of her war golems... including one shaped and colored to look like you."

Three horizontal, ten letters, most difficult to understand; ABSTRUSEST. I was beginning to think the good General was having fun at my expense and the Everymen both. "Which is exactly why we're flying slowly and covertly to an entirely different base in the same area." Security through obscurity on top of stupid mind games. "Forty-five minutes till we land, by the way. My suggestion would be to find some way to pass the time creatively. This will be far from the first time you'll have to hurry up and wait."

OK, so he did have good reasons for the slow flight. Did he have to be so smug about it? No, no he didn't, but he chose to. Well, now I was choosing to be arbitrarily contrary. My powers shifted until Costume Creation came to the fore and I delved into it without actively using it. Military base, probably stuffy older guys all about firepower, discipline and uniformity and kicking individuality to the curb... and here came yours truly with more firepower than they had in an amazonian supermodel package. Could I come up with a new costume that would either annoy or dazzle while still being awesome and cool?

Let's find out.

xxxx

I strutted out of the plane in a strapless, snow-white catsuit that was as form-fitting and low-cut as I could make it without being indecent. Knee-high blue boots with an inch and a half of heel, white gloves up to my elbows, and white belt that hung very low on the hips with a bronze, v-shaped clasp to better draw the eye. The whole thing seemed to be made of high-quality real leather, yet flexed and stretched in ways impossible for that material... or most other things you could normally make clothes out of. The closest analogy would be a second layer of living skin, that looked natural at first sight but had a subtle Uncanny Valley effect the more you looked. The final piece was a long, sky-blue cape falling down my shoulders, only a shade darker than my eyes. It hung around my throat seamlessly and fluttered in an unseen wind without folding up, getting skewed or caught into anything. My long, wavy blonde tresses were left to dance in the same unseen force that handled the cape, giving me a "natural" windswept look.

The escort of soldiers waiting for the General and I stared in open-mouthed stupefaction, exactly as they were meant to. Having spent most of the past week either around supers - both allies and enemies - or jaded men like General Rinaker and Agent Stone, my superhuman appearance had not had much of an impact so the contrast was all the more noticeable. Supers tend to be better than unpowered humans in everything physical, and beauty is no exception; it comes with powers being a manifestation of each super's personality, desires and beliefs. At first, our bodies simply lose any flaws and improve in physique. As we grow more powerful, the effect magnifies. First matching models worked over by make-up artists, then enhanced pictures, then surpassing anything realistic.

The soldiers got an amazonian underwear model mixed with a serious athlete's physique in a way human biology simply could not produce, with the effect boosted by the first hints of supernatural allure on top of the uncanny valley of perfect symmetry, in a costume designed to show a lot and hint at everything else; they did not stand a chance. The further we walked through the base basically unchallenged, the more annoyed ol' Rinaker grew, which was the cherry on top of a whole cake of satisfaction.

"You know if a villain that had really pushed the social influence powers came here, the whole base would be toast, right?" And it would take far less power than I had if that was the only thing they could do. "Normal humans could convince whole groups to commit suicide or start genocides under the right circumstances. Ten times human charisma isn't harder to get than ten times human strength; it's a street-level power... until its user gets access to mass media."

"There's a cruise missile with their name on it if they try," he said through gritted teeth. We walked to an aircraft hangar in silence, then the old man's lips stretched into something only an idiot would take for a smile. "Now since nobody else did, let me welcome you to Tonopah Test Range and your new assignment." He pointed at the hangar. "It's in there."

"That's all I'm getting?"

"Oh, you'll know it when you see it," the old man said with that same nasty smirk. "Try to have fun."

And with that ominously inadequate mission briefing, he stalked off to do what Generals usually did in secret weapons testing facilities. Hopefully it wouldn't involve the nuke stockpile I'd felt buried under the hill we'd passed on our way to the hangar.

xxxx

"...and I'm Everywhere 'cause I'm everywhere. Behind bad guys, and in the boys' locker rooms, and under that hill, and that creepy medical lab, and the armory, and the closet with those guys being gross, and..." the fourteen year old brunette kept on in that vein for about a minute, her body flickering in and out of visibility half a dozen times a second, leaving behind afterimages that lasted longer than they should have. It was an effect I'd only seen once before, which had left me so surprised the moment I walked into the hangar that I had failed to react as she'd picked me up and suddenly we were fifty yards into the cavernous space, sitting on a table that must have served as an improvised mess hall.

"...and in the old nuke silo, and in the General's room looking at his files. And that's why they call me Everywhere!" The torrent of words finally came to an end and the familiar-looking teenage super glanced across the table at the two boys her age sitting there. "And those are Blast and Slash, I guess. Don't mind them, they're just being stupid." Well, gaping at me even worse than the soldiers had probably counted from her point of view. "You know that's your fault, right?"

"Really?" I decided to humor the younger girl while trying to remember why she seemed familiar. "They're the ones gaping, how is it my fault?"

"I was there when you got off the plane. Heard your not-talk with the old man, too," she said with probably criminal levels of smugness. "Plus even if I weren't, trying too hard is always intentional," she told me in a near-whisper and a sagely nod. Cheeky brat but hey, truth was truth. "Hey, wanna see something cool?"

"As long as it doesn't break anything and wouldn't cause the General to tell you off if he knew," I immediately set terms that should limit long-lasting consequences and serve as an impromptu test of her decision-making skills. Never give teenagers free rein; that I knew from just the crap my year-mates and I had come up with in high school.

"Aw man, you're not nearly as much fun as I'd thought you were," she whined, then made a show of looking around for a target. And it was obviously a show; both her heartbeat and a super-quick glance across the table gave it away. "Oh, I got it!"

Then the two boys leaped up with concurrent yelps, trashing the chairs they'd been sitting on with reflexive use of superhuman strength, before crumbling to the ground in fetal positions and cradling their obviously abused privates. The strangest thing about their whole scene was that I hadn't seen the girl do anything, or even move beyond her normal flickering around her seat. The force of the blows had come seemingly out of nowhere.

"Fuck you, Cindy," the shorter, dark-skinned brunet moaned through gritted teeth. "I'll fucking kill you!" He, too, had that same faint aura of familiarity as the girl.

"In your dreams, Mark," the just named Cindy said and blew a raspberry contemptuously.

"Not again..." the other guy grunted, then got unsteadily to his feet. He was a year or two older than the other kids and in my force awareness his body's durability and strength were far higher. He looked vaguely Hispanic, possibly Mexican, but that was less important than the sword of lightning he just threw in Cindy's direction. In an infinitesimal fraction of a second the immaterial blade shattered in a dozen arcs of electricity that crackled all over the girl.

"Meh, still a wimp I see," an entirely untouched Cindy scoffed, then got off the melting chair as if nothing had happened. Sword-boy hadn't missed. The lightning bolts had simply... passed through where the girl had been sitting despite my senses insisting she'd remained physically present rather than going intangible or dodging.

"You're such a cunt, Barnes," the fifteen year old hissed. "One of these days... one of these days I'll make the right sword..." his hands clenched as if wringing a neck. Then he turned around and stared at me. His eyes began to widen, his jaw about to drop, then his eyes narrowed in anger. "All girls are fucking bitches," he said, turned around and walked off, kicking another chair in his way in the process.

"Want me to kick him again?" Cindy asked oh-so-innocently.

"No," I immediately shot back. "In fact, from now on you won't do it again or anything similar unless it's in a proper spar, understood?"

"Aw, and I thought you were fun!" she complained then shrugged. "Well, if you're gonna be another rules-Nazi, I'm off."

"Telling you not to hit your teammates is not being a rules-Nazi, it's common sense," I shot back. She was beginning to annoy me and worse, she was acting like a bully and an idiot.

"Teammates with those two idiots?" She burst into laughter for a good fifteen seconds, time which I put to good use setting up an area force-field. "That..." she wiped an imaginary tear away, "Hah... best joke I've heard in a week. And I listen to everything the soldier boys are saying after lights out." She laughed some more. "Well, your intro was fun enough but everything after that? Yeah, it totally flopped. See ya later, Cape Barbie!" And with that she flipped me off and vanished, entirely ignoring the barrier that was supposed to prevent just that.

My new job of whipping those three into a team suddenly seemed much harder. In his office, a certain General was cackling evilly.