Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

It is almost a rule of comics that when two heroes meet for the first time some sort of misunderstanding will happen and the two of them will fight for the thinnest of reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. It is an even more widely established rule that both heroes and villains fight personally, even those with powers that should allow them to sit back and drown their opponents in indirect attacks from a continent away. A good portion of that, many experts on comic books agreed, was due to how comics had started as stories of vigilante heroism and crime-fighting.

While everything I'd read online on the subject over the past month largely supported this as the main reason, the truth was that conflict sold. Pretty much all fictional stories ever written, comics or otherwise, were centered around conflict and the easiest way to draw reader attention was to escalate conflict in scope. What this said about human nature I'd leave to academics; I was far more worried about its impact on immediate matters.

Enter the advent of powers in a sudden, random, largely inexplicable, and highly disruptive way. Even if survival against monsters had not been a significant influence, what would the random person in the street do if given supernatural power? If your answer was "think things through then try to avoid trouble" I had some bridges to sell you in Florida. The radioactive, monster-infested part of Florida at that.

No, humans being humans, deep down we'd want to be a superhero. Or a powerful sorceress. Or a genius, playboy, billionaire that put on a suit and punched armed criminals in the face. Or the new cool that was living life like an RPG, gaining more power from killing monsters. The common thread behind all those things was conflict and how to win in various forms of it. And because that's what almost everyone would ask, that's what powers provided.

Here's the thing, though; you can't give someone those kinds of abilities, have them repeatedly use said abilities in fights, and not expect them to be changed by it at least a little. Power often comes with not having to follow rules because normal people can't make you, and once you break enough rules you get used to it. You come to expect it and feel entitled to it. This, of course, is on top of any other issues emerging from repeated high stress.

It was something I got from painful personal experience; during the Invasion, the majority of the survivors had behaved like assholes. It was not so much power corrupting them, as it was their choosing to be assholes with it. Because being a violent asshole is cool, while cooperation and critical thinking is boring. The bad guys, of course, had been aiming for precisely such a reaction on the thought that once the most violent and psychotic supers were the only ones standing they'd have lots of new recruits buying into their murder and human sacrifice ideology. It had not worked for them in the end, but the knock-on effects as powers spread around the world on top of humanity's predisposition towards violence had caused and was still causing no end of trouble.

All of it put together made my goal of teaching those kids how not to die in a serious battle, how thinking first and being a violent asshole second was more effective, and how to make a proper team far more problematic. I was already putting together a lesson plan. The big problem was getting them to follow it, because from what I was seeing things between them had already been left to fester and teenagers would never willingly listen to an older and wiser individual.

I should know; I was still a teenager, if only chronologically.

xxxx

"So your power is swords?" I asked the Hispanic boy as soon as I caught up with him. It was the safe, reliable subject; almost everyone would talk about the cool things they could do, or even the awesome stuff they possessed and I reckoned a power of "making swords" counted as both. And teenage boys liked to boast a lot.

"Why is that your business?" ...or maybe not. He picked up the pace, having already filed me under the "dangerous bitch" category for obvious reasons, and having been taught the only way to win was not to play from proximity to the worst of the three problem children. But my plans for dealing with Cindy's obvious problems required tackling the boys first and unfortunately for him, running away wasn't something I could afford to let him do.

"Because I'm making it my business," I told him as we both jogged away from the hangar and into the surrounding desert.

"You mean the General brought in a ringer after Cindy sent all the other trainers packing," he shot back and picked up the pace, going from the equivalent of an Olympic sprint to a desert bike going all out. Naturally, I kept up effortlessly.

"That sounds like a story," I invited further discussion with a raised eyebrow. "What did little miss 'Everywhere' do?" Instead of answering he sped up again and again, trying to leave me behind. For my best guesstimates of his level of power he'd focused much on his overall physique and we soon went from 'desert bike' to helicopter levels of speed, then to that of the fastest Maglev trains, then we were pushing against the land speed record and the sound barrier both.

The ground shook as we got further and further from the base, dust and gravel exploding at every hundred-foot step and the turbulence of our passage raising an enormous dust cloud in our wake. But for all his enhanced physique, the boy's level of raw power was but a fraction of my own and his active powers didn't include anything that would help with the physical limits of ground movement, such as some sort of super-speed, flight or time dilation. After hitting his limit at around the sound barrier, he kept sprinting for a good two minutes, giving me an occasional glance to see how well I was keeping up and, given his deep flush the one time he'd noticed me staring back, to check me out. When he realized he could not, in fact, outrun me he just stopped, setting his feet down and digging a six-inch-deep, forty-feet-long ditch as he messily braked to a stop.

"Shit," he concluded in a word when he also noticed my own flawless stop, the lack of even a mote of dust on me, and the absence of sweating like he did from the effort. "There's no way I'm getting away, am I?" He fell on his knees and started panting for all he was worth.

"Nope!" was my cheerful reply. I flicked a finger at him, causing every bit of dust, grime and sweat to simply fall off. Not quite a bath but good enough for government work. "Your endurance is shit, by the way. A two-minute sprint for someone of your power? Train some more unless you want a bad case of astronaut sickness."

"What the fuck is astronaut sickness?" He made a sword appear from nothing, a broad, dull one made of wood, set it to float in mid-air then sat on it.

"This is a guess on my part but you don't have passive regeneration of some sort, right?" I sat next to him on nothing, held aloft by Proximakinesis. He didn't answer my question so I went on as if he had confirmed my guess. "It's not exactly the same, but when astronauts remain in space for longer than a few days, their bodies begin to atrophy because their muscles only need the most minor exertion to get them anywhere. For people as strong as us, moving our own body in normal activities is similarly negligible effort. If you don't have a power to compensate and you don't exercise, well, you're not going to have it as bad as astronauts because baseline super-strength and durability won't let you, but stamina? Many people forget about it and if you don't remember your powers won't either." I flicked his forehead to help him focus on my words. "Your powers are shaped by you, after all."

"Yeah, I got that four months ago, about a day after I made my first sword," he countered, but it was a weak argument and his mind was elsewhere. A few seconds later he was holding a second blade, one small enough to belong to a doll or other toy. It was a classic longsword with a cross guard, its two-inch blade glowing white. He stabbed it into the meat of his right palm between forefinger and thumb with a wince, but instead of blood coming out he slowly relaxed, tension going out of his body with every heartbeat. His breathing evened out, sweating stopped and then very, very slowly he began to recover at a deeper level.

"A healing sword?" I asked. I was beginning to see how his power of 'swords' went a lot further than simply making empowered weapons for him to throw around.

"A bad one," he told me, his voice sour. "Power goes along with size and it's about a thousand times smaller than a two-foot sword. It'd take, like, half an hour to heal a real wound, let alone a full-body problem." He laughed mirthlessly. "Of course, the alternative is to get stabbed by a bigger sword." He fell into another moody silence so I settled into waiting him out. Five minutes, ten, half an hour... on the two-hour mark his patience finally ran out and along with it his ability to give me the silent treatment.

"Don't you ever give up?!" he shouted, more whiny than angry. He jumped off the hovering wooden sword, letting it vanish in the process, jumped forty feet back, then summoned a blade that was entirely black from its round pommel to its serrated tip. It also happened to be forty feet long, but that didn't seem to be any impediment in his wielding it.

"I learned not to way before powers were even a thing," I shot back. And because all the conjured swords had given me a bout of nostalgia, I made a glass out of compressed dust, filled it with bubbling, clear liquid and took a sip. It had a bit of a kick but was otherwise tasteless, odorless, and quire refreshing. "Compared to the week before cheerleader tryouts, two hours of mildly passive-aggressive one-upmanship is nothing."

"Fine! FINE!!!" he shouted, obviously meaning freaked out, insecure, neurotic and emotional. "We can do whatever training and teaching bullshit you got in mind. At least it'll give Cindy a new target for a day or two until you quit and it might even be a good show..." he gave me his best glare but I was unfazed. "If you like fail videos, that is."

"Any specific hints?" I asked, giving him a smile.

"Oh, no," he denied, shaking his head violently. "If Cindy thinks I snitched my ass is grass and you never know when she's listening in." He shuddered, then gave me a challenging look. "If you think you're that badass, you get to deal with the whole horrible package like we did for the past couple of months."

"Oh, I intend to." And the plan was slowly coming along, too. It just needed a few more bits of information. "But you just won a trip back to the base the fast way for that cheek."

"I won whaAAA-!!!"

His words were carried away by the wind as I grabbed us both with Proximakinesis and the world became nothing more than a blur to anyone without enhanced senses. Turbulence roared like thunder and air molecules were mashed into a tangible wall we had to wade through to get anywhere even as a brief bout of over a thousand gravities of acceleration made for a near-blackout... for him. We hit terminal velocity for the combo of my proper flight form and the tangle of flailing limbs that he had been reduced to in moments, briefly bathed in friction-produced near-plasma, then came to an abrupt halt even faster than we'd sped up.

One teenage boy super, slightly singed, fell to the ground in all fours as his breakfast vacated the premises.

"Huh, nine point eight seconds." I checked our time in the General's watch. The guy was still reading reports and writing out orders - on actual paper, not electronic. Paranoid much... in a world where super-hackers weren't a thing. "Horrible drag coefficient, less flailing next time, please."

"N-next t-time?" he stammered.

"Actions have consequences," I informed him with a nonchalant shrug. "Maybe look back, see what you did wrong and refrain from repeating it? Or don't; high-g maneuvers are a great exercise and you do need the work-out."

And with that piece of advice, I flew off to tackle problem number two.