Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

I found the other boy in the base's library, which was surprising. Not that it existed; I'd known about military libraries ever since I'd gotten lost in one as a kid well over a decade before. No, the really surprising thing was that the boy, whose name was Mark unless Cindy had just called him by a fake name, was actually reading the books. What fourteen year old in this day and age of cell phones, tablets and social media actually reads books? Especially the kind of dense technical manual about a specific line of military transports that was probably meant for military engineers with college-level education? I'd have been bored within a quarter-hour, tops, and I had a couple of years on him.

"You do know the Officer Candidate School requires graduating college and finishing basic training, right?" I asked him to announce my approach.

"You're done wrangling the other two already?" he shot back, not lifting his eyes from his book. "That was quick."

"No, I left Cindy for last so it's your turn." I sat across the table from him without bothering with a chair. "Tell me about your powers."

"Of course, special treatment for the princess," he muttered with a scowl and tried to focus even harder on his reading.

"Oh, she's special all right," I said and he flinched. It was a small, reflexive thing, the tension at the fear of reprisal, the relief when it failed to arrive. So brief; blink and you'd miss it, but there. "Which is why I'd rather talk about you. It's not as if you're really reading; you went over the same line nine times in a row."

"The fuck do you think you know?" His reaction was angry; lashing back at the first available target. "Huh? You come here from whenever the General had you stashed, get involved in shit that ain't your business, think you know everything. Well, you don't!"

"None do, but I'm rather confident about the line thing." I crossed my arms and leaned back on thin air, getting comfortable. "You see, once objects are no longer visual impediments and your senses are sharp enough, it's not hard to notice what people are looking at. Useful, too." Especially if they didn't know you could do it; almost everyone looked at what they meant to attack in a fight.

"So I'm too wound up to read the damn book," he spat. "Care to guess why? No, you got a program like all the other teachers the General picked, ticking lines off your check list. Except whoops! Somewhere between lines five and nine you'll trip down a flight of stairs." Eyes like hot coals glared at me even as Mark smiled nastily. "You'll be in the mess hall at the time, probably, and it doesn't have fucking stairs." The smile widened, less nasty and more deranged. "Just an accident! No big deal, your powers came with toughness, right? Well, you sit down to eat and it's salty as fuck. You go for a cup of water to wash it down and whoops!" He waved his hands around wildly. "Somehow, between the water dispenser and your lips, the cup was spiked. Ever tasted battery acid? It sucks." He threw the textbook down and sat heavily, arms jittery and eyes shifting rapidly, trying not to miss a thing.

"But let's say that doesn't scare you off. You're one tough broad, you won't let a few inexplicable incidents stop you." Mark rolled his eyes at that particular notion. "Next day, all your clothes fall off in pieces the moment you walk into the briefing room with the Big Brass watching via teleconference. It's somehow caught on camera - despite the room being searched for bugs four times a day - and uploaded on YouToob. The Brass can't afford to keep someone after that impossible blunder so off you go." The anger, the disgust, the worry, they evaporated leaving behind only listlessness. "And that's why we are where we are. Still want to be our fourth, no, fifth training instructor?"

"That sounded like a challenge. I like challenges." In another room, in the nearby housing for the soldiers' dependents and visiting civilians, a pair of purple eyes narrowed, making me smile. Step two, just as planned. "But enough about me and/or your other teachers. Cards on the table, Mark. What will it take to get you to cooperate? Not just pretend to do any training but put in some genuine effort?"

"You think a bit of talking will convince me? Who do you take me for, Gabby?" Presumably that was the other boy's name, which I'd forgotten to ask. Maybe there should have been a file about them? But no, writing things down was trackable and with the government having lost monopoly of force that would have been just asking for a bad guys to try a snatch and grab... wait a minute! A memory hit me and the pieces fit. They should have earlier, but in my defense Force Awareness only reveals colors if you really focus and that situation had been too much of a mess for it. Later - Mark was talking and it sounded important. "...only thing I want is to kill that bitch. Can you give it to me?"

"That escalated quickly." Well, it wasn't unexpected. He was a teenager with a combat-worthy superpower getting bullied, of course he'd want to hit back. "Aren't you worried she'd hear of this?"

"I tell her I want to kill her at least twice a day. Bitch thinks she's invincible, you know?" He was actually calming down as he talked about it, less angry teenager and more 'this is my serious face' vibes. That did not bode well for steps five through ten in the plan, especially the bit about the kids not devolving into full psychopaths. "So how about that, Teach the Fifth? How do you see my chances?"

I had been wondering why General Rinaker had handed over those three to me when he did not fully trust me instead of, say, sending me to hunt down every bad guy they had even limited information on. It couldn't have been just the incidents ramping up because training a bunch of kids did not an immediate response make. Maybe there were political considerations I did not know about - slash that, they certainly were. They were just less important on the short term. But if he had had the three kids for some time and saw their relationships turning toxic, not three sidekicks that could grow into heroes but a bunch of little villains about to go for each other's throats and take out a couple of bases in the process... yes, I could see him throwing the one invulnerable gal he knew at them. Was it the latest attack by the Everymen that had forced his hand, or the still unknown enemy that had attacked that base? Note to self: ask for updates on the two captured villains.

"I don't know about your chances specifically, but I know it's doable." Instantly, the watcher from about a block away gave me her undivided attention. New step three; underway. "See, I just remembered where I saw you before."

"What are you talking about?" the black boy told me, giving me a look that practically screamed 'you are stupid'. "You think I'd ever forget meeting someone with your looks?"

"Probably true... unless I saw you while you weren't in a condition to look back." Already focused to the maximum and paired with Forced Acceleration, my Force Awareness saw a certain not so good girl flickering closer to the library. Not in the way normal people did, just momentary, flickering afterimages hanging around a spot that was no longer so distant... and the barest, infinitesimal flickers in the library itself as it became more of a focus of her attention. Gotcha. "Were you in another base, oh, about a couple weeks ago and fell unconscious during a villain attack?"

"Shit, don't remind me of that black... thing." He shuddered. "One moment I was reading a neat article about a new alloy, the next the room was full of tentacles coming out of the walls. Tried to blast my way out but there were coming from all sides and everything felt like bathing in liquid nitrogen. Next thing I know, I'm in this base's infirmary, it's three days later, and Barnes is even more of a bitch than usual."

"Liquid nitrogen feels refreshing, actually." Well, maybe not at his level of durability but it wouldn't hurt him that much. "What you felt was energy being drained away. Kinetic and thermal both, which was why you couldn't move through it and... blasting was it? Yeah, that wouldn't have worked. No real tentacles involved."

"Thank God!" Having been on the receiving end of real tentacles before, I shared the sentiment. So much acidic slime... "So it was a villain?"

"Three villains. We got two, one escaped." And therein lay the question; had Shadow-girl incapacitated both of them, or had it been one of the other two that had taken down Cindy?

"Huh." He thought about it for a moment then asked the question he was meant to. "Did the General have to bring out all of his hidden assets, or something?"

"Nope!" I gave him a wide, self-satisfied smirk and patted my... chest. "I got all the assets that were involved right here."

"Yeah, right," the boy snorted, but only after giving me another once-over. "You single-handedly took down the three villains that flattened a whole base and took me and the bitch out so quickly we didn't even notice until days later."

"I did, Mark," I told him, this time my tone serious. His initial reaction was disbelief, but the General was still on the base and he could confirm it - would confirm it once quietly told why it was a good idea to breach operational security and need-to-know for this one thing. Because this impromptu lesson was about to serve multiple purposes at once. "There's no game balance in the real world and everything has counters. Even for very broad or very versatile powers, trying to cover every angle of attack will just spread you thin and open to a brute force approach. Consciously or otherwise, we all have specific themes our powers are strong in... and others we're far weaker in, or against." I picked up the very manual he'd been reading and pushed it back at him.

"From a point of view, powers are exactly like military vehicles. Like them, they are the greatest threat from and to a specific angle." I pointed at the image of a tank, though one being carried by a heavy logistics vehicle. "If the designer tried to add weapons pointing everywhere, mass, ammunition and mechanical constraints would greatly limit each weapon's size and power. But a single main gun can be big enough to be deadly in a narrow aspect, with a few tertiaries to handle other angles." Then I pointed at the tank's wheels. "Similarly in defense, there's only so much armor the vehicle can carry. Put the same thickness everywhere and you get mediocre toughness. Put most of it in the aspects that will face the bigger threats and you get a powerful defense there... at the cost of weaknesses elsewhere."

"You talk of powers as if they're designed," he muttered thoughtfully. It wasn't really a question but got him an answer anyway.

"Aren't they? Hasn't the Warden tested her scanning devices on you?"

"Oh, that game-like thing." He shrugged. "Yeah she did, and it worked. What about it? My powers didn't change any more than a vehicle does because someone measured its length and mass."

"True, but the scanners couldn't have worked without powers being measurable." And there was one of the most interesting tidbits shared by the only friendly alien I'd ever talked to. "Powers explicitly break physics; it's how they work. If they were random we'd be seeing a lot more crazier and nonsensical things, such as villains that summoned cats and each summon shrinking their enemies by an inch until they vanished, or heroes stopping crime with cheese; eat feta and the bad guy drops all crimes to take a vacation to Greece, eat blue cheese and the bad guy rots from the inside-out." Before the advent of powers, some people hearing that would have laughed. We knew better now. "Instead we all get powers that we like, that fit our skills, interests and personalities. Unless there is some alien intelligence out there that custom-makes powers for us..." Not that this was far-fetched, just less likely than the alternative. "...then the designer of the obviously custom powers is ourselves."

"That..." he raised a finger, paused, thought about it, made to answer again, paused, scrunched up his face in confusion, then scowled. It was pretty funny, at least for us watching on the outside. "OK, it makes sense, is largely consistent, fits the evidence. What about people that do have a game interface, though? I mean, there were two dozen soldiers with minor abilities that had it in the last base."

"Ideas are easily shared and also intrusive. Someone got an interface first because he liked games, told others powers work like that, everyone else had the idea in mind when they got their powers and that's why those two dozen soldiers you met had them. In the meantime, the Invaders got power from murder and human sacrifice, what they did got out, and now we have every terrorist, religious fanatic, would-be cultist, psychopath, nutjob, or plain bastard trying the same things with gusto. And that's how we got the Everymen."

"Well... shit." It was obvious he'd heard more through the grapevine about the Everymen's atrocities than most people in the street because just bringing them up put a damper on everything. "Soo... what's the chance my powers will change now that I know they can change?"

"Changing was the whole point because now you can put conscious effort into improving, not just rote repetition." I floated to an upright position and pulled at him with a force-field. "Now let's go put that theory into practice, shall we?"

We went. Not much further behind a flickering presence followed. Step four; just as planned.