Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

Unlike the two boys, Cindy did not appear to be in any kind of hurry to attack. The fourteen year old brunette practically skipped out to the battlefield, as if she had all the time in the world and made exactly zero effort to defend herself against attack. The whole charade - because it took deliberate effort to look that nonchalant - made it look like she was taking a morning stroll through a park. She was obviously not taking the spar seriously, and seemed to be proud of it.

"You do realize most crisis events are on a timetable, right?" I told her. Being willing to blow the combat part of the evaluation was one thing; not everyone had direct combat skills or even wanted to fight after all, though she might regret doing so by the time we were done. Wasting time was another. "Enemy armies advance towards objectives, hostages can get killed, bomb timers run out, wildfires spread, disaster victims expire, and if you're particularly unlucky you get monsters that grow with every step they take. In a crisis time is the most important commodity you have. It does not matter what skills you have or how great and strong your powers are if you never reach the field in time to help; you will fail before you can even begin."

She scowled but, miracle of miracles, chose not to talk back for a change. That was a relief; it meant she could tell when she was obviously in the wrong no matter how much she might hate it. That was not a given for many people her age - and quite a few adults never developed that skill either. It meant that however difficult, however arbitrarily contrary and spiteful she might choose to be, she could actually be taught.

Changing attitude, she instantly flickered to the middle of the designated sparring space, a smattering of very brief afterimages filling the intervening space. Her method of travel left no footprints, the loose gravel, snow and dust entirely undisturbed by her passage - as they had been for the entirety of our trek out to the wasteland. Once she came to a stop a span of time briefer than a normal human's eyeblink later, she crossed her arms petulantly and looked up at me.

"If you are the bad guy then why aren't you attacking? Or at least advancing to some nefarious goal?" she turned my own words against me. "I got here before you. Does this mean I win some prize? I collect cat plushies in case you can't decide what the prize should be."

"There's many types of bad guy. For example, someone that wants to attack a building you got to defend." And with that I flickered forth, not due to some weird esoteric effect but from sheer speed. Before she could react I flew within an inch of the two of us colliding, narrowly bypassing her as I crossed the mile-wide sparring area to reach a house-sized boulder on a nearby hill. Plowing into it at twenty times the speed of sound let me tunnel through the rock as it liquefied instead of exploding, coring the boulder in an instant before getting back to my starting point. "One building down, all civilian targets killed, you lose."

"No fair!" Cindy shouted and stomped her foot, flattening a circle of earth about thirty feet in diameter as if tens of thousands feet stomped all over it at the same time. "You didn't just fly around the others, you fought them!"

"Because I had a reason to fight them," I reminded the recalcitrant teen. "Enemies with goals other than killing you specifically don't have to engage you. Avoiding a fight is faster, less expensive and generally easier so most people will try to," I told her while a voice whispered about filthy hypocrites in my mind. Then again, isn't it every teacher's goal to train her student into surpassing or at least being less idiotic than them? "But it's true that some enemies will try to fight you, and both supers and monsters tend more towards it than avoidance."

"Then why aren't you-" She winked out mid-sentence as I punched her in the face faster than she could react, or at least tried to. She flickered more than normal, several afterimages forming around me and her old position for a split-second before she reappeared fifty feet away. "Oooh, sneaky! You got me talking then tried for a sucker punch, how very villainous." She giggled, hardly worried about being attacked faster than she could react. So... her power was either reacting on its own, or a passive. Both had their own advantages. "Guess I should strike back, right?"

Then I got punched by a little girl. Not just once, or ten times, or even fifty. Every single part of me got on the receiving end of every type of attack as I was punched, kicked, pinched, karate-chopped and headbutted from all angles at the same time. There was even hair-pulling and eye-gouging involved, and all in all the attack was one of the most uncomfortable things I'd ever gone through. Not that painful per se, because Cindy simply wasn't strong enough to hurt me with her bare hands and whatever power she was using didn't make her blows more damaging. But suddenly getting the memories of having endured each and every one of those blows, of getting the sensation of all of them happening was... imagine just standing there and having a little kid trying to hurt you, trying different things for hours.

"Interesting," I said, seeing shallow scratches as if from a determined kitten vanish as my Regeneration got to work. "You said you were 'Everywhere' back when we first met. I guess that includes doing 'Everything'?"

"Why should I explain when Mr. Dreadlocks didn't?" she shot back and her image flickered once more, followed by another series of attacks. "Huh. I usually only need to do this once but you're too tough. Let's try again and see what happens."

Yeah, she was annoying... so I eye-beamed her in the face. Or at least I tried; what appeared to be her simply vanished, the beam passing through with no effect, while Cindy reappeared immediately next to it. So I did it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, as fast as I could manage it with Forced Acceleration cranked up as far as it would go. But even as the rest of the world slowed to a crawl, even as fragments of rock and puffs of snow from where my beams landed flew through the air at literal snail's pace while Cindy's own attacks on me took longer and longer to conclude despite falling all together across my body, there was no appreciable difference in her discorporations. No matter how closely I looked with Force Adjustment, there didn't seem to be a time interval between my shooting her, her body blinking out of reality then reappearing somewhere nearby.

What if there wasn't any interval at all? What if she didn't wink out or reappear but simply wasn't really there, or anywhere? Force Awareness insisted that the blows were delivered across my body by someone, each blow connected to another identical body. Yet if the bodies my senses insisted were there and all acted at the same time really did exist, there would not have been enough space for them to fit around me. And when I tried to pinpoint where her center of mass was, where gravity was applied to her, where she stepped on the ground, where she breathed, the forces were stretched out over a couple city blocks as if her molecules had been blasted across that whole space at once. Frustrating - almost as much as her repeated attacks.

So I reached for the power of Instant Action, stepped outside of time, and everything became clearer. Tens of thousands of Cindies appeared around me, not visible but still perceptible through Force Awareness. Her claim of being "everywhere" suddenly seemed far less absurd, because her overlapping positions took up every bit of space in a two-block radius, every single position she could have taken in that space filled up... except for where I was standing. Like the proverbial Schrodinger's cat, the younger girl was both here and there, in front of and behind me, in my left and my right at the same time. She was both about to punch me in the nose, and kick at my shin, and pull at my hair, and claw at my throat, all at once. Every possible location and action both taken and not.

Unlike Schrodinger's cat, what she could be - and thus was - doing wasn't limited by observation. By using Instant Action I'd opened the proverbial box and looked because with time stopped her condition could not change, and yet she hadn't 'collapsed' to a single possibility. She still was in each and every place she could be - wait! That was it! The one spot not taken up by Cindies was my own position, because being in my place flat-out wasn't possible. She couldn't move me or at least had not moved me, so she couldn't have been in my space, just like she wasn't underground because she hadn't dug any holes or flying overhead because she had no flying powers.

I shot eyebeams through the nearest Cindy-image. It winked out as the beams would have touched it, as did the image behind it and the one behind that and so on and so forth till the end of the Cindy-occupied area. The beam cut a path through space, clearing it of Cindies because Cindy wasn't hit by the beam... ergo she never was - and couldn't have been - in the space the beam crossed. Now, under normal time the beam would have stopped and after it no longer burned through that space, Cindy could have occupied it again. But we weren't under normal time. We weren't under sped-up or slowed time. In Instant Action we were under no time at all.

I blasted ahead with the eye-beams again then turned, sweeping them through each and every Cindy-image I could see. Places she could have been were no longer possibilities as I collapsed the probabilities through direct interaction. A million potential Cindies were left, then a hundred thousand, then ten thousand, then just hundreds until the beam went full circle, scouring the entirety of the surrounding area. Finally, the last image did not vanish. With every possible position she could have been and avoided the beams disproven, Cindy could no longer avoid them. Smiling, I returned to the normal flow of time.

"Aaaaaiiiieeee!!!"

The girl's scream as she was blasted back into the ground was very satisfying. Mark and Gabby gaped as dozens of Cindies flickered out from the impact site, but all of them were covered in dust, had their blouse torn and were cradling a bleeding gash in their right side. No matter where she flickered or what she did after the fact, the untouchable girl had been touched.

"Not so invincible now, are you?" So I did rub it in so what? Everyone would have done the same - it would have taken a saint not to.

"How... HOW?" she screeched in distress, her voice echoing from several dozen places at once as she frantically looked for the reason her power had failed. The boys were still undecided between being stunned... or looking at me with stars in their eyes.

"You can be everywhere you want but that's not very useful if there's nowhere for you to be." I smugly explained. I was about to go into specifics in a way that would have totally been a lesson on how to watch out for her weaknesses and not a twenty-minute boasting session about the awesomeness that was Maya Wennefer when I got hit in the face by every boulder in a two hundred yard radius. And after every boulder she could have thrown at me was indeed thrown at the same time, she tore up the ground to find even more boulders. A reminder that while she was the physically weakest of the trio, she could still lift a couple dozen tons and throw around car-sized projectiles with impunity.

With an eye roll, I used Instant Action again. Instead of eye beams projected via Force Field, I simply flew through every position she could have taken, eliminating them all until Cindy was forced into the last one. Then I grabbed her by one arm before returning to the normal flow of time. Ten seconds of Instant Action and I was beginning to feel the workout, but the frantically flickering girl hanging from my hand when nothing she could do could get her out of my grip was reward enough.

"As I said earlier when you were probably not paying attention," I said while ignoring all the kicks she sent at my knees and shins, "all powers have weaknesses and limitations. From that it shouldn't have been difficult to realize that finding yours safely, before a bad guy managed it in the field, was half the point of these spars, the other half being all of us getting some hands-on experience with each other's powers." The brunette was finally slowing down, the realization that she couldn't escape my grip giving her a constipated expression.

"All right, I'll admit that was impressive," Mark said, his glare at Cindy shifting into a calculating expression. "How did you do it? We've fought dozens of times and I've yet to hit her once, never mind doing... well... this!"

"I'm sure now that you're a team and everything, Cindy will tell you," I told him drily.

"Like hell!" the girl herself interjected.

"Just as I'm sure you'll explain all your powers to your friends," my smirk took on a dangerous sharpness "and not contemplate how to use their own weaknesses to murder them, or something. Cindy paused in her flickering to shoot Mark a very indignant look. "Killing people for anything short of life and death matters is a bad idea for more reasons than-"

I stopped, let go of Cindy and took flight. After hitting five hundred feet I better focused on what Force Awareness had just picked up. With the Earth's curvature no longer interfering for at least a couple dozen miles and thus no longer having to parse through countless bits of useless information, I could see and hear Tonopah Base clearly... and all the alarms ringing there while soldiers moved with a purpose.

Not for the first time, I cursed the fragility of cell phones and other communication devices. I'd left mine behind in preparation for the spar. Given the amounts and different types of damage superpowers could dole out even indirectly, trying to protect a phone from them would have either also sealed it from incoming signals or bricked it outright. Now I was regretting that decision. Maybe I should have had one of the kids waiting for their turn hold it during the spars? Yeah, no, they'd have probably crushed it or lost it by "accident", or something. Well... nothing that could be done about it, I guess...

"OK, kids, gather up," I told them after landing a split-second later, only to find them bickering like typical teenagers. Or at least Cindy and Mark were; Gabby was staying out of it in a wary silence. "There's something going on in the base and we need to get back yesterday so we'll do it the fast way."

"What's that?" Gabby asked suspiciously, the other two still giving each other glares that promised violence.

"You'll see," I told him cryptically and reached out with a force field...