Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

Three burly terrorists patrolled the top floor of the Secretariat Building, for various meanings of 'burly' and 'patrolled'. All of them were as tall as I was, possessing the sheer bulk of physically-focused supers but lacking both the streamlined bodies and the less tangible aspects of a super's physicality and inner life-force. They also wasted their time kicking, punching and tearing at the machinery supporting the building's functions, from air conditioning and waste disposal to the elevators. I guess when your planned to blow the building up as part of your exit strategy, breaking bits of it to pass the time and vent steam between battles seemed like a no-brainer.

Using the bad guys' own cacophony to cover my own entrance, I broke through the roof not by using the access staircase but by turning a four-foot-wide part of the ceiling near the south-west corner into dust. Several hundred pounds of dust dropping a dozen feet and onto metal were not exactly quiet even against that terrible racket, but the terrorists weren't paying attention. They thought anyone trying to stop them would either have to come through the stairs or the sound of breaking masonry from their entrance would be obvious; despite being granted some level of powers from whoever was backing them they didn't seem to grasp the possibilities of such new abilities in both open and covert conflict. Eh, if they were smart they wouldn't have been patsies for the real bad guys.

Speeding through the gloom under flickering, mostly defunct lights, I got in sight of both their bomb and communicator and disintegrated both supertech devices with my new eyebeams. Then I turned around and blasted all three of them with the same before they could react, turning their power armor to dust. Instead of being fazed by their sudden loss of weaponry, the three of them charged me in their underwear. Unfortunately for them, I didn't have time for fun and games. One burst of speed later, they were all sporting broken jaws, shattered teeth, a mild concussion and a huge headache for when they woke up. Unfortunately for me, I had no idea when that would be. Their internal biology - not just their metabolism - was undergoing random surges, everything from blood pressure to temperature, to the shape of the circulatory system and the density of their bones and organs changing significantly in a dozen places at a time, completely at random.

It was far from the first time I'd seen biological boosts or rapid mutations but even the most newly-formed monsters tended to be more stable than that. The overall boost was similar to but stronger than the bad guys I'd beaten outside and my best guess was that they had exceeded the safety margins of whatever enhancing power or supertech they had been given. Not by much and knocking them out had actually helped push them towards stability but there was no telling when the effect would run its course or what its result would ultimately be. Leaving them was a bad idea but with the situation rapidly changing the only other option was killing them and I wasn't about to do that.

Seeing no other patrols nearby and no booby traps, I left the mechanical penthouse through the stairs. The next few floors were mainly offices that had all been recently trashed; there even were a couple of fires here and there but otherwise no signs of either their normal occupants or the invaders. Curiously, the building's fire suppression systems were not working or responding at all, so I had to put out the fires on my own. A closer look revealed worn, broken wiring, clogged pipes, rusted through emergency batteries, even the plastic bits looked old and rotten. That would explain the lack of lightning and power, but what had caused it?

Things were even worse in the mechanical floors, with all the machines responsible for the building's everyday function having broken down completely and fallen apart. If anyone tried one of the elevators now chances were they'd simply drop into the shafts rather than going anywhere. That was true for all three such levels, in floors six, sixteen and twenty-eight. Bad news was, of the over two thousand people that had been working in the many offices, conference rooms, meeting rooms and committees, none were present. Good news, there were neither corpses nor signs of obvious deaths such as pooling blood or severed body parts and my senses could pick a huge group of people packed in the fourth basement under the three levels of underground parking lot. The only bombs I could see were on the aforementioned parking lot, stuck to the building's structural supports. No different than the General Assembly Building, really, except here the collapsing mass of thirty-nine floors of concrete, glass and steel would bury and crush the hostages rather than being killed directly by the explosion.

I'd initially thought to go to the General Assembly Building first and deal with the situation there. Official delegates from countries all over the world held great political importance. They had also been the terrorists' goal from the beginning. But when I saw four times as many hostages held here... lives were lives. And while the political impact might be less, most people around the world associated the United Nations with the Secretariat building, not the General Assembly. It coming down in an explosion and killing two thousand people in the process... the truth was, I had a plan to deal with both. Because when the bad guys chain two different hostage groups onto bombs and tell you to choose one, it is the hero's job no not play their game, punch them in the face and win the day anyway.

I just had no idea how realistic that would be when actual villains ran the script instead of guys in a movie doomed by the script to lose.

xxxx

The parking lot was empty when I got there. And I did not just mean empty of people. There were over fifteen hundred parking seats here, it had been a day with an enormous workload to prepare for the session of the General Assembly, not to mention the thousand and one other committees, agencies and subsidiary organs that never stopped working... so where were the cars? There was not a single sign of them anywhere, just as there hadn't been the first time I looked. Flying through the parking lot worriedly and scanning everything with my Force Awareness, I couldn't find a single clue about what had happened and I only had a minute to spare at best.

"Looking for this?" a voice called out, echoing as if from a great distance, and a man in a fully-covering, black bodysuit was suddenly there in the middle of the parking lot, tossing a remote control from hand to hand. Apparently I'd miscalculated; I hadn't had a minute to spare at all.

"Possibly," I shot back and came to a hovering stop. "Is it the control for the bombs or not?"

"Yo, chica, slow down!" he told me with a cackle, like he was making an in-joke I couldn't understand. "Deep questions like that are for after the second date, right?"

"Why would I ever go on a date with you? Have you seen yourself?" I gestured at the layer of black latex fully covering his head. "Eyes too round and squinting, broken nose, a real bad case of acne, but the worst part?" I pretended to think about it. "That's probably the buck teeth. Seriously, both powers and medicine offer loads of solutions to such things. Why not just pick one and fix things?"

"Because it's my face, you fucking bitch!" he suddenly screeched, going from affable villain to total psycho in an instant. "Mine! Mine! Mine and only mine! Not yours or anybody else's. It's mine and NOBODY IS GOING TO TAKE IT FROM ME!" And with that he charged. I guess Terrorists R Us take all types, especially the crazies.

He was the first proper super among the bad guys I'd seen so far, instead of someone wearing power armor or having been enhanced by someone else's abilities or supertech. That didn't mean he was particularly powerful. Physically, he seemed to be a step below Cindy; absolutely deadly to any mundanes, capable of denting tank armor with his bare hands if given the chance, but someone I could have taken halfway through my first month of having powers, maybe. He was also very skewed in his abilities, little in the way of strength or speed, with more than half his enhancement going into durability. A strange way to do things, from my point of view. I couldn't even raise strength and durability independently of each other. His powers had to make sense to him of course, and he seemed to be crazy.

My surprise when he narrowly dodged the punch intended to end the fight quickly became even greater when he nailed me in the ribs in turn with bruising force. His blow was powerful enough to overcome my Proximakinetic flight and push me back a little. No matter what my recently improved senses were telling me, he was actually a hair stronger that me. He had to have a power multiplying his strength and a great one too, because he could actually match both my physical strength and Proximakinesis when both were enhanced by Force Adjustment!

"What's up, bitch, cat got your tongue?" he mocked. "You liked it earlier when you were making fun of me, didn't you?" He sent a jab at my jaw which I pulled back to avoid, only it proved to have been a feint when his other fist sank into my solar plexus and cut off my breath. "Do you like it now that the shoe's on the other foot, huh?" He kicked out, narrowly missed my knee and got me in the shin.

We exchanged several blows, and he proved he was actually skilled in hand-to-hand, very skilled. With our speed and strength near-evenly matched - and him actually holding the advantage - I used Forced Acceleration to go to full superspeed. Somehow he kept up, caught my right arm in one of those fancy martial arts holds... then broke it. He tried to trip me up too, pin me with his legs in another fancy maneuver, but his leaping around did not quite match up with my flight's maneuverability. I shook my arm, fingers flexing to test it was healing properly, then shot him a glower. Under his mask he had on an ugly leer, a silent promise to all kinds of nasty shit.

Why was I wasting time on the madman when I had more hostages to save? I stopped time and moved to beat him down to paste - or at least to mild unconsciousness with no permanent harm. Then he caught my good arm, twisted it around behind my back, caught my other arm and pulled it over my shoulder, then his legs wrapped around my own from behind, pushing them off-balance and controlling them. We struggled for a second or two, but his hold was better than anything I could have done and try as might I lacked the leverage to break it.

"Whoa, chica, that was a good fight. Almost got me good." he told me as we still strained against each other. Or rather, I was straining; he seemed to be pretty relaxed. "But ya got ta get way better to get the drop on Master Mirage, ya ken?"

"Get off you bastard," I growled, more to keep his attention while I found another way out. While I could still move us around both with flight, we were in a pretty fragile building so ramming anything was out. And with his strength being what it was, if I stopped using Proximakinesis to reinforce myself he'd break my limbs like twigs.

"Nope! It's pretty comfortable here." He pulled at my arms and legs, getting an even better hold on our relative positions. "No need to struggle now, it's not that bad. Just admit that you lost, you're already getting all sweaty."

He was right... he was actually right! Most of the fight had taken place under Instant Action. In fact, time for the rest of the world was still effectively stopped, which was why the exertion was actually tiring in the only minute or two our fight had lasted... so how was he capable of not just moving around but exceeding my speed within my own power? It didn't make sense, not unless he had much greater raw power than I was, or was a dedicated speedster. But a speedster he wasn't; his build did not fit, my senses insisted his agility was low, and with his strength matching mine he couldn't have dedicated all his power to one attribute. I ran the whole battle again in my mind, reviewing what both my senses and my enemy had told me. Master Mirage, was it?

"Come on, woman, you're getting obviously weaker now," he growled as my efforts to break his grip redoubled. He pulled at my limbs to break them and it hurt, but he didn't actually manage to dislocate let alone crack bones. "Give up!"

"If I've already lost, why are you so frustrated, eh?" I asked, dialing my Proximakinesis down even more. Instead of overwhelming me as he should have, our struggle stayed about even. "If I'm weakening and you are not how come you haven't won?"

"Shut up!" he growled and tried to choke me but he had the wrong grip for that and it wouldn't have worked anyway.

"Could it be that you weren't strong to begin with? That it was all a trick?" He pulled at my arms then pushed, trying to bash my head against the floor. I let him; reinforced concrete might as well have been loose sand for how much it could harm me. There was a reason most real super fights did not involve throwing cars around or using masonry as improvised weaponry; those things simply didn't stand up to the durability of supers.

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut uAAARGH!"

His entirely uninventive cursing turned into a scream as I used Proximakinesis to deliver blows to him without layering it over my strength. I broke both of his wrists, then his knees, then his clavicle with strikes through his own hold on me, his durability entirely insufficient in resisting them. Then I pushed aside his broken grip, got up and stretched to make sure all my joints were working properly after being in that hold for subjective minutes.

"Pro-tip," I told the feebly struggling villain on the ground, copying the same mocking tone he had used before. "When your power is to copy people's strength and speed and add it to your own, don't call yourself Master Mirage. It gives away the trick and then you're the one getting beaten up."

"Screw you!" he shouted and somehow made that controller appear in his left hand. He still retained enough mobility to press the red button... but nothing happened. "What?"

"Pro-tip number two," I continued in proper smug mode. "If your enemy has set up bombs, defuse them before the fight starts then pretend to still be looking for them to make him turn up. When he realizes the whole thing was a trap meant to draw him away from the hostages, his expression is going to be hilarious."

And it was, his barely coherent insults only adding to it. Except the fight had been way harder than it had to be because I'd gotten overconfident. The information advantage from Force Awareness and my enhanced senses in general paired with my usual speed and power advantage should have made everything a breeze. One unexpected power plus newbie mistakes in the fight itself had nearly cost me time and two thousand hostages their lives. With how sweaty, worn down and fatigued I was from my Instant Action abuse, it had also cost me a good half of my endurance.

I kicked the villain in the face, sending him from la-la land to the land of dreams. Then I descended the stairs to the last basement where the hostages had all been shoved into like sardines in a can. They weren't tied up but why would they be? Nothing they could have done would have harmed the guy upstairs and he'd just piled broken masonry against the doors until it was too heavy for them to move and impossible to break without tools. Good thing he was crazy; a logical villain would have just collapsed the stairs.

"Are... we free... to leave now?" an older guy in a torn suit asked. He was covered in plaster dust from the wrecked offices in the upper floors, with a small but bloody wound on his forehead. He didn't seem surprised by the fact I was there, only a bit awed by my looks, disheveled though I was. Those people must have overheard my banter with the bad guy, hadn't they? At least the beginning and the end of our fight which had not happened outside of time. Good thing I had not said anything particularly dumb or embarrassing, then.

"The villain is out cold and the battle in the plaza ended four minutes ago." I shrugged. "It is by no means safe but you could be evacuated by the National Guard and looked over by paramedics somewhere that... hasn't been invaded by terrorists with superpowers?" Yeah, a public speaker I wasn't. Dance and/or perform in a skimpy outfit before a huge crowd? Absolutely. Talk to said huge crowd? Not on your life. It was not a matter of confidence, I could just never find anything elaborate and properly pompous to say. The superpowers did not help; under all the boosts, my personality and preferences remained the same.

"Are you, like, a superhero?" a much younger woman that was shaking like a leaf asked next. She was wearing a Greenpeace shirt, was cradling a broken arm and had to be a decade older than me but just then she looked small and afraid. So I momentarily forgot about being held down by a probable psychopath just a minute before, or the delegates I'd yet to save and acted perky and friendly.

"Well it comes with the cape, doesn't it?" I set that glorified blue sheet to waving in a nonexistent wind without folding up or catching into anything. It looked awesome and lots of glum or fearful faces actually perked up upon seeing it. The superpower of proper props, everyone. "Plus it would be pretty hard to punch giant robots to scrap if I weren't one."

"The terrorists have giant robots now?" the old guy who'd first asked a question spoke up again. "Unbelievable. It's like the nuking of Florida all over again. What's next, dragons?"

"We had dragons in Florida six months ago," I informed him with a shrug. They were scaled, flew, and breathed fire, so it counted. "Maybe that's why everything was nuked?" No, it had been something much, much worse than that, but apparently the government had kept the details close to the chest and from the amount of hallucinogenic, mind-warping and memetic hazards thrown around I doubted mundane civilian survivors could have gotten their facts straight.

"Could be... could be... the world's a broken mirror now..." he muttered before going loud to be heard all over the other whispered conversations. Unfortunately, most of them were about me and super-hearing let me listen to all the nasty comments along with the good. "OK everyone, we're leaving! Double file, no pushing, just as we practiced in the evacuation exercises." Maybe they'd suffered too many shocks to argue, maybe they had just been looking for someone to organize them, or maybe people could stave off our inborn lemming instincts and think in the face of adversity, if only we were given the chance. Whatever one chose to believe, the hostages were finally moving out and I had some delegates to save.

I'd done everything in my power to minimize any potential issues; isolated the General Assembly Building from both information and outside interference, defeated the terrorists' diversionary force wrecking havoc in the city, helped save the surviving National Guard, prevented the bombing of the Secretariat Building and the death of thousands, and defeated one of the actual villains that wasn't just an enhanced pawn. And all of that in only a few minutes, which meant there was plenty of time still.

So why did the thought of getting in one of the most famous places on Earth, fighting another villain and his minions and saving some very important people did not seem like a good task to tackle solo then and there?