Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

"This is terribly boring."

There was a reason teaching had never been a career I'd ever considered and it hadn't been my terrible grade in social sciences. Kids - teenagers especially - usually vacillated between two overall conditions; gleeful maliciousness and misanthropic isolation. At least that had been my experience as a teenager for half a decade and having to run herd on the superpowered version was only reinforcing that opinion.

Half an hour of idle blasting at monsters with zero communication, either with me or with each other. Hello? This was supposed to be a team-building exercise, not some pop quiz to be completed in silence. Except I could not tell them that, could I? Looking back at my own teenage years with the perspective granted by growing up and a superhuman level of awareness - mostly the latter, adulthood by itself was shit at making you a better person - it was clear as daylight that talking to the idiots would have the opposite effect of the intended cooperation. I would be seen as an outsider, a meddler, a semi-parental figure from a prior generation that definitely couldn't understand them and certainly couldn't be trusted. Some things they had to discover by themselves.

Groaning, I stretched in the golden pool of superheated magma, trying to relax. Something had me on edge since my return to the world and it wasn't the fighting; at this point, fisticuffs with the superpowered dregs of humanity and monsters from another dimension was just business as usual. Was it the media and their incessant attempts to drag me into politics of all stripes? It did not feel like it; humans being humans, of course they wanted to appropriate the new power for their own crusades and petty clashes of opinion. The organizations of supervillains that kept cropping up? Not really. Horrible as they were, all the destruction they'd caused and would cause in the future... I'd long since known would happen and come to terms with it. Worrying about it wouldn't solve tomorrow's problems; it would merely mar today's leisure.

I dove into the pool, the use of Force Adjustment to sink into it as if it weren't four times denser than the human body as easy as breathing now. It was something I'd noticed with the powers I used the most; their raw strength might not grow with use but the ease and quickness they responded with scaled with familiarity. A brand new ability felt like driving a car; a bulky tool with complex controls. Those used often, like Instant Action or Chronal Leap were akin to familiar tools or weapons or clothing; an extension of myself easily directed. Force Adjustment, Proximakinesis, Force Awareness and Regeneration? They felt like another limb I'd been using since birth. But despite the improvements, there was something that didn't feel quite right, a mounting pressure at the back of my head.

Bursting out of the surface of the pool, splashes of molten rock and metal sizzling against its banks, I threw another glance at the kids. Still no change; they were killing monsters at a steady pace. A mere thirty seconds had passed since the last check-up. It'd felt much longer, because of course it had. Even if I turned Forced Acceleration off, my perception of time was... not faster but more encompassing than most people's, denser. More things to do, to think about, smaller events noticed, vastly more information dealt with from my senses. Was this the source of that mental pressure, the not-quite-migraine that was there and not there?

On a whim, I activated my ring, the only thing other than my communicator I was currently wearing. The little metal band gleamed oddly and grew hot, something it had failed to do on contact with the yellow-bright magma. The enchantments and programming Liz had built into it moved in a complex wave of forces resonating with my own powers. With my senses sharpening over time, I was beginning to see how the tiny artifact measured and assessed my abilities through that resonance, though I was still far away from making such artifacts of my own.

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y11m21d

Known skills:

Points: 10/218

Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap

Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 22, Ego 25, Luck 7

Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II

Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I

Huh. My birthday was coming up, chronologically speaking. I really had not noticed and wasn't really sure it mattered. The Old Man had turned himself into a monster even before powers and had disappeared during the final battle of the Invasion, while Mother had made it clear she was not interested back when I was twelve. Just thinking about them made the migraine come back with a vengeance; a normal human's head would have already exploded.

Plus, due to extensive use of Forced Acceleration and Instant Action since I'd gotten my powers, my body's biological age had hit twenty-five some time ago and hadn't physically aged since then. Six and a half subjective years as a super... it didn't really feel like it. According to a certain annoying authority on the subject, a super's body reflected their ideal self and that effect scaled with our level of power. Wrinkles would only happen if we wanted them to happen - or if someone with the right hostile power forced them on us, I guess. Hurrah for vanity.

Grunting, I flipped over and took a few backstrokes. Thinking about this was dumb and left me feeling like shit. No, far better to focus on something more tangible and actually useful; powers. Tangling with those terrorists at the United Nations building had pushed my abilities, brought in new potential. Surprisingly, handling the kids for these weeks had provided just as much. Or perhaps not so surprisingly; I was one of the few to reject the invaders' paradigm of being empowered through violence, choosing another principle to champion. Forcing some idiots to shape up and become a proper heroic team seemed to count for something, even though I wasn't clear on what my principle actually was. Eh, that was future-Maya's problem.

Ten points. Resisting the immediate urge to sink all those points into my Might stat and boost my physicality to even greater superhuman heights, I went through the other options. Any attribute taken above the rank of ten was effectively a superpower even without actual powers that worked off it. Agility already made me as quick as a bee and as accurate as a robotic surgeon by this point while Ego gave both fabulous looks and eliminated mental problems from all the fighting and other horrors I habitually faced. What would happen if I made myself luckier, or smarter?

Probably not much. Contrary to their portrayal in comics, luck and intelligence did not immediately made you a combat god. There had been several examples of that during the invasion, most notably my friend Jerry. For all his investments in mental boosts, as soon as he run out of magic he was basically crippled in a fight. Plus if you split your investments between physical and mental power, those who specialized in one or the other would beat you in their field. But the real reason was that I felt comfortable being the strongest gal in the room; punching giant monsters in the face made sense to me. Getting better at planning and plotting and being smart about it? I wouldn't know what to do with that kind of abilities.

The last option was skills. For my power, new ways of using it could be discovered through effort and repetition, just as with any mundane skill. It had happened with my eye-beams... but that was the only time it had happened. Just as with learning a mundane skill, it took a long time to apply forces in a different way. Two "points" and all the time and effort could be bypassed to create a skill immediately. It sounded incredibly useful and I'd wanted to try since I'd discovered it.

With ten points to burn, the only question was what skills to try for...

xxxx

Gabby's fists clenched at his sides as frustration boiled in him. While Mark had been taking potshots at the monsters across the border for the past hour, he just scanned the miles upon miles of blighted terrain while flexing his sword powers. Unlike his friend's mimicry of weapons, the blades he manifested couldn't move more than fifteen hundred feet from him. While that was a major improvement in the few weeks they'd trained under Maya, Mark was still disappointed in himself. The blonde superheroine kept telling him how useful the sheer versatility of his power was, but what was the point of endlessly varied magic swords if they couldn't hit the enemy?

Mark could shoot across whole counties, even states if he mimicked long-range missiles. Their teacher could reach enemies in the blink of an eye. Cindy was more limited, yes, but if the enemy couldn't actually touch you, that was hardly an issue. Case in point, how easily she'd taken apart that small army of wights and was even now daring the wasteland's monsters to attack her. Gabby wanted - no needed to do something awesome of his own. Something to catch up to his peers and impress their teacher; maybe then he'd be one step closer to being a real superhero like he always wanted.

As he sat on top of a flying sword a thousand feet above the ground, the wind pulling at his hair and sunlight gleaming against the blades of a hundred magic swords moving around him in a loose spiral, the Hispanic boy decided to experiment. He started with dismissing most of his other swords, letting the magical constructs fade to nothing. Only having to maintain his floating blade, he poured all his power and attention into something new, something... bigger.

It begun with something he'd read in a web novel years before, a seemingly simple knife that projected its cuts at range. Not the usual sword-beam or slashing wave of anime either, but direct, instantaneous projection without a projectile that could be parried or dodged. The knife in his hands shimmered and sparked as power poured into it, but the results were underwhelming. Feeling out the enchantment, Gabby was certain it couldn't cut much further than twenty or thirty feet. But that was just a knife, and Gabby's swords became more powerful the larger they were.

The knife grew longer, its blade wider, its handle thicker. From a simple knife it grew into a proper dagger, then a short sword, then the standard double-edged, three-foot-long blade of a medieval knight. It didn't stop there, though; it quickly surpassed even the largest seventeenth century swords, its blade lengthening and broadening until it was larger than a telephone pole - and then kept going. The handle only grew as thick as one of the thinner water bottles but nearly a foot and a half in length, the greatest size Gabby could grip properly. By that time the blade had grown to absurd proportions, easily a yard wide, several inches thick at the thickest, and well over sixty feet long. Despite weighing as much as a dozen buses, it swung as easily and quickly as the knife had in Gabby's hands thanks to his sword elemental powers.

Merely holding the monstrous weapon Gabby got a feeling of accomplishment, of his power taking a small but significant step forward. The enchantment crackled with barely restrained power, dwarfing everything he'd created before by a huge margin and the original knife by many thousands of times. Tentatively, he swung it once in the rough direction of a giant, horribly mutated palm tree several miles away, a twisted thing with a trunk of steel spikes and green whip-like tentacles for leaves that snatched at everything living nearby, seeking to drag prey closer and impale it upon the spikes to be sucked dry of life and nutrients. The distant monster-plant was instantly split in twain from its top to its roots, then the fissure kept going, splitting the hill itself.

Gabby stared at what he'd wrought in shock for several moments. Then he snickered. Snickering became chuckles, chuckles grew to laughter, and laughter soon turned to the kind of cackling often associated with mad scientists and evil witches. He'd done it! He'd finally accomplished something really impressive with his powers, and all he had to do was try hard enough! He couldn't wait to show the others!

...Maya must have already seen it with her super-senses. What would she say about his new technique? It had to be awesome, right? Or at least good enough Gabby was no longer falling behind, certainly? Maybe... maybe he should practice it more, try to force more power into the magic sword. He would try until he could cleave the tops off three hills with it and name it Caladbolg! Then nobody could say it was not enough.

So focused was he on his new sword, he did not notice the very unusual cloud floating towards him against the wind...

xxxx

Two hours of milling around monster-land and Cindy was sure of one thing; beating monsters was a hell of a lot of work. The fourteen year old brunette wiped rivulets of sweat off her face but it was a fool's errand. She didn't know if it was the humidity, the oppressive Florida heat that had only grown worse since the state had been warped by black magic, or the sheer effort involved in mowing down wights and mutant zombies, but she was drenched, muddy and stank to high heaven. All the many instances of her being were the same, and she hated it.

How had it happened? She'd deliberately left instances sitting out of the fights, doing nothing but lazing around and trying in vain to get enough bars to browse the net yet exhaustion had crept up on her anyway. Now she'd resorted to having instances actually sleep, on the thought that they could relax and recover while the rest of them fought so at the end she could reject the exhausted copies of herself and keep the well-rested and perky ones. For some reason that was not working.

Countless instances of herself dismantled the latest group of wights attempting to reform from the remains of previous battles and stomped on the pieces for good measure until they were reduced to disgusting greasy smears. Yet the black ichor drenching the soil like so much ink slowly oozed back into the under warriors' brutally pasted corpses. In ten minutes, a quarter hour on the outside, some of the undead would have reformed and be in need of a good stomping.

Cindy leaned on her knees and took in deep, panting breaths. This sucked. It wasn't the monsters' regeneration that bothered her; beating on tenacious but otherwise helpless targets was her whole shtick. It was fun even! Well, it did not feel fun any more. Why was she feeling so wrung out? She was a superhuman badass, two hours of stomping on vermin should have been nothing. It was like there was this phantom weight on her shoulders, like every single instance of herself had to do everything while carrying a ten-ton wrecking ball.

She found some boulders to lay on next to her sleeping selves and dismissed the instances that felt the most exhausted. Something was wrong here. Even as she lay there she was beginning to feel cold, drained as if mildly sick. Bullshit. Supers did not get sick. All studies and her personal experience both indicated that they physically couldn't. And yet, here they were. Her thoughts felt sluggish, molasses oozing through a straw, and her head was growing a serious migraine.

She was still coming to grips with how shitty everything felt when arms came out of the ground and clawed at several of her sleeping selves...