Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

When someone wants to use you as a distraction from even bigger problems and a convenient target for both their allies and the easily duped masses to unify against, the best way to respond is to disappear. Not just because being under surveillance was annoying but disappearing from it was the best initial way to disrupt many of the plans set in motion. Not that staying low would do anything to change the politics involved but because the politics themselves were set in motion by people who were used to being in control and were used to make convenient targets out of enemies that had to be seen in order to act in any meaningful way.

After weeks in the modern world with my new senses it was impossible to miss how much information on pretty much everyone was gathered, analyzed and recorded. We lived in the era of cell phone cameras, of digital government, of data mining and advertisements everywhere; all important and/or self-important people relied on tracking and knowing things. The recent heavy surveillance on me and other supers was a knee-jerk reaction to some authorities' lack of control more than anything else.

In how the political game was usually played, disappearing - if it could even be accomplished given the nature of the Information Age - meant ceding initiative to the other side, losing popularity due to the extremely short-term memory of the masses, being away from contacts and allies, and letting your economic power base erode from lack of direction. It also meant effectively confirming any spurious accusations the other side could make because if you were blameless why were you running?

Except none of that applied to supers in general or me in particular. Our power did not depend on popularity, or economics, or political alliances; in fact, preparing away from prying eyes was why secret lairs and secret identities existed in the first place, both in reality and in the majority of comic books. Simply put, when all power was personal and direct, doing things in secret was both possible and more effective... thus everyone playing games while the world teetered on the edge of a knife was about to be disappointed...

xxxx

The world came to a stop. The helicopters following me froze like insects caught in amber. The people and vehicles below, like so many ants around a kicked hive, paused mid-step even as the over ten million people in various buildings within the range of my senses stood as still as the appliances and decorations around them. Instant Action still was as awesome as the first time I'd ever used it half a year before, though back then I'd lacked the perspective to enjoy the view or grasp the full ramifications.

When my nosy escorts started moving again, I was already gone or so they thought. Being far from my first disappearance, they were certainly annoyed but not exactly worried. Soon, I would be seen in some shop across the country, or eating food in some restaurant, or engaging in battle with some monster before coming back to resume showing the flag like I always had. By the time they realized I was nowhere to be found hours would have passed and the first phase of my plan would already be in motion.

For now, I just flew out of the city. Being able to tell exactly where all the people and cameras were and what they were looking at paired with very quick, silent, three-dimensional movement made it absurdly easy until the next spy satellite came up. Avoiding that would have been easier underground and a non-issue via Instant Action, but I wanted to try something new and awesome. What was the point of superpowers if you didn't have fun doing awesome things?

Up until now I'd used the "Word of Force", my overall ability to manipulate physical forces, mostly for simple and crude mechanical effects; going faster, punching harder, tanking blows, or sensing existing forces. Creating barriers of force had been more flexible but not really complex; causing or stopping fire and sounds were the most complex things I did. None of those applications were remotely stealthy but from a Physics point of view, stealth was not about being sneaky. It was about not being interacted with.

Slowly, almost tentatively, I used Force Adjustment on myself to make any forces between me and anything that was not me less and less until they were effectively nullified. Daylight seemed to dim even as colors distorted, the Earth's pull became lighter, the roar of wind in my ears and the sounds of the city faded away until the world became like the depths of space in its emptiness. Except I could still see... or rather, I could still observe everything through Force Awareness. With it, I saw how the air, dust motes, lights and sounds were now passing through me as if I weren't there... because what did being there mean if I did not interact?

New skill discovered: Forced Intangibility

Now that... that had potential.

xxxx

The first test for the new ability was to apply it to things that were not me, and thus leaves, beer cans, sticks, pebbles, blades of grass and a particularly fat rat were sacrificed in the altar of Science!!! That was more immediate in the case of the rat as the moment it was made intangible it suffered explosive decompression because for it nothing else physically existed, certainly not the air pressure keeping its guts on the inside. That saved it from the even more explosive return to reality suffered by everything else as they suddenly rematerialized... in the same space occupied by air molecules and other impediments. To prevent this hilariously thorough disassembly, I either had to apply a separate force effect to push away other matter as the intangible objects reappeared, or to slow the reappearance enough for the impediments to be pushed out of the way.

The test also thoroughly explored how my powers could still interact with the world just fine even when my own body could not. This had already been quite obvious from my Force Awareness alone, but the ability to poke things with Proximakinesis and various forcefields without making myself tangible or even perceptible was even more fun, because who had never wanted to be a ghost as a little kid? It was also a diametrically different approach to my usual methods, which made sense in retrospect. If a fire mage could make themselves immune to fire, why couldn't a force manipulator make themselves immune to force? It had just needed a different perspective.

The second test for my new ability was to apply it to my home and everything within, layering triggered effects carefully until all of them could be applied at once. It took two hours and my multitude of stalkers had yet to take my disappearance seriously... but things were about to change. One moment, the ring of reporters, news vans, protesters, anti-protesters, police, covert operatives and plain gawkers around my home's bubble shield were pointing countless cameras at a manor house half-hidden behind several trees, the next they were looking at a crater. A near-perfectly symmetrical depression where a whole manor house and its foundations used to be.

Of course, everything was still there but no method of surveillance or interaction based on physical force would be able to tell. To all observers my home had instantly and thoroughly disappeared... exactly as if it had been air-lifted away too quickly for them to notice. Even if they could get through the original forcefield defenses, they could walk through the whole building and neither see or touch anything.

As hundreds of very confused people started arguing outside, I lay down on the bed and relaxed. I was half-tempted to go on vacation, just spend an entire month AWOL sitting at home and doing nothing while everyone else wasted time and resources trying to find me or adjusted their plans due to my apparent absence. Unfortunately, this whole "slayer of monsters, defender of the world" gig was something I needed to take seriously. Not because someone else wanted me to, not because of duty, but because I'd chosen to and because giving up on the first major difficulty was pathetic.

Now if I was to seemingly disappear for a time, but actually stick around invisibly and mess with everyone's plans, what was the one thing I needed the most?

xxxx

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y11m29d

Known skills: Points: 12/230

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

Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 24, Ego 25, Luck 7

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

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

It had been some time since the last time I'd checked my progress in my mental character sheet. Part of it was that I'd never really liked this aspect of my powers. Yes, having a numerical representation of what you could do and how you progressed was supremely convenient, but the fact that you could change yourself through anything as abstract as numbers had always felt a little disturbing. It wasn't something I... would have considered... Its disappearance after the Invasion's final battle and its return only through a magical ring that helped quantify and numerically display my abilities made it feel even more intrusive.

One of these days I needed to have a meeting with Liz, the totally-not-ominously-named Warden, to clarify exactly how the tiny bit of jewelry worked and what else it could do; it really had skipped my mind with all the emergencies coming up one after another. Yet as I sat invisible and intangible on my equally ghost-like sofa I... felt that once again other things took precedence. Much like Liz's ring gave this very helpful mental representation of my powers, the one thing that would help the most against enemy plans and plots would be more information. Power I had aplenty - more than enough to deal with any threats that have come up so far with a single exception. It was knowing how to best apply it that would make a difference and I already had the tools for acquiring more information.

In theory my Force Awareness had enough range and precision to finely observe people from dozens of miles away; in practice, even with super-speed there were only so many things I could pay attention to simultaneously. That limit might be hundreds, even thousands of times greater than a normal person's but even in the countryside there usually were at least a million people in range of my senses, let alone in any large metropolitan area. General trends or important events stood out but if I wanted to spy on an unknown number of political opponents I would need more than that.

With a firm decision and a bit of mental effort, I used one of my accumulated "points", my interface's way of abstracting accumulated magical power, and increased Vigilance, the attribute that represented my ability to pay attention to my senses and handle a larger intake of information, among other things. I braced for the usual changes; every time my innate capabilities got boosted they always came with some sort of physical or mental adjustment that always felt odd and took some time to get used to. Except... this time nothing happened. No altered perception, no sharper detail in everything I saw, heard and felt, not even a hint of the dissonance or mild synesthesia that came with changes to this particular attribute. For a moment I thought that being outside of the normal world must have caused it, except I still had Force Awareness very much active. Besides, there were multiple senses about our own bodies that should have been affected. Did the attribute increase fail somehow?

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y11m29d

Known skills:

Points: 11/230

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

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

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

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

No, it didn't. Not according to the ring's interface at least but why would the magical artifact stop working now? Something was off here and determined to find out what, I increased Vigilance once more. This time something did happen, though not nearly what it was supposed to have.

Ever gone up a staircase in the dark or blindfolded? One you're familiar enough with to not miss a step and take a nasty tumble, but not so used to you can navigate perfectly without seeing? You can't be entirely sure where you'll get to the end so when you do you expect another step up instead of level ground it leaves you unbalanced. For a split second it feels like the ground disappearing under your feet, because your mind expected another step up, adjusted for it but it did not come. Adding another point to Vigilance felt like that... except in reverse. Like something was really there for a split second and then disappeared. Things do not disappear for no reason and since I'd been expecting something to happen I'd been focused enough to be sure this had not been a trick of my senses. At least not a trick coming from me.

My whole body tensing in the void overlapping but not interacting with the physical world, I added another point to Vigilance... and found myself on my hands and knees trying to puke my guts on the invisible, intangible floor. It was no sudden dizziness, no loss of balance, my mind had actually skipped at least a couple of seconds while my body ran on autopilot. Worse, there was an almost imperceptible flicker to my senses, like a badly edited movie skipping between scenes. When I tried to focus through the sudden vertigo, some things in my Force Awareness looked like an old 90s cartoon, back when everything had been hand-drawn and blocky computer graphics hadn't been a thing yet. In those cartoons you could almost always tell which parts of the image on the screen were about to move because they were painted ever so slightly differently. The same thing showed up on my Force Awareness now, subtle edits, things that did not quite fit. Or maybe... maybe they always had been there and only now could I actually perceive them. Getting angrier by the moment, I put two more points into Vigilance at once.

The difference felt like taking a club to the head before gaining powers and yes I'd unfortunately experienced exactly that more than once when I was young. Just like back then, the blow seemed to rattle my brain and almost cause me to black out for a moment. Then the pain exploded in magnitude, feeling like my skull had actually shattered. I screamed and it was a good thing I was intangible otherwise the shockwave would have killed unprotected people within several city blocks. When I could think clearly enough to stop reflexively amplifying my own attempts at screaming, when my senses stopped being a jumbled mess and my hands stopped idly shredding the house's floor, I could finally see what I had been missing.

Just about everything in my awareness was ever so slightly tidally stressed. For normal people it would be imperceptible; for a science lab it would take specialized gear to even notice. For me, it was as obvious as a giant glowing sign in the night sky. Because for someone that could literally see gravity, that had good enough telescopic vision to see the radiation-bleached American flag on the Moon, missing a new million-ton satellite orbiting the planet should have been impossible... and yet it had happened. It had also come with a vast, friends-and-family-shaped hole in my memories, friends and family I had not even noticed I'd been missing. No, there had been instances I'd subconsciously noticed, that my train of thought led there from as recently as a few minutes earlier up to all the way back to my arrival on Earth... only to be subtly diverted by whatever power had been messing with my head.

Screw politics. I had people to see and briefly talk to about invading the minds of others.