Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

"Again with the impersonation, Mads?" I asked my best friend then rolled my eyes. "Haven't we been through this before? As if anyone else could be as perfect - and blonde." I scoffed and crossed my arms exactly as she'd seen me do countless times during our high school years, only moderately impeded by the band of crimson magic trying to immobilize me. "It was me in those underground passages during the invasion, it is me again today." Mentioning the last time Amanda had been her usual paranoid self wouldn't hurt my credentials, either.

"Yes, because knowing some past events can somehow explain your turning up after so long, never mind all the other discrepancies," she fumed. As in, fumes literally wafted off her eyes as they glowed a darker red and the temperature of most things nearby suddenly rose by half a dozen degrees. "You'll have to do better than that, impostor!" I'd make the usual jokes - Amanda had always filled more than her share of stereotypes - but Jerry would probably be cross with us if we blew up his spaceship.

"OK, let's talk discrepancies." With a flicker that had all the younger kids jump back and several of them almost blasting me, my white, low-necked, tube-top costume and its blue cape shifted into a more conservative full-body suit of red and blue with a silver bodice. "I am a blonde flyer with enough super-strength and durability your security tentacle can't fully hold me and I also have the power to generate my own costume." I made my eyes glow for emphasis and because it was cool, before a force-field bubble as strong as I was strained against the magical band and slowly forced it open. "There's also the close-range force manipulation and the super-senses. Does that remind you of anyone?"

"How do we know you have super-senses?" a green-costumed kid blurted, momentarily mortified at the attention that gave him before doubling down and aiming an improbably large, ominously humming gun at me. "How do we know you're not just saying it, huh?"

"I dunno, maybe it is because you're wearing dental braces?" I smiled. "Which are entirely useless to supers by the way. Our powers tend to push us towards idealized looks." It really was the most common superpower; the kid only needed a bit more confidence to get it to work for him... though his frog-themed full helmet really did not help.

"Leave Cody alone!" one of the kid's friends shouted back and suddenly there was some middle school drama all over our high school reunion as more than half the young supers in the chamber started shouting and hurling expletives. In the interest of diplomacy, I refrained from laying down a silencing field though nothing could stop the sigh and the facepalm.

"ENOUGH!" a voice like a roaring furnace cut through the noise like a knife. "This is a space station, not a school yard! Return to your rooms immediately; you're obviously not ready for any hostile encounter," Amanda disciplined her... students? Sidekicks? Underlings? They listened to her too, which made me instantly jealous. Just three kids and my team was a disaster at the best of times and here she was riding herd on dozens. How did she do it?

"And you!" Oh, she was shouting at me again. "I don't know what twisted powers let you mimic Maya like that but if you think we'll fall for such a sloppy act you're sorely deluded!" The temperature spiked again and a red halo formed around the very stubborn redhead even as she... grew? Yes, she was definitely growing, an inch every couple of seconds even as the lights around us flickered and died and her no longer dainty hands now held a sword of crimson flames.

"Amanda, please!" Jerry intervened, putting a power-armored hand around her arm. The plating of his power armor hissed at the contact and almost instantly became red-hot.

"What!" Mandy spat, but her growth stopped.

"Maybe before we knock the station out of orbit in a possibly needless fight, we should actually explain?" Logic in a superhero meeting? What was this heresy?

Joking aside, I had been worried about a brawl the moment the impostor card was played. In the comics superheroes fought because conflict sells but for almost everyone with powers after the invasion violence was not merely habitual; it was both the source of our powers and selection bias because most non-violent powered people had either remained weak or died to the monsters. For all her temper, Mandy had once been the least aggressive member of our little group. Seeing the changes in her... it made me feel a bit sad. We had all survived, but not in our entirety.

"Fine!" she finally growled after a minute or two of whispered conversation I intentionally refrained from listening to. "Let's tell the spy how to come up with better excuses." She was still angry but after Jerry had talked to her there was no aggression. I was suddenly reminded that the brunet boy had been the first among us to reject the invaders' use of violence as a power source - and not just among our group of three.

"Thanks, love," he whispered back then turned to me. "OK, here's the deal. While everything you just did and said would be normally convincing, there's a few serious issues with you being Maya Wennefer."

"Like what?"

"Well, you don't look like her in one major way." He opened his mouth to say more, closed it, then gave me a neutral look. He wasn't willing to share specific details a stranger might not know but the real Maya would. Then again, he didn't have to.

"Several major battles and subsequent power boosts. I am Maya, visuals included. I'm just more than I used to be." That bit he had to know was coming; he and Amanda were more obviously superhuman too, but still recognizably themselves. So why didn't he look... ah. "Plus you do remember I have a superspeed power, right? Turns out using it all the time means you age faster."

"How long?" Jerry asked, and Mandy looked curious too - but still too suspicious as well.

"It hit a factor of twenty after the nukes so my body became biologically twenty-five months ago." Both of them winced and I could relate. The battle that had ended the invasion had been a Charlie Foxtrot of epic proportions for everyone involved. "Then I stopped ageing altogether. Didn't feel like becoming an old hag, you know?"

"I've stopped too," Jerry admitted which was... odd? He was only eighteen, biologically. "Mads hasn't but that's fine. I like older-" He was interrupted by a vicious elbow that actually dented his suit, followed by the redhead's patented killer glare that promised even more punishment later. He just smiled back fondly. "Anyway, there's also the matter of how you got here. Maya was many things; immovable, unstoppable, stubborn... explosively destructive. The one thing all those traits aren't is subtle."

"You get hounded by reporters and government spooks for months and you'd get subtle real quick, too," I growled, because that whole debacle was still in the air. Recovering the memory of my friends had just pushed it down a bit in priority. "And what do you mean I wasn't subtle? I can do invisible, mostly undetectable forcefields so I'm plenty subtle! Going intangible is just another application of force manipulation; all I needed to do was negate any force-based interactions."

"...how did you not explode?!" Jerry yelled, alarmed. "Or turn to dust? Or just vanish from the physical universe entirely?"

"Because I'm awesome?" Also, I could make myself immune to accidents while experimenting. "That's more proof I'm myself, by the way."

"Along with your lack of humor," he deadpanned. What did the nerd know? I was hilarious. "Why didn't you turn up earlier?"

"Why didn't YOU? No, you thought I was an impostor," I mused before he could reply. "Well, Jerry, for some peculiar reason nobody notices this ginormous space station you all live in despite it being large enough to see with the naked eye. There's no news of you either." And I'd checked. "Doubt you get any visitors at all, what with everything about you being magically concealed."

"Liar!" Mandy triumphantly interjected. "The sanctuary doesn't hide us from anyone who knew us personally before the invasion and has no hostile intent!" She pointed an accusing finger at my face with a blazing violet spark at the tip with a temperature hotter than the Sun's core. "You had to breach it to get here and that makes you our enemy!"

"You mean my sister's power? The power that hid us from even the invaders just before the big battle?" Anne had always been an overachiever. She was also twelve, and I'd had to rescue her from the invaders' stronghold. Even recalling those events made me want to punch something... or someone. Knowing that her very existence had been erased from from my mind for months... something creaked and when I looked down I found my fists had squeezed halfway though that red security spell. "One won't try to break what they don't know is there, but that's not what kept me away. Anne's power did not make me forget any of you back then, merely unable to notice you."

"What do you mean, forget?" For the first time, Jerry did not sound like he was suspicious of me, just confused. Well, I was more than happy to explain.

"I mean I did not remember any of you even existed till a few hours before. Anne's power is a perception filter though, not a memory filter."

"That... would explain quite a few things, actually." He closed his eyes and bit his tongue in the way he usually did back when we had a difficult test in school. It was Mandy's time to look on with fondness and even I could admit it was a bit cute. But we had way bigger fish to fry. "Tell me Maya, does remembering us now coincide with any major events? Something that troubles you, that you might need help with?"

"Trouble?" I snorted. "You want the list alphabetically or chronologically?" Then what he'd actually said registered. "Wait, you believe me?"

"Come on, Jer, nothing she's said explained the biggest discrepancy," Amanda said unhappily. There was no longer any anger or triumph in her tone, just exhaustion that the talks weren't over.

"Didn't it?" the ex-nerd and current greatest magical engineer in the world wondered. "If you exclude that one detail everything else fits perfectly."

"Yes, but it's a pretty big detail," Mandy countered. "We both saw-"

"But is seeing believing? Are eyes often not deceiving?" His powers crackled like lightning and a tiny piece of his armor formed into a small screen... a screen that seemed black and empty to me but apparently showed quite a bit to him from the way his eyes kept flickering across it. "I, for one, am beginning to have serious doubts about a single drone photo and an unreliable scrying spell given the parties involved."

"OK, that's enough beating around the bush," I told them. "Explain that last discrepancy that for some reason holds more weight than all the other evidence put together. What could it possibly be that you find it so hard to believe me?"

"We saw y... Maya's body, you ass!" my best friend cried. "Just before the last round of nukes that fried the big bastard, my scrying got through and Jerry got a drone close enough. We... we'd been trying... for a rescue."

My mind ground to a halt. Of course. Of course they had seen me die. Nothing else would ensure they'd take all my appearances since as the work of an impostor. Given the existence of shapeshifting and similarly tricky powers, a look at the body followed by my months-long absence and my never trying to contact them even after my apparent return would make all signs of my continued existence seem like either a copycat or an actual trap. The world being as shitty as it had been the last few months, even several other details had aligned just right to give the wrong impression, a wrong impression they could not afford to expose themselves to confirm. And it had all started by my waking up far from Earth and given time to 'recuperate'.

"Oh that conniving, underhanded bitch..."