Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

The moment we got back in US airspace and the reporters were relatively safe, I dropped the kids back at the base then flew off before anyone could accost me. They could handle writing the after-action reports; after the clusterfuck of epic proportions we'd had to deal with because some people had decided to meddle with forces man was not meant to wield, I needed a break from dealing with fools. Besides, reminding certain people of the not so binding nature of our relationship was a good idea.

For about twenty seconds the world stopped as I stepped outside of time. There would be no sonic boom, no lightning-like streak in the sky for anyone to see as I exited the atmosphere. By the time everything started moving again I was in space and no satellite ever built would pick a human-sized target moving faster than a falling star over a thousand miles away. I settled into the superpowered equivalent of a steady jog, the diamond clarity and absolute silence of space quite welcoming after the cacophony and frantic decision-making of combat. It was a good way to clear one's head and the awesomeness of space travel never got old, not even after six months in the void, six months that had subjectively been several years.

My powers pulled me into higher and higher speeds with very little to show for it, until I could have crossed a whole state in a second back on Earth and the Moon had grown from a thumb-sized disc to a massive vista taking up most of my field of view. Then I was there, slamming into one specific small crater at speeds so great the impact should have shattered mountains yet instead brought me to a complete stop without even disturbing the moon dust beneath my feet. A simple forcefield rising an inch from my skin and infused with Focused Invulnerability had made both me and what I touched immune to the collision, obviating the need to brake and reducing the whole trip to a mere six minutes.

I got to digging, revealing a massive, crudely-made trunk of solid black iron that had been buried under the moon rocks. It had the same layered forcefields as my home, with further instances of invulnerability against being pushed, pulled, lifted, punched, kicked, elbowed, kneed, rammed, drilled through, every type of projectile or melee weapon and tool I could think of, blast waves, fireballs and radiation from both conventional explosives and nukes. It still was far from truly invulnerable as a mere application of proximakinesis opened the lid just fine when no hand could have regardless of conventional strength. That was the flaw of that form of invulnerability; each field would protect from a single specific thing at a time and at nearly half an hour each to make permanent on an object it would never cover even a fraction of potential attacks. But as a preventative and delaying measure if people did reach the Moon, did find this particular random crater, did dig up the trunk and tried to steal it? It should suffice.

Yeah, OK, it had been a vanity project plus powers training during my vacation when I'd had months with nothing to do. Now? It served a rather critical role befitting such an artifact. With the lid carefully opened via powers alone - it wouldn't even budge if I pushed it by hand - I took out a thick stack of hundreds, careful not to break the far weaker protective field around them. After withdrawing and double-checking twenty grand or so, I closed the trunk and buried it once more. Six minutes later I was back on Earth.

Faster, safer and way more private than any bank on the planet, whether you walked there or used electronic means!

xxxx

A brief venture to Portland, Oregon got me to Powell's City of Books, one of the largest physical bookstores in the world. Parking myself ten miles above the city-block-sized store, I used my super-senses and super-speed to browse through their four million, two hundred and eighty-one thousand, five hundred and seventy-four books, both new and used. The rare tomes, author-signed copies and special editions I largely ignored. The same for everything non-fiction; having read through the entirety of Wikipedia at super-speed, I felt content with my level of general knowledge. No, it was time for some light reading so I focused on the fantasy section, with quality writing, decent action, and length of the series being my primary criteria.

Some half an hour later I saw one of the registers was free, so I stopped time. Then I sped through the frozen store, picking up titles and wrapping them up in a forcefield until I had a decent-sized stash. When the pile of books became larger than the average washing machine, I walked up to the free register, put it down and let time resume.

The girl manning the register jumped in surprise since, from her point of view, both the pile of books and I had seemingly appeared out of thin air. When she actually took in my appearance her eyes widened to the size of saucers and her chin threatened to fall off her head. Sure, I'd shifted my usual costume into a loose sky-blue blouse, dark grey jeans and a simple pair of boots, but I was still a seven-foot-tall blonde that would give Greek statues of both athletes and goddesses inadequacy issues.

"Ring these up," I told her to break the poor girl out of her stupor, pushing the half-ton pile of literature forth.

"...err," she stared at the books, then at me, then at the wad of hundreds at my hand. "...I'll have to talk to the manager..."

"No problem," I said cheerfully then gave her a heads-up. "Just try to hurry; it won't be long before the press swarms the store." Already every customer nearby was staring and several were taking out their phones. I reached out invisibly with tiny fields of Force Adjustment, rendering thin discs of air over the phones' cameras far less transparent than usual. Anything they tried to record in line of sight of me for the next hour would just be a blurry mess. That would delay the issue without harming the phones but the newsies would still come eventually.

Fortunately, the store manager was quick on the uptake. He pushed through my small mountain of purchases quickly, finishing just in time for the first news van to arrive. As its crew hurried into the store, I paid him a full eighteen thousand dollars - which came with a two hundred dollar tip, winked, and disappeared a split-second after the first newsies saw me. That ought to give the store some publicity.

xxxx

I got back home to the unpleasant discovery of a perimeter of new vans, fans, placards, and small groups of protesters that had formed around the house's outer defenses. Several people were even trying their luck against the invisible dome of telekinetic force either by pushing against it or throwing everything from eggs and rocks to tomatoes. The latter would have been especially dangerous against normal people since there were still in their cans, but the few police officers present - a mere two patrol cars - did not seem interested in breaking up the crowds.

I saw the whole mess well before they saw me, even with the telephoto lenses some of the newsies had, and came to a stop several miles out. When did the press learn where I lived? Hell, when did the public? It was probably an intentional leak by the government because I'd asked for the house to specifically not be in my name, or the paperwork to be associated with me. For all anyone doing a background check on me should have known, my only known address should have been a blown-up trailer in a monster-infested trailer park in Florida.

Frowning at the implications, I stepped outside of time and got in along with my new purchases without anyone noticing. For now, the crowds could sit out there and do whatever they wanted; the defenses should prevent entry of both people and the sound of their protests. As soon as I was inside, I removed and disintegrated every trace of dirt, grime, sweat and other foulness, shifted my costume to a nightgown and leaped on my very comfy king-size bed, made all the comfier by fine applications of Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment until the mattress felt softer than physically possible without bending so much under my weight it seemed to swallow me. On my left side was two hundred pounds of pizzas kept both warm and fresh via adjusted heat transference and a form of force-based stasis, while on my right were the twenty books of an urban fantasy novel series that had looked promising. Banishing every thought about villains, monsters and politics, I turned off my superspeed and immersed myself in the world of a wizard detective and his chronic inability to stop getting into trouble.

It would be four days and eleven books later that General Rinaker would finally contact me.

xxxx

I glided through the air at a leisury seven hundred miles an hour, the concrete jungle of New York sprawled below me as far as a normal human eye could see. Several specks followed my route at less than half that speed, easily two dozen helicopters of all kinds. Since what many international news stations had dubbed 'the Scouring of Kaiju Island' their numbers had been steadily increasing. This was facilitated by General Rinaker's instruction to both me and the kids to 'show the flag' by carrying out what looked suspiciously like patrols... but weren't.

In many superhero stories, the powered defenders of Justice would spend most of the time in the streets. Whether jumping from building to building, running around faster than speeding bullets, driving a car-shaped, animal-themed tank or simply flying, patrols would make up much of their active hours. They would inevitably stumble into criminal activity, stop it, then keep going until they stumbled into a major villainous plot requiring their full attention. This, as the kids had quickly found in the days after our destruction of Kaiju Island, did not work nearly as well outside the pages of a comic book.

Patrols are for military and security forces and their primary goal is deterrence; except in wars or general civil unrest, criminals and hostiles avoid the authorities because they simply lack the level of force to engage with them. Any sign of patrolling authorities suppress criminals and hostiles due to that disparity of force and thus ultimately no force actually needs to be used in ninety nine percent of situations.

But you could not deter a monster or a villain. The former lacked the sapience and self-preservation for such tactics to work while the latter would gleefully engage in violence anyway because violence only fed their superpowers. Also, because anyone that would deliberately go for violence and murder fueled superpowers in the middle of a city is crazy. Patrols, assuming you even found superpowered enemies in the first place, would only provoke such enemies into an all-out fight in the middle of the area you wanted to protect. Considering the scope of powers available to both sides, that would not be good for the civilian population; one only had to look at what remained of Florida to remember the consequences. Thus patrols were counter-productive.

The proper way to engage superpowered threats was to find them before they got inside cities or, if they were already inside, remove them in the most expedient way possible. That we had been put into mostly fake patrols could only mean two things; either something big was already going down and we were deliberately made into bait, or our presence was indeed used as a deterrent... but not against monsters or supervillains. Either way the whole situation stank of politics, and Rinaker had been keeping things close to the chest for once.

Having completed another full run of my assigned course and reaching the city limits, I turned around. Almost immediately, the helicopters shadowing me adjusted course to keep up as best they could. So did twice as many surveillance drones in a loose ring nearly ten miles higher than my flight level and twenty miles away. I might not be the military buff at least one of my students was but I was pretty sure several of the drone models were not from the US. Not just politics then; the international mess that passed for such since the advent of powers.

It was the exact thing I didn't want to deal with, one of the main reasons I'd signed up with Rinaker's little gathering of American supers. From the average person's point of view it was even understandable. Powers were scary; monsters were even scarier. For the first time since the middle ages there existed events and phenomena with greater impact on the world than human governments. Far too many interests saw their importance dwindle, and that was on top of almost all supers being amazingly photogenic by choice.

The problem was that being a celebrity was the full-time job of pandering to public opinion, and public opinion was objectively unqualified. It was impossible to properly do any specialist job while being a celebrity, especially jobs with moral ramifications - which was the main issue with modern politics. And if doing politics as a celebrity caused problems, those problems paled in comparison with trying to do the same as a superhero. Thinking about public opinion when deciding whether to blow up an island to stop the monsters had a high chance of said monsters eating the public in the end, opinions and all.

Unfortunately, there had never been a question that this whole situation would come to a head eventually; it was just happening earlier than I'd expected due to some idiots playing with giant monsters. Constant surveillance had already started; soon would come the official invitations to defamation campaigns disguised as public debate, then would come registration and legal separation from normal humans followed by the governments' attempt to continue their monopoly of force. It was like watching a train speeding towards a cliff, and I did mean seeing it happen; super-senses meant I was literally picking up the gears of bureaucracy working on it.

The question was how to derail that line of thinking before the country imploded...