Back inside for a moment

Just as the door closed and locked itself behind her, Brittany checked her step and turned back around, chuckling ruefully to herself. She'd almost forgotten something very important--though she had a tendency to forget it.

Her socks.

When she'd gotten her first magical shoes, plain sneakers that let her fly, they had come with a pair of ankle socks. She wasn't sure what all those socks did, but she'd discovered two very useful abilities they imbued her with.

For one, they made her completely invulnerable to harm. Considering how dangerous certain activities her shoes enabled could be, such as flight, being impervious to harm was certainly helpful. She'd more than once slammed into the side of a building while out for a gravity-free jaunt.

But the second ability was by far more important, and that was that it gave her an aura of, for lack of a better term, "normalcy". She wasn't able to just do anything she wanted while she wore the socks--if she tried to steal someone's handbag with her telekinesis, for instance, she would probably still find herself running from someone screaming "STOP, THIEF!" But nobody would think it strange that she'd used magic to do it. She'd tested it with many of her shoes, and nobody had batted an eye as she did things like create pens out of thin air, or make her groceries follow her in an orderly procession, or anything like that. Whenever she forgot her socks at home, she had to be very careful with how she used her powers; when she remembered them, she could use them with near-impunity. They even made sure that nobody would question why she wanted to take a moment to change her shoes in case she wanted to switch to a different power.

Unfortunately, most of her shoes were so comfortable on her bare feet that she forgot her socks more often than not.

A pair of her socks was already waiting and ready, hovering just inside the door, and they wriggled inside her slip-ons, around her toes, and up her feet. Immediately Brittany felt the familiar feeling of "protection" envelop her, and she stepped back outside, now not caring who saw her as her car door unlocked itself and the wheel and pedals moved themselves while she relaxed and let her powers drive her to work.

Opening the gym for the day, she frowned at the mess, but a simple thought was enough to send the equipment moving about, cleaning itself up while she readied her desk for the day. Midway through the process, her first client showed up, but she didn't even bat an eye at all the weights and towels flying every which way, simply going to Brittany at the reception desk and signing in before proceeding to the changing room, coming out a little later to start her stretches just as the cleanup finished.

Brittany didn't change out her shoes the whole day--she found that telekinesis was generally the most useful power for things like spotting, and she'd long since created weights far in excess of anything most of her clients could lift--and in the downtime between her booked hours she sat at the reception desk, browsing the web on her phone.

Specifically, she was looking for stories and videos of people using superpowers.

What she'd discovered shortly after her first few pairs of shoes had appeared was that whenever she consumed any media involving supernatural abilities, with a few exceptions, a pair of shoes appeared in her closet that would give her the same ability. It didn't work with some things that would make her exceptionally powerful--no matter how many stories she read about omnipotent beings, she'd yet to find any shoes that would make her all-powerful, for instance--and sometimes, as with her current pair, it took a while until the shoes finally appeared to give her the power in question, so she reread and rewatched a lot of stuff, but generally she returned every day to find a new pair of shoes.

To her annoyance, however, some of those shoes were pretty uncomfortable.

That thought brought a grimace to her face. For instance, she had a pair of shoes that allowed her complete control over time. While she wore them, she could freeze time, rewind it, speed it up, slow it down, either all across the universe or only in certain spots; she could alter people's aging, or "time-lock" them so that they'd always revert to a certain state... but the shoes themselves were a pair of extremely high heels that made her ankles hurt terribly just to have on, even if she were lying down with no weight on her feet. So even though she knew exactly what she could do with them, all she'd ever used them for was to freeze her own aging and make her body revert to its current state regularly, except for her brain and related parts, so that she could still form memories. (The thought that she'd almost turned herself into an amnesiac also sent a small shudder through her.)

She'd tried using her shapeshifting shoes, a much lower pair of heels, to change her feet to make the time-control shoes more comfortable, but that just made it hurt to do anything else, so she'd abandoned that idea, and the heels sat in the back of her closet. Brittany had resigned herself to their being effectively unusable.

Even more annoyingly, once she had a pair of shoes for some power, it didn't matter how much she read or watched involving them, she'd yet to get a second pair.

Once she was done for the day, she left the gym for the nighttime staff, and drove back home, wondering what new shoes might have appeared. She wasn't expecting anything, but there were still plenty of powers she knew about that she'd yet to get shoes for.