Hoot Girl

"You've got to be kidding me." You spread your arms, raise your hands, and look down with your body with indignation.

"Is there a problem?" The administrative clerk replies with some confusion, as if she can't see any issue at all. And why would she, you ponder, considering her own attire: a navy blue office skirt so short that you're surprised you can't already see her panties, and a white blouse so thin and tight that she might as well not be wearing one at all - you can easily make out the shape and dark colour of her nipples through the light fabric which is so flimsy that it makes her 'Hello My Name is Dorothy' paper name badge seem rigid in comparison. If she thinks this is an acceptable way to dress herself, then no wonder she doesn't consider the appearances of the people around her to be particularly controversial either.

"Oh no, no problem at all." Your voice is laced thick with sarcasm as you respond while giving your body another disdainful visual assessment. A brown leather top adorns your chest, with full sleeves down to your wrists but no more coverage for your upper body than a skimpy bikini top would provide. It ties at the front over your sizable bosom with a single lace, exposing significant underboob, and looking like it might come loose and burst open at any moment. Makeshift owl feathers are dangled all the way along the undersides of your sleeves, but it's missing a professional's touch, and ends up giving off the impression of an amateur's attempt at cosplay.

Your torso is completely bare - in fact your outfit barely even covers your mons pubis! Indeed it feels like the uppermost part of your labia are only just covered by your tiny pair of matching brown leather microshorts. If you didn't keep yourself shaved down there, some of your pubic hair would definitely be on show! Seriously these shorts are so thin they should really be called a belt. The vast majority of your hips and much too much of your butt cheeks remain exposed to the warm air.

Connected to your microshorts by unremovable straps of fabric are a pair of matching thigh-high stockings. If your microshorts didn't feel like a belt before, the fact that they are styled like and act like a pair of suspenders merely exacerbates this image. The additional weight of the stockings pulling down on your shorts makes it look and feel like they might ride down too low if you're not careful, exposing your delicate privates to the world.

Ballet heels and a basic domino mask complete the look of a woman who wants to dress up as a superheroine but doesn't really know what she's doing.  All in all, this outfit does an incredible job of concealing the parts you don't care about being seen, such as your calves and arms, and keeps substantial amounts of the smooth brown skin of your thighs, loins, belly, breasts and butt all visible. It's unthinkable that you would even go outside like this, never mind try to fight crime. And yet, here you are, in the League of Propriety's HQ, registering as their newest member.

Your usually pronounced abdominal muscles are currently hidden behind a very slightly round tum, the consequence of letting yourself go during your semi-retirement last year. Somehow, despite everything else, that's the part of you that you feel the most embarrassed about being on display.

Click here for art of what you look like, commissioned by Aika (me) and drawn by GunShad.

"Come on! Does this outfit really scream 'Wise Owl' to you? It's more like 'Amateur Porn Parody Owl'!" You wave your hands towards your almost-undefended crotch.

"Ah, yes, about that. You've been rebranded." Dorothy flips through some pages on her clipboard. "It turns out that there's already a Wise Owl in the United States - in this very city, in fact, and whilst it wasn't worth her effort pursuing a cease-and-desist order while you were on the other side of the Atlantic, now that you're here... you can surely understand that that won't 'fly'." She smirks at her own pun.

"Oh that's just great! I'm going to have to choose a new name as well?" You whine. You had really wanted to follow in your mother's footsteps, but this bitch must have already stolen her name while you were still a minor. That was totally unfair.

"It would appear that Green Streak took the liberty of handling your rebranding for you. Your superheroine ID has already been printed under the name 'Hoot Girl'."

"...'Hoot Girl'." You repeat, in a deadpan voice. The clerk smiles and nods energetically.

"That's what it says here! Of course in normal circumstances we'd let you change that if you didn't like it, but right now we are much too busy with, well, all of this." The unperturbed clerk waves her hand in the air, gesturing to everything around you. The League of Propriety's headquarters are currently in a state of disrepair and disarray, after the recent villainous attack involving a large number of explosions and an even greater number of spontaneously materialised bunny rabbits.

She's right, of course. This meeting isn't even being conducted in a private room like it would be under normal circumstances, but instead you're just standing and talking to her right in the middle of a large atrium with slightly better structural integrity than most of the other rooms in the tower. The filing cabinets containing the necessary paperwork are still trapped somewhere under the piles of rubble dotted throughout the building. Still, none of this makes any of the news you've just been given any easier to swallow. Who the fuck is this Green Streak guy to think that 'Hoot Girl' is an appropriate name for a superheroine? Several unfortunate puns seem self-evident and Lord knows that villains love a good pun. How is one supposed to maintain their dignity when dressed like this and with such a ridiculous name?!

"Has it really come to this?" You speak out loud, but you're talking to yourself more than to her. "It's outrageous! It's unfair! I should really be storming right out of here without a second thought."

She just shrugs. "Sure. That's your prerogative. But until we get back to full operational capacity and/or find wherever Green Streak has gotten to, I'm afraid that the only other option is becoming 'Hoot Girl'. Are you considering accepting an offer from another organization?"

You groan inwardly, as Dorothy's words you to reflect on your situation, and how you got here...

You are Jennifer Reynolds. You were born and raised in England to a loving white British father, Jack, and black Jamaican mother, Annie. Your mother was a superheroine in Jamaica, but retired and moved to England after meeting and falling in love with your father. 'Wise Owl', they used to call her. You've inherited the exact same powers:

Firstly, the power of flight. Medium speed, and very high manoeuvrability, but with the limitation that you can only fly while you keep your arms stretched wide to the sides, making long distance travel a challenge without using some kind of strap or bar to support your arms.

Secondly, and most impressively, are your telepathic powers. You can detect the presence of all nearby intelligent life, pin-pointing their location and also getting a sense of their current emotions. You can read the surface thoughts of anyone who you touch skin-to-skin. You can telepathically speak to anyone whose presence you're aware of, and also subtly influence their mood over time. Most critically for fighting villains, you can perform a 'brain wail', which is essentially shouting very loudly directly into their minds. It's like setting a flashbang off inside their skulls. All these abilities are unfortunately blocked by metal - the more surface area of someone's brain is blocked by metal, the more weak your powers are on them. Crowns help a bit, hats help a lot, and helmets block you out completely.

Lastly, you're more durable than a normal person. Being riddled with bullets or crashing into a wall at 100 miles per hour is likely to put you out of action, but not cause life-threatening damage to your internal organs. Other than this, apart from usually being in good shape and well-versed in martial arts, you just have normal human level physical ability.

Your history is not unusual for the daughter of a superheroine who has inherited her mother's powers. It was almost inevitable that you tried too hard to be like her. Things started off fine: at 18 you took up your mother's moniker and started patrolling the streets of Clapham, your home area of London, taking down violent thugs and trying to make your parents proud. They disapproved, of course, believing that you were still too young and innocent, and the world too dangerous. But this just made you even more eager to prove them wrong. You took on fiercer and fiercer villains, including a couple with powers, and even earning yourself a nemesis in the form of Mind Meddler, who after his first stint behind bars thanks to yours truly, returned to his life of crime with a new shiny metal helmet.

By 19 years old you made the horrible mistake of falling in love. You met Steve at your sixth form college, not as Wise Owl but as your civilian identity of Jennifer Reynolds. You graduated together and you let him kiss you at the post-graduation party. To this day you have a crystal clear recollection of his surface thoughts that flowed into your head as your lips touched.

"She's so beautiful! She's the most beautiful woman in the world! Holy shit, I'm kissing the most beautiful woman in the world!"

His thoughts were always so pure back then. So full of admiration and awe for you. So different from all the other men who took notice of you, who whenever they emanated the same aroused mood, always ended up having the most disgusting and degrading surface thoughts when they touched your hand or arm and you were able to read them.

You were young and in love. Everyone makes mistakes at that age, right? And you made sure to always use condoms, so that you didn't end up making that kind of mistake. All you did was plan a whole life with a boy you'd only known for a short while, because of your shared love of Star Wars Prequel memes and the fact that whenever you read his thoughts he only had nice things to say. Who can blame you for that? He was the only diamond in a very large amount of rough. And, well, the sex wasn't half bad either. And who is sex for if not two young, attractive people in love?

Steve's parents were both American, but he was born in England. This gave him both American and British citizenship, and made it easy for him to apply to American universities. When he secured a place at Harvard, you both knew there was no way he could turn it down. Your relationship was going to have to become long distance. Unless... unless you went with him. You had no special qualifications with which to secure a work visa, so you would have to... yep. Get hitched. And why not? You were in love, having great sex, and loving life. Plus you could continue to follow in your mother's footsteps by getting married and settling down and eventually starting a family, and also you could continue to stick the middle finger up to her at the same time by ignoring her warnings that this was all bad idea.

It was a bad idea, of course. You should probably have told him about your powers before you got married and moved to America with him. That seems obvious in hindsight.

Married life is tricky for most new couples, never mind couples that are 19 years old and one of whom is a secret telepath. It was inevitable that he would meet other attractive women at university, and that thoughts of them would start to drift into his mind. You thought you could handle that. You've been able to read minds for most of your life, and you've gotten used to the fact that people often can't control their thoughts, and that they can go to some weird and frankly disgusting places. But it just got worse and worse. It started to invade your sex life. It wasn't long before you had to confront him.

What's more ethically dubious? Imagining that your wife is one of your classmates while you're fucking, or hiding the fact that you're a mind reader from your husband? Debatable, but not a debate you ever want to have in public lest you discover that the court of public opinion would rule in Steve's favour. Steve certainly didn't think it was a close call. He said he planned to push for annulment. Not even just divorce! He wanted to legally establish that the foundations of your marriage were built upon lies and deception. Divorce could take a while, but annulment could be fast. It could be only a matter of days or weeks until you no longer had a legal basis to remain in the country. Your world was coming crashing down around you, and the only option you had left was to return home to your parents, disgraced and ashamed, and admit that they were right all along, and that moving across the Atlantic with Steve instead of going to university yourself was an awful idea.

That was, unless you could find qualified work in America. Then you could obtain Leave to Remain, and never have to confront those waiting to tell you "I told you so" back home. But without any qualifications, there was only one way you were going to be able to get a work permit, and that was through your talents as a superheroine.

But it turns out, applying to be a registered superheroine in a foreign country is not easy. The additional paperwork and due diligence required to license a hero who's not a native citizen makes it a rather unappealing for prospect for the local Leagues, especially when there's always a large pool of willing and fully domiciled candidates hoping to make their name known and rise to the top.

The single ray of hope came from the League of Propriety, the largest and most well-established superhero organization in the large city of Acropolis. The city infamous for its liberal attitudes, constant sex scandals, quirky superheroes and even more bizarre villains. You had your hesitations... but when the other option was crawling back to Mama and Papa... did you really have a choice? And who wouldn't get a little excited about one day finding themselves fighting side-by-side with Maiden America herself?

You can do it. You know you can! You can join the League of Propriety, defeat some perverted bad guys, and prove to mum, dad and Steve that they've all been fools to doubt you. You don't need to follow your mother's footsteps and settle down with a man. You can do what she never could, and make it all the way to the top.

Or at least that's what you were telling yourself a few days ago. Now that you're here, you feel somewhat less confident, and more anxious, which is not the best news. When you get anxious, you tend to start failing to take anything seriously enough, and cracking bad jokes using Internet references from the late 2000s. That's probably due to the fact that you were pretty much raised by the Internet. People you talked with online didn't have nasty surface thoughts for you to read, and didn't get aroused whenever they saw your tits. It took a lot less emotional labour to make friends with people over the Internet.

The clerk flips nonchalantly through your file. "Look, your powers are impressive, and as you can see we could use the extra hands on deck right now. That's probably why you ended up getting the green light so quickly in the first place, even considering your lack of citizenship. But nobody has the time, energy or desire to you. You can either join us or accept a different offer. Considering your talents I'm sure you're sitting on a huge pile of them." She says that last line pleasantly enough, but you get the feeling that she probably is fully aware that you won't have received many offers, if any others at all.

"Right. Yes. A huge pile." You lie. "And while I can let the new name slide for a little while, there's got to be something we can do about this costume, right? I'm supposed to be a bird of prey, not a bird-to-lay!" You expected that to sound less corny than it did. Damn, you're too anxious to come up with good puns on the fly. Nevertheless, you continue. "I can't fight crime whilst wearing this! I'll be too distracted wondering if my top has slipped open and my knockers are on show!"

"Well firstly, if you think it'll be distracting for you, imagine how distracting it'll be for the thugs you're taking down! That's a net positive, sunshine!" Barely bothering to look at you, the clerk flips back to the front page on her clipboard. "As I suspected, the tailor has already made the standard three backup copies in addition to the one you're wearing - two waiting for you at home, one more in your locker here, so I'm afraid you'll need to go on a waiting list to get any more outfits made for yourself, plus design changes can only be approved by an A rank." Using your mood sensing powers, you can feel her boredom with this conversation gradually rising.

You rub your forehead with frustration. Am I really considering this? It would appear that you are. Despite your reservations about being seen in public half-naked, you're even more unwilling to face the alternatives. Furthermore there's no use denying that some part of you deep down is interested to find out just how many heads will turn when you strut your stuff in this new get-up. Your mother taught you better, of course, and you would never be seen dead outside like this if you didn't have to be, but if you're backed into this corner, perhaps the silver lining is that you don't need to feel too guilty about this incidental experimental brush with exhibitionism. As the popular saying goes, when God gives you lemons, sometimes you've got to make lemonade and then serve it to strangers while showing off more skin than a Playboy bunny.

"Okay let's pretend for a minute that I'm willing to tolerate all this, if only for a short while. What happens next?" You ask, your defeated tone of voice telling Dorothy loud and clear that you're relenting and willing to play ball.

"Well while under normal circumstances, there would be several weeks of normal patrolling, accompanied by training, mentorship, mission simulations, and so on, it looks like you've actually already been assigned to a team, and you are to be introduced to each other right here, tomorrow morning. I'm guessing that's again thanks to, well, all of this." Dorothy once against gestures to the semi-collapsed facilities around you. "That's all the information I have. You are to get one evening of patrolling under your belt then report back here at 10:00 hours for a meet-and-greet."

"T-tomorrow?! So soon?!" Your eyes go wide. You're horribly out of practice and out of shape. You assumed you'd have at least a month to get rid of your tummy before getting assigned to a proper superhero team. You touch the tips of your index fingers together, fidgeting nervously as you lose yourself in thought, imagining in a hundred different ways how your soon-to-be comrades-in-arms might judge or reject you based on your appearance or lacklustre first impressions in the field.

"To be quite frank, I agree with you." Dorothy states in a firm but not unkind way. "For a new recruit who's not even brought a single criminal to justice-"

"In this country!" You interject.

"In this country," she agrees, "it's much too soon to ask three more established heroines to trust you to have their backs. But times call for measures. If I were you, I'd try and land a big win tonight, so that in the morning you have something to show for yourself."

Dorothy's last words loop over and over in your head as you drag your feet back towards the building's entrance. Yes, you can fly, but it doesn't burn calories to fly, and you're going to need every little bit of fitness improvement you can get if you're going to make it in a real superheroine team. You've never been great with people, mostly because reading moods and minds all day forces you to see the worst in others, so you've never even been tempted to seek out a team before. Plus when you work for yourself, you can choose your bad guys and make sure you don't take on anything out of your league. Once you form a group, you just get given missions. Often even the team leader doesn't have too much say in who or what your team is sent to take down.

You're going to need to earn a major win tonight not just to impress your peers, but also to build your own confidence. It's been too long since you had a proper dance with danger, and you can hardly even remember what it feels like.

An extraordinarily muscular man with a metal bell over his head walks past, his head visibly moving up and down as he checks you out, despite the lack of visible eye-holes on his bell-helmet. He doesn't say a word, but that's almost worse than him saying something. You can't read his mood thanks to the metal headgear, so you're literally getting nothing from him. Now you're just filling in his silence with things he's probably not even thinking, like about how out of shape you are, or how unimpressed he is with your outfit. Fuck, you really need to get out of here and calm down. You're sure everything will feel better after you've been on patrol and knocked some thugs' heads together.

As you are nodding to yourself, trying to remain positive despite the circumstances, you hardly notice a man stepping out to block your way, and almost bump into him.