The Crowd Gasping - THE SUPERHUMAN

The ground shudders and cracks from the of your afterburner braking in front of the crowd. You blink with movement, leaving a shimmering trail of afterimages for each microsecond you move across a city block in the time it takes the humans watching to gasp. Tom doesn't stop his speech, equal parts a plea to not be alarmed and sales pitch. You flex for the crowd, mug for the camera, pulverize for the effect. Your costume hugs you tight, the dark reds and blacks slimming your form and keeping your outline clean while also making you stand out like a fire in the dark. It's hard not to stare, it's harder not to even look.

Life hadn't always been this good, losing the planet you call home as an infant does leave one longing for a faraway shore that no longer exists. When you were taken in by the doting older couple after crash landing in their field, it had been a happy family to an extent. Like with school, every golden moment was undercut by the knowledge that you were faster than a speeding bullet, powerful enough to spike your enemies through the Earth's core. You quickly grew disinterested with human arguments. If you hadn't met Tom, you might have flown into space and never returned. Tom was the marketer, Tom was the one who showed you the hero's guild and said you could be like them. Tom was the one who said to hold a press event in front of the city. Tom was the one who was working the mayor, doing what he could to set up a photoshoot between you two. Show the earthlings you come in peace. Tom had wanted the costume to be scanter, flashier, sexier. You saw no value in preening for the sexual desires of humans, the whole thing had embarrassed you. Even if you did bed one, the process might literally kill them. He had insisted on the worthless skirt, though it did hide the bulge in the skintight lycra where your member was pinched snugly against your thigh. You were pretty sure human women didn't usually have those and the less to do to make yourself an abomination, the better.

The Mayor adjusted his glasses, tousled by the sonic of your movement. The hand he offers you is bulgingly fat and sweaty enough for you to feel through a lycra glove. You smile at the cameras, not looking into the little man's proud face. The pictures being taken guarantee that this moment will live on with him grubbily in it even when his grandchildren are dust. He's in the history books now, shaking the hand of the first real god these creatures have met. As soon as you can, you slip your hand out of his, making a promise to yourself to wash it later.

"You killed em kid." Tom eggs you on as the press disperses.

"What's the fastest way out of here?"

"You have to go meet the hero guild before anything else, the mayor offered a car but I figured it would be better for optics if you flew there. Good to let the citizens know that you're on patrol."

You lift off, you would give just about anything to be out of this piece of shit costume. The seams itch and the crotch is riding up like crazy. As Tom turns into a speck behind you, you can hear him telling you that you were supposed to bring him along. You don't care.

The tower is easy to find, it's the only one with a human-sized landing pad. You come crashing down onto it. Through the glass, you see everybody inside jump out of their skin. One of them springs out of the door at superhuman speed, another slinks out with stretching elastic limbs, the rest walk.

"Hey!" The fast one offers cooly.

The elastic one stretches out a hand across the landing pad.

"I wouldn't if I were you, she just got back from shaking hands with the mayor." One of the others offers.

"Oh no," The elastic one sighs as she pulls her hand back. "Are his hands still super-duper sweaty?"

You nod.

"I told him to get that looked at." The fast one chirps.

"It's probably because he was checking her out." The elastic one shoots back.

The nine girls who finally assemble are... a mixed bag. Some of them look like powerful warriors and a few look like sideshow acts. You're taller and more imposing than most of them, and some you would have to guess at the powers of.

The one who seems to carry herself like the leader, judging by the fact that she's the first one to step within arm's reach, is a dark-skinned woman in what looks like a novelty Halloween costume. Even with hard muscles and a quietly discerning face crisscrossed by scars, she looks like a tourist.

"I am Diane, warrior of the amazons and de-facto leader of the guild, I welcome you to our ranks." She nods, offering you her other hand. You can admire her courage if nothing else, so you shake it. "You may call me Woman of Wonder, or simply Diane if you wish."

"That's quite the costume."

She seems embarrassed. "When I was banished to this world, I was stripped of all of my belongings, this was the closest replacement I could find."

The faux-Roman design of her skirt and plastic jewelry tells you that her budget was measurable on one hand.

She gestures you inside, you stride in as the girls start to circle around you like eager schoolchildren.

"I thought your manager was coming too." Diane tries to fall in stride despite your legs being close to a foot longer.

"Who needs him?"

"All right, I dig the girl power." One of them shoots back. She's dressed like a cat if a cat was dressed in leather that had passed through a blender. The pale black makes her snow-white appearance all the more noticeable. She looks less like a poised heroine and more like a choir girl in a borrowed dominatrix outfit. "We don't let our managers in either."

"Wait, you guys have managers?" One of the others cuts in. She is also dressed like a cat, though this is less of a sex pervert cat and more of an embarrassingly sugary cute one. She catches an elbow for her question.

"You guys have two cat-themed heros?"

Diane sighs. "The one in the leather is Sammy, she and I were the founding members. The other one is Lora-Subab, she's actually part cat. She came through a dimensional rift recently and Sammy didn't want to change..."

"We can both be cats!" Sammy interjects. "You should see how many bird-themed heroes we've had to turn down!"

"It is easy to distinguish us. Sammy is the Dark Cat and I am the Cat of Darkness."

"You can just call them Sammy and Lora." Diane looks like a familiar headache is starting to reappear.

One that looks like a stripper magician distinguishes herself. "There's no confusion with the name The Mighty Zaranatas."

"Aside from how to spell it." The stretchy one shoots back.

"And you wanna pretend that Elastic Girl isn't just a low-rent Queen Stretch?"

"We're not even remotely the same! She got her powers from nuclear waste and mine was a horrible taffy accident!"

Diane fights to be heard, "You would be forgiven for mistaking this for an elementary school, but this is the headquarters of the Lower East Megatropolis heroes guild."

"Is this the best Megatropolis has to offer?"

Diane seems genuinely offended, judging by the knife of silence you've just cut into the room, she isn't alone.

"This is the Lower East Guild, nobody said these were the big-name heroes. But we all do our best, we provide a valuable service to the Lower East side."

You've been pretending to be human long enough to know when you've stepped on toes. "I meant no offense, I merely thought that I was meeting the big-names."

"Nah dude," an otherwise plain-looking girl with pigeon wings corrects. "It doesn't matter if your power destroys the universe, you start by doing local work."

You grumble internally. It's never too late to start melting everything with your eyes, but it's always too early. "My apologies, I should have spoken more carefully."

"It is okay new friend," The Dark Cat... or was it the Cat of Darkness? Soothes you. "I understand you are not originally from this plane. I too experienced the foot in the mouth while integrating."

"No hard feelings, it was a simple mistake." Diane nods. "Perhaps we should be a little more professional, you could start by showing the girls what all you could do."

The training course would be insulting under any context other than being something for heroes fifteen or twenty rungs down the importance scale. There's a segment where you deal with coming attacks, one where you shield a civilian against attacks, and one where you dish out punishment. The girls demonstrate each. Diane makes a shimmering crystal shield around her body, the pigeon girl flies the civvie out of harm's way, and a muscular-looking girl in an almost scandalously revealing outfit delivers harsh strikes to a dummy that dent the metal of the armor. They show you into the chamber, watching expectantly.

You decided to give them a bit of a show. No sooner have the bullets come at you than you catch them with your eyes closed and throw them back. You place a hand on the civvie and instantly warp him out of danger and set him on the seat beside the girl controlling it. You turn and atomize the dummies with your eyes.

The result when you step out of the chamber is a quiet audience, aside from Lora, who claps impressedly.

"Well..." Diane tries to say something but seems to be at a complete loss for words.

"I think the better question is what powers she doesn't have."

"The power of love." You attempt a joke.

Nobody seems to appreciate it much.

"Well, you'll probably move on fast enough," Diane mutters.

"Are you kidding me, Diane?" The stripped magician, the great something or other, seems genuinely upset. "She should be off with the league of justice protecting all of humanity, you really want to keep her here fighting jaywalking?"

"It's not my call! Either she impresses somebody in a higher-ranking guild enough to get a tryout or she's with us for now."

The girls all look at you with either distrust, pity, envy, or some mixture of all three. For the first time in this alien body's life, it feels a twitch in its loins and the desire to see what it's like to breed with one of these monkeys. The effect of your spirit within the shell starts to twist the desires, shaping it more to your feelings. Soon it will feel the need to breed, the superhuman overtaken by the animal.

"Perhaps staying with you guys for a while isn't the worst thing, where do I sleep?"

The team seems excited, they gather to show you the rest of the facility while the chubby one in steampunk goggles goes into the chamber to sadly reassemble the training dummies.