Amanda Alvarez was frustrated. Thoroughly frustrated to the point of acting out nearly every month. She kept a lid on it, and rode herd on it constantly, making it so that things only really got out of hand maybe once in three or four months. She had been counseled on how to handle her frustrations multiple times, and every time she couldn't keep it in again, she had to have another session with Alfred Honeywell. In which she obviously kept why she was frustrated a secret, because it wouldn't do at all to tell him what made her drive herself up the wall.
You see, Amanda had a goal. A goal she had pursued since about a month or two after she started her current job. She had tried everything she could thing of and then some, nearly had a mental breakdown several times, and called her mother at least once a week to vent about how little progress she had made with her goal.
It started off as little more than a side fancy of hers when she saw him for the first time. She noticed that he treated everyone equally, and less than a month after she noticed, she decided to poke at him for some fun. So she started flirting with him, but he didn't notice. She brought him cookies one day, and he shared them with the whole office, talking about how good of a cook she was. She thought she had him that time, but nothing changed. She dropped hints nearly every time they met. She gave him doe eyes, the puppy dog look, walked differently near him, and even once, in desperation, made a duckface selfie, and printed it off of the printer in his office.
Still, nothing changed, as though he didn't even notice her gender. Even when he was helping her deal with the stress he was causing her, he never made reference to her gender, looks, or anything like that. Alfred was still completely oblivious, and now her pride was on the line. She ramped up her antics, and the rumors she spread started involving Alfred himself, and sometimes even her as well. And yet he still treated her just like everyone else.
After a few years, she started to like him even, and yet he still wouldn't look at her as anything other than a coworker. By the time his powers manifested, she was harboring a major crush, and a migraine-inducing level of frustration at his utter lack of interest in her. When he called out to her, and she started slipping too, she even made sure to land in “improper” ways more than once, and he still made no sign of noticing. The pervert that thought he was subtle noticed, but no, not Alfred.
She knew Alfred had his strange quirks, such as never remembering anyone's name if it didn't start with an A or an H, which were his initials, but this one was driving her absolutely up the wall. And then, a while after he had left to the super nuthouse, as she thought of it, she started having strange things happen to her. The first sign was when she was walking a little too quickly through the hallways of the office on her way to or from her desk, she really didn't remember which. The power-walking was a symptom that her stress levels were about to go too high, and were already affecting her behavior.
But this time, something else was also affecting her, something she hadn't experienced before, and as she tried to turn a corner, her momentum caused her to run into the wall. Literally struck out of her thoughts, she paused, and looked around to figure out what was going on. Seeing nothing, she went back to her day, slightly less stressed, but not noticing it – the surprise of running into the wall being more interesting to her for the time being. The next time something happened, she was a little too deep in her thoughts, and when she tried to stop for a stoplight, her car didn't slow down at all as fast as it was supposed to. She avoided an accident, but the shock of it again sent her thoughts away from how her crush was ignoring her.
Amanda soon realized that what was happening was not normal, but what really clicked that things were taking on a super-human bent when she threw the wrapper to her lunch away, and it kept circling around the wastebasket for far longer than it should have. It took it a full minute to stop spinning, and by then, one of her coworkers had stopped to watch, and drawn a small crowd. When it finally fell she looked up to see at least ten people looking over the edge of her cubicle to watch the spectacle. One of them finally spoke up as they looked at each other in confusion;
“Well, that clearly wasn't normal. You should talk to the supers HR about getting some help with that.” Brenda observed.
Brenda was always a busybody, and Amanda knew she wasn't going to let this go, and if Amanda didn't do anything about it herself, Brenda was sure to write a report of her own. Amanda sighed, thanked Brenda for her brilliant(translation obvious) deduction, and promised to get in contact with the relevant department of HR. Which she did – Alfred was still at the Super Safe House or whatever it was called, and that was where she would be sent.
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After sending off her correspondence to HR, she finished her day, her new powers acted up again, this time bringing her to a full and complete stop mid-step without knocking her off balance, which then caused her to nearly miss her next step, since she was no longer moving. Deciding to do some mischief before being sent off, she used a random coworker's computer to add a rumor about Brenda and an affair with an appliance to the office chat anonymously and went home for the day. Upon arrival to the office the next day, she was sent off to the halfway house for supers.
The trip there, as most tended to be, was less than peaceful, with multple near accidents where inertia or momentum seemed to either have more force than it should, or outright be removed from the vehicle instantly. The scariest one was as they were turning, as the car nearly tipped over before it was brought back under control. They finally made it to the safehouse, without any traffic accidents, to her surprise, and she was assigned a cabin. They called it something else, but Amanda always did live at least partially in her own world.
The first thing that caused a problem for her was when she learned that Alfred had been spending all of his time with another woman while he was there. She knew he couldn't be cheating on her, as he had never so much as shown any signs of noticing she was a woman, but it still ticked her off. Until she noticed that he also hadn't noticed that his new friend was a woman either.
Hazel didn't seem to care, and even actively tried to subtly help nudge Alfred in the direction of Amanda, and she was fun to hang out with, so she was cool in Amanda's books. Amusingly, Alfred never seemed to remember that Hazel's last name was Dakota, which Amanda and Hazel would giggle about whenever they hung out without Alfred there. By the time Alfred was released back into the wild, their rapport had grown, and he even used the pronouns “she” and “her” when talking about Amanda. The day he left, he actually blushed when she flirted with him, and she was being subtle about it too.
After Alfred left, she actually made better progress with getting control of her new powers, and could even make more subtle effects, like slowing the momentum of something, or adding a little inertia to an object that was already moving. Unfortunately it took another few months after that before she was in enough control of her powers to prevent any unfortunate effects or accidental collisions. But eventually, she was in control of herself. Completely in control now, as her main frustration was showing progress.
Unfortunately, as soon as she got back to “work as normal”, she had another episode where she forgot to control her powers, causing her to run into Alfred rather hard. This really was an accident, she was sure, but Alfred was now aware of her ambitions, and even starting to reciprocate a bit, and it took a lot of convincing for him to believe her. They both got back to work, and things got back to normal, except better, because a few days later, he asked her out on their first date.
She once again had to fight her powers multiple times as she was preparing, as her excitement made her have a hard time concentrating enough for that. Their date seemed to have both of them nervous, as sometimes things slipped when they shouldn't have, and sometimes things kept moving or stopped moving when they shouldn't have, but it was a fun time anyways. Things continued on in a similar way for a few months before they both finally got proper control of their powers, even around each other.
However, this record is for the fun stories, so even through they were hard to find, here are a few bonus snafus that happened as they got control of themselves.
On their way home from their date, Alfred got a bit too nervous, and instead of sweaty hands, he made the sidewalk for nearly a hundred feet in either direction completely frictionless. As they started slipping, Amanda was surprised enough that she lost control of her powers too, and everyone nearby started having an even harder time stopping themselves. After many a bodily collision, and a bit of swearing here and there, they finally got back in control, and people got on with their day, and with most people looking embarrassed, and the people in question not interested in volunteering their guilt, they went on their way unaccosted by the other people out and about.
On their third date, they went ice skating... in the summer in an empty parking lot. The date went well, and things were a ton of fun, until Amanda slipped and fell and her powers flared for a second, stopping Alfred in his tracks. It took them both a bit to collect themselves again, and they took a short break to laugh about it and eat a meal together, during which Amanda had another episode and a bird fell out of the air. Alfred teased her about it, which Amanda secretly enjoyed, as it was the first time he had ever teased her.
As they were going out of the office together a few months after Amanda got back, one of the super-powered fights going on between the self described villans, the self described heros, and the super-humans employed by the authorities caused some damage to the electrical grid and the elevator safety features kicked in and slammed them to a halt halfway between two floors. They worked together and got out of the elevator and onto the next floor up, helping the other two who were in the elevator out as they went, and just after they were all in the hallway, Amanda sighed in relief, and accidentally triggered her powers, sending the elevator careening back down the shaft with a massive boom.
And as they continued on with their lives, an entry was made, an AI got smarter, and a woman was able to finally achieve one of her goals, while a man became interested in more than just work, finding fun and satisfaction in things that were not, strictly speaking, adding order to the world's chaotic tendencies.