"Your first bad guy?" asked the middle-aged security guard five minutes into the long wait for the police. The dark-skinned, grey-bearded was far from the only security around, but he was the only one not gawking... or futilely trying to hold back the throng of gawkers. A pair of them were dragging away a girl that... "wanted to see if the villain's face was real", were her exact words. It wasn't the oddest thing the shoppers and passers by had shouted since the end of the fight. It wasn't even in the top five.

"I wish," I told the chatty old timer with a sigh. "Just the first time I stuck around for the police to arrive."

"Huh..." he gave me a strange look I couldn't quite decipher. "You don't look like a vigilante. That crowd is usually masked - and Masked, if you know what I mean."

"Not... really?" Because that had sounded like some specific terminology rather than just words, terminology I lacked the context for. A few dozen of the gawkers were waving, jumping or otherwise trying to catch my attention, more still waving cell phones in my direction. Maybe I shouldn't have picked Destiny USA, one of the largest Malls ever, for the shopping trip but the name had just called out to me in the first cursory internet search. And now it looked like a good third of the shoppers were more interested in meeting the new superheroine than further shopping. Still better than what Destiny, Florida had been at the end.

"You must be very new then," the guard mused then picked at his beard for a minute or two, eyes staring at nothing. Another attempt to approach us jolted him out of his thoughts but the pair of screaming teens were quickly returned to their mother by another guard. "OK, them vigilantes wear masks, right?"

"I suppose," I agreed, because what was I going to say, that I'd been out of contact for the past six months?

"But why would masks hide their identities?" he went on, speaking faster as he warmed up to the subject. "We live in the age of cell phone cameras and data mining A.I.s; the government should be able to tell not just who they were but what they had for breakfast! And yet for some reason nobody can or if they can they aren't talking."

"Powers?" Not the oddest thing I'd seen powers do. Not by a long shot.

"Powers. Seems it's damn easy to spoof all those cameras and computer stuff because lots of them can do it," he explained. "Unlike that idiot over there," he pointed at the still near-catatonic Mr. Shirtless "keeping their identity a secret is a point of pride for them. Everyone calls them Masks, or Grey Hats. That and rumors is the most us people in the street know about them."

"I see..." Guess in a world that powers were shaped by belief, desires and choices, hiding from Big Brother would be one of the first things people would want to do, right after the Most Common Superpower and the other Most Common Superpower. Three guesses what those were and the first two did not count.

Could I use my powers to hide my identity if I ever wanted to? At that question I felt my awareness of forces and their interactions stirring, followed by the portion of my abilities that could make shapeable fields that adjusted forces within or exerted them outright. Finding any machines or people that observed me was... not really simple but doable. There would be patterns of interaction that correlated to or derived from other patterns in me, such as my appearance as generated by and transmitted through the electromagnetic spectrum.

As it turned out, the power to perceive forces was not that useful by itself; finding anything specific was a crapshoot even with greatly accelerated awareness; it showed too much because forces were everywhere. I hadn't made any advances in handling the full sensory input, so in the time-honored tradition of students everywhere I'd cheated. Giving our powers restrictions was something anyone with open-ended abilities could do because when a power did less it became less costly to use. But in the case of sensory powers, what if you restricted the sense to perceive only what you wanted to find? Classic example of Superman's hearing; listening to millions of people at once would be useless, but if he could only listen to crimes or calls for help, it actually became useful. The logical counter to this was, what mechanism decided which sounds would fall under the restriction? Fortunately, powers didn't have to obey causality or logic and Superman wasn't driven mad by his super-hearing while I could detect as specific things with my power as I needed, only complicated by their being expressed as forceful interactions.

And once those patterns were found, through them any observers effectively identified, then came the time for force fields. Long, narrow beams of force could be directed at them, either on command or automatically upon detection if I wanted to expend the effort and time to create a lasting construct.

"Nope," I muttered, reining in the almost reflexive response from my powers. We were not setting up a "Detect observers and turn them to greasy smears" field, no matter how sweet the wailing and gnashing of teeth from all the gawking idiots losing their cell phones would be... because they'd lose more than cell phones. The idea was filed under the "What Would Dr. Doom Do?" folder, which had been steadily growing since my decision to bite the bullet and interact with humanity at large once more.

Luckily, the sound of police sirens a mere two miles away provided a much needed distraction.

xxxx

"You can't be serious!"

The police had finally arrived nearly half an hour after being called. Tracking the police cars' progress, I saw them stopping a few city blocks away from the Mall, completely beyond normal sight and not even entering the area. There they'd stayed for fifteen minutes, until several other vehicles had joined them, before proceeding into the lakefront and Destiny USA. The reason for that delay was now pointing several dozen guns at my face.

"Drop to the ground with your arms behind your head!" the SWAT officer demanded quite unreasonably. "Drop to the ground right NOW!"

I shrugged and did just that. "This is probably unnecessary, you know," I told him as a pair of troopers approached me with a weird contraption that looked like a pair of foot-wide rings linked together by two wires as thick as my wrists. It took me a moment to realize they were supposed to be handcuffs.

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"Shut up, prisoner, and stop all power use!" I rolled my eyes - not that he could see with me face down - and did exactly as he so politely requested, no more, no less. The troopers roughly grabbed my arms and tried to put them in the handcuffs... 'tried' being the operative word. They pulled and pulled and pulled, huffing and puffing from the effort, to maybe push my arms around a fraction of a millimeter.

"Sir, the prisoner is resisting arrest!" the trooper shouted, and as far as he knew it was true. In reality, I was doing exactly as I'd been asked. Ever considered how Superman could stop a speeding train or push around large airplanes, how he could tank artillery fire or missiles without being pushed back? The same effect applied here, my inertia scaling to my strength passively. The troopers could no more manhandle me than they could manhandle a locomotive.

"Prisoner, cooperate or we will use force!" the SWAT officer bellowed as two dozen rifles clicked ominously.

"I am cooperating," I told them, still looking straight down to conceal my smirk. "Your inability to move me is due to passive resilience that doesn't turn off." Someone was snickering and it was neither me nor the SWAT teams. We were also drawing an even bigger crowd now than before their arrival; the civvies could apparently smell the drama.

"You will turn off your powers or we'll shoot!" Well, somebody was being willfully stupid.

"Go right ahead. I'm not going anywhere." More snickering from the peanut gallery. "Just get everyone watching to a safe distance so you don't accidentally kill anyone via ricochets."

More threats followed, as well as kicks, pulls and other minor violence. Nobody actually shot, which was better than I'd expected. As for the rest, since they didn't actually order me to walk up and go wherever they wanted to get me, they were summarily ignored. Now all we had to do was wait.

xxxx

"Hot chocolate?" the redhead in the black suit, black boots, black tie and black sunglasses offered.

"Thanks," I told him, taking a sip from the cup. It was very hot, slightly bitter, and only as sweet as it needed to be. Perfection. But just in case... "You do realize poison won't work either, right?"

"Whyever would we want to poison you, Miss Wennefer?" he asked with an easy smile. "If you had really wanted to cause trouble, the SWAT teams couldn't have stopped you." His smile faded, replaced by a frown as he continued in a grim tone. "I've seen it happen, you know? When someone with powers cuts loose against... unpowered people. Twice in person, far more times than I'd have liked in recordings." He took a sip from his own cup, something with a lot stronger kick than chocolate. "The troops have, too. Those that aren't new recruits, that is. New York was hit by a villain group the month before last, back when City Hall still thought we could handle the new Outbreaks ourselves."

"Oh, I do not blame them," I assured him. Despite their stubbornness, the SWAT teams had been rather reasonable; they'd only tried to get me towed away once. "Sorry for the circus, by the way."

"No, you're not," he countered. "I can tell when someone is deliberately causing a scene to draw attention." The two of us watched the enormous crowd barely being held back by a line of struggling police officers. News vans from major channels and local reporters had arrived by the dozens, ignoring the light drizzle or the icy breeze coming from over the nearby lake. There was even a pair of news choppers flying overhead.

"Well, I didn't want to make more of a mess than the bad guy had done but neither did I want to waste hours being 'processed' by whatever system you've set up to handle powered people." Because from what I'd gathered from the news and the 'net, it was a shitshow. The authorities had until recently been in complete cover up mode, scrambling to keep the magnitude of the disaster from civilians. Hard to do when half the state of Florida was still a wreck, the other half being even worse. Then new superpowered people had started appearing everywhere, like mushrooms after a rain. "Complying with lawful authority is all well and good, as long as said authority has a clue. I came to New York to help, not twiddle my thumbs in a cell while everything went to Hell in a handbasket."

"A bona fide super heroine, then?" the agent smiled again as he asked, but it didn't reach his eyes. He didn't know that I could see through his sunglasses to the cold, calculating gaze beneath so he kept pretending to be friendly and approachable. "What, no plans to take over the world, or sacrifice virgins to boost your power? Just offering help to your country, no strings attached?"

"Taking over the world sounds like too much work." As for the other, we both wished he was joking. We really really did. But he wasn't. It had happened, almost certainly would happen again. "The reason I made enough of a fuss to draw your attention is that if I waste time with the fiddly bits, there's less time left to actually help people. And since helping is all I'm interested in..."

"The fiddly bits?" he asked after about a minute of quiet contemplation, but I could already tell I had him when I turned down world domination. The government really couldn't afford to ignore help from supers. They wouldn't have even under normal circumstances, but against hostile supers even more so.

"Warrants, waiting for the police, doing after action reports, data analysis and crime scene investigations, flight plans, crossing state borders while carrying unusual cargo, keeping the newsies at bay, getting a new house, paying taxes, groceries and housework" I shrugged. "You know, the usual things superheroes in comics don't do even though someone has to. Easy things for the government to waive or see done while I'm tackling giant monsters or kicking supervillain backsides."

"You have given this some thought, I see," the agent nodded and gave me the first hint of respect I'd gotten since this whole debacle started.

"More than just a little." Six months working out the stress of mine and my friends' nightmare of an origin story, preparing for the changes the world would see. "Was I the only one? Everyone seems to be scrambling, reacting at best, doing whatever they think in the moment at worst."

"It's the worst disaster on record, cut us some slack," the agent played up his friendly disposition again despite the seriousness of the matter. "You think the Great Recession was bad? The pandemics? Compared to this, they were mere hiccups. There's a guy in Denver that can brew plagues on demand extorting us a hundred million a day. Some super-hacker hiding behind a secret identity froze intercontinental transactions until we sent relief efforts to Orlando. Half of them were eaten en route by bands of roaming monsters. And then there's shits like the one you beat that get a mind control power and go wild." He slumped, seemingly defeated. His eyes still were like two pieces of flint behind his sunglasses. "If you're offering help we'll take it, as long as your demands aren't too unreasonable."

The initial negotiations concluded as the drizzle turned into a proper rain, the water shower cold enough to freeze normal people to the bone. We shook hands. The good news was, I would not be arrested and would meet with his superiors in the new agency handling supers. The bad news... I'd probably delayed my reveal more than I should have. In retrospect, being there to prevent some of the... issues might have helped more than having all my ducks in a row, being as ready as I could be. Only time would tell.

Recriminations later; it was time to be a superhero.