I looked at the building before me, then at the GPS on my cell, then decided that if this turned out to be a practical joke General Rinaker would be seeing everything purple for the rest of the year. The 'apartment' the government had promised appeared to be a manor house and a huge one at that. Agent Stone was probably busy with all the paperwork I would not be doing so with nobody else to contact for information I just flew on ahead.

A ten-foot brick wall surrounded grounds slightly larger than a football stadium, both it and the cast-iron main gate half-hidden within a copse of oaks and elms. The trees made an excellent job of hiding the three-story house from view, which only came into visibility once one walked through the gate proper... or if they possessed some form of penetrating senses. Architecture wasn't something I had even passing acquaintance with but if pressed for an opinion I'd say the manor had to be over a century old. Its windows were glass in cast iron frames, its walls were brick and stone and mortar, and its interior and furniture looked like things rich old people would pay a hell of a lot to get their hands on.

In short, it was the kind of house questionably-genius, probably-playboy philanthropists with way too many items hidden in their budgets would favor instead of the fortress of anti-bureaucracy I'd been hoping for. Worse still it was occupied, as I found out the moment I landed in the back yard.

Heavy-looking gardener's shears dropped from an old woman's hands, barely caught in a force-field before they could prune her toes rather than the admittedly well-maintained roses she'd been fussing over. Two men about a decade younger than her late sixties also stopped to stare, but as they were in a van three hundred yards away and looking at a camera feed they could be safely ignored for the time being.

"Miss?" the older woman rallied with commendable quickness - or appeared to. "Are you the new owner?"

"That depends," I caught the shears from where they were hanging in mid-air and handed them back to her. "Are you one of Rinaker's people?"

"...what?" she acted a bit surprised.

"Right..." More posturing I didn't have time for. "The house is good, the garden was a nice touch, but you really shouldn't have tried to pass as the gardener." I took hold of a bit of rosebush and gently bent it to show its underside and the remains of the thorns on it. "Most people wouldn't grip it hard enough to crush, gloves or no. Gained any enhanced strength lately?"

She stared at the rosebush, then at her hands, then kicked at the ground in frustration. Bits of brickwork cracked and she winced. "Can't believe you made me in less than a minute!" she complained then her face began to bubble and melt like a candle in an oven. In a few seconds the old woman had been replaced by a tall, bulky man in his mid-twenties. his body already straining against his humble gardener disguise. "Told them it wasn't gonna work but I didn't think it would happen so quickly."

"It wouldn't have worked even if I hadn't made you specifically," I told the spy with a smirk. "Huge house for the shock factor, one few people would turn down, but it comes with a maintenance crew because it's so big? It was a bit too obvious, you have to admit."

"You'll turn down all this?!" the shapeshifter whose name and true appearance I still didn't know demanded incredulously.

"Nope! I'd just throw out everyone else," I told him. Then the field I'd applied to him when handing over the shears triggered and he was lifted twenty feet off the ground.

"Now, wait a minute. Let's be reasonaaaaaaaa-" A bubble of invisible force carried him away and not towards the main gate. General Rinaker wanted to play silly games, his people could win solo airlifts to the top of Mount Marcy. And with that, there was only one decision left to be made.

Hot bath or taking out all the little presents the General's people had undoubtedly left behind?

XXXX

In the end, neither the master bedroom nor the bathroom had cameras or other tiny electronic gifts left behind by the good General's people, but that cursory examination convinced me the bath would have to wait for another day. When I'd first gained enhanced senses it had been in an active battlefield, where all my attention was taken up by inhuman horrors wanting to tear off my face. In the several months of quiet after the invasion, as I'd slowly gotten used to and trained with my abilities, most issues of everyday life had taken a backseat to the wonders of the wider, newly magical universe. Now that I was getting back to a more normal life I'd finally been confronted with one of the great mysteries of the world. What did Superman do all the times he wasn't fighting off alien invaders? The answers were not at all comforting.

"Fry you filthy multi-legged scum! Fry!" I cackled in glee as I turned pockets of air within the walls radioactive.

Having already fried all the listening devices around the house was the only reason General Rinaker was not already on the warpath to take down the insane superwoman. Imagine being able to see everything you share your house with, from the spiders in the basement, to the roaches around the garbage disposal, to the wasp nest in the attic, to everything in between. Yes, including the four hundred and eighty-six bed bugs in your mattress, those two dead roaches clogging the water filter and the very much alive rat climbing up the sewage pipe. Hence this little foray into extreme pest control.

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Even without any active defenses I could go to bed with a plutonium plushie and wake up feeling warm and happy; the radiation fields would only kill the menaces. However, unless I wanted to burn enough effort to make them permanent, the enemy would eventually return. If I did, electronic devices within the house would eventually get fried too, fabrics would fray and yellow, food and plastics would spoil and mundane visitors would get lethal radiation doses in about a minute. Thus for permanent pest control I needed to get creative.

With Field Creation the largest volume I could affect was about two dozen cubic yards, an order of magnitude more than I'd been able to when I'd first started. That still was nowhere close to covering an entire house or even a large room but it didn't need to be. By making the field as thin as a pencil it could be spread out to several thousand square yards and by using a dozen fields I could cover a complete sphere to a radius of fifty yards, just enough to enclose the house proper. Within that volume I weakened cohesion forces to almost nothing, causing any matter that would cross the field to be reduced to individual molecules and disintegrated. Then, before I actually cast the fields, I limited the effect to categories of matter I did not like; weapons, bugs, anything parasitic and/or infectious, non-civilian technology, power-enhanced objects I did not create, disguises, so on and so forth.

Making the fields permanent with Lasting Force was far simpler when it didn't need to be done in the middle of a fight. Instead of burning enormous amounts of effort to force the effect to stabilize near-instantly, my power could flow into the result I envisioned over a longer period. The longer the period the easier things became; limiting myself to fifteen minutes per casting was like a normal person keeping up a good run for the same time, given the difficulty and extent of the field. All in all, by the time I was done with phase one I'd worked up loads of sweat, I was famished and felt like taking a short break, so I did.

Peanut butter and corned beef over white bread, with a side order of hot cocoa; the breakfast of superheroes. And the good General won back some lost points for leaving the kitchen well-stocked.

Phase two involved doing everything all over again, this time for a field of Proximakinesis rather than Force Adjustment. This time it was aimed against people. Nothing nearly as lethal as disintegration, or as complex as applying the effect to specific categories of people. It was a simple repulsion and it would affect everyone that hadn't been directly and personally given permission to cross by me in the past twenty seconds. No passwords, no keys, nothing that could be changed or hacked even if I wanted to, unless someone could mess with powers directly. Without Force Adjustment to enhance it, someone as strong as I was could simply walk through. However, the 'barrier' could still push back with several hundred tons worth of force and as it had no physical substance it couldn't be attacked through conventional means. The vast majority of people would be unable to get inside to annoy me, no matter their rank, authority, wealth or press credentials.

There was a reason lots of heroes had their version of a Fortress of Solitude before they started their heroic careers; it paid to be proactive with those things.

xxxx

As every homeowner will tell you, the number one expense after taxes and fees was utilities. Taxes and fees were easily dealt with by not having a bank account for them to be applied electronically, not letting anyone in to demand them physically, and having an understanding with the government that it was less of a headache for them to waive such things than having me deal with economics. Theoretically, the same understanding applied to utilities. Practically, trusting the government to prevent blackouts when you were taking hot baths or watching your favorite TV shows was a fool's bet.

Power was the easiest to deal with. All it took was a generator, a tiny Proximakinesis field that gave it perpetual motion and another one of Force Adjustment that made it effectively immune to wear and tear plus completely silent, and a plug to gain energy independence. It was the other three utilities that proved more complicated.

Water could theoretically be gained through filtering sewage or other fluids. Practically, however clean that might actually be, I was not going to do it. I wracked my brain for other solutions, but all had either accessibility issues such as desalination or resource and legal issues such as drilling for it. About an hour into my brainstorming I remembered the number one byproduct of air conditioning units and the rest was history. A proximakinetic bubble served as both filter and pump by preventing the passage of most gases and particulates... but sucking in water vapors. It also acted as a condenser since it gathered more and more vapor until it got full of water. At that point, running a pipe from it to the house's water supply was simple enough. It could produce roughly four tons per hour until it reached equilibrium and automatically started production as soon as I took some water out.

Sewage was a nonissue; I ran everything through a disintegration field, basically instantly turning complex and smelly organic (and other) waste into matured fertilizer. A field to separate heavy metals was the only speedbump and that only because more than actual heavy metals needed to be reclaimed. The Thorium nitrides were stockpiled for future nuclear transmutation experiments. Everything else... eh, I might make an automatic transmuter when the basement overflowed, or something.

The only utility that I could do nothing about - yet - was cable and internet access. Theoretically, I could pick up the signals just fine and make fields to transmit my own. Practically, I could more easily juggle Mt. Everest than make even simple programs so using my powers to interface with communications would probably take a few years and/or decades. I'd have to negotiate with Rinaker for them, probably, which meant having to listen all about how he had to save his guy from Mount Marcy via helicopter or something.

Oh well, those were future Maya's problems. Now it was finally time for that government-free bath.

...which was when my cellphone rung.