The bad guys had been beaten or forced into retreat, but that was only the simplest of the night's problems solved. For one thing, I very much doubted a team of three teenagers was the entirety of the enemy that had discovered and organized an attack on a secret military base. Neither their powers nor their attitude made for effective information-gathering or strategy-making tools and the fact that Slow-Girl prioritized the kidnapping above helping her allies had disquieting implications.
At a closer examination, the two kids were cold. Not frozen, but serious hypothermia levels of cold for no apparent reason. It was the same thing Shadow Girl tried to do to me, one of the few ways of disabling most supers regardless of toughness or regeneration. They were slowly recovering, their level of enhanced healing ensuring no long-term damage would remain in a few hours, but that did nothing to protect them from further kidnapping attempts. Even if I kept them at my side, I could not ensure their safety in case of ambush by unknown powers, let alone during another large-scale battle. Another solution was needed, which meant math.
Two point two pounds a day, half a percent safe limit... no, that would exceed my force field volume. While working on downsizing the potential solution, I carried the two of them next to the two still-unconscious villains. Big Guy was healing at the same slow rate but Shadow Girl... she was already close to waking up. Even without active power use, her body soaked in warmth and radiation passively, using it up in speeding natural healing. Since the enemy heavy hitter waking up would be bad, I applied a light choke with Proximakinesis while Force Awareness allowed me to track blood flow, blood pressure, brain activity, oxygenation, even the overall trend of chemical exchanges in her cells. I was no doctor, but balancing out the effects of the choking against her enhanced recovery only took a few adjustments.
Once I was certain the effect would neither kill her nor allow her to wake up on her own, I used Lasting Force to make it permanent and let her body become her prison. Now, even if some other villain or automatic recall power took her away she'd be useless to them and no threat to civilians until they managed to remove the choker. A choker that had no physical substance to break, that was no wound or curse to heal, that was entirely undetectable through conventional means because it was a force that existed only for the prisoner and nobody else. Not impossible to remove, but very, very unlikely.
Ensuring the safety of the former hostages wasn't as simple. Instead of preventing a single event such as a captive waking up any protection would have to deal with countless potential hostile powers. No defenses I could come up with would prove invulnerable to every hostile power I've ever met, let alone all the others that had appeared in the six months since the invasion. Ultimately, safety would be possible only if the bad guys could not reach the still passed out teenagers at all.
To that end, two spheres of force with a radius of one yard formed around the kids, their shapes outlined clearly by the rapidly condensing air they caught and drew in. Even as the air was compressed, the pressure it could exert on the spheres' occupants was adjusted to remain within human norms until the pair of younger supers were within their own greyish spherical cloud with about half the density of water. Several more adjustments to cool the spheres if they overheated or create warmth if they froze were added, then the outer barrier was made permeable to carbon dioxide and monoxide. Finally, everything was made permanent before the spheres fell upwards into the smoke-filled sky above.
When in doubt, throw them into space. That particular adage worked for far more than getting rid of enemies; once the spheres left the ionosphere in about three minutes and adjusted their course as programmed, the abilities required merely to find them, let alone catch up with them and remove the occupants, became powerful and complex enough even whole groups of supers should not be able to do it. Adjusting to space was not a trivial issue even for supers and whoever simply slapped on a green forcefield and tried it was in for a rude awakening.
Handling the still raging forest fires was simple in comparison. A disc with a thickness of one foot and a diameter of forty was the largest force-field I could make on quick notice. Within that volume, air pressure was adjusted downwards as far as I could make it so air would be compressed without producing extra heat. Then gravity and permeability of the field were adjusted so the denser air would escape downwards while being replaced by all gases except oxygen. The moment it left the field and those adjustments though, it became a mass of pressurized gas that suddenly decompressed, rapidly cooling in the process of forming a football-field-sized freezing and suffocating cone.
One small violation for the laws of thermodynamics, one giant fire extinguisher for the superheroine in need!
xxxx
"...and then I filtered the smoke out of the tunnels so that the survivors would not suffocate," I finished my report of the whole thing over the sound of Agent Stone typing in page after page of notes. One of my non-negotiable demands for the government was that I'd never have to write, type, dictate or otherwise personally input data in any way, for any reason, ever. It was face-to-face interviews or nothing. Bureaucrats could all go die in a dumpster fire.
"I see..." Across the table, General Rinaker's thin, aging face looked more worn than it had the first time we met, not that I blamed him. This would not be their first base that got attacked in recent times. "Good job."
"Good job?!" the dark haired woman to his right asked incredulously. "She threw the kids into space!" Older than me by a year or two and dressed in a conservative yet immaculate grey business suit, it had taken me longer than it should have to recognize Liz, a fellow survivor of the initial demon invasion in Florida.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
"An unconventional but sound judgement call," the General backed me up to everyone's surprise. "Recently shed light on some of the enemy's methods has me convinced none of our assets should be within easy reach of kidnappers. Wouldn't you agree, Warden?" Liz scowled but neither at the General nor at me, her favorite target in these meetings. To the people around this table she was known as 'Warden', for reasons that had not been explained but could be guessed at well enough. Was I about to get a confirmation?
"No, sir. The enemy combatant designated as..." she sighed and rolled her eyes at me "...Big Guy was proven to be the sole recruit lost along with the New Mexico base. Medical records, genetic tests, brain and power scans all concluded he is the same person... to the limits of our own tests of course." She handed over a paper full of hand-written jargon I could not make heads or tails of, though perhaps reading it upside-down and at an angle did not help in that. That it was hand-written in this day and age meant they were worried about super-hackers, too. "Despite multiple examinations, no evidence of a secondary kinetic absorption power was found. The only power in evidence was his own overlapping duplication."
"How reliable are those results?" I asked her. "Because if I wanted to play supervillain the first thing I'd do would be to develop a power that scrubbed evidence." I paused, looked at the serious military types across the table and shrugged. "Well no, I'd probably build a Moon base with a giant railgun, but then I'd never seriously consider being a supervillain. The point still stands though." Also, why build a railgun when you can be the railgun?
"They are reliable enough," General Rinaker stated with finality, interrupting whatever Liz was about to say. He flicked through the papers, adjusted his glasses, then rapped a finger near the end of the text. "The other captive. She was responsible for the incidents in Brazil?"
"As far as my department can tell without on-site examination," Liz admitted after a bit of hesitation. "Even if someone else had the same power it's unlikely they'd have it to the same extent."
"Unless they deliberately tried for just that. Powers are malleable, fitting both the choices and beliefs of their users. If someone wanted to imitate somebody else, they could have." My favorite superheroes certainly had affected the development of my own abilities more than a little.
"Our tests showed the amount of violence needed to generate a major super," the old Professor whose hydraulic press I'd broken up a few days before informed me. "It's not something easily hidden. Not in another country where the levels of magic propagation would be lower and extended super activities at that level could not be maintained."
"Sorry Doc, but that theory of yours is plain wrong. Magic does not have 'levels' and does not propagate like that." If it did, our problems would not have been nearly as great. "For one thing, my powers had no problem working in space earlier today. There wasn't even the slightest change, whatever the distance."
"Maybe you didn't go far enough..." OK, no, as soon as he discarded my words without even asking how far both me and the kids had gone I tuned him out as yet another idiot with a pet theory he wanted to be right. Fortunately, neither the General nor the other people on the table were so myopic, which was good. The next point was something I didn't have evidence for but hopefully they'd still take my word for it and prepare.
"For another, given all the problems we've been seeing, the usual methods of raising power aren't the issue. Liz, do you remember the enemy's final surprise during the invasion?"
"Hard to forget my own steel fortress crushed underfoot," the dark haired woman said with a shudder. "Why bring up that thing? It is dead; half the US strategic arsenal made sure of it."
"Maybe, but if we believe what both Lovecraft and Einstein had to say, its power had to have gone somewhere." Because the Mavethans' little secret in successfully conquering multiple worlds was that killing their monsters generated more power than the slain monster had... as well as that killing the monster pushed you towards becoming the next monster. "Now, I dunno about you, but a few thousand tons' worth of force is how high my powers can go without exploiting the environment. The invaders' last monster was the size of a mountain, and was throwing thunderstorms and earthquakes around like there was no tomorrow." If it had not been stopped, there really wouldn't have been a tomorrow. "Let's be generous and say that all us survivors that fought that thing and lived got one hundredth of its power, collectively. Maybe another one or two percent went to any military forces and civilians still in the state after the ashes settled. What happened to the remaining ninety-seven percent?"
"You believe that demon's lingering power is responsible for the incidents," the General immediately caught on. "That either new supers unconsciously tap into it, or that someone is deliberately doing so."
"Collaborators were a thing during the Invasion." Because when a genuine, for-reals Dark Lord offers immortality and superpowers there's always those who'd say yes. "From those that were turned into wraiths against their will to willing idiots that got into the human sacrifice business with a laugh. And then there are those who plain enjoyed the power, who needed no instruction to become like the invaders before we even met them." I very carefully did not look at Liz at that. She hadn't been as bad as others and it was obvious she was trying to turn over a new leaf but one could never be too certain. "My suggestion is we get in contact with known survivors of the big battle, check out they haven't been dabbling into things they shouldn't have."
"The council will keep it under advisement," the General said. "Anything else?"
"Yes," I shot back a bit more abruptly than was strictly polite. "If my latest performance finally convinced you I'm not an enemy in disguise," and I didn't plan to be unless they did something incredibly stupid, "I want to check out whatever you have that lets you analyze powers."
Because if things were going to escalate, it was high time I checked out why my powers no longer had an interface and whether what solution the government had cobbled together could provide an alternative.