It hadn't even been a day, and most signs of the battle had been cleared away. When I'd offered to help with the cleaning the General had informed me his people could handle their own clean-up. Over twenty low-end supers had been in the field by the time the battle was over, with a dozen more arriving with the reinforcements that had been just out of reach. None of them had had powers particularly useful in non-violent work, but powers were not the only thing even the weaker supers had going for them.

For one thing, enough strength to lift and carry up to a medium-sized car or bend metal and break concrete with their bare hands paired with the stamina to do it literally all day and standard human agility that machines simply did not have made the grunt work go by far more quickly than any similar operations could have managed before the advent of powers. For another, every super invariably had improved looks. It wasn't immediately noticeable with low-end supers, but when forty soldiers that were all as good looking as Hollywood movie actors gathered in one place, they stood out... especially after the third shirt got "damaged" halfway through the cleanup; Kevlar doesn't tear that easily.

And with that realization came another; while jumping from crisis to crisis and playing catch-up against the bad guys' actions, I'd only had a vague idea of the public image of supers. After a quick crash course on current affairs, how odd the public's reaction to me had been in a certain mall two weeks before truly struck. I'd assumed that the existence of supers was a matter of public record. That after six months and the greatest disaster the country had suffered in living memory everyone would know at least the main points of what had gone down and what was up with powers.

You know what they say about assumptions.

What General Rinaker was now doing was building an impression that supers were more than the countless contradictory rumors made them out to be... or the small glimpse of large-scale violence the people of New York had gotten. Showing off minor but useful abilities in helping people, using the soldiers' looks to shape public opinion on top of a mountain of lies. I crushed the three-hundred-page briefing in my hands, sheets and print-outs crumpling before being squeezed between my fingers. Six months. Six fucking months and everything publicly available was still either deliberate misinformation or conspiracy theories, and one carefully controlled, highly curated interview coming up.

We'd see about that. The Earth's gravity reasserted its grip on me as I turned Proximakinesis off and entered a near-silent free-fall towards the repaired plaza, the impromptu stage and the sea of reporters waiting below.

xxxx

Humans do not look up; even with all-around super-senses I sometimes forgot to and that was with Force Awareness lacking the horizontal bias and aversion to elevation built into human vision. At a good hundred yards per second and with a gloomy, overcast sky on my back I was already at the podium before anybody noticed. That my arrival came ten minutes before the interview was supposed to start helped, and that the introduction and preliminary small talk had yet to be carried out by the government representatives sealed the deal.

Force Adjustment and Proximakinesis ensured my three-point landing remained silent, and a split second later Forcefield Creation had done its job of extending a layer of invisible influence six feet thick across the whole crowd. With a thought, the usual cacophony of such crowds was silenced and the cameras got rolling without the cameramen's input. Over a hundred signals, connections and sensors that had no right to be where they were were cut off, while dozens of people in news stations around the city scrambled to do their jobs earlier than they'd expected.

"Good evening, people," my voice boomed, getting everyone's attention. The microphone on the podium was still unpowered but I wasn't using it anyway. "I'd welcome everyone to your usual government-scheduled press conference but as you can see, some things are quite different than usual tonight."

The crowd focused on my seven-foot frame, the white costume with the blue boots and cape, and tried to enter the classic reporter feeding frenzy. They failed and after a moment or two their efforts stopped before the total, sound-devouring silence. Behind me, several people in uniforms scrambled in the podium's direction for a few feet, then were rebuffed by the force field.

"Some other people were supposed to do a brief introduction before my arrival but they're currently indisposed, so we'll skip the theatrics and get to the point; supers and giant robots." That hadn't been how the government representatives would have put it, but beneath no less than a dozen pages of ass-covering and political correctness they'd have meant the same thing... probably. "But before we get to the good stuff, some ground rules." I stretched, cracked my knuckles, and stared at about a hundred newsies and their hangers-on challegingly.

"I point at you, you ask your question. No shouting, no raised hands or anything else will get you more so don't." There was a bit of silent grumbling at that, but nothing compared to the arguments going on in several news stations across the building. There was talk of cutting the transmission among certain parties, but most of those parties knew that would not go over well with the newsies. This was the biggest news since the atomic bombs; everyone wanted in on it. Plus said parties would have gotten my warning by now. "Try to stay remotely on topic, and no personal attacks." And with that I pointed at one of the reporters at random.

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"Carrie Bolling, Fox News," the thirty-something brunette introduced herself before asking. "Did you just... take over the press conference?"

"More or less," I admitted easily. "I mean, I was already supposed to answer questions but the whole thing was so staged it might as well have been Shakespeare. Never liked theater or staged things, so here we are." A few of them laughed and were pleasantly surprised to find they weren't muted. I pointed at the next reporter.

"Is that legal?" a tall guy sporting a logo for an online news service asked without introducing himself. "Will you get in trouble for it?"

I raised a perfectly arching pale eyebrow. "More trouble than fighting giant robots and throwing down with supervillains in the middle of the UN Assembly?" More laughter at that. "They're the government. If they want to, they will make it legal." The next reporter in line was an older man from...

"Anderson Harlow, CNN," he said more seriously than the previous two had done. "You punch giant robots, wear a costume and cape and can fly, you're obviously a superhero. Then there's all the rumors about odd events. How did that happen? Are we suddenly living in a comic book now?"

"The short answer is energy from another dimension." Because explaining magic, alien invasions and other worlds then and there would cause far too much confusion, sound too unbelievable. Better get a bit closer to the official line. "Like radiation mutations, but less lethal and more useful."

"Is that what happened to Florida!?" a reporter asked out of turn. "Bioweapon research gone bad? Are all good-looking people going to mutate? Is that where the MONSTERS COME FROM?!" He was shouting to be heard over loads of whispered commentary by the end. "WILL WE-" and then his voice seemingly cut off. He was still obviously trying to speak, but nothing could be heard.

"I warned you about the shouting," I told the somewhat wary but very indignant reporters with a sigh. "And before everyone brings it up, I'm not preventing him from speaking. I'm preventing the rest of us from hearing him and the microphones from picking it up." I also wasn't the government, so certain laws did not apply to begin with. "Next?"

"Dexter Osnos, the New Yorker," a short, balding, Middle-Eastern man said. "What did happen in Florida? All we have are a few words from survivors, second-hand data that don't make sense and that bioweapon scare. Half the state is still in quarantine."

"Get used to things not making sense," I told them, but nobody laughed. "Florida was where the extradimensional energy was released. It scrambled communications, wreaked havoc with the weather. It's a disaster zone from that alone. And if you go on foot, I'm not flying in to save you from your just deserts."

xxxx

Fifteen minutes. Fifteen whole minutes to disprove the usual rumors, shoot down fear-mongering, clarify the basics about what had happened six months ago without revealing frightening details, and 'mute' two more idiots. By then an entire ring of government goons had formed around the limits of the force field but the press conference was still transmitted live and unedited. Well, mostly unedited; they'd beeped over those two idiots' cursing. I'd also noted an oddity; if there were any reporters of foreign news media present I'd yet to find them. All in all, not as well as I'd hoped, but a lot better than my worst estimates.

"Maria Marshall, The Hollywood Reporter," a young, energetic blonde introduced herself, fidgeting with her phone. "How did we get from 'strange energy equals powers' to a superheroine protecting the UN from giant robots? Why heroes and villains at all?"

"Because if you could be anything, what would be your first pick? A bit of magic, a bit of wonder... all of us have dreamed we had superpowers at least once, right?" Even genius playboys with bat fetishes. "Suddenly, the dream somehow becomes real... except you're in the middle of a disaster zone with threats everywhere and people dying. What would you choose to do?" I shrugged. "Some people choose poorly. Others were already bad guys before getting powers. Some of us try to help." And with that I gestured at the next reporter in line.

"Wait, you're saying this energy makes dreams come true?" a neatly-combed, sharply-dressed man from a local tabloid I'd never heard of before asked, aghast. "What if some crazy guy gets hold of it?"

"We're all a little crazy," I told him with a small smile. "Good crazy, you get a hero. Bad crazy, a villain. Rational people wouldn't get powers, they'd get a giant pile of money." Joke was on them, though. With all the disasters, rampant inflation was all but inevitable.

Little by little we got through the important stuff, including the reasons for the attack on the United Nations. That just gave the reporters an axe to grind, and not for my neck. It turns out that learning of a secret Assembly none of them had been invited to any press releases for annoyed them a lot more than my hijacking the press conference had.

But all good things come to an end. Unfortunately, inevitably, we got to the type of reporters - and questions - that I'd been trying to avoid. I'd picked those from the more serious media first, then the most reputable of the rest... but I'd finally run out of excuses.

"...what made you decide on such a risque and revealing costume?" a reedy, older woman all but demanded and I was very tempted to mute her despite her feigned politeness. Bitch please, hadn't she seen the latest fashion atrocities the rich and famous tended to wear? A tube-top leotard was nothing.

Unfortunately, the sharks smelled blood in the water and powers or no powers more questions like that would follow.