I ran around my town at my top speed and was able to dodge most of the cars with relative ease since they were moving pretty much like a bunch of turtles. People assume having special powers will make your life better and sometimes they might not be wrong.
Having superhuman strength or being able to move at extreme speed certainly opens up a bunch of new options. At the same time, it can make your existence incredibly complicated when you decide that there should be some moral code governing using these powers.
The building looked bad, very bad. Outside walls were already showing huge cracks in them, I heard creaking metal and was pretty sure the whole thing will fall apart regardless of my actions.
There will be always people who say that those powers make everything easier and would be eager to switch places with us. But there is a good reason why almost everyone with our abilities conceals his true identity.
There was no time to waste and I went straight in, top floor first. I pushed the door and it blew from hinges without me even trying. There should be only eight apartments on each floor, thirty-two in total, I might be able to just make it if most of them were empty.
You can be strong enough to lift trucks like they weigh nothing and so fast that you outrun cars, but try using these abilities to move people and you are bound to hurt the same person you are trying to protect.
It took me long years to master my skills and I could now use them with relative ease -- there was no time to shout and knock on the doors, I just broke them down, did a quick sweep and it I found someone there, I moved them on front lawn before they could protest. I managed to get them all out with a solid two second reserve, before the building collapsed.
In the last possible moment, I moved again and caught a flying piece of concrete weighting around, which almost hit an eager reporter standing too damn close. I felt my muscles straining a little, but it was nowhere near my limits. I did not wait for applause to die down and was on the move before anyone tried to stop me. Not that I was ungrateful or anti-social, but my earpiece just caught a police report and I wanted to get there first. Unfortunately, it was on the other side of my city.
***
In addition to my strength and speed, I was also blessed with near invulnerability to physical harm and because of that, I became the sole guardian of the South City. I had no need for backups, sidekicks, or partners and managed to keep the peace around here. Of course, there were problems from time to time -- bad guys teaming up and trying to give me hard time or figure out my weakness but so far, I did a good job keeping up a one step ahead. Sometimes they managed to run under my radar for a bit, but in the end, I was always able to catch them.
That is why I ran so fast today -- one of those guys kept robbing jewelry stores around the town and cops were unable to get anything from the crime scenes. There was a rumor that culprit left some kind of a weird calling card on each of them, but none of my contacts knew what it was precisely and I did not want to break into police station just to get my hands on some evidence.
Not that I couldn't do that, it would just cause too much trouble and I tried to keep the force on my good side. Tainting this new crime scene wasn't really a solution they would approve of, but if no one knew, no one could blame me. And I really wanted to help them in the first place, so I felt justified in bending the rules a little.
I did a quick sweep around the building to make sure there was no one around and the security systems were disabled the same way as with the other crime scenes. My deep blue costume might look great when inspiring people, but it would be very incriminating on video from a recent crime scene. After that I finally went in and the store looked like mess -- broken glass everywhere, empty display cases and wall safe open wide. There was a small piece of jewelry left lying here and there, suggesting the culprits did have to move with some kind of time limit, but they've done a pretty good job cleaning this place out.
There was a faint glint coming from behind the cash register and I found a palm-sized puzzle box made from some kind of a bluish metal that clearly did not belong to this place. Two lights on it were blinking faintly and there was an intriguing pattern which looked like some kind of broken up symbol -- that was probably the puzzle, to make the symbol whole again.
I fought my instinct to just break it open using my brute strength and quickly looked around. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing else left behind and I was pretty sure that this was the calling card I heard about. Sound of police sirens was getting close and I took it as my queue to get out and move the investigation back to my lair.
***
Lair is probably too generous label for a three-bedroom apartment in a rundown building, but guy can dream right? At least there were no nosy neighbors around and no one questioned my weird daily routines. I finally took off my uniform and slipped into something more comfortable. Tight costume might look great in front of people and ladies certainly liked it, but it was incredibly inconvenient for normal life.
Only after that I took out my loot, moved to a worktable and tried to decipher how that blasted thing worked. There were a lot of incredibly small moving parts and I had trouble even properly getting my fingers in there to move them. And during the entire time I was fiddling with it, those blinking lights kept distracting me. I sat there for a better part of the evening before realizing those lights were actually part of the solution. Each time I moved the pattern in a correct way, their blinking changed a little, as if they applauded my small successes. But it still took me another half hour before the symbol assembled in front of my eyes -- it was a star with lines forming a letter M inside and couple of small spirals around. The blinking lights gave me one final display of complimentary flashes and there was also a faint clicking noise as the box opened.
I had to blink few times to believe what I found inside -- it was actually a small disc, a mini-CD if you will and it felt incredibly out of place to find this outdated medium inside of hi-tech puzzle. There was no way I would be able to view this on my PC, since nobody had CD drive anymore. But luckily my home entertainment system still had one. My eyes were already tired from staring into the blinking light for a few hours, but duty called, I moved to my living room and sat in a chair. My living room was basically a giant TV screen with a best surround system I could afford and it was my place to unwind. I popped the disc in and expected a text file or maybe a couple of them, but to my surprise, there was only one video on it with a name: "The Truth About Mysteria". That was one weird calling card.
I shook my head in disbelief, but then made sure sound is on, settled in my chair and pressed play. There was only some static and popping sounds coming from speakers and I furrowed my brow at this kind of sub-par sound quality. Then finally first images appeared on the screen -- it was the old school black and white countdown with screen simulating the film strip, numbers going down from ten to one with the clock hands spinning around. I wanted to hit fast forward, but noticed there was some kind of watermark showing under those numbers and stopped myself. Maybe there was some clue in those numbers?
10
I squinted my eyes to better see what the watermark looked like.
9
The screen was blinking too fast and it was difficult for me to focus on it.
8
I thought about pausing the video, but I could always go back and do that later.
7
It made more sense to see it in uninterrupted first.
