Unwanted Power

Skywatch

Heather decided to modify her hero body. It came in response to the news coverage, Bill's insider information about the two incidents, and the official response.

All of Heather's initial mistakes.

In misdirecting official attention away from Heather Adams, the middle-aged white woman, Heather screwed up. One of Heather's rookie mistakes on her first public outing as a superhero now had the authority's unwanted and intrusive attention focused on another group. One that did not need the attention.

Despite her initial efforts to generalize her appearance, unwanted scrutiny is now pointed at black men. The eyewitness reported skin color overrode other features she used. 'Christopher Reeve as a black man' was coming out as 'Black man who resembled Christopher Reeve'. That the local authorities have a fair number of white supremacists in their organization was partly to blame.

Heather felt like she should have known better. She has been married to a black man all her married life. She knows his stories from work. How much harder Bill has to work to get the same considerations as white cops. Heather could identify. As a woman, she has had to work harder than the men around her.

Being a 'cross-dressing' superhero is OK for official misdirection, Heather supposed. That is not all she achieved. According to Bill, the authorities are looking at every single black man in the area they could. Traffic stops had them being scrutinized. Harassed. Taken from their cars and photographed. No reasons were given. The white male cops that were part of the White Supremacy movement loved being given permission to hassle black men.

The running 'joke' in the community is that cops pull over motorists for the offense of 'Driving While Brown'. Now Heather gave them a pretext. Her intended blow for ethnic representation backfired in the worst possible way.

Heather needed her male avatar to be less ethnically of a kind. She required more of an obviously mixed ethnicity. Make the authorities have the broader possible net. Authorities have limited resources, after all. If they are after a black man, that is a smaller group they could focus on. It was wrong, but they did not know that. It was making a lot of people miserable.

Heather could hopefully fix it so that the search moved into a wider net. Strain resources. A larger, more diverse group equaled more people to complain.

If she was seen again, Heather wanted the powers that be, both local and Federal, to reset their search parameters.

Before she could do that, she needed changes.

The previous version of her superhero avatar has been seen. That put 'guardrails' upon what she could do. Heather could not give away that she can change her appearance. Anything she did had to be within the error bars of eyewitness testimony. The idea was the same as her unhappiness about not deforming the bullets. She did not want the people looking for her to know what her powers actually are. To look like a movie Superman had been more than pure physical misdirection. It was also about evoking the idea of that set of powers. Not the one she really had.

Heather made the beard a little longer. The hair on the head was made longer too. It flowed and was constructed of what looked like purest silk. Why not? If silkworms can make silk, why not her hair follicles?

What started as a Da Vinci-style representation of hair became more supermodel. Fabio, if the old romance book cover icon had smooth and silky hair. The supermodel from Italy, Fabio, has shorter and frizzier hair than Heather was doing on her sky-golem. She wanted to evoke Fabio. Not be him. Heather made the hair a more noticeable and prominent feature. Something that was 'under-reported' in the previous version.

Heather gave the beard and the head hair of her hero body the same texture. It was all very Salvator Mundi Da Vinci. It was smooth before, but now this hair looked more like the fur of a long-haired cat.