The Star-Spangled Giant (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

[Charles Reid POV]

If I could have the coffee directly injected into my veins, I probably would. I’m expecting a helluva workload today. Technically the title of G.U.A.R.D. Agency Head (as in Agency Head: Charles Reid, as is gloriously emblazoned in silver on my desk) means I get to delegate the mountain of duties related to all things super-powered, but this isn’t some ordinary government branch, and the problems we deal with usually require a personal touch and some brainstorming, mostly because the issues that arise on an hourly basis involve at least one chaotic element that nobody’s ever had to deal with before. Case in point, I’d barely finished reviewing my first round of reports on newsworthy night-saves when the Deputy Agency Head Nancy Madden barged in.

“Chuck, the PR department wanted me to run something by you involving… Athena,” she said. “And the incident from this morning.”

“Who’s Athena?” I asked.

“Well, she used to call herself Stature of Liberty.”

“What, one of the new growers? I thought she called herself that because her skin goes green when she gets too big. Now she’s named herself after the goddess of war? Whatever, which incident are you talking about?”

“First, she stopped a couple elevated trains from colliding. It caused a bit of a mess because she did it by sticking her foot in the middle and crushing some of the cargo, but there were no casualties-”

“Great!”

“-but now she’s taking selfies over the wreckage and posting them online.”

These millennials and their damn technology. Yes, I know it’s a cliché for the baby boomer to call out the twenty-somethings for never putting down their phones, as my younger subordinates like to remind me, but you can’t blame me for going with the stereotype when stuff like this happens. I searched Athena’s social media and sure enough, there she was, two hundred feet tall and snapping pics of herself with a peace-sign and her tongue sticking out, while her boot rested on a smoking heap of collateral damage.

“Oh, for Christ-sake. Okay, so what’s PR bothering us about this for? Have them tell her to delete the pictures and help clean up some of the mess instead before she shrinks back to normal.”

“Well, sir, they were afraid to send a mixed signal. See, the save happened near a peace summit, so she technically stopped a bunch of Congress-people and foreign dignitaries from getting caught in an explosion, and the president already liked and re-posted one of the selfies. He called Athena a national hero.”

I kneaded my forehead, wishing just once I could make it to noon before the stress-headache set in. I know I should be glad we have an open-minded president who allows G.U.A.R.D. to operate mostly-independently from the reach of the executive branch and the military, but sometimes I wonder whose side he’s on. He’s like the dad who rewards the disobedient kid, and then the mom (us) has to come in and lay down some discipline.

“Good grief. Tell them to let her be, then, but make sure she gets some more… selfies… of herself helping clean up the wreck later, too. And we’ll have a chat with her later, once she’s small enough to fit in this office.”

“Roger that, boss.”

This isn’t even the craziest morning I’ve had this week. Every time I think I’ve got too much on my plate, I have to remember that supes-handling is an international affair, and that the agency heads in the European Union, China, and even that weird remote one up in the Arctic have just as many last-nerve worries, yet we here in the good-ol’ U. S. of A. have the single greatest rootin’ tootin’ fightin’ force the globe’s ever seen past, present, or future. I know that’s a cheesy-sounding line, but I remember it from an old radio broadcast my dad had saved for me when he first introduced me to the concept of demigods in spandex and capes, and it reoccurs to me at least once a day. Plus, the statement happens to be true, colloquialism aside; America’s superhero network is the premier world-defending collective, the strongest and most reliable on Earth.

Which is why my blood pressure spikes when I hear the “youngsters,” especially the ones whose powers let them grow to a humongous enough size that every cable network and random Johnny on the street can snap a viral photo of them, are prancing around like they’re at the club right after they’ve just had a hand in preventing disaster. Good as Athena’s heart might be, and glad as I am that she succeeded in averting calamity, she and a lot of her coworkers are too young and naïve to think about consequences past the immediate stop-the-trains-from-smashing moment. Which, fair enough, is a tough skill to learn, one that doesn’t come as naturally to most as the mutations and whatnot that gifted them their powers. But that’s why we have our legacy heroes, like a certain lady who happens to be my personal favorite, to help guide the way forward.

The Star-Spangled Giant will always have a special place in my heart. She’s damn easy on the eyes, as anyone can tell, and doesn’t look like she’s aged a single minute since the days of the old Agency, where I’m not ashamed to say we had our share of dalliances. Of course, that’s not just a compliment, but a byproduct of the woman’s recent “tune-up” that melted off several decades and powered her back up to a place alongside the top dogs of the current squad. Yeah, yeah, she’s a bit of a kooky 1940s-liberal, but she grows on you (literally and figuratively), and as far as old flames go, I could certainly have done much worse.

We have more growers and shrinkers in our current pantheon of heroes than we used to, but the Star-Spangled Giant really shines above them all. It’s not just because of her near-invulnerability or that laser-hand thing she’s getting the hang of that comes in so usefully whenever a lizard-thing turns into a city-crusher the size of Godzilla. There’s a certain spark to that eternal beauty that just makes you pay attention. Maybe it’s the patriotism she both wears and expresses aloud, or that little twinkle in her eye when she knows she’s charmed you, or even that reassurance that everything will be all right once you’re in her hands, again literally, as I’ve been caught from a fall in her enormous palm on a few occasions when crafty villains attacked our base. We’ve since moved to a more secure location.