Death-defying acrobatics.

Amanda.

Hefting her new bag, the young woman stared appreciably at this iteration of her own existence and her impressive cleanliness habits!

There were always slight deviations in quality between her alternate selves and supplies.

A lack of dent here; a little more gas there.

This gun being oiled, that gun being rusty…

It was all just part of it… And, while she knew that the very real treasure trove of wealth she was leaving behind did have value, she would let it be so for whomever else might come along and stumble upon a paradoxical conundrum of excessively duplicated supplies she was leaving behind.

It—just wasn't worth hauling around anything that wasn't the best of the best. After all, it wasn't like she scavaged the wasteland because she needed food and water...

No, she did so because she was fucking bored!

Honestly, finding new and interesting things that she would then be able to duplicate ad infinitum was pretty much her whole schtick…

All… regretfully, that really kept her going out here once she'd given up on trying to find her mom and dad…

Mom had been a true monster of that short but 'golden age' of heroes and villains.

Back before Doctor Splice had fucked the planet with his eco-terrorist bullshit, and more or less destroyed civilization as Mandy had once known it.

Both Splice and her mother had been among those few supers documented and classified as a 'national weapon' by the old United States government.

Her mother had been as close to a comic-book superhero as one could get. Super strength, super speed, the ability to fly…

She'd been indomitable in a fight, invulnerable when attacked. And yet, she hadn't been able to save the world from a cataclysmic disaster of a viral super-pathogen...

Flamboyant villains who wanted to smash stuff while ransoming cities so they didn't go on a rampage?

Easy.

Billions upon billions of tiny micro-organisms that spread faster than the bubonic plague, self-replicated, and that carried through the air, bodily contact, as well as the water supply?

Nigh impossible.

Her father, by contrast, was a brainiac of a different specialty from the 'madman's' own. While Splice had possessed an uncanny knack for all things biological, her father had leaned hard into the strictly mechanical side.

He'd been among those who had earnestly tried to stem the tide of viral warfare that the crazed doctor had started. Doing everything from breeding counter-infections that would fight back against the constantly mutating creation to building bubble cities that left humans living in a sanitized but safe state.

Yet, nothing had seemed to work…

Doctor Splice's was simply too good, too efficacious, too gifted... and pathogens just kept coming.

Soon after, the lunatic had begun altering the genome of animals to create hyper-aggressive mutants with an instinctual and ravenous urge to feast on human flesh.

Ugh, it was all shitshow back then... but the long and short of it was that, after the world hand banded against him and supposedly furious his efforts were being stimed, he'd pushed his thumb on the scale of things even harder. Designing behemoths of titanic proportions to smash the final refuges of humanity that hid behind the futuristic cities, which humanity had thought would save them.

The colossi simply overwhelmed those who were powerful enough to actually stop them through sheer numbers and the distance between attacks.

Sadly, they succeeded in wiping out the majority of all but one such refuge, at least, so far as she knew, it was still standing.

And all so the planet could 'heal' and 'recover' from humanity's supposed virus-like infection of its vast lands.

The last Amanda had heard, a team of the world's most powerful supers had transformed the English Isles into a radioactive dead zone.

Doctor-splices base once found, all his greatest creations, and the man himself, having been purged from the world through hellfire and atomic warheads until nothing remained of his existence save the legacy of a ruined civilization…

These days, only mutants existed.

A new strain of humanity that had succeeded the old…

It was only they, for whatever reason, who managed any semblance of survival rate against the virulent plagues Doctor Splice had unleashed.

However, what few dregs of their species remained were ever weary of the madman's legacy… Fearful of the Titans, which had flattened entire cities... Fearful of the 'creatures' that roamed the world, still seeking out people wherever they could.

Nowadays, people were, more or less, returning to the lives of frontiersmen. Building small settlements as far from oceans as they could... Then, if needed, simply abandoning them when they were overrun by ghouls... Essentially, hanging on by a hair's breadth…

As for Amanda's parents?

Well, she had no earthly idea where they were, even if she did have an inkling of an idea.

Not that it helped, as crossing the ocean was impossible unless you could fly, and Amanda couldn't fly.

Still, she always checked the contact list of people in her various iterations of sat-phones. Ever hyper-aware of any clues that might lead her to their whereabouts.

Her mother could cross oceans without blinking an eye.

Her father, faster than any pre-brainiac jet could whilst in his mechanized power-armor…

In truth, they could be anywhere, she knew. And amidst the chaos of the last 'real war' the earth had experienced, her parents, fighting overseas, hadn't had the time to spare for their little girl. Not out of maliciousness, but when the fate of all of humanity was at stake, well, she'd been bitter, once, but now she was simply pragmatic.

Now, and for a handful of years since the dust had settled, she'd merely been focused on surviving. Drifting from place to place…

Her power might be mighty in its own right, but it wasn't her mother's… or her father's, for that matter.

Mandy was what the 'old world' had categorized as a class four variant, which was to say that her powers had been deemed immeasurable. Not because they were galaxy-destroying levels of colossal might! But because they simply didn't fit into the standardized 'norm' that was considered typical.

On the one hand, you had you're classic powers.

The super speed, the super strength, the ability to fly, and take a cruise missile to the jaw like it was a sloppy right hook, to, of course, wildly varying degrees of potency and combinations.

And, then you had you're 'elemental kinetics'.

Pyros, water-mancers, lightning wielders, and the movers and shakers of earth tectonics… mutants that usually displayed aspects of the big three of powers to some degree and while exhibiting the unexplainable ability to call upon the forces of nature itself as though it were magic.

Usually, this showed up as some variant of; flight and fire powers or speed and earth manipulation. Which, at times, could branch out in rarity and competency as something like super-strength, the ability to fly, and throw fireballs around like the human torch.

Or, if you were like her mother, the very lucky few could even have a combination of all three primary powers that were, simply put, off the charts of performance.

Now, where Mandy lay within the grand scheme of people who might be able to fly anywhere from the speed of a seagull to breaching the sound barrier or individuals who could do little but run a little faster than normal while sloshing around puddles was right smack dab where no old-world brainiac desired to touch.

The dreaded fourth category of mutations.

The one after the genius and brilliant 'brainiacs' who never displayed more than their singular power.

Those strange and whimsical individuals (such as herself) who were so wild in variety and capabilities that the people who had them were always treated on a person-by-person basis so far as the 'potency' of their mutations.

True telekinesis.

Mind-reading.

Rapid self-regeneration or cell-like multiplication.

Those who could transform themselves into a tree or go invisible! Maybe sing exceedingly nicely and put others to sleep or burp caustic clouds of acid…

That was where she belonged.

Not with the 'spicy pigeons' who lobbed fire from the sky or the muscle-bound brutes that could crack coconuts between their attractively thick cheeks and thighs; but among the misfits and misdiagnoses of old world society.

The rejects and confused.

Those who often had no idea how to use their powers because few others, if any, existed in the world who were exactly like themselves.

Even Mandy hadn't understood how her ability worked until the first moment she'd been killed. Sure, the time portion of her power was decently straightforward, yet that was merely a byproduct of her real abilities, which were outright absurd in their own right.

Yet, Amanda still couldn't fly.

She still couldn't create a suit of hyper-advanced armour from a scrapyard full of old Toyotas.

And so far as the big three were concerned? Mandy had none of that.

She wasn't super strong or super fast or able to flap her arms and take flight… heck, she wasn't even more durable than the average person, and she certainly didn't have any kinetic mutation to speak of.

No, in following along with the spirit of chaos itself, her powers didn't adhere to any semblance of common sense, reason, or measurable potency.

That was why she liked guns!

One didn't need to be able to shoot fire from their palms when a sound-barrier breaking wad of lead travelled between her barrel and some asshat's head faster than the speed of thought! Knives were nice too. After all, you didn't need to reload a knife.

Yeah, maybe there were some powers that gave her a hard time, but if there was one thing she had learned, nothing survived the pure dogged tenacity of endless lives being spent in search of how best to murder an arrogant super who thought themselves invincible.

Heck, she'd killed a man not too different from her own mother, if at a lesser scale of power, with nothing but cotton balls, honey, and a burning hatred fueled by spiteful determination!

But, those were ruminations for when next she put her head down for a rest.

The past was behind her. And right now, Amanda had something of a problem.

"Yeah… okay, I admit, I might not have really thought this one through…"

So saying, the young woman squelched and squished her way through the viscous green and red fluids as she stepped into the grim hallway with mild embarrassment. Each step of her boots creating a truly offensive and 'sucking' noise to her ears, let alone how slippery and foul smelling it all was.

Looking to the left of the massive pile, then to the right, she immediately decided that she probably wasn't going to fit…

"Hmmm… Maybe I could—burn all of them? I mean, at least one of my other selves has to have the ingredients for a few molotovs or—fuck, maybe even one of them found a brainiac flamethrower! Those were all the rage for a few years while the army fought against the ghouls…"

'Ghouls' were a sort of bio-weapon engineered as 'sweepers' to help Doctor Splice's plans to kill off his own species. A sort of horribly effective combination of zombie and plant that infected the host they bit, scratched, or simply contaminated with their general gross brand of ick.

They had spread like wildfire through major population centers the world over! Not only were they tough as damned weeds when trying put down, but they were legion! And didn't need a constant source of food to actually keep them moving.

Oh no, the lunatic doctor had made sure that they could survive via chlorophyll! How great was that?

So long as there was sunlight, his plant-zombies could exist anywhere they chose. That meant that, for the most part, one didn't really have to worry too much about ghouls being indoors in massive numbers. Unless of course, you attracted them all in your sleep while screaming at the top of your lungs like a god damn banshee in heat...

Though they did certainly chase after prey that fled inside, or those that they could smell, or hear. For the most part, they usually returned to the outdoors once there was nothing more of interest.

There, they would plant roots wherever they could and start replicating themselves.

That's right! Her world's nightmare hordes could grow new versions of themselves through self-pollination!

Thankfully, they weren't geniuses by any stretch of the imagination. And new variants were actually stupider than their parents, if just a touch more resiliant.

More, they weren't at all speedy on their feet… more shamblers than sprinters… which was good! As Mandy didn't rightly know if there would be any people left other than those who could fly or were too strong to be overtaken by plant zombies if the damn things could actually run…

Plus, they were extra-emely flammable. And, rather susceptible to the cold!

"Just one more reason why autumn is the de facto best time of the year!" Mandy announced, confidence radiating from her proclamation to the heavens and gods. "No snow, fewer ghouls. All the leaves turn pretty. The sun isn't freaking trying to boil you alive! Best time of year, hands down."

As she said this, she tried a tentative yank on a zombie that looked somewhat movable, hauling back with a grunt of effort to try and dislodge a body or two so she might slip by and escape.

Sadly, there was nothing for it…

Despite possessing the hard athleticism of a person who spent their days roughing it beyond civilization, Mandy was still a petite and slight woman. She had plump curves, not wide shoulders…

And while her T and A was nothing to complain about, her shitty body weight and lack of stature left her constantly wanting…

"I mean, mom is freaking six-three without heels! And Dad is at least five-eight! How the hell did I even end up so freaking tiny!"

She practically hissed like a pissed-off cat as she heaved on the sheer deadweight, no pun intended, without managing so much as a reasonable budge. "Being petite is bullshit." She asserted, wishing she had a body more like her parents.

Sure, when she was in high school, being tiny and cute and squishy in all the perfect places seemed like a fantastic win in the genetics department, but nobody had told her she'd be so useless in a post-apocalyptic and zombie-filled hallway!

If they had, then she'd of asked her dad to make her some damned growth hormones. If she couldn't have super-strength, then she'd of at least compromised for a frame suitable for little more than being a swimwear model!

"I mean! Rah! Mmmmmm, wouldn't it be—nice if some of my—nnnerg… muscles could get a few of the calories my—tit's and thighs seem to hog? Like—hah… fuck… is it too much to ask? Seriously..." She breathed, panting while spitting on her hands, "I know being small can have its—nnnggg… ad-vantages! But how often does some tiny crevice nobody else can get into even—freaking show up?"

With a final heave, her righteous indignation fueling her temper, Amanda gave up trying to dislodge the body she was working on as she slipped and abruptly swore!

Windmilling her arms in a horrid dance of misery that attempted to keep her upright and out of the small ocean of zombie guts that threatened to bathe her in a manner she really wanted to avoid.

Thank god, she managed to catch herself on the wall, and after taking a deep and meditative breath while staring at the heap, she simply backed away, unwilling to take the 'green dunk' and swim amidst the gore.

Naturally, it was all a simple question of physics.

And more specifically, of force and mass, of which neither was on her side. She just didn't have the weight, leverage or strength to really do anything—and that didn't even account for the terrible footing. Which, honestly, left her in a sort of bothersome situation as the only 'route' to the stairs was now on the other side of an immovable corpse-pile...

The day was bright. The sun was now well above the horizon by the time Amanda had made her way out to the balcony of the apartment.

Her belongings were already tied together and carefully bundled up the best she could manage before they were summarily 'tossed' from her hands to the loving embrace of the next-door patio concrete.

The large collection of backpacks, rucksacks, pouches, and bundles landed with a weighty 'thud' as Mandy easily climbed up the railing and, without a moment's hesitation, leapt across the span with the easy grace and conviction of someone who'd done gymnastics for the majority of her life.

She'd only been seventeen when the first hints that the world was going to shit had reared its ugly head. And, since then, only six more years had actually passed. That put her at twenty-three. Yet, she'd stopped growing long before her sixteenth year, at least where her height was concerned.

Though she hadn't been with her high school's cheer squad for more than a handful of months before quitting to pursue a life in the superhero field, her parents had more or less forced her through a blisteringly cruel training regime since she'd been but a young girl.

Not learning combat per se, at least so far as lethal tactics were concerned, but more martial arts and callisthenics. Her father's think-tank created a highly specialized program to ensure his daughter would be able to take care of herself to the very best of what human bodies could reasonably offer.

Back then, none of them had really known what her powers could do, beyond, of course, that she could stop time for very short increments. In fact, both her parents, despite Amanda feeling like her power had been lacklustre, had seemed to treat her as though she were some golden goose!

Like a prodigy meant to be shaped and nurtured rather than the useless heap of disappointment, she'd initially believed herself to be when comparing herself to such icons.

It helped that her father passed on at least some of his natural brilliance to her, as Amanda was quite smart. It rarely took more than a few tires at something for her to gain the knack of it. And though she wasn't physically impressive like the tales of great Greek heroes of old, her coordination was spot on and nearly reaching the peak of human performance as it was.

Her hands easily tightened around the opposite balcony railing; Mandy hauled herself up and vaulted over the side with graceful ease.

Grunting, she picked up her pack for a second time before she again tossed it over the next railing and, shortly after, performed the same death-defying eight-foot leap, more scrambling up the next balcony as her boot slipped and she let out a small yelp of surprise, but her grip was as iron, and she merely managed a 'tingle' for the brief scare.

Then, grumbling about a distinct lack of paper towels, the woman eyed the next apartment over, then the sliding glass door she was standing beside, wondering if she'd gone far enough.

"Well, it was a minimum of sixteen feet…" She mused, trying to gauge the approximate size of the patio she was on before deciding that she had gone far enough; thus, who cared what the measurement actually was?

Unsurprisingly, the door was, of course, locked. Yet, she merely pulled out a hammer she kept for these very occasions and smashed the everloving shit out of the sliding door before flipping the latch and letting herself inside.

She'd already wandered through most of this floor's apartments over the course of a few days while staying here. So, there wasn't really anything new to discover.

Instead, Mandy simply slipped her hammer back into her bag and walked right out the front door.

Bang!

A body to her left crumpled to the ground as her hand shot out, Glock tightly wrapped in her fingers, a single bullet flying from the barrel to burrow a neat hole through the skull of a nearby ghoul who'd been, likewise to herself, trying to find a way through the barricade of bodies.

Bang, bang-bang-bang!

Four more straggling zombies collapsed to the ground, Mandy hardly needing to look in their direction as she executed them in rapid succession.

A theoretically limitless supply of lives, ammunition and boredom had bred a talent for gunplay and a sixth-sense-like situational awareness that was, quite frankly, rather terrifying to behold whilst on the other side of her ire.

At this point, it was all reaction.

Her mind often didn't even register that she was killing ghouls, even as her gun smoked and bodies hit the floor. It was merely natural at this point, like breathing.

Amanda's senses knew how to hone in on a nearby threat, and her subconscious acted, oftentimes before she even returned to focus amidst her overactive and wandering daydreams.

That left her with eleven bullets still in her nine-millimetre, which she elegantly slipped back into its hip holster as she headed back towards the stairwell.

For most, wasting bullets on an endlessly replicating horde of undead plants was less than ideal, given their finite supply. Brainiac services did not come cheaply. And when a ghoul died without being 'destroyed', typically by fire, they fed off of whatever nutrients that were nearby and simply created new 'pods' that would, in turn, birth more ghouls.

It was a vicious cycle.

Worse, the only people who could even fabricate bullets were rare as hell!

Few and far between, even in established settlements. Worse for the human race, hyper-intelligent and reality-warping 'tinkerers' of all things technologically magical, for all their inventions made sense to regular folk, weren't gods.

They still needed resources to work. Components and old-world tech.

And though she'd seen a particularly inspired woman manage to successfully make a firearm-adjacent weapon out of nothing but trees and rocks, not all those possessing their bizarre strain of mutation could work the same kind of miracles from person to person.

That old adage that nobody was truly born equal had never proven so right as it did when pertaining to mutative powers.

For one, brainiacs all tended to have their specializations. Areas of the scientific world where they truly excelled. And while their genius could branch out beyond the domain of their expertise, their competency in doing so entirely relied on how strong their baseline gifts were.

If you had a mutant just at the cusp of being smarter than an already intelligent human, then they could probably build you an energy-based weapon with enough time, appropriate resources and—test subjects… However, for a man like her father? One of the greatest minds that the world had ever seen?

Well, she'd seen him create a portal gun out of little more than random shit they had lying around in the garage. The thing was, brainiac tech didn't have to make sense as, just like those with super strength, modern science simply didn't have an answer for how it worked…

Thus, to the average person, the complexity of what went on in the interim between a catalytic converter and shrink ray may as well have been magic for all humanity had begun to understand what the mutations actually did to people…

All of that to say that, for most, bullets were actually something that was in despairing supply.

The only way 'non-Mandy' people got more of them was by scavenging. Thankfully, the old United States of America had something of a gun problem. A big issue for major population centers of the past and a true godsend for those who remained to inherit the shit-heap after it had been infested with zombies.

Upon a time, she'd visited a rather large town that had a small collection of brainiacs at its heart who were doing their damndest to try and make something of the place. Putting the combined genius together and actually pumping out a sort of auto-fabricator that took random everyday goods in, and—through the power of 'friendship' and 'bullshit' spat out beautiful guns and ammunition to arm its populace.

They had actually been doing quite well for themselves and had grand dreams of finally taking back a semblance of the old world from the mutant abominations that Splice had left behind to haunt future generations.

So, why normal guns and ammunition, you might ask?

Well, the answer to that was quite simple.

Conventional chemical-based firearms were rather easy to produce when compared to something like a disintegration ray. And, while all people possessed of themselves a trans-human mutation, few and far between were those that were strong enough on their own to make a difference.

With literal billions of people on Earth, there had been fewer than a single thousand who were classified as 'dangerous' to modern armies and their war machines. All others were just as mortal as the rest of their people when confronted by a machine gun capable of spitting out hundreds of fifty-calibre rounds faster than one could run for cover!

It wasn't that people didn't have 'powers' to help them survive… But, just that, most people didn't have the potency they needed to fly through the air and incinerate a city full of ghouls all on their lonesome…

And that, perhaps more than anything else, had been the true blow to humanity that Doctor Splice had achieved.

Stifling the 'natural growth' of human evolution.

Supers made supers.

It was simply a fact of reality. If one super parent made a child with a normal human, the mutation would take root in the child with near-assured certainty.

Now, how the mutation developed was a whole other matter. However, the reality was that eventually, all people on Earth would have, at some point, had powers of varying degrees with enough time.

And since there was no 'official' correlation between powerful parents and a powerful child, since the old world hadn't had long enough to conduct such studies, very little was actually known about the mutations for anyone to speak with a semblance of confidence.

Though, in modern days, after the world had ended and humanity had become an endangered animal, all she could say on the matter was that the real-world situation she'd seen was that most people were simply far less 'super' and much more—slightly better off…

There were outliers, of course, but one of the many rumours she'd been privy to alluded to some special recruitment agency that still managed a global presence, being responsible for picking up all those who qualified as super-human and taking them away.

A new world order of sorts was forming somewhere across the sea, where the truly powerful of humanity were leaving their lessers behind to live in a utopia all their own.

Some claimed it was so they could build a force to finally stamp down the legacy of humanity's greatest war criminal. Others claimed it was a tyrannical dictatorship that was stealing people for slave labour.

And a few more had even contended that they were building starships to leave the ruined Earth behind. Seeking to start anew in another world, while the old was left to fester in Doctor Splice's wake.

Mandy honestly didn't know if any of that was actually true or not. But, practicality-wise, she had mused it was possible.

It was something on her back burner, all told. A lead, vague as it was, to help her find her parents, if they were still alive… But, for the time being, she had greater concerns to deal with.

The groaning and shifting of bodies could be heard, and smelt, even before she'd reached the fire access…

Amanda let out a long and put-upon sigh as she, once more, placed her belongings on the floor beside her and walked into the horde of nightmares waiting for her, gunfire drowning out the noise of life itself…