Lane Carter didn’t think much of Supers. Heroes were chumps; villains were creeps. So what’s a girl to do when an alien death-ray backfires, granting her super-speed and super-strength? She managed to keep the strength a secret for a while, but after the incident with the baby and the tiger cage, her speed gained her fifteen minutes of unwelcome fame.

Okay, so she got a nice writeup in the papers, and a big thank-you from the parents, but she also had to register with the feds, listen to boring speeches about Responsibility, deal with the suck-ups who insisted they’d always been her Best Friends, and learn to cope with the Internet. The bloggers were only a brief annoyance, and the way-too-personal edits to her Superpedia page were quickly reverted by the editors, but the basement-dwelling mouth-breather who called her “Fast Lane” and wrote hardcore lesbian “team-up” stories was too much. She thought his scooter looked much nicer as an ashtray.

Once they found out about her strength, the recruiters showed up:

• "Join your 'team' and fight for justice? How about 'no'?"
• "Become your 'henchman' and help you take over the world? Is your stupidity contagious?"
• "Be your sidekick? Oh, come on, did your Mom make that outfit?"
• "You want to give me 'special training' and a 'unique costume'? Put it back in your pants, creep."

The worst part was that she liked her new powers. She could explore the City any time of the day or night, zipping past terrorists, gangsters, aliens, and creepy middle-aged men without being noticed, and if someone did try to mess with her, well, a girl who can toss an SUV like a softball only gets hassled once.

If only there were some legal, rational way to use them to make a decent living…

[The name came first, obviously. Making it functional was easy: pump strength as high as possible, and take superspeed as the travel power. This makes the character less viable for long-term play, with strength-based melee powers suffering compared to ranged, and superspeed being one of the slowest ways to get around. Fortunately, her powers don’t need to be optimized for combat; with just the first Crisis missions completed, she has enough strength to pick up a car quickly, and once she can lift a panel truck, I’m done.

For the costume, I started with a design the randomizer threw at me a few weeks ago, that had an interesting, not-quite-human face. I tweaked it further to make everything a bit off (uncanny!), adjusted the body for a mundane look, and assembled an outfit that was plausible for a freelance valet parking service.]

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