It looked easy, or lazy. It wasn’t. In his head, he kept track of a hundred little things. Driving a car was hands on the wheel, foot ready to hit the clutch, gas, or brake. Sometimes a shift of gears, but always four wheels on the road. Fat, rubber tires that struck the necessary balance in making enough contact with the road. Treads.

His frame touched the ground with one limb at a time. The point of contact as wide across as three fingers pressed together, and the total weight of him, his frame, and his current fluid dispenser, the pill popper, amounted to two hundred and sixty-six point one-three-four pounds. Even the weight of the snow that had settled on his helmet and in the seams of his frame mattered.

In a car, one had to check the mirrors every couple of seconds, be aware of the environment. In the frame, moving like this, he had to be aware of everything in that one second at a time where a limb-extension prong was in contact with the ground.

And one didn’t tend to drive a car one hundred miles an hour through a residential area. One didn’t tend to have to look up, out of concern for wires strung between buildings, or overhanging construction cranes, or, well, anything.

Two feet together, a two-footed leap this time. He was aware of how far behind his team was, as he jumped to the edge of the fray.

He kicked up a plume of snow as he skidded to a stop, a pink and red bodysuit with gleaming silver apparatus extending from the limbs. He’d chosen a friendly pink for the round lenses that covered his eyes, the face plates that settled over parts of his face assembled so the seam offered something in the way of a disarming smile. The pill popper was a one hundred pound column topped with a construction that resembled his helmet, a reading on the sleek black bar-display running along the side told him he had 8/9 shots remaining. Not that he was likely to lose track. He was dumb, he thought, but he could count to eight.

He really hoped he didn’t need those eight shots.

These were civilians.

There were another four or so heroes around, helping to form a defensive guard around the processing area. The area was a mess, as far as he could tell, and even though he hadn’t been around for long, he couldn’t help but feel responsible for that. He knew, rationally, that he wasn’t, but he was supposed to be here to fix things, they weren’t fixed, and he couldn’t come away from that simple equation without feeling like he’d dropped the ball.