(See Petrichor's wonderful story for the inspiration for the term)
Today's Just a Little Guy of Interest is a minivan's worth of opalescent goop with a somehow-stolen Ak-Un chemosensory speech synthesis translator unit, and he's being an asshole.
"The Vitruvian Guidelines are an advisory adjunct to the Reykjavík Convention!" today's Little Guy is objecting, which is, of course, entirely factually correct. "The Reykjavík Convention doesn't even apply to me, so the Vitruvian Guidelines are irrelevant!"
"I know, sir," Amanda is saying, very patiently. "In a just world, none of us would be here doing this. Not you, not me, not the legal observer — this is a waste of your time, I agree, and I also agree that your grievance with the procedure is logically sound, but please — this wasn't my idea, okay? It wasn't the idea of anyone here today. We're doing a box-ticking exercise, and as much of an affront as that is, my job here is to do the box-ticking to such a degree that everyone agrees it's fucking done, and then maybe none of us have to bother you again. Okay, sir?"
(Being a slime guy is technically superpowers, which means that using, e.g. a mad science Swole Ray to make a slime guy the size of a guy into a slime guy the size of a minivan would be Mucho Illegal. Bureaucracy being what is it, there is a vast and complex technical document of legal heuristics, the Vitrivian Guidelines, to say how swole counts as Illegal Swole-ification, based on human metrics. This is all kinds of chauvinistic bioessentialist bullshit. Buddy, I did not write the post-Cold War international treaty.)
"Applying the Vitruvian Guidelines to me is insulting and violating and dehumanising—"
"Yeah," Amanda says.
Amanda is, like, a famous superhero. Why she's doing a stint down in civil schmuck processing is a mystery, but I guess all the real supervillains she deals with have given her infinite calm patience with ranting.
"Buddy," Amanda says, and she leans forward and puts her hand on the minivan-sized blob of goop's outer skin, like that's something you can just do to people with weird physiology, like that's not a recipe for losing your hand. She does it slowly, measured, it's not a spur-of-the-moment accident.
Guess she's indestructible, but holy shit you could not pay me to put a soothing hand on half the clients. (Also touching people would probably get me a trip to HR. Also I'm a serious anaphylaxis risk to near-human-baseline-metabolisms.)
"Buddy, I hear you," she says.
And he clucks and fusses but he calms down — the guy who's stormed out of three prior attempts to administer a standard government questionnaire to him, swearing he'll sue us for human rights violations — he calms down and he answers the rest of the questions. No, he is not an enhancile being. Yes, his natural form is a minivan's worth of goop. Yes, that it outside the higher end of human-standard mass and volume; no, he has no been enhanced in that regard, it is his natural size. The Vitruvian Guidelines do not apply to him. No Reykjavík contraventions have occurred. No mad science has been involved. No intervention is necessary or recommended by our office, nor required by state, national, or international law. He is Just That Size.
(He gets a little steamed up again, on the point that we are discussing a euphemistic intervention — means siccing superheroes on him — simply because he is a little bigger than usual. Buddy, they don't even let me flout the system.)
"Christ," Amanda says, when he finally fucking goes, and turns to me across the open-plan. "You ever meet Quiesce?"
No, I tell her. No, I never met a real superhero before.
"Oh, she'd hate you calling her that," Amanda says, grinning slyly behind a cup of our office coffee, which I hold myself back from apologising for. "No, I ask because she knew so many people, all over — I swear you could take her to a football game and she'd say hi to three cheerleaders and a janitor like she's known them a decade each, and then tell you she had a lifetime blood feud with one of the quarterbacks, though fifty-fifty she'd be lying about that — anyway. Christ, the only thing I could think of the entire time with that guy was Squee's voice in my ear going, You smell that? Like alcohol wipes? Probably uses ethanol as a solvent for a lot of his internal processes. Bet he'd burn like a son of a bitch!"
It surprises a little laugh out of me, a half-shocked did she just really say that? laugh.
"Yeah." She sips coffee. "...That's why we didn't let the old lady do this kind of shit." She gestures around. "You here all week?"
I allow that, since it's my nine-to-five to certify the public safety self-declarations of non-costume posthumans, I will in fact be here doing that all week. She winks.
"See you around, then," she says, and turns back to the legal observer assigned to her workload while she's inexplicably slumming down here with us. "Next!"