Tinyman wasn't presidential stuff, and that made him the most appealing candidate on the ticket. Werd figures that this Tinyman is a dreamer with no ambition. Being a superhero was not part of his overall plan, but a role that had trapped this poor tiny man. He couldn't help it.

And now this selfsame Tinyman had been chosen by the New Patriot Party as its figurehead to be installed above the mantel of the fireplace of a new government, in whose belly flames would dance on the burning constitution. But, at the time, nobody suspected that the party had even an ant's chance in an elephant cage of getting votes, much less that the party itself was a new pseudonymous manifestation of a sinister cabal that had held the reigns of American foreign and domestic policy since the time of Eisenhower. Nor did anyone suspect that their choice of Tinyman as a presidential candidate was not improbable, sentimental, inept, even sincere, as it appeared, but a canny move shrewdly calculated to appear as all of those things to an unwitting voting population. But Tinyman's landslide victory would happen later, and is not the subject of this story.

Let me explain: Tinyman is a superhero distinguished not by his size - which is only slightly shorter than average, not tiny - but by the narrow scope of his ambition and his desire to not be a superhero at all. Oh, sure, he was endowed with certain super powers—the ability to fly, X-ray vision, super breath—but he used these as seldom as possible to avoid attracting attention. And, truth be told, he wasn't very good at flying, and sometimes mixed up his heat vision and his X-ray vision causing him to accidentally set ladies' undergarments on fire.

In all he was a piss-poor choice of man to campaign for the highest office of the land. He had stage fright, no talent at oration, and virtually no real work experience, having eked out a tiny living as a tinyhero. Most of his income had in fact come from using his powers to track down missing cats for whose return a generous award had been offered.

(It was also possible for superheroes who were born or naturalized American citizens living in the USA to receive food stamps through a government program that had been in place since the New Deal, although it was seldom taken advantage of.)

Tinyman had subsided on government bread and milk for many years, but now he had been Chosen.

And he didn't know how to get out of it.