by Archer, Mia
I just had to figure out a way to remind her of the hero she’d been once upon a time. Even if it took some tough love. Griping at her was nothing compared to making her think I was going to disintegrate her with my wrist blaster, after all.
Which is totally something I felt guilty about doing in hindsight, but damn had that little ruse been fun and effective.
“That’s not…”
“All I see in front of me is somebody who’s crying and feeling bad for herself. You’ve been given an opportunity. A second chance. How many people out there lost something like you did? How many of them would kill for the opportunity to be able to get back what they lost? You’ve been given that opportunity, even if it isn’t quite as good as what you had once upon a time, and you’re throwing it away. If you’re going to be like that then maybe it’s not worth my time retraining you at all.”
I turned and walked. And prayed she wouldn’t figure out what I was doing here. She’d already picked up on me trying to piss her off to motivate her once, but the plain truth was if she was going to keep second-guessing herself then there really was no point in trying to train her.
Ultimately she needed motivation. Ultimately that wasn’t something I could provide. It had to come from within her.
I really hated Dr. Lana for doing this to her. For taking a woman who’d been such a supremely confident hero and turning her into this insecure person who was afraid to even train to take on the world. And that line of thinking made the proverbial lightbulb go off over my head.
I wheeled around. She stared at me with a combination of anger and resignation. Anger that I was doing this to her. Resignation that I wasn’t done yet when she thought she might finally be getting a reprieve.
“There’s one more thing you need to think about when you consider whether or not you want to go through the difficulty of training,” I said. “Because I’m only going to give you this final opportunity. There’s no more chances. No more second guessing. I’m tired of flying you at giant lizards to try and motivate you, and I’m really not good at motivational speeches that don’t involve pointing the barrel of my wrist blaster at someone. So trust me when I say this is it.”
She swallowed. Nodded. And I realized that a little bit of my inner villain was coming out to play. It’d been awhile since I’d done something like this. Mostly because I’d been doing the whole heroic thing around Fialux lately to keep her happy. But it felt good to get back to some of my more villainous impulses.
I walked over to her again. Got down right in front of her. Like very close. Our noses were almost touching. So close that we could have kissed, but that wasn’t the kind of distraction I needed right now.
“If heroic impulses aren’t enough to convince you that you need to get back in the saddle and train then maybe a little bit of villainy will help you out.”
“Villainy?” she asked. “But I’m not…”
I put a finger on her lips. This wasn’t a moment for talking. It wasn’t a moment for her to talk, at least. No, this was a moment for me to talk, and those were some of my favorite moments.
“Consider this,” I said, sighing because I was about to reveal something I’d been hoping to keep secret for just a little bit longer. “I have a sneaking suspicion that Dr. Lana is still out there. Still lurking out there somewhere waiting to cause us trouble. Now ask yourself what you want to happen the next time she appears. Do you want to wait for me to come and rescue you? Do you want to be a damsel in distress? Or do you want to have access to one of my wrist blasters that you can shove down her throat and disintegrate her from the inside out?”
“What happened to all that talk about how you were almost certain she was dead? What did you find in that landfill?”
“I didn’t find much of anything,” I said.
“I knew it!” she said. “I knew you were hiding that from me!”
“You knew?”
“Well I suspected. I mean what do you think I am, an idiot? She’s a villain in Starlight City. They don’t tend to stay dead.”
I snorted. “You’ve got that right. Not for a lack of trying on my part, but that means if she does show up again you’re the one who can do the disintegrating!”
Her eyes went wide. Obviously she was having a little bit of trouble conceiving of a world where she’d ever want to do something like that. She’d been such a goody two shoes. She’d held to her moral high ground for so long even being around me. But I could see the emotion working behind her eyes. I could tell she was thinking of how easy it would be to slither down from that moral high ground.
Then her eyes narrowed. I could see the villainy taking hold. Maybe not by much. Maybe it was just a teensy little bit, but it was there. She was pissed, and I could use that.
If it took changing what she was to get her to finally see reason then I’d do it. Besides, the thought of getting the world’s greatest hero to join me so we could rule the city as lovers was kinda hot. I imagined scenarios with a lot of leather in our fashion choices.
“I train and we vaporize Dr. Lana the next time she shows her face?” Fialux asked.
“That’s the plan,” I said. “I just wasn’t going to mention all the particulars about what I planned on doing to her once we found her because you tend to get squeamish about that sort of thing.”
Fialux held her wrist out. It was a pose I recognized all too well. A pose she knew all too well herself because I’d used it on her on more than a few occasions.
She was my miming holding out a good old-fashioned wrist blaster and blowing her enemies to kingdom come, or whatever the hell was waiting for people on the other side of death.
I was pretty sure it was just the sweet release of oblivion, but you could never be too sure. I was fully willing to admit there wasn’t enough evidence one way or another to make a definitive case.
"Be still my heart," I said.
She looked at me and cocked an eyebrow. And suddenly she was curious rather than pissed off, but for that moment she’d been holding her imaginary wrist blaster out and imagining what it would feel like to have Dr. Lana in her crosshairs. For that moment she’d looked downright villainous.
"What?" she asked.
"You looked like you were ready to murder and kill indiscriminately to achieve your goals,” I said. "It was a beautiful moment."
She blinked a couple of times in surprise. Looked down at her wrist. Took in her whole pose. She blushed when she realized exactly what she'd been doing.
I figured that was the end of her little brush with villainy, but her whole look was still the epitome of “grim determination."
Like I'm talking I probably should’ve snapped her picture and uploaded it to the definition on any and all online dictionaries that supported that sort of thing so people could get an idea of what it really meant.
"I don't care anymore," she said. "Not with Dr. Lana, at least. She’s taken everything from me. She’s tried to kill both of us on multiple occasions. She's up to something that probably ends with world domination, and I’m not letting that happen. I want to make sure she can’t hurt anyone ever again. Assuming she shows up again.”
I reached up and wiped a tear from my eye. Sure it was a touch melodramatic, but it also perfectly encompassed how I felt. I wondered if this was how parents felt when they saw their kids taking their first stumbling steps.
Fialux might still think of herself as a hero, but it was clear that if her heroics were rubbing off on me just a little bit then the opposite was also true. She was picking up a touch of the villainous antihero from yours truly, and I couldn't be prouder.
"Now come on," she said. "I need to learn how to do this stuff, because I'm going to teach her a lesson she's never going to forget."
“Now that's where you're very wrong," I said.
"I am?"
I held up my hand. I didn't have a wrist blaster there, but a quick click on the nice clicky button at my side made it appear. I held it out, dialed down the settings j
ust a bit, and grinned.
I fired a blast across the room and it splashed harmlessly against the wall on the opposite side. At this low setting it was mostly a cool laser light show. The kind of thing people usually paid for so they could have some recreational fun and listen to some Floyd.
"We're both going to teach her a lesson," I said. "And by the time we’re done with that bitch there’s not going to be anything left of her to come at us ever again."
Fialux grinned. A wide predatory grin that told me exactly how she felt about that, and it was downright villainous.
I could get used to this new villainous streak in my best girl.
18
Getting Good
"Again!"
Fialux tore across the flight gym. Her arm was outstretched. She had a grin on her face. The sort of grin that said I wasn't going to like it when she made contact.
And make contact she did. Only I turned at the last moment. I grabbed that outstretched hand and used her momentum to flip her around onto her back.
The air between her and the ground shimmered as both a shield and an antigravity field sprang up under her to prevent her from getting seriously injured. She looked up at me with a growl, but instead of stopping and pouting like she had a month ago when she was having trouble getting used to the idea of not having her true powers she simply scrambled up. Shot for the ceiling. Did exactly what I'd told her and put some distance between her and whatever the hell had just bested her.
Sure in this case it was just me, not some villain trying to make a name for themselves, but she was learning. She was treating me like I was someone who was trying my best to kill her.
She’d admitted to me in the breakfast nook a couple of days ago that it wasn't all that difficult for her to pretend. Not when she had so many memories of me trying to take her out that were still fresh.
I smiled. I wasn’t going to make this easy on her. The training wheels had long since come off. I fired my wrist blaster. It went off in a rainbow of different colors. One of the side effects of using a less than lethal setting.
Hey, I figured if I was going to have a setting on my wrist blaster that was essentially a light show then I’d create something that would impress the most stoned out stoner in the world.
Light splashed off the ceiling and the walls as she tried to avoid me, and then at the last moment she jerked to the side. So instead of firing where she was going to be I ended up firing where she'd been a moment ago, but wasn't now.
No, now she was coming right at me. Clever girl.
I retrained my wrist blaster and fired off a couple more shots, but she dodged from side to side like an expert.
I smiled. It was clear that her previous experience with the whole flight thing was helping her out. I figured it was sort of like transferring to a new programming language. All the logic was the same. All you really had to do was figure out the specifics of how to instruct the computer to make that logic work.
In this case all the logic of flying on your own was pretty much the same. All the maneuvers were the same. It was just a matter of figuring out how to translate all of the flight experience she had into flying with my toys rather than using her natural born gift that had been taken from her.
“That’s it! You’re kicking some ass now!” I shouted.
“I’m gonna kick your ass!” she shouted between midair acrobatics.
I grinned. Now she was learning. She was feeling the anger and using it.
The biggest problem I'd had to overcome was her habit of barreling straight at me. A holdover from the days when she'd been naïve and invulnerable, and it’d taken me dialing down the shields and the antigrav to give her a jolt whenever she landed to break her of that habit.
She’d never felt pain before, but she sure as hell responded to pain stimulus like every other living creature in the world once she got a taste. Now that she could feel pain she sensibly tried to avoid it.
A harsh lesson? Maybe, but she was the one who decided to take flight lessons from a villain. Anything that happened to her after that was her own fault as far as I was concerned.
I should’ve been doing a better job of avoiding pain myself. I was distracted from training right up until I felt a fist connect to my jaw. That brought me back to the flight gym.
The inertial dampeners and shields came on which saved me from being too terribly hurt, but the physical reality of suddenly finding my head being jerked to the side by a punch from somebody flying at high speed was enough to daze me. The next thing I knew I was on the ground with stars dancing in front of my vision.
I looked around. I was on my ass and Fialux grinned down at me.
"No fair," I said.
"How is that not fair?" she asked. "It's not like it's my fault you allowed yourself to get distracted!"
I opened my mouth to tell her it was precisely her fault. That I'd been thinking about her and she'd taken advantage even though she had no way of knowing I was thinking about her. Then I thought about how ridiculous that sounded and I stuck my tongue out at her instead.
"Again," I said.
Fialux sighed and rolled her eyes. "Are you serious? I'm getting hungry."
"Oh yeah?" I asked. "The next time I'm fighting off a giant irradiated lizard or beating back an alien invasion out in the Kuiper belt I'll make sure to tell the lizards or the aliens that I'm getting a little peckish and I need to stop for a lunch break."
She gave me a funny look. "What was that last bit there?"
"What last bit?" I asked.
I suddenly realized I’d said something about aliens which was a subject I tried to avoid considering I had more than a sneaking suspicion it might be closer to her origins than she’d be comfortable discussing.
Not to mention there was always the possibility I'd inadvertently beaten back her family coming for a visit or something out there at the edge of the heliosphere. I didn't think that was terribly likely considering an entire spaceship full of people who were powered up like Fialux would give me a very bad day indeed.
Sure there wasn't really a concept of day or night out there at the edge of the sun's influence, but you get my point.
Besides, there was always a possibility she drew her powers from our strange yellow sun or something like that. In which case a bunch of aliens coming from the middle of space where they couldn’t bathe in the light of our yellow sun for years at a time to charge up might not exactly be powered up to over nine thousand when I found them getting ready to cause trouble at the edge of the heliopause.
"No seriously," she said. "Did you just say something about aliens?"
"So what if I did?" I asked, looking away. I didn’t like where this conversation was going.
"Wait. So you're saying aliens are real?"
"Enough of this," I said, desperately wanting to change the subject. "We need to go on to your next bit of training."
"Fine," she said, but her tone told me it was anything but fine. That she was anything but happy about me avoiding the subject.
"We’re going to do some hand to hand now," I said.
"Do we have to?" she said with a roll of her eyes. “I thought I was pretty good at that back when we were fighting.”
“That’s because you were punching well above your weight class back then,” I said. “And thank you so much for reminding me of all those times you kicked my ass. That’s a great way to make me go easy on you. I know this isn't your favorite, but it has to be done.”
"And if I agree to do it then you'll tell me more about the space aliens?"
I put my hands on my hips. "Come on Selena. Stop yanking my chain."
"What are you talking about?" she asked. "Who said anything about yanking anyone's chain?"
"You're obviously making fun of me here," I said. "And I don't appreciate it!"
"How am I making fun of you?" she asked.
I looked her up and down. Made a gesture that encompassed everything that was her.
"Come on. You
. Your powers. Obviously you came here from another world. Sure when I was trying to find your secret identity the records were pretty convincing. They went back pretty far. Birth records and everything."
"Because I was born here," she said in a tone that said I was acting like an idiot.
And maybe I was, but I figured if we were finally going to have this conversation then we should go ahead and finally have the fuck out of this conversation.
"Please Selena," I said. "I might not be the greatest at interacting with people, but I am the greatest villainous genius this world has ever known. And that means I know there's no way a human can have the kind of powers you have. There's got to be something extraterrestrial going on with you even if you do have human parts on the inside now thanks to whatever Dr. Lana did to you."
Now it was her turn to put her hands on her hips. "If I have human parts that's because that's what I am. Human."
“Pull the other one,” I said.
She sighed. "My powers started to manifest when I got to college. That’s all I know. It was the weirdest thing. It was right around when I turned eighteen, and I figured it was just one of those weird things where you don't get your superpowers until you become an adult or something. It’s not like there’s a lack of weirdos with powers in this world. You used to fight them weekly.”
She had a point there. Fighting people who’d just manifested their powers and decided they were coming at the queen used to occupy a not insignificant portion of my time on the job.
I arched an eyebrow. "When you got to the university, you say?"
"Yeah, why?" she asked.
"Oh nothing," I lied.
Really it was the most interesting thing I think she'd ever admitted to me. Her powers had only manifested when she got to college? Particularly when she got to a university where there was an entire department dedicated to the sort of super research that could create a super being like her?
Was it possible she wasn't from another world like I’d suspected? Was it possible there was something else going on here? That there was a reason Dr. Lana was taking such a particular interest in her?