by Smith, Maren
It all came to her in a rush, at that moment, with the innocent bystander, who happened to be a chihuahua, still in her arms. The act itself, of picking the little dog up and flying with it twenty feet down the street to keep it from being run down by Charlatan’s flame-cycle, triggered all her suppressed memories and her latent training. It also brought online, just in the nick of time for the chihuahua, the hidden Zaxian capabilities that made her skin invulnerable and her body lighter than air when she wanted them to be. Really that happened just in the nick of time for Ultragirl as well, because otherwise she would have ended up as roadkill, too, along with the adorable dog currently yapping its head off and seeming frankly hardly worth the trouble.
The flying saved her, but in that moment she did, instinctively, also make her skin into the equivalent of granite. She didn’t do so, however, to protect herself from Charlatan, who had zoomed away with his signature flame-trail marking his path behind him on the city street, probably on his way to do battle with Virtueman, his arch-nemesis.
No, Susan Corday, who would henceforth have to think of herself also both as He’Vopra’Mertuq of the Fifth Zaxian Hereditary Cohort (violently, not to say explosively, decommissioned but still in notional existence thanks to the Universal Perpetuity clause in its charter) and as the much easier to remember Ultragirl, turned her skin to stone to keep herself from blushing. She had, after all, just remembered not only that she had powers, but also where her powers came from.
Raised by a conservative couple in a midwestern suburb, with an ordinary small-town high school education and a year of college at a sleepy, rural liberal arts school to which hook-up culture had come only as a rumor, Susan had acquired a set of values and feelings concerning her lovely young body that did not fit particularly well with her just-discovered superhero abilities. Those abilities, it seemed, arose directly from sexual stimulation. The blush she had fended off had begun to rise as she understood, fully and embarrassingly, that the sudden manifestation of her powers that day had a great deal to do with the fact that she had masturbated for the very first time the previous night, and had stopped, guiltily, before she had brought herself to orgasm.
Zaxians, her newly-unlocked memory told her, resemble humans in every respect: Susan for example looked precisely like a blonde, blue-eyed midwesterner. Her heart-shaped face, slim hips, and B-cup breasts had attracted her share of casual boyfriends, from whom she had received a good deal of kissing and a moderate degree of fondling.
Thankfully, she realized now, for those boyfriends, no one had tried to take things farther—including Susan. She suspected as she thought back upon her make-out sessions that the nice boys she had chosen had kept their desires in check more in fear of rejection than out of the respect for her modesty that midwestern boys were still supposed to feel. Susan herself, on the other hand, had refrained from encouraging more advanced caresses for complex reasons of her own.
She hadn’t invited these boys, for example, to remove her bra, although her nipples tingled and stood straight up into the nylon of the conservative garment, and Susan sometimes felt nearly desperate to know what a man’s fingers, or even his tongue, would feel like there. She kept from telling them they could do that, could initiate her into the lewd mysteries of sex, not so much because her foster mother had taught her that nice girls didn’t allow that until marriage as because the need between her thighs got so strong, the ache so intense, that she feared her own ability to keep herself in check.
That instinct, it turned out now, had quite possibly saved the life of Billy Taylor, the only boy whom she had almost told she wanted to go all the way with, senior year of high school. If she had given in to her desire, the consequences for Billy would almost certainly have been severe: as he got Susan more aroused, her powers would have awakened in a completely uncontrolled situation, and she might have injured him without intending it in the slightest. If he had brought her to orgasm, she might have ripped the molecules in his body apart without even realizing what she did.
Zaxian females, Susan now recalled—though the process by which she acquired the information did not much resemble memory in the human sense, involving as it did information coded into her DNA—could mate only with Zaxian males, or with males of other species capable of withstanding the onslaught of their physical and psychic strength. Only sexual stimulation could rouse within a Zaxian female the Zaxforce that gave her that strength. Since there had to the knowledge of her species ever existed only two other species who fell into this class, and both of them had gone extinct even before Susan (aka He’Vopra’Mertuq) had become the last survivor of the Zaxian race, she faced a complicated, and probably lonely, career in the superhero world it seemed she would now join.
The indication that she would have no choice but to serve the planet where she had grown up had, after all, just appeared in the form of a robot hovering off to her left.
“Greetings from the Council of Paranormal Entities,” it said in a voice that probably could have been made to sound more natural, but had received autotuning in order to minimize the unnerving effect of a human voice emerging from a propeller-driven metal barrel. “Will you please follow me?”
Susan put away the blush-causing thoughts about the source of her superhuman abilities for the moment.
“Do I have a choice?” she inquired.
“You do not,” the robot replied, “unless you wish to be declared a threat to civil order and imprisoned.”
Susan sighed. “Alright, I’ll come with you.” She put the chihuahua down, and it ran away, still yapping wildly, to an owner who had just sat up after being leveled, along with everyone else aside from Ultragirl, as Charlatan’s flame-cycle had passed.
“Paranormal readings from this sector,” the robot said, “indicate that you may have flight capabilities. If that is the case, we can travel that way to council headquarters.”
Susan’s mouth twisted to the side as she thought for a moment. She had flown for the first time only a few moments before, and done it entirely by instinct. She didn’t feel terribly confident she could produce the same results of her conscious volition, but the stored DNA memory seemed to be saying she wouldn’t have much trouble. Ultragirl decided in that moment that she wanted to be counted in the category of brash quick-to-act superheroes like Zap and Swiftarrow, rather than that of thoughtful ones, along the lines of Virtueman, Captain Wonder, and (Susan’s personal favorite) Nightprince.
“I’ll fly,” she said, and launched herself twenty feet into the air with her hands above her, just the way the memories told her to do. Zaxians flew by turning their bodies lighter than air and then using the momentum of their appendages—usually their hands—to shape directional vectors.
Susan had hoped to outpace the robot, but he, she, or it gamely rose with her, just to her right.
“The council’s landing pad is directly ahead of you, at a hypotenusal distance of approximately one half mile,” the flying trash barrel said, rather unhelpfully.
Everyone knew where the Council of Paranormal Entities had its headquarters. The tallest building in New Lancaster had CPE emblazoned across its five uppermost stories, after all, and the council’s Electrojets took off from their landing pad several times a day with a whoosh that could be heard all over midtown.
The next thirty seconds or so, during which Ultragirl rapidly got used to flying—it couldn’t really be called learning, since it seemed her body had learned how to fly the instant she grabbed the chihuahua—proved some of the most interesting of her life. The rushing of the air past her body, inadequately clad, she quickly realized, for the resulting temperature drop, disconcerted her far less than the other new sensations that immediately gripped her.
She automatically—DNA memory again kicking in—adjusted the composition of her skin to compensate for the cold, so that feeling went away in a moment. What did not go away, but instead grew, so that the uncomfortable sensation of blushing averted at the last instant also added itself to th
e nearly overwhelming emotional stew, was the sexual arousal between her thighs, dampening her panties in the most humiliating way even as she flew towards the most important meeting of her life.
The changes she made to her biology, in fact, by increasing her metabolic rate five thousand times or so, made the problem in her panties worse. Susan, unaware that she would become a superhero later that day, had worn her usual black nylon bikini panties under her usual jeans, with a blue fashion tee loosely tucked in. She would, she realized now, need to ask some at the CPE to design some special underwear for Ultragirl, because as she flew towards their headquarters she began to worry that the spreading warmth of her sexual excitement might actually make a humiliating spot on the gusset of her jeans by the time she arrived.
Possibly worse—depending on whether the wet spot manifested itself or not—the same metabolic process that protected her skin from the cold and the dust in the air made her nipples much more susceptible to stiffening when she became aroused, and Susan could feel them poking into the fabric of her bralette so perkily that she knew beyond any doubt she would arrive with the signs of her mortifying condition pointing straight at whatever fellow superheroes greeted her arrival.
Worst of all, though, were the thoughts that crowded into her mind, arising in the jarring new combination of a conservative midwestern upbringing and the DNA memories of what it meant to be a female Zaxian warrior. As a biological proposition alone, He’Vopra’Mertuq needed it bad, and as soon as possible. She needed to be ridden long and hard by a rigid penis, to cry out her climax and gather the superhuman capabilities within her that came at their fullest only with orgasm—as many as possible, though they threatened to tear both her and her partner molecule from molecule.
The power she had gained from playing with herself yesterday had almost gone and—Susan realized now—would barely get her to the CPE landing pad. She would need a fucking, or at least a furtive pussy-wank, if she wanted more capacity to demonstrate her powers. That thought left her needing to fend off another blush, as she rose at last over the edge of the broad expanse at the top of the skyscraper to see the gathered, waiting electrojets like something straight out of the movies and TV shows they made about the council’s world-saving deeds.
The Zaxian inside her needed to lose her virginity as soon as possible, preferably to a man she wouldn’t kill as she came under his cock. Her biology demanded it. As a cultural proposition, however, Susan Corday knew—had always known, despite also knowing that the notion was in fact both incorrect and harmful—that a good girl like herself didn’t want to have sex, let alone be bent over for a pounding from a man’s long, thick, hard penis.
“Greetings, super,” said the big man in the black, skin-tight suit and the cape, who stood at the brink of the landing pad as if he weren’t 1500 feet above the ground. “What do you call yourself?”
Chapter 2
The girl, who couldn’t be more than twenty, if that, seemed to land with more force than she wanted to. She stumbled just a bit, and Bob almost stepped forward to help her, but decided against it when she glared up at him, instantly righting herself.
That was when he noticed her nipples, right after he got a full impression of how pretty she was. Elfin blonde, a class of beauty which happened to represent Bob’s weakness, hardly began to describe this girl. The extremely evident aroused state of her breasts under her blue t-shirt didn’t help at all with the need to stay professional, especially given the feisty expression in the girl’s eyes.
“Ultragirl,” she said. “Or, if you prefer…” She gave forth a string of syllables in an obviously nonhuman language, something like He-va-pa-ran-mer-tooch. Bob, who had heard his share of alien names in the course of his career with the Council of Paranormal Entities, found this one rather impressive—or at least relatively long. Zap’s native name, after all, was just Zap, and he could take down an asteroid with a lightning-bolt. Ultragirl then did what Bob supposed must represent her best at increasing the grandeur by adding, “Of the Fifth Zaxian Hereditary Cohort.”
“Oh, the fifth,” Bob said as if he had had dealings with all five Zaxian Hereditary Cohorts, but found the fifth the most worthy of whatever galactically urgent mission the Zaxians (of whom Bob had never actually heard) had seen fit to give their hereditary cohorts.
For a moment the girl—Ultragirl, Bob tried to make himself think, though with little success since there really didn’t seem much ultra about her at the moment—stared back at him with a look of intense concentration. Having seen the expression before on many new supers’ faces, something between anger and constipation, Bob knew she must be attempting to use her powers, though he couldn’t think of the slightest reason she might have to do so, unless she meant to destroy CPE headquarters, which seemed a more foolish sort of intention than her intelligent blue eyes could hide.
Still, Bob had almost decided to assemble the on-duty squad (consisting besides himself of Clearstream and Tigerwoman, now that Virtueman had headed off for his one-on-one with Charlatan), when the reason for her expression became obvious. Ultragirl’s cheeks went bright pink as it became clear both that she had run out of whatever paranormal energy she used to fuel her superhuman abilities and that she had used the last drops of that energy to keep the blush at bay.
Bob felt bad for her, but he had a feeling Ultragirl didn’t want to be patronized, so he waited for her either to acknowledge the difficulty in which she found herself or to try to brush it off. Her choice would tell him a great deal about her character, which represented the topic he most needed to explore, as the superhero making first contact with this new colleague.
She tried to brush it off—at first, anyway. “Greetings, Nightprince. I am hon—”
“Call me Bob,” said Bob.
Ultragirl stopped mid-word, her mouth hanging open.
“Do you have a real name?” he asked, hoping to get beyond whatever facade she meant to put up to keep other superheroes—and supervillains, of course—guessing.
“Um,” she said. The blush, which had receded a little when she began what she had clearly intended to be a formal presentation of whatever credentials she thought she could muster, returned in full force. A little crease developed between her eyes and, to Bob’s astonishment, Ultragirl actually bit her lip. What the hell was up with this girl?
Her eyes traveled downward, surprising him even more. Was Ultragirl checking him out?
“Susan,” she mumbled. “Susan Corday.”
She raised her eyes to his again, and the pink stain on her cheek spread a little more. Bob could understand the girl feeling nervous, especially if she had just run out of paranormal energy, but things had begun to get ridiculous.
“Well, Susan,” he said slowly, “welcome to the CPE. I’m going to be in charge of you, for the next few…”
He stopped speaking, because Ultragirl had just squirmed in front of him, like a little girl who needed the potty. Her eyes dropped to the concrete of the launch deck, and her face reached a shade of crimson Bob didn’t feel sure he had ever seen before.
“Do you…” he began, hardly believing he was saying it, and halting mid-sentence before continuing since he half-expected her to interrupt him with a request to be shown to the nearest facilities. Ultragirl kept biting her lip, though, and looking at the ground, so he finished, “… need to use the bathroom?”
Susan—for Bob found he couldn’t keep thinking of her as Ultragirl under present circumstances, let alone whatever that regal-sounding alien name had been—shook her head, miserably. Now Bob had to contend with the Nightprince side of himself, because that alpha-male had just gotten aroused in a major way by this beautiful girl’s embarrassed and maybe even submissive behavior. He had no doubt of her feistiness, but if Susan Corday hadn’t been a super Bob’s sub radar would have been clanging alarm bells. As it was, he felt himself getting hard in his tight black hyperspandex. Thankfully, because being Nightprince involved rather a lot of this kind of thing, his suit ha
d a self-adjusting sleeve to handle the issue with a minimum of visibility. His night-black suit hid an erection superbly, and Susan would have to get very close before she noticed she had made him hard.
That thought made the issue, which remained a distraction despite its efficient containment, a good deal more serious. Bob had to push away the thought of telling Ultragirl she needed to kneel down and, yes, get very close indeed to the cock she had gotten so hard.
She stopped her head mid-shake, then, and said, as if the idea had just occurred to her, and also somehow as if she found it very troubling, “Actually, yes, please, Bob?”
As Susan lifted her face again to meet his gaze, Bob watched her swallow hard, and saw her get what seemed a bit more command of her thoughts.
“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Follow me.”
Still quite mystified, and also still rather strongly aroused, he led the way quickly across the concrete deck to the ready-room that occupied the other half of the CPE building’s roof.
“Where do you come from, Susan Corday?” he asked as they walked turning around a little to look at her. Really, he just needed an excuse to see the pretty, blushing face again. Bob hadn’t had a crush on another super in a long time, and he wasn’t sure he liked the way one seemed to be coming towards him like a freight train now, but he didn’t think it could do much harm to watch Ultragirl blush, especially when she seemed in such need of guidance.
“Um,” she said. “Before? Or… before before?” Her eyes, fixed on the approaching door of the ready room, darted to his face—his craggily handsome face, as the novelizations always liked to put it.
Bob laughed. “Where did you grow up?”
“Oh. Iowa, after… after my parents found me.” Her face turned a little troubled, now, as if thinking about the contrast between her otherworldly heritage and her life on earth held a special conflict for her.
“Did you know? That you were an alien?”