by Matt Carter
“You guys still need to work on your acting, so we thought this time it would help to get an honest reaction. Next time we rotate a drummer in, you’ll know what to expect.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Look, you did great out there. I’m sorry we didn’t keep you in the loop the whole way, but from now on, we’ll tell you everything.”
“You really think I did great out there?”
“Are you kidding? The people feared you almost as much as they loved me for wailing on you. You’re a media darling. If it weren’t for keeping our secrets, these two lovely ladies would be singing songs to their people tonight about how they had the honor of pleasuring the greatest hero and the greatest villain in America, isn’t that right?” he said. Though his was still busy, mine confirmed his point.
“So, feeling any more relaxed?”
“More, yeah. Getting better every minute actually,” I said, meaning every word. Now that I knew that what happened to Carnivore was all part of the show, my worries started to fade away. They would take away all the real bad guys, while the rest of us would remain the core. It made perfect sense.
“Good, because tonight’ll be a lot more fun if you’re relaxed.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, sipping from an ice-cold bottle of water my masseuse brought from a nearby refrigerator.
“Yeah. Because tonight, we’re gonna party like superheroes!”
I had to take a quick trip back to Death Island to clean up (gingerly, since I was missing more skin than I’d started the day with) and get dressed. The others were mostly ready by the time I arrived. Circus and Trojan Fox had dummied up some fake IDs for us, in case they were needed, but I didn’t think they would be. Trojan Fox and Geode were over twenty-one, Nevermore and I could pass with a little work, and Odigjod and Circus could change their appearance at will.
Besides, we had the heroes with us.
We waited for their call in the rec room, not having the appearance of a typical group that would normally go clubbing. Geode was dressed and groomed so well that I was sure he’d break a lot of girls’ and guys’ hearts tonight. Trojan Fox looked disgruntled, in a short dress I’m sure Nevermore insisted she wear. Nevermore looked amazing, though with all of her tattoos pulled back into an ornate (and very busy) tramp stamp, I barely recognized her with all the skin showing. She looked used to the club scene. Circus and Odigjod, both in human form, looked like kids about to knock over a candy store. Come to think of it, I probably did too.
We’d spent so much time working that it was finally time for us to enjoy the fruits of our labor.
The Tri-Hole the heroes sent put us in the back of an empty delivery truck. Once we were all through, the door at the back of the truck opened. A portly, middle-aged man whose head was replaced by a clear crystal skull with glowing red eyes stood there. I’m sure if he’d been able to, he would have been smiling.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Crystal Skull said theatrically, his booming, Spanish-accented voice almost covering the heavy clicking sound his jaw made. “Welcome to my club!”
Excitement flowed through us all. I’m sure some of them had hoped—I know I did—that we’d be going here, but I had no serious expectations that we’d actually be going here.
Stepping out of the van, we all looked up and smiled. Nevermore squealed, wrapped her arms around Trojan Fox, and kissed her on the cheek. For her part, even Trojan Fox looked impressed.
The large neon sign before us read MODESTO’S KEEP. The actual club floated about thirty feet off the ground, probably using the same kind of anti-grav generator that kept The Pearl afloat. A series of spiral steel stairways connected it to the ground, while searchlights beneath it lit the club up as bright as day, even though the sky above us was black (well, as black as the sky above Los Angeles can get at night, which isn’t all that black). A small mob of paparazzi stood by each stairway, some of them fighting with security when they saw a limo pull up. A line of people looking to get in stretched more than a block, many wearing capes and masks in fashion inspired by the heroes.
If they only knew what it was like to wear the real thing.
Crystal Skull led us to the VIP entrance, a Tri-Hole set in an elaborate iron frame on the ground and into the club proper.
It was everything I’d ever imagined. Booming music, darkness broken up by swirling colored lights. Beautiful, famous people grinding and dancing, passing drinks and drugs around. Since the club was owned by an ex-hero, there were plenty of supers employed to keep the theme going: scantily clad girls in cages changing their skin colors with the beat of the music, a telekinetic bartender putting on a show as he mixed six drinks at once in midair, balls of colored light forming and floating lazily from the chest of the DJ.
“It’s like heaven,” I said.
“More like the Gates of Home,” Odigjod said wistfully.
“Come on, guys, we’ve earned this,” I said, leading the way.
There was plenty of cash to go around after the Amber City job. We had a VIP room all to ourselves, so after purchasing a couple bottles of champagne and some shots, we hit the dance floor. I danced with Nevermore for a while, and even Trojan Fox (though her new legs were top notch, she wasn’t a very good dancer).
A lot of the heroes there were part of Kayfabe, so I got to hang out and dance with most of them. True to what Ghost Girl (dammit) said, Shooting Star propositioned me after only one dance, nibbling on my ear and rubbing her hand against the front of my pants. I told her I’d think about it before making her jealous by moving on to dance with another hero. When Adam and Adriana showed up, they introduced me around to a number of their friends. Actors, athletes, even people just famous for being famous, like Erika Edge, professional heiress to the Edge Industries fortune. And to my surprise, she wasn’t nearly as much a blonde bimbo as she appeared on TV (well, not so much a bimbo, but she was every bit as blonde).
It was hard to fully grasp the fact that I was really Apex Strike, the world’s most famous supervillain. But I managed as best I could, every so often passing a sly wink to Adam.
After a few drinks my head began to swim, and the drugs that everyone was passing around started to look good. Pot, E, coke (Adam’s favorite), a bunch of pills I couldn’t identify, even this blue powder called “Montage” that people would sometimes pinch into their eyes. The others were already digging into these. Aside from taking a few hits off a joint, I didn’t really experiment with that stuff. Though I was tempted, too many old PSAs swam through my head.
After I don’t know how many hours of this, I had to take a break at the bar, looking at the parade of flesh and fame before me and considering how lucky I was.
This shouldn’t have been my life. I should’ve been back home, trying to cram for one test or another, filling out college applications. Maybe Dad would have finally forced me to get a weekend job, or Mom would have given in and talked him into getting me a used car. There were a lot of maybes with that life, but one thing was for sure: if I hadn’t put on the cape and accidentally killed Icicle Man, I would still be a nobody.
Now I had power. I had more money than I could ever spend. I was famous.
I had everything.
Well, almost everything, but that almost could still be remedied.
Everybody else had paired up nicely. Trojan Fox danced to a slow song with her archnemesis, Photon, looking every bit the reject from a 90s boy band; Geode was making out with some basketball player; Circus somehow seemed to have stolen the attention of one of the cocktail waitresses; and even Odigjod sat at a table chatting up Erika Edge.
Nevermore, however, was nowhere to be seen, but Circus told me he’d seen her go up to the VIP room. With all the excitement going on, I was craving her… I had to have her right now.
Sex with us wasn’t a regular thing, but when we did it, it was a lot of fun. I was learning to go longer each time, and she’d stopped hurting me after the first couple times. The way she sometimes got teary and wound up ask
ing me how good she was afterwards was confusing, but it was still sex (inventive too, damn she had an imagination), and she was so hot I wasn’t going to complain.
I walked upstairs to our VIP room, found the door closed. It was too loud to knock, so I just opened it.
Nevermore was in there, all right, moaning and pinned to a wall by Silver Shrike, his pants around his ankles as he impaled her differently from how he’d impaled Carnivore.
“FUCK… ME… SUPER… HERO!” she cried out as he pounded her.
Morningstar, his wife and Nevermore’s archnemesis, sat on one of the couches nearby, one hand moving vigorously under her skirt, the other holding up her phone to record the scene.
I slammed the door. I felt like I was going to be sick—or explode—it was hard to tell the difference. I realized I’d crushed the door handle without thinking, and stormed down the hall.
Maybe you should go back. If this were like porn, they’d let you join. God knows Morningstar looked in the mood, and that is how things work in the cape and mask world, right?
I stormed down the hall, anger mixing with betrayal as I tried to get the image of them out of my head. Fine, if that’s what she wants to do, two can play at that game…
Shooting Star was still out on the dance floor. I found her and pulled her towards me, kissing her deeply. Following her lead from earlier, I reached under her almost non-existent skirt and found her not to be wearing panties. The way she cooed let me know I was doing something right.
“You have a VIP room?” I asked.
She nodded, not seeming to mind how clumsy my fingers were.
“Let’s go,” I said.
She nodded again, leading on. Her VIP room was smaller than ours, but just as plush. After we made out for a few minutes, she pulled a small vial of blue powder from her purse.
“Do this first,” she said, taking a pinch of it and dropping it in her eyes.
“Montage?”
“It’s good stuff, my word… it makes time speed up, slow down, only lets you see the good times, doesn’t let anything feel bad…”
She didn’t need another word to sell me on it. I took a pinch and dropped it directly into my eye. It dissolved quickly, burning like shampoo dripping into your eyes, and immediately transformed my entire whole world into a vague shade of blue. I almost didn’t think it was working until I realized that the music had slowed to a crawl. Shooting Star sauntered over to me, faintly glowing, dropping her top to the floor as she pushed me to the couch.
Then time skipped. She was riding me, screaming out words no good Christian girl like her should know as I slid in and out of her. Every nerve in my body felt like it was being pleasured.
Another time skip. I was naked, she was dressed and running out of the room, telling me to stay put. I didn’t know why, until she came back with her partner, Comet Girl.
I could get used to this.
#Supervillainy101: Addict Man
Nobody knows the true origin of the supervillain Addict Man, since by his very nature he was unreliable, but most seem to accept his usual story that some experimental chemicals at a meth lab exploded all over him, granting him superpowers.
On his own, he was just an ordinary junkie, but under the influence of different drugs he could unlock special abilities. Steroids gave him superstrength, meth gave him super speed, crack could make him burst into flames without killing him, LSD allowed him to alter the world around him in a number of bizarre and disturbing ways… I could go on, but you get the idea. He was hardly the most dangerous supervillain of the War on Villainy, but his low profile and ability to blend into homeless communities helped him elude the Protectors for a lot longer than he should have.
In the end, his powers were his ultimate downfall. While the various drugs he ingested, shot up, and snorted gave him powers, he still felt all the side effects that came along with them, often bungling the easiest jobs because he was too wasted. It made him a particularly unambitious villain, knocking over liquor and grocery stores instead of banks, making out with a few hundred dollars at most on a good day. He was ultimately captured by Locust Man in Denver, not in some epic struggle of wills, but with a needle in his arm and enough heroin in his blood to land him in a permanent vegetative state.
#LessonLearned: Drugs and superpowers don’t mix.
14
MONTAGE
I don’t remember a lot of the next months, but I do remember getting into a pretty easy routine.
Get up, shower, eat, take some pills to open my eyes, see if we have work that day, do it if we do, don’t if we don’t. Travel some. Work out some. Try to get laid. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s night somewhere in the world. Teleport over. Get drunk, get wasted, try to get laid again, go home, sleep, rinse and repeat.
We’d all gotten pretty good at it, and thanks to a steady supply of Montage, I didn’t even have to see anything that might make me feel bad.
Through the haze, there were jobs I do remember. Fights with the Protectors, “Vehicle” by the Ides of March blaring over my suit’s sound system as if on a loop. There were Black Cape Jobs; the kinds of jobs where they didn’t fight us, evil for the sake of evil because we had to sometimes win in order for people to fear us. Those were the easiest. Empty out a diamond mine in a developing nation here, break up a group of protestors there, hospitalize some pesky reporters and environmentalists… stuff like that. Sometimes we’d get hurt, and those days sucked, but pop some painkillers and uppers and spend some time in a healing pod and you begin to forget what being hurt meant.
We went through drummers pretty quick. Moon Warrior and Biocide only lasted a mission each, same with that girl who could turn into a panther. The Zone Runner lasted a bit longer, even though to this day I still can’t quite tell you what zone running is. The longest-lasting drummer was a girl from Thailand called Backbreaker, but after two Black Cape Jobs and two hero fights, she was gone. Sometimes, when my head was clear and I was moderately sober, I hoped to see Showstopper, or Spasm, or Ghost Girl rotate in as a drummer, but then realizing what that meant, I would make myself wish to never see them again.
Thankfully those moments of clarity were few and far between. Partying all night and a whole lot of Montage let us keep the good times rolling. We clubbed in Hollywood and Amber City, Paris and Tokyo, London and Moscow. Wherever there were capes and parties to be found, we were there.
I hooked up with a lot of heroes during this time. Most of them were in Project Kayfabe, like Shooting Star, Comet Girl, Airburst, and Jenny Blade, but with some of their help I was even able to hook up with a couple who weren’t in on it, like Dark Corner and Sidewinder. I got selfies of myself with most of them naked, and even some signed trading cards. It got to be a pretty cool collection, one I looked forward to expanding. There were times I felt like showing it off to Nevermore to show her I didn’t need her anymore… and maybe I did, but it’s kind of hard to remember the down times while you’re on Montage, or if those memories I had of doing her again were really memories or just dreams or fantasies (really hoping me tweeting that dick pic was just a dream).
Montage does that to you.
The job I remember best, before everything started to clear again, was the last one. We were knocking over a museum somewhere, maybe in Berlin, maybe in Bombay, it’s hard to remember. All I remember is that it started with a B.
Anyway, we were all pretty strung out on little sleep and liquor and uppers and teleportation-lag, and were definitely not at our best. Nevermore was home sick with the flu (read: hangover), so it was up to the five of us plus whatever drummer we had at the time. I couldn’t tell you if they were a guy or a girl, but they threw lightning, I think, or maybe they could walk through walls, I forget.
Like clockwork, in came our archnemeses. It was harder to fight them than usual. My stomach kept roiling and my head would not stop pounding. Remembering the choreography was impossible. Our attacks were clumsy, Trojan Fox accidentally flew through a
building, Geode bent over vomiting so much and so hard that he caved in the roof of a parked car. I barely remembered half my lines.
We weren’t having fun.
Somewhere in my ear, I heard Helios and Fifty-Fifty simultaneously call out an early abort code. They sounded pissed, but I really didn’t care. I was just glad to get out of there early. Odigjod started taking everyone out. Circus was toying around with some hostages, being a real prick, when he suddenly started foaming at the mouth, collapsing to the ground in a seizure that stripped him of his cartoon form. A couple of the heroes stood around him, looking back and forth to each other like they didn’t know what to do.
Before they could force me to help, Odigjod took me home.
It was just me, Odigjod, Trojan Fox, and Geode in the Green Room after that, stripping off our costumes.
Somewhere, faintly I knew we were in trouble, but I was beyond caring by that point.
All I cared about was finding a place to puke. After that, I started to feel better.
#Supervillainy101: Nick Stone
Efforts at creating prisons for supervillains were attempted before the Tower, but most of them were abysmal failures. They were generally incapable of containing supers and were prone to constant breakouts. That was why, once the War on Villainy had been declared, the Gamemaster, ATHENA, Caveman, and a few of the Protectors’ other best technical minds got together and constructed the Tower to be the greatest and most inescapable prison ever created. Nobody knows where it is, or what it’s like on the inside, and unless you’ve got a really good lawyer, you’re not even gonna get a trial (not that if you do get a trial will you get out, as nobody has ever before).
Unless, maybe, you’re Nick Stone.
The man the media would dub Nick Stone (because his skin appeared to be made of stone and he had a prominent nick in his forehead) was discovered in 1986, wandering the Atacama Desert between Chile and Bolivia. He was naked, save for a few torn wires that led to probes buried deep in his stony flesh. Aside from being malnourished, dehydrated, and severely sun bleached, he bore multiple scars that indicated invasive medical experimentation and was covered in a faint trace of a powerful toxin authorities were unable to identify. When interviewed on his hospital bed, he claimed, in thick Danish, to have escaped from the Tower and its “miles and miles of smiles.” It was all he said, babbling and raving, and it was all he would say until he was healthy enough to jump to his death from his hospital room window.