We were only a few weeks into a new semester at Northwestern State University, just barely back to school, so we all kept running into people we half-knew. It wasn’t uncommon for students to peer quizzically at one another, squint just a little bit comically as they tried to place you, and ask something like “Hey, don’t I know you?”
But I got that sort of question more than most new students, I think. And it’s not just ‘cause of my, if I do say so myself, dark good looks and chiseled physique, no. I’ve got a secret.
“Hey, don’t I know you?” she asked, peering my way, glancing up from her phone to squint at me, head tilting a little. I’m not exactly dressed for flirting, here at my on-campus student job, manning Cuppa Joe’s.
But she does know me.
I don’t want to come off as That Guy, but lots of people know me.
See, I’m a superhero!
Well, okay, I’m a reservist in good standing. The Protectors, the world’s premier super-squad, don’t have me on the active roster, but I’m on Beta Team. I’ll be one of the first to take the call if Alpha Squad needs a hand stopping an alien invasion or a giant robot or something.
Err, alright, I’m a theoretical superhero reservist, I suppose. I’m really new to it, is the thing. I’m sure the Protectors will give me a call sooner or later. The straight-and-narrow goody-goody big leaguers have to run across a problem they can’t solve eventually, right?
Fine. I’m a probationary superhero reservist, with my special legal status indefinitely contingent upon, ah, how’d that straight-laced dummy the Titan put it, “trying to live a normal life, so that the best parts of you can see the light of day.” Ugh. So lame. His cape had been flapping in a breeze a little as he said it, too.
But—stay with me, here—sure, maybe I’m not exactly a good guy A-Lister like a full-time member of The Protectors, but I’m still kind of a big deal. The bad boy gone good, y’know? I was a smash hit during my years on the Teen Protectors! I was on the cover of Tales of the Teen Protectors just a few years ago, smoldering right at the camera, and I was in their swimsuit summer special!
People recognize me, sometimes, is where I’m going with this. I’ve been in a lot of articles and been caught in a lot of pictures. Maybe folks remember me from when I first got into the scene as Stray, the scrappy adolescent growing into his metahuman powers. I robbed from the rich and gave to the someone-else as partners with Catseye, that world-renowned jewelry thief, even if the headlines got it wrong and called me her sidekick. Maybe fans remember me from when I changed my super identity to Tomcat and fought alongside the Teen Protectors, the heroes of tomorrow protecting the Earth of today! I rolled with the Teen Protectors for over five years, often dragged in alongside the Protectors, or partners and mentors, and made plenty of headlines.
Maybe people remember me from the short but violent time when I went full black-mask, as Alleycat, when all the Teen Protectors and I had been mind-controlled into working for L.E.G.I.O.N., that global terrorist organization seeking world domination. Maybe, though, they remember me from the headlines we made one year ago, today, when we’d finally thrown off the coils of L.E.G.I.O.N., turned the tide by changing sides, and helped the Protectors stop Lord Legionary together.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. There’s all kinds of options! Who knows what global act of heroism or roguishness someone remembers me from?! I’m kind of amazing, after all, and I’ve been in “the life” for over a decade, now.
I gave her my best smile (and my best is pretty good), and I hoped that it overcame the Cuppa Joe’s apron and the built-in servility of my awful, awful job.
“Yeah, I sit behind you in Trig, right?” She beamed and nodded in self-agreement. “Tough quiz on Monday, huh? Ugh! Oh well, see you next week!”
Maybe, uh, maybe sometimes people just remember me from Trig, and they say something friendly while I hand them their coffee. I sighed as she sauntered away, and figured maybe I had to up my smile game.
Poop.
Part of my post-supervillainous probation is going to school. Here I was at Northwestern State U, “living a normal life” for two semesters and starting a third, meeting people my own age, not trying to steal anything from anybody, and being bored out of my skull.
The worst part of my post-villainy probation is working. Having a job. Dealing with people.
Ugh, no. Scratch that. You know what’s worse than the worst? Titan, with his dumb lantern jaw and his earnest smile and his All-American aww-shucks values. I still remember his lame lecture like I just heard it.
“Some of us had misgivings about your joining the Teen Protectors in the first place, and your time with L.E.G.I.O.N. has brought those concerns to the fore. Their mind control couldn’t change who you are deep inside, but that doesn’t mean we’re…comforted…by how you and the Teen Protectors acted. You should all use some time to re-evaluate. We want you, Tomcat, to learn to value the possessions of others,” he said, looking all heroic and trustworthy, talking to me one-on-one as the Teen Protectors got taken apart.
“I think the best way for that to happen is for you to work hard for what you possess. Learn how tough it is for the everyday folks just trying to make ends meet, and maybe you won’t be so quick to steal from them.”
Which, I mean, first off, how very dare he?! It’s not like I ever stole from everyday folks! Why would I? Catseye had drilled it into me early on, everyday folks don’t have anything worth stealing! Trust me, I keep tabs!
The brunette who’d just recognized me from math class had on a high school class ring worth maybe a hundred and eighty bucks, a smartphone two generations old that you could call a hundred bucks, tops. Heck, the key fob I’d seen her twirl around her finger was for an environmentally-friendly hybrid that a chop shop could be talked into like four grand for, and that was if you had a prior working relationship with them and got favorable rates (not that I did...not with any near here).
My fellow barista on duty had a new phone he never shut up about and an expensive game console and high-end TV back at his house, but all of that put together and the bike he pedaled to work—a bike—still wouldn’t come to two thousand bucks or so (especially since flatscreen LCD’s were dropping in value with that new holo-tech starting to hit tech shows).
Even our manager didn’t have bupkis. The top end of her everyday-carried wealth was probably her engagement ring, and I only figured I’d get maybe an even grand for it, and that’s just ‘cause I knew a guy who knew a guy who was really into diamonds (something about death ray refractory nodes or something, I try not to think about it too much).
Heck, dressed down for normal-college-kid life, even I’m not packing much worth stealing, unless you count my Protectors wristband, worn constantly for basic biometrics to be sent back to HQ and for emergency communications (and you totally should, I know people who’d pay a pretty penny to dismantle one).
Where I’m going with this, basically, is that the Titan is a big dummy and nobody worth calling a thief actually steals from everyday citizens. They’re not worth it!
Thugs steal from everyday citizens. Desperate people steal from everyday citizens. But thieves steal from people with stuff worth the trouble! You know the type. Banks. Corporate executives. Corrupt government officials. Supervillains (and superheroes, sometimes, maybe, shut up don’t judge me they have cool stuff). I am a thief. I was taught by a thief. I do business with thieves.
What I’m saying is I’m not gonna steal Brad’s GameDeck 4 and his pedal bike, and it’s not because we work together and suddenly my heart grew three sizes. It’s because all of his stuff is garbage and I am a professional, thankyouverymuch.
Err, was. I was a professional. Hah! No, sir, no professionalism here. I’m a superhero now. Teen Protector alumni. A reservist in good standing. Work-a-day college kid. I’m a good guy.
A good guy.
A good guy who had absolutely hated that Trigonometry quiz on Monday, and who fully expected to get a C—imagine that, bein
g called average?!—at best. When I’d turned it in, I had really wanted to slap it onto the desk, stare my professor dead in the eye, and tell her the truth about who I am and what I thought of her exam.
“When I was thirteen,” I wanted to tell her, “I got sucked into fighting alongside the Protectors for the first time, because my boss-lady’s partner in crime, The Mathmagician, forgot to carry the four and he tore open a hole in reality. Instead of stealing the crown jewels, I found myself defending jolly old London from an army of mad fractals summoned by a cosmic-class idiot with a math gimmick, and battling to defend reality against waves of mathematical impossibilities made flesh. And here’s the thing, your stupid class makes me hate math more than that did.”
But I couldn’t tell her that.
Just like I couldn’t tell off my US History professor who was all wrong about Thomas Jefferson, and I knew that because when I was eleven Catseye and I had used Time Tunneler’s power to travel back to steal the Constitution, and ol’ Tommy Jay had been a real jerk.
Just like I couldn’t explain to my mandatory campus therapist that of course I’m coping with post-traumatic stress by overindulging in the acquisition of material possessions, because that’s how the world’s best thief had raised me to deal with life’s little problems, and maybe I’ve got some stuff to deal with ‘cause I was trained to harness my metahuman strength and speed by training with a high-priced cabal of ninja assassins when I was eleven, and that’s not counting the mind-controlled supervillainy last year.
Just like I couldn’t tell my Into to Brit Lit professor that Romeo and Juliet isn’t the most tragic romance ever. The real tragedy is what happened to the Teen Protectors’ Praetor, our Venusian warrior-prince, and Riser, the Amazonian archer. I was there when it went down, and it had Shakespeare beat, plus it was real.
But no. I stayed quiet. Being “normal” ain’t all it’s cut out to be, lemme tell you. I’ve got to sit on a lot of rants. Working customer service is basically a nightmare. Compared to stealing artifacts from museums, data from sinister corporations, and jewels from wealthy hoarders, the indignity of having a tip jar and having to smile to every caffeine junkie on campus is absolutely awful.
I was just rethinking my sentence of living like a normal college kid for a while—and considering just how tough a lock-up at The Brick with all the other meta-prisoners could really be—when my dull day was saved.
Sort of.
It was, at least, interrupted.
I knew the sound and registered it just as it started. It was a sizzling crackle, it carried with it a bit of ozone stink that even a normal-person-nose could detect, and, if you were too close to the point of entry or exit, you got enough of an energy jolt to send a shiver down your spine and leave an unpleasant tingle.
Me? I was quick enough that the earliest bit of static fuzziness, the sound before the flash and ripple, was enough to get me acting. Inhuman reflexes, right?
The crack-fizz-ripple wasn’t just a weird energy effect. It was a byproduct, waste energy created by a teleporter. A very specific teleporter.
Her name’s Flicker. We went out a few times. I owe her some money. She’s the Cheshire Cat teleporter of a crew of mutates—metahumans, but made into metahumanity, not born into it like me—called the Womenagerie. They’ve all got bestial features, bestial powers, and bestial fury. They’re big. They’re strong. They’re quick. They’ve got claws, fangs, and heightened senses. They heal fast.
They are, one and all, basically me, but I’m prettier.
Flicker’s the runt of their litter, but she underwent supplementary mutate protocols that the rest of them didn’t and ended up with her little sizzle-pop teleportation trick. The good news was she could only carry one of her friends—or victims—with her at a time. She had a mass limitation. The bad news was that she had blinked in Stripe with her for this first trip. Stripe’s the biggest, brawniest, tiger-striped anthropomorphic kitty-cat you never want to run into in a dark alley.
Or, uh, run into in a campus coffee shop, for that matter.
“Hi, ladies, can I get you a frap—” I barely even had time to quip before Stripe rushed me, hissing and snarling and swiping with claws that I’d once seen peel open a main battle tank. I vaulted, flipped, and twisted in mid-air, then landed in a three-point stance halfway across the coffee shop. She tore into the counter, sending half of the cash register and a small storm of wooden splinters flying. Flicker blinked out of existence.
With her absence, it was just me, Stripe, and a coffee shop full of students, faculty, and staff, all staring at the pair of us slack-jawed.
“Hey, just a thought.” I leapt back towards the frenzying tigress-monster, drop-kicking her back into the drywall to tangle her up and buy a little time. “But maybe y’all should get out of here!”
I tried to order them around with what Kid Commando called “the officer voice,” just like she learned it from Major Majesty. Deep. Forceful. Commanding.
They didn’t leave, of course. Not at first. Not quickly. Civilians always need a little time to process something like this. It used to be that a taxpayer’s natural reluctance to accept something like this happening right in front of them, happening to them, was the ace up my sleeve. Museum guards always think it’ll be someone else’s shift that has the break-in. Beat cops never think they’ll run into a supervillain. Corporate security is always sure that The Book was written for other guys to really need to worry about. Normal people think the headlines always happen to someone else. It used to make my job really easy.
Stripe lashed out angrily—I mean, she’s not the type to lash out cheerfully, now that I think about it—and her backhanded swipe threw me across the room to smash through a table, no, make that two, and land in a heap.
“Oof, son of a…would you just…? Get outta here! Now!” I shouted and gave my hands the old super-clap. I’m no Mighty Terror, but I can bench press what I can bench press, and that’s enough for some super-strength tricks. The shockwave busted out the windows and it was just the starter-gun sound needed to get the coffee shop’s patrons to jolt into action, finally.
Stripe pounced, as Stripe is wont to do, and I only just barely twisted away from her claws. I stuffed a stray textbook into her gaping, fang-filled maw to block a chomp, and managed to twist and kick myself free of her and roll to my feet.
While she snarled and picked bits of Advanced Chem out of her mouth, spitting as indignantly as only a cat can manage, I pined for the good old days of the Womenagerie. Once upon a time, they’d been different. Middle-of-the-road, like Catseye and me. Getting by in a world that presented unique opportunities and obstacles, that’s all. Not bad. Not evil. The band of mutate-gals used to be a little softer, a little more balanced. They’d been bio-sculpted in human labs by human men with human science, but when they’d lashed out at humanity for it, it used to make sense. It used to be defensive, precise, controlled.
But then ol’ Stripe here had challenged and killed their original leader, Ligress. The nobility left the group, and only their savagery remained. Ligress had only wanted them to survive, to find a home, to find a place in the world. She’d led their team to fight for women’s rights, fight against animal cruelty, fight to protect the environment. They’d broken the law and fended for themselves under Ligress’ leadership, but the Womenagerie hadn’t been cruel. She’d been a leader and a diplomat. A savage queen, but a queen.
Stripe? Stripe was just a mean streak with legs.
She leapt at me again, and I rolled back, feet planted in her fuzzy belly, and kicked her up, up, and away, to face-plant into a wall. She still got a few claws in me, though, and when I kip-upped to my feet, my barista apron and most of my shirt fell away. I was bleeding, and I didn’t heal as fast as the Womenagerie did. I had to fight more defensively, buy myself time to—aww, crap.
Flicker blinked back in, behind me. I rolled off to one side—standing still meant getting beat, rolling towards Stripe meant getting beat, lateral m
ovement was my best bet—and I came up just as the floor where I’d been standing crumbled beneath a lashing green tail. Gatorina, the Womenagerie’s scaly muscle, had arrived. She busted up the floorboards with another tail swipe and snapped her jaws just to hear them clack.
Flicker wiggled her fingers and winked at me before sizzle-popping away again—we went out a few times, back in the good old days—and then I got busy dodging claws and fangs, like before, and now a superhumanly powerful tail and powerful reptilian jaws.
Fun times, fun times.
So as I desperately fought off Stripe and Gatorina—push kick to create distance, backflip away, dodge the tail, run sideways on the wall for three steps for an unexpected angle, kick, punch, tumbletumbletumble—it occurred to me that Flicker’d be back sooner rather than later, and this coffeehouse would be entirely too crowded for my liking.
Me? I like having a little more room to maneuver.
A modified judo throw sent Stripe crashing into the busted-up floorboards where Gatorina’s tail had already weakened things and got the Queen of the Scratch Cats halfway stuck. I took advantage of her momentary stuckitude by grabbing Gatorina’s jaws just as they snapped shut a few inches from my neck, and then just tossing her right out the broken storefront. Her scale-armored self left scratches in the sidewalk out front, and as she skittered to a stop I heard that crackling sizzle again.
Flicker blinked back into existence with Snarl in tow. Nobody I know likes Snarl. She’s a genetically modified mutt with all the most dangerous parts of a hyena, a wolf, a bull terrier, and who-knows-just-what-else, but you can figure it out, she’s a canine cocktail built for chaos and close combat.
And me, I’ve got this whole cat motif going on.
We never got along, Snarl and me, even back when I was playing sidekick partner to Catseye and we ran with the Womenagerie on the occasional job. Even back when I was going out with Flicker a little bit. Even back when—oh, right, the fight, she’s trying to kill me!
Hellcats: Anthology Page 71