by Logan Jacobs
Just not enough to test out any flying features.
Aileen held up the suit for me, and that immediately gave me the idea to build a station that would hook me into the suit automatically. I was a big fan of delegation and automation, and if I could get the final version of my suit to snap onto me without having to manually put it on, that would be absolutely ideal.
Those were thoughts for another time, though.
For now, I allowed Aileen to assist me into the suit and snap the metal plates together around me. When everything else was on, I put on the helmet and clicked the visor down over my eyes.
Visibility was poor for a split second before I activated the screens. It was a little bit difficult to adjust to a new way of viewing the world around me, but I very quickly adapted to being able to observe all of my surroundings at once. It was even better than having a bird’s eye view, honestly.
I rolled my shoulders back and held out my newly gauntleted hand to aim it at one of my testing dummies. With a click of the mechanism, I fired out a rope of webbing that slammed directly into the testing dummy and sent it crashing to the ground in a heap of stringy webs.
On closer inspection, the webs I’d created weren’t as strong as the ones that Tarantulator had used. They didn’t solidify or harden on impact, but they at least worked very well as a sticky rope.
“Aileen, pull on the web to see if you can break it,” I instructed as I fired another web to stick it to the wall.
“Yes, Creator,” she replied.
She approached the web, touched it gently, and then yanked on the spidery rope. Her titanic strength made me stumble forward, but the connection didn’t break, and the rope-like web remained taut all the way from me to where it connected with the wall.
I detached the web from my gauntlet and let it snap back toward Aileen, who grabbed hold of it and made another attempt to pull it from the wall. The web stuck fast, but I did notice that the strand was beginning to unravel. That meant it couldn’t hold as much weight as Tarantulator’s could, but it could withstand the strength of my android, and that was more than enough for now.
“We’ll need to refine it, of course,” I confirmed once Aileen had let go of the webbing. “But for a first test, it worked pretty well.”
I was confident in the new upgrades for the suit already, even if they still required a bit of testing. But since there was no better way to test out the suit than to dive into action, I figured it was time to head upstairs and see if the girls had managed to come up with a new villain to eliminate.
Despite my confidence in my new suit, I’d prefer to test it against one of Grayville’s villains rather than against Shadow Knight himself. I wanted to be completely prepared for him when the time came to fight him.
And I knew he would be thinking the same thing.
“Shall we invite Norma and Dynamo down to show them?” Aileen asked, but I shook my head.
“Nah.” I shrugged out of the suit and placed it back onto the holding rack. “They’ll see it in action soon enough.”
I had also applied several basic upgrades to Elizabeth and Norma’s suits, though this time I had mostly focused on Norma’s since her power required more involved thinking to come up with something for her to wear. Elizabeth I could upgrade easily, but with Norma, it was more challenging to think of a suit that wouldn’t immediately be balanced out by her superhuman ability to be average in every single way.
This time, I didn’t plan to tell Norma about some of the upgrades I made. I figured it would be a good test to see how much of her ability was based around her own perception of reality, so I would just have to observe her to see if they would work or not.
Aileen finished cleaning up the remnants of our work, and then we both returned upstairs to the main floor of the mansion.
It might not have been as big as my true home back in Pinnacle City, but the Grayville mansion had a spacious living room that connected to the kitchen and a bar off to the side, so it felt comfortable enough. The wide windows that overlooked the city in the distance also served as a way to make the room feel bigger, plus they also allowed me to see any cataclysmic events occuring in the city in the distance.
Like when an overflow prison exploded thanks to four cleverly planted bombs, for example.
“Oh, Miles!” Norma waved me over from where she sat on a barstool at the island in the kitchen.
It was midday, but my mousy assistant had a cup of whipped cream covered coffee on the granite countertop in front of her. I honestly didn’t understand how she tolerated such sweet additions to her drinks, but she found so much joy in it that I could no longer bring myself to comment on it.
Her style of clothing also wasn’t to my tastes, with long flower-print skirts and oversized sweaters. I knew she wore those things mostly because she had very little confidence in herself and her body, especially when she was surrounded by women like Elizabeth and even Aileen, so I never pushed her about that. Today, she wore a dark purple sweater that was one of the gifts I’d given her back when I’d recruited her to be my personal assistant, and she had accented it with a beaded necklace and a long white skirt.
“Yes?” I asked as I took a seat next to her.
“Well-- oh, do you want, um, should I make you coffee, too?” she asked and started to get up.
“No, I’m fine,” I said and patted the barstool for her to sit back down. “What did you want to tell me?”
“Well, I’ve got to find it again, hang on,” she said as she placed her tablet on the countertop. She began to tap away at it for several minutes, and then she finally used two fingers to zoom in on the screen. “There it is! See?”
It was a basic blueprint for the mansion we were currently in but with even more upgrades. Norma had a bloodthirsty streak to match mine, and I knew that my decision to let her improve the mansion’s security would help to encourage that, but I hadn’t expected her to be quite so ruthless.
“A guillotine is a little much, don’t you think?” I snickered after I studied her upgrades for a few seconds.
“But look,” Norma said as she zoomed in on another area. “If an intruder gets past everything else and enters through the back door over here, it’ll send them down into a trapdoor I could set up to lead into a secluded area of the basement, where this comes down and chops off their heads. It’s neat and efficient!”
Her rambling was a little difficult to follow, but the blueprints she showed me were technically sound. The idea behind them was just a little bit… much.
“What if it false flags?” Elizabeth peered over both of our shoulders at Norma’s design schematics.
We had no plans to go out today, so my superpowered girlfriend was dressed in a simple silk dress that cinched in at the waist to show off her ample curves, and it was also short enough to show the full length of her creamy white, and perfectly muscled, legs. It was always impressive that even the clothes she wore at home were as sleek and elegant as the styles she wore when we went out together.
Her dark, curled hair was swept to one side as it tumbled down over her shoulder, and even though the look in her piercing turquoise eyes was curious about the design schematics, the sharpness of her gaze always softened whenever she looked at me.
It was subtle, but I always noticed how her demeanor changed around me.
“Hm, well, it shouldn’t false flag,” Norma explained as she zoomed in on some of the more technical details of her new system. “This is only a last resort, anyway. It’s for if they get past all the other security I’ve installed, so all of those have to activate first.”
“It is a bit much, but I like it,” I encouraged. “As long as it only activates after all the other security has been set off, it’ll work fine.”
“If they can get past the rest, what makes you so sure they won’t be able to get past this, too?” Elizabeth asked.
“It’s more hidden than the other stuff,” Norma said. “It’s completely hidden, actually. I left a little bit
of the other security systems visible enough that they’ll think we’re careless, and so they won’t be expecting anything else. Not that the other systems are weak or anything, but they’re a little more obvious.”
“It’s a good idea, but we have plenty of security right now,” I said, “so this will have to wait a little bit.”
I was pleased at how easily Elizabeth had given in when I proposed the idea to let Norma come up with the most violent and brutal security measures. I knew that my girlfriend didn’t want anyone to enter our mansion unannounced, but since she wasn’t the most bloodthirsty type, I was glad that she had agreed to the possibility of modifications.
To be entirely honest, I really wasn’t afraid of anyone trying to break in. The villains of Grayville didn’t really have any idea of who we were or where we lived, so the only real threat was Shadow Knight.
And I definitely wasn’t afraid of him.
“I have a more important question,” I continued. “I have a lot of new upgrades that I want to test out, so have you two decided what villain we should go after next?”
Elizabeth and Norma glanced at each other, and then they both laughed a little awkwardly.
“Well, not exactly,” Norma muttered. “We kind of couldn’t decide…”
“I want to go after El Tigre,” Elizabeth said as she propped a hand on her hip. “He’s basically a rampaging zoo animal who is more tiger than man, but he’s left a string of civilian deaths in his wake ever since his escape from some supervillain laboratory. A beast like that needs to be put down before it can hurt more people.”
“But El Tigre went into hiding,” Norma said. “He hasn’t been seen in a while, so I want to go after Invisibler. He can only be invisible when he’s standing still, but he uses his power to sneak into private buildings and gather intel that he then sells to other supervillains to make them more powerful and give them more leverage over Grayville.”
“Neither of those sound very interesting,” I sighed.
“I know,” Elizabeth said, “but they’re both pretty low in the hierarchy of villains in Grayville, and we’re not ready to go after the big guys just yet, so--”
“You’re right,” I interrupted. “I just thought we might be able to find somebody a little more interesting. Let me look over the files and see if I can find someone better to hunt down.”
“Invisibler spies on changing rooms and stuff, too!” Norma argued.
“That is super sleazy,” I said as I moved from the barstool to the couch in the living room, “but it’s still not exactly interesting.”
Both girls joined me on the couch in front of all the television screens, and Aileen came over to stand behind us.
I grabbed the remote and began to flick through the information we’d gathered so far on Grayville’s remaining villains. After we’d blown up the overflow prison, the list had gotten significantly shorter, but there were still a lot of villains roaming around the city that needed to be taken care of.
Grayville didn’t have the same type of ultra powerful villains like the ones in Pinnacle City, but there were still plenty of nasty psychos worth taking out. On the top of that list was the Maniac, but without the Shadow Knight’s records and resources, it would be tough to track him down for as long as he continued to lay low.
In fact, now that we were completely cut off from Shadow Knight’s resources, we were going to need to gather a lot more of our own intel, but Aileen had already compiled a pretty extensive amount.
“El Tigre can do a lot of damage if he wakes up,” Elizabeth said from my right.
“But Invisibler is helping the other supervillains get more powerful!” Norma insisted from her seat to my left. “If we take him out, we can weaken a lot of other villains.”
“Information alone isn’t going to make them that much more powerful,” I said, since I didn’t think most of Grayville's villains had the intelligence to properly use the intel they were given anyway. “And that tiger guy doesn’t seem like he’s an immediate threat.”
I flipped through the screens until I settled on a woman in a black and yellow striped leotard with coiffed blonde hair and a thorax attached to her already thick ass. The black thigh-high stockings she wore stopped just below her upper thighs to reveal a tease of skin.
“This one,” I said before I even read the name.
“Honeybee?” Elizabeth rolled her eyes.
“Exactly, Honeybee,” I said. “It says here that she can use her stinger to control the minds of anyone she stings.”
“Isn’t she a little too powerful for us?” Norma asked as she read over the information on Honeybee.
“You only want to go after her because she’s hot,” Elizabeth teased.
“Well, it’s just a fact that she’s hot.” I shrugged. “And mind control is pretty powerful, but I doubt she’d be able to sting any of us through our suits. We’d have to be careful about the mind-controlled people she’ll throw at us, but don’t you want to free them from her clutches?”
“She activates them like sleeper agents,” Elizabeth read from the dossier. “I don’t know, Miles. I think we should start with El Tigre first and work our way up to someone like her. I don’t want to end up hurting innocent people.”
“Well, I could engineer something to reverse the mind control effects or harmlessly knock out the civilians she tries to use against us,” I said with a shrug.
“But didn’t you want to test out your new suit right away?” Norma asked.
“I can still use it against her,” I argued, although it would take more time than I wanted to engineer something new to go up against Honeybee.
“Arguing like this is unnecessary.” Elizabeth sighed.
“She’s right.” Norma gave a sly smile. “We’re not going to come to an agreement this way, so we should have some kind of competition.”
“How about a vote, instead?” I raised an eyebrow. “Aileen, which one do you think--”
“No way!” Norma huffed. “She’ll just agree with you!”
“We should go after Honeybee, as my Creator says,” Aileen confirmed, much to my amusement.
“No, a competition is definitely the fairest way to decide,” my mousy assistant said.
“I agree with Norma,” Elizabeth said as she tapped a finger against her chin. “We should arm-wrestle to decide.”
“That’s not fair-- you know you’ll just win,” Norma groaned. “We should try something none of us know how to do well, like folding origami.”
“Isn’t that unfair to us?” I grinned at Norma since I’d already figured out her game. “You’d be immediately average at the task and beat all of us.”
“Maybe you’re a natural at origami and you just don’t realize it yet?” Norma asked as her ears turned red.
“A basic test of strength is the only competition I’ll accept,” Elizabeth said. “You can both even use your suits, and I won’t.”
“You’d still win any basic test of strength,” I replied with a glance at my superpowered girlfriend. “But nice try. I still think we should vote. Isn’t that the fairest way to decide anything?”
“Only if Aileen’s vote doesn’t count.” Norma folded her arms over her chest.
“It’ll just be a tie if we do that.” Elizabeth shook her head. “No vote.”
“We’ll go after them all eventually,” I sighed and leaned back on the sofa. “It doesn’t matter what order they’re in.”
“Then why don’t you just pick one of the ones that we want to go after?” Norma pouted.
“Because your choices are lame.” I shrugged.
“Okay, I know what we can do,” Elizabeth announced. “We can just play something like rock-paper-scissors. That’s a basic game, and there’s no skill required.”
“It is basically just random chance,” I said. “Alright, let’s do that.”
“Fine,” Norma agreed.
The two girls leaned in so we could all hold out our fists. We shook once, twice, but
before we could shake a third time, a bright red flash swept across all the screens in front of us, and an emergency signal blasted through the speakers all around the room.
I dropped my fist and looked at the emergency breaking news that appeared on all our screens.
“Creator, there’s an urgent situation unfolding on the bridge that leads into Grayville,” Aileen informed us.
My AI system flicked the screens so that half of them were news broadcasts, and the other half were security cameras around the bridge, so between all the screens, we had a pretty full picture of what was happening on the bridge.
A monstrous, hulking creature was perched on the bridge and throwing cars around. The creature looked like it was made up entirely out of a tangle of vines and leaves, and a knotted bunch of vines at the very top served as its head. There were longer, thicker tendrils of vines that hung free and mobile like arms, and the creature used these thicker vines to lash out, grab a bus around the middle, and start to dangle it over the edge of the bridge.
“Breaking news!” the television shouted.
“No shit,” I muttered.
“The Bogdan is holding a bus over the side of the Grayville Bridge,” the television announced, “and the creature is demanding control over the Ashen River!”
“It looks like our decision was made for us,” I quipped as I flicked off the screens. “Aileen, set a course for the bridge. Fastest route.”
“Understood,” she responded with a stiff incline of her head that was meant to mimic a nod.
“Alright, let’s get suited up,” I informed the other girls.
Honestly, I was pretty relieved that our rock-paper-scissors competition had gotten interrupted because the Bogdan looked like an actual challenge. Honeybee would have been very enjoyable to fight from a visual standpoint, but I hadn’t been looking forward to all the preparation we would have needed to fight her.