Laying back in the crater he’d landed in, facing up at a darkening sky visible through the cracked visor of his helmet, Alex Adams, aka the Iron Menace, had just one thought:
“This is still somehow better than retail.”
To no one’s surprise, with the name “the Iron Menace” and sporting a black and red costume, Alex was one of many supervillains who called Victory City home. He wished he could say that he was a household name, but that would be a lie. He wasn’t one of those who threatened the world with doomsday weapons or one who struck from a secret island base packed to the brink with an army of minions all dressed in sleek, face-concealing armor. Hell, he hadn’t even held the city to ransom with a giant robot or monster or suitably large laser weapon.
No, the man who was just barely on the correct side of consciousness in this small hole in the ground was your average “street level” villain. As was typical of one of his ilk, he was dressed in a light amount of metallic armor, the vast majority of that being two chunky, tech-filled bracers that covered his forearms and a custom built helmet. One of those bracers was cracked open and sparking in a somewhat alarming manner. It matched his helmet, the front panel of which was crunched up from a solid blow to the face, leaving a gash running straight down the right side of his face. He’d blinked away the shattered remains of his visor on that side already.
Normally, it boasted a sleek and angular design where the panels all came together to suggest the vague appearance of a skull. Nothing too overt, but something cool enough to brag about at least. It was more impressive when it was whole and the important stuff on the inside was still working.
Other than the light plates of discount body armor and some repurposed sports gear that he’d heavily modified, the rest of the costume consisted of some properly tailored spandex common to those in his profession. It was made up of a mix of reds along with some black sections thrown in to break up the design a little. To complete the look, he’d thrown in a tasteful amount of pouches across the costume, carefully avoiding adding too many. He wasn’t like those edgy freaks from a few decades back that overloaded their outfits with harnesses and pockets. They couldn’t possibly be carrying that much stuff into fights to justify their outfits being fifty percent storage by volume.
Overall, it was a serviceable outfit. Not the most amazing one out there, but it fit the weight class he knew he was in. Nothing worth throwing a cape over but something that would probably get a civilian or two to start rushing for the exits when you strolled into a place.
Now, everything was buried under a layer of chalky dust which had fallen to cover him as the fight progressed without him. Clouds of pulverized building material and smoke from the aftereffects of countless powers darkened this area, further obscuring the villain in this corner of the street.
Alex wasn’t alone here, even if the fighting had moved on. The other D-list… er, street level villains nearby were currently picking themselves off the pavement, adorned in equally modest costumes which were similarly coated in the remains of the battle. The sounds of fighting drifted over from a couple blocks to Alex’s right, letting him know where the really powerful supes were currently duking it out in their giant “save the city” battle.
This was one of those fights which Alex and the rest of his hopefully-not-concussed peers never meant to get involved in. They’d swapped stories on the way over, and most of them had pieced together that the various jobs they’d been individually hired on for had been a lie. The Broker, the man at the center of this little bait-and-switch, was probably going to pay for that trick if he wasn’t wise enough to skip town, even if the bad guys won today.
Every villain that wasn’t part of the League had signed on for a light team up of some kind or another. Some people thought they’d be robbing banks. Others thought this was a distraction job to keep a hero team busy for a bit. Some got lies closer to the truth and were told that they were going to be helping out a bigger villain for a little vanity project, but nothing on this scale. When they’d all made their way individually to what was supposed to be their meet up point, they’d quickly found themselves shuffled into a warehouse alongside several heavy hitters who were way above their pay grade.
This was all part of Dr. Maniacal’s latest scheme to end the New Aurora Champions or something. The details of the plan got lost along the way as admittedly Alex had kind of tuned out of the Doctor’s monologue as he fantasized about wringing The Broker’s neck. All he needed to know was that the League had brought some big device into town which would warp reality or something and he’d show them all with his new power.
It had been painfully obvious that over half the room wanted to bounce at that moment, but everyone knew you didn’t cross an important member of the League of Domination like Maniacal, the head of their mad science division. And you especially didn’t do it while they had a bunch of their fans nearby that would love to crush some no-name to earn a gold star sticker from their favorite supervillain with a god complex. There was a time and a place to run away and it would come later.
So the Iron Menace and about ten dozen villains had been shuffled off to a different set of abandoned warehouses to lie in wait for when the heroes came to knock over Dr. Maniacal’s giant antenna thing. Alex had occasionally wondered about why there were so many warehouses in this city, and apparently it had to do with an overexpansion from cheap development with supes that could mold concrete and steel coupled with massive improvements to logistics. Fascinating stuff you could tell to your coworkers when you’re all packed like sardines in the dark waiting to leap out at the first costumed do-gooder.
The thing about do-gooders in this city though? Unlike in some others places, they mostly come in teams here. Sure, Menace and company had been expecting that but not the amount of superhero teams that showed up to save the day. Despite this very clearly being a grudge match between an insane engineer and a bunch of heroes with magic gems, it looked like almost every hero team in the whole damn city had been called in to help the New Aurora Champions – who honestly have been around enough years that they should lose the adjective in their name. Oh, and there were still two dozen or so solo heroes who had popped by to help out too.
The entire thing since he’d been pushed forward into the scramble of bodies had been a blur. He’d tried to figure out a good match up, but ended up thrown in front of the Young Guardians, some teen-aged team the city kept rotating their younger heroes through for training or something.
Gods, he wished he could say that he hadn’t been putting in much effort in that fight and that’s why things went the way they did. After all other than the really sociopathic types, who really wants to be the one to put a kid in the hospital during one of these things? Much to his chagrin, the ones that actually didn’t seem to be giving it their all in that particular fight were the teens.
Alex was fairly sure he remembered his helmet getting smashed while two of them had been bantering with one another. It was that kind of “playful” arguing that had an edge to it that reeked of them sorting out a recent interpersonal issue they’d been going through lately in the middle of punching and kicking some villains to soothe out the stress. It was probably related to some miscommunication. That kind of drama seems to be a theme in the super community for some reason.
Gods… they hadn’t even acknowledged him during the fight, had they? Oh that hurt more than the bruising.
“Hey, Menace, you alive?” a familiar voice called down to him from above.
Alex tilted his head towards the side of a building nearby. A large shape was descending down towards him, eight legs clinging to the vertical surface effortlessly. He smiled as the giant spider body touched down, her humanoid torso barely managing to stay upright but still taking the time to check on him.
Terrorantula looked about as bad as Alex felt. Despite her moniker, the spider half of her body was devoid of the hair you’d expect. Instead the bare chitin was a pale blue color with spots of violet, a few of which formed into the vague shape of a skull on her abdomen. Her “human” half sported the same pale blue as it peeked out from beneath an extremely ragged black costume with white accents. The half spider woman’s mask, a kind of half mask that left her white hair and mouth exposed, had tears running along it which exposed a speckling of purple bruises. At the very least, Alex knew from experience on a previous team up that Terror would heal quickly, having bounced back from worse injuries in shockingly little time.
As a villain, she was in a weightclass above the Iron Menace. Super strength, venom, the ability to produce web stronger than steel, and more powers from her transformation significantly outweighed the kind of tech he usually used for his jobs. That meant the two only occasionally saw each other on jobs even though Terror also wasn’t the “hold the city for ransom” sort.
Despite that, the two of them had hit it off on those occasions they’d joined up. Hell, the two worked together well enough that they didn’t even hold grudges over the times they’d been trying for the same score. It wasn’t quite a friendship but it was closer than being acquaintances. Though unlike quite a few of the others surrounding him that were currently picking themselves – and for a few unlucky ones, their teeth – off the pavement, Alex had never actually been around her outside of a job. She tended not to swing by the usual hang outs for villains like him. Yeah, he tended to put on a small amount of a disguise but he got the impression she’d be hard to miss out even out of costume.
“I got taken out by a teenager,” he finally groaned as it was clear that Terror wasn’t taking his head movement as enough of a sign of life to not be concerned.
She sighed, “I know the feeling. I think I spent like a month trying to drink away a similar feeling when I learned ArachNed has been doing this since he was 14. Learning that my nemesis was maybe 17 when he first started to ruin my life was great.”
Right… Terror was part of Ned’s villain gallery. She’d been trying lately to break away from that. Apparently a lot of potential team-ups had fallen through out of fear that the spider hero would show up for a fight if one of his rogues were there.
Granted, Alex thought he might’ve seen him during the big battle, but there were apparently quite a few spider-themed heroes lately so who knows.
Alex began the process of extracting himself from the crater he’d fallen into, or caused if his overly dramatic bruises were to be believed. Hopefully it wasn’t actually the latter or he was fairly sure that he’d have more to worry about than all the pieces of his armor that were barely hanging onto him. He was a little too squishy for that to be the case.
After all, Alex didn’t have super powers.
Well, none of note. He, like most people in the world, missed out on being born with anything that special and no supernatural event had blessed him with lasers out of his eyes or the ability to jump twenty feet through the air.
Okay, most people these days had something that experts were willing to shrug and classify as “super” so that parents could celebrate or something. Like hovering an inch off the ground for a couple seconds or the ability to regrow your nails, kinds of things that were absolutely abnormal the human experience but weren’t the kind of thing you themed a whole super identity around. The not-so-experts who made videos on the intraweb which the algorithms kept trying to recommend him loudly assumed it was an Atlanthean plot to mutate the world.
Wait, why was he thinking about those crackpots? Gods, did he have brain damage?
Terrorantula helped him up. That proved to be welcome after some bruised ribs triggered a coughing fit midway through his attempt to stand, the spider woman catching hold of him before he could slam back down to the concrete.
The sounds of fighting raging and flashes of energy blasts drew their attention down the street. A few blocks down, barely visible behind a cloud of dust, rose a giant antenna where packs of heroes and villains brawled around. One hazy shape, probably the supervillain responsible for all this, hovered above the fracas. No doubt he was atop a hovering platform, the type all mad scientists love, and cackling madly above the rest, somehow protected from anyone shooting a beam his way or simply flying up and punching him in the face.
“It looks like the finale’s coming soon,” Terror helped shove a piece of his right pauldron back into place. “We should probably get clear before then.”
Alex barely heard her however. The sheer shame of the fight from before was eating away at him, drawing him back through his memories at just what had led to this moment.
He saw the spiteful teen he’d been striking out on his own the moment the opportunity had presented itself, fleeing a school he hated that his parents had shipped him off to. That kid turned to a couple of smash and grabs for some cash, eventually joining up with a minion group that had managed to hench for some decent villains every now and then. The money from that ended up going into getting a decent kit put together which finally led to him becoming a villain after a few… incidents. He’d gotten set up in Victory, which was a good place to live even with these kind of climatic battles every now and then, and had a few good scuffles here and there with some heroes, a couple of which had gone on to be part of a decent team either here or in another city.
However, even after getting his fresh start as the Iron Menace, his life hadn’t really gone anywhere from there. Sure, Terrorantula had spent years pigeonholed into being part of a villain gallery for a single hero, but that was more than the Iron Menace had managed in the last decade. Forget about being someone’s arch, he hadn’t even gotten a spot in one of those themed team-ups in a couple years now. Not like he had the option to downgrade from this life either. Once you “graduated” from being a minion you couldn’t go back, even if you found yourself being used like one in stunts like these.
Shit… Today had just hammered home how badly he’d stalled out here. He was a background character for a group of teens to chat over.
Pulling himself out of his wallowing, his eyes naturally fell on Terror as she knit her brows together while she figured out a plan to get out of here.
Some small feeling fluttered in his chest as some small recognition unlocked. Out of everything today, the only thing that felt like it was going right for him was seeing her gently descend that building looking for him in the aftermath.
Before he’d moved to Victory, his previous relationship had blown up due to the job, and for the first couple years here he’d been too focused on getting set up to really think about anything like that. After that… well, it was hard to even consider it when most of your options in this life tended to be people willing to cut just as many throats and stab just as many backs as you to get ahead in the same career as you. There was a joke about surgeons or lawyers to be made there by someone with significantly less blows to the head probably.
This wasn’t the first time he’d recognized that it had been nice to see her again, but right here, right now, this was when he felt like it meant something to him. And the thought of escaping here with nothing to show for the day – actually less than nothing with the favors he’d owe to get his kit up and running – and not knowing when he’d see here again after this made his feet lock up.
A voice inside warned against this. Reminding him that he couldn’t trust anyone, especially those with more power than him.
And another voice, tired of all of this, mocked back:
Come on, man, you’re already failing at this supervillain thing. Are you really going to fumble this too after you realized you’re over your ex just because you’ve been zapped in the past? You need a change in life and this might be it.
“Do you want to get a coffee?” he managed to spit out, hoping that second voice was the right one to trust.
“Hm? Sorry, but I don’t really drink coffee,” Terror replied without looking back at him. “It doesn’t really agree with all of this.”
She gestured down at her spider half while continuing to evaluated an escape route.
Right… something about caffeine and spiders. Shit, that was a bad idea.
“No, I mean,” Alex continued even as the other side of his brain that had been warning him was screaming for him to stop, “do you want to grab a bite to eat?”
She turned his way absentmindedly, “Well, I think we’re probably going to have to lay low for a bit after this, and again, my spider half makes that a littl-”
As she was making the same gesture as before, she froze.
A couple moments passed in what Alex assumed was silence but his own heartbeat was hammering in his ears.
He couldn’t see all of her face through the half mask that still remained, but he saw some of her blue cheeks beginning to darken.
“Are you… asking me out right now?”
It was amazing that her question was kicking off Alex’s fight or flight more than being stuck in the warehouse with a world-threatening supervillain telling him to be a disposable pawn in his grand scheme.
“Uh, yeah, I mean after we get away,” his stupid mouth managed to say. The brain damage theory was becoming more likely.
Terror sputtered – actually sputtered – for a few seconds, her lip trembling against her pronounced fangs. She looked intensely uncomfortable as she finally managed to get a few words out, “I- um, I need to-”
Then, without a single other word, she leapt backwards almost 30 feet through the air and took off at the speed of an automobile.
Alex stood there a moment.
He truly hated this day.
“Ouch, man,” a passing villain in purple and gold commiserated as he wobbled past, headed towards the subway.
“Eat a dick, Laser Badger,” Alex shot the asshole a particular gesture before turning back to the giant mess a short distance away.
The dust had cleared for the dramatic climax.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Dr. Maniacal floated in the middle of a sphere of energy as most of the heroes sprawled beneath him. Meanwhile the antenna, or pylon, or whatever was absorbing lights from the darkening sky above, cracks of energy streaming along it and flowing into the orb surrounding the supervillain. His trusted lieutenants and fans fought against whoever wasn’t lying on the ground as they desperately closed in with what strength they could still manage. The line was waivering but had yet to break while the doctor was clearly monologuing.
Alex was too far at this distance to hear anything more than echoes from the speakers muffled by the fighting and the apocalyptic noises of the superweapon. He fumbled with the zoom function on the remaining portion of his visor and after a few tries managed to get it to work. Somewhat. The large crack made it hard to see most things, but he managed to make out one key detail.
The bastard was smiling.
Fury ignited in Alex’s stomach. He hadn’t felt this way in a long, long, long time. This white hot rage reminded him of why he was and would always be a villain. He might not be a great one, but he had some small pride in who he was, and screw those who looked down on him, no matter how powerful they were or what club they belonged to.
Alex shot a quick glance around himself and quickly found a suitable chunk of debris nearby for what his body screamed for him to do. Reflexively he scooped it up and summoned every ounce of strength his body could muster to lean back and throw it as hard as he could.
“I HOPE THEY FUCKING KILL YOU!” he roared, even knowing it was futile to do so from this distance. His body needed him to scream loud enough for the words to ravage his throat and feel the release of concrete sailing from his fingers, even if it was doomed to smash helplessly on the ground.
Or at least that’s what should’ve happened.
For most people – even the Atlantheans who on average tend to be a little more likely to outperform humans when it comes to rising above the baseline or developing quirks – they won’t end up having a superpower of any note their entire life. Even if they decide to volunteer for every shady supersoldier serum testing project imaginable or get themselves exposed to half a dozen magic artifacts from civilizations from before written history, your chances of walking away with something you can make a living off are slim to none.
Sure, a few people win the superpower lottery, but honestly most won’t even if they try every day of their lives for it. Some people might get the ability to create a spark out of their hands, but no matter how hard they train it, that power won’t lead to them shooting a gout of fire like an actual pyrokinetic. Some people can make a part of their body glow, but they almost certainly will never shoot lasers from there even if they spend every lunch break for a year next to the same radiation source that gave Quasar Sage his powers. Alex even knew a guy who could transform his fingers into any type of screwdriver he wanted to. Useful as a mechanic but it would never let him truly shapeshift.
Powers might develop for some people, and you can find new ways to use them, but it was rare to see something useless ever grow into anything worth a damn. Which fucking sucked since Alex had one of those useless powers.
For him, that was being born with a sliver of magic. That barest tease of it had haunted him since it had first manifested, as he’d learned that natural magic is one of those things where if you don’t wind up with enough of it, it’s not worth a damn. To put it into perspective, trying to cast the most basic spell was like trying to start a car with half a lighter’s worth of fuel in the tank.
Magic’s obviously weird as shit and it wasn’t as though you needed to have swimming pools of magical energy to find a way to levitate dinner plates if you were willing to spend decades of research or spend a fortune on dusty grimoires or some exotic training halfway across the globe. But every ounce of results you’d be getting from the massive amount of time, money, and effort you put in would be measured against the pounds or tons of payoff that anyone with a halfway decent store of magical energy could manage to get from half that.
After plenty of attempts to get anything out of the useless sparkle he could barely manage to pass between his fingers on a good day with a lot of effort, he’d grown frustrated with whatever he could scrounge up. Meanwhile, he’d found there were plenty of online tutorials on how to make a good helmet full of visor options for two weeks of retail salary or making your own body armor. Hell, he’d even found one on turning a microwave into a gravitor gauntlet. Thus had begun his hard pivot into being a tech supe early on in his career while he let his useless magic sparkle powers wither on the vine, never to disappoint him again.
Except, something about Dr. Maniacal’s stupid, overly-complicated, ego-driven superweapon leaned more arcane-y in nature than science-y. That superscience monstrosity crackling with energy was outputting some serious vibes that the teeny-tiny, itty-itty flicker of magic Alex hardly even thought about these days really, really loved.
Just as Alex finished his anguished shout…
Just as the very words of “kill you” left his lips with force of a shotgun blast…
Just as that slightly larger than fist-sized piece of debris left his fingertips, Alex felt that little atrophied spark inside of him flare up in a way that made his stomach plummet with a sense of foreboding.
From there, it felt like the world moved in slow motion.
A velvety red stream of light twisted off Alex’s fingertips, wrapping itself around the chunk of rebar and concrete. There was a pop as it vanished.
Staring past the empty space it once occupied, Alex saw the figure of Dr. Maniacal finishing up his speech and ascending into the air, the large sphere convulsing as it followed him after a second of delay. Abruptly it turned the same velvety red while the supervillain inside jerked.
Alex’s visor was still zoomed in and so he saw the debris ricochet off the doctor’s skull, exiting the sphere easily as it tumbled away, leaving a large hole in its wake. The doctor’s bleeding face whipped around furiously.
Alex began to think, I need to get-
In an instant a bolt of red lightning tore from the clouds through the small gap the debris left in the sphere, colliding directly with the villain inside.
Oh, shit.
Then another bolt. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Alex counted 37 shits before the doctor’s body hit the ground, dead beyond any shadow of a doubt. His vision blurred as his body raced him away from the scene on autopilot.
He was at least half the city away, throwing a bike that he did not remember stealing into an alleyway before he was able to think again. The first thought that hit him did so with the force of a train crash.
I just killed a council member of the League of Domination.
---------------------------------
Evelyn Everett – one of countless victims of alliteration on top of being Terrorantula full time ever since the freak accident which turned her into a half-spider woman with blue skin and claws that could shred through cars – finally stopped leaping across building tops as she recognized the alleyways below.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, she berated herself as she pushed aside a dumpster to reveal a large hole in the wall that led into a cluttered room. A quick yank on a pulley inside slid the dumpster back into place.
Lost in her own self admonishment, Lyn – she refused to go by Eve and let her parents win – barely recognized stepping onto the teleportation device at the center of this hidden room that had since turned into storage overflow from the lab. The feeling of being squeezed through a funnel in reality snapped her out of her own mental self-flagellation.
The violent sensation of expanding back into normal space was over in an instant, revealing an extremely messy lab full of large servers, dangerous looking gadgets scattered across almost every surface in sight. This room used to be either the warehouse or processing area of the former packaging plant and so the ceiling loomed ominously above, far above the large computer stacks where dusty lights dangled as they struggled to light the room below.
As Lyn’s ears finished popping, she took off the remains of her half mask and let the conflicting temperatures of the overworked computers and industrial grade cooling pumped from above assault her bare face. She could feel the air conditioning pushing against the harsh and angular features of her blue cheekbones, overly pronounced by the changes to her body that left her with a soft pseudo-carapace instead of normal skin.
Her solid black eyes, at least the pair where human ones were supposed to be, were ringed with circles from what felt like a lifetime of living in a body that no bed was suited for. Freed from the mask, white hair drenched in sweat slipped against the small dots on her forehead, causing her to wince as those weird little lidless eyes reacted to being touched.
All of her eyes, be they in the right spot or not, fell upon the discarded wrapping of yet another fast food restaurant on a nearby table.
Grab a bite to eat? Oh sure, you’re great date material. You haven’t been able to sit down at a Taco Palace of all places in over a decade. Come on, sign up to date Terrorantula and you too can enjoy the benefits of never eating out again!
Iron Menace was great and sure she’d actually had a couple moments where she’d fantasized about what it would be like to maybe just… But when he’d actually asked her, the reality of what that would look like and just how quickly things would fall apart had hit her. In fact, it was like everything about her life for the past decade plus had hit her at once and she’d just…
Oh gods, she just ran away. Shit! Shit, shit, shit!
She couldn’t help it, she screamed in frustration as she collapsed to the floor, her voice resonating in her throat and splitting the air as her freakshow body displayed yet another “perk” of being her.
“Damn, T, are you okay?!” a worried voice cried out as her scream subsided.
Celeste Campbell, Lyn’s supergenius roommate, appeared from between the servers. She ran up to her, face twisted with worry while her robotic right arm – naked of its fake skin like she always had it while in the lab – ran a scanner over the arachnid supervillainess’s body without waiting for an answer.
Celeste was dwarfed by Lyn, even as the spider-woman was slumped against the ground. Her fluorescent green hair, the current color she’d been trying out, was tied back with a hair tie that fought a losing battle to keep it neatly contained in a messy ponytail. More than a few locks escaped to scurry around her face, crossing over a set of goggles with more lenses than Terrorantula had eyes across her forehead. An oversized and overworn shirt with the remains of a screenprinted band logo cascaded past her waist and over a set of leggings that were in surprisingly good condition compared to the rest of Celeste’s outfit with only a hole or two in them. Obviously, to finish out the look in the most stereotypical way possible, she was wrapped a singed and stained labcoat with small gap where the right sleeve met the coat.
The short woman had taken in Lyn years ago after the spider woman had helped the cyborg escape a small gang that had eyes on becoming a big presence in Victory City and thought kidnapping their own weapon maker was the answer. Since then, Lyn paid rent by handling all the hand offs for the toys Celeste sold to supervillains.
Apparently the amount of people that were more willing to pay what they owed to a woman in a ratty labcoat standing under five feet tall was far less than those that were quite honest in dealing with a spider lady sporting venomous fangs and hovering around the nine foot mark, so the arrangement had worked out well.
Lyn wiped her face off with a nearby towel hanging on a chair nearby, mentally adding the state of the shared living arrangements to her own “selling points” and let out a sigh.
“I’m done living like this. I… I want a normal body,” she said at last.
Celeste looked at her hesitantly, “Just as a reminder, I may be a genius- Actually, I’m certifiably a genius. The certificate is over there in that pile, even if it’s not from Nottam University because those fools were too-”
Lyn gave her a stare. Like most on this side of the law when it came to superpowers, Celeste had her own grievances and was prone to a whole spiel if you got her wound up.
“Anyways, I do tech, not biology, T.”
Lyn rolled her eyes. She had to do a whole movement with her head and shoulders too, as apparently her eyes were hard to actually see in normal light, and the admittedly poor lighting here apparently made it hard to see where she was looking at the best of times.
“You told me that you found something awhile back,” she reminded her mad scientist roommate. “Like five weeks ago.”
Celeste squeezed an eye shut in thought before perking up, “Oh right, Dr. Fieldrus? He does owe me a favor.”
Lyn shook her head, “No, that was like half a year ago. I popped by for a visit.”
And at the time, when she’d “arranged” a consultation that was absolutely not a kidnapping, Fieldrus had made it clear his methods would undo her current form, but that she’d be turned into a regular old human. No, she wanted a normal body but there was no way she was going back to that. Not with a criminal record and a lifetime of non-transferrable skills to just about anything legit. There had to be something that would let her walk away with a scrap of power in exchange for this damn spider half. She’d seen too many shapeshifters walking out of lab explosions to believe the solution wasn’t out there.
She bit her lip in thought, “You were excited about them. It was something Red…”
That seemed to kickstart Celeste’s memory as she exclaimed, “Oh, right! The Scarlet Sorcerer!”
Lyn blanched, “Right… now I remember why I turned you down at the time.”
“Hey, by this point I think we’ve tried all the mad scientists around and a good amount of the sane ones with flexible moral fiber, I don’t think looking at magic could-”
“It absolutely can hurt, I swear half the teams I’ve been on have failed almost exclusively because someone who stared into a crystal ball too long ended up thinking they knew everything and ruining everything at the exact wrong time!”
Celeste just looked at her with The Look.
Lyn knew she was being stubborn. While she had some reservations about magical solutions after watching a couple other supes end up turning to the mystic arts and paying the price, if she was being honest, her actual hangups came down to her time on the Evil Eight and its failures as a team to best ArachNed. Especially those failures releated to Mystic Mantis and his replacement Charm Captain. Both had been the absolute worst to work with which helped reinforce her hatred of magic.
Still, Celeste was right. They had tried everything in the science field.
She exhaled, “Fffffffffffine.”
Celeste’s face broke out into a smile, “Great! I’ll see about nabbing an actual appointment with them as soon as possible. Now, mind explaining what this was all about now that we’ve got a solution?”
Lyn nodded as she pulled herself off the ground, weaving between the humming machines over to a well used pile of cushions and beanbag chairs. The two of them had jury-rigged a makeshift chairback to stand among the soft mess so she could rest her human back there. As she made herself comfortable, Celeste ran off to grab a can of some kind of energy drink and a chair of her own. The task took a moment as she tried to find a seat that wasn’t currently occupied by something important, but eventually she found one to roll over.
Once they were settled, Lyn let out another sigh, “So, that job didn’t go well at all.”
Celeste laughed, “Yeah, I heard. Dr. M actually managed to trick a quarter of the villains in this city into working for him.”
“And had over half of the heroes ready to fight them,” Terrorantula grumbled. “Went how you’d expect. Anyways, I was planning on getting out once the fight moved on before the Arrestors could sweep up, when I saw Menace there.”
“Iron Menace? He’s the guy who helped you steal that super serum from CreateCo, right?”
Lyn nodded and Celeste flashed a knowing and annoying grin.
“Yeah well after I helped him up, he… asked me out,” she tensed as she spoke, the words and the memory they conjured felt as though they burned her lips.
“Oh! Oh, that’s-!” Celeste got excited for a moment before seeing her roommate’s face. “Oh, T. Tell me you didn’t.”
“I-I got confused and just froze and then…” she began muttering. “I ran.”
Celeste cringed, making Lyn sink into her seat.
“I just- I felt like shit and thought he would realize-” her arms wrapped around herself and squeezed, clawed fingers scraped against armored skin as she felt like she’d ruined everything.
Celeste quickly piped up in a blatant effort to distract her, “Well, at least he got a little bit of good news.”
The effort worked and Lyn glanced up, “Oh?”
“Yeah, someone offed Maniacal! Got him right in the middle of his big moment and everything!”
Lyn actually straightened up and her grip loosened at this sudden news, “Oh damn, which hero finally decided to step up and do that? One of the New Aurora Champions?”
“No one knows right now. Maniacal shut down almost every camera around there he wasn’t directly controlling with some EMPs so apparently it’s hard to find out more. Looked like a lucky shot, but that means it might be some chump. Someone who just made some very powerful enemies if that’s the case,” Lyn’s friend had a cruel smile on her face.
Lyn realized that she was wearing one herself.
Eh, villains were allowed to enjoy schadenfreude. Assuming this wasn’t someone big enough to justify some personal vengeance, that meant the League of Domination was likely to put out an open call on whoever just offed one of their big wigs, just to send a message.
That was practically a guaranteed future job. A well paying job that almost every villain in this city would be more than willing to take League cash for. No doubt Menace would be one of the countless capes gunning for the prize, and probably looking for a little help to make sure the bounty was in the bag.
Maybe… just maybe she might have one more chance at this. Another chance that involved quite a lucrative payday.
Her lips parted to reveal her fangs, “If some nobody really did get lucky, then they’re about to have a very, very bad day. I can’t wait to help with that.”
