Villainess Love: A Lesbian Romance

by Mia Archer

  What was Fialux's most closely guarded secret?

  What was every hero’s most closely guarded secret?

  What was my most closely guarded secret?

  Who was Fialux?

  The chink in everyone's armor. The one way I could be sure to catch her off guard.

  Her secret identity.

  I giggled, though the giggle quickly turned into a moan as Shadow Wing pressed her body up towards my fingers and I realized I needed to use all of my concentration for something other than world domination for just a little while. Yeah, it was definitely time for round two. I could work out tracking down Fialux's secret identity later.

  10: The New Job

  "I'm sorry Miss… Terrare?"

  "It's Terror," I said with a smile. “It's pronounced just how it's spelled."

  The human resources drone shuffled some papers uncomfortably on her desk and pointedly didn't look at me. "I see. That's an interesting name."

  If this was a real job interview I'd be worried right about now. The way she barely glanced over my resume, the derisive sniff as she looked at my nonexistent qualifications, the way her lips compressed into a line and frowned. No, if this was the real thing I'd be screwed.

  It was a good thing for me this wasn't the real thing. This HR drone just didn't know it yet.

  I glanced around the small office. I couldn't believe this was something I'd actually aspired to once upon a time. A tiny postage stamp of a room with a window open because the air-conditioning was so ancient that it rarely reached the sad little vent on the other side of her desk. The building was probably built back in the '20s, maybe even older, and there was so little space that papers and books were piled high all around the desk.

  The life of a starving academic. Four years of undergrad. A few years working on your Masters and PhD. And then if you were lucky you got to spend your years in an office barely half the size of the dorm room you spent so much time in trying to get the office in the first place.

  And was this lady teaching? Doing research? Nope. Administration. She was stuck doing HR because the journalism department probably didn't trust someone without a doctorate with the academically challenging task of hiring adjunct faculty. A job she could've done with half the education and less than half the student loans if she was in the private sector. A job that would've paid much better in the private sector too.

  No, I was very glad I decided to take a different path in my career.

  "Well Miss Terror," the woman said. "I thank you for taking the time to come down here, but we haven’t even advertised this position yet and honestly you don't have any qualifications that would make you remotely able to be an adjunct instructor for a journalism course. In fact, I'm still trying to figure out how your resume even made its way across my desk."

  "Oh I'm sorry," I said. "I just figured you might be in need of some help quickly seeing as how Professor Benton ended up quitting after he found that winning lottery ticket in his interdepartmental mail."

  The woman sat my resume down and peered at me over her half-moon spectacles. "How did you know about how Professor Benton left? Do you know somebody who works in this department?"

  "No," I said. "I was the one who mailed him that lottery ticket."

  Her face scrunched up in obvious confusion. "But that ticket was worth millions. Why would you…"

  I shrugged. "That's simple. The lotto system is easy enough to manipulate, but if I started winning it every other week people would ask questions."

  "I'm afraid I don't follow…"

  "Of course you don't," I said. "I don't mean for you to follow. The simple fact is I need this position. I need to be in that classroom, and so Professor Benton wins the lottery and here I am to take care of your little HR problem."

  She seemed to gain control of her senses at long last. She picked up my resume again and flopped it down on her desk. "But you aren't remotely qualified for this job. You don't have anything that would recommend you for teaching a journalism class."

  "Oh really?"

  I fished in my pocket and pulled out a small silver disc with a big blinking red button in the center. I liked big blinking red buttons. I felt like it really tied a piece of evil super science together in a way that other colors of the rainbow just couldn't pull off.

  "Because I have this mind control device here, and my mind control device says I'm more than qualified for the job."

  This was one of my babies even though I never used it. Something I came up with back before I left the Applied Sciences lab at this very university because they said my stuff was too dangerous, too unethical, all that stuff that scientists say when what they really mean is they’re afraid of progress. I kept this baby close to my chest because of what it could do. Hell, I didn’t even keep a record of it in the computer banks because I didn’t quite trust CORVAC with the knowledge.

  I pressed down on the blinking red button and it made a satisfying click. I also liked satisfying clicks. A strange screeching noise filled the room and then it settled down to a steady hum. I resisted the urge to wince at that sound. The thing worked via the auditory receptors in the brain and I hadn’t figured out a way to get the damned device to work without that screech. One of many reasons why I didn’t like using the damned thing.

  I really don't like using the mind control stuff. It's an inefficient and brutish way of getting things done, and it also had the pesky problem of not always working one hundred percent of the time. Especially with heroes. The last thing I needed was to have a super supposedly under my complete control, doing my bidding in the middle of my lair, and then all of a sudden the mind control device falls off of the table or the big red button gets jostled. Suddenly there's a very cranky living god in the middle of my lair ready to do some damage.

  I'd been there. Trust me, it was never fun.

  But for this lady? Whatever. I was in a hurry so I figured I could risk getting a little sloppy with a normal. At least I hoped she was a normal. No self-respecting hero or villain would pick a secret identity this soul-crushing and boring.

  As soon as I hit the button she went slack-jawed and her eyes deadened. Yup. Definitely a normal. Not even a normal who took precautions against mind control, though in all fairness to her I figured I was probably the only mortal in the city, maybe in the world, who bothered to incorporate mind control nullification thanks to two handy nano devices embedded in my ear canals. Mostly because I was the one who invented the technology in the first place and how embarrassing would it be if someone managed to get their grubby hands on it and turn it against me?

  I leaned forward and inspected her pupils. If I was doing this right then I'd get out a flashlight and make sure they weren't dilating, but I figured this was close enough for government work.

  "You are going to give me this job," I said.

  "I am going to give you this job," she replied.

  "Stop repeating what I say. That's annoying," I said.

  "Stop repeating what you say. That's annoying," she parroted back at me.

  I sighed and rolled my eyes. Whatever. Just telling her I had the job was probably enough suggestion for now. If she started to show a little mental fortitude, something I definitely wasn't expecting from a glorified middle manager stuck in academia, then I could always give her a booster down the line.

  I flicked the big red button and immediately she shook her head and looked at me. A big smile spread across her face.

  "Well I don't think we need to go over anything else here," she said. "I'd say it's safe to assume you've got the job."

  I reached out to take the hand she offered over her desk and smiled back at her. "Glad to hear it."

  Fialux was somewhere on campus. I was sure of it. It was time for Professor Terror to find her.

  11: Super Survival

  "Journalism."

  I paused and relished the moment as an entire lecture hall full of students leaned forward eagerly hanging on my every word. I could get used to this
. Well, I could get used to it if it wasn't so dull aside from the part where I had the somewhat rapt attention of hundreds of college students. As rapt as a college student’s attention could get on the first day of a 100 level survey course, at least.

  "Is a complete waste of time."

  I smiled at the room. You could hear a pin drop. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say you could hear the collective dreams of a few hundred students in a journalism course being crushed at the same moment.

  "I mean, let's face it. Journalism has been dying a prolonged to death since the invention of television, and you all will be lucky to be the ones who hammer home the last nail in the profession's coffin," I said.

  "Assuming, of course, the Internet didn't already hammer that nail home and you're all just the pallbearers."

  I was really getting into this. There was nothing I hated more when I was still in school than dealing with an insufferable humanities major going on about how they were totally going to make a living with their writing career. I always wanted to yell at them to get a real degree and a real job, but never gave in to that temptation.

  I figured getting to tell off a lecture hall full of them was the next best thing.

  "Let's face it. The only reason there's even potentially a job waiting for you when you get out of school is because this city still inexplicably manages to support a couple of newspapers and networks that are always looking for fresh meat since so many of their cub reporters end up getting smashed, minced, crushed, or disintegrated by whatever villain of the week is coming through and wreaking havoc."

  I looked around the room trying to gauge what sort of reaction that got. All that talk blaming the hero had to be driving her nuts. She was in here somewhere. I knew it.

  I smiled.

  I'm surprised the idea of trying to track down Fialux's secret identity hadn't occurred to me before. It was pure genius. And once I put my mind to it, or rather once I put CORVAC's mind to it, it was a relatively simple matter to track down exactly who she was.

  Or who I thought she was.

  Of course I was making a lot of assumptions with the data set I had CORVAC pull in, so that's why I was standing here at the front of this classroom pretending to be a journalism teacher. I wanted to be absolutely sure lest I kidnap some unfortunate college student who didn't have a single superpower to her name. I may be a villain but I did have some standards.

  No more screw-ups.

  I wasn't going to have a painful repeat of the anti-Newtonian stasis field rollout.

  Assumption one: Fialux was young. Probably a few years younger than me. I figured this was a pretty safe assumption. She looked to be in her early to mid twenties. Sure, there was always the possibility that another one of her superpowers was lack of aging, that would be just the sort of super perk that bitch would get. But there was no way to test that particular hypothesis. So I went with the assumption that she was probably in college right about now. If I was wrong then I started over with my assumptions and lost a week or two having fun tweaking journalism students which wasn’t really wasted time at all as far as I was concerned.

  Assumption two: she was an undocumented alien in the most literal sense of the word. Everyone knew thanks to those ridiculously schmaltzy interviews with Rex Roth that Fialux came from an alien world that just so happened to have convergent evolution that created a species of creatures that were inexplicably exactly like humans in every way, at least to all outward appearances, except for the minor fact that being on earth or in our solar system gave those beings impossible superpowers.

  Yet despite supposedly being alien she walked and talked exactly like a native, which meant she'd probably been here for a while. Maybe even since birth.

  And if she'd been here for awhile that meant there were records out there. Or rather, there would be a lack of records. Maybe forged records. I had CORVAC look for everything just to be absolutely sure.

  Assumption three: she had some sort of connection to that idiot Rex Roth. They'd started their little front page flirtation almost immediately after she showed up and since then it’d been nothing but one exclusive interview after another which was great for intelligence gathering but terrible because that intelligence gathering necessitated staring at Roth’s smug face constantly. The way I figured it a guy like Roth wouldn't get all those delicious scoops and one-on-one interviews with Fialux if there wasn't something going on behind the scenes.

  I was taking a bit of a deductive leap, one that could potentially torpedo the whole enterprise, but I figured that meant they knew each other from before she decided to reveal herself to the world. I was taking a leap of faith that the spot where they met was college rather than the offices of the Starlight City News Network mostly because going incognito here at the university meant I didn’t have to go incognito at SCNN where I’d run into that prick on a regular basis.

  Plus Roth was knee-deep in upper-level journalism courses around the time she would've been starting. Around the time I guessed she would’ve been starting. I'd pulled his transcripts just to be sure. It stood to reason that they met because they were both in the same program.

  When I fed all those parameters into CORVAC's sarcastic circuits I figured it was a long shot. I figured he'd probably come up with nothing and I'd have to start back at square one trying to figure out where I took the wrong logical leap. So color me surprised when he came up with not zero, not one, but three names that potentially fit my criteria.

  So here I was doing a little secret identity work of my own. A quick lotto ticket mailed to one of the older professors in the department, I might be a villain but I wasn't heartless enough to vaporize a respected academic close to retirement, and suddenly I found myself in front of a survey course that most journalism students put off until the very last semester before they were ready to graduate. Presumably because it was a stark reminder of their fragile mortality.

  "Welcome to Journalism 105: Surviving A Heroic Intervention."

  A hand raised near the middle of the lecture hall. I squinted and peered at the girl. Auburn hair, gorgeous face, green eyes covered by a pair of slim fashionable glasses, and what looked like a pretty fit figure though it was hard to tell for sure since she was sitting down. Of course there was only one way to be sure whether or not she was one of the three on my list.

  "Yes, you had a question Miss?"

  "Solare," she said.

  Her voice rang out across the classroom clear, firm, and with a musical quality that carried. I grinned to myself. The name. That voice. Was it really going to be this easy?

  "Selena Solare."

  Yes Miss Solare," I said. "What's your question?"

  "I'm sorry Professor, what was your name?"

  "Professor Terror," I said. "But we're all friends here. You can just call me Natalie."

  "Right Natalie. Didn't you mean to say this class is Surviving A Villainous Attack?"

  I shrugged. "That might be what they call this course in the catalog, but I'm the teacher and I feel like Surviving A Heroic Intervention is more in line with what actually happens."

  "But the villains are the ones…"

  I held up a hand to forestall her. I still wasn't sure if she was even one of the three names on my list. I'd grown overly reliant on my wrist computer and I couldn't wear it in the lecture hall for obvious reasons. If Fialux actually was in here she'd recognize that in an instant and we'd have a live demonstration of a "heroic incident" for all the students to survive firsthand.

  "Miss Solare. I did say we can agree to disagree, but since I'm the teacher we'll just have to agree to go with what I say since I'm in charge of your grade," I said.

  "Now, if there aren't any other questions?"

  The students shifted in their seats and looked back and forth, but no one else said anything. Including the two other auburn haired beauties who were potential candidates. I itched to go around to the other side of my desk and open it up to consult my wrist computer, but knowing my luck
Fialux would actually be in here and recognize the sound with her super hearing. No, better to leave it firmly locked up and turned off where it couldn't cause an incident.

  Besides, I didn’t need to look at my computer to know that Miss Selena Solare was at the top of the list. Everything about her screamed that I was looking at Fialux, but I needed to draw her out. Maybe get her to use some of her superpowers in class. Give herself away somehow.

  "For our first class I’ve decided on a practical demonstration of the sort of skills you'll need to survive a heroic intervention."

  I glanced towards the middle of the hall where Miss Selena Solare was sitting with her arms crossed and a frown on her face. One of the other potential Fialuxes was twirling her hair and trying not to look like she was staring at her phone hidden under her desk. The other one was staring out the window and looking like she was at least thousand miles away from the lecture hall.

  No, if Fialux was in this room then it was definitely Miss Solare. Now I needed to prove it.

  "I took the liberty of grabbing some toys from the applied sciences laboratory to help with our demonstration today."

  Like I’d ever go near the applied sciences department again. Those assholes trying to steal my ideas with one hand and smack down some of my more ingenious but ethically questionable inventions with the other hand were a big part of the reason I’d left academia and started my villainous career in the first place. The last thing I wanted was to give those grey-bearded eggheads an opportunity to steal one of the toys I was about to break out. No, this was all stuff designed by yours truly, and it would give them the kind of firsthand demonstration of what it was like to be in the middle of a fight that they couldn't hope to get anywhere else.