Villainess Love: A Lesbian Romance

by Mia Archer

  “Well I’m very glad you’re my teacher for this class,” she said. “I’m especially glad to have a professor who’s so…”

  Okay, so maybe I wasn’t the greatest at this whole dating thing. Maybe I was more or less clueless even when someone was throwing themselves at me because I was always the kind of girl who was more interested in the science lab than the captain of the football team. Though I suppose with this new interest of mine it would be the captain of the cheerleading squad and not the football team. Like I said, I was still confusing my metaphors.

  But even I couldn’t miss the way she looked me up and down. That was one hell of an appreciative glance. That was the kind of look that made me feel like I needed to smoke a cigarette when it was done. That was the kind of look that screamed that Miss Solare was indulging in a naughty professor fantasy, which was just fine by me given the circumstances. That was the kind of look that sent a fire raging through my body from between my legs to my stomach to the tips of my toes and all points in between.

  It was the kind of look that said she was clearly interested in me in more than academic terms, and it was so obvious that even I, the queen of the oblivious, couldn’t miss it.

  A little voice inside my head was screaming. I needed to say something. I needed to make a move. It’s not like I gave a damn about the whole professional ethics thing regarding students anyways considering I was just a villain who was using a mind control device to take control of a class long enough to capture the greatest hero in the world. Next to that the prohibition in the employee handbook about dating students was small potatoes.

  I opened my mouth.

  Her phone lit up and started buzzing on the table. Damn it. I glanced down at the screen and thought I saw a name that started with R. Roger? Ron? I didn’t get a good enough look to tell, and it’s not like it was any of my damn business anyways aside from being a very interested in anything that had to do with her.

  “Hello?”

  Selena put a hand over the microphone and whispered an apology to me. “It’s my boyfriend.”

  Then she was back to her phone call while I sat there with a smile on my face as the food I was shoveling into my mouth turned to ash. For a moment there it had been downright tasty while we were talking.

  Her boyfriend. She had a boyfriend. So much for all my hopes that she’d been looking at me with interest. So much for all my hopes that her hand gesture, the way she made contact with me, the way she was flirting and talking about how she was so glad I was her professor, meant something more than her thinking I’d be a good teacher.

  I sat with a fake smile on my face. I was good at that, at least when it came to romance. If I was on the verge of taking over the world and somebody caused my plan to come crashing down around me I’d be embarking on a world class villainous rant the likes of which you’d never seen before, but a romantic failure like this was almost expected. Heck, I don’t know why I expected anything else.

  As the conversation wore on she got a vacant look in her eyes and sat slack-jawed, her food forgotten, making the occasional grunt in response to whatever this guy was telling her. I finished my own food and she was still on the phone. I stood and she didn’t acknowledge it.

  With a shrug I took my food tray over to a conveyor belt and turned to leave. On my way out I passed by the table and she was still sitting there with the phone to her ear, a vacant expression on her face, and her food sitting cold in front of her.

  Something about the way she looked tickled something in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t say what it was. Whatever. If she wanted to forget her food because she was so busy talking to her boy toy then that was her business. I needed to get back to my office so I could start planning new tricks for getting her to reveal herself.

  13: Moderately Nasty Tricks

  Only nothing would draw her out and the class became a pure torture as the semester wore on. Every day I’d demonstrate some new and devious method to try and get Fialux to reveal herself, and every day Selena Solare just sat halfway up the bleacher seats and stared at me with a smile on her face as though she was enjoying the show, but she never did anything that would reveal she was actually a super heroine in disguise like jumping out and stopping one of my killer robots, or swooping down at the last moment to save somebody when I opened a portal directly under them into the caldera of an active volcano while they were suspended via the glories of antigravity.

  No, every time I had to save them at the last minute. Every time I was the one who blinked, and it was infuriating.

  Of course if that was all I had to contend with I’d consider myself lucky, but no, that wasn’t all miss Selena Solare threw at me. No, every day after class she stopped by my desk to engage in chitchat. Every day she said something that just crossed the line. Something that made me think she was definitely flirting. Something that made me wonder if she was thinking of me as a professor or as her arch nemesis in disguise.

  Not that she’d probably even think of me as her arch nemesis even if she did suspect my true identity. I was starting to wonder if she even remembered who Night Terror was. I was starting to seriously wonder if the rest of the world remembered who Night Terror was. Other villains came and went, and I watched them on the nightly news, but there was no Night Terror out there getting her face on the Starlight City News Network because I was cooped up grading papers or working late in my office at the university trying to come up with a new diabolical plan to get Fialux to reveal herself.

  I told myself that it’d all be worth it. It would be worth the trouble, worth the brief Night Terror hiatus the city was enjoying, when I finally caught Fialux in my web. One way or another, at that point I’d either rule the city via being Fialux’s new main squeeze, or I’d rule the city because I’d finally captured her and added her to the vast collection of heroic souvenirs I kept buried deep in my lair.

  In suspended animation or something. I’m not that heartless.

  Only in the meantime that flirtation every day when she stopped by my desk was absolute torture. Even more so because every day she got interrupted by that damned phone in the same way she’d been interrupted in the dining hall at the beginning of the semester. It was the same routine. She talked to me for a few minutes after class and her phone started ringing. Invariably she picked it up, swiped, answered, and her face went slack-jawed as whatever the person on the other end of the line was telling her suddenly became far more important than whatever flirting she’d been doing with me.

  It was driving me insane. That annoyance, that craziness, might explain why, in a fit of pique, I decided to do away with little miss nice super villainess. I decided it was time to break out the big guns, or rather get rid of the guns entirely. It was time to stop with nice things like a cloud of nanobots that could disassemble living flesh or inanimate objects with a speed that made piranhas seem like carnivorous sloths in comparison. No more primitive artificial intelligences just on the verge of gaining sentience attached to miniguns loaded with foam darts so no one would actually get hurt when they inevitably decided to turn on their human masters during the convenient time frame of my class.

  I’d demonstrated ways for normals to survive every moderately nasty trick in my repertoire and it did nothing. So in desperation I decided to be more direct with a demonstration of beam weapons which was moving into the slightly more than moderately nasty trick category. If that didn’t work I still had a few really nasty tricks up my sleeve. The kind of stuff that even I never broke out because it brought out the specter of escalation which was never good for business.

  I started by setting up a cement block roughly as tall as a man at one end of the room. I stood on the other end of the lecture hall with another prototype beam weapon never before seen outside my test lab, pointed, and let loose with a blast of pure high energy light. I swiped the rod quickly and in a moment the two ends of the cement block that had been one giant cement block just moments before split and fell to the side. I turned
to the class.

  "This is a beam weapon. Beam weapons operate on one simple principle. You cannot outrun the speed of light."

  I gestured for one of the students sitting in the front row to come down and stand next to the cement block. He hesitated, glancing around the room as though hoping somebody might come to his rescue, but no one said anything. Miss Solare certainly made no move. He moved in front of the bisected block and stood there quaking in his shoes as I pointed the rod at him.

  I glanced up to where Fialux/Miss Solare sat with her arms crossed, but still she did nothing. I shrugged. If this wasn't going to draw her out then I was running out of ideas.

  I pressed a button on the rod and another blast of light, this one a far less high energy, lanced out and hit the poor kid. He screamed in terror, and then he screamed in relief as he ran his hands down the middle and realized that he was still in one piece.

  "What's the number one lesson I've drilled into you so far?"

  "Get out of the way," the class recited back at me in singsong unison.

  "Exactly," I said. "And what did our terrified friend who has now wet his pants not do?"

  "Get out of the way."

  "Also right. Only in this case getting out of the way is trickier. The problem with beam weapons is that the light travels at, well, the speed of light. You aren't outrunning that unless maybe you're that new Fialux chick that’s been causing so much trouble recently."

  The class murmured. Most of the tricks I'd shown them had a way of escaping that at least gave a fifty/fifty chance of survival. This was the first super weapon I'd shown them where that fifty/fifty chance went down to zero.

  Time to give them a little hope.

  "So if you see somebody using a beam weapon, you get the hell out of the way the instant you see it pointing at you."

  The demonstration continued in a much in the same vein, going over the various types of beam weapons they were likely to run into while they were running straight into the middle of a super powered war zone. At no point did Selena make any move to save anyone, though I didn’t really expect her to after the first demonstration failed to draw her out. I was starting to wonder if I was making a serious mistake and wasting my time at the university. I was starting to dread the prospect of going undercover at SCNN.

  After class a familiar perfume wafted across my desk. I looked up from the paper I was pretending to grade while waiting for Selena to stop by and smiled at her.

  “Miss Solare,” I said.

  “I’ve told you, you can just call me Selena,” she said.

  “And what did you think of today’s demonstration Selena?” I asked.

  “Very impressive! I’d never think of trying to dodge a beam weapon like that.”

  Of course you wouldn’t think of dodging a beam weapon like that because you don’t have to. All you have to do is let the damned thing smack into your invulnerable hide, or if you’re feeling particularly showy you could make a big display of holding out your hand and absorbing the beam weapon there as you walk towards whatever poor son-of-a-bitch is trying to defeat you with it.

  I didn’t say that, despite how therapeutic it’d be. I just thought it and smiled at her.

  “So do you have any plans after class? I was thinking…”

  I never did find out what she was thinking. The hope that had been rising in me as she mentioned plans after class was dashed by the sound of her damned ringtone sounding through the empty lecture hall. I’d been leaning forward in my chair anticipating her next words, hoping but never quite daring to dream that she might be asking me to lunch or something, but I crashed back into my chair at the sound of her phone.

  “Sorry, one second,” she said.

  I waved a hand. One second would turn into several minutes if every other phone call she got at the end of class was any indication. Sure enough she picked it up, put it to her ear, and then she was gone. Once again something about her expression tickled something in the back of my mind, but I had far more important things to worry about than how ridiculous she looked when she was talking to her stupid boyfriend.

  Like how I was going to prove definitively that she was Fialux. I’m not sure why I didn’t just use the stasis field on her and get it over with, maybe it was partially because I was starting to enjoy our little conversations after class every day however brief they were before her phone started ringing.

  No, that wasn’t it. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t blasting some poor innocent college girl who may or may not also be moonlighting as a hero. My strict rules about collateral damage were the only reason I was being so cautious. I definitely wasn’t hanging around because the five minutes of flirting we got in after class kept me going for the rest of the day.

  Definitely not.

  I packed my prototype blaster in my bag and started up the stairs towards the exit. I learned early in the semester that there was no point trying to talk to Selena once she started on her phone, and I had to get to a nice private spot with no witnesses before I could teleport up to my office and then off campus entirely.

  I sighed at the top of the lecture hall stairs and looked down at Selena. I’d pulled out all the small and moderately sized guns. There was nothing for it. I was going to have to pull out the really nasty stuff for class next week.

  14: Really Nasty Tricks

  I didn’t want to bring out the big guns, but she left me with no choice. So at the start of the next class I fished inside my desk and pulled out a small orb. I let go and it floated into the air. Up into the middle of the room where a red light started to run around its equator.

  “Does anybody know what this is?” I asked.

  Blank looks. I shook my head. I figured at least some of them would have tried to hazard an answer at this point, but apparently I’d stumped them with this one. Some were looking up inquisitively, others were staring up in terror as though they were wondering what fresh hell Professor Terror was bringing to the classroom today.

  I smiled. Hell certainly had come to the classroom.

  Also, Professor Terror. I liked the sound of that. I made a note to add that one to the idea book.

  “What you see floating before you is a wide area matter dispersal bomb. I paused for a moment to let that sink in. To enjoy the pregnant silence in the room. To wait for the inevitable gasps as they realized what fresh doom was floating just above their heads.

  Blank looks again. Damn it. I shook my head. It really was my fault, after all, expecting a room full of journalism majors to understand regular science let alone the super science required to realize exactly why every single one of them should be soiling their drawers right now.

  “It’s an offshoot of teleportation technology. A rather nasty offshoot of teleportation technology, I might add. Most teleporters work on the principle of taking matter, scrambling it down to its constituent atomic parts, transmitting those constituent parts, and reconstituting them at a new location,” I said. I figured I needed to start with the most basic level even though most of this room looked like the type to watch enough science fiction to know what a teleporter was.

  Only science fiction became science reality when Night Terror was working the room.

  “This little device works on a similar principle, except it skips the second part about reconstituting everything at a new location. Saves a hell of a lot of power that way too. No, instead this takes every piece of matter in a given area and just disperses it on the wind. Reduces it to its atomic constituents and then sends it floating everywhere and nowhere.”

  They were starting to get the idea. Some of the more terror-prone students, and there were a lot more today after all my demonstrations than there were at the beginning of the semester thank you very much, were starting to glance nervously towards the door.

  “And I’ve set this particular wide area matter dispersal bomb to go off within the confines of this room,” I paused for a moment to let that one sink in. At least something was starting to sink in for a cha
nge. “Why would I do that, class?”

  Of course the real answer was that I was trying to lure out a superhero. I was trying to flush a goddess out from the sea of normals she was hiding in. Though I didn’t expect anybody in the room to get that answer, except maybe Fialux herself. I wasn’t even sure if she suspected my game yet, or if she still just thought I was a good teacher. If any of them did guess that answer they’d get an A for the semester right on the spot.

  A guy in the front row raised his hand. “To teach us how to escape it?”

  “No, I’m afraid that’s not it,” I said.

  I pressed my hands together behind my back and smiled, relishing the moment. “I’m afraid there is absolutely no escaping this one. It’s just like the speed of light, only worse. It could go off and you wouldn’t even know it was there as opposed to a laser weapon where you at least have a chance of seeing somebody pointing the damn thing at you before you die.”

  “So what’s the point?” That was from a cute blonde girl about halfway up.

  “The point of these last few demonstrations before your finals is to prove a point, and that point I’m proving is that there are going to be times when you go out there in the world, when you try to gather information, when you try to cover the big story and despite what you do, no matter how good your training is, that big story might kill you without realizing you were ever there. You are subject to the capricious whims of the gods and goddesses fighting around you. You could be squashed like an insect in an instant, your atoms dispersed to the winds, and neither you nor the hero or villain who killed you might ever know. The only thing that would remain is a nice little engraved nameplate on the Starlight City News Network memorial wall. A wall, I might add, that they had to recently expand for the fifth time since they built the building twenty years ago because it keeps filling up.”

  I paused. This was one of the greatest villain monologues I think I’d ever delivered and no one realized that’s what it was. They all thought it was career advice.