by Mia Archer
She appeared for the first time, her head popping out from under the covers. She looked for all the world like the proverbial groundhog popping out of its burrow. Her eyes squinted as though there was enough light in here to bother her, even though it was kept to a nice dull glow because I didn’t have anything higher than a sixty watt bulb in here.
Or, rather, I didn’t have any LEDs that looked brighter than a sixty watt incandescent. I tried to be environmentally conscious, after all. Even if this whole lab was powered by several independent fusion reactors that didn’t require fossil fuels or being hooked up to the grid.
Her nose wrinkled. Maybe she had been hiding under that comforter to keep herself safe from the smell after all. I would’ve done the same if I was stuck in this temple of stench.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “And what the hell is that smell?”
“What I’m talking about is I’m done putting up with this shit,” I said. “And that smell is what happens when you destroy every cleaning bot that comes into your room. Eventually their AI learns that here there be dragons, and in this case it’s a stench dragon.”
“Whatever,” she growled. “Why cant you just do what I want and leave me alone?”
“Because this isn’t who you are. You might not remember it, but I know you’re Fialux. I don’t care if you have had your powers taken away from you. You’re not going to sink into a depressed funk. I’m not going to let you.”
“The last time I checked nobody asked you,” she said. “Besides. Haven’t you already done enough?”
Her words were like a slap to the face. They were words that cut far worse than any other attack she could launch at me. She didn’t realize what she did to me when she talked like that. Playing on my guilt. On my own feelings of inadequacy that I’d let this happen to her in the first place. That I hadn’t figured out a way to reverse it.
And that more than anything combined to really piss me off. I stood. Looked at the mess around me. Looked at the desiccated corpses of cleaning bots and the remains of meals she’d tossed to the floor rather than throwing them into the garbage chute that would come out of the wall on the other end of her room and send everything down to an incinerator.
That growl turned into a yell. I activated the teleporter unit at my side and my suit materialized around me. I had to actually hit a button the old-fashioned way now because the computer wasn’t smart enough to figure out when I wanted my suit delivered to me via teleporter.
God I missed CORVAC, crazy megalomaniacal murderous impulses and all.
At least the button made a nice satisfying mechanical click. Cherry MX Blue, thank you very much. There was nothing like a button that made a nice satisfying click.
My battle suit materialized around me and I did a quick scan of the room. Picked out all the little metal objects, no radiation signatures so I guess that was one less thing to worry about, and then did a scan for organics so I could pick up all the various foodstuffs that had been scattered around.
I raised my wrist blaster. It was time to clean house, and I was going to do a cleaning the likes of which no lazy teenager had ever seen. Not before switching the settings just a little, though. After all, I wasn’t blasting doors off of a bank vault here or fighting off a living goddess in a crop top and distracting skirt.
Fialux hit me with a sardonic smile that said she didn’t for a moment believe I was actually going to do it. Whatever. I was getting sick and tired of people underestimating me because I’d saved the city one damn time.
So I started blasting.
That got Fialux up pretty damn quick. Maybe she couldn’t remember everything that had happened since we got together, but it was obvious she sure as hell could remember the sound of my wrist blaster going off.
I imagined that was something that was pretty well carved into her memory considering all the epic fights we’d had leading up to deciding we were in love with each other. Sure that sound hadn’t been an outright threat to her before, but it sure as fuck was a threat now in her currently mortal state.
“What the hell are you doing?” she shrieked, holding the comforter up as though it would protect her from my wrist blaster as well as the stink.
“Cleaning up,” I said.
I continued firing. Things disintegrated. Though I was using a new setting on the device that only made it look like they were disintegrating. I was actually firing blasts that teleported anything I hit to another part of the lab where cleaning bots could sift through and salvage what they could from the mess while throwing all the rest into the incinerator.
Hey, like I said. Those cleaning robots were expensive. Imagine how much it costs to buy one of those geeky little disk vacuum cleaners that could only suck up maybe a cubic inch worth of autonomous rodent disposal unit hair before they need to be changed, and then multiply that cost by having advanced AI that did way more than tell the bot when it was about to hit a wall.
Yeah, these bots were expensive, and I wasn’t going to throw them away no matter how annoyed I felt. I just had to get their remains into a part of the lab that hadn’t been turned into a cleaning robot chamber of horrors by an angry heroine with an axe to grind against anything automated.
“You’ve gone crazy!” she shrieked.
She pulled up into a corner, pulling her sheets up as though they’d protect her. She didn’t even have the desire to try and fight me off. I’d wanted her to be aware of her own mortality, but this was taking things too far.
Maybe I’d overcorrected, or maybe this was always bound to happen and there was nothing I could have realistically done about it other than scare the shit out of her in the hope it knocked some sense into her.
Either way, it was time to stop with all of this touchy-feely bullshit. I was going to fix this the only way I knew how.
Most of the room was clear now. It had been a pretty fast cleaning because I could shoot it all and let the bots sort out the rest. Now it was time to take on the last mess in the room.
I leveled my wrist blaster at Fialux. Her eyes went wide. I grinned.
“I’m not crazy,” I said. “I’m just a villain. People keep forgetting that lately.”
She screamed. I fired.
37
Clean Up
“You’re a real asshole. You know that, right?”
I leaned against the wall and tried not to get too distracted by how distracting Fialux looked in that towel as she dried her hair. A conventional hair dryer, though I wondered what she’d used to keep her hair looking so perfect back when she was super powered.
Could a hair dryer made for mere mortals be enough to tame hair forged in the fires of a distant sun? At least what I assumed was the fires of a distant sun?
There was still so much I didn’t know about her. So many mysteries that made up the great and powerful Fialux.
Take her rapid mood swing when she’d realized my blaster had teleported her rather than vaporizing her. She’d gone from moping around her room to being mad at me, which was a good change since I figured it meant she was coming out of her shell, and now she looked more annoyed than anything.
Though, to be fair, I think almost anyone would be a touch annoyed after being fake vaporized. She could stand to be a little more grateful the thing had been set to teleport in my humble opinion, but I’d take any emotion that wasn’t moping depression right about now.
“What can I say?” I said. “I needed something to shake you out of that funk you were in.”
“Well you could’ve told me you were using a teleportation setting on that thing rather than vaporizing anything it touched.”
“I could’ve,” I said. “But that wouldn’t have gotten your attention, now would it?”
She let out a noise that might’ve been a grunt. It might’ve been disgust. It might’ve been all of the above.
But she also smiled. That was the important thing. It was the first time I’d seen her smile since we watched those giant robots having
a one-on-one fight with the architecture downtown, and I’d take it.
“I’m going to get my powers back someday, and on that day I’m going to pay you back for that. I want you to know this,” she said.
“And on that day I’ll be so happy you have your powers back that I won’t be all that worried about you paying me back.”
She let her towel drop and I was suddenly caught in an awkward position. Because on the one hand there’d been a time not all that long ago when she wouldn’t have been at all annoyed that I enjoyed the show when she dropped a towel, but that was before she lost her memory and the two of us became something less than more than friends.
Only the way she looked at me now with the barest hint of a smile said that maybe there was something more going on here. We’d been chatting and she’d been surprisingly friendly despite the fact that she thought I’d been on the verge of vaporizing her not that long ago.
Maybe there really was something more going on here. After all, I’d gotten her to fall for me once. Who was to say I couldn’t do it again?
Maybe that was another part of this whole puzzle that I’d been approaching the totally wrong way. And that made me think of another way I could maybe try to make this all better.
“So y’know I was thinking,” I said, suddenly feeling awkward.
“Yeah? I imagine you do that a lot considering this empire of tech you’ve created.”
“Right,” I said. “But I wasn’t thinking about stuff in my lab for a change.”
“Yeah? And what were you thinking?”
She was pulling herself into her underwear now and shrugged on a bra. The show was over for the moment. At least the good part of the show. I found myself wondering if she’d done that on purpose.
That was the bad thing about suddenly being in a situation where I found myself attracted to girls. There was a time, not too long ago, when I wouldn’t have thought there was anything to a moment like that. It would just be a girl changing in front of me because there wasn’t anything weird about two girls changing in front of each other.
But there was way more to it now. It was way too fucking complicated.
Complicated like what I was about to ask her if I could ever work up the nerves to do it. It was weird. I had no problem going toe to toe with the superpowers that controlled this world, and I’m not talking about any sort of government thank you very much, but here I had trouble coming up with the guts to ask a girl out on a simple date.
“Come on Natalie,” she said with a grin. “What were you thinking?”
I swallowed. She had to be teasing me now. Her eyes ran up and down my body and it sent a shiver running through me. Maybe getting her out of her funk had somehow brought back some of that flirtation we’d enjoyed before she went into said funk.
Or maybe it was just so much wishful thinking on my part.
“What would you think about maybe going out tonight?” I asked. “I know it’s been awhile since you got out of the lab and all, basically since I brought you here, and I was thinking maybe it would do you some good to get out there and see a little bit of the world.”
She whirled around and I realized we weren’t even close to being done with the distracting part of the evening. Oh no. She was still as distracting as ever in just her underwear.
Like there was no need for her to do a little twirl like that. If this were a movie that would’ve been the kind of gratuitous shot some lascivious director put in just to have some eye candy for the male demographic in the theater. What was her game?
She arched an eyebrow.
“So were you thinking like a date or something?” she asked.
I swallowed again. This wasn’t a pleasant feeling. How could it be this difficult to just ask someone out, damn it? I’d challenged titans, I’d fought gods, and now I was having trouble with the idea of going out on a date with a girl I’d already been dating before Dr. Lana stepped in and screwed with my life?
What the hell was wrong with me?
I knew what the hell was wrong with me. Maybe Fialux was having a crisis of confidence considering she lost all her powers, but I was having a little crisis of my own.
I was used to being cool. Confident. See all the above about taking on titans and battling gods and winning.
Dr. Lana had pulled a number on me. That was for damn sure. I was supposed to be the best there was at the whole villainy thing. There’d been a time not so long ago when I was convinced I ruled this city and I was on my way to ruling the world.
But then all this had happened. I’d run into Fialux who was nothing short of a goddess in human form come down to earth to ruin all my plans. I’d been betrayed by my supercomputer which left me with some serious questions about my ability to judge character when it came to artificial intelligence. Not to mention leaving me with serious questions about my competence since I hadn’t been able to install a single failsafe that kept him from turning on me and I hadn’t realized he’d moved his entire data banks to an offsite location right under my nose.
Then there was Dr. Lana who was just the latest in the parade of things that seemed to be tailor-made to challenge my assumptions about my status as badass evil genius numero uno in this city.
Everything she’d done to me had seemed incompetent at the time, but everything she’d done had also succeeded despite her seeming incompetence. Almost as though that incompetence was an act or something that was meant to throw me off. To leave me feeling cocky and confident around her so I’d make a mistake.
Finally there was the weapons I’d confiscated from her minions in our first dust up. Weapons that should’ve allowed me to figure out how the hell to get Fialux her powers back, but so far they’d stymied me despite my best efforts.
Yeah, I guess I was in a little bit of a funk myself. Fialux wasn’t the only one having a difficult time with the way the world was working right about now.
I took a deep breath. Looked up at the mirror. More specifically to Fialux staring at me in the mirror and still looking oh so distracting because she was staring at me while wearing practically nothing.
It’d been awhile since I saw her wearing practically nothing. I was like a starving person wandering the desert who suddenly discovered an oasis. So sue me.
But I was better than this. I was a villain. I was the best villain in the world. I didn’t get shown up by stupid women who’d been so afraid to strike out on their own that they stayed in the safety of academia.
I was going to show the world what I was made of again. I was going to strike fear in the hearts of my enemies again. I was going to figure out what the hell was wrong with Fialux and make everything better.
And in the meantime I wasn’t going to wait around for her memories to come back. No, I’d managed to get her to fall for me once, and I was going to do it again, damn it.
“Yeah, it’s a date,” I said. “No big deal. Dinner and some dancing or something like that. What do you say?”
I held my breath. This was a killer moment. I hadn’t ever done the asking out before this. Mostly because I was always too busy with my work to bother with a dating life, but also because before Fialux I hadn’t quite realized a few things about myself and the rare date I’d been on had been with a guy.
She smiled. “Yeah, I think that sounds like a pretty good time Natalie. Maybe you could take me to the Skyhigh Terrace like you did for our first real date?”
I let out a sigh of relief from a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding in. Whew.
Who knew the greatest challenge out of this whole situation would end up being asking Fialux out?
That’s when something else she’d just said really hit me. She mentioned going to the Skyhigh Terrace. Like where we went on our first date. Which was totally where I’d taken her on our first real official date that didn’t involve saving the city, but she couldn’t know that unless…
“How long have you had your memories back?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow at her.
> She turned around and leaned against the sink. Again this part of her room had been done up to look like something out of an expensive lodge out west because that was secretly something I loved so I’d made my recovery room look like something I loved.
And the way she looked at me… The impish smile. The knowing way she’d been showing off. She’d been toying with me this entire time.
She bit her lip. Blushed. Looked away.
“It happened a couple of days ago. I did a lot of sleeping, and it sort of all started coming to me in flashes like I was having dreams or something,” she said.
I could’ve kicked myself.
“Rest and relaxation,” I said. “I should’ve thought of that! I’m going to kill the medical computer for not pointing this out to me.”
“What?” she asked.
“Whenever I go into the med bay in need of some serious repairs I usually have a couple of days of amnesia. I have this whole song and dance prepared to show me everything that’s happened in my life lately. Jog memories. But most of all I take it easy and don’t leave bed for a few days.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” she asked.
“Only everything!” I said. “I had you out in the city fighting giant robots and you were up and active hanging around the lab. What if it’s not the memory jogging so much as the sleep that helps wear off the medbay side effects?”
“Well I guess…”
“But the real question is why did you stay in your bed if you had your memories back?” I asked. “For that matter why were you growling at me to get out if you remembered us?”
She was still looking away. There was still that blush there, but she looked almost ashamed now.
“Because I couldn’t stand facing you,” she said. “I had all these memories flooding me of how great we had it, of how great you were, and then that was coupled with how disappointed you looked because I messed up that fight with those robots and Dr. Lana.”
“Selena,” I said, stepping forward and wrapping my arms around her.
