How to Defeat a Hero

by J Bennett

  “I can automatically override that setting when a major life event is occurring,” Bob explains. “Would you like me to record your defeat for future posting when your Iron Stream goes live?”

  “Thanks for the generous offer, but no.” I slowly put my feet underneath me. Nothing seems broken, but that might be a temporary state of affairs as Candor stomps toward me.

  “It doesn’t take a scientist to know a life of crime doesn’t pay,” he says as he grabs the lapels of my red lab coat and lifts me up. No doubt his costume is giving him serious strength assistance.

  “Neither does contracting herpes,” I mumble.

  Beneath the decorative dragon teeth lining his mask, his real teeth grind. “THAT is a vicious rumor!” he hollers and slams me into the wall for emphasis.

  “Oh my, this level of violence is not appropriate,” says the sexbot from the closet.

  “And who are you?” Candor asks.

  “My name is Kitty,” she replies brightly. “I am just a normal member of the cleaning staff.” Her tail swishes gently behind her.

  Over Candor’s shoulder, I watch my fellow henchmen struggle against the other two Dragon Riders.

  “Get The Professor out!” Mermaid hollers as she gracefully dodges Beyren’s sloppy punches. She executes a fancy roll across the mayor’s bed, grabbing the comforter as she lands on the other side.

  Sequoia and Gold are across the room, double-teaming Argon, who seems like the only Dragon Rider with any real fighting skills beneath his modded costume. He grips chakrams in both hands, each alight with holographic flames.

  Sequoia peels away from the fight and rushes toward The Professor, who has been ranting from a safe distance near the door. Sequoia slings our skinny boss over his shoulder like a rag doll. It’s not the gentlest of moves but we’re all doomed if our villain gets captured.

  Can’t have a very good vil show with the boss rotting behind bars.

  Just as Sequoia turns toward the bedroom door, a figure steps into the entryway blocking it. Candor’s hand is tightening on my throat so it might be a hallucination, but I swear this newest visitor resolves into a skinny man wearing a black outfit patterned with white diamonds.

  And the cape. Of course the cape. There’s only one shigit hero in this town who actually wears a real cape.

  “Buddha’s eye jelly,” I mutter.

  Candor looks over his shoulder and his eyebrows fold down into the open wedges of his mask’s eyeholes.

  “Who’s that?” he asks.

  “Freeter,” I gasp out.

  Candor releases another expletive. No sponsored hero wants an unsigned wannabe crimping on his fight. That’s a more common problem than you might think here in Biggie LC. Almost everyone in this town plays the Fame Game. If you aren’t sponsored then you’re striving to be sponsored. That often entails grabbing lens time on sponsored shows any way you can to try and raise your profile.

  There’s also another reason to despise freeters. They screw things up.

  Still pinning me to the wall, Candor yells over his shoulder, “Hey, this is our fight. Tail it!”

  “I shall go where justice requires,” the freeter replies.

  “Huh?” Candor sputters.

  “He… always… talks… like… that,” I wheeze. It just so happens that this freeter and I have a history. It started with his failed attempt to prevent a bank robbery last month when I was just an innocent patron trying to keep her dollars. He also came to my unnecessary rescue when I was sorta being robbed by a previous coworker. So far, I’ve been more than unimpressed with his heroic aptitude. The only points he gets in my book are for his dogged determination in the face of a supremely ridic costume, lackluster fighting skills, and zero budget for helpful suit mods and weaps.

  “Professor, your dastardly plans shall be thwarted!” the freeter hollers. Whatever inane cliché he’s readying for his next verbal volley is shoved back down his throat when Sequoia tucks his head and barrels right into the freeter. The move reminds me of that brutal game they used to play in the olden days, football. The freeter bounces helplessly off Sequoia’s massive shoulder and lands on his back.

  This is a typical outcome for him.

  As I use my quickly dwindling consciousness to appraise my situation, a part of me is glad that Sequoia is making a clean getaway with The Professor. A bigger part of me would really, really like to be able to breathe again.

  “Perhaps you should use your safe word,” Kitty offers. She still stands inside the closet next to me.

  Candor seems indecisive with this new turn of events. His eyes bounce between me, the dazed freeter jamming the doorway, and the retreating villain. It’s the opening I need to make my last desperate move.

  “Kitty, spank him,” I gasp. The sexbot is probs programmed to respond only to the mayor’s commands, but if Wisenberg perhaps prefers additional company, he might have opened her command structure.

  Kitty smiles and marches out of the closet. “Oh my, you are naughty,” she giggles. She playfully smacks Candor on the ass with her little whip. “Down boy!” she says in a husky voice.

  “Hey!” he snaps turning his head toward her. It’s not much but I’ll take it. I kick his shin as hard as I can from a position of no leverage. I feel the impact through my boot and Candor’s grip loosens. I drop to the floor gasping in ragged breaths.

  Get up. Fight, I think desperately to myself, but all I can do is lift my head and look up at Candor. Beneath the fierce dragon teeth lining his helmet, I see a smirk on his lips. “The Professor might have gotten away, but you won’t escape the cleansing fire of justice.”

  I know what that means. Candor has decided to stop playing with me. He must think he’s generated enough fighting footage, and he did get off those two half-decent lines. It’ll be enough for his producer to edit a nice little scene for the team’s next ep.

  Now it’s time for him to end our fight, which he could have easily done all along with a Dragon’s Fire shot, which is just a fancy stun laz shooter built into his costume. All the Dragon Riders have them. After I’m incapacitated, Candor will dangle me from his sky skimmer, and we’ll go for a ride of shame ending at the front door of the Big Little City police station.

  That will be the humiliating conclusion to my brief and disastrous career as a henchman.

  Candor raises his arm. I tense and prepare to try and dodge the shot.

  A blur of movement catches my eye. Gorgeous and fast as a lightning bolt, Mermaid descends upon my foe. Unlike me, she doesn’t waste her time throwing punches or kicks into Candor’s impenetrable suit. Instead, she drops low and swipes his legs out from under him in a brutal sweep.

  Candor slams onto his back, hard enough that I hear his breath punch out of his lungs. I’m yanked to my feet. Mermaid holds me up as I totter.

  “T… thanks,” I manage. Over her shoulder, I see Breyden hacking at the comforter twisted around his legs with his shimmering heat sword. Smoke billows from the melting fibers. Mayor Wisenberg is nowhere to be found. He probably scampered off to his safe room as soon as the Dragon Riders showed.

  He’s gone. Our mission is a failure.

  “Let’s go,” Mermaid hollers.

  Candor is already regaining his breath. He holds out a shaky arm and the Dragon’s Fire ripples just past my shoulder, close enough to make me flinch.

  “Should we grab one of the Riders?” Gold asks. He’s lingering by the door. His foe, Argon is sprawled on the floor, twitching. It’s so not fair that Gold got to choose a gold-plated stun laz pistol as his weap.

  Mermaid ponders his questions then decides. “No. Too bulky. We won’t move quickly with them.”

  “They’ll have trackers in their costumes, too,” I add. Gold and Mermaid aren’t from Biggie LC, so they might not know these things.

  “Get to the meetup!” Mermaid says to Gold. She looks at me. “You hardy?”

  I gather my lasso and nod. Mermaid gives Candor a heavy kick to the chest, knocking h
im down to the floor again and then races for the door. I make to follow her, then pause. I glance back and a small idea sprouts in my mind. We may not be able to carry a Dragon Rider, but that doesn’t mean we have to leave without a trophy.

  “Kitty, follow me and make sure you keep up,” I say.

  The sexbot smiles. “Certainly. I like playing tag.”

  “I bet you do,” I mutter. I look up at the cam drone buzzing overhead and give it a small, devious smile. We may have failed miserably at our first mission, but at least the audience will get a good laugh at the mayor’s expense. Serves him right for not locking out Kitty’s command structure.

  I rush across the bedroom. My entire body throbs in pain, and my neck is already swelling so that it feels like I’m breathing through a straw. I hop over the groaning freeter who still lies in front of the door’s entrance.

  “Fighting crime isn’t a good look for you,” I tell him. It’s a half-decent line. Too bad I wasted it on a freeter.

  “Justice… will prevail,” he stammers.

  “Not today,” I laugh and run out of the mansion with the sexbot close on my heels.

  Chapter 3

  Falling into that solar furnace may have scorched my skin and mangled my body, but it also burned the need for vengeance into my soul! ~ The Professor, S10, E1

  ~

  “This result is utterly, UTTERLY unacceptable!” The Professor barks. Our boss paces in front of us, hands clenched behind his back. His face is tight with anger and he’s not just playing for the cams. He is truly raging. “You were supposed to be the best of the best, but you have failed me in such a simple, little request.”

  Down in The Professor’s secret lair, we four henchmen stand on the practice mats at attention to accept his criticism. I keep my expression appropriately chagrined, eyes forward, and try not to focus on how much it hurts to swallow. At least my shoulder feels better. Gold recognized the dislocation right away and popped it back into place. With his background, I’m not surprised he knows his way around minor combat injuries.

  “We were supposed to be magnificent. As marvelous as a supernova shockwave rippling across ebony space,” The Professor says, shaking his head. His spikey silver hair wafts with the movement. I notice his limp seems markedly improved.

  I cut a glance toward Sequoia. My friend’s pale, freckled face is slowly turning the shade of a tomato. The Professor is a personal hero for him, which means this verbal lashing has extra sting. On my other side, Kitty’s face is puckered into an unhappy pout. Her tail swishes as she, too, receives this pummeling.

  When Kitty and I straggled to the pre-determined rendezvous spot after the caper, Sequoia looked up her model number and figured out how to turn off her GPS tracking. None of us knew how to power down the homing chip in her hand, so now her left arm ends with an empty stump. I’m sure we can find an after-market replacement hand. Plus, there’s still plenty a robo can do with one hand and I’m not talking sexy good time stuff. If Kitty is like most high-end sexbots, she also possesses an advanced suite of housekeeping and cleaning programs.

  “Professor,” Gold murmurs softly. The youngest member of our henchman group hangs his head in an exaggeratedly sheepish manner, but now turns his face up and thoughtfully purses his metallic gold lips. “The Dragon Riders pounced on us within mins of us breaking into the mayor’s place. That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “We were set up,” Mermaid adds more bluntly.

  I nod. I’ve come to the same conclusion. The next part of the equation is obvi. Someone tipped off the Dragon Riders, someone who knew all about our caper. That list is pretty damn short. I resist the urge to throw accusing glances at my fellow henchmen.

  Could be Gold. I know from experience he wouldn’t flinch from stabbing us all in the back, metaphorically of course, as long as he could step on our bleeding corpses to grab a better opportunity. BGR – Betrayal Gets Ratings. Still, I don’t think it was him. He’s conniving but also canny. It’s too early to make his move. He needs to build his Persona first, and for that, this show must be a success.

  If I had any Loons in my bank account (which is currently at a negative balance), I’d put my cryptocurrency on Mermaid as the traitor. According to rumors, the tall and beautiful blonde has been working the semi-reality market for years, hopping from show to show, even appearing on Z Town. You don’t survive long in Z Town with rainbows and kittens. Personally, I wouldn’t trust Mermaid to care for a robo pet.

  Maybe she’s already made a deal with some other producer or sponsor. The Professor’s name still carries a lot of weight in this town, and he’d be a big bag for any up-and-coming cape if she could deliver him. Then again, she did save my ass tonight. We wouldn’t have made it out of the mayor’s mansion without her. And she wasn’t exactly making life easy for the Dragon Riders as she handed out beat-downs like personal favors.

  “It was shining luck we made it out at all,” Sequoia says.

  “The only shining luck is that we have Arsenic on our team,” Gold replies, tossing a short nod to Mermaid. He’s been trying to work a love angle on her for two weeks but she’s not having any of it.

  “I don’t want to hear excuses,” snaps a new voice. We turn toward the elevator door, which has just opened. Leo steps out, Goggs perch on his forehead, pushing back his wavy brown hair.

  Speaking of absolutely pointless love angles…

  I immediately feel my cheeks flush. You’re such a drooling lobotomy, I think to myself. Sure, Leo is hella handsome in a clean-cut way you don’t often see in this town filled with flaunting peacocks. Sure, there’s something intriguing about his unflappability. But he’s a producer. The head producer of The Professor’s show to be exact.

  Producers are scum.

  Their job is to stick forks in our souls and twist just to amuse a bored audience. Leo has already proven himself to be a brilliant manipulator. He pushed us through a brutal obstacle course during our henchman tryouts and then sniffed out my growing friendship with Sequoia and set us against each other in a winner-take-all combat bout. My entire face hurts just thinking about the huge, freckled fist that put me down. That ep launched last week, and I made a point not to watch it.

  Leo is bad news. He is soulless with a wry smile on the side. So, I bite my lip and ignore my quickening pulse as he marches toward us and stands next to The Professor. Instead of laying into us, he waits. I can’t help but glance at the small mole under his left eye. The blemish captivates me. He could so easily have it removed but he keeps it, almost like a statement.

  “That mission was a disaster,” he says quietly, “not because the Dragon Riders showed up unexpectedly, but because you couldn’t work together, not for ten minutes.”

  His amber eyes are weapons, and he cuts us with his disquieting glare. “We created a plan. Everyone had a role, but you were too focused on striving for lens time instead of working as a team. Perhaps if you had, you might’ve been able to adapt to new circumstances and still succeed.”

  I look down at my black boots, keeping my chagrined expression in place until I realize that with Leo in the frame this scene won’t make the next ep. No viewer wants to see a producer on the screen. It ruins the kayfabe–that weird little mental trick audiences pull on themselves so that they believe what they know isn’t real. Our whole town–all of this cape and vil parody–runs on self-delusion. We pretend it’s all real and the audience is happy to play along.

  “The Dragon Riders knew we were there,” Mermaid says and juts out her hip. She is also clearly aware that this scene won’t be used.

  “So what?” The Professor snaps. “A minor surprise, something well-trained henchmen should easily be able to overcome.”

  When he speaks, Leo’s voice is soft, but it seems to hold thunder at bay. “I know some of you dream of spinning off, headlining your own show. You mug for lens time at the expense of your villain and, more importantly, at the expense of our storyline and the quality of our show.”

&n
bsp; He pauses to let his words sink in. “That behavior has to stop or this show is doomed.”

  I swallow and wince at the pain. Next to me, Kitty processes the fact that he is displeased and lowers her head in shame.

  “We are balanced on a knife’s edge,” Leo continues. “The Professor may have been a big name in the past, but he’s got to prove himself just like every new show. Our budget is almost non-existent and so is the patience of our sponsor. We need to deliver ratings, and we need to do it fast or we’re over.”

  His words are a sharp slap. I knew our show was underfunded and lifting huge expectations, but I didn’t realize the situation was so dire. Are we really in danger of getting swiped? Sequoia’s expression is so crushed I worry he may cry.

  “What about Iron’s little extra credit assignment?” Gold asks. “That’ll shake things up.”

  Leo nods. “When that ep comes out tomorrow, it’ll boost our ratings, but we can’t depend on one desperate gambit that happened to pay off.”

  Desperate gambit that happened to pay off? Anger flickers inside of me, mostly because Leo is right. My one big triumph was a despo move, and it only worked because I deceived someone who might have been a friend. I shove away the guilt that sprouts in my gut. It was the only way to make it on this show, I remind myself. I had to do it.

  “The honeymoon is over,” Leo is saying. “If we don’t deliver good, exciting eps with successful missions, start packing your bags.”

  The Professor’s frown digs deep trenches into his face. He must be under a lot of pressure, too. After all, it’s his name in the title of the series.

  “In seven days I have to deliver a new episode,” Leo says. He takes a moment to gaze at each of us. “That’s enough time for one more mission. One more chance to prove this team can get the job done.”

  Leo turns his back and walks toward a side door that leads to his office. The cam drones pull out of their auto-drifts. I don’t even have to adjust my expression; it’s already set in the appropriate depressed look.