by Logan Jacobs
With that, he turned around and walked away.
“So… I guess we’re not getting any more yacht invites?” Norma asked.
“Probably not from him, but I’m sure we can make other yacht-owning friends in town,” I said. “I’m afraid I can’t buy my own yacht, since apparently Elizabeth would judge me for that.”
“… in town?” Elizabeth asked as she narrowed her eyes at me.
“You heard the man,” I said with a shrug. “He really, really, really wants us to leave. He even threatened us with the boogeyman of his arch-nemesis. That seems to me like a pretty convincing reason to stick around and see what happens.”
“But Grayville sucks!” Norma objected.
“Yeah, but maybe that’s because it’s never had anyone like us around,” I said. “Till now.”
“I guess if we got too active in the crime fighting scene in Pinnacle City, The Wardens would crack down on us,” Elizabeth said thoughtfully. “This is a better training ground for now. For you two, that is. I, of course, am already a seasoned pro.”
“At taking down supervillains maybe,” I said. “Although Mayhem was a tie, might I remind you. But are you prepared for civil war with other Wardens?”
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t know if I ever will be.”
“Then Pinnacle City is not the place for us to be right now,” I said. “It’s still home, of course. We can keep flying back and forth. But we won’t run any major missions there for now. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Norma said, “but does it have to be Grayville? Can we move to like, Paris or something instead?”
“You’re the only one who speaks French,” I reminded her.
“That’s a very elite city for supers,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, their supervillains have the atrocity levels of the French Revolution to live up to. And their superheroes are extremely snobby toward newcomers. They’d make the Shadow Knight look pretty friendly by comparison.”
“Okay,” Norma sighed. “Well, if we’re staying… can we install a hot tub?”
“Yeah, of course,” I laughed. “Why don’t you get in contact with the homeowners? Make them an offer they can’t refuse. I mean that in a financial sense, not a mobster sense. Once it’s settled, then you can buy whatever accessories you want for the house on the company card.”
“Okay, I will,” Norma said.
“Aileen, how about some waffles for breakfast, since we’re all up now?” I requested.
“As you wish, Creator,” she replied. “If we are going to be spending most of our time in Grayville for the near future, will you be having your equipment shipped over from The Cellar?”
“Oh, so that’s your condition, is it?” I asked with amusement. “You want me to complete your skin and hair.”
“I do not ‘want’--”
“I know, I know, you just recognize that it would facilitate the fulfillment of your programmed objectives,” I said. “I was just using the word colloquially. But yes, I’ll buy duplicates of a lot of my equipment that’s in The Cellar, and have some of the rest shipped over. Some of it is too valuable to risk moving or can’t be moved or replicated, or requires the precise conditions of The Cellar to function. But we’ll assemble a functioning laboratory in the basement here, just the essentials. For any really specialized project we’ll just fly back to The Cellar.”
Just then, I received a notification that someone was requesting entry at the gate. I buzzed them in and opened the door again once they drove up.
“Here for the research cadaver, sir,” said the man on the other side. He was wearing a windbreaker printed with the Nelson Biotech logo and had the company ID dangling from his neck on a lanyard.
“Ah, excellent,” I said. “You know, I had thought it was you about twenty minutes ago. Just a moment, please.”
Elizabeth and I went into the other room, carried over the giant cooler in which we’d placed the electrocuted body with the mind control chip embedded in the brain, and helped load it into the delivery guy’s van. Then I tipped him generously and watched him drive away.
“I hope we can figure it out and cure those people,” Elizabeth said. “How many of them were affected?”
“Based on the number of nanobots left in the box, upwards of two hundred,” I said. “But it’s hard to say because presumably some of the nanobots were used up in Mayhem’s initial experiments before he figured out how to successfully install the control chips.” If the nanobots had been removed from their packaging or hadn’t been stored in proper conditions, it was also possible that some of them had disintegrated without being used. Or were just lost, never to be found again. That was the inconvenient thing about microscopic tech.
“Breakfast is ready,” Aileen announced. She had to just shout from the kitchen, since we weren’t currently wearing our earpieces and there weren’t speakers installed all over the house the way they were at my house in Pinnacle City. That was one of the first changes I’d make, once the house properly belonged to me.
After a delicious breakfast of waffles with strawberries and whipped cream accompanied by chia seed pudding with kiwis and an extra strong pot of coffee, we brought our mugs into the living room to plop down in front of the television and review some of the news footage on the investigation of the previous night’s events at Wacky Wonderland.
“They’ll probably interview the Shadow Knight, and he’ll probably condemn the actions of the unknown perpetrators,” Norma sighed. I knew she was referencing the interviews with Optimo that had aired after our successful raid on the lair of the supervillain known as The Chief. For reasons that had to do with saving face, Optimo hadn’t revealed our identities to the public, but he had sermonized extensively on how what we had done was profoundly wrong.
“Naw,” I said. “The Shadow Knight doesn’t talk to the media at all. Now, Dan Slade talked to the media plenty, but he was always careful to steer clear of the subject of supers and crime fighting.”
“Oh, you are right,” Norma said. “But, Miles, there was one thing about The Shadow Knight’s visit that kind of bugged me.”
“Oh?” I asked.
“He said your threat was empty,” Norma cleared her throat, “and you didn’t reply back.”
“Slade is dumb,” I chuckled. “He laid out his threat and told me he’d kidnap me and keep me in his basement or something. The last thing I’m going to do is tell him how I would deal with him.”
“How would you dea--”
“I think you know what I’d do,” I said, and then Norma nodded.
Then, Aileen turned the television on to a relevant channel, and the video that came up was of a brunette ponytailed reporter standing outside the barbed wire perimeter of Wacky Wonderland, with its unlit, deserted Ferris wheel looming up in the backdrop.
There were no superheroes in sight.
“Last night, it was revealed that the site of the amusement park formerly known as Wacky Wonderland, which has been out of commission for years and unfortunately development has been hindered by a series of financial delays since the sale of the park, was in the meantime, unbeknownst to the public, serving as the secret lair of the supervillain known as Mayhem,” she stated as she stared solemnly into the camera and periodically arched one of her well-groomed eyebrows to emphasize a significant clause.
“When police responding to a tipoff from a neighbor who heard the sounds of gunfire coming from the vicinity arrived at the scene, they discovered an extremely unnerving situation. Upon searching the Munchkinville ride, which had been a favorite for families with young children, they encountered dozens of people wandering around in a dazed and nonresponsive state. The people appeared to be healthy and at first there was speculation that they may have been drugged or may have simply been in shock. But a few of them were wearing costumes which one of the first responders recognized from the opera The Demon’s Delight, and that clued in the authorities that these people were in fact among the victims of Mayhem who had gone missing in
the course of his previous attacks. For those of you who have not been following that story, over the course of the past week, Mayhem has been responsible for not one but two terror attacks in Grayville. The first of these attacks targeted a daycare, and the second targeted the Grayville Opera House during opening night of a popular show. In both cases, one of the most sinister aspects, beyond the casualties involved, was Mayhem’s demonstrated ability to seize control of the minds of individuals with no previous connection to him using some kind of medical implant device that is still being researched right now by experts as we speak in the hopes of being able to reverse the symptoms of brain damage in victims.”
“Aileen, how long until that corpse with the control chip arrives at my biotech lab?” I inquired.
“It should be another two hours,” she replied.
“Excellent,” I said. I didn’t know what “experts” Grayville had on the case, but I knew that the medical researchers under my employ were the most skilled that money could hire.
“… have been taken into custody and are being cared for,” the reporter continued on-screen. “But they were not the only people found inside the Munchkinville ride at Wacky Wonderland. In addition, the bodies of thirteen known supervillains including Mayhem himself were recovered inside the ride. For the majority of these supervillains, the apparent cause of death were bullet wounds, but the ballistics expert Peter Kennedy, who examined some of the shell casings left at the scene, commented that these do not appear to have been ordinary bullets. They appear to have been some form of specialized armor piercing round. It has not been possible to identify the manufacturer so far. Kennedy also remarked that he would associate this type of weapons innovation with someone like the Shadow Knight, although the actions of whoever raided this supervillain lair last night clearly do not reflect the well-established ethos of the Shadow Knight, beloved hero and icon of Grayville, who makes a point of refraining from killing even his worst enemies.”
“Here it comes,” Norma said with a sigh. I wasn’t really fussed about what the general public thought of me, and I knew Dynamo also only cared about her own conscience, but poor Norma couldn’t help but worry about others’ opinions of her-- even when they didn’t know that it was her.
“Public reactions to the violent events of Wacky Wonderland last night have been mixed,” the ponytailed reporter continued gravely. “Many are condemning this as an extreme example of vigilante justice which clearly resulted in the deaths of thirteen individuals who never received the chance for a legal trial. Regardless of the histories of the victims, this is nonetheless a multiple homicide which was evidently premeditated. Murder can never be condoned.”
Yup. That sounded a lot like the reaction in Pinnacle City to our defeat of The Chief, the kind of outraged reaction that Norma anticipated.
“Yet, other commentators are tempted to sympathize with the authors of last night’s raid on a secret supervillain lair,” the reporter asserted as a tiny smile crept onto her face. “They argue that Mayhem’s killers have undoubtedly averted further bloodshed that would have occurred at his hands, had he been allowed to continue living. Popular blogger Etta King even went so far as to declare that Mayhem’s killers have ‘finally accomplished all these years what the Shadow Knight could not or would not. These so-called murderers have done more in one night to break the cycle of super crime that holds this city hostage than all the superheroes in Grayville have done for the past decade.’ Her post concluded, ‘They have my vote.’ These views have polarized her followers, with some--”
I snapped my fingers to turn off the television, and the three women looked at me.
“I don’t need the media pussyfooting and all the disclaimers,” I said. “Let’s see what the people are saying. Aileen? Bring up the video she’s referring to.”
On the television, Aileen started broadcasting a Youtube video titled “Mayhem’s Killers got it RIGHT!!” that had half a million views already even though it had only been posted a few hours ago, after the news of the Wacky Wonderland raid broke.
Etta King turned out to be a diminutive girl with ivory skin, white blond hair teased into scruffy pigtails, and oversized black spectacles over her huge green eyes, wearing a heavy metal t-shirt that looked more like a dress on her, with her bare legs crossed under her in a sort of childlike fashion. She was sitting on a blue sofa that looked like it would swallow her, surrounded by houseplants and a fat, sarcastic looking striped cat that kept pacing in and out of frame. She used her hands constantly to gesture as she talked, blinked frequently, and had overall a sort of manic pixie energy about her.
The reporter had already summarized the essence of Etta’s video with her selected quotes, but Etta had also clearly done her research and rattled off a series of statistics on the absurd number of times that supervillains both in Grayville and nationwide had gone on to commit further violent crimes after being apprehended by superheroes and estimated that in the past year alone, eighteen hundred innocent lives could have been preserved if all the supervillains who had been captured had instead been killed the first time around. She also threw in some bizarre conspiracy theories about how Mayhem’s killers had known him well and had probably been close to him during his childhood or teenage years and how at least one of them was probably an astrological Gemini, but, no one was perfect, and I appreciated her support, nonetheless.
The comment section was extremely heated. A lot of the commenters had photos of superheroes or even supervillains as their profile photos and were clearly industry geeks. Some of them wanted to argue the statistics with her and criticize her sources. Others were Etta King fanboys who wanted her to know how beautiful and perfect she was, and how sexy it was to hear her talk about murder being justified. The video had thousands of dislikes. But it had even more likes.
“She’s a little weird, but I think I like her,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, pretty smart girl,” I agreed.
“I am a Gemini!” Norma exclaimed wide-eyed. “Wow, how the hell did she know that?”
“She may be one of the first, but more people will come around to our way of thinking and realize just how useless their beloved Shadow Knight really is,” I said as I picked up an ornamental plastic pomegranate from a nearby bowl and lobbed it across the room to knock over a stuffed toy Shadow Knight.
“Oh, I almost forgot to tell you,” Norma said. “That pomegranate and that stuffed toy will belong to you soon. The family agreed to my second offer when I increased it by fifty percent, and they’re willing to leave most of the furniture and appliances, they just want to pick up some clothes and sports equipment and sentimental stuff like family photographs.”
“That’s fine, we can go back to Pinnacle City for a weekend and let them pack up,” I said. “Hopefully they clear all this Shadow Knight shit out of here.”
“We really need to redecorate the place,” Norma said.
“Be my guest,” I said with a laugh. I was a little more particular about the interior of my real home in Pinnacle City, which I had spent quite a bit of time designing to reflect my interests, aesthetic, and personality, both what could be shown to normal guests upstairs and what was somewhat more confidential in The Cellar. But the way I figured it, this base in Grayville was just going to be the first of many, so if it would make Norma happy to kit it out like some kind of bourgeois home and lifestyle magazine spread, she was welcome to. “You can use my card.”
“It’ll be just like HGTV!” she exclaimed excitedly as she leapt off the sofa from between Elizabeth and me. I didn’t really think anything about our lives resembled HGTV, except maybe that stunning transformations were a central theme. “But I don’t even have to audition with a sob story to get on. Hmm, I think the car keys were in the kitchen, right? Oh yeah, those were rentals. If we’re staying, we’ll need to buy cars, too.”
“Well, I don’t know of any dealership that sells ‘em like I make ‘em, so I’ll probably just have a couple of mine shipped out so I d
on’t have to spend all that time on mods,” I called after her, “but you’re welcome to get yourself one! I still owe you a car if I remember correctly from a long weekend when you worked overtime about a month ago.”
“Can it be a sports car?” Norma yelled back from out of the room.
“Yeah, of course, just don’t get red, it attracts too much attention,” I responded as I smirked at Dynamo, since I was alluding to her absurdly flashy car named Nigel, which was basically the vehicle equivalent of the red latex catsuit that The Wardens had costumed her in.
She reached out her long, athletic leg from the other side of the couch to jab me in the thigh with her foot, but I grabbed her by that ankle and pulled her over closer so that her legs were draped across my lap. Then I reached up to her hips and pulled her leggings and her panties down to her knees.
“Norma’s still in the house!” she protested under her breath as her eyes glimmered with excitement.
“Norma’s just getting dressed upstairs, and then she’s going to run off on her shopping spree,” I assured her. “She’s not thinking about us anymore, and she won’t come back in the room.”
I slid my hand up Dynamo’s leg and lightly stroked her pussy with my thumb until I could feel its wetness. Then I slid my longest finger inside of her as she sighed, tipped her head back, and closed her eyes. As I rubbed my finger against her slick walls, she let out a little moan and scooted her bottom closer to me.
By that time I was jutting through my sweats, so I withdrew my finger in order to pull Dynamo’s leggings and panties past her feet. She opened her eyes, climbed on top of me, yanked my shirt off, and forced my sweats and briefs down to my knees. I pulled her shirt off and unclasped her bra, which was the last scrap of clothing still left on her. My hands roamed hungrily over the marble curves of her waist and her breasts, the only soft part of her entire body, while she bent her head to kiss me ferociously.
