Omega Superhero Box Set

by Darius Brasher

  My sudden ache for this woman was so strong it was almost painful. Even Lilith’s apple tattoo seemed alluringly sexy, though I normally was not a fan of tattoos on women. I wanted to take a bite of that apple. Temptation, an apple, and a blue dress . . . maybe that classic song I had often heard the Old Man play, Devil With A Blue Dress, was based on this woman.

  I had grown up believing what this woman proposed was wrong. But, if there was one thing Astor City had taught me, it was that small-town values weren’t always compatible with the big city. Besides, people paid for massages all the time, and I never saw priests and nuns picketing massage parlors. If paying a woman to rub you during a massage was morally fine, what was so different about paying her to rub you where the sun didn’t shine?

  I looked at Lilith hungrily, teetering toward saying yes. Even with the dramatic dilation of her pupils, I saw eagerness in her eyes. It made me hesitate. It was not the same eagerness I felt, the eagerness of a man for a woman. Hers was a mercenary eagerness, the eagerness of a fisherman who had hooked a fish and was reeling him in, or a con artist who had found a naive mark.

  Disgust twisted in my stomach where there had only been naked lust before. I didn’t want to be touched by someone I paid to do it. I was reminded of the Hero hags, who only had their erotic fantasies about me and people like me because of the power we represented. I wanted to be touched by someone because she wanted to do it, because she liked and wanted me, not because she liked my cape or wanted my money.

  I grabbed Lilith’s wrist and pulled her hand off me. “I said that I’m not interested,” I said, more firmly than before. It would have sounded more convincing had my body not been visibly disputing me.

  Lilith pouted sexily. “Are you sure? It’ll feel real good. For both of us. You’re awfully cute.”

  “I’m tempted, but I have to say no. The truth of the matter is that I don’t have any money.” The first part was true enough. I was lying about that last part; I was trying to spare her feelings.

  The sex kitten look on Lilith’s face slid off as if it had been a mask. “Then what you doin’ in here, you broke ass mutherfucka?” Her voice, before alluring, was now harsh and ghetto. It was as if I was looking at a completely different person than the one who had her hand on my private parts seconds before.

  “Studying your elocution,” Truman said.

  Lilith said, “Ain’t nobody touchin’ my elocution unless you got money. You gotta pay to play.” She gave me a hard look, and then a snort of disgust. She flounced off. Her perfume lingered behind like a ghost. Moments later, she was across the room with her arms wrapped around a middle-aged guy who sported dad jeans and a comb-over. The seductive look she had beguiled me with before was back on her face. The man said something to her. She threw back her head and laughed, as if whatever he had said was the wittiest thing she had ever heard. The man’s hand slid down to her butt and stayed there. I felt a hot irrational surge of jealousy.

  Truman said, “Though the strippers get tipped when they dance out here, they make their real money in the private area. That’s why that woman came onto you so aggressively.” Truman’s voice went up a few octaves and became breathy. “That, and the fact you are so dreaaaaamy,” he added, stretching out the last word in a bad imitation of Lilith’s voice. He smirked, then looked back over at Lilith. She was now touching the middle-aged man as aggressively and intimately as she had me. The smirk faded from Truman’s face, replaced by a touch of sadness.

  “I feel sorry for people like that,” he said.

  “Why? He seems to be having a good enough time,” I said as I mentally chided myself for being jealous. When a stripper paid attention to you, it wasn’t as though she was yours—it was just your turn. In a sudden flash of what I hoped was cynicism and not insight, I wondered if the same was true with all romantic relationships.

  “Not him. He’s just an idiot who’s liable to get the contents of his wallet sucked out through the contents of his pants. I feel sorry for her. Hers is no kind of life to be living, even if she’s too blinded by youth and drugs to realize it just yet. Nobody ever became a stripper because her daddy loved her too much or because she got tired of being a rocket scientist. If you work here, it’s because your life took a wrong turn somewhere. There aren’t a bunch of little girls whose ambition in life is to grow up and take their clothes off for a living. Or prostitute themselves. A lot more than just dancing goes on in those private rooms, after all. As your new friend implied, she would’ve let you do just about anything to her if you had paid her enough.”

  With Lilith no longer pressed against me, the fever she had triggered within me was subsiding. How quickly her true nature had been revealed when I told her I didn’t have any money cast a different light on all the gyrating bodies around me. Though I won’t lie and say I didn’t still find the women arousing, they no longer transfixed me. It was like a high fever breaking. Yes, I was still hot and bothered, but I was no longer mesmerized to the point of paralysis. I now saw the women’s dancing for what it was: advertisement for a product I did not need.

  I said to Truman, “I’m glad to hear you think strip clubs are wrong, too. I was beginning to think my upbringing had made me a prude.”

  “Oh, I don’t think they’re morally wrong. I don’t think prostitution is wrong, either. If two consenting adults agree to get naked or swap bodily fluids in exchange for money, what business is it of mine? The fact that it’s not my business doesn’t mean I must like it, though. The stories of women like the ones in here usually don’t end well. If I could, I’d wave my magic wand and create a different life for every woman in here.” For a moment, Truman looked sad and tired. “Unfortunately, my wand is in the shop for repairs. Besides, nobody here asked me to save them, and would likely spit in my face if I suggested they needed saving. I love a naked woman as much as the next guy, but standing here makes me feel dirty. I wanna go home and take a hot bath.” The tired look on Truman’s face faded as quickly as it had appeared. He looked his old jocular self again. He pointed down at the part of me that I was mortified to see pointed back at him. “Whereas you need to go home and take a cold shower. Your magic wand seems to be working just fine.”

  As it turned out, you cannot die of embarrassment. If you could, I would have done so right then and there. Where was a fig leaf when you needed one?

  “So where’s Cassandra?” I asked, as much to change the subject as to move things along. Now that the spell these women had cast over me was broken, I wanted to get out of here as soon as possible. All this jiggling flesh made me uncomfortable.

  “I have no idea. You can always use your divining rod to find her. Though it’s currently pointing at me, I can assure you that I’m not her.”

  I tried to ignore both my so-called divining rod and Truman’s remark about it. I could’ve taken a page out of the book of almost every woman I had ever known since they had been ignoring my divining rod all my life. “What do you mean, you have no idea?” I demanded. “You said she worked here.”

  “I did and she does. Doesn’t mean I know where she is. She assumes a different form after every time she answers someone’s question. Figuring out who she is is the first step in getting her to answer your question. ‘It cuts down on the riffraff and the unserious,’ she had said when I asked her why she makes people jump through that hoop. She said otherwise she’d be overrun with people asking her questions, which would be great for her bank balance, but terrible for her free time.”

  “Have you asked her a question before?”

  “I have.”

  “Good, then you can tell me how to find her.”

  “Nope. It doesn’t work that way. If I help you find her, her powers won’t work on you. Besides, I don’t even know if how I found her before would work more than once.”

  “What question did you ask her?” The dark cloud returned to Truman’s face.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I asked if it’s possible to resurrect a
young Meta who died while under my protection.”

  “And is it?”

  “I’m working on it,” Truman snapped. I clearly had hit a touchy subject. “Look, quit stalling. Are you going to start looking for Cassandra or are we going to continue to play this rousing game of Nosy Questions?” It was hard to remember that Truman worked for me instead of vice versa. I wondered if Henry Ford’s employees had been this mouthy.

  Truman was right, though. I was stalling. I didn’t know where to begin. I had no idea how to go about finding Cassandra. Then again, just a few short years ago, I had no idea how to do all the Hero-related stuff I now did without a second thought.

  I stood up straighter. I was a licensed Hero. I had been to other dimensions, other planets, fought off supervillains, and survived more deadly scrapes than I wanted to remember. After all that, how hard could finding a woman be? Yeah, maybe my people-finding track record had been less than exemplary lately, but surely finding a Metahuman stripper was easier than finding a Metahuman murderer. At least it promised to be easier on the eyes.

  My pep talk seemed a lot less peppy when I turned my attention away from Truman back to the strippers. There were dozens of them, each different, yet somehow luridly still the same. Finding a stripper in a building chock-full of them when you didn’t have any idea who you were looking for was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It was looking for a needle in a needlestack. In light of how drugged up Lilith had been, I suspected finding a needle in this place would be easier than finding Cassandra.

  The thumping music coming from the loudspeakers made it hard to think. The secondhand marijuana smoke I breathed in did not help. What was it they called getting high from someone else’s weed smoke? Hotboxing? The word had a double-meaning when all this female flesh surrounded you.

  With effort, I forced myself to concentrate. I cast my eyes over the people in the room. No one stood out. Well, that’s not true. The employees definitely stood out from the patrons. The women on the stage on the right stood out due to the perverted things they did to one another. The stripper dancing on the small stage a few feet away stood out in that she looked like she was smuggling two hams in the bottom half of her tight dress. The waitress who just walked past me stood out because she had nipples that jutted out like miniature Star Towers.

  Each woman stood out for one reason or another that was uniquely her own. However, no one stood out in a way that made me think she was Cassandra. Unfortunately, no one had a neon sign over her head identifying her as Cassandra: The Stripping Clairvoyant.

  Could Cassandra be Lilith? She had come up to me, after all. Maybe her clairvoyance had told her I had come to see her and she had pointed herself out to me. Maybe giving me a genital handshake was her way of saying, “Hi, I’m Cassandra. I’m as pleased to meet you as you obviously are to meet me.” If Lilith had the power of prophecy, though, she hid it awfully well. When I thought of an oracle, I thought of someone ancient with wise eyes who wore robes. I didn’t think of someone like Lilith.

  I looked over at Lilith again. She was leading the middle-aged man she had previously been groping toward the door to the private area. Now that I was no longer gripped by lust, I saw that she had an unfocused and hazy look, the way people who were high and liked to stay high often did. How many men would she need to objectify herself for tonight, I wondered, to get enough money for her next series of fixes? I understood why Truman felt sorry for her. It was hard to believe she was the Meta who could give me the answers I needed. She looked like she needed answers to life’s problems, not like she dispensed them.

  I glanced at Truman, hoping he would help me despite what he said earlier. True to his word, he was not helping me look for Cassandra. Rather, he leaned over the bar, talking to the pregnant bartender. He might have been trying to convince her to get a different job in the best interests of her unborn child. Or, he might have been asking if he could get a glass of milk straight from her built-in taps. You never knew with him.

  Truman clearly was going to be no help. Since no one leapt forward and announced herself to be Cassandra, I needed to try something other than staring at everyone like someone who had never seen a woman before. If I couldn’t find Cassandra with my eyes, maybe I could find her with my powers.

  I closed my eyes and lifted my hands a bit. Normally I tried to be subtler when I used my powers. Here, no one paid me any attention. There were far too many other, jigglier, things to pay attention to.

  As I had when I used my powers to sense Antonio about to enter his apartment to find me and Isaac inside, I emitted pulses of my telekinetic touch. Like a submarine using sonar to find what was around it in the depths of the dark ocean, I used my telekinetic touch to feel everyone and everything in the club. I did it gently, not wanting people to feel me probing them. Though I could hit someone so hard with my telekinesis that it felt like a punch from a pile driver, I could also touch someone so gently that I could count the hair on their head without mussing it. With the soft touch I now used, the people in the club would feel nothing consequential, like a weak puff of breath on the back of their necks, except all over.

  I concentrated on finding something unusual, something that would indicate who Cassandra was. It was an effort to not get distracted by all the flesh I ran my mind over. My powers confirmed what Truman had said about how more than just dancing went on in the private area. Some of the positions the people there sweatily engaged in I had never even heard of, much less tried. At this rate, I would be the most experienced guy who had only slept with one woman in the history of mankind. I wondered if there was an award for that. I shuddered to think what the award statuette must be shaped like.

  There! I found something unusual. A woman who sat on a man’s lap on the other side of the club from me didn’t feel like everybody else. Though the inner core of her was flesh and bone, the outer surfaces of her body didn’t feel like flesh. Touching her versus touching the other women in the room was like touching soft Styrofoam versus touching human flesh—something was there, but whatever that something was, it was artificial. It reminded me of when I using my powers to run my mind over the holographic characters which had been used during the Trials—something was there, but it was not what it appeared to the naked eye to be.

  If this wasn’t a clue, I didn’t know what was. I opened my eyes and lowered my hands. I strode through the club toward the woman I had identified. When I finally navigated through the throng of people, I found a woman with blonde bobbed hair dressed in pink hot pants and a matching halter top. The guy whose lap she sat on was burly, which was good for him because she was a big girl. A small man might not have been able to support her weight. She was not fat exactly, but thick, with ample hips, big thighs, plump arms, a muffin top, and a prominent chest. “Thicker than a snickers,” I had heard Deshaun, my friendly neighborhood drug dealer, say appreciatively about women built like this one when they walked by his usual perch on the sidewalk. Standing, this woman would look like the letter S, all boobs and butt.

  She had an arm around the man’s shoulder while her other hand stroked the man’s chest through his shirt. The man was doing a good octopus impersonation as his hands were everywhere. The woman’s face was turned away from me and snuggled up against the man’s. She murmured something in the man’s ear. He half-moaned, half-growled, and squeezed her butt. Maybe she had shared with him her secret angel food cake recipe, but I doubted it. A tall glass half full of an amber liquid was on the pub table next to the man’s elbow. A partially smoked joint was in the ashtray.

  I tapped the woman on the shoulder. She turned to me. Her lips were a thick, blood red slash in her face. She had dark brown eyes under thick dark eyebrows. I didn’t have to be a detective like Truman to surmise her platinum blonde bob was the result of a dye job. I wondered how much I would have to pay this woman to confirm that the carpet did not match the drapes. Then again, the woman’s hot pants were so tight it was clear she did not have carpeting at all. She
appeared to be a fan of hardwood floors.

  “Are you Cassandra?” I said, half yelling to be heard over the music. Another hip-hop song was playing, something with a thumping bassline.

  The woman gave me a quick head to toe look-over. It felt as though she was expertly assessing my net worth, like a banker determining a loan applicant’s creditworthiness. “No,” she said curtly. The tone of dismissal was obvious. She turned away to bury her head in the crook of the man’s neck again, ignoring me like I was invisible. Something in the woman’s eyes belied her answer, though. I didn’t need Truman’s lie detecting abilities to know when I was being lied to. Besides, my powers certainly hadn’t been lying when they told me something was weird about this woman.

  I felt a hot surge of anger at being dismissed. I was fed up. I was sick of the stench of weed, sick of this loud music, sick of strippers, sick of jumping through hoops, and sick of looking for people who didn’t want to be found like Cassandra and Antonio. I wanted to talk to Cassandra, find out what I could about Mechano, and get out of here. I felt dirty. I wanted to go home and soak in a hot tub. I wanted to find Neha waiting in that tub, eager to touch me, not because I paid her to, but because she wanted to. But I knew I would not go home to find Neha. That made me even more angry.

  I grabbed the woman’s wrist. All the time I had spent in the gym the past few years getting stronger had not been in vain. I hauled the big woman off the man’s lap and to her feet. She yelped in surprise. She stumbled in her high heels before regaining her balance.

  “Hey!” the man cried in protest, his tongue thick with weed and alcohol. He unsuccessfully tried to stand.