Last November, I decided to shake things up.
I, a long time fantasy-science-fiction-teenage-********-writer, decided to take a shot at superheroes. After two months of stalling, three months of writing, and 70,000 words of meandering, I looked up from my screen and realized I wasn't satisfied with the conclusion the story was drawing to. So I shelved the project, and moved onto something that wasn't quite a remake, but a re-imagining. A similar universe with a similar villain, but with the main characters of the previous story stirred, shaken, and decked out until they are but amalgams of their previous selves.
So, here's A Tale of Capes (to be changed to a better title, when I think of one).
Rated T for capes, conundrums, and ***********.
If her bedmate wasn’t woken by the high pitched shrill or her sudden exposure to the chilled air of an unheated apartment, she was most certainly woken by Gayle’s sudden exclamation of, “****!” She drifted back into consciousness, her shapely frame enunciated by the dampened sunlight. Gayle couldn’t remember her name, but she would certainly remember the night before. What she would try and forget later was how much she bounced around her apartment, struggling to pull herself into the leggings of a costume that must have been designed for a size negative five. Seeing herself in costume was usually the highlight of her day, but ****, why did it have to be such a pain to put on?
Gayle slapped her cellphone hard enough that the alarm shut off before remembering it wasn’t her wake up bell. An address stared up at her from the screen like an invitation, though she didn’t get a good look at it until she’d finally finished pulling her mask over her eyes. It was comfortable enough that her ginger hair could hang freely out the back, but uncomfortable enough that she could barely turn her head. Someday she would ask her costume designer how the **** someone could design a supersuit without including neck mobility, but that could wait for another hour.
She glanced at her bedmate, who looked like she was preparing for round two.
Well, maybe it could wait for two hours.
“You have to go?” the woman said (whose name Gayle swore was on the tip of her tongue), asking it with such charm that refusing to answer seemed a crime in and of itself, even though she clearly knew the answer.
“Duty calls,” Gayle said, and even though her bedmate was far too old to be amused by such things, she giggled anyway. When Gayle was finished putting the finishing touches on her costume, and finished making sure her cleavage was pushed up just enough to be appealing, but not enough to be slutty, she leaned over the bed and gave the woman a kiss that somehow lacked intimacy, despite involving a great deal of tongue. “Will you be here when I get back?”
“I have to go to work.” The exchange ended there, interrupted by another long kiss. “Will I see you again?”
“Yeah,” said Gayle, too breathless for anything beyond one syllable. She resisted the urge to ask the woman her name. “I do have to go now.”
“Then go, hero.”
The one part of Gayle’s apartment not covered in posters, newspaper clippings, and covers of People Magazine detailing her exploits might as well have been a wall it was so filthy. She could have added it to her growing list of things she needed to do that day, but each time she tried, she kept putting it off. Now she just didn’t bother to add it to the list.
Before leaping out the window, she glanced at her cellphone, which was still flashing an address at her, along with an estimated time before the police would be able to respond. In thirty seconds, she would lose the exclusive publicity. As fortune would have it, she recognized the address: a bank—one of those twenty-four hour banks that catered to used car salesman, graveyard shift employees, and superheroes without a definite work schedule.
Then she took off.
Gayle was at the bank ten seconds later, flying as fast and banking as hard as she dared in a populated city. During her first real flight, she’d cracked supersonic speeds while flying past the Lantern Memorial Center. Hundreds of thousands of dollars down the drain in less than a second in the form of broken windows. If the press had caught wind of her identity then, her career as a costumed crime-fighter would have come and gone in less than a day, demolished by legal proceedings and state-appointed attorneys.
America’s First Superhuman Bank might as well have read America’s Biggest Target. She’d laughed at the name before, and she laughed at it now, though less publicly and in a more bitter, sardonic sort of way. The front door wasn’t blasted or bent or melted or atomized, so she ruled out any supervillain interference, along with any sort of fun from the encounter. The few people who decided to do their banking at five in the morning were huddled on the floor, while a mook in a stupid looking Cookie Monster beanie was exchanging death threats with the teller.
Gayle heard some of the death threats, but didn’t particularly care. Superheroes were a dime a dozen in the US, but mooks just kept trying to commit petty crimes. Maybe there was some mook breeding ground in Texas or something with a conveyor belt dedicated to producing simpleminded criminals. Gayle hovered a good five inches above the ground (because flying was always the most dramatic way to approach mooks), put her hands on her hips, and cleared her throat.
As if he didn’t yet realize the level of **** he’d stepped in, the mook and his stupid beanie whirled around, bringing his gun up with both hands. Gayle half-thought he’d let off a reactionary round right there, which was always good for a laugh, but he kept his cool just long enough to realize he was in way over his head. “Aw ****,” he said. “Aw **** aw ****.”
“Funny,” Gayle said, planting both feet on the ground, “I didn’t know idiots had a repeat function.”
He lowered his gun, his arm shaking like it was having its own personal seizure. “Please, man, just let me go. I made a mistake.”
“You sure did.”
“It just seemed so easy!”
“I’ll bet it did.” Gayle used the mook’s panicky moment to get a good look at his gun—a chrome weapon with a barrel twice the size of his hand, and too many flickering lights to be anything military. Forty years ago, he’d have been laughed out of the bank for walking in with such a ridiculous looking weapon. But in the modern age of modern heroes, it was just as much a threat as a fifty caliber round.
Well, not to her, but to other people.
“…can I just… can you let me go?”
“Oh, I would, but the police will be here in—oh, twenty seconds.”
“The cops? But I—” Just as she expected him to, the mook raised his gun and yanked on the trigger. What hit Gayle wasn’t a bullet, nor even the typical insert-name-here ray, but a bubble of red plasma that left her feeling kind of itchy. But as with every other weapon mooks tended to fire at her, it accomplished nothing but her amusement, and even subsequent pulls of the trigger and subsequent blasts of plasma accomplished little else.
When the mook realized his high-tech gun was doing jack ****, and true horror twisted his face, Gayle stepped forward, yanked the gun out of his hands, and slapped him hard him hard enough to send him tumbling to the floor. The blow wasn’t hard by any means, but the impact of being humiliated was enough that he didn’t get up without help, which Gayle was happy to provide as she lugged him outside to the oncoming rush of police sirens. Even for having danced around in the nude for a good twenty seconds before managing to pull her costume on, Gayle had excellent timing. Even the press managed to arrive a short time later, as if they had their own super reporters sniffing around for stories. And though a police line was in the process of being established, reporters were tearing it to shreds with just as much energy.
The moment Gayle set foot outside and shoved her mook into the arms of the nearest available officer, there were half a dozen reporters chomping at her heels—from a distance, of course. The police line kept them from approaching physically, but it didn’t stop reporters from shouting questions at her from afar. The mess of voices blocked out anything but the shouts of, “Athena! Athena!” followed by fifty microphones being shoved towards her face.
If there weren’t a naked lady waiting in her apartment, she might have been tempted to waste one minute of her life smiling and spouting some one-liner about doing the right thing, or being in the right place at the right time, or even about telling kids to stay in school, but there was a naked lady waiting at her apartment, so she took off, waved at the reporters so as not to appear a total *****, and took off with just enough speed to blow dust in everyone’s eyes. She felt her ears pop during the sudden pressure change, but she’d repeated the gesture so many times that the change in pressure bothered her as much as breathing.
In the early days, Gayle never took the direct route to apartment. There were always scenic routes, diversions, decoys, and misdirection, just to make sure everyone had been thrown off her sent before she decided to strip off her costume. Then she stopped giving a ****, a change that occurred right around the time she realized that the media didn’t give much of a **** who she was either; so few people seemed to give a **** about her secret identity that she just started flying up to and through her window.
All three percent of her brain she’d devoted to being excited about sex fizzled out when she opened her window and discovered there was no naked lady inside. All that was left to greet her was the smell of old newspaper, and the scent of last night’s escapades. Yet even though Gayle knew she should have felt hurt by the sudden departure, or even just a little miffed that her bedmate (whose name she still couldn’t remember) hadn’t even left a note, all she felt was relieved. So she bundled up the sheets she’d strewn across the floor, and tossed them into the laundry hamper before plopping down on her mattress.
Then she stood up, because the mattress did really smell too much like sex.
She thought about taking the costume off, but decided against it, even if she still couldn’t mover her head left or right. A muscle-bound redhead stared at her from the mirror she’d hung in place just so she could look at her conquests without looking at them directly. The muscles were built into the costume to make her look bigger than a frail twenty-something, but they felt intrusive more than anything else.
Her answering machine was next on her list of Why the **** Not? Not her cellphone, but the landline she kept hooked up for her life as Athena. When the machine said, “You have five new messages,” in the closest voice Gayle had ever heard to that of a zombie, she smirked, picked up the phone, and held it to her ear.
The two messages were from a concerned parents group, calling to criticize her for encouraging children to solve their problems with violence. It was the third one this week, and while their messages had been amusing at first, they stopped being fun the second the agitated woman leaving them kept calling and expecting an apology. Gayle deleted them without a thought.
The third message was from a Christian group, calling to tell her that her millions of dollars wouldn’t buy her a single drop of water when she was burning in hell. She’d heard it all before, but the bravado and genuine concern with which the words were spoken would be good for another laugh or two. At the very least, she could call him back and point out how many millions of people were saved when the violent sinners of the superhero community finally stopped the nuclear fueled rampage of the Anarchist. She saved that message for future abuse.
The fourth as from Robert Fingle, her agent, and the only person on Earth who could make superheroics sound boring. Whenever possible, Gayle avoided face to face contact, lest he contaminate her with his receding hairline and his incessant need to refer to all women as, “Gal.” As sad as it made her, his was the first message she put any attention towards, because whenever she ignored his messages, he’d call back later and say, “But your contract,” enough times that was left with the choice to break his face, or relent.
“Hey gal—”
Gayle groaned on reflex.
“—just got word back from Nike. They want to meet up for merchandising talks.” Robert paused so he could partake in what sounded like three other conversations. “They want to attach you to their next line of shoes. ‘Built for peace, but ready for war.’ How does that… wait. Never mind. Just scratch that last part. Oh, and after that, we have a meeting with the Mattel reps. They want to discuss featuring you in their Superhero Barbie toyline. Call me back so we can set up a meeting and iron out the specifics. Ready for war…” The message descended into mumbling before cutting out seconds later.
Gayle stared at the phone for several long, painful moments, hoping the rising anger in her chest could be communicated to him telepathically, that was he could realize how ****ing stupid he sounded by mentioning her image and Barbie in conjunction.
The final message was an offer of sex from a hero calling herself Glamor—well, not an explicit offer, but that was always the implication that came with the offer of team-ups with other female supers.
She almost returned Glamor’s call, then reconsidered and reached to call Robert instead, before remembering it was still five in the morning. With a sigh of relief, agony, and disappointment, she peeled off her costume, booted up her laptop, and took to browsing one of the internet forums dedicated to speculation about her personal life.
"BARBIE," GAYLE SAID hoping her tone of voice would be enough to close the subject for good.
It wasn’t.
“It’s a big name,” said Robert the receding hairline as he placed a napkin over his three-hundred dollar pants and waited for the expensive Italian entrée he’d insisted on ordering. On a busier day, the outdoor seating might have made their conversation harder to overhear, but it wasn’t one of those busier days, so it carried for blocks around.
“It’s Barbie. Have you seen Barbie’s waist?”
“It’s bigger now. They made it bigger in 1997.”
“Why do you know the year when they made Barbie’s waist bigger?” Gayle leaned on the table and gave Robert her best evil eye. It wouldn’t deter him, but it made her feel better. “You’re already in talks with them about this, aren’t you? You want to sell my image to Barbie.”
“It’s a big name,” he said again. “We could start marketing you to children at a younger age. It would expand your consumer range.”
“Again, Barbie. I punch through steel girders. Barbie couldn’t punch through a piece of paper.”
Robert’s meal arrived just then; an expensive looking steak with expensive looking sauce drizzled all over it. His two ten dollar drinks followed. The waitress, a small, ambiguously Asian looking woman, looked at the drinks with a disdain even the warm indifference of her job couldn’t mask, and as Robert uttered a brief and totally uninterested, “Thank you,” the waitress slipped away.
“Must be a new girl,” he said, cutting into his steak. “You sure you don’t want anything?”
“I’m fine.” Gayle did her best to ignore the enticing scent, opting to stare down at traffic. Were it in a quieter city, the rooftop seating would have been quaint. But Olympus City was anything but quiet, and even eating ten floors up could often be a deafening experience. “You were regaling me with stories of Barbie’s waist.”
“Right.” He downed one of his ten dollar margaritas. “I need you to choose one.”
“**** no.”
“We don’t have the luxury of choice right now. Times are getting tougher. There aren’t any villains to fight, so heroes aren’t receiving as much focus from the media. Merchandising is the most profitable move you can make.”
“Then why hasn’t it been snatched up by every other hero without a real job?”
“Because you’re you.” Robert jabbed in her direction with a fork, inadvertently spilling some of his sauce on the tablecloth. He scooted his plate several inches ahead to hide the crimson stain. “You’re marketable. The Anarchist is dead, but you’re still Athena. You’re still the strongest hero in the city—maybe the state. You stop a bank robber and you have half the world’s news networks hoping you’ll tell them something about you.”
“Are you sure it isn’t because they made the boobs on my costume bigger?”
Robert paused mid-chew. “I didn’t—”
“Think I would notice the updated look is packing double Ds? I’m sure you didn’t.”
“Sex sells, Gayle.”
“Feminism at its finest,” she grumbled under her breath, pressing her hand against her chin so hard she was sure there would be an imprint of it there for days. “Back on subject, I need you to choose between Mattel or Nike.”
“**** no.”
“@Mark Slater is still open to ghostwriting your autobiography.”
“I don’t—are you seriously making me choose between Barbie and my biography? You know how I feel about biographies.”
“The world wants to know about you.”
Gayle massaged her temples, groaning in the loudest, most exaggerated manner she could muster. “Fine,” she said. “You win. I’ll sell my image to Barbie.”
“Good. I’ve scheduled a meeting with the Mattel rep so we can go over the details.”
“You planned for me to accept Barbie?”
Robert shrugged. “I guessed.”
“I hate you right now.”
He nodded, and Gayle suspected her dislike of his initiative went in one ear and out the other. “Also,” he said as he reached under the table and pulled a stack of white @cardboard out from what seemed like nowhere. “They gave me several concept pitches to show you, in case you agreed.”
“…seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Gayle started to stand.
“Just give them a look. You don’t have to sign off on anything.”
Gayle paused, fought down the overwhelming desire to hurl the table, Robert, and the whole goddamn restaurant into the stratosphere, and sat down, drumming her fingers against her leg to work out what stress she could. “Fine. Shoot.”
Robert showed her the first. It was Athena, except with a bigger chest, fake hair, ridiculous proportions, and a skirt. For the sake of adding to her bank account, Gayle might have suppressed her frustration about each of those characteristics, but she couldn’t look past the skirt. So with a flick of her hand, she said, “Next.”
The next was similar except that it made Athena look like a slut. In absence of the full-body suit (if a skirt could be lumped into that generalization) was a dipping cleavage line that might have looked seductive on a real person, but emphasized just how much of a toy Barbie was. Oh, and it was still wearing a ****ing skirt. “Are you serious?” she said.
“They don’t think the current outfit is going to appeal to young girls.”
“You increase the breast size of my costume, then tell me I need to wear a skirt to appeal to impressionable young girls? Last time I looked, girls liked pants.”
“Other popular female heroes wear skirts,” Robtert said as he flipped to the next picture.
“No,” she said, and stood up without any intention of sitting down again. “I give up. You know what? If they put the figure in pair of ****ing pants, I will sign off on it. Pants. If you can’t put me in pants, no deal. I’ll fire you. I’ll make due on my own.”
Robert held the displays against his chest, like he was disappointed he wouldn’t be able to show off the others. “Do you want to see th—”
“No. Pants, or nothing. And no, I do not give a **** about Nike.” She dropped a five dollar bill on the table to pay for her soda and made for the exit, ignoring the, “Come on, gal!” coming from her table. She saw a few eyes look at her while pretending not to, and felt a few more when she entered the indoor section of the restaurant. The ambiguously Asian waitress paused whatever paperwork she was filling out to watch Gayle bolt for the elevator.
Once she was safely on her way towards the ground, Gayle slumped in the corner and heaved a deep sigh. If it were as easy as flying out of the restaurant and blowing everyone off the roof in a burst of anger-induced indifference, she would have taken that option. But there were secret identities. There were personal lives. She still owned her personal life, and she wasn’t eager to let franchises buy it out from under her.
The elevator door thunked open and Gayle stepped out while reaching into her pocket for her cellphone. As she slipped through the revolving door, nodded to the security, and slipped herself over the golden Kawasaki parked out front, she reached her voice mail. She bypassed messages until she reached the one from Glamor, and decided to return the call.
The phone rang six times before someone picked up, and said, “Hello?” in the sexiest, most voluptuous voice Gayle had ever heard. A not developed in her throat that she couldn’t explain, and in some unresponsive part of her brain, it occurred to her that this reaction might be part of Glamor’s power.
“Hi,” Gayle said, fighting to regain control of her voice. “It’s Athena. When do you want to meet?”
“It’s patrol,” Gayle told herself after she suited up, glared at the bloated breasts of her costume, before flying off to linger downtown. That was wear Glamor wanted to meet, and for the life of her, Gayle couldn’t bring herself to object to anything that woman said. It was a power, it had to be, but… it was something. It felt like the closest thing to human contact she could manage.
So here she was: occupying her little corner of downtown Olympus City, crouching over the streets like a constipated Spiderman. No matter how much she practiced, or posed herself, or changed the costume, she couldn’t make anything on the ground look cool. It didn’t help that she stepped on her cape half the time whenever she was standing any less than straight up, but hey, capes sold, and in the wake of not a single ****ing supervillain existing—
Gayle took a deep breath.
—was waiting on a rooftop for casual sex.
No matter how she tried to rationalize it, she hated herself for it. But here she was anyway.
Then Glamor showed up.
Glamor was the kind of woman who couldn’t be called beautiful. She could be called sexy—the pornographic kind of sexy that would debut in a Playboy centerfold. The focus of her uniform, if it could even be called that, was a V-neck dipping so low Gayle wasn’t sure if what she saw was pubic hair, or a trick of the light. How her breasts stayed in place was a mystery, because they were hanging out of her suit almost freely. Whoever she was, she didn’t care about any secret identity, because she walked around bare-faced. Even with a full view of her features, Gayle couldn’t tell how old she was, so she decided not to ask.
“Hi,” Gayle said, and wondered again if this was part of Glamor’s power.
“Hello there.” Sex to her ears.
Definitely powers.
Glamor eased up to her and suddenly that V-necked cleavage was pressing against her chest, while fingers played with her hair. Gayle couldn’t resist the desire to… well, lose control of herself. She wrapped her arms around Glamor and pulled her into a kiss so passionate the magnitude of it could have halted an earthquake.[ASB1]
Glamor’s fingers reached for a zipper she couldn’t possibly have known the location of, and Gayle felt the chest of her suit loosen as her bare back was exposed to the chilled air.
Then she managed to grasp her diminishing willpower, and pulled away. She hugged her suit to her chest to keep it from falling off, and zipped it enough just enough that it wouldn’t do so on a moment’s notice. Whatever she turned away for, shame, reluctance, or panic, it felt as if one weight had been removed from her shoulders, and a greater one placed upon them..
“Could we—” Turning away brought on the kind of painful withdrawal she associated with her quitting smoking. “—could we talk, for a little while? Or patrol? Or—” She tried to think of a third alternative, but when nothing came to mind but speculation about the flavor of Glamor’s nipples, Gayle shut her mouth.
If Glamor was surprised by the reluctance, she didn’t show it. Her, “Of course,” came out as easily as if this entire setup were routine.
“I… okay.” She looked for something to support her physically, but didn’t find anything within easy reach. “It’s just—I don’t like where I am. I don’t know you and… I don’t want to fall to this level. Sex on rooftops.”
“But you’re Athena.” She purred the word, and Gayle struggled to keep her mind off sex.
“…yeah. I was. Am. I don’t know now.” She sat down, dangling her legs over the edge. Her cape tugged uncomfortably at her neck, and she finally just tore it off, letting it fall to the street below. The impulsive damage to her costume would no doubt piss off her agent, but being cape-less brought with it a feeling of freedom. “I just don’t feel like Athena anymore.”
“You feel weaker?”
“Kind of, it’s—” She didn’t know why she was talking, or how running away from casual sex turned into an impromptu therapy session, but some small part of Gayle encouraged her to keep going, and she listened to that small part.
“You fought the Anarchist, didn’t you? You’re that Athena?” That Athena, like there were a dozen more Athenas running around, fighting crime in equally disproportionate suits.
Come to think of it…
It became easier to think about non-sex related subjects. Maybe she was becoming better at resisting, or maybe Glamor was easing up out of sympathy. “Yeah. Broke his right arm, too. Shattered it into enough pieces that all the king’s horses couldn’t put it back together again.”
“But that doesn’t make you happy?”
“Not anymore. The Anarchist was like—” She lifted a hand as if she could enunciate the point better with random motion. “—he was the best. Not in a good way, but… he was the villain. Most of us went into that fight thinking we were going to die. He killed people. He had a plan. He knew how to fight capes, and he was winning. Back then, we all had purpose. There were supervillains. We fought, we won, we put them away. Now there isn’t anything. There aren’t as many of us now, because we… aren’t as necessary. The Anarchist came along and just ****ed it up. People see what a villain can do when he puts his mind to it, and suddenly there aren’t any villains. They just stopped.”
“I didn’t see the Anarchist in person. I did not have my power then,” Glamor said with an accent that might have been French.
And suddenly they were having casual conversation, and Gayle felt the effect of Glamor’s power slip away. Maybe she could control the flow of it—or maybe it was just the mention of the Anarchist, and the pile of bodies she remembered fighting him atop. “It was… wasn’t pretty. He leveled New York, and I mean leveled it. There wasn’t a city left. We were fighting him on top of bodies and ruins.”
“But defeating him doesn’t bring you satisfaction?”
“At the time?” Gayle zipped her suit back up, although such a task required bending over and jumping around in such a manner that wouldn’t be acceptable in public. “Yeah, it was satisfying. I didn’t deal the final blow, not personally, but I was there. I guess it was like a last hurrah. The end of the supervillain brought on the end of the superhero.”
“Why not do something that makes you happy?”
“This did make me—” Gayle stopped, remembering who she was talking to and why they’d met up in the first place. “Why are you talking to me?”
“That’s what you wanted, no?” Glamor sat down beside her.
“…well, yes. But we talked about coming up here for sex.”
“We did, but you did not want to, so we are talking.”
Gayle found herself laughing.
“The question is: why did you come.”
Gayle stopped laughing.
“Do you know?”
“I’ve…” She wrung her fingers together, trying to come up with an answer that didn’t make her sound like a *****. “…can you promise not to repeat what I say to anyone?”
“I promise.”
“Especially not People Magazine. They are just waiting for me to be involved in some pregnancy scandal or something so they can throw me on their cover.” She didn’t wait for another assurance before continuing. “I feel like ****. I feel like I am ****. I haven’t done anything super in two years, and now I feel like I haven’t—haven’t earned the uniform.”
“You were in the news yesterday.”
“Yeah, because I stopped a moron with a plastic toy. I don’t know if it would even have done something to a normal person.” In a quieter voice, she said, “I think I broke his jaw. Some idiot with a toy gun and I broke his jaw because I didn’t have anything better to do. Your message was honestly—it was honestly the most exciting part of my day. It was this or spend another hour arguing with my agent about how big Barbie’s tits should be.” A serious look at Glamor. “You aren’t a therapist, are you?”
Glamor laughed. “I’m a nurse.”
“You don’t say.” Gayle couldn’t hide her surprise, even beneath the inflexible cowl she was stuck with. When she tried to turn her head towards Glamor and failed, she peeled her mask off. “This makes it hard to move my head, sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You have a very beautiful face.”
And then they were back in sex mode—or maybe Gayle’s sole superhuman connection in months was having more of an effect than she wanted it to. She stood, turning her back on Glamor yet again. There was no withdrawal this time. Maybe it was just her subconscious telling her what a ****ing idiot she was. “Sorry, I—do you want to go on patrol? Like, real patrol? I know we tend to use it as a cover for sex now, but—real patrol?”
“Of course—”
“Your power, do you turn it on and off, or do you just leave it on?”
Glamor smiled. “I control it.”
“Okay. Good. I thought for a minute I was going insane.”
“I will be careful.” Glamor wiped flecks of loose stone off her costume. “My name is Michelle, by the way.”
Were they exchanging names? Gayle hesitated, but having revealed her face, hiding her name seemed silly, as foolish a notion as it seemed even when she ran the impulse through her head a few times for consideration. “Gayle,” she said at last. “Gayle Corrus.” If Glamor wanted to shake hands, Gayle wasn’t sure she’d be able to survive more physical contact. Just her presence had brought her to brink of sanity for almost a minute. Thankfully, Glamor didn’t seem intent on shaking hands.
Gayle pulled her mask on. Patrol with a less maneuverable power was always trickier, and it wasn’t a conundrum she’d encountered in some time. She hoped Glamor’s power really was under wraps, because she didn’t want to experience a… spasm while carrying her. “So, should I just… carry you?”
“If you want.”
It was going to be a long night.
I, a long time fantasy-science-fiction-teenage-********-writer, decided to take a shot at superheroes. After two months of stalling, three months of writing, and 70,000 words of meandering, I looked up from my screen and realized I wasn't satisfied with the conclusion the story was drawing to. So I shelved the project, and moved onto something that wasn't quite a remake, but a re-imagining. A similar universe with a similar villain, but with the main characters of the previous story stirred, shaken, and decked out until they are but amalgams of their previous selves.
So, here's A Tale of Capes (to be changed to a better title, when I think of one).
Rated T for capes, conundrums, and ***********.
CHAPTER ONE
Waking with breasts pressed against her back left Gayle Corrus grumpy, groggy and just a smidge horny. Then a silent alarm rerouted to her cellphone went off like a tornado siren, and she tumbled out of bed like a superpowered boulder. Five years ago, that alarm would have rocked her world, and guaranteed her a good day—hell, maybe a good week, filled with talking heads, congratulations, and CNN.If her bedmate wasn’t woken by the high pitched shrill or her sudden exposure to the chilled air of an unheated apartment, she was most certainly woken by Gayle’s sudden exclamation of, “****!” She drifted back into consciousness, her shapely frame enunciated by the dampened sunlight. Gayle couldn’t remember her name, but she would certainly remember the night before. What she would try and forget later was how much she bounced around her apartment, struggling to pull herself into the leggings of a costume that must have been designed for a size negative five. Seeing herself in costume was usually the highlight of her day, but ****, why did it have to be such a pain to put on?
Gayle slapped her cellphone hard enough that the alarm shut off before remembering it wasn’t her wake up bell. An address stared up at her from the screen like an invitation, though she didn’t get a good look at it until she’d finally finished pulling her mask over her eyes. It was comfortable enough that her ginger hair could hang freely out the back, but uncomfortable enough that she could barely turn her head. Someday she would ask her costume designer how the **** someone could design a supersuit without including neck mobility, but that could wait for another hour.
She glanced at her bedmate, who looked like she was preparing for round two.
Well, maybe it could wait for two hours.
“You have to go?” the woman said (whose name Gayle swore was on the tip of her tongue), asking it with such charm that refusing to answer seemed a crime in and of itself, even though she clearly knew the answer.
“Duty calls,” Gayle said, and even though her bedmate was far too old to be amused by such things, she giggled anyway. When Gayle was finished putting the finishing touches on her costume, and finished making sure her cleavage was pushed up just enough to be appealing, but not enough to be slutty, she leaned over the bed and gave the woman a kiss that somehow lacked intimacy, despite involving a great deal of tongue. “Will you be here when I get back?”
“I have to go to work.” The exchange ended there, interrupted by another long kiss. “Will I see you again?”
“Yeah,” said Gayle, too breathless for anything beyond one syllable. She resisted the urge to ask the woman her name. “I do have to go now.”
“Then go, hero.”
The one part of Gayle’s apartment not covered in posters, newspaper clippings, and covers of People Magazine detailing her exploits might as well have been a wall it was so filthy. She could have added it to her growing list of things she needed to do that day, but each time she tried, she kept putting it off. Now she just didn’t bother to add it to the list.
Before leaping out the window, she glanced at her cellphone, which was still flashing an address at her, along with an estimated time before the police would be able to respond. In thirty seconds, she would lose the exclusive publicity. As fortune would have it, she recognized the address: a bank—one of those twenty-four hour banks that catered to used car salesman, graveyard shift employees, and superheroes without a definite work schedule.
Then she took off.
Gayle was at the bank ten seconds later, flying as fast and banking as hard as she dared in a populated city. During her first real flight, she’d cracked supersonic speeds while flying past the Lantern Memorial Center. Hundreds of thousands of dollars down the drain in less than a second in the form of broken windows. If the press had caught wind of her identity then, her career as a costumed crime-fighter would have come and gone in less than a day, demolished by legal proceedings and state-appointed attorneys.
America’s First Superhuman Bank might as well have read America’s Biggest Target. She’d laughed at the name before, and she laughed at it now, though less publicly and in a more bitter, sardonic sort of way. The front door wasn’t blasted or bent or melted or atomized, so she ruled out any supervillain interference, along with any sort of fun from the encounter. The few people who decided to do their banking at five in the morning were huddled on the floor, while a mook in a stupid looking Cookie Monster beanie was exchanging death threats with the teller.
Gayle heard some of the death threats, but didn’t particularly care. Superheroes were a dime a dozen in the US, but mooks just kept trying to commit petty crimes. Maybe there was some mook breeding ground in Texas or something with a conveyor belt dedicated to producing simpleminded criminals. Gayle hovered a good five inches above the ground (because flying was always the most dramatic way to approach mooks), put her hands on her hips, and cleared her throat.
As if he didn’t yet realize the level of **** he’d stepped in, the mook and his stupid beanie whirled around, bringing his gun up with both hands. Gayle half-thought he’d let off a reactionary round right there, which was always good for a laugh, but he kept his cool just long enough to realize he was in way over his head. “Aw ****,” he said. “Aw **** aw ****.”
“Funny,” Gayle said, planting both feet on the ground, “I didn’t know idiots had a repeat function.”
He lowered his gun, his arm shaking like it was having its own personal seizure. “Please, man, just let me go. I made a mistake.”
“You sure did.”
“It just seemed so easy!”
“I’ll bet it did.” Gayle used the mook’s panicky moment to get a good look at his gun—a chrome weapon with a barrel twice the size of his hand, and too many flickering lights to be anything military. Forty years ago, he’d have been laughed out of the bank for walking in with such a ridiculous looking weapon. But in the modern age of modern heroes, it was just as much a threat as a fifty caliber round.
Well, not to her, but to other people.
“…can I just… can you let me go?”
“Oh, I would, but the police will be here in—oh, twenty seconds.”
“The cops? But I—” Just as she expected him to, the mook raised his gun and yanked on the trigger. What hit Gayle wasn’t a bullet, nor even the typical insert-name-here ray, but a bubble of red plasma that left her feeling kind of itchy. But as with every other weapon mooks tended to fire at her, it accomplished nothing but her amusement, and even subsequent pulls of the trigger and subsequent blasts of plasma accomplished little else.
When the mook realized his high-tech gun was doing jack ****, and true horror twisted his face, Gayle stepped forward, yanked the gun out of his hands, and slapped him hard him hard enough to send him tumbling to the floor. The blow wasn’t hard by any means, but the impact of being humiliated was enough that he didn’t get up without help, which Gayle was happy to provide as she lugged him outside to the oncoming rush of police sirens. Even for having danced around in the nude for a good twenty seconds before managing to pull her costume on, Gayle had excellent timing. Even the press managed to arrive a short time later, as if they had their own super reporters sniffing around for stories. And though a police line was in the process of being established, reporters were tearing it to shreds with just as much energy.
The moment Gayle set foot outside and shoved her mook into the arms of the nearest available officer, there were half a dozen reporters chomping at her heels—from a distance, of course. The police line kept them from approaching physically, but it didn’t stop reporters from shouting questions at her from afar. The mess of voices blocked out anything but the shouts of, “Athena! Athena!” followed by fifty microphones being shoved towards her face.
If there weren’t a naked lady waiting in her apartment, she might have been tempted to waste one minute of her life smiling and spouting some one-liner about doing the right thing, or being in the right place at the right time, or even about telling kids to stay in school, but there was a naked lady waiting at her apartment, so she took off, waved at the reporters so as not to appear a total *****, and took off with just enough speed to blow dust in everyone’s eyes. She felt her ears pop during the sudden pressure change, but she’d repeated the gesture so many times that the change in pressure bothered her as much as breathing.
In the early days, Gayle never took the direct route to apartment. There were always scenic routes, diversions, decoys, and misdirection, just to make sure everyone had been thrown off her sent before she decided to strip off her costume. Then she stopped giving a ****, a change that occurred right around the time she realized that the media didn’t give much of a **** who she was either; so few people seemed to give a **** about her secret identity that she just started flying up to and through her window.
All three percent of her brain she’d devoted to being excited about sex fizzled out when she opened her window and discovered there was no naked lady inside. All that was left to greet her was the smell of old newspaper, and the scent of last night’s escapades. Yet even though Gayle knew she should have felt hurt by the sudden departure, or even just a little miffed that her bedmate (whose name she still couldn’t remember) hadn’t even left a note, all she felt was relieved. So she bundled up the sheets she’d strewn across the floor, and tossed them into the laundry hamper before plopping down on her mattress.
Then she stood up, because the mattress did really smell too much like sex.
She thought about taking the costume off, but decided against it, even if she still couldn’t mover her head left or right. A muscle-bound redhead stared at her from the mirror she’d hung in place just so she could look at her conquests without looking at them directly. The muscles were built into the costume to make her look bigger than a frail twenty-something, but they felt intrusive more than anything else.
Her answering machine was next on her list of Why the **** Not? Not her cellphone, but the landline she kept hooked up for her life as Athena. When the machine said, “You have five new messages,” in the closest voice Gayle had ever heard to that of a zombie, she smirked, picked up the phone, and held it to her ear.
The two messages were from a concerned parents group, calling to criticize her for encouraging children to solve their problems with violence. It was the third one this week, and while their messages had been amusing at first, they stopped being fun the second the agitated woman leaving them kept calling and expecting an apology. Gayle deleted them without a thought.
The third message was from a Christian group, calling to tell her that her millions of dollars wouldn’t buy her a single drop of water when she was burning in hell. She’d heard it all before, but the bravado and genuine concern with which the words were spoken would be good for another laugh or two. At the very least, she could call him back and point out how many millions of people were saved when the violent sinners of the superhero community finally stopped the nuclear fueled rampage of the Anarchist. She saved that message for future abuse.
The fourth as from Robert Fingle, her agent, and the only person on Earth who could make superheroics sound boring. Whenever possible, Gayle avoided face to face contact, lest he contaminate her with his receding hairline and his incessant need to refer to all women as, “Gal.” As sad as it made her, his was the first message she put any attention towards, because whenever she ignored his messages, he’d call back later and say, “But your contract,” enough times that was left with the choice to break his face, or relent.
“Hey gal—”
Gayle groaned on reflex.
“—just got word back from Nike. They want to meet up for merchandising talks.” Robert paused so he could partake in what sounded like three other conversations. “They want to attach you to their next line of shoes. ‘Built for peace, but ready for war.’ How does that… wait. Never mind. Just scratch that last part. Oh, and after that, we have a meeting with the Mattel reps. They want to discuss featuring you in their Superhero Barbie toyline. Call me back so we can set up a meeting and iron out the specifics. Ready for war…” The message descended into mumbling before cutting out seconds later.
Gayle stared at the phone for several long, painful moments, hoping the rising anger in her chest could be communicated to him telepathically, that was he could realize how ****ing stupid he sounded by mentioning her image and Barbie in conjunction.
The final message was an offer of sex from a hero calling herself Glamor—well, not an explicit offer, but that was always the implication that came with the offer of team-ups with other female supers.
She almost returned Glamor’s call, then reconsidered and reached to call Robert instead, before remembering it was still five in the morning. With a sigh of relief, agony, and disappointment, she peeled off her costume, booted up her laptop, and took to browsing one of the internet forums dedicated to speculation about her personal life.
"BARBIE," GAYLE SAID hoping her tone of voice would be enough to close the subject for good.
It wasn’t.
“It’s a big name,” said Robert the receding hairline as he placed a napkin over his three-hundred dollar pants and waited for the expensive Italian entrée he’d insisted on ordering. On a busier day, the outdoor seating might have made their conversation harder to overhear, but it wasn’t one of those busier days, so it carried for blocks around.
“It’s Barbie. Have you seen Barbie’s waist?”
“It’s bigger now. They made it bigger in 1997.”
“Why do you know the year when they made Barbie’s waist bigger?” Gayle leaned on the table and gave Robert her best evil eye. It wouldn’t deter him, but it made her feel better. “You’re already in talks with them about this, aren’t you? You want to sell my image to Barbie.”
“It’s a big name,” he said again. “We could start marketing you to children at a younger age. It would expand your consumer range.”
“Again, Barbie. I punch through steel girders. Barbie couldn’t punch through a piece of paper.”
Robert’s meal arrived just then; an expensive looking steak with expensive looking sauce drizzled all over it. His two ten dollar drinks followed. The waitress, a small, ambiguously Asian looking woman, looked at the drinks with a disdain even the warm indifference of her job couldn’t mask, and as Robert uttered a brief and totally uninterested, “Thank you,” the waitress slipped away.
“Must be a new girl,” he said, cutting into his steak. “You sure you don’t want anything?”
“I’m fine.” Gayle did her best to ignore the enticing scent, opting to stare down at traffic. Were it in a quieter city, the rooftop seating would have been quaint. But Olympus City was anything but quiet, and even eating ten floors up could often be a deafening experience. “You were regaling me with stories of Barbie’s waist.”
“Right.” He downed one of his ten dollar margaritas. “I need you to choose one.”
“**** no.”
“We don’t have the luxury of choice right now. Times are getting tougher. There aren’t any villains to fight, so heroes aren’t receiving as much focus from the media. Merchandising is the most profitable move you can make.”
“Then why hasn’t it been snatched up by every other hero without a real job?”
“Because you’re you.” Robert jabbed in her direction with a fork, inadvertently spilling some of his sauce on the tablecloth. He scooted his plate several inches ahead to hide the crimson stain. “You’re marketable. The Anarchist is dead, but you’re still Athena. You’re still the strongest hero in the city—maybe the state. You stop a bank robber and you have half the world’s news networks hoping you’ll tell them something about you.”
“Are you sure it isn’t because they made the boobs on my costume bigger?”
Robert paused mid-chew. “I didn’t—”
“Think I would notice the updated look is packing double Ds? I’m sure you didn’t.”
“Sex sells, Gayle.”
“Feminism at its finest,” she grumbled under her breath, pressing her hand against her chin so hard she was sure there would be an imprint of it there for days. “Back on subject, I need you to choose between Mattel or Nike.”
“**** no.”
“@Mark Slater is still open to ghostwriting your autobiography.”
“I don’t—are you seriously making me choose between Barbie and my biography? You know how I feel about biographies.”
“The world wants to know about you.”
Gayle massaged her temples, groaning in the loudest, most exaggerated manner she could muster. “Fine,” she said. “You win. I’ll sell my image to Barbie.”
“Good. I’ve scheduled a meeting with the Mattel rep so we can go over the details.”
“You planned for me to accept Barbie?”
Robert shrugged. “I guessed.”
“I hate you right now.”
He nodded, and Gayle suspected her dislike of his initiative went in one ear and out the other. “Also,” he said as he reached under the table and pulled a stack of white @cardboard out from what seemed like nowhere. “They gave me several concept pitches to show you, in case you agreed.”
“…seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Gayle started to stand.
“Just give them a look. You don’t have to sign off on anything.”
Gayle paused, fought down the overwhelming desire to hurl the table, Robert, and the whole goddamn restaurant into the stratosphere, and sat down, drumming her fingers against her leg to work out what stress she could. “Fine. Shoot.”
Robert showed her the first. It was Athena, except with a bigger chest, fake hair, ridiculous proportions, and a skirt. For the sake of adding to her bank account, Gayle might have suppressed her frustration about each of those characteristics, but she couldn’t look past the skirt. So with a flick of her hand, she said, “Next.”
The next was similar except that it made Athena look like a slut. In absence of the full-body suit (if a skirt could be lumped into that generalization) was a dipping cleavage line that might have looked seductive on a real person, but emphasized just how much of a toy Barbie was. Oh, and it was still wearing a ****ing skirt. “Are you serious?” she said.
“They don’t think the current outfit is going to appeal to young girls.”
“You increase the breast size of my costume, then tell me I need to wear a skirt to appeal to impressionable young girls? Last time I looked, girls liked pants.”
“Other popular female heroes wear skirts,” Robtert said as he flipped to the next picture.
“No,” she said, and stood up without any intention of sitting down again. “I give up. You know what? If they put the figure in pair of ****ing pants, I will sign off on it. Pants. If you can’t put me in pants, no deal. I’ll fire you. I’ll make due on my own.”
Robert held the displays against his chest, like he was disappointed he wouldn’t be able to show off the others. “Do you want to see th—”
“No. Pants, or nothing. And no, I do not give a **** about Nike.” She dropped a five dollar bill on the table to pay for her soda and made for the exit, ignoring the, “Come on, gal!” coming from her table. She saw a few eyes look at her while pretending not to, and felt a few more when she entered the indoor section of the restaurant. The ambiguously Asian waitress paused whatever paperwork she was filling out to watch Gayle bolt for the elevator.
Once she was safely on her way towards the ground, Gayle slumped in the corner and heaved a deep sigh. If it were as easy as flying out of the restaurant and blowing everyone off the roof in a burst of anger-induced indifference, she would have taken that option. But there were secret identities. There were personal lives. She still owned her personal life, and she wasn’t eager to let franchises buy it out from under her.
The elevator door thunked open and Gayle stepped out while reaching into her pocket for her cellphone. As she slipped through the revolving door, nodded to the security, and slipped herself over the golden Kawasaki parked out front, she reached her voice mail. She bypassed messages until she reached the one from Glamor, and decided to return the call.
The phone rang six times before someone picked up, and said, “Hello?” in the sexiest, most voluptuous voice Gayle had ever heard. A not developed in her throat that she couldn’t explain, and in some unresponsive part of her brain, it occurred to her that this reaction might be part of Glamor’s power.
“Hi,” Gayle said, fighting to regain control of her voice. “It’s Athena. When do you want to meet?”
“It’s patrol,” Gayle told herself after she suited up, glared at the bloated breasts of her costume, before flying off to linger downtown. That was wear Glamor wanted to meet, and for the life of her, Gayle couldn’t bring herself to object to anything that woman said. It was a power, it had to be, but… it was something. It felt like the closest thing to human contact she could manage.
So here she was: occupying her little corner of downtown Olympus City, crouching over the streets like a constipated Spiderman. No matter how much she practiced, or posed herself, or changed the costume, she couldn’t make anything on the ground look cool. It didn’t help that she stepped on her cape half the time whenever she was standing any less than straight up, but hey, capes sold, and in the wake of not a single ****ing supervillain existing—
Gayle took a deep breath.
—was waiting on a rooftop for casual sex.
No matter how she tried to rationalize it, she hated herself for it. But here she was anyway.
Then Glamor showed up.
Glamor was the kind of woman who couldn’t be called beautiful. She could be called sexy—the pornographic kind of sexy that would debut in a Playboy centerfold. The focus of her uniform, if it could even be called that, was a V-neck dipping so low Gayle wasn’t sure if what she saw was pubic hair, or a trick of the light. How her breasts stayed in place was a mystery, because they were hanging out of her suit almost freely. Whoever she was, she didn’t care about any secret identity, because she walked around bare-faced. Even with a full view of her features, Gayle couldn’t tell how old she was, so she decided not to ask.
“Hi,” Gayle said, and wondered again if this was part of Glamor’s power.
“Hello there.” Sex to her ears.
Definitely powers.
Glamor eased up to her and suddenly that V-necked cleavage was pressing against her chest, while fingers played with her hair. Gayle couldn’t resist the desire to… well, lose control of herself. She wrapped her arms around Glamor and pulled her into a kiss so passionate the magnitude of it could have halted an earthquake.[ASB1]
Glamor’s fingers reached for a zipper she couldn’t possibly have known the location of, and Gayle felt the chest of her suit loosen as her bare back was exposed to the chilled air.
Then she managed to grasp her diminishing willpower, and pulled away. She hugged her suit to her chest to keep it from falling off, and zipped it enough just enough that it wouldn’t do so on a moment’s notice. Whatever she turned away for, shame, reluctance, or panic, it felt as if one weight had been removed from her shoulders, and a greater one placed upon them..
“Could we—” Turning away brought on the kind of painful withdrawal she associated with her quitting smoking. “—could we talk, for a little while? Or patrol? Or—” She tried to think of a third alternative, but when nothing came to mind but speculation about the flavor of Glamor’s nipples, Gayle shut her mouth.
If Glamor was surprised by the reluctance, she didn’t show it. Her, “Of course,” came out as easily as if this entire setup were routine.
“I… okay.” She looked for something to support her physically, but didn’t find anything within easy reach. “It’s just—I don’t like where I am. I don’t know you and… I don’t want to fall to this level. Sex on rooftops.”
“But you’re Athena.” She purred the word, and Gayle struggled to keep her mind off sex.
“…yeah. I was. Am. I don’t know now.” She sat down, dangling her legs over the edge. Her cape tugged uncomfortably at her neck, and she finally just tore it off, letting it fall to the street below. The impulsive damage to her costume would no doubt piss off her agent, but being cape-less brought with it a feeling of freedom. “I just don’t feel like Athena anymore.”
“You feel weaker?”
“Kind of, it’s—” She didn’t know why she was talking, or how running away from casual sex turned into an impromptu therapy session, but some small part of Gayle encouraged her to keep going, and she listened to that small part.
“You fought the Anarchist, didn’t you? You’re that Athena?” That Athena, like there were a dozen more Athenas running around, fighting crime in equally disproportionate suits.
Come to think of it…
It became easier to think about non-sex related subjects. Maybe she was becoming better at resisting, or maybe Glamor was easing up out of sympathy. “Yeah. Broke his right arm, too. Shattered it into enough pieces that all the king’s horses couldn’t put it back together again.”
“But that doesn’t make you happy?”
“Not anymore. The Anarchist was like—” She lifted a hand as if she could enunciate the point better with random motion. “—he was the best. Not in a good way, but… he was the villain. Most of us went into that fight thinking we were going to die. He killed people. He had a plan. He knew how to fight capes, and he was winning. Back then, we all had purpose. There were supervillains. We fought, we won, we put them away. Now there isn’t anything. There aren’t as many of us now, because we… aren’t as necessary. The Anarchist came along and just ****ed it up. People see what a villain can do when he puts his mind to it, and suddenly there aren’t any villains. They just stopped.”
“I didn’t see the Anarchist in person. I did not have my power then,” Glamor said with an accent that might have been French.
And suddenly they were having casual conversation, and Gayle felt the effect of Glamor’s power slip away. Maybe she could control the flow of it—or maybe it was just the mention of the Anarchist, and the pile of bodies she remembered fighting him atop. “It was… wasn’t pretty. He leveled New York, and I mean leveled it. There wasn’t a city left. We were fighting him on top of bodies and ruins.”
“But defeating him doesn’t bring you satisfaction?”
“At the time?” Gayle zipped her suit back up, although such a task required bending over and jumping around in such a manner that wouldn’t be acceptable in public. “Yeah, it was satisfying. I didn’t deal the final blow, not personally, but I was there. I guess it was like a last hurrah. The end of the supervillain brought on the end of the superhero.”
“Why not do something that makes you happy?”
“This did make me—” Gayle stopped, remembering who she was talking to and why they’d met up in the first place. “Why are you talking to me?”
“That’s what you wanted, no?” Glamor sat down beside her.
“…well, yes. But we talked about coming up here for sex.”
“We did, but you did not want to, so we are talking.”
Gayle found herself laughing.
“The question is: why did you come.”
Gayle stopped laughing.
“Do you know?”
“I’ve…” She wrung her fingers together, trying to come up with an answer that didn’t make her sound like a *****. “…can you promise not to repeat what I say to anyone?”
“I promise.”
“Especially not People Magazine. They are just waiting for me to be involved in some pregnancy scandal or something so they can throw me on their cover.” She didn’t wait for another assurance before continuing. “I feel like ****. I feel like I am ****. I haven’t done anything super in two years, and now I feel like I haven’t—haven’t earned the uniform.”
“You were in the news yesterday.”
“Yeah, because I stopped a moron with a plastic toy. I don’t know if it would even have done something to a normal person.” In a quieter voice, she said, “I think I broke his jaw. Some idiot with a toy gun and I broke his jaw because I didn’t have anything better to do. Your message was honestly—it was honestly the most exciting part of my day. It was this or spend another hour arguing with my agent about how big Barbie’s tits should be.” A serious look at Glamor. “You aren’t a therapist, are you?”
Glamor laughed. “I’m a nurse.”
“You don’t say.” Gayle couldn’t hide her surprise, even beneath the inflexible cowl she was stuck with. When she tried to turn her head towards Glamor and failed, she peeled her mask off. “This makes it hard to move my head, sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You have a very beautiful face.”
And then they were back in sex mode—or maybe Gayle’s sole superhuman connection in months was having more of an effect than she wanted it to. She stood, turning her back on Glamor yet again. There was no withdrawal this time. Maybe it was just her subconscious telling her what a ****ing idiot she was. “Sorry, I—do you want to go on patrol? Like, real patrol? I know we tend to use it as a cover for sex now, but—real patrol?”
“Of course—”
“Your power, do you turn it on and off, or do you just leave it on?”
Glamor smiled. “I control it.”
“Okay. Good. I thought for a minute I was going insane.”
“I will be careful.” Glamor wiped flecks of loose stone off her costume. “My name is Michelle, by the way.”
Were they exchanging names? Gayle hesitated, but having revealed her face, hiding her name seemed silly, as foolish a notion as it seemed even when she ran the impulse through her head a few times for consideration. “Gayle,” she said at last. “Gayle Corrus.” If Glamor wanted to shake hands, Gayle wasn’t sure she’d be able to survive more physical contact. Just her presence had brought her to brink of sanity for almost a minute. Thankfully, Glamor didn’t seem intent on shaking hands.
Gayle pulled her mask on. Patrol with a less maneuverable power was always trickier, and it wasn’t a conundrum she’d encountered in some time. She hoped Glamor’s power really was under wraps, because she didn’t want to experience a… spasm while carrying her. “So, should I just… carry you?”
“If you want.”
It was going to be a long night.