Gabriel Bettelheim felt happy to be in the land of death rays rather than the land of gas ovens. He adjusted his tie, and his waistcoat was a bit outdated as fashion went. He then cleaned his round glasses and took a puff of his cigarette. Across from him in that well-lit room was the imperious Ioanna Belinsky. Belinsky wore a tightly-fitted suit that hugged her curvy form, her platinum blonde hair and aged good looks as unblemished as her white gloves. The two of them ate their take-out food. Gabe liked Chinese. It was sweet.
Of course, Gabriel thought, names like "Bettelheim" and "Belinsky" were hard to remember. For comic book people, that was an issue. Worse, Bettelheim sounded a bit too Jewish back when he came over, and Russian names weren't exactly in season. So, they'd become "Gabe Baker" and "The Empress of Comics".
"...Gabriel," Ioanna said. "Have you seen Jenny?"
She was a promising young artist. "I'm afraid I haven't," Gabe said in his Hamburg accent. "She's always out."
"Remind me to get around to firing her," Ioanna said, in that I-might-be-your-friend-but-I'm-also-the-boss sort of tone.
"Of course, Boss," Gabe said, knowing that Ioanna would probably change her mind. They both took another drag from their cigarettes. Gabe idly turned on the radio.
"The Tet Offensive continues on, with Soviet puppet Utopia Girl proving difficult to dislodge. The Super-Commie has made breakthroughs into South Vietnamese lines. Hopefully our lab boys can cook up something to stop her." The radio continued on like that.
"I certainly hope so," Ioanna said. "That Bolshevik doesn't deserve the power she has, and she's a foot soldier for tyranny." She put some beef into her mouth with graceful movements of her fork.
Meanwhile, Utopia Girl flew through the air in her red spandex alongside a crashing private plane, ripping open a window to fly civilians for safety.
Back at Mystic Comics, Gabe put a bite of sweetened rice into his mouth. "I think she does some good work," Gabe said. "Just last week she helped me find my dog."
Ioanna bit down for a moment. "What about liberty? What about democracy? What about freedom? Are these not things you have said yourself you are quite fond of?"
"Well, yes." He took another puff from his cig.
"Communism and Nazism are two sides of the same coin," Ioanna insisted.
Gabe wondered why they were discussing politics at all. "Ioanna. The next issue of The Legendary Legioness?" He took another bite.
"No, we're talking about Utopia Girl," Ioanna said, putting out her cigarette with excessive force onto an ashtray her daughter had made for her in school.
"Did someone say Utopia Girl?" Jenny Hopkins asked, walking into the break room with her hair windswept. Ioanna passed her her meal, which Jenny eagerly opened and began to devour.
"Yes, where were you?" Ioanna asked, her red nails tapping against her mole in a fidgeting gesture. "We need to work on the next issue."
Gabe chose very diplomatically not to say anything. "We were also discussing the news. Specifically, the war and all that."
Jenny's bag was covered in union pins. "Oh, you heard about what Utopia Girl did?" she asked.
Ioanna rolled her eyes. "Hopkins, don't you have a Socialist Realist art class to take?" she asked, her lips returning to her cigarette.
"Ha ha, very funny," Jenny said, sitting down at the table. "So, I was wondering if we could throw in the Beast of the Broadcast?"
Gabriel smiled. "I'm surprised you remember that Elk River Comics story." He mixed some duck sauce in with his rice.
"It was good. I liked how the conspiracy theorist with the demonic mind control powers was a metaphor for fascism. She was also funny to read." Jenny giggled at that.
"You couldn't get away with that today," Ioanna said. A loose agreement between American comics publishers called the Comics Code Authority had made stories that had any even potentially-objectionable themes all but unheard of. The 40s were a different time, even if it only had been twenty years since the end of the 40s.
"Sure, but what if we brought the Beast of the Broadcast back? We could make her, I dunno, a commie spy." Jenny was an artist, not a writer, but she was also a friend.
"I'm pleasantly surprised that you're suggesting that. I like it!" Ioanna snapped her fingers. "We'll need to get the devil aspect out of it, maybe Woland is actually a space alien? Sci-fi's still big, yes?"
"Planet of the Apes just came out," Jenny said. "That's huge, but the twist in that movie was that it wasn't an alien planet. It was our planet in the future."
Gabe chuckled. "Woland is a time-traveler, then? Isn't that a bit silly?"
"People love silly, Gabe," Jenny said. "Take it from someone a few years younger than you, people are all about silly stuff that keeps them distracted from war and racism."
"I don't know. I think there's a place for silly things. Something is no less true because it's silly, yes?" Gabe asked. "Sometimes I wonder why we write about imaginary heroes like the Legioness when there are real heroes out there."
"Well, uh, Mary Shelley wrote about Victor Frankenstein even though she knew Lord Byron, so maybe there's room for both?" Jenny said, in between massive bites of her beef fried rice.
Gabe gave a sage nod, and Ioanna's red nails clicked against the table. "She isn't a hero," Ioanna said.
Jenny kept eating, then stopped. She heard something with her super-hearing, and used super-ventriloquism to fake an upset, roaring stomach. "Oh, crap, I think they messed up my order!" she said, trying to look queasy as she left the room. "Bathroom!"
Ioanna nursed her cigarette in between bites. "She really needs to see a doctor."
As Jenny ran out the back door of Mystic Comics' offices, she used her super-dexterity to change into her costume, complete with knee-high red stiletto boots and a hammer and sickle on her spandex-covered chest. "Above and beyond!" she yelled, as Utopia Girl took to the skies. Her cape billowed behind her. "The Starlight City Museum of Technology!" she said to nobody in particular. Arriving almost instantly at the Art Deco wonderland in question, she hit the concrete with a well-practiced thud. "Lauren Lohst," she sneered at the woman in the lavender cocktail dress and four-inch heels.
Lauren tossed a few locks of her blonde hair aside, artificially plump lips pursing into a mock-frown. "Utopia Girl. Haven't you learned by now that I'm a model citizen?" she said.
"Like you're the skirt I'd trust to tell me that!" Utopia Girl said, balling her fists up. "That's baloney and you know it."
Lauren preened, her army of bow-tied butler robots standing behind her. "Well, I'm only just here to visit."
"What would Starlight City's most prominent evil scientist-slash-corporate big kahuna want out of our beloved science center?" Utopia Girl asked.
Lauren toyed with the laser gun in her hand. No doubt that diabolical witch had invented it herself, Utopia Girl thought. "I think you know exactly why I'm here, Myopia Girl!"
Her super-deduction skills working on overdrive, Utopia Girl's index finger jabbed through the air at Lauren. "Of course! The Starlight City Museum of Technology is for the people! A proudly-minted member of the capitalist elite like yourself would like nothing more than to remove the rights of the downtrodden to quality education!" Utopia Girl said. The sun was just a bit too bright, and unfortunately Utopia Girl didn't have super-sunglasses powers built into her eyes.
"Very clever, Utopia Girl," Lauren said. "I think you've missed something, though.
"Oh, lay it on me," Utopia Girl snarled.
"Can you imagine a game of miniature golf that can be played without an expensive, hard to maintain course?" Lauren asked. "The Starlight City Museum of Technology has a computer able to create just that! It can simulate a game of miniature golf of any kind based on original parameters, using nothing but a black screen and an array of white geometric lines on a two-dimensional plane!"
Utopia Girl looked at the robot butlers for a moment. "...What?"
"Don't you see? I'll never have to buy another miniature golf course again!" Lauren said.
"No, but you invented an army of butler robots. They're intelligent, right?"
"Yes?" Lauren asked. The butler robots rolled their necks and made punching gestures with their fists into their other palms.
"If you can make a computer-brain, why can't you just build your own miniature golf machine? Be honest, how long would it take you?"
"A few hours, probably," Lauren said.
"Look, you don't have to do this—" Utopia Girl said, and a butler robot's fist fell off to expose a chain gun. A torrent of laser blasts slammed straight into Utopia Girl's chest, blasting her onto her back. She let out a loud moan.
Lauren Lohst strode up to the costumed heroine, hips twisting in a hyperfeminine gait. She bent down and traced her fingers across Utopia Girl's singed costume. The reinforced spandex took the blasts well, but they still hurt. She turned to one of the butler robots. "Jeeves, smash and grab, won't you?" She gave a haughty giggle, only for Utopia Girl to flip onto her feet and punch the crooked Paragon in the cheek. "Not today, exploiter!" Utopia Girl yelled, before vaporizing Jeeves with her laser vision.
"Jeeves!" Lauren yelled in horror.
"He wasn't sentient, was he?" Utopia Girl asked.
"No, of course not, but I was going to have him get a salad later!" Lauren quickly checked her designer handbag for her wallet.
Utopia Girl wound up for a punch and got a very good view of Lohst's cleavage. What was it with that woman? She was a Barbie doll. I did like playing with Barbies as a kid, Utopia Girl thought. Lauren unleashed a series of blasts from her weapon, ones that Utopia Girl easily dodged.
Utopia Girl's laser vision scorched the army of robots in one single arc. Her eyes glowing an incandescent red, she looked down at Lauren as she began to hover above the ground. "Jail?" she asked.
Lauren reached into her purse and drew from it a smoke bomb, throwing it at Utopia Girl's face. Jenny choked as Lauren ran away. How does she run so well in heels? Does she practice or something? Jenny wondered, in between such insightful comments as "Argh!" and "Ugh!".
By the time the smoke cleared, Barracuda stood where Lohst had been. She wore leather, like a chauffeur's outfit, but the weapons she packed were business. She was of African descent and wore the straightened hair characteristic of black women of the thirties. She could have been Jenny's mom. "Afternoon, Utopia Girl," she said.
Thank goodness that she can't recognize my face due to the radiant energy emitting naturally from my eyes bouncing off of my costume, thus creating a mirage! Jenny was quite thankful that her powers worked that way. "Uh, afternoon, Blackfin Barracuda," she said. "Those are a lot of, um, guns. Real guns, with bullets."
"I like bullets. They worked on Capone, they worked on the Nazis, and they work now. Someone like Lohst can tech up some sort of counter to lasers or heat rays or the like, but bullets? The only person I know immune to them is you." There was iron in Barracuda's eyes, and a milky-white scar over one one of them.
"...Speaking of Lohst, you happen to know where she is?" Barracuda asked.
"Uh, why?" Jenny asked.
"She's the biggest capitalist, crooked Paragon, and criminal in this city."
"So?"
"So I don't like people who exploit people or people who tell other people what to do."
"So?" Jenny repeated.
"I'm going to kill her."
"You can't do that!" Jenny said.
"Why not?" Barracuda asked.
"Because she's a villain, and you have to arrest villains! You can't just kill people!" Utopia Girl said, blushing.
"If I arrest her, she'll escape. Probably destroy another ghetto or co-op or something fighting with you. So I'm going to kill her."
"This is your anarchist adventurism talking!" Utopia Girl said, deciding that now was the time for leftist infighting. "She has to be arrested."
"Well, maybe I don't trust cops," Barracuda said.
"Cool. Bye," Utopia Girl said, sharply, as she flew away.
Barracuda looked at the burning wreckage of the robots. "I guess I'll have to call the fire department," she mumbled to herself.
Berlin, 1944
"Did you like it, Barracuda?" The woman in the SS uniform adjusted her tie. It was slightly too tight. "How did it feel to watch the Octopus get incinerated in atomic fire? The most important man in your life:" she snapped her fingers. "gone."
"Hilda Bormann. I don't know how you managed to make it into the SS, but you'll never get away with this! Once our boys make it across the Atlantic, we'll lick you Nazi pigs!" The Barracuda felt something press against her back in a uniform pocket as her back pressed against the wall.
"...Hilda Bormann? You still haven't realized what I truly am? I am not just the newlywed wife of Martin Bormann, that fool Hitler's personal secretary. You didn't pick it up from the Ahnenerbe men you interrogated, mein Liebchen? The ancient ruins in Mesopotamia, and the Lost Kingdom of Izkandar?"
"...who worshiped the Goddess Bazzalle, the goddess of servants, bureaucrats and logistics. I should've known that there was no way that you fascists would have ever managed to make it across the English Channel without some kind of lucky break," Barracuda struggled against the chains connecting her wrists and ankles to the wall.
"One might even say divine intervention," Bazzalle said, her German accent fading into something...different. Received pronunciation—posh English. "This ruse was necessary to keep these idiotic men in line, but their stupidity will prove to be an advantage. Soon Hitler will ascend to be one of my champions and I will take my divine throne. They'll all bow once I reveal my true self and the gods will see me as a servant no longer! I'll be master in Heaven as I am on Earth, and I will add a new aspect to my portfolio — Bazzalle, Goddess of Victory!"
"You're damn wrong," the Barracuda said, picking her locks and disguising it with chatter. The flatcap was plucked off of her head by the goddess as the latter woman's eyes started to glow with violet flame. "You just don't get it, do ya?" At that, she slipped out of her arm cuffs and pulled her leg cuffs off smoothly, getting her dukes up.
"Oh, Roberta Robins. You always were just a sidekick to that self-proclaimed hero." Bazzalle said, as she sucker-punched the Barracuda, bloodying the latter woman's nose and dropping her to the ground. Bazzalle cracked her knuckles. "I'm going to create utopia with this degenerate society. Using order, hierarchy, and harsh logic I'm going to get even. No more old idols, under my eye shall reign the Swastika and the Thousand Year Reich!"
The Barracuda pulled herself up as blood dripped down onto her spandex suit. "Yeah, and hundreds of millions are gonna be fed into the incinerator to make it happen. Ain't worth it, chief. No one should get to rule anyone, least of all you."
Bazzalle threw another punch, though this time with a slick twist the Barracuda dodged and sent a punch to the gut straight Bazzalle's way. Crack! Bazzalle stumbled and tried to grab the Barracuda, but Roberta grabbed Bazzalle's arm and tossed her over her shoulder, turning around to see the Nazi's back broken against the wall. Her body folded like a playing card, all fragments, before starting to knit itself back together. "You know, for someone who called Hitler a fool, you aren't so different with your obsession with wanting to be worshiped and not caring who dies because of your cockamamie plans. Sure, you aren't doing it because you genuinely believe the Jews and Slavs and gypsies and all need to die, but you're doing it so Jerry'll follow. What's the difference?"
Bazzalle got up. "The difference, my dearest Roberta, is that Hitler is only a man." At that, Bazzalle's foot smashed into the front of Roberta's knee, a dodge too late. Bones broke. Snap. Adrenaline kicked in. The human flipped back onto her feet, as if on wires. She felt no pain. She delivered an explosive deck to Bazzalle's jaw, a kick to her groin, and, finally, a very ironic German suplex.
She fell backwards, arm around Bazzalle's neck, as she introduced the goddess's head to the wooden floor. "Having fun, Frau Bormann?" she asked with a smile.
"Plenty." At that, Bazzalle jammed her thumb into the Barracuda's eye, gouging it out. They both screamed, one in bloodlust and the other in agony. Bazzalle smashed Barracuda's back against the stone wall.
The Barracuda coughed a bit. "Ya wanna know somethin'?"
"What?"
"...Shoulda never taken my hat." The thing in her back pocket made a cracking noise, then started to glow, then burned. There was a primordial scream as the Ankh of Atta-Rakh detonated, leaving Roberta broken, tired, and bloody but Bazzalle fading out of existence like falling sand.
"My empire! My legacy! My power!" she screamed as she clawed at existence.
"Your connection to the material world. They don't care much about Aryans up there." Roberta spat out some blood.
This wasn't the day she'd die.
Starlight City, 1968
Aisling saw her reflection. It wore slightly smudged lipstick, a mockup East German Stasi uniform, and too much foundation. The sweat had thinned it out somewhat, but the alcohol wipe in her hand was making the bulk of the progress. A song played on the radio, which to Aisling O'Connor's black coffee-ridden brain was basically heaven. Something about surfing in the US of A.
"Oh, Tessa Schmitz, the Stasi Witch!"
Aisling heard someone push open the door to Dressing Room 2. She jumped a bit at the sudden sound, and turned her partially reddened face and stinging post-mascara eyes to face the intruder. She jerked her head and body around to look at the speaker, finding a rail-thin, artificially busty blonde in pink heels, enough jewelry to fund Aisling's rent, and bubblegum makeup. "Lauren Lohst?" she asked.
"In the flesh," Lohst said, her words tasting like powdered fruit drink.
Well, at least that explained how this visitor had gotten backstage. Lauren snapped her fingers a few times. "Tessa? Tessa? Earth to Tessa Schmitz," she said.
"I'm not Tessa Schmitz. It's just who I play for the promotion. Aren't you supposed to be the smartest person on Earth or something? What does the smartest person on Earth care about small-time wrestling?"
"Oh, I know you probably have some other, much more boring life as some impoverished prole, desperately playing a part that you'll never be able to break until you retire just so various well-oiled men can grapple each other to your mocking commentary. But, Tessa, I don't find Aisling O'Connor's life super interesting, at the moment. Ms. Lohst's got things to do and she wants to talk to Comrade Schmitz."
"...Look, I'm off work right now," Aisling mumbled. "It's one in the morning. If you want an autograph we can find a time."
"Two in the morning, actually. What about kayfabe? Don't you people stay in character at all times? Look, let me explain this in terms you'll understand. I've spent a long and busy week fighting various heroic Paragons as well as other villains. The Barracuda broke into one of my Lohst Arms warehouses. Missy Missile has been trying to get me to watch Get Smart. Judge Cold nearly cut open my damned head with her sword. When I have spent the last day getting very expensive battle robots destroyed by a string of costumed maniacs, I want to be able to go to a pro-wrestling commentator who reminds me of myself in the middle of the night and speak with her. Tessa Schmitz, Aisling. Chop-chop."
Aisling tried to collect herself. "Please go away, Lauren," Aisling sighed.
"What do I need to do? Do I need to buy this entire wrestling promotion? Come on, don't you wish you could actually wrestle women instead of being limited to commentating?"
"...No, women don't wrestle. We're just here to look good."
Lohst waved a hand grandly. "Picture this. A women's wrestling division just as well-funded as the mens, with colorful and larger-than-life female characters not meant for horny men's consumption! Imagine Tessa Schmitz facing off in the ring, whole storylines centered around you! East vs. West! Good vs. Evil!"
"...You don't want to buy this promotion. There's no money in it."
The radio continued to sing about surfing.
"I could have it make money! Lohst Universal Wrestling. If I can learn an entire language in two days over a weekend, no, if I can run everything from Halberd-Billingsworth Banking to Lohst Technologies, I can manage a wrestling promotion. Come on, don't you want to get to be open about being bisexual on TV?"
Aisling's face washed out. "...I'm not bisexual, it's just Tessa's thing. It appeals to men..."
"No, you're hinting at it for you. It's a risk. Tessa's implied bisexuality is a major part of her character." Lauren almost sounded enthusiastic. "Anyone with half a brain can see that it's earnest. Probably the only earnest thing about your character. Don't be stupid, I can just deduce you're bisexual. Or, well, possibly a closeted lesbian, but I'd rather not assume your husband is a beard."
"Pardon me?" Aisling asked. "You can't—"
Lohst raised a finger and interrupted. "Aisling O'Connor, can you honestly tell me you just have an interest in men? Genuinely? When I could be setting you up with anything from open relationship partners to attractive female wrestlers for you to engage in combat?"
"Okay, fine. I'm bisexual, you Barbie steamroller." Aisling said.
"I've made up my mind. Tessa, I'm buying this place. Quite honestly, I'd like there to be a bit of drama, you know, a fling, between General Manager and CEO Lauren Lohst and up-and-coming heel wrestler Tessa Schmitz."
"...Are you hitting on me?"
"No, I'm providing a storyline beat I think I want to do. Come on, darling. Look at me. 36DD, lips and hips to die for, flirty and dramatic high fashion, most men would kill to kiss me once."
"...Very humble."
"Think about it. All you have to do is be my good little Stasi Witch for All-American Pro Wrestling, and you'll be wearing furs and heels. Hubby can wear suits, and if either of you ever wanna stop by my place when I'm not busy..."
Aisling thought about it for more than a few moments, Lauren waiting patiently. "...I'll take it, but tone down the narcissism, and I get veto power over everything to do with my character."
"Love you too, Tessa," Lauren whispered, tracing two thin fingers down Aisling's chest. "Get some sleep, I'll have the purchase done by the end of the week. Toodles." At that, Lauren Lohst seemed to vanish into the night.
Aisling stared at herself in the mirror. All she saw was haze, with maybe a hint of gold somewhere in there.
As Lauren walked out of the Maxwell Performing Arts Center with wrestling on her mind, she heard a crack of thunder. Along with it came the feeling of a heavy leather slug smashing into her stomach. The wind in her evacuated the area. "Cosmic metal body armor," she said, looking at the blue sheen underneath her torn dress. "Never leave home without it."
Think, Lauren. What villains would be so unfashionable to shoot at me with bullets? Her brain whirred at top speed. Well, first there's Ascendancy Jane. Can't be it. If it was her, I'd be able to see her and she'd be talking about Ayn Rand or Nietzsche or something equally pretentious. Frigid robot cow. She'd also care about crossfire. Okay, what about the Minuteman? He's crazy enough to shoot at me in the middle of the city, but this isn't his style. He thinks he's a cowboy and he'd give me a fighting shot. What about one of Pastor Maxine's goons? They think I'm Satan incarnate. No, if Maxine Anderson was behind this she'd be subtle. It wouldn't be in broad daylight. That means I need someone who's experienced with a gun, either so good at shooting or so unafraid of collateral damage that they'd be able to shoot me, and someone who would hide from afar and try to take me down. By the sound of that gunshot, it was a .30-06 round: M1 Garand. Military issue. It's the Barracuda.
"Engage Defense Program Sharkbait!" Lauren yelled, and the computer-brain that existed in her necklace projected a field of pure force around her. The purple sphere blocked another shot, and Lauren to her surprise realized that Barracuda had switched from aiming at the center of mass to aiming at the head. There were three more shots, like car crashes. "Force projection structural integrity is at sixty percent!" her necklace said, in a tinny voice. Two more shots.
"Forty!"
She heard another blast. Where the Hell was that bitch?
"Force projection structural integrity is at thirty percent! entering force recovery mode."
Her shield dissipated, and she prepared to meet her end. A bullet slammed into Utopia Girl's body. Someone's being dramatic, Lauren thought.
"Blackfin Barracuda! Get out of your sniper's nest and show yourself!" Utopia Girl said, standing in front of a cowering Lauren with the communist crusader's arms on her own hips. "Come on, come out!" Utopia Girl whined.
Two .30-06 rounds slammed into each of Utopia Girl's eyes.
"Hey, stop it!" Utopia Girl said. "That's not cool of you. What planet are you even on?"
Barracuda climbed down from a rooftop, her rifle on her back. She dropped to the sidewalk. "...What do you think you're doing?" she asked.
"Saving her!" Utopia Girl said, using her laser vision to melt the barrel of Barracuda's rifle into uselessness. "Get the heck out of here, and don't you dare try to murder anyone in cold blood in my city!"
Barracuda walked away, and the passersby glared at Utopia Girl. "Call me when you actually have beliefs," she said to the other costumed heroine. "Lauren, I saw what you put on the street. Cambodian Marching Powder. It's nasty stuff. Bet you'd rather be remembered for stealing Rembrandts and robot butlers."
Barracuda walked away, and a civilian punched Lauren in her perfect face. She hit the ground. Guess I deserved that one. Still, what a murderous brat. Utopia Girl spirited Lauren away in her arms, cradling her as they flew above and beyond.
Berg's Delicatessen was the sort of place that a stone fox like Lauren Lohst wouldn't normally be caught dead at. Sure, it was clean and smelled like brisket, but the portly old man behind the counter's apron was stained with all of the things that Lauren didn't want to get on her eleven-thousand-dollar dress. She put a menthol cigarette between her perfect lips, her pastel eyeshadow and heavy fake lashes marking her. Across from her sat a brown-haired union girl in a tie-dye shirt. "You got any dope?" Lauren whispered.
"I can't give you dope now, Mr. Berg'll yell at me for stinking up the deli," Jenny said. "Besides, won't it catch on your look?" Jenny asked.
"Point taken."
Mr. Berg gave a wave at Jenny and Lauren, speaking in Yiddish.
Jenny turned to Lauren. "He's asking if you or me want anything," she said.
"Tell him I'll have a salad, and ask for whatever you'd like," Lauren said.
Jenny communicated this to Mr. Berg, also in Yiddish, and he gave her a thumbs-up and got to work.
"How do you speak Yiddish?" Lauren asked. "I picked up some of it as almost German-sounding, and I thought I noticed a Slavic loanword of some sort somewhere."
"Oh, my mom used to talk about it all the time. She was from, you know, the Old Country."
"The British Isles, I assume. Hopkins is a Britannic last name, right?"
"Oh, no, my mom's from France. Her last name was Lalonde, which was Anglicized from Levy. My dad met her during the war, he was real sweet on her at this bar in Paris."
Lauren quirked up an eyebrow.
"One second," Jenny said, bringing back from Mr. Berg's counter a small salad and a large sandwich that bore multiple thick cuts of meat.
Lauren began to pick at her salad. "You're Jewish?" she asked.
"...Is that a problem?" Jenny asked, in the sort of way one did when one was accused of having horns as a child.
"No, it's not. It just occurred to me that my father would be disappointed that I'm, erm, on a date with an 'ethnic'."
"Okay, first, your dad isn't here, so you don't need to worry about that. Second, wait, this is a date? I thought you just, you know, wanted to talk to someone who worked at Mystic Comics."
"Over food? That makes this a date," Lauren said.
"...Why would Lauren Lohst want to go out on a date with me?"
"Well, you are a...utopian sort of personality," Lauren said, very quietly.
Jenny's eyes became the size of frisbees. "How'd you figure it out?"
Lauren shrugged. "Lucky guess," she said, implying that it wasn't anything to do with luck.
"Who told you?" Jenny asked, her hands gripping the table. "Please, please don't tell anyone!"
"Nobody told me. I just put the pieces together. As for telling anyone, why would I do that? I quite like our games. They're fun. Playing the part of the villain is intensely satisfying for me."
"So, what, you're just going to pretend like you don't know?" Jenny asked. Lauren shut her up with a kiss, and Jenny wasn't sure how Lauren had become such a great kisser. Actually, no, she knew exactly how Lauren had become such a great kisser. "...How do you get away with that? If I made out with a girl in Starlight City, I'd get institutionalized or lobotomized or something!" Jenny breathed.
"People let me get away with a lot. For example, allowing my good friend Missy Missile to steal the Buchanan Diamond from the Starlight City Museum of Natural History." Lauren giggled.
"You fiend!" Jenny exclaimed. "Was this all a trick?"
"No, I actually have a thing for airheaded communists," Lauren said in a faux-sarcastic tone.
"Damn you and your schemes!" Jenny said, using her super-quick-change ability to change into her Utopia Girl garb, before rushing off into the skies. "Above and beyond!" she yelled, while Lauren started on her salad.
By the time Lauren finished her salad, a bomber-jacket-clad thief with a jetpack was hauled into the deli by Utopia Girl's hand. She spoke in a high-pitched voice, but one that was affected with a valley girl lilt that contrasted with her obvious Southern accent. "God dammit. Can't a gal steal a stinkin' diamond without running into an invincible super-weirdo?" Missy said. Her goggles hung around her neck.
"Nice try, but you won't be flying the coop this time!" Utopia Girl said in front of a crowd of confused deli patrons. "You know, because you'll be in jail."
Missy tried to pull the cord to turn on her jetpack. It was out of gas. "Crap!" she swore. "Look, you can't do this to me! Do you have any idea how fucked I'll be in prison? I'm a...I'm a...I have a kid!"
"You're a what?" Utopia Girl asked. Lauren whispered that Missy was what was at the time called a transsexual. "She looks so..." Lauren then whispered that she, too, was a transsexual, just one who had invented whole new surgeries to make herself into the beautiful goddess she was. Those were her words.
"Look, if I go to prison, I'm in some real deep shit, and my kid's gonna get taken away, and all kinds of things—" Missy trailed off.
"Okay, I guess you will be flying the coop today," Utopia Girl said. "...Well, why do you do what you do?" Utopia asked.
"I need the money," Missy said.
"What if I helped you find a job?" Utopia Girl offered.
"Nobody will hire me, I have a record," Missy mumbled. "Not all of us have an infinite amount of cash to waste on the world's most expensive Paragon pro-wrestling show."
"Oh, don't you start," Lauren complained.
"Wait, jobs. I know some people," Utopia Girl said.
Ioanna Belinsky tapped the rubber end of her pencil against her lip, as she sat in an antique chair. Gabe Baker stared at his typewriter. Mystic Comics wasn't quite a three-horse company, but there were fifteen horses and most of them were new to the track. What an awful metaphor, Ioanna thought to herself. Unlike Mr. Baker, writer's block had never entered the magnificent mind of Ioanna Belinsky. It always threw her off, being called Belinsky, she thought. In America they used the male version of the surname exclusively. She tapped her fingers against the collar of her pastel green pantsuit.
He sat at his desk. Writer's block sat right atop the keyboard, and he struggled to force his fingers to create magic. "Ioanna, why can't I think of anything?" he asked. Gabe Baker smoked his cigarette in an antique chair as he waited in her office. He dressed like Sigmund Freud, she thought.
"I believe it might have been the wine?" she offered.
"I didn't drink much, right?" Gabe asked.
"No, not much, but it can upset one's sleep schedule," she said.
"How are we supposed to compete with Gumshoe Comics when I can't even—"
"Do you want me to give you an idea for a script?" Ioanna offered.
God, I hate the Mystic Method, he thought. Ioanna just comes up with the ideas, then Jenny or I write the script and draw the damn thing, and she claims half the credit anyway.
My God, I love the Mystic Method, Ioanna thought, for precisely the same reasons that Gabe disliked it. "Tell me, what if we do a romance comic? Those are big. I'm thinking a high school cast. Our lead is Roxy Meen, a young spitfire attempting to seduce a very attractive and very dumb quarterback. Her best friend is an airhead who gets Roxy into trouble, and her sister is a scheming small-town supervillain with no interest in romance but a large interest in spoiling Roxy's. That should be appropriate under the Comics Code Authority, yes? The first comic will have the main character attempt to ask out the quarterback, only for the sister to use a genie found in a bottle in an antiques store to wish for Roxy to fall in love with a cow instead. The spell is reversed at the end of the story, and Roxy's sister learns a valuable lesson about love and family."
"Remember when we used to write stories about spacefaring adventurers fighting in interstellar civil wars against corrupt police and villainous seductresses?" he said.
"Oh, I remember it too well." Ioanna's brow furrowed. "Get to writing Roxy Meen, alright?"
It was at that moment that a tall woman in a bomber jacket entered Gabriel Bettelheim's office. She gave a little wave, and Jenny came in with her.
"Who exactly is this?" Ioanna asked.
"This is Melissa Malloy, she's a friend of a friend, and she really needs a job."
"Well, can you draw?" Ioanna asked.
"Not really," Melissa said.
"I'm sorry, Jenny, but we have no openings," Ioanna said.
"I'm a good driver and pilot!" Melissa offered.
Ioanna tapped the eraser against her finger briefly. "Well, can't she find a job somewhere else?"
"Nobody will hire her, she has a record," Jenny said.
"Well, this place is run on a shoestring budget. How about this? You know who absolutely would need a driver or pilot?" Ioanna offered. "Lauren Lohst. You keep talking about how you went for lunch with her, why don't I ask her? I'll tell her I'm your boss, tell her that you have a friend in need of employment, and see if she has any space available. If Lauren doesn't have any openings, I'll pay for art lessons for her."
Jenny Hopkins wanted to kill Roxy Meen. Her eyes burned holes through the script as she read it in her dingy apartment. A cockroach scurried behind the radiator, and she got up to squash it. "I've never written a romance comic or a comedy story in my entire life, why should I start now?" she asked aloud. "I'm good at drawing, so why do I have to write this crap too?" she said.
She started sketching out figures: a tall and slender one for Roxy herself, a shorter and chubbier form for her sinister sister, and a hunky body for Roxy's love interest. In truth, she had no idea what people saw in all-American boys. She'd liked a few in her day, but she liked her boys the way she liked her erotica: embarrassing and sleazy.
Her pencil stopped as she heard a knock at her door. Leaping anxiously, she used her super-quickness to rush to open it. Behind that door, she saw a self-satisfied Lauren Lohst and Missy Missile duct-taped to a Lohst Technologies branded hand truck. "Well hello, darling," Lauren said.
"What's going on?" Jenny asked.
"Oh, I was just, you know, stopping by," she said with false politeness. Though Lauren's face had been altered to medical perfection, Jenny thought she saw traces of the beak-like nose and cherubic cheeks that Lauren might have had a long time ago. There was certainly still a smug grin. "So, anyway, I hired Ms. Missile, here! She's going to be a test pilot for Lohst Aviation. Isn't that something? See? I can be a good girl when I want to be."
"That's great, Lauren, but why's she tied up?" Jenny said.
"You seem bitter today," the woman in the sparkling and very anachronistic flapper gown said.
"It's the Mystic Method. Come on in." Jenny ushered Missy and Lauren into her apartment, and Lauren closed the door behind them.
"My, this place is a dump!" Lauren said. "I mean that in a nice way, of course," she said.
"Thanks," Jenny said, rolling her eyes briefly. "Look, it's the Mystic Method."
"The what?"
"So you know how when people make a comic book, there's one writer and one or two artists?" Jenny asked, taking a glass bottle of cola out of her fridge and cracking it open.
"Caffeine at this hour?" Lauren asked.
"It helps me work," Jenny said.
"Oh, you poor dear. Oh, and you were saying?"
"Well, the Mystic Method works where the writer comes up with the ideas and then the artists do all the dialogue, storyboarding, and art," Jenny explained.
"Well, that sounds like a scam," Lauren said.
"Mmmmph." Missy Missile agreed, through the duct tape over her mouth.
"Well, if you have to be doing all the work, what are you currently working on?" she asked.
"Oh, it's this dumb high school romance about a pretty girl who tries to, uh...What's the word for seducing someone but in a chaste way?"
"Court?" Lauren offered.
"Yeah. The girl wants to court this quarterback in the groove, but her sister keeps giving her mishigas."
"That sounds entertaining, I'll have to read that," Lauren said, managing to intuit what the Yiddish word meant. "I was also wondering if I could hire you? As Utopia Girl, I mean. I could use a Paragon on the payroll."
Jenny pretended to give it some thought, and put on her most apologetic face. "I dunno. I mean, like, I've already got a job, and I'm, you know, a socialist. I think working for a big company just wouldn't be something I could do."
"Oh, you're in the Students for a Democratic Society?" Lauren asked.
"Not those Maoists, I'm actually in the Communist Party of the United States, which is much better and has the proper socialist line," Jenny clarified.
"Huh," Lauren noted, unsure what the difference was. "Well, anyway, anything I can do to change your mind?" she asked.
"There's nothing, but if you want to kiss me anyway I'd really appreciate it," Jenny said, feeling the bags under her eyes.
Lauren's lips pressed softly against Jenny's as the taller woman embraced the super-Samaritan. Missy smiled as best as she could underneath the tape. "Mmmph!" she asked, and Lauren ripped the tape off. Missy let out a yelp of pain.
"Why did you bring her here tied up?"
"Well, I wanted to inform you with her present that I gave her a job."
"Why the tape, though?" Jenny asked.
"Oh, erm, supervillain business," Lauren said.
"Keep that William Moulton Marston stuff between you two, please," Jenny requested. "I don't need to be a part of it."
Missy gave a nod. "Yeah, that seems like a good call. Don't want to freak anyone out, and don't want to get sent to a mental hospital or something, right?"
Lauren nodded. "...Yes, yes, of course. Silly me. Now, Jenny, do you have any scissors?"
Hilda Koehl stood atop her literal soapbox. Behind her stood the taxidermied corpse of Matthias Koehl. The male Koehl was the head of the National Socialist White People's Party. Nobody called it that. No, the swastika armband with a blue earth in the middle of the hooked cross was known as the symbol of the American Nazi Party. Hilda extended a painfully mortal hand into a Hitler salute, as motley "stormtroopers" assembled beneath her. She was the picture of National Socialist womanhood, modestly dressed and sheet white. None of them knew that she had had her divinity stripped away. "Heil Hitler!" she yelled.
The stormtroopers extended their arms to match hers and barked the words. She continued. "My husband's tragic assassination at the hands of Ascendancy Jane must remind us all that enemies of the volk and the race are many, and powerful." She spoke with a thick German accent, a holdover from before she'd married Koehl. "In the world of the Mundanes, there's the—" Bazzalle used a very offensive term for a person with more melanin than her. It was laced with venom and tediousness. She continued on for a moment, stopping to use similarly incendiary terms about Jews and "Zionists". For good taste's sake, those terms have been excluded. She ranted like a rabid dog, as it was the Jews and blacks who had gotten her stripped of her divinity, and that flying woman and the damnable fish were the avatars of each. A few more heils later, she finally got to her point. "My dearest comrades, we are not simply menaced by Mundanes. Even the most powerful Paragons are enemies of our people, such as the race traitor Utopia Girl and the—" She used that same incendiary and offensive term for a black person. "Barracuda!" She continued to speak, using some very charged words beginning with "N", "C", and "D" to refer to Barracuda, Ascendancy Jane, and Lauren Lohst.
It was at that perfect moment of yelling a homophobic slur that a bullet whizzed past Bazzalle's ear and exploded the head of a counterprotestor. "Damn it, missed 'er!" Barracuda yelled, firing a few more shots from a balcony.
Bazzalle ran, and Utopia Girl descended from the air to kick the ex-deity in the face. A bruised Bazzalle bumbled brokenly off of the soapbox and fell on the floor. Utopia Girl put on her best intimidating expression. "Hilda Koehl, or should I say Hilda Bormann?" she said.
"...It's Bazzalle, actually." She laughed. "We both know you don't kill. What are you going to do? Send me to prison? You know you can't put people in jail for dissidence in this country."
Another counterprotestor got a slug to the shoulder. Bazzalle jumped a bit. "What is wrong with this gun?" Barracuda yelled.
"Anyway," she said, turning to Utopia Girl. "You're going to pack up and walk away. You have nothing to arrest me on."
"You're a Nazi war criminal," Utopia Girl snarled.
"There's a lot of Nazi war criminals in this country, and they walk free," Bazzalle laughed. "Go on. Walk away, little Aryan."
Utopia Girl's eyes turned into superheated coals. She stomped, she kicked, she spit, she beat, she hit, and she pummeled the mere mortal. She reached for Bazzalle's arm and extended it, her eyes still glowing. "You walk away, or I'll melt your arm off. Get the Hell out of my city."
Bazzalle's face drained of what little color it had. "...Of course. You just need to realize that you're being played for a fool! The communists, the Jews, they're the ones who are hurting people like us!"
Utopia Girl's face scrunched up. "You don't know what I am, do you?"
"A misguided Aryan?" Bazzalle offered.
She was about to let out a primal scream and a laser blast over the Nazi's shoulder, before a .30-06 round punched through Bazzalle's eye. Utopia Girl flinched at the gunshot, then turned to look at Barracuda on the balcony. "You're out of line!" she yelled.
"She's dead!"
"So are two counterprotestors!" Utopia Girl yelled. "You shouldn't have pulled that trigger once today. Why can't you just use gadgets or something? Please! Stop killing people!"
Barracuda repelled down from the balcony and looked over the corpse. She turned to the stormtroopers. "Any of you turds want to bite the big one too?" She held the gun.
Utopia Girl floated between the barrel and the bastards. "Barracuda, it's not 1939 anymore. The thing that gets to decide who lives or dies is nature." She turned to the stormtroopers, who were thin and half-starved. "Clean up your goddamn lives. Stop using an accident of birth to justify being awful, meet people, make some friends, move on." She used her ugh vision to sweep the crowd. "...God, Bazzalle really starved you people, huh?" she asked.
One of the Nazi stormtroopers nodded. Utopia Girl continued. "Why'd she do that?"
"She spent all our money on books," another one said.
"See, she didn't care about you all. Here's a lesson. Prejudice is a huckster's game. You distract someone by making them mad at someone else, so they don't realize that you're using them. That's how it always works. Quit this stuff, stop being bums, and make something of yourselves."
"I ain't got nothing to make," the youngest stormtrooper Utopia Girl could see said. "My granddad came from the Old Country with nothing to his name. My dad ain't never gave us any of what he did get."
Utopia Girl spoke. "Well, that's not because of the Jews or Afro-Americans. It's because of the rich. They're the ones who prey on people who'll do a lot of work for very little money because they have no choice. They're the ones who want to divide workers against one another. They're the ones who—"
"Shut your sanctimonious mouth!" Barracuda yelled. "I don't know why you think you can reason with these people. They're Nazis. While they're making nice with you they're trying to kill people like me." Barracuda reloaded her Garand and shot five rounds into the crowd of stormtroopers, causing the motley gang of bigots to scatter with a pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
"They're losers," Jenny said. "They need to get out of this life, not die. Is that your only solution to everything? Mass murder?"
"Dead Nazis mean living civilians," Barracuda said.
"I know that, I'm Jewish."
"So you're willing to let the people who would herd you into gas chambers live? For what, abstract principles?"
Utopia Girl was unsure how to respond. "...Bye," she said, flying away.
Lauren Juniper Lohst found herself on her couch, in need of a late-night coffee. She wore silk pajamas. Her face was still made up to doll-like perfection, but that was because she wore a special kind of makeup that didn't have to be removed nightly. She'd invented it herself. She briefly complimented herself on her entirely non-superpowered technological genius as her wood-paneled RCA television displayed an image of a dark-suited news anchor. He explained that Utopia Girl and Barracuda had scared the both of them off. Then, the show shifted to an on-the-ground interview with one Jenny Hopkins. "What a bad liar," Lauren said to herself. She got up and walked over to her coffee machine, only to be reminded by the "Out of Order" note she'd taped onto it that it was broken. Changing into a red cocktail dress and blasting herself with a special UV light to change her pastel pink eyeshadow to red along with her lipstick, she put on her gold Balenciaga heels, some jewelry that was worth more than a luxury car in total, and begun to walk out of the door of her apartment. Technically, it was the door of one of her seven apartments and five mansions, but who was counting?
She went to the elevator and descended fifteen floors. I need some really terrible coffee, she thought to herself. Good coffee is for when one wants to savor a luxury. Bad coffee is for when one wants to focus on a few things sharply. Specifically, Lauren was hoping to focus on a certain communist Paragon. She left her building and passed by the fifteen-foot-tall Buddha statue in the lobby, before making her way down the brightly-lit streets. She found a convenience store and entered. "Could I have a coffee, please? Black. As bad as you can make it," she asked.
The greasy nobody behind the counter gave a nod. "Of course, Ms. Lohst." He didn't even work for her. She just had a reputation and a name. Sometimes she thought that was all that mattered in this world. Once the fifty dollar bill changed hands along with the bad coffee, Lauren sipped it and noticed what appeared to be a middle-aged proto-Paragon tracking blood into the store. "Are you alright?" Lauren asked.
"I got shot," Barracuda said. "The Minuteman."
Lauren gave a sympathetic "mmhmm". "Oh, that John Bircher lunatic. I'd imagine it was over the shooting-into-a-crowd-of-Nazis thing?"
Barracuda nodded.
"Naturally. Well, is there anything I can do?" the crooked Paragon asked. As always, she thought she looked stunning, and she sort of hoped that even a bitter pill like the Blackfin Barracuda would realize that.
"Stop being such a leech on society, maybe?" Barracuda offered as she doubled over.
"Just last week I invented cold fusion and proved the Riemann hypothesis. I'm doing a lot for the world," Lauren said. "You're taking being shot well."
"Painkillers. I thought I could stop here for a cola. Lauren," she said. "Why haven't you given the world cold fusion if it's so easy for you?"
"Well, there would be no fun in it," Lauren sipped her drink. It tasted like urine mixed with motor oil.
"So you're preventing society's advancement out of selfishness?"
"No, I'm...I just don't do it. Villains never use their intelligence to help the world. It just isn't done."
"You're selfish, playing your stupid little games with each other without actually helping anyone. It's like you're Tessa Schmitz."
"Who?" Lauren asked, failing to lie effectively.
"You know her. The professional wrestler. She's a friend of mine. She plays a villainous character and gets into fights, but in the end nothing ever really changes. That's what you are. You could be giving humanity endless, free, ecologically sustainable energy, but instead you'd rather be a pro wrestling heel."
Lauren, for all of her wit, lacked the words to dispute it.
Barracuda lay on Lauren's couch with bandages around her leg. Behind her, Michael Malloy ran around the supersized apartment as far as his little legs could carry him. His mother, Missy, chased him out of the apartment yelling anxious things, and Barracuda felt her body sink into the couch. It was too perfectly soft to be stock, Lauren must have somehow made it herself. To think she thinks she doesn't have superpowers, Barracuda thought with a pained chuckle.
Lauren, now clad in a nurse's outfit in rubber, exited her dressing room and came with a syringe full of a purple liquid. "What's with the outfit?" Barracuda asked.
"Well, Ms. Robins, I just happened to have this on hand, and I like to look perfect for whatever it is I happen to be doing." She twisted a leather strap around in her fingers, putting it in Barracuda's mouth. "Bite down, won't you?" she asked.
Barracuda obliged. "Don't you think Utopia Girl will be jealous if she hears about this?" she asked.
"That's a good point," Lauren said with a certain amount of liquor in her words. She walked out to the window of her apartment and yelled out of it. Barracuda got a very good look at Lauren's rear in that rubber skirt. She tried not to look too long. "Oh, Utopia Girl!" she crooned, and two minutes later said superheroine came through the window.
"Why are you dressed like a Playboy version of a nurse?" Utopia Girl asked, falling out of the window and into the apartment. She grunted at the fall.
"I like to look the part in whatever I do."
"Is Barracuda alright with this?" Utopia Girl asked.
"If she has to help me, I'm happy with her doing it in something worth looking at," Barracuda pouted.
"Oh, are you sad that you're aroused by a parasitic villainess?" Lauren asked in a very condescending tone. Barracuda's face went apple-red.
"No comment," she spat.
Utopia Girl sat down on the arm of the couch, running a hand down Barracuda's side. "Would you like to see me in a rubber outfit?" she asked. She wondered briefly how Lauren made clothing out of latex, but she realized almost immediately that Lauren could make quite a lot.
"...Maybe."
"Oh, you're tied up in knots, aren't you?" Lauren teased, tracing rubber gloves down Barracuda's chest before pushing in the syringe. Of course, she gave Barracuda ample time to tell her to get away, and clearly motioned what she was planning to do before she did it. She was evil, not rude.
"Would you two stop teasing me?" Barracuda begged, feeling the syringe enter her arm but not feeling it very clearly.
Utopia Girl made goo-goo eyes at the crooked Paragon.
"We get it! You two are dating!" Barracuda said.
"What?" Utopia Girl asked. "I'd never date..." Then, she saw Lauren's face drop. "I mean, I wouldn't if...If she didn't want me to. Yeah, that's it. I just...Besides, it's not like Lauren's even into me! Right, Lauren?"
Lauren looked away and chose to lie poorly. "Erm, no, no, of course not. It's not as though that spandex costume hugs your curves and I find your inane politics arousing." Perhaps she lied too poorly. By the expressions on the other two women's faces, she had lied far too poorly. "Okay, fine, I'm into Utopia Girl. That said, I'm also into a certain leather-clad murderess, so perhaps I just have awful taste." Lauren came to the conclusion that she was digging herself a hole she might not be able to escape from.
"Oh, you like me?" Utopia Girl asked. "You know, there's this guy I heard about. He worked in comics for a while, and he lived with two women. One of them was his wife, and the other one was his mistress. The thing was, though, that he wasn't cheating. They both knew exactly what they were doing, and the wife often had fun with the mistress herself. It was a three-way love affair."
Barracuda politely gave the impression of thinking about it. "With all due respect, I don't think that's gonna work."
"Good evening," Ascendency Jane said at the door to the Mystic Comics studios. A very bitter Ioanna Belinsky stood on the other side of the open door. The skeletal redhead tapped her thin metal fingers against the wooden frame. "Have you seen Utopia Girl?" she asked. Her accent was Russian and her voice was tenser than stretched skin.
"Why would we know where that Red menace is?" Ioanna said.
"One of your artists, Jenny Hopkins. She works here, yes?" Jane asked. Her eyes were faint and glowed yellow.
"...Yes?" Ioanna said. "If you think Jenny's Utopia Girl, that's ridiculous. Besides, she's in the bathroom. What do you want with a urinating artist?"
Jane stroked her plastic chin. "Let us just say that I suspect that where Jenny is, Utopia Girl will be found as well."
Ioanna laughed, craning her neck to look up at Jane's face. "Oh, then I suppose you should be looking for Jenny Hopkins in Earth's orbit, because Utopia Girl was last spotted there trying to stop Lauren Lohst from her usual bisexual philanthropy."
Jane's eyes narrowed. "...Lauren Lohst is a pedophile?"
"Bisexual. She sleeps with men and women. Not many of either. At least, that's what the tabloids say."
"Does that not make her a pedophile? Those who engage in coitus with the same sex are known for violating our nation's youth."
I wish Marston still worked here. He could explain it, Ioanna thought. "That isn't true at all."
"I see. You are also a pervert," Ascendency Jane noted.
"I am not a pervert! I am a married woman! Don't you dare imply otherwise!"
"Would you sleep with another woman?" Jane asked.
"I would not. Would you?"
"I would not sleep with anyone. The very notion repulses me. Goodbye." At that, the energy jets on Ascendancy Jane's palms and souls lit up with fire, and she rocketed off into Low-Earth Orbit. Surrounded by void and a big blue dot, Jane blasted her way to Lohst Technologies Space Station One, where she forced her way through both doors of the airlock. There, she found two idiots. One was an idiot due to being a communist who sought to destroy the righteous individual with false notions of altruism, the other was an idiot due to earning her wealth through illegal and natural-rights-disrespecting means that would inevitably cause her downfall, and they were both idiots because of what they were actually saying.
"I won't let you steal that Rembrant with this space laser, Lauren Lohst!" Utopia Girl yelled, currently staring crudely down the reinforced boob socks built into the tycoon's latex spacesuit.
"Just try to stop me! You can't defeat pure evil!" Lauren said, cackling.
"Oh, I'll lick you right now!" Utopia Girl said.
"You can't lick me, I taught myself kung fu. I need just two fingers to stop you!" Lauren said, struggling to keep a straight face.
"Oh yeah?" Utopia Girl said, pulling her punch. "Well, I'm going to stuff my fist so far up your—"
Ascendancy Jane tilted her head a bit. "...Am I interrupting something?"
"Oh, Lauren and I have been nemeses for a while, but recently we've been getting really into it," Utopia Girl said, giggling awkwardly.
"Yes, you are both perverts," Ascendancy Jane said. "There is right and there is wrong, and there is nothing in between." A machine gun emerged from a compartment on her arm, and bullets sprayed across the velour space station.
"Team-up?" Utopia Girl asked, eyeing Lauren.
"Team-up," Lauren said, tapping various buttons on the wall. "Jenny, stop her!"
Utopia Girl rushed Ascendancy Jane, bullets bouncing off of her chest due to her super-invincibility field which radiated a few millimeters above her skin and covered her entire body. "Atlas Suck This, Jane Galt!" Utopia Girl said, decking Ascendency Jane in the chest. Jane, being a robot, didn't seem to mind, a metal manipulator grasping Utopia Girl's wrist and holding it tightly. She should have grabbed both. Utopia Girl ripped one of Ascendancy Jane's legs off with an arc of bolts and hexagonal nuts, forcing the robot to the ground.
"I have fifty of these bodies!" Jane snarled in distorted tones.
"Activate neutron cage!" Lauren said, and a green forcefield enveloped the station.
"Losing connection to other bodies—" Jane spat, while Utopia Girl bent Jane's knee joint in with a stomp. She then ripped off both of Jane's arms.
"Movement disabled," Jane's operating system said through her mouth. Lauren planted a long kiss on Utopia Girl's face right in front of the robot.
The two took a shuttle back to Earth arm in arm, and Jane had a realization as she sat there on the floor, unable to do much. I was so childish to hate them for being homosexuals. As long as they keep it to adults, there's nothing wrong with that. Individual liberty is of course paramount. No, no, people should hate them for being shiftless, lazy jerks. Say what you will about the Blackfin Barracuda, she earned what she had, and I built myself a new body out of metal just to avoid early-onset dementia. I had to earn everything. Those two can do whatever they want with a minimum of effort due to an accident of birth and a Fifth-Dimensional Heavenly Help-Mate with a fondness for comic books. What do they do with all that the universe gave them? Nothing!
Meanwhile, Lauren and Jenny were doing each other.
As Jenny put her clothes back on in one of Lauren's many penthouse apartments, she heard the crack of a gunshot miles away. Jumping into her super-suit with trained precision, she yelled "Above and beyond!" before rushing out of the door and into the sky.
Speeding past speed, she stopped at Ethos City University. The sun was shining, the kids were screaming, and she floated above four dead bodies. All four of them had the soft eyes of students. They were kids. On one side of the four corpses was a squad of National Guardsmen, and on the other side were young adults fleeing in terror. Utopia Girl gazed down at the National Guardsmen. "What the hell happened here?" she asked.
"There was a war protest. Someone threw a rock at us. We panicked, someone pulled the trigger, and here we are," the highest-ranking Guardsman said. The bodies lay there under the high sunbeams, fist-sized holes in them.
"You shot kids?" Jenny asked.
"We had to, it was a moment of panic, nobody had any idea what was going on!" he stammered out.
"You shot kids?" Jenny repeated. "There's a word for people like you: vile!" She used her see-through vision and laser vision to melt the front of his cerebral cortex through his skull. She put in more power than was necessary, and he dropped like the sack of shit he was. "You people are worse than Lauren Lohst ever was!" she yelled, laser blasts whizzing over the heads of the National Guardsmen.
"What are you gonna do about it? Tell the CPUSA?" an especially brave Guardsman said. She cut his legs off with her laser vision, the light energy cauterizing the stumps as she did it.
"No. To hell with the CPUSA. To hell with the New Left, the SDS, the Chinese, the Soviets, and everyone else!" she yelled. The Guardsmen shot her in the eye, and the bullet bounced right off. She didn't even flinch. They scattered. "Yeah, you run! Today is the day that
Utopia Girl fixes things!"
She waited for the news to come, and a few hours later one leggy brunette named Lara Lissons held a microphone to her lips. "Utopia Girl, how do you respond to these claims that you murdered American servicemen?"
"Well, they killed kids. I'm done with the CPUSA. I'm done with trying to make a difference with being a good example. I'm done with all of it. You wanna know how I'll respond? Let me respond right now. I, Utopia Girl, am going to be a vanguard of one, and I am going to bring socialism to this nightmare of a country no matter what!"
The reporter trembled. "Are...Are you saying that you intend to take over the country?"
"I'm going to free the country. I've spent enough time fighting Lauren Lohst for you people if you're the ones shooting college kids! I know you can't stop me. You can shoot me, bomb me, even nuke me, and I'll survive. I'm the only one who can do this. I'm going to set this world right." Her eyes lit up red. "Now step aside before I hurt you for trying to blame me for their deaths," she said.
They stepped aside.
When Jenny Hopkins entered Mrs. Belinsky's office, she didn't expect to see her eyes red with tears. Jenny wished she could cry, but her mother had told her that tears were emotions bubbling up, and Jenny was a void of feelings. "Are you alright?" she asked.
"No, I'm not alright," Ioanna said. "Four children died, and as usual, Utopia Girl made it all about her." Her words carried revulsion and sorrow for the children with full lives they would never be able to touch.
"All Utopia Girl did was promise to make it right," Jenny said with radioactivity in her voice. "It's not her fault if some people can't see that it was capitalism that killed those kids."
Ioanna cradled her aging head in her hands. "...I know we keep things friendly here, but sometimes I wish you talked to me like a boss," she said.
Jenny doubled down. "Those kids wouldn't have been shot if they hadn't needed to protest the imperialist war in Vietnam."
"Jenny, how old are you?" Ioanna asked.
"I'm twenty-seven," she said.
"Then you should surely give up the childish notion that all the world's problems can be blamed on one thing," Ioanna said. "My family were Russian nobility. We lived in a mansion outside of Saint Petersburg. We had a dacha on the Black Sea. All the privilege in the world doesn't matter in the face of misfortune and cruelty. I'm here, aren't I, not in that dacha?"
Jenny snarled. "I did all I could."
Ioanna spaced her words. "Maybe we should get back to work, Jenny," she said, visibly uncomfortable with where Jenny was going.
"Oh, you'd know a lot about making people get to work. Gabe's told me how you were in the Forties, how you used to be a real taskmaster. You know what? I am Utopia Girl, I killed those National Guardsmen, and there's nothing you can do about it. I make the rules here, not you."
Ioanna cracked a slight smile. "...Just as I thought."
"What?" Jenny yelled.
"I always knew Utopia Girl was a grandstanding egotist who would rather play games and look the hero than actually make the right decisions. I just hoped that you weren't her. I knew you might be with your constant excuses, but I thought I knew you. I thought you were better than that. Whenever Utopia Girl has to choose between herself and her principles, she always chooses herself. That's Bolshevism in a nutshell. Please, get the hell out of my office."
Jenny's eyes lit up a searing red, and she used her laser vision to blast a hole in the wall over Ioanna's shoulder. "You're just another member of the bourgeoisie, Belinsky," she hissed.
"Go on, blast me. Prove you believe in no morals other than the point of a gun." She begun to sing "God Save the Tsar", as Jenny's eyes begun to glow red again. Fearlessly, Ioanna faced the storm incarnate. Jenny lasered off one of the Empress of Comics' legs.
"You did this, you know. It was your ideas that led to their deaths! Capitalism, reaction, it's all the same monster!" Jenny yelled.
Ioanna winced, slumping against the floor. Her wound was cauterized instantly. "I thought Marxists were opposed to philosophical idealism," she said. Jenny walked out, trying not to look at the severed leg. She felt weaker than ever.
As Jenny left the room, she walked down the halls of Mystic Comics with certain sickness in her gut. It expanded to fill her body like a great spider. She reached out to push the door open, to leave the building on its first floor, before hearing a man's scream.
Using her super-quickness, she dashed back to the room with the crippled Ioanna, where Gabe stared in horror at the body. "Jenny!" he yelled, his words laced with incandescent rage that she failed to notice masked a tremor.
"Yes?" she asked, snapping to attention.
Gabe Baker adjusted his glasses as he walked to Ioanna, taking her hand. He picked her up in his aging arms, cradling her. "Dearest Ioanna," he said. "Your leg. Do we need to take you to a hospital?" he asked.
Ioanna's words were weak. "Kill her first," she said with fire.
"She's..." Gabe trailed off.
"Utopia Girl, I know. The charring."
"She's invincible," Gabe finished, holding her. He considered whether to kiss her, even on the cheek, but she was a married woman. His heart beat for her, her high cheekbones and smoky tongue were the only reasons he hadn't flown into a blind rage.
"I crippled a member of the aristocracy!" Jenny said, reaching for justifications.
Gabe exhaled for a moment, holding her, staring at the monster.
"I have no weaknesses! I'm invincible and you can't stop me! Take her to the hospital and let me do the right thing!" Jenny yelled, trying to maintain control like pebbles falling through a sewer grate.
"Oh, you have a weakness, and it's one you've had since before you let that Heavenly Help-Mate grant you a wish," Ioanna said. "Gabriel, surely you know what it is as well?"
Gabriel didn't think too hard. "She's morally weak, too self-obsessed to realize she's playacting."
"Dead right," Ioanna said, wincing in pain.
"I can't believe you told her you were a Russian noble even when she seemed about to kill you," Gabe said.
"What was I supposed to tell her? That I am a Shylock? In America, we make our own names."
Gabe nodded. "We are all children of Israel in this room," he said. "Now, Jenny. Let us talk about your recent conduct. I've humored your disappearances, your backtalk, and your lack of respect for your elders and those you work with. I've done that because I knew that even when you couldn't work, Utopia Girl was out there stopping trains and saving kittens from trees. I started to doubt myself, though. I hired people like Ascendancy Jane's favorite artist to cover your absences, and Steve Ditko has put in more good work than you have ever since Utopia Girl appeared some seven years ago. Why? Because even with his quirks, he is a talented artist.
"I felt that keeping Utopia Girl able to afford somewhere to live was worth having someone who wouldn't pull her own weight here, but clearly you've proven you're not worth it. I held my tongue for years, trying to get along with you, but it's so painfully obvious you don't care about anyone but Utopia Girl. You are addicted to being perceived as a good person by as many people as possible, no matter what the cost." He motioned with his head at Ioanna's severed leg. "Ioanna, what do you feel should be done?" he asked, already knowing the answer.
"Jenny, you're sacked. You're out of a job."
Jenny's eyes glowed red once more. "You can't fire me!" she said.
Once again, the two older Jews refused to back down. Ioanna spoke, softer. "...Is this who you want to be? A common gangster? A thug? Someone who uses force to get what she wants when she hasn't earned any of it? Is that who Utopia Girl is?" Ioanna asked.
"No. It's not. I'll...I'll get my things." Jenny went to walk to her corner office. It wasn't anything grand, and it smelled faintly of mold, but it was hers—up until now."
She walked out, with her feet on the ground like a human being.
1945
The Nazi superheavy bomber careened across the skies of New Mexico, and a younger Barracuda watched as a square-jawed Julius Clint engaged in fisticuffs with slovenly Nazi scientist Arno Herr. "You can't do this, Herr! If the Ankh of Thutmose makes it to the Japanese aggressors, the war could be lost right then and there!" He wore a double-breasted suit, hat, and trench coat. Truly, he was a man of mystery. He socked Herr right in the jaw, and Herr careened back.
"What do anarchistic scoundrels such as yourself and your negro floozy care for a war between the Allies and the Axis?" Herr said.
"More than you know. As anarchists, our job is to take down bullies wherever they are, from corporate fat cats to Stalinist hatchetmen and fascist bigots!" the Octopus said from behind his domino mask.
"Gee, Octopus, you really know a thing or two about getting things done!" the Blackfin Barracuda said, as she watched the Octopus kick the brown-shirted Hell out of the Nazi.
"When Hilda Bormann hears about this—" Arno Herr said, before the Octopus crushed his glasses with a single punch.
"Mein gott!" Herr swore. "You've already lost! The incredible purity of the Aryan race has been mobilized, and America can consider itself conquered!" he said.
"Oh, and why would that be?" the Octopus snarled.
"A Nazi spy communicating with the Soviet-sympathizing nuclear prodigy Theodore Hall under the guise of a Judeo-Bolshevik has uncovered the location where the first atomic bomb is going to be tested—and we are flying right towards it. The plan was never to harness the Ankh, it was to destroy it!" Herr cackled.
"Blast!" the Octopus swore. "If this plane really is heading for the test site of an impossible weapon, we have to escape! Barracuda, tie up Herr."
"Right away, Jules!" she said, binding the bastard.
"I can't wait to burn with you, you degenerate ni—"
Barracuda cut Herr off with a sucker punch. She rummaged around for parachutes. "Come on, you Nazi bastard, where are the parachutes?" she asked.
He laughed, his last cruel defiance. "There's only one!"
The Octopus looked at Barracuda. "...You're the younger of us. You have a longer life to live. Jump."
"But Jules—" Barracuda said. Her heart pounded, her soul begged, her existence was Hell, and she felt like she was dying anyway.
"No, I won't let anyone else die for my war against oppression. I beg you, jump!" the Octopus pleaded, opening the door of the plane. Barracuda watched Herr squirm more and more anxiously. It was Julius Clint or it was both of them. Looking at the man she had loved like a devoted wife and like a comrade-in-arms, she jumped from the plane. She pulled the ripcord. As she descended down slowly in the air, she watched the plane fly across the sky. It moved like a comet, slower the lower she sank to the ground. There was no wind, only dry desert air. There was a great silence. There was. Tears streamed down her face. Perhaps, maybe, he would survive. Perhaps he could commandeer the plane, perhaps he could pilot it, perhaps she'd find him in a little soup kitchen somewhere. Then, in the distance, was a little star. It was the first mushroom cloud she ever saw.
Thomas Hill Cemetery was the sort of place that was cloudy even when the sun was shining. Melissa Malloy found herself in civilian garb, looking at a small headstone. "Jacob Malloy—Sept. 10th 1948 to May 15th 1966—'For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life'"," it read. She put a hand on his tombstone.
"Hello?" Missy heard the Barracuda ask. Missy started into a run, before Barracuda yelled something. "I don't want to hurt you. I'm here to mourn," she said.
Missy stopped and sheepishly walked back. She noticed that an equally small headstone sat about ten plots from her son's grave. She looked at the headstone, which read "Julius Wesley Clint—Aug. 1st 1904 to Jan. 5th 1945—'Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind'"
"It's an Emma Goldman quote," Barracuda clarified.
"Who?" Missy asked, in her Dixieland accent.
"She was a smart woman," Barracuda said. "He cared a great deal for her. He was a brave man."
"My son was, too," Missy said. "Life hates the brave, I think," she said.
"It does," Barracuda said.
"Why aren't you shooting me?" Missy asked.
"I don't shoot people unless it's obvious that the world would be better without them. Sometimes I miss. Sometimes there's casualties, but that's war. You're not a combatant."
"Ain't I a villain?" Missy asked.
"I don't like to think in terms of heroes and villains," Barracuda said. "You're a thief. You haven't killed someone, and I know that you would never start. You take property. I'd be a pretty bad anarchist if I got up in arms about the property of the wealthy being lost." I lost myself, recently, before Utopia Girl became someone who killed the innocent. I was, in a moment, in love with her, Barracuda thought, shame permeating her body.
"I just don't think anyone needs to die," Missy said. "I...I don't want to talk politics, either. I just wanna mourn."
"Me too. Can you tell me about him?" Barracuda asked.
"His name was Jacob. He was my oldest, before I moved up from Alabama. He was brilliant, creative, a damn good writer and a damn good poet. He had an issue where some days he'd be the most miserable person you ever met, and I was scared for him. Then, the other days, he'd be totally out of control, talking faster than anything else and working on his poems for days without sleeping. He had an issue in school, and they sent him to a psych ward where they shocked him. Something happened to his heart."
Barracuda's eyes fell to the grass. "...Yeah. Shame nobody could have helped him."
Missy's face contorted. "No, two someones could have. Utopia Girl could have punched a hole in thw wall of the hospital and flew him out, and Lauren could have used her intelligence to invent something to help him with his mood swings to begin with: something that he'd actually take since it wouldn't make him vomit like lithium," she said.
Barracuda put a hand on Missy's shoulder. Missy continued. "Lauren would rather invent machines to turn Utopia Girl into a baby, and Utopia Girl would rather get into punch-ups with Lauren's giant robots. Sometimes, I want revenge. When you have that kind of power, it's your responsibility to use it. I don't think communism or altruism or whatever means anything to her."
"You can't want revenge in this world. You need to mourn the fallen and be kind even when it hurts," Barracuda said.
"Damn straight," Missy said with a long exhalation. It still stung.
Barracuda didn't live in a luxurious penthouse, but the Robins household was nonetheless full of warm colors and warmer hearts. Melissa snuggled up against Barracuda's side, the two of them having returned from dinner today. It was the day before that they'd met in the cemetery.
Missy held onto Barracuda's arm. There were two kinds of white people in the South, Barracuda thought: the smaller number who were able to interact with blacks as friends and comrades, the larger number who hid their disdain, and rest that would lynch someone easier than chat with them. Luckily, it seemed that Missy was very much the first sort of white Southerner. Missy held onto Barracuda, Barracuda seeming not to realize that Missy intended it in a romantic sort of way. The television turned to Walter Cronkite, who read into the camera. "Tonight, we have a special announcement from Utopia Girl, the superpowered Paragon whose halo who has confessed to the murder of four national guards."
Utopia Girl was shown speaking into a microphone, looking more than a little bit miffed as she talked to a reporter. "I'm gonna say this in no uncertain terms. I am absolutely going to establish a Marxist-Leninist socialist republic in the US, and I don't care what I have to do to get it."
The reporter spoke. "Does this mean that you're abandoning your solemn pledge to protect the lives of the people?" he asked.
"Far from it, I sincerely believe that this is the only way to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people."
"What do you say to the Students for a Democratic Society, the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, and other New Leftists who argue that you are an Old Left relic unwilling and unable to make peace with the fact that there are many oppressed groups in the United States more worthy of primacy in the revolutionary struggle than you?" The reporter looked a bit odd saying that with a comb-over, but the problem was that Utopia Girl had single-handedly made communism relevant. So, people knew what those words meant and found them more important than they might otherwise have.
"I think the New Left is insane, frankly, dominated by Chinese revisionists and petit-bourgeois student activists. The national struggle can never replace the class struggle, and I think anyone who looks at what Brezhnev's doing and thinks that isn't socialism needs to get their head checked. They're dupes for capitalism."
"So if you don't have the communists on your side, and you don't have the capitalists on your side, how do you intend to create your socialist republic?" the reporter asked.
"On my own," Utopia Girl said.
Lauren reached for the remote and turned off the TV. "Son of a bitch," she said.
Missy returned two nights later with a sack full of plastic bags. "Christmastime," she said, in her Alabaman drawl. She crawled through the window of Barracuda's apartment, before dumping onto the table many, many bags of beige Cambodian Marching Powder.
"Oh, perfect," Barracuda said.
"So, what're these for?" Missy asked.
"They're to keep you, me, and anyone else we want safe from Utopia Girl. They're insurance. What we'll do with them is that we'll stockpile them, and if Utopia Girl comes for us or the people we love we'll snort this. That way, we'll stand a chance to fight her off."
Missy gulped. "Aren't these hard drugs? What if we get addicted? What if we lose control?"
Barracuda looked at the bags grimly. "Those are good questions, but if Utopia Girl wants to kill us and we aren't on the drugs we won't even stand a chance to figure them out. It's a big risk, but without Lauren on-side it's all we've got. Speaking of, she's where I got them, not that she knows it."
"Why can't we just ask Lauren to use her super-intelligence?" Missy asked.
"She's a leech on the common people and a crime lord," Barracuda said.
"She isn't Utopia Girl," Missy said.
"Trust me, she's with Utopia Girl. I had a regrettable moment with her and the Paragon. They're desperately in love. You know how Lauren is, being able to get away with things most people would be given electroshock therapy for. I guess when you're that rich, that smart, that good-looking, and that white, you can do pretty much whatever you like.
It starts with manicured hands soldering wires. Then, there's the horror of Barracuda watching Bazzalle, Former Goddess of Bureaucracy, slicing Ioanna Belinsky's hand off. Barracuda stops the second swing, the brick alleyway around them watching. Lauren Lohst de-flips the cross-wires and de-ionizes the polarity position. Barracuda shoots to kill. Bazzalle tries to slice .45 bullets in half as they fly towards her, but she no longer has the reflexes to keep up with her mind. Lauren Lohst is lost. The double gravity beams aren't bouncing off of each other, and the quark-meson shield isn't capturing the Lieber-Kurtzberg particles. There's something wrong.
Barracuda watches the bullets fly into Bazzalle's eyes, splattering her brains across the wall. There's something wrong. Ioanna is crying. Barracuda takes her to a hospital. She's sick, sick at having to watch this violence, and most of all sick at seeing the cruelty that's become routine among the Paragons. The moment fades, things speed, and Ioanna goes to the hospital where they sew her wound shut into a stump. She never writes again. Her husband divorces her, calling her a "double cripple". Gabe Baker meets her at the hospital with an old Red Micah western comic from before the Comics Code Authority.
Lauren deactivates the flux transfer system and reworks it. She uses gluons to "bounce" the quantum gravity beams against one another, thus reversing the signal. Ioanna Belinsky becomes Ioanna Tarasova again. Ioanna Tarasova feels a phantom limb for the rest of her life. Lauren screws in the double gravity enervator, which fixes the machine.
Jenny visits Ioanna in the hospital. Lauren comes with her. Jenny asks Lauren if she can fix Ioanna's hand. Lauren says that she's working on it with Ascendency Jane's help on her space station, but that neither of them get along so it might be slow going. Besides, Lauren's working on something else. Jenny asks what, Lauren refuses to say.
Missy is flying in a Cessna with her son Michael. Missy's handling the controls, and Michael sitting in the passenger seat. They're flying to Ottawa, or London, or wherever the winds take them. More to the point, anywhere the wind slows down to a breeze.
Barracuda's alone, crying, while Missy and Michael are flying. Utopia Girl's flying, too, in search of problems to solve. Anything to pretend that she's making a difference. The drug of public adoration can become an overdose quite quickly. Queens often end up beheaded, too.
Barracuda stared into her 2 AM cup of coffee. She had an addiction, that was for sure. Then, she stared at her bags of Cambodian Marching Powder. Back to her coffee. She looked back at the drugs. She played the scenario through in her head. She had gotten good at that. She imagined herself with energy to spare, with hate in her heart and war on her mind. She imagined herself facing down Utopia Girl in a state of bloodlust and chaos. She imagined her durability doubled, her strength supersized, her militancy maximized, and she finally imagined laser vision going straight into her head.
That was what had been done to those soldiers with guns. Could I rush her? she thought. No, I can't get past those lasers, and even on the drug she might still rip me apart. She stared at the baggies again. What if I got the drop on her, tried to kill her with my bare hands? she thought. No, even then, I don't know if I could get through her invincibility field. She might just snap my neck. She's crazy like that, these days. Almost as crazy as I am.
She opened up a Batman comic she'd bought for dirt cheap from a reseller and started to flip through it. Apparently some asshole named Bob Kane still wrote these. Who the Hell is Bob Kane? she thought. Then, she realized the name sounded familiar. She toyed with it in her head, rubbing her fingers against her temple. Bob Kane the landlord? He wrote a comic? As far as she could tell, Batman was some brightly colored idiot in wings he lifted from a Da Vinci sketch? There weren't any interesting characters or colorful villains. No shit this had never been able to compete with Mystic, she thought. Shit, why does that name sound familiar, too? she thought.
She started to speak aloud. "Utopia Girl crippled the head of Mystic Comics on the news. That means Utopia Girl had a vendetta against Mystic Comics. It also meant that the only person who could stop Utopia Girl from preventing Barracuda saving lives was Utopia Girl, which meant that if she could be given the power to go on her rampage, it would be Barracuda who could rebuild. It would also mean that Barracuda would be able to find where Utopia Girl was by going to Mystic Comics.
"I can't do this," Barracuda said aloud. "This is going to cause unimaginable amounts of death. On the other hand, Utopia Girl is already ruining everything. If I give her the strength and intoxication to make her damage blind, poorly thought out, and unlikely to create the red fascist dictatorship she wants, that would be good, right? She would take it, she wants to feel good about herself, and she's unraveling." She slept on it, and woke up with the right answer.
Sergeant Donovan Cross held his service weapon high as his blue-clad allies kicked in the door to the Mystic Comics studios. "Move in!" he yelled, his men rushing into the facility. The lights were on, and he swept the area. They fanned out, knocking on doors. Then, they opened them. No dice. They switched to another wing. More doors. Open, close, no dice.
"Sir!" Officer Haverford said. "Bodies in Room 105: living." Sergeant Cross swept into the room, his eyes aimed at what he assumed was a pudgy German psychotherapist.
"Hello, everyone," Gabe said, waving a hand. "I take it you aren't looking for me?"
"Where's Jenny Hopkins? We got reports she was here, intoxicated."
"Well, if it's just public drunkenness, you won't find it here. Ms. Belinsky keeps a tight ship," he said, himself clearly a bit buzzed by his slumped posture and shaky walk.
"She's Utopia Girl, and she's on something a lot harder than booze. You work with her, right?" Cross asked.
Gabe Baker put a trembling hand on the cop's shoulder. "You need to understand that she cannot be stopped. She is invincible. Bullets don't hurt her. I don't know if anything can. You don't want to poke her."
"Well, she doesn't kill, so I think we'll be just fine," he said, unaware of that recent time in which Jenny had killed. It was at that moment that a boot flew down from the ceiling and crunched his head into paste against the floor. Utopia Girl floated down, her hands jittering. Her face was an unnatural mask of pulled muscle, and Gabe watched in drunken horror as he saw laser blasts burst down the halls of his workplace. "Where's Ioanna?" Jenny yelled.
"She's in the hospital. She lost her hand," Gabe said. "A Nazi did it."
"Fascists! Pigs!" Jenny yelled, the dread memory that she herself had taken a leg from her friend suppressed but still burning. She flew away, sans catchphrase. As she flew away, Gabe Baker closed his eyes and prayed that the God of the Israelites would once more omit the Jews from this second visit by the Angel of Death.
As she flew ever-higher, the drug worked its way into her system like a drill, and her see-through vision saw factories and brutal despots all around the world. She saw through the Earth's molten core, approached the stratosphere, and saw all around her. Her eyes had become completely unnecessary, all she needed were her powers.
She zoomed around the world faster than an ICBM, her sheer speed setting fire to factories, charring casinos, burning banks, and melting men and women. She went through thousands as she dove to fly low to the ground, until all her eyes could see was red mist. She didn't need her eyes.
Her costume stained red not with communist spirit but with human blood and what used to be entrails, she twirled like a corkscrew as city-block-sized laser beams projected from her eyes. She made ditches, then canyons, bigger and bigger, faster and faster, drilling through earth and clouds and bodies. She was physics, force, mass, and acceleration.
Somehing big and heavy hit her in the gut, breaking against her force field. She heard the name "Atomic Annie". Her super-hearing told her of the telltale scream of a nuclear shockwave. They'd calculated her location. They'd shot a nuclear shell at her. Her entire world was radiation, but she survived. She hurtled out of the blast wave, transonic and transhuman. She slowed down to a stop and looked down to see the blasted ruins of what was once Starlight City. For a fraction of a second, the thought that Ioanna and Gabe had to be in the fallout shelter crossed her mind. Then, before the first thought had ended, she came to the conclusion that there were something like thirty thousand nukes in America. She flew into orbit and used her see-through vision and laser vision to detonate all of them at once. There were thousands of silent mushroom clouds, and a pink energy enveloped her.
She wore a swimsuit and woke up in a concrete cell. Her vision was blurry and tinged with regret, though of course she had a certain lack of subtlety that made it all the more painful. Her eyes closed once more, and she saw the Hell she turned the Earth into. She saw faces of Ioanna and Gabe, dismembered and charred. She saw Mystic Comics torched like torment. She saw the Pyramids and the storehouses, she saw the Pharaoh perched on a balcony with her face. Hatshepsut. She saw frogs, she saw lice, she saw hail and darkness and everything slain from the smallest mouse to the most ponderous elephant. She looked at halogen lights that spiraled in helixes, then at the sound of heels clicking. A plague goddess wandered past Jenny's bars, and Jenny saw her cocktail dress not as the attire of a confident woman but as the armor of a whore too lazy to—
"Jenny, dear," Lauren said with purple-painted perfectly plush clit-pleasuring plump lips. "Welcome to 1973," she said in a sing-song voice. Jenny tried to blast Lauren. Nothing happened. She tried to break the bars in her hands. Her hands trembled, unable to make the slightest dent. Useless—no powers.
"You should have stopped me! Why didn't you stop me?" Jenny screamed. "I shattered the world!"
"I didn't want to," Lauren said with an idle smile. "Still, you are one fucked-up girl, huh? Sure, you ended the world, but where there's damage there's opportunity!" A purple nail punctured the air.
"...What are you talking about?" Jenny asked, crying, screaming, trying to get her fingers through the bars. "Where am I? What are you?"
"Oh, don't knock a life of sin until you try it, my dear," Lauren said with a playful little smile. "Since you were so kind as to end the world, you've given me a space station to work with. What a challenge. I liked our little theatre, but I got bored of it. Now, I can set myself to a new intellectual challenge: world conquest and rebuilding it in my image with limited resources."
"You? Did you do this to me?" Jenny asked.
"Do what?"
"I was on dope!"
"Oh, I didn't put you on that. It's still your fault, though," Lauren chuckled. "Really, did you think I was a good person? The scorpion and the frog, Jenny. The only reason we had our little games was because I found them fun and found you more fun. Now, we're going to sit here, on this space station as angels. I've heard of what you do to people you don't like, so we'll keep the world conquest to simulations for now. Plus, why not let the world rebuild and see what they come up with before I have my fun? Welcome to Heaven. I hear your old co-workers are getting married to each other. Isn't it nice when people get to be happy?"
