Slaywraith OP t1_j6e1rh8 wrote on January 29, 2023 at 6:15 PM

Reply to comment by No-Gene-1955 in [WP] In your world, Superheroics/villainy is Just a Job (even relegated to shift work) monitored and regulated by The Authority. Therefore, it isn't odd to see Heroes & Villains in costume, shopping beside each other, at the local supermarket where you work. by Slaywraith

Oh, this is GOOOOOD!! Keep it going! I'm lovin' it!! 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

No-Gene-1955 t1_j6h6gvg wrote on January 30, 2023 at 8:00 AM

Thanks so much! You've inspired me to add a second chapter:

Even though I got off late and applied to the Villains Association on my phone well past midnight, the next morning, my alarm was promptly followed by a phone call from a friendly representative of the hiring department, who asked through a hacking smoker’s cough when I might be available for an interview. I gave the gentleman my next day off and grabbed a pad and paper to scribble down the address at which I was to report for my interview with a Constance Conway.

That Wednesday at 10 PM, I pulled my beat-up Mazda 3 into the parking lot of a small and rickety, but loud, dive bar on the outskirts of town.

The building appeared fragile on its molding wooden supports, the steps to the flimsy front door weathered and spongy beneath my feet. Despite the scant crowd inside, music was blaring blow-out-the-speakers loud, a disco ball dangling precariously, heavily, overhead by a single, struggling wire. OSHA would’ve had a field day.

Up at the bar, a curvy, leather-clad woman with her long, dark hair razored off on one side sat backwards on her swivel stool. She had a clipboard tucked under her left arm and very many tattoos, some professionally done, some stick-and-poke. She scanned the room with her eyes until her penetrating green gaze landed on me. She chucked back what remained of her drink, approached me, and spoke my name like it was a question–more like shouted, truly, over the racket. I nodded.

“Constance Conway, from the VA?” I practically hollered back. The acronym was vague enough that I figured I could get away with dropping it without giving us away, not that there were too many people around to overhear us.

“Just Connie! Come on, let’s get some drinks!”

I was a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday, but I’ve never exactly been a goody two-shoes. Having two working-class parents who were never home on account of our rising bills afforded me plenty of opportunities to supplement my deprived, Spartan childhood with secret indulgences. The only reason why I was so familiar with the layout of the 99-Cent Mart was before I got hired on there, it was my favorite shoplifting haunt. But it’s not really immoral if you’re stealing from a corrupt corporation, is it?

Or applying to work for a criminal organization with the endgame goal of improving someone’s life?

I followed her to the counter–my own steps steady, hers stumbling. “We’ll both have a tall double whiskey and HydroCut!” she shouted to the bartender.

Oof. Dangerous combo. “Can you make mine whiskey and Dr. B Zero?”

“What?” yelled Connie.

I pulled the pen out of my pocket, because of course I’d brought a pen, and wrote my order down on a bar napkin. Our drinks came swiftly, and Connie ushered me out onto the thankfully much quieter back patio.

No-Gene-1955 t1_j6h6qd0 wrote on January 30, 2023 at 8:03 AM

We took seats on a splintery picnic table under string lights and a tattered canopy. “It’s cool that they let you drink on the job,” I said.

“Encourage it, in fact!” she said with a flourish. “You wouldn’t believe what chaos lowered inhibitions can introduce to a heist. Now tell me a little about yourself, if ya don’t mind!” She took a big swig of her drink and propped her clipboard up against the edge of the table.

“Well, I’m a veteran shoplifter and longtime delinquent,” I said, forcing confidence into my tone. “I’ve always dreamed of accomplishing something more impactful, though. More memorable. And when Flamethrower mentioned y’all were hiring–Flamethrower sent me, by the way–I thought to myself, you guys might be my perfect fit.”

She grinned. “Flamethrower! Love that guy. Bit of a wild card, but great in bed!”

More than I needed to know, but duly noted, anyway. “Special skills?” asked Connie.

“Brawling. Never lost a fight.” Granted, the only person I’d ever fought was my bratty little brother when we were kids, but it still counted. “Oh, and marksmanship.” A rich girl from my public school had once invited me to her laser tag party, and I’d hit every target I’d aimed for. I could probably repeat the performance with a more dangerous weapon.

“Good, good.” She took some notes. “Choose an adjective out of the following that best sums up your personality: intelligent, reckless, manipulative, or subservient?”

I considered my options. ‘Manipulative’ was obviously the most villainous trait, but if I gave it as my answer, it might reveal I was only here with an ulterior motive. ‘Subservient’ was the best bet for my life and limb, but could very well land me a position as someone’s trod-on henchperson. ‘Reckless’ was a no-go, unless I wanted dangerous assignments for the duration of my tenure, and as for ‘Intelligent,’ that was a recipe for setting myself up to meet high expectations.

Finally, I settled on, “Versatile?”

“I like your style,” said Connie. “If you were on the clock and saw an elderly woman struggling to cross the street, you would…?”

“Steal her purse and run.” Was that villainous enough?

Connie seemed satisfied, nodding as she checked off a box.

“In order of preference, first being high priority and last being low priority, which of the following villainous activities would you like to engage in? Your options are: criminal mischief, robbery, fraud, damage to public property, assassination, and random acts of manslaughter.”

“Robbery first. Experience, you know?” I said. “Then, I guess, fraud, property damage, criminal mischief…then assassination, but that’s probably something you save for more seasoned villains, yeah? And then manslaughter.”

I certainly wasn’t eager to kill anyone, but if I had to, I’d rather it be some asshole politician.

“Right, right. I noticed under Genetic Deviance, you checked ‘non-applicable’. Is there anything you’d need, gear wise, from the Association, to enable your heists?”

This question, I answered immediately: “I need a weapon I can wield with minimal recoil, a flight device, and a super suit that acts as an insulator.”

“Perfectly doable! Do you have any questions for me?”

“So…would you be my manager?”

She let out a barking laugh. “Oh, no. I’m not a field agent anymore. But don’t worry, you’ll have a partner until you feel comfortable doing solo heists.”

“And payment–”

“Starts at 20 an hour, plus whatever you can snatch!”

“And regarding the Heroics Division…do I get to pick my own nemesis?”

“Who did you have in mind?”

“Lady Lightning.”

Connie whipped out her phone and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled. Finally, she said, “Bit of a has-been heroine. No one has claimed her right now. She’s all yours, if you want her. When, B-T-dubs, can you start?”

My next day off would be Sunday, so Connie penciled me in then to pick up my gear from the VA HQ.

Thursday morning, I showed up to the store barely able to hide my exhaustion. As I was setting up my checkstand and counting my drawer, Stan, the sleazy floor manager, approached me with a blonde woman at his heels. She was in her late thirties, dressed in a white polo shirt and khaki pants as per regulation, our signature purple apron fastened behind her neck and around her narrow waist. Her cheeks were hollow and gaunt, and her blonde hair hung in a low and elegant bun.

“This is Tessa Turner,” the boss told me. “She’ll be your trainee for the day. Let’s see if you can teach an old dog new tricks, huh?” He smacked her ass and walked off.

I wondered if it was too late to tell the VA I was interested in manslaughter after all.

Slaywraith OP t1_j6kbs5f wrote on January 30, 2023 at 10:55 PM

Yeah... You *REALLY* need to keep this going!! It's really starting to get good. (And I agree, I'd kill that manager without too many qualms myself! I *HATE* those kind of douchebags!!)

No-Gene-1955 t1_j6l99hz wrote on January 31, 2023 at 2:58 AM

TYSM! This is a wonderful prompt, thank you for the inspiration! I do have a little more, the next excerpt elaborating a little more on life at the store, but I hope to keep the momentum up and get to the point of a battle scene!

No-Gene-1955 t1_j6l9aym wrote on January 31, 2023 at 2:58 AM

The cashiering profession is a delicate and precise art lost on the white-collar and best not left to the faint-at-heart. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not simply a matter of running items past a scanner and chucking them in a sack. It takes a quick mind for improvisation to entertain chatty customers, and an incredible mastery of one’s own temper to de-escalate the conflicts that inevitably arise against the most disgruntled of them. It takes a good head for logic, layouts, and categorization to swiftly collect and reshelve items picked up capriciously in aisles, only to be discarded into the shelves beside the checkstand at the last minute by patrons as they anxiously watch their bills rack up on the screen. You must be mindful of the proper handling of perishable food, chemicals, and broken glass–you wouldn’t believe how much stuff people drop and break while they shop. You must appear to move with a sense of urgency that makes your employer deem you worthy of keeping onboard, while never letting your actual productivity level exceed average, lest they get it in their head to bury you under a mountain of extra work. In retrospect, it's just as demanding as vocational villainy, only without the fun.

But I was sure Lady Lightning would be fine.

Not that I had any proof that my new colleague and the electric enigma were one and the same. Could I even count on my own eyesight, when the heroine had been masked from the bridge of her nose upward during our encounter? The resemblance, though, was striking.

After we made brief introductions, I asked her, “Have you ever done this before?”

“Once, when I was a teenager,” she said. “That was before we had all these newfangled screens and gadgets, though.”

“Tell me about it. The world’s gotten too big, too fast,” I agreed. “For now, how about I have you just watch me work the register, and you can do the bagging, until you feel comfortable taking the front? Then, we can switch.”

“I think that would be best.”

I’m not saying it’s rocket science, and I’m not saying it’s any reflection on your quality as a person if you either can’t, or refuse, to be good at bagging other people’s groceries. I get it: who gives a shit? But watching Tessa over my shoulder as she meticulously handled our line’s purchases, gently packing cold items with other cold items, fruits with fruits, meats with meats, large, heavy things double-bagged on their own, and anything fragile wrapped in paper between soft, swift fingers, I became all the more endeared to her. This was a woman who took great care in everything she touched, from a stranger’s avocados to a life in danger. Suddenly, it incensed me all the more to think of her wrung dry by some soulless government agency, milked for all they could squeeze, and then, in her hour of need, finding a door slammed in her face.

“What do you do for fun?” I asked during a lull between rushes.

“Fun?” She laughed nervously. “Moving forward, I barely think I’ll have time for sleep, between this and my other job.”

“Oh? What else do you do?”

She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her purple apron. “A bit of this and that…contract work, mostly. It can get pretty physically demanding, and it’s not as rewarding as people assume it is…but we all must keep the lights on, eh?”

Ringing up on a touchscreen tablet presented a greater challenge to Tessa than bagging, but with me right behind her to guide her to the right buttons, she got the hang of it before the end of the shift. As we made our way to the back of the store together to punch out, I asked her what her plans were for the rest of the evening.

“I was going to try to pick up at my other job,” she said.

“That’s too bad. I was going to try and catch the new Galaxy Wars movie. The only problem is, I don’t have nobody to go with,” I ventured, feeling bold.

She blinked, this stunned, sudden blink that gave way to a doe-eyed expression of surprise. “You can’t be suggesting–but I’m so much older than you are!”

“Who said I was suggesting anything?”

I was totally suggesting something. All I wanted to do was wrap her up in my jacket, protect her from the world, and love her forever.

We took down each others’ numbers on the hood of my car before we left, just in case she ended up free for the evening after all.

When I got home, I had three unread texts, but none of them were from Tessa.

I needed to download the HYST app to network with my fellow villains.

The weapon and flight device I had requisitioned had been acquired.

And as far as the suit was concerned, did I have any preferences when it came to color scheme?

Slaywraith OP t1_j6lv7ap wrote on January 31, 2023 at 6:18 AM

Yeeeesssssss... YEEEEEEESSSSS!!!!!! MOAR!!! I require MOAR!!!! *said in an over-drawn Vaudvillain-style cackle* ;) :D

No-Gene-1955 t1_j6pcfx3 wrote on January 31, 2023 at 11:07 PM

I swear you're gonna have me turning this into a full-blown book

xxxxxxxxxx

On the corner of Third and Chartreuse Street, in Blackwater City’s impoverished west side, there stood a drafty and shoddily-maintained poker and gambling hall, atop which sat two or three dozen cheap rooms for rent by the hour. The two businesses claimed not to be affiliated with one another, despite sharing a building, but in truth, they were both fronts for the Villains Association, which maintained its headquarters in the basement with the prep kitchens below.

"Sorry if the base leaves a bit to be desired," called Connie through the locked door of the white-walled and genderless employee restroom in which I changed, for the first time, into my costume. "If we put any real work into the place, we might start to attract a decent crowd, and inevitably, people would ask questions.” Whether by ‘decent,’ she was referring to the quantity or quality of patrons to our fronts, I didn’t know.

Aside, the VA’s orientation video played on my phone, which I had set on top of the toilet tank. I had already watched it; I merely wanted to make sure there was nothing I had missed, but it was shockingly short and simple. The 99-Cent Mart had given me more direction before putting me to work.

“Well then, how’s the fit?”

The ensemble consisted of a fitted shirt made of reflective silver lycra, lined with both rubber and kevlar, tucked into matching pants, belted with a holster at my hip for a sidearm. Bright white pleather gloves, lace-up boots, and a hooded capelet completed the look, with dark tinted goggles both for safety and identity concealment. Against the smoggy, starless night sky, I would be starkly conspicuous, grabbing the undivided attention of crowds below–and of my superheroic crush.

I closed the video, pocketed my phone, and stepped out of the stall to see if my getup had the approval of my new handler. Connie smirked. “You look like a million bucks, rookie. Now, I just hope you can steal as much!” She jerked her head, gesturing for me to follow her. “Shall we go test out your weapons?”

As she led me down the hallway, a number of other villains passed us, many of them clapping me on the back or nudging me in the side with wide grins and words of welcome. “It’s friendlier than I expected.” I pointed out.

“Oh, yeah. Our Christmas parties are incomparable. Well, here we are!”

We stepped into a room with walls stacked with all manner of weapons, gadgets, and gear. All around us stood mannequins, some more battered than others from what I presumed was target practice, each of them painted with a cartoonish expression of agony, some of them with bullseyes on their chests or the backs of their skulls. Connie pulled what looked like a backpack off the hook from which it hung and handed it to me. As I strapped myself in, I realized it featured two protrusions, each bearing a green button, within reach of my grasp. “The left button is your accelerator, and the right button is your brake,” explained Connie. Curiously, I gripped the accelerator, thumbed the button…

And went rocketing, with a wail, into the air.

Suspended by a miniature jet engine, I hovered above the ground, catching my breath.

“Pretty cool, huh?” said a new voice, from behind. I spun around to see Flamethrower standing in the doorway, in full supervillain regalia, leaning against the frame with a casual grin.

Now that we were on the same side, he wasn’t so intimidating. It was actually a comfort to encounter a familiar–and damn, handsome–face on my first day. (I wondered if he was a rare exception, or if I did indeed, contrary to what I had previously believed, enjoy the company of men.) “Show him the gun, Cons!” he said eagerly. Then, to me, “The weapon was my idea. If you don’t like it, you can send it back or whatever and get something else. I just kind of thought we’d look cool back to back. Oh, I hope it’s alright if I volunteered to mentor you. I figured it’s the least I could do to make up for sticking you up.”

“Hey, what’s a little aggro-robbery between friends, right?”