The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Hi! My name’s Claire Sumner. I’m 23, and a student at River City University. I’m studying history; I also like learning stuff in general—science, art, whatever—and skydiving. And, um, I’m 170 cm tall, and have brown hair and green eyes. That’s how you’re supposed to start a story, right? Introduce yourself? I haven’t done this before. I looked around on advice on how to write nonfiction about yourself properly but I got kinda distracted. There was this really cool thing about [Hello. Claire and Laura named me Blacklight]. Um, yeah. I guess there’s that about me too: I get distracted a lot, even when I’m writing. It’s not my fault. There’s just so much neat stuff out there to talk about.

When I realized how long this was getting, I got my friend Laura to edit it for me. When I asked her to, she gave that exasperated sigh she gives so much and said she didn’t have the time. But I showed it to her anyways and after about a paragraph she gave an even bigger sigh and said that “there is no way in good conscience I can let you release this upon an unsuspecting public.” Which I thought was a bit mean, even if I haven’t written a story in years, but she agreed to “take some time out of my way-too-busy schedule and purge everything that’ll brain-fry the neurotypicals.” Then she went off to her day job, muttering all the while. I’m pretty sure that if I were a superhero, like she is, I’d be happier about it. She gets to see some really cool things, like when [Laura helps people. I like her]. Oh, right. Laura. I think she is happy with what she does, deep down, but I will admit she doesn’t have a lot of free time.

I think it would do her a world of good if she could just cut loose and get pants-wettingly drunk some night, but I’ve learned not to say so to her face.

Anyways, the day all the fun started was the day we finished “Project Vivisect” over at the university. I’m not exactly hurting for money, between my summer job and the occasional bit of sidekicking for Laura, but I am a student, and I wasn’t exactly going to turn down paid experimental work. Plus I got to do some real science—well, have real science done unto me—and I got to see the inside of the Memetic Psych lab, the one with the huge “MEMETIC HAZARD” poster all over the door. And also, Blacklight argued it would be a really cool thing to do, with [I like doing science. You learn things].

The lab turns out to be a lot more boring than it sounds. They’ve got this little warren of rooms, all soundproofed, but there’s nothing on any of the walls (white) and all the chairs and tables (single-piece injection-molded plastic, white) are bolted to the floor (bolts carefully countersunk and painted over, white). Actually, it’s probably the most boring place on earth. When I said so to Josh that last day, he just grinned and said that was the point.

“You’ve got to have a sterile work environment, and it’s not like we can get by with UV baths or whatever the guys in Bio use. The MP lab has to be intellectually sterile, so if you think it’s boring, it’s working.”

“You’re the first scientist I’ve met who wants his work to be intellectually sterile,” I said, and he stuck his tongue out at me. I’ve gotten to know him pretty well over the last few months. Being put inside one of those little white boxes for hours at a time and told to “just talk” will do that for you.

“If you’re done mocking our work, do you want to hear what we’ve learned?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and did my best to look serious. I did want to find out what they’d found out, and it would be nice to get it straight from the horse’s mouth rather than wait a year to look the paper up in the University library.

“Well, you know the project was originally just to try and find a live meme in the University population that we could study. Coming across you was a stroke of luck. It let us up our sights to actually examining a meme in detail.”

“Hence ‘Vivisect’.”

“That’s your silly name. This is really just ‘Dr Lee’s Memetics Research Project’.”

“‘Project Vivisect’ sounds cooler.”

“Yes, granted, but I don’t want to have to explain meme theory to PETA just cause it sounds ‘cooler’ that way. Besides, it’s hardly vivisection if we’re not harming the thing. It’s just as live at the end as at the beginning.”

“Really cool thing.”

“[Let him keep talking. I want to hear about me],” said Josh, and then blinked, trying to regain his train of thought. After a moment he did and realized what I’d done. “Thank you for that demonstration of viability.”

“Sorry,” I said. Me and Josh had spent a lot of time in isolation, talking. It was going to be a while before Blacklight wore off him.

“As I was saying, getting you and, erm, ‘Blacklight’ into the lab to get analyzed was a real piece of good fortune. We were able to get quite a big corpus for study.”

“A hundred straight hours of me infecting you.”

“Well, there was other material too, but you seem to be the only one who can express the meme at will, so yeah, you’re a big part of it. Anyhow, we took the recordings apart and found out some interesting things about its anatomy. So, first off, there’s the marker phrase, which introduces the meme and triggers expression in most carriers.”

“You mean, ‘really cool thing’?” I asked innocently.

“[This is neat stuff. I like science],” said Josh. Then he got that where-was-I look again and kept going. “I was trying not to say the phrase out loud, thank you very much.”

“Sorry,” I said again. I really try to use my superpower only for good. Most of the time.

“Anyhow, following the marker phrase of which we are both perfectly aware and therefore do not need to say ever again, there’s a little bit of volitional speech, context-dependent mostly, and then the meme proper. It’s a single run-on sentence, five independent clauses, of which II and IV seem to be communication on the part of the memetic entity itself, associated with any motor control the meme exercises, and the other three are grammatical but semantically null English used for propagation.”

“That’s really—uh, neat.”

“Yeah, it is.” Josh was getting a little excited now. “It’s the transmission clauses that are the particularly interseting bit, because we can run tests for Kolmogorov complexity on them, and—they’re really pretty small. I mean, not needing semantic content adds a lot, and vocal tone adds a bit more—although we’re not actually sure Blacklight uses vocal tone—but even on conservative estimates it’s on the order of tens of bytes of information.”

“Which means...?”

“Which means we’ve got proof of the memes-as-virus hypothesis. I mean, as a metaphor for memetic operation it’s pretty well established in the field, but this is the first genuine proof that it’s a more direct analogy than that. There’s no way you can encode a consciousness into 60 bytes, which means Blacklight-as-meme is actually an instruction set for hijacking the host consciousness to build Blacklight-as-entity, rather than a transmission vector for the entity itself. Hah, this is going to get us into Nature.” Josh grinned like a little kid. I grinned back. It was cool, and I’d helped with it (even if I was probably going to go down in history just as ‘subject C.S.’).

“That is a really cool thing, the way [I get to be a virus. That’s fun]. And congratulations on the paper.”

“Thanks,” said Josh, still giddy. I don’t think he noticed me rambling on there, but no one except me and Laura ever does anyways. “So, since this is your last session here, here’s your stipend —” he handed over a cheque, for which I was very appreciative (rent was coming due in a few days) “— and we got you this too.” He opened his bag and pulled out a t-shirt. It looked just like the signs on the lab door: the spiky pentagonal memetic warning icon up top and the words “MEMETIC HAZARD” below.

“I though putting warning symbols on clothing for a joke was a big no-no,” I said.

“Oh, it is, but since the University bookstore sells them anyways, we figured if anybody deserved to wear it it should be you.” He was still grinning.

“Aw, thanks,” I said. “Well, Mr Turchin, it’s been a pleasure, and I’m glad I was able to help out science any way I could. So’s Blacklight.”

“It’s been my pleasure. Besides, there’s enough in the recordings we did to earn me a “Dr Turchin” before too long.” He kept that smile going as we shook hands. It’s always nice to help someone out.

I stopped off at a bathroom to change into the tee on my way out—who doesn’t love a shirt proclaiming you a hazard to all you see?—then went straight to the bank. I wanted the cheque to clear before the first of the month: then I could splurge a little with the leftovers. Yup, life was looking good. It usually is, but it’s always nice to have something concrete to tie that to.

Life started to look a little less good when I turned around from making my deposit at the ATM and there were three guys with shotguns coming through the bank doors.

“Everybody freeze!” shouted the one in the middle, and I froze. If I’d been a genuine superhero I would have done something to stop them. I mean, Laura’s superpower has nothing to do with beating thugs with guns but she’d have fought them anyways. Probably angrily muttering the whole time about how she never gets a break. I was just as qualified to fight them as she was, but I froze. That’s why I’m not a superhero.

One of them went into a standoff with the security guard at the side of the room, and another went forward to the tellers to rob the place, I suppose, but the third came right over to me. “Congratulations, you’re a hostage,” he said, and waved the shotgun nonchalantly at my midsection. This was going really, really badly. It would be nice if a superhero could show up right then.

One did. I didn’t recognize her, but no regular person in their right mind would be wearing a slinky red cocktail dress like that at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. She strode in like she owned the place and I relaxed. This would turn out all right. Then she blurred up to the security guard and gave him a good hard one-handed shove: he flew three meters into the wall and crumpled on impact. Well, that wasn’t good. I mentally moved the lady from ‘superhero’ to ‘supervillain’, then checked my math. Yeah, I probably should have gone to the branch on campus to cash that cheque.

“Are we done here?” she asked. The thug doing the actual robbing nodded and held up a wad of cash. “Hardly worth the time,” she said, and then strode over to me—I flinched—and peeled the whole front of the ATM off. Little bits of stressed plastic and metal flew out and bounced off me and the henchman. She shoveled a stack of bills out of the ruined machine and into the henchman’s waiting gym bag, and then started out again, followed by her minions. The one with me poked me in the side with the muzzle of the shotgun. “Erm, can I... go?” I asked, nervously.

“Hah,” says the thug. “I told you, you’re a hostage. Come on.”

We all—the supervilIain, the three thugs, and unhappy me—left the bank, and there was a minivan waiting outside with its engine idling. Somebody inside popped the back door open and the henchmen started piling in. I didn’t—entering the van struck me as an unpleasantly permanent decision—but pretty quickly there was no one left but me and the woman, and she gave me a little tap on the shoulder that sent me stumbling into the open door anyways. Before she could follow, someone shouted “Stop!” and we all stopped.

It was Thunderstrike, standing ten meters off or so, and he gave the woman a look a can only really describe as a ‘stern gaze’. “Femme Fatale. They said you were in town. Well, your reign of villainy stops here!” I was kind of surprised at the villain’s name (it explained the cocktail dress, but, I mean, really?) but more to the point help had arrived! Things were going to work out OK!

Femme Fatale (seriously?) gave him this manic grin back, and cracked her knuckles. “Never mind, this stop just made up for itself. See you all at the rendezvous!” She slammed the van door (millimetres away from my fingers—I know she’s a supervillain but that’s just careless) and started stalking away, towards Thunderstrike. His hair stared to do that crackly on-end thing it does, but before I could see anything more the driver floored it and I rolled back into someone’s kneecaps. By the time I’d gotten myself up, seated and buckled in (none of the henchmen were, I mea, is just really unsafe) we had left the fight behind.

Which was not to say that the Team Fatale partybus was out of the woods yet. About thirty seconds away from the bank we picked up a couple of police cars and got into a genuine car chase. It was entirely terrifying, and it was mostly a blur of motion up until the ending, where Femme showed up out of nowhere and cold-cocked a police cruiser. The car stopped dead on her fist, and the front bumper folded up around it, and then the engine exploded, scattering sparkplugs all over the freeway, and then the next cruiser slammed into the back of the first, and I could see every bit of it because our driver had stopped dead for Femme to climb in after she was done walking around the pile-up of police cars and kicking tires so hard the axles snapped.

It was her appearance, more than anything, that convinced me that the situation was serious. Her dress was wrecked: it looked like it had been set on fire and then hastily put out. So, for that matter, did her hair, which was a lot shorter, blacker, and crispier than it had been half an hour ago. Her face was covered with soot—I think her makeup had carbonized—and was panting like she’d just run a marathon, and grinning like she’d just won it. All of which was to say, she and Thunderstrike had given each other their best shots, and she was here, and Thunderstrike wasn’t. I was in trouble.

“Aren’t you going to put your seatbelt on?” I asked her, by way of not letting my terror show.

She gave me an incredulous look and pointedly rubbed flecks of police car off her knuckles. “Do I look like I need a seatbelt?”

“You should set a good example for your minions,” I muttered.

We arrived at an abandoned warehouse block out in some old industrial park. The collapse of the Rustbelt has really done wonders for supervillainy in River City, is all I can say. The van went in through a loading dock, and then there was no sign from outside that we were here, which I suppose was the point. Everyone got out of the van and started stretching their legs, including myself, but my overly-hopeful amble back towards the dock was interrupted by the guy who’d abducted me. “Sorry, nobody leaves.”

“What exactly do you want me for?” I asked, a little nervously, as he led me to the centre of the warehouse. One of his buddies was dragging a metal folding chair out after us. It scraped and banged alarmingly over the dirty concrete of the warehouse floor.

“Oh, the usual,” said the henchman. “We keep you around while we wait out the heat. If somebody finds us, we use you for leverage; worst comes to worst, we strap you into some ridiculous deathtrap and go to ground while the fuzz is digging you out.”

“You could build a deathtrap in this place?” The warehouse was a desert of crumbling concrete.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “There’s a machine shop next door. Been mostly cleaned out but there’s enough scrap in there to hack something together.”

“That’s...” I had to call a spade a spade. “Actually pretty cool.”

“Thanks,” he said, preening slightly.

“No, seriously, that’s a [i]really[/i] cool thing there, I mean [I want Claire to be OK. But a homemade deathtrap sounds neat]. Sorry, but, you know, what he said.“

He gave that glassy blink everyone gives once Blacklight starts talking. “What who said?”

“A homemade deathtrap sounds neat.”

“Well, thanks.” We had reached around the centre of the warehouse and gotten me seated. I was expecting rope, but then Femme wandered over with some lengths of rusty old metal pipe. She bare-handedly crimped one into a hoop and draped it around my torso and arms, pinning me to the chair, and then she tightened it, pinning me tight to the chair and making it a little hard to breathe. Then the second went around my legs the same way. I was pretty thoroughly stuck.

“All right, I think we’re done here,” said Femme, pretty much echoing my thoughts, and walked off to a side room. The old office for the warehouse, I guess; she must have commandeered it as her home for the duration. I, on the other hand, sat exactly where I was and tried to think through my situation. I didn’t seem in any immediate danger; but I’d much rather watch their putative deathtrap get put through its paces if I wasn’t in it.

OK, plans: (a), sit there and wait for rescue. Safe-ish, but likely to end with me staring down some repurposed machine tool parts. (b), escape on my own. Not a chance. These pipes were rusty (I was hoping I could get out in time for a tetanus shot to do me good) but still too solid to be broken by anyone without superstrength (or at least a serious exercise program—I try, but school and Laura do fill up a lot of hours). Besides which, the minion who’d captured me was still right there, and I’d only minutes before seen Femme outrun a police car. Then beat the police car till parts came off. I was a little outclassed in the escaping department. Which left (c), convince them to let me go. On the face of it this was the least likely, but now that my panic was wearing off (and being replaced by deeper-seated, gut-gnawing terror, but no matter) I was starting to remember that I had an advantage they didn’t know about: Blacklight. I had a genuine superpowered ace up my sleeve; or, at least, a ‘statistically outlying ability to keep memetic agents in conscious awareness’ up my sleeve, which would have to do in a crisis. Which, you know, this was.

I decided to start with the guard. I’d already hit him the once, more or less absent-mindedly, and if I set my mind to it I figured I could get him really malleable. “Hey, friend,” I said, “you heard any really cool things recently?“

He gave me a weird look. “Um, no. And,” a little sardonically here, “you’re my hostage, not my friend.” All right, so one hit didn’t take. I already knew that happened sometimes; just had to keep at it.

“OK then, I heard a really cool thing just this morning, about [Tag. You’re it].“

“Huh,” he said, a little uncertainly.

“Yeah, and also this really cool thing where [Pick me up. Do it].“

“Uh...” His eyes had gone from glassy to totally unfocussed and his gaze had drifted to somewhere around my right ear.

“That’s right. Also, really cool thing that [I think I’ve got him. He can’t be that boring].” I’d given ‘er three times in a minute. If he hadn’t got it now, he was as untouchable as Laura. “How do you feel?“

“Um... What were we talking about?”

“A really cool thing.“

“Oh, you mean like the really cool thing where [I’m in here. Let’s do this, Claire].” Hah. Good job, Blacklight.

“All right. What’ve you got? (Really cool thing.)”

“[We’re at 4953 Sequoyah. And Simon here is really horny].”

“What?” Blacklight’s a good guy, but he’s not really into filtering thoughts that go through his head. Or whoever’s head. Josh’s advisor Dr Lee would argue with the idea that he even has thoughts besides what he says out loud. I’m not so sure, but either way, filtering ability: not good.

“I said, um...” he hesitated as he tried to recall exactly what he’d just said.

“A really cool thing.”

“[He thinks Femme is hot in that dress. And he likes you all tied up].”

“Ungh!” I couldn’t take my eyes off the front of his pants all of a sudden. Oh, wow was this not cool. “I’ll thank you to keep this professional, pal.”

“What?” The minion—Simon, I guess—looked a little disturbed at how fast he was losing the thread of the conversation.

“You can just turn yourself around and go back to lusting after your boss, OK?”

“Sorry, I—wait. How did—shit, you’re not psychic, are you?”

Oh my God lay me down. The last thing I wanted to do was convince them I was psychic—I had no idea what their countermeasures would entail but I was certain I wouldn’t like them. “No, I, um—” what’s a plausible reason to know he’s aroused? “—uh, um, I was just checking you out.” Great recover, there.

“I’m not buying that,” he said, and started to reach for the shotgun slung over his shoulder. Shit.

“OK actually its a really cool thing where [Don’t hurt Claire. I mean it].” I was just trying to stall him with the disorientation-and-amnesia effect of getting hit by Blacklight, but possibly it could also convince him I was telling the truth. Maybe. I still wasn’t quite clear on what exactly went on when different streams-of-Blacklight-consciousness interacted, but Josh had gotten some iffy results with Zener cards that gave me hope.

“Right,” said Simon, blinking, and then stood very still for a moment. He shook his head, blinked some more, and then walked off towards the corner of the warehouse where the other minions were lighting up.

Hooray! Step one complete. I could totally keep myself from getting killed, for ten seconds at a time, anyways. Step two: wait for the minions to cycle it around for a few hours, pass it off to Femme, get her to untie me, run for my life. Maybe that was more than one step. Whatever. If I thought about it this way, I was halfway there.

By that evening, there were a lot more steps left to go. The henchman who had come over to bring me some food (a styro bowl of instant noodles, al dente—just like I’d be eating at home, frankly) had been notably uncommunicative. That was worrying. One of the first things that happens to you when you get infected by Blacklight (or most other memes, probably) is you get all talkative—evolutionary adaptation #1 for spreading the thing. If this guy wasn’t talkative, it meant he hadn’t been exposed enough to be infected; which meant that, despite whammying him ‘til he couldn’t walk straight, Simon hadn’t done a good job of spreading it to the others.

Stupid University life. You think you’re unstoppable because everyone you know is interested in the same things you are, then you go into the real world and get kidnapped by philistine thugs who wouldn’t know a really cool thing if it [Some people are just boring. They suck].

I let the guy finish the meal before I whacked him—this was already awkward enough without him zoning out midway through forking lukewarm salty noodles into me—and then let him have it without interruption seven times in a row. I’d gotten two of the three minions now, both more heavily than I did pretty much ever, but the fact that six hours of loitering hadn’t gotten it from Simon to Minion #2 was worrying me about these guys’ introversion. Well, there was a solution for that too.

I waited for a little while after #2 went back to his buddies, just to make sure they weren’t going to start spontaneously passing Blacklight around—and what is the point in all congregating in one corner of an abandoned warehouse if you’re not going to say anything, seriously?—and once it was clear they were just going to keep silently burning through their cigarettes, I started singing. Quietly at first, because I didn’t want to go fishing for their attention too obviously, but the warehouse was empty and echo-y and I’d only made it to my normal voice and “You’ll never take a cow home / On a dory on such seas” before minion #2 came stomping back over to me.

“What’s the fucking idea,” he snarled.

“I’m borrrrrred,” I whined, entirely sincerely. Beating two people senseless with a meme in less than six hours has an odd sort of satisfaction to it (especially if those two people have just taken you hostage) but it’s not really the same as normal human interaction.

“Well suck it up, princess,” he said, and turned to walk away.

“Can’t you at least come loiter near me?” I asked.

“Christ almighty, you are the worst hostage,” he muttered, and started walking away.

“POKER!” I shouted.

“What?” he said, turning around again with an incredulous look on his face.

“I’ve got forty bucks cash in my wallet! If you hold your poker game over here, I can play too! I’m not very good so you can probably win the money off me fast!”

“What the hell are you talking about,” he asked again, scratching his head in gormless incomprehension.

“Your minion-y poker game! Where you gamble with the loot after the heist! I know you’re going to have one, cut me in!” He was already walking back to his compatriots. “Or at least hold it over here so I can watch! Please!” He kept walking away. “What is the point in being a henchman if you don’t hold a poker game to gamble away your ill-gotten gains, I ask you!?”

Well. Not my proudest moment. Maybe with a little more dignity I could have actually gotten them to move over here, like I was hoping for. But as they walked away to some quieter corner of the building, they were talking amongst themselves (probably making fun of me), and as the last one stepped out of the room, I saw him say something and then freeze up for a moment.

Close enough is good enough. Step 2A complete. Three-quarters of the way there! ...Or something.

I awoke after a long, unpleasant interval of dreams about car chases and boa constrictors crushing me to death. The warehouse was empty, and the skylights, grey with grime where they weren’t simply boarded over, gave no indication of the time of day. I sat there, in my uncomfortable chair and worse bonds, for another indeterminate interval I would estimate as being ten thousand years long, before the door to the loading dock opened up again and my four kidnappers stepped through. Femme Fatale was leading the way, in a second dress, green, presumably a few hours ago as slinky as the first and just as totaled now. She was grinning from ear to ear.

“That was exhilarating,” she gushed, and twirled around, the tattered ends of her dress snapping through the air at high speed.

“We aren’t all bulletproof,” muttered Minion #3.

Femme was apparently too enthused by her latest adventure to rise to the bait. “Awww, you love it too,” she purred, and ran one finger down his nose. He stiffened for reasons that had nothing to do with Blacklight. “You know you looooove working for me.” Then she turned again, the rags of her dress swirling around her, and glided off to her room, leaving the three suddenly immobile henchmen in her wake.

I hadn’t exactly been putting much stock in these guys’ brains, but wow. Ten bucks said they’d never seen more skin on her than her dress was showing now. Still, if they were that easy to lead around, all the better for me. “Hey, guys,” I said. They wandered over, Minion #3 a few paces behind and with a notably stiff gait, heh. Apparently henching isn’t the way to get laid regularly. “So what did you get up to today?”

“Why do you care?” asked Minion #2, surlily.

“Well, you know, I just figured it’s be cool to know how Team Fatale is doing,” I said, and gave him my winningest grin. That’s it, fake Stockholm syndrome and try to get them talking.

“Stockholm syndrome doesn’t work like that,” said Simon. Oh my God lay me down. I thought he was the smart one, but he wasn’t supposed to be that smart. But he seemed vaguely amused, and the others didn’t seem like they were leaving yet, so I kept going.

“Seriously, though, it’s boring just sitting on this chair. Tell me where Super-Adrenaline-Junkie over there took you?”

Minion #2 snickered a little at that, and I figured I had them. As it turned out, they’d hit up another bank, and run into Ghost of the River City Defenders, who’d then gotten the shit kicked out of him by Femme while the other three (again) ran the hell away. When the story finished, Simon and #3 went off to scrounge up some more chairs while #2 pulled a beaten pack of cards out of his pocket.

“Ha!” I said, and he rolled his eyes. “But really, anything really cool happen while you were out?”

“[I’ve got them. I’ve got Femme],” said #2, and casually shuffled the cards all over the floor. I guess Blacklight really isn’t up to that level of fine motor control. Not that it mattered. This was going to work out; I was going to be ok.

“I am taking your money and spending it in Vegas,” said Minion #3, by way of smack-talk, when he got back. “There’s this girl down there who can do this really cool thing with her [I don’t think they like science. Or anything fun].”

Ewwwww. This was how they had been spreading Blacklight? Never mind what I said about “ok”. I felt vaguely dirty by association.

The game they settled on was, indeed, poker. I tried to get in on it but I couldn’t move my hands more than a few degrees in any direction and had to settle for kibitzing. In between hands I kept using Blacklight on them all, and indeed all three of them were pretty much gone. By five hands in I was pretty sure we were good to go, and I decided to have some fun.

“Do you know what would be a really cool thing? You two making out.”

“[Now you’re just being silly—” said Minions 2 and 3, more or less in unison, but Blacklight started ’em macking away anyhow. A few seconds later Simon zoned back in, and blinked, and then blinked some more when he realized what his co-minions were doing.

“Whaaaa —” he said, and then looked at me.

“Yeah, uh. You remember that bit where you accused me of having mind powers? It’s, uh, kinda true. Ish.” I looked at the two other minions, still getting it on. “Wait a sec. Are those guys gay in real life?”

“...No...?” said Simon, in confusion.

“Hot damn,” I said. It was another twenty seconds before the two of them broke loose with a “- ]”!?. “Science time!” I shouted, to the confusion of two of the minions and horrified comprehension of Simon. “You two, keep doing it! You —” and I hesitated here, not least because I didn’t want him to freak out and run for Femme “— just bite your knuckles, ok. Really cool thing.”

Sure enough, with their mouths full, unable to finish the meme, the three of them stayed under indefinitely—nearly a minute this time. Josh and I had had no idea we could do this. Ha! Take that, science, and your ‘ethics’ requiring not forcing your subjects to nonconsensually make out with one another! ...Well, put that way, it does sound kinda bad. But still, I suddenly had another advantage.

Once Simon came back up again I gave him my best ‘intimidating superhero’ glare. “Ok, Simon, this has —”

“How do you know my name?”

“...Terrifying mind powers. This has been fun but I need to be rescued now. You’re going to call a number I give you.” The number was Laura’s specifically, because Blacklight was going to be doing the talking and I needed someone who could pay attention.

“...why aren’t you just whammying me into doing it?” Damnit, Simon, now was not the time to be the smart thug. Really, of course, it was because pretty much anything beyond talking or maybe ‘open a door’ was outside of Blacklight’s capabilities—hell, the two others weren’t so much ‘making out’ as ‘drooling at each other in close proximity’, ewww—but I couldn’t let him know that.

“Cause I’m a good guy and don’t want to unnecessarily, uh, crush your brains to goo.” Simon shot a glance at the two other minions, whose rendition of making out did, indeed, look rather like someone with their brains crushed to goo. This was just getting embarrassing. They were biting their knuckles too next time around.

Simon reluctantly pulled out a cell and I gave him the number. He keyed it in, and then looked at me uncertainly as the phone rang. “Really cool —” I said, and a blue blur ripped through the whole tableaux, sending playing cards, money, minions, and the cell phone—uh oh—in all directions.

“All right, then, you witch,” said Femme Fatale, suddenly standing still in front of me, and lifting me to eye level, “what the hell have you done?”

I probably shouldn’t have been so mean to her, but she was lifting me (and the chair) by the piping wrapped around my torso, and it hurt, a lot. And also, you’re supposed to give a one-liner before kicking the supervillain’s ass, right? I mean, Laura never does, but she’s not exactly an industry-standard superhero, now is she? She doesn’t even have a secret identity! So I went for it: “You don’t think I wear this shirt because I like the color, do you?”

She glanced down in confusion and I’m not too proud to admit I got a little bit of pleasure at the way her eyes widened when she saw the warning icon. “Oh shi —”

“I bet as a supervillain you’ve seen some really cool things!” I shouted, in a rush.

“Yeah, there was this really cool thing where [I’ve got her. You’re safe],” she said. And then it was all over except for the licking. And the sucking. And, fine, the drooling. And the history lecture.

“...and after Alexander Severus, things really went downhill fast: any kind of governmental legitimacy basically went away, and they went through a dozen emperors in two really messy decades, and then they got this guy called Valerian, who did his best for seven whole years before getting himself taken alive in a war with Persia (which was kinda a new thing, since—you remember the Parthians? last seen getting their asses kicked by Trajan?—well, they just —”

It was about there that the doors blew in and Silver Shield stormed in (“Halt, evildoer!”), followed by Mindwipe and the kinda-abused-looking Thunderstrike and Ghost, and then Laura stomping along after them. (See what I mean? It just doesn’t flow without a secret identity.) They’d really come loaded to bear; I felt a little sorry for them, given how well we’d already gotten the situation in hand.

I’d stopped my from-memory runthrough of the Roman Empire once the cavalry came through the doors, and they’d interrupted before I got to the fun bit of the Third Century Crisis. I mean, they managed to get hyperinflation going on a hard-metal currency, which took whole new levels of ridiculously stupid technical and fiscal ingenuity. The really cool thing was how [Claire likes history a lot. I prefer science and skydiving]. Erm, sorry. Anyways, I wasn’t explaining this any more, so I guess that was one little bit of normalcy back, but the rest of the scene still probably looked pretty ridiculous.

I was still in the chair, held in place by the piping (Blacklight and I had decided that it wasn’t a good idea for him to try pulling pipes off me with superstrength, however well-intentioned he might be about it). Around me were the minions, sitting crosslegged and listening intently to my talk; Femme was half-lying on the concrete, curled up around my leg like the love interest on some pulp cover, with my pantleg hiked up to my knee so she could lick my calf. The henchmen had all seemed pretty enthused at the way Blacklight was keeping her mouth busy, but after ten minutes I’d gotten a little bored and started telling a story to pass the time. My audience didn’t strike me as the historian type, but after beating them senseless with Blacklight for something like a day and half now, they’d acquired a bit more of a thirst for knowledge than previously demonstrated. The fact that I triggered everyone in earshot every time Femme came up for air probably also helped.

So, here we were. All the Defenders had stopped about five paces into the warehouse, looking really confused, except Laura. I could see her working it through in her head, and I could tell when she was done because she gave me this irritated look and started stomping over—Laura stomps everywhere, there’s no other word for it—and said “At this point, us rescuing you is entirely superfluous, isn’t it?”

“I still need someone to untie me,” I said, and Laura kept glaring.

“Shield! Get over here! And all of you, put some damn headphones on! Yes! Just do it!”

“That’s not really necessary,” I said, once Shield had earplugged up and started slowly working the pipes off me. It felt nice to move my arms again. “Blacklight’s harmless; these guys will all be fine in a couple of days.”

“It’s for my peace of mind. If you got a coworker, Base Camp would be unlivable for me until it wore off.”

“You’re OK with me.”

“I’m OK with one of you. You’re about all the carrier I can deal with on a daily basis.”

The last pipe came off and I stood, a little wobbly, and Laura offered me an arm that I gratefully took. Shield then yanked Femme off of me, who said “—]” and then woke up.

“Wha?” she said, and got about half-way up into a fighting stance before Shield pinioned her.

“Sorry,” I said: she just looked so confused and defeated. “You’ll be fine in a couple of days. In jail, I guess, but fine.”

Laura rolled her eyes. “That’s not how you do it. This is how you do it.” She rounded on Femme with a glare that made the supervillain—with twenty centimeters, superspeed, and superstrength on Laura—flinch back involuntarily into Shield. “You don’t fuck with my friends. You don’t come dick around in my town, you don’t put more goddamned work on my plate, and you don’t fuck with my friends. Got that?” Femme nodded before she caught herself and glared back. Yeah, she’d be back to normal soon. I felt a little better about her. “That’s how you do it.”

“I did OK, though, right?” I asked Laura as we started limping away. “I mean, zapping all those people—you’re OK with that?”

“You’re alive, that’s what counts. It’s OK, it’s OK.” She gave my arm a little squeeze and smiled a wavery smile at me. Then her face went back to its normal affectedly-weary glower. “A little more weird and kinky than I would have given you credit for, but alive.”

“I needed to keep her mouth busy.”

“...Riiiiight,” she said, and I laughed. It felt good.

As Laura and I passed through the clump of minions being herded out the doors by the rest of the superheroes, Minion #3 said “You know what’s a really cool thing? The way you [You’re safe Claire. I’m happy].”

I smiled and him an affectionate headrub. “I love you, you know that?” He blinked and then looked at me, mystified. It was true; I didn’t know the guy from a hole in the ground. But that was OK. It wasn’t him I was talking to.