a supervillain writing experiment (2)

It feels odd walking down the street as a normal man where I had fought as a silvery goddess just minutes earlier. I was cutting it close, but I wanted to get there before the police started cordoning the area off, or some overly ambitious public worker would empty the trashcan I was searching for. Of course I wasn’t insane enough to go out as myself, enough people down there might still recognize me if I gave them the chance, and I have no intention of chatting about old times. It was easy enough to slip inside the bellboy, and sneak out to watch the show. Everybody else did after all, now that the punching had stopped, the crowds were gathering. A firehydrant had broken, spraying the street with rain. I can swear I saw an actual rainbow there as the sun peeked through the clouds.

I walk fast; I have no intention of costing the man his job if I can help it. I might have stopped playing for the good guys, but that didn’t mean I had lost every trace of a conscience. It wasn’t a bad kid I had crawled into, just the normal sack of hormones and frustrations that any young man in a dead-end job would carry around. I speed up a bit as I see Porphyry stand talking to the police, unconscious Lady Argent wrapped in steel at his feet. She looks untouched, still picture perfect, silver skin washed clean by the water. I wonder what she would remember. I wonder what story she would tell him. But it isn’t really my concern anymore, is it? I walk into the alley, just another curious bystander. The tangle of circuitry is still there when I rummage through the trash, and I pocket it and walks back towards the hotel. Nothing to see, move along, the police is pushing back the crowd now, and I gawk with the rest of them, just another normal, eager for a look at real live superhero. Nobody even looks at me twice as I walk back to the hotel.

Once the bellboy has left what he collected inside the door of my room, I quickly lead him back downstairs and abandon him where I found him. He would remember nothing but a few blurred moments of his time, lost forever to daydreaming. I make sure to leave a final feeling of flushed arousal, I have found that people question a lot less if their minds are wrapped in sensuality. It truly do short our brains out, either with pleasure or guilt, and both are equally effective when it comes to distracting people from wondering about what they have been up to. We fill in our own blanks in the crossword of life.

Slipping out this time as hard on my body as ever, the vertigo floors me for a while, but my gut is already empty where I hang over the porcelain throne, contemplating its depts. I shouldn’t be doing this, not two jaunts after one another, but it was not as if I had much choice. I strip off my clothes and stumbles into the shower, and it’s not until the steam has painted every surface opaque that I step out and wraps myself in crisp hotel towels. My own reflection is misty in the mirror, and I jokingly draw a smiley face there, as if to telling myself to turn my frown upside down. I should be elated. I have what I needed, finally. Soon there would be no turning back.

Not that there ever was. Not after the Event. The bed catches me when I fall, wide enough for two, let alone my wasted frame. My head was throbbing harder than it had since the world turned from black and white to bright once more. See, this is another thing they never talk about. What it is like being a telepath. When my gifts first showed, in those Technicolor days before the Incursion, I was taken in and trained. I had a teacher and mentor to explain to me how my gifts worked, and how to use them responsibly. I built shields to keep myself sane, and I made rules to never probe deeply into another human being. I became a man of surface thoughts, trained myself to glance intentions and intent, to ride the slippery world of instinct and action. I carried gadgets. I became a hero. I fought for what was right.

And then the Incursion came. I was hopelessly outmatched, we all were, the groundsloggers, the footsoldiers, we were dwarfed by bloody-handed gods streaking through the skies, by monsters seeking to devour our world. But we fought, and in the end someone must have found a solution. Someone must have figured out a way to win. Even if by winning we would loose everything that made us special. The world changed that day, gone were supermen and aliens, and shining cities in the skies. There was no more magic, no more fantastic science, no more aliens or alternate dimensions. The world was normal. Black and white. Dull. Without wonder. People lived their lives, without drama, and without passions. The world was safe once more.

We all lost something there. I can still remember how it was, maybe more than most. I still have the dreamscapes of my imprisonment in my head, and sometimes I take a stroll down memory lane. It was such a perfect trap, for all of us, for every man, woman and child on earth. We never knew things had been different. Superheroes were something children read about in comics, and magic was what you saw a Friday night on a stage in Vegas. I was no longer a hero, I was a just a man. Just a young man failing university, not knowing what to do with himself. I turned to drugs of course, I knew I had lost something, but I didn’t know what. I turned to religion, to yoga and to meditation. I tried peyote and LSD, I tried to open my mind, but no matter what, it was as closed as ever. At one point I contemplated killing myself, but I got nauseous enough to throw up the pills before they could do the job.

And then, ten dreary, fruitless years later, we all woke up. I don’t know what tore away the veil and made reality come back in full glorious colour once more, no more than I know why the wonder went away in the first place. It was gone, and then it was there. I think I screamed where I sat, in a restaurant surrounded by people, all their thoughts crowding me at once. I had never read anybody’s mind that deeply before. I had always shielded myself. But then I suddenly knew why my teacher had warned me against those intrusions. Because as I sat there, weeping, I saw the truth. I saw what the people around me were truly thinking. I saw the horrors, the ugliness, the things they concealed from themselves and each other. I saw their dirty secrets. I saw their evil. These were the people I had protected. This was what I had been fighting for. Humanity.

That day I denounced humanity as an ugly scam. I rebuilt my shields, but never my rules. And the more I slipped inside people, the worse they were. The more I learned, the greater the lies I had been told. I couldn’t go back to what I had been; that naïve idealist afraid to open his eyes and see reality for what it truly was. Ugly. I couldn’t go back, but neither could I stay in place. I couldn’t pretend anymore, I lost my job, I lost my girlfriend, I lost touch with my parents and my friends. Every time they spoke a lie I knew. Every time they thought something nasty, I felt the sting. And so I decided to go forward instead. To take that final step. If I couldn’t be a hero, there was only thing I could be. A villain.

It seemed like the only sane response in an insane world.