Glorious Fans 1 (Commission, Worm) (Patreon)

It was just another day in Arcadia High School in Brockton Bay. The sun was shining, the students were eagerly waiting for the last week of the semester to finish, and Victoria Dallon and Dean Stansfield were breaking up again. More than one set of hands saw an exchange of money as wagers on how long it took were settled, even as the two stars of Arcadia’s own personal soap opera shouted at each other.

While there was a fifty/fifty chance of a given breakup being initiated by either Dean or Victoria, there were certain patterns that were easily spotted. One of which, the volume being used when the break up was initiated by Dean, was being broken in this particular instance. Normally, when Dean broke up with Victoria, while not calm, he still tried to avoid making a scene. Today, he didn’t seem to care how many people knew they were breaking up, or the reason why.

“…was supposed to last through college, is empty! BECAUSE I WAS TOO DENSE TO REALIZE HOW A BLONDE GOLD DIGGING BITCH WAS USING ME AS A FUCKING GLORIFIED ATM AND DILDO!”

The sheer anger and vitriol in Dean’s rant, along with the fact that, tears aside, Victoria’s response was stunned silence, meant that the usual bets about how long it would take for the two to get back together were both fewer and were on much longer timeframes. The soonest was twenty dollars on them getting back together when the new school year began after the summer break. Most estimated sometime around Christmas, despite it being the beginning of June.

“Well?” Dean demanded, his emotions, anger fueled by hurt and a sense of having been used and tossed aside. “Are you going to say anything?”

The blonde teen stared at him, eyes wide and shining from the tears forming, sparking a scoff from Dean, “I’m not buying the crocodile tears. We’re done, Dallon.”

Her eyes grew even wider, and several of the students watching revised their thoughts on when the two would get back together. He walked away, turning his back on both her and, symbolically, their relationship.

That was the final straw for her, with a gust of air, Victoria flew away from Dean, from Arcadia, reaching her peak speed in less than a second. She had no true destination in mind, beyond “away from Dean”, she simply flew throughout the city, settling down on the rooftop of a skyscraper in the more well off part of the city around the time Arcadia would be releasing for lunch.

Her tears had long since dried out, spilled over the roads, rooftops, and alleys of Brockton Bay as she tried to process the sheer hurt. She wasn’t a gold digger, she wasn’t… was she? Sure, she loved window shopping, that was half the fun, and she may have been a bit eager to reward him when he got her gifts… did he think that was the reason she stayed with him? That she gave him blowjobs as a bribe so he’d keep spending money on her?

Her thoughts ran in circles, for how long, she didn’t know. But the sun wasn’t anywhere close to where it’d been when she originally landed when a voice startled her out of her thoughts, “Hey, you okay?”

Vicky jumped a literal four feet into the air, turning around to see a short, brunette woman who looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. The woman had both hands held up, a box of cigarettes and lighter in one hand, the other empty. Vicky held a hand to her chest, her heart beating a mile a minute, before she floated back down onto the rooftop, “Sorry, I was lost in my head.”

“I could tell,” the woman said, slowly lowering her hands. “Kayden And, sorry, Russel. You’re Glory Girl, right?”

“Yeah,” Vicky said slowly. “How’d…”

“How many other blondes are there in the city that can fly? It’s basically your family and that’s not a large list,” she pointed out, bringing a cigarette to her lips as she did so.

“I guess,” Vicky conceded as she sat back down, hugging her legs and resting her chin on her knees.

“So what brings you up here, on the roof of Medhall, during school hours?” Kayden asked as she lit her cigarette and took a drag.

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

The older woman snorted, “So boy troubles. At least you didn’t marry the son of a bitch before you wised up. You’re still young, you’ll bounce back from this. Though I can’t recommend enough finding some way to shove what he lost in his selfish, pigheaded piece of shit face.” Vicky glanced at the woman, not sure if she was talking about her husband or Vicky’s boyfr… Dean. Before Vicky could ask, she continued, “Whatever he said: prove him wrong, live your best life, and then shove his face in it.”

“Uh,” Vicky stared at the woman as she began muttering under her breath, something about Max and doing things to him that didn’t sound physically possible, but very, very painful. “I… think I’ll… leave you to that.”

Kayden didn’t seem to notice, completely wrapped up in her rather vicious and creative revenge fantasies. So Vicky lifted into the air and flew off, much quieter and more sedately than she had left Arcadia. Like earlier in the day, her thoughts were running rampant. But there was a new addition to her thoughts: proving Dean wrong. Proving that she could pay for herself, that she didn’t need a boyfriend to be a “glorified ATM” for her. That she could pay for all the things he’d gotten for her, and more!

The question was: how? Sure, her family wasn’t scraping by thanks to her mother being a lawyer, but they weren’t swimming in money either. Her allowance definitely wasn’t enough, so she needed to figure out a new way to make more money. There were the looting laws (they had a more dignified name, but Vicky could never remember it) that’d let her keep some money taken from gangs, but she’d have to actually find stashes the gangs kept, and with the way the laws were written, she’d get maybe a single percent of a given stash, if the stars aligned and she sacrificed a goat to Cthulhu.

“…the deal was four hundred for a full fifty three!” a reedy voice from the alley below Vicky pulled her out of her thoughts. Glancing down, she saw a fat kid standing in front of a black man that looked like a possible Merchant dealer, a rectangular bundle wrapped in brown paper in his hand.

“That was before I had to go through the trouble of getting this. Five hundred,” the black man said, sneering.

…the looting laws weren’t something that Vicky wanted to deal with, but she wouldn’t mind venting some of her frustration. Dropping down, Vicky landed between the two, and her fist lashed out, connecting with the dealer’s chin and knocking him out before he could respond. Leveling an annoyed glare at the fat kid, Vicky opened her mouth to deliver the anti-drug spiel she’d been forced to memorize since her powers came in, only to pause. The wrapped package had opened, showing its contents.

Vicky gave the fat kid a deadpan and disappointed stare as he picked up the bundle of old Playboy magazines, “Can’t you get your porn on the internet like a normal person?”

“You mean like CapeFans?” the fat kid asked distractedly as he flipped through the magazines. “I do, these are a birthday present.”

“Really?” Vicky asked. That excuse was almost as bad as the dog eating his homework.

“Okay, good, they’re all here,” the fat kid muttered before turning back to her. “Yeah, Mom collects them, and I found a guy who said he had some that were published in 1953, so it seemed like a good birthday present for her.”

Vicky blinked, it was admittedly a more creative excuse than ‘I read it for the articles’, but all the same, “Say that again?”

“Well it started with the issues that she appeared in, then the ones her sister, my aunt, did, and it branched out from there until…”

“Stop,” Vicky held up her hand and closed her eyes. Either he had put too much thought into his excuse if a stranger caught him buying playboys or he was telling the truth. Vicky didn’t know which possibility bothered her more. Desperately, Vicky blurted out the first thing that came to mind to try to get off the subject. “What the hell is CapeFans?” She wasn’t very successful.

“It’s a site where people can release videos or images for people subscribed to them. It’s not officially a porn site, but the Not Safe For Work Section is where like ninety percent of everything is. There’s also a creative writing forum on the site, the majority of which is badly written fan smut. If you decide to start up on it, I’ll sign up as a Fan even if you don’t actually post anything. Some people on the site are able to make a few thousand dollars a month. I think Mouse Protector makes like fifty grand a month on it?”

“WHAT?!” Vicky shrieked. What was this kid on to think that Mouse Protector was selling pictures and videos of herself.

“Well, she was the person who started it, so she’s been able to build a massive following, here,” he pulled out his cellphone and quickly pulled up a website, before showing her pictures of a woman that either bore an uncanny resemblance to Mouse Protector or… no, she just bore an uncanny resemblance, and there was no way Vicky would believe otherwise.

“See?” the fat boy asked, his finger moving to point at a spot on the screen. “Oh, she went up since I was last on.”

At the spot he was pointing to, was a number that began with six and had a lot of zeroes. It was more than her mother made in six months… As the boy babbled on, Vicky couldn’t help but think about what the woman had said, about proving Dean wrong. It’d take some work, but if she built up an audience, she could make more money than Dean, and show she didn’t need him for an ATM…

Less than an hour later, Vicky was home, in her bedroom, looking up CapeFans on her computer. She’d gotten a talking to for cutting school that morning, and Amy had asked if she wanted her to give Dean a permanent case of explosive diarrhea or straight up remove his ability to control his bladder or bowels. Vicky managed to talk her sister out of it. She was angry at Dean, but not that angry. But, once that was over, she’d gone to her room and taken another look at CapeFans.

From what she could tell, everything looked legit. No red flags seemed to pop up, outside of the fact that it was essentially an adult version of Pinterest or Instagram. She carefully combed through the Terms of Service and the other legal things that everyone skipped over, but it was all pretty straight forwards. The site took a fifteen percent cut of the monthly pledges, but from what she could tell there weren’t any tricks or hidden clauses. How the fuck was the most straightforward, honest contract she’d read come from a porn site?!

“It would be a quick and relatively easy way to make money,” Vicky mused as she leaned back in her chair, her hand rubbing at her chin as she thought. But it was still porn, and it’d be showcasing her body to countless strangers to jerk off to. Maybe she didn’t have to? Surely there were people on the site who did clothing modeling, or something like that?

Vicky looked through the different profiles on CapeFans, to see if what she was hoping were true. She couldn’t see the amount of money that the profiles were making, but she did notice that the profiles that didn’t post erotic content didn’t have nearly the number of followers that the more… lurid ones did. But they still had hundreds of followers…

“If they pledge even a dollar a month…” Vicky mused. “Fuck it.”

Decision made, Vicky rolled her shoulders and set about making a profile on CapeFans. It wouldn’t be too bad, and it was… fuck, she didn’t even think about the fact that she’d need a profile photo, she couldn’t use her actual face, it’d get back to her parents immediately and damn near everyone at school would know about it before the end of the next day! Wait: Mouse Protector wore her mask, that’s what she could do!

Opening the window in her room, Vicky flew out, heading to one of the various general goods stores in the city and buying a cheap black and silver mask. Glory Girl’s colors were white and gold, so she’d go black and silver, no way anyone would make the connection, right? She also couldn’t just use her bedroom for the backdrop of her profile picture, if anyone she’d had over ever saw it, they’d know what she was doing.

As she stood at the register, the cheap plastic mask in hand, an idea hit her, “Can I use your restroom?”

Five minutes later, Vicky had a series of pictures on her phone of her with her mask on in different poses and with different amounts of cleavage showing. Nothing particularly risque, hell her bikini top showed more of her chest than any of the photos did, but it would probably help her get an initial boost on the site. She also needed to figure out a place to stash the mask so her parents wouldn’t find it.

Her knee-jerk, gut response was to stash it at Dean’s, but given how he was the reason she was doing this in the first place that wasn’t an option. In the end, she found a little hidey hole in the eves that she could wedge the mask into. No one else in the family could fly, so it was the perfect hiding spot. With that taken care of, she returned to her room to get her CapeFans profile made.