Supervillains 2 Chapter 4 (Patreon)

None of the other villain groups we targeted that day were a repeat of the earlier incident, making them easier to knock out and drag back to lockup. But I still had an uneasy feeling about the cancerous blob of villains we’d encountered.

Stella dropped me off at the bureau, kissing me and then flouncing ahead into the locker room with Melody in tow.

Venus paused, hands on her hips as she watched me.

"Yes?" I decided to engage her. She clearly had something on her mind she needed to say.

"It isn't professional."

I was growing tired of this same dig. "Stella keeps a lid on it during work. And shouldn’t you be swooning to see others in love? Your own love is out there somewhere."

She crossed her arms over her white ruffled suit. Hers resembled a roman goddess like her name. Her mask made from material to look like the olive wreath often depicted, only her blue eyes peering out of it. "Maybe I’d find him faster if you and the Point City BSH gave me more help."

"We have analyst resources looking into it." I retorted.

"Bullshit." Venus spat, her eyes narrowing behind her mask. "There's no analyst."

I smiled, happy that this time I wasn’t lying. "Want to meet Steve? He's the one working on it."

"I'd bet he's your reject analyst." She countered quickly, and she was damn close.

I kept the smile on my face, but this one would be a bit more of a lie. “No, he’s great at what he does.” And he was, when he actually did any work.

"Right. Well, if he is so great, why don’t I have any leads to follow? I want more people on it. The BSH could really use an augmentor." Venus continued to glare at me. "So, what are you going to do about this?"

"Excuse me?" I glared right back at her and stood tall. "Are you sure you want to go down this road?"

Venus didn't give an inch of ground, but she also didn't activate her power. "I came here to find him. That's the only reason I'm in this city." The way she obsessed over him was a problem that I was going to have to confront.

"Yep, you’ve made that clear. And I made it clear that we do have an analyst working on it. If that’s not good enough, you are welcome to go back to Coast City." It was time to take the kiddy gloves off. Venus was in for a surprise if she thought she could push me around.

I smiled. Something told me this was exactly why she was on my team. Kim was strategic. She’d have anticipated Venus getting impatient and me not bending to her will.

Damn it, Kim.

But Venus didn't seem to appreciate my smile. "Is this a joke to you?" Her eyes glowed briefly, her power flaring as she became angry. "He is my fate. To stand between us is to be crushed by fate itself."

I nearly burst out laughing. Little did she know that her 'fated lover' was actually standing right in front of her. "What if I was him?" I hid my laughter with the question.

She scoffed. "No. He wouldn't sleep around. My love will wait for me and only me."

"Harems are pretty common these days. The last poll I saw said something like fifty-seven percent of relationships are now harem." I tried to help her open her mind. The mate she thought existed didn’t, and one day she’d either give up or find out.

"No. We are fated, me and him. You didn't feel the connection we had when he augmented me. For a moment, it was like the entire universe disappeared and it was just the two of us. Our souls merged. I knew then that we were destined for each other and only each other." Venus' eyes lost focus as she swept herself into some romantic fantasy.

Shaking my head, I wasn’t sure what to say. She was delusional.

I knew the moment she was talking about. When I boosted her power, she probably felt a wave of intense euphoria, but that was tied to the flood of ki, not some cosmic attraction between us.

Nothing but the truth would pop that bubble for her, and the truth would tie me to power I wasn’t supposed to have.

She wasn’t exactly filling me with trust at the moment. My secret was staying with me.

"So, what do you want?" I asked her, changing the subject away from her fantasy.

"I want you to find him for me." She snapped out of it.

I took a step back. "Then what? He knows you are here in the city. You've made the news with the Chimera, and no one has come forward. We are paying close attention for someone to come forward. But if I find him and give his name to you, what then?”

She shifted uncomfortably.

I pressed harder. "Let’s say you confront him. You profess your love, and he says 'no'. Then what do you do?"

"He won't say no." Venus assured me, but it seemed like she was reassuring herself at the same time. There was something else there that I didn’t quite understand.

"Venus, you don’t know that." I said it gently, but I was being exhausted by the conversation.

She reeled as if I'd slapped her. "We are fated. Once he sees me, it'll all change. It has to. He restored…" she trailed off, not willing to finish that sentence.

I gave her a sympathetic look. "If he was that interested, he'd have come forward. To me, it sounds like you aren’t prepared to meet him, anyway. I’m sorry to be the one to give you the reality check, but I want you to be prepared to be disappointed. I’d hate for you to potentially harm him should he reject you."

Venus worked her jaw, but no words came out. She wanted to fight me, but she was clearheaded enough to see my side of the discussion. "I swear, I would never force myself on him."

"He only has one X chromosome, so one power. Given what he can do, we have to assume that he's only as strong as a normal man. He might be very cautious about anyone knowing his power; people could force him to use it." I tried to caution her, even though I knew it wasn’t true.

"I know." Venus frowned. "That's why I need to find him, so I can protect him. He's my fate, and I want to find him before someone else does."

Heaven help me.

She was so sincere in her concern for this fictional augmentor.

"Brace yourself Venus. We do not know what situation he's in. He could be married with kids; he could be in a hospital bed on his last breaths."

"Damn it." Her power flared. "That's just more reason I need you to find him! What if today is his last day? I need to meet him." Venus' eyes were like two bright suns, and I could feel her weak telepathy brush my own mind.

I practiced the normal anti-telepathy techniques regularly now. "Cut it out before we have to do more. Venus, you need to calm down." My power was at the ready. Telepaths terrified me.

The only way I could deal with one was to shut them or their powers down. I couldn’t block telepathy.

Venus took a deep breath, and I felt her telepathy recede away from my mind. "Sorry, I wasn't trying to do anything."

"Your files don't have much on your telepathy." I said. It seemed pointedly left out, like somebody didn’t want to tell us much.

"My telepathy has no use in combat. I need physical contact to do much at all. Even then..." she trailed off, blushing. "It's not relevant to anyone but my fated. His mind is out there. I can vaguely feel it, but I can't grasp onto it."

"Really? Could you use it to find him?" I was suddenly very interested.

"No. It's like standing in a fog bank and just knowing it is somewhere out there. When he connects to me to boost my power, it's like he's sending up a signal I could follow to him, though."

That was good to know. I needed to limit how much I ever boosted her power, especially now that she was so obsessed. She might leave a fight just to trace back to her fated mate.

"Well, I'll put some more resources into looking for him, but I will only do it on the condition that I can go talk to him first and make sure he's ready." I told her.

Venus glared at me but eventually relented. "Fine. I just want to meet him. Then you’ll see."

I patted her on the shoulder. "We'll help. Just promise me you won't do anything illegal."

She nodded before dejectedly turning to the locker room.

Stella bounced out of the locker room. When she spotted me, she lit up, heading straight for me. "I love you so damn much, Miles." She kissed me as her power drained ki from me.

I fed it to her happily. "I love you too."

Those were words I didn’t think I’d be saying to somebody, maybe ever. But Stella’s joy and love were relentless. I couldn’t help but want more of her in my life.

Stella nearly crushed me with her hug. "What's wrong with Venus?" She looked over my shoulder at the grumpy super.

"She was talking about her augmenter. She doesn't think the BSH is doing enough to find him, and I'm trying to talk some sense into her."

My lovely succubus just rolled her eyes. "She's never going to see sense. That girl is more pent up than she knows what to do with, and this man is, for some reason, her only outlet."

I did a double take. "Wait, she's pent up? What does that mean?”

Stella leaned back, smiling. "You know, sexually frustrated." Stella spelled it out for me. "Very very sexually frustrated."

“I didn’t…” I paused. "How do you even know that?"

"Duh. A girl can just tell. That, and she totally rubs them out in the bathroom. Gotta be hella frustrated to do it there." Stella shrugged as if it were no big deal.

I had so many questions, but I let them go. My biggest concern needed to be that Venus would do something stupid to track the augmentor or find out it was me and flip out.

"We should talk about it later. I think she's going to become a problem, sooner rather than later."

Stella just rubbed her face against me.

Melody came out of the locker room next, strutting over like she was walking on a runway. "I always worry. She's just going to carry you off before I can finish changing."

Stella blew a raspberry at Melody. "No promises! Not my fault you take too long with your makeup."

Melody’s mouth opened in fake outrage.

And I wasn’t complaining about the time she spent getting ready. She always looked fantastic. Today her blond hair had a slight wave to it, and she’d put just a little makeup around her eyes to make her brilliant blue eyes snag my attention.

I stared at her, taking in her model body. She’d been hot back when we’d just been playing around, but now that she knew my secret and was my girlfriend, I found she’d gotten even hotter.

"Done looking?" She asked with a smile.

"What if I say no?" I winked at her.

Stella grabbed my head and forced me to look into her eyes. "Then we might just get down and dirty here."

"On that note, we should probably go." Melody pushed at Stella like a mother hen herding her chick. "You two are already making a spectacle."

"It's fine." Stella shrugged it off. "Nobody cares since I’m a girl."

I rolled my eyes. Double standards. If a woman was the boss of a man and dating him, someone would call it workplace harassment. But the other way around apparently was perfectly fine.

"Let me carry you." Melody hooked her arm under my waist and shot off the ground as soon as we left the building.

Stella came up right behind us. "Not fair! I want to carry him."

"You can carry Angelina. We should go pick her up." I reminded her. Thankfully, with the two of them around, I wasn’t likely to get kidnapped on the way home.

"Fine. I’ll snag Jelly Bags." Stella's wings flapped, and she shot forward.

Melody stared at me. "You really shouldn't encourage that. No one wants to be called 'Jelly Bags'."

"Angelina hasn't complained." I shrugged it off. The girls would manage their own relationships. It wasn't my place to interfere.

But I also appreciated that Melody was the conscience of the group. She helped keep all of us in balance.

"Fine. I'll talk to her, but if she complains, do something, please. Stella really only listens to you."

"Have something you need to tell me?" I wondered if she was projecting her own issues onto Angelina.

Melody shook her head, making her flight wobble just a little. "No. I just worry about the stability of our little budding family. Obsidian needs managing. Venus is a concern, and then there is your mentor that you've been oddly quiet about the last few days."

I was hoping they’d all forgotten about her until I had more of a grasp on the situation. I changed the subject a bit.

"We need to talk about Venus tonight. She's pushing on the BSH to find her augmentor." I informed her.

"Uh oh."

That was the understatement of the year.

"She's still latched onto this idea that she's fated for the augmenter, so we need to figure out a solution. I don't think she's going to give up."

"What about Obsidian and your mentor?" Melody refocused me back on her real question.

"Emma is going to do her own thing. There isn't much we can do besides wait for her to appear. If I go after her, she's just going to get pissed and cause an enormous problem for us." I sighed.

Emma was a wild card, in more ways than one. Her power made her unpredictable at the best of times.

I hoped she just stayed lying low, but that was unlikely. And if the moment arose, I wasn't sure I had it in me to kill her. She wasn’t perfect, but she had been my mentor. She’d helped me in some dark times.

I pushed forward. "As for Obsidian, she's a fairly straightforward task. I just need to spend some more time untangling her."

Melody raised an eyebrow and waited for me to explain.

"Angelina could do a better job at this, but Obsidian needs me. That's why she keeps dropping off clones at our place."

"Needs you how?"

"She needs me to fix her. Whatever happened in Obsidian's past has clearly messed her up. She’s reaching out in the only way she knows how.” I replied.

Melody rolled her eyes. “By having you kill her clones? Yeah, that seems like a real white flag. Personally, that seems like a very bright red flag.”

I sighed, trying to explain. “She has built up these weird coping mechanisms for the trauma in her past. She’s like Humpty Dumpty, but she was put back together again, all wrong. I need to break her down again and then help her heal correctly."

Melody watched me before speaking slowly. "I really don't like the idea of you hurting her."

"You think I do? Doing it to rescue you was in the moment; it had to be done to save you. I'd tear anyone apart to save you, Mel.” I gave her a meaningful look before continuing.

"Now that we are past the trouble, it makes me feel a little sick. I’m planning to dial back on the physical pain over time and see if we can get her to latch onto something else. I’m hoping maybe a kink in bondage or shame."

"You could always lock her up." Melody suggested.

Now it was my turn to be a little angry. "She doesn't deserve that."

"She kidnapped me." Melody shot back.

"She was Liberator's tool. Obsidian is barely a functioning person right now, but she can be. I’ve gotten to know her enough to know that she just needs some help. We just have to get to the real Obsidian."

It wasn't about the crimes that she committed, but that I saw a ray of hope in her. She was broken, put back together poorly and little more than a tool for other villains.

Doing what I wanted to her was going to fix that, fix her and hopefully I could mould her into something that would resemble a functioning human.

"What do you mean?" Melody asked.

It was only a suspicion. "She learns everything when one of her clones dies and returns to her, right?"

Melody nodded.

"What if there's one that has exited that cycle, an original or one of a small set of Obsidian's that hasn't died? That Obsidian is punishing herself. She's cut herself off from the others and is inflicting self harm through them.

"Close your mouth or you are going to catch some bugs, hazard of flying." I poked Melody, whose mouth hung open at the revelation.

"How could she do that to herself?" Melody gasped.

Given some of my own past, it didn't seem like that much of a leap to me. Something told me that this Obsidian was hurting so much mentally that the only relief she'd found was hurting herself physically.

I had to wonder how much of it was still under her control. Had any of her clones gone rogue? They were clearly intelligent, but so twisted.

I wanted to help her out of her darkness.

Suddenly Stella shot up into the air before us and waved, heading off in the direction of the manor. I gave her a small smile and waved back as she flew off.

Then I went back to our discussion. "I don't know how she could keep it up for so long, Mel, but will you help me save her?"

"If you keep picking up every wounded woman we come across, this family is going to get very large, very quickly." Melody cautioned.

I considered it. "Maybe? It’s not like they’ll all be interested in me.”

Melody gave me a look that told me she thought that was bullshit. I smiled, my ego growing ever so slightly.

“Okay, so if they are, is that so bad? I hadn’t planned on a harem, but now that I have you all in my life, I’m happy."

Melody had a delayed reaction before she squeezed me. "We just want you to be happy. That's my only requirement. But if it gets too much, you have to stop collecting wounded women."

I grumbled in her arms, but didn't disagree. "Let's beat Stella home." I pushed ki into Melody, supercharging her power.

She lit up. She always loved showing up Stella. Using the ki, she rocketed us forward.

"I can understand why Venus is chasing you." Melody giggled. "This feels amazing."