Early Bird Reward Story: "Forever Your Girl"! (MC MF MD CB) (Patreon)

Hi all! Here's this week's Early Bird Reward story. I hope you enjoy it! (Oh, and in case anyone worries, this is by no means the last of my superhero stories, any more than "Kingdom Come" was the last DC comic.)

"Forever Your Girl"

Seventeen meters below the surface of the icecap, the evaporation lasers finally hit metal. Jace checked his pitons to make sure they were securely hammered in, and carefully rappelled down the ice tunnel until he stood on the surface of the artifact. "Jace Andron to Satellite Base," he said into his helmet-mike. "Do you read me, Satellite Base?"

"Confirmed," Nadine said, her voice crackling slightly with static. "If you're calling for a weather update, we're not showing any razor storms coming through for--"

"I've found it," he said simply. He didn't need to say anything else--they all knew what he was down there for. They'd been waiting for this transmission for the better part of a week. "I'm standing on it, Nadine. I'm literally right on top of it."

There was a long pause, then Nadine cut in. "I've just informed the team," she said. "We have a four-hour window to send them down by shuttlecraft before the storms get bad again. Can I send the go signal?"

"Give me forty-five minutes," Jace said, unclipping a laser cutter from his belt and kneeling down to examine the metal surface. "Five years of studying tectonic scans ought to buy me something, right?"

"You're paying the bills, boss," Nadine replied. "Just remember to keep in radio contact, okay? This isn't exactly a nice neighborhood anymore. The team's going to be on standby in case anything happens to you."

Jace flipped the switch, and the laser cutter began boring into the thick metal plating. "A thousand years ago, this used to be the Australian Outback," he said, slowly cutting a hole big enough to crawl through. " I don't think it was ever a nice neighborhood."

It took ten of his forty-five minutes just to cut through the hull. Whatever they'd found, it was designed to withstand massive impacts. That probably explained why it was still intact even after centuries under the ice--whoever made this thing made it to last. Ecological collapse, solar flares, shifting orbits, advancing glaciers...whatever this place was, it had survived all of it. The last building on Earth...and Jace Andron had found it. He kicked the metal plug and watched it fall into the hole with a long silence ending in a satisfying clang.

He waited a moment for the metal to cool, and descended through the hole. A hovering glowsphere followed him down, giving light to the enormous cavity all around him. He'd deliberately aimed for the largest open space in the structure, hoping that it would have the most significance to whoever built the place, but this felt like...a temple, perhaps? A cathedral? It was possible. It would explain the eccentric shape of the thing, the way it was half-buried into the ground. Religion made people do strange things, especially if this thing was around in the last days before the Great Collapse. There were legends about the people who'd chosen not to evacuate the planet, the beliefs that had driven them to stay when everyone else fled to the stars. Maybe they'd built some sort of bunker out here, away from the mutants and the rogue 'bots, to try to outlast the Collapse?

Jace checked himself. It was never a good idea to start speculating before viewing the evidence. He finished his descent to touch down onto a floor made of polished stone, and activated his comlink once again. "Nadine, you still hearing me?" he asked.

"...rely," Nadine said in a static-choked drawl. "...out ever...rd word, I..."

Jace unclipped the rope from his climbing harness. "I get the picture," he said wryly. "I'm just going to keep talking--whatever you don't pick up, the omni-corders will get. I'm documenting everything." He began walking, looking for a wall so that he could get an idea of the size of the chamber.

"There's absolutely no dust or debris," he said as he walked, dictating his observations into his omni-corder. "The floor appears to be solid marble--I can't even imagine how they got this much marble out here, even before the Collapse. The room is huge, but it's completely empty. It looks to be some sort of assembly hall. The acoustics are amazing in here. No furniture, but there's a strong religious overtone to the architecture--it's clearly designed to draw your eyes to the front of the hall." He changed direction slightly as he spoke. "I'm heading that way, to see if there's an altar or some sort of..."

Jace stopped. His voice trailed into silence for a long moment. When he finally found it again, it was merely as a whisper in the massive audience hall. "...dear god," he muttered to himself, the omni-corder forgotten in shock. He broke into a dead sprint, the glowsphere barely keeping up as he ran for the front of the chamber.

All he could think of as he ran was the stories. He'd read them as a child, fairy tales of derring-do and heroism from a long-dead world. Stories of men and women who could fly through the skies without rocket-belts and shatter stone with their bare fists, fighting a never-ending battle for truth and justice against all sorts of monsters and madmen. He'd never really forgotten those old stories, even when he grew up and learned the darker, more complex histories behind them. The Age of Heroes, the last great era of Earth civilization before the Great Collapse.

He'd seen artifacts of the Age of Heroes. He'd touched the xenonite knuckles that WildRose used in the final battle against Imperil, he'd seen with his own eyes the empathic crystal that held Professor Psyche's last message to humanity. He'd even gone as far as the Olympus system to see with his own eyes the Dyson Sphere the immortals had made when they withdrew from the universe. He knew all their stories, and he knew how they all ended. All except one. This one.

The raised dais jutted a full thirty feet from the chamber floor, a pyramid of steps leading up to a granite throne. And above that throne, Jace saw the emblem that had launched a billion nightmares. His banner had been flown by a thousand impostors over the centuries, all claiming to be the legend returned. They'd said he was behind the Tyronian Purges, that he was the secret leader of the Sirian Death Cults, that he was working behind the scenes to orchestrate an endless parade of human misery. It had been a thousand years since his last confirmed sighting, but humanity still held its collective breath waiting for him to return. And here it was. The crimson fist, ascending from a lightning bolt. The symbol of Doctor Damian Darke.

"It's his fortress," he rambled into the omni-corder as he surmounted the steps two at a time. "His floating island, I can't believe it! They said it was damaged in the Battle of Sydney, but I never imagined, oh my god, this is the biggest find in a thousand years! We'll be able to rewrite the histories of the Heroic Age with this find, we...oh my god. Oh god." He could see someone at the top, now, a figure on Darke's throne. It couldn't be--it was impossible--he couldn't be--

Jace reached the top. Doctor Darke's skeleton stared back at him, still wearing his red-and-black outfit, mocking history with a grin that could never fade.

Jace sat down hard, suddenly noticing the ache in his legs from his rapid ascent. His mind boiled furiously with a thousand questions, a sudden reordering of the historical record. Was this even real? Had Doctor Darke seeded this centuries ago, a fake artifact to fool his enemies that had been hidden too well? The team would be here soon, they'd need to test everything, search every room, sift through all of his records. They'd be well-protected; Jace shuddered as he realized the luck he'd had in avoiding any number of lethal traps designed to take down the likes of Adventure Girl and the Rescuer. But if all this was real, then...how did it happen? How did Doctor Darke meet his final end?

"Excuse me," a woman's voice said from behind him, echoing loudly in the perfect acoustics of Darke's throne room. "Can I help you with something?"

Jace turned, staggering to his feet as he did so, to see an extraordinary sight. It was a nude woman, her entire body a perfect, gleaming silver. She wasn't a robot, or if she was she was like no other robot that Jace had ever seen--every detail of her anatomy was perfect, from the ringlets of silver hair that curled together like coils of fine wire to her full, pursed lips down to her heavy breasts with their nipples stiff from the cold, down to the tangles of coarse, metallic pubic hair covering her vulva, all the way down to the soles of her feet. The gleaming metal looked almost like it was still liquid, clinging to her in a sheen of silvery perfection all over. He stared at her for a long moment, astonished beyond the power of speech.

She tilted her head slightly to look at him. "It's just that I don't get visitors, you see. Not anymore." Her speech was archaic, the words accented strangely, but Jace had listened to enough pre-Collapse recordings to make it out easily. "I'm out of practice at receiving guests. Can I help you with something?"

Jace racked his brains, trying to remember if Darke had ever been known to use robot servitors. He'd used killer robots, giant robots, robotic suicide bombers in the Apocalypse Plot, but had anyone ever described a robot like this? It wasn't ringing any bells.

"I'm afraid we're out of refreshments," she continued, her voice a bit uncertain now at his continued silence. "The food synthesizer ran out of raw materials some four centuries ago. I could use the dynamo cannons to melt you some icewater, though, if you're thirsty. Are you thirsty? Hungry? I'm afraid I really need to know what you're here for, if I'm to help you at all."

She looked at him for a long moment before Jace finally recovered his wits enough to speak. "Who are you?" he asked. "What are you?"

She blinked. "My name is Lucinda," she said at last, as though recalling a long-forgotten fact from an old textbook. "Lucinda Lake. I am...was...am Doctor Darke's servant."

Jace felt his knees wobbling, and he sat down again. "Lucy Lake," he muttered, half to himself. "Oh my god, you're Lucy Lake. You're the Rescuer's girlfriend. You knew him, you knew them all. Oh my god. Oh my god." Jace felt himself starting to hyperventilate, and forced himself to control his breathing.

He reached out and took her hand, feeling the smoothness of the metal against his gloved fingertips. "Please," he said. "Tell me what happened, if you can. To you, to him," he gestured at the body on the throne, "To the Rescuer. Tell me how it ended."

She stared at him for a long moment, her silver eyes full of suspicion. Then, at last, she spoke.

*****

Lucy pulled out her Colt .45 and took aim at the robot's eyes, not for the first time cursing the day she'd ever met the Rescuer. She let off a couple of shots, but the red glowing orbs set into the heavy metal features didn't even have the decency to crack. She gave it up and started running for the fire escape.

It wasn't really the Rescuer's fault, of course. It was those damn jackasses at the Daily Clarion. Every time she bumped into the Rescuer--and it's not even like he was the only superhero she'd met, being a private eye in Pyramid City meant you wound up getting mixed up in all sorts of crazy superhero weirdness--some photographer was putting a picture of it in the next day's paper. 'Rescuer's Girlfriend Foils Smuggling Ring!' 'Rescuer Saves Girlfriend From Puppeteer!' 'Rescuer's Girlfriend Escapes Zeppelin Explosion!' It was a vicious circle--the more people got the idea that she was the Rescuer's girlfriend, the more supervillains came after her to get at him, and the more saving she needed. And that just meant another headline in the next day's paper.

Lucy shot out the window and jumped through the frame to land on the fire escape. She grabbed the ladder and slid down it with one hand, the other still holding her useless gun. Above her, the robot smashed through the brick wall with casual ease, its head scanning from side to side as it looked for her. She knew it wouldn't take long before it spotted her.

It wasn't even like she knew who the Rescuer was, she thought angrily as she slid down another floor, trying desperately to keep as silent as possible. They'd agreed early on that the less she knew about him, the better. But it didn't stop the newspapers from giving her that damned nickname. She'd thought about suing, but being a superhero's girlfriend was good for business. So long as you had good insurance.

Right now, though, the only insurance that Lucy was concerned about was life insurance. She dropped to the ground from the second floor with a thud that rattled her teeth, and ran down the alley as fast as she could. The robot was still up on the seventh floor, and there was just a tiny chance that she could get around the corner before--

Two more robots stepped around the corner to block her path. A man in a trenchcoat stood between them, but Lucy knew him well enough to see through the flimsy disguise. "Doctor Darke," she snarled, as one of the robots plucked the gun from her hand like a parent taking away a child's toy.

"So good to see you again, Miss Lake," he replied with a smile. He sprayed her in the face with some sort of greenish gas, and the rest of the world went away for a while.

When she awoke, Lucy found herself naked, inside a clear glass tube just a few inches wider than her body. She stood up with some difficulty, still a little woozy from the gas, and immediately slammed her body into the side of the tube. It didn't give at all, and Lucy winced as she felt something pop in her shoulder.

"Oh dear," Doctor Darke said from outside the tube. "That looked most painful." He was standing at a bank of controls, flipping switches and sliding levers into position. "Don't worry, though, Miss Lake, I'll soon have you feeling absolutely perfect."

Lucy tried as best she could to shift position to avoid exposing more of her private parts to Doctor Darke than she absolutely had to, but she was uncomfortably aware that he must have been the one to take her clothes off. She shivered under the intensity of his gaze--no matter how many times she met him, she could never get used to his stare. Being nude only made it worse.

"Do we really have to go through this again?" she asked, pretending a confidence she didn't feel. "You know what's going to happen when the Rescuer finds me missing. You know he's going to follow the clues you undoubtedly left, track you down to your floating island again, get me out of this at the last second, and wreck whatever plan you spent weeks dreaming up. Why do you even bother?"

Doctor Darke smiled. "Because this time," he said, "that's exactly what I'm hoping will happen." He pulled another lever, and Lucy heard an ominous series of hisses and pops from directly overhead. "This time, my dear Miss Lake, things will be quite different. Because when the Rescuer arrives, I will have an ally on my side that will prove decisive. One he cannot defeat."

Lucy slammed her body against the tube again, this time with her other shoulder. It was like hitting brick. "Oh?" she said, trying to keep her voice light. "Who might that be?"

"Why, you, of course." Doctor Darke flipped one last switch, and a stream of dull, metallic fluid poured out of a hole at the top of the tube. Lucy flattened herself against the side, catching only a few dribbles of the thick goop in her hair, but it immediately began to puddle at the base of the tube.

"I don't--" Lucy wriggled her way up the tube, bracing herself with her feet and inching her body up above the gray ooze. "I don't know what you think you're doing, but--oof--" She gave up on speaking for a moment, desperately trying to shore up her position as the fluid level rose. She was uncomfortably aware that her position exposed her pussy pretty damn spectacularly--she had one foot on either side of the pouring liquid, and her legs extended as far as they would go--but she hoped that Darke was too busy monologuing to leer.

"It's quite simple, my dear," Darke said, his eyes glittering in a way that made it clear he was happy to multitask. "The fluid currently pumping into your prison is a solution of self-replicating microscopic machines--nanobots, if you're familiar with the term. They are capable of insinuating themselves into every cell of your body, filtering their way in through your pores and bonding with you on a molecular level."

Lucy inched her way up the tube, higher and higher, desperate not to let any part of her touch the thick, silvery fluid. She tried not to think about the gunk that had already gotten into her hair. "What--mmph--what is that stuff going to--gnnnh--going to do to me?"

"It will adjust you," Darke said, leaving his control station and walking over to the tube to get a closer look at Lucy's struggles. "Your body will become my secret weapon, primed with a xenonite pulse ready to discharge the second the Rescuer comes into lethal range. Your mind will be corrupted, synapse by synapse, into my perfect obedient servant. You will live for my commands. And when the Rescuer arrives to save his girlfriend--"

"I am not his girlfriend!" Lucy snapped out, nervous sweat making it difficult to gain a purchase on the sheer surface. Her feet slipped once, then twice before she could find a spot to brace herself against, and the fluid level kept rising. "We barely even--"

She broke off the sentence, her whole body red with embarrassment. They'd tried, once. Who wouldn't? She remembered the way he held his body perfectly still, unwilling even to twitch from pleasure for fear of hurting her. She remembered sliding onto his stiff cock, riding him hard for what felt like hours until she was exhausted with bliss. And then she'd finished him with her hands, watching his cum jet out hard enough to dent the wall of her bedroom. They'd both agreed that a second time probably wasn't a good idea.

"Oh, you can tell me," Doctor Darke said, his face alight with sinister enjoyment. "Soon, Miss Lake, you'll find that you want to tell me everything."

Lucy's head touched the ceiling of the tube. Out of room. The nanite solution was less than six inches below her now, and she tried desperately to move as much of her body up near the ceiling as she could. "Never...going to...haeeeeee!" Her words dissolved into a shriek as her feet slipped and she plunged into the thick fluid.

It felt cool against her skin, not unpleasant but insistent. She struggled to surface, but it seemed to tug at her with impossible currents, constantly dragging her just out of reach of the precious air. Her fingers broke the skin of the liquid for just a moment, just long enough to brush against the ceiling and realize that there was no place to go anyway.

Then Lucy felt it, a tingling sensation over her entire body. Not painful--it was too delicate to be painful, like being pierced with a needle so fine that it slipped between the nerve endings. She felt a sudden rush of endorphins dizzying her as her body responded to the sensation, buzzing insistently at a feeling like nothing she'd ever imagined.

Her limbs thrashed, now, as she felt her coordination disappearing under the influence of panic and unfamiliar sensory input. The fluid held her up, though, leaving her with a disconnected floaty feeling that kept the fear at bay. The coolness of the fluid seeped into her flesh, sapping the warmth of her body and leaving behind a strange chill that felt weirdly natural.

Her lungs ached for oxygen, now, and she finally took a reflexive breath. The solution filled her mouth, its metallic tang tasting bizarrely of rare beef on her tongue, before oozing down into her lungs and filling them as well. She wondered for a moment if Darke had miscalculated somehow, if she was going to drown here, but then she felt something shift inside her body and the craving for air subsided.

It felt like it was everywhere, now, all around her. She felt it flowing up inside her pussy, an insistent liquid lover that left her clit tingling with arousal as each and every last nerve was caressed by the nanobots. She thrashed in the fluid as a sudden orgasm hit, as unexpected as a summer storm. Then the solution flowed even deeper, creeping up her vaginal walls to infiltrate every part of her.

Her eyes snapped open, but all she could see was gray. Then she saw something different, as the nanite solution rebuilt her eyes from the inside out--she could see heat, magnetic waves, electricity, ultraviolet and infrared all at once. She briefly wondered if this was how the Rescuer saw the world all the time, before thoughts of her former lover were swept away altogether.

They were replaced. She could feel it, literally feel the synapses in her brain shifting to bring Doctor Darke into proper focus. How could she ever have feared him? He was beauty, he was power, he was strength and order and structure underpinning every fiber of her being. She reached between her thighs, pressing her metallic fingers into her pussy and fingering a clit that was perfectly smooth with its nanite coating, chanting one name over and over again into the swirling liquid void as she masturbated. "Darke," she whispered. "Darke. Darke. Darke."

She felt a second orgasm hit, this one entirely entwined with the notion of pleasing her new master. She felt his will settle into her mind, programming her with knowledge of his desires, his preferences, everything she would need to know until the day she flared with lethal energies that would utterly consume his hated foe. And then, she thought, with him dead, she would never have to leave her master's side again. She belonged to Doctor Darke. Forever.

The pleasure continued to build, deeper now. It wasn't just her fingers, it was her whole body--every single nerve caressed gently by a billion billion tiny lovers. She could feel them repairing her damaged shoulder, upgrading her organs, endlessly modifying and transmogrifying each and every last cell of her body into its perfected form, and it felt like bliss. She'd never imagined anything could feel this could, and she helplessly chanted out her reverence to her new master for recreating her so flawlessly.

The fluid level in the tube gradually lowered as the nanite solution soaked into her body, revealing Lucy at last in her new perfection. She was still masturbating, still chanting his name even as she lost count of the number of orgasms she'd experienced. Her body was capable of endless pleasure, now, and she would experience that pleasure whenever she obeyed Doctor Darke. How could she resist that? How could she be anything but his?

He opened the tube and kissed her polished chrome lips. "Do you understand now, Miss Lake?" he asked, taking his uniform off to reveal a stiff, jutting cock. "Does everything make sense to you?"

"Everything makes perfect sense," she whispered, changing position to allow him to slide into her cunt. "You are my master...and the Rescuer must die."

The second she said it, she came all over again.

*****

"My god," Jace gasped. "We never even knew. So many records were lost in the Great Collapse, when humanity fled to the stars. Nobody knew about the final battle between the Rescuer or Doctor Darke."

"I don't either," Lucy said matter-of-factly.

Jace's brow furrowed in confusion. "But you--I mean, he's right here!"

"Oh, I know what happened to my master," she said, casting an adoring gaze upon the skeletal remains. "It was a heart attack, a few years after the Battle of Sydney. One of the herbs he used to remain young and vital became impossible to obtain, and the serum lost potency as a result. Not much, but enough to render him vulnerable to some of the dangers of age."

"And the Rescuer?"

"Never saw him," Lucy replied with a shrug. "They battled several more times, I know that. But my master was never able to draw him back here for a final confrontation. The xenonite in my body finally decayed into stable elements, and my master found other uses for me. Until he died."

Jace looked around, seeing nothing beyond the range of the glowsphere but shadows and emptiness. "Why did you stay?"

"Because I love him." Lucy held out a hand to Darke's skull, holding it mere fractions of an inch away. If she touched it, Jace realized, it would probably crumble to powder. "I will always love him. I have tried to mourn him so many times, but...always my mind returns to the same patterns. Is returned, I should say."

She trailed off into silence. Jace felt a tear running down his cheek. He moved to wipe it away reflexively before remembering his environment suit. "My survey team will be here soon," he said at last. "We have a qualified archaeo-roboticist. Would you like us to see if we can alter your programming? Free you from...from this?" He gestured at the room around them.

Lucy laughed ruefully. "My programming compels me to decline," she replied. "If my consent matters to you under the circumstances, that is. No, all I ask of you is that you respect his remains, and..." She stared into the distance for a moment. "He programmed me to understand him, you know. Better than anyone else ever could."

Jace felt his cheeks flush with anger. "He was a monster," he said. "To do that to you."

"Oh, yes," Lucy replied. "But he would want you to know why. Bring your team here, please. Let me speak with them. Let me tell you his story. I know he would have wanted that. He believed he would outlive history...and if he could not do that, then I can at least help him be remembered." She looked down at him again, with a tenderness undiminished by centuries. "One last gift to my beloved."

THE END