Author Daecrist
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Villains Don't Date Heroes! 84: Depression
🕑 Added 2025-06-11 02:12:00 +0000 UTCI sighed as I checked on the log for this morning. It’s not like I was spying on Selena. Not exactly.
It was all about her health. At least that’s what I told myself. And her health wasn’t all that great ever since we watched two robots double teaming downtown Starlight City in a naughty rendition of Robot Does Downtown.
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the best joke. Work with me here. I’m dealing with a depressed former goddess who wasn’t all that happy about the former part of that word, and I was at my wit’s end.
It didn’t help that we’d been in the middle of that unfortunate metal sandwich. Or that Fialux had done exactly the wrong thing at multiple wrong times because she was following the right heroic impulses gone terribly wrong since she didn’t have her powers.
Or that I’d given her the tools to put herself right in the middle of that robot fight like an idiot under the influence under a pair of pretty green eyes.
I guess she’d skipped a couple of her seven stages of grief. From the readouts, not to mention the way she’d just been lying around doing a whole lot of nothing, it looked like she’d gone from denial straight to depression, and I was trying to figure out a way to get her out of her funk.
The only problem was I had no idea how I was going to do that short of getting her powers back, and I still didn’t have the new weapon Dr. Lana was using to dissect so that was still a big zero.
I’d gone over the cattle prod weapons plenty of times. I had a basic idea of how they worked after running an analysis, but I didn’t see anything in the way they worked that would take away Fialux’s power. They operated using some strange sort of radiation I’d never seen before, but it did nothing when I poked Selena with it.
I’d held out a stupid hope that maybe prodding her with one of the things would be enough to get her powers back, but no luck. It didn’t seem to do anything to her now that her powers were gone, and it drove me wild that I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Which left me trying to handle this the old fashioned way.
Take this morning, for example. I was getting breakfast in bed ready again. Well, it’s more like I was instructing the automated systems to get breakfast ready again and then I was going to take it to her room personally to make sure she ate it.
She wasn’t eating the stuff delivered to her room via robot, and I’d learned the hard way a couple of days ago that even without her superpowers she was able to beat the ever loving shit out of the automated butlers that came to her room to be more insistent about feeding her breakfast.
Okay, so now that I thought about it, maybe she’d had gone through little bit of the anger stage. She just took it out on the robots in the lab rather than on me for some reason.
I was still trying to figure out if that incident was because she went into a violent swing in her depression or if it was because she saw a robot, albeit a scaled down robot, with a humanoid body and decided to have a little PTSD flashback that ended with her beating its metallic head in with the arm she’d ripped off.
For one shining hopeful moment I’d thought maybe she got her powers back. That ended up being so much wishful thinking though. The service bots weren’t hardened for combat like the monstrosities we’d faced out in the city, so it was within the realm of mortal strength to rip them apart.
It still took someone who became violently unhinged to do it, but it was possible.
“Rise and shine!” I said as the doors to her room slid open.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I walked into her room. It’d been awhile since I was down here. I was so busy with research and trying to figure out what the hell made those stupid weapons Dr. Lana put together tick that I hadn’t had time for a personal visit.
Honestly? On some level I hadn’t wanted to do a personal visit. Not and face Fialux as she was now.
Whenever she came to talk to me it was usually her visiting the breakfast nook. Though now that I thought about it, it’d been a while since she’d even been to the breakfast nook.
I was losing track of time. Not good. I needed to be more on top of things. Maybe Fialux wasn’t the only one falling into a funk.
As soon as I stepped through the door I found myself wishing I was wearing my suit, and not for the usual reasons. My suit was a precision engineered piece of technology that was designed to protect me from all sorts of potential nastiness I could run into while I was on the job of trying to take over the world.
It protected hearing, vision, my internal organs, all the usual stuff you’d expect. Only there was another sense it also protected. A sense that was so rarely ever in danger of being ruined that I almost didn’t add it to my suit, and now the one time I might actually need it my suit was on the other side of the lab.
Sure I could teleport it on, but that would only make Fialux curious as to why I suddenly felt the need to wear my suit, and the last thing I wanted to do was draw her attention to the terrible smell permeating the room. A smell I’m sure she couldn’t smell anymore because the receptors in her nose had probably gone straight past nose-blindness to nose-death considering how much it reeked in here.
Seriously. It smelled like a teenager’s room in that magical time after biology decides it’s time for the body to start putting out fun new odors and before said teenager realizes there are entire industries dedicated to keeping that smell from assaulting the nostrils of every other living creature around them.
Oh yeah. There was one hell of a smell going on in here. I looked around at the disaster area.
“What happened in here?” I asked.
“Go away,” Fialux growled, though it was a muffled growl because she was a series of indistinct lumps buried under the comforter on her bed.
Maybe she was hiding from the smell.
Well then. Here we had another similarity with a sullen teenager. She refused to eat, she stayed in her dark room, she obviously wasn’t cleaning up after herself, and it was clear I’d let things go for far too long.
I stepped into the room and set the tray down on a table that materialized out of the wall.
I turned. Stepped over the smashed carcass of one of my cleaning bots. I frowned. Those things weren’t exactly expensive relative to everything else I had going in this lab, but considering “relatively cheap” in my lab could still constitute a budget that would keep the Coast Guard solvent for years that meant the things were still pretty damn expensive to replace.
I was going to have to do something about that.
“So, um, did you decide to destroy my expensive cleaning robots for a reason?”
“They were making little chittering noises,” Fialux growled. “I don’t like little chittering noises when I’m trying to sleep.”
Huh. That was an annoying habit the things had picked up. They didn’t need to make noises that made them sound like mice, but they did. I wasn’t even sure how they’d figured out how to sound like a mouse considering I had autonomous biological hunter killer units patrolling the lab on a regular schedule to make sure no rodents ever made it past the front entrance.
The nice thing about the autonomous biological hunter killer units was all I had to do to keep them happy was give them the occasional cat treat and scratch them behind the ears, and I didn’t have to worry about them suddenly learning to think for themselves and turn on their master.
Though there was the occasional moment when a belly rub turned into a vicious mauling. That was a risk every cat owner had to take from time to time, though, and it was totally worth the visit to the medbay in my opinion because purr cuddles were irresistible.
I looked at the floor. Yeah, there were a lot of cleaner bots that had been coming in here and made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of cleanliness. It looked like the aftermath of a giant irradiated lizard attacking the city, minus the radiation. Or the giant lizard.
I walked over and took a seat on the bed. Then frowned as I sat on something hard. I popped up and looked down. Frowned even deeper as I saw a hardened husk of something that may or may not have been a fruit once upon a time.
No, scratch that. It was the remains of one of the unfortunate cleaning bots that had tried to gorge itself on a fruit of some sort Fialux refused to eat, and either eating the fruit had killed the bot in the process or Fialux had smashed it while it was in the middle of trying to clean up.
Poor little thing. It never had a chance.
Then again, I could understand why she had a healthy hatred for anything even remotely resembling a robot considering everything that had happened to her recently.
Hell, I’d been betrayed by my megalomaniacal supercomputer recently and I was still reluctant to pull the trigger on giving my new computer system anything approaching actual intelligence as a result.
Every time I thought about it I felt like CORVAC was reaching from beyond the grave to flip me the digital bird one final time. I could even imagine it up on the screen. He would’ve done it like old ASCII art on an Apple IIe or something. Put some real old school flare into his middle finger art.
“I said leave me alone,” Fialux said.
“And I’m not going to leave you alone,” I said. “Not a chance. I said I’d take care of you and…”
“What part of get away don’t you understand?” she growled.
“The part where I love you and I’m going to make you better no matter what it takes. No matter how much it hurts me or how many times I have to fight an archnemesis I’m not sure I can beat. That’s the part you don’t understand, and I’m going to make you understand it even if it kills me damn it!”
