Author Daecrist
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Villains Don't Date Heroes! 72: Waking Up
🕑 Added 2025-06-02 02:40:58 +0000 UTCI felt ridiculous carrying a tray into the room, but if I was going to go to the trouble of making breakfast in bed then I was going to go to the trouble of doing it right.
Even if the whole thing did make me feel like the help. Usually I had robots do this sort of work, but chalk that up to yet another thing in the lab that wasn’t working at one hundred percent thanks to my hobbled AI situation.
“Good morning!” I said, trying to sound more cheerful than I felt.
I wasn’t sure how well it worked. Cheerful wasn’t something I did well on a good day. On the day after I’d been sort-of defeated by a woman who was shaping up to be my new archnemesis and my girlfriend had lost her powers and was bound to be upset when she discovered that fact?
Yeah, cheerful was so far from my wheelhouse right now it was a wonder I wasn’t downing enough booze to get a dinosaur drunk with one hand, like one of the big ones, and running a blood purifier in the other hand to cleanse my BAC down a point or so every time it edged from “drunk off your ass” to “potentially deadly.”
I knew Fialux was awake because all the sensors monitoring her for medical purposes showed she was awake. Not to mention her eyes were following me as soon as I stepped into the room, and she didn’t look happy.
I hadn’t gone as far as having a camera in the room. That would’ve been downright villainous, and even I had standards and lines I wouldn’t cross.
The room was designed to look like something out of an expensive English country manor. Even if it was buried well below Starlight City’s sprawling suburbia. The illusion was helped by a screen along one wall that looked exactly like a window with a view of a pastoral scene that was meant to be calming.
Fialux stood in front of that window, and I wondered if she realized it was just a very high resolution screen. Higher resolution than anything you could get at a big box retailer, that was for damn sure.
She whirled around to face me, and there was pure fury in her eyes. I stood dumbfounded with the tray in my hands and suddenly found myself wishing I had more of my suit on.
I only had the basics. A chest piece under my shirt and that was about it. The rest of the suit could materialize around me in a moment from the pattern buffers in my belt, which I always wore, but that moment might not be enough to stop Fialux from coming after me if she’d regained her powers.
Not that I thought I’d be that lucky. Or unlucky. I was in a place right now where the line between the two was so blurred that I couldn’t even see it to know which side I was on. That’s how great the past twenty-four hours had been for the “world’s greatest villain.”
It’d be just my luck her powers would reappear just in time for her to give me a beatdown.
“Night Terror,” she growled. “What are you doing here? Why have you taken me captive?”
I sighed. There was that pesky temporary amnesia. I thought of an awkward time when I’d woken up convinced I was still a grad student working in the Applied Sciences Department where the possibility of a machine uprising was a very real thing. They had training videos and everything about what to do in case you found yourself in a lab where you thought a computer was starting to gain sapience and a healthy hatred of humanity.
CORVAC had to spend a few hours reassuring me I hadn’t been taken captive by computers as part of the rise of the machines. Then he had the even more difficult task of convincing me he was my partner in crime and not a machine designed to tell me that so he could gain my cooperation and access to my toys.
And now that unfortunate side effect meant there was a potentially superpowered individual, assuming her recovery had somehow fixed whatever Dr. Lana had done to her, staring at me with pure hatred and a case of temporary amnesia that looked like it went back to at least the time when we’d been archenemies.
Great. Just what I needed. One new archenemy was bad enough without bringing the old one back into the mix.
Sure enough, her first instinct was to fight. I have to admit it was a little comical. Even if it was also a little sad. She threw herself in the air, her fist punching out ahead of her.
I had no doubt that fist was meant to run straight into either my jaw or my stomach or something that would’ve felt equally unpleasant, but instead she hovered just long enough to give me a surprised wide-eyed look usually reserved for silent coyotes realizing their plans have gone terribly awry. Then gravity reasserted itself as her momentum dissipated and she fell flat on the ground.
I winced. That didn’t look good. And from the way she moaned it obviously hadn’t felt good either. I didn’t think she broke anything, but better safe than sorry.
“Did she hurt anything with that display?” I asked.
There was a brief delay as the medical computer scanned her. Everything in the recovery rooms was tied into the medical computers. “Negative.”
I carefully placed the tray down on a table that slid out of the wall. At least some of the automated systems were working.
I walked over to Fialux. Knelt down until I was crouched beside her. I tried to put an arm around her.
I immediately regretted the decision as she thrashed around trying to get away from me. She flung a hand up and it caught me across the cheek, but it wasn’t nearly as strong as a hit from her should’ve been.
Sure it felt about the same as all the times she’d hit me before, but those times I was wearing my suit which had the kind of reinforcement that prevented her superpowered hits from actually hurting me.
At least that was the idea. Admittedly most of our fights had gone on long enough that she eventually hit me enough times to chisel away at my power reserves until things really started to hurt and I had to cry uncle if I didn’t want to be turned into paste on the pavement.
The fact her hit felt like a normal slap when I wasn’t wearing my suit was telling. It told me she hadn’t gotten her powers back when she was fixed up.
“This isn’t right,” she muttered. “What’s wrong with me?”
That wasn’t good, but I was a little thankful because damn. That would’ve hurt if she’d managed to smack me across the head with me out of my suit and her powers intact.
At full power she would’ve had a very real chance of dislocating my head from the rest of my body, and she probably wouldn’t have even realized what she was doing until it was too late.
The old Fialux, the Fialux who was looking at me now because of the temporary amnesia, was also used to me relying on all of my tech wizardry to stay alive when she attacked me at full power. I imagine it would’ve been a surprise to her that I’d allow myself to be vulnerable in her presence, and it would’ve been an even more unpleasant surprise when the amnesia faded and she realized what she’d done.
So yeah. Maybe there was a small silver lining in her powers being nonexistent. It was a very small lining around a very big nasty storm cloud, but it was something.
“You’re right. This isn’t right,” I said. “If you’ll just let me explain.”
“I’ll defeat you, Night Terror!”
I decided to take a couple of steps back even though she wasn’t going to do any damage from down there on the floor. I’d let her work out her issues at a safe distance where she couldn’t try to beat the crap out of me. Getting slapped wasn’t fun even if she didn’t have her powers.
She stood. Shook her head as though she was trying to clear away some cobwebs. She looked down and took in her body.
She wore a simple robe the medical computer had tossed her in after it finished repairing what it could. I’d then carried her to this room where I figured she could be comfortable and get some of the rest and relaxation she so desperately needed.
She’d already been out for the better part of a day. I figured that meant she’d had a hell of a lot taken out of her in that fight. A hell of a lot more than should’ve been taken out of her considering her usual superpowered status.
Oddly enough, she seemed to have the sleep and calorie requirements of a normal human despite all the superpowered shenanigans she was up to on the regular. That seemed to indicate there was some other source of her powers. Which was one of many things I’d intended to figure out someday, not knowing she’d be losing those powers sooner rather than later.
Yeah, the more I thought about this, the more I realized this was going to be very bad when the dust settled. She might be powerless for the rest of her life, or it could just be a temporary thing.
I didn’t know enough about what had been done to her to even make an educated guess.
My fruitless attempts to figure out exactly what it was that made the weapons Dr. Lana had so generously provided me, or that I’d stolen depending on your point of view, work were proof enough of that. I hated that I couldn’t tell what made them work.
Technology was my thing. It felt like a personal failure that Dr. Lana was able to create something I couldn’t reverse engineer. Even though right now I was mostly in a holding pattern waiting for a full analysis of the radiation coming off the things.
It still galled me that it was taking this long. Especially when she’d shown herself to be so adept at reverse engineering my stuff for her own stupid purposes.
“What have you done to me?” Fialux asked. “Did you do experiments on me? How did you take away my powers? How did you…”
She wavered. I was so surprised that it took me a moment to realize exactly what was going on. She was on the verge of swooning. She might actually fall and run the risk of hurting herself in her new very vulnerable state.
Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she pitched forward like a ragdoll. I swore under my breath and dove to catch her.
