Podcast of a Teenage Super-Villian

Chapter Eight: First Contact

A fight in Silver Dollar is nothing like a fight in Starlight City for reasons I wish I'd remembered before taunting professional power harvesters. Lying on the pavement with the coppery taste of my own blood filling up my mouth, I realize:

1. Most of the heroes I disarmed, I didn't disarm in combat. There are traps that can be set. Blackmail to be dredged up. Drugs that can be bought, and deals that can be made under the orange cast of dying light behind the Nickel Mackerel All Night Diner. Fighting is only a corner of a supervillain's life, and it mostly consists of hitting and hitting hard. Unfortunately, four years of Karate training as a child does not prepare one for professional fighters. In a back alley. With no exit nestled in the brick walls for escape.

2. They're not afraid of me here. No reputation to brandish, small, I'm nothing for them to fear.  And they attack without reprieve, unafraid, and probably pretty pissed.

3. None of my opponents down in old Silver Dollar carried super-powered weapons. I don't know anything about these weapons. Barely understood the ones I had back home. But I can say, when the man takes his pocket knife to my face, my healing factor sputters and fails. The cut swells and sears like a mother. I am a fish out of water and I'm suffocatiing. 

They get me. My first real fight here, minus the one with Gideon's would-be captors, and I lose. 

The man crowds me with his knife, closing distance with racing strides too quickl for human eyes to track. I get a punch in that connects squarely with the side of his neck, but by then, he's already left six cuts that bite deep into my forearm. I never even saw his hand move. Never saw the knife. But the slashes sting, and the blood that wells up drenches my sleeves in a thick, sticky, red goop, and I cuss with every contact he makes

 I defend the woman for about a minute. I get in kick to the chest, the stomach. But she is relentless with her punches. An uppercut snaps my head back and fills my brain with stars and circling birds. The base of my neck scrapes brick, and the man ducks low, slicing behind the knee-caps. The sloshing sound of my own blood as it pours on to the pavement and slithers toward the gutter makes sickness well up in the back of my throat, but before I can even vomit, concrete rushes up at me and I meet it on my elbows and shins. Blood that tastes of salt and metal wends behind my teeth. Mayday, mayday. 

 I try to fly. The woman slams her foot into the base of my spine, and under the hard tread of her fashion-forward combat boots, I understand what it feels like to be trapped. This is what the butterflies, the specimens preserved in shadow boxes must feel like, wings and feet pinned solidly to a panel. I twitch, bleeding from the gums. I think the man caught me in the mouth, but I can't confirm it, not with my slippery memory, which shimmers with one image before slipping back to that obsidian ooze of oblivion. I start cussing with a mouth full of pebbles and kicked up pieces of loose pavement. The man leans down.

"You don't look very old," he says, and I smell a whiff of mellow whiskey on his breath. That and mint. So much mint I start to cough and I don't stop. A minute passes. 

I still haven't stopped coughing. Or cussing. I don't bother with a nod. When I glance out from the corner of my eye, I see the copy of that Taoist book I bought, and its drenched with my own blood.

"Why a vigilante?" he continues. I try to memorize everything about him, every wrinkle in his crinkled brow, the gray glitter of his not-quite-blue-not-quite-green eyes, and the sheen of the white sun on his greasy blonde hair. "What could you have hoped to gain?"

A nervous feeling squirms in my stomach. He is wearing a wrinkled shirt, dark gray, almost black. His sneakers are a dirty white, the tread splitting from the sole of the shoe, ash black and peeling. But his jeans are clean, almost pristine. Designer? My heart pounds faster, my head spinning with that old, stupid adage about how if they let you see enough of them to get a description they plan to kill you.