The Truth About MegaWoman

As far as Zoe was concerned, all reporters these days started out on shitty little beats that didn't matter and which didn't exactly require much research. Hers had been celebrity gossip, which in and around Houston had quickly moved her on to metahuman gossip; a lot of the biggest names locally, after all, were superhumans of one stripe or another, a trend which had held true since the Great Correlation in the 1950s, which was popularly believed to have caused the boom in superheroes.

She'd developed an eye for a scandal on her first assignment, working for the Houston Eye, an assignment she'd hated but with a newspaper (even if it barely deserved to be called that, in Zoe's opinion) with a reputation for outlandish stories. She'd been invited to make a new stories up but never had; had even managed to keep the embroidery on her reporting down to acceptable levels, where someone who read her reporting wouldn't have been too misled over the the details.

All the same, she'd moved on as quickly as she could, making her not just one of the very few cub reporters on her beat, but probably the only cub reporter in the state who was working a more prestigious desk at a more prestigious publication than they'd started with but was still regarded as a newcomer on the scene.

Zoe was, all in all, more than ready for a big scoop that would make people pay attention to her byline, but not quite willing to blow any story she was handed out of proportion in order to get it. She had her integrity. The whole point of this, from her perspective, was to get to a stage in her career where integrity was easier to keep.

This was often hard to do on the supers beat; she'd wondered a few times whether or not it was right to break a particular story. She'd kept secret the fact that Powerlance worked at a local high school as a shop teacher, though she was sitting on the evidence that would confirm it.

On the other hand, Hanging Judge had turned out to be an active policeman, and at least a few of the criminals he'd executed had been ones where, as a cop, he hadn't been able to successfully prosecute. That had got her the transfer over from the Eye to the Houston Examiner, after Jay Cliffe, their lead police reporter, looked into a few of the Judge's targets and finally ran the story that reclassified them from targets to victims, when it was proved that the Judge had executed the wrong man.

The police hated Jay now and they weren't too happy with Zoe, but on the other hand it turned out civilians in the city were a little safer with that particular costume and that particular cop off the street, so she'd decided to take it - as well as the Examiner's job offer; Cliffe had spoken well of the research she'd done and the way she'd presented it.

She hadn't told either the Eye or the Examiner about her Powerlance information. It was all too possible an editor somewhere wouldn't agree with her judgement on the matter.

However, big stories didn't just come along. That Wednesday, Zoe was three days deep in some detailed background research on a Watchdogs case which had wrapped up in a blaze of publicity on Sunday, and she'd found herself going off on a highly unexpected tangent when she'd realised that, no, MegaWoman hadn't been in on the final battle with the Hivemind, and there wasn't any mention of her having helped in the investigation - not unusual in and of itself but she hadn't heard anything about any solo investigations, and then when she thought back to it, she couldn't remember MegaWoman being present for a couple more cases.

She'd therefore sent a quick message to the Watchdogs' PR rep, Mavis Clark, asking whether MegaWoman had quit the team, taken a leave of absence, or anything else, thinking it'd make a good line-item at the bottom of a column. But Mavis had assured her that, yes, MegaWoman was still an active member of the team and as far as she was aware, there hadn't even been any indication of dissatisfaction on either side.

While Zoe didn't make a habit of automatically believing PR flacks - that way, for a journalist, lay madness - there had been what sounded like genuine surprise in Mavis' voice.

That had been lunchtime on Tuesday. Zoe had gone into the Examiner's database and searched around until she found the last public activity from MegaWoman; she'd stopped Baron Flame from igniting every oil well in Texas, or possibly a better way of putting it would have been that he didn't get to collect the ransom he'd demanded and he hadn't been able to follow through on his threat.

That had taken place a little under a week after her last public appearance with the Watchdogs; a press conference put together hot on the heels of the defeat they'd dealt to X. E. R. X. E. S., the mechanised combat robot ("walking skyscraper" being the more evocative description) which had broken free of it's US Army programming a decade or two back and spent the intervening time either trying to wipe out humanity or reconfiguring itself to recover from whatever damage had been dealt to it and become immune to the flaw the heroes had used to defeat it last.

Reading the reporting on that, Zoe was reminded again that MegaWoman was comfortably the most powerful member of the Watchdogs; it was strength they absolutely could have used when trying to break into the Hivemind's egg chamber, where a next generation of biological warriors were about to hatch, but she hadn't been there, and didn't appear to have been following up on her own investigations.

It was at that point when it occurred to Zoe to have a look at MegaWoman's activity prior to the X. E. R. X. E. S. battle. She'd been in action, again with the Watchdogs, a couple of weeks earlier, fighting the Sixth Column; she'd seized their half-built superweapon, flown it into orbit, and hurled it into the sun, getting no more than a light tan into the process. Before that, she'd arrived on-scene when fellow Watchdogs members Calamity Jane and Top Gun had been caught up in a hostage situation, and helped them defuse it; and then you had to go back four or five months to see any news of her again. She'd just disappeared.

Zoe started to get that itch at the back of her mind that said something interesting was in front of her somewhere.

MegaWoman's periods of activity could be quite a nice little news item. For all Zoe knew, the woman had another family on another planet (she'd never owned up to being an alien, but the only reason anybody knew about Pole Star was that his adoptive parents had eventually written a tell-all book with enough details to prove) or was dating her nemesis' doppelganger in an evil parallel dimension or something. But it could also be a story, and her instincts said there was something weird going on there.

On Wednesday morning Zoe had found some footage of the hostage situation on Youtube, blurry and badly-framed, captured by a hostage's cameraphone that had been left recording when the bank robbers piled desperately into the offices above the bank, having just discovered they were being tracked by Calamity Jane and her boyfriend.

MegaWoman showed up about twenty minutes into the footage, but only as a blur; she blew into the room at speed and moments later, the robbers were missing their guns, and MegaWoman was standing at the door to the stairs down into the bank.

*

"Calamity! Gun! Come on up."

"... MegaWoman?"

The eponymous heroine chuckled, too throaty and full of enjoyment to be called a giggle, and reached down to tuck the hem of her black-and-purple costume properly back into place over one buttock, where it had presumably ridden up sometime in her blur of motion.

It wasn't quite the costume any observer would have been used to seeing her in; the legs appeared to have been cut off, leaving a high-waisted cut that exposed much more of her ass than before and created the problem of it riding up like that in the first place. The backless V descending to just above her tailbone was also new, as well as demonstrating that she wasn't wearing a bra - not that her chest had ever been anything perky, nor that this was a surprise given the strength and power of every other muscle in her body.

It might take an onlooker a little longer to realise that her boots had a higher heel than before, or to remember that the heel had been a wedge before rather than a stiletto. Small wonder that rather than stand correctly she'd chosen to hover in place an inch or two above the ground. They might well have noticed more quickly that her brown hair was longer than usual and worn in a plait that seemed to thread through a loop at the back of her costume's neck rather than hanging straight down.

At this point in the video, one of the bank robbers charged her, yelling something incoherent that had started with the word "Bitch," but she didn't respond at all at first - a confidence that seemed well placed after he literally bounced off her on impact.

She turned to look at them, at which point it became clear that the costume alterations visible from behind weren't the only ones; her costume had been a full bodysuit, predominantly black, with the bright purple as an occasional grace note.

Now the purple had become trim, and with a scoop neck and the backless transition, all that kept her chest supported was two thin straps, both of which trailed long, distorted purple swirls beginning just over the cleavage-revealing neckline and running up to join as almost a collar around her throat, the collar band showing up clearly even on the grainy video footage as it was the same bright, vibrant purple.

She raised a hand and wagged a finger at the robbers, her expression stern enough that it didn't seem like a joke and came across instead as exactly what it was; a gesture from someone so far beyond the threat they represented that she could chide them like children. "We won't be having any more of that," she said. "Will we?"

Silence fell, only to be interrupted by new arrivals.

Cautiously, Calamity Jane and Top Gun made their way into shot, their expressions uncertain. Jane looked from MegaWoman to the disarmed robbers, then back to Jane. "Wasn't expecting to see you here," she said, not quite in her usual drawl.

MegaWoman shrugged. "I just got out of... you know what, it's a long story."

"Again?" Top Gun interjected.

"Yeah. Not a word, OK?" The look she gave him was anything but friendly. He raised his gloved hands apologetically, smiling softly.

"We've got to figure something out for you," Calamity said. "Let's get these guys shut up, then we can get back to HQ and discuss it, yeah?"

She turned and started walking out of the camera frame, delving into a belt for restraints. "Top Gun, you want to get the hostages out of here?" she asked over her shoulder, and he set to with a nod.

The camera view shifted as the phone was picked up and carried, not with an eye to filming their exit, just held in one hand so that a view of the room swung backward and forward upside down.

"So where did you wind up?" Jane asked. Just before the video ended, MegaWoman could be heard to say "Iowa, this time."

*

Zoe drummed her fingers on the desk. The costume was unusual, and MegaWoman had been back in her typical full bodysuit, without the low cuts or the curve-emphasising purple trim or the strange, distorted swirls. The costume had been, so far as Zoe could see, a complete one-off.

That didn't make much sense, really. And the conversation the team had exchanged - it didn't make a lot of sense, not when you were already thinking about how strange the recording was.

What really stood out to her was that neither Calamity Jane nor MegaWoman had wanted Top Gun to hear the story, but they were perfectly happy discussing it among themselves. Top Gun was relatively new to the Watchdogs, but Calamity Jane was a founder, and MegaWoman had joined not long after the founding. To Zoe, that suggested that whatever they were avoiding talking about went way back, and it was clearly embarrassing to MegaWoman, to the point Calamity was deliberately sparing her blushes.

Zoe's instincts had been right. There was a story here. But what was it?

There were two places she thought the answer might be found; the past, and Iowa. She decided to start with Iowa, as she at least had a defined timeframe.

*

Her search led her to Charles City, where less than a full day before MegaWoman encountered Calamity Jane, the Iron Ghost had busted Doctrine in the middle of raising an utterly devoted, dedicated cult, which appeared to be his latest scheme for achieving wider control.

Judging by the CCTV footage, MegaWoman had been entered into the position of chief enforcer for Doctrine, and Zoe had to assume that the costume adjustments (which were, admittedly, very PR-friendly, very photogenic, especially on a body like hers) had been Doctrine's idea.

The fascinating thing for Zoe was that Doctrine rarely went as far south as lower Missouri, which still put him a whole state away from Texas, and as far as she knew, MegaWoman almost never left the Lone Star State.

But Calamity Jane had asked where she wound up. Not where she went, where she wound up. Which suggested it wasn't MegaWoman herself going there.

...

That didn't make sense. Maybe she was reading too much into it.

She dug back into MegaWoman's activity, looking for another quiet period.

*

During the conflict, the Iron Ghost's armour retrieved several files from the system for evidence. Most important of these was a video apparently taken on Doctrine's property, in a large holding cell, by a camera mounted in the upper corner above the door.

It is unclear how MegaWoman came to be in the holding cell. The costume she wears is her bodysuit, and her brown hair is in the usual short near-pageboy bob she habitually wears it in. There is a thick metal band mounted around her neck, a tiny LED on which blinks red every other second.

The date and time of the video file are displayed in the lower left corner of the video. MegaWoman paces, slow and surly, up and down on the far side of the cell. A pair of imprints halfway along that wall show the impact of two punches sometime before the video started; her hands are still clenched into fists, and the frustration is clearly visible.

There is a sudden sound, the harsh rattle of a heavy lock, and MegaWoman immediately looks up.

A tall black woman with an athlete's build, muscular arms and thighs, enters the room. Her black curly hair is long and tied back in a single braid, which is being held by Doctrine as if it was a leash, and which first passes through a loop of golden fabric behind her head, a loop that is part of the collar of her outfit.

She wears a pair of gold lace-up leather boots that extend halfway up otherwise bare shins, and a high-waisted cut costume that shows off the musculature of her thigh and the pertness of her ass, black with gold edging. The V of its backline plunges low enough to reveal a tattoo just above the base of her spine, a rose; the V of its neckline almost reveals what else she has to offer. On the two thin straps that secure the costume to its collar, distorted golden swirls stand out against the black material.

The enforcer stands to one side, her body a threat, and although only the profile of her face can be seen it is enough to immediately identify her as MMA champion Maya Dalton, and also to show the glassy look in her eyes, the intensity of her expression completely contrasted by her blankness.

MegaWoman glowers at them both, but falls back a step when Dalton moves closer. To any watcher it is immediately clear that she believes her powers to have failed her.

"Do you know who I am?" Doctrine asks, and she shakes her head. Her body language shifts slightly, her head tilting. Curiosity overcoming caution, someone viewing the footage might think. Or they might imagine that she knows, if not Doctrine's identity, something about him, and they might think they read more than curiosity into the opening up of her stance. "Tell her," Doctrine says.

Maya Dalton, still on the end of her braid-leash, says as if reciting "He is Doctrine."

"Tell her what that means."

"I follow Doctrine. We follow Doctrine."

There is something strange in MegaWoman's expression. Her lips twitch for a moment, but what she says, if anything, is so quiet it cannot be made out.

"I am Doctrine," Doctrine tells her. "Do you understand?"

Her eyelids flutter and her chest rises and falls more visibly than before. It is clear that she is experiencing something.

It does not take long. "You are Doctrine," she answers. "I follow Doctrine." A hand lifts in the slow, lazy arc of one entranced. "We follow Doctrine."

"Kneel," he tells her, and she kneels. He releases his hold on Dalton's braid-leash, and the fighter moves behind the heroine. Fingers more used to applying armlocks and nerveholds begin to plait MegaWoman's short hair, as best as they can.

"Who am I?" he asks again.

"You are Doctrine," the two powerhouse women echo in unison. The intensity and focus on Dalton's face is a contrast to the dreamy smile on the lips of MegaWoman.

"Open your mouth," Doctrine tells her.

"We follow Doctrine," she answers, the last syllable slightly distorted by the fact her mouth opens rather than closes at the end.

"It is time," Doctrine tells her, "for you to understand where you are." He steps in front of her, his belt unbuckled, and while the camera does not show MegaWoman's face, we see her hands come up to steady her against his hips, and can understand what is happening.

"Tell her," he instructs Dalton, "where we are."

"We are in Doctrine Nation," the prizefighter answers obediently.

*

Unaware of the evidence the Iron Ghost had compiled, at least at that time, Zoe was researching the previous gap in MegaWoman's activities. While trying to determine when it ended, then when it started, she'd thought to take a few moments to skim through the heroine's decade-plus career to date.

For someone who featured so heavily in the Watchdogs' publicity efforts, whose face looked out from posters in so many teenagers' rooms and from T-shirts on so many Texan chests, she'd disappeared from public view for extended periods a surprising number of times. In fact, she was absent for more Watchdog cases than she was present on, at least when it came to the big final battles. Zoe didn't imagine she was much of a detective, either, though she recognised it'd be unfair to just assume that without checking.

Remembering what Calamity Jane had said about Megawoman ending up elsewhere, Zoe widened her search. Eventually she uncovered something in Labrador, a part of Canada about as far as you could get from Texas while still being in North America. A conspiracy blog, but it was accompanied by a couple of photos.

*

As all loyal readers of the Owl's Eye know, while many people think Newfoundland & Labrador are too out of the way for anything major to happen, they are in fact a hotbed of activity precisely because they're so out of the way.

We broke the story about the synthetic power serum being brought into North America through our ports three years before the authorities caught on to it. We caught on to the Mountain Men before they invaded Ottawa and tried to conquer it.

This story is a few months in the making, and I started looking into it a month or so after that when Judith and Holly Furnas disappeared from my home town. Declan Furnas, Judith's wife and Holly's father, seemed remarkably unconcerned about the whole thing, which was why I started to investigate.

Declan and Judith were like many couples; they'd certainly had their fallings out, but they weren't just staying together for Holly and I definitely felt like there was love there. Plus he was so full of pride about Holly's first year in college and if you ran into him while she was home for the summer, he couldn't stop talking about her. For Declan to be so nonchalant didn't make much sense.

Embarrassingly enough, I started out working from the assumption that Declan had killed them both; so often when you hear a story like this, that's what turns out to have happened. As my readers will know, I try not to jump to conclusions but to avoid them is hard, sometimes.

Declan, however, had not a perfect alibi but something much more convincing, an imperfect alibi. If you're going to commit a crime, you don't set up an imperfect alibi, therefore an imperfect alibi is a much clearer sign of guilt. But it made no sense that he would calmly accept their disappearance unless something had happened, and my sources near the family told me he insisted nothing had happened but was making no effort to find them.

It turned out that the police weren't, either. At first I assumed this was a result of whatever nefarious influence Declan was currently under, and I went to great efforts to get access to their main radio broadcast kit. After all, if you wanted to mentally reprogram every cop attached to a station house, that would be any technologist's first port of call.

I'll spare my readers a full report of every trick and tactic I used to get there. It's enough to say that as I was disturbed while dismantling it, I cannot conclusively rule out the idea that they're under someone's control, I have enough evidence in this case that they aren't under the same influence as Declan, Judith, and Holly Furnas.

I was expecting some little trouble with the lawmen and I was in the middle of reminding them that I do not recognise my name when it is written in block capitals when they decided simply to escort me out of the station. One of them laughed when he heard what I wanted to find out, and gave me an address about an hour out of town, on a turn-off just a little way off the main freeway from the ports down toward Toronto.

If someone in authority gives you a tip, it's always a trap, as we say here on the Owl's Eye. But it's also almost always got a kernel of truth, both because they need to control the place they're sending you and because they're stupid and don't make things up well. In this case I'd just been told the name of the place, the Pink Perfection Lounge, and what road it was on, and then he clammed up. Too dumb to make things up.

Well, of course, I went on out there. I didn't park in the parking lot, I found a space to leave my pickup off the road, and I made my way across through the pines outside the property and I clambered over the fence from the back and made my way up to the Pink Perfection, which had once been a barracks and had stood empty a long time before falling into the hands of its current owner, and I will tell you now, it's not the only Pink Perfection like that. We've got them all over Canada, never near a big city, always somewhere chosen because it's got four or five big towns and a freeway with a steady trucker trade nearby.

These next two photos I took through one of the thin windows near the fire escape; you can see the stage where the strippers dance in the main room in one, plus one of the strippers, and in the other you can see a bunny-themed dining room where every bunny costume is missing the corset, so it's just a pair of panties with a tail and a pair of bunny ears. I want to draw attention to the stripper in the first picture as she'll feature in my tale later and the blonder of the two bunnies in the bottom left of the second picture.

That blonde bunny is Holly Furnas, not back in college for her sophomore year like she should be but walking around with her tits out and a plastic smile on her face for the truckers and the locals who ordered their food there.

Regular readers of the Owl's Eye will know I'm usually very careful not to be stumbled on or otherwise caught while I'm running about on my investigations. However, clearly at some point shortly after this, I was spotted by someone in the organisation.

Halfway up the fire escape, my attention was on internal windows, as I looked for an opportunity to find and identify Judith Furnas. I knew now the two women were working for a strip club and brothel; I didn't know why. The women I'd seen were all smiles but that didn't mean anything; a professional in a place like that smiled.

I was seized suddenly from behind, my arms pinned to my sides at the elbows by someone infinitely stronger, and someone who I could feel just from the way they pressed against my back must be a woman.

I struggled, but their grip was impossible to break, and I was carried backward and down - not down the fire escape; we floated gently to earth. I caught sight in a reflection of the woman who held me. She was the stripper I mentioned from the earlier photo, and now I knew she had super powers, it was suddenly obvious who she was where I hadn't known at all before; I had been captured by MegaWoman!

She had the same smile on her lips as the others, and I just wasn't willing to believe a well known heroine, even a Texan one, would smile like that when kidnapping someone into a brothel.

So when I came face to face with the man in the flawless white suit behind the desk in the office on the top floor, I knew exactly what to say.

"You've been brainwashing these women," I accused. I'd had my phone in hand for the photos, and I had it recording, and you can head the audio of his voice below; as I don't want the authorities to identify the reporter undercovering and exposing their deficiencies, I have edited the recording not to include my own voice.

He just laughed. "Yes," he said. "I have. Good work, MegaSlut."

That last bit wasn't directed at me, but I'd wondered whether it was or not until she said, in this weird Texas-bimbo hybrid drawl-slash-giggle, "Thank you, my lord."

I'm not proud of what I said next. "You'll never get away with this."

He just smirked, and rose. "To be honest, I'm only here to check up on my delivery."

"What delivery?"

"MegaSlut, bring her closer." There was a long pause after her name, like he was deciding exactly how he wanted to put it. I could tell he was getting off on what he was doing, on my fear, on her helplessness, maybe on both...

"Yes, my lord."

That was annoying me too. I spent all my life with a Queen and I suppose I have a King now but I don't have to be happy with it and I certainly hope nobody would think Canadians fools enough to have Lords into the bargain.

I couldn't stop her bringing me round the desk, though - my feet weren't even touching the floor. I did kick Mr so-called-Lord in the leg, once, but before I could do it again he had this breath mask over my nose and the woman holding me squeezed me, probably very gently by her standards, and I had to breathe in and my mind was swimming.

Before too long I wasn't struggling. "Now," he said, "you will tell me the truth." And I knew he was right. "You want to please me, after all," he carried on, and then he said "Don't you?"

I said "Yes, my lord," without really even thinking about it, and my lord was how I thought of him that whole time; I could only think of him as the Perfectionist after I'd recovered - as much as I have recovered. Sometimes I wake up out of bed, naked, a toy in my hand or between my legs, and I know I'm rewarding myself for a task I don't remember performing.

The gas I was breathing in was delicious, more important and more valuable to me than my own free will.

"What brought you here?" he asked, and I told him all about Judith and Holly Furnas, and about my outrage that the building existed, and about my intention to see him exposed.

He laughed and said "Well, you won't do that."

"Yes, my lord," I told him.

"Put her down, MegaSlut."

"Yes, my lord." My feet found the floor and I was released, but I was stretching up onto my tiptoes, trying to keep my mouth and my nose inside the breath mask, but I couldn't.

"Let me look at her, MegaSlut," he ordered.

"Yes, my lord." She took the shoulders of the coat I was wearing in her hands and tore and I was no longer in a coat. I staggered, but with a light touch of three fingers she kept me upright. My sweater - a good sweater my husband bought me one Christmas - went the same way, and then the tee shirt I'd brought home from an Arcade Fire concert about a decade ago, and then my good jeans were torn off and I was standing before my lord in my underwear (and not even the sexy stuff) and my big outdoor boots.

"She'll do well," he said, and then to me he said "You're going to be one of my performers."

"Yes, my lord."

"You LOVE being one of my performers."

"Yes, my lord."

"Your body exists to bring in money for me."

"Yes, my lord."

He looked to my fellow servant MegaSlut. "Take her to this Judith. She's the one who does the whips and leathers, right?"

"Yes, my lord," MegaSlut answered.

"Good," he said, and looked at me. "Since you sniffed her out, you can be the little bitch at all fours at her feet when she goes on stage."

There was nothing else I could say. "Yes, my lord."

I am mostly recovered from the Perfectionist's work, but one of the ways he made me more perfect was to have me record myself. I cannot keep these recordings secret, and I must make it clear I have them. To see my act with Judith or my other act with MegaSlut, email me at...

*

Zoe sent an email, not, she told herself, out of prurient interest but because she should never miss out on an opportunity to collect more evidence, and besides, MegaWoman might have let something else useful slip.

She rubbed her eyes, and worried about what she'd just read. "My delivery," she muttered. "What does that mean?"

*

By this time, Zoe had worked back through the last two or three years of MegaWoman's career, and she'd found an unusually high likelihood that any gap in activity was tied to her being under some kind of hypnotic effect or full-on mind control.

This was a strange pattern, but was it a story?

Zoe felt like it should be - it was certainly an eyecatching fact - but there wasn't any cause to it.

She sighed, and sat back from her computer, and realised that after a full day of hunting down leads, browsing through archives, and watching videos, her stomach was rumbling. It was usually a blessing that her stomach didn't bother her while she was doing her research, but she always paid for it later when the hunger pangs kicked in. Hunger pangs pretty much always led to her making foolish decisions about food.

The simple problem was that 'one superheroine is repeatedly mind controlled and most of the time it barely makes the news when she recovers' wasn't a story, it was just an odd fact.

Her gut was telling her that more had to be going on, that something in the videos or the transcripts or articles or blogs she'd read was important and she just couldn't yet see how, and Zoe trusted her gut instinct. But she couldn't take this to an editor yet.

She got up and headed to the kitchen, figuring that she'd eat some food and work on the notes she'd had from her initial planned story on the Watchdogs' investigation into X. E. R. X. E. S. so she could get it filed for the weekend edition, and pick up the MegaWoman thing later.

It might just be a statistical thing, she thought idly. If there was X number of mind controllers out there, then it followed that there'd be some multiple of X incidents when the people who opposed them got controlled every year. Maybe MegaWoman was just unlucky, just the statistical outlier who got the worst of it all. Just the heroine with the worst record for getting hypnotised.

... Of course, she thought suddenly, that contained the assumption that MegaWoman was an outlier. That this sort of thing didn't happen to, say, Myrmidone or Scimitar or Gel Girl.

It took an effort of will to stop herself from walking back to the computer to keep on with her research while the eggs were already in the pan and scrambling. Zoe forced herself to finish cooking and to eat - at the kitchen table - without running back to the computer to start her research. She'd done this often enough now to know that refuelling and recharging made her better, made her more effective.

When she did sit down at the computer, though, she turned her attention away from MegaWoman temporarily. When had Scimitar last vanished from public view for a long time?

The answer turned out to be 'about a year ago, for about two months' and as much as Zoe tried, she could find no evidence that the official story, a torn shoulder muscle, wasn't why she'd been out.

Scimitar was with the Motor City Marauders over in Michigan, and Michigan even had fairly regular problems with mind controllers, something you couldn't say about Texas. All the same, a random sampling of Scimitar's downtimes didn't show her as spending many if any of them under the influence of some mind controller.

Myrmidone, who hailed originally from a mysterious island populated by Greco-Roman isolationists who'd taken breeding programs to a point they were almost genetic engineers, who had made her to be their super-soldier, and whose society she had loudly denounced and shunned after they invaded a neighbouring nation, didn't have much in the way of downtime at all.

Like the unstoppable warrior she'd been bred to be, she didn't seem to get ill and didn't take time between campaigns to relax. Zoe wondered how many people in the community were privately keeping an eye on her on the basis that someone so focused, who never relaxed, was bound to snap sooner or later.

Zoe did dig up a couple of times that Myrmidone had been controlled - her frequent opponent, Insurgent, had commissioned the Assembly Line to build control collars for every one of his most hated adversaries and Myrmidone had led them as Myrmidrone, donning a costume that took away her individuality behind a faceless silver mask while showing off her body to an extent her ceremonial armour never had, and the same collars had resurfaced later, with Myrmidone rechristened as the Alpha Bitch under the Tyrant King.

Neither had really involved any downtime, as her battles had kept her in the public eye. It seemed likely to Zoe that the Tyrant King, at least, had considered her available for pleasure as much as her strong right arm, but it didn't at all seem like the same thing.

To test against another Texan heroine, Zoe turned to Calamity Jane. Calamity was, according to the Watchdogs' PR, not actually superhuman, though Zoe had her doubts based purely on the woman's body - superhumans seemed to develop a physique that might be technically possible for a dedicated human to achieve with a dietician, a personal trainer, and a cosmetic surgeon, and Calamity had a body like that, as well as finding the time to fight crime and become one of the world's greatest trick shots.

In spite of this, Calamity managed to maintain an active set of solo investigations while also featuring in more Watchdogs missions than MegaWoman did. It was possible that the woman just had the free time, but something about that fact didn't sit right with Zoe, who made a note of it along with her other observations to date:

1. MegaWoman has more downtime than any other Watchdog

2. A lot of MegaWoman's absences seem to involve her being mentally controlled and used as a sex toy

3. During these absences she shows up all over the place, but her active career is entirely within Texas state borders

4. Watchdogs' press people don't acknowledge MegaWoman's absences

5. MegaWoman's downtime isn't taken up with solo missions, unlike most of the other Watchdogs

All the same, what little of Calamity Jane's downtime Zoe could find was usually pretty well accounted for, and mind controllers didn't seem to feature on the menu at all.

Zoe reread her observations - the few facts she could actually count on - and sighed to herself. It still didn't read like a story so much as a collection of related facts. It wasn't useful to her unless it was a story.

All the same, she was sure it would become one - but for the time being, she needed to get something to her editor. She spent the rest of the evening, somewhat distractedly, working on the Watchdogs story she'd originally started with.

The following morning she picked up her investigation of MegaWoman again, having had an idea overnight; instead of working backwards from the present, what would she find if she started at the beginning and worked forwards?

*

To her surprise, it turned out that MegaWoman's first appearance was her joining the Watchdogs. Honestly, Zoe wasn't sure she could think of a single other heroine - or hero, come to that - who'd gone straight into a state-tier superteam.

All the same there seemed to be no prior appearances. Which made Zoe cynical, and when Zoe got cynical she started to wonder things.

At that time, what she was wondering was whether or not MegaWoman had been a Texan at the time she joined the team, or if she could perhaps be found somewhere else beforehand.

She knew it was going to be a challenging hunt, and she knew that if the heroine had been called MegaWoman before she'd have showed up by now. Zoe spent a good chunk of Thursday digging around squinting at old jpegs and pausing heavily pixellated old footage from online archives trying to find anything related.

After a very late (like, 4pm) lunch, she sat back down at the keyboard and had a thought. It was the kind of thought everyone gets from time to time, but it was also the kind of thought that changed everything about an investigation.

The thought was this:

Why am I only investigating heroines?

MegaWoman had been one of the most physically capable of the Watchdogs from the moment she joined. Impervious to not just bullets but grenades, rockets, lasers and most explosions (and one of the reasons she had nationwide fame was that explosion where she had proved resilient enough to shrug it off, but her costume had not), she could also lift a bus one-handed.

Nobody was entirely sure why it was that people willing to bend the rules, cut corners, and even fall to villainy tended to get more powerful more quickly, although if you asked any psychologist who appeared on news TV giving expert opinions you'd hear one of a dozen or more ideas.

Zoe decided instead to look for villains who'd disappeared around the time MegaWoman debuted, and who bore at least a passing resemblance. She had to set her bar for appearances low, she told herself. After all, sometimes these people really worked hard to make themselves look different, like the woman in Louisiana who'd gone for the baggy jacket, the long hair, and the headband to completely change the silhouette she'd had before she went good, Vagabond or whatever her name was.

When she started that hunt she found a couple of candidates more or less immediately, one calling herself the unlikely name of Phenomena and the other going by Magnifique.

Zoe checked Magnifique first, on the grounds that when supers changed their names, there was usually some link between them. The woman had posted a video manifesto online before her only major criminal act, claiming responsibility in advance. It seemed like it would be foolish not to look at it.

*

She recognised MegaWoman immediately, even under the tight, frizzy curls the woman had evidently thought were the right look, even behind a very different approach to makeup - the left side of her face was so beglittered that it positively sparkled in the light.

There was a heavy sigh, a deep intake of breath, before "Magnifique" started talking, that probably should have been cut from the video before it went life. Of course, the first time was always the one where you made mistakes you'd regret in hindsight.

"Alright," Magnifique said. "I don't think anyone's going to find this before I've got it done. This goes out to Gordo Wesley, Mayor of Los Alamos. Gordo, I'm coming for you. Why?

"Because you're the one who kept giving money to Cairo Genomics, and they're the ones who abducted my class and experimented." Her expression changes. "Only two of us made it out. And I'm the only one now not in jail. Cairo Genomics is already screwed, but Gordo, you made it possible for them to do what they did, and I'm coming for you."

Zoe sat thoughtfully for a while after the video ended. Usually after something like that, the person didn't get tarred with the villain brush. There had to be more to this than that.

Still, it had given her something else to Google. She started looking up Cairo Genomics. It helped that she knew which city it had to have been based out of.

Three years before Magnifique's manifesto, Cairo Genomics had been another start-up in the area, another tech startup that didn't seem to have much to make it stand out. About a year before her manifesto, it had a change in ownership, with the person who took over just barely old enough to be in college.

Usually if something like that happened the new owner had a surname in common with the old owner, but in this case there wasn't much of a connection. On further investigation, the new owner hadn't even graduated high school.

Nor had anyone in his high school class, all of whom had disappeared in the first year of Cairo Genomic's existence.

Zoe sighed inwardly when she got that far. She felt like she already knew a lot of the answers she was about to read, that she was only really reading them to be able to confirm it.

Early on after the strange takeover, Cairo Genomics had abducted a heroine, Graylight. Her team had promptly identified the abductors and raided the headquarters and lab, where they'd fought Greylight and another woman, both of them dressed not in the usual supercostumes but in high heels, wide-grid fishnets, and French maid costumes.

It was quickly confirmed that Graylight and this other woman were under mind control by the new owner of Cairo, and thought for themselves only after he was arrested and injected with psionic nullifier nanites, which had shut down his control over them.

Zoe was able to find witness statements, videos, a lot of other things. It had been heavily reported around Los Alamos, the man calling himself Gaslight when he was working on less legal plans. It just hadn't made the news outside New Mexico.

"There were two of us," the woman who would go on to be Magnifique and then on further to be MegaWoman said, in her witness statement, her expression utterly guileless. "After the first experiments, I mean. I don't know what happened to the rest of our class. Do you-"

Whoever she was looking at didn't answer, at least not on camera or for the watcher to hear. In the slump of her shoulders, though, it was clear the answer wasn't positive.

"We'd been..." She swallowed and tried again. "We'd been exposed to this... this thing. It glowed, and the shape hurt to look at. I don't know what it was. Didn't hear anyone refer to it as anything more specific than 'the Object'. You could hear the capital letter, you know?"

"What do you mean, exposed?" It was a woman asking. Detached. Clinical.

"That was the word they used. They put us in a room, one by one, and this shutter at the far side of the room lifted, and the thing was behind it."

"You said it glowed. What colour?"

"Somewhere between blue and purple."

"Hmm."

Magnifique/MegaWoman's eyes narrowed. "That means something to you, doesn't it?" she asked. Watching, Zoe was quietly surprised the girl had realised so quickly, given how stressed she had to be.

"It... maybe."

"What?"

Silence.

"Don't I have a right to know?"

"Look, it could just be that this is the colour of this gadget," she said. "But there's an alien race, we think an extinct one, whose technology typically shines with a light you could describe that way. Maybe Cairo Genomic found one of their old artefacts."

Magnifique nodded quietly. "Okay," she said.

"How long did this go on for?"

"Thirty-one weeks," she said. "I know because they didn't expose us on weekends."

"Hm."

"We had two days off, regularly. It was the only reason I still had any real sense of time passing. I kept count. Toby and I, we both turned eighteen while all this was going on."

"Right. So... the change took a lot of time?"

"I think so," she said, suddenly doubtful. "The technicians hanging around us seemed very excited in the first week, though. And then less excited for a couple of months. And then all the way to the end of the process they just got giddier and giddier."

She flushed. "Mostly I didn't really notice the, you know, the powers coming in. Not until I took off, the first time. I wasn't exactly testing my strength, and until the last couple of weeks they weren't testing it for me. I mean, the moment I started working out in front of them, obviously I knew, right?"

"Right."

"But mostly, I was..." She gestured at herself. "I was concerned about my body in other ways, you know?"

"I can understand that," the woman she was talking to said coolly. It was clear the development of the physique common to superhumans had kicked in early for her; her arms already had the swell of muscle in the upper arms, her chest was prodigious and perky, her belly was toned, and while the rest of her body couldn't be seen below the desk, Zoe was sure it was close to the way she looked currently, if not already identical.

"One day, near the end of the process, I came back to the quarters they'd put us in and I told Toby that they'd been testing me, and I was strong, and I couldn't be hurt, and I could fly, and he gave me the weirdest look."

"Weird how?"

"Well, at the time, I really didn't know, you know? I think I needed to understand more about what was going on before I could have guessed what he meant. Anyway, he asked me if I could do anything else, and I said like what, but I thought maybe he meant like super-vision or something and I was trying to look through a wall and then there was this tickle at the back of my head and it felt..." Even recalling it, she bites her lip. "Fuck, it felt so good, you know?"

"I'm not sure I do. But that's okay; go on."

"There was just something happening, and it felt good, and I was..." She sighed wistfully. "All of a sudden I was happy and I was floaty and I was, too, real turned on." She blushed, shooting a look at the woman questioning her, nervous about going further, no doubt, if not understood.

"It was like everything was alright, you know? I was locked up somewhere, I'd been experimented on, I hadn't seen my parents in the best part of a year - or any of my friends, Toby barely counted - but I was happy, suddenly, that kind of warm happiness you get sometimes out of nowhere when there's just nothing to bother you.

"I didn't understand it, but then Toby told me everything was going to be okay, and all I had to do was listen to him and do what he said."

"And what did you think about that?"

"I thought I should listen to him and do what he said," she said simply. "Everything would be okay."

On the tape, there's a moment or two of silence. "And what happened?"

"First of all, he told me I should go topless. We were in these jumpsuit kind of things, kind of baggy, but mine was still tight enough around the tits and the ass, now, that he'd been able to tell something was happening. I undid the zipper, shrugged out of it, and tied the arms around my hips to keep it from coming down. Then I put my bra aside.

"Then he told me I wanted him to grope my tits. I remember wondering how he knew."

"Wait, you'd already wanted him to grope you?"

Magnifique blinked in confusion. "I assume so," she said. "I've not really thought about it. The way he said it, it just made sense that I always would have, and I was kind of going off that."

"Okay."

"So he starts groping me, and he's really into it but to me it's just, you know... well, actually it wasn't even okay. It was just bad."

"Like a teenager with no experience who isn't even trying to make you enjoy it?"

"Kind of like that, I guess," she said. "But he told me I should enjoy what he was doing, so I did."

"What did he mean by that?"

She shrugged. "Anything he did, I assume."

"He didn't clarify?"

"No. Should he have?"

"I guess not. Go on."

"He told me he wanted to see me naked. Then he told me I wanted to show me naked to him. So I did."

"And was that something that had always been true, too?"

"No, I-" She frowned, giving some thought to the question after an initial gut answer. "Yes? I don't know. You're confusing me."

"Right."

"That was the first time we fucked. It was good. I mean, I enjoy anything he does, so of course it was."

"Right." There was, this time, a certain contemptuous amusement in the woman's voice.

"Afterwards, he told me to rip the door off our quarters."

"And did you?"

"Of course. If I listen to him and do what he says, everything will be okay." She visibly hesitated on the tape. "He's going to talk to me again soon, right?"

"Well, ah... we'll have to see how quickly we can organise it. So you ripped the door down. You hadn't known you could do that before?"

"I was getting stronger, and I knew that, but I was kinda scared of it," she said. "I wasn't... like, I didn't want to fail and get in trouble."

"Of course not. What happened afterwards?"

"We went to find the person in charge, and Toby did something to them."

"The same thing he did to you?"

Magnifique was, again, quiet for a few moments. "I guess. And then she called the CEO and tricked him into coming out to the lab, and Toby did something to him."

"Again, the same thing he did to you?"

"I don't like thinking about it like that."

"That's fair. So what did he do?"

"He talked to him, and at the end the CEO understood that he had to do what Toby said, and that doing what Toby said would make everything better."

"And is that when you got the new outfit?"

"No. But Toby, or I guess he was calling himself Gaslight by then, did say he liked my hair in bunches, and he wanted me to put it up in bunches."

"All right."

"The costume came a bit later. And it wasn't just me."

"I know. By the time of the raid, both you and Graylight were wearing them."

"Oh, all the women were," Magnifique said carelessly. "They all understood that it was natural and sensible and the best outfit to show off our boobs and our asses."

"And is that something you want to do?"

She shifted in her chair, biting her lip again. "It makes everything okay when I do what Gaslight says," she said.

"Okay. Thank you."

"Can I see him soon?"

"Soon. But I need you to see the deprogrammer first."

"Will he mesmerise me?"

"Sorry, what?"

"Mesmerise me." Her eyes were suddenly alight with excitement. "Gaslight says that's what he did. He told me he wasn't going to for ages because he thought I could do the same thing, and then it turned out I was a big dumb girljock as far as my powers went-"

"His words?"

"Of course!" She beamed. "I'm so proud to be his big dumb girljock. Anyway, once he knew that he could mesmerise me safely. I wasn't going to be able to fight back. So he did it, and... it's the best feeling. Have you ever been mesmerised?"

The recording ended on that odd note, possibly to spare the interviewer any embarrassment.

*

There were other videos, and Zoe almost started one, but beforehand she picked up a pen to make her notes and she found herself sitting there for a long time, running everything through her head, to decide what was going to go down.

In the end, all she added was the single note, MegaWoman appears to have a control/submission fetish.

She felt more and more like she was getting a sense of where the story must lie, and sent another email to Watchdogs PR.

*

The Watchdogs PR response was polite, informal, but as noncommittal as could be.

The Watchdogs did not collect or publically disclose information about the sex lives or desires of its members. The Watchdogs was a sex-positive force, and would not denounce any legal activity between consenting adults, but it also did not speculate internally on individuals' proclivities.

Magnifique was indeed a previous identity of MegaWoman's, and the Watchdogs resented the implication that they were in some way hiding this information from the public. (When she read this line, Zoe went back to reread what she'd said about Magnifique, and couldn't see anything that suggested the Watchdogs had hidden anything; she'd just asked if they could confirm the link for her.)

With the exception of the veiled criticism, Zoe could have written the answer for them. It was almost exactly what she'd expected.

All the same, it was a step she had to go through. Partly this was so that the Watchdogs wouldn't claim that they hadn't been asked about anything when she finally published, and partly it was because, if there actually was a reasonable explanation, the odds were good that the PR team would offer it.

She drummed her pen repeatedly on the notepad she used, staring at her computer screen, thinking about what her next move might be.

She had, she thought, probably reached the limits of what she could do from her home desk. Bleakly, she got up, had a very late dinner, and trudged into the bedroom, where she went to sleep still wondering who to approach first.

Her dreams were fitful that night. So much of what she'd seen, reach, and listened to over the previous several days had revolved around a woman's mind, stripped bare, revealed, rewritten and remade, and the same woman's body, also stripped bare, revealed, repurposed and used and reused.

Zoe found her thoughts returning to some of those moments, over and over, dwelling sometimes on the admirable, stunning body that MegaWoman had developed alongside her metahuman powers, and sometimes on the glimpses she had seen of the woman under control, sometimes emptily vacant, sometimes happily, gloriously complicit in her own control.

And in spite of herself, Zoe found herself enjoying these thoughts, imagining what it must have been, using the fact that MegaWoman (or Magnifique, at one time) had been enjoying herself to construct an idea in her head of how the heroine might think.

Naturally empathetic, it was easy for Zoe to move from that to instead imagine herself in the same position. This she was still doing as she drifted off to sleep, and the dreams she remembered afterward were a mix of reconstructions, the evidence of MegaWoman's repeated control echoing through her mind ad she processed it, and of speculation.

How would it feel to not be in control of yourself? To go along with Gaslight, because anything he said was so convincing you believed it, or to submit to Doctrine because he had brought you into Doctrine Nation, or to find yourself refined and 'perfected' by the Perfectionist?

The last of those ideas seemed to carry greater weight for Zoe than the others had. If she understood it all correctly (and she recognised that she might not) what remained after the Perfectionist had worked on someone was a version of them who had left behind a lot of who they really were. Left behind the worries. Left behind the anxiety. The concern. The fear and the doubt.

What was left was blissful. It might not be a person the victim's friends would ever recognise, but it was so delighted to be in service, to have a purpose, that this didn't matter to it.

Zoe tried not to think too hard about what it meant that she could fantasise about giving up her free will to have a purpose. Instead, she dreamed.

*

She rose early and frustrated the following morning. A lengthy shower had her feeling at least somewhat less frustrated, but she was still... antsy.

The shape of the story was starting to fit in her head, but mostly on an instinctive level. She knew roughly what was there, but not, yet, how to present it. And even then, what she suspected was far beyond what she could prove.

She was always antsy at a point like this in her investigations. When sitting at home and researching was no longer enough. When she knew there was something out there to be found, but she hadn't found it yet.

She needed to speak to someone who'd witnessed MegaWoman during one of these bouts of odd behaviour, she knew. The problem was who.

A little research that morning saw her on a flight out of state, headed for Lincoln, Nebraska, where a former villain had, somewhat inexplicably, settled after serving out their sentence in the Nebraska State Penitentiary, one of the few midwestern prisons that had been upgraded to handle metahuman prisoners.

The former Doctor Highbrow, real name Erick Braun, seemed to have gone straight on his most recent release. Before that, he had enjoyed an idiosyncratic criminal career spanning thirty years, starting while he was still studying for his doctorate when he received his mental powers, the immediate fallout from which put the kibosh on his ever receiving a doctorate.

Like many whose psionic abilities allowed them to manipulate the minds of others, Doctor Highbrow had embarked on a life of crime almost immediately. Unlike most, his choice of targets showed no pattern, no routine, nothing that hinted at any one deeper motivation. It was as if he'd jumped from one whim to another; there was no fascination with government or with research, no great desire to best a particular nemesis. Highbrow had just headed up a variety of oddball schemes.

And shortly after MegaWoman joined the Watchdogs, Doctor Highbrow had been operating in Texas. One plot - one case, from the Watchdogs' perspective - and there seemed to be no reason to think he'd done anything else in the state; however, he had robbed a bank in Austin, and when Zoe had called one of her forerunners on her current beat, the man had dredged up a vague memory that MegaWoman had been the first into the back, and that despite this, Highbrow had escaped.

Zoe was pretty sure she had a witness, had someone who had seen MegaWoman in this state. And if he'd put her there himself... well, that didn't immediately rule him out as someone to fill in the blanks.

*

Braun worked now, it transpired, in a community art centre, manning a clay sculpting and pottery class. It was all but empty when Zoe arrived. She immediately presented her press card and saw a cagey uncertainty enter his eyes. She could tell why, could completely understand his reservations. Supervillains and the press came together only for kidnap plots or exposes, and he hadn't planned to kidnap anyone in years.

"It's about MegaWoman," she said, and while he was looking at her no less cautiously, there was a change, somewhere behind his eyes. She wished she could read him just a little more clearly, so that she could unravel that reaction. It was probably at the heart of what she needed to know.

"I did know her, once," he said.

"I know," she nodded. "A bank robbery gone wrong, right?"

"Kind of," he conceded. "The bank robbery was meant to be the start of something else." He gestured toward a bench at one side of the open space; it didn't escape Zoe's notice that the bench was not visible from the room door, so if anyone simply poked their head around the door, they wouldn't immediately see him talking to a journalist.

For the same reason, she nodded and went along with him. "You needed funding?" she asked, and he shook his head.

"I needed superhumans," he said, and sighed heavily. "How much of my career do you know?"

"Um." She chose her words carefully. "If you enjoy being notorious, my answer won't make you happy."

He waved a hand. "I'm through with all that now," he said. "I finally... Ah, you're not here about that. You're here about her."

"Right," she nodded.

"When I went into that bank," he said, "I was hoping that it'd be her that I caught, her or maybe Mysteque. I still don't understand what her powers actually are but there's so much ooomph behind them, and ooomph was what I needed."

"Wait - you wanted to catch one of them?"

"I said I needed superhumans. If you look at a lot of the crimes I got caught committing, they're all big, they're all showy, and they're all the kind of thing where right from the get-go you know that the cops aren't the right solution."

"That... might be the only thing they have in common," Zoe admitted.

"Yeah, probably. I adopted the same basic idea wherever I ended up, but the targets changed according to the city."

"So your plan was always: first, get a superhero under control?"

Braun gave her a sly grin and for the first time she could actually see the villain inside him. "Right. Step two was: get clear, let the heat die down."

Zoe nodded. "And step three... would depend on where you were?"

"You catch on quick," he said cheerfully. "My goal basically was to push my powers on to another level. I had this belief that I was the first of a new evolution for humanity. That I could push myself on, and then I could pull people up." He shrugged. "I'm here because now I know that was all bullshit, you get me?"

"I think so."

"To do that I wanted any kind of advanced bioscience I could find." He shook his head, smiling off into the distance, his earlier caginess forgotten. "You know, I can't even remember what I was looking for in my one trip to Texas? I would have had something picked up, but it's so long since I thought about that plan I've just completely forgotten it."

Zoe nodded, not wanting to speak and risk breaking the flow.

"I do remember... I would have needed muscle, to get at it. To carry it off somewhere and secure it. And that kind of muscle only really comes in superhuman form."

"And MegaWoman was just the first one to show up?"

"She was, but if she hadn't been, I'd have used whoever did show up to get her to me. She was the goal."

"Tell me about it."

*

He had looked the hypnotised teller straight in the eye, savouring how helpless she was under his psionic impact - because that helplessness, to Doctor Highbrow, had a... a flavour. A delicious flavour - and he had said "Hit the silent alarm."

"Yes, Doctor," she said. "Of course." He watched her hand slide from the top of the desk, along and to the side. Saw her finger flexed. Knew the alarm was in place.

It was, now, a waiting game as much as anything. He swept his eyes over the hostages, feeling their own helplessness, drinking it in. One or two of them, he thought, were quite attractive; the two men in Texans shirts that barely fitted them, substantially less so. One of them had a shirt that barely fitted due to the musculature under it; this was someone who clearly had put in a lot of time building his muscles, and he carried himself like someone who knew how to use them.

"Get comfortable, everyone," Braun told them, and watched as everyone did. He was amused to notice that some of the hostages' feelings of helplessness redoubled as they obeyed; they did not want to be comfortable. They wanted to fight him.

Well, he could understand that, even if it just seemed futile. They would have a sense of pride, when he was gone; they would tell themselves they they had never fully given in, and it would even come to mark a key part of their personality.

Braun wasn't willing to tell himself that he was improving them by giving them something to fight against and fail, but he was all the same perfectly happy for them to benefit from him, just so long as he benefitted more than anyone else.

The cops showed up first, but they stayed outside. He didn't even have to make them. He turned back to the teller and said "Open the door into the staff area."

"Yes, Doctor," she said. "Of course."

He made his way in there, partly to sell the illusion, partly because he knew there would be more comfortable seats there, and he found a desk with a computer that had been left logged in. In his experience, there always was one.

"Come in here with me," he told her, and looked for the next other staff member, a younger man who had intern written all over him. "You too."

"Yes, Doctor," they echoed. "Of course."

He opened up bits of the bank's software at random, clicked until he got a progress bar up on screen. Then he just waited.

At the time, Braun always told himself how calm he was being, how in-control he clearly felt. Looking back on moments like this in memory it was hard to focus on anything except for the nerves he'd felt.

He felt her presence before anything else made him aware of her; a general unease, or the sense of motion just out of the frame of his eye. Perhaps even the subtlest hint of the passage of air as she moved. Hard to say.

He raised one hand from the keyboard, one finger extended on the hand. "One moment, please," he said.

MegaWoman rested a hand on his chairback and then spun him around to face her, moving almost too fast to blink. He looked up, startled, but couldn't get his bearings before he met her eyes, at which point his psionic power activated and his eyes became an unseeing conduit, with her own eyes the other end of the conduit, receiving his power unseeing.

It only ever took heartbeats, and yet it always seemed so much longer. There was time enough to get a sense of the mind he was invading; without that, eh couldn't do it. He seemed to think faster, somehow, riffling through their minds with almost insolent ease.

What he found in MegaWoman surprised him. Usually he would create excitement, or sometimes desire, or he would suppress fear or independence; all ways of getting the same result.

Here, there was already desire and excitement and in plenty.

Braun wondered why, wondered how, but he didn't hesitate; he had only an eyeblink to do what needed to be done, after all. He found the sense of duty, the slim stem that blocked that desire and excitement from action, and uprooted it, planting it again in a new place. Her duty now was to him; her desire now was for him; her excitement now was to serve him.

He made no other changes, but all the same, he was aware of the entire landscape of her mind changing around him from his actions.

He blinked, breaking the connection and ending his invasion. Helplessness bubbled up in her mind, with a subtly different flavour, tinged by a genuine excitement he had not had to cultivate.

"I said, one moment," he said lightly, joking.

"I'm sorry, Doctor," she responded, bowing her head.

"Don't be."

"Very well, Doctor." She raised her head again, looking back at him, and Braun searched her eyes, looking for that delight and excitement he hadn't had to make.

"I'm going to need you soon," he told her. "In three days, at noon, you will go to the east entrance of Sam Houston Park - in your civilian clothes - and you will wait for me there. Understand?"

"Yes, Doctor," she answered. "Of course."

Anyone he gave commands responded with that phrase. It wasn't something he told them to do, or not consciously; his best bet was that his subconscious made some of the alterations for him, without him knowing. His secondary bet was that somehow this was just what people said.

He grinned, and he watched her smile; natural, open, and sunny, with no hesitation or doubt. No trace of resistance.

He could usually see it in their eyes, just a hint; a little resistance blended with a shade of confusion, as they wondered how it was that a moment of eye contact could change so much, could make things irrelevant and make other things matter more than life itself.

"In the time between now and then," he said, "people will ask you what happened between us, because it's important that you and I spend some time apart. You will only tell them about what happens after this point, nothing about these other orders. Is that understood?"

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

His smile got wider. "Pull your costume down and show me your tits," he ordered.

"Yes, Doctor," she said. "Of course."

One hand rose to the neckline of her costume and pulled it open. The other reached inside, scooping out that breast. A couple of adjustments had her breast sitting above the costume, which motion she followed on the other side. The tight material had the two ripe breasts held high and proud, forming a shelf between them.

Braun was not naive enough to think that would be comfortable for her, but that wasn't a concern he gave much time to. He knew she wouldn't either.

He took her tits in each hand and jiggled them. "Very nice," he said, over the coos and moans of pleasure that just being enjoyed by him was triggering throughout her brain.

"Thank you, Doctor."

Braun made a show of consulting the screen and the progress bar. "Not long now," he said. "Of course... your friends might get here soon, I suppose?"

"Yes, Doctor."

"Well, if they do, you'll hold them off."

"Yes, Doctor." He saw a happy lack of struggle in her eyes, and wondered what kind of heroine was so willing to fight her friends, so long as she was under control.

He gestured to the desk at which he was sat. "Walk into the edge," he told her.

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

She took two quick strides forward, bringing one thigh into direct contact with the table edge, then brought the other foot forward, standing so close that the desk's edge pressed back against her thighs, dimpling the skin.

"Bend forward," he told her.

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

She bent at the waist, her legs staying exactly where they had been, her body pressing forward against the desk, her arms by her side. One of her tits ended up in an in-tray, the other's weight caused the stapler it landed on to fire with an audible click.

... did she giggle at that, or was he imagining it?

He admired her ass now as he had been enjoying her breasts and the docile, obedient bliss in her eyes.

"Rip your costume open," he ordered. "Give me access."

"Yes, Doctor," she responded excitedly. "Of course." Her hands came back, fingers spread, and rested on her buttocks for a moment, before she gripped with fingertips, nails digging into the fabric, and pulled.

The costume was made of something resilient, as most supers' outfits were; all the same it was no match for her sheer strength, and it parted along the seam with a healthy ripping noise. Where her fingernails had dragged her skin was a paler white, tracing their paths.

She wriggled her feet further apart, keeping herself firmly pressed into the desk.

MegaWoman clearly expected exactly what was coming, and as he unbuckled his belt and stepped up, he was all too happy to oblige.

He rested his hands one each on the very top of a buttock and thrust inside, rewarded by a scandalised, delighted ooh from the heroine.

Something about them felt better, he'd learned. Maybe the same thing that meant their bodies were always so close to perfection. Or maybe there was simply something about having changed himself... He tried not to speculate, but it was always tempting.

He felt her helplessness and her excitement together and they weren't just delicious, they were nourishing. With them came other sensations of helplessness, the drip feed of response from the two bank employees he'd brought in for verisimilitude, who now had no choice but to watch the man who controlled their minds fuck the woman who had attempted to rescue him.

Braun smiled broadly, not just at how much he was enjoying MegaWoman, not just as the way his plans were continuing to come on to fruition, but also at the idea that was currently forming in his fertile mind.

He was a scientist at heart, albeit one who had abandoned the constraints of grant applications and ethics appeals. To his mind, he represented what a scientist should want to be.

"You two," he asked them, "are you single?"

"No, Doctor," the man said. "Unfortunately not, Doctor, I'm sorry," the woman added.

"Together?"

"No, Doctor."

"Hmm." He smiled. "Well, let's see." And he didn't say anything else for a few moments, turning back to MegaWoman, adjusting his pace, finding a rhythm he could sustain for longer. "You can ride me back, you know," he told her.

"May I, Doctor? Really?" God, the eager lust in her voice, in her mind...

"You may. You will."

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

And as her thighs tensed, as her hips bucked back and forth, as the power surrounding him squeezed with docile, desiring eagerness to be exactly what he wanted, he turned his attention back to the onlookers.

"Love the idea you're seeing here," he told them.

"Yes, Doctor," they chorused. "Of course."

"Fantasise about the idea of what you're seeing here," he ordered. "A supermind over a superbody. It's the way things should be. Correct?"

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

He was delighted to hear MegaWoman echo the watching chorus, and his cock twitched at it, which resulted in a delighted squeal from the heroine.

"You will become lovers," he told the others, "without abandoning your other lovers. But you will have these fetishes now. You," he said, meeting the man's eyes, allowing just a fraction of his power to flow backward along the feed of helpless desire, "will learn to hypnotise. And you," he turned his attention to the teller who had betrayed the bank's defences in the first place, "will be his first volunteer, and as he trains his mind to control yours, you will train your body to be worthy of control. You will hone your power and your beauty. Do you both understand?"

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

"Very good. Over time, you are to see if you can recruit your other lovers into this."

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

He smiled to himself, and turned his attention back to MegaWoman. He had their names, they were on the employee badges. He'd check on them a few months down the line. "MegaWoman?"

"Yes, Doctor?"

"You will only remember the conversation I had with your fellow puppets when you are alone."

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

He smiled, and his pace lost the slow, steady, sustainable rhythm. He fucked her with delight and passion and urgency, and she fucked with obedience and worship and need to please, and when he came in her and pulled out he left her sprawled on the desk.

Braun was presently surprised that he'd had time to fully enjoy her there. It had given him plenty more ideas for things he could do in future, when he got her back to himself in a day or two. After the fuss had died down, when the Watchdogs' guard would be back down.

He'd honestly expected that before he could finish, her team-

"YOU IN THERE. DOCTOR HIGHBROW."

Ah.

"WE HAVE THE PLACE SURROUNDED. YOU CAN'T CONTROL ALL OF US IN TIME."

He wasn't sure which of the Watchdogs that was, but he knew they were there, and in place.

"MegaWoman, you know what to do?" he told her absently.

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

As soon as she was out of the room he turned to the bank employees under his control. "Open the vault," he told the teller.

"Yes, Doctor. Of course."

And with that he made his way out.

*

Zoe sat in silence for a long while, thinking, after the story had been told.

"Go on," she said, at least.

"What to?"

"To - to three days later, of course," she said. "At noon. You said the thing we all missed was that every crime was to set up another, with a superhuman helping you. You were primed for just that. What happened?"

"I assume she showed up at Sam Houston Park," he said, "and she waited for a few hours, and then probably went home. There's only so much point in waiting for me if you're aware I've been arrested."

"Ohhh. So they caught you?"

"Right. I had an exit plan but I gambled on MegaWoman shutting them all down out of concern for her, and instead I got shut down for blocks away when Hailstorm froze my axle blocks solid. They picked me up and took me in."

Zoe had seen what looked like a flaw in the story. "You know there was no story for this whole thing, right? It was never reported?

"I could kind of see that if they lost, but they beat you. So why wouldn't they prosecute?"

Braun smirked. "The way they explained it to me, they would have just been far too embarrassed."

"Embarrassed?"

"Sure. Why do you think I had her stripped all but naked? There was camera footage, plus reporters show up for squeals on cases like that. I'll bet your own - you are from a Houston paper, right?"

"Right."

"You probably have some stills, buried and out of the main catalogue. Ready for if the Watchdogs ever hit a huge scandal while the public is against them."

"So... what happened?"

"Oh, they bought my silence. I saw MegaWoman about three weeks after I'd meant to, but it was in St Lucia. Paid for holiday, her under my influence, lasts for a month, and in return I never use mind control inside Texas state borders again."

*

Zoe sat there in silence for a long moment. "Sorry," she said at last. "Are you telling me that you were offered a trade by the Watchdogs to stay out of Texas?"

"I certainly was, and it wasn't like I wasn't in trouble if I tried to keep operations going in Texas." He shrugged. "So it wasn't exactly like I had a good negotiating position, or anything. But they knew I'd need an incentive, I think, and they knew exactly who to make that incentive."

"So... you had MegaWoman as a sex slave for a month?"

He made a gesture of his hands that said kind of yes but kind of no. "I think their idea was that obviously I'd just treat her as a sex slave. But, I mean, she still had her powers. I might not have been in Texas, and I didn't want to send her back across state lines just in case, but that didn't mean there weren't research institutes with relevant information for me. And the fact of the matter is very few institutions are built to withstand a determined superhuman."

"You're telling me you didn't use her for sex?"

"Lord, no. Of course I did. Tell me, if it's not too personal, are you straight, gay, bi?"

"I'm basically straight." It was the answer she always gave when people who came across as just a little bit too pervy asked about her sexuality. It wasn't exactly untrue; she was much more interested in men than women, but some people just had a certain quality to them.

He shrugged again. "Then maybe you get it, and maybe you don't, but I'm not ace, I'm not an angel, and I'm not going to turn down someone I want to fuck who genuinely wants me to fuck them."

"And do you think she did?"

"The woman is a full blown hypnofetishist," he answered. "I don't know if you'd ever heard of this before?"

"Sort of... I definitely got the impression she might be submissive. But what you just said - is that even a thing?"

He shrugged again. "It doesn't matter to me whether you believe it or not," he told her. "Some people, and when you have powers like mine you get to know the difference, get off on giving up control. I guess it's not much different than getting off on being tied up. That's not my bag, but when I look at it what I mostly see is someone who's given up control. And if they enjoy that, I don't think it's any weirder that someone might enjoy their mind being turned into a nice little melty slush while their body, not having to worry about ethics or aesthetics or really anything at all, just get on with the good stuff."

Zoe squinted dubiously at him. It wasn't so much the phrasing he was using, although she didn't particularly find that appealing, but the concept just felt like he was trying to justify himself. That was particularly strange, as everything about his testimony had seemed completely honest up until this point, without holding anything back.

He shrugged again. It was evidently a habit. "Look, I don't pretend that the things I did in my old life were the right way to be. I've done my time and during that time I was presented with a chance to do some thinking.

"You've already seen the results of that thinking. I just don't think the goals I have before were going to be well served by the strategy I had back then. I've tried enough now to know, I've thought enough about what I did to regret many of my actions, and unfortunately nobody is going to hire me to do the kind of research that I think needs to be done in any kind of legal fashion.

"So I'm out of that game. But those regrets I have? MegaWoman isn't one of them. I didn't make her do anything she wanted to fight back against, and I know she enjoyed everything I had her do during our exile. Now, if you want to believe that I'm making that up specifically, but everything else I said is true, you're allowed to do that. I kind of don't want you to name me in connection with your investigation anyway. After all, I had a deal with the Watchdogs."

"That's right," she said slowly. "Although I don't understand how it could ever be enforced in the courts..."

"I can't imagine they'd risk doing that, no. But that wasn't the point, really. If you ask me, the Watchdogs just don't think they have a good way to deal with mind controllers. So they came up with an alternative."

"If you don't think that they can deal with mind control that well, why would you have to go along with their deals?"

"Not have to. Choose to. And the answer to that is simple, whether I could get the better of them for a time or not there are enough Watchdogs that I'd end up in serious pain if I kept going up against them. So when they offer me a little bribe to make sure that I go bug other hero groups instead of them in future? Of course I'm going to take that deal."

"Hm." She frowned thoughtfully. "If I go public with this, they're going to know you won't back on the deal."

"I have a solution to that."

"You do?"

"Yes, but I'm going to regret it." He reached out and put his hand on hers. Shocked by the sudden physical contact from someone who had been carefully avoiding it up until that point, she looked up, startled, and her eyes met his.

She was still sat where she had been, but she was also tumbling, falling giddily head over heels, spinning and whirling and entirely lost. A strange, delicious, giddy euphoria bubbled up out of nowhere, as if happiness - no, not happiness; bliss - was soaking into every fold of her brain.

"You're not going to name me as a source," She heard him say dimly.

She blinked, and the sensation of falling was no longer there, but she still had the strange, delicious giddiness to her, as if being pulled along, out of her own control, just fast enough to be dizzy and off balance, and loving that sensation more than made any sense. "No, Doctor, of course not."

"You're not going to include me in deep background."

"No, Doctor, of course not."

"When the Watchdogs inevitably ask you, you're not going to mention me."

"No, Doctor, of course not."

"You can keep digging. But anything you learned here you attribute to someone else." He paused, and she had just opened her mouth to say yes when he continued again. She immediately fell silent, letting his voice wash over hers as the more important of the two. "In fact, you will tell them You got this from Professor Power."

"Yes, Doctor, of course."

Zoe felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The Doctor had told her what to do and what not to do, and all she had to do was follow his lead. It was wonderful.

"You know with absolute certainty that I have not used my power on you."

"Yes, Doctor, of course."

"Right, well, I think that's everything," he smiled. "I have a lot to atone for and I just added something else to the list. But I think these guys might have almost as much, and if Professor Power gets what's coming to him as well, my conscience is clear. Zoe?"

Zoe had no idea why he would think he had anything new to atone for. She set that puzzle aside, however, in order to deal with the fact that he was clearly about to ask her something. Her heart soared. She wanted so much to do whatever this man was about to ask of her. She would make sure that his wishes were carried out. There could be no other conclusion. "Yes, Doctor?"

"Blow this story wide open. Nail these assholes. Frankly, there's some good heroes out there but Texas deserves better."

"Yes, Doctor, of course." She rose automatically, and went to obey.

*

Zoe attempted to arrange an interview with Professor Power, but the warden of the prison in which he currently resided was not willing to allow him the chance to communicate with an outsider. It was, the warden assured her, difficult enough to allow him humane contact with others without him having the chance to overwhelm them with his power.

After that, she worked on the story for almost two days, writing and rewriting until she had the best draft she possibly could. Knowing that her editors would never publish this without giving the Watchdogs a chance to rebut, she did something she had never done before.

She published the story directly to her website and tweeted the link. Then she sat back and watched for reactions. She had to make sure that the story would nail those assholes. Nothing else was more important.

*

The piece went unnoticed for a couple of hours and Zoe was just trying to work out how she could bring it more attention when she suddenly saw her notifications start to spike. Having attracted maybe a half dozen or so likes in the first hour and twice that in the second, it finally got a retweet that brought it to wider attention.

The tweet was from Ms Lotus. No longer active, she had through the 80s and 90s been a quite prominent heroine On the national level. In the first half of the 80s, she had been making her name as a member of the Watchdogs, at that time a very new organisation.

@MsLotus

This explains so much. I've gone on record before about having holes in my memory from my time of the Watchdogs. Reading the account of what they've done to another one of their own 1/?

... finally makes me feel like I know what happened to me in that time. I didn't have her raw power. My combat skills were highly praised by the team on missions, but I lost more time off mission 2/?

... Than any other Watchdog and I remember almost none of it. But, quite often, the things I do remember are bound up with one mind control on villain or another. They cannot be allowed to get away with this. 3/3

Zoe sat there and reread the tweet chain several times with her mouth open. She had seen, it seemed, only some of the story. The Watchdogs hadn't developed a new problem, they'd had this solution for decades. After Miss Lotus left the team it would have been someone else - she would have to figure out who soon - before the job fell to MegaWoman.

Zoe watched the responses for another hour, interrupted more and more and by phone calls from colleagues in the industry. It amused her somewhat that her editor wasn't even in the first five to call.

When he did ring, he did so at volume. "You walk into a story like this one and you don't fucking bring it to us?"

"What would the Watchdogs have done?" She asked. "The news had to be out there. It had to get people's attention. This story has to nail those assholes. If they found out we were onto them before it got published they would have found a way to silence this."

Into the fuming silence that followed she said, "But I do have follow up stories that will need to be run, and you can bet that every single one of them will be in the Examiner."

He was only slightly mollified. "Well I guess that's the situation we're in. But we get quotes for a reason, so we we go through legal for a reason. Right now, you've acted alone and your vulnerable if you can't prove this. We're not going to be able to help you much on this first story. But if you bring in what you have now, and we get a supplemental out as soon as possible, we can get that through legal. At least stand by you on that."

Zoe knew enough to recognise when somebody was just bargaining. He wanted this to be an Examiner story, he wanted the sales figures and the praise that would come from attaching the newspaper to this story. That was already in jeopardy; aside from anything else, a lot of people would reach the conclusion that the only reason she'd initially published herself was because she didn't expect backing from the Examiner.

"There's just one thing I don't have clear," he said. "Does she know?"

Zoe had wondered this herself. On the one hand, Ms Lotus evidently had had no idea. On the other hand, Zoe had no idea whether Ms Lotus would have submitted willingly to so many controllers, but as she trusted Braun entirely, she was happy to accept that MegaWoman enjoyed being used in this way, and might or might not have been asked.

"Once I get a chance to speak to her, I'll be able to tell you," she said. "Couldn't risk it before first publication."

"Zoe, they're heroes. You're making it out like they're some kind of gang."

"Seems to me they've been breaking the law plenty enough to be treated like a gang," Zoe retorted, "And considering they started with Ms Lotus, the whole team has turned over since then. There's a heap of conspiracy charges to go around once this is proven."

Again, her editor was silent for a long time. Zoe figured she'd probably got through to him. Whether or not you could call the Watchdogs heroes now, even if they had saved the world a time or two, was probably going to be one of the big debate topics of the next several weeks.

God, she'd probably have to pause her social media before too long. A certain type of person was going to cancel her loudly just for following up on this kind of story.

She heard her doorbell ring. "Look, I gotta go," She told her editor. "Someone's at the door." She paused. "If you don't hear back from me and I disappear, give the cops the time of this call to start investigating."

He grunted agreement irritably and signed off. She was still slipping her phone back into her pocket as she walked into the hallway of her apartment and opened the front door.

MegaWoman was standing right in front of her. Her expression was unreadable.

*

"You must think I'm an absolute fool." They had gone through into the lounge. MegaWoman seemed distracted, frustrated. She was full of nervous energy, moving around awkwardly, pacing back and forth, fiddling with anything that had been left out in the room from games console controllers to Zoe's treasured old Rubik's Cube.

She wouldn't meet Zoe's eye, but Zoe wasn't entirely sure she'd have an easy time meeting the heroine's gaze if she had. "To tell the truth, I wasn't sure what to think about you."

It didn't take the heroine long to work out what she meant. "You think I signed up for this Knowingly?"

"I..." Zoe flushed.

MegaWoman turned back from the window to face her. "Well," she said, "The good news is, you aren't a million miles off." She dipped her hand into her costume's cleavage and came back out holding something, what looked like a tiny gadget, all in gleaming chrome, with a diminutive pistol grip. The whole thing looked like it was designed to be easily palmed if necessary.

"I went into this remembering how I'd felt before," she said. "You did your research, you know my history."

"Big dumb girljock," Zoe mumbled, without realising what she was saying, eyes locked on the barrel of the device. Evidently the phrase had stayed in her head more than she'd thought.

The super heroines eyelids fluttered for a moment. "Yes," she breathed. "A big... dumb..." With an obvious effort of will, MegaWoman snapped back to the present. "I wanted to do good, I still want to do good. But if someone reaches out with their minds to mine, I can't fight it but I also know I'm not going to want to fight it anyway.

"I don't know how the team figured me out. Maybe the same way you did. But I was approached and made an offer."

Her gaze was practically boring a hole into Zoe. The heroine's dad straight at her, her voice flat and uninfected, the words pouring out, the - pistol? Gadget? - still pointed directly at her. Zoe cleared her dry throat. "Excuse me, but that thing you're pointing at me, should I be frightened?"

MegaWoman continued talking, the words just spilling out. "They had someone already who they would offer out the way they offered me out. The way Ms Lotus had been used. She hadn't agreed to it, and she'd figured it out somehow, and she'd made them understand that this had to be voluntary."

She was just talking, on and on, in what felt like a prepared speech without emotion, without inflection, without listening to what Zoe had asked. Maybe she just felt need to confess, but maybe that was something compelled to it, maybe she was acting under orders. Zoe couldn't think of any sensible set of orders those would be, but she couldn't exactly rule it out.

"And it has been, but I guess that ends now. And that's all down to you." The emotion that have been lacking in her voice was suddenly shot all through it, the words vibrating with a frustrated fury.

Zoe slowly raised both hands placatingly. "Listen," she said, "Let's not do anything we're going to regret."

"I don't have many choices left," came the retort. "There's no way the team gets to continue the deal we had, not now. And now, everybody knows my weak spot. I don't have a good way back from that."

"There was only so much I could hide and still be able to run the story," Zoe said. "I'm sorry." And indeed, she had tried several different ways of framing the story which revealed as little as possible about why MegaWoman had been chosen.

"Doesn't matter," was the retort. "It is what it is. The only question is, why did he do it?" Her eyes narrowed. "Who are you working for?"

"You're not going to name me as a source."

"No, Doctor, of course not."

"You're not going to include me in deep background."

"No, Doctor, of course not."

"When the Watchdogs inevitably ask you, you're not going to mention me."

"No, Doctor, of course not."

"You can keep digging. But anything you learned here you attribute to someone else. In fact, you will tell them You got this from Professor Power."

"Yes, Doctor, of course."

The words echoed through her head, which was strange, because Braun definitely hadn't used his power on her. "Professor Power," she answered, and if MegaWoman noticed that there was less nervousness in her voice, that the syllables escaped her lips with a perfectly rhythmic cadence, she gave no sign of it.

Professor Power was currently incarcerated, but that didn't mean that people wouldn't see this as his attack from within the system.

MegaWoman's eyes fluttered again, The tension went out of her stance, and to the focus and concentration that had been clear in every part of her being disappeared into glossiness. She raised her free hand to her ear and said "It was Professor Power, Sir."

Zoe's eyes widened. So she was under control right at that moment. Maybe she'd been loans to a villain but it seemed just as likely, now that someone connected with the Watchdogs had hold of her puppet strings.

"Yes, Sir," she answered the voice in her ear. "How should I proceed here?"

Zoe tensed. Her eyes measured the distance to the door. It was no good; There was no way she'd get there in time, even if the heroine wasn't perfectly capable of running her down afterwards in seconds.

"Yes, Sir." MegaWoman fired the tiny pistol and a bright pink flare of light enveloped Zoe. She felt her eyes rolling up in her head as her knees buckled and her joints went limp. She was out before her body hit the floor.

*

She was face down on a bed, hands behind her back tied to feet bent back almost to her ass, entirely hogtied. The bedding didn't have the scent of her preferred laundry powder, making her even more certain she had been moved. She moaned through what turned out to be a gag and immediately afterwards she heard an electronic click from between her thighs. Moments later, she discovered that she had been placed lying on a vibrator, its head nestled against her pussy through her jeans.

Her initial moan became a squeak, but immediately afterwards someone was on top of her, holding her down, preventing her from rolling off the vibe and even, with a hand on one buttock, grinding her more intensely against it. The other hand found Zoe's hair, lifting her head up and for a second a motel room swam into focus, only to be lost entirely when her eyes took in the TV, which strobed with a pink and green swirling spiral. Zoe's eyes were immediately locked to the spiral, and her peripheral vision fell away until it was all she could see.

It had to be MegaWoman she thought. The power and the unhesitating willingness to do this all said that she was under control and dealing with Zoe as she had been ordered to. That also meant there was no way that someone could break her grip. So what could she do?

She was trying to work out what options she had But every thought process seemed to fall to shreds before it could complete. It was like her thoughts were trying to find their way out of a maze that was also the spiral in front of her and they simply couldn't do it. She kept finding herself back at the centre of the spiral with another thought in fragments, and almost forgotten already. She was vaguely aware that she had started to hump the vibrator with a passion and enthusiasm that surprised her.

She could feel drool emerging around the edges of her gag and running down her chin, she was desperately grinding against the vibrator, she seems to be trapped in the spiral. That was all she knew.

"Do you hear me, Zoe?"

In answer, she moaned through her gag. The hand which had been pressing her against the vibrator released her, reaching up to unsnap the gag from its fastening just below her ears.

"Do you understand me, Zoe?"

"Yuh," She said, and then tried again. "Yeah."

"Who knows about your other research?"

"My editor."

"Are they expecting to hear from you?"

"Yes," she answered, the precaution she had taken against being interfered with in some way lost somewhere else in the spiral.

"Well done for telling me," MegaWoman said. It was strange, Zoe thought, that they both seemed to speak in the same empty, vacant way. All the same, the praise filled her with a warmth that she wanted to feel again and again. "Are you happy you told me?"

Zoe tried to decide, but her attempt was lost in the spiral. She discovered the answer when she heard her own voice say "Yes, Ma'am."

So she was happy, she told herself.

"What do you think about being under control? You love it, don't you?"

"Yes, I love it, Ma'am," she answered, and there was no one in the room who could tell that she did so in a monotone.

"Good. What would you need to do to minimise suspicion before you disappeared?"

Another complicated question, too complicated for someone who couldn't find a thought in the spiral that trapped her. Yet she was aware that her mouth was answering in extensive detail.

*

The pair stood side by side on a raised, bare wooden stage. They were white ankle socks, white Nikes, white G-string panties, and both of them had the number 17 daubed over their bare breasts in white body paint, symbolising that they were lot number 17. Both had their heels together, their hands straight down with fingertips touching their thighs, their heads upright staring out over the top of their audience, glassily unseeing.

They were a matched lot to be sold together at auction in Berlin. Far enough away from the revelations about one of them and the fuss stirred up by the other for their sale to be, if not exactly unnoticed, relatively subtle.

Zoe was aware that the person who had submitted them both for auction considered this vengeance. That it was the last thing they had been able to do before Watchdogs HQ was stormed by the Eagles, a federal team, and the mastermind was arrested and detained for trial. A story had run in the Houston Examiner under the byline of Jay Cliffe which revealed this mastermind to be Harvey Livingston, who had bankrolled the Watchdogs since their founding and who now stood unveiled as The Metal Patriot, who have been the first leader of the team.

Patriot himself had been mind controlled twice in the first six months of the team's existence, which Cliffe speculated may have led to the team's creation of the policy. They had found a number of devices designed to control or influence minds in Livingston's home.

Zoe was aware that her sale alongside MegaWoman was supposed to be vengeance. She simply did not understand this as she loved being under control.