The following is a work of fiction intended for adult entertainment. The author hereby declares it a work of public domain, free for use in whole or in part. Rook.

 

“ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST”

If you look up into the sky, you won’t see any red and blue super man flash by, and you can thank your governments for that. There is a reason that super heroes do not exist, and it isn’t a lack of super natural beings, it’s your local friendly elected government official and all he surveys. It’s me and you, well you anyway. Think about it. What would be the very first thing ol’ super man would do once he put on the cape and tights? Do you think he would rush out and stop a bank robbery? Maybe if one were happening on his way to the White House to kick the Presidents ass. You see he would look around him and see, just like us, that most of the evil of the world isn’t done by a guy with a gun in a ski mask. It’s done by large faceless corporations and governments. He would see that big business and governments do most of the harm in the world and are structured as such as to do it and get away with doing it by enforcing that harm as laws. He would see that these labyrinths of power structures pull evil into them like giant magnates where that evil then dwells and thrives undeterred by the surface illusions of justice they waddle behind. He would realize for every small crushed child lying naked and dying in the street, or family of slaves impoverished in their hovels of millions, their suffering and plight stems entirely from the aggressive greed of their own governments and parasitical large corporations raping the glut of their diminishing resources. That the few are crushing the many without any qualms or respite or penalty for such wicked malice. And being a true super hero he would attack those institutions doing so much wrong, and they would instantly label him a villain, a monster, a terrorist. And he wouldn’t be a super hero anymore. This is why there are no super heroes in the world, the world, by your silent consent, has outlawed them.

That said I do not want anyone to think I am trying to excuse my own chosen profession, nor trying to eradicate the baser aspects of my being, behind a cloud of trivial double talk or subterfuge, I am not a politician after all. I am no ‘senator’, which I believe is Greek for ‘professional liar’. No, I am a super-villain by choice and trade, and I am a damn good one at that!

I was born, many times, the first time to a small huddling frigid homeless refugee mother in the Ukraine. That name and time is lost to me and vapid history. I can look up and tell you what color the King of England’s piss was two hundred years ago, but my mothers name and my own birth were apparently not deemed so valuable to the merchants of memory. I was re-named three times before I was estimated to be four years of age, my birth date of course being guess work and my malnourished state creating some difficulty for the doctors to pin down my age with anything bordering on certainty, and I was re-christened again at the age of seven-ish. This one stuck, for awhile until I stripped it away by my own choosing, but it lingered until then, invulnerable to the cold dead ogre hands of state and nations. For I had been officially adopted by the Synclare family, and like a shuffled around kitten re-titled: ‘Sarah Ashley Synclare’, by the family’s own dottering patriarch, Sebastian Synclare.

Since then I have had numerous names, aliases they are often called on police blotter spread sheets. The one most people know me by is, Sarah Syn Ash. The eccentric owner of The Ash Corporation, one of the leading bio-tech companies lingering on the fringe of privet and government enterprise. Sebastian Synclare had been a cold miserly scientist of great intellect and courage and yes, honor, and he had dwindled his life away in the service of the lash of his governments less than noble designs, and this had shattered him as a man and he died in a twisted mockery of an empty shell to his weeping ambitions. Much like a great ocean liner sunk to the fouler depths twists upon its empty holds until its barnacled spine is corkscrewed into a slag heap of indeterminable shambles of its once noble design.

From that shock of white hair and nicotine stained man, I learned pride and a great hunger for solving the riddles of nature and an aptitude to duck where he had stood bold and been blasted into oblivion. I received some of the best schooling from his erratic indifferent tutelage by his side underneath the dead faceless clocks of night and upon his passing his overlords sought me out to take up his fallen place. But I fled to foreign lands and re-emerged as ‘Sarah Syn Ash’ and would have no doubt passed way my own meager existence in the wings of the worlds stage, had it not been for one late night accident in my makeshift lab in the bowels of my isolated farm house which transformed me utterly and yet left no mark of sign upon me or my mind.

I was scarcely eighteen at the time, but the chemical bath accident infused me with super powers beyond mortal keen, and unlike the comic book dunces of fiction, I readily set about to make quiet use of my new won powers to further my own security in the unraveling world about me. And bit by bit, as I built my new empire nest of fortune during the bleak daylight hours, I also began to hew out my bloody empire of the night as well. Against the world governments who controlled that lunar pitch of power I plundered and raided and established my invisible beach heads, until by a new name I also became known as in the hushed throttled corridors of brooding greed. Great cabals of paunchy jowl men lowered their slicked heads and droned their well manicured nails upon the hundred year old walnut tables glimmering before them and pursed their brandy cracked lips and muttered my secret night name with growing irritation as if they could summon me by the power of incantation and fix me in a circle of salt and destroy me utterly with a stare. I was a wrist rash to some of them, a pie gobbler to others, an indecent indiscretion that slipped in and out of their bulky meanderings in their privileged pastures they had made of a once great world and made off with their prized plumbs before they could scent my arrival. I was a sheep amongst wolves who ate them alive. And they hated me for it and tried desperately to capture me and murder me in my sleep and throw the fortunes of generational upper class wealth-full hate upon me, but I came and went with ease and they howled at shadows learning nothing as time chocked them by degrees. But despite my cautions in my chevachee’s against the night owls watches, I found it both prudent and exciting to lessen my risk to my daytime fortunes of my Ash Corporation, and the some what comfortable life it had endeavored for Sarah Syn Ash, by insulating myself from my nocturnal campaigns through more than just caution and subterfuge, but cloaked myself in the seeming outlandish costume of the cliché comic book super villains whom in image I rapidly adorned one of my privet subterranean rooms under my new converted farm house and which I dubbed my ‘lair’.

Still even this could and would have passed through the decades slow march until death had claimed me or the snare of some poacher hanged me limpid in the marble halls, but for a rather simple oversight upon my part that shook me to the marrow and tripped me up and out from the heavy brocaded shadows and out into the gaudy spotlights of the center stage its self. So instead of my slow build of day and night into a comfortable niche in the ever shifting sands of the world stage, I found my self one late November night just two days shy of my twentieth birthday upon the cusp of destiny and about to be shoved violently into realms beyond my immediate desire or readiness, and all of this without a hint of warning of what was about to come.

There was a full moon, it hung tired and thin in a steel sky of battered moans of a harsh biting wind that lingered at the few trace snow piles angled into the concrete folds of the open roof of the parking garage. I checked my wrist computer one last time and then disconnected myself from the nearly invisible small one woman dirigible fighting the cross winds above me. The tether line zipped up into the belly of the small craft and its electronic brain slid the twenty foot crescent silently up into less hostile strata to await my call. The erratic snow that belched down in twists of wind felt like plastic pellets upon my exposed flesh and I pulled my great cape about me and moved cautiously to the lone vehicle parked upon the exposed lot of the four story structure. It was a non-descript rusted cargo van which I had driven there and left three days before and it was encased in a spider web of snow and ice that sheeted its surface. I unlocked the back door of the delivery van and with some help struggle broke the seal of ice and frost and managed to raise the sliding door wide enough to squeeze into the ice box of darkness and slam the door shut behind me. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark until I could see the white gossamer of my breath, and then I searched and found the hidden release catch for the false back. With an audible snap the fake three dimensional duck blind of an empty van swung up and I slipped under it and quickly closed it behind me. I was now in a tight little six by eight foot cocoon of rapidly blinking lights and hive of high tech electrical equipment that hummed and buzzed around me. There was little choice but plop into the empty seat as there was little room to move in the cramped electronic shell of open circuitry and screens.

I slid into the high backed black leather chair forgetting to place my cape down upon it before I did so and the shock of cold leather against my nearly naked ass sent my teeth chattering beneath my mask! My gauntlet gloved hands raced over the key boards and controls around me and in little time my surveillance trap had brought up everything it had managed to gather over the past three days from its lonely icy perch. The van’s hidden shotgun microphones and telescoping thermal cameras had spent the last three days and nights focusing its multi-million dollar NASA stolen equipment across the street from the parking garage onto the tenth floor of the nearby Benton Building, where the Malicester Corporation maintained some unofficial offices. As I studied the log tapes the equipment had made, I smiled despite the cold of the crypt like confines of the dark surveillance van as my suspicions seemed justified as to the targets viability for further incursion. I uploaded the relevant information into my wrist computer and then made my way back out of the van. The wind had picked up, but it felt surprisingly good after the cramped confines of the small vehicle and as I blinked through the cold fostered tears beading my face mask, I made purposefully to the edge of the parking garage four reinforced wall rim and looking over my surroundings one last time, pulled myself up upon the icy lip of the low wall and felt the tug of wind and gravity swirl my heavy cape about my straddled legs.

Using the dirigible in such torments of weather to gain access to the thirty story building a four lane down town street away from me would be almost suicidal and I shouldered the large heavy squat gun I had brought with me from the back of the hidden niche of the van. It made a slight puff of a report and the recoil nearly sent me plunging to my death, but the cable spelunking gun easily struck its mark and sunk the steel tipped spike into the stone work encasing the glass windows of the Malicester offices with reassuring ease.

I shot the second steel spike into the concrete of the parking garage roof and tossed the heavy riffle behind me into the wall’s ecliptic shadow. I slipped the heavy electric pulley motor onto the semi slack cable now connecting the roof of the parking garage to the tenth floor of the high rise office building and with my gloved wrists through the straps I thumbed the control of the awakened whirling gizmo which sent me contorting through space at a rapid clip.

Not exactly my most favorite means of gaining entry to an opponents security clad domicile but the dull simplicity of it made it more successful than several of the more elaborate means I had used in the past. Soon I found myself with hart in throat and arm wrenching discomfort dangling before the large sealed windows of the Malicester offices. The wind shear was rather intense and I wasted little time in niceties of the moment and set a small shape charge on the thick triple pane of reinforced glass glittering in the icy cold before me. The explosive was of my own manufacture and it popped in an almost silent puff of air a small almost perfect round aperture in the glass of about three feet in diameter. I wiggled through the breach and disconnected the electric pulley from the cable and set it down on the floor at my feet. The blinds had been drawn aside and I left them as such so the occasional influx of the gusts from outside wouldn’t send them scampering about and draw any unlikely passersby’s attention from the cold three a.m. street ten stories below.

There were six offices and three large storage rooms belonging to the Malicester Corporate holdings upon the quarter of the tenth floor that they were renting, and the likelihood that I had blundered into the very room I needed for success was fairly unlikely. As it was I found the office I now stood in to be exactly as I had imagined from the tapes of my surveillance; small, non-descript, paper pusher middling management. Not what I was wanting, but exactly what I had expected. I made no effort to search the place and made my way instantly over to the frosted glass door partitioning off the office from the central hallway that according to both my surveillance equipment and the lifted blue prints of the building form the city hall computer I had hacked, connected the entire Malicester rented rooms in a large ‘U’ shape hall ending abruptly to two doors leading into the central hall of the tenth floors elevator banks and connecting to other tenements offices as well.

I was surprised to find the door locked in such a manner that it did not allow access from the inside to the outer hallway. It required a key, to which I placed the palm of my computer wrist glove on the swipe pad combination lock and in a second the electric swipe card lock of the door over rid its need for a physical key and clicked open. I knew the hallways beyond were under the scrutiny of two surveillance cameras, each positioned above the door leading out into the main hallway and the elevators banks contained therein. The office I was now exiting was situated in the hallow of the ‘U’ shaped bend and thus not in the line of sight of the two cameras. Since the only way out of the Malicester section of the Benton Building was through one of the two doors leading to the elevators the security staff had naturally felt it cost effective prudent to not bother with placing any more security cameras than the two covering hallway exits. I happily agreed with their blind stupid greed.

While the office had been dark, the outer hallway I now found myself peering into was well lit by over head florescent tubes hidden in the false ceiling of all milky white semi opaque plastic tiles. There were two doors on either side of the office door I now closed behind me and no additional doors in my immediate line of sight. I knew one of the doors lead to a small janitors closet whose duct work was too small to allow me any further access of any value, and that the other door was to an equally unpromising adjacent office not much different than the one I had forced my entry into from the outside winter night.

In truth, the most promising location for what I sought was the large storage rooms, whose steel doors were around either corner to my left or right and who were under the unblinking eye of the security cameras. But rather than stride boldly around the corner and run the gamble of some hack security guard spying me on some rotating split screen security panel before I could force the lock of the door to the storage room. Or worse that some motion detector alarm might be situated under each camera’s small mounting (as I knew to be the case on some of the office floors) and fling an immediate warning to the guard station in the lobby. I instead used a near by planter for a perch and lifted one of the false ceiling tiles up and out of the way. I disconnected part of my wrist computer and sent the mobile surveillance spider over the glass tiles and through the web work of steel wires and ceiling supports. It followed my remote commands and I guided it to the near by false ceiling of one of the storage rooms on the other side of the wall before me. There I peered through its electronic eye through the smoky glass ceiling tiles looking for motion detectors or cameras situated inside the storage room that Malicester Corporation may have taken upon themselves to install of their own expense and finally found one such camera pointed downwards above a large section of plastic storage totes and card board boxes in one of the corners of a storage room. I set my little spider to work on the simple little security camera and it soon had a feed back loop of the same ten second image reeling through its circuits. This meant I could now access the storage room with its contents without appearing on the Malicester personal data bank, but it tied up my little spider and meant I couldn’t do the same to one of the Benton Building camera’s still guarding the hallway’s approach to the outer door. This required I adjust my plans, as I had originally thought to use the spider in just such a manner on one or the other of the hallway security cameras, but now I would have to leave it on the camera that was no doubt pointing at exactly what I was looking for as readily as some bleach bone pirate skeleton of yore.

I dug out another of my shape charges and set it upon the sheet rock and plaster board wall before me, but before I detonated the charge, I peered at the wall with my thermal heat vision. This was but one of my new super powers and it was far more reliable for picking out living organisms than the spider, which was best at finding electronic hidden surveillance, or the reliability of the distant spying NASA cameras trying to discern wither anybody was still present in the Malicester rooms from hundreds of yards away and through several feet of stone and steel office building. My thermal vision picked up no pulsing shapes of living tissue moving about in the room beyond the wall in front of me, and I keyed the charge and moved back to safety.

The hole silently blasted into the next room was only two feet in diameter this time and I had to wiggle and squirm to make my way through the smooth bore opening. Inside the room I found nothing unusual and quickly made my way to the inner connecting door that lead to the next storage room beyond and where my little spider held the security camera there in a blind loop. The door was not of steel construction as the outer doors to the storage rooms were, nor did it posses an electronic lock as they did. Instead, it housed a simple bolt and key lock nestled on a plywood door, which I snapped open with a simple thrust booted snap kick. The door flung open and I entered the smaller secondary room and made my way quickly to the area immediately under my spider and the captured surveillance camera in its clutches.

Here indeed I did find the hard copy files I sought and quickly ran them under my wrist computers built in camera scanner, uploading them thus to an electronic file. I was busy working rapidly to finish my task when I caught the faint shuffle of a footfall of some one approaching . There was the faint wall muffled click of one of the main security doors to the elevator hallway clicking shut, (I had not heard the door open, nor the elevator door as well!) in the wake of the approaching person. I immediately used my thermal vision on the thin sheet rock wall separating myself and the security camera hallway down which the figure moved. The red blurry image of a male pulsed along the hallway. Not a guard from the way he was apparently reading some papers as he absently shuffled along. It was nearing five am and the early bird workers would be arriving now. My surveillance tapes in the van though had not shown any such early arrivals to the Malicester rooms, the first arrival was usually a female around six-thirty. I frowned at the important male and hoped for convenience sake he would have no reason to enter the storage rooms and instead enter any office other than the one I had blasted a hole through the window. The figure did enter one of the offices lining the security camera hallway and I went back to work to finish my task as rapidly as possible.

I had just managed to vacate the storage room and recall my spider to my wrist as I exited out the hole in the hallway wall, when as I reached for the door knob of the office I had used for my entrance to the tenth floor of the Benton Building, the lone male sauntered around the corner and nearly slammed into me. Before he could recover from his initial shock at seeing me, I reached out my left gloved hand, the forefinger and thumb and palm of which are fingerless of leather and with them I touched my naked skin to his naked skin and whispered. “Incinerate.”

My primary super power and by which I am named for by the few beginning to piece together my super villain identity, is the power to incinerate anything I touch. For which I am called, “Synerate.” It is not easy, I have to be in flesh contact with what I want to reduce to a pile of ashes. And the act it’s self requires a sort of mental mind game to accomplish. For example, to incinerate a humane, I touch that person flesh to flesh and then I in my mind I begin to run a gauntlet of right angle turns until I complete the course and then I connect the dots and ‘poof’ a pile of ashes falls to the floor before me. For a man there is twenty right angles, for a woman there is fifty, it never changes. Inanimate objects have fewer, but it’s harder to cover the distance between the right angle points. For example a car has four, but in the single instant it arose in which I found myself needing to destroy said vehicle it took me twenty minutes of body shaking sweat drenching agonizing minutes to turn those four corners within that automobile and incinerate it under my hand. Living objects are much easier, a horse has fifteen points and takes four minutes, a cat has eleven points and takes two minutes, a dog has seven and takes thirty seconds. The more often I incinerate a member of a species the easier and faster it is for me to work out the slight variations of each ones inner right angle mappings, so that I sort of know where I am going in that inner race and not running blind so to speak, for some reason this makes a difference though I remain unsure why? The man before me took less than a second of my touch to race my mind through the right angle maze of his twenty points and then breathed upon them all at once, reducing him in a micro flash to a small pile of char and dust at my feet. I have incinerated hundreds of men, but only one horse. I told you that I was evil.

Back at my converted farm house several miles in the rugged remote country side, I slipped from the barn in time to watch the automated process of my dirigible being dragged rear end downward into the large corn silo near by and then being sealed in shut by the corn silo dome wheezing and locking into place. The early gray morning promised a bitter snow storm building upon the low flat horizon of leafless woods that ringed my property for miles. I pulled my cape about me and made for the root cellar doors near the back of the two story gothic farm house and flung them open with a yank of a secret lever disguised as a hunk of wood in the wood pile lying next to the house. I grabbed some of the seasoned limbs brushing off a sluggish spider and a clump of dirty frozen sod and entered down the dark moldering stone steps that lead under the one hundred year old structure. The root cellar was small and cramped with piles of rubbish but another secret lever revealed yet another descending stair and this one of spiraling iron lead me rapidly down into my secret laboratory and lair. I tossed the scraps of wood into the potbelly stove in the center of the makeshift room of modern and ancient mysterious artifacts and quickly kindled up a nice warming fire. I felt it was important to limit my electric use as the computers put my wind turbines and batteries to the task as it was, and I have always enjoyed a good roaring fire!

I set my wrist computer upon a near by work bench and filled and lit a kerosene lamp, trimming the wick smartly and placing the light next to the humming computer screen monitors. I began the upload of my computer wrist into my main data bank and shuffled off to put a kettle on for some nice tea, as I felt a slight tickle in my throat and I had no time for dealing with a cold, though with honesty I have to admit that since my accident three years back I had never had a sick day again! And I wondered if my slightly increased metabolism and higher body temperature had some reasoning effect upon that?

The up load completed I set my wrist computer into its charging slot and began to mull over the data that flooded over my monitor screens as I let my tea steep. Yawning over the chaotic displays and realizing that there was a cipher being used to encrypt the more important works, I let the computer take a crack at deciphering the code before I would do it. Using the moment to remove my super villain costume and put it onto its clothing dummy in its lighted glass cylinder.

I took great pride in the craftsmanship of my super villains costume. For while I possessed many great abilities and talents, being a natural seamstress had not been one of them and yet the creation I now removed and placed upon its perch of honor was utterly perfect. There was the great cape its self with its high swept up collar and its black outer vinyl with its crushed vibrant red velvet interior. The great pair of vinyl gauntlet gloves I wore, that flared up at my elbow and were ridged in a serrated increasing crest of flame like projections upon there outer seam.

There were my boots that rode all the way up my long supple legs to my full buttocks. Tight and shinny with stiletto heels and more riding sea rolls of crescent accents sweeping up the back seam of both boots.

There was the skin tight single piece body suit that covered little and in its slightly semi-transparent state, revealed all that it did cover to the audacious eye. The material was a living pitch of smoky black and red as were the gloves and boots and so swirled and shimmered in the light like a liquid gold puddle upon a molten living lava flow.

And the great black and red mask which I carefully removed from its actors adhesive bond from my sweet innocent face, was of a flaring eye mask coupled with a pair of great black horns that spiraled at my temples when in place. I placed the mask on the dummies blank face and marveled at my outfit. One of the things the comic book images adorning my walls had taught me is that super heroes prosper because they have secret identities and super villains fail because they don’t. I had created my own duality of identity and as long as I remained cautious and low key in my twin natures, I would continue to easily outwit and survive my adversaries.

I sipped at my tea, hmmm, a slight mint taste. I smiled and tossing a silk dressing gown over my thin large busted long limbed figure and pulling my raven black hair into a ponytail that whipped at the upper arcs of my ample firm ass, I keyed off the computers befuddled brilliant top of the line government stolen de-coding program and slipped into the buttery leather captains chair to let genius take its shot.

I had always thought the stealth dirigible to be more of a summer outing craft and with the winter storm hitting fast and furious, I had opted to leave the fast and agile but cross wind plagued craft in its secret mooring harbor inside the corn silo and make due with the Lancelot. The Lancelot was a land hover craft with decent speed (topping out at two hundred and thirty miles per hour) and nice handling being able to turn 360 degrees upon its axis even at top speed and came complete with a gyroscopic cock pit which often proved necessary as the Lancelot’s entire skin was covered in jet vents and as such had no real top or bottom or front or back just a large squishy black semi-mirrored surface that stretched by gravities pull as it raced along. The Lancelot’s one real draw back was that it really needed a power source far more reliable and potent than its chemical battery packs, but until I could either get my gloved hands upon some radioactive isotopes or split some atoms at my own convenience, I would have to make due with the Lancelot’s limited range of less than fourteen hours at full power drain. Not something I was comfortable with considering my farm was sixty miles outside of the sprawling metropolises most far reaching suburbs!

The great trouble with any kind of land craft is stealth versus movability in lee of facing a traffic jam during a police chase. I felt the Lancelot’s speed and small size (it was not much larger, though quiet a bit heavier, than a full sized hog motorcycle) would serve me well in what I knew would be the heavy traffic of the down town area that rimmed the commercial wharf district where I was heading at eleven pm that night. Latter, I would have wished I had brought my battle tank with its ability to simply crush bumper to bumper cars under its massive steel treads. But as it was, I took the Lancelot’. A life lesson learned here; when going into known danger, extreme fire power outweighs fast and stealthy almost every time!

I was able to maneuver through the aforementioned grid lock that a snow storm on a winter weekend always seems to produce no mater how late the hour, by speeding along the sidewalk and tossing screaming pedestrians aside like sea foam before my racing prowl. But it naturally sent shrieking police calls to the area and even though I had managed to duck into a nice hiding place through a ripped piece of chain link fence and hide the Lancelot between two rusted hulks of abandoned junk cars. I was indeed most fortunate that the craft did not leave any kind of lingering tracks in the piling swirling snow that the storm was now rapidly dumping upon the city. For several agitated squad cars slid about the nearly deserted streets of the river front warehouses where I had plunged my craft into the shadows and they continued to linger as I slumped out of the humming machine and proceeded reluctantly on foot through the drifting knee high snow.

With my cape clutched about me in face of the driving sleeting hissing snow, and thankful that my supernatural body temperature kept me quiet warm despite the howling storm, I leaned against the shoving winds and pushed myself forward until I had reached the large steel and tin warehouse I was seeking. Keeping a wary eye out for the stalking squad cars slipping side ways through the slushy abandoned intersections, as I found an appropriate seam in the construction of the metal siding and slipping a cupped tube off the low slung hip belt I wore that night, I pressed the container to the ice encrusted steel rivets and depressed its trigger. The little canister discharged some of its chemical paste, and I quickly repeated the process upon a dozen or so other rivet heads as the swirling biting air filled with an acidic taint. I carefully lifted off the tin siding, my chemical accident three years ago having giving me great strength over which I had accented this with increasing experiments until I could easily out lift four strong men, and pealed back the corrugated tin until I could squeeze inside the pole barn structure. Inside I pulled the galvanized tin back into place and used the same chemical from the small cylinder which had melted the rivet heads, to now tack the sheet into place against the driving wind seeking to tare the sheet free and expose my secret point of entry to some passing police car. I had learned long ago that nature was not to be trusted and that she always would work against you unless you kept her well bridled and under a bloody lash!

My entrance secured against mother nature’s prying mischief I peered about my dim surroundings with my thermal vision. It showed no living creature of warm blood, except for dozens of large rats and several birds and bats. I began to cautiously inch my way from the open wall to the maze of palettes crates wrapped in black heavy mill plastic. While thermal vision was nice for seeing living silhouettes of potential enemies even through walls, it was of little to no use in seeing in the dark of a giant warehouse full of pallets of boxes as my several stumbling shin barks of minor injuries could attest. Still, I made no move to unclip the small powerful battery hand lantern from my hip belt, until I had assured myself that no one else was within the warehouse with me. After all, my thermal vision could only see through thin walls up close and was as limited by distance as my normal sight was. Several large pallets of wooden crates could easily hide a lone figure from me even though they were only a few yards away. Eventually I had wandered around long enough to convince myself that no one else was present and that all the security equipment was keyed off of the main over head garage doors and the several smaller sliding doors and the few fire exit doors. There seemed no cameras located in the warehouse its self that had any interest in pointing at anything other than these points of entrance.

I removed the lantern from its clip and flipped the small halogen bulb block of plastic on. I couldn’t slip it’s palm strap over my right hand as my wrist computer was already taking up some space there, so I slipped the light into the nestle folds of my left hand and slipped the retaining strap over my left wrist. This however put the slight boxy bulk of the lamp between my exposed left index finger, thumb, and palm, essentially rendering my instant ability to touch flesh to flesh and use my incinerate power, obstructed by the lamp. I noted this with some trepidation and bit my full lower lip and increased the caution by which I now moved and widen the arch of which I now swung the light, in order to give myself the most opportunity of warning should I be discovered or approached by a would be attacker. I was unnerved slightly when my booted heel slide in a substance whose immediate stench upon it being stepped in proved to me to be a pile of animal droppings; raccoon, or rat? I pondered, as I scrapped off my stiletto heel the best I could against the slats of a pallet and wished I could find the culprit and fricassee it at once! But then my cringes of disgust gave way to my alarm at letting my guard down so easily and I once again began to peer through the darkness as I stabbed my flash light beam through it for creeping attackers.

No such attacker manifested its self, and I found the proper aisle by its large yellow floor marking numbers and began counting down the row of pallets as I anxiously crept along them. I found the proper slot only to mutter at it being empty! I glanced at my wrist computer and noted that I had taken much longer in my increased caution than I had originally allocated for the mission and considered if I should scrub the whole thing. I checked the Lancelot, it remained undiscovered and I took a deep breath and made my way to where the little warehouse drones slept in their charging slots. I reasoned that the central control room up above in the center of the warehouse would be well locked and guarded by high tech surveillance, but the little powerful robot drones that hauled the pallets around all day would not be, and my hunch proved correct. There was no sign of any kind of camera or monitoring device above the slumbering carry drones. I quickly selected one and ripped open its covering hull plate and began to hook up my wrist computer into its access points. It took several minutes for me to hack into the main frame from such a remote mobile terminal, not because of any great security program but simply because such access was not normally achieved via such a route as this. Luckily it wasn’t above the drones work parameters to request information of where the missing pallet had been taken. I cut and pasted the relevant information into my wrist memory and disconnected from the machine. As I did I heard a low growl and spun to find myself face to face with three large angry Dobermans.

I have incinerated four dogs in my brief career as a super villain. One was a yapping mongrel that kept me awake on a train trek through the Far East. Another was simply a sleeping dog that I wished to experiment on while waiting for the post office to open. The third was a military canine who was searching for a bomb I had planted and whished to go off without his or his masters interference. And the fourth had been a large ferocious canine guard dog who I had wrestled with in the villa court yard of some remote island sanctuary of some rather nefarious tyrant who had been given a luxurious island paradise in return for stepping down in favor of some other tyrant backed by the UN. That beast, a Chinese Chow, had taken me almost four minutes to incinerate, three minutes faster than the other animals, but still a harrowing amount of time with a slavering long toothed beast ripping inches from your neck! Now here were three such beasts still as statues before me! I snapped an arm out from under my cape and threw a gas pellet at their collective paws. It exploded in a flash of light and pepper smoke, and I turned and ran for my life! Great strength is one thing, but it is of little use in repairing several ruptured arteries or reattaching half mangled limbs as police sirens come wailing in, I ran as fast as my long legs could carry me and I leapt at the nearest black shrink wrapt pallet and caught its lip with my elbow and arm pit and wiggled like mad as my feet scampered for purchase on the slick sheet of plastic and my right arm struggled for leverage to pull me up on top of the shifting stack of irregular shaped boxes.

I was just begging to win the struggle against gravity when I felt a powerful tug on my cape! I threw a glance over my raised collar and sure enough there was one of the Dobermans dangling off the hem of my cape, his powerful jaws wielded shut as the other two barked in thunderous reports and leapt about trying to snag one of my churning legs. The weight of the kicking animal was pulling me back off the lip of the boxes I was clinging to and it would only be a matter of a few seconds before I lost my purchase utterly and fell into those slathering jaws of fangs. I wasted no time and swinging the small box light hand against the brutes small pointed skull I slammed it hard for three uneven hits to its muzzle. The creature did not break its hold, but the strikes caused the box light to shatter and finally dislodge its self from my hand. I instantly leaned down and touched my hand to the forehead of the furious monster. Desperation can be a wonderful thing, if you survive it. I saw the wall-less racing point of view filling my eyes, as in a blur of speed the vision ran the invisible circuit of right angled corners, right, left, up, down, forward, back, until I had raced around all seven invisible points in my minds eye and in a husky whisper I snarled, “incinerate.” And I blew my breath across all the points and they shimmered and burst into flame. The dog dissolved into a cloud of ash and with my head still reeling from the effort and panting from the strain, I hauled myself away from the two remaining enraged monsters and pulled myself finally up onto the unsteady shrink wrap palette of boxes.

I rose upon my unsteady purchase and spat at the leaping barking dogs, whishing I could throw fire balls. Just then there was the loud voice of a young woman and I spun around to see another figure perched upon a long row of steel shelving next to the robot carryalls that I had just quitted in my rapid escape.

“You must be the evil villain ‘Synerate! I have been looking for you for a long time!” The young woman was dressed entirely in white leather from head to toe, including a white leather cowl with two small horns on either side of the hooded mask, and a row of fringe hanging off her chaps!

“Who the hell are you!” I muttered over at her, looking for something heavy under my feet to brain the leaping yelping dogs with.

“I am called, Dust Devil!” The young girl placed her hands on her full hips and jutted out her large chest causing the white leather vest there to strain almost to the bursting as they struggled to scarcely contain her mammoth jugs.

“Never heard of ya!” I found a cardboard box of sufficient size, but it resisted my tugging efforts to dislodge it. The odd little teen seemed visibly upset that I didn’t know her and she hesitated for a second in a visible confused pout. The dogs meanwhile, began to race back and forth between us barking insanely, and I was relieved that they weren’t any friendlier to her than to me. “Who are you working for?” I snarled as I gave up looking for missiles to lob at the dogs and began to consider my options for escape.

“I don’t work for anyone. I am a Super Heroine! And I am going to bring you to justice!” I stopped at that and eyed the haughty teen, a super heroine?! I had never imagined they even existed!

“You’re a snotty little bitch aren’t you?” I muttered. Here costume was almost as revealing as my own, and I thought about that for, oh, almost a millisecond as the white leather super heroine suddenly lost her temper and raising her arms, suddenly rose up in a small excessively violent mini-tornado that began at her hips and extended in a snaking finger all the way to the floor as she raced toward me upon it! There was a brief moment as the tornado took form where it whipped up Dust Devil’s short white leather skirt and in an eye widening flash I could see that Dust Devil had an on going aversion to under garments much like myself, and that the young woman was a natural blonde.

Then she was upon me and with such force as to send both of us up into the air and a few seconds latter smashing through the roof of the tin storage shed! I managed to twist Dust Devil around just before we tore through the roof and she bore the brunt of the subsequent impact. It stunned her and we both came tumbling down, smacking into the snow covered roof of the warehouse and then almost immediately sliding and rolling until we fell off its icicle edge and crashed into the snow drifts below.

As I staggered to my feet, rubbing my head, I couldn’t help but think that the little nut job struggling to her knees a dozen yards from me, had intended to send us both smashing through the roof of the building we now shivered outside of in the on going snow storm. She was still learning her powers, just like me. Good, hopefully I could fry the bitch before she could come up with some way to stop me! She didn’t appear all that smart to me and I considered pretending to surrender so I could get my hands upon her exposed breasts. But even as I tried to shake the stars out of my head and make my tongue work, the little psycho bitch raised up her arm and sent a fist of tornado air at me that knocked me somersaulting through the frigid air forty feet and smashed me into the side of a very solid dumpster. Ouch!

As I slumped to my knees in the snow spitting blood, she hit me again with both hands extended this time and the whirl wind hammer slammed my face down into the frozen tarmac. I grunted from the pain and struggled against passing out. I was really beginning to hate this bitch! She let up and sauntered over to stand over me with her wide stance of smirking dominance and I peered one bruised eye up at her as her short skirt hem danced in the night wind and I couldn’t help but notice that she was aroused and glistening. The little slut was turned on by this shit, eh? I snorted into the snow and blood bubbled past my gasping lips.

“Will you come quietly or do I have to get rough?” I could just hear the smugness in her little girly voice and I wished I could acid! But fate is a strange thing indeed, and before I could mutter a retort, two figures rose up behind Dust Devil, and she went down to her knees and out like a light face first into the snow I was so busy bleeding into. The guy who had just slugged her lights out, dropped the piece of iron that had once been part of the roof we had shattered our way through and which in turn had come wind milling down with us in out plunge to earth.

“What about her?” One of the men growled and jutted his unshaved chin at me. It was time to get a hold of the situation and I forced myself to my feet.

“Well done,” I said and drew myself up to my full height. “Now pick up the bitch and bring her with us.”

“Who are you?” The other male sneered and I could see he was eyeing the piece of steel he had knocked out Dust Devil with lying in the snow at his feet.

I threw back my cape and put my hands on my hips, displaying all of my intense beauty in my revealing costume, it had the mesmerizing effect I knew it would and I my forceful voice said, “I am ‘Synerate and you will do as I say or I will use you for grit and snow melt.”

The two men shuffled before the opulence of my body and the command of my voice (I had spent months perfecting my hypnosis techniques) before one of them muttered, “Any one who is an enemy of that Dust Devil is a friend of ours. She’s been nothing but trouble for us since she showed up here about a month ago.”

“I said, pick her up and bring her.” I hissed and stomped away into the nearby skeletal structure of a large building being constructed. I spent a minute to cause a door to burst into a cloud of ash that I could have just kicked in, but I wanted to impress the two men dragging Dust Devil between them. It worked. “Now tie her between those two uprights.” The men hurried to do my biding. ‘I got henchmen! I got henchmen!’ I giggled euphorically to myself. “Good, now let’s have some fun with our little do-gooder shall we?” I learned an important lesson that night, men are stupid. Never, ever, rely on them for anything. Especially when it comes to tying up a young hottie with super powers. I had left them to keep the young girl amused as I returned to finish finding what I had been searching for that night back in the warehouse.

Dust Devil burst loose before the first guy had even managed to rip her vest off for a good tit molestation! I escaped naturally, but not before Dust Devil had beaten the two men to a pulp and the police had arrived and taken them into custody. I did find the crate with the great Flame Gem of Malachite, that the Malicester Corporation had stolen from a small German Firm’s Research and Development program. Which I retuned to my farm hideout and quickly added to my super villain suit, it increased my super powers and was well worth the effort to locate and steal. However, my entire life had changed in that one night. I now had a real super heroine gunning for me, and somehow photos had been taken! I can only think that Dust Devil must have had a partner who video taped her super heroine exploits? For the next day, there I was, ‘Synerate, all over the newspaper tabloids! My days of sneaking around invisible were suddenly over, as was the ease of going in to places without constantly looking over my shoulder. I would either have to retire, or expand!

It was another bitter cold night and the city was buried under a heavy fog that my little devices were churning out of every sewer vent in a six block area. I peered up into the sky with my thermal vision and saw the tell tale streak of the Dust Devils tornado approach. I smiled. “Now, remember the plan. No mistakes this time. Spark, you use the ‘orgasm gas on our guest as soon as she lands to stop us. And Cinder, you use the grappling net gun when I give the order. Now, shoo and go hide until I call for you two!” The two girls in their mirrored skimpy costumes of red and yellow quickly disappeared into the blinding fog, squealing with excitement. I smiled after my two little henchwomen. Who said taking over the world couldn’t be fun as well as profitable?

“Alright, ‘Synerate! This time you are going down!”

I spun around at the hovering whirl wind and purred, “right on time.”