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Kara buried her face in her hands.
“Why is it,” she whispered. “That the two people I love most in the world are villains?”
David awkwardly stroked her hair.
After a moment’s hesitation, he also wrapped an arm around her.
She leaned into the hug.
***
After the Executioner had finished chuckling dryly about her gender change, he made a cryptic remark about it going around. Caroline did not exactly keep track of Paragon’s caped community, but she had heard of the hero Executioner had something of a rivalry with. Apparently he’d had a good laugh about said hero having a magical accident that turned him into a woman, and Executioner had declared that he was now weak and no longer a challenge.
Then the newly female hero had kicked his ass.
And then the female half of the Order had a good laugh at Executioner’s expense, Caroline included.
Still, overconfidence and subsequent karma notwithstanding, Radiance knew him to be highly skilled, and after a little negotiation, he agreed to assist her.
For a price, of course. Nothing worth having was ever truly free in the Order.
“Ian Reynolds,” she said. “I want you to find out everything you can about him or any operations involving Reynolds Industries. You know the Paragon underworld. Rumors, hearsay, I don’t care. Everything.”
“Done.” And he hung up.
Radiance slowly lowered the phone, staring at it as she folded her hands in her lap.
She had rushed in, not knowing remotely enough about who she was facing, and paid for it dearly. She could not afford to make that mistake again. Executioner would contact her as soon as he found anything of interest. That could be hours, or days. Likely days. She knew the Order itself could not be involved; Ian was marked.
The Order of Oblivion never broke contracts, with one exception: every operative could enter a name upon joining, and then a new name for every 5 years of service thereafter. The people thus marked would never be targeted, every contract that would involve harming them turned down, and existing contracts of the same nature broken. It was an open secret that many skilled operatives were coerced into joining the Order using this system. Target a loved one, send assassin after assassin, until the potential recruit gave in and bought the target’s safety with their life.
Radiance had not been subject to that particular form of blackmail, but had entered Ian’s name as soon as she found out it was possible. As the sole heir to a billion-dollar company, enemies were inevitable, so Caroline had taken comfort in the knowledge that she’d made him a little safer. Of course, she kept him safe best by staying far away. Or so she’d thought.
As she kept staring at her lap, her gaze couldn’t help but stray. To her muscular thighs. To her tan arms. To the bulge that should not be there.
Well.
She curiously traced her fingertips along the length and shuddered at the sensation. Surprisingly, being aware of her own body seemed to push back the voices still screaming for attention, so she did it again. Her fingertips made the noise in her head fade to no more than whisper until awareness of the tingling sensation left in the wake of her touch dominated her senses.
Caroline blinked, dazed, and snapped back her hand when she realized she was growing hard.
Fuck, she was not going to experiment with her new dick while Ian was still in danger.
…she had time for that later.
***
PsyKick lay in bed, trying hard to ignore the feeling of his breasts rising and falling with each breath. Diane had left, presumably to look for Kara, telling him to stay here for now. It had been a command, and now he found himself resenting being treated like a child. By what right did she order him around?
Well, the right he had given her, time and again.
Knowing that the compulsion to serve evil had faded somewhat had shifted something deep inside of him. He couldn’t tell himself that he had to serve her anymore.
But he wanted to.
He gritted his teeth and rolled over, trying to put the matter out of his mind.
The only other topic that demanded his attention was the one he’d been studiously ignoring.
This body.
This very, very female body.
He peered down at himself, brushing aside his long curls to reveal his… cleavage. Caroline’s breasts were lovely. They weren’t very big, probably just barely filling out a B cup, but they were perfectly shaped. He reached out with a ridiculously dainty hand, circling one of the perky nipples. It immediately stood at attention, poking through the thin fabric of the white shirt, and he moaned softly at the sensation.
There was probably something seriously wrong with getting turned on by the sound of one’s own voice, but PsyKick hadn’t heard a sound like that from a woman in over three years.
Heat clenched in his belly in what was possibly the female equivalent of arousal.
He squeezed the soft flesh and it turned out lady boners could throb, too.
Feeling vaguely dirty for groping a body he definitely had no right to grope, he withdrew his hand and stared at the ceiling, wishing that there was something he could do.
He sat up when he realized there was.
***
Diane blinked sleepily when a hand gently brushed her shoulder, and she raised her head. Her neck protested the movement, feeling stiff and cold. She lay curled up against one of Kara’s training dummies, thinking that this was the place Kara would likely return to when trying to work out her issues. Kara’s first reaction when faced with an unknown emotion that was on the non-shallow side of the pool was still intense violence.
Diane realized she must have nodded off.
Pale blue eyes were gazing down at her.
“Hey,” Kara said in a soft voice.
Diane slowly reached out to curl her fingers around Kara’s hand.
“I’m sorry.”
“Not a villain.”
“I know.”
There was a long silence.
Kara slowly sank to her knees. She buried her face in Diane’s neck, breathing heavily.
“Caroline’s a murderer.”
“You don’t know that.”
Kara laughed humorlessly. “It’s in the job description.”
Diane said nothing.
“And the worst part is,” Kara continued. “I don’t even care. The only thing I keep thinking about…”
She curled up in Diane’s arms.
“She left me. She was alive all this time and she just… left me. Alone.”
***
PsyKick’s closed his eyes, blinking sleepily as he finally drifted off into the hazy twilight of dreams.
Except that dreams, for a psychic, were never hazy.
It didn’t matter that he currently could not access his powers, nor had it mattered in the hospital. His mind was permanently altered by what he, at his core, was. It was why, despite the power dampeners he’d once had implanted, no other psychic had managed to break into his mind to cure the damage. He had not let them; the power dampeners prevented external expression of his powers, but in his mindscape, he was king.
PsyKick was fairly certain he had given some of the psychic healers who’d tried to help him brain damage. He hoped it was of the non-permanent variety.
He raised his head, opening his eyes. Walls towered over him, reaching high into the non-existent sky and losing themselves in nothingness. He’d once visualized his mental defenses as an endless expanse of white marble, but now the walls loomed, sinister, like a prison, enclosing his barren and shattered mindscape.
The imaginary ground he was standing on was cracked and fractured. In the distance he could see deep and gaping canyons, as if something vast and powerful had ripped the very earth to shreds.
That had been him, carving away parts of his personality to shape himself into the kind of person Cinder Snow’s orders demanded he be.
She’d never been content to just order him to commit villainous acts. That, that would have been easy to recover from. He, better than most, knew just how little responsibility the mindcontrolled bore for their actions. But Cinder Snow didn’t order him to just do things, she ordered him to enjoy them. To want them.
And when given the choice between either molding himself to be as evil as she was, or just to crave following evil orders, he had made himself an all-too-eager slave. Submission, in its own weird way, had been his last act of defiance.
But now he couldn’t recover what he’d stripped away. It was just gone.
And whenever PsyKick dreamed of his mindscape, he was reminded of the loss, of knowing just how altered he was. He gazed at the bottomless pit stretching out in front of him, idly wondering just what part of his personality it used to hold. He couldn’t remember.
Part of why psychic surgery on one’s own self was a terrible idea: It lacked perspective. The memories of what, exactly, he’d done to himself were gone as well.
He shook his head, clearing the melancholy that always enveloped him when he visited his mindscape, and focused on why he was here.
He gazed down at himself. Here, in this world of his mind’s creation, he inhabited his proper body as he saw himself. Not Caroline’s body, not the skinny twig he was nowadays, but what he used to look like – lean, yet muscular.
And wearing his old costume.
He scowled.
With little more than a thought, it dissolved, leaving him standing in just a shirt and jeans.
For all his hopeful progress today, he did not have the right to wear that.
(Not yet, insisted a part of him.)
PsyKick raised his head, gaze faraway as he scanned the landscape for anomalies.
And there it was. A glimmer across the expanse.
He took a step forward and instantly found himself in front of the far away wall. Distance – or rather, the very concept of physics – had little meaning here.
His mental defenses had been breached. There was a gaping hole in the wall in front of him, a swirling vortex of silver light at its very center.
As he had hoped.
While PsyKick had never before performed a full body swap, he had taken control of other people’s bodies plenty of times, and there was one thing he knew: it required a continuous mental connection.
Outside his walls, inside that glowing portal, lay Caroline’s mindscape.
PsyKick took a deep breath, even though there was no air.
He stepped through.
And fell.
Of Heroes And Villains:
The Ties That Bind An assassin. A fallen hero. An unlikely meeting. The road to redemption is long and hard and filled with explosives. |
 |
Kara buried her face in her hands.
“Why is it,” she whispered. “That the two people I love most in the world are villains?”
David awkwardly stroked her hair.
After a moment’s hesitation, he also wrapped an arm around her.
She leaned into the hug.
After the Executioner had finished chuckling dryly about her gender change, he made a cryptic remark about it going around. Caroline did not exactly keep track of Paragon’s caped community, but she had heard of the hero Executioner had something of a rivalry with. Apparently he’d had a good laugh about said hero having a magical accident that turned him into a woman, and Executioner had declared that he was now weak and no longer a challenge.
Then the newly female hero had kicked his ass.
And then the female half of the Order had a good laugh at Executioner’s expense, Caroline included.
Still, overconfidence and subsequent karma notwithstanding, Radiance knew him to be highly skilled, and after a little negotiation, he agreed to assist her.
For a price, of course. Nothing worth having was ever truly free in the Order.
“Ian Reynolds,” she said. “I want you to find out everything you can about him or any operations involving Reynolds Industries. You know the Paragon underworld. Rumors, hearsay, I don’t care. Everything.”
“Done.” And he hung up.
Radiance slowly lowered the phone, staring at it as she folded her hands in her lap.
She had rushed in, not knowing remotely enough about who she was facing, and paid for it dearly. She could not afford to make that mistake again. Executioner would contact her as soon as he found anything of interest. That could be hours, or days. Likely days. She knew the Order itself could not be involved; Ian was marked.
The Order of Oblivion never broke contracts, with one exception: every operative could enter a name upon joining, and then a new name for every 5 years of service thereafter. The people thus marked would never be targeted, every contract that would involve harming them turned down, and existing contracts of the same nature broken. It was an open secret that many skilled operatives were coerced into joining the Order using this system. Target a loved one, send assassin after assassin, until the potential recruit gave in and bought the target’s safety with their life.
Radiance had not been subject to that particular form of blackmail, but had entered Ian’s name as soon as she found out it was possible. As the sole heir to a billion-dollar company, enemies were inevitable, so Caroline had taken comfort in the knowledge that she’d made him a little safer. Of course, she kept him safe best by staying far away. Or so she’d thought.
As she kept staring at her lap, her gaze couldn’t help but stray. To her muscular thighs. To her tan arms. To the bulge that should not be there.
Well.
She curiously traced her fingertips along the length and shuddered at the sensation. Surprisingly, being aware of her own body seemed to push back the voices still screaming for attention, so she did it again. Her fingertips made the noise in her head fade to no more than whisper until awareness of the tingling sensation left in the wake of her touch dominated her senses.
Caroline blinked, dazed, and snapped back her hand when she realized she was growing hard.
Fuck, she was not going to experiment with her new dick while Ian was still in danger.
…she had time for that later.
PsyKick lay in bed, trying hard to ignore the feeling of his breasts rising and falling with each breath. Diane had left, presumably to look for Kara, telling him to stay here for now. It had been a command, and now he found himself resenting being treated like a child. By what right did she order him around?
Well, the right he had given her, time and again.
Knowing that the compulsion to serve evil had faded somewhat had shifted something deep inside of him. He couldn’t tell himself that he had to serve her anymore.
But he wanted to.
He gritted his teeth and rolled over, trying to put the matter out of his mind.
The only other topic that demanded his attention was the one he’d been studiously ignoring.
This body.
This very, very female body.
He peered down at himself, brushing aside his long curls to reveal his… cleavage. Caroline’s breasts were lovely. They weren’t very big, probably just barely filling out a B cup, but they were perfectly shaped. He reached out with a ridiculously dainty hand, circling one of the perky nipples. It immediately stood at attention, poking through the thin fabric of the white shirt, and he moaned softly at the sensation.
There was probably something seriously wrong with getting turned on by the sound of one’s own voice, but PsyKick hadn’t heard a sound like that from a woman in over three years.
Heat clenched in his belly in what was possibly the female equivalent of arousal.
He squeezed the soft flesh and it turned out lady boners could throb, too.
Feeling vaguely dirty for groping a body he definitely had no right to grope, he withdrew his hand and stared at the ceiling, wishing that there was something he could do.
He sat up when he realized there was.
Diane blinked sleepily when a hand gently brushed her shoulder, and she raised her head. Her neck protested the movement, feeling stiff and cold. She lay curled up against one of Kara’s training dummies, thinking that this was the place Kara would likely return to when trying to work out her issues. Kara’s first reaction when faced with an unknown emotion that was on the non-shallow side of the pool was still intense violence.
Diane realized she must have nodded off.
Pale blue eyes were gazing down at her.
“Hey,” Kara said in a soft voice.
Diane slowly reached out to curl her fingers around Kara’s hand.
“I’m sorry.”
“Not a villain.”
“I know.”
There was a long silence.
Kara slowly sank to her knees. She buried her face in Diane’s neck, breathing heavily.
“Caroline’s a murderer.”
“You don’t know that.”
Kara laughed humorlessly. “It’s in the job description.”
Diane said nothing.
“And the worst part is,” Kara continued. “I don’t even care. The only thing I keep thinking about…”
She curled up in Diane’s arms.
“She left me. She was alive all this time and she just… left me. Alone.”
PsyKick’s closed his eyes, blinking sleepily as he finally drifted off into the hazy twilight of dreams.
Except that dreams, for a psychic, were never hazy.
It didn’t matter that he currently could not access his powers, nor had it mattered in the hospital. His mind was permanently altered by what he, at his core, was. It was why, despite the power dampeners he’d once had implanted, no other psychic had managed to break into his mind to cure the damage. He had not let them; the power dampeners prevented external expression of his powers, but in his mindscape, he was king.
PsyKick was fairly certain he had given some of the psychic healers who’d tried to help him brain damage. He hoped it was of the non-permanent variety.
He raised his head, opening his eyes. Walls towered over him, reaching high into the non-existent sky and losing themselves in nothingness. He’d once visualized his mental defenses as an endless expanse of white marble, but now the walls loomed, sinister, like a prison, enclosing his barren and shattered mindscape.
The imaginary ground he was standing on was cracked and fractured. In the distance he could see deep and gaping canyons, as if something vast and powerful had ripped the very earth to shreds.
That had been him, carving away parts of his personality to shape himself into the kind of person Cinder Snow’s orders demanded he be.
She’d never been content to just order him to commit villainous acts. That, that would have been easy to recover from. He, better than most, knew just how little responsibility the mindcontrolled bore for their actions. But Cinder Snow didn’t order him to just do things, she ordered him to enjoy them. To want them.
And when given the choice between either molding himself to be as evil as she was, or just to crave following evil orders, he had made himself an all-too-eager slave. Submission, in its own weird way, had been his last act of defiance.
But now he couldn’t recover what he’d stripped away. It was just gone.
And whenever PsyKick dreamed of his mindscape, he was reminded of the loss, of knowing just how altered he was. He gazed at the bottomless pit stretching out in front of him, idly wondering just what part of his personality it used to hold. He couldn’t remember.
Part of why psychic surgery on one’s own self was a terrible idea: It lacked perspective. The memories of what, exactly, he’d done to himself were gone as well.
He shook his head, clearing the melancholy that always enveloped him when he visited his mindscape, and focused on why he was here.
He gazed down at himself. Here, in this world of his mind’s creation, he inhabited his proper body as he saw himself. Not Caroline’s body, not the skinny twig he was nowadays, but what he used to look like – lean, yet muscular.
And wearing his old costume.
He scowled.
With little more than a thought, it dissolved, leaving him standing in just a shirt and jeans.
For all his hopeful progress today, he did not have the right to wear that.
(Not yet, insisted a part of him.)
PsyKick raised his head, gaze faraway as he scanned the landscape for anomalies.
And there it was. A glimmer across the expanse.
He took a step forward and instantly found himself in front of the far away wall. Distance – or rather, the very concept of physics – had little meaning here.
His mental defenses had been breached. There was a gaping hole in the wall in front of him, a swirling vortex of silver light at its very center.
As he had hoped.
While PsyKick had never before performed a full body swap, he had taken control of other people’s bodies plenty of times, and there was one thing he knew: it required a continuous mental connection.
Outside his walls, inside that glowing portal, lay Caroline’s mindscape.
PsyKick took a deep breath, even though there was no air.
He stepped through.
And fell.
Comments
hmmm...
I wonder what carolines mindscape will look like. I get the feeling that she's not evil, but has learned to do what was needful (even if distasteful).
Reading this story every night is so nice, it helps lighten my heart before I sleep. thank you so much for sharing.
Thank YOU for reading!
Caroline has indeed learned some very unsavory lessons in her life.
I am having difficulty.
I cannot express how excited I am every time I see a new update to this story - or in fact, any new Minikisa work.
It makes going in to work a pleasure, so I can sit and enjoy my cup of tea and a good read before getting to the nitty gritty.
Thank you now and forever.
Hugs, too.
*hugs back*
I'm really happy to hear that my story brightens up your day, and I hope it continues to do so for quite some time ^_^
Bad decisions
Wondering if Caroline has just put a death sentence on herself and the Executioner by targeting Ian who is marked as a do not attack. I doubt it will matter to the guild that his body has changed as that marking is one of the things they use to hold control over their people. Also, it seems that she can't pick up hints of the truth even if she is hit on the head with them. How she could miss that Ian has a power similar to her own, that this same hero has had a sex change and not connect it to Ian is perplexing.
It's really not that easy to figure out
Teleportation is not that rare a power and there is no reason to assume any given teleporter is related to another, any more than you would assume that someone with superstrength has to be related to someone else also with superstrength. Going from "there's a hero among hundreds I've vaguely heard about and never seen who can teleport and recently had a sex change" and "someone is impersonating my brother with an illusion" to "my brother is a hero who recently had a sex change and is maintaining his civilian identity with an illusion" is quite a leap :P I know it seems obvious when you have all the relevant info, but Caroline doesn't.
And Caroline most definitely did not target Ian for attack. She asked for Executioner to dig up dirt on Ian, specifically, if anyone else has planned an attack on him.
lady boners could throb!
you have such a way with words.
great chapter, thanks
*giggles*
Truly one of my finest and most dignified lines. Something to share with the grandkids.
"psychic surgery on one’s own self "
yeah. Disassociation is kinda like that too. I pushed the memories of my rapes into a closet, and tried to forget them, and I succeeded, other than nightmares. But that kind of pain leaves echos that I couldn't deal with, because I didn't know what I had forgotten ...
*hugs*
Psy's condition, imaginary as it is, does take several cues from trauma survivors. *snugs* Recovery is such a hard process, and I hope to have that reflected in his struggles.
Dreams
I've always found dreams utterly fascinating, and the fact that you have dreamscapes as a part of this story makes me really happy :)
-Tas