Empusa 1.3
I feel like shit. That’s what I thought when I woke up. I fell asleep with my glasses on, my body is sore and my fingers hurt. I raise my hand to remove the glasses and they touch air. I don’t have my glasses on. No. That’s just… my vision now! Holy shit! The venom fixed my eyes! The Columbia U guys were working on cure-all drugs?! That are administered through… spiders? That doesn’t seem right.
My happiness is short lived when I see my fingers. When they were just deathly pale and weirdly cold before, now they’re a sickly purple. Uh oh. I might have… uh… I might have fucked up?
My alarm rings again and I rush up. I’ve got no time to worry about that. I’m simply built different and will not be held down by simple flesh necrosis!
So I go to school. I dodge my dad’s sight by doing the fruit fly trick, always keeping my hands out of his field of vision. He doesn’t question that I’m not wearing my glasses. Neither does anybody at school. They- I don’t think they recognize me?! Because
“Hey, are you new here?” Asks one of my tormentors. “Haven’t seen you around before, and damn! I don’t think I’d have forgotten if I did.” Says Sophia. No. What the fuck? I only took off my fucking glasses! This is not a 2000s show where the mousy girl suddenly becomes a supermodel when she removes her glasses! No sire! “Hello?” Sophia waves, noticing that I spaced out.
“You must have a real shit memory then, Hess.” I bite out and shoulder past her while she’s rebooting after hearing my voice.
“What the fuck?” I hear, but not behind me. Emma stops me now. “Taylor? What happened to you? Did you finally hit puberty?” She says, voice regaining its edge, collecting herself. “Aw, look at the late bloomer.”
I don’t even answer her. Leave me alone? There are… SO many people around here you could bully. Please? Just forget about me? For like, a week? A month? Forever?
“Hey! I’m talking to you!” Emma grabs me by the shoulder and twists me around to face her. Which is rather comical, cause she’s half a head shorter than me.
“Did you piss yourself?” I ask, throwing her off again.
“What?”
“You kinda smell really bad. Like you’ve soaked up the toilet smell.” I say loudly.
“Wh- no! That must be your musty ass!” She retorts, but still takes a sniff to check and gags. That’s right, bitch. Piss spiders. I made them web the underside of her skirt, along the threadlines, so they’re harder to notice. And I made them stay in the boys’ toilets overnight, leaving them here yesterday. All for this. I take a step back from her, wrenching myself from her grasp.
“Eww! What the fuck is wrong with you?” I say loudly, making people turn to look. “You pissed yourself?! In front of the whole school?” I start walking backwards, away from her.
“What? No! I didn’t! This is-” She takes another sniff and retches. That’s cause I kept a thin line of webs right under her nose. The webs I laced with stinkbug stuff. “Eugh!” She inhales sharply, the web getting into her mouth now. She starts coughing and falls over. In the chaos, I make a stink bug walk up to her nose and release the spray of stinkstuff and quickly scurry away.
I’m out. People don’t need to associate me with what just happened. But somebody doesn’t quite agree with me. I feel a sudden not-a-headache and step aside as Sophia’s hand whiffs past me. “Hebert!” She shouts. “The fuck did you do to Emma?”
“You saw what happened yourself. I didn’t even touch her aside from brushing off her hand. Fuck off, Sophia.” I growl, catching her other hand as it goes to punch me in the gut. We grapple like that for a bit more until I feel like I can actually just… damn. I’m not putting any effort into this and she’s still struggling! I got super strength! I never tested for it. Huh. What do you know? PRT is right about proper power testing! I still pretend to struggle as well, breathing heavily.
“No, you did something. I can feel it. Like a sixth sense. And once I find out, you’re dead meat, Hebert. And this? This is a preview.” She tries kicking me but I hook her knee with mine and raise it. Being the taller girl is such a great advantage, no matter how small the height difference is. I grab her by the waist as we both fall to the ground, my other hand on her solar plexus. And she lands with an audible “oof”, all air driven out of her.
“I can’t do nothing to convince you that I’ve got nothing to do with it, can I?” I ask her. She doesn’t answer cause she can’t breathe. Well… okay, my bad. I pick her up and set her upright. A firm pat on the back gives her a second wind as she inhales sharply. Oh I wish I had the subtlety to place a stink bug under her nose. “Now please, kindly, fuck off? Maybe help your friend instead?” I push her in Emma’s direction and start walking away.
“Fuck you, Hebert!” She shouts from a distance. She just had to get the last word in. But that's fine. I’m too busy thinking about my sudden surge of strength to worry about later retribution. I enter the girls’ bathroom and freeze.
Usually, I try my best to avoid looking at my own reflections. Emma has spent the past eighteen months ruining my self-image and my confidence. My mouth - too wide, my eyes - too big, my face - chubby, my tummy paunchy. And I know, I know she just took any appearance trait I had and made it sound ugly, despite me being just.. normal. My mouth is wide, not too wide. My eyes are kinda large, and glasses just enhance that. My face is chubby because of the baby fat! Emma has it too! And we’ll both have it till we’re like twenty-somethings unless we work out and diet specifically to get rid of it! The paunch I kind of don’t have an excuse for, but again, it was only the lack of workout that prevented me from getting rid of it. And I was always so drained after school and before school that I didn’t have much motivation to fix it. But now? I don’t look much different now. My mouth is still big, my eyes still large. The baby fat is still there. But my hunch is gone. I stand straight, my shoulders are not slouching. I feel my muscles acting like a living corset, pulling my body together. My chest is still small, but that’s fine too. And now my paunch is gone, so there’s a bit more contrast between my chest and abdomen. I lift my hoodie up and- yep. There it is. A true superhero physique. That’s more like it. I had my reservations about going out in tight spandex to stop crime and maybe sometimes do crime, I didn’t want to go out only for someone to point out how unsexy I am. That’s just law. You can’t be a superhero AND unsexy. Pick one struggle.
Somewhere in another dimension, a tear runs down David’s cheek. He doesn’t know why. He feels like someone just insulted him. He looks at Contessa but she just shakes her head and hands him a small basket of skincare products. He cries a bit more.
The rest of the day passes peacefully, Sophia only sometimes eyeing me murderously. Emma was hospitalized in the end, having passed out from retching. I might have gone a bit too overboard. If the Protectorate comes after me for this, more reason not to be a hero, I guess.
I went back home and took care of my babies. The gene freaks did their job yesterday and died. If the next gen’s lifespan is as short as theirs, I might have to take a trip to NYC and find whoever can make me ones that last longer. But the eggs were laid, the cocoon was wrapped and gestation has begun. I can already feel the little crawlies forming inside, and it’ll only take three weeks for them to hatch. It is also at this point when I check on my Gu eggs. They’re laid in separate chambers, each separated by tightly knit webs, plenty of food left for them when they hatch. Which is also about three weeks, give or take a couple days. Spending that entire time doing nothing seems kind of horrible so I busy myself with preparing another set of Gu jars. If I space them out across the three weeks, I’ll always have a batch of babies to use.
Even with the rates I’m going through my poisonous bugs, I’ve still got a fair amount of black widows to start lining my future suit. I used the fruit fly trick to map my entire body and make a dirt mannequin that’s held together with ant glue underground. The spiders I brought with me after every morning run, and every evening circuit, are hard at work, threading their webs, doing very impressive gymnastics to climb under and over and under and over the other webs. I’m gonna make that thread count reach four digits even if it takes me weeks to do so.
I haven’t checked on Peter in person, but the bugs I left in the Parker residence tell me he’s been fine. A bit jumpy, especially when I make the bugs gather to take a better look at him. Poor guy probably has entomophobia or something. I’ve figured out how to see through my bugs, actually. Almost forgot about that. After my morning… metamorphosis, cause I can’t find a more fitting word, I’ve found it much easier to use spiders than my other bugs. And when I do, it’s easier to use their senses. I still have to bunch them up to see anything clearly, but it works! One more tool in my growing arsenal. This on top of my rather bonkers poison resistance and a slowly forming natural weapon, would make me absolutely deadly.
So far, I’ve been envenoming myself, not poisoning. So in fact, I have shit poison tolerance right now. How would I fix this? Well, easy. I’ll start with poisonous plants, then move to poisonous bugs that process said poisonous plants, and then I’ll use the bees. You see, to make an ounce of honey, it takes the bees eight ounces of nectar. So if I pick flowers that have poisonous nectar, I’ll have a super-concentrated poisonous honey! I could use it for myself, to improve- hm. Why did I think about improving my severe case of finger necrosis? Actually, why am I so unconcerned about it? Something to worry about later.
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Emma laid in the hospital bed, her throat sore from puking, her nose sore from scrubbing. She was dehydrated and in pain. But Panacea wouldn’t heal her. Something about not bothering her with bullshit when there are kids dying from cancer. So Emma didn’t have much hope for early release. That’s why she was surprised to see Panacea come back to her ward at night. She reached out to touch her hand. But the voice that came out of the mask was different.
Wait. Emma thought. Panacea is an open cape. She doesn’t wear a mask. Her robe is white base with red stripes. Not red with white stripes. Who- who is this?
“Oh you poor thing. You must have suffered so, so much.” The unknown cape says. And yes! Yes, Emma has suffered! She understands! “Are you tired of being weak? Being a victim?”
“I’m… I’m not weak.” Emma whispers.
“Of course you aren’t. It’s just that people around you are stronger, right?” She gets me. “We could fix that. Did you ever wish you had powers?” The cape asks. And oh god yes, Emma did. She was so happy to be friends with Sophia, but so, so sad that she couldn’t join her in her… patrols. Emma nods. Emma nods so hard her neck creaks. “Alright. I’ll give you powers. Don’t spend them all in one place now, okay?” The cape chuckles. “Now, what do we know about you, Emma Barnes? Let’s see.” And Emma’s vision goes dark.