((A/N: You know there's always a post-credits scene with me.))
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WHO AM I?
On paper, I'm just your regular, mediocre American woman, fighting through the day-to-day ennui of my boring 9-to-5 to keep the lights on in my crummy, slummy apartment. I like watching the Summer Olympics with a hard seltzer in hand, but if it's not a leap year, I'll settle for soaps. I also like the opera, but I can't afford to go.
A former acting coach once told me I was 'pretty, just not in a silver screen kind of way, and as for the runway--let's just say you've got some work to do', which is fair. I've never been smaller than an 8, and not the stylized, hourglassy kind you see on 'plus-sized' clothing adverts squeezed into two tons of shapewear.
So I gave up. Another failed actress. This year will mark the two-year anniversary of my graduation from community college with a BA in communications and a 3.2 GPA. I've had several one-night stands and one meaningful relationship, if it can be called that--it lasted three days. I ended it. He took it hard, but he's doing better now according to his social media.
I probably sound like your next-cubicle coworker or your spinster neighbor or your aunt who drinks too much vodka: tragic, but in a polite, dismissable way.
But I find that if you really want to examine someone, you need to take a good, hard look at where they're from.
And there's nothing polite or dismissable about Blackwater City.
If you've ever met anyone from here, they probably couldn't give you a straight answer to the question, is it nice?
Sure, it's nice, depending on your definition of 'nice', and how long you've been driving down the I-39 en route to somewhere better.
If you asked me to draw you a map, I think I'd draw you two and layer them one on top of the other. On the surface, you have your pockets of affluence: manicured suburbs and spotlessly-shined strip malls sprinkled sparsely towards the outskirts of town, but growing denser, larger, and higher into airspace the closer you draw towards East Downtown, a veritable clusterfuck of narrow one-ways and tinted-glass high-rises competing for sunlight like it's a finite resource. The fat cats here, along with their pet office-clowns and interns, live in comfortable repose, and why wouldn't they? The streets are swarming with cops. But the crime here is invisible: corporate fraud through shell companies, OSHA violations, tax evasion, you name it. You could go your whole life downtown without being mugged, but for all you know, your boss could be robbing you blind.
And if you do know, then it probably pissed you off when Big Tech announced he was going legit.
Just under the city's vulgar veneer of industry, its landscape is dotted through with enclaves of destitution, emanating on the map like a starburst from the swath of Westside slum where the river runs parallel to St. Philip Parkway. Out on the Westside, the drab earth tones of windblown dirt and dust coat the surfaces of every rickety old apartment complex, grimy gas station, fast fashion 'boutique', plywood 'Psychic Readings Here' sign, and ancient, foreign mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall cafe.
Out on the Westside, you keep your earbuds in, your head down, your mouth shut, and you mind your own business, and you don't walk by the methadone clinic up the street from the Pryor Cosmetic Hospital.
Out on the Westside, trouble waits around every corner, but so does hospitality. If you're out alone at night, or closing up a shop by yourself, you're liable to get stuck up for your wallet, and if you're empty-handed, your assailant might just get pissed at you for wasting their time. This is how many a Westsider has met one of a handful of local superheroes--Bombshell, Evergreen, Spark...and I guess I have made four saves in the month that I've been doing this.
This is also how plenty of folks have met God.
The people in the slums are by far friendlier than the ones in the high-rises. In the most run-down of neighborhoods, you're never at a shortage for someone to pull up and offer you a ride in the rain, or invite you in for a home-cooked dinner. But when you live on a block where anxiety is your default setting, are you really gonna chance it?
What makes it sting more than anything else is knowing you're just one bounced paycheck or late rent payment away from resorting to the same gun-slinging acts of desperation as the people you keep your guard up against.
So who am I?
If you live in the city, you've probably mentioned me in passing lately. Not by name, and probably not even by my supersona. You've just been calling me 'whoever called the Bombshell hotline on Big Tech'. Love or hate that guy, you've gotta admit, he's a trailblazer, and I don't mean because he's the fattest superhero in America.
Everyone has their own version of the story of the battle that demolished the courtyard of the Westpark Hotel last year. Here's mine: in the summer of 2023, an average Oregon man made an unprecedented ascent into the mind-boggling world of super-heroics-and-villainy without any powers to speak of, unless we're counting grit, ambition, and some very sophisticated weapons. Where so many others have crashed and burned, he finally succeeded.
So who am I?
I'm just a girl who got tired of living my life looking over both shoulders, wondering if I'll be in incontinence briefs before I'm 40 on the chance I get attacked on the street and piss myself out of fear, and wondering, in the event that someone does jump out from around a corner to get me, if I'll have time to dial the FatPhone before the light leaves my eyes.
I'm just a girl who decided, if Captain Guy-Who's-Just-Some-Dude can make it in this city, then why can't I turn myself into Super Girl-Who's-Just-Some-Chick?
I'm just a girl who's slept around my office, and, by a stroke of luck, fell into bed once with a coworker who knew how to make his own tranq darts and smoke grenades and was all too happy to teach little ol' me.
Right now, Steve Pryor, the CEO of Pryor Pharmaceuticals Weight Loss Solutions, is probably pacing the floor of his 44th-story corporate headquarters, nervously trying to explain to some scientist from the government how he managed to lose tens of thousands of dollars' worth of drugs and research when Spark and an unknown accomplice raided his cosmetic hospital. As for me...I'm currently in the middle of robbing the cosmetic hospital.
Before you ask why they didn't tighten security after the first robbery, they did. I just know how to get in because, well...this is my day job. I work as a receptionist at this lipo clinic. I'd probably find a better haul if I just robbed HQ, but I didn't want to run the risk of running into Steve.
Then again, would he have recognized me in a gas mask and hazard-yellow skintight catsuit?
In any case, there's enough sedatives and narcotics left in this dump to get me through a week of tranquilizing backalley muggers and stopping gas station gunpoint robberies.
You might never learn who I am, and for your sake, I hope you never need to call for me. But if you just want a name to put to the color scheme, the press has given me one I like enough to keep:
CATALYST
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Bombshell, Big Tech, Scarlet Flame, Spark, Evergreen, Craniotomy, Cannonball and Catalyst will return for an epic feedist hero team-up in: THE COMMUNE OF CRUCIFIX