It had to have been a dream. Had to have been. The black hairs he found on his pillow the next morningâthe lingering scentâjust coincidences. A submissive Asian teenage girl in black leather bondage gear who had admitted to him in the afterglow that she'd only ever done it before with her blonde best friend,
who was also Batgirlâ
clearly a wet dream.
Batgirl-on-Batgirl action. Booster would've loved that. He thought Fire and Ice were dating too. Then again, if anything could make a girl a lesbian, it'd be Guy Gardner. Hadn't he hooked up with both of them? Compared to that, Ted getting with Zatanna
and
Batgirl in the same day seemed plausible...
Ted sat up in bed. He thought he smelled something.
Not
that weird leather smell you got with the Batsâthis was moreâbeefy. Drawing his BB gun from his nightstand, he slid from wall to wall over to the kitchen, where the smell was strongest. Poking his head out did not seem like SWAT protocol, but he didn't have a mirror handy.
His kitchen was not meant for more than one, maybe two people in it. It was a stripe of linoleum between two counters, one holding the sink and dishwasher, the other with the refrigerator and stove. There was a woman in-between them, reflecting the dim early morning light as she chopped up potatoes, carrots, and bits of celery with a sharpened finger. Because she was metal. A silvery robot like the T-1000, only a girl, like the T-1000 in that third Terminator movie they made for some reason.
And she was a good-looking girl. Tall, leggy, andâ'bosomy'. If Ted thought of the metal skin as a jumpsuit, then it fitted her lush body like it was in love with it. She had the pleasant, unprepossessing features of a homecoming queen, framed by a wealth of sheeny hair. There was an innocent sensuality that just hung about her: almost unnoticed until a few moments passed, and then it drew the eye past the shock of her argent body.
"Ted?" she called, looking up sharply. Ted ducked his head back around the corner. "Is that you?"
"...no?" Ted tried.
"I let myself in. Hope you don't mind. I notice you don't have any real breakfast foods, so I thought I'd fix you something. I hope you don't mind, but I made beef stew. I'm good at that. With other stuff, I'm never really sure of whether it'll kill people or not. But this should be fine. I used the same recipe with Dr. Magnus and he liked it very much."
Ted suddenly felt a bit foolish, hiding around the corner with a gun in his hand. "Are you a creepy cyborg lady here to kill me?"
"No! I'll only kill you with kindness!"
Ted tried again. "Is kindness a supervillain name?"
"That would be a pretty poor name for a supervillain."
"It'd be ironic..." Ted argued, before ditching the gun and coming out into the open. "Hey, no offense, but what are you doing here? Did I leave the front door open, because you're the second personâ"
"It was closed," she interrupted. "I turned my finger into a key!"
"Uh-huh." Ted got a whiff of the stew as she opened his crock pot to dump the chopped produce in. "I'm sorry if we've met before, but I don't recognize you covered in silverâwait, are you Bulleteer?"
"That wannabe? No way!" Turning her hand into a wire whisk, she stirred the stew. "I'm Platinum, of the Metal Men! But you can call me Tina."
"The Metal Men?"
"Robotic guardians of the Earth? Invented by Dr. Magnus? Powered by responsometers?"