Cat the Burglar jerked awake, not sure where she was. The last thing she remembered was breaking into the museum to steal the Moon's Eye Diamond, which the curators had been stupid enough to leave right out in the open, unprotected except for a high-powered laser net, five layers of reinforced glass, CCTV cameras, a magical protection circle, three dozen armed guards, several tripwires, two minor demons, a superpowered mercenary and a live cobra.
It was as she'd been making her escape that things had gone wrong. There had been a blinding flash and a shockwave that knocked the wind out of her, then someone had picked her up and bundled her into a vehicle while she couldn't see or stand, and she'd blacked out.
The good news was that she didn't seem to have sustained any lasting injuries. The bad news was that she was in an odd situation even by her standards.
She'd been tied down in a dentist-style chair before, and it was a fifty-fifty on whether it led to torture or a brainwashing attempt. Though, admittedly, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. All the other times, however, the chair had been located in either a run-down underground hideout or a clean, shiny, state of the art facility depending on who was doing it. This time, she found herself at the front of... a lecture hall. It was sparsely populated by young men, each wearing a unique costume, generally more elaborate than her own black latex catsuit, that marked them as supervillains. Rather than plotting to take over the world, however, they were laughing raucously, making paper airplanes, shooting spitballs at each other, just acting like rowdy students waiting for a lecture to start.
She winced and revised that opinion when she noticed one couple off in the corner. The guy was wearing a dark, menacing and spiky costume with a broad cape and crown, while the girl's costume read more like it belonged on a heroine; it was sleek, form-fitting pink latex and her domino mask and dyed hair matched the colour. Rather than fighting, however, as superheroines traditionally did with villains, the man had his arm around her shoulders as she snuggled close and stared at him adoringly. Her hand was blocked from view by the seats in front of them, but it was in his lap and her arm was pumping up and down in an unmistakable motion. As Cat looked at them, the villain took her head in hand and guided it down into his lap, a grin appearing on his face as he leant back in his seat while her head started bobbing up and down.
Yeah, that was a bit too far.
"Get a room, you two!" She called out from the chair, immediately getting the attention of everyone there. She stared them all down. They may have outnumbered her, but the best read she could get was that these were villains in training, possibly still vulnerable to intimidation. Even if not, having them focus on her words meant they weren't paying attention to the hand she was trying to slip out of the restraints.
The one getting the shameless public blowjob cracked an eye open when she addressed him, then smirked and settled himself back in. Before she could get into the swing of heckling him, however, one of the hall's side doors opened and in walked an old man with a distinct clock motif to his costume. His upper face was covered by a white mask with clock hands positioned to look like severe eyebrows. Below that, a long grey wizard beard hung down over his chest. His brown robes hung down from square shoulder pads, and beneath his beard, he wore a pendulum like a tie, giving off a quiet ticking sound as it swung back and forth regularly. She didn't recognise him, but he had an air of gravitas that she associated with someone who was not new to the cape scene.
"Good evening, class," the clock man intoned, "and welcome to our second presentation! Yesterday, Doctor Domination was successful in brainwashing the lovely miss Bubblegum using his Slave Ray. Congratulations again." He gestured towards the villain getting a blowjob, who gave a little wave at a smattering of applause, only half paying attention. If the old man had been monologuing at her, Cat would have started heckling him, but as he was helpfully distracting the audience instead, she took the opportunity to get a hand free while listening to see what he revealed about where she was and what was happening. He continued obliviously.
"Tonight, Class Clown will be unveiling his final project, and thereby determine his final grade for the course. The subject we've procured for him tonight hails from Earth 237-delta, where she's famous for stealing everything from diamonds, to the blackmail material one of their villains had on the mayor, to a hero's underpants. Will he be the one to tame her? Gentlemen, I present to you... Cat the Burglar!"
Cat watched from the ceiling vent as the Clock Man, as she was going to call him until she learned a better name, gestured with a great flourish towards the empty chair she'd escaped from while he'd been bloviating. A round of snickers filled the room from the audience, and one in particular, a young man in an outfit she could best describe as 'high school delinquent raised by clowns,' cackled loudly and gave his red nose a couple of honks. She assumed that was 'Class Clown,' and decided to get the hell out of there before she ran the risk of getting recaptured. As she started slipping through the vent, she reviewed everything she'd learned. First, she was in some sort of supervillain university. Second, it wasn't located on her home Earth. Third, they planned to have Class Clown attempt to brainwash her as an assignment. No way in Hell that one was happening, so her best move was to find whatever machine they'd used to bring her here and get herself home. Once that was done, she'd see about helping that Bubblegum girl escape, but that was something she could think about once she wasn't in danger herself.
As she had that thought, a loud
tick
seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and she froze up as it resonated inside her skull.
She gasped, cradling her head in her hands as a
tock
came and she felt like she split in half. Suddenly, as well as being in the vent, she could feel herself sitting back in the chair with the restraints on. Overlaid atop the metal chute she was crawling through, she saw all the faces of the audience staring at her, and the double vision was so unsettling she closed her eyes so she could only see the lecture hall.
Then the last
tick
came and she was fully back in the chair like she'd never left. She jerked against the restraints, panting in shock, and immediately flinched away from the sharp laugh that came from her right.
Glancing around the room to figure out what happened, she locked eyes with the Clock Man and her stomach dropped. She'd seen his motif and associated it with Timepiece, a minor villain from her home city whose only power was that he could tell time with perfect accuracy. With that being her only association, she hadn't taken him into consideration as a threat.
Her realisation was interrupted by a
HONK HONK
that she flinched away from and she scowled at the laughing idiot on stage with her.
Class Clown was wearing jeans and a hoodie, with his shoelaces untied, in the most garish pastel yellow and pink imaginable. Purple latex gloves stuck out of ruffled cuffs, and his skin was alabaster white beneath his red lipstick, frizzy rainbow hair and a red rubber nose that was the source of that awful honking. He was grinning like they were sharing a joke, and it only got wider once Cat bared her teeth at him.
"Awww, don't be like that! I bet I can make you laugh; I'm a funny guy."
"There's a difference between being funny and being a joke," Cat snapped back, and Class Clown's eyes bulged as he burst out with the loudest, most grating cackle she'd ever heard. He clutched his stomach as great gales of laughter filled the room, tears coming to his eyes as he fell to the floor and started rolling around. Cat watched with increasing impatience as he gasped for breath in between hollers, hoots, guffaws and every other kind of laughter, all expressed in the most obnoxious way possible. Were it not for the idiot's gimmick, Cat would have thought he was doing it as mockery, but he seemed genuinely on the edge of suffocating from laughing too hard.
After several long minutes, which Cat spent studying the Clock Man to figure out how she was going to incapacitate him before escaping, Class Clown's mirth finally died down and he staggered back to his feet.
"WHOO!" He hollered, patting her shoulder. "I
love
you! We're going to have
so much
fun together!"
She spat on his hand, but he didn't seem to notice as he rotated her chair so she was facing the projector screen, directly away from the audience. He clicked a remote, and the projector activated to show the title page of a slideshow. 'Why You Should Be My Girlfriend: a Presentation by Class Clown.'
"Oh, good, I was worried this was going to be a brainwashing attempt. Nice to see it's just torture."
Class Clown laughed and gave her tit a squeeze. "Oh, I have never been so excited to disappoint a woman."
Right as Cat was about to spit on him again for groping her, Class Clown pushed a rubber mask onto her face and opened the valve on the gas canister it was attached to. She immediately shut her mouth tight and held her breath, shaking her head side to side and trying to push the mask off with her shoulder, but Class Clown held it steady and her lungs started to burn with the effort. It was quickly too much and she sucked in a deep breath of whatever was in the canister, feeling its effects immediately.
For one, everything that wasn't directly occupying her attention just faded away. The audience behind her no longer registered, nor did the rest of the hall or even the stage. Her whole world consisted of the rubber mask pressed against her face and the gloved hand holding it there. The bright purple of the glove began to shine, and she could see hidden depths to the colour; swirling blues and violets that she almost felt she could fall into and keep falling forever.
Her thoughts slowed down, her whole mind now dedicated to taking in stimuli from in front of her, and suddenly, everything she saw looked hilarious.
She started giggling into the mask. Uncontrollably. Any attempt to rein it in held for barely a second before it burst out of her again.
