Author's Notes: I asked for reader story suggestions, and this is what resulted from the sole response. It turned out to contain a ton more superheroics than it did sex, but that seemed to be what the story required to make it work. I'll try to arrange more sex in the next one.
EPISODE FOUR: Blowing Hot and Cold During Testing
You've been out of retirement almost six months now. Through all this time you keep finding hints that someone is following you when you're out on patrol, though you never get a good look at your stalker and seem to be unable to track him (or her) in turn.
You decide to ask around in the hero community, and it turns out you're not the only heroine having this experience. Over the past several months several female vigilantes have detected somebody watching them. In fact they've hung the moniker "the Watchman" on the elusive figure. No one knows who it is or what he (or she) wants, and no one's been able to catch him or even get much of a view before he scrams. The general consensus is that he's some low-powered super-villain who's a voyeur.
This isn't quite as rare as one might think. Everybody in the profession knows of two famous cases of this sort of thing, Peeping Tomcat and the Gawker. Peeping was a small-time crook who gained the ability to climb any wall unaided no matter how sheer, even glass. He supported himself via residential burglary (a lot of people above the tenth story don't bother to lock their balcony doors), but his chief interest was peering through windows to watch the unsuspecting occupants have sex (a lot of people above the tenth story also don't bother shutting the blinds, for similar reasons).
He did the same thing at some of the high-rise super lairs (like Revengers Tower) to spy on heroes and heroines doing the nasty, which is how he eventually got caught. Tomcat went to prison for a stretch, now he's on probation but as a registered sex offender wearing an ankle tracker. So you know it's not him.
The Gawker was a bit odder. He was a supernormal with an incredibly rapid healing factor that allowed him to be in harm's way in situations where an ordinary person would be toast, but he used this power solely to stalk heroines and watch as they punched out male criminals. Never followed male heroes around, and never stayed to watch when heroines were fighting other women. He just wanted to see strong females beat up males.
It made a lot of heroines feel pretty uncomfortable having him hanging around during a fight, not to mention the fact that he sometimes got in the way. Things became even worse after Stone Butch got so tired of the dude following her that she decided to teach him some manners by mopping the floor with him. Instead of discouraging him this made the Gawker discover that he enjoyed getting hit by a strong woman even more than he did watching her do it to someone else.
After that the fool kept deliberately harassing heroines trying to get them to "punish" him, until one day the Gawker somehow fell out of the sky from two thousand feet up even though there were no aircraft in the vicinity. At that point everyone (including the Gawker, briefly anyway) found out that his healing factor wasn't strong enough to let him recover from being splattered over several acres. So it can't be him, either.
There have also been other sex-oriented villains over the years (meaning more than just your usual, "defeat the heroine and rape her" sort, which of course is the majority of male villains as well as a strong minority of villainesses). For instance one of Dr. Venus' pleasure-bots spontaneously developed true AI, broke loose from the inventor's control and started calling itself The Penetrator. Now more of a rape-bot, it embarked on a reign of terror until it was scrapped by a joint effort of several heroines.
And there was the even stranger case of a magical flying dildo created by Mr. Magicalist for the private use of Virgin Queen. It later gained intelligence due to a spell of Diabolicale (he apparently was trying to turn it into a way of murdering VQ, who'd thwarted many of his plots), after which the now self-aware magic dildo proclaimed himself a free being and took the name Vibratron.
It's arguable whether Vibratron was even a villain. He had a reputation for sudden and intrusive interactions with females (both normals and supers), but his claim was that he had the magical power of knowing whether a woman really "wanted it" or not and that he only ever accosted those who did. For what it's worth very few of his victims ever went ahead and pressed charges. In the end he was crushed to death during a confrontation (so to speak) with Princess Amazonia.
None of the other heroines believe they've been stalked by this "Watchman"as often as you have, but it's possible this is because your senses are more acute and you're noticing the faint presence while they don't. They all have the same experience of him fleeing when anyone tries to investigate or even merely if he's noticed. So no one is terribly concerned this guy is a real threat.
"It's not as if we don't get ogled by some of the norms and fanboys when we're around them," Lady Liberty said with a shrug while the two of you are discussing the matter. "If all he wants is a panty shot as I do a high kick I guess it's no skin off my nose."
Of course, if this "Watchman" has been spying on you some of the times you think he has then he's seen a lot more than just your panties. As far as that's concerned you don't wear anything under your costume anyway.
You don't tell Libby that, though. No reason to tattle on yourself.
* * * * * *
You don't really have time to worry overmuch about such things anyway. Your life is busy at present. Fighting crime, taking care of most of the household chores because it's not like anyone else is going to step up and do the cooking or cleaning, talking over the phone to your lawyer about your ongoing divorce, trying to reconnect with your son after missing fourteen years of his childhood.
This also means you haven't been able to address certain of your own needs. The episode with Electric Eel definitely left you well-sated, a state which lasted about a week, but since then your only source of fun is your trusty vibrator. And you're reluctant to resort to that when Ryan is at home, because what if he hears it?
So when the message from Thermo arrives challenging you to a private match-up you are immediately interested. A villain who arrived on the scene maybe ten years ago now, Thermo is younger than you by about the same amount. You've heard that he originally wanted to be a hero and applied to become part of the Revengers, but they turned him down saying his powers weren't up to their standards. To show them how wrong they were Thermo decided to become a criminal instead and embarked on typical new-villain showy crime wave, robbing multiple banks in broad daylight, kidnaping the governor for ransom, and generally making a nuisance of himself for the heroes. Which probably teaches some moral about not rejecting a heartfelt offer, or not being so set in your ways to see a person's true worth, or something. Truthfully you think it merely proves the Revengers have been a dysfunctional bunch of egotists from the get-go whose reputation is more hype than anything else, but that's just your opinion.
You've never met Thermo personally, and he's not one of the bad guys who you and the other heroines typically trade notes about. But it's common knowledge that you're back in action, and it's possible that he had his eyes on you before you married Paragon but never got around to asking. Maybe at that point he was simply too new at the game to know how this sort of thing works, and now he does and is still interested in getting to know you a whole lot better.
You check out pictures on the net, along with the old video of his ransom demand when he (briefly) held the governor. Doesn't wear a mask, meaning you can see he's definitely nice looking aside from being a buff, broad-shouldered type. Like most supers he's known to be more resilient than a normal, which is always nice since you don't have to worry as much about hurting him if things get wild.
The message arrived as e-mail, with an obviously fake return address. You check the gateways just in case, but the trail goes dead like you expected. He wants you to meet him at a specific place and time but hasn't left you any way to reply.
It could be a trap, of course. With villains it could always be a trap, that's why you and the other heroines have your network to trade information on which ones are (relatively) trustworthy in situations like this. You reach out to a few of your contacts asking if anyone knows anything about Thermo, but no one has much to offer (beyond a few jokes along the lines of "I think he's pretty hot, ha ha").
