Author's Notes: The penultimate episode. Revisiting a pair of minor characters I particularly liked, and a slightly-loose end tied up.
EPISODE SEVEN: Always Keep Your Fiends Close and Your Frenemies Closer.
After the close encounter with Betty your first order of business is doing something about the load of fertilized alien eggs you're involuntarily hosting. You don't have any idea of how long the things need to hatch and start biting and definitely don't want to find out the hard way.
So you get on the phone to Doctor Z. Z is one of the supergeniuses on the good-guy side and has doctorates in about every science you can shake a stick at. In his case this includes not only your usual particle physics, engineering, chemistry, chemical engineering, biochemistry, biochemical engineering, biology, bioengineering, genetics, and genetic engineering, but also an honest-to-god M.D. In addition he's local, making him both many heroes' go-to egghead when there's a problem that requires massive brainpower and their medical consultant for unusual conditions picked up during the course of adventures.
Once you talk your way past his answering service (it's still very early morning) he picks up. "Zed here. From the urgency of your call, Cougaress, I take it you're having a spot of trouble, eh?"
"I need to see you in your office right away. It's a, um, medical issue."
"The city does have a 911 service, you know."
"I don't think most ERs are equipped to handle impregnation by a hostile extraterrestrial."
"Ah, bit of a sticky wicket, that. But it does sound like something a bit more up my street, as we might say. Well, drop on by."
It's embarrassing calling a ride-share while you're wearing nothing but a canvas boat cover, but you don't want to take the time to walk home to get something else. Fortunately there's not many people around when you get dropped off in front of the office tower where Z leases the top six floors.
Once he brings you into his clinical area you find that Dr. Z owns a gynecology exam table. "It's not that I get very much use out of the old thing but I keep it around just in case. Also it's quite a long while since my rotation in gynaecology, but while waiting for you to arrive I memorized a pair of newer textbooks on the subject so I should be back up to speed," he informs you. "Now, try to relax, this may feel a bit cool."
The medical removal process is not nearly as much fun as the way the eggs were inserted, but you don't tell Z this as it doesn't seem like the reaction a normal woman would have to being forcibly put in the family way by a huge space bug. The good news is that Z tells you he doesn't expect you to have any sort of permanent after-effects from the egging.
During the procedure Z is of course asking you about what happened. When he hears about Betty's corpse and her belongings being in Founder's Park he completely geeks out (or as he puts it, gets "quite chuffed"), both over the thought of being able to do an alien autopsy and at the chance for him to analyze all that advanced technology. You therefore feel apologetic when you admit that as you left the boathouse it looked to you like both Betty's body and all her equipment were melting into glop. Your speculation is that Egioneelan tech is biologically based and they install some sort of failsafe to make sure it can't fall into the hands of their intended victims.
"Ah, well," Z sighs. "At least I'll have these eggs to investigate. Hopefully I can find some way of preserving them outside a host body."
Once your "morning after" problem is dealt with you get back on the phone to let the other heroes who were patrolling the park now that the threat is dealt with and to look for the bodies of the victims near the boathouse. You don't bother to give details. While in the middle of this you receive a text from Ryan which says he's going to be away for a few days on a backpacking trip with some people he's met. He's never mentioned an interest in backpacking before, but you're glad he's making new friends.
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Dr. Z loans you one of his lab coats to wear, which is certainly a step up from a tarp. He also has one of his robot cars take you home so you don't have to deal with another ride-share. As soon as you get to the house you go straight to bed because it was a very long night.
It's about four in the afternoon when you wake up. You missed breakfast and lunch so you microwave a frozen entree for an early dinner. As you eat you find yourself thinking about the Watchman.
He sneaks around and follows heroines, but does that make him a villain? The only thing pointing to the conclusion is the way his actions are being interpreted as those of a voyeur, otherwise he's never committed a single crime anyone knows about. Really the reason he's being called a villain is because he's being compared to Peeping Tomcat and the Oculist, who are the guys everyone thinks about when you combine "superhuman" and "voyeur."
But it's not as if only villains can have kinks, heroes have them too. After all, your compatriots may have strange powers but they're still human. (Well, the ones who are human are still human. You're obviously not including heroes like RoboStar or the Mercurian Mancatcher.) Anyway, the point is that for the most part heroes have the same sort of peculiarities and quirks as other people. And just like with normals, some of those quirks have to do with sex.
Just as an example, pretty much everyone in the superhero community knows that Merit-man has this thing about old ladies. He's constantly looking for chances to save grannies, or rescue their cats, or simply help them cross the street. He's painfully shy about it, but rumor is that occasionally one of the old girls guesses what he really wants and lets him get into her knickers. It's a bit odd, sure, but between consenting adults is there really anything wrong about that?
Then there's Grizzly, whose public image is that of an incredibly tough, rough, ultra-macho he-man. But Lady Liberty, who's dated him, told you he likes to wear a woman's garter belt and stockings in bed. He isn't gay (Libby says she's positive about that from intimate experience), but she also said that if you have X-ray vision you can see that underneath the leather-and-spikes hero costume he's always wearing frilly lace panties.
So you don't think it's fair classifying Watchman as a villain just based on the notion that he might have a kink involving following heroines around. Or even if he's been watching as you had sex with some of your opponents recently. Furthermore he may have thought he was saving you from Thermo that one time, and he definitely
did
save you from becoming larva chow by bringing down Betty. It's hard to call the latter anything but the act of a hero, especially since he got beaten up pretty heavily in the process. He certainly can't be all bad.
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