“That’s impossible! How the hell could you not be brainwashed?”

“The suit diagnostics found the counterfeit chips and firewalled them. When Doctor Dumb-o-Farce...” She snickered again at the gibe. “When Doctor Dynoforce tried to trigger them, all they did was trigger an alarm.”

“And you just played along and pretended to be brainwashed?”

Sentinelle shrugged as best she could in her bonds. “You attacked him and then you acted like you were working for him. That made it even harder than usual to figure out which side you were really on. Playing along was the easiest way to find out what you were up to.”

The mercenary stared down at the superheroine, looking utterly dumbfounded.

“I did all this to snap you out of it, and you were never brainwashed in the first place?” It was hard to tell whether she was baffled, angry, or just too stunned to know how to react.

“Snap me out of it? I thought you were taking advantage of it!”

“No! Well, maybe some....” Spidershade did a double take. “No! I wasn’t taking advantage of anything!” she snapped. “If you weren’t mind controlled, that means you let me do it! You let me take you to bed and spread your legs and tie you up!”

“I didn’t know you were taking me to bed taking me to bed!” Sentinelle shot back. “I thought it was just another trap to get out of! When I couldn’t pull my way out or blast my way out, I tried to think of something else until—”

She stopped dead, then yanked at her manacle as if trying to clap her hand over her mouth.

“Until?” Spidershade echoed. “Until what?” Her lips curled into a smirk. “Until you figured out that I was ‘taking you to bed’ taking you to bed?” she leered, making air quotes with her fingers.

She snickered. “This is what turns you on, isn’t it? That’s why you quit trying to escape. That’s why you cooperated every step of the way while your Goody-Two-Shoes superheroine costume got turned into a skin-tight see-through open-crotch fetish wrap— ”

“Shut up! When’s the last time you went three months without getting laid?”

The outburst hung in the air as the two women stared at each other.

Finally, Spidershade broke the silence. “No way! There is no way a hot piece of ass like you can’t get laid if she wants to!”

“I am not discussing my personal life with you!” Sentinelle snapped.

“You’re the one who brought it up!”

“I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Ever since I broke up with my last boyfriend every guy I liked has been already taken, or clueless, or psycho, or gay — not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she interjected, then continued, “or.” Her voice became a mocking lilt. “...’not ready for a relationship right now’.”

“Err...” Spidershade felt uncharacteristically uncomfortable about speaking bluntly. “Not to offend your noble heroic sensibilities too much, but you do know that you don’t need to be in a relationship to get laid?”

Sentinelle gave a bitter snort. “Maybe you don’t, but I do. Actually, I don’t, but everybody thinks I do!”

Spidershade frowned.

“I didn’t mean it like that! I’m not judging! How you live your life is none of my business except the part of your life where you steal stuff and...” She trailed off and got back on the subject. “It’s like I’ve got ‘BEWARE! CLINGY!’ tattooed on my forehead or something, okay? No matter how much I swear that I’m not looking for anything beyond one night of ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’, the guys I try to pick up run away fast enough to leave Meteor Maid in the dust!”

There was another awkward silence.

“Three months, huh?”

“Yeah, three months! Three long months of nothing but my fingers and battery-powered gizmos!” She glared as if daring anyone to object to what she was saying. “So when I realized what you were doing, something inside my head just went snap! I decided right then and there — I wasn’t going to try to escape; I was going to lie back and finally get myself fucked!”

Spidershade did a double take at the heroine’s language.

“Ooooo, I said a bad word!” the heroine said in a sarcastic sing-song tone. Then she took a deep breath and continued, pouring out her frustration with every word, “I didn’t care about you being a villain...”

“I just work for whoever’s hiring....” the mercenary objected.

The heroine ignored her and continued, “...I didn’t care about doing the whips-and-chains stuff...”

“Hey, I don’t do whips! That’s just nasty!”

“...and I didn’t care about you being a girl! Hell, maybe I’d have better luck dating if I tried being a queer lezbo dyke!”

“Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.”

Sentinelle sighed as she wound down from her rant. “I would have been satisfied to lie back and be a sex toy, but now we’ve ruined the mood to even do that!”

Spidershade stared at her for a moment, and then smiled. Her hand reached out to reassuringly pat Sentinelle on the hip, and then slid down and around to grab her butt.

“Oh, I think we can rekindle the mood! You just lie there and wait a minute — not that you have a choice — and we’ll get this party started!”

She scooted back between the bound woman’s legs and climbed down from the bed. Once again, she opened her toy drawer. Before she reached in or even looked, she turned back toward the bed.

“Oh, about that question: The last time I went three months without getting laid was somewhere in between thinking ‘boys are icky’ and figuring out ‘I was right the first time, boys are icky’.” She thought a moment and decided that she might as well aim high. “Maybe you’ll realize the same thing after you try doing it with another woman.”

She paused. “This is your first time with another woman, right?”

Sentinelle nodded.

“Well, then, I have just the thing for the occasion.”

Reaching into the drawer, she took out something. It was bunched up in her hand, so that Sentinelle couldn’t really see anything but a couple of dangling straps.

Spidershade strode back toward the bed. “Hold still while I adjust the fit on your ‘queer lesbo dyke’ training wheels....”