Lorna’s thoughts were elsewhere as she returned home to Milwaukee. She knew, vaguely, what it was she’d decided to be; understood, on a very basic level, how she was to mentor the younger members of the Justice Guard.

But she felt like she should know more. Milf wasn’t a word she used; she’d heard it, a decade and more back, in a movie, but honestly it hadn’t been her kind of film.

Once she was back in her apartment - she hated the last little bit of the run in; had to make a series of complicated turns and quick shifts to thread a route where she didn’t risk being seen - she made her way over to the computer desk.

This done she opened up her browser and typed one simple word into the search bar.

milf

Just reading the descriptions on the search results made her frown.

…an acronym that stands for “Mother I’d Like to Fuck”… …any woman with children who has men that want to have sexual intercourse with her…

Lorna didn’t have children; she’d had chances, plenty of them, and had always opted away. For herself she was happy with the power of the Osprey, but she wasn’t at all sure how it might have passed on to her children.

Now that felt like a mistake, an error that would hurt her ability to contribute to the world’s best-known superteam, that would poison the greatest opportunity to do real good her career had offered her.

Lorna sat back in her chair and frowned slightly. That seemed overblown. As the only hero in her city, she’d rarely travelled over state lines in costume, except for those times when the world went crazy enough that every hero put on their mask and did what they could.

And, yes, a lot of the time the crimes she’d fought had been regular human crimes, often organised crime of one kind or another. But those had been opportunities to serve the people of her city. More than that, they’d been chances to save the people of her city.

Lorna had no idea how many people she’d saved over the course of her career, even if she limited the count to battles against the various mobs and the intermittent cults that had threatened Milwaukee.

Certainly the count was in the hundreds if not thousands every year of her career; and this was setting aside the banishment of the Bray Road Beast, any time she’d left town to help on a national scale, or that year or two when Queensnake, having sold her soul to dark forces, turned from wanting to conquer the state to wanting to plunge it into mystic darkness.

The Justice Guard was a huge platform and an even bigger honour, and she certainly wanted to do her best for them, but it was hardly her first chance to do real good in the world.

She wasn’t sure where the sudden feeling of necessity came from, but it was certainly illusory.

…also sometimes used to describe women above a certain age (30 or 40+) who are not mothers themselves, but are deemed to be sexually attractive and also have men that would like to partake in sexual intercourse with them…

Why only men, she wondered. The Justice Guard had quite a few younger members, and some of them - the other new arrival, for example - were women. Was this supposed to be gender based?

She didn’t think so, really. The language was so oddly formal in any case that it seemed much more likely to be someone writing in a traditional, formal style.

She decided it was perfectly alright if Sunstone also wanted to have sex with her.

Lorna’s forehead wrinkled thoughtfully. This all seemed very one-sided, simply about being desired. That seemed off, somehow.

Still, she was really only going on what showed up in the search descriptions.

Not really aware that her long legs had uncrossed, she adjusted her position in her chair, thighs well apart. As one hand manipulated her mouse, the other crept down to stroke absent-mindedly but devotedly at her inner thighs.

Lorna felt the arousal building and didn’t realise what it was coming from. It seemed so reasonable, so logical, that a milf would be turned on like this.

Her fingertips crept up her tights toward the white of her costumed crotch. She was starting to stroke, but somehow her conscious mind wasn’t aware.

She followed one of the links.

Lorna was surprised to find it had pictures, though perhaps she shouldn’t have been. Her eyes widened; leopard print, tiger stripes, all tight outfits stretched far enough to be partially transparent. Animal patterns, just a tantalising glimpse of what lay beneath… she could do that; there was a feather motif to the fabric of her costume, although it was far too opaque to compare to the others.

She began studying the images intently, looking not just at the clothing and the lack (those were definitely visible nipples on some of the models, she thought, but one or two of the others had to have flesh-tone bras to be that perky) but also at the stance, the expression, the body language, the makeup…

So much was going to have to change, but she was getting a reasonably clear idea of what she needed to do. She was pretty sure she could make it work; might have to go source a new fabric supplier to make a new, more sheer costume, and she’d definitely have to decide what she was doing about the underwear situation.

She was getting a better idea of how to carry herself, too; how to stand, how to look at people, what expression she should wear when looking at the younger heroes in the team if she wanted to inspire them.

All the same, still images could only do so much.

She went back to the search page and clicked across to the video tab.

Lorna had nearly clicked on the top entry, which was a pop video, when she registered a familiar face in the thumbnail for the third one down. The fingers of her other hand, still idly stroking up and down her pussy lips through her costume without her noticing, curled involuntarily, so that they would have been inside her if not for the fabric.

She whimpered, but still didn’t register what her hand was doing. Something in her head, some rule that she would not and could not have made for herself, kept her unawares.

I so want to be a milf to the younger guys, she thought, still staring at the video thumbnail.

It was hosted on a porn site, she noted, but it looked so like Ms Miracle… and the costume was the same…

She clicked through on the link. Curiosity was a weapon the mind used against itself, she thought, although somehow the thought sounded more like Mentros saying something, like a memory. Odd, as she’d rarely worked with Mentros.

She wasn’t a big fan of psionic types, except for PsyKick.

…the actress in the porn really did look like Ms Miracle. Sounded like her, too. Just didn’t act or move like her; more like some horny idiot version of her.

Every so often the man toying with her would snap his fingers and she’d moan like a tongue just flicked across her clit and her nipples at once, and then she seemed to get dumber. The man was wearing a lab coat, a terrible goatee, and a pair of steampunk goggles.

Like a cosplayer with mad scientist tendencies.

Lorna was biting her lip as she watched, and without really realising it she was almost humping her own fingers, the hand that had been operating the mouse instead gripping the chair seat as she levered herself just off it, fucking the air and her fingers with her hips. Certainly she should have noticed, and yet…

The woman looked astonishingly like Ms Miracle, if Ms Miracle could end up under the influence of a ‘cougar chip’, Lorna thought. But it had to be an actress, considering what she was doing.

Although…

Ms Miracle’s nose and cheeks freckled sometimes. Not often - usually when she’d been exposed to otherworldly energies.

Those looked a lot like her freckles, Lorna thought, and her fingers seemed to work at her pussy even more urgently. The heroine might be unaware of what her hand was doing, but she was extremely aware of its results…

*

“…well, I’ll leave you to it.” True to her word, Maxine Power gave her one last smile then moved on from the doorway of what was now Tanya’s room. She smiled back, but it was such a surreal situation she barely registered the kind words; instead, she was just thinking That’s Maxine Power, and she’s acting like you belong on the same team.

She turned mutely back to her bag, resting on the bed. She’d only brought one big sports bag worth of her belongings; so much that she might have wanted to bring had been caught near ground zero of the Shimmerwave, and it hadn’t undone correctly. Nobody seemed entirely sure why, though privately Tanya suspected it was because her things belonged to her, and she was as much fae as human now; neither side had been able to tell her what to expect from that.

“The last time one of you took on the mantle of one such as we,” one of the fae court had told her, and then she had paused, and stayed quiet so long that Tanya had demanded “Yes?”

“Another of yours agreed to watch him,” they said. “Shaxberd. William Shaxberd. I understand he lost track of them quickly.”

She wasn’t sure she could really even believe that. The fae lied as naturally and as easily as they gave up the truth, and there seemed no way of predicting which was which.

That was why she’d taken the Justice Guard offer residential, too. Her home was twisted and mutated and gone; her remaining family were unchanged, but were almost strangers all the same. The part of her that was fae didn’t recognise them. After the first week, Tanya had become uncomfortable with the sudden lurches between knowing them as her family and seeing them not just as strangers but as alien; it wasn’t like any part of her disliked them but it just wasn’t comfortable.

She took a deep breath and decided not to unpack yet; instead she made her way to the window and looked out over the city of New York.

Her life had changed so quickly, and so fast.

*

PsyKick had ended up working the monitors that evening, while Maxine was on comms. Tyrone felt a little aggrieved by this (as with much else) - he wasn’t approved to handle comms himself, and while he knew Sunstone wouldn’t be either (too many major political and law enforcement figures refused to consider the younger members reliable, no matter what they did) it rankled, as he had plenty of years’ experience.

Most nights this wouldn’t be a problem - there was usually plenty to keep an eye on in the monitor room - but every once in a while, if only from sheer statistical unlikelihood, there wasn’t much that required the entire superteam.

After alerting Ms Miracle to indications that Ol’ Green Eyes had resurfaced, he settled back and gave the monitors one more scan. Nothing serious, he thought; nothing standing out anyway.

He reached out cautiously to find Maxine Power’s sense. She wasn’t exactly on high alert either, taking advantage of the quiet night to dig into an investigation of her own.

Tyrone couldn’t catch much of the details without pushing hard - something about Machisman, who probably counted as Maxine Power’s nemesis if anyone did, and some scheme to do with steroid dealers and metahuman drugs - and, while he was tempted to delve a little deeper - it sounded interesting, and Machisman did come across as a real dickhead - it would be difficult to offer her any insight without explaining he’d been inside her mind while he was bored on duty.

On the other hand, she was preoccupied…

Tyrone turned his sight upward, reaching out toward the few residential rooms in the HQ, feeling out for the other mind he knew was there.

He probably wouldn’t have done this if Mentros wasn’t back in California, re-attuning to the Cosmic Ashram.

But as it was, the young woman’s thoughts were just there; her mind seemed to shimmer in places, and Tyrone could see that a part of her thoughts was somehow set aside from the rest, as if it was watching the rest.

It had an odd texture, too; something that didn’t fit at all, didn’t feel the way Tyrone expected a human mind to feel.

All the same, neither of them were aware of him; accordingly, he made contact, slipped inside with a delicacy of touch he wouldn’t have been capable of just a year earlier.

Tanya (for so he discovered her name to be) did not, he was pretty sure, even register that he was there.

She was…

Well.

She was deeply, deeply unhappy. All that power at her fingertips, but she was still so very sad…

Intrigued, Tyrone reached in and started to probe. It didn’t take long to find out the root of her sadness; the wounds were new, and fresh, with no time to scar; he didn’t exactly have to delve deep to… he flinched… to experience it, to relive the pain, to encounter the horrified loss of a young woman whose sister was dashed away in front of her, whose best friend’s destruction lead her to strike the bargain that gave her the power of the Sunstone, whose decisions ever since that moment had been panicked, uncomfortable trauma reactions, emotional impulses initially built on the idea I don’t want to be hurt like that again and later expanding to acknowledge I don’t want anyone to be hurt like that.

It was no wonder she’d taken the Justice Guard offer when it was presented to her; there could be no better opportunity for someone with powers and without money to try to reduce the suffering in the world.

Tyrone often thought it was strange that, for all the old comics where millionaires (back when millionaires were as far above a typical family as billionaires had been throughout Tyrone’s life) got bored and took up skills that let them be superheroes, and then threw themselves into it - but there was nobody like that in the Justice Guard.

They didn’t even tend to be the ones who gave the Justice Guard the funding it needed, either. Funding came in from lottery winners, from mid-tier CEOs, from heirs and heiresses who’d been rescued (usually in one-off payments), from government grants and community initiatives.

But when billionaires got involved in superheroics, it was usually something they found out about afterward, like four months previous when Macabre had destroyed Clark Enterprises’ research lab, and when Ms Miracle had caught her she’d been quite gleeful about bringing forward evidence she’d been paid by the CEO of their biggest rival.

The trauma that now enveloped him stung Tyrone, but it didn’t swallow him; his training from Mentros allowed him to turn away the force of the deepest cuts. He felt her pain and, to a degree, he empathised - but only to a degree.

All the same, he thought, there was no reason she should have to ache like this. He’d watched Mentros perform empathic surgery many times; how hard, he asked himself, could it really be?

Besides, if he pulled it off, maybe that would be enough for Mentros to acknowledge that he’d come into his own with his powers.

He slipped his consciousness more fully into Sunstone’s mind. The root of all this would be the start of their encounter with the Shimmerwave, right? He projected back to the earliest memories of that, finding her sat talking with her friend in a diner just as the Shimmerwave burst into it.

He replayed the memory several times, studying it closely, before he got to work.

*

Tanya shook her head, her vision suddenly swimming. That was so strange… why had she been thinking about Mariah while staring out of the window? She wasn’t even from a city, there was nothing in the New York city skyline that should bring her to mine, and yet suddenly, she was deep in Tanya’s thoughts.

Not just that, but she was thinking about Mariah’s last moments. The worst part. The part that hurt the most.

She’d been so lost, so hurt, so angry that the choice she was offered had been an easy one. She still wasn’t sure why the Sunstone was offered to her in the first place - her best guess was that not all the fae agreed with the invasion - but it had been easy to do, and reliving it was startlingly painful.

Except…

Except somehow it didn’t seem to be. The hurt was something she had felt, but the dull, numbing ache that she’d had whenever she took time to remember her lost friend wasn’t there.

She felt as if she’d been denied something. Like the grieving she was owed had been ripped away from her. And yet if she’d been asked if she wanted that ache to go away, she would have agreed without hesitation. She might even have begged for that ache to be taken from her. Would have sworn with certainty that she didn’t need it.

Now it was gone, though, losing it was… strange. Uncomfortable. And why? She delved back into memory, looking for that same discomfort, that same ache, and found it in her past.

Tanya found herself clinging to it. She wasn’t ready to let go, and she knew that now. The more she clung, the more real it seemed to feel, the closer it was to feeling right again…

And then suddenly it was gone, but she’d been hanging onto it, and she noticed the abruptness with which it went, the sudden absence.

That didn’t seem like the way anything happened.

She reached down deeper into herself, almost losing herself in the memory, until she caught hold of her pain again.

*

Tyrone was reclining in the big monitor room chair, eyes closed, and he’d been smiling for some time after he started work on Sunstone. It was all going, not according to plan exactly, but it was certainly all going so well…

And then the emotions he’d successfully identified and snipped out started creeping back in, so he snipped them back out.

Strange, though, that her thoughts had turned back to the same terrible memory again. Still, he-

Suddenly the memory began once more, and the banished emotions reappeared.

For a heartbeat Tyrone was absolutely at a loss. This never seemed to happen to Mentros, this was something he sidestepped somehow.

What did Mentros do that Tyrone wasn’t?

He usually placed his targets into a sleep state, Tyrone realised. Something that stopped his patient from interfering - that had to be what was happening here.

But putting someone to sleep required not just power but time. There was a reason every battle Mentros was part of didn’t just end with one side slumbering. Tyrone didn’t think he could do that now.

But, he thought, he had a pretty good alternative - he’d been able to firmly distract Osprey. Sunstone wasn’t likely to be able to out-willpower her.

So he reached out for another kind of memory entirely.

*

A shudder ran through Tanya and suddenly she was remembering spring break the year before; it was so vivid, so clear, it felt like she was actually there.

The pain and the ache tied to Mariah seemed suddenly so out of place; this was a memory of… not happiness, necessarily, but of potential, and of excitement.

She felt her emotions switching on her, and in the turmoil of her mental state changing, her arousal suddenly spiked.

What was going on?

Memory multiplied, intensified, became more real; she jumped from by the pool one spring break morning to inside a rich blond boy’s hotel room that afternoon.

He’d had a crisp, even smile inside a lopsided grin, deep blue eyes that promised a good time and dared her to pick up the challenge. He’d seemed, in that way the all-too-perfect sometimes did, almost another species, but if he was, he was slumming it and he’d chosen to slum it with her.

She’d been nervous enough she hadn’t known what to do, but then she hadn’t been nearly so horny as she found herself reliving the memory. Somehow she found herself smiling at him invitingly, much more confident than she had been then - or just more strongly driven by need, perhaps?

This didn’t feel like a memory anymore. It felt like a dream. And as sometimes happened with dreams, she didn’t feel like she had control of her own thoughts or actions.

She moved closer to the blond, although he wasn’t a blond, he had that light brown hair that was a dozen different colours depending how the sun hit it, and his smile was cocksure rather than lopsided.

He’d changed, and there was something familiar about him, but she put her arms up, crossing her wrists just behind his neck, and she grinned invitingly at him, and she pulled him urgently into a kiss.

…She’d been thinking about something else not all that long ago, hadn’t she? Something that had seemed important?

His hands were on his ass and he squeezed and he pulled her in against him and her body was pressed firmly against this, back arched, as she allowed him to take over after she’d taken the initiative, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember anything more important, more urgent, than giving this guy just exactly what he wanted, no questions asked.

She just wished she knew who he was. It felt like she was close, so close, and yet it was tantalisingly just out of reach…

*

Maxine Power paused in her work and tilted her head to the side. The Justice Guard headquarters was a big place, but the people who inhabited it were, universally, larger than life. As such the atmosphere of the building often seemed to change, depending who was in it and what they were doing.

So what was happening that left her lips dry and a pleasurable shiver running up and down her spine?

The only others in the building should be Sunstone, PsyKick and, of course, D.A.N.I.E.L.

And PsyKick was on monitor duty - she was sure he wouldn’t abandon his chair in the control centre; it had taken two years before he’d been allowed in, and he’d been fighting to be taken seriously the whole time.

It must, she thought, be a fae thing, and she resigned herself to the occasional evening of pleasurable second-hand bliss while Sunstone remained in residence.

She turned back to her screen, vaguely thinking back to her most recent ex.

That guy had had one hell of a body, and he’d known how to use it; the best experience she’d had in bed outside of being mind controlled alongside Ms Miracle, who was, when they were both compelled to show themselves off for a temporary Master’s pleasure, a generous and experienced lover.

Maybe, she thought, she should give Michael another chance.

As soon as she went off shift she’d drop him a text and see if he’d learned to read between the lines properly yet…