Caz was, by this point, extremely confused.

After her conversation with Denise, she’d naturally made a point to look up #RiptideSways for herself. She’d been presented with several videos, and had watched through them with a growing sense of absolute bafflement.

She’d had nothing to do with these. Wouldn’t know where to start in editing videos, and her virality only mattered to her when something happened as a result of it that she could use. Hadn’t known any of it was happening until that moment. But she could certainly see why Denise had been sceptical of that. Who else would be doing this?

It was supposed to be hypnotic, she was pretty sure of that. It wasn’t, of course. None of this stuff really was; you needed an actual mind controller to make a genuine impact on somebody’s mind. But it was odd, she thought, that someone had decided to make these.

“Maybe it’s a frame job,” she mused aloud, not that there was anyone to hear her.

Working that out would probably involve knowing who was actually responsible. The creator hadn’t done much else, or hadn’t done much else that tied to the same username. If she was on Spotlights a lot, maybe she’d look at the way these videos were edited and be able to make a rough guess, but she couldn’t.

There was a twitter account associated with the screenname. It existed just to post links to the videos, though, and the bio read in its entirety “Not Riptide, just a fan.”

Caz had stared at that for quite a long time - well, divided her stare between that and the video loop playing beside it - trying to figure it out. It felt like it should be some kind of coded message, she just had no idea what it was saying, or if it was meant to be a coded message for her or for someone else.

It was confusing, and honestly afterwards, as she reflected on it, Caz was surprised she hadn’t gotten angry about it. It had actually been a reasonably peaceful time, before she set her phone down and went off to make dinner. She was halfway through eating dinner when she started thinking about it and started to get annoyed.

As much as seeing that video on loop had given her a whole new level of satisfaction in how good she looked from behind, it was also annoying to her that someone was using her for this. Sooner or later someone in law enforcement or a fellow costume was going to stumble over it (her money was on Knave, who’d once run four consecutive kidnap schemes in a year, each involving the woman featured on the cover of a gossip magazine the month he put the scheme into play, or Sweet Caroline, who seemed to pick the cases she investigated by what was most likely to get her talked about by celebrities) and they would certainly assume she had to be involved.

Caz had no way to figure out who was behind this or even if they lived on the same continent, so she decided to work off the annoyance she’d built up by trashing something else a billionaire had built to make them even more obscenely rich.

Late Sunday night she stopped off at a phone booth half the city away from her home, already in costume, dialled three numbers, and waited.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“This is Riptide,” she said. “The Watson Lake dam is about to rupture.” Then she hung up and took off.

Watson Lake (formerly the Watson River) itself came out of the nearby mountains into a relatively new valley, along one edge of which a sturdy, wide road had been built in the 1950s to facilitate the construction of the dam. Local authorities had originally planted a forest in the valley afterwards as a sop to the pro-nature lobby, and the sheer awkwardness of its location had kept land prices relatively low since.

Two years earlier, an enterprising venture capitalist had identified the valley as a good location to build a giant new data centre; cheap land, a nearby power source, and a road big enough to make construction easy. It was now part of one of the big AI firms.

On the weekend, Caz didn’t figure there’d be many people there. The opportunity to flood out an AI business was too satisfying to pass up, and this was the perfect opportunity.

She was in the middle of punching out handholds she could use to start wrenching when Suprema showed up.

“I really wouldn’t do that,” the blonde called down from up on the top of the dam. Riptide left off what she’d been doing and looked up at her.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “This is going to be so satisfying to watch.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Suprema said. “So it isn’t. And besides, what about the people who work downriver?”

Riptide had already gone back to work. Dams were thick, robust things. Breaking them wasn’t easy. But she knew it was going to be satisfying. “You already evacuated them,” she said. “Right?”

“Actually, no,” Suprema said. Riptide looked up at her, surprised, but not worried; the tone of the other woman’s voice still suggested her bluff had been called. “They were already driving clear when I got up here.”

“So let me deal with this,” Riptide told her.

“Destroying a dam to do it?”

In spite of herself, she flashed the heroine a grin. “I know, I know,” she said. “There’s a lot of collateral damage here. But it’s going to be so satisfying.”

Suprema sighed, and Caz grinned fiercely. “At least some part of you wants to see what it’s like, huh?”

“We have the power to do things like break dams apart,” Suprema said. “That’s why it’s a good idea for us to not give in to impulses just so we can watch the result.”

Riptide looked up at her, hands on her hips, irritated. “Why are you doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Being reasonable.”

Suprema blinked. “Uh…. what?”

Riptide stomped against the dam wall and a chunk of reinforced concrete three feet across and six inches thick finally came loose. She grabbed hold of it. “This isn’t a world for reasonable people,” she said, and hurled it upward at Suprema. “This is a mad world!”

She was flying up close behind her improvised frisbee, and it might have worked if she hadn’t done a very similar move against Suprema so recently. The blonde had moved further forward, standing in the air out of the path the concrete was flying in, and as Riptide drew level, she swept her foot backward in a solid kick.

Riptide crashed face-first into the dam. The surface of the concrete cracked around her on impact; Suprema wouldn’t have risked doing any such thing in the factory, but a wall of concrete as thick as the dam’s wouldn’t give just from their fight.

She yanked her arms free of the surface and put her hands down to brace against the wall, levering herself out of her impact crater. She expected all the while that Suprema would swoop down on her, maybe grab her. Some kind of restraint hold was usually the biggest advantage you could easily get in a fight like this.

No such grab came. Riptide turned to face her opponent and saw again in her eyes that faintly unfocused look. She hadn’t imagined it the last time either, she thought; the woman’s lips were moving.

But what would she be saying?

…Wait.

Wait a second.

Wait one fucking second.

There was no way.

But on the other hand, she’d fought Suprema enough to know that this was unusually… hesitant… for her. She might give you a couple of opportunities to surrender if you wanted them, but usually the only way to get her to slow down and be careful was if other people were under threat.

Add in the weird expression, and the thing she was muttering just might be Riptide Sways.

Caz wasn’t at all sure what you did in a situation like this. “Hey,” she said. “I have a dumb question for you.”

“I’m not going to just let you do this.”

Maybe you are.

“That wasn’t it,” she said, trying to conceal that she’d even had that thought. “Actually, I’m pretty sure you’d never guess the question.”

Suprema was looking cautious now. “Go ahead.”

“How much time do you spend on Spotlights?”

The blonde blushed scarlet.

Jackpot.

Caz smiled slowly. “I see you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Give her credit, she rallied fast. “Maybe I do,” she said. “And maybe I don’t.”

Riptide smiled slowly, the smirk she was known for emerging clearly. A smirk she’d seen plenty while watching the videos earlier.

It occurred to her that in being convinced Suprema had watched the videos, she was also assuming that they had an effect, where she’d previously dismissed that idea as obviously incorrect. “Well,” she said, “if you think so, then you won’t have any objection if I just sw-”

Air left her abruptly, driven out of her by the shoulder of an accelerating superhuman tackling her low. She was suddenly hurtling backward, being driven back, up over the top of the dam and beyond.

Suprema had charged, accelerating fast enough to stop her even finishing the word. Now the heroine had comfortable control of their fight.

Riptide wasn’t having that. She reached an arm down and around the other woman’s neck, not cinched in tight, just enough for some control. Then she started flying downward.

Suprema didn’t realised what was going on fast enough. They skipped over the surface of the water twice like a stone, then went firmly under. The shift in speed threw both of them off their direction; moments later, they crashed into the lake bed.

The ground shook for a moment. Both women, losing their grip on one another, were flung apart, surging through the water. Then the violent motion of the water itself ceased, and the lake was still and silent.

Before nature could recover from the uncertainty of the intrusion, before birdsong could begin again, the surface of the water broke up at the far end of the lake from the dam. Riptide trudged out of the water, sopping wet, some silt sticking to her in places.

She squinted thoughtfully at the lake surface, then at the dam itself, and heaved a sigh. It wasn’t worth it, she told herself. Instead, struck by a sudden thought, she headed upriver, around a corner and further into the mountains. It wasn’t far to the waterfall which fed into the lake.

Caz had no interest in tracking lake mud through her own home, and besides, some part of her had always wanted to indulge in a waterfall shower, ever since the first time she’d seen one on TV as a kid. This was the perfect opportunity.

She stripped off - it took longer than she’d expected, as everything was waterlogged enough to resist being removed - and hung her costume on a tree branch, not to dry as much as to drip off the excess. Then she walked into the waterfall’s plunge pool which, while it was much colder than the movies had always made it seem - she thought was surprisingly pleasant.

Something - some pent-up emotion built up over the fight, perhaps, or adrenaline without another outlet - came out of her in a gale of laughter. After the fit of laughter was over she began to sing. She always sang in the shower, but never in tune.

A couple of minutes later Caz started to feel as if she was being watched. She turned, slowly, and saw Suprema standing, slightly bedraggled, at the water’s edge, staring at her naked form. Her face, once again, was unfocused.

She realised that she’d been dancing, most probably had been swaying. Her smile slowly reappeared on her face.

“Riptide sways,” she called.

“Her crowd obeys,” Suprema answered. Her voice was soft, gentle, warm.

“I knew it,” Caz called cheerfully. Suprema, apparently having no answer for this, remained silent and still.

It occurred to Caz only belatedly that she was naked in front of one of her regular adversaries, but it didn’t occur to her to be embarrassed about it. It did, however, seem a little unfair.

“Did you come here to arrest me or to get clean?”

There was a pause. “I’m not sure,” was the answer when it came. Which, to Caz, probably meant that both ideas had been halfway in her mind, and the impossibility of combining them both hadn’t really occurred to her yet. She could relate. She operated on impulse most of the time, and Riptide was even more impulsive than she usually was on her own.

Which may have been the thought that led her to say “Undress yourself and put your costume to one side.”

Suprema stood still. The unfocused expression on her face shifted slightly. Caz read it as indecisive, rather than opposed. She turned her back on the blonde in the water and, looking over her shoulder, began to sway her hips.

It turned out to be fascinating to watch the way Suprema’s expression shifted, little by little, as she watched; the indecisiveness warred with the lack of focus, and Riptide had the distinct impression that the two were opposed somehow. Was apparent indecision the result of the heroine pulling against the hypnotic effect of the videos?

The more she swayed, the less uncertainty there was in the other woman’s gaze. Slowly, Suprema’s hands drifted across to her belt buckle and unsnapped it. Bringing the belt out from around her waist, she turned slightly, hanging it on another tree branch. But even as she’d turned toward the bench, her head stayed pointed directly at Riptide, her eyes never left the supervillain’s ass.

The tight-fitting swimsuit style costume followed it, hung up on the branch atop it. Then the boots, caked in mud up past the ankles. She tore her hose removing it, but then it had been pretty seriously damaged already; nothing was really lost in the rip. The panties and bra beneath followed, these hung up carefully on the tree.

Suprema was completely naked, standing in front of Riptide. Her lips shaped Riptide Sways again.

“You’re not going to arrest me today,” Riptide told her.

“No,” she agreed. Caz laughed, clapping her hands, and turned back to face her.

“Come in here,” she said suddenly. Suprema started forward, walking rather than flying, her pace slow, her footsteps light enough that she seemed almost in a dream.

Caz turned her back on the other woman as she joined her. Raising her hands above her head, she started rolling her hips again. “Are you watching?” she asked over her shoulder, her tone as light and teasing as she could make it.

“Yes.”

“Scrub my back.”

She was already swaying, so if there would have been a resistance if she hadn’t been, she didn’t know. The heroine’s touch was slow at first, but she seemed to come alive the more she did it, her other hand resting on Caz’s hip for purchase.

Caz’s cheeks began to burn. This was more erotic than she’d expected it to feel. It would be so easy to give the other woman an order…

“Are you addicted to the videos?” she asked suddenly.

There was a different quality to Suprema’s silence when she had been asked a question, or maybe the difference was in Riptide herself. Either way, it felt stranger somehow.

“No,” the heroine said at the end.

“You’re sure?”

“That is complicated, Miss,” Suprema said.

Miss? “Explain.”

There was another thoughtful, as opposed to thought-free, silence. Caz was almost sure the difference was something she could hear.

“Nothing in the videos tells me to come back for more,” Suprema said. “And nor have you. There isn’t a compulsion. But they make me feel good.”

“That;s not addiction.”

“No, Miss.”

Riptide would have preferred a more cut and dried answer, but she needed to believe it, too. This already felt like pushing things as far as she could justify.

She didn’t remember anything from the videos telling her to watch more. The videos did tell you to feel good, though, not just when you watched them but in general. A confidence and a happiness, or that was the feeling Caz had remembering watching them. Was that addictive?

No more so, she thought, than any other habit. Less so than alcohol or nicotine or anything else that had a physical impact.

She turned, suddenly, in the other woman’s arms. Their eyes met. Caz saw the arousal in the heroine’s eyes, realised immediately that her own arousal was almost certainly just as obvious.

She wanted to kiss Suprema. Wanted it very badly indeed. Maybe wanted more.

This was all new information. And it was so easily within reach. The woman had been staring so fascinatedly at her bare ass that she’d sunk back into a hypnotic trance.

All it would take, she thought, would be to tell her to kiss back. Maybe it wouldn’t even take that, maybe just kissing her would set things off.

“Get yourself clean,” she said abruptly. “Don’t leave here for five minutes.” And with that order given, somewhat curtly, she splashed across toward the shoreline, where she marched out onto the waterlogged ground and collected her costume, gathering it up in her fists and soaring into the air.

Flying naked would dry her out fast. If anyone chanced to look up at the right moment, they’d see something a little embarrassing; on the other hand, at the speed she was going they probably wouldn’t have the chance, and if they did they wouldn’t be able to make her out too clearly. It was, anyway, a lot better than pulling those clothes back on.

The dam, she supposed, would just have to live another day.

*

Renee didn’t fully wake out of her trance until after she’d left the waterfall behind, which had, true to her instructions, not happened until five minutes after Riptide did. She was carrying her own costume in her hands as she flew, not because she’d decided to but because she’d watched Riptide do the same, still deep in trance.

She wasn’t even flying in the right direction to get home. It seemed like some part of her head had heard ‘don’t leave here for five minutes’ and had taken that also to mean she should leave once that time was up, then followed that instruction without enough conscious thought to choose a destination.

More than a little embarrassed, she pushed herself to top speeds returning home, and was grateful that when she’d chosen her new home she’d picked somewhere with high-up exit route that wasn’t overlooked by any neighbours yet.

Once home she stuffed her ruined hose in the bin and started the process of cleaning everything else. Like a lot of established heroes, she relied on Doc Mordecai’s breakthroughs in materials science for her costumes; as well as being hard to tear, they were easy to clean. The process still needed to be done, however, and Renee knew if it wasn’t done early, the odour lingered longer than she’d like.

That was done and she was back in her track pants and hoodie, ready for comfortable relaxation, before she fixed herself a drink and sat down. And all of that had happened before she allowed herself to think about the events of the afternoon.

On the plus side, she thought, the dam had been saved; it definitely should get some repairs soon, but it had been saved, and that was a good thing. Riptide had (Renee thought) taken into account the risk of casualties before she got started, but in her opinion, the villainess hadn’t given enough thought to knock-on issues.

On the downside, she’d undressed when a villainess told her to. Her own feelings about that were… complicated… but the fact of it was, ‘a villainess ordered her to strip naked and she did’ was an accurate way of describing what happened. For that alone, this was a bad thing.

At this point, Renee’s thoughts briefly wandered off into a fantasy. For a moment, she’d thought that Riptide was going to order her to do something more… direct. The woman’s lips had been parted in a way Renee recognised from dates just before they went for a kiss, and she regretted the fact Riptide hadn’t kissed her as much as she regretted the fact some of her more questionable dates had done.

It would have been fine, she told herself, if Riptide hadn’t realised that Suprema was part of her audience, and consequently someone who might have to obey her. And that was the other big problem. Because Riptide did now.

It was a marvel she hadn’t told her to go back and tear up the dam with her. Failing that, it was downright weird that she hadn’t taken advantage of Renee more deeply than to get her to scrub her back. Sure, that might have just been a power exchange thing, without any sexuality to it. But she’d told Renee to strip, too. And there was that moment of eye contact…

No, even accounting for the fact she’d been quite deep throughout and was probably suggestible as a result, Renee didn’t think she’d imagined the look in the other woman’s eyes. And if that was right, then Riptide had come very close to a crossing a further line, then left.

She should be pleased about that, Renee reminded herself. She was actually a little disappointed, and in turn she was annoyed with herself for being disappointed. People were complex, and could hide things from themselves for some time.

So how long, she wondered, had she hidden an attraction to her regular sparring partner from herself? And what did she do now, when she could no longer ignore it?