As far as Zoe was concerned, all reporters these days started out on shitty little beats that didn’t matter and which didn’t exactly require much research. Hers had been celebrity gossip, which in and around Houston had quickly moved her on to metahuman gossip; a lot of the biggest names locally, after all, were superhumans of one stripe or another, a trend which had held true since the Great Correlation in the 1950s, which was popularly believed to have caused the boom in superheroes.

She’d developed an eye for a scandal on her first assignment, working for the Houston Eye, an assignment she’d hated but with a newspaper (even if it barely deserved to be called that, in Zoe’s opinion) with a reputation for outlandish stories. She’d been invited to make a new stories up but never had; had even managed to keep the embroidery on her reporting down to acceptable levels, where someone who read her reporting wouldn’t have been too misled over the the details.

All the same, she’d moved on as quickly as she could, making her not just one of the very few cub reporters on her beat, but probably the only cub reporter in the state who was working a more prestigious desk at a more prestigious publication than they’d started with but was still regarded as a newcomer on the scene.

Zoe was, all in all, more than ready for a big scoop that would make people pay attention to her byline, but not quite willing to blow any story she was handed out of proportion in order to get it. She had her integrity. The whole point of this, from her perspective, was to get to a stage in her career where integrity was easier to keep.

This was often hard to do on the supers beat; she’d wondered a few times whether or not it was right to break a particular story. She’d kept secret the fact that Powerlance worked at a local high school as a shop teacher, though she was sitting on the evidence that would confirm it.

On the other hand, Hanging Judge had turned out to be an active policeman, and at least a few of the criminals he’d executed had been ones where, as a cop, he hadn’t been able to successfully prosecute. That had got her the transfer over from the Eye to the Houston Examiner, after Jay Cliffe, their lead police reporter, looked into a few of the Judge’s targets and finally ran the story that reclassified them from targets to victims, when it was proved that the Judge had executed the wrong man.

The police hated Jay now and they weren’t too happy with Zoe, but on the other hand it turned out civilians in the city were a little safer with that particular costume and that particular cop off the street, so she’d decided to take it - as well as the Examiner’s job offer; Cliffe had spoken well of the research she’d done and the way she’d presented it.

She hadn’t told either the Eye or the Examiner about her Powerlance information. It was all too possible an editor somewhere wouldn’t agree with her judgement on the matter.

However, big stories didn’t just come along. That Wednesday, Zoe was three days deep in some detailed background research on a Watchdogs case which had wrapped up in a blaze of publicity on Sunday, and she’d found herself going off on a highly unexpected tangent when she’d realised that, no, MegaWoman hadn’t been in on the final battle with the Hivemind, and there wasn’t any mention of her having helped in the investigation - not unusual in and of itself but she hadn’t heard anything about any solo investigations, and then when she thought back to it, she couldn’t remember MegaWoman being present for a couple more cases.

She’d therefore sent a quick message to the Watchdogs’ PR rep, Mavis Clark, asking whether MegaWoman had quit the team, taken a leave of absence, or anything else, thinking it’d make a good line-item at the bottom of a column. But Mavis had assured her that, yes, MegaWoman was still an active member of the team and as far as she was aware, there hadn’t even been any indication of dissatisfaction on either side.

While Zoe didn’t make a habit of automatically believing PR flacks - that way, for a journalist, lay madness - there had been what sounded like genuine surprise in Mavis’ voice.

That had been lunchtime on Tuesday. Zoe had gone into the Examiner’s database and searched around until she found the last public activity from MegaWoman; she’d stopped Baron Flame from igniting every oil well in Texas, or possibly a better way of putting it would have been that he didn’t get to collect the ransom he’d demanded and he hadn’t been able to follow through on his threat.

That had taken place a little under a week after her last public appearance with the Watchdogs; a press conference put together hot on the heels of the defeat they’d dealt to X.E.R.X.E.S., the mechanised combat robot (“walking skyscraper” being the more evocative description) which had broken free of it’s US Army programming a decade or two back and spent the intervening time either trying to wipe out humanity or reconfiguring itself to recover from whatever damage had been dealt to it and become immune to the flaw the heroes had used to defeat it last.

Reading the reporting on that, Zoe was reminded again that MegaWoman was comfortably the most powerful member of the Watchdogs; it was strength they absolutely could have used when trying to break into the Hivemind’s egg chamber, where a next generation of biological warriors were about to hatch, but she hadn’t been there, and didn’t appear to have been following up on her own investigations.

It was at that point when it occurred to Zoe to have a look at MegaWoman’s activity prior to the X.E.R.X.E.S. battle. She’d been in action, again with the Watchdogs, a couple of weeks earlier, fighting the Sixth Column; she’d seized their half-built superweapon, flown it into orbit, and hurled it into the sun, getting no more than a light tan into the process. Before that, she’d arrived on-scene when fellow Watchdogs members Calamity Jane and Top Gun had been caught up in a hostage situation, and helped them defuse it; and then you had to go back four or five months to see any news of her again. She’d just disappeared.

Zoe started to get that itch at the back of her mind that said something interesting was in front of her somewhere.

MegaWoman’s periods of activity could be quite a nice little news item. For all Zoe knew, the woman had another family on another planet (she’d never owned up to being an alien, but the only reason anybody knew about Pole Star was that his adoptive parents had eventually written a tell-all book with enough details to prove) or was dating her nemesis’ doppelganger in an evil parallel dimension or something. But it could also be a story, and her instincts said there was something weird going on there.

On Wednesday morning Zoe had found some footage of the hostage situation on Youtube, blurry and badly-framed, captured by a hostage’s cameraphone that had been left recording when the bank robbers piled desperately into the offices above the bank, having just discovered they were being tracked by Calamity Jane and her boyfriend.

MegaWoman showed up about twenty minutes into the footage, but only as a blur; she blew into the room at speed and moments later, the robbers were missing their guns, and MegaWoman was standing at the door to the stairs down into the bank.

*

“Calamity! Gun! Come on up.”

“…MegaWoman?”

The eponymous heroine chuckled, too throaty and full of enjoyment to be called a giggle, and reached down to tuck the hem of her black-and-purple costume properly back into place over one buttock, where it had presumably ridden up sometime in her blur of motion.

It wasn’t quite the costume any observer would have been used to seeing her in; the legs appeared to have been cut off, leaving a high-waisted cut that exposed much more of her ass than before and created the problem of it riding up like that in the first place. The backless V descending to just above her tailbone was also new, as well as demonstrating that she wasn’t wearing a bra - not that her chest had ever been anything perky, nor that this was a surprise given the strength and power of every other muscle in her body.

It might take an onlooker a little longer to realise that her boots had a higher heel than before, or to remember that the heel had been a wedge before rather than a stiletto. Small wonder that rather than stand correctly she’d chosen to hover in place an inch or two above the ground. They might well have noticed more quickly that her brown hair was longer than usual and worn in a plait that seemed to thread through a loop at the back of her costume’s neck rather than hanging straight down.

At this point in the video, one of the bank robbers charged her, yelling something incoherent that had started with the word “Bitch,” but she didn’t respond at all at first - a confidence that seemed well placed after he literally bounced off her on impact.

She turned to look at them, at which point it became clear that the costume alterations visible from behind weren’t the only ones; her costume had been a full bodysuit, predominantly black, with the bright purple as an occasional grace note.

Now the purple had become trim, and with a scoop neck and the backless transition, all that kept her chest supported was two thin straps, both of which trailed long, distorted purple swirls beginning just over the cleavage-revealing neckline and running up to join as almost a collar around her throat, the collar band showing up clearly even on the grainy video footage as it was the same bright, vibrant purple.

She raised a hand and wagged a finger at the robbers, her expression stern enough that it didn’t seem like a joke and came across instead as exactly what it was; a gesture from someone so far beyond the threat they represented that she could chide them like children. “We won’t be having any more of that,” she said. “Will we?”

Silence fell, only to be interrupted by new arrivals.

Cautiously, Calamity Jane and Top Gun made their way into shot, their expressions uncertain. Jane looked from MegaWoman to the disarmed robbers, then back to Jane. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here,” she said, not quite in her usual drawl.

MegaWoman shrugged. “I just got out of… you know what, it’s a long story.”

“Again?” Top Gun interjected.

“Yeah. Not a word, OK?” The look she gave him was anything but friendly. He raised his gloved hands apologetically, smiling softly.

“We’ve got to figure something out for you,” Calamity said. “Let’s get these guys shut up, then we can get back to HQ and discuss it, yeah?”

She turned and started walking out of the camera frame, delving into a belt for restraints. “Top Gun, you want to get the hostages out of here?” she asked over her shoulder, and he set to with a nod.

The camera view shifted as the phone was picked up and carried, not with an eye to filming their exit, just held in one hand so that a view of the room swung backward and forward upside down.

“So where did you wind up?” Jane asked. Just before the video ended, MegaWoman could be heard to say “Iowa, this time.”

*

Zoe drummed her fingers on the desk. The costume was unusual, and MegaWoman had been back in her typical full bodysuit, without the low cuts or the curve-emphasising purple trim or the strange, distorted swirls. The costume had been, so far as Zoe could see, a complete one-off.

That didn’t make much sense, really. And the conversation the team had exchanged - it didn’t make a lot of sense, not when you were already thinking about how strange the recording was.

What really stood out to her was that neither Calamity Jane nor MegaWoman had wanted Top Gun to hear the story, but they were perfectly happy discussing it among themselves. Top Gun was relatively new to the Watchdogs, but Calamity Jane was a founder, and MegaWoman had joined not long after the founding. To Zoe, that suggested that whatever they were avoiding talking about went way back, and it was clearly embarrassing to MegaWoman, to the point Calamity was deliberately sparing her blushes.

Zoe’s instincts had been right. There was a story here. But what was it?

There were two places she thought the answer might be found; the past, and Iowa. She decided to start with Iowa, as she at least had a defined timeframe.

*

Her search led her to Charles City, where less than a full day before MegaWoman encountered Calamity Jane, the Iron Ghost had busted Doctrine in the middle of raising an utterly devoted, dedicated cult, which appeared to be his latest scheme for achieving wider control.

Judging by the CCTV footage, MegaWoman had been entered into the position of chief enforcer for Doctrine, and Zoe had to assume that the costume adjustments (which were, admittedly, very PR-friendly, very photogenic, especially on a body like hers) had been Doctrine’s idea.

The fascinating thing for Zoe was that Doctrine rarely went as far south as lower Missouri, which still put him a whole state away from Texas, and as far as she knew, MegaWoman almost never left the Lone Star State.

But Calamity Jane had asked where she wound up. Not where she went, where she wound up. Which suggested it wasn’t MegaWoman herself going there.

…

That didn’t make sense. Maybe she was reading too much into it.

She dug back into MegaWoman’s activity, looking for another quiet period.

*

During the conflict, the Iron Ghost’s armour retrieved several files from the system for evidence. Most important of these was a video apparently taken on Doctrine’s property, in a large holding cell, by a camera mounted in the upper corner above the door.

It is unclear how MegaWoman came to be in the holding cell. The costume she wears is her bodysuit, and her brown hair is in the usual short near-pageboy bob she habitually wears it in. There is a thick metal band mounted around her neck, a tiny LED on which blinks red every other second.

The date and time of the video file are displayed in the lower left corner of the video. MegaWoman paces, slow and surly, up and down on the far side of the cell. A pair of imprints halfway along that wall show the impact of two punches sometime before the video started; her hands are still clenched into fists, and the frustration is clearly visible.

There is a sudden sound, the harsh rattle of a heavy lock, and MegaWoman immediately looks up.

A tall black woman with an athlete’s build, muscular arms and thighs, enters the room. Her black curly hair is long and tied back in a single braid, which is being held by Doctrine as if it was a leash, and which first passes through a loop of golden fabric behind her head, a loop that is part of the collar of her outfit.

She wears a pair of gold lace-up leather boots that extend halfway up otherwise bare shins, and a high-waisted cut costume that shows off the musculature of her thigh and the pertness of her ass, black with gold edging. The V of its backline plunges low enough to reveal a tattoo just above the base of her spine, a rose; the V of its neckline almost reveals what else she has to offer. On the two thin straps that secure the costume to its collar, distorted golden swirls stand out against the black material.

The enforcer stands to one side, her body a threat, and although only the profile of her face can be seen it is enough to immediately identify her as MMA champion Maya Dalton, and also to show the glassy look in her eyes, the intensity of her expression completely contrasted by her blankness.

MegaWoman glowers at them both, but falls back a step when Dalton moves closer. To any watcher it is immediately clear that she believes her powers to have failed her.

“Do you know who I am?” Doctrine asks, and she shakes her head. Her body language shifts slightly, her head tilting. Curiosity overcoming caution, someone viewing the footage might think. Or they might imagine that she knows, if not Doctrine’s identity, something about him, and they might think they read more than curiosity into the opening up of her stance. “Tell her,” Doctrine says.

Maya Dalton, still on the end of her braid-leash, says as if reciting “He is Doctrine.”

“Tell her what that means.”

“I follow Doctrine. We follow Doctrine.”

There is something strange in MegaWoman’s expression. Her lips twitch for a moment, but what she says, if anything, is so quiet it cannot be made out.

“I am Doctrine,” Doctrine tells her. “Do you understand?”

Her eyelids flutter and her chest rises and falls more visibly than before. It is clear that she is experiencing something.

It does not take long. “You are Doctrine,” she answers. “I follow Doctrine.” A hand lifts in the slow, lazy arc of one entranced. “We follow Doctrine.”

“Kneel,” he tells her, and she kneels. He releases his hold on Dalton’s braid-leash, and the fighter moves behind the heroine. Fingers more used to applying armlocks and nerveholds begin to plait MegaWoman’s short hair, as best as they can.

“Who am I?” he asks again.

“You are Doctrine,” the two powerhouse women echo in unison. The intensity and focus on Dalton’s face is a contrast to the dreamy smile on the lips of MegaWoman.

“Open your mouth,” Doctrine tells her.

“We follow Doctrine,” she answers, the last syllable slightly distorted by the fact her mouth opens rather than closes at the end.

“It is time,” Doctrine tells her, “for you to understand where you are.” He steps in front of her, his belt unbuckled, and while the camera does not show MegaWoman’s face, we see her hands come up to steady her against his hips, and can understand what is happening.

“Tell her,” he instructs Dalton, “where we are.”

“We are in Doctrine Nation,” the prizefighter answers obediently.

*

Unaware of the evidence the Iron Ghost had compiled, at least at that time, Zoe was researching the previous gap in MegaWoman’s activities. While trying to determine when it ended, then when it started, she’d thought to take a few moments to skim through the heroine’s decade-plus career to date.

For someone who featured so heavily in the Watchdogs’ publicity efforts, whose face looked out from posters in so many teenagers’ rooms and from T-shirts on so many Texan chests, she’d disappeared from public view for extended periods a surprising number of times. In fact, she was absent for more Watchdog cases than she was present on, at least when it came to the big final battles. Zoe didn’t imagine she was much of a detective, either, though she recognised it’d be unfair to just assume that without checking.

Remembering what Calamity Jane had said about Megawoman ending up elsewhere, Zoe widened her search. Eventually she uncovered something in Labrador, a part of Canada about as far as you could get from Texas while still being in North America. A conspiracy blog, but it was accompanied by a couple of photos.

*

As all loyal readers of the Owl’s Eye know, while many people think Newfoundland & Labrador are too out of the way for anything major to happen, they are in fact a hotbed of activity precisely because they’re so out of the way.

We broke the story about the synthetic power serum being brought into North America through our ports three years before the authorities caught on to it. We caught on to the Mountain Men before they invaded Ottawa and tried to conquer it.

This story is a few months in the making, and I started looking into it a month or so after that when Judith and Holly Furnas disappeared from my home town. Declan Furnas, Judith’s wife and Holly’s father, seemed remarkably unconcerned about the whole thing, which was why I started to investigate.

Declan and Judith were like many couples; they’d certainly had their fallings out, but they weren’t just staying together for Holly and I definitely felt like there was love there. Plus he was so full of pride about Holly’s first year in college and if you ran into him while she was home for the summer, he couldn’t stop talking about her. For Declan to be so nonchalant didn’t make much sense.

Embarrassingly enough, I started out working from the assumption that Declan had killed them both; so often when you hear a story like this, that’s what turns out to have happened. As my readers will know, I try not to jump to conclusions but to avoid them is hard, sometimes.

Declan, however, had not a perfect alibi but something much more convincing, an imperfect alibi. If you’re going to commit a crime, you don’t set up an imperfect alibi, therefore an imperfect alibi is a much clearer sign of guilt. But it made no sense that he would calmly accept their disappearance unless something had happened, and my sources near the family told me he insisted nothing had happened but was making no effort to find them.

It turned out that the police weren’t, either. At first I assumed this was a result of whatever nefarious influence Declan was currently under, and I went to great efforts to get access to their main radio broadcast kit. After all, if you wanted to mentally reprogram every cop attached to a station house, that would be any technologist’s first port of call.

I’ll spare my readers a full report of every trick and tactic I used to get there. It’s enough to say that as I was disturbed while dismantling it, I cannot conclusively rule out the idea that they’re under someone’s control, I have enough evidence in this case that they aren’t under the same influence as Declan, Judith, and Holly Furnas.

I was expecting some little trouble with the lawmen and I was in the middle of reminding them that I do not recognise my name when it is written in block capitals when they decided simply to escort me out of the station. One of them laughed when he heard what I wanted to find out, and gave me an address about an hour out of town, on a turn-off just a little way off the main freeway from the ports down toward Toronto.

If someone in authority gives you a tip, it’s always a trap, as we say here on the Owl’s Eye. But it’s also almost always got a kernel of truth, both because they need to control the place they’re sending you and because they’re stupid and don’t make things up well. In this case I’d just been told the name of the place, the Pink Perfection Lounge, and what road it was on, and then he clammed up. Too dumb to make things up.

Well, of course, I went on out there. I didn’t park in the parking lot, I found a space to leave my pickup off the road, and I made my way across through the pines outside the property and I clambered over the fence from the back and made my way up to the Pink Perfection, which had once been a barracks and had stood empty a long time before falling into the hands of its current owner, and I will tell you now, it’s not the only Pink Perfection like that. We’ve got them all over Canada, never near a big city, always somewhere chosen because it’s got four or five big towns and a freeway with a steady trucker trade nearby.

These next two photos I took through one of the thin windows near the fire escape; you can see the stage where the strippers dance in the main room in one, plus one of the strippers, and in the other you can see a bunny-themed dining room where every bunny costume is missing the corset, so it’s just a pair of panties with a tail and a pair of bunny ears. I want to draw attention to the stripper in the first picture as she’ll feature in my tale later and the blonder of the two bunnies in the bottom left of the second picture.

That blonde bunny is Holly Furnas, not back in college for her sophomore year like she should be but walking around with her tits out and a plastic smile on her face for the truckers and the locals who ordered their food there.

Regular readers of the Owl’s Eye will know I’m usually very careful not to be stumbled on or otherwise caught while I’m running about on my investigations. However, clearly at some point shortly after this, I was spotted by someone in the organisation.

Halfway up the fire escape, my attention was on internal windows, as I looked for an opportunity to find and identify Judith Furnas. I knew now the two women were working for a strip club and brothel; I didn’t know why. The women I’d seen were all smiles but that didn’t mean anything; a professional in a place like that smiled.

I was seized suddenly from behind, my arms pinned to my sides at the elbows by someone infinitely stronger, and someone who I could feel just from the way they pressed against my back must be a woman.

I struggled, but their grip was impossible to break, and I was carried backward and down - not down the fire escape; we floated gently to earth. I caught sight in a reflection of the woman who held me. She was the stripper I mentioned from the earlier photo, and now I knew she had super powers, it was suddenly obvious who she was where I hadn’t known at all before; I had been captured by MegaWoman!

She had the same smile on her lips as the others, and I just wasn’t willing to believe a well known heroine, even a Texan one, would smile like that when kidnapping someone into a brothel.

So when I came face to face with the man in the flawless white suit behind the desk in the office on the top floor, I knew exactly what to say.

“You’ve been brainwashing these women,” I accused. I’d had my phone in hand for the photos, and I had it recording, and you can head the audio of his voice below; as I don’t want the authorities to identify the reporter undercovering and exposing their deficiencies, I have edited the recording not to include my own voice.

He just laughed. “Yes,” he said. “I have. Good work, MegaSlut.”

That last bit wasn’t directed at me, but I’d wondered whether it was or not until she said, in this weird Texas-bimbo hybrid drawl-slash-giggle, “Thank you, my lord.”

I’m not proud of what I said next. “You’ll never get away with this.”

He just smirked, and rose. “To be honest, I’m only here to check up on my delivery.”

“What delivery?”

“MegaSlut, bring her closer.” There was a long pause after her name, like he was deciding exactly how he wanted to put it. I could tell he was getting off on what he was doing, on my fear, on her helplessness, maybe on both…

“Yes, my lord.”

That was annoying me too. I spent all my life with a Queen and I suppose I have a King now but I don’t have to be happy with it and I certainly hope nobody would think Canadians fools enough to have Lords into the bargain.

I couldn’t stop her bringing me round the desk, though - my feet weren’t even touching the floor. I did kick Mr so-called-Lord in the leg, once, but before I could do it again he had this breath mask over my nose and the woman holding me squeezed me, probably very gently by her standards, and I had to breathe in and my mind was swimming.

Before too long I wasn’t struggling. “Now,” he said, “you will tell me the truth.” And I knew he was right. “You want to please me, after all,” he carried on, and then he said “Don’t you?”

I said “Yes, my lord,” without really even thinking about it, and my lord was how I thought of him that whole time; I could only think of him as the Perfectionist after I’d recovered - as much as I have recovered. Sometimes I wake up out of bed, naked, a toy in my hand or between my legs, and I know I’m rewarding myself for a task I don’t remember performing.

The gas I was breathing in was delicious, more important and more valuable to me than my own free will.

“What brought you here?” he asked, and I told him all about Judith and Holly Furnas, and about my outrage that the building existed, and about my intention to see him exposed.

He laughed and said “Well, you won’t do that.”

“Yes, my lord,” I told him.

“Put her down, MegaSlut.”

“Yes, my lord.” My feet found the floor and I was released, but I was stretching up onto my tiptoes, trying to keep my mouth and my nose inside the breath mask, but I couldn’t.

“Let me look at her, MegaSlut,” he ordered.

“Yes, my lord.” She took the shoulders of the coat I was wearing in her hands and tore and I was no longer in a coat. I staggered, but with a light touch of three fingers she kept me upright. My sweater - a good sweater my husband bought me one Christmas - went the same way, and then the tee shirt I’d brought home from an Arcade Fire concert about a decade ago, and then my good jeans were torn off and I was standing before my lord in my underwear (and not even the sexy stuff) and my big outdoor boots.

“She’ll do well,” he said, and then to me he said “You’re going to be one of my performers.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“You LOVE being one of my performers.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Your body exists to bring in money for me.”

“Yes, my lord.”

He looked to my fellow servant MegaSlut. “Take her to this Judith. She’s the one who does the whips and leathers, right?”

“Yes, my lord,” MegaSlut answered.

“Good,” he said, and looked at me. “Since you sniffed her out, you can be the little bitch at all fours at her feet when she goes on stage.”

There was nothing else I could say. “Yes, my lord.”

I am mostly recovered from the Perfectionist’s work, but one of the ways he made me more perfect was to have me record myself. I cannot keep these recordings secret, and I must make it clear I have them. To see my act with Judith or my other act with MegaSlut, email me at…

*

Zoe sent an email, not, she told herself, out of prurient interest but because she should never miss out on an opportunity to collect more evidence, and besides, MegaWoman might have let something else useful slip.

She rubbed her eyes, and worried about what she’d just read. “My delivery,” she muttered. “What does that mean?”