By this time, Zoe had worked back through the last two or three years of MegaWoman’s career, and she’d found an unusually high likelihood that any gap in activity was tied to her being under some kind of hypnotic effect or full-on mind control.

This was a strange pattern, but was it a story?

Zoe felt like it should be - it was certainly an eyecatching fact - but there wasn’t any cause to it.

She sighed, and sat back from her computer, and realised that after a full day of hunting down leads, browsing through archives, and watching videos, her stomach was rumbling. It was usually a blessing that her stomach didn’t bother her while she was doing her research, but she always paid for it later when the hunger pangs kicked in. Hunger pangs pretty much always led to her making foolish decisions about food.

The simple problem was that ‘one superheroine is repeatedly mind controlled and most of the time it barely makes the news when she recovers’ wasn’t a story, it was just an odd fact.

Her gut was telling her that more had to be going on, that something in the videos or the transcripts or articles or blogs she’d read was important and she just couldn’t yet see how, and Zoe trusted her gut instinct. But she couldn’t take this to an editor yet.

She got up and headed to the kitchen, figuring that she’d eat some food and work on the notes she’d had from her initial planned story on the Watchdogs’ investigation into X.E.R.X.E.S. so she could get it filed for the weekend edition, and pick up the MegaWoman thing later.

It might just be a statistical thing, she thought idly. If there was X number of mind controllers out there, then it followed that there’d be some multiple of X incidents when the people who opposed them got controlled every year. Maybe MegaWoman was just unlucky, just the statistical outlier who got the worst of it all. Just the heroine with the worst record for getting hypnotised.

…Of course, she thought suddenly, that contained the assumption that MegaWoman was an outlier. That this sort of thing didn’t happen to, say, Myrmidone or Scimitar or Gel Girl.

It took an effort of will to stop herself from walking back to the computer to keep on with her research while the eggs were already in the pan and scrambling. Zoe forced herself to finish cooking and to eat - at the kitchen table - without running back to the computer to start her research. She’d done this often enough now to know that refuelling and recharging made her better, made her more effective.

When she did sit down at the computer, though, she turned her attention away from MegaWoman temporarily. When had Scimitar last vanished from public view for a long time?

The answer turned out to be ‘about a year ago, for about two months’ and as much as Zoe tried, she could find no evidence that the official story, a torn shoulder muscle, wasn’t why she’d been out.

Scimitar was with the Motor City Marauders over in Michigan, and Michigan even had fairly regular problems with mind controllers, something you couldn’t say about Texas. All the same, a random sampling of Scimitar’s downtimes didn’t show her as spending many if any of them under the influence of some mind controller.

Myrmidone, who hailed originally from a mysterious island populated by Greco-Roman isolationists who’d taken breeding programs to a point they were almost genetic engineers, who had made her to be their super-soldier, and whose society she had loudly denounced and shunned after they invaded a neighbouring nation, didn’t have much in the way of downtime at all.

Like the unstoppable warrior she’d been bred to be, she didn’t seem to get ill and didn’t take time between campaigns to relax. Zoe wondered how many people in the community were privately keeping an eye on her on the basis that someone so focused, who never relaxed, was bound to snap sooner or later.

Zoe did dig up a couple of times that Myrmidone had been controlled - her frequent opponent, Insurgent, had commissioned the Assembly Line to build control collars for every one of his most hated adversaries and Myrmidone had led them as Myrmidrone, donning a costume that took away her individuality behind a faceless silver mask while showing off her body to an extent her ceremonial armour never had, and the same collars had resurfaced later, with Myrmidone rechristened as the Alpha Bitch under the Tyrant King.

Neither had really involved any downtime, as her battles had kept her in the public eye. It seemed likely to Zoe that the Tyrant King, at least, had considered her available for pleasure as much as her strong right arm, but it didn’t at all seem like the same thing.

To test against another Texan heroine, Zoe turned to Calamity Jane. Calamity was, according to the Watchdogs’ PR, not actually superhuman, though Zoe had her doubts based purely on the woman’s body - superhumans seemed to develop a physique that might be technically possible for a dedicated human to achieve with a dietician, a personal trainer, and a cosmetic surgeon, and Calamity had a body like that, as well as finding the time to fight crime and become one of the world’s greatest trick shots.

In spite of this, Calamity managed to maintain an active set of solo investigations while also featuring in more Watchdogs missions than MegaWoman did. It was possible that the woman just had the free time, but something about that fact didn’t sit right with Zoe, who made a note of it along with her other observations to date:

1. MegaWoman has more downtime than any other Watchdog

2. A lot of MegaWoman’s absences seem to involve her being mentally controlled and used as a sex toy

3. During these absences she shows up all over the place, but her active career is entirely within Texas state borders

4. Watchdogs’ press people don’t acknowledge MegaWoman’s absences

5. MegaWoman’s downtime isn’t taken up with solo missions, unlike most of the other Watchdogs

All the same, what little of Calamity Jane’s downtime Zoe could find was usually pretty well accounted for, and mind controllers didn’t seem to feature on the menu at all.

Zoe reread her observations - the few facts she could actually count on - and sighed to herself. It still didn’t read like a story so much as a collection of related facts. It wasn’t useful to her unless it was a story.

All the same, she was sure it would become one - but for the time being, she needed to get something to her editor. She spent the rest of the evening, somewhat distractedly, working on the Watchdogs story she’d originally started with.

The following morning she picked up her investigation of MegaWoman again, having had an idea overnight; instead of working backwards from the present, what would she find if she started at the beginning and worked forwards?

*

To her surprise, it turned out that MegaWoman’s first appearance was her joining the Watchdogs. Honestly, Zoe wasn’t sure she could think of a single other heroine - or hero, come to that - who’d gone straight into a state-tier superteam.

All the same there seemed to be no prior appearances. Which made Zoe cynical, and when Zoe got cynical she started to wonder things.

At that time, what she was wondering was whether or not MegaWoman had been a Texan at the time she joined the team, or if she could perhaps be found somewhere else beforehand.

She knew it was going to be a challenging hunt, and she knew that if the heroine had been called MegaWoman before she’d have showed up by now. Zoe spent a good chunk of Thursday digging around squinting at old jpegs and pausing heavily pixellated old footage from online archives trying to find anything related.

After a very late (like, 4pm) lunch, she sat back down at the keyboard and had a thought. It was the kind of thought everyone gets from time to time, but it was also the kind of thought that changed everything about an investigation.

The thought was this:

Why am I only investigating heroines?

MegaWoman had been one of the most physically capable of the Watchdogs from the moment she joined. Impervious to not just bullets but grenades, rockets, lasers and most explosions (and one of the reasons she had nationwide fame was that explosion where she had proved resilient enough to shrug it off, but her costume had not), she could also lift a bus one-handed.

Nobody was entirely sure why it was that people willing to bend the rules, cut corners, and even fall to villainy tended to get more powerful more quickly, although if you asked any psychologist who appeared on news TV giving expert opinions you’d hear one of a dozen or more ideas.

Zoe decided instead to look for villains who’d disappeared around the time MegaWoman debuted, and who bore at least a passing resemblance. She had to set her bar for appearances low, she told herself. After all, sometimes these people really worked hard to make themselves look different, like the woman in Louisiana who’d gone for the baggy jacket, the long hair, and the headband to completely change the silhouette she’d had before she went good, Vagabond or whatever her name was.

When she started that hunt she found a couple of candidates more or less immediately, one calling herself the unlikely name of Phenomena and the other going by Magnifique.

Zoe checked Magnifique first, on the grounds that when supers changed their names, there was usually some link between them. The woman had posted a video manifesto online before her only major criminal act, claiming responsibility in advance. It seemed like it would be foolish not to look at it.

*

She recognised MegaWoman immediately, even under the tight, frizzy curls the woman had evidently thought were the right look, even behind a very different approach to makeup - the left side of her face was so beglittered that it positively sparkled in the light.

There was a heavy sigh, a deep intake of breath, before “Magnifique” started talking, that probably should have been cut from the video before it went life. Of course, the first time was always the one where you made mistakes you’d regret in hindsight.

“Alright,” Magnifique said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to find this before I’ve got it done. This goes out to Gordo Wesley, Mayor of Los Alamos. Gordo, I’m coming for you. Why?

“Because you’re the one who kept giving money to Cairo Genomics, and they’re the ones who abducted my class and experimented.” Her expression changes. “Only two of us made it out. And I’m the only one now not in jail. Cairo Genomics is already screwed, but Gordo, you made it possible for them to do what they did, and I’m coming for you.”

Zoe sat thoughtfully for a while after the video ended. Usually after something like that, the person didn’t get tarred with the villain brush. There had to be more to this than that.

Still, it had given her something else to Google. She started looking up Cairo Genomics. It helped that she knew which city it had to have been based out of.

Three years before Magnifique’s manifesto, Cairo Genomics had been another start-up in the area, another tech startup that didn’t seem to have much to make it stand out. About a year before her manifesto, it had a change in ownership, with the person who took over just barely old enough to be in college.

Usually if something like that happened the new owner had a surname in common with the old owner, but in this case there wasn’t much of a connection. On further investigation, the new owner hadn’t even graduated high school.

Nor had anyone in his high school class, all of whom had disappeared in the first year of Cairo Genomic’s existence.

Zoe sighed inwardly when she got that far. She felt like she already knew a lot of the answers she was about to read, that she was only really reading them to be able to confirm it.

Early on after the strange takeover, Cairo Genomics had abducted a heroine, Graylight. Her team had promptly identified the abductors and raided the headquarters and lab, where they’d fought Greylight and another woman, both of them dressed not in the usual supercostumes but in high heels, wide-grid fishnets, and French maid costumes.

It was quickly confirmed that Graylight and this other woman were under mind control by the new owner of Cairo, and thought for themselves only after he was arrested and injected with psionic nullifier nanites, which had shut down his control over them.

Zoe was able to find witness statements, videos, a lot of other things. It had been heavily reported around Los Alamos, the man calling himself Gaslight when he was working on less legal plans. It just hadn’t made the news outside New Mexico.

“There were two of us,” the woman who would go on to be Magnifique and then on further to be MegaWoman said, in her witness statement, her expression utterly guileless. “After the first experiments, I mean. I don’t know what happened to the rest of our class. Do you-“

Whoever she was looking at didn’t answer, at least not on camera or for the watcher to hear. In the slump of her shoulders, though, it was clear the answer wasn’t positive.

“We’d been…” She swallowed and tried again. “We’d been exposed to this… this thing. It glowed, and the shape hurt to look at. I don’t know what it was. Didn’t hear anyone refer to it as anything more specific than ‘the Object’. You could hear the capital letter, you know?”

“What do you mean, exposed?” It was a woman asking. Detached. Clinical.

“That was the word they used. They put us in a room, one by one, and this shutter at the far side of the room lifted, and the thing was behind it.”

“You said it glowed. What colour?”

“Somewhere between blue and purple.”

“Hmm.”

Magnifique/MegaWoman’s eyes narrowed. “That means something to you, doesn’t it?” she asked. Watching, Zoe was quietly surprised the girl had realised so quickly, given how stressed she had to be.

“It… maybe.”

“What?”

Silence.

“Don’t I have a right to know?”

“Look, it could just be that this is the colour of this gadget,” she said. “But there’s an alien race, we think an extinct one, whose technology typically shines with a light you could describe that way. Maybe Cairo Genomic found one of their old artefacts.”

Magnifique nodded quietly. “Okay,” she said.

“How long did this go on for?”

“Thirty-one weeks,” she said. “I know because they didn’t expose us on weekends.”

“Hm.”

“We had two days off, regularly. It was the only reason I still had any real sense of time passing. I kept count. Toby and I, we both turned eighteen while all this was going on.”

“Right. So… the change took a lot of time?”

“I think so,” she said, suddenly doubtful. “The technicians hanging around us seemed very excited in the first week, though. And then less excited for a couple of months. And then all the way to the end of the process they just got giddier and giddier.”

She flushed. “Mostly I didn’t really notice the, you know, the powers coming in. Not until I took off, the first time. I wasn’t exactly testing my strength, and until the last couple of weeks they weren’t testing it for me. I mean, the moment I started working out in front of them, obviously I knew, right?”

“Right.”

“But mostly, I was…” She gestured at herself. “I was concerned about my body in other ways, you know?”

“I can understand that,” the woman she was talking to said coolly. It was clear the development of the physique common to superhumans had kicked in early for her; her arms already had the swell of muscle in the upper arms, her chest was prodigious and perky, her belly was toned, and while the rest of her body couldn’t be seen below the desk, Zoe was sure it was close to the way she looked currently, if not already identical.

“One day, near the end of the process, I came back to the quarters they’d put us in and I told Toby that they’d been testing me, and I was strong, and I couldn’t be hurt, and I could fly, and he gave me the weirdest look.”

“Weird how?”

“Well, at the time, I really didn’t know, you know? I think I needed to understand more about what was going on before I could have guessed what he meant. Anyway, he asked me if I could do anything else, and I said like what, but I thought maybe he meant like super-vision or something and I was trying to look through a wall and then there was this tickle at the back of my head and it felt…” Even recalling it, she bites her lip. “Fuck, it felt so good, you know?”

“I’m not sure I do. But that’s okay; go on.”

“There was just something happening, and it felt good, and I was…” She sighed wistfully. “All of a sudden I was happy and I was floaty and I was, too, real turned on.” She blushed, shooting a look at the woman questioning her, nervous about going further, no doubt, if not understood.

“It was like everything was alright, you know? I was locked up somewhere, I’d been experimented on, I hadn’t seen my parents in the best part of a year - or any of my friends, Toby barely counted - but I was happy, suddenly, that kind of warm happiness you get sometimes out of nowhere when there’s just nothing to bother you.

“I didn’t understand it, but then Toby told me everything was going to be okay, and all I had to do was listen to him and do what he said.”

“And what did you think about that?”

“I thought I should listen to him and do what he said,” she said simply. “Everything would be okay.”

On the tape, there’s a moment or two of silence. “And what happened?”

“First of all, he told me I should go topless. We were in these jumpsuit kind of things, kind of baggy, but mine was still tight enough around the tits and the ass, now, that he’d been able to tell something was happening. I undid the zipper, shrugged out of it, and tied the arms around my hips to keep it from coming down. Then I put my bra aside.

“Then he told me I wanted him to grope my tits. I remember wondering how he knew.”

“Wait, you’d already wanted him to grope you?”

Magnifique blinked in confusion. “I assume so,” she said. “I’ve not really thought about it. The way he said it, it just made sense that I always would have, and I was kind of going off that.”

“Okay.”

“So he starts groping me, and he’s really into it but to me it’s just, you know… well, actually it wasn’t even okay. It was just bad.”

“Like a teenager with no experience who isn’t even trying to make you enjoy it?”

“Kind of like that, I guess,” she said. “But he told me I should enjoy what he was doing, so I did.”

“What did he mean by that?”

She shrugged. “Anything he did, I assume.”

“He didn’t clarify?”

“No. Should he have?”

“I guess not. Go on.”

“He told me he wanted to see me naked. Then he told me I wanted to show me naked to him. So I did.”

“And was that something that had always been true, too?”

“No, I-“ She frowned, giving some thought to the question after an initial gut answer. “Yes? I don’t know. You’re confusing me.”

“Right.”

“That was the first time we fucked. It was good. I mean, I enjoy anything he does, so of course it was.”

“Right.” There was, this time, a certain contemptuous amusement in the woman’s voice.

“Afterwards, he told me to rip the door off our quarters.”

“And did you?”

“Of course. If I listen to him and do what he says, everything will be okay.” She visibly hesitated on the tape. “He’s going to talk to me again soon, right?”

“Well, ah… we’ll have to see how quickly we can organise it. So you ripped the door down. You hadn’t known you could do that before?”

“I was getting stronger, and I knew that, but I was kinda scared of it,” she said. “I wasn’t… like, I didn’t want to fail and get in trouble.”

“Of course not. What happened afterwards?”

“We went to find the person in charge, and Toby did something to them.”

“The same thing he did to you?”

Magnifique was, again, quiet for a few moments. “I guess. And then she called the CEO and tricked him into coming out to the lab, and Toby did something to him.”

“Again, the same thing he did to you?”

“I don’t like thinking about it like that.”

“That’s fair. So what did he do?”

“He talked to him, and at the end the CEO understood that he had to do what Toby said, and that doing what Toby said would make everything better.”

“And is that when you got the new outfit?”

“No. But Toby, or I guess he was calling himself Gaslight by then, did say he liked my hair in bunches, and he wanted me to put it up in bunches.”

“All right.”

“The costume came a bit later. And it wasn’t just me.”

“I know. By the time of the raid, both you and Graylight were wearing them.”

“Oh, all the women were,” Magnifique said carelessly. “They all understood that it was natural and sensible and the best outfit to show off our boobs and our asses.”

“And is that something you want to do?”

She shifted in her chair, biting her lip again. “It makes everything okay when I do what Gaslight says,” she said.

“Okay. Thank you.”

“Can I see him soon?”

“Soon. But I need you to see the deprogrammer first.”

“Will he mesmerise me?”

“Sorry, what?”

“Mesmerise me.” Her eyes were suddenly alight with excitement. “Gaslight says that’s what he did. He told me he wasn’t going to for ages because he thought I could do the same thing, and then it turned out I was a big dumb girljock as far as my powers went-“

“His words?”

“Of course!” She beamed. “I’m so proud to be his big dumb girljock. Anyway, once he knew that he could mesmerise me safely. I wasn’t going to be able to fight back. So he did it, and… it’s the best feeling. Have you ever been mesmerised?”

The recording ended on that odd note, possibly to spare the interviewer any embarrassment.

*

There were other videos, and Zoe almost started one, but beforehand she picked up a pen to make her notes and she found herself sitting there for a long time, running everything through her head, to decide what was going to go down.

In the end, all she added was the single note, MegaWoman appears to have a control/submission fetish.

She felt more and more like she was getting a sense of where the story must lie, and sent another email to Watchdogs PR.