The Watchdogs PR response was polite, informal, but as noncommittal as could be.

The Watchdogs did not collect or publically disclose information about the sex lives or desires of its members. The Watchdogs was a sex-positive force, and would not denounce any legal activity between consenting adults, but it also did not speculate internally on individuals’ proclivities.

Magnifique was indeed a previous identity of MegaWoman’s, and the Watchdogs resented the implication that they were in some way hiding this information from the public. (When she read this line, Zoe went back to reread what she’d said about Magnifique, and couldn’t see anything that suggested the Watchdogs had hidden anything; she’d just asked if they could confirm the link for her.)

With the exception of the veiled criticism, Zoe could have written the answer for them. It was almost exactly what she’d expected.

All the same, it was a step she had to go through. Partly this was so that the Watchdogs wouldn’t claim that they hadn’t been asked about anything when she finally published, and partly it was because, if there actually was a reasonable explanation, the odds were good that the PR team would offer it.

She drummed her pen repeatedly on the notepad she used, staring at her computer screen, thinking about what her next move might be.

She had, she thought, probably reached the limits of what she could do from her home desk. Bleakly, she got up, had a very late dinner, and trudged into the bedroom, where she went to sleep still wondering who to approach first.

Her dreams were fitful that night. So much of what she’d seen, reach, and listened to over the previous several days had revolved around a woman’s mind, stripped bare, revealed, rewritten and remade, and the same woman’s body, also stripped bare, revealed, repurposed and used and reused.

Zoe found her thoughts returning to some of those moments, over and over, dwelling sometimes on the admirable, stunning body that MegaWoman had developed alongside her metahuman powers, and sometimes on the glimpses she had seen of the woman under control, sometimes emptily vacant, sometimes happily, gloriously complicit in her own control.

And in spite of herself, Zoe found herself enjoying these thoughts, imagining what it must have been, using the fact that MegaWoman (or Magnifique, at one time) had been enjoying herself to construct an idea in her head of how the heroine might think.

Naturally empathetic, it was easy for Zoe to move from that to instead imagine herself in the same position. This she was still doing as she drifted off to sleep, and the dreams she remembered afterward were a mix of reconstructions, the evidence of MegaWoman’s repeated control echoing through her mind ad she processed it, and of speculation.

How would it feel to not be in control of yourself? To go along with Gaslight, because anything he said was so convincing you believed it, or to submit to Doctrine because he had brought you into Doctrine Nation, or to find yourself refined and ‘perfected’ by the Perfectionist?

The last of those ideas seemed to carry greater weight for Zoe than the others had. If she understood it all correctly (and she recognised that she might not) what remained after the Perfectionist had worked on someone was a version of them who had left behind a lot of who they really were. Left behind the worries. Left behind the anxiety. The concern. The fear and the doubt.

What was left was blissful. It might not be a person the victim’s friends would ever recognise, but it was so delighted to be in service, to have a purpose, that this didn’t matter to it.

Zoe tried not to think too hard about what it meant that she could fantasise about giving up her free will to have a purpose. Instead, she dreamed.

*

She rose early and frustrated the following morning. A lengthy shower had her feeling at least somewhat less frustrated, but she was still… antsy.

The shape of the story was starting to fit in her head, but mostly on an instinctive level. She knew roughly what was there, but not, yet, how to present it. And even then, what she suspected was far beyond what she could prove.

She was always antsy at a point like this in her investigations. When sitting at home and researching was no longer enough. When she knew there was something out there to be found, but she hadn’t found it yet.

She needed to speak to someone who’d witnessed MegaWoman during one of these bouts of odd behaviour, she knew. The problem was who.

A little research that morning saw her on a flight out of state, headed for Lincoln, Nebraska, where a former villain had, somewhat inexplicably, settled after serving out their sentence in the Nebraska State Penitentiary, one of the few midwestern prisons that had been upgraded to handle metahuman prisoners.

The former Doctor Highbrow, real name Erick Braun, seemed to have gone straight on his most recent release. Before that, he had enjoyed an idiosyncratic criminal career spanning thirty years, starting while he was still studying for his doctorate when he received his mental powers, the immediate fallout from which put the kibosh on his ever receiving a doctorate.

Like many whose psionic abilities allowed them to manipulate the minds of others, Doctor Highbrow had embarked on a life of crime almost immediately. Unlike most, his choice of targets showed no pattern, no routine, nothing that hinted at any one deeper motivation. It was as if he’d jumped from one whim to another; there was no fascination with government or with research, no great desire to best a particular nemesis. Highbrow had just headed up a variety of oddball schemes.

And shortly after MegaWoman joined the Watchdogs, Doctor Highbrow had been operating in Texas. One plot - one case, from the Watchdogs’ perspective - and there seemed to be no reason to think he’d done anything else in the state; however, he had robbed a bank in Austin, and when Zoe had called one of her forerunners on her current beat, the man had dredged up a vague memory that MegaWoman had been the first into the back, and that despite this, Highbrow had escaped.

Zoe was pretty sure she had a witness, had someone who had seen MegaWoman in this state. And if he’d put her there himself… well, that didn’t immediately rule him out as someone to fill in the blanks.

*

Braun worked now, it transpired, in a community art centre, manning a clay sculpting and pottery class. It was all but empty when Zoe arrived. She immediately presented her press card and saw a cagey uncertainty enter his eyes. She could tell why, could completely understand his reservations. Supervillains and the press came together only for kidnap plots or exposes, and he hadn’t planned to kidnap anyone in years.

“It’s about MegaWoman,” she said, and while he was looking at her no less cautiously, there was a change, somewhere behind his eyes. She wished she could read him just a little more clearly, so that she could unravel that reaction. It was probably at the heart of what she needed to know.

“I did know her, once,” he said.

“I know,” she nodded. “A bank robbery gone wrong, right?”

“Kind of,” he conceded. “The bank robbery was meant to be the start of something else.” He gestured toward a bench at one side of the open space; it didn’t escape Zoe’s notice that the bench was not visible from the room door, so if anyone simply poked their head around the door, they wouldn’t immediately see him talking to a journalist.

For the same reason, she nodded and went along with him. “You needed funding?” she asked, and he shook his head.

“I needed superhumans,” he said, and sighed heavily. “How much of my career do you know?”

“Um.” She chose her words carefully. “If you enjoy being notorious, my answer won’t make you happy.”

He waved a hand. “I’m through with all that now,” he said. “I finally… Ah, you’re not here about that. You’re here about her.”

“Right,” she nodded.

“When I went into that bank,” he said, “I was hoping that it’d be her that I caught, her or maybe Mysteque. I still don’t understand what her powers actually are but there’s so much ooomph behind them, and ooomph was what I needed.”

“Wait - you wanted to catch one of them?”

“I said I needed superhumans. If you look at a lot of the crimes I got caught committing, they’re all big, they’re all showy, and they’re all the kind of thing where right from the get-go you know that the cops aren’t the right solution.”

“That… might be the only thing they have in common,” Zoe admitted.

“Yeah, probably. I adopted the same basic idea wherever I ended up, but the targets changed according to the city.”

“So your plan was always: first, get a superhero under control?”

Braun gave her a sly grin and for the first time she could actually see the villain inside him. “Right. Step two was: get clear, let the heat die down.”

Zoe nodded. “And step three… would depend on where you were?”

“You catch on quick,” he said cheerfully. “My goal basically was to push my powers on to another level. I had this belief that I was the first of a new evolution for humanity. That I could push myself on, and then I could pull people up.” He shrugged. “I’m here because now I know that was all bullshit, you get me?”

“I think so.”

“To do that I wanted any kind of advanced bioscience I could find.” He shook his head, smiling off into the distance, his earlier caginess forgotten. “You know, I can’t even remember what I was looking for in my one trip to Texas? I would have had something picked up, but it’s so long since I thought about that plan I’ve just completely forgotten it.”

Zoe nodded, not wanting to speak and risk breaking the flow.

“I do remember… I would have needed muscle, to get at it. To carry it off somewhere and secure it. And that kind of muscle only really comes in superhuman form.”

“And MegaWoman was just the first one to show up?”

“She was, but if she hadn’t been, I’d have used whoever did show up to get her to me. She was the goal.”

“Tell me about it.”

*

He had looked the hypnotised teller straight in the eye, savouring how helpless she was under his psionic impact - because that helplessness, to Doctor Highbrow, had a… a flavour. A delicious flavour - and he had said “Hit the silent alarm.”

“Yes, Doctor,” she said. “Of course.” He watched her hand slide from the top of the desk, along and to the side. Saw her finger flexed. Knew the alarm was in place.

It was, now, a waiting game as much as anything. He swept his eyes over the hostages, feeling their own helplessness, drinking it in. One or two of them, he thought, were quite attractive; the two men in Texans shirts that barely fitted them, substantially less so. One of them had a shirt that barely fitted due to the musculature under it; this was someone who clearly had put in a lot of time building his muscles, and he carried himself like someone who knew how to use them.

“Get comfortable, everyone,” Braun told them, and watched as everyone did. He was amused to notice that some of the hostages’ feelings of helplessness redoubled as they obeyed; they did not want to be comfortable. They wanted to fight him.

Well, he could understand that, even if it just seemed futile. They would have a sense of pride, when he was gone; they would tell themselves they they had never fully given in, and it would even come to mark a key part of their personality.

Braun wasn’t willing to tell himself that he was improving them by giving them something to fight against and fail, but he was all the same perfectly happy for them to benefit from him, just so long as he benefitted more than anyone else.

The cops showed up first, but they stayed outside. He didn’t even have to make them. He turned back to the teller and said “Open the door into the staff area.”

“Yes, Doctor,” she said. “Of course.”

He made his way in there, partly to sell the illusion, partly because he knew there would be more comfortable seats there, and he found a desk with a computer that had been left logged in. In his experience, there always was one.

“Come in here with me,” he told her, and looked for the next other staff member, a younger man who had intern written all over him. “You too.”

“Yes, Doctor,” they echoed. “Of course.”

He opened up bits of the bank’s software at random, clicked until he got a progress bar up on screen. Then he just waited.

At the time, Braun always told himself how calm he was being, how in-control he clearly felt. Looking back on moments like this in memory it was hard to focus on anything except for the nerves he’d felt.

He felt her presence before anything else made him aware of her; a general unease, or the sense of motion just out of the frame of his eye. Perhaps even the subtlest hint of the passage of air as she moved. Hard to say.

He raised one hand from the keyboard, one finger extended on the hand. “One moment, please,” he said.

MegaWoman rested a hand on his chairback and then spun him around to face her, moving almost too fast to blink. He looked up, startled, but couldn’t get his bearings before he met her eyes, at which point his psionic power activated and his eyes became an unseeing conduit, with her own eyes the other end of the conduit, receiving his power unseeing.

It only ever took heartbeats, and yet it always seemed so much longer. There was time enough to get a sense of the mind he was invading; without that, eh couldn’t do it. He seemed to think faster, somehow, riffling through their minds with almost insolent ease.

What he found in MegaWoman surprised him. Usually he would create excitement, or sometimes desire, or he would suppress fear or independence; all ways of getting the same result.

Here, there was already desire and excitement and in plenty.

Braun wondered why, wondered how, but he didn’t hesitate; he had only an eyeblink to do what needed to be done, after all. He found the sense of duty, the slim stem that blocked that desire and excitement from action, and uprooted it, planting it again in a new place. Her duty now was to him; her desire now was for him; her excitement now was to serve him.

He made no other changes, but all the same, he was aware of the entire landscape of her mind changing around him from his actions.

He blinked, breaking the connection and ending his invasion. Helplessness bubbled up in her mind, with a subtly different flavour, tinged by a genuine excitement he had not had to cultivate.

“I said, one moment,” he said lightly, joking.

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” she responded, bowing her head.

“Don’t be.”

“Very well, Doctor.” She raised her head again, looking back at him, and Braun searched her eyes, looking for that delight and excitement he hadn’t had to make.

“I’m going to need you soon,” he told her. “In three days, at noon, you will go to the east entrance of Sam Houston Park - in your civilian clothes - and you will wait for me there. Understand?”

“Yes, Doctor,” she answered. “Of course.”

Anyone he gave commands responded with that phrase. It wasn’t something he told them to do, or not consciously; his best bet was that his subconscious made some of the alterations for him, without him knowing. His secondary bet was that somehow this was just what people said.

He grinned, and he watched her smile; natural, open, and sunny, with no hesitation or doubt. No trace of resistance.

He could usually see it in their eyes, just a hint; a little resistance blended with a shade of confusion, as they wondered how it was that a moment of eye contact could change so much, could make things irrelevant and make other things matter more than life itself.

“In the time between now and then,” he said, “people will ask you what happened between us, because it’s important that you and I spend some time apart. You will only tell them about what happens after this point, nothing about these other orders. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

His smile got wider. “Pull your costume down and show me your tits,” he ordered.

“Yes, Doctor,” she said. “Of course.”

One hand rose to the neckline of her costume and pulled it open. The other reached inside, scooping out that breast. A couple of adjustments had her breast sitting above the costume, which motion she followed on the other side. The tight material had the two ripe breasts held high and proud, forming a shelf between them.

Braun was not naive enough to think that would be comfortable for her, but that wasn’t a concern he gave much time to. He knew she wouldn’t either.

He took her tits in each hand and jiggled them. “Very nice,” he said, over the coos and moans of pleasure that just being enjoyed by him was triggering throughout her brain.

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Braun made a show of consulting the screen and the progress bar. “Not long now,” he said. “Of course… your friends might get here soon, I suppose?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Well, if they do, you’ll hold them off.”

“Yes, Doctor.” He saw a happy lack of struggle in her eyes, and wondered what kind of heroine was so willing to fight her friends, so long as she was under control.

He gestured to the desk at which he was sat. “Walk into the edge,” he told her.

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

She took two quick strides forward, bringing one thigh into direct contact with the table edge, then brought the other foot forward, standing so close that the desk’s edge pressed back against her thighs, dimpling the skin.

“Bend forward,” he told her.

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

She bent at the waist, her legs staying exactly where they had been, her body pressing forward against the desk, her arms by her side. One of her tits ended up in an in-tray, the other’s weight caused the stapler it landed on to fire with an audible click.

…did she giggle at that, or was he imagining it?

He admired her ass now as he had been enjoying her breasts and the docile, obedient bliss in her eyes.

“Rip your costume open,” he ordered. “Give me access.”

“Yes, Doctor,” she responded excitedly. “Of course.” Her hands came back, fingers spread, and rested on her buttocks for a moment, before she gripped with fingertips, nails digging into the fabric, and pulled.

The costume was made of something resilient, as most supers’ outfits were; all the same it was no match for her sheer strength, and it parted along the seam with a healthy ripping noise. Where her fingernails had dragged her skin was a paler white, tracing their paths.

She wriggled her feet further apart, keeping herself firmly pressed into the desk.

MegaWoman clearly expected exactly what was coming, and as he unbuckled his belt and stepped up, he was all too happy to oblige.

He rested his hands one each on the very top of a buttock and thrust inside, rewarded by a scandalised, delighted ooh from the heroine.

Something about them felt better, he’d learned. Maybe the same thing that meant their bodies were always so close to perfection. Or maybe there was simply something about having changed himself… He tried not to speculate, but it was always tempting.

He felt her helplessness and her excitement together and they weren’t just delicious, they were nourishing. With them came other sensations of helplessness, the drip feed of response from the two bank employees he’d brought in for verisimilitude, who now had no choice but to watch the man who controlled their minds fuck the woman who had attempted to rescue him.

Braun smiled broadly, not just at how much he was enjoying MegaWoman, not just as the way his plans were continuing to come on to fruition, but also at the idea that was currently forming in his fertile mind.

He was a scientist at heart, albeit one who had abandoned the constraints of grant applications and ethics appeals. To his mind, he represented what a scientist should want to be.

“You two,” he asked them, “are you single?”

“No, Doctor,” the man said. “Unfortunately not, Doctor, I’m sorry,” the woman added.

“Together?”

“No, Doctor.”

“Hmm.” He smiled. “Well, let’s see.” And he didn’t say anything else for a few moments, turning back to MegaWoman, adjusting his pace, finding a rhythm he could sustain for longer. “You can ride me back, you know,” he told her.

“May I, Doctor? Really?” God, the eager lust in her voice, in her mind…

“You may. You will.”

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

And as her thighs tensed, as her hips bucked back and forth, as the power surrounding him squeezed with docile, desiring eagerness to be exactly what he wanted, he turned his attention back to the onlookers.

“Love the idea you’re seeing here,” he told them.

“Yes, Doctor,” they chorused. “Of course.”

“Fantasise about the idea of what you’re seeing here,” he ordered. “A supermind over a superbody. It’s the way things should be. Correct?”

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

He was delighted to hear MegaWoman echo the watching chorus, and his cock twitched at it, which resulted in a delighted squeal from the heroine.

“You will become lovers,” he told the others, “without abandoning your other lovers. But you will have these fetishes now. You,” he said, meeting the man’s eyes, allowing just a fraction of his power to flow backward along the feed of helpless desire, “will learn to hypnotise. And you,” he turned his attention to the teller who had betrayed the bank’s defences in the first place, “will be his first volunteer, and as he trains his mind to control yours, you will train your body to be worthy of control. You will hone your power and your beauty. Do you both understand?”

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

“Very good. Over time, you are to see if you can recruit your other lovers into this.”

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

He smiled to himself, and turned his attention back to MegaWoman. He had their names, they were on the employee badges. He’d check on them a few months down the line. “MegaWoman?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“You will only remember the conversation I had with your fellow puppets when you are alone.”

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

He smiled, and his pace lost the slow, steady, sustainable rhythm. He fucked her with delight and passion and urgency, and she fucked with obedience and worship and need to please, and when he came in her and pulled out he left her sprawled on the desk.

Braun was presently surprised that he’d had time to fully enjoy her there. It had given him plenty more ideas for things he could do in future, when he got her back to himself in a day or two. After the fuss had died down, when the Watchdogs’ guard would be back down.

He’d honestly expected that before he could finish, her team-

“YOU IN THERE. DOCTOR HIGHBROW.”

Ah.

“WE HAVE THE PLACE SURROUNDED. YOU CAN’T CONTROL ALL OF US IN TIME.”

He wasn’t sure which of the Watchdogs that was, but he knew they were there, and in place.

“MegaWoman, you know what to do?” he told her absently.

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

As soon as she was out of the room he turned to the bank employees under his control. “Open the vault,” he told the teller.

“Yes, Doctor. Of course.”

And with that he made his way out.

*

Zoe sat in silence for a long while, thinking, after the story had been told.

“Go on,” she said, at least.

“What to?”

“To - to three days later, of course,” she said. “At noon. You said the thing we all missed was that every crime was to set up another, with a superhuman helping you. You were primed for just that. What happened?”

“I assume she showed up at Sam Houston Park,” he said, “and she waited for a few hours, and then probably went home. There’s only so much point in waiting for me if you’re aware I’ve been arrested.”

“Ohhh. So they caught you?”

“Right. I had an exit plan but I gambled on MegaWoman shutting them all down out of concern for her, and instead I got shut down for blocks away when Hailstorm froze my axle blocks solid. They picked me up and took me in.”

Zoe had seen what looked like a flaw in the story. “You know there was no story for this whole thing, right? It was never reported?

“I could kind of see that if they lost, but they beat you. So why wouldn’t they prosecute?”

Braun smirked. “The way they explained it to me, they would have just been far too embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

“Sure. Why do you think I had her stripped all but naked? There was camera footage, plus reporters show up for squeals on cases like that. I’ll bet your own - you are from a Houston paper, right?”

“Right.”

“You probably have some stills, buried and out of the main catalogue. Ready for if the Watchdogs ever hit a huge scandal while the public is against them.”

“So… what happened?”

“Oh, they bought my silence. I saw MegaWoman about three weeks after I’d meant to, but it was in St Lucia. Paid for holiday, her under my influence, lasts for a month, and in return I never use mind control inside Texas state borders again.”