The girl kneeling in the center of a derelict shipping warehouse looks like NovaGirl. She has NovaGirl’s boots, and NovaGirl’s cape, and NovaGirl’s startling blue eyes.

But she doesn’t have NovaGirl’s suit.

Or NovaGirl’s powers.

That much is abundantly clear from the bruise blossoming blue and black across her right eye, the heavy steel rings freshly pierced through her nipples. The cigarette burns dotting the curves of her ass, the left side of her face. The split lip dribbling bright red blood. None of these are things that should be possible.

And yet the collar around her throat says otherwise.

It looks exactly the same as all the other collars recovered so far. Thick, shiny, like a rolled plate of steel. Only it’s not steel, it’s pure nullium, and it’s locked so tight around NovaGirl’s throat she can hardly breathe. 

The cock hilted down her throat to the balls doesn’t help much either.

Tears stream from her reddened eyes as she convulses there, on her knees, choking on dick. The world’s greatest superhero - reduced to an amateur cockholster for the men surrounding her.

There’s at least ten, lounging around a table piled with guns, booze, camcorders. Big, ugly guys - with mean laughs and meaner eyes. Most of them have priors. All of them are on the Hero Corps watchlist, for hate crimes and spreading dangerous rhetoric. The types of guys who post shit like Keep our city pure or Mutants are menaces or Earth is for Earthlings, all while stockpiling arms and ammunition in their basements. Those fucking weirdos.

The biggest guy is the leader, of course. He’s the one throatfucking NovaGirl like she’s a five dollar fleshlight. He’s the one with a handgun to her forehead, cocked and loaded with his finger creaking on the trigger. 

“Not so high and mighty now, are you?” he jeers. There’s nothing intelligible about noises she makes in response, with her throat convulsing around his shaft for lack of oxygen. His cronies laugh.

“Alien bitch,” sneers the man, and spits on her face. It joins the coating of cum that’s already dripping down her face, matting her hair, stinging her eyes. The spit lands right on her cheek, and she flinches. NovaGirl flinches like a housewife after twenty years of an abusive marriage. She does it so naturally, so quickly, it’s hard to believe that this was the same girl that could've stopped a bullet train dead in its tracks with one hand. That she was ever a hero at all. 

The man drags her off his cock, extracting his shaft from her throat like he’s plunging a toilet. She collapses, retching - or she tries to, except that his hand is knotted tight in her shoulder-length hair.

“Please.” Her voice is raw, low. She can barely get the word out. “I-”

“Go on,” says the man cruelly. “Fly.” He lifts her up by the hair, and she screams as she’s hoisted into the air by her scalp. She screams as he throws her, sends her sailing across the room. She doesn’t fly. She lands hard on the concrete floor with a sickening thud. She lies there, shaking, cradling the arm she’s landed on. Inches away from her supersuit, lying there discarded on the floor. Drenched in cum and piss and discarded condoms.

She doesn’t reach for it.

She lies there on the floor and cries.

“Look at that, boys,” says the man. “Guess she don’t fly so good anymore.” And he walks over, drags her up by the collar until she’s back on her knees, gasping for breath. “What goddamn joke of a supe.”

He slaps her, across the face. Hard enough for the clap to echo. NovaGirl screams, because of course she does, because she’s probably never felt this type of pain before in her life. Even when she was up against the most powerful villains this city’s ever seen, she was never this weak. This vulnerable.

“Say it,” he hisses.

“I-I…”

He slaps her again, and she tries to scream again, but her voice is gone and there’s not enough oxygen left in her lungs. She coughs, sobs, and then- 

“I’m a…a j-joke of a superhero,” says NovaGirl.

The guys laugh.

His boot connects right between her legs. She wails and writhes but he holds her in place. By the collar. “Now apologize, you goddamn alien.”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorRYYY!” Her voice pitches up as he twists one of the metal rings through her nipples. He doesn’t twist gently. 

“Sorry for what?”

“I’M S-SORRY FOR BEING AN ALIEN!” she howls.

“That’s fucking right,” he snarls. “What else you sorry for?”

NovaGirl just stares up at him, blankly, with those big blue pleading eyes, because she doesn’t know what she should be sorry for. All she’s done in all her time on this planet is help others. Protect those in need of protecting, save those in need of saving. 

But the man doesn’t take that for an answer. Kicks her again. Right in the cunt, steel cap toe to clit. “Apologize properly, bitch.”

“I’M SORRY! I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, please…” She’s reduced to a blubbering mess. Sobbing, cringing. Saying anything at all, to make the bad man happy. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry for everything-”

“Still think you’re better than us?”

“NO! No, I- I’m sorry for… for ever pretending… that I was better...” NovaGirl grabs onto it, like a lifeline. Finally, something she can apologize for. “I’m, I’m not better. I’m sorry.”

“‘Cause you’re not a hero,” says the man. “Just a dumb set of holes and a pair of tits. That right?”

She hardly even hesitates. “Yes, just a- a dumb set of h-holes and a p-pair of tits-”

“Why the fuck do these whores think they get to fly around and prance all over our city?” he asks his men. It’s a rhetorical question. He’s not expecting an answer. Simply demonstrating his power, his point, as he raises the gun.

Not a special gun.

Smith & Wesson, semi-automatic, 9 millimetre.

Twenty bucks off the street, or thirty for one with the serial number filed off.

Not a great gun either. A bullet from one of these would barely go through a car door.

The sort of gun any supe worth her salt would laugh at.

He puts it to NovaGirl’s forehead. 

“You don’t want me to fire this, do you?”

NovaGirl shakes her head. Slowly. Trembling. Not daring to say a word.

“Why’s that?”

She looks petrified. “Be-because- because-”

He squeezes the trigger and the gun goes off. NovaGirl cries out, twisting in her collar as the beer bottle on the table behind her explodes in a spray of glass. But he keeps in place as he presses the still-warm muzzle right between her eyes and says, “Because of that, right?”

Her nod is barely a nod.

“You don't want that happening to you, do you?"

When she shakes her head this time, she does it frantically.

His grin was always ugly. Somehow, it grows uglier. "So why aren't you sucking?"

She doesn't hesitate. She ducks her head, and lowers her eyes, and she takes his shaft into her mouth, as deep as she can. Which isn't that deep, but she tries. She practically fucks her throat on him, as enthusiastically as any streetside whore. Gluck-gluck-glucking like the best of them, tears streaming down her cheeks. Working his shaft for everything she's worth.

Obediently.

Submissively.

Like there's nothing else NovaGirl would rather do, in the whole wide world, in this moment, than suck him off.

The man thumbs the hammer of the gun back. Right up between her eyes. The click is cold, mechanical, louder than it has any right to be.

"Deeper," he says.

She takes him deeper.

"See," the man tells his guys over the wet, sloppy, choking noises, "take her powers away, she's just like the rest of 'em. Just another bitch. And it's not hard to tame a bitch." He sneers down at her. At the gun in his hand. "See, this, this is real power. Man-made, man-used. Not whatever goddamn genetic alien shit she's got in her. And it's 'bout time they understood that."

One of the men's had enough of watching that tantalizing, perfect peach of an ass swaying right in front of him, perfectly framed by the cumstained red cape draped over her back. He's ready for round two, or four, or six, or however many times he's already raped the world's most famous superhero. He stands up and walks over. Unbuckles his belt, drops his pants. Reaches down to grab the kneeling girl by the hips, and hoists her lower half up until she's standing, hinged at the waist, still sucking, with her ass up in the air for someone to fuck.

"Spread 'em," he says, and NovaGirl spreads her legs without a word.

He grunts and reaches down, between her thighs, to the heavy shining steel ring that's been pierced right through her pink little nub of a clit, poking out between the reddened folds of her thoroughly-used sex. Who knew that alien physiology was so similar to the human version?

He pulls.

She screams. She screams and screams and screams, even with a dick shoved down her throat and a gun to her head, until he stops pulling, and then she just sobs.

"Use your hands," he says, and she scrabbles to spread her ass cheeks wider, to show herself off to him as best as she can.

He laughs. "The superslut's wet," he crows. "Look at this fucking whore."

"Bullshit," says the leader, amusedly.

"No shit! She's fucking dripping like a faucet." He puts his cigarette out on the small of her back, that deliciously blank pale canvas that's never seen a mark or a scar in her life. NovaGirl twitches like he's just tased her, but she keeps sucking diligently. Then he pokes his fingers at her cunt, prodding experimentally. She twitches harder. She still keeps sucking.

The leader shakes his head in mock disappointment. "Like I told you," he says. "Just another slut."

"I was gonna go for her ass again," says the man behind her, "but if her pussy's all lubed up, might as well, right?"

He rubs his cock against her pussy, spreading her juice all along his shaft, surely reveling in the fact that he's one of a handful of humans who's fucked an extraterrestrial being. One kind of a leap for mankind, certainly.

"Fuckin' her raw?" One of the other guys chuckles. "You don't know what kinda alien bugs she's got crawling up around there, man."

He grunts. "I'll take my goddamn chances. Ain't ever cracked a pussy so sweet before. Tight as a vice."

The other guy shrugs, as if to say it's your dick.

Doesn't seem to bother the man at all as he positions himself behind the supe, pressing into her, testing, pushing. "I wonder if a human could put a baby in this bitch," he says offhandedly.

NovaGirl's eyes fly open as though she hadn't even considered the possibility. And for the first time in however many hours, she struggles. She tries to twist away, making distressed noises in the back of her throat.

She doesn't go anywhere.

He shoves forward, burying his cock all the way inside, until his balls are nestled right up against her mound, and NovaGirl wails and claws and squirms and cums, cums so hard the concrete under her is painted with squirt after squirt, like he's wringing her out until all that's left is a dazed, dizzy, exhausted girl with shaking legs and tears dripping down her face.

"Goddamn," says the man. "She must've really-"

And then the ceiling above them explodes, glass and steel and wood shattering in a shockwave of kinetic energy - splinters and fragments melting into dust - as I smash right into their midst. They scramble to their feet, grabbing for their weapons, their pants, cursing aloud. NovaGirl's collar clinks against concrete as she collapses to the floor, curling into a useless ball. I draw myself up to my feet, cape fluttering, hands shimmering with power-

-and then I get to work.