Photo by Harsh Kondekar on Unsplash
“Hey Crafty, you still got that emergency fix kit on you?” My present best friend asked from where she sat opposite me in the sandwich joint about a block from the small con a local library was hosting. Karen and Chad had convinced me to come into their version of a big city for a day outside our small town. “Or did you leave it in the car when you picked up your purse? The belt is coming unglued and I don’t want my Wicked Woman outfit to show a gap.”
“Oh, I got it right here.” I tapped my vest. “What is the point of dressing up as Gadget Gorilla if I don’t keep all my gadgets with me?” My full headpiece and two furry armpieces were in the fourth chair at the table so I could eat the late lunch we were grabbing between wowing the little kids and their parents with general Cosplay and hitting the triple-header movie night the library was hosting after dark. I pulled out the glue that would work best on short notice to attach foam to the spandex hugging her hips, plus a bonus safety pin, and passed them over to Chad who had downed his two-foot hoagie and drink and chips already and was sneaking what he could off of the dropping bits from Karen’s six-inch sandwich. “Make yourself useful Captain Awesome.”
After stealing two chips from my area, for which I reached to slap his hand in annoyance but missed deliberately by pretending to be too slow so he would laugh like the bitch he was, he picked up the items and bent down beside her. She rotated in her seat so he had access to the failing portion of her costume while she sucked down the last of her soda. I wished Karen could do better, but for Creek Bend’s, Chad was top tier. And neither was in a position to leave town because of family obligations. Me, I was stuck there for other reasons.
His ass was great in the spandex hero tights, though the dark cosplay cape hid it at the moment, pooling on the floor around him. Chest looked really good too thanks the padding and tailoring the three of us put into the top. Not that he didn’t have a decent chest for a normie; he just didn’t have Captain Awesome’s musculature. Few did. I could count on one hand the number, and none of them were normies. Thanks to the cosplay, pre-teen girls had swooned over him all day and so many little boys wanted pictures with him or me.
“Careful don’t stick me or permanently glue me into this.”
“Don’t worry about that; I’ve been wanting to get you out of that costume all day,” he assured her. “No way am I going to glue you into it.”
“Ick, I’m eating here.” I said.
We sat towards the back of the deli-sandwich place, since the sun glared through the west-facing windows with the late afternoon hour. Even with our semi-concealed position, a lot of the surrounding customers stared at us, the two heroes with a villainess. (I think a few of the little boys were disappointed to discover I was a girl under the cosplay.) Though the two anime cosplayers got some attention too. Though, hands down, the winner of the cosplay people watching was the Disney princess in her bright yellow gown. Two young teens, bless them, had attempted what looked like some live-action roleplaying for dungeons and dragons, with pleather, fur, and some pirate pieces. Their table was filled with half-a-dozen kids their age and one very put-upon adult looking dazed. Everyone, so far, had been very polite, obeying the general rule of letting the cosplayers eat in peace. One of the teens smacked another for taking a picture of the princess eating, then one of the D&Ders grabbed her phone and deleted the picture.
Good manners, I approved. Not that any pictures taken in this establishment would last while my costume head was off.
Oh, it looked like the workers just discovered the wi-fi was down. I popped the last of my meatball sub in my mouth, wiped my lips with a napkin, and moved to pick up my head.
The door rang from the little bell hanging just above it. Much easier on the ear than the typical buzzer alert for small establishments. The man walking in filled the door, backlit against the setting sun. Around him swirled a dark cape.
Everyone glanced his direction. The workers did the normal, “Welcome to the Bread Barn.” Around us, people measured the cosplay. I know they were thinking, oh, another Captain Awesome, why was he showing up so late?
I dropped the head on and ran the belts into place quickly to hold it securely in place.
My eyes, sharp in the goggles I built into the gorilla head, darted to the little tape beside the door measuring people for the camera. The man stood the perfect six-foot four inches, plus two inches for his boots, of the real Captain Awesome. No surprise there, as he was the real Captain Awesome. Who had no business being in a small Midwest deli instead of safely way out in the East Coast metroplex, preferably in New York City or Boston.
The goggles adjusted for the sun. I pulled on and attached my furry arms as I ate up the sculptured caped super. Pecs and abs stretching the spandex, but padded enough with Krimsome gel to keep villains from breaking their hands when punching his invulnerable body. He had traded in the spandex pants for something like tight stretchy jeans, just enough for modesty after he realized just how many people took pictures of him just to post them to …those types of sites. His dark hair was windblown from wherever he flew in from.
Karen and I had argued with Chad about his choice, but he preferred the classic costume for his cosplay. We did get him to wear a ballet belt on threat of putting him in the backseat with all the costumes for the thirty-minute drive to Big River. Instead I sat behind Karen for the drive.
“I am here for Krystal,” he announced to the room.
Everyone looked confused, glancing around. Chad stood, drawing the cape’s eye.
The asshole smirked at the cosplay, before he said “The Krimsome Krystal.”
Mummering doubled. The Krimsome Krystal was a supervillain of some repute. While she never killed, her actions had laid waste to a lot of property. After her capture two years ago, she had traded patents, including the Krimsome gel, and destroyed several incriminating recordings which would have embarrassed a lot of high-ranking politicians and wealthy men, for a very light sentence the media had screamed about for nearly a full month since most of the deal had been under a confidentiality seal. She was captured and neutered, but the fact remained, she was a bad guy. The bounty on her head had been five times the one presently on the Wicked Woman’s head, not counting inflation, and Wicked did kill. The locals appeared worried.
As they should. Things happened around Captain Awesome, admittedly few were his making, but some of them were. Like now.
“Come on out Krystal, your ankle monitor says you are here.” His rich baritone smoothed over muttering voices, filling the cracks in the tiled floor and walls.
“Ankle monitor?” Chad looked down at me. “You said that was for a traffic offense.”
“Sandra?” Karen’s blue eyes stared across the table, hurt.
Fuck. I didn’t want to start over again. Not again. Not that Karen and Chad and Melinda and Rachel and Chris of Creek’s Bend pushed me mentally or made the world endlessly bright, but they did keep the dark back. The intrusive thoughts. Some many thoughts. Fuck.
I pushed away from the table, setting up the wi-fi and recording measures within the space to reactivate in four minutes. I don’t want The Krimsone Krystal to hit the web dressed up as Gadget Gorilla, though I would have killed to have him as my nemesis instead of the Captain and his Hero Posse. (Well, not kill. That comes with a host of issues unless you can get rid of the body completely and not have a single finger point your way. While Gadget was cool, he wasn’t dissolve-the-body-and-cover-tracks-for-eight-months-into-mist cool. Nor was he that evil.) “What do you want…Cap?” I caught myself before saying his real name. Let him think it was a threat instead of a near slip of the tongue. The gorilla head muffled my voice.
He blinked. “Krystal?” Shaking his head to clear it of the absurdity before him, he refocused on me as me, the villain who had fought him to a standstill several times, holding out a hand. There were no calluses on it since invulnerability prevented them; it looked as soft and gentle as I remembered. “There is a situation; they are calling in the second of the favors.”
“It’s the third, actually. Are they sure?”
“Second. What happened? Never mind, you can tell me on the way.”
Grasping his right hand with my fur-clad one, he pulled me out of the Bread Barn and wrapped me in his arms, before taking off.
With the third favor called in, my probation will end. No more ankle monitor. Full access to the internet, officially. Full access to any overseas money I had invested. The royalties stashed from the patents they allowed me to keep since they didn’t see any governmental use, after paying off the property damage, which I fought tooth and nail to keep reasonable, would be my own again.
Curving into his body as he flew us to wherever the emergency was, I was glad to be inside the costume so I just smelled fur and glue instead of his unique scent. I pulled an arm out of a costume sleeve and activated the my home robots with the George Webber code, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” They will clean everything up and move to a pre-determined location. I sent a followup code for K9-4, my good dog in his fourth iteration, to find me when the relocation was complete. While Gadget Gorilla outfit let me have enough equipment I could put a dent into Chandler’s hide, letting him and his government keepers know just how I had been spending my two and a quarter years of isolation would be unwise. I don’t what to go to supermax, let alone the cape prison on the Moon. My power was brain, not brawn, even with the few enhancements I had made to myself.
“So what was the second favor,” his voice vibrated through the fur into my ear.
“If they didn’t tell you, you shouldn’t know,” I replied knowing his hearing worked fine, even as the wind whipped past.
“Was it bad?”
“Define bad.”
“Krimsome bad, Wicked bad, Monster bad, and the Grievoux.”
“Monster. Grevioux level never stays out of the paper. They would have told you.”
I had activated the enhanced hearing in the head, so I heard his grunt and his low-level mutter. “True, I think.”
So, trouble in paradise? That could be interesting.
“Tell me, what are you dragging me into?” One of the things I hadn’t worked into the costume, or my walk-around-town vest that I was wearing inside the costume, is a radio with AI search capabilities to keep me informed of things moment-to-moment. I couldn’t figure out a mobile version which could fool the surveillance equipment they had aimed at me. “Aliens, capes, natural disaster?”
He gave me a little squeeze as we crossed the Mississippi, well aware of exactly the amount of pressure to feel comforting to me, before he answered, “Humans.”
Oh. Fuck. Normies were the most dangerous monsters on the planet.
Then he proceeded to fill me in.
(1,985 words; first published 1/17/2026)