Bondage and Other Tales

Phantasm handed the cab driver the twenty-dollar bill he’d brought with him to cover fare, and waved away the change while he hopped out. It would be so much simpler if he had the power to fly, or teleport, or had super-speed, or the wealth to own a custom themed super-vehicle.

Honestly, it would be easier if his civilian self’s sensible third-hand compact weren’t currently at the garage, with the question of how to pay for the repairs currently unanswered.

Ten feet from the taxi, he dropped his disguise of being a nondescript young blonde man in blue jeans and a grey t-shirt, and manifested as the Prince of Illusion. The title irritated him, but the media had seized hold of it and fighting that was too much even for the truly great superheroes.

To the civilians sharing the street, a voluminous cloak now swirled around him, the hood masking his face, shimmering in the streetlights in a way that made it impossible to determine the colour with any accuracy. Beneath it he wore neat black slacks, a white shirt with the neck open, a vest that shifted colours as fluidly as the cloak, and a short black tuxedo jacket with the sleeves pushed up to mid-forearm.

“Where is she?” he asked, of all and sundry.

After a brief and awkward pause, an older woman pointed to the roof of the building across the street.

Phantasm looked up. Well, at least it was only a three-story building.

The sign over the front door read, “Home for Orphans of All Species,” and below that were silhouettes of a human infant, a puppy, and a kitten.

Phantasm shook his head. He’d hoped that part of the call-in was wrong. How could she? This was out of character for her—she usually focused on technology, information, and parts or straight-up raw materials.

She couldn’t... she would never stoop so low as to see children and kittens and puppies as raw materials or test subjects, would she?

He made the cloak swirl dramatically around him, and as it faded from sight, the crowd discovered that he was no longer there.

Well, he was, but they could no longer see him.

That made it a little more inconvenient, running for the alley across the street while dodging civilians who weren’t aware of his presence, but he was used to that.

Do not attempt to adjust the picture,

he recited to himself, a mantra of sorts to help him stay calm and grounded, and remind him that he could do things that for most people would only be a fantasy. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive.

Not that it was a very effective power against his current opponent, unfortunately.

As he’d hoped, he found a fire escape in the alley, and a convenient pile of sturdy wooden crates made it much easier to reach the bottom of the ladder. He scrambled up that, raced up the rusted metal stairs, and climbed the final ladder up to the flat roof.

The supervillain stood in the middle of the roof, with something small and furry gripped in one rainbow-finished metal power glove and held in the crook of her other arm. The goggles that covered the upper half of her face, reflective gold and effectively opaque from this side, always reminded him of ski goggles. Her rather spiky long hair was dyed in swathes of deep blue, vivid rose-pink, and intense golden yellow. A studded black leather collar with a ring at the front circled her sleek throat.

The rest of her costume varied; today, it was artfully-ripped black jeans that fit over her broad hips and trim legs like another layer of skin, and an amethyst-purple t-shirt stretched tight over her ample breasts with the sleeves ripped off and the bottom cropped to show the hint of softness to her belly. A heavily-laden brown leather utility belt had been buckled loosely around her hips, and her black ankle-height boots looked practical and sturdy.

“I can see you,” she sang out, in a pleasant clear soprano voice. “Illusion doesn’t fool infrared, sweetie. You know that.”

“Put it down, Eureka,” Phantasm said coldly. He released the invisibility illusion, since it was of no use at the moment. “Pick on something your own size. Not a helpless... what is that, a kitten?”

“What, this?” She looked down at the furry thing, then shrugged and grinned at him with lips coloured a shimmery metallic purple that matched her t-shirt. “Come and get it.”

Warily, Phantasm stepped towards her. It couldn’t be that simple. Where was the trap?

“Your choice, sweetie,” Eureka said. “Either walk over here and get it, or take your chances on what I plan to do with it. Cute little thing. I’d probably be sad for at least five minutes, using it as a test subject.”

He was just going to have to trust to his reflexes and stay alert. He strode across the roof hastily. He was grateful that Eureka wasn’t into lethal force, since of all the villains he found himself up against, those goggles made her the one he lost to more often than he won. It was good strategy on her part, though, executing her thefts and raids and other shenanigans on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights, which were Phantasm’s scheduled nights to patrol this part of the city.

When he was no more than six feet away, Eureka laughed and tossed the furry thing in his direction.

Phantasm scrambled to catch it, with sudden visions of an injured kitten that would haunt his dreams. Braced for flailing claws, he found his hands closing unexpectedly on faux fur and foam stuffing. A plush toy?

A plush toy that looked indistinct, as though he were seeing it through fog.

Or a cloud of gas... that had a sweet scent...

He couldn’t tell which way was down, and he realized suddenly that his legs had failed him, that must be why he’d fallen onto a rough surface still warm from the sun. His field of vision had heavy dark borders that were growing with every one of the heartbeats that thundered in his ears, narrowing the world to a shrinking window of light.

“Take a nap, sweetie,” Eureka said. “I’m not going to kill you in your sleep or anything. But we need to take a little trip.”

That was probably bad, but Eureka had never done anything to him that did real damage, not even on the many times she’d had him at her mercy with no backup coming. That made the final slide into unconsciousness much less frightening.