4: Change of View

An Edison City Supervillain RomCom

Previously on And When Two Villains Woo, Candystriper has been teleported from her recovery in the hospital, destination unknown, while the Malevolent Med-Student has also been carried off from his own confinement in the Edison City penitentiary, kidnappers equally unknown! We’ll return to our story in just a moment, but first a word from our sponsor (i.e., me):

Candystriper hadn’t been teleported anywhere in she didn’t know how long, but this was different, she could tell from the start. It wasn’t the usual bamf-you’re there that capes like Audrey or Will the Teleporting Wonder did: this was an honest-to-goodness-bend-the-very-laws-of-physics-and-away teleportation, as in her atoms were flying off the Earth and into the stars with bothering about little annoyances like space and time sort of teleportation. It wasn’t a terribly pleasant experience, either: see how you feel when your very particles are pulled apart and then smashed back together like a precocious toddler playing with Legos and deciding to make a dinosaur instead of the sturdy building depicted on the box.

Needless to say, when she materialized on an unfamiliar sterile-white floor, the first thing Candystriper did was check to make sure she had all her parts. “Arms: check,” she began, “Legs: check-”

“You’re all there,” a voice interrupted her ad hoc inventory. “Well, physically anyway. I can’t speak to your mental abilities but the teleporter can’t provide what wasn’t there in the first place, you know.”

“Hey!” Candystriper said, and grabbed for her Death Kazoos, ready to blast the person who’d just insulted her into smithereens. To her surprise, she found only empty pockets. “What-”

“Yeah, we screened those out,” the voice said. “Basic teleporter security protocol.”

“Who-” she said, and was once again interrupted.

“Rosie Flurnazoid, I’m in charge of this ship and its crew, and I got you up here because I need to know something really important and I need to know now!”

She moved into Candystriper’s field of vision then, and it was at that moment that the henchwoman realized she had a few preconceptions about aliens she needed to rethink and fast. She’d assumed based on years of television sci-fi shows that if she ever met an alien, it would be more or less humanoid: maybe a weird kinda head, but still your basic two-legged two-armed symmetrical talking lifeform. Rosie Flurnazoid wasn’t that. What confronted Candystriper now, to her horror, was something not from humanity’s imagination but from its nightmares: a towering eight-foot squidlike creature with three bulging eyes and, as best as Candystriper could see, no mouth. Which meant, she realized, that Rosie’s voice was coming-

“Yes, I’m telepathic,” Rosie said with a mental sigh. “How do you think I know your language anyway? My thoughts are being run through a basic xenocon filter and at any rate I don’t feel like explaining the rest to you. Here’s what I want to know: what happened to Silky Marin?”

“Who?” Candystriper said.

“What do you mean, who?” Rosie retorted. “You should know. We caught the signals years ago. Many of them. In one of your major cities there was a man named Silky Marin who was bitten by a mysterious stranger and suddenly transformed into an immortal creature who needed to take the blood of others to survive, except that he became a hero and didn’t prey on innocent people, only small animals and other wildlife, and then he fell in love with an ordinary girl of your species, I forget her name, and the last signal we got they were all under attack by a clan of warrior mermaids and we never found out if they survived!”

“Oh, that,” Candystriper said, the reference to the warrior mermaids triggering an old memory. “That was a late-night TV thing that got canceled ages ago. I don’t even think they made the final…” her voice trailed off as a blotchy redness spread across Rosie Flornazoid’s face. Candystriper twitched nervously. “It might’ve been continued in a comic?” she offered. “Maybe?”

“You lie,” Rosie said, the squid being’s every tentacle shaking with anguish. “You lie! I spent over two thousand quirdlons and came across five whole quadrants just to be with him! You lie!” She lashed out at Candystriper, slamming her against the wall in frustrated rage. “Say he’s real! Say he’s real!”

“Grrk!” Candystriper said. Rosie Flornazoid wasn’t satisfied. Her tentacles closed tighter and the whole ship trembled with the force of her anger.

Of all the ways Candystriper, henchwoman to the Malevolent Med-Student, had thought she might die, she hadn’t imagined that killed off by a heartbroken alien over a misunderstanding about Earthling-vampire television programs would be anywhere near the range of possibilities.

---

Unaware that his loyal henchwoman was in dire peril, the Malevolent Med-Student was being hauled through the sky by a caped figure, and he was none too happy about it. “Excuse me!” he shouted. “Put me down this instant! Don’t you know who I am? I’m the Malevolent-”

“Yeah, I know,” the figure said, and dropped him.

The Malevolent Med-Student, like Candystriper before him, was terribly surprised. Thoughts raced through his brain in rapid succession as he plunged earthward.

“That’s surprisingly antiheroic for a cape unless of course he’s another supervillain, but I don’t recall another supervillain with flight powers in this area; is he new? Unless he’s a hero gone rogue, in which case I wonder if he’s the one that helped Candystriper escaped, in which case maybe HE has my thrudanium! Oh I’ll get him for this, you bet I will, but first I’ve got to address this falling problem, oh damn this prison uniform if only I had my emergency Pharma-Beam or even the thrudanium, now that would be useful, but of course I don’t have it thanks to whatever-his-name is and now I won’t even KNOW, well isn’t this just sickeningly ironic-”

Read the Next Episode.

---