In One Spirit Meet and Mingle

Penny snorted and waved her hand dismissively again. "Nahhhhhhh, duuuuuuuude! Valentines Day!"

"Don't you mean Cuck Day?" Felix asked.

"God, do you keep up with any comics?" Penny asked. "Archive brought Cupid back from extradimensional exile last year. With Cupid back in charge of the holiday rather than Zeus, it's an actual holiday now. Like I mean, don't get me wrong. I miss having the chance to bang the boyfriends of the bitchy girls at school without them being able to get mad at me. But I'm way more excited for the idea of an actual Valentines Day." She cooed.

"What do we even do on Valentines Day?" Felix asked, scratching his jaw. "It's been Cuck Day since 1219 AD. It's literally been eight hundred years since Valentines Day was Valentines Day. We don't have any surviving traditions or...anything."

Penny frowned, thinking.

"We fuck a lot, I guess?" she suggested.

"I think that the school might go for something more PG," Felix said.

"Pfff!" Penny blew him a rasberry. "I bet you ten bucks it'll be fucking."

***

"Fuck!" Penny swore, glaring up at the huge pink heart hung over Century City High's front door. Emblazoned on the heart was a logo: Happy Valentines Day! Give your best friend your best hug!

Felix slapped her on the back. "Sorry, Penny."

"I'll get you for this, Felix!" She shook her fist after him as he walked to his first class of the day. Sitting there, Felix tried to pay attention to his teacher. He really did. But for the first time in Felix's academic career, he wasn't the first person to raise his hand and ask questions. Instead, his head was running around and around and around, thinking about his abilities. His powers. He slowly became aware of what molecular structures existed in the desk he was sitting on -- he was able to name the parts of the wood, down to each individual element. He walked to his next class in a daze.

Barely aware that girls were whispering to one anther as they eyed him.

Felix nearly walked through Tracy Delaney between his history and thamaturgy class -- she actually had to put her palms on his chest to slow him down. Felix blinked, shaking his head. "Zuhwha?" he asked.

"I said," Tracy said, blushing as she did so. "D-Did you, uh...here." She shoved a pink slip of paper into his face. Felix blinked, glanced at it, then tucked it into his pocket. It was something about a big party or something being thrown by Tracy's sister, Megan. He didn't exactly have time for that. He was still thinking of possibilities.

And costumes.

And names.

***

Susan Fong's day was not spent in a fog. She, unlike her son, had a lot of experience when it came to handling having superpowers and a day job. She filed her paperwork, called her clients, bugged the judge to see the Hernandez case, and even managed to work in a few quick texts to Project Aegis to inform them about what Junk Yard Dog and Mask Master were up to. She got back a slightly worrying text.

Archive, Ozzy and other heavy hitters still busy in India. Can you handle CC by yourself? - J

Susan tapped her chin as she looked at the text. She was, in the scale of Project Aegis -- the global, UN backed superhuman organization -- a 'Planetary' level hero. She wasn't quite on par with someone like Connie Cosmic, who was a 'Cosmic' hero. Heck, Connie was how they had coined that term in the first place.

She texted back: I can handle the city. Also, found a new hero. No secret ID or costume yet, but I'll show him the ropes.

Good, Director Janus sent back.

The door to Susan's office opened and she casually tapped off her phone's screen. Looking up, she saw that it was Yelasta, the only martian who was working in the legal department. Her green skin was flushed, and her antennas were glowing with low level stress. "Miss Fong, uh, the police department is playing hardball with File 44B? They say that it's still classified in case a scryer is trying to peek at it."

"Tell them that we have a wizard on our staff and we can handle it. No, wait, I'll call them," Susan said, sighing.

Another boring, mundane day. But as she did her work, her mind did drift backwards to the cutie she had met yesterday. Being in her Lady Justice outfit did always make her feel younger and sexier than in a work blouse and glasses -- and seeing a cute boy just...mmm. She bit her lip, then reminded herself that she was going to be his teacher. She wasn't there to seduce him.

But she could enjoy watching him in whatever costume he showed up in.

Please, she thought. Please go for skintight.

Finally, her day job ended. Susan headed out of the offices, waving to her coworkers, stopping only to examine with some bemusement the large pile of Valentines day cards that had been collected on Yelasta's desk. Susan felt a faint pang in her gut at the sight. It had been a long time since anyone had shown any interest in her romantically...out of her costume, at least. She had at least two supervillains who really wanted a piece of her ass as Lady Justice. But that wasn't the same as being courted in the regular fashion. Yelasta, who was trying to do paperwork around the notes, looked up at her and smiled bemusedly.

"Still not really used to this," she said, her voice soft.

"You didn't get this much attention when Valentines day was Cuck day?" Susan asked, smiling slightly. "Uh, don't actually answer that, it...might count as sexual harassment with the new HR rules."

Yelasta smiled slightly, her antennas sparking. "Okay. I won't." She winked at Susan, who laughed and turned to go. Once she was on the streets, she walked along casually until she came to a changing booth. Red in color and roughly phone-booth in shape, changing booths had been built in every city by Project Aegis over the past few years, to replace phone booths now that cellphones existed. Heroes still needed a place to change in a hurry sometimes, after all. But unlike the old phone booths, changing booths were designed properly.

For one thing, they were big enough to move in without banging your elbows -- Susan felt a twinge at the memory. For another thing, the Project had added tiny psi-dampeners that prevented anyone from recognizing anyone who got into the booth. So she didn't need to disguise herself before stepping in, or even try that hard to be stealthy. Instead, Susan just walked past the booth, stopped, then stepped sideways into it, unnoticed by every other pedestrian walking home.

Once inside, Susan stripped.

Most supers never talked about this moment, save for a few veiled references in interviews and fluff pieces in Cosmo. And even then, it was always a joke. A silly little 'oh, well, you know how it is' kind of thing. Most supers tried to pretend that it didn't exist, even while talking shop with eachother. But there was an advantage to surviving through the brash and hopeful 70s, the shocking gut punch of the 1980s, the grim and gritty 90s, and the slow return to civilization that dominated the early 'oughts. After all those years, after all those friends lost, Susan -- Lady Justice -- no longer had the stomach to be embarrassed about simple facts.

Getting into your costume was always an intensely erotic experience. The very first time Susan had donned her Lady Justice digs back in 1972, she had been soaked. A kid, forty years and two costume redesigns hadn't changed that. She always started with the mask. Wrapping it around her face, feeling it mold to her eyes, knowing that she wasn't Susan Fong anymore, sent a shiver down her spine and made her nipples perk and harden. A strange feeling of utter liberation filled her and she reveled in it, stretching her arms behind her back, looking at herself in the changing booth mirror.

She looked damn good for a woman pushing sixty. Part of that was the anagathic drugs. Part of it was working out. Party of it was being a fucking superhero. All of it combined to give her a body she could be proud of. And god, the fetish quality to wearing a blindfold as a mask...it reminded her of the many times she had been captured and chained up. She wondered if she had gotten into bondage because of getting tied up so often...she shook her head and chuckled. "At least I always get out," she murmured to herself. "Looking good every time."

Even if a small sliver of her soul did miss the popped collar and sequins and disco boots from her original costume. Speaking of boots. She pulled out the folded mesh of her costume, then bent forward. She felt her spine pop slightly and saw the sway of her breasts as she slipped her toes into the skintight silver mesh that was her primary costume. It slithered along her body, clinging to her every curve as she tugged and tugged and tugged to get it to encompass her. It felt almost like being swallowed up, and the tautness of it, the slick feel of it...nnh...she had to bite her lip to keep from moaning loudly enough that people outside of the booth might hear her.

Finally, she got the stretchy fabric to her arms. Now she had to wriggle to get her arms into the arm holes -- and for just a moment, she felt the thrill of being restrained by her own costume. It came in the tiny moment between getting her arms in the holes and actually forcing her fingers through the glove-parts, where she couldn't quite move her upper torso properly. She closed her eyes, feeling her nipples ache and her sex grow moister and moister...and then she got her fingers into the gloves. She wriggled them, and then pulled the red pill from her civilian clothes.

Super-tech had compressed her cape to this pill. It was keyed to her saliva, and Lady Justice -- she was fully in super mode now -- had to use every bit of her willpower to keep from mewling with erotic pleasure as she licked the pill. Slowly. Sensually. The cape started to unfold, expanding outwards and with a single crack of her wrist, she was able to unfold it, then drape it around her shoulders.

Lady Justice caressed her chest as she looked at herself in the mirror. She swore her costume took ten, twenty years off her, every time she put it on.

"Lets go meet the cutie," she murmured. Then, quietly, she prayed to every god that might be listening: "Please don't pick a dumbfuck name. Please. I couldn't bear to flirt with another BludGunn."

Getting to the Palladium building, since she didn't need to go top speed, was as easy as using the gentle press of gravity. All Lady Justice needed to do was to take the gravitational force that was pressing her against the ground, then shift it around so that it was carrying her up and through the air. It did mean her top speed was never higher than the speed she could fall at. But since falling was still pretty fast, she got to the Palladium building well before her new hero to tutor. The building itself was set near downtown, with a view on Century City's biggest tourist attraction: The rift.

The rift had been torn open in, eh, the mid 1990s by some kind of science disaster, she wasn't sure what. She hadn't been active in Century City at the time, but she knew that the local heroes had done dick all to actually close the thing. The 90s hadn't exactly been a great time for heroism, since most of their powers had been 'having a gun.' So, the rift had been left to shimmer and crackle and occasionally throw out dinosaurs or aliens or displaced demigods. But with the return of some measure of civilization to the planet after the 90s, the Project and various governments -- including the Deinhardt administration -- had started to study the rift. Rift technology was now what made Century City such a boom town: Siphoning power, new kinds of matter made possible by rift manipulation, and technologies inspired by the way that the rift interacted with the real world...all of it made a lot of people a lot of money.

In fact...

She frowned and pulled out her com. Sending a quick text to Iridium got her the info she needed in a quick data dump: Tynex Polychem definitely used rift tech on their chemicals, but it was all proprietary, meaning she couldn't get access to it legally.

"Hurm..." she murmured, her thoughts batting that factoid around as wind caught and tugged at her cape, setting it snapping dramatically behind her.

"So, just saying...I didn't expect to get a Valentines day card, butt..." a playful voice said behind her. Lady Justice turned, grinning. Then her grin froze, because...holy fuck. The new hero she had met earlier had taken her words to heart. He had gotten a costume and what a fucking costume. He had gone for striking and simple -- none of those overdramatic shoulder pads or ornate helmets or anything. His lean, muscular body was clad in a form fitting blue and gold outfit, with a pair of crossing lines across his torso, forming a V shape that went down to his hips. There, he had a sleek golden belt, then blue leggings. He had foregone a cape, and his mask was a simple domino style mask, making it clear that he was at least partially Asian.

Lady Justice, when in her civilian attitude, got a lot of quizzical looks for her name. Since, well. She wasn't exactly what someone thought of when one heard the name 'Susan Fong.' Not many girls named Fong were redheaded Caucasians, after all. But it had been the 70s, and Susan hadn't been quite ready to forego taking her husband's name, even if half her college roomies were horrified at her bowing to the patriarchy. Now that James was gone, his name and her son were basically all she had left of him.

Maybe it was thinking of James that made an excited shiver of lust crawl along her spine. She sternly told herself to chain up her 'yellow fever' and focus on the fact this kid was new. And a kid. But. Fuck. Her eyes darted down and she saw the faint bulge between his legs and immediately wanted to...

"But?" she forced herself to say.

He grinned at her. "Well, you know how they put hearts on those things." He flicked his eyes down.

Lady Justice's cheeks heated. She smirked at him. "So, you're a total ass man? Please don't tell me that's your name."

He chuckled. "A bit undignified, don't you think? And, while yes, I do happen to have a taste for delectable derrieres..." he put his fingers on his chest, splaying them out, his voice becoming faux posh. "That doesn't mean I am completely unswayed by the rest of a woman."

"So, you like my tits too?" Lady Justice asked, her voice dry.

"No, I was thinking personality and sense of humor, really," he said, so earnestly that it startled a snort out of her.

"So, Mr. Flirt," she said. "Ass Man."

"Butt Burglar," he said.

"Rump Ravager," she shot back. "What's your real superhero name?"

He held himself up right, then bowed. "Lady Justice, I present to you...Polymath!" He grinned. "Super-genius intellect, mastery over polymers."

"Hmm..." Lady Justice rubbed her chin. "Polymath. I kinda like it." She grinned. "But just polymers? Like Kevlar and stuff?"

"Not quite," Poly said, cheerfully. He flicked out a finger and Lady Justice felt a very thin loop wrap around her waist. He tugged slightly and she skidded forward on the roof, spinning around and falling into his arms. He grinned down at her. "I can polymerize any molecular structure I can see. I just polymerized the oxygen molecules around your waist to do that. The more durable the material I'm polymerizing, the longer it lasts." He twirled her around, letting her step away and bowed, like this was a ball room dance.

Holy shit, Lady Justice thought. Cocky little bastard, isn't he?

"How long can you make a polymer chain?" she asked.

Polymath rubbed the back of his neck. His grin was sheepish. "I, uh...I don't know."

"And did you make your costume with that power?" she asked.

He nodded. "To keep it from dissolving, I'm basically rejuicing it every few seconds. I took a bit to make sure it wasn't too hard." He nodded. "Pretty cool, huh?" He paused. "God, what kind of dumb nerd says getting superpowers is cool." He shook his head. "Shouldn't I be more...in awe? Or at least humbled by the immense responsibility?"

Lady Justice laughed, quietly. His earnestness was cute. "Kid, do you know what I first said when I got my power?"

"Well, uh..." He rubbed the back of his neck, thinking. "Groovy?"

Lady Justice leaned forward. Her face was totally serious. She whispered. "No." Her eyes didn't leave his. "It was fucking groovy."

Poly grinned back.

"Now!" Lady Justice drew back. "Lets see how you do traversal."

"Huh?" Poly walked after her as she backed towards the edge of the building. Lady Justice's grin was wide and she spread her arms, then fell backwards -- then, with a twist of kinetic energy, she flew upwards, hovering in the air by carefully balancing gravitational forces. It was trickier than it looked -- the tightness in her belly from keeping herself hovering rather than flying one way or the other was half of the reason she had such a killer six pack at her age. She spread her arms wide, then called down to the newbie.

"How you move, kid!" she said. "A hero's not a hero if he can't get where he needs to go. Show me what you got!"

She flew back and away, going her top speed.

She wanted to see what this Polymath could do.

***

The past few minutes for Felix had been a string of: holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck interspersed with what the fuck are you doing!?

Getting into his costume after he had slipped out of school had been a bit like doing a drug. Not that Felix had ever done drugs. He had no real comparison. But it felt like what a drug should have felt like, the feeling of the rubber and nylon drawing themselves around his body, molding to him. His cock had gotten rock hard and an exhilarating rush of power had filled him. He wasn't just Felix Fong anymore. He was...he was Polymath. A superhero. Then he had needed to get to the Palladium Building, which had taken a jog, a ride on public transit, several extremely awkward moments as he made his way through the lines at the subway, an elevator ride, and then boom.

There had been Lady Justice's absurdly impossibly perfect ass and Felix had known that he was madly in love. He had been entranced, watching as she read something on her handheld communicator, marveling at the smooth curve of her back and the serious expression on her face. The fact she was a redhead was just...nnh...

Fuck.

Then that weird drug-haze cockiness that came from wearing a mask and a costume had started him saying everything he was thinking. He had been so fucking sure that Lady Justice would punt him off the skyscraper. Instead, she was...laughing. Grinning. Winking. Leaning in close. And now she was soaring away at nearly a hundred miles an hour. He wrung his hands, jogged to the edge of the building -- and suddenly remembered that he was a hundred stories straight up.

Vertigo slammed into his spine. Fear crawled into his belly. All those feelings of confidence and excitement were stripped away in a single instant. Felix stood there, gaping at the height, and knew that there was absolutely no way that he could possibly-

"Come on, Polymath!" Lady Justice called over her shoulder.

Felix, without a second thought, leaped off the building. Wind roared at him, blowing at the mask on his face, whipping his hair back. He spread his arms wide, catching the wind, and realized he had only a few moments before he face-planted into the ground and fucking died. Felix flung out one arm, polymerized the oxygen between himself and the window pane of the building across the road, then tugged. Hard. He swung left, arcing through the air, and realized he was about to slam into the far building nearly as fast as he'd slam into the ground. He lifted his feet, polymerizing the nylon he was wrapped in. he wound the polymer strands into a million tiny pads, then spread them outwards on impact. For a few seconds, his suit expanded across a huge swath of the window, spreading his impact outwards, slowing him down, then...