The Long Game

Longella raised her eyebrows and nodded at him. "Dang, you a superhero too? Saving damsels in distress all around the city?"

He laughed and ran his hand through his hair, forgetting how dirty it was. "No, god no, I just uh, I thought I could help, that's all."

She smiled back at him. "Well, regardless, that's very noble of you. But, it wouldn't happen to be this phone, would it?" She lifted her hand from her hip to show that she held an older smartphone with a dark grey case around the edges.

"Hey, yeah, that's it! She said it has a case like that!" he exclaimed. "Where did you find it?"

She tossed her head to the side, gesturing back around the corner she had emerged from. "Actually I just stopped some guy back down the block from doing the same thing to another lady. Saw him trying to pull some other woman into an alley. After I tossed him in the dumpster, I found this on the ground. Lady said it wasn't hers, so I figured I'd take it down to the station for lost and found. But hey, how about this serendipity!" She beamed at him, and her smile lit him up from the inside out.

"Hah, seriously," he said. "Well, that's great, we can give it back to her right now. She's just over there," he said, turning around and gesturing toward the other end of the alley, but he didn't see her anywhere.

"Hmm, down there?" she asked peering the same direction. "Hold on."

Without a word, she shot the arm holding the phone out down the alley way, followed by her neck, both her hand and head stretching down the corridor at an equal pace. Zain watched in awe as her body elongated across the entire length, before curving around a corner. A few seconds later, they suddenly shot back down towards him, reeling in at an incredible speed, before settling back into her body without so much as a staggered step backwards.

"Yep, she was just hiding around the corner," she said casually, shaking her arm out as if it was sore. "Gave her the phone, told her the cops are on the way to grab the guy. Congrats dude, you just helped a superhero solve a crime!"

He chuckled, shaking his head. "I-I mean, not really, you did everything!"

She shook her head right back. "Nope, you pointed out the citizen in trouble and helped them get back their stolen stuff. You'd be surprised at how much hero work is just that." Her arm elongated towards him, before tapping one shoulder, then the other. "I hereby dub you an honorary superhero for the night!"

He laughed, nodding. "Listen, I'll take it. It's an honor, thank you Longella."

"Oh call me L, we're friends now." she said with a wink, before bringing her hand to her chin, studying him with a look on her face that he couldn't quite decipher. "Hmmm. What's your name?" she inquired.

"It's uh, Zain." he replied quickly.

"Well, "Uh Zain", what're you up to now?" she asked.

"Well, I," he stammered, slightly taken aback by the question. "I didn't actually have any plans, I was just headed home from work."

"Hmmm." she repeated. "Right. Well, since you're an honorary superhero for the night," she asked, her eyes darting somewhat exaggeratedly. "Wanna see something cool?"

"Uh, I mean, yeah!" he replied eagerly, straightening up and brushing his dirty hands off on his pants. "What is it?"

"Well", she said, gesturing up towards the top of the building. "Head up there and you'll see. There's an elevator on the first floor, you don't need a key to get in and use it. Door to the roof is right next to the fourth floor elevator. I'll meet you there."

"Uh, okay," he said, starting to walk back through the alley towards what he knew to be the front entrance of the building, before turning back. "Wait, aren't you coming?"

"Oh, I'll meet you there," she said with a wave of her hand, before extending it straight above her into the sky, his eyes following the snaking limb. "Not smart for two heroes to use the same transportation, yknow, safety and all. Plus," she said with another wink, "I don't need an elevator."

Her body suddenly lifted off the ground as she retracted her long arm, which gripped the ledge atop the building above. "See you in a second!" she called back down to him as she disappeared into the air and over the top of the roof.

"Holy shit..." Zain whispered gleefully as he watched her vanish above, before turning back down the alleyway. "Holy SHIT!"

Grace watched from above with a smile as he jaunted down the passageway, before disappearing around the corner. Turning back to the roof, she jogged over to her backpack, tossing it behind an air vent and out of sight, before running to check that everything else she had set up earlier in the day remained in place. She pulled her phone out of the zippered wrist pocket she had slipped it into earlier, removing the grey case and tossing it too out of eyeshot. Opening the phone and flipping the camera open, she examined herself in the front facing view, panning over her body once more. Don't get greedy with the goods now, she thought, resisting the urge to embiggen her assets anymore than she already did, he already took the bait. Satisfied, she clicked her phone closed, slipped it back into the pocket, and plopped down in one of the prepared seats just as she heard footsteps on the staircase behind her.

Zain burst out onto the roof deck, trying to mask how out of breath he was and looking around the roof for the superheroine. He spotted her, sitting in one of two chairs. She was facing away from him, but towards the edge of the roof, beyond which he saw the best view of the city he'd ever seen from his neighborhood. The skyline stretched out before them magnificently. Skyscraper lights twinkled in the dusk, windows reflecting the golden horizon behind them, stars just beginning to shine through the evening sky overhead.

"Wow!" he whispered, slowly walking over towards where Longella sat. She turned to look at him.

"Hm?" she asked casually, before following his eyeline back to the city. "Oh, yeah! Pretty tight view, am I right? This neighborhood is full of them, but you're just not allowed to go on most roofs around here, so nobody knows it."

"I had no idea, honestly!" he said, arriving beside the vacant chair and looking back down at her. "Do you come up here a lot?"

"Yeah, actually, this is my spot of choice when I'm patrolling this neighborhood." she lied through her teeth at him. Truth be told, she'd found this place the night before when she was scouting out rooftops near his apartment, looking for any half decent view that came with an unlocked front door and roof access. She did have to admit she'd lucked out with this one, it just may become her new spot in this neighborhood. The view really was magnificent.

"Wow," he replied, before gesturing to the chair. "May I?"

She smiled. "I'd be offended if you didn't."

Before he could move, she raised her arm out to her side, stretching it over to a red cooler that rested against the ledge nearby. Popping it open, she stuck her hand into the icy water inside. "Want a drink?" she asked.

"Well yeah, sure!" he said, and she nodded, pulling her hand back with two ice cold seltzers. She handed him one on a slightly extended arm, and they both cracked them open. "Thanks," he said before he sat graciously in the open lawn chair, glancing at her uncomfortably, trying to figure out what to say next. She let him squirm a little bit, she enjoyed the nerves that she could feel coming off of him in her presence. She was about to speak up when he cut her off.

"So, why two chairs?" he asked. "You aren't patrolling alone?"

"Oh, erm, no," she asked, slightly surprised by the question and not exactly having a good response that wasn't 'I brought them both up here for the express purpose of tricking you to sit in them with me'.

"I uh, sometimes I go out on patrol with other heroes." she fibbed again. "We'll, y'know, tag team some crimes, but mostly it's just for company while we wait for something to happen."

Dang, I actually wouldn't hate that, she thought to herself, wishing her improvisation was a real thing that existed in the hero world.

"Oh man, really?" he asked. "Like who?"

"Like..." she floundered, hiding her complete lack of an answer as she searched her mind for the name of a hero she'd actually met. "Well, Rocky Rogue and I were up here the other week."

"Oh I know her! Is she pretty cool?" he asked.

"Yknow, she's actually kind of a bitch?" she said before she could stop herself, her eyes bugging out as she quickly covered her mouth. "Oh my god, I can't believe I just said that." That part was actually true. She had met Rocky Rogue in her early days of hero-ing, when she was just starting out. Rocky was a much more established super, and when Grace asked for some advice on how to make a name for herself in the hero world, she mostly just told her that her suit looked corny and her name needed some work.

"I mean," she continued, shaking her head in disbelief, "I really shouldn't have said that. It's sort of an unspoken rule about heroes. You're not supposed to break each other down like that. But it's all a PR game, in the end. Some people are more genuine about being a good person than others." She looked at him with a grimace. "Sorry, I really don't know why I'm telling you all this, hero work is actually really boring and cliquey once you get past the whole superpowers thing."

He shrugged. "Hey, I think it's cool. Sounds like any other job, honestly, except that you can, you know, do some really cool stuff." He took another sip of his drink and spoke again. "How did you get your powers anyway? Can I ask?"

She opened her mouth to speak, but shut it again promptly. She didn't expect him to be taking such an interest in having an actual conversation, she really thought she could wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am this dude into bed without too much small talk. Still, she didn't exactly mind. Without many (any) hero friends, it was hard to find somebody she could talk to about this sort of thing.

"Well... I'm not really supposed to say, you know?" she said, holding her hands out to her sides. "You start telling people how you got your powers, and then all of a sudden you've got kids jumping into toxic waste or letting big irradiated animals bite 'em. Adults start doing it too. More often than not that sort of stuff just, like, kills you." She sat back in her chair and sighed. "But I mean, I can tell you, it's not like it's an easy thing to repeat."

She went into her origin story, as it were. How she was working in a chem lab for her doctorate degree, mixing unstable chemicals that she'd synthesized herself in hopes of creating a new medical-grade polymer that could be used as a human tissue replacement for severe burn victims. Some static electricity had built up, and when she carelessly got her bare hand too close to the beaker, it shocked the liquid and erupted, bursting outwards and covering her in the volatile chemicals.

"Basically I woke up in the hospital covered in bandages, thinking my life was over. But when they took the bandages off, my skin was completely fine, not a scratch or burn on me. After a few days of observation and stuff, they let me go, nobody knew how I'd survived but there was no reason to keep me there. The next couple days, I started noticing... yknow." She held out one finger from her right hand, and pulled it with the left, extending it nearly a foot longer than it should be, before letting it go, watching it retract almost immediately back into normal shape.

"Wow..." he said, watching her finger intently. "That must have been really scary."

"What, the explosion? Yeah, I thought I didn't have skin anymore, man."

"No, well I mean yes, that too," he replied, "but I mean when your powers started to show. That must have freaked you the hell out, right?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Well, yeah, actually. It was horrifying. Yknow?" She had never talked about any of this with anybody before, this was the first time she'd told her story about this to anybody, and she certainly wasn't expecting any sort of empathy on that level.

"Like, when I first started to stretch, I tried ignoring it, I thought I was hallucinating and all, since I felt horrible in every other way basically. I was nauseous all the time, couldn't sleep because I was shaking, hot and cold at the same time. One night I was literally crawling on my hands and knees to the bathroom, just desperately nauseous. I fell forward, and my arm reached out to catch something and grabbed the sink seven feet away." She shook her head and looked him in the eyes. "Most people just think like 'Oh wow, superpowers, that must be so cool!', but it took me a really long time to get there, you know? I didn't ask for powers, I didn't want them. When my body started to change, it was terrifying and unnatural. Even when I knew I could do it, I stopped myself. I didn't want to accept it."

He nodded. "I'm really sorry you went through that. But at least you seem to have come out of it at the other end, no? I mean you wouldn't do this job if you didn't really want to use your powers."

She smiled. "I mean, yeah, I absolutely love it now. It was a long process, though, took me at least a month and a half to really be comfortable with it. Started with me begrudgingly using it to, like, get stuff off the top shelf. Then I was using it to grab the remote when I felt too lazy to stand up and walk over to it, grab my phone from the other room, that kind of thing. I sort of got myself used to it gradually like that, and then one day, I saw somebody getting mugged." She took another sip. "I didn't even think about it, I sort of just, I dunno, snapped. Punched the mugger's lights out from thirty feet away. I didn't even know I could stretch that far yet."

She stared over the edge of the building at the skyline under the now dark sky, shaking her head as if she still couldn't believe she'd done that. "I ran away before the person could thank me or see who I was. But that feeling was just... intoxicating. Using something only I could do to help somebody who needed it. I knew I had to do this then."

"Dang, yeah," he said, shaking his nearly empty can. "I'm really glad you came out of it like that. The whole city is, really."

She grinned and lightly punched his arm. "Thanks, Zain." She gestured down at his drink. "Want another?"

He looked down at his can and laughed. "Hah, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to drink so fast. Guess I'm a little nervous, I've never hung out with a superhero before."

She laughed, stretching her arm back out over to the cooler. "No worries at all, I'm just a gal in spandex, I promise." She pulled another drink out and stretched her arm back, handing it to him. "Cheers", she said, as he opened the can, and they knocked both drinks together, before taking a pull.

"So tell me about yourself," she asked, wiping her lips.

"You sure?" he laughed. "It's nothing like that, I promise. I'm pretty boring."

She rolled her eyes. "Uh huh. So am I, in every single way that's not related to my superpowers. Come on. Dish."

He went into his own origin story, which was far less superhuman, but wasn't without its own set of hard fought obstacles. He had moved to the country with his family when he was a baby, leaving Sri Lanka and settling on the coast. He grew up poor, studied hard, got a good degree from a great college, and landed a job in the city a few years ago. He pointed out his office to her, described his job ("I'm basically a spreadsheet jockey", he said with a laugh as she opened a second drink of her own), and they began chatting about the city itself. Where they'd lived, what their favorite bars and restaurants were, and what they hated the most about the places they didn't like going.

"I mean it's ridiculous!" he said, draining his third drink. "You wait forty five minutes in a line with some of the biggest assholes this city has to offer, and then when you get in, it's too full to move, the drinks taste like shit and cost $15 each, and the music literally never changes."

She nodded as she took a big pull from her own third can. "God, I totally agree. I don't go out much anymore since I started doing this, but I hate those clubs, always did." She stifled a small burp, a mix of nerves and desire beginning to manifest in her arms as tingles. She looked him up and down as he glanced down at his drink. God he was so handsome. The casual conversation had taken her aback, but somehow his genuine interest in her as a person first, superhero second, had kicked her libido right back into gear. She stared hungrily at his clearly defined arms beneath his jacket, thinking about how easily he'd likely be able to stretch her out. The drinks had softened her almost non-existent inhibitions even further, as well as her body's rigidity. She could feel herself molding to the lawn chair back, her back curving and resting languidly in the depressed fabric. She felt as loose as she'd ever been.

"Okay," he said, placing his empty can on the ground. "If you could go to one bar in the city tonight, where would you go?"

"Oh, that's so easy." she said, composing herself as much as she could, but her voice remained a little husky and low. "Little's Bar on Davis. I used to go all the time. It's right down the street," she said, pointing a block over, extending her arm unintentionally, before reeling it in quickly, giggling at her carelessness.

"Well let's go!" he said. "Come on, I'll buy you a drink."

She scoffed. "Come on dude, like this? I wouldn't make it ten feet in the door in that place" she said, gesturing at her outfit. "Nah, I don't have a change of clothes."

"Ah, right." he said, settling back down into his seat. "Bummer."

"Yeah... hey..." she said, her voice trailing off, before turning and placing a hand on his leg.

Zain nearly jumped at the sudden warm touch, and turned to see he was suddenly face to face with the woman aside him, her neck extending and placing her nose within three inches of his own. She glanced up and down, admiring his face, her eyes flitting over him as if unsure where to look, before settling on his own eyes, her hungry stare piercing through his skull as she spoke again.

"Do you have any drinks at your place?"

The door slammed open, and Zain's legs stumbled through the entrance to his apartment. He staggered, using his one un-pinned arm to steady himself against the doorframe, his wall, the bookshelf nearby. He grasped anything he could reach without using his eyes, largely obscured by the face of the superhero he'd just met, and who, to his delightful surprise, was passionately frenching him. Her arms wrapped around his body twice over, sticking his left arm to his side, as her hips sat just beneath his belt buckle, her legs also snaking down his own, her own feet planted atop his for support. He kissed back desperately, unsure how the hell this was happening, but not one to look a gift hero in the mouth. Her unevenly distributed weight made walking tricky, but no more difficult than the already exceptionally firm bulge in the front of his jeans made it. He staggered into the center of the room and pulled away from the kiss for a breath.

"Holy shit..." he muttered, staring at the hazy eyed heroine that constricted him so tightly. "I did not see my day going like this." She giggled, before kissing his neck, her own beginning to elongate and wrap around his back, her lips and tongue coating him in a circle. His eyes fluttered, he could already tell how soft her lips were, the way they pulled and stuck to him, her tongue leaving his skin warm and wet in its wake.

"D-do you want the tour, or..." he began, turning to look around his minimally decorated mid-century modern themed apartment, trying to remember the last time it was deep cleaned. She suddenly released her mouth from his neck and retracted her head directly back in front of his own.