The Return of Cougaress Ep. 01

Author's Notes: As with a lot of first episodes/issues this one has to include the "origin story." So don't expect to see naughty bits right away. The story is not set in an existing superhero "universe" though some of the characters mentioned will be shout-outs to existing heroes.

Disclaimer: The following is a piece of fiction. Fiction (in case you don't know) means it's made up, not real, a bunch of lies. The characters in the story are all fictional too, meaning they don't exist. While non-existent, if they existed and had an age they would be over 18.

Furthermore, since the characters aren't real they can't possibly be harmed by the stuff they do or that happens to them in the story. This would not be true in reality, meaning you should not think you can do the same things safely, legally, or ethically in real life. Just because bullets bounce off Superman (he's fictional) that doesn't mean they're going to bounce off you, got it? If you believe that the things fictional characters do in a pornographic story are a valid guide to behavior in the real world, then you have much bigger psychological problems than a story could ever cause and you should stop reading this and seek medical help immediately.

EPISODE ONE: What's the Use of Being a Heroine if You Never Get to Have Fun?

Night. The city.

A shadow crouches on a high rooftop. The head atop the dark shape slowly turns, surveying the nocturnal cityscape.

The next instant the shadow uncoils, leaping the street far below to the taller building across the gap. Long claws catch a ledge and the body twists to cling like a fly to the vertical brick wall. The lithe form climbs fast and attains the roof. As it pads silently across the top of the building it's clear the figure is feminine. The silent observer gains a new vantage point before once more crouching to scan the gloom filling the avenues and alleys of her metropolis.

Despite her intent gaze as she watches the ill-lit streets for signs of crime, a nagging thought keeps coming back to this lonely, dark sentinel:

"Shit. Is this something new, or did I somehow completely forget the way my costume drags up into my crack whenever I leap?"

* * * * * *

Okay, so you're a girl in high school. (Note: This is a flashback. You are currently not by any means a girl in high school. In fact, you're so long out of that situation you have a hard time recalling why all the teenage nonsense you went through back then seemed so incredibly important at the time.)

Your life is extremely busy, taken up by chatting with boys, keeping your grades up so you can become a veterinarian, thinking about boys, worrying whether you really have time enough to balance your studies and your volunteer work and still be head cheerleader, speculating about certain boys, complaining that your parents seem prouder that your brother didn't fail English on his second try than your string of A's in math, talking to other girls about boys, doing things to help save the planet in a more or less abstract way, and boys. In fact, you're so extremely busy with all these vital activities that the very last thing you need in your life is to have a gang of totally lame but heavily-armed smash-and-grab thieves show up while you and your class are on a museum field trip.

So of course that's exactly what happens.

These guys have way more guns than they have organization. They can't be that smart, either, or they'd have realized trying to steal a traveling collection of gold and gem-encrusted artifacts ("Treasures of the Tsars") in broad daylight from a museum located smack dab in the middle of the city is basically a recipe for making absolutely certain someone notifies the cops. When the sirens start coming closer the criminal geniuses decide they need to take hostages.

Your class is in the Ancient Civilizations wing, where you're currently listening to the docent talk about Imperial Roman bathrooms (take notes, class, this may be on the quiz). Most of the other students start screaming and/or cowering when the robbers run in waving automatic weapons and shouting "Nobody move!" You on the other hand quickly assess the situation and decide the appropriate tactic is to go for help, so you step behind a pillar out of their line of sight and then dash for the nearest door, which happens to be marked "Area Closed for Renovations." Unfortunately as you slip through the exit that idiot Allyson sees you and yells, "Hey, where are you going?" This of course alerts the robbers.

The lights are turned off in the area you enter, it's pretty dark but not pitch black. It looks to be the Ancient Egypt room, but as it's currently under renovation there's plastic sheeting and temporary walls thrown up everywhere, making the place a maze. You start looking for a way out, but two of the gunmen bang open the door and start shouting for you to come out or else. You're not dumb enough to answer. You get low and continue to creep through the shadowy interior using display cases for cover, hoping to find a way out before they catch you.

Now, if the guys looking for you had any brains they'd either find a light switch or start searching the area quietly to get the drop on you. Instead one of them decides that the best way to deal with the situation is by unleashing an aimless burst from his cheap AR-15 knock-off that someone has modified to fire full auto. All the bullets are well over your head, but one happens to hit the display case you're hiding behind. The sign (it's on your side) reads "Ceremonial Urn (possibly small sarcophagus) shaped like a Cat. Likely made to honor the goddess Bast, 4th Dynasty, c. 2500 BC."

The random shot shatters both the case and the urn. Glass and ceramic shards plus a large pile of fine dust that must be what was inside the urn spill all over you. In fact there's so much dust that it not only coats every exposed inch of your skin, you also inhale it and begin sneezing.

Your first thought isn't that you've given yourself away. It's, "Ugh, I just probably inhaled mummy dust. Cat mummy dust!" What happens next however is very, very weird.

The first thing you notice is that it looks as if the lights in the room got switched on, except that you can tell they weren't, you're just seeing a great deal more clearly than before in the semi-darkness. You hear things you couldn't hear before too, like the ragged breathing of the two thugs, the way the trouser legs of one of them swishes against his socks as he walks toward you, and the faint buzz of a fly that's wandering around in another area of the closed exhibit. Even stranger, you can smell the two robbers. One of them ate something containing garlic last night, the other smells ... you don't know how you know, but he smells scared.

You're so absorbed by the odd heightening of your senses that you're not paying close attention to the approaching gunman until he almost reaches you. He must spot you because he inhales sharply and starts to bring up the gun. Not wanting to get shot, you automatically jump up to run ... and leap right over his head, a standing broad-jump that would certainly win you the gold if you'd been doing it in the Olympics.

The guy is shocked, but not so shocked he doesn't turn around and try to aim the gun at you. You swing wildly with one hand and easily bat the rifle out of his hands, because it's like you don't know your own strength anymore. Now you'reboth shocked.

He grabs at you and you dodge, but your attempt to evade his grasp sends you leaping into one of the temporary walls. You knock it down, instinctively roll back to your feet without even trying, then leap again as his partner fires a handgun at you. This leap takes you to one of the structural walls, but about ten feet off the ground. You cling there, which again startles you because how the fucking hell are you clinging to a smooth plaster wall?

Noticing that curved, three-inch long claws have emerged from under your fingernails and embedded themselves in the wall answers that question. Luckily you don't have to figure out how to retract them, that happens without conscious effort when the pistol-armed robber takes another potshot at you and you have to jump out of the way again. The first dude has recovered his weapon, so your next leap is right at him. You bowl him over, then when he tries to bring the rifle up you slap him in the face so hard that it knocks him out (along with knocking out some of his teeth as a side effect).

At this point you're less stunned by your new abilities than you are in awe of what you can do. You look up from where you crouch atop your fallen enemy, and now his partner doesn't just smell scared, helooks scared, too. He fires at you but you're already leaping aside. You bounce off a wall to redirect, then run straight at him so fast than you're in his face before he can pull the trigger again. He has some sort of unarmed training and when you grab at him he falls backward, using your own momentum to throw you over his head. Again you land on your feet without having to think about it, instantly spin and leap back at him.

He tries pistol-whipping your head with his gun and connects, but the blow doesn't even faze you. You grab his wrist before he can try aiming another shot at you and squeeze hard. You can both feel and hear the bones ("radius and ulna" pops into your head from your AP Biology class) crunch as they snap. He gasps and punches you right in the face with his other hand, which under other circumstances might be a reasonable approach but is a silly thing to try against someone who didn't flinch when he'd bashed her skull with a hunk of steel just a few seconds ago. Even so you snarl (and the sound you make really is a snarl, you realize, sounding a lot like a jaguar or something) and use the broken arm you're still holding to throw the guy to the side like he's a ragdoll. Which considering he probably weighs close to twice as much as you do seems unlikely, but there's no arguing now that you can do it because you just did.

He doesn't land well and lies there groaning in pain. You feel a little bad about it, and briefly hope you didn't fracture his spine.

All this has lasted less than two minutes from the sound of the first burst of automatic fire. The rest of the gang may not possess the sharpest intellects, but they know that multiple gunshots and loud thuds are not the sort of sounds usually made when two armed thugs are subduing a single unarmed schoolgirl. Either bravery or exceptional stupidity causes them all to burst through the door to aid their co-criminals. This is a good thing, because it means your classmates don't see any of the battle which follows. That would have ended any chance of you preserving a "secret identity" right off the bat. Furthermore since the bad guys are all clustered together at the start it gives you the chance to pile into them immediately, allowing you to put several more of them out of action right away.

On the other hand, despite having the advantage of surprise as well as far superior speed, strength, and senses, the fact that their reaction is to your assault is to start firing wildly means that you do get hit by several shots. (So do some of their compatriots, but hey, it's not your fault if they shoot each other.) This is how you discover that while you're definitely bullet-resistant (the pistol shots don't even break skin and feel like when Eddie Mumm used to throw sharpened pencils at you point-first back in grade school), you are not bullet-proof (you take a rifle-round in the thigh which only penetrates a little but feels like you were walloped with a bat and which makes jumping a lot harder. Later you find a huge purple bruise there, though in a day the bruise is gone and you can't tell that you were ever shot).

Incidently, getting shot with a high-velocity bullet still hurts like a bitch even if it's not that serious. Your new claws come out when it happens and you discover that you have no trouble at all shredding through a stab-resistant vest in a single swipe. You suspect that the guy who shot you with the rifle ended up with lots of permanent scarring, and serves him right!

About five minutes later you're surrounded by eleven unconscious or disabled criminals. You hurt (especially the aforementioned thigh), but you're not even breathing all that hard. When you hear the cops enter the building you decide you've had enough excitement for the day and make yourself scarce.

Later on you tell everyone that you snuck out of the building before the criminals ever saw you, and you haveno idea what could have happened after that.

* * * * * *

You never really consider becoming a super-villain. For one thing, it seems like something only a seriously maladjusted or not-quite-sane sort of person would do. Also, everything you'd heard about such villains said that the vast majority end up being sent to extremely high-security prisons or exiled to weird dimensions or facing other very unpleasant consequences. And even when they didn't, their plans invariably were thwarted and they never got what they wanted in the first place. What reasonable person would opt for a life full of that sort of frustration?

One the other hand youdo consider concealing your new powers and trying to forget the whole mess. It isn't as if the plans you'd made for your life included becoming a superhero, and while fighting for truth and justice is altruistic and noble and all that, you have a hard time seeing how you could make a decent living doing it.

(In point of fact you can't, at least not in the early years when you're getting started. You need to work as a barista for far too long until you finally can count on supporting yourself from a combination of rewards, bounties, donations, commercial product endorsements, and small stipends from various government agencies and large corporations. Sometimes accepting this sort of money makes you feel like you're selling out, but fuck that, you'renot going back to making lattes for self-centered hipsters.)

What decides things for you is that you can't get over the feeling that what happened to you wasn't just random chance or a ridiculous turn of events. You're sure you've been gifted with superhuman cat-like abilities for some greater purpose. Since you refuse to believe that purpose is the restoration of the worship of Bast the Egyptian Cat-Goddess in modern times (right there you have exactly the sort of thinking that leads to a person becoming a super-villain), you have to assume you're meant to use your new powers to help other people. Ergo, you need to become a superhero.

So you ditch cheerleading in favor of self-defense classes, because being inhumanly strong and fast and having really great reflexes doesn't automatically mean you know how to win fights against trained opponents. You also create your first costume out of odds and ends, which establishes your basic look from then on. (Once you earn some hero cred, Professor Stitch contacts you and offers to make you a better costume of advanced material that is far more resistant to rips and tears. It also fits you like a glove and exposes a fair amount of cleavage, which seems to be a common theme in all the uniforms Stitch creates for heroines. But there's no sense looking a gift horse in the mouth.) And of course you try to decide on an appropriate hero name for yourself.

People might think it strange, but this last item takes about the same time to accomplish as the first two. You don't want a generic name like, say, Mighty Woman, because you think it's silly if your name doesn't reflect something else specific to you like your powers or origin. All superheroines are Mighty Women by default, right? So no names with stuff like Power or Super or Wonder followed by a feminine qualifier.

This means you want something feline-related, but the most obvious one is already taken. (And it's very unfair, not only does she switch between hero and villain, she doesn't really have cat powers at all!) You're also not about to use a name including "Girl" which is way too dismissive and belittling. You think about using a name with "Lady" in it, but "Cat-Lady" makes you sound like a spinster with a house full of pet Siamese. Further speculation along those lines ("Lady Cat," "Lion Lady") brings you to the conclusion that all such "lady" names sound either pretentious, precious, or both.

"Lioness" isn't bad, but there's an existing African hero who calls himself "Black Lion" and you don't want to confuse people into thinking you're together. (Not that you would mind "getting together" with him, he's easy on the eyes, but that's another story.) "Tigress" on the other hand sounds sort of risqué, or at least it did way back when you were young as a kind of low-grade reference to a woman on the prowl, and by that they didn't mean like a hero looking for crime. Not at all what you wanted people to think when they hear your name. So after dwelling on it for a long time you settle on "Cougaress," which when you choose it seems just right.

(Many years later, when it's far too late too late to change it, you'll regret the choice. But in your salad days "cougar" as slang for a sexually aggressive mature woman with a predilection for younger men was restricted to western Canada, and even if you'd ever visited the place it seems unlikely you'd have heard the word in use. Now of coursethat meaning of "cougar" is all over the internet. Makes you wish you'd stuck with "Tigress," which hardly anyone even realizeshas a naughty sense anymore. But your powers don't include predicting what the future holds, so how could you have known?)

(On the other hand, Mentalman's powersdo include precognition, and thinking back you recall how he'd always sort of smirk when he used your hero name. The arrogant bastard could have at least dropped you a hint while it was still possible for you to change your cognomen!)

Once those things are in place you get out on the streets. "Cougaress" soon earns a reputation as a crimefighter. You're not one of the top-tier supers that get most of the press, but you're accepted as a solid, reliable, working-man sort of champion by both the public and your peers.

Years pass. A lot more of them than you prefer to mention, thank you very much.

* * * * * *

When you're first considering becoming a superhero one of the many things you aren't aware of is how it will restrict your dating pool. Experience and the advice of other heroes soon clues you in that having an open relationship with a "normal" is a bad idea. Even if they don't become envious of your superior abilities, they end up getting threatened or killed or held hostage by villains as a cheap shot at you. Having a secret relationship with some ordinary person sounds better on paper but eventually develops the same problems, because inevitably a villain or the media finds out at some point and you're back to the "we can use him against her" problem.

You have the option of having your "secret identity" (which of course is the person you would be if you weren't a masked vigilante, so really shouldn't the other identity be the secret one?) date a normal person, but this leads to a new set of problems. The obvious one is that you're going to be keeping an absolutely enormous secret from them, which is hardly the basis for a healthy relationship. Plus there's the difficulty of explaining away your repeated sudden absences, which will probably end up pissing them off so they break up with you, assuming they're not smart enough to put two and two together and figure out what's going on ("Sorry, but I'm going to have to break our date for tonight, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they just announced the mayor's been kidnaped").