Power Couple - A Black Cape Short Story (Patreon)

Summary:

Rebecca Johnson was caught up in a hero summoning five years ago and ripped away from her soul crushing job and reasonably OK marriage with no hope of ever going home. She has since finished all the quests and defeated the Demon King, despite not being a spunky teenaged boy, and has settled into a transient lifestyle where she at least doesn't have to worry about holding down a 9-to-5.

Or, at least, that is the case until she is suddenly returned to her original body, which has been in a coma ever since she had her fatal encounter with Truck-kun. She wakes up in the subterranean lair of a super villain, where she learns that her original world has lost it's collective mind and there are now professional Super Heroes roaming the skies above her hometown of Megalopolis. Not only that, but the villain who had been keeping her abandoned comatose body alive is none other than her very own husband, who has not only reinvented himself as the villainous 'Recycler', but also as the obsessive Wife Guy she never knew he had the capacity to become.

If you were ever wondering what would happen if Mr. Freeze's wife suddenly rose from the dead one day and decided to pick on Superman specifically, then read on. This story is for you.

The transition was abrupt, to say the least.

One minute, I was nursing a beer at the Pickled Paladin while waiting for the server to bring my lunch and the next I was laying on my back in some kind of metal contraption that looked how I would imagine the interior of an iron lung did.

There was a frosted window set into what I guessed was a kind of lid to the metal contraption I was inside of and the window was located right over my face, sort of like one of those antique peekaboo coffin-lids. Someone had written a message above the window in grease pen.

'Rebecca,

If you wake up and I'm not there, don't try to move right away. Hit the red button by your cheek and the servos will start to disconnect you from your support leads. The pod will open on its own once all the exit procedures are complete. Be careful when you first sit up.

I can't wait to see you again.

Love, J.'

I squinted at the message and rasped, "Jim, what the fuck did you do?"

Just to back it up for a second, five years ago I was an ordinary person who lived an ordinary life and who was married to an ordinary man.

Then I met Truck-kun.

That's not a euphemism, a truck actually hit me while I was getting ready to cross the street on my way back to my office building after my lunch break, which I'd taken at an overpriced salad pop-up located a block away from my building.

I remember it was hot, almost the height of summer, and there were insects droning even in the depths of the downtown business district of Megalopolis, the city where I lived and worked and where there were virtually no trees or plants for bugs to nest in. My linen pantsuit and silk camisole clung to my damp skin as I shielded my head and eyes from the sun and waited for the crosswalk to light up with the little green man icon that meant I had the right of way.

One did not jaywalk in Megalopolis unless you had a death wish and even then, you were still taking your chances with on-coming traffic.

I was partially blinded by the relentless afternoon sun, so I couldn't tell where the blaring horns were coming from in time. I lost the precious few seconds that I could have used to escape the runaway box truck trying to figure where the noise was coming from. Then a truck cut diagonally through the intersection, jumped a curb, and hit me, dead on.

The last thing I saw, before darkness took me, was the fucker's vanity plate which read: TRCK-KN

I woke up, which I had not been expecting to do, in an actual fantasy world. I was sprawled on the floor a room where I was surrounded by a bunch of old guys in long robes. They were looking at each other in obvious confusion. Whatever they'd been expecting to see there was not a 39-year-old ginger in a beige pantsuit.

A girl with a sparkly tiara and an elaborate gown that boasted an enormous crinoline stepped forward, almost hesitantly, and stammered out, "O-oh great hero, thank you for answering our plea? Our world is in crisis and the gods have sent you to aid us in our darkest hour."

Eventually, I got it out of them that this hero summoning ritual had never produced anything other than a teenage boy in all the archives that they'd studied before attempting the ceremony. They had obviously not been expecting to receive a cranky middle-aged quantitative analyst.

The great sages did a scrying spell and found the actual destined hero had been knocked aside by my flying elbow when the truck hit me instead of him. By the time they found him, he was already back home, playing Call of Duty and having a half-assed argument with his sister while he probably tried to drown out the memory of me getting splattered across the pavement right in front of him. Unfortunately, they couldn't try to summon him right away because they'd burned through several rare materials for the ceremony and it would take months, if not years to replace them.

I may not have been the hero they were expecting, but I was the one they'd ended up with.

"I'm so very sorry," Princess Consuelo Boudicca Mignonette, fourth of her name, later said to me over a shared bottle of wine. "The Arcane Record never said anything about a big metal thing attacking the summoned heroes. All we had to learn from were statements left by the previous heroes saying there was no way for them to go home again, but none of them ever elaborated as to why. I'm so sorry to have taken you away from your life in that way."

I did not bother with telling her that I had been a minor cog in the enormous, grinding machine of capitalism with a mediocre marriage and no kids, so this whole mess was actually kind of an improvement over my previous state.

Low-key, I did miss Jim more than I ever thought I would, but when I say our marriage was mediocre I mean we had come to a point where we were more like roommates who occasionally slept together, but weren't unhappy enough to bother with getting a divorce. I know he felt the same way because we talked about it every so often, just to touch base. We did not live in a world where you could make it on a single income and neither of us had any family, so we stuck with each other even if the spark had gone out. We were comfortable. Everything we knew about relationships told us that was bad, but the same time neither of us had ever actually wanted out.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why so many people and publications of my home world wanted to convince me that 'comfort' was such a bad thing in a relationship. Weren't you supposed to be comfortable with your own family?

Ultimately, I did pretty well in the fantasy world. I learned magic. I beat up the demon king thingy that spawned as part of a cosmological event that occurred every five hundred years. I restored peace to the kingdom and then I settled down into the life of a traveling adventurer.

There was a pretty decent gig work economy there and any time I needed money, all I had to do was find a guild hall and pick up an agreeable mission; no corporate career ladder to climb, no meetings that could have been an email, no bitch Susan commenting on my visible activity (or lack thereof) like I was an entry-level desk jockey and she was my supervisor.

It was great and I came to realize that at least 70% of my previous ennui and gray misery had been because I was not cut out for a 9-to-5 job in Corporate America.

In the nameless fantasy world, all I had to do was beat up a troll every so often and I could afford to do whatever I wanted. I got to travel. I could have hobbies. If someone beefed with me, I could turn them into frogs—for a little while, at least.

(If I sometimes I lay awake at night, wondering what became of my husband and if he missed me—well, that was between me and whatever gods had decided to upend my life instead of a random teenager's.)

All that came to a screeching halt and I woke up in what I now came to realize was a re-purposed vintage refrigerator. I could even see the Westinghouse brand name painted in chrome on the inside of the door, next to Jim's note.

I found the red button by rolling my face onto it. Little robot arms unfolded from the interior of the 'pod' and around my sides. They gently disconnected the IV drips that had evidently been keeping me hydrated. That was OK. It was less pleasant when they moved onto the catheter and whatever connection they had been using to catch my other waste.

After all that was done, the little robot arms started to massage my arms and legs, while moving me through what I recognized as a few standard reclined physical therapy exercises. The pod was deeper than I'd been aware of at first and the bed I was resting on sank further down into the space so that arms could have room to work.

The motion helped and pretty soon I could rotate my ankles and move my arms. I was still pretty weak, seeing as I was coming out of what I suspected was an extended coma.

The pod emitted a cheerful, almost triumphant note as the lid unsealed itself with a hiss and my bed rose up to lift me out of the pod to grant me a view of the place where I'd been kept.

I was in an underground tunnel, or at least in a segment of one. The ceiling was rounded over a poured cement floor, lined on either side by slightly raised cement walkways with metal railings. One end of the space ended in rough dirt and stone that had been sprayed down with a thick layer of gravel adhesive and maybe epoxy. The other end was curtained off from more tunnel with freestanding fabric room dividers like they used in hospitals. Light came from couple of industrial lights hooked up to what was either a really quiet generator or an enormous battery bank.

The chipped subway tile on the walls told me that this area was part of the abandoned Yellow Line expansion that a mayor whose name I couldn't remember had tried to pull off as a campaign gimmick, but quickly ran out of money for.

Around me, there were more robots working quietly on a variety of tasks. They weren't polished, highly designed models. They appeared to be made out of repurposed materials from cars and other large machinery. Still, they moved with a kind of grace and purpose that I wasn't used to seeing in the videos of practical robotics available on YouTube when I had my fatal isekai encounter—or, I guess, not so fatal.

The robots were attending a bank of 3D printers that were building random thingies that I didn't know the purpose of, but could guess were mechanical parts that couldn't be salvaged from elsewhere. Other robots were working an assembly line of yet more robots who were missing limbs or had dented chest pieces.

The whole operation was giving 'repair center.'

What did it mean that I was stowed here too?

I sat up slowly, not because I wanted to but because my body wasn't doing anything fast right now. Two of the robots peeled away from monitoring the printers and came to attend me like nurses.

"Please be careful, ma'am," one said in a surprisingly human tone and cadence. "You have been asleep for a long time. There is a 67.875% chance that you will need extensive physical therapy before you can safely walk unattended. Please wait while we retrieve the gravity sedan for your use."

A gravity what?

I got my answer when a third robot appeared, steering what could only describe as what would happen if a hovercraft and a wheelchair had a crack baby. It was a comfy-looking recliner seat surrounded by a thick, soft-looking bumper. It was not immediately obvious what propelled it as it skimmed lightly over the concrete floor and stopped at my bedside.

"Let me try to stand up before you put me in that thing?" I asked the robot in a plaintive tone.

It seemed to process that for a while before saying, "Understood. Please, hold onto us as you make the attempt. You are currently categorized as a fall risk."

I grasped both robots by their shoulders and let them help me down from my hospital bed. In doing so, I got a better look at the area surrounding my pod and—wow.

If I'd just now been feeling like Jim had stashed me away in a corner with all his other broken things, I stopped feeling that way when I saw what could only be described as a small shrine of metal flowers and candles surrounding my pod.

I could now see that my face would have taken center stage in this arrangement, based on how the pod was positioned and where I guessed that the window showing my face would have been, under a small metal banner that read "Rest, if you must, but don't you quit", which I recognized from a motivational desk ornament that I kept in my office.

It was a line from 'Don't Quit' by Edgar A. Guest.

The carved rock had been a gag gift from one of my previous managers, who could tell that the office was getting to me. I kept it as a reminder that I had a family to support and I wasn't a good enough dancer to try my luck at stripping. Jim must have found it when he cleaned out my desk at work.

My feet touched the ground and I wobbled a bit, but managed to stay upright with the help of the two robots. They gently coaxed me into trying to take a few more steps. I was stronger than I would have expected, although nothing near what I had been before I woke up back in my old life. The pod thing must have been exercising me regularly, guarding my muscle tone in anticipation of the day when I woke up.

Had Jim really done all this? My Jim? Who wouldn't even run the dishwasher before we were eating cereal out of coffee mugs? Jim, who would turn his underwear inside out for an additional wear before he would wash it?

"Where is my husband?" I asked the robot who'd been talking to me the most.

"The Master is away," it replied. "A perimeter alarm was tripped forty minutes ago and he has gone to investigate. Please rest assured that we are programmed to see to your safety and comfort in the event that you woke while he was absent."

"A perimeter alarm?" I gasped, while taking another shaking step. This was getting harder. Soon, I'd need that chair just to rest in. "Why are we living underground in a place where we need perimeter alarms? I left behind a paid-off condo, savings, and a maxed-out, fully-vested 401K!"

"This story predates my creation, but I believe the majority of your combined assets were used to continue your care even after the insurance discontinued the payments for your support. Afterwards, the Master was forced to take alternate measures that include relocating you to this hidden base, among others."

"Since when does Jim have hidden bases?" I insisted, trying to resolve this with what I remembered of my sweet, if unambitious and incurious husband.

"I believe he built the first one eighteen months after your accident," the robot continued speaking as it helped me make another loop of the immediate area in front of my vacated pod. I could feel the walking doing things. I hurt and I was tired, but the movement felt right and my limbs were responding better with every step. "It was a bunker located underneath the Old Theater House in the Invictus District, which he purchased through a land bank and vacant property program for a relatively small amount. That location was eventually raided by the Vanguard and we fell back to a new location near the Stratford Chemical Plant. That base became contested when the Harlequin Mafia claimed the entire factory and our operations moved to a more distributed model, with the Yellow Line Station as the hub."

"Who the fuck are the 'Vanguard' and the 'Harlequin Mafia'?"

The latter sounded like a gang of murder clowns. They weren't, right? Right?

"The Vanguard is a loose coalition of super-powered former vigilantes who have accepted corporate and city sponsorship to combat the extra-legal activities of other super-powered individuals specifically within city limits. They have also been called upon as disaster-response teams tasked with combating planetary threats such as alien invasions and inbound planet-killer class asteroids," the Robot said.

Alien invasions? Asteroids? Had I been revived into a Superman comic book?

We ended the last circuit in front of the gravity chair and the robot wordlessly helped me sit. I didn't fight it. My legs were shaking and I needed a breather. It was clear that I wouldn't be able to shake off the physical effects of my coma, even if my head felt perfectly clear.

"The Harlequin Mafia is a band of chemically altered individuals who all experienced similar mutations after being exposed to a certain chemical found at the abandoned Stratford Chemical Site, previously stored in large open vats with precarious walkways suspended over them," the Robot continued as it arranged my hospital smock around me, pinning the sides under my thighs so an errant breeze wouldn't be able to blow my hem up over my head. "We have a tentative truce with them, following the Master's assistance in helping them seal the vats and secure a perimeter surrounding the chemical site."

"Wait, so they just wanted to close up the giant vats of mutagens?" I asked, head still swimming with what I was hearing.

"They use the chemical for the ceremonial induction of new members into their gang and the contents of vats were being diluted with rainwater after the roof of the warehouse they were contained in had rotted out," the Robot clarified. "In return, they supply the Master with any industrial salvage they come across."

I made a little circling motion with my hand as the second robot turned up a lap blanket and used it to cover my legs, which was welcome because I was getting cold. It also gently pulled my hair over my shoulder so it wasn't trapped behind my back. It was longer than I remembered it being, and shiny. Either the robots or the pod itself had kept my hair brushed and loosely braided. No matted bed rest hair for me.

"OK, go back to the Vanguard story. Since when do people have super powers?"

"The first super-abled individual, a man known only as 'Paragon', went public about six months after your accident, or four and a half years ago. Some conspiracy theorists believe that there were earlier examples, dating as far back as the 1940s. However, there has been no concrete evidence made available to the public that supports their belief. Following Paragon's debut, there has been a wave of Meta Origin events across both sides of humanity's moral divide. Today, it is common to refer to such persons as 'Heroes' and 'Villains', depending on their goals and behavior."

"How does Jim figure into this?" I asked. At the same time, I was looking around for a mirror.

The good news was that time seemed to have passed at the same rate while I was absent from my body. The bad news was that I was back in my body that had been wrecked by a car crash and I had no idea which parts of my current infirmity had to do with that and which parts were the natural consequences of surviving an extended coma.

"The Master's Meta Origin is widely believed to be a stress-based reaction to nearly losing his wife, you, in a freak accident caused by an out-of-control vehicle that appeared to have been diver-less, leaving no one to shoulder the cost of your care aside from him. Almost immediately following your near-death, he began to exhibit an increased IQ and creative impulses along with what some might describe as increased obsessive tendencies. He created the first ARA unit, the Autonomous Robotic Assistant, to assist him with your home health care after the hospital released you into the Master's custody."

After the hospital turfed me, it meant.

I took note of the little stenciled code on the robot's chest: ARA-1. The quiet robot was ARA-2. The robots on the repair line and the one that brought my chair were named SARA-1 through SARA-4. I assumed the 'S' stood for 'Semi.'

"That was you?" I guessed.

"An early iteration thereof. I have been recovered from back up on multiple occasions, but I do have recordings of the earliest days when you, I, and the Master were still living in the condo. I am pleased to be able to speak with you at last."

"A pleasure," I murmured distractedly.

What the fuck had happened while I was off beating up orcs? I felt kind of bad that Jim had been having to handle this all on his own, while (and there my gaze drifted towards the metal 'dead wife' monument that had surrounded my recovery pod) potentially being completely out his mind.

At the same time, I was getting pissed off. I had not fucked around and put off my estate planning. I knew Jim could take care of himself just fine in my absence, but I hadn't wanted to be like my own parents who died when I was eleven and left behind nothing except debt. How much had the hospital been charging him for my care?

"If it pleases you, ma'am," ARA-1 continued its robot butler routine. "We have standing orders to relocate you to a safer and more comfortable location, should you awaken. This is the most secure of the Master's bases, but it is an inappropriate setting for a human being to recuperate in. We have a rehabilitation site standing by, ready for your use."

A loud noise echoed through the tunnel and all the robots stopped what they were doing at the same exact moment. I startled so bad that ARA-2 had to steady me in my chair before I fell out of it.

"Intruders detected at the 150 meter perimeter," the SARA units intoned, all in unison. "Multiple bogeys coming in hot. The Master is in pursuit. All units are ordered to fall back to the Hydrofarm."

Something crashed through the fabric room dividers before the SARAs could even finish relaying the orders they'd received. Both ARAs covered me with their bodies and two bubbles of bright blue light sprung up from emitters located on their backs to cover us all, blending together to create what looked remarkably like a mana-generated shield to me. Flying gravel and detritus pinged off the shields and I finally got a good look at what had hit us.

It was two men, grappling together. One was wearing a bright red unitard with a heavy black belt and black briefs with black knee-high boots. He also had a mustard-yellow cape that matched the yellow domino glued to his face and doing not much at all by way of disguising his identity. There was a geometric 'P' shape emblazoned across his chest.

I almost mistook his opponent for another one of Jim's robots until I caught a glimpse of a human profile through the frosted glass of his helmet and realized that I was looking at a man in a suit of powered armor. The suit was a soft greenish-gray with a light pearlescent sheen to it. As I watched, a panel opened on his chest, he crouched to brace himself, and a laser canon fired from the chest piece hitting Unitard in the middle and forcing him back several feet.

"Give it up, Recycler!" Unitard shouted, shielding his face with one hand like he was protecting himself from a sunny day rather than a laser cannon. "It's time for this to end!"

Sheesh, he both sounded and looked like a comic book character; not a good one either.

The ARAs quietly started moving me backwards, towards a side hall I hadn't noticed before. It looked a little bit like something meant for maintenance workers and had a bunch of cables running along the arched walls.

I was distracted, though, when Unitard charged Recycler again and this time they plowed him right into my Dead Wife memorial.

Words cannot describe the sound the man in the suit made as the metal flower warped, tore, and fell around him. The metal banner with my motivational office quote fell on Unitard's shoulder and he shrugged it off as he held the man in the robot suit down with both hands.

"You can't use your grief as an—!"

He never finished saying whatever it was that Recycler shoulder use his grief for, because Recycler got his feet up and fired up little rockets on his heels to empower a two-legged kick right into Unitard's diaphragm. He went flying again and the Recycler scrambled up to his feet. He went straight for my half open pod and, in doing so, moved so that I could see the random Prius emblem stuck to one of his pauldrons.

Oh, no. He didn't.

Recycler lifted the heavy door of the pod as he shouted my name, "Becky!"

I recognized the paint color on that robot suit. It was the 'sea glass pearl' colorway I'd picked out when we bought our 2022 Toyota Prius in the year before that paint color was discontinued, with the misty gray seats and the 'Persona' series wheels in the dark metal finish. I remembered because it was the first car I'd ever bought new and we'd ordered it directly from the factory. It had all the bells and whistles I'd ever dreamed of as an impoverished foster kid imagining a future where I'd never be hungry or uncomfortable ever again.

"James Jonah Johnson!" I shrieked. "DID YOU TURN OUR CAR INTO A ROBO-SUIT!?"

Both of the men froze in comical unison.

Recycler slowly, oh so slowly, tore his gaze away from the wrecked pod under his hands and looked up at me. His faceplate unsealed itself with a pressurized hiss to reveal the face of my very own husband, aged by about five years and untold ages of grief. The rest of his helmet folded back and retracted into his gorget.

There was more gray in his hair than I remembered. The man I'd left behind still had something of the boy lingering in his features, but all that had melted away in my absence. His clear hazel eyes, which had once reflected everything back at me like untroubled waters had turned deep and fathomless.

My heart and stomach did something weird.

Somehow, my husband had gone from mid to incandescently hot while I was gone. I'd always been attracted to him, obviously, or else I wouldn't have even dated him, much less married the man, but this was something more.

Was this part of that 'meta origin' thing that ARA-1 had been talking about or was Jim one of those men who just aged like fine wine? I—I suddenly felt cheated that I hadn't been there to see the transformation.

"Rebecca?" he rasped as he took a numb step forward, then a second, and then more as he picked up speed.

I couldn't find any words other than, "It's me, dummy," as I held out my arms to catch him.

More people arrived, breathless, as Jim collapsed against my collarbone and half into my lap. The gravity sedan dipped under our combined weight and then corrected itself.

I don't think I'd ever heard Jim cry before, except maybe a little when we finally got a response from the adoption agency's record office saying that his biological parents had declined the opportunity to meet him as an adult. Now, I felt his hot breath and even hotter tears slide down my neck as he clung to me and shuddered.

"Fuck, Becky. I thought, I thought—!" he never quite got around to saying what he thought, but I could guess. Everything in the environmental evidence surrounding me when I woke up told me this man had been fighting what he knew to be inevitable, except here I was: alive.

"Shh," I murmured into his hair. "I've got you. It's OK. I'm here."

"Oh, fuck me," one of the newcomers hissed. It was a guy in basically a lime-green full body stocking with little black wings printed over his ears and white goggles built into the suit over his eyes. He had a lightning bolt across his chest that went from one shoulder to his opposite hip. "She was actually alive? Not gonna lie, I seriously thought there was just a scary ice mummy in that box."

Jim froze under my hands and tilted his head so that he could fix one furious eye on the newcomers.

"We all thought that," another one agreed in a somber voice. She was wearing a big elaborate witch hat with a brim that dipped over one of her leaf-green eyes. She was wrapped up in a raggedy black cloak that was very goth-looking until you saw the more utilitarian black BDUs and combat boots poking out from the gap in front. She was giving Unitard a not-nice look. "Paragon?"

That was Paragon? No. I rejected it. He was and would forever be 'Unitard.'

"Nothing changes," Unitard said quietly. "We take him into custody and she goes to a hospital. The Endowment can find a place for her to transition back into normal life."

I had no idea what the 'Endowment' was, but Jim surged to his feet, half-crouching over me. "Over my dead body!"

"It won't come to that," Unitard started to say as he moved towards us.

What I did happened on instinct. I hadn't actually been awake long enough to question whether my magic would still work in this reality or if I just had a really elaborate coma dream where I imagined myself into an unlikely fantasy hero. All I can say is that I've developed a particular hair trigger instinct when it come to enemies making a move towards one of my allies when that ally doesn't have all their armor in place.

The only thing running through my head at the time was: 'Jim has his helmet off.'

My hand snapped up, I pointed two fingers at the group of intruders, and I cast 'Mass Hold Person' on the whole lot of the them.

My eyes glowed a deep shade of amber-yellow as I channeled my mana and it came to me every bit as eagerly as it had in the fantasy world. A bolt of yellow streaked through the air between us and turned into a lasso at the last second, phasing through their bodies before it became suddenly solid and locked them into place. Even Unitard, who seemed to have some sort of enhanced physique, seemed to be affected by my magic. Maybe he really was a Superman analogue. I'd noticed him floating a little bit to correct his position whenever Jim knocked him off his feet.

Unfortunately, they could still move their heads and talk, which they proceeded to do although I immediately tuned them out.

Jim's furious advance stalled out mid-step as he realized I'd already neutralized them. He turned slowly back towards me, with a question in his eyes. "Becky?"

I winced. Yeah, this was awkward.

"It's a really long story," I told him. "I'll tell you when the Keystone Kops aren't listening in."

He nodded after a long, tense moment where I could see questions and projected answers scrolling behind his eyes and then he gestured to his robots. "ARA, SARA, pack it up. We're heading to the Lodge. Get ready to assist the combat units."

The SARA units had been scuttling around behind the 'heroes' and had loaded most of Jim's manufacturing equipment onto a motorized sledge. A group of larger, badly damaged robots with the CARA series name on their chest plates came dragging themselves in from down the tunnel where they'd presumably gotten beaten up by Unitard and Co.

The only thing they didn't pack up was my wrecked metal memorial garden. Jim guided my chair back towards the escape tunnel.

"Mrs. Johnson!" Unitard called after us. "Don't let him do this! You don't…"

I silenced him with a little duck-bill snap of my fingers and a sideways glare. There was no magic behind it, just my absolute lack of patience with his shit. "Forgive me if I don't listen to words out the mouth of a man who wears his underwear on the outside."

"Things have changed since your accident!" he insisted. "Your husband has become a criminal. He has to answer for that."

"Really!?" I gasped, acting for a second like I believed him, only to drop the act once he looked like he was buying it. "Oh, wait. I just remembered. I don't give a shit. I left enough money and resources behind that my husband should never have had to worry about paying my medical bills if I ended up disabled, but not even five years later, I find out he's living in a hole in the ground and making ends meet through some sort of weird Byzantine favor bartering system with murder clowns. If you ask me, the real villain here is the American Healthcare system. Fuck you."

Unitard's mouth snapped shut and he looked taken aback as the man in green started to snicker at him and Witch Hat rolled her eyes in resignation. I looked up at Jim and pointed at the escape tunnel.

"Jim, we're leaving."

His expression went weird and kind of soft, a bit like he was melting inside. "Babe, I missed you so much."

That was really sweet and I wanted to hear more, but I snapped my fingers and kept pointing. "I can feel myself getting dumber just standing in the same room as them. Move it!"

"Alright, alright, we're going," he said, still sounding squishy, and started to push my chair away.

Unitard kept calling after us. "Mrs. Johnson! Mrs. Johnson!"

Meanwhile, the green one made a comment to the one in the witch hat, "You know, the past four years of fighting Recycler make a lot more sense to me now."

"He's really obsessed with you, isn't he?" I commented to Jim as we moved out of earshot.

"Ugh," he sighed. "You have no idea. He thinks I'm mentally ill and keeps trying to have me committed at Saint Dymphna's Insane Asylum. Never mind that that place is a human-rights lawyer's ongoing nightmare."

There was a glowing platform thing at the end of the tunnel. The SARAs guided their motorized sledge onto it first and they vanished as it teleported them away. The CARAs followed and then the ARAs maneuvered my sedan onto the teleporter pad. Jim stepped up next to me and put a hand on my back between my shoulder blades.

"Try and focus on me or one of the ARAs," he advised me. "Otherwise, you can get nauseous watching the transition."

Pale blue light bloomed around us and we reappeared on a new platform, surrounded by huge banks of vertically-mounted hydroponic bar planters. Jim flexed one wrist and a little canister thingy popped out. It looked like one of those hand-held remote detonators from a spy movie. He flipped the cap off of a button on top and I realized it was a hand-held remote detonator.

"How long does that partial paralysis spell last?" he asked me.

I could guess where this was going. I dismissed the spell with a thought. I couldn't be sure if I was out of range or not, so I sent the release command just in case.

Now, I could have felt weird about the fact that my husband had a self-destruct function built into my life support pod, but I hadn't woken up on a ventilator. That meant I had been breathing on my own. The pod didn't seem like it had been designed to be portable, but ARA had mentioned that I'd been relocated more than once. From that information, I was willing to guess that they'd been shuffling me between different pods as part of their "distributed base model."

"They're free."

ARA-1 reported, "They are mobile and investigating the wreckage of Ma'am's life support unit."

Jim nodded and hit the detonator. His helmet popped up again and he watched the aftermath on a projection inside his faceplate. Meanwhile, ARA-1 politely brought over a tablet so I could also watch the green guy get blown across the tunnel when the pod he'd been poking abruptly exploded. He landed on his ass and popped right back up, seeming none the worse for wear. Unitard stepped in front of Witch Hat and covered them both with his cape.

"Good, I tried to time it so Witch didn't get hit," Jim commented. "She's the only non-powered Vanguard and she's the only Cape that the Anti League tacitly approves of so we try not to give her major injuries. She does a lot to improve the lives of people who live in the mutant ghetto, but I really can't take the risk of them getting their hands on my tech. Anything they find somehow gets patented by the Endowment and used to fund more professional Cape teams."

"There's a ghetto with mutants in it now?" I asked, taken aback. The other part about the Endowment, whatever that was, seemed less surprising as a business model.

He nodded and started pushing my chair deeper into the base. Already, I was warmer than I had been back in the Yellow Line Station and the air smelled fresh from all the plants around us.

"Did ARA explain anything about Meta Origins to you?" he asked. "I programmed it to answer any questions you had and try to bring you up to speed on current events when you woke up."

I shrugged, "Sort of. It mentioned that you had some kind of stress episode that boosted your IQ and turned you into a mad scientist."

"That's sort of how it happens," he allowed. "With some variation."

We passed out of the grow room and into a larger space with a recessed center. The robots had already dispersed to different areas to set up their workstations again. There was a big bank of screens in the middle of the room all arranged around a rotating seat with a big ergonomic keyboard attached to it.

"'Meta Origin' is a oblique reference to comic book origin stories, as I'm sure you guessed," he continued. "It refers to an event in which someone awakens superhuman powers. For me, it's as you said. I suddenly got smarter and more creative. I also get less deterred by roadblocks and setbacks than I used to. It starts small and then snowballs, like how I started making androids when I needed someone to help monitor you so I could sleep or eat, but my operation grew from there when I started having to face different challenges and new stressors—now I have secret bases and a robot defense force."

He brought my sedan over to the big rotating chair and the screens flicked on as soon as he got into proximity showing different parts of the city. I presumed they were strategically significant locations. I also noticed a little river rock mounted on the keyboard with some museum putty. It had a familiar slogan carved into its polished surface.

The panels of Jim's suit started to fold back and opened up in the front to let him step out of it. The suit closed itself back up and walked over to a freestanding column with an open front. It stepped inside and the column rotated closed before sinking into the ground.

Jim was dressed in a ribbed tank top and mechanics coveralls, with the arms tied around his waist. He was still talking, but my higher cognitive functions had shut down. All I could focus on was how much muscle he'd packed on since we were separated.

"Not every Meta Origin story ends well, mind you. A lot of people just end up disabled and disfigured. Not all of them get angry enough about it to join the Anti League, but they also can't continue their lives uninterrupted, either—what?" he stopped explaining when he realized I was staring.

"Honey, you must have put on forty pounds of muscle!" I wheezed.

He flushed and chuckled while rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment. "Oh, yeah, well—I seem to put on muscle more easily now. I have some mini-facturing equipment, but I still need to do traditional blacksmithing work at the forge when I build or repair the combat models." He leaned over me, bracing his hands on my armrest. "Like what you see?"

My ears felt hot, but it wasn't as hard as I would have thought it would be to lean forward, tilt my face up towards him, and admit, "Yeah—especially now that you aren't wearing parts of our car as armor."

He snorted a laugh and touched his forehead to mine. "Blame Paragon for that. He landed on it in the middle of a fight during his debut year. Up until then, I was sticking to white-collar crime to pay for my inventions and keep your life support pod powered up. I, uh, already wasn't in a real good place and seeing this careless asshole wreck the car my comatose wife loved almost more than her own life—yeah, I blacked out and didn't come to until I was already wearing the remnants like a suit and beating the shit out of him on live television. Full disclosure, my powers came with impulse control problems."

"I'll say," I murmured. My gaze drifted down to his mouth and—fuck it, why not. I kissed him and that instantly took me back five years to the last time I'd kissed these lips. It had been a drive-by gesture while I was on my way out the door, over almost before it had even started.

He cupped the back of my head and answered me with desperate urgency, like he too was remembering the casual brevity of that last kiss five years ago. It went until we were both breathless and my arms were trembling with the effort of holding myself up. He helped me relax back into my chair and pressed his lips against my temple, staying there for a little bit.

When the silence went on for too long, I glanced around the new base. "This is the Lodge?"

He huffed a laugh against my forehead. "There's no Lodge. I just said that to throw a spanner into their works. They think I'm a kind of idiot savant, good at my gizmos and nothing else, and I've been leaning into it. That's half the reason I'm still using the car suit. They'll be off looking for me in abandoned ski lodges or whatever for a while. This is my monitoring station. I've got some hidden cameras around the city that I use to track Cape movements and share them with affected parties."

"By that you mean your 'Anti League'?" I guessed.

"Among others. The League isn't really a formal organization. It's more like a loose alliance of 'villains' who aren't in it to be assholes," he chuckled. "Although, I guess I've achieved my ultimate goal. You're alive. You're back…you have magic, somehow."

Now it was my turn to laugh a little. "Sit down, buddy. This is going to get wild."

Jim did sit and he listened all while I recounted my spiritual journey to another world. A lifelong Tolkien fan, he could hardly contain his excitement when I told him about meeting the Elf Queen underneath the starlit branches of the World Tree and sailing a galleon across the Blood Sea to fight a Charybdis-like sea monster. He sobered when I got to the less fantastical parts.

"The Princess asked me if I wanted to try and summon you too, but I—I just couldn't do it after the way I thought I'd died," I admitted, once I'd run out of cool stories to tell. "I thought you'd be happier and safer here, even without me. I didn't know the world would lose its damn mind as soon as I was gone. Plus, there was a non-zero chance that we'd end up accidentally kidnapping that poor kid instead, except it would be for no reason because the Demon King was already dead."

"I knew your spiritual essence was somewhere else," he admitted. "We can check for that kind of thing now. I didn't have enough data to determine if you were in an alternate reality or just some corner of the Astral Plane. If I'd figured out where you were, I probably would have tried to join you. I'm not that attached to this world and I knew that you being in an alternate reality was a possibility. We've had some extra-planar invasions and transmigration incidents, but that field of study is still relatively new and I couldn't take the risk of abandoning your body if you were going to come back to it."

Ouch. "Dunno how comfortable you would have been if you came to join me, I was living like a hobo; going from occasional job to occasional job whenever I needed something and camping out a lot in between."

Jim snorted, but it was a fond sound. "Well, then you're going to enjoy our new lifestyle. I don't think there's a real avenue for me to return to normal life and, even if there was, I can't guarantee what I'll do the next time Paragon pisses me off and he's gonna do it. I'm willing to set you up wherever you want to go, but—I'd really like it if you chose to stay with me."

He knelt down in front of my chair and reached over to touch my wedding band, which was still in place on my left hand. I noticed that he was still wearing his too, although it was more scratched and worn than I remembered it being.

"I think I would have asked, even if you hadn't come back to me with magical powers. I know we were on the rocks a little bit when you—when it happened, but I remember going back to the empty, silent apartment and realizing everything that I'd just lost. There was no one to make mean jokes about my boss when I was feeling down. The scent of your perfume faded from our room, but at the same time I felt like you were on the other side of the apartment from me, always just out of sight. I couldn't stand it."

An old echo of grief and madness flashed through his eyes and I felt like I could see the ghost of whatever quirk of magic or genetics had transformed him. He's always been a little bit of a gear head, who'd rather take our malfunctioning electronics apart rather than replace them—except back then, he wouldn't always get around to putting them back together. There were no half-assembled mini-computers laying around this base now. I couldn't tell if that was maturity or what, but I kind of wanted to take my time with finding out.

Over his shoulder, my motivational desk rock looked back at me.

'Rest, if you must, but don't you quit,' it said.

I squeezed his hand. "Not knowing what you have until it's gone is such a cliche, but it doesn't feel that way when it really happens, does it?" I asked and the look on his face told me that, yeah, he knew exactly what I was talking about. "In truth, I actually really wanted to share that world with you. Sharing this one is a strong contender too, though."

I mustered up a watery smile.

"Tell you what, give me a turn at picking on Unitard every so often and I'm in."

He blinked in confusion. "Unitard?"

"The guy in the cape and unitard," I clarified. "Paragon or something. He seems like someone who would benefit from be bullied more often."

He choked on a sudden laugh, eyes going wide with delight and he pulled me into a rib-creaking hug. "I can't believe I didn't think of that first. We're calling him that from now on. I love you so much."

"I've got more material ready to go," I promised him and returned the hug. He smelled a bit like a clean mechanic's shop and something else that was more familiar and harder to describe that made the part of me that had spent the past five years always looking for the next fight relax at long last.

For the first time, I actually felt glad to be back, because I finally felt like I'd come home.

-Fin

"Life is strange with its twists and turns,As every one of us sometimes learns,And many failures turn aboutWhen we might have won had we stuck it out."

-an excerpt from 'Don't Quit' by Edgar A. Guest