Hell on High Heels by Jay Aury

Author:Jay Aury [Aury, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-12-24T16:00:00+00:00

Dealmakers

You’re going to get a lot of weirdos in the super business. That’s just how it is. Well-balanced people don’t get their skin bleached, throw on a clown costume, and start threatening people with poison gas gags they bought out of the back of comics. I don’t care how many ‘bad days’ you have, you were not well if that was your first response.

And villains were particularly bad about it. Maybe it was the flamboyant costumes, or general appeal of sociopathy, or maybe because the first thing a lot of people think to do when they got the power to grow thirty feet tall was step on anyone who messed with them (or make giant porn, though some villains managed to do both).

So if it looked like a duck, quacked like a duck, and shot kinetic blasts from its hands, it was probably the Mighty Mallard, guardian of ponds and champion of general waterfowl.

And that was where magic threw a wrench into things.

And yes, I might be broadening that circus tent to Ringling Brothers dimensions, but the greatest show on earth wasn’t just going to involve women in lakes chucking swords at impressionable young men who’ve never seen a pair of breasts before. There were no hard classifications for this kind of stuff, and I put demons, things from Lovecraft’s dream journals, and pixies in the same broad category for a reason. They’re all esoteric bullshit.

And that’s fine! I have no problem with people getting their powers from magic amulets or whatever. You do you. But when that kind of crap gets shoved in my face, I’m going to have a problem.

Because see, magic doesn’t play by normal rules. At least with mythics you have a general idea of what they’re about. Most of them are all about wrath. You know when you piss of a god that you’re probably going to get smote, fucked, or turned into a tree. That’s godhood 101. Nothing solves theological arguments like a lightning bolt from the heavens. Otherwise, gods tend to stick to their lanes.

Magic though? You never knew what was going on with those guys. Maybe you crossed a circle of mushrooms on the wrong day so you wake up with a bunch of elves around your bed holding clubs. Or your latest song was actually the exact set of notes to summon Irgoleth, demon of night terrors and old socks. Or maybe your love troubles were inconveniently overheard by some fairies and now you’ve got an ass for a head.

Magic.

Blegh.

Like I said, too unpredictable. Last thing I needed to do was take a piss on the wrong shamrocks and get cursed by leprechauns.

Fortunately, most magic types didn’t involve themselves in the world of supers, and magic heroes tended to keep those that did under wraps. Keeping balances was sort of their whole deal. I preferred more scientific villainy, personally. And not just because metal was my jam. With science, your heroes and villains usually had a more predictable powerset, usually advertised by an atom on the front of their costume.

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