Tournament of Supervillainy by Phipps C. T

Author:Phipps, C. T. [Phipps, C. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: superheroes, comic book fiction
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2019-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WHY WE FIGHT FOR MIGHT

The next morning, I woke up to the sound of ringing monastery bells. I slid out of bed, tripped over Cindy’s panda, and eventually got myself dressed with Cindy following behind me. Mandy was already gone. Heading out, I found out the tournament’s participants were all assembled on the beach. Along the edge of the shore were a vast number of fighters with the sun rising behind them. It was the perfect image for a movie poster if you could get the rights to all the legendary and fictional heroes present.

I walked alongside Cindy toward the gathering of the fighters, getting the impression from her silence my actions with Gabrielle had hurt our relationship far more than I’d let on. Then again, I’d never been able to entirely pierce the barrier between the Cindy she showed the world and the person she was underneath. Cindy had grown up with an abusive mother, an absent father, a life in Southtown Falconcrest City that was as close to being an urban hellscape as you could get without Kurt Russell coming in to clean up the place, and had done a lot of things to survive—things that I had no right to judge but bothered me because she was my friend.

Mandy, by contrast, had grown up with a demanding but loving father who had brought her up in various postage-stamp nations across the planet. Places that sounded fictional until you visited them like New Albion, Ruritania, Skullkovia, and Turkey. He’d wanted to train her as a spy and she’d been put through a regime many Olympians would have balked at. The end result had been her choosing to rebel and committing crimes that forever blocked her from that path. I’d been a poor consolation prize and after becoming a vampire, she’d ended up being hardened by a war that had never happened—yet still haunted her nightmares.

“Whatcha thinking?” Cindy asked.

“Just about how I’ve not been a great…whatever the hell we are,” I said.

“Pfft!” Cindy said.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“The problem with you Gary is you think there’s a way to balance being a great anything with being a bad guy,” Cindy said, shaking her head. “Embrace your inner Grand Theft Auto protagonist and realize the purpose of life is to be as spectacularly bad as possible.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, deadpanning. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because I’m smarter than you,” Cindy said, putting a hand over her chest. “Also, prettier.”

“Fair enough,” I said, admitting the point. “But the entire point of being a supervillain is I do what I want and sometimes I want to do good.”

“Ugh,” Cindy said, covering her face. “No, you fool! That’s not how it works.”

“Who is the henchwoman here?” I asked.

“I am a co-villainess now!” Cindy said. “We should form a team.”

“We aren’t already a team?” I asked.

“Not until we get an awesome supervillain lair.”

The tension lessened between us for a bit as we started to mingle with the hundred or so people gathered on the beach.

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