chapter 3.1

Eddie and Oriana had decided to carpool to the radio station on the date of the interview, so that morning, she dropped him off at the office before making her own way downtown to Special Circs. He could have done his inventing at home and saved her the drive, he was certainly experienced enough in the assembly of robotics without the comfort and convenience of a lab, but his current project was not one he wanted strewn across the living room coffee table.

After Jasmine Freeman won the election by a landslide to the office of police commissioner, she'd expressed an indebtment to Big Tech, for both generating the publicity that won her the election with his and Bombshell's showdown against Chimera at her press conference, and for stopping the assassination plot that targeted her. So, she'd pardoned his warrants, and, though it had taken her several months of cutting through red tape, procured him some evidence from the police station that was of personal interest to him.

Spread out on the lab table before him was Chimera, disassembled piece by piece and ready to be reverse-engineered into something Eddie could pitch as a prosthesis, fully prehensile and capable of being connected to a human's neural network for complete motor control of a fully robotic limb. Yeah, he definitely couldn't have done this at home. Philanthropic though his intentions were, it would be cruel to retraumatize Oriana with the sight of the evil cyborg who had almost killed her, even if Chimera was dead. Or was 'inoperational' a better word? It depended on what your stance was on the personhood of tech billionaires who turned their bodies into machines and their brains into online social networks.

When the text came in from Oriana that she had arrived, he made triple-sure to close the lab door behind him before meeting her in front of his office. "Hey baby!" She hugged him and clung, delighted, as always, to see him after her own long workday at the prison. "How was work?"

"Great. I'm close to a prototype on that robotic limb thing. Took me long enough, though. The, uh...technology...that I'm basing mine off of was overly complicated and obviously designed by someone who's never heard of right-to-repair. At one point I had to build all new machines specifically to take apart the first...machine. You?"

"Awful. I had to do another reduction today and the guy whined the whole time about how much it hurt. They don't usually report much pain--it's more like a discomfort--and his vitals all read fine, so my guess is he was just being a crybaby. But if you're gonna be like that, don't waste my time, y'know? I have other parolees that want to go back to society without needing a live-in nurse. Ugh, sorry. Rant over."

"About that," said Eddie. "Maybe once the company reaches mass production stage, we could provide an alternative solution? That way you wouldn't have to put your guys through so much physical stress just to give them back their--"

She rose up on tiptoe to kiss him gently on the lips. "I know where this is goin'. And I love you for thinking of the city's most vulnerable. But there's no way Blackwater City 'bout to fork over the taxpayer dollars to put my crooks in them suits."

She was probably right, but it was nice to dream. Besides, he was a little fixated on that other thing she'd said. "You--?"

She blushed. "I'd a thought you'd been known."

"Yeah, but it's nice to hear." He gave her hand an affectionate squeeze. "I love you too, Ori." Some days he still wondered if he even deserved to, but he was getting better, both by his own initiative and her constant reassurances of his worth and her adoration for him. It was these little moments he cherished; he kept them close onhand in his mind like notecards in his pocket so when the bad days came, he'd have something to remind him why he'd come this far.

"Now, we 'bout to stand here all day and talk about our feelings, or we gonna go?"

The elevator ride down 45 floors of the towering office building was always a slow one, and every day as Eddie left work, the same tall, thin man with his hair in a man-bun and a suit and watch that together probably cost more than most people's mortgage got on at the 44th. Sometimes, he'd be kissing a woman when the doors opened, and it was always a different woman. "New secretary," he would say by way of explanation every single time once the doors closed. It perplexed Eddie: how many secretaries did one man have to go through? Then again, was it any of his business? They were strangers.

Today, though, Eddie wasn't alone, and when the man on the 44th floor got in and saw Oriana on his arm, his first assumption was: "New secretary?" Then, his eyes blew with a sudden sense of recognition. He smirked, his posture relaxing. "Oriana! Didn't recognize you with the short hair. And is it just me, or have you put on a few?"

"Steve," she answered curtly.

"Other than that, though, you haven't changed since we were an item. Am I correct in guessing that this is your new beau?"

Wait, what? Was Eddie to understand that this guy was Oriana's ex? Was this the telepath? He didn't seem like her type.

"Steve, this is Eddie. Eddie, Steve," she introduced them, her tone suddenly vicious as she continued. "Steve went to Rivington with me. He's a shapeshifter. You wouldn't believe some of the things he did for me back in the day. Actually...I think I might still have the tapes on my laptop if you want to see them later."

Ah. That made more sense.

Not one to take the humiliation lightly, Steve threw Eddie a contrived look of concern and said, "Be careful with this one. She's one of those 'feeders'. She broke my heart back in the day and she'll have no misgivings about letting yours stop. But hey, I'm in medicine--take this, and give me a call if you ever feel like reclaiming a few years of your life expectancy. Here, Ori, you can have one, too." He handed each of them a business card embossed with a corporate phone number and website in one corner and four lines of text in the center:

PRYOR PHARMACEUTICALS
Weight Loss Solutions
Less of You to Deal With. (™)
Steve Pryor, CEO

"Bold words coming from somebody who put me in the hospital!" Oriana snapped.

"Hey, aren't you the guys that make Pryorexia?" said Eddie. "Looks like you're still putting people in hospitals; your pills have caused more heart disease this past year than fen-phen did in the '80s. I don't know why you're even allowed on the market." It was amazing what kind of gossip you could happen along in medical forums online even if you weren't looking for it. Eddie had perused the boards back when he was first establishing Salvidar Solutions to see how other firms in the biomedical field got off their feet. Apparently, Pryor Pharma was one of the shadiest corporations in medicine.

"Sometimes it's worth the associated risks, and in your case, buddy--"

"You know what, Steve?" Oriana cut in, her head cocked slightly to the left, as it tended to do before she placed a biomanipulative attack.

"Ori, not here!" Eddie took her around one arm, trying to hold her back. As much as he appreciated her stepping in in his defense, elevators and forced fattening decidedly didn't mix. The car was roomy enough with one super-sized passenger, but with two?

Then again, would Oriana's powers even work on a shapeshifter? They hadn't worked on Ted Greene…

Eddie hoped Steve was likewise immune. He didn't want to have to call the fire department.

But Oriana didn't attempt to fatten Steve. Something happened to him, though. His posture clenched and he grimaced in disgust. The stench was unmistakable.

Oriana pushed the button to open the doors on the 25th floor. "You need to take care of something?"

Steve shuffled out of the elevator with his back to the hallway to hide his shame from the other two.

As they started once more to descend towards the ground floor, Oriana mentioned offhandedly, "So, the media named me Bombshell, but did I ever tell you how I almost became Captain Shit-Your-Pants?"

***

Eddie was sure it would be a tight squeeze for Oriana on Martika's couch, between Martika's soft, wide thighs and his own hefty frame, but she was raising no complaint except perhaps for cold feet. Right before they went live, she asked him, "Are you sure you want to roll with the plan? Especially after what happened in the elevator."

Earlier in the week, they had rehearsed the interview with the questions Martika had emailed Oriana to prepare to answer, which included: what did he have to say to the concern-trolls running rampant on Twitter?

While Oriana never missed an opportunity to troll right back when the haters reared their heads, Eddie didn't have the time of day to engage in back-and-forth discourse with Blackwater City's monopoly-holders of way too much free time. He had a business to build, after all, not to mention a circle of friends to entertain for the first time in his life. But lately, Oriana was having her reputation dragged through the dirt, all because of their relationship. People were tagging him, as Big Tech, in Tweets warning him to cut and run before it was too late for his organs. One particularly vitriolic account had Tweeted, 'When #BigTech has a heart attack we're charging #Bombshell with murder, right?'

He was long overdue to take back control of the narrative. As of yet, the public didn't know of Eddie's sordid motivations for inventing his originally villainous persona, but tonight, he was laying the cards on the table, live, on the air.

"I've never been more sure of anything."

"You'll go from pitied to reviled in minutes," said Oriana.

"If it'll lift a load off your reputation--"

"My reputation's been through enough. I can take it."

"I've already thought about it." All the work it had taken to build himself up into her nemesis seemed now to belong to another life. More than anything, he wanted it to be known that he was not her victim, but her accomplice.

"Oh, you lovebirds," Martika chimed in, all sing-song as she poured three glasses of red wine and handed one each to Eddie and Oriana. Oriana sipped hers, while Eddie placed his awkwardly on the table before them. "We're live in five...four...three…"

She held out two fingers. One finger.

Mics on.

"Welcome, welcome, welcome to Nail Me To The Cross! I'm Martika Mitchell, and I'm here with Big Tech and Bombshell this afternoon! We've got a great episode lined up for you guys, and I, for one, can't wait to launch right in! Now, the first thing I want to talk about is Ted Greene, because holy Hell, what a fight! Bombshell, let's start with you: what even happened?"

"I've always been a controversy," Oriana said into her mic, with all the confidence of someone who had been interviewed in costume before. Eddie wondered to himself how many of these he'd have to sit through before it was no longer weird. Oriana insisted it was for identity protection, but he kept expecting to be attacked by a supervillain out of nowhere. "I guess the Evangelizing Asshole himself decided it was time to take it to my doorstep."

"And when you were fresh out of a fight with Human Hallucinogen, too!"

"Jared was nothing," said Oriana dismissively. "I've fought him before. I knew I was gonna be okay."

"But Ted--"

"Now, that's where I was in over my head," Oriana agreed.

Martika turned to Eddie now and said, "Good thing you showed up just in time to save her life! Ah, a romance for the ages…"

Eddie felt a blush coming on. "I only got a couple blows in...Bombshell's the one who put him down."

"DON'T be modest. Your timing and action couldn't have been more impeccable. And she didn't even have to call you for backup. In fact, Bombshell, as I recall, you actively resisted backup."

"I really thought I had Ted on the ropes. They don't call me the Reckless Wonder for nothing."

"They do, now, do they?"

"Nobody calls her that but herself," Eddie clarified with a chuckle.

"Look, I've always been an adrenaline junkie, okay? I'm just lucky someone watching in the crowd knew better than I did and had Twitter," said Oriana.

"But there had to be a point where you knew you wouldn't make it out of this fight alone?"

Eddie took the mic then in her defense: "I think Bombshell acts out of care and concern when she tries to keep me out of a fight. She can get a little overprotective. She's just got to realize that if she can hold her own, so can I." He knew exactly how Martika was going to use this to change subjects.

Well, this was it.

Time to go public.

"How sweet," said Martika. "And how refreshing to have some light shed on the real Bombshell. It's a relief to know she isn't like what all the Twitter hate would have the public believe." She downed her own glass of wine and picked up Eddie's abandoned glass to sip on that, too.

"There is, uh, there's a lot of Twitter hate, yeah," Eddie agreed.

Last chance to back out...

"For the out-of-the-loop, social media as well as right-wing news have been painting Bombshell as a gaslighter, an abuser, and a future murderer ever since she and Big Tech have become an item," Martika said into her mic. "Big Tech, what is she really like at home?"

"Oh, she's great. Sweetest girl you'll ever meet, and she cooks like a Cajun grandmother to boot. Anyway, it's not like she ever did anything I didn't want done. The whole reason I put together the Big Tech identity was to draw her out."

"By that, you mean you wanted her to catch you and fatten you?"

"That was the plan from the beginning." Eddie waited nervously for Martika's reaction, until…

She smirked. "I knew it! Scarlet Flame, if you're listening at home, you owe me forty bucks!"

"How--?"

&quo t;Darling, it takes one to know one," said Martika. "I know I've talked about being a mutual gainer on this show before."

The way she said it so flippantly, so guiltlessly...he hoped he would reach that place one day. Oriana had done wonders to help with his self-esteem, but he'd still been nervous as all hell about opening up on this interview. It calmed him that Martika was so understanding, though.

"And you two obviously don't let the feedism get in the way of saving the world. Ted Greene brings the number of class-6 or higher threats you've eliminated together to I think three now?"

Oriana counted on her fingers. "Wait...we counting Forklifter?"

"Should we not count Forklifter?" asked Martika.

"Ol boy was almost a villain for almost a week. And Louie's a good guy. Sometimes good guys have one bad day, snap, and decide to build a mech and declare revenge. But he could barely pilot the thing. Dude's already up for parole and a reduction."

"Anticlimactic...but in the moment, it must have been a big deal to the both of you, Forklifter being Bombshell's jilted reject…"

"Actually, though it's true that she rejected his propositions once upon a time, I believe the straw that broke the camel's back for him was when Bombshell replaced him as her auto mechanic," said Eddie.

Louie was good, but Mickey was better.

At the time, Eddie had been concerned for Oriana when a new villain stepped up and declared himself Bombshell's nemesis, but she was right: the boy was a terrible pilot. He'd gone down easily.

"Let's have a speed round!" Martika declared. "Bombshell: missionary or cowgirl?"

"Missionary, all the way!"

That was how she wanted it, at least. Eddie was still worried about hurting her. She claimed to know she would be resilient enough to withstand being smothered under six-bucks-and-change of fat. She also claimed she had Ted Greene on the ropes.

"Big Tech, ass or titties?"

"I--I have to pick?"

"Well, clearly you don't," said Martika with a conspicuous nod toward the curvaceous crimefighter between them.

"Bombshell, pills or condoms?"

"I accidentally sterilized myself sometime before I was eighteen," said Oriana. "I found out the same day I was diagnosed as a biomanipulator."

"So what I'm hearing is, Bombshell orders her meat raw! Get it, girl! Big Tech, what's Bombshell's most annoying habit?"

"She paces around the house while she sorts the mail and throws all the junk mail on the floor like she thinks I can bend down and pick up after her."

"Hmm, yes, I can see there's a lot impeding that," said Martika. The look in her eyes as she glanced pointedly at the gargantuan gut spilling over almost his entire lap was somewhere between approval and pure relish. "Bombshell, have you signed a contract with the feds, or are you still a free agent?"

"Rogue 'til the day I die, baby!" exclaimed Oriana with a fist-pump to the sky, one foot propped against the table.

"Wait, the government contracts superheroes?" Eddie asked, bewildered.

Oriana took the mic and said, "The school-to-registration pipeline is part of a world that you leave behind when you go rogue, or that you can live your whole life totally unaware of if you're a Genetic Typical."

"So that's the opposite of Genetic Deviant, gotcha," Eddie muttered under his breath, taking mental notes.

"It's better for your taxes if you stay rogue, though. From what I hear, the salary for a registered superhero isn't great, and you're on a 1099, so you'll owe enough at the end of the year to outweigh your deductions for expenses."

"Great advice for the up and coming hero! Big Tech, have anything to add for anyone tuning in who's thinking of taking up a life of crimefighting?"

Eddie shrugged. "I guess just keep in mind you're never as alone as you think you are."

"I love it!" said Martika. "Well, that's our time. Tune in next week, when I'll be interviewing a very special guest specifically on the subject of rogue vigilantism and its intersection with body positivity. You know her, you love her, but for now, I'll keep her a surprise! Good night, and once again, I'm Martika Mitchell." She looked at Eddie expectantly.

"I'm Big Tech."

"And I'm Bombshell, bitch!"

Martika motioned to her sound guy behind one-way glass to cut the feed.

"I think that went well!" she said. "Thank you both for your insights tonight."

"It was a pleasure," said Oriana.

"It had to be said," Eddie agreed.

"Anyway, it's been wonderful to catch up with you, Oriana."