chapter 3.2

Like a mom or a therapist, Ms. Freeman opened the floor. "Would you like to talk about it?"

"You must not been following the story when I got my name. I was still a student at hero school," said Oriana. "I'd been working on my costume and decided I would go out and try to save some folks. So I turned up at this What-A-Chicken in the middle of a robbery. The perp had the cashier at gunpoint, and it only took me one second to make him too fat to hold his gun. We're talking maybe 900 pounds? And then...then, Blackwater's Finest show up. They tell me to change the perp back so they can transport him, and I thought I could. So I reduce him a little, but he starts letting out these screams of pain...so I stopped." She drew a tense breath. This was the part of the story that got really hard to tell, but if she and the councilwoman were going to share a common agenda, it felt right to lay it all bare. "The cops were all, 'What are you doing?' And I just froze...I guess an intestine had wrapped around a vital organ or something…I still don't know. And this was before I knew I could make myself bulletproof. Before I got as good as I am with my powers. And they threatened me. You gotta understand, as far as I knew, I didn't have no choice!" Dammit, her eyes were moist now. She forced herself to get it together. "I tried to slim the poor fucker down a bit more, but something was wrong, and before I knew it…" She made a gesture with both hands to approximate a mushroom cloud. "Ka-splat. I still dream about it." She wasn't proud of how she had earned the moniker 'Bombshell,' but it had stuck.

Ms. Freeman put a hand on her shoulder. "It wasn't your fault. And if I have my way, nothing like that will ever happen again."

"Thanks," said Oriana. "But I'm still confused."

"Whatever about?"

"Why you care." She'd never told that story before--not to the media, not Twitter, and certainly not to the current commissioner. Nobody cared.

"Bombshell, look at me?"

She gazed into Jasmine's eyes and watched them flash electric blue before returning to their original shade of brown. "We have to stick together, don't we?"

Oriana raised the last drops of wine in her glass: "Here, here."

That night, when she got home, she got on Twitter and posted:

"Cleaning up the city starts with cleaning up the police force. That's why Jasmine Freeman has my vote for police commissioner in the coming election."

***

Bombshell was loved and hated in equal parts in Blackwater City. There were some, like Jasmine Freeman, who thought that she was doing the good Lord's work, saving innocent lives and stopping would-be and could-be killers in a way that left them alive and with their minds intact. (There were times, even, when she and her Twitter supporters even sympathized with a robber or two. Everyone had bills to pay. What a shame that some were so desperate that they would consider taking human life...but in those cases, maybe she'd done them a favor, fattening them up like she did. They could always get a job as a fat fetish cam model, or at the circus, once the law was done with them.)

Then there were those who saw her as a pervert, a monster, and a disgrace to the name of vigilantism.

Ms. Freeman wholeheartedly believed that Bombshell's endorsement would secure her tons of votes. So far, it had proven polarizing. For every person who saw Bombshell as a force of good, there was another who viewed the fattening as an unjust sentence without due process of the law. But what was Oriana supposed to do? Let people shoot each other?

Her unconventional methods were motivated ultimately by the optimism at her soft, bleeding-heart core.

That and her desire to see a great big fatty jiggle, jiggle, jiggle.

Ms. Freeman was leading the polls, but only barely.

There were also those longtime supporters of Bombshell who were quirking an eyebrow at her latest move. One follower had Tweeted @ her over the weekend: "We communist now?" To which she had responded, "I'm not a communist, I just agree with the candidate that justice is better left in the hands of people who actually care about justice." She still didn't see herself answering to a city authority, but maybe Earthquake Gal or The Flying Missile or that Catboy fellow would step up to the plate.

And, of course, the police department was up in arms, but what were they going to do, arrest her, risking their waistlines in the process? Besides, the last time she had checked, free speech was still a thing, even if they didn't like it.

Oriana tried to put all thoughts of politics aside as she pulled up at her aunt and uncle's house. It was the Fourth of July, and cookouts in the Taylor-Moore household were a big deal, despite rising family tensions in the recent years. Already, she saw her cousin D'von's sleek black Audi parked in the street, along with her parents' humble green SUV.

She let herself into the backyard to find D'von barbecuing by the pool while his younger brother, Ben, about to be a sophomore at Bellvue, drank a beer he was definitely too young to be drinking...but they were on private property.

And what private property it was. Uncle Jerome, the boys' father, made a stressed but lucrative living as a neurosurgeon, while Aunt Bedelia designed expensive women's shoes. The house was a sprawling five-bedroom behemoth with an immaculate white brick wall enclosing its equally spacious yard. Oriana was jarred every time she came here; her father was a switchboard operator turned freight driver once the telecom market crashed, her mother a receptionist for a shipping and receiving company. Oriana herself lived alone in a third-floor shoebox a fifteen minute drive from work. Fire escape, pay-to-play laundry machines, the works.

"Well, look who it is," said D'von as she approached with her tray of hastily-prepared but expertly seasoned deviled eggs, which she set down on a table. "Blackwater's own Bombshell gone political. Next thing we know you'll be running for Congress!"

"Keep your voice down, you'll blow my cover!"

"What? Even if our parents do find out, I can just make 'em forget."

D'von and Ben were the only ones who knew of Oriana's double life. Her parents and relatives, of course, knew about her biomanipulation, but they hadn't put two and two together about her and Bombshell and she wasn't about to spell it out for them. Even if someone she pissed off found out who she was and kidnapped her parents, there was a chance, however small, that they'd be released if they knew nothing. But the boys weren't defenseless.

If D'von had direct eye contact with someone, he was, by Oriana's guess, a mind controller powerful enough to rival Scarlet Flame, despite having never been trained. A lot of folks with these 'invisible powers' were never found out by their families, and as a result, never tested or marked for hero school. He could have been the next president if he wanted to, despite only being 26, but he was content to work as a bar manager and finesse extravagant tips out of his customers to hold down a mortgage on a medium-sized two story house he shared with Ben, because Aunt Bedelia was too scared of her younger son to let him live at home.

Ben's powers had manifested right before Oriana's, despite her being four years his senior. It had started with an eighty pound weight gain despite him never feeling hungry and rarely eating, which the doctor had initially written off as caused by a thyroid issue, until one night at dinner he regurgitated a white-hot ball of lightning.

As it turned out, he was feeding off of the emotional energy of the people around him and had the ability to channel it into electrical energy, which was unprecedented as far as superpowers went. They'd had to coin a new term for him: "electro-empath." If he didn't use the energy, though, his body converted it into blood glucose. He was probably pushing 300 now, if Oriana's eye was as good as she thought it was.

"True, I've seen you work your magic," said Oriana as she watched D'von remove a pair of beef skewers from the grill that still looked raw. "What are you doing?" She winced. "They're dripping!"

"Yeah, well, you know Mom. She'd order a live cow at a restaurant if she could."

D'von cooked up more skewers of both the shrimp and beef variety (Oriana asked for hers done at least medium well; as vicious as she could be in a fight against bad guys, she wasn't literally thirsty for blood), while she shot the breeze with Ben.

"When does school start back up?"

"The eighteenth of next month. I think I'm gonna join the robotics club."

"Following my footsteps into computer science, huh? Color me flattered."

"Yeah, I'm still working on controlling the lightning thing, but if I can get a grip on these powers, they might even help me with the robot building."

"That's the spirit!" She turned to D'von now. "How's work at the restaurant?"

"Great! I just hired a new barback. She's great. She's one of us, too."

"You mean she has powers? Or that she's a you-know-what?"

"Senior attending Bellvue starting this year. She's transferring in from Rivington. Badass telepath. Between her reading minds and me controlling them, we're an unstoppable force down at Antonio's. But yeah, she's also, you know, that other thing. You might get along, she needs a good female role model to talk about this stuff with."

Ben chugged the rest of his beer. "How do you people find each other?"

Oriana felt for Ben. It had to be awkward--he'd been uncomfortable with his body ever since the extra weight came on, and here he was living with D'von, an obvious chubby chaser with a long and illustrious history of bringing home SSBBWs, as they were called in the community, and he had Bombshell, the notorious fattening femme fatale, for a cousin. And now D'von had a partner in crime at work...and Oriana knew, just from talking so much shop herself with D'von about hypothetically picking up thick cuties, that feeders tended to encourage one another to pursue their particular brand of debauchery…it probably wouldn't have been so bad for Ben if not for the fact that he could taste feelings.

"You good?" she asked Ben, but she never got an answer. Uncle Jerome and Aunt Bedelia had come over to see how lunch was progressing.

"D'von, this all looks delicious! You got a real talent," said Jerome, while Bedelia helped herself, with a stumble in her step, to a skewer of borderline raw meat, which she dropped clumsily onto her plate.

Great, so she was already drunk. This didn't bode well.

"Oriana, dear, how's work?" she said, slurring as she threw her free arm around her niece's shoulders.

"It's good, I guess."

"Your mother was just telling me that that manager of yours might be moving on soon. In that case, can I see a p-r-o-motion in your future?"

"Don't know why we have to spell it like that, but yeah, if Dan leaves I'm the one's gonna take his job." She had mentioned it in passing to her mom over the phone, but it wasn't a big deal. Dan might not even leave.

"And I suppose they'll pay for you to get that cyber security certification and fly you all over the country!"

"Yeah, I'll have to take my CISSP, which they'll reimburse me for, and I'll have to go to Defcon and the Gartner conference," Oriana nodded. To be honest, she was kind of hoping Dan didn't quit. She had yet to work out the logistics of a job that required her to travel. Yes, she wanted a promotion...but she would rather take Tom's job. He got to stay put. She knew it was unlikely for anyone to notice that Bombshell was only active when Oriana Taylor-Moore was in town and put two and two together, but there was a non-zero chance. Besides, taking Dan's job would mean having to deal with Tom more.

"How glamorous!" said Bedelia with a pointed look at D'von. "See, this is why you need to get a real job, like your cousin! She's moving up in life, while you're still working at that cheap bar."

"Hey, let's not forget, I'm a whole manager."

"A bar manager," said Bedelia. "Which is basically a bartender with a set of keys."

"And where would you be without your bartenders?" Jerome muttered under his breath, but she didn't hear him. Yeah, that relationship was strained. Oriana would give them another two years tops. In fact, she'd put money on it.

"If my job ain't a 'real job,' how you explain how I pay my fake mortgage with my fake checks?" asked D'von.

"And Ben!" Bedelia rounded now on her nineteen-year-old. "Don't you get too comfortable at that shoddy convenience store. Ori, back me up!"

"It's just a summer job for him. In fact, Ben was just now telling me how he's interested in computer science, like his big cousin," said Oriana, trying her best to mitigate while she worked herself out from under her aunt's pale, spindly arm. "But how is work for you, Aunt B? Must be sweet, life of a designer and all."

"Oh, it's awful." Bedelia bent down and helped herself to another beer. "All the fashion world wants to talk about is how that fat-loving freak show gave herself a costume upgrade."

"Her name's Bombshell, and I say, if you got it, flaunt it," said D'von, as if she wasn't his cousin and standing right in front of him. She thanked him with her eyes for the small effort to maintain her cover.

"She's a menace!" exclaimed Bedelia. "And now she's getting into politics? Politics! I agree about the police brutality...someone needs to keep them from going on killing sprees. But the solution is NOT to let superpowered nut jobs run the streets! I'll give that trollop this, though, at least she can control her powers." She gave Ben a hard poke in the shoulder and glared at him.

Oriana fought to contain the rage boiling in her on her little cousin's behalf. She couldn't blow up her aunt Harry Potter style and say goodbye to her cover. Besides, Ben was practically gagging on her rage over there. She took a deep breath in...out…

"I need to talk to the boys over there," she said, and led them away from the pool.

"Look," she told them, "None of us need to take this abuse. What do you say we go back to mine? I got a bottle of Remy with our names on it…"

Oriana's mother waved from the other side of the yard. "Leaving already? We haven't even gotten to talk!"

"Yeah, well...Aunt B needs to be cut off!" Oriana shouted.

She glanced over her shoulder. Aunt B and Uncle Jerome were arguing. She turned back to the cousins. "What'll it be?"

"Sounds good...you're not gonna run off on us and be like 'duty calls,' though?"

Oriana sighed. "Can't rule it out."

The boys got into their own car.

It was a quiet night. Oriana kept the police radio running, but nothing happened, and she eventually fell asleep on her couch after pleasuring herself to the local news replay of the national hot dog eating contest.