chapter 1

"The streets run rampant with gossip--"

"What is this woman thinking?"

"She calls herself a superhero?"

"The rogue vigilante operating under the name of Bombshell--"

"Can you believe this?"

"This just in, another five criminals fattened to immense proportions--!"

"I mean, look at this, Gerry. It's ludicrous."

"IT'S INSANE!"

"What gives one woman the right to play God with the criminal justice system--"

"The name on everybody's lips is Bombshell, Blackwater City, and we have one question about the fattening femme fatale: is she a hero? Or menace?"

***

Car horns honked aggressively, drivers shouted and rain pitter-pattered on the street below the generic gray, asbestos-ridden office building. Pedestrians fought for space, fought for cover, fought for taxis. And yet...the outdoors held an enviable, dewey bliss, not to be smelled or touched.

Everyone hated Mondays. Oriana didn't get it. Mondays were when she got to come back to Cyber Security, Inc. well-rested, with fresh eyes for her work, maybe a little hungover--blame her best friend, Scarlet Flame.

It was Tuesdays she detested. Tuesdays tended to drag, every hour reminding her of just how far away the following weekend was. It wasn't the work she minded. She actually found penetration testing exciting. It was like solving a puzzle in code, until you finally found the solution and slipped past the firewall protecting a major retailer's online user interface, or a medical billing company's records. Writing the report on how she'd done it was a bit of a snore, but she got those done fast.

She just despised working at a desk.

She was the kind of person who wanted to be on her feet, running around and doing things.

That was why she had tricked out the radio app on her laptop to pick up signals from the police radio.

It was Tuesday. She was listening in on the city's activity--a drunk driver here, a drug bust there--while she worked on her latest report at that horrid little desk when Tom Delancey, the chief technological officer, approached her station. "Oriana, the credit union is extending their deadline on that report. They want you to test their internal security in addition to the user login you've already done. You have until Friday now."

"Bet," she said reflexively and continued working.

"I'm sorry, what's that mean again?"

For the third damn time this week.

She held up a flash drive. "Here's what I got done, send me the deets via email on what you need, and I'm not staying late." She had a lot more she wanted to say, but she bit her tongue. She had her pride, but she liked being able to pay the rent.

But she could still indulge in a little trash talk. DeAndre in the cubicle across from hers, another analyst a few shades darker than she was who could talk to the boss like he went to Yale but dropped the act whenever it was just the two of them conversating, poked his head above the gray partition--it wasn't very tall, in fact, you could easily have a chat face to face with your neighbor if you stood up--and said, "Man, is he a piece a shit or what?"

"Can't kill us without a badge no more so they gotta assert dominance somehow," Oriana agreed.

The little redhead in the cubicle next to her stood up and said, "Maybe he genuinely needed an honest translation. Not all white people are like that."

"Oh, I know, Melissa, I know. My mama's white--or 'anglo-saxon', if you prefer--and I love her very much. See, I could never be racist against white folks," said Oriana with a saccharine smile. She tried. Oh, she tried to be unerringly polite. But once in a while, work pushed her over the edge and she got vicious.

"But you literally just said--"

"Look, sweetie. Talk to me once I'm done getting my degree in second grade education."

DeAndre chuckled and sunk back into his cubicle.

Just as Oriana was finishing her report, something of interest came on the radio: "...Three gunmen with eleven hostages and counting...we need backup, do you copy?"

"The hell y'all do," said Oriana, closing her laptop. She stood and peeked into DeAndre's cubicle. "Tell Dan I'm going on my lunch break. I'll be back in an hour."

During the workday, Oriana left her costume in the car she kept parked on an otherwise unused floor of the office tower next door, which the owner of the building let her do because what was he going to do, say no to Bombshell? She was down the stairs of her own building and up the steps to 'the Fatmobile', as the press of Blackwater City had nicknamed it, in record time. It was a whippy little sports car done up in a white and orange paint job reminiscent of America's most beloved breastaurant. She slid into the driver's seat, peeled off her pink sweater set and khakis, and squeezed into the white and orange latex catsuit that the city had come to recognize as the garb of Bombshell.

With a bit of concentration, she slimmed her waist and slightly adjusted her muscle tone. At the office and at home, she looked how she wanted to look: soft, comfortable, approachable. She had great T and A, but allowing herself a slight tummy that formed a roll when she sat made her look less intimidating.

On the battlefield, though, intimidating was exactly what she was going for. That, and she needed to reduce herself a little for the damn suit to fit. She'd first put it together in college, and it had been a couple years.

The T and A were staying, though. They were of practical use as a distraction to the enemy.

Biomanipulation--that was the name of the power she had to control her own body and that of every living thing around her. For a while, she had no idea she had powers. It never struck her as weird that she never got sick and anytime her parents or cousins got sick, they didn't stay that way longer than an hour after she found out. Then she started dating in her senior year of high school, and every boy she went out with put on about forty pounds within a week.

What could she say? She could appreciate a nice big thickie.

What happened with her boyfriends was bizarre enough that her dad took her to get tested. Apparently, something like this had happened to her little cousin, too. Sure enough, when they got to the special clinic, she received a diagnosis of Genetic Deviant and was marked for super university.

In theory, she could have been a full shapeshifter, but she'd never studied up that much in school. Things like eye color, skin color--you needed to know how to rewrite DNA for that. Body composition, though? That was easy.

Cowl and aviator goggles in place over her eyes and her short, tight curls, she reversed out of the parking space and sped out of the lot.

Nobody could negotiate Blackwater City traffic like Bombshell. She wove effortlessly between cars at 30 above the speed limit, but no one dared pull her over. They knew what she could do to them.

8 minutes had her at the bank where the hostage situation was taking place. The number of hostages had grown to exceed twenty. The three masked gunmen had them, customers and tellers alike, on their knees, gagged, with their hands bound behind their backs. Seven police cars surrounded the building from the front. Ugh. She didn't feel like letting them slow her down. She pulled up around back and slipped inside through the back door. There was always a service entrance, and it was mercifully unlocked this time. One of the employees had probably used it to escape before things had gotten nasty.

The ringleader of the robbers was shouting through a megaphone that if the police didn't leave in five minutes, they were going to start shooting hostages. Bombshell sauntered right up behind the oblivious crook and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around, recognized her from the tabloids, and immediately froze in terror, dropping his megaphone.

In seconds, he and his two goons had dropped their weapons and swelled to immense proportions, tearing out of their clothes and collapsing onto the tile floor as they became too fat for their legs to support them. The police rushed in as she was cutting the hostages out of their zip ties with the pocket knife she kept at her belt. "Thank you, Bombshell!" said a woman as Bombshell removed her gag.

"Yeah, nice save," said an officer. "Now, mind changing them back so we can put them in cuffs?"

"Who said I could do that? You ever seen me do that?" She could...she just wouldn't. Not after last time. She freed another hostage and said, "Sides, you don't gotta worry. They ain't going nowhere."

"And how are we supposed to transport 800-pound suspects?"

"Rent a truck?" Bombshell suggested.

"That's it!" one of the cops suddenly exclaimed. "A non-cooperative superhero is no good to us at all!"

"I wouldn't do that," said one of his cop buddies.

"Come on, dude, don't waste your ammo," agreed Bombshell.

But the jumpy lawman cocked his weapon anyway. "You're no hero! You're nothing but a perverted freak!" With that, he shot her.

Blackwater's Finest indeed.

The bullet tore a small gash in her suit where it hit her in the stomach, but it ricocheted off her skin and hit the ground with a disappointing ping. Of course she had thought to make her skin bulletproof before walking into a gunfight with a knife. She wasn't an idiot.

"That all?"

"I...I…"

It only took a little concentration on her part to get his fat cells swelling.

The officer looked down at his fattening body in horror. "Please, Bombshell--!"

"What?"

The growth stopped right before his uniform buttons could pop off, but they were close. "Hmm...I finally get the appeal of the sexy cop fetish," said Bombshell. With a sardonic laugh, she pushed him and let him fall onto his side, flailing, before glaring at his buddies in turn.

"Imma head to Taco Shack. Y'all want me to bring you back anything?"

Silence.

Crickets.

"Didn't think so."

***

Returning to her desk, Oriana said, "There's donuts in the break room. I brought them for the department. D, feel free to help yourself." She always brought snacks for the analytics department when she left the building for lunch to make up for leaving them as crippled as they were when she was gone--only two years into this job and she was already the most competent one on the team. DeAndre was smart, but tended to struggle when conventional methods failed him. Melissa was sloppy in her work. Dan, the department head, was definitely more of a manager than an expert in testing. He had been promoted into his position about ten years back and his knowledge of the technical side of the work was outdated. As for Tom, he saw himself above the commoner's task of examining code.

"Girl, you're never gonna believe what happened while you was out!" DeAndre reached over the partition to hand her his phone. Onscreen was a Twitter thread where someone had Tweeted @BombshellOfficial: "YAAAAS QUEEN," with a link to an article whose headline read, "Bombshell Rescues Hostages, Fattens Officer who Opened Fire On Her"

BombshellOfficial had ReTweeted it with the caption, "Thanks for the mad props but don't do as I do, kids. If you do not have bulletproof skin do not agitate the cops, because they will shoot you, and you will die. #acab"

She'd hashed that out while waiting at the drive-thru window.

"Oh, I saw that, when I was at China Harbor," she said, making a point to drop the name of the Chinese buffet since everyone had seen the Fatmobile pull up at Taco Shack.

"I don't know about this Bombshell character," said Melissa, standing up to join the conversation. "Shouldn't superheroes cooperate with the cops?"

Oriana rolled her eyes. "Lemme ask you a sincere question, Melissa: what is your favorite flavor of boot?"

"Look, all I'm saying is that there can't just be anarchy in the streets!"

"There's already anarchy in the streets! The question is, where do we stand?"

"Look, I just think it's gross, okay? Running around the city making people fat."

"And rescuing people!" Dammit! She told herself she wasn't going to engage with Melissa.

"Wait a minute, Ori," DeAndre interjected with a wide, white-toothed grin. "Spitfire personality...you obviously like feeding us...and I ain't never seen you and Bombshell in a room together…" He could hardly contain his laughter, but he had no idea how spot-on his little joke was.

"You ain't never seen me and Senator Burgess in a room together, but that don't make me the Miami Impaler." Of course, the senator from Florida probably wasn't the Miami Impaler, but the off-the-wall conspiracy theory had become a meme in popular culture. "Besides," said Oriana, giving the side of her starter belly a soft pat, "I don't got the body to be squeezing into a suit like that."