A work of erotic fiction (NSFW). Any resemblance to anything or anyone in the real world is far too much to hope for. Size matters, especially when it’s all in your head. Welcome back, SWM!
Shannon let out a slow breath as she peered around the antique bedroom. A machine beeped softly in a slow cadence beside the still figure in the bed. Shannon had expected a tiny, possibly withered figure. The woman was, after all, well over 100 years old. Instead, the stunning beauty lying there was as fresh and vibrant as the one photo Shannon had seen of her. If the profound curves tenting the blankets didn’t give it away, the long glass-like claymore resting in a stand beside the bed left no doubt. This was her target. The comatose donor that would change everything. Outside the old-money mansion, the morning sun was moments from cresting the Chi-Town skyline.
A new day was coming. One quite unlike the day before.
“Being a sidekick sucks!”
Levie bobbed his head agreeably, the old crow cawing softly, before answering.
“It's not so bad. You’ve helped people as Silver Siphon. Key Keeper has always credited you for some of his toughest victories.”
“I know. But… But I’m always back to square one, Levie. I can knock out even some of the toughest baddos, take someone’s powers and hang on to them until they come around. But the big hitters know not to let me get close. Not after …
While Key Keeper and The Ionic Storm had been going at it for the fate of North America, she’d run into one of The Storm’s henchmen. Rubber Bandit was a stretchy bit of jackass, but he’d gotten under her skin with his juvenile taunts and antics. After the fourth time he’d called her ‘Sissy Siphon’, she’d gotten her hands around his neck and started squeezing. He was basically invulnerable to such things and thought it was funny – until she siphoned him into a very ordinary and very comatose little shit. She normally whammied people for an hour or less, but Bandit had been out for nine days. Nine days she’s had real powers, even if it was just stretching.
She’d also gotten his memories. She was used to flashes when she siphoned someone, a sort of inner mental landscape where bits of their lives played on the canvas of the sky. That was normal, but having his memories for more than a week had given her time to tease out the secrets he tried to hide, crude blackmail fodder that now kept him from ever bothering her again. It had also given her a firsthand appreciation of what a loser he’d been before he’d gotten powers. It made her extremely uncomfortable, this feeling of unwanted kinship with him as another third-string sidekick.
“Well, it’s not like you’re going to kill somebody and make it permanent,” Levie reminded her. The bird had found her after the Rubber Bandit incident. He was cantankerous, a bit lewd, and a very effective distraction when she was trying to get the drop on a henchman or two while one of the Tier Ones asked her along. Once in a while he was even wise.
“No. Of course not.”
“What if they were really, really powerful?”
“That wouldn’t make any difference!” She insisted.
“What if they were a killer?”
“Still wouldn’t make it right.” She announced, her heroic resolve hardening.
“What if they were a brain-dead vegetable?”
“Wait, what?”
“Already gone. In the head. Blank slate.”
“I… huh. I don’t think I’d…”
“What if they were all three?”
“What are you on about, old bird?” Shannon deflected. Truth be told, really, really powerful was exactly what she wanted. Someone Key Keeper would look at with respect and not just be polite to. And Supers didn’t shed a lot of tears when a murderous villain didn’t survive one of their rampages.
And if they were already gone…?
“Just thinking of someone who was nobody’s sidekick. Ever.”
Levie was always looking out for her. It couldn’t hurt to ask.
“Who?”
“Onyx Swan,” the glossy bird croaked.
“Who?”
“Look it up. With your magic tablet.”
“It’s just a phone, old bird. They’re not magic.”
“Sez you,” the bird chortled as she tapped through to Superpedia.
Shannon continued to wonder how a villain she’d never heard of was going to be some incredible prize. The page demanded a password, something she’d never seen on Superpedia before. She held up her phone to the crow. “What’s this?”
“Certain Villain pages are locked. Try 54914020.”
Shannon tapped in the code; the page began loading. The password number seemed familiar, but she couldn’t immediately place it.
ONYX SWAN
Following the header was an old-time black-and-white photo of a stunningly beautiful dark-haired woman with a few feathers wound through her tresses. Her flapper-style outfit was almost unrecognizable draped over her extravagant curves. She’d stand out even in today’s modern field of caped women: a proper 11-out-of-10, no notes.
Shannon’s own powers had come with a hard zero on the heroine curves scale.
Reading further, Shannon was stunned. According to the hidden Superpedia page, Onyx Swan had burst onto the American Supers scene at the beginning of the 1920s. At first, she’d been a solo act, a hedonist who did what she wanted, when she wanted. And she was powerful enough to get away with it. She could fly, there was no known limit to her strength, and she was quite invulnerable.
Shannon salivated a little. Onyx’s powers were like a dream come true. Pure Tier One.
She’d gained national attention when she’d stolen an entire bank vault… and most of the bank with it, flying away with the crumbling building. That led to a brief skirmish with the United States military that ended badly for several battalions and left bits of tanks and airplanes strewn across most of southern Chicago. While the government backed off, the superheroes of the era tried their luck. She’s trampled a couple of the heavy hitters so casually she didn’t even bother to kill them. In particular, John Venture, the Iron Sun, proclaimed a bitter rivalry until he conceded defeat after his 7th time trying to bring Onyx Swan to justice.
Despite her obvious power, she’d restricted her activities to taking over Chicago’s underworld. More challenging than it might sound, since apparently the city’s toughest organized crime family was led by an actual demon prince. Rumors claimed she’d slapped the demon into submission – literal servitude. Afterward, she appeared less frequently, wielding a massive crystalline claymore when she was in more of a killing mood. She’d become the unchallenged queen of Chicago’s seedier side, but allowed the conventional city to continue to operate mostly unmolested. For the next 25 years. History the city had buried.
The page said she’d ceased activities in February, 1945.
Shannon gasped. No one who knew their Supers-history could fail to recognize its significance. The Green Blast. The end of the ‘pulp supers’ era. John Venture had stolen the third atom bomb prototype, the Gray Grandpa, and set it off on the outskirts of New Orleans. Most of the Tier One heroes at the time died in the blast, having been lured to the city by the Iron Sun.
Had Onyx Swan been there?
Had Onyx Swan been the target!?
Shannon looked at Levie. “This … This is incredible. But how does it help me? She’s amazing,” Shannon shivered with envy at such power. “But she’s dead.”
“No, she’s not. Not quite. And I know where to find her.”
Shannon reached out, wrapping her hand around Onyx Swan’s slender wrist, wondering if those sleek feminine muscles still held limitless strength 80 years later.
Shannon gasped while the form on the bed didn’t even twitch.
It wasn’t power, but unimaginable potential that she felt flooding into her. Her flesh felt… hungry.
An unseen zephyr stirred the curtains and a golden shaft of morning sunlight struck her with unanticipated violence, her cells drinking in the light like she’d been dying of a thirst she’d never known.
Her flesh surged, swelled, and smoothed. Bones cracked and spread and lengthened, her head slowly rising as her figure became a masterpiece of femme fatale seduction. Her scalp itched as a handful of long white feathers grew in amongst her milk-white hair.
She was gorgeous!
Shannon could feel it: this was permanent! Even if she let go now, let this power slip away, the changes they’re wrought on her would endure. She could stop, be devastatingly beautiful and morally untarnished.
Or she could have it all.
She gripped tighter, and now it was power flooding into her. Not just strength and flight; dozens of other superhuman abilities unrecorded even by secret history blossomed inside her.
Her gasp of pleasure created a vacuum so intense it imploded the windows, sending sparkling glass shards dancing through the air like a snow globe, scything her clothes from her invulnerable flesh. Her moans of ecstasy as supersonic bits of glass turned to dust on impact with her breasts shook the entire mansion to its foundation.
So! Much! Power!
Shannon awoke in a strange landscape. The ground was a soft and slightly yielding ivory. Ghostly, nearly transparent fronds lay almost parallel to the ground in a thin and sparse carpet. In one direction, two vast pillars of the ivory material rose to dizzying heights, seemingly leaning away from her and each other. In the other direction, in the distance, a pair of enormous conical mounds rose fifty times her height into the sky. Facing them, to her right, a shallow ditch like a dry riverbed ran past her, seemingly connecting the two formations dominating the horizon. She stumbled but caught herself. The ground was moving, rolling slowly like a gentle sea.
Above her, the sky was painted with a kaleidoscope of strange flashes and recollections. Images of an impossibly beautiful city, crystalline tower gleaming under a dull red sky. The image shifted to a first-person perspective looking up at a beautiful black-haired woman as she adjusted something beyond the sides of the field of view, then stepped away, before a huge prism on the ceiling filled the room with golden light. She couldn’t shake the feeling the woman was her mother.
Shannon felt her magnificent body reacting to the golden glow, much as she had in the hospital room, the energy infusing and caressing her—golden sunlight on a world under a red star.
“Go, my precious.” The woman’s words echoed across a lifetime.
The landscape went dark, and the sky became a field of stars rushing past, until one yellow star suddenly locked into the center of the field. Jupiter whipped past, and now the viewpoint was looking down on Earth. Suddenly the viewpoint shot down into Chicago. A violent blast and then she was peering out of a shallow crater as shocked and terrified Second City citizens milled around her.
“Now that was a good day,” a vast, rich voice called out.
Enormous cliffs rose up on either side of Shannon, parallel to the ditch. The ground shifted as an enormous face rose between the paired mounds, beautiful with glossy black tresses interspersed with dark feathers.
Onyx Swan’s face.
Shannon’s perspective suddenly snapped into place. The pillars were thighs, the cliffs, the Swan’s arms. The mounds… well, obviously. She was on the titanic woman’s belly.
“What are you doing?” Shannon struggled to remain calm as a huge hand came sweeping across the belly-plain towards her.
“I’m unpacking, dear. It's frightfully empty in here.”
Above them, a classy office decorated in art deco shook in time with the thunder of a pale, graceful hand repeatedly slapping the face of a demon in a business suit. “Don’t touch my things, Levandevar.” The demon pleaded for mercy, offered eternal servitude if only to be spared.
Shannon did scream when the massive hand snatched her up.
She shot upwards across the giantess’s body, pinched between thumb and forefinger. The huge face looked at her quizzically. “No threats? No defiance? This is a test of wills, you know.”
Shannon screamed again.
Bored, the villainess popped the youth who had killed her in her mouth and swallowed.
“Truly, banter is a lost art.” She shrugged, her psyche settling into her new residence.
Floating in the center of her bedroom, Onyx Swan looked down at her corpse. That was something new.
The child had underestimated herself, badly. Swan had been uncertain anything could kill her, and decades of agony as her innards churned with that hideous green radiation from John’s meteorite-enhanced atomic bomb had been a life barely worth living. But there were forces bound to her, forces tireless in seeking a cure.
As if summoned by the thought, the unseen breeze coalesced into a slightly shabby crow.
“Mistress?” it croaked.
The world’s most powerful living being caressed herself, quite satisfied with this new flesh. The strands of her psyche that had been Shannon were eager to reveal her body and her powers to the wider world. The child had underestimated her, even more badly. But she did have delicious fantasies that were, Swan was forced to admit, rather more exuberant than those of a shy alien girl who had rarely left the city she’d adopted.
“Well done, Levandevar.” She drifted down, graceful fingers stroking the crystal sword in its stand. A weapon as unbreakable as the pact between them. She idly twirled a finger in her milky hair. That was also something new. More Opal than Onyx now. An impulse for mischief quite unlike her bubbled up in her thoughts.
“We’re going to have such fun, Levie!” Shannon’s glee echoed in the gleaming light.