Super Sales on Super Heroes

Chapter 1 - Not So Black Market -

Felix couldn’t keep himself still. He practically gyrated with nervous energy. He jumped at every noise in the alley. From a mouse scratching at cardboard to a streetlamp that started to buzz.

This is a bad idea. Stupid idea. Trying to buy something from the black market.

Well. The not-so-black market anymore. What exactly do you call a black market when a supervillain runs your city?

He very nearly shouted in alarm when the garage door behind him opened abruptly, the chain rattling as it moved.

A black man in a dark brown trench coat was waiting for him on the inside.

He looked about Felix’s age.

Well, maybe not. He’s a bit younger? Maybe like five years younger? Call it twenty-five?

He looked like any number of people you’d pass on the street and never give a second glance to. He might just barely hit six foot, or so Felix thought, measuring him against the frame of the garage door.

The man’s posture was relaxed, his hands in his pockets, watching Felix with a partial frown.

“You’re a little early there, Felix,” the man said in a smooth baritone. “It is Felix, right?”

“Yeah! Felix, Felix Campbell. Pleasure to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand.

The man stared back at him, his eyes flicking from Felix’s hand and back to his face.

“I, uh, I came early with the van,” he said, gesturing to the unmarked vehicle next to him.”

“So I noticed.”

“I didn’t want to be late. I can’t stand being late. Though I think coming early didn’t do me any favors for my nerves, sorry,” Felix apologized lamely.

The man smirked at that and then chuckled softly. “Yeah, I hear that. I wouldn’t want to stand around in this alley much longer either. Snidely’s come prowlin’ often enough. Come on.”

“Snidely?” Felix asked, stepping quickly to catch up to the man.

Felix was by no means a short man, but nor was he tall. Sitting at an unimpressive five foot eight, he was as average as you could be.

The clack of the man’s polished shoes echoed dully. Realizing how immaculately dressed the man was, Felix felt like a slob in his work uniform, minus nametag.

“Snidely? Snidely Whiplash? You know, villain? Great ‘stache? Dorights and Snidelys? Never mind.” The man shook his head.

“Sorry. I don’t watch TV. What channel is it on?” Felix asked. Then he shook his head. He had to get this done and get it done right. He needed this. “Actually. Forget that. What do I call you?”

“You don’t,” said the man, stepping up to a rectangular wooden crate. On top of that crate was a black box and a sheet of white paper. “I call you.”

Felix took a breath and then pulled out a wad of money from his pocket. This deal had cost him two thousand. What little he had left after that was in his hand in a roll, amounting up to three hundred dollars.

All that he had till his next paycheck.

“Then maybe you can call me when you get similar merchandise in the future.”

Damn, that sounded good! At least I think it did.

The man tilted his head to one side and then smiled widely at Felix, showing a set of bright white teeth. Taking the money from Felix’s hand, he nodded his head, thumbing back the twenties.

“Well alright. I can do that. Call me Marcus, it’ll do for today,” said the man now known as Marcus, putting the wad of money in his pocket. “As for the market, no buyers for this stuff. You’re already paying basement price of what it cost to get it here and out of where it was with only a slim margin for us. So I’ll keep you in mind, but no promises.”

Marcus turned and picked up the black box and the paper, then handed both to Felix.

“Ownership papers and one owner’s box. We call ‘em Pits. Go ahead and stick your finger in that hole,” Marcus explained, holding out the box.

“Uh, shouldn’t the seller put their finger in first for these?” Felix had heard about them. Apparently, Pits were well regarded for transactions among supers, since they had a magical element to them.

“Not for this purchase. For future purchases, we can just use this Pit again. Now go ahead and get that paw up here…”

Felix lifted his index finger and slipped it into the hole.

He felt the sting before he even thought about what was going to happen.

“All done. You’ll feel that tomorrow,” Marcus said, shaking his head with a grin. Turning his head, Marcus whistled at a forklift that was sitting dormant in the side of the warehouse.

Felix flinched as the vehicle came to life. He hadn’t even noticed it. In fact, he hadn’t even looked around at what he’d walked into.

Way to go, idiot.

Marcus pointed to the van. “You go hop in and wait. We’ll get this loaded up in a second.” The man hesitated for a second, then continued, “You know, I’m glad someone’s buying this. We were considering tossing it into the river, but… that never works out.”

“I should think not. It wouldn’t be as bad as, say, lead, but it’d eventually create some problems with the water,” Felix said, nodding his head.

A big shipment of bismuth really could cause problems. I mean, how do you explain buying a shipment of heavy metal that then ends up in a river?

Marcus looked at him in a strange way at that and then laughed with a wave of his hand. “See you later, Felix. You’re a strange cat.”

Felix wasn’t quite sure what to make of that exchange, but he waved back.

“Later, Marcus.”

Felix hurried off back to the panel van and got in. The forklift operator went about his business and had Felix loaded up in under a minute.

There was a smack on the rear door, and then the garage started sliding shut a second later.

Felix adjusted his mirror, catching a look at himself in the process. He looked pale. Pale as ever. His gray eyes stared back at him. Listless.

Even his hair looked defeated. Limp. It hung on him in its way, the brown strands overly worked with hair gel.

He looked incredibly tired for a thirty-year-old.

We’re changing that. Starting with this. We can do this. We saved, we scrimped, and now we’ll succeed.

Popping the radio back on, Felix pulled out into the alleyway.

“Tonight, we have a guest speaker from our new leader’s cabinet. Please wel—”

Felix cursed as he jammed the brakes. A superhero in a costume stumbled out in front of him from a side alley.

The van clipped the caped crusader and sent him spinning.

At the same instant, another costumed weirdo appeared. That person pounced on the hero as they stumbled back from the van and began plunging a knife into their chest over and over.

Felix kept his eyes straight on the road and hit the gas again.

“Didn’t see anything. Didn’t see a super being murdered. Nope, not a thing,” Felix said, staring straight ahead.

The closest Felix had been to crime was watching the loan shark across the street from his work operate.

Even that felt too close for comfort sometimes.

Ever since the supers in charge of the city’s defense had lost, it’d become open season. Anyone not in line with the new power structure was free game.

Which was pretty much every and any superhero out there. There’d been a mass exodus and only a few had remained. And of those who remained, the vast majority were poor slobs who thought that they could tough it out till relief came.

In fact, a lot of people said the relief had come at the same time as the original attack.

Which made sense; no one else ever came.

Felix doubted anyone else would come at this point.

For people like Felix, the everyday man, life hadn’t changed much from the turnover.

Vice laws, like slavery, prostitution, and drugs, were legalized. They were now given government protection, and were expected to meet the same or similar regulations that other markets had.

And let’s not forget taxes.

Taxes were of course levied on all those vices. Being legal, the price had rapidly inflated, crashed, then flatlined. The city raked in the cash and started immediately spending it back on city programs.

Like drug rehabilitation centers.

Then Skipper, the villain now in charge, had promptly lowered income taxes. Since there were no federal taxes anymore, that meant people overall were paying significantly less, unless they were partaking of the new legal frivolities.

Which set off another round of vice spending and purchasing in general.

Suddenly, not only were the heroes not receiving support, but if anything, they were being asked to leave.

Or hunted and killed.

“—to be here, Mike! I’d like to start off by reminding everyone we have a ten-grand reward for anyone with information leading to the capture of a hero. Five grand for a kill with the body as proof.”

Or hunted, apparently.

The audience cheered at that reminder. Felix had heard something about that but had brushed it off as rumors. Apparently, it wasn’t.

“As our government is only here in this city, we need to secure ourselves. The longer we have threats inside, the longer it takes us to begin to branch outward,” said the guest.

“I heard that one of the first cities we’ll be taking is—”

“Now, now, Mike. You know I can’t talk about that. Though speaking of targets, I’d like to warn our listeners out there: Violence towards the other humanoid races, such as Dwarves, Beastkin, or anything other than a Human, won’t be tolerated. It’ll be punished. Severely.”

“No arguments here! Glad to hear justice will be applied evenly.

“I heard the old federal government isn’t even bothering us anymore. That they’ve left the recapture of our city to the Guild of Heroes. Is that true?”

“It is, it is. Skipper is regularly on patrol and watching for anything. So far, they haven’t retaken an inch.”

Tired of the political whitewash he was sure was going on, Felix flipped the radio to an eighties station and drove onward.

Shutting the door with a thump, Felix looked around the spacious garage. Much like every other area in this house, it had the feel of his family. It was their house, after all. He was merely living here as the clock ticked down on them being proclaimed dead. Death in absentia.

They were at year seven of ten.

His aunt and uncle had simply up and left one night when Felix was twenty-three. Give or take a few months.

Leaving him alone in a home that had been paid off completely. Their bank accounts, stock, and everything else was being managed by a group of lawyers through a trust.

He had rights in the trust to insure they weren’t spending money frivolously, but he had no rights to the money itself.

Sighing, Felix moved around to the rear of the van.

“This’ll change everything. Once I get this squared away,” Felix said to himself, opening the rear doors. “Then I can quit. Quit that hellhole of a job and just… just do whatever. Yeah. Whatever.

“Sit around, pick my nose, and watch game shows all day.”

Felix grabbed the edge of the rectangular box and heaved once. It slid out by a foot.

It was at this moment that he realized he had no way to get it from the bed of the van to the garage floor.

A quick hunt of the garage got him the motorcycle ramp his uncle owned.

Wedging it against the van, and getting it in a stable place, he heaved on the crate again.

Groaning, it slid free of the van, hit the motorcycle ramp, and slid down it.

Wood cracked and popped when it hit the floor. It managed to come to a stop the same moment it came off the ramp.

Felix sighed and closed the van doors and put the ramp back.

Getting a hold of the latch at the top and bottom of the box, he took a slow breath, then unbolted them at the same time and tipped the lid backwards.

Looking inside eagerly, Felix felt dumbstruck.

Instead of a load of bismuth, which he’d hoped to turn into gold with his own superpower, there was a corpse.

The face looked like it’d gone through a factory furnace. Like something out of those old slasher films his uncle loved.

There were no eyes. Dry, empty sockets gaped at him. There were no ears, but instead two nubs of flesh no bigger than the tip of his pinky. Two gaping holes sat in the middle of the ruined face, right where a nose would be. Should have been. No lips remained to cover the broken and shattered teeth.

It was a real horror show.

“No more,” mumbled the not-corpse almost like a mantra. “No more, no more, no more, no more, no more.”

Felix looked down at the ruined husk of what had once been a human being and pressed his hands to his face. This wasn’t something his brain could comprehend right now.

“No more,” the body whispered.

His brain slowly lurched into gear and a thought sent him for the passenger door. Popping open the door, he grabbed the paperwork and started to read over it.

Paperwork was on the rise as of late since the taxmen had to collect taxes. And taxes needed accurate paperwork.

National ID cards, too.

Finally, he found the listed items sold. No mention of bismuth came up at all.

Only the purchase of a slave and one slave control box. One superheroine, to be specific. One previously owned by the government.

That’s a woman? Holy crap.

Felix felt his thoughts starting to spiral rapidly out of control. Hunching over, he put his head between his knees and took some deep breaths. Right when the world stopped spinning crazily, he stood back up and breathed more regularly.

Setting the paperwork down back next to the Pit, he considered his options.

His money was already spent and gone; even though he’d clearly received the wrong package, it wouldn’t be good for him to whine about it. They’d just laugh at him and ask him what the problem was. He’d accepted the bill of goods as it was. Who was to say this wasn’t exactly what he wanted?

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. I wanted to transmute bismuth to gold. What if she can do more than that? What if she can make gold? Or find gold?

This might actually be even better than he’d expected. Provided that he could fix her.

That is, if he could keep her alive long enough to fix her.

A super with a decent power set would be worth a lot more than gold. Especially in the current environment where slaves were legal.

He started to think of any number of things supers could do and how he could profit from it.

Closing the passenger door, he walked back to the crate.

“Can you, er, can you hear me?” he asked her.

There was no response. Her chest rose and fell in labored breaths. Now that he looked at her body, he found the rest of it as horribly disfigured as her face. It looked like her fingers had been removed. Her breasts. Most of her skin. She was a real mess.

Could he even fix her?

His face twisted into a frown as he tilted his head to consider her.

He hadn’t used up his power today. It wasn’t as if he had any plans to use it before he went to sleep, either. In fact, if he was up past midnight when his power set reset, he could try again.

Solidifying his decision, he concentrated on her. She was his, he owned her, she was his property.

Felix was actually a superhero or villain candidate. He could modify any item he owned. Make it new, change it into another substance, make it better or worse quality.

Anything, really. The scope was incredible.

The problem was that the more he modified an object, the more it would take from his power pool.

And his power pool barely had enough juice in it to fix a crack in a toilet.

Felix had always thought of it like batteries.

Most heroes and villains had a pretty decent-sized battery. There were those who had smaller ones, and those who had larger ones.

If he had to compare himself in relative terms to others, Felix was a triple A battery that had been left outside in a puddle. The lowest measured superhero or villain before Felix would be akin to a golf cart battery.

Up to this point, the best use of his superpower had been repair jobs. Mostly maintenance, to tell the truth. He couldn’t modify or change big objects, but he could limit wear and tear for sure.

He’d tried minor transmutations with success. Leading to this moment here and now with the hope to change bismuth into gold.

In using his power, the change would simply occur over a few seconds.

The precursor to that, though, when he used his power, was a virtual window that appeared in front of him. It had the look of a checklist sheet with sliders on one other side.

It was all very strange, really.

Focusing on his unexpected guest, Felix struggled to activate his power.

To ultimately no result.

Scratching at his cheek, Felix thought on the problem. She was his possession. Legally.

Up to this point, that’d been all he had to do.

Taking a different approach, he tried using a character sheet. Generic, and yet taking root from hundreds upon hundreds of role-playing games he’d played.

Why not?

He saw it in his mind’s eye first. A piece of white paper. At the top, there was basic information and vital stats. Things that anyone would have regardless of being a super or not.

Below that, all of the powers, abilities, and functions that made them unique.

These sheets would contain everything from blindness, being sick, or even having a genetic disposition to heart attacks.

Then he opened his eyes and saw the exact same form he’d been visualizing floating in front of him.

Only he could see it. When he’d tried to explain it to his family, they’d thought he’d gone crazy at first. Only after showing them an example of what he could do, where he took a faded and dirty penny and made it new, did they believe him.

At first, he’d thought perhaps he was indeed crazy. What kind of superpower presented itself like this? This wasn’t a normal power. In fact, it’d been classified as unique. Nothing even similar.

Felix had become contemplative after that information had been given to him by the guild.

To him, that meant that he either was the one doing the visualizing of his power, or another entity had set it up for him.

Both answers disturbed him.

The reason why Felix had never gone any further with his talent was his lack of power.

At the bottom right of the sheet floating in front of him was where the cost would be to make the modifications he wanted. They were always more than what he had available for anything useful.

After much experimentation, he knew he had roughly one hundred and fifty points he could spend on things before he ran out. He could always tell if he ran out because the confirm button would simply go away.

That was a pretty small number when compared to the things he could change. Like turning a table into solid gold.

With a sudden thought, he tried to flip to the “second page” that his power normally offered up.

The real meat and potatoes of his power.

The upgrade page.

The viewing window changed.

It now looked like something out of a role-playing game character creation page.

He could modify anything about her, providing he paid the power cost. Strength, intelligence, reflexes, weapon skills, languages, skills, height, weight, senses, anything and everything that you could think of.

The list was extensive and a touch overwhelming. The possibilities for a living person were infinitely more complex than a simple item.

Felix shook his head to clear it. He’d have to worry about that later after he’d fixed all the problems.

Maybe try to limit what came up to what he wanted to change.

Focusing back on the here and now, Felix started to read through the list of debuffs this person was suffering from. It looked endless at first.

He began to feel sick at the problems listed. Some of them were rather horrible. She’d apparently been cut open and had a number of her organs removed. He couldn’t even begin to think of a reason for that.

“Waaaaaah…” he groaned. “That’s just sick perversion, isn’t it? Who the hell did this?”

This wasn’t going to be a quick fix; it’d take months to spend enough power to make her human again, let alone whole. That wasn’t even mentioning how long it’d take to get her back into a condition to be useful.

It’d take months to make enough money to buy a shipment of bismuth again anyways.

Besides, not like I’m doing anything else with this power. I could clean up some coins. Scrub the shower. Ooooooh, impressive.

Fine, let’s Frankenstein’s monster this shit.

Felix grunted and looked to the sheet again.

The cheapest thing to change, and which would refund some points he could work with, was putting her in a coma.

A single thought later and “Coma” appeared in the debuff list. One hundred points with a negative sign popped up in the bottom right corner.

Flicking through multiple options, he found that replacing her teeth would be relatively simple and cheap. Her lips came at a discounted price since it was all in the same area and some of the reconstruction could bleed into the other.

Then he was spent. That was all he had.

For a start, it was great. He’d take another crack at it when midnight rolled around and his points reset.

Before he clicked the confirm changes button at the bottom, he stopped. Below the confirmation button was a slider. One he hadn’t imagined or put there.

No time like the present to figure it out.

The slider simply read “Draw” and read from zero percent to one hundred percent. It was set at zero right now.

Moving it to one hundred percent, he checked to see if anything had changed.

Nothing.

Back to zero, no change.

Back to one hundred, still no change.

Leaving it at one hundred, Felix shrugged his shoulders. Maybe he could figure it out tomorrow. For now, he’d leave it a hundred to see if anything changed.

Mentally popping the confirm button, he looked up to the body in the crate.

Instantly, teeth began to straighten themselves, growing anew. Where teeth were missing, new teeth broke through the gum line. In ten seconds, she had a healthy set of lovely teeth.

Then her lips started to warp and fan out as they regrew themselves next, until finally she had a pair of full lips hiding those resplendent teeth.

Felix sighed and looked around the garage. He had an hour or so to wait till midnight.

Going inside the house didn’t appeal to him. It was empty. Dark.

Devoid of life.

Here in the garage, with what was essentially a corpse, at least he wasn’t alone.

When midnight finally rolled around, Felix felt like his skin caught fire for an instant.

It wasn’t painful, but it certainly wasn’t comfortable. Normally when his power reset, it only felt like he’d caught a mild sunburn. This time felt like he’d been in a furnace.

Felix popped open the window and then hesitated. He might as well get it out of the way now. He’d been thinking while waiting for midnight. If he couldn’t fix some of the truly awful things, what was the point?

He selected the box for blindness: left eye, and looked to the corner. Six hundred points.

Despair welled up in him.

Eyeballs aren’t simple things like teeth or lips. They’re intricate organs and—

The confirm button was lit up.