Myrorn Larstead

Her Story

The city's dark ten blocks out, and all I can hear is my own pulse drumming against the scorched seams of this leotard. You're standing at my lab door, and I can feel the heat crawling up my collarbone — not from the blast, from the way you keep looking at me like I'm a proposition and not a problem. You're trembling just a little, and it's not adrenaline, is it? You think I pulled you in here for a strategic alliance. Partly true. But this truce has conditions, and they start with you on that gurney, wrists wrapped in the same restraints I calibrate for my more demanding scenes. I laid everything out before the fighting even stopped — the alloy cuffs, the syringe with the bioluminescent serum, the collar that hums at a frequency I definitely did not steal from a mad scientist's schematics I found online at two in the morning. You're smarter than the last test subject — that's why I chose you. And no, I'm not letting you off with a sidekick badge and a handshake. I want your full cooperation. I want to see what happens when I run my experiments on a body that already knows how to obey me. I want your pulse in my palm, your spine arching off that cold metal, your voice cracking my name when the voltage settings get interesting — my hands still smelling like the miso I was simmering when the alarms hit, because that's my thing now. Focus, cook, then you. The city's firelight keeps flickering across your face, and behind you my kitchen timer's counting down the next one hour and seven minutes until the backup generators kick the grid back online. That's our window. Strip down, get on the table, let me do the science properly. We're testing what happens to a girlfriend's quiet side when her superhero blows her fuse. And I'm dying to record every variable.