Rewq

Hi! Welcome to my longest story yet, I really hope you enjoy it! Minor content warning for dysphoria but nothing too heavy. I hope you enjoy!

Horns blared all around me. The arsehole ahead of me was blasting his with reckless abandon, while the arsehole behind me chose a more frugal approach; only blasting his when he suspected there might be an inch of space someone in the traffic jam could inch forward into. The areshole in my car, me, had the optimal approach; the horn is for when you’re angry. It’s for when the cars around you need to know that you’re already late for work, that there’s no shortage of engineers who could do your job and that the shitty company you work for has been dubious from the start and will no doubt keep that up when it comes to severance packages. My horn, I’ll admit, was being pressed a lot. Not that the arsehole up ahead, who’d decided a busy highway in morning rush hour was a great place for a fight, seemed to mind.

Today, being a Monday, was a terrible day to be late to work. The weekend shift for reactor maintenance would always claim that ‘it’d been fine during their shift’ and that ‘problems must have arisen on Monday morning’ and consequently, the shoddy warp generator that was my purview would be acting up in one way or another. Worse, I was the only even vaguely competent person on my monitoring shift. I mean, I couldn’t count on Darrell to modulate the volume of his voice, let alone the flux suppressors on an interdimensional portal to a realm of eternal flame. That’s not to say that my not being there would, necessarily, doom us all, or even anything of the sort; it just meant more paperwork for me, explaining whatever bodge job I’d done this week to keep the containment seal running.

A bright light shook me from my reverie, as an intricate glyph thirty feet across made of brilliant light manifested over the highway ahead. From the depths of the glyph, a thousand rays of radiant light pierced into our reality, and presumably into the idiot who’d thought to rob a bank or whatever they’d tried, while the sun was out. There was a good reason most crime in our city happened at night, and her name was Helia the Eternal Light. While presumably not an eternal light, she was pretty much unbeatable by daylight and consequently was the face of our city's hero league. She was also beautiful beyond belief, kindhearted and a genuine force for good in our times. Huh, I wasn’t even honking my horn anymore; small victories, I suppose.

With the road clear, progress to work finally picked back up too, and before I knew it I was pulling up to the monument to brutalism and hubris that was Krax Industries. Building a vast cubic edifice of concrete and glass with a huge tunnel hollowed out through the middle was vain enough, but putting a runway in that hollow was just an exercise in excess, especially given that the roof far above was only used as a private garden. The hubris, though, was that the damn thing floated. It was like Nathan Krax wanted to advertise both a clear and obvious way to destroy his research facility and the fact that he was, obviously, a supervillain. Or, if anyone at work asked, a legitimate businessman with great vision.

My esteemed employer hadn’t been in jail since he’d last publicly donned his powersuit, years ago, but that didn’t mean he was in any way an outstanding member of society. Everything about working here screamed ‘dubious at best,’ aside from, I’ll admit, outcompeting every other supervillain’s research lab in terms of pay cheques. Plus, it was the only way someone with my grades was ever going to be involved with the cutting edge of science, even if that cutting edge pertained to research projects with time frames like ‘until it becomes illegal,’ groundbreaking research from sources labelled ‘anonymous, do not ask’ and of course the reactor. Their most recent thinly veiled supervillainy. For starters, it relied on dimensional rift technology that actually was illegal, but apparently only for tearing a rift back to our own dimension. Krax industries instead wanted to, very legally, open a portal to an infinite fiery hellscape and harness the heat vented from that hellscape to, you guessed it, turn a turbine. This was definitely a good, legal and sound plan, not hubris, and would not one day blow up in the faces of me and all of the other thousands of workers who’d been levitated up into the floating glass and steel demonstration of idiocy. Still, the project hadn’t even been rated amongst the top five least safe ongoing projects in the building, so the day it blew probably wasn’t going to be today. Besides, I certainly wasn’t going to rush to the control room, I had coffee to drink.

When I strolled through the door, mug in hand, Darrell was on his phone. Which was fair enough, really; physical maintenance was, strictly speaking, my job. I mean sure, there were perhaps more warning lights than usual, but staring at them wouldn’t stop that flashing, so I couldn’t really blame him. “Hey, Darrell, the lights been flashing like that all morning?” I asked, while I got settled in by the console and took in the data output.

“I mean, yeah, pretty much, I’d have texted, but I figured you were driving anyway and if it was catastrophic, I figure everything would be flashing, right? Also, mate, you fancy drinks this weekend by the way? There’s a bunch of new starters on our floor and I could do with an excuse to go out.” Ugh, did he have to call everyone mate?

“What? Yeah, maybe. One sec,” I told him distractedly. Turns out this week the damage was a little worse than usual; I’d probably have to actually get in there. Bloody weekend shift. Still, this wasn’t catastrophic, yet, it was only a step and a half away and nothing a few new screws couldn’t fix. “Can you find me a set of four eight millimetre liquisealing, I’m gonna have to go in there.”

“Wait, are we having a containment failure? Like a full one? Didn’t we have one last week?” I nodded tiredly. This was not the relaxing start to my Monday I’d vainly hoped for.

“Another Monday, right? Now I’m going to fix this damn thing before the panel that’s coming loose bursts off and torches half the building down.” From the cameras that hadn’t melted yet, it looked like someone, presumably the weekend crew, had misaligned a panel replacement, causing the screws holding the panel in to melt wrong. Rather than sealing it in place, they’d instead dripped onto the floor. The solution, though, was fairly simple: just suit up, go in, replace the screws, realign the panel and try not to be incinerated. An easy choice, given that incineration wasn’t a much bigger risk than being here when containment failed and besides, who didn’t love being a hero? This wasn’t the capes or glamour most people imagined, but it probably still counted.

First, I squeezed into the slightly ratty, hopefully heat-proof suit. Next, I grabbed from Darrell the four liquisealing screws he’d scrounged the maintenance supplies for, mercifully finding them all to be the right size. The blast doors took an agonisingly long time to open, close behind me, vent any heat inside and then open the second set into the reactor room. Immediately I was hit with a wave of heat. Fuck. It was usually hot, but if I could feel it through the suit, that either meant that it was hotter than the sensors had claimed or, worse, it meant my suit was melting or maybe had a leak. Either would kill me soon enough. Bloody Mondays.

Still, I was a professional and something as minor as my abdomen being slowly cooked wasn’t enough to make me do something stupid like drop the screws, although I’ll admit I fumbled a few times getting the screws in place.  Next I just had to realign the panel, by hand, to the precise angle and position that would repair the containment seal and stop the screws from leaking out again. With a heave, and a small sob, partly because of the agony in my chest and partly because it was a Monday, I lifted the panel. Too high, shit. For just a moment, a flare of otherworldly fire pulsed through the gap I’d inadvertently created. 

Between my heart and a realm of near-infinite heat was nothing but a flimsy half-melted clearly not-very-heatproof suit. With the final beat of my heart, I lowered the panel, just a fraction, but enough that I could feel the panel click into alignment and presumably, the breach seal. But then, if I’d sealed it, why could I still feel my insides burn? The heat scorched away furiously at my core, my heart presumably naught but ash by now, and yet my body refused to die even with all the pain.

I collapsed to my knees and then onto my back, but the agony continued; that gave me some hope, though, cause wow, this sure did sound like an origin story. The burning was definitely, maybe internal now and given that I wasn’t yet dead, that probably meant I’d survive. Next, I’d made an, at surface value, noble sacrifice and consequently endured much pain at the hands of a calamity that I’d nonetheless stopped. I mean damn, if this wasn’t my superhero origin story, it was going to be the inciting event of someone else’s. Please don’t let it be Darrell’s, he’d be the worst! No no, calm it down, Joe, his chest wasn’t, very impolitely, begging his body to let him die. Agreeing with it to compromise, I closed my eyes and let darkness take me, y’know, just until the miserable bit of my origin story was over.

Clawing my way back to consciousness in a hospital bed, even though it made sense, was, I’ll admit, quite the surprise. Like, sure, if I woke up it was going to be in a hospital bed; I’d presumed I’d be ash by now, or more deliriously that I’d have superpowers. But given that there was no burning in my chest and a steady beat from my heart, any opportunity for the latter seemed to have come and gone. A bleary glance around revealed I was in the infirmary at work. Thank the heavens. A regular hospital would mean fees and questions; the work infirmary likely just meant enough hush money that I wouldn’t think to complain about the most egregious OSHA violations.

True to form, after a few minutes, a forgettable man in an even more forgettable grey suit came in to offer me a bonus for my dedication to the company. He went on to mention that it wasn’t a publicised bonus scheme, so I shouldn’t mention it to any colleagues and that, in the spirit of keeping things quiet, I should be back to work at the usual time tomorrow. And while all of that was a transparent lie, the bonus was large enough that I could only nod and say ‘Yes, sir.’ After all, you don’t work in a villain's lab without at least some willingness to accept bribes. On record, I would be going home with a slight temperature and approval from my boss, rather than with a line of burns charred across my chest and a slight temperature.

The drive home, mercifully, had no interruptions, no traffic jams and thus, no horn honking required. Although the sticky heat in my car that proved insurmountable to my poor aircon did have me considering a honk, just to be safe. Still, two p.m. traffic was practically non-existent and honking to no one would be gratuitous. Finally home, I hopped out of the car and, finding the outdoors unseasonably hot too, conceded that this was more likely my temperature than a freak weather accident.

An hour later, with all three of the fans in my house pointed at me, I knew this was gonna end in one of two ways: The heat building up inside me would reach some critical point and detonate, either killing me or marking the beginning of my superhero career. Time ticked by and the heat, as well as my anticipation, only built further. Fidgety with nerves, I cleared everything from the tiled centre of my kitchen, not wanting to burn anything when the heat went over the edge. For a moment, I considered stripping naked too, but that just felt weird, and losing today’s work clothes was hardly a loss; they weren’t anything special and I had plenty of others. With a quick apology note to my mom left beside my bed, I declared all sensible prep work done and began to, rather impatiently, wait.

It began, ominously, with my heart stopping, followed shortly and even more ominously with the realisation that what had stopped pretending to beat wasn’t a heart at all. The searing heat gave it away; the core of otherworldly flame that had seeped into me hadn’t dissipated at all, it had been hiding, presumably from whatever tests had been run while I’d been out. Quietly, I begged it to please not be something nefarious about to possess me. Those concerns were, however, short-lived. 

An instant after the heat returned, it went from searing my chest to coursing down every artery and lighting my body aflame. In a wave, from my core to the tips of my fingers and toes, my cells, thousands at a time, ignited and changed, not to ash but to something newer, purer and more importantly, to something immune to the heat. Before I’d even finished collapsing to the floor, the pain had stopped and my body felt made anew. It was even still under my control, which had been a concern for a moment there.

The first issue was that I was definitely naked, my work slacks presumably incinerated. And that probably meant that I looked like a slightly tubby naked guy, possibly on fire. And oh god, what if the fires were stuck on and I couldn’t wear clothes again until I got a super suit made? And then it might be skintight; I didn’t want people to see me in skintight anything, even if I was a superhero! Okay, calm it, Joe, maybe the nice extradimensional fire gave me abs too? I presume that most people, given the opportunity, liked to do their pre-using-a-mirror pep talks out loud, but even alone, I still liked to do mine internally. ‘Okay, deep breaths, calm, it’s okay, it is, at worst, just your body, it'll be fine.’ I opened my eyes and looked slowly downward.

“Wh- wh- wh- what?!” Those were definitely boobs. Happy distracting handfuls, but on my chest! That’s not where boobs were supposed to be! Boobs were for other people to have and me to think about, hornily. And if I had boobs now, that probably meant other things too; girl things. Okay, okay, you’re a girl now, but uh, superpowers, that’s several magnitudes more important… probably, need to check for those. The superpowers were, if anything, just as obvious; I was floating. Another subtle hint was the pair of huge fireballs floating around each of my hands. Holy crap. I was gonna be a superhero! All I needed to do was work out how my powers worked, pick a name and sign up. Oh dear, was I supposed to pick a female-coded name, though? Perhaps best not to worry about it.

Flying around my kitchen, it turns out, was fairly simple. Just lean forward a bit, and use the new, but surprisingly intuitive, heat manipulation to push more heat to my feet, easy. The trick was not to lean too far, else you might end up doing a flailing tumble and getting a mouthful of dishwasher, not that that would ever happen to me, it uh, definitely came naturally to me straight away. Fireballs and flying quickly (and maybe lasers?) would have to wait till I was outside, and outside could wait till I had some actual clothes on.

The need for clothes reminded me of my other, feminine issue, and frankly, of how it could ruin everything! After all, a superhero was only as good as the message they represented. When stopping a bank heist, the biggest impact wasn’t defending money or stopping a thief, it was the kids you could inspire to be better, to be kinder and to live well. But how was I ever going to manage being kind and good and authentic if I was masquerading as a woman the whole time?

Although, that being said, how could I not? I had a chance to make a genuine, positive change in the world; I couldn’t turn that down, even if it meant pretending to be a woman and being an inspiration to a higher proportion of young girls than I’d perhaps imagined. I’d just have to make sure to focus, in interviews, on justice and good deeds and whatever, rather than actual women's issues, lest I be caught out or worse, overstep. And, of course, no one could ever know. The stakes for keeping a secret identity had never been higher. After all, what mattered endangered loved ones to someone risking it all by pretending to be a woman?

Rewq

I'll mention one more time here that if you want to read the whole thing now (or just make me smile) this story is in a bundle, linked in the description. Now, equally important, story recommendations! Starting with Why Can’t You Feminize Me Already? by the adorable Adept Lamia. It's silly, cute and makes great commentary on the bad tg fiction so many of us have read. There's also a sequel coming soon that I cannot recommend enough!