#I shall get better pay and more benefits befitting of myself

[godofthestupid]

it's a "letting my boss talk their head off and trying to gaslight me into staying at this job while I write an email applying for a better paying one" type of vibe today

[necrowriter]

Caffeine Challenge 23

Dialogue Prompt: “Their job wasn’t to save you.”

Alright, I confess-this ran a little bit over an hour (I started early). I...got a little carried away. 

“Oh, sir, thank you, thank you for saving me from those awful men!”

Lillie very nearly winced to hear the words even as they came out of her mouth. That had to be laying it on too thick. If she'd done any acting that bad back in her brief sojourn into college theatre, her own classmates would have dragged her off the stage. But the man in the mask and goggles didn't seem to notice. Supervillains generally didn't, she'd found; it was like you weren't speaking their language if you didn't ham it up as much as possible.

“Save you? My dear, I'm afraid you misunderstand the situation.” The man in the mask chuckled darkly. His smug declarations could have benefited from a deeper voice and probably a British accent, but he actually wasn't doing too badly with a slight Midwestern drawl, and Lillie had to admit, he did have a pretty good dark chuckle. Not the best she'd heard, but better than she would have expected for essentially an amateur.  

“You've mistaken the intentions of my Robo-Raptors,” the man went on, reaching out a gloved hand and fondly stroking the exposed metal cheek of the nearest raptor. “Their job wasn't to save you. Their job was to capture you. And they've done it admirably well, if I do say so myself.”

Inside, Lillie sighed. Oh my goodness, the giant red-eyed dinosaur deathbots weren't on an errand of mercy? Who could have guessed??

But she had a job to do, even if it was getting to be a highly irritating one lately, so instead of saying that, she pulled a look of utter shock and gasped, “What-what do you mean?”

The masked man clapped his hands, and one of the raptors reached out and lifted her up by the back of her coat. There were going to be some impressive tooth-marks in that later, Lillie mused; fortunately she'd long since learned to not wear any clothes she especially cared about on missions like this.

“I understand you're a person of some importance to Captain Comet,” the man said, gesturing casually at the raptor, which obligingly swung her up onto the back of another raptor. Lillie stifled a faint sigh of relief at this. She had not been looking forward to being dragged all the way back to wherever they were going. The neck pain alone was a terrible prospect. “He'll come looking for you, no? And then we shall have...a talk. Oh, yes.”

That dialogue could use some polishing, Lillie thought absently while she gasped in horror. It's just not quite his style, but a few tweaks could really make it work for him. A better way to control the raptors would probably help, too. Hand clapping just isn't in vogue.

Of course, no one ever asked her about these things.

“Oh, no!” she wailed, as the raptors took off at a run.

It had all started so sensibly.

Alright, so she was, essentially, a secretary. But there was nothing wrong with that, and she was a good secretary. She kept things in order for the entire Sanctum Tower, home base for the League and waystation for a good twenty superheroes coming in and out on an average day-sometimes more. That was no small task. And she'd didn't blink at any of the weird stuff: not when Feral had one of his rampages and needed new pants and a quiet cool-down room afterward, not when one of Cold Steel's many volatile devices malfunctioned and filled most of a floor with some noxious chemical, not when Fusion casually called up and mentioned that he needed a new shipment of uranium by this afternoon, not even when the nefarious Doctor Lobo had somehow managed to fill the entire tower full of sheep.

So when someone-she didn't remember who-had come up with the brilliant idea of luring out Starshooter's adversary by having her pose as the superhero's hapless girlfriend, well...it didn't seem that bad at the time. Starshooter and Subterfuge had been stuck in a deadlock for months, getting nowhere, and the pressure was mounting every day; Subterfuge, as befitted his name, was a little too good at infiltration and hacking and various other things that made the government very antsy about him being loose for too long. But he was also something of an old-school nostalgic, the sort that probably wouldn't be able to resist a good kidnapping and ransom-holding. So what was she supposed to do? Say no? There didn't seem to be anyone else to do it; all the female heroes were far too well known for the ploy to work. (And the fact that, for total realism in Starshooter's instance, it wouldn't be a female hero at all wasn't well known enough to work.) And, oh, everyone said, Lillie was so brave and tough and capable, she'd be excellent at it. She didn't even flinch when the Crusader broke in and had her at raygun-point the other week. And she'd be perfectly safe, they all assured her; the minute Subterfuge tried anything, the entire League would be on top of him.

So she'd agreed. She hadn't realized she was setting a precedent.

The problem was that it had worked. It had worked really well. A few mutually uncomfortable just-public-enough dates, and then one clear afternoon while she and Starshooter were enjoying a nice walk down Valentine Bridge, Subterfuge's drones had snatched her up and were flying her downtown while she screamed helplessly and Starshooter shook his fist and raged. That time she hadn't really had to act too much on the whole screaming-in-terror thing; truth to be told, she'd never had much of a head for heights, and those drones had enjoyed showboating a little too much.

The tracking device she wore in one earring led the League straight to Subterfuge's lair. He was in custody inside of an hour, and somehow, in the ensuing press avalanche, no one quite got around to mentioning that the whole thing had been a ruse. Which was alright with Lillie; she didn't much want the publicity.

And because it had worked so well, it made sense to try it again. It was another desperate situation: Nightfang had escaped from prison again, and he had a particular habit of going after civilians. Especially young women, so didn't the whole scheme make even more sense this time? And didn't it make sense to do it soon, before someone could really get hurt? After all, she'd done so well last time. We can count on Lillie, everyone said. She's dependable.

At least that time she didn't have to pretend to be anyone's girlfriend. She just had to wear more revealing clothing than she was used to, and hang around in the area where they were pretty sure Nightfang had gone to ground. By the time he showed up she was actually rather relieved. Alright, so he was a vampire, and pretty creepy in his own way, but he was still more gentlemanly than most of the other encounters she'd had that evening.

The problem wasn't doing it once or twice. The problem was that they kept asking, and the more times she did it, the harder it got to say no. After all, she'd done it all those other times, how could she object now? And it still made sense. In a way.

But it was frustrating.

They could at least give me a raise for this, she thought, wincing as one of the raptors hit a pothole hard; there was no padding on those things. Overtime. Hazard pay. Something. But then, what kind of selfish jerk would demand to be paid to save the city?

She wondered how long this was going to take. She really wanted to go home and take a long hot bath.

The especially annoying part, if she was being totally honest with herself, was that it got less and less, well, important. Helping Starshooter take down a national threat was one thing, but Captain Comet? He was barely anybody. She wasn't trying to be a snob, really, she wasn't, it was just-she did have other things to do, and quite frankly the kid could have used the practice winning a few battles on his own. He hadn't even tried to have a good showdown with his newfound nemesis, just jumped straight to the fake-girlfriend gambit. Wanted to really get the jump on this new villain, apparently, put him down before he could become a real threat at all-and before he had any chance of making Captain Comet look less than captainly.

Of course, the way he'd posed his so-called request in the first place hadn't exactly helped matters. “Hey, can I use Lillie?” Like she was the company car. Honestly.