Supervillain Stalker

2 | auntie ralliana

Dedicated to @FionnW for being the 1st voter on this story and @emilyhelk for being the first commenter.

"Heya Daisy baby!" a boy calls from the sitting room as I step into the house.

"Hi Cyril's creepy best friend," I snark, throwing down my school bag.

"Daisy..." my brother Cyril (yes that's his real name) says warningly from the fridge, looking at me over his shoulder threateningly.

Rolling my eyes, I head straight for my bedroom. Cyril isn't the kind of person you can talk to about getting jumped by and then rescued by supervillains. Dad never bothers with him — I've always been the favourite and we all know it — and that's why while I was being injected day after day with new superhero serums, Cyril was snogging girls and playing video games and striding through puberty like he owned it.

Oh and hanging out with his best friend and our pervy next-door neighbour Jupiter.

I know, I know, and yes, his head is the size of the planet (literally and metaphorically).

My room is in the attic. Dad had it converted when Cyril dibs-ed the spare bedroom two seconds after I was born. His nursery became my nursery and now it's just a dusty old closet filled with boxes of stuff Mum's too sentimental about to throw out.

All the same, my room is pretty sick. My bed cradles under a circular stain glass skylight which sits just below where the upward diagonal slope of the roof begins. To get to my room you have to pull down a metal ladder and then trot up a further five steps. My wardrobe waits opposite to my bed and posters line the walls and the roof, most of which I can't even remember the faces of. An old, fluffy rocking horse from my fifth birthday rests in the corner by the wardrobe, gathering dust.

When I arrive in my bedroom, I see a familiar face sprawled across the bed. He lies on my sheets like a sultry seductress, chin propped up in one hand and one leg resting on the other. His eyes twinkle.

"Heya Rally," I greet. Then I pause. "Why the Hell does everyone in my life have such weird names?"

"Greetings child," Rally purrs with a grin. "Come and sit beside your auntie Ralliana."

Our gazes meet and I frown at him. His smile wavers and then straightens out again. His eyes look concerned.

Then I burst out laughing. "Ralliana?" I echo, guffawing as I run across the room and fling myself onto my bed. The impact makes the bed undulate and Rally grabs hold of my ankle to keep himself up. "What the Hell is wrong with you?"

My face is literally falling off with laughter. Rally always knew how to cheer me up.

The lamp by my bed flickers angrily.

As I roll onto my back, I find myself staring at my favourite poster, pinned to the slanted roof above me. It's a huge, A2 sheet of glossy black poster paper with beautiful yellow stars shining across it, with a quote in the centre that says: "Stars can't shine without darkness". Indeed when my room is drenched in black, the stars on this poster still glow, gleaming a pale green, providing a picture for me to gaze at as I slip into sleep.

I take a deep breath.

"I was attacked today," I mention to Rally who has been sitting cross-legged watching me for the past minute or so. He cocks his head sideways, concern showing in the crease between his eyebrows. "These weirdo supervillains are trying to track down Skull and Blade."

The notion makes Rally snort, flopping down on my bed and dumping his head on my stomach. "Like that's ever gonna happen."

Habit draws my fingers to his blonde hair, tangling in his flowing gold mop. When we were kids, I used to braid his unruly curls but now I prefer to just trail my fingers through its silky texture. It soothes me, just like stroking a dog or hugging a pony. My breathing slows as I drift into a doze.

"There was a tracking device," I say, yawning. "I've got it but Skull doesn't know."

My fingers slip from his mane as Rally leaps up, propping himself on his arms and staring at me in awe and surprise. "You have to give it to your dad."

My dad. Ah yes, the man that would happily spend every waking hour working if they let him. If I were to show you a graph of his behaviour during the day, you would see a steep decline between the time of him stepping out of his work building and spending the night at home. He was the rational choice for who to give the tracker to, but not the trusted choice. After all, I didn't have many enjoyable memories with him since every other day was spent with me in a huge chair being injected with multicoloured serums.

Automatically, my hands rise to my arms and I shudder. I can still remember the ache as the five centimetre long needles slid into my arms, finding the only acceptable vein. I can still remember the burning, scalding, blistering sensation of the liquid oozing into my bloodstream, streaking around my body, filling me with heat and sickness and exhaustion yet never letting me rest.

I was my father's toy, his dummy, his lab rat. I was his "perfect specimen", his tests on other humans and animals provided him with all the right chemicals to make me into the country's "super weapon". The country's only super weapon - my father was very possessive and refused to give the same treatment to anyone else, always giving a mere one or two powers to his other subjects.

I don't suppose my papa noticed the psychological issues these powers caused me. Either that or he didn't care. I was out of place at school, a ghost in the corridors and a bad influence in the classroom. I turned to smoking and alcohol as my not-so-guilty pleasure and endured detentions and suspensions, knowing that even if I flew through school with flying colours, my dad would never let me be anything but his own personal superhero.

"Maybe," I murmur to Rally, rubbing at my eyes as a headache swells in the rear of my mind. "Hey could you go get me some Ibuprofen?"

Frowning, Rally rises from beside me and heads downstairs, going to get me my pain reliever. With a sigh of content, I close my eyes and try to drift into a peaceful sleep.

I daydream about being ordinary, about having a boyfriend and trying hard at school. I picture a mother that stands up to a mad-scientist father, a mother who realises that injecting a four year old with strange chemicals is not fair. My brother Cyril is the only normal one in my family but he doesn't know about the experiments. My parents never saw the need to tell him and I never had the heart.

One minute goes by, then two, then three...

My migraine swells louder and I grimace.

Then I hear a tapping, a tapping on glass, a tapping on my window. Sitting bolt up right, I turn to the skylight and barely swallow a scream when I see the one and only Blade crouching there, crushed against the colours as he balances precariously on the narrow sill.

"Holy Ben and Jerries!" I yell, scrambling backwards and falling off the edge of the bed. When my head pokes back up, Blade is scowling at me, irritated, as he glances anxiously between me and something outside.

"Let me in!" he orders, his voice muffled by the glass although his words are perfectly clear.

Shaking my head, I climb to my feet and step a little further away. What's taking Rally so long? I wonder anxiously, my gaze flickering to the steps that lead down to the trapdoor. He should be back by now.

"For Hercules' sake, let me in Sparky!" He commands bitterly, hammering on the window as his eyes begin to show shimmers of anxiety. It's only been an hour or so since his words stabbed into my thoughts and he's already a breath away from entering my bedroom! What the hell is wrong with this weirdo?

And hold up— Sparky?