Men gasped, necks turning, even the shyest. Women blushed in shame and ground their teeth in anger. Bella was annoyed, but used to it--the envy and admiration came with beauty. And beauty was her power.
It was actually an effective deterrant to crime. This had surprised her. She'd moved to Paragon City, five years ago, to find work as a model. She had been enthusiastically signed, of course, but fired again almost as quickly. She was tall and slender, with a perfect waist, butt, breasts, lips, hair--she seemed to have strolled out of a Mucha painting, only with the slimness that is so fetishized in the modern world. Everything about her, taken separately, seemed to demand to be objectified, but when she took her turn on the catwalk or in front of the camera, her beauty seemed to flash out from her eyes like lightning and strike the photographers, the fashionistas, the oglers. They could DO nothing with it--could not possess it, could not package it. Rather, it possessed them, and they could only stare like dead men.
She had tried to look uglier for a while--but smearing the lipstick looked sensuous on that mouth; mussing her hair made it look alluringly tousled; covering up looked coy or classy, and her pose always had the same lightning-bolt effect on men. One magazine after another fired or refused to hire her, and, in the end, she had nowhere to turn, but the Academy, where, as we all know, the second-best superheroes--those with somewhat more...offbeat powers than flight or strength or invisibility are trained by some of the more eccentric and mysterious of the superhero populace. After graduating, she took the name Freya, after the Norse Goddess of love and beauty (she was hardly gifted with originality in anything besides her beauty), and began fighting crime as well as she could.
That had been about a year ago. She was still self-conscious about her beauty when she walked down the street, as other people are of a deformity, but making friends and rooming with other superheroes did much to lessen her feeling of freakishness which had not gone away even in the world of modeling. She--the most beautiful woman in the world--had been unable to meet men, for they would only gape at her, and lose the power of speech. Her roommates, Blur and Lantern, often commiserated with her, though one frequently had dates, and the other a fiancee. It wasn't fair, she thought, as she walked down the street--all eyes on her. Those other women--the ones who stared at her with hatred--could go to hell, if they thought this was easy.
She patrolled, dutifully, during the day. It didn't work as well at night, when whatever villain she was after couldn't see her to be stunned by her. It was just as well. She didn't have the luxury of an alter-ego, as a few of the stranger superheroes apparently did. "Bella" and "Freya" were interchangeable in the tabloids, which never had anything very juicy to report about her, unless they were lying. She was, after all, perfect. Even her crime-fighting career had been a moderate success so far. She had managed to arrest a gang of three men (who were, ironically, in the process of raping someone), and, even, single-handedly stopped a supervillain who was, after all, as vulnerable as any other man in THAT way.
She was thinking of none of this--save her loneliness--as she walked down Thomas Street, past the garage and into the shadier part of town. "These damn ugly cows," she muttered, encountering more disapproving looks. "Do they really think I'm after their men? Even if I could get a man, I wouldn't go after..."
An explosion. Underground.
"Well, shit."
Explosions were not her thing. She could tackle people, provided they could see her. But Lantern or Blur's powers would have been much more well-suited. This was their beat too, of course, but the two of them, Bella remembered as she reached for her cell phone, were gone for the day--Lantern with her fiancee, and Blur to her mother's.
"Well, shit." Smoke came from a subway entrance nearby. Bella bit her perfect lower lip and pulled down on her summer dress. This could get ugly.
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
