The once-mild court room stenographer dedicates her newfound superpower to cleaning up the violent vice in Got'em City’s Red Light District.
Soon pimps and pushers, psychos and sickos, and all who prey on the vulnerable and helpless, will TREMBLE at the name of the Violet Vixen.
Scene: a tenement apartment overlooking Got'em City’s notorious Penny Park. Scene of six savage murders in the last month. But safe again for the girls who gather there. For half a dozen of the City’s Finest are now poised with service revolvers drawn, all pointed at the man lying on the bed.
The exhausted, naked, barely-conscious man.
Commissioner Markham speaks the words that every officer is thinking. “Poor sap. He’s been fucked half to death.” His steely gray eyes sweep the men ranged around him, as if daring them to splutter the cliche that once, every one of them would have uttered.
“Every man thinks that’s a great way to go,” his deputy murmurs. “But not when you see what it really means.” He steps aside as the medics arrive, and one look at the man’s raw, livid flesh leaves those strong-stomached public servants shaking their heads in disbelief. “Is there even any skin left on it?” one asks as he gingerly lifts the man’s penis with a pencil. An agonized howl is the only answer he receives.
“And look at the state of his balls. It’s like they’ve been sucked dry.”
Unconsciously, every man in the room allows his eyes to drift to the symbol drawn on the wall in scarlet lipstick. The letter “V” repeated, circled and then scarred with an X.
It is the sign of the Violet Vixen.
++++++
Shirley looked up from the newspaper. “Really? They can really print this stuff in a family newspaper?”
“I don’t think the Daily Hate-Mail has been considered a family newspaper in a long time,” her mother said sadly. “And their website is even worse.”
Shirley raised an eyebrow. “Mom? You don’t even have a computer. How would you know what their website’s like?”
Leticia Henderson crossed the room and chose a glossy color flyer from the day’s recycling pile. “I always remove the supplement before your father gets home. You know what his blood pressure is like.” She passed it over to Shirley, four pages of lurid nudity interspersed with four more of gore, and a helping heap of pop star photos to lure readers in even deeper. The Hate-Mail Online! screamed a banner headline. “Log on now to see what you’re missing.” Followed by a host of headlines that, both grammatically and contents-wise, brought garish new meaning to the phrase “scrape the barrel.”
Shirley folded the supplement, handed it back to her mother, then did the same with the newspaper. “Well, it still isn’t decent.”
The paper had printed the very same words that the city cops no longer used, and in the absence of photographs of the victim himself, ran a series of pictures of well-used vaginas, each captioned as though it might be the weapon deployed.
The tone of the article was even worse. Nothing but sympathy for the man; nothing but scorn for the woman who caught him; and nothing but disgust for the original murder victims. The writer all but came out and said it. “If they hadn’t been whoring themselves in the park, the killer would never have had to harm them.”
Yes. Throughout the history of this nation, men and women have sacrificed their very lives to ensure that we will always have a free press. And this is how the press thanks them.
But what can you do? Shirley asked herself that as she got ready for work, and was still pondering the question as she took her seat in the court room, stenography machine at the ready, and the first of the day’s cases got underway.
She recognized the pimp, and wondered if she looked even vaguely familiar to him? She’d taken him down four months before, rounding him up with a few dozen others in the first mad rush of accomplishment that followed…
…well, she still couldn’t explain it. Yes, she’d been a part of the party that day at the nuclear plant when something went amiss. Something else, she corrected herself. The court had adjourned to visit the scene of a case of industrial espionage that the defendant insisted was nothing of the sort… that the plant itself had been negligent, and what its owners claimed was sabotage was in fact sheer institutionalized incompetence.
The plant owners’ lawyer knew his precedents, though, and by the time he’d finished his cross-examination, even the defendant was halfway to calling himself a liar. But then somebody got too sure of themselves, and arranged for judge and jury to view the plant for themselves.
They arrived just in time to witness a storage tank filled with radioactive waste rupture. And somehow, some of it must have come into contact with the contents of Shirley’s bag. With one particular content inside Shirley’s bag. And, before you ask what she was doing, bringing a dildo into work with her, then clearly you have never worked as a court stenographer.
The pimp didn’t recognize her. Of course he didn’t. Shirley remembered the first time she ever caught a glimpse of her transformed self in a mirror. For a start, her skin was violet - at least in a certain light. And secondly, she was foxy. In a 1940s film noir way … not in an urban-wildlife-with-a bushy-tail way. Even for a radiation-induced transformation into a costumed crime fighting superheroine, that would have been silly, and probably self-defeating, too. It’s hard to clear up crime from inside an SPCA shelter.
She blinked. She’d been drifting, but that was one thing that she loved about her job. Her mind could float as far away as it liked, but her fingers kept pace with the action in the court room. She glanced down at her laptop to see where things were, and smiled. The pimp’s lawyer was trying to explain to a predominantly all-male jury how his client’s capture had violated his civil rights. “Because he had no way of knowing that the woman he had invited to fellate him in an alleyway was, in fact, the feared vigilante The Violet Vixen.”
“Objection, your Honor.” The prosecuting counsel was on his feet. “If you’ll pardon my language, the guy just wanted to have his cock sucked. He wouldn’t have cared if it had been a Purple Porcupine.”
“Sustained.” The judge clearly agreed, and a few grins from the jury suggested that they did, as well.
Shirley watched her fingers for a moment, skimming over the keys. How tiny they looked compared with… she was still growing accustomed to regarding her “other self” as herself. But she appreciated her, regardless. Breasts that her ex once compared to a pair of Cadbury’s Eggs (and then looked offended when she didn’t thank him profusely) suddenly swelled to ostrich-inconveniencing proportions. Skinny legs that she habitually hid beneath skirts that swept the floor were suddenly shapely, muscular… they could crack a neck with a single flex, and had done so on more than one occasion. Once by accident. That made for an entertaining night at the ER.
Short dark hair became long, scarlet tresses. A figure that verged on MFC realigned itself to OMG. (“Mildly Fat Chick”… “Oh My God.” For the acronymically-challenged amongst us.) And a dress sense that worshipped at the shrine of Laura Ashley was now more akin to the Rocky Horror Show.
But the biggest change, the most startling change, was the one that even she had not noticed until the first time it occurred. Not counting her dildo… who probably knew her best of all… she’d had precisely two lovers in all her years on Earth, and she’d always been perfectly happy with that. But now; now, she didn’t even bother counting any more. Does Spider-Man count all the bad guys he’s punched? Does Batman keep a tally of all the KER-POWS he’s administered? She called herself the Violet Vixen, but really it was her pussy that did all the work, with her other holes watching its back. They were the true crime fighting force. The rest of her was just the giftwrap.
“Yeah, sister. You and every other woman,” a voice in the back of her mind struck up, and she hushed it because she knew it was true. It doesn’t matter what else a woman brings to the party, there’s only one present most guys want to open.
That was what set her out on her mission, in a way. Well, that and the knowledge that it’s hard to sustain a normal relationship if even the best-intentioned lover is going to pass out with exhaustion before you’ve even worked up your first drop of sweat. So, if she couldn’t use this new ability for fun, with guys she might actually want to meet up with again, what could she use it for?
Guys who she wanted to get off the streets as quickly as was remotely possible.
She’d thought she ought to start slow. It didn’t take much to kickstart the transformation, and she couldn’t quite explain what the trigger even was. But she’d learned how to control it, one night reading porno on eroticstories dot com, and she knew how to use it without even having to think. You’ve heard of those people who ooze sex appeal? The Violet Vixen virtually surfed on the stuff. Half the time, she didn’t even need to go looking for the bad guys. They came to her, like moths to a flame. All she had to do was burn them.
The jury retired, and was back in ten minutes. A unanimous guilty, and the pimp disappeared, remanded in custody for sentencing next week. Shirley wouldn’t be present for that stage of the proceedings, but as she closed her laptop and nodded to the judge, she knew he wasn’t someone who believed in minimum sentences.
Neither was she.
She thought back to the superheroes who sped her brother through his comic-reading teens. They always made it look like such hard work. Here, a death-defying chase. There, a fist fight against a superior armory. Just one endless slog after another. One scene had always stuck in her mind. It was the Mighty Thor, maybe. Or was it Iron Man? Or even the blind guy, the one with the horns. No matter. Up against some ferocious adversary, trading jaw-breaking punch after eye-blacking thump, just slugging one another for page after page, and then a speech bubble popping out of nowhere, “Dammit, will you never go down?”
That’s all every guy the Violet Vixen ever met wanted to do. Go down. And of course she’d let them, because… well, because she let them. And when they finally started to flag, because even the most agile tongue has to tire sometime, she’d move the leg that she rested on his shoulder… just a little, barely more than a twitch, and it’s astonishing how quickly an opponent will drop when you just cut off the blood flow for a moment or two.
Then a call to Commissioner Markham to let him know what awaited, and off with just a handful of slashes of her trademark red lipstick… the first tube had been a gift from a workmate in a shade that Shirley wouldn’t have worn if you’d paid her; now she found herself practically buying the same color in bulk.
A rustling sound above her. She turned, glancing up through the frames of the comic book, out at the guy looking down at the page. To one side, she saw his fingers preparing to turn the page. His other hand was nowhere in sight, but she had an idea where it probably was.
That, she growled to herself, is the only problem with being a female crime fighter whose artist is red hot at drawing simmering sex scenes. Half the guys who read her comic book just buy it to jerk off over. Sometimes, literally. She didn’t know how much The Violet Vixen #1 sold for, although she’d heard the variant cover was already topping $100. And why? Because most of the copies out there have their pages gunged up with cum. Jesus, what do you think tissues are for?
“Enough background information already,” breathed a weary voice. “Get on with the good stuff.”
Shirley sighed. A buck ninety-five, and these people think they own you.
++++++++
The newspaper offices were dark, but scarcely quiet. A dozen desk lamps glowed behind the cheap plastic petitions that were so popular in the eighties, but which were now so holed by past users’ thumb tacks that it was amazing they still stood. The cold blue of so many laptops and handhelds lent an eerie sheen to the very air, and the Violet Vixen waited motionless as her mind untangled the sounds of keyboards tapping, to determine the desk she was looking for.
Years back, she’d read a detective story in which the sleuth could determine what somebody was writing, simply from the scratch of a quill against parchment. Every stroke, and every combination of strokes, spelled out another letter in his mind. At the time, she thought it was absolute nonsense. Until she realized, sometime after the “accident,” that she could do the same with computers; that every key on the keyboard had its own highly distinctive sound, and she only needed to put them all together.
It was harder in a crowded room, where so many machines were being operated at once. But all that meant was that she needed to concentrate harder. And though she found herself feeling either disgusted or offended by most of what she discerned, as tomorrow’s Hate-Mail was slimed into shape, it didn’t take her long to pinpoint the writer she was looking for. Ryan Bradshaw, Crime Beat Reporter.
Who calls it the crime beat these days?
He saw her reflection in his screen as she approached him… exactly as she’d intended him to do… and she both timed and admired his reaction. There were eight, maybe nine seconds of uncertainty; then he spun with his mini-recorder already on “record” and fired his first question. “Some people say you’re little more than a prostitute, exacting payment in the form of prison sentences. What do you have to say to that?”
She’d expected something along those lines… his article in this morning’s paper had all but asked the same question.
“Can someone turn on the lights, please?” she asked. “I’d hate for your videos to come out too dark. Bad for the porn-tube public.” The fluorescent tubes that lined the ceiling flickered into life, and the Violet Vixen fixed Bradshaw with her stare, deep green eyes that promised so much… and threatened even more.
“Yes, some people do say that,” she answered musingly. “But they also say - and I quote from your story this morning - that I am an oversexed harpy, an over-made-up tart, and in need of a real man to put me in my place.”
He blanched.
“So, I’m assuming that you are that man?” she continued.
Giver him points, he regained his composure quickly. “Sorry, darling, you’re not my type.” And then, “besides. I’m married.”
“No you’re not,” one of his workmates murmured.
“As good as,” Bradshaw - suddenly shaken by the dissent - replied, but another voice laughed, “no, she dumped you six months ago.”
Others joined in the commentary. “Go on Ryan. Show her what you’ve got,” and the Violet Vixen smiled and extended a hand. “Your public has spoken.”
Again Bradshaw reassembled his composure. “Not here. I’m not doing it with that pack of animals braying around us.”
“Fine. The bathroom, then.” The Violet Vixen turned, smiling as the crowd of watching writers parted around her. She held open the door as Bradshaw followed slowly behind her. “That’s the ladies room,” he protested mildly, but she patted his ass gently. “I think they’ll know to knock before they come in.” Then, as the door closed behind them, “okay. Put me in my place.”
Despite himself, he had an erection. Not an especially impressive one, admittedly, but it was enough. She dropped to her knees. “I am yours to command.”
He was staring at her, still suspicious, but other emotions, other sensations, were pushing those fears away. What, he was thinking, could she really do to him? A quickie in the ladies, then back to work. He was composing his headline already. “How I Conquered the Violet Vixen…
“She knelt before me, the eyes that had transfixed so many criminal masterminds gazing up at me with nothing more than pathetic lust and degradation. This is no crime fighting superhero. Just a silly, frightened girl surrendering her virtue for a moment of meaningless companionship.”
He dropped his pants. “In your mouth.”
She leaned forward, accepted him between her lips - and he climaxed immediately. They always did.
She swallowed, then smiled. “Awwww. You were just nervous. Let’s try again.”
Of all the super powers she had acquired, there were many that she had long ago given up trying to understand. This was one of them; how, just by jamming one finger up a man’s back passage, she could instantly resurrect the most exhausted penis, again and again and again. Until even the horniest guy started trembling, begging her to allow him to rest. “But you want to do it properly, don’t you?” she’d coo. “Come on, just once more for me?” Or, “oh baby, can’t we try again? You’re so very good at it, you know.”
Christ, men can be so gullible, sometimes.
And besides, she enjoyed it. She enjoyed fucking strangers, no matter what their crimes were. She enjoyed being on her knees on a dirty bathroom floor; on her back in an alleyway with the local homeless for an audience; on all fours in a penthouse, telling Mr Big he was aptly named. Because she knew how it would end. She knew that she’d still be raring to go, long after he’d collapsed into a pathetic puddle of exhausted soreness. And when he did…
She rose, prodding Bradshaw’s prone body with her elegantly booted toe, then walked out of the bathroom. As she’d expected, the crowd was at the door, listening, laughing, and then peering in to where Bradshaw was lying, moaning softly, while his hands clutched what was left of his manhood.
A round of applause began softly, then built to follow her as she walked out of the office. There’d be no need to bother the Commissioner for this one, and she’d not even had to use any lipstick. Bradshaw would know what to write in his column and, as she ramped down her energy and changed back into mild, mousey Shirley, she suddenly knew how Peter Parker must have felt, when Spider-Man out-witted Jonah Jameson once again, and the Bugle was forced to retract another lie.
The next day
The early edition awaited her when she got up for breakfast. She scanned the pages, but Bradshaw’s by-line was absent. In its place, a different name and a different photo too, a young woman she recognized from the office last night. Now she was being billed as the Crime Beat Reporter, and her headline was succinct and to the point.
“The Violet Vixen. You Bet She’s The Real Thing, Baby.
“Last night, the enigmatic crime fighter known as the Violet Vixen paid an unscheduled visit to the Hate-Mail offices, and proved once and for all why she is feared and respected in every corner of Got’em City. And why, no matter how some citizens might disapprove of the methods she employs to keep our streets safe, we should nevertheless be thankful that she chose our metropolis as the scene of her exploits.
“They say a man’s greatest strength is his sex drive. It is a thing of love and beauty, it fires artists and authors and ambition and more. But it also motivates greed, it justifies violence, it prompts the most diminutive shadow to commit the most appalling crimes. Which means it is also man’s greatest weakness.
“So hear this and be warned, thou Sinners of the City. The Violet Vixen knows your names, she knows your lusts and she knows your crimes. And she also knows your address.
“The next time you see a helpless female, and think you will add her to the notches on your bedpost… think also on this. She may not be so helpless after all.
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