Barbra Duncan was laying down in in her cell’s bed, doing what she always did when she was stuck inside and had nothing to do. She was thinking just how the hell she had gotten herself into this mess.
A few years ago, while she was still in college working on her chemistry doctorate, a lab accident gave her the ability to increase her size and mass; albeit within certain limits. At first life had been a little weird, but after learning to control it, life pretty much went on as normal. Since all of this happened back during the era of the costumed superhero, she considered it more lucky than freakish, as did most of the people who found out about her.
As graduation came closer, she got an offer from another classmate, a woman named Danielle Carter. Unlike Barbra, Danni had no powers, and she ran around in a costume, fighting crime. Then Danni asked Barbra to join her.
To be honest, Barbra wasn’t really sure just why she said yes, put on a mask and took up the name Crush. Maybe because it was just the thing for people in her situation to do at the time. Maybe she just saw one too many purse snatchers over the course of her life.
Oh who am I kidding, Barbra told herself. She had been ‘experimenting’ at the time, and Danni was freaking hot! The fact she wore a skintight jumpsuit and was in peak physical condition only sweetened the deal.
But it turned out Danni didn’t swing that way. Still, she did find something fulfilling out of it.
Everything had been going good, until a super villain with an oversized ego an a little common sense managed to figure out who she was behind the mask. A threat to her family later, and the superhero Crush had become a supervillain. She even set a trap for Danielle ‘The Pink Avenger’ Carter and a fellow super hero named Vector. A trap in which she snapped Vector’s spine, and Danielle thankfully got away.
To help with her stress and guilt of betraying her best friend, Crush took as many jobs for the crime syndicate she could that involved rounding up the local gangs, and bringing their territory under the Syndicate’s control. Her powers made her muscles and skin the equivalent of Kevlar, so cleaning the streets of the drug dealers, street thugs, and gang bangers was little trouble at all.
Then Barbra ended up killing an FBI agent. He had been working undercover for some reason she never found out, but Barbra did see his badge fall out of his pocket right after she snapped his neck. He had been reaching for it before she killed him.
Murders, rapists, and people who sold poison to kids was one thing, Barbra slept just fine knowing they had been sent to Hell because of her. But that man’s face, begging her to stop, to wait just the three lousy seconds it would take for him to pull out his badge, Barbra had been having nightmares about that for years.
When the bad guys were eventually beaten and Barbra got her day in court after turning herself in, none of the charges against her mentioned the murder of a federal agent. The man had been undercover, so the FBI let his name be left on the list of dangerous criminals that Barbra had killed. Hell, she was even eligible for parole despite her status as a mass murderer thanks to that little omission on her record, the fact it had all been done under duress, and most of the people harmed at the time weren’t exactly being missed by the police. Even the assault on other superheroes wasn’t thought of as much since the times had changed, and they were now thought of costume vigilantes instead of concerned citizens.
So here she was, inside a normal federal prison instead of one meant to hold someone with her abilities. There was going to be a parole hearing for her later this week, and it wasn’t even Barbra’s first one. This one would be turned down like all the others. She hated it here, but it was where she belonged.
Not three cells down, the federal prison’s other super powered inmate was laying on her bed thinking to herselves; and no, that wasn’t a typo.
Shrike was a bit on an unknown in the criminal databases of America. She just came onto the radar one day, attempting a rather poorly planned one person robbery of the First National Bank in Miami. She shot a guard in the leg, emptied out a single cash register, and managed to get to the steps before the five police cars arrived with the officers that arrested her. Robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and a resisting arrest charge combined with an assault on an officer charge that got tacked on at the last second when she kneed one of the arresting officers in the groin along with a guilty ’and proud of it’ plea got her sent to this maximum security prison.
What no one really knew was the fact that she wanted to be here.
The other thing people didn’t know about her was she wasn’t really Shrike, or to be more precise, she wasn’t ‘just’ Shrike. Shrike was actually a magically created being that a collective of consciousness had made after running into a werecreature a few years back. A collective conscious that she was also a part of, and shared her thoughts with at all times.
Originally, the ‘creator’ of the group of personalities had been a single woman, who with a lack of any knowledge about her own origins, eventually ended up calling herself Array. When she had first woke up, Array was the subject of extremely brutal experiments by an extremely unsavory group of people. At the time, she had only been aware of her ability to regenerate extensive amounts of damage. To better understand this phenomena, the numerous scientists in charge of researching her subjected Array to various degrees of damage. Varying degrees meaning everything from broke fingers to amputated limbs, everything short of fatal injury.
She remembered how a group of people showed up trying to help her, the good guys. Today none of her could remember their faces with any real clarity, but they had all been rather large and dangerous looking, not the average sort. Then the woman in charge of the lab, and the most sadistic person there, presented ‘evidence’ that Array wasn’t alive or even self aware, and her personal property.
That’s when the heroes packed up there things, told Array that they were sorry, and left. They had known she was alive and felt pain, but just left her there because some bitch had a court order. Then the doctors got to work on sawing off her arms… for the tenth time… that morning.
Apparently people didn’t care about her suffering when it meant she could be the answer to amputated limbs, a cure for cancer, or about a hundred other ‘good’ things for mankind.
A bit later, a man broke into the lab she was being held at, intent on stealing its secrets. He was a criminal who was on the lookout for snazzy tech and such to help him evade some heroes on his tail. But instead of plundering all the research, he broke Array out of her container and made off with her instead.
Array quickly fell in love with her rescuer and joined up with him after he decided to found a gang of super powered criminals. She also discovered that after all that time learning how to re-grow parts of herself, she could create whole new bodies at will. They came complete with clothes and their own personalities. Although she could will the new bodies away with a thought, the old personalities stuck around in her thoughts. In fact, even when separated they all share each others thoughts.
Each personality had its own quirks, likes, and purpose; although to date all 100+ of them still worked in unison.
Shrike was just her newest one, created to fill a part in a rather grand scheme to get her boyfriend out of jail. Unlike the one that Shrike was in right now, his actually knew how to handle super powered people. Her job was to break out her cellmate, a former partner of Array’s boyfriend that was an expert thief. The reason for this was that even though Array could make a persona of any race or physical ability, they were born a blank slate, she didn’t have time to get a newbie up to world class thief status.
Slasher, Shrike’s cellmate and target was a veritable unknown to Array. They didn’t know the woman’s real name, where she came from, or anything about her personal life. However, Array did know she was a real sadistic bitch that knew how to break into high security stuff and fight. That’s all they really needed.
“Just a few more days, and we’re outta here,” Slasher reminded her while she went over to the window.
Shrike rolled her eyes and wished her cellmate would stop talking about that. Although she had tried to break Slasher out on the first day she arrived, there was a little problem. Her former teammate and member of the Syndicate, Crush was also in this particular facility. Without her family in danger, a situation Array wasn’t really willing to recreate, Crush had gone back to being one of the good guys.
Which meant Crush kept the two of them in line and put any ideas of escape on hold. Of course since Slasher was a bit of a psychopath, that didn’t stop her from trying to cause trouble. The two butted heads on almost a daily basis, with the much smaller and powerless Slasher ending up with her head in the bottom of a toilet most of the time.
But Crush was going to be having a parole hearing a few days. She would be gone, and Shrike would be able to get out of this dump. In just a few more days, Array would put the plan into motion that had taken years to set up.
Just as long as nothing goes wrong, Shrike reminded herself and everyone else that shared their link.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Slasher’s expression change to one of barely contained excitement to deer caught in the headlights mode as she looked out their cell window like she couldn‘t believe what she was seeing. “W-What the hell is that?”
“FEAR ME PUNY HUMANS! RUN! RUN FOR YOUR MISERABLE LITTLE LIVES! HAHAHA!”
The entire facility shook, and Shrike’s ears rang with the sound of something very big crashing through the prison’s perimeter wall. All of a sudden, Shrike had the odd feeling of over a hundred women who’d REALLY been needing some glaring at her. She just sighed. “Something tells me I’m gonna be at the end of the nookie line.”
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(Posted Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:18)
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