“How do I know you’re telling the truth about all of this?” I asked.

  “A sample,” he replied, and waved his hand. Light surged up from the floor and into my body, so that a moment later the metal morphed into me—but a better-looking, fitter version of me. Nude, so that I was glad to see Xin had turned away, even if technically he could maybe see the entire room without even needing to be there. “This is what I refer to. You can use the energy you gather to upgrade your metallic form, or spend it on taking on this form, when you prefer.

  He went on to explain that there was this Citadel in space, in another galaxy where beings with super powers were fighting for us, and that they needed new champions because they’d suffered a great defeat. That I could be one of these champions… and that indeed this was not a dream.

  I still had no reason to believe him, but also wanted what he was saying to be true. I was angry at the world, at the fact that if I’d been born on a paradise planet, I would’ve had the medical treatment available to easily beat the big C, but since I was an Earther, this was my fate. So fuck ‘em. More than just kind of believing Xin, I yearned for it to be true, for a second chance and for a chance to destroy whatever stood in my path.

  “I’m in,” I said.

  From there, it was like a form of insanity. I became this living weapon, this tool of destruction. He took on one of these forms as well, training me in these rooms where metal could come alive and attack from any direction. His moves were fluid, as if he were one with the rooms—and maybe he was. He’d come at me with a strike, producing metal swords from his hands one minute, long tentacles sparking with electricity shooting out at me the next.

  I learned to dodge, to strike, and to take pain.

  Lots of pain.

  That was fine though, because pain reminded me I was alive. Every time I fell, I lay there in agony, wondering if I’d get up again, and my mind returned to my childhood home. Brought back to memories of my parents. My dad lying with me on the couch, hand on my shoulder when I was sick. My mom laughing with me as I tried making chocolate milk without any help. She played along, even though I always adding whipped cream and gold fish for some reason. There were memories of those little moments, of a camping trip in West Virginia with all-you-can-eat pancakes, and more. Slices of life that reminded me of that precious reason to fight—life. Life for myself, if you could call it that, but more importantly, life for those who deserved it but couldn’t fight for themselves.

  One day, after I’d finished all this training with Xin, the time came for me to be unleashed upon our enemy. When I was out there, I never used my powers to become my old self. In part this was because I wasn’t sure I wanted to remember who I used to be. Focus was the name of the game. But also, I needed all the power I could to upgrade. After fighting off waves of enemies, I would sit for hours pulling their energy into myself, focusing it, developing my inner strength. New weapons became available, unheard of strength and speed.

  Soon I was ready for the enemy stronghold, but when I arrived, it was too late. They were making their move on the Citadel—the ruling seats of the superhero leaders in the Oram system. I made my advance, following them, attacking all I could along the way, but it wasn’t enough. The Elders of the Citadel made their sacrifice, even Xin.

  And ever since, I’ve been on the move, seeking out new enemies, doing what I could for the Citadel. I would kill them, absorb their life force to gain more energy that I could use. More power. Magic? I don’t know.

  At first, part of Xin remained to guide me, but he’s gone now. Maybe he’s out there, somewhere, having been able to transfer himself to one of these metal bodies as I did, but maybe we’ll never know.

  What I do know is that the fight isn’t over. That, and my desire to return to Earth has never died.

  Yesterday was my first time back. I used my power to see my parents in my true form. We laughed, we cried. I joined them for dinner and listened to my dad talk about his day at a data center. Do you know how many kids in the world would roll their eyes at the kind of stories he was telling me? Would pull out a fucking holo-screen and do something else, pretending to listen at best?

  Not me. Not yesterday. I absorbed every second of it, loving the fact that he was with me, that the two of them hadn’t died or something while I was gone. They didn’t understand what had happened, and that was fine. They didn’t need to. After me telling them it was better not to ask, they didn’t, focusing instead on the fact that I was back.

  But ‘back’ is a subjective term, and I knew I had to leave eventually.

  As soon as I’d walked outside, I was drawn to you all. Nobody told me what you were doing or why, but I sensed your presence, sensed that you were on my side.

  Was I wrong?

  The barrage of images that hit me as soon as I was close enough told me the answer to that is no, I wasn’t. I saw your quest, this next team member… even some other stuff you all do as a team. Not sure how I feel about that. But the point is, I’m here to help.

  I’m here to fight the enemy, at your side.

  11

  This ‘lady’ in her death body and glowing gold skull stared at us, waiting for an answer. ‘Death Girl’ she had called herself, and I thought it almost as ridiculous as referring to Barbie as her stripper name for her superhero epithet.

  I finally broke the silence. “You weren’t wrong. We’re preparing to fight off a massive alien invasion.”

  “Great. Where’re the rest of the supers?”

  I scrunched my nose, turning to Ria for that one.

  She shook her head. “There might be some coming, there might not be. We don’t know.”

  “You’re saying… an invasion’s about to happen, and all we have on our side is this demon-looking lady, Mr. Flanders over here, Bollywood, and…?”

  “And you,” Meher replied with a snarky grin.

  “Right…”

  “We’re fucked, aren’t we?” I asked.

  “Let’s hope the gladiator is amazing.”

  Meher glanced back in the car, eyes moving to the scratched interior from Ria’s horns, and now it was worse as Death Girl’s armor tore the leather seats.

  “I hope this whole fighting an invasion thing comes with insurance,” Meher said with a groan, and then sent the car flying again.

  “I’m not even sure how this next lady will fit in the car,” I pointed out.

  “First we worry about getting her on our side,” Ria replied, “then we figure out the transport situation. Worst case, we get rid of this hunk of shit and—”

  “Hey!” Meher protested. “This didn’t come cheap.”

  We rode on in silence for a while, reaching the edge of the city, then Death Girl directed Meher to the Oregon Coast, where a special episode of the next Godly Games was being filmed, the show in which Gloria was a prime contestant.

  So we made for the shore, Bubblegum drifting off to sleep. The idea was that, somewhere around there we’d be able to find our training ground.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, glancing back at Death Girl in the rearview mirror. “But…”

  “Go ahead. Don’t be shy.”

  I scrunched my nose, feeling really bad I’d even thought of the question. “It’s just… is that your real skull?”

  She laughed, a weird sight. “Skull and brain, soul as well, I imagine. The rest is a strange metallic substance given extra enhancements by supers who apparently knew what they were doing.”

  “Shit…”

  “Wait,” Ria said, doing her best to shift around in her seat to look at her. “That’s your real skull?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “I can see your fucking skull.”

  Death Girl stared, golden glow not as bright as it had been when we first met her. “And I can see your horns, practically see your tits, and smell your bullshit across a parking lot.”

  Ria stared, then started laughing. Loud enough to wake Bubblegum.

  “I like this one,” Ria said, and then leaned back to try and close her eyes. “One thing I gotta know, though. That day you first started as… this… did your parents come to visit you in the hospital that day, and you were without a skull and brain? The doctors just sort of shrugged and then they had a funeral? Or how the fuck did that go down?”

  Death Girl turned to stare straight ahead, her empty eye sockets eerily devoid of emotion or life, other than that gold.

  After a almost a minute, she said, “Fuck, I never thought of it.”

  “What?” I asked, realizing the other two had drifted off to sleep.

  “My parents,” Death Girl said. “They told me they thought I had died, that they’d had a funeral, but… Yeah, what the hell did they think? Now I’m curious.”

  “Well, then, we’ll have to go ahead and survive this war, so you can go back and ask them.”

  Death Girl nodded, then adjusted so that, even without eyes, she seemed to be looking at me. Then, for one brief second, there was a woman’s face there staring back with affection. She was not what I’d expected at all, with red, curly hair, skin smooth and speckled with freckles under the eyes, and pouty lips that any man would’ve loved to suck on. And just like that, the face was gone, replaced by the skull again.

  I blinked, turned to her, and she nodded, but held a finger up to her lips. As I reclined and Meher smiled my way, I smiled too, completely confused by this whole adventure. It had only been earlier that night that I’d been walking back from my shift at the diner, certain I’d pass out while watching the latest episode of the fantasy epic, Falls of Redemption. The way they kept the magic until later in the show had really hooked me, and damn, while I never thought I’d give a shit about the romantic side of it all, that’s really what kept me coming back for more.

  We must’ve been driving for a good hour or two before Meher pulled over and said she needed to switch out, so I got behind the wheel and started driving. After a few minutes, I glanced back and noticed it seemed Death Girl was staring at me. Hard to tell without eyes, but the skull was angled my way.

  “You don’t sleep, do you?” I asked.

  “No need, in this form.”

  I nodded, wondering what that could possibly be like. My mind raced with questions about her time with that super she’d called Xin and what the Citadel was, but figured I’d either learn in time, or it didn’t matter. Other questions pressed their way up more than once, such as whether she could really be considered alive at this point or not, but I stuffed those thoughts aside.

  What I did ask, though, was how much of her energy she had stored up.

  “The type I can use to transform to my old self?” she asked, voice a melodic hum to avoid waking the others. “A lot. I save it, as I’ve killed so many of the enemy, I’ve basically reached as far as I can go.”

  “So… you could walk around as the true you whenever you want?”

  She seemed to consider this, then said, “What is the true me? Who I once was? When I transform, yes, I become flesh again, become who I was… but this is as much the true me as that form ever was.”

  “But you could’ve approached us like that, instead of making us think you were trying to kill us. You could—”

  Her glow increased, and suddenly the red haired young lady was there again, only this time all of the black was gone. She sat there in the flesh, completely nude. My eyes darted away, then back, and I had to course correct as I started to veer off the road.

  When I looked back again, she was in her Death Girl mode, skull turned to stare out the window.

  “In truth,” she said, “I’d rather be judged according to this form. It reminds me of all the lives I’ve taken.”

  “Bad lives… right?” I asked.

  She ignored the question, instead saying, “When I showed you my form in the flesh, your mind was filled with other thoughts. You no longer saw me as a warrior, but as the body you’d like to press your own against. As, to put it crudely, a pussy you’d like to fuck. No?”

  I swallowed, trying to think of how best to answer that.

  “Don’t overthink the answer,” she said. “Tell me, from the heart.”

  “If you’re asking me whether my thoughts turn to sex, when I see a beautiful, naked woman,?” I shrugged. “Wouldn’t there be something wrong with me if I didn’t?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it makes me think of you as any less, or that I suddenly put you in some category of ‘pussy I’d like to fuck,’ or whatever you said.” My voice actually started rising, and I had to pull it back a notch. For some reason, I found myself offended at this line of thought. “Matter of fact, every man I’ve ever known who thinks strictly that way was badly burned by a woman who thought equally bad or worse to begin with. It cuts both ways, but that shouldn’t ever negatively affect a man or woman’s sexual appetite. Sexual health, really. And what me and these ladies have, or might have—soon have…? I don’t know. But whatever it is, please don’t cheapen it by making assumptions.”

  The glow returned, only enough to allow me to see both her and the skull at the same time. “So what you’re saying—Contra, was it? —is that you’d like to fuck me.”

  She turned back to the window, laughed to herself, and then returned to skull form.

  This lady was a bit off her rocker, I decided.

  “And another thing,” I started, only to hear her snoring.

  I drove in silence, then shook my head and glanced back. The skull was staring at me, seeming to smile. The laugh burst out of me, and I shook my head again at my stupidity.

  “No sleep,” I said.

  “Nope,” she replied, and we kept on.

  “Wait, if you don’t need to sleep, why aren’t you driving?”

  “First, nobody ever showed me how. Second, you didn’t ask?”

  “If you don’t know how to drive, I’m not going to ask you,” I said. “Though, if we survive this invasion, I might have to teach you how.”

  Her face formed as she smiled, then gave me a nod. “I’d like that,” she said, before the face faded again. All of this back and forth was jarring, and I started to understand what she meant about mostly keeping to the skull. It was badass, in its own way, and I started to find it very interesting that I could be attracted to her in that form.

  “Tell me a story,” I said, my head nodding as I nearly drifted off.

  “Huh?”

  “A story. If you can’t drive, at least you can keep me awake while I drive.”

  She considered this, then adjusted, leaning forward slightly, preparing another tale.

  12

  The story Death Girl told went like this:

  DEATH GIRL II

  Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a princess. Only, this princess had dreams of destroying all that was good and holy in this world. She put together teams of superpowered beings, partnering them with alien hordes, and rose up to proclaim herself ruler over all. No longer a princess, but queen of all she surveyed.

  One day, a knight arrived with a golden crown. This knight, who had been sent by a distant kingdom vowed to stop the queen at any cost. She challenged the queen to a fight.

  “Send out your greatest champion,” the knight said, in her soft, melodic voice. “If I defeat your champion, you know my power. You will back down.”

  The queen, scoffed, but with a wave of her hand sent forth a being that had the upper half of a man, the lower half of what appeared to be a six-legged horse with two tails that acted like whips. She called him Gorstran, and he was one of her many lovers.

  “Kill her fast, but make it gruesome,” the queen commanded her lover, watching with lust for blood and more, as this half-man half-beast hefted up his mighty battle axe, blue flames leaping up the blade.

  “You will have her head on a platter,” Gorstran replied, and then rode out to prove his love for the queen.

  The two fighters circled each other for a moment, the knight pulling her spiked batons from the air and then charging. Gorstran charged, too, axe held high. As he started to bring that axe down, however, the knight slid, shadows pulling her forward, so that she went right between his legs, stabbing through the first two and using that leverage to pull herself up and kick at Gorstran’s mid-section, sending him flying up and over, so that he landed face first and broke his back in the fall.

  Tails whipped out at the knight as Gorstran screamed and attempted to stand again, but it was useless. Cries of horror came from the queen at the fact that her greatest warrior and lover lay there, crippled, about to die.

  But the knight, dismissing her spiked batons and snatching away the fiery axe, first cut off only the legs she’d injured. Fire cauterized the wounds, and she held the fiery blade of the axe to the creature’s throat, just close enough to let him feel the heat.

  “Pull back now and he lives,” the knight said.

  The queen, instead, stood and called down her forces on the knight and champion alike, unable to take defeat in any form. And while the knight fought off the queen’s forces, destroying thousands of them that day, the queen retreated. Maybe she thought of it as leaving the knight to her death, but no, this knight had already died, in a way.

  When the knight left that place in search of the queen, she now truly understood in her heart, and knew that this evil woman must die. So she tracked down the queen, found her on one of her many planets, sitting on one of her many thrones with one of her many lovers’ heads buried in her nether regions, and she ended her rule then and there.

  At least she went out smiling, and the knight could finally move on to track down the rest of the evil in the universe.

  13

  Death Girl sat in silence, and finally I said, “Was that about you again? You were the knight?”