My Super-powered Diary Chapter 3 Good Cop Bad Cop By Amethyst When Maddock Ainsley gets involved in a rescue operation with his unit things go horribly wrong and his life is forever changed. Can the newly minted Merida cope with being a girl and a teenage super hero?

So she was going to be playing bad captor, big surprise there. “Oooh, I’m kinda wantin’ ya tae make me.” I knew it was risky to be pushing her buttons like that, but it was damn satisfying and I wanted her to be focused on me rather than the others.

We had decided that our first order of business would be to find out what powers we might have and how to use them whenever our captors weren’t around. Tasha and I couldn’t really be sure how long we had before they would start trying to reprogram us into good little drones. Tasha sensed though that with only five of us girls they would probably be focusing most of their efforts on trying to Activate and brainwash the boys first. We would actively resist any efforts to do so with us until we were ready to make our escape or they tried to physically separate us, and in the case of the latter we would stick together and make our escape at that point whether we felt ready or not.

If I were still my male adult self I’m pretty sure they would have gone for the full-out deluxe brainwashing package for me immediately. Probably drugs mixed in with telepathic suggestion and a little negative and positive reinforcement therapy. Luckily they were under the impression that I was one of the girls, and I figured that since there were only five of us girls that they would probably start light by a mix of more subtle techniques. Drugged food was most likely so we would have to be careful with that, but good captor/bad captor to encourage a little Stockholm syndrome was a definite possibility too. We would have to be suspicious of everything and not let them on to the fact that we were on to them, which would mean playing innocent and ignorant as much as possible and embellishing the ‘scared kids’ angle.

We had barely finished discussing the plan when Tasha sensed that our captors were on their way to check on us. Vanessa dashed to the bathroom to hop back in the bathtub, while the twins hopped onto Tasha’s bed with her to pretend to be scared and upset while she as the oldest of the group ‘comforted’ them. I practically dove under my blankets, wrapping them about my body tightly and doing my best to look both scared and pissed off, which wasn’t all that far from the truth once Phantom had entered the room. She was immediately followed by a tall woman whose entire body looked to be made up of green stone. She wore a skintight, sleeveless black and gold bodysuit and golden bracers and boots and with one hand she was pushing a rolling cart filled with food and drinks, while carrying at least a dozen shopping bags in her other hand.

I glowered at the familiar teleporter, hoping that my mutant power might be to fire lasers from my eyes. Nope, no laser eyes, dammit. It was taking every ounce of self-control I had right then just to keep sitting there with the blankets wrapped tightly around me. Every fiber of my being wanted to take her down for what she had done to my team, but I wasn’t sure that I could have taken her as Maddock. I may have still had all my training, at least in my head, but as Merida I was small, no stronger than any other girl my age, and still very uncoordinated and off-balance as I was trying to adjust to my new body. I hated that weakness, and myself for being that weak.

“Stick to the plan and play your role,” I told myself firmly. Being the fiery Scottish ‘lass’ that I was, it had been determined that I would be the hostile instigator to hopefully put them off balance while Tasha pretended to comfort the little ones and Vanessa practiced her shifting in the bathtub, hopefully out of mind as well as out of sight. “Wot the hell d’ya think yer doin’ kidnappin’ us like tha’?! Druggin’ us an’ throwin’ us in some dank dungeon like some sorta animals an’ then bringin’ us ‘ere! Why is there a mermaid in the loo, an’ where the fook are ma clothes?! Why the hell dae they ‘ave clothes an’ I’m layin’ ‘ere bare-arsed?!”

The twins burrowed closer into Tasha’s arms on the bed beside mine as the teleporter gave me a look that made me glad that she didn’t have laser eyes either. “Be quiet brat!”

So she was going to be playing bad captor, big surprise there. “Oooh, I’m kinda wantin’ ya tae make me.” I knew it was risky to be pushing her buttons like that, but it was damn satisfying and I wanted her to be focused on me rather than the others. Not only was that the plan, but I felt that if she did decide to hurt one of us or start a little brainwashing early on, I would rather it was me than the others since I was confident that I could handle a little pain and resist any brainwashing attempts better than them with the training I had had.

“If you insist, brat.” In a puff of smoke and displaced air Phantom vanished only to reappear beside my bed. Her arm shot toward me and she grasped my throat tightly as she lifted me off the bed. I struggled for air, choking in her grasp and then I felt a warmth rush through me, it was like there was this fire deep within me and it was spreading through my body until it covered my skin. Suddenly I wasn’t choking anymore, and I opened my eyes to see that same bright red glow from the when I had changed and Phantom staring at me in shock as she continued trying to choke me and failed.

“I thought ya were goin’ tae make me be quiet? Oooh lookie this, I’m still talkin’, ‘ow aboot tha’.” I smiled at her as I tried to figure out what was going on, and then it hit me. “I have a freakin’ force field!” We glared at one another for a long moment, me with that cocky smile on my face and her looking like she wanted to gut me with a rusty spoon. I wanted to punch her then just to add insult to injury, or I guess in this case it would be adding injury to insult, but despite her apparent inability to keep a solid grip on my throat she still had me at arm’s length and her reach was much longer than mine. I settled for a good solid kick to her midsection and I’m not sure which of us was surprised more when, with the sound of cracking ribs, it knocked the wind out of her and sent her flying toward the wall between the twins’ beds on the other side of the room.

Phantom managed to teleport before crashing into the wall, appearing back in the center of the room and wincing in obvious pain as she clutched her ribs on her right side. Once again we stared one another down as she stood there trying to look like she still had some control over the situation and I floated in the air a good foot over my bed. Still, this hadn’t been the plan. The plan had been for me to antagonize her, but get her to underestimate us and allow her to keep the illusion of control, and one of us having a force field didn’t mean we could all escape yet. We still needed time to figure out what other powers we might have to work with.

I felt for the energy inside me, trying to slow the flow of it while keeping that cocky smile on my face. The red glow began to flicker and I put on my best confused and exhausted expression as I cut off the energy off, fell to my bed, and pretended to pass out. I’m no great shakes as an actor, or I guess that would be actress now, but I think I was pretty convincing. The twins jumped onto my bed in concern, shaking me and calling out my new name. Phantom snorted in disgust and muttered, “Wake the girl up Jade, and explain their situation. I’ve had enough of that brat for one day, the next time she steps out of line I’ll kill her.” I could hear her stomping off toward the exit and slamming the door behind her as I continued to fake my exhaustion. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth though, the truth was that I had never felt more energized in my entire life.

“Ya can stop hammin’ it up now, she’s gone,” an unfamiliar voice broke the brief silence that followed. Her accent was familiar, but it was very faint, like she had been actively working on trying to lose it for a long time. I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it at all if my eyes weren’t closed and I hadn’t been straining my hearing. When I opened my eyes the green stone woman was standing at the end of my bed looking over me. Her expression as she looked me over was somewhere between wonder and confusion, but she seemed to shrug it off quickly. “Good thinkin’ cutting your powers out to make it look like you couldn’t hold them for long, she took it hook, line, and sinker. It’s not a good idea to piss her off though, much less humiliate her the way that you did.”

“It’s okay Merida, I think she’s really on our side,” Tasha advised. Then she turned to the green woman and added, “We can talk safely, there are no cameras or listening devices in this room.”

It turned out that Jade was the Hyper Affairs Agency’s inside-woman and, once Vanessa had been convinced to come join us, she began to explain the situation. She had been hoping that her agency would have been able to extract the kids before they could be moved to this new more secure facility, but she hadn’t been able to give much notice and she hadn’t known what exactly the Zeta Bomb was at that point, let alone that they had intended to use it. Fortunately she had been assigned to be the one to look after our needs and try to turn us to Omega’s cause. She was supposed to bring us our meals and socialize with us a bit, taking on the caring mother role while Phantom would come in once a day or so and be intimidating until Jade, and the drugs they were lacing some of our food with, began to make some progress. It was about what I had guessed they would be planning and I had to silently agree with Jade as she referred to it as ‘amateur hour’.

On the unfortunate side, she had no idea where this new complex was. They had all been teleported here, nobody was allowed outside the complex itself, they were teleported to and from missions, and there was some kind of energy field that blocked any sort of communication devices such as cell phones or tracking devices. There were also no outside lines or computers with internet access, at least not in the places that Jade was allowed access to. Even when she had gone out shopping Phantom had teleported her there and arranged a time and place to meet to pick her up again. Jade was pretty sure that the complex was underground somewhere, but it looked like Omega really wanted to keep this location under wraps.

“You girls should eat somethin’,” the woman finally said after her explanation. “I can’t really be sure which foods they drugged though, it could be any or all of them. The pizzas, sodas, and chips are fine, I got those myself while I was out shopping and they haven’t left my sight.”

Tasha pointed to some bowls of cherry Jell-O, a pitcher of orange juice, and some cupcakes, the only real beverage besides water and the only desserts on the cart. “Those are drugged,” she said with that unnerving absolute certainty of hers.

Jade’s eyes widened in response, “Interestin’, are ya just makin’ an educated guess or is there more to it?” She had let a little more of her accent slip out in her surprise and there was something about it that was nagging at me. There was something in her gravelly voice too, something that I just couldn’t put my finger on.

“We think it’s her thing, or at least one of them,” Vanessa put in. “She does that all the time, we’re getting used to it.”

As we all ate, carefully avoiding the things that Tasha had pointed out, we discussed our abilities so far and our changes, and Jade seemed worried about us, asking if there were any physical issues, pains, or anything else concerning since we’d been Activated. Then we moved on to possible escape plans, given what little information Jade had been able to provide about the layout. “Wot aboot the air ducts?” I asked after a bit of thought once we were finished eating. “They have tae be getting’ air in ‘ere somehow an’ some o’ us are pretty small.”

Jade shook her head sadly. “Not unless ya can squeeze through a six inch pipe. I already thought of that and checked. I may have a few things that can help us though. While I was out shoppin’ for you and I was sure that Phantom was busy elsewhere I got my fiancé to bring me some things from home and slipped them in with my purchases. I needed to report to him anyway since he’s my contact with HAA. I got some clothes fer all of ya. I had to guess at the sizes, so I hope they fit okay.”

She was starting to unpack the shopping bags when one of the twins, I think it was Mei, suddenly asked, “How do you go shopping like that anyway? Don’t you get a lot of attention?”

“The real Jade doesn’t care much about the attention, which is how the HAA was able to track and capture her last month just after she was recruited by Omega. My fiancé asked me to take her place as a favor and try to pass on any information until we could bring them down. I was really hopin’ that we could do that before they completed this base.” She grumbled the last unhappily as she sorted through the bags, extracting some dresses in various sizes, undergarments, and some kind of shoes that I later learned were called ballet flats. She had also bought a wide variety of personal hygiene and hair care products for us to use until we escaped.

I wasted no time in putting on the simple white dress, sports bra, and panties she handed me after giving me a good once over. Sure they were girly and the panties had cartoon kittens on them, but they were clothes and at the moment I would have worn just about anything. It took me a moment to figure out the bra and dress, but Vanessa helped me to get everything on after changing out of her wet top and into the slightly more adult-looking undergarments and bright blue dress that had been handed to her. “So since yuir no’ the real Jade, I’m guessin’ yuir a Shifter?” I asked while trying to extract my hair from under the dress.

Not-Jade shook her head. “I’m a Tinker actually, I mostly do contract work for the military and governmen’ agencies and I created a body suit specifically for infiltration missions like this. It projects a force field and photon-driven image of Jade, contains a voice synthesizer to make me sound like her and has sensors inside the mask to realistically copy my facial movements onto the projection in real time. Underneath that I’m wearin’ a lightweight exoskeleton with miniaturized hydraulics to mimic her strength. Neither was tested under long-term conditions yet though, which was why I needed to be doin’ the infiltration myself, in case something went wrong or needed to be tweaked. It’s all a bit uncomfortable and breathin’ is a bitch, so I need to take the mask off whenever I get time alone. So while I was shoppin’ I just took off the mask an’ set the suit to project casual clothes instead, kinda like this.”

She tapped a few spots on her wrist, and Jade’s body and outfit changed into a casual jeans, hoodie, and sneakers combination. Her suddenly shiny white gloved hands reached up for her head, now a shiny white hood and mask that covered her whole head and face, and fumbled with something around her neck. Then she pulled her hands back over her head, revealing a very familiar face with bright blue-green eyes and bright copper hair, a face that could be my own in a decade or two from now. “Blair?!” I gasped as the other girls looked from me to my sister and back at me again in confusion.

Blair’s brow furrowed and she looked at me intently for a long moment before taking my hand and pulling me toward the bathroom. “Excuse us girls, but I think that ‘Merida’ and I need to have a little talk. Alone.”