“Well good morning, sleepyhead,” a high-pitched voice pierced through the fog clouding Siren’s brain.  She struggled to even open her eyes, trying to climb her way out of the disoriented muddle she found herself in.

“Mnngff,” she moaned.  It was a familiar noise, accompanied by a familiar full feeling in her mouth.  A gag, she thought, her tongue exploring the round, smooth object invading her oral cavity.  

“Come on, wake up,” the voice continued.  Siren felt her cheeks being lightly slapped, and she wrenched her eyes open, blinking against the harsh light.

A woman with long, wavy jet-black hair stood in front of her, the woman’s hazel eyes just inches from her own.  Siren tried to pull back, quickly finding it impossible.  She was sitting in a chair, and attempts to move her arms quickly proved they had been tied behind her, thrown over the back of the chair.  Her ankles were bound together.  She was pinned to the seat of the chair, she quickly discovered, and the reason the women was so close to was that she was sitting on her lap.

“Are you always this cranky when you first wake up?” the woman asked, leaning in closer until their noses were touching.

Siren growled into her ball gag, a thick line of drool spilling from her lower lip.  She at least hadn’t been unmasked, the rest of her costume and her wig both still in place as well.  Though their removal was likely being saved for when she woke up.

Siren jerked her head to the side, breaking contact with her new captor.  She used the opportunity to try and figure out where she was.  A single electric lantern hung from the ceiling a few feet behind her.  The walls on either side of her were close, painted green metal.  She couldn’t see far enough into the darkness behind or in front of her.  The revelation of what she was in left a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.  She feared she was in a shipping container.  She could be anywhere, destined for anywhere.

“What’s the matter, Siren?  This can’t be the first time someone’s knocked you out and tied you up,” the woman mocked, getting off of her lap.  Siren noted she was otherwise unbound from the chair, but making a move in front of her captor likely wouldn’t yield positive results.  She sat quietly, testing the rope binding her wrists.

“The Siren, a creature of Greek Mythology who lured sailors to their deaths with her enchanting voice.  A fitting name, and a very interesting ability.”  The woman paced back and forth in front of her captive audience as she spoke.  She was wearing a low-cut black strapless dress with a short, frilled skirt, and a pair of tall black heels.

“In most depictions, the sirens shared features with birds, from wings to feathers to bird heads, but in a few, the sirens akin to mermaids.  I’m guessing those were the sirens you based your image on, no?”  The woman ran her fingers, her nails painted black, across Siren’s green, scaled armor.

Siren didn’t attempt to respond, but it was no coincidence that her armor looked like fish scales.  Given the abundance of Super Heroes popping up that could actually fly when she was getting started, it had seemed silly to base her image off of a bird-like creature when she couldn’t fly herself.

“But you don’t lure people to their deaths with your voice, do you?  Siren’s such an unfitting name.  I mean, you didn’t even use that beautiful voice of yours to take out those buffoons at the law office.  What a waste.”

Siren glared at her captor.  She didn’t seem like she was connected to Hamilton and Thomas.  If the whole thing with the lawyers had been some sort of trap, she owed them an apology; they were more competent than she gave them credit for.  But somehow, she doubted the two were related.

“No, I don’t think Siren is a very appropriate name for you.  I like Ariel,” she said with a wink.  “Just a little redheaded mermaid whose voice I intend to steal.”

Siren’s eyes went wide.  She attempted to pull herself up out of the chair, but the woman just pushed her back into place, climbing back onto her lap, pinning her once more.

“But don’t worry, my little mermaid.  I won’t take the beautiful voice of yours yet.  I have to figure out how first.”  Her hand slipped under the chair, pulling out a white cloth and an amber bottle.  “I saw how you handled those guys without the use of your mouth, so this is just to keep you docile and compliant for me,” she said, pouring the contents of the bottle onto the cloth.  

This wasn’t Siren’s first run in with chloroform, and she jerked her head around, trying avoid the soporific fumes on the drug laced cloth, but her captor had no trouble clamping the cloth over her gagged mouth and nose.

“That’s it, deep breaths,” the women whispered in her ear.  Siren knew it was useless to fight it, but she held her breath anyways, avoiding the inevitable for as long as she could before she finally had to inhale, filling her lungs with the sweet smelling fumes.  Her captor held her face still, staring into her green eyes as the drugs hijacked her system.  Still week from the tranquilizer dart, she didn’t last long, swooning, her heavy lidded eyes blinking lazily before they didn’t open again.  “They call me the Sea Witch, but since we’re going to be such good friends, you can call me by my birth name, Ursula.”  It was the last thing Siren heard before she fell into a drug-induced sleep.

Ursula climbed off of the sleeping redhead.  She hauled her limp form out of the chair, depositing her on the ground.  She untied her wrists and ankles and began peeling the unconscious heroine out of her costume.  She left the girl’s mask, wig, and gag on, but stripped her of everything else, completely naked, splaying out Siren’s rag doll form across the bottom of the shipping container.  Ursula stood over the fallen heroine, admiring the way her naked breasts rose and fell with each shallow breath she took.  Her body was toned and firmed, but still feminine in every way, the faint outlines of her abs and muscular legs not detracting from her womanly charms.

“Ariel is such a prettier name for you than Annabelle, anyways,” Ursula mused, poking her helpless captive with her foot.  She held her hands above Siren’s inert form, spreading her fingers.  “Estoviat vaustula engredios malcium,” she began to chant.  The light of the electric lantern grew dim, all of the light in the shipping container seeming to be sucked into Ursula’s hands.  A pale light lowered from her hands onto Siren’s body, a collar of unearthly light forming around her throat while Ursula continued to incant her dark words of power.



Siren awoke for the second time that day from a heavy drugged sleep, disoriented.  If anything, this time was worse, accompanied by a splitting headache, the reason for which was soon readily apparent as she figured out she was hanging upside down, suspended by her feet, the blood pooling in her head.  

She had no clue how long she had been hanging like that, but it had to be a long time, given how she felt like her head was going to explode.  She opened her eyes, trying to get a bearing on her surroundings.  Her peripheral vision was dark and hazy; something she figured was probably not a good sign.  Hopefully she wasn’t suffering any permanent damage.  Something wet fell into her eye, making her blink furiously.  Her jaws were still wrapped around a fat ball gag, making her drool, the saliva running up her upside down face into her eyes.  Lovely.

She looked down, or up from her perspective first, staring down a considerable distance to the deck of a, a ship, she guessed.  There were railings, and water on either side, so yeah, a ship of some sort.  She looked up, her eyes going wide as she saw her body.  

Her costume and armor was gone.  In its place, she’d been forced to wear a seashell bra, bringing back memories of her captor, Ursula’s nickname for her as the Little Mermaid.  Of course, the clamshells weren’t sitting right, setting atop the bottom of her upturned breasts, leaving her pink nipples exposed.  Below the ill-fitting makeshift bra, around her waist and covering her legs was a mermaid tail.  Green scales similar to her armor adorned the mass encircling her lower half, ending in a flipper like appendage where her feet were, a chain wrapped around the base of which that hung her suspended from some sort of apparatus on the ship.

She wriggled her legs experimentally, finding they were fastened tightly together under the mermaid tail.  Her arms were behind her, bound in a restrictive box tie.  She wriggled, blushing as she realized she was wriggling like a fish on a hook.  The sun was coming up, and the city was still right off side of the boat, recognizable buildings putting her and the ship she was hanging from in the harbor still.  That was a relief, until she managed to swing herself into rotating slowly around, realizing what kind of boat she was on.

It was a cruise ship.  They departed regularly from Bristol Bay for voyages to the Caribbean, and, not that she’d ever been able to go one, she knew they usually started boarding in the early morning.  Meaning that very shortly, the ship would be crawling with people, witnessing her plight.

Siren flew into a struggling frenzy, fighting the ropes holding her body, bucking her body in an attempt to dislodge the chain around her legs, oblivious to the fact that a fall from such a height onto her head would kill her for sure.

Her struggles soon left her out of breath, the headache reaching new levels of torment.  She panted around her ball gag, fresh streams of drool rolling up her face, coating her mask, getting into her eyes and the long locks of her wig, both still thankfully on.  This particular torment was designed to humiliate her heroine identity, and not reveal her true identity.  Somehow, this small blessing was of little consolation in her current state.

The faint sound of voices drifted up to her.  She looked down, spotting the cruise employees gathering on the deck, pointing up at her.  More and more joined them, but no one seemed to be doing a damn thing about getting her down.  Her gaze wandered across the brown waters of the bay to the shore, her eyes lighting on the channel 12 news van pulling up near the gangway to the cruise.  She groaned into her gag, watching the tiny figures spilling out of the van, setting up their video equipment to encapsulate and immortalize her predicament for the entire world to see.

Aegis was right, I should have just retired, she thought glumly, watching the news crew make their way up onto the boat.



It took almost four hours for them to get a crane lifted onto the cruise ship to get her down.  The news crew, channel 12 joined by two more local crews as well as a national news team, had captured every second of it in high def.  By the time Siren was cut loose and lowered to waiting rescue crews, she was dizzy and incoherent from hanging upside down for so long.

“I’m gonna take out the ball gag, do me a favor and just don’t say anything,” she heard someone say as she was loaded onto a stretcher and strapped into place.  She looked around, her vision splotchy and unreliable.  A man sized shape stood over her, and she felt her clamshells being pulled up to cover her nipples, protecting whatever scrap of modesty she had left.

She tried to focus on the person walking alongside her stretcher as she was carried down the gangplank to a waiting ambulance.  The voice sounded so familiar but she couldn’t place it.  The shape swam in and out of her blurry vision, but she was finally able to make out the signature cowboy hat as her stretcher was loaded into the back of an ambulance.  

“Izzy,” she moaned, trying to make out his face.

“Shut up Siren,” he said, climbing into the back of the ambulance after her.  One of the paramedics grabbed a pair of shears and went to work trying to remove the tail the was concealing her lower half, but the industrial metal scissors were no match for whatever her tail was made of.

“Just give me a couple of minutes,” Izzy said to the paramedic.

“Yes, mister Barrage sir,” the paramedic said, nodding frantically, and he joined his partner up front, the ambulance starting up and taking off.

“Hold still,” Izzy said, pulling the hem of the restrictive garment away from Siren’s hip, pointing a finger at it.  A blast of kinetic energy obliterated the material, and Izzy was able to rip it the rest of the way down.

“Izzy, what are you doing here?” Siren managed to ask.  Her vision was rapidly coming back, and she could make out the stern frown on the Legend’s face.

“Just shut up, and pray you don’t have brain damage,” he said, ripping the mermaid tail off of her completely.  She was naked underneath save for a three thick leather straps binding her ankles, calves and thighs into a single limb.  Three of his quick blasts and she was free of those too, and he pulled a gown off of a shelf in the back of the ambulance, ripping it out of the sterile package and draping it over her.

“I don’t have brain damage,” she said.  At least she didn’t think she did.  Her senses were returning to her rather quickly, and other than still sporting a ferocious headache, she was pretty sure she was all right.  Physically and mentally always.  Emotionally, she may never get over the humiliation of what she’d just been through, and she was sure she’d be reliving it for the next for weeks on the news constantly.

“Just let them take you to the hospital and check you out.  I’ve got a doctor coming in who won’t reveal your identity.”

“Ugh, please not that freak,” she had a good idea of who Izzy meant, a man more mad scientist than doctor that the LC called on from time to time.

“Dr. Sisaro isn’t that bad,” Izzy said.

Siren tried to sit up, forgetting she was still strapped down.  “Let me up Izzy, I’ll be alright.”

The cowboy hero paused, hesitating.  She recalled Ursula’s threat to steal her voice, and she wondered for a second if she hadn’t in fact found a way to steal her power, but Izzy undid the strap holding her down to the stretcher.  Izzy had always been uncannily good at ignoring her commands anyways.  

“How bad is it?” she asked, sitting up and pulling the gown on.  

Izzy shrugged.  “It’s not good, but it could be worse.  Your identity still seems to be safe.  And there’s a silver lining.”

Siren raised an eyebrow.  “Siren’s real, and so are her boobs?” she asked.

“No.  Well, probably yes, I’m sure that’s gonna be a headline somewhere, if it isn’t already.  But I think your lawsuit problems are over.”

“Wait, how’s that?” she asked, thinking back to her conversation with the lawyers right before her abduction.  She hadn’t gotten the impression that the lawyers were done trying to crucify her, and she was pretty sure that Ursula was unaffiliated with the lawyers.

“The class action suit was predicated on the idea that you were a threat to the city.  That assumption has been trumped by your, uh, new image,” Izzy said, trying to find a way to delicately phrase it.

He needn’t have tried.  “I’m a joke now, aren’t I?” she asked.

“Kinda, yeah.  You went from badass, mind controlling vigilante of the night to bumbling super heroine slash damsel in distress pretty quick.”

Siren sighed, lying back down on the stretcher.  “And the LC?”

“That depends, really, on who did this to you.”  He took off his hat, running his hand through his messy blond hair.

Siren sighed, draping her arm over her face.  She wasn’t sure of how much to admit to the Legend.  Anything he or the LC might no would be helpful, but even still, the woman had treated her like a helpless Disney princess, and then had shown the world that side of her.  “Her name was Ursula, she said she’s called the Sea Witch,” she said, blushing even as the words left her mouth.

Izzy shrugged.  “Never heard of her.”

“Besides the Disney villain.”

“Still never heard of her.”

“Seriously?”

“Is that a reference I should get?”

“Yeah, everyone should get that.  Even Super Heroes had to have childhoods.”

“Probably, but I’m not American, remember?  The only American films I saw growing up were Westerns, and well,” he put his hat back on and gestured to his get up.  

“Point being, she’s the villain of ‘The Little Mermaid,’ or named after her.”

“And that’s why you were hanging from a ship in a mermaid costume.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess that’s good news.”

“How is that good news?”  Siren removed her arm from her face, looking up at Izzy.

“All heroes get an arch nemesis.  Sounds like you’re officially a hero now.”

“She is not my arch nemesis,” Siren responded defiantly, but even as she said it, she thought back to what Ursula had told her.  The sea witch wasn’t done with her.  She was going to try and steal her voice, and she had definitely not seen the last of her.  “Please tell me you have an arch nemesis at least half as embarrassing as mine,” she said.  “Like an old timey sheriff?”

“Psh, I’ve never had a nemesis.”

“You just said all heroes have one.”

“Yup.”

An awkward silence permeated the back of the ambulance.  Siren realized they were probably nearing the hospital, and she called up front to the two paramedics.  “Don’t take me to the hospital, drop me off on South Main Street.”

“Yes ma’am,” one of them responded from up front.

“Not going home?” Izzy asked.

“I gotta get my car.  I already lost my armor, I don’t need to lose my car too.”

“Look, if you need new armor,” Izzy started.

“Don’t,” she cut him off.  “You’ve done more than enough.  Thanks for getting me, and protecting my identity.”

The ambulance came to a stop.  “We’re here,” one of the paramedics called back.

“Thanks,” she responded.  She got up off the stretcher, opening the back of the ambulance.

“Siren,” Izzy said as she was stepping down.

“Yeah?”

“You’ve got something written on your ass, in case you didn’t notice.”

She blushed, clutching the back of her gown with one hand.  “Thanks Izzy.”

“No problem.  Try not to get into too much trouble,” he said, shutting the ambulance doors.



Anna pulled her car up to her apartment.  She was tempted to just put the seat back and go to sleep in her car.  She reached down her gown, ripping off the uncomfortable clamshell bikini.  Her street clothes were still in her trunk from when she’d changed into her costume, now absconded, less than a day ago.  It seemed like forever ago.  Her mask and wig were shoved into the glove compartment.  They were kind of useless without her costume, her zirconium scale armor something she couldn’t afford to replace on her current teacher’s salary.  

“FUCK!” she screamed, punching her horn, her fists slamming into the steering wheel until her knuckles bleed while she screamed incoherently.

She finally collapsed, exhausted, her head resting on the steering wheel, her fresh blood smearing on her forehead, sobbing.  Who was she kidding?  She should have just stayed retired.  She was a decent teacher, she had been doing good work helping deaf kids learn, but she had thought she could do more.  She couldn’t do more.  She had lawyers stirring up every crazy within thirty miles to blame her for their every sin or crime, and now she had attracted some psycho bitch who wanted to steal her voice, her power, and had already stolen her costume, and destroyed what little reputation she had, turning her Super Heroine persona into a joke and the laughingstock of the whole city.

She choked out one last sob, wiping snot on the sleeve of her gown.  She grabbed her wig and mask out of the glove compartment, tucking them under her arm.  She almost tucked her backup key under the chassis, and then remembered it was now her primary key, and held it tightly into her fist.  She’d have to break into her apartment, she thought, choking back a fresh sob.  She’d lost her phone as well.  Oh god, that madwoman had her phone, her contacts, all the people she cared about, she realized.

Anna climbed the stairs to her apartment; grateful at least that none of her neighbors saw her.  She tried her apartment door, knowing it would be locked, and was surprised to find it open.

She never forgot to lock her door.  The window by the fire escape was usually unlocked, but she was toot tired to even try climbing the fire escape, let alone it was broad daylight and she was wearing a hospital gown.  She eased her door open, assuming a defensive stance as she entered her apartment.

Nothing seemed out of place.  She went from room to room, but everything was as she had left it.  Finally she checked her bedroom.  Her heart sunk as she saw, spread neatly out on her bed, her costume.  

The relief of seeing it again, and finding everything to be in place, was overshadowed by the sickening realization that Ursula knew exactly who she was, and where she lived.  She remembered Izzy pointing out that there was something written on her butt, and rushed to her bathroom, turning around and bending over.  It was difficult to make out backwards in the mirror, but written in neat script across the bottom of her butt cheeks was a short message.

“See you soon.  Love, Ursula.”

Anna stood up, ripping the cheap gown off and hurling it against the mirror.  The cloth unfolded in mid flight, bouncing harmlessly off of the mirror and cascading into the sink.  She stood, stark naked in her bathroom, her hands clenched into tight fists, her breath coming in short gasps as the resigned depression was slowly overtaken by a slow building rage.  

Her fist shot out, shattering the window, a spider web of cracks appearing across the reflection of her naked form.  Fresh blood dripped from her bruised knuckles,

“See you soon, bitch,” She muttered, staring at her shattered reflection.