AAAEEH says the blaring alarm, over and over again. Fed up with the repeated sound, the robber, a pink and red, spandex clad super villain, silences it by shooting it with one of the spring-like projectiles loading her homemade gun.
With a clang the spring hits the alarm. It stops blaring as the spring falls, hits the ground and rolls towards the front counter.
After a moment of quiet, the female bad guy vocalizes her success. “That’s better.” She makes eye contact with one of her hostages and smiles. “It was starting to give me a headache.” The hostage quickly puts their head back down.
The only sound in the bank, other than it’s occupants' breaths, is Intelegant, the villain’s footsteps as they walk to where the spring projectile fell. The youngest of her hostages, a five year old girl, looks up at her as she walks by. Again, the villain makes eye contact and smiles, but the girl doesn’t back down.
“You on news.” The little girl’s mother moves to stop her, but stops when Intelegant glares at her.
“Sit up, I want to get a look at you,” she says to the child.
“You cool,” the child informs the villain.
“Why thank you.” Intelegant fakes pushing hair behind her ear. Her hair is hidden in her costume, it’s under a cap and a hood.
“Mom says I can’t be you ‘cause you bad. Why you bad?”
Intelegant puts a hand to her chin. “I’ve never really thought about it. Why do you think?”
The little girl is confused.
The villain answers her own question. “It’s because I’m evil. Mwahahaha!”
The little girl laughs. A couple of the other hostages snicker at the same time.
Intelegant smiles. “Truly evil!” She jumps over to her weapon’s projectile, still lying on the ground, and scoops it up as more of the hostages join in the laughter.
She leans on the counter as she puts the spring back into her gun. “You, at the counter, can I have some money?”
The worker behind the counter seems much too calm. “Do you have something to put it in?”
“Nope. You got anything?” Intelegant’s looking over the counter at what’s on the other side.
“No.”
“Not used to bank robbers?”
“We prefer not to help them when they do come.” The seasoned worker isn’t at all worried, he’s just interested in seeing how this will end.
“Probably smart, but-” the villain is cut off by the door slamming open. In bursts a second spandex-clad super, this one a hero.
“Naturalist!” One of the hostages shouts happily.
The hero, apparently named Naturalist, lands in the center of the bank in a heroic pose. “Stop right there, Intelegant!”
The supervillain laughs, strikes her own pose and points the gun at him. “You actually think you can stop me?!”
“I have before,” the hunky-looking, brown-haired hero says snarkily.
“That was a long time ago, Naturalist!”
“It was three weeks ago.”
“I’m sure three weeks is a long time for you. You know, since you obviously can’t keep a job or relationship with your hero schedule,” she says with a smirk.
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From under his branch themed mask, he raises an eyebrow. “And you think your villain schedule is better? You must spend hours every day coming up with your awful plans to defeat me.”
“At least I can control when I work instead of running around getting cats out of trees twenty-four seven.”
“I get to help people every day; I couldn’t be happier!”
“I get to do what I love every day, I make money from it and I don’t look like shit.” His costume is a brown onesie while hers is intricate, armored, and customized.
“Is this normal?” one of the people that happened to be in the bank when the villain attacked whispers just a little too loudly. The guy is very old and spends most of his days inside his house doing who knows what, so he’s rather disconnected from the world and does not know the unique way these two weirdos function, specifically Intelegant; she insists on chatting with her opponent.
“Is what normal?” the hero asks.
The civilian blushes. “I-I just meant that police and the people they are trying to catch don’t usually… talk the way you guys do.”
The person lying beside him, a college student with a roommate that’s a huge fan of the two, gives him a deadpan look as if to say, “How could you not know this?” which makes his blush deepen.
“The banter is the best part of being a supervillain,” Intelegant says. “The police don’t let me do this, but this guy is fun to mess with, especially since he always shows up to ‘stop me’.” She mimes air quotes.
“You’re right.” Naturalist ignores Intelegant and speaks directly to the citizen. “But I do this to get her to reveal all her plans, so I can catch her easier.” In reality, he just enjoys talking to her.
“Good job!” the villain claps. “You finally learned how to use your brain when dealing with me!”
“You shouldn’t have said anything,” the person lying beside the man mutters to him.
“Put down the weapon right now and I’ll try to get you a reduced sentence.”
“Ha! You’ve never been able to catch me before! What makes you think this time is any different? ‘Cause there’s no way in heck that I’m going down.” She starts boxing the air with the hand not holding her gun.
“What does that gun even do?” he asks.
“Attack me and you’ll find out.” She has a huge smile under her gas mask like face covering.
Naturalist rushes towards the villain.
BZZZZZTT!
A metal spring shoots out of the gun.
Naturalist dodges it.
“No fair! You have super speed,” the childish girl says with a pout as the hero gets closer to her.
“If that’s not fair then your mystery guns aren’t either.” He punches her in the gut, throwing her into the counter behind her.
“That’s different! I had to work for my weapons and you got yours just ‘cause you were born,” she says as she gets up, seemingly unaffected by the punch.
“You know, I’m always going to show up and defeat you.” He picks her up by her black hood. She takes the chance to shoot him square in the chest.
Naturalist goes limp. The second he’s down the supervillain smiles and leaves with a “Tata!”. The hero gets up within less than a minute, looking rather annoyed.
“She made a taser,” he mutters as he starts running after her.
“A really strong taser!” she shouts from outside of the bank.
Naturalist finds Intelegant as soon as he leaves the building; she’s at the top of a ladder on the side of the building beside the bank. “Get back here!”
“No way!” She climbs on top of the building. He flies up to her and followers after her as she runs across the roof of the fast food place next to the bank.
“Why are you running up here? It’s slower and more dangerous than just running normally.” He sounds annoyed.
She turns and blows a raspberry at him. “I like it this way.” She emphasizes the thought by jumping to another roof. He flies over and starts catching up to her.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he states.
She doesn’t respond. He floats over beside her and reaches for her hand to stop her so he can bring her to the cops. She has been waiting for this second and uses it to shoot him with her homemade taser again which results in him faceplanting in the roof.
“See you later!” she yells as she keeps running.
Once Naturalist’s recovered, Intelegant’s nowhere to be found. She simply vanished. That’s how these interactions always end: Intelegant disappears but she always shows up in a few weeks so no one tries too hard to find her.
While Naturalist’s arch nemesis is gone, he has to deal with more boring things like regular criminals and his day-to-day life. Intelegant is the only person brave enough to be a supervillain in Naturalist’s city. He has super speed, super strength, and he can fly. After his first sighting, the public named him Naturalist because of his color scheme. They later learned that his powers had nothing to do with nature, but the name still stuck.
The hero has an impressive reputation due to never being defeated, yet his nemesis is seen as easy to defeat. The reason that she’s such a formidable opponent has a lot to do with the girl's intelligence, and his ability to never stop underestimating her, but the public says it’s because he likes her. He does like her, but that doesn’t affect their fights… much.
He thinks they’re destined to be together, but they’re not, they can’t be. Why? Because one of them has never and will never be attracted to a member of the opposite sex.