First Job; Final Test

(Does Alex sound like a woman or a man in your inner monologue? Leave your answer in the comments.)

Queen Perdita had long been a nuisance using her country's vote in the United Nations to act as a roadblock for The Light's plans. The Council had voted four to two with one abstaining to send me to kidnap the rogue monarch, return her to the Lexcorp Tower in Metropolis, and deliver into the arms of Count Vertigo. I was excited at the prospect of going on a real mission without Deathstroke, Sportsmaster, or Lady Shiva holding me back while they oversee how I work in the field.

I flew in full stealth mode to the LA penthouse, hacked the security system to unlock her window, and was all set to grab the target and run, but she was in bed with two metahumans who did not hesitate. The green man leapt at me transforming into a tiger in midair while the girl with the purple hair and a bindi tried to pin me down with shadow magic.

Had Raven and Beast Boy not been on the "do not kill" list, then it would have been a rather brief encounter. As it was, I had to figure out how to neutralize two of the Justice League's Top Twenty Most Dangerous, and thinking can be difficult when a grizzly bear is trying to tear your head off.

Once I ed that Beast Boy could not actually hurt me, that his T-Rex form was as dangerous to me as if he attacked me as a mosquito, it became much easier to focus on the mission. Garfield Logan snarled as a honey badger before he and charged at me in the form of a buffalo. I tossed him into the stratosphere aiming to put him on a trajectory to splash down in the Mediterranean a few miles south east of the heel of Italy. I knew that he would get himself together and shift into a falcon or eagle long before that, but it bought me a few minutes, more than what I needed.

Queen Perdita cowered behind Raven. The pale witch's eyes went all black as her cloak billowed with astral winds as she levitated. Rachel Roth called upon her magic with the Words "Azurath metrion zinthos!" The darkness surrounded Raven, the shadows bending to fuel her with power from the Hidden Places.

"Sorĉistino, superu vin. Mi kontraŭas vian sorĉon per ĵeto de Kontraŭsorĉo." I cast, all the arcane power which had surrounded Raven evaporated like mist. Before she could react, I combined green, yellow, and blue energy to construct a tesseract prison and trapped the queen and the witch. The target and asset secured. I went full stealth, invisible and intangible, and flew to a safe extraction point in a deep cave formation out of view of sight from The Watchtower and Waynetech surveillance drones. Safe from detection, I boomtubed home to subbasement sixty nine of the Lexcorp Tower in the great city of Metropolis.

While Count Vertigo indulged his dark urges with Queen Perdita's body. I worked on Raven's mind to make her serve me and in turn, serve The Light.

Of all of my abilities, psionics is the one I enjoy the most, magic is a very close second, but there is nothing quite like the beauty and complexity of a living mind and the connection which we all share in the astral plane. When I was young, my earliest education came from gene-gnomes implanting me with telepathic engrams but I very quickly found out it was faster to go into a person's mind learn everything that they knew as with practice reading thoughts became as easy as reading books. It was just a natural progression from there figuring out how to write fictional memories and edit the engrams seamlessly into peoples' subconscious.

Psymon and the Martian Mahal'Alak became my tutors in the psionic arts. They showed me what a person with a mind open to the astral plane could do. Like how to turn people into puppets, how to enter dreams and manipulate people while they sleep, how to win at poker by seeing through other people's eyes, and how to combine telepathy and telekinesis to assert my dominance over the psyches of others and compel them to submit to my aura of authority and actually feel good while they do it, just to name a few of the skills which my owners required me to master. I turned out to have a real talent for programming people. Apparently, my alterations are all but impossible to detect without painful and invasive deep mind scans and if found I had something of a knack for making people into slaves.

I went deep into the core of Raven's personality to the heart of her identity and made her love serving me. I rewired her instincts to make her feel like she wants to please me. I made obedience to me make her feel deep fulfillment.

I had finished with Raven and left her handcuffed to a hospital gurney with an inhibitor collar around her neck when Perdita was brought to me naked. Her body was covered in bruises, her eye swollen shut, her teeth and nose were broken, her face smeared with tears and blood. "Your Master wants you to fix her up. Make her pretty again." Said the guard. "Then you are going inside her brain and prime her to fall desperately in love with the count. She is to marry him and turn her kingdom over to his istration so Perdita can focus her energy on giving her king royal heirs and her duties as a wife, leaving her kingdom to The Light."

I held the frail young woman gently in my arms. I glared at the guard and thought about how much I wanted to splatter this asshole. Just blast the dude with a fraction of the red rage energy I was feeling right now and blast him to ashes and red splatter or form a sonic cannon on my arm and make his brain explode inside of his skull, or just open a boomtube someplace nasty and give the shit licking goon time to regret his life choices, or give him a good old fashion orbit toss and just throw his sorry ass towards Venus. But protocols are what they are and the best I could do was snark back that "Count Vertigo is not my master. I will heal her. But I do not take orders from that..."

"These orders come from Lex Luthor personally." The guard showed me the hand written orders on His executive letterhead with the microscopic watermarks that were impossible to forge, to say nothing about how I could recognize my Creators handwriting with his unique signature. "He is on floor 145 right now and wants to see you and her upstairs as soon as you are done with the psycho-surgery."

"Master Luthor wants to see me!?!" I thinking that I was glad that my face was covered by a mask of featureless black programmable plastisteel. I can only imagine the number of silly faces I must have made that people do not see because my whole body is covered in a black carapace of smart armor. "Tell my. Tell my Creator." I took a deep breath and tried to get a grip on myself and not let the butterflies in my stomach throw me off balance in front of the morty. "That his obedient and loving slave will fall to command. Tell him that once I have remade Perdita's mind and body to his liking, we shall both present ourselves to our owner for inspection. Tell him that the queen will joyfully submit to The Light."