LIGHTNOVELONLINE Iris and Me
Chapter 78 : Dawn of a new era (Assembling part 3)
Chapter 78 : Dawn of a new era (Assembling part 3)
The Moon’s house, Kew Garden, Queens, New York City, 5th of May, 15:48, in Cindy Moon’s mind
In the subdued light filtered through the drawn curtains of her bedroom, Cindy idly licked her lips as she rose up from her previous position.
In the confines of her accelerated mind, she took in all of the details of the picture before her, fondly consigning them to her memory.
Her shirt long discarded and her chest heaving with her relatively bated breath, her bra still in attendance for the moment, she gazed mischievously upon the dazed look on her boyfriend’s face.
Hector had his hands locked in a tender grip around her hips, her jeans the lone remaining barrier between the warm and slightly moist skin of his hands, his bare and chiseled torso raising and falling with force after a rather intense makeout session.
“Whoa.” Hector said with a slight hint of disbelief and wonder in his voice, “That was…”
Cindy chuckled at her boyfriend's troubled elocution, an action that prompted her hair to fall further down her face like a curtain of black silk before her eyes.
A husky and full of promise silence fell between the two, only disturbed by the noises of the city life outside of the Moon’s walls.
“What’s the matter?” Cindy whispered, slowly gliding down forward and her hands idly outlining her lover’s muscles, “Cat got your tongue?”
Hector shuddered as her hair brushed his naked skin, his grip reaffirming itself as one of his thumb brushed her lower back.
“Nothing,” He whispered back, visibly making an attempt at a logical thought, “It’s just…”
Cindy paused, biting her lower lip as she looked at him fondly.
“You’ve been quite forward lately,” He admitted, “I’m just surprised is all.”
The dark haired girl giggled as she started to close the distance, her eyes boring into Hector’s hazel own.
“You don’t like it?” She asked, internally begging for him to give the correct answer or she would be extremely cross.
“Not at all!” He stammered, his grip tightening possessively, “It’s just…”
Hector paused, seemingly mulling over his own thoughts.
“You’ve been acting strange these last few months,” He started, not realizing that his girlfriend had visibly tensed, “You’ve left the club for unknown reasons, you always hang out with the school’s best students and you're focused on your grades like you’ve never been.”
He paused, his look searching for an answer on Cindy’s face.
“We even had a fight and almost broke up,” He continued slowly, “And now this? Cindy, I’m confused. What happened to you?”
And that is the real crux of the matter, isn’t it?
Her life had gotten increasingly strange since January, Cindy mused.
At least, it had gotten stranger when compared to her past attitude.
It had all started with an innocuous spider-bite during a school outing, followed by a strange illness, her two parents panicking to high heavens the morning after and her nearly successful abduction by less than moral scientists.
Then, her more or less agreed upon induction into a budding vigilante group and all the training that it entailed, her dismayed discovery that her favorite activity was now boring her to hell and back, the realization that what prompted most of her decisions in her life was a rather adversarial relationship with her own mother and a taste for adrenaline inducing activities.
The latter influence was made worse when you took into account that she was fucking bored senseless and that she literally had all the time in the world to think and her schoolwork had become stupidly easy.
So, grasping at straws and in search of an outlet, she had thrown herself into her training with the team after leaving the hockey team, sickened and frustrated by it and her previous team mates.
The only bridge between her and the sporties she hadn't burned was the one with Hector, since they were still dating at the time, and a few of his closest friends with whom she had a cordial relationship, but the others had given her the cold shoulder, not really understanding why she suddenly up and left after a month of practice where she had been positively stellar, burying all of their chances to make it to national level with her departure.
Even Hector hadn’t really understood why she had left despite Cindy telling him in no uncertain terms that she was definitely over hockey and competitive sports in general.
It had led to a fight, because of course it did, where he had insinuated rather rudely that she was pretentious and pedantic with both the team and him.
Cindy hadn’t really taken his attitude very well but had decided nonetheless not to hold it against him.
How could he know, after all?
How exactly could he conceive that your life could be upturned for both the worse and the better by a simple event?
How could he understand that apparently Fate was a thing and a conniving bitch and a half, that she had no choice but to deal with it and that everything else around was just a boring, useless distraction?
How could he not be hurt if she ever took the leap and told him that the two of them were now so different that she feared they had nothing in common anymore?
He still made her laugh, she was still fond of him and their dates were always a happy occasion, but deep inside, Cindy knew that it was merely a facade, a fake little lie that would remain only until the both of them grow tired of it.
For now, the both of them had been happy to lie to themselves, pretending that all was okay in the world and that they could carry on as if nothing of more import than Cindy foregoing her previous passion had happened.
“People change, Hec,” Cindy answered with a lazy shrug, her hair dancing around her still half-bowed form, “There’s nothing more than that.”
She watched him wear a conflicted expression before slowly nodding.
And changed she had, so that wasn’t even a lie.
It had taken her a while longer than Gwen but she had finally started to develop an extra-curricular activity that she could use to stave off the crushing boredom in class. In a whim of fancy, she had one day seated herself in the school library and looked at computer programming while looking for something to do instead of ressassing past, present and future events in a circle.
She had taken to it like a fish to water and still didn’t really know what to make of it.
Her brain had apparently associated it with drawing a very intricate web before she realized it and it had become her go-to pastime those days when she wasn’t engaged either in magical meditation bullcrap or getting her ass handed to her by her various teammates.
She had finally managed to win her first spar against her fellow spider-totemite only days ago, after all.
Play-fighting with Jessica had been easier, of course, but only so far as the flying girl kept the heavy monstrosity she wore as a training tool. It had been rather humbling for the two spider-girls to watch her zip around with her real armor without being able to even brush the tip of her toes.
She still couldn’t win a match to save her life against either Aria or Flash though.
The former had the annoying tendency to always have a trick up her sleeve even when she limited herself to what she called ‘superman look-alike powers’ and the latter was just immovable as long as he didn’t want to, going so far as to vibrate his own armored suit, a bulky and predatory thing with sharp edges aplenty, to rip and tear even her strongest silk like it was so much twine.
The both of them were beyond infuriating to deal with and each time she thought she had an edge over them she was proved wrong the next second.
Cindy needed, craved, to win more, to feel the thrill of the battle that sang only mutely in her veins as long as it remained just between friends and so had been positively pleased when Aria had said that they would begin to go out on patrol the next week.
She just hoped that the one she’ll be partnered with would be amenable to vent her frustration by letting her take point or she’ll be liable to go barmy.
As she watched Hector’s mouth start to move to answer her declaration, the both of them were suddenly wrenched from their awkward talk amid a rather steamy yet fastly degrading mood by a ringtone.
Cindy’s eyes narrowed.
“Is it yours?” She asked her boyfriend, straightening atop of him.
“No, that’s not my ringtone.” He answered after a beat.
Her head on a swivel, Cindy pin-pointed the origin of the rather shrill and peppy tunes.
Bending awkwardly she made to retrieve her phone from atop her perch.
“What the…” She muttered, “I was sure that I’d turned it off.”
Taking the offending communicating device, her eyes bulged slightly at what she saw on its screen.
Three messages blinked alternatively, written in bold, crimson red characters : ‘EMERGENCY CALL’, ‘STOP SCREWING AROUND’ and ‘♪I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING♪’.
Cindy sputtered, raising herself in a dash and gracefully stepping off of her bed.
“Cindy, what are you…” Hector, visibly confused, asked.
“I need to take this,” The dark haired girl answered as she beelined for the door, “Give me a minute.”
Without a second glance and not paying any attention to her confused boyfriend, she crossed the threshold while shutting the door behind her, picking up the line in one fell swoop.
“Finally, I was wondering if you were too busy to pick up.” Aria's heavily distorted voice said through the speaker, badly hiding her amusement.
“Are you spying on me?!” Cindy whisper-hissed to her interlocutor, dearly wishing to strangle the golden girl right now.
“Not one bit.” The answer came instantly, not an ounce of hesitation behind it, “But even turned off, a phone still records what happens next to it, yours just so happens to be particularly chatty.”
Cindy cursed up a storm under her breath, taking a second to glare at her cell phone as her cheeks positively burned.
“Now that that's out of your system, we have a situation.” Aria calmly said as soon as the dark haired girl resumed listening, “I’ll be picking you up in five, an incident is about to happen in East Bronx, Manhattan.”
Cindy’s thoughts halted for an instant before restarting as soon as they stopped.
“We’re doing this?” She asked, her excitement raising as a manic grin etched itself onto her face.
“I know this isn’t the best timing,” Aria answered, her voice dripping with amusement, “But yes, we are.”
“I’ll be on the roof.” Cindy blurted out, cutting the line and pocketing the phone in the same motion as she opened her bedroom’s door once more.
Hector looked at her archly and with a confused expression as he watched her come back.
“Who was it?” He asked, his tone suspicious.
Cindy almost halted her step at his question.
Making a split second decision in the confines of her accelerated mind, she resumed her stride at a more languid pace, making her way to the bed.
“No one really important, handsome,” She purred as she straddled him once more, “Say, aren’t you a little tired?”
In the same breath, she released her self-control on her pheromones, driving their output way up and diffusing the strongest relaxant she could.
She watched with satisfaction Hector’s eyelids starting to droop.
“Now that you asked…” He answered, barely stifling a yawn, “I think I am a little.”
“It’s ok,” She said soothingly, one of her hands palming his cheek, “You should take a little nap.”
Hector didn’t answer, his eyes already closed as she hummed under her breath.
A minute later, once she was perfectly sure that he was out for the count, Cindy rose once more, making her way to her wardrobe as she kicked out the rest of her clothes in preparation.
Once she was finally in her undies, she took a deep breath to wretch some semblance of control back to her face, frozen in an unhinged rictus and opened her wardrobe’s door.
She crouched, unlocking the clamp of the fake bottom Flash had built into her wardrobe, exposing her superhero suit for the world to see.
In Cindy's opinion, she and Iris had managed to come extremely close to the fashion-crazed symbiote's vision.
They had managed to weave two full bodysuits with the strongest and more resilient silk the dark haired girl could conjure, capable of stopping anything short of high-caliber bullets and really sharp weapons and reinforced at the joints with interlocking layers of plastic to dull some unavoidable impacts when roughhousing.
The design in itself wasn’t anything to write home about, really, just a very sleek looking fabric snug to the body with integrated soles for walking and apparent digits for a better grip with their respective feet, with an absolute imperative that no surface was thicker than three millimeters, any extra thickness having conflicting effects with the two totemites' inherent stickiness.
The sole exceptions to the rather common look aside from the fabric had been the hood that integrated with the full mask, an unnecessary addition in Cindy’s opinion that the alien creator had been adamant to include, the spider drawing on the torso and the stylized white 'P' emblem on the right shoulder that all the team sported.
Gwen and her suit were almost identical except the color schemes.
Where Gwen’s suit was mostly white with black outlines, her spider drawing a shade of purple that looked suspiciously like Iris’ own, Cindy’s was black as night with white outlines, sporting a blood red iteration of her totem.
Overall, Cindy was extremely pleased with her suit, finding Gwen’s a little too tacky for her own taste.
Properly geared and after a last glance in her mirror to confirm that, yes, she indeed had a nice ass in that most form fitting outfit, she took the time to scribble a note for Hector’s sake, telling him that something unexpected had happened and she had to go and that he shouldn’t wait for her.
Feeling pleased with herself and only a little apologetic for lying to her boyfriend’s face and putting him to sleep with her power, she made her way to her window with a positively glowing mood.
Time to swing around and kick some ass!
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