"Again!"

Fialux tore across the flight gym. Her arm was outstretched. She had a grin on her face. The sort of grin that said I wasn't going to like it when she made contact.

And make contact she did. Only I turned at the last moment. I grabbed that outstretched hand and used her momentum to flip her around onto her back.

The air between her and the ground shimmered as both a shield and an antigravity field sprang up under her to prevent her from getting seriously injured. She looked up at me with a growl, but instead of stopping and pouting like she had a month ago when she was having trouble getting used to the idea of not having her true powers, she simply scrambled up and shot for the ceiling. She did exactly what I'd told her and put some distance between her and whatever the hell had just bested her.

Sure in this case it was just me, not some villain trying to make a name for themselves, but she was learning. She was treating me like I was someone who was trying my best to kill her.

She'd admitted to me in the breakfast nook a couple of days ago that it wasn't all that difficult for her to pretend. Not when she had so many memories of me trying to take her out that were still fresh.

I smiled. I wasn't going to make this easy on her. The training wheels had long since come off. I fired my wrist blaster. It went off in a rainbow of different colors. One of the side effects of using a less than lethal setting.

Hey, I figured if I was going to have a setting on my wrist blaster that was essentially a light show then I'd create something that would impress the most stoned out stoner in the world.

Light splashed off the ceiling and the walls as she tried to avoid me, and then at the last moment she jerked to the side. So instead of firing where she was going to be, I ended up firing where she'd been a moment ago, but wasn't now.

No, now she was coming right at me. Clever girl.

I retrained my wrist blaster and fired off a couple more shots, but she dodged from side to side like an expert.

I smiled. It was clear her previous experience with the whole flight thing was helping her out. I figured it was sort of like transferring to a new programming language. All the logic was the same. All you really had to do was figure out the specifics of how to instruct the computer to make that logic work.

In this case all the logic of flying on your own was pretty much the same. All the maneuvers were the same. It was just a matter of figuring out how to translate all the flight experience she had into flying with my toys rather than using her natural born gift that had been taken from her.

"That's it! You're kicking some ass now!" I shouted.

"I'm gonna kick your ass!" she shouted between midair acrobatics.

I grinned. Now she was learning. She was feeling the anger and using it.

The biggest problem I'd had to overcome was her habit of barreling straight at me. A holdover from the days when she'd been naïve and invulnerable, and it'd taken me dialing down the shields and the antigrav to give her a jolt whenever she landed to break her of that habit.

She'd never felt pain before, but she sure as hell responded to pain stimulus like every other living creature in the world once she got a taste. Now that she could feel pain, she sensibly tried to avoid it.

A harsh lesson? Maybe, but she was the one who decided to take flight lessons from a supervillain. Anything that happened to her after that was her own fault as far as I was concerned.

I should've been doing a better job of avoiding pain myself. I was distracted from training right up until I felt a fist connect to my jaw. That brought me back to the flight gym.

The inertial dampeners and shields came on which saved me from being too terribly hurt, but the physical reality of suddenly finding my head being jerked to the side by a punch from somebody flying at high speed was enough to daze me. The next thing I knew I was on the ground with stars dancing in front of my vision.

I looked around. I was on my ass, and Fialux grinned down at me.

"No fair," I said.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"How is that not fair?" she asked. "It's not like it's my fault you allowed yourself to get distracted!"

I opened my mouth to tell her it was precisely her fault. That I'd been thinking about her and she'd taken advantage even though she had no way of knowing I was thinking about her. Then I thought about how ridiculous that sounded, and I stuck my tongue out at her instead.

"Again," I said.

Fialux sighed and rolled her eyes. "Are you serious? I'm getting hungry."

"Oh yeah?" I asked. "The next time I'm fighting off a giant irradiated lizard or beating back an alien invasion out in the Kuiper belt I'll make sure to tell the lizards or the aliens that I'm getting a little peckish and I need to stop for a lunch break."

She gave me a funny look. "What was that last bit there?"

"What last bit?" I asked.

I suddenly realized I'd said something about aliens, which was a subject I tried to avoid considering I had more than a sneaking suspicion it might be closer to her origins than she'd be comfortable discussing.

Not to mention there was always the possibility I'd inadvertently beaten back her family coming for a visit or something out there at the edge of the heliosphere. I didn't think that was terribly likely considering an entire spaceship full of people who were powered up like Fialux would give me a very bad day indeed.

Sure there wasn't really a concept of day or night out there at the edge of the sun's influence, but you get my point.

Besides, there was always a possibility she drew her powers from our strange yellow sun or something like that. In which case a bunch of aliens coming from the middle of space where they couldn't bathe in the light of our yellow sun for years at a time to charge up might not exactly be powered up to over nine thousand when I found them getting ready to cause trouble at the edge of the heliopause.

"No, seriously," she said. "Did you just say something about aliens?"

"So what if I did?" I asked, looking away. I didn't like where this conversation was going.

"Wait. So you're saying aliens are real?"

"Enough of this," I said, desperately wanting to change the subject. "We need to go on to your next bit of training."

"Fine," she said, but her tone told me it was anything but fine. That she was anything but happy about me avoiding the subject.

"We're going to do some hand to hand now," I said.

"Do we have to?" she said with a roll of her eyes. "I thought I was pretty good at that back when we were fighting."

"That's because you were punching well above your weight class back then," I said. "And thank you so much for reminding me of all those times you kicked my ass. That's a great way to make me go easy on you. I know this isn't your favorite, but it has to be done."

"And if I agree to do it then you'll tell me more about the space aliens?"

I put my hands on my hips. "Come on Selena. Stop yanking my chain."

"What are you talking about?" she asked. "Who said anything about yanking anyone's chain?"

"You're obviously making fun of me here," I said. "And I don't appreciate it!"

"How am I making fun of you?" she asked.

I looked her up and down. Made a gesture that encompassed everything that was her.

"Come on. You. Your powers. Obviously you came here from another world. Sure when I was trying to find your secret identity the records were pretty convincing. They went back pretty far. Birth records and everything."

"Because I was born here," she said in a tone that said I was acting like an idiot.

"What about all those interviews where you talked about coming from another world?" I asked, arching an eyebrow.

"I've told you. That was Rex making up some bullshit he got out of a comic book because he thought it would play better," she said, rolling her eyes.

"Are you sure about that?" I asked.

"I'm pretty sure I know where I came from," she said, her eyes narrowing.

"What if your parents found you in some ship and lied to you?" I asked.

"I'm pretty sure they don't have the capacity for that," she said.

I still wasn't sure I believed her. I also figured if we were finally going to have this conversation then we should go ahead and finally have the fuck out of this conversation.

"Please Selena," I said. "I might not be the greatest at interacting with people, but I am the greatest villainous genius this world has ever known. And that means I know there's no way a human can have the kind of powers you have. There's got to be something extraterrestrial going on with you, even if you do have human parts on the inside now thanks to whatever Dr. Lana did to you."

Now it was her turn to put her hands on her hips. "If I have human parts that's because that's what I am. Human. I mean sure I never really got hurt the way other people did, at least not for long, but I'm human."

"Pull the other one," I said.

She sighed. "My powers started to manifest when I got to college. That's all I know, and I've gone over all this with you time and again. I don't know why we're doing it again. It was the weirdest thing. It was right around when I turned eighteen, and I figured it was just one of those weird things where you don't get your superpowers until you become an adult or something. It's not like there's a lack of weirdos with powers in this world. You used to fight them weekly."

She had a point there. Fighting people who'd just manifested their powers and decided they were coming at the queen used to occupy a not insignificant portion of my time on the job.

I arched an eyebrow. "When you got to the university, you say?"

"Yeah, why?" she asked.

"Oh nothing," I lied.

Really it was the most interesting thing I think she'd ever admitted to me. She'd gone over getting her powers before, but she never mentioned specifically that they only manifested when she got to college. Which was particularly interesting considering she went to a university where there was an entire department dedicated to the sort of super research that could create a super being like her.

Was it possible she wasn't from another world like I'd suspected? Like Rex Roth had apparently made up? Was it possible there was something else going on here? That there was a reason Dr. Lana was taking such a particular interest in her?

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