New story. Chronos - Prologue

So, I still haven't gotten word about the hard drive, yet. But if I don't do some writing, I may go mad. This is a story idea that came to me, so I'm going to distract myself by working on it. Don't know if it will actually go anywhere, or if I'll actually put it up on Amazon, but I figured it would be something you guys might enjoy, while the other stories are on hiatus.

Prologue – Damn You!

The alarms were ringing, but that wasn’t all that unusual. After all, bank alarms tend to go off when people are robbing the bank. That’s what they’re there for, after all.

It was a little unusual for six men in ski masks and carrying assault rifles to try and rob a bank in Liberty City, of course. The number of superheroes in the city usually meant that such things were done by a supervillain and his henchmen, not just some random group. Still, it wasn’t unheard of, either.

Actually, violent crime in Liberty City was higher than ever, since the Pulse. No one knew who or what caused it, but the Pulse went out, world-wide, and changed something. Suddenly, everyone had attributes and skills and feats, like this was some kind of game world. Even the supers had their powers codified (and in some cases, restricted) by this new System.

The system allowed ‘little fish’ like normal humans to gain experience, and get new abilities. A gunman might spend a couple precious XP on feats to make his guns more accurate, or to make them hit harder. Or, they might gain new skills, picking up a working knowledge of computer programming and hacking overnight. The normal people had options, now. Options that allowed them to get into striking distance of the normally untouchable supers.

Of course, that didn’t mean that criminals had free reign. After all, the police could gain XP, too, and there were still the superheroes to deal with. But people who had nothing to lose were always willing to take that chance.

The six gunmen had quickly taken down the security guard on duty, splattering his brain matter across the wall. The guard hadn’t invested in body armor, and they’d been practicing on how to get quick kills, despite the System making that more difficult. It took two headshots to put him down, but that was what practice was for.

One gunman kept watch by the door, while another loomed menacingly over the customers in the lobby. The other four quickly set about emptying cash from the drawers and the vault into their bags, taking whatever was on hand. It was quick, and efficient, just like they planned.

But it still wasn’t enough. The first warning they had was the glass doors shattering as Lady Liberty flew through them. The man by the door barely had time to yell before the Sentinel of the City crashed into him with her fists, driving him into the stone floor of the bank. He was still moving, so he clearly wasn’t dead, but that impact had taken the fight from him.

Lady Liberty gracefully got to her feet, and kicked the rifle away from the stricken gunman. Not that she needed to do something like that, of course. The System had codified her powers, as well, and rendered her effectively immune to any guns that civilians could get their hands on. Oh, the weapons that a supervillain’s minions carried may have some effect, but these mass-produced civilian weapons? No chance, and everyone knew it.

Still, that didn’t mean that they were just going to give up. As Lady Liberty began a speech about how they should do just that, and surrender before she had to hospitalize any more of them, one of the gunmen from the vault opened fire. Only, he’d traded the normal rounds they used before for a magazine of ‘super-killer’ rounds. SKs, as they were called, were armor piercing heavy penetrator rounds. They were designed to punch through heavy armor and pierce even hardened defenses like Lady Liberty’s.

Of course, on a normal person, they only did slightly more damage, since they tended to go all the way through a body, which made them not worth the $250 a round price tag for most things. Against Lady Liberty, though? Those rounds were the only way they had a prayer of stopping her from going through them like a baseball through wet tissue paper.

To her credit, Lady Liberty reacted like the seasoned heroine she was. The first round, hastily fired, hit her in the shoulder, piercing through her defenses, causing her to cry out in pain. She dived forward, relying on her enhanced speed to and flying ability to spoil the shooter’s aim. The following shots went wide, as she lined up to take down the shooter, her good arm hauling back to deliver a blow that would take the shooter out, one way or—

–another? Suddenly, she found herself bent over one of the tables where bank officials helped customers set up accounts and apply for loans. More importantly, she could tell that she was naked, because of the cool air blowing against her skin. And then a mountain of sensation hit her, all at once.

Her body felt like she had just run a race, and both her poor pussy and ass were feeling like that one time she’d experimented with the football team in high school, before her powers fully came in. She felt warmth dribbling down from her holes. Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself up from the desk and looked around for her clothes.

She easily spotted them, carefully folded and stacked in a pile next to one of the customers. But at the same time, the whole bank spotted her, in her… condition. Not wasting any time, she went into super-speed, taking down each of the gunmen with more force than she would normally use, and managing to get into her costume before anyone could get more than an eyeful of her.

She ended up in the vault, where the last of the gunmen was. Unfortunately, the vault was completely empty. Not only was all the cash gone, but even the safe deposit boxes, which the gunmen hadn’t bothered with, had all been opened and emptied. And all of it was gone, to the great surprise of the would-be robbers.

Lady Liberty was the only one who wasn’t surprised that the robbers’ spoils had been stolen out from under them. She knew that was how it would be the moment she’d recovered. She knew that, if she went to look, there would be markings on her, just like what had happened to Miss Mysterious, Panthera, Nighthawk, Paragon, Silk, and every other female superhero (and more than a few supervillains, if the rumors were true) in Liberty City. Every last one of them had reported a similar experience, and each of them had been marked.

‘Property of Chronos’. That was the calling card of the so-called God of Time. No one knew his face, or anything about him. His MO was to find crimes already in progress, stop time, violate a woman (usually a super, but sometimes a female cop or bystander had been victimized), make off with any loot, and set time running again.

There was no defense against it. Everything happened between one moment and the next. No one had ever seen him, or knew anything about him. They had fingerprints that they thought were him, but no way to know for sure, and there was no match in the system. Running rape kits on the women always ended the same way: the rape kits disappeared in the hospital, right out of the nurse or doctor’s hands, before he’d even left the woman’s side, replaced with a piece of paper saying ‘Better Luck Next Time’, printed off the hospital’s own computers.

In the last two years since the Pulse, this elusive Chronos had become the bane of female supers throughout the city. Thankfully, the ‘morning after’ pill made it so that the violation didn’t extend to unwanted pregnancies, even if the supers weren’t on birth control. That was small comfort, of course, compared to what the bastard god of time had done, but it was something.

Lady Liberty grit her teeth and tried to smile for the cameras as she handed the scene over to the police. It was only when she was in flight, returning to base that she let her true feelings show. “Damn you, Chronos! I’ll find you, no matter what! And when I do, you’re going to wish that you’d never been born!”