True Colours

Two oceans colliding. That’s what it reminded him of when their bellies smacked together, undulating with every laboured thrust. Elias panted for breath, trying to keep up the pace as his cock stiffened and twitched to signal it was nearly ready to burst. Elias wasn’t well endowed in length or girth but that worked to his advantage, it was the perfect size to fit in the navel of the man his weight bore down on. That man was similarly out of breath, countering the rolling force with an impressive lift from his hips. How Ben could manage to lift his own body with lower body strength alone, Elias never understood.

“Ugh... almost, almost,” Elias cried out.

Then he slowed. A stray thought intruded on the haze of his horny mind, cooling it off. He paused on top of Ben, trying to recapture the lost heat; he had already gone completely soft, leading Ben to raise his head in confusion.

“Are you alright?” Ben asked.

Eli avoided eye contact. “I’m fine, I just... lost the feeling, it’s fine. Really, it’s fine.”

Ben moved to gently bring Eli down from the peak of his belly. He sat next to him on the bed, concern was an odd expression to see on the face of a supervillain. It made Eli feel guilty, like he ruined the facade. They both sat in awkward, uncomfortable silence. Ben went to grab a kimono shirt which belonged to Elias from the nightstand, draping it over his shoulders. It was black with a gold trim, though it was splattered with blotches of paint that remained as lurid as the day they were smeared over the silk. Elias pulled it tighter over his chest, hiding his breasts.

“Was it something I did?” Ben raised a hand to Elias’s shoulder. He stopped, unsure if he should touch him.

“No, it was something that happened at work,” Elias muttered. “With the other heroes.”

Ben’s powerful hands curled into fists, reflexively, “what did they do to you?”

Elias, like Ben, had superpowers. He was able to secrete a paint like substance from his skin which caused a multitude of different effects. When the mask went on, he called himself the Power Painter. It wasn’t original or witty, but it was all he could think of when he filled in his hero registration. But that was last year, when Elias was full of hope and genuinely felt like he was making a difference.

“Elias,” Ben repeated. “What did they do?”

The man sitting next to him, over two feet taller than him in height and just as wide with a balloon-like curvature to his body was Ben; he was a supervillain with inflation-based powers. It was unusual for heroes and villains to be friends, even more unusual for them to be friends with benefits. But he had known Ben since before he was a villain, when he was a short-lived hero.

“I’m sorry, this was supposed to be a fun night. I should just... leave, I don’t want you to get involved in this.”

Ben embraced him. “Tough shit, I’m involved.” He placed his hand on the back of Elias’s head and pressed it into his chest. Elias could hear his heart beating, or maybe it was just the purple gas which flowed inside of him, he never quite knew how Ben’s body worked. It was warm though. Elias closed his eyes; thankful he had a way to hide his tearing up.

“They’ve been trying to change my image.” Elias returned the embrace, throwing his arms wide to squeeze himself further into Ben’s body. “They heard me talking to my grandmother on the phone, in Japanese, so they brought that to the head of marketing, and he said I should ‘consider’ paying more homage to my heritage in my costume.”

Ben growled. “Yeah, I’ve heard that bullshit before.” He released Elias from the crushing pressure of the bear hug and positioned him to look him in the eye. “What else did they do? There’s never just one thing, what else?”

Elias took a deep breath. “I told them no, I wasn’t going to turn my heritage into a gimmick.” He wiped his eyes with a sleeve. “I don’t think they liked the way I spoke to them, because we went on a mission after that and...” Elias looked away, again. “Well they let the villain get the drop on me, deliberately. It didn’t leave any lasting damage, a healing hero fixed up my wounds, and I managed to dissolve into paint before I suffered any lasting harm but.” He inhaled sharply. “They took a video of it, and they’re using me getting beaten by a villain as justification for pushing their bullshit on weight loss, and how fat heroes are inherently less effective.”

Ben had a look in his eyes that Elias had never seen before. “Ben?”

“What do you want to do?”

Elias chewed his lip, then brushed his long hair out of his face with his hand. “I don’t know,” it was the truth. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. More accurately he wasn’t sure ‘what’ he could do. Being a superhero was the only job he was qualified for and if he quit the agency, he would likely be blacklisted from other hero agencies, that was just how things worked. People talked. And besides, he was lucky to land this post. He was an enormously fat, shy tempered hero, with a power that wasn’t in demand. Everyone wanted conventionally attractive heroes with things like super strength or laser vision; the industry wanted marketable heroes, not authentic ones.

“Was this why you quit?”

Ben sighed. “Yeah, something like that.” He leaned back, hands behind his head. “I’ll... tell you the full story another time but long story short, it was like what you went through. It wasn’t play by play the same, but close enough that I can empathize.”

“Do you regret it?”

Ben scoffed. “No, I don’t. Supervillain? I own that title. Because I’m the villain of their story, and I scare those prissy, spandex wearing billboards. Know why? Because I’m not afraid to be big, loud, and beautiful. I aint afraid to call a spade a spade and I’m my own boss.”

Elias felt something stir in him while Ben spoke.

“So I’ll ask you again, Elias. What do you want to do?”

Elias leaned forward and rubbed his face. He gave his cheeks a slap, a little mental reinforcement, then stood up.

“I want to send Power Painter out with a bang,” he smiled wickedly. “And I want to take some people down with me. I’m going to need some of that fancy tech you like to use though.”

Three days later...

Elias waited at the centre of the gallery. His arms and legs were bound by cables which lead to the four corners of the room, keeping him suspended in a permanent X shape. Duct tape sealed his mouth shut and gave the false impression that he was the victim. Quite the opposite. Elias laughed, muffled by the tape, before he was interrupted by a voice coming through the earpiece hidden behind his hair.

“Careful laughing boy,” Ben’s voice crackled through the tiny device. “You don’t want to give the surprise, away do you?”

Right on cue, the heroes arrived. Elias struggled to keep the facade up. He did his best to appear hapless despite the urge to glare at them and unleash floods of his paint to bring them to their knees. He could do that; he just never had a reason to. Truthfully, he didn’t really want to hurt them, physically at least, the chaotic mixture of purple gas and his own paint would see to their punishment.

“Well well well, if it isn’t our favourite bouncing ball,” one of the heroes stepped forward and examined Elias’s stomach.

Elias’s stomach was distended with explosive pressure. His entire body had been transformed into a great rounded parody of itself, with his pumped belly groaning under the stress of the payload it was slowly losing the battle to contain. “Mmmph!” He cried out, faking his peril. In truth he couldn’t be more turned on. He had transformed himself into a gigantic paint filled balloon, ready to burst at the seams and dish out some just desserts.

“Do we even need to save him?” Another hero commented. “He’s already making the rounds on socials, thanks to that video. Thanks to him we’re pretty much set to break our revenue goals on the diet line for next quarter.”

“Ugh, this looks like Biohazard Ben’s work,” the third complained. “Probably filled him with explosive gas that will level the entire building if we try to disarm him. I swear, that man has no originality. Who even finds this stuff entertaining? It’s disgusting.”

Oh, not as disgusting as you. Elias thought. Inside of him, along with the gallons of self-produced paint and Ben’s gas, was a host of nano machines. Provided, again, by Ben. They were set to activate once Elias detonated and the paint mixed with open air. Once it adhered to a surface it would receive signals from Ben’s command room and rearrange itself into an image. What was that image exactly?

A damning list of the misconduct perpetrated by each hero from the agency, the criminal activities of its management, and every other dirty little secret, that they paid to cover up all in the name of preserving their hero’s pristine image.

“We could just pop him ourselves.”

The shutters of the art gallery slammed shut.

“What the hell?”

As the three heroes, two of them super strength users, the third a speedster, tried to raise the shutters they found themselves suddenly de-powered. A thin purple fog had been filling the room from the grates, leaving them unable to activate their abilities. It worked on all of them, except for anyone who’s biological material had been mixed with the gas before it was evaporated from the burner below the museum.

Elias screwed his eyes shut and worked double-time, overproducing his own paint. He felt the air grace his sweaty, copper skin, as he self-inflated and burst through the old white spandex of Power Painter’s outfit. Splotches of technicolour stained his naked form, then began to leak. He was reaching critical mass with a look of absolute bliss. Once he hit the point of no return, where no amount of venting gas or paint would save him from blissful release, he opened his eyes and let himself go limp.

The heroes backed against the wall. Elias’s limbs became round and donut like, with his hands and feet sinking into divots of soft, elasticated flesh which used to be his forearms and lower legs.

His entire upper body was a collection of uneven spheres. One grand balloon, stacked with two more, and a large, placid shape with his duct taped expression showing that he was reaching nirvana. Elias was reminded of the night he told Ben, where he had lost the urge to continue their lovemaking and how he lost that heat. Now he was filled with nothing but heat, his body quaking and pulsing. Bigger, bigger, inch by inch. Paint dribbled from and loosened the duct tape.

“Now do it, let’s blow them away Elias.”

The explosion destroyed the shutters. It brought down the walls of the gallery and a fountain of seven colours shot out of the roof. It was a tidal wave of artistic and sexual release. When the paint settled, images were marked across the city. Strange tapestries listing the damning crimes of Elias’s former hero agency, and - even if they might not have had much legal sway - they tarred their public image to such a degree, that they were placed under heavy scrutiny by the global hero commission.

“How was it?” Ben asked, suited up in his black-purple latex and armour.

Elias rose from a pool of paint in a secluded part of the city. His long hair still dripped with paint. “I think I’ve thought of a new name.”

“Oh yeah?” He said, throwing Elias a latex suit that could fit his truck sized width.

“Goodbye Power Painter,” he put the suit on and immediately began to transform it with his paint. “Hello Palette Breaker.”