I awoke gradually, my mind drifting towards consciousness. The first thing I noticed were the lines of pressure on my wrists and ankles. Someone had tied me up. To a chair, if the hard wooden seat beneath me was anything to go by.

My mind came fully alert at last, and I felt physically ill as I remembered what an overconfident idiot I had been. What kind of supervillain allowed herself to be captured before she had even pulled her first big caper? At least I had managed to remain perfectly still while I regained consciousness, proving that I hadn’t forgotten everything taught to me at the Academy.

There were rhythmic footsteps nearby, as though someone was pacing back and forth, and in the distance a couple of coughs. No one was speaking much, and unfortunately no one was divulging secret plans.

I waited a few more minutes just to make sure that there was no help in pretending to be asleep, then carefully opened my eyes.

Knife was staring straight at me, just a foot away from my nose. I struggled to keep the surprise from my face, but was not entirely successful, which in retrospect was probably a good thing. Being too calm in the face of an abduction was a sure way to end up being asked some unanswerable questions.

Knife smiled humourlessly upon finding me awake, and stood up abruptly. I was pleased to see that he was still wearing the coat I had so aggressively sold him that morning, even though that coat was almost certainly the reason that I was tied to a chair in the middle of a dark, cavernous room with a light shining in my eyes and my head throbbing from an unfriendly blow.

“She’s awake,” the man said to an unseen compatriot elsewhere in the room. At least I hoped that was who he was talking to. Otherwise he was just speaking to himself, which was worrying at best.

There was a grunt in reply, and Knife sat himself down in a chair beside me.

I was tied to a plain wooden chair that wasn’t particularly comfortable. My wrists were bound to the arms with rope, and a variety of knots that may not have been the standard for tying people up, but were overpowering in their sheer number and variety.

My legs were likewise tied to the legs of the chair, presumably with the same variety of knots, and there was a rope wrapped around my middle, keeping my back tight against the chair, which was digging into my spinal cord. All in all, someone really didn’t want my going anywhere. I restrained a grin - they were in for a surprise. A few ropes weren’t nearly enough to hold back Death’s Dancer, and I would make them pay for their pathetic kidnapping attempt. I could already picture the shock on their as-yet unseen faces as I doled out their punishments.

Another man entered the pool of lamplight, although I thought at first it might be an runaway ape from the zoo. He was by far the hairiest person I had ever seen. His shaggy, shoulder-length brown hair merged with his long beard, and together they nearly obscured his face. He crossed his arms and stood silently, watching me. I realized I was staring, and quickly looked away, returning my attention to the more immediate problem. Knife.

“So,” Knife said, leaning forward on his elbows. “Who are you and what are you doing in this city?”

I considered my options. Obviously the truth was out of the question, but to properly concoct a lie it would help if I knew why these men had kidnapped me in the first place. The way I saw it there were two main possibilities. Either Knife was involved with Bea, Malik, and Peg in some way and was trying to protect them by figuring out what I knew, or he was a rival intent on torturing their secrets out of me. A third option that suddenly occurred to me was that he could be involved with the police force or the superhero in some way, and they had already managed to track me down before I could even get my crime spree started, but that seemed the most unlikely given his surprise upon meeting me in the shop that morning.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m asking the questions,” he replied firmly. No getting around this fellow. He had obviously been on the interrogation bandwagon before. He gestured to the ape, who rumbled out of the circle of lamplight and began doing something that involved a good deal of crashing, banging, and clattering. “Now, if you don’t tell me what I want to know I'll let my friend here go to work on you. Either way you'll tell me everything I want, but the second option will be much more unpleasant. For you.”

I cocked my head to the side, considering him. He was probably not working for the police, unless the police force was a lot more corrupt than I thought. I didn’t think they would approve of torturing someone for information. Therefore, he was likely involved with my three minion candidates. The question was: friend or a foe? And what answers would most likely result in my survival, without revealing my identity as a supervillain?

It would be a simple matter to make the floor buckle beneath Knife and his friend, or move the molecules in his chair so that his own seat took him captive, but that would leave me with the problem of him free and knowing my identity, which would doubtless come back to haunt me later.

The best idea I could come up with was answering his question with the same story I had given to Bea. A very abbreviated and partially accurate account of my life up to this point.

“I’m just a small town girl coming to the city to escape from the past and live my life. Same old story, you know? I wanted to get away from my family and start fresh in a place where no one knew who I was and I could do whatever I wanted. But when I got here I realized how foolish I had been, because I had very little money and no employable skills. Bea gave me a temporary job at her used clothing store just today, the one you came into this morning. I only met Bea yesterday and I think she gave me a job because she felt sorry for me.”

And because she saw something of herself in my story, I added silently. It wasn’t something that I was certain about, and I definitely wasn’t going to tell this man my musings, but from Bea’s few comments about herself it sounded like she had been in much the same situation as myself a number of years ago. Minus the part about being a supervillain, of course.

Knife paused for a long moment, rubbing his wispy beard thoughtfully. Finally, he seemed to decide that my story was the truth, or at least truthful enough not to warrant torture to get a better version out of me. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.

“Well that’s all very touching, but what should I do with you now?” He asked, whether to himself or me I wasn’t certain.

“You could let me go,” I suggested.

This suggestion made him throw his head back and roar with laughter.

Hey, it was worth a try.

“Yes, I could let you go,” he said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “Of course that would cause the problem of you knowing too much about me. No, I think the best option right now is for me to just kill you. I am truly sorry, but you should not have been so involved in my business this morning. If only you had allowed me to leave the store without any fuss, then I would not have had to kidnap you. As it is, you will just be another tragic death in the city, a young girl all on her own who got in over her head. It’s a common enough story in these parts, and I doubt anyone will give it a second glance, except perhaps to shake their heads sadly over the newspaper tomorrow morning.”

He stood up, as if the matter was settled, and beckoned to his friend, who came back over carrying a large and shiny gun.

“I have another idea,” I said, talking quickly so that Knife would actually listen to me before telling his ape to pull the trigger, ending my career before it even began. “How about you let me go, and I will never tell a living soul what I have heard here today.”

He pretended to consider this proposal, again stroking his beard. The ape did the same, mimicking Knife’s movements, although in this case it looked much better because he actually had a proper beard to stroke. His eyes were surprisingly intelligent for a hired goon, and I couldn’t help thinking that there was more to this torturer than met the eye.

“You know, I would love to trust you, but unfortunately I just can’t take that risk,” Knife said at last, shaking his head with what appeared to be true remorse in his eyes. “Like I said, it’s nothing personal. I’m sorry I need to do this. I’ll probably be in trouble with Bea of course, but I’m sure I can make her understand the necessity of this action.”

So he was friends with the three of them, not an enemy, or at least not more of an enemy than me. This was good news, because it meant that perhaps he could be trusted with a little bit of my secret, which would make escaping easier. Directing my mind out through the floor, I encouraged the metal truck bed underneath the two of them to buckle, sending them crashing into each other and then falling heavily to the floor with two identical thuds. At the same time, I encouraged the ropes around my body to melt into little puddles of fibre on the floor, allowing me to stand up and stretch my stiff limbs.

I took the chair that I had been sitting on and slammed it over Knife’s head. His eyes rolled back in his head immediately and he did not move anymore, but the ape reached out to try and restrain me. I smashed the chair over his head as well, which shattered the chair but otherwise seemed to do no real damage to the large man. Looking around for another weapon, I spotted the ape’s gun on the ground, where he had dropped it when he fell. I picked up the heavy metal object, weighed it in my hand for a moment, then slammed the butt of the gun into his temple. He went down and didn’t look like he would be getting up in time to chase me, which I definitely appreciated.

I looked over the scene, and realized that I needed to reform the puddles of rope fiber back into solid ropes. Everything else could probably be explained away. They would not know what made them fall, but they could imagine that it was a miniature earthquake, or some sudden dizziness from my glare, or something like that. As far as the ropes went, I could simply pretend that I had untied them. Nothing super powered about that.