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The map had the island marked as uninhabited, and Morgan had lost their pursuers almost before the place had even come in sight. They’d still been on alert, because after all you never know, but they’d seen no sign of human habitation from the air and the jungle had been peaceful for the whole walk from Morgan’s landing site to where their biplane had crashed. So sue them, maybe they let their guard down a bit as they started going over the plane for spare parts.
They were shoulder-deep in the mangled engine’s guts and completely oblivious to their surroundings when a voice said, “And where did you come from?”
Morgan jumped. Their elbow bumped against an exposed wire and stinging agony arced up their arm. They screamed and jumped again.
Things got comedic for a bit. Eventually they managed to extract their arm from the plane’s innards. Their sleeve was pocked with scorch marks and their arm was tingling, almost numb. Morgan shook it out, wincing and hissing, as they turned to find the source of the voice.
There was someone leaning against a tree not five feet away, watching Morgan’s antics with unconcealed amusement. An astonishingly beautiful someone. An astonishingly beautiful someone with golden eyes that gleamed in the jungle shadows, and the ability to move silently through dense forest – Morgan glanced down and found that the stranger’s feet were hovering a few inches above the leaf litter. Morgan gulped. Maybe they shouldn’t have used up the last of their warding talismans back at the swimming pool factory. They made sure their smile was friendly and their body language was open when they said, “Hi.”
The beautiful stranger’s body language was also open. One might even call it lazily confident. Their smile was not friendly at all. “Hi,” they drawled. “This is my island. Why are you on it?”
“Oh that’s cool. It’s cool you have an island.” Morgan’s voice wavered embarrassingly. They winced and shook their arm out again, hoping the stranger would assume it was pain, not alarm, making them sound like a wuss. “You mean yours in like a spirit way? Are you the avatar of the island or something?”
The stranger’s predatory smirk scrunched up into total confusion. “What? No! I mean like in a capitalism way. Where I own it.” The stranger squinted at Morgan. “Why are you here? Is this your plane?”
Morgan glanced at the biplane wreckage. “Uh, finders keepers I guess, so yeah. Yeah, it’s my plane.”
The propeller chose that moment to fall off with a hideous shriek of metal on metal. Morgan made a face. “I’ve had better.”
“If it’s not your plane,” the stranger said, “then how did you get here?”
“Oh! No, no, I did fly here,” Morgan assured them. “I just meant I stole this from the Violet Lotus.”
The stranger cocked their head, which was kind of cute and also put Morgan in mind of a tiger considering a gazelle. It was probably the eyes – there was something wrong with them, beyond the color and the way they seemed to be glowing slightly. “You stole a plane from a plant?”
Morgan laughed. Nervously, because it was hard not to be nervous with some kind of fae capitalist hovering in the shadows and watching them like that, but they were starting to feel that first thrill of adrenaline, too, the excitement of facing off against someone they were not remotely qualified to face off against and talking their way out by the skin of their teeth. “Nah, the Violet Lotus is a shadow cult. They defend, like, a sacred garden or something – I don’t really know, I was only running from them because the werewolves dropped me in their enclave. Well, I say dropped me— ”
The stranger blinked. “The what?”
“The werewolves,” Morgan repeated, making sure to enunciate. “They were working for the alligator nuns. Who are not shapeshifting alligator people,” Morgan clarified. “They probably wouldn’t need werewolves if they could do that. Maybe. I don’t know, mammalian and reptilian shapeshifters probably have pretty different skillsets. But no, they just keep alligators.”
“As pets?” the stranger asked. They had the slightly poleaxed look people often got when Morgan got talking about their adventures.
“I think it was some sort of sacred calling.” Morgan shrugged. “I didn’t have time to ask, on account of how I was running away from the cyborg assassins, and then the werewolves caught me and I had to convince them not to feed me to the alligators, which really only worked because I had a portal-making amulet and they needed a good way to fight off the cyborg assassins.”
The stranger’s lips were pulling up into a smile. “You fought cyborg assassins with a portal amulet?”
“Oh god no.” Morgan snorted. “I would die so fast if I tried that shit. I let the werewolves handle that, I just traded them the amulet for the nuns’ enchanted emerald. Well, I say traded. Technically I did not ask and they were not happy about it! But I hopped through a stray portal and it closed before they could follow me, so.” Morgan shrugged again, smiling in fond remembrance of the lead werewolf’s face when she realized what they’d done just as they vanished through a rift in space-time. “Finders keepers, right? And the Violet Lotus were way easier to deal with, they didn’t even have a single alligator.”
The stranger shook their head in bemusement. “Who are you?”
“Oh! I’m Morgan.” Morgan held out a hand to shake.
The stranger regarded it with such dumbfounded shock that Morgan almost went back to the ‘island spirit’ theory. Maybe they were some kind of weird immortal hermit who’d never heard of handshakes? Maybe they had lived on this island for a thousand years and never met another living soul. And spoke flawless modern English… Maybe they’d learned English from watching clockapp videos. With the wifi that they’d deliberately set up on their deserted island despite being older than handshakes…
The stranger saved Morgan from the rest of that mental spiral by stepping forward to shake hands. They squeezed hard enough to make Morgan’s bones creak without any sign of apparent effort. “Ow!” Morgan yelped and pulled their hand away, because they had never gone in for bullshit handshake posturing and were not above shaming people for being weird about that sort of thing.
Their accompanying glare faltered at the sight of the stranger’s eyes. The irises were bright yellow, faintly luminescent even in the sunlight, and up close like this Morgan could see that the pupils were slitted like a viper’s.
“Oops. Sorry,” the stranger said unrepentantly. “I’m Alex. Nice to meet you,” they added through a poorly suppressed giggle.
“What’s so funny?” Morgan started to say, but then they put together Alex and golden snake eyes and hovering and the bottom dropped out of their stomach.
The stranger’s grin was slow and smug and the most terrifying thing Morgan had ever seen. “Recognize me at last?”
Morgan nodded, not trusting themselves to speak. There was only one S-tier villain in the world – had only ever been one, in the history of the Fairness Association and probably of the planet. They were on the news a lot. It was almost a surprise that it had taken Morgan so long to recognize them, really, except it was just too surreal. There was no place for a living flame of destruction incarnate in Morgan’s ordinary, everyday life. Even their A-tier hero brother had never faced off against the Devastation before. But then, if he had, he’d probably be dead.
The Devastation. On anyone else, the name would have been pretentious grandstanding.
The golden-eyed monster in front of Morgan cocked an eyebrow. “Bet you wish you’d taken on those cyborg assassins, huh.”
“Kinda,” Morgan admitted. It came out sort of high-pitched and whistling. They’d been right not to trust themselves to speak.
The Devastation drank in Morgan’s frozen panic with evident delight. The two of them stood watching each other in the hot sun, the jungle rustling quietly all around them. It was surreal. It was horrific. It was going to be the last thing Morgan ever saw.
The Devastation leaned forward just a bit. “This is usually the part where you run away.”
A hysterical laugh tried to bubble up Morgan’s throat. It was strangled by the choking fear and died gasping. Its corpse sat thick and awful right under Morgan’s jugular, making it that slightest bit harder to breathe. Morgan just barely managed to get out, “Would there be any point?”
The Devastation didn’t even bother to scoff. “It’s just more fun for me that way,” they said with a shrug. “But, you know, up to you.” They stopped a moment, considering, and their grin sharpened. “Of course, I could always make you run.”
“Or,” Morgan started without knowing how they were going to finish the sentence, “instead, you could…give me a head start.”
The Devastation rolled their eyes. “Why would I?”
“It’d be more fun?” Morgan’s voice squeaked a little on the last word, but they didn’t try to get it under control. That was pretty much a lost cause at this point. “Give me a few hours and I could hide, maybe set up some false leads for you to follow—you could make an evening of it, you know?”
Those golden eyes were no less terrifying when they were narrowed in suspicion. Big shocker there. “You want me to let you run around all over my island, and then…kill you later?”
“I mean…yeah.” Morgan’s attempt at a guileless smile was probably an awful rictus grin, but they really couldn’t do better right now. “If you’re worried about…” What would the goddamn Devastation even worry about? “Espionage? Or, uh, me sabotaging your base or something? Then we can set some ground rules.”
“Ground rules,” the Devastation said flatly.
“Yeah, like, you can tell me if there are any areas off limits, or—or stuff I can’t do if I do manage to get into your base. And honestly, if this is going to work, we’ll have to set some rules for you too, or—”
The Devastation grabbed a fistful of Morgan’s shirt and pulled them up onto their toes. Those golden eyes were suddenly mere inches away and boring directly into Morgan’s soul. “You’ll have to what?”
“Well if we don’t I’ll just die,” Morgan blurted out. The words crowded after each other with no space between them, a panicked blur of sound. “Like right away I mean. And that’ll be no fun for you, right, way too quick, I mean the point here is to make it a fun game right it’ll be like a puzzle or a treasure hunt but that doesn’t work if you can just skip steps with—with—x-ray vision or just magically knowing where I am or—”
The Devastation released Morgan, who stumbled on weak legs and fell on their ass with a thump, and folded their arms menacingly. They weren’t backlit by blinding sunlight, not even at this angle, but they didn’t have to be. Horror movie lighting was for things that had to convince you they were scary.
Morgan gave them a shrug-and-a-grin of come on, it’ll be fun!
The Devastation snorted. “Alright, sure. I guess I don’t have any other plans tonight.”