And now, my latest attempt to paste in an excerpt from another chapter of long-defunct prose experiment I Am Empowered, a Year-One-ish first-person account from Emp in 140-character Twitter format detailing her earliest days as a superheroine.
Then I think: Is Spooky “cheating” by using her magical powers to allow her to walk in those absurd shoes, just to make an impression on me?
Jury’s out on that one. I could just as easily imagine her practicing for months in those platforms to demonstrate her manifest superiority.
Cue another long, awkward silence as we stand on the Homeycrib’s rooftop landing pad, looking down at the nighttime urban panorama below us.
She clearly has no intention of deigning to explain what we're doing up here. I have no intention of giving her the satisfaction of asking.
I glance over at Spooky, trying my best not to quail before her perfect hotness and cool arrogance, and I'm struck by an amused insight.
Given the strong winds up here at 40-story height, her cloak should've been fluttering and flapping about wildly, uncontrollably, laughably.
Instead, Spooky's cloak continues to just billow dramatically in a fixed pattern, never once behaving in a manner that might embarrass her.
I realize that, hilariously enough, she's definitely using her eldritch powers to keep her Goth Drama Queen Cosplay Ensemble under control.
Call me doofy—"Okay, you're doofy, Emp!"—but the fact that Spooky's burning magical calories to make herself look cool humanizes her a bit.
She's not quite the perfect, immaculate icon of bootylicious badassery—or, if you prefer, badass bootyliciosity—that she wants us to see.
Not unlike Cassidy's hours of prep-time before the mirror, Spooky's expending a heckuva lot of effort to portray a façade of effortlessness.
Note: Anyone traipsing into battle in hot pants and pentagram garters must be deeply committed to a very weirdly idealized image of herself.
"Shut up," she hisses, abruptly breaking the silence.
Puzzled, I look over at her and mumble uncertainly, "Um, I didn't say anything, okay?"
Spooky turns away. "I wasn't talking to you," she says, her voice thick. She points upward with a vague gesture, but now I'm staring directly at her.
I'm "WTF"-ed to witness even a hint of a flaw in her perfect, icy hauteur. My emotional radar instantly locks on to the quaver in her voice.
All of a sudden, despite her not-quite-concealing-enough mask, I can see that Sistah Spooky just looks kind of, well, miserable.
As if on cue, Spooky's cloak gets caught by the wind and WHAPP, violently wraps around her head while she's distracted. Oopsies!
To my credit, I manage not to laugh outright, instead choking back an unattractively piglike snort and rather lamely coughing to cover it.
Spooky claws herself free, angrily gestures the cape-control spell back on (I assume), turns to glare at me as her cloak settles back down.
I hastily look away from her furious glower, belatedly remember her "up there" signal, and direct my flustered gaze to the sky.
I look up, but see nothing overhead, just the opaque, pearlescent haze of nighttime urban light pollution. I squint, then my suit glitters.
I blink, and a dazzling, planetarium-worthy display of perfectly clear, star-bejeweled night sky springs into view through my mask's lenses.
No, screw that. The stunningly beautiful starscape I'm gape-mouthing up at isn't just planetarium-worthy, but Hubble-space-telescope-worthy.
Then, against that insanely vivid, astronomer's-wet-dream tapestry, I notice a single bright star tracking across in visible motion.
"Holy crap," I breathlessly and newb-ily gush, while using a different, rather less refined vocabulary term in place of the word "crap."
I crane my neck back to watch the moving point of light arcing to the zenith overhead. "That's Joint Superteam Space Station 3, isn't it?"
In all the time I’ve spent gazing mouth-agape into the night sky using my supersuit’s vision options, I’ve never thought to look for this.
I squint, and the bright star resolves into a blurred, edge-lit polyhedron, sparkling with tiny lights and streaking across the heavens.
Not just any polyhedron, I know, but a decahedron specifically. This famous satellite’s nicknamed “the d10,” gamer-speak for a 10-sided die.
Make that a half-mile-long 10-sided die, of course, jointly leased by the Superhomeys and nine other superteams as an orbital forward base.
Ah, good ol’ Joint Superteam Space Station 3. This begs a question that, as a mere civilian, has never been answered to my satisfaction.
My voice goes all low and conspiratorial. “Um, now that I’m an actual member of the Superhomeys—”
“An associate member,” Spooky interjects, sharply.
“—I gotta ask this: What exactly happened to the first two Joint Superteam Space Stations? That’s never been made public, as far as I know.”
(Officially—and tersely—the civilian population’s been told only that Stations 1 and 2 are “no longer in use by the suprahuman community.”)
“That’s classified,” she replies, no little satisfaction in her voice. “That’s information well above your pay grade, associate member.”
Pause. Then she clarifies, “Let’s just say that the previous space stations were a bit too fragile for the outgoing suprahuman lifestyle.”
<END OF EXCERPT>
Wellp, if this actually worked, webcomic readers, I’ll try again shortly with another excerpt from I Am Empowered continuing this chapter of Spooky/ Emp interaction.
Today’s Patreon update: Originally done as a means of scratching out more worktime to complete the long-gestating Empowered vol. 12, I've switched over to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday Patreon posting schedule that won't feature the fixed content format I previously used. However, my vast archive of years of Patreon posts—extensive Empowered previews, vintage con sketches, work stages on covers, "damsel in distress" commissions, life drawings & much, much more—remains available for Patrons' perusal.
-Adam Warren
