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.  This episode features our heroine outwitting her latest supercaptors, “The Cash Money Clique,” by exacerbating tensions among this team of dumbass supervilains.

STRAIGHT CASH, SUPERHOMEY (PART 4)

Raiding a villain’s smartphone: Less fun than rooftop recon or surveilling from the shadows, but arguably more useful for gathering intel.

We’d be screwed if most supervillains ever thought to set Passcode Locks on their phones—even the Evil Geniuses rarely seem to bother.

Ah, but once I finish my dataharvesting and set the phone aside, the Cash Money Clique’s final—and toughest—challenge suddenly confronts me.

I look up, start to glance idly over the hideout’s grubby mess, and all at once the full impact of the surreal environment hits me.

For lo and behold, a metric fuckton of scattered cash carpets the lair's floor, a bank vault—or two—worth of loose bills strewn underfoot.

The two-minute civil war between Kap’n Koin and Money Master has left every last dollar of their bountiful loot littering the battlefield.

Snowdrifts of cash, unraked leaf-piles of money, wads and heaps and handfuls and armfuls of bills festoon every horizontal surface in sight.

(Somewhat less impressively, Kap’n Koin’s numismatic rampage has also cast thousands of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters far and wide.)

I'm staring, gape-mouthed and drool-y, at what looks like more money than my entire student-loan and credit-card debt put together.

Andrew Jackson, that slut, gives me a blatant, unmistakable come-hither look from a hundred different $20s. “You know you want me,” he coos.

A-Jac’s hotter friend—hotter and he knows it, the arrogant douche—Ulysses S. Grant says nothing, just winks knowingly at me from the $50.

Then, in my imagination’s fevered nightclub, Ben Franklin elbows Mandrew and Uly aside, gets all up in my face with his undeniable hawtness.

A male-cougar legion of B-Franks sizzlingly lock eyes with me, whispering oh-so-seductively, “$100 says we’re going home with you, Emp.”

(Abe Lincoln and whoever the hell’s on the $10 bill are no doubt kissy-facing at me, too, but at the moment I only have eyes for Big Ben.)

Of course, I'm not likely to scoop up a whole armload of Benjamins and scamper villainously off into the night, gibbering maniacally.

Howeva: I have to (shamefully) confess that I am deeply, acutely, intensely and profoundly tempted to snatch a quick handful of $100 bills.

Will anyone really miss a few lost B-Franks? After all, in the battle outside the bank, a fair number of bills must've been left behind.

Wouldn't the bank maybe be happy to toss me a few crumbs—that is, a few Benjies? I did save the rest of their cash-stash from theft, y'know.

I must admit, at times like these—with $100 bills scattered around me like a green snowfall of cash—I'm glad my suit doesn't have pockets.

I'm beginning to wish that the Cash Crime Cartel weren't all still unconscious, that they could be awake and watching me suspiciously.

No way could I go all larcenously light-fingered and feloniously thief-y under their judgmental gazes. "Not in front of the bad guys, dear."

Now I'm pacing back and forth on an honest-to-gawd carpet of cash, agitated and flustered, wrestling with my own whiny, self-entitled greed.

I’m timidly chewing my supersuit-coated nails, their peculiar, licked-battery taste oddly soothing as my squirrelly jitteriness worsens.

I'm thinking that, of course, A Real Superheroine would never, ever entertain the idea of snagging any stolen money from a foiled robbery.

Then again: I'm counter-thinking that A Real Superheroine would never, ever be as deeply, pathetically, and hopelessly in debt as I am.

For at least six months now, I've barely made the minimum monthly payment on all my credit cards—and those are very minimal payments indeed.

Ah, but my credit-card debt is a relatively minor threat, equivalent in supervillain terms to a lowly C-list pest like, say, Pink Elephant.

Far bigger and much scarier a menace? The looming terror of my student loans, analogous to an A-list superdupervillain like Deathmonger.

The grim total of my student debtload? A jawdroppy $55,000, looming in my fevered nightmares as the terrifying supervillain Double Nickels.

Pathetically enough, I’ve grown to hate and fear the number 55 itself, flinching every time I happen to stumble across it in real life.

(I never even consider taking the most advantageous bus line across town to the Homeycrib, just ’cause its route number happens to be 55.)

<END OF EXCERPT >

Wellp, if this actually worked, webcomic readers, I’ll try again shortly with another excerpt from I Am Empowered, which will likely wrap up serialization of this interesting but incomplete project.

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. So, who knows what today's post might feature? Could be Life Drawing or Distressed Damsels content (both of which are featured at least three times per month), or something in the Work Stages, Vintage Con Sketches or Design departments, or possibly something entirely new. Golly!

-Adam Warren