I stared after the waitress for a long moment as she walked off. Then I looked at the wine in front of me. I knew it was ridiculous not to trust whatever was in that wine glass, but I also couldn't help the overwhelming sense of paranoia that was starting to come over me as I sat in this overstuffed restaurant with entirely too much atmosphere and worried there was something seriously dangerous and wrong going on here.

"You doing okay there?" Selena asked me.

"I'm doing fine," I said. "Why wouldn't I be doing anything other than fine?"

"Because you are acting weird," she said, and then her eyes turned and she was looking at the waitress as she made her way over to a door that led into the back room.

I peered at that door as it opened up, but it was impossible to make out anything over on the other side of the door.

"I think I know exactly what's going on here," she said, turning and looking to where the waitress had disappeared, and then turning to look back at me with a knowing smile.

I blinked again, and then I totally realized what she was insinuating.

"Wait, no, that's not what's going on here at all," I said.

"You're telling me you weren't staring at the waitress?" she asked.

"I mean, I was staring at the waitress, sure," I said, "But I wasn't…"

"Staring at her ass?" Selena asked, arching an eyebrow. "She is a pretty redhead, and I know for a fact that you have a thing for pretty redheads."

"I mean, I do have a thing for you, and you're a pretty redhead, but that's having a thing for you. That's not saying I have a type."

"So you're saying you don't have a type, and I'm not it?" she asked, blinking her eyes and smiling in a way that was entirely too sweet.

I crossed my arms. I suddenly got the feeling she was doing this on purpose.

"You're being difficult on purpose, aren't you?" I asked.

"Maybe just a little," she said. "But seriously, are you going to calm down, or are we not going to be able to enjoy our dinner?"

"I'm sorry. It just seems like this whole thing is a little too pat, don't you think?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean the whole setup. You're a new hero coming up in the city, and you happen to run into another hero who tells you all about this fancy nightclub that all the heroes and villains are going to. You decide to check it out, and then you come in here, and boom, something happens."

"What happens?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said with a sigh. "I almost wish you'd come here when..."

I trailed off. The last thing I wanted was to say something about her losing her powers. If there really was something bad going on here then the last thing I wanted was for the assholes running this sting operation to know she didn't have her powers.

"Think about it logically, Natalie," she said. "If somebody was running an operation that literally targeted all the heroes and villains in the city, then wouldn't there be a lot fewer heroes and villains in the city these days?"

I thought about that, and then I raised a finger.

"But there are a lot fewer heroes and villains in the city these days."

Selena frowned, and when she looked around the place this time I almost thought I could see a little bit of worry in her eyes. Like maybe she was wondering if I was right after all.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

I frowned as I stared off into the distance. I wasn't looking at anything in particular. Thankfully there wasn't waitress ass in front of me to give my girlfriend the wrong idea about where I was looking and what I was looking at.

"Ever since I started working in Starlight City, I noticed fewer and fewer heroes and villains trying to do their thing in the city."

"Well, yeah," Selena said. "But I'd think that should be pretty obvious what's going on there."

"Oh yeah? And what's pretty obvious about what's going on there?" I asked.

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I'd come to my own conclusions about why there were fewer heroes and villains in Starlight City since I started my rise to the heights of supervillainy, but I wanted to see what Selena had to say about it.

"You came along, and you shut down the game," she said with a shrug. "The same thing would've happened if there wasn't an apex supervillain in the city and I came along and became an apex hero. The arrival of an apex supervillain means there are going to be a lot of wannabe heroes and villains who take one look at Starlight City and decide they're going to try somewhere else."

"But that's where you're potentially wrong," I said. "Because there are a lot of people who come to Starlight City to try and start their villainous or heroic career. I know because I had to make a career out of knocking a lot of them down a few pegs when they'd come into the city and start some trouble."

"Okay, I will allow that," Selena said. "But are there fewer of those than there would be on the baseline?"

"That's the problem," I said, slumping back and taking a sip of my wine. I looked down at it for a moment in suspicion after taking that sip. I worried that taking a sip of wine might be the same thing as taking a sip of poison.

I had nanobots moving through my bloodstream that were supposed to take care of any poison that got in there, but that didn't necessarily mean I wanted to ingest the stuff in the first place. Especially when it might take those nanobots a couple of tries to figure out exactly what was going on with the stuff that had just entered my bloodstream, and I could've been incapacitated while that was happening.

"I think you're being paranoid, Natalie," Selena said, and she kicked back her own drink. I'm talking she put the whole thing back and downed it in a couple of impressive gulps. Like she was doing shots, and not like she was taking a sip of an expensive wine.

If I was the kind of person to like expensive wine then I would've winced at the display, but I didn't care as long as the alcohol content was just right. So I did the same thing, slamming my glass down on the table and causing the thing to ting just a little bit.

"Fine. Here's to relaxing," I said.

"Here's to relaxing," she said, hitting me with a grin.

She reached out and grabbed the wine bottle, and then she poured a drink for each of us. I was a little more measured in taking my drink this time around, but I figured I might as well enjoy the stuff if we were out here and I was trying to let loose and have a good time.

"It probably would've been a better idea for me to come check this out back when..."

She trailed off. She looked at me and giggled. I wondered if the alcohol was already having an effect on her.

Then I thought about everything that happened when we were at the Skyhigh. How it became apparent that her alcohol tolerance wasn't nearly as great as it'd been when she still had her powers.

She leaned forward just a little.

"Do you want to know a secret?" she whispered.

I leaned forward across the table as well. "I would love to know a secret."

"You're really pretty," she said.

And then she took her recently refilled glass of wine and she threw her head back and downed that down as well.

I thought about telling her she needed to take it easy. That she needed to remember her limits. She needed to remember she had limits these days.

But I had a hard time bringing myself to tell her to do anything of the sort.

Besides, I had a pattern buffer I'd taped on the inside of my dress. It would transport my belt onto me, and from there I could put on my super suit and everything else if it things got a little nasty in here.

But the more time went on and nothing bad happened to us, the more I thought maybe Selena was right. Maybe I truly was being paranoid.

Meanwhile, music started down below. It was a string rendition of some sort of dance music. Maybe that was the kind of fancy music they played here. But when I looked onto the dance floor down at the bottom of the club I could see there was a DJ setting up on a stage at one end of the floor.

There were lights that going up.

That brought to mind my early forays into mind control, when I'd used a DJ booth at the middle school I was at to try and teach a lesson to one of those bullies who learned a lesson the hard way about what it was to go up against a fledgling super villain.

Of course I'd been caught in that mind control because I hadn't bothered to come up with a way to counter it before I activated it, and I ended up getting egg on my face as everybody danced until a bemused custodian came in the next morning and unplugged the DJ equipment.

It'd been lucky for all of us that guy had a serious case of glaucoma that he hadn't bothered to get fixed because he was too proud to admit he had a problem. Which was a sad thing for him, but it meant people didn't collapse from exhaustion from dancing the entire weekend.

Even the parents who'd come looking for their children had ended up getting caught in the dance fever.

I'd even been proud enough to write everything up so it could be part of my seventh grade science project. I hadn't bothered to publish those results once I realized how negatively everybody reacted to what happened in the gym. It was still the stuff of legend in that school system, even though the school itself had long since been shut down in downsizing.

"You okay?" Selena asked.

"I was just thinking about a dance I went to once," I said.

Her face lit up.

"Are you asking me to dance?"

I looked at her and I grinned.

"You know what? I think I am asking you to dance."

"Excellent," she said. "Hopefully they have everything set up by the time we get down there."

I blinked. "Wait, what?"

"We're going to dance, right? So if we're going to dance, there's no time like the present."

"Like you want to go and dance right now?"

"Why not?" she asked, cocking her head to the side and staring at me. She started to chew on her lip just a little. "Are you worried you can't dance?"

I wasn't worried that I couldn't dance at all. I was pretty good at cutting a rug, despite the fact that I was dorky enough that I thought of it as cutting a rug.

"You're on," I said, grinning right back at her.

"Have you had time to think about..."

Our waitress stopped as both of us stood and nearly ran into her in our hurry to get over to the elevator and down to the first floor. She looked at both of us in clear confusion.

"Sorry, no time to order food right now," Selena said. "We want to go down and dance."

I shrugged as I smiled at her. "I guess we're dancing."

Again, the waitress hit me with one of those odd smiles. A smile that never quite seemed to reach her eyes, but then I was getting pulled along towards the elevator by my girlfriend and I didn't care what the waitress thought of us or our desire to dance when we should've been ordering overpriced food.

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