Is Charm BACK?!!!

Hello and happy Thanksgiving -- great news... I'm writing Charm again! And some other stuff planned. That's right, I'm back, baby, and as excited as ever.

Here's a taste. Unedited, and partially dictated, so... don't hate me. Thoughts? Enjoy?

***

“Go crawl up the ass of an armadillo and die slowly!” I screamed, pulling at the restraints on my hands and legs. My nine tails were rigid, pushed against the wall behind me, my ears perked back, but none of my kitsune powers were of help. It wasn’t so long ago that I rejected the idea of being a kitsune, and now the person with a cup of my blood wanted to take that power from me.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me just say this—when everyone around you treats you like a god, you start to believe it. At least in my case I had a team of superpowered bad asses who, while not exactly my power level, were pretty damn close.

Problem was, on this particular day, they were nowhere to be found.

It was my fault. I’d woken up way before everyone else, and decided it would be fun to get a head start on the mission at hand. Over the past week, my team had received more than a couple jobs from the Citadel. Each one involved heading off to various planets, finding super villains who were trying to run the show, or infiltrating nefarious groups of supervillain loyalists and putting a stop to them. Generally without difficulty.

So after putting on my skin-tight blue and pink superhero suit and heading to the mission hub, I pulled up our holo-screen. It showed a new batch of missions were waiting to be handled. Maybe I’d been planning to just have a look and move on, go find a slice of carrot cake in the mess hall or something. Except, there was my name, right next to a mission and words that said, “Cult of the Fox might have information on a local branch under the Supreme Leader.”

Running my tongue along my pointy teeth, I considered the screen. It took me all of three seconds to decide I was going. The carrot cake could wait. After all, considering how badass I was, how much trouble could I get into? Well, you already know about part of it, but the rest is coming. Hold your damn horses.

“Charm, except mission?” the holoscreen said. It was programmed to know which of us would be going through the portals so that the rest the team could keep track of us at all times. Considering how many supers were now involved in these missions, such logs were necessary. After all, we had our team, Drew and his people, the winged woman known as the Ex Succubus—don’t ask if you don’t know-- and of course the former bounty hunter, Ezra. At the moment, the bounty hunter and his people were off on a mission, but basically on the other side of the universe. They won’t have any interaction with me on this world.

I stared at the holo-screen and my solo name, only considering for a moment that this would be the first mission I went on by myself. With a shrug and a scratch man one of my pink, fluffy fox ears, I hit except. Light started to glow on the platform in front of me, so I stepped onto it and smiled, eager to kick some ass.

As the light started to take me, I held out my arms and spun, tails waving around me as I imagined a crowd applauding my bravery. More likely would be my team berating me for going off without them, but every once in a while a girl needs some special alone time with the villains she plans on trouncing, you know what I mean?

Flashes of multicolored lights came next, then a burst of darkness and jolt as I landed on something hard. I braced myself, using my tails for balance, and only to find the ground literally slipping out from beneath me. Shit, this was clearly some sort of trap, and I’d walked right into it!

Not exactly, it turned out, as my eyes adjusted and I let off a glow in time to see that I was on a roof, heading for the edge as loose tiles failed to hold my weight. I leaped, throwing myself into the air, and then used a twist of my tails to get enough momentum to redirect my fall. Landing a second later on a nearby balcony, I perched, catching my breath. What an entrance!

Roof tiles clattered on the street below. When their small echo stopped, silence filled the dim night. Moonlight glistened off of thick leaves nearby, though no rain fell at the moment. A glance around revealed small houses with a large building towering over the rest of it all. I figured that it would be too easy if my mission was to infiltrate that building, so decided to instead have a look around the houses.

One of my most useful skills when it comes to snooping is my ability to cloak. Turning invisible, I leaped down to the street below and landed with a soft thud. Next, I crept up to the windows of the nearest house to have a look inside.

Not only was the place empty, but a strange glow emitted from the walls. I quickly checked the other rooms and next house, even managing to break a door down and go barreling into one of the houses. From what I could tell, nobody was in any of these houses, and the strange glow from the walls was beyond my comprehension. When I finally decided to give up on the houses, my best guess was that the walls had simply been built like this, so as to avoid the need for electricity. Either solar powered houses, or some sort of material that absorbed light. What added to the feeling that the people were  no longer living in these houses were that in at least two I noticed furniture turned over, a pot with long-ago rotten food, and more of a mess.

“Get out of sight,” a voice hissed.

I spun, alert and ready for anything. There, crouched at the corner of the nearest house and one of the bushes from which those massive leaves grew, was a woman.

“The hell are you supposed to be?” I asked, stepping close but pausing at a hand held up from her.

To my surprise, the woman had fox ears, but no tail. Upon further inspection, however, she saw that the fox ears were actually part of a mask. Was this some sort of game, and part of the reason why my name had been included on the mission to come here?

***

And much more to come! 

In other news, I have a BLACK FRIDAY deal on STONE COLD MAGE (my gargoyle harem gamelit book 1 -- 99c the next couple of days if reading this 11-24-2022). If you haven't had a chance to read it and enjoy my writing, please pick it up.

Your support is amazing! THANK YOU!!!