Getting used to the new job.

Brandon died overnight. Or it certainly felt like it, given how deeply he slept and how tired he was when his alarm rang much too early. He practically tumbled out of bed on his way to the most cursory of morning cleaning rituals: deodorant, comb, splash water on face, breath mint. In his foresight he had at least laid out a clean set of clothes, and he tugged them on in between bites of a cereal bar. With his paperwork in hand (he checked three times) he lumbered out of his apartment and began his new commute.

Gotham in the morning was the same sort of madhouse as every other city, a welcome break from the madhouse it was at all other times of day. Even supervillains slept, it seemed. He only had to deal with the noise, and the cars, and fumbling for his subway pass, and cramming himself between a middle-aged businessman with too much aftershave and a grungy man in a small, stained tee shirt. Then a few more blocks of walking to the nondescript office building, into the nondescript elevator, and toward a nondescript office. Only the cameras in the ceiling gave any indication that the office was anything more than home to a mundane accountant or optometrist, and Brandon only noticed them because he had developed a sixth sense for dodging security at LexCorp, honed by years of stealthily finding the best places to nap.

In retrospect, maybe he hadn’t been as stealthy as he’d thought. Luthor had picked him for a reason, right? Maybe this was part of his unique skill set. He was almost like a superhero himself. “The incredible Amulet Man! With a genetic tendency toward being aggressively normal and the amazing power to hide from the watchful eyes of electronic security and supervisors by generally being beneath their notice, Amulet Man wages a never-ending war for a half-decent job with reasonable benefits and an apartment that doesn’t smell like wet cat!” He chuckled, drawing a worried glance from a man he passed in the hall.

Though superheroes probably didn’t get their powers from mind-control magic handed to them by billionaires. Brandon was fairly sure—at least ninety-four percent—Luthor was a villain. And Brandon’s path to (silent, unknown) glory was to sneak into the Justice League Watchtower, a space fortress with top-of-the-line security and dozens of heroes, and **** as many women as he could find with the express goal of knocking them up without their knowledge or consent. He was probably a villain too, all things considered. But it beat being a destitute janitor, and even with Luthor’s help, accessing one of the solar system’s most secure facilities was a task for a veteran in stealth.

The Watchtower wasn’t impregnable, and he would prove it by making the people inside pregnant. This time he did laugh aloud. The young man at the office desk—likely some sidekick in disguise, doing grunt work—gave him a strange look, but he passed it off with “sorry, didn’t sleep much last night. First day jitters,” and a sheepish smile. The guards seemed to buy it.

As expected, getting into the Watchtower wasn’t easy. He had to sign in, leave his fingerprints, take a retinal scan, and go through what seemed to be an X-ray machine that would make airport security salivate. He left his phone, wallet, and other personal effects at the desk, even his wedding ring (he didn’t have one, but the guard mentioned it as an example of how thorough the screening process was), and changed into the boring custodian’s uniform in a space with roughly the same size and design aesthetic as a windowless closet. Then it was a quick walk through an ordinary door, through a scientifically magical series of glowing rings, and after a brief bout of mild nausea he was in a metal room with a glass wall looking onto the Earth below.

His co-workers and supervisor allowed him a few moments of awe before he got his marching orders. As expected, his duties were much the same as he’d performed at LexCorp: empty trash, straighten areas not currently in use, vacuum or mop where necessary, periodically check on the bathrooms, and similar mindless drudgery. But he immediately noticed how the culture at the Watchtower was unlike his former employer. Instead of milling about half-dead, the other men asked about him and joked around (“Oh, you used to work at LexCorp in Gotham? So you’re, what, already a Superman and Batwoman villain? Hell, next you’ll say your girlfriend is an Amazon.”) Instead of being constantly under the watchful eye of too many cameras and inattentive middle managers, he only received a list of tasks and he otherwise had free reign. “Do your job, follow the rules, don’t make trouble for the superheroes, and nobody minds if your lunch is a little long,” as his supervisor put it. All the better. If he hurried through his work each day, he’d have a lot more time for his true goal.

He didn’t notice anything amiss until a few hours into his shift, when he saw the hallways roped off with large “Female Only” signs hung from them. He withheld his curiosity until lunch, and his co-workers informed him that the Watchtower had been gender-segregated following the first appearance of the amulets. While half the world had seen the Justice League’s best and brightest masturbating themselves dizzy on live television, similar problems had befallen the Watchtower far from the public’s reach. As they understood it, the segregation was a precautionary measure in case another problem happened. Even the security systems were split down the middle; men had no access to the women’s camera systems or any room that required a keycard, to say nothing of the gym, quarters, cafeteria, or other areas. Crossing the line was grounds for immediate dismissal, and opinions seemed to vary on whether “you will be asked to leave” meant “you will be fired” or “you will be directed toward the nearest airlock.”

While his fellow custodians debated whether there was a meaningful differentiation between mind-controlled nudity in the presence of members of like gender versus a mixed-gender gathering of people at large, whether the current precautions were only meaningful in a society that treated nudity as a source of shame and a means by which one might gain and exert power over another, and whether inter-gender nudity was necessarily a precursor to sexual thoughts or interaction any more than intra-gender nudity given the possibility—even statistical likelihood—of individuals within the subject group who were not exclusively heterosexual, Brandon fretted. No superheroines? How was he supposed to fuck women who weren’t even there? But after a few minutes of thought he decided to treat it as a blessing. If half of the Watchtower contained women and only women, within that half he was entirely invisible. He didn’t have to dodge the Flash or Superman or any other men wandering the halls. He just had to escape into the women-only area and don the amulet, trivially easy compared to hiding his every movement. The space station was basically his playground, and as long as he did his job, nobody would be able to link him to the wave of pregnancies due to start any day now (or, any day within the next one to five weeks).

It did end up taking a little longer than he had expected, specifically because of the security measures. He took careful note of his tasks and the cameras and such, and he soon knew the best ways to sneak into the women’s section unnoticed. The problem was remaining unnoticed, because the ground-level office was remarkably thorough each and every morning. Waltzing in with an amulet around his neck would be a little too obvious for his covert mission. Eventually he formed a plan, though he needed a call to Miss Graves to accomplish it. The next day he had a special LexCorp-issue wallet, just barely big enough to fit both the amulet and his subway pass. If he peeked into the office in the morning and saw a male guard at the desk, he would turn his wallet over like normal and go through a standard shift at work. If he saw a female guard, he could slip the amulet from his wallet, put it around his neck, and go through the check-in process while she sat unaware. He could write his name on the sign-in sheet, put his personal items into an empty bin, change his clothes, walk through the scanner, and everything else without any interaction, and with the amulet under his grey work shirt, none of his co-workers knew he had smuggled a powerful weapon into the Justice League’s home base. The League had accidentally given him the best gift they could; if he never interacted with a man and a woman at the same time, there would be no opportunity for them to notice anything amiss. A few hours of hurried work and a few long steps down a hallway, and he stood in the forbidden zone with dozens of women ready for the taking.