Issue #4(a): The Truth Unmasked

18 hours before the heist at the League of Propriety headquarters...

You had always been an adaptable kind of person - 'flexible', one might say, if they wanted to be witty about it - and your new career as anonymous, uniformed eye candy to decorate the League's front lobby wasn't difficult to adjust to. A lot of the employees here were former or prospective heroes themselves, so nobody would call you a 'poser' or a 'washout' the way they might have if you'd left to use your powers in some low-level corporate gig. None of your new co-workers ever said or did anything to belittle you and La Petite Morte, in an uncharacteristically kind gesture, said that you'd be re-instated at your former rank and given your pick of assignments once your whole 'identity' issue was sorted. Indeed, no one except you, Doc, and a few select others knew the real reason you'd taken off the costume and assumed you were just taking a well-deserved break after having your civilian identity compromised and threatened by several unusually well-connected villains that hadn't even been on the League's radar.

But somehow, your shame being secret made it hurt your pride all the worse. You wanted to prove Molly wrong, to defeat her - but it had to be on your terms, done the 'right' way. Blaming yourself barely crossed your mind. You were offended by the very idea that you'd crossed some kind of a moral line in dealing with Gloomy Sunday (who'd been intending to you into helping her blight and cut short the lives of literally thousands of people), or that having sex while in your identity as Nightingale was some kind of a failure on your part even when it had helped to defeat evil and save lives. But just going ahead and stubbornly trying to reassert yourself as Nightingale would only give mother an excuse to dismiss your objects as 'throwing a tantrum'.

What you needed was to be in the right place at the right time without looking like you'd been trying to put the costume back on. That was the holy grail for any kind of disgraced superhero seeking to escape the cloud of a scandal. Having the mask being thrust on to you, stoically accepting it for a greater good in spite of any past shame... the very thought of it gave you a giddy spring in your step. By thinking of such things the last couple days of security guarding had been a breeze (Breeze... why did that term come to mind so easily?), and you'd gotten quite a few compliments from returning and departing heroes.

Of course, that could just be chalked up to the ever-escalating game of virtue-signaling among superheroes, who always wanted to look like they cared about every one of the hundreds of support staff that kept the League running on a day-to-day basis. Sex appeal and beating the biggest baddie wasn't the only way they competed; there was always a race for who did the most charity events, who performed the most superpower-enhanced favors for ordinary citizens and street kids... in short, who could be the most ostentatiously humble.

And nobody needed to humblebrag more right now than the trio of major Leaguers who had been trading sexual favors with villains so brazenly that the League headquarters had been repeatedly infiltrated. You didn't' know much about the third - someone who'd crossed the line into outright villainy himself - but you were experiencing a small but pleasant degree of schadenfreude at the expense of the more famous two, Green Streak and Beast-Beauty. You didn't know either of them very well but you wouldn't think to well of them even if their carelessness HADN'T caused you so much grief; the both of them had some very unfortunate and regressive ideas about heroism and the city in general. Green Streak was the epitome of the macho, posturing, piggish jock whose idea of heroism often amounted to bullying criminals too small-time to fight back for a power fantasy, and then constantly trying to put new superheroines 'in their place' with the sexual prowess that he was so insecure about.

And today you understood why Beast-Beauty had apparently had such camaraderie for the man, now that you'd been assigned as part of the 'security' (or, as your superiors had euphemistically called it, 'leash-holding') detail for Beast-Beauty while performing a tedious task of overwatch at a public park for a city councilwoman's campaign speech. Despite the near-implosion of ASPIC recently, the underlying concerns and resentment for oversexed superheroes and the ever-more perverted villains coming out of the woodwork with each passing month remained hot issues. People in Acropolis City actually cared about local politics more than national, an anomaly in the 'states, but then, most cities didn't have local issues involving sex-change rays, black magic and plutonium on the black market, or a dozen different super-aphrodisiac hitting the streets annually. Even so, being stuck standing around as security at a sparsely-attended political speech while the A-list of the League of Propriety was mounting a manhunt for wasn't the most prestigious thing for you, or for Beauty.

The security detail consisted of you, a rather hapless guy named Dave who was an NCP that apparently had been recently disabused of his ambition of becoming a hero called "Arm-falling-off-Man" - being able to harmlessly detach and reattach your right arm was a fun trick at parties but didn't cut the mustard in superheroism - and Jane, a somewhat crazy-looking shaved-headed ex-military chick who had been 'encouraged' to go for security after she was denied her dream of becoming a vigilante when she refused to switch to non-lethal firearms. And Beast-Beauty herself, of course, though she had disappeared 'to use the tree' mere minutes after you'd arrived, before she could hardly say anything to you.

As a matter-of-fact, the lithe, pointy-eared shapeshifting heroine had very briefly taken you aside to apologize to you a few days ago for her role in the disaster, but it had been very flippant and insincere. It didn't seem to occur to the ditz that you might still hold any hard feelings even though the incident was mere days ago.

Putting yourself in the right position to be thrust into heroism. That is why you step forward and tell Dave and Jane that you will go and find where the superheroine you're supposed to be helping provide security got herself off to.

...and besides, you're already starting to miss the taste of excitement you'd gotten during your few days on patrol. If there wasn't any villainy to stop, maybe you could pick up a fling or two to make the nights stuck at home a little less boring?