The Obligatory Supervillain Monologue

I opened my eyes, wincing at the bright light that was shining directly into them. I tried to block the light out with my hand, but my arm was stopped by a metal wrist strap holding it against an armrest. A little bit of testing confirmed that my other arm and both my legs were strapped down as well, and this jolted me into wakefulness. Even as my vision was still adjusting to the harsh light, I started struggling as hard as I could to break or at least loosen my bonds.

"You're not going to free yourself from those restraints," a sharp male voice said, "But if you want to break your wrists trying, then by all means feel free to keep flailing around like that."

The way he said it wasn't threatening, or showing concern, but rather how one would off-handedly state a fact they were absolutely certain was true. To his credit though, it was effective at getting me to stop. As I sat there and my eyes finished adjusting I saw the man who was my captor. He was standing off to the side, tending to an empty syringe. He wore a lab coat, with a tank top and khaki slacks underneath, and the light in the room gleamed off of his bald head.

"You're... you're Lex Luthor," I said, still somewhat groggy. Even in this state, I could recognize Metropolis' richest man immediately.

"Oh would you look at that, Mercy," he said sarcastically, "He has a working set of eyes."

I looked around the room I now found myself in. It was very obviously a medical laboratory of some kind, with various machines and state-of-the-art computer screens surrounding the chair I was in. The entire place had this sleek chrome finish, and there were no windows to the outside, so the room could be practically anywhere as far as I knew. The only exit I could see was a large steel door, by which stood Mercy Graves, now more recognizable in her regular black business blazer and skirt.

"Where am I?" I asked.

"Hold still."

"Wait, what-"

That was all the warning I got before Luthor stuck the needle he was holding in my arm and drawing a blood sample. The initial prick made me yelp, but I was able to not completely freak out as he filled the syringe with my blood. As he pulled the needle back out and swabbed the spot where he pricked me, I noticed that there were a few other small red dots clustered together on my arm.

"Have you been... taking my blood?" I asked him, "While I was ****?"

"Yes, and I preferred the silence to all these questions," Luthor said irritably, taking the syringe over to a vial and started filling it with the blood sample.

"Why...?"

"Don't bother with the whole 'why me?' and 'there's been some mistake' spiel," he said, not even looking at me as he discarded the syringe, "I got you here by having Mercy flash a phony badge at you and pretend to work with the Justice League. You should already be aware that I know that Kara is Supergirl and that you are her boyfriend, so let's save us both some time and skip that whole song and dance, shall we?"

At this point my heart started beating a mile a minute. He already knows about Kara? I realized I was in a lot of trouble.

"Kara!" I shouted, "KARA!!!"

"Oh, shut up," Luthor snapped. "This facility is lead-lined, and over a mile underground. Even she won't be able to hear you all the way down here."

He placed the vial of blood in a machine, then pressed a couple of buttons to start it up. As what I could only assume was some kind of processor hummed to life, he walked back to me and grabbed a stool to sit on, "As long as you're awake though, I might as well ask what Supergirl has told you about me. Nothing good, I imagine."

I wasn't exactly sure what to say to him. I remember that Kara never really reacted well to seeing Lex Luthor whenever he was on a news broadcast or commercial. And when I had asked her about it, she told me, "You know all those shady rumors swirling around about him? He's actually a hundred times worse: the man's a power-hungry narcissist that absolutely hates Kryptonians, especially Superman."

Which was hard to believe at the time. Sure, Luthor was a vocal critic of the Man of Steel and aliens in general, and had a bit of an ego in interviews, but given all the charities and public works projects his company was involved in it was hard to imagine that the golden boy of Metropolis was secretly an evil supervillain on the same level as Brainiac or the Joker. But now that I was his prisoner, and could see that cold, calculating green-eyed glare of his up close, the thought wasn't so unimaginable anymore.

Luthor scowled as I remained silent. "Fine then, don't tell me. It's not like it matters much anyway. What she thinks of me will be irrelevant soon enough."

"You won't get away with this," I said, "Kara will come for me. I know it."

"I have no doubt she'll try," Luthor said, "I imagine she might even end up tearing apart the whole city, quite literally, looking for you. She's addicted to you after all."

This choice of words confused me, "Addicted?"

"Don't play dumb with me," Luthor growled, leaning in close to me, "The lovestruck way she clings to you when you're out and about, the disregard for masking her own identity just to appease your whims by flying you everywhere, offering to reveal Superman's secret identity to Metallo just to save your sorry skin..."

"H-How did you know-?" The realization hit me, and I muttered, "It was you... you sent Metallo."

"Congratulations, you aren't a complete moron," Luthor sneered, "Yes, I sent Metallo after you as a test to see how Supergirl would react to you being put in mortal danger, and just how far she would go to rescue you. Not that he knew that; he thought it was just me giving him a chance to kill Supergirl with a new toy... though on the off-chance he actually managed to pull it off, I wouldn't have shed any tears for her. I'll admit, I wasn't counting on Nightwing and Starfire being there to help when Metallo made his move, but as expected my contingency plan destroyed any evidence that would lead back to me. And I made sure that didn't happen again when it was time to actually kidnap you."

"So Bizarro... you sent him too."

"And pulled some strings with the Legion to make sure the other heroes were kept busy so that Supergirl would be the only one available to fight him," Luthor said smugly, "All perfectly timed with you walking into that Metro Burger."

"You... you knew when I would be there? How?"

"Do you know where a large chunk of LexCorp's wealth comes from, Charlie?" he asked. Before I had a chance to respond, he answered, "Real estate. Not many people are aware of this, but LexCorp owns over a third of all the buildings and land in Metropolis. That includes all of the warehouses along that dock Metallo brought you to, which as a consequence also had their security cameras provided by LexCorp Security. And Metro Burger? Why, that company just so happens to be a subsidiary of LexCorp, so I own and provide the security systems for all of those as well. Once I saw you in those pictures online, and cross-referenced the images with employee records, it was child's play to locate you and keep tabs on you at your job, listening in to everything you've been telling your friends about your new girlfriend, among other things. Like that you would be meeting with your boss to get your final paycheck."

Okay, that settled it. I was never stepping foot in a Metro Burger again. But one thing was still nagging at me.

"B-But if this was all to get at Supergirl, why hide me where she can't find me? A-Are you going to **** her?"

He smirked, "No. See, you became my target ever since I learned who you were."

"M-Me?"

"Yes, you. I wasn't sure how you were doing it at first, but now that I've got you here... I've figured out your secret, Charlie."

"M-My secret?" A pit was forming in my stomach. If he had been spying on me at work, where else was he spying on me? Did he know about Wonder Woman too? About Starfire?

"What, did you think I was taking your blood just for fun? I'm studying how your metahuman pheromones work."

"My... my what?"

"Oh, come on," he said with an exasperated sigh, "Do you really expect me to believe that you didn't realize what your pheromones were doing to her? That someone of my intellect wouldn't see how unbelievable it was that a Kryptonian superhero would become so attached to someone like you?"

That pit in my stomach was turning into a churning ocean. I started to tremble. Pheromones... was he saying what I thought he was saying? No, that couldn't be right... I'd have known if she was being influenced by pheromones... if she only cared about me because I smelled good to her...

...Oh God. Oh God... from the very first time we met, she said she liked my 'cologne'. And she never had a problem with my body odor. And even Wonder Woman and Starfire said my scent was...

Oh God... there was no mind-controlling supervillain. It was me the whole time.

Luthor's eyes slowly began to widen as he observed my mind shattering in real time.

"You really didn't know, did you?" he said, almost in disbelief.

I shook my head no, too upset to speak. Of course, Luthor didn't care that my whole world was crumbling in front of me. No, he just started laughing.

"I take back what I said earlier, you really are a complete moron!" Luthor said while laughing, "You actually believed that Supergirl, one of the strongest women in the entire world, cousin of Superman, practically a living god, actually fell in love with you? I'd understand if you were rich and powerful, or could at least give her some good publicity like Ms. Lane does for Superman, but you're just some average-looking nobody still working as a cashier in his mid-twenties. I only had to look at one picture of you two together to tell that something was wrong! And you just accepted it completely!"

As his laughter died down he finished with, "You are either the dumbest son of a bitch on Earth or just the most **** for affection to not recognize something so obvious staring you in the face like that."

He grabbed one of the monitors in the room and pulled it over, showing me a picture of some kind of molecule, "Well take a look, Charlie. This is what I found in a sweat sample I took from you. I've been having my computer run simulations with it using the data I have on Kryptonian physiology."

As I just stared at the model of this... pheromone, not even able to focus on the large amount of text scrolling by next to it, Luthor continued, "Given your lack of intelligence I don't expect you to understand any of what you're actually reading, so I'll put it in simple terms for you: this little compound, while harmless to humans like you and me, is highly addictive to female Kryptonians, and with enough exposure alters their mind to be highly suggestible to your will."

"Suggestible?" I said, the word snapping me out of my stupor, "You mean... you mean like she'll obey me if I tell her to do something?"

"Yes, that's what 'suggestible' means," Luthor said with an irritated grimace, pushing away the screen again, "And since it exploits similar chemical reactions in the brain to those that create 'love', she didn't even realize she was being manipulated. She probably even thought it was her own choice to obey. You won the genetic lottery, Charlie, and were given the opportunity of a lifetime."

He gave me a look of overwhelming contempt as he snarled, "It disgusts me that you so utterly wasted it."

"W-Wasted it?" I said, "I didn't..."

Luthor cut me off to start angrily ranting, "You could have done so much more with a Kryptonian under your control than just make her act like your girlfriend! You could have had her crush coal with her hands and make diamonds for you! You could have told her to start killing her villains instead of leaving them alive to come back later, ending the threat they posed forever! You could have even conquered the world, or at least a small part of it, and ruled it with her as your loyal iron-fisted enforcer!"

He leaned in close, and growled, almost at a whisper, "Well I won't make that same mistake. I am going to use her, and all of those Kryptonians, to their fullest potential."

My blood ran cold at this statement, and the way he had said it, "Wh-What?"

"Oh yes," he said, standing up to loom over me menacingly, "The only reason you're still alive right now is because I don't want to risk killing my golden goose before I get all her eggs. Once I have fully sequenced your metahuman gene and figured out how to replicate those pheromones of yours, I'm going to modify them to work on all Kryptonians, not just the female ones, and have them all bend to my will! Even Superman himself will bow to me, and with him and the others I will usher in a new age for humanity, led by me. And when the time comes to dispose of you... I may even grant you the mercy of being killed at the hands of your own precious Supergirl. How does that sound to you?"

I was quaking in my chair at this point, utterly unable to respond. This... This was too much. Too much for me to handle all at once. I could barely breathe, much less think. So I did the only thing I could do in the moment.

I started to sob.

"Ugh, how pathetic... I've had enough of this," Luthor said, going over to the machine in the process of analyzing my blood, "I have work to do. Mercy! Take him to the holding cell until I need him again."

Mercy, who had remained so quiet and still throughout all of this that I didn't even realize she was still here, walked up to the chair and pressed a button on the side of it to release my restraints. She then grabbed me by the arm, pulled me to my feet, and escorted me out of the room.

The emotionally broken wreck that I was, I couldn't even bring myself to make a token effort of resistance.