The hotel she’d settled on was a little run down, but still in a decent area of the city. A compromise, in truth. Any of the big chains would be more likely to have employee SOPs that mandated ID checks for guests. Particularly in Gotham, where who you were checking in might end up being deadly with a bit of bad luck.
Still, it wasn’t a bad hotel.
It was just a privately owned one that suffered from trying to compete with chains…and existing in Gotham. It wasn’t exactly a shocker that, despite maybe still deserving at least a 3.5-star overall rating, it didn’t ask too many questions. Particularly not when it had been a bored teenager pretty obviously part of the owning family that had checked her in.
The first thing Alyssa had done was use Motoko’s skills, a few of the ‘broken’ electronics she’d bought at the pawn shop, and a little bit of carefully concealed creation to create a bug detector. It wasn’t fancy, but combined with ‘sensing’ the room as best she could with her knock-off-brand Force skills, she could be fairly sure that the room wasn’t bugged.
Paranoid. But…Gotham.
Also the way she’d arrived here and how much she had to hide.
But mostly…Gotham.
Satisfied, the next thing she’d done was strip naked and get a good look at her new body in the room’s cracked-but-full-body mirror. Bitch, please. You know it’s what you’d do too in this situation, assuming you managed to make it this far without sticking your hands down your pants to check things out.
Damn she was hot.
Her body was nicely toned all over, with impossibly perky tits for their size and weight. Frankly, the Double E cups would have looked way too big, if not for the fact that she’d selected to be so tall. As it was, they certainly still looked on the larger side, but they still seemed within reason for her body type. Right around, in truth, what the original Starfire had possessed. Of course, there was a distinct difference in equipment between her legs.
The only reason it hadn’t been a problem so far today was that she’d intentionally chosen to be more ‘grower’ than ‘shower’, on the specific thought that it would much easier to appear female at need without a giant-ass-bulge. Given her total size, she wasn’t exactly small even unerect, but it was within reason to tuck away. Particularly with the set of custom undies and jeans she’d arrived with. Which she was absolutely duplicating for those nifty properties.
She absolutely was not unerect now. So sue her. She’d made this body one she’d consider hot and certainly wasn’t used to it being hers yet. Which meant she currently had a throbbing 9-inch monster. Yes, she could absolutely have gone larger. No, she didn’t believe doing so would have been sane.
She, or rather he at the time, had needed to do actual studies at one point in his life when trying to learn how to draw adult art. As a general rule, even professional female sex workers had claimed 5-8 inches as the ‘ideal size.’ Which meant even at 9 he’d technically gone a bit overboard. Not so much that a proper application of lube and enthusiasm wouldn’t do the job for most women, but he’d known he’d been pushing it slightly.
It’s very possible that he might have, possibly, justified it by ‘not knowing what the averages were where he was going and erring on the side of caution.’
Possibly.
Hey, in past his defense, he’d technically been right. She-Hulk and Wonder Woman had absolutely been identified among the heroines he’d spotted in his searches! One of them was like, 6’2” and the other 6’7”! It was possible someone out there would really appreciate the extra size…or just be a Size Queen and like it for that more mundane reason.
Alyssa coughed as she caught her own derailing thoughts and refocused them sharply. Time to test the monster out, and all of her other bits too, which were even more of an interesting mystery to explore! Hopefully, given she’d so far had very good fine control of her new strength, she didn’t break anything breaking her new body in…
… … …
Somehow she’d managed not to break anything, despite ending up a bit…enthusiastic…with her test drive of her body. A test drive that had only ended because her ability to keep quiet wasn’t up to another guest having checked in two rooms down. Thankfully, she’d sensed him coming between rounds of, well, cumming, and had decided to call off more fun. Which still meant she’d spent almost two hours ‘exploring’ her new body, before doing just a little bit more while cleaning up.
Now, fully satisfied and having spent some time and a dozen attempts making some super comfy pajamas, she set about another item repair. This time, it was a middling quality laptop with a broken screen, which she’d sourced a replacement for via another broken laptop the same size.
They weren’t an exact match, but he’d been a certified tech in his past life, and adding Motoko’s skills had only taken that to a much higher level. Combined with the ability to make tools, it only took her half an hour or so to kludge everything together in working order. The thing was locked when she finally got it powered on, of course, but Motoko’s skills helped bypass the need for a simple password with hilarious ease.
Rolling her eyes at the porn wallpaper, she resolved to wipe the thing’s memory overnight. For now, absolutely nothing she was doing was remotely sensitive, so it didn’t really matter if its previous owner had gotten half a dozen viruses on the thing. Nope, all she wanted, after connecting to the hotel’s surprisingly decent wi-fi, was to try and piece together more about the world she’d landed in. Both in general and for Gotham specifically.
What she found over the course of the next four hours was honestly pretty fascinating. It also made an unfortunate degree of sense. From what she could tell, the various big groups, be they hero teams or government oversight organizations, had developed out of the need to work around geopolitics.
The World Heroes Association, for example, was less ‘World’ than it was ‘Pan-Asian.’ Obviously, places like China were never going to be okay with their meta/parahuman crime being overseen by Western-lead agencies. So the W.H.A. was based out of Hero Island, which seemed to be this world’s equivalent of I-island. Only instead of it being a purely research paradise, it was a combination of cutting edge R&D and the W.H.A.’s headquarters.
The same sort of thing held true for the Parahuman Response Team/Protectorate, which was the North American equivalent. The Guild, lead by an openly-known AI in Dragon, was another equivalent that handled South America, not Canada. Europe had Global Justice, and Africa was the usual mess with no one seeming to be in charge beyond a few small local teams. There did appear to be a collective Interpol between the various agencies, but for the most part the closest thing to true global forces appeared to be the Justice League and Avengers.
Those two Super Groups of Super Heroes, completely independent and self-funded, both had United Nations charters and a half dozen sub-teams each, spread out globally. They also apparently had an active and fairly tight alliance, with the primary reason that they managed to hold their charters being that they focused on specific threats. Namely, Alien invasions, Endbringer battles, large-scale natural disasters, and other similarly classed dangers.
They did keep peace in cities their teams were based in when there wasn’t a major global threat ongoing. But those teams dropped everything short of regional-scale threats the moment the truly big issues cropped up, in favor of coordinating a joint response against things like Godzilla or the latest attempt by the Kree to invade Earth. Things like terrorist threats and evil organizations were more the purview of Shield, the W.H.A., the Guild, and Global Justice.
All of that explained the amalgam of big organizations, at least. Though things got a lot more chaotic when one went down another layer to localized teams. Some of them, such as the X-men teams in the United States and Excalibur in Europe, had teams with city, region, or national remits. The Protectorate mostly had regional remits, though were less effective due to red tape applied to them by the PRT.
Others, including the Batman in Gotham, were still truly independent vigilantes. Though ones that were largely ignored by the larger organizations. Reading between the lines, most places that had active independents, metas that hadn’t been scooped up by one authorized team or another, were heavily corrupt. Everyone knew that Gotham had a corruption problem, so even groups like Shield looked the other way when someone like Batman actively tried to deal with it. Success generally meant official recognition. If you managed to clean a city or region up enough, you’d end up getting official authorization/remit for your team.
Of course, that was only true in parts of the world, such as North America. Other countries or regions of the world had more organized systems and harsher rules against vigilantism. Japan, for example, seemed to operating under the HPSC from My Hero Academia, and had an official licensing system for Heroes. Heroing without a license there was heavily punished, which had created a polarized system that only sort of functioned. They had a stupidly high population of ‘Heroes,’ but half of them were closer to pop idols or social media influencers than they were to working heroes.
As it neared midnight, Alyssa finally leaned back, feeling like she had at least a general grasp of the bizarre world and situation she’d landed in. Speaking softly to herself, she aired the resulting problem.
“Okay…now where do I fit into all of this? Was I dropped specifically into Gotham for a reason? Am I expected to start here and try and fix it? It’s obvious the Bats are failing spectacularly at that and have been for close to a decade now, after all. Or am I good to head out wherever and do whatever I want, within reason?”
Idly setting the laptop to do a complete factory reset overnight, she floated off toward the bed as she thought it through. She hadn’t come to any specific conclusion before the crazy day caught up to her and she fell asleep…
... ... ... ... ...
A/N 1: Some shaping up and defining of global super politics. Honestly, this is one thing that the amalgam actually makes make MORE sense, not less. The chances that Earth could EVER actually agree on a single oversight organization for the planet is...unrealistic at best. Even modern takes of things like the JL or Avengers show that people realize that. Heck, so does the Incredibles where the dude sued for having his life saved. The primary characteristic of humanity is that we can't agree on ANYTHING.