It was time to get down to business. The only problem with that deceptively simple and obvious plan? Nothing would draw her out and the class became pure torture as the semester wore on.

  Every day I’d demonstrate some new and devious method to try and get Fialux to reveal herself, and every day Selena Solare sat halfway up the seats and stared at me with a smile on her face. As though she was enjoying the show, but she never did anything that would reveal she was actually a super heroine in disguise.

  No jumping out and stopping one of my killer robots, or swooping down at the last moment to save somebody when I opened a portal directly under them into the caldera of an active volcano while they were suspended via the glories of antigravity.

  And saved from the oft forgotten dangers of convection thanks to a shield over the portal.

  She refused to act. No, every time I had to save them at the last minute. Every time I was the one who blinked, and it was infuriating.

  It was almost enough to make me think she wasn’t who I thought she was. Almost.

  Of course if that was all I had to contend with I’d consider myself lucky, but no, that wasn’t all Miss Selena Solare threw at me.

  Every day after class she stopped by my desk to chitchat. Every day she said something that almost crossed the line. Something that made me think she was flirting. Something that made me wonder if she was thinking of me as a professor or as her arch nemesis in disguise.

  Assuming she knew who I really was.

  Not that she’d probably even think of me as her arch nemesis if she did suspect my true identity. I was starting to wonder if she even remembered who Night Terror was. I was starting to seriously wonder if the rest of the world remembered who Night Terror was.

  Other villains came and went while I was busy with school. I watched them on the nightly news, but there was no Night Terror out there getting her face on the Starlight City News Network because I was cooped up grading papers or working late in my office at the university trying to come up with a new diabolical plan to get Fialux to reveal herself in class.

  CORVAC did most of the actual grading. Sure he bitched about doing it, but I’d pointed out that it took him a fraction of a second where it would take me all night.

  I told myself it’d all be worth it, worth the brief Night Terror hiatus the city was enjoying, when I finally caught Fialux in my web.

  At that point I’d either rule the city via being Fialux’s new main squeeze, or I’d rule the city because I’d finally captured her and added her to the vast collection of heroic souvenirs I kept buried deep in my lair.

  I’d keep her in suspended animation, of course. I’m not that heartless. I figured that was a lot more likely than ruling the city as villain and subservient hero.

  Even if she kept getting my hopes up with that flirtation. It was pure torture. Even more so because every day she got interrupted by that damned phone in the same way she’d been interrupted in the dining hall at the beginning of the semester.

  It was always the same routine. She talked to me for a few minutes after class and her phone started ringing. Invariably she picked it up and talked for a few minutes.

  Her face always went slack-jawed when she switched to video, never showing me who she was talking to, and whatever the asshole on the other end of the line was telling her suddenly became far more important than whatever flirting she’d been doing with me.

  That annoyance, that craziness, might explain why, in a fit of pique, I decided to do away with little miss nice villainess. It was time to break out the big guns, or rather get rid of the guns entirely.

  It was time to stop with easy things like a cloud of nanobots that could disassemble living flesh or inanimate objects with a speed that made piranhas seem like carnivorous sloths in comparison. No more primitive artificial intelligences just on the verge of gaining sapience attached to miniguns loaded with foam darts so no one would actually get hurt when they inevitably gained sapience and decided to turn on their human masters during the convenient time frame of my class.

  I’d demonstrated ways for normals to survive every moderately nasty trick in my repertoire, and it did nothing. So in desperation I decided to be more direct with a demonstration of beam weapons. Which was moving into the slightly more than moderately nasty trick category.

  If that didn’t work I still had a few really nasty tricks up my sleeve. The kind of stuff that even I never broke out because it brought out the specter of escalation which was never good for business.

  I started by setting up a cement block roughly as tall as a man at one end of the room. I stood on the other end of the lecture hall with another prototype beam weapon never before seen outside my test lab, pointed, and let loose with a blast of pure high energy light.

  Sure using something like this always raised the danger that Dr. Laura would find out about it and copy the design, but that was a risk I was willing to take in service of getting Selena to admit who the hell she was.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I swiped the rod quickly and the cement block that had been one giant cement block just moments before split and became two cement blocks. I turned to the class.

  "This is a beam weapon. Beam weapons operate on one simple principle. You cannot outrun the speed of light."

  I gestured for one of the students sitting in the front row to come down and stand next to the cement blocks. He hesitated, glancing around the room as though hoping somebody might come to his rescue, but no one said anything. No one wanted to put themselves in the firing line if this unlucky bastard was next up.

  Miss Solare certainly made no move to stop me. The poor increasingly sweaty bastard moved in front of the bisected block and stood there quaking in his shoes as I pointed the rod at him.

  I glanced up to where Fialux/Miss Solare sat with her arms crossed, but still she did nothing. I shrugged. If this wasn't going to draw her out then I was running out of ideas.

  I pressed a button on the rod and another blast of light, this one far less high energy, lanced out and hit the kid. He screamed in terror, and then he screamed in relief as he ran his hands down his middle and realized that he was still in one piece.

  "What's the number one lesson I've drilled into you so far?"

  "Get out of the way," the class recited back at me in singsong unison.

  "Exactly," I said. "And what did our terrified friend who has now wet his pants not do?"

  "Get out of the way."

  "Also right. Only in this case getting out of the way is trickier. The problem with beam weapons is the light travels at, well, the speed of light. You aren't outrunning that unless maybe you're that new Fialux chick that’s been causing so much trouble for the honest villains in this city lately."

  The class murmured. Most of the tricks I'd shown them had a way of escaping that at least gave a fifty/fifty chance of survival. Sometimes better than that. This was the first super weapon I'd shown them where that fifty/fifty chance went down to zero.

  Time to give them a little hope.

  "So what do you do?”

  They looked around. As always no answers were forthcoming. Not that I was surprised at this point. It was a miracle any young journalists survived long enough to become old journalists. The newsrooms around here must all hire their gruff rapid talking senior editors demanding pictures of various hero menaces from other cities.

  “Right. As always I will spoon feed you the answer. If you see somebody using a beam weapon, you get the hell out of the way the instant you see it pointing at you."

  The demonstration continued in much the same vein. I went over the various types of beam weapons they were likely to run into running straight into the middle of a super powered war zone.

  At no point did Selena make any move to save anyone, though I didn’t really expect her to after the first demonstration failed to draw her out and it was clear I wasn’t going to actually hurt anyone.

  Then again it’d probably been clear I wasn’t going to actually hurt anyone after the second day when I hadn’t vaporized anyone.

  I was starting to wonder if I was wrong about Selena Solare. If I was making a serious mistake wasting my time at the university. I was starting to dread the prospect of going undercover at SCNN which was the second most likely place for Fialux to be lurking given the Roth connection.

  Not to mention I’d be leaving the intoxicating Miss Solare behind. I was growing fond of her flirtations, even if she didn’t turn out to be my arch nemesis.

  And I worried about her. I worried about the way she went slack-jawed talking to that asshole boyfriend of hers. I worried about…

  Speaking of. After class a familiar perfume wafted across my desk. I looked up from the paper I was pretending to grade while waiting for Selena to stop by and smiled at her.

  This was the best damn part of the day.

  “Miss Solare,” I said.

  “I’ve told you, you can just call me Selena,” she said.

  “And what did you think of today’s demonstration Selena?” I asked.

  “Very impressive! I’d never think of trying to dodge a beam weapon like that.”

  Of course she wouldn’t think of dodging a beam weapon because she didn’t have to if she was Fialux. All she had to do was let the damned thing smack into her invulnerable hide, or if she was feeling particularly showy she could make a big display of holding out her hand and absorbing the beam weapon with her hand as she walked towards whatever poor son-of-a-bitch was trying to defeat her with it.

  I didn’t say that, despite how therapeutic it’d be. I just thought it and smiled at her.

  “So do you have any plans after class? I was thinking…”

  I never did find out what she was thinking. The hope that had been rising in me as she mentioned plans after class was dashed by the sound of her damned ringtone echoing through the empty lecture hall.

  I’d been leaning forward in my chair anticipating her next words, hoping but never quite daring to dream that she might be asking me to lunch or something, but I crashed back into my chair, and reality, at the sound of her phone.

  “Sorry, one second,” she said.

  I waved a hand. One second would turn into several minutes if every other phone call she got at the end of class was any indication.

  Sure enough she picked it up, put it to her ear, and then she was gone. It took about half a minute for her to get to the video chat phase, and once again her expression tickled something in the back of my mind.

  I shook my head to get out of my funk. Whatever. I had far more important things to worry about than how ridiculous she looked when she was talking to her stupid boyfriend.

  Like how I was going to prove definitively that she was Fialux. I’m not sure why I didn’t just use the stasis field on her now and get it over with. She was distracted enough, but she was also on the phone which meant there was someone out there who would know something was wrong and potentially call the authorities.

  Or maybe it was because I enjoyed our little conversations after class every day. However brief they were before her phone started ringing.

  No, that wasn’t it. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t blasting some poor innocent college girl. It was my strict rules about collateral damage holding me back.

  I definitely wasn’t hanging around because the five minutes of flirting we got in after class kept me going for the rest of the day. I definitely wasn’t capturing first and asking questions later because she was so damn cute in those tight shirts and tighter shorts and…

  No. Definitely not. I had plenty of good reasons that had nothing to do with my deep and abiding attraction to this woman.

  I packed my prototype blaster in my bag and started up the stairs towards the exit. I’d learned early in the semester that there was no point trying to talk to Selena once she started on her phone, and I had to get to a nice private spot with no witnesses before I could teleport up to my office and then off campus entirely.

  I sighed at the top of the lecture hall stairs and looked down at Selena. I’d pulled out all the small and moderately sized guns. There was nothing for it. I was going to have to pull out the really nasty stuff for class next week.