Big Superhero Action by Raymond Embrack

fear. You are not a pedophile, Doctor Playground. But your intent to become one speaks to pedophilia as the bright sunshiny surface on the incredibly deep underground water table of what you really are.”
    “You promise?”
    Xoir freeze framed her memory to study the look on his face. In her entire life so far Dr. Playground was the first person to inspire fear in her. And the most fascinating person she had ever known was a man almost as brilliant as herself who like her appeared to have had the past life of a Kinner & Membert research scientist, his psychosexuality past-protected by an unknown science. She had cracked him more than she revealed. One of three artifacts dredged was the blurred image of Christ. The other two were the blurred sight of a horse’s carcass, the vivid image of a spinning daisy. Her diagnosis was that Simon Stranko had been so traumatized by his early sexual interactions with women his innate response was to replace the other gender with the nonthreatening helpless innocence of children and the domination he would have over them. But that diagnosis struck her as somehow shallow. She knew not but posed the question to herself if restoring his sexuality would affect his drive for global domination. Or his arcanely derived genius.
    If anyone was game enough to pull a coup on the OSD it was her. She had learned Dr. Playground better than anyone in existence. She knew the operation well enough to run it alone. For her a discreet hit on Dr. Playground would take two years’ planning. And only she ever had contact with the man outside his exoframe. He appeared to trust her enough for physical contact. Direct homicide was not a first for her and during a business trip to Mexico she had bought the perfect 14-karat gold machete to sever his head. That or setting him up for a hit by Man Mafia clones who would nail him quick & dirty. But after three years of treatment she was unsure that she had mined his brain for all the lost outtakes of Kinner & Membert. His was a brain built with booby traps and secret vaults. His brain was too valuable to shut off before she had a grip on KM. Unlike him she was willing to settle for social domination over global and she could keep her domination inside Brutalia. Taking the world was still better. Dr. Playground was her Walt Disney and she was holding out for more cartoons. For now she could afford to put the coup and his assassination on a longer schedule. But
longer
was getting shorter with each year for her to run the organization that had come to dominate her life.
    Xoir started each day with a report listing mass media references to the OSD. Over a decade it had built a reputation that crossed the Mafia with a domestic nuclear dictatorship. If its powers were confined to Brutalia city limits making it a paper tiger it was one whose claws now and then reached beyond to draw blood. That was the role of CWI, Crime Wave International, a division of the OGD, the Order for Global Domination. In a laboratory collaboration with Dr. Playground, their genius extended beyond KM tech to work on an exportable drug named Playground-14 that was like meth made from heroin and nuclear orgasm. The OGD exported violence not as terrorism but as a show of force. The OSD was a secular, pro-authoritarian organization not entirely of this world. People got it, adapted to it, came to live under its shadow. They even took sides between the OSD and AXIS. The OSD had better numbers in the younger demographics, teens and young adults. Among teens OSD tattoos were outselling AXIS tattoos.
    At noon, as the human face of the OSD, costumed in the mask and black KGB domme costume of Xoir, she taped the latest video directive to be issued via Internet on the OSD website. The directive was directed to the Portland OR police department in response to harassment of OSD gang members.
    “If this harassment continues your department and your city will be targeted by the OSD. The Brutalia Limit will not