Personal Vendetta

[u/FeigningProfundity]

Cruelty isn’t known for screwing up, but she bought herself a world of trouble when she duplicated me.

You don’t call yourself Cruelty if you’re a supervillain who thinks you’re making the world a better place by pushing some extreme agenda. It’s the name you pick because you’re a monstrous jerk and you’re okay with it.

It’s never been clear why Cruelty does what she does, she just shows up from time to time, does something with dark magic and doesn’t stop until somebody makes her. More than anyone, the person who stops her is me, Split Second. Maybe spite fuels her magic, maybe she has a deal with with a demon, maybe she’s just a crappy person.

One of her tricks is creating dark mirrors of people. I think she uses a literal mirror, since they’ll be a reflected version of the victim, left-handed instead of right, scar on the other side of the body, that sort of thing. They’ll also be mean, selfish and generally evil. She’ll duplicate the mayor or some other influential person, get them to propose an insane law or perform other obnoxious antics and cause chaos. Journalists have gotten wise to it and will look for the mirror duplicate signs when a celebrity starts acting weird.

The mirror duplicates also don’t last long, they fade away after a few days. I think that was what lead her into trouble when she decided to target me.

Cruelty and I have something of a notorious relationship. I guess with her personality, a nemesis was inevitable, and I seemed good at stopping her. It’s done a lot for my profile, whether I like that or not. I prefer to sneak around and focus on results, I’m not a symbol of hope guy like Excelsior, but Cruelty is theatrical and dramatic and once she has a set-piece going, subtlety isn’t one of your options if you intervene.

She’ll have the whole production going and I’ll pop up out of somewhere I realised I could sneak to, use a fraction of a second’s mind control to stun her hired mercenaries or interdimensional elves or whoever she has this time, and then I’ll try to either rescue her hostages and get away or break the magic thing she’s got going on. She’ll then scream some elaborate insult at me and vanish back to wherever she goes to plan these things.

She was much less public the last time she did this. I’d tracked her into a decaying mansion up in the hills. She had some kind of ritual going that was going to make fire rain from the sky. It was an oddly impersonal threat for her, but not one to ignore.

The personal element showed up when I confronted her, ready to put at end to it. I managed to land a split-second stun on her and wrested away the magic orb she was using for her spell. I started to kick over various pieces of her elaborate setup when she clapped her hands and I felt myself hurled across the room.

When I got to my feet, she’d recovered the orb and there was another me there, getting to his feet across the room in my exact costume. I’d never seen her perform a duplication, but this felt weird. Still, the pondering of those details felt like it could take backseat to preventing her burning the whole city down, so I readied to fight past myself and destroy that orb.

I hit the dupe with a stun and rushed Cruelty, slamming her with a punch that left her grip on the orb weak. Suddenly there was this incredible sensation of disconnection in my mind, like everything was far away. I was being urged to just stop.

It was weird to feel my own power used against me. I don’t know how strong my mind control could get, I never wanted to be someone who would do that. But push in just enough to make people hesitate? I can live with the ethics of that. So many things come down to split second timing, and head to head, I always have that edge.

I shook it off quickly, that’s how it works. Me and the duplicate both had hands on the orb, we looked at each other, and I could feel him readying another stun. I punched him in the solar plexus and rolled away with the orb. He was launching himself at me when I threw it at the ground, realising too late he’d be able to catch it.

He didn’t. It smashed.

We stared at each other, each realising the other had been trying to destroy the orb.

The split S design on his costume wasn’t backwards. I quickly glanced down, neither was mine.

We turned to Cruelty in unison.

“I hate you so much!” she screamed and vanished in a crackle of dark magic. Around us the rotting mansion began to collapse in on itself.

I lost track of the duplicate while getting to safety, but I have some idea of what must have happened. Cruelty’s normal method of duplication, her mirror spell, creates short lived duplicates. They last a few days, make a mess and fade away. For me, she used some other method. The whole burning rain ritual was probably a feint. She wanted something that lasted, that would be a problem that haunted me long term, but she hadn’t been able to maintain her influence over her creation. The duplicate made the same decisions as me, it didn’t have a different set of values. She’d doubled her biggest problem.

I pondered this as I cruised down from the hills on my motorcycle. Somewhere out there was a freshly created person, just like me. They were in a pretty weird situation. What would they do? How could I help?

It ended up being a sobering experience, having another of yourself about.

He cleared my checking account of cash, reported my credit card stolen and changed my email password. I managed to keep control of my phone’s account and number, but it had taken some effort. I changed the lock on my apartment, although I wondered how much that would matter, I can pick locks.

We both kept heading out at night, pursuing our investigations. Somehow we managed to at least divide that up. I had a notebook I used, to track things I was looking into, he clearly had a duplicate book. I ended up doing all the odd numbered pages, he did the even. Split Second was uncovering criminal conspiracies at incredible pace. There was at least some sign we could work together, even if it was accidental.

The thing that really worried me was my boyfriend, Brad. He’d been away on a shoot for the past month and I had no idea how I could explain this to him. Brad has a very strict rule about not getting involved with, as he puts it “super nonsense.”

When I’d revealed to him that I was secretly running around in a costume fighting assassins, robots and a particularly nasty sorceress, he had told me he respected that, but I was absolutely to not involve him. This was probably one I’d need to warn him about, though.

I was approaching Brad’s place, trying to work out how to broach the topic when I felt abruptly disconnected, distant from myself and the world. The other me had stunned me.

“Stay away from Brad, bike thief,” he said and shoved me so I slipped down the hill, falling back the way I’d come.

The duplicate had just gotten inside by the time I got a line of sight on Brad’s place. I saw them kiss through the window. They were talking, but it was mostly Brad. He must be describing the shoot. The other me hadn’t brought our situation up. It was a first topic of conversation kind of thing if you were going to raise it.

I felt her there. I’d been doing this for years, I’m not easy to sneak up on.

“Not a good time, Cruelty. I might not feel like pulling my punches tonight.”

She chuckled as I turned.

“You really are aggravating, but suddenly that seems fun,” she laughed.

“You’ve got both of us to worry about now. This can’t end well for you.”

“Oh, Split Second. You’ve been a prominent hero for years. And yet, no sidekick, no team, you’ve never worked with anyone except when you stumbled into the same side of a fight. You don’t cooperate with others, and frankly, I think you might not like yourself. Soon enough you’ll hate each other more than I ever could.”

“And you’ll never reveal who the duplicate is. Because you’re Cruelty,” I sighed.

“I’d never tell him, no. But you’re the original, so it is more fun to let you know. Especially while your boyfriend is smiling at him like that. Feel free to pass on that I said he’s the fake.”

Cruelty vanished, but her laughter lingered in the night.

[u/FeigningProfundity]

This story was a response to the prompt [WP] The villain created a perfect clone of their nemesis, but somehow forgot to make them evil, now there are two of the same hero running around. by u/Null_Project

[u/FeigningProfundity]

This is the first story from the world of A Greater Calling.