[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/rFsVPbQ.png[/img][/center] [center][b][url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/5199873]Previously On Create-A-Hero[/url][/b][/center] [center][b]Aubrey Adkins | Will Grant[/b][/center] [center][b]Day of the Arlaaekan Invasion[/b][/center] [center][b]Columbus, OH[/b][/center] I didn’t think Father Ed would ever stop talking. While it took us a little coaxing, Will’s and my old parish priest did finally agree to marry the two of us. Usually in a Roman Catholic marriage, the groom and bride-to-be have to complete a marriage preparation run by the parish for anywhere between six to twelve months. Since we did not have six months to spare due to the alien invasion, Father Ed didn’t reject our marriage request despite the short notice. However, the elderly priest had one stipulation to perform the marriage ceremony: we had to sit through a crash course that the regular marriage prep would have covered. Yet, I noticed something strange had happened after Will and I tied the knot. Because Father Ed was cramming over six months’ worth of material in less than a day, it felt as if we were cooped up in that church for several hours. But once Will and I got back to the rental car, the digital clock inside told an entirely different story, as only thirty minutes had passed, somehow. Neither Will nor I could explain this bizarre temporal mystery. While it was a little unnerving not to know what had happened, I was relieved that I hadn’t been stuck inside a church while all my superhero peers fought off this alien invasion. But before I could punch some aliens in the face, I wanted to make sure my parents were okay. Ever since we left for the Columbus Zoo, I had not heard from them. I just had to check on my parents first. Otherwise, they would be in the back of my mind for the rest of the day and that would definitely distract me when my attention should be on stopping an alien invasion. My heart fluttered when I pulled up into my parents’ driveway. I was not sure what distressed me more: not knowing whether my parents were safe or having to tell them Will and I got hitched on a whim? And I wasn’t the only one who was nervous. I had noticed Will had been checking his phone every couple of minutes or so. [color=b22222]“Feeling the butterflies, too?”[/color] I asked Will. “I’ve been texting my folks ever since we left the zoo, but I have yet to hear back from them. I’m really concerned that something—” [color=b22222]“Don’t think like that. I’m sure they’re fine,”[/color] I reassured him, although I truly didn’t know what was up with his family, as I’m not a telepath, after all. I reached out and interlocked my hand with his. The stress of an alien invasion, the unknown status of his family, and having gotten married just less than an hour ago was causing his body to shake. [color=b22222]“Let’s do this,”[/color] I said. Will merely nodded. With each step I took towards the front door, my heart beat harder and harder against my chest. We had reached the front door and I retrieved the spare key when my heart sunk. As I started to insert the key into the lock, the door creaked open at my slightest touch. Turning to Will, I pressed my finger against my lips and then gestured inside. My father always stashed an aluminum baseball bat in the hallway closet. Not that a metal stick would do much against an advanced alien race, but it nonetheless reassured me. Plus, my parent’s house was not designed with my arachnid physique in mind. Even if it were, I couldn’t risk a chance onlooker spotting my true drider self through one of the dozens of windows on my parents’ home. So, I had to stick with the baseball bat. At least I played softball up to the collegiate level. I creeped down the hallway; my hands gripped at the bat’s handle. In the living room, the television blared. The smoke of burn food reached my nose as I continued down the hall. After I peaked around the corner and saw nobody in the living room or the kitchen, I rushed to the oven. My mom had left brunch on the stove top and never removed it. What would have caused my parents to evacuate the house in such a hurry that they risked burning the building down? The charred bacon and eggs almost made me hurl. So, I immediately tossed the ruined brunch. Yet, while I discarded the food, the wood flooring back down the front hallway creaked. As Will was standing right next to me, I knew it wasn’t him. With slow strides, I tip-toed to the corner right before that hallway. My heart raced as the steps came closer. Was this going to be my first encounter with these invaders? Or was this just some jackass taking advantage of the chaos caused by this alien apocalypse? Whoever they are, they’re going to be eating aluminum soon. As soon as the intruder had gotten only a few steps away, I threw my weight into my swing, Yet, instead of the crackle of bones or a clang of metal, a hand caught the bat and even imprinted her hand onto the shaft. [color=b22222]“Athena? What the hell? You almost gave me a heart attack!”[/color] “You would have recovered,” Athena retorted. [color=b22222]“No, that’s not what I—ugh! —whatever. Where are my parents?”[/color] “I have whisked them, along with both your other relatives,"—Athena pointed at both Will and I—"away to a pocket dimension where they’ll slumber until this cataclysm has passed.” [color=b22222]“And what if we don’t win?”[/color] “Well, they would expire in their sleep, none the wiser. But it will not come to that.” I just gave Athena a blank stare after I heard her speak so nonchalantly. Not that it came as a surprise to me: she wasn’t human, after all. Nonetheless, her explanation was not at all comforting, placing even more pressure on me to get out there and lend a hand. But I decided to pivot the conversation, as I didn’t want to dwell on the image of my relatives floating in suspended animation for eternity if the invading aliens happen to win and conquer the Earth. [color=b22222]“So, I guess you’re here to usher me off to the front lines. When do we leave?”[/color] “Not quite yet. I still have to move [i]him[/i] to safety,” Athena answered me, as she gestured towards Will. “In the meantime, I want you to rest and prepare yourself mentally for the task at hand.” [color=b22222]“Wait, by the time you leave and return, it’ll be only a few minutes. What type of rest would that be?”[/color] “I have created a temporal anomaly around this abode. You should have plenty of time.” [color=b22222]“A temporal what?”[/color] Athena sighed when she heard my question. “Time will flow slower within these walls. Seconds will feel like minutes and minutes like hours.” [color=b22222]“Wait, we just experienced something like that back at our Catholic church. You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?”[/color] Athena’s left eyebrow perked up as the goddess heard my words. Before she answered me, she paused for a moment, as her lips were curled. The cogs were definitely turning inside Athena’s head. She finally spoke up after the short pause. “I would have to look into it, but that has to wait, as we have more pressing matters at hand.” From the expression on Athena’s face, I could guess she knew something. This time distortion was way too specific for this to be a coincidence. Yet, Athena was right in a way: aliens were invading Earth. Figuring out what happened back at the church would be pointless if a bunch of little green men conquer this small rock that we call home. I will have to remember to bug Athena about this later, assuming we get out of this mess in one piece. [color=b22222]“Anyways, do you really have to take [i]him[/i]”[/color]—I reached out and pulled Will next to me, shoulder-to-shoulder—[color=b22222]“right now? I’ll be able to relax better if he’s here with me.”[/color] Athena furrowed her brow before giving her response. “Since I still have to track down a few more of your relatives, I guess—” [color=b22222]“Oh, thank God. I guess you have a heart after all.”[/color] “But you two better be ready upon my return.” [color=b22222]“When have we ever disappointed you?”[/color] I replied. However, when Athena started to rub her chin with her free hand, I interjected again before the goddess could say anything. [color=b22222]“Okay, don’t answer that.”[/color] Athena merely shook her head before departing. Once she was gone, I grabbed Will’s wrist and began to drag him towards the staircase. “Wait, where are we going?” [color=b22222]“Well—”[/color] I trailed off as I tried to explain to Will what I wanted to do in the few minutes (or was it hours?) Athena had gifted us. I turned to face Will, still holding onto his hand. With my free hand, I began twirling the ends of my blonde hair. [color=b22222]“Since we went through all the trouble to get married, I thought we should, well, you know, consummate it.”[/color] For a moment, we stood there, staring at each other, as what I had said registered in Will’s head. He rested his freehand on my lower back. We each drew closer to the other, until our lips met. My heart raced while we kissed. However, my conscious nipped at the back of my mind, as if it were telling me that I shouldn’t be here, that I should be fighting the invaders and saving people. When our lips parted, I looked into Will’s eyes and asked, [color=b22222]“I am a terrible person for wanting this intimate moment with you while aliens are invading and people are dying? My mind is urging me to help the other heroes, but my heart yearns for this moment with you, just in case it is our las—”[/color] “What? Of course not! Athena was going to leave you stranded here anyways. You have a big day ahead of you. You gotta unwind somehow.” [color=b22222]“I love that about you.”[/color] “Hmm?” [color=b22222]“The positivity. Always looking on the brighter side,”[/color] I replied. [color=b22222]“But if we’re going to do this, we better get to it. God knows when Athena will be back.”[/color] Now that we were on the same page, we scampered up the stairs and down the hallway to my bedroom’s door. However, right when I started to twist the door handle and push it open, Will wrapped his arms around my waist and halted me from entering. “Wait, shouldn’t I carry you across the threshold? What do you think, Mrs. Adkins-Grant?” Will smiled right after he said my new name. Long before I ever considered marrying Will, I had not yet decided whether to take my husband’s name or to go the hyphenated route. Now that I have heard ‘Adkins-Grant,’ I kind of like the ring to it. [color=b22222]“Well, then, lead the way, Mr. Grant.”[/color] I wrapped my arms around Will’s neck before he swept me off my feet. I kept forgetting that both of us had been temporarily replaced by parallel universe versions of ourselves, whose appearances we were for now stuck with (not that Will changed much in his appearance). Once Will had carried me over the threshold of my bedroom door, we didn’t waste a moment. As he carried me over to my bed, our lips mashed together. He eased me down onto my bed. What happened next seemed like a blur, as our hands explored each other’s bodies. It wasn’t until his shaking hand began to touch my power nullifier. [color=b22222]“You want me being all spidery during our first—”[/color] “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he interrupted me before planted another kiss on my lips. As soon as he deactivated my power nullifier and my arachnid physique became manifest in all of its glory, we immediately returned to the foreplay. Goosebumps broke out on my skin as he focused on my spider half: my eight, spindly legs, the exoskeleton ridges on my cephalothorax, the soft and bulbous abdomen with my two— Anyways, at this moment, we were starting to strip off each other’s clothes. Obviously my shorts, socks, and all were discarded during my transformation back into a drider. Will’s nervous fingers crawled up my spine until they reached the clasp of my bra. While it took him a couple tries to unlatch it, he eventually freed the girls from the prison formally known as a bra. Slipping the straps off my shoulders, I tossed the undergarment onto the floor. When I turned by gaze back to my husband (I still can’t comprehend that we’re married!), I noticed he wore a perplexed glance. [color=b22222]“What?”[/color] “It doesn’t look like anything has changed, except maybe they look [i]bigger[/i]. I guess they [i]really[/i] do have a gravitational field of their own.” [color=b22222]“You’re such a goofball,”[/color] I answered back. A few days ago, Will and I had an open discussion about our sexual boundaries, especially after that elseworld version of myself, while [i]technically[/i] in my own body, tried to guilt Will into sleeping with her. We both agreed on saving our first sexual encounter until after marriage. And since we just got hitched, that wasn’t an issue anymore. We also discussed some of the complications involved with my drider physiology. As volunteering for a live dissection to figure out where exactly all my organs are wasn’t on the top of my list of things I wanted to do this summer, Will and I had, up to this point, to extrapolate from normal spider anatomy. Let’s just say that my spider abdomen houses some important organs and that makes the vanilla missionary position quite untenable. And that doesn’t take into account that, even if he would lie flat on top of me, his head would only reach my navel. So, there was going to be some Twister-like canoodling involved in this one. After some serious contorting and bending under my bed’s sheets, we finally found something that seemed like it would work. Sure, even with leaning on my side and curling my torso towards Will, I still had a foot or two on him. Well, I suppose he wouldn’t mind the view. It was at this moment that everything became so real. My heart was beating like the engine of a locomotion. My hands trembled. A voice inside my head was second guessing every decision I had made since we left for the Columbus Zoo. But I wasn’t going to let eight cold feet stand in my way. [color=b22222]“You’re ready?”[/color] I whispered to Will. I tried sounding confident, but my wavering voice betrayed me. He nodded in turn, although I didn’t need my spider-senses to tell that he, too, was nervously trembling. I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths. I bit my lip and prepared myself for what came next. “Wait!” Will suddenly uttered as he pressed his knees against my spider abdomen to stop it from descending. [color=b22222]“What’s wrong?”[/color] “We can’t do this,” Will said as he pulled himself up to be face-to-face with me. Disappointment dripped from his face as he spoke those words. [color=b22222]“Why not?”[/color] “Remember what happened on our first date?” At first, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. As far as I could remember, that date turned out pretty well. Sure, we did have our awkward moments, but we were still figuring out our comfort zones. The Sunday mass went on without a hitch and that Greek restaurant wasn’t too shabby, although the whole fortune cookie knock-offs were a little— [color=b22222]“Ah, shit,”[/color] I uttered as everything came back to me. Will got this really bizarre fortune from that restaurant. While we first thought it was the most roundabout way to encourage people not to drink and drive, Athena had explained that I would get insta-pregnant the first time Will and I slept together. As much as I wanted to think that Athena was trying to enforce her own virgin lifestyle onto me, my past experience with this Greek goddess forced me to take her warning seriously. [color=b22222]“It would be our luck,”[/color] I continue while I rolled over, so as to be lying next to Will, [color=b22222]“for us to get cockblocked by some stupid Greek prophecy.”[/color] For a minute or two, the two of us just lay in my bed, side by side. Will did eventually wrap his arms around my waist in an attempt to make the most of our ruined moment. We went through all the trouble to get married and we can’t even have sex? Sure, I’m a little bummed about it, but this has far greater repercussions. We’re too young to have a kid right now: Will’s going to be starting grad school in the fall (or at least that’s the plan, pending one alien invasion) and I’m still trying to figure things out, whether this modeling thing will work out. Plus, a superhero side job isn’t the most conducive to raising a child. Does this mean we’re not going to be able to have sex for the next couple years until we’re ready to bring a new life into this world? What the fuck? Then it came to me. [color=b22222]“Wait, what if we were to continue in a way that would have zero chance of getting me preggers?”[/color] “I don’t know. Oracles from Greek mythology have a way of screwing over people who try to bypass them. Oedipus and his family would be exhibits A, B, C, and D.” [color=b22222]“Yes, but they didn’t have the benefit of science and actually knowing how the human reproductive system actually works.”[/color] I could see the inner conflict playing out on Will’s face. Although he wanted to get on with our little romantic moment as much as I did, he also wanted to take the responsible action, considering the ramifications we luckily just recalled before we did the deed. Since my husband still hesitated, I leaned towards his ear and whispered something into his ear (what I said is [b]none[/b] of your business). Will’s face immediately grew flush, glowing brighter than the red on my costume. “Wait, you’re fine with [i]that[/i]?” [color=b22222]“Hey, the other me wanted to perform it on you a few days ago. What the hell, why not?”[/color] “But what about you? I don’t want this to be one sided.” [color=b22222]“Oh, I got that covered. Remember what I told you after I embarrassed you in front of my mom two days ago?”[/color] “Of course. And you still have explained what you—” [color=b22222]“Why tell when we can do some hands-on learning,”[/color] I interrupted him by pressing a finger against his lips. I then pulled my shirt off over my head and tossed it onto the floor. [color=b22222]“So, make those hands of yours useful.”[/color]