I AM EMPOWERED, pt.16: The Twitter-based YEAR ONE prose dealie continues!

 <Note: You can check out I Am Empowered's previous installments with this tag.

And now, back to Emp's first-person narration in (old) Twitter-based 140-character format, taking place roughly around the beginning of Empowered vol.1. This installment continues a chapter addressing Emp's supersuit and its vagaries; prose-form damsel-distress and some fairly disturbing Emp humiliation ahead, so be warned:>

MY STUPID SUPERSUIT, CONTINUED (part 2 of 3) 

Sometimes, I despair that I'm the last girl on earth who should wear a mood-sensitive superweapon, given my truly dire emotional volatility. 

But while the suit doesn't always work terribly well for me, its powers don't function at all for anyone else who attempts to wear it. 

Twice now, I've been kidnapped by wannabe supervillains, aspiring capes who've stripped me of the supersuit and tried to use it themselves. 

Both of them—a nice-looking dudebro, and an infuriatingly cute girl—looked much, MUCH better than me wearing the suit, I'm annoyed to admit.

Even with a fully intact membrane, neither wannabe cape could summon any superpowers whatsoever, the poor things. (Cue the sad trombone.)

Side note: Turns out the suit is hilariously, absurdly revealing when worn by a male, making me very, VERY glad that I lack a Y chromosome.

So, for better or for worse, it would appear that only Elissa Megan Powers can be Empowered, as ill-suited—pun semi-intended!—as I might be.

Anyhoo, as you might well have guessed by now, damage to the suit's membrane is always temporary, no matter how grievous it might appear.

As far as I can tell, the stray tatters and castoff shreds of my temporarily ruined suit seem to briefly glitter, then quickly evaporate.

Where does the vapor go, you might ask? My assumption: It rejoins the rest of the suit, which slowly regenerates over a matter of hours.

Let me emphasize: The membrane SLOWLY regenerates. Frustratingly, excruciatingly, agonizingly, unbearably slowly, to be adverbily honest. 

After villains shred my suit, strip me of my powers, and tie me up, I'm left to wait hours at a time for the membrane to restore itself.

Waiting for suit regeneration: Not unlike watching paint dry, only less riveting. Or watching body paint dry, given the suit's appearance.

My update on "A watched pot never boils": In my experience, "A watched, leisurely regenerating supersuit never restores your superstrength."

A numbingly boring hour or two will pass, and I'll see that the suit's rebuilt its surface area enough to (mostly) cover my chubby thighs. 

I leap to the hopeful conclusion, "The membrane must've recovered enough by now to give me back a little of my amazing strength, hasn't it?"

Then I struggle and strain against the ropes binding me, and disappointment ensues. No superstrength for you, Emp! And I go back to waiting. 

Am I superstrong now? *FLEX* No. Am I superstrong now? *FLEX* No. Am I superstrong now? *FLEX* No. Repeat for the next 3-4 hours straight.

Annoying-ish: As its square footage (well, inch-age) returns, my supersuit's powers never recover on a smooth, upward curve of awesomeness.

Instead, as the membrane regenerates, my powers return in abrupt fits and starts, in sudden stairsteps and seemingly arbitrary plateaus. 

The hours pass like so: "I’m weak, weak, weak, SUDDENLY STRONG." Then, an hour of, "I'm all strong, strong, strong, SUDDENLY SUPERSTRONG." 

By the way: Despite what Hollywood depicts, a surprisingly high level of superstrength is required to snap ropes, let alone break chains.

Still, I do feel like quite the liberated badass when I finally regain enough power to break free of my bonds. This damsel's distress-free! 

I can almost hear mighty trumpets blare, angelic choruses gospelize, and generic guitars shred as King Rope's reign of me-constricting ends. 

A buzz-y, intoxicating mash-up of relief and satisfaction washes over me when the knots give way, the duct tape tears, and I'm free at last. 

"Intoxicating," yeahp: The instant emotional leap from impotent fear and humiliation to potent joy and awesomeness feels almost drug-like.

I spring to my feet flushed with triumph, briefly feeling so powerful and you-go-girl-y that I can't believe I was ever bound and helpless.

I contemptuously toss the ropes aside—as if I could ever be restrained!—and tug the gag from my mouth—as if my voice could ever be silenced!

I feel galvanized and rejuvenated, rocketing from the depths of duct-taped, "mmph"-ing despair to the eagle-cry heights of badass euphoria. 

For an ecstatic few moments, to express the feeling in videogame-y terms, my self-confidence progress bar jumps to 100% and begins flashing. 

I often perform a shampoo-commercial-worthy hair-toss of triumph which, in my mind's eye, sends my blonde mane flowing in silky slow-motion.

I usually do a quick, raised-arm biceps flex—dig these 12" pythons, baby!—then transition into a hands-on-cocked-hips "saucy minx" pose.

Then I raise my chin high and stride boldly towards the (nonexistent) camera—in slow motion, again—with plenty of insolently sexy hip-sway.

Hair-toss, biceps flex, hip-cock, chin-raise, bold stride away: All integral parts of the ritual I think of as My Badass Undistress Dance.

(Gallingly enough, My Badass Undistress Dance has been caught on bad-guy surveillance camera a few times. Cue the vile YouTube comments.)

Then I recall how shamefully I was defeated by the bad guys, and how I wasted the whole afternoon bound, gagged, and shamefully dedamseled.

As a rule, my big ol' balloon of overheated self-confidence deflates instantly once my stupid brain jeeringly reminds me of my disgrace.

This deflation: Caught on camera, twice. Undistress Dance stops, I flinch, head drops, shoulders sag, bold stride restarts as mope-y trudge.

The first time that my Badass Undistress Dance and subsequent, visible loss of irrational exuberence was video'd and YouTubed? Embarrassing.

The second time that my Undistress dance and deflation were caught on bad-guy camera, howeva, wound up being ridonkulously more upsetting.

While I'm rope-snapping and Undistress Dancing, the laser-loving supervillain GigaJoule notices my act unfolding on a security monitor.

So, as I emotionally transition from "I'm awesome!" to "Wait, I kinda suck, don't I?", he's charging down to confront me. 

Security-camera clip #2 shows me deflating, then looking up—and off-camera—with a startled, "WTF?!" expression that even my mask can't hide.

Then, from offscreen, GigaJoule hoses me down with his oxygen-iodine laser, in a fireworks-y flurry of energy pulses and supersuit sparks. 

Note: The energy output of a-hole's laser is maybe 10 megajoules (megawatts per second) at most, despite his grandiose "Gigajoule" supranym. 

No two ways about it: Gigajoule is a laser poseur. Also, as we'll see, he's a rage-happy misogynist with a hate-on for uppity superheroines.

When his coherent-light bukkake onslaught finally ends, my poor supersuit is mostly vaporized, once again. My superpowers? Gone, once again.

Obvsly enraged, Gigajoule stomps into the frame, toting a fresh coil of super-itchy polypropylene rope—my unfavoritest bondage medium EVAR.

He seizes me, drags me back over to the chair, none too gently begins retying me. My dazed, kitten-weak resistance is—go figure—futile. 

Warning: Bad guys get WAY steamed about having to retruss escape-y superchicas. Expect more cordage, tighter knots, and plenty of ropeburn.

No audio on security-camera footage, thankfully, so YouTube viewers miss out on hearing GigaJoule's irate curses and my feeble protests.

Though I already know that superheroine-tying evokes icky issues of gross sexism and feverish misogyny, his furious rants school me anew.

God forbid that an oh-so-dominant male supervillain should have his will (to power) defied by a lowly female. Why, hello, issues with women!

He spends almost ten minutes straight retying me to that chair, huffing and puffing, straining and wrenching, muttering and swearing.

The act rapidly escalates from defensible restraint of a captured opponent to indefensible, blatant, hateful, rage-fueled girl-punishment.

The first few twists of scratchy polypropylene are easily enough to render me helpless again, but GigaJoule, seething, keeps on angry-tying me.

Rope cinches around my neck and shoulders, crisscrosses my chest (not at ALL sexual), bites so hard into my torso that I can barely breathe.

At first, I deny him the satisfaction of hearing me cry out, but soon—to my shame—I'm gasping and whimpering with every painful new knot.

Furious and out of control, he's hurting me badly now, I can't do anything to stop him, and I'm growing increasingly ashamed and terrified.

And there's no mistaking the enraged, "suck it, bitch" intent of the big, jawpopping rag he furiously jams into my mouth and ropes in place.

Then he waves a finger in my face, an oddly goofy gesture on the video clip, given that I'm now blindfolded and can't see his waving finger.

Spraying spittle clearly visible on camera, he bellows a parting shot I won't repeat—the "c-word" was invoked—and stomps out of frame again. 

 <TO BE CONTINUED!> 

Next week, an emotional Emp endures the Kubler-Ross-based Five Stages of Distress before (SPOILER ALERT) turning the tables quite triumphantly on ol' GigaJoule!

TOMORROW ON THIS HERE PATREON:  Possibly another installment of Vintage Con Sketches, though I'm not 100% sure about that.