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The supervillain known only as Bakuda couldn’t be called a humble woman by any stretch of the imagination. If she were, she wouldn’t have snapped hard enough to trigger after one of her professors flunked her for the first time in her life.
She also wouldn’t have retaliated for the flagrant insult to her brilliance by rigging her university with enough Tinkertech bombs to literally blast it back to the Stone Age and holding it for ransom. And she certainly wouldn’t have gone on to seize control of the most feared gang of villains in Brockton Bay and orchestrate the largest city-wide bombing campaign in American history.
“Okay, folks, that’s all the normal merchandise sold. Time to roll out the one you all came here for!”
But as she was wheeled out onto a spotlit stage, her muffled curses and threats drowned out by the chatter of the crowd below, even Bakuda had to admit that maybe her supervillain career had been going a bit downhill lately.
“Just like we promised, folks! The Cornell Bomber, here in the flesh!” the auctioneer boasted, sweeping his hand dramatically toward Bakuda. She glowered at him, memorizing as many details as she could about his appearance in the hopes she could track him down and exact some payback once she escaped. Unfortunately, most of his face was concealed by a black one-way visor, identical to the ones worn by all the other staff and guests at the auction.
“I’m sure you’ve all got your reasons for wanting to get your hands on her. Maybe you’re in a line of work where having a skilled Tinker under your control is a godsend, maybe she turned someone you know inside-out and you’re looking for some good old-fashioned vigilante justice, or maybe you’re just a perv who wants to know what she looks like under all that armor!”
If that last one was the case, Bakuda grumbled mentally, they could save their money. Her captors had removed her armor and underclothes at their first possible convenience, and they hadn’t seen fit to replace it with anything more concealing than an undersized black bikini before their little auction started.
Ironically, her restraints were doing a better job of covering her body than her clothing. From her ankles all the way up to her neck, leather belts seemed to be fastened every few inches up her body and limbs, securing her to a standing pushcart that was almost as tall as her. As if that weren’t restrictive enough, a pair of leather fist mitts had been strapped around her hands, and a pair of shoelaces had been threaded up and down around her toes through a series of holes in the bottom platform of the pushcart, pinning them down. For all intents and purposes, she couldn’t move a muscle from the neck down.
That wasn’t to say she was any better off from the neck up. Her trademark gas mask had been replaced with a hollowed-out replica, devoid of any of the helpful features she’d built into it. Instead, it had two not-so-helpful features: lenses that could be blacked out to obscure her vision whenever her captors wanted, and an inflatable bulb that completely filled her mouth, preventing her from making any sound louder than a whimper.
“Well, whatever reason you have, it doesn’t matter here! All that matters is how much cold, hard cash you’re willing to pony up! Let’s start the bidding at… 500 grand! Do I hear 500 thousand dollars?”
As the crowd began to make their bids, Bakuda yet again found herself wishing she’d just shot the Undersiders when she had the chance. But no, she’d just had to give a big show-offy demonstration of her new bombs in the name of being “unpredictable” and give them a chance to escape.
In hindsight, after learning what that crazy bug girl had done to Lung when she fought him later, she’d probably gotten off relatively easy by just getting stabbed in the foot.
“600 grand from the gentleman in the front row! Do I hear 650?”
And on the subject of Lung getting his eyes carved out, that had led to her narrow defeat at the hands of the Protectorate - and far worse in her eyes, the defusal of her greatest creation by the Wards. It wasn’t all that hard to find a back-alley doctor willing to sew your toes back on without asking questions, but her reputation would never recover from being foiled by an adorable preteen girl and a guy who thought “Clockblocker” was a perfectly acceptable superhero name.
“850 going once, going twi- 950! 950 from the lady in the yellow dress!”
Fortunately, one of her bombs had gotten damaged in the fight and detonated unexpectedly at a key moment, allowing her to slip away from Armsmaster while her lair was collapsing into a miniature black hole around them. Unfortunately, in her haste to flee the state, she’d run right into an ambush by the Conclave, a notorious supervillain group known for their ties to the slave trade.
And even more unfortunately, one of their members could disable electrical signals within a certain area, turning her entire arsenal into a sack of glorified paperweights.
Which was how she’d wound up here, helpless and half-naked in front of dozens of leering strangers as the bidding war over her escalated into the millions. It all went back to the Undersiders - and as soon as she escaped from whatever asshole thought they could keep her as a slave, she was making a special trip back to Brockton Bay and liquefying every last one of them. Especially the bug girl. Hell, she’d probably liquefy her twice just to be safe.
“1.2 million going once, going twice, so-”
“2.5 million dollars.”
The cold, emotionless voice cut through the chatter like a knife, silencing everyone in the auction hall. Even Bakuda could only stare in shock at the woman who had just offered more than double the current bid without a moment’s hesitation.
“S-sold!” the auctioneer stammered out, not wanting to give her any time to reconsider. “To the lady with the tasteful fedora in the back row!”
As the grumbling crowd began to disperse, the man who’d brought Bakuda out earlier grabbed the cart handles, leaned her back, and began to wheel her offstage. She tried to get a better look at the woman who’d purchased her out of the corner of her eye, but a quick tap of a button on the side of her mask turned the lenses opaque. All she could do was grunt impotently into her gag as she was pushed down a series of winding corridors, presumably toward some kind of shipping area.
Eventually, the man pushing her stopped, raising the handles so she was vertical once more. It was hard to make out over the sounds of other “merchandise” being loaded into boxes, but she could recognize the voices of the auctioneer and the fedora woman arguing over something.
“Are you really sure you want to handle transport yourself? I know shipping is expensive, but if you just walk out of here pushing a bound and gagged woman on a cart, people are going to notice.”
“I understand your concern, but my organization has certain… unique resources to call on. If I wanted, I could arrange to have her paraded through Times Square without anyone noticing. Suffice to say, discretion won’t be a problem.”
So this lady had a Stranger power, or someone working with her did. Whichever it was, it wasn’t going to save her. The moment Bakuda got her hands on anything more potent than some scrap metal, she was going to blast a hole straight through -
“[You will blast a hole through exactly what I tell you to blast a hole through, and absolutely nothing else.]”
“I’m sorry, what was that, ma’am?”
“Oh, nothing. Just clearing up some details.”
Bakuda didn’t know what terrified her more: that the woman had known exactly what she was thinking, or that she’d delivered her warning in such flawless, unaccented Japanese that Bakuda had momentarily mistaken her for a native speaker. Suddenly, she was wondering whether she would’ve been better off if she’d been bought by some random creep instead...
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