Jennifer McCowan wasn’t wearing anything that would be out of place at a gym, but the few times she went to the gym to run, everyone else wasn’t there to watch her have a fist fight with her roommate. She looked herself over in the dressing room mirror, turning to get a better look at her profile; tall and slim, she was wearing her favorite pair of soccer shorts, high cut and blue with aquamarine and yellow stripes. She’d never been so self-conscious how skinny they made her legs look, pale and freckled despite the best efforts of the Southern California sun. She barely tipped the scales at 112 lbs. and owed her flat stomach to that more than any actual attention paid to her diet or exercise. It certainly didn’t hurt though. Her eyes wandered north and she sighed; the same low body fat percentage that produced her slim physique also gave her little in the way of cleavage, a fact unfortunately emphasized by her bright turquoise sports bra. She pushed her breasts together, well, as best she could with these big bulky black boxing gloves on. The woman who’d helped tie them assured her that they were her size, but Jennifer couldn’t help but think they looked comically oversized on her. She was thankful that her pixie cut naturally stayed out of her eyes, faded streaks of green still evident in her auburn tresses. Standing in front of the mirror, wearing what felt like basically nothing, Jennifer suddenly felt very small, very frail, and very nervous about the next 10 minutes of her life. She hoped this wouldn’t end up on Youtube somehow. She-
“Hey, Jen, let’s go!” shouted Kelsey, the upperclassman who’d helped her with the preparations. She’d peeked inside the dressing room to find Jen staring off into space. “The first fight just finished; time to show them what you got!.” Jennifer turned around with a start, shaken from her introspection. When the older girl saw the apprehension in her eyes, she placed a warm hand of Julie’s slender shoulders. “You sure? Maybe we should have agreed to wear headgear after all. Maybe we-,”
“Listen,” Kelsey said warmly, “You’ll be fine. You look great; she’s probably more nervous than you are. Just take a deep breath, remember why you wanted to fight her in the first place, and try to remember some of what we taught you. Think about why you got so angry at her in the first place and just keep hitting her. Keep hitting her and let the ref break it up.” She repeated, as she playfully slapped the brunette on her ass and sent her on her way to the ring, following close behind her.
Jennifer and Theresa had only met in college but became fast friends since discovering that they lived two floors apart in the same dorm building and also shared the same discussion section for their general studies class. They'd been roughly inseparable since, spending most of their freshman year together and absolutely no one was surprised when they decided to move in with each other the following school year. They were a perfect pair: Jennifer was by a white girl from the Portland suburbs with cute, mousey features and a budding sense of independence evident in the streaks of green in her dark brown curls while Theresa was Filipino-American, a Biology major with wild eyes and long sunburn hair, still learning to balance business and pleasure.
It was surreal; a thing observed and not felt. Time slowed, begging her to commit this moment to memory. Objectively ordinary, personally enchanting.
Maybe it was just cool as fuck.
A clenched fist, lightly wrapped in leather and guided by bad intentions, sailing toward her face, only to stop desperately, tragically short of its destination and recede back toward the fury that’d sent it. She swore she could see the stitching on the 4oz glove, the ridges of the knuckles. Angry, impotent. The truth of a missed punch.
The moment would stick with her for years.
She’d leaned ever so slightly away from the straight right, the last in a flurry she’d let chase her around the cage, all the while slipping, leaning, taunting the danger. Her opponent’s inhale, deep exasperation evident, made one thing clear: there’d be no follow-up. Hell, that punch was the follow-up to one that’d missed even wider. This fight was a conversation and her opponent had spoken her piece for the moment.
Later September, That Year
In a MMA gym in the San Gabriel Valley, CA, USA....
“Ugh, do we have to?” Bailey pouted. Upstairs in the gym on a Tuesday night was the last place she wanted to be. Watching bits and pieces of her last tragic fight was the absolute last thing she wanted to do, but here she was, staring at the flatscreen. She'd watched videos of her fights before, including her only professional loss to date, but that video, that night, hadn't ended with her in an unconscious heap on the floor...
Her disdain emanated off of her in palpable waves, prompting her coach to put a warm hand on her 22 year old shoulder.
“C'mon Lee; I don't much like watching you lose either, but hell, we figure out what happened, why it happened, we can keep it from happening. Obviously it didn't end the way we wanted it, but it's not like it was bad from start to finish: you got a good solid takedown almost immediately.”
The young Texan woman began to soften up with a deep sigh.
“So what should I be looking for?”
Written as a commission for a client who wanted fanfiction of 3 of his favorite characters
Cosmo Imai looked around his gym and sighed. It was true that their humble gym attracted a murderer's row of fighters and martial artists looking to improve themselves. But they'd spent so much time fighting, sweating, learning together that Cosmo knew their habits and styles nearly as well as his own.
He could scarcely imagine a situation where training and fighting weren't his favorite pastimes, but he could no longer deny to himself that he'd grown bored and this had grown stale.
He sipped from his water bottle and scanned the gym again, forcing a smile and a generic compliment to his latest training partner to hide his growing discontent. He made a note to reach out to some of the more eclectic fighter' s he'd met through his travels and see if any of them were still local.
The athletic 20 year old yearned for the sense of danger and uncertainty that had endeared him to fighting in the first place. His blonde ponytail bounced as he shook his head and subsumed the feeling beneath the simple joy of grappling. The dissatisfaction endured, but he couldn't defeat it by pouting and wishing anymore than he could become the world's best martial artist overnight. Results required effort.
“Hey Simone, are you here to talk shit or are you here to spar?” Natalie Turner asked, standing in what had formerly been a very focused fighting stance. Her blue mouthguard, still shiny with spittle, now clutched in the palm of her hand as she narrowed her brown eyes at her partner.
“Both, ideally.” Simone Williams grinned. There was no tension in her 5'10 frame, just brown eyes full of mischief and laughter creasing her face. She shrugged, baggy tee obscuring the athletic body beneath, palms of her red MMA gloves up towards the ceiling of the gym.
“Come on. I've got class in an hour and we still gotta catch the bus back to campus.” Natalie complained. “Waste your own time; some of us are trying to go pro.” She slid her mouthguard back in and waved on the other college freshman: Nat was done talking even if her friend wasn't.
======================================
“You're fucking kidding me. I mean she's kidding right?” Sofia Gomez groaned. She stood there on the stage, wearing gym shorts and a sports bra. She'd comfortably made weight for her third professional MMA bout only to watch her opponent shed nearly all her clothing to barely make it under the 136 lb limit on the second attempt. Worse yet, the tall black woman had maintained a starry eyed, goofball expression throughout the proceedings as if she were simply happy to be there.
Sofia wondered if she'd looked that starstruck ahead of her professional debut. She doubted it; back then all she'd thought about was just beating the other girl by any means possible. As a final indignity, when they turned toward each other for the weigh in and matchup photos, her opponent had met Sofia's serious, 'fists raised' pose with a broad smile and a goofy pose more suited for a cartoon than a fighter. Sofia clenched her jaw: this girl must be fucking with her. She might not take Sofia serious yet, but once the cage door closed, this goofy teen would realize just how serious she was.
Unlike Sofia’s first two opponents, tonight's victim came with a little buzz of her own: amateur boxing, kickboxing, and MMA experience, and a famous mother. Her opponent's mother might be “The Assassin” but Sofia wasn't fighting Yolanda Freeman. She was fighting the daughter, an apparently starstruck college freshman. Sofia and her team didn't need tape to expect a technically proficient striker and only needed their eyes to recognize a girl in over her head. She ran her hands through her brown tresses and grimaced. Mauling a famous person's daughter might be just what she needed to finally earn the attention she deserved
When the Heavy Gate opened and the godjinn Jhuuba reached through it nearly a century ago, the sprawling desert northwest of the city sprung to life in response. The Nam-Yensa desert became the Nam-Yensa sandsea, a sprawling expanse perpetually churning and shifting on the whims of the Earthen deity. The city of Moghad stood just past the southeastern edge of the Nam-Yensa sandsea like a gateway to the Yol-Jhuuba principalities beyond.
The thriving city offered a number of amenities, not the least of which was the arena. Every city of any renown in Akkreja held an arena; in smaller cities the arena might double as the public square. Though the kingdoms of Yol-Jhuuba did not hold physical combat in the same regard as their equatorial neighbors, Moghad's proximity to Akkreja ensured a bustling, well regarded arena flourished there too. Inside it, in a broad lobby reserved for contestants, not spectators, a young man argued his case to one of the arena's many employees.
He'd expected more from this place. More theming: dirt and dust, glistening gems, or solid stone intricately carved by expert masons like in the stories his countrymen told about this place. Yol-Jhuuba, a sprawling land of mines and merchants formed less than a century ago from the more than two-dozen fiefdoms that dotted the stonelands. The country lay less than a week's journey southeast of his homeland of Akkreja, assuming a smooth trip across the unpredictable sandsea.
Travelers' tales swore that in Yol-Jhuuba, (frequently shortened to 'Yolj') a man's worth was measured by his money, not his might, and freedom was bought, not earned. Isaiah Wylde looked forward to discovering for himself what kind of place so many of his fellow initiates from the Wylde school had traveled to in order to test their mettle and their spellcraft.
He'd expected glitzy, ostentatious splendor and feverish movement and noise from a sprawling port city that might as well be one giant bazaar. Who wouldn't want to sign up for an arena this big, this widely advertised throughout the city? Instead, the broad youth stood in a long chamber ringed by drab, sand-colored walls. A solitary employee stood behind the counter at the end of the near empty room, yawning and staring at a clock near the counter.
Isaiah Wylde rolled his neck, took a deep breath, and prepared to change his whole life.
The following is an excerpt from a larger story I'm working on; it's seen only rough edits for readability and represents a good 1st draft. I wanted a romance between a superhero and a supervillain, though those exact terms don't appear in the story due to murky legal rights to those words. Instead, enjoy magic, powers, teamwork, witty dialogue, and flirting._
“Pulse, Riot, Moon. Go get these folks to safety.” The tall broad man in the white and red outfit explained. Fire ensconced his head. It and his short fade haircut gave him the distinct look of a very brawny matchstick. Tension colored his voice, and he bounced in a boxer's stance: knees bent and fists ready. “I'll deal with her.”
10 feet behind him, the athletic woman working as the hero Pulsar felt her jaw tighten immediately. Heatstroke was treating them like kids again, like sidekicks instead of apprentices. The Korean American college student felt the cold air around her hands and felt, rather than saw, the swirling orbs of blue-white plasma growing in either palm. She fired a ray at the nearest shadow monster, obliterating it and leaving an ugly burn mark on the wall behind it. Pulsar saw it and gasped, then shook her wrists to dissipate her powers. Her aunt preached nothing so much as she preached perfect and unwavering control of the powers she and her niece shared, and Pulsar had let hers get away from her if only for a moment. She wiped her half-gloved hands on her sporty white and blue outfit as if she could literally wipe away her guilt.
“Heatstroke, we can help.” We can take her down together and...”
“Yeah, you can.” He interrupted her, punching clean through a shadow beast as it leapt at a terrified businessman. The summoned shade disappeared in a flash of light and heat and Heatstroke didn't turn around when he addressed the teen trio behind him. “But right now you three are gonna turn around and make sure those innocent bystanders live to see another day. You're gonna do a damn good job keeping them safe. Understand? “