The rooftop was cold, but I resisted the urge to rub my arms. I had purchased a new pair of red gloves that afternoon, from a store far away from Bea’s, so that I could hide the telltale bandages on my hands. I smoothed my tattered red tutu and adjusted the mask on my face, making sure it was firmly in place. It wasn’t a full face mask of course, just a half mask, but as long as it didn’t slip off at the wrong time I was fairly confident it would be enough to protect my identity. As they had been fond of saying at the Academy, most people see a mask and don’t go looking beyond it. Dress like a supervillain, act like a supervillain, and no one will bother to take a closer look.

I crouched in the far corner of the rooftop balcony, facing the door that led into the attic of the store. A wilting potted tree hid me from view, so they would not be able to see me as soon as they arrived. It was nearing twelve now, although I had been out on the roof since eleven to make sure they could not set some kind of trap for me before I got there. Everything had been quiet for the last hour as I got colder and colder, my muscles cramping from being crouched in one position for so long.

There was a soft creak, almost inaudible unless you had been carefully listening for it for the last hour. The door edged open a crack, and then stopped, presumably allowing someone inside to peer out. It opened a bit further, and Abe slipped onto the rooftop, making surprisingly little sound for such a large man. His mane of hair was outlined against the black silhouette of the building across the street, strands tinted orange from the nearby streetlights.

Abe looked around furtively, then began sneaking along the edge of the balcony towards me, ducking behind one dishevelled potted plant after another. He was surprisingly sneaky for such a large man. I wondered if I should remain in hiding and wait until he got to me, or just announce myself now. I pondered for a moment, then decided it would be better if I acted. A supervillain intent on taking over the city would not wait for things to happen; she would take action.

“Looking for me?” I asked, standing up and striking a heroic pose against the background. Or a villainous pose, more accurately. I just hoped it was too dark for him to see my grimace when I pressed my injured hands into my sides.

Abe stood up abruptly and came charging at me with the speed and accuracy of an enraged bull. Luckily for me, I had been expecting this, and I quickly made the ground under his feet rise up and tie itself around his ankles. I couldn’t simply trip him up, for fear that he would realize I was remarkably similar to the girl he had been holding captive in a warehouse earlier that very same day.

“Now is that any way to treat a potential business partner?” I asked, laughing as I stepped toward him.

He snarled, uselessly fighting with the concrete ties around his ankles. They were as solid as the rest of the rooftop though, and until I told them to, they would not be going anywhere.

At that moment, the door leading inside banged open all the way, revealing the rest of the little gang: Bea, Malik, Peg, and Knife. Knife was holding a gun, which was pointed directly at my head in a most unfriendly manner.

“You are all so suspicious of me!” I said lightly, laughing and making an unnecessary gesture towards Knife’s gun. It immediately turned liquid and poured out of his hand onto the rooftop, where it returned to its original shape. Things wanted to be in their original shape. It was difficult to make them go against their nature, so I usually allowed them to return to normal as soon as possible.

Knife gaped at his empty outstretched hands for a moment, then stared down at the gun. He bent to pick it up, but as soon as he touched it I made the roof rise up and flow over his hand, pinning him to the concrete in an awkward hunched position. He ended up sitting down heavily as he futilely wrestled to free his hand.

Malik, Bea, and Peg all reached for their own guns, and now I had three more trembling metallic muzzles pointed at me.

“Do I have to restrain the three of you as well?” I asked, punching my hands back on my hips and looking at them with disappointment, which of course they could not see in the darkness. “That would be such a shame, when my little pet said that you might be willing to join my enterprise. I’d be sorry to kill you all, but if that’s what needs to be done, well, we all have to make sacrifices. I would rather work with you, but if you refuse my generous offer I will make very certain that the next people never even dare think of declining.”

They looked at me for a long moment and we all stood there, facing off on the cold rooftop. Then, one by one, they laid their guns down on the ground and held their hands in the air.

“Wonderful!” I said, clapping my hands with mock joy. “You will forgive me if I don’t release your companions quite yet, but I do want this to be civilized and I am not certain that they will be as civilized as you seem willing to be.”

Bea took a step towards me, but I held up a hand.

“No, that’s close enough! We can speak just as well from this distance, and no one will overhear us up here.”

“What about Fireball?” Bea asked, crossing her arms over her chest. I couldn’t see her face very well in the dark, but she sounded as though she was scowling. I think she was used to running the show, and was not very happy to have the tables suddenly turned on her by someone with a lot more power.

“Don’t you worry about the superhero,” I said, lying through my teeth. I wasn’t about to tell them that I was just as worried about the superhero showing up as they were. With all the rooftops in the city though, I doubted that he would give this one a second glance. “He’s busy elsewhere right now with a little surprise that I planned for him. It should occupy him for hours, at least as long as he wants to save everyone involved. If he doesn’t care about a few people dying he might be out prowling the streets within an hour, but somehow I doubt that’s his style.”

“What do you want?” Peg asked, determined to get to the point and skip all the useless posturing and empty threats on the parts of everyone else.

“I thought you would never ask!” I said, jumping up and down and performing a little pirouette on the spot. Yes, my parents made me take ballet lessons when I was little. It helped build the whole character of Death’s Dancer, so there was one thing to thank them for I supposed. I was beginning to thoroughly enjoy myself.

“I am preparing an undertaking that will shake this city to its foundations, and you can get in on the ground level! I promise it will be very profitable for all involved. You will be able to leave the crime business forevermore after it is done. After I permit you to retire, of course,” I giggled, bouncing up and down on my toes. “And all you have to do is swear loyalty and obedience to my every whim! If you don’t, I will kill you all before anyone can take my secrets to that no-good superhero or the police.”

“And what if we refuse to join you in the first place, or we are unable to do what you ask?” Peg asked, determined to interject herself into my pre-prepared speech, which had been going along quite smoothly up until that point.

“If you fail to do as I ask, then I will have no further use for you, and in that case, well…” I shrugged, leaving it up to their imaginations to fill in the blank.

“So basically, if we leave here refusing to join you we will die immediately, but even if we join you there is no guarantee that we will not also die at some unspecified point in the future,” Peg said.

“Exactly,” I replied, clasping my hands together and beaming at her cleverness. “So what will it be?”

All of them looked at each other, carefully avoiding my gaze, as they tried to have an entire conversation with just their eyes.

“Tell you what,” I said, breaking into their awkward silent conversation. “I’ll give you ten minutes to consider my proposal and then I will be back to hear your answer.”

Before they could make any response, I leapt onto the waist-high metal railing surrounding the balcony, gave them a jaunty salute, and leapt from the building.

There was a shout, and booted feet thumped across the rooftop towards me. By the time they got to the edge of the roof and looked down, I was already around the corner of the building and hidden under the metal slats of the fire escape. Black was a useful colour to wear. I didn’t understand why everyone didn’t wear it all the time. It blended into shadows so well and allowed you to get away with all manner of things where any other colour would have caused you to be caught for sure. The red accents were not quite as good for stealth of course, but they were worth it for the added style.

I slid to the ground and flexed my sore hands, feeling the healing skin stretch and pull on my palms. Minutes ticked past, progressing at a constant rate despite my impatient glances at the watch on my left wrist. My heart was pounding for some reason, and despite the deep breathing exercises I did, it only increased in rhythm as the time for another confrontation drew near.

At nine minutes and two seconds, I walked leisurely around the building and scaled the opposite wall. I peered over the highest peak of the roof, directly behind the door that led inside, to see the three who could walk rather predictably gathered around where I had disappeared, crouching behind whatever shelter they could find. Abe and Knife were still stuck to the ground of course, but had retrieved their guns and were training them on where I was going to appear.

I sighed. I had hoped they would prove smarter than this. Of course I would not simply leap over the edge of the rooftop in the exact same place that I had jumped off. That would be idiotic. Almost as idiotic as believing that I would.

Reaching out with my mind, I called to the individual atoms of concrete floating around in space beneath them, and asked if they were prepared to become a little bit more lively for just a few moments. They were quite happy to oblige. After all, it’s quite boring being a rooftop. Sometimes you just want to get up and dance.

Ready as I could be, I jumped silently down onto the balcony, and leaned gracefully against the door. “Hello everyone, looking for me?”

I watched with satisfaction as five heads whipped around to face me, identical expressions of shock and horror spread across them. Malik and Knife recovered quickly enough to point their guns in my general direction, but I gave a nod to the atoms of the rooftop. They quickly dropped their guns as they tried to beat back the suddenly lively concrete that wanted to swallow them alive.

“Is that any way to treat an associate, or possible executioner,” I asked, pouting as though disappointed in them. Of course they couldn’t see it in the dark, but hopefully they would be able to make out the appropriate inflection in my voice. I would have been disappointed if they had not attempted to get the drop on me, now I was just upset that they had done it in such a foolish manner.

“We were just waiting for you to return,” Peg said in the tone of someone who does not expect to be believed at all and is preparing himself to die.

“Is that so? I believe you of course. So have you thought about my proposal?”

“Your proposal?” Bea said in a dazed voice. Obviously they had been expecting me to massacre them where they stood, but I was priding myself on remaining unpredictable. Always keep everyone around you guessing so that they will never know what is going to happen next. A confused enemy is half beaten already.

“Yes, are you going to work for me, or are you going to die tonight?” I asked cheerfully, bending my toes under my foot to stretch them out, the perfect image of a warning up dancer, utterly at ease n my surroundings.

“We didn’t...” Knife began, but Peg cut him off.

“Of course we will,” she said. The others turned to look at her with a combination of anger and disbelief on their faces. She ignored all of them and stared directly into the eye holes of my black mask. “We would of course be delighted to work with you. I’m sure I speak for us all when I say how glad we are that you chose us to begin this enterprise. It was you who chose us, wasn’t it? Your disguise as a foolish country girl didn’t fool me for a minute. You’re Delphi, that girl Bea hired.”

I cursed inwardly. They weren’t supposed to be smart enough to figure that out. Peg certainly was a clever one. I would have to keep my eye on her. She was so smart she might wind up in trouble because of it someday soon. But not today. If I killed her now, it would only plant that suspicion more deeply into the heads of those around her, not to mention make them less likely to join my campaign.

Instead, I snorted.

“That wimp?” I asked, shovelling disdain into my voice. “She’s just a kid I picked up in the street. I saw how chummy she was getting with your little gang and figured that she might be just the ticket to get into your heads.”

“But why us?” Peg asked, still sounding unconvinced. The others were starting to look thoughtful as well now. We couldn’t have that, could we?

“Why not you?” I repeated back to her. “You don’t give yourselves enough credit. I mean, you’re not right on top, so you won’t mind someone bigger and better than you coming in to take over the operation, but you’re also not right on the bottom, so you have enough pull to be potentially useful to my operation. Your little group is right in the middle of this city’s criminal underground, and the loyalty you show to each other is touching. I only hope you show that same loyalty to me, because if you don’t, well, I’m sure I don’t need to remind you what will happen!”

“So you chose us because we’re mediocre?” Bea sounded as though she was struggling between being offended that they were not considered good enough, and flattered that they were even mediocre. I also detected something else in there, a relief that they were not bad enough to be considered by me as true masters of villainy. After all, they mostly seemed to be doing this as a hobby. Sure, it was probably their primary source of income, but they were not doing it for the fun of it like me. I would have to get over that hurdle when I came to it, but even if they were committing villainy out of fear for their lives that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy our capers.

“Yup, that sums it up!” I pushed myself away from the door and jumped up on the balcony railing instead, giving another little pirouette on top of the narrow strip of metal.

“That’s fine and everything, but I’m still not convinced you aren’t that girl, Delphi, or whatever she called herself,” Peg said. She was obviously the smartest in the group, and the most sceptical. If I could win her over, the rest were mine for sure.

“What, you want me to prove it to you?” I said, doing my best to sound affronted, rather than nervous. My heart was thumping in my chest, reminding me that I had never attempted to do something like this before, and if it didn’t work my life would be toast.

“Yes,” Peg said, with the expression of a woman who is almost certain that she is going to be murdered very soon, but has reached the point of not caring anymore, because she is determined to say her part.

“Fine, be that way,” I said, jumping neatly off the edge of the roof and advancing towards them. They all backed away a step, except for Abe and Knife of course, who had been very quiet during this whole exchange. They were still attached to the rooftop, so perhaps they did not want to draw my attention out of fear that I could easily murder them where they sat.

As I approached the other three, I trickled my willpower into my gloves and urged them to change into flesh colour and take on the texture of normal skin. The skin beneath my gloves was still red and sore from my slide down the tower, of course.

Usually I could only make things move on command, but if I concentrated hard I could actually change the properties of some materials for a few moments. In theory, anyway. It involved taking the properties out of the surroundings, and exchanging atoms in a way that was very difficult and could only be maintained for a short period of time. But I only needed to keep it up for long enough to convince my allies that I was not, in fact, Delphi.

“Gather around children.” I said with a grin that was an attempt to hide the sweat dripping down my face behind the mask. I had my limits, even with superpowers, and this was definitely stretching them.

The three minion candidates who could still stand gathered around as they were told, but remained a good five feet away. It was a nice cushion of space should I turn out to be as crazy as they thought, or simply decide to murder them all for asking questions and refusing to comply with my instructions right away. I wouldn’t lie, the thought had crossed my mind, but killing them now would be pointless. I was not well-known enough that the death of five lowlifes would inspire fear in the city. Everyone would probably just attribute it to gang violence, although how they all got onto a roof would be a bit of a mystery to them. Still, I was sure that the police could explain it away fairly easily, and none of it would result in me getting any closer to my goal.

Their fear worked in my favour in more ways than one, though. This was not the most believable trick in my repertoire. If you looked closely, you could still see that my hands were not in fact hands, but gloves that I had moulded into a colour and texture similar to that of human skin. But in the dim lighting of the rooftop, at the fearful distance they were carefully maintaining from me, it might just work.

“I happen to know that girl you think is me in disguise happened to scrape up her hands pretty badly during our little encounter,” I said, holding out my hands to them.

“She said that she fell,” Peg replied impassively, not letting on that she had disbelieved my story in the slightest.

“Oh did she?” I pouted. “I told her to tell you all what really happened so that you would be more cooperative. I wanted to have a nice chat with her, but she ran away from me, so I tripped her up, grabbed her and dragged her down a rooftop at top speed for a few minutes until she was screaming in pain and had learned better than to try and run from me.”

I looked each of them in the eyes as I said this, including Abe and Knife, who looked away from me, fuming over their continued captivity. As I looked at them, I noticed the ground that was holding them was trying to edge away, back into its shape as a rooftop. It was a testament to how difficult I was finding this illusion, that I could barely hold the concrete in place and my fake hands at the same time. Still, if I could get this done quickly enough, then it would all be worth it. I could go home and sleep for a very long time.

“Anyway,” I said, once I had given them each my serious stare. “I’m sure her hands bear a striking resemblance to chopped meat now. An injury like that does not just go away overnight. But if you look at my hands...” at this I proffered them for inspection “...you will see that they are perfectly normal human hands, with absolutely no blood or gore on them anywhere.”

They all leaned in close to see. I held them out even further so that they would not have to come any closer to me in order to see the proof. I wanted to be very clear on this point, so that they would never think anything like that ever again. I needed to keep my secret identity safe after all. It had definitely been a risk talking to these people who knew me as Delphi, not just Death’s Dancer, but how else could I have made sure they were appropriate minion material? I didn’t know any of the other gangs in the city, and I had no time to wander around conducting interviews. These five would have to do for now, so I needed them on my side.

Once the three still standing had had a look, I offered my hands up to Abe and Knife to look at my unblemished palms themselves. By this time the cool wind was chilling me because of the sweat pouring down my back, and I had to blink hard to get it out of my eyes. I was also breathing slightly hard from maintaining so many atoms in a configuration they wanted to be out of as soon as possible.

“Satisfied?” I asked, still holding out my hands. Reluctant nods were seen all around, the last and most reluctant being from Peg, who still looked sceptical, but resigned to the fact that her suspicions had been inaccurate.

“Good,” I said, pulling my hands back and bounding across the rooftop to the far edge. It was much better to speak with them from a distance, and this way I could place my hands at my sides and allow them to blend back into red gloves. They throbbed in a most painful way and were not very happy about how I had been mistreating them. I would have to make sure Bea changed the bandages tomorrow so she saw they were still injured, utterly unlike the hands that I had just shown them.

“So are you all agreeing to be a part of my enterprise then?” I asked, returning to the original point of our meeting. It was late, I was tired, and very eager to return home and have a good night’s sleep in order to counteract the effects of using my power too much at one time.

They all exchanged glances again, then grudgingly nodded, one by one.

“Excellent!” I said. “We’ll meet tomorrow. Same place, same time, to discuss the details of your employment, including what money you’ll receive as compensation, and what your tasks will be.”

Before any of them could respond, I turned and performed a perfect jeté off the edge of the roof, feeling the satisfying feeling of my muscles stretching. I reached out for the side of the building across the street, but my mind was too tired and my superpowers too drained to catch my fall. I ended up tumbling all the way to the ground. Luckily I knew how to roll to absorb the impact, and the roof of the store was not very high. I was able to save myself to a certain extent, but I would certainly have more bruises the next morning. I was just lucky that there had been no one around to see my fall, and the people on the rooftop had no time to get to the edge and witness my disgraceful exit.

I limped back home, battered, muscles aching, but with a smile that stayed with me long after I crawled out of my tutu and into bed. My haphazard campaign of villainy was suddenly very real. I would take over this city, and I would make it my own. All the power and glory that I wanted were within my reach, and there was no one to stop me but a single pesky superhero. Already a plan was bubbling up at the back of my mind, something that would see the great Fireball out of my city. Permanently.