Huddled in her underground bunker while explosions went off in her lab overhead, Dr. Ultraviolet took stock of her situation.� Calmly and logically, as befitted the Greatest Mind On Earth, of course.� This wasn't as bad as it seemed.� Yes, her lab was blowing up above her; yes, it was full of toxic chemicals and high-powered explosives and radioactive materials, so it was within the realm of possibility that a chain reaction between volatile substances could possibly break open the roof of her bunker and let superheated air, radiation or poison gas in; yes, her secondary escape route from the bunker had been blocked when Landslide had dropped a few tons of rock down the side of the mountain to cover and fill the cave that had concealed her emergency exit.� But she'd been in far worse situations than this, and survived them.� And, in fact, usually she came out of such situations in a better position than she'd started in.

After all, she considered, there had been the time that her clone had wrested control of her organization from her, and then had ended up being murdered by a rogue member of the Alliance of Good.� That had gotten a volatile, potentially dangerous so-called do-gooder out of her hair with a life sentence for murder, and had given her nearly a year in which the world's heroes thought she was dead to be able to plot and rebuild for her comeback.� Plus, it had taught her the important lesson that if she wanted a clone to harvest for replacement organs, she needed it to be brain-dead on life support.� Things had certainly seemed dark when she'd been languishing in her own dungeon, with her clone gloating to her about using her for replacement body parts, but it had all worked out in the end.

Or then there was the time when her supposed ally Malevil had doublecrossed her and she'd ended up on a spaceship with no controls, rocketing out of the plane of the ecliptic, doomed probably to starve to death or run out of air before she ever reached a planet.� Alien pirates had found her and taken her captive, to sell as a concubine to wealthy aliens with unusual xenophiliac fetishes for human women.� And that had seemed an even worse fate than being trapped on a one-way journey to the stars without an FTL drive had been, until she'd turned the tables on her captors and killed them all with a neurotoxin she'd developed that was extremely similar to chocolate.� (Humans, thus far, were the only species she'd ever encountered, including the other non-sentient beings on Earth, who could tolerate chocolate.� Her neurotoxin might have had an effect on a human who didn't consume several pounds of high-grade ultra-dark chocolate every year, but Ultraviolet had always guessed that her own personal weakness for the stuff would turn out to be adaptive someday, and she'd been right.)� She'd returned to Earth with a faster than light drive and a good deal of alien technology to reverse engineer.� Why, in a sense Malevil had actually done her a favor, which was why she hadn't killed him, although the genetically engineered flying lice with skin-damaging toxins in their bite that she'd infested his base with had probably made him wish she'd just killed him, at least for a while.

And who could forget the time she had been struggling to escape Captain Cosmic's grip as he'd been flying her to the Max, the maximum security prison for supervillains, and she'd fallen while he'd been flying at a thousand feet, and the nanobot lubricant she'd sprayed on him had made his hands so slippery he couldn't catch her, and then it had gotten into his eyes and blinded him temporarily so he hadn't even been able to try any longer?� She would surely have died then if she hadn't happened to have a prototype of the Antigrav Lodestone in her lab coat pocket.� Ultraviolet remembered desperately running the calculations in her head, over and over, as the wind of her descent whipped against her body and the ground below had rushed up to meet her, figuring out how to make use of the tiny amount of power in the Lodestone prototype to negate gravity just long enough to break her fall, and exactly when she'd need to turn it on for its tiny power supply to last long enough to save her.�

As it was, she'd forgotten to carry the 2 and had ended up with three broken limbs, which had left her in traction for a month because she had no minions loyal enough that she could trust them to move her physically immobilized body back to her base with her regeneration capsule.� (That, in itself, seemed hardly fair.� Why couldn't she get good minions?� People were lining up around the block to work as henchmen for Crazy Eights, who'd shoot them for failure, or sometimes success, or sometimes just because he thought it was funny� and even Deathlord, whose stated purpose in life was to kill the entire universe, got plenty of loyal help.� But test an experimental protocol that de-evolved humans into air-breathing, bipedal sharks on the henchmen one time and now she was persona non grata with the union� so she had to go to non-union labor for her henches, and you just couldn't get loyal service that way.)� But that had� well, actually, there had been no upside to that event.� Having a chance to reconnect with her younger sister could have had an upside if Scarlett's life hadn't been so mind-bogglingly, boringly mundane.� And if she'd actually been reliable about bringing Ultraviolet books in the hospital like she'd asked her to.� And if she hadn't spent all her time whining and moaning about her love life when she'd been supposed to be cheering up her older sister in traction.� And if she hadn't been so damned smug about her older sister actually needing a favor from her.

Well.� At least Ultraviolet wasn't in traction right now.� She was free, there were no superheroes dragging her off at the moment and with the temperature and violence of the conflagration above, it was unlikely that they'd figure out that she was alive and hiding in a bunker underneath it.� She wasn't injured.� She had food, supplies, all her amenities.� She even had a computer, though it wasn't going to do her a lot of good with the multiply-backed-up secure RAID array that had stored all her data melted to slag, or exploded to bits, or whichever specific way the destruction of her lab had demolished it.� It was possible that there would be an unfortunate confluence of unlikely but statistically possible events up there that would crack open her ceiling and let in roaring flames, or toxic chemicals, but her calculations suggested that there was only an 11.3709% chance of that happening.� All she had to do was wait for the fires to die down up there, and then the cleanup crew to come through and try to find her body, and she estimated that if she waited down here for eight days, those events would both have run their course and she'd be free to leave by the escape hatch.� She had enough food down here to survive for ten years.� Waiting a week wouldn't be so hard.

Dr. Ultraviolet took a deep breath and went into the kitchen.� Staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was going to crack, was hardly a productive use of her time.� She needed to eat something, and then start making plans for what she'd do when she got out of here.� Unfortunately, her giant walk-in supercooled freezer full of cryo-stored meat and vegetables had developed a tiny crack and was full of toxic fumes, a fact she'd found out about half an hour ago.� The intense cold of the freezer and the intense heat of the explosions upstairs must have combined to weaken the ceiling in that specific area.� Fortunately for her, she'd designed the freezer room to be completely airtight, so all she had to do was keep it locked and she'd be safe from the fumes leaking in.� The lack of the freezer reduced her food supplies, but she still had an enormous pantry stocked with cans, and while canned meat and vegetables were hardly a gourmet experience, they were food.� She could get some canned beans, some diced tomatoes, and cook up some rice, and with a little chili powder make herself some vegetarian chili.� Maybe even throw in some canned chicken breast for a passable chili con pollo.� Ultraviolet pulled the cans she needed out of her pantry and went to the drawer she'd had her minions store the can opener in.

There was no can opener in it.

Twenty minutes later, breathing hard and furious, with every kitchen utensil she had available in this bunker laid out on the table mocking her with their lack of being a can opener, she thought back to that Twilight Zone episode she'd seen with Scarlett when they were kids, or maybe it was Outer Limits?� She could never remember which was which. �It had been a story about a man who'd stocked his bomb shelter with cans, and then there'd been a nuclear war, and he'd discovered he'd forgotten the can opener.� She'd sneered at that.� Anyone intelligent enough to build a bomb shelter, she'd insisted, anyone who'd thought to stock his bomb shelter with cans, would remember the can opener because can openers went with cans.� How could a smart person possibly forget that?� She considered now that it had never occurred to her that maybe he'd asked a friend of his to bring down the can opener or something.� The foresight to put the can opener on the list of supplies she had ordered her minions to stock the bunker with hadn't come to much, in the end, given that her minions were incompetent and she hadn't thoroughly checked their work.

Well.� She had pasta, rice, powdered milk and cold cereal in the pantry as well, and they were all in good condition.� If she had to stay down here for a year, she'd probably get vitamin deficiencies, but she could hold out for eight days.

Another explosion overhead shook the bunker.� Everything was gone.� The work of a lifetime, destroyed.� It was a carefully planned attack, she thought, intended to destroy her as a scientist even if it didn't kill her.� She'd been on the phone with the data center where she'd stored her backups, hearing to her horror that the Teslanauts had trashed the place with their magnetic cannons and annihilated the data on all the magtapes at the center, and had just been ranting to the peon on the phone that if he didn't get his boss to explain to her how this could happen right now she would come over there with her sonic decalcifier and liquefy every bone in his body, when the Alliance of Good had broken in.� They'd been working together.� Who would have ever thought that the overly pompous, self-consciously superior Alliance of Good would have ever coordinated with the nerdy Teslanauts?� She'd have thought Captain Cosmic would feel he had to drag the 'nauts off to the Max for MP3 piracy or something.�

She had other backups � her Antarctic base probably still had her RAID array running; the fusion power generator should have kept the base warm and electrified enough to keep the servers alive and the data on them intact for the next several thousand years, and it had only been five.� But when she'd made her way back to Earth after Malevil's doublecross, she'd found that an icequake had buried the hidden entrance to her base, and she'd have needed to invest considerable resources in excavating her way back into it� and since she'd had backups at the data center, she'd just built a new base and retrieved the data from the backups.� But that meant that even if she got to that old data, it was five years old, and all of the work she'd done reverse-engineering the alien technology she'd brought back from space was gone� as was the technology itself.� She didn't expect any of it to survive the explosions.� And even aside from the alien tech, five years of work for an evil genius was an irreplaceable resource, priceless discoveries and inventions and data and years of her life, destroyed.

Ultraviolet's chest grew tight, and her eyes stung.� She rubbed them angrily.� Not only had the minions screwed up with the can opener, but obviously they hadn't cleaned the air recirculators thoroughly, because somehow something she was allergic to must have gotten into the air supply.� She couldn't possibly be tearing up.� She was the Greatest Mind On Earth, the world's foremost evil genius, a ruthless and cunning supervillain, and she could not possibly be feeling like crying.� Actually, she'd better check the environmental console, she thought.� Toxic fumes might account for the burning in her eyes.� And was her nose running?� Good god.� She hadn't even had tissues packed � she hadn't expected to need them, not with properly clean and working air recirculators.� Well, toilet paper would work as well.

Except, as she found out after quickly checking her readouts to confirm that actually, there weren't any toxic fumes, the minions hadn't packed any toilet paper in her bunker either.

She could kill them, except they'd probably died in the explosion already.

Ultraviolet sighed.� It was going to be a really long eight days.

Eight days later, after her remote telemetry no longer identified any heat sources above larger or hotter than a squirrel, Doctor Ultraviolet was even more convinced that, if any of her minions had survived, she was going to have to hunt them down and kill them herself.� They had packed her wardrobe with one spare costume, one spare lab coat, the two civilian outfits she had hand-picked and given to them, but no bras, no underwear, and no socks.� Also, no soap.� Also, no towels.� Also, no deodorant.

She emerged from underground, smelling like she'd been living underground with no soap, towels, changes of clothes or deodorant, in a pair of civilian business slacks and a nice blouse.� At least no one could see how filthy her underthings or socks were, although she was sure anyone would be able to smell her at ten meters.� Well, at least no one was likely to guess that someone dressed as a businesswoman and marinating in body odor was the feared Dr. Ultraviolet, and she had cash.� Given the attack by the Teslanauts on her data center right before the assault on her base, she doubted any of her credit cards were safe, but she had more than enough cash for some toiletries and a cheap motel room for the night.� All she had to do was get a ride into the nearest city.

This was, unfortunately, easier said than done.� She hadn't been stupid enough to build a secret base near the city; Utopolis was crawling with super heroes.� And the traffic through the suburbs was so bad that she hadn't wanted a base there either; the odds of a random commuter taking a route off the beaten path to try to avoid the traffic and accidentally going past her base were extraordinarily high.� Of course the odds that a sheeplike commuting salaryperson who spent their workday in a cube farm would notice that her base was a secret base, and not just a random manufacturing facility for nothing they had any interest in buying, was much lower, but she'd thought it would pay to be more secure.� On the other hand, everyone always located their bases in places like the Arctic or the Himalayan mountains or the Australian outback, so those places were usually the first places superheroes looked when they were hunting down secret bases, and besides, the low-quality minions she was able to hire weren't generally loyal enough to the job to be willing to live on site, so she had to be near a population center.� Which was just as well, now that she was walking, on foot, through the far exurbs of Utopolis, watching cars drive by ignoring her as she headed down the road.� She might have a ten mile walk to find the nearest motel, but if her base had been located in Antarctica like her old base was, her situation would be much more dire.

A car slowed as she went past.� She turned, expecting that perhaps one of the sheeple heading into the city was going to offer her a ride.� Instead a young man screamed out the window, "Hey, freakshow!� Love the glasses!"� And then he drove off.

Oh.� The goggles.� Right.�

Ultraviolet pulled her goggles off, dismayed.� She'd grown so used to them, she'd almost forgotten she was wearing them.� A critical error that could have gotten her captured or killed � her goggles were her signature, her symbol as much as the skin-tight black bodysuit with the iridescent purple highlights and the sparkles that appeared under black lights was.� But now that they were off, the light was painfully bright in her eyes.� She put up a hand to shade her eyes � the hand holding the goggles, since the other one was carrying her bag, which caused the headband of the goggles to dangle in her eyes.� Irritated, Ultraviolet stuffed her goggles into the bag.� Now the light was hurting her eyes, she could barely see, and of course she hadn't thought to bring her prescription sunglasses, or her prescription glasses with the tinted lenses, or even a hat.�

Two hours of walking alongside the road, holding her hand above her head and squinting her eyes against the ambient glare of the overcast sky, and Ultraviolet was half ready to put the goggles back on anyway in hopes that some superhero would hear about it and drag her off to prison.� At least she wouldn't have to walk miles and miles in inadequate footgear then.� She should have had the minions pack sneakers with her civilian clothes rather than her smart businesswoman pumps, although those would have hardly matched the outfit.�

A car pulled up alongside her with a middle-aged matron at the wheel.� "Miss?� Do you need help?"

The idea that she, Dr. Ultraviolet, nemesis of the Alliance of Good, world-reknowned-and-feared supervillain, would be called "Miss" almost made her snap at the woman to respect her betters� but she had a car, and unless Ultraviolet wanted to fish around in her bag for one of her ray guns and vaporize the woman or mind-control her, she would have to play nice in order to get transportation into the city.� "Oh, uh, yes, thank you.� My car broke down a few miles back."

"And you need to get help?"� The woman smiled.� "Don't worry.� My husband is a mechanic!� Why don't I bring you back to my house, and he can drive you out to your car?� I'll bet he can get it up and running in no time."

Since Ultraviolet did not, in fact, have a car � or, in fact, a driver's license, though she'd like to see a policeman try to stop her from driving one of her flying, radar-and-light-bending, virtually indetectible hovermobiles with computer-assisted control � this was not going to work for her.� "Oh, no, no!" she said, hurriedly � the last thing she wanted was to have to deal with some strange woman and her probably ape-like husband for any greater length of time than necessary.� "You could just drop me at my sister's house.� She's expecting me."

"You don't have a cell phone to call her?" the woman asked sympathetically.

The Teslanauts had found her data center, and someone had found her base and given the information to the Alliance of Good.� The likelihood that her cell phone was uncompromised was so low that Ultraviolet had deliberately left it behind.� "No, I actually left it at her house."

"Oh, I hate that.� I always leave it behind and then I'm like, 'Oh, I'll just call on my cell phone' and then I realize I don't have it and it's so irritating!� I swear, I want one that's connected to my head."

Ultraviolet had had one connected to her head, but she didn't dare wear her goggles in public and hadn't been able to risk using them for teleconnection anyway� and the one that had looked just like a civilian cell phone, she'd left behind so she wouldn't be tempted to use it.� "She lives in�" God, where did Scarlett live again?� Some stupid suburban name.� "Middleton Oaks."

"Oh, that's only about forty-five minutes away.� It's actually not far from my house!� I live in Birchwood."

Ultraviolet was a genius, but even geniuses had limitations on their mental capacities, and as a result she had used up absolutely none of her precious brain's capacity on knowing where the hell Birchwood was in relation to Middleton Oaks, or Utopolis, or anywhere.� "If you could take me there, I would be enormously grateful."

"It's no problem!� Hop in!"

Ultraviolet got in.� The woman turned her music back up.� It was playing some sort of godawful cross between pop and country.� Ultraviolet pretended, very very hard, that the sound was some sort of cacophonous alien speech and not actually something that was posing as music.

Her benefactor winced.� "Miss, I don't want to be rude," she said in an almost whisper, as if there was anyone else in the car who could hear them,� "but I think I should warn you that your deodorant's worn off.� When you get to your sister's I think you need to take a shower."

"Believe me, it's my number one priority," Ultraviolet said, and daydreamed about the creative ways in which she might be able to kill this idiot if she had her back at her base.