The thing about being a superheroine is that every once in a while, not everything goes according to plan. Sometimes, you accidentally mix your costume and your whites in the wash and stain your laundry. Sometimes you end up dating a supervillain on the sly (story for another time). Sometimes you get so tied up in saving the city that you forget to keep a dentist appointment.

And sometimes you find yourself ensnared in tentacles, your belly straining against your outfit and your womb absolutely packed full of eggs.

Shit like that.

My hero name is Echidna. Yeah yeah, laugh all you want, just shows how little you know about the classics. In Greek mythology, Echidna was one of the most feared beings this side of Tartarus. Consort of the mega-beast Typhon, she created almost all of the most famous of the monsters of Greek myth. Cerberus? The Nemean Lion? The Sphinx? Yeah, you can thank her for all those. Her name means ‘She-Viper.’ And then some poncey, monocle-wearing British scientist decided to borrow her name for some dopey marsupial down in Australia and now whenever anyone hears her name, they laugh.

Typical.

I know what you’re thinking—‘She-Viper’? ‘Monster creator’? Am I really hero material? Yes, don’t worry, I’m firmly on the side of good. It just fit too well into my powerset.

See, most of the fighting isn’t done by me, per se. I’m not super fast, or strong; I can’t fly or punch through walls. But I’ve always had an inherent affinity for magic, especially summoning magic. So just like the mythical Echidna, I create—or summon—monsters of my own to deal with the bad guys. Don’t worry, so long as the summoner keeps an iron will, the monsters stay in check and don’t run rampant.

Mostly.

It all started on a boring day—a Wednesday, I think it was? You’d think it would be easier to remember, considering how thoroughly shook up my life became. We’d gotten reports of a villain terrorizing some small town out in the boonies, and since those spots don’t have designated heroes of their own, we supers cycle who has responsibility for them a specific week. It’s actually a pretty sought-after job: you get a week of relaxation, and what few villains do show up are total chumps.

So I show up to some ass-end in the middle of nowhere, the type of town where Main Street is one lane wide and has a mediocre bronze statue commemorating some dude who died in the 1800s, and what do I find but a supervillain—an honest-to-god powered character—robbing a pharmacy of all places. Like, how desperate do you gotta be, my guy? A pharmacy? There was a bank two streets over!

I portal in and cross my arms. A lot of the villains know my reputation; I get more surrenders than almost any other hero, since they don’t want to risk getting on the busy end of one of my summoned creatures. But this guy—some shadow-manipulator who I’d later find out was named Ombra—actually decides to take a stand. He sends out tendrils of shadow to snake at me, so I conjure up a portal to one of my creatures. There are plenty of beasties I have to call on: giant wolves, vicious hawks the size of ostriches, the works. But I figured tendrils should be fought with tendrils.

Yeah, my mistake.

The old texts called it ‘Ysilar.’ It was a creature from another plane, feared and frightening. The summon magic I delivered just conjured up enough gateways for its tentacles to come through, and boy were there a lot of them. Ysilar swatted away Ombra’s shadows like they were confetti. Ombra and I had the old hero-vs-villain back and forth: “Surrender, evildoer!” “Never! Take this!”

Gods, it just gets so cliché. One of these days I’m gonna snap and just ask these guys if they’ve ever had two braincells to rub together. One of my first villains was a guy who could just make electricity from his body—and I’m talking to the level of a lightning storm. Like, imagine how much money he could make by teaming up with the government to give discounted power to the Eastern Seaboard or some shit. But no, he decides to try and steal a military experiment, gets shot at, wipes out power for a whole metropolitan area, gets the shit kicked out of him, and spends the next thirty years in a tailor-made rubber prison. Dumbass.

But I digress.

We battle it out, Ombra gets spanked; seriously, he can’t hope to match a tentacled terror from beyond this plane. Ysilar very easily overcomes Ombra’s shadows and is moving in to grab the guy, so the newbie villain decides to try and escape. He pierces his shadows down into the ground to anchor himself as he rises up—little did he know there was a natural gas line below.

Yeah, oops.

The ensuing blast barely even registers as an explosion—doesn’t even damage the surrounding shops beyond rattling their windows. Sets off a bunch of car alarms, though, and knocks both me and Ombra on our asses.

That latter part turns out to be a, uh, Significant development in my life.

I’m not knocked unconscious—though I wish I had been. The magic spell sustaining the portals would have dissipated in that case. Instead, I’m simply left with my ears ringing and my mind reeling—and that latter part turns out to be of prime import. Remember what I said about summoning magic needing focus to keep the creatures in line?

I only lose said focus for a tiny bit, probably a dozen seconds max—but that’s all Ysilar needs. I don’t know why the extraplanar beast goes for me and not Ombra. Maybe because I’m closer, maybe to pay me back for all the times I’d summoned it to do my bidding…

Oh, who the hell am I kidding. I know why. It’s cause I have a womb.

The explosion knocks me back, my ears ring, and mere seconds later I can feel Ysilar’s slimy tentacles winding their way about my arms and legs.