The cashiering profession is a delicate and precise art lost on the white-collar and best not left to the faint-at-heart. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not simply a matter of running items past a scanner and chucking them in a sack. It takes a quick mind for improvisation to entertain chatty customers, and an incredible mastery of one’s own temper to de-escalate the conflicts that inevitably arise against the most disgruntled of them. It takes a good head for logic, layouts, and categorization to swiftly collect and reshelve items picked up capriciously in aisles, only to be discarded into the shelves beside the checkstand at the last minute by patrons as they anxiously watch their bills rack up on the screen. You must be mindful of the proper handling of perishable food, chemicals, and broken glass–you wouldn’t believe how much stuff people drop and break while they shop. You must appear to move with a sense of urgency that makes your employer deem you worthy of keeping onboard, while never letting your actual productivity level exceed average, lest they get it in their head to bury you under a mountain of extra work. In retrospect, it's just as demanding as vocational villainy, only without the fun. 

But I was sure Lady Lightning would be fine. 

Not that I had any proof that my new colleague and the electric enigma were one and the same. Could I even count on my own eyesight, when the heroine had been masked from the bridge of her nose upward during our encounter? The resemblance, though, was striking. 

After we made brief introductions, I asked her, “Have you ever done this before?” 

“Once, when I was a teenager,” she said. “That was before we had all these newfangled screens and gadgets, though.” 

“Tell me about it. The world’s gotten too big, too fast,” I agreed. “For now, how about I have you just watch me work the register, and you can do the bagging, until you feel comfortable taking the front? Then, we can switch.” 

“I think that would be best.” 

I’m not saying it’s rocket science, and I’m not saying it’s any reflection on your quality as a person if you either can’t, or refuse, to be good at bagging other people’s groceries. I get it: who gives a shit? But watching Tessa over my shoulder as she meticulously handled our line’s purchases, gently packing cold items with other cold items, fruits with fruits, meats with meats, large, heavy things double-bagged on their own, and anything fragile wrapped in paper between soft, swift fingers, I became all the more endeared to her. This was a woman who took great care in everything she touched, from a stranger’s avocados to a life in danger. Suddenly, it incensed me all the more to think of her wrung dry by some soulless government agency, milked for all they could squeeze, and then, in her hour of need, finding a door slammed in her face. 

“What do you do for fun?” I asked during a lull between rushes. 

“Fun?” She laughed nervously. “Moving forward, I barely think I’ll have time for sleep, between this and my other job.”

“Oh? What else do you do?” 

She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her purple apron. “A bit of this and that…contract work, mostly. It can get pretty physically demanding, and it’s not as rewarding as people assume it is…but we all must keep the lights on, eh?” 

Ringing up on a touchscreen tablet presented a greater challenge to Tessa than bagging, but with me right behind her to guide her to the right buttons, she got the hang of it before the end of the shift. As we made our way to the back of the store together to punch out, I asked her what her plans were for the rest of the evening. 

“I was going to try to pick up at my other job,” she said. 

“That’s too bad. I was going to try and catch the new Galaxy Wars movie. The only problem is, I don’t have nobody to go with,” I ventured, feeling bold. 

She blinked, this stunned, sudden blink that gave way to a doe-eyed expression of surprise. “You can’t be suggesting–but I’m so much older than you are!”

“Who said I was suggesting anything?” 

I was totally suggesting something. All I wanted to do was wrap her up in my jacket, protect her from the world, and love her forever. 

We took down each others’ numbers on the hood of my car before we left, just in case she ended up free for the evening after all. 

When I got home, I had three unread texts, but none of them were from Tessa. 

I needed to download the HYST app to network with my fellow villains. 

The weapon and flight device I had requisitioned had been acquired. 

And as far as the suit was concerned, did I have any preferences when it came to color scheme?