Olivia Dalton never graduated college, she lasted exactly three quarters in a computer science degree. It was the obvious choice, she had been programing since her ninth birthday. It also meant that the introductory courses were too easy for her. When she realized that testing out was an option the classes were already full. One of her professors offered her credit if she could place in a security systems competition. She didn’t place, she won with what the judges called the most advanced adaptive security protocols on the planet. She sold them to a security contractor for 1.3 billion dollars and promptly dropped out of college. The protocols remained the gold standard of security for the next 10 years without any challengers.
Olivia did the next only logical thing to do with that much money and traveled for two years. When she made it back to the states the CEO of the defense contractor that she sold her protocols to tracked her down and offered her a job. She turned him down and pointed out that if he wanted her to work for him he shouldn’t have given her a billion dollars. He would proceed to take her out to lunch twice a year for the next eight years under the pretense of a job offer. He would also call her from time to time. When he did die of a heart attack, Olivia did genuinely cry at his funeral. In his will he left her a bottle of wine with instructions to drink it when she changed the world. He was one of three men in her life she ever truly cared about.
The other thing she did after returning from her round the world trip was buy a nice car and a rather unpretentious house in the suburbs. She told all of her neighbors that she was a security analyst to justify her apparent wealth and the fact that she never seemed to go to work. Her next door neighbors seemed to decide that at 24 she would be the perfect babysitter for their nine year old son Jason. She was in a way, over the years he started calling her big sis and he would go to her for advice more often than his own parents. He was the second man she ever truly cared about.
Since the occasional babysitting was not nearly enough to keep her occupied Olivia took up a number of hobbies over the years. The first hobby was investments, making her already sizable fortune considerably larger. She even re-acquired her security protocols by way of gaining a controlling share the the company that bought them in the first place. She made sure the CEO never found out, she enjoyed their lunches too much. She gave up investments after a year and allowed an automated program to control them. Half a year later Olivia decided she needed more social interactions and got a job at a small tech startup.
It was fun and she remained busy even if she was only in it for the interactions. Eventually one of her female coworkers and approaching good friend came to her with a request for help in a way. Jessica admitted that she had become interested in BDSM had met some people online that offered to show her around the local scene. Rather reasonably she didn’t want to go alone and asked Olivia to come with her. Olivia who at 26 still considered herself invincible agreed immediately and without reservations. Looking back this was probably the single most important decision she had ever made in her life.
Meeting Jessica’s friends went extremely well, they turned out to be a couple looking for a new playmate. Olivia didn’t really understand how it worked at the time but they were good people as far as she could tell and wasn’t worried when Jessica went home with them rather early. This of course left her alone at a BDSM bar without any idea of how the community worked or any friends. Naturally she decided stick around drink and eventually go home with a cute guy that promised that the rest of the night would be purely vanilla. It was a vanilla evening as far as she could tell, not that she had all that much experience .
The next morning she woke up in the guy’s surprisingly shitty apartment to the sound of him making french toast. His apartment might have been run down and moldy but his cooking was near legendary. He asked if they could meet up again some time and Olivia agreed on the condition that he make breakfast. They saw each other with increasing frequency over the course of the next 6 months were he showed her the ropes of the BDSM community, both figuratively and literally. He called himself a sub and asked if she would would be his dom, after trying it a couple of times Olivia was more than willing to agree.
He was definitely an odd person with an extremely varied skill set. He spoke eight languages fluently, he could cook like a dream but the one time he drove Olivia feared for her life. He also couldn’t keep down a steady job, going from one crappy temp job to another. He avoided all forms of social media like the plague and wouldn’t give her his cell number. He said that his cell was only for emergencies and would always leave when answering it. Olivia eventually just bought him a smart phone so she could call him whenever she wanted to. He would also disappear for random spans of time. He was the third man she ever truly cared about.
It didn’t last, eight months after meeting him he slipped up. After a particularly tiring evening together she saw a sight that would change her life forever. He had never really been all that masochistic preferring to be mentally dominated, the whips were more Olivia’s thing. He slipped up by healing too quickly right in front of her eyes. He never bothered to explain instead chose to go out the window of his fourth floor apartment. He never returned to that apartment and he ditched the phone Olivia had given him almost immediately. Olivia Dalton has been in a relationship with a metahuman for eight months and had never suspected.
She wasn’t one to just give up on a guy, even after he jumped four stories to get away from her. So she started looking, turns out that the series of temp jobs were because they were the only work he could get with a fake drivers license. His name had clearly been fake, there were no records of him having existed, ever. After a highly illegal takeover of the cities surveillance system and a very thorough facial recognition program was done Olivia had to admit her man was gone. But Olivia was a girl that needed to have a hobby, and finding him seemed like a good one.
As it turned out interacting with the metahuman community was hard. They were suspicious of normal humans and generally kept to themselves or relied on referrers. However Olivia found an opening, heroes needed private bank accounts and new identities things she could provide. The established heroes might have systems already in place but the newer ones to the scene were not quite so well taken care of. Her first client was a tank people called the ‘Unkillable” mostly because he could seemingly take anything and get up again. He couldn’t give her any info on a guy with healing abilities that had been in her city during an eight month span. Her did get her in contact with a few other heroes that could use her services. One of those heroes was a girl called Dancer. Dancer despite being something of a piece of work had a surprisingly large network of contacts, something about a trade fair going well.
For the next two years this is how Olivia worked. She started by simply giving basic identities, setting up shell companies and basic anonymous bank accounts. She however came to a realization that she was really good at setting up support networks for heroes, possibly one of the best. This realization hit her when a hero contacted her and asked her to relocate his entire family. They had never been in contact before and the man had willingly handed over his entire families identities. At some point she started manufacturing her on cell phones that could be given to heroes. They were generally untraceable, could connect to her directly and allowed private calls between heroes. Eventually she even developed powers of her own, not altogether unexpected considering how many heroes she was interacting with. She realized she had her powers when updating her security and noticed her wireless keyboard was out of batteries. She could jack into any wifi network, and had minor regenerative powers that she suspected would slow her aging.
She found her man, after three years of this. Not that she was trying very hard at this point, she was having too much fun running global operations, and generally being the go to girl for the most powerful people in the world. She found him after an offhand remark from Dancer about how shape shifters usually could self heal with out having healing abilities. Olivia Dalton had spent three years barking up the wrong tree. After figuring this out it only took her another eight days to find his cape identity, two more to find his civilian identity. He was a shapeshifter alright and one of the best of them. He had been an active hero for the past 80 years, and had been A class for the entire time. He almost always operated solo and never stayed with a team for any period of time. His shapeshifting abilities allowed him to copy the powers of other heroes and integrate them into himself. He couldn’t keep too many at one time but he could change them at will.
Olivia wasn’t much interested in getting back together with him but she did kind of want to see his squirm one last time. So she hoped on a plane that night and flew across the country to meet him. Figuring it would probably not be a good idea to just show up at his apartment she decide it might be fun to try an pick him up at a bar. So after the three most exiting years of her life Olivia found herself once again in a BDSM bar drinking alone, at least this time she knew how things worked in the community.
He came in wearing a difference face and a different body, and on the arm of a girl that couldn’t be more than twenty two. Olivia wondered briefly if he would even remember her, as it turned out he did. He froze up like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing eighteen wheeler. The girl with him noticed that something was wrong rather quickly but didn’t know what. Olivia for her part, as much as she was enjoying this, decided to keep things short before someone accidentally got hurt.
“What’s the matter, you don’t call, you don’t write. After everything we had together you just disappeared.”
He didn’t quite manage a coherent response, so Olivia handed him one of her phones. The slight twitch he gave indicated that he recognized it. She have him a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Call me when you get your whits about kay.”
The girl he was with was looking equal amounts of betrayed and pissed, Olivia realized that it would not be a good idea to ruin this relationship for him.
“Don’t worry honey, I’m just an old fling. I don’t really want him back anymore.”
Olivia spoke in her most commanding voice, that she had learned for yelling a people who could blow up buildings. She walked out without looking back, after all she had an alien invasion to thwart. What could possibly be more fun.
Continued in Overwhelming
Raising Angels & Defection 