Scarlet Starlight

[Note: I do not own Dansen Macabre, a Marvel character who first appeared in Marvel Team-Up and has subsequently made sporadic appearance in various Marvel titles. I also do not own Lady Death, the identity of whom she appropriates for herself within the story. Lady Death is property of Chaos Comics.]

Prologue 2: The Dance of (Lady) Death





For the woman formerly known as Dansen Macabre, things of late were definitely looking up. After far too long working with failures and of being herself a failure, she was finally meeting some success. It was about damned time.



Too long she had spent working with or against the Shroud, or with his pathetic assemblage of bargain bin "supervillains". How had they ever expected to get anywhere when their group featured such formidable powers as circus acrobatics, a giant sewing needle, the ability to melt paper, and having a shovel? Sadly, even her own powers, though formidable enough in their own way, weren't well suited to direct combat. She could command victims, even kill them, by tapping into the power of Kali, goddess of destruction Herself. The problem was that it was a time-consuming process. Her powers required her to enact a physical ritual, a "dance of death" which served as the inspiration for her name. And as effective as it might be, how could she get her foes to hold still for it in the heat of battle? A power that took so long to activate was often as good as useless.



She'd had a long time to think about it after the last time the Night Shift had been defeated. She had no interest in working with most of the jokes from that erstwhile group again, and the name itself had been taken up again by the Shroud and his new lover, the second Spider-Woman. Those that had at least some potential, like the former Gypsy Moth, had reinvented themselves and moved on to bigger and better things. The remainder were beneath consideration. And so it was, while she spent her time using her abilities to enthrall men to make a rather respectable sum as an exotic dancer, that she reevaluated her career as a supervillain and decided that she herself was in need of reinvention as well.



As it happened, her inspiration had first come in the form of a dream, a dream where she had employed a new dance. After much work, she had worked through and eventually perfected the dance she had seen in her vision. In many ways it was like a combination of her two prior dances, but more than either or both. She had come to call it the "dansen la petit morte", the dance of the little death. And a potent dance it was...



She reminisced of this as she watched her reanimated slaves work through the steps of the bank robbery they were in the process of committing. Herself cloaked from view by her power to remain unseen and protected from psionic and magical attack by the cloak of spectres torn from the men whose undead bodies she commanded, she had a perfect vantage point to oversee the operation. Her puppets had already made short work of the security guards, the casualties of the victory both minimal and utterly expendable, and they were now in the process of controlling the customers and employees in the front area of the bank and collecting what money and valuables were available there. It was now time for her to make her own move, and play her part in this carefully choreographed dance of larceny.



Leaving her servants to carry through her instructions unsupervised, not expecting any surprises needing her direct command now that the situation was under control, she moved through the employee offices of the bank seeking the largest of them. There she would find her target, and the next to succumb to her deadly dance. And as she expected, she found the man where she expected to, cowering behind his desk like a craven dog. He could scarcely be less attractive in her eyes if he were a dog in truth, but it wasn't his body she wanted. Or at least, his body to her was only a means to an end. His end, to serve her ends.



Closing the door and locking it behind herself, she allowed herself to become visible. Her new dance, powerful as it was, was also even more time consuming than the lesser ones in her arsenal and she didn't want to be interrupted. Her prey was startled by the click of the door, and came up with a small revolver in his shaky hand.



"Who's there! Don't move, or I'll shoot!", he declared in a voice as shaky and uncertain as the hand holding the weapon.



Instead of reacting with fear or hostile action, she simply smiled soothingly, and began to softly move her hips. "You don't want to do that, sweetie..." she said, counting on her subtle dancing motions to begin to put him under her sway. Sure enough, it wasn't enough to put him under her complete control --that would require more time and a more blatant dance-- but it was enough to make him hesitate and become more suggestible. Which was more than enough.



"W- what do you want?" The gun wavered, dropping slightly and skewing off from it's already poor aim to merely point near her rather than at her. She responded by locking her eyes on him and increasing her gyrations, slowly tightening her web and enthralling him further as she replied.



"It's not about what I want. It's about what we both know you want." she said with honeyed tones and with that, she smoothly and in a well practiced motion loosed the binds on her bodysuit and let it slide to the floor at her feet, revealing her pale feminine flesh in all it's naked glory. His slack-jawed stare at her openly displayed body and the blatant desire it revealed for her would nearly have been enough to get him under her de facto control even without her power enthralling him, but with it enhancing her sexual charms he was as good as hers. He stll held the gun, but it was as slack as his open mouth and nearly forgotten. Shooting her was at or near the very bottom of the list of things on his mind. He tried to speak, but his words were as disjointed as his thoughts and forming a sentence proved impossible for him. She had him.



"Why don't you drop that silly weapon? We both know you don't want to shoot me." she said with a soft smile, almost a smirk, knowing he had him under her control for all practical purposes even without having him completely entranced. He responded with an almost startled blink and a look at the gun as if surprised it was there, like he'd forgotten about it entirely. Without hesitation he tossed it aside, and looked up at her expectantly, hanging on her every word and action. He would hardly have been likely to object to her advances at this point even without her hypnotic thrall, but it served to effectively quash any questioning, suspiscion, or conflicting loyalties he might have had. He merely responded in a dreamlike fog as she undressed him, assisting her in revealing his pasty, pudgy body to her hands and gaze. The sight of him naked was certainly more than enough to confirm her earlier assessment of his unattractiveness, but she'd long since gotten past such petty trivialities. Even as she kneeled and bent to bring her mouth and tongue to his member, his body was far from her list of priorities. She had other plans.



She mostly ignored his reactions as he moaned and stiffened beneath her expert attentions, frowning in annoyance when he awkwardly got a hand tangled in her hair as he pawed at her but dismissing it as a trivial bother. Her prize was in her grasp. Moments later he was in her grasp in more ways than one as she kept her hand gripped on his erect manhood as she moved up to mount him, guiding it into her slickened sex and gripping him with it as well. He moaned louder still, and she merely set her jaw grimly as she set about riding him in efficient but mechanical fashion. Only a short time now, and this distasteful business would be over with and she would have what she wanted.



Indeed it wasn't much longer at all, a pathetically short time until his body coiled like a spring and he cried out in ecstacy as his male fluid filled her clenching feminine channel. And it wasn't until his orgasmic cries had shifted into a shriek of gut-wrenching, dying horror that she smiled genuinely for the first time. His warm spurt up into her was followed by a flood of heat and light that overwhelmed her senses, causing her own body to tense and tighten as her own scream of climactic bliss was ripped from her throat. As she came down from the senses-shattering grip of ultimate pleasure, her whole body felt infused with electric warmth she could almost see in her mind's eye. As many times as she'd done this, she still was as enraptured as the first time by just how good it felt. Even if it didn't have concrete and practical usefulness, the mind-numbing pleasure of it would have kept her doing this as often as she could get away with it.



Of course, it did have practical applications, and this one in particular had been targeted for a reason. She looked down at his empty eyes, set in a face still locked in it's dying scream, and smiled as she dismounted from him. The feeling of sudden emptiness in her sex as it closed from it's so-recent filling was a minor pang that she dismissed from her mind as she commanded his newly-undead corpse to it's feet. Sliding back into her bodysuit and cloaking herself from sight once more, she opened the door and bid him follow. Like the puppet he was, mindless and soulless as his newly disembodied soul orbited her as part of her metaphysical cloak, he followed. He could do naught but obey.



She smiled as they arrived at her destination, and at her order he began working on the locks that secured the heavy vault door. Who needed explosives or heavy equipment when you could put the branch manager at your command and have him open it for you? Such a simple thing, and just as simply he had the door open and the vault's contents just as open to her and her puppets. With a mental command she called all those who could be spared to emptying it of it's most valuable contents. Leaving them with instructions to scatter with their haul and regroup at her current base of operations, she departed just as invisibly as she'd arrived. None would ever know she'd been here.



Like their other crimes, this one would be blamed on a bizarre gang devoted to the worship of a semi-obscure comic book character mostly known only in geekish circles. None had any indication that the object of their worship might be a real woman, nor that it had been her, the former Dansen Macabre, who had taken up the fictional identity they fixated on. They would only know that the Cult of Lady Death had struck again.



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