Edvin and the Massage Parlor For Engy By Draconicon
Edvin, a dark-furred mink of rather middle-class background, poked his head out of the front door of his massage parlor. He looked left, then right, checking to make sure that no patients or clients had come by during a midnight patrol. Sometimes they did; they liked to camp out for the first spot if they lacked the strength to beat down the door in the middle of the night, or, if they were more polite, if he didn’t wake up when they knocked.
Nobody today, though he could see that someone had come by last night. A bit of a dent in the doorframe where four fingers and a thumb had squeezed. He poked it a few times, shaking his head.
“Gonna need to get the carpenter out for that.”
The mink hesitated, knowing that he was about to get swarmed...and then turned the sign on his door from closed to open.
As if summoned by magic, three supers appeared out of thin air. Edvin was almost used to it, but the sudden combination of a teleporter, a super-speedster, and a flyer landing in front of his door was still enough to half-stop his heart.
“Jesus, guys…”
“Sorry, Edvin,” the flyer said, a squirrel. “We just, uh, wanted to make sure we got here first.”
“I was watching the time. It’s exactly 8,” Saul, the teleporting stallion, said. “I didn’t turn up early or anything.”
“And I swear, I was just, uh...getting some milk,” the cheetah of the trio said, disappearing for a split second and reappearing with it in hand, “when I heard the door open. So, uh, you free?”
“...Yeah, come in.”
He stepped out of the way, the first three customers of the day darting past him. The mink shook his head, letting the door close behind him. They’d be far from the last.
It was a relief not to have a villain be the first today, though, if he was completely honest with himself. Much as the parlor was a neutral zone, they sometimes used it as a stash zone for their stolen goods, and there had been a few times when the other heroes - and even cops - had come busting down his door in order to try and find it. Hell, there were times when they came by even when he hadn’t had a villain client for the day, just because it happened so often.
At least today, he could start quiet.
“Alright, guys, what are we looking at today?” he asked as he walked over to the washing station.
“Strained shoulder,” Saul said.
“Stiff tail,” Wiggins, the squirrel, offered.
“Repeating leg cramps,” Carl, the cheetah, concluded.
“We’ll start with you then, Wiggins. On the table.”
The squirrel chirped happily, making his way out of the waiting room and into the back one. Wiggins was half a head shorter than Edvin - which was saying something, considering that Edvin was at least a head shorter than most of his clientele - but was quick enough to clamber onto the massage table.
“Do you need me to get out of costume?”
“Nah, not today,” Edvin said. “Just make sure that you stay still. Don’t twitch too much; I know it feels good, but you’re not going to help by moving.”
“Got it, got it.”
Which means you don’t, you don’t, he thought as he watched the tail keep twitching anyway. Squirrels were not good at following directions, and Wiggins was worse than most. The number of times he came in for an original injury was immensely dwarfed by the times he came in with one he’d just fucked over again.
Shaking his head, he walked to the table and laid his hands around the base of the squirrel’s tail.
Just as he’d thought. The muscles had half-seized at the base of his spine, probably from overuse as an aerial rudder. He probed and prodded at it with his fingers, squeezing it to feel just how tense it was.
The answer was very, judging by Wiggins grunts and bitten-off whimpers.
“Alright, looks like you’ve managed to come within a hair’s-breadth of paralyzing yourself with all the over-exercise...Are you even going to listen if I tell you to stay on the ground for the next week?”
“...Maybe?”
“Uh-huh.”
Heroes. Never know when to leave well-enough alone. At least villains, for all their problems, listened to the doctor. Or...masseuse, as the case was.
But it wasn’t like he was going to turn the poor guy down. Couldn’t leave him like this.
The mink loosened his grip, allowing his fingers to rest gently around the tail-base. He closed his eyes, and reached out.
His powers were fairly mild compared to most people, though he’d run into a couple of Tacticians - the brains behind the superhero assignments and the ones that built up their power-capabilities and techniques - that it could be a major one if he practiced it enough. He had touch-based muscle-control power. While he mostly used it to convince the body’s muscles to relax and untense themselves, he could also push them to move in different ways, even temporarily control the body if he could stay in contact with it long enough.
The fact that it came with a body-reading power was helpful, too. Again, most of the time he just used it as part of his business, allowing it to tell him where someone was hurting, what they needed, what he could do to help them, but according to the Tacticians…
Well, they said he could probably use it as a sort of combat precognition ability, but he really didn’t want to test that. His clients could hit really, really hard, and if they were wrong, he probably wouldn’t get a chance to try again.
For now, though, he was happy enough with the massage parlor, and happier to see people walk out better than they walked in. He focused his ability on the muscles around the tail, encouraging them to un-knot themselves, loosen, relax. The muscles were quick to take to his advice, and soon, the squirrel was moaning with pure relief.
He ran his fingers up the base of the tail to the middle, forcing that same relaxation message along as he went. The tail slumped down, the muscles too limp and tired to be able to move around. The twitching stopped.
“Heeeeeey,” Wiggins grumbled.
“You’re on bed-rest for the day. I don’t care about your patrol, you’re giving this thing a rest before it snaps off in protest.”
“Hmmmph.”
“Hey, you’re a hero. Act like it. Save yourself.”
“Fiiiiiine.”
The squirrel stuck out his tongue at him, then rolled off the table. He wobbled this way and that, but with a bit of help from the mink, managed to stumble out of the room.
“Just send the usual charge over CAPE later,” Edvin said. It was the main currency and payment exchange for anyone with a power, and one kinda had little choice but to opt into it if one wanted to get paid. “Next!”
#
The morning went by in a rush, and by lunch, the waiting room was packed. Edvin had to tell everyone that he needed a break after the twentieth customer in four hours, and though both hero and villain groaned, they didn’t protest.
They did, however, start playing games. One of the villains, a black-furred cat going by the name of Void-Master, stood up.
“You need lunch?” the cat asked in a deep, growling voice. “Got a favor from the cook down at the Divine Condition.”
“Hmmph. A way in, you mean,” said the shorter rat hero, Blazin’ Bolt. “He wants lunch, I’ll jump down to Joe’s Deli and get him a sandwich. Whaddya say, Edvin?”
“I’d say that I packed a lunch and neither of you are jumping the line,” the mink said. “Sit down and be quiet, please? I don’t want more stress to fix.”
He left the waiting room behind, shutting the door to the massage room and sitting down on the table. Pulling out his sandwich, he took his first bite -
BANG!
“Oh for the love of…”
He forced himself to take a deep breath, letting it out, and then taking another one before he put the sandwich down. That had been a bigger than average gunshot, which meant that someone was making trouble. Edvin walked out of the back room, trying not to make a fuss -
BANG! BANG-BANG!
Half the heroes and villains - the ones without some form of armor, regeneration, or invulnerability - had already dived for cover. The other half just stared at the front door to the massage parlor as three more bullet-holes joined the one that had popped in while he’d been out. Edvin groaned, rubbing his forehead.
“Anyone gonna tell me what’s going on?” he asked.
“From the looks of things -”
BANG! Another bullet came flying through the door, though this one disappeared into a Void portal that appeared by Void-Master’s head.
“We have a Gunslinger-type vigilante out there. Probably new.”
“Lemme look.”
Blazin’ Bolt opened the door, only to catch a bullet to the face. It went right through, tinged with lightning and sparking as it hit the wall. The rat slammed the door shut.
“Fuck!” he growled, rubbing his face as it regenerated. “Son of a monkey-humping plague rat. That stings like a son of a bitch…”
“So, enhanced ammunition?”
Before the heroes and villains could get into a discussion of the details of the situation, Edvin clapped his hands to get their attention.
“Hate to interrupt the chatter, but I am trying to have my lunch. First guy to deal with him, gently and non-fatally, gets the next slot.”
That had the predictable effect of both clearing the front room and ending the gunshots. While the heroes and villains had their little contest, Edvin apologized to everyone still in the room, promising discounts.
Then he went back to his sandwich. He wasn’t going to face the second half of the day with nothing in his belly, after all.
A little massage parlor in a city of superheroes and supervillains, and how the guy that's the unofficial medic of the group quickly becomes something of an untouchable among his clients.
