Do you know what a pseudoscorpion is? Of course you don’t. Why would anyone know that? Pseudoscorpions are flat arachnids with pear-shaped bodies and pincer-like pedipalps that resemble the claws of true scorpions. They’re everywhere all the time but they’re so little hardly anyone ever notices them.
Pseudoscorpions are beneficial to humans because they eat other bugs that we don’t like hanging around our stuff. When they want to go someplace new they grab onto a fly and go wherever that fly is headed. They hibernate through the winter in silk cocoons.
I know all these stupid facts because I looked up what a pseudoscorpion is. I looked it up because a couple of years ago a pseudoscorpion the size of a fucking Leonberger started showing up in my apartment. I hate that fucking thing.
Times such as tonight when I got home from work, it was sitting on my couch daintily taking single pieces of popcorn out of a bowl with its giant fucking claws and eating them. The thing is huge and ugly and stupid and I hate it and it just shows up and sits on my couch whenever it wants. I have no idea how it gets in.
“No!” I shouted at it was I hurled my purse onto the counter (which I felt bad about because the purse didn’t do anything wrong) “not tonight! I just worked a twelve-hour shift! I’m tried and I’m hungry and I’m not doing it tonight! No! No! No!”
I don’t know where’s its voice comes from, probably the butt, but I know that it sounds like when your stupid brother would talk through the fan when you were kids, all weird reverb “Yes Ela. Justice Ela. Tonight.”
I stomped my foot like a child “No!” I plucked at my comprehensively soiled scrubs “A dude shit on me! Shit! And that filthy dirty disease-ridden prostitute Martialla stole my spare scrubs so I just had to walk around like this all night! I was on the bus coming home covered with shit! Not that I was the only one.”
“You are chosen” it fan-buzzed at me with a mouthful of popcorn.
I kicked the bowl off my coffee table “How did you even make that? Can you use the microwave?! Where does the bag come from? Stop touching my bowls! Why don’t you leave me alone?!”
“Justice Ela. You are chosen.”
“Shut up!” I sighed “Do I at least have time to take a shower?”
“Justice” it droned relentlessly.
One of my “pseudoscorpion powers” isn’t invisibility. People just don’t notice me most of the time when I’m doing this stupid stuff. Like a pseudoscorpion see? Isn’t that clever of however the fuck this works? Adamantine didn’t see me coming because of that but she was looking around in confusion, she knew something was wrong.
“That’s me” I said, drawing her attention so that my cloak of pseudoscorpion unawareness evaporated “you’re smelling me. Because a guy shit on me. I’m covered in shit. That’s what you’re smelling.” I actually didn’t know Adamantine could smell anything with her metal nose. Good to know.
She drew herself up into classic villain pose “So, you have defeated my androids Scorpion Girl but soon you will see . . .”
“Pseudoscorpion” I interrupted.
“What?” her metal face squeaked into a frown.
“I don’t have scorpion powers, I have the powers of a pseudoscorpion. There’s another guy with scorpion powers. Although he can teleport which makes no sense.”
“What difference does it make?” she demanded.
“I don’t know” I yawned “they make me say that.”
“Who?!” she demanded more demandingly.
“That’s what I’d like to know” I grumbled.
I shot pseudoscorpion-silk at her but that was just a distraction, Adamantine is strong enough to rip it apart. Most villains with any kind of enhanced strength are. My silk has the strength of rope like you’d buy at the store. Spider-Man’s silk can hold up a bus, or an entire ferry. Or a small moon. Are spiders that much better than pseudoscorpions? Is that how powers work? Or is it all random?
While Adamantine was ripping up the silk I clobbered her with pseudoscorpion strength and snipped at her with pseudoscorpion claws and dodged her metal fists with pseudoscorpion agility. The problem with Adamantine is that she’s made of metal. I can’t knock her out or trap her with silk. I used to try to be clever and get her to fall in a hole or something so the cops could come get her but now I usually just fight her until she runs away.
She paused in running away this time to yell back at me “You’ve won this time Scorpion Girl but vengeance will be mine!”
“Pseudoscorpion” I murmured looking around the empty bank.
“It would be so easy huh?” said the Fly, reappearing by my side as I gazed at all the money lying scattered around.
“Yeah” I agreed sadly.
“But justice” he said grimly.
“Yeah” I sighed “what I want to know is where does she get her metal bikinis from and why does she bother?
The fly shrugged “Metal bits are still bits. And Madonna had a metal bikini so it can’t be that hard. What was she after?”
I held up a scrap of paper that I silk-snatched out of her hand before the fisticuffs got underway “This.”
He peered at it with his seven hundred eye-chambers “What is that, you know I can’t see writing that small.”
“Magic I think. I bet she was hired by the Fallen to steal it. He’s probably doing some magic thing again.”
He nodded his giant fly head “That should keep us busy for a while. Why do you smell so wonderful tonight?”
“Shut up and take me home.”
