SUMMARY: Well, my one reviewer for "Quid Pro Quo" suggested that I write another of my point-of-view fics, except this time for the lovely Mirage. There was quite a lot of discussion about her, her background, and her powers. I've merely created a backstory that seemed suitable enough to explain why she helped Syndrome.

WARNINGS: Rated PG-13 for language and some rather nasty violence. Not in too much detail, of course. Also mentions of sex. Spoilers.

DISCLAIMER: Pixar owns The Incredibles. If I did, I would've given them all different outfits.

lies, ifs, and Mirages

One wonders at how life can be lived if it is nothing but a lie. That is, how one goes on accepting the same bullshit over and over again until it seems that a bullet through the brain is one's new best friend… and yet lives on and on. Call me a coward if you want, but I carried a gun that would never gently caress my innards in that blinding blow of a shot.

Why would I carry a gun? I, carry a gun? With my powers? If I allowed myself to use them, then the enemy that saw fit to kill me would see nothing there, no trace of me standing before them. I would disappear as if I were never there. Maybe instead they would feel themselves on a fifty-story building, standing at the edge, battling the harshest breeze and whoops – they're afraid of heights. Oh no, falling… falling!

Mirages. That's what I'd do. I'd shove them into a fake world of my own creation and watch and laugh as they stumbled around blindly in a panic, unaware that the ground is safely beneath them. Maybe I'd let them stumble their way into the street in the path of a speeding vehicle, or let them impale themselves on a wrought-iron fence. Whatever is the whimsy that day. If I allowed myself to use them.

The word is if, and with good reason. I don't use those powers now, those supernatural demons that haunt me. I do Syndrome's dirty work à la weaponry, sans powers. It is because of them, those powers, that life is a lie – because of them that nothing seems real to me anymore and I find myself wanting to reach out and change it. Change what I do not like.

I wished away my parents and my house and my school that way. I shut my eyes and screamed inwardly about how unfair it all was, how I hated everything and nobody loved me and wouldn't they all just die and leave me alone? Then I opened my eyes, expecting to see the same old thing – boring parents yelling at me, school kids teasing my unnaturally white hair, trashy house where so many times I huddled in its musty corners as father came home drunk and in the mood to hit.

It wasn't there. None of it. I opened my eyes to nothingness, just a vast plain of gently waving grass and a single cracked road: a dark highway that led off into the distance towards the slowly setting sun. My house, my school, my neighborhood and all the people within them had vanished.

I was thirteen and I didn't understand it at all, how my entire life had been blown away with a single wish. Of course, I entertained thoughts of fantasy and magic wishes and genies, as I was prone to do. I was always the little dreamer. But with no food and only the clothes on my back that dream shattered quickly into the reality that I, Penelope Nox, had to deal with. The next day I had hitchhiked my way to the nearest city, ready to begin my new life. And God, what a life.

Only now do I understand what must have happened. Sometimes powers don't appear until adolescence, and my powers decided to come to life in a brilliant blaze of energy that sent everything I had always known into a mirage. Except at thirteen I didn't know it, and so they stayed in that mirage forever. Nothing is real in those mirages. They are fake worlds suspended in giant bubbles of nothing but air… so I assume they all died. Starved, maybe. Or maybe dying of thirst comes first? Yes, I think so. Either way, that whole neighborhood, that whole little town, was dead.

If I'd known… but I didn't. I won't blame myself, or even say that I felt remorse when I discovered what exactly my powers did. At fifteen, I'd been living on the street for nearly two years and I used my powers to my advantage. I'd heard of the Supers, of course, but even then I didn't consider myself one of them. My power was – by God, my power was extraordinary but evil, not meant for doing good and saving people. I knew by now that I could thrust unsuspecting people into the fake world and while they stumbled about in a daze I could take their wallet just as nice as you please. I let them out, of course. I always let them out, after the time –

After the time when the man exploded. I was only just learning what my powers could do, and one day as night crept up I was standing at a deserted corner, looking upwards and wishing beyond all my other wishes to escape into space, far far away, maybe to Pluto. The man came and tried to grab me and before I knew I sent him away into the mirage. Before my eyes he froze and warped and twisted and then exploded in a matter of seconds in a flash of iced-over skin and hair and innards. I was splattered in bluish-black blood and I screamed and screamed because I finally understood. I'd sent him into a place without even air, created Pluto in my mind and sent him there.

I ran as far away from that place as I could possibly go, and I never went back. Never.

Eventually I accumulated enough money to buy myself into security. I became close with those people you always find in dank clubs in hidden alleys where the black market thrives, and purchased myself a new identity. I went by the name of Vega Chavez, a name I picked out for two reasons: firstly because Vega means star and I was constantly haunted of the mistake of sending that man into the stars, and secondly because Chavez means dream-maker and that is what I was, in a sense. Although more nightmares than dreams.

I rented out an apartment, and after securing doctored documents claiming that I had graduated from Columbia University with an M.B.A. in Management I received my first job at age eighteen, working for a large company specializing in the development of military weaponry. They were tricky to deal with because of the expensive background checks they ran, but of course I simply lent of a little of my power to creating a glimpse via computer into a world where I had graduated high school at age thirteen. God, how I worshipped my power by then. It worked wonders.

So whenever people questioned my young appearance, I simply told them I graduated early and the computers would always correlate it. I was a hard worker. Bullshitting my degree didn't mean I'd been sitting on my ass for years. I read voraciously and hacked into computers and I believe that I could have earned that degree in real life. But as I could not afford it, a degree in a false life would have to do.

It was through my business dealings with the weaponry division of this corporation that I met Syndrome. I had worked my way into a circle within this corporation that had a little experience with dirty dealings, and they needed to negotiate a business deal with some hotshot Anonymous wanting money in exchange for some high-tech improvements on a current missile the corporation manufactured. They knew of my prowess and so I was given the job of negotiating. I performed beyond all expectations, so much that the mysterious "Anonymous" wanted to meet me. I was flown to his office and we met for the first time face-to-face. Call it love at first sight if you will, but I recognized a power that matched my own within seconds.

Maybe he recognized my power, although he had no way of knowing that I was a lie-casting circus freak. Just a young woman with a penchant for making deals. Later he learned I had a lust of power that matched his own, and we became partners. I helped him negotiate deals, selling his inventions and investing and creating the island paradise-fortress that we later inhabited together.

I never told him about the mirages. All he knew was that occasionally during my business-making deals some client or the other got a little too personal or too demanding and they'd end up dead. He assumed, I suppose, that I killed them by mundane means. I did, after all, carry a gun that he'd given me for "emergencies." What he never suspected was that Mr. So-and-So had probably burned to death because he walked into a building on fire or fell off of a cliff or some other little mishap.

If he'd ever discovered my secret I think he would've killed me. I learned soon enough that he was obsessed with the destruction of all the Supers, and he wanted me to help. I could negotiate like no other, after all. I told him I'd do it, but they'd only believe me if I paraded as a Super. So I gave myself the name Mirage and, when necessary, elaborated on my powers to any particularly suspicious Supers that I encountered. Even if I had to demonstrate my power, they'd have no way of communicating with Syndrome about them, and they always died anyway.

I sickened myself, helping Syndrome to do this. I was a hypocritical little bitch who hated the world, full of lies and only the ability to create a facsimile of the other world I had always dreamed of going to, even as a child, even at thirteen. Eventually I decided that if I was going to do this, I simply could not allow myself to use my powers. So I didn't, and little by little I began to feel a bit more normal, a bit less saddened by each new death. It was better that way.

Maybe life became a lie, and maybe I never needed to carry that gun – but I didn't care. Mirage didn't care, Vega tried not to care, and by now Penelope was too dead to ever even think about it. That little girl died the day she killed everything she knew.

Mirage remained to fill her shoes, negotiating business deals and killing Supers and sleeping with Syndrome in between because it seemed only natural. I knew he didn't love me – I didn't think he really knew love. But it was satisfying enough and before I began to lock myself away from my mirages I simply imagined myself somewhere else, with some perfect handsome creature among the stars, only now space had air.

If we'd never found Mr. Incredible I never would have broken free from Mirage. When I helped him escape and betrayed my master and fled the island, with it I left behind Mirage and now I was only Vega, looking for a new job and touting an impressive Master's degree in Management from Columbia University.

But could I ever truly escape from the ifs and lies of the old life, of Mirage? When I began using my powers again, I started to think that it wasn't so. Even when I hadn't used them I had relied too much on lies and ifs. I couldn't let them go with or without powers. I couldn't kill myself to end it, either.

So call me a coward if you want…

…but in my mirages I will always stay.