B.A.L.D.

We've got it! The perfect superhero team name. Well, almost. It's thanks to the introduction of one Commodore Dylan Horton that D possibilities came into view, and Becca just happened to discover this one when randomly sounding out combinations of initials. I for one think it's brilliant...but it sounds like it'd only include Becca, Amanda, Dylan, and Laila, as a strict naming. Which makes me wonder...are we destined to separate? Laila's busy at college now, and I'll soon be going away, and Mary's got so many theatre positions she hardly sleeps...it looks like the major task force in Oregon may be left to those with the most time on their hands. Besides, I'm pretty sure Willa's becoming a villain, if she wasn't before...

Anyway, we take it as a brief name for our current logo purposes (we have to advertise to get business. Superheroes need to make a living, just like anyone else) and head off to an alternate universe. We received a distress call from Amanda's sister Chloe, who has apparently been living in this alt world for some time.

A troll guide leads us not to the silver city, but to the dangerous misty forest that guards the metropolis from unwanted visitors. We hack our way through the brush and evade the fierce jumping spiders as best we can, but then I accidentally drop my bag in quicksand. It's may favorite bag, too. The one I made out of a pair of jeans and decorated with a three-headed phoenix using multi-coloured sharpies. I have to rescue it! I touch the edge of the quicksand, and find I have a new power: I can emulate the earth. Although, I suppose all my powers stem from some form of emulation... I fight the quicksand with reverse suckage (I know it's a terrible-sounding term), and pull the bag out-- but to my surprise, there are now two bags. Great. Which one was the original? Did I duplicate it, or is the forest responsible for this trickery? I carry them both as we move on, staying close to the others to fend off attacks, trying to figure out which is the real bag. They both smell like swamp. They both look the same-- covered in goo. I guess I won't know until we reach civilization and a sink...

Well, we finally make it out, and to the skyscraper apartments where Chloe lives. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the apartment complex are filled with pillows, because it is an anti-grav establishment. We float along until we find her room-- the penthouse suite-- and she gives us a package to deliver: some vital information and a strange brown clayish thing. Apparently the seed of all genetic diversity or somesuch. We are to take it to Pluto somehow, and bury it deep in a crater. It's to be a safeguard for our Galaxy in case of a disaster that destroys all living things. In the event that its highly sophisticated sensors register no life within given parameters, it will begin a large-scale process of regeneration.

Who knew Chloe had access to such tech?

We are strictly warned not to let NASA know it exists. We sneak out in the middle of the night and stick it onto a probe headed for Pluto. When it arrives, the blob presumably knows to detach itself and float down into the nearest crater.

We return home, and I wash the bags, and decide to keep the smellier one, and give the other to a random hobo I meet in Portland. No harm there, right? I mean, it's not as if there could possibly be anything dangerous in a clone bag from an alt universe, just waiting to become an invasive species...

It Never Happened.

Mum, Gran, Lyle and I are immigrating to Europe, because America has become so poor and corrupt you can't live in safety in an underground bomb shelter. We had to sell our home and all our possessions except the Terminator we reprogrammed to assist us on our journey. It goes slightly haywire every once-in-awhile, but then mum just bangs on its left foot and all its circuits return to normal.

On the way, our train gets pushed off a cliff by a giant dragon. I hold it in the sky as long as I can, while Laila chases after the creature. I tell mum to call Amanda and Becca and Mary, and see if they can come help me out, because super-strength is NOT my fortay. They come. We fix the train and discuss the merits of the new cell phone service, then are nearly crushed by the feet of the pursuing dragon as it returns our way, Laila leading it into the forest away from human settlements. The train continues down the underwater track leading to Europe.

When we arrive in Europe, there is a scandal afoot. Previous immigrants from America, a villanous cabal called "The Tamers," are going around innocent little country villages and drowning people. But...they appear to be doing it by convincing the victims to drown themselves. Some kind of Mind Control...emanating from the blonde dreadlocks of the beautiful leader. As she sings, and her hair reaches out toward me (whom everybody elected to use as bait in this situation), I can feel my brain start to grow foggy...

They wake me, hours later, and I wipe the bubbly drool from my face. "Yuck."

"Man, you were SO entranced," laughs Mary. "You had the dopiest-looking grin on your face."

"Did you catch them?" I cough, Standing and brushing a strange goo from my pants.

"No," Amanda sighs. "They had some sort of magic fairy dust. I've no idea where they went. But...it turns out they're not just killers. They're also dabbling in sorcery...And from the looks of it, just for fun." She motions to two motionless shapes lying across form me in the little tower room we are now in, which is filled with musty astronomy tomes and old telescopes and boxes of newspapers, neatly folded. I move closer and see that the forms are two dogs. Well, one normal-looking dog, one that appears to be made of blackberries.

Next to them are a series of spiked cages with bones in them. Bones of various shapes and sizes, some that look so unusual I wonder what kind of animal, if any, could have possessed them all in the same body.

The villagers are a grey, shadowy people, easily impressionable, easily afraid. Events like these could cause the entire species to go extinct if not treated carefully.

"What shall we say to them?" I ask.

"Nothing," says Laila, covering the dogs with an empty corn sack. "Tell them it never happened."

The Betrayal

In the basement, past the laundry room, we plot our secrets.
Or, could, if we ever got around to it. The convention this Friday of five or six supers doesn't mean much, since there are nine total and everyone in the group has to be present to accomplish anything. Right now, those present are goofing off. Becca and Laila are playing foosball, Amanda's eating popcorn and watching Doctor Who, Mary's practicing the dance choreography from Chicago...No one shows even a hint of paying attention when I ask them to look over the plans with me. I slink over to the corner and slump onto the floor in defeat. They do not realize the gravity of the situation, the dark brooding matter spinning under my skin. I want things to be taken seriously. I am just about ready to split, to abandon this worthless cabal-- a mere splinter of obligation remains between loyalty and villainry.

 Danny, a newer member of the group, saunters over and decides it'll be fun to mess with me. He waves his beautiful Native American locks in my face like a feather duster on crack. "Hey, hey, Hannah- don't sneeze!" he chuckles maniacally as I jerk my head away. I pull my knees up to my chin and sit huddled in frustration.

"Leave me, alone, Digger. I'm not in the mood for stupid games. If you're going to address me, be mature, and use my codename. I'm The Weaver, not Hannah, to you."

He rears back in farce. "Geeze, some fangs you got there, snakey. But can you bite?" I can see he wants to joust or banter with words, or both, but my patience is just about drained, and I can feel something else inside me boiling up to take its place. If he'll just walk away, maybe nothing bad will happen...

He doesn't. He saunters up until he is so close my nose touches his chin. He smiles, and the corners of his mouth twitch annoyingly. He pokes at my gut with a finger, looks into my eyes, and says: "You need to lighten up a bit," and, so saying, stomps his left foot so that the ground raises up under me and throws me into the air. He laughs at his little trick. He is just barely learning how to control the earth and move through it, but is not above using his limited talents for practical jokes. I am so sick of it. I'm sick of all of them...

I use my momentum and leap over to the weapons cabinet, yank open the badly locked wooden door. It splinters. I grab out two katanas from the top rack, throw one to Danny. "Defend yourself, you jerk!" I yell. "You've messed with me too much this morning, and now you're going to pay!"

Danny grins, thinking I have finally relinquished to his sport, but I am not fooling. His face grows shocked as I slam into him with my first blow. The ricochet of the metal knocks us both back and echoes throughout the base, bringing silence at last. Laila and Becca stop playing foosball to stare at us.

"I'm sick and tired of having to babysit you guys and wait around on your whims to get anything done!" I shout, slashing the air where Danny's organs were half a second before. "I'm the youngest member of the team, and it shouldn't be me that has to plan everything and get you all off your sorry derriers!" Smash. The flatscreen TV we got from the Superhero's Sustainability and Starter Support Fund dies under the piercing judgment of my angry blade. "What are you even doing, sitting around and watching TV all night? You're not heroes, you're friggin' bums! And not the cool kind, the purposely-leeching-off-society kind! You're not even motivated to come out of the basement because you're always getting takeout delivered to the door! I'm so SICK of you all!"

Something splits inside me. The growing thing. I can feel it, peeling itself apart from my soul, curling in smoky trails through my heart and lungs, resting its claws confidently upon my brow. A cold, murderous haze descends over me like rotten cotton candy. The monster within me is awake. It wants to come out... And I am bloody relenting.

I raise my arms and open my mouth wide, and begin sucking the power from all the lights in the building. With a flash, Becca and Mary and Laila are around me, but I funnel my energy into a spinning explosion that knocks them across the room.

I dash up the stairs, leaving a trail of disarrayed telekinesis behind me, whipping dryers off their cords and plates out of cupboards.

I race out into the street, and am momentarily disoriented by dancing people, balloons, music. I'd forgotten it was carnival weekend. *snicker*... These Portlandian fools. Always willing to celebrate one thing or another while the world comes crashing down around their heads...And soon, it will be.

I duck behind an ice-cream vendor's stand. Taking a moment, I change my face and form so that my friends will not recognize me when they come out at last, if they even try to search for me. As if they care. I step out, and hear the rushing of the first of the evening's fireworks. An idea strikes. Flying over the display, I wait until the timing is perfect-- until the next rocket has just been launched-- and direct it to the little underground base of my so-called associates. I wait, legs crossed and hovering calmly. BOOM.

I fly over the devastation, but see that they are already outside and unharmed. They spot me, and start running towards me. Silly little supernobodies...Waving their limbs frantically as if to ward off the Second Coming. They do not know what I have become, they are useless things. I will shape the world now, to my liking. They have already lost. 

I land on the pavement with a sonic crash, and take a moment to look them all in the eye. "Goodbye, friends. you will not be seeing me again."

Then, I slow down time.

They rush forward pathetically, their little muscles nothing against the ravages of time. I rocket away into the atmosphere, and by the time my spell has worn off, I am sitting cross-legged on the wing of a passenger jet headed towards my new destination, reading A Tale of Two Cities for the third time. The relative concepts that guide my balance here ebb gently away from the aura burning inside my new soul.

How long it has waited to awaken.

Breaking into Biostorage

They keep them frozen.
All 88,000 of them, in slide-out drawers in a giant warehouse. Storage, while they're not being used for any of the various mental experiments funded by the Nightmare Company.

Thankfully, I know how to save them-- I think.
It's an experimental new technology designed by Willa, which will hopefully actually work, but we'll see. I shove the first of the patients into the "briefcase," and it immediately assimilates a proper room environment for them, with a bed and lamp and chair. I shove in the second, and the program adds a duplicate room, plus hallway connection. I twist the dial up a tiny way, and thirty people are sucked in at once, and the parameters of the tiny world expand to include a bathroom and snack bar.
It's working!
I haven't time to waste, though. The assistant who thinks I'm in the bathroom, and was taking me on a tour of the facility, will realize any minute now that he's been fooled. I crank the dial up to half power, and it starts sucking and assimilating minds by the hundreds. Laila jumps down from the ceiling. "Hurry up! We don't have much time left!"

"Hey," I say suspiciously, "Aren't you supposed to be monitoring the surveillance people to make sure they haven't caught on to us?"

"I was," she sighs in frustration. "They did."

"Oh, well, crap!" I reply. I crank the dial to maximum. Angry voices succeed some large banging sounds on the nearest door, which we barricaded on the inside. "Almost there..." I slow the dial down gently, and turn off immediately after the last person enters the virtual briefcase world. "Come on!" I yell. "Let's get these people outta here!" We burst out the skylight and into the night air, as the lab minions burst through in time to spot us from below. "Ready searchlights!"One yells into a radio. "They've stolen the specimens!" We race toward the dream-time continuity breach in the sky, to release the minds of these tortured souls out of the nightmare realm altogether and into the dreamless, deep sleep of what I like to call dream Limbo.

Before I can lob the briefcase in, however, a tidal wave of colossal windy power sucks me into the breach as well. The sky closes, and all grows dark.

I walk out onto Amanda's back porch. Her mother waves as she simultaneously stacks wood for the winter, bakes apple pie, and dances to jazz. I dive off the balcony into a sea of memories, floating among MyScene dolls and dress-up clothes and Beatles records...the tang of sweaty feet in the air. I can feel childhood closing in around me. I close my eyes and open them again to find myself sitting at a tea table with Laila and Amanda, who are leafing through pages of emotion and treasure and memory and laughing, as the tides of life, rather than allowing us to be present and enjoy the moment, sweep us ever onward to the Future. A TV screen rises form the depths and engulfs the world around us. Its electrical impulses in the space between thought and action register as comets in a starry sky. We talk of philosophy, physics, the relevancy of claims...Around our little tea table, floating in celestial space, we count the ways one can be a hero, the opportunity cost of the road less traveled, the merit of looking forward by hoping to perpetuate those things we enjoy now.

The sun sets, but we are so far above it in space that we do not notice the darkness, only the constant relationship of our little planets doggedly circling their source of light, and never straying too far from orbit, out of love. It must be love.Why else would they keep such creatures as us alive on their backs?

I leave at last, happy to have spent some life outside the confines of time in a quality way, with good friends.

You see, even in dreams, we are limited by time.

Unless we can find a way to separate ourselves.

The Extinction of the Magic Crystals...

Mom and I decide to go hiking up on Mt. Hood, as it is a hot summer day and the rocks look very inviting.

Up on the viewpoint, I find two beautiful crystals wedged into the path, and eagerly bend down, trying to pull them out. An old man walking by warns me: "If'ens ya want phenomenuh like time travel and magic tuh last, ya better leave 'em there. Pull out the foundation, and all else'll crumble away, sure 'nuff." Sighing, I leave them there, but mention to mom how hard it is to find nice rocks these days that come with no spatio-temporal strings attatched.

I turn to leave when I notice mum is no longer beside me. Instead, she is scrambling up the side of the embankment to the right of the path. "Mum, what are you doing?" I cry, fearing for her already unsteady ankle. "Get down from there!"

"I just want to look for agates," she replies cheerfully, paying me no heed. She stumbles a bit.

"It's okay mom, we don't need any more rocks, just come down," I urge, as a man in an orange-striped coat walks up next to me. I'm starting to feel embarrassed of the spectacle, but mom, in that life-or-death stubbornness inherent in our family tree, struggles onward even more fiercely.

"No. I'm doing this for you! You can make art projects with them!" I have a momentary flash of Belle's father picking the flower from the beast's garden. There are going to be repercussions from this, I am sure. The man next to me decides at that moment to take from his bag a small clipboard. He asks me questions about mom, her age and how many dependents she has and stuff that sounds very FAFSA-esque, and finally tears off a small piece of paper and hands it to me.

"What is it?" I ask.

"A ticket. It's illegal to climb up the embankment. It's said to be possessed of evil spirits."

"Great," I sigh, shlumping against the post that tells of the site's historical and legendary past. "Okay, mom, you really need to come down now," I call.

"I'm trying!" she returns frantically, throwing down her fistfuls of little rocks in order to yank at her legs. She glances mournfully down at me. "My feet are stuck." I snort.

"Yeah, right, like that's not just a ploy to stay up there longer and collect more rocks. Come on."

"No, really, I mean it, my feet are stuck! I think something's got ahold of them..."

That makes me sick to my stomach. There could be anything lurking in the rock fields...I fly up to her, disregarding the stares from other visitors, and pluck my mother from the rocks as fast as I can without risking damage of her sensitive ankle. I vaporize the man's clipboard on the way over, for good measure. Don't want mum worrying about fines when she could be cursed or have a parasite infiltrating her system or goodness knows what. We fly home and I fix some tea.

Together we watch Perry Mason with granny, happy and blissfully ignorant of the fact that mum transmitted a bacteria on her shoes that is even now destroying the last of the magic crystals...

TIRED...

Dreamed that I couldn't get a wink of sleep all night, and drooled all over the pillow. When I went to the bathroom to wash my face, I could hardly see. My eyes hung in droopy folds of pus and eroding tissue, swirling and with the scent of sour milk. I poked one, and it felt like a soggy sponge. I leaped back in bed, resolving to sleep better.

When I woke for real, the first thing I did was run to the bathroom. My eyes looked perfectly normal, if a bit peaky around the edges...

Whose House Is This?

I wake up underneath someone's bed with a sore arm and what appears to be, when I poke it, a loosened rib. How'd I get here, exactly?

I wander around the empty suburban house, confused and slightly hungry. Dang, I must've forgotten to eat dinner again last night. I head downstairs and poke around until I find the kitchen, and immediately start raiding the pantry. I'm sure the inhabitants won't mind if I borrow a little food, I'm feeling so very faint...

Just as I am bringing some tomato soup to a boil, two cars pull up. A group of hungover college students piles out haphazardly and three of the guys head for the door of this house, while the others wander away to their own respective dwellings. Oh, no...drunk college students? They tend to be more protective of their food. Maybe I'd better eat my soup on the way out the back door. I don't want to hazard any confrontations in this state...I rummage for a jar and pour in the soup, and jam a handful of crackers into my pants pockets. I am tiptoeing out of the kitchen and heading for the back door, when I bump into a guy that was apparently in here all along, just watching me cook. He grins, holding tight to the scruff of my shirt. "Where you going, pixie?" he asks. "You haven't finished what we were doing last night..." and belts me a good one right in the gut.

I fall backward onto the stairs, and my soup jar smashes on the tiled floor. Darn. I was so hungry...

It's the soup tragedy that makes me angry. So angry, that I decide this is one of the worst villains I've ever faced, especially someone that would take advantage of me while sleeping in a perfectly innocent Dream! My skin burns red hot, and I don't feel the rib anymore. Whether it knits itself together, or not, I don't care. I am going to make this jerk pay. I leap into the air, crackling with angry electricity.

"Don't. Call. Me. Pixie." I growl, sending bolts of lightning through the house, shorting out all the power grids simultaneously. "You are going to wish you had NEVER SPILLED MY SOUP!" I yell, zapping cabinets and flying about in hysteria. The other guys wander in, looking slightly confused.
"YOU ARE ALL GOING TO PAY!" Fumes are coming out of my nostrils now. I summon all the energy I can muster and funnel it into the ground right below their feet. They tumble to the basement below. I smooth down my frazzled hair, block the door to the cellar with a chair, and continue cooking in the kitchen.

I drink my new-made batch of soup, sitting on the couch in the front room. It is a nice house. Rather peaceful this way. I turn to look out the window, and several heads vanish from the corner. It seems the ruckus I caused might have disturbed the neighbors...

I leave the house but, as a last sign of spite, take all the tomato soup cans in the house, double wrap them in plastic bags, and fly away to re-stock the laughable larder of my moon base.

Not exactly the best, moral way to deal with the situation?

I know.

But I was hungry.