Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 28

Soliloquy, 2

This is how it feels to be Gaseous Girl, again.

You set aside that you don’t exist anymore.

It’s a time thing, and you hate time things.

You set aside the fact that no one knows your name now.

They only laughed at it anyway.

There’s a behemoth alien monster on the loose in your city.

You’re the only one who can stop it.

As usual.

You might’ve had help.

There was Phil, who could morph into a refrigerator.

Weird power, but you’d be surprised how effective.

But Phil went bad. Refrigerator powers and volcanic temper don’t mix.

Funnily, you’re the one with the fire blasts.

But you didn’t smush an innocent-

Forget Phil.

Phil was bad.

There weren’t many others. Being a superhero doesn’t leave time to date.

You barely have time for your cat.

So here you go, saving the world again,

For the people who have dates.

They won’t thank you.

They won’t care.

You do it anyway.

And hey, why not? How bad could an alien behemoth monster be?

Oops.

For more adventures with Gaseous Girl, She Who Dealt It, go here. This story was written for Grammar Ghoul Press and their Mutant 750 prompt. Thanks for reading!

And I Feel Fine

I do not know just how the world will��fall,

We could all die in glowing atom’s��light

A shadowed order, urgent red-phone call,

A��diplomatic crisis late at night.

Pandemics too could finish people off,

New viruses impossible to stop,

An ill-timed sneeze, a germy-laden cough,

Plague spreading fire until like flies we drop,

A comet’s falling hammer from the sky,

A gamma ray burst somewhere out in space,

Or earthquakes, lava, pestilence: oh my!

Then mass extinctions: good-bye, human race.

�� ��However the world’s end comes, small or big,

�� ��It likely will not be by guinea pig.

Last month the poetry slam was centos; apparently this month we are doing sonnets. So I went with a sonnet. Ah, poetry.

Transformation!

“Eureka!” exclaimed Farthington Milroy, “I have unlocked the secrets of alchemy! I can transmute base metal into-”

“Gold?” squeaked lab assistant Jennifer.

“No,” Milroy said. “Padamantium! With its��crystals I can take over the world!”

Jennifer was duly impressed. She was less impressed when Milroy’s alchemy went wrong. He transmuted base metal into a guinea pig. A guinea pig couldn’t take over the world at all.

Oh, Crime

One of the interesting aspects of life in a superhero city is the position of low-level criminals. They’re not the scenery-chewing supervillains with the maniacal laughs and the plots to destroy the world. They’re often minor burglars or shoplifters or some other kind of petty criminal, just trying not to get caught. They never have henchpersons. At best, they’d get��public defenders

The one thing a low-level criminal doesn’t want is the attention of a superhero. When you have no superpowers, you don’t look forward to going up against someone who can lift a garbage truck and swat you with it. A superhero will look at stopping their small act of lawlessless as a mere diversion, an opening scene to establish their character before they go charging off after the apocalyptic threat. Worse, however, are the superheroes who devote themselves��entirely��to stopping small crimes, the night-time vigilantes with expensive gadgets and jet-powered cars. These can pose real difficulties for criminals operating on limited budgets.

Lionel was such a person. He had engaged in a bit of burglary, nothing fancy, just a smash and grab from a jewelry store.��The police were on their way, he knew, but he had a fast car and a head start, and he knew his escape route down cold. Then, as he barreled down a side-street, something thudded into the roof of his car. Lionel knew all too well what that thud meant. It sounded like boots. Superhero boots.

He slammed to a stop, hoping to fling the person atop his car away. It didn’t work. Instead, an arm clad in purple spandex smashed through his window. Lionel was pulled right outside and flung to the sidewalk. A figure in purple and black towered above him. “Right, you,” Gaseous Girl��said. “You’re about to be the dissolving criminal cornstarch in the Stew of Justice!”

“What?” Lionel said.

Madeleine��winced. “Yeah, I know. It’s a lousy metaphor. Sorry. Long day. I’ve been wiped from existence, you know. Time paradoxes, Shrieking Tree Demons, resurrections,��oy. I don’t get paid enough for this. Anyway, why don’t��you surrender before I have to make another speech, okay?”

Lionel reached for his gun. Madeleine melted it in his hand. More fire blazed around her. “Okay.��Last warning.��Surrender, or I put you in the cemetery.”

Maybe she was bluffing, Lionel thought, but maybe she wasn’t. He didn’t know her. She could be the vigilante type that crossed the line and killed punks like him, or the antihero with a heart of gold type that talked tough��but showed mercy��in hopes that he would reform. He was unarmed, and she was a flying brick with flame-blasts. Lionel didn’t want to bet on the antihero type and be wrong. He surrendered.

Madeleine flagged down a passing police cruiser, and soon Lionel had been��whisked away to disappear into��the state penal��system. Having wrapped that up, Madeleine��was about to fly away again when she heard a loud boom in the distance. A��very��loud boom. “The never-ending battle,” Madeleine��sighed.

This story was written as part of the Grammar Ghoul Mutant 750 writing challenge, and is part of the ongoing series involving Gaseous Girl. Thanks for reading!

Answer to Prayer

The lizard stared morosely into his drink. He didn’t know what to do. The math did itself inexorably in��his��head. He had a certain number of credits. It was far, far less than the amount he needed. Specifically, if he didn’t come up with nine thousand credits within twelve standard hours, his small spacecraft would be repossessed. A trader without a spacecraft was like a solar system without a sun. He would be grounded. His small lizard family would go hungry. What was he to do?

He’d come to the casino starship on a last hope, but now he was nearly out of what little he’d scraped together. He had won at first, but then, inevitably, his luck had turned bad. The house always got theirs in the end. The poor lizard had missed his moment to walk away.

He had nowhere else to turn now. But he did remember some things from his youth, back on his home moon. He lifted his eyes towards the ceiling. “I’m not,” he hissed quietly, “a church-going lizard, but…. if you’re out there…”

A short distance away, Constance wandered through the bustling crowds, her hands shoved in her pockets. She was bored. Her friends were away on their own mission, and she couldn’t help unless they were truly in mortal peril. It was the burden of being a guardian angel. She knew she could run her charges’ lives better than they could, but could she intervene? No. Constance rolled her eyes. Just once, just��once…

Then she felt it: the slight ding from her halo, indicating the presence of a desperate soul. Constance shot a look round. She spotted the lizard. The halo dinged again. “You have��got��to be kidding,” Constance said.

She felt the angelic pull. It was the lizard all right, and he needed help. Constance rolled her eyes. She popped herself visible, and slid onto the bar stool next to him. “Right, what’s your problem?”

The lizard blubbered out his tale of woe in a few short sentences. Constance quickly assessed the situation. “So you need X, but you’ve only got Y. Okay then. Tell you what: you make one more bet, and you’ll win this time.”

“No I won’t,” said the lizard. “The house wins, ma’am. They always wins.”

The angel smiled. “Do they now?”

It turned out that it was a lot easier for someone to win at a card game when an invisible angel is reading the other players’ cards. In ten minutes, the lizard had won more than enough money to pay for his spacecraft. He would’ve kept going, but Constance saw the light in his eyes and wisely intervened. She pushed him off to the teller where he cashed in, and then saw him safely to the teleporters that would take him off the ship. “Bye now!” she said, as he disappeared, stunned but grateful, in the teleporting energies. She reflected that being a guardian angel wasn’t all that bad, all things considered.

This story was part of the ongoing Angel and the Space Otter series I’ve been writing, but I hope it stands on its own as well. Thanks for reading!��

Words

He didn’t expect a genie in a tambourine. Genies lived inside lamps. Everyone knew this. So when Phil gave the tambourine an experimental shake and a genie popped out, he was quite surprised. “The hell?” he exclaimed.

This genie, unfortunately, was unfamiliar with modern expletives. It assumed that Phil wished to go to the place he’d named. There is, alas, only one way to go there.

Changes

Life is complicated. Seven billion people walk this planet, each one making choices every second of every day, each choice resulting in��consequences, each consequence affecting more people and leading to more choices. If a choice goes one way instead of another, an entire universe of possibilities shift. It could be something simple, like ordering��one soft drink��from the vending machine instead of another. But that choice means that the tiniest bit of income goes to one company instead of another. Tiny bits of income add up. The accounting department begins to worry. One employee is let go; another is hired. The financial problems of the former employee wreak havoc with his personal life. He breaks up with his girlfriend. The child they would’ve had doesn’t exist. Neither does their granddaughter, an extremely gifted astronaut. Her replacement turns out to be a saboteur secretly working for a terrorist organization. A critical nuclear rocket misfires. The asteroid hits Earth. We all die. But pick the other soda, and the Earth is saved. Changes matter.

Some changes are bigger than deciding between sodas. For instance, when Madeleine realized that through some weird time paradox she hadn’t been born, she had assumed this simply meant some problems paying for things. She hadn’t thought through all the rest of it. She was deliberately not thinking about the fact that she still existed, although technically she didn’t. Time paradoxes gave her such a pain. So, when she flew off to help with the latest crisis in her city, she didn’t realize what it all meant. She hadn’t been born. Therefore, she hadn’t become Gaseous Girl. Her arch-nemesis, Hiccup Holly, hadn’t been created either, as Holly hadn’t been splashed by chemicals mixed with super-powered snot. That meant all of their titanic world-in-the-balance fights, with Gaseous Girl pitting her flames against Holly’s sonic hiccup blasts (and usually winning) never happened. That changed a��lot.��

Specifically, the night Madeleine had been wiped from the timeline. Something big threatened Edison City. Something very big. The Third Collapsing Ix-Durham Anomaly, to be exact. It was an alternate dimension that, for reasons no one ever knew, decided to open up right over the playground outside Harriet Elementary. Gaseous Girl and Hiccup Holly would have��managed to set aside their problems and team up to fight this existential threat. But now Hiccup Holly didn’t exist. Madeleine did (sort of) but she had flown to another crisis in another part of the city. It turned out to be a standard police chase of a burglar in a getaway car. Meanwhile, the Ix-Durham Anomaly went and collapsed the heck out of itself, tearing a merry hole in space-time. Things got loose.

***

Paul had been a painter. In the new timeline, he was still a painter. He had changed from Episcopalian to Baptist, but nothing else in his life had shifted. He had gone out to the river to sketch some things, while his dear wife Amelia took a nap by his side. As Paul reached for his pencil, he heard a sudden ominous rumble, and then a thud and a dull scraping, like some very big animal pawing at the ground. He looked up, wondering if the local farmer’s prize bull, Old Hector, had gotten loose. That would be bad, Paul thought. Old Hector wasn’t friendly.

It wasn’t Old Hector. A gigantic creature towered above him. Behemoth Bob, the result of an unfortunate alien genetics experiment. He’d been locked up in a temporal prison reality after he ate a small moon. Now Behemoth Bob��was out. And he was still hungry.

This post was written for the Grammar Ghoul Mutant 750 Challenge, and is part of the ongoing adventures of Gaseous Girl. Thanks for reading!��

Escape

Sarah May had been��near panic before. Now she was beyond panic. She was positively��terrified.��She was going to die. Any second now, she and Mr. Stamper would be thrown into a thermal reactor and she would die. She’d never see Domingo Kirrexanvex again, never get into medical school, never see her��squidling��sister Melinda grow up. She was about to perish in fire.

So was Mr. Stamper. A tiny bit of irritation spiked in Sarah May’s mind amidst the storm of panic. The otter seemed awfully calm. Why, he acted as if getting tossed into a thermal reactor was all in a day’s work. He acted as if he’d had it happen��before. She didn’t expect him to dissolve into bouts of weeping, but he could at least have looked a bit worried. A mere twitch from the otter would have relieved Sarah May’s feelings very much.

He didn’t twitch, however. As a matter of fact, he��had��faced death by reactor before. Otter Corps business. A Starlizard War Fleet had tried to invade Earth. They’d had railguns and planet-stopping graviton beams. The Corps had him. Of course he’d gotten captured, and of course they’d threatened to toss him to their reactors. Then the Starlizard commander had the bright idea of making him watch as they stopped the Earth in place. He didn’t bother to explain that he had no emotional connection to the planet. His otter ancestors were only distantly related to Earth otters. He had been on the bridge as they aimed the graviton beams. The commander took some pride in explained exactly what would happen when the planet slammed to a halt. He went into some detail regarding air masses and 1600 kilometer per hour wind blasts and shifting polarities, so much detail that he hadn’t seen Mr. Stamper going for a concealed blaster. He was still monologuing when the space otter shot��him. Escape, after that, was easy. So was blowing up the Starlizard War Fleet, since they had so helpfully shown Mr. Stamper the way to the reactors.

He didn’t have a blaster now. What he did have was a word. “Sarah,” he said quietly to the squidling being marched along beside him, “do you remember what we were looking for in the first place?”

“Sure,” Sarah May said, puzzled. Why bring this up now? “The Orb That Should Not Be Named.”

“Name it.”

“I can’t,” she said, now aghast. “You know what happens when….” Then Sarah May got it. “Oh.��Oh.”��

The guards decided that this was quite enough chit-chat. “Here, you!” one said, leveling his laser rifle at Sarah May. “What’re you going on about?”

“Oh, nothing,” Sarah May Raxenpaxerflirk said sweetly. “I was only wishing we’d managed to find the Orb of the Whangdoodle before we died. That’s all.”

“Well,you didn’t and now you’re about to die,” the guard said, missing her point entirely. He felt it was now time for a last speech, as per tradition. “We’ve reached the reactor. We will now throw you into it, as milord Baron von Fluffingfluff commanded. Prepare to meet ��your-“

*WHAM*

“What was that?”

 

This story was part of the Angel and Space Otter story arc. Thanks for reading!

Annuciation

“Hi there!”��

“Wha-!”��

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t ….oh dear. That’s gonna stain.”��

“How’d you-“

“Angel. Messenger of God. Heavenly teleportation, yo.”��

“But you’re not-“

“Yeah, I know. No wings and a halo, right? Wings are clich��. I misplaced my halo in Uzbekistan. Long story. Anyway. I���m angelic, really.���

���So… ���

���…Oh, right, the message! Yes. Ahem. Your lucky numbers are: seven, nineteen-���

���Seriously?���

���No. Couldn���t resist.���

This story was written for Grammar Ghoul Press’s very first Chimera 66 micro-story challenge. You’re welcome to imagine the angel here as Constance, or not. I left it ambiguous. :)��

The Birth of Hiccup Holly

A last big moment in a superhero’s life is when��you get��a nemesis. This is a signal that��you��have finally hit the big leagues. This is when the media starts to pay attention, and Facebook fan groups form, and people start to make T-shirts. After the first powering up, and the going public, getting a nemesis is the last step before��you are��properly recognized as a hero.

A nemesis is not, of course, an ordinary enemy. Random muggers demanding people’s valuables in dark alleyways don���t count. Policemen handle that easily enough. No, a true nemesis, worthy of a superhero, is out for world domination. Maniacal laughter, a fondness for calling other people fools, a complicated scheme with multiple parts and the potential to end life as we know it, and quite possibly sharks with lasers on their heads: all these things go into the making of a nemesis. The final element, of course, is that they have to have an intense and specific dislike of the hero. It can’t be just anyone’s nemesis; it has to be��personal.

Madeleine��was some time in getting an arch-enemy. Once she resigned herself to going public, she found she preferred fighting people who couldn’t shoot death rays back at her. Also, she was still trying to get through college, and having to save the world from collapsing into a hell-dimension��played havoc with one’s study schedule. Then she graduated, and went into the private investigator business, as this seemed to fit her chosen vocation. A year later, she was behind on the rent for her office and her apartment, and in a bad financial way generally. Contrary to what she’d seen on television, the police hardly ever seemed to need her help solving crimes. Madeleine was beginning to wonder what to do.

Then, one night, everything changed. She was flying home late after a dismally minor case involving a lost cat. ��It was raining, and she had a cold. As she came in over her��neighborhood, Madeleine felt in her pocket for her handkerchief. She didn’t find one. What she found was a tissue. She sighed, blew her nose, and then committed a grave error, one she wouldn’t have done five years later. Rather than dispose of the tissue safely, she let it fall randomly over the street. Normally she tried not to litter, but she was tired, and frustrated with her lot, and she didn’t care.

The tissue, with Madeleine’s snot (and, worse, her super-powered DNA) in it, caught a stray breeze and flew out across the city. By pure chance, it wafted into a chemical factory. In a flagrant violation of state and federal safety standards, the factory had a vat of chemicals bubbling away right out in the open. The factory would be shut down by the government shortly after for exactly that reason, but too late. ��There was a flash and a bang. Unfortunately, someone happened to be standing nearby in the path of the explosion.

Holly Donahue had a dead-end job that didn’t pay nearly enough. Unlike Madeleine, who muddled along the best she could, Holly had resorted to burglary to make ends meet. She had that day scored a very nice laptop computer, and had chosen the parking lot outside the factory as a secluded place to meet her fence. She was standing there in the��drizzling rain when she heard the sound of the blast. Holly was so startled by the unexpected explosion that she hiccuped. She was in mid-hiccup, in fact, when the wall of chemicals, mixed with Gaseous Girl’s snot, hit her.

She woke up the next morning in the hospital. A nurse noticed she was awake and summoned the doctor. The doctor began to explain that she had changed in some undefinable way, and that they needed more tests. Holly started to protest. Instead, she hiccuped again. To her shock, the doctor went flying out into the hallway, right into a passing nurse with a food tray.

Some people, realizing that they had been gifted with hiccups of explosive power, might have resolved to use their power��to do good works. Others might have been overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all. Holly faced the strangness somewhat different.��Burglary would be so much easier now, she exulted. And why stop there? With her newfound power, she could do��anything! ��

And so, Madeleine’s nemesis was born, though Madeleine didn’t know about Hiccup Holly yet. She would soon.

This post is part of the series on Gaseous Girl, and was written for the Mutant 750 Challenge at Grammar Ghoul Press. Also, props to Lance, who back in May 2013 left a comment on this post��leading to the creation of Hiccup Holly.��Thanks for reading!