by Baron Sord
“Cat scratcher.”
“Dog catcher.”
“Ew! Do you think she wears a flea collar when she’s around her staff?”
“Fuff. I hope she does. I would.”
“Goodness, she probably has worms.”
The tittering laughter always followed.
Lynda took it all in stride.
Her thought bubble said, “Wait’ll they see my new collection debuting at this year’s Fashion Week. Scandalous won’t begin to scratch the surface. Rawr!”
Lynda walked up to a crowd of human and Mutam seamstresses busily fitting dresses on a number of beautiful human and Mutam models. This year, Lynda’s show would be the first ever in Megapolis history to have humans and Mutams walk the historic Fashion Week “catwalk” together.
Lynda smirked to herself and her thought bubble said, “No doubt the catty comments and claws will come out when my Liger and Tigon Mutam models hit that catwalk. Talk about me-ow!”
Mutams were of course forbidden to participate in Megapolis Fashion Week and held their own fashion shows elsewhere in the city the same week in protest and solidarity. In years past, Lynda had attended them in secret, wanting to stay up-to-date on the latest Mutam fashions. This year, her affection for Mutam couture would be made public.
“No, no, no,” Lynda said as she marched over to assist her team of seamstresses. Designing unispecies outfits that looked equally good with and without tails was an unexpected challenge, but one Lynda was determined to tackle. “This won’t do. The tail-line is too high in the rear!”
One of the cute Mutam seamstress muttered, “I thought you said tail-lines were rising this season.”
“Not this high,” Lynda snorted. “A little tail is good, but it needs to tease. We can’t show everything, can we?”
Mute nods from her faithful staff.
Lynda absently laid her A-line coat on the nearest cutting table before rolling up the sleeves of her blouse and getting to work.
Clementine swooped in and picked up Lynda’s coat and draped it around the shoulders of an available dress form mannequin. “Oh, look, Miss Lynch!” Clemmy gasped with sarcastic good humor, clasping her panda paws together in surprise while dancing on her hind hooves. “I do believe your coat has hung itself!”
“Thaaaank you, Clemmy,” Lynda smiled over her shoulder, already squatting behind the curling tail of the Tigon model and re-pinning things.
The hours flew by as Lynda directed her staff to work their magic. Everything went like well-oiled clockwork until late that afternoon when an emergency call went out over the Megapolis PD scanner, which Lynda had been monitoring in her hidden earpiece.
There was a hostage crisis in progress on the east side of the city. Members of a gang calling themselves Darwin’s Devils had taken hostages at Mutam General Hospital. Darwin’s Devils were a notorious human gang dedicated to terrorizing Mutams. In Megapolis, the Mutams weren’t the only criminals, and they weren’t always the worst.
Lynda dropped everything at the design studio, made a feeble excuse, and took the elevator down to her secret garage.
Time to take the hovercar out for a spin.
Her Takata Tempestus R7 was the only thing that could get her across town during rush hour traffic. Even with Megapolis’s multi-level mega-highway, a hundred million vehicles daily clogged the roads and slowed them to crawling until nine o’clock when the nightly Mutam curfew started. At that point, traffic generally sped up to a slow walk.
Wearing her costume and cat-eye mask, Lady Liberty dropped into the cockpit of her Tempestus and rocketed down the launch tube that fed into the Megapolis river. From there, her Tempestus exploded from the water and climbed screaming into the smoggy skies.
—: o o o :—
“Definitely my new Waifu,” I snorted.
Within minutes, I finished reading through the high-stakes hostage action at Mutam General, a Mutam-only hospital. As expected, Lady Liberty saved the day and handed over a collection of black-eyed, broken-nosed, and loose-toothed Darwin’s Devils to the Megapolis PD.
Words did not do justice to the real Lady Liberty’s exquisite art, which seemed to move on the page, or her dancing panel flow that sucked you through the story and pulled you into the action like you were there.
Smiling big, I closed the comic and set it on the nightstand beside my bed.
Turned off the light.
Grinning in the darkness, I couldn’t get over how awesome the real Lady Liberty was.
Her comic was incredible. The ideas, the writing, the art, the colors, all of it.
That woman was a dream come true. Knockout-gorgeous and incredibly talented.
Was there any chance her real name was Lynda Lynch?
No way.
You only found a name like that in comics.
With any luck, I would run into the real Lady Liberty again soon, and maybe find out her real name.
The sooner the better.
We could fight the Mutam scourge together.
I chuckled to myself.
If only.
Who needed Mutams?
We could fight real crime side-by-side.
With our fricking super-powers!
How awesome would that be?
And who needed a Waifu when you had the real thing?
What if the real Lady Liberty and I became a thing?
A real thing?
“Naaaaaah,” I laughed to myself.
If only.
—: Chapter 17 :—
An hour after I’d finished reading Lady Liberty #1, I was still lying there alone and staring at the dark ceiling.
I couldn’t sleep.
I kept seeing that thug Ice Statue shatter into shards over and over again.
CRASH!
I wasn’t a killer.
CRASH!
It was self defense.
CRASH!
But I killed him.
CRASH!
My guilt was overwhelming.
I wasn’t a killer — I mean, I didn’t want to be.
But I was.
I guess everyone really was capable of extreme violence under the right circumstances.
Even me.
But Ice Statue had shot me.
Eight times.
And I killed him.
He was dead forever.
Because of me.
I sighed and flopped over in bed.
If this was what being a superhero was really like, I wasn’t interested.
I wish there was somebody I could talk to about this. Arnold was great, but he wasn’t living it with me. The only person who might really understand was Lady Liberty.
Thinking about her prompted me to turn on the light on the nightstand and grab her comic. Her art really was amazing. No surprise, Lady Liberty in the comic looked a lot like the real Lady Liberty I had met at the Con. Flipping through pages, I looked closely at the drawings of Lynda Lynch.
Was that what the real Lady Liberty looked like under her mask?
Hard to say.
It was comic art, after all. Lynda Lynch was gorgeous, but in a stylized and slightly cartoonish way.
I set the comic aside and got out of bed. Whenever my mind wouldn’t stop running, I always started sketching. It helped me relax.
I walked over to my drafting table and turned on the lamp and sat down. The book case beside it was filled with graphic novels, art books, instructional drawing books, art supplies, and collectible action figures from Sideshow Toys, DC, Mattel, McFarlane, and everybody else who made quality figs. I pulled out a blank sheet of paper and my trusty mechanical pencil.
While drawing, I did my best to capture Lady Liberty’s real face from memory, sketching her from different angles with her cat-eye masquerade mask. After drawing for almost an hour, I sighed to myself and set my pencil down.
Time for sleep.
I turned off the drafting table lamp and got back in bed.
As soon as I closed my eyes, a thoug
ht flashed through my mind. I had solved the heat source problem. I didn’t need to extract it from car fires. I could extract it from anywhere, including hot asphalt and… people. Obviously, I couldn’t go around killing people like a Heat Vampire just to take their heat energy.
CRASH!
I saw the shattering shards of Ice Statue again. Who knew frozen people could be so fragile?
With a grimace, I blocked it out.
Was it possible for me to take heat from the environment? I mean, enough heat? When I had sucked heat from the asphalt driveway earlier, all I had pulled out was a small flame’s worth. Was it easier with people for some reason? I didn’t want to find out. I needed to get heat from the environment, end of story.
The good news was, there was enormous amounts of environmental heat everywhere you looked. Wherever the sun shone on the road or stone or concrete, there were volumes of stored heat energy. Heck, the entire planet was one big ball of hot magma. Maybe I could get heat from the ground whenever I needed it?
Or the air?
It was everywhere, and I didn’t have to get out of bed to touch it. I held my hand up and focused on drawing heat from the air in the guest house. After five minutes of intense concentration, my hand was barely warm.
I needed to try something else.
Again, my mind went to the ocean. It stored an incredible amount of heat energy overall. But, as I had already established, flying there might not be feasible. Of course, I could simply drive to the beach and walk into the water. Swim out far from shore and start extracting mass amounts of heat energy. Once I had extracted enough, I could simply fly to my destination.
There was only one problem with that approach.
The ocean teemed with life.
Whales, dolphins, sharks, seals, fish, plankton, jellyfish, coral reefs, microscopic organisms, surfers, swimmers, you name it.
Setting aside any humans in the water, I didn’t want to accidentally freeze any sea life. I would effectively be polluting the ocean with death. Not good.
Sure, the surfers might think it was awesome if I froze a section of the ocean temporarily. They could stow their surfboards, grab their skateboards, and skate the frozen waves.
Gnarly, bra!
I didn’t know if I could freeze a section of ocean the size of an average skate park, but I knew I wasn’t going to try. Things would go horribly wrong for any sea life, scuba divers, or snorkelers in the vicinity.
Overall, the ocean sounded like a bad idea.
That brought me back to solids on land.
I had to be careful of unintended consequences if I pulled too much heat from any given object. I didn’t want to go around ruining things by freezing them to the point their atomic structure broke down. Think about what freezing things in liquid nitrogen did. It wasn’t just humans like Ice Statue.
Drop a rose in a bucket of liquid nitrogen, and you could shatter it like glass with a hammer. The same was true of all living things. In short, I wasn’t going to run around killing trees or shrubs to steal their heat like a vegetarian Heat Vampire.
That left inanimate objects like buildings, cars, and raw materials or minerals.
Buildings weren’t ideal. Extracting too much heat from them might compromise the integrity of their structures. Obviously, if I did it slowly and didn’t remove too much heat, it would be no different than a cold winter day. But how much heat energy would that convey to me and how quickly would it transfer? I would have to run some tests on some abandoned buildings or something similar.
The same issues applied to parked cars or trucks or what have you. I could pull some heat slowly, but too much too quickly and I might ruin someone’s car or truck. Or pop their tires at the very least.
Imagine a random mom walking out to her SUV one Monday morning with her three kids in tow. She sees all four tires are shattered and the SUV is resting on its rims.
“Acch!” she blurts furiously. “That stupid Doug Moore makes me so mad! Running around all over town wrecking people’s cars like he owns the place! How am I gonna get my kids to school?! I’ll be late for work! I better not get fired because of this!”
Definitely not people’s cars.
The best option was raw materials and minerals. Fortunately, they were everywhere. Road asphalt and sidewalk concrete in a city stored a tremendous amount of heat, especially here in warm and sunny San Diego.
What would happen to a section of street if I extracted too much heat too quickly? It would probably crack into millions of pieces as it thawed. Talk about potholes.
I certainly couldn’t drain heat from a road while cars were driving over it. Imagine what would happen if I drained too much. Unless I had a pyrometer handy (a thermometer that measured heat from a distance by measuring infrared radiation, aka heat), and I was constantly scanning the entire surface of the road with the pyrometer (or wearing modified Infrared goggles designed to give an accurate temperature map of the environment), I wouldn’t know if I was over-freezing any given section of road or not.
Maybe I could use my mental heat vision to keep track, but I had to do it with my eyes closed, and it wasn’t calibrated. I didn’t know what temps the colors corresponded to. I’d have to run tests and take temperature readings. With practice, it might work, but that didn’t mean I could easily control the process of extracting heat.
For example, draining a street of heat from 80 F to 40 F (27 C to 4 C) in a span of minutes might not be so bad. But what would happen to asphalt when you froze it from 80 F to -321 F (-196 C) — or colder — in mere seconds, and did so over a large area of 300 hundred square feet, for example?
I was 100% confident no one had ever run that test, unless they had spilled a massive tank of liquid nitrogen on a parking lot. Even then, it wasn’t the same. That would be liquid nitrogen spread out on the surface of asphalt. I had already established I could remove heat from an entire human body from top to bottom and the inside out — almost as if I had vacuumed it out — which was nothing like a liquid nitrogen spill on the surface of anything.
What would happen if I really did freeze that hypothetical 300 foot square of asphalt to a depth of six inches and did so in a matter of seconds?
Again, unintended consequences.
What would happen to any cars driving over said Liquid Nitrogen Parking Lot of Death (LNPLoD for short) if it was frozen to -321 F or colder? Would the tires freeze instantly? Blow out suddenly? All four at once? Would a car hitting the LNPLoD at 25mph (40kph) have a catastrophic blow out and skid helplessly across the lot, smashing into whatever was in its way?
Or would the tire rubber break free in unpredictable chunks? Or would the tires leave a thin layer of frozen rubber, unpeeling the tires down to bald steel mesh, which might also freeze, rip free from the rims, and leave the car skidding on its rims and equally helpless?
What if the car was going 70mph (112kph)?
What if several cars entered a frozen stretch of road at the same time?
Call it a Frozen Freeway of Death (FFoD for short).
Cars would slide all over the place, creating the potential for huge multi-car pile ups. The survivors, if there were any, would get out and step on the frigid asphalt. Their shoes would freeze to the pavement and their feet would freeze to their shoes.
If the passengers jumped out of their cars suddenly, and their shoes froze to the road, their momentum would carry them forward. If their ankles were suddenly frozen solid, their legs might snap off their feet and the now-footless person would fall onto their hands and knees. You can guess what would happen if they tried breaking their hands and knees free from the FFoD.
Frozen Freeway of Death indeed.
Not pretty.
Worse, if any fallen passengers landed on any part of their torsos on the FFoD, game over. Once their torso froze to the pavement and their internal organs and blood started freezing too, it would be quickly fatal.
Clearly, roads were a risky source for heat energy.
What
I needed was a remote location safely outside of populated areas.
The desert would work.
I could roll around in the hot sand to my heart’s content. But the deserts weren’t exactly close to downtown San Diego and Bankers Hill. Yes, there were huge dunes out by the Salton Sea, but that was a two hour drive from here. There were closer rockier desert areas, but getting to them would still require a long drive. I certainly couldn’t get to them in an emergency.
As before, if I went in advance to some deserted desert trail out past El Cajon, for example, it was unclear I could retain the extracted heat long enough to use it when I needed it back in town or wherever there was an emergency 2 or 3 or 4 hours later.
Yeah, science and engineering were also a good distraction when I couldn’t get my mind off other things that I did not want to start thinking about lest my guilt punch me in the stomach like a fist of ice.
Before it did, I hastily grabbed at the first thing that came to mind.
Shartman.
Fricking Arnold.
Couldn’t he come up with a better name than that?
“Shartman,” I chuckled out loud. That was a comic I would have fun drawing and reading. In fact, I hopped out of bed, turned on the light on my drafting table, and sketched out a picture of Shartman, snickering the entire time as I imagined what sort of super sharting powers he had and how he would use them to fight crime.
Think stink.
The next thing I knew, I had drawn up an entire comic strip featuring Shartman and busied myself coloring it. When I finished, I yawned big and climbed back in bed with a smile on my face.
Tomorrow, I’d have to play around with heat-gathering strategies and brainstorm some superhero names with Arnold. Something other than Shartman.
Tonight I needed to sleep.
Closed my eyes and tried to relax.
My mind continued spinning with ideas for heat applications, so I tried to clear it by picturing infinite blackness.
Quiet, soothing, infinite blackness.
As I drifted off, one last thought played across my mind: even if I woke tomorrow and discovered my powers were gone for good, today had changed me forever. Whether for the good or bad, I couldn’t say.
