by Baron Sord
“What was that?!” Tygor demanded as they flew from branch to branch, leaves whipping in the wind as each branch flapped back into position.
“Just a little Cat Nap!” Lady Liberty called over her shoulder. “I make it myself! Special recipe!”
Tygor laughed, “You think a little pink smoke will silence the king of the jungle?!”
“It’s fast-acting!” she winked.
When Tygor landed on the next branch and launched himself forward, his rear legs buckled mid-launch. His eyes closed and his limbs went limp. Tongue dangling from his mouth, he fell forty feet into a pile of bushes that cushioned his landing. A spray of leaves fluttered upward.
“Night, night,” Lady Liberty grinned.
Not even she would killed a murderous Mutam jungle cat. Lady Liberty never killed anyone, man, woman, or Mutanimal.
Kukka! Kukka! Kukka!
Somewhere far behind, Grizzlion was still firing.
“She’s getting away!” Rhinock roared, even farther behind.
Lady Liberty made haste around Pentagon Park. When the trees ended at Tower 3, she dropped to ground, fully aware the Trio of Terror’s remaining duo was not far behind.
She tapped her comm button, “Hunter! How long until backup gets here?! I can’t disarm a bomb if I’m getting shot at!’
“Five minutes!”
“How long until the bomb blows?”
“Three minutes!”
“I don’t like that math, Hunter!”
“I can’t…! They aren’t…! We already…! They’re on their way,” he finished with a defeated groan.
“I’ll work with it,” Lady Liberty grumbled.
Running full out, she made it across the park bridge to Tower 4.
Tapped her comm button. “Hunter! I’m here! Facing the southwest corner! Where’s the bomb?!”
The screen back at CTU showed Lady Liberty’s blue blip not far from the viral bomb’s red blip.
Hunter’s forehead was beaded with sweat as he tensely positioned the mic right over his mouth and said, “Fifty yards on your ten! Right in the middle of Tower 4!”
Lady Liberty looked slightly to her left. “Where! All I see is—!”
“The fountain!”
“I see it!” She dashed across the grass toward an ornate and very large circular fountain.
In the center was a towering sculpture of life-size water nymphs, mermaids, and gigantic fish climbing up each other in a fluid spiral, their bronze skin green with patina, their mouths spouting splashing water into the surrounding fountain.
“Where in the fountain?” Lady Liberty barked as she jumped into the thigh-high water and trudged forward, her eyes searching the massive and intricate sculpture. With the water running, a bomb could be hidden anywhere inside the mass of life-size figures.
“You can’t miss it!” Hunter said in her ear.
Sure enough, in the center of the statuary was a shiny metal cylinder the size of a coffin standing on its end. With a white waterfall hammering down around the mirrored cylinder, it was difficult to see unless you looked right at it.
“I see it!” she said.
“You’ve got less than two minutes to disarm it!” Hunter said, his voice garbled by the splashing sounds of the fountain.
“Any suggestions?”
“We’re trying to find design plans! So far, nothing!”
“In other words, don’t cut the red wire,” Lady Liberty quipped.
“What?! I can’t hear you over the static! Is that from the fountain?!”
“Never mind! I’ve got this!” Lady Liberty released the comm button on her masquerade mask and turned her attention to the bomb.
Zip!
Inches from her ear, a bullet whizzed passed and smacked a bronze nymph right between the eyes.
Only pure luck had saved Lady Liberty’s skull from a deadly killshot from behind.
She dove into the thigh-high water and swam, staying low to the bottom and circling around toward the far side of the statue as sun rays flickered down through the water.
Spizz!
Spizz!
Spizz!
Bullets cut bubbles through the water all around her.
Once she was behind the statue, she looked up, expecting to see the rippling faces of Rhinock and Grizzlion hovering over the water and waiting for her.
They weren’t there.
Lady Liberty planted her boots on the bottom of the pool and launched herself out of the water. The water did slow her down, but she still managed to fly high as she sailed out of the fountain and land on the paving stones surrounding it.
KUKKA! KUKKA! KUKKA!
She lunged and rolled and came up ready to fight or dodge or whatever she had to do to win this day.
To her immense relief, Rhinock and Grizzlion weren’t shooting at her. They were engaged in all-out combat against Fireblast, a flying inferno of a man and ally of Lady Liberty’s.
While Fireblast flew loops around the two Mutams, and blasted them with balls of fire, they blasted him with gunfire from the ground, Lady Liberty jumped back into the fountain, trudged across the water once again, climbed onto the splashing statues, and squeezed between a giant fish and a mermaid to climb on the bomb.
Garbled by the splashing water, Hunter said, “Forty seconds left! Make it quick or we’re all dead!”
“On it!” Lady Liberty grunted, her hands searching all over the slick metal missile of death ticking away between her legs. Water from the fountain poured down around her, making it hard to see what she was doing.
“Thirty seconds!”
If only Fireblast could fly over here and melt a hole in the metal casing. That might give her something to work with. She searched in desperation for a seam, a latch, anything she could pry open.
“Twenty seconds!”
For a moment, hope. She found what she thought was the edge of an access panel, but it wasn’t.
“Ten seconds, Lady Liberty! Do something now or we’re done!”
“Screw it,” Lady Liberty grimaced.
She planted both hands on the metal missile between her legs and closed her eyes.
Thought balloon, “If I can just overload the circuits…”
A mental picture of the missile’s innards appeared in her mind.
“Seven seconds!”
It wasn’t technically a missile. It had no propellant.
“Six seconds!”
What it had was a several pounds of explosives, twenty gallons of liquid viral DNA, and a simple circuit of wires running from a timed detonator to the blasting caps in the explosives.
“Five seconds!”
“Here goes nothing,” Lady Liberty muttered to herself and slapped one hand on a wet bronze statue.
She didn’t know it, but the builders of the Tokyo Tower’s Greek fountain had spared no expense. The copper content of the fountain’s bronze statuary was unusually high, making it an excellent conductor of electricity.
“Four seconds!”
She concentrated on the weak vortex of energy swirling inside her body. She hadn’t charged up today, which was for the best.
“Three seconds!”
Directed her existing vortex out her arm into the fountain while pulling away current from the metal bomb—!
“Two seconds!”
!—and drained the bomb’s battery and capacitors dry, directing the current across the air gap inside the bomb’s metal missile case into her hand, through her body, and out her other hand into the statuary and fountain where the current grounded out harmlessly.
“One second!” Hunter shouted in high panic.
Lady Liberty tapped her comm button, “I got it! The bomb’s disarmed!”
Back at CTU, Hunter and his teamed sagged into their chairs, their faces sweaty, hair disheveled, all of them frazzled beyond belief. They were still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but hopeful that Lady Liberty had in fact saved the day once again.
FWOOM! FWOOM! FWOOM!
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KUKKA! KUKKA! KUKKA!
Lady Liberty looked up.
Fireblast was still fighting, tossing fireballs at Rhinock and Grizzlion, herding them away from the fountain.
Spakka! Spakka! Spakka!
Coming from the other direction, armed reinforcements from both Megapolis PD and the TTSF were rushing across the bridge from Tower 5, guns blazing.
The cavalry had finally arrived.
Rhinock and Grizzlion took off running along the bridge leading back toward Tower 3 where their Shokasu DragonFly was parked.
The cavalry followed. With any luck, they’d beat them to it.
Lady Liberty stood in front of the fountain, fists on hips in a heroic pose.
Fireblast came in for a graceful landing, flames shooting from his feet as he touched down.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Lady Liberty grinned.
He said, “Not since the Megapolis Comic Con.”
“The day we met,” she grinned.
“And got our powers,” he winked at her with a fiery eye. His flames slowly ebbed, retracting to reveal his handsome, chiseled face, then chiseled chest, then chiseled abs. There the flames stopped, flickering around him like flaming pants.
Lady Liberty said, “You’re looking good.”
“Crime fighting keeps me lean and mean.”
“You too?” she flirted.
“The Mutams never sleep.”
Lady Liberty’s thought balloon said, “I’d like to sleep with him.”
“What?” Fireblast smirked.
“Nothing,” Lady Liberty said. “Thanks for covering my ass back there.”
“Rhinock and Grizzlion?”
She nodded.
“All in a day’s work. Only thing is,” he grinned, “I never got a good look.”
“At what? The viral bomb?”
“No…” he cocked a crooked grin, “…your ass. I was so busy covering it, I never got to see it.” He stepped around her like he was gonna look.
Lady Liberty danced away laughing, “Would you stop?! You can’t go around looking at my ass!”
“Who says?” He took another step, trying to get around behind her behind.
“No!” she laughed. “Don’t you have any manners?!”
“Not when it comes to you.”
Lady Liberty’s eyes popped with desire. “Stop it! People might hear!”
This portion of the park over Tower 4 was empty save them.
“I don’t see anybody,” Fireblast said and swooped in for a kiss. Right before he planted his lips on hers, he grabbed her by the ass and—
—: o o o :—
“I can’t print that in the comic!” Kristy laughed from where she sat at her computer desk inside her apartment. “Doug might read it!”
She leaned back from her Cintiq and considered deleting the artwork from the point when the cavalry arrived to chase off Rhinock and Grizzlion, to the kiss.
Kristy scanned back over it, looking at the rough sketches. When she was busy putting the story down on digital paper, she sketched quickly, completely lost in the moment. The line drawings were sloppy, loose, and suggestive without detail, but still showed the flair of an accomplished draftswoman.
None of this occurred to Kristy as she inspected her work. She only paid attention to the emotional moments in the story.
“Ugh! Why do I wanna kiss Doug so bad?!”
Fireblast was obviously supposed to be Doug Moore. She had no idea if he called himself Fireblast, but it didn’t matter because it wasn’t supposed to be stupid Doug!
But it was so obviously Doug.
It even looked like him!
She hadn’t meant to draw his likeness, but she had.
“What does that tell you?” Kristy snorted to herself.
She considered doing to Fireblast what she’d done to Borky Pig, namely removing him from the comic entirely.
In issue #2, Borky Pig’d been the obvious stand-in for Kristy’s stupid ex Brock.
Dead Brock.
The Brock she’d murdered only a few weeks ago.
Kristy cringed at the memory.
Brock bouncing.
Bouncing down that 200 foot drop into the desert canyon.
Ew.
Stupid K-Cray!
Don’t think about it!
Put it out of your head!
Forget it ever happened!
Kristy stood up from her desk and fought off a shiver. Paced her apartment, trying not to think about it.
“Meow!”
“Missy!” Kristy smiled and opened the screen door for Mischief.
The kitty trotted right in from the sunshine outside.
“You hungry?”
“Meow!”
Kristy cracked open a can of cat food and put it on a clean plate, setting it on the floor beside Mischief’s water bowl, which she rinsed and refilled.
Mischief made with the num-nums.
Kristy said, “Should I leave Fireblast in my comic? Or is it too obvious?”
“Num, num, num, num!”
“I know, I know! It’s too obvious! But Jeff wanted an origin story! I already drew the pages for that! I even colored them! I can’t go back now. Fireblast stays in the comic.” Kristy sighed in frustration, watching Mischief. “What do I do with the kissing scene, Missy?”
“Num, num, num.”
“You’re in tuna heaven, aren’t you?”
“Num, num, num.”
Kristy rolled her eyes and snickered. Thought for a moment. “I know! What if I make Fireblast super tragic? Like, he’s can’t ever kiss Lady Liberty because he’ll burn her? No, he can’t kiss anybody! Yeah! That’s totally tragic! He’s tortured and lonely and can’t find anyone to love him! Not even Lady Liberty can, because she’s not resistant to heat! Yeah! That totally works!”
Kristy knew she was pretty resistant to heat since getting her powers, but she couldn’t make her comic character so tough. It wouldn’t read well if she wasn’t in danger all the time.
“That’s the answer, Missy. Lady Liberty has barely any heat resistance. When Fireblast tries to kiss her, she pulls away and breaks his heart! It’s perfect!”
She trotted over to her desk and sat down, ready to sketch the new panels. As she reached for her drawing stylus, a new email caught her attention.
To: Misty Kristy
From: Jeff Strickland
Subject: World backstory - edited
Kristy had sent her backstory ideas to Jeff the other night so he could go over them. It was pages and pages of ideas, mostly sketches, about where the Mutams of Megapolis came from. Jeff had a knack for simplifying Kristy’s rambling thoughts and images into words. He made them short, quick snippets, which was exactly what you needed for comics.
Kristy opened up the email and clicked on the pdf.
Mischief hopped up on the desk and started licking her paws and face clean.
Kristy said, “Missy, listen to this, my little werecat nemesis.”
In a soft voice, she read Jeff’s text out loud.
“A hundred years ago, the Panspermian Asteroid crashed to Earth. It was a small space rock teeming with virulent alien DNA that impacted dead center on the Megapolis Zoo. The resulting blast was minor, but it unleashed a torrent of quickly-evolving and highly intelligent mutant animals, the Mutams. For decades, the Mutam-Human Wars raged, taking millions of lives until both sides demanded an end to the suicidal conflict. Now, the Mutams live alongside the humans of Megapolis in a tense truce. But some Mutams will never forget their captive past, or the cruel treatment suffered by their ancestors at the hands of the ruthless humans…”
“That’s pretty good, isn’t it?” Kristy said to Mischief.
Missy was still busy cleaning.
“You’re no help,” Kristy giggled.
Kristy scanned over Jeff’s version again and decided she liked it. He had a way with words she definitely didn’t.
In issues #1 and #2, Kristy’d already establi
shed the weird world of Megapolis as a highly polluted and overbuilt future city where humans and Mutams lived together, and where the imaginary Lady Liberty’s alter ego Lynda Lynch lived as a rich and successful award-winning fashion designer by day, and fought Mutam and human crime by night as the city’s only super-heroine. That’d been established before Fireblast’d come along in issue #3.
But Kristy’d never explained how the city got that way. Recently, when she’d told Jeff about the asteroid and the backstory world-building she’d come up with to go along, he’d enthusiastically insisted she put it in the book.
“But it’s too long!” Kristy’d complained. “I’ve got pages and pages of rambling notes and sketches.”
“Do a Jack Kirby thing,” he’d suggested. “Put a few blocks of text over a big double-page spread. Something spectacular. Show the Mutams and humans duking it out on the battle field after the asteroid hits. Total war. Death, destruction, mayhem, all in a double splash page. You know what I mean. Then spread the text blocks around the art. Done. People’ll love it. It’ll be a collectible page.”
“But I do everything digital,” Kristy’d replied.
“We’ll make prints. Fine art prints. Sell ’em for fifty bucks a pop. No, a hundred. We’ll call ’em giclees.”
“What’s a giclee again?” she’d asked.
Jeff’d smirked, “Same as regular, but with a fancier name. And we’ll call ’em artist proofs too. You’ll sign ’em and they’ll buy ’em.”
“For a hundred bucks?” Kristy’d said doubtfully.
“Trust me, kid. You do your usual five-star art, people’ll buy ’em. And do an origin story already. Here we are working on issue three, and Lady Liberty ain’t got no origin story! Put one in already! It’ll go great with the 2-page battle splash.”
That was when she’d decided it’d be a no-brainer to write her real life origin story into the comic, except not at San Diego Comic Con. She put it at the Megapolis Comic Con. That was when she’d decided to add Fireblast. You couldn’t have a crime fighting superheroine without a hot and hunky crime fighting superhero.
Mischief was now done cleaning herself on Kristy’s desk and reached out with a paw and tapped her arm.
“You want in my lap?” Kristy picked her up and sat her down in her lap and started petting. “Missy, do you think people’ll figure out I got my powers at SDCC if I say Lynda got hers at MCC?”
