by Archer, Mia
“See, looks like the locals have everything in hand,” Sabine said. “They’ll manage to capture at least one of those things, which is probably what the hive mind has been after this whole time.”
“But it doesn’t look like they have things under control at all,” I said. “Look at that! The monsters have destroyed huge chunks of the city and they’re killing people every time they get knocked over!”
Sure enough even as I said it a bigger flying saucer appeared over the city and fired a huge weapon that looked like a mix between a laser and lightning at one of the monsters. The blue beam slammed into one of the buildings next to the monster and the whole thing disappeared in a massive explosion.
I didn’t want to think about what might’ve happened to the poor aliens that’d been in that building. Sure they might be aliens that’d been trying their best to kill me until very recently, but they were stil living and thinking creatures and they didn’t deserve to be killed like that.
A few moments after the building disappeared there was another thud that was loud enough that it reverberated through the whole volcano lair Sabine had set up.
“See? That’s not even the giant monsters making those noises. The aliens are killing their own trying to stop the monsters and that’s what’s making those noises. As far as I’m concerned the more the worms kill each other the better,” she said.
I stared at the death and destruction. It tore at my heart to see something like that happening to anyone. And I realized that I wasn’t going to let it happen.
At least I was going to try and do something. I had to do something. Maybe those people out there were aliens under the control of cats who were under the control of worms, a complicated villain to be sure, but the type of villain or the scale of what I was facing didn’t change what I was:
A hero.
“No,” I said.
“No?” Sabine said.
“No. I’m not going to let them destroy each other like that. I don’t care if it is parasitic worms calling the shots. That just means the people they’re controlling are innocents who need to be saved,” I said.
“I mean it would maybe be theoretically possible to disrupt their telepathy, Natalie was working on something like that on a small scale before I was shoved through the portal, but even if I had that tech, which I don’t, it’d take a ridiculously powerful transmitter to disrupt the city and…”
I blushed and looked away. I didn’t want to let on that I had the answer to all her problems sitting in my ear canal. Not when that might involve giving up the one advantage I had against the worms who ruled this world.
Not when I didn’t trust this clearly dangerous woman or anything she said. Besides, the mind control conversation wasn’t what was really important right now.
“I’m not talking about that,” I said. “The mind control thing is a problem, but I’m talking about the giant monsters that are doing their best to destroy that city.”
“Oh,” Sabine said. “You can see what’s going on there for yourself. Those things are indestructible. Why waste your time?”
I thought back to a fight on earth waged by a girl who didn’t have the kinds of powers that I did. That hadn’t stopped her from doing everything she could to stop those giant lizards from attacking Starlight City.
Up to and including allowing herself to be swallowed so she could plant explosives inside one of the lizards and be crapped out on the other end. Dr. Lana had the fight playing out on one of her big screens right up to the moment when it became clear Natalie hadn’t been devoured so much as she’d allowed herself to be eaten so she could kill the thing from the inside.
It’d been amazing to watch, even if Natalie hadn’t smelled all that great when she came out the other end.
“I’m going to fight those things,” I said. “It’s what Natalie would do.”
Sabine arched an eyebrow at me. “Are we talking about the same Natalie here?”
I thought about the Natalie I’d met when we first got together. The Natalie who was obsessed with taking over the world even though she mostly spent all her time in Starlight City messing with the local cops and the occasional hero or villain stupid enough to take her on.
Then I thought about the Natalie I’d known when I was shoved through that portal. A Natalie who, I’m pretty sure, was starting to get a taste for the heroic.
“I don’t think she was the same Natalie at all,” I said. “And I’m going to do what my Natalie would do, because I’m the one who taught her.”
Sabine shrugged and rolled her eyes. “Whatever. If you’re that intent on getting out there and mixing things up then let’s do this.”
14
Fight Back
“So how did you and Natalie get together in the first place?” Sabine asked.
She didn’t have to shout to be heard even though we were moving through the air at a pretty good speed. She’d extended one of her shields so it surrounded us in a thin layer that blocked out most of the wind noise.
“It’s kind of a complicated story, but we sort of fought each other until we fell for each other,” I said.
“Huh,” she said. “That does sound like something that’d happen with Natalie. We were like the biggest rivals in the Applied Sciences Department before all that academic heat turned into a different kind of heat.”
“Right,” I said, not sure I was entirely comfortable hearing about my current girlfriend’s exploits with her ex-girlfriend who might not be her ex-girlfriend if it weren’t for her getting shoved through a portal.
It was enough to make me wonder how long Natalie would wait for me back on earth. Would she be out there looking for a replacement right away when she figured out I was gone, or would she mourn for a few days before she got back on the dating scene?
Then again as far as I could tell I was the first girl she’d gotten with since that incident with Sabine, though now I was wondering if that was because she tended to wait a long while between relationships or if it was because she was under the influence of some sort of mind control Dr. Lana had used on her to plant some false memories.
My life was needlessly complicated sometimes. I figured I needed something that was good and not complicated. Like punching out a lizard that was killing a bunch of aliens.
I also had other ideas working their way through the back of my mind. Like all that stuff Sabine had said about ways of disrupting the mind control being used on the poor people on this planet, and how I had the secret ingredient to make that plan work.
I couldn’t leave these aliens to their fate. An entire planet enslaved by mind controlling worms wasn’t something I could live with. Not and go back to earth with a clean conscience.
“There’s one of the bastards,” Sabine said. “Not sure what you want to do about it, but there it is.”
Sure enough one of the giant lizards reared up. It looked like the thing was climbing one of the taller buildings, and making that taller building into one of the shorter buildings in the city in the process.
“Damn those things are ugly,” Sabine said. “But is it weird that at the same time it’s kind of nice to see something ugly from earth and not something ugly from this planet?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been away from earth long enough for anything from the old planet to feel nostalgic.”
“Right,” she said. “So what was your plan for fighting these things?”
Several flying saucers moved in around the giant monster climbing that building, though for some reason they weren’t firing on the thing. Maybe they’d figured out that they were doing more damage than they were preventing and so they were holding back.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was never the one for coming up with the plans. Mostly I flew in and beat stuff up until it stopped doing whatever I didn’t want it doing.”
“Huh,” Sabine said. “Sounds like an interesting plan, but I think you’re going to do more damage than you prevent if you pull something like that.�
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“You don’t have a plan?” I asked. “I thought you intelligent villain types were supposed to always have a plan.”
“Who said I’m a villain type?” Sabine said, hitting me with a look so innocent that I almost believed her. “I’m just a poor innocent earth woman who was thrown onto a strange alien world trying to survive the best that I can. And I did come up with a plan for dealing with this.”
I sighed in relief. It was good to know she had a plan. I hadn’t even realized I’d been waiting for that until she said it. I guess that told me I hadn’t learned everything I should’ve from Natalie about being smart in fights.
“Right, so what’s the plan?” I asked.
“Mostly it’s watching you try to defeat these things and running into some serious disappointment,” she said. “I can’t wait to see the look on your face when your dreams of being the big hero on this world are crushed.”
“Whatever,” I said, breaking out of her little shield bubble so I didn’t have to listen to any more of her smart mouthed remarks. “I have a score to settle with these guys, and if you aren’t going to be any help then I’m going to take care of it myself thank you very much.”
The funny thing was I wasn’t sure if I was talking about settling a score with the aliens or the giant monsters. Either way I knew someone down there was about to have a bad day.
I flew down towards the monster. I was going to take one of these things out. I’d seen Dr. Lana take one of them out when she was showing off powers that were remarkably similar to my own, after all.
If she could do it with her habit of screwing things up then I could do it considering I had far more experience throwing around the kind of punches she was throwing that day.
I hoped Natalie was able to figure out just how Dr. Lana was able to do that. I didn’t want to return to earth only to find that Dr. Lana was in control of everything because she’d used these powers for evil rather than good.
I was just about to slam into the monster when I got a surprise. Though considering everything else that’d happened since I came to this world I guess I shouldn’t have been all that surprised.
All the big military flying saucers that’d been surrounding the big scary monster turned their turrets on me and fired.
If I’d been prepared for something like that then it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. I would’ve put my head down and flown right through it.
The only problem was even though I was super powered, the laws of physics still had some control over me. Something Natalie had been fond of pointing out and exploiting on more than a few occasions when we fought.
This time around it meant that when all the flying saucers fired their laser beams and plasma weapons and even some good old fashioned explosives like they used back on earth, they all slammed into me at the same time and knocked me back.
“That’s really annoying!” I shouted, getting a mouthful of high explosives and plasma blasts for my trouble.
“What were you expecting?” Sabine shouted down at me once some of the firing tapered off.
I looked up to see her floating at a safe distance. Of course. She might have shields, but there was no guarantee she’d be able to stand up to that amount of firepower being thrown at her. Natalie had used directional shields a lot, though towards the end before I got thrown through the portal she’d been using full body shields more.
I wondered if she’d been making upgrades without telling me. Not that those upgrades were going to help me here.
“This is not cool!” I shouted.
The aliens stopped for a moment, but it quickly became clear they’d only stopped firing long enough to determine whether or not their blasts had taken me out. Once they’d ascertained that I was, in fact, very much alive they opened fire again.
I pressed against the firepower being leveled at me. It took a moment to adjust, but soon enough I was absorbing everything they were throwing at me.
At least I was until I realized the aliens throwing everything at me was resulting in an embarrassing situation I hadn’t thought of when I held out against them. A situation that’d never come up before because previously I’d been in my own suit that’d been made of tougher stuff. My special gift that could keep up with me no matter what was thrown at me.
A special gift that I had tucked into my catsuit. A little addition I’d insisted on over Natalie’s objections. Having my old suit with me was sort of a good luck thing even if I hadn’t been as resilient as it was.
At least I hadn’t been. That’d all changed, and I could see little flashes of green poking through the rapidly widening holes in my current catsuit.
Natalie’s stuff had been designed to stand up to a lot of abuse. Considering the kind of fun she got up to on a regular basis it sort of had to be able to stand up to a lot of abuse.
The thing is the suit was also designed as a last resort. Natalie had always been clear that if someone got through her shields and started chipping away at her armor it meant something really terrible had happened and she needed to get the hell out of whatever situation she was in that allowed someone to knock down her shields in the first place.
Which meant that while all the military hardware being thrown at me wasn’t enough to hurt my skin, it was enough to hurt the outfit I wore. I looked down and saw that with every blast it was ripping and tearing and revealing more and more.
I frowned. This was going to result in one heck of a wardrobe malfunction if it kept up. Sure it’s not like it mattered all that much. I was on an alien planet, after all, and presumably they wouldn’t even be interested in an earth girl.
There was at least one earth girl watching, though, and I didn’t want her to see me suddenly being reduced to nothing by a high explosive striptease.
I dove for the deck. Which had the effect of causing all that firepower being leveled at me to suddenly go flying off into the open air since I wasn’t there to block it any longer.
Damn it. That was going to cause some damage. I hadn’t thought of that, but it was too late to stop it. Sure they stopped firing a moment after I moved, but already their stuff was slamming into things in the city causing even more damage.
The only thing that kept me scrambling away from those weapons was the sure knowledge that Sabine was up there watching all of this. I was not going to give her the satisfaction of seeing my heroic dreams crushed. I wasn’t giving her the satisfaction of seeing me disrobed in front of all these aliens either.
No, I was going to do so much more than that.
I had my secret weapon, after all.
I weaved between a couple of buildings and dove for the ground. I landed in the middle of a group of aliens who stared at me in astonishment. My Night Terror suit was in tatters, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the whole thing disintegrated around me.
I looked for a place where I could change with some semblance of privacy. Finally I saw a rectangular booth that looked like it could fit me. I sprinted over to the thing and pulled the door open, only to find a very surprised alien staring at me with something that looked sort of like a phone, but viewed through the prism of whatever strange alien mind had invented the thing on this world.
Right. They didn’t have satellites and didn’t do the broadcast thing because of the radiation.
Whatever. This booth would do.
I pulled the very surprised alien out of the not-a-phone-booth and pulled the door closed. Reached down to the belt and pulled at my old suit tucked in there against my skin where I could always feel it. I pulled it out.
A bright green tight top that moved just right and a miniskirt to go along with it. Sure the miniskirt was a touch ostentatious, but I figured if you looked good in a miniskirt then you might as well show off what you had.
I smiled. My old uniform. Just what I needed. I quickly shed Natalie’s suit and pulled on the old one, then opened the door and stepped out.
Aliens all around me stared. Some with their mouths h
anging open, others looking me up and down with an appreciative eye.
Okay then. I guess the aliens looked close enough to humans in form and function that they could appreciate an earth girl. Whatever. It was time to get to work. I looked up to see more flying saucers bearing down on me, as well as one of those giant monsters that seemed to be working with the alien military.
I guess not all of them had been attacking the city. That or the hive mind managed to take that one over while I was busy playing hide and seek with the flying saucers.
Whatever. It was time to get down to business.
I took a deep breath. Looked down at my old uniform. It fit like a glove. I felt my power surging through me, and I smiled as I stared up at the army descending on me.
It was go time. I raised my fist and shot into the air.
15
A Certain Point of View
For a surprise the giant monster bearing down on me seemed to be held up by a couple of the big flying saucers that’d been fighting it just moments ago. It had its big clawed hands out and was using those to hold onto the things.
Well then. There was something you didn’t see every day. It was like the giant monster was working with the creatures flying the saucer.
I thought about everything Sabine said about these things using mind control. What if they’d managed to mind control the big scary irradiated monster that was trying its best to kill me?
Not good.
Of course I could also use that against the thing. If giant monsters were meant to fly then they would’ve grown irradiated wings. Something I’d seen in a couple of movies Natalie had shown me to try and get me into science fiction or whatever the heck it was she was watching all the time.
Whatever. The point is this giant irradiated monster didn’t have wings. Which meant if I could separate it from the flying saucers it was using to move through the air then the thing would be easy enough to rough up just a little.
Heck, gravity would do a lot of the work for me if I could do this just right.
