This story was written as a commission for a Cetas of Fur Affinity. He requested a short story about a person who gained the ability to increase her size via inflation. In a world of super-heroes and mad scientists, though, the darker sides of power are all-too common. The world-setting and the in-context characters of Castle (Cassiopeia “Cassie” Tower), Fury (Nula Sindali), Miss Switch (Tamara Keefe), Doctor Qilin, Big Girl (Donna Aryu) and others in addition to the settings/creations of Ampsburgh and other unique elements of this story are owned by myself.
Heroes of Ampsburgh
©2013 Sylvan Scott
Hurricane Castle ripped through the steel-reinforced door like it was paper. The winds roared and her long black mane whipped into a fury as she ignored the cowering foo dogs and penetrated the inner sanctum of Doctor Qilin. Air pressure plummeted and the skies, outside, boiled with her fury. Castle’s body and musculature bulged as she grew. The sound of her flesh and bone stretching got swallowed up by the rumbling crashes from the storm. All around her, disaster reigned. Twenty feet tall and expanding, she loomed above the mad scientist.
“Ungrateful witch!” Doctor Qilin backed away. Her scaly, dragon-like body moved lightning-fast as she tried to reach a worktable on the far side of the lab. “You should be bowing down; thanking me!” Her powerful equine legs and arms helped her navigate the maelstrom and her lion-like senses told her everything that was happening in her lab … not that it helped, now.
The good doctor was chimerical: possessed of a leonine head, equine limbs, and a draconic body. To Castle, she looked like an escapee from a sideshow. Whatever species she had originally been was now long-lost.
Cassie didn’t care. Any pity she might have felt for this patchwork person was nullified by the terror the occult scientist had wrought. Along with Nula and Tamara, Castle had come here for a reason and none of them were leaving without stopping Qilin.
The winds whipped through the room, permeating Castle’s black hide. She drew the air in a chaotic vortex that not only fueled her mass but spun the clouds over the secret lab. It had taken her weeks to find this place and, now, she wasn’t going to let Qilin escape.
Qilin reached her techno-arcane equipment despite the winds.
“‘Thank you?’” It was Nula’s voice, booming like thunder. “We’re not here to thank you, bitch!” The wall gave way around the door as the titanic zebra kicked her way into the lab. She’d grown even bigger than Cassie but she was also angrier.
That was how her powers worked.
Behind her, surrounded by black tendrils of power, came Tamara. The mad scientist’s secret base started to collapse in the giraffe’s wake. Each energy whorl emitted by her body sapped the mass and solidity of nearby objects, feeding her own. Both of the women were becoming giants as they pushed on in Castle’s wake and closed on their quarry.
Castle tried not to envy their methods of growth.
Each surge in her size was accompanied by a momentary, balloon-like inflation before her normal proportions caught up with the storm winds she was absorbing. But even after Cassie converted the mass into muscle and size, she retained something of a bulging appearance. She was half-balloon and half-solid: the bigger she grew, the more she bulged and looked like something that had escaped from a parade. It eventually would settle into pure mass but, before then, she thought she looked silly. The other two just grew.
Nula gained mass the angrier she got. One doctor hypothesized that she actually absorbed emotions, somehow. Tamara drained structure from her surroundings, shrinking and crumbling both animate and inanimate material to fuel her inflating growth. She never could achieve quite the same sizes as the other two but all of them were still new at this. They possessed variations of the same, general inflationary power.
That aside, the three of them were going to end Doctor Qilin’s madness once and for all.
Tendrils of black power whipped forward like an ethereal octopus, one shooting over the mad doctor’s head and piercing the wall before her. It retracted, pulling a shrinking and shriveling tree in its wake through the wall. Qilin grabbed what looked like a sci-fi laser gun and threw herself behind cover. Debris flew everywhere, bouncing off of Cassie’s bulging body. She cursed, inwardly. Tamara had no control. Then again, before three weeks ago, none of them had powers. It was Qilin’s sorcerous science that had nearly destroyed Ampsburgh and accidentally given the three friends the power to confront the reclusive super-villain. The irony wasn’t lost on Cassie that she, “Fury”, and “Miss Switch” were now using those powers to end the doctor’s threat.
Qilin staggered to her feet despite the crumbling wood and swirling debris. The gun she had was inscribed with glowing runes. That she could move in all this wind and storm was a bit of a surprise. But her dragon-like constitution and horse-like muscles gave her an edge. Cassie knew that she’d faced down the famous Mortar Squad of New Brisbane and even banished the great Captain Stellar to the Outer Darkness for over a year with one of her techno-arcane reality bombs. The mad doctor had experience fighting super-heroes. Castle and her friends weren’t the most powerful or the most experienced: she knew they had to end this, quickly.
Qilin fired her gun. Small crystals along its shaft glowed and projected their auras down the barrel with a shriek as it powered up. At Castle’s size, some forty feet high, she was an easy target.
“Fury! Punch me!”
“What?” Confusion tainted the zebra’s rage-filled voice.
“Nula! Just do it!”
She didn’t have to wait long. Ever since Nula had gained the power to convert dark emotions into mass, her life had been on a razor’s edge. She rarely needed an excuse to argue with, or hit, anyone.
Her punch hit Cassie square in the back. Her bulbous, stretchy body absorbed the impact and sent her hurtling forward like a wrecking ball.
The last thing Castle saw was Qilin’s shocked face as she fired.
The blast went between Castle’s legs and teleported a massive hole into the floor by sending it … somewhere else.
Castle’s body crashed into Qilin and the far wall, knocking out the mad scientist in a hail of concrete, rebar, and broken bones. Castle was unharmed.
Slowly, with bits of ceiling collapsing around her, Castle stood. She stopped drawing in air and the pressure began to return to normal. The storm-tossed sky ceased its swirling and the dark clouds began to lighten. Nula—Fury—slowly strode up behind her. Miss Switch followed. Fury’s face was dark with the missed opportunity for revenge.
They looked down at the flattened, but still breathing, Qilin.
“Somehow, I thought this would feel better,” Castle said.
Fury spat and turned to go. “Feels good to me,” she huffed.
“Revenge never feels good,” Switch said. “At least she won’t be destroying the world any time soon, though.”
In the distance they could hear emergency vehicles approaching. At least half of them were SWAT teams.
Castle nodded. “You two should get outta here. For our debut as super-heroes, we don’t want to be associated with all this collateral damage if we can avoid it. I’ll talk to the cops and press.”
Switch nodded and fully retracted the rest of the black, energy tendrils coiling around her.
“Thanks, Cassie,” she said.
“Go on,” Castle replied.
Carefully, she knelt down and picked up the injured and broken form of Qilin. Explaining this to the cops would be … interesting.
* * *
Ampsburgh wasn’t as big as New Brisbane or Solomon City. But it had its share of super-powered adventurers. Cassie remembered old Professor Wunder lecturing in her Contemporary History class that costume wearing, super-powered beings were the modern equivalent to ancient world gods and monsters. Every ancient land, every bygone city-state, had their heroes and villains and, today, every city seemed to have six or seven. Ampsburgh, in the current economy, wasn’t one of them. Once great, it was more in its twilight years.
Built around the Power Core, the fallen hub of an alien warship brought down by the Ministry of Justice during the Halladian invasion back in ‘46, it provided the energy needs for half the country. Back then, out of the world’s two hundred nations and fifty-six different races, only the scientists in Ampsburgh had been able to figure out the alien technology following the war. Sure, Halladian power centers were eventually made mainstream across the globe but in the fifties and sixties Ampsburgh possessed the only such facility. And while the city had grown, early on, the spread of easily-accessible power had left it behind. And as jobs left, so did its economy and heroes.
Cassie had survived six rounds of layoffs at the power plant and was grateful for her job. Now that she had powers, though, that job seemed … annoying.
It had been six weeks since she and “the Balloon Babes” (a name that some annoying journalist with the Daily Wire had given them; they preferred “the Shock Troops”) had taken down Doctor Qilin. The chimeric mad scientist had been trying to find a way to collect power and store it for some unknown purpose. The power plant, itself, had suffered brown-outs throughout her attack. Several weeks before they’d found her, an early prototype of her magical technology had apparently exploded, scattering powerful magical energies throughout Ampsburgh. In the chaos that followed, six innocent bystanders ended up gaining powers. Of those, only Cassie and her friends had decided they needed to track down the person who was threatening their home.
Big Girl had also wanted to find Qilin but the three new heroines had found her first.
The last hero of Ampsburgh, Big Girl had been the one to talk to those who’d gained their powers during Qilin’s initial mistake and try to help them make sense of what was happening. She’d told them that they had a responsibility to use their absorption-based abilities to better the world. Cassie and the rest of the Shock Troops took the advice seriously. They had been working late at the power plant the night Qilin tried to use it to fuel her dark ritual and it only made sense to try and do something about it.
After tracking and taking Qilin down, they’d become instant celebrities. Luckily, they’d had the foresight to make masks.
Big Girl, a kangaroo who could control kinetic energy and absorb it into her body for strength and size, had warned them not to get involved at first. But one thing had simply led to another and they ended up bringing Qilin down. After the Shock Troops had defeated Qilin, Big Girl had arrived at the ensuing press conference to praise them as Ampsburgh’s newest defenders. In the whirlwind of coverage that followed, Cassie and the rest had met heroes from around the world and even helped The FixIt Team repair the damage to the city.
She’d even taken to patrolling the streets at night. She felt … good.
But coming into the office every day (and sometimes on weekends) was increasingly dull. No one had figured out their identities, yet, but she was certain someone would. Equines, even those with striking black coats and deep brown eyes such as herself, were common in the city but zebras and giraffes were exotic. In fact, she was surprised that no one had confronted either Nula or Tamara about their super-heroic identities, yet. Then again, maybe it was willing suspension of disbelief.
Either way, her powers didn’t help the fact that she needed money to live. This, of course, required her job. It was so boring not calling the winds and not becoming a giantess that every day when she didn’t go out and use her powers was a day spent in drudgery.
“I heard you took in the Timberline Arsonist last night.”
Donna, aka “Big Girl”, stirred her coffee and leaned back in the Sunny Side Up Café booth.
“Yeah,” Cassie said. “Stomped him like a bug.” At Donna’s shocked expression, she quickly added, “I was pretty inflated at the time and hadn’t solidified the mass into muscle, yet. So it was like hitting him with a giant balloon. But my hoof smothered him pretty good and kept him pinned so he couldn’t hurt himself or anyone else. Fury really wanted to rip into him.”
Donna winced. “She’s got serious anger-control issues, that one.”
Cassie nodded. “Always had.” She sipped her tea. “But, honestly, she’s been worse since the accident.”
“Gaining the power to convert rage into power could do that to a person.”
She nodded. “I guess power really does change a person.” She paused and looked at her lunch companion. A question that had been bothering Cassie for weeks bubbled to the surface. “Does it feel good when you grow?” she asked.
Donna arched an eyebrow. “Come again?”
“When you grow: does it … feel good?”
The kangaroo looked confused. She’d had her powers for years and lived in Ampsburgh for the last twenty. It was only coincidence that Qilin’s experiments had also resulted in several new “absorption-based” heroes in the local area.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Cassie blushed. “Well, when I call the winds, when I absorb them to, uh, inflate: it feels … good.”
Donna leaned forward, steepling her fingers before her face. “Define ‘good’. Are we talking—?”
Cassie felt a sudden flush of embarrassment. She knew she shouldn’t have brought this up. “Look, don’t make this weird. I’m not saying ‘good’, good. I’m just saying, well, I look forward to using my powers more than I don’t.” It was a lie, a hasty one at that, but it was all she had. “Does that make sense?”
“Not really.” She chuckled and sipped her coffee again. “But it’s good if you enjoy using your powers; don’t let it get to you. Not all heroes are as lucky.”
“What do you mean?”
Donna set her cup down. “Do you remember Pillar Pete?”
She snorted and nodded. “Stand-up comedian with super-powers.”
Donna nodded. “He could make his body as hard as stone and walk through rock. Concrete, granite, sandstone, clay: it didn’t matter.”
“What about him?”
“He retired a couple years ago. After saving lives, stopping muggers, and doing it all with a quip and a joke, he stepped down. Not many know it but he was seriously depressed.”
“Why?”
“His powers,” Donna confirmed. “Truth is, comedians are fluid. Some who take their profession seriously take every aspect about it seriously. Walking through walls and being as strong as a truck are abilities that are pretty damn overt. Nothing subtle about it. To top it off, Pete couldn’t really use his abilities in creative ways. He was only seen as ‘original’ when he first appeared; when no one knew what he could do. His powers made him popular but only because they were new and unusual. Once all his secrets were known, he was just another hero. He couldn’t do much that people didn’t expect from him. It drove him nuts.”
“Well, that’s not quite the same...”
“Maybe not, but at least you enjoy what you can do. Pete spent six years in therapy. I know because we share the same psychiatrist.”
Cassie blinked. She’d only known Donna for about two months so this was new territory. Normally she liked hearing stories about all her favorite heroes. This was a bit … darker. “You see a shrink?”
The roo nodded. “Every other week for the past eight years. I don’t have a girlfriend, all my buddies wear capes, and I’m not really into the whole church scene. My last real relationship was with a reporter who turned out to be one of Shadowspy’s minions. If I didn’t see a therapist, I’d probably go crazy … even though I love my powers.”
Cassie nodded. She didn’t want to admit it, certainly not with someone she’d only known for a few months, but she was starting to realize that the super-hero world was bigger and more complex than she’d thought. She wanted to ask Donna more but they were veering into uncomfortable territory. As it was, she’d almost blurted out the truth. It did feel physically good to absorb the winds and grow. Not just the sense of power as she loomed over cars, trees, and buildings, but there was an actual rush in the pleasure centers of her brain when she inflated. As a child, she used to get dizzy going up to the top of tall buildings. Ever since she gained the power to absorb the winds, she revelled in exploring new heights. Feeling her skin stretch, feeling her organs and muscles swell and grow as she created a vortex of inward rushing wind, was...
Well, it was private. She didn’t need to ask Donna any more.
Anyway, she had her answer: no one in the rest of the super-hero community really felt a rush when using their powers. It was just her, Nula, and Tamara.
“...worst part is the clean-up,” Donna was saying.
Cassie’s attention had wandered. She smiled, covering for it with a toss of her mane. “Yeah?” she prompted.
“Cleaning up,” Donna repeated. “After stomping around a city, battling aliens or demons or giant robots, you do a lot of damage. I think fixing what you break is the hardest part of being a super-hero. Hell, you know how that can be, right?”
Cassie shrugged. “A bit.”
“Definitely,” Donna said. “When you stopped that train from hitting the stranded bus last week, you kicked a divot out of the road the size of a tree.”
Cassie blushed. She remembered. She’d felt so powerful: every casual motion she made had consequences when she was big. It gave her a thrill. Looking back on it, though, the collateral damage seemed less like a problem and more like a necessary price to pay to use her powers.
“Not to mention I stopped a speeding locomotive,” she added.
“You certainly did.” Donna smiled.
Breaking things just went with the territory. It was part of what Cassie had come to love about her powers. Everything about being “Hurricane” Castle (as the press had dubbed her) was exciting, empowering, and new. It was all part of her growth and strength.
She smiled and wondered, not for the first time, just how big she could get.
The bell over the door chimed as her two friends entered. Nula had dyed her mohawk-like mane, again, but this time to a deep, emerald green. She always wore a traditionally-colored black wig when fighting crime but, really, Cassie didn’t know how much longer she could keep up the charade. Tamara was talking to her and looking annoyed.
“You can’t just quit, though! Cassie: tell her!”
Cassie looked at the zebra, unsure. “Tell Nula what?”
“I’ve quit my job,” she said. “Look, people are going to figure out who I am sooner or later anyway, right? Well, if my secret identity isn’t all that secret, I’m going to have to be a full-time hero. And full-time heroes don’t hold down nine-to-five jobs.”
“But where will you get the money to live?” Tamara insisted. A small aura of black energy was starting to form around her. Cassie drew her friend’s attention to it with a nod. Tamara pulled back the wispy tentacles.
“Who cares?” Nula said. “Look, I’m a super, now. I don’t need that sort of thing.”
“Oh, honey: we all need a source of income.”
“Then I’ll take it from the knuckle-heads I bash,” she said, stubbornly.
Cassie looked shocked but only because she saw Donna’s expression.
“And you’re going to declare that on which line of your 1040 form?” the kangaroo asked.
Nula’s face darkened. “Hey, don’t judge me. All I’m saying is that I finally have something I can do that makes me feel good, y’know? And I’m not about to give it up.”
Cassie blushed. If only she’d not just ventured to ask Donna about how using powers felt.
“No one’s saying you should give up your powers,” the kangaroo replied. “The only ‘giving up’ that anyone’s talking about is you leaving your job.”
“Exactly,” Tamara said. She turned to Cassie. “Please, Cass: talk to her. You can explain—”
A muffled boom shook the plate glass windows of the diner. In the distance, a thin column of smoke rose from the direction of the river.
“Time to go,” Nula said. The heated exchange with her friends had made her a couple feet taller. “Someone needs us.”
Donna was getting up, too. “We can talk about this later,” she said.
“Yeah, later,” Cassie agreed. But, down deep, she knew today would be the last time she had coffee with Big Girl. After the battle, she’d go to the power plant and tender her resignation, too.
* * *
No one knew where Monstro had come from. He had first appeared during the great Eurosaille Blackout of ‘76 and spent six days stomping around the city devouring batteries, cars, generators, and anything else that held a charge. The more energy it devoured, the bigger it got. Resembling a T-Rex with long arms, vicious claws, sharp teeth, and a spiked tail, it stood about a hundred feet tall. During that first appearance, the creature had stomped through town and left nothing but debris in its wake. It had only been defeated by the Disco Brigade’s timely intervention and had vanished into a cloud of green fog. But since then, the mysterious creature had shown up over a dozen times.
Today, a month after they’d stormed out of the coffee shop to help disaster control put out a fire from a ruptured power junction, Monstro was in Ampsburgh.
Castle threw her best punch and landed a haymaker right across the giant’s scaly, green muzzle. Storm clouds roiled overhead. She landed blow after blow, pressing the attack. The best part about being filled with air (for the most part, anyway) was that punching things didn’t hurt. When she’d been a teenager, she’d gotten into a fight with Sondra Sayles and thrown a punch that left her knuckles bruised and hurting for a week. Now, even after she’d converted most of her absorbed air into mass, becoming less balloon and more giantess, there was still a spongy padding to her body that helped immensely.
She could punch this thing all day.
Miss Switch staggered to her feet. Her black tendrils of energy emanated from her small, giraffe’s horns. They reminded Castle of antennae on an old-style television station.Monstro had slapped her pretty hard with its tail and sent Castle’s ally flying.
Castle’s own weight, being much less, made that swatting tail a greater threat. She didn’t want to think about how far she’d sail if hit.
So, she kept absorbing the winds. She was nearly ninety feet tall and about to pass a hundred for the first time. Her giraffe partner was half her height but weighed much, much more.
“I’ll go for his legs,” Switch shouted.
Before Castle could respond, Miss Switch flung herself at Monstro’s knees.
“Monstro … smash!”
The beast’s roar and guttural language was more than he’d said since appearing that morning. It was all the monster ever said, really: just its name followed by an imperative verb … usually a destructive one. When Miss Switch hit it, it stumbled back but didn’t fall. Monstro reached down with both clawed hands and grabbed the giantess by the back of her neck and her waist.
“Tamara!” Castle shouted.
Between the rush of power, the thrill of adrenaline, and the sheer good feeling of making her body bigger, she’d forgotten to call her Miss Switch by her hero’s name. Most people had probably figured out that Miss Switch was really power station employee Tamara Keefe, so it probably didn’t matter.
Monstro hefted Miss Switch over his head. She was still growing, getting heavier and bigger as her black energy tendrils cracked pavement, shrunk cars, and absorbed mass from nearby buildings. Monstro wasn’t smart, but he didn’t give her time to reach a more dangerous height. The creature hurled her away, sending her across the power plant’s parking lot to smash into one of the concrete outbuildings. It crumbled beneath the fifty-foot giraffe’s chest and shoulders as she crashed into it face-first.
Castle passed Monstro’s height.
“Hey!”
The creature turned to face her.
Her mass was nowhere near enough to back one of her punches with anything but air but she concentrated as hard as she could on converting it into muscle and size. She continued to draw the winds. The titanic, over-inflated black horse looked like an escaped parade balloon.
“You leave her alone!” Castle shouted.
With one hoof the size of a minivan, she kicked as hard as she could. Two cars, struck by her foot, shot up and into Monstro’s belly. One of them exploded (just like in the movies) while the other merely made the monster take a few steps back. It recovered quickly and, snarling, dove at Castle.
She was fast but not fast enough to avoid the towering pile of hide, scales, and muscle. He hit her with an impact loud enough to momentarily overshadow the gathering storm. She gasped as she hit the ground and lost air in a rush of wind from her mouth. She got smaller, denser, in the wake of the attack.
Castle felt a surge of surprise. She had a weakness.
It wasn’t easily exploitable, and she doubted Monstro had noticed, but she had a weakness: her unconverted air could be squeezed out of her. She sprang to her hooves and kicked her leg into Monstro’s groin. Then, she grabbed his head like they’d taught her in self-defense class. She brought the beast’s muzzle down into her knee. In the month since she’d quit the power station job, she’d taken a judo class and was, now, applying its lessons for the first time.
Thunder crashed overhead as the winds, and Monstro, roared.
He pushed back, startled but not overtly hurt. Castle stumbled back to catch her breath.
Monstro roared again. Lightning and electricity rippled from the storm clouds into its mouth. Electricity burst from capacitors on the edge of the power plant grounds and arced into the beast’s body as it grew past a hundred feet tall to a hundred ten … a hundred twenty. It was devouring the energy both of the power plant and Castle’s storm.
Castle looked up at the spinning clouds and got an idea.
“Hey, monster!” she shouted. Monstro looked over. She reached out with all her power making the funnel clouds spin faster. Above her a black tornado began to form. The winds whipped inwards and debris scattered across the power plant grounds. Castle concentrated on converting as much air into solid mass as she could, faster than she’d ever done before. “Wanna know why they call me ‘Hurricane’?”
Monstro didn’t answer but snarled and charged forward.
Castle was ready.
She met the charge with both hands, gripping Monstro’s wrists and falling back on her rear. Her body, still mostly balloon, squished and deformed under him as she pulled him close, over her, and planted her hooves on his abdomen. Then, with all her strength, she kicked him over and away from the power plant. She grew past a hundred feet again as the funnel of the tornado descended around her. Cars were flung like paper. Her quarry still grew, but the air flowed into her faster than Monstro could absorb the lightning.
She loomed over him watching him seem to diminish down past her breasts to her hips. She loomed some two hundred forty feet tall.
“I’m coming, Castle! Hold on!”
Castle didn’t look back. Miss Switch would arrive late. It didn’t matter. She was in the eye of the storm, now, and the raging winds fueled her. The power sang in her limbs, making her fill out and get bigger and bigger. The pleasure, the sensation, was unlike anything else. She narrowed her eyes and gritted her teeth. It was exhausting but she kept converting air into muscle and size with each passing second. She didn’t know what she’d do with the tornado when she was done growing; a part of her didn’t care. All she did care about was Monstro.
She dove at the beast and tackled it.
Monstro roared and tried to fight back, but she smothered his toothy maw beneath her as she pinned his wrists to the ground. With the tornado around her Monstro was finding it hard to breathe. All the available air was fueling Castle. Monstro’s eyes began to bulge.
Tendrils of black energy whipped around the giant combatants and sank into the beast.
It howled with pain as Miss Switch began to drain the size and power out of him.
Monstro shrank as Castle grew. She didn’t risk a glance behind her at Miss Switch but knew that the giraffe was growing, too.
Monstro got smaller and smaller, gasping for air and struggling.
Castle grew past two-hundred-fifty feet as Monstro shrank to forty.
Then, suddenly, the creature burst beneath Castle’s mass. A pale, green mist exploded into the air quickly dispersed by the winds. Monstro had been defeated. Castle had won.
Slowly, she stood, the wind raging around her. She looked down and saw a knee-high Miss Switch staring up at her, wide-eyed. The feeling was amazing. How tall was she, now? Three hundred feet? Three-fifty?
“Cas! Castle, please: you’ve got to stop! The storm! The tornado: they’ll rip the town apart!”
Castle sneered. “So? I did it! I beat the monster!”
Miss Switch looked scared. “But what kind of monster are you replacing him with?” she screamed over the winds.
Castle frowned. She was jealous; Tamara had always been jealous. And, now, she wanted her smaller again. She wanted weak, little Cassie instead of Hurricane Castle. Of course she did.
A stroke of lightning momentarily blinded her and, in that moment, Tamara dove directly into her stomach. Castle flew back, stumbling over a tiny semi-truck and crushing a stand of trees beneath her hooves. She fell and the small but heavy Miss Switch dove on top of her. The giraffe’s tendrils of power reached out and felt cold against Castle’s fur. Then, she started collapsing in on herself. The air rushed out of her and the tornado began to dissipate.
“No! Get off of me!” she shouted.
But Miss Switch held on.
Slowly, Castle shrank to Switch’s size and, then, even smaller. Miss Switch began to expel her own stolen mass in arcs of black lightning. The two women, as the storm dissipated, shrank down and down until both were back to their normal heights. Each was panting as Miss Switch slowly stood on shaking hooves.
“I...I’m sorry,” she said. “You were losing it.”
Castle punched her.
Taken by surprise, Miss Switch stumbled back and tripped over what was left of a tree branch. Castle didn’t even notice the pain in her knuckles.
“You stay away from me,” she snarled. “I was there; I was in the moment! I was the biggest and most powerful super of all time and you took it away from me!” She was exhausted and couldn’t even raise a breeze.
“Cas: you … you weren’t yourself.”
“How do you know what I am?” she snapped. Turning away, she started towards town. Fires burned in the husks of nearby cars and fallen debris. Several collapsed buildings loomed like the shell-shocked remnants of a bombing campaign.
“Cas! Please!”
But Hurricane Castle had already stormed off.
* * *
“So, what’s the story? Were you bitten by a radioactive puffer fish?”
Castle ground her teeth and tried not to imagine sitting on the reporter and slowly growing until her accrued mass made him pop like a grape.
“Hardly,” she said. She adjusted her black mask with one hand and wished, again, she’d gone for goggles with smoked lenses. The lights of the studio were blinding. “As I said, it was all Qilin’s fault. If not for her—”
“And even the rest of the Balloon Babes? They also benefitted from Qilin’s mad experiments?”
Internally, she made a note to have a talk with her agent about setting up interviews with jerks who still referred to that one-off comment in the editorial pages back at the beginning. The Cetasian Agency had reached out to her to help Castle control her public image in the wake of copious collateral damage. All she had to do was make a few public appearances for the agency’s clients and, in return, her agent—Missy—would get her booked on a number of shows to talk about her life and defend herself from accusations that she was a destructive attention-whore.
But Missy hadn’t done her job this time.
Castle hadn’t spoken with Fury or Miss Switch in over a month and, clearly, her standing instructions to not be addressed as part of either “the Balloon Babes” or even “the Shock Troops” was not getting through. It was annoying.
“The short-lived group I was with, the Shock Troops,” she replied, “all got their powers the same way. Both Fury and Miss Switch benefitted from the mad scientist’s experiments … whatever they were. But, really, since no one really knows, what does it matter now?”
She was now eight feet tall: the size she preferred to use in everyday “heroic” life. She was bulging around the hips, muscles, and torso, not fully incorporating the air she’d absorbed that morning into mass. It made her a bit lighter on her feet and helped make her less easy to identify. Although, given how good it felt, she’d not gone back to being merely “Cassie” in two weeks.
“Well, my next guest may be able to shed some light on that,” the interviewer said with a game show host smile. His voice sounded forced and stilted.
Castle sighed, inwardly. Another guest? Great. She was supposed to be the only one on “Ampsburgh Today”; it was supposed to be her big chance to help smooth over the recent incident at the grain exchange … and the hoof-shaped holes she’d put in Amstel’s Dam just south of town … and the flattened part of Topridge State Forest. The world was so fragile: why couldn’t people just understand that and cut her break?
“So,” the interviewer continued against the backdrop of scattered applause, “please help us welcome the one, the only, Doctor Qilin!”
Castle’s thoughts screeched to a halt as she spun to face the parting curtains.
There, in her white lab coat embroidered with gold, crimson, and blue arcane symbols, was the dragon-bodied Doctor Qilin. Flanking her were two of her cybernetic foo-dogs. A cruel smile on her face, the doctor fired a laser-like shot of energy from the concealed gun in her coat pocket, zapping Castle. Her muscles burned and her mind clouded.
As the audience continued to clap insanely, Castle fell to the ground noticing, for the first time, that the interviewer, stage crew, and audience looked more ...mindless... than most normal people did.
The dragon-bodied Qilin walked up, her equine legs clopping with hoofstep after hoofstep.
“Sorry, my dear,” Qilin said icily, “but it’s now time to end this little experiment.”
Castle tried to make a snappy retort but her jaw was locked. She couldn’t speak; she could barely breathe. Whatever Qilin had zapped her with was making her mind sluggish and her muscles, unresponsive. The mad scientist looked so much smaller than she had been all those months ago. It was difficult to remember how scary she had seemed as a neophyte hero. But, now, all those trepidations came rushing back.
The foo dogs, half-lions and half-wolves, possessed powerful mechanical limbs and flowing, stylized manes. Their large, bulging eyes glared at Castle as they stalked around her, circling like sharks. Their fanged muzzles radiated a hyena’s smile.
Quickly, with the audience and staff still applauding, the mad doctor quickly placed six small statues on the stage around Castle. Each looked like a tiny, jade foo dog with red rubies for eyes and sat on a platform laced with circuitry and LEDs. The arcane machines took a while to adjust, apparently, but after about fifteen minutes, the doctor stood and crossed her equine arms, satisfied.
“There,” she said. “All ready. Just needed one of you at the center, and I figured you would do nicely.” She knelt down and tousled Castle’s mane. “Too bad you didn’t vet your agent more thoroughly. You’d have found that her agency has only been around for a year or so. I knew one of you young heroes would need their help sooner or later. It was the perfect way to maneuver one of you into place when my plans were finally done.”
“You … were in … prison,” Castle finally managed to gasp. Her jaw burned but she hoped that by talking to the evil woman she could delay long enough for her powers to kick back into gear.
“No, my dear,” Qilin said. “I was never a prisoner. The State Correctional Facility has been under my control for eighteen months. I just wanted to be sure that I was safely ‘locked away’ while I finished calibrating the powers I gave to each of you. As they grew, they matured. And, now, they’re ripe for the harvest.”
Castle felt like an immediate idiot. She and the others had been played. She should have realized that a long-time villain like Qilin wouldn’t have been so easily beaten; not by three novices. Before she could speak again, though, a boom shook the studio. The audience continued to clap.
Qilin looked up as the roof was ripped off. Fury, her giant face twisted in anger, glared down at her.
“Let … my … friend … go!” she boomed.
Castle felt a surge of hope. The cameras must have been broadcasting or word leaked out about Qilin’s attack. Fury, despite their fallen relationship, had come to help. Judging by her giant size, she was furious, too.
“Ah, the oversized zebra,” Qilin said. “Right on time.” She gestured and a burst of light surged from the six, little foo dog statues striking Fury in the face. Fury, bathed in a golden light, looked like she was trying to scream but couldn’t move. Despite being sixty feet tall, she’d been immobilized by Qilin. “Now,” she said, “let’s get you good and angry...”
It was all a plot; it was all a master plan and each of them was a part of it. No doubt Qilin had contingencies ready for Miss Switch, too, should she arrive. Castle had to do something. It was all spinning out of control.
“Absorption,” Qilin lectured, “is so interesting a thing. It enables you to take in power from outside sources. But, really, regardless of the source, you have to ask yourself where it’s all going. In this case, your powers have been feeding my foo capacitors for months. And, now, they’re finally charged: charged with emotion, structure, and the power of storms: enough for me to finally complete my life’s work!”
“But … what’s it … for?” Castle gasped.
Qilin laughed. “I can finally summon my lord and master to the earthly plane.”
Black tendrils snaked through the door and took Qilin by surprise. They shot through her and rooted themselves to the stage. The wooden floor began to crack, wither, and shrink beneath the mad occultist. But Qilin didn’t change or diminish; she resisted Miss Switch’s power. In the shadow of the stage door, Castle could just see Miss Switch drawing energy away from her captor. The gang was all here.
“Switch...” she gasped. Moving wasn’t any easier; she could barely talk. But she had to warn Tamara; warn everyone. “Switch: it’s … a … trap...” The audience’s clapping, their hands starting to bleed, drowned out her warning.
Despite her preparations, though, Qilin groaned. Her body pulled in on itself and became pale and grey. Her lab coat hung in folds on her deflating body as Miss Switch stepped into the room, already twelve feet tall from the stolen mass and size from the floor and villain.
“Sorry, Qilin: you made one hell of a mistake,” she said. “You threatened my friends.”
Castle could see it, even at this distance, that Switch was enjoying herself. Her gentle friend was as intoxicated by her powers as she and Fury. It made sense. By associating their powers with good sensations, using them had a positive reinforcement. Qilin had ensured that they would use their absorption abilities as often as possible. In that moment, she saw the past five months clearly: she’d been an addict and almost as bad a monster as the villains she’d fought.
“Not … really … a mistake” Qilin gasped.
She fired her pocket gun again and managed to zap Switch in the chest. Taken by surprise, the final hero fell, as paralyzed as Fury and Castle. The energy from the little foo dog capacitors shone their light on her, too, and Castle could feel the circuit becoming complete. Overhead, the sky burned with dark clouds as the pressure dropped. Energy and wind flowed in through the hole Fury had ripped in the ceiling. The winds flowed into her, but she wasn’t getting bigger. She felt the power flowing through her but the capacitors were drawing it off. Qilin stood back up and smiled cruelly.
“Ah, can you hear it? My Master is coming!”
The ground was shaking and, indeed, Castle could feel a powerful energy rising in the air. She continued to struggle, trying to move, but to no avail. She thought she made one finger twitch but that was all. Then, without warning, The rest of the ceiling exploded outward as a column of purple light flared from the foo statues and blew the roof off of the studio.
The audience clapped and clapped and clapped.
From where she lay she could see it: the purple energy gathered and coalesced. Form and passion and storms gathered and began to take the form of powerful, towering lion. His fur was deep red and tinged with black highlights the color of storm clouds. His eyes were wide and aflame with hatred and his body was bristling with more muscle than even Monstro had possessed.
“See him? He is here! The Demon Lord, Fahlraxxus has come!”
Something hit Fahlraxxus from the side in a blur. He was knocked out of Castle’s field of vision. Then a giant appeared above the building.
Big Girl landed with a boom, her foot crushing the stage and two of the six little statues. The arcane circle was broken.
Castle felt the energy drain stop.
The massive kangaroo, her tight-fitting T-shirt and short-shorts not her typical costume, loomed over the television studio some forty feet tall. She was standing up to her hips in the structure.
“Get everyone out!” she boomed. “I’ll handle the demon!” Then, with a rocketing boom, she leapt away.
Castle managed to move her head.
Nearby, stunned but not taken down, Qilin was crawling towards one of the still-unsmashed foo capacitors. Gritting her teeth, Castle forced her legs to move. She pressed her somewhat flexible, half-inflated hooves against the floor and, gaining traction, pushed herself towards her adversary. It was a battle of inches. For every foot she gained, Qilin advanced by two. But whereas Qilin was badly injured by being half-stomped by a giant kangaroo, Castle’s was healthy and her paralysis was wearing off.
The two reached the capacitor at the same time.
“Get … your hands … off!” the mad scientist gasped.
Castle didn’t listen. She drew back her fist and punched the dragon-horse-lion in the face.
Qilin’s head snapped back in unconsciousness.
Slowly, holding the small statue, Castle rose.
“Cas; Cas are you okay?” It was Tamara—Miss Switch—staggering towards her. She’d shrunk back to her normal height but could move again.
“Okay; yeah, I think … I think I am,” she answered. “What about Fury?”
“She fell somewhere outside the building,” Switch answered. “I don’t know.”
“Hopefully she’s shaking off the paralysis.” Castle looked up at the stormy sky and felt the winds. They tempted her, called to her, and she wanted to call them to make herself grow. “You heard what Qilin said?”
“Every word. She used us … turned us against each other.”
Castle shook her head. “No. We did that ourselves; I did that … I pushed you guys away.”
“It doesn’t matter: that demon has to be stopped.” Miss Switch finally made her way next to Castle and the two stood, holding each other up. A boom shook the ground and, looking overhead, they saw Big Girl go sailing back over the missing roof as if she’d just been punched by something.
“We have to get out there,” Castle said.
“But … but our powers: what if they fuel it more?” Switch asked.
“I don’t know,” Castle replied. “The circle’s broken but we can’t stay here.” She looked at the interviewer, toppled out of his chair in the wake of Big Girl’s arrival, still clapping his bloody hands. She gazed up at the audience in their chairs and swallowed. “Get them out of here, first. I’ll go find Fury and see if we can do something.”
“Look, I want to help—”
“You are helping,” Castle assured her. “But the people come first. I have to help Big Girl.” Without waiting for a response, she ran for the stage door and staggered outside.
The debris field stretched for a block in every direction. Nearby, partially pinned by a section of roof, was Nula. Her mane had been dyed scarlet but the zebra was, otherwise, the same as she’d always been.
“Fury!”
Castle ran up to her. Nula was conscious but weak. Her size had been drained away to fuel the monster that now loomed over the city. It was still growing, easily a hundred twenty feet high already, and advancing on Big Girl who was trying to get back on her oversized feet.
“They’ll destroy everything,” Fury gasped, as Castle helped free her.
“Get inside, rip out some walls if you have to, but help Miss Switch get the bystanders to safety!”
“What are you going to do?”
Castle stared up at the boiling sky and felt the temptation to use her powers rise. She knew the cost, she knew how addictive it was, and yet it had to be done.
“I’m about to get my second wind.”
Fury, exhausted and no longer feeling the rage that was drained from her, ran into the building to help Tamara.
As they had when she’d fought Monstro, the clouds began to spin. Castle felt the old, familiar rush of power flow into her. A tornado formed as, in the distance, Big Girl leaped and kicked the giant lion-demon square in the chest and bounced off. She was sixty feet tall and her landing crushed half a block’s worth of buildings. Castle hoped they were empty.
The giant demon lord was nearly two hundred feet tall and still growing.
Castle felt the winds reach a fever pitch around her and drag her off the ground with the low pressure in the storm’s core. She felt her body grow and began converting wind into mass. She bulged and swelled. Her contours filled out and expanded like over-thick rubber as she ballooned up in size. Widening her stance, she held off, hoping Big Girl could keep the demon occupied until Castle’s mass was sufficient.
She accidentally stepped on a knee-high car which rapidly became calf-high … then ankle-high. She grew faster and faster, dizzy from both the giddy use of her power.
The demon breathed fire, scorching a city block and setting Big Girl’s fur on fire.
The hero cried out in pain and had to leap away, heading for the river to douse the conflagration.
Fahlraxxus clenched its fists and roared a challenge to the skies.
He loomed over Ampsburgh, his massive paws dug deep into the ground. He raised his arms to the black skies and laughed a terrible laugh. His leonine tail swished like that of a cat with a newly-caught mouse. Qilin forgotten, the demon turned his gaze to the city at his feet. He sneered and took a deep breath, ready to spew more hellfire.
Castle kicked him in the back.
She looked worse than she ever had: her body was bulging and taut as if she’d just consumed a blimp. She loomed over the demon but her mass had still not solidified. She felt as if she was about to burst. She knew it wasn’t just a feeling: she was drawing so much air, so much wind, that her body was overloading. The danger of an explosion was real: she could feel it in her bones. The worst part was, it still felt good.
She punched again, her punches doing almost no damage but keeping the demon off-balance.
The creature turned its malevolent gaze at Castle and he breathed a gout of flame in her face.
Castle gritted her teeth and pushed through. Her stretching body seemed slightly resistant to the fire. The cyclonic winds descended in a whirling tornado. Both combatants continued to grow, each three hundred feet tall and rising. But the beast was stronger; more powerful. He threw a punch and slashed with his claws. Castle felt her body rip and bleed. But she forced herself to fight on.
She kicked him in the stomach and punched him twice in the face. She stopped another fiery breath by pinning his muzzle shut. She pushed Fahlraxxus back until he tripped, backwards, over a convenience store. He fell on his ass, crushing the Fourth Avenue Church of the Savior.
Not wanting to let up, she dove on him. In her wounded desperation, she failed to notice his tail. It lashed like a serpent and wrapped around her leg. It pulled and twisted her to the side, slamming her bulbous body into the ground. She actually bounced a couple of times as the wind was knocked out of her. She shrank about two dozen feet.
Slowly, the demon stood and gazed down at her with fury and hatred.
Castle, wracked with pain, tried to get up.
The lion slammed his foot down on her face and crushed Castle into the ground.
“Now, little one,” he boomed, “this world ends in fire...”
Fury punched him in the jaw.
Rocketing up on a mixture of frustration and rage, the crimson-maned zebra looked like she was angrier than she’d ever been.
Black tendrils of energy snaked out of the alleys and down the streets where the demon fell and stabbed into his body. He screamed a cry of denial as his body began to wither and shrink. Over the horizon of a nearby office building, Miss Switch began to grow.
Castle moaned but didn’t let her injuries keep her down. The called the winds again. The column of the tornado descended once more and surrounded her, filling her with force and power. She felt herself growing bigger and fuller; ready to explode. Gritting her teeth, she held on and strode towards the fight. Fury and the demon were fighting hand-to-hand but with Fury only three-quarters the demon’s height. Despite being only half of that, Miss Switch had joined in.
But Castle dwarfed them all.
Surrounded by the storm’s fury, she loomed twice as tall as the demon. All that air, all those bulging and silly-looking curves that made her look like a balloon, solidified into powerful muscle and mass.
Demon Lord Fahlraxxus looked up, his face captured by fear for the first time, as Castle raised her hoof over him. He was two hundred feet tall, reduced by expending power and being drained by Switch, but Castle was three times that. She brought her foot down and crushed him to the ground in a single blow. The winds surrounded them, forcing Fury and Switch to back away, as Castle drew the air from his lungs. The flames in the streets guttered and were snuffed out. Fahlraxxus grasped for her legs with his tail but she was too big, now. She stomped on him again and again, growing larger as he shrank.
He tried to rise, to crawl away and get back to the damaged studio building, but Castle didn’t let him.
With all the fury she could draw from the storm, she pounced on him, slamming her giant body down over his ankle-high form. She felt the Demon Lord compress under her mass and, after a moment’s pressure, burst from the impact. The demon’s scream of pain echoed through the streets but was swallowed up by the fury of the storm.
Castle lay, battered and bruised, in the remains of the city streets, having crushed two city blocks beneath her.
The storm raged on and she wanted to let it. She wanted to let it sweep away the devastation and take her with it. She wanted to let it all end.
But things didn’t end so neatly outside the pages of a comic book.
This was her life.
If things were to conclude, she’d have to finish them, herself.
It took all her strength but, slowly, she let go of the storm. The winds began to fade and she began to dwindle. By the time she was able to stand on her shaking legs, she was being helped up by her two teammates. They were all roughly the same size, now: each about a hundred and twenty feet high with most buildings coming up to their knees. In the distance, bounding across the cityscape, was Big Girl. Fury and Miss Switch hugged Castle. Despite their injuries, none of them held back.
The storm and battle dissipated but the mass each of them had accrued wasn’t draining away very fast. Big Girl, singed and only half their height, bounded up to them, looking warily at the three.
“Are you girls okay?”
Fury and Miss Switch nodded but Castle shook her head.
“Lots of people were hurt,” she said. “I’m far from ‘okay’.”
Big Girl nodded and reached up to take Castle’s hand. “I’d say that’s a normal response,” she said.
“Let’s clean up this mess,” Switch added.
“I’ll start by getting people out of the buildings,” Fury said.
“Agreed,” Big Girl said.
As they started to go about the work of heroes, Castle reached out to take Big Girl by the shoulder. The kangaroo turned around.
“When we’re done,” Castle said, “we’re going to need some help.”
Big Girl cocked her head, curiously. “Help? With what?”
“I want to use my powers but...” She trailed off thoughtfully. After a moment, she asked, “Is there a rehab clinic for supers?”
Big Girl smiled and nodded. “If there isn’t, we’ll start one,” she said. “After all, I wasn’t completely honest with you.” She hugged what she could reach of the giantess’ leg. “All heroes are addicted to using their powers,” the kangaroo admitted.
Castle smiled and nodded. Wearily, she joined the others in cleaning up after the storm.
End
