Original Twist 1 part two.

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The emergency escape door fell away, and the would be inter stellar travellers climbed out still dressed in their purple jumpsuits.  Just the feeling of getting good old terra firma underneath her soles again was a surprising and unplanned for joy for Susan.  Then she saw the look in her brother’s eye and got a pretty good idea of exactly what he was thinking.

“Johnny if you say ‘let’s do that again’ right now there isn’t a court in the world that would convict me.”  Johnny made as if those words had been the furthest thing from, his mind.  “Actually sis I was about to comment on what a total bust this turned out to be, guess our tour guide wasn’t all that smart after all...”  

Susan didn’t feel that bad about dealing her brother a small whack upside the head, though for some reason her brother’s head felt even harder then normal.  “Jonathan Spencer Storm!  The only reason that we’re still alive is because of the brilliance of Reed Richards so you should at least give him a certain amount of respect...”  

Since it was clear Johnny wasn’t about to do this Susan decided it was time to fight dirty.  “Besides, he’s also the man who is dating your sister.”  Because of all the time she’d spent playing mother to him, Johnny tended to take the prospect of her dating about as well as the children of most widows who’d lost their husbands while their kids were still growing up.  

Johnny’s skin seemed to become noticeably paler and his eyes bulged out in shock slightly before his shoulders slumped and he focused on walking.  “Fine, you pretend I’ll never said those particular words and I’ll pretend you never said anything in response to them.”  This agreement left Susan free to focus on walking, which was a good thing, because Johnny was making it an unusually difficult task.  

He felt heavier, and not just had put on a pound or fifteen while he was at college and thus could eat whatever he wanted, it felt like he weighed at least thirty to fifty pounds more than he used to!  As she struggled along Susan realized something else that was out of place, given that he wasn’t helping his good for precious little younger brother stumble along their pilot should have passed the two Storms almost at once, and yet he was still hanging behind them.  “Something the matter, Ben?”  

Susan turned around as she asked the question and Ben waved a hand in a gesture of reassurance.  “It’s nothing, you think this was bad?  You should have seen some of the rough landings I ended up being involved in a few years back, but I walked away from all of them and I’m gonna walk away from this one also!”  

The words on their own were comforting, but Ben’s tone of voice suggested something completely different than what he said, as did the way that both of his hands seemed to be clutching his shoulders for dear life.  Deciding that since the worst Johnny needed was a chance to lay down and catch his breath Susan gently helped him sit down and once she’d done that she raced to Ben’s side.  

In the process Susan couldn’t help but notice that all of a sudden every step she took made her feel decidely... weird.  With every step she took it felt as if the world was pulling down on her especially hard, and then especially softly a few moments later.

But any concerns she had over her own state of being were pushed aside as Ben let loose with the kind of cry you’d normally expect only to hear in a gritty action movies when the valiant hero was mercilessly tortured by the evil villains.  He sank to his knees with tears starting to form in his eyes.  “My shoulders... something wrong with my shoulders...”  

Susan gently brushed aside Ben’s hands trying to get a look at what could possibly be causing him the pain.  But sadly all she saw beneath his hands was the purple jumpsuit.  For a moment she contemplated asking him to pull down some of the jumpsuit so she could see what was bothering him beneath it, but before she could decide a strange ripping sound filled her and she jumped away from it out of pure instinct.  

Instinct had something going for it that day, because much of the back of Ben’s jumpsuit was suddenly torn to shreds as a pair of large purple wings suddenly sprouted from his back.  As this happened Ben let loose with such an ear-shattering scream, that it made Susan wonder if she’d lost her hearing for a moment after it ended.  

In reality it turned out that Ben’s scream had led to an unexpected calm.  Now that the wings had finally worked their way to the surface they apparently weren’t tearing him apart on the inside, so the only sounds that filled the air after his scream ended was the gentle swishing of Ben’s wings as first the right flapped, then the left, then the right again.  

He gingerly reached over his shoulder and began to feel out the texture of his wings, to Susan’s eye they weren’t exactly leathery like a bat’s, or winged like a bird’s, but instead had segmented plates like they belonged to some kind of insect.  “Well I’ll be...”  Those three words uttered Ben’s wings began to beat together in a rhythm that grew quicker and quicker until she wondered if her eyes were deceiving her and Ben was rising off the ground.  

Then she knew her eyes weren’t as Ben shot upwards into the sky and did a quick loop-de-loop, evidently just for the fun of it.  Susan just stared in amazement.  She wasn’t as smart as Reed, but she was smart enough at a moment like this.  So faced with the impossible much to her surprise she found a certain serenity in reciting the facts she had been living by up to this moment.  “There’s no way that can work.  Birds have hollow skeletons which weigh less. A human with a pair of wings that were of the same scale as the ones birds have would never be able to fly.  Never...”  


Sadly, much like the bumblebee, at the moment Ben was showing blatant disregard for what human knowledge had to say on the subject of aviation, quite easily staying airborne and pulling off an impressive series of maneuvers until he finally came in for a landing that was every bit as smooth as the group’s last one was rough.  “I’m not exactly sure how it happened but a guy could get used to this...”  

Johnny apparently had other ideas as he slowly rose to his feet.  “You’re happy?  Look at yourself Ben, you’re a freak!  I bet that weird cosmic ray storm we ran into had something to do with this.  I’d gladly punch Reed Richards in the face hard enough to knock a few of his teeth loose right about now, but since he isn’t around and you’re his oldest friend I suppose you’ll have to do.”  

As Johnny spoke his skin became paler, and paler and paler until it lost all trace of color, and became white.  Then it went even farther, finally acquiring a silvery metallic sheen to it.  He walked towards a large tree, leaving very deep footprints in the ground, wrapped his arms around the trunk and pulled.  

He somehow managed rip the tree (roots and all) out of the ground and turned around holding the tree in both hands like an oversized bat.  “Now why don’t  you step away from my sister so I’ve got some room to swing this thing and can properly crush you!”  Ben took to the air, easily ascending to a height beyond which Johnny could strike him, even with the aid of his huge weapon.  “Why don’t you calm down for a moment kid?  Johnny swung away even if all he could hit was empty air.  

“Calm?  I am calm!  I just don’t recall signing a disclaimer about how his little trip might involve unexpected mutations!”  Susan took a moment to evaluate the situation, and then a single step forward.  “Johnny, put down the tree.”  Her brother stopped swinging away a Ben for a moment to glare a her, leaving the tree to rest horizontally pointing towards her, though she was perhaps about three feet between the end of it and the start of her body.  

Granted if Johnny stepped forward and swung that thing unless she managed to go flat on the ground very fast it’d connect, and if it connected it turn whatever part of her body it hit to mush.  “Why should I?”  There were a great many smart moves someone could made in Susan’s situation, but the action she decided on, taking another step forward was doubtlessly not one of them.  “Because I’m your older sister and I told you to put it down.”  

The response she got was more or less word-for-word exactly what she expected to get from Johnny when he was in one of his snits, even if he previously hadn’t been able to cause quite so much havoc with just his bare hands.  “I’d like to see you make me.”  “Then make sure to keep your eyes open.”  

Susan could feel that there was something different about her body, she wasn’t sure what, but at some point after getting off of that ship she’d changed, even if it wasn’t as obvious as with Ben and Johnny.  She slowly curled her hands into fists and all over her body she felt muscles tensing, winding up, compacting, storing energy, as if every single atom of her being was on up on its non-existent legs cheering its heart out, pouring out all the energy it could muster for her.

She allowed her gaze to dip slightly towards the tree, the distance she’d have to cross, then her eyes focused on her brother, the goal she had to reach.  Susan dived in without the slightest ounce of hesitation.  

Getting from where she currently stood to Johnny would be tricky, luckily her body seemed unusually obliging, in the sense that it seemed to be trying to lengthen itself to make up the difference.  No, her body actually was lengthening itself, as from her waist up Susan felt herself growing longer and longer like a tape measure slowly being unwound.  

She looped herself around the tree over and over again as she raced along its length.  Johnny in surprise dropped the thing, but even as the tree hit the ground Susan only felt a slight bump, and didn’t let it deter her.  She hadn’t become captain of her high school swimming team by pausing when she’d reached the middle of the pool to see how the other swimmers were doing, she did it by picking a target and not letting anything come between her and it, so what if the distance seemed to grow longer?  

Water played tricks with the way the eye perceived distance, you kept stroking all the same, or in this case stretching.  She reached the end of the stump of the tree and then “leapt” (in the sense of her body arched upwards though she had no idea what was propelling it) and her hands grabbed hold of her brothers.  

It was easy from there, her hand elongated wrapping themselves all along the length of her brother’s arms before growing even longer so as to bind his midsection and finally his metal legs.  Susan pulled, and even if it felt like her brother weighed several hundred pounds, she had all the leverage in the world and subsequently he toppled like a statue.  

While he was on the ground he began to get some of his wits back and started to thrash about, achievieng about as much as your average fish did while it flopped about on board a boat with a hook still firmly attached to its jaw.  Eventually he lay still with a petulant look on his face.  

Ben landed softly next to them gazing at the latest round of squabbling between the members of the Storm family in amazement.  “Jeez Susy, I’ve heard of girls getting bent out of shape before but...”  Now that she’d accomplished her goal, Susan finally had time to catch her breath and think about what she’d done.  

The first thing she did was look behind her, directly behind her, in the sense of her neck twisted about like to a degree that would have sent plenty of people running to try and find the nearest priest, allowing her to see the ’lengths’ to which she had gone, and the fact that her legs were still standing there back where she had been a couple seconds ago as if nothing at all out of the ordinary was going on.  

Susan pressed a hand to her neck for a moment and felt the twist she’d put in it. The human body wasn’t supposed to be able to bend like that without wrenching the wind pipe, which led to suffocation, so how was she still breathing?  Granted the human body wasn’t supposed to be able to stretch itself out until it was longer than a tree with arms that had to be over five feet!   

Putting aside all the things that she was doing which she wasn’t supposed to be able to she returned her attention to her brother and the thing he had been explicitly told by her (and apparently today Susan Storm was proving to be a harsher mistress then common sense) not to do.  “Johnny say you’re sorry.”  Johnny squirmed about in the purple part-cocoon part-straitjacket made of his sister’s limbs that he had been trapped in.  

“No fair, since when could you go all bendy like that!  I got used to the fact that you had a longer reach then me growing but this is totally ridiculous!”  Susan caused her right arm to elongate slightly, and made as if she was about to tenderly drape this extra length of her body over her brother’s mouth.

“Say it now or I won’t let you say anything for a long while.”  Johnny gave in.  “Okay fine, I’m sorry Ben.  But seriously guys somewhere between almost getting blown up in space, nearly getting killed coming back to earth, you growing wings, is it really so much to ask for one minute for a man to properly freak the hell out so he can at least get losing his shit over and done with before he winds up with post-traumatic stress disorder?”  

That was about as close as Susan expected her brother to come to an actual apology and given their less than conventional situations it would do. “No more trying to hit people with trees, promise?”  “I promise all right?  Just let go of me, the sooner you do that the sooner I can start  trying to forget how my sister beat the crap out of me, again.”  

Susan began to unwind herself slowly, hoping and praying all the while that everything would go back to its proper place.  Her current appearance was convenient for the task that used to be at hand, but if she couldn’t reverse it then she’d probably end up spending the rest of her days with her head in one room, her belly-button in another, and her ass in a third, not exactly the most enjoyable of arrangements.  

Slowly but surly however everything did flow back together. Her arms returned to their original length, her midsection retraced and she found herself once again looking just like she normally would.  Or almost like normal.  “Very funny guys...”  

She wasn’t talking to Ben or Johnny but to he index and middle finger of her right hand, she’d crossed them at some point and while she’d been getting the rest of her body back in order they’d just kept right on  crossing themselves, at the moment they’d overlapped one another so many times that they now gave her the appearance of having a malformed hand with only three fingers, one of which was far larger than the others.  Luckily the situation quickly remedied itself as her fingers untwisted themselves.  

Johnny and Ben slowly approached Susan (one on the wing, the other on foot) as if afraid she’d suddenly launch herself at them as her body lost all definition transforming into something resembling the monster out of a bad black-and-white horror film.  Well they were all a little unnerved by one another at the moment so at least thing where equal among the three of them.  The three of them?  

Susan’s face met her palm with such force that she was sure she could feel her nose and flattening out before springing back to their normal appearance as she removed her hand.  “Reed! We were all so busy worrying about ourselves that none of us realized that Reed’s still in the ship.  He might have gotten hurt or need help getting out for some other reason.”  

She tired to make “some other reason” sound as if she was saying he was currently pinned underneath some piece of equipment that had come loose.  What she was thinking of course was that given that Ben had grown wings,  her brother had apparently turned into some kind of robot and she, Susan decided she’d waste time worrying about her own situation later, logic would seem to dictate that Reed would have changed in some way as well, and that change might be why he hadn’t joined them outside the ship.  

She took all of one step back towards the ship, and then showing the kind of pinpoint Malus Ex Machina that didn’t make atheists because anyone who saw such an event would know it couldn’t have happened by random chance alone, the ship exploded.  

Susan just stood there, she vaguely felt several pieces of flaming shrapnel which ranged in size from about as large as a tick to one that had to be about the size of a baseball struck her body.  Susan barely felt the impacts.  When the dust finally settled she look down, not one single rip in her purple jumpsuit, no sight of her pink flesh, none of said skin torn open with blood oozing from the cuts, and a nice collection of wreckage various distances from her feet that had apparently tried to go through her and bounced off.  

Susan was somehow reminded rather distinctly of some Greek (at least she thought it was Greek she could have been wrong) tragedy about how some famous warrior had been cursed with an indestructible body by a god he’d angered for some reason or another so that he’d never die and subsequently never be reunited with his dead love in the afterlife.  
Looking down at the pieces of razor sharp metal which should have torn her open like confetti, but instead had apparently hit her, and only made her body distend slightly before they were slingshotted away with close to the same amount of force as they struck her, a singular thought ran through Susan’s mind.  Immortality was going to suck.  

As that thought passed she found at least a slight silver lining: clearly hanging herself would only leave her with a absurdly long but still functioning neck, putting a gun in her mouth would lead to the bullet bouncing back out, jumping off the Empire State Building would probably leave her two dimensional but doubtlessly for less then a full minute, sticking her head in an oven would probably melt her into a puddle, but poison would probably work.  

At least so long as it was the right type of poison, sitting in a closed garage with the car engine on seemed like a fairly good plan also, or better still she could hurl herself into vault of industrial acid.  

Of course in the time it’d taken Susan to go over all the plans for suicide that would (and wouldn’t) work, she’d also had time to disregard the concept entirely.  Johnny didn’t deserve to have her remove herself from his life so suddenly, and the entire idea of giving up now seemed disrespectful to Reed’s memory. Die in some over-elaborate experiment gone wrong, that perfectly suited him of course, but to actually engineer ones own destruction?  

At some point after the blast, the two surviving male members of the craft had taken up positions on either side of her, Johnny put a heavy metal hand on her right shoulder.  “I’m sorry about what I said a bit back.  “Reed was a great guy, definitely the Fredrick Von Fronkenstein of mad scientists.  He sort of reminded me of myself sometimes actually, because behind all of those words that went right over my head, at the end of the day he was a just a guy who wanted to play with his toys.”  

She also felt one of Ben’s arms on her left shoulder, and one of his wings rubbing up against her back.  “Reed wasn’t the first friend I’ve lost like that, when his bird basically blew itself to bits around him.  It would have been quick like that, and painless as you could ask for.”  

Somebody disagreed.  /Ouch....  Susan felt her eyebrows just about jump off of her head.  “Did either of you two just here somebody say ‘ouch’ by any chance?”  From the surprised and downcast looks on their faces they evidently hadn’t, which in turn meant that they probably thought she was either just plain crazy or at least too stricken with grief to be thinking properly.  

But she was sure she had heard that voice, well maybe ‘heard’ wasn’t the right word, it was more like she had sensed it, but voices didn’t just pop into people’s heads for no reasons.  “Fine go ahead and call me crazy you can even make the little swirling index finger gestures while you’re at it, but even after a blast like that there’s probably something left of him that we should find so that we can bury something more than a coffin full of dirt with his name on it!”  

They couldn’t argue with her on that, so regardless of whatever they thought the chances of finding something alive among the ruins was, the three of them began to sort through the rubble.  In the process both Storm siblings showed off considerably.  Johnny was easily able to lift even the largest bits of rubble and hurl them aside while Susan found that she could extend her fingers to any length that she wanted them to be, sending them crawling this way and that among the wreckage hoping to find something that felt organic in nature.

Though sadly Susan’s probing fingers failed to locate any trace of Reed, she did realize something about herself.  There was no denying that she’d been in “L” “O” “V” “E” “LOVE” with Reed Richards.  He’d doubtless meant a lot more to her than just some old (well older) guy who she was throwing down with in exchange for some monetary favors (room and board instead of actual cash changing hands) or some eccentric genius who she hung around with because his foibles amused her, if he was just either of those things then there was no way she’d be feeling the way she currently was.  

Whoever had said “you don’t know what you have till you lose it” had been right on the money, no doubt about it.  Except that at the moment Susan was still clinging to the impossible hope that she hadn’t lost it.  Okay maybe not impossible, as Reed would say nothing was impossible until it was directly proven, until then it was just an implausible theory, like that Reed had been changed in such a way so as to survive having a front row seat to having a rocket which still had enough fuel left in it for a one-way trip to the moon blow itself to bits.  

Despite Susan and her brother’s advantages slow and steady won this particular race, it was Ben who the first to find something worth talking about among the wreckage, and what a something.  “Wow, we can probably get at least a page in Ripley’s for this if not two.  The entire rocket goes up like a string of firecrackers and yet somehow his brain is left in perfect condition.  Couldn’t ask for a much more fitting representation of him.”  

In Ben’s hands he held what to Susan’s eyes was apparently a human brain.  Just a brain, no remnants of a skull, no actual damage done to the brain or any other sort of suggestion what exactly had destroyed the skull or the rest of the body.  /Forgive me for being overly dramatic, but rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.  

Susan was quite sure that she wasn’t the only one who had heard it this time around, chiefly because Ben suddenly decided to treat the brain like it was hot enough to scorch his palms and dropped it.  Without even thinking about it Susan’s right arm shoot out her palm flattening in the process so as to catch the vital organ without harming it.  

Johnny pointed at the brain and his voice two full octaves above normal and a slight stutter in his voice.  “I’m not the only one who heard that right?  Except that I’d have to be crazy to have heard that, I mean it’s a freaking brain, how is it suppose to talk, it’s like a dog with no nose smelling...”  It was one of the oldest jokes in the book which was probably why Reed actually knew the punchline.  /Horrible.  I wasn’t sure at first but I think it’s probably a fair bet that in addition to being able to survive in my current less than ideal environment, I’m also psychic.  

More looks were exchanged among the three who still had eyes to gives looks with.  In the end Ben’s cold practicality won it.  “Well they say, anything is better then being dead.”  Johnny nodded slowly and solemnly.  “Let me guess, much too soon to be making jokes along the lines of how he always was the brains of the operation?”  Susan nodded curling her left hand into a fist (since her right was busy holding Reed) and emphasis was added to the gesture by the way her hand promptly grew to around three times its normal size.  “Much too soon.”  

Her hand shrunk back to its normal size as quickly as it had grown.  Ben shook his head as he turned his back on what was left of the wreckage.  “Seeing as the autopilot did take us back to our take-off point more or less we can probably reach civilization fairly easily, though that assumes that civilization doesn’t get out the torches and pitchforks the moment it catches sight of us.”  

Johnny playful drove his metal elbow with enough force that it should have cracked one of Susan’s ribs, luckily she didn’t seem to have any at the moment the impact just distorted her body slightly.  “Well we will just have to send my sister ahead first.  At the moment she looks like something that was actually born and didn’t climb out of a foul-smelling bog beneath the light of the full moon, or was created as part of a plot to take over the world.”  

Susan didn’t disagree, her body hadn’t grown any extra appendages, her skin was still the same color, as long as certain parts of her didn’t start growing long or getting shorter all of a sudden she could probably pass for human.  “And after that?”  She’d expected it to be one of those question that hung in the air so forcefully that it all but cast a physical dark cloud over their heads.  Instead her brother snagged it like a dog would a Frisbee the moment it left her mouth.  

“After that we become superheroes.”  Susan and Ben both glared at him, but Johnny just shrugged.  “Hey, if you guys can think of something better to do with your superpowers than fight crime I’d like to hear it.”  Susan could think of all kinds of better things she’d rather spend her time doing, like work how she felt about deciding she was in love with a man before finding out that all was left of him was his brain, his living psychic brain that could talk, but just his brain none the less.  

/I think Johnny’s’ idea has a certain amount of merit to it.  She wasn’t sure if Reed had been observing her thoughts (he officially claimed to be psychic now) or just throwing his general opinions into the ring.  Either way they caused Susan and Ben to harmonize over the exact same two words.  “You do?”  

If Reed had been able to nod or otherwise give ascent he probably would have.  /We’ve gifted with great powers, and should try do some good with them.  Though I suppose that we should try to focus on the problems at hand before we go about making long term plans.  I could be wrong, but I think my car is still intact...  

It was, the pickup truck that Ben had used to transport himself and Johnny to the area hadn’t been so lucky, to judge by the crater that was left of it Susan would guess that some piece of flaming debris from the exploding rocket had struck its fuel tank.  Reed’s car on the other hand had only picked up a couple new adornments -- pieces of jagged metal sticking out of it here and there -- but none of the tires had gone flat and it seemed to still be road-worthy.  

The three would be astronauts turned would be superheroes and gathered around the vehicle like it was some kind of blessed holy shrine.  It was locked, and all the doors were shut of course, so Susan quickly turned her attention to the fourth member of the group who she was still carrying.  “So where are the keys?”  

If Reed’s brain had possessed sweat glands they would have been kicking in full blast to judge by the tone ‘voice’.  /Well they were in one of the pockets of the jacket I took off and stored in the rocket when I put on my jump suit.  So they’re probably melted scrap...  The sound of Johnny’s metal hand hitting his metal head was a cross between the ringing of a bell and an industrial accident in the making.  

“Well that’s just great.  Okay fine, seeing as I’m able to tear through whatever kind of metal your rocketship was made of like tissue paper, something tells me that I won’t have too much trouble breaking a window with my bare hand.  Sis if you’d stand aside I’ll just punch through the driver’s side window, and unlock it that way, then I’ll pop the hood, we hot wire and we ride back.”  

He sounded a bit to confident that someone in the group would be able to successfully hotwire a car for Susan’s liking but she wasn’t exactly surprised.  /I’d prefer that you dind’t.  Johnny sighed his shoulder’s slumping slightly.  “Listen, I of all guys understand why you don’t want me smashing one of your windows, but considering everything else it has been through it’s more or less a lost cause no matter how you look at it.  

Besides if we’re gonna be superheroes we’ll need a mode of transportation that looks WAY cooler than this thing did even when it was new, back when fossil fuels meant killing a dinosaur grinding up its bones and pouring the powder into the tank.”  It was a long way to go for a bad joke, but Susan’s found it rather reassuring, as long as the four of them could laugh and joke among each other then they weren’t completely screwed the way they had all felt back up in that ship when those, whatevers had started pouring in and doing, whatever to their bodies.  

/I actually do have an alternative suggestion.  Susan would you mind handing me over to Ben, you’ll need both hands free before too long.  Susan nodded and slowly did hand Reed’s over, trying not to think about the sound that it made in the process.  /See that hole where a piece went through the driver’s side window?  Put your hand against it, then see if you can work a finger or two through the hole and open the door from the inside.  

Part of Susan wanted to ask how exactly Reed could see anything given that had no eyes, but she wasn’t particular enamoured of any of the possible answers she might get.  So instead she simply pressed her palm against the crack in question, which was plenty big enough to have slipped a penny or even a quarter through.  She had to work at it for a few moments but she managed to fit her entire hand through it, then it was just a matter of making that hand attached to a long enough arm let it firmly grasp the small lever which had locked the door and jerk it into the unlocked position.  

Susan only had to think about it to get her arm to zip back through the minuscule hole in the window, and she tenderly began to stroke as if to make sure it really was that easy.  While she had been doing that Johnny had brushed past her, opened the door and climbed into the drivers seat.  “All right, now it’s my time to shine.  Now let’s see to pop the hood I should just need to...”  

He got no farther before Reed interrupted again.  /Actually Johnny I want to have Susan try something first....  Johnny grumbled slightly but shifted over to the passenger’s side seat the car protesting his weight slightly.  Susan climbed into the driver’s seat and waited for the orders she knew she was going to get.

/If you think you can handle driving one handed, why don’t you try turning your left hand, or even a single finger should be enough really into a mockup of the key...  Susan couldn’t help but wonder just how much enjoyment Reed might have been getting out of ‘watching’ her twist and contort herself in all kinds of unnatural ways.  That said, she had a rather sick fascination with it herself. Johnny was clearly a lot stronger then he used to be, Ben could fly, and what was she exactly?  

Not wanting to look like a fool, she decided to use her entire left hand, sending it flowing into the ignition, and then carefully shaped it by touch alone so that it perfectly matched every ridge and bump waiting for her.  Only after she was certain her ‘handiwork’ was perfect did she close her eyes and twist her left wrist.  

Even after being peppered with shrapnel the engine came to life almost at once.  So apparently she could exert enough force on her body to have it pass for a metal car key, she wasn’t sure why that discovery made her feel so good, but it did.  Of course while she expressed that confidence with a small well dissevered smirk her brother was a bit more vocal.  “Wow Sis you’re turning into a veritable Swiss Army knife!”

Before Susan could respond there came a slight tapping at one of the car’s slightly shrapnel-studded windows.  She twisted her neck around to see it was Ben doing the tapping, he was still standing outside the car.  Susan quickly looked and saw that the car didn’t have a polite little button to press in order to unlock all the doors, if she wanted to unlock the door that Ben was standing at either she or Johnny would have to do it.  

Sending Johnny to do it would probably cause him to do another hundred dollars or so of damage to the interior of Reed’s car, but if she’d do it hen she’d either have to stop using her left hand as a makeshift, key... or she’d need longer arms.  As Susan stretched out her right arm to unlock the necessary door she reflected that she would have slapped herself in the face to punish herself for her stupidity.  

It was just as her right hand got a firm grip on the lock that what could only be described as a tentacle sprang from her left arm and rapped her softly across the cheek before it vanished back into the limb it had sprung from in the first place.  Johnny chuckled at the sight and Susan glowered.  

For a moment she contemplated slapping her arm, but while Susan might not be as much of a fan of slapstick as her brother she was fairly certain she’d seen a cartoon along similar lines and could guess how it would play out.  She’d slap her left arm and then one of her feet would find a way to kick her in her own posterior, by the time she had finished fighting herself she’d be such a mess that Ben and Johnny would spend the rest of the day fixing her, and now was no time for squabbling amongst each other, of any type, so she let it go.  

Ben climbed in and closed the door, adjusting himself as best he could so as to hold onto Reed, buckle in, and not have his wings get in the way.  Once he’d done that Susan attached her own seatbelt and glared at her brother until amid protests of how he was made of harder stuff then the car he buckled up as well.  Then she put her foot down, despite the fact that it was leaving carrying several times the weight it had originally brought to the site, Reed’s car managed to reach a respectable speed fairly quickly.  

“Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway, we’re the best of friend insisting that the world keep turning our way, and our way, is on the road again...”  “Johnny the driving manual suggests that the you should use only one foot to work the pedals regardless of whether it’s accelerator or brake.  “I’ve got one hand for a key so that our engine runs, and one hand on the wheel so I can more or less steer.  If you do the math, that still leaves me one leg free to strangle you if with if you make me want to hard enough.”   The three of them listened to the sounds of silence, all the way back.


End of chapter one.

AN: As some of you can probably guess by this point, obviously this story is intended to serve as a prequel to my other story Swelling With Love (which I’ve posted about 3/4ths of on FF.net)  That said, this story will eventually stretch itself out to the last chapter of this story perfectly book ending the first chapter of SWL.

If you haven’t read my other story then this chapter alone should at least give it a more solid grounding then a simple paragraph long author’s note at the start of it.  If you haven’t, then hopefully I’ve wetted your interest.

Either way hope you enjoy , I’ll probably update this story about once every two weeks, and know that I crave reviews like a vampire does blood.