Original Twist Chapter Five

Original Twist Chapter five, Experimentation: In which Susan Storm shakes hands and Reed Richards runs some tests.


“So as you can see Miss Storm, the Baxter Building is equipped with all the latest, in convinces, and doubtlessly cold serve as a fine apartment complex or...”  “I’ve had enough of the ten cent tour, I’ll buy it.”  

Susan really wished that she was wearing sunglasses and some kind of fur, (preferably made from the kind of animal that there weren’t many left of) as she said those words instead of an ordinary enough looking outfit that carefully concealed the purple jumpsuit beneath.  

The people who currently owned the Baxter Building had obviously done some fact checking when she’d called them up, but once they’d found that yes she really was legally authorized to act in place of Reed Richards an extremely rich and extremely eccentric genius, they rolled out enough red carpet to mummify an entire army.

After all, they clearly had no idea what exactly to do with this white elephant so why not make it someone else’s problem?  Susan had been the model of tact and grace for the most part, but she wasn’t about to give them the chance to let them show off every single floor to her, which they doubtlessly would have if they’d had the chance.  

“Of course Miss Storm, I believe we’ve got all the papers we need in the lobby, if you just follow me..”  Susan did a slightly vacant expression on her face.  /Well phase two seems to be going along much more smoothly than phase one did, lets hope things continue to get easier from here.  

She was not wearing a backpack with Reed’s brain in it.  The backpack was currently in the car which was parked outside the Baxter Building.  Susan had been a little worried about doing that since this was New York City, and she couldn’t be absolutely sure that someone wouldn’t steal the car (and Reed with it) while she wasn’t looking.  

Reed considered it a necessary risk since he wanted to be inside Susan’s head while she was touring what would soon be their new home.  He had also fairly quickly brought Susan around to his point of view that if someone was in the business of stealing cars, their shrapnel-perforated current mode of conveyance was probably the most unappealing target imaginable.  That was a hard argument to refute, considering it was hard to imagine how the car could get any more dilapidated without ceasing to function.  

There was a lot of important legal talk that by and large Reed translated for her (though sometimes his translations required another translation just to fully get the point across) but she understood the process well enough.  She signed all the necessary forms and was told that the place was hers.

---

Susan then headed back to Reed’s house. Driving at night was risky, but conveying Johnny and Ben around in day light would have been riskier.  The clothing they were wearing was much too extensive for the summer weather, but with the air conditioning in Reed’s car going full blast it was bearable for them, even if Susan (who was dressed in equally heavy clothing since being in the driver’s seat she got a bigger blast of AC than either of her backseat passengers) could feel her teeth chattering the entire way.  

With such heavy clothing on and his wings tightly folded, Ben looked a little like a hunchback, but most certainly not someone with wings and unless some light fell directly on her brother, no one was likely to directly notice the color of his skin.  

They parked in front of the Baxter Building, walked calmly inside as if they didn’t have anything to hide and then quickly began to remove their excess layers of clothing.  Johnny looked around the huge lobby and instantly came to a conclusion.  “I call this floor!”  

----

Susan looked at the list of items that Reed wanted her to obtain, Ben had transcribed it for him and so the handwriting was perfectly legible.  “I have two important questions.  The first, is where exactly am I going to get this stuff?  The second is, could you slowly and carefully explain to me how each one of them is pronounced?”  

---

Phase three came and went quickly.  Mainly because one didn’t purchase an entire skyscraper without making the news, and especially not when you were doing it through your girlfriend.  

So people were aware that reclusive genius Reed Richards was interested in expanding his laboratory and since Reed did in fact know the right people to talk to, it wasn’t too difficult to get it delivered to the Baxter Building.

Once it was inside the moving it to Reed’s lab became Johnny’s job, at least assuming said equipment was sturdy enough.  Bit by bit, piece by piece Reed was starting to develop a laboratory that was starting to make his old one look like a nothing more than a high school chemistry class.

----

Of course not all of all Reed’s equipment was for purely scientific purpose, and not all of his time was spent working on producing the team’s uniforms.  /Again.  Susan swung a fist that she had increased to comically large proportions against the pressure which was more or less exactly the same size as the fist that connected against it.  

Susan’s brow furrowed when she saw the readout, she still had no particular idea exactly what a single Newton really was the physical, real-world equivalent of, but she understood the basic principle well enough.  Newtons were used to measure how hard you hit something, and Susan’s last punch just like the one before it had been beneath her baseline no powers jab.  “I don’t get it.”  /I think I do.

Somehow, Susan wasn’t surprised in the slightest that what left her thoroughly befuddled was clear as daylight to Reed.  “All right then, right about now I should be pulling on a string to release confetti and balloons because I think this is the ceremonial one hundredth time I’ve uttered these words to you, explain it to me.”  For the ceremonial one hundredth (or at least Susan had claimed it was for humorous effect) he did.

/The force an object strikes with is dependent both upon the force driving the object and how large an area it strikes.  When you’re increasing the volume of your fists, but not paying attention to increasing the mass of them as well, you’re effectively turning them into giant foam hammers which is why you’re hitting with less force than you did with an ordinary human-sized hand.  Why don’t we try a blow with the aid of centrifugal force and see what it achieves?  

Susan was familiar with the concept of centrifugal force, but wasn’t quite sure how it applied to this situation.  “For the hundred and first time, explain what you mean to me by that.”  He did, and it was deceptively simple.  “Oh, okay then in that case I’m going to need to take about a dozen steps back.”

She did, then raised her right arm above her head and began to swing it around, letting it get slightly longer with each rotation.  Every time her arm went around it also gained speed, and after about fifteen seconds of twirling she let loose with her punch.  After a wind-up of epic proportions, her arm sailed across the distance between her and the pressure sensor.  

It connected solidly with the middle of the thing and her old “score” was replaced by a new one.  “Ding! the lady rings the bell and wins a prize!”  The number was higher than the last one, it was also higher than a baseline, what exactly that new number meant was up to debate at the moment.  

/A vast improvement just as I predicted.  Though you should know that striking with that much force would likely prove fatal against an ordinary human being, but still it would seem a very real possibility that we find ourselves in combat against opponents who aren’t ordinary human beings, so it only makes sense to be prepared to face such opponents.”  

Susan nodded a slight smile on her face.  When it came to dealing with normal human beings she had already mastered what her technique of choice would be.  Being the first person to ever be subjected to it Johnny was had suggested two different names for it, either “the hug of death” or “the time out”, not that she particularly cared what he had to say on the issue.  It wasn’t like part of the job requirements for being a superhero was to yelling the name of any attack you were using before you actually attacked.  Either way, it amounted to simply extending one of her limbs around a person, and wrapping it around them.  

It was a hunting technique that was still in use by pythons and other such constricting serpents the world over, both simple and effective.  Restrain the prey, prevent it from escaping, then slowly tighten, applying more and more pressure until the lungs no longer had room to expand, and thus the prey could no longer truly breathe.  Unconsciousness followed fairly quickly, and if the grip was maintained it eventually resulted in death.  

Ben had spent a lot of time in Susan’s “coils” recently, letting her practice with the closest thing to a human being (and Reed had theorized that given his ability to fly Ben might not be as near to a human being as he looked) they had on hand, so that Susan could figure out exactly how hard she had to squeeze, how long she needed to squeeze for, if was more effective to apply pressure to the throat instead of the lungs, what about the possibility of applying pressure to both, and otherwise letting himself be half-strangled with surprising calmness.  

They had no idea what their first job as superheroes would be, so they practiced anything that might possibly prove useful.  In the process, her brother had discovered something weird, in addition to being able to punch hard enough to break the first two pressure sensors Reed had acquired, he could also syphon and release most types of energy.  

What that amounted to was that if he stuck his finger in a socket he could build up enough electricity in his body to easily shock an ordinary person into cardiac arrest.  Once he discovered this, he promptly began handing out “joybuzzer” handshakes to everyone he could, which was of course limited to Susan (who apparently had a higher tolerance for having electricity run through her body than normal humans) and Ben.  

/Now why don’t we find out how much momentum you can build up bouncing off the walls before you strike the sensor and see how hard you hit it?  Susan bowed her head as she began to curl herself into a sphere.  “Whatever you say, and maybe after that I can try stretching across a gap and inverting my body so that my legs walk across myself.”  

To his credit when she struck the pressure sensor Reed once again interpreted her results as having struck with enough power to have caved in a human skull.  Which left Susan to figure out if it was more humorous or macabre to know that she could transform into a bouncing ball of death given enough time to build up momentum.

----

Susan woke up and checked he color of her undergarments, still perfectly purple as always. There was something very strange going on.  It had been three weeks since she’d gained her powers.  By her own calculations that meant her cycle was more or less dragging a week behind.  

She knew it wasn’t impossible for her to be pregnant (she’d taken precautions, but in a world where going into space gave you superpowers a little thing like managing to get pregnant while taking birth control pills was nothing) but half a dozen tests she’d purchased and quickly gone through a few days back had made it quite clear that she wasn’t.

Which meant that Susan wasn’t pregnant, and yet wasn’t menstruating either.  Which in turn would suggest that gaining superpowers had somehow kicked her age about thirty-five years forward where menopause was concerned, except that if she’d been having any symptoms of that besides a lack of menstruation she hadn’t noticed them.  

There was no way it was menopause, that was suppose to deaden sexual urges since the biological clock had officially stripped its gears, and Susan’s was still ticking loudly enough for her to hear to hear it every time she closed her eyes.  So that wasn’t it either, which exhausted all of the logical possibilities she could think of.  

She somehow doubted that Reed would be able to help her with this distinctly feminine problem, and going to a proper gynaecologist was out of the question until the Fantastic Four had publicly announced themselves since any regular physical would doubtlessly reveal Susan’s powers.  Which left her with no choice but to put that particular issue on the shelf until later, especially considering that Reed said today he’d be showing the group their new outfits.

----

Susan had to give credit to Reed for doing a lot with a little.  Even though his telekinesis only let him exert a small amount of force, he’d still figured out a way to finagle a reasonable amount of mobility out of it.  

A tupperware container, a largish remote controlled toy car, and some duct tape.  It sounded exactly like the kind of thing that MacGyver would create some kind of improbable machine or tool for escape out of, and Reed hadn’t particularly disappointed either.  

With the container taped to the top of the car, and its control taped to the top of that, he was able to telekenetically manipulate its controls.  Reed evidently felt the dignity he sacrificed in the process was well worth the mobility he gained.  He was waiting for them on the kitchen of the floor that they had all agreed to share. Reed’s lab took up a considerable portion of it, but there was still plenty of room for three people to each have their own individual residence.  

He just “sat” off to the side while the three ate.  Once they had he didn’t even bother with a telepathic command, he simply let the unmistakable sound of the tiny engine revering to life speak for him as he rode off leaving the three to follow him on foot.  He led them into an elevator and in a slightly more grandiose display of telekinesis, managed to hit the button for the roof.  

After a short trip, the elevator doors opened and the three found themselves face-to-face with what looked more or less like a perfect duplicate of the ship that they’d tried to get to the moon in.  “Jeez you work fast Reed, I mean I know that you’re smart, but how did you get thing built inside a fortnight?”  There was more than a little bemusement in Reed’s mental voice as he made his next announcement.  

/I didn’t build it recently actually.  This was a prototype of the ship I built because I wanted to make sure that I had all the concepts involved in the creation of a rocketship down pat.  It still seats four, but it’s engines are weaker.  I designed it as a strictly stratospheric craft, but none the less it is extremely effective for that task.  

Just the fact that it arrived here in one piece says that once some other people took care of dragging it out of storage it’s automatic piloting and landing systems work.  Eventually I’m going to design and elevator system in the roof similar to what you’d see on most aircraft carriers with a retractable roof so we don’t have to leave our vehicles up here where they’re more vulnerable to the elements.  I know I’m getting ahead of myself but this takes care of phase five.  Now as for phase four...  

Once again, certain buttons lit up without any fingers coming near them and soon the elevator returned to the floor from which they’d departed.  Reed took off, wheels spinning and the other three followed him to his lab.  /There are six outfits on the table over there.  Two for each of you, though given that they’re more or less completely stain-proof and should in theory last forever, the additional outfit might prove superfluous.  Still, our failure three weeks ago taught me another lesson in the importance of having a redundant backup.  

Sure enough there were six complete outfits.  They consisted of a long-sleeved shirt, gloves, a belt, long pants, and boots.  The shirts had a white “4” logo with a circle around it, and Susan estimated that the logo would be more or less directly between her breasts once she put them on.  As Johnny began to pull the outfit on over his civilian clothing once again he decided to say something completely inappropriate.  “Reed, I realize that you’re a genius, not a fashion designer, but thank you from the bottom of my central processing unit not for making them purple.  

Oh and doubly thanks for making our uniforms all nice, and, well uniform.  Because if the one you’d made for my sister consisted of a literal breastplate and a skirt, then I would have been left with little choice but to fill that container you’re in with a dishwasher detergent.”  The outfits on the whole were in fact sky-blue, with the gloves and boots tending towards a slightly darker shade of it, and after having spent so much time in her purple jumpsuit, Susan certainly had gotten more or less thoroughly sick of it.  

She quickly scooped up two tops, belts, the necessary undergarments, (these were the only obvious deviation among the three sets of uniforms) long pants, and four gloves and boots increasing the size of her hands so she could more easily hold it all before turning back towards the door out of Reed’s lab.  “I don’t know about you boys, but I’m going to try and find some place a bit more private to change...”  

Ben evidently agreed with her, grabbing enough articles of clothing to make up one outfit (finding to his surprise that two of the shirts had small openings in the back of them so as to let his wings out) before flying out.  Susan slowly returned to her room, completely undressed herself, then completely redressed herself in the outfit.  

She tossed the jumpsuit and the other outfit into the drawer in her room for later, and just like she’d expected she certainly felt a lot more heroic wearing the blue outfit.  Maybe it was just something about primary colors, or maybe it was because to the best of her recollection no military in existence had ever considered purple an appropriate color to wear while going off to battle.  

Not to mention upon even closer examination the outfit just about matched the color of her eyes.  Susan suddenly stood still as a stature, stretching her body into the bathroom that was attached to her bedroom (in advertently proving the new outfit with hits first test which I passed with flying colors, stretching along with her body just as easily as her purple jumpsuit) so that she could use the mirror in it to run a more comprehensive comparison.  

Sure it wasn’t a perfect match, but it certainly had seemed like someone might have had a certain color on his mind at the time he designed the outfit.  That said, she had no intention of actually asking that particular question or even thinking about it (if she could avoid doing it at least) near Reed.  

Johnny liked the outfit, she preferred them over the old one, and something told her that outfits that apparently would last forever were probably not cheap to produce.  She headed back to the lab and found that she was the one who was holding up the show, Ben had already returned from wherever he had gone (granted Ben had gotten pretty handy at flying through the reasonably narrows corridors of the Baxter Building and none of the other members of the team could match the speed he could reach while flying) and Johnny had probably never left.  /So what do you think?  

Susan lazily lengthened, then retracted her arms so that those present could see just how efficient the new outfit was.  “Well they work, so do you have anything else in particular you want to tell us about them?”  Susan knew that she was more or less inviting the possibility of finding herself in a very dangerous situation, but she figured Reed disserved a chance to have some fun even if it made the rest of them feel vaguely narcoleptic.  
/Well I’ve decided to call the somewhat unique properties that these outfits display unstable molecules.  They automatically adjust themselves to fit the body of anyone wearing them, and they’re also next to unbreakable.  The practically upshot of which is that they’re practically bullet-proof and uncutable.  

That said, they don’t have any particularly remarkable abilities to absorb kinetic energy, so if you are hit by a bullet even though it won’t enter your body, the transfer of momentum is going to hurt, probably leave a bruise behind, and quite possibly even break a bone or two.  Susan and Johnny both slowly turned their glances towards Ben, since he was clearly the one who this warning was intended for.  /So now I guess with phase four and five over and done with, it’ll be time to move on to phase six, no?

----


Phase six was by no means easy, because it involved talking with people.  It took time to schedule meetings, and it took even more time to first of all convince whoever they were meeting with that not only were they talking with someone who possessed superpowers, but that said person was actually on their side and not some kind of lab experiment gone wrong about to wreak revenge upon those who had brought them into the world.  

But one after another the meetings took place, and by time the meeting was over, most people were cautiously agreeing that they wouldn’t mind having the Fantastic Four available to them and they in turn would try and pull some strings to try and make things easier for them.

---

Which brought them eventually around to the planning for phase seven.  “I am a bundle of nerves...”  Even through the unstable molecule outfit with her right hand pressed against the sleave of her left arm, she could feel her pulse racing.  /You’re always a bundle of nerves, Susan.  

She shook a fist upwards at the container which housed Reed’s brain and was currently several floors above her.  “Yeah, right. I was remarkably calm about the entire going into space thing, and when we started developing superpowers it was my brother, rather then me who got freaked out by it.”  

/Not even remotely close to what I mean.  You see when last I checked your body seems to have lost most of its skeletal structure and muscles.  I’m not quite sure how it manages to support itself but there isn’t a lot more to you than a bundle of nerves and some organs at the moment Susan.  

She buried her face in her hands, and felt her face threatening to slip through them, Reed’s attempt at humor had been just that horrific.  /It won’t be that bad, all you’ve got to do is a give a speech in front of an audience, is that such a great task to ask from a former actress?  Susan pulled her face back together and then looked up at the ceiling.  

“Well when you’re acting its just that acting, you’re getting into a character rather than having to be yourself.  Not to mention there’s this thing called a ‘script’ that I’ve memorized, and the attention of the audience is usually  pretty evenly spread among instead of a number of eyes equal to the double the attendance focused squarely on me.”  Reed’s was at least trying to help, even if he wasn’t coming very close to succeeding.  /Well if you need a script I could telepathically whisper into your mind...  

Susan grimaced in disgust and she stuck her tongue out far enough that it landed on the floor with a wet “plop”, even if it didn’t stay there very long.  “Having the director whisper lines to me from back stage?  No thanks, any serious actress would rather take a shot at ad-libbing and possibly looking like a fool rather than just roll over and allow herself to sink to something like that.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some people to either deeply impress or scare the pants off of, though I suppose doing both isn’t out of the question.”  

Without another word she calmly walked out the front door of the Baxter Building and came face-to-face with the expectant crowd and the podium with microphone attached waiting for her that she quickly took up position behind.  

“Just to get things started, no this isn’t some kind of overly complicated marketing ploy for a movie or whatever, we really have superpowers, and intend to use them to fight crime, save the day and all that other stuff.  If you don’t believe me just ask the man who’ll be the Fantastic Four’s eyes and ears, Benjamin Grimm, also known as Dragonfly.”  

After circling over head for nearly half an hour, at Susan’s words (mentally relayed to him by Reed) Ben who had been flying a considerable distance above the crowd went into a steep dive which he pulled out of just in time to land right next to Susan drawing “oohs” and “ahhs” of appreciation.  

“Or my brother, Jonathan Storm the Mandroid, who’s the muscle of the group. He’s about to do some serious property damage since he feels no dramatic entrance is complete without it, luckily we own said property...”  Johnny calmly walked straight through the wall of the Baxter Building leaving a hole in it that looked exactly like the kind of imprint you’d see in a wall that a cartoon character had just exited through.  

He waved to the crowd a few members of which numbly waved back.  Susan meanwhile was silently wishing that her brother could have found a less costly way to make his arrival, but at least once they’d revealed themselves to the world they could hire contractors to take care of rebuilding whatever damage he’d just done to the Baxter Building.  

“And as for myself I’m Susan, or Sue, or even Susy so long as you don’t make it sound demeaning since as you’ll see in a moment I’m quite flexible, Storm, who’ll also be going by Ultra Woman.  I suppose by virtue of being the normalest looking one of the bunch, I’ll be the one who’ll be serving as the group’s mouthpiece pretty frequently.  That said, I’m not just a pretty face... not even close.”  

To prove her point Susan extended her entire body upwards, keeping the proportions more or less the same, but doubling the scale.  Then she retracted herself back to normal a polite smile on her face.  “And that’s the three of us who you’ll be working with on anything approaching a normal basis.”  

Once they’d got over their collective shock, it didn’t take long for one memeber of the crowd to notice a certain inconsistency that was right before there eyes.  “If there are only three of you, why is there a ‘4’ on your outfits?”  Susan picked up a remote control that was resting on a shelf of the podium.  

“I said there are only three of us you can expect to see and talk with.  As the fourth member of our group, well, the role he plays should be fairly obvious...”  She pressed the on button and a TV screen that had been set up before hand facing the crowd flickered to life, revealing the image of Reed Richards resting in a small glass sphere.  “This is Big Brain, the mind of Reed Richards, one of the smartest men on the face of the Earth to start with, refined by no longer needing to worry about the trivial concerns that suck up countless hours lives, like: eating, breathing, or sleeping for a full third of every day.”  /Not to mention giving his supposed girlfriend a good roll in the hay, but they don’t need to know that.  

It also dawned on Susana moment later that Reed didn’t need to know what she had just been thinking either, but there was precious little she could do on that front.  Trying to remind herself not to think about something only lead to her thinking about it in the process, so with nothing to gain by wasting time she got back to introductions.  

“As weird as it sounds to all of you folks, and trust me it sounded every bit as weird to us at first, although Reed obviously lacks the capacity for any normal form of communication, he is now able to relay information directly from his mind to the minds of those around him.  

Since he’s up at the top of the Baxter Building you’ll have to forgive him for staying silent.”  Susan hit the same button a second time and the TV screen flickered off. “And that’s us.  No masks, no secret identities, and no ‘now have a pleasant day citizen’ followed by soaring off faster then a speeding bullet.  

We’re not here to try and change the fundamental way the world works, we just want to help a little.  We’re not here to be policemen, I guess the most apt metaphor I could come up with is that we’re like a SWAT team, when things get really dicey and more than the ordinary protectors of the thin blue line can handle, give us a call and we’ll be the cavalry, the heavy artillery, or whatever you want to call the people who you count on to save you from trouble.  

Aside from that, I can’t promise I’ll have time to use my elastic arms to rescue every single kitten that gets stuck in a tree, but we’ll at least make a go at it.  I think that more or less covers all the basics for now, so I’ll turn the floor over to you folks.  We’ll answers questions, sign autographs, and give you a couple more displays of our powers if you want them.  This is as new to us as it is to you, so lets just be cordial and try to get to know one another.”

---

Susan would spend a couple hours doing just what she said she would: answering questions, (sending a few of them “upstairs” when she felt Reed would do a better job answering them  then she could) glad handing people, signing autographs (to her surprise her right wrist never threatened to cramp up, so maybe Reed was right about her lack of muscles) and showing off her powers.  

Eventually however she’d said that they’d have to call it a day.  Given that people seemed sad to see the three members other Fantastic Four go, she took that as a good sign.  But still, she could only take so much of being adored, and was glad to finally collapse into her bed.  And ‘collapse’ was clearly the word for it to, by the time she had gone fully prone Susan wasn’t much more than blue sheet.  /So how did it go?  

Her neck had wound up on the floor, but now she raised it up to look at the wall with irritation.  “You were watching through our eyes most of the time weren’t you?”  /Yes, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter, and I don’t mean read them.  In the process of thinking about how to voice your recollection of the situation you’re likely to come upon realizations that might not have previously occurred to you.  

Susan’s body began to work its way towards a slightly more human appearance, though she was still more or less two-dimensional.  “I already grasp the difference between thinking of something, and thinking about something, but thanks for spelling it out to me in four-syllable words.  As for what I think, well you know how people are...”  

Of course just like Reed had predicted no sooner had she said those words then she came to a realization concerning who exactly she was speaking to.  Susan finished regaining a fully human three-dimensional appearance and sat up in her bed.  “Okay, maybe you don’t.  For right now, we’re a spectacle.  

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, in and of itself and I’m quite sure like many spectacles, just the fact that we’re unique will help keep us in the public eye.  For example, I’d wager it’ll be at most a week before my brother gets an offer from some oil company to promote their company’s products as the only brand he uses to keep his joints from squeaking or something along those lines.  

If we’re gonna be anything more than a spectacle though, well I think the burdens on the four of us to do it.”  /And the best way to do that?  Susan remembered quite well what exactly phase eight was suppose to be comprised of.  

“On the list of things not to do I’d suggest we avoid trying to get ‘brand recognition’ by paying for advertising.  It’d probably end up having a ‘big brother is watching you’ vibe, especially once it becomes common knowledge that you can read people’s minds, which is an ability any Orwellian dictator would just love to have at his command.  We should do what we set out to do, be superheroes.  

Stop some crimes, save some lives, review however the hell citizen’s arrests work, make it clear that we don’t intend to go anywhere anytime soon.  I suppose we can get to work on that tomorrow after I finally get around to hiring all those lab assistants you wanted.  You said you had an outfit that looks like normal civilian clothing made out of unstable molecules ready for me, right?”  /Yes, why?  

Susan readjusted her position and laid her head down comfortably on the pillow a smug smile in her face.  “Well, we are living in New York City.  If we ever feel really hard up for crimes to thwart I’ll just go for a walk in the wrong part of town at the ‘right’ time of day and by the time I walk out I’ll probably need to figure out how to turn part of my body into a wheelbarrow so that I can deliver all the would-be muggers I ran across who will probably have a very surprised look on their faces when they realize just a bit too late that it’s a bad idea to try and rob a superheroine.”  

As she spoke Susan elongated her right index finger and spun it about in the air like a tiny blue lasso.  /That’s a very pessimistic outlook.  Susan just pressed her head to the pillow having no desire to defend her position.  Mainly because it would have involved asking Reed what exactly she had to be optimistic about when that first night after the accident was the only one during which he’d been in the room with her when she’d fallen asleep?

-----

All jokes aside, it should have just been a normal day out and about New York City for Susan.  She was on her own, dressed in a white jacket (with a white t-shirt underneath) and black pair of pants that Reed had given the unstable molecule treatment so that she could stretch in them to her hearts content.  

She also had a purse containing around two hundred dollars and all the other usual bric-a-brac (credit cards, lipstick, checkbook, pen, driver’s licence, and a very durable tracking device sewn into the lining since now more than ever she didn’t want anyone else to be claiming to be Susan Storm) slung over her shoulder.  

After spending close to an entire month cooped up with Ben, Johnny, and Reed she probably would have gone insane from the boredom if it hadn’t been for testing out her powers, so she was intent on finding some way of dealing with the tedium.  She still had more practicing to do of course (there was always more practicing) but all training herself to be a superheorine and no play made Jill a dull girl, so she’d decided to just go for a walk, a normal activity it’d been far too long since she’d last engaged in.  

Not to say Susan was just going to walk in a circle (or zig zag, or square, or rectangle) she also planned to pop into the first bookstore she came across.  That money would be useful for acquiring a paperback or two with which she could commit a vicious homicide upon her free time.  

Normally Susan was a fan of romance novels, but at the moment she had a certain feeling that one was or another she was going to end up gravitating towards the science fiction section.  With her current downward turn her love life had taken, a story in which the two lovers suffered excruciating hardships before finally being together would leave her halfway between a sullen “well where is my happy ending?” and bile-spewing rage.  

There was also the added bonus that it would be nice to see that as weird as her life currently was, humanity had it within their collective souls to imagine someone living one which was even stranger.  Of course before that could happen, she needed to be able to get to a bookstore, something that the world had other ideas about letting her do.  

She was simply walking down a street when she saw police car go by with its sirens blaring, and deciding that since she was at least semi-dressed for the occasion, she might as well see what was going on.  Susan broke into a run, not using her powers, at least not obviously.  

Some of the tests Reed had put her through had revealed that her endurance had been increased well beyond normal human levels.  Unless she actively used her power she wouldn’t be setting any land speed records, but she could keep up a good jog longer than most marathon runners.  She didn’t have too much trouble finding the source of the disturbance, or guessing exactly it was.  

Susan might not have ever even considered outfitting any vehicle she owned with a police scanner, but she’d seen enough action movies to recognise what had to be a bank robbery turned hostage situation when she saw one.  She ducked into an alley opposite the main event and quickly hid her purse among the refuse in a nearby dumpster (careful to liberally burry it so no one would notice it if they were just walking by (it wasn’t exactly glamorous, but she’d yet to figure out where Superman kept his wallet) and then went about a quick transformation.  

Sadly it was nothing as impressive spinning around fast enough to leave her wearing an entirely different set of clothing. Instead Susan decided to make like she was playing limbo and see just how low she could go, reducing her body to a white, black, and pink smear on the ground.  In this form she didn’t attract much attention and was easily able to slide across the ground right past the police officers who were responsible for keeping civilians at bay (and happened to be paying attention to people, not puddles) stealthily manuevering herself untill she was right next to the feet of the officer who was probably in charge of the show given that he had a bullhorn.  

“Need a little help?”  The black-haired green-eyed police officer looked down, and for a moment understandably given that he had just been addressed by a tag blob) looked like he didn’t believe his eyes.  Before he started to seriously worry about the stress of his job getting to him, Susan reformed herself, causing the look she was receiving to go from complete shock to a glare of accusation.  “So you’re that girl...”  

Susan crossed her arms, shrugged, and glared right back.  “Woman, actually.  I was just passing through and it looked like you could use some help.  If I was mistaken then I’ll just leave this to the professionals since I won’t try to hide the fact that this is my first time.”  Sure enough just like she’d planned, by actively admitting that she was more or less still a complete and utter naif when it came to catching criminals, she’d left the police officer with no adequate retort.  

“Tell you what, why don’t we go some place a little more out of the way and discuss this...  Lou?”  Another police officer looked over and the one Susan was talking to flipped the bullhorn to him.  Then Susan followed the police officer (drawing plenty of strange looks as several of New York’s Finest obviously wondered how exactly they’d missed her walking right by them) outside the line boundary line that civilians weren’t suppose to cross.  

Susan approved of that, since out of uniform her powers were the only real proof she had of her status as a superheroine.  “Well they didn’t exactly have courses on working with superheroes in the academy, so apparently this will be a new experience for both of us.  The guys in there have already released one hostage who let us know just what a bad idea it would be to try and use force.  

Apparently the half-a-dozen guys who are pulling this job planned to turn it into some kind of siege from the start.  They’ve got an infrared trip wire set up just inside the place that if anybody breaks it, the thing will set off a couple Claymore mines aimed directly at the hostage who they currently have corralled inside the vault itself.  

They’ve also to some more infrared trip wires set up in the ventilation system, hell if I know how, so that’s out as an entry point as well.  Two guys in the vault with most of the hostages, two more in the main room with a hostage in one hand and a gun in the other, and two more with their guns trained on the door just in case we do try to rush them.  All six guys apparently wearing Kevlar just about anywhere you can strap it to your body.

In short, a nightmare waiting to happen. If we try to tackle them head-on, a lot of innocent people are going to die.  At the moment all we can really do is stall and hope they make a mistake.  If you can figure out a way to make this all better then guess you deserve to call yourself Ultra Woman.  If you can’t, then get out of here and wait untill Lex Luthor shows up with a stolen nuclear warhead.”  

Susan glared at the man, she could have done without the sarcasm that accompanied the last sentence, but she had to admit that from what she’d just heard the situation was going to be a tough nut to crack  /Reed please tell me that you can still hear me...  Her message sent she held her breath for five of the longest seconds of her life.  /You’re still well within my range, though I was rather busy in the lab untill you called, what is it?  

Susan quickly sketched over the same details the police officer had told her ending with a question about whether Reed thought there was anything she could do to help.  /Tricky, very tricky.  Hmm... interesting, it’s rather like a puzzle where you have to carefully shift pieces without ever undermining its structural integrity in the process.  I never realized that thwarting law breakers could be such a cerebral task.  Ask the man you’re dealing with how he’s sure about the infrared trip wires in the ventilation shafts.  She did.  

“We didn’t just take their word for it if that’s what you’re wondering, we sent some men in there with infrared goggles.  The vents aren’t exactly spacious, so there’s no way to for a normal person to move through them without...”  Apparently an idea occurred to Susan and the police officer more or less simultaneously, though Reed had evidently realized it a bit before either of them.  

“Okay, but even if you could get in, you’re still only one woman...”  Susan smiled at this point.  “Well not just any woman, if you hand me your side arm I can wrap my lips around the barrel, pull the trigger, and spit the round back out about twenty seconds later...”  The police officer didn’t feel like putting her word to the test.  “I’d rather not waste the money, bullets are expensive.  

I’ll set you up with a pair of infrared goggles, try to give them back in one piece when you’re done saving the day.  And remember anyone dies...”  Susan nodded and held out her hands, which were shortly holding a pair of red-lensed infrared goggles.  “Thanks, and don’t worry about getting a helicopter or anything else fancy, I can see myself up to the roof.”  

She walked off a bit deciding that giving the bank a wide berth was the best way to avoid making her approach obvious, before finally selecting a building which was halfway down the block from the bank.  She increased the length of her body untill she was able to slither onto the top of the building drawing more than a few gasps of surprise from anyone who was watching.  

Then she increased the length of her legs till she was easily able to step from one building to another, and Susan hoped that any news crews on the scene had the intelligence to be filming something else at the moment, or that the robbers inside the bank weren’t watching what was being broadcast about them.  

A few short steps later she was on the roof of the bank and sure enough four SWAT team members gaped at her with slack-jawed surprise from beneath their helmets.  “No time to chat boys, I’ve got lives to save.”  

The entrance to the ventilation shaft was obvious, and after slipping the goggles on she started to slither down it.  Once she’d gotten her body fully inside the ventilation shaft Susan decided to take a moment to gather her thoughts, not to mention the thoughts of a man who was much more likely to have a plan that would let everyone involved in this robbery walk away with their lives intact.  /Okay Reed.  Here I am, now what is your plan?  

He didn’t keep her in suspense for long, something she was very grateful for.  /Rescuing the majority of the hostages in the vault has to come first, since the robbers in the main lobby probably have a manual detonation switch for the mines, which they could doubtlessly activate before you subdued them.  If they’ve managed to get inside the vault in the first place, then they probably left a way for you to get in as well.  

Susan chuckled to herself as she inched forward a little bit, and saw the first infrared trip wire come into view.  /Are you insinuating that I couldn’t squeeze my way into a bank vault in pristine condition if I wanted to?  /Well I don’t remember ever testing your powers against something as supposedly airtight as a vault door, so I honestly can’t say.  

Anyway, after you’ve rescued those hostages and dealt with two of the robbers, that will only leave the four in the main lobby.  There will doubtlessly be an exit from the ventilation shaft through which you can fit your body into that, if you can deal with one of them with each of your limbs simultaneously that should make it a clean sweep.  

Susan thinned down and carefully twisted around a infrared trip wire that doubtlessly would have been impossible for any human to evade. She had to dodge another one before she made it to the first downward opening, at which point she removed her goggles.  Then she extended her head through the grating and took a look around.  There was plenty of space between the vault and the main lobby so it was unlikely that the four robbers she’d get around to dealing with would see her while she focused on their two friends.  

She quickly poured herself downwards through the vent like a multi-colored drop of honey.  As she reformed herself after hitting the ground she saw a small hole in the vault door, and it was all Susan could do could do not to whistle with joy.  The two gunmen inside would doubtlessly notice if the vault door started to swing open, but she supremely doubted they expected what Ultra Woman was about to do to them!  

She pressed herself up against the hole and began to slide through it as easily as a fox entered into a rabbit’s burrow.  She soon had a good view of the situation and saw exactly what she expected, two men standing behind a pair of Claymore mines (their distinctive shape made them easy to recognize) with automatic weapons gripped tightly in both hands, and a frightened mob of innocent people cowering against the back end of the vault.  

Susan abruptly broke her earlier promise to about not shouting a warning to her opponents before she attacked them.  “Pardon me gentlemen, but do you mind if I ask to see your permits for those things?”  The men weren’t able to resist the siren song of curiosity she had spun for them, and they also weren’t able to look one way and point their guns another.

That was exactly what Susan wanted, because it meant the two guns pointed at her instead of at the innocent people, not only would they do much less (in the sense of “no”) damage to her, but it also made her next trick much easier.  She shot her arms out, wrapped them around the two rifles and yanked them from the two men’s hands.  One of them just looked at her with complete surprise, but the other reacted more violently.  “Fuck this!”

Either having realized how pointless it would be to shoot Susan, or out of sheer malice and wanting to end as many lives as he could, the man pulled out a small pistol he’d tucked into his pants, and yanked hard on the back of it, sliding a bullet into its chamber and then started firing at his captives.  

Of course Susan had been able to guess what he was planned to do the moment she’d seen the light reflecting off the gun’s barrel.  She drew her legs out from the hole into the vault, momentarily managed to balance there before pushing off against the door and went flying forward.  

Susan couldn’t bounce faster than a bullet, but she had a head start and was in front of the barrel by the time the first round left it, at which point she quickly stretched herself into a giant blue barrier between ceiling and floor.  She felt the robber still pulling the trigger untill his gun ran dry and felt the mild tickle of seven lead bullets hitting her body and then bouncing off.  

Once she knew he’d shot his clip, Susan quickly resumed her human appearance, smiled at the two men (because anyone who put innocent lives at stake just to try and make some money at least disserved a moment or two of pants-pissing terror) before she used a new technique she’d been practicing with Reed for the first time “in the field” as the saying went.  

Her arms lengthened themselves dramatically untill they distance between her fists, and her opponents’ faces was nil.  She could stretch very fast when she wanted to, which built up a lot of momentum, not as much as the centrifugal force punch, but then she’d only been trying to knock the two silly rather then kill them, and sure enough both men tumbled to the floor.  

Then she turned around (making sure she turned her entire body around rather than just twisting her head, because innocent civilians she had come to rescue didn’t deserve to end up with soiled undergarments) and gave a smile of a completely different nature.  

“Don’t worry folks I’m on your side.”  A brown-haired woman who was crouched low to the ground so as to better hold onto her child looked first at Susan and then down at the mines which still remained a silent but equally deadly threat.  “Can you disarm those things...?”  Susan thought long and hard for a moment.  /Hey Reed, this may just be my knowledge of various bits of fiction talking, but I think Claymore mines upon detonation release a bunch of really small metal spheres moving really fast, am I right?  

This time there was a long pause, leaving Susan with no choice but try to make it look like she was in deep thought instead of simply waiting for a proverbial phone to ring with her answer, but one way or another she eventually got an answer did arrive.  /Ben agrees with you.  Finally Susan felt it was safe to smile.  “To be perfectly honest I doubt it, luckily if I do this right I shouldn’t need to.  Watch and learn ladies and gentlemen...”  

Susan stretched out her arms and carefully encircled each of the mines completely then she applied pressure to them.  Sure enough her ham-handed approach lead to the things going off like fireworks on the fourth of July, luckily Susan’s hands made more or less a perfect place for them to vent their rage without accomplishing anything at all.  

Once they’d spent their wrath Susan opened up her hands, and with a cacophony of tiny clatters (which hopefully didn’t alert anyone outside the vault) countless small spheres dropped to the ground.  “There you go.  You shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping track of these two for a while, I’ve got a few more lives to save and villains to deal with...”  

Susan made her first return trip (through the hole in the vault) with ease, and her second one back into the ventilation shaft provided little more in the way of difficulty.  She put the goggles back on just to be on the safe side, since tripping the wires might in some way alert the remaining four robbers to the fact that they had a hundred and twenty pounds of angry (not so much at them -- though she was upset they were metaphorically between her and the nearest bookstore -- but what was the world coming to if a woman couldn’t sublimate her ever mounting sexual frustration by pummelling a few criminals?) superheroine headed their way.  

Once she’d managed to take up position above the main lobby she slowly squeezed her head down through another shaft, and luckily enough none of the men were looking up at the moment.  She withdrew her head, took a deep breath to get herself under control and then went at it with all she was worth.  

Her legs descended a little behind her arms but that was okay, as the former two limbs shot down to the floor, and before the two gunmen could realize anything was wrong her arms had wrapped around them and yanked them into the air.  The sudden shock of being hefted into the air and finding themselves hanging upside down made them drop their weapons and cry out in terror.  

The other two turned around, just in time for Susan’s legs to ensnare both of them, and firmly press their weapons against the two robber’s chests, leaving them unable to fire in any direction but straight down.  The four writhed and wriggled like fish on a hook, but Susan’s elastic limbs easily held all of them still, and before long just like she had practiced, by applying pressure to their chests she left them unconscious, at which point she lowered them softly to the ground.  

She slid out of the ventilation system, taking the goggles with her.  She used them to easily locate the source of the trip wires set up around the front door (just in case they lead to some explosives besides the ones she had already dealt with) then opened the front door and stretched out a hand to calmly deposit the goggles back in the somewhat startled hands of the police officer who had made them available to her in the first place.  

He was also the first one to enter into the bank his gaze shifting between the four unconscious robbers and the two former hostages who were equally still out of sheer shock.  “The pair in the vault?”  Susan gave the man a smug smile as if she was slightly insulted that he would even ask such a thing.  “I not only took care of them I also ‘disarmed’ their mines, just make not sure to slip on the loose ball-bearings when walk in.”  

The man looked around one last time and then calmly removed his hat.  “Well then, I suppose if you can keep producing performances of this kind of quality I could get used to having folks like you hang around.”  A red-haired woman who up until a few moments ago had been a hostage finally found her voice.  “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but who are you?”  

Before Susan could answer the police officer did, striding boldly forward to confront the woman face-to-face.  “What kind of a question is that?  She’s Susan Storm of the Fantastic Four, also known as Ultra Woman.”  At that point Susan had to admit that she could deffiently get used to the warm feeling that had blossomed just above her stomach and was slowly starting to spread through her body.

----

Even more importantly Susan was able to successfully retrieve her purse from its hiding place (and it didn’t smell too much worse for the wear) though she still had to spend around ten minutes signing autographs before she was able to get back to her original task of finding a bookstore.

----

To her credit she found one, and by the time the next morning rolled around she had to admit that the compared to her normal literary interests, a tale about female starship captain and her six legged pet/sidekick was proving a nice palate cleanser.  

Especially because even though the female lead was obviously going to save the day when the fecal matter hit the ventilation system, it was equally obvious that she wouldn’t be acquiring a male companion in the process.  She looked up from her reading (she’d brought it to the breakfast table with her) when Johnny tossed a newspaper in front of her.  “Well....”  

He said the words in his best (though of course not very successful) attempt at making Susan feel like a little girl who had done something wrong, and should explain herself this very instant.  She quickly thinned down the index a finger of her left hand to keep track of her page before grabbing the paper with her right hand.  

The foremost headline said the entire story in all its alliterative glory “Stretchy Superheroine Saves Hostages and Captures Crooks.”  The article gave a recap of how events unfolded or at least as much of the events as anyone besides Reed or Susan could be expected to have known.  

Although it seemed to be somewhat on the fence about the entire thing, they obviously approved of the fact that no one had gotten killed and that Susan had been so personable afterwards.  Of course one the underling message she picked up on was that the moment she or any other member of the Fantastic Four screwed the pooch, the citizens of New York would know just where to send the bill, which gave Susan premonitions that the group would be spending a fair amount of Reed’s money on replacing wrecked cars and other bits of damaged property in the future.  

“What can I say that isn’t in the article little brother?  Okay it wasn’t exactly my brilliant plan, I was working with Reed most of the time, but you can’t exactly expect the first edition of any form of mass media to get things one hundred percent correct.”  Johnny glowered at her, he hated it when she called him ‘little brother’ and thus she only referred to him as such when she distinctly felt the need to get his goat.

“Not that, I mean if there were bad guys to deal with, why didn’t you contact me?”  Susan balanced her chin on her right hand giving her brother a look of pity mixed with inquisitively.  “In a small part because you were a long way off, as I understand it hostage-takers don’t tend to be the most patient people in the world.  In a large part because even if you were there, what exactly would you have done?  

Probably take the brute force approach, bash through a wall, and promptly get a lot of people killed.  This was a situation that called for a certain, cliché as the expression is, feminine touch.”  Johnny unable to come up with an argument about how he could of helped was reduced to glaring sulkily at Susan across the breakfast table for a few moments before he grabbed the newspaper back from her.  

“Fine, fine, fine, for today at least.  But I’m gonna find out what the telephone number is of this Parker guy who took the pictures of you and give him a chance to get a bonanza of photos of the Mandroid out on the town and saving folks in really cool ways!”  Susan began to search about the room for something to serve as a more permanent bookmark than her finger.  “Yeah, you do that.”  

Johnny shot his own glare back (even if Susan only saw it in peripheral vision) at her suggesting that indeed he would live up to his word.  “Don’t take it so hard, Metalhead, so Susy’s go the limelight at the moment, if Reed’s right sooner or later we’ll all get our shot at it.”  Susan hopped Ben was right, and more importantly feverently wished that no matter how important the Fantastic Four became they avoided having their names mentioned in one particular section of any newspaper -- the obituaries.