Puffed and Pounded

Puffed and pounded

The brown haired Samantha Evens smiled to herself as she walked out of one of New York City’s largest and most well respected banks. They said that crime didn’t pay. They said that cheater’s never prospered. As it turned out, “they” simply hadn’t been trying hard enough.

After discovering that apparently she was the heir to an ancient mystical bloodline yadda yadda yadda and all the great power inherent within it, she’d reacted to this particular bit of news the way most people probably would; by designing a costume for herself. Figuring an appropriate pseudonym she’d proceeded to get to work making herself rich by using her powers to rob, steal, and otherwise pilfer the hell out everyone around her.

Well not exactly “everyone” Samantha (or as she decided to start calling herself Pufferchick) preferred to maximize her time to profit ratio. The best way to do that was to go straight where the money was, the banks. So dressed in her purple and green costume (a purple one piece outfit that left her legs and right arm bare, with a green balloon symbol nested between her breasts, green belts, green gloves, and green boots) she’d just pulled off an absolutely MASSIVE bank heist, and it had been ridiculously easy, too!

All she had needed to do was use her power to generate any gas she chose to fill the lungs of every other person inside the bank with plenty of carbon dioxide and keep generating more and more of it faster than they could draw a breath, causing them to go unconscious in the blink of an eye.

After that, well it had been a bit trickier to fill up the bank’s vault itself with enough of an extremely heavy gas of her choosing to make it break itself open in order to equalize the pressure (she’d even broken a sweat in the process). But it had been worth it. There was no doubt in her mind on that issue. With the vault door out of the way all she’d needed to do was to scoop as much money as she could take money into a large (at that point uninflated balloon she’d brought inside with her.

It was ungainly, but after inflating it with some hydrogen (the lightest gas there was) she was easily able to carry the thing about on a string despite being no stronger than the next woman. That was how a smart supervillianess operated after all. She’d be able to combine her cash sack and getaway vehicle into one easy package!

Of course while she was busy working on attaching the floating cash sack to the wooden basket she had dropped in front of the bank before walking in, she didn’t realize she was being watched...

Half a dozen figures were currently observing her from a nearby rooftop and scowling down at what they were seeing. One of them was a blond haired girl who had suddenly broken into a smile that looked slightly too big for her face. “Well, well, it looks like we’ve got ourselves our very own first supervillianess to play around with!”

A blond haired boy who seemed to be about the same age as the girl (in their late teens) took a bit more conservative view of the situation. “Umm Sam, we’re only supposed to be on patrol. I don’t think we should get involved something this dangerous.”

Another blond haired girl (whose hair was noticeably messier turned and scowled at the boy. “Oh come on Franklin don’t be a wet blanket. We’re all eighteen years old now. We’re legally adults. This could be our chance to earn some serious respect. Opportunities like that don’t just come along every day!”

A third girl who had blond hair tinged with a black stripe going horizontally around her head took on a more neutral expression. “One way or another, we should make sure we don’t get in over our heads.”

A black haired youth scoffed. “Oh come on, uncross your eyes Valeria. Look at that costume she’s wearing!”

The blond haired girl with the scraggly hair proceeded to move her hands about so that her index finger and thumb met near her nose, making it look as if she was wearing pretend goggles. “Yeah Benjamin you’ve got that one hundred percent right. I mean seriously how threatening can a woman who has a party favor on her costume be? Come on. There’s no way that we can’t take her!”

Finally the black haired girl on the roof joined the conversation. “While we should focus on the probable, it never pays to discount the possible. Let’s hedge our bets just to be safe.”

The girl with the neat blond hair coughed loudly and then proceeded to speak up in the kind of voice that brooked no disagreement. “Fine then, Rache, I’ll call Mom and Dad now...” She proceeded to raise her right hand to the height of her ear curling all but her thumb and pinkie into a fist, projecting the appearance of a phone. For a while there was silence until she finally spoke up again.

“Well there you go, you guys all heard that right?” Five heads nodded as one.

“Good. They’ll be in the area case we need them, but for the moment this is our show to make famous or infamous. So let’s do it! Jane I want you to slingshot me right at her.” Then the girl started running forward as fast as she could. She jumped and tucked her arms and legs against her chest trying to making her body as compact and spherical as humanly possible. Except that somehow as she hurdled toward the edge of the roof the amount of space between her arms and legs seemed to be shrinking rather noticeably and then it was completely gone. What was left behind literally was a ball, one which matched the color of the uniform the girl had been wearing before hand, but otherwise betrayed nothing at all of her former human appearance.

When she struck the small wall surrounding the edge of the building’s roof she bounced off of it like a living pinball and careened back toward the girl with the untidy blond hair. A moment later, the other began to stretch her body outwards making herself look like a giant living trampoline that was perched upright. Then the blue ball struck the trampoline. It proceeded to bend backwards for a few seconds before it snapped back to ‘normal’ hurling the blue sphere outward down towards the street and Pufferchick in the process.

---

Said supervillianess was just about finished attaching the money balloon to the necessary basket, knowing that in a few moments she’d be airborne and be out of the city in no time. After that it was just a matter of finding some place safe to put down, change into the civilian outfit which was hidden in the balloon’s basket, carefully stack stuff the money into a pair of briefcases that were also hidden in, and walk back into town.

Finally would come the process of finding some place to deposit the money, and then it would be time to relax, kick back and do whatever the hell she felt like. Except that as she was just doing one last check to make sure her escape craft was in perfect working order she suddenly saw something headed her way. She wasn’t quite sure what it was exactly, but she reacted on gut instinct, and used her powers on her own body filling herself up with a sizeable amount of the densest gasses she could summon.

It was a good thing she had in fact, because the end result of it was that she managed to transform her own stomach into more or less a living airbag just before a sphere about three feet in diameter slammed into her like the world’s biggest rubber bullet.

It impacted against her with such force that Pufferchick was knocked out of the basket and back onto the pavement. She landed on her equally inflated backside with aloud “BOOING” again and again as she proceeded to more or less bounce across the concrete until she landed back inside the bank, still trying to figure out exactly what the hell was going on.

She could only watch in amazement as the blue sphere which had slammed into her and the clung to her body with unexplainable determination rolled off of her chest and sprouted a head, arms, and legs before turning into a normal enough looking young girl who was probably only about half a decade Pufferchick’s junior.

Though she had seen plenty of weird things during her fairly short career as a supervillianess (and expected to see plenty more, it went with the territory) watching a perfectly uniform orb transform into a living breathing human being reach an entire new level of WTF for Pufferchick. “Who, and what are you?”

In addition to her odd abilities the blond haired girl was dressed in a skin tight blue costume which showed of her nubile form well, though it didn’t show even a speck of skin from her neck down. The most startling thing about it however was that the uniform had the number “5/6” on it in the same place Pufferchick’s had a balloon.

While the purple eyed supervillainess began to regain her footing (slightly unsteadily, the gas she’d filled herself with playing hell with her sense of balance) the girl in blue took a moment to ease into a fighting stance, and as she did so a few strands of her hair that had been askew at first proceeded to fall back into place all on their own.

“You really don’t know? Oh, this is gonna be fun!” The girl just stood there, and yet suddenly her arms grew longer and longer and longer until her clenched fists managed to make contact with Pufferchick’s still inflated middle sending the supervillianess on another series of bounces.

Though the impact had hurt less than that first attack, it had once again managed to take Pufferchick more or less completely by surprise. After all what kind of superheroine would (or could) sucker punch you from ten feet away? When she had managed to recover from the shock Pufferchick saw the girl was now standing over her with a foot planted on her foe’s bulging midsection.

“My name is Samantha Richards, and I’m the one who’ll be taking you to jail today!” For a moment Pufferchick was slightly thrown just by the simple coincidence that this girl and her shared the same first name, and so she just laid there slack jawed. Thus Samantha had plenty of time to elongate her arms once again and slip them underneath Pufferchick’s back, grab her hands and tie them together in the middle of a knot of Samantha’s stretchy limbs.

Pufferchick soon realized that as doubtlessly absurd as it must look, the maneuver was a decent enough replacement for a pair of genuine handcuffs, since her arms had been thoroughly immobilized. Samantha proceeded to step off of Pufferchick’s chest, take another couple paces away from her captive and then and then yanked her arms upwards.

For the fallen supervillianess the experience was somewhat akin to finding oneself superglued to the back bumper of a car that had just decided to pull out of its parking space. She was dragged across the floor and forced to endure another series of bounces, but then managed to get her feet planted underneath her. Once she’d taken care of preventing her costume from acquiring skid marks she realized she was now standing directly in front of Samantha with the girl’s arms pressed into her back.

“March!” Ordered the superheroine in an authoritative tone that was quite at odds with her teenage appearance, but Pufferchick remained firmly in place as she struggled to gather her wits. “Hey, what kind of superheroine doesn’t even have a secret identity?”

In response to her question (and her uncooperativeness) she felt Samantha press the bundle of flesh which encompassed both girl’s arms into Pufferchick’s back prompting her to start moving, though she did at least answer the question. “The kind whose parents were superheroes and felt they didn’t need secret identities either. Besides a least when superheroes decide to try and not hide their powers the worst they have to deal with is overeager fans. You’re the one who is committing crimes and not even wearing a mask...”

Very slowly a tendril of blue began to emerge from Samantha’s shoulder and began to carefully work its way over to Pufferchick’s face, moving closer and closer to her right eye until it suddenly retract, and it’s owner began to giggle. “What’s this? No contacts? That’s your real eye color? Well then I hope you wear some when you’re not committing crimes since purple eyes aren’t an easy thing to forget! How long do you honestly expect you could have stayed off the radar operating like that?” Pufferchick had a perfectly logical answer to that question, but she didn’t care to voice it aloud, certainly not to a superheroine.

While she might not be taking any obvious steps to hide her identity, but by using her powers to always inflate her breasts and backside noticeably after getting into costume (and deflating them after she got out of it) it insured that the difference in appearance was marked enough to prevent anyone from connecting Samantha Evens with Pufferchick.

Besides, at the moment her mind was more focused on how to avoid being arrested than how to keep her identity secret. Luckily, while her captor was busy having a laugh at her expense, the grip she was maintaining on Pufferchick’s arms had relaxed slightly. It wasn’t much, (doubtlessly an ordinary criminal still would have no chance extracting their limbs from the living Gordian Knot they’d been entombed inside) but it gave something to work with.

Of course the problem was that since she couldn’t reach her belt and the dolls within Pufferchick would have to use her powers the old fashioned way, and to do that she’d need eye contact. A few quick twists of the head confirmed that Samantha and her arms were in Pufferchick’s blindspot, which left her with only one choice.

Though the supervillianess still wasn’t entirely sure of what this young girl who had doubtlessly gained the upper hand over her was capable of, she was willing to hazard a guess of how her powers worked. If Samantha could lengthen her arms, then the odds were good that someone else could as well!

Pufferchick broke into a run, and sure enough she could feel those blue sleeved arms starting to elongate, and Samantha’s giggles became out and out hysterical laughter intermixed with a few mocking words. “You still don’t get how this works do you? Okay then if you insist, be my guest, you’ll only get arraigned tired!” Pufferchick smiled to herself all the while, glad to see that Samantha was overconfident enough to think that her prisoner was actually trying to simply make a break for it rather than embarking upon a cunning plan.

After having run a good ten feet away, she turned around and locked her gaze on Samantha’s arms imagining that they were full of helium. Of course she had to hold her mental projections back slightly since arms weren’t known for having much give (unlike people’s stomach) but that didn’t mean she couldn’t insert at least some gas into them safely.

As she felt the gas spread throughout Samantha’s arms the knot around Pufferchick’s own limbs grew looser and looser and then with one quick tug they were free. Samantha looked at amazement at her arms which were now tied up in a knot it would apparently take her a while to undo, and at the villainess they no longer held.

Not about to give her time to recover however Pufferchick reached into her belt and pulled out one of her special voodoo dolls. Well it really wasn’t all that special, it was just a green balloon with barbie doll limbs taped to it but as she held it in her arms she focused on Samantha and then used her powers to place air inside the balloon.

Instantly Samantha’s belly and stomach began to surge outward as she like the balloon in Pufferchick’s hands began to inflate. Samantha who had a moment ago been walking forward in an energetic stride now began to shift her stance slightly as it transformed into something more like a waddle. This waddle gave way to a pathetic bounce as her belly became so big that it touched the ground and Samantha was now forced to hop forward.

“What are you doing to me?” She plaintively asked Pufferchick who only increased the size of the balloon in response and smiled as she saw how the young superheroine had gone from confident to utterly and hopelessly confused inside the span of a few seconds. With every passing moment her body began to grow more and more bloated. Her belly was getting larger and larger and absorbing the elastic woman’s limbs so that she couldn’t even hop forward any more, she just rolled back and forth on the ground pathetically.

Yes, Samantha had been inflated so utterly and completely that the only thing left of her limbs was her hands and feet which wobbled about pathetically. Likewise, her neck had been completely absorbed into the giant sphere her midsection had become. Her face was filled with a look of consternation clearly still trying to stretch, but having been inflated so thoroughly had drained all the slack from her body.

Still holding the doll in one hand Pufferchick took her time to walk back over to Samantha and press a finger from her free hand into the helpless superheroine’s nose. “Not so high and mighty now, are you? In fact I do believe at the moment you’re less of a superheroine and more of a superball! Though of course if I changed the gas you were filled with to something lighter than air you might spend the next few hours bouncing around on the ceiling...”

Samantha heaved and grunted but her body barely seemed to move despite her best efforts, and she adopted an expression of childish embarrassment. “Ugh... you’re right. So since you’ve so effortlessly defeated me, what exactly is your name anyway?”

Pufferchick drew herself up to her full height, though of course she couldn’t hope to be taller than an inflated superheroine. “Pufferchick, for now at least I’m trying to figure out something more appropriate.”

Samantha let out a noise that was half cough, half chuckle, and completely disdainful. “That was the best you could come up with? Come on, a much better name is obvious. You use those doll things to help inflate people, so why not call yourself the Puffputear as a play on ‘puppeteer’ instead?”

Pufferchick proceeded to deliver the strongest kick she could muster to the middle of Samantha’s body sending her helplessly bouncing across the bank. “No thanks, I’d rather have a name that’s incomprehensible than one which is that corny! Anyway I’ll be heading back outside and escaping now since there’s nothing you can do to stop me Bouncy Babe!”

After she finally stopped ricocheting around the bank Samantha let out yet another mocking laugh. “Well you’re right. There’s nothing I can do, but one more friendly piece of information, I’m not an only child...” Pufferchick turned around to stare at Samantha and then with a sinking feeling in her gut once more began to increase the amount of heavy gasses within her own body, this time taking them to the very max she could safely achieve.

Pufferchick’s belly swelled outward as did her breasts the two drooping downwards and of her ass cheeks grew till it was practically the size of a volleyball. Her body itself puffed outward to a degree that she resembled a vaguely human set of limbs merged with some kind of air matress. It was none too soon that she took such drastic measures because a moment later a veritable cavalcade of spheres connected one after another with her back.

They didn’t strike with as much force as Samantha had, but the fact that they were more of them more than made up for it. Not only was Pufferchick sent on her own little nonstop tour of the bank’s interior but her stubby inflated fingers were unable to maintain their hold on the doll she’d linked to Samantha causing it to land carelessly upon the bank’s floor. It soon was scooped up by a blue gloved hand belonging to the black haired girl who proceeded to stare at it intently alternating glances between it and the utterly inflated Samantha. “Looks like a focusing talisman for her power.” She muttered loudly enough for everyone else to hear.

Still flapping her hands and kicking her feet pathetically Samantha struggled to move closer to the doll’s new holder. “Which means what exactly, Rachel?”

The black haired Rachel shrugged holding the doll out toward the one who had been tied to it. “It means that disposing of it will either get you back to normal or cause you to suffer the same fate as the doll. I can’t be sure which...” The messy haired blond girl grabbed the doll from Rachel’s hands, a devil may care smile on her face.

“Well then, let’s do some experimenting!” She proceeded to undo the knot that had been tied in to keep the air inside, and then took a big breath, in fact the breath she took was so big that it caused her stomach to momentarily puff outwards like some kind of strange blue bellied robin. Then she exhaled into the balloon which struggled grew bigger. As did Samantha who now seemed to be in danger of having her head swallowed by the same menace that had just consumed her hands and feet completely.

“Jane...” She growled as best she could, however the blond girl only blew another breath into the balloon. “JANE!” Shouted Samantha as her head did in fact vanish leaving her a giant blue balloon without the slightest trace of humanity again. Jane blew into the balloon a third time and it burst. With surprising abruptness Samantha was suddenly back to her old self (and old size), though she seemed more angered than happy about this change as she proceeded to stretch her arms across the bank to grab her savior by the neck. “Thanks a lot Jane! You do realize you could have just splattered me all over this room don’t you!”

Jane casually proceeded to trod on the dissected doll parts which now littered the floor. “Please Samantha given the ratio between how inflated the balloon got and how big you did there was no way you would have maxed out your bodies elasticity before that thing gave up the ghost.”

The girl with black stripped blond hair proceeded to stretch out her limbs, wrapping her right arm around Samantha and her left around Jane. “Would you two kindly save the infighting for after the mission?” Both reacted the exact same way, shooting a venomous irritated glance at the one who had interrupted their feud, then another at their opponent before skulking slightly and nodding.

The blond haired boy was also nodding and pointing towards the corner of the bank that Pufferchick had landed in. “Yeah Valeria’s right it looks like we’ve still got some business to take care of!”

The black haired boy began to approach the slowly rising supervillainess. “Big deal, if she could barely take on Sam, then there’s no way she’ll be able to deal with all of us at once!”

As he spoke Pufferchick (who had needed to deflate herself back to the point where her legs weren’t constantly rubbing together before she could stand back up) glowering at the collection of teenagers gathered before her. “Good grief, does your mother have a clown car between her legs?”

The black haired boy took a step forward raising a fist in irritation. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, we’re sextuplets. It’s not like we haven’t noticed it before. I’m gonna make you eat every single one of those words or my name isn’t Benjamin Richards!” To prove his point Benjamin jumped forward curling his body into a ball before he hit the ground and bounce toward Pufferchick.

But the supervillianess was ready this time around, and she proceeded to throw a considerable amount of helium into Benjamin’s body so that when he took the final bounce towards Pufferchick he came in slowly rather than with blinding speed. Thus the supervillianess had no trouble at all directing a kick at him that sent him flying backwards his siblings, at which point Pufferchick replaced the gas inside him with some of the heaviest stuff that she could summon. He careened into Valeria like a lead weight and the two went down in a tangle outstretched limbs and blue fabric.

Unfortunately no sooner was Pufferchick taking a moment to congratulate herself than suddenly the very ground itself seemed to turn against her. It began to shift back and forth like there was an earthquake going on and since she still had some gas inside her body (otherwise she was fairly certain it would only take one good hit to knock her unconscious) she had about as much chance of staying up right as a snail does of winning the Kentucky Derby.

The ground she fell on was surprisingly soft even taking into account the cushioning affects of her mildly inflated form, which made a dangerous amount of sense (not to mention answering the question of what had caused her fall) once she’d realized she was laying on a rubbery blue material rather than the bank’s tilled floor.

Said material promptly grew a handful of tentacles as well as a human face belonging to Rachel. “Jane proved that putting the squeeze on your balloons frees people from your influence so let’s see what happens when we cut out the middle man?” Rachel’s body soon look much less like an innocent blue puddle and much more like a giant cerulean scaled python that was putting a deathgrip on Pufferchick.

The supervillianess was not so easily subdued however, and promptly began to use her powers to generate oxygen within her own lungs due to the fact that she couldn’t get enough to them naturally at the moment. Rachel seemed content to simply wait for her victim to pass out, as did the others, which gave Pufferchick plenty of time to give Rachel her own dose of lighter than air gas, and the next time she squeezed, her captive slid right out of her coils like the proverbial greased pig.

“What the?” Rachel began to reform herself and as she did so she watched in horror as her belly ballooned outwards to the size of a beachball. With a distressed look on her face she stretched out her arms so that they would be long enough to cradle her swollen midsection.

Pufferchick just clicked her tongue in a mocking way as the young superheroine hesitantly touched and examined her new girth which just shifted off to the side slightly with every attempt she made to press it back in. “That’s a shame to see that a girl your age has gone and gotten herself puffed up. Well you can’t say you didn’t know the risks right? Hope you’ve got plenty of stretch pants back home!” She capped this sermonizing speech off with another kick. Thanks to the lighter than air belly she sported, Rachel punted high enough to hit the bank’s ceiling before she began to slowly drift back down.

However the moment after she finished the speech Pufferchick was yanked off her feet, and the entire world went dark. Then Samantha’s mocking voice filled her ears. “Hey, remember me?” Pufferchick began to struggle about, but it felt like she was trapped in a coffin made some kind of high tech space age super rubber. In the time it took her to start feeling light headed from lack of oxygen she realized what had happened and proceeded to reach into her belt once more.

Clearly Samantha had enveloped Pufferchick’s entire body, but this was an easily counterable strategy. It was just a simple matter of attuning another doll to the do gooder superheroine and then inflating it.

What had once been a large blue blob that seemed to have been devouring a human being alive suddenly began to puff up and parts of it that weren’t being weighed down by its captive began to rise into the air. Then the blob seemed to be straining itself as if it was coming apart at the seams or trying to sew itself back together. But it was all for naught as the blob proceeded to become a perfectly round ball a form which was utterly incapable of maintaing a grip on anything and so Pufferchick dropped to the floor fine and dandy. “Why yes I do, in fact now that you’re nothing but a big bloated balloon I can’t help but remember how I did that to you once already and you weren’t smart enough to learn anything from it!”

Of course practically the moment she finished this quip she was hit from both the left and the right by a pair of bouncing bodies without much time to prepare a defense.

The attack left Pufferchick seeing stars as she staggered backwards struggling to maintain her footing. Before her she could see Franklin and Jane uncurling themselves, but only to get another running start. Then after gathering plenty of momentum and curling into balls, the two bounced towards each other combing together like something out of a bad anime. Pufferchick could only watch in amazement as their bodies flowed around one another meshing together perfectly in mid-impact to create one ball which was twice as large without slowly down or changing course in the slightest.

Pufferchick wasn’t completely sure how well she could take a hit from a weapon made out of the bodies of two of her foes combined and had no desire to find out. She stuffed more and more lighter than air gas into the oncoming ball as fast as she could without holding anything back.

It worked, too, as one bounce short of connecting with her it came to a stop and proceeded to simply float upwards into the air, bobbing up and down slightly like it was being lapped by invisible waves. Then a layer separated itself from the orb like a drop water from a melting ice cube and reformed itself into Franklin Richards, leaving Puffer chick to stare in horror at what was left behind.

“NO!” She covered her eyes and tired to simply walk away, but between her shock from the sight before her and the blows she had taken recently she ended up tripping over her own feet and falling to the floor in a sobbing mess. It had never supposed to be like this, that was why she had her dolls after all.

Pufferchick could fill anything with gas, but not change its internal nature unless she was using one of her dolls. That was why she’d always been careful about much gas she put into someone when she wasn’t using one of her tools, because something terrible might happen. This wasn’t fair, not for any of them!

Pufferchick had only wanted to steal some money that the bank probably had insured anyway not hurt anyone! That stupid blond superheorine should have had her whole life in front of her, and now it was probably only a matter of moments until the overabundance of helium that Pufferchick had meant to spread between her two attackers but had somehow only gone into Jane caused her to expire in one of the most disgusting ways imaginable!

Tears began to leak from her eyes, and she began to sob hysterically awaiting the inevitable bang.... Except that it never came. What did come was the strangely comforting feeling of a gloved hand placed on her shoulder. “Hey are you all right?”

Pufferchick slowly wiped the tears from her eyes and looked. Franklin had forgone attacking the momentarily distracted supervillainess to try and comfort her instead. “Of course I’m not all right, I JUST KILLED YOUR SISTER!” She looked at the huge blue balloon that still hung placidly in midair, it hadn’t popped yet. Probably out of some perverse joke that the universe was having at her expense.

Then to Pufferchick’s surprise Jane spoke up, and it wasn’t in the voice of one whose body was racked by pain and was nearing death's door in the slightest. “Yeah right, it’s gonna take a lot more than your little inflationary tricks to kill Jane Richards! Now you’ve royally pissed me off but seeing as you’re a supervillianess I don’t intend to beat you any harder than I usually would because of it. As soon as I have arms to get around you again that is!” Pufferchick very slowly rose to her feet. There was more or less complete silence inside the bank, a strange lull having been cast upon the formerly bitter battle.

She proceeded to walk over to Jane and poke the side of the girl’s body feeling that while the material of her costume and her skin were was doubtlessly stretched beyond its normal size the stuff was still far from truly taut.

“How is this possible? My powers don’t work like this when I don’t use dolls... I’ve tested just to be sure, I inflated a pig carcass to the point that it split itself in half. I can place gas inside things but not change the way they react to that gas, not without the dolls... this doesn’t make any sense...”

Her question was answered by Rachel who had finally managed to get both feet on the ground though she was now shifting form one foot to the other, and whichever one she wasn’t putting her weight one seemed to be lifting off of the ground of its own accord, not to mention her voice had the telltale high pitched squeak of one who had recently inhaled helium. “Wow you’re not exactly a fast learner are you? Our bodies are naturally elastic. Our mom can stretch herself up to one thousand and five hundred feet, and we’re all easily doing at least a thousand ourselves!”

Pufferchick paused for a moment and poked Jane once more. “So you’re saying that because of your powers you guys naturally just inflate to the kind of degree that I normally need my dolls to have other people reach successfully?” Franklin nodded earnestly and instantly Pufferchick’s expression went from one of polite surprise to focused malice.

“Oh! Well in that case I think all of you are due for a spanking!” She casually waved her hands around at the six superheroes present in the room. Rachel was the first to feel Pufferchick’s now unchecked wrath. In an instant the brunette’s belly grew even larger and she lost the battle to keep her feet planted on the floor.

“You’re such a smart girl. I hope you remember that the sky’s the limit, at least unless you let your overinflated ego get the better of you!” Rachel proceeded to struggle to stretch out her arms and touch the floor with them to try and pull herself back down. But she only ended up pressing off against it propelling her body even further up into ceiling which was now calling out to her like a magnet attracting a piece of iron.

Then Pufferchick turned on Benjamin and Valeria who were only just now getting themselves untangled. Instantly the pair lost all reasonable semblance of being human beings and turned into a pair of floating blue balloons.

“Now you two play nice and don’t float too far apart!” They made a vain attempt to use one another’s bodies to try and bounce the other in Pufferchick’s direction, but the inflating villainess countered this maneuver by just making them even bigger than before taking away their hands and feet in the process.

Then Pufferchick proceeded to casually pull a pin from another pouch of her belt and pop the doll that she had inflated causing Samantha to return to normal. For about five seconds at least before Pufferchick gave her another heaping helping of gas that left her thighs rubbing against each other so tightly that she ended up falling over when she tried to take a step forward.. Luckily her belly provided her with a built in airbag though the fall was the least of her problems. Before she knew it the influx of gas had left her spherical once more.

“There we go wouldn’t want you to be able to get thin again all of a sudden and take me by surprise! So tell me how does it feel to be so large that you can’t touch your kneecaps let alone your toes?” She then wrapped her arms around Samantha’s swollen sides before she could float up and kissed it.

“But seriously, I love you girls you’re just bursting with energy, or is that helium?” Then she let go, and Samantha began her own pathetically helpless journey towards the ceiling. Next, Pufferchick added a little extra to Jane just for good measure and threw in yet another kick.

“You should have been more careful if you play with the big girls then you just might turn into one yourself!” Then finally she turned her gaze to Franklin who had been standing there in shocked amazement as Pufferchick now easily immobilized all of his siblings.

“Thanks for giving me a shoulder to cry on. I’ll try to make this fun for you.” First Franklin’s previously flat midriff transforming into a cute little beer belly like bulge that Pufferchick patted with a mix of mock and genuine affection.

“Aww, looks like you’ve been partying too hard maybe you should just curl up with a nice pillow, or better yet turn into one!” Franklin’s body continued to expand his belly growing out and out and out. It didn’t swallow his arms, legs, and neck the way it his other teammates had been inflated, not that it did him much good. The end result was that sure he ended up looking like a giant blue pillow with human limbs attached to it as an afterthought.

“Timber!” Cried Pufferchick as she poked Franklin’s bloated belly causing him to tilt left and right before falling backwards. Thanks to the heavy gasses he’d been filled with he landed with what sounded like enough force to shatter some of the floor’s tiles but that was of no concern to Pufferchick.

Instead she began to slowly spinning herself around in circles drinking in the sight around her with the same amount of relish an alcoholic would show when consuming their first nip of the day. She’d defeated superheroes before with her powers but never so many and never with such ease. Thanks to the way these elastic kid’s bodies naturally stretched to accommodate whatever gas she chose to fill them with they really were utterly, utterly powerless before her!

“How is the weather up there? Oh by the way girls don’t worry, no matter how big you are you’ll never be afraid to step on a scale ever again at this rate. Of course you might have trouble figuring out how to step on a scale...” She called up to the five who were still bouncing around on the ceiling thanks to having become so inflated with lighter than air gas that “down” and “up” had effectively been reversed for them. One of them squeaked a reply back but between how high pitched her voice as and how large the bank was Pufferchick couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.

“Sorry, but if you want to hear me you’ll have to get your head out of the clouds. Tell you what, why don’t I bring you all back to down to earth?” She swapped out the helium for more of the same heavier than air gas she’d used to fill Franklin and instantly they fell like a handful of blue colored stones, if it hadn’t been for how sturdy the bank’s floor was they’d probably have ended up plunging into the basement! Pufferchick cackled at the sight of all six of them laying on their back moaning and groaning as they tried to move about.

“Looks like the lot of you need to go on a diet, I bet there isn’t one of you blobs who weighs less than four hundred pounds at the moment!” Then she went back to Franklin and began to beat out a playful rhythm on his drum tight tummy.

“But don’t worry about needing to join a gym, you’ll all deflate once I stop focusing on you though it’ll probably take about an hour. So long my bloated boys and gigantic girls, I’ve got some dirty, dirty money I need to take care of. Today is laundry day after all!” Then things went south for her. It happened painfully quickly, too. One moment Franklin was just laying there, and the next he suddenly rose up into the air and proceeded to drop back down on top of Pufferchick like a wrecking ball.

She found herself trapped underneath his massive body and the considerable amount of extremely heavy gas that she had filled him with. She tried to use the same trick as before of creating oxygen in her lungs but because of the pressure being put upon them there was no room for them to inflate. That was when Pufferchick knew it was only a matter of time until she passed out and had only one word to say. “How?”

Franklin answered in a much lower voice than he previously had possessed showing off that heavier than air gasses could mess with someone’s vocal range as well. “We’re not just stretchy. We’re also telekentic. But we’re not very good at it. It takes all of us doing nothing but concentrating to move me. Don’t worry I’ll make sure to get off you as soon as you’re unconscious....”

Pufferchick tried to bury her chin in the banks floor tiles. “No fair... you super slobs need to come with.... warning labels...” Then she passed out, and after waiting a bit to make sure she wasn’t just playing possum the six once more concentrated and rolled Franklin off of Pufferchick so that she didn’t end up suffocating.

It was at this point that Benjamin spoke up once more his voice also having become a bass which was heavily at odds with his appearance. “Well we beat her, now what... we’re in trouble if she wakes up again before we’re done deflating.”

Of course if Franklin’s voice seemed unnaturally deep it didn’t even compare to what Rachel now sounded like. “We could always call mom and dad telepathically they’ll take care of seeing her locked up.”

Samantha wiggled back and forth as she struggled to move her body. “And let them see us like this? No way! Everyone concentrate on Franklin again and shift him the way I do...” After taking some time to catch their breath before making their next attempt Franklin was once more psychically lifted into the air and he was shifted over until he was directly above Samantha.

Then they all (gratefully for using their psychic powers wore on them considerably more than their elastic ones did) relaxed and Franklin slammed down on Samantha squashing her flat as a pancake. However said pancake wiggled its way out from underneath Franklin’s bulk and soon took on the form of an uninflated Samantha Richards who once more spoke in a reasonable mezzo soprano.

“All right then, see? Was that so hard?” A chorus of comments rose up making it quite clear that no one was interested in trying to lift anyone a fourth time but Samantha was nonplussed as she transformed her fists into mallets.

“Okay fine, I’ll just beat all that gas out of you one punch at a time.” At which point she got to work on Franklin proving she was true to her word. It would take a while of course, but Samantha Richards didn’t mind. In fact she once more had a smile so large it required her to use her powers to achieve it plastered upon her face. She and her siblings had taken on their first supervillainess and they had won!