by T Campbell and Comickook
If you had been looking out over the docks about ten minutes later, you would have seen a black cat, a white poodle, and a blue tortoise shell float overhead at nearly sixty miles per hour. You wouldn’t have been able to hear their words, but you would have heard that they were shouting over the wind.
“CAN YOU POINT THAT THING IN ANOTHER DIRECTION?” shouted Yankee Poodle.
“DON’T CALL HER A THING!” replied Alley-Kat-Abra. There was anger in her voice, and something else.
Rova Barkitt was pretty sure she overheard a telepathic whisper from Abra afterward: “Shhh. Shhh. It’s okay. It’s okay.” There was kindness in the telepathy, and something else. The same something else as before. It took Rova a moment to recognize what that something else was:
Fear.
If you’d asked her, Rova herself couldn’t have told you why she started thinking back to the day she got her powers — when Byrd Rentals — her best friend — had started swelling and stretching like a CGI effect, and magnetics started shooting out of her hands, smashing everything they touched.
What if she’d never learned to completely control the powers?
And what if they had a mind of their own — a mind she had to placate with improv poetry, a mind that could stop liking her at any time?
It’d be almost as bad as being married.
And despite herself, Rova felt a moment of worry on Abra’s behalf, followed by a much more typical moment of worry on her own. As they descended through the streets of Mew Orleans, homing in on the Siren Belle, Rova’s mind drifted to a line from the Super-Squirrel movie:
“You’ve got me, but who’s got you?”
***
Meanwhile, a few minutes beforehand, after the Siren Belle had unleashed a smokescreen on Alley-Kat-Abra, Yankee Poodle, and Fastback during their midair tussle, she decided to take a breather and lay low, evading her pursuers. “Finally lost them three,” the Siren Belle chuckled to herself, her confidence soaring. “But jus’ ta be safe…”
With an effortless wave of her telekinetic powers, the villainess expelled three sizable clumps of earth, hurtling them toward Abra, Rova, and Timmy-Joe while they were still disoriented by the smoke. Although the smoke and earth chunks posed little threat to the heroic trio, who had faced far more formidable adversaries in the past (including their recent second encounter with Frogzilla), it served as a sufficient distraction for the Siren Belle to believe she had successfully eluded capture.
However, her triumph was cut short when she spotted a brilliant flash of green diving toward her in the shape of a living coil. Before she knew it, the coil had snaked around her tightly, and a duck’s head emerged from its top, ready to deliver a witty remark.
“So, you majestic menace. Frequent visitor to Mew Orleans, I presume? But perhaps a detour to the Cats-bah is in order before I bounce you over to the authorities.”
Desperate to break free, Samantha Drake, alias the Siren Belle, attempted to use the power of her voice to mesmerize Rubberduck. Unfortunately for her, his earplugs thwarted her efforts.
Rubberduck grinned mischievously, his gaze locked on her. “You don’t need to serenade me to fall under your spell; I’m already bewitched.”
The alluring and dangerous Siren Belle then tried to use her power to control minds upon him, but Rubberduck’s trusty special lens protected him from her hypnotic gaze. Despite his attraction to her, Rubberduck knew his duty was to bring her to justice.
With a heavy sigh of reluctant determination, Rubberduck pouted, “You’ve got eyes that could charm the birds off the trees, gorgeous, but I’ve still got to hand you over to the police-dogs. Can’t say I’m not a little sorry about that, though.”
Feeling fed up with the antics of this stretchable Down Juan, the Siren Belle used her telekinesis to break free from his elastic grip, effortlessly launching him into a nearby wall. Keeping him pinned against the cold, hard surface with her mind, a slightly surprised Rubberduck found himself rather unfazed by the situation. In fact, he couldn’t help but admit, “I like a gal who plays rough and hard-to-get.”
However, as the Siren Belle focused all her powers on keeping Rubberduck at bay, she left herself vulnerable to an incoming star-blast from Yankee Poodle.
“Back away from our teammate, you baleful bird bandit!” Rova sternly commanded, while Alley-Kat-Abra signaled Fastback to carry Rubberduck to safety in their trusty Zoo Cruiser, while she and Rova confronted the Siren Belle.
The disoriented Siren Belle, recovering from the star-blast, was at first surprised that the blast hadn’t made her stronger as it did the first time. Then it dawned on her that, with the protective wand no longer under her control, her powers weren’t as strong as they had become. And now that Magic Wanda was back with her partner, and Rova, Abra, and Wanda never looked more focused, Samantha couldn’t help but gulp nervously. She knew that facing all three of them together was a fight she couldn’t win.
The Siren Belle was faced with a choice: surrender and become a laughingstock among her fellow villains, or fight against seemingly insurmountable odds.
It was then that she realized that she had allowed fear to cloud her judgment. She still had a trick up her sleeve, one that she had obtained from a group of lonely evil scientists she had recently ensnared with her mind-control powers. Though she didn’t want to resort to it, she believed in always being prepared for the worst. As she weighed her options, Samantha, the Siren Belle, prepared herself mentally for what lay ahead.
With a mischievous glint in her eye, the Siren Belle discreetly activated a button on the remote control that she kept hidden in her purse. In the blink of an eye, a bizarre creature emerged — a fantastical amalgamation of a rabbit, turtle, duck, and pig.
Samantha Drake couldn’t help but drawl, “Say hello to CFRP-One, the Multi-Critter. Y’all won’t believe the combined awesomeness he possesses from all four o’ yore Zoo Crew teammates. Oh, and the scientists that created him even managed to make the Captain Carrot powers permanent in this here critter. Ah really hated having to call him in, howevah. It was definitely a drastic move, and let me tell you, ah am not a natural-born killer. But y’all left me no othah choice.”
The words flew out of Rova’s mouth as unexpectedly as the first stars and stripes had flown out of her hands: “Joking… right?”
CFRP-One replied: “PRIMARY TARGETS IDENTIFIED. COMMENCING LETHAL–”
The poodle and the tabby’s reflexes and skills responded before their conscious thoughts. In less time than it took to tell it, there was a stripe-shaped cocoon around them both, glowing with Magic Wanda’s xanthic protection.
“–MANEUVERS,” the robot finished, and all high holy heck broke loose.
Samantha ran, not stopping for anyone or anything, but shouting all the way, “Y’all brought this on yourselves! It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!”
Imagine the combined strengths of Pig-Iron and Captain Carrot in one creature. Combine that with Rubberduck’s ability to throw punches from any direction, using extended arms like twenty-foot snakes. Finally, add Fastback’s speed, which was nearly supersonic even in close quarters like these. If you could imagine all that, you could just about imagine the sheer punishment Rova’s cocoon was taking. It would have taken an outrageous optimist to hope that they would be safe for long — and Rova was nothing if not a realist.
“Get us out of here!” she shrieked.
Abra was levitating inside the cocoon, twitching and thrashing as if half-possessed, sweating and growling, muttering, “Concentrating…”
“Concentrate faster!” Were there cracks in the cocoon already? Rova strained, shot out more stripes, and built up a second cocoon inside the first. But she couldn’t keep doing that; the air was already getting thin.
“This is much harder than — it’s the magnetism in your stripes, I can’t find the ley lines…”
“Sorry, dearie! I’ll try to–”
Abra’s eyes glowed yellow-green, a glow that spread along her cape, and she called in a voice that was not quite her own, “Félicette, Spirit of the Astronauts! I call upon you! Heed us! Help us! Open your doors!”
There was a blinding flash within the cocoon, followed by an equally blinding darkness, and then silence, save for Abra’s labored breathing.
After a minute, Rova pulled a few of the stripes back into her hand, just enough to open the cocoon a tiny crack, and let in a bit of air and light. She saw nothing through the peephole. “It’s… gone?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Abra, getting enough breath back to laugh a little. “It’s really gone.”
“Where?”
“About fifty miles up.”
“Uh-huh…”
“Wanda and I and… a third party… were able to teleport it up there, even through the stripes. And tough as the Captain and Pig-Iron are, even they wouldn’t survive a fall from that height. I have to give Wanda credit: I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
Rova widened the peephole. “Didn’t Pig-Iron tell us he met Rod when he caught him from falling out of the stratosphere?”
“Yes, I’ve wondered about that, too. I believe the Captain might have some latent levitational ability, which he isn’t consciously aware of. It’d be interesting to see how his powers worked on a magical world, where the laws of gravity and physics are more flexible. But I doubt the scientists who built this robot could duplicate that.”
By now, Rova had widened the peephole into a door. “Well, faaascinating as this is, dahling, we should be going. That crooning crone is a lot more dangerous than we expected. And I was hoping to get to the sauna tonight.”
She looked back at Abra and saw she was still squatting on the floor and breathing hard. “You all right?”
“Yes. I just… remind me to sacrifice a sardine on Wednesday.”
“I’ll put it on my day planner. Is that for that spirit you paged? Felic–”
“Shhh. Don’t say her name.”