Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time 1: Disappearance

She's a flying brick with the power to control one of the fundamental states of matter, but no one takes her seriously. That's about to change.

Welcome to Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time, a longform weekly superhero serial which is part of what I hope will be a collection of stories about the many capes who protect the civilians of Edison City (cue dramatic theme here). New chapters will be released every Sunday afternoon. And now, the story begins!

Madeleine Smith hadn’t seen a TV show or a movie in ages. She couldn’t even remember who the big stars were anymore. Thus it fell to the police detective to explain to her who the apparent victim was. The detective was a little shocked. He had assumed everyone knew about Pamela Percy, who’d taken the awards by storm last season. “Don’t you remember?” he asked curiously. “She’s the one in that show where-”

“Didn’t see it,” Madeleine said absently. “So. Fell out the cathedral, huh?”

“Fell, jumped, pushed…” the detective listed. “We’re not sure yet. Thing is, she didn’t land. Just vanished in mid-air. Flash of green light, she’s gone. Figured this was your department.”

“Figured right.”  She paused, looking up at the cathedral. “Where was she when this happened?”

The detective pointed to a window. Madeleine could’ve flown straight up, but she didn’t want the attention just yet, so she took the stairs inside.  She pushed her way past the yellow crime scene tape and examined the room. There weren’t many signs of distress. No note, no marks of struggle on the floor or walls, no scorches from errant laser beams. Pamela Percy had, it seemed, gone straight to the window, stepped out, and vanished clean away. For all Madeleine knew, the television actress was in another dimension by now. This assumed that she had in fact materialized elsewhere.  She might have been reduced to a random squiggle of matter drifting through space.

Madeleine couldn’t teleport herself. Her powers were more of the flying brick variety, with a bit of flame thrown in. Fortunately, she knew people who knew people. She was on the phone to one of them within five minutes. “Audrey,” she said. “You know teleporting. I think I’ve got someone who just vanished right out of a cathedral here. I need help figuring out where they’ve gone.”

Audrey wasn’t just a teleporter; she was also telepathic. She didn’t even use spoken words unless absolutely necessary. Her reply was, therefore, brief. “Where are you?” she rasped.

Madeleine gave her address. Without warning, not even so much as a bamf sound effect, Audrey was standing next to her. Madeleine jumped involuntarily. “Would you mind not doing that?”

Sorry. Audrey’s voice echoed in Madeleine’s head. The teleporter looked over the room, then outside. Curious. No inter-dimensional residue. No transport energy signatures. Your Pamela Percy, whoever she was, did not teleport, not in the standard way. She just ceased to exist. 

“Not good enough,” Madeleine said. “People don’t just blip out, not like that.”  Then she paused. “What do you mean, whoever she was? I didn’t know her, but the detective said she was on that show. The one where-”

Never heard of her. Are you certain the detective identified her correctly? 

Madeleine froze. She grabbed for her smartphone and did a bit of swift Internet searching. There was no record that anyone named Pamela Percy had so much as auditioned for a car insurance commercial, let alone starred in a major show. “Oh, crap,” Madeleine said. “This is a time thing. I hate time things.”

It got worse after that. By that afternoon, not only could Madeleine not find any records of Pamela Percy starring in anything, she could find no records of her existing at all. Even the original detective who’d called Madeleine in couldn’t remember why he had done so in the first place. Madeleine called Audrey back, but the telepather only made an irritated huffing noise on the phone and clicked off. That meant she didn’t remember either. Madeleine even checked her phone history, but that too had been wiped. 

She pondered the case on her drive home to her meager apartment. She could’ve flown, but at that hour the sun would’ve been in her eyes, and she hated that. She also hated time things, and this was definitely a time thing. Someone had tinkered with the continuum and wiped poor Pamela from existence. But why? Who had she ticked off? Madeleine started to wonder how, if Pamela had never existed, she could have upset someone enough to cause her non-existence, but then she decided emphatically that she was not going down that route. That was exactly why she hated time things. So, as the empty countryside flew past her window, she pushed the case from her mind and turned on some music.

An old wooden sign came up in the beams of her headlights. She didn’t bother reading it; she had seen that sign every night she’d worked Edison City. It hadn’t changed. It advertised that the suburb ahead of her was home of the state basketball champion of ’63. The suburb was many years past its glory days, and the basketball team had never made it back to the heights, but the sign hung on. Madeleine barely glanced at it as she went by. Then she slammed on her brakes and skidded to the side of the road. Pamela Percy was standing right next to that sign.

Madeleine leaped from her car and dashed up to her missing person. “Where’ve you been?” she demanded. “And what happened-”  Then she noticed that Pamela was transparent.

“Ooooooo!” Pamela wailed enthusiastically at her. “I am the spirit of Pamela Percy, come from beyond the grave to-”

“Knock it off,” Madeleine said. She didn’t have much patience with ghosts; they were almost always too melodramatic for her taste. “Right. How’d you die, and how come no one remembers you?”

The ghost looked wounded.  “No one? At all? But.. my ratings… my show…. I worked so hard.”

“Sorry. But you don’t exist anymore. You’ve just gone from the time stream. At least I thought you had. Guess something stuck around.”

Pamela sighed ghostily. “Great. I get pushed out a window, I’m dead, and for a haunt I’m stuck with a little patch of road way out in the boonies. And no one even remembers my show! It’s so not fair!”

“Life’s not fair, Pamela,” Madeleine said. “Look at me. I get superpowers, right? Just like lots of people these days. The usual thing, you know, squish a radioactive bug, genes go wrong, chemical accident, whatever. But do I get the cool powers? No. I get your basic flying brick combo, and I can burp fire. That’s pretty much it. Woohoo for me.”

Pamela snickered. “You’re Gaseous Girl? I saw a video of you using the Armpits of Armageddon on whatshisname, Crudmuffin. That was so funny.”

“Yeah, laugh it up, ghostie. At least I exist.”

The poor spirit’s laughter dissolved into tears. Madeleine felt a tad guilty. “Look,” she said, not unkindly, “I’ll figure out who killed you and erased you and try to get you back. No promises. Best I can do. Okay?”

“Okay,” Pamela sniffled, wiping her transparent eyes with an ethereal tissue.

Just once, Madeleine wished she could take a normal client. A plain old murder. A missing cat. Anything. Just once.

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