Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time 8: To Boldly Go

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.

Previously, Gaseous Girl and her alternate selves had just teleported up to a starfighter to find a wormhole to get everyone back to their own universes. Meanwhile, Evil Madeleine has arrived. We’ll get back to the starfighter shortly, but first, a flashback!

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The last time Evil Madeleine had been bored it had been on Earth, her Earth, after she had destroyed it. She had spent a whole week all by herself and it had been just super.

First she thought about watching a movie. So she watched all her favorites, five times. But after that, she was out of movies and out of popcorn. Time for another grocery store raid, she decided. She flew over to the nearest one, stepping through the shattered glass of the automatic door. Popcorn was near the soft drink aisle, she vaguely recalled. There was only one box left. "Crap," she said, her voice muffled through her respirator mask. She'd have to fly to anther store soon. This one was about picked clean.

She left the store, and hovered above the crater that had been the parking lot, musing over her fate. She had popcorn now, but what to do with it? She'd run through her movie list. Maybe there was a television show she hadn't seen yet. Perhaps the library- then she laughed. She had almost forgotten that she'd torched the library a year back. She'd been bored back then, too.

"Y'know..." she said. "This planet stinks. I need to leave." It was an idea that had been growing in her mind for some time. One of the last scientists she'd seen had said something about other worlds. She'd flamed him shortly after that, down by the river. Or had it been the park? No, she remembered, she'd already vaporized the park before that. It had been the river, surely. All that steam and boil had been so fun. The scientist had turned red. She liked red.

Now that she'd settled on the idea, it took a while to get it moving. She had to find the military base again. The scientist had carried an ID badge from there. She hadn't been to the military base since she'd lighted off the atmosphere. That, she figured, was probably why she was so bored now. There was no one else around anymore. Setting the planet on fire would do that. Oh, well, time for the next one.

She flew over the remains of the military base. The science part was beneath the largest crater. She had to dig through rubble for a bit, which proved an interesting if somewhat laborious distraction. And there it was, the portal thing the scientist had been blathering about. He'd had friends too, and they'd fought hard to save the portal. She giggled. Now that had been fun.

The portal beeped in the silence. Oh, good, she thought, it was still running! She would've hated to fly all this way across the burnt landscape for a portal that didn't work. She spent the next two days eating popcorn and puzzling out the controls. There wasn't an instruction manual. She'd probably torched it when she'd come before. Oops.

Finally, she figured out how it worked. With a push of the button, the portal fired up. She stepped through. As the burned-out old Earth faded out, and a shiny green new one faded in, Madeleine Smith had begun laughing. She wasn't bored anymore.

Up in orbit around the new Earth, a small light on a starship panel registered her presence, but no one noticed at first. They were occupied with a slightly more pressing issue. The Century Comet Starfighter belonging to Lady Madeleine Smith-Harrington really was a wonder, light-years beyond anything 21st century Earth had created. It had teleporters, replicators, a cloaking device, an array of weaponry that could disintegrate a small asteroid, and yet, with all that, it lacked something incredibly basic: a bathroom.

"So much for boldly going where no one has gone before," Madeleine Prime observed. She had started thinking of herself in that way to distinguish herself from her alternate versions.

"I apologize," Lady Smith-Harrington said, "but the Century Comet was designed for short-range combat, not multi-year expeditions."

"Well, that sucks," Mad Maddie said. 'Cause I gotta go. Like, bad."

"Can't you do it in the teleporter pad and beam the, er, waste off into space?" Madeleine Prime suggested.

"I beg your pardon?" Lady Smith-Harrington looked positively scandalized. "It's a teleporter, not a toilet!"

Princess Madeleine of the Grey Castle chimed in then, with a questioning tone. Fortunately, the Century Comet had its own translation matrix. Her words came out as "Verily, why have we not returned to my own land? Prince Patrick is in great peril!"

"I am attempting to find an appropriate set of hyper-drive coordinates suitable for creating an Einstein-Selvik bridge that will take us into your reality," Lady Smith-Harrington patiently explained.

Madeleine Prime wondered how that would sound translated into the princess's Latin. By the confused look on her face, it seemed she understood about as much of that as Madeleine Prime did herself. "Zounds," the princess said. "I like this not. If I but knew the proper spell, I would have magicked myself back to my own world and left you to your own devices. Alas, the only magic I can conjure are these blasts of flame."

"It's not magic, it's.... oh, never mind." It occurred to Madeleine Prime that maybe, on the princess's world, her abilities were magical. Why not?

Mad Maddie was starting to edge onto the teleporter pads. She might have made it too, but at that moment the ship's computer wirped alarmingly. Lady Smith-Harrington's eyes went wide. "There is another one of us."

"You're kidding," Madeleine Prime said.

"I kid you not. I instructed the computer to scan the planet for life signs genetically identical to our own. It appears it has located one."

"Well, beam her up here," Madeleine Prime said resignedly. "Might as well get all of me together."

Mad Maddie swore under her breath. Apparently she would not be able to use the teleporter as a bathroom after all.

The teleporters had a difficult time locking on to the life sign. Lights flashed and blared, and the ship's computer squalled in protest. "Perhaps you should increase the power?" Madeleine Prime suggested.

"I am giving her all she has!" Lady Smith-Harrington snapped. "What next, shall I reverse the polarity?"

At that moment, the teleporters finally got hold. In a flash, yet another Gaseous Girl materialized on the ship.

"Oh, super," she said, looking around in glee at the ship. "This is fantastic. I was a ghost when I got here at first but now I’m all physical and stuff. Cool. "

"Hi there," Madeleine Prime said. "I'm Madeleine, so's she, so's you, so's everyone else. What's your variation?"

The new arrival giggled. "I'm evil."  She proved how evil she was by a sudden burst of fire. In a slight failure of engineering, the teleporter pads were located within sight of the Century Comet's engine room. Evil Madeleine's blast sliced through the engine room door and shot into the stardrive chamber.

A loud boom shook the ship and klaxons blared over their heads. "Hey, that was fun!" Evil Madeleine exclaimed in delight. "What'll we do next?"  Mad Maddie settled that question by walloping the woman over the head so that she fell unconscious on the teleporter pad.

Lady Smith-Harrington ran to the controls. Her face went white with alarm. "The core's breaching. Within seconds it will melt down into a catastrophic explosion."

"Great," Madeleine Prime said. "I get to die. Again. I'm getting tired of this."

The princess drew herself up. "If we are to perish, then I must say; it would be my honor to do so in your company. Across the worlds, we are the same person. It seems appropriate that we end our road together."

Mad Maddie sniffled. "Ain't it the truth."

"Quite," said Lady Smith-Harrington.

Read the Next Chapter.