Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time 5: Hiccup Holly and Behemoth Bob
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, our heroine had been erased from the timeline and had flown off to deal with another crisis in the city; meanwhile, we had flashed back to the first time she unleashed her powers as Gaseous Girl. Today, another flashback….
Although she’d begun her public career as Gaseous Girl after the Owl Bandit’s attack on her friend Barbara’s wedding reception, Madeleine Smith didn’t really hit the big leagues until she acquired a nemesis.
A nemesis isn’t your ordinary bad guy; random muggers demanding people's valuables in dark alleyways don’t count. Policemen can handle that easily enough. No, a true nemesis, worthy of a superhero, is out for world domination. Maniacal laughter, a fondness for calling other people fools, a complicated scheme with the potential to end life as we know it, sharks with lasers on their heads: all these things go into the making of a nemesis. The final element is that they must have an intense and specific dislike of the hero. It can't be just anyone's nemesis; it has to be personal.
Madeleine was some time in getting one, as it happened. Once she resigned herself to going public, she found she preferred fighting people who couldn't shoot death rays back at her. Also she was still trying to get through college, and having to save the world from collapsing into a hell-dimension played havoc with one's study schedule. Then she graduated and went into the private investigator business, as this seemed to fit her chosen vocation. A year later, she was behind on the rent for her office and her apartment, and in a bad financial way generally. Contrary to what she'd seen on television, the police hardly ever seemed to need her help solving crimes. Madeleine was beginning to wonder what to do.
Then, one night, everything changed. She was flying home late after a dismally minor case involving a lost cat. It was raining, she had a cold, and she could feel a terrible sneeze coming on. As she came in over her neighborhood, Madeleine felt in her pocket for her handkerchief. She didn't find one. What she found was a tissue intertwined with a spare scrunchie. She sighed, pulled them both out, and managed to undo the tangle, but in the process she accidentally dropped the scrunchie. Madeleine blew her nose and used her flame powers to dispose of the tissue in one quick burst. Then she committed a grave error, one she wouldn’t have done with more experience. Rather than swoop down to the street below to search for and retrieve the rain-soaked scrunchie, she gave it up for lost and flew off home. Normally she tried not to litter, but she was tired and frustrated with her life, and she didn't care.
What she’d forgotten was that this particular scrunchie carried a strand of her hair, which contained just a bit of her super-powered DNA. Worse, as the scrunchie had fallen, it had caught a stray breeze and flown out across the city. By pure chance, it wafted into a chemical factory. In a flagrant violation of state and federal safety standards, the factory had a vat of chemicals bubbling away right out in the open. The factory would be shut down by the government shortly after for exactly that reason, but all too late. A few moments after the scrunchie wafted into the factory, there was a tremendous flash and a bang. Unfortunately, someone happened to be standing nearby in the path of the explosion.
Holly Donahue had a dead-end job that didn't pay nearly enough. Unlike Madeleine, who muddled along the best she could, Holly had resorted to burglary to make ends meet. She had that day scored a very nice catalytic converter, and had chosen the parking lot outside the factory as a secluded place to meet her fence. She was standing there in the drizzling rain when she heard the sound of the blast. Holly was so startled by the unexpected explosion that she hiccuped. She was in mid-hiccup, in fact, when the wall of chemicals, now mixed with Gaseous Girl's DNA, hit her.
She woke up the next morning in the hospital. A nurse noticed she was awake and summoned the doctor. The doctor began to explain that she had changed in some undefinable way, and that they needed more tests. Holly started to protest. Instead, she hiccuped again. To her shock, the doctor went flying out into the hallway, right into a passing nurse with a food tray.
Some people, realizing that they had been gifted with hiccups of explosive power, might have resolved to use their power to do good works. Others might have been overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all. Holly faced the strangeness somewhat differently. Burglary would be so much easier now, she exulted. And why stop there? With her newfound power, she could do anything!
And so Madeleine's nemesis had born. ,Shortly after that she’d had her first battle, and then another, and so on, right up to the present moment.
Or she would have. But then Madeleine didn’t exist anymore.
That meant all of their titanic world-in-the-balance fights, with Gaseous Girl pitting her flames against Holly's sonic hiccup blasts (and usually winning) never happened. That changed a lot.
Specifically, the night Madeleine had been wiped from the timeline, something big threatened Edison City. Something very big. The Third Collapsing Ix-Durham Anomaly, to be exact. It was an alternate dimension that, for reasons no one ever knew, decided to open up right over the playground outside Quincy Adams Elementary. Gaseous Girl and Hiccup Holly would have managed to set aside their problems and team up to fight this existential threat. But now Hiccup Holly didn't exist. Madeleine did (sort of) but she had heard sirens and flown to another crisis in another part of the city. It turned out to be a standard police chase of a burglar in a getaway car. Meanwhile, the Ix-Durham Anomaly went and collapsed the heck out of itself, tearing a merry hole in space-time. Things got loose.
The first one to notice was a security guard named Paul. He’d been a guard in the old timeline; in the new one he was still a guard. As Paul was patrolling the school grounds, he heard a sudden ominous rumble, and then a thud and a dull scraping, like some very big animal pawing at the ground. He looked up, wondering what the noise was.
A gigantic creature towered above him. Behemoth Bob, the result of an unfortunate alien genetics experiment, had locked up in a temporal prison reality after he ate a small moon. Now Behemoth Bob was out. And he was still hungry.