Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time 18: Deus Ex Procyon
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 had defeated her possessed evil twin in battle on the shores of the river Acheron in the First Circle of Hell, but as one might expect, Eviler Madeleine didn’t give up so easily. Now our heroine is in the middle of an all-out scrap against the full might of the Infernal Regions…
The advantage of fighting a hell-army that insanely outnumbers you is that you don't have to think about it too much. Ordinarily, when Gaseous Girl was fighting Crudmuffin or Thunderdomestic, she had to take a little care that her flame blasts were aimed properly. She didn't want to miss and burn down little Sally's lemonade stand, for instance. Now, that didn't matter. Enemies were everywhere. She could flame and burp explosive gas and snap-kick and punch to her heart's content. It was almost automatic. And as Gaseous Girl threw herself into the fight, she could divert a small part of her attention to the possibility that she might not make it out of this one.
She’d seen superheroes die before. Her mother died quite frequently. Of course, Maria Smith promptly resurrected in seventeen seconds each time, so Madeleine wasn't sure that counted. She'd meant to ask Father Milo about that. There had been other heroes who had died and then come back. Their consciousness had been transported to a new body, or maybe they'd been cloned, or the event that killed them had been erased by a time change. It happened a lot. She couldn’t remember if she knew anyone who’d died permanently.
What she did know was that her powers included, among other things, near invulnerability. But as she pounded through yet another death-bot and smashed yet another loathsome hell-being, Madeleine Prime began to feel an aching bone-weariness that she’d never felt before. Her flames flared just a little less brightly. For the first time, she knew the cold certainty that nearly invulnerable would not be invulnerable enough.
Meanwhile, back in the universe, on a small planet roughly 93 million miles from its star, a raccoon named Bingo was going about its business in as covert a fashion as it could. Bingo considered himself a most well-ordered raccoon these days. He knew of some raccoons that longed after adventure, who might join with other animal friends to save the environment or venture into space and fight aliens. Bingo was no longer that sort of raccoon. He had changed, he told himself. He’d retired from all that. He’d become a raccoon of study, a raccoon who liked to conceal himself in his forest hideaway and read deep intellectual works.
Bingo had, he knew not how, acquired the ability to read, and so had taught himself the English language. Although he was deeply ashamed of it, he had stolen human books and then read them. He’d set up a little library for himself underneath his tree. He was very happy.
Still, though, at times, Bingo couldn’t help longing for something greater. He would step out of his hideaway at night and stare at a patch of stars, and wonder what it was like out there, whether things had changed. Then he would dismiss the feeling, go back inside, and make himself a bit of cocoa. His life was calm. Quiet. Untroubled.
Then the angel came.
Bingo was just starting a new book he had snagged from the library some time before, a young-adult dystopia where a girl named after a flower challenged some evil regime or other. Suddenly, the angel interrupted. "Yo," it said, its golden light spilling across the pages.
"Wha!" squeaked Bingo.
"I'm Constance," the angel said. "What's up?"
"Wha!" Bingo repeated.
"Yeah, I getcha. Angels don't often communicate with animals, right? Well, we do sometimes. My friend Tabitha had a great conversation with a dolphin the other day. It was named Skip. She and Skip rescued some castaways. It was big in the news. Anyway. Here's the thing: I need your help."
"Me?" said Bingo. "What for?"
Constance sighed. "I wish I had a Powerpoint projector to explain all this. Ah, well, let me sum up. So you know about Edison City, right?”
“Of course I know,” Bingo said, trying to recover and muster his dignity. “One of their superheroes, the Wombat, nearly ruined my library with his boundless burrowing and all.”
“Right, yeah,” Constance said, “Anyway. There’s another cape, Gaseous Girl, nice girl, got herself in hell, and long story short she's trying to get out, only there's a huge hell-army blocking her path. Like, real big."
Bingo was confused. "But what have I got to do with it?"
Constance grinned. "I know you, buddy. And before you went all philosophical, you worked with lasers and things. Zapped a shark or too, didn't ya?"
The raccoon looked very much abashed. "It was a different time, then. There were sharks everywhere, sharks in tornados, sharks in space even. I had to do something. But I swore off that life ages ago, honestly I did."
"Welp, you just swore back on. Thing is, you're the only one who can help. You don't, she dies. And if she dies, the whole universe goes plotz. Save Gaseous Girl, save the universe. Or don't. Your call."
Bingo didn't see as he had much of a choice. "I will need a moment," he said miserably. "I’ll have to hunt out the old battle-suit again."
"Excellent," said Constance, giggling. This was going to be fun.
Gaseous Girl had nearly flamed out. She had used up the last of her emergency supply of caffeinated sodas and burped nearly her last explosive burp at the advancing hell-armies, but there were thousands upon thousands of them, and only one of her. The result now was simple, brutal math. Sooner or later she knew she was going to die. After that, since she wouldn't be able to get her evil twin back to the twin's universe and restore the rip in reality, the universe itself would die. Gaseous Girl bleakly wondered if God would step in at that point to fix things.
That train of thought led Gaseous Girl to the obvious conclusion. She snap-kicked one last giant verminous insect, then dropped to one knee. She still remembered some of the old prayers, even one or two of the Latin bits. "Right," she said, "here goes... I mean, hail Mary, full of-"
There was a sudden small pop. A raccoon appeared, looking glum and wearing an armored battle-suit. "Hello," it said. "I'm Bingo. I've come to help."
"You have got to be kidding," said Gaseous Girl.
"No," said Bingo miserably. "I'm the answer to your prayer. I'm supposed to save you."
"You're the... but...I haven't finished praying yet!" Madeleine spluttered.
"Look, the angel said, save Gaseous Girl, save the world. So here I am. I brought lasers."
"Lasers," Gaseous Girl repeated.
Bingo demonstrated this by opening fire and zapping a rampaging slimy tentacle monster that had been prepared to break the momentary lull in the battle by biting Madeleine's head off.
"Nice," she said, "but I'm gonna need about fifty million more of those. We're still only two, and they've got-"
The raccoon produced a small vial from a pocket in his battle suit. "I also brought some holy water, I thought maybe-"
Gaseous Girl snatched it. "Oh, you're brilliant." In her hand the vial began to glow red. She shot a look around. Caught in the flow of the battle, she now stood just on the bank of the river Acheron. On the far bank, the possessed Eviler Madeleine stood watching the fight on a little hill, just high enough to give her a perfect view of Gaseous Girl's demise. She ought to have left the fight to its inevitable end, but she couldn't resist staying to watch. It was the classic villain mistake, and it had just caught up with her.
"Ready for some science, Bingo?" Gaseous Girl said. "When you heat up water, it becomes steam. And do you know what form of water steam is?"
Bingo's eyes widened. "It's a gas!"
Gaseous Girl smiled. "Now you know." She smashed the glowing red vial into the river, then shot out her hand. A geyser of holy-water-infused steam blasted out of the Acheron, booming away right smack into Eviler Madeleine. The possessed supervillain gave a wrenching scream as she careened off her hill.
Gaseous Girl seized the raccoon and flew frantically across the river, the hell-armies reeling back in disarray. With her other hand she grabbed a flailing arm of her evil counterpart, who no longer looked possessed but was still mad as anything. Ignoring Evil Madeleine’s screams, clinging onto Bingo, Madeleine Prime charged off towards the exit from hell. She had a flying glimpse of bees chasing a crowd of people, and then a gate of wrought iron loomed up before her, bearing an inscription in ancient Latin.
Madeleine Prime crashed right through without even stopping to provide a translation. She had another flying glimpse of trees, and dark hills, and a gaping rift through which she saw a torrent of white stars and red suns. Without much idea of what else to do, she aimed straight for it.
"Hey! Stop! Wait!" Evil Madeleine screamed. "That's a rift in reality, you idiot! You can't just fly into it! You'll break everything!"
The thought flashed through Gaseous Girl's mind that she should say something heroic before she pitched into the rift. She blanked. She should've prepared-
The universe flashed.