Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time 3: Death and Resurrection
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 was in pursuit of the truth behind the disappearance of Pamela Percy from the timeline when she is called upon to battle the Shrieking Tree Demon. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive. You’d think that would be the end of our story, but you’d be wrong…
"When a superhero dies, whether in combat or rescue, the authorities are presented with a dilemma. Traditionally, the next of kin would be notified as soon as possible. This would normally be all the more important in the social media age, when video of the death event could flash across Twitter or rack up YouTube views almost before the body grows cold. However, a specific and irreversible death event for superheroes is no longer assured. Impossibly slow heartbeats, healing trances, mind-to-clone transfers, time reversals: all of these mean that a person could die one day and be perfectly healthy the next. Due to the potentially traumatic complications that could arise, it is recommended that a uniform death-notification policy be established to account for potential resurrection variables. Such a policy could include delayed notifications until it appears certain that no resurrection is imminent or possible." -Excerpt from proposed amendment to Manual of Superhero Policy, Government Publication 947-A5.
Maria Smith didn't see the notification people coming. She had just died herself. Bullet in the head, quick, relatively painless. Resurrection in seventeen seconds. She didn't get much press, not being one of the big-leaguers, so the burglar who had shot her on the way out of the jewelry store was caught entirely by surprise when he glanced back and saw his victim getting calmly to her feet. Naturally, he shot her again. Maria grabbed hold of a glass table to stop herself from hitting the floor this time. She blinked, died, and then seventeen seconds after, breathed again. "You wanna keep doing this?" she asked. "I've got all day."
"You..." gasped the burglar. "You can't..." He took several steps closer and shot her for a third time.
"Okay, now that is pushing it," Maria said, seventeen seconds later, as the hole between her eyes stitched together. "When I said I've got all day, I really don't. I have tickets for a movie with my daughter later, okay? So drop the gun. Now."
He dropped it, shaking in terror. Maria relieved him of the loot and smoothly cuffed him to a nearby lamp-post. "You just sit there and think on your sins, okay?" she lectured him. She turned, intending to return the stolen goods to the shop owner. Then she saw the grave faces of a military officer and a chaplain approaching her. "Look," Maria said, "I appreciate the thought, but I'm not still dead. I'm sure someone probably saw me get shot and reported in, but honestly, it only lasts seventeen seconds. I am fine, really."
"Ma'am," said the officer quietly, "This is about your daughter, Madeleine."
Maria went cold. "What about my daughter Madeleine?"
"I'm so sorry. She was killed two days ago."
The words seemed void to Maria, so many meaningless syllables. She couldn't comprehend them. She died twenty times a day. She had almost forgotten what death meant. Rile, her husband, was so durable he was practically immortal anyway. They had gotten into the way of thinking their daughter would be immortal too. She was a flying brick, but now... it seemed that wasn't quite enough.
"How?" Maria forced out.
"She went in against the Shrieking Tree Demon. Natalie James was on the way as backup, but your daughter attacked before Natalie arrived. The monster was too strong for her."
"I see," Maria said. "And where is my daughter now?"
This was the hard part for the officer. "Ma'am, I....I'm afraid we couldn't recover her. She was blasted right out into space. We tried to track her by satellite but... we lost her. She never came back to Earth."
Maria looked at the sky. Her daughter was out there, floating in the stars. It wasn't the comforting thought she hoped it might be.
Her phone chirped. She fumbled for it, her eyes suddenly burning with tears. "Riley?"
"Maria. You know?"
"I know."
That was all they said for a long time. Their daughter wasn't a telepath or a regenerator. She wasn't coming back. Ever.
***
Somewhere in the dark, Madeleine blinked. "Wha- Oh. I'm still alive. I wonder how-"
The sun blazed at her eyes. She raised her hand to block the light. Her hand was transparent. "Oh...crap," said Madeleine. "I'm a ghost. I'm a stupid ghost."
She paused for a second, startled that she couldn’t even hear her own voice. Then she realized she was still floating in space, apparently ghosts couldn't talk in space any more than a normal person could. There were a lot of things ghosts couldn’t do, now that she thought of it. No more chats over coffee with her friend on the Edison City newspaper commiserating over local crimes and politics. No more staring out her little office window at night, listening to the howl of police sirens, wondering whether she could make the rent that month. She couldn't pay anything now. “What do you know, an upside,” Madeleine said bitterly.
She decided that she had to get herself resurrected. She didn't have the ability of her mother, who could die and pop back to life in seventeen seconds flat. She also didn't want to tell her mother of her demise just yet. If she could get fixed up quickly enough, Madeleine could simply show up alive again and no one would know otherwise. Madeleine would, therefore, have to rely on a close, discreet friend to get her back. Better yet, a relative. She knew one, specifically, a distant cousin, perfect for this sort of thing. Madeleine gathered her ghostly self together and floated back towards Earth.
She landed on a snowy field in North Plaznik, a small European country just east of Genovia and southwest of Kaznia. Madeleine had to admit that there were a few useful things about her current deadness. For instance, she hadn't been challenged by air traffic controllers to state her destination and business. Nor had she needed to deal with customs agents or airport security. She just dropped right down in the snow outside the capital and looked about for her cousin. He wasn't hard to find.
He sat alone on an old bench, staring down at his boots. Madeleine had a suspicion he'd been drinking. He often did, when he wasn't doing superhero work. As long as he was sober enough to do what she wanted, she didn't much care what else he did. "Hi, Gregory," she said, and winced at the sepulchral tones that attached to her voice. "How's it going?"
"Maddie?" Gregory said, without looking up. He was the only one who called her that. "You have a cold."
"Actually,” Madeleine said, “I'm not sick, I'm dead. I need you to resurrect me."
He looked up finally, and saw her outline floating before him. "Cannot resurrect you," Gregory said. "Forbidden."
"Like heck," Madeleine said. "You resurrected Captain Snowbuster just last year, remember?"
"That was different," Gregory grumbled.
“Why?”
“I can’t explain. Cannot resurrect you.” He looked down at his boots again, hunching down, intransigent. Madeleine saw he wasn't going to help.
"Be that way," she snapped. "I'll just go home and tell my mom I'm dead, shall I?"
Gregory smiled in an odd, twisted way. "Fine. I will resurrect you. Then you go home to your mother." He raised his hand and made a few complicated passes in the air. Then he pulled a vial from his pocket and let a single crimson drop fall to the snow. A red mist rose and swirled about Madeleine. Then, in a blink, it was gone. Madeleine sucked in a breath of frosty winter air. She could breathe again. She'd gotten cynical over the years with all she'd seen, but now, she almost cried.
"Thanks," she managed. "I owe you." Then she flew off, fire trailing behind her in the sky.
"No, Maddie," Gregory said somberly. "You really don’t."
She landed several hours later in her own neighborhood. Brimming with sudden excitement, she dashed up the walk to her front door and banged on it. "Mom! Dad! I'm alive, I'm not dead, I'm alive, I am, I-"
The door opened. A hard-faced woman she barely recognized as her mother stared at her. "I don't know what you're up to, but I'll call the police if you don't stop."
"But... Mom..."
"Mom? Are you high? I'm not your mother. I don't even know who you are." The door slammed in Madeleine's face.