The Charge

It is a calm and ordinary day in Pleasanttown. The sky is a calm cerulean blue; the air is crisp with that ever-present autumnal scent; it is warm for November. Old Miz Hubbard, the kindly old lady down the street, is taking her cats out for a walk. She crosses the street, her tiny feet shuffling. Over the cement sidewalk, down the curb, over the smooth asphalt of Main Street. She does not see the tiny, insignificant pebble of hematite in her determined path until it is too late.

To be continued...

I would be a rather versatile superhero. Talented in the arts of telepathy and minor telekinesis, my strong points would be changing and using to my advantage the magnetism and polarities of my body and other things, and being able to walk in platform high heeled shoes. (In fact, in Episode 839, I so nearly met my demise because my arch-nemesis followed my trail of high heel-induced holes in the sand I had run through -- but that's another story.) I would have these superheroes because being able to fly is so cliche, and my ability to walk in said shoes would intimindate female opponents. As for the magnetism power -- since flying would not be in my repertoire, if I had the sudden need to be on a ceiling, I could simply make myself magentically attracted to the ceiling (as long as the ceiling was metal) and rise up to the ceiling, where I could stay until I changed my polarity so that I could stick to some other magnetic object. Likewise, I could also change metal objects to be attracted to other metal objects they would normally not be attracted to.

Back to the action

Miz Hubbard, distracted by the contented mewings of her many cats and the beauty of the whimsical scene around her, does not see the shard of raw and, incidentally, magnetically charged hematite until her loafer-clad shoe is lodged below its edge. "Ooop," she cries softly, as she is caught off-balance and she plummets towards the unforgiving black of the asphalt. Her feeble hands fly out, instinctually blocking her face from the rough of plane of the road, drawing ever-closer, inches away, so close and this is going to hurt and she braces herself and POW

The Charge is sailing on the breeze, on it but not with it, not even on it in truth, merely gliding through it as the entire core and essence of her being is focused on the wrought-iron mailbox on Main Street. The leaf of the oak tree she was hiding in detachs from her hair as every molecule of the Charge is focused on the attraction of the mailbox to her newly-polarized body, the shard of raw hematite that she sent flying in front of the woman's foot. She strains it to the texture of Main Street, scrutinizing the expression of the old woman who is falling to the road, seeing nothing but pavement. The Charge hits the mailbox like an aluminum bat hitting a ping-pong ball, if the ping-pong ball were magnetic, at the same time that the woman's hands hit the pavement. The creak of mailbox number 42 is drowned by the terrible crash on metal on metal, the Charge (steel, as she decided while still sitting in the tree) against the iron (fortunately for her, makes the polarity conversion so much simpler) of number 42. The mailbox shudders but welcomes the Charge, its rightful magnetic partner. Locked in her perch on the mailbox, still unseen by the woman, the Charge observes --her eyes grow wide with shock and wise with the sudden knowledge as

Miz Hubbard blinks confusedly at her sudden acquaintance with Main Street. Her carbon-black eagle eyes dart sharply underneath wisps of gray hair and she sees that rock

The Charge observes Carbon Fourteen's face snap up. With a snap decision and an exertion of her powers, the hematite's magnetic field rotates and strikes Carbon Fourteen full in the face. Rather than falling back to earth the mineral sticks to her face, regardless of Carbon frantically clawing at it and, still attached to her face, slides slowly down to earth.

Blast it all and what's more blast that rock, Miz Hubbard's mind screeches. Her cats have vanished. Howling with rage, she is upright in a second, and rips the rock from her cheek. "Charge--"

The Charge's eyes are wide with revulsion, but thankfully her magnetically-oriented subconscious has already sent her sailing towards the sharp, geometric, black planes that are Carbon Fourteen's face, set almost comically above Miz Hubbard's body (Miz Hubbard's face lying plastic, a mask, on Main Street). Her leg strikes Carbon Fourteen with a high keening -- metal on mineral.

And as the Charge can reforge her body with a will and Carbon Fourteen, her nemesis, and been deteriorating into a useless radioactive mess since their first battle, all it takes is the strike of a red platform high heeled shoe to bring down the carbon-black rock that once stood in the way of The Charge.

The End! :)