Got Gal, Issue #002

Issue #002 – – – – – controlled by Keith Nixon – – – – – Credits 115

The ladder ascended quite some distance, first along the side wall of the sewer tunnel and then into a vertical shaft.  Above, Got Gal could see a manhole cover through which shafts of light penetrated.  “I can this coming out in the middle of the Governor’s Ball,” she muttered, “with myself wafting the fashionable scent of Eau du Cesspit about and with a used condom stuck behind one ear.”

However, perhaps luckily, it did not.

Pushing the manhole cover aside Got Gal found herself at the tail end of a long alley.  Dumpsters lined both walls with barely space for people, let alone vehicles, to navigate between.  “This probably explains,” she mused, wrinkling her nose in disgust, “why none of them have been emptied in, like, forever.”

Still, with so little information to assess her situation, she determined to find something she could use as a weapon.  Overflowing dumpsters, despite their barf factor, seemed a likely source of such a device.

Got Gal hovered up into the air and floated above the stinking piles of refuse, looking through the old rotting fish, soggy crates and thousands of pieces of merchandise packaging for something useful.  She spotted an old metal chair and plucked it from the garbage, easily rending the seat into pieces so that she could wield a steel leg in each hand.  Sure, her physical strength was pretty awesome (not to mention catching people by surprise – who expected a bikini-clad young woman to have the strength of twenty men?) but it never hurt to grab an edge.  Or two.

A fraction of a memory surfaced. “Perhaps that ghost image was right”, she thought, laughing at herself.  But Got Gal wasn’t one to dwell on what might be.  Better to just find out what the hell was going on.

With a kick she angled upwards and soared towards the sky at incredible speed.  Blasting clear of the rooftops she soared up into the air, her arms tucked at her sides and her legs together to give minimal wind resistance.  She looked, for all intents and purposes, like a human bullet.  A very curvaceous human bullet, if she said so herself.

At just below cloud level in what appeared to be the late afternoon, she could see the city spread out below her.  A grand canvas of urban humanity, a daunting skyline as jagged skyscrapers thrust heavenward, their shadows long and dark across the streets far below.

This was not right.  While her memory was faint and fragmented, she was sure that the towers should not have been this tall, their architecture less severe.  There seemed to be huge, derelict sections, blasted areas of the city which she had expected would be glittering and healthy.  There was something to the way the metropolis looked; tired, dirty, menacing.  This did not look like a healthy place, but the opposite.  It looked sick.

“Hey, honeypants,” she heard.  Glancing across, three figures were hovering in the air to her North, perhaps one hundred feet away.  The voice carried well, the faint breeze blowing precisely the right direction.  “I hope you got yourself a license for that.”
“For what?” Got Gal asked.  She was sizing up the three individuals.  Each wore a black and grey suit, like a uniform, but more sleek.  Like a cross between a uniform and a superhero costume, in fact.  Oh crap, she thought.  Minions?
“For the use of your super-powers in a public space.”
“A license?  To fly?  Really?”  She asked.
“Honeypants,” the man sneered as the trio hovered towards her.  “You obviously ain’t from around here.  But that’s okay.  We’ll just take you into custody and we can sort this mess out.”  He leered at her bikini-clad form, “One way or another.”