Vic Kemple loved him some sexy superheroines. He never expected to be one!

 
Victor Kemple ran. For all he knew he might be running for his life. The four boys chasing him certainly seemed intent on doing him grave bodily harm.

"We're going to slice you up, you fat pussy sneak," snarled the closest one.

"He's going into the park," said the leader.

"Now we've got him," said a third.

Victor looked up to discover that it was true, he had headed into the park, instinctively perhaps. But the trees and shrubs of a lonely city park at night would do him no good for cover with four of them to surround and search for him. He couldn't run fast enough to get a big enough lead to do any good at hiding.

Why, he asked himself again, had he put off going to the comic store until after dark?

"There he is," yelled one of the bullies. "The fucker is headed toward the johns."

I am? wondered Victor. Oh, the portable toilets set up because the regular bathroom building is being worked on. What a horrible place to die, he thought.

He considered again dropping his backpack in order to run faster. And maybe the contents would distract his pursuers. But it was exactly those contents that prevented him from doing so. Almost fifty dollars of new comics including the latest issues of some of his favorites like, Batgirl, Batwoman, Birds of Prey, Bomb Queen, Danger Girl, Executive Assistant, Fathom, Grimm Fairy Tales, Power Girl, Red Sonja, Sirens of Gotham, Spider Girl, Supergirl, Vampirella, Wonder Woman, X-23, and Zatanna. Victor was of the opinion that a comic was only worth spending three or four dollars on if it featured lots of beautiful artwork starring scantily clad females. And he didn't want to give up his treasures to be pawed over by the likes of the bullies chasing him.

Except they weren't just bullies. He'd seen them commit a crime for which they could all go to jail. And he knew all of their names, had known them since junior high. And worse, they knew his name.

"Vicky, Vicky Kemple," called their leader, Dick Yardley. Dick had been captain of the Junior Varsity football team last year, before he was caught drinking beer in a car with the captain of the cheerleading squad.

"Vic the Sick, where are you?" The second member of the brute squad called out. Rod Meats had been Vic's nemesis since second grade, they had known each other longest and had once been friends.

"Kimple, you twinkie, I'm going to give you a permanent kink -- in your neck." Lance Bollard promised bringing up the rear of the procession. Lance was slow because he was so big, almost 300 pounds of teenage acne and resentment.

But where had Willie Peters gone?

Vic regretted having glanced backward to locate his enemies since not seeing Willie increased his fear more than the sight of the three others had. Somehow he knew that Peters, the most dangerous of the four, the one who might be actually insane, had gotten ahead of him. He suspected Willie of being crazy because why else would he have set fire to his sister's dollhouse after stuffing it full of rats -- something else Vic had witnessed, though that was years ago?

And there he was! Willie made his sudden appearance peering through the corner of the temporary chain link fence around the construction project. "I see you," the mad boy smirked.

"Don't let him get away," called one of the other bullies.

"We got the fat little fucker now," said another.

Desperate, in panic mode, Vic did the only thing he could think of, he ducked into the nearest Porta-Jon, right in view of the deranged posse out for his blood.

"You were right, Gooma," said Twirt. "These Earthers have some of the vinchiest music in this Spiral Arm."

"It's roblastic," agreed Gooma, pleased to have a friend's corroboration in matters of musical taste.

The two young bogtasses from the planet Dawoop had "borrowed" Gooma's parent's starjumper to check out the music scene in nearby solar systems. Well, nearby if you have a starjumper to make the tens and hundreds of light years between destinations irrelevant.

"It's the beat," said Twirt, moving a pair of chelated anterior psedopalps in time with the catchy rhythm. They drifted high above one of the Earther cities, their starjump drive quiescent, staying aloft through the virtue of good thoughts and just a bit of darkforce repulsion. The communication module in the little craft allowed them to sample the ambient electromagnetic radiation and decode it into multi-frequency audio signals appropriate to their sensory arrays.

"Driz me," sighed Gooma.

A harsh BLANG-kkkk-kkkk! from the hull startled them out of their groobulence.

Gooma opened one dorsal ocular and two referent finials to examine the instrumentation. "I think one of the local hopcraft is shooting at us."

"Far out," said Twirt. "Ask them if they've got any of the blue stuff." Immature bogtasses back on Dawoop weren't allowed to shoot blue stuff into their medial peduclices.

"Not that kind of shooting," said Gooma. "I mean like with a restructor or a depanopoly ray." Another BLONK-kk-RRR-ggg!

"Well, pruck that," said Twirt, realizing the seriousness of the situation. "I thought these wogs were supposed to be more primitive than that."

"INITIATING COUNTERMOVEMENT PROTOCOLS!" announced the starjumper's Artificially Sentient Sapience. To the pleasing sounds of the Earther melodies, the little craft jinked and didoed to avoid the energies being thrown at it by the unexpectedly competent Earther defense force.

Inside the Porta-Jon, Victor had no idea what was happening. He could only hear the excited cries of the boys who had been chasing him.

"Look! Up in the sky!" one of them exclaimed, completely unselfconsciously.

"What the fuck is that?"

"It's..."

"No, it's not!"

"Look, it's flying and we don't know what it is, so it IS a UFO!"

"Bullshit. It's probably swamp gas."

"Over the ocean?"

"Or a weather balloon."

"You guys are being dumbshits...."

"Holy Shit! It's coming right at us!"

"Attempting to engage passenger safety restraints," announced the Artificially Sentient Sapience. "Passenger safety restraints appear to be disabled."

"Well, der," said Gooma, or the equivalent. "You wouldn't have let me take off from Dawoop with the safeties active."

Twirt, launched by one of the evasive maneuvers, landed right in the middle of Gooma's second ventral segment. "Oof," they both said.

"I must use less vigorous methods to avoid being damaged by the primitive weapons of the autochthons," said the A.S.S.

"The who?" asked Twirt, trying to get disentangled from all ten of Gooma's pedal appendages.

"I think it means the natives that are shooting at us," said Gooma.

"Hold on to the endoflora of your second and third stomachs," warned the A.S.S. "This maneuver will be a trifle hirsute."

"The what?" asked Twirt.

"Don't hurl, it's going to get hairy," Gooma translated.

The starjumper abruptly dove between the fighter jets that had been scrambled to investigate. Reasoning that the restive natives might hesitate to fire their chemically-powered slug-throwers and flying torpedoes toward a large group of their own habitations, the A.S.S. spun a quarter turn and skewed in between two tall structures to do a curving 270 in three dimensions and head straight up.

Unfortunately, this required the ship to pass between some of the native growths and much too near an array of the structures.

"Look out!" screamed Twirt. "We're going to hit that row of apartment buildings!"

One of the disadvantages of both artificial and natural sentience is distractability and all the sapience in the universe won't save an intelligence whose attention is not focussed. The A.S.S. twitched the controls of the starjumper only a micro-measure but it was enough to take out the row of Porta-Jons. Especially including the third one from the end.

The very one that Vic Kempel was attempting to hide inside.

Vic woke up all at once. No drowsy dreamy half-sleeping state but instant-on, like they used to advertise for the first transistor radios. Vic did not need to warm up any tubes. This was not normal. Vic, in fact, was notorious for being hard to wake up and for managing to sleep while eating breakfast.

But just now, consciousness came back in a rush. Vic remembered the dark-thirty trip to the comic book shop after collecting a two week check from Taco Tigre for $155. Spending almost a third of that on comics had seemed like a good idea at the time. A quick trip to the all-night auto-teller to make a deposit and withdraw cash, then down the block to the comic store where slices of paradise cost three or four dollars each, less a discount for being a regular customer.

Eyes open, lying on grass, looking up at a multi-colored sky, Vic wondered what had happened after that. Wandering home by a different than usual route while examining the covers of nearly a month of comics still in their bag-and-board combos, Vic had paused at an alley and looked down the length of it to see four boys from school apparently making a drug buy from a sleazy looking individual in a grubby duster and cowboy hat.

After that the shouting, the chasing, the running, the hiding...then what?

But before Vic could work it out any further, the thought occurred: multi-colored sky?

Pollution, maybe? It looked sort of like a Jack Kirby effect, or maybe Steve Ditko in those old Doc Strange issues from the Silver Age. Bands of different colored light stretched across the sky, interrupted by dots and globules of other colors and sprinkled with more and brighter stars than Vic could ever remember having seen before. Especially not in the city where light pollution normally made the sky a nearly uniform gray with only the brightest of stars showing through.

For a moment Vic wondered about actually being in the city but the sounds of traffic did not seem far away. Unusually distinct though, as if each individual vehicle, even each individual tire had a unique sound. And people, Vic could hear people talking. Someone was ordering a Double Cheese Double Bacon with Extra Sauce and Super Chili Cheese Fries.

And a heart attack on the side, thought Vic. Am I lying in the grass in the parking lot of a Burger Bonanza? It sounded like it. And when the order taker asked if there would be any drinks with that, Vic could hear the same voice from both the buzzy speaker that must be hanging on a pole in the drive thru and, simultaneously, the live voice of the person who must be inside the Burger Bone.

How could that be? Intrigued, Vic sat up to look around, but then looked down instead as the unfamiliar sensation of breasts bouncing on her chest attracted her attention.

Continued on next meteor...