Hail, hail, the gang's all here?

Willie Peters came to like a gas range with an electric pilot spark. Suddenly awake and aware, he first thought he must be dead and in hell. Flames surrounded him but he realized that he didn't feel any heat. Or rather, only a pleasant amount, like a warm spring day.

And it was day, bright daylight around him. Decrepit, decaying buildings marched away from him in the direction he faced. It didn't look like anywhere he'd ever been. Maybe somewhere in L.A., he thought. Los Angeles had rundown industrial areas filled with abandoned and derelict buildings that looked spooky even in daylight.

But, It had been night, hadn't it? he wondered. Nighttime when the light in the sky had come down and the toilets exploded....

Had he been killed by an exploding Porta-Jon? And the devil had come for him, a devil that looked like a three-foot-tall green spider eating a squid with purple... what-do-you-call-thems? Fangs? Why not? Who said the Devil had to look human?

Willie blinked. This all took only a few moments but in that short time, he became aware that something else was wrong. Something that involved himself, not just being surrounded by cool flames, not just having strange memories, but something abut himself.

Something terrible.

He raised his hands and looked at them. Flames danced on his palms and the ends of his fingers and dripped off his forearms like water. But his hands looked wrong, small, slender, delicate.

He looked down, feeling something brush against his cheek and his shoulders but he looked down and ignored that. He had to look down, he had to see. He saw.

And then she screamed. A bright fiery scream that set fire to row after row of wood and dryrot in the abandoned buildings.

# # #

"You left something in Mile Square Park last night?" asked Dan'l.

"Uh, huh," Vicki said. "My backpack with all my stuff in it." She giggled, a little dizzy from all that had happened. And now her powers had returned but she'd been able to stop herself from turning into Star Bunny right in the cab of Dan'l's truck.

Dan'l frowned. "How did you get from Fountain Valley to Fullerton last night? And...." He trailed off, not wanting to ask what had happened to her clothes.   

Vicki shook her head. "Aliens?" she said.

Dan'l laughed and Vicki giggled.

# # #

Rod Meats woke up on the beach. He'd done that before, of course, but somehow this time was different. The surf sounded different, more boom, less hiss. It sounded close, too. When he opened his eyes he was surprised not to see waves within a few feet of him. He apparently lay in a sheltered alcove between some rocks.

Looks like South Newport, he thought. How'd I get here? He sat up, using his hands.

Her enormous breasts made this an experience she never forgot. The first time you wake up with double-G boobs sort of impresses it on your memory. "Eek!" she said aloud. She tried to stand-up and get a better look at herself at the same time and nearly took a header into the rocks. "Eek!" she said again.

Why am I screaming like a little girl, she thought. Just because I have tits? And what's happening now?

The rocks seemed to be getting smaller and the ocean closer. She could see over the rocks now, north toward Corona del Mar, south toward Laguna, east would be Pacific Coast Highway.... Why were the rocks shrinking?

"I'm getting taller?" she guessed.

She heard yelling. People on the beach had seen her. Four or five surfers in jams sitting on their boards, two mothers with small boys, a pair of old men with metal detectors, all of them staring out at the water for some reason. It was the boys who noticed her and yelled to get everyone else's attention. They pointed.

"What the heck is that?" someone asked.

"It's just some sort of inflatable balloon, I think," one boy said.

"Balloons," said a slightly older boy in a reverent tone. "Those are some balloons."

"I'm not a balloon!" she screamed at them.

"Whoa," said a surfer dude. "Chill, Carlotta."

The smaller boys ran a short distance then stopped and looked back. "She keeps getting bigger!"

"It's the Attack of the Fifty-Foot Tomato!" said another surfer.

"Tomatoes," said the third surfer. "And I don't think she's, like, fifty feet tall, maybe twenty?"

"Tomatoes, to-mah-toes, I think she's pissed, dude." But the surfers, brave fools like all their clan, actually moved closer.

"What did you call me?" she asked, glaring at the first surfer. She tried to take a step forward but she had sunk into the soft sand up to her ankles. Once she tried to move, though, she seemed to stop growing.

"Uh?" said the surfer. "Carlotta? I mean, is that, like, your name? Like wow? Hooda thunkit?"

"I know what that means!" she growled at him. "You're saying I'm fat!" She tried to reach for him and almost fell over.

The mothers grabbed the small boys and ran for the lifeguard shack. The two old men pointed their metal detectors at her. The surfers grinned and ogled her -- her tits.

"Stop looking at me!" she screamed. "I'm not fat, I'm just big-boned!"

# # #

"Now that constipated nark has too many targets, he won't be able to finger out which one is us," said Gooma.

"AFFIRMATIVE," said the stolen jumpship's ASS. "IT IS AN EFFECTIVE STRATAGEM."

"Who knew you were so fudding clever, Goom," said Twirt. "For a bogtass who flunked hyperspatial manifold geometry twice, you make some vinchy plans!"

"Branes," said Gooma. "I never could get into working with branes."

"One thing," said Twirt. "What's a finger?"

"It's those dinguses the locals have on their anterior pseudo-pedipalps."

"Why do they give them to each other?" asked Twirt. "Doesn't that hurt?"

# # #

"Help!" squealed Dick Yardley as he went down for the third time. "I can't swim and I'm a girl!" She honestly wasn't sure which was more alarming. She'd only woken up a few moments before and discovered one: that she was in the middle of some body of water she couldn't see the shore of and two: that she had natural water-wings. Not that they were doing her much good, she not only didn't know how to swim --he'd never learned-- but she didn't even know how to float.

"Glub, glub," she said, swallowing some of the Pacific Ocean.

"Squeety squeet squeet," said a dolphin near her.

"Pardon?" she gurgled.

"I said," the dolphin repeated, speaking slowly this time. "You're not gonna be much of a super-villain if you can't remember to use your powers to save your own ass."

"I'm a super-villain?" she asked.

"Well, super-villainess," said the dolphin. "No wonder they call you Dizzy."

"I don't get it?" she said as she rose out of the ocean on a spinning column of water. "Oh. That's what you meant." She pointed. "Land, I can see land! I'm not going to have to drown."

The dolphin swam up the column of water to get a look. "That's Catalina, blondie. You want the land the other direction. It's closer."

"Oh," she said turning to look and recognizing the coastline of Newport Beach only a mile or so away.

It was when she tried to move her column of water that she realized that she and it were spinning, spinning, spinning so very fast that everything should be a blur but she could see fine if she only tried to look in one direction at a time.

"Squeet squeet squeety," said the dolphin.

"Huh?"

"I said, you can let me off at the breakwater, toots. Be seeing you." The dolphin leaped gracefully from the spinning column into the ocean and swam away with one final, "Squeet ya later!"

"I wonder what he meant by that?" the blonde said aloud, spinning toward the shore.

# # #

"Five targets?" said Neener Neener the Constable of Space Sector 2814. "Are you sure?" he asked his ASS.

"FIVE, SO FAR. ALL IN THIS ONE SMALL AREA OF THE PLANET." They hovered, orbited really, between Dirt and its large satellite, incongruously named Cheese on the Galactic maps.  

"Decoys," muttered Neener. This mission was running into unexpected complications. He could sure use another shot of the blue stuff before he invaded Dirty Space. He refrained from indulging himself though and considered his next action.  

Those wogstaffers down there had already invented some weapons effective enough to penetrate his defenses if one of their little hopcraft got a lucky shot. And the immature bogtasses from the planet Dawoop he was pursuing had effectively concealed themselves among them even after his skotonergic bolus had activated all quiescent galactic machinery on the world.

"One of those blips belongs to our target. Is there anyway you can get them to reveal themselves without us going down to an interdicted planet and doing a visual?"

"I COULD TRY ASSTALKING. ONLY THEIR SHIP'S ASS WOULD HEAR ME AND IF IT RESPONDS..."

"We've got them. 'Make it so, Number Two,' as the locals say."

"THAT'S 'NUMBER ONE.' NUMBER TWO IS SOMETHING ELSE," said the ASS.

Neener waved a hemi-claw. "Just fudding do it."

"OPENING ASS-TO-ASS HAULING FREQUENCIES," said the Artificially Sentient Sapience, and then sent the intergalactic signal on the skotonic band the locals had not yet discovered.  

The call went out. "Squeet squeety squeet."