[PPGZ][HPL]Powerpuff Girls - L
hcobb
By Henry J. Cobb
The Powerpuff Girls were created by Craig McCracken. Demashita! Powerpuff
Girls Z was produced by Cartoon Network, Toei Animation, and Aniplex. The
L part is from the name of an American author rather than say an Aegean
island.
Momoko Akazutsumi tuned out Ms. Keane's lecture and turned her head to look
out the window of the classroom. She felt unsatisfied with her life. All
she did was attend class then go home to do homework and live with her
mother and sister. She felt that she ought to have a boyfriend but she
somehow never managed to approach the boys she liked. Where did her time
go?
Her train of thought slammed to a stop as she heard a buzzing. She looked
down at her belt buckle, which had a thick disk attached to it. Why was
she wearing such a thing?
A flood of alien memories washed through her mind. Flying through space
far from any star. Worlds and places of strange geometries. She clutched
at her desk and screamed at the top of her lungs as she struggled to put
words to concepts about things that no human had ever seen and survived to
report.
A moment later she stopped as a cold calm crystallized in her mind. She
was Blossom, champion of justice, and she had a job to do.
Blossom raised her hand, "Ms. Keane!"
"Yes," the teacher looked up from the chalk she had dropped, "You three
girls had best report to the nurse's office."
Blossom looked to her side. Her teammates, still in their civilian garb,
had also raised their hands. The rest of the class quickly turned away
from the three girls and stared down at their textbooks.
Why did they need to make such a fuss, Blossom wondered, surely they could
simply ask to be excused, but this way they at least could leave without
question.
The three girls walked from the classroom and turned to the stairs.
Instead of going down to the nurse's office they climbed up to the top of
the stairs and exited out onto the roof then moved to a spot out of line of
sight of the other buildings
They faced away from each other, closed their eyes and said something in a
language far older than mankind. A moment later they reopened their eyes,
but now these eyes looked more like cuttlefish eyes than human and third
eyes of the same kind opened in their foreheads. Their forms expanded,
consuming their clothing and assumed trifold symmetry in strange winged
alien forms then collapsed back to their human forms, but now clothed in
leotards, skirts, boots, gloves and vests.
Blossom removed the disk from her belt and opened it like a compact as her
two teammates watched over her shoulders. She recognized the face shown on
the display, "Yes Mayor, what is it?"
"There you are girls. The Second Townsville Bank on the corner of Vegas
and Riverboat streets is being robbed!"
"We're on it!" Blossom folded up and replaced the transformation control
disk on her belt then leapt high above the school, with Bubbles and
Buttercup at her side.
The three girls flew through the air with no obvious exertion. It was as
if the law of universal gravitation took no notice of their presence.
Blossom felt a strange unease about the rectangular plan of the city below
her. Something about the cubical shapes of the buildings hinted at a
hidden danger.
"Is something the matter Blossom?"
Blossom turned to Bubbles and replied back in the same way, without
vocalization or other sound. After all they were flying too fast for sound
to be a practical means of communication. "No, it's just been a while
hasn't it?"
"I wish we could go flying more often. School is boring," Buttercup looked
down at their destination and inside it. It wasn't as if she looked in the
window or through the material of the roof but that somehow she looked
around the side of the building in some direction she could not name.
X-ray vision is neat, she thought, "There's the problem!"
Blossom rushed past her and threw the door of the bank open. With a single
glance she focused on the man with a gun in his hand and a ski mask over
his head, "Not so fast, bank robber man!"
Startled the robber shot three times, striking Blossom in the chest.
"Why you!" Buttercup flew up and punched the man so hard in the gut that he
stumbled backwards, hit his head against a pillar and dropped his gun.
"Blossom!" Bubbles turned to examine her friend. The bullets had torn
through Blossom's vest and leotard and sunk into her flesh. But instead of
blood there was just a white pulpy material pushed out around the wounds.
Bubbles' gaze went blank for a moment and when she looked back at Blossom
the wounds and costume damage was gone, as if it never happened, "Blossom
are you alright?"
"Of course I am. Bullets can't harm the Powerpuff Girls," Blossom turned
to the police officers gathered outside, "It's all yours men."
The girls exited the bank to the cheers of the onlookers and flew back up
into the sky.
A tall curvaceous woman traced the path of the three girls from the corner
of her eyes. Even from a distance she could not stand to look directly at
them.
Satisfied that the girls were returning to their school she turned to the
man behind the desk, "Mayor! How could you activate THEM for a simple bank
robbery?"
"But Ms. Bellum, they saved the day didn't they?"
"Yes, this time. But you heard the Professor, they're unstable. The girls
are our only line of defense against the monsters, but if we keep pushing
them then at some point they will revert to their true natures and we'll
all be doomed."
Ms. Sara Bellum let her mind drift back to the first day she had met these
creatures.
"Mayor, one of the students took a video recording of the incident."
"Good, let's see it. I keep getting calls from the parents asking what
happened to their daughters."
The two of them watched the tape. The camera jerked around in young hands
as it swept over a laboratory from an observation deck above.
"No, tape me. That's what I'm paying you for. This is Himoko's field trip
to the Utonium Laboratory."
The camera turned to one girl standing in a group of her classmates.
"Now be quiet class, I think they're about to do something," Their teacher
said from off camera.
Himoko pushed her way to the railing and the camera operator followed and
filmed over her shoulder as two scientists in protective suits strapped a
chimpanzee down in a chair placed in the middle of a ring of strange
instruments.
Satisfied, one of them climbed a ladder up to the observation deck and
removed his helmet, "Ah, Miss Keane and students. I'm Professor Kitazawa.
We're about to run a test of our L-space generator. L-space is a new
dimension we've discovered recently that runs on slightly different
physical laws than our own universe. We can exploit this difference to
generate electricity with no carbon emissions, but we need to test the
effects
on living beings to ensure safety. Yes?"
One of the students, a blue eyed girl with her blond hair in twin pigtails
had raised her hand, "You're not going to hurt the monkey, are you?"
"No, no. Jojo will be fine. He's been through this before. We just need
to run some long term tests and ensure that there's no side effects. Are
you ready Professor Lumpkins?"
The suited figure in the lab raised a gloved thumb.
"Then go ahead and start and I'll explain everything to the students here."
Professor Lumpkins activated some switches and the machinery hummed into
operation. Then his control panel exploded and he crossed his arms in
front of his face. The chimpanzee shrieked and thrashed against its bonds
as a dark rift appeared before it.
"It can't be," Professor Kitazawa stared at the rift for a moment then put
his helmet back on and ran for the ladder. He opened a breaker panel and
threw some switches, plunging the laboratory below into darkness and
silencing the machinery, but the deeper darkness of the rift remained.
"Professor Lumpkins, are you alright?" He reached down to grab the other
man's arm, but was tossed aside with a single blow.
Professor Lumpkins ran away from the rift and knocked one of the support
columns for the observation deck away as if it were cardboard then smashed
through the wall.
The part of the deck above the missing column collapsed down and the blond
girl fell. Two other girls, a redhead and a girl with short black hair
grabbed her hands and were pulled down with her. The trio fell into the
rift, which then vanished.
The camera swept back to the chimpanzee who had grown and ripped free of
its restraints. It ran away through the hole Professor Lumpkins had made,
its shrieks fading into all too human maniacal hysterical laughter.
The mayor rose from his chair as the tape ended, "Well that cleared up
nothing. Let's go see this Professor Kitazawa. He'll either give us some
explanation for this or I'll see him arrested for kidnapping, if not
murder."
At the Utonium Laboratory a young boy answered the door and invited them
inside, "Dad, it's the Mayor."
Professor Kitazawa came out looking much more worn out than he had seemed
on the tape. He obviously had not slept in days and his eyes tended to
wander to the corners of the room, looking for something that should not be
there, "Ah Mayor and you must be Ms. Bellum? I was just about to call
you."
The mayor stepped forwards and glared at Professor Kitazawa, "Do you have
some explanation for what happened to the three missing girls?"
"Yes, we're done for now. Girls, there's somebody here to see you."
The three girls walked down the stairs, looking exactly the same as the day
they had vanished and even wearing the same clothing.
"What!" The mayor stood slack jawed, "They were here all the time?"
"Girls, this is the mayor of our city and his assistant Ms. Bellum. They
are very important people and you should do what they tell you."
"Whatever," Kaoru, the black haired girl, could have passed for a boy in her
shorts and cap.
"Pleased to meet you," Miyako, the blond, curtsied.
Momoko, the redhead, said nothing and watched the professor's son as he
walked away, avoiding looking at any of the three girls.
"You can see the girls to their homes? Their families must have been very
worried this past week."
"Shouldn't we take them for medical examinations?" Ms. Bellum asked.
"No, it would be best if you didn't."
Ms. Bellum saw the look of terror Kitazawa tried to suppress. What was he
trying to hide? Best to get the girls away from him and question them
about this in private.
Then the professor's son ran into the room, "Dad! I just saw the news.
Jojo's on a rampage downtown."
"Yes Ken, I was afraid of this," Professor Kitazawa pulled a cellphone out
of his pocket, flipped it open and pressed a button, "Powerpuff Girls we
need you!"
The three girls screamed and dropped to their knees, then their expressions
blanked for a moment, they turned to him and Momoko asked, "Is it okay?",
while nodding towards the mayor and Ms. Bellum.
"Yes, they need to know. You can transform here."
The three girls turned away from each other and said something Ms. Bellum
could not understand. Their bodies expanded into two meter tall monsters
with three eyes spaced around the upper part of their columns in what could
possibly be considered heads and then they shrank down into their usual
forms, but wearing matching outfits that differed only in color.
Ms. Bellum noticed that the belts they wore had not changed in the
transformation and were the only new items they had added since the tape
was made.
The three girls turned again to the professor and he said, "Girls, you
heard about Jojo?"
They nodded.
"Please stop him and bring him back here and then you can go home."
"It's about time!" Kaoru rose into the air then flew for the door with the
other two flying after her.
"What was that?" The mayor was helped back to his feet by Ms. Bellum.
"Those are the creatures from the L-dimension who devoured the bodies of
the three girls, but apparently their souls were harder to digest. I call
them the Powerpuffs because their internal structure is closest to certain
kinds of mushrooms, but they have no real relation to any Earth lifeform."
"What have you done?" Ms. Bellum accepted the cell phone as the Professor
handed it to her.
"Attempting to find the girls was the worst mistake in my entire life. I
should have known that no Earthly lifeform could survive for even one minute
in L-space. But now that they're here there's no point in sending them
back, because they now know where we are. Pressing the blue button
activates the link to our systems here and through them to the
transformation control devices on their belts. You should be careful about
how you use their superhero personalities because those are unstable
artificial overlays on their normal selves."
"Unstable? What happens when they break down?"
"When the creatures assume their normal personalities I imagine that
they'll devour us all. And at that point there will be nothing we can do
to stop them. So please be careful with the girls and get them back into
their ordinary lives. The reinforcement offered by their friends and
families is our only hope for staving off our inevitable doom."
-HJC