Hey
I’m gonna tell you a fun super hero story.

She is beautiful in her spandex uniform that creaks and groans under the weight of her overflowing–almost but not quite excessive–curves. The cold Pacific Ocean sparkles calmly back and forth in the northern sun in early May. She’s underneath, in the secret undersea fortress. She’s in chains anchored to the sea floor. But they misunderstand themselves; they’re wrong to think they’re keeping her there. What’s keeping her there is that she can’t find the direction of her partner. She reaches out for him with a wide, conically-expanding infinitely-bright Soullight. She feels out for him that way in all possible directions, but she does not find him.

You don’t understand! They’re like two love birds! Without connecting to one another, their thoughts and feelings get all muddled and tired. I guess it’s romantic, but it is also causing a lot of trouble right now. How easy it would be for her to disappear from those chains! How effortlessly she’d pass through twenty feet of steel and two thousand feet of high-pressure, pitch-black, near-freezing waters! But she’s like a sad old character befuddled in her slippers and dementia, unable to quite organize the jumble of vague notions and sharp longings into a coherent thought. So she’s just been sitting there while nervous scientists read medical charts they can’t fathom and pompous security chiefs clackety clack up and down the metal walkways, imagining their procedures and technologies sufficient.

Then one day she gets a sliver of him. So faint that the first thought she has is “pill bug; rolly polly; armoured ball-beetle; little silver bug tank; what??” But then recognition like electricity zaps all through her and she’s awake again. She opens her eyes. Her captors don’t notice. She looks around at her steel cell and feels the cold of the chains and floor. She’s very beautiful. They’re both like that: eternally youthful, trim, athletic, she with full bosom, thigh and seat, he with the classic umbrella-back, narrow hips, sprinter’s thighs. All this with no effort on their parts, I might add. Anyway, there she is all gorgeous in an unbreakable metal cell, with heaps of inescapable chains shackled to her ankles, wrists, waist, neck, and so on; there she is waking up to 40F naked and alone (the spandex part comes in a minute); she bounces her mind out into the whole fortress, sees the military thinkers in full uniform debating with stern faces over their war table; inspects the scientists and their mile of cages, trapped rats, clipboards, computer models, and cross-eyeglass glances (of all sorts), watches the hearty soldiers at their push-ups, mess halls, card tables, frogman drills, bathroom breaks. Hmmph.

Now she’s vanished from her chains and emerges, clothed in that red, white, and blue Olympic-style form-fitting suit. If her hair is long and naturally curling, or short straight and pert, or a spherical afro-mane–that’s up to your mood. My point is the suppleness of her form and the fullness of her womanhood. And how easily she passes through metal, concrete and water; how she walks now upon the water and now, with an easy flick of spandex-stockinged toes (it isn’t really spandex! it’s some indestructible fabric they invented years ago), flings herself into the sky.

One of their tricks is that they can change their mass at will. They can be as massive as a planet or as light as an electron. That, combined with their mastery of energy and mass manipulation, allows them pretty much any physical feat. For example, she didn’t have to jump off a little cowlicked wave into the pale blue sky of the North Pacific at round about 65 degrees North. She could’ve just slid basically instantly to anywhere on the planet. But it is fun to leap about in the physical world, especially when you’re infinitely good at it and never experience fatigue, soreness, or other standard human complaints.

BW/AMW