The following is a work of fiction intended for adult entertainment. Any elements that may be construed of my own personal creation I hereby declare works of public domain. Rook

Authors note: Mr. X is one of those artiest who throws out ideas like an elephant shelling peanuts between big top acts. So many ideas in fact, dose this guy churn out, that he often drops them and passes over them in a mad scramble against the setting sun to jot down a dozen or so more brilliant notions. Fortunately he is also a very kind and understanding artiest, who is insanely sharing with his multitude of creations, and when we stumble across one of his slightly dusty on the shelf or back burner characters he’s very pleasant in letting others take a whack at them.

Such is the short story that follows. Through the generosity of Mr. X, this copyrighted character of his creation; “Batbroad” is going to take an on loan stroll through a quick short story bellow. I want to thank him for this, and point out that this character is the exclusive licensed product of Mr. X. The story it’s self is based entirely on the very first hand drawn image by Mr. X that can be viewed in his fun Batbroad comic located on his personal web site. The image shows the heroine standing behind a tree as she is preparing to storm a mansion in the far back ground. The story that follows below naturally deviates from the original comic, but it dose start out with that same great classic image of Mr. X’s extremely fertile imagination! Thanks, Rook.

 

BATBROAD IN ‘THE CHEST OF THE JADE DRAGON’

The sultry humid air couched in the towering boughs and lingered its long careless fingers upon the slumbering leaves, but did not stir them nor rustle them above the great amazons head. Batbroad leaned back against the knotty gnarled oak and gathered her senses from the recent sudden rush to this choice cover. The moon had peed out from behind its cavalcade of clouds just as the mighty heroine had broke from the bushes and made her mad dash to close the distance between her and the night shrouded mansion, and its sudden silver light had sent the statuesque brunette careening to this new hiding place.

Batbroad now paused and strained each of her heightened senses to detect any slight sight or sound of detection of herself from the silent panes of glass that sat blank in the frowning fabricade of masonry, just a few tantalizing yards away. But the ancient structure retained its dead pan stare and the unlighted windows did not blink awake in the waltzing striated moonlights dream inducing pale shimmering gauze.

Waiting for the moon to subside behind another strolling bank of slow creeping cloud, Batbroad took the moment to give her self a finial pre-fight check list going over, before dashing across those last remaining yards of open ground, and one last muse to recollect her thoughts that had lead her to this whispering glen of cut grass and manicured wilds.

Lifting one of her elbow length thick shiny black leather trimmed in blood red gauntlet gloves with their serrated leather crescents running its underside span, Batbroad carefully pulled back a few lose tangles of her great flowing mane of thick luxuriant midnight black hair, that had become caught upon the upward sweep of her eye mask. The mask was cut wide about her flashing bright large eyes, and came to points on her high cheek bones and again to high points above her eyes. The velvety rubber black mask rimmed in blood red, was held into place by actors adhesive and did not cover her small straight nose.

Next she used both her hands to re-adjust her top. Here a great bat wing strained to cover each of her double J-cup breasts, held from bursting by a tinny red bat head clasp, clipped precariously between her ever quaking-shaking mountains. A few tugs was all she dared do at the skimpy garment lest it explode from the effort to contain her mighty melons, and a little packing of her silver dollar sized nipples who invariably wished to peek out and see what all the jostling was about.

Next she checked her compartment belt that housed all her important crime fighting gadgets who so often proved their miniaturized worth in a sticky situation or two. The slim belt which hung low on her wide shapely hips under her tiny waist, was of black leather and the small metal compartments which adorned it were of blood red.

Bellow the belt she wore a small bikini bottom of black shiny leather upon which a blood red bat was superimposed. Batbroad had cut out along the outline of the red bat icon leaving just an inch of black and had thrown away the rest of the tight bikini bottoms. This had left her with the bat silhouette to cover her buttery smooth choice genital. She had repeated this process with another bikini bottom, this time a red leather bikini with a black bat icon silhouette upon it, cutting it out again, and then sewing the wing tips of the two front and back pieces together as well as the two tails to join them over her soft folds of flesh between her most sensitive of apertures, this gave her a tight bottom to match the bat cutout motif of her top.

Bellow this she wore her leather boots, black, trimmed in blood red, knee high, with high heels, and again the serrated sea scroll crescents of leather running up the back seam of the boots to match those on her gloves.

This then was the outfit of the great six one (six foot three inch in her boots!) amazon crime fighter known to the fearful villains of the naughty night as Batbroad!

The moon light slowly sunk into the depths of a cloud like the nocturnal nautical drowning of a whaling ship, and sensing her chance the fearless feline burst from her cover and sprinted up to the side of the hedge rimmed windows of the mansions first floor. Selecting an appropriate window Batbroad slipped out her lock picking set of tools from her belt and set to work. Unlike the doors with its entryway security cameras, Batbroad knew from a few hours on her super crime fighting computer earlier that evening that no other surveillance security systems had been installed in the long abandoned eighty year old residence. Only a weekly visit from a caretaker employed by the Realtor firm desperate to unload the creaking old structure kept the grounds in shape for any potential buyers. But potential buyers for a house where an entire family had been hacked to death by a deranged psychotic family member decades ago were slim indeed.

The widow jimmied up and Batbroad just managed a difficult squeeze of her opulent over sized curves through the stuck sash, without miraculously, bursting through any of her imperiled costume. Gathering herself from the rather un-lady like posture she had been forced to adopt, slumped to upon the floor after spilling through the widow, Batbroad began to quickly scan the inky black room she now found herself in.

Somewhere in all that murky gloom was a nefarious nare-do-well with at least two rascally accomplices, searching the premises and its remaining furnishings for some kind of chest. That was what little Batbroad had managed to piece together over the last nine hours of frantic crime solving. Crimes that included the discovery of a dead body in a ransacked eccentric collectors house, an arson at two pawn shops, another body (unconscious and tortured) found tied up in a city park tied to some monkey bars who Batbroad had whisked to a near by hospital, and finally the first solid lead that had tied all those crimes together and raised them up singularly from the hundreds of other such criminal dealings of a single night of the underworld in the crime plagued city. The discovery that the master mind behind the broken Jade tong, Jade herself, had escaped from her maximum security China prison just two short weeks before.

Batbroad could not be sure that whoever was leaving this scar of a crime trail upon her city was indeed the return of the Jade Princess and her Tong of thugs, but it had all the hallmarks of them. But why return here, to her city? The very place where Batbroad had toppled her and her evil empire. Surly she did not think she could run the risk of crossing the mighty Batbroad’s path and not end up once again behind bars! Batbroad had to smirk at this. All she did know, was that she had trailed a lone black sedan to the crushed red brick drive of this secluded mansion, and that from her great detective skills she had deduced that three individuals, one a woman, had then forced their way into the house by shattering one of the downstairs windows at the back of the house, which she in turn had naturally avoided to use for her own entry. All the heavy handed thugery did indeed seem to spell out the Jade Tong, but what little information she had gathered thus far, it was impossible to say. The badly injured man had kept muttering, “Jade, Jade” over and over again. That seemed rather conclusive in her book!

Jade was an arrogant tyrannical spoiled little monster who had murdered half her own family to take over the Tong. But her henchmen where always easy to beat and Batbroad found the entire evenings venture to be less of a promising challenge than cleaning up after a weak bowled puppy. She would find Jade and trounce her easily!

Batbroad snuck quietly through the meandering rooms and listened intently for sounds of the criminals she pursued, but flummoxed at the unearthly silence that radiated around her. There was no sign of any ones recent passage amongst the dust cloth covered furniture, nor any telltale tracks upon the dusty floor boards where the carpets had long been rolled up and placed to the edge of the large rooms. Apparently the caretaker did not bother to come inside much, the place needed a good cleaning. For three individuals so hapless and reckless in their dealings with locating their desired ‘chest’ to leave an apartment in tatters, a body dead, two pawn shops in ashes, another man beaten to a pulp, to then arrive at what must have been nearing their finial destination. To then, vanish so silently and leave no trace, no sound of smashing search or rubble of their looking, it seemed very odd to the curvaceous heroine!

Frustrated the super heroine made her way to the back of the house and finally located the smashed window where the three villains had forced their entry. In doing so she had to pause and unlock several doors with her lock picks, this was most strange indeed! Batbroad began to search around the crushed glass upon the floor trying to pick up the trail, but after several minutes was forced to abandon the effort. Where had they gone!

It was then, that the buxom battler noticed that one of the many closet doors of the large room was slightly ajar. With no other leads, she strode across the expanse and flung the door open. No cringing male cronies hid within, and confused she was about to shut the door to the barren little closet when instead she stepped inside it and closed the door behind her. There was a soft audible double click as the door latched shut and sensing a deepening mystery, Batbroad began to feel about the bare walls and shelves of the dark closet. Within seconds her talented gloved fingers discovered the lose shelf and she wiggled it experimentally until she deciphered it pushed inwards. The entire back wall of the closet slide silently back with it into utter inky blackness. Here then is where they had gone!

The false back of the closet swung aside to reveal a simple bare hallway, or so her blind fingers probed out for her as Batbroad cautious slide her booted toe forward, sliding step by sliding step. She dared not use one of her belt lights less she give her stealthy approach away to the villains she was no doubt closing in on, she cursed the hours she had wasted in swinging around and coming through the front, but what was done was done and now she would soon have them! Jade you will soon be mine! And Batbroad felt the warm tingle in her lower belly that she got when she was about to pummel a naughty boy or two! A slow smug smile crept across the super heroine’s face as she felt her toe and gloved hand bump lightly against a dead end. She began to search for the secret latch she knew would be near by, and soon found it!

This is too easy, she snorted to herself, and swung the panel out before her. There was more light here, but it still took her eyes a second to focus in the gloom after the deep dark of the narrow hallway. She was stunned to find herself in a large room! Not some secret chamber or some hidden cellar or a little cubby hole niche, but obviously one of the regular rooms on the first floor! It looked to be a ball room or else a game room with all the games stripped form it. The place was bare of any furnishings and any criminals. Batbroad frowned. What the heck!

She strode out into the opulent detailed walls but devoid empty vastness and put her hands upon her mighty flared hips, where the hell was everybody! She walked around the hard wood floor as her boots clopped, having giving up any pretense of stealth for the time being and began to search for another way out of the room. There wasn’t one! So, it was a hidden room! But the size of it was immense! All along the walls were windows which tuned out to be fake and not real windows at all. The view they offered were painted between the grills, that is what had thrown her when she first entered the room, convincing her on first glance that it was an open first floor room on the outer side of the house. Now Batbroad began to search with more earnest. She knew that the three hoodlums she was tailing had entered this room via the manner she had, and she knew they had not exited back out that same way. So, obviously there was one more secret door which they had used to leave the room. Batbroad wandered about the room looking for signs of her foes departure.

She found it at last, it hadn’t even been hidden, but in the dark she had mistaken the marble crypt like opening to a marble descending stair case to be a large fire place like the several others she had seen in some of the other rooms she had snuck through earlier. Setting her teeth in determination against the now throbbing in her loins that the promise of a good slapping of males around always gave her, the hour glass shaped heroine pendulum swung her hips down the marble stair into their increasing murky depths.

The stair descended at a rakish angle for a considerable distance before it stopped abruptly in its encasing folds of white marble before a large door of bronze. There was no door handle nor lock and in the dim twilight of the congested and thick air, it took Batbroad some time to make out the proper sequence of tugs and pulls upon the various garish fiendish figures jutting from the door. Eventually it gave way before her and with a heavy grinding grating slow ponderous slide, it slid backwards six feet and revealed two passage on either side of the small marble hallway. Batbroad quickly scanned the floor of each identical passage which was smooth and ramped containing no stair in its rapid descent, and chose the one to her right. She had taken only a few tentative steps down it when the large block of bronze making up the door slide noisily shut back into its place and thus blocking all three hallways from one another. Batbroad returned to give the enormous block of bronze that had sealed off her point of entry a quick once over and found that upon this side it was utterly smooth and had no carved figures to manipulate to make it open. There would be no returning back to above world through that way!

Oddly, the air was fresher in the new sealed hallway and taking that to be a sign that it must soon open up into a vast space that had some kind of ventilation with the upper realm sent Batbroad’s hopes soaring. But the narrow marble lined passageway slanted steadily downwards despite its odd sharp right angle sudden turns. In the dark Batbroad found the purchase of her high heeled boots some what wanting and steadied herself against one of the cool slick polished marble walls less she slip and find herself tumbling headlong down the slippery slope of the polished marble floor’s incline.

With her own super heightened powers of awareness, it took Batbroad a minute or two to realize that the illumination of the twisting turning hallway was increasing steadily. She fought the urge to hurry less she slip and stumble and maintained a stead descent into the ever increasing light.

Soon enough the hall spilled out into a large horizontal hallway of irregularly carved natural rock into which large sills of white marble had been set within which sturdy looking green black bronze doors resided. On either side of each such door stood a little orange flickering bulb in a wall mounted brass holder. It was from these hundreds of small lights from which the long hallway received its sole illumination. It looked like a tomb to Batbroad. A catacombs half carved in what must have been an natural snaking cavern far under ground. Where the source of the electricity for the small light bulbs came from or where that slight chilly draft of fresh air stirred in its source from, she could not fathom. For all the care to encase the walls of the descending shaft with polished marble, no effort had been made to improve the rough and jumbled floor of the new large hallway Batbroad now teetered through on her heels. Pools of brackish water dotted the almost lunar landscape of ropey looking rock of the floors and equally uneven walls. Only the equally spaced tombs lining each side of the twisting hallway had been placed with great care, all else had been left to their raw primeval state and Batbroad bit her lip against an ankle wrenching threatening slip again and again.

She had traveled for several hundreds of yards along the snaking tunnel, all the while wondering if the three she chased had taken the other turn to the left instead of this path as she had caught no sign or trace of their passage thus far, when she stopped up short at the sudden sound of voices! Distance made them indistinct and the echoes of the tunnel made them impossible to place, but obviously they could not becoming from behind her as there had been branching in the singular minded tunnel…. Batbroad quickened her step and bent low as she made her way to the next turning of the catacombs.

And stopped up short, gasping despite herself, the turning had ended abruptly into an enormous cavern! Batbroad found herself at the lip of her irregular tunnel several hundreds of yards up above the rocky floor of the great oval cavern. She looked about her and saw that every surface of the great sides of the massive confines walls were riddled with small aperture cave mouth openings identical to the one she now stood in. And before her in the very center of the great bowl of entombing rock was an enormous citadel of regal carved grandeur. It was easily large enough to house several of her own downtowns impressive skyscrapers in its mighty edifice. And blooming out of its center was a great rising spiral of rock that rose up and joined to the far distant ceiling of rock above. A giant natural stalagmite that towered hundreds of stories above! The sight stunned the crime fighting crusader and set her super model face into a lingering gasp of awe and wonder.

It took the reoccurring sound of distant voices to awaken her from her thunderstruck gaze. There they were, laden down with backpacks and lanterns, a small group of figures just now disappearing into the base of the central imposing structure! Batbroad scowled, it would take her hours to climb down the sheer jagged walls and race to catch up with them, unless…

Using her Batbroad emergency belt repelling cable was brilliant upon her part. She had to stop and retract the thin nylon cable ever few hundred meters, but in hops skips and jumps she was soon on the bottom floor of the enormous cave! And in only twenty minutes! She began to race through the twist and turns of the jagged wimpled floor to were the small party had vanished into the great central spire. As she ran her perilous course, Batbroad noticed that the cavern was surprisingly well lit. This seemed to stem form a combination of phosphate lichen which covered the walls and floor of the great valley in great thick layers adding a bluish glow to all, but there was also the telling orange flickering light which poured out oily from several hewn windows in the great citadel of natural rock and altered construction. Who had made this wondrous edifice or what possible use it once housed, Batbroad could only guess at and shake her roiling raven locks. All that mattered in the immediate here and now was to catch up to and thwart the criminals she had been so doggedly chasing all night!

Entering the great doorless portal to the base of the spire, Batbroad was immediately faced with two sets of rock hewn stairs. One descended down into an unfathomable darkness out of which inhuman tithers of sound seemed to shrink back as they rose and touched the dim light, and a second stair that spiraled upward lost into the gothic ribs of the high ceiling of living dripping rock above. Batbroad was immensely grateful when she heard the distinctly human voices of those she pursed coming down from the stair that lead above and quickly edged passed the pool of black of the descending stair. She raced up the stairs and found a room with a fresh dead body in it. Spikes had shot of the floor and impaled it. The room had three doorless openings leading into other rooms, which in turn each had three doorless openings leading into other rooms and so forth. Batbroad frowned and entered into the maze of seemingly endless identical barren rooms. Every now and then, she would enter a room and find a lone dead figure of one of those she pursed, killed by floor spikes that had shot out from the seemingly harmless floor. After finding the fourth such male, she realized that she had miscalculated the number which she was in pursuit of, but as they were all males and dying so stupidly easily she felt no qualm about over taking them and moved as rapidly as she dared through the deadly maze. Each male had died almost instantly and analyzing the spikes she noticed they were slightly hallow and must have sat waiting in a slight pool of poison before bursting through the surface of the floor to strike their target with incredible swiftness.

Eventually, Batbroad found the central chamber with the spiral stair case leading up and proceeded up to the next floor in her relentless chase! The stair here simply spiraled up to a hole in the floor and stopped into a central small shaft of a cylindrical room, There were one hundred and forty doors all identical lining its surface, but her selection was easy enough, as a slight growth of pale fungus had covered the floor and there were a multitude of foot prints crushed into the fungi as they milled about and then headed directly to one lone door. Batbroad rushed to it expecting some kind of complex lock, but there was none. The door of heavy quartz swung effortlessly upward and she passed easily under it. On the other side she found a short rock hallway that opened into a large chamber that was well lighted. From it she could easily hear several voices of her quarry, but the opening was of such an angle that she could not yet see them in the great room beyond. Pausing, Batbroad frowned at a sudden thought and turned back to the door, it would not budge! She realized the door was like a pet door that only opened one way, and fitted in its moldings as such that it could not be budged to swing back the other way, the several ton block of rock would not allow her to descend from the tower in that direction! Batbroad gritted her teeth against the almost orgasm inducing rush of endorphins now racing through her aroused body at the thought of the ass whooping she was about to unleash on some very stupid males and one long female “Jade”! That is if there were any of her men left?! Ha!

Batbroad rounded the corner and forty men in military uniforms turned abruptly to stare at her! The woman who stepped out from behind them holding several parchments clutched in her small hands, to see what every one was staring at, was NOT Jade! In fact, Batbroad hadn’t the slightest clue as to who she was, but she was obviously in charge.

“It’s Batbroad! What the hell is she doing here!?” The costumed woman scowled at Batbroad who instinctively struck a classical pose with her fists on her ample hips as she shimmied to a stop in the center of the room before the forty male up raised eyebrows, and that wasn’t the only thing she was raising on them, Batbroad smirked.

“That’s alright boys, there’s no reason to salute. But I am going to have to take you in to the authorities for all the mischief you’ve been causing tonight all over town.” Batbroad sneered at the heavily armed men. Apparently they had stripped their fallen comrades of their weapons as they died.

“We don’t have time for this!” The woman in the silk streamers which seemed to float about her slightly hiding her slim stacked body but never quiet touching it howled. Immediately the men snapped their fire arms level to Batbroad and she instinctively flexed for the upcoming battle. “I said, we don’t have time for this!” The sultry vixen knocked aside the nearest gun barrel and strode out in front of her men to stand before Batbroad and mirror her stance, “Do you have any idea where you are?” The angry young costumed and masked woman growled. As Batbroad frowned, the young woman rolled her eyes and muttered in exasperation, then snarled at her, “You are in the lost city of the Great Ones. An ancient race who once enslaved the entire humane race before the dawn of history. I have no idea WHY you are here, but I am here to recover a lost artifact of imposing power for a rather demanding employer. And if you ever want to see the daylight world again, then you had better come take a look at this!” And with that, the gossamer entwined woman jiggled her shapely ribbon woven body through the throng of men who parted rapidly to let her pass. After a moments hesitation, Batbroad reluctantly abandoned her battle stance and followed the young girl.

“I have already lost a dozen men to the creatures who dwell in the ruins around the citadel, but some flash grenades sent them scurrying into their hovels for a time being. They took the men they slayed with them, and they will be back when hunger strikes them again. The house up above once hosted a cult who use to worship and sacrifice to the dwellers, God knows why! There, that’s our dilemma! And one we must solve,” She reached over and looked at the watch of one of her soldiers, “soon! If we are to get out of here alive. One of those green chests of jade contains what we are looking for, the others will release a fungi spore from the ceiling above which will consume us in hours. The right choice will also let us leave this room via a hidden door. Otherwise we are trapped in here, for we have used up all our explosives and are almost out of ammo for our weapons, and neither mine nor your great powers can shift that door, even with their measly help.”

Before her in a raising staircase of hundreds of risers were thousands of small jade chests lining one wall of the great room. Batbroad swallowed hard, “Uh, we have to open one of those and open it to get out, huh?”

“And soon if we are to make it up the tower before the geysers begin.” The girl frantically shuffled her papers of crumbling parchment.

“Geysers?” Batbroad whined.

“Yes, every forty-eight hours the floor erupts with thousands of geysers spewing gasses into the cavern. I doubt we would survive it, even in here, but what’s worse is the creatures dwelling even deeper below need the gasses to breath and they take the moment of the eruption to spend the next few hours to rise up and feed off the lesser creatures who dwell in this cavern. If these manuscripts are correct and considering how difficult it was to kill one of the lesser creatures who dwell in the cavern, I don’t think we want to be here when those monsters rise and come forth. Truce?” The girl frowned at the pages and sighed.

“I see, truce,” was all Batbroad could manage and she glanced worriedly over the cascade of small green chests.

“Huh,” the girl tossed the papers over her shoulder and set her hands on her hips and glared at the chests. “Too bad the information the scrolls had contained and the bits collected from the diaries of the former owner of this estate had been rather useful up until now. But it simply ends by saying that we must select and open the correct green chest or perish. I don’t suppose you have some kind of x-ray vision?”

Batbroad shook her head. “Just strength and super healing really, sorry.”

“Well, all I have is some power over the winds and stealth and the ability to cloud the minds of some men. Not really proving to be rather useful in this phase of the operation.”

“How about them?” Batbroad nodded back behind at the increasingly nervous soldiers. Both girls burst out laughing.

“Thanks, I needed that. It was getting WAY too serious in here!” The young girl returned to her hands on hip slunk to one side pose and Batbroad mirrored her in the same pose next to her. “I suppose we will just have to pick one at random.”

“You should have just sent each one of them in here one at a time,” Batbroad nodded at the jittery men.

“Yeah, that would have been fun, but each room contains glyphs that the parchments help you to read. See.” She pointed to the walls and Batbroad followed the girls pointed finger and the slow dancing streamer that flowed off of it. What Batbroad had first taken to be chips of mica and quartz in the walls, she slowly realized were somehow an alien language.

“And its no help in telling us which chest to open?” Batbroad frowned at the walls covered in carved images.

“No more than what I’ve told you. Though there is an interesting scrawl in the margin of one of parchments allegedly made by the homicidal killer who last owned the mansion above. He suggests we chose the largest chest.”

“But they are all identical, all the same size! Say, those are people!” Batbroad pointed out the carved relief’s dotting the walls. They were definitely humane female figures intertwined across every surface of rock, but in the rocks flickering glistening she had not noticed them at first.

“Yeah, this city was once the home of priestesses who served the Great Ones who dwelled bellow.”

“What happened to them?” Batbroad pondered out loud.

“You don’t want to know,” the girl shuddered and the air around her became chill for a second or two.

“Well, the Great Ones certainly liked their women busty! Look at them! Hey, look at that one!” Batbroad pointed behind them at a figure carved in jade set in a niche amongst the flow of female images. “You don’t suppose!”

“She certainly has an enormous jade chest!” The ribbon girl excitedly flew across the room and up to the statue. Before the soldiers could shout in fear she had slid away one of the enormous jade tits and plucked out a long silver tube. “That’s it!” The girl giggled gleefully and behind Batbroad the small jade chests suddenly sunk into the floor of the stairs and at the risers top the stone wall parted like a curtain of water and revealed another stair case continuing up!

“Hurry!” The young girl screamed. “We may yet make it up to the main entrance shaft!” And the young girl flew up the stairs and disappeared up into the next stair well. Batbroad leaped behind her, rushing from the room and bounding up the next set of stairs beyond. They terminated at a lift, and Batbroad just managed to squeeze into the small elevator next to the hovering girl and her clutched prize as the stone doors crunched close.

“What about your soldiers!” Batbroad panted as the lift raced up wards!

“Fuck them, they are only men!” The girl squealed as the small car cruised up and up.

Even Batbroad had to nod and giggle at that, as her super senses could just make out the frantic muffled shouts of the abandoned males receding quickly below.

The elevator stopped abruptly and its cylinder door slide open to reveal a long exposed spiral stair carved into the naked side of the stalactite slowly spiraling up into a distant small cave far above in the side of the stalagmite. The girl rushed out of the elevator car and shouted for Batbroad to hurry up!

“That’s easy for you to say. If you fall you can just fly!” Batbroad clutched at the rough side of the pillar of rock and looked down at the city thousands of feet bellow!

“No I can’t. I can only hover about thirty feet off the ground max! I need a horizontal surface to glide over, not vertical. If I fall I won’t be able to stop my fall until I’m at thirty feet off the cave floor. At that velocity the stop in the air won’t be any different than just hitting the floor. Splat!” The young girl smacked the silver tube into the palm of her hand. The sound made Batbroad feel nauseas as it forced a mental image of her falling several thousand feet to her death.

“Great, just great. Nice to know.” The super heroine wondered if all evil doers were naturally nuts?

“Hurry, there isn’t much time left before the geysers start to erupt!”

“Right behind ya!” Batbroad forced herself to let go of the rock wall and ignoring the un-railed death just a few foot steps width to her right, ran up the spiraling rough uneven steps!

They both stumbled into the small opening in the side of the great stone cone and found themselves inside a small round room. The young girl pointed straight up into the inky darkness. “It’s five hundred feet straight up that well.” Her ribbons entwined Batbroad’s limbs. “Hold on, I think I can carry us!” And without a hesitation, they soared up thirty feet. “Now, use your great strength to pull us up the rest of the way! I will try to do what I can with my ribbons to pull us up as well!” And Batbroad dug her fingers into the wall of the well and began to haul the two of them up to the top!

At the top both girls fell onto the ground and panted and rested. Sometime later they got to their knees, their ears still popping, and then onto their weary legs, and wandered through the pitch darkness of the maze of caves. Until Batbroad remembered her belt light and that there was no longer any need for stealth and flipped the halogen belt buckle on. She also reached into her belt compartments and produced some energy pills to help them both keep going. “Tell me when you hear water,” the young girl told Batbroad. And soon she did indeed hear water. They raced to it. And soon found them selves next to a deep pool. “That’s the great Lake of Central Park. We are about five miles from the mansion and that is the only way out. We will have to dive in and swim along a tunnel and then up to the surface of the lake. I’m not a very good swimmer!” The girl fell to her ass in the near pitch darkness and sighed. “I never thought I’d make it this far. I brought a few scuba tanks, but they were being carried by some of the men the creatures attacked and dragged away for diner. Ha!”

Batbroad reached into her belt again and removed a small mouth piece with two small canisters at its side. “It gives us fifteen minutes of air, and we will have to share it! Want to try?” Already her belt light was beginning to fade.

“What other chance do we have?” The two women embraced one another and taking a deep breath leapt as one into the dark pool of water.

Paul Manson had never caught anything worth keeping in his seven years of fishing on the shore of the cities great isolated park lake, but he kept trying despite all the guff he received from the joggers and passerby’s. Besides it was a beautiful bright Sunday and what better way was there to spend one of the last of the dog days of August? Just then his reel zinged and his rod nearly snapped as he struggled to land what must have been Moby Dick himself! A few minutes latter and Paul was stunned to see two voluptuous women come popping up out of the lake before him and come wading to shore leaning upon one another and clinging to his fishing line. He recognized one of the soaking wet scantily clad women as the super heroine, Batbroad. And she even posed next to him for a photo for his wallet, but the one who flew away as soon as she got to shore with some kind of metal rod in her hand, he had never seen before. He turned to Batbroad and asked her, “who was that?” And Batbroad had only smiled and reached into her belt compartment to make sure the tinny magnetic tracking beacon she had slipped onto the end of that odd silver tube the girl was fleeing with was indeed working fine! It was and she kissed Paul on the cheek in the next picture, this one he secretly kept under his mattress!