Lady Midnight Blows Up the Klan
by
Tom diCentauri
It was a rare treat to be invited to a party at the estate of Bixley Gedadahiyah, the more so when the invitees are lesser members of the District Attorney's team. It was also not an invitation that any of the assistant D.A.s could evade, even if they had wanted to do so. Thus it was that Angela Grear accompanied Kwame Patterson to the party and found herself in one of the most splendid homes she could imagine. The mansion itself could have housed the people of a small African village and it sprawled over an estate that draped over a wide hillside and sloped down to a creek.
Bixley was a charming and gracious host and Angela found herself enjoying the party. But, as inevitably happens at such events, she soon discovered that she had a need to use the bathroom. She also discovered that both bathrooms were already occupied. She couldn't hold out much longer, so she went looking for an alternate bathroom, figuring that in a house as large as Bixley's there just had to be more than two bathrooms. However, figuring and finding are two entirely different things and Angela became increasingly frustrated. She had gone through every door she could find, except one, and now she went through that one.
She found herself alone in the mansion's library. The lights in the room were off, but it didn't matter: the faint light coming in through the windows was more than enough for her to see by. She was just about to leave when her feline sense of smell detected something out of place. It seemed to come from a floor-length tapestry hanging next to one of the bookcases. She gently pulled the tapestry away from the wall and saw an open door behind it. Figuring that there would very likely be a bathroom in the part of the house behind the tapestry and that it would almost certainly be unoccupied, she went through the doorway and into the silent hall beyond.
Her senses came fully alert. This was just the kind of setting favored by that archfiend, the much-too-jolly Captain Chloroform. He had cloth'd her more times than she could count and she renewed her vow that she would eventually hunt him down and make him pay for the humiliations that he had inflicted on her. Mild-mannered though she was, her alternate identity, Lady Midnight, was not so easy going. When someone gave her pain, she added downright usurious interest when she repaid it.
Soon she found an empty bathroom. Going in, she closed the door and turned on the light, more from habit than from necessity. She was surprised to see a deflator, a plastic straw with a flange around its middle, lying beside the sink: it was a device used to deflate plastic toys and just seemed out of place in this bathroom. She was just about to attend to her business when something, a faint sound or a subtle shifting of the light, prickled the hairs on the back of her neck. She turned around and saw a faint shadow moving on the shower curtain. Ready to strike with all the speed of a snake, she pulled back the shower curtain and found herself facing a woman standing silently in the bathtub.
She had to look again to make sure her eyes were not deceiving her. A naked white woman, wearing only her transparent-yellow plastic shower cap and a transparent-white plastic raincoat that looked like a parody of the costume that Ku Klux Klansies wore, stood before her with her hands bound behind her back. She seemed to be trapped in an inflated skirt made of opaque white plastic that had the Klan's red-and-white crosswheel emblem printed on the front. She had large breasts that bulged outward against the soft, skin-smooth plastic of the raincoat.
"Are you for real?" Angela whispered, not really expecting a response.
The woman nodded and shocked Angela to her core. She felt a wooziness that she usually got from a cloth-load of chloroform. Then she reached out and touched the woman, finding that her plastic was body warm and that she was, in fact, an inflated doll. When she turned the woman around she saw that her hands had been tied behind her back with a soft white satin cord.
She didn't hesitate to do what she knew she must do. She picked up the deflator from the sink and pushed it into the valve in the plastic woman's neck and then squeezed her to force the air out of her. Once she had the woman deflated and folded up, she pushed the deflator into the valve of the inflated skirt, the rocking skirt that had made the woman a punching bag. Leaving the rocking skirt to deflate, she attended to the business that had brought her to the bathroom in the first place and then she deployed one of her hidden assets, a net folded up in a pocket in her dress. She attached the net to her utility belt, which she wore under her skirt and then squeezed the last of the air out of the rocking skirt.
Having deflated the woman and her rocking skirt, Angela put the woman and her raincoat into the net bag hanging under her skirt and put the rocking skirt and the satin cord into the bottom of her oversized purse. Her mind stilled then and her senses sharpened. She turned out the light and her eyes grew large. She didn't smell anyone close and heard none of the sounds that she had learned to interpret as people nearby. She left the bathroom and went deeper into the private part of the house. In a bedroom she found French doors opening onto a balcony. Slowly she ran her hand along the door-frame, but she didn't feel any of the signs of electric current, the kind that might activate an alarm if the doors were opened. She opened the door and took a step out onto the balcony, holding the door so that it wouldn't shut behind her and leave her trapped.
She found that she was about twenty feet above the ground, but there was a tree close enough. She closed the door quietly and then dropped her purse into a bush below the balcony. She looked again at the tree and found a branch that was in just the right place for her. She stood on the railing and leaped, reaching for and grabbing the branch. She hand-walked along the branch to the tree's trunk and then backed down the trunk as a cat would do. On the ground, only slightly out of breath, she brushed off her hands and then retrieved her purse.
She kept to the shadows and made her way to the mansion's formal garden. Thence she went back to the house, pausing only to pick up a wine glass that someone had left on a planter. She passed several couples as she came up the brick steps to the patio. She saw Bixley and Kwame talking on one side of the patio and went to join them.
"That's a beautiful garden," she said more to Bixley, "so peaceful."
"Indeed it is," Bixley agreed. "It's a good place to go to put down the cares of the world, at least for a time."
"Only temporarily, of course," Kwame commented.
"Yes, of course," Bixley said. "But I look at it this way: if we didn't have the cares of the world to make us weary, we would not fully appreciate such peaceful and pleasant things."
Angela and Kwame agreed with him and carried on conversing about the human need for gardens.
After she got home there was no time to examine her prize. She had to get ready for bed in order to get up on time the next morning. She thought of the possibility of calling in sick, but dismissed it. She would have plenty of time to examine the plastic woman after she got home from work. She put the deflated woman, her raincoat, and the rocking skirt into a drawer in her dresser and went to take a shower.
After bathing she was still too keyed up to sleep, so she took her Bobo to bed and played with him. Standing just under five feet tall, Bobo was an inflated plastic punching bag bearing the image of a jolly clown. Although the clown had paper-white skin, his other features, especially his thick lips, gave him a Negroid appearance. She sometimes wondered whether circus clowns were meant to be parodies of Africans, black men in white-face. Nonetheless, she loved her Bobo and had since her teens. She spread her legs and pulled Bobo down on top of her. She took him in an embrace that lifted his sandbag off the bed, thereby pressing soft, smooth plastic into her crotch. By squeezing him rhythmically, she made him bounce on top of her and thereby masturbate her. The convulsions of her climax made the clown bounce all the harder against her, thereby intensifying her orgasm. She exhausted herself and then drifted off to sleep. The plastic clown was still on top of her when she woke up the next morning.
The day went by quickly enough. Angela was dedicated to her job and once she got into a case it was actually difficult for her to keep track of time. It was her workout session in the gym after work that dragged for her, but it was something she would not skimp on. Finally she had fulfilled all of the day's obligations, to her society and to herself, so she went home.
She made a quick dinner of her mama's broccoli-shrimp stir-fry and a small salad. She suddenly became remarkably self-conscious about putting on her apron. Made of transparent-green plastic that had images of strawberries printed on it, the apron had a waxy sheen that looked just like the highlights Angela had seen on the woman's plastic skin. It had an extra-wide bib to accommodate her large breasts and its ankle-length ruffled skirt wrapped almost completely around her. She ran her hand over the soft, smooth plastic and recalled to mind her long-ago observation the a number of men looked at her more intently on rainy days, when she went out wearing her transparent-green plastic raincoat. What would those men think of a plastic woman (and did she really want to know)?
While she ate she decided to take her shower before examining her prize. In her bathroom she stripped off all of her clothing and spent several minutes running her hands over herself. They slid easily over chocolate-brown skin that had a slight translucence that gave it a rubbery appearance. Then she flexed and felt steel muscles under the rubber. She circled her hands over her firm 38DD breasts and got an almost sexual thrill out of the touch, even if it was her own. Then she went over her breasts again, searching for lumps and finding none. She took her bouffant beret-style shower cap made of soft, skin-smooth, transparent-white plastic on which forest-green and burnished-gold leaf patterns had been printed and slipped it over her afro.
She didn't stay in the shower long and once she had dried herself and hung her shower cap back on its lunette on the back of the bathroom door, she put on fresh panties and her purple pajamas, took the items she had taken from Bixley's mansion, and laid them out on the sofa in her living room. She ignored the inflatable skirt with the weighted base, unfolded the raincoat and draped it over the back of the sofa, and then sat down on the sofa and unfolded the woman.
She was blond under the transparent-yellow plastic of her shower cap and she had blue eyes. She would stand about five feet, seven inches tall with a zaftig body and breasts that would inflate to something close to 36C. Angela held the woman facing away from her, pulled her onto her lap, and began to re-inflate her. It was just like inflating a pool toy, Angela told herself, but this was no toy. When she felt the woman starting to fill up, Angela paused, slipped her into her raincoat, closing the rubbery magnetic patches down the front, and then finished inflating her. As she felt the woman becoming firm, she also felt the woman's plastic become body-warm. As the woman's plastic went taut from the pressure inside her, she began to squirm.
Angela got up, stood the woman in front of her, and turned her around. "My name is Angela Grear," she said. "I'm an Assistant District Attorney in the Superior Court of Delta City. I need you to tell me about yourself and what happened to you." She led the woman to her computer, turned it on, and brought up the basic word-processing program. "Since you can't talk, you'll have to communicate by typing what you want to say into the computer. Do you understand?"
The woman nodded and sat down in the chair facing the computer. [[My name is Adrienne d'Umbass]], the woman typed. [[I am the Great Kudde in the Delta City chapter of the All-Powerful Nobility of the Ku Klux Klan, saviors of the White Race. My own working group was working on preparations for a demonstration when a buncha niggers busted in on us]]
Angela pulled her away from the keyboard. As Adrienne struggled against her, she stripped her raincoat off her and pushed her legs into the inflatable skirt. Then she knelt down, lifted Adrienne up, and began to inflate the skirt. She had put the valve behind Adrienne so that the plastic woman couldn't grab her, but then she had to hold Adrienne by pressing her hands against her thighs lest she end up kissing the woman's butt as she inflated the rocking skirt. Ignoring Adrienne's squirming, she blew the skirt full, making the plastic go taut in her hands. As the skirt filled with warm air Angela shifted her hands to take it in an embrace, feeling the plastic press against her double-dee breasts as it came firm. She blew a few extra breaths into the skirt to ensure that it was fully erect (and she was startled by that thought). Then, with a heavy sigh, she stood up.
She confronted her prisoner and gave her a quick jab, making her tip over backwards. "We don't use the word 'nigger' in this house," she said. As Adrienne bounced back up at her, Angela bopped her again. "We don't use 'jigaboo'." Bop. "We don't use 'coon'." Bop. "I don't even like 'nee-grow'." Bop. "The only words that are acceptable..." Bop. "...are African-American..." Bop. "...and Black." Bop.
Although she had tried to fight back at first, Adrienne soon put her hands on her thighs and submitted to being Angela's punching bag. For several minutes soft rubbery thumps echoed in the room as Angela punched her toy and worked out her anger. But soon the sight of Adrienne standing like a soldier at attention, passively accepting the punishment Angela was dishing out, cooled her wrath. She stopped throwing punches and allowed Adrienne to come to rest. Then she knelt down, picked up the rocking skirt and set it in front of the computer. She wedged a folded up sweater under the rocking skirt's base to tip Adrienne forward and she put a thick book under the keyboard to make it easier for Adrienne to use.
Adrienne backspaced on the message that she had typed and then resumed typing. [[...when a buncha Black boys busted in on us]]
Angela let out a soft feline hiss, but let the minor insult pass.
[[They said they was gonna put an end to the Klan for good. Then one of the ni]] Backspace. Backspace. [[...one of the guys took me into the back room and put a wet cloth over my face. It smelled like a kinda sweet purfume and then I got real weak and real sleepy and then I musta passed out. 'Cause when I woke up I was in a cage lyin naked on a blowup raft. They said that they had gave me klorri- somethin]]
"Chloroform," Angela said and spelled it out. She had recognized the symptoms from Adrienne's description. She was all too familiar with them, having been "perfumed" so many times that she had lost count.
[[Kin I have my raincoat back? It's cold in here.]] Adrienne typed.
Angela retrieved the raincoat from the chair onto which she had tossed it and handed it to Adrienne. "Do you know where you were?" she asked as Adrienne put the raincoat on with a soft, warm-sounding swish.
[[No. They didn't tell us and I didn't see nothing that I could figure out where we were. I couldn't even figure it out from the way they was driving cause I was unconchus.]]
"What happened while you were there?"
[[It was weerd. Like all Star Trekkie. First they kept us in these cages and made us get sorta fat. They said it was so that we would make good balloons. Then they stuck a drug in me that made me do whatever they told me. Then they told me to put on a shower cap and they took me into this thing that was all Beam me up, Scotty and made me puff out my belly and other stuff. And then they turned me into a blowup doll.]]
"And yet you are still very much a living person," Angela said in some awe.
[[Yeah, but only when I'm blown up. When you let the air out of me I went to sleep and I woke up again when you blew me up just now. Anyway, they turned my friends into blowup dolls too and then they played with us. They didn't get to fuck us, but they made us be punching bags for them until the special people arrived. Then they sold us to the special people. They thought it was real funny when they put us on auction like we was a buncha slaves]]
It took all of her willpower and all of her deep commitment to professionalism to hold back the obvious comment, but Angela succeeded in not saying it.
[[I bet you think it's funny too]] Adrienne typed.
"I can see how someone might think it was," Angela said, "but it's not. It was a lousy thing for your ancestors to do to mine and it's just as lousy for any of my people to do it to you. So what happened next?"
[[A guy came up to me and said I was sold. And then he stuck something in my neck to let the air come blowin out of me and it felt just the same as it did when they gave me the cloriforum. Like I got all weak and sleepy and then I just passed out. The only difference was when I was gettin the cloriforum I was goin unh, unh, unh, but when they let the air out of me I wasn't sayin nothin.]]
"So whoever bought you took you home and blew you back up," Angela commented.
[[Yeah. It was this guy Bixley. He bought me and blew me up and I was afraid, but then it turned out he wasn't so bad for a ni...]] Backspace. Backspace. [[...Black guy. He showed me his house and told me that I was gonna have a real pleasant time there. Well, I just knew he was gonna play with me in bed, but he was real nice about it, you know. Some guys just wanta rough a woman up, but Bixley was real gentle, like he was really in love with me. Like he kissed me and rubbed me real good before he got on top of me and stuck his dick into my cunt. It was so good that I could pretend that I was his wife and not just some rubber slave girl]]
Angela felt herself growing jealous of Adrienne. And also starting to feel more than a little hot for her. Her awareness of that latter feeling set her up for a shock when she saw what Adrienne typed next.
[[You're gonna play with me in bed, too, aren't you? I'm so soft and helpless, you can do whatever you want to me. And I'm so smooth and warm, you'll wanna lay on top of me all night.]]
"You're not a toy," Angela said, "You're the victim of a horrible crime."
[[You played with me just now]] Adrienne typed. [[You made me your punching bag.]]
"I was punishing you for using foul language," Angela said. "I didn't...." She paused and looked at Adrienne, trying truly to see her as a person and not as an inflatable doll. "I'm sorry. I was wrong to do that. I'll make it up to you."
[[OK. Take me to bed and play with me.]]
Angela shook her head, then happened to glance at the clock and saw that it was late. "We're going to go to bed now, but I am not going to play with you. Like I said, you are not a toy."
She lifted Adrienne and set her in the middle of the floor, then she retrieved the deflator and lifted the skirt of Adrienne's raincoat. As she slid the deflator into the valve stem on Adrienne's rocking skirt, Angela noticed a feature that had not registered with her before. The aureole of welded plastic around the valve, the means by which the valve had been attached to the bag, bore the same logo as did the aureole on her Bobo. All she had to do was to contact the manufacturer and find out who had ordered the rocking skirts and whither they had been shipped.
When the skirt had gone sufficiently limp, she pulled Adrienne out of it. Then she saw what made Adrienne so eager to go to bed with her. The woman's clitoris was swollen and protruded a half inch from its sheath at the top of her vulva. The poor woman was in a state of perpetual sexual heat.
Trembling slightly, she led Adrienne into the bedroom. The sight of her Bobo standing on the hassock where she kept him during the day made her feel warm inside, all the more so when she saw Adrienne hug and kiss him. She turned back the covers on her bed and then slowly took off her pajamas. Adrienne took off her raincoat, draped it over a chair, and then got into bed. Angela turned off the light and then got into bed.
In the dark she saw Adrienne turn toward her and reach out with a trembling hand. Angela responded by turning herself onto her back.
"I'm not going to play with you," she said softly, "but you can play with me. It's only fair." She looked at Bobo seeming to leer at her in the semi-dark as Adrienne slowly mounted her. She spread her legs as she felt Adrienne trying to push her thigh into her crotch and suddenly realized that Adrienne felt just like Bobo, only much warmer. And she felt Adrienne moving herself; she didn't have to manipulate her as she did Bobo. Her breathing deepened and she noticed that she was getting hot.
She felt Adrienne's inflated breasts, soft, warm plastic balloons that they were, press and rub against her breasts and she felt her nipples swell and stiffen. Her heart beat ever faster and harder and she felt her clitoris swell and stiffen; felt it slide out of its sheath and kiss Adrienne's thigh. She was trembling all over now with anticipation and desire. She put her arms around Adrienne and hugged her tightly.
"Adrienne," she panted, "I think I'm falling in love with you."
Adrienne responded by kissing Angela full on the lips and then thrusting rhythmically with her hips. As her clitoris slid up and down Angela's left thigh her own left thigh rubbed Angela's clitoris. She also arched her back to make her breasts rub up and down Angela's, writhing to add a bit of circular motion to them. She strove to press herself harder against Angela, sliding her arms around Angela's back and squeezing the bigger woman with what Angela thought of as surprising strength for an inflated doll.
For what felt like an hour the two women writhed and squirmed together, wrestling each other to hot arousal. Angela grunted desperately and tried to bring Adrienne to climax, but the plastic woman kept pumping on her. Finally Angela felt Adrienne jerk so violently that her thigh rammed into Angela's clitoris forcefully enough to bring Angela to climax. For a long minute the two women convulsed together in Angela's bed and then they stopped moving. With Adrienne lying on top of her, Angela panted to get her oxygen levels back to normal.
"I'm going to make you my punching bag again," she whispered in a quavery voice, "so that I can be your fucking bag again." And then she drifted off to sleep.
She seemed to come awake some time later, but soon discerned that she had entered a lucid dream. She dreamed that she had been turned into an inflated plastic punching bag, like Bobo, and that she was Adrienne's toy. Like Bobo, she was merely an image printed on a penis-shaped bag. Standing completely naked but for her shower cap, she was Adrienne's plastic sex prisoner. She was standing in Adrienne's bedroom, facing Adrienne's bed and listening to water run in the shower in the adjoining bathroom. All too soon the water stopped and a few minutes later Adrienne, completely naked and still wearing her shower cap, come into the bedroom to confront her captive.
"At last," Adrienne gloated, "the mighty Lady Midnight is my soft, inflated pleasure slave!"
Angela could feel the warmth of her body as she came close and then put her belly against the bag.
"My hot plastic sex prisoner!" Adrienne crooned as she gazed into Angela's eyes. She thrust her knees forward to shove Angela backward and then belly bounced her when she rocked back up.
And then they were in bed together with Angela lying on top of Adrienne, the weight of the blankets pushing her down onto Adrienne's crotch and Adrienne's hug pressing her against Adrienne's belly and breasts. Soft, warm, and rubbery, Adrienne belly bounced Angela just as Angela did with her Bobo. Imagining herself as Adrienne's masturbating toy got Angela hot, but before she could reach climax she sank back into a deep sleep.
Early the next morning, after having sex with Adrienne again and then letting the air out of her, Angela got up and went to her computer. Here she displayed skills that, had anyone else witnessed them, would seem almost magical. Like a panther tracking her prey through the forest, she sniffed out the information she wanted, regardless of how well hidden it might be or how deeply in the forest of the Internet she would have to go. True, the first stage of this morning's search wasn't all that impressive, but she had discovered that the most rewarding searches often began simply. In this case an Internet search under inflatable punching bags and Bobo led her to the company that had made her special toy. The company had put their logo on their home page, so there was no doubt in Angela's mind that she had the right one. The manufacturer was called "The Plastic Heating Company" and they made pretty much everything that could be made from soft plastic film, from raincoats and aprons to inflatable toys. As Angela paged through their online catalogue she found nothing resembling the rocking skirt that made Adrienne into a punching bag. It must have been a special order, she thought.
Using what faint clues she could gain from the website, she hacked her way into the company's computer, hoping to find that special order and the address of the buyer. As she searched, she found that The Plastic Heating Company was privately held and that one of the stockholders was one Bixley Gedadahiyah.
That discovery reminded her of the value of taking her explorations beyond the range of immediate necessity. She now knew that she did not want to make any direct inquiries about the rocking skirts. She likely didn't need to do so: it made perfect sense to suspect now that the plasitifiers worked for a plastic-goods company. And that suspicion led her to lay out her plan for the next stage of her research.
Later that morning, when Angela was at work, the District Attorney called his staff into the conference room. There he introduced a man with whom Angela had worked before, Detective William Wyler Wiggins, also known jocularly as Officer Internet. The briefing lived up to its name; Detective Wiggins told the assembled staff that Bixley Gedadahiyah had gone missing and that foul play was suspected.
"You were all at his mansion a few days ago," he said. "I know this is the longest of shots, but if any of you can remember seeing or hearing anything suspicious, please let me know."
"Do we suspect the Klan in this?" Angela asked.
"That's our leading hypothesis," Detective Wiggins said. "After all, you people were at that party because you successfully put away a bunch of Klansies that had gone after him. That, by the way, is something else to think about; they may be targeting some of you as well, so stay alert out there, boys and girls."
"I just don't understand why anyone would want to harm that nice Mr. Gedadahiyah," one woman said.
"Two reasons," Detective Wiggins said. "He's rich and he's black. When I was growing up," he mused, "there was a black comedian - Dick Gregory - who said 'In the North they don't care how big I get as long as I don't get too close and in the South they don't care how close I get as long as I don't get too big'. Apparently even that despicable arrangement isn't good enough to satisfy some people."
After the meeting Detective Wiggins walked with Angela back to her office. She was certain that he wanted to ask her in more detail about the party at Bixley's mansion. He knew, from having worked with her before, that she would have noticed things that others might miss.
"Sometimes," she said, "I feel that trying to do away with the Ku Klux Klan is just a big game of Whack-A-Mole."
"They're getting better at manipulating society's conception of them," Detective Wiggins grumbled. "They have even managed to fog up history a bit."
"How so?" she asked.
"Coupla years ago there was some show on television that tried to present John Brown as the father of American terrorism. Huh! The only 'terrorist' act they could pin on him was actually a vendetta against people who had murdered several members of his family. But there are people in this country who do not want anyone to remember who the real father of American terrorism was or to recognize the group he founded as a terrorist organization."
"Fathers. Plural," Angela said, "Terror got knocked up by six guys, Calvin E. Jones, John B. Kennedy, Frank O. McCord, John C. Lester, Richard R. Reed, and James R Crowe, the six founders of the Ku Klux Klan."
"Indeed so," he said. "At least one person remembers. Unfortunately it's my people who need most to do the remembering and who are the least likely to do it."
As they walked on to her office, she remembered an encounter she had once had with a demented Klansie (wasn't that a redundancy?). She had been walking to a class when a dim-looking lad looking like a refugee from the recent Aryan Pride Parade had stepped into her path. He had been wearing something that looked like a white choir robe covered with an amazing array of esoteric symbols and she remembered thinking that he had looked very much like a true Ku Klux Klown.
"Why don't you all go back to Africa?" he had demanded to know.
"Probably for the same reason you all don't go back to Europe," she had replied with a wicked grin before stepping around him and walking on. That was when she had first figured that those who honk the loudest about white supremacy constitute the best evidence against it.
She and Detective Wiggins talked in her office for an hour, going over the party as Angela remembered it, though she was careful to leave out her little escapade with Adrienne. It bothered her to hide her activities as Lady Midnight, but those activities were not always completely legal, although they were quite effective against those who held the law in utter contempt. It was a dilemma that often kept her awake at night, but she had yet to come up with a resolution of it.
That afternoon she went to the Building Inspector's office to conduct her special research. The Office of the County Building Inspector was only too happy to cooperate with the District Attorney's office, so of course Angela got to look at the building plans for The Plastic Heating Company's corporate office in downtown Delta City. She had to leave her purse and her cell-phone at the plan librarian's desk for security reasons, but that was OK: she had an astounding quantity of micro-electronics built into the buckle of her belt and the squarish links that made up the belt itself could store amazing amounts of data. She had done this so many times before that she was tempted to wonder why the staff didn't get suspicious of her.
She leaned over the table to examine the blueprints and then stood up again to refer to the photographs of the building. Again she consulted the calculator that she had borrowed and the notes she had penciled on a sheet of paper. Somehow the dimensions were not adding up. She didn't make errors in math, so something was... Oh. There was an extra volume in the building, one not shown on the blueprints. She checked again. Yes, that was it: the building's original three stories with fifteen-foot ceilings had been altered to a ground floor with a fifteen-foot ceiling and three upper stories with ten-foot ceilings. The fourth floor was not indicated in the records. <Well, well, well>, she thought, <someone should check that out.>
So late that same night someone did. Angela had gazed longingly at deflated Adrienne before turning out all of the lights in her apartment and getting down to business. In the skyglow seeping in through the windows she stripped off her clothes and put on her pink leotard, purple cape, and utility belt. She put on her mask and boots last, thereby transforming herself into Lady Midnight, every crook's nightmare.
She went through the window that she had long ago rebuilt and climbed up the fire escape to the roof. She paused to listen and to smell, to make sure no one else was on the roof. Then she vaulted over the parapet. She strode to the chain-link enclosed lockers where tenants kept the lawn chairs, barbeque grills, and other items that they would use when they came onto the roof. Opening Angela's locker, the Black Avenger removed what looked like an elaborate, folded up beach umbrella and a picnic cooler. From the cooler she removed an electric engine and its fuel cell; then she put the cooler back into the locker. She unfolded the "umbrella" to reveal it as a purple-winged hang glider and she quickly attached the engine and deployed the propeller. Then she strapped herself to the glider, faced into the wind that almost always blew across the building at night, turned on the engine, and leaped off the parapet.
She began to climb almost immediately, gaining altitude before turning toward the building housing The Plastic Heating Company's offices. No, it wasn't the Batplane, but some superheroes have to work within rather restricted budgets. Nonetheless, it got her where she wanted to go. Half an hour after launching herself into the night, Lady Midnight set her boots onto the roof of her target. She locked the glider to a standpipe and then explored the roof.
At one point she was looking out over the lights of Delta City. The building itself stood on a low hill, so the city spread wide before her. It should have seemed magical, this odd human challenge to the night, and for a moment she allowed herself to feel that sense of wonder that she had felt the first time her father had taken her to a tall hill overlooking the city. He had pointed up toward the Milky Way and intoned the old blessing, "Behold, my daughter, the only thing greater than yourself!", but she had gazed out over the city and marveled at its own constellation of lights. And now she wandered the night, hunting those who betrayed that magic.
How had she gotten herself into this? She remembered the comic books that she had read when she was growing up. She especially remembered Radio Woman, who could receive and transmit radio waves thanks to a freak accident in a nuclear power plant that bathed physicist Anne Tenna in strange patterns of both electromagnetic and nuclear radiation. She could even project microwave beams from her hands and thereby weaken villains by overheating their bodies. Aided by her sidekick, Ellen-Marie (aka Electro-Magnetic) Fields and occasionally by her friend Sola Vwitte (who took the nom de guerre of Brevity), Radio Woman would foil dastardly plots, in particular those hatched by the Tank-Circuit Trio; the Resistor, the Inductor, and the oh-so vile Capacitor. Yeah, those were the days!
With a sigh she resumed her exploration of the Plastic Heating Company building. The main roof access, she found, was an external steel ladder that came up the side of the building at the rear from a landing on the third floor. There didn't seem to be any external access to the fourth floor, the one she wanted to see. Aside from the old water tank, the only large structures on the roof were the vents for the air-conditioning system. There were two of them, each the size of an old-fashioned telephone booth. She would examine them both before deciding which one to break into: apparently she was going to have to enter through the air ducts.
With both sight and touch, she examined the first of the vents. Being able to see in the dark as well as other people can see in the day, she discovered that the vent had a none-to-well-hidden door. She was able to tickle the latch with a lock-pick from her utility belt and open the door. She saw a ladder going down into the building and, without a second thought, swung herself into the vent and began climbing down. When she had descended to the level of the fourth floor her boots came down on a grille that spanned the vent and prevented her from going any lower. Sure enough, to the right of the ladder she found the door that had to be there.
Again she brought her lock-picks into play and let herself into the building. And again the darkness offered no barrier to her. She paused to take stock of the situation and heard voices coming from somewhere ahead of her. Then she heard music and understood that the sound was coming from a television. As quietly as possible she crept toward the sound to see who might be occupying this hidden space.
Suddenly a strong arm grabbed her from behind and held her while a hand pressed a damp cloth over her face. Her startled gasp huffed sweet-smelling vapor into her lungs. She struggled desperately to get free, even as her strength faded. But she couldn't apply her strength and hold her breath at the same time: she tried but her body betrayed her and she gasped even more chloroform into her lungs. Steel muscles turned to rubber and she slumped in her captor's grasp. The worst part of it was that her muffled grunts seemed only to give her attacker added strength. No, she corrected herself, the worst part was that while she was getting weaker her captor had jammed a boner against her butt.
<I have got to learn to stop doing that>, she thought as her eyelids grew heavy and her consciousness faded to black.
She fell into a dream world, a place far removed from the world of her conscious self, and in the dream world she remembered. In college she had been inspired by the "Roots" phenomenon from the late 1970's, the more so because of the stories that her mother and her grandmother had entrusted to her. Like Alex Haley, she had come into possession of an heirloom that had been successfully passed down for generations, none the easier for being an heirloom of information. So one summer she had gone to equatorial Africa to look for the village whence at least some of her ancestors had come.
The guides had assured her that no one lived in the area, that it was haunted by strange spirits. But she had insisted on going and they followed, albeit reluctantly, to protect her. She had been amazed and delighted to see how open the forest was. She didn't have to hack her way through the stereotypical jungle (and why did it have to be a jungle, anyway? That was just a Hindi word for forest and certainly shouldn't apply to Africa.); she had simply walked down an open trail.
And the soil had amazed her. Around the city where she had arrived the ground had been reddish, but in the forest the soil had the color of deep chocolate, a sign of intense fertility.
She had come to a village, a living village full of happy people who had run to greet her. And it had felt as if she had been coming home, especially because she had noticed that the people seemed familiar. Indeed, an old griot who had approached her to offer his welcome looked just like her father. And a young woman standing next to him could have been her twin sister. As the old griot had spoken she had felt herself becoming feverish. Her body had begun to ache and she had become dizzy, unable to concentrate her thoughts on anything. And then she had passed out.
She had awakened to find herself looking into a pair of yellow eyes with slit pupils. Oddly, she had felt no fear in the presence of the great black cat of Africa. She simply watched in amazement as the panther put a paw on her chest and said to her, "Your people need you to be more than you are now. My spirit will join yours, inseparably so." She had reached up and felt the velvety softness of the panther's fur. "I am Africa," the panther had said, "I will be with you always."
She had awakened a second time to find a large black snake coiled on her chest. The mamba stared at her and she felt no fear. "Your people need you to be more than you are now," the mamba said. "My spirit will join yours, inseparably so." Venom seemed to drip from her fangs and seep into Angela's skin. It felt good. "I am Africa. I will be with you always."
She had awakened a third time to find herself looking into the oddly wise face of an old chimpanzee. Under her thin black hair she had skin even blacker than Angela's. "Your people need you to be more than you are now. My spirit will join yours, inseparably so," the chimpanzee had said. "I am Africa. I will be with you always."
The fourth time she had awakened, she had been lying on her air mattress in her pup tent. As she got up, all sign of disease gone from her, the guides came to her and expressed relief that she was well. She had thanked them for their concern and then looked around the campsite. She recognized the place, but the village that had once stood on that site had long ago fallen into ruin: no one had lived in that place for a very long time.
So she had returned to her hotel, and thence to the United States and Delta City. But she could not get that weird African village out of her mind. It had seemed so utterly real. She had been certain that it had not been a hallucination, because one does not bring anything back from a hallucination.
Something had gotten into her, of that fact she had been certain, though the doctors she had consulted told her that she was in perfect health. Something that could evade the tests of modern medicine had gotten into her, of that fact she had been certain. She had found out what it was after she returned to school.
She had been returning to her dorm one night when someone grabbed her from behind. She had let out a purely feline yowl that startled her attacker, made him release her just enough that she could pirouette and slam the heel of her left palm into his nose and beyond. The punk's head snapped around and he staggered back a step. Brandishing a knife, he tried to approach her again, only to have the heel of her right palm slam into his nose and snap his head back the other way. That blow so jolted him that he dropped the knife and turned to flee.
Angela had not been aware that she was screaming, but other people had come from nearby buildings to see what was wrong and to offer assistance. Ordinarily the would-be rapist would have eluded pursuit in the dark, but Angela had discovered then that she had become something other than ordinary. She picked up the knife by its blade, then followed the smell of the punk's blood and found that she could see in the dark. She had zeroed in on slight bruises that his passage had imposed on the plants and she had found him cowering under a staircase. Trapped by an angry mob, the punk had wept with relief when the police arrived to arrest him.
It was the reaction of one of her fellow pursuers after they came into a dimly lit area that had told her that something was not quite right. The woman had turned to speak to her and had let out a startled yelp. She had explained her fright by telling Angela that Angela's eyes looked too large, reminiscent of the eyes on certain statuettes that had been found in the ruins of Ancient Sumeria. Then Angela had overheard people wondering how she had pursued the perp in the dark and she understood: the night belonged to her.
And now night began to give way to the dawn. It was not the dawn of the rising sun, but the dawn of returning consciousness.
<Cloth'd again, damn it!> she thought. <What is it with villains and chloroform, anyway?>
She kept her eyes closed and her breathing slow and steady as she took inventory of all of the sensations that would offer clues as to her situation. She noticed first of all that her hands were tied behind her back: Standard Operating Procedure, straight out of Mr X's Villain's Handbook, a copy of which rested on her bookshelf at home. Yeah, how many times had she gotten the impression that she was just a puppet in some play devised by the mysterious Mr X?
OK, next she became aware that she was lying on an inflated plastic air mattress resting on a carpeted concrete floor. The air was warm and carried smells consistent with a corporate office. Her costume, especially her mask, were still intact, but that was no surprise: several times crooks who had knocked her out had tried to unmask her only to recoil in terror as what looked like a giant black snake lunged over her shoulder at them. And the quality of the light seeping through her eyelids was that of morning.
As her consciousness expanded she could smell a man in the room with her. Subtle clues that a lesser human would have missed told her that he was sitting and waiting for something. Then she heard him sing "You Are My Sunshine", but with lyrics that made her blood run cold:
"You are my prisoner, my plastic prisoner.
With your hot body I want to play.
I will inflate you and then I'll fuck you.
There is no chance that you'll ever get away."
At that point she figured that it was time to wake up.
She rolled over slightly and moaned as she opened her eyes. Looking up at an angle, she saw a slightly plump young black man sitting in a chair just outside the cage in which she lay.
"Welcome back to the wonderful world of consciousness," he said to her with a broad smile.
"Thanks," she said. "Any possibility I could get directions to the lovely land of freedom?"
The man chuckled as he got up from the chair. "You want to leave?!" the man said, feigning astonishment. "Already?! But you only just got here! And besides, if you leave, who will warm up this sexy outfit?" He gestured toward the chair.
Still a little dopey from the chloroform, Lady Midnight took a more intent look at the chair. Then she saw what he had been sitting on as he waited for her to awaken.
Draped on the chair were, she saw, a raincoat made of transparent-purple plastic and a full apron made of transparent-pink plastic with a two-inch wide ruffle made of transparent-purple plastic. A wide opaque-silver disc printed on the apron's skirt bore the cursive LM of her logo in purple. She saw that the apron had an extra-wide bib to accommodate her 38DD breasts without simply slipping into her cleavage. And lying on the seat of the chair, she saw, was a bouffant beret-style shower cap made of soft, skin-smooth, transparent-black plastic on which white starburst patterns had been printed.
"Think of it as your bridal trousseau," the man said as he indicated the items with a sweep of his hand. "And I'm getting all hard just thinking about inflating the bride."
"I really don't think this is a good time for a wedding," she said.
"Maybe so. Nonetheless, your timing is just so exquisite, my dear," the man said. "Today you get to watch us poof a Klansie. The Great Fuming Klodde himself, Justin Embassille is going to become our inflated plastic prisoner. He'll be joining his friends, Ima Meauronne and Eddie Ott on the block at our next auction. But until then he'll be our punching bag." He opened the door to the cage and helped her get up off the air mattress, then gently pushed her out of the room and into the hallway she had seen earlier.
Only a short distance down the hall they came to a door and the man pushed her through it. The room they came into looked like a very small auditorium, with a stage raised a foot off the floor in the back. A curtain hid the stage itself and whatever was on it. The man sat her down in a chair facing the stage and went to open the curtain.
"As long as we're talking together," Lady Midnight said, "would you mind telling me your name. 'Hey, You' just seems so rude."
"Oh, we don't use real names here," the man said with an easy smile. "We don't want evil spirits to find them out and make trouble for us. You can just call me Bumba Kolodde." He opened the curtain then and Lady Midnight felt a shock go through her.
She saw Bixley standing with his hands behind his back, like a sea captain on the bridge of his ship. But then she noticed that he was wearing only his transparent-black plastic raincoat and a fully inflated opaque-black plastic rocking skirt. She saw that he was also wearing a beret-style shower cap made of transparent-black plastic and that a valve stem protruded from his neck about an inch below and behind his left ear. A little thrill of horror shot through her when her captor gave Bixley a jab in the belly and made him bounce.
As he bopped Bixley Bumba sang to the melody of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat":
"Punch, punch, punch the bag,
make him bounce and sway.
Bippity-boppity, bippity-boppity,
punch the bag all day."
He spent several minutes playing with Bixley that way as Lady Midnight watched in fascinated horror.
"Isn't he a member of your gang?" Lady Midnight asked.
"He was," Bumba said. "But then his prisoner escaped, so we had to poof him to ensure that he would not reveal any information to the authorities. Apparently, I am now thinking, you had something to do with that escape. There were signs that an intruder entered the house while he was entertaining guests from the DA's office." He put his hands on the chair's arms to lean over her. "And then you show up here. I'm guessing that his prisoner didn't actually escape: I'm betting that you took her. You haven't told anybody about her, have you? No, that's not your style. You've got her stashed away somewhere and nobody knows about her. So our secret is still safe. And it will be even safer when I have made you my plastic prisoner."
He then reached into a small box and took out a ball gag. "Merely temporary," Bumba said. "Just to keep you from interfering with what comes next." Then he put the ball into her mouth and fastened the strap behind her neck. He pulled her up out of the chair and escorted her to another room.
Now Lady Midnight understood what Adrienne had meant when she said that she had been taken to a place that was all "Star Trekkie". The room looked like one of the sets of Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise. A captain's chair occupied a spot near one wall and faced across the room toward what looked like a small version of one the starship's transporters. This one, however, was completely enclosed with Plexiglas™. Her captor sat her down in the captain's chair facing the device and fastened the seat-belt across her lap: with her hands bound behind her, she was now trapped in the chair.
"Now you have a front-row seat to see how a prisoner turns into an inflated plastic doll. We have one last Klansie from this batch to do," Bumba said gaily. "I've already pumped him up with a dose of Yesmassa, so he will do whatever I tell him. He'll be ready soon and then you can see what I'm going to do to you."
She cringed at the thought of putting the idea into Bumba's mind, but it was so obvious that he likely had it already and there was something that she needed to know. Curiosity overcame prudence (which sounds like a Puritan mud-wrestling match) and she grunted her question. When he removed the ball gag, she asked, "So why haven't you used it on me?"
"For what?" Bumba asked. "To get information? Useless! It works in large measure by making its victim totally stupid, so that all they can do is obey orders to do things. Unfortunately, providing information beyond 'D'uh' is one of the things they become unable to do. But don't feel left out. You're turn will come. When all four of our board members are here, I will give you your dose. We'll play with you a little bit while the Yesmassa takes full effect and then I'll turn you into a plastic balloon. You'll serve the board as a punching bag for the rest of the afternoon and then tonight you will be my blow-up bride." He glanced at the clock on the wall. "Ah, it's time to poof a Klansie." And he replaced the ball gag and left the room.
He returned a few minutes later, apparently alone. Then Lady Midnight saw a young white man following him in a perfectly normal manner: he gave no indication that he had been zombified, except for one detail.
She saw Justin Embassille come into the room completely naked except for the transparent-black plastic shower cap that he wore. Bumba opened a door into the transformer and gently pushed Justin toward it, whispering something to Justin as he did so. Seeming to be in a daze, Justin went through the door and stood on the transformer's stage. Justin stared at Lady Midnight and his penis came erect, standing up long and hard. A happy look grew on his face as Bumba counted down from ten. When Bumba reached three Justin inhaled a deep breath and puffed out his belly. At zero Bumba pressed the red button and Justin was enveloped in what looked like a heat shimmer. He seemed to go all blurry and then snapped back into focus as the shimmer went away and a sound like the thumping of a bass drum echoed in the room.
With the happy look frozen on his face, Justin looked around as if in a panic. He noticed his audience and put his hands over his penis as if to shield it from view. When Bumba opened the door into the transformer, Justin jumped him, but to no avail: Bumba picked him up, held him lightly, and informed him that he was now an inflated plastic balloon. As if to emphasize his point, Bumba took his squirming prisoner in a full embrace and kissed him, making him squirm all the more frantically.
"I can't wait to get you pregnant," Bumba said softly into Justin's ear (and loud enough for Lady Midnight to hear), "with a copy of your own plastic raincoat." He ran his hand over Justin's smooth belly. "You're going to be so hot in bed." At that point Justin seemed to be in shock; he wasn't moving, but was standing like a soldier at attention.
Bumba took that opportunity to put Justin into a transparent-white plastic rocking skirt. He pulled the skirt's waistband up around Justin's waist and knelt before his prisoner to inflate the skirt. With a rude comment about a blow job, he took the skirt's valve in his lips and blew. It took several minutes, but all too soon for Justin the skirt came full and firm and Bumba stood up to attend to his prisoner.
He gave Justin a quick punch in the belly to knock him over backwards. When Justin bounced smartly back upright Bumba punched him again and kept on punching him as he bounced and wobbled helplessly for his master. And Bumba gloated over his toy, taunting him over his white supremacist beliefs.
While Bumba attended to his new toy, Lady Midnight felt for the seam of her leotard, the one in the small of her back. Very carefully she peeled the Velcro™ apart and pulled the little cutter from its sheath. Made from a razor blade cut down and embedded in a bit of rubber, it gave her the means to cut the rope binding her hands. As she worked she looked around to make sure that she was aware of every possible advantage that she could gain over Bumba when the rope parted. And on a table to her right she saw it; she saw the all-too-familiar brown-glass bottle and, next to it, a patch of thick cloth.
Bumba was having too much fun with his new plastic prisoner to notice what his other captive was up to. With her hands free, Lady Midnight slid her cutter back into its sheath and re-fastened the Velcro™. As quietly as she could she unfastened the seat belt and set its halves on the chair. Then, with only a glance at Bumba, she went to the table, picked up the cloth and the bottle, and then, using a circular motion (recommended by Captain Chloroform himself in the Villain's Handbook), she poured a load of chloroform onto the cloth.
Grinning around the ball gag, she snuck up on Bumba. She remembered the procedure that the Villain's Handbook recommended:
"You must approach your victim from behind. Hold the cloth in your dominant hand (if you are right handed, then your right hand is your dominant hand). You may want to practice this on a dummy first to ensure a smooth attack. Coming upon your victim you wrap your non-dominant arm around her chest just under her breasts and grab her arm. At the same time press the cloth against her face, making sure that it covers both her nose and mouth. Then pull her backwards to take her off balance. Keep her leaning on you and move around to keep her off balance. Now you're in for the ride of your life."
"Mmpff!!" Bumba complained as he jerked and writhed in a futile attempt to break free of Lady Midnight's effectively unbreakable grip.
"Mm-hmm," Lady Midnight agreed around the ball gag.
"Mmp-mmff!!" Bumba added as the chloroform worked its biochemical magic and he began to soften.
"At first her muscles will tense and you will feel them as hard as steel" the Handbook continued. " She will heave and writhe in her efforts to break your grasp, but you must hold on and keep her off balance. This will seem to go on for a very long time, but it's actually less than a minute. You will feel her soften as the magic mist takes effect and her muscles weaken. Her muffled grunts will fade out and she will slump helpless in your embrace. Take care that she's not 'playing possum'. Once she is firmly asleep, she is yours to use as you wish. Good hunting!"
"Hmm-hmm-hmmm!!" Lady Midnight gloated as Bumba slumped in her embrace. She knew that he wasn't "playing possum"; she could feel his heartbeat, slow and regular, just like someone asleep. She laid him out on the floor and removed the ball gag so that she could breathe more easily. She found that she was panting and that she felt strangely warm inside.
<So,> she thought, <this is what it feels like to cloth an opponent.> And suddenly she understood. She understood why various villains seemed to take such pleasure in cloth'ing her and other superheroines. And then she had to chuckle over the thought of giving the ever-so-jolly Captain Chloroform a good stiff dose of his own sweet-smelling medicine.
In no time at all she had stripped Bumba naked, to ensure that he didn't have any escape devices hidden in his clothes, and had tied his hands behind his back. Then she lifted him into the captain's chair and fastened the seat belt. Seeing him slump over, she took another rope, put it around his chest and the back of the chair and tied it to hold him upright. Then she took the opportunity to look around and conduct a quick security scan of the hidden space before he regained consciousness. Bumba was just coming awake when she returned to the transformer room.
"Now, wasn't that fun?" she asked with a giggle. "I know it was for me."
"You don't know what you're doing," he said, his speech still a little slurred from the chloroform.
"Sure I do," she said. "I'm avoiding becoming an inflated plastic balloon."
"You shouldn't have interfered," he said.
"I always interfere with criminal activity," she said. "It's an odd little fixation I have on people's rights."
"Which is exactly what we're trying to protect," Bumba said.
"By kidnaping people and turning them into inflatable toys?" Lady Midnight asked in astonishment. "How does that work?"
"We only do it to active members of the Ku Klux Klan," he replied.
"But why? What's the point?"
"The point, my dear, is to rid the world of America's original terrorist organization. And there really is no other way."
"But if they haven't committed any crimes...," she objected.
"Precisely," Bumba said. "There's nothing the law can do. So how do we eliminate the danger that these people are building against ours?"
"Not by committing crimes against them, I'm sure," she said.
"Is it any different from what you do?" he asked.
"Uh, yeah," she said in her I'm-addressing-a-moron voice. "I don't turn my victims into beach balls. I leave them for the police to pick up and let the courts decide their fate."
"You're forgetting," he said, "that they haven't done anything that a court can deal with...yet. That's the problem. They haven't actually committed any crimes, but they are preparing a huge atrocity. How do we stop it if the courts can't?"
"It's not the courts who are going to stop it," she said. "The police will have that pleasure."
"No, they won't," he said. "They'll fail because they don't know what's coming. And even if they didn't, the Klan would continue to exist. No, we need to carry out a final solution to the Klansie problem."
"Ooh," she said, "that sounds familiar. Now where did I hear that before?"
"This is different," he said. "These people are actually dangerous and they can't change."
"How do you figure?" she asked.
"It's just like the rapist," Bumba said, "who blames women for his own failures and throws tantrums in the hope that they will magically give him the manhood that he lacks. The Klansies blame Black people, Jews, and anyone else they dislike for their failures and throw tantrums in the fond hope that they will magically give them the racial superiority that they crave so desperately. The sad irony is that if they were not failures, they would not need to compensate with feelings of superiority. But even if they could satisfy that need, it would not erase the need. They just can't change. They will always be a danger to us."
"Unless we blow them up and make pool toys out of them?" Lady Midnight commented. But she understood what Bumba was saying:
"Criminality is nothing more than a form of mental retardation," her father had said. "Entirely self-inflicted. Your typical criminal has the mentality of a two- or three-year-old child. Children of that age are not rational, so you can't deal with them rationally. Sometimes you have to shock them out of their self-obsession."
"But how do they get that way?" she had asked. "What goes wrong in their lives?"
"Basically," he had responded, "you will find that criminals spend all of their time kissing their own asses, to put it crudely. That self-obsession makes them emotionally weak. They get their feelings hurt too easily and that scares them away from the things that would actually make them tough enough to face life as the rest of us do."
She knew her father was right, but that meant that to some extent she had to agree with Bumba. She was going to have to accept Bumba's plan, though not quite in the way that Bumba intended.
The irony of it all had to make her laugh. As the other four of the special stockholders arrived to participate in the humiliation of the new plastic prisoner, Lady Midnight, usually the victim of such shenanigans, cloth'd each of them in turn and made them her prisoners. She got another thrill when she stripped her prisoners naked: she felt herself coming aroused as she touched Theja Swees big naked breasts and again when she ran her hands over Kate Gowanda's bare thighs. Then, one by one, as they regained consciousness, she turned her prisoners into plastic and deflated them.
The secret penthouse above the corporate offices of The Plastic Heating Company would remain her secret. Indeed, it might even serve her as her own little Fortress of Solitude. Yeah, why should Doc Savage be the only one to enjoy his own superhero castle? She could keep all kinds of good stuff here: it would be just like having her own little Batcave.
So she spent the rest of the day securing the place. She would have to come back some other time to retrieve her prisoners, although she could and would take one with her. She waited until after nightfall and then locked the place up, went to the roof, and with her wings in place, soared silently over Delta City. It wasn't even ten o'clock when she got home. She made sure to call the District Attorney's office and leave a message on the answering machine, saying that she had been on an investigation and had not been able to call in earlier. As she hung up the phone she wondered why she continued to get away with that.
Tomorrow was Saturday, so she could sleep in. That meant that she could play with her special prisoner all night. His plump plastic body would feel so good, she got hot just thinking about it. Oh, was he ever going to squirm and writhe for her! And if he was a good boy, she might even let him get on top of her and be her new Bobo.
As she undressed herself to take her shower she noticed that her panties were damp. She hesitated as she reached for the bouffant shower cap hanging on its lunette on the back of the bathroom door: made of transparent-white plastic on which forest-green and burnished-gold leaf patterns had been printed, it had a satiny sheen that brought to mind what had been planned for her. She imagined being turned into an inflated plastic toy. Then she left her own shower cap on its lunette, put on the black-plastic shower cap that Bumba had brought for her, and wondered what it would have been like to be Bixley's inflatable love slave. As warm water ran over her body she played with that idea and masturbated over it.
She imagined herself turned to plastic and wearing her special plastic raincoat and apron. The auction was being held in Bixley's mansion and she had to watch as other plastic prisoners, in inflated rocking skirts, were put up on the block and sold. She trembled at the thoughts that her own moral code forbade and started coming aroused. The thought of being put on auction to become someone's sex slave made her nipples swell and stiffen and made her clitoris grow and slide forward in its sheath. The taste of forbidden fruit, the world's most powerful aphrodisiac, was getting her hot. She imagined the sensations of being forced into her own transparent-pink plastic rocking skirt and being held helpless as a maid inflated it. She touched her clitoris and nearly climaxed as she imagined the maid, having blown the skirt full, bopping her several times, making her bounce and wobble for the buyers, and then putting her on the block.
As she imagined standing on the block, she rocked to and fro in the shower. She imagined the auctioneer slapping her rocking skirt to make her tip forward and rock to and fro for the buyers. She could almost hear the auctioneer's suggestive remarks on the subject of what the right buyer could do with a helpless superheroine and she felt quivery all over. When the auctioneer held up a knee-length, transparent-white plastic raincape and suggested that it would make a perfect nightie for her, she climaxed long and hard.
Gasping from her exertion, she finished bathing and then got out of the shower to dry off. She shook the water off her shower cap and then dried it as well before hanging it over her own shower cap on its lunette.
She waited until her body had dried completely from her shower and spent the time thinking about what she was about to do. The very idea of it was getting her hot again and she luxuriated in the feeling. Completely naked, she stood over her deflated prisoner and thought of how he would feel when he was fully inflated and held against her body. Soon she was ready, so she went back to her bedroom and got ready.
She put on fresh panties to soak up the wetness that was about to develop in her crotch and then she put on her bathrobe and her new shower cap. In her new black-plastic shower cap and silvery satin bathrobe, she conceived the idea that if she put on her raincoat she would look just like a plastic prisoner. So on a lark she did just that. Transparent-green plastic on which transparent-gray tiger stripes had been printed slid smoothly over silvery satin with a soft swish and warmed instantly at her touch. It actually felt very good, even sexy. Her special prisoner would love it, she was sure. So she sat down on the sofa, draped Bixley across her lap, and began to inflate him.
*****
Mama Grear's Broccoli-Shrimp Stir-Fry
This can be eaten by itself or over rice. Ideally it takes just a little less than half an hour to prepare. To prepare this dish you will need:
1. 1 pound of broccoli crowns
2. 1 half pound of medium shrimp; shelled, deveined, and butterflied
3. 2 tablespoons of olive oil
4. 1 quarter cup of oyster sauce
5. 2 cloves of garlic, minced
6. 2 - 3 tablespoons of minced ginger root
7. White pepper
8. Toasted sesame seeds, for garnish.
To make this dish:
A. Cut the broccoli into florets.
B. Blanch the florets. You can try telling them a ghost story, but it's better to put them into boiling water in a saucepan for 30 seconds. Drain them well and set them aside.
C. If you don't have a wok, heat a medium-sized skillet over high heat and add the oil. Add the shrimp and stir-fry them until they start to turn pink. That should take about 15 seconds. Next add the broccoli and keep stirring, then add the oyster sauce, garlic, ginger, and just enough pepper to satisfy your taste. Keep stirring to mix the ingredients all together.
D. Keep stir-frying, adjusting the heat if necessary to avoid burning the food, until the shrimp are cooked through. That should take two to three minutes. Take care not to overcook the shrimp or the broccoli, lest the shrimp become tough or the broccoli lose all of its crunchiness.
E. Garnish with the toasted sesame seeds and serve.
This recipe makes two servings. Each serving contains: 328 calories; 2,164 milligrams sodium; 124 milligrams cholesterol; 16 grams of fat; 24 grams of carbohydrates; 24 grams of protein; and 2.62 grams of fiber.
*****
Lady Midnight
and
The Aryan Pride Parade
She had decided to watch it after all. It never hurt to keep track of what her people's enemies were up to. So it was that Angela Grier sat in front of her television and watched the Aryan Pride Parade on WACK. The station's two news readers, Bifford "Biff" Boppe and O. J. "No, not that one!" Sampson, kept up a running commentary from a small booth on top of the van that carried the cameras and broadcasting equipment that gave it the ability to serve as a remote broadcast site.
O. J.: OK, so why April 20th?
Biff: Didn't they tell you? It's Adolf Hitler's birthday.
O. J.: This is a celebration of Hitler's birthday!?
Biff: Right.
O. J.: Do any of these people have the faintest notion of what the word 'loser' means?
Biff: Apparently not. Happy birthday, Adolf! In whatever part of Hell you're burning.
O. J.: Man, this really stinks!
Biff: Well that's not a very positive attitude.
O. J.: OK, this positively stinks!
Biff: Let's not find out what you consider a negative attitude.
O. J.: Lordy, nothing stinks the way this thing stinks!!
Biff: We're journalists, O. J. Let's try to be objective about this.
O. J.: OK, OK, it looks like the parade is getting started.
Biff: And here comes our first group, the Army of God's Children's Choir. This is a test, O. J. When I was but a wee lad my mother used to say that if I couldn't say something nice, I shouldn't say anything at all. Let's see if you can keep my mother happy.
Wearing white satin choir robes, a platoon of preteen children marched down the street with some of them pulling a cart that carried their sound equipment, their amplifiers and loudspeakers, and the batteries that ran them. Each child carried a microphone attached to the cart with an electrical cord and as they marched the children sang:
"Jesus loves the little children, but not all children in His sight.
Red and yellow, black and brown; they all make poor Jesus frown.
Jesus only loves the children that are white."
O. J.: (through tightly clenched teeth) They were singing on key.
Biff: Indeed they were. And you have to give them credit for that. If you're going to sell something as vile as racism, you better have a really attractive package to put it in. And speaking of attractive packages, our sponsor, El Bombero, has one he wants to show you.
We see a residential street seen on a rainy day. As our point of view moves along the sidewalk we see a man wearing a transparent-black plastic raincoat waiting at a bus stop.
Announcer: When the world seems cold and dreary and life just makes you weary, a hot bowl of El Bombero's Chili will give you just the pick-me-up you need!
We hear a blast from a tuba and see the man's raincoat puff up like a balloon, then collapse to its normal drape as a broad smile spreads across the man's face. Next we hear a honk from a Sousaphone quartet and see the walls of a nearby house bulge outward and then snap back into shape.
Announcer: Yes, El Bombero selects only the gassiest beans and chilis specially bred to provide the most efficient catalyst known to Science. Mixed in with a hearty meat sauce, El Bombero's Chili provides enough gas in one serving to blow up a bus tire.
Now an entire tuba and Sousaphone ensemble begins to blat away and, as the houses on the street bulge and snap back in rhythm, it segues into an old Mexican folk song "No Tengo Dinero" as a chorus of mariachis begins to sing the El Bombero jingle:
"Beans and chili, a magical treat. They'll gas you up and put you on your feet. If for some chili you've got a burning desire, El Bombero Chili will put out the fire."
Biff: And we're back. Now, wouldn't a big bowl of El Bombero Chili feel good right now? O. J.?
O. J.: Uh, what's up with the elephant?
Biff: Ah, that would be the group from India.
Angela had to look twice to make sure she was seeing correctly. Sure enough, a large elephant was lumbering down the street accompanied by a platoon of men with brown skins almost as dark as hers, men wearing silk pajamas and turbans, men with thick black mustaches, men wielding huge curved swords. In an ornately decorated howdah on the elephant's back a young woman, equally dark-skinned, wearing a silk sari and a dazzling array of jewelry, smiled and waved at the stunned crowd.
She just had time to see the group in front of the Indians, a bunch of neo-Nutsi clowns in phony SS uniforms, so discomfited by the group behind them that they were unable to perform the "I've got a ramrod up my ass" strut, commonly called the goose step, with anything remotely resembling precision. They weren't even in step. The ones at the rear of the formation kept casting worried glances back over their shoulders.
O. J.: But...but...but...but....
Biff: That's right, O. J., except for a few purely Dravidian folk in the southern provinces, almost all of the people of India are Aryan.
O. J.: But...but...but...but....
Biff: You see, it all goes back to the last half of the second millennium before the time of Christ. At that time Aryan people from Central Asia invaded India in waves that brought their language, Sanskrit, and their Vedic culture to the subcontinent.
O. J.: But...but...but...but....
Biff: The Aryans took over and subjected the native Dravidians to a system that they called varna, which means "color"; that is, they established their own version of segregation to keep the white folks separate from the black folks. Well, we can see how well that worked. And now the last tattered remnants of that caste system are dying out, thanks to the work of people like Mohandas Ghandi.
O. J.: But...but...but...but....
Biff: But now the people of India speak languages that evolved from Sanskrit. Those languages are just as Indo-European as are Latin or German, as William Jones figured at the end of the Eighteenth Century, so the people of India are just as Aryan as the white folks in this parade.
O. J.: But...but...didn't...anybody...tell...these...guys...,
Biff: What they were getting into? Oh, I think they know.
That same question had come galloping like Paul Revere across Angela's mind. Now she looked more closely at the image on the television. The Indians were all smiling, but the smiles were more than expressions of happiness. Several of the men, she discerned, were struggling to keep from laughing out loud. She didn't struggle at all: she just fell back in her chair in hysterics.
*****
This story is dedicated to our own Lord and Master, Mr X, a true Man of the Cloth, the Sandman's jolly apprentice, who conducts this website, draws the best Bondage and Discipline cartoons on the Internet, and still has time to go out and cloth a few unwary superheroines. Cee-aitch-cee-ell-three, Man!
*****