Supergirl - Trapped in the Plastic Brothel

by

Tom diCentauri

The Adventures of Supergirl

Faster than a speeding rocket!

More powerful than the atom!

Able to leap the highest mountains with a single bound!

Up on the sky!

Higher than any bird!

Faster than any plane!

It's Supergirl!

Strange refugee from a shattered planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal humans!

She can change the course of drifting continents!

Detonate plutonium in her bare hands!

And, disguised as Linda Lee Danvers, a soft-spoken student at a small Eastern college, she shares her cousin's never-ending commitment:

To seek Truth!

To pursue Justice!

And to promote the American Way!

She floated lazily a mile above the Town of Stanhope, flying in a slow, wide circle and just enjoying a pleasant Saturday. Using her magnifying vision, she gazed down on the town and watched people going about their weekend business, taking pleasure in the observation that all human activities seemed to be proceeding smoothly, that nothing looked like it required the intervention of a super-powered young woman.

Her pleasure evaporated instantly when she heard from behind her an all-too-familiar, all-too-irritating voice say, "Hi there, Sweetie!"

In a fraction of a second she pitched up ninety degrees, executed a half pirouette, and stood on thinnest air with her fists on her hips. She glared at the imp floating nonchalantly in front of her.

"I am not your sweetie," she snarled.

"Oh, pish posh," the little man said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Merely a matter of time, my dear Supergirl, until my charms have worked their way through that invulnerable exterior of yours and melted your heart."

"What charms?" she said with a sneer. "You're nothing but a pest."

"Oh, no, no," he protested. "I'm really quite witty. I'll show you. What do you get when you beat up a goober?"

"Assuming that I would ever do such a thing," she said in a dull voice. She rolled her eyes, sighed, and in a voice lacking all enthusiasm said, "OK, what do I get if I beat up a goober?"

"Assaulted peanut," he chortled and then broke up laughing. "Get it? Assaulted peanut. Ho, that's a killer!"

"Ashoa thagmakuvai (Gods of Krypton, help me)!" she muttered through clenched teeth.

"You know, you're so cute with steam coming out of your ears," he sighed.

"I don't have...," she started to say. Then she heard a soft hiss. Turning her head, she saw a little cloud dissipating. "Stop that!" she demanded.

"Stop what?" he asked innocently.

And just then she discovered a new addition to her superpowers, the ability to rein in a rage that was about to explode with all the force and heat of a supernova. It emerged from her maternal instinct, so in her best mommy voice she said, "Listen. We both know that this is going to happen anyway, so why don't you save us all a lot of wasted effort and say your name backward right now?"

"Say my name backward?" he said.

"Yes," she said sweetly. "Please."

"What is my name," he asked.

Again she tamped down her anger at being taunted. "Mxyzptlk," she prompted.

"It was," he giggled.

"What do you mean 'It was'," she asked in a mix of suspicion and horror.

"I had it changed," he snickered. "Legally."

"Changed?" she said. "To what?"

"Ah, that's for me to know and you to find out," he said with a smirk. "So you want me to say Mxyzptlk backward, do you? OK. Kil'tip-...."

"STOP!" she yelled.

"What? Why?" he said, startled. "Don't you want me to say my name backward?"

"Yes, of course I do," she said. "But I don't want you to feel that I tricked you unfairly. I should trick you fair and square, right?"

"Uh...yeah...right...I think," he said.

"So it's only fair that I tell you," she said, "that your name change is likely not valid in this world."

"But...but...," he stammered.

"However," she continued, smiling a little too sweetly, "if you want to risk spending another ninety days in that boring ol' Fifth Dimension...,"

"Well, I wouldn't call it boring...exactly," he said weakly.

"OK, then repeat after me," she said. "Kil'tip-zey-skim."

"Uh, maybe we shouldn't be too hasty here," he said. "Perhaps I should play safe and get a legal name change in this world. So how do I do that?"

"It's easy," she said. "You find a judge and ask him to change your name." She began a slow pirouette and then paused, staring intently into the distance. "Hmmph!," she snorted. "You would think that in a city the size of Metropolis there would be at least one judge working on Saturday." She resumed her slow scan of the horizon.

"Wait a minute!" Mxyzptlk said suspiciously. "I'll have to tell the judge my new name, won't I? And you'll be listening in to find out what it is. So that's your game!"

"You don't have to do the procedure orally," she said. "You can ask the judge to do it entirely in writing."

"So that you can look over my shoulder with your super-vision?" he said.

"Well, yeah, if you forget to put a lead bubble around the courthouse," she said. Then she pointed. "There! In the Town of Schlepping-on-Fiddlewash. Judge Robert Wilson is working today."

"Unh huh," he said. "And then when I'm done you'll simply go and read my new name out of the public records, right?"

"Wrong," she said. "As a non-resident of the town you will retain possession of the documents."

"OK," he said with a sigh. "Come with me!" And he flew in the direction she had pointed.

She flew beside him and a little above him on his left. As they gained speed she felt the wind flutter her cape, skirt, and hair and caress her body. She luxuriated in the sensations, but denied herself the erotic thrill that she normally derived from flying. She was on a business flight and with an annoying dwarf at that.

The dwarf himself flew in a reclining position, as if riding in an invisible chair. He had his left leg crossed over his right knee and his hands clasped on the back of his neck, presenting the very picture of relaxed ease. The wind didn't seem to touch him at all: the little bowler hat perched on top of his mostly bald head did not so much as tremble and the skirt of his butterscotch-colored coat draped limply over his legs and hung motionless.

They flew like that for the several minutes that it took them to cross a little over fifty miles. Then Mxyzptlk tilted down and descended at a seventy degree angle. Supergirl pitched down to follow as he led her toward the top of a hill overlooking the Town of Schlepping-on-Fiddlewash. As she approached the ground, she executed a forward somersault and exerted her thrust to land lightly on her feet. She turned to face her tormentor, who, in his usual manner, floated several feet above the ground.

"Turn and face that direction," he told her as he pointed, "and hold your arms out straight!"

She obeyed and immediately felt something close on her wrists, ankles, and neck. Because they had been produced by magic, she knew, she would be unable to break these bonds: she was effectively trapped.

"Now, Miss Archimedes," he said to her. "Normally I would rely on the power of my magic to hold you fast. But I don't want to leave anything to chance, so I have connected your bonds to a kind of lever. It won't move the Earth, but it will move a certain town. If you move so much as a hair's-breadth, the Town of Schlepping-on-Fiddlewash will be flung into the air and will come down somewhere in Metropolis. I would have aimed for Stanhope, but I thought that the flying town would make a nice gift for someone else we both know and love. I'll come back to release you when I have finished my business. Until then, ta!" And he flew down into the town.

Schlepping-on-Fiddlewash was a fairly typical New England town, so Mxyzptlk had no trouble finding the courthouse: it faced the town square. He floated into the building, landed in a hallway, and walked through the open door of Judge Robert Jernneve Wilson's courtroom.

Judge Wilson was an older man, with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching Van Dyke beard. Wearing his judge's black robe, he was sitting at the courtroom's judge's bench and writing on a document. He looked up as Mxyzptlk came into the courtroom.

"Uh, good morning, Judge Wilson," Mxyzptlk said, "uh, your honor."

"Good morning," Judge Wilson replied. "Do you need help with some legal matter?"

"Um, yes," Mxyzptlk said tentatively. "I need to have my name change validated...legally." Seeing the judge's quizzical look, he added, "I had my name changed in my world, but I've been told that it's not valid in this world. So, I need to have it, uh, validated."

"Ah, yes," Judge Wilson said. "Well, I can do that for you. It won't take but a few minutes of our time."

"Uh, there is just one other thing I should mention," Mxyzptlk said. "This new name cannot be pronounced by anyone. It's..., uh..., it's a kind of a religious thing, you see."

"Yes, yes, of course," Judge Wilson said. "We can do this without saying the new name out loud. I will have to write it on the Oath of Affirmation, but when you come to that point when reciting the Oath you simply say 'the name written here' and that will be sufficient for the laws of this world." He pulled a form from a folder, then handed Mxyzptlk a small scrap of paper and a pen. "I need you to write your old name, your place of residence, and your new name on this."

Mxyzptlk wrote his name (pronounced Miks-yez-PITTLE-ik), his address in the Realm of Zrfff (pronounced zur-fa-FOOF), and his new name Bzltwp (pronounced.... Oh, but we're not supposed to pronounce it, are we?), then handed the pen and paper back to Judge Wilson. Referring to the paper, Judge Wilson filled in the information on the form he had pulled out, handed the paper back to Mxyzptlk, then wrote some more on the form, finally signing it with a flourish.

"Read this to me," he said as he handed the form to Mxyzptlk, "and remember that when you get to your new name you may say 'the name written here'."

Mxyzptlk looked the form over, examined it carefully, and then began to read. "I, Mxyzptlk, a resident of the Fifth Dimension,...," he read. On and on he read the document, ending with, "...and by the authority of the Supreme Justice, Grand Flopi'oot LeZibskiy, I hereby accept this ruling."

The air around him began to glitter and to sparkle and a luminous silvery fog began to envelope him. Judge Wilson stared, not in astonishment, but in expectation. The glitter danced and the sparkles jittered within the pulsating fog as it thickened.

"No!" Mxyzptlk cried. "I didn't say my name backward! This can't be happening! I didn't say my name...." Then he noticed the judge grinning as he took off his wig and false beard. "Oh, fznrk!" he yelled and then he vanished with a soft pop.

Chuckling, Superman finished removing his disguise. He returned the judge's robe to the closet in the judge's chambers and cleaned up the judge's bench. Then he left, locking up the courthouse behind him. Soon he was floating high above Schlepping-on-Fiddlewash, to be joined only a moment later by Supergirl, who had been freed from her bonds the instant Mxyzptlk left this universe.

"That was almost too easy," Superman said to Supergirl.

"Yeah, well I thought we might have an advantage we don't normally get with him," she said. "When he told me he had changed his name, I remembered how hard it was for me to get used to being called Linda when I first got here. Fortunately people thought I was just being absent-minded. I figured that he would have the same difficulty and would be slow to recognize his new name backward."

"So now he will change his name back and we'll be back to the same old game," he said.

"It's still better than playing Rumpelstiltskin with him every time he shows up," she said. "I think we got lucky this time. Especially in your flying over Metropolis so that I could send you a message with my heat vision."

"Now do you understand why I insisted that you learn Morse Code?" he said.

"Yes," she said. "It really is useful. Thank you for helping me out with this."

"You're welcome," he said. "But now there's something that you may be able to help me with."

Commercial Break #1

We see a half dozen or so teen-aged girls with their camp counselor huddled in a ramshackle cabin in a meadow in a forest on a gray day with rain falling heavily. They are all wearing T-shirts with the words "Camp Saka-Gah-Weah" printed on them. The girls look up in fear as they hear wood creaking. "We'll be crushed if we stay here," one girl says.

"But that rain is freezing and our camp is two miles away," the counselor says.

Lightning flashes and one girl points at the sky and cries out, "Look! We're saved!"

We see Supergirl land in front of the cabin door. She is holding her cape as a bag and she lays it on the table in the middle of the cabin. Finding an old gas lantern, she uses her heat vision to make its mantle glow while she opens her cape to reveal a pile of plump plastic packages in various colors.

At Supergirl's invitation, the girls take the packages, open them, and take out what turn out to be Stormette™ plastic raincoats. The raincoats, their transparent plastic displaying a rainbow of tints, are in a duster style with pixie style hoods. Another groan from the ceiling inspires the girls to put on the raincoats, put up the hoods, and head out of the cabin. We hear the rain patting on the plastic become a soft crackle as the whole group goes out into the open.

When the girls have left, Supergirl spins herself rapidly to shake the water off herself, shakes out her cape and puts it on, then she takes the last raincoat and puts it on. We see that it is made of clear, untinted plastic, which lets the bright colors of her costume show through, and that it has an ankle-length full skirt. She pulls up the pixie style hood and leaves the cabin to join her friends. A moment later we hear a crash as the old cabin collapses.

"You saved us, Supergirl!" the girls cry out.

"Well, I couldn't have done it by myself" Supergirl says as she strokes the plastic of her own raincoat, "Fortunately I was able to get help from the Stormette™ Company. Now you girls can get back to your camp warm and dry."

"These raincoats are so light," the counselor comments, "that we could have brought them with us without any inconvenience."

"There's something to remember for the future," Supergirl says as she and the girls walk down the trail away from the cabin.

We hear the announcer say, sotto voce, over that scene, "Stormette™ plastic raincoats, available in Vinylhaven stores in Metropolis and throughout the Northeast."

It was purely a matter of dumb luck that the Metropolis Police Department became aware of the problem infesting the city's lower wards and even then no one had a clue as to how long the problem had been festering. Some would even say there was no problem, thereby expressing the sad fact that, except for the usual do-gooder church groups, nobody cared about the city's prostitutes; well, the usual church groups and a bizarre alien with a remarkable commitment to Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

A girl, a runaway barely out of her teens, had been picked up off the streets by a prostitute, who had taken her in until the girl came to her senses and went back to the far-rural Podunk whence she came. Until that revelation dawned, the prostitute had kept the girl as invisible as possible: even the woman's pimp (especially the woman's pimp) did not know about her. Then one day the prostitute had gone to an appointment and had not returned. The girl had panicked and, not knowing what else to do, had contacted the police. The police had put the grateful girl onto a train back to her hometown, but not before finding out all that she knew about the goings on in Metropolis' red-light district.

"Dozens of women missing...just vanished into thin air," Inspector Henderson had said some days later.

"That we know of," Superman had added.

"That we know of," Inspector Henderson had grumbled. "No bodies, no complaints, except for the girl's, not so much as a blood stain. I hate missing persons cases, especially when I have reason to suspect foul play."

"What bothers me," Superman had said, "is that I haven't heard anything from any of those women."

"And you can be flying over the Battery and still hear the muffled scream of a woman being mugged at the north end of Metropolis Island. Do you suspect that we're looking for Silver Blaze?"

"The dog that didn't bark in the night," Superman had mused. "The silence is telling us something, but what?"

"Well, if we can't get Sherlock Holmes," Inspector Henderson had said, "then perhaps your buddy Batman might be willing to help? No offense meant."

"None taken," Superman had replied. "I agree that we need a new perspective on this case and I know just whose we need."

And so Supergirl had been called into the case. Inspector Henderson and Superman had acquainted her with the facts already known, including Clark Kent's discovery, during his own investigation on behalf of the Daily Planet, that several of the city's nastiest pimps had also gone missing. Then they had taken her to examine the belongs of almost two dozen of the missing women, the belongings of the other women having been discarded or donated to charity by the women's landlords before the police could obtain them.

"You see?" Inspector Henderson had said as they had returned to his office. "All of their clothing, all of their jewelry, their personal items, even cash - still there. There's nothing missing."

"Except," Supergirl had said, "for their raincoats and their shower caps."

Inspector Henderson had looked at her in astonishment and then looked to Superman.

"Fresh perspective," Superman had said.

"But does it tell us anything?" Inspector Henderson had asked.

"Anything out of the ordinary is a clue," Supergirl had said. "It's up to us to decipher it. So I think I need to go looking for a Rosetta Stone."

"Yeah, well, give Miss Stone my regards when you find her," Inspector Henderson had said.

Superman and Supergirl had looked at him in amazement and then had broken up laughing when he merely grinned at them.

(1964 Jul 13, Mon - Jul 17, Fri)

She didn't want to compomise her secret identity as Linda Danvers, so she put on a red wig and glasses with blue frames and thpoke with a thlight lithp. She introduced herself as Irene Klundameyer. In began to rain on that Monday when she began her investigation, so she went to the nearest Vinylhaven store and bought herself a new transparent-blue plastic raincoat, one with a pixie-style hood and a full, ankle-length skirt. Wrapped in silk-soft, skin-smooth plastic, she went to the Sisters of Rahav Free Clinic on the ground floor of the Lawn-Guyland Building.

Named for the righteous harlot who protected two Israelite spies in the story of the fall of Jericho (Book of Joshua, Chapter 2), the clinic provided medical care to the prostitutes of Metropolis. The runaway girl had told the police that the woman she was staying with had gone there before she disappeared. Since the clinic was less than two blocks from the woman's apartment and the woman had gone in the middle of the day, "Irene" figured that it would be a good place to begin her search. She figured all the more so because the owners of the building had used what seemed to her like an inordinate amount of lead-based paint on the place.

Once she entered the clinic she approached the receptionist, a terribly thin woman named Anna Reksic, introduced herself, and explained the reason for her visit.

"I've been having problemth... uh, down there," she said. "Tho I need an egtham."

The receptionist gave her a form to fill out and when Irene returned the completed form to her, she pointed to a row of chairs and asked to take a seat and wait to be called.

As she waited, Irene took the opportunity to explore the clinic with her supersenses. She didn't want to draw attention to herself, so she didn't look around much. It wouldn't have gained her anything in any case: in the directions that she could look in without being obvious some walls and the floor remained stubbornly opaque to her x-ray vision. Her supersensitive nose, vastly more sensitive than any dog's, picked up the medical smells that would be expected of a clinic; in particular, one that treated sexual diseases. Her superhearing picked up conversations that confirmed that impression: all that she heard were conversations involving sexually transmitted diseases and involving the cuts, abrasions, and bruises inflicted by customers or pimps. Since she was facing more or less in the right direction, she used her x-ray vision and shifted into superspeed mode to read the clinic's files, which, oddly enough, were not lead-protected. She noticed that the records for all of the disappeared women and dozens more bore a PL next to the woman's name. She came out of her fugue just in time to respond to the nurse who was calling her name and beckoning to her.

She followed the nurse down a corridor to an examination room in the rear of the building. She felt a twinge of anxiety when she saw a lead-lined cabinet on the counter by the sink, but then she saw an x-ray machine standing against the wall and the anxiety faded.

In response to the nurse's request that she take off all of her clothes and lie down on the examining table, she put her purse on the counter, took off her raincoat, folded it up, and put it next to her purse. Then she took off her shoes and bobby socks and set them next to the purse. Then she undressed herself. Having anticipated this procedure, she had removed her Supergirl costume earlier and put in the bottom of her purse. When she was completely naked, she hoisted herself up onto the leather-covered cushion of the examining table and lay on her back.

After making sure that she was comfortable, the nurse went behind her. She heard a faint click and then a bolt of intense pain shot through her and made her gasp. Abruptly the world changed. The soundscape went dull, as if she had gone partly deaf (and in a way she had). The grand jostling crowd of smells that filled her nose simply vanished. Her skin stung all over and she trembled from the sensation of deep cold penetrating her to her core. Though her muscles were beginning to cramp, she managed to roll over to look behind her. She saw the cabinet door swung open and inside the cabinet lay a brick glowing bright green. She tried to blast the brick with her heat vision, to make it melt and thus render it harmless, but her superpower nimbus had already shriveled back into the aetherial realm whence it came.

"Please, don't...," she whispered.

The nurse simply took two thick, soft cords from the cabinet and laid them on the examining table. She took Irene's glasses off, then examined her hair and pulled off her wig. She tossed the glasses and the wig onto Irene's clothing and pushed Supergirl back down onto the examining table.

"I'm not going to kill you," the nurse said. "I'm merely going to enslave you."

She used one cord to tie Supergirl's wrists together in front of her. Then she sat Supergirl up facing away from her, put the other cord around her right elbow, drew it behind her back and around her left elbow before cinching the cord tight and tying it, leaving Supergirl's hands resting on her belly. Then she went to the cabinet, took out a parcel of soft, green plastic, and closed the cabinet's door.

The cessation of pain shocked Supergirl almost as much as its onset had done. She felt woozy and wobbled on the edge of the table. She waited, but her superpowers did not return. The nurse showed her why her powers remained absent when she shook out the plastic parcel in her hand: it was a wide, ankle-length serving apron made of transparent-green plastic with a two-inch wide ruffle around the skirt and an inch-wide doubled-plastic tie, both ruffle and tie made of opaque metallic-green plastic that emitted a faint green glow. The kryptonite dust embedded in the plastic would not kill her, but it would keep her weak and helpless.

As if to demonstrate that fact, the nurse laid the apron on the examining table and pulled Supergirl off the table into a standing position. "Lift your hands," she said as she turned partly away from Supergirl and reached behind her as if to pick something up off the counter. Then abruptly she jerked back around and slammed her fist into Supergirl's belly, doubling the hapless superheroine over. "Yes, perfect," the nurse said as she straightened her gasping prisoner back up and turned her to face away from her. "Still soft and helpless, just the way we want you!" She tied the apron on Supergirl and put Irene/Supergirl's belongings into a large brown paper grocery bag.

Bag in hand, the nurse went to a supply cabinet standing against the examination room's back wall. She reached up and behind the cabinet on its left side and with a click the cabinet swung away from the wall to reveal an opening and, beyond it, a well-lighted flight of stairs leading down.

"Let's go!" the nurse commanded.

Supergirl went to the opening, stepped through it, and descended the stairs, with the nurse right behind her. At the bottom of the stairs they came to a door with a combination lock. Supergirl was not reassured by the observation that the nurse made no effort to hide the combination from her as she turned the dial.

After opening the door, the nurse pushed Supergirl into what appeared to be a large basement of the Lawn-Guyland Building. It was hard to tell how large the space was because it was filled, at least as far as Supergirl could see, with banks of electronic equipment. The nurse prodded her into walking down an aisle between high racks holding circuits that appeared to be made of things resembling minuscule flower bulbs and vines instead of vacuum tubes and wires. Here and there she saw, under glass, whole landscapes of tiny colored-glass wedges and thread-thin beams of light weaving intricate patterns among and through them. At the end of the aisle the nurse pushed her to the right, into an aisle that opened onto a wide, brightly-lit room.

Pushed to her left, Supergirl saw an aluminum-framed, glass-walled booth set against one wall of the room. The nurse pushed her into it, sat her down on the secretary's chair inside, and closed the door. She set the bag down by the booth and left, going back the way she had come. Supergirl noticed immediately that the booth's door could only be opened from the outside.

At first Supergirl felt anxious that she might suffocate if she were left in the booth long enough, but then she felt air blowing onto her back from a vent in the wall above her. With that worry eliminated, she took stock of her situation. She estimated that the distance from the wall behind her to the opposite wall to be something less than one hundred feet. A low dais jutted from the base of that far wall and a puffy armchair made of opaque-black plastic sat fully inflated on it. To her right Supergirl saw the banks of electronic equipment looking like the stacks of some bizarre futuristic library. In the wall to her left she saw the sliding doors of an elevator. And in the middle of the room stood an object that mesmerized her.

Three shiny-silver metal pylons rose from the floor through the rim of a foot-thick glass plate, rose through a second such plate seven feet above the first, and then merged with an array of conduits that ran across the ceiling to the equipment banks on her right. Thin gold and silver traceries seemed to weave patterns within the glass plates, but she couldn't see them clearly enough to be sure. What was obviously a control console grew out of the nearest pylon.

She didn't have any idea of what the thing was or what it would do. She certainly did not want to find out the unfortunate way, as she was clearly intended to do. It was time for her to escape.

It's a funny thing about Earth people: they forget that, even without their superpowers, Kryptonese people are still amazingly strong, tough, and fast. All Supergirl had to do was lean back in the chair, lift her feet, and give the glass panel in the booth's door a sharp kick to shatter it. She could use the jagged edges of the broken glass to cut the cord that bound her wrists. Putting her hands behind her to untie the apron would also allow the cord around her arms to slide off. Thus freed, she could put the apron in one corner of the room, then she could go to the opposite corner to regain her superpowers and bust out of this trap. Assuming, of course, that she couldn't simply use the elevator.

Yes, it was a good plan. An elegant plan. Supergirl felt quite pleased with herself for devising it. She could see herself kicking out that glass panel and then freeing herself. Yes, the more she thought about her plan, the more she liked it. All she had to do was lean back in her chair.... Yes, this was a great plan. She would have to make sure to remember every detail so that she could give the reporters at the Daily Planet the full story in all of its brilliant glory. All she had to do was to lean back in her chair....

She was distracted from her reverie by the sound of the elevator doors opening. She saw three women step out of the elevator and come to her. One was the nurse who had captured her: she was carrying a canvas laundry bag. Anna Reksic came with her carrying a dull-gray metal box. It was the third woman, the leader of the group, who drew most of Supergirl's attention.

She was a plump woman of medium height, perhaps three or four inches taller than Supergirl herself, with light-brown, shoulder-length hair. Under arched eyebrows her hazel eyes were narrowed in contemplation of her prisoner. Her sensuous lips curved in a way that suggested that she might break out in a sneer at any moment. She was wearing a silvery satin bathrobe and, over it, an ankle-length full apron made of transparent-red plastic. The two-inch wide ruffle that ran around the apron's wide skirt and its yoke and the apron's inch-wide doubled-plastic tie were made of opaque-red plastic. The skin-smooth plastic was so soft that the apron swirled lightly around the woman's legs as she walked, giving off only a faint swishing. The plastic sheen suggested warmth as if the apron were radiating fever heat.

"OK," the woman said as she stood in front of the booth and looked Supergirl over, "let's see how well the zombie gas worked on her." She nodded to the nurse, who opened the booth's door.

"Come!" the woman said to Supergirl. "Kneel before me!"

Supergirl stood up. Zombie gas, she thought with an inner sneer, indeed! However, as long as she was helpless it would be to her eventual advantage, she knew, to let her captors believe that they had her under their control. She stepped out of the booth and approached the woman, then bent over as if bowing to her, grabbed the plastic of her own apron and lifted it up so that she wouldn't kneel on it and possibly tear it, and then knelt down.

The woman took a step toward her. "Tell me truly. Do you want to kiss my apron?"

Supergirl leaned back and shook her head. "No," she said without thinking. She was appalled at her error: now the women would know that their so-called zombie gas had not worked on her.

The woman stepped even closer to her. "Kiss my apron!" she commanded.

To her horror, Supergirl immediately leaned forward and pressed her lips against the soft, smooth plastic at the top of the apron's skirt, feeling the woman's warmth seeping through it.

The woman put her left hand on the back of Supergirl's head and pushed her belly forward to push Supergirl's face into the plastic. "You enjoy this," the woman said, not as a command but as a matter of fact. "You enjoy touching and kissing my personal plastic!"

Supergirl felt her horror and discomfort dissolve into sheer, unmitigated pleasure. She felt that she just could not get enough of the woman's apron. In fact, she knew that when she escaped she would take it with her. Later, in her little Fortress of Solitude in Stanhope College's abandoned steam plant, she would wear it on her naked body and she would kneel, draping the apron's skirt over a large beach ball as she did so, and kiss it until she climaxed.

"That's enough for now," the woman said. "Get up!"

Reluctantly Supergirl broke off the kiss and stood up. She fought the urge to lean forward and kiss the apron's bib between the woman's breasts.

"Now," the woman said as she gazed deep into Supergirl's eyes, "I am Balloonda, your mistress. And you are my prisoner and my slave. You will do only what is necessary to carry out my commands and to fulfill my wishes and you will have fun doing it." It was not a command: it was stated as a simple matter of fact. She put her left hand on Supergirl's right breast. "In fact, you have already enjoyed kissing my apron. You have become quite fond of it. It's so pretty and sexy. You want to put it on your naked body and masturbate with it. And being so close to it right now is getting you hot!"

Supergirl felt a prickling in her nipples and aureoles as they began to swell and stiffen. She felt her clitoris swell and slide forward in its sheath. Her heart began to beat faster and she began to breathe heavily. The sight of shiny red plastic right in front of her made sexual heat blossom within her. She wanted nothing more than to take Balloonda in an embrace, feel her plastic warm on her skin, and rub against her apron until she climaxed.

Balloonda lightly pinched Supergirl's right nipple between her thumb and forefinger and marveled at how hard it had become. "But you must wait," she said. "You can play with my apron later. Right now we have something more important to do." She began to untie the cord that bound Supergirl's wrists.

<<OK, now I can escape>>, Supergirl thought. <<They still haven't remembered that even without my superpowers I'm still faster than a striking snake, more powerful than a forklift, and able to leap a football field in a single bound.>> Again, her plan was perfect. She would snatch the lead box from Anna, set it on the floor, and then use her superior speed and strength to herd the women away from it and into a corner, where she would tie them up. She would take Balloonda's apron then, redress herself as Irene Klundameyer, and take the elevator out. The police would raid the place in less than half an hour and she could retrieve the kryptonite-laced apron so that she could use it to weaken herself when she played with Balloonda's apron. She went over the plan again and again in her mind as Balloonda removed the cord that went around her arms and behind her back and then took off her green plastic apron to leave her standing naked.

"Energize the plastifier!" Balloonda commanded and Anna went to the device standing in the middle of the room. She set the lead box on the floor and began to carry out a procedure of flipping switches, consulting dials, twisting knobs, pausing, flipping more switches,....

"Let's see what we have here," Balloonda said as she looked into the canvas bag, which the nurse held open for her. She reached in and brought out a Pert and Pretty™ Supergirl shower cap. A transparent-blue plastic film formed into a beret-style shower cap by a blue rubber headband, it had small red-and-yellow copies of Supergirl's ess-on-a-shield emblem printed on it in a tiara-like swirl. It hung limply in Balloonda's hand as she held it out to Supergirl. "Put this on!" she said.

Supergirl took the proffered shower cap and with feminine grace tucked her hair into it and pulled the headband into position across her forehead. She gave her head a slight shake to toss her hair back into its proper setting inside the blue plastic bag that enveloped the top and back of her head like a halo.

"Go stand on the middle of the plastifier!" Balloonda said. She pointed to the glass slab on the floor. What looked like butterflies made of pure light seemed to flitter about within the glass.

Supergirl went to the machine, stepped onto the glass slab, and stood herself on its center. She gazed at her bare feet and at the luminous phantoms swirling beneath them. She felt a tingle/prickle all over her skin, as if she were being exposed to red kryptonite, but instead of flashing through her in heartbeat this sensation persisted.

"Look at me!" Balloonda said. She stood in front of the machine and waited until Supergirl complied. With her prisoner gazing at her with a kind of bemused expression on her face, Balloonda began stroking and caressing her apron. "You want to play with this," she said. "You can feel it getting you hot again. You can almost feel it touching your naked body."

Supergirl felt her nipples swell and stiffen anew. Her clitoris swelled and slid forward in its sheath until it protruded a full inch from the top of her vulva. Her heart beat faster and her breathing deepened, her breath coming and going in quivery little gasps. Sexual heat made her feel especially warm inside and the pressure of her lust rose in response to Balloonda's comments and suggestive movements. She reached the verge of climax and just before crossing it she drew in a deep breath, in response to Balloonda's command, and puffed out her belly.

"Now!" Balloonda said.

Anna pressed a button on her console and a loud whump echoed off the room's walls as the machine went abruptly dark.

Supergirl felt something jolt her from within, much like the time she had swallowed a prankster's M-80 to prevent its explosion from startling a team of horses drawing a wagon full of small children. At the same time she became aware of a fog that she had not noticed before lifting from her mind. She regained control of her will: she knew that if she intended an act now, she would actually carry it out. It was time for her to free herself. She felt strange going into action without her red-caped blue minidress, but she figured that a Supergirl shower cap would do for the moment. She had to separate Anna from the lead box first, so she started to turn....

Strong hands grabbed her arms and held her while others pulled her hands behind her back and tied her wrists with a silky soft cord. Then the women carried her out onto the floor and set her feet in the middle of a pile of shiny, opaque-red plastic that Balloonda had taken from the canvas bag. As one woman held her feet, another pulled the plastic up over her legs, pulling an elastic band up around her waist. Supergirl looked down and saw that she was now wearing a rather loose red plastic skirt and she could feel her feet resting on a kind of rubbery mound.

Balloonda knelt before her and she noticed that there was a yellow and black-outlined ess-on-a-shield, like the one on her cape, near the top of the skirt. A short, translucent-white plastic tube protruded from its center: Balloonda took the tube in her lips and blew.

At first nothing seemed to be happening. Then Supergirl felt soft, smooth plastic starting to press against her legs and buttocks. She looked down and saw the shiny red plastic beginning to bulge slightly. It became clear to her that the skirt was a double-walled construction, meant to trap her legs when it was inflated. She felt the inner plastic slide between her legs and into her crotch, pressing against her extended clitoris. Then Balloonda had the skirt blown full and firm. Supergirl struggled to keep her balance.

Balloonda stood up, confronted Supergirl, and gloated. "Now, at last, Supergirl, you are my plastic prisoner!"

Supergirl thought that the reference to her as plastic was strange, but soon found out what her captress meant. Balloonda punched her in the belly and she tipped over backward. But instead of falling onto the floor, Supergirl felt the skirt's plastic press against her buttocks and the backs of her legs and throw her back upright.

Balloonda punched her again and again she bounced smartly upright as if eager to be punched yet again. For a full three-minute round Balloonda punched Supergirl as her henchwomen cheered her on and jeered at Supergirl. Though she felt the impacts jolting her, the punches didn't actually hurt. It became clear to Supergirl that these women had turned her into a living inflated plastic doll. And the inflated skirt had turned her into a roly-poly punching bag for Balloonda to play with.

As she bounced and wobbled she recalled an odd datum that had come up in the investigation of the vanished women. One person interviewed by the police had talked to one of the pimps just before he disappeared. The pimp had made a disparaging remark about someone he called "the rubber witch". Familiar with the fact that poorly educated people often confused rubber with plastic, she wondered if she was now looking at the object of the man's comment.

"Don't be afraid," Balloonda cackled. "You won't pop. Your plastic is almost as indestructible as you were...yesterday. You're going to be my soft, inflated plastic prisoner forever!"

Bobbing and weaving, Supergirl tried to evade Balloonda's punches, but with little success. Balloonda, for her part, laughed with delight at her new toy. Again and again Supergirl bounced lightly off her fists, tipped backward almost to the floor, and then came back up at her as if begging to be punched again.

As each punch jolted her Supergirl felt the plastic of the rocking skirt press against her extended clitoris and rub it. That, combined with her residual lust for Balloonda's apron, was arousing her yet again, filling her with sexual warmth, though not enough to bring her to climax. Nonetheless, she still felt a twinge of disappointment when Balloonda stopped punching her.

Balloonda told her henchwomen to go get the car ready and when they left she turned Supergirl to face the inflated chair. She took a dish towel from the canvas bag and tossed it onto the chair. Then she took off her apron, her bathrobe dress, and her damp panties. Completely naked, she sat down on the dish towel and sprawled in the chair.

Balloonda rocked and bounced lightly in the inflated chair and gazed up at Supergirl in wonder. "I enjoy plastifying women," she said. "Turning them into helpless inflatable toys and putting them at my mercy turns me on. But making you my plastic prisoner has got me totally hot! So if you'll excuse me,...."

She put her left hand on her breasts and Supergirl became aware of her own swollen nipples. Spreading her legs, Balloonda put her right hand into her crotch and began rubbing her labia. Soon Supergirl saw her clitoris slide out of her vulva by the merest fraction of an inch. But it was enough. She rubbed the tip of her clitoris with the forefinger of her right hand, caressed her breasts with her left hand, and then went all dreamy eyed and stared up at Supergirl.

"Oh, Supergirl," she moaned. "You are now my plastic prisoner forever!"

"Oh, Supergirl," she panted. "You are my big bouncy plastic punching bag!"

"Oh, Supergirl," she cried out, half sobbing. "You are my weak and helpless blow-up slave girl! You are completely at my mercy!"

She shuddered. To Supergirl it looked as if she was receiving an intense electric shock. She was uttering quavery little squeals as her middle finger ran to and fro over her clitoris. She writhed in the chair and made it bounce slightly from side to side. Then she let out a series of increasingly desperate tremulous ohs and grimaced as if in pain. Finally she went limp. "Oh, Supergirl!" she sighed.

Her eyes came back into focus and, as she sat panting, she looked up at Supergirl and said quietly, "My plastic prisoner at last!"

She rested for a time and then got up, cleaned up her mess, and then put her clothes back on. "Are you starting to get the picture?" she asked Supergirl.

Supergirl nodded. She struggled, trying to untie her bonds, but it was no use.

"Then it's time to acquaint you with the rest of the picture, my dear," Balloonda said. She summoned her henchwomen and allowed each of them to go a round with Supergirl.

When they were done, they revealed which of them had won a lottery. Balloonda handed the woman a straw that had a flange around its middle. The woman took up a position behind Supergirl.

"You may let the air out of her now!" Balloonda said.

Supergirl struggled, but in vain. The woman slid the flanged straw into the valve in her neck and she felt air rush out of her in a long exhalation. She felt the air blow out the side of her neck and began to feel sleepy, then, as darkness fell, she slumped over in the woman's arms and lost consciousness.

Commercial Break #2

Inside the Alpha Lambda sorority house on the campus of Stanhope College we see that preparations have been made for a party. The women, including Linda Danvers, are standing by in their formal dresses and watching tall, blond Fleta Veltergeist as she hangs up the telephone.

"That was the servers," Fleta says. "Their car broke down in Quodnabekett, so they can't make it in time. We'll have to serve our guests ourselves."

"But vot if dere are spills?" red-haired Bente Halvorssen asks. "Our dresses vill be ruined!"

"We will just have to be especially careful," Fleta says.

We see Linda in the background sneaking out of the room. We cut to a view in front of the Stanhope Vinylhaven store and see Supergirl land on the sidewalk and run into the store through its revolving door. A few seconds later we see her run back out of the store with a thick package tucked under one arm and leap into the sky.

Back in the Alpha Lambda house we see the women gathered around Supergirl as she opens the package on a table to reveal a selection of Pert and Pretty™ plastic aprons.

"These will solve your problem," Supergirl says, "and they look good too."

Fleta selects an apron in the Autumn Leaves style (soft, smooth, clear plastic with images of red, yellow, and orange leaves printed on it) and puts it on. It has a wide bib, which Fleta's large breasts press outward, with an inch-wide ruffle on the yoke. It's skirt hangs down to the hem of Fleta's dress and wraps almost completely around Fleta. She wraps the extra-long ties around her waist and ties them in a neat bow in front of her. Then she slips a dish towel into the tie on her right side.

"This will protect my dress from almost any spill I can imagine," Fleta says.

"And if you do spill something on it," Supergirl says, "the plastic simply wipes clean with a damp sponge."

"Oh, they're so pretty!" Sondra Minderflyss says as she selects one in the Tokyo Spring style. The smooth, pale-transparent-pink plastic drapes limply in her hand as she picks it up and puts it on, revealing the clusters of pink and white cherry blossoms printed on the plastic with thin brown lines suggestive of branches and twigs looping within each cluster.

"Well, that solves that problem," Supergirl says. "I hope your party's a success!" She turns to leave.

"It will be, thanks to you," Fleta says.

"And thanks to Pert and Pretty™," Sondra adds.

The other women thank Supergirl as she hurries out of the room and then they select their own aprons. We see a variety of styles, several in various transparent colors, none repeated.

Linda Danvers comes into the room carrying a stack of linen napkins and brings them to Fleta. "I thought we might need these," she says as she sets them on the table next to the package of aprons.

"Yes, we might at that," Fleta says. "Thank you." She picks up an apron made of transparent-blue plastic and holds it up as if to put the yoke over Linda's head. We see that the apron has an opaque-yellow tie and the red-and-yellow ess-on-a-shield emblem printed on the bib. Linda looks worried, but Fleta pulls the apron away and sets it on the table. "Nah," Fleta says. "Not even close!"

Linda selects her own apron, the Niobrara Hoe-down style (red gingham-style checked pattern printed on transparent-white plastic). As she puts it on she looks into the camera, smiles, and winks. Then she turns and goes to join the other women as they greet their guests.

We hear the announcer say, sotto voce, over that scene, "Pert and Pretty™ plastic aprons are available at Vinylhaven stores in Metropolis and throughout the Northeast."

Darkness lightened to a gray haze. She felt someone's lips, soft and warm, on the left side of her neck about an inch below and behind her ear and she could feel herself inhaling warm air. Whoever was holding her and kissing her neck would inhale and then Supergirl would feel as if she were inhaling. She heard a slightly echoing blowing sound, like the sound of a beach ball being inflated and understood that she was hearing the sound of herself being blown up. As she was blown full, as her plastic skin came taut, the world came back into focus and her thoughts clarified as one last breath was puffed into her.

She saw that she was standing naked in a luxurious bedroom, standing at the foot of a plush double bed. She felt that she was being held against someone who had a hand on her right shoulder and an arm around her waist. With a sigh of satisfaction that someone released her and she turned around to see that she was confronting Balloonda, who was wearing only a black satin camisole and matching half slip.

"Now, Supergirl," Balloonda gloated, "you are my own personal toy!" She pointed to the bed and said, "Put on your raincoat!"

Supergirl saw the transparent-blue plastic raincoat that she had bought for her Irene Klundameyer role lying on the bed. She picked it up and put it on, luxuriating in the sensations of the limp-soft, skin-smooth plastic touching and caressing her naked body and warming instantly at her touch. She felt the sensation of her nipples swelling and stiffening as the plastic slid over her breasts. She brought the raincoat's rubbery magnetic patches together to close the placket down the front and then tied the sash-style belt in a loose bow. Not having been told what to do with the hood, she left it draped across her back.

"Perfect!" Balloonda enthused. "You're just so very pretty in plastic!" She then went to an inflated chair made of opaque-red plastic sitting by the left side of the bed. On the chair, Supergirl saw, Balloonda's own plastic lay waiting.

First Balloonda picked up and put on an opaque-white plastic wimple, reaching behind her head to align the magnetic patches that held it closed. Then she put on a parody of a nun's habit, one made of limp, skin-smooth transparent-black plastic. Finally she took a soft silk cord that had a loop at one end and was knotted at the other, wrapped it around her waist, and slid the knotted end through the loop to wear it as a belt.

"Ta da!" Balloonda announced when she was done. "Behold my other identity - Sister Punishme, The Rubber Nun!"

Then she picked up off the chair a thing that looked like a plastic parody of a hair dryer. She handed the thing to Supergirl and told her to put it on. The largest part was what appeared to be a square cushion one foot on a side and two inches thick. A soft, smooth, opaque-pink skin completely covered what felt to Supergirl like a rounded square of foam rubber. A long, inch-wide pink-plastic strap attached to opposite sides of the cushion's perimeter. From beneath one of the strap's attachment points an inch wide hose made of transparent-pink plastic more suitable for a shower cap extended three feet to a bonnet made of the same transparent-pink plastic on which small pink-and-green rosebuds had been printed.

Supergirl put her right arm and head through the loop formed by the strap and rested the strap on her left shoulder so that the pink cushion hung against her right hip. With the hose coming up her back, she put the bonnet on over her shower cap. "...-imply don't understand what.... Oh!" she heard her voice whisper from the cushion. Then, recalling the confusion that poorly educated people made between plastic and rubber, she said, "Shouldn't you be calling yourself The Plastic Nun?"

"No," Balloonda said. "I wear plastic, but I myself feel like rubber." She stroked and patted her belly. "Now, I know you're just chock-ful of questions. You came to my clinic looking for answers. Well, now you can have all the answers you want," she said, leering at her victim, "because you will never leave here to share them with anyone." She put her hand on Supergirl's back and gave her a gentle shove toward the room's walk-in closet. "Come! I'll show you."

Accompanied by the whisper-swish of their plastic, they went to the closet. Turning right, they walked past coats and dresses on hangers hooked over a thick rod on their right and racks of shoes on their left. The wall at the end of the closet suggested to Supergirl a Mondrian painting: the wood had been painted cream-white and was cris-crossed by narrow vertical and horizontal vee-section grooves gouged into the wood. Reaching up to her right, Balloonda quickly pressed several of the small squares defined by the grooves and a door, its seams hidden in three of the grooves, swung open. Balloonda reached into the darkness beyond and flipped a switch: dim lights came on down the length of a narrow, carpeted corridor.

"Part of the air conditioning system," Balloonda commented. "It's cleaned once a week, so you won't get your feet dirty."

Taking the hint, Supergirl stepped through the door and into the corridor.

Balloonda came through the door and closed it and then led the way down the corridor. "Come," she said, "I want to show you my collection."

"Collection of what?" Supergirl asked.

"Plastic prostitutes," Balloonda said, "blow-up bimbos, hot-air whores, inflatable pleasure slaves."

"So this is what's been happening to the prostitutes of Metropolis," Supergirl said. "You've been luring them to your clinic and using that thing in the basement to turn them into plastic dolls!"

"Yes," Balloonda said, "and then I deflate them and pack them into an overnight case so that I can bring them here with no one being the wiser. Then I re-inflate them and put them to use."

Walking down the corridor, Supergirl was intensely aware of the soft, smooth plastic of her raincoat warmly caressing her bare skin as she walked. She was begin to feel warm inside, starting to come sexually aroused. She had to struggle to keep her attention focused on the problem at hand and to suppress the urge to masturbate with her raincoat.

They came to a place where light entered the corridor through a screened grille. Balloonda looked through the grille and then stepped back to let Supergirl take a look. Beyond the grille was a simple dormitory-style bedroom with a single bed. The room's sole occupant was a plump woman with large, well-rounded breasts. She was wearing only her Wonder Woman shower cap, the catalyst for her transformation, and her transparent-green plastic raincoat. The woman was sitting in an inflated chair made of opaque lime-green plastic and was reading a magazine.

As she and Balloonda continued on their way down the secret passage, Supergirl saw light coming through more grilles, spaced about ten feet apart, on both sides. In each room she looked into she saw a plastic woman wearing only her shower cap and her raincoat and, in some cases, her plastic apron. In one room, though, she saw the woman lying naked on her bed with a naked man on top of her.

Balloonda made a sour face and pulled Supergirl away from the grille overlooking that scene. "He's early," she whispered.

Looking through the grille into another room, they saw the room's door standing open and the room's occupant gone.

"I'm guessing she won't get far," Supergirl commented.

"There's no way for her to leave this floor," Balloonda said, "but the women are allowed to wander during the day. We have reading materials and televisions in the day rooms."

Supergirl looked through the open door and saw that the corridor leading to the rooms was built against the building's outer wall. Windows let light come in and enter the rooms through frosted-glass panels set high in each room's corridor-side wall. She also saw that the windows looked over what she took to be a courtyard to another wing of the building.

"It looks like a prison," she commented.

"Some people would say you're not far wrong," Balloonda said. "It was originally built as a girls' boarding school. It was built during the Second World War, so in order to get the necessary permits and access to rationed materials the builders had to design it in such a way that it could be readily converted into a hospital if so needed by returning troops. Where the corridors meet the building's main axis you will see alcoves that were meant to become nurses's stations."

(The Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, actually has such a building. In the middle of World War II Walt Disney was able to expand his cartoon factory simply by accepting the risk of his studio being converted, however temporarily, into a military hospital. - TdC).

They had come to the end of the secret passage, to a place where a spiral staircase rose through a wide hole in the floor and went up through an equally wide hole in the ceiling. Balloonda led the way up the stairs and Supergirl followed, climbing the padded stairs as a gentle updraft billowed the skirt of her raincoat. They came out on the floor above in a passage that duplicated and ran parallel to the one they had already followed. Now they went back the other way and Supergirl was able to look through the grilles and see more of Balloonda's appallingly large collection of inflatable people.

Supergirl paused to look through one grille and saw that at least one of Balloonda's plastic prisoners was male. He was wearing one of Pert and Pretty's™ "Queen of France" shower caps, a beret-style cap made of a dark-blue rubber band and transparent cerulean-blue plastic on which gold fleurs-de-lis had been printed in a tiara-like array, and he was standing trapped in an inflated rocking skirt made of smooth opaque-black plastic. In its front the rocking skirt had a circular opening through which the man's erect penis jutted and below that the words "Punch Me!" were printed on the plastic in big blobbery white letters. The man was wearing a transparent-black plastic raincoat and was masturbating with it. He had his left hand on his belly, as if supporting it, and with his right hand he was rubbing the plastic of his raincoat rhythmically up and down his penis. At the same time he was arching his back in time with his down strokes, making himself rock and wobble. Supergirl then looked again at the man's belly, which was swollen so big that it made him look like he had swallowed a basketball.

"Why did you make him so fat?" Supergirl's voice whispered from the vocalizer.

"Not fat," Balloonda whispered with a giggle. "Pregnant."

Startled, Supergirl looked again at the man. Now he was arching his back in rapid jerks, squirming and writhing as he stroked his penis even faster. Then suddenly he stopped. His hands fell to his sides and he stood up straight like a soldier standing at attention.

"But," Supergirl stammered, "that's not...possible?"

"No more impossible than turning the mighty Girl of Steel into a living plastic bag," Balloonda said quietly as she nudged Supergirl away from the grille.

"B...but how?" Supergirl asked.

"He was wearing his raincoat when one of our guests got frisky with him," Balloonda said. "So when the guest squirted his cream, Buggerboy there got pregnant with a copy of his own raincoat. Now, whenever a guest creams into him the raincoat inside him grows a little bigger and someday soon he will have a new raincoat. It should be an interesting birth, to say the least," she added with a chuckle.

"Oh, that poor man," Supergirl moaned.

"Don't misplace your sympathy," Balloonda said. "He wasn't much of a man, that's for sure. He was just a sissy pimp who didn't have the balls to get a job and work like a real man. No, he was too weak to take responsibility, so he forced women to support him so he could go out and play like a little boy. Well, now he can play all day. His only obligation is to submit to being a punching bag and a sex toy, and that's not really work. And," she added, "he seems to be enjoying himself." She pointed out another grille to Supergirl and said, "Over here is another of my favorites."

Supergirl looked through the grille and saw one of the homeliest women that had ever come before her eyes. The woman's blond hair had been tucked into a Pert and Pretty™ "Kornblumenblau" shower cap, a standard beret-style shower cap made of a yellow rubber band and pale transparent-yellow plastic on which small light-blue images of cornflower blossoms had been printed at random. She stood trapped in an inflated rocking skirt made of opaque pale-blue plastic and she was wearing an ankle-length Stormette™ raincoat made of transparent pale-yellow plastic on which a dense array of thin vertical yellow stripes had been printed. With her hands pressed against the sides of her rocking skirt, she seemed to be staring at the wall and, as Supergirl watched, she made a slight bow and then arched her back to thrust her hips forward. Like the pimp, she rocked and wobbled as a result of her bowing and thrusting.

Curious, Supergirl shifted her point of view to one end of the grille so that she could see the part of the wall that the prisoner appeared to be staring at. She was able to see most of a poster bearing a life-sized image of Balloonda posing in a boxer's stance. Completely naked, except for red panties and transparent-red plastic boxing trunks, she seemed to menace the prisoner with her upraised fists. The prisoner thus seemed to be acting out a role as Balloonda's punching bag.

Her curiosity satisfied, Supergirl came away from the grille and resumed her walk up the passage.

Balloonda walked behind her and sang softly:

"When he wears a plastic raincoat

and its transparent skirt unfurls

he knows that his fondest wish is

just to be one of the girls."

Supergirl stopped abruptly, turned around, and went back to the grille. She looked more closely at the prisoner and saw that his breasts were small, yet well-shaped conical mounds, though their nipples and aureoles were too small. His belly was puffed out like hers, but he might just have been a plump woman. His shoulders certainly seemed too broad for a woman. And now his motions made sense: he was masturbating by rubbing his penis against the inside of the rocking skirt.

Supergirl came away from the grille again, looked at Balloonda, and said, "What...?!"

"He's one of those rare men who enjoys dressing up as a woman," Balloonda said. "Some months ago he decided that he would come to Metropolis and spend a whole week playing femme. He made the mistake of checking into my special hotel, under the name of Raney Daye. When my helpers could find no record of such a person, I decided to add her to my collection. She wasn't the prettiest girl I had ever seen, but I figured that if the men didn't go for her, she could serve my helpers as a pool toy and shower slave. But then I found out that my new prisoner had a little secret. Sister Punishme doesn't like to be deceived, so now the erstwhile Miss Daye is my punching bag."

They came to the end of the passage and Supergirl saw branch passages leading to the left and the right. Balloonda nudged her toward the passage on the left and after following it for perhaps fifty feet they came to a flight of stairs that they descended. At the bottom of the stairs they faced another gouge-patterned door.

"Give me your vocalizer!" Balloonda said.

Supergirl took off the bonnet and the cushion and handed them to Balloonda. Now mute, she could only wonder what would come next.

Again Balloonda danced her fingers over an array of small squares on the door. This time Supergirl watched intently. The process that had turned her into an inflated plastic balloon had retained enough of her Kryptonese nature that, though she would be no match for even a child, she would be much stronger and faster that any of Balloonda's other plastic prisoners. Now she made use of the faster: she watched Balloonda's fingers press the squares and, as the door swung open, she memorized the sequence.

As she stepped through the doorway behind Balloonda, Supergirl saw that they had come into a sitting room. What drew her attention was what she saw occupying the center of the room. As Balloonda closed the door, Supergirl went over to examine yet another of Balloonda's plastic prisoners.

The young woman stood trapped in an inflated rocking skirt made of opaque-black plastic that had the words "Punch Me" printed across its front in white. Otherwise naked, the woman wore a transparent-black plastic chador, a version-in-vinyl-film of the body enveloping garment worn by religiously conservative women in Iran: like Balloonda's plastic nun's habit, it was a sexual parody of a garment that normally connotes sexual repression. The woman's hands were bound behind her back and she stood with her head bowed.

Balloonda came to stand by Supergirl in front of the woman. "Mary!" Balloonda said to get the woman's attention. "I'm sure you recognize Supergirl." She put her hand on Supergirl's back as if displaying her. "Supergirl, this is Mary Atkins. She is very special to you. If it weren't for her going and blabbing off to the cops, you would not be here...at least, not yet. So I'm giving her to you as your own plastic prisoner. She will be your personal toy. Now, I must go and attend to business, so I will leave you here to play with your new punching bag." With a hearty laugh, she went to the room's not-secret door and went out, closing the door behind her.

Supergirl heard a click that told her that she was locked in. She turned her attention back to Mary and saw that she had bowed her head and was shaking it in a vigorous gesture of denial. Wanting to offer at least some reassurance, she took Mary in an embrace and felt her shuddering as though she were crying. She felt Mary's body heat warming her raincoat's plastic and she felt Mary's medium-sized breasts pressing against her own A-cup mounds. She began to come aroused and fought to suppress the urge to kiss Mary and make love to her. She stood hugging Mary and rubbing her back until Mary stopped shaking, then she released Mary, went behind her, and untied the thick silken cord that bound her wrists together.

Mary responded by putting her hands down at her sides and pressing them flat against the rocking skirt. She stood with her head bowed, as if submitting to being Supergirl's punching bag.

Supergirl waved her hand in front of Mary's face to get her attention. She pointed at the words on the front of the rocking skirt and both shook her head and waved her hand from side to side in a gesture of negation. She saw Mary relax then, so she began to search the room for something that she could use to deflate the rocking skirt.

Now she noticed that all of what Fleta Veltergeist called butt-holders comprised inflated plastic furniture. She saw a puffy sofa made of two shades of opaque blue plastic and half a dozen matching chairs. She saw a fully inflated chaise longue made of two shades of opaque pink plastic and saw that a pink comforter was draped over it: apparently that was Mary's bed. In front of the sofa there was a coffee table made of completely clear Plexiglas™. The only other furniture in the room was an ornately carved combination desk and bookshelf. She noticed several boxed board games on one part of the shelf, but none had what she needed. None of the desk's drawers contained anything useful either. Then she noticed a sheet of paper with writing on it and inspiration struck.

She took the sheet and scraped it on the edge of the desk until it began to curl. She set the paper on the desk and rolled the curled edge as tightly as she could and then rolled up the entire sheet. Twisting the paper tube in both hands, she strove to make it as narrow as possible. And when she had made the tube as narrow as she could she took it to Mary.

Seeing what Supergirl intended, Mary hiked up her chador to expose the rocking skirt's valve stem and watched as Supergirl slid her paper tube into it. Supergirl pushed the tube into the valve until she felt it push open the air-tight flap at its inner end and felt warm air blowing out of it. She released her paper tube and allowed it to unroll until it was pressed against the inner wall of the plastic tube that was the valve stem.

As the rocking skirt deflated Supergirl took the opportunity to examine the secret door through which she and Balloonda had entered the room. At the top right side of the door, she saw, the grooves outlined a pattern of small squares identical to the one Balloonda had tapped to make the door open. She recalled from memory the dance that Balloonda's fingers had performed on the pattern on the door's opposite side and she made her right hand perform the same little dance on the pattern before her. She had to leap back as the door swung open. Now she had free access to the secret passage and, presumably, to the rest of the building. But now was not the time to exploit that fact, so she pushed on the door to close it.

The door didn't move.

She pushed again, as hard as she could, but still the door remained open. Fear shot through her with a shock and made her tremble all over. She absolutely did not want Balloonda to know that she could open the secret doors. The consequences would be very bad, of that she was certain. Then she remembered something, an observation that had caught her attention earlier, though she hadn't known what to make of it. When Balloonda had closed the secret door at the end of her closet she had not pushed it near the edge, as most people do; instead, she had pushed on its center. Supergirl looked at the center panel in the pattern on the door in front of her and saw that it looked ever-so-slightly discolored, as if it had been touched many times. She pushed on it and the door closed itself.

By that time Mary had pulled the black rubber waistband of the rocking skirt down around her thighs and was struggling to get out of the collapsing bag. Supergirl went to her and embraced her from behind, then pulled on her while she kicked her legs to free them from the enfolding plastic film. Again the sensations of holding a warm plastic woman started getting her hot, made her want to take Mary down onto the floor, get on top of her, and play with her until both of them came to and experienced a full sexual climax. But again she restrained herself from expressing her lust and simply concentrated on pulling Mary free of the rocking skirt.

Mary's feet came free suddenly and Supergirl fell backward onto the floor with Mary sprawled on top of her. Mary recovered her poise quickly from the fall, rolled over to stand up, and offered Supergirl a hand to help her get up.

Supergirl noticed her makeshift straw jutting from the valve stem of the still deflating rocking skirt. She thought about removing it and hiding it, but then she knew that Balloonda would ask how Mary got free and she would have no options for lying. No, she decided, better to leave it and let Balloonda think that she was careless.

Without the vocalizer she was mute and so was Mary. Aside from a few simple gestures, the two women could not communicate through anything that could be called a sign language. There was paper, but nothing to write with. Then Supergirl saw the answer. She went to the bookshelf, took down the box containing the Scrabble™ game, and put it on the coffee table.

Mary shook her head and made a pushing away gesture toward the box. Nonetheless, Supergirl opened the box, took the game out, and unfolded the playing board. She selected eight tiles, spelled out the words [LETS TALK], and then turned the board around so that Mary could read the message. Mary nodded, knelt down by the coffee table, and began using the tiles to spell out her own messages.

Over the next several hours, as she explained how she had been captured in Balloonda's clinic, Supergirl learned Mary's story. After the Metropolis police had put her on the train that would take her home, Mary was befriended by two older women. They engaged her in conversation about their respective destinations and then, after a time, they invited her to join them in their private compartment in the first-class section, explaining that one of them had to use a humidifier to minimize the symptoms of her asthma. In the compartment, with the humidifier (which Mary later figured out was no such thing) sighing softly, the three women resumed their conversation. Mary felt a strange lassitude come over her, as if all the cares and worries of Metropolis had fallen away from her, and the women began asking her questions about herself. She answered them all, even those pertaining to the most intimate details of her life: she was appalled that she was revealing so much about herself to complete strangers, and yet the words came out of her mouth at the slightest suggestion from the women that they should do so. Then the women began giving her commands and she obeyed all of them, even the most humiliating ones. Somehow the women had made her their puppet.

The three of them got off the train at the next station, taking care to bring Mary's carry-on luggage and to leave not a trace that she had ever been on the train. They were met by a chauffeur and a limousine. Doing nothing to draw unwanted attention to themselves, looking like any trio of upper-class women being met at the station by their family's chauffeur, they got into the car and the chauffeur drove them back to Metropolis, to Balloonda's converted girls' school.

In a hidden laboratory deep inside the building, Balloonda compelled Mary to bathe herself. With Mary clean and dry and still wearing her own shower cap, Pert and Pretty's™ Femme Fatale (black rubber band and unadorned transparent-black plastic), Balloonda used the laboratory's plastifier to turn her into a sexually aroused living plastic doll. She tied Mary's hands behind her back, forced her into a black plastic rocking skirt, and then knelt before Mary to inflate it. When she had blown the plump skirt full and taut, Balloonda stripped herself down to her panties and then punched, jabbed, and bopped her new prisoner, not in anger, but in sheer gleeful delight. As Mary bounced and wobbled, Balloonda gloated over her, gaining sexual arousal from her prisoner's special helplessness. When she was hot enough, Balloonda dropped her panties, sprawled herself in an inflated plastic chair, and masturbated to climax over the sight of naked plastic Mary standing helpless before her.

After a time Balloonda got up, wiped up her mess, and then put on her Rubber Nun costume. She hung around her neck a nylon sling that hung down her front almost to her ankles. Bowing slightly to put the lower part of the sling on the floor, she lifted Mary's rocking skirt onto the sling, embraced Mary, and stood up. Thus she carried Mary to her sitting room, where she spent more time playing with her. For almost two weeks now Balloonda had kept Mary in the sitting room and had come in every day to play with her as a punching bag and as a masturbation inspiration.

[NOW IM YOUR SLAVEGIRL] Mary spelled out on the Scrabble™ board.

Supergirl pointed to the statement and shook her head. Quickly she spelled out [U R NOT A TOY].

[IM PLASTIC BLOWUP DOLL] [THATS A TOY] Mary laid out.

Supergirl pointed insistently at her own statement and then spelled out [I WANT TO B FRIENDS].

Mary seemed almost disappointed as she laid the letters [OK] on the board.

Just then Balloonda came in. She had taken off her Rubber Nun costume and was wearing a conservative dark-blue business suit. She noticed the deflated rocking skirt lying on the floor with Supergirl's paper tube still jutting from the valve stem. "Well, aren't you just a clever girl!" she said to Supergirl. "I see that I'm going to have to bring in a proper deflating tube for you to use...and an air pump so that you can re-inflate your punching bag when she's been naughty." She extended her right hand to Supergirl and said, "Come! You can play with your new toy tomorrow."

Supergirl reached up to take Balloonda's proffered hand and allowed Balloonda to pull her up into a standing position. She then went with Balloonda out of the sitting room. Following a short corridor brought them back to Balloonda's bedroom. There Balloonda used a silken cord to tie Supergirl's hands behind her back, used another silken cord to tie her ankles together, and then she tossed her onto the bed. For a long moment she stood gazing upon her prisoner and then she went into the adjoining bathroom.

For a brief moment Supergirl made the stereotypical and stereotypically futile struggle against her bonds. Then, as she heard water running in the bathtub, she took the opportunity to examine Balloonda's bedroom more thoroughly than she had before. She noticed thick lacquered-wood beams running up the walls and across the ceiling as if the room's frame were standing exposed. A horizontal bracket jutted from one beam, a little over six feet above the floor, and on it crouched a carved wooden gnome. The gnome's face was contorted in an intense grimace, he was pulling down on the sides of his hat with both hands, and his erect penis jutted a full eighteen inches from his crotch. The pixie-style hood of Balloonda's transparent-red plastic raincoat had been slipped over the gnome's penis so that the raincoat hung limply along the beam. Soft highlights shifted over the soft, skin-smooth plastic as air currents pushed gently on it.

Supergirl turned over to examine more of the room and the plastic of her own raincoat caressed her breasts and made her start to come aroused again. She hadn't had a good opportunity to play with her raincoat until now and now she was unable to play with it. She would just have to be patient. Meanwhile she could distract herself from her frustration by improving her knowledge of her situation. She turned her attention back to Balloonda's bedroom.

Thick drapes covered the windows in the wall opposite Balloonda's bed. Turning onto her left side, she saw a small cage with lacquered wooden bars built into the wall next to the bed and inside the cage stood a fully inflated punching bag bearing a life-sized image of her. Rolling onto her right side, she saw Balloonda's red plastic chair next to the bed with Balloonda's plastic nun's habit and wimple draped over its back. The vocalizer that she had used was propped against one of the chair's arms. Beyond that she saw the door to the closet. And behind the chair she saw another built-in cage, this one holding an inflated plastic punching bag bearing the life-sized image of Wonder Woman.

All too soon Balloonda came out of the bathroom. She was still wearing her shower cap, Pert and Pretty's™ Independence Day, a bouffant-style cap made with a dark blue rubber band and transparent cobalt-blue plastic on which brightly colored, thin-line starbursts had been printed. Over her white terrycloth bathrobe she wore a transparent-white plastic raincoat. She sprawled herself in her chair, opened the front of her robe to let the last remnant of bath moisture evaporate from her skin, and gazed at Supergirl.

"I've been getting hot over you all day," she said as she gently stroked her plump, smooth belly, teasing herself as she contemplated the inflated plastic woman lying helpless on her bed. "And now, at last, I get to play with you in bed."

Supergirl felt herself quivering all over. All of the sensations of deep anxiety coursed through her. From the moment she had first seen Balloonda masturbating in front of her, she had suspected that the plump woman intended to use her as a sex toy but had managed to put the thought out of her mind. But now, with the sex act imminent, she trembled, as much from anticipation as from anxiety.

Oh yes, anticipation. For as long as she could remember Supergirl had gained sexual arousal from the sight and feel of plastic film. As a little girl growing up in Argo City she had sometimes rubbed her own shower cap over her breasts so that she could feel her nipples swell and stiffen and feel the special swelling sensation between her legs that came with it. At the beginning of her tenth avoshan, when she was about thirteen Earth years old, she went through menarche and suddenly found a new use for the inflatable plastic Warrior Maiden punching bag that she used in the city's exercise center: she had long felt the special swelling, a faster beating of her heart, and a quivering of her whole body whenever she inflated the bag and played with it. But as her libido matured she began stripping herself naked in her bedroom, inflating the bag, and then hugging it and masturbating on it while fantasizing that she was the Warrior Maiden's plastic pleasure slave. And now, though Balloonda looked nothing like the Warrior Maiden, Supergirl's girlhood fantasy was coming true.

Balloonda slipped out of her bathrobe, leaving it spread across the chair, and came to sit on the bed. She turned Supergirl over on her belly and untied the cords binding her ankles and her wrists, tossing them onto the chair. Then she rubbed Supergirl's buttocks.

Supergirl lay limp and luxuriated in the sensation of a warm hand rubbing her raincoat's plastic across her buttocks. Her fantasy of the Warrior Maiden's revenge came back to life in her mind and she felt the sensations of her nipples and clitoris swelling and stiffening. The fact that Balloonda was a villainess didn't prevent Supergirl from gaining what pleasure she could from the situation. After all, Balloonda had not displayed any nastiness that would interfere with that pleasure. She was a nice villainess, the kind that only exists in books and movies.

Balloonda turned Supergirl over onto her back and began rubbing her breasts with her right hand. "I love your raincoat," she said, "and I want us to have fun with it, but not tonight." She slid her right hand down to Supergirl's right thigh and rubbed the raincoat's plastic down into the inside of her crotch.

Supergirl reached up and pulled the raincoat's magnetic patches apart, laying the raincoat out on the bed. She raised herself up on her elbows and half rolled from one side to the other to slide her arms out of the sleeves. Then she wrapped her arms around Balloonda's neck and put her head on Balloonda's left shoulder.

Balloonda stood up, leaving Supergirl's raincoat spread across the bed. She turned back the covers and gently but firmly pushed Supergirl under them. Pausing only to flip the wall switch next to the bed's headboard to turn off the room's lights, she slid herself under the covers.

Supergirl slid herself over to the right side of the bed, the side with the pillow that had a plastic pillowcase. She lay on her back and waited, feeling the bed move as Balloonda made herself comfortable. She remembered how she had trembled with anticipation the first time she had taken her punching bag to her bedroom and taken off her clothes before blowing it up. Now she was Balloonda's punching bag and she trembled as she had that first time. Her nipples and clitoris felt as stiff as they could possibly become and she felt sexual warmth permeate her entire body. If she had been breathing, she would have been panting in quavery gasps.

She heard Balloonda's breathing, deep and tremulous, and felt Balloonda move across the bed, half sliding and half rolling over to lie against her. Balloonda had been right about one thing: her skin did feel like rubber - soft, elastic, smooth, and warm. Supergirl felt Balloonda's left arm slide under her back and felt Balloonda's right hand press against her waist.

"Now, at last, you're all mine!" Balloonda gloated as she tightened her embrace to hold Supergirl closer. "Oh, you're so soft and warm!" she sighed. Then she put her lips on Supergirl's and kissed them passionately.

Supergirl tried to squirm away from her. She heard the soft swish of her shower cap rubbing against the pillowcase and felt Balloonda's breath hot on her cheek. But she went completely still when she felt Balloonda's right leg sliding between her legs. She felt Balloonda rolling and lifting herself on top of her and straddling her right thigh. Then she felt Balloonda's lips give one last push against hers before sliding onto her left cheek and panting into her left ear.

"Oh, Supergirl!" Balloonda panted. She slid her right arm around Supergirl's back and squeezed. "Can you feel what I want to do to you?"

Supergirl felt Balloonda's labia spread across her right thigh and felt her stiffened clitoris poking like a finger into her plastic. She felt Balloonda's right thigh press rubbery-smooth and hot against her own vulva and stiffened clitoris. Balloonda's belly pressed heat into hers in time with the rhythm of Balloonda's now quavery breathing. Balloonda's breasts, with their soft, semi-waxy feel, spread across hers and pushed on them. And the warm plastic of Balloonda's shower cap, with the weight of Balloonda's hair behind it, pressed against her face. The heat and pressure in her libido increased rapidly. This, she thought, is what it feels like to be the Warrior Maiden's plastic pleasure pillow. And that thought got her hotter yet.

Then Balloonda began to move. Supporting her weight on her left arm and her knees, she thrust her hips to and fro to rub her belly against Supergirl's and to slide her vulva up and down Supergirl's thigh. With each thrust Balloonda let out a half-sobbing little grunt. Then the grunts segued into quavery squeals as Balloonda squeezed Supergirl harder and moved more forcefully.

As Balloonda bounced on top of her, Supergirl felt Balloonda's right thigh pushing hot and firm into her vulva and rubbing her clitoris. She squirmed, not in an effort to escape, but to enhance the sensations of Balloonda rubbing against her. Soon she felt a tickling in her clitoris and then she jerked. She writhed and bucked desperately as Balloonda reached her own climax and convulsed on top of her. The world seemed to vanish, to melt away, as Balloonda became a mere abstraction of heat, pressure, and rhythm that drove the pulsations that wracked her as her libido detonated.

And then the passion-storm ended. Balloonda gave one last thrust and went limp. She lay panting on Supergirl, unable to move. Supergirl stopped squirming and felt almost as if she were deflating. After a time Balloonda dozed off and Supergirl did the same.

Much later Balloonda came partly awake, lifted herself off Supergirl, and moved to her side of the bed to go back to sleep. Awakened by Balloonda's movement, Supergirl pulled the corner of the top sheet under the covers and used it to wipe the last of Balloonda's crotch slobber off her leg. Then she reached across the bed, grabbed her raincoat, and pulled it under the covers with her. Recalling to mind one of her favorite sex fantasies, she masturbated with the raincoat before turning over and going back to sleep.

Commercial Break #3

Our scene is a dance studio and we see about two dozen girls, ranging in age from ten to sixteen years, engaged in an exercise class. Each girl is wearing a leotard or a one-piece bathing suit and has before her an inflated plastic punching bag bearing a life-sized image of Supergirl, Batgirl, or Wonder Woman. At one side of the class a woman wielding a pair of wooden mallets pounds out a rhythm in the buzzing clangor of a Kryptonese kabeyad, an instrument that resembles an Indonesian saron whose bronze sounding bars have been mounted over a rolled up harp.

In front of the class Supergirl and Batgirl are leading the exercises. Batgirl wears only her Bat-cowl and a one-piece black bathing suit that has her black-and-yellow Bat-emblem displayed on her chest. Supergirl is wearing a one-piece blue bathing suit that has her red-and-yellow ess-on-a-shield emblem displayed on her chest and she is using her levitating ability to keep bouncing herself upright as Batgirl uses her as a punching bag.

On first impression, the girls seem to be practicing the forms of the traditional Cambodian dance. They hold their arms over their heads with their hands' palms pressed together and their elbows bent. But instead of making the slow ritualized movements of the Cambodian dance, the girls move briskly: each girl snaps one hand down and strikes her punching bag with the heel of the hand, then quickly brings the hand back up over her head. As the bag bounces back up the girl brings her other hand down and strikes the bag. The girls strive to carry out this rapid one-two punching while ensuring that their bags tip over straight and fall between paired parallel lines marked on the floor with masking tape.

In voice over a woman announcer intones, "Precision in speed, grace in strength, elegance in motion. Perfect coordination between mind and body is essential to the feminine poise necessary to young women in this modern world. And the Kryptonese Akarashnayinth exercises, brought to Earth by Supergirl, cultivate such coordination. Each girl confronts her own poshaba, a sparring partner whose lively bounce and wobble challenge her growing skill. And these girls are using Everplast™ poshabas. Made of high-quality polyvinyl plastic, they are soft yet tough. And Everplast's™ patented no-leak valve system ensures that they remain firm for quick bounce-back action. Each Everplast™ poshaba bears the likeness of an epitome of modern womanhood - Supergirl, Batgirl, Wonder Woman - so that any girl facing it knows that she's good enough to test herself against the very best! Everplast™!

(Yeah, and if your daughter has any lesbian tendencies, they make great masturbation toys too. - TdC).

The announcer says, sotto voce, over the exercise class, "Everplast™ poshabas and other fine inflatables are available at Vinylhaven stores in Metropolis and throughout the Northeast."

Supergirl was Balloonda's punching bag again. It had been late afternoon on the second day of Supergirl's captivity when Balloonda had come into her bedroom carrying the deflated red plastic rocking skirt that she had used when she first humiliated her new plastic prisoner. She had set it on the floor in the middle of the room and told Supergirl to take off everything that she was wearing and get into it. With no other options available to her, Supergirl had complied, taking off her vocalizer and raincoat, laying them on the bed, and then stepping into the red plastic skirt and pulling its rubber waistband up around her waist, making sure that the skirt's valve was behind her as Balloonda had ordered.

Meanwhile Balloonda had undressed herself, stripping down to her panties, and then had gone to kneel behind Supergirl to inflate her rocking skirt. Pressing her hands against the sides of Supergirl's thighs to steady her, Balloonda had taken the rocking skirt's valve stem in her lips and blown. With each whoosh Supergirl had felt Balloonda's warm breath push the plastic of the inner skirt against her buttocks. After a time she had felt the inner skirt push against and between her legs and into her crotch, gripping her tightly as Balloonda had blown the skirt full with one last whoosh that faded to a sigh. Again the skirt held Supergirl helpless and upright.

Getting up. Balloonda had given her toy a playful jab in the belly, making her wobble lightly, and then had given her an apron and an order to put it on. Supergirl had shaken out the apron and seen that it was Pert and Pretty's™ "Supergirl" style, a full apron made of transparent-blue plastic with a ruffled, ankle-length skirt and her Super-ess printed on the bib in red and yellow. She had slipped the yoke over her head, then wrapped the extra-long ties around her waist and tied them in a neat bow in front of her. Then she had pressed her hands flat against the sides of her thighs and submitted to Balloonda bopping her.

Now, rocking and rolling with Balloonda's punches, Supergirl reviewed the day's events. As the soft, rubbery thumps of Balloonda's fists striking inflated-taut plastic, accompanied by the swish of Supergirl's apron, filled the room, Supergirl recalled how Balloonda had left her in bed when she dressed and went to get breakfast. Getting out of bed, Supergirl had put on her raincoat and luxuriated in feeling its plastic soft, smooth, and warm on her bare skin. Then she sat down in the inflated chair and masturbated with Balloonda's shower cap, using it to tickle her clitoris while she rubbed her raincoat's plastic over her nipples. Several times she had herself writhing in the chair, making it rock and wobble as she climaxed long and hard over a fantasy of the Warrior Maiden playing with her.

She finished just in time to put Balloonda's shower cap back on its lunette in the bathroom and hang up Balloonda's bathrobe/raincoat ensemble. She made up the bed and was just straightening the covers over her pillow when she was startled by Balloonda embracing her from behind; without her superhearing, she had not been aware of Balloonda coming into the room and sneaking up behind her. More from reflex than thought, she squirmed in her captress' embrace, but Balloonda only hugged her tighter.

"Ah, my warm plastic sex prisoner!" Balloonda cooed into Supergirl's right ear. "My big blow-up love toy!" she sighed as she slid her left hand inside Supergirl's raincoat and caressed her right breast. She was breathing heavily as she kissed the right side of Supergirl's neck.

For her part Supergirl bucked and writhed, knowing full well that her helpless effort to escape would inflame Balloonda's passion all the more. Go ahead, she thought, get me good and hot. She had discovered that, in spite of the woman's evil designs, she found Balloonda desirable enough and nice enough that she could enjoy having sex with her. So she would play the defiant slavegirl, the naughty maid, or any other role that would get Balloonda hot, because, until she could escape for real, she had nothing better to do. She twisted and thrashed, as if desperate to escape.

"You're all mine, Supergirl!" Balloonda panted. "My helpless plastic prisoner! I can have my way with you whenever I want!" She released Supergirl from her embrace and gave her a light shove with a thrust of her hips. "But not right now," she said, still breathing heavily. "Later."

With one hand in her crotch, rubbing her clitoris, Supergirl was taken by surprise. She recovered her poise quickly, pulled her hand out of her crotch, and went to retrieve her vocalizer and put it on.

Balloonda changed into her Rubber Nun costume, then took Supergirl through her closet and back into the building's hidden passages to resume and finish what she called her Villain's Gloating Tour. No sooner had the closet's secret door closed silently behind them than Balloonda asked Supergirl, "Did you know that dwarves are magic?"

Supergirl felt a chill slither up her back. She knew a candidate for the magic dwarf category, a pesky imp who came from a world called Zrfff, separated from our world by an all-too-short distance in the Fifth Dimension. But she dismissed that suspicion because the magic done by pests like Mr. Mxyzptlk or Miss Snrdlfrk came undone when they went back to their own world: the magic that Balloonda had used to turn her and others into living plastic dolls had not come undone in a period that extended over a year at least.

Before Supergirl could reply Balloonda spoke again, offering an explanation to put the question into a proper context. Her real name was Maude Seintess and she had obtained her RN from Metropolis University's School of Nursing, figuring that it would give her an advantage in creating the most successful and lucrative prostitution ring ever to infest the streets of America's Premier City. But then an accident in her organic chemistry laboratory had (in true comic-book fashion) led her to the discovery of zombie gas, a neurological agent that permanently sapped its victims' wills, leaving them totally apathetic and, at the same time, hyper-suggestible: it had done so by making her lab partner her first slave.

Experimenting on her classmate, Maude discovered that the woman would obey any command, but that she also had to be given certain commands to ensure that she would do the things, such as eating or bathing, necessary to maintain her life and health. Maude developed what she called her catechism, a set of commands that she would give to newly enslaved persons to ensure that they remained strong and healthy and absolutely loyal to her throughout their expectedly long lives. She knew that she had acquired the means to realize her dream to a degree that she could not have previously imagined. She also knew that she would have to be extremely discreet, to keep her true identity secret, just like all of those pesky superheros. Because of her love of inflated plastic toys, she took the code name Balloonda and then she took her slavegirl, wearing only her shower cap, to bed.

While still in school Balloonda had begun to assemble the first pieces of her empire, laying its foundations in the dark niches of Metropolis' underworld. She spent several months carefully stalking her prey, giving him no cause to suspect that he was under surveillance, and then, using her classmate as bait, trapped and enslaved the unsuspecting pimp. Soon after that the pimp's stable of prostitutes became Maude's property. As they became cleaner, healthier, and stronger, those women also benefitted from Maude's way of advertising their services, a way that did not attract the attention of the police. As a student nurse, she had worked with police officers, gotten to know their ways and how to avoid catching their interest.

After her graduation Maude received an offer to work for a small clinic in the seedy area of Metropolis where her slaves worked. It wasn't surprising, really, since the entire staff of the clinic had been her slaves for over a year. Thus embedded in the seamy side of Metropolis, Maude, now Balloonda, consolidated her little imperium and plotted its expansion.

The overt signs of prostitution had begun to vanish from the streets in a small area, but when Balloonda took full-time control of her organization that process accelerated and spread slowly over an ever-widening area of the city. All too eager to give the phenomenon a positive interpretation, various and sundry pundits convinced the good people of Metropolis that prostitution was on the wane in their fair city. The Metropolis Police Department, abetted by the ever-friendly Daily Planet, claimed credit and several members of the vice squad gained promotions. Everybody was happy. But not everybody was fooled.

The ever-cynical wise guys who ran Intergang knew that prostitution was not waning: it was just becoming invisible. And they were more than vexed by their inability to get close to, never mind penetrate, the command structure of the thing that was rapidly infesting the territory of one of their most important component gangs. They were also deeply impressed by someone who could slide so smoothly under the MPD's radar and even evade the attention of the fellow who flies around Metropolis in a red-and-blue circus costume. Eventually, to their shock, the elusive Balloonda contacted them. Over the course of a month she negotiated a meeting with Intergang's ruling board.

She had expected the laughter that attended her arrival at the meeting and was willing to forgive it. After all, people had laughed when Wonder Woman first appeared in public. But she would never forgive the gangsters' refusal to listen to reason and to accept her as an equal. She told them that she intended to take over all of the prostitution in Metropolis (failing to mention her intent to go much farther than that) and that she felt that she should have a seat on their board. They dismissed her statements as the tea-party fantasies of a naive little girl and told her that no woman would ever sit on Intergang's board (they actually expressed it in cruder terms). Then they told her flatly that she would subordinate herself to the gangster whose territory she occupied. It was presented to her as fait accompli, closed to any discussion or negotiation.

Nimble of mind and cold of heart, Balloonda thanked her inner self for advising her to keep her reptilian cunning hidden. Exploiting the gangsters' misogynist prejudice, relying on it to blind the thugs to the truth, she dropped her business-woman persona and revealed the persona of the dependent woman they expected to see. She told them that their explanations had shown her the error in her thinking (true enough, but not in the way the gangsters assumed) and that she accepted their generous offer. Smiles and well-wishing accompanied as she left the meeting. It took her less than a week to enslave her "supervisor" and the entire command structure of his gang. By the end of the month that entire gang was her personal property. Nothing was going to stop her now.

As Balloonda came to this part of her narrative she and Supergirl came to a room only accessible from the hidden passage they were in. It looked to be about the size of Balloonda's bedroom and the far wall was dominated by a wide, presumably one-way, window that looked out on a corporate boardroom. Balloonda turned on the room's lights and Supergirl noticed almost one dozen plastic punching bags standing inflated and facing the window. Standing six feet tall, each bag bore the image of a porcine man in a shiny black suit. The character wore moneybags on his hands as boxing gloves and the words "Capitalist Pig" were printed in red across the punching bag's base. A Japanese company had made the punching bags for the local Communist Party to distribute as propaganda toys that would also help mitigate the party's sinister reputation. And each punching bag wore a knee-length serving apron made of transparent-pink plastic with opaque-pink roses on its ruffled skirt along with a man's name in delicate pink lettering. Supergirl recognized three of the names as belonging to gangsters that the Metropolis police suspected of being top bosses in Intergang. Now Supergirl could see who all of Intergang's bosses were, at least for the moment.

"I control about half of these clowns now," Balloonda said. "In the next few months I'll enslave the others and then I will own Intergang. I'll replace the current leadership with my own people so that I can give these guys," she nudged one of the punching bags, "the retirement that they deserve. I'm a proper witch, so I'll fatten them up before I turn them into plastic. We'll have a plastifying party and I'll have their subordinates make them pregnant with their own plastic raincoats before I let the air out of them. Then I'll bring them here and make them my punching bags."

Supergirl was inspecting a pile of deflated rocking skirts. She lifted one skirt and felt its limp plastic as soft and as smooth as the plastic of her raincoat. It was also as clear as glass. Still holding the skirt, she looked at Balloonda.

Anticipating Supergirl's question, Balloonda said, "Oh, yes, I want to see how much my blow-up goons enjoy bouncing for me when I punch them. And if they're feeling a little modest..., well, they have their cute serving-girl aprons." She stroked the apron on the bag in front of her and then, with a swish of her habit, she punched the bag. "I want them to feel appropriately dressed while they watch me run Intergang better than they could have ever done," she added as she continued bopping her toy.

"You're not just going to leave them in here, are you?" Supergirl asked. She confronted a punching bag that wore an apron bearing a chillingly familiar name. It belonged to a gangster who, rumor had it, had offered one million dollars to anyone who could put a kryptonite collar on her and deliver her to him for him to rape. Suddenly the sexual warmth that seemed to emanate from the plastic in the room evaporated and Supergirl felt thoroughly cold.

"Oh, heavens, no!" Balloonda said as she threw a quick jab into Capitalist Pig's face. "That would be terribly cruel, wouldn't it? No, I can't rightly leave my punching bags up here to get bored. Fortunately, I have a special clientele, some very nice young men who enjoy squirting their cream into male prisoners. For the first time in their lives the bosses of Intergang are actually going to earn their keep."

"Unh huh," Supergirl commented noncommitally. She turned away from the bag of horror and found that she felt no objection to what Balloonda was planning.

"OK, come with me!" Balloonda said as she walked away from the bag she had been abusing. She turned off the light as they left the hidden playroom and returned to the ventilation corridor.

"So when do we get to the part about the magic dwarf?" Supergirl asked.

"Background first," Balloonda said. "Now we can paint in the foreground. I trust you remember Luthorland."

"That hideous little amusement park," Supergirl commented. "Yes, I remember it. It seemed like it popped up almost overnight."

"I love the way you pay attention," Balloonda said as she grabbed Supergirl and hugged her. She gazed into Supergirl's eyes and said, "That's why you're my plastic sex prisoner." She kissed Supergirl then and Supergirl, quivering inside, didn't resist. Balloonda's breathing began to deepen as she pressed her lips against Supergirl's

"About the magic dwarf?" Supergirl prompted. She put her hands up as if to push herself away from her captress and realized too late that she was pushing against Balloonda's breasts.

Balloonda half released her, allowing her to pull back about a foot, and looked down at Supergirl's hands. "I'm going to be on top of you all night tonight," she said with a leer.

"Yeah, that's, um... yeah," Supergirl stammered. "About the dwarf?"

"Luthorland," Balloonda said. "It didn't just seem to pop up overnight. It actually did pop up overnight. One day there's only empty swamp next to the New Guernsey Turnpike and the next day this amusement park sprawls over it like some weird bridge. With your senses you should have known that it couldn't have been a normal construction. As for the rest of us... well, the railroad spur next to the park fooled us all into thinking that Luthor had planned this thing for some time, had the parts prefabricated, and then brought it all in by rail to be set up and assembled in the middle of the night. I saw this as an opportunity to begin my penetration of Luthor's gang. My goodness, if I could have Luthor working for me,...!!! So I took my purse with my special perfume spritzer...."

"Eau de Zombie, I'm guessing," Supergirl said.

Balloonda smiled. "You see? You're not so stupid after all!"

"Uh, thanks, I think," Supergirl said in a tone of uncertainty.

Balloonda went on with her story. She had gone to Luthorland with the intent of enslaving a number of its employees, working her way up the chain of command until she had gained control over someone who could eventually lead her to Lex Luthor himself. Her modus operandi was simple: she would approach her victim with her spritzer in hand, ask "Does this smell like lilac to you?", and spray a puff of zombie gas at his nose. She would give the victim an abbreviated version of her catechism, instruct him to come to an address in Metropolis later (for a full debriefing and the full catechism: Balloonda did not want to waste her resources or have the police finding people dying of terminal apathy), and then command him to point out his superior on the park's staff. A few hours after entering the park she was meeting with the park's proprietor, a strange-looking dwarf with a name spelled all in consonants.

"Mxyzptlk?" Supergirl asked.

"Gesundheit!" Balloonda said.

"No, I meant was his name Mxyzptlk," Supergirl said and then spelled it out.

"Oh," Balloonda said. "No, it was something else entirely. And I'll tell you now, I would not have been so eager to spray the little clown if I had known that he came from another universe and could work real magic. Lucky for me, the zombie gas worked on him. Imaging my disappointment when I found out that he had no contact with Luthor's gang whatsoever."

Curious, she had interrogated the dwarf and learned his story. He was a psychiatrist from a world in which everyone could work magic. One of his patients had been having difficulty for years with a recurring nightmare. He would cast a certain spell and find himself in a world populated by giants who could not work magic at all. Among these giants was one who possessed powers and abilities far beyond those of the other giants, almost magical in themselves. The people were in awe of that godling, who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time enforcing a strange set of commandments upon the people. In a world where everyone can work magic society is, of necessity, intensely egalitarian, so the patient took offense at the godling and his behavior. In response the patient took on the role of the Trickster, the prankster who would expose the godling as a fool and thus drive him to set himself among the people rather than over them, although he got the impression that at times the godling did just that. For years the patient had been struggling with the nightmare world, but instead of meeting success, he had only made the godling more adept at tricking him into pronouncing his name backwards, thereby breaking the spell that kept him in the dream world.

Finally the psychiatrist decided to take direct action. He cast the spell that put him into his patient's weird dream world and found it just as his patient had described it. More important, for him, he discovered that the godling has a nemesis. Inspiration struck then: the psychiatrist figured that if he promoted the nemesis, used him to humiliate the godling, he might be able to help his patient regain his emotional stability.

"Luthorland was to be only the first part of the plan," Balloonda commented.

They were just passing a vent that let fresh air into one of the day rooms when Supergirl heard the robot anthem, "The Way We Whir". She looked through the grille over the vent and saw that the television was tuned to WHIZ's Morning Movie. They were showing "Bobocop" and they had come to the famous scene where Bobocop makes his first public appearance.

In the movie a mortally wounded policeman has been surgically implanted into a cybernetic clown costume that was created by Toshi Wookahada, the Japanese workaholic robot-maker. In the scene on the television a policewoman has accosted three punks, but has found that they intend to reverse the situation by moving apart so that she cannot keep all of them covered with her service revolver.

As the punks edged apart a small boxy car sped around the corner. Its lights flashed and its siren let out the "Whoo-woo-woo-woo!" that would soon become all too familiar to the scum and slime of the city's underworld. The car halted at the curb with a screech. A crank on one side whirled as a mechanism inside the car frantically plinked out "Pop Goes the Weasel". At the last note the top of the car flipped open and with a loud "Boing!" Bobocop bounced up out of the car and landed on the sidewalk, wobbling on his oversized shoes.

"Need backup, Thweetie?" he called out in a squeaky voice.

One of the punks chose that moment to make his move. Ducking to one side, out of the officer's line of fire, he reached into his jacket.

Bobocop was even faster. In a blur of motion, he whipped out a bouquet of rubber squirty flowers, squeezed the bulb, and sprayed the miscreant in the face with industrial-strength Liquid Tickle™.

The other two punks looked on in horror as their companion froze, a look of utter terror on his face. "Huh," the punk grunted. "Huh-unh!" He began to giggle. He tried to pull his gun from its shoulder holster, but he lost his grasp and the gun clattered on the sidewalk. The punk's giggles became guffaws, which became belly laughs that had the punk gasping for air. Unable to breathe, the punk slapped himself again and again, harder and harder, desperately trying to stop laughing. He punched himself in the face with the back of his fists, but only succeeded in giving himself a bloody nose. In a moment it was over. Deprived of air, the punk passed out and lay chortling unconscious on the sidewalk.

Bobocop brandished his bouquet at the other punks. "Go ahead, thcumbagth," he squeaked, "try thomething funny!"

Balloonda nudged Supergirl, prompting her to move on as she continued her narration. Having ascertained that the dwarf had no connection to Luthor's gang but having discovered that he could work magic, Balloonda had decided to pursue a new line of endeavor: she could go after Luthor later. So she asked the dwarf about his magic and found that it was limited only by his imagination... or hers if she were controlling him. That thought pleased her. But then she asked the Caveat and Proviso questions and discovered that anything the dwarf created ex nihilo would vanish and anything he transformed would regain its original form when he went back to his own world, as he would inevitably do sooner or later. Those things would exist only in memory or, possibly, in photographs.

Her first thought was to command the dwarf to create a large amount of cash that she could have her other slaves deposit into their bank accounts. Once the cash had been credited to the accounts and dispersed throughout the banking system its disappearance wouldn't affect those accounts. But Balloonda had learned early the value of following first thoughts with second, third, and even fourth thoughts. In this case she saw that the amount of cash that she would need to make the plan worthwhile would cause a major crisis in the banking industry when it vanished and the amounts that her minions would have to deposit would bring them under suspicion. She had also learned that one of the locks that protected her survival was that of ensuring that nothing overly exciting happened near her, nothing that would draw undue attention of the authorities into her vicinity, so she discarded that plan.

She had a glimmering of an idea, wanted time to work it out in more detail, so she commanded the dwarf to meet her at her home that evening and then left. For the rest of the day she plotted and schemed. Her slaves would get phone calls from her and would bring her the information that she wanted. By the time the dwarf popped out of thin air in her living room she was ready. She gave the dwarf her complete catechism, as she had done earlier with the other people she had enslaved at Luthorland, and then got down to business.

She laid out her plan, asked the dwarf questions to ensure that he could do what she wanted, and modified her plan when he couldn't. He could carry out his own plan while working on hers and she felt that it would be an advantage to her to let him do so. When she was certain that everything was ready, she gave him a special set of commands. A large, thick book appeared on her coffee table. Balloonda called to her former classmate, who came into the room completely naked, carrying a nightie and her shower cap. The dwarf turned the nightie into plastic and the young woman put on her shower cap and came sexually aroused. The dwarf turned her into a living inflated plastic doll and then vanished.

Trembling all over, heart beating wildly, Balloonda told the woman to put on the plastic nightie. When she complied Balloonda took her first plastic prisoner to her bedroom and spent the entire night playing with her. The next day, exhausted, Balloonda stayed home, still playing with her new toy, as her plan seemed to come to life by itself.

An abandoned girls' school, slated for demolition, suddenly changed ownership. In various county buildings people knowledgeable in such matters were compelled to hunt down all of the documents pertaining to the building's condemnation (as an attractive nuisance, not for any structural flaws) and destroy them. Even before the title had been transferred to Balloonda's dummy corporation, gardeners and their tools appeared on the building's grounds and began removing the trash and weeds that had accumulated. Over succeeding days plants and other gardening supplies arrived from nurseries in the surrounding area and the gardeners used them in restoring and improving the school's landscaping; then, when the gardeners and their tools vanished, their work remained.

At the same time workers with tools appeared inside the school building and began to clean and strip the building for the construction crews to follow. Again, over a span of weeks, construction materials obtained from earthly sources arrived at the site: construction crews incorporated them into the building at an astounding rate and, again, when the workers and their tools vanished, their work remained. Further speeding things along, the building inspectors, those tortoise-like denizens of the civic bureaucracy, became desperately eager to carry out their inspections (no bribes required), to carry them out correctly (Balloonda, no fool, wanted her buildings up to code at the least), and to authorize the next stage of the construction.

Balloonda had also obtained exclusive use of the basement in the Lawn-Guyland Building and she obtained the office next to her clinic so that she could expand her operation just enough for what she had in mind. Almost overnight the basement became a wide, clear, well-lighted space connected to the clinic through a hidden stairway and a secret elevator. Electronic parts began to accumulate in the basement along with parts for the frame that would support the device that they were meant to become. Some parts had to be custom-made: although the companies that made them got paid, the people who made them had no memory of making them and the machines used to make them vanished, leaving only faint marks on factory floors.

While all of this activity was going on Balloonda was running her operation as she usually did and carefully photographing, page by page, the book that had appeared on her coffee table. She developed and printed the pictures herself, lest someone copy them or discern what she was up to. Over the course of several months she made several complete copies of the book and stashed them in secure locations, one of them being the safe in her clinic.

At last everything was ready for phase one of Balloonda's plan to come to a close. The girls' school had been rebuild as a special brothel and was already staffed by a minimum crew of enslaved petty criminals and several dozen prostitutes. The machine in the basement under the clinic was fully assembled and ready to be tested. In preparation for the special day Balloonda had taken red wrapping paper and cut and glued it in a large full apron, had let the air out of her special prisoner and stuffed her into an oversized purse, and called to have a special work of art delivered to her clinic.

In the basement with the dwarf Balloonda had turned on the machine, her new plastifier, and given it time to charge up to full readiness. She laid her paper apron on the transformer stage, adjusted the settings on the device, and pressed the trigger. She then went and found that the apron had been changed into skin-smooth plastic that draped limply over her hand.

"The very same apron I was wearing when I captured you," Balloonda commented to Supergirl. They had come to a door leading into another of Balloonda's hidden playrooms and Balloonda paused as she finished her narrative.

Balloonda had reinflated her plastic slavegirl and commanded the dwarf to reverse her transformation. The woman was restored to her flesh-and-blood form and Balloonda told her to stand on the transformer stage, bring herself to full sexual arousal, and to puff out her belly. As the woman complied, Balloonda adjusted the settings on the plastifier, using crosshairs on a television screen to designate the spot on the woman's neck where her valve would be, and then with a trembling hand pressed the trigger. She heard a loud whump and went around the control station to see what the machine had done.

Balloonda's erstwhile classmate had once again become an inflated plastic doll. But this time the transformation seemed to have removed the effect of the zombie gas. Seeing that she was standing naked in a strange environment, the woman panicked. She grabbed up Balloonda's new apron to cover herself and backed away from Balloonda, shaking her head. She tried to escape, but Balloonda cornered her easily. Offering gentle assurances, the newly empowered plastic witch picked up her squirming toy, hugged her, kissed her cheek, and then pushed a flanged straw into her valve to let the air out of her.

Satisfied, she turned to confront the dwarf. She commanded him to forget all that he had witnessed or done involving her, both directly and indirectly: he was to remember only his own project in this world. Then she told him to pronounce his name backward. He complied and a glittery, silvery fog reached out of nowhere, grabbed him, and yanked him out of this universe with a soft pop. The book that had appeared on Balloonda's coffee table, the book containing the instructions for building and operating the plastifier, vanished, but the photographic copy of it remained unchanged. Balloonda saw that nothing else had changed: her red apron was still plastic and her slavegirl was still a deflating doll.

One final test remained. Balloonda opened the six-foot tall cardboard box standing by the elevator. Inside stood an artwork made of construction paper stiffened by starch. It had the shape and sheen of an inflated plastic punching bag and on it the artist whom Balloonda had "hired" had produced a life-sized image of Supergirl standing with her hands behind her back, her wrists bound with a plastic raincoat tie that glowed green. Kneeling, Balloonda slid her hands under the sculpture and lifted it by the weight that held it upright. Carefully she carried it to and set it on the transformer stage of her plastifier. Again she adjusted the settings on the plastifier's controls and set the valve-placement crosshairs between the images of Supergirl's feet. When she pressed the trigger Balloonda heard a soft whump.

When she touched the sculpture she found that the stiff paper had become rubbery-soft, skin-smooth plastic. She lifted the bag off the transporter stage and set it on the floor to try it out. The bag bounced and wobbled gaily in response to her jabs and punches. Playing with her new toy, Balloonda laughed with delight. Phase one of her plan was successfully complete.

"So what is phase two?" Supergirl asked as Balloonda opened the door of the hidden playroom.

As she gently pushed Supergirl into the playroom, Balloonda said, "Eliminating all obstacles to the successful completion of phase three."

Opposite the door, Supergirl saw, a wide window allowed light from outside to fill the room. Shutters mounted on the building's outside wall ensured that all sight-lines from the room to the world beyond the building were blocked: from inside the room Supergirl could see only the building's opposite wing. Then she noticed the punching bags standing inflated in two rows, facing each other along the length of the room. On her left the bags bore the life-sized images of the members of the Justice League of America: Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, The Flash, The Martian Manhunter, and, last but definitely not least, Wonder Woman.

"Nothing against you," Balloonda said, embracing Supergirl from behind as she gazed up at the six-foot tall Amazon princess, "but I just can't wait to get on top of her in bed!"

Supergirl felt all quivery and warm inside. Princess Diana reminded her of no one so much as the Warrior Maiden of her fantasies. She understood that if she did not succeed in escaping from Balloonda, then sooner or later she would be alone with inflated plastic Wonder Woman. The thought of Wonder Woman mounting her and riding her to climax made Supergirl intensely aware of Balloonda's belly pressing into her back in rhythm with Balloonda's breathing.

Then, with a sigh, Balloonda released her and she was free to examine the row of punching bags that lined the opposite side of the playroom. Of course they depicted the members of the Junior Justice League. She saw herself depicted on one bag, her hands apparently bound behind her back. Robin and Batgirl were there, as were Aqualad and Kid Flash. Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman's teen-aged sister, was also depicted as a plastic toy.

"It'll take time," Balloonda said. "I like to move carefully. But in the not too distant future all of these so-called superheroes will be my plastic prisoners, my inflated toys."

"But the world needs us," Supergirl protested. "You need us!"

"For what?" Balloonda asked. "Fighting crime? It's been almost thirteen years since Superman first showed up in Metropolis and crime hasn't been reduced by any noticeable amount. In less than two years I have eliminated the worst kind of crime from the areas I control. I could have eliminated crime completely - and soon enough I will - but I didn't want to draw too much attention to the phenomenon. Nonetheless, I have done more for the people of Metropolis than this entire gang of costumed clowns." She indicated the punching bags with a sweep of her hand.

"How could you...?" Supergirl started to say but Balloonda interrupted her.

"Easily," Balloonda said. "In any neighborhood people generally know who the bad guys are. It wasn't too hard to lure them into my special, uh, gas chamber. They're all working for me now. And the real beauty of it is that if someone makes a mistake and I end up gassing a good person, no harm is done. I simply instruct that person to go on with their life as usual, and nothing's lost."

"Except their free will," Supergirl commented.

"Huh!" Balloonda snorted as she gave the Superman bag a quick jab. "For all the good it does them. Face it, most people are drones who lead drab little lives unenlightened by anything that requires the use of free will." She led Supergirl out of the playroom and closed the door. "They have their simple pleasures and count themselves happy. I don't take that away from them and I don't allow anyone else to take it either."

Following Balloonda through the hidden passages, Supergirl struggled to find the flaw in her argument. The plastic witch couldn't be right, could she?

In a few hours Balloonda completed her tour and brought Supergirl back to her bedroom. Seeing that she was running late, Balloonda quickly changed her clothes and hurried to attend to her business, leaving Supergirl to hang her Rubber Nun costume on fat hangers so that the steamy plastic would dry properly. Alone at last, Supergirl took off her vocalizer and her raincoat. She lifted Balloonda's raincoat off the gnome's penis, put it on, and sat in the inflated chair to play with it while imagining that she was Wonder Woman's plastic prisoner and sex slave.

She played with herself and Balloonda's raincoat until the clock showed a time in late afternoon, then she put Balloonda's raincoat back on the gnome's penis and put on her own raincoat and the vocalizer to await Balloonda's return. She didn't wait for long and now, once again, she was bouncing and wobbling as Balloonda's punching bag.

Balloonda hadn't punched Supergirl a dozen times when she took a step forward, put her hands on the sides of her thighs, and thrust her hips forward to bounce the hapless Girl of Plastic off her belly. For half a minute Supergirl submitted to being belly-bounced. As she bumped against and bounced off of Balloonda's naked body, she became aware of Balloonda's heavy breathing, the softness and warmth of her bare skin, its translucent, plastic sheen. That and seeing Balloonda standing more or less "at attention", as if submitting to being Supergirl's punching bag, got Supergirl hot again. Suddenly, as she bounced up, she flung her arms around Balloonda, hugged her, and kissed her.

Startled, Balloonda started to put her hands up to push Supergirl away. But feeling Supergirl squirming, rubbing warm plastic against her naked body, made her nipples swell and stiffen, made her clitoris grow and slide forward in its sheath, increased the sexual pressure inside her. So she kept her hands pressed against her thighs and allowed Supergirl to play with her. Though it felt like much longer, it actually took less than a minute for the pneumatic slavegirl to get Balloonda so hot that she could not stand still.

Gently Balloonda freed herself from Supergirl's embrace. Panting, she grabbed up the deflator and pushed it into the valve in Supergirl's rocking skirt. Then she practically ran to the bathroom to put on her shower cap and grab a towel. Coming back into the bedroom, she tossed the towel onto the bed and then took Supergirl into an embrace to pull her out of the deflating rocking skirt. With one hand she pulled down her now-damp panties and dropped them onto the floor.

"Oh, my hot punching bag!" she moaned into Supergirl's left ear. "I want you so much!"

Supergirl had already taken off her apron and tossed it onto the chair where it would be visible to Balloonda as she lay upon her prisoner. As Balloonda pulled her out of the rocking skirt, Supergirl put her hand up and stroked and rubbed Balloonda's breasts, hearing Balloonda gasp as she felt Balloonda's nipples swollen and stiff.

Panting heavily, half sobbing from the tension glowing hot within her, Balloonda put Supergirl down onto the towel and got on top of her. "My warm plastic Supergirl!" she sighed in a quavery voice as she slid her right thigh into Supergirl's crotch and spread her own legs to bring her clitoris down onto the soft, warm plastic of Supergirl's right thigh. She slid her arms around Supergirl's back, hugging her tightly, and kissed her passionately. "So perfectly inflated!" she whispered as she put her left cheek on Supergirl's and began rubbing her crotch up and down Supergirl's leg. She licked the valve stem protruding from Supergirl's neck and Supergirl's squirming boosted her libido almost to climax.

And Supergirl did squirm...desperately. She had been cocky about provoking Balloonda's lust, but when she saw Balloonda's naked body looming over her, saw Balloonda's face framed by the warm, translucent halo of her shower cap, and heard Balloonda gloating over her, she felt a thrill of anxiety shudder her whole being. The rubbery warmth of Balloonda's thigh in her crotch and of Balloonda's breasts spread across her chest transformed that anxiety into quivering sexual desire. When Balloonda licked her valve she almost climaxed. She squirmed and writhed, not in an effort to escape, but striving for even more intimate contact with her captress.

It ended too soon. Stimulated by Supergirl's helplessness, her softness and warmth, by the bounciness of her inflated body and the smoothness of her plastic skin, by her pretty face framed by the transparent-blue halo of her shower cap, Balloonda's libido quickly became unstable. Thinking of how lightly, how gaily, how submissively Supergirl had bounced for her as her punching bag, Balloonda felt a tickling in her clitoris as is slid up Supergirl's leg and then she jerked and convulsed in climax.

Balloonda's spasms detonated Supergirl's own climax. She bucked and heaved under her mistress, striving to keep pushing her throbbing clitoris against Balloonda's hot rubbery thigh. The sound of Balloonda's desperate grunts and the feel of Balloonda's hot breath on her neck and valve kept her own climax going, kept her hot libido pulsating within her. And then it ran out.

Balloonda stopped moving. "My plastic sex prisoner," she gasped. Then she went limp and lay panting on her toy.

That night Balloonda allowed Supergirl to wear her vocalizer to bed. Indeed, she insisted on it. Supergirl discovered that the sounds of her moans, squeals, and grunts intensified Balloonda's arousal and that, in turn, got her all the hotter. When they were done, Balloonda was too exhausted to move: she simply lay on Supergirl panting. After a time she got her breath under control and quietly told Supergirl about her love of plastic.

Even when she was a little girl Balloonda had known that seeing people wearing plastic raincoats made her feel funny in her crotch and her breasts, made her feel quivery inside. She came to love rainy days, when she could see people, especially girls and women, wearing their raincoats and inspiring her fantasies. Plastic aprons had much the same effect upon her and on rare occasions when she was alone in the house she would put on her mother's apron and lovingly stroke its plastic. It all seemed innocent enough, though she was careful not to let anyone know about it.

It was inflatable plastic toys, though, that did the most to shape her desire, especially the punching bags with their images of jolly clowns and superheroes eager to be bopped. Pool floats, meant to be laid upon or sat upon by nearly naked people, reinforced the sexual meaning of plastic for her. She once saw a boy put an air mattress into the water of a swimming pool and lay himself on top of it and she thought of a groom taking his bride to bed. But punching bags, with their not-so-subtle implication of people turned into helpless inflated plastic dolls, inspired her. Like tomatoes in a hothouse, fantasies grew from the vine of her plastified lust.

She had discovered the joy of masturbation when she was fourteen and she had developed a ritual. In the bathroom at night taking off her clothes and putting on her shower cap made her feel "bridal": the sensation of wearing her shower cap made her feel as though she were someone's plastic prisoner and that feeling got her hot. In the shower she would masturbate over one of her fantasies, the sound of the water covering her poorly suppressed grunts and moans. Of course, it made her terribly self-conscious in her high school gym class when she had to shower with a group of naked girls wearing their pretty plastic shower caps (she had worn a rubber bathing cap to avoid stimulating herself), but that only nurtured her lesbian tendencies and their bondage and discipline expression.

One day she worked up the inner strength to suppress her self-consciousness, went into a toy store, and bought a Wonder Woman punching bag for herself. At home she hid the box containing the deflated punching bag in a drawer and waited for a day when she would be home alone. When that day came she took her deflated toy to the bathroom, took off all of her clothes, and put on her shower cap. She was trembling all over as she knelt on the rug to inflate the bag. As she blew into the valve and watched the bag fill with air, plump up, and then rise like a boy's penis coming erect, teen-aged Maude Seintesse went into her reverie:

<<She had been captured by Amazons, taken to Paradise Island, and put naked into a cage to be fattened up. After several days in the cage, she was soft and plump and ready for what her captors had in mind. They took her from the cage, made her put on her shower cap, and used their magic to turn her into a living inflated plastic doll. They played with her for a time, tossing her around like a beach ball. Then they made her put on a Greek slavegirl dress made of rubbery-soft, skin-smooth, translucent-white plastic that had a dark-blue frieze pattern at the hem and put her onto the auction block.>>

She had the bag blown full and bouncy firm and she gazed up at the nearly life-sized image of Wonder Woman looming over her. Strange thrills shot through her as she imagined the big Amazon buying her at auction. She spread her legs and pulled the bag into her crotch, then embraced it and began rubbing herself against it, feeling her nipples swell up and get especially hard as they rubbed against the bag's soft, smooth, now body-warm plastic.

<<Wonder Woman took her new blow-up slavegirl to her private bungalow and informed the hapless doll that she was to be the Amazon's maid. As Wonder Woman explained her duties, Maude noticed her transparent-red plastic raincoat and yearned to touch it, saw her plastic apron patterned after her Wonder Woman costume and longed to wear it, and had her attention drawn to the big woman's shower cap by the fact that she had taken off all of her clothes and was putting it on. Raven hair puffed out the transparent dark-blue plastic with its tiara pattern of red and gold starbursts. "Now," Wonder Woman said as she gave Maude a gentle push toward her bedroom, "I want to test you in bed." A strange warmth filled Maude as she walked toward the bedroom and felt herself to be Wonder Woman's plastic bride.>>

Her clitoris slid far enough out of its sheath to poke into the punching bag's plastic and she climaxed long and hard, shoving her clitoris into the plastic, feeling it slide up and down on it, over and over again. She kept at it until her libido was exhausted and she was left hugging the bag, half sobbing and half panting. After a time she took the bag into the shower with her to rinse her crotch slobber off it. She gazed into Wonder Woman's eyes, took the bag into her arms, and kissed Wonder Woman's image on the lips. She masturbated again, then she got out of the shower and dried herself and the bag. She let the air out of the bag (and started getting hot over the image of deflating Wonder Woman herself), folded it up, and put it back into her drawer to await the next opportunity to play with it.

It wasn't simply a monologue. Supergirl also described her own lust for plastic. She told Balloonda how, early in life, she too had discovered that seeing plastic made her feel pressure and warmth increase in her crotch and her nipples and how that made her feel strangely quivery inside. She talked about how she loved wearing her shower cap and how much she enjoyed seeing other girls wearing theirs: indeed, she had even fallen in love with one girl because she enjoyed her shower cap in the same way. Because it never rained in Argo City when she lived there, Supergirl told Balloonda, she did not become aware of plastic raincoats until she was in her pre-teens and just entering puberty, which made the discovery all the more potent when she happened upon a picture set showing a rainy day on Krypton prior to the explosion that destroyed the planet. But when she saw those pictures of people wearing their plastic raincoats, raincloaks, and raincapes, it was lust at first sight and after that she would often go to the Archive to look up more rainy-day pictures. And then there were the Warrior Maiden punching bags that girls and women used in their work-out routines. Supergirl told Balloonda about the first time she had masturbated on hers, in the near-weightless environment of her bedroom.

Slowly the pillow talk faded out. Balloonda slid herself off of Supergirl and then rolled over onto her back, spreading her legs so that her feet would lie flat under the blankets. But talking about plastic had gotten Supergirl hot again, so she rolled over to her right and mounted Balloonda.

"Nn...don't," Balloonda protested sleepily.

Supergirl silenced her with a kiss. "Hush!" she whispered through the vocalizer. She ran her left hand over Balloonda's right breast and felt the nipple and aureole swell and stiffen, felt Balloonda's left nipple swell up against her own chest. "You're all mine now," she gloated as she pushed her left thigh into Balloonda's crotch. "My big, fat, plastic witch!" She felt Balloonda's clitoris kiss her thigh and she began sliding herself up and down on her hot, rubbery sex pillow. Soon she brought both of them to a squirming, grunting climax and when it was over they both sank deep into a dreamless sleep.

Commercial Break #4

We see Lois Lane standing in front of the Daily Planet building on a rainy day. She's standing under the awning that protects the building's entrance, but off to one side so that she's out of the pedestrian traffic and also out of the rain, which is coming down in a torrent. The sidewalk is crowded with people wearing a variety of plastic raincoats, raincloaks, and raincapes, in all the colors of the rainbow and more, many of them also displaying printed patterns on their plastic. The falling rain emits a soft roar punctuated by patting and spattering sounds. We hear the slishing sounds of cars going by on the wet street and the low murmur of people talking.

From a gray plastic pouch that hangs on her left hip from a belt Lois takes a wrap skirt made of soft, smooth, transparent-gray plastic and puts it on, sliding it under the pouch and bringing the magnetic strips in its waistband together on her right hip. She takes a gray hand towel from the pouch and tucks it into the front of the rainskirt's waistband. Then she takes from the pouch a waist-length cape made of the same transparent-gray plastic of the skirt, shakes it out, and puts it on, leaving the pixie-style hood draped across her shoulders.

Something seems to be drawing the collective attention of the lunch-hour crowd on the sidewalk and as Lois looks toward the focus of people's stares we follow her gaze and see teenaged Susie Tompkins walking through the rain. She has blue eyes, a light spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and has her shoulder-length auburn hair tied up in a pony tail. But what is drawing everyone's attention is the fact that she's wearing an ankle-length raincloak made of silk-soft, satin-smooth, transparent-blue plastic that displays a strange iridescence: the highlights dancing across the swirling plastic bring ghostly (we would say holographic - TdC) red-and-yellow Super-esses into and out of visibility. The cloak consists of an ankle-length cape with arm holes that extend from her shoulders to her waist, a pixie-style hood, and hip-length capelets in lieu of sleeves. The billowing of the plastic makes the flower patterns on her dress blur and then snap back into sharp focus as the faintly hazy film pulls away from the fabric and then slaps back against it. Added to the waxy highlights shifting across the cloak, it makes the plastic seem to radiate a strong feminine warmth. Susie has the hood snugged around her face by means of the hood's extended corners, which adhere to magnetic patches on opposite shoulders. As she walks she is clearly aware of the attention she is getting and is delighted by it.

"Susie!" Lois says, "is that Supergirl's raincloak?"

"Yes, it is," Susie says brightly. "She lent it to me so I could try it out. This Kandorian plastic is really neat!"

"Susie!" Lois says in a warning tone.

"Oh, Aunt Lois, really," Susie says. "I've outgrown all that fibbing I used to do. Besides, do you really think that I could sneak this away from Supergirl if she didn't want me to borrow it?"

"No, I suppose not," Lois says. "But where's your Stormette™ two-piece raincape?"

"Right here," Susie says, patting her left hip. "In its convenient carrying pouch hung on my belt."

At that moment the roar of the rain diminishes noticeably and people look toward the part of the sidewalk where the rain has ceased its fall just in time to see Supergirl drop lightly onto the concrete and duck under the awning as the rain resumes coming down with a roar.

"How did you do that?" Lois asks.

"As I came down into the clouds," Supergirl says, "I used my heat vision to evaporate the raindrops in a large bubble and then came down in the bubble. That doesn't work too well when I'm on the ground, though." As if noticing her for the first time, Supergirl looks Susie up and down and says, "I only meant for you to hold my raincloak. You didn't have to put it on."

"Susie!" Lois says in a voice full of disappointment.

"Well, she didn't say how to hold it," Susie says to Lois. More to Supergirl she says, "It's really a more efficient way to hold it, 'cause it leaves my hands free. Right"?

"Right," Supergirl says. "Well, since you're already cozy, lend me your raincape and I'll wear that."

"OK," Susie says. She pulls her arms through the arm holes of the raincloak and pulls the pieces of her raincape from the pouch on her left hip, slipping them through the raincloak's right arm hole and handing them to Supergirl. First comes the skirt, made of soft, smooth, transparent-pink plastic. "Make sure the magnetic patches are on your right hip," Susie says, "so the wind won't blow the skirt open and leave your legs to get soaked." Next she passes over the pink hand towel with a comment that it's for Supergirl to dry her hands after she handles something wet, such as a door handle. Then she hands Supergirl the raincape itself. Finally, as Supergirl puts up the hood of the raincape, Susie hands her the visor, whose bill is made of stiff, clear plastic. Supergirl takes it and puts it on over the raincape's hood.

At the same time Lois puts up her raincape's hood, takes a clear visor from her pouch, and puts it on over the hood. Then the three women step out into the rain, chatting gaily as they walk away from us.

The announcer says, sotto voce, "Stormette™ raincloaks and two-piece raincapes are available at Vinylhaven stores in Metropolis and throughout the Northeast."

On Wednesday, the third day of her captivity, Supergirl was to spend the day with Mary, her own plastic slavegirl (at least according to Balloonda). As pleasant at the thought was, she had no intention of using Mary as a toy. She did, however, want something from Mary.

She got out of bed and took off her vocalizer. Balloonda was half watching her as she went to her dresser for fresh underwear. Supergirl put on her raincoat and her new Supergirl apron, and then put the vocalizer back on, pulling her raincoat's hood up over the vocalizer's bonnet. Then she confronted Balloonda, who had put on culotte-style panties and a black plastic half slip.

"I need another vocalizer," she said, "for Mary."

Balloonda responded with a snort of derision. "You're supposed to talk to a slave, not with her," she said.

"That depends upon what we have to talk about," Supergirl said as she reached up with her left hand to gently stroke the curve of Balloonda's right breast. She saw Balloonda's aureoles bulge as her nipples swelled and heard Balloonda gasp.

"Yes, I see," Balloonda said as she gently, almost reluctantly, pushed Supergirl's hand away. "Very well," she said. She opened a drawer in her dresser, took out a vocalizer made of black plastic, and handed it to Supergirl.

"Thank you," Supergirl said as she accepted the device. Then she threw her arms around Balloonda and kissed her.

Breathing heavily, Balloonda returned the kiss and then pushed Supergirl away. She finished dressing herself and then took Supergirl to the parlor and locked her in with Mary.

Supergirl knew that she would be alone with Mary all day. Today, Balloonda had gloated, another component of Intergang was to become her personal property. Although she would not confront the mobsters herself - specially trained slaves would lure them into the trap and apply the zombie gas - she had to be present to ensure that the catechism was properly imprinted upon her new victims and that they became unalterably loyal and devoted to Balloonda Almighty. Thus Supergirl figured that she would have time to begin arranging her rescue and the freeing of Balloonda's prisoners.

At first Mary seemed confused when Supergirl handed her the vocalizer, but as Supergirl explained it, demonstrating with her own vocalizer, Mary took off her plastic chador, put on the vocalizer, and then put the chador back on over it.

"Oh, what a relief to talk again!" Mary said. "I missed you yesterday," she added.

"Yeah, Balloonda gave me the rest of the villain's gloating tour of the place," Supergirl said. "I think it's part of her contract with the Villains, Varlets, and Mad Scientists' Union."

Mary giggled at that and said, "Well, at least we'll be together today."

"Um, not exactly," Supergirl said slowly. "Balloonda's going to be gone all day, so I need to take this opportunity to set up something that will get us rescued."

"Oh, yeah, right," Mary said. She sounded disappointed. "I sorta forgot about that."

Supergirl took a step toward Mary, looked her in the eyes, and said, "Mary, please tell me that you don't really want to spend the rest of your life as a beach ball."

"Well, maybe if I was your beach ball,...," Mary said tentatively.

"Wha...what do you mean?" Supergirl asked in puzzlement.

"It...it's just that after we're rescued," Mary stammered, "we won't be able to.... I...I mean I'm kinda in love with you and I was sorta hoping that we might...." Her voice trailed off and she looked away from Supergirl as if in shame or embarrassment.

"Oh, my goodness!" Supergirl said. Gently she gripped Mary's biceps and turned Mary to face her. "Oh, Mary!" she said and then took her into an embrace, hugged her close, and kissed her. "You got me so hot when we first met, but I was afraid that you would be offended, so I didn't say anything." She felt Mary's hands slide around her and her arms hug her tight, felt Mary's lips pressed against hers, felt Mary squirming to rub her pneumatic body against hers, and trembled as she felt the hot pressure of libido grow within her.

"Oh, Supergirl!" Mary said in a tremulous whisper, as if afraid to believe in what she was hearing and feeling.

Supergirl broke off the kiss and pressed her left cheek against Mary's. "I have to wait awhile to make sure Balloonda doesn't come back for something she forgot," she said as she stroked Mary's left thigh with her right hand. "And I can't wait to have you on top of me."

Mary gasped. "You want me to...," she said in astonishment. "Oh, my goodness! Oh, my...oh, my dear Supergirl! Oh, I love you so much!" She kissed Supergirl passionately, then broke out of her embrace and took off her chador, tossing it onto an inflated sofa.

Supergirl had to take off her vocalizer first, then she took off her apron and her raincoat and tossed them onto Mary's chador. She put her vocalizer back on and went to lie down on the air mattress that Mary slept on, sliding her legs under the ultrasoft blanket. She turned over onto her back, watched Mary kneel down and crawl onto the air mattress next to her, and then pulled the blanket up over both of them. She felt body-warm plastic rub soft and smooth against her as Mary mounted her. And the thrill that shot through her when Mary's vocalizer bonnet pressed soft and warm against her cheek got her all the hotter.

Mary moaned as she laid herself out on Supergirl and felt warm naked plastic press against hers. Supergirl spread her legs in response and Mary slid her left thigh into Supergirl's crotch until she felt Supergirl's clitoris poke into it, felt Supergirl jerk and heard her gasp, and felt her own clitoris press into Supergirl's left thigh. "Oh, you're so sexy warm!" Mary sighed. She hugged Supergirl tight and pressed her clitoris even harder against Supergirl's left thigh.

Supergirl felt Mary's breasts press against her chest like a pair of hot balloons. She put her right hand onto Mary's left buttock to pull her thigh more tightly into her crotch and slid her left arm around Mary's back to hold her more tightly. She felt the heat and pressure in her libido growing and making her tremble inside. "Oh, Mary!" she moaned. She arched her back to press her belly more firmly against Mary's and squirmed in Mary's embrace. "My warm plastic Mary!" she said in a strained voice. She kissed Mary's cheek and then kissed the valve stem protruding from her neck.

Mary jerked and let out a yelp. With her knees braced against the air mattress and her arms wrapped around Supergirl, she began to rub her crotch up and down Supergirl's thigh while her own thigh rubbed Supergirl's crotch. She felt Supergirl writhe desperately in response, rolling the two of them from side to side under the blanket, and felt the heat and pressure inside her growing. Her consciousness was dissolving into the purely tactile sensations of the moment, yet a small part of it remained and felt astonishment that the mighty Supergirl was merely a soft inflated doll, hers to play with, and that realization only added to the heat that was melting her soul. "Oh, Supergirl!" she half sobbed over and over.

Supergirl was lost in her own passion storm. She was only aware of soft, warm plastic smooth against her skin - the air mattress on which she was lying and the hot young woman bouncing on top of her. She grunted with the effort as she strove to match Mary's motions and thereby augment the stimulation Mary was imposing on her and Mary responded. She was ready and so was Mary. "Get...me...pregnant!" she grunted.

Mary bucked, ramming her clitoris against Supergirl's thigh, slamming her thigh into Supergirl's crotch, as she went into the convulsions of her climax. She shuddered in great spasms and let out a long series of sobbing grunts.

At the same time Supergirl felt a tickling in her clitoris and then she popped her cork. She felt as if her libido was gushing out of her in great throbbing spurts of heat. She heard desperate, quavery squeals and was only dimly aware that she was producing them through her vocalizer.

And then it was over and a deep stillness filled the room. As if awakening from a sound sleep, Supergirl regained her awareness of her surroundings. She became aware of Mary lying on top of her, not as an undifferentiated source of softness and warmth, but as a specific person. In a slowly expanding wave her consciousness spread outward, taking in the blanket that covered her and Mary, the furniture in the room, the faint sounds coming through the ventilation grilles and from vibrations of the windows.

"Mary," she whispered after resting for several minutes, giving Mary an extra hug, "I need to get up."

"Mm, right," Mary said a little sleepily. Reluctantly she slid her arms out from under Supergirl's back and raised herself up onto her knees, letting the blanket slide down her back. She offered Supergirl her hand and then stood up, pulling Supergirl up with her. "You know," she said, "I'm almost sorry that you have to get us rescued."

"Yeah," Supergirl said as she put her head through the strap on her vocalizer and rested it on her shoulder, "well think about what's behind that 'almost'."

"I know," Mary said, "it's got to be done."

"OK," Supergirl said, "I don't want to make any noise, so I'll leave my raincoat and apron here. You can play with them if you like," she added as an afterthought.

"Thanks," Mary said. "I may just take you up on that. Shouldn't you leave your vocalizer here, too?"

"No," Supergirl said. "I'll just take off the bonnet so it won't make my thoughts audible. But I may need it. If I encounter someone, I'll have to hope they've been zombified and that they will obey my commands. Of course, I prefer not to meet anyone at all, but if I do, having my vocalizer at least gives me a chance to control the situation."

"Well, good luck!" Mary said and gave her a kiss.

"Thanks," Supergirl said. She went to the hidden door, found the pattern she needed, and danced her fingers over it. The door opened and, with a last glance and a wave at Mary, she went through it. She pressed the center panel on the opposite side and the door closed. As she climbed the stairs she pulled off her vocalizer bonnet and let it hang on her shoulder.

She trotted through the empty corridors and up and down stairs, reviewing her plan in her mind, looking for flaws. At intersections, stairwells, open doors, and other blind spots she paused to ensure that no one was present to see her.

Balloonda had gloated that her organization was approaching the size of a medium-sized corporation and that her plastic brothel doubled as corporate headquarters. And like any corporate headquarters, it had a busy mailroom. Supergirl had seen a team of women sorting mail coming in, most of it consisting of reports from Balloonda's growing army of zombies. In another part of the room she had seen large mailbags held open on racks, bags into which the outgoing mail was tossed. That mail consisted largely of letters bearing activation codes and commands to Balloonda's zombies throughout the region in and around Metropolis. Supergirl had seen that all she had to do was to get a letter into one of those bags and rescue would come in a few days. Aloud she had commented on how empty the room looked.

"We'll fill it up soon enough," Balloonda had said with a chuckle.

"As you take over the world?" Supergirl had commented.

Stifling out-loud laughter, Balloonda had broken in giggles, swept Supergirl into her arms, pulled her close, and went nose to nose with her. "You watch too many old movies, my dear," she had said. "What would I possibly do with the whole world? With all of its different cultures, places I've never even heard of and certainly don't care about? No, no, my pretty pneumatic love slave, I will take full control of the Greater Metropolis area and possibly the State of Hoosatonick. From that not-so-little queendom I can control all that I need to control. Anything else, I can influence and make go my way easily enough." She had given Supergirl a light kiss and then added, "I know how utterly hypocritical this sounds, but one of my goals is to push this country into realizing the Founders' promise of a society with freedom and equality for all of its citizens."

Supergirl had no doubts about Balloonda's ability and willingness to realize that dream, even if it meant zombifying several million people. She felt a strong temptation to let the woman succeed and simply enjoy being a rich woman's plastic sex toy. But then she thought of Mary and the other women, who likely didn't share her insouciance in this matter; thought of the times when she would want to do things impossible to an inflatable doll; and thought of the fact that Balloonda's plan would not permanently solve the problems it would suppress, simply because it didn't go to the roots of those problems.

She suddenly got the sense that her stroll was taking too long. Was she lost? Had she become so dependent on her x-ray vision that she simply couldn't find her way around a simple maze without it? She paused, went to one of the cells backing up to the passage, and peered through the ventilation grille to see whether she recognized the prisoner in the cell.

The young woman was trapped in a fully inflated rocking skirt made of smooth, clear plastic that looked like it might be Mylar™. She had a zaftig figure with large, well-rounded breasts that jutted from her chest and held out prominent nipples as if in invitation. Her wide blue eyes had gone wider in an expression of surprise and her well-formed lips were pursed as if her mouth were about to open in a startled "Oh!" Her blond hair, in its puffed-out style, had been tucked into a bouffant shower cap made of transparent pale-yellow plastic on which the outlines of roses had been printed in pink. She wore a ruffled, knee-length serving apron made of the same plastic on which the words "Miss January, 1965" had been printed, also in pink.

Supergirl recognized the woman as Lily-Ann E. Fanning, a photographer's model often associated with Epicurious Magazine. When she had first seen her she had been tempted to ask Balloonda how she knew that Lily-Ann was going to be Epicurious's Party Doll of the Month for next January, but then she had remembered that magazines typically need a nine-month lead time on articles and features: Miss Fanning already knew when she would be in the magazine and Balloonda certainly had no difficulty in getting the information from her before preparing her for her fate. "I had to fatten her up a bit to give her a properly pneumatic shape," Balloonda had commented. Now Balloonda was simply waiting for the magazine to hit the news-stands in December before putting the hapless Miss January on the auction block. Supergirl shuddered and ran on.

Soon she came to her destination, the secretarial supplies closet serving the second floor office where zombies' orders were typed up and mailed. Looking through the ventilation grille, she saw women working at their desks. A quick glance through the spyhole Balloonda used showed the supply closet to be unoccupied, so Supergirl quickly tapped out the code that made the hidden door open. Taking care not to give herself a paper cut (if such a thing were possible, given what Balloonda had said about her plastic being indestructible, but she didn't want to put it to the test), she took an envelope, a sheet of paper, a pen, and a cellophane-wrapped roll of stamps. Pausing only to close the door behind her, she ran all the way to Balloonda's bedroom.

She used Balloonda's dressing table as a desk. She started by addressing the envelope to C. J. Kent at 344 Clinton Street, Apartment 3-B, Metropolis, 38, Lenape-Hoking (if she had addressed it to the Daily Planet, it might have caught someone's attention). She put down the girls' school as the return address and then picked up the roll of stamps. Carefully she opened the cellophane on one side of the roll and then pulled out the stamps at the center of the roll until she could bend the last one enough to weaken the perforation and then tear the stamp off. She used a wad of wet toilet paper to moisten the stamp, stuck it onto the envelope, and then set a perfume bottle on it to help it adhere properly to the envelope. Then she nudged the remaining stamps back into the roll, folded the cellophane over, and pushed it into the hole in the center of the roll to hold it in place. Now no one would notice that a stamp had been taken.

She began her letter by drawing an elaborate border around the edge of the paper. An apparently meaningless pattern of dotted whorls and knotted loops, it was actually a distress call expressed in the Churdna-kiAshoa form of Kryptonese, the liturgical form of the language that she had been learning in Argo City as part of her training to become a priestess, the form that she had once shown her cousin. Then she filled in the blank part of the sheet with the standard form of a business letter and a message that complimented Mr. Kent on a report that he had never actually written on the Sisters of Rahav clinic and asking how he had come to choose that topic. She signed the letter Carrie Sorrel, folded it, and slipped it into the envelope. After moistening the glue on the flap, she closed the envelope and set several bottles on it to ensure a proper seal. Then she went to flush the wet toilet paper down the toilet and to wash her hands.

She picked up the letter, the pen, and the roll of stamps and left Balloonda's room through the closet. She returned the pen and the stamps to the supply closet, lest someone notice the shortage in the supplies, and then made her way to the mailroom. In this part of the building the rooms on the first floor were ventilated through the ceiling, so she was walking over the ventilation grilles. There were no screens over them, so she had to look through each one before she crossed it to make sure that no one was looking up and might see her. At last she came to the grille that was more or less above the outgoing-mail bags.

Looking through the grille, she saw that she would have to give the letter a flip as she dropped it through the slot so that it would go into the mailbag. She knelt down and contemplated the situation for a moment, then she slid the letter into one of the slots in the grille and gave it a slight flip. The letter spun as it dropped and it appeared to be headed straight for the bag, but then a puff of air hit it and it fell onto the rim of the bag and thence onto the floor as Supergirl looked on in horror. An electric bolt of fear shot through her. There was no way for her to go into the mailroom to retrieve the letter and if it were brought to Balloonda's attention, there was no doubt in Supergirl's mind that the witch would quickly figure out what it meant. While she stared through the grille and wracked her brain trying to think of some way to salvage the situation she saw a woman carrying a tray of mail approach the mailbag. The woman stooped down, picked up Supergirl's letter, and then, with barely a glance at it, dropped it into the mailbag and dumped her load of mail on top of it. Giddy with relief, Supergirl ran and danced back to the parlor to rejoin Mary.

Supergirl saw that Mary had put her plastic chador back on and was playing both sides of a game of Scrabble™. Her own raincoat and apron lay neatly folded on the inflated sofa. She took off her vocalizer, put them on, and then put her vocalizer back on, this time slipping the bonnet over her shower cap. "Who's winning?" she asked as she sat down opposite Mary.

"You are," Mary said, "but only by a couple of points. I think I can still defeat you."

"Uh huh," Supergirl grunted skeptically. "We'll just see about that."

So they got into the game and that's how Balloonda found them when she returned.

Balloonda took Supergirl straight to her bedroom and began undressing herself as soon as she had closed the door. Supergirl took off her vocalizer, her apron, and her raincoat, then hung the yoke of her apron back around her neck. She stepped into the rocking skirt and, as Balloonda inflated it, adjusted the skirt and her stance so that the plastic of the inner skirt would press firmly against her clitoris. When Balloonda had the skirt blown full, firm, and bouncy Supergirl tied her apron behind her back, pressed her hands against the sides of her thighs, and submitted to being Balloonda's punching bag.

Completely naked, Balloonda punched Supergirl vigorously, not in anger, but in sheer victorious delight. As Supergirl bobbed and reeled Balloond gloated, describing in almost lascivious detail how she had made another part of Intergang - a very important part at that - her personal property, how she had spent a long day supervising the zombie gassing and programming (as the operators of electronic computers would say) the gang's entire command structure and then extending her control down to the gang's soldiers, the common street thugs who carried out the bosses' orders. Now bouncing the once-mighty Supergirl off her fists was Balloonda's celebration and reward. In February, 1961, when her existence had been revealed to an astounded world, the Daily Planet had called Supergirl "The World's Greatest Superheroine" (and what did Wonder Woman think of that? - TdC) and now that super-powerful creature was Balloonda's helpless plastic prisoner, a fact that got Balloonda super-hot whenever she brought it vividly to mind by playing with her special toy.

Supergirl was also enjoying herself. Balloonda's punches didn't cause any pain; instead, each one gave Supergirl a jolt that thumped outward on every square inch of her skin and pressed her clitoris against the inside of the rocking skirt. With every blow her apron caressed her breasts and her belly. And her private humiliation in the bedroom of a very sexy woman was getting her hot. Not knowing what Balloonda was going to do to her filled her with a quivery anxiety that mimicked that of a sexual encounter. In addition, being forced into contact with plastic film freed her from any impulse to feel any residual shame over transferring her sexual desires onto it. She came to climax quickly, bucking and writhing against the firm embrace of the rocking skirt as she bounced for Balloonda.

And Balloonda, seeing Supergirl's motions as efforts to evade her punches, bopped the inflated young woman all the more vigorously. She felt her fists punch into pneumatic softness and felt Supergirl bounce away as lightly as a beach ball. She felt the smoothness and warmth of Supergirl's apron kissing her fists and she felt heat and tremulous pressure building up inside her. She took a step forward and allowed Supergirl to bounce up against her, then put her hands on Supergirl's shoulders and spread her legs, going into a semi-crouch as she did so. Breathing heavily, she pressed her clitoris against Supergirl's apron and began rubbing it up and down on the now-slick plastic.

With her hands pressed to her sides, Supergirl held her apron's skirt taut for Balloonda. She bowed her head and stared at Balloonda's breasts as Balloonda masturbated on her. Still hot herself, she pushed with her hips in time to Balloonda's rhythm to help Balloonda gain full arousal.

Balloonda gazed intently at Supergirl's shower cap and seemed to feel the heat radiating off her toy. Grunting with the exertion, she pushed her crotch repeatedly against her punching bag and felt Supergirl pushing back. The sight of Supergirl in a posture of abject submission tickled something in her subconscious mind and triggered a shuddering climax that had her uttering a series of desperate-sounding squeals that the prostitutes she had worked with called "singing Chinese opera". When it was over she hugged Supergirl and stood panting, Supergirl's apron still pressing hot into her crotch.

After a time Balloonda caught her breath. She stepped back and allowed Supergirl to tilt fully upright. She picked a hand towel up off her chair and used it to wipe her cunny-spoo off her thigh and crotch, then folded the towel over and wiped her wetness off of Supergirl's apron. Going to her bathroom, she tossed the towel into the dirty clothes hamper, washed up, and then returned to the bedroom to put on fresh clothing. Just before she left to go out to dinner she handed Supergirl a straw with a flange around its middle and told her that it was for deflating her rocking skirt.

As she heard the door close Supergirl reached behind her back. With the deflator in her right hand, she felt for the skirt's valve stem with her left hand and then used that hand to guide the deflator into the short tube that protected the valve itself. Warm air blew through the straw and Supergirl felt the skirt loosening its grip on her. A few minutes later she was able to pull herself out of the skirt. She left the deflator stuck in the valve so that the skirt would deflate completely.

She thought about playing with her apron, but then took it off and laid it onto the bed. She picked up Balloonda's black plastic half slip and contemplated it for a moment, but then tossed it onto Balloonda's bouncy plastic chair when she had a thought that made her tremble all over. She couldn't even bring herself to look at her inspiration, but bowed her head as she went to get it.

Inspired by the presence of the punching bag in the lock-me-tight on Balloonda's side of the bed, she devised a new sex fantasy to play with, one that she had avoided for years. The situation she was in seemed to weaken her inhibitions and thereby allow the forces of her id to run free. Long-suppressed thoughts and desires emerged into her consciousness and got her hot. Trembling all over, she opened the cage and dragged Balloonda's Wonder Woman punching bag out into the center of the room.

Almost four years earlier, when her existence had been revealed to an astounded world, she had been hailed as "The World's Greatest Superheroine". The twenty-year career of Wonder Woman seemed forgotten. True, Supergirl's Kryptonese superpowers made her the more powerful of the two, but greatness is not merely a matter of physical strength and the Amazon princess certainly had a legitimate claim to the title of Greatest Superheroine. Supergirl knew that Wonder Woman did not resent the fame and admiration that were heaped upon her, but the fact that she rejected the possibility of Princess Diana's resentment meant that part of her mind had considered it. Now that consideration grew into a sexual fantasy of Wonder Woman's revenge.

Confronting the punching bag bearing a life-sized image of Wonder Woman, Supergirl imagined that Balloonda had been defeated by a strike team of Amazon commandos from Paradise Island. Led by Wonder Woman, they had freed the other prisoners, reversing their transformations into plastic, while Wonder Woman had come to Balloonda's bedroom and let the air out of the helpless Girl of Plastic.

<<Wonder Woman re-inflated Supergirl in the sitting room of her private apartment in her mother's palace on Paradise Island. As she regained consciousness, Supergirl became aware of warm plastic pressed soft and smooth against the front of her body, felt it bulge against her belly as her captress inhaled more air to blow into her. She felt strong arms pressed across her back and understood that the person inflating her was holding her in lover's embrace as if kissing her neck. She felt the pressure inside her increase, felt a small amount of strength return to her, and pushed against her captress.

<<Released suddenly and standing naked, she saw that she was confronting Wonder Woman. The plastic that she had felt was of Diana's transparent-white raincoat, which she was wearing over a black satin camisole and half slip. Diana's large breasts bulged the plastic and the rubbery sheen dancing across the plastic with her every movement made the raincoat seem to radiate an especially feminine warmth. The Amazon princess was also wearing her shower cap, a bouffant beret-style cap made of transparent-white plastic, on which thin-line images of tropical flowers had been printed in green, red-orange, and purple, and to which an opaque-white rubber band had been attached as a headband (Supergirl had seen Diana fresh from her shower once and thus knew that Wonder Woman does not wear a Wonder Woman shower cap).

<<Wonder Woman turned Supergirl around and took the belt off her raincoat. She used the half-inch-wide doubled-plastic sash to tie Supergirl's hands behind her back. Then she forced Supergirl into a clear plastic rocking skirt. Kneeling before her prisoner, Princess Diana took the skirt's valve stem in her lips and blew air into the skirt. Supergirl felt soft, smooth plastic caress and embrace her legs, her buttocks, and her belly as Diana blew the skirt full and firm. Panting a bit, Wonder Woman stood to confront her new toy.

<<"I don't know about greatest," she said as she gave Supergirl a quick jab that tipped her over backward almost to the floor, "but you are certainly the world's bounciest superheroine!" Supergirl bounced back up and, with a swish of her raincoat, Wonder Woman punched her, producing a rubbery thump of her fist striking inflated-taut plastic and sending Supergirl down to the carpet. Again the Girl of Plastic bounced back up, only to be punched again. For several minutes Wonder Woman bopped her vigorously and then she paused to take off her raincoat and her camisole and toss them onto a chair before resuming her workout. Now Supergirl could see Wonder Woman's naked breasts bouncing and jiggling and she started to get hot.>>

In Balloonda's bedroom Supergirl belly-bounced the Wonder Woman punching bag, holding her hands at her sides as if she were helpless. She was too light to have much of an impact on the bag, but it was the rubbing of her belly and her thighs against what she thought of as Wonder Woman's plastic that excited her sexual arousal and drove her lust. After a time she embraced the bag and rubbed herself against it, rubbing her cheek on the plastic and kissing it.

<<Wonder Woman had deflated the rocking skirt and pulled Supergirl out of it. "Now I want to test you as an air mattress," the Amazon said as she untied Supergirl's hands. She pushed Supergirl toward her bedroom, closed the door behind her as they entered the room, and confronted her prisoner by the bed. "Kneel before me and pull down my slip!" she said.

<<Supergirl knelt down and slid her hands into the slip's waistband. She felt Wonder Woman's warmth in the satin and felt the rubbery smoothness of her skin rubbing on her hands as she pulled the slip down around Wonder Woman's ankles. She saw Wonder Woman's clitoris protruding a quarter inch from its sheath at the top of her vulva and trembled inside. She put her hands up in an almost defensive gesture, pressed them flat against the fronts of Wonder Woman's thighs, and saw the Amazon's clitoris swell and come out another quarter inch.

<<"Oh, you're good!" Wonder Woman said, breathing heavily. "Now let me get on top of you!" She picked Supergirl up and laid her on the bed and then crawled onto the bed to mount her.>>

Supergirl slid slowly down the front of the bag, spreading her legs as she came down into a kneeling position. Still embracing the bag, she pushed her spread-open vulva against the plastic and felt the quivery excitement of her sexual arousal intensify. She began rubbing her clitoris up and down on what she conceived as Wonder Woman's plastic skin.

<<Supergirl was overwhelmed. Wonder Woman was huge, hot, and heavy. Supergirl felt a big left arm on her back and a big right hand on her right buttock, holding her steady. She felt Wonder Woman's panting breath hot on the left side of her face and felt her lips caressing her cheek, her neck, and her valve stem, which made her nipples and clitoris stiffen and throb. She saw Wonder Woman's shower cap, filled with soft, raven-black hair, bobbing before her eyes, yearned to kiss it, only to have the warm plastic come down to kiss her face as Wonder Woman turned her head to rub her cheek against hers. She felt Wonder Woman's breasts spread soft and hot across her chest and felt her belly pressing rhythmically against hers in time with her breathing and her thrusting. She felt Wonder Woman's right thigh pressing hot and rubbery into her crotch, rubbing her labia and her clitoris, and felt Wonder Woman's clitoris rubbing like a thumb on her right thigh.

<<"I'm going to marry you," Wonder Woman panted into her ear. "You will be my hot plastic bride! I'll get you pregnant with my raincoat! And every night I'll fatten you up in bed!">>

Supergirl climaxed. She rammed her clitoris against soft, smooth plastic as she leaned into the inflated pushover, squeezing it and kneading it as she shuddered and jerked. The sensations of the punching bag and the images in her mind merged into one object of her super-desire and she drove herself into the most intimate contact of which she was capable. She seemed to melt into the image and pulsate with its heat. And then, like a storm ending, her passion cooled, calm returned, and with it consciousness.

By the time Balloonda returned Supergirl had put the punching bag back into the lock-me-tight and was once again wearing her raincoat, apron, and vocalizer, but not for long. After taking a quick shower, and still wearing her shower cap, Balloonda took Supergirl to bed. The overheated witch spent most of the night on top of her inflated maid. It was as if a lifetime of yearning were suddenly being fulfilled. Too hot to sleep, Balloonda took little naps between bouts of lust-pumping her toy.

And yet the next morning Balloonda bounded out of bed, eager to start the day and showing no signs of fatigue. Supergirl barely had time to drag herself out of bed and put on her raincoat, apron, and vocalizer before Balloonda hustled her into the parlor and locked her in with Mary for the day. At first Supergirl thought of writing and sending another letter, but then decided against it since she didn't know when Balloonda would be returning: she could wait a day or two for another opportunity, just in case her first letter got lost in the mail. So she and Mary spent the day playing together. Balloonda had left an electric air pump in the parlor with a deflator, so the two young women took turns getting into Mary's black plastic rocking skirt and each being the other's punching bag, though there was more hugging and kissing than punching and jabbing.

That night the previous night's activity caught up with Balloonda and knocked her out. She brought Supergirl from the parlor into her bedroom and went immediately to the bathroom. Supergirl took off her vocalizer, apron and raincoat and put on Balloonda's floral-print transparent-white plastic pantaloons, and transparent-black plastic negligee. But after a quick shower, Balloonda went straight to bed and immediately fell asleep, so tired that she didn't even bother to take off her shower cap. Supergirl tucked her in, then undressed herself and turned out the light. With only a moment's hesitation, she put on Balloonda's black plastic half slip, got into bed, and then, using Balloonda's shower cap for a pillow, spent an hour masturbating on the zonked out witch.

Commercial Break #5

We see a Japanese mansion surrounded by forested hills and we hear a koto and a Japanese flute playing softly in the background. The mansion sprawls across a rise above a wide grove of cherry trees clothed in the dark green leaves of summer. As we descend under the trees we see that they grow on small islands in a large swimming pool that consists of circular ponds connected by wide curving channels that are crossed by delicate arched bridges.

On the water we see air mattresses in several styles, in soft pastel shades of all the colors of the rainbow, made of both opaque and transparent plastic. Japanese girls wearing bikinis lie on the mattresses and lazily trail their hands in the water. The wet-skin sheen of the plastic may hint that the girls are plastic as well. We also see hourglass-shaped plastic balloons that other girls straddle at their waists and lie upon, using the broad ends as pillows.

On a path alongside the pool we see a beautiful woman in a pink kimono walking with a teen-aged girl wearing a cream-white kimono on which cherry blossom images have been embroidered. The woman wears a full apron made of soft, smooth, clear plastic, its full-length skirt wrapping completely around her as if to protect her kimono from being splashed. With delicate grace they walk onto a bridge and gaze out over the water under the shade of the trees. After a pause to woman recites the 5-7-5 pattern of the Haiku:

Air-filled plastic cloud

floats upon clear, cool water.

Pleasant summer day.

She is enveloped in a slow flood of light and turns into a transparent-pink plastic air mattress.

The girl tosses her into the water, quickly sheds her kimono to reveal that she is wearing only a bikini under it, and dives into the water. She grasps the air mattress, mounts it, then lies down on it to join the other girls floating lazily on the pool.

Over that scene we hear the announcer say, sotto voce, "Everplast™ air mattresses and pool pillows are available at Vinylhaven stores in Metropolis and throughout the Northeast."

Balloonda overslept the time she was supposed to get up the next morning. In her haste to compensate lost time and get herself back on schedule she forgot about Supergirl and left her in the bedroom. After a short time Supergirl got out of bed and took off Balloonda's half slip. Standing naked, she contemplated her opportunity. She felt all quivery inside as she gazed on Balloonda's transparent-red plastic raincoat hanging off the gnome's penis and felt her nipples and clitoris stiffen as she went over to it and took it down. She was trembling and felt weak as she put the raincoat on, luxuriating in the sensations of the silky-soft, skin-smooth plastic sliding over and caressing her bare skin and warming instantly at its touch. She put up the hood and stood for a long moment stroking the plastic on her breasts, her belly, and her thighs.

With the raincoat swishing around her and getting her even hotter, she went to the lock-me-tight on the left side of the bed, opened it, and took the Wonder Woman punching bag inside in an embrace to drag it out into the bedroom. Still hugging the bag and gazing on the form depicted on its soft, smooth, opaque-white plastic, she slid down into a kneeling position, spreading her legs as she did so in order to pull the bag into her crotch. Then she brought to mind her new fantasy, the one in which she is Wonder Woman's bedtime slavegirl, and rubbed herself on the bag until she climaxed.

For several hours she played with Balloonda's raincoat and punching bag, using her favorite fantasies to heat up and pressurize her libido as if she were the boiler of some strange psychological steam engine. Between bouts with the punching bag Supergirl lounged in Balloonda's inflated chair and thought about what had to be done once she was rescued. It was while she was lounging in the chair resting from her latest sexertion that she noticed the drapes over the window lit up by a bright flash of green light. She was sure it wasn't supposed to rain: Balloonda would have come back for her raincoat if that were the case. So it couldn't have been lightning. Then understanding dawned.

Moving quickly, Supergirl took off Balloonda's raincoat and tossed it onto the bed, then put on Balloonda's bathrobe-with-raincoat and her vocalizer. She had just slipped the vocalizer's bonnet over her shower cap when she saw tendrils of green light slither under the door and flitter about the room. The tendrils withdrew, the door opened, and Superman walked in accompanied by a masked man wearing a green-and-black uniform. Emblazoned across the man's chest, like Superman's ess-on-a-shield, a white disc displayed in green what looked like a cartoonish parody of a railroad brakeman's lantern. Like a genie of Arab folklore, a green wraith flickered around the ring the man wore on his right hand.

"Hi, guys!" Supergirl said gaily. "Welcome to Plasticland!"

"Yeah, thanks," Superman said a little uncertainly.

"Man, I've been in some really weird places before now," Green Lantern said, "but this one takes first prize!"

"I'm guessing that you don't have your own clothes with you," Superman said to Supergirl.

"Oh, I'm sure they're around here somewhere," Supergirl said. "I just haven't had time to look for them."

Like a charge of ball lightning, a baseball-sized blob of green light came off Green Lantern's ring, circled the room once, and dove through a wall.

A moment later Balloonda came into the room. She had her arms held down at her sides and she seemed dazed. Then Supergirl saw the shimmering golden rope that encircled Balloonda at her waist as if holding her arms down. Seeming to be as much snake as rope, the golden lasso wriggled as Balloonda led the rope's owner into the room. Supergirl saw that Wonder Woman was wearing a clear plastic mask that covered her nose and mouth. Transparent plastic tubes led from the mask over the Amazon princess's shoulders and into a turtle-shaped tank strapped onto her back. Wonder Woman was clearly using her glass airplane's high-altitude breathing system to protect herself from the zombie gas and had subjected Balloonda to a zombifier of her own.

"The building's clear of zombie gas and there are no booby traps," Green Lantern said to her.

Wonder Woman responded with a nod and then pulled her mask off and let it dangle between her breasts. Still holding her golden lasso, she came over to Supergirl and gave Supergirl's left bicep a tentative squeeze.

"Great Hera, I still do not believe it!" she exclaimed in Greek-accented English (like Supergirl, when in costume, Wonder Woman speaks English in the accent of her native language, the better to protect her secret identity - TdC). She rested a hand on Balloonda's shoulder and said, "Tell me truly! What is the most expedient way to change Supergirl back into her proper form?"

"There's a plastifier in the basement of this building," Balloonda said. "We can use it to reverse her transformation."

Just then a green platter floated into the room through the open door. Supergirl's costume lay neatly folded on it and her boots lay on top of her costume. As Supergirl picked her clothes up off the platter, the platter faded and vanished.

"OK, let's go," Wonder Woman said and she led the group out of the bedroom. They paused in the hall just long enough to free Mary from the parlor. Mary gave Supergirl a hug and then hugged Wonder Woman, thanking her for coming to the rescue, and then turned to Superman and Green Lantern.

"Aw, gee forces!" Green Lantern exclaimed when he noticed that Mary was wearing nothing but what looked to him like a transparent-black plastic caftan. Suddenly he and Superman took an intense interest in examining the ceiling.

"You know, we really ought to finish checking out the building," Superman said.

"I agree," Green Lantern said. "We need to be sure that this place is properly secured."

After offering polite farewells the two men went down the hall in what they hoped was not an obvious unseemly haste.

"Huh!" Wonder Woman said. "You would think that they had never seen a naked woman before now."

"We're just trying to be polite," Superman's disembodied voice said from somewhere to her right.

"And we appreciate it," Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Mary said more or less in unison.

With Wonder Woman leading the way, the four women went to the nearest elevator and took it to the first floor. Under the compulsion of Wonder Woman's golden lasso, Balloonda led the party to the inevitable hidden door that opened into another elevator, one that took them to the basement where Balloonda had her second plastifier set up. Seeing it for the first time, Wonder Woman gasped in astonishment. Then she commanded Balloonda to work the controls to restore Supergirl's proper form.

Supergirl put her clothes on the chair in front of the machine's focal stage, then took off her vocalizer and Balloonda's bathrobe, dropping them onto the chair as well. She allowed Mary to give her a hug, then she stepped onto the stage and waited. She heard Balloonda give the countdown and then felt a jolt like the ones she had felt when Balloonda used her for a punching bag.

The silence in the room filled with sound that swelled to a cacophony that faded away as her mind sorted the component sounds and tuned them out. The room seemed to brighten as she began to see heat and the small amount of ultraviolet coming from the plastifier in addition to visible light. That, too, faded away as her supervision adjusted to give her a normal view of the world. Strength flowed into her in a might torrent that her body's growing invulnerability barely contained. She heard every radio and television station in the Metropolis area until, again, her mind tuned them out. And as all of the sensations of superpower flooded into her she wondered whether she would still be a helpless zombie.

When first captured, she had been unable to move without being commanded to do so. For a moment she stood and was afraid that she had failed to regain her free will. Then she reached up, took off her shower cap, and shook out her hair. She stepped off the stage and put her costume back on, folding up the shower cap and putting it into the pouch behind the emblem on her cape. Then she levitated herself up to the ceiling, came down slowly to land in front of Mary, and spread her hands.

"Perfect!" she said, more to Wonder Woman. "I don't feel any aftereffects." She gently poked Mary in the chest. "Now it's your turn."

"Yeah,... I... um," Mary stammered. "I... listen. I... I don't know about this. I mean I'd... I'd rather be a balloon than a zombie." She looked into Supergirl's eyes. "If... if this doesn't work, promise you'll change me back." She started to cry. "Please."

Supergirl looked to Wonder Woman and said, "Yes."

"Well, then, yes," Wonder Woman said, "but we believe that we can do better than that. We want to make you both solid and free."

Slowly Mary took off her chador and vocalizer, dropping them onto the chair, and then went to stand on the focal stage. Again Balloonda counted down the time and at "zero!" a soft whump echoed in the room. For ten long seconds Supergirl and Wonder Woman watched Mary, but Mary did not move.

Supergirl picked up Balloonda's bathrobe, went to the stage, and put it on Mary. Tenderly she picked Mary up and carried her to the chair. She sat her down, took off her shower cap, and laid it on the left armrest.

"I think we are now ready for Mister Greenbeam," Wonder Woman said.

Supergirl stared up at the ceiling and watched as, floor by floor, the building went transparent for her. She found Green Lantern and, using the weird ability that people called super-ventriloquism, teleported her voice to his location. As the women waited and tears ran down Mary's cheeks, Supergirl stroked her shoulder and tried to reassure her.

Soon Green Lantern came into the room accompanied by Superman and a heavily-muscled man with hairless green skin and a Neandertal brow. That third man wore blue shorts with a red belt, from which belt two inch-wide red straps rose to cross over his chest and back. A blue cape was attached to the straps where they went over his shoulders. Where the straps crossed each other on his chest they went through a medallion whose intricate embossed pattern would tell anyone who could read Martian Hydroglyphs that Dzh'onn Dzh'onzz was a b'Ziggdoth, an anti-entropist of the Canal Mucking Priesthood. The three men paused to gaze in astonishment at the plastifier and then Green Lantern strode over to where Supergirl stood.

He took up a position about six feet in front of Mary, clenched his right hand into a fist, and held it out toward Mary. A stream of luminous green transparency gushed from his ring, struck Mary in the chest, and soaked into her.

"The powerbeam analyzed the zombie gas that we found in Balloonda's laboratory," he said. "It turns out that the zombigen molecule is really flimsy. In air it lasts only a few seconds, but once it gets absorbed into the body and the nervous system it becomes perfectly stable. However, if we force it to react with hydrogen, which the power beam is doing by pulling hydrogen atoms off water molecules in her body, it breaks up. The by-products are benign, so her natural body functions will remove them safely. I just have to take care not to do this too fast, lest the process generate heat faster than her blood can remove it." A moment later the beam vanished and he put his hand down.

Mary sniffled and then reached up to wipe the tears off her cheeks. She leaned forward in the chair and used the chair's bounciness to help her stand up. Then she leaped at Green Lantern, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed his cheek. "Oh, thank you!" she cried. "Thank you so much!"

Startled, Green Lantern said, "You're welcome." Then he added, "I'm happy to do it."

Mary hugged and kissed Supergirl next and then Wonder Woman. Filled with an almost orgasmic delight at regaining her freedom, she hugged and kissed Superman and the Martian Manhunter. Then she went back to Wonder Woman and pointed to Balloonda. "Now," she said, "can we turn her into plastic so that she can be our punching bag for awhile? It seems only fair."

"Fair, yes," Wonder Woman said, "but allowed, no."

"We could get our superhero licenses revoked," Supergirl added, though she cast a brief wistful look in Balloonda's direction.

"Oh," Mary said and then gave Supergirl a quizzical look.

So the Justice League of America and its junior counterpart gained a spiffy new headquarters. There were things that needed to be done, but with their astounding abilities the members of both groups got them done.

Somewhere out west the Ferris Aircraft Company's lead test pilot, Hal Jordan, took several weeks of accumulated vacation time and simply disappeared. In Central City, police chemist Barry Allen did the same. In Middleton, Colorado, police detective John Jones went undercover and was not expected to be seen for a month or so. At the Pentagon, Air Force Lt. Diana Prince applied for and received several weeks of leave. Clark Kent had already been assigned to the disappearing prostitutes story, so no one noticed that he appeared rarely in the offices of the Daily Planet for a time. In Gotham City, wealthy playboy Bruce Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson, answered to no employer, so they were free to disappear for a time. And Linda Danvers was presumed to be visiting her foster parents in Midvale, so her absence from Stanhope College caused no concern.

At first they were busy freeing Balloonda's prisoners, using the plastifier to reverse their transformations into inflatable dolls and then using Green Lantern's powerbeam to destroy the zombigen in their bodies. Green Lantern also freed those who had been zombified but not plastified. Of course it wasn't as easy as that simple statement implies: these kinds of things never are. Even though they made full use of Balloonda's own organization in the effort, they got snagged on certain complications.

The first complication came from the plastified pimps. Terrified by the prospect of the utter humiliation that would dog them for the rest of their lives, they begged and pleaded not to be changed back, even vowing to commit suicide if they were not allowed to remain inflated in the "Balloonda Hotel". After some discussion, and more than a little argument, the superheroes decided that it would be best for all concerned if the pimps were allowed to keep their present form and stay in the building.

One of the pimps then tried to convince Wonder Woman that he would make a good punching bag for her and perhaps some of her friends from Paradise Island to play with. She thanked him and then turned away so that he wouldn't see her rolling her eyes. "It should not surprise us," she commented to her companions later, "that those who would enslave others make good slaves themselves."

Balloonda's special punching bag, Raney Daye, also elected to remain as a "plastic prisoner of the JLA", which offer was accepted with a collective heavy sigh from the members of the aforementioned JLA.

The second snag that slowed their progress was the fact that in capturing Balloonda they had come into possession of most of the largest and deadliest criminal enterprise in the Northeast. "By Athena's wisdom!" Wonder Woman cried out when the problem became manifest, "how do we solve this?!"

"What's to solve?" Batman asked, spreading his hands in a shrug as he looked at the other JLA and Jr. JLA members gathered around the table in Balloonda's conference room. "We've got an impressive number of the worst scumbags in Metropolis acting like law-abiding citizens. Isn't that what we want?"

"Superficially, yes," Superman said. "But I don't think that turning crooks into puppets helps us to achieve our ultimate goal of cultivating a crime-free civilization."

"Their victims might disagree," The Flash commented.

"With all due compassion for the victims," Green Lantern said, "and that, after all, is why we're out there, I have to agree with Superman. Turning crooks into zombies doesn't address the underlying problem. It's like redecorating a dilapidated house: it sure looks good, but the timbers are still rotten."

"We must achieve a balance," Dzh'onn Dzh'onzz said, "between suppressing the evil and healing the mental retardation that it expresses."

"So what will we do?" Robin asked.

"I have an idea," Batman said.

It was actually a very elegant idea. It still needed some discussion and refinement, but the JLA enacted it pretty much as Batman proposed it. They brought members of different gangs together in groups and allowed the Metropolis police to interrogate them. Then, and only then, did Green Lantern use his powerbeam to free them from the zombigen. Soon after the men were released they and their families disappeared. They left Metropolis in a great criminal exodus, spreading out around the country, taking on new identities, and striving to become invisible. They ended up becoming law-abiding, hard-working citizens, inspired by a simple nightmare that had been planted into their minds as a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion:

An Intergang mole in the police department would have witnessed the interrogations and then reported to the Big Boss.

"So did any of the boys sing?" Big Boss would have asked.

"Aw, Jeez!" the mole would have replied, "It was like bein' at the fuckin' opera!"

With the information that they obtained from the interrogations the Metropolis Police, the Lenape-Hoking State Police, and the FBI were able to mount a withering offensive against the remnant of Intergang and within a few months the vile thing crumbled and was washed away as its key members and more were sent off to prison. Metropolis became a safer and happier place.

Then they came to the third snag, the one that tied them in moral knots. It came up when Wonder Woman simply uttered "uh oh!" as she stared at the conference table. When asked to elaborate she simply asked, "Is this the unavoidable sin that dooms the world?", referring to the mythology of the Norse people.

The others saw it at once. They didn't dare let Balloonda spread her knowledge of the zombie gas throughout the criminal underworld, so they couldn't send her to jail, much less prison. They didn't even want to send her into the Phantom Zone with Krypton's worst criminals. Exiling her to an uninhabited planet with a squad of robots was not a good option either.

It was Supergirl who came up with the solution. So they gave Balloonda a choice - either be exiled to an alien planet or remain forever in the building as an inflated plastic doll. When Balloonda made the obvious choice, Supergirl and Wonder Woman executed the sentence.

Balloonda wore a Queen of France shower cap for her transformation. As she stood on the plastifier's focal stage the thought that she was about to become Wonder Woman's plastic prisoner got her so hot that she nearly climaxed before she was transformed. Wonder Woman was right about those who would enslave others, especially with regard to sexual slavery.

So Mary got to play with Balloonda after all. She spent a delightful afternoon punching the Rubber Nun (who was trapped in the rocking skirt that had been Mary's prison) and then playing with her in bed. She even went to work for the JLA as a secretary, living in the building and playing with Balloonda when the occasion arose. And sometimes she would get a visit from Supergirl, who would bring her special green plastic serving apron, the one that emits a faint green glow in the dark.

Once the problems had been solved, the JLA set about rebuilding the old girls' school into a headquarters suitable for a team of superheroes, but that's a story in itself.

Commercial Break #6

Our scene is a beach on some tropical island. In the distance we see an old-fashioned pirate ship riding at anchor and in the middle distance we see a rowboat pulled up onto the beach. To our left we see palm trees and before us we see six or seven young women dressed as pirates. Two of the women, holding shovels, stand waist deep in a pit they have dug and the wooden chest that they have unearthed sits on the edge of the pit. A woman who is obviously the pirate captain stands with one booted foot resting atop the pile of dirt dug from the pit and she is holding a cutlass. The first mate is using a whisk broom to brush dirt and sand off the chest as the other women stand and watch expectantly.

"Argh!" one of the women in the pit growls. "Diggin' buried treasure be dirty work!"

"Aye!" her companion agrees. "And we'll not be smellin' so sweet for tonight's boardin' party!"

"Hah!" the captain says. "A hot showerbath will do us all good... and leave us smellin' sweeter than a Tahiti luau!"

One of the women standing above the pit takes the bandana off her head and shakes out her hair. "But the water in the showerbath will scuttle me perm for sure and leave me lookin' like something dragged up from Davy Jones' locker."

The other pirates growl their agreement with a small chorus of "Aye!"

"Belay that talk!" the captain says. "For here be real treasure!"

The first mate opens the lid of the chest and we see that the chest is almost full of gold and silver coins with a pile of beret-style shower caps lying on top. They are made of transparent plastic in an array of tints and they have thin-line depictions of floral themes printed on the plastic in contrasting colors. The first mate picks one up and it hangs limply in her hand.

"Well, blow me down with a feather," one woman mutters.

"Aye," another says. "Pert and Pretty™ indeed, I say!"

We cut to the interior of the pirate ship. We see one or two portholes with lacy pink curtains and a row of shower stalls. Wooden doors on the stalls, with bathrobes and towels hanging from hooks on the outside, allow us to see the women only from the neck up. Wearing their new shower caps, the women are bathing and singing, to the tune of "Blow the Man Down":

Come all ye young women who sail on the sea,

singing weigh ho, bathe yourself clean.

If your perm you would save, then hearken to me,

and take your sweet time to bathe yourself clean.

A good shower cap your companion must be,

singing weigh ho, bathe yourself clean.

And Pert and Pretty's™ the right one for me,

so take your sweet time and bathe yourself clean.

In the foreground we see the captain, wearing her shower cap and bathrobe, punching and jabbing an inflated plastic punching bag that bears the life-sized image of a plump sailor. The hapless man is wearing only cut-off trousers with a rope for a belt, he appears to have his hands tied behind his back, and he has a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression of shock on his face. The words "Blow Me Down" are printed on the plastic near the bag's base, partly obscuring the sailor's shins.

As the music fades we hear the announcer say, sotto voce, "Pert and Pretty™ shower caps are available at the notions counter in fine department stores and in Vinylhaven stores in Metropolis and throughout the Northeast."

Epilogue: Three Months Later

Near the end of October Supergirl floated lazily a mile above the Town of Stanhope, flying in a slow, wide circle and just enjoying a pleasant Saturday. Using her magnifying vision, she gazed down on the town and watched people going about their weekend business, preparing for the upcoming celebration of the festival of Halloween. The cold wind that ruffled her hair and fluttered her skirt and cape also made the leaves on the trees far below dance and quake. And the leaves themselves seemed to glow in every hue of red, yellow, and orange. Supergirl let out a sigh of contentment.

Her pleasure evaporated instantly when she heard from behind her an all-too-familiar, all-too-irritating voice say, "Hi there, Sweetie!"

In a fraction of a second she pitched up ninety degrees, executed a half pirouette, and stood on thinnest air with her fists on her hips. She glared at the imp floating nonchalantly in front of her.

"I am not your sweetie," she snarled.

"Oh, pish posh," the little man said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Merely a matter of time, my dear Supergirl, until my charms have worked their way through that invulnerable exterior of yours and melted your heart."

"What charms?" she said with a sneer. "You're nothing but a pest."

"Oh, no, no," he protested. "I'm really quite witty and...ah, so erudite."

They had drifted into the territory of a belligerent hawk and the crazy bird had begun to dive-bomb them, obliging them to jink from side to side to avoid its attacks.

"Am I what?" she asked sharply.

"No, not you," he said. "Me. I'm erudite."

"It sounded like you asking if I am tight," she said with more than a hint of menace in her voice.

"Oh, no," he said. "I would never ask such a thing. I merely said that I am erudite."

She gave him a skeptical look just as the hawk came down on another of its bombing runs. Suddenly the bird turned into a dictionary and Mxyzptlk snatched it out of the air. He opened the book and pointed.

"See?" he said. "It's a real word. It means pertaining to knowledge obtained by study or research. That's me." He tossed the book aside and it turned back into a hawk that flapped its wings frantically to flee the scene. "I'll show you," he said. "How is a fleet of bicycles like Baroque music?"

"Oh, I could never guess," she said in a dull voice. She rolled her eyes, sighed, and in a voice lacking all enthusiasm said, "OK, I give up. How is a fleet of bicycles like Baroque music?"

"They both have handlebars," he chortled and then broke up laughing. "Get it? Handel bars. Ho, that's a killer! Sometimes I just slay myself."

"One can only hope," she muttered through clenched teeth.

"You don't really mean that," he said with a hurt-puppy expression on his face.

"There's one simple way to find out," she said with a grin that displayed more than a hint of insanity.

"M...maybe some other time," he said.

"Aw, you're no fun," she said and started to turn away.

"No, that's not true," he protested. "Ask your cousin. He'll tell you. There's never a dull moment when I'm around."

"Sometimes dull moments are a good thing," she said. "Listen. We both know that this is going to happen anyway, so why don't you save us all a lot of wasted effort and say your name backward right now?"

"But I just got here," he said plaintively. "Do you really believe that I expended all the effort needed to get here just to turn around on go back?"

"Yes, I do," she said, "because we both know it's going to happen anyway."

"Now, you listen," he said. "Instead of trying to get rid of me, why don't you try to get to know me better? You'll find that I'm not really such a bad fellow."

"Hai-Shna'tyo!" she groaned as she rolled her eyes. Then she remembered the trap that she had set a month ago and let out a resigned sigh. "All right," she said. "Come with me." She fell over backward until she was descending at a forty-five degree angle and then executed a half roll so that she was flying more or less "right side up". She adjusted her course until she was flying toward a steep hill overlooking Stanhope. She saw Mxyzptlk flying alongside her in the same prone, arrow-in-flight pose.

"So," she asked, "what name are you using now?"

"The one my parents gave me," he said ruefully. "I don't remember exactly what Superman did to trick me last time, but I'm guessing that having a new name actually made it easier for him."

"Oh, indeed it did," she chortled.

"Well, you don't need to take such pleasure in my misfortune," he said. "Schadenfreude doesn't look good on you."

"Unh huh," she grunted noncommitally. "Say, did you know that my superpowers give me super-fine control over all parts of my body?"

"And your body deserves only the super-finest," he commented.

She gave him a look that made him blanch and, by reflex, move several feet away from her.

"Uh, no offense intended," he said.

"None taken," she forced herself to say. "Anyway, one of the things that superfine control lets me do is to mimic people's voices so accurately that even their closest relatives can't tell the difference." Rapidly approaching the ground, she executed a forward flip, exerted her thrust, and landed gently on her feet on top of a hill strewn with boulders left by the last glaciation of the area.

"Yes, that's...sort of interesting," he said as he came to a stop floating a foot and a half off the ground so that he could look her in the eye without craning his neck. "But what can you do with it?"

"I'll show you," she said, mimicking his voice. "Behold, I am the world-famous Mister Mxyzptlk, agent provocateur, suave raconteur, and sophisticated connoisseur!"

"Really?" he said, eyes wide with wonder. Then understanding dawned. "Oh. No, no, no," he said, wagging his finger at her. "It won't work. It has to be my actual voice. Nothing else will do it."

"Well, let's find out for sure," she said, still in his voice. She looked away, as if pausing to think, and sent a faint pulse of x-rays into the hollowed-out rock in which she had hidden a small, battery-powered tape recorder. Then she looked back at him and said, "Kil'tip-zey-skim!"

"There! You see?" he said, spreading his hands in a flourish. "I told...." He was brought up short by the sight of the air around him beginning to sparkle and glitter. "No!" he protested. "It...it's not possible. It has to be my voice, my actual voice." Pulsating tentacles of luminous silver fog emerged from thin air and wrapped around him, thickening rapidly into a throbbing little cloud. "It wasn't me! I didn't say my name backward!" he cried out as if appealing to The Gods Themselves. He looked at Supergirl with a mixture of awe and horror.

She smiled, held up her right hand, and waggled her fingers in the bye-bye gesture.

"Oh, fznrk!" he barked and then vanished with a soft pop.

With a chuckle Supergirl turned and shot another pulse of x-rays into the hollow rock to turn off the tape recorder. Sometime within the next ninety days she would have to move the device to a new location and test it, but for now she could simply enjoy a feeling of satisfaction at a job well done. It had been so simple to record him saying his name from a newsreel made the time he ran for mayor of Metropolis, form the tape into a loop, and load the loop into the tape recorder so that it would play backward. She stood for a moment in contemplation, then raised her arms over her head and rose into the sky to resume her lazy Saturday flight over Stanhope.

This fantasy was partly inspired by the "Mystery in Wax" episode of "The Adventures of Superman", first broadcast 1953 Jan 02. The owner of a wax museum predicts the disappearances of five of Metropolis's leading citizens and makes the predictions come true by kidnaping the men and keeping them in cages in the museum's basement. It was also partly inspired by the white-slavery theme of the 1967 movie "Thoroughly Modern Millie".

I also drew inspiration from the story "Super-Girl?" in Adventure Comics #404 (March 1971), in which Supergirl has lost her superpowers and the villainess Starfire uses her for a punching bag while her henchwomen watch. Having captured Supergirl, the women have her tied to a post in the basement of their hideout. Deciding to finish her off, Starfire stands over her and says, "Now, untie her - I think I'll have some fun with her!" As one woman comments, "I'm going to enjoy this!", Starfire throws Supergirl around like a rag doll. Though the appropriate reaction to that scene is horror and fear for the superheroine, I also felt a strong erotic component. And I suspect that I was not alone in that feeling. Is there anyone who grew up reading superhero comics who is not into Bondage and Discipline?

Anyone who had read even a few of these stories knows that the sexual perversion woven into them consists of a fetishist lust for plastic film (in the form of raincoats, aprons, shower caps, and inflatable toys) merged with Bondage and Discipline. Other fetishisms, such as those devoted to rubber or leather, also have a close connection with B&D. We don't have to think hard to discern the reason behind that connection.

A plastic raincoat, by itself, does not arouse a sexual response. It may inspire us to think about sex when we otherwise might not have done so, but the sight of it alone will not engage the full panoply of physiological reactions that comprise sexual passion. We need something more: we need something that will make our hearts beat faster, make our breathing come deeper and faster, make our muscles quiver, and make our penises or clitorises come erect. With the exception of the last item, those are the symptoms of anxiety and this is where B&D comes in.

Please note that, as our Lord and Master, Mr X, implies in his rules for acceptance of these stories, Bondage and Discipline is not merely a milder version of sado-masochism: S&M is a wholly different perversion. B&D does not focus upon pain and terror, as S&M does, but rather upon anxiety and embarrassment. Yeah, the superheroines in Mr. X's graphic stories don't show a lot of confidence and pride after they meet the villains, at least not until the end of the story when they turn the tables on their captors and prevail over them, as they must do in order to be available for the next story. Here, the anxiety and embarrassment are entirely vicarious, but effective nonetheless in driving a sexual arousal in someone of the right persuasion.

And there is the point. Think of this pornography as a kind of dog park for the id, a place where our baser instincts can run off the leash for a time. The removal of normal social controls in these stories allows us to explore the desires that we normally suppress. Across the span of nearly two and a half millennia Aristotle admonishes us, "Know thyself!" If these stories help us in that endeavor, help us to gain understanding, then, however frivolous they may seem, however offensive to some people, they have value.

The commercial advertisements accompanying this fantasy may look strange to anyone born after about 1960. Today you don't see the characters in TV shows acting out one-minute minidramas during their shows' commercial breaks: you may see the actors in some commercials, but they are not playing their characters. But in the first two decades of television broadcasting in this country every show had one or two regular sponsors (who basically owned the show) and in some cases it made perfect sense to write commercials around the characters. For example, in the 1950's one of the sponsors of "The Adventures of Superman" was Kellogg's™. One of their commercials had Clark Kent (played by George Reeves) standing in front of Perry White's house and hearing his boss complain loudly about being out of breakfast cereal. Kent changes into his Superman persona, flies to a store, and returns with a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes™, thereby making Mr. White happy and making Clark Kent's day at the office a little more pleasant.

Even in the late 1960's, when the current system of spot advertising (in which advertisers buy spots in a variety of shows rather than sponsoring one whole show) was being put into place, we could still see these weird commercials. One commercial coming in the middle of an episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies" showed Jed Clampett sitting in front of his mansion smoking one of the sponsor's cigarettes (yes, boys and girls, in the old days, when people still believed that the sun goes around the Earth and that disease is caused by evil spirits, cigarettes were actually advertised on TV. In prime time, no less). When Jethro comes by and comments as to how he would like to try one of the sponsor's cigarettes, Jed admonishes him to wait until he's "all growed up" and then, by golly, he will smoke the sponsor's cigarettes. My, how things have changed!

Notes on Sex Plastic

The plastic film used in sexual fantasizing comes from applications in the late 1940's and 1950's. Typically 100 micron (4 mil) vinyl film was used in raincoats, shower caps, and aprons while 200 micron (8 mil) was used in shower curtains and inflatable toys. The plastic was usually calendared smooth (that is, made by pressing it between steel rollers) and both sides were thus skin-smooth.

A lesser amount was cast film, made by pouring a solution of plastic onto a metal sheet and allowing the solvent to evaporate as the plastic polymerized. Cast film is skin-smooth on one side and glassy smooth on the other.

Blown film is made by extruding liquid plastic through a circular slot into a chamber in which the air pressure is higher on the inside of the circle than it is on the outside. The pressure differential makes the plastic expand and thin even as it cures, thereby making a cylindrical bag that rises through the chamber to a slitter that cuts it so that the film can be flattened into a sheet and wound onto rolls.

The material itself is polymerized vinyl chloride that is softened either by a plasticizer (a kind of heavy oil mixed into the polymer to lubricate the molecular chains) or by co-polymerization (as, for example, with vinyl acetate).

There are numerous sites on the Internet that offer plastic rainwear for actual use as well as for sexual fetishes. For example, go to http://www.pvc-u-like.com/images/gallery/40.jpg to see a good example of what Balloonda's raincoat looks like. I can't believe that pvc-u-like doesn't offer these any more: that is one super-hot plastic raincoat! You can also see the same model and the same raincoat (shown as style PA3-STR) in a slightly different shot in the first image in the seventh row (as of 2006 Mar 21) if you go to the website http://www.sealwear.co.uk/catalogues/pvc-u-like/rainwear/ . You can still obtain plastic raincoats and other plastic wear if you go to the site http://www.pvc-u-like.com/.

You can also find a good selection of plastic raincoats and aprons at http://www.montcler.com/index.html. The style listed as Steffi comes closest to Balloonda's raincoat. Susie Boult's website http://www.plastiqueunique.com/homepage.htm also has Steffi raincoats plus other styles along with some very interesting fetishwear.

Though it's not Balloonda and Supergirl, there is a site on the Internet that shows a pretty young woman playing with her own plastic prisoner. Go to http://www.iloveinflatables.com/index.html#, click on About Us, click on Free Pictures, and then click on Alex. You will then see five pictures of a naked woman dominating her plastic punching bag.

If you go onto the Internet and search for "Sister Discipline", you will find references to a 46-inch tall inflatable plastic punching bag bearing the image of a scowling nun wielding the classic ruler. Apparently it is no longer being made, but that bag was the inspiration for Balloonda's "Rubber Nun" fancy (though I conceived Balloonda as looking more like Kirstie Alley and not so much like the piggish creature depicted as Sister Discipline [yeah, yeah, I know: what's the difference?]) I think that if they had kept the bag's diameter and had made it a full six feet tall, the makers would have had a more intimidating and, therefore, more successful product.

Susie Tompkins was Lois Lane's eight-year-old niece in six episodes of the Superman comic strip that appeared between 1943 and 1955. She was described as having a penchant for telling wild stories, as having an overactive imagination, as "Lois Lane's ever-fibbing niece". In Commercial Break #4 she appears as a teenager and seems to have reformed, but not by much.

On Making a Certain Imp Go Away

We all know that Mr. Mxyzptlk and other denizens of a world called the Fifth Dimension sometimes pop into our world and use their magic to make mischief. We also know that we can rid ourselves of any of these imps by tricking them into pronouncing their name backwards. How does that work? And how did Superman find out about it?

Superman first encountered the little pest in "The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk" (Superman #30, Sep-Oct 1944) (and, yes, for his first appearances the imp was identified as Mxyztplk (pronounced Mix-yez-tipple-ick), but then one artist misspelled (!?) it in September 1955 as Mxyzptlk (pronouned Mix-yez-pittle-ick) and that's the way it has been spelled ever since). From the beginning Mxyzptlk was a magic-powered prankster who delighted in stupefying people possessing only a "meager three-dimensional intelligence". In terms of physical power the little clown (originally wearing a purple suit with a lime-green bow tie and socks) was more than a match for the Man of Steel. After the imp unleashes a plague of pranks upon the people of Metropolis (water squirting from a radio, music coming from a refrigerator, the mayor braying like a donkey at a news conference, a statue coming to life and walking out of the auction at which it was to be sold, et al.), Superman confronts him on top of a bridge and they have the following conversation:

SUPERMAN: Are you going to cut out these absurd shenanigans?

MXYZTPLK: Why should I? Haven't had so much fun in ages!

SUPERMAN: Then perhaps you'll tell me what strange manner of being you are - and where you've come from?

MXYZTPLK: The answer is absurdly simple. I'm not from this world, you see - but a being from another dimension! If the truth be known, my full-time activity in this other world was in the nature of a court-jester. Therefore I had no business poking my nose into the secret volumes of a brilliant scholar. But, inquisitive individual that I am, I couldn't restrain my curiosity. Thus did I learn the two magic words, one of which would transport me to this dimension. And the other word if spoken aloud would return me to my world for a time!

SUPERMAN: And when do you intend to return to your world?

MXYZTPLK: Never! I find this backward three-dimensional world of yours most amusing. With my extra-dimensional powers I could easily conquer and rule it. Think of that! I, a lowly court-jester, could become a king!

SUPERMAN (to himself): Mxyztplk is cunning, but perhaps he can be fooled.

SUPERMAN (aloud): And what is the second magic word?

MXYZTPLK: Ha! Ha! Ha! That IS funny! With your meager three-dimensional intelligence you thought that you could trick me...

SUPERMAN: Ha! Ha! - Well - Ha! Ha! - you'll have to give me credit for trying, eh, Mxyztplk? Ha! Ha! Ha!

MXYZTPLK: ... into... Ha! Ha!... saying the magic word "KLPTZYXM"! Ha! Ha! Good grief! What am I laughing at?? I - I just said it - I just said the magic word!! No fair! You tricked me! It's unethical! It ain't funny!! Itttzzz..z..z.

He then vanishes in a puff of orange smoke.

Thus Superman was able to exploit both the imp's vanity and the fact that he was under a certain amount of pressure to avoid saying a certain word. Just as the admonition "Don't think of pink elephants!" creates images of rosy pachyderms trying to force their way into our consciousness, so Mxyzptlk's effort to avoid saying his name backwards keeps "Kil'tip-zey-skim" pushing for acknowledgement. All the more so, because he knows that Superman is trying to trick him into saying it. If we were to rewrite that conversation we might have Superman saying something like, "That's really very interesting! I've never heard such an amazing story! I want to know more! You say that pronouncing a certain word brings you into this world. What does that word sound like?

MXYZPTLK: You might have some difficulty with it. It's QRDMLZFL (pronounced curd-mull-ziffle).

SUPERMAN: And that brings you into this world. So what's the second magic word?

MXYZPTLK: Now THAT'S funny! Your meager three-dimensional intellect tried to trick me by simply asking an obvious question!? My goodness!! Did you actually believe that I would just come out and say "KLTPZYXM" for you!?

Oops! Oh, the fun we can have with Freudian slips!

(I will note in passing that in the early 1960's the Superboy comic book presented a story in which the two antagonists first met when they were in their teens. In that story, instead of updating the original confrontation, the writers had Superboy finding out how to send the pesky pixie home through an outrageous deus ex machina; Mxyzptlk's own father sent Superboy a message explaining how to send his wayward son back to the Fifth Dimension. Oy!)

So how does it work? How does Mxyzptlk's pronouncing his name backward force him out of our world and keep him out of it for three months? The Superman comic strip explained it this way: "The sound produced by his own voice saying his name backwards sets up vibrations which open the gates to his own dimension and push him back through for at least 90 days!" (Superman #131, Aug 1959, "The Menace of Mr. Mxyzptlk!"). Can we do better than that? How far can we push plausibility in describing this imaginary universe?

Recall to mind the fact that Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, which informed much of S. I. Hayakawa's classic work "Language in Thought and Action", tells us that a word is not the thing it represents. A word is merely an arbitrary noise that we use to evoke an image in other people's minds. Richard Feynman illustrated that principle quite nicely in a story he told of his father pointing out a bird to him, telling him what the bird was called in English, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese, and then saying, "You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird." In a world that allows magic to exist that postulate does not remain necessarily true to Reality.

So when Mxyzptlk utters the first magic word, presumably with his name associated with it in some way, he is manifested into our world just as speaking his name evokes an image of him in our minds. That manifestation, the little man that we see, is a three-dimensional projection of a five-dimensional being (or, if we count time as dimension, a four-dimensional projection of a six-dimensional being). We are to him as shadows are to us. To him what we see as magic is nothing more that the play of light and shadow on the wall of some five-dimensional analogue of Plato's cave.

We infer the existence of some kind of force that keeps Mxyzptlk projected onto the wall called Zrfff and away from the Platonic wall upon which our universe and its contents are manifested. That same force acts to keep objects in our universe from moving into alternate universes, such as the one occupied by Zrfff. The quantum theory tells us that forces are mediated by virtual particles that, in accordance with the wave-particle duality, can be represented as vibrations in an extra-dimensional aether. When Mxyzptlk speaks the first magic word with his name attached, the vibration alters the force holding his three-dimensional manifestation in Zrfff and pushes that manifestation into our world: a combination of constructive and destructive interference between the force waves and the incantation waves annihilates his presence in Zrfff and recreates it in our world. And when he says his name backwards, that creates an anti-symmetric vibration that cancels his name in the incantation wave and re-establishes the original force, which yanks him back into Zrfff. Then any effort to re-establish the incantation wave will also recreate the anti-symmetric wave by resonance: he must wait for the resonance to decay completely, a process that takes about three months.

As for Mxyzptlk's vaunted five-dimensional intelligence, which Superman seems to confound with inordinate ease, we need only note that our three-dimensional intellects are often confounded by two-dimensional shadows. Our minds have to interpret what our senses perceive and we know any number of illusions that can play tricks on that interpretation: think of M. C. Escher's 1961 lithographic print "Waterfall", which depicts a stream of water falling onto a millwheel and into a basin, whence it flows into a zig-zag channel that takes it back to the place whence it falls onto the millwheel, all in apparent defiance of proper three-dimensional geometry, never mind gravity. By putting Mxyzptlk into an emotionally excited state, usually by threatening his vanity, Superman sets up the conditions necessary to confuse the imp so that in his haste to correct the situation he doesn't realize until it's too late that he's reading his name backward.

But the phenomenon goes beyond optical illusion to include another kind of illusion, the kind that we now associate with our own "magic". Just as stage magicians use the misdirection of their audiences' attention in their magic tricks, so Superman uses the misdirection of Mxyzptlk's attention to hoodwink him. It seems as though such a thing wouldn't work, but psychological testing has shown that it actually works best on people who have the highest measure of intelligence. On one television presentation I saw The Great Randi (James Randi) demonstrate the phenomenon by showing people how he could make small wads of paper simply disappear. The camera was set up in such a way that the television audience could see that Randi was merely tossing the wads over his marks' heads. Misdirection enabled him to do that without the marks noticing. And thus a "meager three-dimensional intellect" can trip up a fifth-dimensional "super-intellect". Fznrk indeed!