TWENTYSIX: the Chase

I teetered on the edge of the mammoth and archaic building outside City Hall. The streets were nearly empty three hundred feet below me. But from up here, with the warm breeze pounding upon my back, I could see the teeming masses parading through Chinatown.

Looking forward and down, I dropped, face first towards the speeding pavement below. People whipped out their digital cameras and video phones and recorded my plummet as I soaked in the freefall adrenaline rush.

I'm not sure but I think underneath the gasps that escaped from the lips of the passerbys, I heard several dissappointed exclamations, such as "AW MAN! I wanted to see him go splat!"

My magnetic field throbbed to life as my feet slowly lowered towards the ground. With a subtle tap of the tip of my kicks, the field that caught me, launched me back up. Twice as fast as I had dropped, I began to soar straight up, rocketing into the warm winter sky.

I lifted myself high above the city, punching through a low passing blanket of clouds and I saw it all at once. Every piece of matter below me was simultaneously working in unison to create this higher ideal, the city god we call New York City.

My thrust had carried me thousands of feet up and I began to drop once again. The earth came screaming towards me with the mind numbing intensity of certain doom. I let my powers wane for the plunge until the very last moment, when, with a spin and a gentle kick off the spiralling columns of the monolithic building, I fired myself along the magnetic waves that pulsed all through this great and sprawling metropolis.

Guided by my gleaming, mental unicorn horn, I weaved my way like a pinball, ricocheting off ledges, taxis, and newstands. I removed my army hat and let my hair whip with the winds. Surfing the wavelengths I soon had roared through all of downtown at a heartracing pace. I may make it to work on time after all.

I had found myself a little bored lately having captured that speedy minx I call Velocity Girl. Bouncing around the city had become tiresome as I had already mapped out the strongest pulses of power that could carry me all over the island, from the uptown museums to the downtown bars and back again.

Velocity Girl had eluded me since I first developed my powers. It was her visage that I had first seen when I sent my mind along the etheric river. Shot upstream as if from a cannon, I had instananeously glided around the entire moebius strip that comprised our reality. And there she was.

She was turned away from me but I could see her beauty shining with a quicksilver shimmer. With a glance over her shoulder I knew I had seen the most perfect female I could ever imagine. Her ghostly muscles tensed and relaxed like a perfect machine, pumping and pushing her ever forward and away from me. My hands lunged out and I could feel her misty hair as it flowed free from my fingers.

The cosmos had slapped my forehead and I could feel my entire being sucked back into my body. An upturned corner of her mouth was the last I saw of her. I had crashed back into flesh and she was long gone.

When my powers began to develop it was like I could sense her at times. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of her as she passed invisibly through a girl getting off the subway, or a woman laughing in a restaurant. It was all about timing. I would need to strike just as she passed through another female. I began experimenting with my powers and found that I could strip myself of my magnetic field and use it to create a trap. So with a concentrated effort I closed the field around her as she passed by.

I don't know if it was the girl she was trapped in, or Velocity Girl herself, but it was nearly impossible to contain her. Our opposite polarities made us simultaneously drawn together and violently blown apart. Over time I was able to calm the fields so that they vibrated in sync with each other, yet remaining separated by their innate polarity. My leaping and soaring days were long over, but it didn't matter. We were together.

It's hard to put into words the way that I experience love. It's like we all have these fields and they carry little snippets of us, culminations of our experiences. And when these fields are in prolonged contact they begin to merge and change each other. Empowering and devouring ourselves in a closed circuit loop of mutual co-existence.

I had hardly missed my powers, except those times stuck on the subway or waiting at the bus stop on the cold winter nights. I did miss the battle aspects though of pitting my powers against someone else's. And the team-ups and crossovers...

So I was bored. And Velocity Girl began to look like an ordinary girl nowadays. Her flighty spirit had been contained and drained and her glow had all but dimmed completely. I had learned to care for this girl that housed the essence of this lunar goddess. I told myself it was for her sake that I released the field and absorbed it back into myself. But the truth was I wanted the chase again.

The field had come slowly off of her, then suddenly crashed about my person. The shockwave threw me back into the far wall of our small apartment. Something within my girlfriend instantly exploded into a spectacular luminous Amazon. Velocity Girl had been reborn in a glorious golden explosion.

My own powers throbbed and pulsated around me and by the time my eyes had adjusted, she was gone. Light years around the cosmos and back again, circling the fringes of our minds, she was soaring through the ether. She was gone.

When I had regained my senses I spoke to the girl I had trapped Velocity Girl in. We talked for hours and hours, feeding off the electromagnetic high. Sitting there indian style on the floor, staring at each other for hours as we both jabbered on about everything and nothing.

We collapsed under the dawn's rays, the sunlight glistening off our sweaty, naked bodies. And just there, as I glanced over, I saw a golden shimmer in her eyes fade into stark reality. Then we slept for ages.