Topper moved into position above her and screamed, "Ah, YEAH baby, this is better than cocaine and sex all rolled into one!" He released another burst of whatever that horrible purple energy was. This brought WeatherGirl to her senses. She dodged to the right and the bolt crashed to earth beneath her. The desert floor erupted sand and bits of housing complex. Suddenly, she was blind.
Coughing, choking, crying, she flew on through the maelstrom. Now she was scared. What was this freak going to do to her if he caught her? And how was she supposed to fight him with sand in her eyes? This wasn't fair. This wasn't the way people with superpowers were supposed to fight. Not by any stretch of the rules.
"God, I love that ass!" Topper cried out.
She felt violated just by the sound of the little man's voice. Oh, this was terrible. As she struggled to clear her eyes, she felt more than saw the purple bolts of force, sick and slow, pounding into the ground around her. Enough of this shit, she thought. And then, drunk on a cocktail of anger and panic, she flew into the ground.
High above the cloud of mayhem and destruction he had wrought, Topper flew through the night air, free and powerful. "Come on! Come out and play." FOOOOOM! He flung another bolt of destruction randomly into the night. "Catch me if you can!" he said. Far beneath him, deep within the roiling dust of the bruised and battered desert floor, there was a blue flash as a finger of lightning illuminated the cloud of sand. Then another. Then there was an explosion of superheated air so loud it rattled the windows of the gigantic hotels miles away on the strip. Every particle of dust blew outward, and in the center, in a crater made of her own rage, stood WeatherGirl.
Stacey knew she looked like hell. She knew that there was no way WeatherGirl, her carefully cultivated alter-ego, should be photographed in this state. She knew there were no media points to be scored by taking down a little person. But right now, she didn't care. She was beyond angry. Beyond enraged. For the first time since she was 11, she really couldn't care less what her hair looked like.
She vaulted into the sky on wings of lightning. In the distance she could see a tiny speck of purple fleeing towards the glimmering lights of the strip. The little bastard was out of range, but not for long. In her heart, vengeance began to sing. She called the winds to her and raced in pursuit.
Topper saw the flashes and heard the lightning behind him. He knew she was coming. His plan, a terrible, twisted, hopeless plan, was to lure WeatherGirl back to his penthouse and complete his “seduction.” Yes this idea was stupid—incredibly, moronically, unbelievably stupid, even for Topper. But that's the thing about power—especially the kind of power that was coursing through Topper's diminutive, misguided body—it's a drug. Maybe the best drug in the world. That's how he could stand atop the tall spire of his casino headquarters, moments from complete disaster, and believe that everything was going his way.
As he saw the beautiful, powerful woman that he believed he loved racing toward him surrounded by a ball of lightning, he actually thought to himself, "My plan has worked. She's chasing me because she loves me." The feeling that filled his tiny little heart could not be adequately conveyed to another person without making them crazy too. But as that feeling washed over him, Topper threw back his head and cried, "MADE IT MA! TOP OF THE WORLD!"
And, for one brief moment, he had. But then it all went to hell.
It was not that a bolt of lightning came down from the heavens and struck him. It was that the air around Topper was so saturated with charge that when the lightning let go, bolts came at him from every direction imaginable. Bolt after bolt after bolt transfixed him, tearing holes in his cheap costume and illuminating his eye sockets with a terrible glow. When the air had discharged its fury, some of Topper's hair was on fire. Dazed, he staggered towards the edge of the tower. Before he went over, he had time to say one word.
"Ow."
Stacey Storm watched him fall from the top of the tallest tower in Las Vegas. She could have caught him. She could have slowed his descent with cushions of air. But she didn't. Her nostrils flared in anger as she watched gravity do its work. It took Topper so long to fall that she had time to think, "Serves him right if the fall kills him. That's what he gets for playing a grownup game in a child's body."
Topper crashed into the parking lot far below. His fall was slightly broken by that big dumb blonde of the American road, a Corvette. He hit with so much force that the car's windows shattered and the tires exploded. The alarm attempted to go off in protest, but died in a pathetic, spiraling warble.
WeatherGirl floated above him in triumph, her anger still crackling into the air around her. She had defeated her first supervillain. Well, kind of.... What a disappointment. Everybody had to start somewhere, she tried to tell herself, but as she looked at the small, unconscious man lying in the middle of a crushed car in front of her, a tiny voice in her head whispered, "Over. You should just start over."
She thought she should probably hand this guy over to somebody, but who? The local cops weren't equipped. She wasn't sure she knew anybody who would be. But as she was trying to figure out how to get out of babysitting this little freak, she heard a voice say, "Excuse me, Ma'am."
She looked up and there was a man in a black suit. He flashed a badge and said, "Agent Putney, Ma'am. Bureau of MetaHuman Affairs. If you are done with him, we'd like to take care of some business."
"But how?" She noticed a nondescript white panel van idling behind him and men in jumpsuits waiting to swing into action.
"We've been following him for some time in conjunction with another investigation. If you'll stand down, we'll take it from here."
"I..." She sized up Agent Putney. Nice jaw, clean-cut, standard issue all the way. As they had talked, he checked her out, but less than most men. She took this a sign of professionalism. If he hadn't have looked at all, she would have been offended. She floated gently to the ground and said, "Yeah, sure. Take the little slimeball."
The van pulled up next to the unconscious Topper and men swung into action. The man who had called himself Agent Putney injected something in Topper's neck. Then other men wrapped Topper's legs and torso in clear plastic to restrain him. Then they placed him in the back of the white panel van.
The Agent handed her a card and said, "Ma'am, we need to get him into containment, but please call the office tomorrow. We need to get you registered?"
"Registered?" WeatherGirl asked.
"You are a Superhero, correct? You want to do good?"
"Superheroine, actually."
"You didn't think you needed to do this all on your own did you? G'night, Ma'am." He gave her an official nod and then got in the van.
As she watched them drive away, she thought to herself, "You're on your way Stacey. You are on your way." She vaulted into the night sky and flew home with something very much like a song of victory playing in her heart.
