“This is not a good time for my powers to come back,” Mary said sulkily, stirring the ice at the bottom of her plastic cup of boba tea. “Nothing in my life is working the way it’s supposed to. My husband lost his legs in a war. I work two jobs to make ends meet so I’m exhausted all the time and I don’t get enough time with my ten-year-old who’s growing up too fast. He’s having trouble in school. We’re so behind on bills it’s pathetic. I get calls from bill collectors all the time. I’m going to be 35 next month. 35! This isn’t how life was supposed to be.”

Amy reached across the table to take Mary’s hand. “It’s ok. We’ll get through this. I’ve got your back. Anything I can do to help, just let me know, especially with Jaime. I love being his Auntie Amy.”

Amy was about ten years older than Mary, and had a few laugh lines in her face to show it. The two of them sat at a table outside a coffee shop along St. Louis’s Central West End. Amy had finished her drink awhile ago. So had Mary. But Mary, deciding to drink her feelings, had splurged on a second, third, and now, this fourth boba tea she had just finished.

Mary had been eating a lot of comfort food and drinking a lot of sugary beverages lately. She knew she should stop before she started to put on pounds. And she would. Soon. Just not today.

Amy continued trying to cheer her up. “Remember when Mikey was a baby? Remember all the babysitting you did back then, and what a good friend you were to me back then? A single mom with only a part-time job? Let me be the sister to you now that you were to me back then.”

Mary looked up at Amy, who had been her best friend since Mary had been 15. One left side of Amy’s head was shaved bald while the right half was styled in a purple wave that luxuriously spilled down her right shoulder. Her left ear sported a tiny, conservative earring while her right ear supported a large, dangly cross. Amy gave Mary a look that the younger woman had seen hundreds of times before, cocking her head to the side, while smiling with one side of her mouth, looking for all the world as if she had just gotten a devilishly clever idea.

Mary, in spite of her depressed funk, smiled back. Both ladies giggled for a moment, as if they were a teen and a twenty-something again.

“Amy, I don’t know what I’d do–”

Suddenly, Mary was cut off by the blaring of half a dozen car horns. Over Amy’s shoulder, in the intersection at the end of the block, a nice red convertible with its top down flew through a red light. The driver’s upper body rocked. He was clearly using all his leg strength in a vain attempt to pump brakes that simply weren’t working. The driver’s already panicked expression changed to terror as the car rapidly closed the distance across the intersection to a woman with a baby stroller in the opposite crosswalk.

There wasn’t time to think about the full consequences of what Mary was about to do. There was only a baby to save. Mary reached inside herself and touched her power. In a blur of speed, faster than the eye could focus, she was up out of her chair at the table, her chair falling down behind her and her cup of ice and boba thumping on the table as she set it down suddenly. Mary ran into the street dodging an obstacle course of people, bicycles, dogs on leashes, and cars both moving and parked. Anyone looking at her would see only a blur. Anyone near her would feel a blast of air as she rushed past. Even having to pick her way through the crowded street, Mary still gained speed as she approached the scene of the accident.

The red convertible collided with the stroller. The precious infant cargo flew out of the stroller in an arc that lobbed like a football pass. Mary leaped from the pavement onto the hood of an oncoming car, then onto that car’s roof, then the roof of the next car behind that. From there, she judged the angle to be correct and she leaped at the baby. She was careful not to block the baby with her body. The sudden, jolting stop against her chest at that speed would have killed the young life she was trying to save. Instead she reached out with her arms to the side and pulled her young charge into her chest.

Her landing was rough. She rolled into the pavement and hit a street light pole before she stopped rolling, with the baby tucked into her chest, her arms protectively shielding it and her chin tucked tightly down over it.

During her former career as the costumed heroine known as Velocity Girl, Mary had been injured many times before, sometimes gravely. Back then, she had worn special armor and protective gear that mitigated crashes like this one. Today, she was just wearing normal clothes. She knew she had broken things inside her. Probably punctured a lung. She knew her legs weren’t broken, though, and that meant she could still run.

Clumsily, she got up without being able to use her arms for balance or to push off the ground. She looked around just for a moment, thankful that her long hair now covered her face. The red convertible with the failed brakes that caused this whole thing had been steered into a storefront on the other side of the street. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel. Someone was already leaning over him, checking his pulse. She noticed people in the crowd raising their phones to record everything. Many of them were pointed in her direction. Mary was glad those phones weren’t so prevalent back during her Velocity Girl days. Before anyone could record her and take note of what she was wearing, whether her face was covered or not, Mary once again moved at vision-blurring speed, returning to the hysterical mother of her charge. The speedster paused just long enough to pass the babe safely into its mommy’s arms before whooshing away, wincing in pain.

*******

Amy turned around and saw Mary’s superspeed rescue of the baby.

“Good for you,” she quietly murmured. “Welcome back, girlfriend.”

*******

In a place that exists outside of the normal dimensions of space that most beings experience, Smerd the P’ckit Dragon lounged in his bubble bath. Though Smerd easily fit in the hands of most adult humans, his bathtub was quite large, doubling as his swimming pool when he didn’t have bubble suds in it. The tub/pool was in a room that had magenta walls and two light blue doors. One door led to a changing room and the other door led into the rest of Smerd’s pocket dimension. The ability to create pocket dimensions was the main survival feature of the p’ckit dragon species.

Around the tub/pool sat a variety of pool furniture, i.e., lounge chairs and the like. On one wall was a large monitor screen. Smerd lay across his rubber ducky conversing with another p’ckit dragon on the screen. The rubber ducky was a full sized rubber ducky that would have been a small bath toy for a human. For Smerd, it was nearly as big as he was.

“You never come visit anymore,” the p’ckit dragon on the screen was saying to Smerd. “You used to come visit all the time.”

“Mom, since Mary stopped being Velocity Girl, we haven’t been jetting around the world saving it anymore. You’re all the way in Tokyo. It’s pretty far from St. Louis.”

Smerd’s mother, purple as her son was, wore a set of spectacles on her long face. Her crest was white and wavy, styled in the latest aesthetic look. Smerd, as a male p’ckit dragon, didn’t have a crest.

“Hey, Mom, did you have your crest redone?”

“Don’t change the subject, young one.”

Smerd knew that she wasn’t really mad when she called him “young one”. That was a term of endearment that always made Smerd think of her taking care of him when he was a young hatchling.

Suddenly, Smerd’s rubber ducky bucked as the mixture of water and bubbles sloshed around and cascaded around the room. Smerd felt a sensation in his gut like the sensation he got riding a human roller coaster. It was a good thing the screen was waterproof, he thought.

“Smerd, what’s going on? Is it that New Madrid fault you live near? Is it an earthquake?”

Smerd got really excited. He smiled so big that he hadn’t remembered he could even smile that big.

“No, Mom, but I think it is going to shake things up. I gotta go. Love you!”

“I haven’t seen you look like that since you and Mary used to go on adventures. Is that happening again? Does that mean you’ll come visit more?”

“I promise, Mom. If Mary becomes Velocity Girl again, we’ll visit soon.”

“I’ll hold you to that, my son.”

“I know. Bye.”

“Bye”.

Dripping wet, Smerd leaped from the back of his rubber ducky and grabbed a towel from the back of a lounge chair. He opened the door and furiously rubbed himself with the towel, almost tripping on his own tail, as he navigated the halls and corridors, rooms and staircases of his pocket dimension.

*******

The first place Smerd went was a special room in which he saved things for such a day as this, a day he had prayed to the p’ckit dragon understanding of Creator God, would come. The room was as large to Smerd as an aircraft hanger or large warehouse. It contained gear for Velocity Girl, Mary’s alter ego, gear she had never worn or used. Smerd had been planning to give this gear to Mary on her birthday about ten years ago. It was not only an upgrade of her equipment, but a color scheme change as well. For nine years, Velocity Girl had saved people and stopped bad guys in blue and white. His birthday present costume for her was red and metallic silver, with a few chrome accents.

Smerd stopped in front of a red visor and a pair of armored boots.

“She’ll need these first,” he said to himself, rubbing his front handlike paws together. “Time to get to work.”

*******

Mary stumbled along in pain, but she stumbled along at vision-blurring speed. As she focused on blocking out the pain of her injuries, her training kicked in. She had made it to a park with a large willow tree. The drooping willow’s canopy made an almost cavelike place where no street cameras would be able to really see her well. She stopped and breathed as her mentor, Xian Hu, the Grey Fox, had taught her.

“Hey, boss! Take these!”

Smerd’s purple head and arms poked out of her right front jeans pocket. He was holding up a red version of her old visor she had worn as Velocity Girl. It was shaped with a little more modern look, but it was a welcome sight. One of the features of such a device was a photo distortion field that would make it impossible for cameras to see her face. That was important, especially with all the facial ID tech in them these days. The glasses also contained a mic and had an earpiece attached that would enable her to talk with Smerd inside the world that he created inside the pockets of her clothes.

As she put on the visor and inserted the attached earpiece, she breathed out through the pain, “Thanks, Smerd.”

“You’re welcome. Now get these on.”

Smerd’s head and arms disappeared into her jeans pocket and then, impossibly, physics-defyingly, two armored boots plopped out of the small jeans pocket. Mary peeled off what was left of the tennis shoes she had been wearing that day.

When she ran at superspeed, her normal shoes couldn’t take it and running at superspeed barefoot on concrete was a no-go. These boots had been designed by Alex HIrshkov, the genius inventor who had equipped a lot of costumed heroes back in the day. To Mary’s relief, the boots fit fine. She knew her body dimensions had changed since she’d been pregnant and given birth and she thought her feet were bigger than before.

She shoved the shredded scraps of what was left of her sneakers into Smerd’s pocket dimension and, impossibly, they slid right down into the extradimensional space. Leaving no evidence was a big part of her training. It had been very important back in the 2000’s. Now, in the 2020’s it was a brave new world. How would costumed heroes ever keep a secret identity nowadays, she wondered.

“Smerd, please do what you can with my phone in there.” Although Smerd had returned to his world inside her pockets, Mary knew he could hear her through the visor she wore.

“I’m on it, boss. No one will trace this phone and know that it was recently moving through St. Louis at superspeed.”

“Thanks. I’m going to get us home and figure out how injured I really am.”

“I’ll take care of you, boss. Just like the old days. I’m so glad you’re back.”

Mary grunted. “I am NOT back.”