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The Case of the Mall Smugglers
Super C speaking. The two large lists we presented for you documenting all humans that CNG had turned into animals were just for two specific years, but I don’t think it is necessary at this point to mention all the lists at this point. It took too long, but it does go to show how powerful CNG is, and it helps us understand why CNG wanted a world without humans. What we are still not sure about is the exact event that triggered the civil war it fought against itself. There was double standard after double standard.
We may have another list to present later on, but those will be much shorter because those were all specific groups. One list, for example, consisted entirely of first responders (firefighters, police officers, ambulance drivers and paramedics, etc.), while another list had nothing but animals wearing the formal suit and tie or fancy tuxedo, due to the fact they were attending Game Show Congress. I’ll let you folks know which one is the case. Otherwise, it is a mixed bag, with the bulk majority being those playing in marching bands and/or drum and bugle corps, those actively serving in our military (or retired, but having been active military in the past), or both. Thankfully, we are offering counseling to all these groups, and it doesn’t cost them anything.
People ask me why CNG didn’t just wipe out humanity in one fell swoop; instead, it decided to do things very slowly so that it would forever torture the world. When it killed all 7 million of those Argentine soccer fans (and the 1.5 million soccer fans in Turkey), it thought it had made a big mistake to start with, but then you factor in the fact about 90% of those fans were innocent people. They were not even at the scenes of the rioting. This is why we saw those people come back to life. When they came back to life, however, there were different individuals running the countries, and all sporting events were being played behind closed doors. (It might also be worth knowing that having experienced the tortures of Hades—for those that were not saved—and considering it their worst nightmare, every single one of those 8.5 million people converted to Christianity, but they didn’t just do it to protect themselves from CNG upon discovering it wasn’t going to kill those who followed either that religion or Judaism—or both, because it is possible to do both. They genuinely wanted a better life, and the shocking experience of the afterlife under Satan scared and scarred them for life.)
Depending on the victim, most of the stories are not to be repeated unless the individual gives us permission to do so, and if they do, they’ll tell us how much detail they want us to keep secret or go ahead and reveal to the public. The one we are highlighting here, however, is one we can speak about because it was already in the news.
When we documented all those individuals in Washington, D.C., we made it clear that only a specific group of those individuals, depending on their military careers or some other noteworthy thing they had done, were eligible to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and since Leo the Patriotic Lion is our President, it made it even more special to them. These same individuals, if they hadn’t won it already, were also receiving Kriegland’s version of the same thing: the SSSMSB, or Stupendously Superiorly Shiny Medal of Superiority and Bravery, which was the highest honor one could won in the Forsythe System. (A rare few had also received the highest award a lion of Leonine could win: the Silver Paw, but according to King Lionel XVIII, he didn’t have as many to give out, because he felt it was not necessary. “You can’t top the SSSMSB,” he said. “That’s as prestigious as it gets.)
The people in charge of Guinness World Records also listed Leo as the President with the biggest amount of these awards given (in addition to having the largest inauguration parade for not just any President, but any head of state. Period. “Your predecessors would be so jealous of you,” they said, “for you have given more of these than all of them put together.”
“I think I have made the manufacturers angry,” Leo joked, “because they keep having to build these.”
One such winner is the case we were documenting here. At the time, a young lady by the name of Stacy Blutberg (pronounced “bloot berg” according to her) was just a high school student, although she had a perfect 4.0 GPA, and she was playing the flute in her high school marching band. As a kid, though, she liked the typical girly things girls would be expected to like, and so she dressed up for Halloween as a princess, a unicorn, or similar things to that. She also had a special admiration for pets, particularly lost or abused pets that needed rescued, but she didn’t have one for herself due to the fact both her parents were allergic to pet dander from dogs and cats. “It is worse with cats than it is with dogs,” they said. “I think it’s the way they shed.”
Around this time, the family was doing Christmas shopping for their relatives, and so naturally, they drove to the mall to get it done. (Their hometown is anonymous for the time being.) They also chose to eat dinner at the foot court. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to get very far before a bunch of CNG smugglers entered the building, and because they thought the parents were somebody else that they held a grudge on (because the people in question beat them to the punch, buying a bowling center before they could, and choosing to keep it open instead of shutting it down so that they could transform it into an office building), they decided to go after them. (The office building would have been a cover-up for their smuggling operations, showing how CNG was setting them up for their doom by making them as dumb as a rock. The people in question were already wanted criminals in 10 other states, with 29 outstanding warrants on them.)
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about!” the dad protested. “I promise you I’m not who you say I am!”
The managers of the JCPenney store called security and the police, but neither one was able to get there fast enough, since the smugglers were already attacking the parents. They did not have any weapons, so they just tried to beat the daylights out of the parents. What they weren’t counting on, however, was the fact that Stacy had been taking karate lessons (because her aunt and uncle insisted on it so that a previous unrelated incident that happened to them would not happen to her). As a result, she got in the way on one attack and had the perfect counterattack.
“Stacy, don’t; you’re going to get killed!” her mom yelled.
“If I don’t, you will get killed!” she countered back as the pink and purple CNG spilled out of the smugglers’ pockets. At that point, the store shut down, and the rest of the mall was warning the shoppers that there were smugglers in the building. Another security guard called the C.I.D.F. so that they could dispose of it and help clean and sanitize the place. However, the stores didn’t all close down, because the staff at JCPenney had managed to contain the problem inside the store, and the CNG clumps decided they would not torture any innocent lives. After all, it was the holiday season.
After the third case of Stacy flipping the criminals over, they tried to make a run for it. “Beat it; this girl is too good for us!” one yelled. At that point, the store had locked down, so there was nowhere to run or hide. The CNG, however, started to glow, indicating it was doing its act of transforming humans into furries. Stacy quickly got her parents out of the way, but she wasn’t able to escape the effects. As a result, she suddenly noticed that something was different.
“What happened?” she asked as the police arrived to arrest the smugglers.
“You’re…you’re not you anymore!” the dad winced. “You’re a dog!”
“A dog? Oh. Wait a minute. This stuff does that to people.” Stacy ran into the women’s restroom to look in the mirrors, and saw that she was now stuck as a white female cockapoo. (A cockapoo, for those that don’t know, is a cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle.) It scared her at first, but she quickly regained her senses.
The C.I.D.F. wasted no time in getting the place back open so that it was safe to shop again, and when Stacy came back out to rejoin her parents, her best friend’s parents had entered the store after getting an all clear from the security. “Don’t tell me somebody murdered Stacy!” her best friend’s dad exclaimed.
“No; nobody murdered her,” her dad replied. “It just took her humanity away and made her a dog.”
“It’s still me,” Stacy assured them. “My voice hasn’t changed; my personality hasn’t changed, I don’t think. I’m just stuck as a dog. I’m going to take a guess and say I’m a cockapoo.”
“I guess you would know; I know you love your dogs,” the other dad said. “Stephanie likes her rescue pets, too.” (Stephanie was her best friend; she had already turned from a human to a cockapoo, but the difference was that she didn’t play the flute. She instead was the libero for the volleyball team.) Stephanie then came inside, saw Stacy, and immediately said, “Oh, no; did it get you, too?”
“I’m afraid, so,” she replied. “I can’t believe it didn’t get to me last time.”
“What do you mean, ‘Last time?’”
“I just realized something. Dad, I think those same people tried to go after you at the bank. Mom wasn’t with us, though; she was at the dentist.”
“Having thought about it myself,” her dad said, “I think you may be right about this. They think I’m somebody else.”
The two families decided it was best to resume their shopping together, so they did everything together for the rest of the time they were at the mall, although they first spoke to the police and the C.I.D.F. as needed. Coincidentally, when they decided to eat dinner at the food court, they bumped into the people the smugglers were actually trying to kill, who confirmed that it was a coincidence that there were similarities between the two dads in appearance, it was obvious that they were not even related, let alone twins.
“They wanted to buy out the building we bought out so they could make an office out of it, but they weren’t even qualified to own a business,” the bowling alley owners explained. “They didn’t have the money to buy it, so our guess is they were planning to use the money from that bank robbery to buy it. However, you got in the way—well, your daughter got in the way, I suppose.”
“She did.” Stacy had indeed protected her dad from these very same criminals during said bank robbery attempts. While the police officers who talked to them at the mall weren’t the same as the ones who spoke to them during the bank robbery, the whole department had an APB (all points bulletin) placed on these smugglers. “We do remember seeing the news story,” they said, “so we figured that it was you, except now you are a dog.”
“That was me,” Stacy verified, and the troops in the C.I.D.F. showed us evidence with their hologram powers.
At the food court, the three families set themselves up so that the parents were talking to one another, while the offspring sat at their own table. “I’m not familiar with that CNG stuff,” Stephanie said to Stacy, “but do you have any idea why it made you and me the same thing?”
“I don’t,” Stacy replied. “I think those details are better left unknown.”
A month later, the Blutberg family had received a subpoena to testify in court against these smugglers, but the day after they got it, the trial was canceled due to the fact the smugglers had died in prison. The autopsy revealed that all of them died of the same thing: a brain aneurysm. (This was another common pattern of CNG; it killed multiple people using the exact same reason for death. The 7 million Argentine soccer fans and 1.5 million Turkish soccer fans, for example, all died of cardiac arrest; when it brought them back to life, however, the people found themselves in much better shape than they were, and their teeth were all pearly white, acknowledging that CNG had declared it was wrong about these people, even though it still modified them. Subsequently, they developed better habits, and as mentioned before, they all converted to Christianity.) “So sad; they didn’t deserve the death penalty, did they?” Stacy’s mom lamented. (No song jokes allowed here, people!)
“I would have preferred they live to see the consequences of their actions,” Stacy replied. “I am with you; it’s so sad.”
Flash forward to later on, and Stacy and her family were among the thousands of people in Washington, D.C. attending the documentation parade and ceremony, with Stacy herself playing her flute in the parade. For the purposes of the parade, she had purchased a custom drum major uniform from “Uniforms ‘R’ Us,” which consisted of pink as the main color, but also had black and silver portions on it. The shako didn’t have a plume, but it did have a bald eagle on it, representing our national animal.
While presenting Stacy with the Presidential Medal of Freedom (and the SSSMSB), Leo learned about how the smugglers would have used the office for their smuggling operations, since they were part of one of two street gangs fighting over territory, and both sides were bickering over the part of town that had the bowling alley in question. “Both would have shut the place down,” Stacy’s dad had said to Leo and the others, “but the owners who got it wanted it to stay open. Also, the police knew I was innocent, but if you look at the picture of the dead smuggler, and then look back at me, you can see the resemblance.” We looked at the photo, and then back at the dad, and saw that this was so.
“The resemblance is amazing,” I said. “Coincidence, I feel, but you can’t control those things. But one thing is certain: you have a very courageous daughter. You should be quite proud.”
“I am. I sometimes wished that she hadn’t got involved, but she was only trying to protect me.”
“You are indeed a very brave young lady,” Leo said to Stacy. “The world needs more brave individuals like you, even if you aren’t active duty.”
“I don’t plan to go into the service,” Stacy replied. “I plan to go into nursing. I’ll still play the flute, of course.”
“Good for you.”
I would later grant Stacy access to the G-52 HQ and place her inside my simulator, the Cube (named after a feature from my long-running version of a once-popular game show known as “The Krypton Factor;” while inside the Cube, players would test their mental agility). This helped her understand why she got the superpowers that she got, and any G-52 or ally who was a musician had the same powers that she did:
1. Being able to summon any instrument (and make it disappear), and play it at the level of the Forsythians, who were said to be “beyond professional.” If the animal sang, they could sing at the level of a classically trained opera singer. Stacy, however, just played the flute.
2. Being able to manipulate sounds with one’s hands and feet, although this doesn’t always happen. The individual would have to really think about it to make it happen; the one consistency, though, is that if somebody was frustrated, embarrassed, or upset with something, and they face palmed, we would always hear an eerie piano chord.
3. Being able to summon portals that allowed one to get from one place to another in a hurry. Stacy felt she never had a reason to do this, but she did have that ability.
4. Being able to change clothes on the fly just by waving one’s hands in front of themselves.
Stacy’s abilities in the martial arts had also increased tenfold, so she would easily advance all the way to the black belt.
Note that I had also allowed Stephanie into the HQ building and had her do stuff in the Cube as well, since she was the athletic one. She found she had the same abilities as Parkour Panther, even though she wasn’t a parkour enthusiast: super high jump and advanced athletic abilities, super speed, teleportation (without the need for portals), and ice manipulation. “I did have a thing for winter sports as a kid,” she said, “so maybe that’s why it made me an ice heroine.”
“I believe so,” I said. “CNG always based its decisions on one’s interests and hobbies. It’s why Cripto, being the G-52 game show guru, so to speak, has the superpowers he has, not counting the ones he received later, which are the music superpowers.”
When all was said and done, Stacy commented, “At least I feel better about life now. If fate decides I end up being one of you, I may just choose the name ‘Flute Dog’ for my codename, unless that’s already taken.”
“We have too many on the USA Waiting List already, but given the circumstances, there is a chance that might happen. Otherwise, you’re just an ally, but all the ones we talked to in Washington are allies.” (Indeed, with Cripto’s help, all the ones we documented in Washington and in Dark Wolf’s castle had been inducted as allies to the G-52s in what became the largest induction ceremony in the history of that organization. I had to do it with the video chat app Zoom, however, since there was no way to get them all to do in person. Some of the allies were able to do it in person, though. However, I should point that induction ceremony was after the castle documentation rounds, but before the ones in Washington.) “I’ll let you know if you do qualify—and you, too, Stephanie—even though you’re both smart to realize that CNG was the reason everybody has these powers in the first place. However, that code name has yet to be taken.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“In any event, you ladies are dismissed; thank you for coming today.”
“No problem.” The girls thanked me for helping them understand the circumstances better, as well as helping them inside and outside the castle.
Bit by bit, both families were starting to feel better about the whole thing, and when I coincidentally ran into them later that week at the G-52 Diner, I also answered any questions that the parents had about it, since they were baffled as to why it got their offspring and not them. In the end, justice was served, and with CNG dead, it was easier than ever to get a good night’s sleep.
You get a good night’s sleep yourselves, now, okay? Good night.
THE END
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The Case of the Mall Smugglers
Super C speaking. The two large lists we presented for you documenting all humans that CNG had turned into animals were just for two specific years, but I don’t think it is necessary at this point to mention all the lists at this point. It took too long, but it does go to show how powerful CNG is, and it helps us understand why CNG wanted a world without humans. What we are still not sure about is the exact event that triggered the civil war it fought against itself. There was double standard after double standard.
We may have another list to present later on, but those will be much shorter because those were all specific groups. One list, for example, consisted entirely of first responders (firefighters, police officers, ambulance drivers and paramedics, etc.), while another list had nothing but animals wearing the formal suit and tie or fancy tuxedo, due to the fact they were attending Game Show Congress. I’ll let you folks know which one is the case. Otherwise, it is a mixed bag, with the bulk majority being those playing in marching bands and/or drum and bugle corps, those actively serving in our military (or retired, but having been active military in the past), or both. Thankfully, we are offering counseling to all these groups, and it doesn’t cost them anything.
People ask me why CNG didn’t just wipe out humanity in one fell swoop; instead, it decided to do things very slowly so that it would forever torture the world. When it killed all 7 million of those Argentine soccer fans (and the 1.5 million soccer fans in Turkey), it thought it had made a big mistake to start with, but then you factor in the fact about 90% of those fans were innocent people. They were not even at the scenes of the rioting. This is why we saw those people come back to life. When they came back to life, however, there were different individuals running the countries, and all sporting events were being played behind closed doors. (It might also be worth knowing that having experienced the tortures of Hades—for those that were not saved—and considering it their worst nightmare, every single one of those 8.5 million people converted to Christianity, but they didn’t just do it to protect themselves from CNG upon discovering it wasn’t going to kill those who followed either that religion or Judaism—or both, because it is possible to do both. They genuinely wanted a better life, and the shocking experience of the afterlife under Satan scared and scarred them for life.)
Depending on the victim, most of the stories are not to be repeated unless the individual gives us permission to do so, and if they do, they’ll tell us how much detail they want us to keep secret or go ahead and reveal to the public. The one we are highlighting here, however, is one we can speak about because it was already in the news.
When we documented all those individuals in Washington, D.C., we made it clear that only a specific group of those individuals, depending on their military careers or some other noteworthy thing they had done, were eligible to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and since Leo the Patriotic Lion is our President, it made it even more special to them. These same individuals, if they hadn’t won it already, were also receiving Kriegland’s version of the same thing: the SSSMSB, or Stupendously Superiorly Shiny Medal of Superiority and Bravery, which was the highest honor one could won in the Forsythe System. (A rare few had also received the highest award a lion of Leonine could win: the Silver Paw, but according to King Lionel XVIII, he didn’t have as many to give out, because he felt it was not necessary. “You can’t top the SSSMSB,” he said. “That’s as prestigious as it gets.)
The people in charge of Guinness World Records also listed Leo as the President with the biggest amount of these awards given (in addition to having the largest inauguration parade for not just any President, but any head of state. Period. “Your predecessors would be so jealous of you,” they said, “for you have given more of these than all of them put together.”
“I think I have made the manufacturers angry,” Leo joked, “because they keep having to build these.”
One such winner is the case we were documenting here. At the time, a young lady by the name of Stacy Blutberg (pronounced “bloot berg” according to her) was just a high school student, although she had a perfect 4.0 GPA, and she was playing the flute in her high school marching band. As a kid, though, she liked the typical girly things girls would be expected to like, and so she dressed up for Halloween as a princess, a unicorn, or similar things to that. She also had a special admiration for pets, particularly lost or abused pets that needed rescued, but she didn’t have one for herself due to the fact both her parents were allergic to pet dander from dogs and cats. “It is worse with cats than it is with dogs,” they said. “I think it’s the way they shed.”
Around this time, the family was doing Christmas shopping for their relatives, and so naturally, they drove to the mall to get it done. (Their hometown is anonymous for the time being.) They also chose to eat dinner at the foot court. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to get very far before a bunch of CNG smugglers entered the building, and because they thought the parents were somebody else that they held a grudge on (because the people in question beat them to the punch, buying a bowling center before they could, and choosing to keep it open instead of shutting it down so that they could transform it into an office building), they decided to go after them. (The office building would have been a cover-up for their smuggling operations, showing how CNG was setting them up for their doom by making them as dumb as a rock. The people in question were already wanted criminals in 10 other states, with 29 outstanding warrants on them.)
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about!” the dad protested. “I promise you I’m not who you say I am!”
The managers of the JCPenney store called security and the police, but neither one was able to get there fast enough, since the smugglers were already attacking the parents. They did not have any weapons, so they just tried to beat the daylights out of the parents. What they weren’t counting on, however, was the fact that Stacy had been taking karate lessons (because her aunt and uncle insisted on it so that a previous unrelated incident that happened to them would not happen to her). As a result, she got in the way on one attack and had the perfect counterattack.
“Stacy, don’t; you’re going to get killed!” her mom yelled.
“If I don’t, you will get killed!” she countered back as the pink and purple CNG spilled out of the smugglers’ pockets. At that point, the store shut down, and the rest of the mall was warning the shoppers that there were smugglers in the building. Another security guard called the C.I.D.F. so that they could dispose of it and help clean and sanitize the place. However, the stores didn’t all close down, because the staff at JCPenney had managed to contain the problem inside the store, and the CNG clumps decided they would not torture any innocent lives. After all, it was the holiday season.
After the third case of Stacy flipping the criminals over, they tried to make a run for it. “Beat it; this girl is too good for us!” one yelled. At that point, the store had locked down, so there was nowhere to run or hide. The CNG, however, started to glow, indicating it was doing its act of transforming humans into furries. Stacy quickly got her parents out of the way, but she wasn’t able to escape the effects. As a result, she suddenly noticed that something was different.
“What happened?” she asked as the police arrived to arrest the smugglers.
“You’re…you’re not you anymore!” the dad winced. “You’re a dog!”
“A dog? Oh. Wait a minute. This stuff does that to people.” Stacy ran into the women’s restroom to look in the mirrors, and saw that she was now stuck as a white female cockapoo. (A cockapoo, for those that don’t know, is a cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle.) It scared her at first, but she quickly regained her senses.
The C.I.D.F. wasted no time in getting the place back open so that it was safe to shop again, and when Stacy came back out to rejoin her parents, her best friend’s parents had entered the store after getting an all clear from the security. “Don’t tell me somebody murdered Stacy!” her best friend’s dad exclaimed.
“No; nobody murdered her,” her dad replied. “It just took her humanity away and made her a dog.”
“It’s still me,” Stacy assured them. “My voice hasn’t changed; my personality hasn’t changed, I don’t think. I’m just stuck as a dog. I’m going to take a guess and say I’m a cockapoo.”
“I guess you would know; I know you love your dogs,” the other dad said. “Stephanie likes her rescue pets, too.” (Stephanie was her best friend; she had already turned from a human to a cockapoo, but the difference was that she didn’t play the flute. She instead was the libero for the volleyball team.) Stephanie then came inside, saw Stacy, and immediately said, “Oh, no; did it get you, too?”
“I’m afraid, so,” she replied. “I can’t believe it didn’t get to me last time.”
“What do you mean, ‘Last time?’”
“I just realized something. Dad, I think those same people tried to go after you at the bank. Mom wasn’t with us, though; she was at the dentist.”
“Having thought about it myself,” her dad said, “I think you may be right about this. They think I’m somebody else.”
The two families decided it was best to resume their shopping together, so they did everything together for the rest of the time they were at the mall, although they first spoke to the police and the C.I.D.F. as needed. Coincidentally, when they decided to eat dinner at the food court, they bumped into the people the smugglers were actually trying to kill, who confirmed that it was a coincidence that there were similarities between the two dads in appearance, it was obvious that they were not even related, let alone twins.
“They wanted to buy out the building we bought out so they could make an office out of it, but they weren’t even qualified to own a business,” the bowling alley owners explained. “They didn’t have the money to buy it, so our guess is they were planning to use the money from that bank robbery to buy it. However, you got in the way—well, your daughter got in the way, I suppose.”
“She did.” Stacy had indeed protected her dad from these very same criminals during said bank robbery attempts. While the police officers who talked to them at the mall weren’t the same as the ones who spoke to them during the bank robbery, the whole department had an APB (all points bulletin) placed on these smugglers. “We do remember seeing the news story,” they said, “so we figured that it was you, except now you are a dog.”
“That was me,” Stacy verified, and the troops in the C.I.D.F. showed us evidence with their hologram powers.
At the food court, the three families set themselves up so that the parents were talking to one another, while the offspring sat at their own table. “I’m not familiar with that CNG stuff,” Stephanie said to Stacy, “but do you have any idea why it made you and me the same thing?”
“I don’t,” Stacy replied. “I think those details are better left unknown.”
A month later, the Blutberg family had received a subpoena to testify in court against these smugglers, but the day after they got it, the trial was canceled due to the fact the smugglers had died in prison. The autopsy revealed that all of them died of the same thing: a brain aneurysm. (This was another common pattern of CNG; it killed multiple people using the exact same reason for death. The 7 million Argentine soccer fans and 1.5 million Turkish soccer fans, for example, all died of cardiac arrest; when it brought them back to life, however, the people found themselves in much better shape than they were, and their teeth were all pearly white, acknowledging that CNG had declared it was wrong about these people, even though it still modified them. Subsequently, they developed better habits, and as mentioned before, they all converted to Christianity.) “So sad; they didn’t deserve the death penalty, did they?” Stacy’s mom lamented. (No song jokes allowed here, people!)
“I would have preferred they live to see the consequences of their actions,” Stacy replied. “I am with you; it’s so sad.”
Flash forward to later on, and Stacy and her family were among the thousands of people in Washington, D.C. attending the documentation parade and ceremony, with Stacy herself playing her flute in the parade. For the purposes of the parade, she had purchased a custom drum major uniform from “Uniforms ‘R’ Us,” which consisted of pink as the main color, but also had black and silver portions on it. The shako didn’t have a plume, but it did have a bald eagle on it, representing our national animal.
While presenting Stacy with the Presidential Medal of Freedom (and the SSSMSB), Leo learned about how the smugglers would have used the office for their smuggling operations, since they were part of one of two street gangs fighting over territory, and both sides were bickering over the part of town that had the bowling alley in question. “Both would have shut the place down,” Stacy’s dad had said to Leo and the others, “but the owners who got it wanted it to stay open. Also, the police knew I was innocent, but if you look at the picture of the dead smuggler, and then look back at me, you can see the resemblance.” We looked at the photo, and then back at the dad, and saw that this was so.
“The resemblance is amazing,” I said. “Coincidence, I feel, but you can’t control those things. But one thing is certain: you have a very courageous daughter. You should be quite proud.”
“I am. I sometimes wished that she hadn’t got involved, but she was only trying to protect me.”
“You are indeed a very brave young lady,” Leo said to Stacy. “The world needs more brave individuals like you, even if you aren’t active duty.”
“I don’t plan to go into the service,” Stacy replied. “I plan to go into nursing. I’ll still play the flute, of course.”
“Good for you.”
I would later grant Stacy access to the G-52 HQ and place her inside my simulator, the Cube (named after a feature from my long-running version of a once-popular game show known as “The Krypton Factor;” while inside the Cube, players would test their mental agility). This helped her understand why she got the superpowers that she got, and any G-52 or ally who was a musician had the same powers that she did:
1. Being able to summon any instrument (and make it disappear), and play it at the level of the Forsythians, who were said to be “beyond professional.” If the animal sang, they could sing at the level of a classically trained opera singer. Stacy, however, just played the flute.
2. Being able to manipulate sounds with one’s hands and feet, although this doesn’t always happen. The individual would have to really think about it to make it happen; the one consistency, though, is that if somebody was frustrated, embarrassed, or upset with something, and they face palmed, we would always hear an eerie piano chord.
3. Being able to summon portals that allowed one to get from one place to another in a hurry. Stacy felt she never had a reason to do this, but she did have that ability.
4. Being able to change clothes on the fly just by waving one’s hands in front of themselves.
Stacy’s abilities in the martial arts had also increased tenfold, so she would easily advance all the way to the black belt.
Note that I had also allowed Stephanie into the HQ building and had her do stuff in the Cube as well, since she was the athletic one. She found she had the same abilities as Parkour Panther, even though she wasn’t a parkour enthusiast: super high jump and advanced athletic abilities, super speed, teleportation (without the need for portals), and ice manipulation. “I did have a thing for winter sports as a kid,” she said, “so maybe that’s why it made me an ice heroine.”
“I believe so,” I said. “CNG always based its decisions on one’s interests and hobbies. It’s why Cripto, being the G-52 game show guru, so to speak, has the superpowers he has, not counting the ones he received later, which are the music superpowers.”
When all was said and done, Stacy commented, “At least I feel better about life now. If fate decides I end up being one of you, I may just choose the name ‘Flute Dog’ for my codename, unless that’s already taken.”
“We have too many on the USA Waiting List already, but given the circumstances, there is a chance that might happen. Otherwise, you’re just an ally, but all the ones we talked to in Washington are allies.” (Indeed, with Cripto’s help, all the ones we documented in Washington and in Dark Wolf’s castle had been inducted as allies to the G-52s in what became the largest induction ceremony in the history of that organization. I had to do it with the video chat app Zoom, however, since there was no way to get them all to do in person. Some of the allies were able to do it in person, though. However, I should point that induction ceremony was after the castle documentation rounds, but before the ones in Washington.) “I’ll let you know if you do qualify—and you, too, Stephanie—even though you’re both smart to realize that CNG was the reason everybody has these powers in the first place. However, that code name has yet to be taken.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“In any event, you ladies are dismissed; thank you for coming today.”
“No problem.” The girls thanked me for helping them understand the circumstances better, as well as helping them inside and outside the castle.
Bit by bit, both families were starting to feel better about the whole thing, and when I coincidentally ran into them later that week at the G-52 Diner, I also answered any questions that the parents had about it, since they were baffled as to why it got their offspring and not them. In the end, justice was served, and with CNG dead, it was easier than ever to get a good night’s sleep.
You get a good night’s sleep yourselves, now, okay? Good night.
THE END
Flashback story related to my big story Another Wave of Transformations. A courageous teenage girl, while defending her family from CNG smugglers (who mistook her parents for somebody else they were going after), ends up being transformed into a cockapoo. Her actions result in her being one of the latest recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Leo the Patriotic Lion, G-52 organization, C.I.D.F., etc. © me and me alone
Leo the Patriotic Lion, G-52 organization, C.I.D.F., etc. © me and me alone
Category Story / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Gender Any
Size 120 x 120px
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