It was a school night but Madeleine Price was already bored. She had already used her super speed to do all of her reading assignments in a fraction of the time. Of course, she had to slow down when she was actually writing out her assignments and do them at regular person speed. If she dragged her pencil along the paper at full speed, she would probably cause a fire from all the friction. In fact, she had lost a book report two years earlier that way. Homework was boring enough doing it one time, having to do it several times over was definitely torture. Homework was boring because it was too easy. If the teachers threw out a challenge on par with foiling a bank robbery now and then, Maddy would be more than happy to do a little math or read Romeo and Juliet.
So instead of doing homework or engaging in extracurricular activities, Maddy was laying on her bed and listening to police scanners. It was still a restless way to spend time but the local police were all stirred up and on the lookout for Quick Lass. Foiling the convenience store robbery was fun but it had put the cops on alert for super fast vigilantes. So, Maddy had bugged her sister Jan for a solution. She needed something to do before she started just going out and running laps in a field somewhere. If she was considering going on a run, she must be really, really bored. Thankfully, Jan had come through yet again. There was a reason that Maddy automatically gave the girl a percentage of her allowance. The genius girl made Maddy feel dumb but instead of leveraging that, Jan liked acting like Maddy’s Q. At least, she seemed to enjoy it when she was not working on her own secret projects.
Jan had developed a device that could tap into police and emergency frequencies from other nearby cities. She had it shuffling around, trying to find something to do outside of her jurisdiction. While she was happy she had not heard any big emergencies, she was getting bored. She had no other hobbies outside of fighting crime. Before her powers developed she had been way into video games but now they were an exercise in frustration. She was able to move her fingers way faster than current technology could keep up with and she had busted a controller at one point. There were few people at school that she felt like she related to. Most of the people she had gotten along with were anti-social and spent their time looking for space for tags at the trainyard or under bridges. She was stuck with fighting crime as her hobby but she could not do that if there was no crime to fight.
The scanner clicked over to Drake City and all of a sudden the dispatcher sounded like things were far more urgent. “Calling all cars. There is a 132 at Drake Nationa Bank. 51st and Cable. Be advised, suspects are armed and one them has some sort of ice projection powers. Surround and contain, SWAT has been deployed.”
Maddy jumped off the bed in surprise and excitement. A “132” was code for an armed robbery which meant that this was an honest to goodness bank robbery. Usually, she only got to bank robberies after the criminals had gotten to their getaway car. Most successful bank robberies were in and out and then they were speeding away from the scene of the crime. That’s usually when Maddy caught up to them and pulled them one by one out of their car. It was fun and the robbers usually looked really surprised. The kind of surprised that made a crook never want to try a robbery again. That is how things usually went but now it was a police siege with the criminals inside and armed and possibly with hostages.
There had also never been somebody with powers at the scene of the crime. Maddy hardly knew what to do with herself. On the one hand, she had never met anybody like herself before. She had always felt separate from the world around her although she suspected that Jan might have some sort of brainiac powers. She wanted to see somebody else with powers and talk with them and share all of her experiences. But the person at the bank would not be interested in that. They were a criminal. Not a vandal or a shoplifter like some of her friends but a real potential threat. Maddy could not imagine hurting innocent people with her powers and the thought suddenly angered her.
The superhuman icicle jerk would have to be stopped. She jumped to her feet and opened her window. There was no time to get caught by her mother or bargain with Jan to cover for her. The police were not equipped for this sort of thing. Somebody was going to get hurt if Maddy did not get to the bank and it was already fifty miles away. She would have to run fast but she would be there in minutes. She did not know if she would succeed but she also knew that there was no time for fear or doubt. Maybe this was why she had been given super speed abilities. Maybe this was her higher calling.
She changed into her costume with a press of a button and jumped out of the window. She started running the instant she hit the ground. As soon as she could, she pointed herself toward Drake City. She caught glimpses of shocked faces and startled drivers who must have seen her only as a blurred streak. She smiled to herself. They were all amazed by her and they had every right to be. In this costume, she was allowed to be special and now she was going to show the world again. She was on her way.
Tags: Comic Books, Crimefighting, Fiction, Jan Price, Madeleine Price, Original, Quick Lass, Superhero
Wolf of Words 
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