The Unbeatable
Squirrel Girl
Vs
One Thousand and One Character Introductions
It takes a lot to catch me off guard. I’ve seen so many unbelievable things – dinosaurs on fire off the shore of Liberty Island, alternate-universe reasonably priced New York real estate – but the wonderful thing about the universe is that there’s always something new that can stop you in your tracks and really make you say, “Gosh dang!”
One of the few things I was not prepared to see that morning was the neighborhood between Battery Park and Wall Street, piers and streets and cars and everything, phase through the east side of Empire State University’s campus.
“Gosh dang!” I said, stopping in my tracks.
“There goes the neighborhood,” Nancy muttered. Such a wit, that Nancy.
She and I had been walking together to Algorithms and Ethics and just generally enjoying life. She was my roommate and best (human) friend. It had been hard to find a break to breathe that week. We were coming up on the close of our second year in the CompSci program and spring was breaking everywhere. We were surrounded by huge sycamores with floofy green blossoms, sprouting botanical club flower gardens, the smell of street tacos in the air. And, of course, squirrels cavorting and careening along the campus’s trees.
Now the flower gardens had half-transposed with the Bowling Green subway station’s boarding platform. The sidewalk ahead was boarding passengers for cruises to the Statue of Liberty. The faces of people standing in line at a falafel cart had only a second to look startled as they ghosted through Nancy and me at interstate speeds.
Then they were all past us. ESU’s campus was back to its ridiculously beautiful self. Nancy and I looked at each other. Angry ducks yelled at us in duck, but that was normal.
It hadn’t just been sights and sounds that had barreled through us. Reader, I could smell the roasting
shawarma. A cold breeze had tingled through my skin as the street passed through us. Because we were already going to be late for class, I didn’t want to say how hungry that made me.
We started running in the direction the rogue piece of Manhattan had flown. When you spend as much time around squirrels as I do, you learn to pick up on some pretty subtle sounds (and having the proportionate hearing of a squirrel doesn’t hurt, either…). The click-claw of tiny scampering claws on sidewalk cement is the background noise of my life.
I knew without looking that my best squirrel-friend, Tippy-Toe, was right behind me. I leaned forward and, after a pause long enough to account for a mighty leap, she landed on my shoulder. Her bushy tail tickled the back of my neck.
“I think one of those Battery Park squirrels phased through my nut cache,” she complained. “Now they know where it is! I was even good, and saved some through winter!”
“I feed you,” I pointed out.
She didn’t have time to answer. I’d been blessed with, among other things, the proportionate speed and jumping ability of a squirrel – which, blown up to human size, is quite a lot. Nancy used to have to get around by more conventional means until I entered her life. I scooped her up, coiled my legs like springs, and leapt to the top of the Gorman Gymnasium.
“Hup,” I said, because what was I going to do – jump three stories and not say hup?
It still felt weird to just jump around in the middle of campus like that. My secret identity hadn’t been “secret” for months. I no longer had to hide my big bushy squirrel tail in my pants, or don a costume before leaping around, but I still got moments of self-consciousness. One of these days, I was going to have to get used to Doreen Green and Squirrel Girl sharing the same life. I wasn’t there yet. Change is weird. Not as weird as ghost images of New York flying around, but, y’know. Still.
Nancy still complained when I carried her in public. She said it was undignified. Dignity is for cats, not squirrels, but Nancy had always been a cat person.
She didn’t complain now. If someone was stealing New York landmarks and neighborhoods, we had to figure out where in the world – or possibly in time – they were.
The phantom cityscape had vanished by the time we reached the gymnasium’s higher vantage. The first one, anyway. Nancy shielded her eyes from the sun and pointed. The southern tip of Manhattan, just visible against the fringe of the Hudson River, was perpendicular to the horizon.
“Huh,” I said, tilting my head.
The concave bowl of Yankee Stadium, flipped upside-down, superimposed over a cloud. The George Washington Bridge crisscrossed through the insurance and bank ads on the left-field scoreboard. A V-formation of panicked geese was too slow to dive out of their way, but nothing struck them.
A moment later, and the images faded. Except for the reeling birds, the sky was clear again.
“Huh,” Nancy and Tippy-Toe and I said.
Nancy and I had seen a lot in our lives, even by second-year CompSci student standards. We were immediately
in problem-solving mode.
“Hallucination gas?” Nancy suggested.
“Time travel?” I asked.
“No, I just saw that construction on the George Washington Bridge yesterday,” Nancy said. “Holographic projection?”
“Total catastrophic space-time inversion?” I asked.
“What the heck does that mean?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “But I bet we can find someone who will tell us something that sounds just as alarming.”
Nancy braced herself for another jump. Tippy-Toe’s tiny claws dug into my shoulder. Once the air between us and our next vantage point was clear of any interleaving parks, subway stations, billboards, and street theaters, I leapt.
New York! It’s a heckuva town! Nobody I know is entirely clear on why it’s such a magnet for super villainy (not to mention regular villainy). It has a greater concentration of crimebusting super heroes than any other city in the world. I mean, seriously – the Fantastic Four are here, Spider-Man, Tony Stark, Doctor Strange, She-Hulk, He-Hulk, me and my friends…
Kinda makes you think. Do super-empowered heroes attract menaces like mountains attract mountain-climbers? If all of us weren’t here, would New York have faced so many terrible threats in so short a time?
You know what? Scratch that. What am I thinking? If it hadn’t been for the city’s heroes, New York would have been conquered by Doctor Doom, or gobbled up by Galactus, or become the setting for some grim-and-gritty deconstructive reboot about how there’s no good people left in the world, only innocents to crush, monsters who call themselves heroes, sad relics of a bygone age, and–
Ahem. Sometimes my thoughts wander. They’ve been going in stranger directions than they used to.
Anyway, case in point as to the density of New York super heroes: it didn’t take me long at all to find my fellow animal-themed crimefighters, Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi. (One of the delightful things about super hero callsigns is how much they tell you about the person who chose them. You know a lot about Chipmunk Hunk’s personality and interests already.)
It wasn’t too much of a coincidence that I found them. The three of us, plus Nancy, were all undergraduates at Empire State University. In the same department, even. Chipmunk Hunk leapt along the rooftops, coming from the direction of the Stacy Memorial Dining Hall. Koi Boi skimmed the Harlem River, a white-blue blur of spray and foam.
When I landed atop the Park Avenue Rail Bridge’s skeletal metal counterweight tower, Koi Boi flopped onto the strut right beside mine. Steam from the speed of his passage still wafted from his skin. “You look like you know where you’re going,” he said.
“Good!” I said. “I kind of do.”
“Kind of?”
Chipmunk Hunk slammed atop the tower with an impact that rattled the gridwork. Chipmunk Hunk’s other name is Tomas Lara-Perez, but we all have an unspoken agreement to refer to each other by callsign when we’re in costume. He was, as you might expect, ludicrously handsome. The wind swept his hair dramatically without mussing it.
Like me, he wasn’t traveling alone. His girlfriend, Mary Mahajan, had hitched a ride on his back. Chipmunk Hunk said, “We just saw the Knicks practicing in the Hudson River!”
“And they didn’t even drown,” Mary remarked. It had not been a good season for the Knicks.
“If we’re all seeing the same things, I suppose that rules out hallucination gas,” Nancy mused. “Probably. You could all be my figments.”
“No, you’d all be my figments,” Mary said. Her hair was not as windproof as her boyfriend’s but that only boosted her mad-scientist image. She was a CompSci student by day, and a superweapon hobbyist at night. And during the day, too, come to think of it. I’d hoped that might have given her some insight into what we were facing, but she just looked somewhere between bemused and irritated, the same as usual.
“Now we figure out if this is happening across the world or localized in New York,” Koi Boi said. His short, wavy brown hair was still dripping. His costume consisted of whatever he happened to be wearing (jeans, a shirt, and windbreaker today) plus a pair of fisheye goggles. Even his civilian outfits were all light, quick-drying cotton.
Just in case you were thinking of stereotyping hunks, don’t. My man Chipmunk Hunk is razor-sharp. “I haven’t seen any clouds near the ground, or buildings too high up,” he said. “That suggests a more localized problem. Or at least one that stays low.”
“It’s okay,” Koi Boi said. “Squirrel Girl kind of knows where we’re going.”
“I’m not ready yet,” I said. Seeing my friends in costume had reminded me of my own. I reached back and grabbed a squirrel-ear headband that, until now, had been safely hidden in my tail fuzz. I slipped it over my hair. “Now I’m ready.”
Before we launched again, Nancy looked at Mary stretched over Chipmunk Hunk’s back. Then back at me. Being held in my arms was, admittedly, not the most dignified position. Too bad! My shoulders were taken. I’d promised Tippy-Toe the seat against my neck the next time we traveled.
I have tons of friends around the city. I’ve only been living here full-time for two years, but it’s my friends that make New York feel like home. Some of my friends here, though, I’ve known for a lot longer than two years.
Like Tony Stark. First among Iron Men.
I made my super hero debut with Iron Man. That was the first time I beat Doctor Doom! Since Tony and I go way back, I knew he wouldn’t mind me breaking and entering into his offices atop Stark Tower, no matter how many times he’d tried to send me repair bills for that before. Oh, Tony! He knew I was a
broke college student. We had a mutual understanding that the bills are just the motions that, as a titan of capitalism, he was expected to go through.
I think, anyway. We never actually talked about it.
Today though, just getting up there was tricky. A ghost image of the Avengers Mansion drifted across the cityscape, disrupting my sightlines. We were atop skyscrapers now, far enough off the ground that a fall would be bad news even for me, and worse for Nancy. I had to align my next jump through an image of Central Park Zoo. A crowd of people standing vertically across the sky scattered as I barreled through them. A troop of Japanese macaques watched us with jaded eyes.
Our group landed atop Stark Tower’s westmost helipad. Alarm klaxons blared instantly. Crackling blue containment fields sprung up around us. The rooftop thudded with the clanging footsteps of security robots. Tony knew the rooftop of his monumental tower was the first place his many enemies would think to attack, and had concentrated his defenses there.
Oh, well. We had to get in, fast. In situations like that, my team preferred to improvise. Things usually worked out – if not the way we intended, then the way things needed to go. I raised my fists, ready for a fight.
The roof suddenly gave way beneath us. The six of us (counting Tippy-Toe, still clinging desperately to my shoulder) tumbled down a surface that had suddenly become a slick metal ramp. We slid down a long, steep drop toward a carpeted floor. That floor was coming up far too quickly. Chipmunk Hunk and I only just managed to position ourselves to cushion Mary and Nancy.
I told you things usually worked out for us. Tony had finally given up and programmed the building AI to let us in and avoid the property damage.
He stood behind a magnificent mahogany desk, surrounded by two dozen half-transparent holographic displays, all flashing urgent red. He looked unsurprised to see us. More tired, really.
“Nancy, Mary,” he said. “I would have set some pillows down if I’d known they’d bring you along.”
Nancy and Mary have hearts of steel, but their butts were a teensy bit more breakable than Koi Boi’s, Chipmunk Hunk’s, and mine. They’re humans with the proportionate speed and strength of a human. Still pretty incredible, but not quite as up to long falls as us.
“Just a little… winded,” Nancy gasped. “Pretty normal… day so far.”
My butt came with its own fuzzy pillow attached. I refloofed my tail. “So you and the Avengers already know what’s happening, right?” I asked Tony, standing up.
“Total catastrophic space-time inversion,” Tony said.
“No way!” I said at the same time that Nancy asked “What?”
“No, I did make that up,” Tony said. “We’re still collecting data. It’s not holograms, not parallel dimensions, not time warps, not mass suggestion.” The latest model of Tony’s Iron Man suit stood in the corner. Tony eyed it longingly. But this wasn’t the kind of problem repulsor blasts would solve. At least not
yet. “The Hulk is already out there, trying to punch things until this stops. Guess how much that’s helping.”
“What if it’s some kind of cosmic reboot?” I asked. “Those have happened before, right?”
“If they had, we wouldn’t remember it,” Tony answered. “But, no, that’s never happened.” He scratched underneath his beard. “I’ve got to stay and sort this out. If whatever’s happening has a technological or scientific cause, we’re the best people to root it out. We’ll keep looking.”
“So will we,” I said.
“Close the roof hatch on the way out, please,” Tony said. For the first time, his eyes met mine. “And be careful out there.”
See! He cared.
Mary was transfixed by one of the pieces of Iron Man suits on Tony’s tables. Specifically, a gloved fist with its repulsor cannon. Chipmunk Hunk and I pulled her away before she could do anything to embarrass us more than our entrance already had.
Back outside, the interior of a Queens penthouse party segued through us – I swear I saw a monocle pop – followed by the guts of a storm sewer. The dingy caverns of New York’s Subterranea spilled over the next crosswalk. The Mole Man shook his fist at the outside world in the manner of angry old men everywhere. The city was folding up on itself like a sheet of paper. ...
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