Oh wow! I totally forgot I had left this thread as it was!
Part 9: PENGUIN Pinball
Treetops.
These are the usual places for birds.
Granted, the birds that now flap and flutter away from their avian cousin's barreling feet first into the branches have proper feathers and working wings. They do not have flippers or webbed feet or mutant ice-generating powers.
Waddle the Penguin gives another shove forward from upper branches, a streak of black and white through the sky that fades back beneath forest canopy with a crash of leaves and angry squawks.
Even little mutant hero penguins, though, need to rest. He finally huffs to a stop some twenty feet up and. . . how many yards distant from the retrofitted Crey base he left behind? Beady, tiny eyes squint the way he came. He doesn't hear any Metalfaces tromping through the woods. He must, thus, be free.
"Freeeeeee!" comes the merry squeak, and, done resting, away he leaps--
only to break free of the treeline and find himself soaring over a rooftop and into the top of a billboard for the local Super Mexicano. One leg and one arm catch the advertisement, and there the penguin hero dangles, reverting to instinctual, frightened awks as he scrambles, hanging, off-balance and not really wanting to fall some twenty or thirty feet uncontrolled. He is a penguin, not one of those funny, fluffy things that go mew and have twitchy, long tails.
But from below, on the sidewalk, coming out of the Super Mexicano in question?
"Waddle?"
"You know that. . . bird, Jenny?"
"Candy! Just. . . I don't know! Help me get him down! He looks hurt!"
"Down? He got you down from Atlas, and he--"
Down! Hand loses grip, and then leg spasms, pumping the bird away from the billboard in a somersault away over the street. The heads of Jenny Hall and Candy "Cardio" Carradine crane in a circle, following the flight of the flightless bird. But what? Wait?
Icy brilliance bursts forth from the bird's body, circling the entire creature in a sphere thick and solid. Smashing into the side of an apartment complex, some fifteen feet from the ground, cracks the ice, and down the protected bird goes, rolling down the bricks until bird and ball come to rest amid bushes.
The two fitness gurus change glances, and across the way they sprint, while Jenny calls out a single, frightened word.
"Waaaaaaddle?"