"committed" By A.r. Kirby, Episode 34: "vulcan's End"

COMMITTED by A.R. Kirby

Episode 34 Vulcan’s End

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lice and her friends huddled together on the museum rooftop, each gaping at Liv as she leaped into the smoke-filled air above the park. Liv paid them no attention; her main goal was to get back to Tal and help him with the teetering statue of Vulcan. She swerved in mid-air to avoid a pair of mockingbirds flying erratically over the chaos, and it was then that she noticed how her heart was pounding -- racing, actually, racing like an extended drum solo from a speed metal band. She could feel the blood throbbing through her veins. She supposed it was adrenaline, but then she noticed something else, something... different. She wasn’t nervous. This quite surprised Liv. She’d gotten used to being worried and nervous during the past few days. Ever since that fateful Thursday evening, she had been a nervous wreck. But now? Now she wasn’t nervous at all. In fact, she was quite the opposite. She was confident and sure of herself, and for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom,

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she had absolutely no fear of doing the wrong thing. At once, everything started to come freely and naturally to Liv, as free and as easy as if she had been in the superhero business since birth. She paused for a moment, the fabric of her sundress billowing around her. For the first time in her life, Liv was absolutely certain that she was doing exactly what she was supposed to do. Perhaps it was the adrenaline, or maybe it was maternal instinct, but for the first time, Liv thought that yes, yes she could save the world. And she would do it with her husband... “CAN I GET A LITTLE HELP OVER HERE?” Liv’s head snapped around to see Tal struggling mightily to keep Vulcan and his pedestal somewhat upright. He was not doing a great job. Every so often, Tal would shift his grip, causing the entire structure to shudder dangerously. With each passing moment, the thick iron bolts holding the statue to the top of the pedestal were pulled a little further out from the stone, making great creaking and groaning sounds as they strained against the laws of physics. The pedestal itself had also begun to crumble, with increasingly larger pieces of stone falling down into the chasm below as Tal grunted and groaned with his effort. Liv flew quickly to her husband, bobbing up and down excitedly as she hovered. She glanced at Tal’s tenuous hold on the statue, then quickly looked him in the eyes. “This-is-so-cool,” she chattered, “I mean, now I know we can really do this. We can do it! We can save the world, Tal! We really can! Holy shit, we can do it! And 2

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we will! “Oh, and Alice is safe, I made sure of that,” she added, and turned away from Tal toward the front of the park. “Now let’s go get Monica!” She had flown a good fifty feet before she heard the strained cry of “WAIT!” come from behind her. She spun around to see that Tal’s face had turned an unseemly shade of red, with the veins at his temples throbbing visibly. His arms trembled as he strained against the weight of the statue and pedestal. Sweat gushed from what seemed to be every pore on his body, and streamed into his disbelieving eyes “WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS!” he screamed. Liv glanced at the ground around the pedestal, then took off back in the direction of Tal and the statue. She flew forward quickly, a grin on her face, her arms outstretched before her and her hands clenched into wellmanicured fists. Faster and faster she flew, achieving full velocity at the exact moment when she moment she reached the structure -- and crashing into it just below the point where the statue was attached to the stone. There was a horrible noise of stone being blasted apart and iron being wrenched loose from its anchors, and then Liv flew free into the clear air on the other side. For a brilliant, blazing moment, the separated statue of Vulcan hung motionless in the air, chunks of stone in a motionless orbit about its base. Then gravity kicked in, and the whole kit and caboodle began crashing down. “Shit!” Tal cried as he attempted to grab Vulcan’s arm 3

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as it fell past him. He missed, and could only hover and watch as Birmingham’s favorite landmark clanged into the chasm below in an ungainly heap of stone, dust, and tangled metal. He turned to look at Liv, who hovered nearby, dusting off her hands while she admired her handiwork. “ARE YOU CRAZY?” Tal yelled as he flew next to Liv. “Can you tell me what that was all about? You could have killed somebody with that stunt!” “Nope, wasn’t going to kill anybody, I knew that,” Liv said calmly as she scanned the ground beneath them. The scurrying forms of the dragon moles covered much of the park; ahead of them, farther down the mountainside, people ran helter-skelter away from the animals, paying little or no notice to Tal and Liv. She couldn’t see Monica in the crowd. “I had it covered,” she continued, turning her attention back to her husband. “It’s all part of the plan.” “Covered?” Tal was aghast. “You had it covered? How the hell do you ‘cover’ knocking over a giant statue? And what plan? What the fuck is going on?” “What’s going on,” she said, “is that you have to: 1) not freak out like you’re about to; and 2) trust me.” “Trust you? You just knocked Vulcan out of my hands and broke it! How can I trust someone who would do that?” Liv sighed. “Listen. I know that whole Vulcan thing had to have been a surprise to you, but it’s all part of the plan. I knew I wasn’t going to hurt anybody, because... 4

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well, because I just knew. That, and I looked to see if it would fall on anybody before I hit it. But I knew it was the right thing to do before I even started flying. See how it all fell?” Tal followed Liv’s outstretched arm down to the ground. A few stones were scattered about on either side of the chasm, but most of the pedestal had collapsed into the hole. Vulcan himself had landed mostly intact but upside down and at an angle, so that his feet rested at the top edge of the crack with his body leading down into the depths of the hole. “We’re going to use Vulcan as a bridge to get the devil rats or whatever they are back into the ground,” Liv said as Tal turned his face back to hers. “I told you I had a plan, and the first part of it is to find Monica. Do you know where she is?” As if in answer, a mighty squeal of feedback punctuated by a resonating, musical THUMP! blared out of the speaker system framing the stage. Liv and Tal both whipped around toward the front of the park to see Monica huddled on stage behind Eric, who was valiantly keeping a horde of dragon moles at bay by using his guitar as a weapon. Tal thought he made an epic figure, swinging his flaming Takamine to and fro, sending flaming rodents flying through the air with each mighty stroke. THWANG! A dragon mole whizzed between Tal and Liv, its fiery breath setting a small fire ablaze on a patch of Tal’s beard. He quickly smacked it out using his palms, and then both Tal and Liv approached the stage cautiously. As they neared, Liv could see a fist-sized hole 5

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in the side of Eric’s acoustic guitar, with a small piece of smoldering moleskin attached to its edge. They touched down beside the musician and Monica, who blubbered at his feet. “DAD!” Tal’s daughter screamed as she threw her arms around her father’s legs. “Ohdaddydaddydaddy... what’s going on? We’re gonna die!” “We’re not going to die if I can help it,” Tal said, reaching down and grabbing his daughter’s arm and pulling her to her feet. “We’re going to get you out of here.” “Mind if I tag along?” Eric asked as he thumped another dragon mole back into the park. “Not at all,” Liv said, wrapping her arms around Eric. “Um... how is a hug going to help right now?” he asked, then gasped as he felt his feet leave the stage. Tal and Liv carried the two upward, and quickly. A spate of dragon moles crowded into the space the quartet had just vacated, and sent up a fireball that just missed Eric and Liv’s feet. Monica wrapped her arms even more tightly around Tal’s neck as they skimmed above the park. Her mind was filled with questions, but her astonishment at the extreme weirdness of the situation kept her from opening her mouth. It wasn’t long before all four of them joined Alice and her friends on the rooftop. As soon as they landed, the questions began, with Alice, Monica, Eric and the rest babbling and interrupting each other while Tal and Liv stood at the edge of the roof and watched. After about thirty seconds, Liv had heard enough. 6

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“OKAY, PEOPLE...” she shouted, her voice clear and confident. An immediate hush came over the group. Even Tal straightened up and paid rapt attention to his wife. “First off -- is everybody okay?” She looked at the faces in front of her on the roof; everyone was scared, she could tell, but no one seemed to be horribly injured. Eric and Monica were singed and covered with soot from their encounter with the dragon moles, but were otherwise unharmed. Alice and her friends had a few bruises, but seemed physically okay as well. Liv took another look, then continued. “There’s a lot to talk about,” she said. “I know you all have questions, I know this is the weirdest thing that has happened to any of us -- ever -- but we don’t have time to get into all that right now. What we have to do now is take care of these moles and get you all home. “First, Tal and I are going to drive these creatures back into the ground. While we’re doing that, Alice and Monica, you’re going to take your friends home. Tal, give the girls your keys.” Unquestioningly, Tal dug around in the pockets of his cargo shorts and quickly fished out the keys to the Volvo. He tossed the key ring to Monica, who caught it onehanded. “Listen,” Liv went on, “when we get these moles clear of the museum, I want you all to head down to the parking lot and get the hell out of here. Go straight home. We’ll meet you there as soon as we can. Does everybody understand?” Nods from the group. Liv grinned. 7

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“Okay then,” Liv said to Tal. “You ready?” “I guess so. Do you have a plan?” “Oh yeah, I’ve got a plan,” she said. “Follow my lead.” Then the two of them headed back into the park to deal with the flaming rodents. In the end, the dragon moles turned out to be very little trouble. Liv guessed that the moles might be afraid of water, and tested her theory by directing the jet of the park’s fountain at some moles that had wandered away from the main pack. As soon as the water touched them, they ran shrieking. Soon, she had created a wall of water around the periphery of the park and was using it as a corral around the subterranean threat. Tal, his own spirits buoyed by Liv’s commanding presence, went to work using his earthen powers and created a berm outside Liv’s water wall. The two of them began working together, hovering above the edge of the park and moving earth and water in an ever-shrinking circle. They looked like floating symphony conductors as they used their powers to drive the moles back down into the chasm from whence they came. As soon as the last mole was back underground, Tal waved with a flourish and the chasm sealed with a groan. “So now you can do something besides fly and be strong,” Liv said. “Why didn’t you do that when all this started?” “I told you I couldn’t concentrate,” he replied. “But after watching you... I mean.. what happened you?” “I don’t know. I guess I just decided that if we’re going to save the world, we might as well get started, you 8

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know?” The couple hovered silently together for a moment, looking at the panorama beneath them. Steam and smoke still filled the air, the neatly-manicured lawn of the park was now a broken and cracked mess, and Vulcan’s legs protruded ungracefully from the cracked ground around what used to be his pedestal. Behind them, the crowd began to reassemble. A smattering of applause grew, until soon the entire park was cheering for Tal and Liv.. “Not bad for our first real day as superheroes, huh?” Tal asked. “Shut up,” Liv said, and punched him in the shoulder playfully. Suddenly, Liv became aware of the sound of sirens growing above the adulation of the crowd. She looked at her husband, who had also cocked an ear toward the sound of the onrushing emergency vehicles. “I think we better get out of here before we have to answer any questions,” she said, and Tal nodded in agreement. “Shall we?” Liv held out her hand, and Tal took it. Then they both rose quickly into the air and headed back to Mountain Woods. -------Back at the edge of the park, Hannah Johnson brushed a stray hair from her smudged face and stared into the camera. This stuff has Emmy Award written all over it, she though to herself. New York, here I come! 9

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“Today’s Humane Society benefit became a war zone after an earthquake hit Vulcan Park and the park was overrun by fire-breathing underground animals,” she said, using her best hard-news voice, “An estimated crowd of eight hundred people was in the park at the time of the incident, and while the park was heavily damaged, it appears that no one at the park suffered anything more than minor injuries. “We have video of two unidentified people who apparently used supernatural powers to subdue the creatures,” she went on. “Local musician Eric McGinty, who was scheduled to perform at today’s event, is here with me. He became one of the day’s many heroes when he saved a young woman from certain death by using his guitar to beat away dozens of the flaming creatures that attacked the park. Eric, can you tell us what happened?” “Sure,” Eric replied. “I was getting ready to play, and the earthquake hit, and Vulcan started to fall over, then all these flaming moles came out of the ground. I had a friend at the stage with me, and we were fighting for out lives. But then Tal and Liv swooped down and saved the day!” “Tal and Liv?” Hanna asked. “Who are they?” “Why Tal and Liv Hooper, of course,” Eric said. “He was my history professor at UB, and she’s one of the coolest women I’ve ever met. Of course, now they’re even cooler! They’re superheroes!” To be continued... 10