Siren crouched in the bushes, waiting for the police cruiser to pass.  She was covered in the burglar Slimeball’s super sticky goo, blobs of it covering her mouth, her hand, chest, thighs, hip and back.  It stuck fast to anything it came in contact with, grabbing leaves and branches as she hid from the cops.  One of her gloves hung from her sealed mouth, the other from her hip.  She at least still had one hand free, and she was only hobbled at the knees and still able to shuffle along, making her way back to her car.  Small miracles, she thought, groaning as she noted her phone was trapped in her belt.

At least the cops hadn’t brought dogs.  Another small miracle she wasn’t overly grateful for as she watched the flashlight beams dance across the neighborhood as the police searched for Slimeball.

She waited until the coast was the clear and shuffled as quickly as she could to where her car was parked a few blocks away.  Careful not to get her arm stuck, she reached across her body, gingerly fishing her keys out of her belt.  

She put the keys in the door when it dawned on her that while she was fortunate enough to be able to get in her car, if she did, she’d be stuck fast to the seat.  

She kicked the wheel of the Corolla, screaming in frustration into the goo sealing her mouth shut, punching her car door with her free hand until her knuckles bled.  

Finally, she calmed down, suddenly keenly aware of how close the slime on her face was to covering her nostrils as she caught her breath.  It was unevenly plastered across her face, partially obscuring her left nostril, limiting her air intake.  If it spread and cut off her air, she would die, just like one of Slimeball’s victims, smothered to death.

She needed a plan.  There had to be a better way than acid, which she didn’t even have access to.  The school had a chemistry lab, but she didn’t have the first clue how to make acid, and she was likely to burn her face off in the process.  She groaned, realizing there was one place she could go.  She didn’t like it, but as she stared at her reflection in the window, dirty, disheveled, and covered in sticky slime she had no way to remove on her own, she knew she had no choice.

She unlocked her car door, carefully leaning over and picking up the floor mat.  She played it on the side of her car, turning around and pressing her back against it, covering the blob on her back.  At the very least, it would keep her from getting stuck to the seat and protect the upholstery.  She found a fast food wrapper and stuck it over the blob on her hip, a plastic bag over her chest and right hand, and wrapped a spare sweatshirt around her knees.  Satisfied she wouldn’t become stuck to anything else, she eased herself into the seat, starting up the car and driving off into the early dawn light.



“What are we looking at?” Detective Merrick asked one of the uniforms as he arrived on the scene.

“Hard to say.  Our guy showed up, started looting, and fired a couple of his slime balls at the homeowners, trapped them in the master bathroom, but he left all the stuff.”  The officer pointed at the sack of valuables pilfered from about the house.

Merrick walked over to the broken window.  “It’s broken from the outside.  I thought the alarm triggered when he came in the front door?”

“It did.”

“So there was someone else.”  Merrick leaned out the window, shining his flashlight into the grass.

“Yeah, looks like a scuffle.  There’s piles of his slime out there, the grass is a bit torn up.”

“Anything else?”

“They also found a bottle of 5 Hour Energy drink on the lawn.  Forensics has it.”

“Alright.  Thanks Frank.”

“No problem Detective.  What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking someone’s trying to do our job for us.”



Siren stood in front of the massive granite doors, her fingers poised in front of the doorbell.  This was the last place she wanted to be, and behind that door one of the last people she wanted to see, but right now, she was out of the options.

The energy drink had worn off hours ago, but the fear of the slime shifting up over her nose and suffocating in her sleep had kept her driving, pushing past the exhaustion.  

And here she was.  She pressed the doorbell.  She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.  She had to pee, but getting out of her suit to do so presented a whole host of problems.  She waited, nervously, and as she was torn between ringing the bell again, and, possibly the saner option, turning and leaving, the door slowly opened.

A tall man in a white lab coat stood at the door.  His was thin, his skin gaunt and tight against his face.  His eyes, yellow and bloodshot, magnified behind thick glasses, stared at the mess of a heroine on his doorstep.  “This is an interesting turn of events.”

Siren held up a note she’d messily scrawled in her left hand on the back of a receipt.  

“Please help,” the man read her note, taking it from her.  She shuddered as she saw that the pinky on his left hand didn’t match the rest of his hand, larger than the proportions of the rest of fingers, a slightly different hue, and fresh scaring where the finger had been sewn on Frankenstein style.  The ring finger next to was it gone completely, replaced with a robotic digit made of up metal ball and socket joints and exposed wires.

Siren pointed at the slime over her mouth, her glove still hanging from it like some bizarre turkey’s waddle, as if her peril wasn’t clear enough.

He held up his hand to her face, and she leaned back out of reach, loathing the thought of his fingers becoming stuck to her face.

“I see,” he mused, stroking his chin, the robotic finger clicking as it tapped his face.  “Come inside, Siren.”  He opened the door, beckoning her inside.  “I think I may have something to help with your current predicament.”

She followed him inside, silently praying he had a solution better than acid.  Dr. Jeremiah Sisaro was every bit the embodiment of a mad scientist.  His personal home and lab reflected that.  Even in the foyer, the walls were decorated with diagrams and charts and pictures of experiments.  What looked like a human foot was just sitting in a tube of purple liquid on an end table.  It was like he’d hired Tim Burton as an interior decorator.

“You came to the right place, Siren.  I keep up to date on all the goings on of the super humans and the mystical and magical.  I must say, this truly is a pleasure.  I was disappointed when the Legendary Consortium kicked you out before I’d had a chance to study that interesting voice of yours.”

Siren shuddered.  Dr. Sisaro was a genius, no doubt about that, and had proven an invaluable resource to the Super Hero community time and time again, but his incredible wealth of knowledge came at a price.  Money, had she had any, was of no interest to this man.  If you needed a favor, it was going to cost something far more precious.

He led her into his lab, instructing her to sit on an exam table.  She hoisted herself up, watching him as he pulled a pair of blue sterile gloves on, thankfully concealing his unsettling fingers.

He pulled a lighted magnifying glass over her face, examining the slime.  “Very interesting indeed,” he mused, grabbing a pair of tweezers.  He pinched some of the slime over her cheek, pulling on it.  The tweezers immediately became as stuck to her as everything else.

Play with any of it not stuck to my face, she thought.  Of course, she’d covered the rest of it in an attempt to avoid getting stuck on anything else, but still.

Her eyes widened as Dr. Sisaro produced a scalpel, its razor sharp edge gleaming in the light.  “Hold really still,” he told her, pulling the tweezers away from her face, tugging the slime, and her cheek with it.

She shut her eyes, unable to watch as he brought the blade up to the slime.  The blade of course immediately joined the menagerie of junk hanging from her face, its sharp blade unable to do anything against the resilient goo.

“Maybe a laser…” Dr. Sisaro said to himself, his gloved fingers rubbing across his forehead.

“Mmm mmm!” she protested, shaking her head, the tweezers and scalpel flapping about wildly.

“I’ll be right back,” he told her, briskly walking out of the room.

Get up and run.

Or hobble along, as her case may be.  The idea was ludicrous, but even still, letting the police pour acid on her face was sounding really appealing at that moment.

She shifted on the table, quickly discovering that leaving was no longer an option.  The slime on her back, sandwiched out from behind the car mat by her body weight, had her glued to the surface of the table.  

She was stuck, helplessly waiting on whatever twisted idea the mad scientist came up with to get her out of this situation.

The panic wasn’t enough to stave off her exhaustion, and her eyelids were growing heavy when Dr. Sisaro finally returned.  The sight of the blowtorch in his hand woke her up immediately.

“MMMM!  MMMM!  MMMMMMMM!” she screamed, flailing her free hand.  

“Relax, it’s just a little heat.”  He lit the tip of the torch, two inches of blue flame igniting from the tip of the blowtorch.

Siren bucked on the table, attempting to pull herself off the table to no avail.

“If you don’t calm down, you’re going to get burned.”

Siren forced herself to remain still, taking quick short breaths through her nose as she helplessly watched the hot flame approach her face.

Dr. Sisaro grabbed the scalpel, pulling it taught and heating the metal.  Siren watched out of the corner of her eye as the silver metal blackened under the heat, and she smelled melting plastic.  It took her a second to realize it wasn’t the slime she smelled burning, but Dr. Sisaro’s gloves, the fingertips melting.  The doctor seemed not to notice, or care if he did.  

Siren was starting to feel the heat on her cheek, but still the slime held firm to the scalpel.  “Fascinating,” Dr. Sisaro said, turning off the blowtorch.  He relinquished the scalpel, and Siren gave a muffled scream as it felt like she’d burned her neck with a curling iron.

She tilted her head, letting the hot scalpel hang away from her neck, glaring at Dr. Sisaro.  He had his back to her, mumbling to himself.

“This is a truly interesting substance.  I would love to get my hands on the man producing this.”  Without addressing Siren, he turned and left again, to her relief taking the blowtorch with him.

Yeah, torture him, Siren thought, fidgeting on the table.  The idea that Dr. Sisaro wouldn’t find a way to remove the slime without maiming her in some way was taking root in her mind.  Maybe he’d try freezing it next, leaving her face scarred and damaged from severe frostbite.  Or try cutting it off with a laser as he’d mentioned.  At this point, it seemed unlikely that he had some magical solvent that would just dissolve the slime away without leaving her permanently disfigured.  For all she knew, he might have just the thing, but he considered it more fun to try new and dangerous ways of removing it.

She heard the squeak of wheels as Dr. Sisaro returned, pushing a cart in front of him into the room.  Sitting on top of it was a metal box, adorned with buttons and dials.  Hanging from it off the side of the cart where two wires with two pronged heads.  Dr. Sisaro pushed the cart up next to her, and walked around the exam table, pulling a series of straps up from the far side.  Wordlessly, he strapped Siren down, pinning her free hand while she mumbled questions into the slime covering her mouth.

She had to have fallen asleep, passed out from exhaustion, as Dr. Sisaro twisted a dial on the box and pressed a button, and the thing hummed to life.  This had to be a dream.  He held the two wires a few inches apart, a flesh of electric energy arcing between the prongs.  Not a dream, a nightmare.

“This may hurt,” he warned, holding the prongs up to each side of her sealed mouth.

“MMMMMMGH!” she screamed as the current tore through the slime.  Nope, definitely not a dream.  She was more awake than she’d ever been as electricity surged through the slime, electrocuting her.  

She bucked and strained against her restraints as the electricity tore through her body, screaming in pain.  Dr. Sisaro was unmoved by her evident agony, watching as smoke rose from her wig as the thing fried, filling the air with the smell of burning hair.  He casually walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a fire extinguisher, spraying the wig just as it caught flame, just about the same time Siren passed out from pain.