Bridie Hyding 01 

The Strange Case of Ban Mor and Bridie Buchanan

‘Could you bob down a bit, please?’

Bridie was a smidgen under seven feet tall and whenever she was out in public it was inevitable that she’d hear some variation on this question. As Ban Mor, the superhuman, super-strong member of the local Flying Squad, she was conspicuous even when out of costume and in an anonymous sweatshirt and joggers like today. A simple trip to the shop to pick up a bottle of milk - like this - would be accompanied with a dozen requests for photos and autographs all along the ten-minute walk there and back.

Bridie towered over the young mum who was trying to get the best angle with her phone for the selfie she had bagged with her hero. Obligingly, Bridie crouched so they were both in frame and flashed a well-worn smile. There was delighted laughter from two small girls, both in primary school uniforms with a year or two between them, who shyly hid behind their mum as all this was going on. With a decent photo finally achieved, the mum politely thanked the off-duty superhero and, still in a daze from her encounter, promptly tripped over her smallest daughter as she turned to go. Reacting quickly, Bridie effortlessly caught her admirer with one hand and gently righted her. The girls screamed with excitement at this, giggling furiously. There was an ‘ooh’ of appreciation from a couple of the onlookers who had gathered at the sight of a celebrity abroad and the embarrassed mum took that as her cue to depart.

Bridie made a few reassuring noises by way of goodbye, then took advantage of the pause that had occurred in the wake of this incident to make her own exit. Her apartment building was across the street and her apartment was on the eighteenth floor. With a mumbled ‘excuse me’ not directed at anyone in particular, she propelled herself into the air from a standing leap and landed gracefully on the balcony.

Of the apartment above hers.

Realising her mistake, she effortlessly swung over the narrow wall of her upstairs neighbours’ balcony and vaulted onto hers below. She was pretty sure her mistake hadn’t been noticed. Her neighbours had seemed a little busy from what she saw through their window...

Safely back in her own apartment, she looked ruefully at the plastic bottle of milk that had caused all this trouble. Had she really needed to go out and get it? She had most of her groceries delivered to avoid this sort of thing. Was she trying to prove something to herself? That a normal, everyday life would always be beyond someone as different as her? She knew that was the case, so why did she keep putting herself in these situations? What was the appeal to a seven-foot woman with naturally purple hair of an ordinary existence?

‘Do you have a Secret Origin?’ asked Bridie’s friend Bian, a few weeks ago.

Bian had been Bridie’s colleague in the Flying Squad up until recently. She had the power to alter her size at will, from that of the smallest insect all the way up to full-on kaiju proportions. She had just been telling Bridie how she got her power by accident, and having never actively sought the role of superhero, how she’d always felt uncomfortable as one. She’d confided in Bridie that she was planning to leave the Flying Squad and had been pleased that this news had been received sympathetically by her friend. This had led to discussion – over tea and biscuits in the Flying Squad Mess Room - on what had caused Bridie to become a superhero, and how she saw herself in and out of costume.

‘Not as such,’ replied Bridie to Bian with a soft Scottish accent that got a lot harsher in the heat of battle. ‘I’ve always been like this: gigantic, strong.’ She fluffed her purple hair. ‘Not quite human. My Mam and Dad say I washed up on the shore by our village in the Highlands in a lifeboat. I vaguely remember that – I must have been six or seven at the time – but nothing before then. They wondered if there was something odd about me when they saw the colour of my hair. They were a little more certain when I grew taller than them in just a couple of years.’

Bian offered Bridie a Ginger Nut. She accepted and dunked it into her mug (a piece of knock-off merch with a blurred photo of her growling face on it) before popping it whole into her mouth. She took a swig of tea to wash it down and then continued.

 ‘It was quiet enough where I lived that people just got used to me. Flying Squad scouts came to my school when word got out beyond our village and I was signed up for power polytechnic just like every other boy and girl wonder. But no-one ever got to the bottom of where I came from. “Not quite human” means I’m a bit human. But as for the rest...’

She finished off her tea, then counted off on her fingers.

‘I’ve been called an alien, a changeling, an evolutionary offshoot, a fairy-tale giant and a creature from a parallel dimension before now.’ Bridie sighed. ‘It wasn’t such a big deal back home. But here in the Flying Squad, I’m the only one who doesn’t have a civilian identity. I have to be Ban Mor, the Scottish Strongwoman, all the time.’

Bian munched half of a digestive biscuit and gestured meaningfully with the other half.

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ she said. ‘I wonder if that’s actually the case. How strong are you?’

Bridie picked up the newspaper that had been left on the mess room table and tore it in half with an exaggerated growl, holding the pieces in the air in mock victory.

‘Well, I can pick up a tank with one hand. How strong is that?’

‘That’s my point!’ said Bian, warming to her theme. ‘I mean, you’ve got muscles, but they’re not tank-tossing muscles, are they? Your strength comes from some sort of superpower, like my abilities, like everyone else’s on the team. And a superpower can be turned on and off...’

That conversation had come back to Bridie now. Could she simply switch all this off? Bian had described how she called upon her own power, how it felt as if there was warming flame inside her that she could increase or decrease with a thought, how her body would grow or shrink in response to her control of that heat. That didn’t ring a bell with Bridie, but in her quieter moments, like now, when she stilled herself and allowed her thoughts to drift away from the world around her, she could feel something deep inside her, not hot, cold or anything, but  just there. Something that due to its constant presence she rarely noticed, but something that in the quiet of this makeshift meditation she was now certain of. She took a deep breath and focussed on it, unable to imagine it, but nevertheless sharply aware of it.

And popped it.

At least that’s what it felt like. An unexpected tiny explosion and the thing disappeared. A shiver – no, more than that, a quake – ran up and down Bridie’s body. Dizziness overcame her and she fell back, tumbling on to the couch in her living room. As her head rolled back, her hair swept forward, covering her eyes. She started to brush it away with her hand, but hesitated as she noticed something odd.

It wasn’t purple. It was brown, ordinary dull brown. She grabbed the unfamiliar strands in confusion and stared at them. To anybody else they would have looked normal, but to Bridie they were the strangest thing she had ever seen. But before she could register this change, she noticed another.

Her hands.

Her hands were slowly getting smaller.

In quick succession she connected the tingling sensation that accompanied this strange phenomenon with a similar one that was beginning to spread through the rest of her body.

Bridie wasn’t given to panic. She had held her own in the most terrifying situations faced by the Flying Squad. Even so, a sudden fear gripped her, an automatic reaction to the realisation that she had set in motion something that was overwhelming her. Without really understanding what was happening she attempted to reverse the sense of it. Whatever this was, she didn’t want it. It had only been curiosity, an idle thought, a whim.

A second’s work.

Everything was going wrong, everything was changing because of whatever uncertain thing had happened in that reckless second. And Bridie couldn’t stop it.

Cramps shot through her biceps and she instinctively rolled up her sleeve and grabbed her

right arm to massage the muscle, something she had never needed to do before. Only there was very little muscle there, the taut, bulletproof flesh that she was expecting to feel having been replaced with something softer and more yielding. As she rubbed it, Bridie could feel it growing smaller and softer still. She flexed her arm, a gesture that usually felt like calling upon an extraordinary reserve of power. The hand that grasped it wasn’t troubled by any movement and all that could be felt in the arm itself was an aching fatigue.

The cramps struck other parts of her body. She lifted her sweatshirt to see her abs fading away, their definition smoothing out and her trunk shrinking and losing shape. She tried to stand, but the legs that had propelled her eighteen storeys into the air earlier now struggled to keep balance. As she fell back down again, one of her custom-built trainers slipped off a tiny foot. No, not a ‘tiny’ foot, a regular sized one. Bridie grasped at her leg to hold it steady while she inspected the unfamiliar thing at the end of it and was immediately distracted by the slimness of what she was holding. Her joggers were also specially-made and she was used to even their outsize fabric being stretched by the powerful muscles of her thighs and calves. Now, there was something pathetic about the way the material hung baggily around the thin leg within. It was getting baggier still as Bridie felt the last vestiges of strength and power dwindling away.

With a desperate determination she stood again, this time keeping her balance. Her joggers fell from her hips, far too big to be held up by her new, smaller waist. She kicked them off and adjusted the suddenly huge-to-her sweatshirt that hung down to her thighs. Half-running, half-stumbling she hurried to the bathroom. Her dizziness had passed, but she was confused and disoriented. Everything looked so much.... larger?

In the bathroom she made for the mirror above the basin only to find it much higher than she expected. She could only see the top of her head, crowned with hair that was not only the wrong colour, but also limp and lifeless. Where had it all gone? Where had she gone? Where was Ban Mor?

Bridie pulled a small cabinet over to the basin, catching herself as she discovered how much effort it took to move this relatively light thing. Still fired up on adrenalin, she leapt on top of it, wobbled, then steadied herself and got a proper look at what had become of her.

She was just in time to see the last of it. Her shoulders drooped and her sweatshirt hung off her like a shroud. Bony legs protruded from the bottom, her knees disappearing beneath it as a last couple of inches was deducted from her height. She hitched up her drooping sleeves to free her hands and clutched her glutes, dismayed but not surprised to find them smaller and softer. Even as a superhuman, she’d put work into them and, yes dammit, she’d been proud of them. Shocked but resigned to the transformation she was undergoing, it was her perfect butt melting away beneath her grasp that had the most profound effect on her.

Her back gave a last ‘crick’ and she straightened it in its much shorter configuration. It too had given up, it seemed, and left Bridie with nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly not her face, which was thinner, pointier (at the chin and nose) and worried.

This wasn’t what she had wanted.

Was it?

She’d been so bewildered during the process it only now dawned on her what she’d been left with. She patted her cheeks experimentally, checking that the face in the mirror was actually hers. It must have been, because it began laughing at exactly the same time as Bridie did. Loudly, but in a much higher pitch than she was expecting and this made her whoop all the more.

And the whooping made her wobble.

And the wobbling made her fall.

And the fall knocked the wind out of her for the first time in her life. She lay there, simultaneously put out and fascinated by the unfamiliar sensations she was experiencing.

‘I think that’s enough for now,’ she wheezed.