The sun was setting over the city of Melbourne. For the majority of the businesses, it was closing time. Rats, possums and pigeons scurried about the alleyways, waiting until the coast was clear. Seagulls were fighting for food. And atop the rooftops, a lone figure was running, looking for the best shortcut to get home.
The figure was dressed in red-and-blue spandex, and her face was covered by a mask. In her civilian life, her name was Lucy, a 19-year-old university student. To the public at large, she was Extendo-Girl, the local superhero.

She had only been the local superhero for a few months, and long before that, she was exposed to a strange chemical that gave her the power of superhuman elasticity and malleability. Once she moved to Melbourne, she felt a sense of responsibility, and became their friendly neighbourhood Extendo-Girl. When she wasn’t fighting crime, or studying at uni, she spent a good deal of her downtime making sure she was physically fit and agile enough, pumping weights or doing yoga.

But Lucy was not in the mood to exercise at that moment. She had just dealt with the evil geneticist Dr. Vyle, and one of his genetically-modified spiders had bitten her on the hand. Its bite was very strong, too, breaking through her spandex glove. She knew what she wanted to do - after dealing with the spider bite, she would engage in some rest and relaxation.
As she engaged in rooftop parkour, Extendo-Girl came across a huge gap between buildings. But she was undeterred. Suddenly, her arms and legs stretched out to incredible lengths, allowing her to scale the gap. Her limbs may have looked like overcooked spaghetti, but they were strong enough to support her as she made her body into a tightrope to cross the big gap. Once she had done so, her limbs retracted back to their normal length.

As soon as Lucy got home, she whipped off her mask. It felt good to breathe without something covering up her nose and mouth. She looked down at the tear in her glove, and pulled it off. After the adrenaline rush of rooftop parkour had died down, the throbbing pain caused by the spider bite had returned. Quickly, she went to the bathroom for some painkillers and anti-bacterial ointment - she wasn’t overly familiar with spiders, but she knew that it wasn’t a funnel web or redback that bit her, and Dr. Vyle wasn’t the kind of mad scientist who made experiments for the purpose of murder.

After applying ointment to the wound and bandaging it up, Lucy downed the painkillers with a glass of water. Changing from her costume of primary colours to a simple t-shirt and sweatpants, Lucy logged onto Netflix, plonked herself down on the couch, and promptly deflated.

With the exception of her head and hands, she looked like a blow-up doll with all the air sucked out. She could still move, but it felt like pins and needles, and she was just a lot more comfortable lying down. Occasionally, her arm would re-inflate and pick up a snack from the kitchen, and she’d re-inflate in full whenever she needed to go to the bathroom. But even super heroines needed time off, and having suffered a work hazard was the perfect opportunity to do so.

Eventually, she fell asleep, and woke up an hour and a half later. God, that was a nasty spider bite, she thought, as she inflated her body back to its normal volume. But something felt wrong - she felt like she had gained a significant amount of weight, and her loose-fitting t-shirt felt a good deal tighter.

She looked down at her bandaged hand. The throbbing pain had subsided, but it felt a tad too convenient for her injury to have healed so fast. She made her way to the bathroom, still rather groggy. But then, she noticed something in the mirror that woke her right up.

There was something bulging underneath her T-shirt. It looked like huge lumps of fat barely contained by the fabric of her top. And what’s more, the lumps appeared to be moving. Lucy was hesitant to touch the lumps, because she had no idea what they could be. She almost didn’t want to know.

Slowly, as she pulled up her top, she saw something that made her eyes pop as much as they could without going cartoony - beneath her normal arms were two more pairs of arms.

Lucy was stunned. She had just gotten used to the prospect of being a living rubber band, but now she had a new issue to deal with. At least when it came to being stretchy, she could conceal that physical anomaly by just not using them in front of other people.

She was just not used to the sensation of having four additional limbs to control, and her six arms just seemed to slap against each other as she tried to move them. Twenty extra fingers were wiggling around, and she could barely tell which ones corresponded to her brain function.

Frustrated, Lucy headed back to the living room, carrying the weight of six arms attached to her torso. This was a weird burden to carry, but she had no idea how she was going to deal with it. She didn’t want to go to a doctor to have them amputated because that could have unexpected consequences - for one, she’d have to divulge her identity as Extendo-Girl, and that was a huge risk. Furthermore, she wasn’t even sure if it would work - sure, rubber could break, but she herself was pretty durable.

Lucy sighed and picked up the remote. But to her surprise, it wasn’t in either of the hands she was born with. She looked down, and saw one of her extra hands holding the remote.

Lucy looked towards the fridge. She concentrated. Suddenly, another one of her extra arms stretched, extending towards the fridge. It was a bit wobbly, and wasn’t fully coordinated, but she managed to opened the fridge and grab a soda, before retracting her arm back.

Lucy looked down at her six arms. And that’s when she got the first of several ideas.

“I’m going to have to upgrade my costume,” she thought.