Future Girl in: The Gauntlet!

When evil rears its ugly head, when all hope is lost and doom seems inevitable, into the breach flies Future Girl, defender of the right and protector of the innocent, to save the day and punish the wicked!

None who looked upon her would suspect that mild-mannered paralegal Linda Lester is, in reality, Future Girl! Yes, Future Girl! Who fights crime with the aid of her astounding Future Suit, given to her by a mysterious time traveling fugitive from a dark future ruled by evil. Future Girl! Who knows not how or when she will be called upon to change the course of history and prevent the grim future of the strange visitor's prophecy, but who has solemnly vowed to fight all forms of tyranny and injustice in the hopes that her actions might save the world! Future Girl! Whose astonishing Future Suit, forged of woven Duranium and powered by advanced Gizmotronics beyond the ken of Earth's most brilliant minds, absorbs any attack leveled against its wearer, then returns the blow ten fold upon the attacker!

And now, another exciting episode in the Adventures of Future Girl!

This week: The thrilling conclusion of: The Gauntlet!

As we rejoin our heroine, she has just infiltrated the secret hideout of the nefarious Doctor Malevolent, mysterious crime boss and evil genius, whose face no one has seen and lived to tell the tale! Future Girl has come here to answer a challenge leveled by the insane scientist: successfully overcome his deadly gauntlet, and he will willingly surrender himself to face justice for his many crimes. But if Future Girl should fail, it would mean the end of her and the doom of humanity! Now, let's watch!

Future Girl strode through the round vault door that served as the entrance to Doctor Malevolent's hidden, underground lair. Getting here had not been easy; the first challenge in the mad Doctor's gauntlet had been following a series of increasingly obscure clues laid out at the scenes of the villain's crimes. But Future Girl, having thwarted Malevolent in the past and not being an amateur at the hero business, had managed to both stop the crimes in progress and follow the clues to the demented Doctor's door.

Future Girl surveyed the room she now found herself in. Well lit by fluorescent light, the room was notable for its lack of features. Smooth white walls blended into the ceiling and the floor, and the only apparent exit from the room was the door she had just passed through. A mighty CRASH! sounded behind Future Girl, and she whirled about to discover that the vault door she had entered through had just closed and was now securely locking itself. At the back of her mind, Linda Lester felt the tiniest twinge of fear, a primordial remnant of her old life before becoming Future Girl. But she quickly shoved it aside as she reminded herself of her years of experience and the awesome power of her Future Suit. Whatever Doctor Malevolent had in store for her this time, it was nothing she couldn't overcome.

Future Girl took a moment to check herself and make sure everything was in place for the challenges that lay ahead. Her Future Suit was a brilliant silver and clung to her curves like a second skin. On her chest, the letters "FG" were embroidered in a brilliant blue logo that she spent more time designing than she would care to admit. A matching blue belt encircled her trim tummy. She wore a blue domino mask to protect her identity that, in her opinion, well-complimented her blue eyes and wavy, shoulder-length blonde hair. Blue knee-high boots, blue gloves that came almost to her elbows, and a blue cape that fell to just below the bottom of her perky posterior completed the ensemble. Future Girl looked good, as usual, and all of her suit's systems appeared to be in working order. It was time to get to work.

"Malevolent! I followed all your silly clues, only to find that your next challenge is a doctor's office waiting room? Where's the much-vaunted doom you promised me?"

A hidden loudspeaker crackled to life. "Ahh, Future Girl! I hadn't expected you to follow my string of bread crumbs quite so quickly! Unfortunately, I'm not quite done setting up, if you can believe it. But then, I've always been a bit of a procrastinator. I'm sorry to keep you waiting, but let's see if I can't keep you entertained while I finish preparing my hall of death traps."

As he finished speaking, two doors, previously invisible, slid open to Future Girl's left and right. Out of each door came three black-clad toughs, some holding metal bars, others brandishing brass knuckles. They moved to surround Future Girl, then slowly closed the snare.

"Ah, good, I was hoping for a warm-up!" said Future Girl as she rolled her neck, cracked her knuckles, then assumed a fighting stance on the balls of her feet.

CLANG! The henchman straight in front of Future Girl ran forward, swinging his iron bar sideways so as to hit Future Girl full-force in the gut. The bar flew backwards out of the henchman's hands with equal force as the invisible shield projected by Future Girl's Future Suit repelled the blow, absorbing its kinetic energy.

ZOIT! The Future Suit converted the force of the blow into potential energy, then its advanced Gizmotronic technology went to work amplifying that energy. Future Girl smiled; she was right in her element. The confused henchman looked back across the room at his lost bar, then turned to Future Girl, a wince crossing his face as he anticipated the pain to come. CRACK! Future Girl struck him with a left hook across the jaw, the force of the blow lifting him up off the floor and sending him flying across the room into the wall. He struck head-first and was knocked unconscious. He was lucky; he got to sit out the remainder of the blood bath.

ZOIT! WHAM! ZOIT! BIFF! ZOIT! SOCK!

In short order, the six henchmen lay sprawled out around the room, none of them in any condition to continue the fight.

"Is that all?" shouted Future Girl, "I'm not even sweating!"

"Never mind them, they're not important," the voice of Doctor Malevolent replied. "Now, prepare yourself for the real challenge!"

The two doors the henchmen had entered through had disappeared during the fight. Another door, across from the vault door through which Future Girl had entered, now slid open. Future Girl strode through confidently; that fight had given her just the ego boost she needed and had vanquished any doubts that she could handle whatever the mad Doctor threw at her.

She found herself in a narrow corridor with about five small holes at chest level on each side. Future Girl wondered what they could be, then decided she might as well walk on through and find out. After all, she could count on her Future Suit to protect her from any harm.

WHOOSH! The first set of holes shot out continuous jets of flames as she approached.

"Hope that suit's air conditioned, because you're about to get uncomfortably hot!"

Future Girl just rolled her eyes. She walked straight through the flames as though they weren't there. And, indeed, for her, they weren't! The shields on the Future Suit absorbed the brunt of the heat, leaving Future Girl to feel only a pleasant warmth.

"Ah! You know, I'd have to pay good money for this kind of thing at a spa!"

Her suit's mighty ZOIT was almost an afterthought. She marched through the flame jets and came to the other end of the corridor, only to be faced by a sturdy wooden door. Well, this would be no problem! Future Girl struck a pose for the benefit of Doctor Malevolent, left arm on her hip, right arm pointing at the door. With a mental command, she instructed her Future Suit to unleash the pent-up and multiplied heat from her fingers.

WHOOSH! A mighty fireball shot out and engulfed the door. In half a second the wood had been reduced to kindling.

"Is that as good as you can do?"

"Don't get too confident, Future Girl, the worst is yet to come!"

Future Girl continued on. She found herself in a round, metallic room. A small hole was situated in the middle of the ceiling. A sealed grating sat in the middle of the floor.

"Hope you know how to swim, Loser Girl!"

Future Girl smirked. The Doctor only resorted to lame name-calling when his plans were starting to unravel. She could already guess what was coming. Anticipating a torrent of water from the pipe above, she quickly sent her Future Suit a mental command to enter liquid matter absorption mode.

FWOOSH! A blast of water emerged from the pipe above. Future Girl casually walked to the middle of the room, right under the water. Yet Future Girl remained dry as a bone! The water seemed to disappear just as it was about to touch her, absorbed by the suit.

"It's a shame, a shower might have been nice." Future Girl pouted. "And," she added with a sly wink towards a small hole in the wall where she imagined Doctor Malevolent's security camera to be, "I'm sure you wouldn't have minded watching me take a shower, you creepy perv!"

"Bah! Slattern! Even to suggest such a thing! Well, you may no longer be in danger of drowning, but how will you escape this claustrophobic little prison?"

Future Girl shook her head. Clearly the drain in the floor was designed to remove the water once she had drowned. She mentally switched on her suit's matter duplicators. ZOIT! The duplicators came to life and multiplied the water she was absorbing ten-fold. She wasn't sure where all that water was stored when she used her suit's matter absorption and duplication functions. She remembered the user manual said something about a pocket dimension. All that was beyond her; she was by no means dumb, but science had never been her strong suit, let alone crazy future science.

Future Girl stepped back off the grating, placed the heels of her palms together, fingers outstretched, as though holding a ball, and pointed her palms toward the grate.

WOOOOOSH! A mighty river gushed from her hands, crashing into the grate and blasting it backwards down the drain. Future Girl finished dispensing her absorbed water and turned off her suit's matter absorption, then knelt down to inspect the hole. The pipe was more than wide enough for her to fit into, and seemed to curve forward about six feet down, so the drop shouldn't be too bad. She carefully swung her feet down into the hole, sat on the edge, then pushed herself off as though riding down a slide.

Future Girl allowed herself a smile as she rode down the curves of the pipe. This was like a water park! Forgetting where she was for a second, she let out a brief "Whee!" as she slid through the darkness.

She emerged in a square, metallic room. She landed on her butt and slid about ten feet forward before coming to a gradual stop, spinning as she went. The floor she sat on was slippery. Future Girl looked down and realized that she was sitting on a slick of ice, the frozen remains of the water that came out of the pipe she had entered through. She looked around. A strange mist permeated the room. She put all this together and realized something that would have been obvious to anyone not wearing a super suit from the future; the room was freezing. It looked like a meat locker without any meat.

"Well, Future Girl, looks like we're about to freeze your assets!"

"Aren't you supposed to be the fourth smartest man in the world? Why are you putting me through these simple tests? And why can't you come up with anything more clever to say?"

"I'm sorry, I'm just too overjoyed at having you in this situation. After all of these years, I'm putting this bitch on ice!"

Future Girl let out an exasperated sigh. This was all becoming pathetic. She couldn't believe she had actually felt a twinge of nerves when she came in here. Naturally, her Future Suit was absorbing the ambient cold from the environment. All she felt in this freezer was a cool breeze. Getting out of here, though, would require some thought. She looked around and found a set of steel bars obstructing a passage out of the room. She walked over and tested them with a kick.

CLANG! Quite hard. "Perfect," thought Future Girl. At her command, her suit let out a ZOIT as the absorbed cold energy was multiplied inside of it. Future Girl took a deep breath, then blew as hard as she could on the steel bars.

WHOOSH! A mighty wind issued forth from her mouth, freezing the bars. The cold steel turned a mottled white from the change in temperature. Future Girl walked forward and casually poked a bar with her finger.

CRACK! CRACK! CRASH! The freezing air had made the hardened steel brittle, and the little push from Future Girl was all it took to shatter the once-mighty bars.

"Oh, Future Girl, I'm so glad you figured that one out. And I hope you remember this moment when you look back on this gauntlet after your utter defeat, because soon I will do to you what you did to those bars."

Future Girl cocked an eyebrow and wondered if she might not be taking the good doctor seriously enough. But she dismissed the thought with a shake of the head. He always blustered like this. Still, this whole thing had been pretty easy. Maybe...

Future Girl continued onward. She emerged into a great room, probably a hundred feet high. The room was bathed in an eerie green light. The whole thing reminded Future Girl of the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and her companions went into the Wizard's chamber for the first time. She smiled at the thought. Perhaps, once all the artifice was stripped away, Doctor Malevolent would be similarly unimposing.

The room was dominated by a pair of giant Tesla coils. Electricity arced out from them, seemingly at random. An imposing sight, but not one that phased Future Girl.

"Here's something to make your hair stand on end! I think you'll find this next challenge quite... shocking!"

"Are we almost done here? You know this isn't going to hurt me. This isn't even the first time you've tried to use electricity on me!"

Future Girl didn't even break her stride as she crossed the room. ZZZAAP! Bolts of lightning shot from the coils toward the intruder, only to be absorbed and stored as electrical energy in Future Girl's Future Suit. ZOIT! The energy was multiplied inside her. With a wave of her hands, first her left, then her right, Future Girl shot two mighty blasts of electrical energy at the pair of Tesla coils. The feedback of electricity shorted out the transformers inside the coils, whose mechanisms exploded with a shower of sparks.

"Are we done here? I'm actually starting to get pissed off. There'd better not be much more to this, and you'd better actually be there when I finish this stupid gauntlet of yours. I have a life, you know, and I'd like to get back to it. Now, do I have to figure out some stupid puzzle to get the next door open, or are you just going to let me through?"

"...Fine. Have it your way."

A door slid open at the far end of the room and Future Girl marched through it, now flat-out angry. If Doctor Malevolent was going to be evil and make a serious attempt at her destruction, that was one thing. It was in his nature. But to waste her time on these trivial challenges! It just showed a basic lack of respect for her busy schedule.

She entered a white room, quite similar to the one she had started out in. This time, though, a silver chair set in the center, facing away from her. A frail voice emerged from the chair.

"Ah, you're here. Excellent. You know, you've actually done rather well, much quicker and more clever then I expected. So I've decided to let bygones be bygones. If you wish, you may now leave through that door..." a gloved hand lifted on the right side of the chair, pointing to the wall. A door slid open. "...You'll go back to the surface, I'll stay here, and we'll continue our never-ending struggle."

"I didn't come all this way to give up when I've almost won. That's not what superheroes do. That's not what I do."

"Bah! Superheroes. Disrupting the natural order of things. The smart and powerful should prey on the weak and stupid, and the poor unfortunates should be grateful for whatever scraps their betters deign to give them. That's how it was in my day, before these do-gooders started running around in long underwear. And once my plan reaches fruition, I think we'll see a return to normalcy."

"You'll never win, Doctor Malevolent!" said Future Girl. She paused a second, then got a quizzical look on her face, "In fact, I don't even see how you could win. Aside from the general principle that the forces of righteousness will always triumph over evil, there's the practical matter that I'm at the end of your gauntlet and am about to apprehend you."

"Oh you're not at the end of the gauntlet yet, Future Girl! There are still a few more obstacles for you to overcome. I'll even be so gracious as to tell you what they are: a pocket lighter, a glass of water, a cube of ice, a doorknob, and, of course, these hands."

At that, the chair swiveled around, and Doctor Malevolent was revealed! He was a short man, perhaps five feet tall, bald, with thick glasses balanced on an oversized, bulbous nose. He held up a pair of gloved hands, small and seemingly frail with age. Future Girl started to feel bad, like she was picking on her grandfather. Then she remembered all the evil that Doctor Malevolent had done, and she shook it off.

"You're clearly going senile in your old age! You couldn't stop me with jets of fire or bolts of lightning, how are any of those things going to stop me?"

"Senile? Senile! That's it! I was trying to be nice by offering you a face-saving exit. And all I would have done was broadcast a video of the mighty Future Girl turning tail and running! But now! Now, I'm afraid you need to be taken down a peg for disrespecting your elders!"

The doctor fiddled with some buttons on his controls. The door he had pointed to earlier slid shut. Future Girl couldn't help but wonder if she might have made a mistake in not taking the villain's offer.

He fiddled with his controls some more. Suddenly, Future Girl's Future Suit felt... different. She couldn't say exactly what was different, but she knew there was a change. She'd become used to it over her years of use, comfortable with its operation. But now... something was off.

The Doctor stood up. Slowly, carefully, he removed his right glove.

"Now! You have insulted me, and I demand satisfaction." He hobbled over to her, holding his glove in his right hand. Drawing his hand to the other side of his body, he slapped Future Girl across the face with his glove. The action was comical; the short man had to stretch and do a little hop to reach her face.

ZOIT! Future Girl felt bad for the old man and his pathetic display. She'd have to be careful not to-

POW! A force like a heard of elephants struck Future Girl across her face, sending her spinning up into the air, her blue cape twirling out behind her to form a pinwheel. She slammed into the wall, breasts first.

"OWWWW!" Future Girl wasn't used to getting hurt. In fact, this was the first time she'd felt any pain while wearing the Future Suit since the first time she'd put it on. "What in the..."

ZOIT! Why was her suit activating again? Oh yes, the impact against the wall. She hadn't been thrown around since she became a hero, so she hadn't absorbed energy from secondary shocks before. She started to pick herself up when-

WHAM! It felt like a freight train had crashed into Future Girl's breasts. Her tits jiggled uncontrollably under the force of the blow as she went flying backwards, landing on her round ass and sliding across the room.

ZOIT! "AAAAAAAAAGHHH!! WHAT IS HAPPENING? WHO'S DOING THIS TO M-"

BOING! Future Girl felt like a cannon had just been fired into her rump. "YEEEOOOOOOWWCH!" As she rocketed upwards her hands flew to her butt, rubbing it as it throbbed with pain. Future Girl crashed into the ceiling, punching a hole through it. She was stuck! Future Girl's head, shoulders, and breasts were now in a dark crawlspace above the ceiling. Her arms and torso were wedged in the hole, and her feet were left dangling, kicking helplessly and giving a nice view of her pulsating posterior.