Okay, I had this idea and I had to write it . . . If anyone wants me to continue it, let me know . . . I will when I get done with "Death Becomes Him: if people are interested.
Disclaimer: The Veronica Mars characters and setting belong to Rob Thomas. The other characters referenced who will eventually show up belong to DC comics.
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Prologue
Shifter flew over Neptune, looking for trouble.
And when you look for trouble in Neptune, you usually find it.
In this case, Shifter found it at the nearby Sac-n-Pac, where someone holding a gun was running out of the door holding a wad of cash and, for some reason, a bag of Cheetos.
"It's never just the money," Shifter thought. "No, they always have to take some food with them. It's like, the $150 isn't enough, I'd better take some junk food to prove what a man I really am."
She began to swoop down.
Unobtrusive, Shifter wasn't. Not when she flew, at any rate. The only form she could take that flew was that of some form of pterodactyl -- not being able to change her weight when she transformed was a bit of a drawback.
The robber saw her descent and began firing when Shifter was still about fifty feet up.
Over time, Shifter had managed to control her transformations to the point where bullets didn't cause her nearly as much damage as they did the average person. But she still liked to avoid getting hit by bullets whenever possible. Of course, she thought, so did everyone . . .
Turning once, she waited until she was about twenty feet off the ground when she changed her form to that of a cheetah.
The robber -- one of Weevil Navarro's rejects, it looked like -- fired once more, wildly, then got on the motorcycle.
Shifter was on him before he'd gotten ten feet. Growling and snarling, she did her best to throw the man off balance.
She fell off before he did, but the damage was done. The motorcycle plowed into a highway sign about fifty feet away and the man got off and started running for the nearby woods.
A cheetah wasn't built for woods, so Shifter changed, this time into a wolf. Then she ran after the man.
He could hear her coming. He pulled the pistol from his waistband and began firing frantically over his left shoulder.
The bullets missed, but when the biker turned around to look, the wolf was nowhere to be seen.
Shifter wasn't dumb enough to stay directly in the line of fire; even a bullet fired wildly could still hit something.
Instead, she circled around, changed shape again, and jumped on him from a nearby tree in the form of a leopard.
The robber tried to fight it off, but to no use. . "Alright!" he said. "Alright! I surrender, already."
"Damn straight," the leopard growled. Human vocal cords in a leopard body were impossible, but Shifter had learned to alter the animal vocal cord's enough to give her a rough form of speech. It gave her a sore throat when she changed back into human form, as she now did -- that of a woman in a dark costume that covered her entire body. The only thing that could be seen was her long dark hair. People thought she was no doubt drop-dead gorgeous under the costume --weren't all superheroines? -- but Shifter had never revealed her identity to anyone, as far as people knew.
The Neptune Sheriff's Department arrived a few minutes later; Don Lamb himself got out of the car and said, "Thanks, Shifter."
Inside her costume, the woman grinned. "No problem, sheriff. Money's in his back pocket and the Sac-n-Pac cameras should have it all on tape." She pointed to the bag still held in his right hand. "He didn't even drop the Cheetos."
"They never do," Lamb said. Lamb then handcuffed the biker and the woman changed into an antelope of some form and ran off.
The world had had superheroes since the late 1930s, all the way back when the first Flash and Hawkman debuted. It hadn't been until a couple of years ago that Neptune had gotten its very own superhero, the mysterious shapechanger known only as Shifter.
As Shifter approached her residence, she changed back into human form -- that of a 5'3" woman with long black hair whom no one in town would recognize.
Then she dodged into an alley and resumed her natural form, then came out and opened the door to her apartment.
The man inside said, "How'd things go tonight, sweetie?"
"Same ol' same ol'," said Veronica Mars.