Chapter 36: Mayor Wilford (Part 2)

The City of Townsville. Central District. City Hall.

11 DEC 1988. 1754.

With the help of two aides, Mayor Wilford climbed aboard his dirigible. He was wearing a thick coat to shield him from the city cold that gnawed at him. Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup jumped in with ease. The Mayor gave his staff on the roof a thumbs-up sign, and so they let loose the rope that was anchoring the dirigible to the roof.

The airship was a simple contraption, meant to hold no more than a few people in a basket. It rose slowly up into the air, with the Girls whooping with joy at ascending to heights they had never been before. Below, the snipers of the TPD were extra vigilant; the Mayor was taking a big risk this way, exposing himself in the middle of the day, in the middle of the open air. And he was alone up there with three 'operatives' of the USDO. Some snipers had already shifted their targets to put Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup in their sights.

Soon, they were at the equivalent of ten storey in the air, then fifteen, twenty and finally twenty-five, when the weight of the rope and cargo was equal to the lift the flying machine was able to put out. The Girls looked around them in wonderment, at the city that had, until recently, towered over them. Now, it seemed as if the opposite was true.

"Isn't Townsville beautiful?" Mayor Wilford said with admiration at his own city.

"Yes, Mister Mayor, it is! I like it! It's so… So…" Blossom agreed, and she wasn't just being nice. It truly was beautiful. The Central District was filled with tall buildings, and surrounding the Central District was the Business District, which contributed numerous skyscrapers to the skyline.

"Breathtaking?" the Mayor filled in the blanks for Blossom.

"Yeah! Breathtaking!" Blossom repeated the new word the Mayor had given her. It was a good word, one that she'd remember like the other odd 1,200 something words she had filed in her mind.

"I wish I can spread my arms and fly…" Bubbles said once more.

"Wish hard enough, and maybe you can," the Mayor said, not wanting to destroy the hopes of a (very) young child.

Even Buttercup was speechless at the sight, even if she felt its effect less.

"You see these sleek, tall buildings all around you? They weren't always there," the Mayor said as he pointed his cane at the skyline, drawing a line across it, a little more contemplative now. "That over there is the business district. You see all that glass, Girls?"

"It looks like I can swim in it…" Blossom said in wonderment. The skyscrapers were amazing. She had never seen that many windows before, and it was like a cascading waterfall to her, just like in those fairy tale books. But she had never seen a waterfall before.

"That was where Townsville got rich. I saw tall skyscrapers rise out of the ground like beanstalks one after the other, from the sixties and even to this day," the Mayor said, with one or two embellishments thrown in. He knew who he was dealing with. It wouldn't hurt to capture their attention with some hyperbole.

"Did those skyscrappies really rise from the ground? Like beanstalks?" Bubbles asked naively.

"Well, in a way, yeah. Except we planted money there to make them grow," the Mayor continued to joke with them. Only, the Girls weren't able to tell jokes from facts. Wilford then pointed his cane elsewhere. "And that over there is the Tenement Area. Some of the few public housing projects in America to work. I remember ordering it in the fifties, I think, for the poor, and for twenty years, they built those apartments for those who couldn't afford a roof over their heads. I remember that place to be peaceful, thanks to those hippies in the seventies. Now… It's filled with no-good bad guys, as you would call it."

"It looks… Sad," Bubbles described, her vocabulary beginning to show its limits. But her description was apt. The apartments there were stunted creatures, dark and dirty and looking like a horde of hobgoblins getting together to jab spears into their taller, cleaner neighbors. Smoke rose from numerous apartments and alleys there, a sign of desperation in an age of heaters.

"What happened to it?" Blossom asked.

"People get desperate when they're poor, and there are people who took advantage of that," the Mayor explained. He then pointed his cane at an even more dismal area near the tenement areas. The slums, which was a part of the tenement area that had fallen into disarray, with crumbling buildings and houses, makeshift homes and tents. "And it gets worst there. People here call it The Slums, or The Hole, or The Gangrene Gulag. None but the most heroic of my men would ever visit that place."

"Why not just bulldoze it?" Buttercup suggested. The sight of urban blight there had irked even her, and her tolerance level for all things dirty was higher than the other GIrls.

"Darling, it's not that simple. It never is," the Mayor said, with a hint of sadness in his voice. "No matter how it looks, it's still home to some of the most needy and destitute. If I clear it, those people will have no place to go. In a winter like this, they'd die out there. No other cities will accept them, and the bad seeds among them will crowd the other parts of Townsville."

"Really? Who would want to live in that dump?" Buttercup said unsympathetically. "I'd rather live in a dumpster."

"The dumpsters are full," the Mayor said cryptically. Buttercup thought he meant it literally, and she pictured dumpsters with doors and windows in them, with men coming in and out of them, though there was very little space inside. Maybe he did, or maybe he meant something in between - Buttercup's imagination had hit a roadblock.

The Mayor then took the time to show them the other parts of the City of Townsville, even if he was starting to get really cold. The Downtown area, Uptown. Little Tokyo, when he remarked that he'd seen the roots of it grow like a sapling when he was a mere boy, starting with just a few hundred Japanese settlers in the 1900s and 1910s before ballooning into the endless thousands that made up that area. Those districts were a little more upbeat than the Tenements and Slums.

"I've been in Townsville for a very long time. I was born here, near the turn of this century, and I was raised here. I've seen Townsville when it didn't even have a million citizens, and now there's six million of us."

"Is that a lot?" Bubbles asked, having never heard of numbers amounting to millions before.

"Yes, lots and lots and lots…" the Mayor said. "I've seen these buildings rise myself. I've cut the red ribbon countless times. See, I helped build this town, until it's not quite a town anymore."

"You must really love this city, Mister Mayor," Blossom said as she continued gazing at Townsville's skyline.

"Yes, I do. And there are evil men and women who are ruining it, trying to destroy everything and everyone in it," the Mayor said, his one monocled eye staring intently into the distance, as if searching the city for its criminals, for Intruders. "My city's been hurting and bleeding for a long time, Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup." He then turned to them, one sad little eyes peering out of its glass. "Will you help me save it?"

"I'd want to. Very much, Mister Mayor," Blossom agreed. The look on his face, that old, worn out face, had told her that he needed her, just like how he needed her to walk him across his room, no matter how independent he wanted to appear. "If there are people who need our help, then we should help them. I don't want anyone else to get hurt…"

"As long as I get to punch and kick something," Buttercup said.

"As much as I hate to admit it, there will always be people who need a few punches and kicks to set them straight," the Mayor said, in a rare moment of casualness. In the meantime, he was studying the Girls' faces very carefully. He pride himself for being a very good judge of character, and he could always tell (well, most of the time anyway), whenever someone had something to hide or if they were lying.

"What if we try giving everyone a bunny to hug, everyone would be happy," Bubbles followed along.

"Haha, you try that, Bubbles," the Mayor said patronizingly. "You might swing some of them to your side, who knows?"

Mayor Wilford liked what he had heard. It wasn't all just a mere conversation to him. He had been testing them throughout their short time together. Thus far, no one had seen much value in the Girls, not even the USDO who created them. He could tell from the way they spoke about them. His very own top dogs in the Townsville Police Department were no better; it was all a joke to them, these Girls. It was a miracle that Police Commissioner Davis had given the USDO the clearance to deploy the Girls at all. Perhaps he thought that a catastrophic USDO failure would mean that he didn't have to share his job with a federal agency that seemed determined to sink its roots in Townsville.

No, he believed in the Girls. They were clearly the real deal when it came to their lab-gained abilities, but what was most important was the fact that they were pure of heart. Even Buttercup could be described as that - she wasn't in it for the money, or the glory, or the sweet sex, or for some God-forsaken ambition in a bid to win some upcoming election or promotion. She was in it for the fun, however misplaced though it may be. They seemed incorruptible, like angels of justice that had come down from the heavens to dispense the law and order so desperately needed.

They even looked the part when the clouds, for a brief moment, parted to shine a ray of hope on them.

Mayor Wilford was going to make sure the Girls get to do their bit even if it killed him.

"At least, today, Townsville looks peaceful," the Mayor said. He was an old man, but he had beaten the superstition out of himself with decades of self-determination and down-to-Earth municipal politics and management. But this was the one time he thought he should let himself believe. "I think it's a good omen. The three of you will save the day, and the city will love you for it."

But he'd spoken too soon. In the distance, at one of the nearer residential districts, there was a bomb explosion, followed by the sound of police sirens. The Mayor gave a sigh. So much for a good omen. Even the Girls noticed the bad timing, and they hung their head in sadness.

"We'll help you, Mister Mayor," Blossom declared once more. She could imagine people on fire, people hurt, people shooting each other, when the bomb exploded. And she didn't like the idea one bit. Her photographic memory had captured every single pixel of that moment, when she saw the burning men at the gas station, their faces. She wasn't sure if she'd zoomed in on the scene; she was a couple weeks too young to notice back then.

"I hope your policemen have puppies for the poor people in pain…" Bubbles commented after that.

"If only we were there!" Buttercup then said.


The City of Townsville. Suburbs. The House

11 DEC 1988. 2012.

Professor Utonium stood on the balcony facing his backyard, his signature black smoking pipe in his hand. He nursed the pipe and released a puff of smoke.

Changes were happening, good and bad. After the Girls had come down from the Mayor's personal office, he was able to speak to the most important person in Townsville. Mayor Wilford. And they'd talked. Touched on things he might have thought of, that he was deathly worried about, and he'd touched on things he'd never thought about.

He was a good politician, good with words, good with his image. When he expressed his fears that the Girls would be in peril in a city like Townsville, he'd launched into a speech about the virtues of his trusted police officers, the citizens of Townsville and how even the Mob, the worst of the worst, had a certain honor code. He'd covered, in great length, how his cops would have the Girls' back and how they fully, whole-heartedly supported the Girls' entrance into the local law enforcement scene. Of course, Professor Utonium wasn't entirely convinced. He was no politician, but the Organization had its fair share of politicians. Agent Cliff, the current director, was a prime example, though what Mayor Wilford did with words, Cliff did with actions. It remained to be seen if the Mayor of Townsville was both.

Less shady things were brought up too. The Girls' education, for one thing. Although the Mayor was still partial to the Girls' involvement in law enforcement despite their illiteracy, he advocated enrolling the Girls into the Townsville education system. It was one of the few things they could agree on, though the professor had mostly kept his opinions to himself. Back at home, he'd already talked it over with Selicia, who was just as adamant as the Mayor about sending the Girls to school, and he'd already made the necessary phone call to Wiggums, who promised to expedite this with the help of Alice and… Blackwater, of all people. Within half an hour, the weedy Chief of Logistics promised on a return call that the principal of Pokey Oaks Kindergarten was 'willing' to accept the girls despite the fact that the year was about to end. Arrangements would be made the next morning with one Ms. Keane, so that the Girls would be able to go to school immediately the next day.

However, Blackwater had conditions. He always had conditions. With the Mayor of Townsville's go-ahead for the deployment of the Girls, law enforcement operations took precedence over the Girls' education, and they would be accompanied by their speed transport convoy in the event of a scramble. Originally, Blackwater wanted the Girls permanently suited up in SWAT gear and escorted by guards, but the professor had rang the Chief of Security on the line and argued vehemently – for close to half an hour – against that, and when that didn't work (as usual), he spoke in Blackwater's language. The man of science brought up matters of morale, and that the lack of it will worsen the Girls' performance in combat, as well as their concentration on actually becoming literate, which would be undoubtedly useful to soldiers who need to understand and interpret orders in the first place.

In the end, Blackwater had compromised by having all the Girls' gear stored in their Lamborghini speed transport, though it meant changing in the vehicle while while it was speeding towards its target. Security would be provided from a distance by Sergeant Blake (who had been demoted by Blackwater for what he saw as poor leadership) and his Powerpuff Task Force soldiers in the transports and accompanying security detail, commanded by a new lieutenant.

The professor took another puff from his pipe. Jojo came to mind. Had he been too hard on the chimpanzee? Could someone good be pushed to commit a massacre? No, he decided. Killing 42 people would have required too much premeditation for someone good. Desperation was only good for a single cry-of-help kind of deed, and Jojo was incredibly intelligent for someone of his origins that the professor had thought of him as a person shortly after his exposure to Chemical X. Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, his three good angels, would not have done such a thing, no matter what happens to them.

But the incident with Jojo's visit had raised questions. The USDO had been doing things behind his back. As much as he hated it, it was standard fare for the organization to do as it wish without consulting its members. He could only hope that as the USDO became more and more known to the general public, with newspaper journalists and watchdog organizations surrounding it, that they will stop operating like the very criminals they sought to stop.

After having his fill of his one vice, Professor Utonium put out his pipe and went back into the House. He had resumed his research on Chemical X, and he wasn't going to stop until he'd understood everything about it. It was going to be tough, however, considering that he had to start from the beginning, remaking the stabilizing cocktail that had resulted in the kind of Chemical X that created the Girls. But he'd begun considering other avenues of research, such as analyzing and studying the cells he had taken from the Girls.

With Selicia helping with the Girls, he would be able to scrounge together a few hours of research time a day, and more than that, now that the Girls would be attending Pokey Oaks Kindergarten. As the professor was heading down to the labs, he smiled. Just a mere couple of days ago, he wouldn't have thought that having Selicia around was a good thing. But now… No, he wouldn't allow himself to feel for her. Their 'marriage' was a lie, concocted to give the Girls a more stable domestic life. It would be like spitting on Eileen and Bloome's grave.

He could hear the Girls shouting as he descended the stairwell leading into the labs. Selicia was getting the Girls to go through everything she had taught them about punching and kicking. He hated the idea that the Girls were going out there to fight crime, but with Selicia, at least they would be prepared for it. Everything was falling into place, not just for the USDO, but for himself.

He didn't want to admit it, but he was starting to believe that things might go well from here onwards.