The Long Arm of the Law
In almost every comic book, it seems, there is a dark alley where the villains run... to get away, perhaps, or perhaps to attack. The world is dark, the shadows stark, and the brightly lit city is but a few feet away.
In almost every comic, a brightly colored man appears. He is the hero and the sparking, spitting guns of the bad men are fired uselessly, senselessly at him to little or now effect, The hero leaps forward, and with a mighty blow at least one villain is taken out.
From this point, the action varies but the formula rarely does. The plot advances & the villains eventually lose.
In this moment, this alley, if drawn in lines of black and white, would serve very well as a comic book backdrop.
The villains running down the alley were just normal furs, certainly not super-powered anything... unless you count a high tolerance level for cheap crack a super power. You almost never see the villains in the comic books as terrified as this. Mouths wide, eyes rimmed with white nearly as bright as the distant street lights, as if they were victims and not the bad guys. Not the ones who just emptied three bullets into a shop owner for a couple of bucks in cash.
As if remembering about the bullets and that he still had some, the taller of the two turns to fires, his gun raised as if he expects something huge or airborne to be chasing him.
What comes around the corner... was certainly colorful. Bright greens reflected off a spinning factorial numeration of shattered glass feathers expanding and twisting in weightless tentacles of broken dimensions filled gap between the buildings. It was hard to look at; you can see a ribbon of flesh inside this store. You recognize it as a living creature even as you realize that body is torn to pieces by it's very movement... as if the fractured air storming about it, ever increasing and decreasing its tornadoes of glass feathers and mirrored pinions. No blood. No reds. Just a shimmer of rainbows as the tattered being at the eye of the storm reared up four stories high.
There is a roar of tortured winds about the thing. Space bends, gravity hesitates, confused by nominally variable mass intersecting with a flowing event horizon. It would be a stretch to call it man-shaped; but the mind it insists.
Perhaps it is is because blazing and burning raptor eyes that shine down from the very top of its... head... a dozen feet across... like a swimming giant breaking the ocean surface...
Buildings seem to bend into it as it dives after the fur with the gun. Stars and streetlights bled into yellow and green and neon blue blobs but our villain victim with the gun ignores all distortion. It is just another acid trip for him. He fires four shots into the center mass. The ribbons of blue that make up mass of the creatures shatters instantly at the first shot and the first piece of lead comes out directly behind him, slowed and tinking lamely to the ground. The next three bullets are deflected and never reach any of the blue tatters deep inside the living storm.
The last bullet spins about inside the monster, whining, picking up speed as time and space play games with it. The moment the gun clicks uselessy, the mass spits the bullet out, hitting the standing villain in the forehead. He goes down, bloodlessly.
The other villain keeps running, fear burning the cravings from his body for the moment. His body remembers ancient needs. Running equals survival. If he could eat miles faster running on all fours, he'd throw himself at the ground, but evolution here, on this world, this Aesop's Planet had other ideas.
And the creature, who chose a different evolution, reaches forward and makes a seventh foot tall wall with his... what the mind insists on calling his hands.
The fur screams, running into the wall of flesh, hoping that this terrific thing is as insubstantial as it is implausible. There are illusionists on these urban streets. It is not an uncommon superpower even in this day and age. And there is nothing before him that the eye can look at and hold onto long enough to make sense of it. It just cannot be real.
But he bounces back, knocking the air from his lung, even as hurricane force winds rip around and along the "arms" of the thing. He is conscious but uncomprehending as the hands move forward, towards him. He does not understand the winds buffeting him are from molecules of air expanding and contracting about and along the body of the creature. Not from heat, which would be normal and right in a sane universe, but from the very will of the creature in the midst of the walking storm.
The "arms" and "hands" pushed the villains-victims together as they meekly fought this fleshy trap all the while a nimbus of shattered reality whistled shrilly and enveloped them. From within, the fleshy prison seemed to grow about them.
But from without this prison, from the exterior of the stereotypical comic book page we started with, we see the villains-victims shrink and vanish in the "hands" of the shrinking tangle of blue-green center of the storm. The storm collapses into a less conceptual and less fantastic size, but the villains are gone from sight.
A raptor stands, six foot tall. Impossibly blue-green, especially in such a dark, poorly lit alley. Eagle in impossible neon shades. He looks down at his closed, feathered hands. He tips his head, listening to the steady whistle of miniaturizing and expanding air running through his closed fist. Listening to their screams, considering that only his willing of air into his fist, making the molecules the right side for their now tiny lungs to process. Wondering how much of a margin of error he had over his power shrink the air. Wondering how long he can hold them like this.
Wondering if he shouldn't just open his beak and drop them, wastes of humanity that these parasites were, down his gullet...
He is almost certain he'd survive. That his body, adapted by alien forces to transit across pan-dimensional distances and circumstances and thrive, would easily absorb or eventually expel their divergent and re-aligned mass.
Still... For an Avian with a most unique perspective on linear time and distances, there were some lines he chose not to cross.