7
South of Pasadena on the coast was Long Beach, California at the mouth of the Los Angeles basin. It had been founded by Spanish Conquistadors and San Franciscan monks spreading their religion into the New World in 1785, but it wasn't until 1840 when it was actually became a settlement. Through the 1920s, it became an industrial port for much of Lower California. Several oil refineries dotted the skyline along with several other businesses. Dr. Stephanie Powell was a medical researcher for Global Tech, a private research facility that researched new medicines and new biochemical techniques in other fields. She lived with her family in the northern suburb of Pacific Bay with her husband and two teenage children. Returning home, she pulled her car into the driveway slowly and pulled up alongside her husband's Nissan. Placing her car in Park, she turned the engine off from the ignition as usual, her left hand responding by habit to open her driver's side door and slid her legs out as her other hand unsecured her seat belt. Her body lightly swaying as she rose, the lovely mother moved slowly and unsure as if in a trance. Instead of just swinging the door behind her, she turned to press it close with both her hands, her key ring still dangling off her small finger. Subconsciously realizing where she was, she then turned toward the house and unerringly drifted toward the house. Her mind was deep in thought as she reached up to slide open the glass patio door in her way and wander inside half aware of where she was.
"Hey, baby…" Her husband, Jim, was a police sketch artist. As she tossed her keys into the bowl near the doors, he lifted his head in love with her every time she entered his life. "How was your day?"
"Fine…" Stephanie noticed her kids doing their homework at the dinner table. "Just fine…." She mumbled distractedly, but Jim didn't believe her. Her daughter, Daphne, lifted her head up to her.
"Steph…" Jim set aside the knife he was using to chop vegetables for dinner as Stephanie paused distractedly, pulled a chair out from the counter and sat down with a disconcerted sigh. "Baby, what happened?" Jim came over to her and lovingly held her head up to him. "Did something happen?"
At that point, JJ looked up from his philosophy textbook.
"I'm not sure." Stephanie looked around confusingly.
"Mom…" Daphne had poured cold water from the refrigerator door into a glass and gave it to her mother. "Are you okay?"
"Of course, I'm okay…" Stephanie took the glass and sipped a bit of water as she slowly returned to reality.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Jim looked worried and concerned as he took her other hand and caressed it in his own.
"About it?" Stephanie started thinking back. "It's nothing really. I mean… I was driving home on the expressway…" She simulated holding the steering wheel in her hands. "I'm talking to Katie over my cell phone, and eventually I found myself backed behind a large tractor truck in front of me on the road. I started slowing down to give him clearance and make the exit, but when I started slowing down, I discovered this school bus coming up behind me…"
"You were in an accident?" Jim grew concerned. JJ stopped writing to listen. Daphne hung on her mother's every word.
"No, no accident at all!" Stephanie came out of her trance and accepted what had happened. "I had started changing lanes, but the bus driver must have been going too fast or hadn't enough time to notice me, because I came this close…" She showed an inch between her fingers. "…To getting knocked through the guard rail off the expressway."
"He missed you?" JJ guessed.
"No."
"He hit you?" Daphne's eyebrows went up worried.
"No… that's the crazy part!" Stephanie still couldn't believe it. "All of a sudden, I saw this streak of red out the corner of my eye and there was suddenly this girl in a blue costume and red cape on the expressway. She comes right between me and the bus and rides the front of it through the shoulder, around me at fifty miles an hour and drags it into the empty left side lane ahead of me." She paused looking at her family. They all looked at her in disbelief.
"Jim, this twenty-ton bus flew over the car and landed on the other side of me on the other side of the exit!" Stephanie was defiantly sure of what she had seen. "It didn't fly. This girl carried it!"
"Mom…" JJ smirked a bit holding back a cynical laugh. "Mom, did this blonde girl have a big red "S" across her chest?"
"Yes, she did!" Stephanie recalled the girl's face. "Wait a second, how did you know she was blonde?"
"Mom…" Daphne reached over for her laptop, Googled a word and opened a website. "You're not the first person to see this girl. She's like the new Sasquatch…" She turned her laptop around to reveal Howard Wolowitz's Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database. "Look at this… hundreds of people… mostly geeky comic book freaks… have seen her over the last five to ten years. The site has hundreds of sightings from all over the world…"
"Wow…"
"I thought she was like a ghost or something." Jim recalled one of the officers in his precinct had run into her after a gas station robbery last year. He scrolled down through the 2010 sightings back to January. "That's a lot of sightings…"
"This is impossible." Stephanie perused the site with Howard's statistics, theories, beliefs and logistics. She felt closer to reality once she realized she was not the only one to see the Kryptonian goddess. On the picture page were scans of newspaper articles from the Los Angeles area about the mystery blonde. On another page, there were photo-shopped images of everyone from actress Reese Witherspoon to entertainer Britney Spears in the red, blue and yellow costume. "Jim, there is no way for a girl to fly and carry a bus. No one gets superhuman powers."
"It looks like she did." Jim perused the sightings page back to last winter. "Wow, look at all these people." He suddenly recognized a name.
"JJ!" Everyone looked at the boy. The boy snapped to attention a bit embarrassed.
"Did I forget to tell you guys that story?" JJ recalled the girl who had saved him from a beating from high school seniors. "God, she was so hot…."
Back in Pasadena, Howard and Raj rarely missed a meal at Leonard and Sheldon's apartment. Every night was assigned to something else. Monday was reserved for Thai Food, and Tuesdays they went to the Cheesecake Factory, which Bridget pretended to work for as Penny Parker, little suspecting that as Linda Kent, she actually owned the place. Wednesdays were reserved for tacos from the Ha-Ha Hacienda even if Raj suspected their hamburger tasted a bit like horsemeat. Thursdays were at Big Boy for Sloppy Joe sandwiches, Friday was reserved for Giacomo Pizza, Saturday was Subway Sandwich Day and Sundays were the day for Captain Ahab's Seafood. It was Sheldon's strict schedule, but the guys sort of followed it. Heading to meet Leonard and Sheldon, the guys walked leisurely up the stairs to the fourth floor apartment of their associates. On the second landing, his laptop under his arm, Raj stepped a bit quicker than his best friend, and Howard was now following Raj, but a moment to hasten his step, and Howard was more secure leading the way. On the fourth floor, he would be first to reach the door and give the announcing knock. Raj rolled his eyes at this unspoken hierarchy of ascension between them and gazed back to Howard one more time before Leonard opened the door.
"Hi, guys, come on in." He waved them through. "Why are you here so early? I haven't even ordered the Chinese food yet." That was the menu for every Wednesday.
"Raj got some pictures of Priya from India." Howard spoke up.
"Dude, I wanted to be the one who told him." Raj sounded both annoyed and crest-fallen.
"Sorry... go ahead."
"My parents sent me some pictures of my little sister from her vacation in Calcutta." Raj quickly announced. "I thought I'd bring them by to show you."
"Of Priya?" Leonard grinned as Sheldon feigned interest from his computer. "Sure, I'd love to see them."
"Okay…" Raj moved to sit on the end of the sofa away from Sheldon's spot and opened his laptop. He opened his e-mail account and clicked on the message for the attachments. "Here she is… She's standing in front of the Temple of Shiva."
"She looks cute."
"Dude… that's my sister…." Raj played the over-protective older brother. He knew his sister was hot from other guys, but he did not want his friends to think of her in that way or even think of dating her.
"Sorry…"
"What's that she's holding?" Sheldon sat in his spot.
"I don't know."
"How could you not know?" Sheldon launched into another worthless observation. "As the provider and host of these images, you should be able to provide any and all details of the stories behind them."
"Dude, I'm not writing my sister's biography." Raj grew annoyed along with the other guys. "I just want to share some pictures from home."
"Then what's she holding?"
"A pound of coffee grounds, who cares!" He clicked to a picture of Priya in a light shirt sitting on the wall of a bridge near the Ganges. Leonard grinned a bit, and Howard checked out her figure as Sheldon grumbled a bit put off by Ray's sharp comment. Raj clicked to the next picture.
"Here's she is in front of our old school." He commented.
"Looks a bit run down." Leonard noticed.
"Yeah, there was a big fire several years ago." Raj explained. "They never bothered to rebuild it."
"Was that before or after that story you told us about a volcano you created?" Howard recalled how Raj described a fire he couldn't stop.
"No connection!" Raj grew disconcerted and embarrassed. "No connection at all!" He quickly went to another picture of the marketplace near the city.
"This was my grandfather's old market." He quickly moved on. "He sold it for a crap load of money to buy a hotel that later burned down."
"Did you burn that down too?" Sheldon asked.
"I never burned anything down!" Raj started screaming. "Nothing! Nothing at all! They couldn't prove it either way! Don't say stuff like that!" He reached to click to the next picture, but Leonard gazed at the surroundings in it and noticed something odd. He noticed something…. Something off…
"Wait a minute, Raj…" Leonard scowled a bit confused. "That looks like Penny in the background."
They all leaned into the laptop.
"Oh, my god…" Howard noticed the shapely Cheesecake Goddess standing sideways at a table in the background. She was fifteen to twenty feet behind Priya up front and glancing over items at a table beyond Raj's baby sister with a pack over her shoulder. "Leonard, I think you're right! I don't recall her ever saying she had visited India."
"When would she have visited India?" Sheldon was struck confused by the revelation of the picture. "She is around us almost all the time. Maybe she's a quantum reality doppelganger counterpart of our Penny visiting here from the Anti-Matter Universe?"
"Or…." Raj looked up. "Penny has a twin sister… or a twin cousin?"
"Twin cousin…" Sheldon chortled in disdain. "There's no such thing as a twin cousins. I'm almost positive my solution is the only correct one."
"Look, let's just check the time stamp of the photo." Leonard took Raj's laptop and pulled the photo into the computer programs separating Penny from the rest of the image and pulling up the computer code for the image. A few more clicking of keys and he had the date of the photo as August 18, 2009. "There you go…" He stopped. "August of last year. Where was Penny last August?"
"Here…" Howard revealed.
"Yes, but it's also the week before of Raj's birthday." Sheldon's brain processed and recalled things quicker. "Raj, what was it that Penny gave you for your birthday?"
"A Hindu camel hair blanket like I had as a kid…" Raj nervously recalled as he took back his laptop. "Remember? I said you could only find them back home."
"Exactly." Sheldon revealed. "Where was Penny all that month? Pasadena. For her to have been in India, she would had to have been missing a minimum of three days to go there, find the blanket and come home. Thereby proving I am right. That girl is not Penny; she is Penny's quantum reality doppelganger counterpart visiting here from the Anti-Matter Universe and she is hiding her from me."
"Or…." Howard could not believe he was saying this. "She was there in one day because she can fly at subsonic speed like…"
"Supergirl?" Leonard had wandered into the kitchen thinking about it. He said it and wondered about it. "No… no…" He tried to disbelieve it. "Could it be?" He grinned about it thinking a bit about it.
"Of course not…" Sheldon scoffed at the idea. "For Penny to keep such an obvious revelation from me, she would have to be smarter than me, which she is not. Penny is dumber than dirt."
"Let me get this straight…" Leonard turned to Sheldon striding into their kitchen nook. "You don't think Penny could be Supergirl just because it would mean she would have to be smarter than you."
"Of course…" Sheldon answered assuredly. "If Penny was Supergirl, I would have recognized her immediately. In fact, I have automatic recall of every purported image of Supergirl taken of her of within the last five years since she first appeared." He poured himself a drink from the refrigerator. "Disavowing all the obvious fakes, she would have to look something within a reasonable amalgamation of Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Simpson, Gwen Stefani and Katee Sackhoff."
The guys drew silently annoyed by his far-flung and conceited estimation.
"Dude, " Raj sighed a bit. "Just call her and ask her where she got my blanket…"
"Yeah…." Leonard took out his cell phone and pressed Penny's number on his speed dial. Taking it to his ear, he glanced over to Sheldon.
"Don't forget to ask her about her quantum reality doppelganger counterpart visiting here from the Anti-Matter Universe." Sheldon chimed in.
"How can I forget?"
Several hundred miles away on another continent, the girl known as Penny Parker was sitting in her favorite Chinese restaurant, the Xi Shen Ho in Beijing, China. It was a short hop for her godly powers, and she stopped and ate here almost every time she hopped the Pacific. She enjoyed the poached tofu in tomato sauce with the roasted lamb with mung bean paste and didn't cringe at all to snack on roasted grubs and crickets. A sweater and long skirt pulled over her costume, she sipped the juice of fermented peaches and heard her cell phone chirp next to her on the table. Tossing her long blonde locks aside, she flipped it open, looked at the number and held it to her ear.
"Hey, Leonard…" She greeted in good spirits and munched on a piece of roasted pig ear.
"Penny?" Leonard scowled a bit. The signal was weak and barely audible. "Where are you? I can barely hear you."
"Where am I?" Bridget started thinking. Next to her was a table of Chinese businessmen talking and laughing during a company meeting in the restaurant. "Uhhh…"
"Is that Chinese I hear in the background?" He recognized it as Howard and Raj grew excited. "Are you in Chinatown?"
"Yeah…" Penny looked around nervously. "Yeah, I guess you could say that. What's up?"
"Oh…" Leonard moved ahead. "We're having sort of a crazy discussion over whether or not you could be Supergirl."
Bridget's eyes widened in worried surprise.
"Just tell me where you got the blanket you gave Raj for his birthday so I can disprove it." Leonard continued after a glance at Raj and Howard.
"What's a blanket got to do with me being some stupid girl in a cape?"
"Raj has a photo of his sister in India with you in the background." He told her.
Groaning under her breath, Bridget slapped her hand to her forehead for not being more careful. It sounded like a bullet going off in the restaurant. She remembered that day.
"I'm not convinced it's you," Leonard continued. "But Howard is pretty convinced. Just tell me where you got the blanket."
"I got it off E-Bay…" She claimed.
"She got it off E-Bay." Leonard looked to Howard.
"Crap!" Howard acted defeatedly. "I was so sure!"
"Hey," Leonard turned round with his phone. "As long as you're in Chinatown, why don't you pick up the Chinese food?"
"Yeah, sure…" Bridget was a bit worried. "I can do that. I'll be there in about an hour." She could make that time easily.
"See you then…"
"See you…" Bridget hung up. This was not good. The guys had never any inkling of who she was. It was Detroit and Boston all over again. Back home, Kerry had come close several times to busting her secret, and in Boston, Zack and Cody Martin were constantly placing connections between her and her other identity. It got worse when Maddie Fitzpatrick became involved. Mulling over those events of the past, she began debating over moving out of Pasadena closer into Los Angeles. A few feet from her in the Chinese restaurant, her hostess came over to check on her.
"Ni xihuan, chi le ma?" She spoke her native language
"Shì de, wo néng you wu cān dài huí jiā ji wo de péngyou?" Bridget answered back in flawless Chinese. Because of her increased mental capacities, she had picked up twelve languages just by being immersed in the languages and cultures of several countries. She could speak German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Hindu, Farsi, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and even Klingon because she hung around the guys so often. Picking up a take-out order from the restaurant, she paid in Chinese yuan, checked her watch for the time and pretended to wander from the restaurant.
Stepping into the busy Beijing sidewalk, her feet turned away from the traffic, strolled down a few steps as she placed the carryout in her knapsack meant for her street clothes and pretended to window-shop the stores as the locals ignored her. What was one blonde American tourist in the country? When she was sure she wasn't being watched, Bridget suddenly dashed across the street behind a rickshaw and into an alleyway, her feet moving so fast until they were no longer touching the ground. She shot out of the other end of the alley over a private residence heading due east, miles of structures, trees and highway under vanishing to turn into miles of endless ocean and a few dotted islands in the East China Sea. At a hundred miles an hour, her sweater sleeves rode down over her elbows from the winds, and her skirt flailed and flapped against her lower legs. Without taking off her sweater to her regular costume, her long blonde locks poured and beat down over her knapsack with the food for the guys. Truthfully, the first time she started making these long ocean flights, they scared her to death – she was scared of getting lost. But after seeing whales and playing with porpoises and sailing high above ocean liners, she had grown to accept them. She had to be careful with her speed though. She could set off tidal waves at over 200 miles per hour and trigger patterns in the weather that could cause hurricanes and typhoons. She also had to fly high enough to stay off Navy Radar but low enough to not alter the weather. It wasn't even a straight line. Following the ley lines of the planet while gliding of wind currents made her bob to and fro, left and right as she grabbed and punched through every opening in the currents of air around the planet. Sometimes, she drifted a bit too far north or south and had to follow the coast to get back to Pasadena. To keep her mind busy, she tried to guess the nationality of the ships she sailed past under her on the Pacific.
"Major Tucker, sir," Sergeant Tony Ganios at Hickham Air Force Base near Honolulu, Hawaii suddenly picked up Bridget on satellite. "I'm picking up an unidentified bogey coming east in sector twelve. I'm clocking it at 187.9 miles an hour. It is not reading as any identified aircraft."
"At that speed, it's going to be very quickly off the scope." Major Frank Tucker turned to his superior, former astronaut Colonel Anthony Nelson, then spoke into his headset. "Sierra Foxtrot 10, can you get me a visual." Nelson stood at attention and observed.
"Heading to rendezvous point in Sector Fifteen." Pilot Topper Harley answered back in his F-15 jet. "Damn, this thing's fast."
"Do you have visual?"
Bridget was now in Hawaiian air space. She bobbed down low enough to check for landmarks and noticed Topper Harley in his Air Force fighter jet then elevated sharply again.
"It's a girl." Harley's voice came over communications in the Air Force Control Tower near Honolulu Bay. Major Tucker looked to Ganios with the same thought as the sergeant. It was the idea that Harley had been tipping back the bottle before his flight. The major looked back to the Colonel to get his impression, but Nelson just sighed a bit and brooded quietly.
"Sierra Foxtrot 12, can you confirm Sierra Foxtrot 10."
"Affirmative, Foxtrot Zero." Pilot Kent Gregory was now heading to catch up with Harley. "I am now to rendezvous with Foxtrot 10."
Bridget looked behind her in the skies over the Hawaiian Islands and saw Harley keeping up with her. Not sure of the range of these Air Force jets, she turned herself skyward and started climbing higher and higher to sub-orbital height over the planet. Harley turned on his reserve oxygen and stayed on her. The mist and spray condensed on her face and hair, but without air, there was not enough friction to warm it off of her. Gregory was catching up. He looked off his left wing and saw Harley at hundred yards and then the other sharply form coming straight at him, gliding over his cockpit close enough to see Bridget's blue eyes looking straight at him.
"Major, it looks… it looked like a girl." He spoke dreamily in love with that angelic face.
"Repeat, Foxtrot 12. Did say you a girl?"
Bridget bobbed down out of the clouds and quickly shot back up out of view avoiding a westward wind. She needed to pick up another eastbound wind to get some more speed, but these pilots had taken her off course. She needed to lose these guys fast before the rest of their flight team caught up with them.
"Yeah, a girl."
Colonel Nelson sighed distractedly as if he'd seen and heard enough. He had turned round and was heading back down the stairs to the third floor, pulling his cell phone from his pocket and stepping aside for a personal phone call. He speed-called his son, Major Anthony J. Nelson.
"Tony," The white-haired bespectacled former astronaut caught the boy sitting at a Honolulu eatery with his mother. "Where's your mother?'
"She's right here with me, dad." The young pilot was on reserve duty from Iraq, now on leave visiting his parents in Hawaii. His mother was a former Iraq beauty from Baghdad herself from the days the region was still part of Babylonia. A former jinni, she was now a mortal woman of mature beautiful married to the love of her life and spending time with her son. He looked over to her. "Mom, dad wants to know if you've been flying over the islands?"
"TJ, honey…" Jeannie Nelson sipped her fruit drink. "I haven't flown since…" They suddenly both had the same thought.
"Bridget!" They didn't know the girl personally, but they had whispers about her through the mystical community. She was being talked everywhere from Hogwarts to Waverly Place to the home of Tabitha Stephens in Westport, Connecticut.
"Tony…" Jeannie took her son's phone. "You tell your pilots to stop scaring that girl. She's just passing over."
"Passing over…" Nelson fretted a bit. "Jeannie, do you know this girl? Is she a jinni?"
"I'll explain her later." The long-lived enchantress tried to assay his feelings. "Just let her go."
"We're going to have to have a talk about this…"
Hundreds of miles off Oahu, Bridget was nearing the Marquesas Islands. Upon increasing her speed with the only southbound winds she could get, her skirt had been ripped off of her by the winds and what was left of her sweater was being held together by the straps of her knapsack, revealing her costume underneath and the stitching on it was coming undone in high speed. She couldn't out fly these pilots, she couldn't out maneuver them and she was trying to fight the compulsion to just start ripping the jets off their wings. Following her on radar, they followed her into the stratosphere and stayed within two hundred feet of her as she climbed higher and higher then dived down between then like rocket and vanished off their radar.
"Where'd she go?" Harley was looking around him through the clouds. "Where did she go?"
"Give it up, Topper…" Gregory was off his starboard side talking through their radios. "It was a nice try…"
"Yeah, but she was hot…"
"I wonder where she vanished…"
Down below them was the Castaways Resort founded and built by the late Thurston Howell III; it was now owned and run by his son, Thurston Howell IV, and his five remaining partners. Among them were former actress Ginger Grant, now a filmmaker in her own right, scoutmaster and survivalist Professor Roy Hinkley, retired sailor William "Buddy" Gilligan and his wife, Mary Ann, a cookbook authoress. The resort was on the same island upon which they had once lived on, and today, they always had anywhere between two hundred to three hundred guests staying in the hotel or the surrounding bungalows on the small tropical island. Largely retired and living on the money from endorsement deals he had made after the island, Gilligan left his bungalow to head to the eatery on the island to get a snack.
"Gilligan," The professor came from his laboratory on the island. "Mary Ann is looking for you."
"What does she want now?" The white-haired former first mate commiserated.
"It's not always bad, is it?"
"Let me put it like this." Gilligan sighed. "I feel like I'm working for the Skipper again."
The Professor chuckled at him as if he was a big brother. By his left side, Bridget came wandering out of the public ladies room adjusting a Hawaiian top and sari, carrying her knapsack with the Chinese takeout and her costume pushed down alongside of it and then shined a nice smile to the two mature island hosts. The two former castaways turned and watched the young beauty head off down the path to the lagoon. Even the Professor lit up a bit wishing he was a young man again, but then another thought came to him.
"You know, I'm reasonably sure I know all the guests on the island, but I know I've never seen her before." He stated.
"Well, she didn't fall out of the sky!" Gilligan headed off to look for his wife.