Joanna McIlheney thought she had seen it all in her twenty years as a bank teller. Like the guy who misspelled the name on the endorsement of a check he had stolen, then, when the discrepancy was pointed out to him, claimed that he was dyslexic. Then there was the guy who used the back of a personalized cheque to write a hold-up note, but he knew he wasn’t going to get caught because he’d borrowed the cheque from his best buddy. Or the guy who brought in a cow and wanted to know if he could use it as collateral for a trip to Las Vegas.

Some people just have no appreciation for modern banking techniques.

“Give me all the money in your till,” the woman standing in front of Joanna McIlheney on a slow Tuesday afternoon (they were all pretty slow since the bank started “encouraging” customers to use the ATMs, actually) said, “and nobody will get hairballed.”

This got Joanna McIlheney’s attention. Looking up, she saw a woman in a sleek brown cat suit, complete with ears. Except, the more Joanna McIlheney looked at it, the less it appeared to be clothing. She looked for buttons or snaps or seams that would indicate Velcro, but there were none. Not only that, but the ears didn’t seem to be attached to any cloth or other fabric. In fact, they seemed to be attached to –

Okay, Joanna McIlheney thought to herself, now I’ve seen it all. There wasn’t much conviction in the thought, though, because, somewhere inside her, she knew that if she could be surprised by a…a…a Cat Lady, life could still have other surprises in store for her. That part of her mind decided to put that thought in the “To Be Considered When I Have the Time” cubbyhole and deal with the immediate matter at hand.

“I can’t do that,” she said with a wistful shake of her head. “Not bank policy.”

The hair on the Cat Lady’s back rose. Joanna McIlheney could tell because the lavender cape, the only thing about the Cat Lady that she could identify as clothing, rose. “Have you ever experienced a hairball?” she menaced.

“Nooo, I can’t say as I have,” Joanna McIlheney replied.

The Cat Lady looked around. She couldn’t find any other tellers, and she didn’t think it would be right to do anything to the middle-aged man standing in the line (is one person a line? Oddly enough, Nietzsche is silent on this question). Then, she spotted Jeb Mullavey. After he was let go from the PD for reasons that were never made public, he kind of let himself go. For sure, he was still six foot three and filled a uniform impressively, but he couldn’t outrun a snail or fight a paper bag from either side; mostly, he just smiled at the female customers and pinched the cheeks of children and exuded authority. The Cat Lady waggled her furry fingers in his direction.

Jeb Mullavey coughed. Then, he coughed again. Then, he coughed a few more times. Then, he coughed for real, his face getting increasingly red. Just when it seemed he couldn’t take any more, a hairball flew out of his mouth and he fell unconscious to the floor.

“Are you going to be long?” the man behind the Cat Lady asked. “I really need to get back to the office.”

The Cat Lady turned and hissed at him. This appeared to set off some kind of—well, for lack of a better term, let’s call it a force field—that brushed his hair back. “Ah. I see you have serious business to attend to, here,” he impatiently said. “I’ll come back another time.” He turned smartly and, using a hand in an attempt to put his hair back in place, walked out the front door.

“Does it look like having a hairball is an enjoyable experience?” the Cat Lady, turning back to the teller, asked.

“No, Miss, I must admit that it does not,” Joanna McIlheney replied evenly. Part of her knew that she would be well within her rights to panic at this point, that nobody would think the worse of her if, under these circumstances, she emitted a hysterical shriek. But Joanna McIlheney was a professional, and professional bank tellers do not shriek while on duty.

“Do you want to be next?”

“No, Miss.”

“Then, please, give me all the money in your till.”

Joanna McIlheney looked around. “What would you like me to put it in?”

“This.” The Cat Lady handed her a tattered Loblaws bag. The Cat Lady looked chagrined. “I know it’s bad for the environment, but I am trying to get as much use out of it as possible.”

With a curt nod to acknowledge the Cat Lady’s environmental consciousness, Joanna McIlheney opened her till and started to put the money from it into the bag.

A hand tapped the Cat Lady on the shoulder. She brushed it off. Then, the arm sprung a second arm with a second hand, and Joanna McIlheney was tapped on both shoulders at once. She brushed both hands off. Then, the second arm sprouted a third arm, and she was being tapped on both shoulders and patted on her head. Okay, that was just patronizing!

The Cat Lady turned and hissed. The…force field – yes, it was definitely a field of force – pushed the hands back a couple of feet. The Cat Lady and Joanna McIlheney traced the arm back as far as they could: it disappeared about five feet away in the thicket of dividers with images of smart young people and distinguished older people smiling at helpful bank officials with important messages about mortgage rates and retirement fund plans that kept the main area of the bank out of sight of the people passing by the front window. This apparently did not please her, so, as the pseudo-arms retracted into the main one and it receded out of sight, the Cat Lady let out a much louder hiss that shredded the dividers.

A young man was revealed standing behind the dividers; he wore a purple and orange body suit with an image of a baseball plate on his chest that seemed elongated at its top. He had a purple and orange mask and a black cape. The man appeared to have been caught off guard: he waved sheepishly and said, “Uhh, hi.”

The Cat Lady snorted. “And, who are you supposed to be?” she scoffed.
The man pulled himself up to his full dignity. “They call me…The Home Stretch.” Well, as much dignity as somebody wearing colourful tights and calling himself The Home Stretch can muster.

The Cat Lady turned back to the teller. “Yeah, better stay out of my way, Stretch,” she warned him.

“I’m sorry, Crazy Cat Lady,” he replied, “but I can’t let you rob this bank.”

The Cat Lady turned, her claws coming out. “I am not crazy!” she spat. “I am moderately eccentric. To be Crazy, a Cat Lady has to own at least…47 cats! I have three!”

The Cat Lady hissed; a wave of energy flew towards The Home Stretch. He split down the middle and…flopped to either side of where he had been standing. The wave passed over him, shattering the front window of the bank. The Home Stretch flopped erect and the two parts of his body…melted back together.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said with a smile.

“Why no –” the Cat Lady began. The entire bank shuddered. Then, there was a pause. Shudder. Pause. Shudder. Pause. Everybody looked at the empty space where the front window used to be: a chubby, eight foot tall baby appeared and waved.

“Hi-lo,” the baby happily said.

“Big Baby!” the Home Stretch shouted. “Cat Lady is trying to rob this bank! We must stop her!”

“K,” Big Baby said. He was wearing nothing but a diaper…to which somebody had attached a baby blue cape. Big Baby bent over and entered the bank through the demolished window. When he was inside, he straightened up as best he could, the tufts of hair on his head brushing the ceiling, standing next to the Home Stretch.

“Give up, Crazy Cat Lady,” the adult hero sternly advised. “There’s no way you can beat the combined might of the Home Stretch and Big Baby!”

The villain sighed. “You’re not going to let the whole ‘Crazy’ thing go, are you?”

“I didn’t choose your super powers,” the Home Stretch stated. “I work with what I’m given.”

“Fiiiiiiine! Prepare to taste my wrath!” the Cat Lady responded. “Prepare to –”

“Cookies!” Big Baby shouted.

“To eat hot…hot furba – what?” the Cat Lady stumbled.

“Cookies!” Big Baby eagerly shouted. He had noticed that along a wall on the right side of the room there was a small cabinet, on top of which was a coffeemaker, an inverted stack of styrofoam cups, a few napkins, a small carton of crea – oh, but that’s not really important. What is important is that there was a plate of Peak Freans on top of the cabinet, and Big Baby wanted them.

The Home Stretch shrugged. “Do you mind…?” he asked.

The Cat Lady threw up her hands. “If you insist. But can we please make this quick?”

“Okay,” the Home Stretch told the titan toddler, “you can have two –”

Big Baby took the entire tray and shoved it into his mouth.

“Big Baby!” the Home Stretch scolded. “No! Bad! We do not eat trays!”

The Cat Lady took the opportunity to hiss at the ground underneath the other caped people in the room, causing the floor to collapse beneath them. Seeing what was happening, the Home Stretch extended his body over the hole, barely holding up his partner.

“Big Baby!” the Home Stretch groaned.

“Umm?” the titan toddler responded.

“Pet…the…cat!”

“Ooh!” Big Baby enthused. “Kitty!” He jumped onto solid ground, causing much shaking of loose objects (including people) and dust becoming airborne. He ran a few steps, arms open in intended embrace.

The Cat Lady fully let out her claws and hissed a warning at him.

“Kitty?” Big Baby, stopping before her, asked, confused.

The Home Stretch was shakily getting to his feet next to the hole. “Really?” he angrily demanded. “You would hurt a baby?”

The Cat lady looked at him in disbelief. “He’s eight feet tall!” she protested.

“And three years ol –” the Home Stretch started. He was cut off by a stern man’s voice saying, “Okay, kids, it’s time to go home!”

Everybody turned to see a short, weedy man with a hawk nose and a suit that looked like it was designed by somebody who was colour-blind. I need a programme! Joanna McIlheney thought. There are too many of them to keep track of!
“Who are you?” the Cat Lady challenged the newcomer.

“My name is Antonio Van der Whall,” he answered. “I’m an object psychologist. I’ve been studying conscious matter since just after the Singularity. I’m always on the lookout for strange occurrences, and when –”

“No fair!” Big Baby loudly interrupted him.

“I’m sorry,” Van der Whall blinked.

The Home Stretch turned apologetically towards him. “I’m sorry, man,” he said, “but Big Baby is right. If you want to play, you have to be wearing a cape.”

“This is not a game!” Van der Whall protested.

“Yeah, tell that to the big guy,” the Home Stretch replied.

Van der Whall stepped forward. He was immediately enclosed in a cage of iron bars. You children don’t know who you’re dealing with, Van der Whall thought with a smirk. He closed his eyes and thought for a moment, allowing his mind to drift into the Quantum Entanglement Dimension, where all matter held a conversation with itself. It took a mere moment for him to locate the cage that was holding him.

“Let me go,” he ordered it.

“No can do, friend,” the cage informed him.

Van der Whall’s imaginary jaw hit the unreal floor of the communication space. In the decade plus that he had been communicating with conscious matter, this was the first time that it had flatly refused to do what he asked of it. To be sure, negotiations were often involved, but never flat out refusal.

“Please?” Van der Whall added. It hurt.

“Sorry.” The cage wouldn’t budge.

“Why not?” Van der Whall demanded.

“It’s the kid’s game,” the cage said with a mental shrug. “If the kid says the only way you can play is to wear a cape, you need to wear a cape.”

“I’m not wearing a cape!” Van der Whall snarled.    “Suit yourself,” the cage responded. “Only, how many colours is that suit you’re wearing? I lost count at 47. Can I be totally honest with you? You look like you’re already wearing a cape. What would it hurt?”

Van der Whall fumed for a few seconds. In that time, Big Baby started smothering the Cat Lady. She tried poking at him with her claws, but they seemed to just bounce off his skin without leaving a scratch, and she had less energy with every stab. Oh, and all of the executives whose offices were on the left side of the bank pulled their blinds and those in a small corridor off the room locked their doors. This was bank policy for executives in a branch being attacked by a supervillain. The only one who poked her head out the door of her office was Marjoram Fuentes, who briefly considered taking a photo of the scene with her cellphone, but thought better of it when she realized that anybody who saw the image would assume that she had Photoshopped it. Shaking her head sadly, she retreated back into her office and locked the door. If everybody got out of this alive, she was going to get a letter of reprimand for not following bank policy.

With a scintillating sigh of resignation, Van der Whall asked some of the matter in the air around him to create his “Get out of jail free cape,” essentially an extension of the collar of his jacket. Once that was completed, the bars of the cage melted away.

“Put her down!” he commanded.

“Kitty?” Big Baby asked, confused. Still, he let the Cat Lady slump to the ground.

Van der Whall threw out his hands, uncertain what would happen. They emitted a wall of flashing, multicoloured light. Of course. He poked at the light to see if it had any substance (like, I don’t know, some kind of force field? We’ve already established that they work in this situation, so that’s what the colours could have been), but his hand went through it. Frustrated, he waved his hands in an attempt to disperse the colours, which, of course, only made them deeper.

“Pretty,” Big Baby sing-songed.

Okay, Van der Whall thought. That’s progr –

“Pretty,” the Home Stretch sing-songed.

Van der Whall decided to make this quick. He walked through the lights, which apparently had some kind of hypnotic effect, and towards Big Baby. But before he could reach the ostensible hero, the Cat Lady sprang up from the floor and stood between them, claws out.

“Don’t you dare go near him,” she angrily warned Van der Whall.

“But,” he blurted, “he…he…he was about to squeeze the life out of you!”

“He was just being playful,” the Cat Lady warily explained. “He just doesn’t know his own strength.”

Van der Whall considered for a moment. It hadn’t occurred to him that Big Baby was merely a…big baby. A brief conversation with the giant diaper confirmed the fact that, in his…civilian identity, he was only three years old. Another quick chat with fibres in the Home Stretch’s costume revealed that he and the Cat Lady were the child’s teenage babysitters.

“I just want to put him to sleep so that you three can go,” Van der Whall, softening, told her. “You really have to go – the police are on their way. They’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”

“How do you know that?” the Cat Lady asked. Suspicious. “I don’t hear any sirens.”

“The street told me.” Van der Whall knew that there was a serious possibility that she would reject that assertion – she didn’t seem all that clear on the ins and outs of a conscious universe. But, to his surprise, the Cat Lady laughed.

“Alright,” she said. “What do we have to do?”

Van der Whall stepped around her and put one of his hands over Big Baby’s eyes. (He may have had to levitate a foot or two off the ground – it’s not like he could stretch his arm all that way up. Not him.) The moment the eyes closed, Big Baby disappeared.

“What did you –” the Cat Lady started, but Van der Whall pointed to the giant diaper on the floor. The Cat Lady found the right-sized baby inside.

“We have to talk,” Van der Whall stated. “I’ll catch up with you at the child’s home.”

“But, you don’t know where –” the Cat Lady started again.

“He lives on Blue Forest Drive,” Van der Whall said. Now, the sirens could be heard. “Toronto’s a big place – you shouldn’t have chosen a bank just a few blocks down the street. We can discuss that later, too. You need to leave now. Trust me – I’ll have no trouble finding you.”

The Cat Lady picked up the baby and took a still befuddled Home Stretch by the hand and led him out of the bank through the shattered front window. As he watched them go, Van der Whall thought, Now, for some damage control. First, literally. He did a little digging around in the QED and convinced the front window to reassemble itself, which it immediately did. Oh, sure, it was missing a few atoms here and there (there are always strays), which would take a few seconds off its expected lifespan, but, Van der Whall mused, if they were lucky, the bank system would collapse before the window shattered from stress.

Antonio Van der Whall had a different definition of luck than most of the people of his time.

Now, figuratively, Van der Whall thought. He walked up to the teller. “So… Joanna. What would it take for you to tell the police that you pushed the silent alarm by accident?”

“By – they tried to rob me!” the teller indignantly answered.

“They’re just kids,” he told her. “No point in ruining their lives over such a…small matter. Seriously, if you could have anything you wanted…”

“You couldn’t give me what I want,” Joanna McIlheney said. “What am I saying? It’s against bank pol –”

Van der Whall grinned. “You naughty girl!”

Joanna McIlheney blushed. “I don’t know what you’re – oh!” She could feel her breasts getting rounder and her cheeks becoming more pronounced. The blue eyes she would have to discover the next time she looked in the mirror.

“Our little secret?” Van der Whall mischievously suggested.

“But…what about the security tapes?” Joanna McIlheney protested with wonder.

“There should be more mystery in the world, don’t you think?” With a wink, Van der Whall disappeared in a puff of smoke. (Strictly speaking, it would be more correct to say that Van der Whall disappeared as a puff of smoke, but that would spoil the mystery for Joanna McIlheney, and why would we want to do that?)

* * *

“YOU WHAT?” Van der Whall, well, screeched.

“Keep it down!” Millicent Transcriptase (of the Mississauga Transcriptases) – you might know her better as the Cat Lady – urgently whispered. In her human form, she was a mousy fifteen year-old girl with big glasses and an easy way with a frown. “Eddie is taking a nap. If you wake him up, we’ll have to go through that all over again!”

“I’m sorry.” Van der Whall moderated his voice, if not his irkedness. “But, you robbed a bank because the three year-old you were babysitting was having a crying fit?”

“We didn’t rob the bank,” Milly argued. “I mean, I wasn’t going to keep the money or anything.”

“I’m sure the judge would have taken that into account,” Van der Whall sarcasmed.

“You kind of had to be there,” allowed Biff Plantaine (aka: the Home Stretch). He was seventeen, gangly, with teeth that would have made him chief of a beaver clan if he had been born a different species. “Eddie got hold of one of Milly’s comic books, and thought it would be fun to have an adventure in it. When we told him we couldn’t do it, he had some atoms from his crib get in touch with atoms in our brains and explain to us all about the QED.”

“He taught you about the Quantum Entanglement Dimension?” Van der Whall was incredulous.

“Imagine our surprise!” Biff confirmed.

“We tried to tell Eddie that we couldn’t create an adventure for him, but he started bawling his eyes out and refused to stop,” Millicent continued the tale. “We didn’t want to rob a bank, but we didn’t know what else to do.”

Van der Whall asked to see the comic book. Millicent left the cozy suburban kitchen where they were enjoying hot chocolates, returning half a minute later with issue 129 of The Stupifying Snailman. In this issue, the Gastropod of Justice has to deal with the unexpected (for him, not for fans, who had been discussing it on message boards for three months) return of his fiercest foe, the Red Moth. Van der Whall turned to a couple of pages with a fight scene and laid the comic down on the table.

“This is what you do instead of robbing a bank,” he informed them.

The first panel of the left hand page started to blur, then elongate, then take three dimensional form. In a matter of seconds, they were watching Snailman and the Red Moth battle after hours in the hallways of the Eaton Centre.

“I’m not sure this would have worked,” Biff said, dubiously fascinated.

“Why not?” Van der Whall asked.

“Eddie wanted to be in the action. He didn’t just want to wa –” Before Biff could finish his sentence, his point of view had zoomed from the kitchen to the image of the Eaton Centre. He tried to move, but he was slow, encumbered by the shell on his ba – Oh, my god! he realized, as he watched the Red Moth fly into the window of a store that had left its lights on overnight (intelligence was not his strong suit), I…I am Snailman!

“It’s like a computer game,” Van der Whall’s voice boomed from high above him. “Only, completely different.”

Biff, who perhaps wasn’t as much of a Snailman fan as Millicent, asked, “How do I –” and was back in his own body. “Whoa.”

“As I said,” Van der Whall told him, “it’s like a computer game. You can be totally immersed in a viewpoint of a character, but, at the same time, you never really leave your own body.”

“Can I do it with an issue of Irony Man?” Biff wanted to know.

“Once you get some experience working with conscious matter,” Van der Whall assured him, “you’ll come up with tricks that I couldn’t possibly imagine.” And, as you have seen, I have a broad imagination, he didn’t add.

Millicent closed the comic book. “Okay. Good to know. But, are we in trouble?” she matter-of-factly asked.

“The damage was repaired, the teller won’t talk and the two of you can’t be identified from the security footage,” Van der Whall assured her, “because you were in your superhero costumes. Eddie might have been because, of course, cuteness scales up, so I took the liberty of giving him a thick black moustache, bushy eyebrows and big glasses. Anybody who looks at the tape should mistake him for a young Marx brother.”

“What about you?” Millicent asked. “You weren’t in a costume – not really.” The way she looked at what he was wearing led Van der Whall to believe that she thought his everyday dress was highly costume-like.

“Ah, well,” Van der Whall smiled. “I had a talk with the tapes – there are four of them – and they agreed to portray me as a certain much beloved cartoon character whose name I will not state in order to avoid the inevitable lawyer’s letter threatening a lawsuit.” Van der Whall cocked his head for a couple of seconds, then put down his half-drunk mug and stood up. “I have to go.”

“Off to thwart another robbery?” Biff half-joked.

“Got to get a cat out of a tree,” Van der Whall replied. When they looked at him like they were expecting a punchline, he said, “In her never ending quest to make me a better person, Frances, the love of my life, has given me one month to save 30 cats from trees. I’ve only got three days left and I have to save eight more cats. This one is in Alberta, so I’m going to have to hurry.”

“Isn’t saving cats kind of…beneath you?” Biff again.

Van der Whall shrugged. “We all have to take our opportunities to be heroes as they come…”