The Adventures of Ice Woman

Part 1 - Meet Ice Woman

A figure lurked in the shadows. Thomas St. Jones could always tell when someone was there, no matter how stealthy the individual - and the girl hiding in his office was an expert.

He looked down at the pages of 'nonsensical shit' (as he'd dubbed it) strewn across his writing desk, rearranged them, straightened the many photos (of himself) and played with the souvenir paperweights littered across his table. He didn't want his guest to know he was aware of her just yet.

She slipped out from behind the life-size cut-out of Thomas to a slightly larger, more comfortable hiding place behind the curtains.

Thomas yawned widely and rested his feet on the table before him. He began to hum one of his favourite tunes, of his own composition, that no-one but himself found any pleasure in. He began to reminisce on his latest victory: the council being swayed to invest in more pounds to "clean the streets and rid us of these pesky animals". He intensely disliked nature of all sorts having been mentally scarred in his youth by the sight of a dog excreting waste upon his lawn.

The hoot of an owl returned him to the present as he made a mental note to do something about those stupid birds.

The girl hidden in the curtains drew a breath slightly louder and deeper than the others, causing Thomas to remember her.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," he called loudly. She did not move.

Thomas was annoyed by this; he always wanted things exactly as he planned it. He always wanted the upper hand in every situation. He rose from his comfortable, high-backed armchair and strode about the room, trying to find her and not show he was losing his cool.

The girl was quick though. She slipped out from behind the mauve curtains when his back was turned and in less time than it took to blink, Thomas St. Jones was bound and gagged, kneeling in a very awkward position before the girl. His highly gelled hair began to stick to his face in cold sweat as he scanned her figure.

A teenage girl, barely 15, stood in front of him. She was the type of girl he would have hit on at the local pub, and publicly too had she been older; medium height, with long, dark hair piled on her head in a stylish hair-do. She was slim, but not one of those stick figures he usually loved. The harsh look she gave him, through the blue, sequinned mask covering her face from her forehead to the edge of her nose, intimidated Thomas as he checked her out.

She was wearing a pale blue cocktail dress and was barefoot. She kicked his face, making his nose bleed.

"Ice Woman," she stated matter-of-factly, as though she knew he was wondering who his captor was. "You have been a bad boy. Do you know what you have done?" She looked him up and down. Thomas was whimpering slightly wishing he could wipe the blood off his face.

"You have enabled the murder of our fellow beings with your making more animal pounds. What do you have to say about that Mr. St. Jones? Thomas?" she spat his name, cocking one eyebrow and giving him a look one would usually spare for something disgusting in a public toilet.

She smiled. "Nothing?" she continued, unconcerned that his knees were starting to hurt. "Well, well... if you want to live - and I'm guessing you do - you better fix this little mess you've created by the end of next week. And stop any future attempts to destroy or kill nature. That includes - " she knelt down and turned his face toward hers so that she could see the beads of sweat forming in his temple and rolling down his face " - polluting our city's natural water supply with toxic wastes. Got it?"

To emphasise her point, she pulled out a blade from her retro beehive 'do and and brought it near his Adams Apple. She pressed it into his throat so that a trickle of blood seeped down his neck and dripped onto his clean, white shirt.

With that, she jumped up, did a series of quick slicing through the bonds holding Thomas's arms and legs together, and leapt out the window.

Thomas followed her, and stuck his head out. He saw her sliding along ice that had certainly not been there before, to the street below and then sprint into the darkness.