- Joanna Anderson -

Joanna started walking towards the city airport. She thought that it would be marvelous to be able to fly. She reasoned that her body responded when placed in peril, and that if she wanted the ability to fly, that all she had to do was to put herself in danger in the air.

She looked down at herself. She was naked. She must have lost her clothes earlier. She didn’t really mind; after all, she was gorgeous, and her recently acquired invulnerability made it quite comfortable for her to walk on rough pavement. It did present a problem, however, as her purse with her money was also missing, so she didn’t have air fare with her. She would just have to avoid the ticket line.

As she arrived at the boundary fence for the airport, she noticed that one plane had moved into position on the runway for takeoff. She liked the looks of this plane; it was the type that had three jet engines, one under each wing, and the third on the tail. She thought that if she jumped onto the tail, that she could use the third engine as a comfortable seat.

The plane began to move. Joanna began to move also. She jumped the fence and began running towards the plane. Airport security police also began to move. Spotting her on the runway, one officer gunned his patrol car towards her. Joanna was concentrating on the plane. She was rapidly approaching it from the side when she felt tingles on her back. Gunfire! They were shooting at her! She would have stopped and confronted the police, but she had a plane to catch. And catch it she did, jumping onto the plane’s tail just before it left the ground.

Joanna settled in on the tail of the plane. She tried to make herself comfortable, but the third engine was so noisy! She soon lost patience, and tightened her legs around the noise-maker. The engine cowling began to collapse, until it made contact with the spinning turbine blades inside. Then the blades began cutting through the cowling, and the engine caught fire. The flames were obstructing her vision, so Joanna reached down and tore the engine from the tail and casually tossed it aside.

The engine fell to the ground, impacting an Elementary School below and exploding. Joanna could hear the screams of the children inside, but they were of no concern to her!

Losing the rear engine caused the airplane pilot serious trouble. The plane became nose-heavy due to loss of weight from the rear, and also lost one third of its thrust power. The combination of these two caused the plane to go into a dive. The plane was out of control! Joanna could tell the plane was going to crash. Although she would have survived a crash, she needed to jump while the plane was still in the air, in order to put herself into jeopardy to gain a flying ability, and therefore she jumped.

She began flapping her arms, but to her dismay, it was having no effect. She couldn’t fly! Her fall continued as she watched the doomed plane crash to the ground in a housing development. It exploded on impact, causing a massive fireball and demolishing apartment buildings for blocks around. Joanna didn’t mind, she thought the fireball was quite colorful and pretty, in its own way. Her view soon disappeared, however, and everything went dark.

Joanna’s fall ended abruptly as she encountered a solid surface. She seemed to be in some sort of room, although it was totally dark and extremely smoky. She couldn’t see, so she got to her feet and started feeling her way. Things seemed to be all around her; she couldn’t tell what they were, but it seemed to her like walking through spider webs. Whatever they were, the room was definitely getting much smokier now. She wasn’t sure if she was going in the right direction, but she decided to keep moving.

Alarms sounded in the Control Room of the coal-fired power station, indicating low differential pressure in the baghouse. Laura, the shift supervisor, left to investigate.

Joanna continued moving forward. The room started getting brighter and she soon spotted the source: a huge white-hot flame. She continued moving towards the flame and was soon standing directly in front of it. She liked the feeling of warmth it gave off, and basked in its glow. She then noticed that the room had a small window, and someone on the other side was waving to her. She waved back.

Laura was walking past the boiler, on her way to the baghouse, when she spotted something in the boiler inspection window. Curious, she went up to it and looked inside. There was a woman in there! But, no one could possibly survive there, not with temperatures over 2000ºF! Not even in a steam suit! She waved, and the woman inside waved back! How was this possible? Laura adjusted the forced-air blower to lower firebox pressure to slightly sub-atmospheric, then opened the firebox inspection door.

Joanna saw a door open in the room. The woman outside beckoned to her, so she walked over to the door and exited. The woman closed the door.

“I’m Laura. Who are you?”

“I’m Joanna. Where am I?”

“You’re at the power station, and you were just in our main boiler!”

Joanna looked around, then smiled. “Oh, so that’s what happened! I fell into your smokestack!”

“You did?” Laura asked. “Then that explains the baghouse alarm.”

“What alarm?”

“Did you tear through anything in a smoky room?”

“Yes, it fell like spider webs.”

“Those were our bag filters, they remove particulates from our smoke.”

“So this is the power station?”

“That’s right. Would you like a tour?”

“Sure.”

“Follow me.”

Joanna followed Laura across the building.

“This is our main turbine generator,” Laura said.

“How much power does it have?”

“One million horsepower.”