--Target: Flamestar--

Angelica flew as fast as she could to the financial district. She banked her lithe body and dove between two skyscrapers, leaving a flaming contrail behind her. As she got closer to the street she could see the effects of Madame Medusa's petrification helmet. The streets were littered with petrified men and women like some sort of bizarre art show street faire, but she knew the truth was far worse.

They were all victims of the mad Madame. Destined to remain statues forever if she had her way with them.

Flamestar skimmed over the heads of numerous statues, following the trail of granite figures until she saw some movement ahead. Some fortunate souls had escaped the petrifying wrath of the villainess and were running and screaming. She turned the corner and saw her quarry ahead.

"Oh this is just delicious!" Medusa exclaimed. She had stumbled onto the path of the parade route for the annual Good Cheer day. Drum majorettes stood frozen in their poses, stone batons transformed in mid-twirl as some didn't even realize they were in the sights of a petrifying madwoman. Statued cheerleaders in short pleated skirts that bared their flat tummies stood side by side with petrified band members and equestrian riders. Dancers stood immobilized in granite poses. Medusa had seemingly turned half the crowd in this block to stone and was now concentrating on picking off whatever moved.

"Hey!" Flamestar yelled at the top of her lungs. Her impressive chest heaved with the increased adrenaline that came with the anticipation of battle. "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" she flung a couple of fireballs that impacted at Medusa's feet. She was trying to throw off Medusa's aim and it worked as the villainess missed a skimpily dressed samba dancer.

"You're going to pay for that!" Medusa turned her full attention to the flying flame girl. She fired off a wide beam of petrification energy but the yellow suited heroine easily dodged the ray beam in a loop-de-loop and arced her curvaceous body to take another strafing run at the gorgoness. Heat from the flames as Flamestar shot by licked at Medusa's body and she instinctively flinched from the intensity of the blazing babe. She took a Gorgon Grenade off of her costume and lobbed it towards the flaming femme.

"Whoa!" Flamestar saw the glimmering sphere and altered her trajectory to go straight up, perpendicular from the street. Madame Medusa's Gorgon Grenades had the power to completely petrify anything within a twenty foot diameter sphere, as Dee and Darlene had learned earlier today. With the foresight of having seen the effects it had on Darlene earlier today, Flamestar knew she had to get out of range quickly. The detonation of the grenade flashed below her, affecting a mostly empty sphere of space to stone. Only the slightest signs of the petrification bomb were seen in the side of a building whose windows were now fragile collapsing in granite bits.

"You can dish it out but can you take it?" Flamestar dived down towards Madame Medusa, zigging and zagging around the lancing beams of petrification shooting up from Medusa's helmet. Closer and closer she got as she raised her arms in front of her and shot a double spear of heat energy lasers that impacted into the ground and threw the gorgoness to the ground in a contained explosion.

"Ungh!" Medusa rolled in the debris of pavement and concrete as Flamestar reached down and snatched the gorgonizing helmet right off the stunned villainess's head. Medusa's red ponytail whipped in the wake of Flamestar's attack as the green and white clad woman struggled to get back to her feet.

"Not so tough without this, are you?" Flamestar had circled around and landed behind Medusa. She held the villainess' helmet like she was threatening to drop it and smash it.

"You wouldn't dare!" Medusa snarled. "I know you need it to restore all those people I turned to stone!"

"True, but without it you're helpless," Flamestar walked towards the retreating villainess, her empty hand ablaze with flickering flame.

"Not so helpless!" Madame Medusa grabbed a Gorgon Grenade and held it menacingly. "I'll turn you to stone with this!"

"And there's no way you could get out of the perimeter before you're turned to stone too," Flamestar called Medusa's bluff. "So go ahead, turn me to stone."

"Okay," a voice from behind Flamestar spoke!

"Wha?" Flamestar heard the voice but she couldn't turn around. She knew she was turning to stone! Her body had stiffened, turning solid and hard. Her body, turning around in surprise was motionless now. Her legs spread apart, her body twisting to the right. Supple breasts turned to solid rock. Her ass turned harder than it ever had been before. Her lovely long hair turned into waves of stone. Her right hand was stripped of the gorgonizer helmet, which alongside Flamestar's costume, was strangely unaffected by the petrification that had overcome her.

Her body, and only her body itself, had been changed to whitened stone. Marble so perfect like the color of fresh snow. The alabaster face of Flamestar showed utter surprise at having been ambushed from behind. Her widened eyes, still framed by the red mask that was a part of her costume, highlighted by delicate marble eyelashes were blank with astonishment. Her pouting red lips, now white and frozen in a pursed `oh' were now solid rather than soft. Flamestar stood motionless, a statue in form and figure drabbed in the colorful trappings that seemed to mock her former heroic identity.

Madame Medusa smiled as a young woman dressed in a green miniskirt costume with white snake design that bared her arms and legs. She wore a domino mask of white and her hair was tussled like her mentor's namesake. Her white go-go heeled boots reached to her knees. Her white panties flickered between the fluttering green pleated skirt. Her hands clad in delicate white inspection-style gloves. Her right index finger encircled with a glittering greenstone bauble set on a golden circle. "You did well," she complimented. "Gorgon Girl."

"I live to serve you Madame," the girl said as she unzipped the front of Flamestar's costume, exposing marble white cleavage and fantastic alabaster aureoles. "She certainly is. . . statuesque, isn't she?" Petra said sensuously.

--Falling Behind--

"Flamestar come in. . . Flamestar come in. . ." Wanda repeated into her femm-comm. "Nothing Sue," She turned to the team leader from her co-pilot's seat.

Sue sat silently with a grimace on her pretty face. Lovely blonde hair falling in a cascade around her shoulders reflected only the barest shudder as Sue took a deep breath and her breasts filled the cleavage cutout on the front of her skintight bodysuit. "We'll be there in thirty seconds, prepare for full dispersal pattern Omega."

Heatwave and Cosmic Girl sat in the two seats behind Wanda and Sue. Darlene held Tiffany's hand as the young heroine wondered about her sister's fate. "She'll be okay," Darlene comforted Tiffany.

"Landing commencing," Wanda announced as the Inc Jet settled down in the middle of a silent street. The heroines emerged from the ship to face an eerily un-bustling city street.

"No," was all Sue could say as she surveyed the petrified crowds of people. All of them were frozen in place as statues.

Cosmic Girl stared at the frozen cheerleaders, their petrified undies and perfectly pert tits preserved in stone and she couldn't help but feel her crotch moisten. She looked at Tiffany and could confirm that Heatwave shared her forbidden desires to just fondle the stoned pretties. Their long bare legs, so inviting to the touch, tapering up to their tightly pantied crotches, completely and utterly turned to stone throughout every crack and crevice of their pussies.

Heatwave's breathing intensified and her heart raced as she saw some stony dancers clad only in what once were sparkly sequined leotards. The long hair turned to stone filaments was frozen like an expertly sculpted masterpiece's. It took all her might not to run over to fondle the crotches of the statues with her fingertips probing the pubic mounds turned to stone.

The Crimson Sorceress inspected the cheek of a teenaged bystander dressed in low slung pants that hugged her stone hips and looked dangerously close to her bikini line. The petrified girl's face reflected fear and shock at being turned to a statue. Her long hair lay flat against her back and she wore her midriff-baring tits that were braless based on the prominent looking petrified points on her stony outfit. Tiffany walked over and touched the statue gently on the shoulder. The stone girl looked like she was about her age. She gasped, more out of a growing erotic orgasm growing inside her but Wanda mistook it as shock at what had been done. "She'll be okay once we get her back to HQ."

"Good," Tiffany said softly. Her thoughts were fighting against doing her duty and wishing she were in that girls' place. Stone, peaceful and silent in immortal beauty. She imagined her own breasts in place of the girl's and how solid and statuey they would look. Her body in that place, transfixed and permanently a fixture on display. And next to her Cosmic Girl, also petrified and naked, her large breasts and perfect body preserved forever and ever...

"Tiffany?" Darlene interrupted Heatwave's fantasy. "We've got a job to do," she motioned to the advancing heroines. "Time for fun later, okay?"

Tiffany blushed at her erotic thoughts. "Okay," she smiled weakly. Her mind still imagining Darlene's hot body turned into a statue but feeling a little guilty she had forgotten about her sister.

"This way," Transparency Girl was rounding the corner and stopped as she saw waves and waves of people turned to stone. It was as if the entire viewing audience, parade members, floats and anything in-between were made of stone. She gasped at the magnitude of petrification. It would take days, maybe weeks, to restore everything and everyone back to normal. "Calling Artie," she spoke into her femm-comm. "We'll need those reverse-petrifiers ASAP. Initiate restoration protocol Medusa immediately."

"Affirmative mistress," Artie replied.

"There's no sign of Flamestar anywhere," Sue spoke to the assembled heroines. "This was her last known location but there's no sign of her. Can you get anything on her homing beacon Dee?"

Shadow Lady adjusted her wraparound goggles to display a heads-up display. Flamestar's tracking beacon was blinking and moving. "She's moving pretty fast too," Dee's voice halted. "I just lost the signal, Sue. We've lost her."

--Picking up the Pieces--

"We're getting in another report Sue," Cosmic Girl had silently walked in and interrupted as she touched Sue softly on the shoulder.

The testing bay was crowded with petrified statues, victims of Madame Medusa like some kind of triage unit. Artie, Stacey and Sue were hard at work restoring the statues to normal. The victims had been slowly transported over to FF INC HQ by the police and groups of about twenty to thirty, depending on how many could be fit into the police trucks due to their static poses. It seemed as if a seemingly endless line of statues were coming in to be restored back to life.

Officer Kimberly was doing her best at being a liaison between FF INC and the public but the mayor's office was getting concerned at how long it was taking restoring the victims to normality. The heroines had spent the last day trying to undo all the damage Madame Medusa had inflicted on the parade and the exhaustion was starting to show on their faces. Trying their best to put Flamestar's fate out of their minds, they had jumped wholeheartedly into the enormous project of helping the citizens who had been turned to stone. Sometimes it was hard to imagine one woman could cause all this.

Artie had used the captured Madame Medusa technology from a previous encounter and cloned it into portable handheld restoration units to distribute to the police but they had limited ability. The last thing anyone wanted was to have this technology fall into the wrong hands so fail safes were built into the units to allow only restoration of stone to normalcy. Even then there was a limit to the amount of units Artie could produce before the number of incoming victims started to take priority. At least his programming didn't allow him to show any kind of frustration though. Just keeping up with the amount of statues coming in that the police couldn't handle on their own was starting to wear down the FF INC members.

To change as many victims as possible back to normal as fast as possible required more specialized technology like the captured Medusa helmet and the Mok'tn transmutation device and now both Wanda and Sue were using the dangerous devices to literally transform entire groups of people back to normal. Wanda was manning the Mok'tn transmutation device in the control room above and restoring as many victims as she could but the mental strain was starting to get to her.

Tiffany was downstairs helping coordinate the arrival of petrified statues. Sue herself was using the Madame Medusa helmet they had removed from their so-called trophy room to revive the petrified people by setting the helmet in its reverse setting. She removed the helmet as she finished returning a group of cheerleaders, bystanders and majorettes to normal. Grey hard rock softened and became flesh. Blonde hair, green miniskirts, colorful pom-poms and sparkly uniforms that bared way too much flesh regained their normal un-stone-like properties as the people were changed back.

"Another report? News of Angelica?" Sue asked hopefully as she directed a confused cheerleader to the police debriefing line that had been set up in the lobby and front courtyard of the building. Stacey took charge and led the woman away to join the recently restored in a queue to the lobby elevator. She was wearing her Galatea costume, a cover to disguise her identity, more than a reflection of a desire to become an adventurer. She had been amused at how the press had started wondering what the new heroine living at FF INC HQ. The crowd of people was abuzz with confusion and amazement at being inside the FF INC HQ.

"No, it's Madame Medusa," Darlene said through clenched teeth.

"Assemble the team," Sue straightened herself and stretched her aching muscles. The arch of her back caused her round breasts to press against the skin-tight fabric of her costume, revealing the soft nubs of her nipples. "We're going to get her this time," she said seriously.

"Transparency Girl, we've got another wave of petrified people coming in," Wanda said over the intercom. Her voice sounded tired, but still strong as she looked down on the staging area from above. Her face was drenched with sweat that beaded down the open diamond of her costume top and ran down and over her voluptuous breasts.

Sue and Darlene left the testing room and turned the corner to head to the elevator. "Wanda I want you to lock down the transmuter and follow us as soon as you can. Let Stacey know she'll be in charge while we're gone." Sue turned off her femm-comm and stepped into the elevator that took her and Darlene directly to the hanger deck.




...Stay Tuned for the next petrifying chapters...