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Papercut, the Folding Girl

Barta’s stomach roiled as she stood once again in the tryout chamber, with the Legionnaires who had dismissed her nearly two years before now sitting once again, like a row of brightly colored jurors, ready to pass judgement over her.

Saturn Girl was the one to stand, which did nothing for Barta’s nerves. ‘What if she can tell how nervous I am and decides that I’m not Legion material?’ She was so caught up in her own internal turmoil, she almost missed the Legionnaire’s words, “Barta Malsen, aka Papercut, in recognition of your exemplary leadership of the Substitute Heroes, you have been approved for Legion membership. This ‘tryout’ will be merely symbolic, to provide a visual record of how much you’ve developed your abilities and training since your first tryout.”

‘Gulp. Don’t screw this up.’ Barta thought as she looked towards the two robots that had stunned her into unconsciousness the first time she faced them. They looked as daunting as ever, and their charged claw-like hands sparked with electricity.

Leaping forward with a shout, she compressed her mass into the 2nd dimension, becoming a wispy sheet of flesh, mere molecules wide, and before she even realized it, she had shot both of her outstretched arms through the mid-sections of the advancing robots. She landed and turned in a single sinuous motion, twisting around herself like some bizarre mobius strip, to see the two robots messily clattering to the floor, their tops halves sheared seamlessly from their bottoms. She felt a slight tingle of electricity, but had intentionally leapt clear of the floor to avoid being grounded, sparing her from the brutal shock she’d taken in her first tryout. Smoke came up from the sputtering robots, and she turned and walked on twisting two-dimensional legs to the two human challengers, who, despite their training and sparring armor, looked at her dubiously as she advanced.

Whipping her arms out along a two-dimensional plane, she attenuated her form, and from five meters away, sliced their combat-staves into useless fragments, as easily as she’d sundered the security droids. Both pulled back and went on the defensive, and when Colossal Boy swung a fist at her, she twisted sideways, easily avoiding his blow, and wrapped around his arm, slithering up until her torso and legs were wrapped around his arms and holding him fast. Her arms waved around like tentacles, and finally managed to ensnare Officer Cusimano’s leg, pulling her closer and wrapping her up as well.

Her cheeks flushed as she remembered how a school-girl crush had distracted her and the Legionnaire had thrown her around like a rag-doll in their first meeting. She was a little disbelieving at how easily she was able to ensnare the pair of combatants this time around. What a difference a year and half, and more life or death situations than she cared to remember, makes! A repetitive sound interrupted her reverie, and she craned her head around from the two now helpless combat-trainers to see that Phantom Girl was standing up and clapping her hands. As she looked on in shock, her fellow Legionnaires also stood and began clapping. She couldn’t believe it, and was only startled out of her moment when Colossal Boy, still entangled within her extended body, spoke up with good humor, “We’d clap too, but you might want to let us out first.” Gigi added, “Quickly, if I spend much longer squished up against Gim, his wife is gonna kill me…”

Barta uncoiled herself carefully from the pair, so as not to risk cutting them with one of her laser-sharp edges, and then expanded herself back into three dimensions, surprised to feel tears welling from her eyes as the clapping finally started to die down, and her former Subs rushed forward to congratulate her on her new status as Legionnaire.

'Ron-Karr? You suck.' she thought defiantly, raising her hands and cheering back to her new team-mateas.

Notes;

Barta Malsen is from Mars, and a big fan of Colossal Boy, who is from her home-world and also has the ability to manipulate his form spatially. In her case, Barta stumbled into one of her mother’s science experiments, which crushed her out of three-dimensional space entirely. Her mother and her estranged father (a science police officer), in agreement on something for the first time in over a decade (and yet arguing the entire time), recreated the accident and went after their missing daughter. After a harrowing and surreal series of adventures in two-dimensional space, they managed to return to three-dimensional space with their daughter, only to discover that she had been permanently altered by her time there, and could now compress her own body into a two-dimensional state at will. In her two-dimensional form, her edges are able to slice through almost anything, sliding between the molecules like a laser through mud, and she can attenuate her form to stretch out several meters, as well as twist her two-dimensional form in three dimensions to perform impossible feats of acrobatics and contortion.

Since the ‘adventure,’ Barta has eaten like a horse, and her metabolism has changed so that she utilizes well over 95% of the foodstuffs she ingests. Whatever microbes exist in her gut are extradimensional in nature, and cannot survive out of her body in any event, but they are preternaturally good at their job of tearing apart organic matter to unleash the energy within. Her skin always feels warm, even feverish to the touch, and yet she always feels cold.

Barta grew up in an ‘LG’ section of Mars, where some Martian colonists eschew the use of artificial gravity on philosophical grounds (preferring to adapt themselves to their new home, rather than rely on artificial technologies to adapt the world to themselves). As a result, she is tall and ethereally gaunt, almost unnaturally so, and, by earth standards, was physically quite frail at the time of her first Legion Tryout. She spent the intervening year and a half on a series of hormone-accelerated exercise regimens to strengthen her bones and muscles, to bring her strength up to earth-equivalent standards. The treatments weren’t perfect, however, and not only did she put on muscle mass at an accelerated rate, she also changed hair color, started having to shave and found that her voice had dropped to a manly tenor, which she still finds somewhat disconcerting at times. Her hair had its own story-arc, of sorts, starting as waist-length, light brown and slightly wavy, bleaching to sandy-blonde and becoming even frizzier and less manageable under the stronger sunlight of Earth, and finally growing in coarser and black during her hormone-treatments. She finally chopping most of it off, and with improved hormone treatments no longer has to shave, but her voice never quite restored to it’s original pitch, leaving her with a deeper voice than most would expect from such a slim girl.

Due to the constant chill that Barta feels, she usually wears a jacket over whatever uniform she’s wearing at any given time, and in that jacket stores an assortment of snacks, keeping a schedule of when she needs protein and when she needs sugars and when she needs carbs, as her metabolism is a harsh mistress.

As a result of the various dramatic changes in hairstyle, voice, costume and even build, Papercut is not as readily recognized as some of her team-mates, but she’s grown accustomed to living out of the spotlight.