“A bit of an empty house we share here, so I’m glad you’re awake. Hello, stranger,” she said.
“I…didn’t know…we were rooming together,” the Equalizer fought to squeeze out. His throat felt like sandpaper and there was a dull pain throughout his body. Having tried to get up, he realized he couldn’t.
“We’ve been bedfellows since you passed on your ticklish lead and I hit pay dirt,” Gypsie-Ann was saying. “Better to lay still, Jack. We have matching bandages, but I’m in better shape.” The reporter raised the hospital gown she was wearing so he could see the wrap looping her torso. “The Brick told me you had a chunk of Bulkhead embedded in your abdomen — you really don’t want to know which part.”
“Bulkhead. He’s dead…?”
“In little pieces.”
“The explosion.”
“Something like that. I don’t know the full details.”
“Crap.” Jack felt like he was on fire. “I need water.”
“No need for subtlety.”
Gypsie-Ann climbed out of her cot, grabbed a tumbler off a small table, poured from the plastic jug there, and walked it over to her pyjama partner.
“Thanks,” he said, after completely finishing the glass. Swallowing had become marginally easier, but it still hurt like hell. “What happened to you?”
“Someone shot me in the stomach.”
“Jeez. Did that hurt?”
“What do you reckon? I thought I was going to die.” Obviously tired of standing, the reporter settled down on the end of the other patient’s bed.
“Me too,” Jack muttered, and then he stopped to think. “How long’ve I been out of it? I mean, since the explosion.”
“Pretty Amazonia says three days.”
“Then when did you get shot?”
“Yesterday arvo.”
The Equalizer stared at her as she sat there. “And you said you got shot in the stomach?”
“I did.”
“In that case, you look remarkably peachy.”
Gypsie-Ann laughed. “I do, don’t I? When it came to choosing baggage before downloading into Heropa, I was smart.”
“You’re invulnerable.”
“No, no. Since we can’t have the option of invulnerability — believe me, I harried them — I thought I’d go with the next best option.”
“Which was…?”
“Wolverine’s healing factor.”
“Ah-hah.”
“I have no idea why no one else here has chosen it — if you look at Wolverine in comicbooks, he’s been on death’s door dozens of times, yet always recovers. I know it’s not the most realistic mojo to have, but this whole place is make-believe.”
“Isn’t that cheating? It makes you virtually invulnerable.”
“Not really — since I go through all the pain before my body decides to heal itself. You have no idea how excruciating it is to get shot. Still, I’m alive.”
“Wish I’d thought of that, but the ’60s’re more my speciality.”
“Meh, I’m more of a bronze-age-comic fan. It’s what I grew up with, thanks to my dad — who had a great collection of the stuff.”
“Some good yarns tucked away in there,” Jack admitted, “though the Avengers, from the late ’70s, had this rabid policy of superhero overpopulation.”
“That so? I hadn’t noticed, since I was more into the X-Men. How many are we talking?”
“Eighteen members of the team, along with respective spouses and nemeses.”
“Yep,” the woman agreed, “that is a spot of overpopulation. Kind of kills the idea of ‘the more the merrier’, right?”
“Probably because you don’t care a single iota about anyone since the individual protagonists’re watered down.”
“It’s tricky, when you have so many characters.”
Gypsie-Ann mulled over the geeky concept, surprisingly without objection. Jack had expected to be slapped down but all he got was a vague glance.
“To be honest,” the reporter continued, “the Wolverine thing always made me scratch my head.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, if you think about it seriously, in order to fix the point-blank bullet wound in my tummy the surrounding cells would have to multiply themselves at an insane rate, causing a form of hypermitosis. Instead, there’s a trigger mechanism somewhere here inside me that tells the cells to play ball, and thereby make up for any loss of structure, dividing at extreme speed when needed — giving rise to the creation of new blood vessels and neurons, et voilà. Look,” she unwrapped and revealed her stomach, “not even any scarring. I never road-tested this before. Thank Christ, it works. I was beginning to wonder, since — and this really annoys me — the knack only kicks in with major injuries. Trivial things like blisters from new shoes take the old-fashioned route. In the good old days, they’d heal inside twenty-four hours because of the Reset, but now no such luck. Remember this?”