by Bejammin2000
“Twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go-0-0h… I wanna be sedated! Nothin’ to do, nowhere to go, oh… I wanna be sedated!” Ilyssa Jordan, the teenage heroine known as Air Wave, sang and was dancing. Oddly enough, she wasn’t wearing any headphones, nor was a radio on.
Larry Jordan, grandfather to Ilyssa Jordan, peered over his newspaper at his dancing grandchild. He didn’t know whether he should be upset or proud. On the one hand, she had greater control over the radio belt’s power and had used it well in the past three months since she had begun protecting Portland, Maine, as the new Air Wave. (*) On the other, the radio belt was a tool, not a toy.
[(*) Editor’s note: See Secret Origins: Air Wave: Making Waves.]
“Just put me in a wheelchair, get me on a plane! Hurry-hurry-hurry, before I go insane! I can’t control my fingers, I can’t control my brain! Oh, no, oh, oh, oh, oh!” Ilyssa kept singing, gracefully avoiding objects in the room. All of a sudden, the music stopped, as did she.
“Hey, what happened?” Ilyssa asked aloud, a little surprised and shocked at the silence she was now hearing.
“I happened,” Larry said, holding his own, albeit less powerful, radio belt. “I think we need to have a discussion on the ethical and moral use of our equipment.”
***
“OK, school is out, Christmas was sometime last week, and all we’re doing is hanging out at the pond? Why?” Tyler Rainey asked his intolerant sister Alex. “We don’t even ice skate, for goodness sakes!”
“True, we do not ice skate,” Alex said to her rather slow brother. “Ilyssa, on the other hand, does, and does it very well. Also, we were told to meet Bobbi here. She said she had some important news for us.” The two then saw that Bobbi Fairbanks was approaching them and called to Ilyssa, who skated over to them, braking with a spray of ice.
“Hello, hello, hello, hello!” Bobbi said as she leaned up against the railing. “Riddle me this: what do the four of us, Dick Clark, Times Square, and the thirty-first have in common?”
Instead of waiting for her friends to reply, she answered her own question in a giddy squeal, “I’ll tell you! We’re going to the greatest New Year’s party in the country. I won in a radio contest five tickets to Dick Clark Rockin’ New Year’s Party!”