Flamy the Fire-Fighting Friend! Part 1

Idea contributed to by 0neGenericWord and CrypticCollaborator

Written by HikerAngel

“Sit down, Jules.”

The secretary did as he was told, sweating bullets as he took the only other seat within the massive penthouse office. The first chair, a far more lavish and extravagant one, was sat upon by his boss and one of the wealthiest women alive on the whole planet, Octavia Mason.

‘Cruel’ was too kind of a word to describe Octavia. She seemed to view everyone as beneath her, especially lately, even those she was supposed to be in good relations with, like Julius.

She loved no one but herself, some said. They had never seen a smile on her face unless it was at the expense of someone else’s misery, others said.

But as her net worth piled into the billions over the years, all valid criticisms of her seemed to be silenced when in her presence. It certainly didn’t help that she possessed every authoritarian force of power under her mighty dollar.

Getting fired was often a mercy sentence knowing the shady dealings she got into, but as someone who had been working as her personal secretary for a great while, the last thing Julius wanted was to be let go.

After pausing for a bit to stare out at the city beneath her, Octavia continued, not even looking Julius in the eye.

“Do you know why I’ve called you here, Julius?”

“U-uh, no ma’am.”

“Yes you do. You know exactly why I called you here. I want you to say it.”

“M-ma’am, I—”

“Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me!” Octavia interrupted with a growing anger in her voice, though leaving her face still obscured. “You’ve been working here for fifteen years and you’ve never made this mistake before, how do I know you didn’t do it on purpose!?”

“I-I’m not even sure what I—”

As soon as she heard that, Octavia turned to give Julius a silencing side-eye. He felt a lump in his throat grow as she turned the full 180 to properly stare into his soul.

The whole situation really wasn’t helped by the fact that Octavia was drop-dead gorgeous. Just one look at her perfectly-constructed face was enough to have Julius’ heart skip a beat. Not only was she born naturally beautiful, but extensive workouts and diets made her body almost worthy of Mount Olympus with its beauty.

The red peplum dress she wore hugged her form tightly with its pencil skirt and hourglass trim. It had been slightly modified to expose more of her sizable cleavage, which served well to create a catch-22 cocktail of domination. All too often she had accused men of staring at her perfect body for a little too long, even though she wanted to be adored. Her impossible standards reinforced the threatening presence she always carried with her, especially towards Julius.

“Are you really going to tell me that you didn’t misfile this order report?”

Her index finger pivoted slightly to her desk, which contained a solitary sheet of paper upon it.

“Pick that up and read to me what it says. Now.”

He did as he was told.

“U-uh, let’s see here, ‘Paper, Printer Stacks. Times three. Pen, Ballpoint Black. Times twenty-one—”

“Stop. Do you see the error?” Octavia asked as if she was scolding a child.

“W-well, it, uh…—”

“Twenty one pens? Why would you suddenly order one more than we need?”

Julius sank in his seat.

“You think this is funny, don’t you? You think you can just order extra things for yourself behind my back with my company’s money!?”

Octavia’s voice rose louder and louder, neglecting to mention the fact that it was likely a mistype and the average ballpoint pen was a mere ten cents.

Her hands became more animated as she erupted with rage. Even with feisty fire in her eyes, she was still sexier than any woman Julius had ever laid eyes upon.

“I am building an empire here! I will not have freeloaders such as yourself ruining that for me!”

Her temper somewhat quelled itself as she stepped closer and closer towards Julius. With each clack of her diamond-encrusted high heels, his heart rate rose ten fold.

She bent down slightly, wrapping a perfectly manicured hand around his necktie slowly yet purposefully. Then, with a hard yank, she brought his face to hers.

Their foreheads locked as Octavia commanded his fear with a Kubrickian stare, a smile of pure evil growing on her face. Her other hand then grabbed the inside tail and tugged it hard in an awkward direction, strangling Julius.

“Now, today is your lucky day, worm. It just so happens that my… collectors are going to make a pit stop at some… residential housing. It’s only the safest and most secure part of the neighborhood.”

With every sarcasm-laiden word, she yanked tighter on the two strips of fabric that once resembled an orderly necktie.

“Now, you’re going to accompany these collectors later tonight. Don’t even think about making any detours, my drone cameras can see everything in that area so I’ll be able to confirm if anything goes wrong...

“...And, by the way, you have to do it. Or I’ll fire you, do you understand?”

Julius nodded his head faster than he ever had in his life. After a moment of consideration, Octavia released her iron grip on his tie, letting him collapse backwards into his chair.

He took several moments to recapture his breath and grip his reddening neck in pain.

“You’re on thin ice with this one, Jules. Don’t disappoint me.”

The poor secretary was on the verge of tears, but that smug smile never once left Octavia’s face. She knew the assignment was ultimately a grueling, tedious task designed to waste her secretary’s time… and she reveled in that fact.

~

“What’s got you so down in the dumps, dude?”

Julius’ train of thought was suddenly derailed as the far burlier man next to him grabbed his attention. The ride in an unmarked van with no windows and ten other guys he didn’t know nor want to know had caused his mind to wander. But now, one of them was being friendly and he felt obliged to answer.

“It’s, well, it’s this whole situation, y’know? No offense to you guys, but I really don’t belong here. I’ve got an ill daughter at home I should be spending time with, but Octavia forced me to do this as punishment for misplacing an order.”

The man next to Julius gave him a friendly pat on the back. “I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter, man. Octavia sounds brutal in person.”

“I mean, she wasn’t this… comically evil until just a few weeks ago. I have no idea what overcame her. Like, she started physically strangling me just because I ordered one pen too many…”

“Jesus, dude. If I wasn’t getting paid handsomely by her I’d probably hate that bitch! But, well, I can give you some optimistic news. You’ve probably heard the horror stories about where we’re going, these guys that live on the outskirts of Mason Tech company property for free and they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes. You’ve probably heard that they’re dangerous freeloaders…”

“...uh, a-and?”

“No, that's it.”

A silence overcame the truck for a brief moment, only for another member of the squad of goons to speak up.

“Listen, what I think he’s trying to say is that you won’t have anything to worry about when we’re around. We’re world-renowned bounty hunters going up against a couple of scrappy street rats. You’ll be perfectly fine.”

Julius noticed that a few men exchanged nervous glances as he said that.

“Wh-what’s with the nervousness, uh, fellas?” Julius asked, trying to squeeze an honest answer from the men.

“Don’t worry about them. They’re just paranoid about some rumored weirdo in the area who’s apparently been running around beating people up in a mascot costume over the past few weeks.”

This truck ride was just getting weirder and weirder.

Thankfully, it wouldn’t be too much longer before the doors opened and all the men piled out onto a street only illuminated by the moon.

“Right then, looks like we’re all here” said the one of the men who was apparently the leader. He then proceeded to verbally assign everyone to specific houses. Unsurprisingly, Julius was then assigned with the two biggest guys in the team.

“Oh well,” Jules muttered under his breath. “At least these guys seem to understand that I don’t belong here.”

What happened next also didn’t surprise Julius. The ten burly men with riot gear and guns of various caliber went door to door terrorizing often innocent people who kept insisting that they needed a bit more time to get money and didn’t want any trouble.

It was quite hard to stomach, but as long as Julius didn’t protest and made sure that the ten men got their jobs done, it would all be over soon. Then, he could return to his job and pretend like none of this had ever happened.

Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t going to be that easy.

After just three houses had been sacked, something surreal happened. Julius noticed a strange object silhouetted within the sky. It looked far too large to be a bird yet far too animal-like to be a plane. It almost looked like a guy in jetpack gear, but there was no stream of flames to convey it.

Then the shadow got closer to the ground.

“Uhh… guys?” Julius exclaimed to the two men in his group. “What’s that?”

The two men looked where he was pointing. Their eyes widened.

“The mascot.” The two of them said in frightened unison.

“P-pardon?” Julius clarified, but it was too late. Both men were frightened and ran away into the bushes as the creature came out of the contrast and onto the sidewalk.

Jesus, and he thought the worst of it all was left on the truck.

What stood on the concrete before him was hard to describe without him sounding completely insane. It was a dragon-person, to say the least. Resembling a type of bygone animation and costuming from the early VHS era.

“W-what the— wh-what?” was all Julius could squeeze out of his mouth. He wasn’t sure if he should be afraid, happy, or check himself into a mental institution.

“Flamy Burns, firefighter extraordinaire! At your service!” came the creature with a rather goofy voice that sounded like a mix of Barney and Smurfette.

Okay, so Julius was going to have to take this one step at a time to keep his sanity.

Judging by the curvature of its chest, sound of its voice and the volume of its… waist. This thing was likely female and went by the name of Flamy. Simple enough so far.

She seemed to sport a firefighter motif, wearing the familiar brown jacket and hat with yellow patches common to the attire. Though she didn’t wear any pants. Thankfully, for his sake, she didn’t seem to have any genitals, just a belly-patch of scales that extended from the bottom of her tail to the recesses of her jacket.

With the exception of some miscellaneous spikes on her shoulders and tail and somewhat sharp claws, Flamy looked quite… soft. Despite being a dragon-like creature, she looked to be made out of almost a fabric-like substance. That would have reinforced the mascot theory, if Flamy didn’t have almost uncannily realistic body movements.

It didn’t help that her eyes were lazy and a rather jagged pair of buck teeth were jutting from her snoot. She looked very dopey, to say the least.

Flamy tipped the tiny fireman’s hat on her head. “Don’t worry, new friend! I’ll stop all these bad guys! For this no-goodery could only be the work of Queen E.Vile!”

Before he could even get a chance to question what the fuck was going on, one of Octavia’s hired guns attacked the large dragon. He started swinging at her with a combat knife, yet her rotund body seemed quite flexible, able to maneuver itself like jelly as specific body parts slipped in and out of range with unexpectedly precise movements.

Despite being what seemed like four feet taller than the six foot man, Flamy was still being backed into a corner by the knife-wielding mercenary. Her body pressed itself up against the wall, seeming to almost contort and flatten itself to reflect the fear she seemed to be expressing. She then shot her hands up in surrender.

“Alright then, Dragon, time to say your prayers!” the man said, waiting for Flamy’s response.

“O-okay, but it’s kinda long, pal, y’know? I’m Roman Catholic.”

“Uurg! Forget the prayer, you die now!”

“Wait! Can I at least be given an honorable death worthy of the firefighters guild?”

For some reason, the highly trained mercenary seemed to lose all his common sense and go along with the strange request. “Very well, but it better not be too much of a hassle!”

“Oh, not at all, you just have to slay me while standing over that large, red “X” that’s marked on the ground over there.”

Sure enough, there was indeed a large, red “X” painted over the grass on someone’s lawn. Placed next to it was a metal yellow sign that read “Warning: Anvil Dropping Zone Firefighter official slaying spot.”

Immediately, two million questions popped into Julius’ head, ones he knew he’d probably never get an answer to. But, the most pressing thought was that no functioning adult would be stupid enough to actually fall for a stunt like that, no matter how much setup their was. Right?

And then the two of them walked over to the grass and the hired gunman stood atop the X.

Julius almost felt no sympathy for the man when, from seemingly nowhere, a cartoonishly large anvil fell atop his head.

He expected blood and guts to fly everywhere, but no such event occurred. Instead, Flamy lifted the anvil off of the man to reveal that he had been flattened into a disk shape that seemed to compose of just his face with tiny feet peeking out from underneath. He waddled away, muttering to himself that “I don’t get paid enough for this.”

But just as he left, another one of Octavia’s men took his place. He immediately rushed at Flamy with rifle ablaze, firing missed shot after missed shot as she fled into a bush that almost looked too big for her to hide in, yet she somehow slipped behind perfectly.

Her hiding spot didn’t seem to do much at first, with the man stopping right in front of the bush she had dove into and pointing his gun into it.

Instead of simply firing like he had done before, he started poking around in the bush for a longer time than anyone realistically would have.

This gave Flamy ample time to quietly pop out of a different bush from behind the man, a silly, sneaky grin on her face and a comically large mallet in her hands.

She reeled back, puffing out her chest before slamming the massive wooden hammer atop the man’s head. A cartoonish “WHAM!” sounded off and the man stood straight as an arrow, teetering slightly before collapsing backwards right in front of Flamy, knocked out cold.

The large dragon took this positional opportunity to pull a black marker out of the hammerspace behind her body and scribble over the goggles on the KO’d man’s night vision helmet.

She then tip-toed in an exaggerated fashion behind one of the houses, once again placing her out-of-sight for everyone involved. That didn’t stop another debt collector from sneaking up alongside the visible side of the wall, pulling the pin from a grenade and placing it on the ground near where Flamy had disappeared to.

The man then tiptoed off, only for Flamy’s hand to poke out from the wall and fit a new handle with a pin in it back onto the grenade. Due to how a grenade functioned, it should have gone off regardless, but it didn’t. Like blowing on the fuse of a cartoon bomb, somehow Flamy had deactivated the grenade, leaving the man who placed it thoroughly flustered.

He ran back over and picked up the grenade, then backed up a few feet before pulling the replacement pin off. But before he could approach, Flamy’s hand came stretching around the wall, her arm’s actual length heavily exaggerated as her clawed fingers fit a new handle and pin on the grenade before retreating back behind the wall.

What was visible of the merc’s face under his gear turned red with anger. Julius swore he saw steam erupting from the man’s ears. This time, he stepped back a few more feet before ripping off the handle, only to frantically look both ways rapidly to make sure Flamy’s hand wasn’t trying to put another pin in his plan.

When no such dragonic limbs made themselves apparent, the man breathed a sigh of relief and chuckled reassuringly to himself, finally believing he had outsmarted Flamy.

He was so happy, he forgot he was still holding a live grenade, which promptly blew up in his face.

A regular grenade would have likely seared half of his flesh and filled his body with deadly shrapnel, but this one merely engulfed him in a smoky explosion. When the effects cleared, his body had been reduced to ash with the sole exception of his eyes, which blinked twice in disbelief.

With three men taken out, the remaining five from the other side of the street decided to break the cycle of approaching one-by-one and all attack her at the same time. They ran to the sidewalk, but before they could cross the street Flamy came out of nowhere adorned in a crossing guard vest atop her firefighting one.

“HOOOOLD IT!” Flamy yelled at the top of her lungs, throwing an exaggeratedly large open palm forward which spanned the length of the entire road, stopping all of the guys in place. “You guys need to look both ways before crossing the street! A car could hit you!”

It was the middle of the night and it wasn’t a particularly popular road to drive down, but the five men paused their assault to oblige anyway. They all looked both ways in unison, visible concern on their faces.

With no cars visible in either direction, one of the men immediately tried to cross the street. He was greeted to a sudden rush of cars in both directions that quickly dissipated, flattening him like a pancake on the street.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Flamy said, shaking her head. “Should’a used the crosswalk. Jaywalking is no joke!”

She pursed her lips and exhaled a steady stream of air which scooped up the flattened man in the gust like a sheet of paper. His body flapped and flipped about in the air until he flew out of sight.

Thinking like a hive mind, the four remaining men walked over a few feet until they reached the nearby parallel white lines.

The next man ran across, only to immediately suffer the same fate as the previous street-crosser.

“Oops, he forgot to continue to look both ways while crossing the street.”

The next man attempted it, following Flamy’s instructions to a T only to be inflicted with the same half-second barrage of cars.

“Oooops, he forgot to wait until the light had turned green again.”

The final two mercs then waited patiently for the traffic stop to turn in their favor. When it did, one of the men followed all of Flamy’s steps up to that point only to be trampled by a ton of ambulances.

“Ooooooooops, he forgot that emergency vehicles are allowed to bypass traffic lights if there is an urgent situation.”

Now, there was only one man left, and he was terrified. He looked both ways, waited for the light to turn green, checked for emergency vehicles and began the terrifying trek across the asphalt, continuing to look both ways as he did.

And then, the most unexpected thing happened: he made it across the street.

“Good job, little guy!” Flamy exclaimed with glee, placing a large, golden star on his chest. “You get a gold star for a job well done!”

Jumping for joy like a little schoolboy, it was as if he had completely forgotten what his initial goal was. Julius had long come to the conclusion that standing next to Flamy seemed to make the average man just as insane as her.

But the celebration was cut short but the man who had been stricken on the head from earlier. He had recovered and was pointing a rifle at both Flamy and the merc with the gold star.

“Ugh, it got so dark all of the sudden, which one of you guys is the dragon?” he demanded, unaware that Flamy had blacked out his goggles earlier.

“It’s her, it’s her!” the man shouted, frantically pointing at Flamy which shifted the gun’s aim over to her.

“No, it’s her, it’s her!” Flamy said in response, doing a bad impression of the man who had just correctly accused her, pointing her finger rightward in a similar fashion. Somehow, this tactic worked and the man with the gun aimed accordingly.

“What!? No, it’s her!” The gun shifted again.

“No, it’s her!” The gun shifted once again.

“It’s her!”

“No, it’s her!”

“It’s her!”

“No, it’s her!”

“It’s her!”

“No, it’s me!”

“It’s me! It’s me, goddamnit!”

“Very well, you heard the man.”

The man with the gun open fired upon the man with the gold star.

“Yes!! Did I get her?” the blinded man shouted.

“You sure did!” Flamy responded, filling him with confused confidence right before striking the ground with her foot. Despite the two of them standing on someone’s lawn, the specific section of the ground that Flamy stepped one suddenly functioned like a loose board in the floor of a saloon, with the man standing squarely on the other end of it. Like a high-powered see-saw, the final debt collector was sent flying high into the sky where he disappeared with a little star twinkle.

With what Julius could only describe as heavy reality manipulation, this strange cartoon humanoid had wiped the floor with every single high-grade mercenary on the west coast.

And then, the dragon’s wall-eyes turned their attention toward Julius.

He became mortified in fear as she walked towards him. Technically, he was with those debt collectors, which made him an enemy of the goofy god-like entity before him.

“Aww, don’t be afraid, I’m not gonna hurt’cha!” Flamy said, rustling through Julius’ hair with her massive hand. “I know you’re not like those other bad guys, I can see the goodness in your heart, after all!”

“R-really?”

“Yes really, silly!” Flamy then looked beyond Julius at nothing in particular. “Remember, a firefighter is your friend, and only wants to help you!”

To say Julius felt safe was a lie, but he felt a weird sort of nostalgic comfort around Flamy that he couldn’t quite describe the intricacies of.

“So you’re like a superhero or something?”

“I suppose someone could call me that! After all, every firefighter is one! But if thwarting the schemes of that dastardly villain Octavia Mason grants me that title, I’ll gladly take it!”

Julius didn’t have the heart to tell Flamy that he wouldn’t be employed without that woman. Although, he had noticed that Octavia was becoming more and more “evil” as the days went by… perhaps Flamy was the universe’s strange answer to her crimes?

That was certainly the only plausible theory to make about any of the insanity he had just witnessed.

Flamy then lifted up her sleeve and took a peek at a large, minimally detailed wristwatch, her eyes lighting up with worry. “Ooh! There goes my allotted time! I gotta bounce back to the station!”

“W-Wait! Flamy!” Julius shouted. “Will I ever see you again?”

“Sure you will, weekends at 7 most likely!”

And with that, she literally bounced away, leaping into the air and using her sizable rear to rapidly ricochet off the sidewalk, her body contorting like a rubber ball as she did.

Julius could only hope that Octavia wouldn’t blame him for what transpired. Though a quick glance up at a floating security drone pointing its camera directly at his guilty face suggested otherwise.