Earth-349: General Jumbo

Disclaimer #1 This story was inspired by a story in Superman #349, but is not
limited by that story or any other.
Disclaimer #2 This story features characters based on characters owned by DC
Comics, Inc., Marvel Comics and others. This story was written for
entertainment only and is not intended to infringe or disparage those
copyrights, even though they should have expired decades ago and freed those
characters from the dead hand of perpetual corporate ownership.
Disclaimer #3 This story was inspired in part by the short story “Boobs” by
Suzy McKee Charnas, but not so much that anybody’s likely to call it an
infringement.
Disclaimer #4 This story is not recommended for persons under 18 or the easily
offended, especially those who are uncomfortable with a feminist analysis of
precocious breast development in jailbait.
Note 1: General Jumbo will be a pretty obscure character to USAn readers, but
Britons should recognize him. More information can be found at
http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/j/jumbo.htm
Note 2: This story is dedicated to “Melons” and all the other girls who have
had to endure the sort of cruelty Amanda suffers from in this story.

Mummy always says I’ll be glad one day to be “well-endowed”, and maybe
I will, but if so, couldn’t the silly great things have waited until “one day”
to come along, instead of popping in unannounced during the summer I turned
twelve?
“One day”, according to all of Mummy’s friends, the boys will be
worshipping me on account of them, but so far it’s been nothing but teasing and
rude jokes and hands grabbing at them.
I swear, if one of the boys would just look me in the eye and tell me
that my knockers were driving him crazy and could I please take off my jumper
and let him have a feel, I might just say yes. I could see doing that for
Nigel Barr or Bert Gregory. They’re halfway human most of the time and they
used to act like they were my friends (although I haven’t got the least wish
for a “boyfriend”). But not for that beastly Colin Gillie. He’s the one who
really made my life miserable over the things. He was the one who started
calling me “Jubblies” instead of Johnson, and when he got four of the best for
it, he changed it to “Jumbo”, and pretended it was just because I was so tall.
I don’t think the adults were fooled, but it gave them an excuse to pretend
they were fooled, and most of the time that seems to be all they want.
And it was Colin Gillie who got that pack of boys chasing me down
Mulberry Lane that day in April, when I really thought something bad was going
to happen.
I was walking home from school. It’d been a long day and I was good
and ready to be home and watch a little tele. I was adjusting my bra, trying
one more time to find a way to make it actually comfortable, when I heard
Colin’s nasty voice behind me.
“Look at that, even she can’t keep her hands off them!”
And it was his nasty voice, not the one he used for talking to boys or adults
or other human beings, but the one that was for talking about my tits and the
creature unlucky enough to be standing behind them.
I looked behind and there were Colin and Nigel and Bert and a couple of
other boys I recognized from the comprehensive, though I couldn’t put names to
them.
I shouldn’t have run. I should have walked up real close and showed my
teeth and called Colin a nice ripe bad name. If I’d done that, they might have
left me alone. Instead, I started to run, and when I did Nigel yelled “Get
her!” and they were off after me.
If it had only been Colin by himself, or Nigel, I expect he wouldn’t
have gone past copping a feel, but with the lot of them together, each one
afraid to back down before the others did, it might have gotten a lot worse.
In the books I’d been reading lately, boys did terrible things to girls at
times like this. They didn’t go into detail, those books, but that made the
terrible things all the more terrifying.
In the books, it was bad girls who had things happen to them, but I
wasn’t so stupid as to think that there were really rules about who bad things
happened to in real life.
Besides, any girl in those books who had big tits was always a bad one.
I ran, and the boys all came baying after me, and the more I ran and
they yelled, the more frightened I became. And it would have to be the part of
Mulberry Lane where the creek ran along one side and there was a stand of trees
along the other, and no houses for a couple of hundred metres, and there was
nobody else around.
I rounded a turn and the boys were still after me. I was taller than
all of them except Bert, and I probably could have just outrun them, but I was
scared and I wanted help, wanted adults or better yet a policeman nearby. I
wanted to be amongst people, not here in this frightening place where there was
nothing between the boys and me but the law of the jungle. Yes, I was getting
all out of proportion here, but that’s the way I was thinking right then.
Up ahead was a garden wall, and I ran right up to it and grabbed its top and
hauled myself up. I balanced on top of the wall, trying to get a purchase with
my feet, and felt myself starting to slide over the other side. I remember
thinking that with my buttercakes on the far side of the wall, I had gravity on
my side. A hand grabbed my foot and I kicked back, connecting with somebody’s
face, and served him right.
Somebody’s hand went up under my skirt. I don’t think he did it on
purpose, I think he was just grabbing for me any which way, but whoever he was
got hold of the waistband of my panties and I screamed and made a crazy
scramble that put me over the wall in a tumble, scratched and bruised and
panting. I sat up and there was a tank pointing its cannon right in my face.
It was small enough that you could cover it with a hat, but somehow it
didn’t look like a toy. Looking down that pen-sized barrel, I felt as though
it could shoot a small but very real hole in me.
There were more tanks, I now saw, and behind them squads of tiny soldiers scrambling over miniature terrain, forming up to face me. I was in a garden, back of a house, and it was all little ridges and hills and tiny trees and houses, all made to the scale of the soldiers, who were maybe five centimetres tall. With all those little guns pointed up at me, I felt like one of the monsters in the films they showed at the Palace on Saturdays, except for
the “bombs and shells have no effect” part.
I stood up slowly, and the guns all tracked on me. The soldiers aimed their
rifles (I learned later that only their bayonets were functional, but I didn’t
know that then), and the tanks swung their turrets, all aimed at my chest. I
held very still.
“Here, girl, leave off the toys and come play with us!”
I looked over my shoulder, and there was Colin grinning over the wall at me.
I stood there, frozen between a danger I didn’t really understand and a danger
that just seemed crazy, and then I heard a buzzing noise like a giant wasp, and
a tiny little fighter jet flew between Colin and me and shot something at him
that exploded like a squib in his face. Colin fell backward, squawking, out of
sight.
I stared at the wall for a moment and then remembered the army behind me. I
was turning to face them again when I heard a sharp voice.
“Who are you and what are you doing in my garden?”
On the far side of the tanks and soldiers, a tall thin man with white hair was
holding a small metal box with a long antenna coming out of it. He was pushing
buttons on the box, and turning a little dial, and the army was moving away
from me. The man looked rather familiar, though I couldn’t place him.
“Those aren’t toys, you know. Their weapons are real. You could have been
badly hurt.”
The man wasn’t very cross, he was obviously more concerned for me than anything
else, but he also seemed like a very authoritative person, like a teacher or
even a clergyman. I’d never dropped a curtsey to anyone before without having
been reminded ahead of time to do it, but I did for him.
"Amanda Johnson, Sir. I’m sorry for intruding, but there were these boys….”
He nodded, and then he bowed.
“Yes. I saw that one nasty fellow, and you were obviously afraid of him, so I
saw him off. Christopher Pike, Miss Johnson.”
“You’re Professor Pike? You’re the one who invented Robot Annie!”
I expected him to smile and look proud at that, since Robot Annie is so
famous, but instead he just looked sad, and then he said, “I worked on that
project, yes, but I’m not a member of that group anymore.”
He sort of shook himself, and then he smiled at me.
“Well, let’s get you inside, where you can telephone home and have a
cup of tea to settle your nerves.”
That sounded lovely to me, so I went to walk with him into the house,
and that’s when I found out that the boy who’d been yanking at my panties had
ruined the waistband, because they fell down around my ankles right in front of
Professor Pike himself. Worse yet, there was no way I could just pull them up
and they’d stay up, so I was forced to step out of them and stuff them in the
pocket of my blazer. The Professor was ever so kind, though, and didn’t say a
word.
It was the most remarkable cup of tea I’d ever had. In the Professor’s
parlour, more little creatures like the little army bustled about. A teddy
bear, three feet high, brought sugar and milk to the table, and a little
footman walked across the tabletop to scoop up sugar for me. The teapot rolled
over to my cup on little wheels and poured itself without spilling a drop.
The Professor told me that he was living in Dinchester to have a quiet
place to work on robots for the military. They were going to be used for
things like sneaking cameras behind enemy lines, or bombs that could fly
themselves to their targets. For fun, he’d built his first prototypes in the
form of toys, but he’d given them the kind of motors and sensors that the real
military robots would have, and had even armed some of them. The planes fired
missiles that exploded like squibs. That was what he’d used on Colin. The
tanks had the barrels and firing mechanisms of small pistols (“twenty-twos”, he
called them), and while they normally just fired blanks, he’d loaded them with
real bullets to do some target practice today.
He explained that the government was eager to have weapons that could
keep Britain a world power, even though we had no atomic weapons, and also
wanted to encourage science, even though we had no space program. He made a
joke, saying, “And if we’ve got any superheroes stashed in a bunker somewhere,
I’m not aware of it!”
We went out into his garden after that, and he showed me what his
little army could do. He let me handle the control box, and told me I was
a “natural”, which made me feel terribly proud. I told him about how the boys
harassed me on account of my tits (only I said “bosom”), and he was very
sympathetic.
“When I was your age, I developed the foulest breath on Earth. No
tooth powder or mouthwash could control it. I learned much later that it was
an infection, and it took sulfa to get rid of it, but at the time it was just
misery for me. The kids all called me ’Stinky’ and that name came close to
breaking my heart.
“And then one day a boy called me ‘Stinky’ one time too many and I just
snapped. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him up against the wall,
good and hard, and I put my face up close to his so he could get a real faceful
of my breath, and I yelled, ‘That’s Mister Stinky to you!’ And somehow, that
was the right thing to say, because after that they did call me Mr. Stinky, and
it didn’t seem so bad. I had my Mum knit me a sweater with a big picture of a
skunk on the front, and I had more friends and less trouble.”
I could only shake my head at this story, finding it hard to believe
that I could ever make a decent name out of “Jumbo”.
The Professor had a caller then, and I was ready to say goodbye and
head for home, but he invited me to spend some more time with his little army,
and left me alone in the garden. I set the soldiers to drilling in formation
and the tanks to patrolling along the garden wall, and started getting familiar
with the planes. It really was amazing how much you could get the little
things to do, with just one little control box with only a few buttons and a
couple of dials.
It felt good, having those little machines under my command. It felt
like nothing I’d ever done. The sense of power, of control, of having a kind
of talent for running things, was simply marvelous.
For so long, I’d felt as though I were helpless, pinned down by adults
and their rules, by boys and their mad hands, by girls and their envy, but at
least here, in command of the Professor’s little army, I was in charge.
I was making the planes fly in formation and then break off one by one,
while part of my mind was working out how you could set up little tabletop
battlefields and have people hire them like pinball machines, when I heard a
cry of pain from the house.
I ran back to the French doors and saw two men raising the Professor
roughly from the floor, while a third stood over him with a pistol in his
hand. There was blood coming from the Professor’s mouth.
“I’ll say again,” the man with the gun said, “is there anything you’d
like to take with you? We really do want you to comfortable in your new home.”
I should have been too frightened to do anything, except maybe run the
way I had from those boys. But right at that moment, I didn’t feel like a
schoolgirl – I felt like a general. So I twisted dials and punched buttons as
fast as I could, and the Professor’s little army went marching through the
French doors with guns blazing.
I saw later that I really shouldn’t have fired so many of the guns.
The three men were all wounded, and one of them nearly died, and it was only
luck that the Professor wasn’t also shot. Still, I did manage to stop them
from abducting him.
My little army stood guard over the men while I telephoned the police,
a little plane circling above them as they cringed together and held
handkerchiefs to their wounds.
I got a nice letter from the police and my picture in the paper.
Everyone at school made a fuss over me, and so did my family, but I assumed
that would be the end of it. At tea a few days later, though, the Professor
surprised me. He told me that he wanted me to come by every day and drill his
army, and even take some of them out with me to march and roll and fly around
town. He said it would serve as a test of his robots’ powers, and also let me
get practice at using them. He said that I had a real future as an operator of
little machines like his, and that there would be lots of jobs calling for that
kind of work in the future, both in business and in the military.
The idea of being part of a new industry, and maybe a new kind of war,
was kind of interesting, but I’ll admit that what really sounded good was
getting to have my own personal army to follow me around.
I have a permit from the police to take the little army out in public. The tanks and planes only fire squibs now (even an adult wouldn’t be allowed to
load the tanks with bullets), but those can be quite useful in distracting and
confusing a person. I’ve already helped the police capture a man who was
robbing a shop, and disarmed a bomb someone left in the Mayor’s office.
Things are different at school, as you might imagine. Nobody tries to
bully a girl who commands an army. They call me General Jumbo now, and you
know, I do like the name better, just as Professor Pike said. I even have a
cap with gold braid on the bill, and a military tunic.
Double-breasted, of course.
Contact the author at dr_psycho1960@hotmail.com