The world conceded and said she was queen of Earth, anointed by God. She was unstoppable. Still, Erika would try and prove it to Earth that she was not a monster and that she was good. That she was the best.
She won many Olympic gold medals that year they banned her from future events. She was too good. She was the best in the Guiness Record, suddenly feeling bad the name Erika Copper went above ordinary humans' best. But was she still not human?
Then her dreams warned her, thundering a doomsday vision of a killing machine. This automaton was enormous and snaky like a dragon. Its shelled and spiky body shuttling, its eyes electric gold, creepy-crawling out of the unknown depths of outer space. A space worm with a nasty face of bristling thorny teeth, as if it had evolved from a biter to a skewer. Its engine chugged like a motorcycle and a train, an engine performing at sheer force. Its tail was a blade. It was a war probe sent by a deadly spartan extraterrestrial empire, designed to decimate planets, any planets they find, and since Erika's dreams, she was the only one on Earth who saw it coming. She almost crapped her pants but this wasn't new. She saved the galaxy many times in her dreams, and perhaps those were prophetic too. This was her moment to show them all how lucky they were to have her. The Planet Guard.
It was the final dream (of many failed attempts of surviving it) when Erika finally noticed that after the space worm began its systematic slaughter, a little wormhole opened at the roof of the tallest skyscraper in the city. She was drawn to it. She stepped through it and landed on a floating shard of rock. A howling wind played with her hair and smelled of wet metal. Erika stared aghast at a coliseum broken into bridges and islands. At the very end of its disaster was a small stairs to a shrine. In its darkness, the silver lightsaber glinted. She hopped from wobbling piece to piece and made it to the saber. She quickly turned the laser blade on. Its piercing star-bright blade reached startlingly long into space, slicing the pieces smaller with deafening explosions. This was the sun sword, the stellar blade, the most powerful in the universe and certainly can destroy a rusty space worm. But the wormhole closed leaving behind a visage of the Virgo supercluster, too suddenly that Erika woke up.
Wow? Blinking, she held her head that throbbed of pain. That was a very short window of time. She would have to hurry to that saber and back before that window closed. Erika laid back, trying to sleep but couldn't. Her eyes opened and she cried loudly. What if that was her fate? Earth would love it if she was stuck out there. She wearily waited for the morning, and didn't wait long.
By dawn the space worm came, and the world filled with bloodcurdling screams. Erika ran down the streets of the city while cars swerved when a giga shadow swooped, eclipsing the day, creating a golden dusk. The killing machine automatically fired a rain of a thousand napalm bullets. Buildings collapsed until she saw a wormhole open at the roof of the tallest skyscraper. She ran up the building, her shoes slapping the shuddering glass windows, the ground falling under her. She ran up, up, up, above the burning city like gravity couldn't hold her back. She was as agile as a dragonfly. But then the skyscraper blew up. Erika leapt onto the roof from splintering glass and crystal and steel and dashed through the wormhole.
The scattered coliseum, like in the dream. Everything was similar but not the same. That bothered her. But the silver saber awaited. She awkwardly leapt from one tilting and spinning platform to another. Much slower this time, the horror of being stuck out here weighing on her mind. The vast shapeless galaxy was encompassing. Enveloping. Overwhelming. Below seemed an infinite fall to the countless pinpointed stars that it would be an explosive heart attack that killed her instead. She panicked for a moment then jumped to the platform and seized the sword.
Erika looked back. The wormhole was open. She hopped the way back, not realizing she was stalked by a second worm with quill teeth. It roared snapping powerful t.rex jaws at her, knocking her floating island into another. She was almost flung into the galaxy but clung on for dear life.
Shouting an exaggerated war cry like she did in her dreams, the Planet Guard turned on the sun sword and sawed the worm in half. It died a glorious death, bursting fireworks of many colors. Erika made it through the wormhole back to Earth, just as it closed, back above the dismantling skyscraper, shattering beneath her feet, back to the moment she left. Time flowed differently with wormholes.
Erika fell happily and glided to the next building that still stood. She hunted down the first worm. When day turned to night again too soon, she looked up at the sky. She turned on the sun sword and cleaved it. It crashed dead, bursting fireworks, and the world thundered with cheers.
And that was only the beginning of the galactic adventures of the Planet Guard! Erika Copper would discover many more wormholes, tour the universe, and put all her efforts in her dreams to the final test. She saved many planets before she even turned seventeen. They revered her as good, as the best, as queen of the universe, as the Planet Guard. And that made her happy. She laughed.
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