Fourteen hours later... (DARK)

Over the last fourteen hours, Ms Kyoto had added various accoutrements to make Melissa's prison more intimidating. "So you'll feel right at home," she said when she set up a large apparatus surrounding the treadmill to monitor Melissa's deteriorating health.

"So you'll always know how far you've come," she said when she brought in two large digital clocks: one with the current time and the other counting up from the time Melissa began slowly running in place.

"The better to watch yourself age, my dear," she said as she wheeled an enormous mirror in front of the treadmill. "And the better for me to watch you age, over and over again," as she surrounded Melissa's prison with HD videocameras.

And age Melissa had. She no longer recognized the woman staring back at her in the mirror. Long, thin strands of grey hair fell over her deeply wrinkled face. Her once strong jaw line now hung in baggy jowls, her thinned lips set in a perpetual frown. Her ears had elongated, her chin sagged beneath itself loosely.

Staring down at her quivering, bony arms, Melissa was horrified by the liver spots marking most of the surface of her hands. Her bony, wrinkled fingers struggled to retain even the weakest grip on the bars of the treadmill. It was a miracle she could still run, let alone carry any weight on her weakened legs.

Melissa's knees buckled with almost every step. Her hip ached, her right ear rang constantly, she'd lost a couple of teeth, and the image of herself in the mirror was just a tad cloudier than it had been two hours earlier. Melissa would have chalked this all up to exhaustion if not for the machinery surrounding her. "CAVITY," it had barked earlier in the night.

That pronouncement preceded the first lost tooth by a mere five minutes. As the night wore on, the diagnostic machine barked terrifying words with increasing frequency. "OSTEOPOROSIS," it said, then "ARTHRITIS" and "CATARACTS." Melissa didn't know whether to believe the machine or not -- maybe Ms Kyoto was just trying to scare her. But psychosomatic or not, Melissa couldn't deny the pain she felt in every part of her body.

There had been other, unexpected effects to aging so quickly. For the first several hours, Melissa's abdomen was constantly cramped as she shed all her eggs one after the other. Ms Kyoto gathered as many of these as she could by cutting a hole in the crotch of the modified Rocketgirl costume and shoving a test tube up Melissa's twat. But what became of the test tube, Melissa didn't know. All she knew was that now she was barren, past menopause before her time and unable to bear children.

Not that she would want children at this point. The thought of being physically active enough to have sex, let alone energetic enough to raise children, made her queasy. And she couldn't imagine anyone wanting to have children with her, either. She was repulsed by the old woman she saw in the mirror. She shed a tear as she glanced down at her shrunken, empty, sagging breasts. She closed her eyes for a moment and remembered her once sexy physique.

She missed her body. She feared she'd never get it back.

And it wasn't just because she felt and looked old and frail. Every ten minutes or so, Ms Kyoto would strap a paper hat on her head, sing "Happy Birthday" and **** feed her an entire sheet cake -- usually decorated with Rocketgirl paraphernalia. Occasionally she'd get a glass of milk to wash it down. Melissa had grown increasingly unable to put up resistance, always succumbing and swallowing it all. With how quickly her body was processing its high-sugary diet, and no other sustenance coming into her body, her muscles had quickly turned to gelatin, and within the first few hours, she'd put on significant paunch.

She'd been skeptical of Ms Kyoto's ridiculous plan when she first heard it the day before. But there was no denying it now. Rocketgirl was no more. In her place, Melissa was old, weak, and fat -- it was a credit to her superhuman abilities that she still had a figure at all. There was no hope for her now, not even if --

"All right, I think that's just about enough," Ms Kyoto said, approaching Melissa. "You look to be in your mid-nineties now. Your health, your figure -- most of your life are now gone. You couldn't possibly be a threat to my criminal operations anymore. So why bother to kill you? Especially when there's so much left on your bucket list."

Melissa, still running in slow motion, strained to lift her head to glare at her captor, letting out a soft growl.

"Come now, my dear," Ms Kyoto said, stroking Melissa's balding head. A few long strands of thin grey hair came off in her hand. She shook them to the ground. "Don't be like that. You should be grateful. I'm going to let you live, and I'm going to make sure the rest of your life is much more entertaining than the last several hours have been. There's so much you've left to experience in the world, My Little Lissa, and so little time left to experience it. I'm going to give it to you -- well, as much of it as I possibly can. I suppose eventually you'll expire, though I certainly hope it's not from the exertion of all the things I want us to do together, all the things I want you to do."

Melissa trembled in fear. What could Ms Kyoto possibly still have in store for her? How could she possibly fight back?

Ms Kyoto pulled a pair of metal scissors from behind her back and plunged it straight down the front of Rocketgirl's costume. The cold metal made Melissa flinch. Ms Kyoto tore the rest of the costume open, ripping it to shreds as she removed it from every inch of Melissa's once gorgeous body.

Freed of her treacherous togs, Melissa found her aching limbs finally able to stop their ceaseless churning motion. Her legs collapsed beneath her and she fell to her knees on the treadmill that had finally stopped turning underfoot. Ms Kyoto unshackled Melissa's wrists one by one. The elderly, naked Rocketgirl collapsed in a fleshy heap at Ms Kyoto's feet.

"Oh, boys," she called. Putting her fingers in pursed lips, she whistled, and her henchmen came running. "Get our guest cleaned up. I want her ready for her next adventure in fifteen minutes."

It only took one henchman to toss Rocketgirl into the air. He caught her, she fell over his shoulder, and he hauled her like a sack of potatoes out of the room.