Call In An Expert

The reporter didn't like asking for help...but she had done an interview once with one of those Justice League hangers-on, who had offered her help if she needed it. So Lois tapped out a message to the Justice League, hoping whoever was on duty would answer it and be able to contact her.

Five minutes later, still dressed in nothing but her raincoat and gloves and opening a bottle of water, a vertical rent appeared in the fabric of space in Lois Lane's kitchen. It looked, to the reporter, uncomfortably like a gigantic vagina, except through the dark folds she could see the glimmer of stars and galaxies...and stepping out of it was a Native American woman, with long dark hair, face slashed with bluish-green, the scanty bustier of deer-hide showing her belly and leaving her arms bare, the tight deerskin trousers hugging her flaring hips and muscular legs. In one hand she held a staff of bone, a little longer than a baseball bat with a ring through the larger end, and her arms and neck were festooned with bracelets and necklaces of cord, bone, and beads.

"Lois Lane," Manitou Dawn said, her accent strong but her English impeccable. "Why do you call me?"

Behind her, the vertical rent in space closed.

"So...it's like this..." Lois Lane began.

Somehow, it was easier talking to Manitou Dawn about the problem than it would have been for someone that Lois knew well. The mystic listened calmly to the reporter's story, the thing in the tub and the thing with the bottle, asked detailed questions about the shrine, and gave an air of professionalism and clinical detachment that gave the reporter a vast amount of confidence in her overall abilities.

Manitou Dawn pointed her bone at Lois. "Inukchuk!"

The bone glowed. It was hard for Lois to focus on, but it almost felt like...something touching her, but not touching her. Whatever it was, it wasn't touching her skin, but like something crawling beneath it, searching fingers squeezing her breasts from the inside, running down the muscles of her arms and legs, prodding at all the secret places in her abdomen and between her legs...the glow dimmed.

"You are cursed, by a dark spirit of flame and shadow. Its stink clings to you, to this bottle, to everything you have touched," the woman moved lightly, but Lois admired how form-fitting her outfit was. She wondered at the choice to wear something so revealing...of course, many superheroines picked out costumes that fairly clung to them...but during their interview Lois recalled that right before her husband's ****, they'd been on the rocks. He'd neglected her, she'd had an affair...now that he was dead, Lois wondered if she had gone back to a life of celibacy, like Lois had been these past few months.

"Can you...um, remove it?"

"If you wish," Manitou Dawn said. "But there is a price."