Chicago

“Stop her! She’s getting away!”

Fiona sprinted through the White City, a dozen full-figured policewomen in blue uniforms hot on her heels. When she’d arrived at the World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago’s Jackson Park on the shores of Lake Michigan, she’d anticipated nothing more exciting than a short tour of the fair’s many exotic and wonderful exhibits, imported from all across the globe in celebration of the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World. The last thing she expected was to have to flee across the showgrounds with the law in hot pursuit.

“That’s the legendary Wild West outlaw Cactus Sal! There’s a bounty out for her arrest!”

Had she more time, Fiona could have protested that she was not, in fact, the legendary Wild West outlaw Cactus Sal, but rather a travelling Englishwoman who merely happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to the legendary Wild West outlaw Cactus Sal. However, the pursuing policewomen were in such an excitable state that she judged it better not to halt and straighten out the matter. She raced between the tall, white, neoclassical buildings of the fair, passing by thousands of startled fair-goers from all corners of the world, hunting for a place to hide.

She darted first into the Electricity Pavilion, where the world’s first moving walkway ran between towering Tesla coils and other such miracles of science. Fiona sprang onto the moving walkway, building up a considerable lead as the conveyor belt underneath her feet added their momentum to hers. A few seconds later, however, a quick-thinking policewoman observed on the walkway’s control panel a large lever marked REVERSE, and immediately pulled it.

The exit was in sight! But the last few feet seemed as long as a mile, the belt beneath Fiona’s feet now doing its best to drag her back mercilessly towards her pursuers. She threw herself off the walkway’s end to stand on mercifully solid ground, clinging to a nearby experimental radio antenna for support, as yet blissfully unaware that her modest Victorian travelling dress had caught in the machinery.

There was a dreadful ripping sound.

Fiona, now wearing nothing but lacy bloomers, tight corset and patent-leather boots, squealed in horror as the exhibition visitors around her began to laugh. Her dress had already vanished into the gears of the mechanical walkway, which was continuing to roll on as if nothing had happened. “Lord help the women of the world,” she thought, “if these things ever become popular,” and took a sharp left turn through a thicket of Tesla coils as the police closed in.

Bolts of crackling blue lightning danced over Fiona’s body, drawn by some mysterious galvanic magic to her breasts and bottom. They zapped her through her clothes, filling her body with energy making her squawk with the unusual tingling sensation and the sudden sharp whiplike shocks to her backside and nipples as she steered her way through the electric field, searching for an exit that wasn’t already blocked by the police. She ducked left, feinted right and backpedalled out the very door she’d come in through, leaving her standing right in the middle of one of the Exposition’s busiest neoclassical arcades.

She paused for a moment, just to catch her breath, in front of thousands of curious Chicagoans and spectators from all around the world. The crowd’s attention had, quite naturally, been drawn by the startling display of flickering blue light that had just been visible through the windows and skylights of the Electricity Pavilion, as well as the extraordinarily beautiful and very flustered English rose who had just come racing out its front door in only her undergarments.

Fiona stood on the steps of the Pavilion, presented for the admiration of what must have been tens of thousands of people. Greasy-handed workmen in overalls, college boys in straw hats, educated young ladies in stiff skirts and broad hats. Plus thousands of foreigners - immigrants from Italy and Greece and Poland, tourists from England and Japan, diplomatic representatives from Mexico and Abyssinia and Siam, all of them gawking wide-eyed at the utterly lovely and very red-faced blonde who stood before them with her mouth open, in her corset and bloomers. Waiting to see what would happen next.

“Er,” said Fiona. “Hello.”

And her undergarments dissolved into ash and blew away. Leaving the unlucky young lady standing on the steps of the Electricity Pavilion, in front of tens of thousands of people, with nothing on at all but her patent-leather boots.

“Eeeeeeeek!” squealed poor, nude Fiona, throwing her hands over her breasts and sex (too late! they’d already seen everything) and wanting only to sink into the earth as the gale of laughter from ten thousand throats swept over her. But she couldn’t stop running now! As the policewomen emerged from the tall, white building behind her, cursing and swearing and giving off smoke, with little lightning-holes burnt into their formerly neat blue uniforms, the pretty, blushing English rose was left with **** but to sprint right down the steps of the Pavilion and across the crowded street, with the law still in hot pursuit.