African Paradise

Swift and a crisply safari-suited Hawkgirl zoom into central Africa, where the elephants have been vanishing. Superspeed reading of every newspaper on the way (the one major advantage newspaper has over TV/radio/Internet is that you can't absorb those media at x1000 speed like you can with print. And the paper doesn't even ignite until around x4510 speed!) shows that rhinos, monkeys, zebras, and flamingos have also been vanishing. And another section of the newspapers, never correlated until someone read ALL the papers RIGHT NOW, shows a baffling absence of pigeons, rats and even insects in the city of Kigali.

Hawkgirl's portable absorbascon can read the surface thoughts of every African for clues, although that level of broad monitoring tends to leave the user a little addled for a while. But it's a possibility.

Anyway, the side of a mountain along the Great Rift Valley is now covered with every color in the rainbow, as the normal lush green is supplemented by a cornucopia of flowers and fruits. From here, it looks like someone spilled all the Easter baskets in the world down a green slope.

In fact, right as you watch, red and yellow flowers bloom with incredible speed down the valley of the Zaire, propagating at forty miles an hour! Every inch of soil is bursting into floral, fragrant, radiant flower.

And fleeing, not away from the botanical avalanche, but towards it, is a mixed-species stampede of giraffes, lions, tapir, domestic dogs, and even the odd gorilla.

The very odd gorilla. The one with the shiny gold helmet and the nine-barreled shotgun.