Dan leaned back in his chair and propped his sketchbook up on his lap. Peering over the top of it, he did a brief mental inventory of his desktop's contents.
-Computer. Unused for some time, and so gone to screen saver (dancing Spider-Man).
-Mostly eaten sandwich (lettuce, tomato, cheese and eggplant).
-Green Lantern action figure (John Stewart, not one of the good ones).
-Several pens.
-Clock (showing the time as 12:47. Meaning Dan had thirteen minutes left in his lunch break).
A tap on the back of his chair (the spinny-around kind!) suddenly drew Dan's attention away from the sketchbook and back to the real world. He span around in his chair (whoooo!) to be face to face with his boss.
"Mr Connors..."
"Fortune."
(Fun fact! Fortune is Dan's last name.)
"Can I help you?" Dan asked.
Mr Connors took Dan's sketchbook out of his hand and surveyed it quickly, before shaking his head and putting it down on Dan's desk.
"This doesn't look like work, Fortune."
"Well, no, sir. I'm on break."
"Really?"
"Yes."
There was a long (and uncomfortable!) silence.
"But you're still at your cubicle," Connors said.
"Yes, sir."
"Don't most people go...elsewhere on their breaks? Outside?"
Dan shrugged. Connors' eyes moved slowly across the cubicle walls surrounding Dan's desk, taking in the pages upon pages of fictional superheroes who had been hastily sketched on Dan's breaks and subsequently taped up (Dan was in a retro mood, so his current favourite was a pulp-style hero named Professor Action who had- Get this!- a talking ape for a partner. An ape! That talks! Can you imagine...?).
Connors just sighed, saying nothing until a call on his mobile phone drew him away.
"What? No, it's nobody, I'm not with anybody..." Connors said as he left Dan's desk without saying goodbye. Dan picked up his sketchbook again before being interruped by a head popping up, meerkat-like, from the next cubicle.
"Will NOBODY let me finish?!" Dan yelled in exasperation.
"Dude. You have to come quick," The head said.
"I have to do no such thing, Rodney..." Dan said.
"You have no choice. There are big, dramatic things happening. With drama."
Rodney stepped around the cubicle wall, grabbed Dan's forearm, and dragged him towards the window of the office. Dan noticed with some interest that everyone else in the office was headed in the same direction.
"Look," Rodney said.
Dan looked out of the window and down, at the seventeen storey drop below.
"You're looking the wrong way," Rodney said as he grabbed Dan's head and tilted it upwards.
With a startled gasp, Dan realised what had caught the attention of the thirty-two people in his office. On the top of the building across the road from theirs, a building which reached a full twenty-four storeys high, a lone woman stood dangerously close to the ledge.
"What... what is she doing? Is she going to jump?" Dan asked.
"That's what it looks like..." Rodney answered.
"But... but she can't! Somebody has to call the police or the fire department or whoever deals with situations like-"
Dan's grammatically unsound sentence was brought to a merciful halt when the woman jumped. The silence that followed, as she fell sickeningly quickly towards the ground, seemed to last forever.
Dan winced and turned his head away, not able to bring himself to keep watching.
"HOLY SHIT!" Rodney yelled, an exclamation that brought Dan back to reality. He once again looked out the window, dreading what he would see.
The last thing he was expecting was a flying superhero holding the falling woman comfortably against his chest as he flew slowly towards the ground, before depositing her softly in the arms of a waiting police officer.
"Who the shit is that?!" Dan yelled.
"I don't know! He just came out of nowhere!" Rodney replied. "And he was flying! That dude flies! How awesome is that?! Have you ever seen that before?!"
"No, I haven't" Dan said, before he fell silent. He peered down at the mysterious hero, trying to get a good look at him. The hero was wearing a red full-piece jumpsuit, with a huge blue cape billowing majestically behind him (the amount of wind that day was barely enough to blow a tissue down the street, so the billowing remains an enigma).
A lightning bolt was drawn down the centre of the flying man's chest, and a bold 'A' was stamped directly above his heart.
After waving to the onlookers and patting the woman he had rescued on the shoulder, the flying man disappeared the way he had arrived: Suddenly, unexpectedly, and flyingly.
"What do you think? Some sort of movie publicity stunt? How does that even work? There's not enough special effects in the world for that..." Rodney said.
Dan didn't answer, instead turning and running back to his desk.
"Aren't you wondering about what we just saw?!" Rodney asked, following. When he caught up, he found Dan silently staring at the top page of his sketchbook.
There in front of them, in an almost-finished sketch that Dan had been working on his whole lunch break and under the heading "AIRMAN!", was a man. A man with a full body jumpsuit and a huge, billowing cape. A man with a lightning bolt and a huge 'A' stamped on his chest.
"Dude," Rodney said. "You said you'd never seen him before."
"I hadn't," Dan replied. "He doesn't exist. I made him up."
