“She knows, dummy,” said Will.
“Before you did,” added Laverne, setting her chin with pride. Her scraped chin. She was standing kind of lopsided herself.
Cassie jumped at that, and in a desperate hurry insisted, “It still counts as a gift.”
I was touched. “Thank you.” Now my heart ached just a little, as I pretended not to know the answer to my next question. “Are you guys okay? You look a little ragged.”
“Lucyfar was there,” said Laverne, raising her hands, palms out, either setting the stage for drama or just reflexively warding off the memory of pain.
“It was so, so, wicked! Ow ow ow,” said Teddy, clenching both fists in glee, and then staggering on his bad leg.
Will groaned, rubbing his left hip. “Of all the nights for her to feel heroic.”
I looked down into the box, at my birthday present. The candle had a surprisingly fresh scent. Not like it had been imbued with an aroma, but like I was standing near a waterfall or something. “You got the prize, so I guess you won?”
Everyone groaned at the same time. There were personal touches. Charlie's was more of a grunt. Teddy's trailed off into an ecstatic gurgle. Cassie hunched up and sounded like she was in pain. Marcia merely looked 'stare at the sky' mortified.
“She wiped the floor with us,” squeaked Teddy, miming that by sweeping his hands to the sides.
Cassie sat, and Will had to help her. “I hurt in places I didn't know I had.”
Laverne looked shaken, her eyes defocusing. “We weren't ready. We weren't even close to ready. She broke my box, and both backups, the moment I got them out. Stuck one of her knives into the slot. What was I supposed to do?”
Beaddown – Charlotte – rubbed her pointy nose. Like Marcia, she looked more embarrassed than anything else. “I thought I'd show off. I challenged her one-on-one. Ten seconds later, I had knives laced around my throat. At least she let me surrender.”
“Marcia hit her once,” said Sue, glaring at me, as if I were the one who had placed a phone call to a villain who moonlights as a heroine, and told her that some fun could be had keeping a pack of would-be kid villains from wrecking the carnival.
Oh, wait. That's exactly what I did.
Marcia smiled at the display of loyalty, but remained sheepish. “I've fought her before I had powers. I didn't realize she'd been going easy on me. When I became an actual threat, she bounced me around in the air on the hilts of her knives.”
Will wheezed in pain, taking a seat next to Cassie. “That was the worst part. She not only beat all of us, she did it with the backs of her knives. She didn't have to get serious.”
Olga scowled, and stomped her foot. “She pulled me out from behind my web! That's not fair!”
From over with Mirabelle, Claudia spoke up, “I warned you. Real, adult supervillains don't play fair.”
“Which we learned, the 'covered in bruises' way,” wheezed Cassie. She gritted her teeth, twisting from side to side and rubbing her ribs.
Marcia looped an arm around her best friend's shoulders and gave a squeeze. “We only have your present because Sue here was smart enough to grab it and crawl away under cover after she got her beating.” From Sue's grimace at the hug, said beating must have been harsh.
“Yeah, not… not a victory. I don't think Lucyfar knew or cared it was there.” Cassie shook her head tiredly. “The point is, you've been hinting at this all along, and we wouldn't listen. We got the message. None of us are ready to play with the grown-ups. We'll wait until we're a little older to go professional with the villainy.”
“But it was still wicked!” declared Teddy.
“It was!” agreed Marcia, low-fiving him.
Barbara arrived, hurrying in a flurry of skirts. She couldn't hurry too much, thanks to how high the heels were on her boots, but she tried. “What happened to everyone?”
“Teddy will tell you. Teddy would love to tell you,” said Cassie.
“After I take care of you,” Barbara insisted. She gave Marcia a nod. “Lift her up, but carefully.”
With a lot of groaning, Will and Cassie both were rendered vertical, and Cassie stood very still while Barbara stuck pins in her.
No longer the center of attention, I lifted the lid on my present again, but the moment I did, Barbara left out a yelp, which meant Cassie let out a yelp. Barbara threw her hands over her face, and said, “Put it away! Put it away!”
I clamped the top down firmly. “Well. I guess that confirms it's magic. Where did you find something like this at Pacific Park?”
“Among the carnival game prizes, of course,” said Will, helping hold Cassie steady.
Send someone after a made-up treasure in LA, watch them come back with a real one. Yep.
“Hey, Penny,” wheezed Cassie, trying not to move even so much as required to talk loud. Having a bunch of six-inch pins stuck in you can cause that kind of caution.
“Hmmm?” I lifted the box in both hands. A magic candle. How odd. I guess I'd stick it in the dungeon with my two other cursed artifacts.
“What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?”
Maybe I could look at it if I turned around and hid the light from Barbara? No, it would be mean to take chances. I'd just have to examine my birthday present later. “Reading a book.”
“Then do you want to hang out?”
I blinked, attention dragged back to the conversation. “What? Oh, no, I have to finish the book. It's a rare book that Claudia's mom loaned me. It's called 'Jaguar People and Parrot Feathers: Recurring Themes In Central American Mythology.' It's all about hints of superhumans in legends.”
“Oh. Okay.” Cassie winced, and then let out a sigh of relief, as Barbara pulled a needle out.
assie was getting more and more determined. When I showed up late to the next meeting, she hobbled out of the playground to meet me.
I said, “Yikes. Are you not feeling better?”
For a moment, I got a blank look, then a sigh, and Cassie leaned her back against the post that started the recess ground's fence. “What? Oh, no. Scarlet Charlotte, the Half-Human, Half Butt-Kick Hybrid just peppered me in the face with beads, yanked my feet out from under me, and pushed my head so I landed on my back. Not that my odds were good, but that puts me out. And I so badly wanted a rematch with you. I mean, I knew I wouldn't win, but watching you is a nonstop revelation.”
Oh, criminy. All of a sudden I was blushing. My hand reached up and twisted a finger around a pigtail before I spotted what I was doing. So much for looking cool in front of my biggest fan.
The thing about fans is that it's quite hard to embarrass yourself in front of one. They seem to love everything stupid you do. Cassie actually lit up with delight when I fidgeted, and then lit up with realization. “Hey, I remembered the flash drive today! It's in my backpack. I'll go get it as… soon as… we find out what that is.”
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. “I'm certain this is not going to work. Do it the easy way!” shouted Bull.
He and Claudia hadn't shown up yet, and now I knew why. Bull was trying to back a large, even by truck standards, semi around the corner onto the little street between Northeast West Hollywood Middle and Upper High. The trailer was huge. It was not going to make the turn.
So Claudia picked up the back end, and dragged it into place.
Bull hopped out of the cab, and moseyed around to the back end. His lack of hurry meant that by the time he rolled up the door, the whole club and some powerless people besides were gathered around to see the contents.
The truck was full of blue, white, and chrome machines. Some were huge, barely fitting in the trailer, while others were merely man-sized. As Claudia and Bull carried them out to the playground, I got a better look. They were sleek, but creepy combinations of medical scanners, exercise equipment, and carnival games.
“Eee, power testers!” squeaked Claire, hopping excitedly from foot to foot beside me.
Ray didn't say anything, but his smile stretched the limits of
his face. Any more sublime rapture, and he would pass out.
They had materialized on either side of me the instant real super stuff began to happen. We were teammates to the end.
While Bull and Claudia were arranging their latest burdens on the basketball court, Marcia grabbed the edge of the trailer bed, and flipped herself up onto it. She took hold of one of the bulkier remaining machines, and tried to lift it. It was, oh, the size of a car, and it did not budge.
“Like, Marcia, you're not-” Sue started to say.
“Shut up!” Marcia yelled back, her voice booming in the metal tunnel. “I am, and I will prove it if I have to crush the bodies of every single weakling one of you along the way!”
With an animal snarl, she heaved the thing off the floor. Stomping awkwardly, she made her way back to the trailer opening, screamed, “Get out of my way!” at us, and jumped down.
Her legs wobbled, but they didn't break, and she didn't drop the machine. It looked like a really super high tech salon chair, if the hair dryer cap were an MRI. Its solid back had computers built in.
Step by step, Marcia carried it over to the recess ground. At first, Charlie hustled over, arms held out protectively, but Marcia yelled at him, “Get your own!”
He looked hurt for about two seconds, then perked up. “Hey… yeah!” When his upper body began to swell, I looked away. Charlie Kamachi's transformation hadn't gotten any prettier, but it did make him strong enough to easily help with the unloading.
Marcia only managed the one piece, snarling like a jaguar the whole way. Bull and Claudia walked around her, completely ignoring the sweating, trudging teenager. That felt right. It was what she wanted. I did the same.
By the time she put it down, Bull was bolting the biggest machine in place. As the flock stampeded up to us, he gave a lopsided grin. “So. You've figured out what these are. Most of you are out of the tournament by now. I thought we'd give you a chance to see how your powers have grown.”
“So, like, what do they do?” asked Sue.
Claire leaped into action. “The one with the targets tests strength. The super speed treadmill is obvious. That one, the sadist merry-go-round, tests reflexes and agility. The booth is a magic tester. Those are experimental. They work, but we have no way to know how well. Those two metal globes, those are to test the strength of energy powers like Cassie's. The chair with the helmet is for brain powers, like my projective field or mad scientist inspirations-”
“Finally, something I can do!” cried the Other Claire. When all eyes turned to her, she slid her fingers into her hair, flipped it up and back, and strutted arrogantly over to sit down in the machine Marcia had carried.
“Now, that is a great place to start, since it requires the most technical knowledge to operate,” agreed Bull.
“I know how to operate it!” declared my Claire.
Not My Claire thrust a finger at her accusingly. “Disqualified. Not a neutral judge.”
I thought that was unfair, but Claire accepted the argument without protest.
Bull switched the machine on, and played with its settings very, very carefully. His fingers were big, thick, and hoofy at the ends. Typing on keyboards had to be miserable for him.
He did get it working. The monitors lit up, and we were all treated to different cross-sections of Other Claire's brain, mostly in blue and white.
After a little dial twiddling, Bull said, “That would be it. Activate your power, if you would, Miss Winter.” After three months, I found out that Other Claire did indeed have a last name.
She had the little-girliest face, round-cheeked almost like a toddler's. Clips of Shirley Temple I'd seen on commercials came to mind when she put on her proud smile.
Nothing particularly obvious happened, at least out here. The machine made soothing tinkly sounds. Vivid purple stripes lit up on the brain scan, and everyone went, “Oooooooh!”
“Okay, Penny's turn,” said Cassie.
“Yes! Mad scientist brain!” echoed Beaddown. Charlotte.
Other Claire glared at the crowd for cutting her short, but in seconds, she was physically removed from the chair, and I was lifted off my feet and deposited in her place.
The helmet lowered over my skull. Its circular bits spun around me. I could just barely see under the edge.
What I could not see was any of the monitors to show me my own brain, but Cassie said, “Does it look a little different back here? Kind of bulgy?”
Yes, thank you, Cassie. No matter how rapt your tone is, discussing my misshapen brain would never be a compliment.
“We won't see anything interesting unless we activate her powers,” said Claire, out there somewhere.
“She does clock stuff. Somebody hand her a watch. Or go inside and get those cogs she leaves lying around.” That was Other Claire, probably the only person left within a hundred yards who did not know I was Bad Penny and wasn't limited to clockwork.
Even those who did know seemed to think this was a good idea. Machine-gun-rapid footsteps had to be Will, and in a few seconds, a tray was placed in my lap. It did have a lot of gears of various sizes in it, and even one of my special springs and winding keys. Hooray.
This was not the kind of thing my super power liked. I twiddled the cogs around with my fingertip, waiting for a picture to appear in my head. Nothing. No surprise.
While I waited, bored, I lined up a bunch of the gears to spin when I turned one of them. Cassie squealed, “Hey, was that a flash, there?”
Wishful thinking from an overenthusiastic fan! I had nothing. So I sat there, fiddling with the gears, building a little box out of them with axles running through the middle to keep it from falling apart. It took a lot of experimenting, because I had to make the gears not lock up trying to turn in opposite directions, which would happen in a simple cube. I ended up with what looked kinda like a clockwork rubik’s cube.
It was ugly. It did nothing but turn. It involved no super powers whatsoever, just a lot of poking and twisting.
Everybody else seemed to disagree.
“Woooooow.”
“Does my brain look like that when I build?”
“There goes another spark between the two lit up parts.”
“Awww, it's all fading away, now.”
I pushed the helmet up and gave the crowd a jaundiced look. “Guys, nothing happened. That was regular brain activity.”
Cassie grabbed the armrest and leaned forward almost into my lap to tell me about it. “No, it was a brain bonanza the whole way! Glutinous glowing globs lit up all over the middle section. You had Christmas Tree Brain! They sent little lightning bolts to your forebrain, which was swirly yellow and green.”
More likely one of the Claires gave me a nudge so there'd be a show. I was the one on the inside of my brain. I knew what my power looked and felt like!
Will looked longingly over his shoulder at the treadmill. “Time to test my super speed.”
At that signal, kids scattered to the machines they thought they could use. Olga sat in the brain scanner and toyed with her web, while Laverne played with the dials and scrutinized the results. The girl with the Pudgy Bunny books stood in the magic tester and pulled a ball of light out of her cowboy hat over and over. That was so screamingly adorable it could compete with Claire at her best.
The strength machine was getting the most attention, but then again, our most dramatic club members could use it.
Beaddown was just finishing throwing some punches at the bullseye shaped cushion, presumably to establish a human baseline. It was just like a carnival game, with a light-up scale running up the side. Her punches barely flickered at the bottom, despite looking like she'd had boxing training.
“And now a strong strong human normal to compare, if you would, Mr. Kamachi,” said Bull, leaning against the side of the strength tester.
Charlie stepped up, started to swell, and Bull reminded him, “Human normal, if you please.”
Shrinking back to his merely bulky, almost ad
ult sized and much more heavily muscled normal, Charlie threw a punch into the bag. It wasn't as pretty as Charlotte's, but he'd clearly been practicing. It made a satisfying 'thump' sound, and the lights flickered noticeably higher.
“And now, all your power. Everything you've got.”
Charlie went through his full Sharky transformation, and I made myself watch it, even though those open, red meat gaps in his skin were so stomach-churningly gross. They flapped like goldfish mouths, even. I tried to ignore them and watch clinically as Sharky repeated his punch, but this time with his giant fishy body behind it. The thump boomed across the playground.
The machine shivered. The lighted scale went way up to the level of my head, the white grading into orange.
We all applauded, and he grinned sheepishly, which is hard to do when you have multiple rows of serrated triangular teeth.
When Bull asked, “Who next?” Claire gave Ray a nudge with her elbow.
He looked at me for permission. For a second I wanted to pop Claire one myself for endangering our cover, and I was grateful for Ray's steadier thoughts, but…
I let out a heavy sigh. “Nobody's watching who doesn't know.”
So, Ray stepped up, massaged the knuckles of his fist, and hit the target so fast I almost missed it. The sound was a much sharper pop than Sharky's punches, and the scale lit up about to my thighs, nowhere near as high as Sharky's super powered punch, but at least twice as high as his regular one.
Ray got a lot of discreet approving murmurs, nods, and appreciative stares. The Other Claire's eyes bugged almost out of her head.
Oh, yeah, right. There had been one person watching who didn't know. Well, she would have found out. My secret identity was spreading faster than swine flu.
“Marcia's turn!”
“Yeah, Marcia! You try it!”
Our resident unkillable lunatic stepped up in front of the machine. She took a few deep breaths, clenching and unclenching her fists. She scowled. She muttered to herself. Her face twitched, sharper and sharper.
Please Don't Tell My Parents (Book 3): I've Got Henchmen Page 28