Origins of a D-List Supervillain

by Jim Bernheimer

  Growing bored, Seawall hit Bobby a second time and sent the redneck ‘roid rager backward.

  “Oh, I know all about you Hillbumpkin Bobby,” D’wan said. “You’ve been coming down and taking jobs from me these past couple of months, and I don’t really care for that, so I figured I’d come up here and tell you that in person.”

  Seeing red, Bobby threw a kick at the man’s leg. Once more the force was turned away and scattered in all directions. Seawall mocked him and punched my friend two more times.

  Think, Cal! Think! He has a weakness, otherwise he wouldn’t be so low on the threat index. What was his Achilles’ heel? Concentration! That’s it! He has to be focused on being invulnerable. Break his concentration and his protective field starts to fall.

  As I recalled that nugget of information, it dawned on me that Bobby was well and truly screwed. Bobby’s strategy relied solely on hitting something until it fell. I needed something to rattle Seawall for a moment. There was a water spigot, but no hose attached, so dousing him in water was out, unless I ran back in and grabbed a bucket.

  Bad idea, I thought. That’d put me real close to a guy who could cave my skull in.

  At that point a light bulb went off in my head, literally. Running back inside, I ran to the booth where Glenn usually sat and ran the lightshow. Pulling out a twelve-volt halogen portable spotlight, I figured it would serve as a decent distraction and give me a minimum safe distance. For a bonus, I grabbed an air horn.

  In the forty-five seconds it had taken me to get the gear, Bobby’s predicament had taken a turn for the worse. His face was puffy and swollen, blood drizzled down the side of his mouth, and one eye was almost completely shut. He was down on one knee and keeping his guard up, unused to being on the defensive.

  “That’s right! That’s right!” Seawall circled Bobby and chanted, sounding like one of those fake wrestlers on television. “You think you can come down to my state, my city, and take money outta my pocket!”

  I cranked up the spotlight and shined it at the side of Seawall’s face and blew the air horn. The man turned away, but Bobby looked at me confused.

  “Hit him now!” I screamed.

  Bobby followed my order and this time Seawall went flying and landed with a thump. Several of his gang ran to his side while a few of the others started walking toward me. Fortunately, the locals, who were licking their wounds as a result of all this, got in their way. In this case, the rednecks had accepted me as one of their own and if it kept me from getting my ass kicked by a bunch of bikers, I was actually fine with that.

  Before a few more altercations could break out, the shining lights of Johnny Law could be seen coming down the highway, so everyone decided to calm down. The Sheriff and his deputies took a good look at Bobby and Seawall and started asking some questions. The owner of the bar jumped in and sold them a lie that the two of them were settling a bet about being super strong and it spiraled out of control. The Sheriff nodded and I knew there’d be a payoff involved, but I had firsthand knowledge of how money could get a person out of a tight squeeze.

  “I told you to not start any shit until I was done! Since I didn’t finish my set, I only get half my check, D’wan!”

  The outburst drew my attention to Afrodite who’d just been told to get her ass and her entourage off the premise. I wasn’t surprised that the owner had stuck to their contract. He’s a tight-ass with Bobby’s and my money.

  Afrodite, upset at missing out on several thousand dollars, brought the cringing Seawall his jacket, and was beating him with it. It was safe to say his concentration was so jacked up right now that I probably could have sucker punched him and caused some real pain. Still, this wasn’t the end of things. While trying to talk his woman down, he was giving Bobby and, surprisingly, me, a death glare. My guess was he had a couple of bruised ribs, maybe even fractures. D’wan’s ride home wouldn’t exactly be domestic bliss, either.

  It was tempting to have a good laugh over it, but I wanted to wait until Bobby wouldn’t punch me out of reflex or something. Self-preservation is my middle name. Well, technically, it’s Matthew.

  Leslie handed me a first aid kit and I went to work cleaning Bobby’s bruises as the bikers and the silver Mercedes sped from the parking lot. With a captive audience, I explained Seawall’s power to my friend and gave him some advice.

  “Carry a plastic bag of flour, or sneezing powder with you. Get him off his game and he’s as vulnerable as you. Come to think of it, he wears goggles and a mask with his costume, so something like pepper spray would probably work too.”

  Wincing at the peroxide, Bobby said, “Thanks, Cal. When you get your suit ready, I think we should go down to the bayou and pay our respects to Seawall; don’t you think?”

  Truthfully, Seawall was pretty far down on my list of people whose asses needed kicking, but I could see how upset Hillbilly Bobby was over this and threw him a bone.

  “Yeah, I reckon we should.”

  Chapter Seven

  She Who Hesitates

  .

  My hope of completing my powersuit in a few weeks stretched into four additional months of calibrations, rework, bruises, and interruptions. Surprisingly enough, Maxine wasn’t too keen on her weapons designer sidelining as a supervillain. Her orders and demands were coming in at a rate that I could barely keep up.

  “It worked! Itworked! Itworked! Itworked!Iwrkd! Itwd! Id! ! I!” I could barely make it out as she cackled with a buzzing laughter and became a blur standing next to me. In truth, I’d never seen her so excited.

  “Slow down, Maxine!”

  “Ohsorry! Youshould’veseen the lookonHermes’ face whenIhitherwithyour light!” she exclaimed. It was better, but still barely comprehendible. I keyed the digital recorder I carried in my pocket, so I could slow down the audio later and ensure I didn’t miss something important. She’d already played the “I told you that” card on several occasions and had gotten tired of my “I must’ve missed that” defense.

  Maxine’s new kick was designing weapons specifically for use against other super-fast people. My best design, inspired by my encounter with Seawall, was a handheld stroboscope connected to a backpack that held the powercells. To a normal person it looked like a very powerful solid light, but to someone moving as fast as my temperamental patron, it was actually a chain of multicolored pulsing lights. It only gave her a three second window, but to a speedster, that was a very, very long time. Maxine had put that to good use.

  My other designs had been somewhat less effective and the test phases had left Max V angry and covered in goop from my “gummy bomb” or me with a painful day at the eyewash station, coughing out the contents of my lungs and washing off the airborne irritant blown back into my face by her arms creating a gust of wind.

  Mental note—Never forget your safety glasses and mask when testing out a new weapon.

  Sometimes Maxine’s behavior made me think she was more temper than mental, but on other days she was definitely more mental than temper.

  Today was the latter. She’d intercepted Hermes, who’d been protecting a valuable collection of gems being transported between New York and Washington. The “Stringel Bedazzler”—trademark pending—had blinded the fastest woman in the world and allowed the relatively slower villain to get a little revenge and a lot of shiny rocks.

  “Even my aunt is impressed,” Maxine said. “She asked me if she should offer you a position.”

  I would be lying if I said that an offer to work for General Devious full time didn’t intrigue me. However, considering what happens to the engineers in her employment when there were “less than satisfactory” results soured me on that idea. The life of a freelancer appealed to me and probably added to my life expectancy, because for every brilliant hit I had, there were usually several spectacular misses.

  Also, several of the people who shared that prison block with me had at one time or another believed what General Devious had said to them, only to find out later that it was
n’t true. There was a reason they called her Devious, after all.

  Even so, I needed to look grateful, lest I piss off the woman in front of me. “I’ll keep it in mind, but I’d rather finish my suit first. From my perspective, I’d be worth more money with the suit. Speaking of which, does this mean I finally get my hands on a C class powercell?”

  My question was important. I had two B cells running the suit at the moment, but it was too underpowered. I needed at least one C for the main systems. Two would be nicer and ultimately three would work best—because I’m greedy like that.

  She frowned, or at least I think it was a frown, tough to tell with her. “Why does everything with you revolve around your suit? We’re talking about me here and my perfect day! But no! I have to hear you whining like a little baby! ‘When do I get my powercell? Why can’t you get me this? When can I have that?’ Is that all you ever think about?”

  Crossing my arms, I looked at her for several seconds before saying anything, just to annoy her. “Pretty much, yes. That’s what I’m always thinking about. Do you have any other obvious questions you’d like to ask?”

  “Fine!” she muttered, sounding annoyed. “But for such a valuable commodity like a class C cell, I’m going to want something special in return.”

  “Such as?” I asked, wondering if the mercurial speedster was about to ask if I would reengineer her sex toys.

  Max Velocity shot me a wicked grin and said, “I want you to build something that will take down Ultraweapon.”

  What! That was not what I’d been thinking. “Excuse me?”

  “C’mon, Cal,” the woman said. “Anytime someone gets him in a bad situation, Ultraweapon flies away or holds on long enough for his teammates to bail his ass out. Give me something that will knock out his flight system and keep him stuck on terra firma.”

  She’s going to try and steal my chance to be the one to humiliate and destroy Lazarus Patterson! I can’t let her do that.

  “So,” I said, looking for the words to stall her and try to drive this foolish notion out of my patron’s mind. “What would you do with him if I could prevent his suit from flying?”

  The woman paused and stood rigid for almost 30 seconds. For her, that time must have seemed like an eternity. Finally, she spoke, “Well, I think I could toss a two hundred pound C4 poncho over his neck, back off a few hundred feet, and then push the detonator. Boom! No more Ultraweapon. My aunt has never been able to do it. Hell, even The Overlord has never taken him. I would be a legend!”

  Her plan actually sounded workable. That fact bothered me. “Maybe you oughta think this one through.”

  Maxine did not appear to be deterred. “You know his suit better than he does! If anyone can do this, it’s you.”

  Now she is just trying to flatter me, even if it is true. Could she actually do it? Why am I even standing in her way?

  “Yeah, I do,” I admitted. During my resignation and subsequent blacklisting, I had never interacted with Lazarus Patterson. It had always been Barton one of his bootlickers causing me no end of trouble in Promethia’s name.

  That said, Lazarus was Promethia and Promethia was Lazarus.

  “Give me some time to think about it,” I said. “You’re asking a lot from me.”

  Placing her hands on her hips and tilting her head, Maxine said, “Do you honestly believe that you’re the only one who’s ever been screwed over by Promethia? They created me and my aunt!”

  “Say what?” I certainly never heard that before.

  “My mom and Aunt Elaine were twin sisters, both Air Force pilots who had volunteered for Promethia’s version of the enhanced human project that Patterson’s pappy lost out to Doctor Ivan Manglev.”

  I considered myself a fairly well-informed jackass, but this was all news to me, and I told her that. Doctor Mangler, as he came to be called after the name change, supposedly never had any real competition for his flawed process. This must have been some kind of behind the technological curtain deal that most people never heard about.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “As soon as Aunt Elaine began manifesting her psychic bursts, they couldn’t figure out why my mother wasn’t demonstrating any powers, but it turned out that she was less than a week pregnant with me and I got the powers instead of her. They didn’t figure out that she was knocked up until she fell into a coma. Mom’s body started to shut down, but they kept her alive so I could be born after only one month. Old man Patterson lied to my aunt and said that neither of us survived, but when her telepathy emerged, she found out the truth. The rest was history. The General never did find out who my father was for certain, but let’s just say that there’s a decent chance I might be Ultraweapon’s half-sister. So if you think you’re the only one who has an ax to grind with them, then maybe you’re not as bright as I give you credit for being.”

  That explained why General Devious, or Elaine Davros as she’d been known before, eventually murdered Lazarus Patterson’s father. In retribution, Lazarus had shattered her spine with his prototype powersuit. They had created Maxine just as they created me. In a strange and twisted way, that sort of made us kin, at least in spirit. She appeared to genuinely believe the story she just told me, but, having been raised by one of the most notorious liars in recent, or perhaps all of history, I took it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

  Think about this too long, Cal, and it will give you a headache!

  I didn’t need any further convincing. “Okay, I’m in. I’ll start working on it right away, but I want the C cell up front.”

  Maxine agreed and said she’d have it delivered to the storage locker in three days. I sat down and thought, after she left, and didn’t even work on the suit. The more I considered it, the more I didn’t mind Maxine killing off Lazarus with my assistance. Sure, I’d like to put the pompous ass out of everyone’s misery, but if I did that, I’d be a marked man. Every hero in North America and others around the globe would be out for my blood. Even this hole probably wouldn’t be deep enough for me to hide in forever. Max V, on the other hand, was a top tier villain and had her aunt’s organization at her disposal. She’d have a better shot of weathering that shit-storm.

  Besides, there was always F. Randall Barton. He’d make an acceptable consolation prize and wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous.

  Getting others to do your dirty work should be a villain’s motto, I thought and concluded that I would be better off letting Ms. Fast and Homicidal do the heavy lifting.

  Spreading out the original blueprints, I began following the paths around the flight system. The flight system was considered sacred during all of the design meetings I’d been forced to attend. It was one of the few things besides the synthmuscle that Lazarus had actually done himself. One of the first things Joe Ducie had told me was to, “never mess with the flight system.” Chances were that the one in his current suit wasn’t that different from what I was looking at right now.

  Familiarity breeds contempt, or that’s how the saying goes.

  When it came to Promethia, I had lots of contempt built up.

  • • •

  There was a nervous, jittery feeling as I triggered the mechanism and slid the larger and more capable powercell into the cradle. A whine came from the connectors as they screwed down onto the ends. The shielded plate on my stomach retracted and locked into place and the meter surged from the red level up into the green.

  Yeah, boy! It’s on now! I thought.

  For the first time since I calibrated the power systems, NOMINAL flashed on the bottom right corner of my heads up display and I resisted the urge to break out into that one Muppet song that sounded like that word.

  Aloud, I said, “It’s really a powersuit and not a really slow jet pack with a forty-two minute flight range!”

  Sure, it didn’t move with the grace and speed of Patterson’s and there was still plenty for me to do to it, but I wasn’t just Cal Stringel anymore. I was much more than just ManaCALes. I’d given plenty of thoug
ht to what I should be called when I’m wearing it.

  I am Mechani-CAL!

  Bobby rounded the corner into my workshop and bedroom, “Cal! You gotta come see this.”

  “What’s up?” I asked, enjoying the digitized sound of my voice coming from behind the helmet. It was a little too loud; I’d have to adjust that later.

  “It’s Maxine,” he said. “They’ve got her on the TV.”

  I ambled after him to the big screen in Central Command. A pair of talking heads was at the studio desk, with an inset of a chopper circling over a cluster of buildings and three more with other idiot know-it-alls in them.

  “...still following the action. So far what we can tell you is that the high speed supervillain Maxine Velocity has taken several Promethia employees hostage inside the industrial park and is demanding only one thing, that Ultraweapon come and face her.”

  The anchor at the news desk nodded and tried to sound grim. “Do we have any word about the condition of the hostages, Lori?”

  “No, Dan, we don’t,” the traffic lady answered the obvious question. It’s not like Max V would contact the helicopter.

  “Thank you, Lori. Let’s bring in Doctor Yun Lee, our superhuman expert. Dr. Lee, thank you for joining us on such short notice. What do you make of the situation?”

  The Asian doctor, known for his encyclopedic knowledge of heroes and villains steepled his hands before saying, “Without demands for money or anything other than facing Lazarus Patterson in combat, we can only surmise that today is about humiliation or perhaps even misdirection. She did not stipulate that he appear without his armor, so she must clearly want a fight.”

  “But is it a trap?” the female co-anchor asked and I wondered where they got these people.

  “It depends on how much thought Maxine Velocity has put in to her plan. She has shown time and again to be rash and impulsive, so this may be a spur of the moment attack or a carefully laid trap.”