“Of course, Miss Petard,” he promised. He stood and watched her, smiling and grateful, as she started walking away. She didn’t look too certain about this, but she’d agreed. When she stopped looking back, we let ourselves into the repair lab.
“Why are we even in here?” I asked Ray when the door shut behind us.
“I don’t know how much you remember, but you got your inspiration when you were trying to build that antenna and didn’t have the parts. I figure The Machine has something to do with electronic parts. If you try to build the antenna again, maybe you’ll figure out what you needed The Machine for,” he suggested.
It wasn’t a bad idea. I grabbed an old hard drive and a sound and video card and dumped them on a table. Then I stared at them. What was supposed to be happening?
“Okay, I… was building the antenna,” I needed a wire. Anything would do, really. Claire handed me the toolbox. It had a wire stripper, so I cut a wire out of a spare internal power cord. It didn’t matter, right? And I’d have to send an electrical current through it.
This was going nowhere. Without that obsession, I knew I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t even have the tools or the supplies. I hadn’t when I built The Machine, either. I’d been so annoyed by it…
“…I built a machine to recycle parts,” I finished out loud.
Ray and Claire stared. They were trying not to jinx it. I grabbed The Machine and twisted until it began to roll around on my wrist by itself. It uncurled, but this time I didn’t let it crawl up my arm. Instead, I dropped it on the table and pointed at the video card.
“Eat that,” I ordered.
By all the stars and little fishes, The Machine did. It pounced on the card like a cat on a mouse, and a grin split my face so wide my cheeks hurt.
Behind me, Ray laughed. “He’s getting fat. That’s so funny!” He was right. Flakes of metal laid themselves over the gaps in The Machine’s armor, and through the holes that were left I could see green plastic circuit board lining the interior. The little robot centipede looked plump.
Well, that was half the job. The Machine took voice commands, and I knew what I’d really wanted from it the first time. “Give me a blank circuit board.”
It did. The Machine twisted, lurched, and ejected the original video card, blank and green and smooth with none of the attachments or holes punched in it.
“That was so cool!” I gushed, scratching its little metal head. It sat there, reared up off the workbench, perfectly still. Aww.
“Mom thought it might be alive, but I think it’s just a really fancy machine,” I added, looking back over my shoulder at Claire and Ray.
Ray nodded. “A very useful machine for an inventor.”
It certainly was. What couldn’t I do with this? “Transistor,” I ordered The Machine. Off the top of my head I didn’t know what a transistor was exactly, but it spat a little chunk of metal attached to wires onto the tabletop.
Now, if only my power would come in! Then I’d know what to do with this. Maybe it would even let me do something about my German grade. I had a page of vocabulary to learn for Monday, and it all looked Greek to me, pun only partly intended. It’d be nice if my power made me smarter, but maybe I could at least build something to help me study.
“Eat that. I need wires, a six-inch diameter shell, and three circular magnets,” I ordered The Machine, pointing to the hard drive.
Trying to program a computer to speak a language I didn’t know wouldn’t work. I had to go past that, to something universal. I… stop the words, Penny. You know what you’re doing!
The Machine was wonderful. It ate and it spat out parts for me, over and over, until I screwed the upper dome of the shell into place and sighed. “That’s it!”
“Das ist alles!” the little metal ball immediately echoed, in a raspy metallic voice.
“It translates English—” was as far as Claire got before the ball copied, “Es English übersetzt—”
That little lever… that was the volume control. Yes! I remembered. I switched it down to zero, then I asked, “Wait, did I just invent something again?”
“You should have seen your hands move. And, apparently, The Machine makes a good wrench and screwdriver,” Claire answered in a hush. She and Ray realized how close they were standing and took a sudden step apart.
I had to ignore that. “Another episode already, and that one was almost under control. I can still feel it! I need… to make something. Flying boots would be cool! I’ve always wanted flying boots! Now, how would those work?”
I had no idea. Well, I had some ideas. Flying boots were all over the place, although they mostly relied on exotic power systems or other components nobody but the creator could reproduce. Some of them manipulated gravity to repel the Earth as the largest body around, and you could do weird things with magnetism, and there was simple propulsive force… and the feeling I’d had when I was inventing was totally gone.
I thumped my head against the desk in despair. OW! Not doing that again.
“Not working?” Ray asked. I appreciated the wry, sympathetic tone. Perspective. That’s what I needed.
“It’s gone. I think we can be sure it’s not gone for long.” I scooped up the round metal… I guess it was a German grenade, huh? I held it in one hand and laid my wrist over top of The Machine, which curled around it obediently.
The glee hit me again. “And I know what The Machine does!”
“Part of what it does,” Ray corrected me. Interesting idea, that.
“Now we can go shopping in triumph!” I told them both.
I stood back, examining a fan-made chart of Mech’s tools and weapon systems. The secondary boost systems in the wrists were accompanied by a photo of him lifting a cruise ship out of the water. It was too ludicrous a weight for him to actually lift, and now I recognized those glowing, spinning wrist cuffs. That was Dad’s ferrous gravitic rejection device, wasn’t it? It had to be. My dad’s craziest toy was installed in Mech’s armor, and he was using it to move weights he shouldn’t be able to budge. I’d seen the theoretical papers behind the device. Nobody else could understand them, or how Dad had turned a painfully abstract mathematical model into a functioning, if weird, invention. I sure couldn’t. So how could I do the same thing? Saying it made iron’s easily magnetized properties exactly cancel out gravity sounded great, but how did it work? Without lots and lots of math? Could I just… line up the…
“Hey, Penny?” Ray interrupted. Not that there was anything to interrupt. It didn’t make sense, it just felt like it should. Ray, on the other hand, was really leading up to something.
Might as well be direct. “What is this leading up to?”
From me, a sarcastic tone was no discouragement. “When I told Miss Petard we were making a club, I thought it might be a good idea. You want to surprise your folks when you’ve got control of your powers, and, I will not lie, Claire and I want a pile of mad science devices to play with.”
Claire hunched her shoulders, avoiding looking back at us for a moment. That only lasted a few seconds. Embarrassment is foreign to the Lutra genetics. Chattering enthusiasm resumed. “I should get my powers soon. A club for super-powered kids could be useful. If we’re official, Upper High will transfer the club with us next year. We’ll have regular time to practice our powers without our parents asking questions, because we’re being all healthy and extracurricular.”
“I will manfully endure being the token regular human in the club,” Ray announced airily. I snickered.
I took off my glasses and scrunched up my nose, considering. Claire and Ray did exactly the same thing, just to be goofballs. “I like the idea, but it won’t be much use unless I can get a laboratory set up. The school might let us use a room for club meetings, but a dozen other clubs will be using the room. We won’t be able to build or install anything.”
“Your Dad could set you up,” Claire pointed out immediately. She slid glasses back up her nose with one finger. Elegantly,
of course. Maybe her Mom taught her how.
“I’d lose out on surprising my folks, and now I really want to. They don’t want to believe it’s happening, so I’m going to wait until I can blow their socks off and they can’t deny it.” For now, though… “I don’t know. Maybe having a clubhouse with a real laboratory would be worth spoiling the surprise.”
Ray’s smile turned sly. I’d almost missed it, since he was now one of two blonde blobs in front of me. I put my glasses back on with just enough time to catch that wicked grin before he suggested, “If you want a working laboratory, you don’t need a clubhouse. You need a lair.”
“Thanks for bringing me home, Mom!” I piped as I shoved the car door closed behind me. “Could I get into the basement?”
“Why?” She’d just been sitting there in the car and hadn’t bothered to open the door, luxuriating in not having a schedule. Right up until I asked my question and got the pointed look.
The key was to tell most of the truth. A direct lie would not get past The Audit. Not while Mom was alert. “Me’n Claire’n Ray were thinking of starting a club. You know, kids of superheroes. It means a lot more now that my own powers are on the way, and maybe we could figure out if any other kids in the school had superhero parents. Anyway, Claire and Ray love superhero memorabilia, and it’s all in the basement.”
There. Lots of plausible, rambling truths that weren’t the actual reason at all. Come on, fall for it!
“Trying to uncover the secret identities of your classmates is a disastrously bad idea, Penny. They could take it personally,” she warned me. Gently, though. That was the voice that trusted me to do the right thing.
“You’re right. It didn’t occur to me, but that’s how bad they’d freak out. It doesn’t make a big difference. If there’s a club, some of them might join us on their own, and if they don’t we’ll still have fun. I still want to poke through your mementos.” I put on an extra-relieved smile and didn’t have to fake it. It hadn’t occurred to me, and her advice might have prevented a lot of trouble.
“If you want. You know what not to do,” Mom finally conceded. I waited, swinging my arms behind me while she got out of the car, then followed her inside. She unlocked the door to the basement stairs and wandered over to Dad’s office.
Ha! Rule one of living with super genius parents, play it light. If they suspect at all, it’s over. I felt smug as I tromped down the basement stairs and flipped on the light.
For the one millionth time, I wished my parents had kept some kind of superhero headquarters beyond my dad’s laboratory. This was a storage basement. It looked like a storage basement. Gray cement walls, green cement floor. Those boxes over there? Camping gear and thirteen years of my old clothing. Those file cabinets held every receipt and financial and legal form that had ever crossed my mother’s hands. She never even opened them. Pure packrat instinct.
The file cabinets on the other side were different. I scampered over to them.
Mom kept papers. All kinds of papers. I pulled a drawer open. Mostly newspaper clippings. “Who is The Audit?”“Brainy Akk Captures Spectral Burglar.” Maybe I should pull a couple of these. We could put them on the walls of my new lair. Claire and Ray would flip. Here were a bunch about The Minx. My Mom and Claire’s Mom must have known each other forever.
I tried the next drawer. “Akk and Audit Announce Espousal.”“Audit Reveals Identity To Marry Super Sweetheart.” Did these fill the whole drawer? How big a story was my parents’ marriage, anyway? No, they only filled half the drawer. The other half was announcements of my birth. The excitement over that disappeared fast.
Ah, this next drawer was it. I hadn’t poked through these in forever, but I knew she had a bunch of files on supervillains. This stuff was all ancient, pre-internet printouts. A KGB dossier on The Last Soviet? Freaky. The inner pages were all in Cyrillic. So much for the cool factor. A scrapbook of photos of some villain in ugly spandex in action. The cover read “Unknown Villain 1993” and over that had been glued a label “Coincidence (deceased).”
Okay, who was a local mad-scientist-type villain Mom and Dad had taken down? The Thief Of Parts had stolen a lot of Dad’s old crime fighting inventions when I was tiny. Dad had told me that a few times. He hadn’t committed a crime in years, so info about him must be low security and might be in here. After Coincidence was Lubricia, then a thick stack of foot and fingerprints all labeled “The Hope Chest.” Not alphabetical order, then. By date? No, The Last Soviet held on until nearly 2000.
This wasn’t in any order. Or, if it was, it was some system only my Mom understood. I slammed the drawer shut in irritation. I should have known. They wouldn’t keep any information anyone could use in our basement!
I looked at the boxes on the shelves by the filing cabinets. Most of that stuff was just as useless. The very few items that weren’t were dangerous enough that I wasn’t going to go opening random boxes.
That left two possibilities. My mother’s laptop, sitting on its shabby little desk right here next to the filing cabinets, or Dad’s computer upstairs. The location of every secret villain lair ever discovered in the world was probably on that laptop, along with the rest of Mom’s important files when Dad scanned them into electronic format. It wasn’t hooked up to the internet for good reason. Who knows what security systems Dad had put on it?
Time to find out. With the laptop pointing away from me, I lifted up the lid and pressed the power button. A grinding noise. Was that an alarm?! I tried to restrain the feeling that my skin was trying to jump off my body. It was just a computer noise. This was an old laptop. I knew Mom kept her Audit research on it, but…
Blue screen of death. There it was on the laptop screen: “Fatal Exception.” This old broken piece of garbage didn’t hold anything. My Mom had suckered me with a fake.
I grabbed my bracelet, then forced myself to let go. No, I was not going to let The Machine eat this piece of junk. I didn’t know what was actually going on. Maybe this was a trap for any supervillain who just couldn’t believe that Brainy Akk and The Audit had really retired. Maybe I was overthinking this, and it was an old, dead laptop, and Mom had moved her files elsewhere.
I could forget aboutgetting into Dad’s computer. I needed a new plan.
“Penny, Claire’s here!” Mom yelled down from upstairs.
“What, already?” I asked.
I didn’t wait for an answer. What did I have down here? I ran upstairs. Claire still stood on the stoop, so I ran out to meet her, leaving my Mom to shut the door behind us.
“I struck out. Nothing,” I leaned up against the car and puffed a little. Stairs, okay?
“I didn’t,” Claire returned.
“How did you find one this fast?” I asked in shock. I wanted to disbelieve, but she had her hands clasped behind her back, and her smile radiated smug pride.
“I asked my Mom! She thought a clubhouse in an old supervillain lair was a great idea. You’re going to love her recommendation, but I have to show it to you.” She was going to explode from smug. There had to be some kind of joke here, but it was a joke that got me a laboratory!
Although it wasn’t a laboratory without equipment.
Something about Claire’s pride was infectious. I had the craziest idea.
Opening the door again, I leaned way in and yelled, “Dad, can I have your junk bin?”
“For what?” he yelled back. He didn’t sound suspicious, he sounded baffled.
“To put in our clubhouse! I’ll need equipment when my powers arrive, right?” I yelled.
“You can’t hurry nature, Penny. You’ll get your powers when they’re ready!” he called back, his voice softer with parental understanding. Parental misunderstanding. He was so sure of his own timeline for my powers, he’d gotten entirely the wrong idea about what I wanted. I had him!
“Can I have it or not?” I demanded, just as impatient as if he were right and I refused to believe him.
A moment of silence. Mom making her opin
ion known, I was sure. Then, “I suppose. Do you need a ride to move it?”
“Nope, Claire’s Mom wanted to help with that. Thanks, Dad!” I pulled the door closed.
This was delicious. “You’re sure we’ve got a lair?” I asked Claire.
“We could have a dozen, but one of them is perfect,” she promised me.
“Then I have what we need to set it up. Watch this.” I skipped around the back of the house. Yes, it was twee. I was so eager to try this.
Dad’s junk bin is a huge thing. He’s not great at repairs, only building things the first time, and he racks up piles of equipment that can’t be regularly thrown away. Until he makes arrangements, he dumps them in a big concrete bin in the back yard. I pulled the bar out and hauled the double doors open. There was one of those saws, and his old special welding and soldering rod with the broken handle, and that was the old scanner before he built the new one. He hadn’t emptied the bin in awhile. None of it worked, but there were treasures in here, if only they could be recycled.
I grabbed The Machine and twisted until it let go of my wrist and flopped around in my grip on its own. Then I tossed it into the bin. “Eat that whole pile. I’ll want them back later, but with anything broken fixed back together.”
With a grinding noise, The Machine began to eat. With its little jaws, this might take an hour, but it would be an entertaining hour.
Or it might take a lot less. Plates formed over the empty patches. Then they pressed out, and more plates made out of the metal it was eating slid up to fill in the gaps. New legs emerged near the front, shoveling mechanisms into larger jaws that hinged like a bear trap. Every bite made it bigger, and, as it got bigger, it ate faster.
I watched the bloated, turtle-like metal monster filling the bin suck up the last bits of wire, loose screws, and a tiny screwdriver lying on the bottom.
“Come here, boy!” I ordered, my voice hoarse from excitement.
The Machine stepped out of the bin on four bladed, multi-jointed legs. It was the size of a car.
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