Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain

by Richard Roberts

  It had never been a dragon at all. It was something much worse.

  “Hey, could you take care of that monster for us? It’s a little out of our league, and it looks like the bystander eating kind. Okay? Thanks!” Was that my voice sounding so taunting and sarcastic?

  “Young lady—” Mech started, his voice exasperated. But as he said it he fired twice, two gleaming ropes firing from his arms to wrap around the monster, stapling it to the ground.

  It didn’t like that. Arms exploded out of its body, telescoping, and tongues lashed out of the clawed hands to wrap tightly around him.

  HA! I got him!

  “Should we help him?” Claire asked anxiously.

  “No way. Mech can handle that thing. We are going to escape with the loot,” I corrected her. Sure enough, the tongues wrapped around Mech glowed, then exploded. The monster shrieked, but ripped itself loose from the bonds that tied it down. It was big now. Huge. Nearly two stories tall.

  And not my problem anymore. I kicked the top of The Machine’s head. “Split up, circle around, and return to the lab to wait for me.” It took me literally, and as I slid down its back onto the ground it came apart in pieces, all of them growing their own legs and scattering like baby spiders.

  I slapped my chest, and blue light shot out to form a motorbike in front of me. I climbed on, and wedged the statue on the seat in front of me. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw Mech blasting away at the monster’s gelatinous bulk with his vaporizer beams. Color me impressed. He didn’t use those on just anybody.

  “Thanks, Mech! Ha! HA HA HA HA HA!” I laughed, shoved on the pedals, and my bike leaped forward, zooming out of the schoolyard, over the wrecked fence, and onto the now traffic-less street.

  We’d done it. We’d gotten away. Mech would defeat the monster, imprison it so it could never come after me, or kill it if it could die. The statue was mine. We’d won.

  But we’d won by the skin of our teeth. Dad was right. Overconfidence had nearly gotten me killed, in a very literal “bullet through my brain” sense, not to mention the dragon. That was not going to happen again. I wasn’t going into another fight without a lot of preparation.

  he Machine was heading back to the lab, but not us. I lost track of Ray and Claire almost immediately, since my light bike doesn’t travel the same paths as Claire’s frictionless skates or a super fast boy on foot. Driving it was a bit hair-raising, but fun. I could see through every shiny blue-white surface I touched, and I only had to pump the pedals once to get it racing down the street as fast as any car. I could barely control it, but I didn’t have to. The bike wove around obstacles like a fish without my instruction, and all I really had to do was turn when I wanted to switch streets. So I zipped down Los Feliz, speeding through red lights, circling around cars that rarely bothered to even beep at me. It’s mostly a straight shot from Glendale to our neighborhood.

  I pulled up into Claire’s driveway, hoisted the jade statue into my arms, and slapped the button that made the bike dematerialize. Then I ducked around to the side door. I really, really did not want to stand out where I was visible from the street. Not in my mad scientist jumpsuit.

  I hardly had my breath back when Ray jumped off the next roof onto the walkway next to me. That had stopped surprising me.

  “Did you see Claire?” I asked him.

  “Right on our tails.” He slid off his fancy mask and his coat and folded them up into a neat little bundle. That was it; he was in civvies again. So easy for him!

  A teenager-sized teddy bear slid down the street at high speed, swerving to spin in a tight spiral across Claire’s front yard until she pirouetted to a stop. Those shoe inserts I made her even worked on grass. Wow. I was pretty good at this.

  She coasted up to us, turned a key in the lock, and yelled, “Hi, Mom, we’re back!” as we all piled in. First things first. I rushed into the bathroom and Claire into her room. Thirty seconds later, we emerged at the same time, wearing the civilian clothes we’d left here when we got suited up for villainy. Ray lowered his head in theatrical disappointment at our being fully dressed, and my cheeks felt a little hot. Criminy, I was the sole person with any kind of modesty in the house, wasn’t I?

  Still, we were back, we all looked like regular kids again, and we shuffled out all together and collapsed on Claire’s Mom’s couch in front of her giant TV with me in the middle and the statue in my lap. Collectively we let out a giant sigh, and I heard Miss Lutra laugh from back in the kitchen.

  I also heard, “Firefighters believe the school is completely evacuated, but they can’t be certain. We’re all lucky Mech has been able to keep the monster contained in the schoolyard so far.” That came from the TV.

  Whoa. We were on the news. At least, the thing we’d released was on the news. Monsters were more interesting than regular supervillains. They made no attempt to avoid casualties, after all. Mech still hadn’t killed that thing?

  He hadn’t. It had only gotten bigger and uglier. The amorphous, iridescent, particolored body oozed a new arm while I watched and slapped it at Mech, only to have the clawed hand at the end sliced off with Mech’s vaporizer beam. The severed hand hit the ground with a splat, and dissolved into the air in seconds. I couldn’t tell if that caused the monster pain. I counted six mouths, all chanting in different languages I didn’t know nonstop.

  I looked down at the statue in my lap. There was the same cluster of eyes, and the randomly placed mouths. I had to congratulate myself. I now owned the ugliest hunk of jade in the known world.

  Claire’s Mom walked around the couch, sat down on the arm of it next to Claire, and tapped a few buttons on her phone. “Beebee? I’m guessing you’re watching the same news story I am. I thought you’d want to hear that the kids are at my place.” A pause, and a cheerful, “I understand perfectly. I only look like I’m not having a heart attack whenever I hear the words ‘The Inscrutable Machine.’“

  I couldn’t hear what Mom was saying, but Miss Lutra laughed. Then she paused for much longer, and it occurred to me—she’d just breezily lied to my Mom like it was nothing. I couldn’t pull it off myself, but it was an interesting lesson. Always sounding like you were lying was almost as good a poker face as always sounding sincere.

  “Of course. He may need your input,” Miss Lutra finished, tapping her phone to end the call. Looking down the couch at us, she explained, “Your father’s talking to Mech right now, Penny, helping him work out how to defeat this thing. What could you possibly have stolen that let loose a behemoth like that?”

  We all stared at the chunk of jade in my lap until I confessed, “I have no idea. We found it completely by accident. I don’t know what it is, what it does, or even what I’m going to do with it.”

  Claire waved her hand emphatically. “I guarantee we can sell it. I can think of four supervillains right now who’d pay for a cursed statue.”

  I shook my head. “That’s kinda the problem. I think this thing is dangerous. Really dangerous.”

  “So it is magic?” Ray asked. He reached for it, but I tilted it gently out of the way. Was I just nervous, or was that my power giving me a hint?

  “Call it magic if you want. It has to do more than just change shape to be protected by a monster like that.” We all looked at the TV screen. Now holes had opened in the air around Mech, with giant eyes peeking through. Mech punched one, and the hole closed on his fist like a mouth. Yikes.

  Nobody wanted to argue that point. You don’t bind a guardian like that to an artifact without good reason.

  Ray threw out another idea. “Feed the statue to The Machine. It converts the curse into useful energy and an ugly statue into an untraceable and highly marketable block of raw jade.”

  I tried to think about that. Would it work? I tried to look into the thing in the back of my brain that understood the weirdest science, but all I felt was nervousness. “That would probably work, but the ‘probably’ scares the heebie-jeebies out of me.”

  Ray leaned b
ack against the couch, folding his arms behind his neck, and concluded rather smugly, “Then keep it. Every villain’s lair needs a few valuable trophies on display.”

  He was right. The idea had a lot of appeal. Maybe I could decorate one of the spare rooms with nice marble pedestals. Even if I never got to show it to anyone, a cursed artifact made an amazing display piece. Especially when I snuck it out from under the noses of the rainbow abomination on the TV screen.

  Of course, that rainbow abomination wanted the statue back real bad, but as I watched the fight changed. Mech fired his vaporizers and missed, except he didn’t miss. He wasn’t aiming at the monster. Instead, the beams burned complicated patterns into the schoolyard’s asphalt at high speed. The glowing inscriptions looked like a circuit diagram, and he drew them out in a circle around the monster. The effect was immediate. Tentacles and claws flailed against that boundary, unable to cross. Floating eyes winked out of existence one by one. Mech had the monster contained, or would as soon as he closed the circle.

  The thing was smart enough to recognize that fact, and Mech had to circle it to keep drawing the imprisoning lines. He strayed past their protection for a second, and the monster hit back— magic for magic. Eyes, tentacles, mouths, beams of light sprang out of all of them, tracing an intricate cage of its own around Mech, blocking his vaporizers, trapping him. More than a cage. Mech bunched up, and I barely caught the flash before the screen blacked out.

  Beside me, Ray sounded impressed. “I’ve only ever heard of Mech using his EMP pulse once before. Here we go. It looks like it worked.” The screen lit back up, now with footage from a helicopter above the fight and much farther away. Mech was moving again, but the fight had become a real light show.

  I leaned back and asked Miss Lutra, “Mech could die in this fight, couldn’t he? That thing might kill him.”

  “Mech? No, way,” Claire insisted. “Mech’s the top of the game. He’s beaten tougher opponents than this.”

  Claire’s Mom’s expression changed. Hardened, I guess, still playful but in a hard and thoughtful way. It reminded me of watching my Mom start thinking like The Audit. It was definitely The Minx who said, “Name a major superhero who died in the line of duty.”

  “Evolution,” we all answered together. Some names are on the tip of your tongue. Evolution had been the best, and everyone had thought he was invulnerable until the day they found out he wasn’t.

  “Name a major villain who died fighting,” The Minx prompted us again.

  “Chimera,” Claire non-answered. She was trying to get around the question by naming someone secretly alive. I gave her a shove.

  Ray picked up the slack. “The Good Doctor. Razorback. Glow. Black Hat—” He was ready to continue, but The Minx put her finger to his lips. That left him looking stunned. Maybe she seemed different to me because she’d turned her powers on.

  Her voice dropped. “The Audit fought Bull once. He wasn’t trying to kill her, but one lucky slap would have broken every bone in her body, and Penny wouldn’t have a mother.”

  “So he could die. That monster might kill him.” I could hardly hear my own hushed voice.

  “He could, and he knows it, and now I know why Ray and Claire made you the leader,” she agreed.

  Ray nodded. “That kind of thinking gets us out of trouble.”

  “I thought we put her in charge because she makes great toys,” Claire argued, her pout an open refusal to get drawn into a somber moment. She had a point. We’d just won big, and, from the helicopter’s bad vantage point, it looked like Mech had the monster pinned.

  Actually… “You’ve still got those static gloves with your costume, right? Do you want to keep them?” I asked Claire.

  She lit up like a Christmas tree. “Seriously?”

  “Yep. They’re a terrible weapon for me. They require too much charging. Once a battle starts, I don’t have the time and I can’t dodge well enough.”

  Claire squealed, jumped off the sofa, and went charging off into her room, coming out a second later with the gloves on her hands. She charged one up, took a baby photo of herself off the wall, blasted it, then stuck it back up upside down. “Ha!” she crowed, grinning hugely with glee.

  “And I guess that’s my cue.” Miss Lutra strolled down to the hall closet, reached up to the top shelf, and pulled down what looked like an egg beater with sharp teeth. Walking back, she held it out toward Claire, who got it an instant before I did.

  “Your grappling hook!” Claire had gone past squealing to whispery, but she still had the strength to bolt forward and scoop the device out of her mother’s hands, then strap it onto her forearm. Very sleek. You could hardly tell what she was wearing. Fantastic engineering.

  Miss Lutra filled in that blank immediately. “Made by Penny’s father himself. There’s at least a dozen copies out there by now, so as long as you don’t wear it in front of him no one will know it’s mine.”

  Claire looked up at her mother, and a smile forced itself onto my face. Claire was so happy tears had started to leak out of the corners of her eyes. Miss Lutra brushed one away with her thumb. “I was hoping to give that to you when you became a superhero, but I said I’d support you no matter what and I meant it.”

  Claire threw herself into her mother’s arms, and they hugged tightly. It went on for a while. Eventually, Claire pulled back enough to promise in a more normal voice, “I haven’t given up on that. None of us have. It’s just that nobody’s going to listen if we say we always meant to be heroes, so we’ll have to wait until we can do a showy public change of sides.”

  The hug let go, which I took as my opportunity to interrupt. “We’re not doing anything, heroic or villainous, until I upgrade our equipment. Right now, there’s a big hole in our defenses, namely the possibility we’ll be shot full of big holes.” The memory of that bullet going past still gave me a shiver.

  “I was hoping to try out the grappling hook!” Claire sulked, holding up her arm to show off her prize.

  “I was hoping to convince you ladies to try Parkour with me,” Ray added, giving me a hopeful smile.

  Claire’s answer was obvious, but I had to refuse. “I’m not nearly fit enough for that, Ray.”

  Ray’s hopeful look started to settle as he realized I meant it. “I thought those teleport rings might give you the edge you need.”

  I had to shake my head. “They work on muscle energy. I’d get about a block and collapse. Even with the Serum, I’m surprised Claire thinks she’ll keep up.”

  I gave Claire a curious look, and she grinned back at me. “Well, it turns out I’ve been doing a lot of high-impact exercising like supervillainy since I took my dose, and I’m in excellent shape if I do say so myself.”

  An obvious line like that got the expected look from Ray. A very long look, while Claire acted as smug as a mink. I pushed myself up off the sofa and hefted the statue up in my arms. “I need to put the artifact away where it’s safe, anyway.”

  Ray rolled over the back of the sofa and onto his feet with, well, superhuman grace. Bowing low, he held out his hand to Claire. “Then if the younger Miss Lutra would care to join me for a stroll across the fences and rooftops…?”

  Claire laid her hand in his, and answered as airily as a debutante, “I’d be delighted.”

  Ray held the door open for Claire, and I stumped after them with the statue in my arms. I only got to the doorway before Claire turned, lifted her arm, and fired the grappling line up at her own roof. It jerked her upwards, and I saw her flip over onto the rooftop and disappear. Wow, she was in great shape. Not as good as Ray, who only had to jump and grab the edge of the roof with one hand to do the same thing. They were already laughing.

  Claire’s Mom’s hand settled on top of my head. “You’re worrying about nothing, you know.”

  I grunted, pulling the statue up into a better grip. It really was heavy. “No, I’m not. I don’t know how, but this thing is dangerous.”

  “It’s certainly ugly,” she
conceded in a dry tone. Whimsically, she reached out and lifted the statue from my arms—or tried. It slipped right out of her grip, and I caught it before it hit the ground only in a desperate, lucky grab. “Sorry, Penny. It’s heavier than it looks!” she apologized.

  I hoisted it back high in my arms, and asked her, “Can you grab my costume? I left it in the bathroom.”

  “Of course.” She disappeared into the house. A few seconds later she returned, handing me the jumpsuit I immediately wrapped around the statue to form a protective bag. I just wasn’t sure who I was protecting. I’d never seen The Minx drop anything before. Ever. Clumsy mistakes were not a Lutra thing, especially Misty “The Minx” Lutra.

  I walked down the stone path to the street and hit the button on my jumpsuit to activate my light bike. Settling the wrapped up statue in front of the seat, I glanced over at Ray and Claire tightrope walking along the top of a fence. Then I shoved my foot against the pedal and sped away toward the school and my laboratory.

  By the time the elevator opened up on my lab, I didn’t feel quite so left out. I couldn’t walk on fences, but they couldn’t stand in front of a set of machine tools and tell the thing in the back of their heads to make something crazy. But first things first. What was I going to do with this statue? I wasn’t even sure I should be touching it, although it hadn’t affected me obviously like it had Miss Lutra.

  Well, the first thing I had to do was put it on the floor. There wasn’t anywhere else. I wished I had some marble, but The Machine was perched on top of a giant pile of steel bars that would have to do. I scooped him up, fed them into the smelter, and twisted a few levers around. I had to have a display stand at least. While the steel cooked and shaped I put on some gloves and my visor. I really ought to put on the whole jumpsuit, but I’d just gotten out of it! Anyway, this wasn’t complicated. Set the mold to this flat surface and those rounded sides, weld that to a hollow cylinder, put it through the cooling sequence, and drag the excruciatingly heavy pedestal out into the middle of the floor. I wish I’d had enough plastic left.