Oh, well. My arm muscles might sting, but I had somewhere to display my new prize. I hoisted the jade statue and put it on top of the pedestal. Wow. What an ugly hunk of rock. The creamy jade was naturally beautiful, but the blobby tentacle-limbed humanoid it had been carved into just made that soft green look like slime.
As a display piece, this monstrosity scored a solid zero. It had powers, I knew that. Could it be useful? I mean, sure they had to be awful powers, but I was technically a supervillain now. Even on the hero side, I’d need weapons. Not to be too clichéd, but could I use its powers for good? What were those powers?
I pulled out my wallet and scooped all my change out of my coin purse. I tended to accumulate pennies, and for once that would come in handy. Picking them all out, I dropped the pennies into the bowl made by the unnatural monster’s cupped hands.
Then I wondered why I’d done that.
I’d done it because it was there, printed in my brain. My super power knew what this statue could do and how to use it, and I needed to put pennies in it and let them sit. No matter how pointless that looked, in the picture in my head, something powerful was happening.
Wondering wouldn’t get me anywhere. I understood that picture as well as I likely ever would. I had a more important issue. Bullets. Bullets were bad. I did not want any puncturing my body, and that seemed extremely likely if I kept up the super-powered adventures. What had my Dad done about bullets? I didn’t know. He’d never said. What did my Mom do? That I did know—she picked her moment, knew exactly when to not be in the way, employed traps and the element of surprise, and scared criminals until they were too afraid to shoot. I couldn’t do any of that. For one thing, Mom liked stealth and surprise, and I had to face facts: I liked giving villainous monologues and brandishing super science weapons.
I was a mad scientist. I’d better be able to come up with something to deal with bullets. Armor? Armor wouldn’t be a bad idea, especially for me, but my power didn’t like repeating itself and all three of us needed protection. I’d rather bullets not be flying around at all.
I could do that. I could see a design. It was still vague. My brain filled in bits while I watched. I needed gold, a lot of quartz, a lot of metal salts and crystals… to bake into ceramics maybe?
I didn’t have any of that stuff. Well, not much. I had steel. Lots and lots of steel. Steel and bad rubber and insulating foam from the car’s upholstery. I had really run short on supplies. I’d started with so much, and used it up so fast!
Maybe… I’d just think away from that idea. Let it go and hope it was still there when I got the materials I needed. How about a new weapon? Something to replace my gloves? I liked the air conditioner cannon, but it was very limited and straightforward. Also not very showy. I wanted something cool, and for that I needed a theme, something to tie my creations together. If it weren’t for the theme, Teddy Bears and Machine Guns would be boring.
I could make a candy chainsaw. Seriously. It would work. I could see in my head sugary candy corn spikes cutting through cement. I’d need a lot of sugar. A whole lot of sugar. I still had a pile of wood, and I could convert some of that, but it wouldn’t be enough. Criminy, another cool design I didn’t have materials for!
I had steel. What could I do with steel? I stared at the steel bars, and my super power gave me a blank slate. Great.
I needed more raw materials. Where was I going to get them? I’d spent the rest of the money Cy gave me on the car, whose raw materials sat in the corner taunting me right now. The chainsaw needed piles of sugar, but that bullet stopping mechanism was small. Getting the parts had to be cheaper and easier than thirty pounds of sugar. I just—
OW! Pain jolted from the back of my head to the front. I grabbed my skull, but the headache faded as fast as it came.
There wasn’t going to be any mad science today. Maybe I shouldn’t let that bother me. Right next to me I had a hideous jade statue I’d stolen (and the best part was, it had no owner so it wasn’t really stealing) in an action-packed super-powered monster fight. My day had been amazing, and I ought to stop pushing and savor the accomplishment.
I took off my visor. I was going to go home and read Sentient Life like I’d always wanted to do, and, if Claire and Ray were out necking on the rooftops somewhere, that was their business. If I just relaxed and let myself realize what a great day I was having, it wouldn’t bother me anymore.
I took my regular old boring bike home, leaving my super science equipment in the lab. Well, I had the teleport bracelets on under my shirt. Those things were seriously too useful, plus they didn’t look like anything but copper arm bands.
I paused at the kitchen door. Was I about to face serious levels of parental freak out? Nothing to do but find out. I opened the door, took one step in, and yelled, “I’m home!”
Mom stepped out of Dad’s office, smiling and relaxed, and met me halfway through the kitchen to give my bangs a ruffle. “Hi, honey. Enjoying your break? Want me to make you something to eat?”
Not a bad idea, although I didn’t feel like sitting at the table and being social. “Maybe a sandwich.”
Now Dad came out of his office, buckling on his belts with all the pouches and checking to see if his toys were in place. The two I saw were diagnostic tools, meters or scanners or something. I hadn’t messed with them since I’d gotten old enough to even guess what their readouts meant. “Is Dad going somewhere?”
“Mech asked me to personally check the containment unit,” Dad answered.
“Which means he caught it, but couldn’t destroy it?” That information might be very important to the girl who owned the statue the monster craved.
Still all in a hurry checking his pockets, Dad took a moment to lean down and kiss my forehead. This was why I wore braids. My parents can’t leave my hair alone. “It can’t be killed, Pumpkin. Or, at least, it can’t be killed with the resources we have. Most of the creature exists in the wrong probability state.”
My eyebrows raised. I’d unleashed a whopper, hadn’t I? That was why you don’t go treasure hunting in LA. “A real honest-to-goodness interdimensional horror?”
“Strictly speaking, no,” Dad corrected me. “The organism exists in our world, but operates on a level of physics we don’t interact with. For a crude example, a being made of neutrinos could be passing through you right now, but neither of you would know. This monster is able to translate parts of itself into a form that can interact with us, but, without attacking the main body it can’t be killed.”
“So…?” I filled in dutifully.
“So it’s not practical to kill, but it’s not hard to set up a jamming field against the process it uses to translate itself. The monster is left with a tiny extrusion caught in our world, which we sealed inside… well, it’s really a mayonnaise jar with a lot of high tech attachments.” Dad gave me a wry smile as he admitted that, but I actually felt a touch jealous. Could my super power improvise like that if it had to?
Dad stopped checking his pockets when Mom handed him the car keys and gave him a kiss. “I hope I won’t be too long!” he added, and hurried out the door.
I slipped into Dad’s office, added a couple of marks to the note stuck to the Pumpkin Jar, and wandered back to my room. My hand reached out automatically to turn on my computer, but… Ray and Claire wouldn’t be online, and I needed to relax. So I scooped up my collection of Sentient Life, walked back to the living room, and lay down on the couch to read.
Eventually Mom brought me a grilled cheese sandwich. The wages of sin were sweet indeed.
I read. I’d read most of the first volume before and little bits of the second, but now I had a chance to follow the story. Well into the third volume, Delph’s trainers were dead. He hadn’t met any aliens yet. As he piloted his tiny ship between Jupiter’s moons, the only person he had to talk to was Vera, who gave him orders over the radio. He hadn’t admitted even to himself that he had a crush on her, but he thanked her for talking to him so much, told
her that dolphins need human friendship. She promised to be that human friend.
Then the scene cut to the station sending Delph his orders, and a human scientist asked a computer box, “Any updates on the mission, V-3RA?”
“I learned that I can lie today, Dr. Mills,” the box answered in Vera’s typeface.
I’d gotten enough peeks at the series to know how much trouble those words would cause. Of course, by volume five there weren’t any humans left in the comic at all. I laid the comic over my chest and let it all sink in.
That was when Dad got home. “Hey, Beebee,” I heard him say in the kitchen.
“How was Mech?” Mom answered.
“Just fine. He had more to say about The Inscrutable Machine than the monster.”
Okay, that took my mind off of star-crossed AIs and engineered slave races.
“It’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Picking fights with sidekicks is one thing. Interfering with LA’s whole public school system is another,” Mom replied. Replied rather firmly. Criminy. It hadn’t quite occurred to me that adults would see getting everybody out of school early as less harmless than I did.
“Mech thinks that was just cover. He doesn’t just think it; he’s certain. They were there for the artifact.” Dad kept his voice low, but they weren’t whispering. I just had to sit quiet and listen.
“The odds are very reasonable that they found it by accident. This is LA, Brian,” Mom noted.
Dad didn’t let that stop him. “I wasn’t there, but Mech was and he doesn’t think so. He watched the kids fight the monster before he joined in and saw in person how they used it to snare him. He says they’re too smooth. They worked together like professionals and, faced with a superior force, set a trap and escaped like professionals. They didn’t fight like kids, Beebee. He even thinks the name The Inscrutable Machine doesn’t refer to the tech weaponry, but their teamwork.”
Mom got quiet for a moment. When she answered, it was in the flat tones of The Audit. “That all seems unlikely, but ‘unlikely’ isn’t ‘impossible.’ Mech is an experienced and active field worker. He’s seen them in person, and I haven’t. I’d be foolish not to take his opinion seriously.”
Okay. When Mom started doing The Audit, junior supervillains like me did not want to be around. Anyway, my heart couldn’t handle another volume of Sentient Life yet. I got up and went back to my room.
I turned on my computer and resisted the urge to ask my super power if it could make me one that took less than forty days and forty nights to boot up. Dad custom made my smart phone, but a desktop wasn’t an interesting enough challenge for him.
Actually, now that I’d gotten into mad science myself, I could see the point. Why make anything that regular engineers could come up with?
Claire and Ray were online, so they’d gotten home already. I set up my microphone and sent them a voice chat invitation.
“The Master calls!” Ray greeted me immediately.
“I thought you’d sleep through the evening. I’m exhausted, and I supposedly have super stamina,” Claire chirped.
Okay. Well, might as well leap right into it. “Guys, I had a crazy thought. Would you be interested in trying a team PvP match?”
“Of Teddy Bears and Machine Guns?” I could hear the surprise in Claire’s voice.
“This is a surprise. I thought you hated random PvP,” Ray mused. He knew something was up. Neither of them sounded negative, so I booted up the game.
Ray was right. I didn’t like dealing with sore winners or sore losers, and the idea that I didn’t know how good my opponent would be made my heart flutter—or at least, it used to. After facing an unholy dragon-shaped eldritch abomination from beyond the ken of mankind this morning, snotty teenagers weren’t that intimidating.
That wasn’t what made the difference. “Dad talked to Mech, and he was impressed by our teamwork. It made me wonder if he was right, if we’re just naturally a good team.”
“We impressed Mech?” Claire asked, a bit of a squeal in her voice.
“I’m game for a game,” Ray assured me.
“We impressed Mech?!” Claire repeated. She just couldn’t let go of the glee. It made me feel kinda warm, too.
I clicked the invitation buttons. “Let’s find out if we deserved the praise.”
It took the game seconds to find us a match. I chose candy, Ray took junkyard, and Claire took toybox. This was our first time, and we wanted the arrangement we were most comfortable with. Our opponents took one candy, one toybox, and one junkyard themselves.
Candy sets up fastest, and I was counting on that. “I’ll give you two cover,” I told Claire and Ray through our chat connect. Just the basics. I needed speed and offense. Candy chainsaw, start the Rot Your Teeth upgrade building, put on the Sticky Shield to slow down anyone who attacked me, grab a pile of Soda Bombs as the upgrade came online, and then I downed every Pixie Stick I could stack. If I were playing by myself, I’d never go for a short term bonus like that. It would kill me later.
I wasn’t playing by myself, and The Apparition had given me a plan. Namely, I charged.
It went exactly like I would have predicted. Only the candy player had anything ready, and he was working on basic upgrades. I took the chainsaw to him, sent him into retreat to heal. I could probably finish him off, but that wasn’t the point. I swerved aside into the junkyard construction pit.
Junkyard takes forever. He was still building his salvage machines, constructing his assembly line, and he had exactly one nameless cobbled-together abomination building. I ignored it. I planted Soda Bombs on all his salvage machines and took my chainsaw to the assembly line. In a few seconds it was wreckage, and his salvage machines were a mess of sugar.
I didn’t have time to finish him off, either. I turned and ran for the toybox.
Here I was in trouble. The toybox player had flooded her own base with Jacks, spat cheap Toy Soldiers at me as fast as she could pull them out of the box. My health was dropping fast, and that one junkyard monster roared up behind me. I kept cutting, swiping down soldier after soldier, every swing of the chainsaw taking me closer to the toybox itself. I tossed my remaining Soda Bombs at everything in sight as the junkyard monster caught up with me. They wouldn’t do much damage, but they did some. It took the junkyard monster about three seconds to chew through my remaining health.
Just before I died I heard Claire announce, “Phase two, online.” I got a glimpse of the first few Zombie Rag Dolls at the edge of the enemy base before my respawn sequence started. After that I was too busy putting myself back together to watch the action up close, but the map showed me what I expected to see—Claire’s little blue dots multiplying, filling all three enemy bases. I’d given her time to get them fully upgraded and hit critical mass, and Zombie Rag Dolls bred like zombie rag dolls.
Still, the other guys weren’t stupid. Their toybox player had put a lot of defenses in place to slow me down, and their candy player hadn’t actually died. He’d gotten his own candy chainsaw together. The junkyard player had rebuilt and gotten a second metal monster active. The blue dots thinned.
Over the speakers, Ray asked, “May I cut in?” I respawned and watched his nightmare roll out. Ray liked to pile everything he could into one terrifying juggernaut, and we’d given him lots of time. From what I could tell, he started with his Thresher design and added grinding macerators. Their purpose became immediately clear. While the enemy team whittled the Zombie Rag Dolls down just a little faster than Claire could replace them, Ray’s monster crashed into the enemy junkyard and devoured the construction machines. All of them.
I grabbed a new chainsaw and ran. I wasn’t even as well equipped as last time, but as the enemy team threw everything they had at Ray’s Thresher, surrounding it, I ran up behind and cut down their candy player, then went to work on their junkyard player’s machines. Without resistance, Claire’s Zombie Rag Dolls multiplied again, flooding the enemy junkyard base.
I personally blocke
d the candy player’s spawn point as Claire’s dolls slammed the enemy toybox shut. We won.
I sent a quick “Thank you for the game!” message to the opposing team, and they logged off without a word.
I sank back into my chair. “Looks like Mech was right.” Come to think of it, we’d barely spoken. Ray and Claire had understood what I was doing, and I’d known how they would follow up.
“That wasn’t nearly as hard as I expected. Do we want to go again?” Claire sounded about like me. Satisfied and proud, but not excited.
“I’d be okay with it, but all that really did was put me in the mood for some late night supervillainy,” Ray purred incorrigibly over the microphone.
“Not even considering it,” I shot back immediately. I wanted to put my foot down on that idea. “I nearly got shot today. We couldn’t even damage the dragon, and, if the monster hadn’t shown up, Mech would have had us. We need major equipment upgrades before we even consider getting into costume again.”
Ray sighed at length. “I wish you weren’t right, but of course you are. I had a heart attack when that guard pointed his gun at Claire. At that range, he couldn’t miss.”
“He wasn’t going to fire,” Claire scoffed.
Ray corrected her in a firm, serious voice. “He might have. I don’t want to face that ‘might’ again. His odds of hitting Penny were very low, but even that was unacceptable. We need better protection, better planning, and options for dealing with highly damage resistant enemies. Mech isn’t the only hero with armor and shields. We’ve met Chimera and The Apparition. What could we do in a fight against either of them? We work together well, but we need defenses and contingencies.” My jaw just about dropped.
I supplied the rest of the bad news. “That won’t be happening soon. I have to figure out what we need and find a lot of supplies. I’m close to out, and the scrap from that car wasn’t good for much.”
“So we need to identify a source of widely varied basic materials that can either be bought cheap or obtained through stealthy villainy. In general big public scenes are fun, but we should be picking specific targets and keeping as low a profile as possible. Trouble will come to us, after all. I think conventional guns are our biggest defensive concern. We can outmaneuver anything more exotic, because there’s only likely to be one or two energy weapons or magic swords coming at us at once. Doubling or even tripling up on defenses would be wise. Lightweight armor designed to turn aside one or two lucky strikes? Independent chaff? And of course a few easily portable weapons designed to augment what we can do already to deal with heavily armored opponents or inconvenient walls,” Ray speculated.
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