I stared at him. Then I laughed, and laughed, and then I laughed some more. Claire managed to hold it down to a couple of squeaky giggles, enough to say, “Three peas in a pod. No accident we ended up friends.”
“And teammates,” I managed to wheeze.
I spent the next couple of hours at Pizza Place, sitting on a chair so high my heels kicked the air, eating delicious pizza and convincing Mr. Grigoryan three middle school kids didn’t need a discount. Ray and Claire talked about cosplay costumes, and I didn’t say much and I didn’t really listen. I just ate sharply spiced pepperoni pizza and basked in their happy chatter while the knot in my heart let go. I couldn’t help but notice the costumes Ray suggested Claire wear wouldn’t cover much, but all that did was make me giggle occasionally.
I slept like a rock when I got home. It felt great.
I didn’t feel quite as great when I got up in the morning, but I kicked myself out of bed and made myself shower and get cleaned up. Vera wandered in with me, although she didn’t seem to enjoy, mind, or even notice the water. Great. Now I was showering with both of my greatest inventions. The dividing line between mad scientist and crazy cat lady got thinner.
I couldn’t really get into the humor of the thought. I was going to walk into Spider’s lair tonight, and she knew my real name. Maybe we’d be okay, but it hung on my heart like a weight while Dad’s braiding device twisted my hair into neat pigtails.
I went back to my room, flipped on my computer, and checked if Ray and Claire were online. They were. I might have to face down Spider in her web tonight, but I’d do it with my friends by my side.
Me: “I’m still biting my nails over tonight, guys.”
Ray: “It will be fine. Whatever happens, I will protect you. I mean it.”
Claire: “Instead of brooding, have fun. Let’s play a game of Teddy Bears and Machine Guns!”
Me: “Okay, but only against each other. I’m too nervous to play against strangers.”
So we started up a game of Teddy Bears and Machine Guns. I picked candy, Claire took toybox, and Ray chose junkyard. After that, nothing went as usual.
It certainly didn’t for me. I grabbed the chainsaw and basic armor, then spent some time setting up heals and soda buffs. Candy had a million of them, but I’d never liked how temporary they were before. It still wasn’t my preference, but I could see the use now.
In the middle of this, a bunch of slinkies rushed my base. I let them get in, scratch uselessly at my candy heaps, and then I cut them down with the chainsaw. An early sacrificial rush like this wasn’t Claire’s usual style. I set some new toys building and wandered out to explore the map.
The center buildings were empty. Claire and Ray were hanging back in their starting areas, building up. I used up my temporary stealth soda and wandered as close as I dared. I saw what I expected to see from Claire—zombie rag dolls. Lots of them. Lots and lots of them. She was keeping them close to her box, breeding and breeding them with no support. I couldn’t even get that close to Ray without tipping him off. He’d built a wall of buzz saws to protect his base and, instead of his usual single giant abomination, had several completely different monsters in construction at once.
Nobody was going to start anything until they could bury me. That could not be allowed to happen. I ran back to my sugar mines and picked up everything I could, then rushed Claire. I ran down the line of her rag dolls, chewing them up with my chainsaw, scattering flaming hot tamales and acid cola bombs in my wake. Then I did something I’d never done before – I took a speed boost and ran. Her rag dolls shambled after me, most of them never getting a chance to hit me back.
I led them straight for Ray’s base. Claire thought she would be clever and not fall for it. Her rag dolls veered off toward my undefended sugar mine instead. I ran in behind and cut another swathe with my chainsaw. Her constantly multiplying rag dolls meant I hadn’t seriously hurt her forces, but that wasn’t the point. She had to follow me again, and again I boosted my speed and ran. This time she followed me close enough for saw blades to fire out of Ray’s fortifications.
Suddenly, chaos reigned. Ray’s machines shambled out, one spraying fire, one sawing mercilessly, one blocking for the others. I speed boosted again and ran in the opposite direction, watching from a distance. Ray didn’t follow me. His combined machines wore down the rag doll horde, but only because he had his fortifications backing him up. So I ran back and started downing heals as I ignored everything else and moved from turret to turret, chainsawing them and dumping acid to finish them off as I moved on.
The tide turned. Rag dolls broke in through the gap in Ray’s defenses. They swung and bit at me, but I turned and ran again.
I ran straight to Claire’s toy box. If Claire pulled her army back, she’d lose it. She might be so busy she didn’t even notice me ripping up the rag dolls breeding up a fresh wave. She had to notice when I slammed her toy box shut, but, by then, it was too late.
I didn’t stay to gloat. The last thing I could afford was to let Ray recover. I drank my last speed boost, ran past my sugar mine, and grabbed everything ready, then downed every boost I had as I charged Ray’s badly damaged machines trying to limp back to repair. Stunning them all with sticky syrup, I chainsawed them one by one, circled around his remaining turrets, and carved up his salvage and construction machines. He tried to sneak off a miner, but I set it on fire with one of my remaining tamales.
Ray surrendered. I’d won.
That had been the longest match we’d ever fought. The game dropped us back into the waiting room to chat and look at our stats.
Claire: “Wow.”
Ray: “You took the words out of my mouth.”
Me: “I had a lot of tools I’ve never used before. Now I can see what they’re good for.”
Ray: “Same here.”
Claire: “I had the opposite experience. I’ve been scattering my attention too much. If I was going to bury you in endless hordes, I should have endless hordes. They weren’t enough!”
Ray: “Are you feeling better, Penny?”
Me: “Yeah. What next?”
Claire: “I think it’s time to meet at the lair. We’ll want to arrive by sundown.”
Me: “Chinatown won’t know what hit it.”
e took the Red Line to Chinatown to attract less attention. Lounging on a subway seat in full costume with Reviled on one side of me and E-Claire on the other, I grinned behind my visor and soaked up the irony of the situation. The car wasn’t crowded, but it was certainly full. The riders standing and sitting near us pretended we didn’t exist. The ones toward either end of the train stared. The only people talking were a pair of teenagers, and, from the constant glances between whispers, they were talking about us.
Of course, nobody actually refused to get on the subway car as we pulled up to each station. This was LA, after all!
We got off at Civic Center and raced up the stairs to ground level. Ray, the clown, walked up the rubber handrail of the down escalator. We strutted up to Cesar Chavez, giggling nervously and making distinctly uneven progress. When we came up on a group of pedestrians, I would teleport past them, and I teleported across the first street without warning, forcing Claire and Ray to catch up. After that, Claire skated whimsically all over the sidewalk and Ray jumped up onto bus stops, walking on his hands over them before flipping back down onto his feet on the other side.
If we were walking to our executions, we might as well do it with style.
Those big gateposts crowned by golden dragons reared up over the entrance to Chinatown. Fences ran together along the blocks to either side, sealing this part of the city off like a wall. The only way a regular person could get in was walking down the street itself, and heavy yellow plastic roadblocks stood in the way with an old Chinese man guarding them.
“Sorry, Chinatown closed for weekend,” he warned us as we approached. There was no way that Mysterious Immigrant accent could be real.
“Not to us,” I answer
ed. Me, Claire, and Ray kept walking toward him.
He got even less believable. He waved a conical traffic flashlight at us and scolded, “Halloween over! Go away! Costume not get you through here!”
I reached out and took Claire and Ray’s hands. Just as I was about to walk face-first into the oh-so-ethnic old man’s flashlight, I focused. Our feet set down on the other side beyond him, and we kept walking as he hadn’t been there. We’d proven our point, and he didn’t say another word. As an added bonus, the pain that shot through my legs didn’t produce even a stumble. It had only been a few feet, but I’d technically been carrying both Ray and Claire. Ow. Thank goodness for the supervillain exercise regimen.
Chinatown is a shallow bowl with one big building dominating the center. Not a skyscraper or anything, but a squat, broad shopping mall type building, white and lurking and maybe four stories tall. We were heading right for it. All the other buildings looked like normal little houses or shops, all of them dark and quiet and deserted. We had to go a block before I saw the first sign of life and our first supervillain. Way up ahead, what looked like a family was setting up a roadside stall centered around several wooden barrels. An otherwise normal looking guy way too broad and beefy to be normal filled a mug from those barrels and passed the mother some cash.
Leaning my head to the side, I asked Ray whimsically, “I thought alcohol doesn’t work on you guys?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s alcohol.” We could both see the smoke rising from the mug. Not steam, smoke.
As we watched, another supervillain glided down out of the air to land in front of the stall. Ray and Claire probably knew who both of these guys were. All I knew was this guy had added thick metal bands to his brightly colored spandex and cape to keep from looking too much like a hero. If only he looked less like a circus clown.
Nervousness makes me sarcastic, apparently. I gave a real jump when a man crawled out of a sewer drain on the side of the road. He was dressed head to foot in tight, shabby brown leather, and as skinny as you’d have to be to get through a drain. Leather pilot’s goggles magnified his twitchy eyes, and the leather outfit was part harness, covered in pouches and pockets and straps for fastening on equipment.
Almost all of them hung empty, except a leather collar with wiring running up into his tight hood, a set of armbands that looked like my teleport bands with more wiring, and metal braces over his ankles. Without an inch of skin showing he still looked naked without any weapons. I sympathized, and my hand strayed by itself to pat my hip where the weight of my sugar tank should be. Claire had been emphatic. Being visibly armed wasn’t forbidden, but it was rude. That went for flaming auras or spiked hackles or what have you. Claire had even left her grappling hook in the lab, figuring the claws on it looked too offensive.
Cape Wearing Guy gave us a long, pointed stare, but the skinny guy from the sewer didn’t stop at a stare. He scurried right up to us, really scurrying, his skinny back bent low and feet shuffling rapidly. The way he crouched brought him down to our level as he said, “Bad Penny. You are Bad Penny, correct? Tasty. Absolutely tasty. Nobody even knows you’re coming, and I get to bring you in!”
Ray tilted his face down, giving the crazy, skinny supervillain a hard stare just past the brim of his hat. “You may want to rephrase that.” More than a hint of threat sharpened Ray’s words. He couldn’t leave his weapons behind. He’d even brought the special gloves, since they looked harmless enough.
Hazel eyes darted nervously behind overlarge goggles. Then the sewer villain laughed. “Oh, right, right! Lab Rat. My nom de plume is Lab Rat. You are Bad Penny, and I am tasty, so tasty—delighted to have encountered you first. The mad scientist community is agog, atwitter, delicious over a girl your age joining us, and I formally request you let me be the smug mad scientist who introduces you.”
I snickered. I couldn’t help it. I loved the theater of it all, and I couldn’t tell where the supervillain act ended and the actual crazy began with this guy. Maybe mad scientists just feel naturally at home with lab rats. “And this would involve…?”
He gave his head a jerk toward the next intersection. “You following me to where we’re set up.”
I took a step toward him and activated my bracelets again, so I ended up a step past him. Extending an arm in the way his head had gone, I commanded, “Lead on.”
He let out a loud, sharp laugh. “Ha!” and smacked his fist into his palm. Pushing himself up straight—and he was tall when he really stood up—he gave his back a crack and led the way. His normal walk lasted about five steps before he started crouching again, but he’d clearly made the effort.
Lab Rat led us circling around the central building to the other side by means of a looping, zigzag route that took advantage of the short blocks in Chinatown. The roundabout path seemed… well, roundabout, but I wasn’t sure our guide could think in straight lines.
The route had its own attractions. We passed a glowing woman wearing what looked like patches of blue body paint tucked into a doorway talking to a man in a nice suit who might have been good looking if so much of his visible skin weren’t threaded with metal. They never looked away from each other for a moment, and their sly, lazy smiles were obviously flirting. Ray grinned like a cat until we left them behind us. The next block was much busier. We had to circle around a crowd of men and women, some obviously in costume, yelling and cheering. Whatever they surrounded made loud thuds. Very loud. Painful and rattling, when we actually walked past. I caught a glimpse between bodies of two big, big men hitting each other. One was covered in brown hair, and the other silvery metal.
Past the fighters stood another stand selling smoking brew and doing brisk business with the spectators. We were close enough now to see the golden light spilling out of the huge, open interior of the central building. Small groups stood around, laughing and talking, and at least one person in each group wore an obvious costume or wasn’t human. Many of the others wore uniforms in a variety of colors and patterns. Even assuming those were henchmen and the Chinese ones were locals catering to the crowd…
I’d had no idea there were this many supervillains in LA. Yikes. It was a big city, but still. I couldn’t count them all!
We walked inside, as much as there was an inside. What to call a building like this? A shopping mall? An open air market? I’d never been in one like it. There were shops around the edges, a mezzanine floor I could see from here, but a huge, open tunnel made up most of the building. Tables, stalls, video games, dance mats—the crowd had spun out a haphazard array of decorations that obviously weren’t here during the week. A glowing, larger than life hologram of Mech in the distance caught my attention first, but didn’t keep it. There was too much to look at close up.
We’d entered at the weapon sellers’ end. Businessmen in pressed suits and scruffy guys in camouflage had racks of pistols, rifles, and other scary looking military hardware. My hand instinctively cupped the soothing round shape of Vera in my belt pouch. Lab Rat veered toward the opposite side of the hall. More racks of weapons, but these tended more toward tanks of mysterious chemicals, decorative rings, crystals, exposed wiring… and the villains lounging around their tables all wore goggles, even the guy in the rumpled dress clothing who otherwise looked like a college professor. I’d found the mad scientists, and Lab Rat hopped up and down and beckoned with glee.
He wasn’t the only one beckoning. “Bad Penny! Over here!” shouted Cybermancer, both hands waving to invite me closer.
I walked over, but I didn’t hurry. It was a shame they couldn’t see the grin that made my face ache. Claire and Ray fell back a step. This was my moment.
I was obviously welcome. “Mine! I brought her here! My tasty pride!” Lab Rat snapped at Cybermancer.
“Noted in the minutes,” an elderly man in a lab coat promised.
Cybermancer sat up straighter. That wasn’t saying much. He’d been slouched almost horizontal. “We’re recording this?”
; “The Evil Eye remembers all,” one of his fellows joked, tapping her own oversized, plastic, glowing left eye. Red, of course. Most everyone’s goggles were perched up on their foreheads, but I wasn’t sure how she could wear hers anyway.
Lab Rat bowed lower. “Ladies and gentlemen, mad scientists all, I introduce Bad Penny, the youngest applicant ever to our order. I have seen her deliciousness myself already.”
The professor-looking guy rendered his judgment. “Tesla’s Moustache, she’s small.”
“Small, but she’s the real thing,” promised Cybermancer. Hefting a grimy green beer bottle with straps and a grenade’s pull tab trigger on it, he gave me a grin directly. “I owe you big time. You would not believe how these things sell. The explosion never does the same thing twice in a row, and the showier villains like Lucy love it. When the heroes get back from their convention, crime fighting is going to get very weird in LA for a month or two.”
The woman with the artificial eye smacked both fists on her table. “Don’t drag out the formalities. Bad Penny, Evil Eye. Evil Eye, Bad Penny. Where’s your gear, girl? We’re all on pins and needles to see what your tech looks like. Every report is different!”
That took me aback. “I left most of it behind. I’m not supposed to carry weapons!”
Evil Eye rolled her eyes, which was a little gross since one was at least twice the size of the other and not quite in synch. “Oh, that. Just get a table, sell maybe one thing. Essential courtesies obeyed. You think I would come here and leave all my babies behind?” She scooped the contents of her table into a pile to hug them protectively. At a glance, she seemed to like guns. Beam weapons, specifically. Lots of crystals, mirrors, and lenses.
Claire had seated herself on the edge of one of the stalls, and the guy with all the brass plates and cogs on his costume asked her, “Bad Penny built the sliding surfaces into your costume’s shoes, didn’t she? Take it off and—”
Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain Page 30