I knew exactly what she meant by that. She meant we were still being blackmailed.
It turned out we weren’t done after all. Lucyfar stepped away from the wall, holding up her hand. “Since everybody else is too afraid to ask, you’re going to take the blame for us violating a major superhero/supervillain truce, right?”
Spider’s expression remained unidentifiable, but she sounded delighted by the question. “We will not be violating the truce. To ensure we are not, my representative informed the conference an hour ago that I am planning a major operation Monday. That is why diversions are so particularly important for this theft. They are on guard, but they won’t know which operation is my real target.”
“Wait, an hour ago?” I blurted out.
“Quite a few of the attendees have left for home already.” Oh, yeah, she knew exactly what I meant.
I ducked back into the stairwell, and pulled out my phone. Could I have missed their call? I punched a button. The screen remained dark. I pushed more buttons. I held them down. Nothing.
Vera had shorted out my phone along with all of Mech’s computers. Nuts!
Ray asked, “Why did you bring your phone on a mission, anyway?” He and Claire had followed me out. I ought to pop him one, but I’d break my hand and he sounded confused, not sarcastic.
Claire provided the sarcasm. “Internet access, duh.” She wasn’t teasing me, she was teasing herself. She showed plenty of sulky bottom lip as she poked uselessly at her own burned out telephone. She added a philosophical shrug and sigh. “Oh, well. I’ll check my bank account when I get home. I bet Spider paid us enough for ten phones.”
I barked, “You don’t get it! My parents are on their way home, and I missed their call!”
I’d delayed too long already. I ran up the stairs and out the door, slapped the control on my chest, and leaped onto my light bike right in the middle of the Chinatown mall. I shoved my foot against the pedal as hard as I could. It sped out onto the street, weaving around two tables all on its own.
I had just passed the crazy intersection at Sunset and Hollywood when it occurred to me that if my parents were already home, pulling up to the house on my supervillain light bike wearing my supervillain costume would be seriously unwise. I lost more time going around to my school, changing into the civilian clothes I’d left in my lab, and taking my perfectly normal bicycle home.
I admit I teleported across intersections twice when I thought no one was looking and raced the rest of the way. By the time I turned off Los Feliz onto my street, I was ragged.
I had barely made it, or barely not made it. I saw my parents’ car pull into the driveway. No, it was fine. In the middle of the afternoon, my being out of the house would seem perfectly innocent.
Unless, of course, they noticed Vera floating by my shoulder doing her best Conqueror orb impersonation. I screeched to a halt, grabbed her and put her to sleep, stuffed her in my belt pouch, and biked down to the house in a more leisurely manner. They didn’t know I’d been getting a lot more exercise, so looking tired after biking would make perfect sense, right?
I turned into the driveway myself, and there were my parents trying to unlock the door and carry luggage simultaneously. I jumped off my bike and didn’t have to fake running up and yelling, “Mom! Dad!” as I gave them each a ferocious hug. My secret identity was suddenly back. I hadn’t expected it to feel this good.
“We tried to call you, Princess, but you didn’t answer your phone,” Dad explained. I tried to chalk up a mark on the Princess tally in my head, but I wasn’t used to caring about it anymore.
Mom grabbed me for a second hug. “I knew coincidence was much more likely than foul play, but I worried anyway. It’s good to see you’re fine.” She let me go, but still fussed with my hair, trying to get my wind-blown bangs straight.
I dug around in my pocket. “Oh, that. My phone burned out all of a sudden, and I haven’t had time to fix it.”
They both stared at me as I held up the dead phone. Then Mom gave Dad a smile. “Your daughter is hinting that her powers are advancing ahead of schedule, Brian.” He got it and smiled to match her. I got it and had to hope they’d misinterpret my sickly grin like they had everything else. I’d just about given away the ballgame there!
“But not quite enough, huh?” asked Dad. He gave up on holding two suitcases and the keys simultaneously, and put a suitcase down to unlock the kitchen door. As he pushed it open, I grabbed the abandoned suitcase.
Not quite enough? Would my fully developed powers fix anything, anyway? They only seemed to like building something new, and even then only once. I could feed the phone through The Machine and ask for it to be returned whole. I wasn’t confident I’d get a working phone rather than a pile of parts out of that.
“Could you fix it for me, Dad?” I asked. I didn’t have anything incriminating stored on the phone anyway. Man, this suitcase was heavy. I’d picked the one with Dad’s traveling computers in it, of course. I had to lug it down the hall to my parents’ bedroom two-handed and put it down with relief.
“I’d be happy to,” he agreed immediately, placing another pair of suitcases beside the first.
Mom followed us in last, to put down the one remaining suitcase. “So how did you handle being alone?” she asked, giving me a curious smile. It was really, really nice seeing a face that wasn’t cagey and suspicious.
I shrugged and told part of the truth. “Just like normal. I played a lot of games and hung out with Ray and Claire all day. We are running short on pre-made food.” I gave her my best puppy dog eyes, and meant them. I hadn’t eaten nearly enough the last two days!
Mom laughed and walked out into the kitchen. “That problem is over. The conference ended early.”
Which I knew, of course. “I saw you brought your luggage back. Did you have a good time?”
Behind me, Dad called out, “I did. I think Beebee wanted to punch someone.”
Mom tried to shrug it off. “It’s the downside of retirement. Hardly anyone still heroing has worked with me directly. They respect the name, but they all think they can beat the numbers.”
Dad joined us in the kitchen, filling the dishwasher and laying out fresh plates. As much to Mom as to me he said, “The community is more impulsive and emotional than when we were active. It should have taken an hour to come to an agreement about The Inscrutable Machine. Instead, the argument only ended today when the kids broke into Mech’s lab and demanded full supervillain status. Then Retcon made his announcement, and the whole conference broke up.”
“Retcon?” I asked, having no trouble looking blank.
Mom gave a shrug and an eye roll, and answered the question she thought I was asking instead. “Spider’s playing a game, and the whole community is falling for it.”
Setting a stack of dishes on the table, Dad leaned over to wink at me. “Don’t let your Mom fool you. She’s actually in a great mood. She never shook the worry that The Inscrutable Machine would come after you, but now they’ve made it clear they want to play by the rules, so you’re off limits.”
He had her. Mom smiled, even in the middle of chopping onions.
My eyes stung a little from the onions, and maybe just a bit from the sentiment. Dad felt the chopped onion fumes too and asked me, “Want to watch me repair your phone?”
I kicked out of my chair. “Oh, yeah!”
I spent the next hour watching fascinating things I didn’t understand in the slightest. I had hoped picking up some knowledge about electronics would help me work with my own super power, but I would have to start with something a bit more basic. Watching Dad work was a lot like using my super power, in fact. I was just along for the ride.
Dad had just gotten my phone working when Mom dragged us both back to the kitchen to eat. She’d filled the table with different dishes. Nobody without her timing skills could have cooked this many at once.
I ate like a pig while my parents joked with each other, and by the end of the meal I felt bl
oated and relaxed and happy. I went to bed Saturday night determined not to let Spider mess this happiness up.
Of course, on Sunday I had to figure out how to do that, but I intended to do it without going to pieces in the process. I didn’t hurry out of bed, took a nice, hot shower, and with leftovers and the scrambled egg machine made myself a breakfast burrito. I could hear Dad in his office, so about halfway through I wandered in to see what he was doing.
He was vivisecting one of my zombie rag dolls. Seriously, he had it laid out on his desk, cut open down the middle and stuck through with sensors he’d plugged into his computer.
“Whatcha got?” I asked Dad dutifully.
“One of Bad Penny’s inventions that The Inscrutable Machine left in Mech’s base. They reproduce, and she left over a hundred behind. This one’s even pregnant,” he answered.
I raised my eyebrows. “Pregnant?” Hey, I didn’t know how they worked!
“Pregnant,” he repeated. He poked the interior with a teeny tiny pair of scissors. I peered over the table and into the guts of the doll. Packed into the lint was another doll’s head and shoulder, sure enough. It even had teeth already.
Dad adjusted his goggles. Maybe I should just start wearing the pair Cybermancer gave me. I could get prescription lenses for them, right? Or make those myself? Naah, if my super power made a pair of lenses they might correct my vision, but only as a side effect of doing something crazy.
Dad talked right over my speculation. “Even nonfunctional in every other respect, it’s very slowly growing a new doll. The actuator system made out of fabric strands is clever, but I haven’t found a control or power system and the new dolls seem to grow themselves. It’s classic mad science, the creation of instinct rather than design. I couldn’t make one myself, and I suspect the mass it’s adding is fake.”
“Uh, fake?” I asked helplessly. “Instinct rather than design” described my creation process perfectly, and now I was watching someone try to piece together what I’d done after the fact. My Dad’s super power was really nothing like mine at all.
“Temporary. When it disappears, it will take an amount of real mass and energy with it to equal all the energy it added to the universe while it pretended to exist. The loss of mass will be so small we’ll never notice, but conservation of energy will be maintained—after the fact.” Fastening two metal clips to the ragged end of the half-formed doll’s shoulder, he peered at a series of graphs drawing themselves gradually on his computer screen. “I’m trying to determine how the increase of mass changes over time, to estimate when the process gives out and the dolls will disappear.”
He’d gotten through the whole speech without using the word “magic” once. I sympathized with his desire to work out the fundamental physics involved, but I had no problem with labeling a big branch of processes ‘magic’ even after we knew how they worked.
I tried to hug my Dad hard enough that he’d know just how great he was, then walked out to the front door. For courtesy’s sake, I shouted, “Bye, Mom! Bye, Dad! Call me if you need me, I won’t be going far!”
When no objections were raised, I left the house and headed down to my laboratory.
Within seconds of stepping out of the elevator, I had to face it: This place was a dump. Seeing Mech’s place had changed everything. I’d been getting by with barely any equipment. Granted, The Machine was an incredible tool all by itself, but what could I do better, faster, with a real laboratory? Plus, I wanted a place that looked cool!
The lab wasn’t a problem. It was an opportunity. I was going to enjoy fixing this place up after I dealt with Spider.
I didn’t know how to do that. I wasn’t going to let her push me around forever, and I wasn’t going to give up and spill the beans to my parents myself so they could protect me. I wanted out of her web, for good. Supervillainy had been running away with me from the beginning, and I wanted to take control.
I would find a way. For the moment, I’d better get ready for tomorrow. If I planned on making a show, I’d need better weapons. Let’s face it, I needed better weapons anyway. My power dutifully threw up a plan, and I set The Machine to eating quartz while I filled the smelter with plastic. This would be big. I didn’t want to look too closely at what I was doing in case my power jammed on my desire to put words around it. That gave me a little room to think. The split attention effect was fun, with my hands putting together this awesome thing while I wondered how to get out of supervillainy. I had to be honest with myself. The whole thing was fun. Other than not having a choice, I had a natural talent for being a supervillain and I got a big kick out of it. Who’d have thought? I had to hope I’d find heroism just as natural!
I hefted up my finished invention in my arms and let myself take a good, solid look at it. It was big, bazooka-sized, a classic alien ray gun of wires, bulging plastic in neon colors, and a fat crystal sphere filled with writhing, glowing blue smoke. The sphere part reminded me a bit of a Conqueror orb.
What did it do? I’d stayed too detached from the process to remember. Easy enough to test. I pointed the almost feather-light gun at the floor across the room and pulled the trigger. With a satisfying buzz, the floor flared with blue light, leaving a deep cylindrical hole carved in the concrete and well past the concrete into the Earth.
I almost dropped the gun. If I pointed this at anyone, no matter how well defended, it would kill them. If I pointed this at anything, it would kill someone on the other side! This was not what I wanted super powers for! I grabbed a hammer off my worktable. I’d break this thing into bits so it couldn’t go off by accident and feed those bits to The Machine so it couldn’t be reassembled. My blood chilled just thinking about what I could have hit with that test fire. If I’d struck a gas line, I’d have blown the neighborhood sky high.
I’d start with the globe. The whole gun ran through that. One good hit and the rest would be inert. I laid the gun out on the desk, lifted the hammer, and let out a little squeak as my super power showed me what I was about to build by breaking this sphere. I didn’t understand any of the details, but I recognized the end result: A crater.
I could feed it to The Machine. No, The Machine would be safe, but I wouldn’t be. Neither would the neighborhood. The actual science involved might be wildly different, but for all intents and purposes I’d built a basketball sized fusion reactor and cracking it open would be bad, bad news. Break the shell, and it would go from reactor to bomb.
Bombs got a lot of attention. I’d been asked to make a distraction. It’s not like I wanted to blow anybody up, but I could take the hand I’d been dealt and play it in an unexpected way.
Not just with the bomb. I had it. I had a plan.
Force me to remain a supervillain? I’d show Spider. I’d show them all!
onday. My last day as a supervillain, if I had anything to say about it.
I woke up early. I’d play it light, just like yesterday. I got cleaned up and dressed, ate leftovers until I bulged, and I was reaching for the handle of the kitchen door when Dad stepped up behind me. “Sorry, Pumpkin. You’re staying inside today.”
I strangled down my frustration as tightly as I could, but my “What?!” still sounded whiny in my ears.
Dad gave me what would have been an understanding smile, if he’d understood. “Spider has a major crime planned for today. Until I know it’s safe, you’re staying indoors.”
Mom emerged from the basement stairs, blowing dust off her laptop and adding her two cents. “It’s just a precaution. Spider doesn’t like grand conquest schemes and she’s finicky about collateral damage. Not that she’s merciful, but she picks her targets carefully.”
“I’ve activated our house’s more exotic defenses, just to be sure,” Dad told us as he returned to his office, presumably to finish the job.
I sighed, grunted, and glared at the floor. “Fine. I’ll be in my room playing computer games. All day.” That ought to be the right amount of sulk to establish that I was mad, but not so mad I
couldn’t surrender with a sense of humor.
I trudged back to my room, and I didn’t quite slam the door behind me, but I gave it an audible thump. Then I set up my computer to play a championship Teddy Bears and Machine Guns video again and pried open my bedroom window just a notch.
I could teleport through that, I thought. I’d angle around as close to the corner of the house as I could see, to avoid any windows. Then I’d grab my bike and be gone.
I took a step, and my face hit the grass. Pain jolted my neck and lower back. Ow. I climbed back to my feet and found myself right outside my bedroom window. What was this? I’d never missed a teleport before!
Oh, right. Dad probably had a teleport disruption field. I needed to take a little more interest in what he had lying around the house.
Well, the hard way wasn’t that hard. I crouched low under the windows and scurried down the length of the house, grabbed my bike, and pushed off hard. If my folks saw me, they saw me. If they found out I wasn’t in my room, so be it. I had an excuse ready. I’d tell them I was on a date with Ray. A Birds and the Bees lecture would be toe-curlingly mortifying, but it wouldn’t last long and I’d get through it.
I left all of that behind me. The next part was simple. I rode down to school and down to my lab, where Ray and Claire were waiting for me already. I changed into my villain jumpsuit in a backroom, with Claire guarding the door. She didn’t need to. We were all business today. Ray carried my bomb up the elevator, and we set it right out in the middle of the schoolyard where it gave off a devilish blue light that churned and spun. I thought the base, with all the tubes and wires, set the reactor sphere off nicely.
Ten after noon. We were ready. I sat on the sphere, kicked my feet, and asked, “Vera? Project what I’m about to say as far as you can.”
I pushed aside a faint worry that would be “planet wide” and announced, “I’m sorry to interrupt your daytime television, ladies and gentlemen, but The Inscrutable Machine has been thinking about this for a while now, and we’ve decided Northeast West Hollywood Middle School has to go. I apologize to those of you caught in the blast radius, and I’m hoping a superhero or twelve will show up to try and stop us just as much as you are. I’m really getting a kick out of humiliating them.”
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