Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen

by Claude Lalumiere

  Levels Two through Five are primarily the SÜPER surgical wards, and—

  Leaving us already, Miss Tycal? Are you sure you can’t stay and visit the… no, of course, you’re busy. I understand. I do hope you’ll visit from time to time?

  That was obviously Miss Tycal, checking out after a week-long recuperation from her defeat by BlunderGus. She’s known for her rapid healing abilities; we’re rather superfluous when it comes to her. What is not well-known is that any part of her, if severed, grows, starfish-like, into an identical Miss Tycal in a matter of months. In the past we’ve managed to halt the maturation through reattachment or incineration, but this time her arms and left leg got away from us. Literally. It took days to find them. By that time they were completely sentient, and I simply didn’t have the heart to cremate the misshapen little tykes. Miss Tycal, as you saw, does not care to take her new charges with her, not when she’s on a mission of vengeance. I do hate it when it’s personal.

  So now our children’s ward on Level Seven has three very odd-looking new residents. Eventually, we plan to reunite them with their hostmother to form a new superteam.

  Ah, Surgical Theatre Seven is in use. Let’s peek in, shall we? Ooh, a good one. Last night, a squadron of organic zeppelins besieged the headquarters of The Excellent Eight. The blimps were thwarted, but Flexgirl suffered internal injuries. Normally not a problem, but normal is not what this facility is about. Flexgirl was in full elongation when she was knocked unconscious and has not retracted to her normal size and shape. We’re very wary of reviving her while her body is elongated to thirty-two feet and thin as ribbon candy. The surgeons are now trying to suture an abdominal wound, but it’s like trying to knit silly putty.

  Looking at the schedule, I see we have a procedure on deck for tomorrow. Doctor Maxfield, you’ve some practice with thoracic malignancies, yes? Good, you’ll be assisting Doctor Pearce with a lobectomy. Yes, well, it doesn’t sound too bad, but your patient will be Third Degree. As his skin is an unquenchable inferno, you’ll have your work cut out for you. I’m sure there’s some irony in a man of living flame suffering from lung cancer

  We’ve repurposed a hydrotherapy tank to keep Third Degree fully submerged during the operation, and we’re all very anxious to see if it works. I’m rather jealous; good luck to you!

  Oh dear, the Colonel is tapping his watch. I do tend to go on, but can you blame me? Back to the elevator! I think we’ll have to cut the tour short and bypass gynaecology, occupational therapy, psychology, and the morgue and skip to Level Ten, our convalescent ward. A shame, our psychology department is second to none. You’d be surprised by how often near-omnipotence leads directly to erectile dysfunction.

  Level Ten, rehab and long-term care, where we help those heroes who cannot help themselves. Down this hall is an assortment of the differently capable. Here you will learn that the überlife is not necessarily all fun and games.

  Room 1001. Ladies, gentlemen, please gather around. Don’t worry, he’s quite unconscious. May I present Mr. Tim Tibbetts. Sad, sad case. Timothy, as you can plainly see, is suffering from a marked excess of dermis. In other words, too much skin. His internal organs are similarly affected; heart, liver, lungs, intestines, what have you, all stretched to near-bursting. This accounts for the marked bulging of his torso. We keep Timothy in a constant state of complete sedation and hooked up to a heart-lung machine. It’s the only way his body can continue to operate in its present form.

  I see you don’t recognize poor Timothy, but you’ve no doubt heard of his exploits under his nom de superplume, the musclebound, nine-foot tall fuchsia force of nature known as The Humongous. In pre-Flux days, Mr. Tibbetts was a mild-mannered accountant with suppressed anger issues. Ordinarily this would have presented no real worry, but the Flux physically externalized his rage, expanding his body mass into the indestructible grunting horrorhero we all love. The thing is, when the rage ultimately subsides and escapes his body like air from a deflating balloon, what is left is a distorted, enlarged mass of muscle tissue and skin draped over a skeletal structure far too puny and frail to handle it.

  Timothy has begged for death several times now, but our government considers The Humongous a critical weapon in the War on Superterror. Frankly, his care and feeding are among the easier tasks you’ll have. The tubes do most of the work, and the bed automatically turns him every twelve hours to prevent bedsores. The real work lies in reigniting his fury. Once it was a simple matter of transporting him to the site of the villainy, waking him, and making various unimaginative allusions to his mother’s sexual preferences. But endless repetition has inured him, and even the cattle prods aren’t working so well anymore. I fear we may have to resort to torturing his loved ones— if we can get legal on board.

  Omelettes, broken eggs, etc. You know the idiom.

  Let’s head to Room 1010, a much nicer space. Barbara, I’ve brought the new residents, may we come in? Are you decent? Just a joke, she never wears anything but Lycra undergarments anyway. Doctors, may I introduce to you Barbara Bainbridge, better known as Boulder, a woman fluxwarped into a being of living metal and rock. How are you today, Barb? I see you’ve crushed another sofa, I’ll ring the custodial staff to fetch you a new one. Not a problem; we get a discount on bulk orders.

  I see. Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Doctors, if you’ve seen footage of her many battles with The Alterdimensionals during Parallel World War II, you’ll know that Boulder is the closest thing you’ll ever see to a human tank. Particularly when she’s equipped with a plasma bolt-cannon. Barbara’s outer dermis is a compound mixture of lead and molten lava (don’t think we haven’t exhausted ourselves trying to figure out how it all works), rendering her nigh-invulnerable.

  But it’s her inner composition that has forced Boulder to become our longest-term resident. Skin of molten stone and metal is one thing, but her inner organs run the gamut of the periodic table. Barbara’s blood is pure liquid mercury, her liver is made of copper, and her colon is titanium. She has eardrums made of cobalt, and her heart is, no, not gold, tungsten. She subsists mainly on rhenium and magnesium alloys, they seem to be what least upsets her zinc stomach. Part of your job will be refining her diet to allow for some variety. One cannot live on beryllium alone, eh, Barb?

  Also, Boulder routinely suffers from rather serious kidney stones. Doctor Maxfield! What did I say about tact? You try passing a four-pound renal calculus through your ureter, see how much you giggle then! Just for that, you’re now in charge of sifting through Boulder’s excretions for rare metals. Until I say so, that’s how long! Honestly! Head to the nurse’s station, tell them you’re the new bowel boy. Doctor Ginther will be more than happy to let you take over his duties. And tell them to prep Barbara for a session with the sonic jackhammer. Go!

  Apologies for the intrusion, Barbara. You have yourself a wonderful day.

  As you saw, Barbara is fairly content here. She was a freelance writer before Flux, so in her downtime she keeps herself occupied writing nonfiction pieces under a number of pseudonyms. If you get the chance, take a gander at the titanium-reinforced, extra-large keyboard our engineers cobbled together for her. Considering each of her fingers weighs ten kilograms and her hands are the size of frying pans, it’s remarkable she only goes through one a week.

  We’re very lucky with Barb; her natural reticence keeps her amenable. Not all our long-termers have such resilience of spirit. Which brings us to our last door, or rather, aquarium.

  Meet one of our less-celebrated residents, Jellied Eel. Wave hello, doctors. Oh, Jelly, naughty naughty. It’s difficult to tell, what with the excess of boneless limbs and overall translucence, but he just made a rather vulgar gesture. Yes, that’s his genitalia he’s fondling there, under that flap. You are incorrigible, Jelly! Ha! You have to yell to be heard through the Plexiglas. Not that he ever listens.

  Jelly may not be entirely media-friendly, but when it comes to naval warfare he has no peers. If it weren’t for
him and his electracles, the entire Atlantic seabed would now be overrun with the spawn of Octopustule.

  Doctor Shonaman, Jellied Eel is a patient, not a sideshow! Tap the glass again, and I’ll make sure you spend six months on dietetics duty with Regurgitator!

  As I was saying, Jelly here is rather unwilling to remain in our care. He’s a good soul, but unstable. He was an environmental activist at one time, and he’d much rather be causing havoc to fishing fleets and offshore drilling rigs. That’s how we caught him, actually; he became ensnared in the nets of an illegal bottom trawler he was set on sinking. We can depend on him to fight when the cause is just, such as when the Fishmongers tried to poison the world’s drinking water. But when the job is done he invariably flees, and we have a devil of a time capturing him again.

  No, Jellied Eel is not a prisoner. We don’t use that term here. Jellied Eel is a conscripted volunteer. Also, he’s particularly susceptible to waterborne fungal infections, anchor worms, gill flukes, sea lice, and the like, and the only place he can receive treatment is here. Right now he’s recovering from a nasty battle with an army of nematodes that annexed his colon. I’ll hazard none of you expected to work as an ichthyologist, eh?

  And thus concludes our tour. I realize that this is a lot to take in, which is why the rest of you won’t begin your residencies until tomorrow. For the rest of the day I want you to rest and acclimate. If need be, please take advantage of one of our on-site counselors to help you through this transition. They’re excellent listeners, and psychic empaths as well, so don’t bother holding anything back.

  Sorry to leave you now, but I have a rather full slate of patients to examine and only four arms. Colonel Tidhar will now lead you to the barracks you’ll be calling home for the next several years. After you’ve freshened up and had a bite at the commissary, you’ll be briefed on your various assignments over the next few months. Just to whet your appetite: The Gruesome arrives in the morning for a bowel resection; Madame Carbon is due for her monthly graphene finger- and toenail trimming; Chlorophyllis has come down with her annual bout of early blight; and Captain Awesome once again seared his eyelids when he blinked while using his laservision.

  I won’t lie to you: I don’t expect all of you to survive your residency. Those who do can consider themselves employed for life, either here or, if you show an aptitude, at one of our government überhuman research facilities. Those who don’t, well… nice try.

  I’ll be seeing you around the wards. Keep your heads on straight and you’ll do fine.

  And remember: sometimes, the only difference between a superhero and a supervillain is a malpractice suit. Ha ha.

  * * *

  Based in New Brunswick, Corey Redekop is the author of the novels Shelf Monkey and Husk.

  Bedtime for Superheroes

  Leigh Wallace

  Marie had made a full pot of tea even though she was alone in the little house. She added a perfect dribble of milk to her mug and took a slow sip. It was late, and everything was tidy. She was an old lady, she reminded herself. She should sit down, take a load off. Instead she pulled three more mugs from the drying rack and lined them up before her on the counter.

  Into the ugly cartoon mug she dropped two absurdly large blobs of honey. Into the sparkly unicorn mug she poured some of that artificial hazelnut stuff. Next to the yellow mug with a chip in it she placed a container with a perfectly sliced lemon wedge— not too thick. She made the tasks take up as much time as possible.

  Tea in hand, she turned from the counter toward the living room, the living room being the far corner of her unspacious kitchen-living-dining room area, where the soft old furniture was crowded. And there, on the sofa, suddenly and silently, was a ninja. So Marie went back to the counter and poured a second mug of tea. The tacky supervillain mug — with an image of a punching masked woman and the word Shwoooom! — half full with two oversized spoonfuls of honey. It was for the ninja, who liked her tea sweet and evil and who was all tuckered out.

  Marie shuffled her old feet to the couch, a mug in each hand. She kissed Lacy, her ninja, on the forehead before closing the living room window, which Lacy had suddenly and silently left wide open to the chilly night before collapsing onto the sofa. The ninja hugged her mug like a friend, like she didn’t even think it was ugly, because she didn’t.

  Before Marie could sit down with her own tea there was ninja paraphernalia littering the floor. She put her mug down on the coffee table and gathered up the mask and the gloves with the little black buttons that she had sewn onto them. Lacy had asked her to sew them on. Had begged her to. Even though nobody’s ever heard of a ninja with buttons.

  “You’re wearing the housecoat we got you,” said Lacy, cracking open a drowsy eye.

  “It’s lovely, dear,” said Marie.

  “Is it warm?” asked Lacy.

  “Yes, just lovely.” The housecoat was a leopard print, but it was nubbly and thick and Marie loved it.

  Marie nudged the ninja’s boots with her toe. No shoes in the living room. No. Not even ninja boots. Not even after a long day of fighting crime. The boots blurred off Lacy’s feet and onto her lap.

  Marie, with her usual unhurried step, put the mask and gloves away on the hall closet shelf, above her limp old housecoat and the ninja’s patched old ninja suit that neither of them had ever thought of throwing away. One of the fingers of the ninja’s good gloves, the new ones with the shiny buttons sewn on, was pulling open at the tip and Marie thought she might try and get that sewn up tomorrow before the ninja went back out. Or exchange the pair, since they were new. No, it was easier to just mend it. That’s what she would do.

  “Oh no!” In the living room Lacy was poking at a wisp of thread hanging loose near the top of one of her boots. “Gram! I lost a button!”

  Marie paused in the hall. “Who ever heard of ninjas with buttons?”

  Lacy shrugged. “I like buttons.”

  Marie shrugged back. “So put on another one.”

  Lacy made a scrunchy, lip-bitey face. “I didn’t buy any extras.”

  “Honestly, Lacy.”

  Lacy didn’t look up. “Well, they were expensive.”

  Marie didn’t sit down to her tea yet. She made her way to the hall closet to fetch her sewing basket. “And may I ask why you came through the window? Again?”

  “I forgot my key. What do I do about my button?” Between those two sentences Lacy had gone from a sock-footed ninja to a pyjama-clad young woman who looked like she’d been coiled into that afghan all evening, betrayed only by the current of inside air that eddied back from her bedroom. Her buttonless boot was back in her hand.

  Marie finished placing the sewing basket from the hall closet down on the coffee table. “Watch the springs. Don’t go so fast.” But Lacy never went slow. It wasn’t her thing. The sofa had lost the will to moan ages ago, anyway. Lacy dove into the sewing basket and scrounged through all of it before Marie had turned back to her tea, which was now getting lukewarm.

  “Guh! They’re all pink!” The sewing basket was instantly on the floor, its contents strewn all the way into the kitchen.

  “Pick that up,” said Marie, but the full sewing basket was already back on the coffee table. Lacy was fast. It was her thing. The sofa sighed an unheeded whisper of protest.

  “Gram. Girl superheroes don’t. Wear. Pink.”

  “In my day, ninjas didn’t wear buttons, either.”

  Lacy didn’t say anything. At first. Then she said, “I like buttons.”

  Lacy pushed the sewing basket further away down the coffee table with her toe, grabbed a paperback from the overstuffed living-room bookcase, flipped its pages once, and tossed it onto a growing pile on the floor. Marie, with creaking old bones, put the boots in the closet where they belonged, with the gloves and mask. When Marie re-entered the living room Lacy had curled her feet up under the afghan, forgotten the sewing basket on the coffee table, and was deep into another book, an unauthorized biography of The Housekee
per.

  “The Housekeeper’s making a comeback,” Lacy informed Marie.

  “Mmm.”

  “Gram, she was spotted in Toronto,” Lacy went on.

  “Mmm.”

  “She was in her mask,” Lacy insisted.

  “Mmm.”

  “Gram, you’re not listening.”

  The Housekeeper was the vintage supervillain on Lacy’s ugly mug, and one of the only other speedsters out there. Of course, Marie knew perfectly well that Lacy’s fascination with an old villain didn’t mean Lacy would ever go villain herself. It was silly to even think it. Marie would remind herself of that in the empty evenings, when Lacy’s mug sat the counter. Marie was proud of her granddaughter. Lacy was a true hero. Marie sipped her tea, ignoring how cool it had gotten, and took out her knitting.

  “I bet she’ll go on Ellen.” Lacy mused.

  “Mmm. Wait. Wouldn’t she be too old? Or dead? Or evil? Wait, is she Elvis?”

  Lacy rolled her eyes and went on reading. Marie leaned over Lacy to flick on the corner lamp for her. Lacy was always reading in the dark. It wasn’t one of her super things; it was one of her young woman things.

  As Marie unwound her yarn the front door clicked open and heavy, uneven stomps made their way down the hall toward them. Marie put the knitting and tepid tea aside and hurried back to the kitchen. She filled another mug, the one with the sparkly unicorn handle that still shed unvacuumable glitter everywhere, and handed it to the six-and-a-half-foot-tall pirate who just clomped in.

  “Thanks.” The pirate tossed eye-patch and bandana onto the small dining table against the side wall and thumped over to the sofa with her mug. Marie noted that one foot had a hesitant quality to it. She wanted to ask about it but managed not to. The pirate was a grownup who could surely look after herself. What could a little old lady do, anyway? She didn’t want to be a nag. Even if she had let the pirate move in for free, incidentally, and handwashed the sparkly mug every day because it wasn’t dishwasher safe.