Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen

by Richard Roberts

  She hung up. This was the best moment I was going to get.

  Shuffling my school papers around, I asked, “So, am I in any trouble?” Just because I wasn't facing immediate parental wrath didn't mean there weren't repercussions on the way. A girl needs to know what to expect.

  Dad sprinkled something that smelled like pepper onto the soon-to-be-roast. “Not with me. Is there something I should know about, Beebee?”

  Mom shook her head, although with a detached, distracted expression. “No, you're fine. You reacted with all the responsibility we could have hoped for, despite things moving towards my worst projections.”

  “And that's not your fault either, Princess.” Score, five bucks! Computer simulations of- no, I didn't want to waste the Princess jar on a game.

  Oh, yeah. Dad was still talking. “Even Beebee couldn't have predicted that Marcia Bradley would have a breakdown and put her own father in the emergency room.”

  Mom grimaced. “At least the emergency room was on the other side of that wall. His odds of surviving an average ambulance wait were low.”

  Okay. Well, I'd gotten hints of this in class.

  Dad poked the beef with a fork. It was an idle gesture, followed by him opening the stove and sliding the roast in. Despite the rush of almost painfully hot air, he took his time, which kept his face turned away from me and Mom as he said, “I can't blame her.”

  “Brian!” Mom yelped, scandalized. Except… not convincingly. More like she was reading from a script she didn't like.

  “It certainly makes me think Misty is onto something with her laissez faire approach to parenting.”

  Mom managed a grim chuckle, and walked around the table to pat Dad on the shoulder. “We can't be doing too badly. We've raised a child who passes all the metrics for responsibility.”

  Dad straightened up. They both looked at me. I held up my hands in a show of surrender and said, “Just tell me what you have planned.”

  Both of my parents burst out laughing, and Mom gave me a quick hug. “Nothing big. Dad and I will be out most of the afternoon, tomorrow and Sunday. The roast beef is so you have extra leftovers.”

  Dad patted my shoulder twice, and added, “Sorry to leave you hanging on the weekend your club is shut down.”

  I gave him the boggle-eyed stare. “Are you kidding? Now I get to spend that time with just me and Ray and Claire. This is perfect.”

  Mom… smiled at me. She knew something, and wanted me to know that I knew it, except the thing that she could know she definitely didn't know, so I didn't know what she knew.

  Time to divert attention from that brain-destroying maze. “You're going to talk to the other heroes about the whole club thing?”

  “Heroes and villains,” Dad confirmed.

  Mom sighed. “Nobody believes it can happen to their kid until it does.”

  Well. Since I was free of any guilt in all this craziness, it was all good for me.

  My smile froze as a thought finally dropped into place. “Waaaaait. I'm supposed to be getting my new phone this weekend.”

  Dad shook his head, his smile turning apologetic. “Sorry, Pumpkin. We won't be able to get that done this weekend.

  Arrrg! Curse you, Cassie Pater, and curse you, Marcia!

  I might not have a new phone, but I had a new base, and after I waved my parents off and ate five pounds of beef and potatoes, I made my merry way to meet my friends there.

  Pacifying those who spawned me did not keep me too late, as I found my minions in the great hall, hands on their hips in perfect unison, surveying my new domain.

  Just to make sure they weren't finishing up rather than preparing to start, I asked, “Have you brought my equipment back, yet?” Then I fell over.

  It totally wasn't my fault! Riding an invisible platform that isn't even really a platform, it just holds your feet up as you descend, is disorienting. I swear it doesn't keep your feet even if you move around.

  Ray caught me. Sure, he'd been standing fifteen feet away, but he wasn't about to let an opportunity like that pass him by. It felt awfully good to have my descent floorward interrupted by strong, caring arms.

  I really needed to ask him out.

  Being held up suddenly became burningly embarrassing, and I jumped to my feet with unseemly haste. Ray looked smugly satisfied, his chin raised just a preening inch.

  Claire radiated even more illicit amusement. She managed it by showing no sign anything had happened whatsoever, and continuing the interrupted conversation. “We need to decide where to put everything first. Ready for a look around?”

  Oh, yeah.

  The old base had about a dozen dusty, metal-walled rooms, most of them empty, arranged like a broken orb web. This place was bigger, arranged in more of a 'labyrinth' theme. It wasn't big enough to get lost in, but it was big enough that you started feeling lost seconds before you found a landmark you recognized. The rooms weren't quite as empty or uniform.

  We found a bedroom, for example. The poster-sized photograph of a woman with scales on the wall had streaked from water damage, the dresser looked rotten, and…

  We all stared at the bed.

  “How are we going to get rid of that? With gas masks?” said Ray.

  I grimaced. “Maybe we should back up. Our breath could kick up spores.”

  After we eased our way out, Claire whispered, “Fire? Fire is cleansing.”

  You know what I didn't have? A flamethrower. I didn't even have any materials to make a flamethrower, but my power insisted that I did, throwing up designs in my head, instructions so complete that they started by telling me to turn left, now…

  I shook my head, wincing. Not that it hurt, but criminy. I didn't want a flamethrower! It required no scare stories about a guy destroying police stations to warn me that fire was a weapon that went straight to 'agonizing hospitalization' without passing through anything useful, like 'debilitating ouchie.'

  “We're missing the obvious,” I told her. Unwinding The Machine, I gave it a couple of cranks to wake it up, then passed it to Ray. “Feed it kinetic energy.”

  My Machine did not love him like it loved me. The harder he twisted and jerked, the more it resisted. Ray might not be able to punch down a wall, but he was pretty strong. If he had to strain, my baby was swallowing force by the pound per second squared.

  That was the point, of course. Reclaiming The Machine, I set it on the floor and gave it a little push into the room. “Eat the bed. Suck up any powder out of the air.”

  Then we beat a hasty retreat.

  A couple of minutes of exploration later, trying to keep track of more rooms whose moldy furniture would need The Machine's loving care, I heard Claire yell, “Pay dirt!”

  Ray and I rushed over, and found her grinning ear to ear, one arm extended to welcome us through a particularly ornate engraved archway.

  “Summoning circle!”

  She was right. This was the second biggest room I'd seen so far, octagonal, with mysterious ever-burning candles on six-foot stands rather than mysterious ever-burning torches. A pentagram inside a circle had been chiseled into the smooth stone floor, with a second circle outside that, and all kinds of sigils and decorations. Dishes on twisted iron legs, like the fanciest ashtrays, stood in every point of the pentagram.

  I had a summoning circle. Also a terrible urge to have Teddy here, so he could shout 'Wicked!'

  As gleeful as me, Ray actually giggled before suggesting, “You should put that jade monster statue in the middle.”

  “Not. On. Your. LIFE.” The whole idea made me shudder. This wasn't my super power warning me of danger. Putting a mysteriously cursed object in the middle of a summoning circle resonated with profound and fundamental unwiseness. It was the Ur-Bad Idea.

  “It's enough just to own a summoning circle. It's the supervillain's expensive luxury car,” said Claire.

  “There has to be somewhere suitably dramatic for her statue,” Ray insisted.

  About fifteen minutes later, I k
new he was right. It was my turn to do the arm sweep.

  “We'll put it in here!”

  Ray paused at the hallway entrance to clap. “A dungeon. Bravo.”

  It was on the lower level. The maze theme of the lair included crumbly, uneven stairs at the end of a particularly twisty corridor, leading down to a second floor below the main. I'd put money on their being a hidden top floor, but it remained hidden.

  The rooms down below were less homey and general purpose, although the path between them was no less twisty. One of the first theme rooms I found was this dead end hallway, lined with cells blocked off by iron bars. The bars had no obvious doors. Two to one they opened by some magic trick. Ten to one the trick was so stupid that the prisoners could use it themselves.

  Claire scrunched up her nose in disgust, which pushed her glasses up her face. “Is that a skeleton?”

  “Fake skeleton.”

  “You're right, it is!” She laughed, skipping down to the skeleton hanging on one wall by rusty shackles. She tested the wires holding its joints together by wiggling a plastic humerus.

  “Do you think the guy who used to live here could even do magic?” Ray asked, his voice fluttering with barely restrained laughter.

  “The torches and the elevator are real,” Claire pointed out.

  “He could have bought them.”

  “Reviled, bring down one of those stone podiums from the upstairs gallery. We'll put it near the end of the hall, and rest the trophy on that. I'm not using this dungeon for anything else.”

  Claire looked up from abusing the skeleton. “Is that room a gallery? I thought it was a button press puzzle.”

  I shook my head. “The pedestals aren't joined with the floor.”

  Claire amended, “Okay, a fake button press puzzle.”

  “Or a pushing blocks puzzle,” suggested Ray.

  Giggling and waving a skeleton foot around, Claire said, “I feel like an archaeologist. Superhero history would be so much richer if the battle between the goofy poseurs underneath our schools had been recorded for posterity.”

  Returning to business, I wagged a finger at Ray. “You go get the podium, and I'll go get the statue. I wanted it out of the old base a month ago.”

  That took me awhile. The stupid statue is heavy, and even knowing about the wards, having helped write them myself, I hesitated setting foot in the room where I'd hidden the statue. All the writing on the walls was creepy, including the sentence 'All of this writing on the walls is creepy.' I must have lost fifteen minutes waffling before pulling the statue out from under its pile of chairs.

  On the way back into the new base, I had to ask The Machine, “Can you spit up the fabrics intact, turn the wood into a barrel, and reduce the other organics to oil, putting that in the barrel?” Apparently it could, because it started shuffling around and weaving a big square of cloth.

  I was on the stairs when Claire called, “Penny! Ooh, Penny, come look what I found!”

  I had to call back, “Just a minute!”

  My arms trembled by the time I got the statue on its new pedestal. Carrying around a football-sized rock could get heavy, fast. After dumping some change in the bowl held up by its tentacles, I scurried back to find Claire.

  She led me on a bit of a chase. The gallery had been a sliding block puzzle after all, or at least a door had opened in it that hadn't been there before. A rich, fresh smell blew out of it, and I climbed stairs to the secret upper floor I'd suspected, stepping into…

  …a greenhouse. Wow.

  Where the sunlight came from, I didn't know. The vaulted roof was stone, not glass, and we were still underground, with a high school sitting on top of us. Rows of stone planters had overgrown, filling the room with greenery. Vines tried to climb down the stairs, but withered when they got too far from the Mystery Sunlight.

  Claire stood in the middle of the leafy riot, hands spread and a huge grin on her face as she complained, “I just don't know what we're going to do with it.”

  My head shook slowly. “We're going to leave it exactly as it is.”

  Hey, were those red things behind Claire strawberries? In the middle of winter? This room might be the only useful thing in the lair.

  Ray's voice echoed up out of the stairwell. He was way far away, and I couldn't make out any words. I did recognize the stilted rhythm he uses when he's calling me by some ridiculous villainous title.

  As I pointed towards the stairs, Claire held up her hands. “I wouldn't dream of getting between you and your boyfriend.”

  Thank Tesla for the excuse to get out and not blush in front of her.

  Tracking Ray's voice led me down to the bottom level again, past the dungeon, through a rune-covered, metal-banded wooden door built to withstand a magical siege, and down yet another stairway, this one spiraling and descending a couple of floors. We were getting pretty deep underground, now.

  At the bottom was only a single, circular room. Moss covered the walls, not enough to disguise the statues of women pouring water, each in a different way, into the neck-high basin that ringed the room. In another of the rare displays of actual magic in this base, that water was crystal clear.

  My voice dropped almost to a whisper. A room like this had its own magic that had nothing to do with power. “What is this, a cistern?”

  “Probably. That's not what's interesting.”

  Okay, he had my attention. What could be more interesting than this room?

  The hole in the middle of the room. A heavy metal grating, with a bar and a fat padlock, covered a hole wider than I was tall. Ray crouched next to it, peering in. I joined him. Shoulder to shoulder, we looked like a pair of curious vultures.

  The hole went down. And down. Even before the light from the cistern grew too weak to illuminate, the stone blocks gave way to rough rock, like a natural tunnel. Uneven climbing notches had been cut into that rock.

  My mouth opened. My mouth closed. I swallowed. My mouth opened again. “Lab Rat said there was an LA Undercity. I just thought he meant there were lairs all over.”

  “We have to go down there,” Ray whispered. When I looked up at him in shock, he raised his hands to protect himself. “Not right now! But someday, we do. I can't grow up and never know what's there.”

  I didn't want to admit it, but… “Yeah. We do.” That hole in the floor screamed danger at me, but down there were secrets cooler than this earth-smelling, statue-lined room, with its gentle sounds of pouring water that muffled everything else into stillness.

  “Do you think we're safe?” I asked. “If there wasn't anything down there, it wouldn't be so forcefully locked.”

  “We must be. The grating is still locked, and there's no sign it was ever forced open.”

  Ray lowered his hands. His fingers were touching mine. It was nice, being down here with him, imaginations trying to people that darkness with caverns, sleeping dragons, glowing mushroom forests and mole-men.

  I wanted to do this more. It was different when things were just me and Ray. More thoughtful.

  Now was the time to ask him out, if there ever was one.

  “What time is it?” I said out loud.

  Penelope Akk, legendary supervillain and absolute romantic failure.

  he other parents must have yakked until they collapsed, because I got home way before Mom and Dad. I was ignoring the delicious beef roast and instead seeing how much macaroni I could spear on a fork at once when they returned.

  Mom came through first, and circled around to give me a kiss on the head as a greeting. “Sorry we're so late. You smell like fresh deciduous plant life. What did you kids do at the club?”

  “We barely set foot in it. We mostly hung around the garden behind Upper High and talked. The lab doesn't really feel like my place anymore.” All scrupulously true!

  “That's life for you. Things change.”

  “Tell me about it.” I stuck my macaroni and cheese in my mouth and chewed with world-weary sophistication.

  Dad arriv
ed, and I got another kiss on the head. “They're changing faster. The girl everyone thinks is Bad Penny robbed a music studio. She's believed to have made copies of a lot of unreleased songs, but what we're hoping the public doesn't find out is that Echo had loaned some of his sound concentrators to the studio, so a death metal band could play with them. Unless we find out the band members took those home, it looks like she was really out to steal weapons.”

  “Which suits Bad Penny's modus operandi, but I still don't think it's her. In this business, I can't rule out a robot, physical transformation, or at her age, simultaneous sudden growth spurt and personality change, but the odds…”

  Dad chuckled, nodding his head. “Right.”

  “So, uh… this maybe-maybe-not-Bad Penny pulled a job while I was out fixing up the lab?” Yeah, that didn't sound suspicious, Penny. Thanks.

  Mom shook her head. “No, it happened this morning.”

  Dad, who had been heading to his office chair, turned to give me a reassuring smile. “It's not your worry, Princess. If it's someone in your club, you don't want to know and you're not expected to rat them out.”

  Smugly, I pointed at the Princess Jar, and watched Dad until he put a five-dollar bill into it. I hadn't actually been fishing, but I wasn't going to pass up credit for trapping him. This girl had computer game bills to pay, and it could be – ugh – years before I was able to enjoy the proceeds of my supervillain career.

  Oh, well. I did it for the fun anyway, right?

  Fun I might be getting back into, now that the latest attempt to go straight had gone down in flames. My folks had already misinterpreted my interest, so why not ask? “If Bad Penny, fake or not, is robbing businesses while school is out, will people with tech start upping security on the weekends?”