“My apologies for our tardiness,” Lord Pincushion said as he tipped his hat to me, revealing a dagger sticking from the top of his head.
None of them looked as they had when I last saw them only an hour ago. Then, they had been in their early fifties but still very active. Now I saw three elderly heroes in their late seventies. But they had an aura of excitement about them that reminded me of their younger selves. These were heroes ready again for action.
The New New Crusaders and the League of Ultimate Goodness were still doing battle with the Commune for Justice. The Amazing Indestructo was still holding Professor Brain-Drain, who had a big grin on his face. My classmates and their parents, along with the school faculty, finally remembered that they had superpowers and started fighting back against the dinosaurs as well. Stench had just lifted one above his head and hurled it into another oncoming lizard. Another was attempting to snap at Plasma Girl, who kept reducing herself down to a goopy puddle and then re-forming herself a few feet away. All I could see of Halogen Boy was a bright glow that was warding off a trio of dinosaurs who were blinded by his brilliance. Tadpole was caught in a trickier situation. He had used his tongue to pull the legs out from under one velociraptor, but he didn’t know that another was sneaking up right behind him. Just as I was certain it was going to pounce, it went stiff. Tadpole swung around to find that Miss Marble had just saved him.
As I watched the dinosaurs begin to panic and run, I turned to Lord Pincushion and the Animator, who were standing beside me. The Bee Lady also puttered up to join us.
“I’m sorry you only found out the truth recently from my letter,” I said to them. “I should have told you all twenty-five years ago, but I was afraid I would alter the course of history.”
“Oh, we knew the truth shortly after you disappeared,” the Bee Lady said casually as she lit up a cigarette.
“Indeed.” Lord Pincushion confirmed. “But I regret to say I continued to harbor doubts until you arrived on our doorstep with your letter.”
I’m sure I was standing there with my mouth hanging open. I was dumbfounded. Who had revealed the truth to them?
“That letter was a clever idea,” the Animator smiled at me. “We would never have thought to notify your parents on our own.”
“How clever could I have been?” I finally found my voice, as I indicated the disaster surrounding us. “Everything is a mess!”
“Oh, but things are certain to improve,” Lord Pincushion reassured me as we watched Tadpole and Miss Marble shaking hands. “We’ve already been told how everything will turn out.”
“But how? And by whom?” I said, perplexed.
“Why, the same person who told us twenty-five years ago to show up at this place and time prepared to do battle with dinosaurs,” Pincushion explained. “We don’t normally bring along the armor when we leave the house.”
I didn’t know what to say. Who was manipulating all these events?
“Of course, things will get worse before they get better,” Lord Pincushion calmly informed me. “Take a look.”
He removed a long, sharp pointer that had been stuck through his neck and used it to direct my attention toward the sky. Even if it had been broad daylight, there would have been no way to miss it. The fact that dusk was setting in made it all the easier to see. Heading straight for us was a gigantic fireball.
“It’s enormous!” I said in alarm. “What is it?!”
“It’s a meteor, of course,” said Lord Pincushion. “A gigantic one. It will be striking this very spot in under an hour. And unfortunately, this is one meteor that Meteor Boy could never stop.”
“Meteor Boy’s career is over, anyway,” I admitted. “I lost my jet pack when I shot into the future.”
“I know,” said the Bee Lady. “I found it after you vanished. I held on to it for twenty-five years, until I could return it to you.”
“But then who invented it?” I said, so perplexed I almost forgot about the giant meteor.
“I have no idea.” She shrugged.
“Don’t think about it.” Lord Pincushion shook his head sharply. “It will only give you heartburn.”
“So how do we stop it?” I said, trying my best not to sound helpless.
“We don’t,” he replied. “What we need to do is return to our own time.”
I glanced up to the top of the Time Tipler and saw that the large chunk of meteorite had vanished. And then I remembered how a trip of a mere twenty-five years had left my own small chunk of prodigium reduced to a pebble. Clearly, the power required to transport all Superopolis back sixty-five million years had totally used it up.
“The meteorite is gone!” I said in alarm. “There’s no power source left to return us to the future!”
“I think the kid’s right, Pincushion,” said the Bee Lady nervously, squinting through her cat’s-eye glasses at the empty dish atop the water tower.
“Indeed,” he agreed as he paused and absentmindedly inspected a meat thermometer protruding from his left arm. “That does present a bit of a problem. But I have faith that the boy will figure something out.”
“Why is it always my responsibility!?” I shouted.
“Surely you don’t expect one of them to provide a solution?” Lord Pincushion stated sharply, indicating the heroes surrounding us.
Unfortunately, as I had come to realize was often the case with Lord Pincushion, he had a point. The League of Ultimate Goodness was being utterly humiliated at the hands of the hippies, while my father’s team, the New New Crusaders, wasn’t faring much better. The other heroes were all too busy fighting off dinosaurs or protecting the other kids. And all the while, Professor Brain-Drain just continued laughing as AI stood there helplessly holding him aloft, not sure what else to do. Watching the egghead of evil so gleeful got me completely steamed.
“Well, I know one person who can figure a way out of this,” I fumed, storming off toward the Time Tipler.
Professor Brain-Drain spotted me coming.
“Ah, there’s the junior do-gooder who made all this possible,” he said, chortling. “I must admit, it took me a moment to realize that you were, in fact, Meteor Boy when I met you backstage. It wasn’t until you used my Tipler to escape to the past that it all came together. Happily, despite your valiant effort, my master plan has worked, with only a minor twenty-five-year delay.”
“There’s one other little glitch you might want to consider,” I said, pointing to the meteor that was now beginning to dominate the darkening sky.
It was never easy to tell what was going on behind those thick glasses of his, but Professor Brain-Drain did not seem at all panicked.
“Why do you think I brought us all here?” he said with malicious glee. “That is the meteorite that created what we know to be Superopolis. When it hits, it will do so with such force that it will create the Carbunkle Mountain range and the plain where Superopolis will eventually rise.”
“But why bring us back here?” I demanded.
“So that Superopolis can be destroyed by the very thing that created it,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Surely you see the beautiful symmetry of my plan?”
“But you’ll be destroyed, too!” I said.
“One must sacrifice for one’s art,” he said. “Of course, there is always a way to escape any fate, if one can only think of a solution.”
I turned to AI. “Can you fly out there and stop it?”
“Are you nuts?” cried the Amazing Indestructo, setting the Professor down. “Look at the size of that thing!”
“You’re indestructible!!” I yelled at him.
“What about all these other heroes?” AI protested. “Why can’t they handle it?”
“You’ve made that impossible by choosing such feeble wits as your teammates,” the Professor pointed out just as the Human Compass ran by us pursued by one of SkyDiamond’s duplicates.
“North is this way!” he shouted to us.
“I rest my case,” Professor Brain-Drai
n replied. “But, as I said, there is always a means of escape. And if the Amazing Indestructo here can fly up to the dish atop my Tipler to retrieve what is left of the prodigium, I’ll show you all the solution.”
“Sure,” AI said, blasting up to the top of the water tower. He returned with a small rock—all that remained of the once-large meteorite.
The Professor stepped up to the control panel and pulled the indicator lever from the past position to the future, leaving the number 65,435,797 on the screen.
“Now give me what’s left of the prodigium,” the Professor demanded.
“AI! Don’t!” I warned him.
“How can a piece this small transport all of us forward in time sixty-five million years?” AI asked as he handed it to Brain-Drain, ignoring me completely.
“It can’t,” he replied with an enigmatic grin on his face. “But it will transport me.”
Professor Brain-Drain darted into the interior chamber of the Time Tipler, locking the door from the inside. I ran to the window just in time to see him place the chunk of meteorite into the small power chamber. The cylinder, which had continued to rotate slowly, immediately began to pick up speed. I didn’t know if the small Tipler chamber would generate an electromagnetic barrier and force me away from the tower, so I acted quickly.
As loudly as I could, I slammed the outer lock in place. This got Brain-Drain’s attention, and his sinister face appeared in the window. It didn’t take him long to see the danger he was in and he immediately unlocked the door from the inside—not that it did him any good.He could only watch helplessly from the window as I grabbed the time lever. I almost felt guilty about how much I enjoyed the look of horror on his face when I switched the lever from the future setting to the past.
A moment later the warping of space-time flung me from the platform and I landed with a soft but solid thud on the grassy ground. I vaguely remember staring up at the cones as they once again began to tip. After that, I must have blanked out—just as the Time Tipler hurled Professor Brain-Drain another sixty-five million years further into the past.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Cretaceous Park
When I opened my eyes I had no idea where I was. It was dark out and there were people huddled all around me. At first I thought that I must be at school because I noticed Principal Doppelganger and Miss Marble standing there. My team was also gathered around, and I noticed looks of relief on the faces of Stench, Hal, Tadpole, and Plasma Girl. But when I saw the Amazing Indestructo, the Bee Lady, and Lord Pincushion, it quickly came back to me where I was. And then I heard two familiar voices calling my name.
“OB? Where are you?”
“Here he is!”
The panic in my mom’s and dad’s voices vanished in an instant as they elbowed their way (carefully) past Lord Pincushion, both attempting to hug me at once.
“Well, I guess you figured out the mystery of Meteor Boy,” my mom said with a mix of laughter and tears.
Meteor! It suddenly reminded me of the danger we were still in. I looked past my parents and saw that the meteor was now dominating the sky to such a degree that it appeared at least ten times bigger than the sun.
“What are we going to do?” I said. “That meteor is going to destroy us all in less than an hour! And we have no power source to activate the Time Tipler so it can return us to our own time! And for some reason, people think I know how to get us back there, but I don’t have any idea!!”
I honestly thought I was going to start crying—which may have been worse than getting crushed by an enormous meteor—but then Principal Doppelganger said something very odd.
“No one expects you to fix this all by yourself,” he said mysteriously, as he stretched out a hand to help me to my feet. “And I think someone is on his way who can help you.”
He gestured toward the entrance of Telomere Park. I squinted into the darkening night, unsure of what I was seeing. There was a disturbance of some kind, and it was coming our way. I could mark its trail primarily by the leaves and branches being flung wildly into the air. But the object itself soon became clear. An enormous tornado nearly twenty feet high was moving toward us. As it finally stopped, directly in front of us, I realized there was only one person it could possibly be. As the winds began to dissipate, a lone individual was left in its wake. It was Funnel Boy. Except he was no longer a boy. He was now a fully grown criminal—Cyclotron. For a moment he just stared at me with the strangest expression on his face.
“You look exactly like you did the last time I saw you,” he finally said.
“I should,” I replied, not knowing how else to react. “That was only a couple of hours ago, my time.”
“I was told that you might need my help.”
That was an understatement. Most of the dinosaurs had fled and the Commune for Justice was finally being reined in by the combined efforts of the League of Ultimate Goodness and the New New Crusaders. I had no idea, though, how any of them could help stop the oncoming meteor.
“We don’t need the help of an evildoer,” AI shot back huffily.
“Why?” I asked, turning to him. “Have you decided to fly out there and stop that thing?”
The Amazing Indestructo stood silently with an oops look on his face before finally replying, “Well, there’s no reason not to let him try, I guess.”
I heard a faintly mumbled “despicable” from the direction of Lord Pincushion.
But how would Cyclotron save us? No funnel cloud could possibly stop a meteor.
“But what can you do to help us?” I asked.
“That’s for you to figure out,” he said. “Someone told me twenty-five years ago that this was going to happen and that you and I together would be able to prevent it.”
“But how?!” I blurted out in complete frustration. All this someone-sometime-told-me-something-some-such was driving me crazy. “And can’t someone just give me a straight answer?”
“Maybe you have something in your pockets,” Principal Doppelganger suddenly spoke up.
I slipped my hand into the right pocket of my Meteor Boy costume and retrieved the last remaining pebble of prodigium in existence—the remnants of the piece that had first brought me to the past. I stared at it for a moment, but nothing came to me.
“It’s only the size of a chocolate chip,” I said with a sigh. “It’s not powerful enough to return even one of us to our own time.”
“Try your other pocket,” suggested Principal Doppelganger. “But make sure you hold on to that tiny rock.”
I looked up at my principal suspiciously as my hand dipped into my left pocket. As my hand wrapped around its contents, an idea materialized in my brain. It was the Oomphlifier and if it still carried a charge, I knew how to get us all back to our own time.
“Here, take this,” I said, handing the device to Cyclotron. “But don’t do anything until I give the word.”
I ran back up to the platform, where the Time Tipler had slowed to a moderate rotation, which was the best it could do with no prodigium to power it. I grabbed the direction lever and switched it from the past to the future. The number 65,435,797 still appeared on the panel. That done, I darted back to Cyclotron.
“Now, all you need to do is whip up a tornado around the Tipler and press the button on the Oomphlifier. It will increase the level of your power almost a million times, which I’m hoping will get the central cylinder of the Time Tipler spinning fast enough to return us to our own time. Ready to give it a shot?”
I hoped that the answer was yes. The meteor was now so close that I knew we had only one chance at this.
“Let’s give her a spin,” Cyclotron said confidently.
Turning to face the Time Tipler, Cyclotron closed his eyes and concentrated. A funnel cloud immediately began to develop around the cylinder of the tower. It began to spin faster and faster as he got the device spinning at the top speed he could manage on his own.
It was moving fast, but not fast enough to activate the time
machine. I looked up once again at the meteor which now filled most of the sky. I knew only minutes remained before it hit.
“Now,” I said nervously. “Try it now.”
Cyclotron pressed the button on the Oomphlifier. Instantaneously, the speed of the funnel cloud ratcheted up to the fastest cyclone on record—and then got even faster. We all began backing away as we felt the pressure from the circular winds start to suck us in. And still the speed got faster. And then faster still. The cylinder was spinning at a speed that looked equal to what the prodigium had been able to generate.
The meteor was now so close that not only could we hear it but I could swear we could feel the enormous heat from it as well—or maybe that was just my dad’s hand on my shoulder. Cyclotron only had seconds left. And then I saw it. The cones on top of the Tipler began to move. With one final burst of willpower and speed, Cyclotron gave it his last bit of effort, and the cones tipped sideways. The last thing I saw was a flaming ball heading right for us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
A Wrinkle in Timing
When I opened my eyes again, I expected to see a blinding fireball. Instead, all I saw was a full moon rising in the still-dusky sky high above the once-again-present Carbunkle Mountains. We had made it back to our own time.
Heroes and villains alike were also just shaking off the effects of the journey across sixty-five million years. There was even one stray dinosaur that had failed to flee with its fellow reptiles and was now looking very out of place.
The members of the Commune for Justice used the momentary confusion as an opportunity to resume their attack. But they had seriously underestimated the level of irritation that had built up in people who had just been whipsawed through time, threatened by dinosaurs, and almost crushed by a meteor. I don’t know who threw the first one, but a large custard pie came hurtling out of the crowd, smacking Bliss right in the face. From there it turned into a free-for-all.
The Return of Meteor Boy? Page 20