by Seth Jacob
“Whatever, Robin Hood.”
“I wish you would listen to me, Spectacle. I want to use the money generated from this operation to fund scholarships for inner city kids. I want to donate millions to the run down schools, I want to give heavily to charities, I want to develop outreach programs for young superhumans, I want to create SUHP addiction treatment clinics. I want to establish institutions to help the underprivileged, instead of trod all over them like the wealthy people in this city do. There will always be supervillains. Fighting that truth with your fists is an endless, pointless war. Your father’s death taught me that. I want to eliminate the societal conditions, the poverty and terrible quality of life, that produce dangerous and violent supervillains. You could save more people working with me than you ever could as a superhero.”
“And I guess Mistress Gorgon is just going to give her money to charities. I’m real sure that The Immaterial Man’s going to donate to a soup kitchen.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. They can do whatever they want with their take. I’m just talking about the millions that I’ll make…and the millions you’ll make, if you can play ball. Work with me. Be my mole within the superhero community. Feed me information on the activity of superheroes, like when and where The Millenials will be patrolling. Use your relationship with Ultra Lady, find out if the Superb 6 are onto my scent and let me know. Help me distract the superhero community with meaningless super-brawls and, if you’ll excuse the term, spectacle. Think of all the lives that could be saved, and all the good that we can do, together, as friends. As partners, son.” The way that The Punster was crouched in front of me and the desperate passion in his voice almost made it seem like he was begging me to see things from his perspective. He seemed completely earnest, and his proposal actually seemed to come from a genuine desire to make the world a better place. On top of that, he had a comforting, grandfatherly presence that made me want to help him. But I wasn’t buying it.
“No thanks,” I answered.
“You’re sure? There’s no way we can talk about this—”
“No, there’s no way we can talk about this. You’re full of shit, Punster. You’re putting on a show for me right now. None of this is real. You never bribed my father. There’s not going to be any charity, you’re not going to give back to the community. You want the same thing every supervillain wants. You want everyone to appreciate your greatness, you want to be filthy rich. You want to be the king of everything. And I don’t care if you give me this box of my dad’s stuff, I’m not going to stop until you’re in a prison cell.”
The Punster furrowed his brow. He stood up, and his old knees cracked. He stretched a bit, and he rubbed the white stubble under his chin. Then The Punster looked back to me, and all of his kindness and warmth was gone.
“Listen to me, you little shit. I don’t care if you believe me or not about the bribes, read your father’s journals, it’s all there. You’ll see in his own words that I’m telling the truth. And here’s another thing. If I even get a vague idea that you’re trying to interfere with my operations…I command some of the most powerful superhumans on the planet. I will not hesitate for a second to kill you.”
“Yeah, okay, but you just said you weren’t going to kill me.”
“No, I won’t just abduct you and make you disappear, because that’ll make people like Ultra Lady ask questions that I don’t want asked. Then I’ve got the Superb 6 searching for you. No, I’ll have you killed in the most explosive, extravagant way possible. No one will wonder what happened to you. I’ll have The Abnormalite rip your arms and legs off in the middle of the street. I’ll have Mistress Gorgon burn you up while crowds of pedestrians record it all on their phones so that the whole world can watch you screaming as you die.”
“You’re bluffing…you’re just an old nerd who’s obsessed with puns.”
“Am I? Was I bluffing when I killed your mother?” The Punster shouted in my face at the top of his lungs.
“That’s not true, my mother died in a car accident,” I said, and The Punster smiled.
“Oh, is that what Jack Titan told you?” The Punster grinned in a way that contorted his entire wrinkled face. I saw the murderer that he hid behind the curtain of a soothing, kindly senior citizen. I saw the pure glee in those eyes. I saw the swirling madness that was The Punster, and I knew. I knew that he was telling the truth. I knew that this deranged bastard killed my mother.
“How old were you, Spectacle? Two? Three? That was my greatest victory over Jack. Sabotaging your mother’s car by replacing the brake pads with pads of paper. She was a wonderful woman, by the way. I killed her just to hurt your father, just to spite him. He never quite got over that. If I’d do that to an innocent woman, you don’t think I’ll kill you? You don’t think I’d put some idiotic kid with severe daddy issues out of his misery, if he stood in between me and cementing my legacy? Just. Fucking. Try me.” Tears ran down my face. If I wasn’t restrained with thick steel cables, I probably would have killed The Punster right then and there. The Punster waved over a few Goons, and they started spraying that cold, sedative goo all over me. I felt my eyelids getting heavy.
“When you wake up, you’ll be home, Spectacle. Keep that box of your father’s things, and move on with your childish life of squabbling with bottom of the rung, loser supervillains like the loser superhero that you are. Keep playing spandex dress up and crimefighter make believe in Never Never Land with your little friends while the adults handle the real adult business. Can you do that? Can you do that for me, Spectacle?”
Chapter 12: Soup de Grâce
Armadillotron is easily one of the silliest supervillains in a long, storied history of ridiculous costumed criminals. Basically, he’s a guy with a lot of free time who put together a bargain basement exoskeleton armor that looks like the gross, leathery segmented shell of an armadillo. You’d think if you were going to build a suit of weaponized armor, you’d come up with a cool name that has to do with knights, or metal alloys, or at the very least, something that sounds vaguely technological. But no, Armadillotron really committed to his whole armadillo theme. He even had a swarm of little robot armadillo drones for back up. One month after I met The Punster, this was the caliber of supervillain that I was fighting.
“Armadillo Army, attack formation alpha seven!”
It was 2 pm, I had just woken up, and I was watching online video of The Millennials fighting Armadillotron and his absurd armadillo robots. The armadillo drones skittered across the street and towards us with their taser tails spitting sparks, and I could only watch the video sober for thirty seconds before it was too much to take.
I got up from my couch, where I had passed out last night, and I walked across the garbage coated floor of my apartment to grab the first of that day’s many beers. As I crossed my apartment, I heard Armadillotron ranting something about the “little armored ones inheriting the earth.” I grabbed a beer out of the fridge, then I heard myself in the video drunkenly slur something about Armadillotron’s reign being “armadillover before it started,” and I grabbed the three more beers that I would need to deal with the fact that I actually said that out loud.
I walked back to the couch and continued watching the video that Joe Metal had recorded on his armor and uploaded to the internet. Mr. Mercurial started to snake his metallic tendrils into the seams of Armadillotron’s exoskeleton, and I looked through the playlist of recent videos of Millennials fights. In the past month, we had fought Armadillotron twice, the Lacrosse Assassin (the less said about him the better), Master Boson and the Ninjatoms, Professor Dinosaur and his Henchasaurs, and a guy who called himself, no joke, Bob the Invincible.
I was two beers deep by the time Mr. Mercurial had taken apart Armadillotron’s shoddily constructed exoskeleton and Insight telekinetically socked the shit out of his glass jaw. Even though he was beaten, it was obvious from the video of Armadillotron’s smug face that he was completely satisfied. This is what The Punster paid him to do
. This is what The Punster paid all the bottom feeders that the Millennials fought to do. They were paid a respectable fee to make as much noise as possible, to rant and rave like carnival barkers about taking over the world, to cause a spectacular distraction that would preoccupy superheroes like me while The Punster and his forces quietly pilfered untold millions of dollars. The game was rigged.
I had started on my third beer when I clicked on the video of our fight with Professor Dinosaur and his Henchasaurs. Professor Dinosaur was beginning his spiel about “the superiority of homo sapien dinosaurus,” and my eyes started to glaze over as I watched myself and my teammates fighting the scaly skinned blowhard for the umpteenth time. My attention drifted to my father’s box sitting on my messy coffee table. His so called ‘trophy room,’ which I had worked for months to obtain sat there, with the empty beer bottles and half eaten plates of food. I leaned over the coffee table, and I snatched one of my father’s journals out of the box.
For the past month, I had been reading about my father’s career as a superhero in his own words. That cardboard box was stuffed with mementos from his life as Jack Titan, but none of them provided me such a clear window into his world as those dozens of spiral notebooks. I never knew that my father was a superhero when he was alive, and I never had a chance to talk to him about it. Those journals revealed more to me than he ever would have.
I read about the first time that his superpowers manifested when he was just a kid participating in the Harvard SUHP Project. He said that he was sure that the psychoactive drug had killed him as his heart raced, he saw strange visual distortions and vivid colors, and his muscles grew strong enough to tear through a metal table like tissue paper.
I read about the day he met The Punster, a cripplingly shy linguistics student who was also in the study, and how The Punster never got over the fact that SUHP didn’t give him any permanent superhuman ability. I read about that first night that my father put on that golden wreath and mask and called himself Jack Titan, and that amazing feeling he got when he saw that they were calling him “The Man of Myth” in the papers.
I read about his first confrontation with The Punster who almost pulled off the largest SUHP heist in history which he called “the soup drive”, and how he never understood The Punster’s all consuming fixation with Jack Titan that began that day. The Punster’s unhealthy obsession with Jack Titan may have started their feud, but it was my father’s pride and inability to just ignore that psychopath and his endless pun-themed schemes that turned it into a full fledged rivalry. If you read in between the lines, it was clear that he became infatuated with the idea that Jack Titan always beat The Punster at his own game.
He wrote about meeting my mom after almost getting killed by The Punster’s giant rampaging ant robot, the “Antdroid.” He wrote about never believing in the idea of love at first sight before he met her. He wrote about the night that I was born, and how that changed everything about being a superhero. He held my tiny body in his hands, and wondered how he could go on risking his life every night in fights against costumed criminals when there was this little life that depended on him? How could he justify leaving a baby boy without a father because he got a thrill from slapping on a Titan-motif costume and beating up maniacs like The Punster? When I was born, being a superhero changed for him. It’d been something that he did purely for the charge, for the adrenaline rush, for the fun of it, but it had become something else. He couldn’t put it into words, but he clearly knew that it wasn’t about the super-brawls for the sake of super-brawls anymore. He had a responsibility to continue that he could not explain or understand.
I had read maybe half of all of my father’s journals by this point, and as Professor Dinosaur went on and on about “the reign of the Dinosaur”, I flipped to a random page in the notebook I just grabbed. I took a sip from beer number three, and I expected to read about another fistfight with The Abnormalite or maybe a particularly surreal confrontation with the original Dr. Delusion. What I actually read was so disturbing that it made me feel sick to my stomach. All I’ll say about what I read on that page of that notebook is that The Punster killed my mother. You don’t want to know what my father wrote on that day. There are some things that don’t need to be repeated in these memoirs.
I dropped the notebook on the floor. Insight telepathically attacked Professor Dinosaur’s reptile brain in the online footage, and the video ended with Mr. Mercurial making some joke about asteroid impacts and extinction. The room was silent now, and I sat there clutching a beer and wishing that I had never read what I just read in that notebook. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. Took a few deep breaths. It didn’t help. I still felt like I had a bucket of ice in my stomach.
When I opened my eyes and got up from the couch, I happened to notice something out of place on my cluttered coffee table. It was a small gift wrapped box with a purple bow. Someone must have broken into my apartment and left it on the coffee table while I was passed out right there on the couch. I picked it up and ripped apart the wrapping paper. I opened the box, and there was a baggie of SUHP crystals inside of it. A little card attached to the baggie read, “Soup de Grâce.” A bouillon cube mercy killing wrapped up in a neat little bow.
There was a tapping on the window behind me. It startled me, and I dropped the bag of SUHP crystals onto my laptop keyboard. I turned around and saw Ultra Lady hovering outside of my window.
“Open the window,” she said.
“What do you want?”
“Just open the window, Spectacle.”
I unlocked the window and opened it. Ultra Lady wafted into the room like she was carried in by a gentle breeze. She crunched an empty beer can under her red boot as she touched down on the carpet. Ultra Lady looked around at the mess that my apartment had devolved into over the course of the last month. She looked at the legions of empty beer bottles, the unwashed spandex littering the floor, and she scowled at the stench of half eaten food and mountains of unwashed dishes. She saw the cardboard box on my coffee table marked “Trophy Room,” and she was confused.
“I…I came to tell you that I tracked down Mistress Gorgon. I wanted to warn you that…I can’t prove it, but I know that she’s working with The Punster. And maybe even a few more high profile villains are involved. This is…big. I wanted to let you know because I figured you’d need to know what you’re getting into if you’re going to confront Mistress Gorgon about your father’s things…but obviously you’ve already found them. What happened, Spectacle?”
“Nothing. I’m fine,” I said, and I opened another beer. I took a long sip. There was an awkward silence.
“After the museum, The Punster blindsided me. His henchmen, his Goons, ambushed me and brought me to talk to him. Turns out The Punster took my dad’s stuff. He gave it back to me.”
“He just gave it to you? Why would he do that? What did he get in return?”
“Nothing,” I said, and I drank again. Ultra Lady leaned over the couch and shoved my shoulder.
“What the hell, Spectacle? What is wrong with you? What happened to you?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for the concern, but I’m fine.”
“I don’t know what to say…when I saw you at the Z-Ray Lounge and at the Kirby Museum…you had changed so much from the first time I met you. You were doing great. Now look at you. Jesus Christ, Spectacle, you look like shit.”
“Whatever. I’m completely fine, thanks.”
Ultra Lady gave me this look of skepticism mixed with disappointment.
“Spectacle…stop lying to me. Every time you say you’re fine, your heartbeat tells me that you’re losing your shit. Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Ultra Lady…I just…I got what I wanted, okay? I wanted to find my father’s ‘trophy room.’ I wanted to know about his superhero career. Now I know. Everything I imagined about Jack Titan is bullshit. The truth is that my dad was a superhero because of his own fucked up addiction to the adrenaline rush. Th
e truth is that he antagonized The Punster, he was just as responsible for their lifelong rivalry as The Punster was. The Punster killed my mother, Ultra Lady, did you know that? Did my dad tell you that my mother would still be alive if he hadn’t played this stupid game with The Punster?”
“…No, no I didn’t know that. I’m sorry…that’s…”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re sorry. Look, I don’t want to have anything to do with The Punster. I never want to see that man for the rest of my life, so you take this to the Superb 6. You…people deal with him. The Punster has organized all of the major league supervillains. Mistress Gorgon is working with him…so is The Abnormalite, The Immaterial Man, Dr. Delusion, Dragon General, and a goddamn legion of D-list supervillains too. The Punster is running the super-crime in this city. You take that to the Superb 6, I’m washing my hands of the whole thing.”
“You knew about this? And you’ve been doing, what…” Ultra Lady gestured at my disgusting apartment.
“Drinking and doing nothing?”
“Not doing nothing. I took down the mighty Armadillotron, I defeated the fearsome Professor Dinosaur—”
“Spectacle, I just don’t get you. I saw you survive a fight with Mistress Gorgon and her Harpies. Not many people can say that. Yet for some reason, you’re playing in the minor leagues with jokes like Armadillotron. What the hell, man?”
“What do you want me to say, Ultra Lady? You don’t know me. Don’t pretend like you know me because you had some team ups with my old man. I mean, what is this? What the fuck is this? You’re trying to be my mentor or something because you think my dad was your mentor? You are just completely full of shit. My dad didn’t write a word about you. He wrote hundreds of pages about The Punster. But I haven’t found a single sentence about you.”
Ultra Lady was hurt. She didn’t say anything, and I felt bad for lashing out at her almost instantly. She sat down on the couch next to me, and she saw the baggie of clear SUHP crystals on my laptop keyboard.