Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis

by Richard Roberts

As soon as I found Claire and Ray and told them the good news.

  e’s got to still be here, because he’s not answering his phone.”

  So spaketh my best friend Claire, about my other best friend (and boyfriend) Ray. Her argument made a lot of sense, for we stood on the threshold of the kingdom of quiet and peace―the Los Angeles Main Branch Public Library.

  I regarded the glass doors of the main entrance with trepidation. That’s not the usual emotion people experience in front of a library, but not a lot of people have rampaged through one to steal a piece of alien technology from a demigod. Technically, we were the good guys in that encounter, but the Librarian had not been open to moral nuance then, and I had no reason to believe she’d become more understanding. Thus my avoiding the place for six months.

  Claire, my literal partner in crime, could always read my thoughts. She opened the door and pushed me inside. “Relax. Ray’s been going here regularly, so she can’t be that mad.”

  “Why? He never mentioned it to me. When did he even find the time before the semester ended?” Not that I was jealous, but it was a good question.

  “We go home to our families in the evening,” Claire replied, studiously bland.

  Ow. Lacking the fabled Lutra Poker Face, I winced. Yeah, Ray did not spend any more time with his family than he had to. I’d gotten the message that things were so bad, he had no intention of ever telling me the details.

  My best friend gripped my shoulders and leaned her face forward over one of them, so the arms of our glasses clicked together. “There, now. All that worry for nothing. Not a single vengeful history-warping old woman to be seen.”

  Indeed, we stood in the anteroom with the little statues right by the doorway to the big check-out desk room. Everything was… quite normal.

  The children’s section was full of miniature shelves with miniature books on them, like normal. The young adult section looked like a Victorian prison, like normal. The pointlessly ornate domed room completely failed to have a giant iron gate or menacing statues of gods, destroyed or otherwise.

  Quite why I had expected anything to be different, I couldn’t say. Obviously, the Librarian sucked all the crazy stuff she’d summoned back wherever it came from, and returned the library to normal. A lot of damage would have been repaired in six months even without her interference. It’s just hard to let go of the memory of cloud escalators, or fuzzy animals fighting on castle parapets.

  One thing had changed, but in a ‘the more things stay the same’ way. The deep pit at the center of the actual library part of the library no longer had an orange glass globe the size of a beach ball on a pedestal at the bottom. From up here, I couldn’t tell what it was, but something else had replaced the stolen Orb of the Heavens in its display.

  Slick. Very slick, Librarian. Bravo. No stolen ultra-powerful alien weapons, nope! Just rotating the abstract art collection.

  Claire and I paused at the top of the pit, looking around the multiple stories, above and underground, that made up the real library. Finding one person in this giant warehouse of human knowledge should have been a nightmare, except…

  “There!” I pointed down a couple of levels into the pit. A figure in all black sitting at one of the tables. ‘Distinctive fashion’ wins again!

  All the main library floors were the same. Gray shelves packed with books, wooden tables and chairs, blandly patterned carpeting. When supervillains weren’t rampaging through it, the library wrapped you in blissful peace.

  Ray, scrawny and blond, looked uncharacteristically relaxed. We’d tracked him by his black jacket over a black T-shirt, black slacks, and black dress shoes, and he sprawled like a dropped doll in a chair near the glass wall. On the table in front of him were, well, books. Old books. Scruffy books, with faded red and brown and green covers, no decoration, and aging yellow pages. In itty bitty letters, the nearest’s cover said ‘Notes On Dungeon Exploration, With An Aim Of Surviving Scientific Inquiry.’ Well, okay, then.

  “I can smell the age on these,” I said, leaning over him. Dust. They smelled like dust.

  He lifted the book he’d been reading. It had a wood spine. “This one’s three hundred years old. First printing.”

  “You could buy a less disintigratey copy online,” I suggested to the boy who didn’t have to worry about his parents finding out he’d been paid a fortune by a superintelligent evil spider.

  “I don’t think there was a second printing,”

  That got me inspecting the collection again. The next book I picked up didn’t have a title at all. If the letters weren’t typed, I would have thought someone just glued their notebook into an old book cover. No table of contents, no proper spacing. Crudely scribbled pictures of broken buildings, glyphs, area map, and ‘paragraphs’ like:

  cellar masonry too advanced for village super powered construction lack of bats in village made me suspicious so I forewent acoustic hollow detector swept walls until I found clef symbol cannot find switch so levered one stone out with crowbar while wearing armored coat right about detector silver bell contraption behind secret door sonic war?

  “Treasure hunting manuals?” I didn’t know there were such things!

  The same page had captured Claire’s attention. “I don’t know which I’d want more, the bell trap as a treasure, or to know what ancient superhero built it. It never occurred to me until now that people like Faust and Joan of Arc must have had secret lairs.”

  Claire and I picked at the collection like curious vultures. Ray, justifiably proud, stroked the book he’d been reading. “If the librarians even knew they had these books, they’d lock them up in the rare book section.”

  That made me hoist an eyebrow over the top of my glasses. “How can they not know?”

  Claire and Ray both gave me the same look of disbelief at my naiveté, and chorused, “Superheroes.”

  Oh, right. Stealthy donations. And a super powered mysterious head Librarian.

  In fact, I’d set something off. Claire lowered her voice even below ‘library hush’ and leaned in close to us. “I hear there’s a room for magic books.”

  Ooh. That made me lick my lips. “They’d be more valuable than the whole rest of the collection. And the building.”

  Claire rubbed her hands together eagerly. “I’d love to get my hands on those.” She sagged, arms hanging, head on her shoulder, and let out a theatrically despairing sigh. “But Mourning Dove and the Librarian would go ballistic, so it’s out of my league.”

  She pouted, visibly offended that we might not be able to accomplish alone what an army of top power supervillains directed by a diabolic arachnid intelligence had barely achieved last time. Poor thing!

  My pity for her evaporated. Leaning over the table so I could tilt around to grin at Ray, I asked, “So, guess-what-guess-what-guess-what?”

  His floofy eyebrows went up over his glasses. Me, Ray, and Claire, the Three Spectacleeers! “You came up with a formula to give yourself physical powers?”

  Oh, you’re good, Ray Viles. I kept forgetting to do that. Mad science was fun, but…

  Back on track, Penelope!

  “My parents lifted the superheroics ban!”

  “Which means lifting the supervillainy ban!” added Claire, flanking him from the other side.

  Ray grinned, forced to it by our lovable enthusiasm. Of course, sunshine, interesting shadows, and breathing made Ray grin. It was not a high bar. “Which, most importantly, means your mother won’t be subjecting everything you do to minute statistical analysis.”

  Got it in one, Ray.

  Claire slid up to sit on the edge of the table, hands perched behind her, feet kicking in idle rumination. “We’d better grab this opportunity while it lasts. My mom doesn’t think it will. The other parents think their kids are just kids. When something happens, they’ll change their minds.”

  I lifted my hands, palms out. “As long as my folks are going with the crowd until then. They’re trusting my discretion, as long as the
y get to give me lessons on using my powers for good.”

  “Ooooooooh.” Claire’s eyes actually sparkled. Literally. Shock had loosened her control over her super-cuteness power.

  Ray crossed one leg over the other knee, leaned back, and stroked his chin, creating a picture of philosophic thought. “So you’re not just back in business, this is bonus territory.”

  My grin bullied its way onto my face. “It’s been a good day. With this, I can start planning to finally fix my Bad Penny problem.”

  Ray shrugged. “Just stop.”

  Claire leaned over him, scowling. “I don’t want to stop. I love the Inscrutable Machine!”

  We’d run variations of this argument a dozen times, but now I was putting my foot down. In fact, I gave a light stomp on the library carpet to make my sincerity clear. “Not an option. Mom doesn’t think the way other people do. Right now, we’re coasting on the truth being wildly improbable, but even if Bad Penny disappears, she will figure it out. She might figure it out faster. This is a house of cards, and I’m going to get out from under it before it falls over. Besides, I want to be a hero, remember?”

  Claire gave me the skeptical head-tilted look. “No you don’t. You want to be a villain. You just think you should be a hero.”

  My turn to pout. “Hey! Justice is literally my middle name! Penelope Justice Akk!”

  Claire and Ray burst into peals of laughter, causing the librarian at the reference desk to eye us disapprovingly. Until now, even our exclamations had been hushed, but my friends just couldn’t hold it in. I had to wait like thirty seconds before Ray managed to wheeze, “I forgot.”

  “And this is why I let you forget.”

  He giggled a little more and waved a finger between me and Claire. “You’re both right. Penny can decide on villainy when she’s not living with hero parents. Until then, she can’t live under the Sword of Damocles.”

  Claire nodded, although she still tittered too hard to get words out.

  Ray, almost succeeding in sounding solemn, said, “When you come up with a plan, we’ll be with you no matter what it is, Penny. You know that.”

  Claire gave her golden curls an exaggerated flip, leaning to one side as smugly as a cat. “But until then, we can get in high-quality Inscrutable Machine fun. I want to score as much as I can before I go off to summer camp.”

  Trying to pretend more reluctance than I felt, I said, “Well… I guess stealing from heroes and villains never felt like actual theft…”

  Claire pumped her fist in gleeful triumph. Ray closed his book, pushed his chair back, and stood. “We can split the difference. I would like to locate Mourning Dove’s hideout.”

  “Bwa?” I said intelligently.

  Claire lacked my ‘at a loss for words’ gene, but did look a bit stunned. “So, the whole ‘out of our league’ thing…?”

  “I don’t want to attack it or steal from it. She won’t hurt us for looking around.” He sounded confident in his argument, and… actually, it made sense to me. Mourning Dove might seethe with dark power and leave a corpse-strewn trail behind her, but we’d run face-first into her morality before, which I would describe with words like ‘bloodless’ and ‘robotic.’

  That left me with another question. “Why?”

  Ray’s habitual smile disappeared, replaced with the stern, clenched jaw of a boy working his way up to something. The expression alone wasn’t enough to steel him, so he pushed the table away and stood. He couldn’t even look at me directly. This was that serious. When it came, the confession was… anti-climactic. “I got hooked working out the trapped corridor in the museum. The puzzles, the archaeology, the danger… I don’t want to be a hero or a villain. I want to be a treasure hunter. You can’t learn it just with books, and it’s more dangerous than crime. A lot more. Ms. Emilia Rivka Nikiti St. Daphne keeps hedging on whether she’s willing to teach me, so I’m going to prove I’ve got what it takes.”

  After closing up his books, Ray gathered them carefully, lifting fifty pounds of wood pulp in his arms and heading off into the stacks. From his stony expression, he still hadn’t figured out that I was more jealous of his super strength than mad about… whatever betrayal he thought he’d just inflicted on me.

  Claire and I trailed along, and as he carefully slid ancient tomes onto their shelves next to merely fusty old books, I slid up next to him. “So, did these books teach you enough to find Mourning Dove’s lair? Base? Hideout? Fortress of Corpseitude?”

  Ray’s gloom melted. He turned a smile on me radiating adoring gratitude as mysterious as his guilty fear a moment ago. Slipping his arm around my waist, he pulled me closer, and touched his lips to mine.

  Ggglk. Criminy. We were in a public place! Okay, yes, the bookshelves hid us from most of the library, but there could be people watching. Forget people, Claire was right there, grinning in lurid matchmaking triumph!

  Ignoring my incendiary cheeks and jelly knees, Ray said, “I think so. I could use your help, both of you.”

  Despite her sly amusement, Claire was a good enough friend to cover the conversation side of things while I recovered from mortifying bliss. “You have our help even if you don’t want it.”

  Ray nodded, slipped off his fake glasses, and cleaned them with a cloth while he went into lecture mode. “What I’ve learned from these books is that people with super powers have been hiding their secrets for all of history, and way back into pre-history. Those secrets tend to be hard to find, not because they’re so well-hidden, but because people assume they’ll be hidden in some clever, magical way.”

  “The Purloined Letter effect,” supplied Claire.

  “Pretty much. People hunting for treasures or lairs assume there’s a mystery attached, or that they know more about the location than they really do. Modern science has only just created instruments hinting at hidden rooms in the pyramids. Archaeologists looked so hard for secret doors, it didn’t occur to them that a room might be completely walled off and abandoned. In this case… how much of the library have you guys actually seen?”

  I followed that intriguing thought. “All of it…? But no, of course not. Only the public areas, and only the ones with books.”

  Claire nibbled her lip, her whole body tilted to one side as she considered. “There are those doors near the children’s section. I’ve only seen them opened when the Librarian used them as time gates. And there’s an employee-only door behind the checkout desk.”

  Nodding again, Ray waved a hand up and around, encompassing the library. “This building is huge and it’s full of employee sections. Mourning Dove’s lair will be in one of them.”

  My hand went up. “Bzzt. No can do. The librarians would know.”

  Claire rubbed her hands together gleefully, looking past me towards the pictures in her imagination. “I bet they do, but they’re happy to keep the secret. I would be.”

  “Something would leak,” I insisted.

  She bobbed a fingertip at me. “It has. Everyone knows her lair is here somewhere.”

  “Everyone in the super powered community, at least,” Ray corrected, now back to his usual sly cheer.

  I launched the sixty-four google-plex dollar question. “So… where?”

  “It has to be in the areas least prone to volunteers or visitors seeing Mourning Dove moving around, but with a convenient exit,” Ray said.

  My lips pursed. That didn’t narrow it down much. “A convenient exit could be anywhere. Some actual, non-superhero-related secret doors wouldn’t be out of place in this building.”

  Claire pointed through the glass wall, and down. “But the most secret area is obvious.”

  The bottom of the pit, which had hardly anything available to the public, lots of room for underground passageways, and stored the Orb of the Heavens in convenient guarding distance until Christmas.

  Still… “So, that’s it? You think she has, what, staked out a few book-binding rooms and the librarians leave her alone?”

  Ray stuck his hand
s in his pockets heading towards the history section’s front door, and the main stairway. “It may be more subtle than that, but that is where I’d like to start.”

  When we got out into the pit, Claire pressed a hand against each of our backs, and pushed us toward the stairs going down. “You go on. I’ll catch up in a minute.”

  She skipped up the stairs while we tromped down towards the bottom. We had much less distance to go.

  With Claire gone, a spell took hold. It was the same magic as every time Ray and I were together alone. The hush of the library settled over us, and while I didn’t know what to say, there wasn’t any need to make something up. We descended in peace, and wandered up to the exhibit that had replaced the Orb of the Heavens.

  The display stand, a massive, rough, gray rock, remained. The Orb had floated above it, pretending to be a pretty, flame-orange crystal ball donated by some superhero, and nothing more. The new exhibit was a bit more blatant. A full human facemask, but only the back was clearly visible. The front connected by a tangle of wires to, of all things, a book. Everything looked to be made out of silver, although practically any metal could shine like silver. It hovered, occasionally bobbing faintly, in the center of what looked like an extremely large soap bubble.

  Unable to resist, I tapped the bubble. Hard. Felt like glass.

  On the upper edge of the stone block, a little bronze plaque read:

  From the collection of the superhero Inquisitor. You are unforgotten and unmourned.

  Ray and I both snickered. Charming.

  I turned an expectant look on Ray. “So?”

  He didn’t get it. “So, what?”

  “Who was Inquisitor? You know every hero and villain there ever was.” Claire was probably the biggest geek of the three of us, but Ray came close to matching her super power enthusiasm.

  He laid his hand against his chest, unconvincingly aghast. “That is not even close to true. There have been about two hundred heroes and villains at any one time just in Los Angeles since 1970, with an average career length of ten years. Do you think I can keep track of eight hundred names?”