Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis

by Richard Roberts

  “We have our own Undercity entrance that we’ll go through when we’re ready,” I said.

  They stopped struggling, and stood side by side, shoulders hunched and glum faces looking down.

  Ray broke character first, looking back at me with a nod. “I want to go down there, but I want to know what treasure I’m hunting for, first.”

  Claire stayed slumped for a couple more seconds so that everyone would understand how much more dedicated an actress she was than Ray. Then the sulk disappeared, and she spun around to give me a bright grin and rub her hands together. One still had the bird ring on it. “This is Penny’s time, anyway.”

  “So, this is more than just a social visit?” asked Cybermancer hopefully. Working with Lucyfar, my team’s ridiculous antics had not ruffled him in the slightest.

  On the spot before an older mad scientist, I twisted one of my braids around my finger and felt awkward. “I wanted to do something villainous, but I’m too short on weapons to launch anything official. So, instead, I’m going to make it snow.”

  That did get him. A moment’s pause, and he bowed deeply, gesturing at the equipment surrounding us. “My lab is your lab, mem sahib.”

  Claire caught me looking around hungrily, and giggled. “She wishes. Bad Penny’s lab is pretty sad at the moment. She would love a lab like this.”

  “I would love my parents to not disown me. The funny thing is, I get the feeling if I’m a villain when I grow up, they won’t mind. It’s the parts where I’m a kid and I did it without asking that will infuriate them.” I was babbling, really, while my eyes drifted over strange machines and the back of my head sparkled with half-formed schematics and possibilities.

  “We’ll help―” Claire started to say. I didn’t hear the rest. She reached out and squeezed my shoulder, and the ring on her finger flared, black in one direction, light in the other.

  Claire fell over, but she disappeared from my vision before she hit the floor. All I could see were the blueprints. So many, and so beautiful.

  I didn’t actually catch myself laughing, but the whole ‘feet spread, hands curled into claws’ posture when my memory caught up suggested it.

  What had I missed while my power took over and built? Unusually, I didn’t feel tired.

  Wait, Claire. Was she okay?

  Yes, there she was, standing with the others and no longer wearing the bird ring.

  Something must have given away that my power had let go. Ray, Claire, Cybermancer, and Lucyfar all applauded.

  Looking around, I realized why. I had not built a snow machine, but that was about the only thing I hadn’t built.

  At least it all clustered together. In fact, at first glance, it looked like the room contained two Pennys, one dressed in my casual summer T-shirt and skirt, and the other equipped for villainy better than Bad Penny ever had been.

  Where to even start? The mannequin? I stepped up to it. It looked like me. Exactly like me, but with doll joints for posing. Up close, the skin and hair weren’t quite convincing, although it did capture my hair’s drab brown and braided pigtails perfectly. Cautiously, I took my double’s jaw in both hands, and turned the head left. “I made this?”

  The mannequin had boots. The mannequin had an entire supervillain costume, the kind of hardcore mad scientist look I’d always envied. Brown leather pants, or at least some material that looked like leather. A blue and white striped shirt, mostly hidden under the white lab coat. Clearly I’d been inspired by Cybermancer’s.

  But…

  “I am not wearing a corset again,” I said as I fingered the one on my model, ridged and the same brown fake leather as the pants. Really, the corsets the robot overlords of Jupiter’s moons herded us into had been annoying and uncomfortable.

  “You’ll have to. It has most of the armor.” Claire stepped up to the mannequin with me.

  That got me fingering the rest of the fabric. These weren’t just clothes. They had… stuff imbedded inside. Armor of some kind, maybe high-tech. Wow. And that was before the staff, the obviously weaponized gloves, the backpack, the grenade pouches…

  I took the staff from the mannequin’s stiff, but unresisting hands. Jointed fingers. I’d gone out of the way to make a lifelike double of myself in the middle of producing so much other stuff? What kind of zap did the ring give me?

  My audience noticed the shift of attention to the statue itself.

  Lucyfar said, “We thought you were building a robot, for a minute there. No such luck.”

  “Huh.” Super witty, right? But her mistake tickled my brain in a totally different way than activating my power. Holding the staff loosely, I took the mannequin’s chin with my other, tilting it from side to side. Close up, it was too stiff, but at a distance, you would think this thing was me. Great field of movement, too.

  An actual separate Bad Penny might be just what I needed. Some kind of display to make my parents be a little too happy with the good Penny, and a little too off guard, to destroy my life when I told them the truth. But what? And how? Have someone else operate it with the control chair? That wouldn’t fool my mom for five seconds. Building an AI sounded like a recipe for disaster.

  Almost there. I almost had what I needed. This idea would have to percolate, and anyway, I had too much to do right now.

  My attention went back to the staff. It was about my height, made of metal, but surprisingly light―probably because it wasn’t solid. Windows peeked into bubble compartments containing variously colored fluids.

  That got Cybermancer to step forward, hands raised, fingers spread, but reluctant to touch the weapon. “Those are my potions. You raided my stock hard to build your new equipment set. These were mostly bombs. What do they do now?”

  My cheeks felt tight. Oops. I was blushing. “Iiiiiiii have no idea.”

  He looked puzzled only for a moment, then gave me a disarming smile smile and shrug. “Oh, right. You have the fugue style of mad science talent, so you don’t remember. Don’t look awkward, kid. I’m the idiot for not realizing. I just watched you ranting and moving like lightning.”

  Taking off his goggles, he held them against his chest. It was a ridiculous pose, but he looked solemn and sincere. “As one of your peers, Bad Penny, I am humbled. You had six machines running at a time, and you never measured anything. I’ve had to make my own costumes, and I can’t imagine operating a sewing machine freehand like you did, or that fast.”

  Now I was blushing because I felt flattered. Tugging a pigtail, I gave him a crooked grin. “The downside is that I now have a stack of dangerous weapons to test, with no idea what they do.”

  Claire sprang to attention like a soldier. “I’ll help!”

  “I offer my hands as well,” said Ray, as soon as she finished.

  Lucyfar rubbed her hands together, face lighting up with the kind of demonically eager grin I normally expected from Ray. “There’s nothing I love more than―”

  Cybermancer held up a finger to her. “No.”

  Cupping her hands before her as if cradling a precious thing, Lucyfar begged, “But… explosions!”

  “No,” he repeated. “Theirs, not ours.”

  She scowled, stuck her hands in her pockets, and scuffed the floor with a kick. “Aw, shucks, Dad. Can I at least watch the explosions?”

  Convincingly exasperated, he answered, “You can be the target, for all I care, as long as Penny and her friends get to play with their own toys first.”

  Lucyfar smacked her fist into her palm. “I love it. Bad Penny. Give it to me! Unleash the wrath of that death dealer you’ve got there. Give it to me right in the face!”

  Okay, now she was actually getting weird. I gave her the ‘you’re being weird’ stare. “You’re kidding.”

  She pointed up at her chin with both index fingers. “Right in the face!”

  Well… she was awfully hard to hurt. I’d seen that in action. And she did ask for it.

  So how to use it on her? Was it melee? Aside from the stick, three
metal cogs floated in the air around one end. They were different sizes, and not connected to the shaft at all. No other controls presented themselves.

  I tried pointing it at Lucyfar. Nothing. I gave a little jab. Squadoo. Reaching out, I flicked the nearest gear. It started to spin, and the middle gear spun in the opposite direction, while the top gear matched the bottom―if not quite at the same rate. Another jab. Still, no results―until I lowered the staff to stare down its length. The downward sweeping motion unleashed a twisting arc of energy off the tip, spraying up bubbles as it swept over the floor.

  The blast lasted less than a second, ending as suddenly as it began. It left behind rock scoured so clean that it gleamed.

  Cybermancer snorted a repressed laugh. Then I did. Ray and Claire joined in with chuckles.

  I shook my head. “Not what I was expecting, but maybe a vicious scrubbing has stun factor?”

  Lucyfar still had her fingers pointed at her face, and glared in impatience. “My face hasn’t been blasted clean yet, little girl!”

  The gears still spun. Giving the aim my best guess, I slashed the air with the staff in Lucyfar’s direction. Pink-and-purple-threaded light burst out this time, whipping down her head and upper body.

  Our putatively demonic hostess wiped frosting out of her eyes. “This is not clean. This is also not death. This is cake. Cake is the opposite of death.”

  Ha! Making sure not to let that laugh out of my mouth, I looked at the layer of, well, cake that the staff’s beam had smeared over Lucyfar’s upper half. “Some of Cybermancer’s potions have random effects, right? I guess so does the staff.”

  “My turn!” said Claire gleefully, pulling the gloves off the dummy. They were thick, with the roughness of real leather, and had shiny (brass?) struts and electrodes going down the backs of the fingers and hand, almost like a skeleton.

  Sticky gloves, blast gloves, these gloves… my power sure liked making gloves. Almost as much as it liked… “I didn’t make any bombs, did I?” That sure looked like a grenade pouch.

  Lucyfar burst out laughing, which sprayed crumbs. Cybermancer definitely chuckled. Ray and Claire looked more experienced and knowing in their amusement.

  To my incensed pout, Cybermancer explained, “You made a whole set of bombs, then yelled at yourself for doing it, and cannibalized them to make other equipment.”

  Ray stripped the goggles off the dummy. Holding them over his eyes, he looked around with his usual resting grin, but with increasing perplexity as he poked and prodded the edges. “Nothing. These are just costuming, I guess. Can I have them? I’ve always wanted a pair of mad science goggles.”

  That made me squint. “Are you allowed to have them?”

  Cybermancer shrugged. “As long as he doesn’t wear them in any official capacity, sure.”

  “I just want to own a set,” said Ray.

  That made sense to everyone in the room, so we all nodded. Besides, he’d helped me plan just a little bit further. I was going to need a helmet, something head-disguising that would match that costume. Eeeexcellent…

  There was so much here. If I didn’t like bombs, what was in the grenade pouches? Mostly, blue wafers like metal kitchen sponges. Weird. Two things did look awfully bomblike.

  One, to my amusement, was my good old German Grenade. Obsolete, never all that useful, I’d cherished it for the memories and laughs. It looked different, but how? It remained a pale gray tennis-ball sized globe covered in circuitry-like etchings.

  Nothing for it. I fiddled with the volume switch. It said, “Clickclickclickclickclickclick,” each click subtly louder than before. That is, each time it said the word ‘click.’ It didn’t actually click.

  Claire was in the middle of figuring out what the gloves did. Crispy electrical noises as lightning danced around the fingers of the gloves and shot randomly into the floor had disappeared, replaced by a dry, unidentifiably gendered voice saying, “Bzzt. Crackle. Hiss.”

  Somewhere in the distance, something went, “Crunch crunch crunch hiss ting crunch crunch…”

  Lucyfar laughed, and clapped her hands together. Her voice came out, clearly and unemotionally, as “Hee hee hee clap.”

  I switched it off, and said, “Onomatopoeia grenade. Well, that’s… sure to confuse.”

  Cybermancer, with one hand pinching the bridge of his nose and the other arm wrapped around his middle, finished choking down silent laughter. Merely gaspy and squeaky, he said, “I like you, Bad Penny, and wish I could say I would never hurt you, but if it were physically possible to steal your super power, I would do it. I feel like someone who whittles raccoons looking at Mount Rushmore.”

  Lucyfar let out a bark. “Like when Delicious crashed the arm wrestling tournament in that bar. The looks on those guys faces!” She leaned way, way close to him, so close I thought she was going to kiss him. “Yeah, I can see it. That same intimidation.”

  A glance over at my teammates revealed Claire juggling a marble-sized glowing ball of shifting pink and purple. Ray… yes, he’d brought his energy blast gloves, so that was where she’d gotten it. With the gloves, she rolled the not-really-there orb around like a slight of hand magician with a rubber ball. That looked promising. Very promising. That looked like a weapon you could build a whole power set around.

  Okay, but what about this box? Along with the Onomatopoeia Grenade, I now had a fist-sized cube surfaced in shiny yellow metal. Engravings like on the grenade made it hard to distinguish the exact lines, but the shell was far from one piece. Twisty, Tetris-like shapes meshed together to form it, like a…

  I pushed and pulled and wriggled, until one of the bits slid out. It was a puzzle box!

  “You don’t know how to open it? Does your power make you forget?” asked Cybermancer, crouching down to study the configuration.

  That was a question I’d wrestled with for more than half a year. “Sort of? More often I don’t understand what I remember.”

  “Jekyll and Hyde is common in mad scientists. Multiple personalities come with blackouts, but even arguing with yourself, you sounded manic, not like you had a different identity,” he mused.

  I waved my hands in denial. “No, it’s not like that. I get a good look when I’m falling in. It’s like… there’s my super power, which knows everything. Absolutely everything. There’s me, who can’t possibly understand that kind of information. And there’s the point where my human brain and the super power touch, but since I can’t understand my power in abstract terms, everything has to filter in and out through my subconscious.”

  “Which, by definition, isn’t sane and doesn’t make sense,” he filled in. I needed to hang out with other mad scientists more. They got it, got everything, in ways nobody else did. If Dad weren’t my dad, would he be this easy to talk to?

  Lucyfar, meanwhile, stopped tapping her cheek in thought. Narrowed eyes fixed on the puzzle box, she held out one hand. “I can do it. Give.”

  Why not? I dropped it into her palm. She slid the piece I’d opened back, and opened another. Then twisted one side about, and pulled another strip half-out. That let her slide the first back in place, and…

  It went on, surprisingly quickly. Or maybe it took awhile and I was distracted by the intense déjà vu. My power had left me with the knowledge of how to open this box, after all. It just needed a kick. Watching Lucyfar do it, I remembered. When she took a wrong turn, I was even able to reach out and correct the mistake.

  As we opened the box, the outer layer spread, revealing an inner layer. Inside that were interlocking cogs and levers, the kind of intricate mass I saw whenever I peeked inside the Machine. When we’d spread enough of those aside to get the first peek at the interior…

  …the whispers started, not loud enough to be understood, just giving the impression of threats and insults almost heard behind your back. Shadows darkened in the already erratically lit room. A draft tugged at my hands, pulling towards the spot of glowing nothing in the center. It looked like the blind spot left b
y staring at a light.

  “Okay, that’s enough.” Grabbing the box out of Lucyfar’s hands, I pushed and turned it between my palms. Everything snapped back together in one go. “I can open it myself in an emergency.”

  Nobody argued. Ray and Claire were staring over at us now, and everyone looked a bit chilled. Everyone except Lucyfar, who pouted. Maybe the box shook her, too. She didn’t actually say anything about it.

  My power did leave me bits of information, though. It stole over me, as the seconds passed, that we’d all been suckered. Yes, the box was a weapon, or bomb, or something, but all the scary side effects were fake.

  Right? I understood that correctly? Please? Some kind of confirmation, super power?

  No, of course not. Pbbt.

  Putting the puzzle box back in a pouch, I peered at one of the metal sponges. Unlike a sponge, the openings clearly had organization, shape, and purpose, like a three dimensional punchcard. “Okay, but I have no idea how these work at all.”

  Lucyfar shrugged carelessly. “You started making those when you dismantled the bombs. You said they’re instructions for the Machine, showing it how to build complicated tools. You wrote labels on them, but they’re teeny tiny and in Russian.” She grinned at that, amused by my self-sabotage. Joke’s on you, old woman. I had web browsers and unicode! Translations would be no problem.

  Ooh. Plus, these would be something I could use as Penelope Akk. I’d made sure not to use it in a recognizable shape as Bad Penny, although of course I never―

  An alien, unpleasant feeling of emptiness gripped my left wrist, the lack of a normal and welcome feeling of the Machine curled there. I risked a look. Nothing.

  “Where is my Machine?!” I asked, my voice spiking.

  Criminy. Calm down, Penelope. Don’t look like a doofus in front of Cybermancer. You can’t have lost it.

  Lucyfar’s whole body curved in exaggerated nonchalance, but she couldn’t hold back her toothy, smug grin. Waving a hand past a wall of machinery, she said, “It’s back there in the metals stockpile. You stuck one of those schematics into it. I believe it was ‘fighting robot’?”