That’s when Paramount came in. He had a look of extreme satisfaction on his face.
“Well, if it isn’t the great Kid Sensation,” he said.
“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘late, great,’” I replied.
He smiled. “A sense of humor. That’s good. It shows you haven’t lost hope. And the truth of the matter is that there’s still hope for you yet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hope that you might join us. Aqua tried to recruit you when she came to your room. I was surprised that it didn’t work. Most guys find her powers of persuasion irresistible.”
For the first time, I noticed Aqua leaning against a far wall, with Incendia next to her. They each winked and blew a kiss at me simultaneously. My hypothesis about them having some type of mental connection was starting to look less theoretical and more factual by the second.
“In truth,” Paramount continued, “my conversion actually started with you. I should be thanking you, since you’re the one who showed me the way.”
“What do you mean?”
A weird gleam came into his eyes. “Until you made him disappear two years ago, I didn’t realize how much I hated him. How much I wanted him dead.”
With a jolt like lightning, a sudden realization came upon me as to who he was talking about.
“Alpha Prime? Your father? Why would you hate him?”
Unexpected rage suddenly erupted from him. “You have no idea what it’s like to have to be his son! To have to constantly live with the comparison! Always knowing that you’ll never be good enough!”
“That’s crazy!” I shouted. “Everybody knows that you were being groomed to take over, that you would be the world’s premiere superhero one day!”
He laughed maniacally, then leaned in close to me. “You honestly don’t have a clue, do you? No one does. Well, let me enlighten you. There was never going to be a day that I would take over, never going to be an opportunity for me to say, ‘This is my time.’
“My father came to this world over eighty years ago,” he continued. “Do you know what he looked like then? The same way he looks now. Scientists have studied him, and as far as they can tell, he’s practically a living god.”
“And you’re just like him!” I interjected. “You’ve got his genes!”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’ve only got half his genes. Do you know what that means? According to doctors, I will probably live an extraordinarily long life. And I’m not talking a hundred or two hundred years here. I’m talking thousands….thousands of years.”
He put his head down, then went on. “Do you have any idea of what life is like when all you have to look forward to is being a poor man’s substitute for something else? When all people see when they look at you is a grainy copy of the original?”
“That’s why you got rid of him,” I said, understanding.
“What did you expect???!!! He can’t be beaten! He can’t be killed! He’s never going to grow old, and he’ll never die! If I were only going to live a normal lifespan, maybe it would be tolerable. But a millennium of living in his shadow? Two? Ten? Living for eons and never having a chance to be my own man? I’ve barely made it through eighteen years. The thought of that being my life was unbearable.”
“So you made a deal with supervillains.”
“Yes. At least that way, I get to live my own life, right or wrong. I get to make my own choices. And now, you get to make yours.”
That’s when I saw what he had in his hand. It was BT’s inhibitor collar.
“No!” I screeched, instinctively trying to lean back, away from him. My powers were a part of me. Part of who I was. Losing them would be as agonizing as losing a limb.
I struggled like a wild man, but I was simply held too tightly; there was nowhere to go. He slipped the collar around my neck and I heard it lock in place. He held up a small controller in his hand and pressed a button. At the same time, the inhibitor began making a high, keening noise which soon faded.
“Now, let’s make sure we understand each other,” Paramount said, looking at me levelly. “This inhibitor is particularly attuned to you. With this controller, which is modified to work for me and only me, I can turn it off or on. And just so you don’t get cute, the inhibitor is also equipped with a bomb. In other words, I will dissolve the current partnership between your head and neck if you don’t do what I want. So–”
“I already know the spiel,” I said. “You want me to bring you Mouse’s tablet so you can bring the TNIP back online and free your masters.”
“Not exactly,” Paramount said, laughing. “I want you to bring me his tablet so I can make sure they never get free.”
The shock must have shown on my face. It was also reflected on the faces of several members of his little army, including Incendia and Aqua.
“Uh, Paramount,” Aqua began, “that wasn’t the plan. We’re supposed to free the Masters–”
“I don’t have any masters!” Paramount screamed.
“What?” he said, looking round at his cohorts. “You think I threw off the yoke of my father just to put on that of another bunch of costumed clowns? Who do you think destabilized their device in the first place?”
This was almost more than I could contemplate, so I could only imagine the shock of his followers, who looked back and forth at each other while processing all this in disbelief. I had seriously underestimated Paramount, in terms of abilities and ambition. So had the League. So had his friends. And so, especially, had his one-time masters – the supervillains now trapped in another dimension.
“So you’ve been going off-script this entire time? Doing your own thing?” I asked. “Including framing me for murder?”
“Actually, that order came from the Masters,” he answered. “Former Masters, I should say. Kubosh was a meta with a recently-developed tracking ability, and he was hired to locate you.”
That explained why Kubosh hadn’t tried to run me to ground before and get the reward. He’d only recently gained the power to track things down. Too bad it wasn’t an ability that did him much good in the long run.
Paramount went on. “Once we helped him cross your trail – you can thank Omen and his visions for that – it was just a matter of time before he found you. However, he got greedy, tried to play both ends from the middle. He told us about your little mansion hangout outside of town, but then he tried to collect the reward on Kid Sensation by telling the Alpha League your whereabouts. Omen and his buddies felt that was a little bit of a betrayal, and the rest is history.”
“How’d you know about the inhibitor?” I asked.
“Omen again. In one of his visions of the future, he saw how it could be used to take away your powers. Which brings us back to the current plan,” he said. “The nullifier is now off. In a minute, I’m going to turn the inhibitor off, and you…”
His voice trailed off as I stopped paying attention to what he was saying.
The nullifier is off???!!! Didn’t he know that the inhibitor was only partially effective at the best of times?
I didn’t wait to hear the end of his speech. I switched into super speed and then ran forward to snatch the controller from his hand. Then I wrapped my mind around Electra and attempted to teleport…
And found myself in Mouse’s lab, along with a still-bound Electra. I could only imagine Paramount’s face as we disappeared, but we didn’t have time to gloat. Goon had met me in the conference room right here at HQ. I had a funny feeling that Paramount’s entire crew was fairly close.
“Mouse!” I screamed. “I’ve got an inhibitor collar with a bomb!”
Mouse stopped what he was doing and ran over.
“Here,” I said, handing him the controller. “This is what’s supposed to detonate it.”
The inhibitor was making that keening noise again. I felt for sure the bomb was about to go off, and then the noise began to die down like it did before.
“Hurry!” I shouted. “Before this thing explodes!�
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Mouse raced over to a nearby workbench and grabbed some kind of toolkit. In less than ten seconds he had the controller case open and was fiddling with wires. I gave him the seriously condensed version of what had happened, taking less than thirty seconds to do so.
By the time I finished, Mouse looked up and said, “Okay, you should be good for now. If it goes off, it won’t be from this.” He tapped the controller.
“Hey,” Mouse shouted at someone behind me. “Untie Electra from that chair.”
For the first time, I noticed that there were other people in the room. Basically, about a dozen teens were milling around, seemingly doing odd jobs around the lab: moving boxes, sorting equipment, and so on.
“Who are they?” I asked Mouse, who was now examining the inhibitor with some odd-looking instruments.
“Ask your friend,” Mouse answered. I looked around and saw Smokescreen, grinning as he walked towards me.
“I know what Mouse said about playing it safe,” Smokey said, “but I couldn’t let you guys try to make this stand alone. So I rounded up what members of the teen supers I could and came as fast as possible.”
“And almost got shot for his trouble,” Mouse inserted. “They showed up right after you left. I thought it was Paramount and his guys trying to get in and almost blasted them. He’s lucky I don’t have an itchy trigger finger.”
Nobody said anything else as Mouse continued examining the inhibitor collar. I tried to look around and noticed Electra being helped to her feet. She rubbed her wrists in an obvious effort to get circulation going again after being tied up for an extended period. She saw me looking and mouthed “Thank you.” I just nodded in response, but I noticed that she began to make her way towards us.
“Okay,” Mouse finally said. “Good news and bad news.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Another mixed report.”
“I’ll take that as you wanting the good news first,” Mouse retorted. “Basically, you should still have most of your powers, and the bomb isn’t likely to go off.”
“‘Most’ of my powers?” I said incredulously. “What exactly does that mean?”
“Well, that’s tied into the bad news. From what I can see, this inhibitor has some type of adaptive logic circuit. Basically, as you use your powers it learns about them and then figures out how to block them. Afterwards, as long as you have it on, you won’t have that ability anymore.”
“Are you sure?” Electra asked. “Because he just teleported us here.”
Mouse made a vague gesture. “Go ahead and try it.”
I attempted to teleport to the other side of the room. Nothing. Likewise when I tried to shift into super speed. Almost embarrassingly, I told Mouse that he appeared to be right.
“Unfortunately, there’s more,” he said. “It’s locked into your biometrics.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that, for all intents and purposes, that collar is now like an additional limb or appendage. Where you go, it goes. Didn’t you notice that you teleported here with it still on?”
In all honesty, I hadn’t even thought about trying to teleport without it; at the time, I was just trying to get away, and I admitted as much.
“Normally that would be a foolish oversight,” Mouse said, “but in this case it wouldn’t have mattered. Like I said, it’s locked in to your biometrics. If you teleport, it teleports; if you phase, it phases. You’re stuck with it for now.”
The shock and desolation must have shown on my face, because Mouse laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
“Buck up, Kid,” he said. “We’ll fix this, assuming we have time.”
Just then, there came a booming, thunderous pounding on the door to Mouse’s lab, followed by the tortured screech of tearing metal.
Paramount and his crew were coming in.
Chapter 23
“Move!” Mouse shouted, grabbing his computer tablets and rushing to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase on the side of the lab. “Follow me!”
I missed seeing what he did, but the bookshelf quickly slid right, into a recessed area set in the wall. Standing where the bookshelf had been a second ago was a monstrous, vault-like door. As it began to slowly open, I could hear the hiss of hydraulics.
Everyone began hustling inside as soon as the vault door was wide enough to permit ingress. Mouse went first, and I saw a light come on somewhere inside. All of the other teens began scrambling in, followed by Electra and Smokey. I was last.
As I slipped inside, the bookcase shot out from its hidden area, once again covering the vault door. Presumably Mouse had a remote for the thing, because I hadn’t done anything to put it back into place. He must also have had one for the vault door, because it stopped opening and slowly reversed course, preparing to close.
Looking around, I noticed that we were in a cavernous chamber. There were a few chairs and tables – including one where Mouse currently sat on the far side of the room – but the most overriding feature of the room were the containers. Everywhere you looked there were boxes and crates and bins. There were even long rows of shelves that appeared to hold various bric-a-brac and miscellaneous objects. This was clearly a storage room of some type.
Through the bookcase, I heard the door to Mouse’s lab finally yielding and the rhythmic thudding of heavy feet running into the room.
“Find them!” I heard Paramount snarl. “They’re here somewhere.”
There was an odd cadence established by feet running willy-nilly all over the place, as well as the sound of equipment being knocked over.
Suddenly, the vault’s hydraulics made a clear, squeaking noise. It was followed by an “Over here!” from somewhere nearby in the lab. I found myself trying to will the door to go faster. I even pressed my back against it and pushed, as well as used my telekinesis to try to get it closed.
That was a near-fatal error. My telekinesis helped for a few seconds, and then the inhibitor began keening once more. Suddenly it stopped. I tried using my telekinesis again, but to no avail, it was gone.
Right about then, I heard the bookshelf being ripped away, torn up from its moorings. And just as the vault was about to close, a big, meaty paw thrust its way through, trying to keep the door wedged open.
I didn’t recognize the arm, which was through the opening to about mid-bicep, but whoever owned it obviously had super strength. The door had stopped closing, and the hydraulics were actually making painful noises as they attempted to seal the vault.
“Move your arm!” I screamed.
“Make me!” shouted the arm’s owner, someone I didn’t recognize.
Smokey and Electra raced over and added their weight to mine in an attempt to close the door. Still, even with all three of us pushing, we were losing the battle.
Deciding on a bold move, I made the arm insubstantial. The inhibitor again started with the noise, while the vault door – now with no physical impediments – actually started to close again, passing through the phased arm. After what seemed like an eternity but was actually just a few seconds, the vault door closed and locked itself – with the insubstantial arm still sticking through it.
“Move your arm!” I screamed again. “If you want to keep this arm you need to move it now!”
The response was what I assumed to be a blow from his other hand, so powerful that it made the metal of the vault door bulge. The arm swung deliriously to and fro, with the hand opening and closing almost spasmodically in an attempt to find purchase on something. Obviously the owner of the arm didn’t realize what had happened - that his arm was now insubstantial - and was trying to find anything on our side of the vault to grab or grip.
Suddenly, the noise from the inhibitor stopped. There was a bloodcurdling scream of pain and anguish from the other side of the vault, and the arm that had been phased a second ago fell to the ground, solid and twitching and bloody.
Electra covered her mouth and gasped in horror. Smokey looked like he was going to be sick.
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“Mouse,” I said, kicking the dismembered arm away, “how’s it coming?”
“I need more time,” was his only response. His fingers were flying across the surfaces of the two tablets.
The sound of painful screaming on the other side of the vault continued but decreased in volume, as if the person had moved away from the door. And all of a sudden there was more insistent pounding on the vault. In particular, the bulge that had been created in the door earlier was getting bigger, as if someone had designated it an obvious weak point and began exploiting it.
I kept my weight on the door, but it wouldn’t be any use for much longer. Moreover, water had begun seeping in under the bottom of the door and around the frame. Aqua, trying to get in.
“Move!” shouted Electra.
I stepped away, and she shot a bolt of electricity into the water on the floor. There was a painful yelp that seemed to come from several places at once, and the water withdrew almost too fast to see. However, the pounding continued, and the bulge was extending well into our side of the room. Moreover, the frame that the vault sat in was starting to bend and warp as the strength of those on the other side began to prove superior to the metal of the door and its housing.
I threw myself against the door again, determined to buy Mouse every second I could. Electra and Smokey joined me, but I wasn’t sure it would do much good. Truthfully, we just needed more weight. Then I had a thought about where I could possibly get some.
Earlier, I had been asked about using my phasing power to increase my density. Again, it was something I’d never done before, but the principle wasn’t really very different from phasing. In fact, it was pretty much the same as when I returned a phased object to its original solid form. However, instead of just leaving an object as I found it, this time I wanted to keep going, making the object a bit more solid – denser, heavier. And in this case, the object was me.
It was an odd sensation. First, I reached out with my mind, the way I would have if I were trying to phase myself. But rather than become insubstantial, I focused on doing the exact opposite – becoming more substantial, so to speak. I imagined my entire body - my bones, muscle, tissue, sinew - all becoming more packed…more condensed…thicker…heavier…
The Kid Sensation Series Box Set Page 15