Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (24 page)

The room was occupied, and not by regular folks. “You did it. I can’t believe it. How can you already know The Inscrutable Machine?” the floating gray girl in the shadowy back corner gasped.

“The devil’s own luck,” Lucyfar answered. She’d gone quiet and casual during the walk, but now she grinned, sauntered around a brown table, and threw herself into a ragged, brown easy chair.

“Assuming those aren’t fake costumes. These could be any three kids,” objected the brown skinned guy with the spiky, gelled hair and all the muscles. His old denim jacket and loose jeans made him look like a rougher thug than pants around his knees ever could. My heart skipped faster as he stepped up to us, scowling in disbelief. His eyes looked straight into mine. Brown, then green, then gray, they changed with his breath as he reached for my chin.

He didn’t get there. Ray’s hand shot up and grabbed his wrist. The guy even tried to pull back and dodge, and it didn’t work. Muscles tightened on both their arms, but the wrist stayed exactly where it was.

“The young ladies are not to be touched,” Ray informed the thug, his English accent thicker than ever. Please don’t let me be blushing, and please don’t let Ray get us killed. Two fights in one day were enough. I was unarmed and didn’t have the stamina for a third!

The guy’s muscles relaxed, and so did Ray’s. He grinned. Criminy, he had sharp teeth, an irregular hacksaw set that made Sharky look tame. He straightened up, and Ray let go so he could pull his hand back. “Well, you’re sure the real Reviled. Okay, you win. They’re The Inscrutable Machine.” Digging a hand into his pocket, he pulled out a rolled-up stack of bills and tossed them across the room, where Lucyfar caught them effortlessly.

“Kids, meet Chimera,” Lucyfar introduced as she counted off the bills.

“Chimera’s dead,” I blurted out like an idiot. Well, he was! And this guy was too young to be the original, even if somehow he’d survived.

“Not even Chimera Junior, Chimera Two, anything? Someone’s going to get real, real mad you took that name,” Claire echoed, just as disbelieving.

“Evolution missed a piece. You still had the hydra’s powers,” Ray said in a much quieter voice.

Chimera didn’t answer immediately. Ray had nailed it. Barely remembered antiquated TV footage wasn’t much to go by, but this guy had the right look. It had been years. Lots and lots of years. But then, Evolution hadn’t left much to regenerate.

Chimera finally laughed. “You kids are way too sharp. I’m glad to meet you already. Sit down, make yourselves at home. We’re not formal here. This is just the place we hang out.”

Ray looked around at all the brown. “I would have expected a bar. I suppose that just shows off how new I am to this.”

Lucyfar giggled, a little too hysterically for my tastes. Chimera gave his head an amused shake. “Yep, you are, but not for the reason you think. The only drinks here are for Cy.” As he explained, the half-sized brown refrigerator the brown lamp sat on opened up and a brown beer bottle floated out, sitting atop a black knife. The knife flipped, tossing the bottle over to Chimera, who caught it in one hand—a hand that red and black scales flickered across as his arm swung.

He held the bottle out to Ray. “Have a drink if you want, but it won’t do you any good. If you’ve got a physical power, forget getting drunk or high. Super metabolism.”

Ray took the bottle and flicked the metal cap off with his thumb curiously while Lucyfar added, “And I’m pretty sure E-Claire’s out of luck as well.” Ray passed the bottle over to Claire automatically. She gave it a sniff, and wordlessly handed it back to me. I sniffed too. Yuck, smelled way too much like coffee.

I held the bottle back out to Chimera. “I don’t think we’ll be putting underage drinking laws on our crime spree.”

“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” the guy on the couch offered immediately. That left me to step away from my friends and hand it to him. I could tell he was a mad scientist automatically. I’d never seen a coat with so many pockets, in rows down the front and all of them bulging. Plus, he had leather goggles pushed up on his head. They were clearly a badge of office.

I had to make me a pair. Could I get away with wearing them when not in costume? I totally could; my dad was Brian Akk. People would think it was a father/daughter thing.

Without them, I got this skeptical stare from the couch guy. As he tilted back the bottle to take a pull from it, Lucyfar said, “Bad Penny, this is Cybermancer. Cybermancer, Bad Penny. You may feel free to commiserate about your supervillain names.”

I did wince. I knew it was coming, but… “It’s been like two hours. Am I Bad Penny already?”

“I don’t know. Are you? How does that lightning attack work? It didn’t hurt Ifrit, but it sure threw him off balance,” Cybermancer questioned me.

Lucyfar broke in again. “Why would I bring Reviled and E-Claire, but a ringer for Bad Penny?”

“Princess of Lies, remember?” Cybermancer shot back. Lucyfar pressed her hand to her chest and gave him a wounded look. It was all fun and games between them, but, when his eyes turned back to me, they weren’t convinced. He was waiting for an answer.

An answer I didn’t have. “It glues you to the next thing you touch. I stuck his foot to the floor,” I hedged.

I’d been totally obvious. He took another swallow of the beer, and pressed. “But how does it work? If you’re Bad Penny, you built it, right?”

I didn’t know how it worked. My heart tightened with embarrassment. It got worse because he wasn’t even being a jerk about it. He wanted proof, yeah, but he gave me a minute to think while he peered into his beer bottle, pulled a vial of glowing green liquid out of a pocket, and cracked it open.

I had to say something, but only the thing in the back of my head knew the answer. The same thing that took the sickly sweet smell of that green liquid and painted pictures I didn’t understand in the back of my head. Cybermancer had almost forgotten me as he lifted the vial up to the mouth of the beer bottle.

Those pictures in my head clicked, and I lunged forward, grabbing the bottle in both hands. “Don’t do that!”

He recoiled back into the couch. “Why not?” Now his voice had gotten sharper, and he really was angry.

Why not? Because I didn’t want to be… be… “Does anyone have a pencil?”

A black knife pulled open the drawer of a little brown table and flicked out a black magic marker. Relief flooded me as I caught it in both hands. I rushed over to the wall. I didn’t have words, but maybe pictures? I drew a bunch of interlocking lines. Grids of them. Make those two really thick, okay. Were these arrangements of atoms? They looked kind of like diagrams… okay, okay, the thing in my head didn’t like that. Just draw. It would let me go far enough to draw that this bit connected here, and to here, and to here. But those were physical shapes. I drew sweeping ovals to show how different parts were linked, then filled in the arrows for how the energy moved. There were a lot of them. A lot, a lot of them. I hoped Cybermancer got the message.

Okay, that was close enough. The best I could do without making my power lock up. I sighed heavily and slapped the marker down on top of the fridge.

“I surrender. She’s Bad Penny,” Cybermancer announced beside me. He twisted around farther to the opposite end of the couch so he could look over what I’d drawn. To my considerable relief, he also closed the lid on his vial of sludge.

“Cy, what does that diagram say?” Lucyfar asked, her thin black eyebrows going up and her tone sharp.

“That you don’t mix beer with magic science goo.” His worried, guarded tone and the hard stare he gave the wall filled me with even more relief. Yes, he’d understood.

Lucy picked a small brown pillow off her recliner and threw it right past my face to bounce off Cybermancer’s head. “You ninnyhammer. The rest of us aren’t wearing protective shields!”

“Yeah, I… sorry,” Cybermancer clumsily apologized, still staring at the wall.

“Lucy?” Chimera broke in.

Shooting him a suspicious glance, she asked, “Yeah?”

“He ain’t wearing it, either.” A grin forced its way across Chimera face.

Lucy let out a loud, incoherent growl and threw herself backwards, leaning her chair way back and sprawling her arms and legs over the edge. She lay there in melodramatic defeat, and that seemed to be the end of the fight.

“You’ve captured the whole reaction,” Cybermancer murmured to me, not looking the slightest bit guilty anymore. “I’m impressed, yeah, but why couldn’t you just tell me?”

No point in lying, I guess. “My power doesn’t work that way.”

“Oh, one of those.” Eh? He’d accepted it immediately.

“What, do a lot of mad scientists not understand what they’re building?” I blurted out.

“You must have regular human parents. Or they’ve got a physical power, right?” he asked me. I didn’t answer that, and he went on as if he hadn’t expected me to. “A regular brain can’t hold a superhuman intellect. Everybody’s different, but it takes someone real scary like the Expert or Brian Akk to know what they’re doing in detail. Not a problem for me. I’m a puny little normal human, not a super brain.”

He winked at me, and I dropped onto the couch at the far end from him. “Normal humans don’t carry around that…” I knew what it was. The information was there in my mind, but in the itchy way of a word I couldn’t quite remember.

“I call it magic science goo. I’ve got three magical teammates, so it’s easy to make.” He lifted the bottle of beer to his lips, paused, and dropped it in a brown waste can. Laying an arm over the back of the couch so he could turn and look at me properly, he explained, “I don’t have a power, just a talent. I figured out how magic interacts with basic chemistry. It’s a separate layer of energy storage. Caused a big stir, then I got slapped down when I sent my theory to Brian Akk and he proved it was wrong.”

“I’ve met him. He’s got a serious chip on his shoulder about magic,” I offered, hoping I wasn’t revealing too much.

Cy shrugged. He didn’t look mad at all. “My theory may be wrong, but my model works. All I’m good at using it for is making explosives, but the community loves them. Even heroes buy from me sometimes. Speaking of…” He plunged his hands into two of his pockets. Not finding what he wanted, he sat up and tried again, and a third time. That one paid off. Out came a folded up pile of bills that he tossed into my lap.

I stared at the cash. How much was that? The bill on top was a hundred, for pity’s sake! What was he doing? He’d just given me a stack of money, and yet he leaned forward and looked at me with wide eyes, like he was begging for a favor. “Can I buy that recipe on the wall off of you? A thousand is all I’ve got on me. I can’t steal someone else’s idea, but if I understand your markings it doesn’t just explode, it curses everyone caught in the blast.”

Another cushion came sailing over to bounce off of Cy’s head. As he yelped and threw his arms up, Lucy snapped, “You are the biggest goober I’ve ever met! If I could find your pea brain, I’d feed it to a goldfish! It’s not enough blowing up the rest of us, you could have blown up Apparition!” That stopped her. Half-raised out of a still horizontal easy chair, she waved a hand at the shadowy corner next to her, and the gray girl floating in it. Looking suddenly guilty, she added, “Uh… kids, meet The Apparition. Apparition, The Inscrutable Machine.”

I had just enough time to mumble, “Yeah, sure… you can have it,” before Claire came charging across the room.

“You really are The Apparition! I know, I’m sorry, I’m gushing, but I’ve only seen drawings of you. Your image doesn’t capture on film! But, I mean, you know that.” Claire squealed all of that in a rush, then giggled nervously and twisted her hands together. Her paws together, since she bear suit pajamas covered everything.

I should give the money back. I couldn’t sell a supervillain an explosive recipe. It would be better just to give it to him. It would.

As I gave up and stuffed the thousand dollars into my own pocket, I tried to cover by giving The Apparition a good look. Her feet didn’t touch the ground, and I could see the brown wood paneling through her gray. “Is she a ghost?” I guessed.

Everybody looked at me. “I don’t follow supervillains, or even superheroes much,” I explained, feeling pretty lame.

“And that’s what I like!” Lucyfar rolled forward out of her chair, snapping it upright as she stood up and raised her arms toward the brown ceiling. She almost clipped the brown ceiling fan. “So many of our comrades in arms are poseurs. They want the fame, or the money, or they’re imitating a big name villain. They’re not having fun! Let someone else judge if I’m a hero or villain. I’m free to enjoy my powers however I want!”

“I thought we didn’t ask these kids over to talk business,” Apparition cut in. Cold, calm, and a little sour, or was that a very deadpan playfulness?

“I love watching Lucy rant.” Chimera certainly didn’t hide his whimsical tone. Cy wasn’t even paying attention. He was scribbling down my formula. I wished him luck making sense of my super power’s wordless imagery. I wished him a thousand dollars of luck.

“You’ve had your turns. Now it’s mine. Forget business. What do you guys do for fun? What are you into?” Apparition asked us.

Chimera grunted. “They’re middle school kids, App. It’ll be stuff like computer games.”

That dragged up Cybermancer’s attention long enough to give us a curious glance. “Do you all game? What do you play?”

Shame is something that happens to people not named Lutra, so Claire answered for us. “Supervillainy is eating up our free time lately, but we’re Teddy Bears and Machine Guns players.”

A high pitched shriek sent me jumping an inch into the air. What the… ?

I didn’t get time to finish the thought. “You play Teddy Bears and Machine Guns?!” Apparition demanded. She flew out of her corner, grabbing Claire’s shoulders first, then Ray’s, then mine. I felt her fingers gripping me, but at the same time they felt more cold than a physical touch. I guess she really was a ghost. Her pale face floated right in front of mine, and even her giddy enthusiasm couldn’t completely erase lines of heavy tiredness from her face. “What side do you play?”