Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (31 page)

I leaned back and asked Miss Lutra, “Mech could die in this fight, couldn’t he? That thing might kill him.”

“Mech? No, way,” Claire insisted. “Mech’s the top of the game. He’s beaten tougher opponents than this.”

Claire’s Mom’s expression changed. Hardened, I guess, still playful but in a hard and thoughtful way. It reminded me of watching my Mom start thinking like The Audit. It was definitely The Minx who said, “Name a major superhero who died in the line of duty.”

“Evolution,” we all answered together. Some names are on the tip of your tongue. Evolution had been the best, and everyone had thought he was invulnerable until the day they found out he wasn’t.

“Name a major villain who died fighting,” The Minx prompted us again.

“Chimera,” Claire non-answered. She was trying to get around the question by naming someone secretly alive. I gave her a shove.

Ray picked up the slack. “The Good Doctor. Razorback. Glow. Black Hat—” He was ready to continue, but The Minx put her finger to his lips. That left him looking stunned. Maybe she seemed different to me because she’d turned her powers on.

Her voice dropped. “The Audit fought Bull once. He wasn’t trying to kill her, but one lucky slap would have broken every bone in her body, and Penny wouldn’t have a mother.”

“So he could die. That monster might kill him.” I could hardly hear my own hushed voice.

“He could, and he knows it, and now I know why Ray and Claire made you the leader,” she agreed.

Ray nodded. “That kind of thinking gets us out of trouble.”

“I thought we put her in charge because she makes great toys,” Claire argued, her pout an open refusal to get drawn into a somber moment. She had a point. We’d just won big, and, from the helicopter’s bad vantage point, it looked like Mech had the monster pinned.

Actually… “You’ve still got those static gloves with your costume, right? Do you want to keep them?” I asked Claire.

She lit up like a Christmas tree. “Seriously?”

“Yep. They’re a terrible weapon for me. They require too much charging. Once a battle starts, I don’t have the time and I can’t dodge well enough.”

Claire squealed, jumped off the sofa, and went charging off into her room, coming out a second later with the gloves on her hands. She charged one up, took a baby photo of herself off the wall, blasted it, then stuck it back up upside down. “Ha!” she crowed, grinning hugely with glee.

“And I guess that’s my cue.” Miss Lutra strolled down to the hall closet, reached up to the top shelf, and pulled down what looked like an egg beater with sharp teeth. Walking back, she held it out toward Claire, who got it an instant before I did.

“Your grappling hook!” Claire had gone past squealing to whispery, but she still had the strength to bolt forward and scoop the device out of her mother’s hands, then strap it onto her forearm. Very sleek. You could hardly tell what she was wearing. Fantastic engineering.

Miss Lutra filled in that blank immediately. “Made by Penny’s father himself. There’s at least a dozen copies out there by now, so as long as you don’t wear it in front of him no one will know it’s mine.”

Claire looked up at her mother, and a smile forced itself onto my face. Claire was so happy tears had started to leak out of the corners of her eyes. Miss Lutra brushed one away with her thumb. “I was hoping to give that to you when you became a superhero, but I said I’d support you no matter what and I meant it.”

Claire threw herself into her mother’s arms, and they hugged tightly. It went on for a while. Eventually, Claire pulled back enough to promise in a more normal voice, “I haven’t given up on that. None of us have. It’s just that nobody’s going to listen if we say we always meant to be heroes, so we’ll have to wait until we can do a showy public change of sides.”

The hug let go, which I took as my opportunity to interrupt. “We’re not doing anything, heroic or villainous, until I upgrade our equipment. Right now, there’s a big hole in our defenses, namely the possibility we’ll be shot full of big holes.” The memory of that bullet going past still gave me a shiver.

“I was hoping to try out the grappling hook!” Claire sulked, holding up her arm to show off her prize.

“I was hoping to convince you ladies to try Parkour with me,” Ray added, giving me a hopeful smile.

Claire’s answer was obvious, but I had to refuse. “I’m not nearly fit enough for that, Ray.”

Ray’s hopeful look started to settle as he realized I meant it. “I thought those teleport rings might give you the edge you need.”

I had to shake my head. “They work on muscle energy. I’d get about a block and collapse. Even with the Serum, I’m surprised Claire thinks she’ll keep up.”

I gave Claire a curious look, and she grinned back at me. “Well, it turns out I’ve been doing a lot of high-impact exercising like supervillainy since I took my dose, and I’m in excellent shape if I do say so myself.”

An obvious line like that got the expected look from Ray. A very long look, while Claire acted as smug as a mink. I pushed myself up off the sofa and hefted the statue up in my arms. “I need to put the artifact away where it’s safe, anyway.”

Ray rolled over the back of the sofa and onto his feet with, well, superhuman grace. Bowing low, he held out his hand to Claire. “Then if the younger Miss Lutra would care to join me for a stroll across the fences and rooftops…?”

Claire laid her hand in his, and answered as airily as a debutante, “I’d be delighted.”

Ray held the door open for Claire, and I stumped after them with the statue in my arms. I only got to the doorway before Claire turned, lifted her arm, and fired the grappling line up at her own roof. It jerked her upwards, and I saw her flip over onto the rooftop and disappear. Wow, she
was
in great shape. Not as good as Ray, who only had to jump and grab the edge of the roof with one hand to do the same thing. They were already laughing.

Claire’s Mom’s hand settled on top of my head. “You’re worrying about nothing, you know.”

I grunted, pulling the statue up into a better grip. It really was heavy. “No, I’m not. I don’t know how, but this thing is dangerous.”

“It’s certainly ugly,” she conceded in a dry tone. Whimsically, she reached out and lifted the statue from my arms—or tried. It slipped right out of her grip, and I caught it before it hit the ground only in a desperate, lucky grab. “Sorry, Penny. It’s heavier than it looks!” she apologized.

I hoisted it back high in my arms, and asked her, “Can you grab my costume? I left it in the bathroom.”

“Of course.” She disappeared into the house. A few seconds later she returned, handing me the jumpsuit I immediately wrapped around the statue to form a protective bag. I just wasn’t sure who I was protecting. I’d never seen The Minx drop anything before. Ever. Clumsy mistakes were not a Lutra thing, especially Misty “The Minx” Lutra.

I walked down the stone path to the street and hit the button on my jumpsuit to activate my light bike. Settling the wrapped up statue in front of the seat, I glanced over at Ray and Claire tightrope walking along the top of a fence. Then I shoved my foot against the pedal and sped away toward the school and my laboratory.

By the time the elevator opened up on my lab, I didn’t feel quite so left out. I couldn’t walk on fences, but they couldn’t stand in front of a set of machine tools and tell the thing in the back of their heads to make something crazy. But first things first. What was I going to do with this statue? I wasn’t even sure I should be touching it, although it hadn’t affected me obviously like it had Miss Lutra.

Well, the first thing I had to do was put it on the floor. There wasn’t anywhere else. I wished I had some marble, but The Machine was perched on top of a giant pile of steel bars that would have to do. I scooped him up, fed them into the smelter, and twisted a few levers around. I had to have a display stand at least. While the steel cooked and shaped I put on some gloves and my visor. I really ought to put on the whole jumpsuit, but I’d just gotten out of it! Anyway, this wasn’t complicated. Set the mold to this flat surface and those rounded sides, weld that to a hollow cylinder, put it through the cooling sequence, and drag the excruciatingly heavy pedestal out into the middle of the floor. I wish I’d had enough plastic left.

Oh, well. My arm muscles might sting, but I had somewhere to display my new prize. I hoisted the jade statue and put it on top of the pedestal. Wow. What an ugly hunk of rock. The creamy jade was naturally beautiful, but the blobby tentacle-limbed humanoid it had been carved into just made that soft green look like slime.

As a display piece, this monstrosity scored a solid zero. It had powers, I knew that. Could it be useful? I mean, sure they had to be awful powers, but I was technically a supervillain now. Even on the hero side, I’d need weapons. Not to be too clichéd, but could I use its powers for good? What were those powers?

I pulled out my wallet and scooped all my change out of my coin purse. I tended to accumulate pennies, and for once that would come in handy. Picking them all out, I dropped the pennies into the bowl made by the unnatural monster’s cupped hands.

Then I wondered why I’d done that.

I’d done it because it was there, printed in my brain. My super power knew what this statue could do and how to use it, and I needed to put pennies in it and let them sit. No matter how pointless that looked, in the picture in my head, something powerful was happening.

Wondering wouldn’t get me anywhere. I understood that picture as well as I likely ever would. I had a more important issue. Bullets. Bullets were bad. I did not want any puncturing my body, and that seemed extremely likely if I kept up the super-powered adventures. What had my Dad done about bullets? I didn’t know. He’d never said. What did my Mom do? That I did know—she picked her moment, knew exactly when to not be in the way, employed traps and the element of surprise, and scared criminals until they were too afraid to shoot. I couldn’t do any of that. For one thing, Mom liked stealth and surprise, and I had to face facts: I liked giving villainous monologues and brandishing super science weapons.

I was a mad scientist. I’d better be able to come up with something to deal with bullets. Armor? Armor wouldn’t be a bad idea, especially for me, but my power didn’t like repeating itself and all three of us needed protection. I’d rather bullets not be flying around at all.

I could do that. I could see a design. It was still vague. My brain filled in bits while I watched. I needed gold, a lot of quartz, a lot of metal salts and crystals… to bake into ceramics maybe?

I didn’t have any of that stuff. Well, not much. I had steel. Lots and lots of steel. Steel and bad rubber and insulating foam from the car’s upholstery. I had really run short on supplies. I’d started with so much, and used it up so fast!

Maybe… I’d just think away from that idea. Let it go and hope it was still there when I got the materials I needed. How about a new weapon? Something to replace my gloves? I liked the air conditioner cannon, but it was very limited and straightforward. Also not very showy. I wanted something cool, and for that I needed a theme, something to tie my creations together. If it weren’t for the theme, Teddy Bears and Machine Guns would be boring.

I could make a candy chainsaw. Seriously. It would work. I could see in my head sugary candy corn spikes cutting through cement. I’d need a lot of sugar. A whole lot of sugar. I still had a pile of wood, and I could convert some of that, but it wouldn’t be enough. Criminy, another cool design I didn’t have materials for!

I had steel. What could I do with steel? I stared at the steel bars, and my super power gave me a blank slate. Great.

I needed more raw materials. Where was I going to get them? I’d spent the rest of the money Cy gave me on the car, whose raw materials sat in the corner taunting me right now. The chainsaw needed piles of sugar, but that bullet stopping mechanism was small. Getting the parts had to be cheaper and easier than thirty pounds of sugar. I just—

OW! Pain jolted from the back of my head to the front. I grabbed my skull, but the headache faded as fast as it came.

There wasn’t going to be any mad science today. Maybe I shouldn’t let that bother me. Right next to me I had a hideous jade statue I’d stolen (and the best part was, it had no owner so it wasn’t really stealing) in an action-packed super-powered monster fight. My day had been amazing, and I ought to stop pushing and savor the accomplishment.

I took off my visor. I was going to go home and read Sentient Life like I’d always wanted to do, and, if Claire and Ray were out necking on the rooftops somewhere, that was their business. If I just relaxed and let myself realize what a great day I was having, it wouldn’t bother me anymore.