Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (37 page)

Mom stepped out of Dad’s office right in my way. She sounded friendly enough as she asked, “Going to meet Claire and Ray again?”

I shook my head as I swerved around her and opened up the door. “Going to the clubhouse. I’m so close. I know I can get another spark. Anyway, I think Claire and Ray will be off together somewhere.” I was surprised by my own vehemence. It was fully fledged supervillainy that I felt I almost had in my grasp, but the frustration felt the same.

Mom brushed her hand over my head, fingers toying through my bangs. I wasn’t looking at her, but I could feel the cheerful affection as she told me, “I learned this as a superhero, Penny, but it proved just as true in my personal life. The person who cares enough to work for what they want, who both thinks and acts and doesn’t hesitate? She’s the one who wins.”

I nodded. “Yeah.” Good advice. Stepping out and closing the door behind me, I circled around the house to get my bicycle. Mom was absolutely right. I wasn’t going to stumble into trouble again. I would do this right.

First I needed to prepare, so I got on my bike and headed down to my lab.

What did I need? I pedaled industriously down Los Feliz and tried to figure it out. I’d built my most important group defense, and I had a personal defense in the rings, but I needed more. A surprise defense, maybe. Something for emergencies. I did have okay defenses. I was out of weapons. We all needed weapons. Claire’s sticky gloves were useful, but not enough against professionals. What would we do if we ran up against a heavy hitter like Bull or Mech? We needed the option of more raw physical force than we had. Simple impacts wouldn’t do it. We needed different kinds of attacks. Shock-based attacks against the armored, heat attacks against unliving targets, something to remove walls that might be armored themselves, area effect attacks, distractions, and especially nonlethal attacks to take fragile human enemies out of the fight.

I was never going to remember all that. It wouldn’t matter. I’d make everything I could think of, then figure out what I was still missing.

I passed by the cool side entrance, the one that looked like a manhole cover. My bike wouldn’t really fit. So I took the elevator down to the lab, ditched my bike in a side room, and pulled on my jumpsuit as fast as I could. I needed to get to work. Which meant first I had to think, so I dumped Vera and The Machine on my bench, activated them both, and asked the obvious question.

What first? Start with the most glaring lack. I’d lost my air conditioner cannon. I needed a basic, obvious weapon to replace it. A candy chainsaw would be cool, but useless. There was no way easily breakable little me was relying on close-in attacks. Still, I liked the candy theme. It would be great to tie everything together.

I could see possibilities with candy. I’d brought back a lot of sugar. Of course, not all the parts would be candy. I pointed at a block of red plastic and ordered, “Vera, cut me off this thick a slice of that plastic.”

I pinched my fingers to show how thick I wanted it, and Vera flew over to the slab. Awesome. She’d understood. I pulled levers on the smelter, got it fashioning some curved glass for me, then took the plastic from Vera and used The Machine to cut it more precisely.

Eventually, Ray’s hand settled on my shoulder, shocking me out of my building trance. “I think you’ve built enough,” he said quietly.

I turned around and leaned against the metal folding bench, taking a few deep breaths. Tired, but not too bad. I hadn’t entirely blacked out either. I could sorta remember all the work I’d done, just… “You’re right. I got a little carried away.” Tidy the mad scientist wasn’t. My new toys were scattered across the floor around me.

“We could tell. By the maniacal laughter,” Claire informed me. She was standing halfway across the room in civvies, arms folded. Her faint smile seemed torn about whether or not she’d been joking.

I just had to grin. I pointed at the gloves I’d left hanging from a hook on the wall. Vera zoomed over, picked them up, and brought them back to me. They were gorgeous, black and satiny with thin, oval amber crystals set into the palms. They were too big for my hands, of course. I tossed them over to Ray. “Try those out and tell me you don’t feel like laughing.”

Ray’s eyes lit up with fascination, slipping on the gloves and turning them over several times to study from all angles. “How do they work?”

“Click the gems together,” I answered.

He did. Claire giggled a bit, which meant she noticed the different way he moved afterward. “Interesting. They’re dragging at my hands. Drawing power for something?” Ray asked. He swung his hands up and down, putting a little more effort into it. I couldn’t tell the gloves were impeding him anymore, which was good. I didn’t actually want to slow him down.

“Click them again, pull apart slowly, and push,” I ordered.

He gently smacked his palms together again. When he pulled them apart, purple beams arced and twisted between the two gems, and, in two seconds, they’d formed a glowing ball suspended between his palms. Leaning forward, he angled his hands out and gave the ball a shove. That sent it rocketing away from him… straight at Vera.

Vera moved fast, her own ceramic hands coming together just like Ray’s. A pink burst of light hit the energy ball, and a hot wind blasted across us as the two attacks detonated each other.

I decided to pretend I knew that could happen. “This is Vera. She’s mainly a defensive design, but as you can see she has offensive capabilities.”

Claire took a sharp step forward, hands clasped together and grinning as big as her face could hold. “Do I get anything?”

I gave my back a stretch, trying to push aside the still alluring pictures in that wordless, more-than-human part of my brain. “Not yet. You get a task. Check with your contacts and find us a job. A real job, but something I won’t feel too guilty about.”

Claire nodded, her smile sly and knowing now, rubbing a finger along her lower lip. “I know someone who’s just aching to give us suggestions like that. While I’m at it, want me to sell some of that gold?”

That caught me off-guard. I looked over at the block of gold, much smaller than the jars and slabs and blocks of rough crystals. “It’s not that big, and I need some for my work.” That thought bounced off the thing in my brain. “I guess I don’t need much,” I amended. Which left me with only one answer. “Okay, I guess. Some of it. If you think that little gold is worth something.”

Ray stepped over and snapped the bar in two in his hands. Show off. I walked past him into the other room and changed back into my regular clothes.

I could hear Ray out in the lab clearly. “I believe that I know where to start. This isn’t technically stolen and it’s raw, pure gold. A pawn shop that thinks he’s ripping us off won’t be too eager to ask questions.”

“All the fences are downtown, near Chinatown. I could go home and get addresses. It would be too clunky on my phone,” was Claire’s contribution.

I clasped The Machine around my wrist and dropped Vera in my belt pouch and walked my bike out past them as Ray dropped the chunk of gold in Claire’s hand. Her eyebrows went up. “How can it be this heavy?” she protested, but she was just being theatrical. She obviously wasn’t straining or anything.

“I’m going home. Don’t touch my toys—you’ll see what they do soon enough,” I called back as the elevator gate shut.

Then I did go home.

I had to take it a lot easier on the way back. My first few building sprees had wrecked me. This one hadn’t been so bad, but I didn’t have the energy to pedal hard. I certainly wasn’t going to speed things up with the teleport rings. That might have been fortunate. When I biked up to home, Dad was standing out front talking to a woman.

Brown hair, decent looks, college age, maybe a little older, and a very in-shape figure. She was giving my dad one very friendly smile, but it would be physically impossible to cheat on my Mom. No, the figure gave it away. She had to be a superheroine.

As I wheeled up, Dad asked her, “So what’s your take? What do we do when middle schoolers start getting into this life?”

Her grin didn’t waver. Maybe it got a little sly. “My ‘take’ is that The Inscrutable Machine is the least important issue we have to worry about right now. Either they’ve got what it takes to be supervillains, or they don’t and they’ll get caught. I’d rather know if cloning technology has finally been perfected.”

We had what it took to be supervillains. I would make sure of that. Criminy, listen to me. I needed to relax. I didn’t get to meet many heroines in person. Let’s see, brown hair, that expression and build…

I parked my bike and walked up to the two of them. “You’re Marvelous, right?”

“I don’t like to brag.” She deserved to be smug. I’d walked right into that.

Dad put his hand on my head. “This is my daughter, Penny.”

Marvelous looked me over and gave a little wiggle of her fingers. “If you’re still wondering who I am… lift!” Except the word wasn’t “lift.” It had an odd rhythm, and a singsongy tone like Chinese. When everything got really light and I floated a couple of feet into the air, I couldn’t help but hear that funny word as “lift” anyway.

I giggled. Being levitated broke the ice pretty well.

I warned her, “You don’t want my Dad thinking you’re a bad influence by exposing me to magic.”

We both looked at Dad. We both cracked up. He was trying so hard to look like he wasn’t bothered that his daughter believed in magic. It was really, really easy to laugh. Levitation made me feel like all the weights of the world had been removed. I curled up my legs and folded my arms in my lap, since they didn’t float quite as well.

“It’s nice to actually get to meet you, Penny. As something more than a pair of pigtails in the next room, I mean,” Marvelous told me, extending her hand.

I shook it. “It’s a little more personal now I’ve got powers of my own.”

That lit her eyes back up. “Oh, yeah. I heard we know for sure you’re inheriting the Akk Brain.”

Dad warned, “Don’t get her started. My little princess is impatient enough as it is.”

“Five bucks,” I chirped. Hey, I needed the money now that I’d blown the thousand from Cybermancer.

Marvelous nodded, giving me a more sympathetic and slightly more serious look. “Yeah, I know how that is. At your age I could cast
one
spell even close to reliably, and it drove me crazy that it took four more years of study to have enough powers to join the community.”

And, at that, the weirdest question popped into my head. I just had to know. “Did you really wear that costume? With the boots and the… black leather?”

That got a loud, long laugh. “And not much of it? Mmm-hmm.”

I gaped at her. “Seriously?”

She nodded. “Oh, yeah. When you turn eighteen, it will make complete sense.” Then she busted out laughing again. “Oh god, Brian. You should see your face!”

I couldn’t stop grinning. If Dad’s failed attempt to look unconcerned wasn’t funny enough, I was floating in midair talking costumes with a famous superheroine.

I tried to get serious. I leaned forward, crossed my arms over my knees and asked, “Isn’t a costume like that asking for trouble?”

Marvelous’s eyes shut tight, and she ducked her head down as she wrestled to force down the laughter. “She’s going to wear what she’s going to wear, Brainy,” Marvelous wheezed.

I didn’t think Dad’s stiff expression was
that
funny. Taking a deep breath, Marvelous straightened up and answered me mostly seriously. “It wasn’t a big deal. Believe it or not, most of the supervillains were real gentlemen, and the banter made some tense fights much less scary. The villains who weren’t gentlemen… well, nobody wants to get Judgment and Winnow’s attention.”

“Nobody wants to go back to the seventies,” inserted my father, scowling hard.

That got a more solemn nod from Marvelous. The joking seemed to be over. “I switched costumes because of civilians, not villains. The new outfit’s still not exactly modest, but the bystanders don’t act like pigs anymore.”

Fair enough. Another question loaded itself right onto my tongue. “You know about dragons, right? I saw one on TV, but it turned into a really ugly monster when it attacked Mech.”