Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (45 page)

Me: “I’m still biting my nails over tonight, guys.”

Ray: “It will be fine. Whatever happens, I will protect you. I mean it.”

Claire: “Instead of brooding, have fun. Let’s play a game of Teddy Bears and Machine Guns!”

Me: “Okay, but only against each other. I’m too nervous to play against strangers.”

So we started up a game of Teddy Bears and Machine Guns. I picked candy, Claire took toybox, and Ray chose junkyard. After that, nothing went as usual.

It certainly didn’t for me. I grabbed the chainsaw and basic armor, then spent some time setting up heals and soda buffs. Candy had a million of them, but I’d never liked how temporary they were before. It still wasn’t my preference, but I could see the use now.

In the middle of this, a bunch of slinkies rushed my base. I let them get in, scratch uselessly at my candy heaps, and then I cut them down with the chainsaw. An early sacrificial rush like this wasn’t Claire’s usual style. I set some new toys building and wandered out to explore the map.

The center buildings were empty. Claire and Ray were hanging back in their starting areas, building up. I used up my temporary stealth soda and wandered as close as I dared. I saw what I expected to see from Claire—zombie rag dolls. Lots of them. Lots and lots of them. She was keeping them close to her box, breeding and breeding them with no support. I couldn’t even get that close to Ray without tipping him off. He’d built a wall of buzz saws to protect his base and, instead of his usual single giant abomination, had several completely different monsters in construction at once.

Nobody was going to start anything until they could bury me. That could not be allowed to happen. I ran back to my sugar mines and picked up everything I could, then rushed Claire. I ran down the line of her rag dolls, chewing them up with my chainsaw, scattering flaming hot tamales and acid cola bombs in my wake. Then I did something I’d never done before – I took a speed boost and ran. Her rag dolls shambled after me, most of them never getting a chance to hit me back.

I led them straight for Ray’s base. Claire thought she would be clever and not fall for it. Her rag dolls veered off toward my undefended sugar mine instead. I ran in behind and cut another swathe with my chainsaw. Her constantly multiplying rag dolls meant I hadn’t seriously hurt her forces, but that wasn’t the point. She had to follow me again, and again I boosted my speed and ran. This time she followed me close enough for saw blades to fire out of Ray’s fortifications.

Suddenly, chaos reigned. Ray’s machines shambled out, one spraying fire, one sawing mercilessly, one blocking for the others. I speed boosted again and ran in the opposite direction, watching from a distance. Ray didn’t follow me. His combined machines wore down the rag doll horde, but only because he had his fortifications backing him up. So I ran back and started downing heals as I ignored everything else and moved from turret to turret, chainsawing them and dumping acid to finish them off as I moved on.

The tide turned. Rag dolls broke in through the gap in Ray’s defenses. They swung and bit at me, but I turned and ran again.

I ran straight to Claire’s toy box. If Claire pulled her army back, she’d lose it. She might be so busy she didn’t even notice me ripping up the rag dolls breeding up a fresh wave. She had to notice when I slammed her toy box shut, but, by then, it was too late.

I didn’t stay to gloat. The last thing I could afford was to let Ray recover. I drank my last speed boost, ran past my sugar mine, and grabbed everything ready, then downed every boost I had as I charged Ray’s badly damaged machines trying to limp back to repair. Stunning them all with sticky syrup, I chainsawed them one by one, circled around his remaining turrets, and carved up his salvage and construction machines. He tried to sneak off a miner, but I set it on fire with one of my remaining tamales.

Ray surrendered. I’d won.

That had been the longest match we’d ever fought. The game dropped us back into the waiting room to chat and look at our stats.

Claire: “Wow.”

Ray: “You took the words out of my mouth.”

Me: “I had a lot of tools I’ve never used before. Now I can see what they’re good for.”

Ray: “Same here.”

Claire: “I had the opposite experience. I’ve been scattering my attention too much. If I was going to bury you in endless hordes, I should have endless hordes. They weren’t enough!”

Ray: “Are you feeling better, Penny?”

Me: “Yeah. What next?”

Claire: “I think it’s time to meet at the lair. We’ll want to arrive by sundown.”

Me: “Chinatown won’t know what hit it.”

e took the Red Line to Chinatown to attract less attention. Lounging on a subway seat in full costume with Reviled on one side of me and E-Claire on the other, I grinned behind my visor and soaked up the irony of the situation. The car wasn’t crowded, but it was certainly full. The riders standing and sitting near us pretended we didn’t exist. The ones toward either end of the train stared. The only people talking were a pair of teenagers, and, from the constant glances between whispers, they were talking about us.

Of course, nobody actually refused to get on the subway car as we pulled up to each station. This was LA, after all!

We got off at Civic Center and raced up the stairs to ground level. Ray, the clown, walked up the rubber handrail of the down escalator. We strutted up to Cesar Chavez, giggling nervously and making distinctly uneven progress. When we came up on a group of pedestrians, I would teleport past them, and I teleported across the first street without warning, forcing Claire and Ray to catch up. After that, Claire skated whimsically all over the sidewalk and Ray jumped up onto bus stops, walking on his hands over them before flipping back down onto his feet on the other side.

If we were walking to our executions, we might as well do it with style.

Those big gateposts crowned by golden dragons reared up over the entrance to Chinatown. Fences ran together along the blocks to either side, sealing this part of the city off like a wall. The only way a regular person could get in was walking down the street itself, and heavy yellow plastic roadblocks stood in the way with an old Chinese man guarding them.

“Sorry, Chinatown closed for weekend,” he warned us as we approached. There was no way that Mysterious Immigrant accent could be real.

“Not to us,” I answered. Me, Claire, and Ray kept walking toward him.

He got even less believable. He waved a conical traffic flashlight at us and scolded, “Halloween over! Go away! Costume not get you through here!”

I reached out and took Claire and Ray’s hands. Just as I was about to walk face-first into the oh-so-ethnic old man’s flashlight, I focused. Our feet set down on the other side beyond him, and we kept walking as he hadn’t been there. We’d proven our point, and he didn’t say another word. As an added bonus, the pain that shot through my legs didn’t produce even a stumble. It had only been a few feet, but I’d technically been carrying both Ray and Claire. Ow. Thank goodness for the supervillain exercise regimen.

Chinatown is a shallow bowl with one big building dominating the center. Not a skyscraper or anything, but a squat, broad shopping mall type building, white and lurking and maybe four stories tall. We were heading right for it. All the other buildings looked like normal little houses or shops, all of them dark and quiet and deserted. We had to go a block before I saw the first sign of life and our first supervillain. Way up ahead, what looked like a family was setting up a roadside stall centered around several wooden barrels. An otherwise normal looking guy way too broad and beefy to be normal filled a mug from those barrels and passed the mother some cash.

Leaning my head to the side, I asked Ray whimsically, “I thought alcohol doesn’t work on you guys?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s alcohol.” We could both see the smoke rising from the mug. Not steam, smoke.

As we watched, another supervillain glided down out of the air to land in front of the stall. Ray and Claire probably knew who both of these guys were. All I knew was this guy had added thick metal bands to his brightly colored spandex and cape to keep from looking too much like a hero. If only he looked less like a circus clown.

Nervousness makes me sarcastic, apparently. I gave a real jump when a man crawled out of a sewer drain on the side of the road. He was dressed head to foot in tight, shabby brown leather, and as skinny as you’d have to be to get through a drain. Leather pilot’s goggles magnified his twitchy eyes, and the leather outfit was part harness, covered in pouches and pockets and straps for fastening on equipment.

Almost all of them hung empty, except a leather collar with wiring running up into his tight hood, a set of armbands that looked like my teleport bands with more wiring, and metal braces over his ankles. Without an inch of skin showing he still looked naked without any weapons. I sympathized, and my hand strayed by itself to pat my hip where the weight of my sugar tank should be. Claire had been emphatic. Being visibly armed wasn’t forbidden, but it was rude. That went for flaming auras or spiked hackles or what have you. Claire had even left her grappling hook in the lab, figuring the claws on it looked too offensive.

Cape Wearing Guy gave us a long, pointed stare, but the skinny guy from the sewer didn’t stop at a stare. He scurried right up to us, really scurrying, his skinny back bent low and feet shuffling rapidly. The way he crouched brought him down to our level as he said, “Bad Penny. You are Bad Penny, correct? Tasty. Absolutely tasty. Nobody even knows you’re coming, and I get to bring you in!”

Ray tilted his face down, giving the crazy, skinny supervillain a hard stare just past the brim of his hat. “You may want to rephrase that.” More than a hint of threat sharpened Ray’s words. He couldn’t leave his weapons behind. He’d even brought the special gloves, since they looked harmless enough.

Hazel eyes darted nervously behind overlarge goggles. Then the sewer villain laughed. “Oh, right, right! Lab Rat. My nom de plume is Lab Rat. You are Bad Penny, and I am tasty, so tasty—delighted to have encountered you first. The mad scientist community is agog, atwitter, delicious over a girl your age joining us, and I formally request you let me be the smug mad scientist who introduces you.”

I snickered. I couldn’t help it. I loved the theater of it all, and I couldn’t tell where the supervillain act ended and the actual crazy began with this guy. Maybe mad scientists just feel naturally at home with lab rats. “And this would involve…?”

He gave his head a jerk toward the next intersection. “You following me to where we’re set up.”

I took a step toward him and activated my bracelets again, so I ended up a step past him. Extending an arm in the way his head had gone, I commanded, “Lead on.”

He let out a loud, sharp laugh. “Ha!” and smacked his fist into his palm. Pushing himself up straight—and he was tall when he really stood up—he gave his back a crack and led the way. His normal walk lasted about five steps before he started crouching again, but he’d clearly made the effort.

Lab Rat led us circling around the central building to the other side by means of a looping, zigzag route that took advantage of the short blocks in Chinatown. The roundabout path seemed… well, roundabout, but I wasn’t sure our guide could think in straight lines.