Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (46 page)

The route had its own attractions. We passed a glowing woman wearing what looked like patches of blue body paint tucked into a doorway talking to a man in a nice suit who might have been good looking if so much of his visible skin weren’t threaded with metal. They never looked away from each other for a moment, and their sly, lazy smiles were obviously flirting. Ray grinned like a cat until we left them behind us. The next block was much busier. We had to circle around a crowd of men and women, some obviously in costume, yelling and cheering. Whatever they surrounded made loud thuds. Very loud. Painful and rattling, when we actually walked past. I caught a glimpse between bodies of two big, big men hitting each other. One was covered in brown hair, and the other silvery metal.

Past the fighters stood another stand selling smoking brew and doing brisk business with the spectators. We were close enough now to see the golden light spilling out of the huge, open interior of the central building. Small groups stood around, laughing and talking, and at least one person in each group wore an obvious costume or wasn’t human. Many of the others wore uniforms in a variety of colors and patterns. Even assuming those were henchmen and the Chinese ones were locals catering to the crowd…

I’d had no idea there were this many supervillains in LA. Yikes. It was a big city, but still. I couldn’t count them all!

We walked inside, as much as there was an inside. What to call a building like this? A shopping mall? An open air market? I’d never been in one like it. There were shops around the edges, a mezzanine floor I could see from here, but a huge, open tunnel made up most of the building. Tables, stalls, video games, dance mats—the crowd had spun out a haphazard array of decorations that obviously weren’t here during the week. A glowing, larger than life hologram of Mech in the distance caught my attention first, but didn’t keep it. There was too much to look at close up.

We’d entered at the weapon sellers’ end. Businessmen in pressed suits and scruffy guys in camouflage had racks of pistols, rifles, and other scary looking military hardware. My hand instinctively cupped the soothing round shape of Vera in my belt pouch. Lab Rat veered toward the opposite side of the hall. More racks of weapons, but these tended more toward tanks of mysterious chemicals, decorative rings, crystals, exposed wiring… and the villains lounging around their tables all wore goggles, even the guy in the rumpled dress clothing who otherwise looked like a college professor. I’d found the mad scientists, and Lab Rat hopped up and down and beckoned with glee.

He wasn’t the only one beckoning. “Bad Penny! Over here!” shouted Cybermancer, both hands waving to invite me closer.

I walked over, but I didn’t hurry. It was a shame they couldn’t see the grin that made my face ache. Claire and Ray fell back a step. This was my moment.

I was obviously welcome. “Mine! I brought her here! My tasty pride!” Lab Rat snapped at Cybermancer.

“Noted in the minutes,” an elderly man in a lab coat promised.

Cybermancer sat up straighter. That wasn’t saying much. He’d been slouched almost horizontal. “We’re recording this?”

“The Evil Eye remembers all,” one of his fellows joked, tapping her own oversized, plastic, glowing left eye. Red, of course. Most everyone’s goggles were perched up on their foreheads, but I wasn’t sure how she could wear hers anyway.

Lab Rat bowed lower. “Ladies and gentlemen, mad scientists all, I introduce Bad Penny, the youngest applicant ever to our order. I have seen her deliciousness myself already.”

The professor-looking guy rendered his judgment. “Tesla’s Moustache, she’s small.”

“Small, but she’s the real thing,” promised Cybermancer. Hefting a grimy green beer bottle with straps and a grenade’s pull tab trigger on it, he gave me a grin directly. “I owe you big time. You would not believe how these things sell. The explosion never does the same thing twice in a row, and the showier villains like Lucy love it. When the heroes get back from their convention, crime fighting is going to get very weird in LA for a month or two.”

The woman with the artificial eye smacked both fists on her table. “Don’t drag out the formalities. Bad Penny, Evil Eye. Evil Eye, Bad Penny. Where’s your gear, girl? We’re all on pins and needles to see what your tech looks like. Every report is different!”

That took me aback. “I left most of it behind. I’m not supposed to carry weapons!”

Evil Eye rolled her eyes, which was a little gross since one was at least twice the size of the other and not quite in synch. “Oh, that. Just get a table, sell maybe one thing. Essential courtesies obeyed. You think I would come here and leave all my babies behind?” She scooped the contents of her table into a pile to hug them protectively. At a glance, she seemed to like guns. Beam weapons, specifically. Lots of crystals, mirrors, and lenses.

Claire had seated herself on the edge of one of the stalls, and the guy with all the brass plates and cogs on his costume asked her, “Bad Penny built the sliding surfaces into your costume’s shoes, didn’t she? Take it off and—”

He stopped when the professor-looking guy cleared his throat, loudly. Claire gave the steampunk scientist a sunny, teasing grin. “Why, Mr. Mechanical Aesthetic, aren’t I just a little too young for you?”

Steampunky guy stared, confused. It took him another second to get it. “No, that didn’t even occur to me!”

Standing over him, the professory scientist put his hand on Mechanical Aesthetic’s shoulder but addressed Claire. “Your mind control power is dangerously subtle, little girl.” Grim as his face was, he sounded approving.

“So if we can’t see her shoes, what did you bring?” asked the most unlikely member of the group, a stout middle aged man with a huge red beard. He wore goggles like all the others, although the metal shields around the edges looked much less fanciful.

“Well, I didn’t leave everything,” I conceded. What to show them? Might as well leave Ray’s weaponized gloves a secret. “I suppose I could let you examine my teleport bands.” Everybody knew I could teleport by now, right?

They crowded around eagerly as I pulled up my sleeve and slipped off one of the bands. Big beard guy received it in both hands as I held it out. Why him I had no idea, but the others huddled and stared as he turned the band over and over, rubbing his fingers over the metal.

In a solemn and businesslike tone, he described what he saw. “Impure copper. Hard to know what the alloy is. The inner lining is another alloy, one I’m completely unfamiliar with.” He thumped the metal with a finger. “Solid. No sign of moving parts, visible circuit connects, antennae, power source, controls, or any seams or hatches for adjustments.”

I gave a little shrug. “It doesn’t need any of that. It operates purely passively.”

I didn’t realize I’d been expecting disbelief until I didn’t get it. They all looked at me with complete faith that it did work. Evil Eye asked, “Would you be willing to describe the mechanism?”

Which left me with only one thing to do. I lied! “Like I said, it’s passive. Rather than moving you through space, the six bands together distort the wearer’s attitude in time. They give you the ability to travel in a closed time loop that’s cut away at the other end. The time you spent walking from here to there doesn’t exist. The time removal has a number of odd side effects. Most are useful, like letting you move vertically to places you couldn’t reach normally.” Glee bubbled up in my belly as I rattled off this made-up explanation. For all I knew, that
was
how the bands worked. My power didn’t object, or throw up any new plans based on this idea.

They passed the band around through everyone’s hands. Some of them tapped or thumped the metal themselves. Finally, the professor type gave my teleport band back to me, and, as I slipped it back on, he asked, “I’ve heard you have a Conqueror orb. Is that true?”

My eyebrows lifted. “News travels fast.”

“In my experience, superheroes and supervillains spend more time gossiping than fighting each other,” he answered in grave, absolute deadpan.

I patted my belt pouch without thinking about it. Oops. Now they knew where Vera was. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing! And maybe there were limits to how much lying was appropriate. “It’s a misunderstanding. Vera isn’t a Conqueror orb. I built her myself.”

That didn’t deter him. “Even more interesting. Are we lucky enough that you brought her tonight?”

I cupped my hand over my belt pouch. “Well… yes, but she’s deactivated. I didn’t want to appear armed.”

“I assure you, she’ll be viewed as a status symbol, not a weapon.” He was insistent. Insistent? His eyes burned with curiosity, and so did the others. Even Cybermancer leaned forward over his table and its explosives.

I was starting to blush. I could feel it on my cheeks. Thank goodness for the visor. I unzipped the pouch, pulled Vera out, and tapped her. “Time to wake up.”

She did, bits of ceramic sliding away, faintly glowing ball floating up into the air as the pieces surrounded her in a pixie configuration. Like an eye, her black pupil flitted slowly and curiously between the various mad scientists. Then she dismissed all of them and floated over to roll one of Cybermancer’s explosive beer bottles from side to side.

I felt weirdly awkward at how they stared at her. Jerking a thumb over my shoulder at the arms dealers behind us, I warned, “We might want to make this quick. If we don’t, all the conventional ammunition in the building will rot.”

The guy with the beard reached out to touch Vera, but she pushed his finger away and floated back. He frowned, staring at her. He looked confused, and he sounded a bit angry. “That’s not a fake. That’s a real Conqueror orb. She didn’t make it.”

The professor type’s head bobbed slightly, and his own voice hardened. “No, it’s too small. Only drones are that size, and this is obviously no drone. Battlefield support units with the gunpowder degradation field are twice that diameter.”

Evil Eye peered at Vera, reaching up to plug the cord of a phone sized device into her artificial eye. It made soft beeps and ratcheting noises as she slowly twisted the rim of the eye’s setting. She squinted. Her brow furrowed, then furrowed more. “These readings are ridiculous. She’s emitting all kinds of energy, from infrared to the exotics I register when magic is in use. The levels bounce all over the place, and—” As she spoke, Vera turned from playing with Cybermancer’s explosives to look at her, and she was interrupted when the computer noises of her plug-in burst into a brassy and very badly synthesized rendition of electro-swing.

“I guess I never cleared that program,” I apologized, not sure if I was embarrassed or proud. Reaching out to cup one hand under Vera’s globe, I tapped her and ordered, “Sleep.” She closed up, and I tucked her safely back in my belt pouch.

They all looked at me. Very stiffly, the professor type bowed his head low and announced, “It is the official opinion of the mad science community that you may keep the name The Inscrutable Machine.”

“With our blessings,” the bearded guy added. I guess I’d convinced him.

Claire giggled, hopping off Mechanical Aesthetic’s table. “Now that that’s settled, I want to drag Bad Penny away. This is our first time in Chinatown, and we haven’t even looked around yet.”

“We’re glad you stopped here first,” the professor guy replied politely.

“I did that! Me!” Lab Rat hopped up and down like he would explode with pride.

Cybermancer threw up a hand. “Hold up! Don’t leave yet! Here!” Twisting around, he rummaged through a duffle bag of explosives and pulled out… a pair of leather and brass goggles. He tossed them over, and I managed to catch them in both hands. Cybermancer winked at me. “You can’t wear those with your helmet on, but you should have a pair.”

Everyone gaped at him. Mechanical Aesthetic slapped his vending table. “I should have thought of that.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it. I kept giggling as I buckled the goggles behind my neck so they hung like a necklace. I felt like I was floating and could hardly feel my fingers to fasten the buckle. Had I ever gotten a better gift? I couldn’t remember one.

Ray’s hand touched my lower back, and I took a halting step away, and then another.

“Come back soon, prodigy daughter,” the professor said.

“And bring something to drink! Cybermancer experimented on all our alcohol, and the soft drinks!” called Evil Eye.

Claire hung back. Leaning over Mechanical Aesthetic’s table, she clasped her hands together and gave the professor her sweetest, goofiest grin. “Would it be too much to ask for the Expert’s business card?”

She’d addressed the professor guy, and he nodded. He went by ‘Expert’? The others sure deferred to him like one. He pulled a little card out of his wallet and passed it into Claire’s gloved hands. Rather coyly, he answered her, “Of course. I am, after all, a reputable businessman.”

We turned away and walked into the chaos. This place was crazy. Inside, most of the villains were real, costumed supervillains. Not all of them. Claire tugged on my hand and pointed at a booth under the mezzanine’s overhang. “Is that a sign-up station for henchmen?”

She giggled, and I admit I kinda giggled, too. Ray waved his hand dismissively. “We don’t need henchmen.”

Claire lifted her chin and folded her arms over her chest. “You don’t. I’ve got a future to think about!”

An odd motion caught my eye. A kid almost our age jumped off the balcony above. His hair and clothes whipped about him as he floated down rather than fell. About halfway down his power gave out, and he dropped into the waiting arms of a villain in costume who was probably his father. It was an interesting reminder. We weren’t the only kids with super powers, just the only ones trying to compete with adults.

Ray pointed, dragging my gaze in the other direction. “Lucy was right. We could have gotten a better price here.” Sure enough, like the mad scientists half a dozen tables were piled with occult looking gear and manned by eccentric looking shopkeepers. Unlike the mad scientists, these tables didn’t crowd together, and the magical vendors eyed each other suspiciously instead of socializing.