The Great Powers Outage

by William Boniface

  Safely behind mighty steel bars was a genuine, live velociraptor. A week earlier, he had been living the normal life of a dinosaur sixty-five million years ago. But when Superopolis took that wild ride into the past—and then back to the present—the dinosaur came along with us. It was quickly decided it should be placed in the zoo, since it just wouldn’t have been wise to let a velociraptor roam about the city on its own.

  My classmates immediately wandered toward the cage, even though Mayor Whitewash was up on the dais waiting to give his speech. Irritated that an exhibit was grabbing all the attention away from him, he turned to his wife standing with him.

  “Blanche, go take care of that distraction.”

  The woman turned white as a sheet then hurried off the stage. Thanks to her size she had no problem positioning herself in such a way that she completely blocked the view of the dinosaur cage. Reluctantly the crowd turned its attention back to the mayor.

  “Welcome, Superopolitans young and old,” the mayor began. That was as far as he got before being interrupted by one of the “old” Superopolitans in the audience.

  “What are you going to do to help those of us on fixed incomes afford the increasing price of potato chips? These newfangled chips are so consarned delicious we can’t resist them. But they cost a whopping ten cents a can more than Dr. Telomere’s did.”

  A bunch of other old people began seconding his complaint.

  “Of course, of course,” the mayor said reassuringly. “I always take the concerns of our elderly citizens seriously, seeing as how they’re often the only ones who vote.”

  He glanced nervously at his wife, who shrugged her shoulders as she once again drained of color. That was all the time he needed to come up with a plan.

  “That’s exactly why I’m proposing that the city purchase every empty canister of the Amazing Indestructo’s Amazing Pseudo-Chips for a dime. Not only can you make back the extra ten cents the chips cost, but you can also gather up the canisters that others are too lazy to redeem and make even more money to fund your retirements. I think you can all agree with that idea.”

  He made that announcement with the sureness of a man who had never had anyone disagree with him.

  Until now.

  The old people in the crowd erupted in jeers.

  “But that would require effort on our part,” one woman complained.

  “Yeah,” added another. “Why can’t there just be a government grant that gives us the money as if we had redeemed the cans without us actually having to do the work?”

  The mayor looked shocked. No one had ever questioned one of his statements or proposals. I was shocked, too. My idea for enlisting his aid to steer people away from Pseudo-Chips was collapsing in front of me. What had happened to the mayor’s power?

  “Mithter Mayor?” I turned around in surprise to see Melonhead eagerly raising his hand. “Thurely you mutht know that the prithe of Amathing Indethtructo comic bookth have rithen by twenty-five thenth in jutht the latht year. Wouldn’t thuch a program be perfect for that crithith?”

  “Of course not, son,” the mayor replied as he tried to shake off his panic over his failure with his older constituents. “You’re not old enough to vote. And even when you are old enough, statistics show that you probably won’t bother. But old people do vote, and could very well vote me out of office.” I looked at the various old people in the crowd, all of whom looked ready to prove the mayor right. “That’s why I pander to their every whim and why I’m proud to announce my new Pseudo-Chip Senior Citizen Rebate Grant Program.”

  The old people all let out a cheer.

  “But you’re running unopposed,” I shouted out.

  “That isn’t completely true,” the mayor corrected me. “There may not be another candidate on the ballot, but I’m not the only choice. I live in constant fear that ‘none of the above’ could someday be elected mayor.”

  The saddest thing was that he could be so honest about his motivations without causing any outrage. Or so I thought.

  “Perhaps your greatest concern, Mayor, should be whether you’re elected to be someone else’s meal.”

  All heads turned toward the mayor’s wife, which was the direction from which the eerie voice had come.

  “Blanche . . . ?” the mayor started to say.

  She was whiter than anyone had ever seen her before and had a look of sheer terror on her face. She quickly darted back to her husband on the stage, and we could all once again view the zoo’s latest attraction.

  “Excellent,” the dinosaur spoke again. “I see I have your full and undivided attention.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Zoo Hullabaloo

  Just then, chaos erupted throughout the zoo. Every animal in every cage suddenly began bursting its barriers. To describe what happened next as hysteria would be a massive understatement. It was panda-monium, it was otter chaos, it was an albatrossity, it was . . . well . . . it was a whole bunch of other really bad animal puns.

  There was nothing strange about seeing a person in Superopolis doing something unusual. But animals behaving bizarrely was a whole different story. People always had superpowers. Animals did not. Until now.

  Some of them instantly went for payback. The birds that Sparkplug had shocked off their perch came dive-bombing right toward him. At the last possible moment they pulled back up, but not before pelting him with droppings.

  “Eewwww!” my classmates and I exclaimed simultaneously.

  But it was worse than just getting splattered with bird poop, if you can imagine such a thing. What these birds had left behind stuck to Sparkplug like glue, and the more he struggled, the more he found himself being coated with the stinky, sticky mess.

  Not everyone was sympathetic. Cannonball was laughing his butt off, though he should have been paying more attention to his own safety. The seal he had humiliated just moments earlier had quietly sidled up behind him. Still laughing hysterically, Cannonball turned around, only to go silent as he noticed the seal glaring at him. Before he could react, the seal reared up and gave his front flippers one solid clap creating a massive shock wave that sent Cannonball rolling more than a hundred feet away.

  “These animals have developed some remarkable abilities, wouldn’t you say?”

  I turned to the dinosaur inside the cage. He was speaking directly to me.

  “As have I,” he continued. “You may call me Gore.”

  “Gore?” I repeated, baffled by the impossibility of what I was hearing. “But how did you . . . ?”

  “I’m really not certain,” he replied. “I woke up in this cage the other morning with the remarkable ability to not only understand the languages of all creatures but also to speak them.”

  “Including humans,” I added numbly.

  “Yes.” Gore nodded. “Well, you are just animals yourselves, despite your delusions to the contrary. Your language is, however, quite sophisticated—though not as highly developed as that of the orangutan or the chipmunk.”

  “Chipmunks speak?” I asked, momentarily distracted from the mayhem around me.

  “All creatures have ways to communicate with each other.” Gore broke into a pleased grin revealing rows of impossibly sharp teeth. “And language, of course, is the key to knowledge. For instance, thanks to the newspapers that line my cage I’ve come to fully understand where I am and how I got here. That’s how I also happen to know that you, young human, are responsible for me being brought here to this time. I recognized you from your photo.”

  “But I have no way of sending you back,” I said, assuming that was his ultimate goal.

  “Oh, I have no desire to go back,” he replied almost cheerily. “I realize that everything I knew of my past was destroyed just moments after you brought me forward to this time. That enormous meteor was coming—with or without you being there—along with the complete extinction of my race. There is nothing for me to go back to even if I could.”

  “Then what are you after?” I aske
d.

  “I’m fascinated by this time and its contradictions—incredible technology, yet simpleminded individuals; people with amazing powers, but who use them in meaningless ways. Can these animals utilize their new abilities in any poorer a manner? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I’m fascinated to see. I’m also incredibly curious as to how these powers came about.”

  Where did these animals’ powers come from? Then I did a double take. Where did anyone’s power come from? The dinosaur had planted a question in my brain that crowded out all other thoughts. Maybe people haven’t always had superabilities. What if there is something that causes powers to develop?

  “Believe me, I won’t waste this gift that has befallen me,” Gore concluded, snapping me back to the situation at hand. “I merely wanted to thank you for having made it possible.”

  I was too surprised to even respond. Then he made some high-pitched clucking noises and small whirling dervishes plunged into the crowd. They were only about two feet tall, but they caused a panic that sent everyone fleeing. One of them stopped long enough for me to see that they were penguins.

  My friends and I were about to run from the wildly spinning critters when we heard a strange whirring sound above us. I looked up to see a whole mess of monkeys hovering in the air, their tails spinning madly above them like helicopter blades. They began pelting the stampeding crowd with nuts, and my teammates and I backed against the cage to avoid being hit.

  If we had run off like most of the crowd, we would have missed it when one of the monkeys landed, depositing an enormous king cobra onto the pavement in front of the dinosaur exhibit. The snake slithered up to the front of the cage as the velociraptor watched approvingly. Rising to its full height, the cobra reared back and spit a huge wad of something onto the bars of the enclosure. Within seconds they began to bubble, smoke, and hiss as a powerful acid ate through three or four of the steel bars.

  “Thank you, my friends,” the dinosaur said to the animals as he knocked aside what little remained of his barrier and stepped out onto the pavement in front of us.

  “As the only one among these creatures who can understand all their languages, I seem to have become their de facto leader,” he informed us. “Now what do you suppose happened to your leader? He and I really need to speak.”

  We looked up at the stage, but the mayor and his wife had already hit the trail running. Despite our fear, my teammates and I held our ground.

  “Children, please do as your friends have done and run away,” Gore said calmly. “I have no intention of harming you, but please don’t block my path. I must find your mayor.”

  “You claim to understand everything,” I said, “but clearly you don’t understand what it means to be a hero.”

  “Logic dictates that one does only what is in one’s own best interests,” Gore lectured. “Yet your species has a remarkable tendency to do things that provide no apparent advantage. Most prove detrimental. Yet I concede that occasionally these heroic actions deliver benefits that could not have been calculated in advance.”

  “All risk. No reward,” said Stench as he picked up one of the iron bars and bent it in half. “Bring it on.”

  “Very well.” The velociraptor sighed. “That meteor from which you rescued me destroyed my species and everything with which I was familiar. Yet, ironically, it also brought me great riches. Without it I would not have become the enlightened creature that now stands before you. Part of enlightenment includes knowing when it is best to avoid a confrontation not fully in one’s favor.”

  The dinosaur made an intense growling noise and a leopard bolted up beside him. To our complete amazement, the leopard removed one of its spots, stretched it to the size of a manhole, and tossed it onto the ground. Before we even had a chance to react, the velociraptor jumped onto, and then into, the spot, vanishing from sight.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Cause . . .

  The papers on Friday morning were jammed full of stories about the sudden rampage of newly powerful zoo animals. The Hero Herald ’s headline used a pun I had missed, screaming: BAD GNUS AT THE ZOO!! The Superopolis Times was a little more sedate and a lot more alliterative with: POWER PETS PUZZLE POPULACE, despite the fact that the animals in question were hardly “pets.” Neither paper mentioned the mysterious failure of Mayor Whitewash’s power. Or maybe they just missed it amid the general chaos.

  As usual, The Weekly Daily was just catching up to the events involving Professor Brain-Drain’s attempt to transport Superopolis back in time to be destroyed. They even had a photo of the approaching meteor. It was the first chance I’d had to look at it closely. I wondered what it was made of. There was something familiar about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. Gore’s comment that the meteor had brought him great riches still echoed in my brain.

  “Say, this could be a perfect opportunity for the New New Crusaders,” my dad said between gulps of orange juice and handfuls of Eggs ’n’ Bacon flavored Pseudo-Chips. He still hadn’t revealed to my mother that his team had been fired as the Maximizer Brand spokesteam. “Dumb animals wouldn’t stand a chance against the NNC.”

  “I wouldn’t assume they’re so dumb,” I said as I set down the paper and poured myself a bowl of sugar-flavored Power Pellets. “That dinosaur I talked with sounded more intelligent than most people.”

  “And just where did their powers come from?” asked my mom as she handed me an extrachilled pitcher of milk for my cereal.

  “That’s exactly what I’m wondering,” I responded, though I was really wondering: Where does anyone’s power come from?

  If I could solve the mystery of how animals that never had powers before now did, it could help me answer the biggest question of my life. After all, if animals could suddenly develop superpowers, then why not me?

  All the way to school, I became more and more excited at the possibilities. By the time I got there, I was in a great mood. The same could not be said for my classmates. Each one of them seemed to be in various states of depression, ranging from mild in the case of the Spore (who always seemed a little morose) and Somnia (who dozed fitfully as a trail of drool ran from her mouth) to extreme in the case of Lobster Boy who was so slumped in his chair that his chin rested on his desk. My teammates were acting down as well.

  “Yesterday was so unsettling.” Plasma Girl sighed. “And the thought that those animals are still out there kept me awake half the night.”

  “Me, too,” Stench agreed. “I had an opportunity to embarrass my brother, Fuzz, this morning, but I just didn’t feel up to it.”

  “What happened?” Tadpole asked with only a slight degree of curiosity.

  “I caught him in the bathroom growing hair under his arms while he talked to his reflection in the mirror about how impressed all the “chicks” would be. All I had to do was throw open the door. My mom was standing in the hall and would have seen it instantly.”

  “He didn’t really say ‘chicks,’ did he?” Plasma Girl said with annoyance. “That is so demeaning to women.”

  “He didn’t mean baby chickens?” I caught Hal mumble, mildly perplexed.

  “That’s Fuzz,” Stench said in a way that carried with it a lifetime of irritation with his older brother.

  Just then Miss Marble came into the room. She didn’t seem herself either—she was actually in a good mood.

  “Well, I’m glad to see we all managed to survive our day at the zoo,” she said as she counted heads. “I have no idea what happened yesterday, but I hope ‘animals with superpowers’ is a situation that will go away just as quickly as it appeared.”

  “Where can their powers have come from?” asked Transparent Girl.

  “Clearly this was the work of some previously unknown supervillain whose own power is the ability to bestow powers on animals,” said Miss Marble.

  This seemed like a bit of a stretch to me.

  “Maybe whatever causes people to have powers has also now affected these animals,” I piped in.

  Eve
ryone in the class looked at me as if I had said something inexcusable. Silent shock hung in the air until . . .

  “What do you mean causes people to have powers?” The Quake rumbled from the back of the room. I turned to see that she had raised her fist menacingly at me.

  “Yeah, people just have powers,” Cannonball added. “Except you, anyway!”

  The nastier kids laughed as my face flushed red. My own friends didn’t laugh, but I could tell they were embarrassed by what I had said.

  “Everyone knows that a superpower is what makes someone unique and special,” said Little Miss Bubbles. “It’s only natural.” She giggled amid an eruption of bubbles.

  “But what if it’s not?” I pressed, despite the discomfort of my friends. “What if something causes it? And now that same thing has affected these animals.”

  “Miss Marble,” wailed Puddle Boy as a pool of liquid rapidly spread out from under his desk, “Ordinary Boy says there’s nothing special about my power!”

  “He has to say that,” a voice came from the cloud that encased Foggybottom, “because there’s nothing special about him.”

  I felt humiliated as most of the class laughed. My attempt at asking a legitimate question was only drawing scorn.

  “Don’t let O Boy put us down, Miss Marble,” demanded Transparent Girl. “And we have to make certain he isn’t elected to a post as important as class treasurer.”

  “I’m not trying to put anyone down,” I insisted. “I’m just trying to get answers. Isn’t the whole point of school to seek out knowledge?”

  “Not particularly,” Miss Marble responded gloomily. “I’m afraid the point of school isn’t so much about learning things as it is learning not to say things that irritate other people.”

  “But how else do we gain knowledge?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we always be asking questions and trying to use what we discover to make life better?”