Temporary Superheroine

by Irene Vartanoff

  A waitress came to take our orders. Barb wouldn’t let me order a meal, saying there wasn’t time. After the waitress left, Barb answered my question. “Roland said he wanted to give you a warning, but couldn’t locate you. We all know your psychic link powers are not well developed yet.”

  She gave me a rather critical look before she continued in a lighter tone, “I suspect your friend also wanted a tour of the FC offices. He had a lot to say about how much he loves our comics.”

  “What was Roland’s message? Where is he now?” I asked, ignoring Barb’s constant put downs. My own Barb did the same thing.

  “He said to tell you Dave drew a page showing the Purple Menace building a machine to steal what he called DNA strength. You must destroy it. Then Roland went—poof!—back to your dimension.” She waved her gloved hand to underline Roland’s actions.

  The waitress arrived with a martini for Barb and a glass of tomato juice for me. Barb sipped hers elegantly. I hungrily chugged mine. Too bad there weren’t any peanuts in this ladies’ retreat. Apparently they didn’t serve happy hour snacks to women. Or perhaps happy hour hadn’t been invented here? Confusing world.

  At least Roland was safely home. I didn’t have to worry that he would be grabbed again. But where was Eric? What was he up to? Whose side was he on?

  “Where in Brooklyn is the Purple Menace?” I asked. “Could you see?”

  “The old South Brooklyn ferry terminal. It’s at 39th street. A big deserted industrial building.”

  “I’m a Queens girl. I’m not too strong on Brooklyn. Does that skyway go there?”

  “No. The Transatlantic is not programmed for local traffic. It would take you to Europe via Iceland. That singer who wore a swan costume at the Oscars, I forget her name, lobbied successfully to get a stop in Reykjavik.”

  “You have the same celebrities here?”

  She wasn’t interested in chitchat about her world. “Get going. Take a cab. You shouldn’t waste any more time.”

  That was twice she’d criticized me for being too slow at my saving-the-world task. This Barb wasn’t my mother, but she nagged like her.

  “You’re absolutely sure the Purple Menace is in Brooklyn at the abandoned South Brooklyn Terminal?” I asked.

  “He’s there, up to his neck in machines.”

  I made to leave, thanking her for the drink and the information. But there was one more thing. I settled back in my dainty chair. “Uh, Barb? When the bubble thing crashed, I fell out of it in midair.”

  Barb gave me a look that made me think she knew what was coming next.

  “I should have been killed.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Instead, I began to fly. Not well,” I hurriedly disclaimed. “I only broke my fall. What do you know about flying?”

  Not entirely to my surprise, she had an answer to my question. “It took the Purple Menace at least a month to develop his ability to fly. I expect you’ll need some time, too,” she said with a judicious air.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all you need to know. Stop him.”

  Should I follow the trail to Brooklyn? I hadn’t had much luck finding the Purple Menace so far.

  Barb jarred me out of my futile musings. “Get on with it, will you? Two worlds are depending on you.”

  I gave her a wry look. “No pressure, right?” I stood up, waved a goodbye, and headed out to the street to hail a cab. This trip, I’d brought plenty of cash. Surprisingly, Jerry had pulled out a big wad of bills and pressed them on me before I’d left Dave’s studio. Nice of him.

  I waved down a cab and piled in. The sun was beginning to set now. After directing the driver, I reflected on all the small and large differences visible in this dimension from my own. The hats, the cars, the skyway. The antique customs, like a ladies’ bar and a men’s bar. Bad guys not cussing and talking dirty. It must be due to Diabolical Dave’s influence. Although how, I had no clue.

  We were going south on 5th Avenue, approaching 34th Street, when I saw what should have been the Empire State Building. It looked all wrong.

  “What is that building?” I asked.

  The cabbie replied, “The Sky Tower. It was built in the 1930s.”

  So were the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. The Sky Tower looked like both of them architecturally.

  Why wouldn’t Dave or Barb tell me something solid to go on? How was I supposed to stop the Purple Menace when he had superpowers greater than mine, a couple of goons working for him, and now he’d morphed into some kind of comic book mad scientist with the ability to build dangerous machines?

  Dave had denied knowing the exact method to save the day, but what if he did know and chose not to tell me?

  Better not to continue that line of thinking, or I’d be intoning my return incantation right now. Diabolical Dave McCay was as ornery, inexplicable, and downright vague as any mad scientist himself. Despite my negative feelings toward him, I wanted to help him. Not out of daughterly duty. No need for duty to a man who had ignored me my whole life.

  He needed me. Unlike my own Barb living in Queens and doing low-level office work and not giving a darn, he seemed curiously out of step with the modern world and somewhat the worse for it. She was always cynical, detached, and amused by the goings-on around her. By contrast he seemed like an antique, not happy to cope with the many changes of recent years. As if his thought patterns hadn’t entertained any new notions for a long while.

  Did I want Dave to get his wish and move to this other dimension so I could avoid conflicting feelings about him? Perhaps. If I did this one big thing, it would be over. He could be happy. Maybe I could, too.

  First I had to defeat the Purple Menace.

  Or was I fooling myself? Eric had asked me earlier why I was risking my life for a father I’d never known. I didn’t have a good answer. Parents are supposed to care about their children, aren’t they? They so often don’t. Still, the children are desperate for the parents’ love and approval. It’s a lifelong yearning. I’ve been mad at Barb for months and years at a time, but I’m always drawn back to her for one reason or another. She’s not so toxic that I feel justified in cutting her from my life. Our problem is we never see eye-to-eye about what is important.

  Take my art, for instance. It still burns me when I think of it, but she didn’t want me to attend art school, or even to take art classes when I was young and eager. Perhaps she was trying to protect me from a life she knew was difficult at best. What an irony that I chose webcomics as my career.

  I couldn’t live with her insistence that I be practical and train for some stupid office job. I didn’t see myself spending most of my waking hours in a cubicle farm. I’d moved to Chicago to stop hearing her daily criticisms. It had worked, which was weird because she could easily have called me there and continued giving me advice I didn’t want to hear, but she didn’t bother. Out of sight, out of mind. Not very flattering to me, but a relief nonetheless.

  At least Barb had never pushed me to get married. Perversely, I’d been angry at her lately because she hadn’t. Didn’t she know I hoped to find a boyfriend who loved me, a man I loved, and even have a family someday?

  If she did care, Barb had a tough-minded way of showing it. She advised me to stop hoping to meet Prince Charming, get a solid career going and support myself. On my twenty-first birthday I had the revelation she was probably right and Prince Charming wasn’t showing up in a golden coach to carry me off to an idealized existence, even if I did have an old princess costume in my closet. I should get busy turning my webcomic ideas into a living, which I had not done.

  I’d moved out, but then I’d allowed myself to get distracted by the dating scene. I’d fallen in and out of relationships instead of paying attention to my craft. I’d never reached out to other webcomics artists to learn from them. I’d tried to go it alone. I hadn’t even considered syndicating my strip, or joining any other alliances that might promote my webcomics, or hand selling a print version of my �
�Average Chloe” stories at indie comics conventions. I’d only focused on creating my art.

  Another bone of contention between me and Barb. From having worked at one of the premier superhero comics publishers in America, she was highly opinionated about what constituted a successful piece of artwork. She didn’t have any affinity for my art style or for my subject matter. She’d never once complimented me on anything I drew. You’d think my own mother would have something kind to say about my achievements, even if they didn’t appeal to her personal taste. Wrong. She didn’t. It bothered me.

  My breast-beating whiled away my trip to the wilds of Brooklyn, but otherwise it solved nothing. Time to give it a rest.

  Where was Eric? Could he have been the one whose purple bolts saved me from the steel arm? Perhaps, but where did he get the bolts unless he, too, has a superpower in this dimension? Oh, boy. This was getting more complicated by the minute.

  The world outside the taxi was significantly unlike mine. No jersey walls on the highways. No towering sodium vapor streetlights. No standard green highway signs. The cars were a curious mix, some like the ones back on my world, others a vision of last century’s wish fulfillment. They were bulbous and yet sleek, with big clear plastic bubbles for roofs. Instead of an HOV lane, there was a track in the middle of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, like on a roller coaster. Cars somehow were locked into it at intervals. Every few miles, one of the tracks took off for the sky highway. As cars ascended, they reminded me of spaceships just off a launch pad. The climb was steady until, far above, they leveled out and were gone, on their way to Europe. I wished I could follow them.

  It took a while longer, but we finally arrived at the destination, an obscure landing on the west side of Brooklyn called South Brooklyn—typical Brooklyn logic. I’d reached the abandoned ferry site, a dock dominated by a large old stone-and-metal industrial building stretching over a city block. All the windows and doors had metal sheets over them. Not exactly inviting. Even less inviting was the twelve-foot chain link fence with rolled barbed wire on top surrounding the entire area.

  The cab stopped at the gate. “You’ll be okay alone here?” the cabbie asked, “You being super and all?”

  Decent of him to ask, when it was obvious he thought the deserted dock was spooky. I pulled bills out of my utility belt and paid him. Once I was out of the cab, he shot away in a big hurry.

  Now I was truly on my own. Sunset was finally complete. Only afterglow lit the sky.

  “Here goes.” I walked to the gate.

  Chapter 18

  The gate was not locked. A length of heavy, rusty chain was artfully wrapped to give that illusion. I unwrapped it and pushed the remarkably smooth-moving gate open a couple of feet. It didn’t even make a creaking noise. Oiled. I slid in and shut the gate behind me, then carefully rewound the chain. No need to announce my presence to anyone else who might arrive after me.

  I walked around the building, trying not to step on rusty cans and other random trash. I looked for signs the building was inhabited by the Purple Menace, and not some homeless persons or a teen gang. If they had either in this prissy dimension. Who knew? They had thugs who didn’t talk dirty. Maybe they had pleasant teen gangs. Anything was possible.

  The front of the building gave nothing away. It was merely a massive, endless warehouse with zero charm, completely sealed. But a side door half-hidden by quick-growing bushes showed a shiny new padlock, currently unlocked, and a well-oiled deadbolt, too. I eased open the door, which made no noise. The lights were on inside. By the door was a stack of empty wooden crates, perfect for hiding behind while I scoped out the room. They were new crates, like the ones I’d seen at the Purple Menace’s former hideout in Manhattan.

  Carefully peeking around the crates, I saw what had been moved in since the city abandoned this ferry building. A complex set-up of banks of machines with lots of blinking lights, dials, knobs, and buttons. This dimension followed comic book rules from decades ago. Machines in my dimension, or at least the controls for machines, were quite tiny. On this world, everything was bulky. Definitely pre-chip technology. These behemoths probably ran on vacuum tubes and coils and other devices now relegated to Rube Goldberg designs in children’s museums in my own world. They made a huge racket. I stopped tiptoeing.

  I wanted to surprise the Purple Menace. From my visit to his former hideout in Manhattan, I knew his two minions were either nearby or likely to show up soon. Although the machines gave me cover, they would do the same for anyone else.

  The building had a very high roof, and long loading docks that stretched endlessly. Some walls rose partway to the ceiling, creating rooms. No way to tell what was inside without venturing into unseen territory. A few remaining pink and orange strands of afterglow were visible through the huge multi-paned windows facing the water. Beautiful, but I didn’t need the sun. Inside this vast building, all the lights were on. Someone was home.

  I advanced to study the machines up close. What did they do? I had no idea. I have no technical background. I could not identify their purpose despite all the gauges, buttons, switches, dials, and blinking indicator lights. For all I knew, they could have powered the subway, or run the entire Social Security system. The room was enormous, and the machines hummed endlessly.

  The Purple Menace surprised me by walking from behind the bank of machines.

  “You again,” he said. “Like them?” The Purple Menace asked, nodding at the machines. He wore a lab coat over his costume but still had his eye mask on. He looked like a mad scientist. I guess he was. Mad, that is. Maybe even a scientist, if Diabolical Dave had imagined him as such.

  “I’m about to launch my campaign to destroy your world as you know it. These machines are creating my masterpiece.”

  I stared at him. There was something awfully familiar about him up close I hadn’t noticed while he dangled me from the twenty-story building.

  “Eric?”

  “Yes?” He turned his head from the happy contemplation of a dial on a machine.

  “You’re this world’s Eric Wood, aren’t you?” I said. “How can you be a criminal here and an upstanding citizen there?”

  “You hardly know your Eric,” he said with condescension.

  “What is the difference between the two of us?” he asked. “A mere matter of semantics and lucky breaks.”

  The man had a point. Considering how the Eric of my world had acted today, I wasn’t sure about his upstanding citizen status.

  “I must give some credit to your father,” the Purple Menace continued. “He hates corporate comics so much he conflated your Eric, the corporate executive, with me, the mere employee. Your father dreamed that the Eric of this world—that would be me—was a villain. Thus I was imbued with the ambition to attain greatness as the Purple Menace. My job as a cog in the comic book corporate machine ceased to be enough for me. In fact, Diabolical Dave set me on my current path. I am no petty criminal. I think big. What better ambition than to rule the world?”

  I had to grimace. A cliché supervillain plan straight out of a comic book. “This entire dimension is in Diabolical Dave’s head. He’s in charge,” I argued.

  “No, he’s not. He has influence. Too much. I shall fix that problem shortly.”

  Now what? I had never intended to hurt the Purple Menace much, merely do whatever it took to stop him. Now that I knew he was the physical double for Eric, how could I even try? I was disappointed. I wanted this to be cut-and-dried, but it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. Meanwhile, I’d better find out as much as possible about the Purple Menace’s plans. Make sure this wasn’t my world’s Eric after all. He didn’t talk like my Eric. He wasn’t muscular like my Eric, either. Nor did the Purple Menace look at me with anything like the sexual interest I had always seen in Eric’s eyes.

  “What will your machines do? Deny everyone health benefits? That’s probably the easiest way to kill us all,” I offered.

  “Cute,” he nodded. “You’re already slipping int
o the superheroine manner of wisecracking. Too bad I have to kill you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have powers, girl. You might interfere with my plan to create the most devastating weapon ever designed. I’ve forged the prototype. The next step is miniaturization so I can take it to your world.”

  I didn’t even need to keep him talking. The Purple Menace was having fun showing off.

  “My obedience beam will enslave your entire dimension.”

  “An obedience beam? Where do you come up with inventions like that? Weren’t you a comic book artist on this world? I thought you worked at Fantastic Comics with Bodacious Barb?”

  “Yes, until Diabolical Dave’s constant mental interference changed my life. Now, I find I have a wide range of superpowers, including the ability to create amazing scientific inventions and machines of great power.”

  “You made that steel arm?”

  “A beginner’s experiment,” he shrugged, then stroked one of the machines. “This is my masterpiece.”

  “How do you expect to enslave a real dimension when you live in a virtual dimension in someone’s brain?”

  “What makes you think you don’t do the same?” he fired back.

  The Purple Menace could see from my puzzled expression I didn’t understand what he meant. He enjoyed enlightening me.

  “The universe could be a series of worlds within worlds, endlessly repeated. I have chosen to rule the one in which I am most powerful. Yours,” he explained, as if to a child.

  The scary thing was he made sense. As long as dimensional portals didn’t exist or weren’t traveled, each dimension was the only reality. By wanting desperately to live in a dimension like this, Diabolical Dave had messed with the reality of two worlds. Had he created this dimension or simply contacted it? Whatever, he was the link who inspired the Eric Wood of this world to turn into a supervillain. Diabolical Dave also was the portal to let the Purple Menace into our world.

  “Why can’t you rule this world and leave mine alone?” I asked.