by Charlie Wood
“Too many eyes on us,” Nova said, as police sirens blared from a few streets away. “We need to get out of here.”
“Yes,” Rigel said, looking at the punching-and-kicking robot he was holding by the neck. “And we’ll bring him with us.”
“No!” Scatterbolt shouted. As Nova and Rigel began walking away, Scatterbolt opened a compartment on his chest and reached into his robotic insides. Soon, he pulled out an object: it was a golden sphere, covered in shining computer circuitry. After rearing his arm back, the robot heaved the sphere toward Keplar, and it rolled across the pavement and toward the dock where Strike had driven into the water. Seconds after the sphere left the robot’s hand, his body shut down; his eyes turned off, and his arms and legs went limp.
“Let’s go,” Rigel said, with the motionless robot dangling from his hand. With his other hand, the red giant reached into his cloak pocket and retrieved a black, chrome portal pistol. Pointing the shining pistol in front of him, he pulled its trigger and created a black, swirling portal of energy.
“Where’s Strike?” Nova said, as they walked toward the portal.
“No time to deal with the others; they will have to wait until later.”
The two villains stepped into the portal, and it closed after them. They—and Scatterbolt—were gone.
Near the dock, Scatterbolt’s golden sphere was still lying on a patch of grass—until Adrianna picked it up. The beautiful, purple-garbed girl looked over the sphere, before noticing tire tracks on the dock leading into the water. Bubbles were rising to the surface from the darkness of the river below.
Putting the sphere into one of her pockets, Adrianna sprinted across the dock, leapt off of it, and dove into the water. Swimming downward, she followed the bubbles until she saw a car—it was sinking downward, with its nose toward the bottom of the river and its brake lights glowing toward her. The vehicle was a convertible, and inside she could see Strike in the driver’s seat—he was tangled in the seat belt, floating and unconscious.
Knowing she only had a few seconds, Adrianna kicked her feet and swam down to Strike. Reaching into the car, she used a knife to cut the seat belt around the hero, and then pulled him free. After holding his unmoving body against her, she pushed herself off the car with her feet, looked up, and swam toward the moonlight above.
With a desperate gasp, Adrianna broke the surface of the water and pulled Strike into the open air. After swimming with him to the shore, she threw him down onto the riverbank. His mask had fallen off, and she saw that the teenage boy’s face was blue and his lips were purple. Dropping to her knees, she leaned over and began giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, before sitting him up and giving him the Heimlich maneuver. Finally, after feeling the boy move, she let go of him just as he coughed violently and fell to the dirt. After vomiting a few gallons of water, he looked up, confused and disoriented.
“Yes,” Adrianna said, smiling down at him, “I just saved your butt again.”
Tobin nodded, then spit up more water. He was starting to remember: the car chase; Keplar and Scatterbolt crashing in the submarine; driving the convertible off the dock. And now here he was, with the beautiful, dark-haired girl from the hotel rooftop. And he was pretty sure they had just made out. Technically.
Adrianna reached into her pocket. “By the way, your robot friend left this behind.”
She tossed the golden sphere onto the dirt in front of Tobin. He picked it up, inspected it, and then looked up at Adrianna.
“Toodle-loo,” she said, with a smile and wave of her fingers, before throwing something to the ground. It was a smoke bomb, and with a sudden CRACK!, a burst of grey smoke covered Tobin’s vision. He coughed and waved his hands in front of him…but when his vision was clear, he saw that the girl was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Damn it!” Keplar shouted. The husky’s left arm was in a sling, but that didn’t stop him from using his other arm to flip over a medical table in the Museum of the Heroes infirmary. The metal instruments on the table were sent flying across the room and clanging to the floor, just as the dog punched a hole through one of the cupboards on the wall. “Arrrrrrrggggh!” he growled.
“All right, Keplar,” Orion said, standing on the other side of the infirmary. “Smashing things isn’t going to help us. Let’s get our thoughts in order here.”
“They treated us like amateurs!” Keplar yelled. “Scatterbolt was taken away, while we basically watched like morons! We should be ashamed of ourselves!”
“You got taken by surprise by odds that no one could have handled,” Orion said. “Now we need to prepare ourselves for the next step. And this certainly isn’t achieving that. So why don’t you go get the Sky-Blade ready for our flight? We’ll be out in a few minutes.”
After flipping over one more table on his way out, Keplar stomped out of the infirmary and toward the Museum elevator.
Orion and Tobin also walked out of the infirmary, but headed down the hallway in the opposite direction.
“Hopefully he’ll cool down soon,” Orion said. “But I doubt it. How are you doing, Tobin?”
Tobin tilted his neck to the side and patted one of his ears.
“Not so great. I think I’m gonna have swimmer’s ear for the rest of my life. But thank god that girl saved me, whoever she was.”
“Yes, that will be our first step: figuring out who did this, and who was involved. We know at least Rigel was there. Apparently still alive.”
“Yeah, what was that all about?” Tobin asked. “Keplar said that he turned into a human? I don’t understand. I thought he…?”
Orion led Tobin into the Museum’s research room. Its floors were lined with bookshelves, and there were dozens of circular filing cabinets and computer stations along the walls.
“There are still some things we haven’t told you much about, Tobin,” Orion said. “Some things that aren’t very easy for either Keplar or me to talk about.”
Orion walked to a shelf; it was lined with small, crystal discs in plastic cases. The old man found the disc he was looking for, then placed it inside a circular machine on the floor.
“You already know some of this,” Orion began, “but we have never gone into too much detail. Many years ago, after your father moved to Earth and retired from being a superhero, I decided I needed to train a new team of superheroes here on Capricious, in case Vincent ever returned. If there was ever another threat to Earth, I didn’t want to have to rely on you, when you grew up.”
“So much for that,” Tobin said with a smirk.
Orion laughed. “Yes. But I did try.”
Orion pressed a button on a remote control, and a life-size, three-dimensional image appeared above the machine on the floor—it was an image of Tobin’s father Scott, the original Strike, and Orion. The image was made out of shimmering, colorful light, and as Tobin walked around it, he could see all sides of Orion and his father in their superhero costumes. It was still one of the coolest things Tobin had seen on the world of Capricious: a machine that created life-size, life-like holograms. The hologram machines here in the Museum played movies about history and science, but there were other machines, as Tobin had quickly learned, that played the greatest video games in the entire universe.
“Two of the superheroes I decided to train when your father retired were two new heroes who had recently begun making news fighting crime on Capricious,” Orion said. “One of them was Keplar.”
Tobin watched as the machine projected a hologram of a young Keplar, about twelve years old. The pre-teen husky looked much younger and skinnier than he did now, but he was still wearing his usual cowboy hat, heavy boots, and leather jacket. The image began to move, and Tobin watched as the twelve-year-old Keplar fired his laser blasters in the Museum of the Heroes training room. The husky easily dispatched a squadron of six-foot tall,
humanoid robots, all while laughing and hooting with glee. The target shooting came so natural to him, even at an age when most kids were just starting sixth grade.
“And the other hero,” Orion continued, “was a young man named Marcus Drake.”
The hologram changed: now it showed a young black man, about eighteen years old. He was tall and built like a marathon runner, with a fit body and dark hair that was shaved nearly down to his skin. A training robot was charging at him, but he readied himself; as he yelled in anger, his body grew nearly a foot, and his skin turned red and rough like a rhinoceros. The giant’s appearance wasn’t as inhuman and demented as Tobin had seen in the present, but the boy could still recognize who it was—it was Rigel. The red-skinned man quickly clubbed the robot with his forearm, knocked it to the ground, and then stomped on its head with his elephant-like foot.
“Both of these heroes were young and hot-headed,” Orion explained, “but they were also very gifted. Keplar took to the training immediately, embracing the challenge of becoming a better hero, but Marcus was...very troubled. I thought I could help him deal with his terrible past, and help him overcome the paranoid thoughts that were haunting him, but in the end, I couldn’t. Eventually, he revealed his true intentions—for the majority of the time, he had only been training with Keplar and me so that he could learn the secret whereabouts of the prison where Vincent Harris was being held. Like Vincent, he was obsessed with the planet Earth, and he believed that unless the inhabitants of Earth were controlled and ruled over by Capricious, the universe was doomed to be destroyed. He was terrified about what might happen if the humans of Earth gained the ability to travel the universe, and believed it was his destiny to stop this from happening.
“Using the information he had gathered from myself and the other heroes of Capricious, Marcus found the underground prison where Vincent was being held, broke him free from his cell, and awoke him from the cryogenic sleep he had been under for nearly five decades.
“The rest of the story you know: with Vincent reawakened and threatening to travel to Earth, your father came out of retirement and helped me stop him. Your father paid a terrible price for Rigel’s actions that day. We all paid a terrible price.”
“And now,” Tobin said, “Rigel is back, carrying on Vincent’s work since Vincent isn’t here any more.”
“Yes,” Orion said. He watched the image of Rigel. “It appears that way.”
After walking out of the museum’s giant double-doored entrance, Orion and Tobin walked across the headquarters’ brick-lined sky-ship landing platform. The gleaming, winged sky-ship known as the Sky-Blade was waiting for them at the edge of the platform, with its engines running.
“When Vincent and I were both still members of the Guardians,” Orion explained, “I often heard him talk about something or someone called the Daybreaker. He was always saying that this Daybreaker was even more powerful and important than him, which is saying something, considering Vincent’s ego.”
Orion and Tobin walked up the Sky-Blade’s ramp and into its open door.
“Rigel and this other man dressed in green must be working together to search for the Daybreaker, to continue Vincent’s plan for the enslavement of Earth. And they must be looking at you as their main obstacle to finding this Daybreaker, which is why they were giving all those Earth criminals superpowers, in an attempt to get you out of their way.”
Tobin shook his head. “Great, I’m flattered. So where are we headed now?”
Orion sat in the passenger seat of the sky-ship’s cockpit. “First, we get Scatterbolt back. We find out where Rigel took him, and we take Rigel and his partner down in the process.” The old man held up the golden sphere that Scatterbolt had left behind in Boston. “There is only one person in the world who can help us figure out what this sphere is—the person who created Scatterbolt. And he lives, conveniently enough, in the one place that may be able to cheer Keplar up.”
CHAPTER NINE
Five hours later, under the night sky, Tobin, Keplar, and Orion stepped out of the Sky-Blade and onto the wet, grassy shore of an ocean. However, Tobin thought, the ocean appeared to be more of a massive bog—the air was filled with a thick, rotten fish-stench, and nearly everything around him was black: the slow-moving water, the sand, the trees, even the patches of dried-up lily pads under his feet. Nearer to the shore, there were hundreds of rocks lining the sand, and they were also covered in a black, slimy algae. Looking closer, Tobin could make out crabs and six-legged rats scavenging and chewing on the carcasses of dead fish, hidden under the blanket of thick fog.
“You guys bring me to the nicest places,” Tobin said, careful not to slip on the rocks.
“Here we are,” Orion said. “My friend should be able to get us across the water more discreetly than if we flew in. We want to be as inconspicuous as possible, after all.”
Tobin had originally thought there were no signs of human life along the ocean, but then he noticed a rickety, wooden dock sticking out into the water, and next to it there was a small, wooden shanty. The shanty was leaning to its left, like a condemned building about to fall down, and it was barely bigger than a tollbooth. There was also a window on the front of the shanty, with a sign above it that read: SHADOW OCEAN TICKETS.
“Hi, Drendel,” Orion said, approaching the booth’s window.
Tobin saw a person sitting in the booth, facing the other way and watching a sporting event on a black-and-white television. When the person turned around in his chair, he revealed himself: it was a strange, incredibly thin man, with light grey skin and a neck that was nearly two feet long. His small head was topped by a thatch of black hair, and he had little red dots for eyes and a nose that stretched far out from his face. He was so skinny, Tobin realized, that in certain places his bones could be seen through patches of his translucent skin.
“Oh, hey Orion!” Drendel said in a graveled, but friendly, voice. “Wow, didn’t think I’d see you around this place at this time of night.”
“Normally you wouldn’t, but there’s someone I need to see on the other side. Can you take us over?”
“Yeah, sure, sure.” Drendel looked at Keplar. “Good to see you, too, Keplar. Going over for your weekly visit?”
Orion looked to Keplar, with his eyebrows raised.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” the husky replied.
“I saw Tess over there last night,” Drendel said. “And Diane, too. They were both looking for you.”
“Again,” Keplar said with a smile, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Orion shook his head.
“Right, right,” Drendel laughed. “Well, let’s get you three over there, huh?”
After opening the shanty’s wooden door (causing it to nearly fall off its hinges,) Drendel stepped out of the booth and onto the sandy shore. Tobin was shocked to see that the skinny man was nearly nine feet tall, with scrawny legs that looked like they were about to snap simply from trying to hold him up, and bony arms that were dragging along the ground. After lifting the waistband of his saggy, white-and-grey striped pants, Drendel walked past the heroes and toward a tugboat that was anchored near the dock. The tugboat was the size of a large pick-up truck, and it looked like it hadn’t been washed or serviced in decades: its stern was covered in mold, its wooden floor was rotting, and its smokestacks were black with soot. Its rear engine was shiny with slippery grease, and the smoke that emitted from it was heavy and thick and possibly responsible for 65% of all of Capricious’ pollution.
Drendel removed the rope that was blocking the boat’s entrance and looked to the heroes with a smile.
“That’ll be ten bucks a pop.”
Cruising across the Shadow Ocean, Tobin, Orion, and Keplar sat in the rear of the noisy, chugging tugboat. Looking in the direction of where they were heading, Tobin could see
an island cutting through the darkness; there was a city on the island, and it was full of flashing neon lights: blue, yellow, green, red, purple. There were also spotlights swooping through the sky above the island, and the boy could hear the faint, bumping beat of loud music drifting over the water and toward the boat.
“The Never-World,” Tobin said, watching the island city grow closer. “How come I’ve never heard of this place?”
“Because I didn’t want you to know it existed,” Orion said. “It’s a twisted island—a lost place full of lost people. A group of supposedly-reformed super villains run it, and with not very good intentions. It’s a great place if you want to have a trouble-filled weekend, lose all your money, and never remember any of it.”
“Wow,” Tobin said. “Sounds great.”
“Don’t even think you are ever coming back,” Orion told him.
Soon, Drendel’s tugboat reached the shore, and Tobin stepped onto the Never-World. The island city was completely overwhelming: even though it was nighttime, the city’s colorful lights made it as bright as the middle of the afternoon, and its sidewalks were lined with every vice you could imagine: bars, casinos, street-side gambling tables, and booths selling booze and junk food were found every ten feet. The air was filled with the greatest rock-and-roll music Tobin had ever heard, and the streets were mobbed with laughing, yelling, drinking, partying people.
“Wow,” Tobin said, walking down the main strip of street. “This is...”
“Awesome,” Keplar replied. “Yeah, I know.”
Orion walked behind them. “This is not a vacation, guys. We find who we’re looking for, we talk to him, and we get out. Got it?”
“Uh-huh,” Tobin replied. He looked to his left. A snappily dressed man with the face and head of a bulldog was barking into a microphone, enticing people to enter his establishment, which was a massive, red-striped circus tent resting in between two buildings on the side of the street.
