V Is for Villain

by Peter Moore

  SUBVISIBILITY: essentially the same as invisibility. One of the powers that can result from people who can control and expand the space between atoms in their body.

  TELEKINE: someone who has the ability to use mental force to move objects (from telekinesis)

  TELEPATH: someone with the ability to read minds, implant thoughts in the minds of others, and distort or alter memories and knowledge.

  THERMAL WARS: international conflict that erupted shortly after WWII, during the Cold War, and the first widespread use of enhanced humans as fighting forces. Generally credited by historians as the primary factor that prevented a third world war.

  TRIANGLE BATTLE: epic and historic battle between Justice Force and Troika, which resulted in two members of Troika being wounded and incarcerated. The third member was killed. Widely considered by military historians to be one of Blake Baron’s finest moments.

  TRIPLE-M: see Myomegamorpherone®

  UMI: Undetected Mind Incursion is the practice of telepathically entering another’s mind without their knowledge.

  UNDERNET: a semiprivate version of the internet, highly covert, and accessible only to very advanced hackers

  VIEWSTOPPER® QUARTZLON®: a synthetic fiber used in clothing to resist powers of intersight

  VILLAIN: the meaning can vary, depending on the context and who is using the word. It may have the traditional meaning of someone evil or harmful, someone with wicked intentions. It may also be used as an antonym of hero, particularly referring to a political position or view rather than having a qualitative connotation.

  VITAL (ALSO, VITAL): Villain In Training; A-program Loser is a self-chosen group nickname, originally coined by Layla Keating.

  Endnotes

  1 Hero-in-Training: Teen

  2 Mom is really little, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t tough. Intellectually, anyway. The thing is, her mother was powered, but her father wasn’t, so as much as she wanted to go the hero route, her physical powers just weren’t strong enough. Instead of becoming a traditional hero, she took a different path.

  3 In case you never bothered to learn about Phaetons, I’ll give you the so-called official explanation about these public enemies. Pronounced “FITE-onz,” they’re the wretches who tried to enhance themselves through second-rate mutation splicing or bionics jobs that were botched up. They ended up as walking mutations gone wrong. And given their history of vicious attacks, they’ve come to be considered the lowest, most savage tier of villains.

  4 Why hand-to-hand? Why not bring out some heavy artillery and just blow the Gorgon Corps into oblivion? Here’s why: It was never made public—pretty embarrassing, obviously—but a few years ago, when the Regulators tried to take down the GC, they came armed to the teeth with major firepower. They found out the hard way that several Gorgon Corpsmen had the power to remotely cause explosives to detonate. So if it wasn’t made public, how do I know? Because Blake told me. He had been friends with Bob “Ish” Ishkatel, who was finished off when a 90mm shell in his bazooka exploded in the barrel, blasting back, right in his face. Bad ending for him, but it meant that Blake could warn his team not to go in armed with anything explosive.

  5 Of course he meant “Serious as a heart attack.” The guy couldn’t even use a cliché the right way.

  6 Pure bravado. I probably heard it in a movie and liked how it sounded.

  7 Yes, he really said that.

  8 “Your new teachers have been notified that you’ll be joining their classes! They’re all very excited to have you!! Have a terrific first day!!!” We have heroes for just about every supposedly good cause, and yet we don’t have a single one who has taken on the mission of apprehending and punishing all the people who use cute little emoticons and/or more than one exclamation point per sentence.

  9 Turned out that this kid took on the name Inflammable, not knowing that the word actually means “flammable.” Two minutes with a dictionary would have saved him from years of embarrassment.

  10 This was, I later found out, Melanie Krone, who could emit subsonic sound waves that were inaudible to humans but were extremely audible—and irritating—to different types of animals. She could whip them up into a frenzy, I suppose making them useful as angry (if unpredictable) weapons.

  11 Of course, I wasn’t actually an M-level. That’s just how I tested for the level evaluator. In all likelihood, at that point I was probably either an R-level or S-level, at least. Not even a year later, the court psychologist measured me as a T-level just before the trial, and I wasn’t even trying.

  12 G-level isn’t too bad. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard would look like a dope next to a G-level.

  13 Which, I just want to make clear, was overtly exposed and entirely visible to the naked eye. I may be a lot of things, but one thing I’m not is a creep.

  14 Reading is being able to know someone’s thoughts. Writing is being able to tell another person something using telepathy by putting the words or ideas directly in his or her mind.

  15 Yes, that Barry Brown. And no, I don’t believe they’ll ever catch him. Hell, I don’t believe they’ll ever even figure out where he’s hiding. But this conversation in class, of course, was before he became famous for the Fort Knox thing.

  16 Which meant his muscles were mainly for show. Sure, he was as strong as any Regular who was built like him—could probably bench or squat several hundred pounds—but he didn’t have genetically enhanced strength. Anyone with actual powered strength, even someone half his size, could easily bounce him around like a rag doll. And the Myomeg had all the great side effects of any anabolic steroid, including ’roid rage and testicular atrophy. This latter affliction, I figured, was the reason for his nickname Peanut.

  17 A metahuman ability to control muscle movements to an extraordinarily high degree. A great power for microsurgeons…or bombmakers.

  18 When we first squeezed in, Layla whispered to me that Javier needed space and couldn’t have direct physical contact with people without going temporarily insane.

  19 I knew shite was either British or Irish, which didn’t fit with Javier’s accent. Odd.

  20 That is, those who had them. (Ears. Or hands.)

  21 Dead, it turned out. Its—or his—heart literally exploded inside the chest.

  22 No such word as sneery, of course, but actually it’s pretty expressive. I’ll give him credit for that.

  23 Yes, I know there’s no such thing as true invisibility, and yes, I’m well aware that the correct term is subvisibility, but it amounts to basically the same thing, right? They can control and expand the space between atoms in their body, and blah, blah, blah. The point is, you can’t see them. In my book, that’s called invisibility.

  24 The ability to see changes in temperature, which allows the lucky person with this power to see where people have recently been, based on slight variations in ambient temperature.

  25 Moving stuff using only your mind.

  26 Kind of the other side of telekinesis: making something immovable, making it “freeze” in place. Pretty helpful when you want to apprehend someone who’s trying to run away.

  27 If you live under a rock and don’t know, AVID is the Anti-Villain ­Investigation Division. I’d say the FBI gets, let’s see, zero points for creativity on that one.

  28 I had been thinking about calling Virginia, Travis, and Shameka for a week, but I kept putting it off. It may sound cold, but I just didn’t have a huge desire to talk to them anymore. With me in the A-program, we didn’t have that much in common. I figured that if we were really and truly deeply close, we would have stayed friends and I would have wanted to call them. I guess sometimes friendships just fade.

  29 (“Go ahead, Meeze Kitting. Zeese vas your idea. So tock.”)

  30 The Industrialists,
often in league with the military, were the businesspeople—usually phenomenally wealthy—who sponsored or otherwise invested in heroes, ensuring a way to make heroes’ work a money-making endeavor. I believe Karl Marx referred to these folks as “capitalist pigs,” or something to that effect.

  31 When he said heroes this time, the H came from the back of his throat and the W in twelve was more like a V, all of which sounded more Russian than French/Italian/Spanish. I was starting to wonder if his accent was just an affectation to go with the Eurotrash image.

  32 Psi, if you don’t know, is standard shorthand for psionics, which refers to psychic abilities, most commonly telepathy. As such, use of any psi powers is illegal in most countries. Psi, of course, is often represented by the Greek letter psi, Ψ.

  33 The only way I could say or think lair with a straight face was to look at it as being an entirely ironic usage of the word.

  34 That is, by using the always preferred SMI: stealth mind incursion.

  35 Yep. He said “appraised.”

  36 “Syoo-pair.”

  37 You know that awful feeling you get when you say something and you realize it’s a mistake the second the words leave your mouth? It’s even worse when it happens with TP thoughts instead of spoken words. Then if you think about what a jerk you are, the other person knows exactly how embarrassed you feel: that’s because she knows your every thought and feeling, exactly when it takes shape.

  38 A command projection is when you telepathically compel the target do something.

  39 Okay, let’s just be honest: I didn’t much like Javier. The others were fine.

  40 He meant overtures.

  41 No, I’m not kidding.

  42 On this particular ATM, that spot was the closest to the computer interface. Later, Layla explained that any mechanical or computer device has a way in for her; it’s just a matter of finding it. Which, she said, is usually pretty easy: it’s as if that access point glows bright green for her.

  43 At first, I thought that Boots was always making peace because she was really uncomfortable with conflict, which was at odds with the idea of her fighting heroes. I eventually figured out that it was because conflict didn’t shake her up at all and she was totally comfortable addressing it. Very little seemed to get this girl agitated. Cool and calm, pretty much all the time.

  44 Yes, I know. Once someone is captured, it’s not too hard to unmask him or her. My aim, though, was to not get captured. Best-laid plans and all that…

  45 Javier offered to set it up for me.

  46 Oh, and Justice Force boxer briefs, just for the necessary note of irony.

  47 Which is not at all what baculum means. Look it up, if you’re curious….

  48 I was actually going to use something similar, though stronger, which would have rhymed nicely with mind-chucker, but Layla said it wasn’t good, because it wouldn’t be printed in newspapers or spoken on the news, rendering it useless for publicity.

  49 I know my description of how she looked sounds sexist and kind of like every adolescent geek-boy’s objectifying dream-girl, but what can I say? She picked the costume.

  50 Of course, I had no intention of letting Rotor get hurt. And I could have given him a command projection and made him tell us, but I felt like I wanted to keep that power in reserve for when we really needed it. Doing it this way seemed more badass.

  51 Or adoration.

  52 Many with an overabundance of enthusiasm, which someone smart (that is, not Blake) would read as insincere and sarcastic.

  53 “Young people.” Blake isn’t even ten years older than me or my classmates.

  54 I predicted—correctly—that the answer was not going to be, “I’m not doing Justice Force business, because I have a few serious injuries that I’m not telling anyone about, and so this unexplained leave of absence I seem to be on is causing the rest of the Justice Force and all my corporate and government-agency sponsors to get frustrated with the fact that I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  55 Not sure where he came across this word, but he clearly didn’t look it up in the dictionary to find out the actual definition.

  56 Did he mean to say aspirations? Expectations? I guess he decided just to split it down the middle.

  57 I’m not making this up: that’s what he said, verbatim. He constantly…oh, what’s the use. Forget it.

  58 Well, actually like a Regular would do after touching a hot stove. Heat didn’t bother Blake much.

  59 It was basically a steel gangplank, doing switchbacks down the cliffside. When we first set foot on it, the guide lights all went out, like someone had deliberately switched them off. We were able to make our way down by holding on to the railing.

  60 I’d suspected it was acromegaly, and I was right. His gigantism was more like the human hormonal imbalance that causes crippling pain and death rather than a mutation that results in a tall and muscular physique. This was a prime example of what happened when you tried a do-it-yourself mutation: you ended up as a Phaeton.

  61 The difference between regular telepathy and CCP is that in telepathy, writing is easy: the person basically hears the inserted thought in the voice of the sender. In CCP, the aim is to have the receiver think the thought is his own. To do that, you have to find the person’s individual psi form and project the thought using that pattern. So in this case, I didn’t want Wittman to think I was telling him what to think; I wanted him to think the idea was entirely his own.

  62 As one would guess, people with more sophisticated thought processes have mind patterns that are harder to duplicate accurately. Not to be mean, but there’s really no way that anyone could honestly use the word sophisticated in reference to any aspect of Peanut.

  63 This is called thought-erasing or, more colloquially, mind-sweeping. Very, very useful….

  64 Department of Defense and Bureau of Metahuman Affairs. They worked jointly and with various hero teams—Justice Force being one of them—in the effort to hunt down Phaetons.

  65 In the same boat, he meant. I had to wonder whether he realized what a moron he sounded like half the time.

  66 I still don’t know if he meant whether I liked it or not or if he liked it or not. Works either way, I guess.

  67 He meant…oh, forget it. You know what he meant. I’m not going to bother explaining him anymore.

  68 Of course we didn’t have the keys, because we’d borrowed the car without asking. One of the major benefits to having biomech-merge ability: you never need to ask for a ride. Wherever you are, there are always more than enough available cars.

  69 There was thick, clean carpet on the floor. The walls and ceiling had some white spongy material that looked quilted like a down jacket and provided extra soundproofing. Behind that material we had lead-plated steel sheets on all the walls. The low lighting that had a calming blue tint was kind of a by-product of some electronic stuff we had running. Image and sound transmissions set up by Boots made it so that anybody who might try to see what was there would see an empty place. Even heroes with intersight would get the false transmitted picture. And the only sound they would hear was rats scurrying around. Basically, we made it pretty much impossible to listen or see into the lair from the outside.

  70 Okay, yes, I’m being humble. I had gone through a cryptography and cryptology reading jag a couple of years earlier and developed a reasonable foundation in the subject. That foundation being, I figured, about as good as Regular cryptologists who had spent their careers doing it for the FBI and CIA.

  71 This was when Pneumatica from the Vindication Squad had an aerial battle with Bubonica in the skies above Crow’s Falls. Pneumatica wasn’t thinking, apparently, when she slashed at Bubonica, which, of course, resulted in Bubonica’s poison blood becoming atomized
and raining down into all the reservoirs, rivers, creeks, soil. Good job, Pneumatica: you captured a minor villain, and the only cost was that you made a suburban township completely uninhabitable for decades. Go, heroes!

  72 And, of course, Caliban. I was sick with guilt, but I knew it was not the time to dwell on it. I couldn’t let myself think about him. Not yet.

  73 Villain incarceration officer, a.k.a. prison guards, jailers, hacks. They don’t call them correctional officers for us, because it’s assumed that we can’t be “corrected” at all.

  Hall of Heroes

  Power supporters: many thanks to members of the families Tiven, Kohn, Bihaly, Moore, and Shenfeld; and thanks to my pal, Abi M.

  My super editor, Catherine Onder, used her powers of good judgment, strong insight, and x-ray vision to see into the heart of matters, which has been invaluable to me, and she has had a strong hand in making this book the best it can be. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  I’m lucky and thankful to have the absolute best agent on Earth, Jodi Reamer. Her powers of wisdom and tenacity have been invaluable. As always, she provides judicious guidance, honest and smart critique, and constant encouragement. She is my literary advocate and protector.

  Heartfelt thanks to Jake, my personal hero; and Hedy, my enthusiastic cheerleader.

  And finally, very, very deepest thanks to my wife, Ellen. When she heard my idea for this story, she said, “Superheroes and villains? Really? Okay, but make it good.” I hope I did. She is a mighty source of encouragement, support, and inspiration for me not only in my writing, but in every way, every day of my life.

  PETER MOORE has been fascinated by superheroes since he was old enough to trip over his own cape. (He didn’t make a very graceful hero.) After a brief life of crime (he shoplifted some candy and got caught) he decided to devote his energy to the forces of good. Finiding job opportunities for aspiring heroes to be scarce, he instead has worked as a screenwriter, college professor, English teacher, film teacher, and guidance counselor. He lives with his wife and two kids in an undisclosed headquarters somewhere in New York State, where he allegedly works on his writing. This is his fourth book for young adults. He strongly denies allegations that any character in this book is based on him. Peter can be found online at petermoorebooks.com and on Facebook.