Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen

by Claude Lalumiere

  They called the photograph a classic. It won awards, but I never considered it to be one of Mikey’s best. Something always bothered me about the way it captured Pherognome’s spellbound fiancée. Sufferjet lay sprawled on the ground, dressed in her shining white armor, hand on her dazed head. A veil crowned her long black locks in place of her usual half-helm, her head almost resting on the Captain’s rippling thigh.

  To my mind she deserved better than to be portrayed as a damsel-in-distress for him to save. She’d singlehandedly stopped the Venusian Horde from destroying Earth, to name only one of her exploits.

  When I suggested not using the photo for the story, Mikey balked. “Come on, it looks great,” he said. “They look like they belong together! People are going to eat it up.” Turned out he was right, and since it got me my interview I couldn’t complain too much.

  The Captain agreed to meet me on my rooftop, but only if we were alone. Too bad, I would have liked Mikey’s company, and to be honest I was incredibly nervous. He could melt me with his eyes, crush me with one hand. That kind of power instilled an instinctual fear in people. I was no different, even if I did write glowingly of his many adventures.

  When he finally arrived, his entrance did not disappoint. The clouds opened up with a flash of light, his laser vision burning a hole in the cumulus layer. He slowly drifted down toward me, giving me time to admire him. His suit was white with red stripes down the sides, a stylized C emblazoned on his chest. No maple leaf adorned the uniform, but it was obvious which country he represented.

  He touched down on the roof and walked up to me, offering his hand. Before I knew it he was kissing my knuckles, his deep voice so full of bass that it rattled my ribcage.

  “Myra Moon, it is a pleasure. I am Captain Stupendous.”

  And that’s how my adventures began.

  After a lengthy interview, which included showing me his Chalet of Secrecy up at Whistler, he flew me home. I was exhausted, the night having lasted much longer than I thought it would. He seemed eager to talk about himself and even more eager to impress me, like a schoolboy showing off for a girl he liked. To be honest it turned me off a little, but I knew I’d be writing something more positive than that in tomorrow’s paper, especially if I wanted another interview.

  Once he disappeared back into the clouds in a streak of light I hurried down to my apartment for a hot shower and a bottle of wine. Even though my article later talked about feeling warm and flush while flying in his muscular arms, in truth I’d felt frozen the whole way.

  I’d finished drying my hair and was on my first glass of red when the doorbell rang. There stood Mikey, a bottle of champagne in one hand, his camera in the other. “Did you get the shots?” I asked.

  “Yep. Perfect view from the apartment across the street, just like you said. Want to see them?”

  “Later,” I replied, pulling him inside for a kiss while slamming the door with my foot.

  * * *

  Captain Stupendous didn’t seem surprised by the photos of our rendezvous, but their unintended consequence surprised me. The other news agencies dubbed me his girlfriend, but not with kindness: “that mousy brunette”; “lacking in style”; “too plain and chunky for such a super man.” They were jealous of my impending Pulitzer, and all the exclusive interviews with him that followed.

  Mikey and I rose to fame on the Captain’s back, and for the next few years we travelled the world chronicling his exploits, along with those of his new team, the Canadian Super League. We reported on their peace talks in war zones, their famine relief work, and big bad supervillain attacks.

  Those caused me the most problems. Even though I constantly denied being involved with Captain Stupendous, the villains believed whatever they read on TMZ and kept kidnapping me to get his attention.

  The Ameriterrorist was the first, strapping me to a bomb on the Skytrain while threatening to detonate it if the city didn’t pay him two million dollars. He needed the money to buy his family a house in expensive Vancouver.

  Another time the henchmen of the Canadarm took me to the International Space Station, where NASA’s robotic arm held me hostage while demanding the governments of the world acknowledge its newfound sentience.

  Dr. Vortex tried to turn me into a human black hole that would swallow up Toronto for daring to refer to itself as the Centre of the Universe.

  Stupendous saved me every time. Mikey and I made enough money that we were able to buy a fancy condo downtown. We finally got married on a trip to Scotland, while reporting on the battle between Stupendous and the Highland Bullboy. We had to change wedding venues after the Bullboy destroyed our castle hotel with his magic horns.

  Finally, there was my kidnapping in Rio de Janeiro. I’d like to say I’d gone down there to cover the Brazil-Canada trade summit, but really I was hoping some supervillain would attack the Canadian Super League, who were providing security at the event, giving me another Stupendous story.

  By this time the CSL was almost as famous as the Captain himself. Sufferjet, Grizzlyman, SuperSquirrel, Ice Flow, and Stupendous were now the United Nations’ official superhero team, since few countries wanted American heroes on their soil. Don’t know why anyone would want their protection though. Trouble always followed the CSL, wherever they went, which was why I followed too. Then trouble found me.

  I woke up tied to a chair in a well-furnished cave lined with glowing quartz crystal and furnished with plush couches and Tiffany lamps. I heard the unmistakable sounds of the jungle outside. The humidity was oppressive. When Jaguar grabbed me from my room I’d just removed my makeup and put on some PJs. Good thing Mikey isn’t here, I thought. I’d hate for him to get a photo of me looking like this.

  Jaguar was prowling back and forth across the cave entrance, her tail swishing from side to side. A stout figure with thick shoulder muscles and strong legs, the villainess truly lived up to her name. Fur covered her body, which she barely hid under a V-shaped swimsuit. I’d met her before, back when she’d still been a member of the Canadian Super League and one of the good guys. Though short she had a feline beauty about her, with more curves than a Grand Prix raceway, and a fierce intelligence I’d always admired. When she first immigrated to Canada I’d written an article on the little that was known of her origin story, but it never made it to press.

  Maria Felinus was a brilliant aviation engineer in Brazil, and one of their best test pilots, when her experimental craft crashed in the Amazon. The government called on Sufferjet to help find her. Weeks later, they finally emerged from the jungle. Maria had been transformed into the Jaguar by some mystical force they’d encountered in a hidden city. Whatever adventures they shared had made her and Sufferjet best friends, causing her to immigrate to Canada.

  Then one day Jaguar tried to kill Captain Stupendous. Now here she was kidnapping me, like every other villain in the world.

  No point in wasting the moment, I thought. Might as well get an interview.

  “So, Jaguar, why did you switch sides?”

  She’d gained weight since last I’d seen her, though with her curves it only accentuated her full figure. She looked tired, her fur unkempt and mangy. She held a strange gun, probably one of the many weapons auctioned on eBay as the one thing that could defeat the Captain. Her reply was punctuated with a low growl coming from the back of her throat.

  “I am no villain. Your precious Captain, he is the villain.”

  “He isn’t ‘my Captain.’ Don’t believe everything you hear. We aren’t dating.”

  Jaguar bared her fangs. “That does not matter. He will come and save you as he always does, and then we will have the truth.”

  “What truth is that? What wrong has he done you?”

  “He stole something that did not belong to him.” She paused her prowling to come up to me. With a long slow sniff she smelt me from knees to head. “I can smell him on you, and something else as well. Just like him you reek of Pherognome. What does that little diabinho have to do wit
h all this?”

  “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Before anything else could be said the roof imploded, raining stone and dirt on us. Jaguar raised her weapon, but it was too late. A large figure dropped on top of her, knocking her to the ground. It wasn’t Captain Stupendous but Grizzlyman, his bear mantle hiding his face, his deadly claws gleaming in the sunlight, shining down through the new skylight.

  Jaguar reached for her gun but it was gone, snatched in a blur by the lightning-quick SuperSquirrel, his tail vibrating happily at the shiny new toy in his tiny hands.

  For the first time it wasn’t the Captain who saved me. I wish he had, because what Grizzlyman did to Jaguar in their ensuing fight brought tears to my eyes, and still does. Only SuperSquirrel intervening stopped the savage giant from killing her.

  They carried her unconscious bloody form to their supercharged Cormorant helicopter, with Ice Flow waiting in the pilot seat. Even her cold heart melted upon seeing Jaguar, her tears turning to icicles as they touched her blue cheeks.

  I stayed beside Jaguar for the flight home, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was her adamant belief that she’d been wronged, or the glib way that Grizzlyman joked with SuperSquirrel while a woman he’d beaten half to death lay behind him.

  I held her hand, wanting to speak with her more, wanting to understand.

  As if she heard my thoughts she opened her swollen eyes. Gripping me tightly she asked, “Is she here? Did she come?”

  “Who? Ice Flow?”

  “No, no…” And then she passed out.

  When I got back to Vancouver I cried in Mikey’s arms for hours. He held me tight, whispering over and over how happy he was to have me back, safe and sound.

  “You never have to worry again, Mikey. I’m done with superheroes.”

  “Good. I’m tired of you getting kidnapped.”

  I laughed through my tears. “Yeah, gets pretty old, doesn’t it? Mikey, what they did to Jaguar, it was awful…”

  “Was it? She’d kidnapped you, Ace. As far as I’m concerned she got what she deserved.”

  “Don’t say that, please. You weren’t there, you don’t know.”

  And neither was the Captain, I thought to myself. Why hadn’t he come?

  The story of my rescue was front-page news, but it wasn’t written by me. The papers described a scene I don’t remember: bold heroics from the heroes and awful villainy from the villainess. The news channels even placed the Captain at the scene, which was a total lie.

  Jaguar got what she deserved, they said, reminding me of Mikey’s words from the night before.

  I can admit it now, with no shame. As an investigative reporter I sucked. The pieces should have fallen into place right then and there, but they didn’t. Not until the day of the wedding.

  When they announced that Captain Stupendous and Sufferjet were getting married my editor begged me to write one more superhero story. But I refused. I couldn’t get what happened to Jaguar out of my head, and Grizzlyman was going to be best man. Nothing “best” about that brute.

  Like every other normal person in the world I read about the wedding online the next day. But I merely glanced at the photos of a beaming Captain Stupendous holding Sufferjet in his arms and barely skimmed the article about the lavish party and the who’s who in attendance. What caught my attention was a small sidebar attached to Mikey’s picture from the day Pherognome had tried to marry Sufferjet.

  After undergoing rehabilitation treatments under the watchful eye of Captain Stupendous, Pherognome had been released from prison. Though the reporter who wrote the article wanted a comment from the little villain about the super nuptials, Pherognome had disappeared.

  My mind went back to Jaguar sniffing me. She’d smelt Pherognome on me, but I’d never been anywhere near him.

  I stared at the old picture for a while before returning to the main page and searching through the wedding photos. One in particular caught my eye, showing the Captain standing with his groomsmen. In the background stood Sufferjet, her head resting in her hand, looking dazed.

  Even though I’d sworn to Mikey that I’d never investigate superheroes again, I needed to know the truth.

  The so-called “reporter” who wrote the wedding article was primarily a blogger and even worse at investigative journalism than I was. Finding Pherognome was simply a matter of making a few long-distance phone calls. Before his career as a supervillain Pierre Ferrer had been a world-renowned perfumer based in Montréal. Soon I was on the trail of a short man who’d leased a luxury storefront in Old Montréal.

  I convinced my editor Tony that I had a great lead on a Captain Stupendous story, and he got me on the next flight to Montréal. I found the shop in a narrow stone building on Rue Saint-Paul. Its entranceway was half the height of a normal door, the only signage the word Parfum etched in glass above the frame. The door was locked. I rang the bell and waited, my heart beating rapidly.

  The door swung inward, revealing a small man with a face not quite as ugly as the one being choked in that notorious picture. “Ms. Moon, I wondered when I’d be seeing you. Come in, please.” Without waiting for my reply he retreated into the darkness.

  Crouching low I entered and was immediately greeted by a museum of scents. Lavender, rose, and other hints of spring filled the cool air in the entranceway, even though the city was suffering from a suffocating heat wave. Carefully I ventured down the hallway into his shop, where more scents wafted from the exotic bottles lining the cabinet shelves. Closing my eyes I inhaled deeply. Memories of my trips to Istanbul, Zanzibar, Shanghai, and Bombay engulfed me. I thought I caught the aroma of a wet summer night in Vancouver, a day at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, even the hint of the time I rafted down white rapids in Austria. Then I caught the musky scent of a certain Brazilian Jaguar. It gave me pause, reminding me of where I was and with whom.

  He climbed a small set of stairs to a raised platform behind the shop counter. Wearing a fine blue suit and carrying a shiny wooden cane, Pherognome appeared older than I remembered, his eyes showing dark rings of insomnia. He sat in a chair by the cash register and studied me intently, scrunching his nose with distaste. “Ms. Moon, you reek of passenger jet and the sweat of a humid day,” he said, producing a bottle from behind the counter. “Please, have a sample, your pungency offends my sensibilities.”

  “Is it the same spray you used on Sufferjet, Monsieur Ferrer? If so, I will pass, thanks.”

  Pherognome made a Pffft sound then sprayed the air anyway. It filled the room with the scent of cloves and a trace of chocolate that made my mouth water. “Is that why you have come, to speak of the past? Not talk of the present?”

  “Both actually. I had a run-in with Jaguar recently.”

  “Ah, yes, the buxom feline,” he said, his eyes rolling briefly into his head as he recalled her. “What a creature! I managed to capture her musk in our last entanglement, before she went bad, of course. Shame what those so-called heroes did to her. I hear she still lies unconscious in the prison hospital.”

  “Yes, it is a shame, on that we agree. It’s why I’m here, in fact. She had some interesting things to say about you.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Oui? And what was that?”

  “She said you’d done something to Captain Stupendous, that she could smell you on him.”

  A pause as his beady eyes watched me closely. “And is that what you believe?”

  “No. I think you gave him your love perfume in exchange for your freedom. What I want to know is why he needed it.”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He wanted Sufferjet but she did not want him, so he took her by force. Would you care for some tea and cookies? They are freshly prepared.”

  “What? Um, okay,” I said, nonplussed by the sudden change in topic and the shock of hearing my worst fears confirmed. A part of me had hoped he would deny it, tell me I was a fool to doubt the Captain.

  A pot of tea had been steeping, as if waiting for company to arrive.
As Pherognome placed a fine bone-china tea set on a tray with some chocolate biscuits I wondered if anyone else had ever ventured inside his shop. The back wall was neatly lined with bottles, shining bright, free of any dust or fingerprints. Each jar was neatly labelled: Joie, Haine, Passion, Confort, Jalousie, and more.

  “Do those really work?” I asked, nodding my head as he served me a cup. “Can you really make someone jealous with your perfume?”

  Pherognome shrugged as he sipped his tea, a pinkie raised in the air. “I can produce emotional triggers with these scents, yes, but the power inside me used to amplify the effect to terrible proportions, the curse of an experiment gone wrong in my youth. Biscuit?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I replied, accepting one from the offered tray. “You said ‘used to.’”

  “Oui. The Captain took the power from me, using the same genetic splicer that turned that poor man into a twitchy mutant squirrel.” He smirked at the look on my face. “Don’t you know his origin? The Captain made SuperSquirrel, back when he was trying to create heroes to form his league, before Sufferjet arrived on Earth.”

  I reached into my purse for my recorder.

  Pherognome paled upon seeing it. “You cannot record anything we say here, Ms. Moon, I thought you understood that. Captain Stupendous would kill me if he found out I’d been talking to a reporter, especially you.”

  “The Captain has never killed anyone.”

  “Not yet, but it is inevitable that he will. To silence me, or Jaguar if she ever wakes. Maybe even you, Ms. Moon, if you insist on learning the truth. Too many will know what he has done.”

  “But why do it at all?”

  “Because he is infatuated, just as I was. Did you know that Sufferjet was designed by her alien people to represent the perfect woman, giving her all the attributes we desire in the female form? He confuses his lust for her with love, and feels he deserves her love back. But she will never love him, for no man can have her.”