“EEEWWWW!” she screamed as the liquid was instantly absorbed. Even worse, her head quickly expanded to double its normal size, creating a target that Cannonball couldn’t have missed if he’d tried. Sure enough, the ball squished into her head moments later.
“You’re next, Odd Boy.” Cannonball laughed, clearly impressed by what in reality was a fairly poor ability to make up insulting names.
The trouble was even our good players couldn’t hit most of Cannonball’s players. I watched Tadpole use his fully extended tongue to whip one of the balls right into a cloud of fog, but it passed through to the other side. Stench kept throwing balls at Sparkplug but the balls bounced off his force field an inch before touching him. And while Plasma Girl was doing a great job avoiding getting hit (after all, she could dissolve into a pile of protoplasm at the first sign of trouble), she was having no luck finding Transparent Girl to hit her.
Back with his team, Cannonball got his hands on a ball and wasted no time getting me in his sights.
I braced myself for the impact . . . and then something amazing happened. The ball barreled into my chest . . . and I caught it!
“You might as well get used to jail, you creep,” I taunted as he passed me on his way to jail. “You’ll be spending plenty of time there when you’re older.”
I was so proud of both my catch and my comment that I almost didn’t notice that an adult was standing on the sidelines observing us. It was as if he had appeared from nowhere.
“Principal Doppelganger!” I said in surprise.
I was relieved. Surely he would put a stop to this unsanctioned dodgeball game before anyone was harmed further. Unfortunately, I thought wrong.
“Don’t mind me,” he said in his usual humorless tone. “I’m just watching for a few minutes. Go on with your game.”
No one wanted to chance playing at full brutality with the principal standing there. This was especially true since none of us really knew what Principal Doppelganger’s power was, and that always kept us on guard.
As the game resumed, I was still holding the ball Cannonball had hurled at me. I turned to throw it at someone else, but in the middle of the ball’s arc toward Sparkplug, it suddenly came to a halt. Only then did I notice the faint outline of the person who’d caught it.
“Transparent Girl!” I hollered.
“Get your behind to jail,” she ridiculed. “You . . . are . . . out!”
How humiliating. My throw was so feeble even a girl could catch it. Thank goodness she was nearly invisible. Maybe nobody else saw it. Then I glanced at Principal Doppelganger. It was impossible to make out his face, but I got the distinct impression he was smirking at me.
“Ha-ha!” Lobster Boy laughed as I arrived in jail. “O Boy got knocked out by a girl.”
“Just ignore him,” a voice said behind me.
I turned to see Plasma Girl, also on her way to jail. Moving away from Lobster Boy, the two of us went over by Hal.
LI’L HERO’S HANDBOOK
PEOPLE
NAME: Principal Doppelganger. POWER: Classified. But it’s probably not what you think it is. LIMITATIONS: Hard to say—which is exactly why he keeps it a secret from his intimidated students at Watson Elementary. CAREER: Little is known about Doppelganger prior to his employment as principal, possibly due to his ability to come and go remarkably quickly. CLASSIFICATION: Possibly a major power—if it ever becomes known.
“We’re getting clobbered,” he commented quietly.
He was right. The only members of our team still alive were Tadpole, Stench, Limber Lass and . . . Puddle Boy? How did he get out of jail? Well, I guess anything was possible.
“Let’s get back over there and help them!” Plasma Girl insisted.
“First we’ve got to get a ball back here,” I said.
“Stench,” she hollered across the gym. “Throw a ball back.”
Stench had one, but he threw it to deflect one coming straight at him from Foggybottom. Then it rolled out of bounds, coming to rest at the feet of Principal Doppelganger. He picked it up and turned in my direction. Without saying a word, he cocked his arm and threw the ball right toward me. But it passed clear over my head and up onto the stage.
“I’ll get it,” I volunteered. I jumped onto the platform to chase it and caught a glimpse of the white ball as it disappeared into the shadows, rolling toward some curtains at the back of the stage.
I shifted the curtains aside and noticed a small hole in the back wall of the stage. Kneeling down, I peered inside and saw light coming from somewhere. As my hand pressed against the wall alongside the hole, it budged slightly, and I realized it was actually a hatch cover of some kind.
I stood up and felt around the edge of the hatch. With a firm grip on both sides, I yanked it, and it easily came loose.
Crouching back down, I crawled into the space. Thanks to the mysterious light source, what should have been total darkness was brighter than I expected. Then I noticed that the illumination was coming in through a grate at the base of the wall. I crawled over and looked through the grate. What I saw there was utterly fascinating.
CHAPTER THREE
A Peek into the Past
I barely noticed as Hal and Plasma Girl crawled up behind me. I was transfixed by what I was seeing through the slits of the grate.
“Gosh,” Halogen Boy whispered. “We can see into Coach Inflato’s office.”
“Shhh!” I instructed. Hal was right, though. We were situated above the coach’s office, and we could see right down into it.
Plasma Girl looked over at Hal and me with an expression that basically said, Isn’t this SO cool? We would have nodded in agreement, but just then Coach Inflato did something that left us dumbstruck. He slumped down in his chair, and then he let out his breath as if he’d been holding it for hours. Not only did his muscle-bound body deflate like an empty balloon, but he actually flew up out of his chair and briefly ricocheted around the room. After settling to the ground, he got back up on his now-skinny and wobbly legs and reseated himself in his chair.
“He’s all hot air!” I mouthed to my two teammates, who were equally astounded.
We watched as our now deflated coach reached for a bag of Dr. Telomere’s Caramel-Coated Potato Chips and struggled mightily to tear it open. Just when we thought that the bag was going to win the battle, it suddenly ripped all the way down the front and potato chips went flying everywhere.
“Can you believe that Coach Inflato is really a deflated wimp?” I whispered.
“Why would anyone pretend to be something he’s not?” Plasma Girl asked seriously. She hasn’t figured out yet that guys almost always pretend to be something they’re not.
I turned to Halogen Boy and found him practically doubled over in hysterics. He was doing a great job of keeping his laughter silent.The only problem was that he was getting brighter and brighter the more he tried to hold it in. It wasn’t exactly a blinding light, but the last thing we needed was for Coach Inflato to realize we were spying on him.
I backed up against the grate in an attempt to block the light, and that’s when I noticed our surroundings. The first thing that caught my eye was a poster on one of the walls. It was hand lettered as if it had been created by a kid. It said THE JUNIOR LEAGUERS. My friends noticed the astonishment on my face and turned to look.
“Who could have put up a sign for the Junior Leaguers?” I whispered. “We’re the Junior Leaguers!”
“I’ve never been in here before,” Plasma Girl said with equal conviction. “And look! There’s even a Hall of Trophies, just like ours!”
Sure enough, in a corner of the space was an upside-down shoe box with the words “Hall of Trophies” sloppily written on it in marker. Sitting on top of the box were a couple of odd items like a knitting needle and a packet of flower seeds. But one object in particular caught my eye. It was a rock the size of a large fist, partially wrapped in a piece of newspaper. And the part of the rock that was exposed was glowing. In fact
it appeared to be getting even brighter.
Then I looked up and realized it was Halogen Boy who was getting brighter. He had been doing it so that he and Plasma Girl could look more closely at the team’s handmade sign.
“There’s more written here,” Hal informed us. “It also lists the group’s members.”
“Who are they?” Plasma Girl probed.
“It says, ‘Friends Forever,’” he read slowly and deliberately, “‘Funnel Boy, InvisiBoy, the Great Inflato, and . . . Meteor Boy!”
“Meteor Boy?!” Plasma Girl and I said in unison.
I wished we’d said it more quietly, but I took a quick peek through the grate and saw that the coach was still crawling around under his desk in an attempt to retrieve his scattered potato chips.
A week ago, the name Meteor Boy would have meant nothing to us. We hadn’t known about him because the Amazing Indestructo had gone to great lengths to keep the name from ever being mentioned. You see, Meteor Boy had briefly been his sidekick. That was at the start of AI’s own career, when having a kid as a partner was considered a trendy thing to do. Unfortunately, Meteor Boy, despite his awesome ability to fly as fast as a meteor, vanished in a mysterious explosion the first time he and AI took on Professor Brain-Drain.
From that day on, AI, who was racked with guilt over his failure to protect his young sidekick, did everything he could to make sure the public never saw any further reminders of Meteor Boy. And for over two decades he was successful. People who had been around at the time hadn’t completely forgotten him, but with nothing to remind them, their memories faded. Then something happened that AI hadn’t expected. The Amazing Indestructo’s business partner, a guy named the Tycoon, allowed Meteor Boy to be included in the set of AI collector cards that my friends and I had spent the entire past week searching for. The Tycoon had printed only ten of the cards, but that small number had had a large effect. They had become collector’s items, and now Meteor Boy was once again fresh in people’s minds. AI had been furious . . . and guilt-ridden . . . just not both at the same time.
“Coach Inflato and Meteor Boy were on a team together as kids?” Plasma Girl hissed under her breath.
“Along with some kids named Funnel Boy and InvisiBoy,” Halogen Boy added helpfully. “Who are they?”
“I’ve never heard of InvisiBoy,” I admitted, “but I think I know who Funnel Boy was.” I fished my copy of the Li’l Hero’s Handbook from my back pocket. “My dad mentioned him to me once. I think he was a junior sidekick to Zephyr, one of the founding members of the League of Ultimate Goodness.”
I flipped through the pages and soon came to Funnel Boy. It said: See Cyclotron. I flipped back a bunch of pages and found an entry about a villain named Cyclotron.
“Wow, a kid who fought alongside the original League of Ultimate Goodness ended up going bad.” Plasma Girl shook her head in amazement. “It just goes to show that you never know how you’re going to turn out.”
I was about to look up InvisiBoy, when I heard shouting from the gymnasium and remembered our dodgeball game. Our teammates had to be missing us.
LI’L HERO’S HANDBOOK
PEOPLE
NAME: Cyclotron. POWER: The ability to whip up tornado-like funnels of wind. LIMITATIONS: About category three in strength. CAREER: As Funnel Boy, Cyclotron battled crime as Zephyr’s sidekick. He later turned to crime, working occasionally with Professor Brain-Drain against the Amazing Indestructo. CLASSIFICATION: A powerful villain, with a fixation on humiliating AI.
“Come on,” I said to Hal and Plasma Girl, “let’s get back to the game.”
Following my two friends, I was about to crawl back through the hole, but then I stopped. Don’t ask me why, but I turned and grabbed the glowing stone wrapped in newspaper from the Hall of Trophies.
Back on the stage, I shoved the rock into my pocket, and quickly moved one of the curtains to cover the hole. Without looking back, I ran to get into my team’s jail just in time to see our final humiliation. Every one of our players was there except Stench.
“What happened?” I asked Tadpole, who was hollering for Stench to throw him a ball.
“They clobbered us!” he said in disgust.
I watched with admiration as Stench successfully avoided one ball after another. But there was just no way he could keep avoiding four balls.
Sure enough, the inevitable happened when Cannonball and the Quake caught him in a triangulation move along with . . . Melonhead? . . . who was back in jail. Even with Melonhead’s lack of athletic ability, Stench didn’t have a chance with all three balls headed for him at once. The first smacked against the back of his shoulder, the second missed him altogether, and the third skimmed off the top of his head from the front.
The other team’s jubilation was short-lived, however, as Stench momentarily lost control and an invisible cloud of noxious gas drifted toward the victors.
“That is so disgusting!” Transparent Girl’s jubilation was replaced by a shriek of horror. Like a canary in a coal mine, she served as an early warning for her teammates, who all ran to the opposite side of the court in an attempt to get out of harm’s way.
At that moment Coach Inflato returned, once again fully inflated, just as the bell rang signaling the end of class.
CHAPTER FOUR
Half-baked Science
All the way back from gym class, Stench and Tadpole grumbled over our embarrassing dodgeball defeat. Cannonball couldn’t resist hurling taunts and insults at us right up to the door of Miss Marble’s classroom.
They were quickly silenced, however, when we found Principal Doppelganger standing with Miss Marble at the front of the room. In a sudden burst of wishful thinking, I imagined that he was here to tell us that he was firing Coach Inflato for gross incompetence and dereliction of duty. Silently and calmly we filed in and took our seats.
“Sure, you all shut up for him,” Miss Marble vented, “but if it were just me, you’d be screaming your heads off.”
Miss Marble has some issues, but she’s really a pretty good teacher. I’m not sure how old she is. My friends and I generally lump everyone who’s between twenty and sixty into one big group (old) and everyone above sixty into another (really old). But if I had to guess, I’d say she’s somewhere in her late forties. She has a power that comes in pretty handy for her. She can freeze anyone she wants in a brief state of suspended animation. With a class full of unruly fifth graders, she ends up using her power quite a bit.
“Principal Doppelganger is here today to tell us all about a very exciting upcoming event,” Miss Marble continued without a trace of excitement in her voice.
“Despite the fact that it’s only October, it involves the school’s annual spring science fair and bake sale.”
This piqued my curiosity. The science fair always took place in the spring. About five years ago they had begun holding it jointly with the school bake sale. It made a lot of sense. The baked goods weren’t even remotely good enough to draw people in by themselves. But if they were offered at the science fair (which most parents felt obligated to attend), people would end up flocking to the cakes and pies just to get away from the inevitable pea plant experiments and baking soda volcanoes. Bake sale sales skyrocketed the first year, and stayed that way ever since.
“First of all, how many of you kids are familiar with the famous artist Crispo?” the principal asked. His use of the adjective famous was his hint that he expected us all to know who Crispo is. I started to raise my hand, but when I noticed that nobody else’s hands were moving, I discreetly slipped mine back under my desk.
“Nobody, eh?” he said as his black mask of a face appeared to look directly at me. “Well, let me just give you a brief biography of Superopolis’s greatest artist.
“Crispo began his career nearly twenty-five years ago by making art out of potato chips. In fact, that’s how he got his name. Of course I’m not saying he used potato chips to create the art. What he did was use potato chips as the subject
of his art. Initially, he did paintings of potato chips. From there he moved onto his famous potato chip mobiles and eventually to his potato chip sculptures, which I’m sure you’ve all seen throughout Superopolis.”
Even the dumbest kids in my class had seen the potato chip sculptures all over town, but I guess nobody else had wondered where they came from. I had been fascinated by them as a little kid, so I was familiar with Crispo’s potato chip period, even though I didn’t know that much about the artist himself. But it was some of the projects that came later that most impressed me. Principal Doppelganger must have read my mind.
“Of course, it was the works that came later that were most impressive. Projects such as filling Superopolis Harbor with giant rubber ducks and covering MegaManly Beach with millions of miniature cocktail umbrellas; and of course you all remember his most recent extravaganza, decorating Mount Reliable to resemble a giant fudge sundae.”
Everyone in my class remembered that one! After all, how many times in a kid’s life does an active volcano erupt whipped cream?
“Well,” Principal Doppelganger continued, “the exciting news is that Crispo is once again at work on another enormous project. I can’t tell you where or what it is just yet, but given Crispo’s reputation, it’s sure to be exciting!
“What’s even more thrilling,” the principal continued, “is that I’ve made a proposal to stage our science fair and bake sale on the same day that Crispo will unveil his new creation—and that proposal has been accepted!”
He paused for what he expected to be a spontaneous outburst of excitement, but he had seriously overestimated my classmates’ interest in the arts. Everyone sat silent.
The Return of Meteor Boy? Page 2
