Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women

by Michael Bailey

  “Such is the thrilling life of a certified public accountant at the start of tax season,” Matt says. “Anyway, back to our business: when do we have to be at Protectorate HQ?”

  “Mindforce said eight if we can make it,” I say, “but we’re not going to be tested there. They’re going to take us to the Quantum Compound out in —”

  “The Quantum Compound? For real? Awesome!”

  “Yeah, that’s about the reaction I expected,” Sara says. She slaps down a Dark Ritual and then a Feeding Frenzy. “Target creature loses X power and X toughness for every zombie I have in play, which is ten.”

  “And I...crap, I die,” I say, and I toss my very dead Killer Bees into my discard pile.

  “I hate your zombie deck,” Missy says.

  “We all hate her zombie deck,” Stuart says.

  “Which is why I love my zombie deck,” Sara says. “My zombie deck feeds on your hate.”

  “Is Doc Quantum going to be there?” Matt says. “Is Doc Quantum going to test us personally?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t know, and it’s your turn,” I say.

  “Would I look like a huge fanboy if I asked Doc Quantum to autograph my copy of Discover with her on the cover?”

  “Probably,” Sara says. “C’mon, play your turn so I can kill you horribly.”

  “Should we dress up? I mean, like, in our costumes?”

  “You shouldn’t, your costume sucks,” Stuart says. “Will you pay attention to the game?”

  Alas, the game is a lost cause; Matt has shifted into full-tilt super-hero geek mode. There is no coming back.

  He’s still geeking out the next morning when we converge on the Protectorate’s office on Main Street (however, in an impressive show of restraint, he did not bring his magazine for autographing purposes).

  Natalie is there to let us in and escort us to HQ via the Wonkavator, which I’ve decided is the official name for the Protectorate’s secret subway elevator mash-up thingy. Natalie is in her full Nina Nitro regalia, which prompts me to ask, “Should we change into our costumes for this?”

  She shrugs. “Your call. The Quantums are cool — you don’t have to worry about secret identities around them, but if you’re more comfortable putting on the outfits, go ahead.”

  Matt, eager to impress, suggests we go in costume. I hate to say it, but I’m with him. The Quantum Quintet is one of the top super-teams in the country, and showing up in street clothes feels...I don’t know. Unprofessional, I guess.

  We change after we get to HQ. I step out of the bathroom, all super-heroed up, and Matt’s face drops. I totally forgot, he doesn’t know about the new costume.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  Natalie — I mean, Nina (she’s on-duty now) — answers for me. “Looking sharp there, kiddo,” she says. “Looks like it fits perfectly. Concorde thought it would be too small, but what does he know about women’s clothing sizes?”

  “Concorde gave that to you?”

  “It was a group gift,” I say, which doesn’t help. “It came with the transponder goggles,” I add, but it’s way too little, way too late. Matt glances down at his sad quote-unquote super-hero outfit, the BMX facemask-and-trench coat combo we’ve told him so many times looks lamety-lame-lame, and I swear he’s one step away from stripping naked in front of everyone. The others are less put out, thankfully; I can handle only so much guilt at a whack.

  “That’s how cool I want to look,” Sara says.

  “That’s how cool I already look,” Stuart says, striking a pose in his sleeveless leather vest (which, honestly, isn’t that much better than Matt’s get-up, but I don’t have the heart to say it).

  “Mm, almost. You need something better than the shades.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But it’d be a crime to hide this handsome face from the world.”

  Concorde and Mindforce are waiting for us at the Pelican landing pad behind HQ. Concorde steers me away from the airship, closes the rest of the team in, and slaps the cockpit window. Mindforce flashes a thumbs-up before firing up the Pelican. A low-frequency note, the hum of its maglev system, ripples through me as the ship lifts off.

  “You’ve been going up a lot,” Concorde says. There’s nothing judgmental in his tone, but everything he says to me feels disapproving.

  “How do you know that?”

  He taps my goggles. “Our systems record your flight activity.”

  “You’re tracking me?”

  “Don’t take it personally. My activity’s logged too, as is every registered flyer’s. It’s all part of doing business.” He doesn’t explain further. “Right. Time for your first test. Show me what you got.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Concorde activates his suit. “Let’s race.”

  THREE

  I follow Concorde into the sky. We climb higher, higher. I steal a glance at the ground beneath me. Fine details become patches of texture and color, and those merge to become large blocks of muted greens and grays and browns. God, I love that.

  My headset’s heads-up display ticks off our altitude. Five thousand feet. We punch through the ceiling of dark clouds. Ten thousand feet. Fifteen thousand. Twenty thousand. We’re in commercial airplane territory now. The sky is crystal blue, like the waters of a Caribbean beach. It’s gorgeous up here.

  “How are you doing?” Concorde asks.

  “Fine. How much higher are we going?”

  Concorde stops. “Here should be good.”

  Here is 29,853 feet above sea level. Holy crap. Have I ever been this high before?

  Concorde is staring at me. “What?” I say.

  “You think you’re good to go?”

  “Yeah, sure. Ready when you are.”

  “Then try to keep up,” Concorde says, and off he goes. He breaks the sound barrier almost immediately.

  I hit mach one immediately, no almost about it. I catch up to him within seconds. He lets me keep pace for a little while, then races away. My display switches from measuring my speed in miles per hour to increments of mach — as in, I am moving at M1.5 and rising. The display reads M2 when I catch up to Concorde. He pulls away again. I match him again at M3.

  “Still okay?” he says.

  “Fine and dandy.”

  He grunts. “We’re almost there. Let’s take it down.”

  We descend. My headset tells us we’re in (or rather, above) Stockbridge. By car, the trip would take more than two hours, and that’s in favorable traffic. We’ve been in the air less than ten minutes.

  “Quantum Compound, this is Concorde, on final approach, ETA one minute.”

  A woman responds. “Copy that. Someone will meet you on the pad.”

  “Copy that.”

  We zero in on a sprawling facility in the middle of a heavily wooded slope overlooking the town of Stockbridge. From above, it looks like a flying saucer parked atop a small industrial park. A circular landing pad marked with bright yellow paint, a giant bull’s-eye, sits at one corner of the complex.

  A girl about my age walks out onto the pad, waves to us as we touch down. She’s as pale as Sara, and her hair is such a light blond it’s nearly white.

  “Morning, Concorde.”

  “Good morning, Meg. Nice to see you again,” Concorde says. I’ve never heard him speak so politely to anyone, certainly not to any of the Squad. “Meg, this is Lightstorm of the Hero Squad. Lightstorm, Megan Quentin, a.k.a. Megawatt Quantum.”

  “You can call me Meg,” she says, extending a hand.

  “I’m Carrie,” I say, since we’re being so casual and friendly and all. “You throw lightning, right?”

  “That’s my go-to party trick, yeah, but basically I generate bio-electrical energy I can discharge in a variety of ways. Right now I’m trying to figure out the right balance of voltage and amperage so I can act as a human defibrillator.”

  “Seriously? That’s cool.”

  “Right?”

  “The Pelican’s five minutes out,” Concor
de says. “We ready to go here?”

  “Yep, the dungeon’s almost ready,” she says to Concorde, causing my stomach to twitch. The dungeon?

  People and their unnecessarily scary nicknames. The dungeon is the compound’s subbasement, a heavy-duty, super-reinforced warehouse-size testing ground for superhuman abilities, the most advanced such lab in the world, designed by —

  “Doctor Gwendolyn Quentin,” says the woman better known to the world as Doc Quantum, by all accounts the smartest human being on the planet. She’s also the leader of the Quantum Quintet, but she doesn’t dress the part of a super-hero: she’s in a conservative white blouse, a knee-length tweed skirt, a lab coat, sensible shoes, her hair is up in a bun secured by a pen, and a pair of thick-framed glasses perch on her nose. Aesthetically speaking, she’s more of a hot librarian from a music video.

  Shock of shocks, the boys are totally into it. Concorde makes the introductions, and Matt and Stuart slide into Proper Young Gentlemen mode with their careful enunciation and ramrod posture. I want to shake them and scream She’s married! And way older than you! in their faces, but logic, reality, perspective — these things mean nothing when you’re dealing with hormonal teenage boys.

  “I love the compound,” says Matt, who has so far seen the landing pad, a hallway, an elevator, the control room of the testing facility, and nothing else, “but I thought the Quantum Compound was in Worcester?”

  “It was, until last winter,” Dr. Quentin says, “when the mayor requested in the strongest possible terms that we leave the city.” She snorts indignantly and mutters, “You cause one brief city-wide blackout to power a miniaturized supercollider, and everyone flies off the handle.”

  I look a question at Concorde. “She’s not joking,” he says. “That actually happened.”

  Oooookay...

  Dr. Quentin takes us in, contemplates us. “I’ll begin with you,” she says to Stuart. “You’re a standard tank, yes?”

  “Tank?” Stuarts glances at Mindforce for clarification.

  “Super-hero community lingo for anyone with super-strength and invulnerability,” he says.

  “Oh. Okay, yeah, tank it is.”

  Dr. Quentin Hrms, a noise that hints strongly she doesn’t find Stuart all that fascinating. “This shouldn’t take long. Megan, please take the others to the common room until I call for them.”

  “Could we maybe get a tour of the compound?” Matt asks, full of hope.

  “I don’t see why not,” Dr. Quentin says, adding firmly, “anywhere but the bunker, Megan.”

  “Sure. Come on,” Megan says.

  The last thing I hear before we step out of the dungeon is Dr. Quentin suggesting to Stuart that he take off his shirt, “Because I need to shoot you, perhaps several times.”

  Yeek.

  The compound reminds me in many ways of Protectorate HQ, but with a greater sense of organization. The team’s workspaces, like the dungeon and Dr. Quentin’s main lab, are in one wing of the complex, personal spaces are in another, public areas meant for visitors such as us in another. Everything is clearly defined and, no kidding, labeled; the hallways and doors are all prominently signed, even the bedrooms. Seriously, Megan’s room has a placard on the wall reading MEGAN’S BEDROOM like it was a business office. I suspect this is Dr. Quentin’s doing. She strikes me as a serious neat freak.

  “I know this isn’t as exciting as you might have expected,” Megan says. “Most of the best stuff is down in the bunker.”

  “What’s the bunker?” Matt asks.

  “It’s a military-grade subterranean vault where Mom keeps all the super-dangerous stuff. Only one way in or out, secured with a series of biometric locks, rigged with sensors and defense systems up the yin-yang, and it’s deep enough so if we have to activate the self-destruct sequence, it won’t take half the mountain with it.”

  I’m noticing an unsettling ability among the Quentin women to say absolutely terrifying stuff like it’s no big whoop.

  Megan leads us into the common area, where she says hi to...well, you know those big stone heads on Easter Island? Imagine one of those with a body, complete with skin the tawny color of desert sand, but with a sheen like polished marble. It — he — puffs on a steaming mug of coffee I could submerge my head in, and takes a gulp.

  “Hi, honey,” he says in a resonant baritone.

  “Dad, this is the Hero Squad,” Megan says, introducing each of us by our real names. “Everyone, this is my dad, Rockjaw Quantum.”

  “You can call me Joe.”

  “Hi Joe,” Missy says with a cheery wave. “You’re huge.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “And that,” Megan says with a tired sigh, flipping a hand at the figure sprawled across a leather couch, “is my twin brother Kilroy.”

  “Kilowatt Quantum, master of the electromagnetic pulse, thank you very much,” Kilroy says, tossing his comic book onto the coffee table. He makes a beeline for me, takes my hand, and bows like he’s going to kiss it. “A pleasure, my dear.”

  What, do all teenage boys turn into total meatheads in front of attractive women? I might have to cut Matt and Stuart some slack in the future.

  I said might.

  Kilroy repeats his greeting with Missy and Sara (although, I can’t help but notice, he’s significantly less drippy with plain-Jane Sara, which raises my hackles). “Can I get you ladies anything? We have tea, diet soda...”

  “Would you maybe like to make some finger sandwiches and petit fours too, you big girl?” Megan sasses.

  “Shut up, Sparky.”

  “Bite me, Monkeywrench.”

  “Kids, not in front of company,” says Joe, who now has a small child shimmying up his arm like a monkey. He perches atop Joe’s shoulders, and throws his arms in the air triumphantly.

  “Conked daddy!” he crows.

  “Sure did, buddy, you conquered Daddy good.”

  “That’s Farley,” Megan says.

  “We call him Final Boss,” Kilroy says.

  “Final Boss?” I say.

  “Yeah, because he can...”

  “He sort of, uh,” Megan says, fishing for a description.

  “He does this thing.”

  “Yeah, but only when he’s really mad or really scared.”

  “It’s cool because he...” Kilroy poses like a monster in an old black-and-white horror movie, arms raised, hands curled into claws. “It’s wild.”

  “You have to see it for yourself.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  Well, glad to have that cleared up.

  A speaker set into the ceiling beeps at us. “Megan, are you there?” Dr. Quentin says.

  “Right here, Mom.”

  “I’m done with Stuart. Send the psionic in.”

  “Okay.”

  “The psionic? I have a name,” Sara says to the speaker.

  “Yes, you do: it’s Sara Danvers, but you’re also a psionic, so my summons was technically accurate,” Dr. Quentin says. “Bring her down, please, Megan. I’d like to throw things at her.”

  “Coming, Mom. Come on.” Sara throws us a panicked glance as Meg grasps her hand to pull her out of the room.

  “Did she say she was going to throw things at Sara?” Missy says.

  “I think she was joking,” I say.

  “Probably not,” Kilroy says. He gives me his best come-hither smile. “Want to see my room?”

  I think I’d rather have Dr. Quentin throw things at me.

  I dodge Kilroy’s clumsy advances by engaging in the fine art of conversation with Joe, who is very forthcoming about his, shall we say, condition, the result of one of his wife’s early experiments. Even before she was the smartest person on the planet, Dr. Quentin was among the world’s top brainiacs. She earned her doctorate (sorry, her first doctorate) in theoretical physics at age seventeen, which she parlayed into a fat government grant to develop new sources of renewable energy. What she came up with was a process that, in Joe’s wor
ds, “Did something to neutrinos to induce a reaction in fissionable material...don’t ask me, that stuff’s all way over my head.”

  Whatever it was, it went kerflooey one day when Joe was visiting the lab. A half-dozen lab assistants died a slow death by radiation poisoning. Joe and Dr. Quentin, then three months pregnant with the twins, not only survived, they mutated. I’ve heard stories of radiation sparking mutations, but I always thought it was an urban legend. I now have seven feet of stony-skinned proof standing in front of me.

  (I’m trying so hard not to touch Joe. I’m curious to know what his skin feels like, but groping my host, that’d be way rude.)

  “Gwen, she went from genius to super-genius. Me? Well, I suppose it goes without saying I didn’t look like this before.” Joe says this with no hint of self-pity or resentment or anger. His condition, the way he is, however you want to phrase it, he accepts it, doesn’t lay blame on his wife, even though he has every right to do so. This is one classy man.

  It’s nearly lunchtime when Megan returns to bring me down to the lab, and honestly, I don’t want to go. So far Dr. Quentin has, yes, as promised, shot Stuart repeatedly, thrown series of increasingly large objects at Sara, and run Missy through an obstacle course that included a gauntlet of air cannons, which pelted her with tennis balls. God only knows what Dr. Quentin’s going to do to me.

  “You’ll be fine,” Megan says. “And hey, once Mom’s done with you, she’s offered to spring for pizza before you leave.”

  “Wait,” Matt says, “what about me?”

  “Oh, Mom didn’t mention you. Hold on. Mom?” Megan says to the ceiling speaker.

  “Yes?”

  “You haven’t seen Matt yet, should I bring him down too?”

  “...I suppose,” she sighs.

  Ouch.

  Matt walks out into the center of the dungeon, pulls on his gloves. I wave to him from the observation room overlooking the lab. It’s like a box for sports reporters, with a NASA control room stuffed into it — a very Star Trek. Dr. Quentin and Concorde hunch over a wide touchscreen set into a center console, and poke glowing buttons that have no obvious functions. Mindforce and Nina, out of their element amidst all this high technology, stay toward the back of the room, out of the way of the scientists.