Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women

by Michael Bailey

  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the only thing worse than a jerk like Concorde is a jerk when he’s right.

  Mindforce clears his throat softly. “Okay,” he says. “I think we’re all set.”

  God, that was awkward.

  Astrid cleared out fast after my debriefing, leaving Matt and Sara to be grilled without any moral support. Sara couldn’t have cared less, but I think Matt felt...I guess jilted would be the right word.

  Before showing us the door, Concorde gave us firm orders not to act on any information that might come to us by way of Astrid — not without checking in with him first. We agreed, and curiously, it wasn’t as painful to give in to Concorde as it usually is. What happened to Missy was still too fresh in our minds.

  Speaking of the Muppet, she bounced back pretty quickly (I think; I don’t know what the normal recovery time from demonic possession is). She was still snoozing away when Stuart, using the spare key the Hamills hide inside a fake rock in the yard, slipped into the house to check on her. He sat with her for a while, and she never once stirred.

  She woke up Wednesday morning, still wiped out, but hungry. She wolfed down a huge breakfast, then conked out on the sofa until dinnertime, when she again gorged herself. On Thursday, when we all stopped by to visit, she was awake, and had been for much of the day, but her energy levels were nowhere near normal, as evidenced by the fact that she spoke only in short sentences that each expressed a single thought. Didn’t care for that at all.

  Today she is mostly back to normal. Her parents kept her home anyway, to avoid a relapse, so we invade the Hamill home laden with Chinese from Junk Food and extra controllers so we can, to the chagrin of the ever-dour Dr. Kenneth Hamill, Mario Kart our cares away (a pox on you, Rainbow Road).

  Throughout the night, we keep one eye on Missy, looking for any uncharacteristic behavior, any sign that the imp, as Astrid put it, tainted her. She swears a few times in Japanese, but come on, getting blue-shelled when you’re in the lead? Cursing is totally justified.

  During a break in gaming, I check my phone. I have a voicemail from “C” — my not-so-clever label for Concorde. Guh. All he says is, “Call me back, please.”

  Please? Must be serious if he’s asking nicely. I slip into the bathroom for some privacy, and he must be sitting on his phone, because he picks up after one ring.

  “Carrie.”

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “How is Missy doing?”

  Huh. He actually sounds concerned. “She’s okay. We’re at her place now. She’s up, she’s moving. Not back to a hundred percent yet, but she’s good.”

  “Good. That’s good.” He pauses. “Do you think she’s up to come in to HQ tomorrow?”

  “You don’t like us having full weekends off, do you?”

  “Look, I’m only —” he snaps, then he stops. I hear him take a breath, then he says gently, “I spoke to Enigma. She told me about her...concerns about Missy. We want to give her a quick once-over, make sure there’s nothing to worry about. That’s all.”

  Nuts, why is this guy making it so hard for me to dislike him lately?

  ELEVEN

  Mrs. Hamill was not thrilled at the idea of letting Missy out of the house, not so soon after getting over “the flu,” but, “Mom I’ve been stuck in this house all week and I’m going crazy and I want to go hang out with my friends and they aren’t going to let anything happen to me I’ll make them promise to bring me home if I start to feel cruddy so please can I GOOOOOOOOOOO?!” was a very convincing argument.

  “I don’t even care that we’re going to spend the morning at HQ,” she chirps as we hike into town, a subdued but noticeable bounce in her step. The sight is as happy-making as the smile on Stuart’s face. This was a rough week for both of them.

  Mindforce meets us at the Wonkavator. He smiles at Missy, and for a moment I think he’s going to hug her.

  “Let’s get you up to the medical bay,” he says, sans hug.

  “Hop up on the table,” Mindforce says.

  Missy’s eyes pass, with suspicion, from Mindforce to Concorde to Dr. Enigma. “You’re not going to stick me with a needle, are you?” she says. “I don’t like needles. They hurt.”

  “We might want to draw some blood,” Concorde says.

  “Might,” Mindforce stresses. “Astrid told us there might be some lingering after-effects of your...recent unpleasantness, so we want to give you a quick check-up to make sure everything is normal. If we think we need to draw blood...”

  “Like there’s a blood test for demonic possession,” Astrid mutters to herself, softly enough that only Missy catches it.

  Missy slides onto the examination table, her stomach gurgling unhappily. The stainless steel is cold beneath her hands.

  “How have you been feeling?” Mindforce begins.

  “Okay. I was wicked tired right afterwards and I slept a lot but I’m okay now. Is it weird I slept a lot?”

  “No, not at all,” Astrid says. “In fact, I’m betting the only reason you’re on your feet so soon is because you have such a strong constitution. So I’m told,” she says with a nod at Concorde.

  “What are you looking for, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure, honestly. I think this is a case of we’ll know it when we see it.” Mindforce picks a penlight out of a squat cabinet of medical instruments. He flashes it into Missy’s eyes, as though administering a routine eye exam. “Missy, how’s your night vision?” he says, his brow knit in curiosity.

  “Oh, I see in the dark real good. Always have.”

  “Hm.”

  “What?” Concorde says. He shifts his helmet’s smoked outer visor out of the way, and hunches slightly to match Mindforce’s point of view. Mindforce flicks the light back and forth, back and forth. “Huh.”

  “What?” Missy says. “Is something wrong?”

  “Not wrong,” Concorde says, “but definitely interesting. Show me your teeth.”

  “Show you — what? Mindforce?”

  “It’s okay. Go like this,” Mindforce says, flashing his teeth in a manner that toes the line between comical and disturbing. Missy mimics him. Another round of fascinated grunts follows.

  “Guys, talk to her,” Astrid prods. “You’re freaking the girl out.”

  “Yeah you are,” Missy says, but Concorde ignores them both. He grasps Missy’s hand and leans over it, his visor nearly touching her fingertips.

  “Relax your hand.” He pinches Missy’s index finger right above the top knuckle. The double-thick fingernail, curved and ending in a wicked point, slides out, a dagger leaving its sheathe.

  “AAAAH! AAAAH!” Missy pulls her hand free and flails away. “What did you do? What did you do to me why did my finger do that that was freaky it never did that before what’s wrong with me?!”

  “Dammit, Concorde, what the hell is your problem?” Astrid says, snaring Missy in an unwanted but very much needed hug.

  “I didn’t do anything to her!”

  “Concorde, please,” Mindforce says. “Missy, it’s all right, nothing is wrong with you.”

  “Says you!”

  “Explain this to her now,” Astrid says, “or I swear —”

  “Missy, I promise you, this is all perfectly normal,” Mindforce says in his most soothing tone. “For you,” he amends.

  “Your powers derive from genetic mutation, same as Mindforce’s powers, and Sara’s, and Stuart’s,” Concorde says, “but in your case, you’ve developed secondary physical characteristics. It’s not common among superhumans, but it’s not unheard of. If anything is odd here, it’s that your secondary characteristics are very specific to a non-human organism.”

  “What’s that mean?” Missy says.

  “In English,” Astrid says.

  “Your eyes appear to have what’s called a tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer in the back of the eyeball,” Concorde says. “Your upper and lower canine teeth are slightly elongated, and your fingernails...well, those speak f
or themselves.”

  “All of which are distinctly feline traits,” Mindforce finishes.

  Missy unconsciously touches a hand to her ever-present cat-ear headband, as if saying goodbye to their innocent novelty.

  “It’s fascinating, really,” Concorde says. “Physical manifestations like yours can be progressive or regressive, but in natural mutations they’re always along the lines of the human genome. Cross-species manifestations like yours...hmmm...”

  “What?” Missy says. “Is something wrong with me?”

  “No. No, nothing’s wrong,” Concorde says — a little too quickly, Missy thinks. “Don’t mind me. Thinking out loud. Let’s finish this up and get you out of here.”

  Missy is gone all morning. The Protectorate brings her back to the common room few minutes after noon, by which time we’re all starving to death (Stuart especially, despite the fact he helped himself to several slices of leftover pizza from the Protectorate’s fridge).

  “About time. I was starting to think you’d taken her hostage,” Matt says.

  “Nothing to worry about. We were being thorough,” Concorde says.

  “That’s one word for it,” Astrid says, slipping an arm around Missy’s shoulders. “C’mon, guys, I’ll take you back to the office. And go buy yourselves some lunch, on us. Give them some money,” she says to Concorde.

  “Excuse me? I don’t think so.”

  “It’s the least you can do for keeping them here so long. And be grateful I don’t make you cover my lost income. Not all of us are crazy rich, you know. Some of us work for a living.”

  Concorde, grumbling, reaches into a pouch on his belt. He pulls out some cash, and shoves a twenty at me.

  “That’ll feed Stuart. Barely,” Matt says. Astrid flicks her fingers at Concorde: Fork it over, cheapskate, the gesture says, and he slaps another twenty in my hand.

  “Spend wisely.”

  As promised, Astrid accompanies us back to the office, where we part ways (much to the boys’ disappointment and, not coincidentally, Sara’s delight). Before departing, Astrid says something for Missy’s ears alone. Missy nods mechanically, then hugs Astrid tight around the neck. Whatever passed between them, Missy’s not sharing with us.

  We hike down to the Carnivore’s Cave to enjoy our free meal, in which chili cheese fries feature heavily. We normally don’t indulge because they’re way expensive, but hey, we’re not paying for it.

  Except we are, it turns out. “Looks like it’s not a totally free lunch,” Matt says, studying the check. “We have enough to cover most of the food but not all of it, plus we have to leave a tip.”

  “How much?” Sara asks.

  “Check is $61.74 with tax, so the tip is $11.11, that makes the total $72.85, we have forty bucks from Concorde, so we each have to kick in $6.57,” Matt says without pausing once to think about it.

  “That’s not bad,” Stuart says, “but I think we should go back and hit Concorde up for more lunch money for eating up half our Saturday. Ha! Lunch? Eating? See what I did there?”

  Two things strike me at once. One: how the heck did Matt figure all that out? In his head? That fast? And two...

  “Did you guys catch what Astrid said about Concorde?”

  “What’d she say?” Matt says.

  “She made a crack about him being rich.”

  “Yeah, she did, didn’t she?”

  “I heard Natalie say something similar a while back.”

  “Makes sense,” Stuart says. “Dude’s got to have some serious scratch to make a suit like his.”

  “Except he didn’t make it,” Matt says, swinging into super-hero geek mode. “Bose Industries developed the maglev suit and gave it to Concorde.”

  “Maglev?” I say. I know Matt’s thrown that term out before...

  “Magnetic levitation,” he says. “Edison Bose pioneered the technology. You know, like what those Japanese bullet trains use, except the suit is freestanding: he doesn’t need a magnetic base to repel off. It’s uber cutting-edge. Why he gave that kind of cool tech to a tool like Concorde...”

  “Can we stop talking about Concorde?” Missy says. “He said things I didn’t like and asked me questions I couldn’t answer and he got mad at me because I couldn’t answer them and Astrid told him to stop acting like such a huge d-bag but it didn’t help and he was mean to me.”

  “Astrid called Concorde a d-bag?” Matt says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I think I’m in love.”

  Countdown to Sara bristling in three, two — there she goes.

  “You haven’t told us how the exam went, Muppet,” I say. “Clean bill of health, I assume?”

  Missy’s eyes narrow. “Don’t wanna talk about it.”

  “But you’re okay, right?” Stuart says.

  “Said don’t wanna talk about it. I’m fine. Shut up. Let me eat.”

  “The Congo,” I say. “Monkeys, hats, et cetera.”

  “Yeah,” Stuart says, eyeing Missy. “Right. The Congo.”

  TWELVE

  Something I’ve noticed about the super-hero biz: it tends to run hot and cold.

  During the Archimedes case, we had periods of several days when nothing would happen, then things would go berserk and everything would happen all at once, then it would quiet down again. All told, that mess took close to three months to clean up.

  It’s been a few weeks since we nearly burned down the library, and it’s been quiet — yes, I’ll say it, too quiet. Black Betty — assuming that is in fact our culprit — hasn’t made another move, or so Astrid assures us. She’s been keeping an eye on Kingsport, looking for any unusual magical activity (I can’t imagine what qualifies as usual magical activity), and so far, nothing to report. The only other bite came a few days after our second encounter with Stacy: the John Hay Library at Brown University in Rhode Island — which has in its collection a rare, original Lovecraft manuscript for The Shadow Out of Time, according to uber-geek Matt — was broken into and ransacked, but nothing was reported missing. The trail went cold after that.

  Speaking of cold: winter has gone out of its way to be miserable and unpleasant, and maybe that’s why neither the Hero Squad nor the Protectorate have had much to do. Freezing temperatures, high winds, and the occasional heavy snowfall seem to be keeping all the bad guys inside where it’s warm.

  The same goes for us, and I’m okay with that, but you want to hear something ridiculous? We’re getting itchy for a fight. How stupid is that? Here we are, living normal lives for a change, slogging through schoolwork during the week so we can relax and have fun gaming on the weekends, and what are we all secretly hoping for? A reason to risk our necks.

  We’re dumb.

  I’ve been trying to put the downtime to good use in a variety of ways. I’ve been plugging away at my much-hated math class to nudge my grades up (so far, so good); I’ve been helping Sara with her exercises so she can better control and fine-tune her telepathy (again, progress has been made); I’ve been exploring possible career options so I don’t feel so much like a loser with no future (still treading water there); and my cleric in our Dungeons and Dragons campaign is up to level ten, so I can turn low-level undead like nobody’s business.

  Look, all work and no play and all that.

  I can’t say whether I’m making any progress in my weekly sessions with Mindforce. Every Friday we sit, we talk — correction: I do most of the talking while he nods and mm-hms and occasionally asks pointed and uncomfortable questions that force me to confront things I’d rather wipe from my memory...which, I guess, is the point of such questions.

  “Y’know, you could always ask him how you’re doing,” Matt suggests at lunch.

  “Maybe,” I say. I thought of that too, but I’m a little afraid of the answer.

  “I have to see him today too,” Sara says, “so let’s hit him up together. Maybe between the two of us, we’ll make up one completely sane person.”

  “We’re not insane,” I say, “we�
��re...psychologically interesting.”

  “I’d have gone with traumatized,” Matt says.

  “Oh, thanks ever so much for your sympathy, Captain Tactless.”

  “What? Am I wrong? Bad stuff happened to you, it messed you up a little. Getting all P.C. and saying you’re ‘psychologically interesting’ or whatever doesn’t make it all go away.”

  Not unlike Concorde, Matt is especially infuriating when he’s right.

  I spend the rest of the school day giving myself a pep talk, convincing myself there’s no harm in asking Mindforce for an assessment. I mean, how bad could it be? If I were a basket case, I’d be on medication or in a hospital, right? So what am I worried about?

  What am I worried about?

  Matt, Stuart, and Missy plant themselves at Coffee E while Sara and I head over to Protectorate HQ. We don’t talk at all during the Wonkavator ride. Whatever’s gnawing at me, it’s on Sara’s mind too.

  Mindforce is there to greet us at the end of the line. For some reason, so is Natalie.

  “Ladies,” she says.

  “Carrie, you’re with Natalie today. Sara, you’re with me,” Mindforce says, and they head upstairs for their session.

  “Change of pace today?” I say.

  “Come on,” Natalie says, beckoning. I follow her through the bowels of HQ, and we stop at the door leading to Concorde’s workshop. Natalie pulls out of her pocket something that looks like an oversized cell phone, pokes at it.

  “You told Mindforce you wanted to learn how to use your powers more effectively,” she says.

  “Yeah...”

  “Because you want to feel empowered. No pun intended.”

  “I guess.” Natalie arches an eyebrow. Looks like noncommittal pseudo-answers aren’t going to cut it with her today. “Yes. I want to...I don’t want to feel...you know...”

  “I don’t know. Tell me.”

  She waits. Damn her, she’s going to make me say it.

  “Helpless.”

  There it is. I wasn’t scared of what Mindforce might say about me; I was scared of what he’d make me say about myself, but it looks like that duty’s been assigned to Natalie, for reasons that aren’t clear yet.