Personally, I had to hold back laughing. Why bother holding it back? Because Cassie was having a way better time than me. When the holograms had us pressed against each other, which was a lot, I could actually feel her heart pounding through two layers of costume and a certain amount of natural padding, most of that on her side.
If this game had a swing dance option, Ray would be equally hysterical.
The dance ended with a couple of foot stomps and Cassie standing close behind me again. The man on the screen leaned his face in to the woman’s neck. Cassie did the same, until the mustached little goth guy whispered something husky and affectionate in… French? Probably French. Some Romance language.
The whisper was too much. Cassie bust out laughing, banging her forehead against my shoulder a couple of times in case I did not understand the strength of her hilarity.
“What?” I was terrible at languages. If it had been German, I could at least have mistranslated it.
Trying and failing to mimic the guy’s deep, hoarse tone, she recited, “‘I love how many throats you have ripped out with your high quality bicuspids.’“
I extricated myself from Cassie’s embrace, and gave her a skeptical look. Her face still twisted in spasms of humor, she nodded frenetic confirmation. The goth couple faded from the screen without defending themselves, replaced by a score list. We were terrible. Cassie had scored ten times what I had, and was still an order of magnitude below anything on the list.
My robot body might have precision my mortal body never did, but it still contained Penelope ‘What Is This Grace You Speak Of’ Akk.
Suddenly blushing furiously, Cassie waved towards the rest of the arcade and mumbled, “We should go find Murder-boros.”
With her clashing black-and-white patterned costume, Ouroboros would have been easy to find anywhere. In this case we didn’t even need her phenomenal eyesore super powers. We could hear her barking and yapping, and follow the sound.
Marcia had found a martial arts cabinet. Like the other, this one had been built with hologram technology, but if the smacking of Marcia’s hands against its were any indication, this hologram was solid. That was some hardcore mad science, right there. Impressive.
This hologram leaned out of the screen, the upper body of a six-armed man with a smooth, oval face. A Hindu statue, maybe? Not Vishnu, Vishnu was blue. This guy was brown. And as far as I knew, all three of the Brahma-Vishnu-Siva trinity approached ‘pacifist’ levels of peaceful. This one kept trying to punch Marcia.
Er, sort of.
After watching for a minute, I figured out that this was a peculiar, high-speed game of violent rock-paper-scissors. The statue would thrust out an arm at her with the hand either balled in a fist, held out open palm, or jabbing two fingers. Fist beat fingers, fingers beat palm, palm beat fist. If Marcia got it wrong, she winced in pain as it smacked her hard. If she got it right, the hologram arm was knocked back, momentarily stunned.
When she spotted us, Marcia walked away in the middle of her match, leaving the hologram punching at nothing until it racked up some preset number of wins and faded away. Grinning at least as goofily as Cassie, Marcia rubbed her palm and said, “This place is great. If people knew it existed, there would be lines down the block.”
A fair point. Only three other teenagers lurked in the arcade gloom.
Cassie, her cheeks still furiously pink, bumped her shoulder against mine and looked guilty about it. “Thanks for inviting us. I hang out with supervillains all the time, but we don’t do super-powered civilian stuff. It’s all business or regular people or You’re Too Young.”
Time to drop the bomb. Envisioning Claire’s sly shameless body language in my head, I smiled teasingly, twisted from side to side, and held out my arm to examine my doll-jointed fingers. “Actually, this is both pleasure and business. You see, I lured you two here because my supervillain contacts are currently limited by my being designated a high-tech trophy, and Ouroboros’s father has vast collections of villain and hero data he keeps for detective work.”
Marcia bobbed her head cheerfully. “Yep. Say the word, I’ll deliver all those hard drives to you. Or eat them, if that’s what you want. It’s all good.”
Cassie looked considerably more shocked, eyes wide, curious, and understandably cautious. “Oh. You want me to find out something for you?”
I took her hand, and squeezed it reassuringly. “I need to locate a mind-swapping device. I have been informed they’re rare. Stupid rare, ridiculously rare. My double must know that already, and I know how I think. Unless I hurry, she will collect the ones that are left, and hide them.”
“Kind of unsportsmanlike, isn’t that?” Marcia asked.
I shr—criminy. I rocked my head from side to side, solemn but noncommittal. “We take this a lot more seriously than we let show, and in supervillainy, the prize goes to the most devious thinker.”
Cassie grimaced. “I’m not sure where to start, but I’ll try. Don’t get your hopes up too much.”
Marcia straightened her back and lifted her chin, theatrically proud. “I, on the other hand, am looking forward to breaking into one of my father’s bases and ransacking his files. The old control freak will have apoplexy.”
“I can give you both a lead. Some guy named Paul Peitman used to make brain switchers. Supposedly they’re all used, but it would be very easy for one or two to have gotten lost and be floating around somewhere.”
Cassie calmed down slightly, her mouth pinched but thoughtful. She nodded. “Well, okay. I guess I can ask around.”
I clapped them both on the shoulder. “Then let’s stop talking about it, and get back to having fun.”
That lit up Cassie’s face. Literally. She got so excited, her eyes began to glow and her hair to turn blue. “Yeah! Can we have another twirl at the dance machine?”
“Maybe last thing before we leave. I want to explore. There could be something even wilder.”
Marcia smacked her fist into her palm in unnecessarily violent anticipation of an almost certainly peaceful afternoon. “And variety is the spice of life!”
We circled around towards the back of the arcade to start an inventory.
Poor Cassie. I wasn’t lying to her, exactly. I had no expectation of either Cassie or Marcia locating a mind switcher for me, not if they were that rare. What I expected was for Cassie Pater, queen of not being able to keep a secret and forgetting to use people’s super-powered names, to accidentally spill the beans to my duplicate. She had information-gathering resources I could only dream of, and would find a device for me. She might already be looking.
Pretty villainous, huh?
On the way back, we passed a Pac-Man game, whose modifications were visible as pipes sticking out and curling around the box. Little word bubbles popped up over the ghosts in the idle screen, wondering if we were going to stop and play. We did not, to the relief of the orange one that had apparently just hung new curtains.
Off in the corner, another cabinet asked me to defend the frontier from someone named Zur and his coding armada.
However, if we were going to play a space game, one stuck out as the obvious choice. Two cockpits sat against the wall on the far side from the lounge door. They looked a lot like the race car games where you sat in a driver’s seat of a crude model car, except these had hoods that rolled over the top to completely enclose the chair. No sign declared the name of this game, but really, who had to ask? A couple of spaceship pilot seats were all you needed to know.
We gravitated to the game without even needing to discuss it. When we got there, Marcia pushed me into one chair, and Cassie into the other.
I gave the Monochrome Misanthrope a sharp look. “Why us?”
“Because I’m the one who thought to bring quarters,” Marcia answered.
Couldn’t argue with that logic. Besides, I wanted to fly a spaceship.
As I settled into my seat, Marcia closed the lid over top of me. Monitors lit up all across its inner surface. Th
ey looked like windows, like I was actually in the cockpit of a space fighters. The controls were, uh… well, there were a lot of them. I had flashbacks to trying to fly a Jupiter aethership. Little gauges and switches and tiny displays lined the whole dashboard, all the way around. Yes, they were labeled, but what did all these things do? And how could anyone keep track of all of them?
Well, start small. Throttle and joystick. My fighter zoomed into action, and I guided it around in circles and spirals. So, it swooped. Not actual space physics, thank goodness, but atmospheric aircraft physics. Although I did not rule out the possibility this game perfectly modeled some mad scientist’s exotic engine that operated on relative speeds instead of inertia and acceleration.
I fiddled with the buttons on the joystick and throttle. Okay, I had a machine gun-style weapon, a beam I could run until its battery exhausted, and four missiles, one of which I wasted before I knew what that button did. There had to be a tracking system for that, if I could figure it out.
Yellow lights flashed. Alarms warbled. My chair shuddered subtly, and the flashing lights switched to red.
Tesla’s Magnetic Heat Ray, Cassie was already attacking me!
I did a barrel roll, taking advantage of it to turn around and circle towards Cassie. The radar… there, that had to be it. The arrows on it indicated above or below me. All right.
A spiky, star-shaped, electric blue spaceship slid into view as I turned. All I had to do was line her up—
Cassie’s spaceship writhed like a cobra in a mosh pit, and zipped out of the way. The girl could dodge. What she could not do was control our relative positions. I followed her loops, slowing down and speeding up to stay behind her. When I had her in my sights, I searched for the buttons to get a missile lock. The thing with the wandering triangle was probably part of it. I got it to focus on her spaceship, but it wouldn’t stay. One of these buttons had to actually lock on.
While I experimented, Cassie finally managed to slip away farther than I could catch up. In fact, after about fifteen seconds of whirling around, the yellow lights flashed, and turned red as she hit me again.
And the controls suddenly got weird. I was listing to the right. What in Gerty’s armor-plated apron…?
One of the little readouts had a picture of my ship, and from the red dots, I could now see that was a damage indicator. Wow, no shields and pinpoint damage modeling. Bravo. A red needle struck through the green right into one of my engines.
At least the list swung me automatically in a loop, and gave me a few seconds to plan. With all these controls… yes, there were a whole set of individual thruster switches. If they were like circuit breakers, and matched the pattern on the damage readout, I could flip the one opposite the damaged engine and restore stability.
“AH HA HA HA HA HA!” It worked! Yes, I wasn’t quite as fast, but I had control again. Yanking the throttle to zero, I spun my ship around, and launched a missile ahead of me as I turned the thrusters back onto full. It sailed harmlessly past Cassie, but it forced her to dodge, and now it was me following her again. A situation that this time I would not give up. Forget the missiles, I was going to carve her in half with my laser.
Someone knocked on the roof of my cockpit. Presumably Marcia. “A little busy!” I called in response.
The lid thumped, and with a clack that I hope wasn’t something breaking, flipped open.
“I had her in my sights!” I protested, pushing myself indignantly to my feet.
Marcia, mildly sarcastic, jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Yeah, you have bigger problems.”
In the glowing rectangular entrance to the arcade stood a scrawny figure in a jumpsuit and pigtails and goggles. A very familiar figure, once I’d seen in the mirror thousands of times.
Lifting a hand, Meatbag Penny held it at an angle by her face and did the high-pitched “Oh ho ho ho”-style evil anime maiden laugh.
I stomped my foot in pure jealousy. “I always wanted to do that. It never seemed like the right time!”
“That’s because you never do what you want. You always have to be pushed,” she answered, with an edge of real resentment and unfortunate accuracy.
Cassie’s cockpit lid slid open, and she looked out, only to shrink down and peek anxiously over the edge when she saw what was actually going on. “Penny! You… what are…”
“It’s fine. It is,” I assured her.
My double chipped in. “Either of us would love to have you only on our side, but only Ruth thinks you can’t like us both.”
Leaving my innocent friends behind, I walked out into the middle of the room, facing my double across the space like two Western gunfighters in a cluttered town square. “What are you doing here?” I asked, despite the obviousness of the answer.
“Cassie ran off to see you—”
“I didn’t say that!” squeaked the aforementioned blue-haired admirer, throwing off sparks in her panic.
“You’re not good at hiding it—”
I interrupted my double to supply, “Arc Flash.”
Meatbag Penny hesitated only for a moment. “Oh, of course, you’re in costume! I didn’t know you’d picked a hero name, Arc.”
Cassie’s face was still a white, stiff mask, and her head shook slowly. This conversation was too much for her. “I didn’t.”
“Claire came up with it,” I explained.
My doppelgänger smirked, bitterly amused. “Ah. Get used to it. When someone else names you, you’re stuck.”
“It happened to me,” Meatbag Penny and I said in chorus.
Cassie had no immediate response, so my goggled nemesis returned her attention to me. “May I resume?”
I nodded. “Please.”
“When she ran off to meet you, I had a sudden revelation. Why wait for random encounters, or for you to ambush me? Sportsmanship is all very well, but I should play my advantage while I have it. So I’m going to blow you up now, and take the Heart of Steel.” Reaching into one of the pouches on her bandolier, Meatbag Penny pulled out a small handful of marble-sized bombs, and rolled them around in her grip.
“Wait. That means… you followed me?” Cassie’s voice spiked, and she bit down on her fingertips.
Holding up my hand to her, I lowered my voice to a gentle level. “That’s also okay, Cassie. It’s not something you should worry about.”
My double nodded, emphatically so we could see her from over there. “All’s fair in love and war against myself.”
There went the last bit of guilt I might have felt for manipulating Cassie. Also, following Cassie wouldn’t be as easy as just staying behind her. My double had a tracking device on our blue-haired admirer. Cunning. I’d better check my clothes when I got—before I got back to my lair.
I gave Other Me a big ‘ol bared-teeth grin. “I don’t mind humiliating you again, after you’ve ambushed me virtually unarmed, again, but can we take it outside? I’d rather not damage a room full of unique mad science videogames.” That Pac-Man game seemed oddly alive, for example.
She grinned right back. Huh. I didn’t look smug when I did that, just demented. “But that’s the great part, Bad Penny. One I’ve shattered you into a million pieces, I can build new, better arcade games. Maybe I’ll lock your heart inside one, so you can play inside a game instead of sleeping through the next decade. After all, I have our super power.”
Ouch. That stung. Criminy, that grin looked nuts. Was that confirmation bias, or had the power enhancing pill really given our brain a twist?
“Okay, enough of that,” snapped my double. She flung the bombs she was holding, already scooping out another set to throw them.
She wasn’t aiming at me, but I backed up and brought my shields to ready, just in case. I might not have brought any other weapons, but I did not go anywhere without these shield gloves and sliding boots now. Maybe I should make it a policy with my other weapons.
The brown metal marbles hit the floor, and stuck, forming an arc that cut the room in half, interrupted on
ly by a couple of game cabinets. Ah. Land mines.
And Gerty Be (yes, I was loving knowing the real Gerty Goat): Marcia, of all people, was on the other side of the line, with Meatbag Penny. The civilian teenagers had fled before I even climbed out of the space fighter game. Smart kids.
Holding one fist by her side, Marcia threw out a hand, palm out, fingers splayed, towards Other Me. “False Penelope! Your timing is salubrious indeed. I have worked through my history with the real Bad Penny, and now at last I shall have closure. This, now, is the moment I relive abandoning our battles, and becoming her ally to rescue her goofball supernerd boyfriend. Rescuing her goofball supernerd body is close enough.”
“…what,” said Meatbag Penny.
She closed her fingers, and with a sharp jerk, held both arms out from her sides. Black fluttered around her left first, and her right began to glow white. “I refuse your offer of being friends equally with you both, for I do not accept you both! The true Penelope Akk is trapped in a robot body thanks to you, evil monster. It is fitting that I began your career, and now I shall end it, for I am Ouroboros! I am both beginnings and endings, the eternal cycle! The wheel has swung around, and it will crush—” She broke off, shuddering. The light around Marcia’s right hand went out, and she hunched forward, grabbing her chest. The cough that came out sounded gruesomely wet, but when it was done she straightened up and gave her head a shake. “Whew! That one kicks like a mule.”
Cassie hovered at the edge of the land mine field, arm extended over it beseechingly. “Marcia—”
“Ouroboros,” my double and I corrected her, with the exact same gentle reproof.
She flinched, but pressed on. “You don’t have to do this. Being Penny’s friend means being both their friends. They say that themselves.”
“Penny is too nice to her enemies. I of all people should know. I know which one is real, and no one can tell me otherwise. There shall be a reckoning, and I reckon we will reckon now.” Marcia pulled off the ridiculous statement absolutely stone faced and deadpan.
“I won’t let you hurt her, Marcia. Not either of them.” Cassie’s voice fluttered in terrified determination, and lightning crawled up and down her already lightning-themed bodysuit.
You Believe Her Page 31
