Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis

by Richard Roberts

  “Yes.”

  He sniggered, then laughed, leaning against the stone block and relaxing. “Honestly, I cannot. I’ve heard of Inquisitor, but I am not sure I even remember him right. I think he was one of the first heroes turned in by other heroes to Mourning Dove. There was a big thing in the seventies for heroes torturing villains for information, and Inquisitor was right at the front of it.”

  I scrunched up my nose. A lot of yuck there. “But it doesn’t even work. My Mom gets really heated about that. People just make up something so you’ll stop hurting them.”

  Ray shrugged, helpless to change human nature. “Some people have their minds made up that it works, and do not care about the facts. I don’t even remember what Inquisitor’s powers were, or his costume, and I am only kind of sure he was a guy. He must have been meaner than a weasel in poison ivy if torture is all anybody thinks is worth remembering about him. Like, ‘Winnow’ level mean.”

  I tapped the bubble. It didn’t quite feel like glass, after all. More stiff, and smooth. Glass always vibrated a bit when you touched it. “So whatever this thing is, it probably does something horrible.”

  “If they put it on display? Impressively, beyond-mortal-comprehension horrible. So horrible no sane person would want to steal it, and most insane persons wouldn’t, because they can’t do anything with it. An item of pain or murder so vile that those who knew what it did refused to write it down, lest it become legend.”

  Sliding right between us, Claire cut in. “Those are called ‘ballet shoes.’ If Mom had let me start six years ago, I’d have the arches for high heels already.”

  My keen supervillain reflexes came into play, before Ray could get his rhetorical hands on the topic of Claire in high heels. “You’re back quickly.”

  “I thought the treasure hunter could use these.” She held up a fat ring of keys and dropped them into Ray’s outstretched palm.

  We looked at her expectantly. Claire preened, smug smile, upraised chin, her butt planted against the display rock. “Mom’s been training me in picking pockets. I needed to practice. She’s right, nobody’s on guard for it anymore.”

  “You stole a librarian’s keys?” I asked. Something about the idea amused me.

  “The janitor’s,” she corrected. “I took Ray’s advice about people thinking a puzzle is harder than it really is. My mom says similar stuff, but I wasn’t taking her as seriously as I should. Picking locks is hard. Grabbing a janitor’s keys is easy.”

  “Well, by that measure…” I started.

  “That door.” Ray finished for me, pointing at a shabby little brown metal door in the corner at the bottom of the pit. It wasn’t hidden, merely blended into the background by sheer drabness.

  Nobody was paying attention to us. Ray fiddled with the keys until he found the right one, and we slipped through the door.

  Paydirt. Boring, boring paydirt. A white hall with dingy old paint and tile floors, studded with boring gray metal doors. Some had windows, some didn’t. Fluorescent bulbs hummed listlessly overhead. We had achieved the pinnacle of institutional behind-the-scenes décor.

  Ray noted something else. “No one here. That is a good sign. Wherever is the least official traffic is where we shall find Mourning Dove’s lair.”

  We did the obvious and checked the nearest T-branch first. The main hallway went way down to turn a corner at either end, probably making a ring around the pit. This side hall had an EXIT sign at the end, with a staircase picture and one of those doors with a push bar.

  “Secret exit, check,” Claire said.

  As was my job on this team, I played the killjoy, waving my arm down both corridors in all three directions. “There are a lot of doors here, and some will have regular people behind them. We won’t get in much trouble if we’re caught, but our investigation will be over.”

  Ray tapped the side of his nose. “I have a plan.”

  That British gesture actually meant something else, but Claire and I sniffed the air automatically. Then it hit us.

  “Mourning Dove smells like a corpse,” I said.

  “You plan to smell your way to her?” Claire added.

  “We don’t have good investigative equipment―” Ray started.

  Claire wagged a finger. “Penny could have made some, if you’d given us warning.”

  My boy in black pushed on. “My books said smells are a big thing in treasure hunting. Fresh air, rot, plants, that kind of thing can be very useful when you’re exploring a treasure site. We’ll start with the exit hallway, and check the smell of each door before we make a decision.”

  We split up, and did just that. I sniffed the crack around the edge of my first door, then wrinkled my nose. “It smells like bleach. Cleaning supplies. I guess there’s a reason the janitor had these keys.”

  Ray tried the next one down. “The same. This must be a storage area.”

  Claire had one of the doors with a window, but it had brown paper tacked up on the inside, blocking the view. She sniffed, frowned in puzzlement, and sniffed again. “Dusty paper. There must be a lot, if I can smell it through the door.”

  “Worth remembering, but probably not Mourning Dove,” I judged.

  Ray nodded.

  Claire perked up. “What if it’s the room with the magic books? I’d love to get my hands on some of those.”

  “We already have a cursed book that kills whoever opens it. We don’t need another, and we don’t need to make Mourning Dove mad.” I wagged a finger at her.

  Claire folded an arm under her chest and flapped the other hand at me. “She wouldn’t kill us for taking a book.”

  I folded my arms, just as stubborn. “There are lesser punishments than death, and I don’t want to find out what they are.”

  “Ray, help me outvote her!” Claire pleaded.

  Ray ignored her, and that ended the argument. If he was able to ignore Claire in full-on platinum-blonde temptress mode, one hip out and an arm drawing attention to her ‘early bloomer’ attributes, with some eyelash fluttering thrown in… well, he was serious about this treasure hunting thing.

  Very serious. He had continued down a couple of doors while we argued, and crouched down to smell a keyhole. Quietly, and in sharp contrast to our drama, he said, “This door is different.”

  Games abandoned, we moved to support our teammate. Claire sniffed the edge of the door. “Smells like cleaning supplies to me.”

  The door even had a little plate on it reading ‘Janitor,’ which the others hadn’t bothered with.

  “Too much so. Penny, you try,” he said.

  I slid down next to him, sniffed the keyhole, and shuddered. “Yuck. That’s strong. And nasty. Maybe there’s formaldehyde in there?” The other doors had smelled like bleach and rubbing alcohol. This was all sorts of chemically foul.

  “This is as Purloined Letter as it gets,” Claire conceded.

  Ray sorted through the keys, trying them one after another. He quickly narrowed the pile down to only the square orange keys fitting in the lock at all. Would a janitor even have a key to Mourning Dove’s hideout?

  The lock turned. Apparently so. If this…

  We pulled open the door enough to peek in. Yes. This was it.

  Instead of a supply closet, we were looking at a multiple-room suite. The first room wasn’t all that big. Whatever it had been originally meant for, no furniture remained, only a path between two piles of junk. Weird, often ornate junk.

  “Trophies,” I guessed. Opening the door the rest of the way revealed no traps. Normally I would scream for caution, but I couldn’t imagine Mourning Dove risking killing an innocent librarian.

  Claire slavered. “Ooooooooh,” Okay, she wasn’t actually drooling, but she did rub her hands together in glee and her eyes sparkled. Constant exposure was making me resistant to her power, and I didn’t get sucked into staring… for more than, oh, five seconds.

  “I don’t think Mourning Dove keeps trophies.” Ray walked slowly up the aisle, eyes roamin
g everywhere in case of traps.

  Claire snapped out of it. Once again, we’d been struck by how completely serious Ray was about this.

  But I could be serious, too. “Not in a display sense. Items too dangerous to let circulate, and too valuable in some non-monetary way to destroy.” Looked at that way, these shabby heaps of junk…

  Well, most of them were small. There could be hundreds of magical and mad science toys here. Or crown jewels, or maps to secret locations of mystery and power, or…

  Criminy. This pile of garbagy knickknacks was probably worth more than the official city of Los Angeles itself. They’d been shoved into corners by a heroine who cared only about whether they might hurt people, and protected by nothing but her reputation. My confidence that Mourning Dove would merely be annoyed if she caught us looking around dropped.

  Claire had exactly the opposite reaction. She flexed her fingers over one of the piles, her voice down to an awed whisper. “The cream of the cream, collected over thirty years by one of the world’s top-ranking heroines…”

  Fulfilling my own superheroinely duty, I swatted Claire’s covetous hand and saved her from herself. “No touch. These are all too dangerous to put in a museum. I like you not turned to ash because you poked the wrong eldritch rune. If we need a bomb, my power can make us one.”

  Her sulk conceded the point, and I tried very hard to look stern and determined and not show how dizzy I felt. My power leaped on the bomb idea with glee. Items that should have been buried invisibly within the piles were suddenly as obvious to me as if they sat on display stands. Pictures rolled through my head, threatening to overwhelm my actual vision, of how easy it would be to turn this one, or that one, or some of those, into a landscape-destroying display of the weirdest fringe of the laws of physics.

  Nope. No bombs, power. And since you never come up with anything twice, you can throw all these ideas away and forget them.

  Interpreting my stern scowl as aimed at her, Claire shuffled after Ray into the next room. I trailed along last, sweeping unwanted blueprints out of my brain. Did I really like explosions this much?

  Well, yeah. Who didn’t? But I wasn’t going to make them.

  Okay, so. Where were we? A poorly maintained doctor’s examination room, apparently. Or… a very cut-rate surgery. Eww. This room might have had a janitorial beginning. It had a sink, and a lot of cabinets, even a refrigerator. Cabinets lined the walls, both above and beneath a long counter. An austere metal table―or maybe bed―dominated the center of the room. Scalpels, forceps, drills, and fun items like that lay on racks underneath. While it might not be filthy, the place wasn’t particularly clean. Most every surface sported an old yellow or brown stain, and a couple of the surgical tools had a bit of crust on them, suggesting they had been used recently on a patient who had no need for sterilization.

  Ray and Claire were already grimacing. I joined them, and announced our mutual summary. “And this is where Mourning Dove takes care of those intimate biological needs only a zombie has.”

  Even without Mourning Dove, that was creepy, but apparently not creepy enough, because Claire had to squeak out, “Which means there’s at least one human head in this room. Everyone knows Dove hated the Bad Doctor so much she decapitated him as a memento.”

  Ray slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “That will be perfect. I’ll take a photo of it, and send that to Emilia. That will prove my treasure hunting talent.”

  He reached up to open an upper cabinet, and I swiveled on my heel, facing away. Whatever was in there, I could handle it, but why put myself through that? Claire did not follow my lead, and a couple of seconds later, her mouth twisted in disgust, while her cheeks turned an adorably dramatic yellow-green color. Awkwardly, she turned around as well, and shuffled up to cuddle behind me.

  “That bad?” I asked, without looking back.

  Ray sounded a bit strained. “The goat cancer zombies in the asteroid belt were worse, but it is gross. You run across a lot of human remains in treasure hunting, so I will have to get used to it.”

  A few camera clicks sounded, and a series of wooden cabinet doors clunked. Ray let out a sigh. “You can look around again. I need to wash my hands, but I do not trust the sink in here.”

  The wall we came in from had a second door. This wasn’t the end of the little suite of rooms Mourning Dove used. Before I could suggest checking it, Claire held up her hand, serious and alert. “I hear something,” she whispered.

  We all went silent and listened. Yes. Clicking? The sound was faint, barely audible.

  “Wood on tile, more than two legs. It’s outside and down the hall. Cat burglars have to learn to listen.” Creeping up to the door, she pointed down the hall we came through.

  Ray hissed, “Not Mourning Dove. Not human. The Librarian?”

  My team leader instincts took over. “Don’t care. We take the emergency stairs. Now.”

  All together, we eased out of Mourning Dove’s lair and into the dull white utility hallway. Out here, the clacking of wooden poles on ceramic flooring almost boomed. Our visitor hadn’t reached the corner yet, and we tiptoed down to the exit door, pushed it open, and ducked into the stairwell before they did. Ray and Claire moved like ghosts. My footsteps sounded louder to me than whoever was around the corner. Still, we got through the door and closed it behind us without any sign they noticed.

  Not that we were safe. I pointed up the stairs without saying a word, and we climbed―up, and up, and up, and it was a good thing supervillainy kept me in shape, because it must have been five floors before we reached a tiny door with a standard red and white EXIT sign over it.

  It only locked one way, so we peeked out and saw… a tree.

  We were in one of the little fenced-off gardens around the main library building. The door itself was hidden behind a tree.

  Ray scooped me up in his arms and my stomach tingled from the thrill and the vertigo as my super-strong boyfriend jumped right over the fence, carrying me. Claire merely vaulted it, jumping up to grab the upper edge and pulling herself over.

  I slid down onto the sidewalk. Around us, downtown LA went about its day. Nobody cared about three kids with super powers jumping a fence. A block down, some guy was jogging horizontally along the walls of the packed skyscrapers, and he didn’t get any attention either. Weirder stuff happened every five minutes downtown, right?

  We all looked back at the barely visible door, which did nothing in an archetypically doorish way.

  I told my troops, “We weren’t seen and we didn’t take anything, so unless Mourning Dove has an animal sense of smell, I don’t think she’ll ever know we’re here. Let’s split up and go home.”

  Ray nodded. “Safest way.”

  Claire did the same. Not a word of objection. I didn’t think that was suspicious at all, until I got home, pulled my clockwork disk out of my backpack, and a statue of a bird fell out of its gears onto my desk.

  Oh, right. Someone I knew was practicing pickpocketing.

  hen my dad took me on a field trip to learn to use my powers, I didn’t think it would be to a desalination plant.

  It’s a long drive up to Santa Barbara, with looming brown mountains, more and more green trees, and a lot of ocean views. Just me, my dad, and a box of gears both of us had to lift together. I sat with it in the back seat, and built something that spun around on the ceiling while he drove. Magnets and gears go really well together. They like to rotate.

  Of course, thirty seconds after I built it, ‘magnets and gears like to rotate’ was the only thing I understood about my whirly car ceiling doodad. Such was the curse of my power. I still considered it a good omen.

  Pulling into the lot of a desalination plant did not have the same omen power. Nobody stopped us, so either these plants don’t get much protection, or everybody knew my dad.

  After getting out of the car, we walked across gravel towards the beach. The beaches around Santa Barbara were lovely, especially with the ext
ra greenery not far behind them, but hundreds of gray pipes sticking out of the ground did not a scenic natural wonderland make. There wasn’t anything else to see. Pipes, and in the distance a few storage tanks that didn’t look all that big.

  Sincerely trying not to sound sarcastic, I asked, “…why are we here?”

  “Your powers are coming in, and you want to be a superhero when you grow up.”

  If I had a tail, it would be wagging. “Yes!”

  “Well, Pumpkin, your mom and I are going to show you how to do it right. Superheroes do a lot more than fight. We use our powers to help the public in ways that have nothing to do with violence. Especially mad scientists.”

  This was less than exciting news, but he did have my interest. Also, one Pumpkin.

  “We’ve arranged for you to do volunteer work this summer.”

  AAAAAAGH. He did not just say that!

  “I’ll be taking you around to places where any technological improvement helps the public, and you, Princess, will find a way to use your powers for good.”

  AAAA―actually, this was starting to sound fun again.

  We crunched a few more steps across the gravel, and dad raised an arm to indicate a nearby raised platform. “And here we have one of the most common places my colleagues, who will eventually be your colleagues, try to help out. California’s water crisis is one of the most important problems the state faces, and it’s all about technological limitations. Half the advancements of the last twenty years came from superheroes, and a few from villains. The state set aside this area for us to experiment.”

  Sure enough, next to the platform was a big sign that read Santa Barbara Alternative Technology Testing Site. Below it, several pieces of scrap metal had been nailed to the same pole, covered in graffiti. Comments like ‘Microtubules are a dead-end technology’, ‘3.2 kWh/kgal Brainy, top that!!!’ and ‘If you cannot scale up to commercial output levels, Malcontent, your boasts are laughably irrelevant’ suggested these were not ordinary vandals. They also took some of the sting out of my parents’ blatant attempt to make superheroing less attractive.