Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis

by Richard Roberts

  I climbed the steps onto the platform. It consisted of a basin, three pipes, some valves, and a box with switches that I figured controlled the pipes.

  Cool sea air blew over me. With it came a feeling of helplessness I wasn’t used to. Looking around the platform, I asked dad, “So I just… come up with… something?” We’d even left the box of gears in the car!

  He laughed affectionately, and patted my head. “No, Pumpkin. I thought we’d start you off easy. I want to see what the Machine can do.”

  That perked me up. This I not only could do, I could shine at. Separating ingredients was what my beautiful, beloved mad science masterpiece was for! Unhooking it from my wrist and revving it up, I eyed the input and output pipes. The Machine wasn’t much above a foot long, unwrapped. It couldn’t reach.

  Dad pointed past me. “There’s a bin of spare pipes for fitting on that side of the platform, Pumpkin.”

  Three Pumpkins, one Princess, and we’d just started. This ‘volunteering’ could be lucrative.

  Sure enough, I looked over the edge at piles of pipes of different sizes. Some might even have been small enough for me to lift, but I didn’t need to. I tossed my baby into the pile and instructed, “Eat! Eat, my darling! Grow fat and strong, and attach yourself to those three pipes. So commands your mistress, Penelope Akk!”

  About a minute later, the Machine crawled like a bloated car-sized beetle into the basin, and extended tubes to fasten itself in place.

  Dad tapped the nearest pipe. “Sea water comes in here. Output brine to that pipe, and the purified water to the other. Fresh water should be at least―”

  I waved him off. “He doesn’t obey anyone but me, Dad, and if I say pure, the water he gives us will be pure. Period.” Dad didn’t argue, so I gave the Machine a hug. “Okay. Time to make the rest of mad science look like banging rocks together. Eat the seawater, eject the water part out the other end, and separate and store all other contaminants.”

  Dad and I turned valves, and he flipped a few switches. Pipes rumbled as water flowed through them. At first, that was it, but I knew what to look for, and after a few seconds, spotted the first extra plates of shiny salt and metals growing out to join the Machine’s shell. Most were still tiny, but there were a lot of different plates, and one was green. Sea water was weird stuff!

  We watched it work, me smug, dad occasionally increasing the water pressure on the board. He and I had about the same attention span, so just when silent gloating got boring, he spoke up. “You know how my power works, right, Pumpkin?”

  “Sure,” I said, knowing this would not stop him from telling me again.

  It didn’t. A craving to lecture is baked into the Akk DNA, and not just on my father’s side of my family. “My ability is to understand theory in a practical way. Most advanced physics is mathematical, and other people tell me they have trouble seeing what that really means. For me, it’s clear. The theory for optical computers is already developed, and I’ve built one. Making it manufacturable by people who can’t see what I see is the major obstacle. It gives me advantages in reversing supervillain technology as well. If it follows known theory, I can see that. If I can get a good guess of how it works, I can test that. That’s why I hate the word ‘magic.’ As soon as we have the theory worked out, it will be as usable as electricity.”

  He let out a sigh, and finished with an uncharacteristically glum, lost expression, “But when I look at your Machine, Princess, it feels like I’ve walked off a cliff. The results may be prosaic, but the process to get there…”

  I grinned at his discomfited silence. Grinned hard. The top of my head felt like it would float off. It’s always good to hear you’ve already left your parents in the dust.

  Also, four Pumpkins, two Princesses. I might be buying a new game card today.

  However, it was rude to rub my dad’s face in my totally superior awesome. I changed the subject. “Is there something else we can do? The Machine can keep doing this… basically forever.”

  Dad’s mood changed to speculative. “Someday, that may be the best way you can help humanity. We’ll let it run for a little bit, and walk down to the beach. We need to stay close in case anything goes wrong.”

  The rushing and vibrating sound of water abruptly stopped, and dad said, “…like that.”

  Grabbing my braids, I yanked them out to either side. “No! The Machine doesn’t break down. That’s not a thing! What’s going on?”

  Dad didn’t panic. He even smiled, just a little. “I have my suspicions. Go check.”

  I rapped on the Machine’s mouth by the intake pipe. “Open up. Make a window so I can see what’s going on.”

  Plates shifted out of the way, leaving me looking through a transparent (quartz crystal from bits of sand?) window. Inside, I saw… nothing particularly interesting. A lot of interlocking levers and gears in a spiky cone, like the inside of a turtle’s mouth. The gap contained water. ‘A little cloudy’ was the worst you could say about it.

  That is, until it moved.

  Moving water isn’t that distinctive, but distorted waves washed past my window, and then the cloudy patch broke up, pushed aside by… something. Something I couldn’t see. The rippling came back to the window, rolling around it in a circle with the center still.

  Was I being stared at?

  “Dad, something is alive in there, and it’s invisible,” I reported.

  His eyebrows raised over his glasses in curiosity, but he still retained that hint of smugnessitude. “I thought it would be a fish.”

  That got me rolling my eyes. Most powerful mad scientist in the world, here. I’d overheard my parents admitting it. And still everybody underestimated me! “Dad, the Machine eats seashells, rocks, plant matter, and garbage just fine. I don’t think a fish would stop it.”

  “I think my little Princess would program into her greatest creation that it’s not allowed to hurt living creatures.” That left me momentarily speechless. He was probably right. Current evidence suggested he absolutely was right.

  Which still left me with an invisible something stuck in the Machine’s craw. I was about to ask my dad what to do about it, but… the answer was obvious, wasn’t it?

  “Stay hooked up, but make me a pail,” I said. A few seconds of metallic grinding later, a bucket dropped out of the Machine’s underside, clanking on the cement. A rainbow sheen suggested my Machine used the metals out of the seawater before cannibalizing iron from the pipes.

  Holding the bucket in both hands, I instructed,. “Drop that living thing in here, and fill the rest of the bucket with water.”

  Splortch. Woosh. Slosh. The Machine took me literally, and I ended up with a bucket absolutely full, spilling water over the edges with my slightest movement. Well, we were next to the ocean. Nobody would miss a few ounces. Or gallons. Or swimming pools.

  So, that left me and my dad standing around a pail of water sitting on the warm concrete next to my once-again-gurgling Machine. A pail of transparent, dirt-free, regular-old water, with nothing to see inside it.

  Right up until the water extended two tiny arms, pulled up a lump of water that might have been a head, and stared at us back.

  “A water elemental!” I whispered, in as shouty surprise as you can get while still whispering.

  “There’s no such thing, Penelope,” dad corrected.

  Giving him a stiff pout, I pointed at the bucket. The elemental tilted its head. Or what might be a head. It only had a suggestion of human shape, not anything clear. I might be mistaking a really thick tentacle for a body.

  He remained unmoved by the physical evidence before us. “Pumpkin, we’re still near Los Angeles. The waters off the coast of Southern California are full of escaped mad science experiments. They don’t breed, but a semi-intelligent coelacanth with ejectable poisoned spines doesn’t have many natural predators, except maybe the three thousand pound crab with an impenetrable shell composed of advanced carbon fibers and only one soft spot on its belly. As be
autiful as it is, this creature was made in a lab, not summoned by a spell.”

  Crouching down, I asked the little water girl, “Can you speak?” I couldn’t even tell if she was human-shaped, she just… felt like a girl to me.

  Human-shaped, a girl, intelligent or not, she couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. The bits sticking out of the water dropped back in, becoming invisible. I had to applaud that defense mechanism. Water camouflages water perfectly.

  Dad might be unmoved, but things like this were not a hundredth as common as he pretended, and especially not this, yes, magical. A great joy lit in my heart. “Can we take her home? Keep her in an aqua―” The joy squeezed into frustration. “Arrrgh. I―”

  “Yes, Pumpkin?”

  “I can’t make anything smarter than a goldfish live in a tank. I’m going to put her back in the ocean.” The words tasted like sand and ashes in my mouth. Mainly sand. A windy beach will do that.

  “Up to you, Princess,” he said, exaggeratedly casual.

  That was it for excitement. Toddling down to the surf holding a heavy pail held no more challenges than getting my bare feet sandy, and when I’d waded as far as I dared and poured her into a retreating wave, all I saw was clear, formless water. Not long after that, we made my Machine spit the pipes back out, put it all away, and went home. Dad had that ‘trying not to look smug’ look the whole time.

  My feet were still caked in sand when I got home, and Mom dragged me back out for the other half of the day’s training.

  Right after I made sure I got paid for six Pumpkins and four Princesses.

  ad took me North, Mom took me South. We drove down to one of those areas that’s not really Downtown, or South Central, or Koreatown, but just ‘somewhere in Los Angeles.’ There’s a lot of little blending dusty buildings down there, and it’s hard to tell a good neighborhood from a bad one.

  Except the one we drove to. That went past ‘bad neighborhood’ and stopped being a neighborhood at all. The buildings were broken and burned-out hulks, and looked like they’d been left that way for years, except for the one we pulled into the parking lot next to. That one merely looked ramshackle, with thinner walls and more wood than I’d ever seen in any building within LA city limits. Behind it stretched a tall fence with a droopy tarp concealing the interior, and above the whole thing, a battered, charred sign declared ‘Cursed.’

  I didn’t know what I was expecting inside, but it wasn’t paintball. It should have been paintball. Guns, protective gear, pellet ammunition, they hung from hooks on the feeble walls, and a guy with a scruffy tan beard and a scruffy tan coat and scruffy tan skin approached Mom. “Mrs. Akk! It’s an honor.”

  “I’m sorry to ask for a reservation on such short notice,” Mom said.

  ScruffMan’s coat rustled as he waved his hands. “No, really, it is an honor. I’m proud to help the next generation take their turn blowing this place up.”

  Mom just smiled, and when he unlocked and opened the back door, she walked past him with a regal, poised, chin-raised stride, every inch the famous Audit granting a favor to a fan. I knew he was watching us, because she kept up the walk after we got out into the yard. Continuing her Audit thing, she said, “You’d like an explanation.”

  “Of course.” I’d never been to a paintball field. I’d never speculated what they would look like. This seemed about right, if on the extreme end. The tarpaulin-covered fence walled off an area bigger than a football field , and it contained… rubble. Ruins. The same as the neighborhood outside, but more so. Half-broken walls, upturned car frames, pipes and girders sticking out of the ground, and even recognizable chunks of building high enough to have a second floor and big windows. The ground had been gravel once, until pounding feet turned even the dust into a hard, flat surface.

  “Several decades back, a developer bought this land and tried to build up a shopping mall. Construction sites draw supervillains like drosophila flies to active yeast, but this spot, even more so. Every time they started building, a super powered fight would break out and level the place. The damage spread to several streets around. Eventually, people decided it must be cursed, and abandoned it. A few years ago, Armin decided to put the rubble to use for recreational combat games. The super powered fights haven’t stopped, but for him, they’re all publicity.”

  “So, is it cursed?” I asked. Mom isn’t as magic-shy as dad.

  “The frequency of battles is not outside of two standard deviations, but no collection of known factors for probability of fights breaking out here convincingly explains the results.” Of course, what she is shy about is claiming answers she doesn’t know.

  “It’s a better training field than anything I imagined,” I admitted, looking around at all the spots for cover, and raised platforms.

  “Then get equipped. We’ll be working primarily on defense at least through the summer.”

  Which was why she’d only told me to bring my flight fans. I strapped them onto my wrists and ankles, but I also hung the flying disk on my back and buckled its controller on my wrist. Would my mother resent this display of rebellious spirit?

  She showed no sign of noticing. Judging from experience, I put that as a statistical probability of seventy percent that she approved, but directly telling me why would encourage me in some wrong direction.

  The other thirty percent was that she was about to let me fail horribly. Moms.

  Equipment equipped, I fell in before my waiting maternal unit. She gave me the expected speech. “You’ve figured this out already, Penny dear, but repeated emphasis will help establish the lesson on a reflex level. You only have powers outside of combat. In a fight, you are a baseline human, and not a sturdy one, at that. The single most important skill you can have is avoiding being hit, because you cannot afford to be hit even once. Those flight rotors are clumsy, but their simplicity gives them advantages if you can master their use. We’re going to do that. Fly over there.”

  She pointed, I saluted, and with a flick of my wrists, activated the fans and launched myself into the air.

  To my crawling embarrassment, she had a point. I wobbled, nearly crashed on the way, and when I did land in front of the desired wall, I hit the ground stumbling. Mom gave me no instructions, or reviews. She knew quite well I felt clumsy enough. She just whistled, and pointed to the next target.

  I missed the ledge on the third floor of a ruined building entirely, but amidst my squealing and flailing limbs, I did manage to also miss the ground. Mom didn’t wait for me to get that one right. She just pointed somewhere else.

  After about an hour of this, I’d at least figured out how to stop the rotors and land on my feet at basic targets. Anything up in the air was hit-or-miss, and those are words you do not want to use twenty feet in the air. My bruises waxed poetic on that point.

  I was also getting edgy about how long my rotors would last. The springs that powered them were the real mad science behind the simple clockwork inventions I let my parents find out about. Yes, they carried orders of magnitude more energy than a regular spring should. Exactly how much fuel that gave me, I had no idea, and those were more words I did not want to use twenty feet in the air!

  So, naturally, that was when my Mom gave a longer whistle, and shouted, “You’ve reached your muscle memory limit for stage one today. We’ll get back to this in future sessions, but you’re doing well enough to begin stage two. If our special guest would come out, please?”

  On the other end of the field, a boy stepped out from behind a barricade, closing up a book. Athletic but not heavy, he had pretty features and dark skin and hair, but only in the ‘deep tan’ range that could be any ethnicity. I pegged him as just having graduated high school. He moved with the tension of a superhero expecting a fight as, two by two, he carried a line of rubber buckets out onto the field.

  Mom explained, “Penny, this is Ifrit. Ifrit, this is my daughter Penelope. Ifrit has magic-based fire powers, and has been wise enough to let Marvelous train him instead of leaping into
a career on his own. This will be training for both of you.”

  Criminy. Keep your mouth shut, Penelope. Neither of them know you’ve met Ifrit before, in your second fight as Bad Penny, and total silence is the best technique for keeping it that way.

  To my complete lack of surprise, Mom’s next words were, “Get as close as you can without getting hit, Penny dear. Go!”

  Ifrit picked up one of the buckets, hung it over his hand, and pointed that arm at me.

  Foom! The bucket launched like a rocket, tumbling through the air towards me. The distance made it look slow, but I knew better. I shot up higher, drifting to the side as I eased forward. Distance was my friend, until I had a feel for this. So was altitude. My control issues didn’t amount to much with nothing near for me to hit. Zooming sharply from side to side was the easy part.

  Ifrit wasn’t reckless, either. He launched a couple more buckets at me from a distance, but lazily. At a distance, they couldn’t possibly hit me.

  Mom threw the first bucket back during this slow approach period, and I made a mental note. Do not get between Mom and Ifrit. She will throw the bucket right at me and claim it’s some kind of lesson.

  Easier thought than done, but if I kept moving laterally and didn’t rest in the direction Ifrit had just fired, I should be okay.

  Only when I’d gotten a couple dozen yards(ish) did he get serious. Face set in concentration, he tracked me with his arm, firing off leading shots to where my momentum led at the time. Oh, yeah, someone had been training him.

  Not well enough. My rotors might be garbage for precise landings, but boy could I change direction in an eyeblink. That kept me out of the way. Buckets sailed past me, but none of them hit, and that was the important part.

  When I became confident he couldn’t get me at this distance, I eyed my options for getting closer.

  A thunderous boom echoed past me, not far ahead of a bucket traveling way faster than any had before. When I dodged back in the opposite direction, Ifrit launched another super-fast bucket right in my path.