Okay, Penny. Stop reacting. Assess and decide. First step, gather information. “What do I do now?”
“Whatever you like.” After another plunge into her office, the energetic old woman returned, flipping through pamphlets. “I have maps, directories, brochures―since every Extraordinary Volunteer has a different talent, making up a schedule for you died faster than the Alternative Medical Consultant title. Or an Alternative Medicine patient.”
A guy in blue medical pajamas snorted a laugh as he walked by.
That pushed a button in my brain. “So what do you do with super powered healers?”
She eyed me, suspicious but also smiling. This was the ‘grim satisfaction’ look. “I can tell you’re Brainy’s little girl. That question drives doctors crazy. Is a thought scanner ethical to use? What if that scar remover causes cancer twenty years after use? The mad scientist who made it wouldn’t know, and he meant well giving it to us. Licensing magical healers is impossible. You can’t write off a reattached retina as the placebo effect, but no two practitioners get the same results. Usually no one practitioner gets the same results twice. It’s my job to make sure medically sound and ethical decisions get made, and the best I can tell you, Penelope, is that if you make us anything that directly affects a patient, we’re going to put it through a whole lot of testing.”
Huh. Mad science was a completely different world, depending on your specialty. Unless you had my super power, which could do anything.
The super power my parents thought I had, on the other hand… “That’s probably not an issue. I mostly work with gears. Clockwork. Things that spin. They don’t do much healing. Although…”
Judith waited, head cocked, eyeing me curiously.
I sorted through the pamphlets. “Can I see an MRI machine? I’m curious what my power will think about that.”
“Do you mean a CT? That’s the one that rotates,” she suggested without a trace of condescension. Her bubbly tone implied we were co-conspirators on an evil scheme to revolutionize medical scanning.
We proceeded into the bowels of the hospital. No medical pun was required. Hospitals are just that kind of building. Buildings plural. I was pretty sure we crossed from one building to another through a catwalk, but it didn’t have windows. Or maybe it was a tunnel? Anyway, a hallway longer than I thought could fit led to elevators, which we ignored, and then to stairs down.
We emerged into eerie white tile corridors. I couldn’t see a speck of dirt, but the whole place felt grungy.
The doors were as blank as the walls. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Some were double doors, and several were open. Every once in a while, someone in a lab coat or those medical pajamas or a security uniform would walk from one doorway to another, sometimes pushing a patient in a wheelchair.
Judith checked a set of double doors. “Well, thank goodness, the machine isn’t in use. Come on in and take a look.”
The room was big, and a lot more friendly than the hallway outside. The tile disappeared, replaced by smoother, less threateningly sterile walls with a fat blue stripe near the ceiling. A counter, some cabinets, and even a bookshelf were all made out of soothingly pale wood. A big glass window separated the scanning room from a control booth, but even the control booth had paintings hanging on the walls.
So, hospitals were designed by the architect for superhero lairs, and the decorator for superhero bases. Every room looked radically different, modules fitted into place themed only to what they did. Got it.
A man in nurse pajamas―criminy, they looked like they were made of paper, even―stepped out of the control booth to meet us. He had the relaxed air Judith didn’t, and seriously dark, almost coal black skin, and four eyes. Height? Weight? I couldn’t tell you. Honestly, I only noticed the skin because the extra eyes on his forehead, gemstone blue and green, stood out so sharply against that darkness.
Come on, Penny. Don’t stare. You’re better than this. Anyway, you know people who look way weirder.
I refocused my attention on the nurse pajamas. They were made of paper. They rustled when he moved!
He greeted me with, “They’re called scrubs, and no I’m not psychic. No super powers. I’m just naturally beautiful.”
Judith laughed. Like everything else about her, the laugh rang out joyful, energetic, and friendly. “Herb is our CT technician.”
That I could tell by the name card hanging around his neck. Wishing I could kick myself, I mumbled, “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he assured me. “Your parents are either superheroes, or supervillains, right? Oh, wait. I’m not supposed to ask.”
He really wasn’t part of the community. Feeling more on equal ground, I showed him a grin. “In my case it’s also fine. My mom and dad are the Audit and Brainy Akk, and they stopped keeping it a secret when they retired.”
Judith murmured to herself, loud enough for me to hear, “Not that Brainy ever tried very hard.”
“So, the people you know with powers have serious powers,” Herb finished.
I reached back and grabbed one of my pigtails, wrapping the braid around my hand. “Yeah. I guess that’s what I’m used to.” They were just people my parents knew, until now.
Note to Penny: Hospitals are also imbued with some sort of deep philosophical introspection aura. Could be dangerous. Could also be useful. Find a way to drain and weaponize that aura.
Herb bent forward and picked up my Extraordinary Program Volunteer badge. “And you also have serious powers, or you wouldn’t be wearing one of these. Especially at your age.”
Hopefully, the awkwardness of not being able to admit to being the most powerful mad scientist since Tesla would look like the awkwardness of not being all that powerful. “It’s more like I’m in training for having serious powers. I’m not even here to do anything, just look at the CT machine.”
Something beeped. Judith pulled out her phone, and said, “And I have to go meet Ruven about the inventory transfer. My card is in your documents, Penelope. If you need any help, feel free to call me, or ask any employee. The first time a telepath calms the screaming child you’re immunizing, you learn to love Extraordinary Volunteers.”
Herb nodded. “Or cleans and deodorizes a room in thirty seconds with magic bubbles. Go ahead and look at the machine, Miss Akk. I’ll let you know if we get an emergency patient. If you really have to take it apart, you let me know.”
That left me to follow up my actual errand, looking at a CT scanner.
One of the reasons this room was so pleasant and relaxed was that it centered around the least impressive piece of technology I’d ever seen. A simple white hospital bed stuck partway through a big white plastic doughnut. Of course, regular science tended to look like this, streamlined for efficiency and safety. I could only hope that if you took off the lid, you would get a cool ring of colorful wires rigging together mysterious boxes and cylinders with bolts sticking out everywhere.
One thing was for sure. Okay, two things were for sure. It did not work with cogs, and the only thing I could do with my super power here would be turn it on and rebuild the machine into some random toy, ruining hundreds of thousands of dollars of precious equipment.
It’s not like my super power was even big on analysis. Sure, the basic idea was obvious. CT scans were three-dimensional views of the body, right? And you had a turning ring and a bed that could move in and out. So, hidden in the ring you had the actual scanner, an x-ray or something. It didn’t matter what. You could scan a thin slice, in a straight line. That’s all you need. Spin the ring fast enough and move the bed slow enough, and you got a spiral of pictures like a compacted spring. Let a computer sort that out, and you could get one seriously detailed image of what’s going on in the human body. Criminy, it was only a spiral. I could probably…
Wait, no I couldn’t. That was insane. And why had all that seemed obvious a moment ago? The certainties faded away, leaving me only with my conclusions.
Tesla’s Lost Theorems, was my pow
er getting more powerful? Had it ever analyzed anything for me before, beyond ‘Yay, an explosion!’?
Waving to Herb, I wandered out into the hallway to be alone with that thought.
Of course, going out into a hospital hallway to be alone would not count as one of Penelope Akk’s most genius decisions. People shuffled in and out of the room down the hall, carrying boxes or stacked up papers. Judith had said something about an inventory transfer, so maybe this was it.
Should I call my dad? I really wanted to give this a serious try first, even though I had no idea what I could do. I flipped through my maps and brochures. Maybe something would leap out at me.
Something leaped out at me, only not in my maps. All of those nurses carrying boxes were bald, and all the same height, and… did they have dimly twinkling halos?
Ha! Okay, this should be fun.
Who to talk to couldn’t have been more obvious. A heavyset older man―not fat, exactly, but solid and jowly―watched the identical orderlies do their work. He stood very straight, even proud, with his hands holding the lapels of a new, precisely tailored and pressed black suit. Not superhero black. Priest black, judging from the funny collar with its white buckle.
Walking up next to him, I took a moment to study the minions. They were… minions. Definitely not people. Their faces didn’t have much more detail than a mannequin, and they all moved with exactly the same stiff gait. The halos were also kind of sad, thin, and barely visible.
“Can I help you, child?” he asked. A moment’s pause let him take in the tag around my neck. “I do declare, another generous soul here to share the blessings given to her by the Lord. Good for you, child.”
Wow.
That accent.
‘Here’ sounded like ‘hee-yuh’, ‘Lord’ like ‘Law-ud’, and the ‘d’ on ‘child’ seemed to have wandered off and gotten lost. Not to mention that every other word got enough emphasis for a Shakespearian play.
His Extraordinary Volunteer badge said ‘Mammon.’ When I gave it a look, he lifted it up for easier inspection and managed to puff out another couple of inches in pride. “I was a grave sinner when I was younger, child. A grave sinner. Though I have seen the light and sought the Lord’s forgiveness, I keep that name that my flock may forever know the depths to which a man can fall and yet be saved.”
After several seconds of translating first his accent and then his bombast, I said, “So you used to be a supervillain?”
“Veritable armies of devilspawn did I raise up to afflict the masses, child. Truly, I sank into the vilest pits of sin before I saw the light. You, surely, are too young to have walked that terrible road.”
Half a dozen of his angel mannequins returned from wherever they’d been sent, and headed back into the nearest room. Real human nurses packed bottles and tubes and stacks of flat, harder-to-identify items into boxes, loading those into the arms of the minions. One got a big pile of towels.
My brain caught up with the implied question. “Who, me? No. As if. My parents are superheroes. I’m Brainy and the Audit’s daughter.”
“Truly, names to conjure with. You would do well to follow their example, child. I never faced them myself, for by the time they became prominent I languished in a much-deserved prison cell, waiting for the Lord’s word.”
The more he wanted to tell me his origin story, the more I wanted to avoid it and get to what interested me. “So, your power is to make these… dummies?”
He leaned forward a few inches, hanging his head. “Weak vessels, child. The Lord fashioned man of clay, from the dust of the Earth, and so too can I in feeble imitation.” His energy came back, rearing him up for another speech. “In my sinful pride, I sought to be as the Lord and make true life to serve me. And so, as sinners do, I sought the Devil. Like any man, my creations amount to little unless they are filled up by something greater. Now I tell my congregation―”
I interrupted, steering things back again. “So, filled them with what? Black magic? You made these dolls, but you cast spells on them?”
He gave me a heavy sigh, and put his hand on top of my head. I tried not to scowl or flinch too hard. As much as his exaggerated righteousness annoyed me, he had one seriously interesting power, and I wanted to know more about it. Shaking his head in weariness at my folly, he let himself be pulled back to that topic. “Child, this is the path of temptation, and I know it all too intimately. Yes, I sought the Devil’s power, channeling it into my creations to make them stronger. They would take any power that I could give them. It did not matter. My sinfulness led always to my own defeat. I even obtained an unholy artifact that would copy my mind into my vessels, that they might be powerful and intelligent as well.”
“Until a superhero destroyed it?” I asked, giving him a knowing grin.
That got a bitter laugh. “They didn’t have to! What a terrible idea that was. And terrifying, seeing devolved copies of myself. I didn’t have access to a source of power worth making into a real person. No, I abandoned it, and good riddance.” For a minute, he’d deflated a bit, the accent dropped down from ‘parody’ to ‘noticeable,’ and Mammon seemed to really be talking to me.
It didn’t last. He swelled back up with the desire to preach, and the accent came back. “It is for such reasons that I was summoned here today. Along with my ministry, I prove my devotion through charitable work. The hospital asked me, as an expert on empty vessels, to examine a woman in the ward for super powered injuries.”
That made me perk up a bit. “Huh. I guess they’d have to have one of those. I’ll check it out. So what did you try to put into your creations?”
His arms flapped. He sounded exasperated. “Everything, child! I was a sinner, a desperate man. When I could not summon enough of the powers of darkness, I stole the tools of others and filled them with elemental magics, or radiation, whatever I could find, always seeking greater power. It was a dark road. I have put it behind me and am a man of the cloth now, a preacher to the weak and a pillar of society.”
I pinched the cheek of one of the mannequins as it walked past. It kind of felt like rubber. It hesitated, feeling the touch, but kept going. No, not bright, but smarter than a robot.
“Everything but eldritch power, anyway,” he added, under his breath.
They were by far the most honest-sounding words he’d spoken yet. No Southern accent, fake or otherwise. I fished for more. “Like, tentacle monster eldritch?”
“And eyeballs, and scales, and shapeshifting. Don’t let them fool you, little girl. The mages who are naturally good at it are so proud of their crazy person reputation. It’s just another type of power, one which combines well with flesh. I worked out a whole ritual using that power to sculpt minions who were everything a living body could be, and more.” The fierce, indignant lecture ended in a resigned sigh.
Ah, that pain. All too familiar. “It didn’t work?”
He scowled, abandoning his lapels and sticking his hands in his pockets. “It would have, but I couldn’t get access to the power. No one with a natural ability would work with me, the books that open you up to it cause brain damage, and any real eldritch relic has a guardian.”
I nodded. Oh, yeah. “I’ve seen one of those in action. Mech barely took it down, and he was ready.”
He jerked in surprise. “What? Someone defeated one? It didn’t just grab its relic and go hide in its hole again?”
“You didn’t see the battle? It was on TV. Science caught up with magic again. He drew some kind of laser reverse summoning circle. Now I hear it’s locked in a mayonnaise jar.” The important thing was to describe it as something I’d seen on TV, not something I’d seen when I was running away with the relic the guardian had guardified.
He let out another sigh, then drew himself up, not inflating, but reassembling himself. He straightened his tie, put on a flat expression of concerned righteousness, and took hold of his lapels once more. “Take an old man’s bitterness as the reason you need to stay off the path of sin, child. Now
, if you will excuse me, I have a sermon to record.” ‘re-kaw-erd.’
Mammon wiggled a finger, and his shuffling fake angels formed ranks behind him as he walked off in the direction of the elevator. What goofy, pretentious creatures they were. I kind of liked them.
I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about Mammon, who was a lot like his minions. It felt unfair that the first actually religious superhero I’d met was an obvious phony. Or then again, was he? The first, that is? Gabriel might be pretty religious. And Lucyfar too, for that matter. They just didn’t need to tell you every five minutes. By that standard, almost anyone I knew might be.
Eh. Not my business. What was my business was that super powered injuries ward Mammon had mentioned. I would go look at that, and when my power couldn’t think of anything to do there, either, I’d call my dad and we’d go to a movie.
I unfolded my map, traced a route across two buildings to my target, and started walking. Let’s see. We had most of the afternoon. What movies were playing? Spending some super-power-unrelated time with my dad would be pretty cool.
I ought to look up show times on my phone, but after talking to so many people, I also felt like retreating into my own thoughts for a few minutes during the walk. The hunger was welling up within me to get back home and continue playing Little Reaper Girl. For sheer cinematography, anything I’d see today would have a hard time matching that beginning. The game had started me playing a little girl in a palace, teaching me the stealth mechanics by having me sneak around and hide as my caretakers wanted to get ready for a fancy dinner. It was all sweet and pretty and elegant, until distant music turned to screams. The sunshine outside turned to darkness. The last room you snuck through had a bloody corpse in it. And finally, the player gets back to her wardrobe, opens it, and pulls out a black robe and a scythe.
Criminy, I wanted to get home and play more.
Drifting in that hunger kept me distracted until I reached the top floor of building E and a pair of double doors like a hundred I’d passed so far. The closest thing to abnormality was the sign ‘Exotic Injuries Ward.’
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis Page 9
