The Kid Sensation Series Box Set

by Kevin Hardman

  “Come with me,” he said, not wasting time on small talk. He turned and marched down a hallway with me close behind.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “What, you thought you had a fan club?” he asked, stopping in front a door after a few twists and turns. “We didn’t want you freaking out again, so I suggested that I talk with you one-on-one so it wouldn’t feel like the whole League was ganging up on you. Again.”

  He smiled at that and opened the door, which led to a conference room. He took a seat in the first available chair and motioned for me to sit across from him.

  “Besides,” he continued, “we had some other emergencies that we had to respond to. Believe it or not, we actually spend a lot of time focused on things other than Kid Sensation - like saving the world.”

  I plopped down in the proffered seat. “So does this mean that I’m not under arrest?

  “Arrest? For what?”

  “The body in my apartment.”

  “Oh, so that was your apartment? Well, there was a little suspicion at first, but we established the time of death, and it just so happens that you were on a date with our own Electra then. So no, you’re not under arrest.”

  I leaned forward as a great wave of relief washed over me. Whoever was after me, they hadn’t expected that I would be doing anything social at the time of the murder, that I’d actually have an alibi. Tension that I didn’t even know had been building evaporated almost instantly.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “Well, continuing with my spiel from last night, we could really use someone like you. We’re getting stretched pretty thin - so much so that we’re even utilizing the super teens a lot more than we ever anticipated.”

  “You want me on the team?”

  “Well, you passed the trials two years ago, using only one power from what we could tell, so you’ve earned a place here. Our issue has been finding you and getting you to accept.”

  He grinned, and I grinned back.

  “There’s something I need from you, though. And it’s a bit of an emergency.”

  I quickly explained the situation regarding Braintrust, my mother, and my grandfather. Mouse took it all in without comment until I finished telling everything that had happened.

  “Well, we can give your family some extra security, and I can fill in some of the blanks about what’s happened,” he said. “The guy we found in your apartment basically called us yesterday with info on Kid Sensation. He told us where to meet him, but was dead when we got there.”

  I explained our theory about framing me and he nodded sagely as I finished.

  “I can’t argue with the logic,” he said. “But we can come back to that. Right now, let’s go to my lab. There’s some stuff I want to make you familiar with if you’re going to be working with us now.”

  *****

  Mouse’s lab was a complex affair with a lot of computers and machines and lots of data scrolling across several huge screens on the wall. It was located on the same subterranean level as the nullifier cells, but down a different hallway. Off to one side, I saw several bookcases stuffed to capacity with books. I also saw what appeared to be a refrigerator, and a small but ornate bathroom.

  There weren’t any Bunsen burners or colorful chemicals bubbling in test tubes, but the place still had kind of a mad scientist vibe. I was half-listening as Mouse was demonstrating some gadgets to me that would be part of my standard equipment when something in the corner caught my eye.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at and walking towards an expensive-looking piece of equipment. It looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t say from where exactly. I was reaching out to touch it when Mouse caught my wrist.

  “You don’t want to mess with this machine,” he said. “It’s a Transdimensional–”

  “Nanite Induction Platform,” I said in unison with him, grinning.

  Mouse was suddenly alarmed. “How do you know that?”

  “Know what?”

  “The name of this machine. How do you know it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve seen one somewhere before.”

  “Uh-uh.” Mouse shook his head vehemently. “You couldn’t have. This is the only one in existence. So again, where did you see it?”

  “Look, man, I don’t know. Just around, I guess.”

  “That’s not good enough,” he said intensely. He was looking at me in a fierce and uncompromising way. “This is important, Kid. I need you to think back and tell me exactly when and where you saw this.”

  I sighed in exasperation. Then I told him about the dreams.

  Chapter 13

  We were back in the main conference room, where Mouse and I had previously had our little chat. Only this time, every chair in the room was filled with League members: Esper, Rune, Buzz, Feral, and a bunch of others. And, of course, Alpha Prime.

  I looked around nervously. The last time I had been in a room with this many superheroes, I was in a fight. In fact, it was a fight with some of the very people in this room. I sincerely hoped that nobody held a grudge.

  After I had told him my story, Mouse had convened an emergency meeting. Any Leaguer not currently on a mission or handling a crisis was to report in immediately. Within thirty minutes everyone available was present and accounted for. Mouse didn’t waste any time on pleasantries; he asked me to recount what I’d told him.

  “Basically, I’ve been having weird dreams - dreams about a group of supervillains trying to take over the world, destroy the League, and kill me. Mouse thinks my dreams are real.”

  I expected there to be some level of scoffing, some grunts of displeasure at being called in to an emergency meeting over foolishness. It was a sign of how much Mouse was respected and revered that no one said anything, although gazes did turn in his direction. Again, I wondered what kind of power he had that made the entire League treat anything he said as gospel.

  Mouse gave the group a brief overview of the supervillains I had seen in my dreams. They were all heavy hitters and not to be taken lightly in any way, manner, or form.

  “And before anybody asks,” Mouse said, “the reason I believe his dreams are real is because he knows about things he couldn’t have learned any other way. Frankly, I believe he has some kind of coeval cognizance that he uses in a subconscious manner to learn about things in the present or near-present.”

  “Is that true?” Esper asked me.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” I said.

  “Precognition is an ability that allows people to see the future,” Mouse explained. “The one you dreamed about - Omen - takes his name from having that power. A person with a post-cognitive ability can see the past. What I’m calling coeval cognizance is kind of knowing about things in the present - or near the present - through some extrasensory means.”

  “But that’s not a power that I’ve ever had!” I cried.

  “Is it a power you could have developed?” asked Rune.

  “No!” I shouted. “When I get a new power, I get this weird sensation…”

  My words trailed off as I suddenly remembered. It was the buzzing sensation - the telltale sign of a new power - that had distracted me when Pinchface was following me. How long had I been having those dreams? I didn’t know. It was then that I noticed that the room was abnormally quiet. Looking around, I saw that everyone was waiting for me to speak.

  “On second thought, I recently had the sensation that I was developing a new power, but I didn’t know what it was,” I said. “It’s possible it’s this…cognitive ability.”

  “If I’m right,” Mouse jumped in, “we’re in danger. And by ‘we’, I mean the entire world.”

  Everyone was looking at Mouse, as he began explaining. “One of the things the Kid saw in his dream was a device that I’d made, the Transdimensional Nanite Induction Platform or TNIP. In short, it makes pocket dimensions - kind of like alternative worlds that you can enter, much like where we keep the Academy. />
  “However, the Academy exists in only one such dimension. This device creates hundreds, thousands of them. Maybe even millions. Moreover, you can move pieces of our world into them. Basically, you can carve the world as we know it up into a million different dimensional pieces.”

  Esper shrugged. “But what does that get you? What’s the advantage of mincing the whole planet?”

  “Ever hear the phrase ‘divide and conquer’?” Mouse asked. “Imagine that you can trap a nation’s navy in another dimension. Or that you can take away their army. Or their leadership.”

  Rune tapped his fingers on the table. “That would make the world a whole lot easier to take control of…or flat-out conquer.”

  “Listen, the things we’re talking about, that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Mouse stated. “There are a thousand worse things they could do with this technology.”

  Finally Alpha Prime stepped in. “So how do we stop them?”

  Mouse smiled and turned towards me. “That’s where the Kid comes in.”

  *****

  “You’re insane,” I said, not believing what I’d just heard. “You’re certifiably insane.”

  “Probably,” Mouse said, “but just hear me out anyway.”

  I shook my head in the negative. “I don’t need to hear any more. I’m not doing it.”

  We were back in Mouse’s lab. He had broken up the meeting and allowed me to glad-hand some people, but hadn’t explained what his plan was for stopping the enemy until we got back to his lab.

  “There’s no other way,” he replied.

  “So, just to make sure I understand, you want me to teleport a team of superheroes to a place that I’ve only seen in my dreams?”

  “That’s about the gist of it.”

  “But that place may not even be real! I’m not sure I buy your cognizance theory. I might pop you all right out of existence. We’ve got no proof that this place is real!”

  “I’ve got proof.” I gave him a sideways glance as he continued. “When I’d turn on my machine, I’d get this weird reflective reading. I just assumed it was some kind of transdimensional echo. I didn’t think it could be another device because mine was supposed to be the only one in existence. But it was actually the machines recognizing each other.”

  “Even if it’s real, though, you want me to teleport you and a team to a place I’ve only seen in my dreams? Shouldn’t you guys take a vote on this or something?”

  He gave me an odd look and something new suddenly occurred to me. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Is that why you didn’t bring up the subject of this little mission in the conference room just now? You didn’t think the rest of the League would agree to it, did you? You knew they’d vote you down!”

  “On the contrary,” he said, “I had no doubt that they’d agree with me. There wouldn’t be a need for a vote. The reason I didn’t mention it back there is because we have a mole.”

  I stood there in stunned silence. It felt like a full minute passed before I responded.

  “What???!!” I said incredulously.

  “These supervillains didn’t just build a device identical to mine and then give it the same name by happenstance. Someone told them. Ergo, we have a mole in the League, and I didn’t want to give them a hint of what we were up to.”

  “Even if that’s true, I can’t just go teleporting people to some place I’ve never been. And even if it works, have you thought about the fact that there are six major supervillains there? What if I land you dead smack in the middle of their hideout, and you have no idea of where you are or how to get out? Are you going to be prepared for something like that?”

  Mouse scratched his chin in thought for a second, then looked at me with a sparkle in his eye.

  “Okay,” he said, “how about this: instead of transporting a team there, what about something small, like a bug?”

  “Huh? You mean like a grasshopper?”

  “No, not a bug bug; a mechanical bug - a listening device.”

  “Oh,” I said in surprise. “Uh, sure, we can try that.”

  Mouse nodded, then stepped over to a nearby workbench. I saw him pull a miniature tool set out of a drawer on the workbench and go to work on a small object on the tabletop.

  “Can this thing really do what you said?” I asked. “Create pocket dimensions - like where the Academy is?”

  “That and worse,” he answered as he worked, “although technically, the Academy actually exists in an alternate reality, one where sentient life never arose. Because of that fact, we use it for our own purposes. To be honest, though, the terms ‘dimension’ and ‘alternate reality’ are often used interchangeably - even by me, because it can make it easier to explain some things - but they’re really two different concepts. In science, ‘dimension’ actually refers to–”

  He glanced at me at this juncture, and something in my face must have indicated my low level of interest, because he gave a deep sigh and just said, “I guess it’s not an important distinction, as long as people know what you mean.” With that, he turned his attention back to the item on his workbench.

  Five minutes later, he looked up, smiling.

  “Voila!” he exclaimed, holding up his hand. In it he held a small circular object that looked like a black button set in a metal casing. He stepped over to the transdimensional platform and motioned for me to join him.

  “You already know what this is,” he said with a broad gesture at the machine. “If you’ll look on this part of the device, you’ll see a button that looks just like the bug here that I just cobbled together.”

  I looked where he was pointing and said, “Okay. I guess you want me to try to swap your bug for the real thing?”

  “No, nothing so complicated. The bug is designed so that it looks like it belongs on the machine. Just put it right next to the real thing. Can you do that?”

  I shrugged and took the bug from him. I stared at his machine one last time, then closed my eyes and tried to imagine it as I’d seen it in my dream. Buttons, screens, panels…. I concentrated, trying to recall the images and align the machine’s design as it had appeared to me with Mouse’s actual device. After a few seconds, I was able to picture it in unerring detail. I mentally looked for the button…there!

  I felt the negligible weight of the bug vanish from my hand as I teleported it.

  “Now, let’s see if it worked,” Mouse said, stepping over to a computer screen.

  Looking over his shoulder, I saw what appeared to be a kind of radar.

  “It’s transmitting. Shouldn’t be long before we get a fix.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we go in, guns blazing.”

  Chapter 14

  Mouse rounded up a group of superheroes for the planned assault in almost no time. Handpicked by Mouse as being above suspicion (i.e., none of them were the mole), they were secretly briefed and out the door in less than thirty minutes. Of course, they weren’t going to let me - or any other teens - go along for the ride.

  “You’ve done enough for now, Kid,” Mouse had said. “With any luck, we’ll have this thing wrapped up by the end of the day. Why don’t you take a break for a few hours?”

  With that, he had taken me to the teen lounge area. It was a smaller version of the break room at the Academy; there was a pool table, shuffleboard, and some other similar games, and a few flat-screen TVs on the walls. There were about ten teens in the room at the moment.

  Mouse wasn’t much for introductions. “Kid, this is everybody. Everybody, this is Kid Sensation.”

  Everything in the room came to a screeching halt, and a couple of people seemed to be waiting to hear a punchline. But Mouse was already gone, leaving me standing there looking like a lost sheep. When it appeared that this wasn’t a joke, I found myself the center of a mad rush.

  The other kids practically mobbed me, randomly shaking my hand and patting me on the back. It turns out that word of my little visit the night before was already circulating thr
ough the local grapevine. There were also a slew of rumors that I had to dispel (for example, that I had come back to challenge the League to another round).

  After about fifteen minutes, a lot of the excitement died down. The mob gave me a bit more room to breathe, but I was still being peppered with questions. I also gave a short demonstration of a few of my powers, like teleporting around the room.

  Someone asked to see my phasing ability, so I made a nearby card table insubstantial and pressed a pencil through the top of it. When I made the table solid again, the pencil was stuck in it. I left it there for a few moments, then phased the table again and pulled the pencil out.

  “Why does the pencil punch through the table instead of getting cut in half?” a girl with glowing red eyes asked.

  “Whatever I phase is the item that gets perforated,” I answered. “Here, I made the table insubstantial, so the table is the item that gets punctured. But if I make the pencil insubstantial…” As I spoke, I phased the pencil, pushed it halfway through the table, then solidified it again. There was an audible clink as the bottom half of the pencil - which had been neatly sliced in two - fell and hit the floor under the table.

  The girl with the red eyes reached down and picked up the piece of pencil off the floor. She seemed to be thinking about something, and then she asked, “Can you go the other way?”

  “Huh?” I said, totally confused.

  “The other way,” she repeated. “Instead of becoming insubstantial, can you become more solid?”

  “You mean like denser? Heavier?” I asked, frowning in thought. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.” In fact, the concept had never actually occurred to me, but it was certainly worth thinking about. I became so focused on the idea that it was a few minutes before I fully joined the conversation again.

  I was happy to see that Smokescreen, my erstwhile football teammate, was there. He had a camera and took a few pictures of me. A short time later, he asked, “After you shapeshift, how do you know how to go back to your own body? I mean, how do you keep from making yourself shorter, fatter, or something like that?”