Sensation: A Superhero Novel (15 page)

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 through 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?”

I shrugged. “Instinct, I guess. I just know. I guess it’s like a balloon that gets blown up, then has all the air let out of it; it just goes back to its original shape.”

“Can you turn into someone right now? Like me?”

“I usually don’t do people I know. I might base it on someone real, but I usually change something.”

“Let’s see!”

I tried to refuse, but after much cajoling, I shifted into Smokescreen. It only lasted about three seconds, but then everyone started clamoring for me to do someone else. I don’t know why, but for some reason I decided to mimic Paramount.

“I’m Paramount,” I said after changing shape. I struck a bodybuilding pose. “I’m the most gorgeous hunk of super teen you’ll ever see. I’m strong, and pretty, and fast, and pretty, and…did I say pretty?”

Everyone was rolling with laughter as I continued my impersonation. Without warning, however, a deafening silence settled over the room. I was in the middle of mimicking Paramount when I turned to see what had happened - and there was the real Paramount standing in the doorway.

I casually changed back to myself and flopped down on a nearby stool. Paramount entered the room, making a beeline for me. The path between us cleared as students quickly stepped aside for him, like townspeople in a spaghetti Western getting out of the way of a gunfight. He strolled right over to where I sat and just stopped. He stood there for about thirty seconds just looking me over, up and down, as if I were a fish he had hooked and was deciding whether to keep.

“So, it’s true,” he said finally. “They found you.”

“I was never lost,” I replied.

“Well then, you decided to come out of hiding,” he sneered.

I really wasn’t in the mood and I contemplated just getting out of there, but I didn’t want to even imply that I was intimidated by him.

“Call it whatever makes you feel better,” I said. “It doesn’t make a difference to me. Whatever you say.”

“That’s right,” he said, tapping himself in the chest with a thumb. “Whatever
I
say. And as long as we have that understanding, welcome to the team.”

He extended a hand, which I looked at for a second in surprise before taking. As expected, he squeezed unnecessarily hard.

“Just so you know,” he whispered, leaning in close, “in a one-on-one fight, I’d take you in a second.”

He let go, almost throwing my hand away, and turned towards the door. He’d gone about three steps when he stopped and looked back as if he’d forgotten something.

“One other thing,” he snarled venomously. “Don’t ever do me again.”

Of course, after Paramount left the room, I immediately shifted into him, much to the amusement of the other kids.

**********************************

Needless to say, Paramount’s appearance put a damper on things in the break room. I still hadn’t really seen the facilities, so a group of the other teens offered to show me around. I thought about the last purported tour I was invited on and almost declined. I’m glad I didn’t.

They first took me to the weight room. It was singularly impressive. I’d never seen multi-ton weights before (outside of pictures). Likewise, there were treadmills that could go at hundreds of miles per hour. (I even tried one out.) There was also a massive training room that simulated attacks from supervillains via holograms.

All in all, it was great. The only downside was that, on one little trip from one place to another, we passed Electra in the hallway. She stopped when she saw me, and made a gesture for me to approach.

“Look, I’m sorry about last night,” she said.

“What’s to be sorry about?” I said blandly. “You guys had been looking for Kid Sensation; you found him. You just had to play with my emotions to do it.”

“Jim, I wasn’t trying to–”

            “I don’t know what you were trying to do and right now I don’t care. I liked you, and you used that to trick me and lead me on.”

“I wasn’t leading you on. I liked you, too. But I also have a duty to the League! You’ll learn that after you’ve been here for a while.”

I walked away without saying anything. She did have a point, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. She could stand to stew in her own juices for a little while.

Chapter 15

It was late afternoon when someone brought back word that the team had returned. (Apparently the secret mission had only remained “secret” for a limited amount of time.) We’d finished the tour quite a while earlier, and I was actually in the League cafeteria eating a sandwich. 

All of the kids kind of scattered, running off to try to get news of how the mission had gone.  According to the rumor mill, it was a success, but I was hoping to get more detail.  I tried to be patient and give them time to debrief, but after about thirty minutes I couldn’t take it anymore.  I started asking random people where I could find Mouse.  Eventually, someone told me that he was probably in his lab.  I didn’t have the clearance to physically get through all the checkpoints, so I just teleported there instead.

I appeared right in front of Mouse, who was busy typing something in on a computer tablet.  I’ve teleported in front of people before and most of them find it startling; Mouse barely looked up.

“It’s been less than a day,” he said, “and I can already tell that we’re going to have to put a bell on you.”

“I need to know what happened,” I said anxiously.  “Remember, my family is in danger.”

“It’s something of a mixed report,” he said, finally looking up.

“What do you mean?”

Mouse gave me a quick overview of what had happened.  The bug he’d had me plant was also a homing beacon that had given them a location that turned out to be deep underground.  Despite Mouse’s earlier statement about going in “guns blazing,” the team had actually tried to be as stealthy as possible.  But, as usually happens, they were eventually revealed and that’s when the real fight started.

“One of those villains tried to use the TNIP,” Mouse said.  “I assume they were going to try to trap the team in a pocket dimension.  So I blew up the machine.”

“You blew it up?”  I was incredulous.  “How?”

“With the bug you planted.  It was actually a Triple-B device:  bug, beacon…and bomb.”

“Wait,” I said.  “You had me teleport a bomb somewhere?  And you didn’t tell me???!!!”

“Look, Kid,” he said in an explanatory tone.  “I didn’t know how much time we had or what exactly they were planning to do.  I just knew we had to stop them, and that meant preventing them from using that device – by any means necessary.  So yes, I had you teleport a bomb, and I didn’t tell you because I didn’t have time to deal with it if you were some kind of conscientious objector who got squeamish at the thought of people getting hurt.”

I didn’t know how to respond.  I was overflowing with an emotion that I couldn’t put a name to:  fury and disbelief bundled with remorse and finality.  I understood what Mouse was saying, but I’d never used my powers in a way that might kill someone.  It’s not that I couldn’t accept it – Gramps had instilled in me the fact that death was sometimes unavoidable in order to achieve the greater good – but it was something you usually had an opportunity to make your peace with beforehand, if only for a few seconds.

I let out a long breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding.

“How many?” I asked.

“How many what?”

“How many died?  From the bomb I planted?”

“Oh, none from what we can tell.”

My relief was almost palpable and certainly visible, because Mouse started grinning.

“Is that why you were suddenly so uptight?  You thought you’d killed somebody?”

“I didn’t know…”

“Maybe I should finish this story, then.  The bomb went off, but it was a shaped charge, only meant to destroy the machine.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t strong enough; the device was only damaged initially.”

“So it’s still functional?”

“No.  The bomb didn’t immediately destroy it, but it became seriously destabilized.  The technology underlying it became corrupt, and it began creating random proximal pocket dimensions.”

“What does that mean?”

“As best as I can tell, all six of our supervillains are trapped in a pocket dimension of their own creation.”

**********************************

It was a little more complicated than the way Mouse explained it. He’d had to reverse-engineer the sequence of events following the detonation of his bug-bomb to find out what happened.  The villains in charge had indeed been seemingly trapped in one of the pocket dimensions. However, the machine had created thousands of such pockets before it permanently ceased functioning.  Moreover, there was no way to identify or track the specific pocket the villains were in.  In short, they were trapped to a certain extent, but at the same time not in custody.

On the flip side, the raid had resulted in the actual capture of a number of henchmen, both normal and super.  Those that were normal had been handed off to the authorities.  Those with superhuman abilities were being held in the League’s nullifier cells until proper transportation could be arranged.  I offered to teleport them, but Mouse declined.