The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy, Book One: The Hero Revealed (7 page)

“I think I have an idea,” I announced. I picked up one of the card packs. “Hal, stick out your hand.”

I placed the pack flat on the palm of his hand and said, “Now make yourself as bright as you can.”

He took another drink from his sippy cup and began to glow. His white costume looks solid, but in reality it’s made out of a tight mesh material that allows his light to pass through unobstructed. The same wasn’t true for his green briefs, boots and cape, but that hardly seemed to matter. The light he was generating continued to get brighter until the others had to turn away. I cupped my hands over my eyes and focused on the pack of cards. Sure enough, as he reached a strong enough wattage, I clearly caught a glimpse of a card featuring AI that I hadn’t seen before, and a card with another member of LUG—Spaghetti Man. Then, Hal’s hand got even brighter and I lost the image. In fact, I was now seeing the bones in his hand as clearly as an X-ray.

“Too much,” I said squinting my eyes shut. Halogen Boy dialed it back to the point where I could see the cards inside the pack. I told everyone what they were and we set it aside to buy.

“You’re a genius,” Plasma Girl said with admiration. I couldn’t help it—I blushed almost as brightly as Halogen Boy.

With Hal and a full sippy cup, we went from pack to pack and aisle to aisle, avoiding lots of packs that were filled with duplicates. We found some packs that had a card we needed, but if the other card was one we already owned, we’d skip it and move on. By the time we got to checkout lane nine, we had nineteen packs with thirty eight of the forty cards we still needed. By this time, though, we had attracted some unwanted attention.

Mr. Mister was waiting in lane ten. He watched us suspiciously as I picked up the first pack and set it in Hal’s hand. It wasn’t like we were doing anything illegal, so I tried to ignore him and told Hal to light up. Like most of the packs we were finding now, it had two duplicates. I could feel a fine mist settling down on my shoulders as I handed Hal the next pack. Mr. Mister was clearly annoyed, mostly because he couldn’t think of any technical reason to throw us out of the store. I just turned to him and shrugged. He always seems annoyed about something. Maybe it’s because he has a crappy power. But, come on, give me a break. I don’t have
any
power, but I still try to be a nice person.

As Hal’s hand lit up I saw a card with a character named Meteor Boy on it.

“Who is Meteor Boy?” I said aloud. The rest of the team just shook their heads, confused. This was very strange, but there was no time to discuss it. The mist gathering around the store manager’s head made him look all steamed up—which, of course, he was. The card sharing the pack was an AI image that none of us could remember seeing before.

“Okay, guys, I think we have ’em all!” I said quickly.

“Well, then,” Mr. Mister said, with a look on his face that reminded me of the short-lived disastrous pickle-flavored potato chips that Dr. Telomere’s had released last year, “if you’re going to buy those, I suggest you do so and stop clogging my checkout lanes.”

We did exactly that, and were soon back at our headquarters. As Plasma Girl got her tea party ready, we unwrapped the twenty packs and spread them out on the table. Of course we didn’t expect any surprises, but we got one anyway. The AI card in the final pack we had bought was identical to one of the ones we had found earlier that morning. With Mr. Mister hovering over us we had rushed into making a mistake. We only had sixty-three cards. One was still missing.

CHAPTER SIX

The Mystery of Meteor Boy

That night at home, all I could think about was the one card we were missing. The most frustrating part was that I didn’t even know who was pictured on it. Normally, I would have guessed it was another Amazing Indestructo. But so far the deck had had thirty-two of them—exactly half the total. It only seemed logical for that to be all of them. That meant that the missing card was either a member of the League of Ultimate Goodness or one of AI’s villains.

Now it would also seem logical for the remaining thirty-two cards to be divided into sixteen heroes and sixteen villains. I knew fifteen we had were members of LUG, and another fifteen were villains. And then there was Meteor Boy. Was he a hero or a villain? Young villains were unusual but not unheard-of. In fact, there were some creeps in my class who I’d bet were well on their way to becoming villains.

I pulled out my copy of the
Li’l Hero’s Handbook
and looked up Meteor Boy. Sure enough, there was a listing with the same picture as the card.

One mission? Missing in action? So why would this kid have gotten his own trading card? When Dad came up to tuck me in, I decided to pick his brain.

“Time for bed, OB,” he said.

“Okay, Dad.” The night air had cooled my room quite a bit. With a shiver, I got my AI pajamas from my dresser drawer.

Dad pulled back the covers on my bed and ran his hands back and forth across the sheet. “Okay, hero, it’s all set.”

“Dad?” I asked as I crawled under the sheets, where it was now warm and toasty.

“What is it, OB?”

“Have you ever heard of Meteor Boy?”

Dad paused a moment, and I could instantly tell by the look on his face that he had.

“Yes,” he said finally. “I haven’t heard that name in quite a while—almost twenty-five years, in fact.”

“Who is he?”

“Well, he first came on the scene when I was a teenager. He was younger than I was, though, as you’d guess by the name Meteor Boy. At the time, all the major superheroes were going through a phase where it was trendy to take on young kids as sidekicks. A hero would look for a kid about your age who had a power that was similar to, or complemented, his own power.”

NAME:
Meteor Boy.
POWER:
The ability to fly really, really fast.
LIMITATIONS:
But not fast enough.
CAREER:
Meteor Boy performed only one known mission.
CLASSIFICATION:
Missing in action.

“What do you mean, Dad?” I asked.

“For instance, there was a hero, who is gone now, called the Zephyr.”

“I know about him!” I responded, remembering the card for him that we had found as part of our morning haul. “He’s one of the original members of the League of Ultimate Goodness.”

“Exactly,” my father continued. “He was able to control the winds and manipulate them to do whatever he liked. He had a sidekick named Funnel Boy, who could spin himself into a funnel cloud. The two made a pretty good team.”

“I get it,” I said. The idea sounded pretty cool to me.

“Of course, this was about when the Amazing Indestructo became such a star,” my father added.

“Wow! Tell me about that!” Of course I knew everything about AI, but I was always eager to hear it again.

“Well, AI was just starting to

make a name for himself, but he already considered himself the city’s most powerful hero. Naturally, he thought he should also have a sidekick.”

“Naturally,” I agreed, instantly thinking how awesome it would be to have that role. I also wondered why I had never heard about this.

“And, of course,” my father continued, “he thought his sidekick should be the most powerful of all sidekicks.

That’s when he discovered Meteor Boy.”

“Tell me about him,” I asked.

“When he met AI, he wasn’t much older than you are now. But he already had an incredible power. He could streak through the skies with the speed of a meteor. As you know, there aren’t a lot of heroes who can travel through the air, and those who do have a tremendous advantage.”

“That’s why AI uses a jet pack,” I volunteered.

“That’s right,” my dad agreed. “So he knew an impressive ability when he saw it. Meteor Boy was still young, though, and he hadn’t really mastered his power yet.”

“What a great power to have,” I said, wide-eyed. Personally, I’d be thrilled to have any power at all. Dad caught my change of mood right away.

“Be careful what you wish for,” he said. “Things didn’t turn out well for Meteor Boy.”

“What happened?” I asked, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

“He just wasn’t ready. The Amazing Indestructo was a rookie, too. He took Meteor Boy into a situation that was too big for both of them. Back then, Professor Brain-Drain was fully active and by far the worst of the supervillains, and AI wanted to start right at the top. Of course, AI was indestructible. The problem was that Meteor Boy wasn’t.”

“So … ?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Let’s just say no one knows exactly what happened to him,” my father concluded.

“That’s what it says in my handbook, too,” I confirmed. “But he was a hero, right?”

“Oh, yes, but in a way that no one had counted on. It was his example that made everyone recognize the incredible danger they were putting these young kids into. Shortly after the incident with Meteor Boy, kids went back to being kids, and adult superheroes went back to fighting crime on their own.”

Dad leaned over to kiss my forehead and then stood up.

“I know it’s tempting to get out there and start doing everything you can as soon as you can,” he said as he clicked off the light, “but don’t pass up the opportunity to enjoy being a kid, too.”

As the door closed, I stared silently into the darkness of my room. I heard what my father had said, but to be perfectly honest all I could think about was what it would be like to be the Amazing Indestructo’s sidekick. I couldn’t imagine anything cooler! But who was I kidding? AI would never pick a sidekick with no power whatsoever. And if a kid with such an incredible power couldn’t handle teaming with AI, then what chance would I have? I know Dad didn’t mean it that way, but it sure managed to depress me.