- On the Efficacy of Supervillain Battles in Eliciting Therapeutic Breakthroughs

On the Efficacy of Supervillain Battles in Eliciting Therapeutic Breakthroughs

Physical: Tamara appears to be a healthy teenage girl, approximately fourteen years old, with—oh, hell. Who am I kidding? The poor girl is a laboratory experiment, one of Michael “Monster-Master” Manchester’s final creations before he was locked up for a decade. In Tamara’s case, he spliced blowfish and human physiology together.

As challenging as this has been for Puff, she’s adapted better than Manchester’s half-man/half-skunk soldier.

Physically, Puff is roughly human sized, heavyset with venomous spines that lay flat against the skin. When frightened or angry, her blowfish instincts take over, something that apparently happened two weeks ago in phys. ed. Needless to say, Puff was mortified. This was when her adoptive parents, both superheroes, brought her to me.

Psychological: Puff presents with low-level anxiety disorder and possible depression. Her relationship with her parents is terse and strained. Given her unique physiology, psychiatric medication is not recommended at this time.

I’m uncertain whether her father’s telepathic control over sea creatures allows him to command his daughter. I suspect he knows better, but if he’s using his powers to make his kid clean her room or some such, I’ll kick his ass myself.

“It’s so embarrassing.” Tamara Jones, aka “Puff,” sat with folded arms in her wheelchair, avoiding eye contact with her adopted parents. “Other superheroes can fly faster than the speed of sound or punch a hole through the moon. What does my father do? Gossips with jellyfish.”

“A telepathic bond with the creatures of the sea is a powerful weapon,” said Jarhead. This was his third session with Puff, and the first time he had felt comfortable bringing her parents in for more than a few minutes at the beginning and end. Given the amount of anger emanating from the teenaged mermaid, that might have been a mistake on his part.

“It’s like they’re stuck in the Silver Age,” Puff said. “He hasn’t changed his costume since the seventies.”

“It’s iconic.” The superhero known as Triton, self-proclaimed Master of the Oceans, was a tall, broad-shouldered man with umber skin, blue eyes, and bright red gill slits running just beneath his jawbone.

“It’s gold and brown.” Puff still hadn’t looked up from her smartphone. “Your costume is literally the colors of an unflushed toilet bowl. And Mom’s is worse. It’s like she made her outfit from the leftover scraps of his.”

Jarhead kept his mouth shut. He had been a superhero back then too, before a neck-height tripwire transformed him from the fastest man in the world to a decapitated head in a jar. He had once seen Optica peer into a lead-lined armored car, then use her heat vision to burn through the car and vaporize the mercury switch on a bomb that would have turned the people of Lake City into giant mutant gerbils. After that, he figured she had the right to wear whatever the heck she wanted. He wasn’t about to criticize a woman who could kill you just by looking at you.

“She’s fifty-three years old,” Puff continued, tapping the screen of her phone. “Her costume doesn’t even make sense. What do skintight hot pants and all that cleavage have to do with superpowered eyes?”

Puff didn’t answer, but her tail flapped against the base of her wheelchair, one of many, many ways she signaled annoyance. Unlike her parents, Puff dressed in heavy layers of dark, drab clothing that, in the words of her father, made her look like a homeless person. The only exception was her hair, which was styled into short blue spikes. She made a show of finishing what she was typing, then shoved the phone into her pocket.

“Thank you,” said Jarhead. “How have you been doing on the goals we set last week? Homework and chores?”

“She doesn’t study,” said Optica. “When we remind her, she tells us to stop treating her like a child.”

“It’s not biology,” Puff snapped. “It’s human biology. I should be taking Intro to Medical Freaks instead.”

Puff inhaled… and kept on going. Her body swelled, stretching her clothing tight. Spines poked through her skirts and sweatshirt, and she gripped the arms of her chair to keep from toppling forward. Her cheeks and eyes bulged, and she looked at her adopted parents as if to say, Oh, yeah?

While Jarhead hated to see his clients hurting, this was a good sign. At least Puff wasn’t locking everything away inside.

Puff deflated and began picking at her clothes, sliding her spines back through newly-torn holes. Optica had jerked back, and now folded her hands in her lap, looking sadly at her daughter with those mesmerizing, all-black eyes.

“There are days she doesn’t say a single word to either of us, from morning until bedtime,” said Triton.

“What do you want me to say? ‘Hey, mom. Guess what! The boy I like has an old cheesecake poster of you in his locker.” Puff pantomimed gagging. “You wouldn’t understand, Doctor J. You were one of them. Zipping around, punching bad guys and doing commercials for running shoes. It’s like they don’t know what to do with a problem they can’t blow up or feed to a shark.”

“I’m sorry about this.” Jarhead used the microneural circuitry connecting his brain into the technology in the base of the jar to remotely open the office door.

A squad of LCPD’s finest waited, guns drawn, with polarized riot shields on their arms. Before anyone could react, they fired a Taser into the room, striking Optica in the shoulder. She seized and fell. Puff screamed and ballooned outward so hard she fell from her chair.

Triton leapt toward the door, but his powers were weaker on land, and another Taser took him down.

“I’m sorry,” said a detective wearing a bullet-proof vest over a shirt and tie. “We have a warrant for the arrest of Optica and Triton.”

The arrest was only the beginning of Jarhead’s headache. The detective called him later that day… not to apologize, but to ask for Jarhead’s help.

For the most part, Jarhead had come to terms with his lack of body, but some conversations called for a good old-fashioned facepalm. Slapping his jar with one of the mechanical spider-like legs built into the base just wasn’t the same. “You’re saying that in the two hours since you burst into my office to assault my clients, your men—a task force charged with bringing down supervillains—have managed to lose a mermaid in a wheelchair?”

“There was… an incident.” The speakers carrying the detective’s voice through the bionutrient fluid in the jar conveyed both embarrassment and annoyance.

“Some sort of monkey/goat centaur things. They ambushed us. They’d gotten up onto the ledges of the credit union and the history museum. Damn things can climb like—”

“That’s my guess. We’ve got a BOLO out to all units. Manchester’s parole officer says he’s has been checking in regularly. We searched his apartment, but it was empty.”

Jarhead blew a thin column of bubbles, the equivalent of a relieved sigh. “Was anyone hurt?”

“You don’t understand, Doc. They didn’t attack us. Just shot steel lines across the road to stop traffic, and then the lead monkey-goat climbed down to deliver a court order.”

“It was almost cute. She was wearing a tiny suit jacket and tie.” The detective hesitated. “I confirmed the order was legit.”

“Yeah. With the custodial parents under arrest, Michael Manchester is suing for custody of Tamara Jones.”

Jarhead had spent several sessions working to build trust and rapport. A text message from Puff was enough to confirm that those efforts had paid off.

Puff’s family split their time between land and sea—a another source of stress for a teenaged girl looking for stability and identity. Their land-based house was protected by an electronic security system keyed to a series of lasers Optica had designed in her free time.

Puff was too smart to try to hide out here. Between the initial arrest and her disappearance, the police would have searched her house at least three times. The computers had been taken, along with any files that might prove or disprove the allegations of tax fraud.

After turning off the alarm, Jarhead skittered into the house and maneuvered himself through the doorway of Puff’s room, a hybrid arrangement that reminded him of an oversized turtle aquarium. Half the room sank into a pool, while the other half held a small flat-screen TV, closet, and a poster of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue. Plastic ponies lined several shelves on the wall. A large tank full of goldfish sat beside the pool. Puff had inherited a number of the blowfish’s traits, including a voracious and predatory appetite. Those goldfish were the equivalent of a half-eaten bag of chips.

Jarhead retrieved a black electrical cord from the floor. He pulled up the display inside his jar and sent a text message. “At ur place. Got ur cellphone charger.”

The response came quickly. “Thx. And don’t say ‘ur.’ You’re too old.”

Jarhead sent an emoticon of a face with its tongue sticking out. “U know about the court order?”

“If the courts decide that using his genetic material as part of your creation gives him a parental claim…”

“Then they can send a scuba team to try to catch me. Come on Dr. J. U know he framed my parents. Ugh. He’s so creepy.”

“He tried to friend me on Facebook. Like I even use that site anymore. My *parents* are on Facebook. I blocked him.”

Jarhead’s sensors picked up a faint noise from the next room. He amplified the microphones, trying to pinpoint what he had heard. “Gotta run. Company.”

His mics weren’t good enough to pick up heartbeats, but the quick breathing of three creatures one room over? No problem. He crept toward the door, then paused. Several of the goldfish in the tank floated upside down on the surface. Swimming over the gravel at the bottom was one of Manchester’s spies, a tiny merman, half minnow, half fetus-like person, and 100 percent disturbing. “How long have you been hiding out here?”

It would be just Manchester’s style to have installed a camera and transmitter into the merminnow’s head. He’d known the instant Jarhead arrived. Jarhead crept into the living room to see what Manchester had sent. “That’s new.”

From the waist up, the creatures resembled small hawks, but their legs and tail were those of black, chitinous scorpions. One stood atop the sofa. The second was helping itself to butterscotch candies from a bowl on the coffee table. Like most of Manchester’s creations, they showed little sign of intelligence. Puff was one of the few exceptions. The third spread its wings and swooped at Jarhead.

He waited for the clink of the thing’s tail against the jar to stop. “You know, back in my day, supervillains were a little smarter. That glass will stop a .45 caliber bullet at point blank range. You’re only going to hurt yourself.”

The creature’s tail stiffened, and a pointed flame erupted from the tip. It narrowed to a needle of blue fire.

“That’s much better.” Jarhead tipped himself forward, trying to crush the animal, but it scampered around the glass, continuing to try to cut through. His temperature sensors spiked. It was hard to say whether the flame would pierce the jar before it heated his biofluid to unsustainable temperatures. “Crap.”

The other two flew at him in a cloud of feathers, adding two more blue-hot torches to the mix. One still clutched half a butterscotch in its beak.

In the old days, Jarhead would have moved too fast for them to touch him. He could have plucked every feather from their bodies between one wing beat and the next, and duct taped their tails so their weapons pointed at the backs of their own heads. Sadly, the ability to wiggle his nose at superspeed didn’t do him much good now.

He climbed onto the counter and into the kitchen sink. The motors in his legs were strong enough to carry several times his weight. Once there, he used one of his manipulators to turn on the water and grab the sprayer. The water did nothing to stop the flames, but spraying it directly into their faces seemed to annoy them.

Warning: Temperature reaching dangerous levels. His fluid cycled faster, the cooling mechanism trying to cope.

Jarhead pulled up the neurocontrols. His jar was a self-contained, self-sustaining environment, but every mechanical device required maintenance sooner or later, including the ability to change out his nutrient fluid. He mentally unlocked the drainage spout, tightened the valve, and overrode the safeties to increase the pump’s pressure to dangerous levels.

The blast of blue biofluid slammed the creature’s head against the end of the faucet. It gave a pathetic squawk and slumped to the bottom of the sink. He used his legs to grab the next one, yanked it around, and fired directly into the beak, blasting the butterscotch candy into its throat. It staggered away, hacking and choking.

The third flew away, either out of fear, or because Manchester had ordered it to retreat.

Jarhead tested his jar’s metal limbs and checked the status of his systems. He hadn’t had a good old-fashioned throwdown since the day he lost ninety percent of his body weight. That had almost been fun.

“You know, legally I’m obligated to report your whereabouts to the police.”

Puff had taken refuge in the bay, hiding out in the shadows below the docks. Jarhead bobbed in the darkness beside her. His system was equipped for swimming and diving, using a series of small pumps to propel him through the water. The buoyancy was off, though, thanks to his expending a quarter of his biofluid against those flying scorpions. His eyes and scalp kept threatening to dry out, forcing him to perform rather ridiculous somersaults with his jar every few minutes to rehydrate.

Puff’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll be long gone before they get here.”

“Exactly. So reporting you wouldn’t help anyone. But as your therapist, it’s my job to help you. The way I see it, our best chance is to prove your parents were set up, and that Manchester was behind it. That should be more than enough to get a judge to rule in your favor.”

“How do you expect to do that?”

“I say we take the war to him. He broke into your home, so we break into his. We find the evidence we need, and—”

“You’re as bad as my parents,” Puff snapped. “Do I look like a superhero? What, am I supposed to dress up in spandex and follow you around as your sidekick now?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not—”

“Oh, now I’m ridiculous? All I wanted from you was my stupid cellphone charger.”

Jarhead used a claw to remove the charger cable from the compartment in his base. “Here you go. I put it in a baggie so it wouldn’t get wet.” He waited. “You have what you wanted, and we both know I can’t stop you from swimming away.”

She snatched it away and rolled her eyes. “I’m not interested in breaking into Manchester’s lair and fighting past traps and guards and whatever else he has waiting. It’s crazy.”

“It’s normal to be afraid—”

“I’m not afraid,” Puff said, emphasizing every syllable. “I’m telling you the whole superhero thing is stupid and archaic. Dressing up in costumes, trying to solve everything with your fists, always looking over your shoulder for the day your arch enemy kills your loved ones or banishes you to an alternate dimension. The only winners are the lawyers and the merchandisers selling action figures and movies and ‘Super-inspired fashion.’”

“You might be right,” said Jarhead. He had been thinking like a superhero, not a therapist. The fight at Puff’s house had triggered old memories of a life he thought he’d left behind years ago. He was still feeling the aftermath of the adrenaline rush… which was fascinating, now that he thought about it. He’d have to do some testing on how the adrenal gland worked when you were nothing but a head. Maybe he could get a paper out of it. “I’m sorry. You have every right to be angry.”

“I know that.” They bobbed in silence in the darkness beneath one of the docks. “I meant what I said. I’ll run away rather than let him take me.”

Jarhead started to assure her that he wouldn’t let that happen, but that was him speaking as a superhero again. In the past twenty-four hours, Puff’s world had been ripped apart.

But she hadn’t. She had escaped both Manchester’s monkey-goats and a team of highly trained police officers. “Why was your charger so important? You wouldn’t risk me turning you in just so you could check Facebook.”

“I told you—”

“I know, Facebook is for old people. You don’t need me to come up with a plan. You already have one, don’t you?” He studied her more closely, and smiled. “How can I help?”

Puff took a deep breath, enough to raise her spines slightly. “I could use a beta reader.”

###

It took Puff just over twenty-four hours to bring Manchester down. Jarhead was impressed. Even with superspeed, it would have taken a while for him to find where Manchester was hiding, scout the location, and deal with whatever obstacles were waiting.

Puff didn’t bother with any of that. She foiled his plan within twenty-four hours, using nothing but a smart phone, and stopping only to sneak onto one of the ferries to recharge it.

Unfortunately, as any experienced superhero could have warned her, villains were at their most dangerous when their plans were falling apart.

Jarhead and Puff had just picked up her chair from a dockside storage locker and were waiting for a wheelchair-friendly cab to arrive when the commotion started.

“What the hell are those?” Puff whispered.

With his quasi-legal attempt to gain custody of Puff ruined, Manchester had fallen back on his old tactics. Charging down the road were a pair of full-grown bulls with the long, flailing tentacles of a giant squid and the thick armor plating of an armadillo. “Three species in one,” Jarhead commented. “He’s finally changing things up a little.”

A third… squimadull? … carried the doctor himself, a middle-aged man who made Frankenstein look like a male model. Manchester had spliced himself back together again and again over the years, until he was a patchwork of different races and species. Only the head and brain were original parts. In that respect, he and Jarhead had something in common.

Traffic screeched out of the way. Cars too slow to move were gored aside.

“Doctor J, I can’t control my chair.”

Manchester had probably found a way to hack it. Jarhead hoped the nanocircuitry in his jar was advanced enough to ward off similar attempts. He climbed onto the back of Puff’s chair as it carried her toward Manchester.

“I tried to be civilized,” Manchester shouted. “Once I discovered your home, my creatures could have poisoned your parents in their sleep. As a favor to you, I allowed them to live. And you repay me with slander and libel?”

Jarhead grinned. Puff had started by posting a series of animated gifs on Tumblr, showing clips of some of Manchester’s more disturbing experiments. She had included a two-paragraph summary of how, despite being a convicted supervillain, nothing in the law prevented someone like Manchester from suing for custody.

What if it was your baby sister he kidnapped from the hospital? Your newborn daughter he cut and pasted into a monster. Bad enough he creates monstrosities like me, but should the insertion of a bit of his DNA give him ownership over his victims?

The last time Jarhead checked, that particular post had been reblogged six thousand times, with an additional twelve thousand “likes.”

Similar clips, images, and pleas had gone live on Vine, Instagram, Superfriends, Twitter, and even Facebook. The results were impressive, and included a petition to the mayor with thousands of signatures; a barrage of Tweets targeting Lake City’s elected representatives, three of whom had already vowed to fight any attempt to grant Manchester custody; and more.

It turned out that Puff’s various online friend lists included a number of other superpowered kids. One had the ability to telepathically interface with the web. She had begun digging up Manchester’s oldest and most embarrassing secrets, and posting them online. Another was some kind of superevolved computer genius, who had hacked the IRS computers to find evidence of Manchester’s tampering. He had also provided the location of Manchester’s hideout to a third superteen, one who had done some very careful and precise weather manipulation to create a wind that began at the waste treatment plant and ended in a slow-moving circle of air, concentrating the stench at Manchester’s front door.

Jarhead amplified his speakers. “It’s over, Manchester.”

Manchester was experienced enough to have had long ago learned not to waste time with pointless monologues. He shouted a command, and one of the bullsquallos whipped a tentacle forward to pluck Jarhead from the wheelchair. Slimy, dripping suction cups surrounded him. They couldn’t hurt the jar, but they blinded him to whatever was happening.

Jarhead jabbed two metal legs into the tentacle and sent an electric charge through his attacker. An instant later, he was flying through the air. He hit someone’s windshield, breaking halfway through the glass and leaving a web of cracks around him.

By the time the biofluid stopped sloshing around, Manchester had reached Puff.

Jarhead scurried forward, then grinned. “You didn’t think this through, did you?”

Puff had escaped her chair and expanded to her full size. She bristled like a porcupine in the middle of the road. An angry, venomous porcupine. She couldn’t fight like that. She could barely move. But neither Manchester nor his creatures could touch her. From the way one of the animals whimpered and cradled a tentacle, they had already tried.

Another tried to carefully sneak a tentacle around Puff’s throat. She grabbed the tentacle, pulled it close, and took an enormous bite. Never underestimate the appetite of a blowfish or a teenager.

“There’s still time to run away before the police and superheroes arrive,” Jarhead said.

Manchester’s mount reached past Puff to grab a bystander. It hurled the man at Puff, who deflated to keep from impaling him. The tentacles snaked around her body, squeezing tight to prevent her from inflating again. Manchester laughed, and his mount turned to escape.

“Hey!” Jarhead skittered into the street. “Get your tentacles off my client.”

He adjusted the output feed on his speakers and used the one weapon he had left. The weapon he had hoped never to have to use. Not because it was dangerous, but because it was… embarrassing.

Bubbles filled his vision, but he saw the armasquidull stumble. The bull head shook angrily, like it was trying to get rid of an annoying insect inside his skull. The other two creatures were already running away.

Jarhead walked toward them. He could hear sirens approaching.

Puff tumbled free as the animal wrapped its tentacles around its head, staggering in pain.

Manchester jumped down and strode toward them, a pistol-sized bioweapon of some sort clutched in his hands. “I don’t know what weapon you’ve got hidden away in there, but we’ll see how cocky you are once I’ve spliced you face-first to the back end of a cow! You’ll—”

That was when Puff slapped him in the legs with her partially inflated tail, driving her spines deep into his leg.

He yelped and jumped away. His body wobbled. “Oh, hell.”

With that, Manchester’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed.

###

“I told you,” Puff said sullenly, sitting in her customary spot in Jarhead’s office. “It’s the twenty-first century. My parents are stuck in the past with their costumes and their showdowns and their battles in the middle of the city.”

“How long have you been fighting crime?” asked Triton.

Puff shrugged. “We’ve been working as a team for a year or so. We have three other supers, and a few normals. You remember the scandal that killed Maximole’s run for Governor? We were the ones who turned him into a laughingstock online.”

“It’s an impressive power,” said Jarhead. “But remember—”

“You’re going to give me the ‘great power, great responsibility’ lecture, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Optica. “Fighting crime from a smart phone? With no costume, no secret identity—”

“Oh, please. I have six different identities,” said Puff. “Neurogirl has thirty-four. And I guarantee my user icon is cooler than a few strips of spandex.” She turned back to Jarhead. “What I haven’t been able to figure out is how you stopped Manchester from escaping. I was trapped, and then his animal suddenly went crazy.”

If Jarhead’s circulatory system had still been capable, he might have blushed. “I’m still a speedster, remember?”

“But you’re…” She gestured at the jar.

“That’s right. Pretty much all I can do these days is wiggle my nose at superspeed” He pursed his lips. “However, sound is nothing but vibrations, and animals tend to have much better hearing than we do.”

“You can shoot sonic beams out of that thing with your nose?” She covered her mouth and nose, but not before he saw her laughing. “That is so weird.”

“Says the mermaid to the head in the jar,” he shot back. “Now, it’s going to take a while to process everything that’s happened over the past day. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore things like your biology grade.”

Puff smiled. It was a dangerous, predatory smile. “I already emailed her about a make-up paper examining the physiology of a hawk-scorpion who choked to death on butterscotch candy…”

***

Jim C. Hines’ first novel was Goblin Quest, the humorous tale of a nearsighted goblin runt and his pet fire-spider. After finishing the goblin trilogy, he went on to write the Princess series of fairy tale retellings, and is currently working on the Magic ex Libris books, a modern-day fantasy series about a magic-wielding librarian, a dryad, a secret society founded by Johannes Gutenberg, a flaming spider, and an enchanted convertible. His short fiction has appeared in more than 40 magazines and anthologies. You can find him online at www.jimchines.com.

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