#23: Dining Room Diagrams

Back on Ann Street, a couple evenings later, I calmly spread a paper map of downtown Ann Arbor and the campus of Arbor State University over the dining room table. Over that, I spread sheets of tracing paper—the biggest I could find was a pad from a stationary store, so I had to tape sheets together. On this surface, I drew the coordinates my visor had calculated based on my cape’s tour through the underground network of Megatonic University.

#22: Dr. Joe’s Lab

I still had no idea where Megatonic University was located. I only recalled Preston Percy saying he had relocated to Ann Arbor to oversee several projects “around and under” the Arbor State University campus. He denied that these had anything to do with any fabled Megaton University, but they must have been important for a secret agent to abandon his perch on the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning orbiting satellite and relocate from New York besides.
     But I was no closer to knowing exactly where Dr. Joseph Levitch’s secret laboratory was.

#21: Daddy Issues

It was the fourth week of September, with the semester well underway, that something miraculous happened: I found myself in the kitchen in the middle of the week having lunch with Trent, Stella, and baby Simon in his high chair. A meal with all three of them almost never happened, given our busy schedules, despite living in the same house. Pammy was absent—she was back in Ann Arbor but was busy lecturing and in the final stages of preparing her manuscript for publication, which was to be released the following spring.

#20: Campy, Coverless Comics

I went back to the van and put on my civvies, then the four of us—Samson, Preston, Koz, and I—met at an outdoor table in front of the bookstore to compare notes.
     Preston reported that at that very moment agents from ICHHL were investigating Mervyn Goldfarb’s apartment. Sure enough, he was formerly employed by Dr. Joe Levitch’s lab years before when it was still located in Ann Arbor, and recently had taken to cooking up batches of homemade Mega-Soldier Syrup in his bathtub and selling it to unwary college students at a huge profit. Notes located already seemed to indicate it was an obsolete formula and the Mervyn hadn’t been too particular about following the recipe precisely.

#19: Megatonic University

At least now I knew I was as tough as Megaton Man. I had survived being sucked up into the orbiting ICHHL satellite and the subsequent drop back to earth. My government-issued uniform and space helmet had proven their mettle as well. But that didn’t mean I considered myself a full-time megahero—far from it. For one thing, I was never one of those crime fighters who went around wearing her uniform under her street clothes in case she needed to change into her secret identity and save the world on a moment’s notice. I didn’t have one of those world-savior egos. Beat up somebody for cheating on their mid-term? For the most part, my Ms. Megaton Man uniform—along with my cool new visor and other accoutrements—remained safely tucked away in a garment bag in the back of my closet on Ann Street, although this never sat well with my cape, who loathed hibernation mode and yearned to be free.

#18: Origin Secrets

Kozmik Kat and I couldn’t agree whether he was now my sidekick or I was his—just in case we were ever officially called into action for some mission. We didn’t come to blows over this, since it was mostly hypothetical; as soon as the fall semester started, I planned to put my Quarantinium-Quelluminum mesh-fiber Ms. Megaton Man uniform in its garment bag and consign it to the back of the closet. The hard part was learning to put my cape into hibernation, which I could only do through some complex instructions on my touch-screen visor. But before I could do that, I still had one personal mission of my own to perform.

#17: Body by Nuke

What took place on my virgin flight and immediately thereafter has been greatly exaggerated in the media, most notably in that aforementioned scandalous “novel,” Megasomething. If you believed everything in that account, you’d be persuaded I had gone on a tear with every student athlete returning to the Arbor State campus for late-summer training camps—and taken on scores of lovers besides. The precise number bandied about is one hundred and twenty-seven men and thirty-one women—which was totally made up. I should know, because I made it up.