#162: What Cape Saw

Music blared in basement of the West Forest apartment of the James sisters, Clarissa and Avie, as they worked out on weight machines a couple of college girls should not have been able to afford. The Police, the B-52s, Was (Not Was), Prince and the Revolution, and Morris Day and The Time, carefully curated by Avie on high bias chrome type-II mixed cassette tape, streamed from a boom box, replete with Dolby noise reduction.

#159: Green Eyes

Clarissa thought she saw a shimmer in the alley as she climbed down the ladder from the roof of her apartment building. But her Ms. Megaton Man visor was in her garment bag, along with her uniform. She landed on the back stoop of her apartment and rifled through the bag; by the time she affixed the visor and scanned the alley, whatever it was she thought she saw had gone.

#158: Screen Door

Avie James thought she heard what sounded like tires on gravel in the alley behind the apartment. She was in the kitchen at the rear of the apartment, not cooking or cleaning but planning a stage production on the small kitchenette table. Her notebooks, sketchbooks, and drawing and writing implements were spread out.

#155: Stakeout

The Phantom Jungle Girl and Clarissa sat in the Pinto belonging to Donna Blank, which was parked along a residential neighborhood in Detroit. Fanny wielded a camera with a long telephoto lens propped atop the steering wheel; she had it trained on an apartment house further down the street. Clarissa sat with a comic book-sized brown paper bag on her lap; she was flipping through newly-purchased copies of Megatron Man #3 and #4.

#153: The Blow Dryer

The orbiting killer satellite of the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning made for a pretty picture against the stars and black space and misty-white horizon of Earth. Shaped like a handheld hair pistol, but scaled a thousand times bigger, it amply earned the nickname agents of ICHHL called it—the Blow Dryer.

#152: Shore Leave

There was commotion on the bridge of the starship. Something had gone slightly wrong. Already, officers were scrutinizing monitors, recalculating calculations, looking for answers …
        “What just happened?”

#151: Around the World

Volume VI: Starship Summer

A small group of kids assembled on the sidewalk to watch something they had never seen before. The tallest of the kids, a boy around ten or eleven, stood straddling a black, rugged-looking his old bike that looked like it might have been new in the 1950s. He was about ten or eleven, with greased-back longish hair and thick, black-rimmed glasses, corduroys that were too short, and a light blue cotton button down shirt—definitely out of style for 1985. His nose was too big for his longish face, and his mouth had too many teeth, out of which he tended to breathe as he watched through lenses that were too thick. His complexion made him look older than his age, as if it were already preparing for the pockmarks of severe acne to come.

#149: Hypothetically Speaking

The day before the Hypothetics conference, I got a small package in the mail. It was from Gene. The note read, “Consider this a belated birthday gift”—he’d missed it back in February—“and a congratulations on your presentation, which I’m afraid I’m also going to have to miss. About the gift: Whatever you do, don’t point it at your eye. Good luck.” Inside the padded envelope was a small, silvery, pen-shaped cylinder.
        “It’s too small to be a vibrator,” I said.
        “Get your mind out of the gutter, Sissy,” said Avie, who was reading a textbook for school. “It’s obviously some kind of writing instrument.”

#148: Tête-à-Tête in Troy

“We’re gathered together around the Y+Table,” said Soren “Sabersnag” Sneed (with a slight speech impediment since he was a saber-toothed tiger), “at this, the headquarters of the Troy+Thems, to consider the charges leveled against Clarissa James, the sometime-megahero known as Ms. Megaton Man …”
        “Charges?” I cried.

#147: Deep Throat

“You’ve composed a fine paper,” said my thesis advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, smiling amiably behind her desk stacked with books and various research projects in progress. “You’ll certainly give those Hypothetics people something to chew on.” She handed back my paper, with several Post-It notes covered in red pen attached. “I’ve made a comment or two for you to consider, but they’re neither here nor there; they’re mostly cosmetic. I think you’re good to go.”

#146: Megatron Man #1

“Chase Bradford’s comic book has been published? By a real publisher? That’s wonderful,” I said. I had seen much of the original artwork while he was working on it, but being busy with grad school myself, hadn’t been in touch with the aspiring cartoonist in quite a while. “How do you know, Nancy? Have you seen it?”

#145: Fusion Jazz

Clarissa’s first-person narrative resumes …
        “You expect me to believe the Quantum Quest Quartet became the Megatropolis Quartet simply because all four people temporarily forgot their team name on the Fourth of July, 1976?” I said. “I assume they later recovered their memories. Why didn’t they go back to the original team name? Had they already filed paperwork that prevented them from changing it back or something?”

#140: Cross Under at Manhattan Transfer

Trent Phloog’s third-person flashback from 1976 continues (Part 2 of 6):

A young, long-haired conductor sidled up the aisle, smirking. His uniform was ill-fitting and unkempt. He tapped a more senior conductor on the shoulder.
        “Get a load of this, old-timer,” said the younger man. “It’s a train schedule from 1931!”
        The older conductor, his uniform neatly pressed and immaculate, turned around, annoyed; the rookie was continually pestering him with observations on the peculiarities of passenger rail travel. With a ticket puncher in one hand, he unfolded the brittle, yellowed brochure.
        “Where’d you get this? I haven’t seen one of these since I was your age.”

#138: The Dreaded Conference Paper

Rather than think about the upcoming spring semester and the courses I’d be taking or teaching, I spent the evening pondering the conference paper I promised myself I’d write, the abstract for which had to be submitted by the end of January if I wanted to be included in the program at the end of March. My thesis advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, had recommended the opportunity to me back in August, but I had procrastinated on the extracurricular project all semester, though it lingered in the back of my mind like a sword of Damocles over my head. Now with the semester and my foray in the Civilian Reality over, I finally had some free head space; it was now or never.

#137: Trading Places

After a night a passion with the overly-muscled Mr. Megaton, Stella reluctantly administered the Mega-Soldier Syrup antidote to Trent, who reverted to civilian form, so he could resume his role as Simon’s normal father and fit in Gene’s white van for the road trip home. By the time we all gathered in the Doomsday Factory pantry for breakfast, Trent, Stella and Simon appeared as one big, happy Nuclear Family. But Trent, again a normal looking man, seemed more than a bit wobbly, not only from his epic battle with Bad Guy but also presumably the unexpected barrage of carnal desire from his usually platonic parenting partner.

#136: Coup Détente

Mr. Megaton, Kozmik Kat, and I—followed by the chopper with Gene, Stella, and Avie—returned from Liberty Island to the Doomsday Factory. As we approached the roof, I noticed a caravan of headlights sweeping down the promontory’s gravel path; they were white vans from an ICHHL front company dubbed Incarcertory Consultants for Hardened, Lawbreaking Louts. They were whisking off Rose Shark and the Megatown Mobsters, presumably to the Civilian Reality’s version of the Criminality Clinic which, for all I knew, may have also been called the Criminality Clinic, too.

#135: Night Flight

“Hey, wait a minute!” Kozmik Kat protested, his paws flailing about, as he tried to wriggle free from my grasp. “My powers are no good in a fight scene, Ms. Megaton.” But it was too late; we were already far out over water and ascending rapidly in the frigid night air.

#134: Mr. Megaton

I hadn’t seen exactly what Stella had done, as my grandmother had been intentionally shielding Stella from the view of the Megatown Mobster guarding us. He wasn’t paying any attention to us anyway; he was too flabbergasted at the transformation of his boss—the President-Elect of the United States, Bartholomew Gamble—into the purple-clad megavillain, Bad Guy.

#133: Rex, Rose, and Mega-Bad Guy

We were screwed.
        Stella quickly slipped the unopened jewel case containing syringes and vials of Mega-Soldier Syrup back into her windbreaker; Avie and Seedy both rolled down their sleeves. No one, it appeared, was going to be transformed into a megahero.
        “You want I should grab their guns, Rose?” said one of the Megatown Mobsters.
        “No need,” said Rose Shark. “This is just a friendly visit. Besides, our next President of these United State believes in fostering the most deadly proliferation of firearms our nation and the world has ever seen.”

#132: The Megatown Mob

“Stella, what are you doing in Bayonne?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you drove ten hours straight all the way from Ann Arbor.”
        “Of course not,” Stella replied. “We flew.”
        “Flew? But Stella, you guys can’t fly. In this reality, you’re civilians, not megaheroes.”
        “On a plane, silly,” she replied.