#164: Roberts

Agent Lemon Lime woke with a start. “Did you hear that?” she asked. It had sounded to her like a thud, a boom, in the distance, like an artillery shell in war.

#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.

#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.

#76: Who’ll Have You?

A week later, Secret Agent Preston Percy called to summon Avie and I to an urgent meeting of the Y+Thems at their Troy, Michigan headquarters. “Be here this afternoon,” he ordered.
     “Impossible,” I replied. “I’m scheduled at the Union Stripe Café, and I have a buttload of homework…”
     “Call off,” said Preston simply, and hung up.
     I got Nancy, who was back in the employ of the restaurant after quitting abruptly the summer before, to cover for me at the last minute. Avie and I drove up to Troy in her Pacer that evening, our megahero uniforms under our civvies.

#74: Double Negative

I agreed to go back up to Troy a few nights later, on a night when I wasn’t scheduled at the Union Stripe Café. But it had been so long since I’d used my megapowers I really had to psyche myself up. The last time I had tried pulling on Avie’s weight machines, I could barely do ten reps at forty pounds, flabby civilian weakling I had become. But when I put on my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, my courage came back and I managed to fly to Detroit’s northern suburbs without any problem. I had no choice, since I don’t drive and I didn’t want Avie hanging around dangerous scientific machinery any more than was necessary. In fact, I was hoping she’d get so busy with school and her theater group that she’d forget about joining the Troy+Thems altogether, so I never even let on to her that I was going.

#71: The Troy+Thems

It was the first of February, the day before my birthday, and I was walking home from my afternoon class at Old Main when I noticed a white van in the parking lot of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City. This wasn’t just the usual white van belonging to the residents, my friends the Y+Thems, which was always there, but a second van parked alongside it. On the side of this van were the words Inter-faith Church Healing for Hopeless Liabilities, and there was a dumpster unceremoniously plopped down next to it that ICHHL workers were quickly filling with debris.
     “Oh, no,” I said to myself. “What now?”

#59: Mona Lisa Outer Drive

After Thanksgiving, things were hopping at the Union Stripe Café. A lot of businesses along Woodward Avenue booked our “banquet hall”—basically, another storefront adjacent to and about the same size as our regular dining room—for holiday parties. Even the professionals from the medical center, notorious for being stingy tippers, had to pay up—a fifteen-percent gratuity was automatically added to their collective bill. Some patrons got so drunk they still left change—only a few percent, but gravy for us wait staff. Some nights I was walking out of the restaurant with more than a hundred bucks in cash—good money in the early eighties.

#52: Big, Blue, Bulky Guy!

The behemoth robot seemed momentarily confused; its four pairs of red camera lenses whirled around inside its bubble-like glass helmet, taking in the situation.
     “The Hybrid Man seems conflicted,” said the Phantom Jungle Girl, leveling her stone-tipped jungle javelin at the Bot, just in case. “The mad scientist here has given him a direct order contradicting the moral code Wilton and Audrey programmed into him.”
     “Kill the costumed intruders,” Grady barked again, waving the remote in his hand. “And kill these two civilians, while you’re at it.”

#51: B-50, the Hybrid Man

I ran down the hall where I’d seen my cape disappear and burst through some swinging doors into a large laboratory, darkened except for some blinking lights on equipment I couldn’t make out. With the infra-red vision of my visor, I immediately spotted my cape and buttons; they lay lifeless on the floor just a few feet into the lab. For a moment, I feared my cape was dead.
     I picked them up and shook the dust off. I slung my cape around my shoulders and snapped buttons back onto my uniform at the clavicles. The buttons responded by flashing magenta lights, and my cape fluttered.
     “Good; you weren’t killed,” I said. “But something shut you down as soon as you entered this place. What…?”

#50: Telling Tall Tales Along the Ann Arbor Trail

After locking up her office, the Phantom Jungle Girl and I raced downstairs to the waiting Y+Thems van. Rubber Brother was in the passenger seat; with an elongated arm, he opened the sliding side door for us to hop in back. Domina was behind the wheel; she was the only Youthful Permutation. The others—Soren, Kiddo, and Tempy—were never part of our plan, Jasper wanting to keep the operation light and mobile.
     But much to my surprise, my sister Avie and Kozmik Kat were waiting for us in the back seat.

#49: Enter: The Phantom Jungle Girl!

Despite the invitation from Donna Blank herself, not to mention the urging of Rubber Brother, I still procrastinated about visiting Royal Oak. After all, what was I going to tell a licensed social worker? That there was a laboratory deep under the Arbor State where not only Megasoldier Syrup was produced, but also the dead returned to life, and possibly some kind of scientific project was underway that was fusing together incompatible dimensions of reality? And that this may have been connected to my own missing biological father and the return of my long-lost Grandma?

#48: Donna Blank, District Defender

I was in my sweats, shivering at the poor steam heating in my garret apartment, reading over the voluminous notes my advisor had scribbled all over my senior thesis draft, when suddenly there came a knock at the door. “Who is it?”
      “Jasper,” came the reply. “Jasper Johnson.”
     I let him in. Rubber Brother was nattily attired in a sharp business suit with a carefully-folded pocket handkerchief. “You look awful,” he said. “Are you feeling well?”

#47: Dana Dorman, Two Doors Down

Ever since she’d arrived from Megatropolis with a vanload of Youthful Permutations, I’d gotten the vibe that Dana Dorman—the megaheroine known as Domina—had the hots for me. I suppose I’d gotten that vibe from the several times she’d overtly hit on me; her rather crude suggestions in front of the others were frankly embarrassing, and revealed how ill-equipped and lacking in social skills some megaheroes can be. I’d had to make it clear to her over and over that she simply wasn’t my type—she was way too aggressive. But I tried not to be rude to her; after all, she was living in the communal residence of the Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City, just two doors down West Forest from where I lived, with the other Y+Thems exiled in Detroit—along with my younger half-sister, Avie.