#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.

#150: Megahero Gossip

That was my spring 1985 semester in a nutshell, completing my first year of grad school. It wasn’t the entire semester of course; just the main highlight. I still had several weeks of finishing up my classes, both those that I taught and those I was taking, along with seminars. But grading papers and all that stuff is boring, so you get the gist of it.

#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.

#88: The Quantum Tower

Since my visit to the Forbidden Future, I swore off any form of transportation that was faster-than-light let alone temporal or dimensional, and decided to fly myself to New York as Ms. Megaton Man. So, one morning I suited up, with the class ring my father had bought me for graduation snugly under my yellow glove. Kozmik Kat, who could probably fly but was too chicken to try, had to settle for being uncomfortably crammed into my backpack. The digital readouts on my visor kept me out of the air lanes—it even provided me a good public domain book to read, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White—and we made it in a couple of hours, although Koz clawed me once or twice when I wasn’t paying attention and we hit turbulence.

#83: The Tragic Realization of Temporal-Dimensional Travel

Before I could clamber to my feet, two of the Megaton Mice had grabbed Kozmik Kat by the whiskers and were flinging him around the clearing.
        “Hey, you guys! Cut that out!” I shouted. But the other two had clamped onto my ankles. For their size, they were strong. “Ouch! That hurts!
        I shook them off; they went rolling toward the rubble pile. But Koz wasn’t faring as well. “Guys! I’m a different person now!” he cried, as one twirled him by his tail. “I would never chomp your brother today—really! He even tasted lousy, compared to other mice. I haven’t touched one since!”

#82: My Excellent Adventure with Kozmik Kat

I had often wondered what caused readers of popular fantastic fiction to spend as much time, if not more, poring over the writings of Emil Reardon Ryerson, Grover Edwin Honath, and Henry Potsdam Lipschitz, and memorizing shelves of information of completely made-up worlds like Whagool or the Daemonic Ravines of New Hampshire, or the Antediluvian Age, and yet be unwilling to put the same energy into public school, and later a master’s degree in history, philosophy, or French Medieval lit?

#81: Views from Olympus

“What up doe, Banky?” I said as I entered the Troy+Thems hall.
     Few people get my sense of humor to begin with, and my white colleagues weren’t sure they had permission to laugh at a black woman doing her impression of a racial stereotype. But Rubber Brother loved it.
     “Ha! Buckwheat from The Little Rascals,” he chortled. “Clarissa, that breaks me up every time you do it!”

#67: Knock Down, Drag Out

I shed my bookbag, winter coat, and civvies, stripping down to my Ms. Megaton Man leotard and panties. Koz took my bookbag before I could retrieve my yellow gloves and boots, let alone my red cape, brass buttons, or translucent-orange visor. “You won’t be needing that stuff,” he said, throwing me a pair of white silk boxing trunks instead. “Here, put these on,” he said as he grabbed a pair of red boxing gloves that hung on a peg on the wall.

     I noticed Alice², the Mod Puma, had shed her boots with their razor-like talons, so we were both barefoot. Presumably, she wasn’t wearing her taloned gloves, either, under her boxing mitts. She had slipped on a pair of black boxers nearly indistinguishable in color from her navy blue tights.

     All that was left after my gloves were tied was the padded head guard that boxers wear around their faces for protection during sparring matches, and a mouthpiece to protect the dentistry. “Is that really necessary?” I asked, as Koz proffered these.

     “Better safe than sorry,” said Koz.

#66: Plenty of Free Parking

I don’t know why I tell my sister Avril anything, because she always makes things more complicated.
     I mentioned to her that I desperately wanted to visit our Grandma while she was in Ann Arbor, and to visit my biological father, the Silver Age Megaton Man, and our alternate mama, the Mod Puma, at Megatonic University.
     “Great,” said Avie. “I’ll drive.”
     “No, I just want to fly in and out, real quick,” I said. By myself, was the implication.
     “Nonsense,” said Avie. “Seedy is my Grandma, too, and Alice² is our alternate mama.”
     “I’ll come along,” said Kozmik Kat. “I like the Mod Puma…I like any feline character of the female persuasion.”

#65: At No Fixed Address

“What possible justification could you have for evicting me, on the night before Christmas?” I said, my eyes narrowing at my landlord. “I pay my rent on time. I’m clean, I’m quiet…”
     “Up and down the stairs with your friends all the time,” he replied. “Men, women, all hours. You have some kind of twenty-four hour orgy going on in my attic!”
     The lady on the first floor who listened to fire-and-brimstone radio preachers all the time, I figured, had blown the whistle. I resisted the urge to break my landlord’s jaw in three places, something I was pretty sure I was angry enough to do—even without my megapowers. His words were so completely shocking, it took me a moment to realize his breath was rank with booze.

#64: Edge of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Volume III: Troy

The fall semester of my senior year had ended strongly, and it looked as though the year itself would end on an upbeat note. Moving back to Detroit had been a good move; I had successfully completed my senior thesis on urban cultural theory, and nearly all of the credits in my social planning major had been completed. I was looking forward to a spring semester much like the fall had been. My schedule—mostly electives—would be entirely in the University-Cultural Center, with classes held either at the Arbor State Extension across from the museum or at Warren Woodward University, where I had already taken several cross-listed courses and where I had applied and planned to go to grad school. Except for paperwork, I would have little need to visit Ann Arbor regularly until graduation—which I really looked forward to, because it meant walking in the ceremony with Stella Starlight, my old roommate and almost the first friend I had made there, who would be graduating at the same time.

#53: I Got the Senior Thesis Blues

I clacked away at my typewriter into the wee hours of the morning. In the background was the Warren Woodward University public radio station, WWWU, humming at a low volume on my cheap clock radio. It was so late, the programming had gone from news to jazz to classical; they were now broadcasting some free-form art rock courtesy of a deejay who was also an editorial contributor to Detroit’s anarcho-primitivist underground newspaper, The Fifth Wheel. The sounds were hypnotically weird, and I was getting bleary-eyed.

#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.”

#25: The Devastation Chamber

Avie and I went downstairs to the Observation Booth. Koz was already there; some of the Y+Thems who knew him were glad to see him and were petting him. Ordinarily, Koz abhorred being petted, but he was basking in the limelight. “My God,” I said. “This is just like show business.”

#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.

#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.