#143: The Bicentennial Battle of the Millennium!

Trent Phloog’s third-person flashback continues … (Part 5 of 6)

The Marketable Universe, July 4, 1976

The City Room of The Manhattan Project, nerve center of that great daily newspaper, was empty on the sweltering summer afternoon except for the lone figure of Trent Phloog. The unpaid cub reporter, his padded Robert Mitchum suit soaked in perspiration, snoozed at his desk, his snores in concert with the rattling sounds of the window fans and the smooth murmur of ceiling fans, neither of which did anything to combat the sultry New York City heat.

#142: The Quantum Quest Quartet

Trent Phloog’s third-person flashback continues … (Part 4 of 6)

The Marketable Universe, May 1976

Meanwhile, in a midtown skyscraper, a megahero team was scrambling to an alarm.
        “I’m afraid we’ll have to cancel our regularly-scheduled vacation to Bug-Eyed Island, See-Thru Girl!” announced a bulbous, sloshing, elderly man in blue leotards with a white “Q” on his chest. Rex Rigid’s bloated face stared opaquely at a bank of computer monitors arrayed from floor to ceiling, his gloved hands turning knobs and pressing buttons. “The Quantum Tower’s elaborate defenses systems have detected an emergency!”

#127: Return to Doomsday

Sunrise beat us to Bayonne, New Jersey the following morning, but only slightly. It was already daylight as Gene drove the white van up a gravelly path up Constable Hook, the promontory Avie and I had visited once before back in our reality. That time, we approached by air and from the east, in the flying Q-Mobile piloted by old boyfriend, Bing Gloom, also known as Yarn Man. This time, of course, we were climbing up the hill from the west. The sun seemed to rise anew as we reached the crest of the hill, casting the hulking old building in stark silhouette.
        “The Doomsday Factory,” I said.

#90: Profusion and Proliferation

Introduction to Volume IV: Civilian

I graduated from Arbor State University in the spring of 1984—a year late, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere and at the time was still trying to live down. Briefly, I attribute the delay in part to what I call my delayed freshman crisis. Being a studious student, it took me a couple years of college before I came out of my shell socially and sexually, aided by more extroverted friends and various psychoactive substances, not to mention a serendipitous, protracted hookup with Yarn Man.
        Another impediment was my discovery, in the summer of 1982, that I was a natural-born megahero, which earned me a costume and some quirky new colleagues. As Ms. Megaton Man, as I called myself, the few adventures I’d had, if you could call them that, were a distraction at best, only making my return to the dean’s list that much more challenging.

#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.

#38: My Appointment with Pammy (or, Meeting Jointly)

I pushed thoughts of my parents’ pending divorce out of my mind and resisted the temptation to fly up to our old Boswick-Addison neighborhood and confront them about the matter. Daddy would still be at work at that hour—or perhaps he was parked at some motel in Dearborn instead—and I had enough issues on the table with Mama. She refused to reveal the identity of my biological father, and—as I had discovered during my trip to New York over the winter—had for reasons unknown lied to me and Avie all our lives about our grandmother’s death. Apparently, Grandma Seedy—Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James—hadn’t died on some government mission during World War II, as we’d been told, but was alive and well. In fact, she’d even manufactured my custom-made Ms. Megaton Man uniform especially for me in a place called the Doomsday Factory in New Jersey, although I still hadn’t met her.

#37: The First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City

About a week after my tumble with Nuke, I was coming home from my summer class at the Arbor State Extension and passing the church, hoping perhaps to get another glimpse of the man with the stretchy arm. A white van had just pulled into the church parking lot with a New York license plate. The brake lights went out, the engine shut off, and the side passenger door opened. An orange, fur-covered arm had pushed it open; then, a leg that looked more animal than human stepped out. Long, shiny saber teeth protruded from the mouth of the enormous tiger-man that appeared. He wore long shorts, a tank top, and tennis shoes.

#24: Start Spreading the News

Over the winter break, I did make a trip to New York—not as Ms. Megaton Man, but as a plain, civilian tourist—with my sister Avie. We made plans over Thanksgiving: Avie was eager to see all the hot Broadway shows and museum exhibits and do shopping, while I drew up an itinerary that included definitely meeting my father. Since I didn’t know how to do that, I just planned to visit every megahero team I could think of, starting with Bing’s Youthful Permutations.
     When we realized it would cost us a fortune to stay in a Manhattan hotel for a week, or even for lodgings reasonably close to the city, Koz suggested we stay in the Y+Thems dormitory. It wouldn’t be elegant, but it would be free.

#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.

#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.

#16: Ms. Megaton Man Breaks Out!

That summer following my delayed junior-year freshman crisis began quietly enough. Duly chastened by the academic catastrophe of my own making, I begged and got myself hired back as a waitress at the Drowned Mug Café; all seemed forgiven and forgotten. I worked my ass off there for the entire month of May; when June rolled around, I went off again to Camp Michi-Fo-La-Ca again. So far, this was my typical summer routine.

#15: Yarn Man’s Hippie Crash Pad

The next morning, I phoned Avie and told her not to come out to Ann Arbor to pick me up. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You don’t have any incompletes or anything, do you?”
     “No, of course not,” I said.
     “They don’t need you at the Drowned Mug, do they?” she asked.
     “No,” I said. I didn’t mention I got fired.
     “You met some guy!” she said.
     “No, I did not meet some guy,” I replied. During the entire Thanksgiving weekend at home in Detroit, I had never mentioned once that Yarn Man had shown up and was being held a virtual prisoner—for his own good—in our Ann Street basement. Nor had I mentioned he was still there. “I just like the snow better in Ann Arbor.”

#14: Thanks for the Use of the Safe Room

The object descending upon us was egg-shaped, with a flat bottom; it sprouted retractable landing gear with disc-shaped pads from its underside as it descended from the night sky over Ann Street.
     Pammy and Matt, who by now had come out onto the porch, were also gazing up at the sky.
     “Looks like one of those old-fashioned beauty shop hair dryers,” said Matt, “like old ladies would sit under in hair curlers.”
     He was right—that’s exactly what it looked like.
     “It’s just Preston,” said Pammy, “making a big, show-offy entrance, as usual.”
     “Preston?” I said. “Secret Agent Preston Percy? What’s he doing up in outer space?”

#13: Late to the Party from Mars

As Thanksgiving approached, Stella announced she was going to make a big, traditional Thanksgiving dinner—a giant turkey with all the fixings. It was time to make use of the house and make it feel like a home, Stella said, and everyone was invited. This in itself was remarkable; even though we all lived in the same house, our differing schedules seldom permitted more than two of us to ever sit down and eat at the same time.

#12: Kozmik Kat’s Trick-or-Treat

The next time I saw costumed characters on Ann Street, I happened to be one of them.
     It was October, and apple cider was in season; Trent bought some fresh, at the Ann Arbor farmer’s market, and he and Pammy and I sat on the porch sipping. It was a warm Indian summer afternoon; I realized that Halloween would soon be upon us.

#11: The Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning

Preston led me to the Drowned Mug Café a few doors down from Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore on State Street—the same place I had had a cup of coffee with Stella the first day I met her. Neither Preston or I said a word. Busted, I thought, for pounding on the door of an official Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning spy van parked around the corner from our Ann Street house.

#10: The Local Section

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#9: The Dean’s List, Again

“You lost your virginity to Yarn Man?” My sister Avril was both horrified and fascinated. “Now I know you’re making it all up—about living in a house with Megaheroes and the whole bit. I don’t believe that Trent Phloog ever was Megaton Man or any other Megahero, either…and Stella, well…she’s pretty and all, but she’s hardly ravishing enough to have been the See-Thru Girl.”

#8: A Night at the Hospital, a Day in the Funny Papers

It was late when the doctor finally spoke to me and Pammy in the waiting room. She told us what Stella had experienced were known as false contractions; she hadn’t gone into labor yet; her membrane hadn’t even ruptured. In other words, her water hadn’t broken. It might still be another seventy-two hours before she went into real labor. The way Stella had been overdoing things lately, this came as no surprise. The stress and strain she’d put herself under to get ahead before she’d have to take time off from school had brought this on, I guessed. Not to mention Trent Phloog reverting to Megaton Man—the father of her child—again, thanks to Secret Agent Preston Percy’s booster shot. Still, the doctor said they wanted to keep her overnight, just in case.