Charlotte Powers 1: Power Down (2 page)

Except it's actually gotten really late while I've been writing all this, so maybe I'll just go to sleep now and talk to them tomorrow. Even Greatest Superheroes need their rest, right?

Tomorrow, my story begins!

xx48.10.27 / 10:22 / Wednesday

Ugh. Terrible morning. I woke up bright and early and caught Mum and Dad in the kitchen (Daniel was, as usual, in his workshop 'tinkering'). Mum was making pancakes and Dad was making fruit smoothies, apparently it's mango season again (we've had at least five this year, the climate here is mental).

"Lotte!" he said (he calls me Lotte). "Do you want a smoothie? It's mango season again! Botler brought in a whole clutch of them this morning."

Botler is our robot butler. He's pretty much just a big floaty tin can with bendy stretchy arms but he can do a lot of different stuff, including going out into the jungle to get fresh fruit.

"No!" I said. "I don't want a smoothie, I want to talk about my future!"

Well actually I DID have a smoothie, two in fact, and some pancakes, but after that I definitely started talking about my plans and stuff straight away. After I'd finished explaining very calmly and maturely about my intentions and my hopes and my dreams, they did this Mum-Dad glance thing I've learnt to dread and then they looked at me again.

"Charlotte," said Mum (she calls me Charlotte), "I know you think you're ready, and in fact your dad and I agree. You're twice as capable as we were when we first began adventuring."

I didn't bother interrupting. I knew EXACTLY where this was going. Dad took over from Mum:

"It's not really about
you
at all," he said. "It isn't that you're not ready for the world, it's that—"

"—the world isn't ready for me," I finished for him. I've heard this before, QUITE a few times.

"Heroes are born from necessity," Dad was saying now, while I (stupid honesty curse) sulked a bit. "Not from choice."

"No!" I said. "That's wrong, that's SO wrong, it's ALWAYS a choice. Everything you've taught me about being a hero has that at its core, that to be a hero, to REALLY be a hero, you have to CHOOSE to do the right thing. How can you say that that's not how it works?"

"Because before you choose to do the right thing," Mum said, "you have to know what the right thing
is
."

"And at this time," Dad took over again (I swear they rehearsed this), "the right thing is 'giving people the chance to sort out their own problems'."

"They've had FIFTEEN YEARS to sort out their problems," I said, "and things are just getting WORSE!"

"But their problems aren't the sorts of things we should involve ourselves with," said Dad. "They're
ordinary
problems. It's no longer a world of superheroes and supervillains, Lotte. It's a world of ordinary heroes and ordinary villains. What have I always told you? What have I always said about the balance of things?"

"That heroes will rise to defeat villains," I muttered. "But—"

"Heroes rise to fight villains," Dad said, kind of redundantly. "And superheroes rise to fight supervillains. But a superhero in a world without supervillains? The end result of that wouldn't be pretty."

"But what if there ARE supervillains out there?" I said. "Maybe disguising themselves!"

"There's an odd thing about supervillains," Mum said, "which is that they can't resist showing off. Maybe it's something to do with their powers, but they don't go for subtle, long-term plans. They love the showy, the ostentatious, the over-the-top—they're attracted to it like moths to a flame."

"But you can't just say that there are NO supervillains!" I protested. "We're still here, aren't we? And there are others, I know you still talk to Motoplasm and Lightning White and Gaia and probably lots more of your friends even if you NEVER invite them to visit—and you go and meet them, don't try to deny it, it's TOTALLY obvious what you're doing, it's as obvious as when Dad's going to the fridge to get an ice cream, he's always like 'this'."

I did my best impression of Dad's 'sneaky' walking. Mum laughed and Dad looked kind of sheepish.

"It's easier for us to go to them than it is for them to come to us," Mum said. "And we WILL take you to meet them, once—"

"That's not what this is about," I said. "Don't try to change the subject!"

"The point is," Dad said, after clearing his throat, "that it's possible old supervillains will return, or that new supervillains will appear, or some other great threat will arise. Why do you think we spend so much time monitoring the world? We're looking for signs of supervillain activity."

"I KNOW that," I said.

"And when we find those signs," Mum said, kind of ignoring me, kind of rudely, "we investigate. Subtly and without drawing attention to ourselves."

"So you're saying that I couldn't be subtle," I said. "That I couldn't even INVESTIGATE without drawing attention to myself."

"No, that's not what we're saying," said Dad. "What we're saying is that until there DOES arise a new wave of supervillains, we're going to just have to be patient."

"I'm fifteen and a half! I don't have TIME to be patient!" I said. "Is that what superheroes did back when you and Mum were adventuring? Just waited for something to happen and then reacted to it? No! You went out LOOKING for trouble and you stopped it BEFORE it could happen!"

Mum and Dad just looked at me, both wearing their special 'Charlotte is getting herself worked up' expressions.

"What have I been training for?" I asked them. "My whole life I've worked as hard as I could to be the best superhero possible, I've listened to all your stories and lessons and I'm ready, I'm READY, I'm ready NOW! And isn't it BETTER to start small? Isn't it better to take on non-supers to begin with? Dad, YOU started out cleaning up your neighbourhood, there weren't any supervillains there, right? Mum, when you started supervillains didn't even EXIST, there were just superheroes and bad guys, REGULAR bad guys, you stopped men treating women badly, you made it safe for everyone in your city—"

"All right, Charlotte, that's enough for now," Mum said. "It was—"

"—a simpler time back then, you say that SO OFTEN but is it SO complicated now? Like this gang terrorising Powerstone City, mugging people and dealing drugs and stealing cars, making people feel like they're not safe even in their own homes, in their own city—but what if I was there? What if I could stand up to them? What if the next time those idiotic psychos tried to mug an innocent person, I was there to stop them? How can THAT be anything BUT right? How is that anything but a simple choice: to stand up to these thugs and bullies or just let them walk all over everyone—"

"That choice isn't yours to make," said Dad. "You're not the one they're bullying—"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" I said. (Actually it was more of a scream, I was just feeling so frustrated and angry, but it's hard to write down how a scream sounded, I guess it was something like 'GIIIIIIIYA!'.) "It doesn't matter who they're bullying, it doesn't matter who the victim is, it doesn't matter if they're right in front of me or a million miles away, I'm a hero! I'm a SUPERHERO! Where there is wrong, I WILL STOP IT! When an innocent person suffers, I WILL FIGHT FOR THEM!"

"For the whole world?" Dad asked.

"YES!" I said. "That's what superheroes do, isn't it? They save the world! It doesn't matter that there isn't some supervillain planning to drill through to the earth's core or drain the oceans or turn kittens into mutant monsters, the world is drowning under NORMAL problems and it needs SOMEONE TO SAVE IT! WHY SHOULDN'T IT BE ME?"

I kind of stormed out after that, and came here to the training room to beat up a couple of dozen Virtual Bad Guys and write stuff down. One good thing about my curse is that my memory's pretty much perfect, at least for recent stuff. (At least I assume it's because of my curse, it could just be another super power EXCEPT Mum also has it, and she says (and Dad confirms) that before she was cursed her memory wasn't that great at all.)

Anyway, I'm going to beat up some more VBGs now to try to cool down some more. It seems so pointless, though. Why am I beating up VIRTUAL bad guys when the world is FULL of ACTUAL bad guys in DESPERATE need of a beating?

Sigh.

Maybe I'll go through Course #6, it's one of my favourites, there's this great bit where three guys all come at you at once and if you're awesome about it you can get two of them to bump into each other and trip up the third, and then right after that there's like ten bad guys in a row coming down a long corridor, I can usually take them all out without slowing down or getting hit at all, just bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam, it always looks awesome in the replay. Then after that—

Hang on, Daniel's knocking on the door (I kind of locked myself in). If I don't let him in he'll just phase through the wall anyway.

...

Okay, well THAT was kind of weird. After I opened the door Daniel kind of drifted into the room in that lazy can't-be-bothered way of his, and he sat down on one of the VBGs I beat up before (I always set the simulator to keep them around after I take them out, it's much more satisfying than just having them blip out). Then he just looked at me.

"Did Dad send you?" I demanded. "Did he send you to
talk
to me?"

"Hey Curls," he said, as if I hadn't said anything (he calls me Curls, it's just his utterly weird sense of humour, because my hair is pretty much totally straight. He's the one with curls, he got Dad's curly brown hair, but to him it's funny if—you know what, I can't even be bothered explaining this). "Heard you guys fighting before, thought I should see if anything interesting was happening. What was it about this time? You planning another jungle expedition?"

"Ugh, no, don't bring that up." I'm not even allowed out into the jungle. It's not for MY safety, it's just that a lot of the animals out there are endangered and Mum and Dad worry that I'd accidentally make some rare species extinct by defending myself. I always TELL them that I'd just phase-out and run away if I got attacked, but nooooooo apparently I wouldn't be able to control myself and I'd punch an albino jaguar to death as soon as I saw one.

"So what then?" Daniel asked.

"Just their usual totally ridiculous and unfair stubbornness," I said. "Actually maybe you can help, how can I force them to let me go adventuring?"

"Is that what all the shouting was about?" he said. "I don't get why you even WANT to go out there, the world sucks."

"How do you know? You weren't even old enough to talk when Mum and Dad came here—"

"Yeah, but I watch the news, there's nothing out there that's as good as what we've got here—"

"And that's the point," I interrupted, getting worked up again. "You're right, the world DOES suck, and somebody needs to do something about that."

Daniel laughed, but not really
at
me. "And that's gonna be you, huh?"

"I don't see anyone else stepping up!" I said. Daniel laughed again.

"And where are you gonna start?" he asked. "The world's a big place, it's got a lot of problems. You're just one itty-bitty girl."

"I am NOT itty-bitty!"

It's true, I'm not! I mean, it's not like I'm TALL but I'm definitely not short either and I train every single day, my build is definitely 'athletic'. I was about to tell Daniel this when he kind of did it for me:

"I meant in a metaphorical sense. How many bad guys are there out there, Curls? Millions? Mathematically, there's no way you could even FIGHT them all, not without a couple of hundred years to do it in."

Actually, now that I've got Opal out again maybe I'll do those calculations. Let's say it takes me fifteen minutes to beat up each bad guy, that's abstracting a little to take into account the time it'll take to find them and work out that they're bad but also considering the fact that bad guys tend to clump, so to beat up a million bad guys would take fifteen million minutes, or a quarter of a million hours, or around twenty-thousand days (taking into account twelve hours a day for eating and sleeping and such), or around fifty-seven years HAH Mr Daniel Science King, your math is OFF by a factor of DECADES.

"Besides, we're not exactly
near
anything," he said. "It's not as simple as just popping out to do a bit of heroing then coming home for tea and crumpets."

"I'm sure there must be a city somewhere near," I said. "It's not like we're just in the middle of nowhere."

Daniel gave me a really weird look. "You mean you don't know where we are?" he said. "I thought you would've figured that out ages ago."

I hate it when he does that, tells me I should already know something, just TELL me!

But he didn't. "Taken a look at the sky lately?" is all he'd say. You can't see the sky from inside the training room, but it looked pretty normal to me this morning—nice and clear and blue and pretty. What's THAT supposed to tell me? I bet he's done some brainy calculations based on the relative position of the sun or something, that'd just be typical.

Anyway. After that he just kind of mumbled something about his 'project' and phased out through the wall. Which was pretty weird, I mean he hardly ever specifically comes to talk to me and when he does it's always with a 'reason', I mean he never just chats and usually he stays out of my Disagreements with M & D, I mean RIGHT out. At times he is infuriatingly neutral.

So I think I'm going to stop writing now, #6 is all primed and ready to go and I have some VBGs to beat up—because OBVIOUSLY real bad guys are too 'complicated' for me.

xx48.10.28 / 13:11 / Thursday

My 'word of the day' this morning was 'compromise', which turned out to be pretty appropriate. After yesterday's shouting match I pretty much avoided Mum and Dad for the rest of the day, but they got Botler to ambush me outside my room this morning and he 'escorted' me to the lounge. Mum and Dad and Daniel were all there, so I knew it was serious. Dad gave a big speech about the 'old ways' and the 'new ways', it was really long and he repeated himself a bunch so I'm not going to bother writing it down here. Towards the end it kind of got interesting, though:

"You're right, Lotte," he said (as you might expect, this got my attention). "It's not good for a bright, charming fifteen year-old to be locked away with just her family. Keeping you cooped up here is unfair both to you and to the world."

"So I CAN go adventuring?" I said. Of course, the answer was 'no'. But for a moment I let myself get excited. Anyway, then Mum said:

"The world isn't ready for Charlotte Powers the superhero. But it might be ready for Charlotte Powers the girl."

Daniel kind of snorted at that, but I ignored him.

"Could you be a bit more specific?" I asked. "I'm not sure how excited I should be getting."

"Do you remember Uncle?" Dad asked me. "He used to visit when you were smaller—"

"Of course I remember," I said, "he's your mentor! Oh! Is he going to be MY mentor too? To teach and guide the next generation of heroes—"

"He lives in a town called Green Grove," Dad said. "There's a school there called Green Grove Academy, by all accounts a nice, normal school filled with nice, normal students. The town's in the mountains, isolated, quiet, not too big and not too small—"

"Don't
quite
understand what you're getting at here," I said.

"The world is a complicated place," Mum said. "Very different to the one we adventured in. Things were simpler back then, even in the rather convoluted Plastic Age. It's not enough these days to just have a Secret Identity. You're going to need a Public Identity as well."

"Aha," I said. "So I go to this school, establish a Public Identity, and then when evil appears I'll don my Secret Identity and rise up to fight it!"

"Something like that," said Dad. "In any case it'll be a good opportunity for you to meet people your own age, make friends—to be ordinary for a while."

Ordinary. It doesn't sound SO great, but to be honest I'll take anything. Besides, even a friendly-sounding town like Green Grove is BOUND to have a seamy underbelly full of shady characters. I'm sure that even with just a little investigation I'll find PLENTY to occupy myself with!

Anyway, then it was Daniel's turn to speak:

"You know I've been working on phase-shift technology," he began, but after that I was pretty much lost while he went on about 'unfamiliar quantities' and 'dark matter' and 'protean markers'. From experience I've learnt to just let him talk when he gets into one of these states of technobabble, it's impossible to stop him or even interrupt and eventually he gets to the point—which in this case was pretty cool.

"You built a teleporter?" I asked, still not
quite
sure. It turned out that I was right, though, he DID build a teleporter.

"That's how you'll get to Green Grove," Dad said.

"Couldn't I just fly there in Mum's invisible jet?" I asked. They all laughed. "What?"

"That was a joke, stupid," Daniel said. "Mum doesn't have an invisible jet."

I am always the last to find out these things. It's not like I'm even allowed in the hangar, it's in the Outer Base which is Very Forbidden. The security is
insane
, I bet even Daniel couldn't crack it.

"Then how do you guys go visit people?" I asked. "What DO you have, if not an invisible jet?"

"Green Grove is quite a distance away," Dad said, avoiding my question (except I just now noticed this so it's kind of too late to go back and ask him again now). "Teleportation would be the easiest way to get you there."

"It's not really 'easy', Dad," Daniel said. "It's taken me months to get it even to this stage."

"You know what I mean," said Dad. "In terms of practicality—"

"What do you mean 'this stage'?" I asked. Hey, if I'm going to be teleported I want ALL the information!

"Right now it only works on living things if they're phase-shifted," Daniel said. "I've heard that the military has teleporters that work on anyone, but I think their research is progressing according to different principles than mine—"

And another couple of minutes of incomprehensible babbling followed, thankfully interrupted by Mum saying:

"Anyway, why don't we have a look at it?"

So we all went to Daniel's messy cluttered kind of scary workshop and he showed us all the teleporter. It wasn't that impressive, actually, just like a glass tube with all these bundles of wires going to a big computer nearby.

"I can only
half
phase-shift," I pointed out. "What if it just
half
teleports me? I don't want half my body in Green Grove and the other half left here!"

"That couldn't happen," said Daniel. "It'd actually bisect you in a much more interesting way, your out-of-phase energy would be sent to the destination and your in-phase energy would remain here, to put it poetically your 'phase shadow' would be ripped from your body—"

"Ahem," said Mum, pointedly.

"But that won't happen," Daniel said, smoothly. "Actually, it CAN'T happen, not with all the safety protocols I've put in place—"

And here he went off for about ten minutes about physics and stuff, I spent most of the time playing with his little robot mouse thing, Arthur MBE. It's getting pretty smart now, you can trace a path with your finger and it'll follow it. Maybe that doesn't sound very impressive considering all the AIs and SIs and ALs running around the place these days, but Daniel says Arthur is a NEW kind of artificial life, a true 'learner'. When he first invented the little guy all Arthur did was sit there watching you, seeing his intelligence 'grow' has been pretty interesting.

"We can do a test run right now, if you want," Daniel said, once I could understand him again. "It's all warmed up and ready to go."

I admit I was a little hesitant, but Daniel teleported himself first—you have to go out-of-phase to do it, so for him it was like he disappeared and then opened the door and walked back into the workshop, pretty cool actually.

Then it was my turn.

I shouldn't have eaten before doing it, but then Daniel should have WARNED me not to eat before doing it. Aside from throwing up all over his death ray (it never worked anyway, apparently they never do) being teleported was kind of fun, I went out-of-phase then I got kind of all warm and fuzzy and tingly, then I was standing on the other side of the workshop. I actually reappeared halfway through the floor, but because I was still out-of-phase that wasn't such a big problem, I just pulled myself out. That was after I threw up, of course. Fortunately being out-of-phase meant that I didn't get any on myself, phase-shifting works as a kind of field around your body so anything close (like clothes) shifts with you (up to five layers if they're not too thick, Daniel and I did an experiment once, that sixth coat falls right off), but if you spit or throw up or something then that leaves the phase-field and becomes in-phase again.

Anyway, enough about me throwing up, Daniel's teleporter works and that's the important thing. We're having a going-away party tonight and then tomorrow morning I'm off! Off to adventure! Well, ordinariness actually, but I'm SURE I'll find SOME kind of adventure out there in the big wide world. Even if I have to hide my powers and pretend to be normal it's going to be SO much fun.

I can't wait!