“I…” She stopped, “I don’t know. After everything, I have an excuse, but I know I can’t really do that. What I really want is to talk to him. After they removed him from doing anything except for a couple of combat classes one year, I never got to talk to him about everything he’d done. He nearly got me expelled from Stapledon after I was harassed by children of his friends. I never got to hear him say why he thought that was right.”
Nodding along as she spoke, Vaughn asked, “Are you looking for an apology?”
Tara shook her head, the muscles around her mouth tight. “I know better. I’ve even thought it through… dispassionately. I know it’s a waste of time. I’m not going to get anything out of him, but I still want to go.” Continue reading Memories: Part 9→
Tara paused, her expression unreadable, “But I don’t think it’s as easy as I’d guess from what we saw. From what I’ve read about the Dominators, they need more time than that to make what they’re doing permanent. Also, Bullet knew and liked the person who threw the dart and he wasn’t surprised to see her.”
“Her?” Vaughn’s smile widened, “People tell me I see women everywhere, but there was nothing in that voice that said woman to me. Well, it didn’t say ‘man’ either. It was kind of fuzzy.” Continue reading Memories: Part 8→
Over the team radio channel, Bullet muttered, “Give me the okay and I’ll turn the freak into Swiss cheese.”
Len jumped over a pile of snow, landing less than ten feet behind Master Martian. “You know the policy and you know why.”
In October of 1954, the Feds came to an unofficial agreement with the superheroes of the period, agreeing to leave them alone as long as the body count didn’t get too high. My grandfather had told me about the negotiations. As the highest-profile team of the day, the Heroes’ League had to be there. Continue reading Memories: Part 7→
Cassie caught my eye and grinned, “And I’d gotten so used to Nick having the ‘normal’ family.”
I raised my eyebrow, “Normal? Rachel’s currently flying around in space without a spacesuit. Plus, my grandparents were not normal at all at least on one side.”
“Yeah,” Cassie said, “but Daniel’s whole family is full of telepaths. Jaclyn’s older brothers have the same powers she does. Vaughn’s uncle was basically Lex Luthor and his grandfather was Red Lightning—“
Vaughn talked over her, “And Haley’s family owns a lot of pizza places. Some of them offer anchovies. Definite supervillain material there.” Continue reading Memories: Part 6→
The metallic thunk of something being placed on the stove came over the line. “How interesting is Anastasia? Is this the cousin that babysat us once?”
The trouble with old friends is that they might remember any random piece of your past. On the other hand, he’d at least be able to recognize her in Uncle Steve’s mind, “Yes. She’s the one who watched us um… eleven years ago or something? I’m pretty sure we were ten. Anyway, she might be very interesting. She’s the one who connected Uncle Steve with Armory.”
My jaw dropped as I thought about how close we’d been to each other. He’d been gone by the time I’d fought with the Grey Giant, but he’d have been working when Cassie, Daniel, and I went exploring during the day.
Grandpa stared out at the water, not saying anything else.
“What precautions?” I asked.
Turning back to me, he said, “I don’t know. The regular ones they took with all of their families, but more than that on the advice of Gunther. He wasn’t there, but Joe mentioned his name.”
We talked longer than that, but he didn’t have anything more to add about the block, Grandpa Vander Sloot, or anything about the League. We talked about Grandma who’d taken the car into town to do grocery shopping. She didn’t know that Grandpa Vander Sloot was the Rocket or that I’d be flying in this morning. Grandpa Klein had chosen our meeting time to make sure she’d continue to remain ignorant. Continue reading Memories: Part 3→
I gave a half-smile, “Sorry. There’s too much going on right now. In some ways, it’s mostly in my head because none of it’s hit the point where people are trying to kill me. I’m just worried it might hit that point sooner rather than later.”
He frowned, looking down and drawing a breath, “I never wanted this life for you, and if it weren’t your best chance to survive, I doubt Joe would have wanted it for you either. If you think about how our society’s decided to handle superheroes, it’s not the best thing we could have done. I understand why we’ve done it, but I don’t think it’s good either for the people doing it or for society as a whole. Continue reading Memories: Part 2→
If you asked a random person on planet Earth what a superhero did all day, the answer you’d get is something like “beating up criminals.” If you asked me or anyone else in the business, it would be some combination of training, your day job or your cover, beating up criminals, and checking out leads on whatever case you were working on. Of all of those, beating up criminals was the least likely to actually take place.
In my particular case, the list would also include working on new technology since I could now, for the first time in my life, do that for hours at a time if I wanted to. Continue reading Memories: Part 1→
Already suspecting the answer, I asked, “Did he use a word more precise than ‘it’?”
Daniel’s laugh had a hint of weariness, “No, but if I had to guess, he said something about a device that needed to be destroyed last time, and when we asked him if he meant the power impregnator he didn’t respond.”
I thought back to the afternoon. Even besides the tablet, we had two storage rooms worth of Abominator devices. I could think of half a dozen devices that might be good candidates for destruction and I’d only opened one of the two rooms. Plus, and I wasn’t going to mention this outside of HQ, we had a whole lower level below the main level of HQ that Grandpa set up to be a fallout shelter and base for rebuilding civilization in case of nuclear war. Continue reading Never Go Home: Part 14→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)
