"You're not going to believe this," Helen announced to Bob, Dash, Violet, and Dr. Fitz. "Someone with Mr. Incredible's appearance and powers is wreaking havoc downtown."
"I don't believe it," said Violet in astonishment.
"I can tell you now, it's not me," said Bob.
"A clone, perhaps," the doctor theorized. "Or a robot doppelganger. Or a long-lost tvin brudder."
"Get your suits, kids," Helen commanded. "Whoever he is, we're taking him down."
"I'm coming too," said Bob, leaping to his feet.
"You have no powers," said Helen as Dash and Violet raced past her toward their bedrooms. "You'd only get in the way."
Saddened, Bob sat down and put his boulder-like chin in his hands.
"I didn't mean that, honey," said Helen apologetically. "But you still can't come." She transferred the baby into his hands. "You can watch Jack-Jack."
Bob's day was getting worse by the minute. He had lost his powers, his family was going crime-fighting without him, and to top it off, he was now saddled with the most unmasculine of chores, babysitting.
Wasting no time, Helen retrieved her super suit from the top dresser drawer, and went into the bathroom to put it on underneath her dress. Violet and Dash, also wearing costumes under their street clothes, met her as she emerged.
"Girls sure take a long time to get dressed," Dash complained.
"We don't have super speed like you do," said Helen with a patronizing smile.
"Mom, I think we should bring Chris Hamilton along," suggested Violet. "She can use her Transfixer powers on the phony Mr. Incredible."
"Not a chance," said Helen as she double-checked that her mask was stowed in her handbag, along with Dash's and Violet's.
"She could save us a lot of trouble," Violet insisted.
"The Hamiltons are supervillains," said Helen sharply. "We do not fight alongside supervillains."
As she led Dash and Violet to the station wagon, Dash proposed a scenario. "What if space aliens attack Earth, and all the superheroes in the world can't beat them? Would they team up with the supervillains?"
"That sort of thing only happens in comic books, to sell more issues," his mother replied.
As they drove away toward the center of town, Bob held the giggling Jack-Jack at arm's length. Suddenly he sensed a rank smell from the infant's diaper.
"Ugh..." He turned to Dr. Fitz, who was curiously rifling through Helen's dresses in the closet. "Uh, Theo? Since you're a doctor, maybe you could..."
"Auf Wiedersehen," the doctor blurted out, and he rushed from the house to his parked Lexus.
As Bob struggled to reconcile with his maternal side, Helen parked the station wagon in a side street and led Dash and Violet into an alley, where they pulled off their everyday clothes and masked themselves. Helen wrapped her arms around the two children, twisted her legs into springs, and bounced through one city block after another.
"Whee!" exclaimed Dash as the wind roared through his hair.
"I think I'm getting sick," groused Violet, looking down at the street dozens of yards below her.
Helen followed the trail of ruined buildings to a scene of chaos. A tall, musclebound man who resembled Mr. Incredible in every way, including the suit, was terrorizing citizens at the corner of Fifth and Main. While the helpless townspeople fled, the evil duplicate picked up a yellow Corvette and prepared to fling it in the direction of an old woman who walked with a cane. It was obvious to Helen that the oldster couldn't get out of the way in time.
"Dash! Help her!" she exclaimed, dropping her son onto the sidewalk.
"I'm a superhero, not a Boy Scout," the boy retorted.
"Go!" Helen ordered him. "Run!"
Dash charged forward at roughly 200 mph, just as the Mr. Incredible clone hurled the car at about the same speed. The fast-running boy realized that he wouldn't reach the woman in time...
...but he didn't have to, as a bird-faced man with a ten-foot wingspan swooped down and carried her from the spot, only a split second before the flying automobile crashed through the brick wall of the convention center.
Once Bald Eagle had moved the old woman a safe distance away, he confronted Elastigirl and her costumed children. "You'd better leave him to me, Mrs. P," he warned. "The Solon set this all up so he could take your powers. He can't take mine, since I don't have any."
"If you know so much," said Elastigirl sarcastically, "maybe you can tell me where that clone of my husband came from."
"It's like I said before," Bald Eagle replied. "The Philosopher's Stone can transmute matter in any way imaginable. That includes changing one person to look like another."
"Mom," Dash chimed in, "how does he know who you are?"
"Never mind," Helen responded, then turned to the winged hero again. "Edgar, we're going to help you whether you like it or not."
"Uh, Mrs. P," Bald Eagle cautioned her, "please don't use the E-word in front of the kids."
"Edgar," Violet mused. She recalled the fun times--fishing trips, bowling, video games--she had enjoyed with the son of Lucius and Honey, who had often seemed like a big brother to her. There could be no mistake--the man behind the beak was him.
"You're a superhero," she marveled. "That's so cool. What can you do besides fly?"
"I can do this," boasted Bald Eagle, who then raised a gloved hand and fired an electrical bolt at the approaching Mr. Incredible clone. The shock hurled the impostor onto his back and stunned him monentarily, but he was angrier than ever when he regained his footing.
"Get ready to fight, kids," Helen instructed.
"This is weird," Violet remarked. "I've never had to fight my own dad before."
"He's not your..." Elastigirl began to say, when the evil clone thrust his hands into the asphalt and yanked up the surface of the street underneath the four heroes.
The sudden tremor caused them to lose balance. Bald Eagle allowed his cybernetic wings to carry him aloft, Dash somersaulted a few times and sped away, Violet rolled to safety inside a force bubble, and Elastigirl stretched her body in an arc, wrapping around and binding the man who resembled her husband.
"I don't care how good-looking you are," she said sternly. "I won't stand by while you wreck my city."
"Then you will die!" bellowed the duplicate, straining mightily against the rubbery coils of Elastigirl's body.
"Oh, puh-leeze," she joked. "The real Mr. Incredible has much better dialogue than that."
Although she tried to keep a sense of humor, she felt as if her every cell was being taxed to the bursting point. If this menace were truly as strong as her husband, she would give out long before he did. She gritted her teeth and breathed heavily. Sweat poured down her temples.
She could hardly remember the exact moment when her body went limp and the evil clone threw her off like a strand of spaghetti. Violet and Dash gasped as she landed in a twisted heap on the street, and began to slowly ooze into human shape.
"Invisible Force!" cried Violet, blinking out of sight. A shimmering field appeared around the clone, who glanced around in confusion before trying to push his way through the barrier. As Violet concentrated with all her mental might, and the evil duplicate hammered against her shield with his fists, Bald Eagle soared in circles above the melee, as if probing the area for suspicious individuals.
Mere seconds later, Violet abruptly became visible and collapsed to her knees, exhausted. The field around the Mr. Incredible clone faded, and he trudged toward the girl with murder in his eyes. Only Dash stood in his way.
"Sonic Boom!" he shouted. By the time the battle cry left his mouth, he had already punched the advancing fiend in the leg about seventy times--but in vain. The evil duplicate kept closing the distance between himself and the fallen Violet, seeming to regard Dash as an annoying gnat. The boy flailed desperately, but despite his efforts, the hulking clone raised a ham-sized fist and launched it downward...
...just as Violet vanished, snatched away by the long arm of the revived Elastigirl.
Dash fled to his mother's side. The three Incredibles assumed combat poses, doing their best to conceal their unbelievable fatigue. Not one of them knew how to topple the villain, who had easily withstood their full-strength onslaught.
"He's as strong as Dad," Dash observed. "He's, like, Mr. Incred-Evil."
"Mom, I told you we should've gotten Chris to help us," Violet whined.
As the newly dubbed Mr. Incred-Evil snarled and ripped a traffic signal pole out of the ground, Elastigirl came to realize that she was running out of options.
"Dash, run to the Hamiltons and tell them we need help," she ordered. "Violet, disappear. I'll keep him busy until..."
"Wait!" called a voice that Helen had hoped never to hear again.
Dash stopped in mid-stride. All eyes, including the clone's, turned toward the newcomer, a tall, lanky, blond woman with an oval-shaped face. Her silver-gray spandex costume complimented her Rubenesque figure. Over her forehead and gem-like eyes she wore a pink Mardi Gras mask with a sapphire in the center.
The woman's disproportionately large hips seemed to wobble back and forth as she strolled toward the heroes, smiling warmly. "Stand aside," she instructed them. "He's too much for you...and so am I."
"Mirage," growled Helen with a malicious glare.
"Indeed," said the slinky blonde. "You're about to learn how I got that name, as well as why I don't use my powers very often. Now stand back."
Elastigirl only folded her arms and scowled. She wasn't moving, and neither were her children.
Impatient with the introduction, Mr. Incred-Evil started to swing the signal pole about, breaking windows and knocking over other poles in the process. Mirage peered at the hulking villain, who suddenly became motionless and dropped the pole with a mighty thud.
Helen, Dash, and Violet couldn't believe what happened next. To Helen, it appeared that zombies of her husband were crawling out of the cracks in the asphalt and staggering toward her. To Dash, it seemed that all the girls in his fifth-grade class were frantically pawing him, trying to kiss him, green acid dripping from their mouths. Violet's vision was even more disturbing--her skin was dissolving and falling from her arms, exposing blood and tissue.
All three of them screamed in terror, and the nightmares suddenly ended. The familiar, though damaged, environs of downtown Metroville reappeared around them. Their hearts pounded like woodpeckers. They struggled for breath. Mirage stood before them, still clad in her spandex suit and mask, staring at them condescendingly. In the street behind her Mr. Incred-Evil lay in a fetal position, his body trembling, his face blank as if semi-catatonic from fear.
"Wh-what was that?" Elastigirl choked out.
"I did warn you," said Mirage with a shrug. "With my powers of sensory illusion, I can make people experience intense pleasure--or intense horror."
Dash, clutching his stomach, sped away to an alley. Helen and Violet heard retching sounds in the distance, and the boy reappeared, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
"That was like...Halloween on steroids," remarked the dazed Violet.
"I'm sorry you had to go through that," Mirage went on. "I have a hard time focusing my powers on one person. Usually everyone around me is affected to one degree or another." She glanced over at the still-prostrate Mr. Incred-Evil. "You're lucky you didn't end up like him."
"Whose side are you on?" Elastigirl demanded to know.
"Side?" Mirage chuckled. "I'm on no one's side but my own. But when I saw your hubby tearing down all that magnificent architecture..."
"He's not my hubby," Helen interrupted.
"Really?" said Mirage eagerly. "He divorced you? About time, I say."
As the incensed Elastigirl wrapped her plastic fingers around Mirage's throat, several police officers arrived and placed restraints of reinforced steel around the wrists and ankles of the whimpering Mr. Incred-Evil. Many of the townspeople, seeing that the menace had been neutralized, started to throng Mirage and the three Incredibles. Bald Eagle, never one to seek publicity, watched events unfold from a building ledge.
"I can't believe Mr. Incredible would turn against us like that," marveled a middle-aged man.
"I don't know what you did to him," a woman commended Mirage, "but it was impressive."
"What are your plans, now that your husband has turned to evil?" a curious man inquired of Elastigirl.
"I'm Calvin Turnmire, billionaire philanthropist," said a tall, bearded old man wearing a top hat and a Victorian suit. "It always makes me happy to see a new superhero hit the streets. Can I take a group picture of you?"
As the old man reached into his jacket and drew out an object, Bald Eagle sprang into action. Plunging toward the crowd below, he tackled the man just as he was raising a digital camera to his eye. The people in the crowd screamed and dispersed.
With one hand Bald Eagle pressed the unresisting old man against the asphalt, and with the other he snatched up the camera, which the man had dropped. While the masked vigilante probed the camera for signs of hidden weapons, a flexible arm coiled around his wings and torso, and lifted him above the ground. He lost his grip on the camera, revolved in midair, and found himself face to face with an offended Elastigirl.
"I...told you...to leave...Mr. Turnmire...alone," she snarled.
The surrounding citizens witnessed with alarm as the old man grabbed his chest and wheezed. "Help me...my heart..."
Bald Eagle was about to open his mouth and urge his captor to open the camera and look inside, when the magnitude of The Solon's treachery dawned upon him.
"Don't let him go, Elastigirl," called a woman who had knelt down with several others to aid the fallen man. "He may wear a costume, but he's no hero."
A number of police officers joined the crowd as Elastigirl plucked off Bald Eagle's mask and disarmed him of his gloves and belt. "This is what cousin Edgar has been reduced to, kids," she told Violet and Dash. "Attacking old men in the street." Her children gaped in disbelief.
Astonished and curious, Mirage bent over to pick up the camera. The case had cracked open, so she peeked inside. Wires, circuit boards, lenses, a battery compartment--nothing unusual.
Elastigirl approached the blonde after she had handed Bald Eagle and his costume components over to police custody. "I'll cut you some slack, since you helped us before," she offered. "I know some people who can help you control your powers better. Join us for dinner tomorrow, and we'll talk."
"I'd love to," said Mirage cheerfully.
Grabbing her mother's hand, Violet pulled her aside and gave her a serious look. "You can't invite her to dinner. She'll learn our secret identities."
"She already knows," Helen told her. "I don't like this either, Vi. But with Mr. Incredible out of action, the forces of good need all the help they can find."
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A/N: Okay, I brought Mirage into the story. Now will you write some reviews?