Junior Hero

Part 4

Mom had broken the hinge on her clutch purse a few weeks ago, and Dad had taken it to the garage with the clear intent to fix it. When a week had gone by without any repairs being performed, Mom had sighed and bought another one.

This had given rise to an argument that was so old, I could fill in the respective sides without even venturing from my room.

Dad: Why did you do that, I was going to fix the old one.

Mom: I got tired of waiting for you to do it, dear.

Dad: I was getting around to it.

Mom: And while you were getting around to it, I didn't have one. And I needed one. So I got one.

Dad: But I could have fixed it, and you could have saved the money.

And so on, and so forth. In the meantime, the broken purse sat on Dad's workbench, unattended. So when I asked Mom if I could use it – in a class project, I told her – she shrugged and told me I was welcome to it.

When I saw Kate at school the next day, I pulled her aside.

"Did you do it?" she asked me, her face eager.

In response, I pulled the clutch purse from my bag. "Here, check it out."

She opened it; within, as opposed to the compartments and suchlike, was what I privately called the KD-1. It was basically the same as the D-1, with a few less bells and whistles, to bring down the weight and volume. Oh, and I'd fixed the busted hinge. Tinker skills were useful for some things.

"Cool," she breathed, brushing her fingers over the tiny screen, the equally small keypad. "Hey, there's a button missing."

I nodded. "That's the Manual button. It's used for inputting coordinates. All you have to do is hit Store and a button, and it will store the coordinates of where you are right now."

"Why don't I have a Manual button?" she asked, beginning to look a little upset.

"Because my power's given me an instinctive understanding of distances and angles," I told her. "I could, for instance, put in coordinates that would get me from here to my seat in the computer lab. But if you tried something like that, you might end up inside a wall. So the way I have it set up for you is much safer."

"Oh," she replied, mollified. "Well, it's gorgeous. Thank you."

I grinned. "Anytime. Oh, and you might want to plug it in to wall power every few days." I pointed at a small power plug, tucked into a recess. "And if any of those orange warning lights come on, don't use it till I've had a look at it. And if any of those red warning lights come on, put it down and walk away from it before you call me to have a look at it."

She blinked, taking in the tiny, neat row of orange and red warning lights. All dark right now, these were designed to report misalignments and malfunctions in the various mechanisms that made up the KD-1.

"Okay," she told me. "I can do that."

"And don't go doing anything stupid with it, okay?"

She smiled and kissed me – on the cheek, again. I supposed I'd have to work harder for the smack-on-the-lips thing. "You know me, Rob. If I do anything stupid, I think about it first."

Ironically, my being a Tinker didn't give me an particular advantage at school, even in the sciences. Just because I had designed and built such a device, that allowed me to step from one point in space to another, didn't mean I had a real grasp on the physics behind such an act. In fact, I suspected that from the viewpoint of the physics we understood, what I had built was impossible. Tinker tech, as had been remarked by many people before me, was bullshit.

If I had been doing Shop, things might have been a little different; I had a good grasp on the mechanics of assembling devices now. Of course, anything I built in Shop may well have had teleporters included in the design, because I had so many ideas now ...

D-3, the teleport mine, turned out to be relatively easy to put together. Along with D-4, the remote designed to work with it, I had no problems with assembling it. Put it down, set the coordinates using D-4 – in that order – and then the next person or thing to depress the sensor pad on top (an old rubber mat) would be teleported to wherever the coordinates sent them.

My immediate thought was that it could be used to drop criminals straight into a holding cell; of course, the glaring flaw with this was how to get said criminals to step on to the device, which was not all that inobvious.

While I was thinking about that, I was already working on D-5. I wanted to be a superhero; superheroes occasionally came into contact with the criminal element, who may well be resentful of the hero's presence. And so, I wanted to protect myself.

The basic concept of D-5 was an energy shell, not so much a force field as an event horizon. Anything touching it was teleported to the exact opposite side of me. Material items, that is. Through some quirk of tinkertech physics, energy was absorbed into the field, and was an absolute pain to dissipate; if too much built up, the entire generator could burn out. I didn't want to find out if that meant all the stored energy would explode out of the field like a bomb while I was still wearing it.

And then I hit on the idea of using the field to power the generator. Energy hitting it would literally recharge it. This was good, because material items – bullets, shotgun pellets, knives, et cetera – drained the battery when they were teleported from one side to the other. And once I followed that on with using the excess energy to power my other devices – using a quantum-entangling connection that I called the QD – I was set. So long as a certain number of foes hit me with energy attacks, I could run my devices all day.

Of course, then I also needed a way to carry the fight to the bad guys. I'm reasonably proficient with my fists, for a sixteen year old. But against a twenty-year-old Empire Eighty-Eight thug, I'd be really not so much of a challenge. Teleport, yes. Punch, not so much.

Still, I wanted to prove that I could do the superhero thing. Plus, I was strapped out on my allowance after doing the final test runs on D-5. I had a really cute idea for D-6 and D-7, based off an Earth Aleph computer game, but there was no way I could afford the energised crystals, or the materials to build them.

So I decided that I would go out as a cape, help the community. Right a few wrongs, get on the Protectorate's radar, and get recruited by them. Surely they paid the Wards; any extra cash would be a godsend here.

My weapon of choice, I decided, would be a baseball bat. At least until I could get the funding to complete D-6 through about D-13. I had filled three notebooks with closely-scribbled notes and diagrams, and was working on a fourth. I also wanted to rebuild D-2 and D-4 with the QD connectors; it would bypass jamming and ensure a perfect signal anywhere. D-3 could do with a power connection the same way. More than that, D-9 was an idea for a HUD running via a QD connection to my computer at home, with a police band radio attached, so I'd know where I was needed. All the useful gear, with none of the bulky extras needed to keep it running.

Anyway, I needed funding badly. So that's what found me out and about on that Wednesday night, wearing a makeshift costume, with D-1 on my chest, D-2 and D-4 on my left and right wrists respectively, D-3 on my hip, and D-5 clipped on to the back of my belt.

My costume was a black cloth mask, a black fake-leather jacket with reflective yellow panels, a black t-shirt with the letter Q stencilled in yellow paint, black jeans and the heaviest boots I owned. The jacket also had the letter Q stencilled on the back.

I only realised after I strapped D-1 on that it obscured part of the Q on the t-shirt. Ah well, I was still working this sort of thing out.

For now, it was good enough, or so I hoped.

And that's what had me out in the wilds of Brockton Bay on a school night.

My study of the superhero scene had indicated to me that a starting lone hero needed three things; mobility, the ability to defend himself against superior odds, and the ability to find out where he was needed.

I had the first, in spades. The second was fine, so long as D-5 held out and did its job. The third ... yeah, still working on that.

I don't know how it is for other starting superheroes, but I nearly gave up and went home on my first day. Night. Whatever. For the first two hours, nothing. I swear, the criminal element of Brockton Bay could have been playing bingo for all the action I saw.

But then I heard a cry, from an alleyway. I was getting good at typing coordinates without looking, so I jumped down to ground level, right in front of the alley. At the same time, I activated D-5.

"Hey!" I yelled, pulling out my torch and shining it into the alley. "What's going on here?"

Two men looked up guiltily from where they had a woman pressed back against the wall.

"Nothin' ta see here, junior, move along," growled one.

I dropped the torch, hit the Save button, then calculated coordinates and tapped them in. When I jumped, I was already swinging the bat.

I appeared, unable to see because of jump-dazzle, but the bat impacted behind the knees of the man I was aiming at. My eyes cleared; I swung again, this time at the other man, as the first collapsed.

My bat hit him on his upraised arm, and then there was an impact on my thigh that drove me back several feet.

The man on the ground had kicked at me, and while his shoe had been teleported off his foot, D-5 had not teleported him!

This was a factor I had not considered. Weapons, yes. Big things like people, no.

But I was in this fight now, and so I was committed. I stepped forward and swung the bat at the downed man's arm; I wanted to disable him, not kill him.

His companion was about to step forward at me when there was a hiss of escaping pressure, and he screamed as he clutched at his eyes. The woman had found something in her purse – pepper spray, maybe – and sprayed him with it. This put him out of the fight.

The other guy was still on the ground; he was scrabbling backward as we both advanced on him. He obviously wasn't a threat any more; we let him go. Scrambling to his feet, he bolted down the alleyway, leaving the other man to writhe in pain.

I escorted the woman to the mouth of the alley, and got my first good look at her. She was dressed as a streetwalker, and I belatedly realised that I may well have gotten the wrong idea about what was going on in the alley.

"Uh ... that was a robbery or something, wasn't it?" I asked, as I picked up the torch.

She nodded. "Or something. Bastards didn't want to pay."

"Ah. Okay. Well, I'm glad you're all right."

She suddenly smiled my way, the expression making her look about my age. "Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. Didn't want to lose my night's takings as well. Say, what's your name, anyway?"

I cleared my throat. "I'm calling myself Kid Quantum."

"Huh. Cute name." She paused, and I could see her looking me up and down. "Say, how old did you say you were?"

"I ..." My voice squeaked; I cleared my throat again. "I didn't. I'm, uh, eighteen."

She snorted. "My Aunt Fanny, you're eighteen." Giving me a wink and a smile, she sauntered off down the street. I stood there like a stuffed dummy, staring after her.

It was the sirens that broke the spell. Fire truck sirens.

Now, this was something I could look into.

End of Part 4