It was not true that Megamind had no friends in high school. He had no respectable friends. Those who chose to associate with him came from one of two categories. The first was members of the extended families of the prisoners who had raised him. They accepted him as part of the criminal community. The other was students at the center of a three-circle Venn diagram, all three circles being defined by what they were not. The circles were:
1. Students who were something other than standard humans
2. Students who had not attended the Li'l Gifted School. (None of those students were standard humans, but Wayne Scott had well and truly poisoned that well. Even those who no longer counted themselves among the Scott boy's soft-headed groupies still wanted nothing to do with Megamind.)
3. Students who, for one reason or another, had little or nothing in the way of respectable prospects.
Lu (short for Lucino) Desutero fell neatly in the center of that Venn diagram. His eyes were a dark greenish brown with golden centers and rectangular pupils like a goat's. His tongue was longer than normal and slightly pointed. He had a mass of curly hair that made the silhouette of his head look even larger than Megamind's. Those curls were so frequently dyed, color-stripped, and re-dyed that no one remembered any longer what its natural color was. When he was fourteen he began to wear little bows or artificial flowers in it, always pinned onto the same two spots high on the sides, seemingly floating on the surface of the mass. Other than that, his presentation was mostly androgynous and involved the same few items of clothing over and over.
He had two tiny superpower. The better known was that he could produce a small flame at the tip of either index finger. The other, which he was very careful to conceal from all but those he trusted most, was what he called "Jedi mind tricks"; he could put suggestions in the minds of susceptible individuals. His favorite way of messing with the authorities was disruptive pranks that were not actually against the rules and therefore had no specified punishment. His pranks often inspired the writing of new rules, for instance to specify that shoes must be worn on the feet and to ban unauthorized hologram projectors. For the technical aspects of these pranks, Megamind was delighted to help out.
He seemed to have a growth spurt every year. He and Megamind had started middle school the same height, but by the time he dropped out, on his 16th birthday, the top of the blue head didn't quite come up to his collarbone. He said his cousin was setting up as a supervillain under the name Hot Flash and he was going to join up as one of her henchmen. A few weeks later, Megamind heard through the criminal grapevine that Lu had left Hot Flash's service due to personal differences (meaning that Lu was too headstrong to take orders) and seemed to vanish from the city.
He was definitely not thinking about Lu three years later, when he was spending a night in the county jail pending arraignment the next morning. Lying awake during the redeye shift, he was brought back from mentally designing his next attack on the city by a scent he recognized as that of a sleep-inducing gas that affected humans but not him. He decided to fake sleep, relaxing his limbs and lowering his eyelids to nearly shut, leaving just a slit through which he could tell if someone came into his cell.
Someone did. Five someones, in fact, all muffled in long black hooded robes and off-the-shelf gas masks. He waited until four of them had picked him up and carried him out of the jailhouse and into the parking lot. Then he started squirming, twisting, kicking, punching, and generally showing off the unarmed combat skills his prison uncles had taught him. If they hadn't had tasers, he might have gotten away.
They bound his wrists and ankles and put a canvas bag over his head (a technique he made a mental note of in case he ever wanted to kidnap someone), then laid him in the rear cargo compartment of some sort of motor vehicle. During the ride, his mind went back and forth between speculating on how he might use his senses of hearing and smell to detect one of his abductors precisely enough to land a good hard kick with his bound legs (assuming that he'd recovered from being tased by then) and speculating about who these people were and why they had gone to all this trouble to snatch him in particular.
When the engine stopped, it was a long moment before he heard the compartment open. His attempt at a kick completely failed, and then he was tased again. Two pairs of hands grasped each of his limbs, which meant at least three more team members had joined the five who originally took him. He was carried from an open, echoey space to a more confined one, carpeted to judge by the sudden quietness of the footsteps, down a flight of stairs without carpeting and then another, then across several feel of level, uncarpeted floor. Then he was lowered onto a hard surface and tased again. His limbs were unbound and he was positioned on his back with a round closet bar or pipe under his neck. His arms were spread wide and his wrists cuffed to what felt like further points along the pipe. His legs were likewise unbound and shackled by the ankles to rigid points so that he was held, unable to move, in a spread-eagle position. They tased him once more and then they pulled the bag off his head.
At first, looking up, he saw joists, ductwork, and wiring attached to what looked like a concrete subfloor. Off on the far edge of his vision, there was a lit fluorescent ceiling lamp of the plain utilitarian kind usually used in warehouses. He'd half expected vivisection or torture, but no one came near him. Nor did anyone speak. He heard footsteps and a sound that it took him a while to recognized, it was so unexpected: the sound of someone marking concrete with chalk or charcoal.
Then as he became able to move again, he turned his head and looked around. He saw a big, empty room with concrete walls and floor. The pipes he was bound to were part of a framework laid on the floor. There were thirteen robed figures, twelve of them engaged in drawing with charcoal on the floor. The one that wasn't drawing was standing next to a table in one corner, draped in black, crowded with candles in candlesticks. He realized that the charcoal drawings formed a large circle. He and the framework of pipes that imprisoned him were inside that circle, taking up about half. The other half was left empty.
Gradually, in ones and twos, the marking figures ceased their work and stood back. When the last one stopped, the one by the table distributed candles in candlesticks, one to each. In unison they began to chant in a language he wasn't familiar with. The vocal range was from basso profundo to tenor with a single mezzo soprano. As each lit their candle and placed it just outside the circle, among the other markings, he finally caught onto his situation. This was a demon summoning. He was being sacrificed to it, possibly in exchange for some boon. He cleared his throat.
"You know," he said, "anything this demon can get you, I can probably get you as well. Technology can do amazing things." He was ignored. A dark cloud seemed to be forming in the unoccupied half of the circle. He fell silent, fascinated and speculating that, if the cultists weren't listening to him, maybe the demon would. He watched the smoke coalesce into the shape of a horned humanoid, maybe eight feet tall, also robed in black. At the moment it seemed to become fully solid, the chanting fell silent. He was about to speak, but the demon spoke first.
"Hey Megamind! Haven't seen you in forever!" The voice was deeper and a bit hoarse, but the timbre and accent were unmistakeable.
"Lu?!"
"Hyeah." The huge figure waved a finger and Megamind's bonds released. "Hey, could you, like, roll over and wipe out part of the circle?"
"Sure." Megamind wasn't at all sure this was wise, but he was unarmed and the demon seemed entirely capable of killing him. He complied, rolling over and brushing away the nearest bit of it with one hand.
As soon as there was a gap, the thirteen ritualists fled. The candles went out and the fluorescent light went on. When he turned back, the demon was standing next to him, offering him a hand up. Up close and in bright light, the face he could see was definitely Lu's but older, the last of the baby fat gone, the features sharper and more adult.
"Did you set this whole thing up?" He asked as he rose to his feet.
"Yeah. Like, I figured out Pandemonium sucks about a month after I got there, but it took me all this time to get into that chick's Ouija board, then teach her enough magic to start the cult, then get her to recruit the twelve followers, then teach them the ritual and the formula for the knock-out gas, then wait for you to be in a place you could be snatched from. But it was totally worth it. Man, it's good to be back." Lu started moving toward the stairs. Megamind flanked him.
"Me? Why me?" They began to climb.
"Because you have, like, no magical susceptibility. A human couldn't have wiped away that charcoal. Even Metro Dude - is he still Metro Dude?"
"Metro Mahn now. Official Defender."
"Well, that comes with some magical bells and whistles, so maybe now he could have done it. But how would they snatch him? No, it had to be you."
"Wait. So you're implying that you tried magic on me when we were in shool together?"
"Every fucking kid who had magic tried it on you. None of it worked. You didn't even seem to fucking notice. Isolda Brazdeikis could do some amazing illusions, but you walked right past or sometimes right through 'em. It was like you didn't notice."
"I didn't. This is the first I knew that illusions were happening, although it does explain certain instances of odd human behavior."
"Hehe. Yeah, that must have seemed weird."
"So Pandemonium. Place of All Demons. Why didn't it suit you?"
"I guess I got too adapted to this plane. Also, Pandemonium is very hierarchical. Like, the old guys rule. If you're a young demon, like I am, your life is usually shitty." As they reached the top of the stairs and stepped out into the hallway, Lu glowed faintly, then seemed to blur, then suddenly looked the way he had in 10th grade. His hair was green.
Megamind stopped and stared.
"Can't go out looking the way I did downstairs, can I?"
"You... but you... Wait. I can see this, so it can't be an illusion. Shapeshifting?"
"Yep. One of the things I learned there."
"I must study this. I mean, if you don't mind giving a few demonstrations while I run scans and measurements."
"No prob, if you'll put me up. I haven't got a place to stay here anymore or, like, anything."
"Certainly. As soon as we get outside, I can call Minion. Oh, you won't have seen my communication watch. It works off laser beams..."