The Hero wept. Nuklear Man, who had battled vicious foes across the world, who had defended the entire globe from catastrophic events of all manner, had been utterly defeated by the U.S. postal service. He managed to somehow scrounge enough willpower to crawl to the final piece of mail. His trembling fingers opened the blue envelope and slid its contents into the light of day. His eyes scanned across the lines. There was joy. “A fan letter, at last! And it’s from a law office at that. How prestigious!” He hugged it tight. “I can’t wait to brag—er—
tell
Sparky about it. Poor fella didn’t even get a single letter,” he shook his head despondently. “Must be a terrible blow to the ol’ ego, not that I’d know of course.”
__________
Issue 32 – Are You Experienced?
Rachel munched on her overpriced popcorn while trying her darnedest to ignore the utter crapfest of cheesy pre-preview advertisements on the wide screen. “Tell me something about yourself.”
Atomik Lad swished a mouthful of Dr. Zap and swallowed. “I don’t trust twist ties. Your turn.”
“Oh no you don’t.”
“What?”
“You’re not getting out of it that easily. Tell me something personal.”
“That is personal. It’s a very deep mistrust of twist ties. You try to untie them one way, but then it looks like you’re actually tying it up more, so you start twisting it the other way, but you actually had it right the first time. It happens to me every time, no matter what. I feel closer to you now that I’ve shared this burden.”
She gave him The Look.
“Well, I do.”
“Hmmphf. Okay, Mr. Sparkypants. I see how you play this game. Tell me....” she thought for a moment. “Tell me about the last time you cried.”
“When you beat me at Samurai Swordplay.”
“Ha. Ha. I’m serious.”
“Okay, Okay. Um, well, it was a long time ago.”
“You’re stalling.”
“Just hold your horses. Nuke and I had been together for, I don’t know, two or three years by that point. My name was still Sparky then.” He paused for a second and thought. “Heh, of course it was.”
“What do you mean it was
still
Sparky?”
“Oh, that was my original sidekick name when Nuke and I first teamed up. He took one look at my Field and called me Sparky. It stuck.”
“And he still calls you that. That’s so sweet.”
“It’s something all right.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I don’t mind when you, or Norman, or whoever says it. But with Nuke, it’s like he’s trying to keep me that same little kid he ran into at Überdyne that he has to protect and train. Like he won’t even acknowledge that I’ve grown up.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Or maybe sometimes he’s forgotten about renaming me Atomik Lad. I’m surprised he knows who I am half the time since I don’t wear a label.”
She laughed. “Okay, so why’d he rename you Atomik Lad then?”
“That’s actually the same story.”
“What a coinkydink! Do tell.”
“Well, like I said, Nuke and I had been Heroing for about three years by then, so I must’ve been around eleven years old.”
“You haven’t cried in eight years?”
“I’m from the Bottle It Up Into A Single Point Of Seething Turmoil And Bitterness school of emotion.”
“Fun.”
“It’s my line of work. We can’t let our emotions clog our thinking and get in the way of saving the city.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t that turn you into an emotional powder keg that’ll explode under the right circumstances?”
He thought back to the morning’s session with Dr. Genius. “Er, it’s a possibility. You wanna hear the story or not?”
“Fine, fine.”
“Okay. There was some sort of disturbance out at the Überdyne building and we were called in. A golden age villain, Dr. Never, had somehow traveled through time to meet his arch-nemesis, Dr. Velocity who had disappeared back in the ‘20s or something but she popped up at Überdyne in the present. Anyway, Dr. Never had developed this weapon that could....”
“...send a target through the time stream thanks to my Hyper-Quantum Accelerator Drive!” the Temporal Tyrant announced while brandishing a hand gun attached by a hose to a metallic backpack labeled Nefarious: Hyper-Quantum Accelerator Drive. Both the pack and gun had a sort of art deco appeal.
“You’re mad, Never!” Dr. Velocity retorted from the entrance to the Überdyne Complex.
“You’ve never seen me mad!” he shot back. “Upset, irked, vexed, these you’ve seen. But mad, I think not.”
“And just what do you plan on doing with that Time Cannon of yours?”
“What? Weren’t you listening to my exposition? How’d you ever get your degree in Faster Than Thought Travel with an attention span like that? You
know
how I hate repeating myself. I think you’re just doing this on purpose as some sort of stall tactic.”
A mighty, “HA-HO!!!” echoed through the streets of Metroville’s High Science District.
Dr. Never clawed his face. “Ooh! It
was
just a stall tactic. I knew it!”
Dr. Velocity stuck out her tongue. “Nya-ha.”
“Dirty cheater,” he muttered.
Nuklear Man landed in the lovely park in front of the Überdyne building. He then crawled out of his entry-hole and dusted himself off. A small boy surrounded in a crimson splotch of energy landed far more gracefully beside him. The lashing field disappeared and both newcomers posed with their fists on their hips.
“Okay, villain guy,” Nuklear Man began. “You wanna make it easy on yourself, or do we hafta rough ya up?”
“This is what passes for a heroic quip nowadays?” Dr. Never asked his contemporary. “I remember the days when the language was an entire field all its own. You couldn’t say two sentences without a pun, or a play on words, or juxtaposition between the current situation at hand and modern world events, and probably a mythological reference to boot. ‘Ha-ho’? ‘Rough ya up’? What has happened to quality?”
“Er,” Nuklear Man answered.
“I think he’s makin’ fun of you, Nukie,” young Sparky observed.
“Hm, how so?” the Hero asked.
Dr. Never shook with anger. “You baboon! I’m saying that you’re an idiot! A twit! A nimrod! A clown! A moron!”
Nuklear Man struck a dramatic pointing pose. “Moron like a
fox!
Ha!”
Sparky shook his head.
Dr. Never quaked. “This! This is what you stalled for?
This?
I tell you I’m going to send the Überdyne building and everyone in it thirteen
trillion
years into the future to the exact moment of the end of the universe, so you send for help, which is perfectly understandable given the nature of our relationship and my intents here today, and this is it.
This.”
Nuke smiled proudly.
“This oaf is supposed to stop
me.
I’ve mastered time itself, you know. It’s insulting, that’s what it is. Downright insulting.”
“Psst, Sparky. Has he given up yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Of course I haven’t given up! Clod!”
Sparky tugged on his mentor’s cape. Nuklear Man leaned down to receive some quick advice from the sidekick.
“Ah-ha,” Nuklear Man stood proud and tall once more. “Ahem. I’m rubber, you’re glue. Everything you say bounces off me and
Plazma Beam!”
Sparky shook his head again.
“What was that?” Dr. Never, flabbergasted by stupidity, asked.
Another tug by Sparky. “You were supposed to
do
a Plazma Beam, not just
say
it.”
Nuklear Man straightened up and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Ohhhhh, Plaz
ma
Beam. Got it.” He adopted a dramatic pose to gather glowing energies into his hands. “Never, you’re
Nuked.”
“I’ve had enough of this,” the villain said. “Be gone.” He casually aimed the Time Cannon at Nuklear Man and fired. The Hero disappeared into an implosion of whiteness. “Now then, unless all of you would like a similar foolproof death, I suggest signing over rulership of the world to me in one hour,” Dr. Never said.
Sparky tore his gaze from the little smoking scorched spot of earth where Nuklear Man had been standing. He stared at Dr. Never with an intensity beyond his years. “What did you do with him?”
Dr. Never closed his eyes and breathed a deep sigh. “Does no one listen in the future? I hate repeating—oh no we don’t. I’m not going to repeat my sentiments about repeating myself. Not again. Suffice it to say that your friend there has been transported to the end of the universe.”
“Bring him back,” Sparky stated.
Dr. Never laughed. “How naive. Even if I had the equipment to reverse the polarity of my Time Cannon, and for some
insane
reason decided to give in to your silly little demands, what I would bring back could hardly be considered matter, much less living.”
His Atomik Field exploded to life, somehow amplifying the boy’s desperate cry. “Bring him back!” he screamed, his eyes tearing up.
“I’m afraid he’s quite dead.”
The Field doubled in size and took on a grotesquely disproportionate humanoid form that mirrored the sidekick’s movements,
“NO!”
The earth shook and windows cracked from his voice. He took a step forward. A monstrous energized foot smashed down on the ground. Cracks splintered out from the impact. “Bring him back!” he screeched. Tears streamed down his face only to fall into the crimson tumult of chaotic energies surrounding him.
“And that was the last time I cried.”
Rachel snapped out of her entrancement. “What! But what happened? How was Dr. Never defeated? How did Nuke get back? You’re not through with this story yet, buck-o.”
“Well, it gets kinda fuzzy around that point. Dr. Genius said that’s partially due to the effects of being around chronoplastic distortions. It screws with memory. But mostly I think it’s just that they never quite told me what was going on.”
“Oh?”
“Let’s see. My little tantrum was really freaking out Dr. Never, so he tried to take Dr. Velocity hostage to get me to calm down. I remember they were talking in that classic ‘ah-ha, I have won,’ ‘oh-ho, but you didn’t count on,’ ‘oh, but you didn’t think to,’ and ‘but while you were distracted,’ way heroes and villains talk to one another around the climax. It seems Dr. Never hadn’t set his Time Cannon properly, something to do with the Exponentiality Equation, and only sent Nuke thirteen years into the future instead of thirteen
trillion.”
“Oops.”
“Yeah. So it was around then when the air all around us seemed to explode with this white light and there was a sphere of it, maybe ten feet wide, a ball of pure light. I could hear things inside it, explosions and a scream somewhere in the background.” He paused for a second. “You know, that scream has always reminded me of my dad’s voice somehow. It was probably just because of the accident, I still had nightmares about it sometimes back then. Anyway, I remember that right after it, Nuklear Man was tossed out of the sphere like he was kicked out by a giant or something. The sphere flickered and imploded. Nuke looked up at Dr. Never with – his eyes were gleaming with that golden fire of his. It scared the hell out of me, I couldn’t move and he wasn’t even looking at me. He glares at Dr. Never with those eyes, Plazma sparks falling from them, and he says ‘You.’ Just one word. ‘You.’ Only it sounded like hate if it was a voice, you know? And Dr. Never has this look on his face like he just pissed off God. He turned a dial on his gun and shot himself somewhere into the time stream. We haven’t heard from him since. Or yet. Whichever.”
“Wow. But how did Nuklear Man make it back?”
“I don’t know. I ran over to him and he picked me up and we hugged each other. I asked him how he did it and he just looked at me. It felt like minutes, still and alone, looking at me with the most compassionate eyes. I remember thinking it strange that they were the same eyes that had been filled with so much fury just a second before. I asked him again and all he said was ‘You’re going to be a great Hero.’ On the way back to the Silo, he asked what I thought of the name Atomik Lad, and that was that.”
“I wonder what he meant by that hero thing.”
“He told me later that when he was sent to the future, it was ruled by Dr. Never and I had been leading some kind of resistance against him. Never knew when and where Nuke would pop up, so he set a trap in the future. But
I
knew all about it too, so I was able to thwart it, rescue Nuke, take him back to our headquarters, devise a plan, and attack Never’s base. He knew he couldn’t stop us without using his Time Cannon. We defeated him and used it to send Nuke back to the present to correct the future.”
“Then why’d you hear screams and explosions from the portal if you guys won?”
“Nuke said Dr. Never had an army of robots, so the final battle was probably pretty big. I guess.”
“Hmm,” Rachel slurped some of her own Dr. Zap. “That’s quite a story, Sparky. Last time I cried was when my dog died last year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And I’m sorry to hear that there are people out there with access to time travel.”
“Yeah, well—” The house lights dimmed. “Finally.”
Rachel smiled and they settled into their seats. “They recently renovated this theater, you know. All new state-of-the-art equipment.”
“Ah yes, I suppose that’s enough justification for the exorbitant ticket prices.”
“Just watch the movie,” she said with a grin and a light elbow to Atomik Lad’s ribs.
“I guess they don’t get enough blood money from the twenty dollar bucket o’ popcorn.”
“Oh, hush.”
“And the drinks, they have to do a credit check before they’ll give you one.”
“Welcome to the ZMAX experience!” the theater boomed from all around in a recorded voice. It was a thick and friendly tenor that shook the theater’s seats with its depth and resonance.
“Whoa,” the sidekick said, holding onto his armrests.
“Told ya.”
“This certified ZMAX theater is proud to showcase the state-of-the-art ZMAX experience to you, the ZMAX audience.”
“He sure likes to say ZMAX.”
“The ZMAX experience is achieved through the world’s most advanced technologies, or as we like to call them, ZMAXologies, produced by leading engineers, or as we like to call them, ZMAXineers.”