You were once the most powerful villain. You retired early and are engaged to a minor super hero who isn’t aware of your past. They are about to be killed right before your eyes..but you step in.
She asks him why maybe a dozen times before they decide to get married. It’s not hard to figure out where he goes in the little hours of the morning, not hard to follow him to the edges of forests and abandoned towns and deserts, not hard to smell the spandex, blood and sweat that he wears home. He’s always got bags under his eyes and dirt under his nails and the blood that stains their welcome mat is more often his than not.
So she asks him why before they decide to get married because for all her mysteries, she can’t have him be one.
(Hypocrite isn’t the worst name she’s ever been called.)
He hardly looks surprised at the question, lips quirking as his fingers find the condensation on the glass in front of him. He runs his forefinger up the side, the move thoughtlessly seductive, before drawing it away. The water follows, a thin stream of twisting molecules for a long moment before the tension snaps and it forms a circle hovering above the pad of his finger.
“I may not be a Superhero,” he says, “or even a hero. But when I needed someone, when I really needed someone, a superhero was there. It’s an amazing thing to experience. The rescue. The salvation. It’s…indescribable. It makes you thankful in way you didn’t know you could be.” He allows the water to drop to the diner table and gives her a warm, nostalgic smile. “I want everyone to have that, even if it’s just some guy in a mask with a spray of water at his command. I became Zone for that and I’ve never regretted it. Not once. ”
She’s surprised by the moisture gathering at the corners of her eyes. She hasn’t cried in public for years, normally doesn’t even have to worry about the possibility after years of being on guard. That’s what’s special about Gannon; he makes her feel vulnerable and safe all at once. Comforted. Able to exist within herself, at peace.
She reaches past her empty breakfast plate to cover his hand with her hot palm. The smile she returns is new, her most precious treasure and something she’d never think twice about giving him.
When I was in high school, I was the part-time henchperson of a Mad Scientist.
I’m not exaggerating about “Mad Scientist”. “Riley” (Name changed for his family’s privacy) was a former Medical Doctor, as well as an artist, microbiologist, pilot (as in, designed and flew his own experimental aircraft), magician, computer programmer and musical composer, and had an outbuilding attached to his house where he kept things like his hand-made 3D printer, electron microscope and drone-dirigible assembly devices.
Riley had ALS and was eventually wheelchair-bound, so by 2006 I was being called in on the odd school night or weekend to go out around FoCo and the surrounding mountains. “I need a younger set of legs and someone with no fear of heights” He’d say. Being that I was a very boring child that had no interest in sex or drugs and always called when I was going to be late, and that Riley was a trusted family friend, My parents trusted me to go out at like 9PM and come home at 2AM on a Tuesday.
…To do things like scale locked fire escapes and climb around on rooftops that we DEFINITELY did not have permission to be on to do things like install speakers and bluetooth broadcasting devices at strategic points around Old Town so that if you download the right app onto your phone (I’ve got it backed up somewhere, I’ll post it when I find it) , you can walk around town and be exposed to the ghostly, extremely shady side of FoCo history for his 2007 Halloween project.
We did get caught by the cops but I was 17, short and white as goddamn mayonnaise so when the cops asked me what I was doing “It’s for a community art project!” actually worked.
My favorite Mad Science Project was in 2009, Gallus rostromegalus.
I was home from college for summer, and Riley had been messing around with Rotational Physics and had managed to make Giant (24’ x 18’) extremely realistic Chicken eggs, weighted and everything so that if you picked one up, it would feel like there was a heavy yolk wobbling around inside. They’re amusing all on their own, but after leaving them in the slash pile from spring cleaning, Riley realized they had POTENTIAL.
So we went around getting permission from a few businesses and the art museum, and I spent a few nights making plausible enormous chicken feathers in Riley’s lab out of grass, acrylic glaze and some other odds and ends laying around, and filling up the back of my mom’s van with as much of the backyard slash pile as fit in there, then drove out in the middle of the night to set up giant nests for the eggs, strewn with feathers and surrounded by Traffic cones and orange construction mesh and signs from the entirely fictitious “Department Of Fish And Wildfowl, Specious Relocation Division”
(an incomplete nest on the steps of Fort Collins Museum of Art)
(signage, responsibly warning people to stay away in case of giant chickens)
Riley even made QR codes that linked back to an obviously false Wiki- if you scrolled to the bottom, the page was covered in feathers and after five minutes it would start to make chicken noises.
People. Went. INSANE.
Crowds turned up to take selfies with the nests and Riley tracked down literally dozens of tagged photos captioned “IS THIS REAL????”.
Someone wrote a very worried and not terribly facetious-sounding letter to the editor concerned that Giant Chickens were roaming around FoCo, something that big could hurt someone! There was an entirely-serious-sounding counter-letter that we Humans have clearly invaded this majestic creature’s natural habitat, where are they SUPPOSED to make their nests, huh?
Multiple people called the police to report having seen the elusive Gallus rostromegalus up in the hills or skulking around downtown. Reports claimed it was anywhere form five to twelve feet tall, with dramatic plumage and an eerie, yodeling sort of call.
A few nights after installing each nest, we went back, collected the eggs, and left broken ‘eggshells’ and extra down feather around each of the nests. One of the nests was put up at the local Garden Center and I remember one of the assistant managers coming outside just after we finished the ‘hatching’ and shrieking “OH GOD I THOUGHT THOSE WERE FAKE THEY’LL GET TO THE TOMATOES SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!” That woman would later become my manager when I worked there for a summer, though she never made the connection between me and The Chickens.
Riley passed away in 2015 after a good and well-lived life, and was kind enough to leave me The Eggs in his will.
It was a truly splendid bit of ruckus, and I miss him terribly, and I very much treasure the memories. And the Eggs, which I am absolutely going to inflict on some unsuspecting neighbors at some point, in his honor.
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Question of Smoke 