4: Second Date
Last time, on Quarks of the Heart, Meg Atomic had come home from her date with the Malevolent Med-Student only to run into … Super Soccer Mom! She only just escaped the peril of her mother’s questions, but not without creating suspicion! Will she attempt another date with the Malevolent Med-Student, aka Keith? Should she?
Superhero families, like normal families, exist in delicate lattices of trust. Super Soccer Mom and Captain Happily Married relied on each other implicitly, and their kids relied on them, but the dynamics of sibling-to-sibling and sometimes sibling to parent were somewhat more complicated. Meg Atomic knew that with her mother’s suspicions raised, she’d have a more difficult time ducking her patrol that night in order to meet up with the Malevolent Med-Student for a second date. (Keith, she thought to herself. She’d have to try and keep thinking of him that way. It made things easier.) In order to duck her patrol and avoid her mom successfully, she’d need help. Specifically, she needed one of the family.
It didn’t take her long to figure out who. The Twins were right out; they were too young, too hyper, and they couldn’t keep a secret if you paid them. Aaron was quiet and might help, but might also decide to work her plight into one of the songs he was always working out on his guitar and posting on the ‘Net, and that was no good. Caden had the hacking skills, but then again she had no idea whether he’d take an interest; she’d never been entirely sure about her insomniac little brother.
That narrowed it down to her two younger sisters: Sauna and Tamsin. Tamsin was dealing with the stress of power-control and puberty simultaneously, which was difficult when her power involved turning into a flying purple Frisbee. This had happened by accident at school and Tamsin had been so embarrassed (it had happened in front of Blake of all things) that she’d flown home and hidden and sworn she was never going back there again and she hated the world and her school and everythingohmygodleavemeaLONE!
That left one option. Meg didn’t like it, but she had no choice. She knocked on Sauna’s bedroom door.
“What?” came her sister’s voice. She didn’t sound thrilled.
“Can we talk?” Meg said.
A long pause.
“Oh, fine. If you must.”
It was 7 P.M. As usual, Meg started out the door to where her beater of a car sat by the curb. “Going on patrol, Mom, bye!” she called over her shoulder as she left.
“Oh, hey, Meg!” Super Soccer Mom said, hurrying into the living room after her. “I heard an alert that the Wild Woodchuck and his boys might be making a move tonight, and you know the Captain’s a few states over fighting those robots; why don’t you take Seymour along with you?”
“Sure!” Meg said with a forced smile. “You bet! Hey, Seymour, old buddy, wanna catch some bad guys?”
Seymour beeped the cybernetic soccer ball equivalent of are you serious? at her. In the hallway leading off from the living room, Sauna rolled her eyes. “Real subtle there, sis,” she whispered. Then she gathered herself and concentrated.
Thermal manipulation is usually a blunt-force sort of power. One lights something on fire, torches a hot dog or a building or, worst-case, a person, and that’s the end of it. A really skilled thermal manipulator with a little imagination and some patience, however, can produce some really remarkable results. This is what Sauna hoped to do now. She didn’t particularly care about Meg’s date; that was just dumb in her opinion. What she wanted was to see whether this would work.
Meg had already been subtly altering the flow of gravity around herself just slightly, only enough stray gravitons into the mix to throw off Seymour’s visual sensors and make it switch to its infrared and heat sensors. Now Sauna hit those with a low-level targeted temperature blast. There was a very faint, almost imperceptible flare of violet in the air. Seymour’s alarms triggered, throwing the soccer ball into a level-E diagnostic mode. It fell to the floor, wirping in hysterics. In the hallway, Sauna smiled. Success.
“What in the world?” Super Soccer Mom exclaimed. She dropped to Seymour’s side, psychically linking with it and scanning to find out what was wrong.
“Well, sorry about that, gotta go, bye Mom!” Meg Atomic said, hurrying out the front door. She dropped into the front seat of her old beater of a car, hit the radio, and drove away, Seymour’s alarms fading in the distance behind her.
They went to the concert at Marconi Park, and after that they went to a restaurant to talk about it. It wasn’t a coat-and-tie sort of place, but it was a step up from the coffee shop. They talked for several hours as jazz music played unobtrusively in the background.
“I should probably start back soon,” Meg said. “I’m supposed to be on patrol. My sister distracted the soccer ball for me, but she can’t keep that up forever.”
The check arrived nestled in its slim black folder. Keith tucked in a small card, wrote in a tip, and signed his name. The waiter smoothly carried it away.
Meg considered what would happen if she asked him whether the money he’d just used to pay the bill had come from his activities as a supervillain. The probabilities began to work themselves out in her head.
“That’s from my day job,” Keith said suddenly. “I saved up. I’m not actually a med-student, you know.”
“What-” Meg began, caught off guard.
“I washed out of medical school. I couldn’t even get a job at an insurance company and help that way. Now I work at the post office. I’m in charge of stamps.”
“Oh,” Meg said.
“That’s the only reason I became a supervillain. Not the money or the costume, all that. I just … I wanted to help people. Change the system. Not just… sell…stamps.”
“Oh,” Meg said again.
The waiter came back with the card, blinked, and turned discreetly on his heel. As he retreated, he heard a distinct smerp.
For more episodes of Quarks of the Heart, check out the serial index page below. Thanks for reading!
If he sells stamps, why doesn't he call himself the Philatelist?