The Great Powers Outage (21 page)

PEOPLE

NAME:
Miss Marble.
POWER:
The ability to cast a paralyzing spell over living subjects.
LIMITATIONS:
Paralysis lasts only a few minutes.
CAREER:
A desire for low pay and little respect led her to teaching.
CLASSIFICATION:
Chronically annoyed.

“No one can hear me!” I barely heard the Banshee whimper.

“We're all like Ordinary Boy,” Cannonball wailed. I knew he had meant that as an insult, but I actually enjoyed the howl of despair in his voice.

“Calm down, kids,” Miss Marble urged, despite no sense of calm in her own voice. “Someone is bound to figure out what is causing our loss of power and correct it soon. We just need to be patient. In the meantime, let's try to concentrate on our lessons. Everybody take out your biology books and we'll continue our discussion of the anatomy of the potato fungus.”

Only the Spore perked up at that suggestion.

“Miss Marble!” My hand shot up. “Could we talk about history instead this morning?”

“Again with the history,” she said. “Why would we discuss that? It's already happened, so what's the point?”

“Maybe if we knew something about past events, it might give us an idea today for solving this power crisis,” I proposed. For once nobody shouted my idea down.

“I don't see how,” she said.

“Well, think about it,” I said. “Nobody seems to know how long Superopolis has even existed. When was it settled? And by whom? And did they have powers when they got here?”

“There he goes again, Miss Marble,” Transparent Girl said, pointing a finger at me. “Ordinary Boy is claiming that our powers aren't an unchangeable part of us.”

“Your complaint would have more validity, Transparent Girl, if it weren't for the fact that currently everyone's power is very much a changeable part of who they are.” Miss Marble actually stuck up for me. “Like it or not, you have, in fact, become normal. Go on, Ordinary Boy.”

“That's a perfect example!” I blurted out. “Take the word ‘normal.' It means average. It's used to describe something that is just like everything else. But here we are saying that people have turned ‘normal,' as if that was the natural state. Why would we be using the word in that way unless at one time everyone really
was
normal? Take my own name for instance. I'm called ‘ordinary' but there's nobody else like me. I'm ordinary compared to whom?!”

“You're ordinary compared to everybody!” Cannonball snorted. A week ago he would have gotten the laugh he expected from that line, but now nobody found it particularly funny.

“I see your point,” Miss Marble said as she considered the logic of what I had said. “But how would we even figure out what life was like for people over a hundred years ago? They're all gone.”

“But they've left clues behind. Like the names that they gave to places,” I added, remembering my question from yesterday about Crater Hill. “And there must be physical things, too.”

“If a man-made item ith two hundred yearth old,” Melonhead spoke up, “it mutht mean that people were here two hundred yearth ago.”

“Melonhead is right,” I said, almost choking on the words. “So all we have to do is figure out what the oldest object is in Superopolis.”

Every kid in my class went silent and stared directly at Miss Marble.

“I'm not
that
old,” she blurted out in annoyance. “Think again.”

Everyone began shouting out suggestions.

“There's a seven-year-old jar of tartar sauce in my refrigerator,” said the Spore as he licked his lips just thinking about it.

“My grandma has a fruitcake that she's been setting out at holidays for twenty years,” volunteered Limber Lass.

“My dad just turned forty-three,” hollered the Quake.

For lack of any practical suggestions, everyone tried outdoing everybody else. They were coming up with increasingly older items—only none of them was useful.

The noise reached a peak as Transparent Girl attempted to top the whole class.

“The Carbunkle Mountains are sixty-five million years old,” she shouted, ignoring the fact that we were looking for something man-made. “We all saw how they got here.”

The arguments among my classmates continued to build and Miss Marble was just getting frustrated. Her power was gone, too, and she had no way to rein in the class. But I was no longer paying attention. I had just realized what the oldest thing in Superopolis actually was.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

On the S.S. Befuddlement

“I still don't see what you're getting at,” Stench said as we left school at the end of the day. “What difference does it make knowing when Superopolis was settled?”

“And how would we find out, anyway?” Tadpole added.

“Well, it only stands to reason that the oldest manmade object in Superopolis has something to do with the first people here,” I explained. “And Transparent Girl gave me the clue I needed to figure out what that is.”

“How did she do that?” Hal asked, tilting his head in confusion.

“When she brought up the Carbunkle Mountains, she added that we all knew how they got here,” I said. “She meant the meteorite that created them, of course, but it made
me
wonder how did the
people
of Superopolis get here?”

“I don't see—” Stench started to say.

“Yes, you do,” I corrected him. “You see it every time we go to the beach.”

They looked at me with blank expressions.

“The lighthouse on Hero's Cape?” asked Stench.

“I've worked there a couple of times,” Halogen Boy agreed. “It
is
really old.”

“Yes, but not the oldest thing on the beach,” I corrected. “Whoever built the lighthouse first had to get here. And how would they have gotten here . . . ?”

“Probably by sea—” Plasma Girl started to say.

“The wreck of the S.S.
Befuddlement
!” Stench beat her to it.

The S.S.
Befuddlement
was an enormous ship that had run aground on the south shore of MegaManly Beach. It was a rocky part of the seashore, so most people never went anywhere near it. Even from a distance, though, it was easy to see how old it was. But it wasn't until now that I realized the potential significance of its age.

“Exactly!” I beamed. “And we're going to investigate it, to see what clues it may hold to the origin of Superopolis itself.”

“This isn't going to be as dangerous as our visit to the Carlsbark Caverns, is it?” asked Plasma Girl. “With no powers, we're going to have to be careful.”

LI'L HERO'S HANDBOOK

THINGS

THE S.S.
BEFUDDLEMENT

Despite the mystery of its origins, the wreck of this once-mighty sailing
vessel, which sits along the southeastern shore of Superopolis
Harbor, is seldom visited by the residents of Superopolis. If they
were to take a look, they would find more questions raised than
answered. So it's probably good they don't, since that kind of thing
just annoys people.