The Superhero's Origin (The Superhero's Son Book 5) (7 page)

Landing in front of the House’s entrance, I walked into the lobby, intending to pop by the Meeting Room and see whoever was there before I returned to my room to check out Dad’s files.

As it turned out, however, the lobby wasn’t empty. Two people stood in the center of the lobby, apparently arguing with each other about something. I recognized the man in a powered armor suit that looked like knight armor as Mecha Knight, the supervisor of the Young Neos, while the girl with white hair, dark skin, and a white hood arguing with him was Blizzard, one of my teammates.

I was surprised to see Blizzard, of all people, arguing with Mecha Knight. Blizzard was normally a very timid girl, sweet and kind, but definitely prone to avoiding overt confrontations with anyone. It was even weirder that she was arguing with Mecha Knight, because Blizzard never argued with Mecha Knight or any of the other adult members of the Neohero Alliance.

The two were so engrossed in their argument that they didn’t even seem to notice me enter. I just stood there awkwardly, not sure whether to interrupt their argument or not, as they argued with each other.

“Why can’t I do that?” said Blizzard. Her voice was heated and even loud and she looked almost ready to attack Mecha Knight, though since Blizzard had gained a lot of control over her powers recently, I didn’t think she was in danger of accidentally freezing him.

“Because it is against the rules,” said Mecha Knight. In contrast to Blizzard’s passionate tone, Mecha Knight spoke in his usual robotic monotone and even his body language betrayed no emotion. “That is why.”

“But if you let me do it, we’d all be much better off,” said Blizzard. “Please?”

“The answer is still no,” said Mecha Knight. “The rules are the rules and they can’t change unless a majority of the Leadership Council votes to change them or someone calls a convocation of the NHA and a majority of the members vote in favor of the change.”

“Can I call a convocation, then?” said Blizzard. “Because I think that the rules need to be updated.”

“According to the Neohero Alliance Constitution, members of the Young Neos cannot call a convocation, though you can try to convince one of the adult members to call a convocation for you,” said Mecha Knight. “I cannot, however, guarantee that anyone would actually agree to call a convocation, since the process is rather long and time-consuming and often a waste of time for everyone involved.”

Blizzard groaned. “But—”

Blizzard was suddenly interrupted when Carl—the AI built into the House—shouted, “Welcome home, Bolt! How was your visit to your grandparents?”

All of a sudden, Blizzard and Mecha Knight looked over at me. I just waved at them kind of awkwardly and said, “Hey, guys. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” said Mecha Knight, shaking his head. “Your teammate here is arguing with me about something in the rules that she doesn’t like.”

“What, exactly, are you guys arguing about?” I said.

“Blizzard can tell you,” said Mecha Knight. “Right now, I must leave, because the Leadership Council is about to have another session and it would be unwise for me to miss it.”

With that, Mecha Knight walked away from Blizzard and past me and was out of the House in seconds, closing the doors behind him as he left. His armor made weird clunking sounds when he left, which made me wonder what he was carrying in his armor.

When Mecha Knight was gone, I looked at Blizzard again in confusion. “Um … what was that all about?”

Blizzard brushed back her hair and said, “Mecha Knight just being his usual emotionless self. He wouldn’t listen to anything I said. Seemed to think he was better than me.”

“He can be kind of arrogant sometimes,” I said. “But I still don’t know what you were talking about.”

“I was trying to convince Mecha Knight to let us hunt down the Visionists,” said Blizzard.

I raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Hunt down the Visionists? While I’m not against that idea at all, I don’t know where you got that idea from.”

“I was just thinking about Robert Candle,” said Blizzard. “Remember how he worked with the Visionists? Or at least, we think so? That’s how he was able to remain hidden from the G-Men for so long, because they were harboring him somewhere. What if the Visionists work with some other supervillain at some point to attack us again?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Aren’t the Visionists laying low at the moment?”

“Yes, but they’re still a threat,” said Blizzard. “Especially since Thaumaturge and the others know about Hero Island’s defenses. I just worry that they might try to attack the Island at some point.”

“Aren’t the G-Men going after them?” I said. “The G-Men arrested Mimic, remember. I imagine they’ve probably interrogated him and know where the other Visionists are by now. Why do we need to worry about them?”

“Because I read a news report that said that the interrogation revealed that Mimic doesn’t know the location of Thaumaturge and the other Visionists,” said Blizzard. “But it doesn’t matter, because as long as Vision is out there, they’ll always be a threat to us.”

“Uh huh,” I said. I wondered where Blizzard’s new found determination to hunt down Vision came from. “And you were trying to convince Mecha Knight to let us hunt them down?”

“Yeah,” said Blizzard, nodding. “But he says it’s against the rules, since the Young Neos are only supposed to go to the locations that Mecha Knight tells us to. We can’t go hunting down villains on our own.”

“I know that,” I said. “And I don’t see what the problem with that is, because it’s worked out pretty well so far.”

“Maybe, but I think we’d be a more effective organization if we were allowed to hunt down certain criminals or supervillains,” said Blizzard. “Don’t you want to take them down? I mean, you have more experience with Vision than the rest of us do.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to see those smug bastards get what’s coming to ‘em, but at the same time, we can’t really hunt them down effectively if we don’t know where they are. It’s best to wait until they show themselves; then we can go take them down.”

“Like they’d ever do
that
,” said Blizzard. “But come on. Can’t you talk to Mecha Knight about this for me? He might not listen to me, but you’re the leader of the Young Neos, so he probably will be willing to listen to you.”

“Maybe later,” I said. “I just got back from upstate New York and I want to go back to my room.”

I was about to step around her, but then Blizzard stepped in my way. I tried to go the other way, but again, Blizzard blocked my path.

“What?” I said. “I need to go.”

“Not until you promise to talk to Mecha Knight for me about this,” said Blizzard. “Please?”

Okay, I could never deny Blizzard a request when she looked at me with her puppy dog eyes, so I nodded and said, “All right, all right. I’ll talk to him later about this and see if I can get him to at least reconsider the idea.”

“Yay!” said Blizzard.

She hugged me suddenly and tightly, and then let go of me just as quickly. Yet I could still feel the coldness of her body on my suit and found myself wishing she was still hugging me.

“Thanks,” said Blizzard. “See you later. I’m going to the Training Room to get some practice in.”

I just had time to nod before Blizzard turned and ran up the steps into the main hall of the House itself. I watched her white cape disappear into the House and I just stood there for a moment, still feeling her coldness on me, before I shook my head and entered the House as well.

Ever since I regained my powers, Blizzard had been a lot more openly affectionate with me. And I had to admit that I actually liked it. We hadn’t dated or anything like that, but out of all of the Young Neos, Blizzard seemed to be happiest about the fact that I had regained my powers. She had also sat very close to me at Dad’s funeral, even put an arm around my shoulders to comfort me.

And yeah, I did think she was kind of cute, but I had never actually managed to gather the courage to ask her out. Partly this was because I had spent a lot of time recently grieving Dad and not thinking about romance, but at the same time, I was honest enough to realize it was just pure cowardice on my part. I wasn’t sure what I was afraid of; maybe I was just worried about how it would affect the team dynamics if she rejected me or if we started a relationship and then ended it at some point. Would we be bitter exes or would we manage to stay friends even if that happened? How would the rest of the team react if we started dating?

I honestly didn’t know and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out, not if that meant endangering the effectiveness of the team anyway. Besides, I was pretty sure there were rules about no dating teammates somewhere in the NHA Constitution, even though I couldn’t quite remember where at the moment. Maybe I’d ask Carl to look up that particular clause later so I could shut up that voice in my head that keeps calling me a coward for not asking her out.

When I got to my room, I first took a shower, because I was pretty dirty and sweaty from my fight with Twinfist, plus the flight home hadn’t exactly been clean. After I did that, I went over to the large computer on the other side of my room and pulled out the flash drive that Triplet had given me.

I hesitated a moment before I took the cap off the bottom and stuck it into my suit’s pocket, and then stuck the drive into the USB port. At the same time, I removed the USB drive already in there, which was probably blank at this point, since I had gotten this drive from Mom back in Texas during the funeral and had been transferring some old files from my old laptop back home, and put that drive into my pocket where it would be safe.

As soon as I did that, the computer tried to open the files, but a message appeared on the screen that read ‘DEVICE ENCRYPTED. CANNOT READ FILES.’

“Carl,” I said. “Can you decrypt the files on this device for me? I want to read them.”

“I’ll try, Bolt,” came Carl’s flamboyant voice. “But it will probably take me a little while, because I’ve never seen an encryption like this before.”

I tapped my earcom and said, “Val, can you help Carl? Since you’re one of Dad’s creations, you might be familiar with the encryption technique he used.”

“Okay,” said Valerie, though I could tell she wasn’t looking forward to working with Carl. “I’ll see what I can do.”

I nodded. Although Valerie and Carl were both creations of Dad—which basically made them ‘siblings,’ in a sense—I was under the impression that Valerie didn’t like Carl that much. Of course, because they were both AI, they probably couldn’t ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ anything, but I would still describe her attitude toward him that way. Maybe it was because Valerie tended to be very reserved and logical, while Carl was extroverted and something of a go-getter.

In any case, I figured they’d crack this encryption in no time. Because I was tired, I decided to take this moment to grab a quick nap. I figured they’d have the encryption cracked wide open by the time I woke up.

So I went over to my bed and lay down in it, but before I could close my eyes and go to sleep, my suit-up watch suddenly beeped. I looked down at it and saw that Malcolm Rayner—my non-super friend back in Texas—was trying to call me.

I was reluctant to answer, mostly because I was too tired to talk to anyone, but I decided to see why Malcolm was calling me. So I tapped the screen of my watch and said, “Hey, Malcolm, what’s up?”

“Hey, Kev!” said Malcolm. “I just wanted to call you because it’s been a while since we’ve talked. How are things in New York?”

“Okay,” I said as I lay my head down on my pillow. “It’s been pretty boring since Robert’s death, though. Haven’t had much to do.”

“Maybe all the supervillains are on vacation,” said Malcolm. “Anyway, I heard you were going to go see your grandfather. How did that go?”

I thought about whether or not I should tell Malcolm about what I learned from Grandfather. Grandfather had warned me not to tell anyone about what he’d told me, but I didn’t see any harm in telling Malcolm about what happened. It wasn’t like Malcolm could actually do anything with this info. Besides, I trusted him to keep secrets, because he had successfully kept my secret identity to himself so far.

So I told Malcolm about what happened at Grandfather’s mansion. I didn’t tell him every little detail, but I gave him a rough overview of what happened and what I learned there. Malcolm listened pretty intently and didn’t even ask any questions, which was good because I didn’t want him to interrupt me and force me to spend more time explaining stuff to him. I also didn’t mention Triplet’s theory that Grandfather knew more than he let on; I didn’t want to make it sound like I thought my Grandfather was up to no good.

When I finished, Malcolm said, “Man, that’s some pretty crazy stuff. What do you think is going to happen to your grandparents?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Grandfather said that they were going to be okay and that I didn’t need to worry about them, but he made that Echo lady and her allies sound dangerous.”

“Yeah, I’m looking up Echo and Twinfist on Neo Ranks right now, but they don’t have any pages, not even in the Villain section,” said Malcolm. “Guess they must keep a low profile or something.”

“That is what it seems like,” I said. “I’m just not sure if I should tell Mecha Knight and the rest of the Leadership Council about them. Grandfather told me not to tell anyone, but Echo and the others seem like a threat that the NHA should deal with.”

“Yeah, you probably should,” said Malcolm. “At the very least, the NHA will be able to help protect your grandparents from them if they know.”

“Right,” I said. “But I don’t know where my grandparents are going to hide, so even if I told the NHA, they wouldn’t be able to find them. Maybe I’ll just keep it to myself for now.”

“Do whatever you need to do, man,” said Malcolm. “But anyway, did your grandpa say anything about your new lightning powers? Help you understand them at all?”

I shook my head. “No. I didn’t even get a chance to mention that to him. He was in a real hurry to leave after Twinfist attacked, because he thought that Echo would send someone else after him now that she knows where he lives.”